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“What we're trying to say, Mr. President,” Lambert said, “is that the Russians have not yet targeted our population centers. In fact, their targeters have very deftly avoided striking any target, no matter how valuable, which is located in a place of high population density. San Diego Naval Base, for instance.”

“But their submarines haven't fired yet,” Admiral Dixon said. “They're going to be the force that is targeted at our cities, sir, because their accuracy sucks. The bulk of their fleet is in the Kara Sea defended in their ‘Bastion.' They can make good subs, but our antisub boys are better and so they fall back on defense. They deploy all these subs, you see,” the admiral said, holding his hands slightly apart in the air, “in the Kara Sea north of Murmansk and Polyarnyy. Then, while the subs lay low and quiet, their conventional surface and submarine forces, and massive numbers of land-based air force aircraft, defend that area.”

“So you're saying we can't sink these submarines in this Bastion?” the President asked.

“You give me a month or so to marshal enough assets and we'll sink ‘em, Mr. President. It'll be one bloody hell of a battle, though. We'll lose some ships, even a carrier, maybe.”

The President's head drooped. “The point is, sir,” General Thomas said, “that those submarines' missiles are not as accurate as their ICBMs. The longer they stay underwater, the more outdated their positioning systems grow. Consequently, they need big targets, where missing by a few hundred meters won't matter much.” The President looked up at him. “They're aimed at our cities, sir.
The hammer is cocked, and you can damn sure bet after the punishing we're giving them that the safety's off.”

“What do we do?” the President asked.

“That's a political question, sir,” Thomas said, and the Secretary of Defense nodded. A long silence followed.

“That should about conclude this trans-attack assessment conference, Mr. President,” the Secretary said. “We'll have another in about half an hour to assess our missile strikes and all of the new damage reports from the Russian attack on us. Meanwhile, if you don't mind, sir, we've got some work to do and this would probably be the best place for us to do it.”

The President stood almost immediately and said, “I'll be on the phone to . . . to London and our other allies. And to the Congressional leadership.”

As soon as he left, General Thomas asked, “Okay. How the hell did the Chinese get that shot off?”

General Starnes shook his head and said, “I just can't imagine, Andy. There must've been a leak or an intercept. They could've intercepted Razov's call to you, but”—shaking his head again—“that sure seems beyond their technical capabilities.”

“The President ordered Secretary Moore to tell them.”

All heads turned to look at Lambert, and he felt his throat constrict, but he swallowed and continued. “While he was on the way to Crown Helo, on his portable phone.” Lambert looked down at the table. “I tried . . . ” he opened his mouth to say, but he couldn't bring himself to tell them how he had tried to stop him but failed. How it wasn't his fault.

When he looked up, the faces of the others gathered there registered various emotions, really varying degrees of the same emotion. “Jee-sus H. Christ!” Marine General Fuller said, burying his face in his hands and shaking his head. “That stupid fucking ignorant bastard! That stupid,
stupid bastard!”

Lambert was shocked at Fuller's disrespect for the President and waited for the reprimand. Instead, however, Thomas looked over at the Secretary of Defense. “Sir, I recommend that we start keeping the Vice President informed of events more closely.”

The Secretary thought about it for a moment and then nodded slowly. “And Greg,” the Secretary of Defense said, turning to him, “if I were you I think I'd put everything down about that conversation that I could remember before it, you know, fades.” He stared back at Lambert, but the others avoided Lambert's eyes. “You understand?”

Lambert nodded.
A C.Y.A. memo,
he thought, and shook his head.
Missiles are raining down, Jane is fleeing for her life, and I'm
going to write a memo.
It sickened him. Everything is always C.Y.A. War, peace, government life is the same. He shook his head again, thinking,
C.Y.A.—Cover Your Ass.

