President Brown was already reaching for the red phone, strategically placed inches from his right hand.

The room broke into pandemonium. The men gathered here were charged with defending the nation. They knew the urgency to take immediate action. All the phones in the room were attacked as they tried to get their staffs to work.

Amid the noise and chaos, President Brown did his best to give the message to the high-ranking Russian who answered the crisis phone on the other end of the line. He had to try to convince the man that the impossible was happening, that there was a missile racing at his country at that very moment. And that it was a Russian missile.

The communications officer raced back into the room again. The man was sweating heavily. No one was paying him any attention until he yelled at the top of his voice. The room fell silent.

“I have voice comms with the Toledo! President Smitrov wants to talk to President Brown!”

The Russian SS-N-27 missile raced across the Gulf of Finland, twenty meters above the gray seas. At Mach 0.85, the missile reached a point above the brown sand beach a few miles south and west of the old Czarist capital of St. Petersburg ten minutes after it was launched from Vipr.

Inside the missile’s computer brain, a correction to the course was made. The silver bird rolled slightly as it turned southwest, away from St. Petersburg. The leafless birch forests were a trackless blur below as it raced on toward its predetermined target.

The Alpha followed the contour of the land as it climbed from the low-lying coastal forests to the wooded hills in the south of the Leningrad Oblast. The smokestacks of Novogrod flashed by to the east. The missile flight control algorithm continuously updated its position, courtesy of the American GPS. It made minor corrections as it continued to follow the flight plan that had been programmed into its electronic brain.

The Volga River passed under the deadly bird and then the Moskva River appeared below. After checking its position, the Alpha obediently spun around to follow the Moskva toward the heart of Moscow. As it raced down the waterway, the missile climbed and increased speed until it was roaring toward its target at Mach 0.95, five hundred meters above the cold, snow-covered ground.

Boris Medikov slammed the phone down in disgust. The call had been from his niece in America, Marina Nosovitskaya, and her news was the worst he could have anticipated. She reported Dmitri Ustinov’s capture by the FBI, the loss of the OptiMarx operation. She had also been unable to communicate with her “uncles.” There was news on the TV of an FBI operation that involved the deaths of two Russian nationals in a gunfight. She was afraid it was Vujnovich and one of the others. She was on the run and would be out of contact while she went into hiding.