It might have been good news. No mass arrests and detainments, the usual handmaiden of invasions. No overt display of force beyond mere presence. You would hardly know that they were here, except that they were sure as hell here, Portagee told himself. And they planned to stay. And they didn't think anybody was going to dispute that. And he sure as hell was in no position to change their view on anything.

"Okay, here are the first overheads," Jackson said. "We haven't had much time to go over them, but—"

"But we will," Ryan completed the sentence. "I'm a carded National Intelligence Officer, remember? I can handle the raw."

"Am I cleared for this?" Adler asked.

"You are now." Ryan switched on his desk light, and Robby dialed the combination on his attache case. "When's the next pass over Japan?"

"Right about now, but there's cloud cover over most of the islands."

"Nuke hunt?" Adler asked. Admiral Jackson handled the answer.

"You bet your ass, sir." He laid out the first photo of Saipan. There were two car-carriers at the quay. The adjacent parking lot was spotted with orderly rows of military vehicles, most of them trucks.

"Best guess?" Ryan asked.

"An augmented division." His pen touched a cluster of vehicles. "This is a Patriot battery. Towed artillery. This looks like a big air-defense radar that's broken down for transport. There's a twelve-hundred-foot hill on this rock. It'll see a good long way, and the visual horizon from up there is a good fifty miles." Another photo. "The airports. Those are five F-15 fighters, and if you look here, we caught two of their F-3's in the air coming in on final."

"F-3?" Adler asked.

"The production version of the FS-X," Jackson explained. "Fairly capable, but really a reworked F-16. The Eagles are for air defense. This little puppy is a good attack bird."

"We need more passes," Ryan said in a voice suddenly grave. Somehow it was real now. Really real, as he liked to say, metaphysically real. It was no longer the results of analysis or verbal reports. Now he had photographic proof. His country was sure as hell at war.

Jackson nodded. "Mainly we need pros to go over these overheads, but, yeah, we'll be getting four passes a day, weather permitting, and we need to examine every square inch of this rock, and Tinian, and Rota, and Guam, and all the little rocks."

"Jesus, Robby, can we do it?" Jack asked. The question, though posed in the simplest terms, had implications that even he could not yet appreciate. Admiral Jackson was slow to lift his eyes from the overhead photos, and his voice suddenly lost its rage as the naval officer's professional judgment clicked in.

"I don't know yet." He paused, then posed a question of his own. "Will we try?"

"I don't know that, either," the National Security Advisor told him.

"Robby?"

"Yeah, Jack?"