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President had interrupted, grinning, “we'll call you.”
    Then he launched into what he called his hemorrhoids theory of history, mixing metaphors rather badly. All the best-laid plans of mice and men, he informed the general, could go awry because of one enlarged blood vessel in the wrong leader's rectum. Very irritating, that, enough to cause anyone to misread Sarajevo and stumble into World War I. The Secretary of Defense had blanched. The general had stumbled to a stop. “Don't worry, general,” the President, attempting to make up clearly lost ground, assured him. “I'll keep Preparation H in every desk drawer.”
    The general waited an intolerable length of time, twenty seconds on the long row of Command Balcony clocks that had crept past midnight in Omaha, one A.M . in Washington.
    “Icarus,” the general repeated.
    “Icarus,” the President said.
    “Mr. President, is your EWO there?”
    “EWO.”
    Jee-zuz. The general paused in frustration. Then he added with a bite: “Your Emergency War Orders officer, Mr. President.” He almost added: The man with the black briefcase who sits outside your bedroom while you're fucking, Mr. President.
     
     
    Radnor returned from his daily thirty-minute session with the Alert Facility's barbells, slipping into the cafeteria two minutes after the scheduled ten-o'clock closing. A young Vietnamese, the only remaining attendant, shot him a briefly hostile glance—a look that said Radnor once again was keeping him in this crazy place longer than necessary—and continued rubbing down the stainless-steel counters. Radnor, caught up in a decision between pie or a doughnut, ignored the look. He chose the doughnut, bounced a single penny onto the counter, and retreated in his skivvies to a dimly lit government-issue lunch table. He draped his flight suit, from which he never could be separated, over a plastic chair.
    The price was right, the radar operator thought, mentally thanking the Air Force for this little fringe benefit for a 168-hour work week without overtime.
    The wall menu read: “Doughnut 1 cent, pie 5 cents, Blue-Plate Special (Chicken Cacciatore today) 35 cents.”
    Radnor, a freckle-faced twenty-five-year-old newlywed who usually chose apple pie, liked the Air Force. He had many reasons for that, not the least of which was his wife, Laura. If it hadn't been for the Air Force, they would not have met. He took a lot of joshing about being married to an Air Force cop. The base newspaper, the Geiger Alert, loved it—romance on the flight line and all that. The public press sensationalized it—”A Doomsday Romance,” “Finding Love by the Megaton,” and so forth. But he didn't mind, figuring he had found the most special woman in the world.
    The Air Force had been very good about it, transferring her from the Minuteman missile base at Great Falls where they met and placing them both on duty here. Just a few years earlier, the Air Force would have turned purple and transferred one of them to Guam. But the times were changing. He knew that the other guys his age, middle to late twenties, were studying and using this as a chance to get advanced degrees and get out. But not Radnor. This was a way of life, a good way of life, important. And it was even better since he had met his wife, the cop.
    Radnor made a mental note to ask Tyler if the incident with his kid had been planned. They picked some screwball ways to test flight-line security. But with a kid? Radnor was glad Laura had not gone on duty till tonight.
    At times he really worried about her. That was another reason he felt a debt to the Air Force. She was a lot safer here than she had been in Montana guarding those isolated missile silos. That wasn't just a rationalization, either, of which he knew they all did their share. Sure, the missile silos and their underground command capsules were targeted with the biggest crater-makers the Russians had. That was the only way to take them out—dig them out in the