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“But,” the President said in growing frustration, holding his hands out and shaking his head, “how do you know which is the credibility-bolstering tidbit and which is the disinformation?”

“That's where the art of it comes in, sir,” the director said. “Separating the grain from the chaff.”

“ ‘SWAG,' ” Marine General Fuller growled in a low voice.

“What?” President Costanzo asked.

“Bob,” General Thomas said in a cautioning tone, but the commandant of the Marine Corps sat forward and said, “We who are on the sharp end of the stick have a term we use whenever we get ‘soft' intelligence and assessments like this from back in the rear areas. We call it SWAG.”

“And what is SWAG, might I ask?” the President said.

“Simple Wild-Assed Guessing, sir.”

“Is that what this is?” the President asked, turning to the CIA director. “I've authorized an attack on Moscow
and
the Bastion that, if your ‘assessments' about the submarines' fail-deadly policy or Operation Samson are wrong, will result in the thermonuclear annihilation of our nation's cities. Are you just making a wild guess?”

“We've assumed, sir, that our opponent is rational. Once you make that assumption, you can play the ‘Game'—run it through our wargaming programs. The computers don't give a damn, sir. They'll blow everything and everybody to little bitty bits if it'll win the Game. They indicate a fairly low order of probability that the Russians either employ a fail-deadly policy or would plan anything like Operation Samson.”

“How low of a probability?”

“Well, there's some disagreement about that,” the CIA director said, looking across the table at the head of the NSA. “We believe it's somewhere on the order of a one to five percent chance that the attacks will trigger a launch.”

“And you?” the President asked the director of the NSA.

“Fifty-fifty.”

The President slammed his hands on the table.
“Je-sus
Christ!” He stared back at the man.
“Fifty-fifty?”

“They're assuming, sir,” the CIA director said lurching forward to the table, “that you believe CIA's source, the very source that we say is a plant. If you back out the weighting that they put on Damocles's credibility, then their numbers are roughly consistent with ours: two to seven percent.”

“Is that true?” the President asked the NSA director.

The man shrugged and nodded, not willing to openly challenge his colleague as Lambert had heard he had done privately, heatedly.

“So it all comes down to this Damocles?” the President concluded. “If he's lying, if he's trying to scare us into believing a Razov bluff, then we go in there and end this thing before the collapse of our economy. And if he's telling the truth, we get blown back into the
Stone Ages?”
The President laughed at the last words. It was not humor, Lambert knew, but nerves.

“Sir,” the Chief of Naval Operations interrupted, and all eyes turned to him. “There's another possibility here. We've got three carrier battle groups plus three submarine, two antisubmarine, patrol and reconnaissance, and two surface combatant task forces up there in the Barents and Kara seas ready to go. That's three carriers, eight cruisers, nine destroyers, twelve frigates, and
thirty-seven
attack submarines. We're operating eighteen of our new P-7 antisubmarine and patrol planes right out of their naval airfield in Arkhangelsk.”

“What are you telling me, Admiral? That you can sink those submarines in the Bastion before they fire?”

“We can sink a whole bunch of 'em,” Admiral Dixon said, “and every sub we sink before they fire takes about one hundred and seventy warheads with it. That's why they targeted so many warheads
at our cities, Mr. President. One hundred and three warheads at New York! They don't plan on actually getting those kinds of results.”

“How many submarines do you think you can sink, Admiral? How many of those twenty-two can you put on the bottom before they fire their missiles?”

The CNO sat hunched under his broad, thick shoulders, his gold epaulets bunching up against his neck as he leaned heavily on the table. “Well, on a clear day, and if we make the first moves and have our land, carrier, and ship-based ASW planes and helicopters on station over the Bastion—and if we get submarines on the five boomers our experimental blue-green lasers have pinpointed from space—we might be able to get fifteen, maybe seventeen, clean with no missiles fired. They gotta come to a hover, which is a tricky maneuver, at firing depth just under the surface. And they've been under a long time so they'll probably stick their periscope mast up for a final bearing check before the first missile breaks the surface. That'll be visible on radar, and they're sitting ducks during that maneuver.”

“Won't you tip your hand when you go in with the aircraft and submarines?” the Secretary of State asked. “I mean, we may have run their air force off, but the Russian Navy is still parked out there right on top of the Bastion.”

“Well, sir, we can slip the subs in if you give us a few days. I'm willing to stand by my estimates of fifteen to seventeen sunk without a missile fired. The Russian ships won't pose too much of a threat during the fifteen or twenty miserable minutes of their remaining time afloat.”

“So that leaves five to seven submarines firing,” the President said. “How many warheads?”

“Now, we'll get some of those before they expend their full complement of missiles. Our guess—our SWAG, as General Fuller would say—is about half of those remaining missiles would be expended. And of those, there'd be duds and flat-out misses. The Russians' submarine-launched missiles aren't as good as their land-based ICBMs.”

“But a city is not a hardened silo,” the President said. “If one of those things misses Times Square and lands in Central Park, it'll still blow the crap out of Manhattan. What's the bottom line, Admiral? How many warheads, and how much yield, would strike our cities?”

“Assume, say,” the Admiral sighed, “six Typhoons firing ten of their twenty missiles on average before we sink them. That's sixty missiles, about four hundred and fifty warheads—two hundred and seventy megatons. About forty percent of the megatonnage expended in the first strike.”

“And they would hit the vast majority of our three hundred
largest cities,” the President said in a far-off voice.

“More or less,” the CNO said. “We could get luckier than that.”

“What? Four hundred warheads lucky? Three hundred and fifty? Just how much good luck can I count on?”

“You can count on none of that happening at all,” the director of the CIA said.

