Able One

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Hank Barstow frowned at the blank screen of his GPS box. Rolling down Interstate 75 at nearly eighty miles per hour, he was looking forward to making a breakfast stop at the Sticky Fingers restaurant a couple of his trucker pals had told him about. Food’s not all that much, they’d said, but there’s this really stacked blonde waitress…

But he needed the doggone GPS to find his way through the streets of Chattanooga and get to the restaurant. Hank had been through Chattanooga plenty of times on his runs down I-75 to Tampa. But this time he had to get off the highway and find that blonde.

And the GPS was dead. Hank pounded a big fist on the gray box mounted on his cab’s dashboard. Didn’t do any good. The doggone screen stayed blank.

A sign whizzed by: TRUCK STOP FIVE MILES AHEAD. I’ll pull in there and dig the road atlas out of the pile in back, he decided.

To Hank’s surprise, the truck stop was filled with tractor-trailer rigs. Unusual for this time of the morning. Drivers were standing around their rigs, a lot of them talking into cell phones. He found a spot out on the grass, parked his rig, and killed the engine.

As he climbed down from the cab he heard a familiar voice yell, “You too, Hank?”

Turning as he stepped onto the grass, he saw one of his old buddies, Phil Camerata, heavy with belly fat, face stubbled, plodding up toward him.

“Me too what, Phil?” Hank asked.

“GPS dead?”

“Yeah? How’d you know?”

Waving at the jam-packed parking area, Camerata said, “Everybody’s GPS is down. Whole GPS system is out.”

“Everybody’s?” Automatically, Hank fished in the pocket of his jeans for his cell phone.

Shaking his grizzled head, Camerata said, “Lotsa luck, buddy. Looks like most of the cell phones are out, too.”

In Manhattan the air was filled with the bleating horns of thousands of taxicabs, trucks, cars, and buses, like a rising chorus of wailing lost souls. .

The automated tollbooths in all the city’s bridges and tunnels had abruptly shut down, piling cars in long lines behind their unmoving barrier arms. Even in the subway tunnels automated MetroCard dispensers had gone dead.

Drivers leaned on their horns in maddened frustration. The streets and avenues were choked with honking, steaming vehicles whose sweating, puzzled, cursing drivers stared at the traffic lights, which had all gone blank.

Gridlock, all across Manhattan and rapidly spreading through the other boroughs. The helpless bleat of thousands of taxi, automobile, truck, and bus horns filled the air all across New York’s crowded, choked streets.

Gordon Hathaway swiped his Visa card through the slot in the taxicab’s bulletproof window, scribbled his signature on the strip of paper that came stuttering out of the chugging machine, then ducked out of the cab while the driver sat in sullen silence. Some sort of Asian, Hathaway thought: the driver was swathed in a white turban and had a deeply black curly beard.

Lower Broadway was a total bedlam of gridlock, cabs and trucks and city buses sitting unmoving, horns blaring insanely, drivers and radiators fuming. Do better on foot, Hathaway told himself as he headed down toward Wall Street.

Fifteen minutes later he was panting from the unusual exertion, his three-piece suit rumpled, his brand-new shirt soaked with perspiration. When he finally got to the lobby of the building where his brokerage firm was quartered, he saw a crowd of his fellow brokers milling about in dazed confusion.

“You hoofed it out here for nothing,” one of his buddies told him as Hathaway tried to push through the throng to the elevators. “The office’s closed.”

“Closed?”

“Whole damned market’s closed. All the computers are down. Nothing’s going to happen today, Gordo.”

Hathaway’s jaw dropped open.

“The New York Stock Exchange is closed? I can’t believe it!”

“Believe it,” said his buddy sourly.

In Boston’s Children’s Hospital the head of the surgical team gaped at the suddenly blank display screen, his blue eyes above his surgical mask going so wide you could see white all around the irises. “What happened?” he whispered harshly.

His chief nurse shook her head. “The screen’s gone out.”

“I can see that!” Louder, snarling.

One of the assistant surgeons said needlessly, “The patient’s open.”

The baby on the surgical table was only three weeks old. She was undergoing surgery to correct an aneurysm in her aorta that threatened to kill her before she’d seen one month of life.

“Get the screen back up!” the head of surgery demanded of no one in particular, of everyone in the surgical theater.

The actual surgery was being performed remotely, over an electronic link, by a surgeon in Minneapolis who was recognized around the world as the best and most experienced man for this particular procedure. But the link had abruptly shut down in the middle of the operation.

“Get it back up!” the head of surgery shouted again.

“We’re trying,” said the computer technician from her console off in a corner of the surgery theater. She was almost in tears.

“The patient. . .” said one of the nurses.

With a growl that was almost feral, the head of surgery said, “I’ll have to finish this myself, goddammit to hell.”

He was a very good surgeon, but not good enough. The infant died on the table, four days short of her first month of life.

In the headquarters of Travis Broadcasting Systems, in Atlanta, Herman Scott blinked unbelievingly at the wall full of monitor screens. Seven—no, eight—of the thirty had crapped out. Make it ten. In stunned amazement he watched as, one after another, the remaining twenty screens broke into hissing snowy static and then went dead gray.

The big electronic map that covered one entire wall of the monitoring center froze. Every last one of the pinpoint lights that showed where the satellites were in their orbits winked out.

We can’t have all thirty satellites going down at once, Scott said to himself, trying to remain calm. Must be a power failure here in the building.

But the big map was still lit, and a glance at the lights and gauges of his console told him that electrical power was normal, and the backup power system was in the green too.

A couple of the other engineers were getting up from their consoles, confusion and outright fear on their faces.

“What’s going on?” one of them asked.

As if I know, Scott said to himself.

“How can all thirty birds go down at once?”

Something very bad is happening here, Scott realized. Something terrible.

His console phone buzzed. Picking it up automatically, his eyes still on the dead screens, Scott heard the angry voice of the news bureau’s chief:

“We’re off the air! How the fuck can we be off the air in the middle of the sports report?”

In London, Sir Mallory Hyde-Grosvener was pacing up and down his office, desperately trying to get a phone connection to Singapore. He had pulled off his tweed jacket ten minutes earlier, crumpled it into a ball, and thrown it with main force against the wall where the portrait of his grandfather hung watching him with hard unblinking eyes. Through his office window he could see chaos on the floor of the market, absolute chaos. All the boards were down; where up-to-the-second market numbers should be flashing there was nothing but dead darkness. Every bloody man on the floor had a telephone jammed to his ear, red-faced and screaming.

Sweating, his impeccable gray tie pulled loose from his collar, he bellowed into his own dead phone while his grandfather’s image frowned sternly at him.

Colonel Brady Desilva was also sweating heavily as he sat in the command center at NORAD headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.

“They’re all out?” he asked, his voice already hoarse from yelling at his staff officers.

Captain Nomura nodded. “Almost, sir. Four commsats are still on the air, but they’re in and out. Sputtering, kind of.”

“Sputtering,” DeSilva echoed darkly.

Nomura was normally unflappable. But even his usually deadpan face was sheened with perspiration, his dark eyes blinking nervously.

“The milsats are okay, mostly, sir,” the captain said. “But the commercial birds have gone dead, just about all of them.”

“Half our communications traffic goes through those commercial satellites,” DeSilva muttered.

“The early-warning system is functional,” said the captain, trying to sound cheerful. “If anybody tries to attack us while the commercial birds are down, we’ll spot them right off.”

DeSilva growled at his aide. “And how the hell will we get the warning out? Carrier pigeons?”

General “Bernie” Bernard had been holding the phone to his ear for so long he felt as if it had taken root in his skull. He was pacing behind his desk, too edgy to sit.

To his credit, he and his staff at Space Command headquarters had not panicked when the satellite communications system started to break down. But he was scared; for the first time in his life, this former B-52 pilot who had flown combat missions over Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan was scared.

At last a voice crackled, “The President is coming on the line now.”

A click. Oh shit, Bernard thought. It’s gone dead again.

But then a crisp voice said, “General Bernard.” Bernard automatically stiffened to attention. “Mr. President.”

“What’s going on?”

“All the commercial satellites over this hemisphere have gone dark, sir.”

“I know that. What about—”

“The birds orbiting over the other side of the planet are degrading rapidly. They’re dying, one by one.”

“Jesus.”

“As you know, sir, yesterday we tracked an unannounced rocket launch from North Korea. We went on alert, but the bird went into a geosynchronous orbit, twenty-two thousand miles up. It was a satellite, not a missile.”

“So?” the President demanded.

“Three hours ago there was a nuclear detonation at geosynch altitude. The electromagnetic pulse from the explosion knocked out almost all the unhardened satellites over our half of the globe.”

“The communications satellites?”

“Commsats, yessir. Weather satellites too. Landsats, ocean surveillance—they’re all down, sir.”

“But your military satellites are protected, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir. Most of them. A few of the older ones have gone dark, but the others seem to be holding up. So far.”

“Our military communications, the early-warning satellites, they’re all okay, aren’t they?” “For the most part, sir.”

A heartbeat’s pause. Then, “What do you mean, ‘for the most part’?”

General Bernard replied, “Sir, our communications needs have grown a lot faster than our milsats can support. The Department of Defense has been using commercial commsats for almost half its day-to-day traffic.”

“And now those commsats are down.”

“Yes, sir.”

Again a pause. Then the President asked, “What about satellites on the other side of the world? Over Russia, China?”

“They’re degrading, sir. It’s not just the EMP that kills ‘em. The nuke puts out a big cloud of energetic particles, too: high-energy electrons, protons. They bounce around along Earth’s magnetic field lines like Ping-Pong balls. Those particles can kill unhardened satellites, too.”

“So what you’re telling me is that we’re back to 1950, as far as telephone communications are concerned.”

“Television, too, sir. Computer networks. Anything that uses satellites to relay information or data. All kaput.”

For several long moments the President said nothing. Then he asked, “Is this the first strike in a war, General?”

General Bernard hesitated, then answered, “It’s a good way to start a war, sir. Pearl Harbor, in orbit.”

Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska

Harry Hartunian was having the same nightmare again.

He was at the test center out in the desert, standing in the control room as the team powered up the big laser. Through the thick safety glass of the observation window he could see the jumble of tubes and wires, the stainless steel vat that held the iodine, the frosted tank that contained the liquid oxygen, the complex of mirrors and lenses at the output point where more than a million watts of invisible energy would lance across the desert floor to the target, half a mile away.

Five technicians were at their posts, but Pete Quintana was out beside the optical bench on the other side of the observation window, right in the middle of the laser assembly. Pete was worried about the effect of the rig’s vibration on the sensitive optical setup. Quintana.

“Iodine pressure on the button,” one of the technicians in the control room called out.

Don’t pressurize the oxy line, Harry warned. In his nightmare he tried to say the words out loud, but not a sound came out of his mouth. The tech was sitting five feet away from him, but he couldn’t make him hear his warning.

“Electrical power ramping up,” another technician said.

“Optical bench ready.”

“Atmospheric instability nominal.”

“Adaptive optics on.”

