He reached over and pushed a second button on the console.
"Yes."
"Mr. President," came the voice, its accent more pronounced now, "I know you think you can recover this facility with an assault, but I want to assure you that any such action would be a very costly mistake."
"The only mistake that's been made so far was made by you. Going there in the first place." Hansen glanced at the listing of his commitments for the next day. Ted would have to cancel all of them. This wasn't how the presidency was supposed to be. Nobody told him he would be spending days on end negotiating with a criminal threatening mass murder.
"Let me put it like this," the voice went on. "If there is an assault, all I have to do is retire to the lower level of the facility and then detonate one of the nuclear devices I now have armed. It's radio-controlled."
"If you want to commit suicide, then go ahead," Hansen said. What kind of bluff was that? he wondered.
"Let me put your mind at ease," came the voice, as measured and secure as it was foreboding. "My revolutionary colleagues and I will be at the main power coil, which is buried at least three hundred feet below the bedrock here. It is a ready-made bomb shelter. Any invading force, however, would be vaporized, along with all the civilians."
"You'd never escape," Hansen shot back. "What's the point?"
"That remains to be seen. But what you have to ask yourself is whether you are prepared to have a nuclear disaster in the Aegean."
On that point, Hansen admitted to himself, the son of a bitch had a point. The political costs, not to mention the economic costs, would be staggering.