Why are you doing this? she asked herself; but she knew that she could not accept more sympathy without crying, and she was not ready to cry before these men. At least she had diverted them. Dalehouse was frowning.

“We don’t have any nuclear weapons,” he objected.

“Softheaded person!” she scoffed. “Your mistress has what she wants to have. I should not be astonished if she had a fleet of submarines or a division of tanks. She wears weapons as she wears that cheap perfume. The smell of them is always around her.”

“No,” he said doggedly, peering up at her, “you’re wrong about the nuclear weapons. She couldn’t conceal that from us. And she’s not my mistress.”

“Do not flatter yourself that I care. She may have her sexual excesses with whomever she likes, and so may you.”

Kappelyushnikov coughed. “I think,” he said, “dance has suddenly become more attractive.”

As he stood up, Ana put her hand on his arm. “I am driving you away. Please forgive me.”

“No, no, Anyushka. Are difficult times for all, nothing to forgive.” He patted her hand, then grinned and kissed it. “As to myself,” he said, “I see beautiful blond colonel roaming about alone, and perhaps she wishes to dance or otherwise relate to some new person, such as I. Also do not care for cheap perfume worn by big cockroach. You do not yourself desire to dance? Or otherwise relate? No. Then stay with friend Danny.”

They watched him walk steadily toward Marge Menninger, strolling past her checkpoints. They heard her laugh as Gappy spoke to her; then he shrugged and moved on toward the dance floor.

The Krinpit, in his random stagger around the beach, was coming closer. It was true that the stench of his exudations was strong. So was the sighing, droning sound of his presence. Ana listened, then said gloomily, “This one is muttering about his love now,” she said. “It was killed somehow, I cannot tell how. I think Ahmed had something to do with it, and it is for that that it is determined to kill human beings. But it had become Ahmed’s ally! Dan, is not that lunacy? It is as though killing has become an end in itself. It no longer matters who is killed or for what possible gain the killing is done. Only the killing itself matters.”

Dalehouse stood up in his shallow rifle pit, looking up the hill toward the dancers. “She’s coming this way,” he said. “Listen, before she gets here. About her being my mistress—”

“Please, Danny. I spoke without thinking and because I am, yes, upset. It is not a time to worry about personal matters.”

Clearly he was not satisfied and would have pursued the subject, but Margie was now too close. She paused to light a cigarette, studying the Krinpit and its guard, now a model of military deportment, his recoilless at port arms as the colonel approached. Then she came smiling over to Danny and Nan. “Getting it on, are you?” she said amiably. “When was the last time you checked your earphones, Danny?”

Guiltily Dalehouse clapped the phone to one ear. He had been neglecting the buried microphone probes, which were supposed to warn of burrowers digging toward him under the ground. There was no sound. “Sorry, Margie,” he said.

She shook her head. “When you’re on duty, that’s colonel. And when I say frog, you hop. Now that that’s understood,” she said, smiling sunnily, “would either of you folks like a hit before we talk some business?”

“I am not in the habit of using narcotics,” Ana said.

“Pity. Danny?” She watched while Dalehouse filled his lungs, and as she took the stick back from him, she said, “I want you to draft your gasbag friend. One hundred and—” She glanced at her wristwatch. “One hundred and eight hours from now, give or take a little, we’re going to hit the Greasy camp, and he’s going to be our air arm.”

Dalehouse coughed and spluttered. “He — he can’t—”

“Take your time, Danny,” she encouraged. “While you’re getting your breath, just listen for a moment. Storm’s over. Looks like we’ve got maybe five or six good days. I’m taking fifteen front-line effectives, plus you, Danny. We’ll mop up that camp without breathing hard. Only I don’t want to take a plane, and I don’t want you or Gappy floating around up there where they can see you, and that leaves Charlie.”

“Charlie can’t fight!”

“Well,” she said reasonably, “come to that, I don’t figure you for your real Geronimo trained killer, either. But I don’t expect it of you. You communicate. Charlie observes. The Greasies won’t pay any attention to one more fartbag hanging around—”

“Bullshit they won’t! They’ve been shooting balloonists down all along.”

“Danny,” she said, “I’m not asking your advice. I’m giving you an order.” She dragged on the joint, down to the last centimeter, and then carefully rubbed it out and pocketed it before exhaling. “You see,” she said, “the Greasies are going to come to the same conclusions I did, only it’ll take them a little longer. One of us has to run things. The only way to do that is to knock the other out. All Charlie has to do is hang in there with his radio and keep us posted if they send up a plane or put some people out in the woods. I’ll bring the company up overland. But we’re naked without air cover. We need to know when to get out of sight. That’s easy enough for him, right?”

“Well, sure. But — shit, Margie. He’s almost the last survivor. It’s a lot to ask—”

“But I’m not asking, Danny. You keep making that same mistake. I’m ordering. If he doesn’t, he’ll make a nice flame.” She scratched under her belt, regarding him amiably. “So after the dance I break the news to the camp, and tomorrow this time we’re on our way.”

“To atom-bomb the Fuel Bloc,” said Ana bitterly.

Marge Menninger’s face froze. After a moment she said, “I guess I’ll let that pass, Dimitrova. I didn’t specifically order you to keep your mouth shut. But I won’t let it pass again. What you hear when you’re translating is classified. ”

“Holy Christ,” Dalehouse said. “You really have a nuclear bomb?”

“Bet your ass, Danny. You’ve got a piece of it right there in your ground mikes.”

“Where? You mean the plutonium power-packs? That’s no good, Margie — colonel, I mean. There’s not enough of them. Even if there were, you couldn’t flange them together to make a bomb.”

“Wrong and wrong, Danny. Takes eighteen hundred grams and a bit to fission. I have a little over six thousand grams, all tidied away in the stores marked ‘fuel replacements.’ All this was planned a long time ago, and they’ll fit together because some pretty high-powered weapons people designed them to do that before the first ship took off. Oh, it’s not one of your hundred-megaton jobs. Maybe not even a kiloton, because I don’t have containment to keep the parts together very long. But I don’t want a big one. I don’t want to wipe out the Greasy camps, I want to own them. I want to take out their ammunition and their food stores, and I know just the place to put baby for that. Then they can beg.”

She looked serene and innocent as she said it, and Dalehouse responded with shocked disbelief. “That’s — that’s unprovoked aggression! A stab in the back!”

“Wrong, Dalehouse. That’s preemption. The Greasies don’t have a choice, either. They just haven’t figured it out yet.”

“Bullshit! It’s what the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor all over again!”

She opened her eyes wide. “Sure, why not? There was nothing wrong with Pearl Harbor, except they fucked it up. If they’d gone on to take out the carrier fleet and follow up with a landing, history would be a lot different. You’d be saying ‘Pearl Harbor’ the way you say ‘Normandy’ now, only you’d be saying it in Japanese.”

She seemed quite pleased with herself, but then she hesitated. She sought a dry place on the ground and sat down before adding, “But I will admit to you two dear old friends from Bulgaria that right now I’m scared and tired and not what you’d call real happy with the way things are going. I — what’s the matter with that thing?”