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The Joint Chiefs were, Lambert knew, as unprepared for this response as he was. They had spent hours justifying their plans with mock arguments, junior officers playing “DA”—“devil's advocate,” he was told officially, “Democratic appeaser,” they let on conspiratorially, worse he imagined when he was not in the room. As a result, they had made numerous revisions to modify the plans precisely so that the President would not find them overly provocative. However, their contingencies had not included, Lambert knew, a lay-down by the President.

“Perhaps, sir,” Lambert began, hesitantly, “you might inform us of the reasons why you so readily agree to the deployment plans so that we might all more accurately interpret the orders in light of the spirit in which they were intended.”

Marine General Fuller and the President, an unlikely pair, both
laughed suddenly, and Lambert felt his face redden. “Old lawyering habits die hard, hey, Greg?” the President said as Fuller cracked his own joke to Admiral Dixon in a whisper that Lambert could not pick up. “Just kidding, Greg. It's a good idea, if I understand it correctly,” Livingston said smiling, and then he paused to think for a second. “My number one reason for approving the deployments is that, if we really do lose control of things, I'll be damned if this country isn't in the best possible position to win a war that I, as commander in chief, can put it. But I must tell you that my other motivation in approving this,” he said, tapping the first page of over 100 pages that followed, the “summary” of a plan whose details were far too long for any one book, “is to press home the point with Razov and his buddies on the Russian general staff that if they want to mess around with us, they're gonna get burned. With that as our ‘stick,' I hope to launch a new round of initiatives when State gets back up and operational. These deployments should put us in position to extract at least some concessions from the Russians on weapons levels before we both begin a new arms race to rebuild our now depleted nuclear arsenals.”

The President looked around the table to ensure his answer was satisfactory.

Just then the phone rang in front of General Starnes, and he picked it up. After listening for a moment while everyone waited, as always, in tense anticipation of what the call, any call, might foretell, Starnes said, “All right, take everybody back off MOPP Level Four and send out an advisory to all commands retracting our prior assessment and warning order.” He listened for a moment longer and said, “Just do it!” and hung up. Starnes looked up at the President. “The air samplers on Guam were turned on only after the cruise missile attack, and they immediately sounded their alarms. The
PA-COM
CBR team has conducted their initial tests, and the preliminary judgment is bee pollen.”

There was silence until the President finally repeated, “Bee pollen? You mean bees, as in
b-z-z-z?
Bee pollen?”

“Yessir,” Starnes said, as forceful in retraction as he had been in assertion of his position. “Bee pollen triggered the alarms. The air's thick with it, apparently.”

The President's mood darkened noticeably, angered, Lambert presumed, by the near overreaction based on bad information. “All right, now what I want to know is,” the President asked, holding up the briefing book, “will these deployments put us in position to fulfill our treaty obligations in defending Eastern Europe? And what the hell is this ‘Far Eastern Front' that all these marines are allocated
to? Cut to the chase, General Thomas. If the Russians moving into Ukraine don't stop at the Polish and Slovak borders and I take your muzzle off, can we hold them?”

Thomas hesitated, trying to decide, Lambert realized, where to start. It was then that it dawned on Lambert how unprepared his boss, elected, as had been his recent predecessors, solely on his domestic affairs agenda, was for the rapidly evolving concepts of national strategic thinking. That was his own fault, Lambert realized. He was the President's national security adviser.

“If we go to war, Mr. President,” Lambert blurted out, jumping in before Thomas could respond, “all of the plans are to fight to win and win quickly. The cost to the nation would be billions—
billions—
of dollars every . . . single . . .
day.”

“Greg,” the President said in irritation at the nonresponsive lecture of his relatively new young aide, “you know too much. I have a simple question, and I want a simple answer. What are the ultimate military objectives of all these plans I'm approving?”

“Have you ever heard of the Lehman Doctrine, sir?” The President shook his head. “Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, was an A-6 strike pilot in the navy reserve. During his tenure, the Navy Department formulated a plan to take the war deep into Siberia from the Pacific, striking at Russia itself where their forces were weakest—from the east—as a penalty for encroachment in Western Europe. It was highly classified, and it was called the Lehman Doctrine.”

That was too much for the President. “If you don't get to the point, Greg, I'll get a national security adviser who knows how to give me a straight answer when I ask for one!”

Lambert began his answer in a low voice. “Our current plan is called Operation Avenging Sword,” he said, and he felt the eyes of the Joint Chiefs on him now. “If war with Russia comes, the objective in the Far East, Mr. President, would be to sever the Trans-Siberian Railroad by air strikes, force a landing of marines and army troops on the Pacific coast of Russia, engage and neutralize the Russian Far East Army Command, and seize the Russian Pacific Fleet's home port of Vladivostok. That would effectively contest control of all of Siberia east of a line running from the Kara Sea in the north to Tomsk and Novosibirsk in the south, or approximately one half the landmass of Russia.”

The President stared at Lambert, thinking his aide had lost his mind. He looked around the table and nervously loosed a burst of air as a smile of disbelief spread across his face. The smile was short-lived, however, as he inventoried the grim faces of the men
present. “My God, you're serious, aren't you?”

His gaze ended on Lambert, who completed the lesson with the capper.

“And the objective of the forces deployed into Poland and Slovakia, the ‘Eastern European Front' with their three armored corps, three armored cavalry regiments, six armored and mechanized infantry divisions, and twelve of the twenty tactical fighter wings of the Air Combat Command plus all the allied troops we can muster, sir—the largest concentration of firepower in the history of the world—would be to drive into and through Byelarus and Ukraine, engage and destroy in the field the army of Russia, and capture the Russian capital, Moscow, all before the first snows of winter.”

