Debt Of Honor (1994)

by Tom - Jack Ryan 06 Clancy

  "So all we have is what we can infer from their operational patterns."

  "And here it is," Robby said, walking to the chart.

  "Pushing us off ..."

  "Making Admiral Dubro commit. It's pretty clever, really. The ocean is mighty big, but it can get a lot smaller when there's two fleets moving around it. He hasn't asked for an ROE update yet but it's something we need to start thinking about."

  "If they load that brigade onto their amphibs, then what?"

  An Army colonel, one of Robby's staff, answered. "Sir, if I were running this, it's real easy. They have troops on the ground already, playing games with the Tamils. That secures the beachhead pretty slick, and the landing is just administrative. Getting ashore as a cohesive unit is the hard part of any invasion, but it looks to me like that's already knocked. Their Third Armored Brigade is a very robust formation. Short version is, the Sri Lankans don't have anything with a prayer of slowing it down, much less stopping it. Next item on the agenda, you gobble up a few airfields and just fly your infantry forces in. They have a lot of people under arms. Sparing fifty thousand infantrymen for this operation would not be much of a stretch for them.

  "I suppose the country could degenerate into a long-term insurgency situation," the Colonel went on, "but the first few months would go to the Indians almost by default, and with their ability to isolate the island with their navy, well, whatever insurgents have a yen to fight things out wouldn't have a source of resupply. Smart money, India wins."

  "The hard part's political," Ryan mused. "The U.N. will get pretty excited...."

  "But projecting power into that area is a bitch," Robby pointed out. "Sri Lanka doesn't have any traditional allies, unless you count India. They have no religious or ethnic card to play. No resources for us to get hot and bothered about."

  Ryan continued the thought: "Front-page news for a few days, but if the Indians are smart about it, they make Ceylon their fifty-first state--"

  "More likely their twenty-sixth state, sir," the Colonel suggested, "or an adjunct to Tamil Nadu, for ethnic reasons. It might even help the Indians defuse their own difficulties with the Tamils. I'd guess there have been some contacts."

  "Thank you." Ryan nodded to the Colonel, who had done his homework. "But the idea is, they integrate the place into their country politically, full civil rights and everything, and all of a sudden it's no story at all anymore. Slick," Ryan observed. "But they need a political excuse before they can move. That excuse has to be a resurgence of the Tamil rebels--which of course they are in a position to foment."

  "That'll be our indicator," Jackson agreed. "Before that happens, we need to tell Mike Dubro what he's going to be able to do about it."

  And that would not be an easy call, Ryan thought, looking at the chart. Task Group 77.1 was heading southwest, keeping its distance from the Indian fleet, but though there was an ocean in which to maneuver, not far to Dubro's west was a long collection of atolls. At the end of it was the American base at Diego Garcia: a matter of some comfort, but not much.

  The problem with a bluff was that the other guy might guess it for what it was, and this game was a lot less random than a poker hand. Combat power favored the Americans, but only if they had the will to use it. Geography favored India. America really had no vital interests in the area. The U.S. fleet in the Indian Ocean was basically there to keep an eye on the Persian Gulf, after all, but instability in any region was contagious, and when people got nervous about such things, a destructive synergy took place. The proverbial stitch-in-time was as useful in this arena as any other. That meant making a decision on how far the bluff could be pressed.

  "Gets tricky, doesn't it, Rob?" Jack asked with a smile that showed more amusement than he felt.

  "It would be helpful if we knew what they were thinking."

  "Duly noted, Admiral. I will get people cracking on that."

  "And the ROE?"

  "The Rules of Engagement remain the same, Robby, until the President says otherwise. If Dubro thinks he's got an inbound attack, he can deal with it. I suppose he's got armed aircraft on the deck."

  "On the deck, hell! In the air, Dr. Ryan, sir."

  "I'll see if I can get him to let out another foot of lead on the leash," Jack promised.

  A phone rang just then. A junior staff officer--Marine newly promoted to major's rank--grabbed it, and called Ryan over.

