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  The President paused, exhausted.

  The EWO thrust sealed packets at him. The duty officer talked on a second telephone. The appointments secretary looked at him plaintively.

  “We have to get you downstairs, Mr. President,” the secretary said. “Quickly. Or aboard the chopper.”

  The President stared at him in disbelief. He heard the whump-whump-whump of the giant helicopter landing on the South Lawn.

  “Rat's ass bit of difference downstairs will make. And that chopper won't make it past those beady red eyes that are staring at me.”

  “You are not secure here, Mr. President.”

  “Secure? And I'm secure downstairs? The basement hasn't been secure since the fifties. It's about as secure as Omaha.”

  “Secure from surveillance, Mr. President. The phone line is secure. We are not certain about the room.”

  The President laughed, a harsh, crackling laugh. “You mean the Preme might be listening? That's rich. Well, fuck you, Preme.”

  The duty officer interrupted, holding the second phone loosely at his side. “A message is arriving on the direct teletype from the Soviet Premier, Mr. President.”

  The President's head started to spin. “What's it say?”

  “Eyes only for you, Mr. President.”

  “Well, get the fucker.”

  “Two more minutes, Mr. President.”

  The President placed both his palms against his forehead, running his fingers roughly through hair that suddenly felt unnaturally oily. “Did you hear that, general?” he finally said into the phone.

  “Yes, sir. Nastygram on the hotline. Shrewd buggers, aren't they?”

  “What is your superbrain saying now about the Premier's earlier message for me?”

  “Three minutes, twenty seconds to impact. Trajectory still uncertain. Wobbling slightly. Forty kilotons. Ground burst likely. Ten-ninety on Andrews. Still fifty-fifty on White House.”

  The President stiffened now, ignoring the trajectory and target odds, focusing on a nagging human question that SIOP never would compute. “I'll wait,” he said.

  “You'll what?”

  “I'll wait, general.”

  “Mr. President, you are playing with the fate of millions.”

  “That's how I earn my two hundred thou, general.”

  “They're mousetrapping you.”

  “I'll wait.”

  Icarus paused, feeling the heat of the sun. “You will accept my resignation, Mr. President?”

  “Strange time to run, general.”

  “Effective in twenty-five minutes, Mr. President. I want it on the record.”

  “The record. Very well.”

  “Good luck, Mr. President.”

  “Thank you, general. And to you.”

  “You fully realize, sir, that under my authority I launched the B-52's when I moved us to Double Take?”

  “You what?! God damn you, general.”

  Three

  0608 ZULU

  After two weeks working in this crazy place, the Vietnamese counter boy just wanted out of here as fast as he could every night. At ten o'clock sharp. This was a place of dragons and malevolent spirits. It had no soul. It was a place to play war. Crazy war. When the Americans had no place to fight a war, they made a place to play war. He would never understand them and he would never like this place.

  The counter boy unlocked the cash register to add the last penny the American had bounced off his counter. He hurriedly locked the register again, still unhappy that the visitor had kept him here past the ten-o'clock closing. He rubbed one last smudge off the stainless-steel counter and turned to leave.

  Down the hallway in the game room, Kazaklis kicked the Space Invaders game in frustration. “Fucking machine,” he muttered. “Life's run by fucking computers that don't work.” He kicked the machine again, watching the game flare in rebellion after eating his last quarter. He turned to catch Halupalai grinning at him.

  “You laughing at me, you over-the-hill beachboy?”

  Kazaklis leveled his heaviest stare at the gunner, but his eyes gave themselves away with their twinkle. He liked Halupalai. Everybody liked Halupalai.

  “Or you laughing at Moreau? Got her a good one, didn't I, old buddy?”

  “You're hopeless, Kazaklis. Why don't you let up on her?”

  “Me?” the pilot protested. “Don't lay that one on me, pal. This joint's been like a damned sorority house since Moreau showed up.”

  “No, you'd like that. Your problem, captain, is that our hard-nosed Vassar copilot won't let you romp through her fortress like it was a sorority house.”

