"How did that happen?" Premier Xu asked.

"Peng had gone forward, as a good general should, and there was a lucky Russian out there with a rifle," the Defense Minister explained. Then one of his aides appeared and walked to the marshal's seat, handing him a slip of paper. He scanned it. "This is confirmed?"

"Yes, Comrade Marshal. I requested and got confirmation myself. The ships are in sight of land even now."

"What ships? What land?" Xu asked. It was unusual for him to take an active part in these meetings. Usually he let the others talk, listened pa.s.sively, and then announced the consensus conclusions reached by the others.

"Comrade," Luo answered. "It seems some American warships are bombarding our coast near Guangszhou."

"Bombarding?" Xu asked. "You mean with guns?"

"That's what the report says, yes."

"Why would they do that?" the Premier asked, somewhat nonplussed by this bit of information.

"To destroy sh.o.r.e emplacements, and-"

"Isn't that what one does prior to invading, a preparation to putting troops on the beach?" Foreign Minister Shen asked.

"Well, yes, it could be that, I suppose," Luo replied, "but-"

"Invasion?" Xu asked. "A direct attack on our own soil?"

"Such a thing is most unlikely," Luo told them. "They lack the ability to put troops ash.o.r.e in sufficiently large numbers. America simply doesn't have the troops to do such a-"

"What if they get a.s.sistance from Taiwan? How many troops do the bandits have?" Tong Jie asked.

"Well, they have some land forces," Luo allowed. "But we have ample ability to-"

"You told us a week ago that we had all the forces required to defeat the Russians, even if they got some aid from America," Qian observed, becoming agitated. "What fiction do you have for us now, Luo?"

"Fiction!" the marshal's voice boomed. "I tell you the facts, but now you accuse me of that?"

"What have you not told us, Luo?" Qian asked harshly. "We are not peasants here to be told what to believe."

"The Russians are making a stand. They have fought back. I told you that, and I told you this sort of thing is to be expected-and it is. We fight a war with the Russians. It's not a burglary in an unoccupied house. This is an armed contest between two major powers-and we will win because we have more and better troops. They do not fight well. We swept aside their border defenses, and we've pursued their army north, and they didn't have the manhood to stand and fight for their own land! We will smash them. Yes, they will fight back. We must expect that, but it won't matter. We will smash them, I tell you!" he insisted.

"Is there any information which you have not told us to this point?" Interior Minister Tong asked, in a voice more reasonable than the question itself.

"I have appointed Major General Ge to a.s.sume command of the Thirty-fourth Shock Army. He reported to me that Twenty-ninth Army sustained a serious air attack earlier today. The effects of this attack are not clear, probably they managed to damage communications-and an air attack cannot seriously hurt a large mechanized land force. The tools of war do not permit such a thing."

"Now what?" Premier Xu asked.

"I propose that we adjourn the meeting and allow Minister Luo to return to his task of managing our armed forces," Zhang Han Sen proposed. "And that we reconvene, say, at sixteen hours."

There were nods around the table. Everyone wanted the time to consider the things that they'd heard this morning-and perhaps to give the Defense Minister the chance to make good his words. Xu did a head count and stood.

"Very well. We adjourn until this afternoon." The meeting broke up in an unusually subdued manner, without the usual pairing off and pleasantries between old comrades. Outside the conference room, Qian b.u.t.tonholed Fang again.

"Something is going badly wrong. I can feel it."

"How sure are you of that?"

"Fang, I don't know what the Americans have done to my railroad bridges, but I a.s.sure you that to destroy them as I was informed earlier this morning is no small thing. Moreover, the destruction inflicted was deliberately systematic. The Americans-it must have been the Americans-deliberately crippled our ability to supply our field armies. You only do such a thing in preparation to smashing them. And now the commanding general of our advancing armies is suddenly killed-stray bullet, my a.s.s! That tset ha tset ha Luo leads us to disaster, Fang."

"We'll know more this afternoon," Fang suggested, leaving his colleague and going to his office. Arriving there, he dictated another segment for his daily journal. For the first time, he wondered if it might turn out to be his testament.