“Iodine flow in ten seconds.”

“Oxygen flow in eight seconds.”

Don’t pressurize the oxy line, Harry tried to scream. But he couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but watch them go through the same disaster again.

“Pressurizing iodine.”

“Pressurizing oxy.”

“No!” Harry screeched.

The explosion knocked him against the back wall of the control room, shattering his ribs against the gauges mounted on the concrete. Pain roared through Harry as the laser blew up in a spectacular blast that knocked the roof off the test shed. The heat from the oxygen-fed fire poured through the safety glass of the observation window, hot enough to melt the gauges on the back wall.

Pete Quintana was enveloped in the flames, screaming, gibbering, flailing in agony. Harry tried to reach out to him but his own pain was so intense that he blacked out.

“Rise and shine, Harry!”

Hartunian blinked awake. The room was dark, but somebody was flicking a flashlight beam in his eyes.

Harry was drenched with sweat, gasping for breath.

“You were yelling in your sleep, pal.” Monk Delany. Harry recognized his voice and dimly made out the outline of his heavy, bearlike body in the darkness of the strange bedroom. Elmendorf Air Force Base, Harry remembered. We’re in Alaska.

“C’mon, buddy, we’re gonna miss breakfast if you don’t get going.”

Harry didn’t mind the flashlight glaring in his eyes. It was Monk’s chipper, cheerful tone that irked him. Can’t be more than four o’clock in the friggin’ morning, Harry thought, and Monk’s as jolly as a goddamned Santa Claus.

“Come on, Harry,” Delany coaxed, flicking the flashlight beam back and forth across Harry’s face again. “Rise and shine.”

“Go ‘way!”

Delany laughed. “You gotta get up, Harry. Time’s a-wasting.”

With a groan, Harry sat up, blinking, rubbing his stubbled jaw. Reluctantly he switched on the bedside lamp.

“What time is it?”

“Nearly six.”

Squinting at the room’s only window, Hartunian said, “Christ, it’s still dark.”

“Alaska, buddy. We’re not in sunny California anymore.”

“Tell me about it.”

Hartunian swung his legs out of the bed and stood up, shivering slightly in his boxers and undershirt. His back ached dully. He was a short, round-shouldered man with baby-fine thin dark hair that flew into disarray at the slightest puff of breeze. His midsection showed a distinct middle-aged bulge. He hadn’t come to Alaska willingly.

You’re the program engineer now, Harry, Victor Anson had told him. Wherever that plane goes, you go. We need you to make that damned laser work. Harry. Forget the accident. Just make it work. The company’s ass is on the line. We’re all depending on you.

“Okay,” he said to Delany, “I’m up. Go on down to the restaurant—”

“Mess hall,” Delany corrected.

“Whatever. I’ll meet you down there in ten minutes.”

Delany was several inches taller than Hartunian and outweighed him by more than thirty pounds. His hair was dark and thick, but despite his formidable appearance his normal facial expression was a genial, lopsided smile. He was already dressed in his white coveralls with the Anson Aerospace Corporation logo on its chest and back.

“You know how to find the mess hall?”

“I’ll find it,” Harry said, reaching for his bathrobe.

“Ten minutes.” Delany went to the door. He turned back, though, and advised, “Wear the heavy coat. October out here can be pretty damned chilly.”

“Where’s your coat?”

Delany flashed a grin. “I never feel the cold.”

Blubber, Harry thought sourly.

It was cold outside, he discovered. Cold and still dark, although the sky was lightening enough in the east to silhouette the rugged snowcapped mountains. Despite his brand-new goose-down-lined parka Harry’s back twinged from the cold. Psychosomatic, the doctors had claimed. Your ribs have healed and there’s nothing wrong with your spine. Still, ever since the accident, Harry’s back ached.

If I’d stayed in California like a sane man, Harry thought, I could’ve gone to the beach today.

Yeah, a sardonic voice in his head replied. And you’d have Sylvia and her lawyers pounding on your door, trying to get you to sign the damned divorce papers.

With a shake of his head, Harry looked around for the mess hall. He’d arrived at Elmendorf Air Force Base the previous afternoon, and most of the buildings in the sprawling facility looked pretty much alike to him. Last night, though, before going to sleep in the room they’d assigned him and Delany to share in the Bachelor Officers quarters, Harry had checked the route from the BOQ to the mess hall and put it into his cell phone’s memory. Now he pulled the phone from his pants pocket to orient himself.

Damn! The phone was dead. No, he saw, it was getting power from the battery. But the screen said NO CONNECTION.

Harry looked up. A young airman was walking along the bricked pathway toward him.

“Hey . . . Sergeant,” Harry said, noting the stripes on his jacket sleeve.

“Can I help you, sir?”

Feeling sheepish, Hartunian admitted, “I’m kind of lost.”

The sergeant directed him down the street one block and then to the first right. “You can’t miss it,” he added cheerily.

Harry, who had been raised in the tangled suburbs of Boston, thought of all the “you can’t miss it” locations he’d missed. But he went to the corner and turned right.

And there was the mess hall, with dozens of men and women streaming into it. Most of them in uniform.

But what caught his attention was down at the end of the street, where a little Day-Glo orange tractor was towing ABL-1 out of its hangar. Harry gaped. The sight of the big 747, all white, never failed to awe him. It was an immense airplane with that graceful hump up front and the huge raked-back tail towering over the other planes parked in front of the hangars. Somehow she looked dignified to Harry, regal, like royalty as she grandly allowed herself to be slowly rolled out onto the tarmac.

Make it work, Harry, Victor Anson had told him. The company’s ass is on the line.

Sunshine Airways Flight 19

Jerry Jarusulski frowned as he sat at the controls of the Airbus A350 XWB. Halfway between Hawaii and California, he grumbled to himself, and the nav system craps out.

Through the cockpit’s windshield he could see nothing but cloud-dotted ocean, steely gray and rippled with waves. Not a ship in sight. No land for another thousand klicks or more. “Anything?” he asked his copilot. “Not a peep, JJ,” said Pete Jacobson. “Every damned freak is out. I’m getting some commercial stations, L.A. and ‘Frisco. But all the air control frequencies are off.”

“What the hell’s happened to them?” “Something weird,” the copilot said. “Well, we’ll reach the California coast in another couple of hours. We can go to VFR then.”

Jacobson nodded, but he looked doubtful. Jarusulski shared his worries. Flying a big-ass jet airliner on visual wasn’t going to be easy, he knew. Always a helluva lot of traffic at LAX. And the last weather report they got predicted rain. Those guys in the tower better have their systems working if they expect me to bring this bird down. What a time for the navigation satellite system to go kablooey.

Jacobson started chuckling softly.

“What’s so goddamned funny?” Jarusulski growled.

“It’s like that old joke, the one about good news and bad news.”

Yeah?

“You know. The pilot gets on the intercom and tells the passengers, ‘I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that we’re lost. I don’t know where the hell we are. The good news is we’ve got a tail wind and we’re making good time.’ ”

Jarusulski didn’t laugh. He was thinking about trying to land this jumbo bird in the rain. LAX better have its comm systems working, he said to himself. If they don’t, we’re toast. Burnt toast.

The Oval Office

The Oval Office was crowded.

Hunching forward in the padded chair behind his gleaming broad desk, the President muttered, “From North Korea,” his lean face bleak, his voice ominous.

In a shallow semicircle in front of the desk sat the Secretaries of Defense and State, the National Security Advisor, the director of Homeland Security and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Off to one side of the room the President’s chief of staff sat on one of the striped sofas in front of the empty fireplace, his hands clasped tensely on his knees. Half a dozen aides were back there, too.

“Pyongyang has been on the wire with us for three hours now,” said the Secretary of State. Her normally cool demeanor was gone; she looked just as worried—almost frightened—as the rest of the people in the Oval Office.

“They’re pissing themselves, they’re so scared,” the National Security Advisor added, with a grim smile. A former admiral, he still looked as if he were in uniform, despite his light gray hand-tailored three-piece suit. His silver hair was tousled, though; he’d been running his hands through it since this meeting had begun.

Frowning slightly at him, the Secretary of State said, “The North Korean government is begging us to show some restraint—”

“Restraint?” the President snapped. “They’ve attacked us!”

State raised a brow. “‘Someone has attacked not only us but the whole civilized world. It’s not just our satellites that have been wiped out. But Pyongyang says it wasn’t them.”

“That missile came from North Korea,” said the Secretary of Defense in his heavy, rasping voice. “We traced its launch and its orbital track.”

“But it wasn’t launched from one of their regular launching bases,” State insisted. “Pyongyang assures us that the North Korean government did not authorize the launch or the detonation of that bomb in orbit.”

“What difference does that make?” the President growled. “It came from their territory. It’s knocked out just about every satellite in orbit.”

“Except for our hardened birds,” Defense pointed out. He was the oldest man in the room, a former longtime senator, bald and jowly. He and the Secretary of State had been senators together and rivals for the nomination that the man behind the desk had won.

State raised a manicured hand. “Wait a minute. Since Kim Jong Il died last year North Korea’s been in turmoil, practically civil war.”

“Their military took control of the government,” the National Security Advisor said.

“Yes,” State agreed, “but there are factions within the military. One of the rebel factions must have fired that missile.”

“What difference does that make?”

“Pyongyang tells us they’re sending troops to the site where the missile was launched. They’re asking us to allow them to solve the problem by themselves.”

“Won’t wash,” said the Security Advisor.

“Are you saying we should send in our own troops?” the President asked.

“Or hit that launch site with an air strike?” State added.

The Security Advisor turned slightly toward the oversized television screen mounted on the wall between portraits of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. Without asking the President’s permission, he half rose from his chair and reached for the remote control unit on the desk.

The wall screen flickered, then showed a satellite image of rugged, mountainous country. Snowpacks covered many of the peaks; from orbit they looked like bony white fingers stretching across the bare brown mountains.

“NRO satellite imagery, two hours old,” said the Security Advisor. “That’s the area where the missile came from.”

The view zoomed in dizzyingly, then steadied to show a leveled area of ground where a dozen brown military trucks were parked in a ragged circle. At the center of the circle two missiles were standing on portable launch pads. A third pad was empty.

“That’s where the missile was launched,” said the Security Advisor. “As you can see, they have two more ready to go.”

The President sagged back in his chair. “They’re armed with nukes?”

“We’ve got to assume that they are.”

“Hit them now!” the Secretary of Defense urged. “I can get a submarine within range in a few hours. Wipe them out with one missile.”

The President’s eyes never left the image on the screen. “In a few hours they could launch both those missiles.”

“What’s their range?” asked Defense. “Could they hit us?”

The CIA director said, “Our people have identified them as Taepodong-2s. From where they’re sited now they could reach Alaska or Hawaii.”

“The West Coast?” asked the President.

“No, that’s a bit beyond their range.”

The President smiled weakly. “Good. I’m scheduled to give a speech in San Francisco tonight.”

“But they could hit Japan,” said the Security Advisor.

“The Japanese will go apeshit when they see this,”

Defense rumbled, almost as if he was enjoying the thought.

