Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor (69 page)

“We know where to look the next time he snorts, too. Anyway, you can call Fleet Operations and tell them there's nobody close to the carriers. Here, here, here, surface groups.” He made marks on the paper. “Also heading west at good speed, and not being real covert about it. All target-track bearings are opening. It's a complete disengagement. They're not looking for any more trouble.”

“Maybe that's good.”

Jones crushed out the cigarette. “Yeah, Master Chief, maybe it is, if the flags get their shit together.”

The funny part was that things had actually calmed down. Morning TV coverage of the Wall Street crash was clinically precise, and the analysis exquisite, probably better than Americans were getting at home,
Clark
thought, what with all the economics professors doing the play-by-play, along with a senior banker for color commentary. Perhaps, a newspaper editorialized,
America
will rethink her stance vis-a-vis
Japan
. Was it not clear that the two countries genuinely needed each other, especially now, and that a strong
Japan
served American interests as well as local ones? Prime Minister Goto was quoted in a conciliatory way, though not in front of a camera, in language that was for him decidedly unusual and widely covered for that reason.

“Fucking Twilight Zone,” Chavez observed in a quiet moment, breaking language cover because he just had to. What the hell, he thought, they were under Russian operational control now. What rules did matter now?

“Russkiy,” his senior replied tolerantly.

“Da, tovarisch,” was the grumbled reply. “Do you have any idea what's going on. Is it a war or not?”

“The rules sure are funny,”
Clark
said, in English, he realized. It's getting to me, too.

There were other gaijin back on the street, most of them apparently Americans, and the looks they were getting were back to the ordinary suspicion and curiosity, the current hostility level down somewhat from the previous week.

“So what do we do?”

“We try the Interfax number our friend gave us.”
Clark
had his report all typed up. It was the only thing he knew to do, except for keeping his contacts active and fishing for information. Surely
Washington
knew what he had to tell them, he thought, going back into the hotel. The clerk smiled and bowed, a little more politely this time, as they headed to the elevator. Two minutes later they were in the room.
Clark
took the laptop from its carry-case, inserted the phone plug in the back, and switched it on. Another minute, and the internal modem dialed the number he'd gotten over breakfast, linking to a line across the
Sea of Japan
to the Siberian mainland, thence to
Moscow
, he supposed. He heard the electronic trilling of a ringing phone and waited for linkup.

The station chief had gotten over the cringing associated with having a Russian intelligence officer in the embassy communications room, but he hadn't quite gotten to the whimsy stage yet. The noise from the computer startled him.

“Very clever technique,” the visitor said.

“We try.”

Anyone who had ever used a modem would recognize the sound, the rasp of running water, or perhaps a floor-polishing brush, just a digital hiss, really, of two electronic units attempting to synchronize themselves so that data could be exchanged. Sometimes it took but a few seconds, sometimes as many as five or even ten. In fact, it only took one second or so with these units, and the remaining hiss was actually the random-appearing digital code of 19,200 characters of information crossing the fiberoptic line per second—first in one direction, then the other. When the real transmission was concluded, formal lockup was achieved, and the guy at the other end sent his twenty column-inches for the day. Just to be on the safe side, the Russians would make sure that the report would be carried in two papers the next day, on page 3 in both cases. No sense in being too obvious.

Then came the hard part for the CIA station chief. On command, he printed two copies of the same report, one of which went to the RVS officer. Was Mary Pat going through change-of-life or something?

“His Russian is very literary, even classical. Who taught him my language?”

“I honestly don't know,” the station chief lied, successfully as it turned out. The hell of it was, the Russian was right. That occasioned a frown.

“Want me to help with the translation?”

Shit. He smiled. “Sure, why not?”

“Ryan.” A whole five hours of sleep, Jack grumped, lifting the secure carphone. Well, at least he wasn't doing the driving.

“Mary Pat here. We have something. It'll be on your desk when you get there.”

“How good?”

“It's a start,” the DDO said. She was very economical in her use of words. Nobody really trusted radiophones, secure or not.

•     •     •

“Hello, Dr. Ryan. I'm Andrea Price.” The agent was already dressed in a lab coat, complete with picture-pass clipped to the lapel, which she held up. “My uncle is a doctor, GP in
Wisconsin
. I think he'd like this.” She smiled.

