Once duty here had been relatively exciting. He remembered when the Soviets had splashed the Korean Airlines 747 and other incidents, and it must have been wonderfully chaotic during the Iraq war - that is, when the senior watch officer wasn't answering endless calls of 'what's happening?' to anyone who'd managed to get the direct-line number. But now?

Now, as he had just watched on his desk TV, the President was about to defuse the world's biggest remaining diplomatic bomb, and soon Rosselli's work would mostly involve taking calls about collisions at sea, or crashed airplanes, or some dumbass soldier who'd gotten himself run over by a tank. Such things were serious, but not matters of great professional interest. So here he was. His paperwork was finished. That was something Jim Rosselli was good at - he'd learned how to shuffle papers in the Navy, and here he had a superb staff to help him with it - and the rest of the day was mainly involved with sitting and waiting for something to happen. The problem was that Rosselli was a do-er, not a wait-er, and who wanted a disaster to happen anyway?

"Gonna be a quiet day." This was Rosselli's XO, an Air Force F-15 pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Barnes.

"I think you're right, Rocky." Just what I wanted to hear! Rosselli checked his watch. It was a twelve-hour shift, with five hours left to go. "Hell, it's getting to be a pretty quiet world."

"Ain't it the truth." Barnes turned back to the display screen. Well, I got my two MiGs over the Persian Gulf. At least it hasn't been a complete waste of time.

Rosselli stood and decided to walk around. The duty watch officers thought this was to look at what they were doing, to make sure they were doing something. One senior civilian ostentatiously continued doing the Post crossword. It was his 'lunch' break and he preferred eating here to the mostly empty cafeterias. Here he could watch TV. Rosselli next wandered over to the left into the Hot Line room, and he was lucky for a change. A message was announced by the dinging of a little bell. The actual message received looked like random garbage, but the encryption machine changed that into cleartext Russian which a Marine translated:

"So you think you know the real meaning of fear? Yeah, you think you do know, but I doubt it. When you sit in a shelter with bombs falling all over, And the houses around you are burning like torches, I agree that you experience horror and fright. For such moments are dreadful, for as long as they last, But the all-clear sounds - then it's okay - You take a deep breath, the stress has passed by, But real fear is a stone deep down in your chest. You hear me, a stone. That's what it is, no more."

"Ilya Selvinskiy," the Marine lieutenant said.

"Hmph?"

"Ilya Selvinskiy, Russian poet, did some famous work during the Second World War. I know this one, Strakh, the title is "Fear." It's very good." The young officer grinned. "My opposite number is pretty literate. So "