The Eschaton debacle — "Pieces of tennis gear are carefully…"
Pieces of tennis gear are carefully placed within each Combatant’s territories to mirror and map strategic targets. Folded gray-on-red E.T.A. T-shirts are MAMAs—Major Metro Areas. Towels stolen from selected motels on the junior tour stand for airfields, bridges, satellite-linked monitoring facilities, carrier groups, conventional power plants, important rail convergences. […] Toe-worn cast-off corporate-supplied sneakers sit open-mouthed and serenely lethal, strongly suggesting the subs they stand for.
Context
The gear-map taxonomy, still in the exposition: the verbs are literally "mirror and map," and the whole semiotic system runs on sweaty adolescent laundry standing for the apparatus of thermonuclear war. When Pemulis later screams that you can only launch against "the gear that maps what's real," this is the gear he means.