PRESIDENT NARMONOV:

WE SENT SOME AIRCRAFT INTO BERLIN TO INVESTIGATE THE SITUATION THERE. THEY WERE SHOT DOWN WITHOUT WARNING BY SOVIET MISSILES. WHY WAS THIS DONE?

"What does this mean?"

" 'Shot down without warning'? There's a battle under way, and that's why the aircraft were sent there! The regiment has anti-aircraft troops," the Defense Minister explained. "They only have short-range, low-altitude rockets. If the Americans were just looking from a safe height - ten thousand meters - we couldn't even have touched them. They must have been lower, probably trying to support their troops with an air attack. That's the only way we could have gotten them."

"But we have no information?"

"No, we have not established contact yet."

"We will not answer this one."

"That is a mistake," Golovko said.

"This situation is dangerous enough already," Narmonov said angrily. "We do not know what is going on there. How can I respond when he claims to have information which I do not?"

"If you do not respond, you appear to admit the incident."

"We admit nothing!" the Defense Minister shouted. "We could not even have done this unless they were attacking us, and we don't know whether it really happened or not."

"So, tell them that," Golovko suggested. "Perhaps if they understand that we are as confused as they, they will also understand that -"

"But they won't understand, and they won't believe. They've already accused us of launching this attack, and they won't believe that we have no control over the area."

Narmonov retreated to a corner table and poured himself a cup of tea, while the intelligence and defense advisors traded - arguments? Was that the right word? The Soviet President looked up at the ceiling. This command center dated back to Stalin. A spur off one of the Moscow subway lines built by Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin's pet Jewish anti-Semite and his most trusted henchman, it was fully a hundred meters down, but now his people told him that it was not truly a place of safety after all.

What was Fowler thinking? Narmonov asked himself. The man was undoubtedly shaken by the murder of so many American citizens, but how could it be possible that he was thinking that the Soviets were responsible? And what was actually happening? A battle in Berlin, a possible clash between naval forces in the Mediterranean, all unrelated - or were they?

Did it matter? Narmonov stared at a picture on the wall and realized that, no, it did not matter. He and Fowler were both politicians for whom appearances had more weight than reality, and perceptions more importance than facts. The American had lied to him in Rome over a trivial matter. Was he lying now? If he were, then none of the past ten years of progress mattered at all, did they? It had all been for nothing.

"How do wars begin?" Narmonov asked himself quietly in the corner. In history, wars of conquest were started by strong men who wished to grow stronger still. But the time for men of imperial ambition had passed. The fast such criminal had died not so long before. All that had changed in the twentieth century. The First World War had been started - how? A tubercular assassin had killed a buffoon so unloved that his own family had ignored the funeral. An overbearing diplomatic note had prompted Czar Nikolay II to leap to the defense of people he hadn't loved, and then the timetables had begun. Nikolay had the last chance, Narmonov remembered. The last of the Czars had held in his hand the chance to stop it all, but hadn't. If only he'd known what his decision for war would mean he might have found the strength to stop it, but in his fear and his weakness he'd signed the mobilization order that had ended one age and begun another. That war had begun because small, frightened men feared war less than showing weakness.