The Soviet Union is a vast country, by far the largest in the world both in area and in the expanse of its borders. All of those borders are guarded, since both the current country and all its precursors have been invaded many times. Border defenses include the obvious-troop concentrations, airfields, and radar posts-and the subtle, like radio reception antennas. The latter were designed to listen in on radio and other electronic emissions. The information was pa.s.sed on by landline or microwave links to Moscow Center, the headquarters of the Committee for State Security, the KGB, at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square. The KGB's Eighth Chief Directorate is tasked to communications intelligence and communications security. It has a long and distinguished history that has benefited from another traditional Russian strength, a fascination with theoretical mathematics. The relationship between ciphers and mathematics is a logical one, and the most recent manifestation of this was the work of a bearded, thirtyish gnome of a man who was fascinated with the work of Benoit Mandelbrot at Harvard University, the man who had effectively invented fractal geometry. Uniting this work with that of MacKenzie's work on Chaos Theory at Cambridge University in England, the young Russian genius had invented a genuinely new theoretical way of looking at mathematical formulae. It was generally conceded by that handful of people who understood what he was talking about that his work was easily worth a Planck Medal. It was an historical accident that his father happened to be a General in the KGB's Chief Border Guards Directorate, and that as a result the Committee for State Security had taken immediate note of his work. The mathematician now had everything a grateful Motherland could offer, and someday he'd probably have that Planck Medal also.

He'd needed two years to make his theoretical breakthrough into something practical, but fifteen months earlier he'd made his first "recovery" from the U.S. State Department's most secure cipher, called STRIPE. Six months after that he'd proven conclusively that it was similar in structure to everything the U.S. military used. Cross-checking with another team of crypt-a.n.a.lysts who had access to the work of the Walker spy ring, and the even more serious work done by Pelton, what had resulted only six months earlier was a systematic penetration of American encryption systems. It was still not perfect. Daily keying procedures occasionally proved impossible to break. Sometimes they went as much as a week without recovering one message, but they'd gone as many as three days recovering over half of what they received, and their results were improving by the month. Indeed, the main problem seemed to be that they didn't have the computer hardware to do all the work they should have been able to do, and the Eighth Directorate was busily training more linguists to handle the message traffic they were receiving.

Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko had been awakened from a sound sleep and driven to his office to add his name to the people all over the world shocked into frightened sobriety. A First Chief Directorate man all of his life, his job was to examine the collective American mind and advise his President on what was going on. The decrypts flooding onto his desk were the most useful tool.

He had no less than thirty such messages which bore one of two messages. All strategic forces were being ordered to Defense Condition Two, and all conventional forces were coming to Defense Condition Three. The American President was panicking, KGB's First Deputy Chairman thought. There was no other explanation. Was it possible that he thought the Soviet Union had committed this infamy? Was it possible that he thought the Soviet Union had committed this infamy? That was the most frightening thought of his life. That was the most frightening thought of his life.

"Another one, naval one." The messenger dropped it on his desk.

Golovko needed only one look. "Flash this to the Navy immediately." He had to call his President with the rest. Golovko lifted the phone.

For once the Soviet bureaucracy worked quickly. Minutes later, an extremely low-frequency signal went out, and the submarine Admiral Lunin Admiral Lunin went to the surface to copy the full message. Captain Dubinin read it as the printer generated it. went to the surface to copy the full message. Captain Dubinin read it as the printer generated it.

AMERICAN SUBMARINE USS MAINE REPORTS LOCATION AS 50D-55M-09sN 153D-01M-23sW. PROPELLER DISABLED BY COLLISION OF UNKNOWN CAUSE. Dubinin left the communications room and made for the chart table.

"Where were we when we copied that transient?"

"Here, Captain, and the bearing was here." The navigator traced the line with his pencil.

Dubinin just shook his head. He handed the message over. "Look at this."

"What do you suppose he's doing?"

"He'll be close to the surface. So ... we'll go up, just under the layer, and we'll move quickly. Surface noise will play h.e.l.l with his sonar. Fifteen knots."

"You suppose he was following us?"

