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“Sorry about that, sir,” Top said, shaking his head as he watched the soldier depart. Chandler had detected nothing wrong in the first place, but the first sergeant seemed to think the boy was irredeemable. The private, Chandler noted, no longer headed in his prior direction but dropped instead against the wall to rest after a short distance.
Mission, whatever it'd been, aborted.

“Well,” Chandler said, “I think I'll be off,” and turned to go.

“Sir.” Chandler stopped and looked back at the older man. Top wore a troubled look on his face as he removed his helmet and swiped a hand over the gray stubble on his tanned head. Looking at Chandler and squinting as he replaced the helmet, he said, “You got kids, sir?”

Chandler froze at the unexpected question. “I've got a son.” It was the first time in his life he'd ever uttered those words.

The first sergeant scanned the row of men who lay resting on their gear and said, “Good. I don't much care for officers that ain't got no sons.” Top's eyes drilled back into Chandler, the intensity of the look so great as to cause Chandler to avert his gaze. In so doing, he looked down at the men lying closest to him. Big, sweaty, dirty men. All of them sons, somebody's sons. Above the men, the near total darkness of the now empty tarmac made a mirror of the window, and in the darkened glass Chandler saw his image reflected.

Standing there, the features of his face indistinct in the dim reflection, Chandler saw a man in mottled green, brown, and black camouflage fatigues and combat boots, wearing his helmet and fighting load, an M-16 slung over his shoulder.

Pretty good impersonation,
Chandler thought.
Even fooled Top.

Henry Dodson, the President's lawyer, rose to address the Senate. He had a kindly smile, like that of an old man whom the years had mellowed. His slight stoop, short silver hair, and bow tie dated him to an age long gone. His blue eyes, however, hinted that the torch of life still burned brightly within him.

With a smile he bowed slightly to the Chief Justice and then turned to the Senators. “You hold the world in your hands.” The only sound Lambert heard was the whirring of the movie camera not three feet from his head. “It is yours to dispose of as you wish. Will there be war? Peace? Nuclear oblivion? Is this a time for healing, or the end of the world? Those are the great questions that spin in your head. It's enough to make a man dizzy with the weight of it. But, luckily enough, it's not the question before you today.

“This is a trial of one man, Walter Nathaniel Livingston, President of the United States of America, and there are only two facts, when you boil it all down, that are of any significance whatsoever. President Livingston was informed of a dastardly attack by the Russians against China, a nuclear surprise attack that would certainly bring about massive death and destruction in that most populous nation. From that moment forward he had two choices: remain silent, thereby tacitly becoming a party to a great and tragic villainy, or refuse to subject himself, and with him this nation, to that indignity. To live
up
to the ideals of this peace-loving country, and forewarn a fellow member of the family of nations of the coming storm of fire and death.” He stopped and looked up, adding almost perfunctorily, “He chose the latter, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is fact number one.

“We all know what happened next. The Russians fired at the Chinese, the Chinese returned fire, and an obscure Russian general in Moscow who had, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, only just seized control of their nuclear arsenal mistakenly fired a massive volley of warheads at
our
homeland in an attack that, although
horrific,
was nonetheless mistaken.

“Tempers run hot, white hot, after such disasters. You cannot blame anyone for a flood. You cannot rail against anyone but perhaps a deity for a hurricane, or an earthquake, or a tornado. But we Americans have a
President,
a real flesh-and-blood man, to blame for all that has happened. We were
attacked!”
he shouted. “A
thousand
nuclear weapons rained down on us! And it's
his
fault!
His! The President's!
Walter Nathaniel Livingston!”

The old lawyer took in the whole of the room now, with one slow sweep of his shaking head, his lips pursed. “That anger, that pressure, built up, and slowly but surely it found a vent. Demonstrations. Burnings and lootings of stores whose owners had Russian names. The ransacking of impounded Russian freighters. A Declaration of
War,”
he said eyeing the Senate, “the ultimate vent to
all
of our anger!”