For her part, Ming was disturbed by her minister's demeanor. An elderly man, he'd always nonetheless been a calm and optimistic one for the most part. His mannerisms were those of a grandfatherly gentleman even when taking her or one of the other office girls to his bed. It was an endearing quality, one of the reasons the office staff didn't resist his advances more vigorously-and besides, he did take care of those who took care of his needs. This time she took her dictation quietly, while he leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed, and his voice a monotone. It took half an hour, and she went out to her desk to do the transcription. It was time for the midday meal by the time she was done, and she went out to lunch with her co-worker, Chai.

"What is the matter with him?" she asked Ming.

"The meeting this morning did not go well. Fang is concerned with the war."

"But isn't it going well? Isn't that what they say on TV?"

"It seems there have been some setbacks. This morning they argued about how serious they were. Qian was especially exercised about it, because the American attacked our rail bridges in Harbin and Bei'an."

"Ah." Chai shoveled some rice into her mouth with her chopsticks. "How is Fang taking it?"

"He seems very tense. Perhaps he will need some comfort this evening."

"Oh? Well, I can take care of him. I need a new office chair anyway," she added with a giggle.

Lunch dragged on longer than usual. Clearly their minister didn't need any of them for the moment, and Ming took the time to walk about on the street to gauge the mood of the people there. The feeling was strangely neutral. She was out just long enough to trigger her computer's downtime activation, and though the screen was blank, in the auto-sleep mode, the hard drive started turning, and silently activated the onboard modem.

Mary Pat Foley was in her office, though it was past midnight, and she was logging onto her mail account every fifteen minutes, hoping for something new from SORGE.

"You've got mail!" the mechanical voice told her.

"Yes!" she said back to it, downloading the doc.u.ment at once. Then she lifted the phone. "Get Sears up here."

With that done, Mrs. Foley looked at the time entry on the e-mail. It had gone out in the early afternoon in Beijing . . . what might that mean? she wondered, afraid that any irregularity could spell the death of SONGBIRD, and the loss of the SORGE doc.u.ments.

"Working late?" Sears asked on entering.

"Who isn't?" MP responded. She held out the latest printout. "Read."

"Politburo meeting, in the morning for a change," Sears said, scanning the first page. "Looks a little raucous. This Qian guy is raising a little h.e.l.l-oh, okay, he chatted with Fang after it and expressed serious concerns . . . agreed to meet later in the day and-oh, s.h.i.t!"

"What's that?"

"They discussed increasing the readiness of their ICBM force . . . let's see . . . nothing firm was decided for technical reasons, they weren't sure how long they could keep the missiles fueled, but they were shook by our takeout of their missile submarine . . ."

"Write that up. I'm going to hang a CRITIC on it," the DDO announced.

CRITIC-shorthand for "critical"-is the highest priority in the United States government for message traffic. A CRITICFLAGGED doc.u.ment must be in the President's hands no less than fifteen minutes after being generated. That meant that Joshua Sears had to get it drafted just as quickly as he could type in his keyboard, and that made for errors in translation.

Ryan had been asleep for maybe forty minutes when the phone next to his bed went off.

"Yeah?"

"Mr. President," some faceless voice announced in the White House Office of Signals, "we have CRITIC traffic for you."

"All right. Bring it up." Jack swung his body across the bed and planted his feet on the rug. As a normal human being living in his home, he wasn't a bathrobe person. Ordinarily he'd just pad around his house barefoot in his underwear, but that wasn't allowed anymore, and he always kept a long blue robe handy now. It was a gift from long ago, when he'd taught history at the Naval Academy-a gift from the students there-and bore on the sleeves the one wide and four narrow stripes of a Fleet Admiral. So dressed, and wearing leather slippers that also came with the new job, he walked out into the upstairs corridor. The Secret Service night team was already up and moving. Joe Hilton came to him first.

"We heard, sir. It's on the way up now."

Ryan, who'd been existing on less than five hours of sleep per night for the past week, had an urgent need to lash out and rip the face off someone-anyone-but, of course, he couldn't do that to men who were just doing their job, with miserable hours of their own.