"Took you long enough to realize that, didn't it?" Dubinin measured the distance to the target. "Very proud, this one. We'll see about that. You know how the Americans boast of taking hull photographs? Now, my young lieutenant, now it will be our turn!"

"What does this mean?" Narmonov asked the First Deputy Chairman.

"The Americans have been attacked by forces unknown, and the attack was serious, causing major loss of life. It is to be expected that they will increase their military readiness. A major consideration will be the maintenance of public order," Golovko replied over the secure phone line.

"And?"

"And, unfortunately, all their strategic weapons happen to be aimed at the Rodina. Rodina. " "

"But we had no part in this!" the Soviet President objected.

"Correct. You see, such responses are automatic. They are planned in advance and become almost reflexive moves. Once attacked, you become highly cautious. Countermoves are planned in advance so that you may act rapidly while applying your intellectual capacities to an a.n.a.lysis of the problem without additional and unnecessary distractions."

The Soviet President turned to his Defense Minister. "So, what should we do?"

"I advise an increase in our alert status. Defensive-only, of course. Whoever conducted this attack might, after all, attempt to strike us also."

"Approved," Narmonov said bluntly. "Highest peacetime alert."

Golovko frowned at his telephone receiver. His choice of words had been exquisitely correct: reflexive. "May I make a suggestion?"

"Yes," the Defense Minister said.

"If it is possible, perhaps it would be well to tell our forces the reason for the alert. It might lessen the shock of the order."

"It's a needless complication," Defense thought.

"The Americans have not done this," Golovko said urgently, "and that was almost certainly a mistake. Please consider the state of mind of people suddenly taken from ordinary peacetime operations to an elevated state of alert. It will only require a few additional words. Those few words could be important."

"Good idea," Narmonov thought. "Make it so," he ordered Defense.

"We will soon hear from the Americans on the Hot Line," Narmonov said. "What will they say?"

"That is hard to guess, but whatever it is, we should have a reply ready for them, just to settle things down, to make sure they know we had nothing to do with it."

Narmonov nodded. That made good sense. "Start working on it."

The Soviet defense-communications agency operators grumbled at the signal they'd been ordered to dispatch. For ease of transmission, the meat of the signal should have been contained in a single five-letter code group that could be transmitted, decrypted, and comprehended instantly by all recipients, but that was not possible now. The additional sentences had to be edited down to keep the transmission from being too long. A major did this, got it approved by his boss, a major general, and sent it out over no less than thirty communications links. The message was further altered to apply to specific military services.

The Admiral Lunin Admiral Lunin had only been on her new course for five minutes when a second ELF signal arrived. The communications officer fairly ran into the control room with it. had only been on her new course for five minutes when a second ELF signal arrived. The communications officer fairly ran into the control room with it.

GENERAL ALERT LEVEL TWO. THERE HAS BEEN A NUCLEAR DETONATION OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN IN THE UNITED STATES. AMERICAN STRATEGIC AND CONVENTIONAL FORCES HAVE BEEN ALERTED FOR POSSIBLE WAR. ALL NAVAL FORCES WILL SORTIE AT ONCE. TAKE ALL NECESSARY PROTECTIVE MEASURES.

"Has the world gone mad?" the Captain asked the message. He got no reply. "That's all?"

"That is all, no cueing to put the antenna up."

"These are not proper instructions," Dubinin objected. "'All necessary protective measures'? What do they mean by that? Protecting ourselves, protecting the Motherland-what the h.e.l.l do they mean?"

"Captain," the Starpom Starpom said, "General Alert Two carries its own rules of action." said, "General Alert Two carries its own rules of action."

"I know that," Dubinin said, "but do they apply here?"

"Why else would the signal have been sent?"

A Level Two General Alert was something unprecedented for the Soviet Military. It meant that the rules of action were not those of a war, but not those of peace either. Though Dubinin, like every other Soviet ship captain, fully understood his duties, the implications of the order seemed far too frightening. The thought pa.s.sed, however. He was a naval officer. He had his orders. Whoever had given those orders must have understood the situation better than he. The commanding officer of the Admiral Lunin Admiral Lunin stood erect and turned to his second in command. stood erect and turned to his second in command.