“The tank is the weapon of decision on the modern battlefield,” David Chandler read in the beam of his flashlight. “The individual soldier in a tank unit must be indoctrinated with the spirit of the offensive. His thinking must be geared to the speed and violence of mobile warfare. He is trained to operate deep in hostile territory. He must regard the presence of the enemy to his front, flanks, and rear as a condition to be expected. He must develop a spirit of daring that will ensure effective engagement of the enemy.”

The manual went on and on and on. Chandler was in his element: cramming for the big exam.
I know this stuff,
he thought, reassured as it all came back to him. Cross-attachment of units, mixing and matching of armor and infantry. Sections on mortars, artillery, tactical air support, ground surveillance radar. For the second night in a row he hadn't been able to sleep on the ground like all the snoring men spread over the low hills around—the same problem he'd had since Boy Scouts—and he relished the opportunity to quietly calm his self-doubts with a foray into the arcane and only dimly familiar science of warfare.

Hidden down at number six of nine neat things about tanks he read, “Rapidly exploit effects of mass destruction weapons.”
Probably works like a charm,
he thought.
Wipe out an area along the enemy's front line with nukes or chemicals or biologicals and then pour through it into his rear, safe and sound buttoned up in your thick-skinned, overpressured vehicles.
It was a trick that the Russians surely knew too, he realized.

Small-unit tactics.
Always just remember,
he thought,
fire and maneuver. Advancing by bounds.
Alternate. One unit leap-frogging another. Or successive, always the same unit in front, with the unit behind assuming the front unit's old position.

Dominant terrain. Cover and concealment, the former meaning protection from fire, the latter, from observation. Avoid being near conspicuous landmarks like the tops of hills, places where the Russians would shell and bomb. Chandler wondered whether the telltale antennas and command vehicles of Division Headquarters would attract Russian shells and bombs, remembering from Armor School with a momentary chill the rain of fire they had been told their “radio-electronic” troops could be expected to direct on any such targets.
I wonder if they're still as good as the training officers said back in the old Soviet days?
Chandler returned his attention to the manual.

Tank armament. Fire distribution. Helpful hints: “When attacking unprotected infantry, attack with the maximum possible speed and violence, and disruption may occur.”
“Disruption,”
Chandler thought, shaking his head at the understatement.
You need euphemisms. Panic, desperation, collapse, and inevitable death—let's refer to that as “disruption.”

Chandler yawned and lay his head down, holding the book up and repositioning the flashlight. Reconnaissance and security. Offensive operations. Exploitation and pursuit. Defensive operations. As tired as he was, he forced himself to keep reading.
Better to not think about home, about Melissa.

The mere recollection of her name soured his mood, and he found concentration on the manuals no longer possible. He crawled out of his sleeping bag, itching from three days of living on the land without a bath, his muscles aching from the field march on which he had led his “command” the day before, his bones aching from his unsuccessful attempts to sleep on the hard ground. He threw his pack and webbing onto his shoulders, grabbed his rifle and flak jacket and headed off toward the terminal. Once out of sight, he put his full combat load on, taking time to get the straps adjusted so the heavy load felt right. He had led his men on a ten-mile march around the marshes and grass the day before, but they had left a guard with their heavy gear and taken only their rifles and a light load. His sore legs protested now under the seventy-odd pounds, and he was surprised that his breathing picked up and he broke into a sweat on the cool morning after walking just a short distance.

He had not yet had the opportunity to get accustomed to the heft and feel of his pack and webbing, and his hesitation at becoming
grist for the bored regular-army types' ridicule mill with his comical full dress rehearsal made this predawn hour the best time for his excursion.

He carefully skirted the other troop areas, not only because he felt like a joke from the Orvis catalog, but because they may have posted armed guards. All was quiet, however, and the darkness of the night cloaked him in the desired anonymity.

As he approached the only lights within sight at the airport terminal building he heard a heavy, rhythmic beat that was growing louder. From around the side of the terminal, the front of a large formation of men appeared. They were running in step and clapping their hands each time their left boot fell with a hollow thud on the tarmac's concrete, the cumulative sound of the two hundred feet pounding the ground in unison creating a muted thunder. There were so many, and they were so synchronized, it was an awesome sight.

As they ran past, Chandler heard a deep, gravelly voice yell, “Company-
y-y,”
followed by the repeated, “Plato-
o-o-n”
from several voices, “single time—
ha-a-arch!”
Pulling even with Chandler, they slowed to a regular cadence and then were halted and given a “left face” by the deep-voiced leader, their boots again sounding in perfect unison.

“Listen up, Alpha Company!” a new voice shouted. “You got thirty minutes to clean yer weapons, take a shit, and be back here with full loads for an equipment check and field exercises! Dismiss the men, First Sergeant!”

There was a pause, and then the deep voice from before once again rocked the night. This time, the first sergeant's words were repeated from the chests of over a hundred men shouting in unison.

“I recognize that I volunteered as a
Ranger!”

“
I RECOGNIZE THAT I VOLUNTEERED AS A RANGER!
”

“I accept the fact that as a
Ranger . . . ”

“
I ACCEPT THE FACT THAT AS A RANGER
 . . . ”

“ . . . my country expects
me . . . ”

“ . . .
MY COUNTRY EXPECTS ME
 . . . ”

“ . . . to move
further . . . ”

“. . .
FURTHER
 . . . ”

“faster. . . ”

“ . . .
FASTER
 . . . ”

“ . . . and fight
harder . . . ”

“ . . .
HARDER
 . . . ”

“ . . . than any other soldier in the world!”

“
RANGERS-LEAD-THE-WAY! RAN
-ger!
RAN
-ger!
RAN
-ger!
A-A-A-A-R-R-R!”
the men ended in a guttural growl.