Strike Zone

IV Duty

Rubeo laid the printouts flat on the table, pulling the two pages close together so that the lines he had highlighted were next to each other.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” he told Cortend. “But to anyone with a modicum of knowledge of the systems involved, it’s obvious what’s being done. There’s a repeater system that takes bits of captured information and rebroadcasts it. You can see here, here, and here. That’s why the signal seems to be ours. It is ours. This”—he took the two sheets from the folder, laying them side by side—“shows the intercepts and our own flight communications from the other day. Incontrovertible. That word is in your vocabulary, is it not?”

Cortend glared at him. Rubeo realized that he had made exactly zero progress with the old witch.

Then again, he hadn’t come here to convince her. He’d come for the satisfaction of showing her to her face that she was an idiot. And he had accomplished that.

“Now that I know what’s going on, we can easily strip out the signals that are being beamed back, and then determine the actual signals. I would explain how we do it,” he said, gathering up the pages, “but you don’t have the clearance to hear it. Let alone the IQ to understand it.”

He had nearly reached the door when Cortend spoke.

“Just a minute, Doctor,” she said.

Rubeo couldn’t resist one last look at her constipated face writhing in the torment of ignorance unmasked. He turned around. Cortend pointed at her two assistants, dismissing them with flicks of her finger. The lieutenants scurried away.

“You think I enjoy questioning the integrity of your people?” she said.

“In a word, yes.”

Cortend said nothing for a moment. “My father’s name was Harold Bernkie. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“Hardly,” said Rubeo.

For the first time since she had come to the base, Cortend smiled. “It shouldn’t. In the 1950s, he was a very promising scientist. And then his name was linked with the Communist Party. He was blacklisted and couldn’t get work. He’s my father, so obviously I think he was a genius, but of course that really isn’t for me to say. I only know that he eventually became an electrician. A very good one, in my opinion, though I suppose that too is neither here nor there. This hasn’t been a witch hunt. I’ve been extremely fair.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

Cortend shook her head. “No. I believe that you will find that I have been thorough, that I have been a stickler for details, and I have pursued any and all leads. Those were and remain my orders. As far as your Miss Gleason goes, I never charged her with a crime or recommended any disciplinary action against her.”

“That’s because your investigation wasn’t complete,” said Rubeo. “Don’t banter definitions around.”

“You are a scientist. You’re precise in your work. I am precise in mine,” said Cortend. “No charges were filed against your coworker. I was here on an informal basis precisely to spare you and your people the ordeal of a full-blown inquiry. Believe me, it would have been ten times worse.”

“I doubt that is possible.”

Cortend took a long, labored breath. “I’ve been informed that there are explanations for what appeared to be omissions concerning the conferences. Given those explanations, I see no need to make any recommendation concerning her to the commander.”

Rubeo wasn’t sure exactly what to say. He remained angry — extremely angry. This idiot had cost him one of the top scientists in the world, who even now refused to get out of bed, claiming to be sick.

“The data that you have gathered would appear to exonerate Dreamland completely,” said Cortend. “Coupled with the information about the aircraft’s physical characteristics, it would appear very convincing.”

“You’re not going to imply that we created it,” said Rubeo.

“I’m sure you’re clever enough to do so,” said Cortend. “But no, Doctor, I don’t believe that for a moment. And more importantly, there is no evidence suggesting that you did. There is no evidence suggesting that anyone at Dreamland is anything less than a dedicated and patriotic American. Good day.”

That was it? She was giving up?

She was giving up.

Truth and reason had won?

Truth and reason had won. The Inquisition was over.

Rubeo, unsure exactly what to say, turned and left the room.

“Are you awake?”

Danny Freah floated for a moment, caught in dream limbo between sleep and waking. He saw his wife, he saw the hard-assed Colonel Cortend, he saw two brown eyes staring down at him asking whether he was awake.

“Yeah,” he said, pushing up in the seat.

“The pilot is asking everyone to put their seat belts on,” said the stewardess.

“Oh. Thanks.” Danny smiled and pushed his head forward, as if trying to swim away from the back of the seat. Bits and pieces of the dream fluttered away, just out of reach of his conscious mind.

Jemma and Colonel Cortend — God, what a combination.

“It’s beautiful from the air, isn’t it?” said the woman next to him. Her name was Alice something-or-other, and she was a programmer for a computer firm who traveled a lot between LA and Asia.

No, she worked for a company that manufactured rubber boots. The programmer thing came from his dream.

“Yeah,” said Danny, leaning forward to see past her. Their arms touched and he felt a shock go through his body; he jerked back, as if the touch had been something else.

“Temperature’s only eighty degrees, Fahrenheit,” said Alice. “Humidity is supposed to be pretty low. I don’t remember the percentage.”

“That’s good.”

Danny avoided her eyes, inexplicably feeling guilty about sitting next to her, as if he were somehow being disloyal to his wife.

He’d spoken only briefly to the woman before falling asleep — the civilian flight had proven to be among the most comfortable he’d ever taken — and their conversation had hardly been intimate: he’d given his basic cover story, claiming that he was working for a banking company as a security consultant, and then spoke of New York City as if he lived there.

Which he did, since his wife had their apartment there.

Alice was a middle-aged businesswoman, nice enough, but not really attractive to Danny. He was impressed that even though she was white, her voice didn’t have the forced tone white strangers sometimes took with him, the “I’m really not a jerk and please let me prove it by being nice to you” tone that the best-intentioned stranger sometimes betrayed. But no way was he having sexual fantasies about her, not even if she had been ten years younger and maybe twenty-five pounds lighter.

So why was he feeling guilty about Jemma?

Because he’d changed his mind about leaving the Air Force to run for Congress?

He had changed his mind, hadn’t he? Even though he hadn’t really thought about it.

The plane rocked slightly as it settled into its final approach. Danny felt his neighbor’s arm jostle against his and once more thought of his wife. He was still thinking of her a few minutes later when they parked at the terminal and passengers began disembarking. He waited for the others nearby to clear out, then rose and pulled open the overhead compartment where his suit jacket and carry-on were. He took out his seatmate’s as well.

“Thanks. Don’t forget, if you need a guide, give me a call,” said Alice.

“Right,” said Danny. He gestured toward his shirt pocket, remembering that he had put her card there hours ago. She gave him a smile, then bumped her way toward the front of the plane with her heavy carry-on.

Danny’s civilian sport coat was a little tight at the shoulders, and he felt the squeeze as he waited in the terminal to complete the arrival processing. He eyed the line behind him as he approached the clerk, professional paranoia suddenly kicking in. By the time he made it through the passport check his heart had started to beat double-time, and he sensed he was being shadowed. He turned left in the large hallway, then saw the row of limo drivers holding signs up for arriving passengers.

And there was Liu, holding up his placard as if he were a driver.

“Mr. Freah?” asked Liu as Danny stood in front of him.

The sergeant was of Chinese extraction, but even Danny could tell that he looked different from the other drivers. He wore the right clothes, his short hair and smile seemed to fit, but there was something American about the way he filled the space — his shoulders rolled as he moved, as if he were a linebacker waiting for a blitz.

“This way,” said the sergeant, starting to the left.

“Should have insisted he take your bag,” said someone behind him.

It was Stoner.

“Hey,” said Danny.

“If you guys are going to play spy, you got to work on the routine,” said Stoner, moving ahead briskly.

Stoner had an overnight bag under his arm, as if he were an arriving traveler. In fact, Liu and Stoner had come up from Brunei the night before on a leased airliner, bringing along some of Dreamland’s high-tech gear with them. They had landed at a military base, which allowed them to move their equipment in without much notice. Still, as a security precaution Liu had brought along only a few essential items, including a short-range communications unit that could upload surveillance information to Dreamland. Danny had more gear and men en route to Brunei in case things got more interesting.

The muggy outside air felt as if they’d stepped into a shower room, even though it was balmy by local standards. He followed as Liu and Stoner turned left, continuing past both the taxis and the rentals. A small blue Toyota darted through the lot and headed toward them as Liu stepped off the curb; Danny grabbed for his sergeant.

It was just their driver pulling up. Stoner smirked and got into the front seat; Danny and Liu took the back.

“Jack is from the American-Asian Business Coalition,” Stoner told them. “That’s where he learned to drive.”

The driver, who looked no more than fourteen, turned and grinned. He seemed to be Chinese, though obviously in the employ of the CIA. Since America did not officially recognize Taiwan, there was no embassy; interests were handled at the American Institute. Danny gathered that the American-Asian Business Coalition was a “trade” organization that was one of several fronts used by the CIA in Taiwan.

“We have a few places to check out,” Stoner said. “I’d like to get started right away.”

“Fine with me,” said Danny.

“Satellite transmitter is in the trunk,” said Liu. “We ran a diagnostic on the way over. Sat phone connects without a problem.”

“Good,” said Danny. The phone and transmitter tied into the Dreamland system normally used by the Smart Helmets and Dreamland aircraft to communicate. The transmitter took information from a variety of sensors and sent it back to Dream Command for real-time analysis.

“Colonel Bastian is working on getting a Megafortress up here as part of the ASEAN exercises,” added Liu. “They want to keep the cover story intact, so he sent us ahead while he worked on it.”

“That’s fine,” said Danny. The captain smiled to himself, thinking there was little need for a Megafortress, though it was just like the colonel to line one up. No self-respecting zippersuit could stand to see an operation under way without air support.

Danny reached into the bag for the viewer he’d brought from Dreamland. Shaped like a large pair of opera glasses, the device could present different “slices” of heat at a depth up to roughly one hundred meters. The information from these views would be analyzed by specialists back at Dream Command, who could use them to draw a diagram of a building’s interior and what was going on inside. But the device’s sensor plane had to be kept cool for it to work properly; he slid it into a bag that looked like a collapsible lunch bag and twisted a plastic container at the bottom that released liquid nitrogen into the cooling cells.

Danny also had a Geiger counter and radiation analyzer, which measured alpha, beta, and gamma radiation and could identify fifty-five isotopes. He also had a number of self-activated bugs, video spy devices, and motion detectors.

“First target is near Sungshan, the domestic airport not far from here,” said Stoner. “The others are in the south on the coast near Kaohisiung. We’ll drive over to the site near the airport, look around. Then we’ll arrange for a helicopter at the airport. All the easy spots have been looked at already by my associates, and I don’t know how close we’re going to get to the ones that are left on our list, so this may all take a while.”

With every second that passed waiting for the elevator in the lobby of his grandfather’s building, Chen Lo Fann felt the weight against his chest grow. He could not avoid his solemn duty to tell his grandfather that he had failed, even though the disappointment his grandfather would feel would surely hurt the old man as gravely as any injury he had ever felt.

Surely, his grandfather already knew that he had failed. The communists had not attacked the Americans or the ASEAN fleet, despite their rhetoric. Nor had they called off the summit.

The criminals were cowards at heart. That was why they picked on lesser nations instead of facing truly worthy opponents. Chen Lee no doubt knew this.

But that did not remove his grandson’s duty to inform him.

Chen Lo Fann had rehearsed what to say for hours, thinking of it the whole way back to Taiwan aboard the helicopter, as if the right phrase might save him. But finally he’d conceded to himself that the words themselves were insignificant.

Professor Ai had taken the helicopter back with him, and offered to come along to talk to Chen Lee, perhaps thinking he could soften the blow. But Chen Lo Fann had politely declined. There were other things the professor must see to in Kaohisiung; facing the old man was Fann’s duty.

The elevator opened. Chen Lo Fann stepped in.

He remembered jumping up to tap the button as a child. The memory pushed down against his shoulders as the car slowly made its way upward.

The secretaries stared at him as he got off. Chen Lo Fann lowered his gaze toward the carpet, walking the familiar steps to his grandfather’s office suite. The two security guards stepped aside as he approached, as if they didn’t want to be polluted with his failure.

It wasn’t his failure, it was the communists’. And most especially the treacherous president’s, their supposed leader. A coward, a quisling, a traitor.

Chen Lee’s secretary nodded. He could proceed.

Chen Lo Fann went to the door to his grandfather’s office, his hand hesitating on the knob. He opened it with a burst of resolve; he would face his grandfather like a man.

Chen Lee sat at his desk, his back to the door, staring out the window. Chen Lo Fann stepped forward, waiting for the old man to turn around. He waited for nearly five minutes, until the clock struck the quarter hour.

“My plan has failed, Grandfather,” he said, no longer able to bear the weight on his chest. “The mongrels will not make war and the president will go ahead with his meeting.”

The old man said nothing.

Chen thought of what to suggest. Assassination had been debated; as desperate as it was, perhaps it was the best option now. The only option.

But there would be other traitors. The people to strike were the communists, the usurpers. Chen had suggested bombing the capital with the UAV, but they did not possess a strong enough weapon to guarantee the death of all the thieves.

“Grandfather?” he said, when the old man failed to respond. “Grandfather?”

As unbearable as the weight had been before, now it increased ten times. Chen flew across the room, turning the chair roughly.

His grandfather’s slender body slid from the chair into his arms. His pale skin was cold; the old man’s heart had stopped more than an hour before.

Chen Lo Fann trembled as he put the old man back in his chair. There was a note on the desk, the figures drawn in Chen Lee’s shaky hand.

“The weapons are in place,” said the note.

Chen stared at the ideograms. He was not sure what weapons his grandfather was talking about, or even where they might be. Silently, he folded the paper and placed it back in his pocket. And then he went to find out.

All his life, Starship had been on top of the wave. He’d ridden it to the State Class A Football Championship in junior year as all-league quarterback; the next year he’d taken the state trophy in wrestling. The Academy — more success in football, of course, where his exploits against Notre Dame were still the talk of the place. Pilot training, F-15 squadron. The assignment to Dreamland was supposed to be another notch in the belt.

It was. But it wasn’t going precisely as he had planned.

For one thing, he hadn’t planned on joining the Flighthawk program — he’d been shooting for one of the manned fighter programs but discovered the only open pilot slot was in the Megafortress, and with all due respect to the monster craft, no amount of Dreamland gadgets could turn it into an exciting ride. He’d managed to finesse a slot with the Flighthawks and figured he’d be in a good position to transition eventually — though eventually might be far down the road.

But what Starship hadn’t counted on was the pressure. Because even though he was good — better than good — he’d felt unbelievable stress ever since the start of the deployment. He wasn’t sure why — was it because he was so far from the plane he was flying? Was it the fact that Kick was looking over his shoulder? Was he intimidated by Zen, a pilot so tough he could lose the use of his legs and still come back for more?

Or was it fear?

He slid another ten-dollar bill on the bar of the club.

Eating at the palace last night with Mack Smith had been a revelation. He’d thought the job proposal was complete BS, but the sultan turned out to be serious. He wanted to take Brunei into the twenty-first century — even beyond. He wanted frontline fighters and Megafortresses. Mack Smith could build an empire here.