"Increase speed to twenty-five knots. Battle stations."

It happened just as fast as men could move. The New York FBI office, set in the Jacob Javits Federal Office Building on the southern end of Manhattan, dispatched its men north, and the light Sunday traffic made it easy. The unmarked but powerful cars screamed uptown to the various network headquarters buildings. The same thing happened in Atlanta, where agents left the Martin Luther King Building for CNN Headquarters. In each case, no fewer than three agents marched into the master control rooms and laid down the law: Nothing from Denver would go out. In no case did the network employees know why this was so, so busy were they trying to reestablish contact. The same thing happened in Colorado, where, under the direction of a.s.sistant Special-Agent-in-Charge Walter Hoskins, the local field division's agents invaded all the network affiliates, and the local phone company, where they cut all long-distance lines over the furious objections of the Bell employees. But Hoskins had made one mistake. It came from the fact that he didn't watch much television.

KOLD was an independent station that was also trying to become a superstation. Like TBS, WWOR, and a few others, it had its own satellite link to cover a wide viewing area. A daring financial gamble, it had not yet paid off for the investors who were running the station on a highly leveraged shoestring out of an old and almost windowless building northeast of the city. The station used one of the Anik-series Canadian satellites and reached Alaska, Canada, and the North-Central U.S. reasonably well with its programming, which was mainly old network shows.

The KOLD building had once been Denver's first network television station, and was constructed in the pattern originally required by the Federal Communications Commission in the 1930s: monolithic reinforced concrete, fit to survive an enemy bomb attack-the specifications predated nuclear weapons. The only windows were in the executive offices on the south side of the building. It was ten minutes after the event that someone pa.s.sed by the open door of the program manager. He stopped cold, turned and ran back to the newsroom. In another minute a cameraman entered onto the freight elevator that ran all the way to the roof. The picture, hard-wired into the control room and then sent out on a Ku-band transmitter to the Anik satellite, which was untouched by earlier events, broke into the reruns of The Adventures of Dobie Gillis across The Adventures of Dobie Gillis across Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, Idaho, and three Canadian provinces. In Calgary, Alberta, a reporter for a local paper who'd never got over her crush on Dwayne Hickman was startled by the picture and the voice-over, and called her city desk. Her breathless report went out at once on the Reuters wire. Soon thereafter, CBC uplinked the video to Europe on one of their unaffected Anik satellites. Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, Idaho, and three Canadian provinces. In Calgary, Alberta, a reporter for a local paper who'd never got over her crush on Dwayne Hickman was startled by the picture and the voice-over, and called her city desk. Her breathless report went out at once on the Reuters wire. Soon thereafter, CBC uplinked the video to Europe on one of their unaffected Anik satellites.

By that time the Denver FBI had a pair of men entering the KOLD building. They laid down the law to a news crew that protested about the First Amendment of the U.S. Const.i.tution, which argument carried less weight than the men with guns who shut the power down to their transmitter. The FBI agents at least apologized as they did so. They needn't have bothered. What had been a fool's errand from the beginning was already an exercise in futility.

"So, what the h.e.l.l is going on?" Richards asked his staff.

"We have no idea, sir. No reason was given for the alert," the communications officer said lamely.

