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The general slumped slightly in his swivel chair. Who the blazes did he think it was? On the Command Balcony, the siren-red lights had stopped spinning. The room was still blue. The white lines out of Polyarnny had inched ahead. The lines over the coasts looked like the Fourth of July weekend at the O'Hare Traffic Control Center. The general did not like his most recent code name.

  “Icarus.”

  The phone seemed dead, the silence was so leaden, although the general heard some babbling in the background. The President was beginning to make him very nervous, bringing back some old, nagging doubts. The general had dealt personally with four Commanders-in-Chief, briefing each of them on the complexities of this moment. Of the four, this President was the only one who had joked during the briefing. The others had been dead serious as they listened. One broke into a heavy sweat, left the room abruptly, and slipped into such a deep depression afterward that he spoke only to his wife for a week. But this President had listened in what appeared to be satisfaction and quiet confidence until they reached the communications portion of the briefing.

  “Don't call us,” the President had interrupted, grinning, “we'll call you.”

  Then he launched into what he called his hemorrhoids theory of history, mixing metaphors rather badly. All the best-laid plans of mice and men, he informed the general, could go awry because of one enlarged blood vessel in the wrong leader's rectum. Very irritating, that, enough to cause anyone to misread Sarajevo and stumble into World War I. The Secretary of Defense had blanched. The general had stumbled to a stop. “Don't worry, general,” the President, attempting to make up clearly lost ground, assured him. “I'll keep Preparation H in every desk drawer.”

  The general waited an intolerable length of time, twenty seconds on the long row of Command Balcony clocks that had crept past midnight in Omaha, one A.M. in Washington.

  “Icarus,” the general repeated.

  “Icarus,” the President said.

  “Mr. President, is your EWO there?”

  “EWO.”

  Jee-zuz. The general paused in frustration. Then he added with a bite: “Your Emergency War Orders officer, Mr. President.” He almost added: The man with the black briefcase who sits outside your bedroom while you're fucking, Mr. President.

  Radnor returned from his daily thirty-minute session with the Alert Facility's barbells, slipping into the cafeteria two minutes after the scheduled ten-o'clock closing. A young Vietnamese, the only remaining attendant, shot him a briefly hostile glance—a look that said Radnor once again was keeping him in this crazy place longer than necessary—and continued rubbing down the stainless-steel counters. Radnor, caught up in a decision between pie or a doughnut, ignored the look. He chose the doughnut, bounced a single penny onto the counter, and retreated in his skivvies to a dimly lit government-issue lunch table. He draped his flight suit, from which he never could be separated, over a plastic chair.

  The price was right, the radar operator thought, mentally thanking the Air Force for this little fringe benefit for a 168-hour work week without overtime.

  The wall menu read: “Doughnut 1 cent, pie 5 cents, Blue-Plate Special (Chicken Cacciatore today) 35 cents.”

  Radnor, a freckle-faced twenty-five-year-old newlywed who usually chose apple pie, liked the Air Force. He had many reasons for that, not the least of which was his wife, Laura. If it hadn't been for the Air Force, they would not have met. He took a lot of joshing about being married to an Air Force cop. The base newspaper, the Geiger Alert, loved it—romance on the flight line and all that. The public press sensationalized it—”A Doomsday Romance,” “Finding Love by the Megaton,” and so forth. But he didn't mind, figuring he had found the most special woman in the world.

  The Air Force had been very good about it, transferring her from the Minuteman missile base at Great Falls where they met and placing them both on duty here. Just a few years earlier, the Air Force would have turned purple and transferred one of them to Guam. But the times were changing. He knew that the other guys his age, middle to late twenties, were studying and using this as a chance to get advanced degrees and get out. But not Radnor. This was a way of life, a good way of life, important. And it was even better since he had met his wife, the cop.

  Radnor made a mental note to ask Tyler if the incident with his kid had been planned. They picked some screwball ways to test flight-line security. But with a kid? Radnor was glad Laura had not gone on duty till tonight.

