Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [289]
"War?"
Jack looked up and nodded. "Maybe."
"But the people at Wilmer today, they were just as nice—you mean they don't know either?"
Ryan nodded. "That's right."
"That doesn't make any sense!"
"No, honey, it sure doesn't." The phone rang just then, the regular house phone. Jack was the closest and picked it up. "Hello?"
"Is this Dr. John Ryan?" a voice asked.
"Yeah. Who's this?"
"George Winston. I don't know if you remember, but we met last year at the Harvard Club. I gave a little speech about derivatives. You were at the next table over. By the way, nice job on the Silicon Alchemy IPO."
"Seems like a while ago," Ryan said. "Look, it's kinda busy down here, and—"
"I want to meet with you. It's important," Winston said.
"What about?"
"I'll need fifteen or twenty minutes to explain it. I have my G at Newark. I can be down whenever you say." The voice paused. "Dr. Ryan, I wouldn't be asking unless I thought it was important."
Jack thought about it for a second. George Winston was a serious player.
His rep on the Street was enviable: tough, shrewd, honest. And, Ryan remembered, he'd sold control of his fleet to somebody from Japan. Somebody named Yamata—a name that had turned up before. "Okay, I'll squeeze you in. Call my office tomorrow about eight for a time."
"See you tomorrow then. Thanks for listening." The line went dead.
When he looked over at his wife, she was back at work, transcribing notes from her carry-notebook to her laptop computer, an Apple IIIc laptop.
"I thought you had a secretary for that," he observed with a lopsided smile.
"She can't think about these things when she writes up my notes. I can." Cathy was afraid to relate Bernie's news on the Lasker. She'd picked up several bad habits from her husband. One of them was his Irish-peasant belief in luck, and how you could spoil luck by talking about it. "I had an interesting idea today, just after the lecture."
"And you wrote it right down," her husband observed. Cathy looked up with her usual impish smile.
"Jack, if you don't write it down—"
"Then it never happened."
30—Why Not?
The dawn came up like thunder in this part of the world, or so the poem went. Sure as hell the sun was hot, Admiral Dubro told himself. It was almost as hot as his temper. His demeanor was normally pleasant, but he had simmered in both tropical heat and bureaucratic indifference for long enough. He supposed that the policy weenies and the planning weenies and the political weenies had the same take on things: he and his battle force could dance around here indefinitely without detection, doing their Ghostbusters number and intimidating the Indians without actual contact. A fine game, to be sure, but not an endless one. The idea was to get your battle force in close without detection and then strike at the enemy without warning. A nuclear-powered carrier was good at that. You could do it once, twice, even three times if the force commander had it together, but you couldn't do it forever, because the other side had brains, too, and sooner or later a break would go the wrong way.
In this case it wasn't the players who'd goofed. It was the water boy, and it hadn't even been much of an error. As his operations people had reconstructed events, a single Indian Sea Harrier at the very end of its patrol arc had had his look-down radar on and gotten a hit on one of Dubro's oilers, which were now racing northeast to refill his escort ships whose bunkers were nearly two thirds empty after the speed run south of Sri Lanka. An hour later another Harrier, probably stripped of weapons and carrying nothing but fuel tanks, had gotten close enough for a visual. The replenishment-group commander had altered course, but the damage was done. The placement of the two oilers and their two-frigate escort could only have meant that Dubro was now east-by-south of Dondra Head. The Indian fleet had turned at once, satellite photos showed, split into two groups, and headed northeast as well Dubro had little choice but to allow