General Razov stood with his staff on the roof of the building above his command bunker, insistent on watching the nuclear attack on his country from this vantage. The Svobodnyy Missile Field was almost 400 kilometers away, however, and in the twilight of early evening he didn't expect much of a show. The officers who stood there wore a mix of uniforms and were in various states of appearance. Crisp, clean, bright-eyed officers in dress uniforms from the warm beds of Khabarovsk and dirty, reeking men whose camouflaged battle dress and dull stares only hinted of the distant life in the field from which they had just been summoned.

“There!”

Razov followed the direction of the pointed finger and could then clearly see to the northwest that the sky along the horizon was growing brighter. It was as if a second sun were setting, the new one slightly behind the old.

It's beautiful,
Razov found himself thinking before purging himself of the awful thought. The men watched in silence as the thin clouds grew red in the artificial sunset over the horizon. The glare of detonation after detonation popped silently like slow-motion flashbulbs seemingly all at the exact same point on the earth. When the last of the glow dimmed, Razov turned to leave.

Another glow silently lit the horizon to the south. Razov froze, and his entourage stopped around him. Against the much darker background of the sky to the south there glowed a now clearly recognizable nuclear fire.

“What the hell is that?” one of the officers behind Razov asked.

“It's gotta be Vladivostok,” another answered, his voice sounding disbelief.

A bright flash burst the night sky open to their left, to the east this time and closer.

“My God!” one of the officers said, his voice low but his tone strident.

“What's going on?” another asked.

“That's close,” someone said as they watched the glow grow
much brighter than the others, the wall surrounding the roof casting a steep and dim shadow. “Must be Sakhalin.”

“But what's happening? What are the Americans doing?” the first officer repeated, voicing the question that echoed through Razov's own mind.

Chandler heard the bong and saw the
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT
sign turn dark. “Uh, ladies and gentlemen,” he heard over the PA system, the first announcement since the fires other than emergency instructions to the flight attendants, “we're gonna let you go off oxygen. You can just stick the masks back up in the overhead compartments. If you need them again, though, if the fumes are still too much for you, we'll leave the oxygen turned on and you can just get the masks back down.”

Chandler took his mask off, unbuckled his seat belt, and stood. It had been half an hour since the rapid descent, and his muscles ached from the tension of sitting.

When Chandler turned to face the cabin, most of the men and women looked at him expectantly. Several of the soldiers coughed a couple of times and held the masks to draw oxygen every few breaths. He could smell the burned plastic in the air, but it didn't bother him. When he looked down, his eyes met those of Barnes, who sat across the aisle from him.

“I think I'll go find out what happened,” Chandler said, and Barnes nodded in agreement.

He went up to the cockpit door and knocked. The door opened a couple of inches, and Chandler saw the flight engineer eyeing him. “It's a passenger,” the man said.

“Go away, passenger!” Chandler heard boomed from the cockpit.

The flight engineer turned and shrugged in apology, closing the door. Chandler's anger rose immediately and he pounded on the door. The door opened wide and the flight engineer waved Chandler in.

“Dammit, we got an airplane to fly!” the pilot said without turning around. “What the
hell
do you want?”

Chandler looked at the massive bank of avionics to his left, charred black, he could see, in the places not coated with white fire
extinguisher foam. Racks of components had been pulled out, leaving holes through which more foam had obviously been sprayed. The flight engineer's left hand was wrapped in a bandage, and a first aid kit sat on his small desk, which was otherwise covered with a map and drawing tools.

“What the hell happened?” Chandler asked.

“What kinda way is that to start a conversation?” the pilot said. “Aren't you gonna interduce yerself?”

“I'm Major David Chandler, U.S. Army Reserve.”

“Cap'n Golding,” he said, “Delta Airlines. This here is my copilot, Mr. Frazier.” The man waved with one hand as his other carefully clicked through the radio frequencies, headphones hugging his ears. “And that back there is Gator, the flight engineer and dead reckoner extraordinaire.”

“I got some city lights down there,” the copilot said. “Two o'clock, about ten miles.”