And it looked like he was going to take the job.

If he did, Starship would be in line to help. Major Smith had said so. More than likely, much of the work at first would be staff BS and PR, but he would have the pull to fly whenever he wanted.

Those little trainer jobs they flew at first, but eventually, real planes.

A week ago, he’d have laughed out loud about the whole idea. But now he wasn’t sure.

Starship took his drink and slid around in his seat to watch the girl dancing on the stage. The girl started to slide her skirt down.

Someone shook Starship from behind.

“What’s the story?” he said angrily, turning.

“So this is where you’re hiding,” said Kick. “I can see why.”

“Hey, roomie. Pull up a stool. How’d you find me?”

“Mack Smith suggested I look here.”

“Yeah, good ol’ Major Smith. Have a drink.”

“Thanks but no thanks. Zen wants us ASAP.”

“What for? It’s our day off. Besides, we’re still grounded, right? Because of the Chinese baloney?”

“Not anymore. Colonel Bastian arranged for Pennsylvania to fly up to Taiwan as part of the ASEAN exercises. You’re supposed to leave right away.”

“Damn,” said Starship.

Kick stepped back. “I’ll tell him I couldn’t find you.”

“Screw that,” said Starship, sliding off the barstool.

“I’m serious, man. You can’t fly.”

“Better than you.”

Kick looked at him. “Not at this moment.”

“I can fly better than you in my sleep, Kick boy.”

The first factory Stoner took them to lay about a mile and a half from Sungshan airport, in a crowded district of warehouses and industrial buildings. The roads were so thick with traffic that it took hours to get to the facility itself; when they finally did they found their way blocked by uniformed employees. The men were polite — the driver pretended to be asking for directions and they answered helpfully — but there was no way past them.

Danny eyed the fence, which was topped with barbed wire; there were also video cameras. Besides the two men at the gate he saw another patrolling down the way.

He took out the IR device and slowly began scanning the building. A small wire connected to the side; it was an earphone that buzzed as soon as the reading was complete and logged. The data were ferried via a small antenna to the transmitter unit in the trunk, though at the moment they weren’t broadcasting to Dreamland because of the small possibility that it might be detected.

Every time the machine buzzed in his ear, he pushed the small trigger button on the top between the two barrels; the IR sensors adjusted themselves and took another “bite” at the building. As it moved further inside, the buzzes started to be punctuated by clicks; it was having trouble seeing. Danny tried holding it at different angles and jostling it; finally he decided they had gotten everything they could.

“So?” asked Stoner as they drove away.

“We’ll see what the techies say. They can construct a three-D model when they look it over,” said Danny.

“That thing like a radar?” asked Stoner.

“No, it uses heat signatures so it can’t be detected. We call in IR or infrared, but the techies say it has a somewhat wider band. The sensors are here.” Danny pointed to the top rim of the glasses. “They have to be kept fairly cool to work right. But they have better range than the viewers on our Smart Helmets, and since there’s no radio waves, there’s nothing to be detected.”

“I’d still like to get inside.”

“Fine by me,” said Danny.

“They make seats for aircraft,” said Stoner. “I have somebody working on getting us in as buyers. But it’s going to take a few days.”

“Is it big enough?” asked Liu.

“Could be,” said Danny. “We’ll see what the tech people say.”

“There’s a rail line that runs from the back over to the airport,” said Stoner. “Chun Sue owns some hangars there. That’s one of the companies Chen Lee owns. As far as I know, only one is occupied. I figure we hit the empties first.”

They uploaded the data on the way over. The Dreamland techies told Danny that he had only managed to see about eighty feet inside the building; a stock of insulation and fabric for the chairs blocked a deeper view. Everything they had been able to see was consistent with a seat factory — or something trying to look like one.

They didn’t need the viewer in the airport; all the hangars were open and unguarded. Stoner had prepared a story — they were looking to lease a facility — but no one seemed to even notice they were there.

Danny took a small scoop and wad of plastic bags from the attaché case he’d brought, sampling some of the dust so the chemicals could be analyzed. He also took out the Geiger counter and took some readings; all were within background norms.

“Just a hangar,” said Stoner, walking to sit on an old crate in the corner.

“What’s the crate say?” Danny asked.

“It’s the name of a fish company. Heavenly Fish, along those lines.”

“Why would it be here?” Danny asked. He bent down to examine it.

“Shipped cargo in and out. Lost one of the crates,” said Stoner.

“The crate wasn’t used to carry fish. It’s too clean.”

Stoner shrugged.

Danny took a picture with his digital camera, then took out his knife and took a sample of the wood where it had been worn down. He took his rad meter out again, but found nothing special. Finally, he planted a pair of the video camera bugs near the doorway.

The cams were about the size and shape of three-quarter-inch bolts, the kind that might be used to secure a part on a child’s bicycle. There were two types, one with a wide-angle lens and the other more narrowly focused but able to work in near darkness. Each sent its signal to a transmitter the size of a nine-volt battery, which could be hidden anywhere with fifty feet of the cams. This transmitter in turn linked with a large base station — about the size of a cement block though nowhere near as heavy — that uploaded images either on command or in a random burst pattern that made it difficult to detect. The cameras and transmitters themselves used a similar random pattern with a very weak signal that would generally escape detection.

“You sure those things work?” asked Stoner as they got back in the car.

Danny turned to Liu, who gave him a thumbs-up. The sergeant was using his sat phone to talk to Dream Command, where the techies had just finished diagnostics on the gear, confirming there was a signal.

“Now I am,” said the captain.

The hangar that housed the airplane was open, and the four Americans managed to walk right in. The building was about twice the size of the others, and the Boeing 767-200ER it housed filled only about a third of the massive space. The wings of the large airliner were covered with large sheets of rolled cardboard, and the place smelled of fresh paint.

A pair of Chun Sue employees came over and told them that the company airplane was undergoing refurbishment. The men were very polite, and seemed flattered by the praise Danny threw at the airplane, which in fact was a beautiful piece of machinery. The 767 typically cruised between 35,000 and 40,000 feet; this model, optimized for the long-distance flights common in Asia, could clock close to six thousand miles before having to hit the gas pumps.

The experts back in Dreamland noted one other interesting fact about the airplane as they briefed Danny through the headset connecting to his sat phone — it was a bit large for the airport, which was generally used by smaller jets and turboprops on local hops.

Danny took several photos with his small camera for them, and planted a pair of video cams near the entrance.

“Those suckers cost a fortune,” he told Stoner as they left.

“The company is pretty rich,” said Stoner. “You notice anything funny about the paint?”

“Besides the fact that the plane doesn’t need painting?”

“The colors are used by the People’s Xia Airlines.”

“They own them too?”

“That’s a Mainland airline,” said Stoner. “They left off the symbols on the tail, but otherwise it’s a ringer.”

Zen took one look at Starship and rolled his eyes.

“Where the hell did you find alcohol in Brunei?”

“Excuse me, sir?” said Starship.

If Zen had had any doubts about Starship’s sobriety, the accent he put on “sir” would have dispelled them.

“Take the rest of the day off,” he told the lieutenant. “You were due rest anyway. I shouldn’t have called you back.”

“I can fly, Zen. Major — I can fly.”

“Go take a shower, Starship. That’s an order.”

Starship’s face turned red. He spun on his heel and retreated from the hangar.

“You and me, Kick, let’s go,” said Zen, backing his wheelchair away so he could go and get his flight suit and other gear. “Pennsylvania is taking off in an hour. We’re way behind schedule.”

They launched the Flighthawk as soon as they were over water. Zen took the first leg of the flight, checking on some of the merchant ships that lay in their path. He wanted Kick to take the last half of the flight so he’d have the experience of landing at Tainan Air Base, their destination on Taiwan.

“See the ship there, Kick?” he asked his nugget assistant, who was monitoring the flight from the second station.

“Yes, sir.”

“Zero the cursor in, query it, get the registration data.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Relax, Kick, I’m not going to bite your head off. You don’t have to say ‘sir’ every ten seconds.”

“Yes, sir.”

Zen laughed.

Both Kick and Starship were excellent pilots and Flighthawk operators, but both men tended to be nervous around him. Was it because he was in charge of the program and therefore had a huge amount to say over their futures?

Or was it the wheelchair?

When he first came from his accident, he would have automatically assumed the latter. Lately, though, he’d become more discerning, or at least willing to let the complicated attitudes people had toward him ride.

Most days, anyway.

The wheelchair could get in the way. It had with Fentress — but that was Zen’s fault. He’d been jealous of the kid, or rather jealous of the fact that the kid could walk away from a session and he couldn’t. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.

“Got the data,” said Kick.

“So? What do you think?” Zen asked.

The information was already on Zen’s screen — the ship was a Malaysian freighter.

“Looks pretty straightforward. Carrying tea. My thinking is we go over low and slow, find out. No big deal.”

“No big deal.” Zen nudged the Flighthawk toward the ship. The computer already had a dotted line plotted for the recon run; he authorized the flight and gave control to C³.

“You know how I got crippled?” he said to Kick.

“I heard some sort of accident.”

“Mack Smith and I were having a mock dogfight with the Flighthawks. I got too close to one of them. Sawed me in half. I was below five hundred feet. A lot below, actually. I don’t even remember bailing out.”

Kick was silent. Finally, he said, “Sucks.”

“Yeah, it does. But you move on. You have to.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hey, you know, just call me Zen. You take the stick after this run, all right? I’m going to roll back on the deck there and grab myself a soda.”

“I can get it.”

Pity? Or just a young officer trying to please his superior.

Zen opted to believe it was the latter. He’d give the kid the benefit of the doubt until proven wrong. Same with Starship.

“That’s okay, Kick. I want you to get as much practice in the air as possible. Okay?”

“Great,” said the other pilot. “I appreciate it.”

The island of Taiwan measures only 396 by 144 kilometers. While Kaohisiung was on the opposite end of the country from Taipei where Danny and the rest of the team were, the flight south in a rented Sikorsky took less than an hour.

The first site they had to check was a large office building near the center of the city off Kusshan-1 Road. Danny took out his fancy opera glasses and slowly scanned the interior. Liu, once again acting as the liaison with the Dreamland team, declared the basement nearly empty; the only machinery on the floors above related either to the cooling system or to the elevators. Twenty-something stories filled with office workers and nothing more lethal than a letter opener.

Even so, Stoner and Danny went inside, going up to the fifteenth floor where a Taiwan magazine had its offices. They played tourist, Stoner claiming to work for a San Francisco publication Danny had never heard of but that somehow impressed the Taiwanese. After a few minutes it was clear to Danny that there was nothing of much interest here, and he practiced smiling and nodding. Stoner passed out a whole parcel of business cards; Danny realized from the looks he was getting that not having any was a serious faux pas.

“What’s with the cards?” Danny asked as they took the elevator down.

“Considered polite to exchange them,” said the CIA agent. “I have dozens for every occasion.”

He showed a few to Danny. They declared he was a magazine editor, electronics equipment buyer, engineer, and American trade representative. The backs of the cards had the information in Chinese characters.

“You sure you’re not schizophrenic?” said Danny, handing the cards back.

“Sometimes I wonder.” Stoner pocketed the cards. “Computer system is easy to access. They’re networked with an Ethernet. We can get in if we want.”

“You think it’s worth it?”

“At the moment, no. But now we can come back and get in easily. Once the system is bugged, the NSA whizzes can get into the printing plant.”

“Where’s that?”

“Our next stop.”

Neither the printing plant nor the warehouse they looked at seemed very promising; the printing plant was in fact used for printing, and the warehouse held vegetables. Stoner pushed on, aware that the last site on his list was the most promising — it had a pier on the harbor front and sprawled over nearly a hundred acres.

It was also well guarded by fences, men, and dogs.

“This would be a perfect place,” said Danny, looking at the site through binoculars from a dock diagonally across the bay. “What the hell do they do there?”

“Recycle everything and anything,” said Stoner. “Electronics mostly. That shed at the far left had car batteries. They strip away the outer casings, reuse the lead and the acid as well. Those drums there are filled with sulfuric acid.”

“Lovely.”

“Oh yeah. Real environmental operation.”

Stoner pointed to two buildings at the right side of the facility, fenced off from the others by a double row of razor wire.

“That’s where I think the operation might be, if it’s here. There’s a track up from the pier.”

“Pier looks shaky,” said Danny.

“Appearances can be deceiving. Can you get a scan?”

“We’re too far for the viewer. We have to get a lot closer.”

“Not a problem. We can get on that dock at night, go up to the fence. There’s no guard on the water side.”

“Not now, maybe,” said Danny. “What about at night?”

“We’ll have to find out,” said Stoner. “But if they’re not going to watch during the day, they probably won’t at night.”

“Man, I can smell the acid from here,” said Danny.

“Yeah. We stay away from the damn battery shed if we can.”

“I got to scan it.”

“Your call.” Stoner put down his glasses. “Hungry?”

“Starving.”

“Let’s go get some shrimp.”

“I thought we were getting something to eat,” said Liu when they stopped in front of the large warehouse building in the city’s southwestern district.

“We are,” said Stoner, getting out of the rental.

“This a restaurant?”

“In a way.”

Danny, Liu, and the driver followed Stoner up a set of cement steps to the side of the large metal building, passing inside to a small corridor lit by several rows of fluorescent lights. Tekno-pop boomed from beyond the plasterboard wall, the bass so loud the cement floor shook.

A woman sat on a stool in front of a large opening at the end of the hallway; at first Danny thought they’d been taken into a carnival. Stoner said a few words, first in Mandarin Chinese and then in English, before handing over some of the local money; in return, the woman passed out several fishing poles, empty baskets, and kids’ pails filled with what looked like small brown slugs.

“Bait,” said Stoner, handing a pail to each man. “Liver. I think. She had trouble with my Mandarin and I couldn’t quite get her Taiwanese.”

“What is this?” asked Liu.

“We have to fish for our dinner,” said Stoner.

The driver was smirking. Danny followed him inside, where a large pool of foul-smelling water was surrounded by pink lawn chairs, about a third of them filled by Taiwanese “fishermen.” The water was filled with six-inch-long shrimp; the crustaceans were easy to hook, though pulling them out required a bit of wrist action. There were several ways to do this, which the nearby fishermen were eager to explain; Danny found his small basket quickly filling up with shrimp.

“On to the barbie,” said Stoner when each of the party had caught about a dozen or so. The warehouse was studded with charcoal barbecues; Stoner showed them how to skewer the creatures, snap off their claws with a knife, and then roast them alive, or at least nearly alive.

They washed dinner down with cans of beer, bought from one of the vendors.

“Lovely,” said Danny, eyeing his roasted dinner.

“It’s really tasty,” said Liu.

“So’s burnt toast.”

Stoner laughed, and got a few more ready for the grill.

