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“Ladies and gentlemen,” came a loud voice in the background, “the President of the United States.”

“David!” Melissa shouted. “It's o-o-on!” A jab of pain shot through her back, and she shifted position again.

“Let's listen now,” the reporter said in hushed tones as Melissa heard David running across the floor upstairs.

President Livingston at the podium donned his reading glasses, pulled several cards from his jacket pocket and glanced down at them before facing the camera. “My fellow Americans. I come to you tonight with the gravest of news. Early yesterday morning, Washington time, elements of the North Korean Army crossed the Demilitarized Zone into South Korea in a massive invasion of that good friend and trusted ally. They attacked without warning, and without provocation. Let me take this opportunity to state, categorically, that we have no quarrel with the people of North Korea, who are enslaved by the brutal policies of their leadership, and that we remain open to discussion with the North Koreans about ending the hostilities and returning to the preinvasion borders. Repeated attempts, however, to contact the North Korean leaders have all failed, and there are currently no further attempts under way to initiate such contact.”

The camera zoomed in for a closer shot, and the President stared right at it. Out of the corner of her eye Melissa caught sight
of David, his chest bare, entering from the darkened hallway carrying his clothes. “The position of this country, and of all the world leaders with whom I have spoken, is clear. The invasion of South Korea will not be tolerated, and North Korean troops must withdraw immediately and unconditionally.”

A man in a dark gray suit appeared next to the podium and distracted the President, breaking the drama of the moment. The President stepped back to read the message handed to him.

Melissa looked up at David. He already appeared different, Melissa thought. Not taller—he was six feet one—not more fit. She looked at his bare chest. He was trim but not skinny as he had been when they met, in good shape despite the toll that years of sitting at a desk practicing law took on a thirty-three-year-old. It was his dark hair, which he had gotten cut short, military-style, over lunch after listening to the morning news.

“What the hell's going on?” David asked from behind the sofa as the press in the room began to buzz with muted conversations at the unprecedented interruption. Melissa arched her neck to peer back at him. He was just back from a run, and his shoulders still glistened with perspiration despite his shower.

The President returned to the podium, his face creased with concern as he cleared his throat. He looked down at his notes, flipped through several cards and then said, simply, “At the appropriate time, I will . . . I will be able to give you more information, but for now I'll turn it over to . . . to General Halcomb, here.”

David walked around the sofa and pulled one foot up to the sofa's arm, his leg covered by the mottled black, brown, and green of the camouflaged pants that Melissa had not seen for years. His eyes glued to the screen, David did not see her watching him as he laced his black boots.

The President left the podium, putting his glasses in his pocket, and followed the man who had interrupted him to the door of the Briefing Room amid a thunderous torrent of questions from the media.

“Mr. President, Mr. President, are U.S. forces engaged in combat right now?” “Mr. President, was it a mistake to withdraw U.S. ground troops before reunification?” “Does the Russians' war with China have anything to do with the North Koreans' invasion?”

As the door closed behind the President, General Halcomb stepped up to the podium and raised his hand for quiet.

“I have no announcements,” the army general said after the room quieted, “other than the following. ‘All leaves of U.S. military personnel are hereby canceled. All members of the 1st Infantry Division (Mech) are to report to Fort Riley, Kansas—immediately.
All members of the 2nd Infantry Division—Fort Ord, California.' ” He looked up from his notebook. “Unless I say otherwise, all orders mean immediately, by fastest available transport.” He looked back down. “ ‘Fourth Infantry Division (Mech)—Fort Carson, Colorado. Seventh Infantry Division (Light)—Fort Lewis, Washington. Twenty-fourth Infantry Division (Mech)—Fort Stewart, Georgia. Thirty-eighth Infantry Division (Army National Guard)—your Army Reserve Centers in Indiana.' ”

The list went on for thirty minutes, but David was gone in ten.