“That's not good enough,” the President replied. “Is there anything we can do between now and a week from today? Anybody, anything?” He scanned the bowed heads of the principals of the National Security Council, getting no response. “So it's this or back down?” Nobody said a word. It was a political decision. It was the President's call. He rocked back in his chair and closed his eyes.
Was he thinking,
Lambert wondered,
or praying?
The silence dragged on, but nobody seemed impatient. Nobody exchanged looks. This was it.
“This is the ball game,”
Filipov's words, Damocles's words, whispered from the deepest recesses of Lambert's mind.

The leather seat of the President's chair squeaked as he rocked forward, opening his eyes. “Okay,” he huffed. “We go. Admiral, start sneaking your subs in when you're ready. I want you to
try
for perfection; don't hold anything back.”

“Including tactical nuclear weapons, sir?” Admiral Dixon asked.

“Yes, if you have to.” The President scanned the room one more time. “Anything else before we bring the others back in?”

“What about crisis relocation, sir?” Lambert asked, and everyone looked at him. “I think the time has come to evacuate the cities.”

“Greg,” the President said, “if we announce an evacuation, the people are going to go ape shit with panic.”

He stared at Lambert, and Lambert said, “It may just frighten the Russians enough to bring them to the table.”

“And if the only people it frightens are our own citizens?”

“Then they're frightened,” Lambert said, “frightened and maybe, just maybe, alive if the worst comes true.” Lambert looked around. All eyes were downcast. It was as if even discussing the possibility, the possibility of death on a massive scale and the wholesale destruction of what generations of Americans had worked their lives to build, somehow tainted them all. It was like a coating of dirt, and Lambert felt it too. “Sir, maybe the Russians don't plan on implementing this Operation Samson. Maybe it is a plant. But our troops are swinging for a knockout blow. They're headed for Moscow. This is World War Two all over again, but with one huge difference. The genie is out of the bottle. Hitler didn't have ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads. Now we all know Razov isn't Hitler, but none of us knows what's going on inside the closed
loop of STAVKA politics. We don't know that it will be Razov down there in that bunker in Moscow when the lights start to flicker and the sound of explosions rumble in.”

Lambert looked around the table again. He had hit a chord. They had talked about it only rarely, every time rationalizing why it wouldn't happen, and then blithely carrying on as if the clock had turned back to 1945. But it had not. Even though the vast majority of the two countries' arsenals remaining after the downsizing of the nineties had been expended or destroyed in the nuclear exchange, the two countries were still locked in a death grip. “If the missiles in the Bastion had fired at our cities in a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack one sunny day last year, FEMA says we would have lost somewhere between forty-five and sixty million dead, most from radiation deaths out to five years. Right now, with the largest cities already largely depleted of their populations and the displaced persons camps generally upwind of probable target sites, the losses would be somewhere around twenty to thirty-five million. We could halve that again by evacuating.”

The President's head began to shake from side to side. “I can't believe we're doing this. I just can't believe it's come down to this.” He looked pale, his eyes, their pupils wide, giving him a hunted look. He took a deep breath, which he exhaled raggedly. It did nothing to steady the quiver in his voice. “Okay, I guess the time has come, Greg. You get together with FEMA. Start the evacuation tomorrow.”

“Come in, Greg,” the President said. He sat at the small writing desk of his bedroom on the Airborne Command Post to which they had returned for the final stage of the war, for the attack on Moscow and the Bastion, just over twenty-four hours away. Lambert closed the door and walked up to the small group—the secretaries of Defense and State, the director of the CIA, and General Thomas.

“You called for me, sir?” Lambert asked.

“Have a seat.” Lambert pulled up a chair and sat pressed into the tight space between Thomas and the director. The President took a deep breath, and let it out as a sigh as he clasped his hands on his head. There were rings on his shirt under his armpits from several successive sweats, with a new dark spot forming in the center. He
ran his hands down to his face, messing up his hair and dragging open the eyelids of his tired eyes.

Lambert quickly surveyed the faces of the other men present. They all were drawn and introspective.

The President picked up the papers before him, and the Secretary of Defense tossed a copy onto the desk in front of Lambert.

“What you've got, Greg,” the President said, “are the terms of a peace proposal approved on an ‘Eyes Only' basis by the heads of government of each of our alliance partners. I apologize for not bringing you in on this earlier, but you now make”—he looked around—“the seventh person to know about it in this country, after the people seated here, and my wife, of course.” They all laughed.

“Greg,” the President said holding the paper, “I'm just not satisfied in going forward with our attacks on Moscow and the Bastion based on probabilities and opinions and assessments; I never have been. We've been working on this since I approved the plans last week.” The President appeared apologetic and defensive.
Eyeball-to-eyeball,
Lambert thought,
and he blinked. Thank God.

“What are the terms?” Lambert said, looking at the multipage memo.

“We are proposing,” the President said, sitting back again and clasping his hands over his head, the dark ring at his armpits now wider than before despite the chilly air of the aircraft, “to completely denuclearize Russia. In return, we would extend a nuclear ‘umbrella'—a firm pledge to retaliate with American nuclear weapons against any country attacking Russia with nukes—for a period of five years. Thereafter, we would either extend the umbrella for subsequent five-year periods or lift the cease-fire restrictions on Russian development of nuclear weapons, depending on what state Russian affairs are in at the time.”

The mind trained in law school immediately saw the flaws from the Russians' perspective. “What about conventional attacks? The Chinese?”

“We would guarantee reconstitution of Russia's prewar borders,” the Secretary of Defense said, “and would grant them a five-year pledge to defend Russia from Chinese aggression. That should give them time to get back on their feet.”

Lambert remained unconvinced that the Russians would go for it.

“We'll also agree to withdrawal schedules for our troops in Europe,” the President said, “but you can read those later.” They all looked at Lambert as he considered the proposal. “Do you think the Russians will go for it?”