The cameras had closed in on the vulpine face and cold blue eyes of the President as he sat at his desk in his office in the Kremlin, the gold double-headed eagle of Russia filling the background. This was obviously part of a longer speech, but the English subtitles of this short soundbite could not have been more chilling.

“The Motherland cannot stand by while our children are massacred. On top of this outrage American jets have attacked and shot down one of our pilots . . . The ceasefire in Ukraine is worthless . . . Ukraine must pay the price . . .”

Then it cut back to the CNN newsreader and there was silence in the Situation Room.

Bear watched the President as she looked round the table at the guarded faces; nobody as yet prepared to stick their neck out and speak. Lynn Turner Dillon had only been inaugurated as 45th President of the United States of America five months earlier and this was the first serious military crisis of her presidency. Bear had also been in Washington long enough to know that, until the politicians around the table knew how she would react to such an incident, silence was the best way of not incurring her disfavor.

And who could tell how she would she react to this carnage? Sixty years old but looking twenty years younger, a former chief executive of a giant Canadian gold mining company and a tough businesswoman who had risen to the top in a man’s world, she had been the surprise winner of last year’s Presidential elections. She was neatly dressed with highlighted blonde hair and preferred to emphasize her femininity by wearing skirts rather than a trouser suit. This morning, however, she was learning the hard way that while it took tough decisions to reach the top in business, lives were rarely lost by those decisions. Now, two men she had ordered to Ukraine were dead and their comrades had been kidnapped.

Bear’s thoughts were broken by a tap on the shoulder. A Situation Room staffer had come up behind him and he now handed Bear a code word-classified CIA report marked “Top Secret.” Bear quickly scanned the headline, stood up and placed it in front of MacWhite.

MacWhite speed-read the first page and leaned forward, breaking the silence. “If I may, Madam President?”

“Please, General. I need your advice,” she replied.