  At times he really worried about her. That was another reason he felt a debt to the Air Force. She was a lot safer here than she had been in Montana guarding those isolated missile silos. That wasn't just a rationalization, either, of which he knew they all did their share. Sure, the missile silos and their underground command capsules were targeted with the biggest crater-makers the Russians had. That was the only way to take them out—dig them out in the craters. But, hell, Fairchild probably was spray-targeted with smaller but more warheads to get the Buffs before they got off the ground. So that wasn't the point. Radnor was career. He knew why they were here. To deter. As long as they were here, as long as the hardened silos were spread throughout the Great Plains and the submarines moving silently beneath the oceans, nothing would happen. That was the point of all this. If that wasn't the point, what was?

  No, it was simply that her job had been damned dangerous in Montana. People were wacky over there. They went hunting with a thirty-aught-six in one hand and a six-pack in the other. Get those folks out there in the boondocks, where the silos were, and they took half-stewed potshots at the Minuteman security patrols. Just for kicks. It was nice having her here, near him, guarding B-52's, where all she had to worry about was the screwball drills and a few ban-the-bomb freaks trying to climb the fence.

  Radnor took the last bite of his penny doughnut, wiped at the barbell sweat glistening off the freckles on his forehead, draped his flight suit back over his arm, and headed for the showers.

  Icarus was mistaken. The President was not drunk. He had fallen asleep in his chair in the Lincoln Sitting Room on the second floor, watching a rerun of Mission Impossible. His wife was in Connecticut overnight after christening a new ship, and it was uncomfortably lonely in the White House. The ethereal image danced foggily in front of him now, Greg Morris setting an elaborate bug in the ornate woodwork of an old East European capital. The sounds meshed uneasily—cocked pistol, this tape will self-destruct, Icarus.

  Icarus.

  Greek mythology was not the President's strong point. His mind tripped woozily to the vision of a demigod flying too close to the true god, the sun. Icarus. Then he remembered. He came awake rapidly. Damn, he wished these guys wouldn't call him in the middle of the night. He had aides for this stuff. Still, he was embarrassed by his lapse and his mind raced in search of a smart line to recapture control of the conversation. Then, recalling his first meeting with the general, he discarded that thought and said alertly: “Sorry, general, you caught me half asleep. What seems to be the problem?”

  The President thought he heard a sigh at the other end.

  “Is your EWO there, Mr. President?”

  “I'm sure he is outside the door. In all this time, I've only been able to ditch him once.”

  The President chuckled. The general did not.

  “You need him immediately, sir.”

  “General, what is the problem?”

  “We are at Fast Pace, sir. I am now moving us to Round House. It is in your hands.”

  “My hands, general? What is the problem?”

  “Mr. President, we are in the secondary stages of a major attack, probably a Counterforce variation. SIOP is analyzing it now. Our defenses show a swarm attack by submarines, almost certainly Soviet, and a random attack by land-based ICBM's, certainly Soviet. We need your authority.”

  The phone conversation paused again, the President staring dully into the television screen as Martin Landau parked a false-bottomed getaway van over a Budapest sewer manhole.

  “Defenses,”
the President said finally. “The computers again, huh?”

  The President thought he heard another sigh, which he took as a sign of weakness. Getting no other response, he went on, adding a touch of anger to his voice.

  “General, may I be candid with you? This is a shitty way to get a new set of computers.”

  “Sir!”

  “How many times, since I became President, have those damned machines screwed up? Several hundred? How many times have they screwed up so badly we have gone to attack conferences? Five? Six?”

  The general was getting truly worried. And angry.

  “And how many times have I picked up this telephone, Mr. President? We have no time for this, sir. As you know from the briefing”—he paused slightly on that—”we have no time for debate, no time for thinking. We need your authority. This is real. This is Pearl Harbor.”

  “I don't believe it. I talked to the Russian ambassador today.”

  “I'm talking to SIOP. I trust him more.”

  “And what is your computerized adviser telling you, general? You woke me up at one o'clock in the morning with this crap. This is not new. What is SIOP telling you? Your career may be riding on it.”

  “My career, sir?”