  “Worst mistake the Air Force ever made, letting broads into SAC.”

  “That's not what you thought when she first showed up.”

  Their eyes locked. Then the twinkle returned. “That's what broads are for, Halupalai. Typin' or screwin'. Wasn't much typin' to do around here.”

  “Not much of the other, either.” Halupalai paused. “As it turned out.”

  “Fuck off, old man,” Kazaklis said sharply.

  Halupalai watched Kazaklis closely, for the pilot seemed genuinely irritated this time. “That's okay, Kazaklis,” he finally said. “I evened it up for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  Halupalai paused again, wondering briefly if he was being unfair to Moreau by continuing. He thought not.

  “You know how point-blank she was when she first came here. Had to know everything about everything and everybody. She was a real pisser. But she learned how to fly the Buff faster than anybody I ever crewed with.”

  Kazaklis grunted.

  “Well, after your little . . . uh, failure, Moreau comes up to me the way she does—sticking her chin out a foot and boring those laser-beam eyes straight through to the inside of my skull—and asks what's with Kazaklis. I say whaddaya mean. And she says, very seriously, 'Everybody's got a skeleton in his closet, Halupalai.' I says, are you serious, and she says, yep, she's serious, she wants to know what skeletons Kazaklis has got in his closet.”

  “No shit?” Kazaklis said, surprised.

  “So, I look at her,” Halupalai continued, “and say, just as seriously, 'I wouldn't open his closet door, Captain Moreau.' She asks why and I says, 'Cuz you'd be smothered in pelvic bones.'“

  Kazaklis erupted into volcanic laughter. “Pelvic bones!” he roared.

  “You know something, Kazaklis?” Halupalai continued quietly. “She laughed as hard as you just did.”

  Kazaklis stared at the floor and frowned. His lips puckered outward and his face took on that flagrantly fraudulent double image of little-boy pout and pool-hall hustle that Halupalai had seen so many times it no longer was fraudulent.

  “She still walks around here like she's got cramps twenty-eight days a month,” Kazaklis grumped without looking up. “You think you can trust somebody with nukes if they're on the rag?”

  Halupalai went quiet, wishing he had not told Kazaklis the story.

  “You old fart,” Kazaklis said after a moment, his twinkling brown eyes lifting off the floor and out of their pout. “I think you're in love.”

  Halupalai said nothing. Not true, he thought sadly. He felt his stomach, once taut and flat, bulging against his flight suit. He felt his bronzed face tighten into furrows that never quite disappeared now. He felt old and he felt Kazaklis sensing it, too. Their moods changed simultaneously.

  “Why don't you get out of this shit, Halupalai?” Kazaklis said abruptly. “How old are you? Forty-three? Forty-four? Been through Nam. Been in these airplanes for twenty years. Why don't you just retire and lay in the sun on those islands of yours? This is such bullshit. Sitting here in this godawful overheated bomb shelter waiting for something that will never happen and if it does we couldn't handle. Get out of it, man.”

  Suddenly Halupalai didn't like this at all. He could handle Kazaklis when he was deadly efficient or wildly, excessively escaping. He could handle the double image and the con. But he looked at Kazaklis now as if he h
ad never seen him before. He was certain Kazaklis didn't even believe what he had said about bomb shelters and wars. That wasn't the subject. It was far more serious than that. It was personal and threatening. Halupalai sucked his stomach in hard. He forced his face to relax, flattening the furrows.

  “Why do you stay, Halupalai?”

  “Why else, captain, sir?” Halupalai grinned, forcing the smile and forcing the lighthearted sarcasm into his voice. “To keep this world safe from godless communism, captain, sir!”

  And then the siren wailed.

  Halupalai bolted out of his chair, started his scatback dash past the picture-window vista, and pivoted sharply under the howling klaxon. In the hallway he opened up his long-yardage sprint and collided with the terror-struck Vietnamese counter boy, sending him sprawling back into the darkened cafeteria from which he had been emerging. Halupalai did not pause. The clock was on him now. He had no illusions, no fears, about anything else. This was a drill. That was fear enough. Someone somewhere had a stopwatch on him. So he raced against it, against the others, against the unseen evaluators, against the looming end of his own usefulness.

