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craters. But, hell, Fairchild probably was spray-targeted with smaller but more warheads to get the Buffs before they got off the ground. So that wasn't the point. Radnor was career. He knew why they were here. To deter. As long as they were here, as long as the hardened silos were spread throughout the Great Plains and the submarines moving silently beneath the oceans, nothing would happen. That was the point of all this. If that wasn't the point, what was?
    No, it was simply that her job had been damned dangerous in Montana. People were wacky over there. They went hunting with a thirty-aught-six in one hand and a six-pack in the other. Get those folks out there in the boondocks, where the silos were, and they took half-stewed potshots at the Minuteman security patrols. Just for kicks. It was nice having her here, near him, guarding B-52' s , where all she had to worry about was the screwball drills and a few ban-the-bomb freaks trying to climb the fence.
    Radnor took the last bite of his penny doughnut, wiped at the barbell sweat glistening off the freckles on his forehead, draped his flight suit back over his arm, and headed for the showers.
     
     
    Icarus was mistaken. The President was not drunk. He had fallen asleep in his chair in the Lincoln Sitting Room on the second floor, watching a rerun of Mission Impossible. His wife was in Connecticut overnight after christening a new ship, and it was uncomfortably lonely in the White House. The ethereal image danced foggily in front of him now, Greg Morris setting an elaborate bug in the ornate woodwork of an old East European capital. The sounds meshed uneasily—cocked pistol, this tape will self-destruct, Icarus.
    Icarus.
    Greek mythology was not the President's strong point. His mind tripped woozily to the vision of a demigod flying too close to the true god, the sun. Icarus. Then he remembered. He came awake rapidly. Damn, he wished these guys wouldn't call him in the middle of the night. He had aides for this stuff. Still, he was embarrassed by his lapse and his mind raced in search of a smart line to recapture control of the conversation. Then, recalling his first meeting with the general, he discarded that thought and said alertly: “Sorry, general, you caught me half asleep. What seems to be the problem?”
    The President thought he heard a sigh at the other end.
    “Is your EWO there, Mr. President?”
    “I'm sure he is outside the door. In all this time, I've only been able to ditch him once.”
    The President chuckled. The general did not.
    “You need him immediately, sir.”
    “General, what is the problem?”
    “We are at Fast Pace, sir. I am now moving us to Round House. It is in your hands.”
    “My hands, general? What is the problem?”
    “Mr. President, we are in the secondary stages of a major attack, probably a Counterforce variation. SIOP is analyzing it now. Our defenses show a swarm attack by submarines, almost certainly Soviet, and a random attack by land-based ICBM's, certainly Soviet. We need your authority.”
    The phone conversation paused again, the President staring dully into the television screen as Martin Landau parked a false-bottomed getaway van over a Budapest sewer manhole.
    “Defenses,” the President said finally. “The computers again, huh?”
    The President thought he heard another sigh, which he took as a sign of weakness. Getting no other response, he went on, adding a touch of anger to his voice.
    “General, may I be candid with you? This is a shitty way to get a new set of computers.”
    “Sir!”
    “How many times, since I became President, have those damned machines screwed up? Several hundred? How many times have they screwed up so badly we have gone to attack conferences? Five? Six?”
    The general was getting truly worried. And angry.
    “And how many times have I picked up this telephone, Mr. President? We have no time for this, sir. As you know from the briefing”—he paused slightly on that—”we have no