"Well?" Jackson asked, looking at the large television on the wall of the Situation Room.

"Mancuso has his people at work in Hawaii. The Navy can give the Chinese a bad time, and the Air Force can move a lot of a.s.sets to Russia if need be," said Army General Mickey Moore, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. "It's the land side of the equation that has me worried. We could theoretically move one heavy division-First Armored-from Germany east, along with some attachments, and maybe NATO will join in with some additional stuff, but the Russian army is in miserable shape at the moment, especially in the Far East, and there's also the additional problem that China has twelve CSS-4 intercontinental ballistic missiles. We figure eight or more of them are aimed at us."

"Tell me more," TOMCAT ordered.

"They're t.i.tan-II clones. h.e.l.l," Moore went on, "I just found out the background earlier today. They were designed by a CalTech-educated Air Force colonel of Chinese ethnicity who defected over there in the 1950s. Some bonehead trumped up some security charges against him-turned out they were all bulls.h.i.t, would you believe-and he bugged out with a few suitcases' worth of technical information right out of JPL, where he was working at the time. So, the ChiComms built what were virtually copies of the old Martin-Marietta missile, and, like I said, we figure eight of them are aimed back at us."

"Warheads?"

"Five-megaton is our best guess. City-busters. The birds are b.i.t.c.hes to maintain, just like ours were. We figure they're kept defueled most of the time, and they probably need two to four hours to bring them up to launch readiness. That's the good news. The bad news is that they upgraded the protection on the silos over the last decade, probably as a result of what we did in the Iraq bombing campaign and also the B-2 strikes into j.a.pan on their SS-19 clones. The current estimate is that the covers are fifteen feet of rebarred concrete plus three feet of armor-cla.s.s steel. We don't have a conventional bomb that'll penetrate that."

"Why not?" Jackson demanded in considerable surprise.

"Because the GBU-29 we cobbled together to take out that deep bunker in Baghdad was designed to hang on the F-111. It's the wrong dimensions for the B-2's bomb bay, and the 111s are all at the boneyard in Arizona. So, we have the bombs, okay, but nothing to deliver them with. Best option to take those silos out would be air-launched cruise missiles with W-80 warheads, a.s.suming the President will authorize a nuclear strike on them."

"What warning will we have that the Chinese have prepared the missiles for launch?"

"Not much," Moore admitted. "The new silo configuration pretty well prevents that. The silo covers are ma.s.sive beasts. We figure they plan to blow them off with explosives, like we used to do."

"Do we have nuke-tipped cruise missiles?"

"No, the President has to authorize that. The birds and the warheads are co-located at Whiteman Air Force Base along with the B-2s. It would take a day or so to mate them up. I'd recommend that the President authorize that if this Chinese situation goes any further," Moore concluded.

And the best way to deliver nuclear-tipped cruise missiles-off Navy submarines or carrier-based strike aircraft-was impossible because the Navy had been completely stripped of its nuclear weapons inventory, and fixing that would not be especially easy, Jackson knew. The fallout of the nuclear explosion in Denver, which had brought the world to the brink of a full-scale nuclear exchange, had caused Russia and America to take a deep breath and then to eliminate all of their ballistic launchers. Both sides still had nuclear weapons, of course. For America they were mostly B-61 and -83 gravity bombs and W-80 thermonuclear warheads that could be affixed to cruise missiles. Both systems could be delivered with a high degree of confidence and accuracy, and stealth. The B-2A bomber was invisible to radar (and hard enough to spot visually unless you were right next to it) and the cruise missiles smoked in so low that they merged not merely with ground clutter but with highway traffic as well. But they lacked the speed of ballistic weapons. That was the trouble with the fearsome weapons, but that was also their advantage. Twenty-five minutes from turning the "enable-launch" key to impact-even less for the sea-launched sort, which usually flew shorter distances. But those were all gone, except for the ones kept for ABM tests, and those had been modified to make them difficult to fit with warheads.

"Well, we just try to keep this one conventional. How many nuclear weapons could we deliver if we had to?"

"First strike, with the B-2s?" Moore asked. "Oh, eighty or so. If you figure two per target, enough to turn every major city in the PRC into a parking lot. It would kill upwards of a hundred million people," the Chairman added. He didn't have to say that he had no particular desire to do that. Even the most bloodthirsty soldiers were repelled by the idea of killing civilians in such numbers, and those who made four-star rank got there by being thoughtful, not psychotic.

"Well, if we let them know that, they ought to think hard about p.i.s.sing us off that big," Jackson decided.

"They ought to be that rational, I suppose," Mickey Moore agreed. "Who wants to be the ruler of a parking lot?" But the problem with that, he didn't add, was that people who started wars of aggression were never completely rational.

