Narmonov looked around the room for a dissenting opinion. There was none. "Make it so," he told Defense.

"We still haven't heard anything from Denver," Fowler said, rubbing his eyes.

"I wouldn't expect much," General Borstein replied.

NORAD's command post is literally inside of a mountain. The entrance tunnel had a series of steel blast-doors. The structures inside were designed to survive anything that could be aimed at them. Shock-absorbing springs and bags of compressed air isolated the people and machines from the granite floors. Overhead were steel roofs to stop any rock fragments that might be blasted free by a near-miss. Borstein didn't expect to survive an attack. There was a whole regiment of Soviet SS-18 Mod 4s tasked to the destruction of this post and a few others. Instead of ten or more MIRVs, they carried a single twenty-five-megaton warhead whose only plausible military mission was to turn Cheyenne Mountain into Cheyenne Lake. That was a pleasant thought. Borstein was a fighter pilot by trade. He'd started off in the F-100, called the 'Hun,' by its drivers, graduated from there-to F-4 Phantoms, and commanded an F-15 squadron in Europe. He'd always been a tactical guy, stick and rudder, scarf and goggles: kick the tires, light the fires, first one up's the leader. Borstein frowned at the thought. Even he wasn't old enough to remember those days. His job was continental air defense, to keep people from blowing his country up. He'd failed. A nearby piece of America was blown up, along with his boss, and he didn't know why or how or who. Borstein was not a man accustomed to failure, but failure was what he saw on his map display.

"General!" a major called to him.

"What is it?"

"Picking up some radio and microwave chatter. First guess is that Ivan's alerting his missile regiments. Ditto in some naval bases. Flash traffic outbound from Moscow."

"Christ!" Borstein lifted his phone again.

"Never done it?" Elliot asked.

"Strange but true," Borstein said. "Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians never put their ICBMs on alert."

"I don't believe it," Fowler snorted. "Never?"

"The General's right," Ryan said. "The reason is that their telephone system historically has been in pretty bad shape. I guess they've finally gotten it fixed enough -"

"What do you mean?"

"Mr President, God is in the details. You send alert messages by voice - we do it that way, and so do the Soviets. The Russian phone system stinks, and you don't want to use a flukey system for orders of that importance. That's why they've been investing so much money in fixing it up, just as we have invested a lot in our command-and-control-systems. They use a lot of fiberoptic cable now, just like we do, plus a whole new set of microwave relays. That's how we're catching it," Jack explained. "Scatter off the microwave repeaters."

"Another couple of years, they'll be fully fiber-optic, and we wouldn't have known," General Fremont added. "I don't like this."