  "Yeah, what is it?"

  "White House Signals, sir," a watch officer replied. "Prime Minister Koga just submitted his resignation. The Ambassador estimates that Goto will be asked to form the new government."

  "That was fast. Have the State Department's Japan desk send me what I need. I'll be back in less than two hours." Ryan replaced the phone.

  "Koga's gone?" Jackson asked.

  "Somebody give you a smart pill this morning, Rob?"

  "No, but I can listen in on phone conversations. I hear we're getting unpopular over there."

  "It has gone a little fast."

  The photos arrived by diplomatic courier. In the old days, the bag would have been opened at the port of entry, but in these kinder and gentler times the long-service government employee got in the official car at Dulles and rode all the way to Foggy Bottom. There the bag was opened in a secure room, and the various articles in the canvas sack were sorted by category and priority and hand-carried to their various destinations. The padded envelope with seven film cassettes was handed over to a CIA employee, who simply walked outside to his car and drove off toward the Fourteenth Street Bridge. Forty minutes later, the cassettes were opened in a photolab designed for microfilm and various other sophisticated systems but readily adapted to items as pedestrian as this.

  The technician rather liked "real" film--since it was commercial, it was far easier to work with, and fit standard and user-friendly processing equipment--and had long since stopped looking at the images except to make sure that he'd done his job right. In this case the color saturation told him everything. Fuji film, he thought. Who'd ever said it was better than Kodak? The slide film was cut, and the individual segments fitted into cardboard holders whose only difference from those any set of parents got to commemorate a toddler's first meeting with Mickey Mouse was that they bore the legend Top Secret. These were numbered, bundled together, and put into a box. The box was slid into an envelope and set in the lab's out-bin. Thirty minutes later a secretary came down to collect it.

  She walked to the elevator and rode to the fifth floor of the Old Headquarters Building, now almost forty years of age and showing it. The corridors were dingy, and the paint on the drywall panels faded to a neutral, offensive yellow. Here, too, the mighty had fallen, and that was especially true of the Office of Strategic Weapons Research. Once one of CIA's most important subagencies, OSWR was now scratching for a living.

  It was staffed with rocket scientists whose job descriptions were actually genuine. Their job was to look at the specifications of foreign-made missiles and decide what their real capabilities were. That meant a lot of theoretical work, and also trips to various government contractors to compare what they had with what our own people knew. Unfortunately, if you could call it that, ICBMs and SLBMs, the bread-and-butter of OSWR, were almost extinct, and the photos on the walls of every office in the section were almost nostalgic in their lack of significance. Now people educated in various areas of physics were having to learn about chemical and biological agents, the mass-destruction weapons of poorer nations. But not today.

  Chris Scott, thirty-four, had started in OSWR when it had really meant something. A graduate of Rensselaer Poly-technic Institute, he'd distinguished himself by deducing the performance of the Soviet SS-24 two weeks before a highly placed agent had spirited out a copy of the manual for the solid-fueled bird, which had earned for him a pat on the head from the then-Director, William Webster. But the -24s were all gone now, and, his morning briefing material had told him, they were down to one SS-19, matched by a single Minuteman-III outside o
f Minot, North Dakota, both of them awaiting destruction; and he didn't like studying chemistry. As a result, the slides from Japan were something of a blessing.

  Scott took his time. He had lots of it. Opening the box, he set the slides in the tray of his viewer and cycled them through, making notes with every one. That took two hours, taking him to lunchtime. The slides were repackaged and locked away when he went to the cafeteria on the first floor. There the topic of discussion was the latest fall from grace of the Washington Redskins and the prospects of the new owner for changing things. People were lingering at lunch now, Scott noticed, and none of the supervisory personnel were making much of a big deal about it. The main cross-building corridor that opened to the building's courtyard was always fuller than it had been in the old days, and people never stopped looking at the big segment of Berlin Wall that had been on display for years. Especially the old hands, it seemed to Scott, who felt himself to be one of those. Well, at least he had work to do this day, and that was a welcome change.

