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By Root 1281 0

of them didn't? - had to spend some of their time in close association with peers from the other uniformed services. Rosselli had never been told how hanging around with a field-artilleryman might make him a better submarine driver, but then no one else had evidently wondered about that. It was simply accepted as an article of faith that cross-pollination was good for something, and so the best and brightest officers were taken away from their professional specialties and dropped into things which they knew not the first thing about. Not that they'd ever learn how to do their new jobs, of course, but they might learn just enough to be dangerous, plus losing currency in what they were supposed to do. That was Congress's idea of military reform.

"Coffee, Cap'n?" an Army corporal asked.

"Better make it decaf," Rosey replied. If my disposition gets any worse, I might start hurting people.

Work here was career-enhancing. Rosselli knew that, and he also knew that being here was partly his fault. He'd majored in sub and minored in spook throughout his career. He'd already had a tour at the Navy's intelligence headquarters at Suitland, Maryland, near Andrews Air Force Base. At least this was a better commute - he'd gotten official housing at Boiling Air Force Base, and the trip to the Pentagon was a relatively simple hop across I-295/395 to his reserved parking place, another perk that came with duty in the NMCC, and one worth shedding blood for.

Once duty here had been relatively exciting. He remembered when the Soviets had splashed the Korean Airlines 747 and other incidents, and it must have been wonderfully chaotic during the Iraq war - that is, when the senior watch officer wasn't answering endless calls of 'what's happening?' to anyone who'd managed to get the direct-line number. But now?

Now, as he had just watched on his desk TV, the President was about to defuse the world's biggest remaining diplomatic bomb, and soon Rosselli's work would mostly involve taking calls about collisions at sea, or crashed airplanes, or some dumbass soldier who'd gotten himself run over by a tank. Such things were serious, but not matters of great professional interest. So here he was. His paperwork was finished. That was something Jim Rosselli was good at - he'd learned how to shuffle papers in the Navy, and here he had a superb staff to help him with it - and the rest of the day was mainly involved with sitting and waiting for something to happen. The problem was that Rosselli was a do-er, not a wait-er, and who wanted a disaster to happen anyway?

"Gonna be a quiet day." This was Rosselli's XO, an Air Force F-15 pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Barnes.

"I think you're right, Rocky." Just what I wanted to hear! Rosselli checked his watch. It was a twelve-hour shift, with five hours left to go. "Hell, it's getting to be a pretty quiet world."

"Ain't it the truth." Barnes turned back to the display screen. Well, I got my two MiGs over the Persian Gulf. At least it hasn't been a complete waste of time.

Rosselli stood and decided to walk around. The duty watch officers thought this was to look at what they were doing, to make sure they were doing something. One senior civilian ostentatiously continued doing the Post crossword. It was his 'lunch' break and he preferred eating here to the mostly empty cafeterias. Here he could watch TV. Rosselli next wandered over to the left into the Hot Line room, and he was lucky for a change. A message was announced by the dinging of a little bell. The actual message received looked like random garbage, but the encryption machine changed that into cleartext Russian which a Marine translated:

"So you think you know the real meaning of fear? Yeah, you think you do know, but I doubt it. When you sit in a shelter with bombs falling all over, And the houses around you are burning like torches, I agree that you experience horror and fright. For such moments are dreadful, for as long as they last, But the all-clear sounds - then it's okay - You take a deep breath, the stress has passed