Kick had Hawk One running five miles ahead of Penn and was just checking back with Major Alou about a contact when Pennsylvania was hailed by a flight of AIDC Ching-Kuos of the Chung-Kuo Kung Chuan — Republic of China Air Force, aka the Taiwan air force — patrolling the waters south of the island.

The AIDC Ching-Kuo came in two “flavors”—a single-seat tactical fighter, and a two-seat combat trainer. Developed with the help of Northrop and other U.S. manufacturers, the Ching-Kuo was a two-engine aircraft that might be favorably compared to a Northrop F-20 or advanced F-5E, able to top Mach 1.7 and with a combat radius of one thousand kilometers.

Major Alou altered the flight to the Megafortress, and Zen told Kick to let them know where he was as well. No sense surprising the allies, whose flight path would take them into visual range as they approached.

Both Taiwanese pilots spoke English very well, though Kick struggled somewhat to make out the words through the accent and vagaries of radio transmission. The two CKKC aircraft were flying southward toward the Megafortress at roughly thirty thousand feet, about five thousand below Penn ’s altitude.

Kick plotted out an intercept in his head, mocking up how he would handle the two planes if they were Mainland Chinese. His altitude and tiny size gave him a decent advantage; he saw himself tucking his wing, slashing into a front-quarter attack on the lead plane before he even knew Kick was there, then lashing back around to take out the trailer. A “normal” aircraft would find the maneuver difficult at best, but the small Flighthawk would have no trouble spinning back around for the second attack.

“Quite a plane!” exclaimed the CKKC leader, a Captain Hu, as they drew within visual distance.

“Thank you,” answered Kick.

The CKKC pilot began peppering him with questions about the aircraft’s performance. It soon became clear that he didn’t realize it was a robot.

“What should I tell him?” he asked Zen.

“Tell him you’re a UFO, recently enlisted in the U.S. Air Force,” joked Zen.

“Um—”

“I’m just pulling your leg,” said Zen. He clicked into the circuit and spoke to the CKKC pilot, giving some generic data that they were cleared to share. The existence of the U/MFs was no longer a secret, since they had seen action over the past year and even been written up in the aviation and general media.

“Wants to race you,” laughed Zen.

“Race?”

“He’d probably win. The AIDC Ching-Kuo is a good aircraft, very capable. No match for a Flighthawk, of course, but we won’t tell him that.” Zen’s tone changed. “All right, we’re about ten minutes from the coast. Best check with Major Alou about the landing details. I’m going to see if I can get ahold of Captain Freah and see how he’s doing.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kick, wincing as the word ‘sir’ left his mouth.

Zen double-checked the plotted course as they headed toward the airfield. In general, he was pleased with Kick’s flying. The lieutenant was still a few notches behind Starship, but he did have potential, and undoubtedly his skill would grow as he became more comfortable with the aircraft.

“Zen, got a second?” asked Alou over the interphone.

“Always for you, Merce,” he laughed.

“Danny’s got a little job lined up for tonight, couple of hours from once it’s dark. Wondering if we can provide a little overhead reconnaissance.”

“That’s why we’re here,” said Zen.

“Okay. We’ll go ahead and land and get refueled, find some grub. Think they do takeout here?”

Danny could swim pretty well, but the mile from their small motorboat to the pier was nonetheless a trial. The water stunk of oil and sewage. It felt like acid, boring its way past his wetsuit, through his skin, trying to disintegrate his bones. The wind whipped at the water and Danny lost his sense of direction; he knew he was moving forward, but it seemed as if his target kept moving away. By the time he finally drew within fifty yards of the pier, his shoulders were burning with the effort.

Odd sounds rushed into his ears, the whine of machinery and boats and other mechanical sounds jumbling with the lap of water against the docks. When he got near the end of the dock, he heard a sharp whistle and turned to find Stoner treading water a few feet away.

“How are you doing?” Stoner asked.

“I’m okay.”

“There’s a spot to get up on the shore over there, on the other side of the pier. A little dock they use for boats.”

“I thought we were going up here,” said Danny. “That was the plan.”

“There’s a light at the end of that wharf there. I saw it coming in. I’m afraid we’d cast shadows.”

Danny grunted, and followed as Stoner slid under the pier. He brushed his leg unexpectedly against the side of one of the pilings, and even though he knew it was just part of the dock, he instantly thought of sharks.

Stoner had already climbed out of the water by the time Danny reached the incline, which was lined with rotting pieces of wood. He hoisted himself up and crawled on the planks, pushing up from the harbor.

“Don’t get a splinter.”

“No shit.” Danny caught his breath a moment, then pulled up the waterproof sack he’d towed with him. He exchanged his flippers for a pair of sneakers, then took the viewer from its cooled bag. Stoner, meanwhile, was scouting on shore, viewing the facility from a pile of old ropes and tires.

Danny settled in next to him and trained the viewer on the general area, getting a lay-of-the-land picture for the specialists. Stoner pulled out a sat phone to talk to Dreamland, confirming that the device was working.

“Target buildings are that way,” he said when Danny finished. “We go along that fence line right to the building. See the railroad track? We can walk right up it.”

“Don’t think the midnight express is running tonight?”

“Hope not,” said Stoner.

Danny pulled out his sat phone and hooked in the headset so he could talk to Zen.

“Whip One to Hawk Eyes,” said Danny. “Zen, how are we looking?”

“Twenty-twenty,” replied the pilot. “Just making another pass now. We have you and the spook down near the wharf. Six guards, up near the road. Uh, looks like there’s a couple in target building one, still just the one in building two.”

“Thanks for the assist. We’re going to get closer and use the viewer.”

“Have fun. Hey, Liu told me you went shrimp fishing,” added Zen.

“An experience, believe me.”

“Beats McDonald’s.”

“Don’t count on it.”

Danny and Stoner climbed over an eight-foot fence to get to the railroad tracks, then walked along them to the razor wire fence separating the two buildings they wanted to inspect from the rest of the yard. Rather than climbing the fence as they had planned, Stoner led the way to a large yard on the other side of the tracks dominated by piles of discarded computers and electronics gear. The piles gave them a good vantage on the first building and a decent though slightly obstructed look at the second.

“About a million dollars’ worth of computer parts here,” said Stoner as Danny climbed the largest pile. The old PCs — some dated to the first IBM models — provided a surprisingly solid base for him to stand on.

“Just think of how much they cost new,” said Danny, pulling up the viewer and getting to work.

Zen did an instrument check on the Flighthawk as he looped south of the target area, confirming that the aircraft was in the green and in good shape. Zen had flown the U/MF so long now that he had an almost extrasensory feel for it; still, as he told his young charge sitting next to him, you couldn’t take anything for granted.

“There were twelve people near the gate on that last pass,” said Kick as Zen finished his check. “That’s six more than before.”

“Uh-huh,” said Zen. “Maybe we just missed them the last time.”

“Might be. But it looks to me like they came with two more cars.”

“Probably just a shift change,” said Zen. “But let’s take another look when we swing back.”

Danny steadied the viewer, completing the last of the series. Stoner had gone down toward the buildings to do more reconnoitering; Danny packed the gear away and hooked back into the Dreamland circuit with his com device. Zen warned him a security patrol was approaching the area where they were.

“They’re on the other side of the building,” said Zen. “They have a pickup.”

“Thanks,” said Danny. He stared into the shadows at his left, waiting for Stoner to reappear. He missed his Smart Helmet — not only did it have an integrated night viewer with magnification, but he could have popped up a screen showing where his team member was. He planted a pair of his video “bugs” in the ref-use pile, then added the transmitter to the collection of discarded CPUs.

Damn thing looked right at home.

The Dreamland techies confirmed that the gear was on-line.

“So what’s inside the buildings?”

“We’re still analyzing it,” said Charlie Tombs, who was back at Dreamland handling the data flow. “Go on and get out of there.”

No shit, thought Danny, but before he could reply, bright light filled the overhead sky. A siren sounded and someone back by the building began shouting.

“Back to the water! Go!” yelled Stoner, running toward him.

“What the hell?” asked Danny.

“Go! Go!” said Stoner, and as if to punctuate his command an automatic weapon began firing from back by the warehouses.

Zen had already started to bank away from the target area when he saw the explosion. He tucked back eastward and almost immediately got a warning from the computer that he was flying at the edge of their control range.

“Penn, I need you closer to our target area,” he said calmly.

“Hawk leader, we’re trying. We have a request from an air traffic controller and—”

“I need you closer,” insisted Zen. “Team may be under fire.”

“Understood,” said Alou.

Zen felt the big plane sway beneath him, lurching closer to the shoreline.

“The guards are coming around toward the dock area,” said Kick, watching from the other station.

“Let’s distract them,” said Zen. He pushed the Flighthawk downward, diving toward the buildings from about eight thousand feet.

“How?” asked Kick.

“Like this,” said Zen, starting to pickle the air-defense flares.

As the light show sparkled directly over the road at the front of the complex, Danny put his head down and ran for all he was worth back toward the dock. Stoner was waiting for him at the eight-foot fence, an M203 grenade launcher in his hand.

“You can’t shoot that,” Danny yelled at him. “We’re under orders.”

“It’s smoke,” said the CIA agent. “Fog up their night gear.”

He pumped a few rounds into the area back by the computer piles, in effect laying out a curtain they could escape behind.

Danny felt his heart thump as they went over the fence and ran to the dock area. He stopped, pulling his flippers out of his pack, but then jumped into the water with his shoes, figuring it would be safer to change in the water. In his haste he fumbled with his gear and nearly lost one of the flippers; a mouthful of putrid water reminded him he wasn’t a SEAL.

“Let’s go,” hissed Stoner.

“I am,” said Danny, stroking out after him. He could hear voices on the shore, curses, he thought; something loud ripped behind him.

A machine gun?

“Our boat’s coming in!” yelled Stoner.

The warning came just in time — Danny pushed himself back as the hull of the speedboat passed within a few yards. Water churned everywhere; there were more shouts; Danny felt himself being lifted out of the water and then flying away, hustled from an exploding typhoon.

“What the hell happened?” Sergeant Liu asked.

“One of the guards must have seen Captain Freah up on the pile,” said Stoner. “He fired a flare.”

“They were shooting at you,” said Liu.

“Guess we found the right place, huh?” asked Danny, finally pushing himself upright. “Anybody got a towel?”

Whilezen’s flares had served their purpose in momentarily distracting the guards from Danny and Stoner, they had also attracted the attention of the local authorities. The CKKC as well as the local police and harbor authorities were rushing to investigate; Zen and Major Alou discussed whether they should admit they’d launched the flares as a mistake during their flight. But it would be difficult to explain how the small incendiaries had managed to travel nearly twenty miles from where the Megafortress — clearly visible on radar — was flying, and for the time being at least it seemed better to say nothing.

By the time a CKKC controller came onto their frequency to ask for help searching for “possible communist intruders,” Zen realized he’d blundered. They played through, joining a search off the coast.

“Want me to take the stick for a while?” asked Kick.

“Let me hold on to it,” said Zen. Then he reconsidered — the kid needed the time a heck of a lot more than he did, and it wasn’t like they were really going to encounter anyone.

“Yeah, good idea, Kick,” he told him, and they initiated the swap.

The radar capabilities of Pennsylvania made it virtually impossible for an airplane to fly anywhere within two hundred miles of it without the EB-52 catching a whiff, but the CKKC pilots didn’t know that. They assumed that the Megafortress was equipped similarly to regular B-52s, which of course had very good radar, but weren’t outfitted as a mini-AWACS. Zen felt a bit embarrassed as the pilots swept southward; he realized now how seemingly innocent misunderstandings during the Cold War had nearly led to hostilities several times.

“Hawk leader, we have a contact on the surface that’s not supposed to be there,” said Penn ’s copilot, Kevin McNamara. “We’re wondering if you can check it out.”

“Roger that,” said Zen. The information was fed in from the Megafortress, indicating two small boats — or possibly submarines — thirty miles directly to the west. “Kick — hop to it.”

“On it,” said the pilot.

While it was pitch black outside, the Flighthawk visor gave Kick a view as detailed as he would have if it were high noon. Synthesized from its radar as well as IR and optical feeds, the screen showed the sky as a light gray and the water a deep blue; if he wanted, Kick could choose any of a dozen preset schemes or even customize it with a 64,000-color palette.

A bit too much choice as far as he was concerned, but what the hell.

Kick pushed forward in his seat. It was difficult to square the movements of the Megafortress with the path of the plane he was controlling. Most of Kick’s airtime had been in the cockpit of A-10As. While the Hog — the popular, though unofficial nickname had been shortened from Warthog — wasn’t particularly fast, it was highly maneuverable, and a Hog driver got used to taking g’s real fast. But this was different, bizarre in a way — he pushed his stick left and slightly forward, and his stomach began to climb nearly straight up.

“I have a shadow on the surface,” he told McNamara, the Megafortress copilot. “Feeding you visual.”

The shadow lengthened into the thick thumb of a submarine. Upstairs on the flight deck, the copilot had taken the image and presented it to the onboard computers, which searched for identifying marks and then compared these to an onboard databank. In this case, the mast configuration, along with a small fin toward the bow of the craft and a rounded nub at the conning tower, told the computer the submarine was a Chinese diesel boat, a member of the Romeo class originally designed by the Russians in the late 1950s. Though competent, the sixty-man submarines were hardly technological marvels.

“Good work,” Zen told Kick. “Look for the other further west.”

“On it.”

“I have a patrol vessel approaching from the east,” said the copilot. “I’m handing off the information.”

Kick changed his view to IR, thinking he could pick up the thermal trail of the submarine. But the change in the screen disoriented him.

“Use preset two,” prompted Zen. “The IR takes the lower left window next to the sitrep and you still have your main view on top. Watch your altitude.”

“Right,” said Kick. He nudged upward and asked the computer for the proper screen configuration. As it came in he got a distance warning. He backed off the throttle slider so abruptly he nearly flamed the engines. Disoriented, he pulled up out of his search pattern, afraid he was going to stall the U/MF right into the waves.

“Go back again,” said Zen.

“Okay,” managed Kick.

“It’s all right. You did all right. Best thing to do sometimes is just take a deep breath. The system throws a lot of information at you and you have to learn to process it.”

“I’m all right,” insisted Kick. He immediately regretted the sharp tone in his voice, but there was no way to take it back; instead, he concentrated on getting himself back into position to resume the search.

Zen folded his arms in front of him, watching the Flighthawk screens with one eye and Kick with the other. The kid had just passed through a crisis, and how he handled himself now was key. If he got himself back on the horse — put the Flighthawk back into the search pattern, went after the other sub, didn’t fuck up worse — there’d be hope for him.

