Kurushio was on the surface, never something to make a submarine commander happy. They wouldn't be here long. Fuel was coming aboard through two large-diameter hoses, and other stores, mainly food, were lowered by crane to crewmen waiting on the deck. His navy didn't have a proper submarine tender, Commander Ugaki knew. Mainly they used tank-landing ships for the purpose, but those were fulfilling other purposes now, and he was stuck with a merchantman whose crew was enthusiastic but unfamiliar with the tasks they were now attempting.
His was the last boat into Agana Harbor because he'd been the one farthest away from the Marianas when the occupation had begun. He'd fired only one torpedo, and was gratified to see how well the Type 89 had worked. That was good. The merchantmen didn't have the equipment to reload him properly, but, the captain told himself, he had fifteen more, and four Harpoon missiles, and if the Americans offered him that many targets, so much the better.
Those crewmen not on duty loading stores on the afterdeck were crowded forward, getting some sun as submariners often did—as indeed their captain was doing, bare-chested atop the sail, drinking tea and smiling for everyone to see. His next mission was to patrol the area west of the Bonins, to intercept any American ship—more likely a submarine—that attempted to close the Home Islands. It promised to be typical submarine duty, Ugaki thought: dull but demanding. He'd have to talk to his crew about how important it was.
"So where's the patrol line?" Jones asked, pushing the envelope again. "Along 165-East for the moment," Admiral Mancuso said, pointing at the chart. "We're thin, Jonesy. Before I commit them to battle, I want them to get used to the idea. I want the COs to drill their people up. You're never ready enough, Ron. Never."
"True," the civilian conceded. He'd come over with SOSUS printouts to demonstrate that all known submarine contacts were off the screen. Two hydrophone arrays that were operated from the island of Guam were no longer available. Though connected by undersea cable to the rest of the network, they'd evidently been turned off by the monitoring facility on Guam, and nobody at Pearl had yet been able to trick them back on. The good news was that a backup array off Samar in the Philippines was still operating, but it could not detect the Japanese SSKs shown by satellite to be replenishing off Agana. They'd even gotten a good count. Probably, Mancuso thought. The Japanese still painted the hull numbers on the sails, and the satellite cameras could read them. Unless the Japanese, like the Russians and then the Americans, had learned to spoof reconnaissance efforts by playing with the numbers—or simply erased them entirely.
"It would be nice to have a few more fast-attacks, wouldn't it?" Jones observed after a minute's contemplation of the chart.
"Sure would. Maybe if we can get some direction from Washington…"
His voice trailed off, and Mancuso thought a little more. The location of every sub under his command was marked with a black silhouette, even the ones in overhaul status. Those were marked in white, showing availability dates, which was not much help at the moment. But there were five such silhouettes at Bremerton, weren't there?
The Special Report card appeared on all the major TV networks. In every case the hushed voice of an anchorperson told people that their network shows would be interrupted by a speech from the President about the economic crisis with which his administration had been dealing since the weekend. Then came the Presidential Seal. Those who had been following the events were surprised to see the President smiling.
"Good evening.
"My fellow Americans, last week we saw a major event take place in the American financial system.
"I want to begin my report to you by saying that the American economy is strong. Now"—he smiled—"that may seem a strange pronouncement given all that you've heard in the media and elsewhere. But let me tell you why that is so. I'll start off with a question:
"What has changed? American workers are still making cars in Detroit and elsewhere. American workers are still making steel. Kansas farmers have their winter wheat in and are preparing for a new planting season. They're still making computers in the Silicon Valley. They're still making tires in Akron. Boeing is still making airplanes. They're still pumping oil out of the ground in Texas and Alaska. They're still mining coal in West Virginia. All the things you were doing a week ago, you are still doing. So what has changed?
"What changed was this: some electrons traveled along some copper wires, telephone lines like this one"—the President held up a phone cord and tossed it aside on his desk—"and that's all," he went on in the voice of a good, smart neighbor come to the house to offer some kindly advice. "Not one person has lost his life. Not a single business has lost a building. The wealth of our nation is unchanged. Nothing has gone away.
"And yet, my fellow Americans, we have begun to panic—over what?
"In the past four days we have determined that a deliberate attempt was made to tamper with the U.S. financial markets. The United States Department of Justice, with the assistance of some good Americans within those markets, is now building a criminal case against the people responsible for that. I cannot go further at the moment because even your President does not have the right to tamper with the right of any person to a fair and impartial trial. But we do know what happened and we do know that what happened is entirely artificial.
"Now, what are we going to do about it?" Roger Durling asked. "The financial markets have been closed all week. They will reopen at noon on Friday and…"
33—Reversal Points
"It can't possibly work," Kozo Matsuda said over the translation. "Raizo's plan was perfect—better than perfect," he went on, talking as much to himself as the telephone receiver. Before the crash he'd worked in conjunction with a banker associate to use the opportunity to cash in on the T-Bill transactions, which had gone a long way to recapitalizing his troubled conglomerate. It had also made his cash account yen-heavy in the face of international obligations. But that was not a problem, was it? Not with the renewed strength of the yen and corresponding weakness of the American dollar. It might even make sense, he thought, to purchase American interests through intermediaries—a good strategic move once the American equities market resumed its free fall.
"When do the European markets open?" Somehow in the excitement of the moment he couldn't remember.
"London is nine hours behind us. Germany and Holland are eight. Four this afternoon," the man on the other end of the phone said. "Our people have their instructions." And those were clear: to use the renewed power of their national currency to buy as many European equities as possible so that when the financial panic ended, two or three years from now, Japan would be so enmeshed in that multinational economy as to be a totally integral part of it; so vital to their survival that separation would run the renewed danger of financial collapse. And they wouldn't risk that, not after recovery from the worst economic crisis in three generations, and certainly not after Japan had played so important and selfless a part in restoring prosperity to three hundred million Europeans. It was troubling that the Americans suspected a hand in what had taken place, but Yamata-san had assured them all that no records could possibly exist—wasn't that the masterstroke of the entire event, the elimination of records and their replacement with chaos? Businesses could not operate without precise financial records of their transactions, and denied those, they simply stopped. Rebuilding them would require weeks or months, Matsuda was sure, during which time the paralysis would allow Japan—more precisely, his fellow zaibatsu—to cash in, in addition to the brilliant strategic moves Yamata had executed through their government agencies. The integrated nature of the plan was the reason why all his fellows had signed on to it.