"Command tank, two o'clock, skylined, moving left to right," a sergeant told a corporal.

"Identified," the gunner replied over the intercom.

"Fire."

"On the way." The corporal squeezed his trigger. The seal-cap blew off the missile tube, and the TOW-2 blasted out, trailing behind a thin control wire. The target was about twenty-five hundred meters away. The gunner kept his cross-hairs on target, guiding the antitank missile to its target. It took eight seconds, and the gunner had the satisfaction of seeing detonation right in the center of the turret.

"Target," the Bradley commander said, indicating a direct hit. "Cease fire. Now let's find another one of these fuckers ten o'clock, tank, coming around the PX!"

The turret came left. "Identified!"

"Okay, what does CIA make of this?" Fowler asked.

"Sir, again, all we have is scattered and unconnected information," Ryan replied.

"Roosevelt has a Soviet carrier battlegroup a few hundred miles behind them, and they carry MiG-29s," Admiral Painter said.

"They're even closer to Libya, and our friend the colonel has a hundred of the same aircraft."

"Flying over water at midnight?" Painter asked. "When's the last time you heard of the Libyans doing that - and twenty-some miles from one of our battlegroups!"

"What about Berlin?" Liz Elliot asked.

"We don't know!" Ryan stopped and took a deep breath. "Remember that we just don't know much."

"Ryan, what if SPINNAKER was right?" Elliot asked.

"What do you mean?"

"What if there is a military coup going on right now over there, and they set a bomb off over here to keep us from interfering, to decapitate us?"

"That's totally crazy," Jack answered. "Risk a war? Why do it? What would we do if there were a coup? Attack at once?"

"Their military might expect us to," Elliot pointed out.

"Disagree. I think SPINNAKER might have been lying to us from the beginning on this issue."

"Are you making this up?" Fowler asked. It was coming home to the President now that he might actually have been the real target of the bomb, that Elizabeth's theoretical model for the Russian plan was the only thing that made sense.

"No, sir!" Ryan snapped back indignantly. "I'm the hawk here, remember? The Russian military is too smart to pull something like this. It's too big a gamble."

"Then explain the attacks on our forces!" Elliot said.

"We don't know for sure that there have been attacks on our forces."

"So, now you think our people are lying?" Fowler asked.

"Mr President, you are not thinking this through. Okay, let's assume that there is an on-going coup in the Soviet Union - I don't accept that hypothesis, but let's assume it, okay? The purpose, you say, for exploding the bomb over here is to keep us from interfering. Fine. Then why attack our military forces if they want us to sit on our hands?"

"To show that they're serious," Elliot fired back.

"That's crazy! It's tantamount to telling us they did explode the bomb here. Do you think they would expect us not to respond to a nuclear attack?" Ryan demanded, then answered his own question: "It does not make sense!"