How do we go about calling up reserves?" Bondarenko asked.

Theoretically, almost every Russian male citizen was liable to such a call-up, because most of them had served in their country's military at one time or another. It was a tradition that dated back to the czars, when the Russian army had been likened to a steamroller because of its enormous ma.s.s.

The practical problem today, however, was that the state didn't know where they all lived. The state required that the veterans of uniformed service tell the army when they moved from one residence to another, but the men in question, since until recently they'd needed the state's permission to move anywhere, a.s.sumed that the state knew where they were and rarely bothered, and the country's vast and c.u.mbersome bureaucracy was too elephantine to follow up on such things. As a result, neither Russia, nor the Soviet Union before it, had done much to test its ability to call up trained soldiers who'd left their uniforms behind. There were whole reserve divisions that had the most modern of equipment, but it had never been moved after being rolled into their warehouses, and was attended only by cadres of active-duty mechanics who actually spent the time to maintain it, turning over the engines in accordance with written schedules which they followed as mindlessly as the orders that had been drafted and printed. And so, the general commanding the Far East Military Theater had access to thousands of tanks and guns for which he had no soldiers, along with mountains of sh.e.l.ls and virtual lakes of diesel fuel.

The word "camouflage," meaning a trick to be played or a ruse, is French in origin. It really ought to be Russian, however, because Russians were the world's experts at this military art. The storage sites for the real tanks that formed the backbone of Bondarenko's theoretical army were so skillfully hidden that only his own staff knew where they were. A good fraction of the sites had even evaded American spy satellites that had searched for years for the locations. Even the roads leading to the storage sites were painted with deceptive colors, or planted with false conifer trees. This was all one more lesson of World War II, when the Soviet Army had totally befuddled the Germans so often that one wondered why the Wehrmacht even bothered employing intelligence officers, they had been snookered so frequently.

"We're getting orders out now," Colonel Aliyev replied. "With luck, half of them ought to find people who've worn the uniform. We could do better if we made a public announcement."

"No," Bondarenko replied. "We can't let them know we're getting ready. What about the officer corps?"

"For the reserve formations? Well, we have an ample supply of lieutenants and captains, just no privates or NCOs for them to command. I suppose if we need to we can field a complete regiment or so of junior officers driving tanks," Aliyev observed dryly.

"Well, such a regiment ought to be fairly proficient," the general observed with what pa.s.sed for light humor. "How fast to make the call-up happen?"

"The letters are already addressed and stamped. They should all be delivered in three days."

"Mail them at once. See to it yourself, Andrey," Bondarenko ordered.

"By your command, Comrade General." Then he paused. "What do you make of this NATO business?"

"If it brings us help, then I am for it. I'd love to have American aircraft at my command. I remember what they did to Iraq. There are a lot of bridges I'd like to see dropped into the rivers they span."

"And their land forces?"

"Do not underestimate them. I've seen how they train, and I've driven some of their equipment. It's excellent, and their men know how to make use of it. One company of American tanks, competently led and supported, can hold off a whole regiment. Remember what they did to the army of the United Islamic Republic. Two active-duty regiments and a brigade of territorials crushed two heavy corps as if it were a sand-table exercise. That's why I want to upgrade our training. Our men are as good as theirs, Andrey Petrovich, but their training is the best I have ever seen. Couple that to their equipment, and there you have their advantage."

"And their commanders?"

"Good, but no better than ours. s.h.i.t, they copy our doctrine time and again. I've challenged them on this face-to-face, and they freely admit that they admire our operational thinking. But they make better use of our doctrine than we do-because they train their men better."

"And they train better because they have more money to spend."

"There you have it. They don't have tank commanders painting rocks around the motor pool, as we do," Bondarenko noted sourly. He'd just begun to change that, but just-begun was a long way from mission-accomplished. "Get the call-up letters out, and remember, we must keep this quiet. Go. I have to talk to Moscow."

"Yes, Comrade General." The G-3 made his departure.

Well, ain't that something?" Major General Diggs commented after watching the TV show.

"Makes you wonder what NATO is for," Colonel Masterman agreed.

"Duke, I grew up expecting to see T-72 tanks rolling through the Fulda Gap like c.o.c.kroaches on a Bronx apartment floor. h.e.l.l, now they're our friends?" He had to shake his head in disbelief. "I've met a few of their senior people, like that Bondarenko guy running the Far East Theater. He's pretty smart, serious professional. Visited me at Fort Irwin. Caught on real fast, really hit it off with Al Hamm and the Blackhorse. Our kind of soldier."