He dropped now to a low tone, exhausted, it seemed, by his one-man battle. “This may well be the last voice you hear on the
subject of peace for quite a while. What lies between my words tonight and that next counsel whose voice will rise from the charred landscape like a fresh green sprout to say, ‘Enough'? Death, more death, and, unless we are all
very,
very lucky, possibly the end of the world. For you see, this war that everyone seems to want is not about issues, about establishing who is right in the surest way we as a species have developed—by imposition of justice by the conqueror over the conquered. This war of yours is about
punishment,
pure and simple.

“But the Russians
have
paid, haven't they? They have paid, and now, ladies and gentlemen, here, today, it is time for the death and destruction to stop. And what if it doesn't? What if the war goes on? They too have suffered the hammering blows from the sky. Do you imagine that the Russians are inclined to bow to our demands that they lie down at our feet and lick our
boots?
That is
madness—absurd!
And, ladies and gentlemen, it is dangerous.

“President Walter Livingston knows what lies ahead if war be our path. We will call upon our men and women to fight and die for what cause? We press home our attack, and if, God forbid, we are successful, it can have but
one
result! If we roll over their country, slaying all who rise up in its defense, scorching the earth that shakes under the treads of our mighty war machines, swooping down from the skies like great birds of some long-ago nightmare, what is it that awaits us? Is it glorious victory? A parade, with the head of General Razov on a stick at the lead?”

He shook his head slowly. “If their patriots are anything like our own—and I fear, ladies and gentlemen of the Senate, that they are—then you and I both know what the last act of this tragedy will be. As our conquering troops close in, at the moment of our greatest triumph, the groping hand of that dying Russian patriot will bravely seize upon that last remaining instrument of war at his disposal, and in that spasm of death will
unleash
the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the fires of hell will consume us all.

“Walter Livingston knows this. Walter Livingston is all that stands between us and that end. Leave him there, in the office to which he was elected. Let him go down in history as the greatest coward, the most infamous villain, that this nation has ever known, but leave him there in his office—to save us. To save our nation, to save our world, from destruction.”

“ . . . six, seven, eight, nine,
ten!
Yeah, buddy! Stu-u-u-d! Tol' ya you could do it.”

Marine Lance Corporal Terrence Monk spun his leg up and over the bench on which he had been pressing 220 pounds. The sounds of clacking iron weights and grunting men with spotters and squadmates urging them on filled the large open compartment of the amphibious assault ship.

“Shi-i-i-t, man!” Mouth shouted. “Ain't
nobody
gonna touch T Man but Bone. You up for it, Bone?”

Monk got up off the bench, sweat pouring from every pore in his body, drenching his red USMC T-shirt until it looked black. The ship's exercise room was humid, its special air conditioning precisely matching the norms of temperature and humidity for June on the Far East Pacific coast as part of the acclimatization system.

The hulking Oklahoma boy they called Bone—short for “Bone Crusher” Crenshaw—stepped up to Monk and stood menacingly in his face before lying down on the bench. The other members of First Squad added beat-up black five-pound weights to each end of the bar and fastened them on.

“Spot me,” Bone said to the men over him, who grinned, enjoying the masochistic end to their twice-daily workout.

Two of the men hoisted the heavy bar off the rack. “You got it?” a tall gangling man named Stick asked. Bone nodded, not wasting on the effort of speaking the heavy puffs of breath that he was storing.

His arms buckled and the bar came down. Slowly he pushed it back up. “One!” the men counted off. Down and up. “Two!”

Monk watched without joining the others in the count as Bone slowly approached the requisite minimum to score the victory. His mind wandered as the sounds of other Marines' shouts and profanity echoed through the enclosed space.
“Ten!
You done it, Bone man!” Mouth shouted.

But Bone wasn't through. With the greatest of efforts, his face red and the veins at his temples bulging, Bone lowered the weights one more time.