This was exactly the sort of experience that could be the making of him. You had to fail, Zen thought; you had to taste the bitterness of screwing up in your mouth, and then get beyond it. And it was infinitely better to fail in little ways, as Kick just had, than to wait for one big blowout failure to end all failures as Zen had.

There was no way to teach that, no way to simulate it in exercises. Kick — and Starship, for that matter — had to learn it for themselves. His job was to somehow get them to the point where they could.

“Team is recovered and heading back to the hotel,” reported Major Alou. “We can head back whenever you want.”

“Soon as Kick gets over that other contact, we can head back for the barn,” said Zen.

“Got it at two miles. It’s diving,” said the Flighthawk pilot.

The submarine was similar to the other one they had seen. Data recorded, Alou set a course for home.

“Keep your eye out for an unidentified aircraft firing flares over the city,” added the pilot.

“If we see it, you’ll be the first to know,” said Zen.

Rubeo stood back from the computer screen, rubbing his temple fiercely. They had taken all the inputs from Danny’s viewer and compiled them into a model, supplementing them with information from the Flight-hawk flyover and earlier satellite data.

“Problem, Doc?” asked Natalie Catsman.

“It’s not an airplane.”

Major Catsman looked at the three-dimensional mockup of Shed Building Two, which included legends showing items in the facility. The area next to the wall looked like a machine shop, with several stations set up that looked to contain presses and drills. Further back were large banks of some sort of computer equipment, though the Dreamland system could not render it with much precision.

“Recycling?” asked Catsman.

“You wouldn’t need computer-controlled machinery for recycling,” said Rubeo. “This material here. It’s a portable wall. It’s shielding.”

“Shielding what?”

“Yes,” said Rubeo. “This piece here came from a centrifuge. Or could have. They’re making bombs here. I believe they’re nuclear weapons.”

Catsman, still new to Dreamland and the high-tech gear at its disposal, frowned as if she were overwhelmed.

“We need more data,” said Rubeo. “But look at this.”

He pulled up another screen filled with a row of numbers.

“The lottery?” Catsman laughed.

“Readings from Captain Freah’s Geiger counter. They are above normal background levels. Material was taken through here, and there was an accidental spill. Small, but it contained minute traces of plutonium.”

“We have to tell Colonel Bastian about this right away,” said Catsman.

“Absolutely,” said the scientist.

Monitoring the operation from the Dream Command trailer, Dog watched the fuss over the flares at the site and the subsequent patrols. Taiwan and Mainland China might be on the verge of historic discussions, but tensions were still very high — the wrong match at the wrong time, and they could just as well be exchanging gunfire as greetings. And war wouldn’t be confined to the two Chinas. Units all across Asia had hiked their alert status.

Gradually, things ratcheted back down. As Dog waited for Penn to return to base, the screen flashed with an urgent, coded communication from Dream Command marked eyes only. He punched in his password, and leaned to the eyepiece so the computer could confirm his identity by checking his irises. Natalie Catsman’s face flashed on the screen.

“Colonel, the site that Captain Freah inspected today, we don’t believe there is a UAV there, or any aircraft. It’s only remotely possible that it’s ever been there,” said Catsman. “But—”

She stopped, turning around to someone in the situation room.

“But what?” said Dog.

“Shed Two appears to be a fabrication factory for bombs. Possibly nuclear,” said Catsman.

“Nuclear?”

“Dr. Rubeo has someone with him who can explain.”

Rubeo came on the screen, along with a physicist from one of Dreamland’s weapons labs. Together, they gave the colonel a ten-minute executive summary of the types of machinery needed to construct a high-yield nuclear device, typically known as a neutron bomb.

“We’re not sure of this, absolutely not sure yet,” emphasized the physicist, Dylan Lyon. “Until we have direct access to the devices, there’s no way of knowing for sure. However, combined with the plutonium reading—”

“Plutonium reading?” asked Dog.

Rubeo cut in, explaining what Danny’s detector had picked up.

“Guys, bottom-line this for me,” said Dog, cutting the scientist off as he began talking about sieverts and rad counts.

“Bottom line, you have an apparently private company with the technology and the wherewithal to make a nuclear device,” said Catsman. “And the company owner doesn’t particularly like the Communist Chinese, or the current president of his own country.”

Jed Barclay had just started to sift through the latest CIA briefing paper on South Asia when the secure phone in his small NSC cubicle buzzed.

“Jed, this is Colonel Bastian. We have to update the President.”

Jed tried to work out where the nuclear material had come from as the colonel ran down the evidence the Dreamland team had passed along. Iran, North Korea, and Russia were the probable candidates, though none was a perfect fit.

Korea, probably. They were desperate for money and would sell to anyone.

Assuming there was a weapon. He cradled the phone as he spoke, quickly booting his personal computer into the restricted access intelligence network known as SpyNet and searching the Asian pages for anything new. The update was dominated by the arrival of the vice president in Beijing ahead of the summit.

“There hasn’t been a threat,” said Jed. “There’d be blackmail of some sort. If someone had a weapon and didn’t want rapprochement, say, they’d threaten to use it.”

“I think you’re way too optimistic, Jed. I think these people might just go and blow people up. Forget about blackmail. They’d worry about the weapon being taken.”

“Good point. I’m going to have to go to the boss right away on this. The whole NSC,” said Jed. “I need everything you have.”

“They’re expecting your call at Dreamland. Major Catsman has a team assembled to brief you. Jed — I think if they do have a weapon, the summit will be an inviting target.”

“I was just thinking that. It starts tomorrow.”

“Exactly my point.”

Rubeo slammed his hand down on the counter area, barely missing the computer keyboard but upsetting the nearby cup, which shattered on the floor, sending a spray of hot coffee onto his pants.

“Figures,” muttered the scientist.

“Problems, Ray?”

Rubeo turned and found Major Catsman with her arms folded in the doorway.

“Major.”

“You all right, Ray?”

“Peachy.”

Catsman smirked, then walked over to the pot of coffee on the nearby counter and helped herself. She made a face with her first sip.

“Wow,” she said.

“Yes,” muttered Rubeo, who had made the coffee himself. He might have the equivalent of several Ph.D.’s, but none was in home economics.

“Your people just finished briefing Mr. Barclay. Dylan was very good. Thank you.”

“Yes,” muttered Rubeo.

“They may want you to talk to the President himself.”

“Fine.”

“Problems?”

Rubeo liked Catsman; she was intelligent, quick on her feet, and unlike some of the career military people, pretty easygoing about working with civilian scientists. He had worked with her several years before on the Megafortresses prior to Major Cheshire’s arrival. Still, Rubeo wasn’t in the habit of sharing personnel concerns with bluesuits, with the exception of Colonel Bastian.

“There are always problems,” he muttered.

“New theories on the ghost clone? Or the weapon?”

“I have plenty of theories,” he said. “Putting them into action is the problem. I could use about twenty more people.”

“Maybe Jennifer Gleason could help.”

“Hmph,” he said.

“Hmph?” said Catsman.

“Ms. Gleason is thinking about leaving us,” said Rubeo, almost in spite of himself.

“But she was cleared by Danny, and Colonel Cortend.”

“Yes, well, she’s rethinking her future.”

“Don’t we need her here?”

Catsman might be a good officer to work for and with, but there was still a block there; she couldn’t quite understand that dealing with geniuses wasn’t like flipping on a computer. And Jennifer Gleason was a real genius.

Ironically, until this security blowup, she’d been among the least temperamental geniuses he knew.

Excluding himself, of course.

“Of course we need her,” said Rubeo.

“Have you asked her to come back to duty?”

Rubeo realized that he hadn’tasked her to come back. He’d just assumed that she would when she was ready.

“Want me to talk to her?” asked Catsman.

“No thank you, Major,” snapped Rubeo, jumping up from the console.

He was actually surprised when Jennifer answered his loud rap on the door.

“It’s me, Jennifer. I’d like to talk to you.”

“Door isn’t locked.”

Rubeo put his hand to the knob hesitantly and turned it. Jennifer, dressed in a gray T-shirt and jeans, sat on the couch across from the entrance to her small apartment.

She looked different.

“What have you done to your hair?” asked Rubeo.

She touched the ragged edge above her right ear, smiling faintly. The jagged edges made it clear she had cut it herself.

“Latest look,” she said.

“You look like Joan of Arc,” he said.

“Maybe I’ll have visions soon.”

“Hmph.” Rubeo felt his arms hanging awkwardly by his sides. He shoved them into his pockets. “I’ve been working on an idea for tracking the clone and possibly taking it over. But there’s so many systems involved, I’m having trouble pulling it together.”

“Good,” she said, making no move to get off the couch.

“I was wondering about your help.”

A quizzical look crossed her face, as if she didn’t understand the words.

“I’ll help,” she said, still making no move to get off the couch.

“Are you still going to leave?”

“I haven’t made up my mind,” she said.

Coming from anyone else, Rubeo would have interpreted the statement as hinting at blackmail. But Jennifer wasn’t like that.

“Teaching — I don’t think you should waste your time,” he said.

Jennifer smiled. “Someone taught me.”

“Well, yes. But in your case… ”

“Let’s go get some breakfast. Blue room?” she said, referring to one of the all-ranks messes.

“Fine,” said Rubeo, following her out.

Jennifer picked up the long strip of bacon and eased it into her mouth, savoring the salty tang. She hadn’t eaten for days. She hadn’t eaten bacon in months if not years; her breakfast ordinarily consisted of yogurt and an occasional oatmeal.

“Good?” said Rubeo, sitting across from her at the table.

“Delicious. Go on.”

Rubeo wanted to use the electronic signal gathering capabilities of Raven to intercept the control frequencies used by the unmanned plane and take it over.Raven carried gear ordinarily used to jam radars, and they could link the Flighthawk control units into it to supply the proper code.

Couldn’t they?

“Probably. Of course, if we interfere and don’t get the encryption right, the UAV will probably go into native mode,” observed Jennifer. The Flighthawks were programmed to act that way if interfered with. “The first thing you have to do is straighten out the hooks between C³ and the Raven systems — that’s a real tangle. I mean, you may not even be able to do it physically.”

“I have Morris working on it.”

“Morris?”

“Well, you weren’t available,” said Rubeo. “The team from the Signal Group is helping him.”

Jennifer picked up another piece of bacon and stabbed it into one of her eggs. She scooped up the yolk with the bacon like a spoon and pushed it into her mouth.

“Have you tried checking the data against the NOSS system?” Jennifer asked. She was referring to a network of quasi-stationary Sigint satellites used to gather radio signals around the globe. The abbreviation stood for Naval Ocean Surveillance System.

“Why?”

“You could use that to track down whatever they’re using as a base station. Then you’d know where they were operating from and you could physically take them out of the picture. All that data has to be available. You can backtrack from that. You really haven’t done that yet?”

Rubeo frowned. He hadn’t thought of it, but being Ray, he wasn’t going to admit it.

Jennifer stood, then reached down and grabbed the bacon off her plate. “Let’s get to work, Ray. What have you been doing for the past few days anyway?”

Stoner decided to go back to Taipei; he wanted to talk to his people back at Langley as well as see what else the local agents had dug up on Chen Lee and his companies. Though dead tired, Danny insisted on going along, and so he was awake when Dylan Lyon called him from Dreamland to tell him what his survey with the IR viewer had found. The physicist began grilling him about the site. Danny really couldn’t supply much more information than what the sensors had already transmitted, but he answered their questions patiently, describing the exterior of the site and everything he’d seen.

Danny stayed on the phone as they switched from the helicopter to their rented car, and only concluded the conversation a few blocks from their destination. That gave him just enough time to call down to Brunei and tell Bison to get the team ready to move out; he anticipated Colonel Bastian would want another recon at the recycling plant, and this time he was going in with full gear.

Dog had already beaten him to it.

Stoner drove to a building owned by the American-Asian Business Coalition on Hsinyi Road not far from the American Institute, which handled American “concerns” in Taiwan on an officially unofficial basis. Despite the late hour, the coalition building was ablaze with lights, and Danny wondered if anyone in Taipei believed that the coalition was anything other than a front for the CIA.

Stoner led the way downstairs to a secure communications center. In contrast to the Dreamland facilities, the unit was primitive, amounting to a set of encrypted phones and two computer terminals that had access to a secure network. The decor wasn’t even up to the command trailer’s standards: The walls were paneled with a wood veneer so thin it looked like plastic; the industrial carpet on the floor was old and ragged.

Stoner pulled out a rolling chair from the conference table at the side of the room and swung it next to the desk with the phone bank. He swept his hand for Danny to take a seat, then made the connection back to Langley. When it went through, Stoner gestured for Danny to pick up a nearby phone. A case officer named James Pierce came on the line, updating them on information he’d gotten from Dreamland and the NSC liaison, Jed Barclay. That segued into a discussion of the capabilities of the government forces of Taiwan, and conflicting estimates of Chen Lee, his business empire, and the possible capabilities of his companies.

“There are dissenting views,” said Pierce. “But at this point, the best guess is that the government knows nothing about the UAV project. And if this is a nuke, they know nothing about it.”

“You sure?” asked Danny.

“The real expert’s sitting next to you,” said Pierce, meaning Stoner. “But there are no intercepts from known CKKC units indicating any sort of operational control on the aircraft, let alone any indication of experimental work, no unit movement, nothing,” said Pierce. “The NSA group working on it for us has gone over it pretty well. And as for nukes, forget it. We’re pretty wired into the government; we’d know. Believe me.”

Danny wasn’t sure whether Pierce meant what he said literally or figuratively.

“The best evidence that they don’t have one is a conversation three weeks ago between the president and the defense minister debating whether they should start a program and what it would cost,” added Pierce. “It was partly that debate that led the president to make his overtures toward China.”

Dog’s four or five hours of fitful sleep made him feel more tired than ever. He cut himself shaving, then burned his finger on the in-room coffeemaker. His mood was so foul that even a message on his voice mail system at Dreamland that Cortend had returned to the Pentagon “and contemplated no formal report” failed to put a bounce in his step as he walked from his hotel room to his elevator. Instead, his brisk stalk warned off the security detail escorting him, even the normally loquacious Boston, heading the team. The men stood at stone attention during the brief ride to the lobby, fanning out as the door opened — as much to stay out of the boss’s way as to protect him.

Miss Kelly, the State Department rep, was waiting near the door.

“Good morning, Colonel,” she said. “Breakfast?”

“No thanks. I have to check in with my people,” he told her.

“I wanted to apologize for being brusque the other day,” she said.

“Not necessary,” said Dog.

“I wonder if I could have a word,” she said, touching his arm to stop him and then glancing at the bodyguard detail.

“Fire away,” said Dog.

“The sultan would like a demonstration,” said Miss Kelly. “He’s heard so much about the Megafortress from his nephew, the prince — they would greatly appreciate a ride.”

“I thought Mack was entertaining them,” said Dog.

“He is,” said Miss Kelly. “But he made it clear that a ride, uh, a flight, was up to you.”

