Betsy wasn't interested. "Chris, take a look at this."

Their visitor looked up from the map. "Oh. The truck? I don't know what color they paint their—"

"Not green."

Time usually worked in favor of diplomacy, but not in this case, Adler thought as he entered the White House. He knew the way, and had a Secret Service agent to conduct him in case he got lost. The Deputy Secretary of State was surprised to see a reporter in the Oval Office, even more so when he was allowed to stay.

"You can talk," Ryan told him. Scott Adler took a deep breath and started his report.

"They're not backing down on anything. The Ambassador isn't very comfortable with the situation, and it shows. I don't think he's getting much by way of instructions out of Tokyo, and that worries me. Chris Cook thinks they're willing to let us have Guam back in a demilitarized condition, but they want to keep the rest of the islands. I dangled the TRA at them, but no substantive response." He paused before going on. "It's not going to work. We can keep at it for a week or a month, but it's just not going to happen. Fundamentally they don't know what they're into. They see a continuum of engagement between the military and economic sides. They don't see the firebreak between the two. They don't see that they've crossed over a line, and they don't see the need to cross back."

"You're saying there's a war happening," Holtzman observed, to make things clear. It made him feel foolish to ask the question. He didn't notice the same aura of unreality surrounding everyone else in the room.

Adler nodded. "I'm afraid so."

"So what are we going to do about it?"

"What do you suppose?" President Durling asked.

Commander Dutch Claggett had never expected to be in this situation. A last-track officer since his graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy twenty-three years earlier, his career had come to a screeching halt aboard USS Maine, when as executive officer he'd been present for the only loss of an American fleet-ballistic-missile submarine. The irony was that his life's ambition had been command of a nuclear submarine, but command of Tennessee meant nothing at all now. It was just an entry on his first resume when he entered the civilian job market. Her designed mission was to carry Trident-II sea-launched ballistic missiles, but the missiles were gone and the only reason that she still existed at all was because the local environmental movement had protested her dismantlement to Federal District Court, and the judge, a lifelong member of the Sierra Club, had agreed to the arguments, which were again on their way back to the United States Court of Appeals.