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“What about in the north—Karelia?”

“They're going at it tooth and nail in Petrozavodsk today. That's the largest city left before St. Petersburg itself.”

“Are you going to try to hook up the Karelian Front with the troops in the south?”

“They're still a long way away. If this thing drags on, then we probably will try to open the road through Novgorod, but right now it's a tough row to hoe just to get down to St. Petersburg.”

“What about the Polish and Finnish troops? Any chance they'll come down from southern Finland?”

“Not right now. The two Polish divisions are very light infantry—an amphibious assault and an airborne division. And the Finns can only field about the equivalent of four infantry divisions. They're doing their job—tying down about an equal number of Russian motorized infantry divisions—but it's pretty much a push. The armored and mechanized infantry divisions the Poles sent into the semiautonomous Kaliningrad Oblast did a really fine job, though, and they're tying down four Russian divisions in Lithuania, two of them armored.”

“I don't guess that British air power had anything to do with it?”

Lambert laughed. Livingston really had been following things closely, he realized. He noticed the comfortable-looking but out-of-place leather armchair off to the side of the room, a muted television set playing on in front of it and newspapers spread all around. It was a far cry from the Oval Office briefings.

“What about ‘The Ultimatum'?” the President asked with a
voice suddenly gone lifeless. Lambert frowned. “Let me guess. CIA and NSA think he's bluffing.”

Lambert looked up and gave Livingston the most subtle of nods.

“And if they're wrong? Does Costanzo have any tricks up his sleeve for that contingency?”

Lambert shrugged.

“So they're just going to go charging into Moscow—and into the Bastion too, I suspect—and call his bluff? My God, that's just a massive game of chicken: just see who swerves first!”

Lambert needed to look at his watch, but he resisted the temptation. “Sir,” Lambert said, looking up, “don't you think it would be . . . prudent to consider relocating? Maybe heading up to your place in New Hampshire?”

“So that's it?” Livingston snapped, his old fire burning through his hospitality. “Just clear out in case Razov's serious. That's the plan? Have you talked about a formal evacuation?”

“Yes, sir, it's been discussed. Over sixty percent of the big-city population is already in the countryside anyway.”

“And you know who's left, and who would always be left despite how much effort you put into any evacuation. The underclass. The tenements full of people who've never been more than ten city blocks from their homes in their lives. And the National Guardsmen, police, firemen, city workers, and all the others who are needed just to keep the cities standing in case the Russians don't blow them to pieces. And what about the workers that Costanzo is drafting?”

“All the workers in noncritical jobs would be relocated.”

“So how many are we talking about remaining behind if there's a formal evacuation?”

“A report by FEMA and the Census Bureau estimated five, maybe eight percent,” Lambert replied. “A few million, maybe ten million people.”

“And then there's radiation.”

“The relocation camps are mostly placed upwind of the likely targets,” Lambert said. “Assuming the prevailing winds, of course.”

Lambert felt Nancy staring at him. He looked over at her. She tilted her head and shook her hair away from her face, meeting his gaze with a stare.

“Sir,” Lambert said, “it just makes sense to play it safe. If you don't have to be in a major city when the time comes,
if
the time comes, why put yourself there? And there is your family, sir.”

“Oh, I'm sending them to their uncle's ranch in Montana.”

“Sending?” Nancy said, and then she laughed, popping a grape
in her mouth. “You're ‘sending' me somewhere?” she said, smiling and arching her eyebrows. “To Uncle Bill's ranch, no less?” She laughed again.

“You have to go, because Jack won't go otherwise,” the First Lady said. “We've told him he needs to take care of you, to talk you into going.”

Nancy stared at her parents, and they stared back.

“Sir, wouldn't it make more sense if you and Mrs. Livingston went to Montana with—”

“Give it a rest, Mr. Lambert,” Nancy said, still staring at her parents. “They're as pigheaded as they've ever been, both of them. Nobody can tell them anything they don't already know.” She looked over at Lambert. “All that crap about the underclass not being evacuated from the city. They were saying that a week ago. You wanta know what else they were saying? Why it is they won't leave New York?” She turned back to look at her father. “Tell him. Tell him your great reason to stay here and get fried to a crisp. Tell him.”

