Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [96]
"Whoa!" Ryan observed, sitting in the family room of his house, at a decent hour for once.
"He's got real killer instinct," Cathy observed, looking up from some medical notes.
"He does," her husband agreed. "Talk about fast. I just got briefed in on this the other day."
"Well, I think they're right. Don't you?" his wife asked.
"I think it's going a little fast." Jack paused. "How good are their docs?"
"Japanese doctors? Not very, by our standards."
"Really?" The Japanese public-health system had been held up for emulation. Everything over there was "free," after all. "How come?"
"They salute too much," Cathy replied, her head back down in her notes. "The professor's always right, that sort of thing. The young ones never learn to do it on their own, and by the time they're old enough to become professors themselves, for the most part they forget how."
"How often are you wrong, O Associate Professor of Ophthalmic Surgery, ma'am?" Jack chuckled.
"Practically never," Cathy replied, looking up, "but I never tell my residents to stop asking why, either. We have three Japanese fellows at Wilmer now. Good clinicians, good technical docs, but not very flexible. I guess it's a cultural thing. We're trying to train them out of it. It's not easy."
"The boss is always right…"
"Not always, he isn't." Cathy made a notation for a medication change.
Ryan's head turned, wondering if he'd just learned something important. "How good are they in developing new treatments?"
"Jack, why do you think they come here to train? Why do you suppose we have so many in the university up on Charles Street? Why do you suppose so many of them stay here?"
It was nine in the morning in Tokyo, and a satellite feed brought the American evening news shows into executive offices all over the city. Skilled translators were rendering the conversation into their native tongue. VCRs were making a permanent record for a more thorough analysis later, but what the executives heard was clear enough.
Kozo Matsuda trembled at his desk. He kept his hands in his lap and out of view so that the others in his office could not see them shake. What he heard in two languages—his English was excellent—was bad enough. What he saw was worse. His corporation was already losing money due to…irregularities in the world market. Fully a third of his company's products went to the United States, and if that segment of his business were in any way interrupted…
The interview was followed by a "focus segment" that showed Nissan Courier, still tied up in Baltimore, with her sister ship, Nissan Voyager, swinging at anchor in the Chesapeake Bay. Yet another car carrier had just cleared the Virginia Capes, and the first of the trio was not even halfway unloaded yet. The only reason they'd shown those particular ships was Baltimore's convenient proximity to Washington. The same was happening in the Port of Los Angeles, Seattle, and Jacksonville. As though the cars were being used to transport drugs, Matsuda thought. Part of his mind was outraged, but more of it was approaching panic. If the Americans were serious, then…
No, they couldn't be.
"But what about the possibility of a trade war?" Jim Lehrer asked that Trent person.
"Jim, I've been saying for years that we've been in a trade war with Japan for a generation. What we've just done is to level the playing field for everyone."
"But if this situation goes further, won't American interests be hurt?"
"Jim, what are those interests? Are American business interests worth burning up little children?" Trent shot back at once.
Matsuda cringed when he heard that. The image was just too striking for a man whose earliest childhood memory was of the early morning of March 10,