CIA pointed out, “You remember a couple of years ago North Korea launched a whole series of missiles across the Pacific and we didn’t do anything about it.”

“Those were just tests,” said the President.

“Yes, and now they put a bird into orbit. We’ve got to assume those other two missiles they’ve got on their pads won’t be tests, either. They could hit Hawaii, the Philippines, even northern Australia.”

“Screw Australia,” the Defense Secretary snapped. “They could wipe out Honolulu! We’ve got to take them out!” Banging a fist on the arm of his chair, Defense insisted, “We’ve got to!”

“And start World War III?” the Secretary of State countered. “How do you think the Chinese would react if we hit North Korea?”

“Hell, their satellites have been knocked out, too.”

The President asked, “What do the Chinese have to say about this?”

State hesitated a fraction of a moment, then replied, “It’s been difficult communicating with them. The satellites are down and we don’t have a direct cable link with Beijing.”

“They’re being inscrutable, I bet,” said Defense, allowing himself a tight smile.

“They have a fleet of nuclear missiles with the range to reach every city in the United States,” the Secretary of State said firmly.

The CIA director spoke up again. “Do we want to take the risk of starting World War III? A nuclear war?”

“I do not,” said the President.

“But those missiles,” the Security Advisor said, jabbing an accusing finger at the wall screen. “They’re going to fire them. And soon, before Pyongyang’s troops can reach the site.”

Turning to the Homeland Security director, the President said, “How soon can you get Hawaii and Alaska alerted?”

Homeland Security looked startled. He had formerly been the head of one of the nation’s largest construction companies, known to the media as a can-do kind of executive who wasn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty.

“We’re talking about evacuating Honolulu?” he asked.

“And Anchorage, maybe Juneau.”

“On a half hour’s notice,” added Defense.

The former construction executive shook his head. “We’d have to start right now.”

“That’s going to cause quite a panic,” State pointed out.

“But you can’t evacuate a city the size of Honolulu in half an hour!” Homeland Security said, almost pleading. “You’ve got to start right away. Now.”

“Wait a minute,” the President said. “What about our missile defense system?”

All eyes turned to the Secretary of Defense, who shifted uneasily in his chair. He and the President had cut funding for missile defense every year they’d been in office.

“Um… the system’s still in a test and evaluation stage.” Defense temporized.

“I was told it was operational,” said the President.

“It was declared operational...” Defense let the implications hang in the air.

“You mean we couldn’t shoot down those missiles if the North Koreans launch them?”

“When they launch them,” the Security Advisor corrected.

“Can we shoot them down or can’t we?” the President demanded.

Defense answered with a shrug and said, “We can try. But we certainly couldn’t stop a full-scale Chinese attack.”

“There’s the Russians, too,” the CIA director pointed out.

The President raised both hands, silencing them all.

After a moment’s thought, he said, “We will activate our missile defense system. And alert our own retaliatory forces: missiles, submarines, and the manned bombers.”

“Defense Readiness Condition Three?” asked Defense.

“DefCon One,” said the President. “Let’s not waste time on this. Full alert, everybody ready to go.”

Before anyone could object, the President turned to the Secretary of State. “Let Beijing and Moscow know our moves are strictly defensive. Tell Tokyo what’s going on. Maybe they’ll want to attack that missile site. That way we could keep our hands clean.”

“I wouldn’t depend on that,” the Security Advisor muttered.

The President went on, “But we will not make an attack on North Korea. Not yet. We’ll give Pyongyang the opportunity to clean their own house. Our moves will be strictly defensive.”

“And when those two nukes are launched?” asked the Security Advisor.

“We’ll hope to hell we can shoot them down,” the President replied. “And if we can’t, if they hit an American city, we’ll blow those fuckers off the face of the earth.”

Dead silence in the Oval Office.

Then the Secretary of Defense muttered, “Maybe we ought to get the chaplain in here.” The President glowered at him.

They rose and left the Oval Office, all except the chief of staff, who got up from the couch by the fireplace and settled in one of the emptied chairs in front of the President’s desk.

“It’s a mess, Norm, isn’t it?” said the President.

“Yeah, but I think you’re doing the right thing.”

The President shook his head. “I wonder. Why’d they knock out all the satellites?”

“Economic terrorism. Wall Street’s shut down. Markets all over the world have closed.”

“Damn. I’ll have to work this into tonight’s speech.”

“In San Francisco? You’re still going?”

“I won’t cancel it,” the President said. Then, rubbing at the bridge of his nose, he added, “My wife wanted to go with me, but I told her I’d only be there for a few hours.”

“The First Lady will be safer here,” the chief of staff agreed. “You would be, too, you know.”

“No, I’ve got to go,” the President said. “There’s enough panic out there, with all the satellites out. My job is to show the people that everything’s under control.”

“Even when it isn’t?”

The President flashed his famous grin. “Especially when it isn’t, Norm. Especially when it isn’t.”

Missile defense basics

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has developed a research, development, and test program focusing on a layered defense system based on the three phases of a ballistic missile’s trajectory: boost, midcourse, and terminal.

Boost Phase Defense

The boost phase is the part of the missile flight from launch until its rocket engines are exhausted and it stops accelerating under its own power. Typically, the boost phase ends at altitudes of 300 miles or less, and within the first 3 to 5 minutes of flight. During this phase, the rocket is climbing against Earth’s gravity.

Intercepting a missile in its boost phase is the ideal solution. We can defend a large area of the globe and prevent midcourse decoys from being deployed by destroying the missile early in its flight. Of the boost phase defenses, the Airborne Laser (ABL) is the most mature.

Midcourse Phase Defense

The midcourse phase of a ballistic missile trajectory allows the longest window of opportunity to intercept an incoming missile: up to 20 minutes. This is the part of the missile’s flight where its engines have stopped thrusting so it follows a more predictable coasting path. The midcourse interceptor and a variety of radars and other sensors have a longer time to track and engage the target compared to boost and terminal interceptors. Also, more than one interceptor can be launched to ensure a successful hit.

A downside to the longer intercept window is that the attacker has an opportunity to deploy countermeasures against a defensive system. The warhead and decoys are detached from the spent rocket stages during the midcourse phase. However, the interceptor and other sensors have more time to observe and discriminate countermeasures from the warhead. The midcourse defense segment has ground-and sea-based elements, including the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) and the sea-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (Aegis BMD).

Unlike the Airborne Laser, which fires a beam of light energy to destroy the missile, the midcourse and terminal phase systems employ smaller, high-velocity missiles to strike the incoming warhead; this is known as the “kinetic kill” method.

Terminal Phase Defense

A missile enters the terminal phase when the warhead falls back into the atmosphere. This phase generally lasts from 30 seconds to one minute.

The primary elements in the terminal defense segment are:

Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), which will destroy a ballistic missile’s warhead as it transitions from the midcourse to the terminal phase of its trajectory. THAAD consists of four principle components: truck-mounted launchers; interceptor missiles; radars; and command, control, and battle management (C²BM). The system has rapid mobility so that it can be airlifted to almost anywhere in the world within hours.

Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC-3), the most mature element of the ballistic missile defense system. Built on previous Patriot air and missile defense infrastructure, PAC-3 missiles were deployed to Southwest Asia as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

Arrow, a joint effort between the United States and Israel, provides Israel with a capability to defend its borders and U.S. troops deployed in the region against short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. The system became operational in 2000.

Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS), a co-developmental program with Germany and Italy to develop an air and missile defense system that is mobile and transportable. Using the combat-proven PAC-3 as a platform, MEADS’ role in ballistic missile defense is to bridge the gap between man-portable systems like the Stinger shoulder-fired missile and the higher levels of the ballistic missile defense system, such as the THAAD system.

Missile Defense Agency

Overview and BMD Basics

Elmendorf Air Force Base

The mess hall was big and crowded, but not as noisy as Harry expected from the size of the place. The rest of his laser team was finishing up their breakfast by the time Harry worked his way down the counter and carried his tray to their table. He could spot them from across the cafeteria by their white Anson Aerospace coveralls, like a cluster of ice floes in a sea of Air Force blue.

“She’s hot, I tell you,” Wally Rosenberg was saying as Harry dragged a chair from the next table and sat down between him and Taki Nakamura.

“What do you think, boss?” Angie Reyes asked. He was a chemical technician, in charge of the volatile mix of iodine and oxygen that powered the big laser. Reyes was a wiry bantam cock of a guy, short, slim, dark-haired. He had replaced Pete Quintana; Rosenberg kidded that the company’s management wanted to keep its quota of Hispanics on the project.

“Think about what?” Harry asked, taking his English muffin and mug of coffee off the tray.

“Our new pilot,” Rosenberg answered. A chemical engineer, Rosenberg always had a sly grin on his long, horsey face. “I say she’s hot.”

Taki Nakamura, the only woman in the team, made a mock scowl at Rosenberg. “You say every woman you see is hot.”

“Not you, Tiki-Taki,” Rosenberg shot back.

“You’d better not. Unless you want your nose stuffed up your butt.”

“Kung fu engineer,” Monk Delany cracked. Everybody laughed, even Rosenberg.

“Colonel Christopher?” Harry replied to Rosenberg’s question. “I just met her last night, same as you guys. I guess she’s good-looking, all right.”

“Well, you’re an eligible bachelor, aintcha?” Rosenberg said, his grin turning into a smirk.

“I’m still a married man,” Harry said. “We’re separated; we’re not divorced yet.”

Delany shook his head. “When are you gonna bite the bullet, Harry? Go through with the divorce, pal. Get on with your life.”

Harry said nothing.

Nakamura asked, “Is the colonel married?”

“Nope,” Rosenberg answered. “I Googled her. She’s in hot water with the Air Force, as a matter of fact. They caught her sleeping with a married guy—some general, no less.”

“Your kind of woman,” Delany said.

“Yeah. A slut,” added Reyes.

Harry decided the banter had gone far enough. “We’ve got work to do. Let’s get moving.”

As they carried their trays to the disposal area, Taki asked, “Did any of you see the northern lights out there? They’re spectacular!”

Delany said, “So that’s what it was! I caught a glimpse just before the sun came up. Then they faded out. I was wondering what those lights were.”

“Well, shit, we are in Alaska,” Rosenberg said.

Nakamura shook her head. “They were awful bright. Must be some big flare on the sun to work them up like that. Or something.”

Standing in front of the desk in the cubbyhole of an office that the base commander had given her, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Christopher was not in a happy mood. Bad enough to be exiled to this godforsaken dump in Alaska. Even worse to push the regular pilot of this oversized bus out of his job and into the right-hand seat. He’s already pissed off at me. Now they’ve stuck me with a navigator who’s so inexperienced he looks like a skinny high school kid who’s snuck into Air Force blues.

Her navigator, Lieutenant Eustis Sharmon, was tall, quite lean, with skin the color of dark chocolate. He was standing at attention before Colonel Christopher, who stood a full head shorter than him. Sharmon looked uncomfortable; Christopher felt grouchy.

