Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [127]
Clark wanted to smile, but didn't. He'd reactivated yet another member of THISTLE a few hours earlier, who had insisted that he and Ding look at the assembly floor.
"You know, I used to go into Russia, back when you needed more than a passport and American Express."
"Doing what?"
"Mainly getting people out. Sometimes recovering data packs. Couple of times I emplaced cute little gadgets. Talk about lonely, talk about scary." Clark shook his head. Only his wife knew that he colored his hair, just a little, because he didn't like gray there. "You have any idea what we would have paid to get into…Plesetsk, I think, is where they made those things, the Chelomei Design Bureau."
"They really wanted us to see that stuff."
"Sure as hell," Clark agreed.
"What do I do with the photos?"
John almost said to toss them, but it was data, and they were working on company time. He had to draft and send a story to Interfax to maintain his cover—he wondered if anyone would print it. Wouldn't that be a gas, he thought with a shake of the head. All they were doing, really, was circling in a holding pattern, waiting for the word and the opportunity to meet Kimberly Norton. The film and a copy of his story, he decided, would find their way into the diplomatic bag. If nothing else, it was good practice for Ding—and for himself, Clark admitted.
"Turn that damned noise down," he said, and they switched to Russian. Good language practice.
"I miss the winters at home," Chekov observed.
"I don't," Klerk answered. "Where did you ever acquire the taste for that awful American music?" he asked with a growl.
"Voice of America," came the reply. Then the voice laughed.
"Yevgeniy Pavlovich, you have no respect. My ears can't tolerate that damned noise. Don't you have something else to play?"
"Anything would be an improvement," the technician observed to himself, as he adjusted his headphones and shook his head to clear them of the damned gaijin noise. Worse still, his own son listened to the same trash.
Despite all the denials that had gone back and forth over the past few weeks, the reality of it was finally plain for all to see. The huge, ugly car-carriers swinging at anchor in several different harbors were silent witnesses on every TV news broadcast on NHK. The Japanese car companies owned a total of a hundred nineteen of them, not counting foreign-flag ships operating under charter that were now heading back to their own home ports. Ships that never stayed still any longer than it took to load another cargo of autos now sat like icebergs, clogging anchorages. There was no sense in loading and dispatching them. Those awaiting pier space in American ports would take weeks to unload. The crews took the opportunity to do programmed maintenance, but they knew that when those make-work tasks were done, they would truly be out of business.
The effect snowballed rapidly. There was little point in manufacturing automobiles that could not be shipped. There was literally no place to keep them. As soon as the huge holding lots at the ports were filled, and the traincars on their sidetracks, and the lots at the assembly plants, there was simply no choice. Fully a half-dozen TV crews were on hand when the line supervisor at the Nissan plant reached up and pressed a button. That button rang bells all up and down the line. Ordinarily used because of a problem in the assembly process, this time it meant that the line was stopped. From the beginning, where the frames were placed on the moving chain-belt, to the end, where a navy-blue car sat with its door open, awaiting a driver to take it out of the building, workers stood still, looking at one another. They'd told themselves that this could never happen. Reality to them was showing up for work, performing their functions, attaching parts, testing, checking off—very rarely finding a problem—and repeating the processes for endless numbing but well-compensated hours, and at this moment it was as if the world had ceased to rotate. They'd known, after a fashion. The newspapers and TV broadcasts,