"Well, it leaves us between two chairs, doesn't it?" This was a rhetorical question. The TR battle group was just pa.s.sing Malta, and was now in range of targets in the Soviet Union. That required "The Stick's" A-6E Intruders to take off, climb rapidly to cruising alt.i.tude, and top off their tanks soon thereafter, but at that point they had the gas to make it all the way to their targets on or near the Kerch Peninsula. Only a year before, U.S. Navy carriers, though carrying a sizable complement of thermonuclear bombs, had not been part of the SIOP. This acronym, p.r.o.nounced "Sy-Op," stood for "Single Integrated Operations Plan," and was the master blueprint for dismantling the Soviet Union. The drawdown of strategic missiles-mostly land-based ones for the United States-had radically reduced the number of available warheads, and, like planners everywhere, the Joint Strategic Targeting Staff, co-located with headquarters SAC, tried to make up for the shortfall in any way they could. As a result, whenever an aircraft carrier was in range of Soviet targets, it a.s.sumed its SIOP tasking. In the case of USS Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, it meant that about the time the ship pa.s.sed east of Malta, she became not a conventional-theater force, but a nuclear-strategic force. To fulfill this mission, it meant that about the time the ship pa.s.sed east of Malta, she became not a conventional-theater force, but a nuclear-strategic force. To fulfill this mission, TR TR carried fifty B-61-Mod-8 nuclear gravity bombs in a special, heavily-guarded magazine. The B-61 had FUFO-for "full fusing option," more commonly called "dial-a-yield"-that selected an explosive power ranging from ten to five hundred kilotons. The bombs were twelve feet long, less than a foot in diameter, weighed a mere seven hundred pounds, and were nicely streamlined to cut air resistance. Each A-6E could carry two of them, with all of its other hard-points occupied by auxiliary fuel tanks to allow a combat radius of more than a thousand miles. Ten of them were the explosive equivalent of a whole squadron of Minuteman missiles. Their a.s.signed targets were naval, on the principle that people most often kill friends, or at least a.s.sociates, rather than total strangers. One a.s.signed SIOP mission, for example, was to reduce the Nikolayev Shipyard on the Dniepr River to a radioactive puddle. Which was, incidentally, where the Soviet carrier carried fifty B-61-Mod-8 nuclear gravity bombs in a special, heavily-guarded magazine. The B-61 had FUFO-for "full fusing option," more commonly called "dial-a-yield"-that selected an explosive power ranging from ten to five hundred kilotons. The bombs were twelve feet long, less than a foot in diameter, weighed a mere seven hundred pounds, and were nicely streamlined to cut air resistance. Each A-6E could carry two of them, with all of its other hard-points occupied by auxiliary fuel tanks to allow a combat radius of more than a thousand miles. Ten of them were the explosive equivalent of a whole squadron of Minuteman missiles. Their a.s.signed targets were naval, on the principle that people most often kill friends, or at least a.s.sociates, rather than total strangers. One a.s.signed SIOP mission, for example, was to reduce the Nikolayev Shipyard on the Dniepr River to a radioactive puddle. Which was, incidentally, where the Soviet carrier Kuznetzov Kuznetzov had been built. had been built.

The Captain's additional problem was that his battle group commander, an admiral, had taken the chance to fly into Naples for a conference with the Commander of the United States Sixth Fleet. Richards was on his own.

"Where's our friend?" Roosevelt's Roosevelt's CO asked. CO asked.

"About two hundred fifty miles back," the operations officer said. "Close."

"Let's get the plus-fives right up, skipper," Jackson said. "I'll take two and orbit right about here to watch the back door." He tapped the chart.

"Play it cool, Rob."

"No sweat, Ernie." Jackson walked to a phone. "Who's up?" he asked the VF-1 ready room. "Good." Jackson went off to get his flight suit and helmet.

"Gentlemen," Richards said as Jackson left, "since we are now east of Malta, we are now part of the SIOP, therefore a strategic and not a conventional a.s.set, and DEFCON-TWO applies to us. If anyone here needs a refresher on the DEFCON-TWO Rules of Engagement, you'd better do it fast. Anything that might be construed as a threat to us may be engaged and destroyed on my authority as battle group commander. Questions?"

"Sir, we don't know what is happening," the ops officer pointed out.

"Yeah. We'll try to think first, but, people, let's get our collective act together. Something bad is happening, and we're at DEFCON-TWO."

It was a fine, clear night on the flight deck. Jackson briefed Commander Sanchez and their respective RIOs, then the plane captains for the two Tomcats sitting on the waist cats walked the flight crews out to them. Jackson and Walters got aboard. The plane captain helped strap both in, then disappeared downward and removed the ladder. Captain Jackson ran through the start-up sequence, watching his engine instruments come into normal idle. The F-14D was currently armed with four radar-homing Phoenix missiles and four infrared Sidewinders.

