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"It means that you can't use nuclear weapons to take these boys out—not easily anyway," Scott went on. "Summarize what you know for me," he ordered.
"This is a rail line that doesn't make any commercial sense. It doesn't go anywhere, so it can't make money. It's not a service siding, too long for that. It's standard gauge, probably because of the cargo-dimension requirements."
"And they're stringing camouflage netting over it," Betsy finished the evaluation, and was already framing the National Intelligence Estimate they had to draft tonight. "Chris, this is the place."
"But I only count ten. There's ten more we have to find."
It was hard to think of it as an advantage, but the downsizing of the Navy had generated a lot of surplus staff, so finding another thirty-seven people wasn't all that hard. That brought Te
A car pulled up to the brow, and a petty officer got out, carrying a metal briefcase. He made his way aboard, dodging around the crewmen tossing cartons, then down a hatch.
"That's the software upgrade for the sonar systems," Claggett's XO said.
"The one they've been tracking whales with."
"How long to upload it?"
"Supposedly just a few minutes."
"I want to be out of here before dawn, X."
"We'll make it. First stop Pearl?"
Claggett nodded, pointing to the other Ohios, also loading men and chow. "And I don't want any of those turkeys beating us there, either."
It wasn't a comfortable feeling, but the sight was worth it. Joh
"Bastards," the skipper breathed.
"We can fix her," Sanchez noted quietly.
"Four months. If we're lucky," the Captain added. They just didn't have the parts to do it any faster. The key, unsurprisingly, was the reduction gears. Six complete gear sets would have to be manufactured, and that took time. Enterprise's entire drive-train was gone, and the efforts to get the ship to safely as quickly as possible had wrecked the one gear set that might have been repairable. Six months for her, if the contractor could get spun up in a hurry, and work three-shift weeks to get the job done. The rest of the repairs were straightforward.
"How quick to get number-one shaft back to battery?" Sanchez asked.
The Captain shrugged. "Two-three days, for what that's worth."
Sanchez hesitated before asking the next question. He should have known the answer, and he was afraid it would sound really stupid—oh, what the hell? He had to go off to Barbers Point anyway. And the only dumb questions, he'd told people for years, were the ones you didn't ask.
"Sir, I hate to sound stupid, but how fast will she go on two shafts?"
Ryan found himself wishing that the Flat Earth Society was right. In that case the world could have been a single time zone. As it was, the Marianas were fifteen hours ahead, Japan fourteen, Moscow eight. Western Europe's principal financial markets were five and six ahead, depending on the country. Hawaii was five hours behind. He had contacts in all of those places, and everyone was working on local time, and it was so different in every case that just keeping track of who was probably awake and who was probably asleep occupied much of his thoughts. He grunted to himself in bed, remembering with nostalgia the confusion that always came to him on long flights. Even now people were working in some of those places, none under his control, and he knew he had to sleep if he were going to be able to deal with any of them when the sun returned to where he lived and worked. But sleep wasn't coming, and all he saw was the pine decking that made up his bedroom ceiling.
"Any ideas?" Cathy asked.
Jack grunted. "I wish I'd stuck with merchant banking."
"And then who'd be ru
A long breath. "Somebody else."
"Not as well, Jack," his wife suggested.
"True," he admitted to the ceiling.
"How do you think people will react to this?"
"I don't know. I'm not even sure how I'm reacting to it," Jack admitted. "It's not supposed to be like this at all. We're in a war that doesn't make any sense. We just got rid of the last nuclear missiles ten days ago, and now they're back, and pointed at us, and we don't have any to point back at them, and if we don't stop this thing fast—I don't know, Cathy."
"Not sleeping doesn't help."
"Thank God, married to a doctor." He managed a smile. "Well, honey, you got us out of one problem anyway."
"How did I do that?"
"By being smart." By using your head all the time, his mind went on. His wife didn't do anything without thinking it through first. She worked pretty slowly by the standards of her profession. Perhaps that was normal for someone pushing the frontiers buck, always considering and pla
"Well, I think they've learned one lesson," Yamata said. A rescue aircraft had recovered two bodies and some floating debris from the American bomber. The bodies would be treated with dignity, it had been decided. The names had already been telexed to Washington via the Japanese Embassy, and in due course the remains would be returned. Showing mercy was the proper thing to do, for many reasons. Someday America and Japan would be friends again, and he didn't want to poison that possibility. It was also bad for business.
"The Ambassador reports that they do not offer us anything," Goto replied after a moment.
"They have not as yet evaluated their position, and ours."
"Will they repair their financial systems?"
Yamata frowned. "Perhaps. But they still have great difficulties. They still need to buy from us, they still need to sell to us—and they ca
And until then, Yamata thought, things were going well. The Americans would not soon again probe his country's mainland. They didn't have the ability to retake the islands, and by the time they did, well, Japan would have a new ally, and perhaps even new political leadership, wouldn't it?