“Do I have anything to worry about?”

“I really don't think so,” Agent Price said, still smiling. Protectees didn't like to see worried security personnel, she knew.

“What about my children?”

“There are two agents outside their school, and one more is in the house across from the day-care center for your little one,” the agent explained. “Please don't worry. They pay us to be paranoid, and we're almost always wrong, but it's like in your business. You always want to be wrong on the safe side, right?”

“And my visitors?” Cathy asked.

“Can I make a suggestion?”

“Yes.”

“Get them all
Hopkins
lab coats, souvenirs, like. I'll eyeball them all when they change.” That was pretty clever, Cathy Ryan thought.

“You're carrying a gun?”

“Always,” Andrea Price confirmed. “But I've never had to use it, never even took it out for an arrest. Just think of me as a fly on the wall,” she said.

More like a falcon, Professor Ryan thought, but at least a tame one.

“How are we supposed to do that, John?” Chavez asked in English. The shower was running. Ding was sitting on the floor, and John on the toilet.

“Well, we seen 'em already, haven't we?” the senior officer pointed out.

“Yeah, in the fuckin' factory!”

“Well, we just have to find out where they went.” On the face of it, the statement was reasonable enough. They just had to determine how many and where, and oh, by the way, whether or not there were really nukes riding on the nose. No big deal. All they knew was that they were SS-19-type launchers, the new improved version thereof, and that they'd left the factory by rail. Of course, the country had over twenty-eight thousand kilometers of rail lines. It would have to wait. Intelligence officers often worked banker's hours, and this was one of those cases.
Clark
decided to get into the shower to clean off before heading for bed. He didn't know what to do, yet, or how to go about it, but worrying himself to death would not improve his chances, and he'd long since learned that he worked better with a full eight hours under his belt, and occasionally had a creative thought while showering. Sooner or later Ding might learn those tricks as well, he thought, seeing the expression on the kid's face.

•     •     •

“Hi, Betsy,” Jack said to the lady waiting in his office's anteroom. “You're up early. And who are you?”

“Chris Scott. Betsy and I work together.”

Jack waved them into his office, first checking his fax machine to see if Mary Pat had transmitted the information from Clark and Chavez, and, seeing it there, decided it could wait. He knew Betsy Fleming from his CIA days as a self-taught expert on strategic weapons. He supposed Chris Scott was one of the kids recruited from some university with a degree in what Betsy had learned the hard way. At least the younger one was polite about it, saying that he worked with Betsy. So had Ryan, once, years ago, while concerned with arms-control negotiations. “Okay, what do we have?”

“Here's what they call the H-11 space booster.” Scott opened his case and pulled out some photos. Good ones, Ryan saw at once, made with real film at close range, not the electronic sort shot through a hole in someone's pocket. It wasn't hard to tell the difference, and Ryan immediately recognized an old friend he'd thought dead and decently buried less than a week before.

“Sure as hell, the SS-19. A lot prettier this way, too.” Another photo showed a string of them on the assembly building's floor. Jack counted them and grimaced. “What else do I need to know?”

“Here,” Betsy said. “Check out the business end.”

“Looks normal,” Ryan observed.

“That's the point. The nose assembly is normal,” Scott pointed out. “
Normal
for supporting a warhead bus, not for a commo-sat payload. We wrote that up a while back, but nobody paid any attention to it,” the technical analyst added. “The rest of the bird's been fully re-engineered. We have estimates for the performance enhancements.”

“Short version?”

“Six or seven MIRVs each and a range of just over ten thousand kilometers,” Mrs. Fleming replied. “Worst-case, but realistic.”

“That's a lot. Has the missile been certified, tested? Have they tested a bus that we know of?” the National Security Advisor asked.

“No data. We have partial stuff on flight tests of the launcher from surveillance in the Pacific, stuff A
MBER
B
ALL
caught, but it's equivocal on several issues,” Scott told him.

“Total birds turned out?”

“Twenty-five we know about. Of those, three have been used up in flight tests, and two are at their launch facility being mated up with orbital payloads. That leaves twenty.”

