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The director looked up. “He goes on to say that the target package given in Razov's address is accurate, and that more information will follow.”

“Who is this source?” the Secretary of Defense asked.

“His code name is Damocles.”

“You mean like the Sword of Damocles?” Lambert asked, and the director nodded. “I guess that's appropriate,” Lambert said. “The Sword of Damocles: ‘an impending danger that causes anxiety.' ”

“The source chose the code name himself,” the director said. “I guess he's got a flare for the dramatic.”

“But who the hell is he?” the President asked.

“We don't know. We suspect, however, that Damocles is nothing more than a
STAVKA
disinformation program. It's clear that
STAVKA
wants us to believe that the submarines have a fail-deadly policy. We discussed that at length after Colonel Filipov's meeting with Mr. Lambert just after the war began.”

“But if we keep getting intelligence that there is a fail-deadly policy in effect,” the Vice President asked, “shouldn't you reevaluate your assessment that it's improbable? Maybe they really
do
have orders to fire if attacked.”

“But we have only one source,” the director said. “Filipov, Damocles—we believe they're both mouthpieces for
STAVKA
. They aren't separate, mutually confirmatory reports. The Russians' GRU boys are playing to a very simple psychological phenomenon that if you hear something enough times you begin to believe it, even though, if we're right, it's just the same thing being repeated over and over by the same source.”

“And that's
if
this Damocles is who you think he is,” the President said, “and not some modern-day Oleg Penkovsky.”

“Our profiles people did a run on who he might be,” the CIA director said. “Assuming Damocles is for real, then profile's composite says he is more likely than not to possess the following attributes.” The director turned to another page in the folder. “Young, meaning under fifty. Western-oriented, meaning he's not one of the ‘Red-Brown' coalition of anti-Western xenophobes. Speaks English, which is based upon the use of one American idiom set out in quotation
marks in the text—‘that's the ball game'—which he used when he said that no matter how well our conventional forces perform, if the Bastion fires, ‘that's the ball game.' ”

A charge of electricity shot through Lambert, and he sat up. General Thomas looked over at him as the director continued. “Finally, a recent or impending professional setback or adversity along a career path within the military or security establishment, meaning the guy is disgruntled. In addition, he is almost certain to have or be the following. Access, obviously, to classified information at the highest levels. Damocles would be Russian, of course, and not an ethnic minority. And he would be male; there is no reported instance among Western security agencies of Russian females having any inclination to embark upon a program such as this.”

“Does anybody fit that profile?” the President asked.

“We're waiting on a block of computer time later tonight to run—” the director began, but Lambert interrupted.

“Pavel Filipov,” Lambert said, and all eyes turned to him.

The director shook his head. “We discussed Filipov, naturally.” He shook his head again. “He's a good soldier. He does what he's ordered to do. The fact that he may satisfy some or most of the profile does not make him Damocles, and the fact that he came to us a while back under purportedly clandestine circumstances does not make him a spy.”

“He said
STAVKA
didn't know about his visit,” Lambert said. “He said he came on orders of Razov alone.”

“Has anyone here seen any evidence that there is a difference between Razov and
STAVKA
?” the director asked. “Razov
is
STAVKA
.”

“He lost his wife,” Lambert said, and the room fell silent. “He lost his wife to an accidental nuclear war. His motivation is simple. He wants to avoid a recurrence, perhaps a devastatingly tragic recurrence.”

The director's voice was low, calm, persuasive. “He was sitting right here, in the United States, in our safe house speaking directly to you. His delivery was canned. He refused to answer additional questions.”

“Look at the tape!” Lambert said. “He used the expression, the idiom, that was used in the message Damocles delivered. He used the expression ‘that's the ball game' ! Can't you see? He's telling us who he is, but in a way that the Russians could never figure out if they intercepted the communication.”

“But if you peel back the onion, Mr. Lambert,” the director said, “who's to say this isn't part of the same disinformation scheme? We're not dealing with rookies here. The Russian GRU is as good as it gets. They don't miss a trick. Add to that, Mr. President,” he said,
taking his case to him directly, “that in our entire history we have had exactly one—
one
—agent placed this highly in the Russian, at that time Soviet, defense establishment, and that was Penkovsky. We have had, however, during the Cold War
and
since literally
hundreds
of purported sources that turned out to be managed disinformation. Against that backdrop we—and I think I can speak for the NSA as well,” the CIA director said, nodding at his counterpart from the National Security Agency, “are
not
inclined to believe
any
source, much less one that merely reiterates what we have previously assessed to be the
STAVKA
party line.”

“NSA would have to concur with that assessment,” the NSA director said, “on first blush, sir.”

The President nodded. “Okay, so this Damocles is really
STAVKA
. That means that
STAVKA
wants us to believe that the submarines have a fail-deadly policy. But we don't think that they really do, because our wargames tell us that it would be a stupid mistake to program in a fail-deadly policy.”

