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Lambert saw General Thomas immediately lean forward in his chair and punch several buttons on the panel recessed into the conference table.

“What the hell does Lemon Juice mean?” the President asked.

“It means an attack by hostile aircraft and/or missiles is probable,” Lambert answered for the busy Thomas.

“Communications,” a woman said over the speakerphone.

“This is General Thomas. I want an air threat conference, a missile threat conference, and a space threat conference—simultaneously.”

“What the hell . . . ?” the President began.

There was a long tone over the speakerphone, and then the woman said calmly, “The conferences are convened, sir.” In the background, the sound of a rhythmic buzzer could be heard from one of the command centers.

“Al, what's the story?” Thomas asked the commander in chief of
NORAD.

“DSP has thirty-six unconfirmed launches from western Russian fields,” Wilson replied. “Early impact assessment is
CONUS.”

Thomas's chin dropped to his chest and his eyes closed. Lambert's mind refused to admit the meaning of the words he had just heard, but he felt the shock of the news vicariously as its effects rippled down the table. Jaws dropped or wide eyes stared blankly into space as the stunned Joint Chiefs each absorbed the blow in his own way.

“What the hell's going on?” demanded the President, looking from one Chief to the next, all silent and ashen.

It was Lambert who translated. “The Defense Support Program System has detected the infrared signatures of thirty-six missile
launches from western Russia.” The words he spoke ignited a flame that began to burn slowly within Lambert.
The bastards!
his first thought as the news sank in. “The probable points of impact are in the continental United States.”

“Forty-three now, sir,” a new voice said over the speakerphone. Lambert looked around the table at the faces of the military men and the Secretary of Defense. General Thomas returned his look, and with the tingle that ran down Lambert's spine there rose a resolve to do his job.

“But you said . . . you said ‘unconfirmed,' ” the President managed in a voice so low he could have been talking to himself. “Maybe there's a screwup somewhere.”

“I've got to go,” General Wilson said over the line and hung up.

“Wait!” the President shouted, but it was too late. The sounds of several lines disconnecting came over the speaker. “Get that son of a bitch back on the line!”

“Mr. President,” Thomas said, “he's got a lot to do and not much time to do it in. We can answer your questions.” Lambert struggled against the state of shock into which he had fallen. Everything about the situation had an otherworldly quality to it, so much so that Lambert had to force the idea from his head that this was not real, that it was all just a vivid dream. “We have a verification system based on the principle of dual-warning phenomenology, which means that we need warnings from two distinct types of warning systems before we declare an attack confirmed. We already have infrared detection, so we'll get radar confirmation in . . . ” He looked at the captain, who lingered in the door, not wanting to leave. Wanting to know what was happening. “When did
CINCNORAD
declare Lemon Juice?”

The man looked down at the flimsy piece of paper.

“Zero five two six fourteen Zulu,” the man said, his voice distant and distracted. The look on his face made Lambert shudder.

“That'll be all, Captain,” Thomas said, frowning. The captain left without closing the door. Lambert leaned over to give it a push as Thomas looked down at his watch. “Assuming launch at zero five two four Zulu, we'll get first impact in about twenty-eight minutes unless they launch from subs near our shores, or have had cruise missiles in the air for some time now, or they use depressed trajectories on any of their ballistic missiles instead of lobbing them high in a typical flight profile.
BMEWS
—the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System of phased array radars across the north from Clear, Alaska, to Thule, Greenland, to Flyingdales in the U.K.—or Cobra Dane out of Shemya Island in the Aleutians should pick up the first post-boost
vehicle launched on a high trajectory any second now when it rises over the Arctic horizon.”

“Is there . . . is there any chance, any chance at all, that this is a false alarm?” the President asked, his hands raised and clasped in front of him as if in supplication.

General Thomas stared back at him. “No, sir. We must have already gotten
ELINT,
electronic intelligence such as radio transmissions of telemetry on the missiles—which doesn't count as the second warning—from Diogenes Station in Sinop, Turkey, and Teufelsberg in Berlin that's consistent with massive launches from European fields, or General Wilson would've taken us down from Yellow by now. They're on the way, sir.”