  Icarus looked at the huge map in front of him, saw the white lines inching farther out of Polyarnny. He looked at a side screen onto which the computers, very rapidly now, spewed out data showing one of the white lines attaining suborbital height over the Arctic Ocean. He watched the computerized data quickly reduce the margin of error on the missile's trajectory. His voice took on a brittle quality.

  “Our defense system is telling me that a Soviet SS-18, carrying 2.5 to 5 megatons, has my name on it, Mr. President. SIOP is telling me my career will be over in twenty-six minutes.”

  The conversation stopped again.

  “It also is telling me that a submarine-launched missile, fired off the Outer Banks, has MIRVed near Richmond. One of its multiple warheads, carrying forty kilotons, is directed at the vicinity of Washington.”

  The general's tone changed again, with a slight hint of puzzlement. “Strange. It's so small.” Then the brittle monotone returned.

  “The computers say the odds are fifty-fifty the target is the White House, thirty-seventy it is aimed at Andrews Air Force Base. Pentagon is a possible target but it is so near the White House the choice seems irrelevant. Depends somewhat on whether it is a ground burst or air burst. We can't determine how the warhead is rigged. It will arrive in four minutes, sir.”

  “Bullshit,” the President said.

  The President looked up to see his EWO, the ever-present man with the briefcase, switch off Mission Impossible. Standing near the EWO in the open door to the sitting room were the night duty officer from the Situation Room and the President's appointments secretary, the only one of his personal aides working late this night.

  The water pelted O'Toole with a thousand Lilliputian fingers. His own Gulliver's hands pummeled the soap, turning the Ivory into a froth that filled his hair, whitewashed his huge shoulders, and invaded every bodily crevice with 99.44 percent purity. He was glad the Air Force provided Ivory. It reminded O'Toole that he hadn't come that far. The shower reminded him that he had.

  O'Toole felt good. He almost always felt good.

  Inside the Alert Facility, O'Toole took two showers a day, one in the morning and one, like this one, at night. He realized this was an idiosyncrasy, one which his buddies razzed him about. But they had not grown up in a three-room house with no running water, escaping to the Air Force.

  O'Toole rubbed the soapy lather up and down his legs, working the Ivory into the warmth at the top of his thighs where he felt the familiar pleasure of lubrication as well as cleansing.

  “O'Toole!”

  O'Toole's spongy knees snapped into a near-joint lock. He dropped the Ivory.

  “Cleanliness may be next to Godliness, you Mick prick. But you can't stay in the shower all night. Get your well-scrubbed butt out of there or you're going to have company. And you know what the Air Force thinks of asshole buddies.”

  O'Toole relaxed. It was Radnor, back from his barbell workout. Radnor was his pal. He hadn't seen.

  “Hang on to your own sweaty dong, Radnor. And don't try anything funny. I got a pal whose wife is a security cop here. She'd love to get a couple of hotshot SAC airmen on lewd behavior in a public—well, almost public—restroom.”

  The young Electronics Warfare Officer picked up the soap, placed it on the shelf, and let the shower spray begin to hose him down. He turned the water on ice cold, as he always did, to get that last jarring bit of stimulation.

  The EWO opened the briefcase. The President seemed not to notice, staring out the sitting room's corner window where the white edifice of the Washington Monument stood frozen in the clear January night. The monument's tiny red eyes, beacons for the commercial aircraft at National Airport, winked at him in devilish mockery.

  Like most Presidents, in moments of trauma he felt a sudden dislike for this house. It creaked with ghosts. He felt Lyndon Johnson here, during Vietnam, sleeping fitfully, jolted out of nightmarish dreams by the roar of aircraft approaching National, certain that the planes were bombing the White House. Johnson had lunged out of bed night after night, the huge Texas frame dripping sweat, and stared out the window at the same haunting red eyes.

  The President gripped the phone tightly and stared into the monument's tiny Orwellian orbs. The Emergency War Orders officer spread a file in front of him.

  No one had told him it would be like this. No one told him he would have to trust computers that didn't work half the time. No one told him he might have to make a decision in four minutes, not knowing if the computers were working or not, not knowing if some fool Russian or some fool American had run the wrong tape again, not knowing if SIOP or the general was out of control. Not knowing, for God's sake, if he ever would know.