But as she looked up at Sharmon’s young face and troubled, red-rimmed eyes, Colonel Christopher said to herself, It’s not his fault. The brass assigned him to me and he’s stuck with the job. Just like I’m stuck with driving this clunker of an airplane.

“Take it easy, Lieutenant,” she said, trying to put some warmth into it. She extended her hand. “Welcome on board.”

Sharmon loosened up a little. “Thanks, Colonel,” he mumbled.

Christopher perched on the edge of the desk and gestured to the chair against the wall. “Have a seat. Relax.”

The lieutenant settled into the chair like a carpenter’s ruler folding up, big hands on his knees.

“I bet you played basketball,” Colonel Christopher said, trying to smile.

“No, ma’am. Track. Ran the distance events.”

Her brows rose. “Marathon?”

Shannon smiled for the first time. It was a good, bright smile. “Did the marathon once. Once was enough.”

She laughed. “Well, what we’re doing here is easier than a marathon.” “Racetrack, they told me.”

Nodding. “That’s right. We take the bird out to a designated test area over the ocean, then fly a figure eight while the tech geniuses downstairs get their laser working. Piece of cake.”

But in her mind she was thinking of the missions she had flown over Afghanistan: twelve-thousand-kilometer distances, midair refuelings, full stealth mode, pinpoint delivery of smart bombs. Going from flying a B-2 to jockeying a dumbass 747 was more than a demotion, it was a humiliation.

“So there’s not much for me to do, then,” Lieutenant Sharmon said.

Christopher nodded. “Not as long as the GPS is working.”

Fargo, North Dakota: KXND-TV

“Whattaya mean there’s no satellite pictures?” Heydon Kalheimer demanded indignantly. He was standing in front of the studio’s blue wall, due to be on the air with the weather report in forty seconds. As usual, he had shown up at the last possible moment. The monitor screen that usually showed the National Weather Service satellite imagery was as blank as the wall. Kalheimer felt very put out.

His producer shrugged her heavy shoulders. They made quite a pair: Kalheimer was long and lanky, all arms and legs, even his head was narrow and long-jawed. He always had a slap-happy grin on his face, even when he was furious. The producer was built like a squat teddy bear, short, heavy, given to sighs of long suffering.

She sighed in her long-suffering way, then repeated, “No satellite pictures. Something’s screwed up. News reports say that all the satellites are down, malfunctioning.”

“How in hell am I supposed to do the weather without satellite graphics? What’m I supposed to do, just stand in front of the camera and look stupid?”

“That wouldn’t take much,” the producer muttered.

“What?”

Louder, she said, “You’ll have the local radar imagery and the National Weather Service’s forecast. Just read it off the monitor, like you always do.”

“That’ll take ten seconds. What do I do with the rest of my two minutes?”

“You’ll just have to wing it.” She knew that Kalheimer did not like winging it. Behind his facade of overweening self-confidence he was still as insecure as he’d been his first day in front of the cameras.

“Heads are gonna roll over this,” Kalheimer growled. “And your head’s gonna be the first one!”

“In five!” the floor manager shouted. “Four… three…”

The overhead lights turned on and Kalheimer turned to camera one, his toothy professional grin spread across his long, bony face.

“Hi there! It’s time for your up-to-the-minute weather report.”

The Pentagon: Situation Room

The first meeting of this emergency action team is convened”—General Franklin P. Higgins glanced at his Breitling wristwatch— “at 11:46 a.m., 23 October.”

The situation room was in the basement of the Pentagon, in the wing that had been rebuilt after being blasted and burned by the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. It was a small room; it felt crowded, tense, even with fewer than a dozen men and women sitting around the oblong table. Almost every one of them had opened a laptop or notebook computer on the table before them.

Three of the room’s walls were floor-to-ceiling smart screens, showing various images from hardened Defense Department satellites. The ceiling was paneled with glareless lights. The seats around the highly polished table were dark leather, plush, comfortable. Each place at the table had a built-in phone jack and power plug.

General Higgins was a big, morose-looking man with a flabby-jowled face and a bulbous nose that had earned him the nickname Possum when he’d been a cadet at the Air Force Academy. Although he was presently on detached duty with the Defense Intelligence Agency, he still wore his blue uniform.

Zuri Coggins sat at the general’s right hand. She was from the White House, a member of the National Security Advisor’s staff, sent to this emergency action team as the West Wing’s representative. She was a tiny African-American woman, almost elfin, but very intense. Wearing a stylish short-skirted red jacket dress, she was the only woman in the conference room.

The rear door opened and Michael Jamil stepped in, looking apologetic. All eyes around the oblong conference table turned to him.

“Sorry to be late,” he said, his voice soft, contrite. “They held me up at the security checkpoint outside.”

Jamil, a civilian analyst from the National Intelligence Council, was in a suede sports jacket and baggy, creaseless chinos. No tie, but a sleeveless V-neck yellow sweater beneath the jacket. He slid into an empty seat at the foot of the conference table, glancing at the displays on the smart screens that lined three of the room’s four walls. The images showed a satellite view of the missile launching site in the rugged mountains of North Korea, an electronic map of the North Pacific Ocean with each U.S. Navy surface vessel and submarine highlighted by a pinpoint light, and other satellite pictures of Air Force bases in Alaska, Okinawa, and Japan.

Jamil was of medium height, spare of build, his face fringed with a neatly trimmed light brown beard. His skin was the color of tobacco leaf, although he had never smoked in his life. He brushed at a lock of sandy hair that stubbornly fell across his high forehead and nervously adjusted his tinted eyeglasses. His eyes were caramel brown. He felt very junior to this assemblage of uniformed brass and high-powered civilians, even though he was convinced that he knew more about the situation than most of them did.

“Are we all here now?” General Higgins asked, his tone biting, his fleshy face clearly displeased.

His aide, an Air Force major sitting on his left, replied, “The representative from the Chief of Naval Operations is on his way, sir. And the chief of the Homeland Security office at Honolulu was going to attend via a satellite link, but the link isn’t operative this morning.”

Higgins grumbled, “Which is why we’re here, isn’t it?”

Zuri Coggins said, “The President and the National Security Advisor have both instructed me to assure you that any and all resources you may need will be made available.” She peered down the table toward Major General Bradley Scheib.

Brad Scheib gave the impression of being a dashing sky warrior in his crisp blue uniform with its chest full of ribbons, and his handsome, chiseled features. In reality he was more of a tech geek than a jet jock. A graduate of Caltech, Scheib had spent more of his career in laboratories than cockpits.

“What about it, Brad?” General Higgins asked. “Is your missile defense system up and running?”

With a curt nod, Scheib answered, “We’ve activated all our ABM units in Fort Greely, in Alaska, and at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The Navy has alerted all four of its Aegis battle groups in the western Pacific. Two of them are steaming at full speed for the Sea of Japan; the other two are deploying between Japan and Hawaii.”

“There’s only two missiles to worry about,” one of the civilians on the other side of the table said, pointing to the satellite image of the North Korean launch site.

“Two that we know about,” Scheib replied.

“How many do the Chinese have?” an Army officer asked.

“And the Russians?”

“They both have missile-launching submarines, too.”

Zuri Coggins said, “The President has decided that our moves will be strictly defensive.” Poking at the air with one finger to emphasize her words, she added, “We will not do anything that could provoke a Chinese response. Or a Russian one.”

“But they’ve both gone on alert, haven’t they?” asked the admiral sitting across the table from her.

“Not yet,” Coggins replied, “although the State Department was tasked with informing them that our own nuclear retaliatory forces are being placed on full alert.”

“State Department,” the admiral muttered distastefully.

General Higgins looked toward one of the civilians sitting down the table from Coggins. “Are our snooper satellites still working?”

“They are,” said the civilian. “ELINT birds have picked up coded messages sent along landlines in China and Russia.” Glancing at Coggins, he continued. “They are in the process of putting their missile forces on full alert.”

Higgins nodded morosely, as if he had expected nothing less.

“Pakistan and India, too,” the civilian added.

“Sweet Jesus,” said the admiral. “That’s all we need, those two pulling the trigger.”

“What about the Iranians?” Higgins asked.

“They’ve only got a half dozen missiles.”

“Guess where they’ll fire them?” asked Higgins’ aide, who was Jewish.

“What if the Chinese or the Russians take advantage of this situation to attack us?” Higgins snapped.

Coggins replied firmly, “That will trigger a fullscale retaliation by our missile forces and both the Chinese and Russians know it. What’s more, they know that our systems are on full alert. We could respond with a devastating nuclear counterstrike at a moment’s notice.”

“Even if the President is dead?” Jamil asked. His voice was soft, tentative, as if he’d surprised himself by speaking up.

Everyone turned to him. Her dark eyes narrowing, Coggins demanded, “What do you mean by that?”

Suddenly the focus of everyone around the table, Jamil blinked his brown eyes nervously and pawed at his unruly hair. At last he said, “Well, the President is scheduled to give a speech in San Francisco tonight.”

General Scheib pointed to the wall screen with one hand as he pecked with a single finger at his laptop’s keyboard. A schematic drawing of a ballistic missile appeared on the screen, with a list of performance specifications alongside it.

“Those two missiles are Taepodong-2s,” Scheib said. “They don’t have the range to reach San Francisco. Or the reliability. The last time they fired one it splashed into the Pacific several hundred miles short of Hawaii.”

Jamil had to turn in his chair to see the drawing. “According to our information,” he said, “the Taepodong-2 has a range of ten thousand kilometers.”

“That’s Pyongyang propaganda. In the real world, the Taepodong-2 doesn’t have the range to reach San Francisco.”

“I admit that San Francisco is at the extreme fringe of the missile’s capability.” Jamil’s tone was conciliatory, yet he was clearly contradicting the general.

Scheib glared at the civilian analyst. “Even so, the missile doesn’t have the accuracy to hit San Francisco, not at that range.”

Jamil nodded slightly but countered, “Yet they launched a bird into geosynchronous orbit. General, I submit that their guidance system has demonstrated a sophisticated degree of accuracy.”

“You can submit whatever you want,” Scheib retorted with a humorless grin. “They can’t reach San Francisco.”

General Higgins pointed down the table at Jamil. “Are you saying those two missiles could hit San Francisco?”

“It’s within the realm of possibility,” Jamil replied.

Shaking his head vigorously, General Scheib insisted, “They’re Taepodong-2s! They don’t have the range. Or the accuracy.”

“Then how did they get a nuclear warhead all the way up to geosynch orbit?” Jamil asked. “If you do the math, you can see that they do indeed have the capability.”

“For Chrissakes, we can see the missiles on their pads,” Scheib retorted. “We can count the solid rocket units they’ve strapped onto their first stages. They don’t have the range to reach San Francisco.”

“But if you do the math—”

“Screw the math,” Scheib snapped. “We’ve got satellite imagery.”

Zuri Coggins looked from Scheib to Jamil. “Do you seriously believe that those missiles could hit San Francisco?”

“It’s theoretically possible, if their payloads are light enough.”

“How light?” General Higgins asked.