“Do we have a fail-deadly policy in our nuclear control system?” the Vice President asked the director of the CIA.

Admiral Dixon answered. “In peacetime,” he cleared his throat, “no, sir.” He looked over at the CIA director. “But after the nuclear attack, when our principal nuclear opponent became established with such clarity, we began injecting from tapes a fail-deadly control option into the computers of Ohio-class boomers that established data links for routine computer maintenance. The update injections should be one hundred percent complete in about three weeks. The National Command Authority would have to issue an Emergency Action Message, however, to activate the control orders, but once issued the verification committee on the subs would have authority to fire at their preplanned targets in Russia under certain conditions such as nonresponsive command channels, heightened levels of radioactivity in air samples, cessation of normal civilian and military electromagnetic emissions such as radio, TV, microwave, et cetera.”

“But would you
use
it?” the CIA director asked. “That's where the wargaming scenarios answered no. It's too brittle. The chance of inadvertent firing in any given month is
x
percent, and over
y
months—one minus
x
raised to the
y
power—the chances of inadvertent firing become unacceptable. Isn't that correct, Admiral?”

“I would never counsel activating the option, sir,” the Chief of Naval Operations said. “We just put it in because we had it, and wanted to give you the widest variety of potentially relevant options. The only time it would make sense would be if we were in the late stages of a nuclear conflict and it was unclear whether or not
any
viable
command structure would survive the next incoming attack. In that case, if decapitation were to be successful, then you might want the system to fail deadly. You might want the submarines to fire if over the weeks and months that followed they surfaced to find nothing left.”

“But the Russians are control freaks, sir,” the CIA director said. “They have—they have always had, back into the old Soviet days—the most rigidly centralized command and control system in the world,
especially
when it came to nuclear weapons. Hell, that's why Zorin was able to fire in the first place. They removed all the human links in the chain down the line from their nuclear communicators. They're paranoid. They don't trust anyone. Why the hell would they program in and then actually
use
an option that delegated the authority to destroy us and invite retaliatory destruction of their own country to a bunch of completely autonomous submarine officers, for God's sake?”

The President stared down at the table trying to digest it all. “So you think Damocles is a
STAVKA
disinformation campaign,” he said looking at the CIA director, “and you agree,” he said to the head of the NSA. “And you,” he said to the CNO, “say we have a fail-deadly policy, but it isn't ordinarily programmed into our computers. Plus you wouldn't advise using it under all but the most extreme of circumstances.” Admiral Dixon nodded. “And you don't think the Russians would even have a fail-deadly option,” he said to the nodding confirmation of the CIA director.

“Anybody else?” The President turned to Lambert. “Are you persuaded, Greg?”

Lambert shook his head. “I think Razov went behind
STAVKA'S
back to warn us off the Bastion.” He leaned forward to put his elbows on the conference table. “I think Filipov is Damocles, doing his damnedest at extreme peril to avoid destroying the world in an all-out nuclear war. And I think Zorin, who we've gotta remember is the nut who pushed the button on their end to begin with, screwed up not once but twice: first in firing their ICBMs at us, and then in issuing fail-deadly orders to the subs in the Bastion.”

“If he's such a nut, why didn't he just fire the missiles in the Bastion in the first place?” the CNO asked.

“Plus, Greg,” the CIA director said, “if Razov is so damn concerned about the risk of a hair trigger on those missiles in the Bastion, why doesn't he just issue a recall?” He looked around the table.
“Any
sensible system would have a recall option built into it.”

There was silence. Finally, the President said, “I'm sorry, Greg, but the weight of the reasoning appears to me to be on the side of discrediting the intelligence as a Russian bluff designed to scare us
into backing off going for an
X
in the win column. You know me,” he said, turning now to look up and down the table. “I will not be bluffed into backing off. The American people want this win, and I aim to get it. Now”—he leaned back and took a deep breath—“let's bring all the others back in here and get down to business.”

Lambert shut his eyes.
“Please, God, let me be wrong,”
he prayed as General Starnes opened the door to readmit the Wallflowers.

“So this is it?” President Costanzo asked. “A Defense Mobilization Order?” he read from the cover of the thick sheaf of paper. The Secretary of Labor nodded. “And with this order I will be drafting all workers, nationwide, and ordering them to report to duty at their places of employment?”

“There's no other way to keep production going,” the Secretary said.

“Jesus.” The President shook his head. “You know what this looks like, don't you? It looks just like what's going on in Russia.”

“There's no other way. Look at those industrial production numbers the Bureau of Labor Statistics just came out with. They're as bad as we feared. Down twenty percent! Only five percent of that is due to war damage; the rest is from absenteeism. And it would be worse, sir, if the workers who have stayed on the job weren't working nearly double their normal shifts, which is unsustainable over the long haul. Look at the population figures from the top ten Metropolitan Statistical Areas. More than half of the population of the ten largest metropolitan areas is living outside the cities where they're not only
not
adding to our production but are a drain on our resources.”