“I’ll bet he did.”

“He’s looking for a liaison and has asked Major Smith if he might stay on.”

“I have a mission here,” said Dog, starting back into motion. “Mack can deal with him.”

“I have a mission here as well,” said Kelly, who had trouble keeping up in her heels. “I will call Washington.”

“I’ll give you a quarter.”

The coffee at the Dreamland Command trailer had been made hours before, and to compare the burned-out dregs to crankcase sludge would have been to defame engine oil everywhere. Boston volunteered to make a fresh pot; Dog made a mental note to add a personal commendation to the sergeant’s file at the earliest convenience.

He was on his second cup of coffee when Ray Rubeo’s face snapped onto the screen from Dream Command. Rubeo’s familiar frown was back, and even before the scientist stepped aside to reveal the others in the control room, Dog knew Jennifer was back.

But what in God’s name had she done to her beautiful long hair?

“Good to see you back where you belong, Ms. Gleason,” he said.

She didn’t answer; it wasn’t clear that she had even heard.

“We’re sifting through a forest of radio transmissions,” said Rubeo, giving the latest update. “We’re still a distance from figuring it out.”

“Anything new on the bomb factory?”

“The video cameras that were placed show nothing unusual,” said Rubeo. “They’ve continued their standard security sweeps.”

“We have to assume they know something’s up,” said Stoner, who was in Taipei. “But we do have people watching both on land and out in the harbor, and there’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Even if the assessment is right and they do have a bomb, we haven’t found the delivery system yet,” said Dog.

“Sure we have,” said Jennifer. “The UAVs.”

“They’re not big enough,” said Zen, who was on the circuit from Penn, on the ground in Taiwan.

“You’re looking at their UAV as if it were a Flighthawk,” Jennifer said. “It isn’t. From the analysis that I’ve seen — and admittedly I’ve been out of the loop for a few days… ”

She paused. Dog could see her frown.

“From what I’ve seen,” she continued, “the ghost clone should be able to go further with a heavier payload. It’s been used up until now for reconnaissance, but reengineering it for a different role is child’s play. If I were building a long-range nuclear cruise missile, I’d start with an airframe like the ghost clone’s. It’s not quite as stealthy as a B-2, but it’s damn close. And it’s small to begin with.”

“Then why not use a cruise missile?” asked Zen.

“It is a cruise missile,” said Jennifer. “With longer range and a heavier payload. The thing is, if my technology isn’t good enough to build a very small nuke, this may be easier.”

“We are speculating,” said Rubeo.

“Sometimes speculation isn’t wrong,” said Jennifer staring into the video camera.

After a long day of meetings, Jed Barclay’s eyes felt as if they’d screwed themselves deep into his skull. The NSC had scheduled a meeting for ten P.M., but he and his boss had been summoned by the President to the White House for a private briefing ahead of the session. While not unprecedented, the move underlined how serious the situation was. The meeting in Beijing was now less than twenty-four hours away. The vice president had just arrived in the capital.

Jed and Philip Freeman were ushered up to the private quarters, where the President was changing after returning from an appearance in Bethesda. No matter how many times he came here, Jed still felt a feeling of awe. He was walking where Lincoln had walked, taking the same stairs Madison had used to look for his wife when the British were marching up the hill. They were shown to the East Sitting Hall near the Queen’s Bedroom, one of Martindale’s favorite conferencing spots. Jed pulled over the ornate wood chair so that it was catty-corner to the couch and opposite his boss’s seat, anticipating that the President would sit on the couch. The drapes had been drawn across the large fan window that dominated the room; lamps on both sides of the couch cast a yellowish light around, reflecting in the chandelier above.

Jed closed his eyes for a moment, wondering what it would have been like a hundred and fifty years before. Lincoln strode through, looking for his clerk, calling him: “Nicolay! Nicolay!”

Mrs. Lincoln wandered behind him, fretting over her sick son Willie, not yet dead…

“Sleeping on us, Jed?” boomed the President, coming in.

“No way,” said Jed, springing upright.

The President patted him gently on the back, pulling over his own seat rather than taking the sofa. His chief of staff and several other aides, along with members of the Secret Service, had trailed him to the end of the hall, standing back to give them a modicum of privacy.

“They have a bomb, or they may have a bomb?” asked the President, immediately cutting to the heart of the issue.

“We’re not sure,” said Freeman.

The folder in Jed’s hands contained the latest estimate — it was really more like a guess — of what had happened, fingering Iran rather than Korea as the likely source. Small amounts of material — enough for one or two bombs — were possibly unaccounted for.

The estimate, courtesy of the CIA, was three sentences long. The argument that had led to those three sentences was continuing over at Langley.

“How can we be sure what they have?” asked Martindale.

“We have to go in and find out,” said Freeman.

“Jed?”

“I would agree, sir. Dreamland — Colonel Bastian is preparing a plan to cover that contingency, if you order it.”

Martindale nodded.

“I would note,” said the national security advisor, “that at the moment there’s no concrete evidence supporting the construction of a bomb. We have circumstantial findings only.”

“Two weeks ago there was no evidence there was an advanced UAV,” said the President. “Will Colonel Bastian have his plan ready for presentation at the NSC meeting?”

“I believe he will,” said Jed.

“Good.” Martindale got up. “Ties are getting better, Jed.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The briefing with the NSC went about as well as Dog had expected, meaning that it didn’t go particularly well at all. A mission to inspect the site further was authorized, but most of the members of the NSC were skeptical that the weapon even existed. Dog couldn’t really blame them; all he really had to go on was the fact that his scientists thought it was there, and while that was good enough for him, it wasn’t particularly surprising that it wasn’t good enough for Washington.

Dog’s plan called for securing the site if a weapon was found. That, of course, would create real complications — Taiwan was an ally, but the operation, at least at present, was to be conducted without the country’s government or military knowing about it. It had to be that way, since it wasn’t yet clear what if any connections Chen might have that would tip him off.

Assuming that he did in fact have a weapon.

“Have you located their robot plane?” asked Admiral Balboa after Dog finished his briefing.

“We’re still trying to figure it out.”

“Thank you, Colonel. We’ll take it from here,” said Freeman. “Keep us advised.”

The connection broke. Dog resisted the temptation to punch out the video tube. No matter what he did, it would never be enough for Balboa.

He got up, glancing at his watch. He needed to do about twenty million things, including get the latest Dreamland updates and prep a flight to Taiwan so he could support the mission.

But he also wanted to find out what the hell Mack was doing.

“Boston?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Find Mack Smith and bring him to me. Fetch Lieutenant Andrews as well.”

“On my way, sir.”

Mack Smith was enjoying yet another retelling of his exploits when the beautiful if stuck-up Miss Kelly entered the reception hall, trailed by a member of the Whiplash security team. Though the tall, bulky sergeant wore civilian clothes, he was instantly recognizable as a Dreamland trooper by his swagger and bulk.

“Miss Kelly, a pleasure,” said Mack. “Very sharp suit, Sergeant,” he added to her escort. “Boston, right?”

“Sir, Colonel Bastian wants to see you yesterday.”

“If he wants to see me yesterday, he’ll have to settle for videotape, won’t he? Or maybe fly back to Dreamland. I think with the dateline it’s yesterday there when it’s today here.”

“Yes, sir. I need Lieutenant Andrews as well.”

“Starship,” said Mack, calling over to the other end of the lounge. Starship emerged from the small pack of European women he had been fraternizing with. “The master beckons.”

Twenty minutes later, Dog interrupted his latest update from Ax to give Starship the sort of stare no lieutenant should ever have to endure from his commander.

It made an impression — for about half a second. Then the lieutenant’s fighter jock smile returned.

“Where the hell have you been?” the colonel demanded.

“Sir, you had told me to, uh, see if there was anything Major Smith needed. And so I went to it.”

“That was yesterday, Starship. Did you get that handle because your head was out in orbit?”

“Nah.”

“Go get your gear, and get over with the Flighthawk personnel and make sure your aircraft is ready to fly.”

“All right! Kick ass.”

The lieutenant slapped his hands together, twisted on his heel, and practically ran from the trailer.

“As for you, Major, we’re under a Whiplash order,” Dog told Mack. “We have an operation tonight.”

“Great.” Mack stood, but then a quizzical look appeared on his face. “What am I flying?”

“Nothing. You’re going to stay at the trailer to liaison with us.”

“Liaison?” said Mack. “But—”

“We have some Air Force security police heading over from the Philippines to pull security, but they’re not cleared to enter the trailer. You got that? It’s just you. They have to take a leak, they have to go across the street.”

“You want me to act as communications sergeant? I mean, all I’m doing is babysitting the gear?”

“You have the general idea, Mack. The security detail will be armed and under orders to shoot if there are any problems. Nobody in and out.”

Mack’s face had turned white.

“I’d like you in uniform before they get here,” Dog added. “I believe you have about ten minutes.”

Chen Lo Fann had known there were enough parts for another UAV.

The bomb was another matter.

“It was created five years ago,” explained Professor Ai. “Your grandfather foresaw the day when this would occur. The Russians were desperate, and opportunity presented itself. Even so, it has taken considerable work. The bomb has only been ready within the past month.”

“Your visits to your aunt?”

“I regret that I found it necessary to lie to you,” said Ai, bowing his head slightly as a gesture of remorse. Chen Lo Fann knew it was a sham, and said nothing.

“The bomb will kill the people in the target area, but not damage the buildings,” said the scientist. Fann knew Ai was exaggerating slightly — buildings very close to the blast would be damaged and possibly destroyed by the neutron bomb his grandfather had had built. Still, unlike a “normal” atomic weapon, the large cylinder before him would cause relatively little damage to the capital.

Should he use it?

His concerns had nothing to do with the deaths the bomb would cause — he cared nothing for the communists, who clearly deserved to die. While undoubtedly many innocent victims would be caught up in their destruction, their deaths were completely justifiable, an honorable part of the necessary equation. Regrettable, lamentable — but necessary.

Chen’s concern was with what would happen next. The communist military leaders who survived would no doubt wish for revenge.

Would the Americans step in and prevent it?

He was unsure.

And if they did, then what?

An uneasy truce? Things would continue as they had for the past fifty years.

That would be an even greater failure.

Perhaps he should wait, and try and build other bombs, enough to obliterate every last communist.

Chen Lo Fann thought of his grandfather, whose body he had just come from cremating.

The letter in the old man’s desk — a letter Ai knew of, though he seemed not to have read — directed that the meeting between the two heads of state be stopped at all costs.

What was his duty as Chen Lee’s grandson? Should he use the weapon as Lee clearly wished? Or should he choose his time?

Duty demanded he carry out his grandfather’s wishes. The way was clear.

The endless surging of the universe, as he interpreted the Tao, or “way.”

The way that can be spoken is not the true way.

Life and death were as one, different stages in the never-ending river. His grandfather’s death, his own — these were meaningless. Duty was constant. Duty lasted longer than the poor clay and ashes of a single day.

“Prepare,” he told Professor Ai. “We will strike during the meeting, as my grandfather wished.”

Jennifer got up from the computer station and bent her head straight back. Her vertebrae all seemed to crack at once. She felt a surge of energy, and if it weren’t for the fact that they were close — very, very close — to a breakthrough, she would go for a run. Instead, she stretched and twisted her way across the lab to the coffee counter. A fresh pot had just finished sifting through into the carafe; she poured herself a cup and took a few slow sips.

Dog’s voice had surprised her during the video conference earlier that morning; he seemed to have aged ten years since she’d last seen him.

Maybe that meant she was over him.

Good.

She went back to the computer, which had just finished running a search of an NSA database. The computer had deposited three lines of hexadecimals on her screen; not taking any chances, she recorded them on the blank yellow pad at the station, then entered each one into the second search program she and an assistant had customized earlier in the day. A set of computers across the country at Fort Meade, the NSA headquarters, began rumbling through a vast array of intercepted and logged transmissions, trying to match the scripts she’d just harvested. Six keystrokes later, a Navy computer began doing the same.

The screen flashed. It had found the radio.

Several radios.

“Oh,” said Jennifer aloud to the empty lab. “Now I get it.”

She picked up the phone to call Major Catsman, who was over in the Dreamland Command Center getting ready to update the Whiplash Force in Taiwan.

“I know how they do it,” she said when the major came on the line. “Basically they’re using buoys and a commercial satellite. I should be able to narrow down the ship, but I’m going to need some help from the Navy. High-level help. We have to tap into their collection of NOSS intercepts, the Sigint data they collect to track ship movements.”

“Who do I talk to?” asked Catsman.

Rolling toward the small room at the far end of the hangar, Zen realized he hadn’t spoken to his wife, Breanna, in more than two days. While she’d certainly understand, he felt a pang of guilt, and told himself he’d catch up with her as soon as he could.

Dog — just in from Brunei with Penn and the two Flighthawks — was already holding forth on the latest plan. Danny and Stoner had come down from Taipei, along with a driver and Sergeant Liu; the rest of his Whiplash team was due in a few hours, aboard Dreamland’s souped-up MC-17, which was en route with one of the Ospreys tucked inside its cavernous tummy. A contingent of Marines from the Philippines was due to arrive at the airport no later than 2300; they would add a little more muscle to the assault.

Danny and Stoner had worked out a straightforward plan to secure the factory site at Kaohisiung.Penn would launch a laser-guided E-bomb at the start of the assault, wiping out all unshielded electronic devices at the target site. Whiplash would parachute in, secure the building, and hold it. The Marines would come in with the Osprey as well as some small boats, providing backup and extra security. The devices would be evacked out via the Osprey to this airport — the hangar area would be secured by more Marines — and then taken away by the MC-17 to Brunei.

Stoner would ride with the Marines in the Osprey, carrying backup detection gear and his own hot link back to Dream Command, where a team of experts would be providing real-time analysis of the data the assault team gathered. Major Alou and Penn would fly offshore, with two Flighthawks — one piloted by Starship, the other by Kick, providing cover. About the only difficulty Danny could see was persuading the Marines to take what was drawn up as the secondary role in the operation.

While the site was being secured, Zen and Raven would head south to observe the ship Dreamland had just tagged as the possible UAV operator. With the help of signal intelligence the Navy routinely collected as it tracked ships on the ocean, the Dreamland team had matched seemingly innocuous radio transmissions to those Jennifer Gleason had ID’d as belonging to the UAV control mechanism. The transmissions had been traced to the Dragon Prince, a small oil tanker. According to Jennifer’s theory, it operated the UAV with the help of a network of buoys and a satellite, disguising transmissions to appear as routine navigational inquiries or as “junk” reflections from other systems. The latest intelligence, cobbled together from a variety of sources, showed that the ship was due in Kaohisiung harbor tomorrow.

Undoubtedly to get the bomb.

