Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

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