Jamil hesitated. “Well, according to our estimates, they could each carry a two-hundred-and-fifty-kiloton weapon over the distance to San Francisco.”

“That’s half a megaton between the two of them.”

“Twenty-five times more than Hiroshima.”

“More like thirty.”

“What makes you think that’s going to be their target?” Higgins demanded.

Jamil was unaccustomed to being in the spotlight. And unhappy with it. He had done his analysis in the taxi on his way to the Pentagon, using his iPhone’s calculator application, plus a lot of figures he’d pulled from his own memory. It was shaky, but it made sense to him.

“Whoever launched the first missile wanted to wipe out our satellites. They must understand that the North Korean army is rushing to their site as fast as they can. Yet they haven’t launched the other two missiles they’ve got on their pads. Why not?”

“Because they’re waiting for the President to arrive in San Francisco?” Coggins asked.

Jamil nodded. “That’s my conclusion.”

“Bullshit!” Scheib scoffed.

But Coggins asked, “Why would they do this? What do they hope to gain?”

“It’s the Sarajevo scenario,” Jamil replied. “We’ve run the analysis dozens of times back at Langley.”

“Sarajevo?”

“It’s how World War I started. Some Austrian archduke got assassinated in Sarajevo, in Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. Russia had a treaty with Serbia, so they declared war on Austria-Hungary. Germany had an alliance with Austria-Hungary so they declared war on Russia. England and France had an alliance with Russia so . . .” Jamil spread his hands. “World War I.”

Higgins shook his head ponderously. “I don’t see how that connects with what we’ve got here.”

His brows knitting slightly, Jamil explained, “North Korea hurts us. We hit back at North Korea. The Chinese don’t like that, so they attack us. We counterattack China. Russia comes in, and once that happens NATO gets involved.”

“Full-scale nuclear war,” Higgins’ civilian aide breathed in an awed voice.

“Armageddon,” someone whispered, loudly enough for them all to hear it.

Elmendorf Air Force Base

“The GPS is off-line?” Lieutenant Sharmon looked shocked.

The iron gray-haired tech sergeant standing behind the counter made a face that was halfway between apologetic and disgusted. He was more than twice the lieutenant’s age and had spent most of his time in the Air Force making young shavetails look good.

“The system went off-line a couple hours ago, sir. All the satellite links are down. Must be those damn northern lights.” Then he added, “Sir.”

From the other side of the flight control center, Colonel Christopher could see the alarm on Sharmon’s face. She walked across the worn tile flooring toward him.

“Something wrong, Lieutenant?”

Sharmon shook his head, his brows knit into a tight furrow. “The GPS is down, ma’am.”

Christopher almost smiled, but she held herself in check. “Then you’ll just have to navigate without it.”

“I guess I will, ma’am.” Sharmon clearly was not happy with that prospect.

Christopher stepped away from the counter and the listening tech sergeant, motioning Sharmon to follow her.

Lowering her voice, she asked, “Do I call you Eustis? And you don’t have to be so formal; you can drop the ‘ma’am’ business while we’re on duty together. Just call me Colonel. Unless there’s bigger brass around, of course.”

She remembered how some of the wiseasses at the Academy used to call her Chrissie, just to rile her. She had kept her temper under control, hidden, until graduation day. That’s when they found their shoes had been glued to the dorm ceiling, all of them. They had to attend the graduation ceremony in bedroom slippers and flip-flops and got reprimanded for being out of uniform. They never tumbled to the possibility that five-foot-four Karen Christopher could reach the ceilings of their rooms while they slept.

Lieutenant Sharmon made an effort to smile. “Thank you, ma… uh, thank you, Colonel. My middle name is Jon. Without an aitch. My friends call me Jon.”

“All right, Jon. That’s what I’ll call you. We’re not friends yet, but maybe we will be.”

He did smile, faintly. “Thank you, Colonel.”

“Now, don’t sweat this GPS business. It’s just a crutch anyway. You’re a trained navigator. You can get us to our correct position out over the ocean without it, can’t you?”

“Yes… uh, Colonel. But I’d feel a lot better with the GPS to back me up.”

Christopher said, “You’ll do fine, Jon. This is just a milk run anyway. We run a racetrack pattern while the nerds play with their laser. So don’t sweat it.”

“Thank you, Colonel.” Sharmon still looked unconvinced.

Christopher nodded at him once, then turned and headed for the meteorology desk. Poor kid looks scared to death, she said to herself. Then a voice in her head warned, He’s not a poor kid and he’s not your friend. He’s supposed to be a navigator and you’re supposed to be his superior officer. Keep it that way.

Her copilot, Major Obadiah Kaufman, was already at the weather desk, looking red-nosed and bleary-eyed. Either he’s had a late night, Christopher thought, or he’s got some bug—which he’ll pass on to the rest of us, for sure.

“No metsat data,” said Major Kaufman, in lieu of a greeting.

He was a round butterball of a man, not much taller than Christopher herself. She wondered how he passed his physicals, he looked so out of shape. And miserably unhappy. So would I be, she thought, if I got bounced out of the pilot’s job for some stranger.

“What do you mean, no metsat data, Obie?”

Kaufman’s bloodshot eyes flared at her use of his nickname, but he immediately clamped down on his resentment.

The harried-looking female captain in charge of the meteorology desk confirmed from the other side of the counter, “The weather satellites went down a couple of hours ago, Colonel. We don’t have anything for you except the local weather forecast, from the base’s met instruments.”

“All the metsats are down?” Christopher asked. It was hard to believe.

“The whole civilian satellite system is down, ma’am,” said the captain. She looked frightened, as if the system failure would be blamed on her.

“What about our own metsats? Are they down, too?”

“No, ma’am. The milsats are operational. But the comm system’s overloaded. Swamped. Data requests from everybody, all at once. They’re running half an hour late. More.”

Christopher studied the captain’s face for a moment. The younger woman looked as if she expected to get reamed out by the colonel.

“Give me the latest you’ve got, then,” Christopher said mildly, “and update me as soon as you get more data.”

“Yes’m.” The captain looked distinctly relieved. Major Kaufman took out a large red-and-white-checked handkerchief and snuffled into it. Looks like he swiped it from an Italian restaurant, Christopher thought.

Kaufman mumbled an excuse and headed for the men’s room. Colonel Christopher decided not to wait for him and left the control center together with Lieutenant Sharmon, he tall and gangly, she petite and graceful. Both in Air Force flight suits, plastic helmets cradled in their arms. As they headed out toward the flight line, Christopher thought, This could be an interesting flight. “Interesting” was a term she reserved, like other fliers, for situations that were either hairy or downright terrifying.

Out on the flight line it was gray and raw; the wet wind gusting in off the water sliced right through Harry’s goose-down coat. It made his back ache sullenly. He squinted up at the clouds, low and dark, thick with moisture. A low gray bank of fog blanketed the far side of the airfield; he couldn’t even see the end of the runway. Harry wondered if they’d have enough visibility to get the plane off the ground. Nothing seemed to be moving out on the flight line. No planes were taking off; everything was as quiet as a tomb except for the low moan of the wind.

We moved to California to get away from this kind of miserable weather, Harry thought as he trudged out toward the ABL-1 plane. Had enough dark, cold winters in New England. It’s dry in California; even when it rains it’s never bleak and nasty like this. When we wanted snow we drove up into the mountains.

Harry remembered teaching his two daughters to ski. They loved the snow. Why not? he asked himself. They never had to shovel the stuff off a driveway. Wonder what they’re doing now? Probably taking a dip in the pool. Sylvia liked to swim. She spent more time in that damned pool than she did in bed with me. And after the accident...

He reached the plane. The huge 747-400F loomed above Harry like a giant aluminum iceberg. He stopped at the foot of the narrow ladder that led to the plane’s innards and tried his cell phone again. Victor Anson had made it painfully clear that he wanted to be called each time Harry and his crew flew a mission.

But the damned phone was still on the fritz. Harry scowled at it. Modern technology at its finest, he grumbled silently. It can perform nineteen dozen different functions and none of them are working.

The flight crew was climbing aboard up front, by the plane’s bulbous nose. He saw the new pilot and a tall, lean, black lieutenant with her. They ride first class, Harry thought. We ride coach, in the back of the plane. He shrugged. He’d met the new pilot only briefly the night before, when she’d introduced herself to his team. She was good-looking, that was true. Rosenberg had barely kept his eyes in his head.

Delany and the rest of the Anson team trudged across the tarmac and started climbing the stairs and entering the plane. Wally Rosenberg, last in line, noticed Harry trying to work his phone and cast him a snide grin.

“Calling our new flygirl?”

Fuck you, Harry thought. Aloud, he answered, “Phoning the boss.”

“Levy? He’s prob’ly heading for coffee break. It’s an hour earlier back in sunny California.”

“Not Jake. Anson.”

Rosenberg’s brows rose. “The big boss?”

“The man whose name’s on our coveralls. Yeah.”

“You talk to Anson?”

Harry nodded wearily. “He wants to know what we’re doing. He’s got a lot riding on this system.”

For once, Rosenberg did not have a flip retort. He merely nodded, then clambered up the shaky aluminum ladder. Harry gave up on the dead phone, stuffed it into the pocket of his bulky coat, and started up the ladder after him. His back twinged with every step.

Travis Broadcasting Systems, Atlanta

“They can’t all be down!” Tad Travis insisted. “Not ever’ last one of ‘era!” Herman Scott pushed his rimless glasses up against the bridge of his nose more firmly. He’d never met Mr. Travis before, except once at an office Christmas party where the corporation’s founder, CEO, and self-proclaimed genius was more interested in the younger female staffers than a tech geek with an MIT ring where a wedding band ought to be.

“Every last one of them, I’m afraid,” Scott said softly.

Travis glared at him as he paced feverishly between the rows of useless consoles. The great man had come down to the monitoring center, the first appearance he’d ever made below the top floor of the office tower, as far as Scott knew. The wall screens were still dead, the monitors still showing nothing but hissing static.

“For what it’s worth,” Scott continued, standing in front of his useless console, “every other satellite constellation is down, too. GeoStar, Intelsat, Galaxy, AMC… all of them.”

“XM, too?” Travis asked. “I got money in XM.”

“XM, too. They’ve all been wiped out.”

“Sweet Jesus!”

Scott waited for the outburst. Travis was famous for his volcanic temper.

The great man stopped his pacing and whirled on Scott. “You get the White House on the line! I wanna talk to the President! Pronto!”

Scott wondered how he could break the news to his boss that he’d called Washington an hour ago, trying to reach the corporation’s office in the capital, only to find that all the satellite communications links were down and the landlines were jammed with frantic, urgent calls.

The Pentagon: Situation Room

Zuri Coggins closed the phone link on her book-sized minicomputer, which she had plugged into the Pentagon’s communications network. Cell phone reception was too spotty for this call; besides, the landline was more secure. Looking up at the people sitting tensely around the table, she said, “The Oval Office says the President’s already on his way to San Francisco. Air Force One took off twenty minutes ago.”

“Then call it back,” General Higgins snapped.

