"Turn up the radio, Rob. I forgot what the score is."

Jackson leaned across the table and turned the dial, but got music. The carrier had her own on-board TV system, and was also radio-tuned to the U.S. Armed Forces network. "Maybe the antenna broke," the Air Wing Commander observed.

Richards laughed. "At a time like this? I could have a mutiny aboard."

"That would look good on the old fit-rep, wouldn't it?"

Someone knocked at the door. "Come!" Richards said. It was a yeoman.

"Flash-traffic, sir." The petty officer handed the clipboard over.

"Anything important?" Robby asked.

Richards just handed the message over. Then he lifted the growler phone and punched up the bridge. "General quarters."

"What the hell?" Jackson murmured. "DEFCON-THREE - why, for Christ's sake?"

Ernie Richards, a former attack pilot, had a reputation as something of a character. He'd reinstituted the traditional Navy practice of bugle calls to announce drills. In this case, the i-MC speaker system blared forth the opening bars of John Williams' frantic call to arms in Star Wars, followed by the usual electronic gonging.

"Let's go, Rob." Both men started running down to the Combat Information Center.

"What can you tell me?" Andrey Il'ych Narmonov asked.

"The bomb had a force of nearly two hundred kilotons. That means a large device, a hydrogen bomb," General Kuropatkin said. The death count will be well over one hundred thousand dead. We also have indications of a strong electromagnetic pulse that struck one of our early-warning satellites."

"What could account for that?" The questioner here was one of Narmonov's military advisors.

"We do not know."

"Do we have any nuclear weapons unaccounted for?" Kuropatkin heard his president ask.

"Absolutely not," a third voice replied.

"Anything else?"

"With your permission, I would like to order Voyska PVO to a higher alert level. We already have a training exercise under way in Eastern Siberia."

"Is that provocative?" Narmonov asked.

"No, it is totally defensive. Our interceptors cannot harm anyone more than a few hundred kilometers from our own borders. For the moment, I will keep all my aircraft within Soviet airspace."

"Very well, you may proceed."

In his underground control center, Kuropatkin merely pointed to another officer, who lifted a phone. The Soviet air-defense system had already been prepped, of course; inside a minute radio messages were being broadcast, and long-range search radars came on all over the country's periphery. Both the messages and the radar signals were immediately detected by National Security Agency assets, both on the ground and in orbit.

"Anything else I should do?" Narmonov asked his advisors.

A Foreign Ministry official spoke for all of them. "I think doing nothing is probably best. When Fowler wishes to speak with us, he will do so. He has trouble enough without our interfering."

The American Airlines MD-80 landed at Miami International Airport and taxied over to the terminal. Qati and Ghosn rose from their first-class seats and left the aircraft. Their bags would be transferred automatically to the connecting flight, not that either one particularly cared about that, of course. Both men were nervous, but less so than one might have expected. Death was something both had accepted as an overt possibility for this mission. If they survived, so much the better. Ghosn didn't panic until he realized that there was no unusual activity at all. There should have been some, he thought. He found a bar and looked for the usual elevated television set. It was tuned to a local station. There was no game coverage. He debated asking a question, but decided not to. It was a good decision. He had only to wait a minute before he overheard another voice asking what the score was.