  He felt Richard Nixon in the house, with a different kind of trauma, gesturing almost hysterically to a group of congressmen who wanted him to quit. He could go into the next room, Nixon said, push a button, and kill twenty-five million people. Too low, the President thought. Nixon's figure was too low. Button, button, who's got the button . . . dammit, there is no button . . . dammit, you've got the button.

  The appointments secretary placed a hand on his shoulder, squeezing slightly, seeming to nudge him, too.

  The President sagged. He had pushed the Russians. Everyone knew that was the proper way to treat them. Push them and they backed down. He had run his entire life believing that, preaching that. It was gospel, part of his political liturgy. You didn't question truths like that. It was the wishy-washy Carters that got us into trouble, nibbled to pieces; the dilettante Kennedys with their first-step treaties.

  He didn't understand. He had weapons so accurate he could lob them, as Goldwater had said years ago, into the can in the Kremlin. Weapons so awesome Russia could be a moonscape in half an hour. They couldn't possibly be so foolish. He didn't believe it. It had to be the goddamn computers. His palm had grown wet gripping the phone. But the voice at the other end continued.

  “We need your authority, sir.”

  The words rang woodenly in his ear.

  “Authority,” the President repeated dully.

  In Omaha, the general's hands had grown wet too. He was afraid now. Not of the white snake uncoiling out of Russian Arctic. He was afraid of the President.

  “Time to earn your two hundred thou, sir,” the general said coldly.

  He almost added: Time for the Preparation H, Mr. President. But he already had spoken more icily, more disrespectfully to his Commander-in-Chief than he had ever dared during his long career. He also had moved the alert status to Double Take.

  “We need your authority.”

  In the sitting room, the President looked around him. He saw the appointments secretary, an old friend and overweight political strategist who had advanced to the White House by virtue of his fri
endship and his penchant for remembering the name of every county chairman in the country. He saw the night duty officer from the Situation Room, a young naval commander he knew only as Sedgwick. He saw the Emergency War Orders officer, one of a faceless corps of shadows to whom he never had spoken, never so much as nodded. He was alone.

  “The Secretary of Defense is not here,” he said into the clammy phone. “The Secretary of State is not here. The head of the National Security Council is not here.”

  “They will not be there, sir. We anticipated this. SIOP has accounted for it. Confusion was expected. You do not have time for your advisers and you do not need them.” “A decision of this magnitude—”

  “We do not need decisions, sir. We need your authority.”

  “To nuke Moscow? To nuke Kiev and Leningrad and Vladivostok? You don't need my decisions?”

  “We've been through this before, sir. You don't have to make those decisions. SIOP will make those decisions. We need your authority. In the codes. In the EWO's briefcase.”

  “SIOP will make those decisions? A goddamn computer?”

  “The goddamn computer has twenty-five minutes, sir. You may have less than four. The computer's brain registers data, evaluates alternatives several million times faster than your brain, sir. SIOP has all the options and has never lost.”

  “Because it's against the goddam law!”

  “Because we decided long ago we did not want to lose. Because we realized long ago that a single man or a group of men could not react quickly enough to the options. We placed the options, determined by the best human brains of two generations, under the authority and understanding of eight Presidents, in SIOP. We placed the Russian options in RSIOP. It is all there—even, I'm certain, this rather strange attack sequence.”

  “Strange?”

  “We're wasting time, sir. Your time.”

  “Damn you, general, I want to know what is coming at us. If anything.”

  “Sir, our readouts show a massive attack from submarines, directed almost entirely at our strategic-bomber bases. The exceptions are our Trident submarine base in Puget Sound, which is multitargeted, and the single small warhead directed at Washington. Soviet land-based silo doors are open, but only a handful of ICBM's have been launched. Their targets are Omaha, Cheyenne, and a token number of Minuteman installations at Malmstrom in Great Falls. Frankly, it is not a strategically sound attack. If I had more time, I would be puzzled.”