Shaking her head annoyedly, Coggins said, “Only the President himself has that authority.”

“You’ve got to get him to turn back,” said one of the civilians on the other side of the table.

“I’m trying,” Coggins said. “I have a call in to him aboard the plane.”

Down near the end of the conference table, Michael Jamil muttered something.

“What was that?” General Higgins demanded.

Looking suddenly embarrassed, Jamil said, “The President has a sort of macho reputation. Maybe the terrorists—or whoever has those missiles—are counting on him going on to San Francisco despite the risk.”

Higgins’ thick-jowled face darkened. “How do you know they’re going to hit San Francisco?”

Jamil shrugged slightly. “It’s only an educated guess, General, but San Francisco’s the logical target. The place where they can do the most damage to us.”

“How do we know they’re terrorists?” Higgins demanded. “From what we know about this, they’re a faction of the North Korean army.”

“A faction that wants to plunge the world into nuclear war,” Jamil argued.

“Fanatics?” asked Higgins’ aide.

“Muslim jihadists?”

“The Koreans aren’t Muslim.”

“They’re Communists,” Higgins said firmly. “Atheists.”

Coggins said, “But the fact is that, for whatever reason, they’ve knocked out just about every un-hardened satellite in orbit around the entire world.”

“It could be the Chinese behind it all,” Jamil suggested. “The North Koreans could be pawns for the Chinese.”

“But why would China…?”

Unconsciously going into a lecturer’s tone, like a schoolteacher, Jamil said, “The Chinese have been hit by this global recession harder than we have. Their people were starting to expect a rising economic tide. Now they’re facing cutbacks, unemployment, economic slowdown.”

“Who isn’t?” General Higgins retorted.

“There’s been a lot of unrest, especially out in the provinces. Riots, even. And Beijing blames us for it. They claim the recession started in America and then spread to China and elsewhere.”

“And for this they’re willing to go to war?” Coggins asked, clearly unconvinced.

“Their government isn’t monolithic. They have factions, just like everywhere else. The hard-liners in Beijing have long maintained that they could survive a nuclear war,” Jamil replied. “They’ve got more than a billion people, and they’ve built extensive underground shelter complexes deep in the mountains of their western regions.”

“Are their government leaders moving to those shelters?” General Scheib asked.

“How would we know?” replied the man from the National Reconnaissance Office. “Both of our recon birds looking down at the region have gone dark.”

“Like the civilian satellites?” Higgins asked.

The NRO man shook his head. “No, it’s more like their optics have been degraded. Maybe by a laser beam.”

Jamil tapped a fingernail on the tabletop. “Maybe that’s why they’ve knocked out the other satellites as well. So we couldn’t see them heading for their shelters.”

Coggins looked down the table at him. “What did you call that doomsday scenario?” “Sarajevo,” said Jamil. “Sarajevo,” she whispered.

Aboard Air Force One, the President was frowning at his chief of staff. Norman Foster was accustomed to such scowls from his boss: the President did not take kindly to bad news.

“Turn back?” he asked. “Why?”

The two men were facing each other, sitting in plush chairs in the President’s private quarters aboard the massive airplane. Foster was tall and lean, his head shaved totally bald, the expression on his face as hard as the President’s.

“They think the gooks might hit San Francisco with a nuclear missile,” he said.

“Gooks?” The President frowned with distaste. “You mean the North Koreans, don’t you?”

“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” Foster replied, his voice dripping irony. “Yes.”

“Why would they do that?”

Foster shrugged his lean shoulders. “Some analyst from the NIC came up with the idea.”

“And I’m supposed to turn tail and run home because some academic has a theory?”

“It’s a long shot, maybe, but—”

The President jabbed a forefinger at Foster’s ice blue eyes. “Norm, I’m not going to run away from a goddamned theory.”

“If they do hit ‘Frisco…” Foster left the thought dangling.

“And if they don’t I’ll look like a goddamned coward!” the President snapped. “I’m supposed to be the leader here. Hell, the real reason I’m going to San Francisco is to calm the people down over this satellite business.”

“They could deliver half a megaton smack on the Cow Palace,” Foster said, his voice as calm as if he were quoting stock market quotations.

“Two missiles. That’s all they’ve got, right? We’ve got a missile defense system, don’t we? God knows I’ve taken enough flak for cutting the funding on that system. Okay, now’s the time for them to show what they can do.”

“That’s crazy,” Foster said flatly. No one else in all of Washington, all of the government, would speak to the President that way. But Foster could. He’d been with The Man since the President had been a very junior congressman. He’d guided him through elections and conventions and nominations and finally into the White House.

The President stared at his old friend and adviser, tight-lipped.

“Now look,” Foster went on. “You can’t trust your life to that cockamamie missile defense system and you know it. Half its tests have been out-and-out failures.”

“They’ve had three successes in a row.”

“It’s like trying to hit a bullet with another bullet.”

“But they’ve had three successes in a row,” the President insisted. “They’re working out the kinks in the system.”

“And you’re going to put your life on the line based on that?”

For a moment the President did not reply. Then he said slowly, “We have military satellites watching their launch pad, don’t we?”

Foster nodded tentatively.

“If and when they launch you can pull me out of San Francisco, okay?”

“The missiles can reach ‘Frisco half an hour after they’re launched. You couldn’t even get to Air Force One in half an hour from the Cow Palace.”

“I’m not going to run away based on some analyst’s theory,” the President insisted. “I’m not going to look like a coward. Or a fool.”

“But—”

The President ticked off points on his fingers. “One, the idea that they’ll try to hit San Francisco is just a theory cooked up by some academic with a computer scenario, right? Two, from the briefings I’ve had, the North Korean missiles probably couldn’t reach San Francisco.” He grinned at his old friend. “Y’see, I do listen to those briefings. And I remember ‘em.”

Foster shook his head. “They do have the range, according to this analyst.”

“Three, we have a defense system that can shoot those missiles down while they’re still thousands of miles from San Francisco.”

“Maybe.”

“Four, I’m not turning tail. That’s final.”

“Final?”

“Final.”

Foster knew when to give up. “Okay. You’re the boss.”

“Damned right I am.”

With a sigh, Foster pushed himself up from the seat and, grinning, gave his President a sloppy military salute. The President grinned back at him and snapped off a crisp salute in return.

But as he left the President’s compartment, Foster found himself wishing that he didn’t have to be on this plane with his boss. He had the distinct feeling that they were flying to their deaths.

National Weather Service Headquarters, Salem, Oregon

“I wish we had some satellite data,” muttered Sid Golden. “I feel like a blind man groping through this storm.”

Golden was not tall, but very broad in the shoulders, with heavy, well-muscled arms and legs. In his youth he had been a good enough baseball player to get a tryout with the Los Angeles Angels. He’d shown up at the camp filled with hopeful excitement, but badly sprained his left knee on the very first day. He went to college that autumn, eventually got his degree in meteorology. Now, his thinning hair barely covering his pate and his belly rounded from years of doughnuts and pizzas, he leaned back in his creaking desk chair and glowered unhappily at the blank electronic map on the wall above his desk.

Ralph Brancusi shook his head. “No satellite data. We’re just gonna hafta figure this one out the old-fashioned way.”

Golden stuck a finger in his mouth and then held it high, as if testing the wind. To his surprise he felt a slight draft coming from the vent up near the ceiling of his office.

Brancusi laughed. He was short, lean, wiry. Golden secretly envied him his thick waves of dark hair.

“Come on, Sid. We’ve gotta get an eleven o’clock forecast out on the wire.”

“Rain and cold,” Golden growled. “Snow in the higher elevations.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Who the hell knows? More of the same. The storm’s moving inland. It’ll probably develop into a full-scale blizzard once it clears the Rockies.”

“We oughtta get a warning out, huh?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Golden. “I just wish we had some satellite imagery. This is like being back in the mother-humping Stone Age.”

The Pentagon: Situation Room

General Higgins didn’t like Jamil’s looks. Must be an Arab, he thought. Or at least Arab descent. Put a turban on him and he’d be a poster boy for those damned terrorists.

Aloud, though, he asked General Scheib, “If they launch those two remaining missiles, can your people shoot them down?”

Scheib glanced at Zuri Coggins before replying, “We’d have a good chance to do that.”

Higgins’ jaws clenched visibly. “And just what in hell does that mean, Brad, ‘a good chance’?”

Sitting up straighter in his chair, Scheib answered, “The system has been declared operational.” He paused, then added, “Sir.”

Coggins said, “The White House made that pronouncement during the Bush administration. George W.”

“Operational,” Higgins echoed. Scheib said, “We’ve shot down test missiles out over the Pacific from our Fort Greely site in Alaska. Our record isn’t one-hundred-percent perfect, of course, but it’s improving with every test we fly.”

“You’re hitting a target missile with a missile of our own, right?” asked the admiral sitting next to General Higgins’ aide.

“That’s right,” Scheib replied. “It’s the kinetic kill mode. Bash the warhead with an interceptor vehicle.”

From the end of the conference table, Jamil asked, “What about decoys?”

With a slight grimace, General Scheib admitted, “That could be a problem. If the missile releases decoys when it detaches its warhead, our people have to figure out which object has the warhead in it and which ones are dummies.”

“How much time do you have to do that?” Zuri Coggins asked.

“If the missile’s in midcourse, coasting after its rocket engines burn out, we could have as much as ten, fifteen minutes.”

“They can tell which object is the warhead?”

“Not with one-hundred-percent reliability. It’s something we’re working on.”

“Working on?” asked one of the civilians, looking shocked.

“For what it’s worth,” Jamil said, “if the North Koreans try to reach San Francisco their missiles probably don’t have the throw weight to carry both a warhead and decoys.”

“You’re certain of that?”

Jamil nodded. “Reasonably certain. Of course, if they strike at Honolulu or another target that’s not as far as San Francisco, then they could include a set of decoys to spoof the defense.”

“Wonderful news,” General Higgins muttered.

Coggins turned to the admiral sitting across the table from her. “What about the Aegis ships? Can they shoot down the missiles?”

“If they’re in the right position. It’s easiest to spot them when they’re in the boost phase, with their rocket engines still burning. Once the engines burn out and the missile goes into its midcourse coasting phase, it gets harder.”

Coggins nodded uncertainly.

“That’s why we’re rushing two battle groups into the Sea of Japan. Closer to the launch site, so we’ll have more time to shoot at them.”

“They wouldn’t release any decoys in boost phase,” General Scheib added. “The warhead would still be attached to the main body of the missile.”

Higgins said, “So we have your anti-missiles in Alaska and California, and the Navy’s Aegis ships in the Pacific.”

“Heading for the Sea of Japan,” the admiral added.

“And that’s it?” Coggins asked.

General Scheib said, “There is one additional possibility.”

“What?”

“The Airborne Laser. ABL-1.”

“What’s Able One?” Coggins asked.

“It’s a megawatt-plus laser carried aboard a 747 jet. The laser can shoot down a missile—”

“A ray gun?” Coggins asked, her face clearly showing disbelief.

