Daisy stared wearily at her face in the washroom mirror, glad that Taylor could not see her now. Her unwashed hair was gathered back into a knot, exposing the full extent of the deterioration of her complexion. She always broke out when she was overtired and under stress. Washing her face had helped her regain her alertness, but it had certainly done nothing for her looks. Hurriedly, she tried to apply a bit of makeup. She had never been very good at it.
Everyone back in the situation room was jubilant. The President, who had campaigned on a platform that barely acknowledged the existence of the military, was like a child who had discovered a wonderful new toy. He had no end of questions now, and the assorted members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff crowded one another out of the way to answer them. Bouquette was in his glory. The intelligence picture had apparently been dead-on, and the initial reports and imagery from the combat zone made it clear that the operation was already a resounding success, even though the U.S. force was still fighting its way across the expanses of Central Asia. There was not a single report of an American combat loss at this point, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs kept returning to the intelligence workstation every few minutes to verify what he had just been told, unable to believe the extent of his good fortune. The chairman had repeatedly shaken Bouquette's hand, congratulating him on the intelligence preparation of the battlefield.
'Now that's the way intel's supposed to work,' the chairman had said, smiling his old country-boy smile.
Bouquette, recently returned from a shower and a meal, his clean shirt a model of the purity of cotton, had drawn Daisy off to the side. Forgetting what a mess she looked, she had imagined that Bouquette was going to suggest some private victory party a bit later on. But he had only said:
'For God's sake, Daze, not a word about this Scrambler business. They're as happy as kids in a candy store. They've completely forgotten about it, and there's no point in causing the Agency any needless embarrassment.'
For all of their trying, the assembled intelligence powers of the United States had been unable to come up with a single additional scrap of information about the Scramblers.
'It could still be important,' Daisy said. 'We still don't know.'
Bouquette raised his voice. Slightly. Careful not to draw unwanted attention to their conversation.
'Not a word. Daze. Regard that as an order.' He shook his head. 'Don't be such an old maid, for God's sake. Everything's coming up roses.'
And he turned his attention back to one of the National Security Council staffers, a female naval officer with a tight little ass squeezed into a tight little uniform. Perhaps, Daisy thought resentfully, the two of them could go sailing together.
The President had decided that he absolutely had to talk to Taylor in the middle of the battle, to congratulate him. Taylor's voice, in turn, made it clear that he definitely had more pressing matters to which to attend, but the President had been oblivious to the soldier's impatience. The thanks of a grateful nation…
Daisy had to leave the room. She hurried down the hallway, past the guards, to the ladies' room. The tears were already burning out of her eyes as she shoved her way in through the door.
They were all such fools, she told herself, inexplicably unable to be happy. She sat down in a stall and wept.
Something terrible within her, a hateful beast lurking inside her heart, insisted that all the celebrating in the situation room was unforgivably premature.
Noburu stared at the image on the oversize central screen, trying hard to maintain an impassive facial expression. All around him, staff officers shouted into receivers, called the latest shred of information across the room, or angrily demanded silence so that they could hear. Noburu had never seen his headquarters in such a state. Neither was he accustomed to the sort of picture that now taunted him from the main monitor.
It was a catastrophe. He was looking at a space relay image of the yards at Karaganda. The devastation was remarkable, and as he watched, secondary explosions continued to startle the eye. He had already reviewed the imagery from Tselinograd and Arkalyk, from the Kokchetav sector and Atbasar. Everywhere, the picture was the same. And no one knew exactly what had happened. There was no enemy to be found.
The first report of the debacle had come by an embarrassingly roundabout path. An enterprising lieutenant at Karaganda, unable to reach higher headquarters by any of the routine means, had gone to a local phone and called his old office in Tokyo with the initial report of an attack. Amazingly, the old-fashioned telephone call had gotten through where the latest communications means had failed, and the next thing Noburu knew he was being awakened by a call from the General Staff, asking him what on earth was going on in his theater of war.
It was a catastrophe, the extent of which was not yet clear to anyone. Especially to the poor Russians. Oh, they had pulled off a surprise all right. They had caught their tormentors sleeping — quite literally. The Russians had made a fight of it after all. But the poor fools had no idea what they had brought upon themselves.
He knew there would be another call from Tokyo. And he knew exactly what the voice on the other end would say.
I did not want this, Noburu told himself. God knows, I did not want this.
If only he could have foreseen it somehow. Prevented all this. He closed his eyes. The dream warrior had known, had tried to warn him. But he had grown too sophisticated to pay attention to such omens.
The spirit had known. But Noburu had not listened. And now it was too late. For everyone.
'Still nothing?'
Takahara was a cruel man. And, like all cruel men, embarrassment before a superior left him with the look of a frightened child.
'Not good enough. Find them, Takahara. No matter what it takes.'
It was time to be cruel now. In the hope that somehow he might still compensate, might prevent the unforgivable horror he knew was coming.
'And I want to talk to the commander of that bombing mission to the Omsk site.'
Takahara flinched.
Noburu turned away. His anger was too great to allow him to look at the other man. It was more than anger. Fury.
Omsk. Why had he failed to trust his instincts? He had known that something was terribly wrong the minute Akiro had pointed out the heat source anomaly in the abandoned warehouses. Why had he waited to hit them?
No one had suspected that the Russians still possessed such a capability to strike back. Japanese intelligence had missed it entirely. And why had the Russians waited so long to employ these new means of destruction? Why hadn't they employed these superweapons — whatever they were — immediately? When it might still have made a difference?
It was too late now. All the Russians had done was to call down a vengeance upon themselves that would be the one thing future historians remembered about this war. The one thing with which his name might be associated in the history books.
It would have been better for the Russians if Japanese intelligence had detected their preparations. The Russian deception effort had been too skillful for their own good.
The shadow warrior had known all along. And now he was laughing.
But there was no need to shout. When he turned, Noburu found that the colonel had never left his side.
