"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? Forty-plus years of MAD, thought to be ended less than seven days before, and now it was back again, Ryan thought. Wasn't that just wonderful?

"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.

And the Russians, Ryan reminded himself. Why them? "Anything else?"