  In the shriek of the siren, Kazaklis heard World War Three. He always did, despite his words to Halupalai, and he wanted it that way. Some always heard drill, to keep their sanity. A few always heard more, to keep the adrenaline pulsing, to keep their speed at optimum. Kazaklis always heard more, and as he wheeled into the hallway, he trailed Halupalai only slightly. He knew Halupalai had to be first. He understood the Hawaiian's need. Still, he would not give him an inch, not lag a quarter-stride now to serve that need. If Halupalai got there before Kazaklis , it would be because Halupalai beat Kazaklis .

  Moreau, lying on her bunk in a sleepy reverie, landed on her feet before her brain fully changed gears. Her roommate moved simultaneously, the reflexes automatic, and the two women wedged in the door before Moreau elbowed out first, ripping the chastity belt in the scuffle. Halupalai shot past. Moreau slipped in front of Kazaklis and broke into long, strong strides. Kazaklis cut off the tanker pilot, causing her to stumble.

  Tyler, his head swimming in the money curves that would guarantee his family's long-term security, slapped his book shut. He jammed his feet into poised boots, tucking the laces without tying them, and joined the race. In the Alert Facility all minds, except one, were blank.

  O'Toole shuddered. His heart leaped, his stomach sank, and he burst out of the icy shower without turning off the water. Radnor stood there, already pulling his flight suit rapidly over his sweaty body. Radnor glanced quickly, with no facial sign of sympathy, at his drenched crewmate. O'Toole caught the look, silently answering it with “Oh, shit!” in his eyes.

  “You gonna have one very clean, very cold fanny, pal,” Radnor said as he spun out of the room.

  O'Toole grabbed a towel, discarded it immediately, seconds ticking away, and pulled his suit over his dripping body. He forced his wet feet, bare, into his boots, grabbed his socks and his underwear and his flight jacket, and started running. At the locker-room doorway he lurched after another towel for later, missed, dropped his socks, paused, forgot the socks, goddamn these drills, and stepped back up to full speed. He was scared, like a kid on the way to the dentist—not of the wrench of the dental pliers but of the quick stab of the needle. It was going to be balls-freezing cold out there. But he ran.

  Outside the Alert Facility a soft mantle of powdery snow blanketed everything except the polished runways, the floodlit B-52's, and the bulbous brown tankers. Fairchild's darkened roads throbbed surreally in the undulating fog-light orange of the scramble signals. A few blue alert trucks sped through the burned light. All others pulled quickly onto the highway shoulders. In the tower a young air controller watched traffic screens monitoring flights at both Fairchild and nearby Spokane International. He quickly aborted an F-15 fighter-interceptor coming in for a touch-and-go landing. But he was drawn away from the flight-control screens to the other computers and their coded printouts. He had heard the sirens, seen his world turn flexing orange, many times before. But this time he paled, the acne on his twenty-one-year-old face turning scarlet against a mask gone white.

  Icarus glanced sideways almost stealthily, feeling as if he were intruding into a valued colleague's soul. At his right sat Harpoon. The admiral. Suddenly the general wished he had come to know him better. His number two. They came and went so fast in this business. Odd job for a sailor, holed up down here running SIOP and the targeting staff. But his number two was always a sailor, always a submariner, a bow to the Navy's persuasive role in nuclear deterrence. Nuclear war, buddy boy, Icarus told himself. The game just changed. The admiral was white-haired and open-collared. His face was tanned and Marlboro-man craggy, a contradiction in a man who spent so much of his life away from the sun, deep beneath the sea, prowling. The red police-car lights of the Command Post whipped across Harpoon's forehead as his unrevealing eyes darted almost imperceptibly between the large missile-display screen and the row of relentless clocks. The clocks said six minutes past midnight, Omaha time; 0606 Zulu. Twenty-four minutes left for Omaha, perhaps two minutes for the President.

