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Page 260
''Yes, Mr. President. Thank you.'' The astonishment in the woman's voice and on her face was clear.
She sees me as an idiot, he thought. An idiot and a weakling. As I probably am. It is time to find out if there is a better man, a stronger man, able to cope with the danger ahead, lurking deep inside this soft body. Red-eyed with grief and loss of sleep, weighed down with fatigue and worry, Aleksandr Cherny walked across the long room to the elevator. Dovi, he thought, how I wish you were here.
In the Kremlin, the Hot Line Room was deep below ground, in a structure that had been hardened in an attempt to protect it from a thermonuclear attack on the city. Of course, the newest weapons would most probably destroy it, just as an attack on the American Command Center at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado would demolish that useful but also semi-obsolete facility. The shelter lay directly under the Spassky Tower, thirty meters down, and one entered through two sets of vanadium-steel blast doors and past three guard posts. The security arrangements for the direct line between Moscow and Washington had not changed appreciably since the days of Leonid Brezhnev. The original teletype machines had been long ago relegated to backup duties. The current state-of-the-art audiovisual links now terminated in large, high-resolution television monitors with stereo pickups and players.
Cameras and television screens occupied the end wall of a cramped and cheerless room a dozen meters in length, filled with mainframe computers of French manufacture, obtained by a barter agreementSoviet oil and gas for French technology.
Aleksandr Cherny sat down at the console and signaled his readiness.
In Washington, Cole Caidin was suffering from severe shock, compounded by throbbing pain from a bad toothache. His handsome face was marred by a massive frown and a swollen jaw. The documents that Charlotte Conroy and Vin-

 
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