Livingston looked at Lambert with a humorless expression. “Because it's that underclass, those poor people, who voted for me all along from the Congress right up to the Presidency. It was those poor people who have never been more than ten blocks from home, according to all the polls before the impeachment, who stood by me to the end. They were the six percent who still had a ‘favorable' impression of me.”

Lambert hung his head, and then looked up and said, “You know that everyone will do everything they possibly can to keep it from happening.”

“Everything except one thing, Greg. Everything except the one thing that will work. Everything but swallowing their pride and backing down before it's too late.”

Almost every bump slammed Chandler into something hard or sharp. Sweltering inside his chemical protective gear on MOPP Level IV, he scanned the radioactive landscape through the cupola's vision blocks. Although the gas turbine engine could produce its rated 1500 horsepower burning diesel or gasoline, it was currently effortlessly turning at 22,500 RPM on aviation fuel from their last fill-up and pushing them along at forty miles per hour over the rough terrain. He was constantly shaken, and the lenses of his gas mask were
fogging from his sweat and from the general dampness of the water-soaked suit following decontamination at the last Maintenance Collection Point.

Need to get the mask filters changed again,
he reminded himself.
They should have collected a fair amount of fallout by now.

He felt miserable and confined, made dirty by the repeated radioactive contaminations despite the prompt washes. It made sense they would pick lines of advance that were awash in fallout. The Russians could not defend them with trenches of Provisionals, at least not for long. But he felt unclean and wanted to pop the hatch and stick his head up, to get fresh air and to get a feel for his surroundings. Chandler had been in armored combat in the M-1A1 now long enough to know that the old adage was true: “If you can see it, you can kill it.” But outside, the terrain was black and packed hard by the near-ground-level burst, and despite the passage of time since the nuclear phase, the NBC-1 report that Bailey's Scout Platoon had worked up indicated fifty RADs per hour. If they stayed buttoned up, with the separate air system just for the crew compartment filtering the radioactive fallout from the air and the thick armor shielding direct radiation, they'd be fine. No heads stuck out on this ride, at least for the next ten miles.

Chandler struggled to maintain his vigilance to his front and flanks. Although he felt fairly safe sprinting across ground zero, they were exposed to fire not only from the front but at the weaker armor protection of their sides as well. Brigade had laid two lines of M-718 antitank mines, fired ahead of their advance by artillery, to form a corridor through which they advanced. Those mines and a couple of helicopter gunships were the sole protection on their flanks. They had to hurry not just because of the radiation but also because the mines were set to self-destruct shortly after they had passed to prevent risk to follow-on troops. Chandler would've felt better if he and Jefferson were in their hatches as usual with binoculars to their eyes looking for threats.

Buttoned up inside, Chandler was able to see only the occasional scorched stump of a tree or foundation of a farmhouse rush by.
No infantry here. This was high speed country—no stopping, no dismounting.
He glanced down at the torn and crinkled map he had folded and refolded numerous times as they advanced progressively to the northeast. He was thrown again into the wall of the turret, unable to brace himself for the undulating terrain ahead when looking down at the map.

Looking back up, Chandler saw out of the corner of his eye a break in the landscape, an irregular line. He traversed the turret to look directly at it through the gunsights just as the M-1 smashed into
the slight rise of a dirt road at a steep angle and caught air. Chandler's helmet slammed into the hatch above his head with a loud thwack and then he floated in air, his knees rising off the seat on which he had knelt. The sixty-three-ton tank fell back to earth with a crash.