  “Turn off the fucking red lights,” Icarus barked into the P.A. system. “We know we got an emergency, for Christ's sake.”

  He turned squarely toward the admiral, eyeballing him across the bank of multicolored phones on the Command Balcony. He had to send the man out now, off in the giant E-4 command plane idling on a runway just minutes away. Then the country would have at least two command planes up. Harpoon in the E-4; Alice, his friend and fellow general, already up in the always-flying Looking Glass plane. They would run the show after he was gone. That was the system. Harpoon also had another job—finding a surviving President. Any surviving President, most likely a successor. Harpoon turned slowly to face him and stared without expression at the general.

  “It's time to go, admiral,” Icarus said softly.

  “The Navy doesn't like to abandon ship, general.”

  “This is my ship, admiral. You got a new one now.”

  “Still . . .”

  “You don't want me to order you to do your duty.”

  “No.”

  The admiral rose, picked up the satchel at his side, gazed one last time down at the men below, and then snapped a salute. The general saluted back.

  “Godspeed,” Icarus said.

  “God grace,” Harpoon replied.

  The general watched the sailor's ramrod-straight back move across the Command Balcony. The admiral tapped a young escort on the shoulder. Even now, twenty minutes before the No Lone Zone beneath Omaha would become most lonely indeed, the admiral could not move alone here. The two of them disappeared around the balcony's corner and the general returned his attention to the screens.

  The admiral moved quickly now, striding into a tiny hallway and up to the vault door that sealed the post off against gases and biological spores. At one time, long ago, the door offered some blast protection. Not now. Man had moved beyond defense in that area. Two guards, dressed ranger-style in berets and ascots, stood barrierlike at the door. Holsters were unsnapped over pearl-handled pistols.

  “Open it up,” the admiral said.

  “Sir,” one protested firmly, the awe of military brass ruthlessly drummed out of him.

  “Open it.”

  “Sir. I am not allowed.”

  “You been practicing practices, son,” the admiral said without rancor. “The door will be opened.” Harpoon gestured at the red cipher box behind them. “Zebra One, Charlie Six, Zebra Three, Alpha One-Niner.” The guard fingered his sidearm, as he had been trained, then turned and punched the instructions into the code box. He looked up without expression and asked: “Code word?”

  “Jericho.” And the walls came tumbling, Harpoon thought.

  “Jericho,” the guard repeated in an emotionless voice. He turned and spun the wheel on the back of the door. The door hissed, then gave way. The admiral and his escort moved quickly through
it into an empty hallway. The door hissed behind them, sealed again, for the last time now. The admiral glanced at an elevator door, decided against trusting technology tonight; and headed for the stairway, choosing the short walk to the surface. He took the stairs two at a time, followed by his escort. At the top, he met two more stern guards.

  “ID, sir,” the first said.

  The admiral unsnapped the sealed plastic card from his shirt pocket, handed it to the young man, and watched as the card passed first under ultraviolet light and then through an electronic authenticator.

  “Right hand,” the guard said.

  The admiral laid his hand on a plastic square. He thought he felt the probes tickle but knew that was his imagination.

  “Code.”

  “Jericho.”

  “Your card, sir,” the guard said, returning the ID. “The alert truck is at the door.”

  The admiral wheeled away, then paused briefly to look back at his escort. “You can't go,” Harpoon said.

  “I know, sir.”

  “You can't go back, either.”

  “I know that, too, sir. Maybe I can find a good gin-rummy game in the cafeteria. Stakes ought to be out of sight tonight.”

  The admiral looked deep into the young man's face. There was no fear in it. “Good luck, son,” Harpoon said. He turned away from the young man quickly and began sprinting now. “Shove it up their commie asses, admiral.” The voice trailed off behind him. He ran down the office-hallway entrance to SAC headquarters, past the bust of Curtis LeMay and the glass-encased red phone, and stiff-armed the outside door.