"Sir, NORAD reports that the explosion was in the Denver metropolitan area, very close to the Skydome where they were playing the Superbowl. SecState and SecDef were both at the game, sir."

"Christ, you're right," CINC-SAC realized instantly.

At Andrews Air Force Base, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post - NEACP, pronounced 'Kneecap' - was positioned on the ramp with two of its four engines turning, waiting for someone to arrive so that the crew could take off.

Captain Jim Rosselli had barely been on duty for an hour when this nightmare arrived. He sat in the NMCC Crisis Management Room, wishing a flag officer was here. That was not to be. While there had once been a General or Admiral in the National Military Command Center at all times, the thaw between East and West and the downsizing of the Pentagon now meant that a senior officer was always on call, but the day-to-day administrative work was handled by captains and colonels. It could have been worse, Rosselli thought. At least he knew what it was to have lots of nuclear weapons at his disposal.

"What the fuck is going on?" Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Barnes asked the wall. He knew that Rosselli didn't know.

"Rocky, can we save that for another time?" Rosselli asked calmly. His voice was dead-level. One might never have known from looking at or listening to the captain that he was excited, but the former submarine commander's hands were so moist that by rubbing them on his trousers he'd already created a damp spot that their navy-blue color made invisible.

"You got it, Jim."

"Call General Wilkes, let's get him in here."

"Right." Barnes punched a button on the secure phone, calling Brigadier General Paul Wilkes, a former bomber pilot who lived in official housing on Boiling Air Force Base, just across the Potomac from National Airport.

"Yeah," Wilkes said gruffly.

"Barnes here, sir. We need you in the NMCC immediately." That was all the colonel had to say. "Immediately' is a word that has special meaning for an aviator.

"On the way." Wilkes hung up and muttered further: "Thank God for four-wheel-drive." He struggled into an olive-drab winter parka and headed out the door without bothering with boots. His personal car was a Toyota Land Cruiser that he liked for driving the back country. It started at once, and he backed out, struggling across roads not yet plowed.

The Presidential Crisis Room at Camp David was an anachronistic leftover from the bad old days, or so Bob Fowler had thought on first seeing it over a year before. Constructed during the Eisenhower Administration, it had been designed to resist nuclear attack in an age when the accuracy of a missile was measured in miles rather than yards. Blasted into the living granite rock of the Catoctin Mountains of western Maryland, it had a solid sixty feet of overhead protection, and until 1975 or so had been a highly secure and survivable shelter. About thirty feet wide and forty deep, with a ten-foot ceiling, it contained a staff of twelve, mostly Navy communications types, of whom six were enlisted men. The equipment was not quite as modern as that on NEACP or certain other facilities that the President might use. He sat at a console that looked like 1960s NASA in configuration. There was even an ashtray built into the desktop. In front of him was a bank of television sets. The chair was a comfortable one, even if the situation decidedly was not. Elizabeth Elliot took the one next to his.