“Check and make sure,” the President said, and Thomas turned to General Starnes, Air Force Chief of Staff, and nodded. Starnes picked up his telephone.

This is it,
Lambert thought.
Oh, my God, this is it!
Jane's beautiful face flashed into his mind and he quickly did the calculation. She was on the Beltway nearing the Highway 193 exit.
In twenty-seven minutes,
he thought,
at sixty-five miles per hour, she'd be . . . about thirty miles away from D.C.
He heaved a sigh as if he had just witnessed her complete her escape. His skin tingled, and he felt drained emotionally.
Thirty miles,
he thought again.
That's far enough.
He caught himself almost speaking the last words. Nodding his head without realizing, Lambert's thoughts began an inventory of those next closest.
Mom and Dad,
he thought,
asleep in their beds on the thirty-second floor of their East 72nd Street apartment. New York.

General Starnes placed the telephone's handset into its cradle. “
ELINT
has twenty-eight high-frequency intercepts and counting. Spot Decrypt indicates high probability of telemetry.”

The Joint Chiefs stared at the President as if he had gotten his answer. President Livingston didn't ask for an explanation and seemed to deflate physically into a mere fraction of his former size and presence. “Why?” the President asked faintly. “Why?” Lambert felt a shiver run up his spine, and he crossed his arms to ward off the chill.

A stunned silence filled the room. Had the President at that moment shown decisive leadership, Lambert might have sunk into the noise of his scattered thoughts and taken a back seat to the men around him, all decades his senior. But when he saw the incredulity on the President's face, Lambert felt compelled to step to the fore and do his job as the President's national security adviser. He felt the adrenaline charge his system, and in an instant his mind cleared
and Lambert felt—he saw—with a clarity not normally attained what was coming and what was required of him and of his boss. “Mr. President,” Lambert said, and everyone turned to him, “we need to discuss an Air Combat Command alert order.”

“An alert order? An order to do what?”

Lambert's jaw hurt, and he forced himself to loosen its clench. He didn't hesitate—the apocalyptic vision born from years of study stood full-blown before his mind's eye, leaving only one rational course of action. “An alert order to implement the Single Integrated Operational Plan, sir. To strike, and destroy, the remaining Russian nuclear forces.”

Chris Stuart heard the heavy boom on closing of the Launch Control Center's concrete blast door, doubly reinforced with steel rods and coated with special polymers to dampen the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear detonation. Access to the bottom of the elevator shaft was now sealed off. Double titanium blast doors had also closed off the top of the shaft. The physical links of the two men in the underground center to the aboveground Launch Control Facility and the three airmen stationed there were now severed.

Stuart looked over and watched while Scott Langford reached up and ran his index finger under the yellow ascot that he wore inside the collar of his blue blouse. The finality of the sound didn't seem to bother the man, who sat in his padded aircraft-style leather chair positioned twelve feet from and at a right angle to Stuart's chair.

The launch center, a one-piece steel capsule sunk 100 feet underneath the former cavalry post, was suspended from the roof of its cavern by four hydraulic jacks. Its interior ceiling was curved along the forty-one-foot length and twenty-six-foot width of the capsule.

The two men were on the second run through their prefiring checklists, confirming the correct positioning of every switch and the correct status of every indicator on their two identical consoles. Nine of the ten lights on Stuart's panel shone green. The tenth, missile number eight, which they had visited on their ride out to the Launch Control Center, shone red.

This is a drill. This is a drill. This is a drill,
Stuart kept thinking,
like a mantra, to keep himself calm. But the whole base had gone to
DEFCON
2. He shook his head again and forced the thought to vanish.
I'll pick up a bottle of Scotch at the Ground Zero and have a whispered conversation about this with the other launch officers when my shift is up tomorrow.