“What payloads?” Ryan asked almost on a whim.

“The NASA guys think they are survey satellites. Real-time-capable photo-sats. So probably they are,” Betsy said darkly.

“And so probably they've decided to enter the overhead intelligence business. Well, that makes sense, doesn't it?” Ryan made a couple of notes. “Okay, the downside, worst-case threat is twenty launchers with seven MIRVs each, for a total of one hundred forty?”

“Correct, Dr. Ryan.” Both were professional enough that they didn't editorialize on how bad that threat was.
Japan
had the theoretical capacity to cut the hearts out of one hundred forty American cities.
America
could quickly reconstitute the ability to turn their
Home
Islands
into smoke and tire as well, but that wasn't a hell of a lot of consolation, was it? Forty-plus years of MAD, thought to be ended less than seven days before, and now it was back again, Ryan thought. Wasn't that just wonderful?

“Do you know anything about the assets that produced these photos?”

“Jack,” Betsy said in her normal June Cleaver voice, “you know I never ask. But whoever it was, was overt. You can tell that from the photos. These weren't done with a Minox. Somebody covered as a reporter, I bet. Don't worry. I won't tell.” Her usual impish smile. She had been around long enough that she knew all the tricks.

“They're obviously high-quality photos,” Chris Scott went on, wondering how the hell Betsy had the clout to call this man by his first name.

“Slow, small-grain film, like what a reporter uses. They let NASA guys into the factory, too. They wanted us to know.”

“Sure as hell.” Mrs. Fleming nodded agreement.

And the Russians, Ryan reminded himself. Why them? “Anything else?”

“Yeah, this.” Scott handed over two more photos. It showed a pair of modified railroad flatcars. One had a crane on it. The other showed the hardpoints for installing another. “They evidently transport by rail instead of truck. I had a guy look at the railcar. It's apparently standard gauge.”

“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.

“The width between the rails. Standard gauge is what we use and most of the rest of the world. Most of the railways in
Japan
are narrow gauge. Funny they didn't copy the road transporters the Russians made for the beast,” Scott said. “Maybe their roads are too narrow or maybe they just prefer to do it this way. There's a standard-gauge line from here to Yoshinobu. I was a little surprised by the rigging gear. The cradles in the railcar seem to roughly match the dimensions of the transport cocoon that the Russians designed for the beast. So they copied everything but the transporter. That's all we have, sir.”

“Where are you off to next?”

“We're huddling across the river with the guys at NRO,” Chris Scott answered.

“Good,” Ryan said. He pointed at both of them. “You tell them this one's hotter 'n' hell. I want these things found and found yesterday.”

“You know they'll try, Jack. And they may have done us a favor by rolling these things out on rails,” Betsy Fleming said as she stood.

Jack organized the photos and asked for another complete set before he dismissed his visitors. Then he checked his watch and called
Moscow
. Ryan supposed that Sergey was working long hours, too.

“Why the hell,” he began, “did you sell them the SS-19 design?”

The reply was harsh. Perhaps Golovko was sleep-deprived as well. “For money, of course. The same reason you sold them Aegis, the F-15, and all—”

Ryan grimaced, mainly at the justice in the retort. “Thanks, pal. I guess I deserved that. We estimate they have twenty available.”

“That would be about right, but we haven't had people visit their factory yet.”

“We have,” Ryan told him. “Want some pictures?”

“Of course, Ivan Emmetovich.”

“They'll be on your desk tomorrow,” Jack promised. “I have our estimate. I'd like to hear what your people think.” He paused and then went on. “We are worst-casing at seven RVs per missile, for a total of one-forty.”

“Enough for both of us,” Golovko observed. “Remember when we first met, negotiating to remove those fucking things?” He heard Ryan's snort over the phone. He didn't hear what his colleague was thinking.

The first time I was close to those things, aboard your missile submarine, Red October, yeah, I remember that. I remember feeling my skin crawl like I was in the presence of Lucifer himself. He'd never had the least bit of affection for ballistic weapons. Oh, sure, maybe they'd kept the peace for forty years, maybe the thought of them had deterred their owners from the intemperate thoughts that had plagued chiefs of state for all of human history. Or just as likely, mankind had just been lucky, for once.