“Flagsta-a-aff,” Gator said, placing a mark and a time on his map and using his ruler to draw a line with his pencil connecting it to the previous mark.

“What's going on?”

“Gator's playin' connect the dots,” Captain Golding said. “We lost all our navigation aids. Did you ever see Jimmy Stewart in
The Spirit of St. Louis? Damn
good movie!”

“You mean you're flying this thing by finding lights in the dark and matching them up to a
map?”

“Well, we got a compass and a watch,” Gator said, holding his wristwatch up for Chandler to see, “and the printout of wind speed and direction from when we filed our flight plan. There won't be many more lights out west, here, but we'll muddle along.”

“What happened?”

In the silence that followed, the only sound that he heard was the slow click—click—click of the copilot's search across the radio spectrum. In their reluctance to respond to his question Chandler had his answer.

“That air raid back at March . . . was it . . . ?”

“I'm afraid so, son,” the pilot said in a voice that was surprisingly gentle for so gruff a man.

“Russians?” Chandler asked, incredulous.

“ ‘Parently so.”

He shook his head.
“Why?
What in God's name happened? I mean . . . right out of the blue like that and all?” He could not believe it. There must have been some mistake, some huge, monumental mistake.

“It don't make much sense to us, either,” the pilot said slowly.

“Did they hit L.A.?” Chandler could feel his heart pounding, and his head grew light.

“I don't know.”

He was in shock. He wanted to cry, but he suddenly had to fight the inexplicable urge to laugh. His lips curled up at the edges and he said, “I can't believe it.” He had to know more. The need to know rapidly consumed him. “Can't you radio anybody? LAX? Find out?”

“Nope,” Captain Golding said. “Either our transceiver's fried or the regional control centers are all gone or the FAA just shut ‘em down so as not to give homing beacons to any Russian bombers or whatever that may be pokin' around up here somewhere.” Golding looked to the front and out to the sides as if to search for Russian aircraft.

“Shouldn't you land?” Chandler said. “I mean”—he looked at the burnt equipment—“Jesus Christ! You can't fly like this.”

“I'd rather take my chances up here, personally,” Golding said.

“So where are we going?”

“The last we heard outa L.A. before the regional there went off the air was that the Russians had attacked and that we should head somewhere safe. There was a whole bunch of us on the air—everybody who got flushed outa March—and we were all askin' where the hell is safe. The guy didn't know, but his supervisor came on and said Gander, Newfoundland. He told us they didn't know what was goin' on, but said we should head to Gander, Newfoundland. Musta repeated it ten different times to other charters like us, which are about all that's flyin' since they activated the Civilian Reserve Air Fleet yesterday after the Ko-rean invasion.”

“So that's where we're headed?” Chandler asked, incredulous. “Newfoundland?”

“That's where they told me to go. I just work here.”

“Yeah, but . . . Newfoundland?”

“Major,” Golding began in an irritated voice, and then turned for the first time. He had a white patch, a bandage, over one eye. He looked at Chandler for a second with his unbandaged eye and then turned to look back out the windshield. “Major, I don't know what's goin' on. I don't know which airport is still operational, which airport may be gone, which airport may be the next target, which one may be two feet thick in fallout. I just don't know nothin'. We passed a coupla other flights headin' in the opposite direction, but they were as ignorant as we are. Frazier here's tryin' to find some civilian radio stations so we can get more info, but until then I'm goin' to Gander ‘cause they told me to, and ‘cause it sounds safe. Who the hell would wanta blow up a place like Gander, for Christ's sake?”

“What happened to your eye?” Chandler asked.

“Oh, nothin',” Golding said, scratching at the itchy tape around it. “We had our backs to March, fifteen miles out. We counted nine detonations. It was bright as shit. We had a full-blown stall, you know, when those winds caught up with us from behind. Took the lift right off the wings. Dropped our airspeed to damn near zero for a few seconds while the blast wave rushed by, and we fell like a stone.
And
we had a fire.
And
our night vision was completely screwed up by the flash.”