Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [133]
"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