Special Agent Charlie Malone was at the elevator. He took the folder from the messenger and trotted over to Ryan.

"Hmm." Ryan rubbed his hand over his face as he flipped the folder open. The first three lines jumped into his consciousness. "Oh, s.h.i.t."

"Anything wrong?" Hilton asked.

"Phone," Ryan said.

"This way, sir." Hilton led him to the Secret Service upstairs cubbyhole office.

Ryan lifted the phone and said, "Mary Pat at Langley." It didn't take long. "MP, Jack here. What gives?"

"It's just what you see. They're talking about fueling their intercontinental missiles. At least two of them are aimed at Washington."

"Great. Now what?"

"I just tasked a KH-11 to give their launch sites a close look. There's two of them, Jack. The one we need to look at is Xuanhua. That's at about forty degrees, thirty-eight minutes north, one hundred fifteen degrees, six minutes east. Twelve silos with CCC-4 missiles inside. This is one of the newer ones, and it replaced older sites that stored the missiles in caves or tunnels. Straight, vertical, in-the-ground silos. The entire missile field is about six miles by six miles. The silos are well separated so that a single nuclear impact can't take out any two missiles," MP explained, manifestly looking at overheads of the place as she spoke.

"How serious is this?"

A new voice came on the line. "Jack, it's Ed. We have to take this one seriously. The naval bombardment on their coast might have set them off. The d.a.m.ned fools think we might be attempting a no-s.h.i.t invasion."

"What? What with?" the President demanded.

"They can be very insular thinkers, Jack, and they're not always logical by our rules," Ed Foley told him.

"Great. Okay. You two come on down here. Bring your best China guy with you."

"On the way," the DCI replied.

Ryan hung up and looked at Joe Hilton. "Wake everybody up. The Chinese may be going squirrelly on us."

The drive up the Potomac River hadn't been easy. Captain Blandy hadn't wanted to wait for a river pilot to help guide him up the river-naval officers tend to be overly proud when it comes to navigating their ships-and that had made it quite tense for the bridge watch. Rarely was the channel more than a few hundred yards wide, and cruisers are deepwater ships, not riverboats. Once they came within a few yards of a mudbank, but the navigator got them clear of it with a timely rudder order. The ship's radar was up and running-people were actually afraid to turn off the billboard system because it, like most mechanical contrivances, preferred operation to idleness, and switching it off might have broken something. As it was, the RF energy radiating from the four huge billboard transmitters on Gettysburg's superstructure had played h.e.l.l with numerous television sets on the way northwest, but that couldn't be helped, and probably n.o.body noticed the cruiser in the river anyway, not at this time of night. Finally, Gettysburg glided to a halt within sight of the Woodrow Wilson bridge, and had to wait for traffic to be halted on the D.C. Beltway. This resulted in the usual road rage, but at this time of night there weren't that many people to be outraged, though one or two did honk their horns when the ship pa.s.sed through the open drawbridge span. Perhaps they were New Yorkers, Captain Blandy thought. From there it was another turn to starboard into the Anacostia River, through another drawbridge, this one named for John Philip Sousa-accompanied by more surprised looks from the few drivers out-and then a gentle docking alongside the pier that was also home to USS Barry, a retired destroyer relegated to museum status.

The line handlers on the pier, Captain Blandy saw, were mainly civilians. Wasn't that a h.e.l.l of a thing?

The "evolution"-that, Gregory had learned, was what the Navy called parking a boat-had been interesting but unremarkable to observe, though the skipper looked quite relieved to have it all behind him.

"Finished with engines," the CO told the engine room, and let out a long breath, shared, Gregory could see, by the entire bridge crew.

"Captain?" the retired Army officer asked.

"Yes?"

"What is this all about, exactly?"

"Well, isn't it kinda obvious?" Blandy responded. "We have a shooting war with the Chinese. They have ICBMs, and I suppose the SecDef wants to be able to shoot them down if they loft one at Washington. SACLANT is also sending an Aegis to New York, and I'd bet Pacific Fleet has some looking out for Los Angeles and San Francisco. Probably Seattle, too. There's a lot of ships there anyway, and a good weapons locker. Do you have spare copies of your software?"

