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-ig-type launch-
ers, 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, see-
ing 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 con-
cerned with arms-control negotiations. “Okay, what do we have?”
“Here’s what they call the H-n 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 recog-
nized an old friend he’d thought dead and decently buried less than a week
before.
“Sure as hell, the 88-19. 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 techni-
cal 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 kilome-
ters,” 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 sur-
veillance in the Pacific, stuff AMBER BALL caught, but it’s equivocal on sev-
eral 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 pay-
loads. 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 tin- overlie,td intelligent<•business. Well, that makes sense, doesn't it?" Ryan made a couple "I notes."Okay, the downside, worst-case threat is twenty launcluTs with sevenMIRVs each, for a total of one hundred forty?""Correct, Dr. Ryan." Both were professional enough that they didn't edilorialize on how bad that threat was. Japan had the theoretical capacity ID cutthe hearts out of one hundred forty American cities. America could quicklyreconstitute the ability to turn their Home Islands into smoke and tire aswell, but that wasn't a hell of a lot of consolation, was it? Forty-plus years ofMAD, thought to be ended less than seven days before, and now it was backagain, 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 neverask. But whoever it was, was overt. You can tell that from the photps. Theseweren't done with a Minox. Somebody covered as a reporter, I bet. Don'tworry. I won't tell." Her usual impish smile. She had been around longenough that she knew all the tricks."They're obviously high-quality photos," Chris Scott went on, wonder-ing 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 intothe 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 ofmodified railroad flatcars. One had a crane on it. The other showed the hard-points for installing another. "They evidently transport by rail instead oftruck. 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 ofthe rest of the world. Most of the railways in Japan are narrow gauge. Funnythey 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 todo it this way. There's a standard-gauge line from here to Yoshinobu. I was alittle surprised by the rigging gear. The cradles in the railcar seem to roughlymatch the dimensions of the transport cocoon that the Russians designed forthe 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 Scottanswered."Good," Ryan said. He pointed at both of them. "You tell them thisone'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 roll-ing these things out on rails," Betsy Fleming said as she stood.Jack organized the photos and asked for another complete set before hedismissed his visitors. Then he checked his watch and called Moscow. Ryansupposed that Sergey was working long hours, too."Why the hell," he began, "did you sell them the 88-19 design?"The reply was harsh. Perhaps Golovko was sleep-deprived as well. "Formoney, of course. The same reason you sold them Aegis, the F-I5, andall-"Ryan grimaced, mainly at the justice in the retort. "Thanks, pal. I guess Ideserved that. We estimate they have twenty available.""That would be about right, but we haven't had people visit their factoryyet.""We have," Ryan told him. "Want some pictures?""Of course, Ivan Emmetovich.""They'll be on your desk tomorrow," Jack promised. "I have our esti-mate. 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 firstmet, negotiating to remove those fucking things?" He heard Ryan's snortover 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 Iwas in the presence of Lucifer himself. He'd never had the least bit of affec-tion for ballistic weapons. Oh, sure, maybe they'd kept the peace for fortyyears, maybe the thought of them had deterred their owners from the intem-