"'Okay, here's where it started, then?" George Winston asked. Mark Gant ran his linger down the screen display.

"Bank of China, Bank of Hong Kong. Imperial Cathay Bank. They bought these up about four months ago, hedging against the yen, and very successfully, it appears. So, Friday, they dumped them to cash in and bought up a truckload of Japanese treasuries. With the movement that happened here, it looks like they turned twenty-two percent on the overall transaction."

They were the first, Winston saw, and being first in the trend, they cashed in big. That sort of hit was of a magnitude to cause more than a few expensive dinners in Hong Kong, a city well suited to the indulgence.

"Look innocent to you?" he asked Gant with a stifled yawn.

The executive shrugged. He was tired, but having the boss back in the saddle gave everyone new energy. "Innocent, hell! It's a brilliant move. They saw something coming, I suppose, or they were just lucky."

Luck, Winston thought, there was always that. Luck was real, something any senior trader would admit over drinks, usually after two or three, the number required to get past the usual "brilliance" bullshit. Sometimes it just felt right, and you did it because of that, and that's all there was to it. If you were lucky, it worked, and if not, you hedged.

"Keep going," he ordered.

"Well, then other banks started doing the same thing." The Columbus Group had some of the most sophisticated computer systems on the Street, able to track any individual issue and category of issues over time, and Gant was a quintessential computer jockey. They next watched the sell-off of other T-Bills by other Asian banks. Interestingly, the Japanese banks were slower off the mark than he would have expected. It was no disgrace to be a little behind Hong Kong. The Chinese were good at this thing, especially those trained by the Brits, who had largely invented modern central banking and were still pretty slick at it. But the Japs were faster than the Thais, Winston thought, or at least they should have been . . .

It was instinct again, just the gut-call of a guy who knew how to work the Street: "Check Japanese treasuries. Mark."

Gant typed in a command, and the rapid advance in the value of the yen was obvious—so much so, in fact, that they hardly needed to track it via computer. "Is this what you want?"

Winston leaned down, looking at the screen. "Show me what Bank of China did when they cashed in."

"Well, they sold off to the Eurodollar market and bought yen. I mean, it's the obvious play—"

"But look who they bought the yen from," Winston suggested.

"And what they paid for it . . ." Gant turned his head and looked at his boss.

"You know why I was always honest here, Mark? You know why I never screwed around, not ever, not even once, not even when I had an in-the-bank sure thing?" George asked. There was more than one reason, of course, but why confuse the issue? He pressed his fingertip to the screen, actually leaving a fingerprint on the glass. He almost laughed at the symbolism. "That's why."

"That doesn't really mean anything. The Japanese knew they could jack it up some and—" Gant didn't quite get it yet, Winston saw. He needed to hear it in his own terms.

"Find the trend, Mark. Find the trend there." Well, son of a bitch, he told himself, heading to the men's room. The trend is my friend. Then he thought of something else:

Fuck with my financial market, will you?

It wasn't much consolation. He had given his business over to a predator, Winston realized, and the damage was well and truly done. His investors had trusted him and he had betrayed that trust. Washing his hands, he looked up into the mirror over the sink, seeing the eyes of a man who'd left his post, deserted his people.

But you're back now, by God, and there's a ton of work to be done.

Pasadena had finally sailed, more from embarrassment than anything else, Jones thought. He'd listened to Bart Mancuso's phone conversation with CINCPAC, explaining that the submarine was loaded with weapons and so filled up with food that her passageways were completely covered with cartons of canned goods, enough for sixty days or more at sea. That was a sign of the not-so-good old days, Jones thought, remembering what the long deployments had been like, and so USS Pasadena, warship of the U.S. Navy, was now at sea, heading west at about twenty knots, using a quiet screw, not a speed screw, he thought. Otherwise he might have gotten a hit on her. The submarine had just passed within fifteen nautical miles of a SOSUS emplacement, one of the new ones that could hear the fetal heartbeat of an unborn whale calf. Pasadena didn't have orders yet, but she'd be in the right place if and when they came, with her crew running constant drills, leaning down, getting that at-sea feeling that came to you when you needed it. That was something.

Part of him dearly wished to be there, but that was part of his past now.

"I don't see nothin', sir." Jones blinked and looked back at the fan-fold page he'd selected.

"Well, you have to look for other things," Jones said. Only a Marine with a loaded pistol would get him out of SOSUS now. He'd made that clear to Admiral Mancuso, who had in turn made it clear to others. There had been a brief discussion of getting Jones a special commission, perhaps to Commander's rank, but Ron had quashed that idea himself. He'd left the Navy a Sonarman 1/c, and that was as good a rank as he'd ever wanted. Besides, it would not have looked good to the chiefs who really ran this place and had already accepted him as one of their own.

Oceanographic Technician 2/c Mike Boomer had been assigned to Jones as personal assistant. The kid had the makings of a good student, Dr. Jones thought, even if he'd left service in P-3's because of chronic airsickness.

"All these guys are using Prairie-Masker systems when they snort. It sounds like rain on the surface, remember? Rain on the surface is on the thousand-hertz line. So, we look for rain"—Jones slid a weather photo on the table—"where there ain't no rain. Then we look for sixty-hertz hits, little ones, short ones, brief ones, things you might otherwise ignore, that happen to be where the rain is. They use sixty-hertz generators and motors, right? Then we look for transients, just little dots that look like background noise, that are also where the rain is. Like this." He marked the sheet with a red pen, then looked to the station's command master chief, who was leaning over the other side of the table like a curious god.

"I heard stories about you when I was working the RefTra at Dam Neck. I thought they were sea stories."

"Got a smoke?" the only civilian in the room asked. The master chief handed one over. The antismoking signs were gone and the ashtrays were out. SOSUS was at war, and perhaps the rest of PacFlt would soon catch up.

Jesus, I'm home, Jones told himself. "Well, you know the difference between a sea story and a fairy tale."

"What's that, sir?" Boomer asked.

"A fairy tale starts, 'Once upon a time,' " Jones said with a smile, marking another 60Hz hit on the sheet.

"And a sea story starts, 'No shit,' " the master chief concluded the joke.

Except this little fucker really was that good. "I think you have enough to run a plot, Dr. Jones."

"I think we have a track on an SSK, Master Chief."

"Shame we can't prosecute."

Ron nodded slowly. "Yeah, me, too, but now we know we can get hits on the guys. It's still going to be a mother for P-3's to localize them. They're good boats, and that's a fact." They couldn't get too carried away. All SOSUS did was to generate lines of bearing. If more than one hydrophone set got a hit on the same sound source, you could rapidly triangulate bearings into locations, but those locations were circles, not points, and the circles were as much as twenty miles across. It was just physics, neither friend nor enemy. The sounds that most easily traveled long distances were of the lower frequencies, and for any sort of wave, only the higher frequencies gave the best resolution.