The buzzing of the “red phone,” the Primary Alerting System connecting the Air Combat Command headquarters to its 152 missile launching centers, caused Stuart to freeze. A red light lit on the base of the phone.

Stuart looked at Langford, who was lifting his red phone off the cradle. As Stuart reached for his own phone, he could already hear in his head the cool voice of the computer from all the drills of training: “Big Noise, Lemon Juice. Big Noise, Lemon Juice.”

The recorded message, repeating itself continually, was in the familiar cool woman's voice. “Sea Plane, Lemon Juice. Sea Plane, Lemon Juice. Sea Plane, Lemon Juice.” The world stood still. It was as if the filter through which Stuart saw the world had suddenly changed and everything around him seemed alien, bathed in a stark new illumination. A tickling feeling spread over his scalp and trickled down his spine, and he shivered as he replaced the receiver in its cradle. He pushed the orange button off to the side of the phone, extinguishing, he knew, the one small light on the console at ACC Headquarters. One more person knew. He had been informed. He knew.
“Sea Plane,”
Stuart thought.
“This is not a drill.”

“I have Air Defense Warning Yellow,” Langford said without turning around. “Confirm.” It sounded to Stuart as if he were a mile away, but he responded as trained with, “Air Defense Warning Yellow—confirmed.”

“I've still got number eight showing off line. Get on the horn and give ‘em a shove,” Langford said, opening the black leather logbook of the Launch Control Center to record the event.

Stuart looked at the white radio telephone on his console for several seconds before he reached up to hit the button, ringing the telephone in the access tunnel of the number eight silo.

“Senior Master Sergeant Kline, here,” Stuart heard the tinny sound through the receiver. It was the twangy accent of the man they had seen earlier at the open blast door of the silo.
Kli-i-ine,
Stuart tried to mimic in his mind as he formed the name with his lips, flattening the
i
of the man's name as the sergeant had done himself.

“Sergeant Kline,” Stuart said, “we've got a Yellow alert.” Stuart's own voice sounded distant, and he had to concentrate hard to remember the purpose of the call. “How long before you can put number eight back up?”

“Jeezus. What the hell's goin' on, sir?”

“I don't know.”

Stuart clearly heard a sigh over the line. “Well, we could just deactivate the
PENAID
master control and patch ‘er up.”

Stuart felt distracted as he blinked several times, Kli-i-ine's words looping back through his mind several times until he thought to process them. “Do you, uh,” Stuart began, pausing to compose the rest of his question, “do you have to take the whole
PENAID
package off?”

“Well . . . no, sir,” Kline said. “The fault showed up in the chaff dispenser circuitry. We could get into the master control and—hell, we could just sear the circuits right off the board if ya think we should. All the penetration aids'll pro'bly show up as ‘Non-Op' on the run-up, but the decoys and jammers'll be active. Hey, but we'd be messin' up a two thousand dollar circuit board.”

The logjam of Stuart's confused thoughts was suddenly broken by the realization.
It's a fuckin' test,
Stuart realized,
and Kline's in on it!
Stuart pinched his lips closed to mask his smile, knowing now what to do, his brain functioning smoothly again. “How long would it take to sear the circuits off the board?”

“To get the assembly back in and closed”—Kline took a deep breath—“oh, and then to reattach the commumbilical—forty-five minutes. I don't know, maybe more.”

“That's too long, Sergeant,” Stuart said curtly, his lips curling up as he imagined how that would sound on the audio tapes they would review.
“Personnel Reliability Profile Tests,”
Stuart thought. They were always having to change things up since the first thing launch officers did was tell one another about the drills despite the stern warnings about secrecy.

“Well, sir,” Kline said, “I guess we could go ahead and start reattachin' the umbilical now, but it'd violate safety procedures.”
Oh,
Stuart thought.
A good one. Safety versus combat capability.
“You know,” Kline continued, “if there's a surge when we slide the
PENAID
board back into the rack ‘cause of the static electricity—”