  Back in his office, Chris Scott closed his drapes and loaded the slides into a projector. He could have selected only those he'd made special notes on, but this was his work for the day--perhaps the whole week if he played his cards right--and he would conduct himself with the usual thoroughness, comparing what he saw with the report from that NASA guy.

  "Mind if I join you?" Betsy Fleming stuck her head in the door. She was one of the old hands, soon to be a grand-mother, who'd actually started as a secretary at DIA. Self-taught in the fields of plrotoanalysis and rocket engineering, her experience dated back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lacking a formal degree, her expertise in this field of work was formidable.

  "Sure." Scott didn't mind the intrusion. Betsy was also the office's designated mom.

  "Our old friend the SS-19," she observed, taking her seat. "Wow, I like what they did with it."

  "Ain't it the truth?" Scott observed, stretching to shake off his postlunch drowsiness.

  What had once been quite ugly was now rather beautiful. The missile bodies were polished stainless steel, which allowed a better view of the structure. In the old Russian green, it had looked brutish. Now it looked more like the space launcher it was supposed to be, sleeker somehow, even more impressive in its purposeful bulk.

  "NASA says they've saved a whole lot of weight on the body, better materials, that sort of thing," Scott observed. "I really believe it now."

  "Shame they couldn't do that with their g'ddamn gas tanks," Mrs. Fleming observed. Scott grunted agreement. He owned a Cresta, and now his wife refused to drive in it until the tank was replaced. Which would be a couple of weeks, his dealer had informed him. The company was actually renting a car for him in their vain effort to curry public goodwill. That had meant getting a new parking sticker, which he would have to scrape off before returning the rental to Avis.

  "Do we know who got the shots?" Betsy asked.

  "One of ours, all I know." Scott flipped to another slide. "A lot of changes. They almost look cosmetic," he observed.

  "How much weight are they supposed to have saved?" He was right, Mrs. Fleming thought. The steel skin showed the circular patterns of the polishing rushes, almost like jeweling on a rifle bolt ...

  "According to NASA, over twelve hundred pounds on the missile body ..." Another click of the remote.

  "Hmph, but not there," Betsy noted.

  "That's funny."

  The top end of the missile was where the warheads went. The SS-19 was designed to carry a bunch of them. Relatively small and heavy, they were dense objects, and the missile's structure had to account for it. Any intercontinental missile accelerated from the moment its flight began to the moment the engines finally stopped, but the period of greatest acceleration came just before burnout. At that point, with most of the fuel burned off, the rate at which speed increased reached its maximum, in this case about ten gees. At the same time, the structural rigidity lent to the missile body by the quantity of fuel inside its tanks was minimal, and as a result, the structure holding the warheads had to be both sturdy and massive so as to evenly distribute the vastly increased inertial weight of the payloads.

  "No, they didn't change that, did they?" Scott looked over at his colleague.

  "I wonder why? This bird's supposed to orbit satellites now ..."

  "Heavy ones, they say, communications birds ..."

  "Yeah, but look at that part ..."

  The foundation for the warhead "bus" had to be strong across its entire area. The corresponding foundation for a communications satellite was essentially a thin steel annulus, a flat, sturdy donut that invariably looked too light for its job. This one was more like an unusually heavy wagon wheel. Scott unlocked a file drawer and removed a recent photo of an SS-19 taken by an American officer on the verification team in Russia. He handed it over to Mrs. Fleming without comment.

  "Look here. That's the standard structure, just what the Russians designed in, maybe with better steel, better finish. They changed almost everything else, didn't they?" Fleming asked. "Why not this?"

  "Looked that way to me. Keeping that must have cost them--what? A hundred pounds, maybe more?"

  "That doesn't make sense, Chris. This is the first place you want to save weight. Every kilo you save here is worth four or five on the first stage." Both stood and walked to the screen. "Wait a minute ..."

  "Yeah, this fits the bus. They didn't change it. No mating collar for a satellite. They didn't change it at all." Scott shook his head.

  "You suppose they just kept the bus design for their trans-stage?"