The sophisticated hydromechanical suspension system of fourteen road wheels under the tank's armored skirt, together with the steel torsion bars and sixty-three square feet of track area, absorbed most of the blow, but Chandler came down hard on his knees and slipped down to the deck of the crew compartment, pain shooting through the small of his back. Sweat, shaken loose from his brow by the fall, now stung his eyes and blurred his vision, but there was no way to get through the mask's lenses to his eyes to rub them clear so he batted his eyelids repeatedly. His headache from lack of sleep was joined by the new ache in his back. With the gunner's help, Chandler climbed back up to his perch to resume his watch.

Looking out to the right, Chandler saw a jinking missile rapidly approaching, barely three hundred meters away.

“Driver ri-i-ight!”
Chandler screamed into the open intercom and then felt himself thrown to the side, his helmet smashing on the left wall of the cupola spraining his neck.
“Missile—missile . . . !”

A deep
THO-O-O-NK
from just outside the tank and a vibration that Chandler felt clearly through the armor left him holding his breath, waiting.

“Je-e-ezus!”
the driver said. “Man! That was fuckin'—”

“Gunner!” Chandler shouted, staring down the length of thin wire that had controlled the missile, which glinted in the sun all the way back to the BTR. “Battlesight—twelve o'clock! BTR! Loader, load HEAT!” Chandler yelled, ordering the High Explosive Anti-Tank round to be readied for firing.

“Cannot identify!” the gunner yelled.

“From my position!” Chandler replied, seizing the pistol grip, the Tank Commander's Override, and quickly spinning the turret around to center the cross hairs on the object he'd seen earlier: a low, bulky armored fighting vehicle covered by a camo net.

“Up!” Jefferson yelled, and the gunner added, “HEAT!” to tell Chandler that he had reset the gun's computer to the new round's ballistic profile. A small puff of smoke from the target shot out and from it emerged a small missile jinking up and down before settling in a path straight at Chandler's tank.

The gun and its sight were absolutely still despite the continuing bounds of the tank. Chandler laid the cross hairs right onto the middle of the BTR's metal side and locked it on as the missile closed the distance.

The battalion net was filled with reports of contact with BTRs and BMPs, but no tanks. As the antitank missile passed the halfway point, Chandler lazed the target with the neodymium YAG laser range-finder. Mounted high on a column at the rear of the turret, weather sensors fed wind, temperature, and humidity to the tank's computer. The digital solid-state computer, armed with those data and the tank's speed, now constantly fine-tuned the aim of the gun.

“On the way!” Chandler yelled and squeezed the trigger. The main gun let loose its HEAT round with a
WHA-A-A-NG!

The target exploded almost instantly despite its range of fourteen hundred meters, and the second missile spun crazily into the dirt hundreds of meters short of Chandler's tank. A new, much larger secondary explosion from inside the BTR tossed the camo netting high into the air and knocked the BTR onto its side, its body a roman candle of pyrotechnics shooting horizontally across the earth.

“Got it!”
the gunner yelled, having watched through his own sight.

“Cease fire,” Chandler said, exhausted and jittery from the tension.

Seeing one of Delta Company's Bradleys streak through his field of vision, Chandler said, “Get back up there with Alpha Company,” and the driver turned left to continue their high-speed run at Moscow.

Chandler pulled back the tank tarp, uncovering the dead men. There were six of them—all tankers. All of them were burned horribly, some of them dismembered—their body parts placed roughly in their correct positions relative to the torso. Chandler let the tarp drop. He was exhausted. It was difficult to feel for the men who lay dead under the plastic shroud at his feet. More dead men. He was just going through the motions of visiting all the dead and wounded that he could during lulls in the fighting. Off in the Tactical Operations Center, Loomis, the battalion Executive Officer, was completing the details of the mission plan that Chandler had discussed in broad details with the company commanders and their XOs. Next, he knew, would come the S-l with personnel matters, the S-2 with the intelligence briefing, the S-3 with the operations plan, and the S-3 Air with the air support plan. Finally, the S-4 would brief everyone on the most important topic of all, resupply, which was mainly where to link up for refueling.