"Ready back there, Shredder?" Jackson asked.

"Let's do it, Spade," Walter replied.

Robby pushed his throttles to the stops, then jerked them around the detent and into afterburner, and signaled his readiness to the catapult officer, who looked down the deck to make sure it was clear. The officer fired off a salute to the aircraft.

Jackson blinked his flying lights in reply, dropping his hand to the stick and pulling his head back against the rest. A second later the cat officer's lighted wand touched the deck. A petty officer hit the firing b.u.t.ton, and steam jetted into the catapult machinery.

For all his years at this business, his senses never quite seemed to be fast enough. The acceleration of the catapult nearly jerked his eyeb.a.l.l.s around inside their sockets. The dim glow lights of the deck vanished behind him. The back of the aircraft settled and they were off. Jackson made sure he was actually flying before taking the aircraft out of burner, then he retracted his gear and flaps and started a slow climb to alt.i.tude. He was just through a thousand feet when "Bud" Sanchez and "Lobo" Alexander pulled alongside.

"There go the radars," Shredder said, taking note of his instruments. The entire TR TR battle group shut down every emission in a matter of seconds. Now no one would be able to track them from their own electronic noise. battle group shut down every emission in a matter of seconds. Now no one would be able to track them from their own electronic noise.

Jackson settled down. Whatever this was, he told himself, it couldn't be all that bad, could it? It was a beautifully clear night, and the higher he got, the clearer it became through the panoramic canopy of his fighter. The stars were discrete pin-p.r.i.c.ks of light, and their twinkling ceased almost entirely as they reached thirty thousand feet. He could see the distant strobes of commercial aircraft, and the coastlines of half a dozen countries. A night like this, he thought, could make a poet of a peasant. It was for moments like these that he'd become a pilot. He turned west, with Sanchez on his wing. There were some clouds that way, he realized at once. He couldn't see all that many stars.

"Okay," Jackson ordered, "let's get a quick picture."

The Radar Intercept Officer activated his systems. The F-14D had just been fitted with a new Hughes-built radar called an LPI, for "low probability of intercept." Though using less power than the AWG-9 system it had replaced, the LPI combined greater sensitivity with a far lower chance of being picked up by another aircraft's threat receiver. It also had vastly improved look-down performance.

"There they are," Walters reported. "Nice circular formation."

"They have anything up?"

"Everything I see has a transponder on."

"'Kay-we'll be on station in another few minutes."

Fifty miles behind them, an E-2C Hawkeye airborne-early-warning bird was coming off the number-two catapult. Behind it, two KA-6 tankers were firing up, along with more fighters. The tankers would soon arrive at Jackson's station to top off his fuel tanks, enabling the CAG to stay aloft for four more hours. The E-2C was the most important. It climbed out at full military power, turning south to take station fifty miles from its mother ship. As soon as it reached twenty-five thousand, its surveillance radar switched on, and the onboard crew of three operators began cataloging their contacts. Their data was sent by digital link back to the carrier and also to the group air-warfare officer aboard the Aegis cruiser, USS Thomas Gates, Thomas Gates, whose call sign was "Stetson." whose call sign was "Stetson."

"Nothing much, skipper."

"Okay, we're on station. Let's...o...b..t and searchlight around." Jackson turned his aircraft into a shallow right turn, with Sanchez in close formation.

The Hawkeye spotted them first. They were almost directly under Jackson and his two Tomcats, and out of the detection cone of their radars for the moment.

"Stetson, this is Falcon-Two, we have four bogies on the deck, bearing two-eight-one, one hundred miles out." The reference was for TR TR's position.

"IFF?"

"Negative, their speed is four hundred, alt.i.tude seven hundred, course one-three-five."

"Amplify," the AWO said.

"They're in a loose finger-four, Stetson," the Hawkeye controller said. "Estimate we have tactical fighters here."

"I got something," Shredder reported to Jackson a moment later. "On the deck, looks like two-no, four aircraft, heading southeast."

"Whose?"

"Not ours."