The map was color-coded. Hard-to-kill structures were colored brown. Dwellings were yellow. Green denoted commercial and other buildings deemed easy targets to destroy. The stadium, he saw, was green, as was nearly everything immediately around it. Well inside the lethal radius were hundreds of houses and low-rise apartment buildings.

"How many in the stadium?"

"I called KGB for an estimate," the lieutenant said. "It's an enclosed structure - with a roof. The Americans like their comforts. Total capacity is over sixty thousand."

"My God," General Kuropatkin breathed. "Sixty thousand there at least another hundred thousand inside this radius. The Americans must be insane by now." And if they think we did it

"Well?"Borstein asked. "I ran the numbers three times. Best guess, one-fifty-KT, sir," the captain said. Borstein rubbed his face. "Christ. Casualty count?"

"Two hundred-K, based on computer modeling and a quick look at the maps we have on file," she answered.

"Sir, if somebody's thinking terrorist device, they're wrong. It's too big for that."

Borstein activated the conference line to the President and CINC-SAC. "We have some early numbers here."

"Okay, I'm waiting," the President said. He stared at the speaker as though it were a person.

"Initial yield estimates look like one hundred fifty kilotons."

"That big?" General Fremont's voice asked.

"We checked the numbers three times."

"Casualties?" CINC-SAC asked next.

"On the order of two hundred thousand initial dead. Add fifty more to that from delayed effects."

President Fowler recoiled backwards as though slapped across the face. For the past five minutes, he had denied as much as he could. This most important of denials had just vanished. Two hundred thousand people dead. His citizens, the people he'd sworn to preserve, protect, and defend.

"What else?" his voice asked.

"I didn't catch that," Borstein said.

Fowler took a deep breath and spoke again. "What else do you have?"

"Sir, our impression here is that the yield is awfully high for a terrorist device."

"I'd have to concur in that," CINC-SAC said. "An IND - an improvised nuclear device, that is, what we'd expect from unsophisticated terrorists - should not be much more than twenty-KT. This sounds like a multi-stage weapon."

"Multi-stage?" Elliot said towards the speaker.

"A thermonuclear device," General Borstein replied. "An H-Bomb."

"Ryan here, who's this?"

"Major Fox, sir, at NORAD. We have an initial feel for yield and casualties," the major read off the bomb numbers.

"Too big for a terrorist weapon," said an officer from the Directorate of Science and Technology.

"That's what we think, sir."

"Casualties?" Ryan asked.

"Probable prompt-kill number is two hundred thousand or so. That includes the people at the stadium."

I have to wake up, Ryan told himself, his eyes screwed tightly shut. This has to be a fucking nightmare, and I'm going to wake up from it. But he opened his eyes, and nothing had changed at all.

Robby Jackson was sitting in the cabin of the carrier's skipper, Captain Ernie Richards. They had been half-listening to the game, but mainly discussing tactics for an upcoming wargame. The Theodore Roosevelt battlegroup would approach Israel from the west, simulating an attacking enemy. The enemy in this case was the Russians. It seemed highly unlikely, of course, but you had to set some rules for the game. The Russians, in this case, were going to be clever. The battlegroup would be broken up to resemble a loose assembly of merchant ships instead of a tactical formation. The first attack wave would be fighters and attack-bombers squawking 'international' on their IFF boxes, and would try to approach Ben Gurion International Airport in the guise of peaceful airliners, the better to get inside Israeli airspace unannounced. Jackson's operations people had already purloined airliner schedules and were examining the time factors, the better to make their first attack seem as plausible as possible. The odds against them were long. It was not expected that TR could do much more than annoy the IAF and the new USAF contingent. But Jackson liked long odds.