  "Even if they did, they don't need all this mass at the top end, do they?"

  "It's almost like they wanted it to stay the way it was."

  "Yeah. I wonder why."

  14

  Reflections

  "Thirty seconds," the assistant director said as the final commercial rolled for the Sunday-morning audience. The entire show had centered on Russia and Europe, which suited Ryan just fine.

  "The one question I can't ask." Bob Holtzman chuckled before the tape started rolling again. "What's it like to be the National Security Advisor in a country with no threat to its national security?"

  "Relaxing," Ryan answered with a wary look at the three cameras. None had their telltale red lights burning.

  "So why the long hours?" Kris Hunter asked in a voice less sharp than her look.

  "If I don't show up for work," Jack lied, "people might notice how unimportant I am." Bad news. They still don't know about India, but they know something's up. Damn. He wanted to keep it quiet. It was one of those things that public pressure would hurt, not help.

  "Four! Three! Two! One!" The assistant director jerked his finger at the moderator, a television journalist named Edward Johnson.

  "Dr. Ryan, what does the Administration make of changes in the Japanese cabinet?"

  "Well, of course, that's a result of the current difficulties in trade, which is not really in my purview. Basically what we see there is an internal political situation which the Japanese people can quite easily handle without our advice," Jack announced in his earnest-statesman's voice, the one that had taken a few elocution lessons to perfect. Mainly he'd had to learn to speak more slowly.

  Kris Hunter leaned forward. "But the leading candidate to take the prime ministership is a long-standing enemy of the United States--"

  "That's a little strong," Ryan interrupted with a good-natured smile.

  "His speeches, his writings, his books are not exactly friendly."

  "I suppose," Ryan said with a dismissive wave and a crooked smile. "The difference between discourse among friendly nations and unfriendly ones, oddly enough, is that the former can often be more acrimonious than the latter." Not bad, Jack ...

  "You are not concerned?"

  "No," Ryan said with a gentle shake of the head. Short answers on a show like this tended to intimidate reporters, he thought.

  "Thank you for coming in this morning, Dr. Ryan."


  "A pleasure as always."

  Ryan continued to smile until the camera lights blinked off. Then he counted slowly to ten. Then he waited until the other reporters removed their microphones. Then he removed his microphone and stood up and moved away from the working part of the set. And then it was safe to speak. Bob Holtzman followed Jack into the makeup room. The cosmeticians were off drinking coffee, and Ryan took a fistful of HandiWipes and passed the container to Holtzman. Over the mirror was a large slab of wood engraved on which was, IN HERE EVERYTHING IS OFF THE RECORD.

  "You know the real reason behind equal rights for women?" Holtzman asked. "It wasn't equal pay, or bras, or any of that crap."

  "Right," Jack agreed. "It was forcing them to wear makeup. We deserved everything we got. God, I hate this shit!" he added, wiping the pancake off his forehead. "Makes me feel like a cheap whore."

  "That isn't too unusual for a political figure, is it?" Kristyn Hunter asked, taking wipes to do the same.

  Jack laughed. "No, but it's kind of impolite for you to say so, ma'am." Am I apolitical figure now? Ryan asked himself. I suppose I am. How the hell did that happen?

  "Why the fancy footwork on my last question, Jack?" Holtzman asked.

  "Bob, if you know it was fancy footwork, then you know why." Ryan motioned to the sign over the mirror, then decided to tap it to make sure everyone caught the message.

  "I know that when the last government fell, it was us who developed the information on the bribery scandal," Holtzman said. Jack gave him a look but nothing else. Even no comment would have been a substantive comment under these circumstances.

  "That killed Goto's first chance to become Prime Minister. He was next in line, remember?"

  "Well, now he's got another. His patience is rewarded," Ryan observed. "If he can get a coalition together. "

  "Don't give me that." Hunter leaned toward the mirror to finish cleaning her nose off. "You've read the stuff he's been telling their papers, same as I have. He will get a cabinet formed, and you know what arguments he's been using."