“It works,” Scheib said. “At least, it’s worked in flight tests so far. If they can get close enough to the missile. The laser’s range is only a hundred miles or so, a hundred and fifty, max.”

“So you’d have to get the plane to North Korea for it to be effective,” Higgins said.

“It’s in Alaska right now, for testing under bad-weather conditions.”

“A ray gun,” Coggins repeated.

“It’s a laser,” Scheib corrected. Hunching forward eagerly in his chair, he went on. “Its beam can reach out a hundred miles or so from the plane and hit the missile while it’s in boost phase. Deposit a megawatt or more of energy on a square inch of the missile’s skin for a second or so and it burns through the aluminum skin. The missile explodes.”

“But the missile isn’t standing still for you.”

Scheib let a tight smile crease his face. “That laser beam strikes with the speed of light. Nothing in the universe goes faster. In the time it takes the beam to cover a thousand miles, the missile moves maybe one foot.”

Coggins blinked down the table at the general, absorbing this information. “And the beam blows up the missile?”

“It burns through the missile’s skin and goes through to the propellant tanks,” Scheib replied. “Remember what happened to the space shuttle Challenger? The way it exploded when its propellant tank burned through? Boom! That’s what happens to a missile when that laser beam hits it.”

“You said the laser plane is in Alaska?” asked Higgins.

“At Elmendorf Air Force Base, sir. The evaluation program calls for tests in a foul-weather environment.”

With a huff, Higgins muttered, “Plenty of foul weather up there, God knows.”

“The plane operates above the weather, of course. Forty-thousand-foot altitude or higher.”

“Then what’s the point of a foul-weather environment?” Coggins asked.

“To make sure the plane can operate under zero-zero conditions. Make certain it can get off the ground and up to its operational altitude no matter what the weather conditions on the ground. ABL-1 has to be able to react to a missile threat regardless of the weather where it’s based.”

“Can you get the plane to a spot where it could intercept the North Korean missiles?” General Higgins asked.

Scheib pecked briefly at the keyboard of his laptop, checked his wristwatch, then looked up. “According to its schedule, it’s just about to take off from Elmendorf for a test flight over the northern Pacific. There’s a four-hour time difference between here and Alaska.”

General Higgins glanced at Zuri Coggins, who nodded.

“All right,” said the general. “It isn’t a test flight anymore. Get that bird to a spot where it can shoot down those goddamned missiles.”

Scheib blinked once. “We’ll have to set up a couple of air-to-air refuelings.”

“Do it,” said Higgins.

“Yessir,” Scheib snapped.

“Without violating North Korean airspace,” Coggins added. “Or Chinese airspace.”

“I understand.”

Coggins gave Scheib an appraising look. “Can your plane do the job?”

The general hesitated for a heartbeat, then replied, “I’ll need a direct communications link to the plane.”

Higgins nodded. “You’ll get the comm link. Can the plane do the job?”

“Yes, sir, I believe it can.”

“It better,” General Higgins growled.

Pasadena, California: Hartunian Residence

It was a modest split-level house on the cul-de-sac at the end of a quiet, tree-lined street. The Hartunian family had lived in it for nearly sixteen years, ever since their first daughter had been born. Even with the separation and now the divorce proceedings, Sylvia Hartunian had held on to the house. She had raised her daughters here and she had no intention of moving them away from their school, their friends, and the safety of the only home they’d ever known.

Sylvia was a determined woman. She and Harry had been drifting apart for years. At first she thought it was his job at Anson Aerospace. He spent more hours at that laboratory than he did at home. Usually he left for work before the sun came up and arrived home long after the girls had gone to bed. Sylvia had to raise their daughters by herself, just about.

Then Harry started going out to the Mohave Desert. Test operations, he claimed. Classified work; he couldn’t tell her anything about it. He’d be gone for several days at a time. Weekends, sometimes. Sylvia began to get suspicious, but at first she couldn’t picture Harry fooling around with another woman. Harry was a nerd, after all. He was more in love with his damned high-tech hardware than any human being, including her.

As the weeks turned into months, though, and stretched into years, she became convinced it was more than his work that was separating them.

It was when Harry was hospitalized after the explosion at the test facility that Sylvia realized she didn’t really have any feelings for him anymore. She went to the hospital and it was like she was visiting a stranger. She couldn’t even cry about it. She had married an engineer, a man who couldn’t or wouldn’t show his feelings; maybe he didn’t really have any. She’d thought she loved him. She bore him two daughters. But now it was all gone. Turned to ice. He lay there unconscious on his hospital bed, burned and battered, and she felt like she was looking at a stranger.

When he came home to recuperate Sylvia kept her distance from him. She made up the guest room for him and even after he was completely healed and had gone back to work, she refused to let him into her bed. It was over. Even the girls knew it. They knew their father was a cold, unfeeling man.

When he finally admitted that he’d had an affair with one of the women at his laboratory, Sylvia told him to get out. He acted as if he were numb, as if he’d expected them to break up but couldn’t take the first step himself. He left without an argument, without raising his voice even once, which angered Sylvia even more.

But that was all in the past. Sylvia settled down to the task of raising her teenaged daughters by herself and found that she enjoyed being on her own, with no one to contradict her. She could sit up in bed and read all night if she wanted to.

She was still reasonably attractive, she thought. At least that’s what her friends told her. A little overweight, but men liked zaftig women with generous bosoms. Still, she dated very little. It was just too much of a chore, too much of a stupid ritual. She’d been through it all with Harry and found that she didn’t really have any interest in going that route again.

Sylvia took a job at their congresswoman’s local office. It didn’t pay much, but with the child support money that Harry paid every month, they were getting by nicely.

Today she was especially happy. She had a surprise for her daughters. She’d made all the arrangements and everything was set.

At the breakfast table she announced, “No school today.”

Her daughters looked up from their cereal bowls in surprise.

“How come?” asked the elder, Vickie. Harry had insisted on naming her after the founder of Anson Aerospace, as if that had made any difference in his career advancement.

“I got permission from your teachers to keep you out of class today.”

“What’s going on, Mom?” Denise asked.

“We’re flying to San Francisco and staying overnight in a hotel,” Sylvia told them. Beaming, she explained, “Congresswoman McClintock has given me three tickets to the big rodeo at the Cow Palace.”

“Rodeo?” Clear distaste showed on Denise’s fourteen-year-old face.

“Horses and all that smell,” said Vickie.

Her smile even bigger, Sylvia explained, “You don’t understand. The President of the United States is going to officially open the rodeo. He’s giving a speech and we’re going to be sitting in the front row!”

“The President?” Denise looked truly surprised.

But Vickie moaned, “That phony. He said he was going to start a big green-energy program and he hasn’t done a thing.”

“Congress hasn’t voted on his energy program yet,” Sylvia said firmly.

The girls looked at each other. “I guess,” Vickie said with a resigned shrug.

Sylvia told them, “You’ll be the envy of all your friends when you tell them you were right there with the President.”

“I guess,” they said in unison, equally unenthusiastic.

Teenagers, thought Sylvia.

ABL-1: Cockpit

Lieutenant Colonel Karen Christopher came through the cockpit hatch without needing to duck and slid easily into the pilot’s seat. It was still misty gray outside, but visibility was good enough for takeoff. She remembered one of the older jocks telling her that when the 747 was first introduced to the commercial airlines, the FAA had to raise its ceiling limits for takeoffs because the huge plane’s cockpit sat so high above the ground it was sometimes in cloud while the ground was clear enough for smaller planes to take off.

As she pulled the safety harness over her slim shoulders, her copilot, Major Kaufman, squeezed into the cockpit and settled his bulk into the right-hand seat, red-nosed and sniffling.

“That’s some cold you’ve got,” said Colonel Christopher.

“Alaska,” he said. She thought it sounded sullen. Major Kaufman did not like the fact that Karen had been jammed down his throat by headquarters, forcing him to relinquish command of the plane.

He sneezed wetly. That’s right, Colonel Christopher grumbled silently, spread your damned cold to the rest of us.

She pulled her plastic flight helmet over her short-cropped hair and plugged it into the communications console.

“You want me to take her out?” Kaufman asked. Christopher realized that the major knew she had only a half dozen hours of piloting a 747. “I’ll do it,” she said tightly. “I can fly anything that has wings on it, Obie.”

She saw his eyes flash again. He doesn’t like his nickname, she realized. But Kaufman said only, “You’re the boss.”

She said nothing. Stick to business, she told herself. He’ll just have to get used to being in the right-hand seat.

“ABL-1 ready to start engines,” she said into the pin mike that nearly brushed her lips. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Kaufman as he pulled up the takeoff checklist on the control panel’s central display and started scrolling it down the screen.

“ABL-1, you are clear to start engines,” said the flight controller’s clipped voice in her earphones.

Turning to Kaufman, she said, “Spool ‘em up.”

With a bleary nod, the major murmured, “Starting one.”

As the first of the plane’s four turbojet engines whined to life, the flight controller called, “ABL-1, message incoming for you from Andrews.”

Colonel Christopher felt puzzled. “Andrews Air Force Base?”

“Relayed from the Pentagon.”

“Better pipe it to me,” she said.

A series of clicks. Then a mechanical voice started dictating a formal military order. Computer-synthesized audio, Colonel Christopher realized. The voice droned through the date, routing, and classification level: Top Secret.

Then it said, “From: Major General Bradley B. Scheib, deputy commander, MDA. To: Lieutenant Colonel Karen R. Christopher, command pilot, ABL-1.

“A nuclear device apparently launched from North Korea has been exploded in orbit. All commercial satellites have been either knocked out completely or seriously degraded.

“You will proceed to a site to be designated over the Sea of Japan and orbit until further orders. Navigational information is being transmitted in a separate order. You will avoid violating territorial airspace of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and/or the People’s Republic of China. You will attack and destroy any ballistic missiles launched from DPRK. Confirm receipt of this order immediately.”

Christopher looked at Major Kaufman, who sat wide-eyed and suddenly pale.

Swallowing hard, she said into her mike, “Order received and understood. Please confirm to General Scheib.”

“It’s going to take a little time, Colonel,” said the flight controller’s voice. “The commsats are overloaded with traffic.”

“Send the confirmation,” Colonel Christopher said in the hard voice of command she had learned at the Air Force Academy.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Major Kaufman seemed frozen in his seat. “Shoot down any missiles launched from North Korea? Are they crazy?”

“Get on with the engine start,” she snapped. “Maybe they are crazy, but orders are orders.”

As Kaufman punched up the second engine, Christopher unbuckled her safety harness and got to her feet. “I’d better talk to the chief nerd.”

But as she stepped through the hatch and into the area where the navigator and communications stations were, she wasn’t thinking of the chief of the laser crew or of her surly, suddenly frightened copilot, or even of the possibility that her orders meant a war was starting. She was thinking of the last time she had seen Major General Bradley B. Scheib.

“You’re out of uniform, Colonel.”

She smiled at the general. “So are you, sir.”

