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 Ar-
mored 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 thou-
sand infantrymen for this operation would not be much of a stretch for them.
“I suppose the country could degenerate into a long-term insurgency situ-
ation,” the Colonel went on,’ ‘but the first few months would go to the Indi-
ans 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 ex-
cited. …”
”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 both-
ered 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 In-
dian fleet, but though there was an ocean in which to maneuver, not far lo
Dubro’s west was a long collection of atolls. At the end of il was iho Ameri-
can 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 lor what it
was, and this game was a lot less random than a poker hand. C’omhal 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. licet
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 Roles 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-a 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 un-
popular 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
wilh 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 equip-
ment-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 commem-
orate 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 Headquar-
ters 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 nostal-
gic 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 Polytechnic Institute, he’d distin-
guished himself by deducing the performance of the Soviet 88-24 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 -245 were all gone now, and, his morn-
ing briefing material had told him, they were down to one 88-19, matched
by a single Minuteman-III outside of 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. Thai look two hours, taking him to lunchtimc. The slides were repack-
aged 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 Red-
skins 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