If the robot launched, Zen would destroy it.Raven had been tabbed for the mission because its computers had the UAV frequency data; Dog would take the helm.

The Dragon Prince would be apprehended by two U.S. Navy destroyers in international waters after the ground operation was under way. The ships were already en route, though they had not yet been informed of their exact mission or situation.

“Washington is worried about security concerns,” explained Dog.

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Stoner. “The ship captains may not think it’s a high priority. They ought to have the entire situation laid out for them.”

“It’s not my call,” said Dog. Zen realized from the sharpness in Colonel Bastian’s voice that he didn’t agree with the decision, but was prepared to carry it out. “The concern is not only to preserve the element of surprise, but to keep the Mainland Chinese from finding out. If they knew there were nuclear devices on the island, they might use that as a pretext to launch an all-out attack.”

Major Alou brought up a few practical issues about which non-Dreamland frequencies would be used during the operation, as well as the availability of refueling assets that were being chopped from Pacific Command. Zen found his mind drifting as the discussion slanted toward minutiae; he worried about Kick and Starship, who’d be working without a net.

And then he remembered he’d still forgotten to call his wife.

What was up with that?

He eyed his watch, waiting for the briefing to end.

Breanna Stockard had just finished packing her things when the phone on the bedstand rang. Thinking it was probably her mother — her mother had taken to calling her every hour on the hour — she blew off the first few rings. Finally, she reached for it, grabbing it just in time to hear whoever had been calling hanging up.

Probably Zen, she thought, instantly angry with herself for not picking up the phone. She took her bag and went out, glad to finally be out of the small whitewashed space.

As she rode the elevator downstairs, Breanna felt a surge of concern for her husband. She knew he’d deployed on a mission somewhere, but security concerns had prevented him or anyone else from saying exactly where he was or what he was doing. As a member of the military — not to mention the same elite unit — Breanna was expected to understand that there would be times when duty demanded she not speak to Zen. But it wasn’t easy, just as it wasn’t easy for the literally thousands of other men and women — and children — who found themselves in similar situations around the country. Breanna accepted this as a given, a part of her life. Even so, as she made her way to the elevator, she felt an undeniable ache, a longing to be near her husband.

The ache turned into something else in the elevator downstairs, something sharper, a jagged hole.

Fear. She was worried about him, afraid that something was going to happen.

She was sure of it. Convinced. Her hands began to tremble.

The door opened. Bree’s mother stood a few feet away, talking to some other doctors. Breanna managed to bite the corner of her lip and pushed herself out of the elevator. She forced a smile and suffered through her mother’s greeting and introductions, looking toward the floor not out of modesty as her mother bragged, but hiding the emotion suddenly washing through her. She signed herself out, the words on the papers at the desk invisible behind a thick fog.

Spotting a phone nearby, she gave in to the temptation to call Dreamland, even though she knew she wouldn’t get Zen himself. She dialed the number, her finger sliding off the keys.

No one would be able to talk to her anyway. It was an open line. All she’d do was make other people nervous.

The phone rang and was answered before she could hang up.

“This is Breanna Stockard,” she told the airman handling the phone. “I—”

“Captain, how are you?” said the operator, and before she knew it she was talking to Chief Master Sergeant Terrence “Ax” Gibbs.

“Everybody’s who’s anybody is out seeing the world,” Ax told her. “If you know what I mean.”

The twinkle in the chief’s eyes translated somehow into his voice. Breanna’s apprehension didn’t melt — it was too deep for that — but her hand stopped trembling and the ground beneath her feet felt solid again.

“Something up?” asked the chief.

“No, chief, thanks. I appreciate it.”

“Sure I can’t do anything for you?”

“You have, kinda,” she said. “I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”

“Red carpet’ll be waiting.”

Boston had never worn one of the fogsuits before, and Sergeant Liu had to help him into it. Covered with a thin layer of LEDs, the suit was designed to emit light in a pattern that blended with the surroundings. In pitch black, of course, it was completely dark. But in a grayish setting it would appear gray, and on a splotchy brown background it would look splotchy brown. The technology was still being worked on at Dreamland, and the scientists predicted that within a few years, new versions would make foot soldiers practically invisible to the naked eye.

For now, they were just extremely hard to see, especially at dark.

Sergeant Liu unfurled the hood from the back of the suit, covering all but the visor area of Boston’s helmet. The six Whiplash troopers looked like aliens, ready to take over the earth.

Or at least a small part of it.

“Check your tasers,” said Liu.

Because of the political ramifications of operating without authorization in an allied country, the White House had ordered the Whiplash team to use nonlethal weapons “to the extent practical and possible” to take down the factory. Each team member carried a special Dreamland shotgun taser as his primary weapon. The gun looked like an Olin/HK CAWS RHINO (Repeating Hand-held Improved Non-rifled Ordnance) Special Forces shotgun with a large box in front of the trigger area. Traditional tasers fired two darts at a target that were connected to the weapon by a wire, allowing the shock to be administered. While potent, the need for the wire limited most tasers to relatively short range — fifteen yards was an industry standard. That was perfect for many police applications, but would put a Whiplash trooper at a severe disadvantage.

The Dreamland gun — officially known as T-3, though the troopers usually just called them tasers or sometimes phasers after the weapons used in the Star Trek sci-fi series — fired a shell containing two bullets that looked like the jacks used in a child’s game, except that their points were considerably sharper. The bullets housed capacitors charged as the gun was fired; the shock when they contacted a target was enough to put down a horse.

While the weapon could fire its cartridges beyond a hundred yards, technical difficulties with the separation of the bullets meant the team had to decide between short or long-range cartridges, with effective ranges between five and fifty yards or forty and one hundred yards. In both cases, the bullets would not separate or set the charge properly before the minimum range, and beyond the maximum they tended to be wildly inaccurate. All team members carried clips packed with both sets of ammo, color-coded and notched so they were easily ID’d.

The team members also carried standard-issue M-4s — shortened M-16s favored by Airborne and SF troops — or MP-5s beneath their fogsuits; they were intended only as weapons of last resort.

“We’re ready, Captain,” said Liu over the shared team frequency in the Smart Helmet as the last trooper signaled he was good to go.

“Good.” Captain Freah’s rich baritone reverberated in Boston’s helmet. “Now remember, the E-bomb will go off just as we hit the ground,” he added. “It may not get everything, and they may start looking for us once their lights go out. Questions?”

Bison made a lame joke about plugging his taser into an outlet and charging the city for electricity.

“Any real questions?” asked the captain, and the silence told Boston they were ready to board the plane.

Starship took the Flighthawk from the computer as the launch sequence completed, tucking the U/MF down toward the water as Kick authorized his own launch. It was damn good to be back in action.

He wasn’t feeling any jitters, and the pressure wasn’t even up to football game levels. The fact that Kick had his hands full with his own aircraft reassured him somehow.

Bottom line, Starship knew he was twice the pilot Kick was. Having his rival next to him in the Flighthawk bay flying his own aircraft seemed easier to deal with than having him hovering over his shoulder.

It didn’t hurt either that Zen was off in the other plane.

“Hawk One is coming through 25,000 feet, on course and ready,” he told Penn ’s pilot, Major Alou. “Systems are solid. Instruments are in the green. I’m ready, Major.”

“Roger that,” said Alou, his voice so calm it sounded as if he were ready for a nap. “Preparing for alpha maneuver and launch on Hawk Two.”

The big aircraft began to dip, sleighriding downhill as it fell into the launch maneuver for the other U/MF. The launch went perfectly; Starship saw his wingman pop onto the sitrep to the west, picking up speed as the computer and pilot double-checked their systems.

“As we drew it up, boys,” said Major Alou. “Starship, you have the first run over the target area. Keep your altitude up; we don’t want anyone hearing us. You ready?”

“Born ready,” said the pilot, tacking onto his course back toward land.

Danny Freah waited until he had the infrared feed from the Flighthawk before clicking the bottom of the visor to get the computer-interpreted view from the Dreamland tactical computer system. Located deep in the computer bunkers below the Megafortress hangars, the computers were sifting through the data supplied by the camera and radar in Hawk One, interpolating it with what was already known about the site.

Building Two, their primary objective, was occupied by a single guard at the shore side of the compound. Another dozen men were nearby, in a building about a hundred yards away, most of them clumped in a basement suite they had identified as the security headquarters. The suite and its sensors would be blinded by the E-bomb, which would effectively fry any unshielded electronics within a half mile of its air-burst explosion. The bomb — actually a small laser-guided missile that could be controlled by Danny once launched — sat in Penn ’s bomb bay, ready to go.

“All right, listen up, you can see the schematic,” said Danny as the image of the site flashed into his team’s helmets. “As we planned it. Liu and Boston on Shed One. My team has the security headquarters building. Bison and Reagan, you have the approach. Make sure the Marines don’t kill us,” he added, knowing it would get a laugh from his men.

Six Marines, all trained in SF warfare, were jumping with the team to help take control of the perimeter. They too were armed with nonlethal weapons — Remington shotguns, equipped with crowd-control shells, along with M-4s as backups. Frankly, the hardest part of his job so far had been convincing the Marines they had to stay behind his guys once they got on the ground.

Two companies of Marines had squeezed aboard the Dreamland Osprey and would roar in once the Whiplash team was down. Four small boats sat about a mile offshore, filled with Marines, ready to race into the harbor. Danny had worked with a number of Marine units over the past few years and was confident that, despite a bit of jawing back and forth, they’d do as good a job as his troopers.

What he hadn’t worked with before in combat was the fogsuit. It was a great idea in practice, certainly, and had done well during the exercises. But jumping from a large aircraft in the middle of the night was always a risky venture. If the bulky suit felt uncomfortable to him, he was sure it would feel uncomfortable to most if not all of the others.

And being uncomfortable was never good.

But it was too late to take them off. The light flashed. The ramp at the back of the aircraft cranked open. The wind howled.

“We’re going,” he told Major Alou aboard Penn.

“Missile launch is counting down,” replied the pilot over the Dreamland circuit.

Bison, the jumpmaster, put up his fist.

“Let’s go,” Danny heard himself say.

Zen had split his lower control screen in half so he could see a sitrep feed from Dream Command showing the assault. The screen was tiny, especially in the helmet viewer, but he avoided the temptation to make it his main view — he was controlling two Flighthawks from the hold of the Megafortress, orbiting Dragon Prince, and watching for signs of activity. While the computer was presently doing most of the work, Zen couldn’t afford to let his attention stray too far from the controls.

“First wave is out of the plane,” relayed Dog, who was piloting the plane. “Looking good.”

“Yeah.”

“Merce is ready to go with the E-bomb.”

“Roger that.”

Zen checked his instruments, purposely trying to draw his attention away from the other operation. His guys were good. They could handle it.

Best thing to do was let them.

“Hawk leader, you want to take a run over the ship’s deck?” asked Dog. “Get a real close-up and see if we can spot the clone?”

Zen acknowledged, then took the helm of Hawk Three — his U/MFs were designated Three and Four to avoid confusion — and tucked toward the oil tanker, which was about ten nautical miles from the mouth of the Kaohisiun harbor.

The sitrep for the assault flickered.

“E-bomb went off as scheduled,” said Dog. “The power is gone in that part of the city. Everything’s on schedule.”

“Roger that,” said Zen, forcing himself to concentrate on the task at hand.

Danny hit the roof of the building square in the middle, only a quarter meter from the point the computer had designated. With two quick snaps, he had unhooked his chute. He pressed the trigger on his taser lightly, activating its targeting mechanism. Its aimpoint appeared as a crisp red circle in his Smart Helmet visor. With the helmet’s starscope vision showing him the night, there was no need to pop on the LED wristlight that was an integral part of the fogsuit; instead, he made his way to the end of the building above the door closest to the security headquarters. He saw the door open as he reached it. Kneeling, he waited as two of the company guards emerged from the building, each carrying a handgun. As the door started to close behind the men, he fired.

Vvvvrooop.

Vvvvrooop.

A net of blue light enveloped the men. Both Taiwanese spun slightly, stunned by the shock of electricity pulverizing every muscle and nerve in their bodies. Danny climbed over the edge of the roof and swung down, landing on his feet a few feet from the men he had downed. The shock had rendered them semiconscious. He kicked the guns away, then Danny took a small plastic canister from his pocket. It looked like a grenade with an extra-long spoon handle. He pulled the handle and tossed it between the men, stepping back as netting material expanded over them. The sticky material was not escape-proof, but it would easily hold them in place until the reinforcements arrived.

Egg Reagan, meanwhile, had come around the side of the building. He slapped what looked like the head of a plunger on the door; it was actually a man-portable radar unit similar to SoldierVision to help them see inside. Using the unit rather than their own Smart Helmets would prevent anyone from homing in on the source of the radio waves and targeting them. Egg strung a wire to the unit and stepped around the corner, viewing it in his helmet visor after attaching the wire at the back.

“Clear,” said Egg.

The door was locked. Danny took out a Beretta loaded with metal slugs and fired point-blank through the mechanism.

“Still clear,” said Egg.

“In.”

The hall, dark because both the electricity and backup lighting had been knocked out by the E-bomb, made an L about twenty feet from the door. As they cleared the corner, the yellow beams of small flashlights danced at the far end.

“We’ll zap them,” said Danny. “I have the ones on the left. Wait as long as we can; get them all in view.”

He edged toward the side of the hall as the first of the Taiwanese guards came around the corner.

As soon as one of the lights played across the floor near Egg, Danny opened up, firing two bursts in rapid succession. Three guards shot back against the wall of the hallway, literally blasted off their feet. But another man had been behind them; unharmed, he began to retreat. Danny and Egg gave chase, running for all they were worth down the hall. The bulk of their suits and gear slowed them down, however; by the time they reached the corner, the hall was empty.

“Fuck,” said Egg.

“Yeah,” said Danny. “Let’s see if we can find this joker.”

He tapped his Smart Helmet, activating the unit’s penetrating radar mode. The mode emitted low-power radio waves that could penetrate walls roughly out to thirty feet. Their subject was nowhere in sight.

Danny flipped back into Dreamland connect mode, taking the display off the Flighthawk. But the U/MF was too far to the west to be of any use.

“Hawks, I need some coverage down here,” he said. “On my building.”

“Copy,” said Kick, gunning the aircraft back.

Kick had just started the Flighthawk back when the Osprey veered across his path. He threw the small robot plane down hard toward the earth, realizing even as he did that he had overreacted. Cursing, but only to himself, he came back with the joystick control, trying to swoop level and get back more or less on course. The robot fluttered slightly, her airspeed plummeting.

“Hawk Two, looking for that view,” said Captain Freah in his ear.

“Yeah, roger that,” said Kick. “We’re working on it. A lot of things going on up here.”