“Whoa! Shit, man! Bone ain't through, unh-uh!” Mouth said in his annoyingly hyperactive manner. Bone's press back up was labored and slow. At one point about halfway, the bar ceased rising and the spotters moved to grab it, but Bone let a burst of air out in a loud growl and drew another breath, resuming his effort. The bar rose.

“Eleven!”
the group yelled as the spotters moved the bar back onto the rack. Bone stood up, his face beet red and sweat dripping off his jaw, and faced Monk, Bone towering over the much more compact man. Standing close, Bone stared at him for a moment and then brushed by, heading for the showers.

Monk and the rest of the men of his rifle squad gathered their towels and followed.

“You men sweat all that bad shit out?” boomed from off to the group's left, emanating from a barrel-chested man. The small group of marines snapped to rigid attention. Being the senior man, Monk cautiously turned his head to face the lieutenant colonel, who stood there with sweat glowing amid the gray stubble on his head, his PT or “Physical Training” gear dark with perspiration.

“Yes,
sir!”
Monk replied, barking out the “sir” in proper form.

“Excellent, excellent,” the lieutenant colonel said, “ 'cause this is the last PT we're gonna get for a while. You men carry on.”

They continued tentatively on to the showers, not talking until they were some distance from the officer. One of the new arrivals to the squad, which had been brought up to full strength only after the Russian nuclear attack, ran up from behind and said, “Hey! Hey, guys! I heard we got an all-hands call down on the well deck at twenty-one hundred. This may be it!”

“Say?” Mouth whined. “Who the fuck are you, man? What the fuck do you know? We was jus' rappin' with the colonel, and I know my man woulda tol' me if—”

“Where'd you hear that?” Monk interrupted.

“Some guys over in Headquarters Company say the CO was up all night last night goin' over things.”

“That don't mean nothin', shitface,” Mouth asked. “Pro'bly in there whackin' off.”

“Yeah, well, Armed Forces Radio outa Japan said the Senate is gettin' ready to vote. They said all personnel who aren't on medical leave should return to base and that if they impeach the President that we're at war.”

“They said that on AFR?” Mouth asked, the pitch of his skeptical voice stuck at the highest level possible.

“Well . . . the stuff about the vote, and about everybody getting back on base.”

The opinions as to whether they would see action or whether the Russians would back down flooded out of the older men, those in their early twenties who had been in the Corps for a couple of years now. Monk's thoughts and his gaze drifted. Off at one end of the large exercise room unnoticed by the majority of its occupants, Monk saw a detail of sailors quietly breaking down the exercise
equipment and stowing it along a bulkhead. A second detail was bolting metal frames in pairs into brackets on the deck, each upright about six feet from its mate. As they reached the showers, Monk stopped to watch the “Squids.” The frames were going up in rows, and each pair had a rod sticking up above it with four hooks protruding from the rod. Hooks for IV bags, frames for litters to be placed on them. Monk's eyes followed the regular pattern of brackets along the deck. They ran the full length of the huge compartment.

“Can you at least tell me where the bathroom is?” Chandler asked.

The air force lieutenant looked up, black bags underneath his red eyes. “Men's locker room,” he said.

Chandler was fed up with the effort of trying to find something out about his predicament and needed to get back to his people, but this was obviously the right place, and he would try a few more desks before he gave up.

Squeaking across the floor of the basketball court-turned-operations center—its hardwood surface coated with condensation presumably caused by the ice rink that lay under it—Chandler entered the locker room. The conversations inside were mainly just random chatter, centering around the national sport of American males: “shit-giving.”

As Chandler entered one of the stalls, his heart leapt when he saw a newspaper at his feet. It was opened to the middle and fat from having gotten wet and then dried. He picked it up and searched for the first page of the section.
The New York Times!
Chandler realized with a surge of anticipation as he saw the page, splattered with heavy black headlines.