Debt of Honor

infantrymen for this operation would not be much of a stretch for them.

'I suppose the country could degenerate into a long-term insurgency situation,' the Colonel went on, 'but the first few months would go to the Indians 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 excited…'

'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 bothered 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 Indian fleet, but though there was an ocean in which to maneuver, not far to Dubro's west was a long collection of atolls. At the end of it was the American 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 for what it was, and this game was a lot less random than a poker hand. Combat 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. fleet 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 unpopular 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 with 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 equipment—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 commemorate 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 Headquarters 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 sub-agencies, 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 nostalgic 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 distinguished himself by deducing the performance of the Soviet SS-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 -24's were all gone now, and, his morning briefing material had told him, they were down to one SS-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. That look two hours, taking him to lunchtime. The slides were repackaged 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 Redskins 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 the old days, and people never stopped looking at the big segment of Berlin Wall that had been on display for years. Especially the old hands, it seemed to Scott, who felt himself to be one of those. Well, at least he had work to do this day, and that was a welcome change.

Back in his office, Chris Scott closed his drapes and loaded the slides into a projector. He could have selected only those he'd made special notes on, but this was his work for the day—perhaps the whole week if he played his cards right—and he would conduct himself with the usual thoroughness, comparing what he saw with the report from that NASA guy.

'Mind if I join you?' Betsy Fleming stuck her head in the door. She was one of the old hands, soon to be a grandmother, who'd actually started as a secretary at DIA. Self-taught in the fields of photoanalysis and rocket engineering, her experience dated back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lacking a formal degree, her expertise in this