"Then give me something that does," Fowler said.

"Mr President, we are in the very earliest stages of a crisis. The information we have coming in now is scattered and confused. Until we know more, trying to put a spin on it is dangerous."

Fowler's face bore down on the speaker phone. "Your job is to tell me what's going on, not to give me lessons in crisis-management. When you have something I can use, get back to me!"

"What in the hell are they thinking?" Ryan asked.

"Is there something I don't know here?" Goodley asked. The young academic looked as alarmed as Ryan felt.

"Why should you be any different from the rest of us?" Jack snapped back, and regretted it. "Welcome to crisis-management. Nobody knows crap, and you're expected to make good decisions anyway. Except it's not possible, it just isn't."

"The thing with the carrier scares me," the S&T man observed.

"Wrong. If we only splashed four aircraft, it's only a handful of people," Ryan pointed out. "Land combat is something else. If we really have a battle going on in Berlin, that's the scary one, almost as bad as an attack on some of our strategic assets. Let's see if we can get hold of SACEUR."

The nine surviving M1A1 tanks were racing north along a Berlin avenue, along with a platoon of Bradley fighting vehicles. Street lights were on, heads sticking out windows and it was instantly apparent to the few onlookers that whatever was happening wasn't a drill. All the tanks had the speed governors removed from their engines, and they could all have been arrested in America for violating the national interstate highway limit. One mile north of their car, they turned east. Leading the formation was a senior NCO who knew Berlin well - this was his third tour in the once-divided city - well enough that he had a perfect spot in mind, if the Russians hadn't got there first, Efjiere was a construction site. A memorial to the Wall and its victims was going up after a long competition, It overlooked the Russian and American compound, which were soon to be vacated, and bulldozers had puslyd up a high berm of dirt for the sculpture that would sit, jjtop it. But it wasn't there yet, just a thick dirt ramp. The Soviet tanks were milling about on their objective, probably waiting for their infantry to show up or something. They were taking TOW hits from the Bradley, and returning fire into the woods.

"Christ, they're going to kill those Bradley guys," the unit commander - a captain whose tank was the last survivor of his company - said. "Okay, find your spots." That took another minute. Then the tanks were hull-down, just their guns and the tops of turrets showing. "Straight down the line! Commence firing, fire at will-"

All nine tanks fired at once. The range was just over two thousand meters, and now the element of surprise was with someone else. Five Russian tanks died with the first volley, and six more in the second, as the Abrams tanks went into rapid fire.