"Well, sir, I guess he really is now, eh?"

That's when the phone rang. Diggs lifted it. "General Diggs. Okay, put him through. . . . Morning, sir. . . . Just fine, thanks, and-yes? What's that? . . . This is serious, I presume. . . . Yes, sir. Yes, sir, we're ready as h.e.l.l. Very well, sir. Bye." He set the phone back down. "Duke, good thing you're sitting down."

"What gives?"

"That was SACEUR. We got alert orders to be ready to entrain and move east."

"East where?" the divisional operations officer asked, surprised. An unscheduled exercise in Eastern Germany, maybe?

"Maybe as far as Russia, the eastern part. Siberia, maybe," Diggs added in a voice that didn't entirely believe what it said.

"What the h.e.l.l?"

"NCA is concerned about a possible dust-up between the Russians and the Chinese. If it happens, we may have to go east to support Ivan."

"What the h.e.l.l?" Masterman observed yet again.

"He's sending his J-2 down to brief us in on what he's got from Washington. Ought to be here in half an hour."

"Who else? Is this a NATO tasking?"

"He didn't say. Guess we'll have to wait and see. For the moment just you and the staff, the ADC, and the brigade sixes are in on the brief."

"Yes, sir," Masterman said, there being little else he could say.

The Air Force sends a number of aircraft when the President travels. Among these were C-5B Galaxies. Known to the Navy as "the aluminum cloud" for its huge bulk, the transport is capable of carrying whole tanks in its cavernous interior. In this case, however, they carried VC-60 helicopters, larger than a tank in dimensions, but far lighter in weight.

The VH-60 is a version of the Sikorsky Blackhawk troop-carrier, somewhat cleaned up and appointed for VIP pa.s.sengers. The pilot was Colonel Dan Malloy, a Marine with over five thousand hours of stick time in rotary-ring aircraft, whose radio call-sign was "Bear." Cathy Ryan knew him well. He usually flew her to Johns Hopkins in the morning in a twin to this aircraft. There was a co-pilot, a lieutenant who looked impossibly young to be a professional aviator, and a crew chief, a Marine staff sergeant E-6 who saw to it that everyone was properly strapped in, something that Cathy did better than Jack, who was not used to the different restraints in this aircraft.

Aside from that the Blackhawk flew superbly, not at all like the earthquake-while-sitting-on-a-chandelier sensation usually a.s.sociated with such contrivances. The flight took almost an hour, with the President listening in on the headset/ear protectors. Overhead, all aerial traffic was closed down, even commercial flights in and out of every commercial airport to which they came close. The Polish government was concerned with his safety.

"There it is," Malloy said over the intercom. "Eleven o'clock."

The aircraft banked left to give everyone a good look out the polycarbonate windows. Ryan felt a sudden sense of enforced sobriety come over him. There was a rudimentary railroad station building with two tracks, and another spur that ran off through the arch in yet another building. There were a few other structures, but mainly just concrete pads to show where there had been a large number of others, and Ryan's mind could see them from the black-and-white movies shot from aircraft, probably Russian ones, in World War II. They'd been oddly warehouse-like buildings, he remembered. But the wares stored in them had been human beings, though the people who'd built this place hadn't seen it that way; they had regarded them as vermin, insects or rats, something to be eliminated as efficiently and coldly as possible.

That's when the chill hit. It was not a warm morning, the temperature in the upper fifties or so, Jack thought, but his skin felt colder than that number indicated. The chopper landed softly, and the sergeant got the door open and the President stepped out onto the landing pad that had recently been laid for just this purpose. An official of the Polish government came up and shook his hand, introducing himself, but Ryan missed it all, suddenly a tourist in h.e.l.l itself, or so it felt. The official who would be serving as guide led them to a car for the short drive closer to the facility. Jack slid in beside his wife.

"Jack . . ." she whispered.

"Yeah," he acknowledged. "Yeah, babe, I know." And he spoke not another word, not even hearing the well-prepared commentary the Pole was giving him.

"Arbeit Macht Frei" the wrought-iron arch read. Work makes free was the literal meaning, perhaps the most callously cynical motto ever crafted by the twisted minds of men calling themselves civilized. Finally, the car stopped, and they got out into the air again, and again the guide led them from place to place, telling them things they didn't hear but rather felt, because the very air seemed heavy with evil. The gra.s.s was wonderfully green, almost like a golf course from the spring rain . . . from the nutrients in the soil? Jack wondered. Lots of those. More than two million people had met death in this place. Two million. Maybe three. After a while, counting lost its meaning, and it became just a number, a figure on a ledger, written in by some accountant or other who'd long since stopped considering what the digits represented.

