Fortunes of War by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online Page B

the safes of the top leadership, because some of this information could have come only from official documents.
    Boiled down, the message was that the last of the guidance systems had been removed from the Russians’ submarine-based ballistic missiles. The Russians had finished removing the guidance systems from their land-based ICBMs last year; their tactical nuclear warheads had been removed from service and destroyed five years ago.
    Russia was no longer a nuclear power.
    Okada knew that the United States had secretly insisted upon nuclear disarmament as the price of the massive foreign aid needed by the current, elected regime to solidify its hold on power. That fact camefrom intercepted American diplomatic traffic. The United States hadn’t even briefed its allies.
    Well, the secret had certainly been well kept, even in Russia. Not a whisper of this earth-shattering development had appeared anywhere in the public press in Russia or Western Europe: Okada would have seen it mentioned in the agency’s press summaries if it had been. Part of the reason was that only the top echelon of military commanders in Russia knew that all the guidance systems had been removed in a series of maintenance programs nominally designed to test and return to service every system in the inventory.
    Disarmament was such a political hot potato that the Russian government had kept it a secret from its own people.
    By some tangled loop of Kremlin logic, this course of action made perfect sense. As long as no one outside the upper echelons of government knew that the nuclear weapons delivery systems were no longer operational, no one lost face, and no one lost votes. The domestic political crises never materialized. And as long as no one outside Russia knew, the missiles continued to deter potential aggressors, just as they always had. Deterrence was the function of ICBMs, wasn’t it?
    Now the Japanese knew. And the Russian government didn’t know they knew.
    That is, the Japanese would know as soon as Masataka Okada signed the routing slip and sent the message to his superior officer, the head of Asian intelligence for the Japanese Intelligence Agency.
    From Okada’s boss, the news would go to the head of the agency, who would take it to the prime minister, Atsuko Abe.
    What Atsuko Abe would make of this choice tidbit was a matter to speculate darkly about. Masataka Okada did just that now as he chewed on a fingernail. Abe’s national-destiny speeches leapt to mind, as did the secret military buildup that had been going on in Japan for the last five years. And now there was the assassin’s letter, written in blood, which had been leaked to the newspapers by someone in the prosecutor’s office investigating the assassination. The letter demanded that the military take over the government and lead Japan to glory. Okada’s friends and acquaintances—indeed, the whole nation—could talk of little else. Amazingly, the ritual suicides of the emperor’s killers had given the ultranationalistic, militaristic views of the Mishima sect a mainstream legitimacy that they had never before enjoyed.
    Watching this orgy of twisted patriotism gave Okada chills.
    What would be the consequences to Japan if military force was used against Russia?
    Okada well knew that there would be consequences, mostly unpredictable and, he feared, mostly negative. He certainly didn’t share Abe’s faith in Japan’s destiny.
    Okada’s father’s first wife died at Hiroshima under the mushroom cloud. He was a son of the second wife, who had been severely burned at Hiroshima but had survived. As a boy, he had examined his mother’s scars as she bathed. When he was ten she died of leukemia—another victim of the bomb. Forty years had passed since then, but he could still close his eyes and see how the flesh on her back had been burned, literally cooked, by the thermal pulse of the explosion.
    He fumbled for