“It's a complete mobilization,” the colonel said as he sat in front of the television screen with headphones on, having long since ceased the verbatim translation of the President's address and the military's call-up that followed.

Marshal Gribachov placed his telephone back into its cradle, and the other marshals of
STAVKA
—the Russian military's Supreme High Command—turned their attention from the television screen to the head of the long table. “Our nuclear control orders have been received. General Razov reports that the weapons locks on the twenty-five ICBMs—nineteen in the first volley and six more in reserve—have been removed. Their status indicates ‘Ready' for ‘Launch at Designated Time.' ” He looked at the men before him. “I have given him final authority to fire.”

“What about the Americans?” the commander of the RVSN, the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces, asked as he looked at the television screen.

“Razov called General Thomas. The Americans have been alerted.”

“Did you see the way they pulled President Livingston away in the middle of his speech?” the commander of the Western Strategic Direction asked. “It makes me nervous. The Chinese watch CNN too, you know.”

“And so what?” the commander of the RVSN challenged. “The President got pulled away by pressing matters related to the Korean War that they are about to enter, if they in fact intend to enter the fight.”

“They are going in,” Marshal Gribachov, commander of the Supreme High Command, said from his seat at the head of the table.

“And the missiles will be fired automatically?” the commander of the Western Strategic Direction asked.

“It's just a matter of time now,” Gribachov said.

“And may God have mercy on our souls,” the old marshal in charge of Naval Shipyards intoned.

There was a knock at the door and an aide entered, closing the heavy door behind him with a loud metallic pop of its latch. “It is General Zorin, sir,” he said to Gribachov. “He has arrived in response to your summons.”

“Oh,” the old marshal said with a sigh, and turned to the gathering with a questioning look. When no one objected, he said, “We are through here. Send him in.”

The marshals had barely finished collecting and covering the papers spread out on the table detailing the supersecret launch plan when the door opened and in walked General Zorin, not alone as would have been more appropriate for the censure that was planned but with his entourage of aides. There were so many of them, as always, that several of the older men exchanged looks. One leaned over and whispered, “Like an American prizefighter.”

Zorin eyed the fat men slumped in their padded chairs around the rosewood table as his aides began to mount charts and maps on the wall behind him.

“I thought it was we who had summoned you, General Zorin,” Marshal Gribachov rasped.

“I have come here to speak to you about the survival of our nation,” Zorin said in a low voice, his eyes slowly panning the long conference table to take in each of the men present in turn. “The time has come to take action.” He was annoyed by the rustling noise of the paper maps behind him, which stole, he thought, some of the drama of the moment.

“To take what action, might I ask?” Gribachov said, settling back into his chair with a twinkle in his eye.

Zorin turned to the area maps as the aides were tacking them onto the corkboards on the conference room wall. Walking up to the largest of the maps, Zorin extracted a silver telescopic pointer from his jacket pocket and pulled it to full extension with a snap. He waited impatiently as an aide put the last tacks in the edge of a map that hung loosely and then stepped clear. Zorin slapped the pointer down sharply onto Poland, onto the blue boxes with unit markings hand drawn on the paper.

He turned to look at the marshals and picked up the pointer, slapping it down again with added force a little below its previous position.

The commander of the Black Sea Fleet cleared his throat and said, “Are these your vacation plans or has Switzerland somehow offended our national pride?” Several of the marshals erupted in laughter, and Zorin looked back at the map and moved the pointer to its intended position in the Slovak Republic, to the other blue unit markers drawn there.

“No, Admiral,” Zorin replied. “But I, and thousands of other patriotic Russians are outraged at this government's reaction, or lack of reaction, to these American deployments!” Zorin saw the amusement drain from the men's faces at his outright insubordination. “They have put troops right on the borders of our country! Two divisions, plus corps-level combat support and four tactical fighter wings! Over sixty thousand troops!”

