'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.
'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-19-type launchers, 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, seeing 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 concerned with arms-control negotiations. 'Okay, what do we have?'
'Here's what they call the H-11 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 recognized an old friend he'd thought dead and decently buried less than a week before.
'Sure as hell, the SS-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 technical 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 kilometers,' 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 surveillance in the Pacific, stuff AMBER BALL caught, but it's equivocal on several 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 payloads. 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 the overhead intelligence business. Well, that makes sense, doesn't it?' Ryan made a couple of notes. 'Okay, the downside, worst-case threat is twenty launchers with seven MIRVs each, for a total of one hundred forty?'
'Correct, Dr. Ryan.' Both were professional enough that they didn't editorialize on how bad that threat was. Japan had the theoretical capacity to cut the hearts out of one hundred forty American cities. America could quickly reconstitute the ability to turn their Home Islands into smoke and tire as well, but that wasn't a hell of a lot of consolation, was it?
'Do you know anything about the assets that produced these photos?'
'Jack,' Betsy said in her normal June Cleaver voice, 'you know I never ask. But whoever it was, was overt. You can tell that from the photos. These weren't done with a Minox. Somebody covered as a reporter, I bet. Don't worry. I won't tell.' Her usual impish smile. She had been around long enough that she knew all the tricks.
'They're obviously high-quality photos,' Chris Scott went on, wondering 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 into the factory, too. They wanted us to know.'
'Sure as hell.' Mrs. Fleming nodded agreement.
'Yeah, this.' Scott handed over two more photos. It showed a pair of modified railroad flatcars. One had a crane on it. The other showed the hardpoints for installing another. 'They evidently transport by rail instead of truck. 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 of the rest of the world. Most of the railways in Japan are narrow gauge. Funny they 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 to do it this way. There's a standard-gauge line from here to Yoshinobu. I was a little surprised by the rigging gear. The cradles in the railcar seem to roughly match the dimensions of the transport cocoon that the Russians designed for the 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 Scott answered.
'Good,' Ryan said. He pointed at both of them. 'You tell them this one'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 rolling these things out on rails,' Betsy Fleming said as she stood.
Jack organized the photos and asked for another complete set before he dismissed his visitors. Then he checked his watch and called Moscow. Ryan supposed that Sergey was working long hours, too.
'Why the hell,' he began, 'did you sell them the SS-19 design?'
The reply was harsh. Perhaps Golovko was sleep-deprived as well. 'For money, of course. The same reason you sold them Aegis, the F-15, and all—'
Ryan grimaced, mainly at the justice in the retort. 'Thanks, pal. I guess I deserved that. We estimate they have twenty available.'
'That would be about right, but we haven't had people visit their factory yet.'
'We have,' Ryan told him. 'Want some pictures?'
'Of course, Ivan Emmetovich.'
'They'll be on your desk tomorrow,' Jack promised. 'I have our estimate. 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.