He could see it in his mind, the human shapes, the bodies, the heads, but thankfully not the faces of the dead. He presently found himself walking along what the German guards had called Himmel Strae, the Road to Heaven. But why had they called it that? Was it pure cynicism, or did they really believe there was a G.o.d looking down on what they did, and if so, what had they thought He thought of this place and their activity? What kind of men could they have been? Women and children had been slaughtered immediately upon arrival here because they had little value as workers in the industrial facilities that I. G. Farben had built, so as to take the last measure of utility from the people sent here to die-to make a little profit from their last months. Not just Jews, of course; the Polish aristocracy and the Polish priesthood had been killed here. Gypsies. h.o.m.os.e.xuals. Jehovah's Witnesses. Others deemed undesirable by Hitler's government. Just insects to be eliminated with Zyklon-B gas, a derivative of pesticide research by the German chemical industries.

Ryan had not expected this to be a pleasant side trip. What he'd antic.i.p.ated was an educational experience, like visiting the battlefield at Antietam, for example.

But this hadn't been a battlefield, and it didn't feel at all like one.

What must it have been like for the men who'd liberated this place in 1945? Jack wondered. Even hardened soldiers, men who'd faced death every day for years, must have been taken aback by what they'd found here. For all its horrors, the battlefield remained a place of honor, where men tested men in the most fundamental way-it was cruel and final, of course, but there was the purity of fighting men contesting with other fighting men, using weapons, but-but that was rubbish, Jack thought. There was little n.o.bility to be found in war . . . and far less in this place. On a battlefield, for whatever purpose and with whatever means, men fought against men, not women and kids. There was some honor to be had in the former, but not . . . this. This was crime on a vast scale, and as evil as war was, at the human level it stopped short of what men called crime, the deliberate infliction of harm upon the innocent. How could men do such a thing? Germany was today, as it had been then, a Christian country, the same nation that had brought forth Martin Luther, Beethoven, and Thomas Mann. Did it all come down to their leader? Adolf Hitler, a nebbish of a man, born to a middle-grade civil servant, a failure at everything he'd tried . . . except demagoguery. He'd been a f.u.c.king genius at that . . .

. . . But why had Hitler hated anyone so much as to harness the industrial might of his nation not for conquest, which was bad enough, but for the base purpose of cold-blooded extermination? That, Jack knew, was one of history's most troublesome mysteries. Some said Hitler had hated the Jews because he'd seen one on the streets of Vienna and simply disliked him. Another expert in the field, a Jew himself, had posed the proposition that a Jewish prost.i.tute had given the failed Austrian painter gonorrhea, but there was no doc.u.mentary evidence upon which to base that. Yet another school of thought was more cynical still, saying that Hitler hadn't really cared about the Jews one way or another, but needed an enemy for people to hate so that he could become leader of Germany, and had merely seized upon the Jews as a target of opportunity, just something against which to mobilize his nation. Ryan found this alternative unlikely, but the most offensive of all. For whatever reason, he'd taken the power his country had given him and turned it to this purpose. In doing so, Hitler had cursed his name for all time to come, but that was no consolation to the people whose remains fertilized the gra.s.s. Ryan's wife's boss at Johns Hopkins was a Jewish doc named Bernie Katz, a friend of many years. How many such men had died here? How many potential Jonas Salks? Maybe an Einstein or two? Or poets, or actors, or just ordinary workers who would have raised ordinary kids . . .

. . . and when Jack had sworn the oath of office mandated by the United States Const.i.tution, he'd really sworn to protect such people as those, and maybe such people as these, too. As a man, as an American, and as President of the United States, did he not have a duty to prevent such things from ever happening again? He actually believed that the use of armed force could only be justified to protect American lives and vital American security interests. But was that all America was? What about the principles upon which his nation was founded? Did America only apply them to specific, limited places and goals? What about the rest of the world? Were these not the graves of real people?

John Patrick Ryan stood and looked around, his face as empty right now as his soul, trying to understand what had taken place here, and what he could-what he had to learn from this. He had immense power at his fingertips every day he lived in the White House. How to use it? How to apply it? What to fight against? More important, what to fight for?

"Jack," Cathy said quietly, touching his hand.

"Yeah, I've seen enough, too. Let's get the h.e.l.l away from this place." He turned to the Polish guide and thanked him for words he'd scarcely heard and started walking back to where the car was. Once more they pa.s.sed under the wrought-iron arch of a lie, doing what two or three million people had never done.

If there were such a thing as ghosts, they'd spoken to him without words, but done it in one voice: Never again. And silently, Ryan agreed. Not while he lived. Not while America lived.

