Taro Ikeda surveyed his office, his personal command center. The space was appointed like the headquarters of a field marshall: a deep metallic gray with video screens along one wall permitting him continuously to monitor activities in every sector of the facility. And across the top of his black slate desk was marshalled a line of gray telephones with scramblers, each a secure direct line to the offices of one of the project's prime contractors.
The first was to Nagoya, to the head office of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Theirs was the initial contract let by the CEO after the project financing was in place. Indeed, Mitsubishi's Nagoya Aircraft Works was the ideal choice to manufacture the air-breathing turboramjets-scramjets for the vehicle. That conglomerate had produced over fifty thousand aircraft engines during the great Pacific war, and, more recently, their new Komaki North plant was responsible for the powerful oxygen-hydrogen engines that composed the first stage of the giant H-2 booster. The phone on his desk connected him directly to the office of Yoshio Matsunami, Mitsubishi's general manager for space systems. The massive scramjets for this project had been manufactured in Nagoya under a veil of total secrecy, then static-tested at their aeropropulsion test facility and individually shipped here to Hokkaido in unmarked railcars.
Another line connected him to the head office of Nissan's aeronautical and space division in Tokyo, already in charge of all solid rocket boosters for the Japan Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science. The CEO had hired their senior propulsion engineers to resolve problems connected with air-breathing combustion of liquid hydrogen.
The third connection was to Hitachi City, sixty miles from Tokyo. Hitachi, Limited manufactured the booster cases for the new H-2 vehicle, and their extensive experience with composite alloys at high-temperatures made them the obvious choice to create the hypersonic airframe.
There were other lines as well. The vehicle's inertial- guidance system and flight controls—both based on advanced Soviet designs—had been produced at Japan's National Aerospace Laboratory. Preliminary wind-tunnel tests had been assigned to the Kakuda Propulsion Center, whose rocket-engine development facilities were already being used to support NASDA's program in oxygen-hydrogen thruster R&D.
The last high-security line connected him directly to Tsukuba Space Center at Tsukuba Science City, forty miles from Tokyo, the nerve center for all Japanese manned space-flight research. Their clean-rooms and deep-space tracking facilities were comparable to any in the world, and their Fujitsu SX-10 supercomputer—which, with 128 processors for parallel processing, performed nine billion calculations per second—could provide realtime simulation of a complete hypersonic flight profile.
Feeling impatient now to begin the day, Taro Ikeda settled back and reached for the phones. Each contractor would give him a quick morning update, and then he would outline any further component tests or retrofitting as required. In truth, these exchanges had long since become scarcely more than rituals, since the project was all but completed. The major components had already been designed, delivered, and assembled. The contractors had been paid, the reports and evidence of their participation declared top secret and locked away from any possible prying eyes. All traces of the project had been safely secured.
There was, he reminded himself, only one major problem remaining. As part of the initial scenario, the Soviets had agreed to provide a laundered payment of one hundred million American dollars, to be used for Tanzan Mino's "incidental expenses" in the Liberal Democratic Party hierarchy. To avoid another Recruit-bribe fiasco like the one that brought down the prime minister in 1989, the money had to be scrupulously clean and totally untraceable.
But the funds had not arrived.
How the Soviets had secured the hard currency required outside of regular government channels, he could not imagine. There were even reports the money had been secretly "embezzled" from certain slipshod ministries. That it was, in fact, hot money.