Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

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