CHAPTER 46.

Journey Home They waited for SORGE, and rarely had anyone waited They expectantly even for the arrival of a firstborn more There was a little drama to it, too, of a firstborn child. There was a little drama to it, too, because SORGE didn't deliver every day, and they could not always see a pattern when it appeared and when it didn't. Ed and Mary Pat Foley both awoke early that morning, and lay in bed for over an hour with nothing to do, then finally arose to drink their breakfast coffee and read the papers in the kitchen of their middle-cla.s.s home in suburban Virginia. The kids went off to school, and then the parents finished dressing and walked out to their "company" car, complete with driver and escort vehicle. The odd part was that their car was guarded but their house was not, and so a terrorist only had to be smart enough to attack the house, which was not all that hard. The Early Bird was waiting for them in the car, but it had little attraction for either of them this morning. The comic strips in the Post had been more interesting, especially "Non Sequitur," their favorite morning chuckle, and the sports pages.

"What do you think?" Mary Pat asked Ed. That managed to surprise him, since his wife didn't often ask his opinion of a field-operations question.

He shrugged as they pa.s.sed a Dunkin' Donuts box. "Coin toss, Mary."

"I suppose. I sure hope it comes up heads this time."

"Jack's going to ask us in . . . an hour and a half, I suppose."

"Something like that," the DDO agreed in a breathy voice.

"The NATO thing ought to work, ought to make them think things over," the DCI thought aloud.

"Don't bet the ranch on it, honey bunny," Mary Pat warned.

"I know." Pause. "When does Jack get on the airplane to come home?"

She checked her watch. "About two hours."

"We should know by then."

"Yeah," she agreed.

Ten minutes later, informed of the shape of the world en route by National Public Radio's Morning Edition, they arrived at Langley, again parking in the underground garage, and again taking the elevator up to the seventh floor, where, again, they split up, going to their separate offices. In this, Ed surprised his wife. She'd expected him to hover over her shoulder as she flipped on her office computer, looking for another brownie recipe, as she called it. This happened at seven-fifty-four.

"You've got mail," the electronic voice announced as she accessed her special Internet account. Her hand wasn't quite shaking when she moved the mouse to click on the proper icon, but nearly so. The letter came up, went through the descrambling process, and came up as clear-text she couldn't read. As always, MP saved the doc.u.ment to her hard drive, confirmed that it was saved, then printed up a hard copy, and finally deleted the letter from her electronic in-box, completely erasing it off the Internet. Then she lifted her phone.

"Please have Dr. Sears come up right away," she told her secretary.

Joshua Sears had also come in early this morning, and was sitting at his desk reading the New York Times financial page when the call came. He was in the elevator in under a minute, and then in the office of the Deputy Director (Operations).

"Here," Mary Pat said, handing over the six pages of ideographs. "Take a seat."

Sears sat in a comfortable chair and started his translation. He could see that the DDO was a little exercised about this, and his initial diagnosis came as he turned to page two.

"This isn't good news," he said, without looking up. "Looks like Zhang is guiding Premier Xu in the direction he wants. Fang is uneasy about it, but he's going along, too. Marshal Luo is fully on the team. I guess that's to be expected. Luo's always been a hardball guy," Sears commented. "Talk here's about operational security, concern that we might know what they're up to-but they think they're secure," Sears a.s.sured the DDO.

As many times as she'd heard that sort of thing, it never failed to give her a severe case of the chills, hearing the enemy (to Mary Pat nearly everyone was an enemy) discuss the very possibility that she'd devoted her entire professional life to realizing. And almost always you heard their voices saying that, no, there wasn't anyone like her out there hearing them. She'd never really left her post in Moscow, when she'd been control officer for Agent CARDINAL. He'd been old enough to have been her grandfather, but she'd thought of him as her own newborn, as she gave him taskings, and collected his take, forwarding it back to Langley, always worried for his safety. She was out of that game now, but it came down to the same thing. Somewhere out there was a foreign national sending America information of vital interest. She knew the person's name, but not her face, not her motivation, just that she liked to share her bed with one of her officers, and she kept the official diary for this Minister Fang, and her computer sent it out on the Web, on a path that ended at her seventh-floor desk.

"Summary?" she asked Dr. Sears.

"They're still on the warpath," the a.n.a.lyst replied. "Maybe they'll turn off it at some later date, but there is no such indication here."

"If we warn them off . . . ?"

Sears shrugged. "No telling. Their real concern is internal political dissension and possible collapse. This economic crisis has them worried about political ruin for them all, and that's all they're worried about."

"Wars are begun by frightened men," the DDO observed.