"Sure."

"Well, we'll have a phone line from the dock in a few minutes. We'll see if there's a way for you to upload it to other interested parties."

"Oh," Dr. Gregory observed quietly. He really should have thought that one all the way through.

This is RED WOLF FOUR. I have visual contact with the Chinese advance guard," the regimental commander called on the radio. "About ten kilometers south of us."

"Very well," Sinyavskiy replied. Just where Bondarenko and his American helpers said they were. Good. There were two other general officers in his command post, the CGs of 201st and 80th Motor Rifle divisions, and the commander of the 34th was supposed to be on his way as well, though 94th had turned and reoriented itself to attack east from a point about thirty kilometers to the south.

Sinyavskiy took the old, sodden cigar from his mouth and tossed it out into the gra.s.s, pulling another from his tunic pocket and lighting it. It was a Cuban cigar, and superb in its mildness. His artillery commander was on the other side of the map table-just a couple of planks on sawhorses, which was perfect for the moment. Close by were holes dug should the Chinese send some artillery fire their way, and most important of all, the wires which led to his communications station, set a full kilometer to the west-that was the first thing the Chinese would try to shoot at, because they'd expect him to be there. In fact the only humans present were four officers and seven sergeants, in armored personnel carriers dug into the ground for safety. It was their job to repair anything the Chinese might manage to break.

"So, Comrades, they come right into our parlor, eh?" he said for those around him. Sinyavskiy had been a soldier for twenty-six years. Oddly, he was not the son of a soldier. His father was an instructor in geology at Moscow State University, but ever since the first war movie he'd seen, this was the profession he'd craved to join. He'd done all the work, attended all the schools, studied history with the manic attention common in the Russian army, and the Red Army before it. This would be his Battle of the Kursk Bulge, remembering the battle where Vatutin and Rokossovskiy had smashed Hitler's last attempt to retake the offensive in Russia-where his mother country had begun the long march that had ended at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. There, too, the Red Army had been the recipient of brilliant intelligence information, letting them know the time, place, and character of the German attack, and so allowing them to prepare so well that even the best of the German field commanders, Erich von Manstein, could do no more than break his teeth on the Russian steel.

And so it will be here, Sinyavskiy promised himself. The only unsatisfactory part was that he was stuck here in this camouflaged tent instead of in the line with his men, but, no, he wasn't a captain anymore, and his place was here, to fight the battle on a G.o.dd.a.m.ned printed map.

"RED WOLF, you will commence firing when the advance guard gets to within eight hundred meters."

"Eight hundred meters, Comrade General," the commander of his tank regiment acknowledged. "I can see them quite clearly now."

"What exactly can you see?"

"It appears to be a battalion-strength formation, princ.i.p.ally Type 90 tanks, some Type 98s but not too many of those, spread out as though they went to sub-unit commanders. Numerous tracked personnel carriers. I do not see any artillery-spotting vehicles, however. What do we know of their artillery?"

"It's rolling, not set up for firing. We're watching them," Sinyavskiy a.s.sured him.

"Excellent. They are now two kilometers off by my range finder."

"Stand by."

"I will do that, Command."

"I hate waiting," Sinyavskiy commented to the officers around him. They all nodded, having the same prejudice. He hadn't seen Afghanistan in his younger years, having served mainly in 1st and 2nd Guards Tank armies in Germany back then, preparing to fight against NATO, an event which blessedly had never taken place. This was his very first experience with real combat, and it hadn't really started yet, and he was ready for it to start.

Okay, if they light those missiles up, what can we do about it?" Ryan asked.

"If they launch 'em, there's not a G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing but run for cover," Secretary Bretano said.

"That's good for us. We'll all get away. What about the people who live in Washington, New York, and all the other supposed targets?" POTUS asked.

"I've ordered some Aegis cruisers to the likely targets that are near the water," THUNDER went on. "I had one of my people from TRW look at the possibility of upgrading the missile systems to see if they might do an intercept. He's done the theoretical work, and he says it looks good on the simulators, but that's a ways from a practical test, of course. It's better than nothing, though."