this world get?
It was six hours later in Tokyo, and eight hours earlier in New York. The
fourteen-hour differential and the International Dateline created many op-
portunities for confusion. It was Saturday the fourteenth in some places and
Friday in others.
At three in the morning, Chuck Searls left his home for the last time. He’d
rented a car the previous day-like many New Yorkers, he had never trou-
bled himself to purchase one-for the drive to La Guardia. The Delta termi-
nal was surprisingly full for the first flight of the day to Atlanta. He’d
booked a ticket through one of the city’s many travel agencies, and paid cash
for the assumed name he would hereafter be using from time to time, which
was not the same as the one on the passport he had also acquired a few
months ago. Sitting in 2-A, a first-class seat whose wide expanse allowed
him to turn slightly and lean his head back, he slept most of the way to At-
lanta, where his baggage was transferred to a flight to Miami. There wasn’t
much, really. Two lightweight suits, some shirts, and other immediate neces-
sities, plus his laptop computer. In Miami he’d board another flight under
another name and head southeast to paradise.
George Winston, former head of the Columbus Group, was not a happy man
despite the plush surroundings of his home in Aspen. A wrenched knee saw
to that. Though he now had the time to indulge his newly discovered passion
for skiing, he was a little too inexperienced and perhaps a little too old to use
the expert slopes. It hurt like a sonuvabitch. He rose from his bed at three in
the morning and limped into the bathroom for another dose of the painkiller
the doctor had prescribed. Once there he found that the combination of
wakefulness and lingering pain offered little hope of returning to sleep. It
was just after five in New York, he thought, about the time he usually got up,
always early to get a jump on the late-risers, checking his computer and the
Journal and other sources of information so that he could be fully prepared
for his opening moves on the market.
He missed it, Winston admitted to himself. It was a hell of a thing to say to
the face in the mirror. Okay, so he’d worked too hard, alienated himself from
his own family, driven himself into a state little different from drug addic-
tion, but getting out was a … mistake?
Well, no, not exactly that, he thought, hobbling into his den as quietly as
he could manage. It was just that you couldn’t empty something and then
attempt to fill it with nothing, could you? He couldn’t sail his Cristobol all
the time, not with kids in school. In fact there was only one thing in his life
that he’d been able to do all the time, and that had damned near killed him,
hadn’t it?
Even so …
Damn, you couldn’t even get the Journal out here at a decent hour. And
this was civilization? Fortunately, they did have phone lines. Just for old
times’ sake, he switched on his computer. Winston was wired into nearly
every news and financial service there was, and he selected his personal fa-
vorite. It was good to do it early in the morning. His wife would yell again if
she saw him up to his old tricks, which meant that he was nowhere near as
current on the Street as he liked to be, player or not. Well, okay, he had a few
hours, and it wasn’t as though he’d be riding a helicopter to the top of the
mountain at dawn, was it? No skiing at all, the doc had told him firmly. Not
for at least a week, and then he’d confine himself to the bunny slopes. It
wouldn’t look that bad, would it? He’d pretend to be teaching his kids . . .
damn!
He’d gotten out too soon. No way he could have known, of course, but in
the last few weeks the market had begged aloud for a person with his talents
to swoop down and make his moves. He would have moved on steel three
weeks ago, made his killing, and then moved on to … Silicon Alchemy.
Yeah, that was one he would have snapped up in one big hurry. They had
invented a new sort of screen for laptop computers, and now with Japan’s
products under a cloud, the issue had exploded. Who was it who’d quarter-
backed the IPO? That Ryan guy, good instincts for the business, pissing
away his time in government service now. What a waste of talent, Winston
told himself, feeling the ache in his leg and trying not to add that he was
pissing away his time in the middle of the night at a ski resort he couldn’t use
for the next week at best.
Everything on the’Street seemed so unnecessarily shaky, he thought,
checking trend lines on stocks he considered good if stealthy bellwethers.
That was one of the tricks, spotting trends and indicators before the others
did. One of the tricks? Hell, the only trick. How he did it was surprisingly
hard to teach. He supposed that it was the same in any field. Some people
just did it, and he was one of them. Others tried to do the same by cheating,
seeking out information in underhanded ways, or by falsely creating trends
that they could then exploit. But that was .. . cheating, wasn’t it? And what
was the point of making money that way? Beating the others fairly and at
their own game, that was the real art of trading, and at the end of the day
what he liked to hear was the way others would come up and say, “You son
of a bitch!” The tone of the comment made all the difference.
There was no reason for the market to be so unsteady, he thought. People
hadn’t thought the things through, that was all.
The Hornets went off behind the first wave of Tomcats. Samhcv taxied his
fighter to the starboard-side bow cat, feeling the towhar dial formed part of
his nosewheel gear slip into the proper slot on the shuttle. His heavily
loaded fighter shuddered at full power as the deck crewmen gave the air-
craft a last visual check. Satisfied, the catapult officer made the ready sig-
nal, and Sanchez fired off a salute and set his head back on the hack of his
ejection seat. A moment later, steam power flung him off the bow and into
Ihe air. The Hornet settled a bit, a feeling that was never entirely routine,
and he climbed into the sky, retracting his landing gear and heading to-
ward the rendezvous point, his wings heavy with fuel tanks and blue prac-
tice missiles.
They were trying to be clever, and almost succeeding, but “almost”
didn’t really count in this game. Satellite photos had revealed the presence of
the three inbound surface groups. Sanchez would lead the Alpha Strike
against the big one, eight ships, all tin cans. Two separated pairs of Tomcats
would deal with the P-3S they had out; for the first time they’d hunt actively
with their search radars instead of being under EMCOM. It would be a sin-
gle rapier thrust-no, more the descending blow of a big and heavy club.
Intermittent sweeps of an E-2C Hawkeye radar aircraft determined that the
Japanese had not deployed fighters to Marcus, which would have been
clever if difficult for them, and in any case they would not have been able to
surge enough of them to matter, not against two full carrier air wings. Mar-
cus just wasn’t a big enough island, as Saipan or Guam was. That was his
last abstract thought for a while. On Bud’s command via a low-power radio
circuit, the formation began to disperse according to its carefully structured
plan.
“Hai.” Sato lifted the growler phone on Mutsu’s bridge.
“We just detected low-power radio voice traffic. Two signals, bearing
one-five-seven, and one-nine-five, respectively.”
”It’s about time,” Sato told his group-operations officer. / thought they’d
never get around to their attack. In a real-war situation he would do one
thing. In this particular case, he’d do another. There was little point in letting
the Americans know the sensitivity of his ELINT gear. “Continue as
before.”
“Very well. We still have the two airborne radars. They appear to be fly-
ing racetrack patterns, no change.”
“Thank you.” Sato replaced the phone and reached for his tea. His best
technicians were working the electronic-intelligence listening gear, and they
had tapes collecting the information taken down by every sensor for later
study. That was really the important part of this phase of the exercise, to
learn all they could about how the U.S. Navy made its deliberate attacks.
“Action stations?” Mutsu’s captain asked quietly.
“No need,” the Admiral replied, staring thoughtfully at the hori/.on, as he