Starship, whose aircraft was to the west covering the harbor approach to the complex, started to interrupt. “You want me to—”

“I’m on it,” insisted Kick, sliding his speed up. The target building was now dead-on in his screen. Kick let his speed continue to bleed off, determined to provide a detailed view to the ground team. The Osprey, meanwhile, began rotating its wings upward, driving down toward a field near the road to drop its men.

Someone shouted over the circuit — there were people on the ground, near where the Osprey was headed.

Several things happened at once — the chain gun in the Osprey’s nose rotated, Kick threw his Flighthawk down toward the spot, Danny Freah yelled a warning and told the Osprey not to fire.

Kick struggled to keep his head clear, fighting the black fuzz of confusion creeping up from behind his neck.

“The boats,” someone said, and whether it was intended for him or not, Kick started to line up the Flighthawk for a view of the harbor. But he was already crossing over the dock toward the water; he accelerated and began banking to the south to try for another run.

As soon as Danny saw the Taiwanese guards emerging from the buildings beyond the battery recycling shed in his sitrep window, he shouted at the Osprey pilots to back out. He saw the Osprey whip away just as one of the men began firing an automatic weapon. An instant later, Sergeant Geraldo Hernandez launched a stun grenade and then fired his taser, scattering the guards.

“Two of the fuckers down,” said Hernandez.

It took Hernandez another sixty seconds to work around a pile of discarded metal before he could get close enough to take out the others. He popped a mesh grenade over the pile, then ran around the side and zapped them as they struggled.

“Osprey in,” said Danny.

“Can I get my view of the building now?” he asked Kick after the Marines flooded out of Osprey.

“Roger that,” said the Flighthawk pilot. “Two seconds away.”

Danny toggled between an IR and a penetrating radar view, preferring to see the details himself rather than using the synthesized and annotated image the computer provided.

“Freeze,” he said, getting a good visual of the facility. It looked like there was only one man here besides themselves; he was two corridors down to the right.

“With you,” said Egg, following as Danny set out cautiously.

Starship saw the boat darting into the harbor. He knew it wasn’t theirs — the computer had the Marines dotted out with daggers — but he hesitated, as if his brain were trying to process the information and couldn’t find the next branch in the logic tree.

Gun in the boat.

Big gun.

Something else.

“Company,” he said finally. “I’m taking them out.”

He leaned on the stick, starting the Flighthawk downward. But then something tingled in his brain — the other half of the thought that had started a millisecond before. He pulled back, nailing the throttle slide to full just as the missile flared from the boat.

Missile.

They were gunning for the Osprey, coming in over his right shoulder.

“Flares!” he yelled, hitting his diversionary devices.

Ordinarily, he would have jinked away, ducking the surface-to-air missile that had just been launched, getting himself to safety. But something had pushed off the instinct for survival; something deeper took over — he kept the Flighthawk on her course, directly into the path of the oncoming missile.

The shoulder-launched SA-14 hurtled upward at something approaching Mach 1. Though primitive by Dreamland standards, the Russian-designed heat-seeking missile was nonetheless an effective weapon when properly handled. The sensor in its nose ignored the flares, sucking the heat signature of the large aircraft it had been aimed at. But then something juicier stuck itself in its face — the tailpipe of the Flighthawk, flashing within a few meters of the weapon. The missile jerked itself to the right, following the hot scent of its new target, but it couldn’t quite keep up. Afraid that it would lose everything, it ignited its charge, sending a spray of shrapnel through the air.

Starship felt the small robot spinning to its left before he actually lost the U/MF; whatever sixth sense it was that helped him fly the plane knew he was down.

The last feed from the cam in the Flighthawk’s nose showed the Osprey just a few yards off. The frame froze, as if the tiny aircraft wanted to show that its death had not been in vain.

“Nail the motherfuckers in the boat,” Starship told Kick. “I’m outta the game.”

Boston’s visor portrayed the interior of the building in a ghostly gray. A door sat at the far end of the room, leading to a hallway. There was an office at the end outside the range of the helmets’ low-power radar; two guards were holed up there, marked in the small sitrep view in the lower left-hand corner of the screen supplied by the Flighthawk sensors. The guard icons blinked steadily, indicating the view had not been updated in more than thirty seconds.

Sergeant Liu moved ahead stealthily. Boston saw a shadow in the hall and steadied his taser at the doorway.

“One coming,” he told Liu.

“Wait,” said the team leader, his voice so low Boston could hardly hear it. “We want both.”

The Taiwanese guard appeared in the doorway, holding an M-16. Boston steadied his weapon, watching the man peer through the dark room. He seemed to know they were there somehow. Boston decided he could take no chances, and fired his weapon. The doorway burned blue and the guard fell to the ground. Liu dove through the doorway from the side, spinning left in the direction of the offices where the guards had been earlier. As he did, the sitrep updated itself as the Flighthawk flew overhead once more.

“Other guard’s still in the office,” Boston told Liu.

“Yeah,” hissed the team leader, and Boston belatedly realized that Liu was now close enough for his helmet-borne radar to pick up the guard.

By the time Boston reached the hallway, Liu was next to the doorway. He reached inside his fogsuit and took out a small tube that looked a bit like an old-fashioned folding carpenter’s ruler. He unfolded it, hooking a wire into one end and then pushing it around the corner.

The near-infrared view was capable of greater detail than the radar, and had the advantage of not giving off a detectable radio wave. Liu configured the feed so it could be shared by the team members; a small window at the right of Boston’s visor opened and both men saw the guard inside, huddled behind a desk at the left of the room.

A Minimi machine gun sat on one side of the desktop; the guard was pounding a computer keyboard, possibly erasing information. The computer had obviously been hardened against electromagnetic pulses somehow.

“Flash-bang?” whispered Boston.

Too close to the door to risk speaking, Liu fisted a yes signal and Boston reached below his fogsuit for the grenade. He thumbed off the tape as he slipped forward, crawling along the floor and then sliding the grenade into the room.

Time altered its shape in the scant seconds before the grenade went off. Boston felt Liu move, then stop; things flew into fast-forward as the grenade flashed.

“In,” said Liu, but by the time the word settled into Boston’s skull, the guard at the computer was falling backward, zapped by the discharge of Liu’s taser.

Boston ran to the computer.

“No. Check for explosives,” said Liu. “I have the computer.”

Boston clicked the bottom of his helmet visor, selecting a sniffer mode optimized for explosive materials such as C-4. The unit got two significant hits back in the main part of the building; the computer ID’d them as five-hundred pound bombs.

There ought to be more explosives, Boston thought — I’m not even picking up what would be used for the nuke.

“Boston,” said a controller back at Dream Command. “If you guys are secure, we need you to use Probe I so we can locate the nuke. We haven’t caught it yet.”

Boston stepped out of his fogsuit and pulled out the probe, an ultra-sensitive ion detector that looked like a long wand from a vacuum cleaner and weighed a little more than three pounds. By the time he had the device out and working, Liu had slapped a special modem on the parallel port of the computer and began sending the contents of its hard drive back to Dreamland.

Boston walked slowly through the hall, passing his arm back and forth. The readings were being relayed directly back to Dreamland for analysis through his Smart Helmet system; he had no idea what the unit was picking up, only that his own Geiger counter had not detected radiation serious enough to warn him away.

Large metal-working machines dominated the left side of the room. Wooden boxes and other items were lined neatly on the other wall; most of the middle was empty.

“How we looking?” Boston asked the Dreamland people as he walked toward the area where the explosives sensor had found the two bombs. They were packed into slatted wooden crates, the sort that were used to ship vegetables back in the States. Boston thought these might be the nukes, but in fact they were a bit too small and filled with conventional explosives.

Sergeant Liu joined him when he was about three-fourths done.

“Marines are down,” Liu told him. “We have to finish the sweep before they can come in. Find anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’ll tell you. Keep at it. I’m going to go back up to the rooms in the front, make sure the data transfer is working. You okay?”

Boston nodded and kept moving forward with the probe.

Starship pulled off his control helmet and stared at the white screen at the top of his station. He could see from the sitrep at the bottom of the screen that the Osprey was landing.

He rubbed his eyes, trying to get them to refocus and adjust to the darkened flight deck. Finally, he pulled on his headset.

“Shit. You did that on purpose?”

Kick.

Was that a legitimate question, or was he being an asshole?

Both, thought Starship, even though he knew he was being unfair.

“Yeah, on purpose. Otherwise they’d’ve gotten squashed,” he said.

“I got the boat,” said Kick. “Sank the motherfucker.”

“Good.”

“You saved them,” said Kick.

“I did,” said Starship.

Kick said something to someone on the ground. Starship undid his restraints, stood up, flexed his back and legs, then sat back down. He clicked the radio into Zen’s frequency to tell him what had happened.

“I heard already,” said Zen before he got two words out of his mouth. “Good going. Watch Kick.”

Starship grunted, then reached to change the resolution on his main screen. A shiver shook his upper body. His throat was dry, and he felt a thirst more powerful than any he’d ever felt before.

“Looking good,” he told Kick. “Looking good.”

The good news was that the rest of the site was secure, with the Marines now arriving and holding positions around the perimeter. A computer shielded against electromagnetic pulses had been captured and was feeding itself to Dream Command.

The bad news was that preliminary data said there was no bomb here. They’d have to conduct a painstaking and no doubt time-consuming search, and hope that the local authorities took their time responding to the alarms that were now sounding about gunfire and explosions around the harbor.

But Danny had a more pressing problem to deal with: The man they had missed in the hallway earlier had barricaded himself inside a men’s room. He was armed with at least two machine guns — Belgian Minimis, compact 5.56mm machine guns known to American troops as M249 Squad Automatic Weapons, or SAWs.

Egg and Danny watched him from around the corner of the closed door, thanks to the helmet radar. The image was sharp enough for Danny to see that the machine guns were special short-barrel versions equipped with belt feeds contained in compact boxes ahead of the trigger area. The box could hold a hundred bullets.

“He doesn’t have a NOD,” said Egg. A NOD or “night optical device,” also known as night goggles, amplified available light or used the infrared spectrum to allow the wearer to see in the dark. “If we could get that door down, we could get in.”

“Too risky,” said Danny. “Those bullets can go through that wall like butter. Easier.”

While they were wearing body armor, a hundred shots at very close range were bound to find something soft sooner or later. At this point, it was better to go a little slow rather than take any unnecessary risk.

Danny switched his helmet’s com device to loudspeaker, and repeated the Mandarin word for surrender Dream Command had given him.

There was no response.

The language specialist at Dream Command suggested they tell the man he was under arrest, and gave him the phrase, which was rather long. Danny tried it.

“Didn’t work, Coach.”

“Try Cantonese.”

“Give me the words.”

To Danny, the phrase sounded nearly identical to the Mandarin: “Nay in joy bee ku boh”—néī yīn jōi bēi kùi bō.

His pronunciation may not have been precise, and he couldn’t quite master the up-and-down bounce of the tonal language, but the captain did a good enough job to get an answer: A dozen slugs from the Minimi splattered through the hallway.

“You had the wrong tense,” said the translator. “That was You have been arrested.”

“Forget about it,” said Danny.

“Let’s just fucking take the bastard out,” said Egg. “Demo the door.”

“No. You got a flash-bang?” said Danny. “Let’s see if we can make him use up his ammo.”

Egg rolled the stun grenade down the hallway, hunkering down as the loud bang and flash filled the corridor. The Taiwanese guard immediately began to fire his weapon; if he didn’t go through the entire box of slugs, he came pretty close. Danny waited until he stopped firing, then told Bison to toss another grenade. It bounced, rolled a bit, and then went off. Another fusillade of gunfire filled the hall.

Danny trained his taser on the doorway, expecting that the man would run out into the hall, tired of being toyed with. But the guard showed admirable restraint.

“Let’s smoke him out,” said Egg. “I’ll go down and pop a smoke grenade in.”

“Not yet,” said Danny, fingering his own stun grenade. He set it, then underhanded it down the hall.

The grenade boomed and flashed, but this time the guard did nothing.

“Figured it out,” said Danny.

“Or he’s out of ammo.”

Danny put the visor in radar mode and went down the hall, half walking, half crouching. The man was still there, still staring at the door. Danny took out the telescoping IR viewer, angling to get an idea of what was left of the door. The center had been shot out, but the frame and lower portion remained intact.

The man inside began firing again. Danny fell back as a slew of 5.56mm bullets laced up the corridor, the last few only inches away.

No one would blame him now for saying the hell with the damn nonlethal crap. One conventional grenade — he had two — and the SOB and his stinking machine guns would be history.

But he had his orders.

“We’re going to use a variation of your plan,” Danny told Egg. “Post a flash-bang. When it goes off, I’ll toss in a smoke grenade. Nail the motherfucker with the tasers when he comes out.”

“You going down that close?”

“Bullet holes show where he can reach.”

“Damn, Cap. Be careful he doesn’t shoot your hand off.”

“Yeah,” said Danny. “Let’s go.”

The grenade rolled down to the end of the hall. Danny pushed his head down, waiting. The helmet took some of the loud impact away, but the charge was still unsettling; he swung up and popped the grenade into the hole, slipping and losing his balance as he did.

A shadow moved behind the doorway.

Danny saw the barrel of the Minimi inches away.

He pressed the trigger on his taser just as the first bullet flew from the Belgian-made gun. Something smacked him hard against the leg — then everything went blue, and he smelled fire.

“Shit, shit,” Egg cursed, running up. He fired his taser at the door two, three times without a target.

“He’s down, he’s down,” said Danny, seeing on his visor that his shot had knocked the Taiwanese guard back into the room. “I’m all right. Chill.”

By the time Stoner got in with the Marines, the technical experts back at Dreamland had finished a preliminary analysis of Building Two. Aided by the data on the computer as well as their physical analysis, they had no doubt that one or two devices had been stored and probably assembled here.

They also had no doubt that the devices were no longer in the building.

The next logical place on the site was Building One, and Stoner sent a team inside with their rad meters and a video cam. But even before the feeds from their gear started back through the mobile transmitters, Stoner had climbed to the top of the administrative building, trying to figure out where else on the site the bomb might be.

“How you doing?” asked Danny Freah, clambering up behind him.

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Yeah. I’m going to let Zen and Colonel Bastian know what’s going on.”

Stoner folded his arms, thinking.

“I say we stop that ship right away.”

Jennifer joined the others in the command center after pulling an all-nighter working with the computer team on a Trojan horse virus to take over the ghost clone’s control system. Jennifer was convinced that the best bet was to simply block the communications, then try to insert some of the commands they’d intercepted. The problem was, they couldn’t be sure what those commands were, which meant they might succeed in stopping the clone from doing what its masters wanted, but not be able to have the clone do what they wanted.

Jennifer took a seat at a station in the second row reserved for her use and began loading the necessary code into computer memory so it could be shipped out to Zen. As the CD-ROM spun, she popped open her notebook computer; she had some more code for the Flighthawk control computer aboard Raven, which would have to attempt the takeover.