Old Marshal Gribachov at the head of the table drew a deep breath noisily into his lungs through his nose. “I suppose by ‘our' borders you mean the borders of Ukraine and Byelarus—'Greater Russia,' as you so artfully called it in that interview with the London
Times.”
Gribachov shook his head and leaned forward to the table. “You and we both know what they are doing. The Poles and Slovaks pissed in their pants when we declared martial law and redeployed into Byelarus, which seemed to greatly amuse you at the time. Held a party at the Metropole, if I am not mistaken, which was also reported in the Western press. Your picture was even on the front page of the
Time
magazine issue dedicated to what we had hoped would be a change in power that would not be viewed as a threat to the West, and the article about you in that shaded box was entitled what? ‘The Dark Horses.' I never understood what that meant?” Gribachov said, turning to look at the translator who still sat hunched by the television.

There was a smattering of laughter around the table at the derision evident in the voice of Gribachov, who knew exactly what the expression meant, and then Gribachov continued. “We went to great lengths to reassure the West that we posed no threat, but you give quotes to
Red Star
magazine that make you sound like the second coming of Genghis Khan! And
you
view their action as provocative? The Americans want nothing to do with Eastern Europe, that much is clear from their absurdly public debates on policy, but the administration was trapped.”

“That is just what they want you to think!” Zorin shouted, breaking the silence with a jolt for effect. “Don't you see what's happening?” He slammed his hand down onto the conference table. Zorin abandoned the numbers he had memorized and the computer projections displayed on the charts and graphs behind him and pleaded from his heart, recounting from memory the litany of indignities
to the old men. “Our borders have been reduced to what they were
three hundred years
ago! We have all sat here,” he continued, waving his arm to take in the marshals, his seniors, “listening to you disparage the pathetically weak bureaucrats in Parliament and at the Kremlin who did nothing as the country spiraled into disorder, cutting deals with the provinces just to hold Russia itself together.”

“And so we have done something!” the commander of the Western Strategic Direction said. “We took power, kicked the bastards out onto the street.”

“And then we ourselves do nothing!” Zorin exclaimed, feeling the emotions flood in and his eyes almost fill with tears. He was exhausted from weeks of sleepless nights in preparation for this big moment, and he had to fight for control of himself. “Do you not all remember the night we spent in this very room listening to reports of the rapes and murders of Russians—of families of our
own
men, even officers—as our troops and fellow countrymen fled from Central Asia during the withdrawals? And when our men fired in self-defense, what did our government's ‘friends' in the West do? Sanctions!” Zorin shouted. “The West gives our people free food and clothing and saps their will to work on the one hand, and then they
crush
our efforts at competition with sanctions on the other! Meanwhile their businessmen swarm over the carcass like hyenas to buy everything we have for a
fraction
of what it's worth! And the dollars they pay for the gold and diamonds and oil and everything else they take away from Russia barely cover the
interest
they charge on the
money
they have loaned us to buy
their goods!
Everything goes right back into
their
pockets! What we have is
theirs,
and what
they
have is theirs! Don't you see what they're
doing?”

His aides, men his age and younger risen to the rank of major or colonel, listened with rapt attention, but the old men sat impassively. None of what he was saying registered on the members of
STAVKA
, but on he went, red-faced and determined to have his say at last.

“And the
Kazakhs!
When the Japanese launches began at Baykonyr, at the Cosmodrome that
we
built there, do they begin their profit-sharing payments as agreed?
No!
We suddenly owe them an ‘environmental clean-up charge'!” Zorin saw the commander in chief of the Southwestern Strategic Direction roll his eyes to his counterpart from the Air Defense Forces, amused by Zorin's tirade. “Our
soul,”
Zorin shouted, “our very soul is being auctioned off to foreigners.
Foreigners!
Our national treasures—the Tsarist antiquities in the Hermitage and the Kremlin's Oruzheynaya Palata, the French Impressionist artwork in the Pushkinskiy Museum . . . ”