"Fax coming in from Denver," a woman announced.

"Bring it over," Murray commanded.

"Here's page one." The rest arrived rapidly.

"Airline ticket connecting ticket. Pat-"

O'Day took it. "I'll run it down."

"Shit, look at this!"

"Familiar face?"

"It looks like Ismael Qati, maybe? I don't know the one." and hair are wrong, Dan," O'Day thought, from his phone. "A little thin, too. Better call Records. Lessee what they have current on the mutt. You don't want to jump too fast, man."

"Right." Murray lifted his phone.

"Good news, Mr President," Borstein said from inside Cheyenne Mountain. "We have a KH-11 pass coming up through the Central Soviet Union. It's almost dawn there now, clear weather for a change let’s us have a look at some missile fields. The bird's already programmed. NPIC is real-timing it into here and Offutt also."

"But not here," Fowler groused. Camp David had never been set up for that, a remarkable oversight, Fowler thought. It did go into Kneecap, which was where he should have gone when he'd had the chance. "Well, tell me what you see."

"Will do, sir, this ought to be very useful for us," Borstein promised.

"Coming up now, sir," a new voice said. "Sir, this is Major Costello, NORAD intel. We couldn't have timed this much better. The bird is going to sweep very close to four regiments, south to north, at Zhangiz Tobe, Alyesk, Uzhur, and Gladkaya, all but the last are SS-18 bases. Gladkaya is SS-11s, old birds. Sir, Aleysk is one of the places they're supposed to be deactivating, but haven't yet "

The morning sky was clear at Alyesk. First light was beginning to brighten the northeastern horizon, but none of the soldiers of the Strategic Rocket Forces bothered to look. They were weeks behind schedule and their current orders were to correct that deficiency. That such orders were nearly impossible was beside the point. At each of the forty launch silos was a heavy articulated truck. The SS-18s - the Russians actually called them RS-2Os, for Rocket, Strategic, Number 20 - were old ones, more than eleven years, in fact, which was why the Soviets had agreed to eliminate them. Powered liquid-fueled motors, the fuels and oxidizers in were dangerous, corrosive chemicals - dimethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxal and the fact that they were called 'storable' liqiilds was a relative statement. They were more stably than cryogenic fuels, insofar as they did not require refrigeration, but they were toxic to the point of nearly instant lethality to human contact, and they're necessarily highly reactive. One safeguard was the encapsulation of the missiles in steel capsules which were loaded like immense rifle cartridges into the silos, a Soviet design innovation that protected the delicate silo instrumentation from the chemicals. That the Soviets bothered with such systems at all was not - as American intelligence officers carped - to take advantage of their higher energy impulse, but rather a result of the fact that the Soviets had lagged in developing a reliable and powerful solid fuel for its missiles, a situation only recently remedied with the new SS-25. Though undeniably large and powerful, the SS-18 - given the ominous NATO codename of 'SATAN' - was an ill-tempered, pitiless bitch to maintain, and the crews were delighted to be rid of them. More than one Strategic Rocket Forces soldier had been killed in maintenance and training accidents, just as Americans had lost men with its counterpart U.S. missile, the Titan-II. All of the Alyesk birds were tagged for elimination, and that was the reason for the presence of the men and the transporter trucks. But first, the warheads had to be removed. The Americans could watch the missiles in the destruction process, but the warheads were still the most secret of artifacts. Under the watchful eyes of a colonel, the nose shroud was removed from Rocket Number 31 by a small crane, exposing the MIRVs. Each of the conically shaped multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicles was about forty centimeters in width at the bottom, tapering to a needle point one hundred fifty centimeters above its base. Each also represented about half a megaton of three-stage thermonuclear device. The soldiers treated the MIRVs with all the respect they so clearly deserved.