“And?”

Jennifer looked up at Ray Rubeo, who was wearing his twenty-four-hours-with-no-sleep frown.

“And is a conjunction,” said Jennifer. “You can’t use it alone.”

“Can we take over the clone?”

“Probably not,” she said frankly.

Rubeo frowned.

“Yes. Come look at this,” he told her, starting for one of the stations at the very front of the room, just below the large display screen. The bomb experts were reviewing coding from a computer at the Taiwan base.

“It’s encrypted. We’re working with the NSA on it,” said one of the experts. “We’re feeding it back and forth. There’s a lot of technical data and inventory information. We want to see where to concentrate our resources; the encryption takes quite a while to get through.”

“This block here is email,” said Jennifer. “Look at the structure. Tell them to look for the dates and times.”

“Why?” asked Rubeo.

“Maybe they’re instructions on when to do something, like launch an attack.”

“They may just be love notes,” said Rubeo, scowling.

Even though he meant it as one of his acerbic remarks, the idea stung Jennifer.

“Maybe,” she said, looking over to the screen where the decryptions were appearing.

Zen had Hawk Four posted to the north, ready to intercept the ghost clone if it got off. He swung Hawk Three down, readying a pass that would take him from bow to stern and give the people back at Dreamland a good view of the ship, which was about forty miles out of the harbor. The Navy destroyers, meanwhile, were still a good hour away to the south.

The E-bomb had successfully wiped out the radios back at the assault zone; Raven’s powerful sensors had not picked up any transmissions from the Dragon Prince. It seemed clear that the ship did not know what was going on; its speed was below ten knots. Except for its normal running lights, the deck and the area where it launched the ghost were dark.

Zen checked his speed, nudging off the throttle slightly as the ship grew in the screen. The HUD ladder notched downward; he dropped through five thousand feet. The Flighthawk engines were relatively quiet, but at this altitude the aircraft could be heard; Zen figured that was a reasonable trade-off for the better images the lower altitude would provide.

As he closed to five miles off the bow, the water on the starboard side of the boat bubbled. His first thought was that the crew aboard the Dragon Prince had thrown the robot aircraft overboard; a few seconds later another geyser appeared on the port side, and Zen finally realized what was going on.

“Submarines,” he said over the Dreamland circuit. “Two of ’em. Those ours?”

Two people started to answer at once, and Dog said something over the interphone circuit. Zen kept Hawk Three on beam, riding in over the tanker.

There were people moving now aboard the ship. Something flashed at the stern — Zen saw a small rubber boat in the water near the bow.

“They’re being boarded,” he said. “The Chinese.”

As soon as the Marines secured the wharf area, Kick took Hawk One over the water. He saw some flotsam where he’d sunk the boat earlier, and one body; as he began to bank for another run, he saw two small speedboats approaching from the distance. The dark, sleek hulls looked like very much like Mark V Special Operations Crafts (also known as SOCs), used to land SEALs.

“Two un-ID’d boats,” he said over the Dreamland circuit. He clicked into one of the frequencies the Marines were using. “I have two unidentified boats approaching from the harbor, moving at twenty-three knots, twenty-four. I want to make sure they’re not ours.”

“I’ll work on it,” interrupted Starship, buzzing in on the interphone circuit. “Take a pass and get some video back for Dreamland.”

“Yeah, good thinking,” said Kick. He pulled the Flighthawk around, accelerating as he set up a pass that would take him across their bows.

Starship hit the keyboard preset and brought up the infrared on the approaching boats. The heat signal from the engines was baffled — these were not pleasure cruisers, and they certainly weren’t Americans.

“I say we nail the mothers,” he told Kick.

“Marines are checking with their captain. What’s Dream Command say?”

“Screw Dreamland,” said Starship. “They’re scientists back there. Get these guys.”

As he finished his sentence, a flare shot from the stern of one of the boats.

Not a flare — a shoulder-launched weapon.

Kick saw the missile’s ignition and knew it was coming for him; as the thought formed in his head another jumped in — scumbag.

A jumble of other thoughts and images came in quick succession, the most important of which was the realization that the missile, fired at his nose, had no chance in hell of hitting him.

“Guns,” he told the computer, activating the gun radar. The screen blinked red — he had the small boat’s midsection fat in the claws of his targeting pipper.

The trigger on the Flighthawk stick had a long run, a precaution against it being fired accidentally. He nailed it all the way down, and a burst of 20mm shells punched a fat hole in the boat’s midsection.

“Get the other mother,” said Starship.

“Yeah, no shit,” said Kick. He tried pirouetting the Flighthawk on her wing but had too much speed to get the right position; he had to nose down and bank around, far out of position and cursing himself for trying to do too much.

Not too much for the plane. He’d seen both Zen and Starship pull that hard a maneuver several times during various flight exercises. He didn’t quite have the right feel for it; he wasn’t really sure where the performance edge was, and maybe hesitated a little as he got near it.

Not a problem, he told himself. He didn’t have to fly like Zen did, or even Starship. His job was to take the boat.

And that could be done very easily.

Starship snickered to himself as Kick tried to get on the second boat in the first pass; it was obvious from the screen that he hadn’t set himself up right for the hard slam downward that it would require to pirouette the Flighthawk back in that direction. Sure enough, Kick had to pull off and get into a wider approach.

Dream Command said something about the boat being ID’d as a Mainland commando group.

They had carte blanche to take it out.

About time, he thought.

“Sink the boats,” said Colonel Bastian, breaking in from Raven. “Take them.”

“Roger that,” said Starship. “We’re on it.”

As he clicked off his mike, he realized he’d covered Kick’s own acknowledgment.

“Sorry about that, roomie,” he muttered as the cannon in the U/MF lit up.

Dog studied the feed on the small video screen as Zen finished his sweep. There was gunfire on the port side and stern of the Dragon Prince; two or more parties of commandos were aboard the ship. Most likely they had launched their operation from some distance away, and then waited for the submarines to close in before going aboard. The effort appeared coordinated with an attack on the Kaohisiung plant; fortunately, Dreamland’s schedule had been a half hour ahead of the Mainlander’s.

Dog had no trouble giving approval to take out the Chinese boats attacking Kaohisiung himself; it was necessary to protect his people and clearly authorized by his governing orders. The situation below, however, was not quite so clear-cut. The Navy destroyers that were supposed to assist had been authorized only to stop the ship, with the minimal amount of force required to make it comply.

Given the circumstances, however, Dog decided he had to take out the clone and the ship or the UAV would fall into communist hands.

“I can pepper the submarines with cannonfire,” Zen told Dog. “Get them to back off until the destroyers get here.”

“Negative, Hawk leader. It’s too late for that. We’re going to sink that ship. Stand off.”

Dog told Delaney to open the bay doors.

“Bays,” said the copilot, who functioned as a weapons officer in the slimmed-down crew structure.

The large rotating bomb rack in the bay of the aircraft spun around, preparing to launch one of the two Harpoon missiles aboard. While the AGM-84 (Block 1D) missile had been developed by the Navy, B-52s had actually carried the tried-and-true antiship missile for more than a decade. A noodge over twelve and a half feet long, the missile carried five hundred pounds of explosives in its nose. Designed as a fire-and-forget weapon that could be launched from at least seventy-five nautical miles away, the Harpoon would duck toward the waves and then skim the surface of the ocean, extremely hard to detect and even harder to stop.

“Ready to launch on your command,” said Delaney.

“Jed Barclay in the Pentagon situation room for you,” interrupted Major Catsman at Dream Command. “You want Channel Two. It’s scrambled.”

“Jed, make it quick,” said Dog as the NSC aide’s face flickered onto the com screen.

“Colonel, we’re monitoring the situation here at the Pentagon.”

“Then you know I have two Chinese submarines taking over the ship that controls the ghost clone,” said Dog, trying in vain to muzzle his anger. “They have to be stopped now.”

“Stand by,” said Jed.

“What the hell?” said Delaney.

The defense secretary came on the line.

“Colonel, we don’t want you to hit the Chinese submarines.”

“Understood,” said Dog. “That’s why we have to strike right away.”

Modern communications technology could be a blessing — he had a team of highly trained experts backing him up halfway across the globe at Dreamland. But it also gave the Washington types unprecedented ability to screw things up.

“We can’t afford collateral damage,” added Chastain.

“Look,” said Dog, his patience nearly gone. “I have about thirty seconds to decide whether to try to sink the tanker or not. If the robot plane is aboard, the communist commandos will grab it.”

“Colonel, we’re on their radar,” said Delaney, breaking in. “This may be some sort of unbriefed fire control radar — the computer is doping it out as an SA-6. Has to be a mistake… ”

The SA-6 was a Russian-made ground-based antiaircraft missile; there was no way it could be aboard the Chinese submarine.

Then again, this wasn’t a particularly good time to be wrong.

“You’re cleared to take down the Dragon Prince,” said the defense secretary.

“Fire the Harpoon,” Dog told his copilot. Then reached to the panel and killed the connection to Dreamland — and the Pentagon. “Missile status?”

“I’ve gone to ECMs. Computer says those subs carry no missiles.”

“Is it on the tanker?”

“Searching.”

“Zen, can you get a look at the decks of those submarines?”

“Roger that,” acknowledged the Flighthawk pilot.

“Watch out for the Harpoon,” warned Delaney. “It’s terminal.”

“No shit,” said Zen.

Zen checked Hawk Four as he banked Three back to- ward the tanker, making sure the computer was doing a good job flying the robot. Systems green, course perfect — he jumped back into Three, zooming in toward the ship. The right side of the tanker flared.

“Harpoon hit,” he told Dog.

“Negative!” said Delaney. “It’s still en route.”

Zen saw the shadow streaking toward the middle of the tanker at the bottom of his screen, then realized what had happened as the tanker exploded.

“I have a launch. The ghost clone is airborne!”

“Take it out,” said Dog.

Jennifer punched the mike button again, trying to tell Zen that she was ready to upload the program. But they’d lost contact with the Megafortress.

Dog had punched it out, she knew, pissed at interference from the Pentagon people.

Just like him to shut off the rest of the world.

She slammed her hand down on the desk counter so hard it stung.

“Damn it,” she shouted. “I want to upload!”

“The telemetry circuits are open,” said Rubeo behind her, his voice soft and calm. “Go ahead. You don’t need to talk to them until the program is ready to run.”

Zen slammed the throttle against the stop, coaxing Hawk Three out past Mach 1. He glanced at the sitrep, making sure Four was positioned in case he couldn’t catch up. C³ began calculating moves to stop the aircraft, its silicone brain prioritizing them according to the likely shootdown percentage.

Catching the clone from behind with Hawk Three rated only fifth on the list, with a 65.3 percent shot.

Zen laughed at the computer.

“You just want all the glory, my friend,” he said, momentarily baffling the verbal instruction interpreter circuits.

The clone had stopped accelerating. Its speed barely touched 200 knots. Zen gained rapidly and the targeting cue went to yellow as he started to close. But he had too much altitude and had to tug downward to get a better shot; his real danger was overshooting his target. One of the Elint operators upstairs started to tell him something, but just then the pipper went to red; Zen lit his cannon, riding a stream of hot lead down into the delta-winged aircraft.

The clone shot left, zigging desperately out of the way. But it was already too late for the robot; the right wing had been hit in three places and now cracked under the pressure of the turn. A large hunk of metal separated as the UAV jerked back north; before Zen could squeeze his trigger again, the airplane exploded in a red fireball.

Dog was too busy getting the Megafortress north to keep up with the U/MFs so he didn’t see the Harpoon’s strike on the tanker. He heard his copilot’s “Wha-hoo,” however, along with his more sober and professional “Good splash” pronouncement a few seconds later. By then, Zen had taken out the ghost clone, which collapsed into the water in its own fireball.

“See if the experts back home can figure out if there was a bomb on it,” Dog told Zen.

“Lost my link,” said Zen.

Dog reached to the buttons and keyed it back, feeling somewhat sheepish. A cacophony of voices flooded into his ears over the circuit.

“We’re talking first,” he said, trying to clear the line and the confusion. “Splash one ghost clone. We have a good hit on the tanker, Dragon Prince. Returning to assess the damage now.”

“Was the bomb aboard the UAV?” asked Catsman, back in Dream Command.

“We’re looking for your assessment,” said Dog.

He noticed that the Pentagon people were quiet. He’d undoubtedly have to deal with them later. They would not be pleased that he had killed the link.

So be it.

“Colonel, this is Danny Freah.”

“Go ahead, Danny. How are we?”

“We have complete possession of the site. There are no nukes in Building Two or Building One. Repeat, we have found no devices.”

“None? Did they have a bomb or not?”

“They do,” said Stoner. “It must have been moved.”

“It’s possible it was aboard the ship already. We’ve just sent it and the ghost clone to the bottom,” said Dog.

“I say we keep looking here,” said Stoner.

“Authorities are approaching the gate,” said Danny.

“Hold them off until you’ve completed a thorough search,” said Dog. “Look under every pile of garbage there.”

“That may take some time.”

“Understood.”

Chen Lo Fann strapped himself into the first officer’s seat of Island Flight A101, pulling on the headset. He had come from checking with Professor Ai in the back, making sure that the big jet was ready.

Discovering that the Americans had placed bugging devices in the hangar of his grandfather’s 767-200ER had caused him to move up his plans. But otherwise it had not complicated things too badly — his grandfather had apparently foreseen the possibility that the first plane would be discovered, and so had prepared a nearly identical 767 with the necessary launch and control apparatus, storing it in Hualin. Chen Lee must have suspected something himself, since he had ordered the UAV and the weapon moved from Taipei twenty-four hours before. Most likely he was only concerned about the possibility that security would be increased at the international airport when the president took off, but it was a fortuitous move.

Fate favored his plan. It was a sign that Chen Lo Fann had made the right decision to honor his grandfather’s wishes and fulfill his duty and destiny.

The only difficulty to be overcome was the length of the runway here. At roughly three thousand meters, it could not be called short. Nonetheless, it did present a challenge to the 767, which was not only fully loaded with fuel but had to take off with the UAV under its wing. Chen Lo Fann could not have gotten the plane up himself, and was only too glad to follow the exact command of the pilot in the captain’s seat as they completed their checklist and prepared to taxi to the runway.

Chen’s grandfather had disguised the aircraft well. It was a “combi” or combination passenger-cargo carrier; fake windows lined the fuselage, complete with lighting that helped simulate passengers moving around inside. The plane’s path from the hangar was obscured from the tower; the presence of the UAV under the wing could not be detected until it was off.

And then it would be too late.

The tower granted clearance. Chen Lo Fann took a long breath. The plane turned from the ramp.

“Ready?” asked the captain.

“Absolutely,” replied Chen, and the 767 began rumbling down the runway.