She was standing nude in the bathroom doorway while he lay on the thoroughly rumpled king-sized bed. The motel was a little on the seedy side, but Karen hadn’t minded that. Over the months since she’d fallen in love with Brad Scheib she’d become accustomed to being furtive. It even added a touch of spice to their relationship. Brad was married; she’d known that from the outset, but she knew how to make him happy and his preppy socialite wife didn’t.

The Air Force brass did not like it when an officer had an affair with a married officer. But there was this handsome hunk of a man, so serious, so troubled when she’d first met him. And now he was smiling and contented. At least, most of the time when they were together. But he wasn’t smiling at the moment.

She went to the bed and snuggled beside him. He wrapped his arms around her. For long moments neither of them spoke a word.

At last he half-whispered, “I’m up for the deputy director post at the MDA.”

Delighted, she asked, “That means a second star, doesn’t it?”

He nodded. Only then did she realize how grave his tone was.

“You want the job, don’t you?” “I sure do.”

“So you’ll be moving to Washington, then. It’s okay. I can get there often enough.”

“I don’t think so, Karen,” he said.

She suddenly understood where he was heading, but she didn’t want to believe it. “What do you mean?”

“There’s going to be an investigation.”

“Of you?”

He shook his head. “Of you. My wife…” His voice trailed off.

“She ratted you out?” Karen felt anger seething up inside her.

He wouldn’t look into her eyes. “No. She ratted you out.”

“What?”

“She got one of her Georgetown friends to tip off the AG that you’re having an affair with a married officer. She didn’t say with who. She’s too devious for that. She expects you to finger me once the AG investigation starts.”

Karen pulled away from him. “The Advocate General’s office is coming after me?”

“They’ll want to know who you’re sleeping with.” His voice was misery personified. “If you tell them, I can say good-bye to the MDA job and the second star.”

“But if I don’t...”

“They can’t do much to you,” he’d said. “A slap on the wrist, that’s all.”

A slap on the wrist, she thought. They bounced me out of the B-2 squadron and gave me this bus driver’s job with a bunch of tech geeks. Some slap on the wrist.

But now this bus she was driving might be heading into a shooting war. Karen almost smiled at the irony of it.

ABL-1: Flight Deck

Colonel Christopher saw that Lieutenant Sharmon and the communications officer were staring at her.

“You heard our orders?” she asked. Sharmon said, “I got the navigation data. Fed it into the flight computer.” He looked uneasy, almost scared.

“Good. We’ll need a couple of refuelings on the way. Must be a ten-, twelve-hour flight.”

Nodding, the navigator said, “Approximately ten hours, Colonel. They’re workin’ out the refueling rendezvous points at Andrews. They’ll send the fixes while we’re in flight.”

The communications officer, red-haired Captain Brick O’Banion, said grimly, “Looks like we’re flying into a war.”

Karen felt her insides clutch. “Looks that way,” she said. Taking a deep breath, she tried to calm herself. “All right. Call the tech chief up here. This isn’t a test flight anymore.”

As the plane’s first engine rumbled to life Delany complained, “Christ, it’s colder inside this bucket than outside.”

Harry agreed. Cold and damp. Not good for my back, he thought as he followed Delany and the rest of the laser team past the color-coded pipes and gleaming stainless steel tankage toward the cramped compartment that was their station during takeoffs and landings. His nose twitched with the faint iron tang of iodine. Like dried blood.

A leak? Harry asked himself, alarmed. That’s all we need; the damned stuff is corrosive enough to damage your eyes and lungs.

“Wally!” he called to Rosenberg, three bodies ahead of him. “You check the tank pressures yet?”

“Last night,” Rosenberg called over his shoulder. “Like I do every night before a mission. We all went over the whole damned system, remember?”

The night before, Harry and the rest of the team had inspected every part of the laser system, from the bulbous turret in the plane’s nose to the COIL fuel tanks in the tail. Every pipe. Every electronics console. Every gauge and switch and display screen. Routine. They’d done it the night before every flight.

“Check ‘em again,” he said.

“Now?” Rosenberg turned around to face Harry, forcing Taki Nakamura to sidle past him in the narrow passageway.

Harry thought, If I make him check the pressures now it’ll delay our takeoff by half an hour or more. The new pilot won’t like that. He can check it while we’re flying out to the test range.

“Once we’re at cruising altitude,” he said.

Rosenberg nodded, muttering, “There’s nothing wrong with the friggin’ tank pressures.”

Yeah, Harry retorted silently. There was nothing wrong with them when the damned rig blew up in the desert, either.

They got to their compartment, sat in the padded seats, and began to strap in. There were twelve seats, six facing six. They had been scavenged from a commercial airliner, but the compartment was so tight that they couldn’t recline; the seat backs were smack against the bulkheads. The safety straps were Air Force issue: not merely a lap belt but a harness that went over the shoulders as well. Diminutive Taki looked like a lost little waif in the gray webbing.

The intercom hummed briefly, then, “Mr. Hartunian, could you come up to the flight deck, please?”

Harry’s brows shot up. “What the hell for?” he wondered aloud.

“Maybe she wants to give you a flying lesson,” Delany wisecracked.

“Or maybe she’s lonely up there,” said Rosenberg, with a smirk.

She’s got a copilot, a communications officer, and a navigator up there, Harry thought. All men. And all of them a lot younger than me. She’s not lonely.

Puzzled, he unlocked his safety harness and went to the forward hatch of the compartment. As he did, he heard the whine of the second of the plane’s four turbojet engines start up and quickly turn into a roar. The plane began to vibrate noticeably.

Ducking through the hatch, Harry made his way past the plane’s minuscule galley and up the ladder that led to the flight deck. A lanky young black lieutenant was on his feet up there, tall enough that his closely cropped hair nearly brushed the overhead. Harry had never seen him before this morning. He recognized the communications officer, though: a stubby little red-haired captain seated at his board full of dials and screens, headphones clamped to his ears.

The lieutenant introduced himself. “I’m the new navigator, Lieutenant Sharmon. You must be Mr. Hartunian.”

“Harry.”

Sharmon nodded and put out his hand. “I’m Jon. Without an aitch.”

“Jon,” Harry said, grasping the lieutenant’s proffered hand. The kid’s grip was firm, his long fingers wrapped around Harry’s hand.

“I’ll tell Colonel Christopher you’re here.”

One by one the plane’s engines were growling into life. Harry stood uneasily next to the communications console while Lieutenant Sharmon ducked through the cockpit hatch. Harry caught a glimpse of the control panel, studded with instruments and sensor screens, and the windshield above it. It still looked miserably gray and foggy outside.

Maybe they’ve canceled the flight, Harry thought. But then he countered, So why’s she powering up the engines?

Lieutenant Colonel Christopher came out and forced a smile for him. She was small, petite really, but he could see that she had an adult’s body beneath her blue fatigues. Dark hair, bright, intelligent eyes. Really pretty, he realized once again. For a moment he thought she looked familiar, as if he’d seen her somewhere before. But that’s impossible, Harry thought. Our paths haven’t crossed before this. Still, he couldn’t shake the nagging thought that they had.

“Mr. Hartunian,” she said without offering to shake hands.

Harry nodded. The colonel looked as grim as death.

“We have a situation on our hands,” she said.

“A situation?” Harry asked.

“I just got a top-priority message relayed from Washington. There’s been an attack on our orbiting satellites and—”

“An attack?”

“A missile fired from North Korea detonated a nuclear device in geosynchronous orbit several hours ago. Just about every civilian satellite around the world has been knocked out of service.”

Harry gaped at her, his heart suddenly pumping wildly. “From North Korea?”

“We’ve been ordered to proceed to a position over the Sea of Japan and be prepared to shoot down any more missiles that the North Koreans launch.” Christopher spoke crisply, with no hesitation, no doubts in her tone.

“But we can’t... I mean, we’re supposed to be testing the laser. We’re not ready for a shooting war.”

Colonel Christopher said, “You techies are never ready for reality, but ready or not, Mr. Hartunian, those are our orders. Get your people on the mark. Make sure that ray gun of yours works right.”

Jefferson Hotel, Washington D.C.

It had started to rain. Looking out the window of the penthouse suite’s sitting room, the Secretary of State saw brittle dry leaves gusting across the pavement far below. The afternoon sky was clouded over, gray and gloomy. Yet she felt excited, eager.

How often had she used this suite over the past few years? she wondered idly. It fit perfectly her need for an informal meeting place, a spot where she could chat quietly in privacy with men or women who preferred to stay safely out of the glare of publicity, a place where she could develop the back-channel contacts of her own, without the State Department bureaucracy’s officious meddling. The Jefferson was perfect: downtown, close to the White House, old, elegant, and very discreet.

After leaving the White House that morning she had changed her attire for this meeting: a quietly elegant pantsuit of pearl gray over a tailored white blouse, with a small choker of pink pearls and matching earrings. She turned away from the rain-swept windows, thinking, He’ll come. He’s got to come.

The phone on the desk buzzed, and she rushed to it before it could ring twice. The face of the young security woman down in the hotel’s lobby appeared on the screen. “Mr. Quang is on his way up, Madam Secretary.”

The Secretary’s pulse quickened. “Good.”

In less than a minute the doorbell chimed. The Secretary of State crossed the thickly carpeted sitting room and admitted a portly, blank-faced Chinese. He was wearing a dark business suit, white starched shirt, pale blue necktie—and a tiny red star pin on his lapel.

He bowed slightly as she ushered him into the sitting room. The Secretary of State said, “Mr. Quang, it’s good of you to come on such short notice.”

His bland expression warmed slightly into a tentative smile. “Madam Secretary, there’s no need for formalities,” he said in perfect American English. “I understand the gravity of the situation.”

Gesturing to one of the comfortable armchairs in front of the dark, unlit fireplace, the Secretary of State said, “We’ve been unable to establish a reliable communications link with Beijing. Your ambassador seems unable to give us a clear picture of what’s going on there.”

Quang nodded as he settled into the chair. “I would think there is great turmoil in Beijing at this moment.”

“They prefer not to talk to us?”

“They prefer” —he hesitated a heartbeat, searching for a word— “not to commit themselves.”

The Secretary of State took the armchair facing Quang’s and studied his round, almond-eyed face. How many times have we met like this? she asked herself. How many times have we cut through the red tape and talked clearly and honestly to one another? She had known Quang since she’d first visited Beijing, back when she’d been a law student with political ambitions and he a fast-rising industrial tycoon. She realized that, in truth, she owed much of her advancement to the private, authoritative back-channel link he offered to the highest levels of the Chinese government.

“Have you been able to reach the chairman?” asked the Secretary of State. “Or any of the council members?”

With a modest smile, Quang replied, “As you know, I am merely a businessman. I have no position in the government.”

“You are the chairman’s brother-in-law.”

His smile widened slightly. “A brother-in-law is usually without much influence.”

The Secretary leaned slightly toward him, her fists clenched on her lap. “You’re the best link I have to the chairman. You’ve got to help us avert a nuclear war!”

Quang’s smile faded. “I will do whatever I can, of course.”

“Did the People’s Republic of China provide nuclear weapons to North Korea?”

“Of course not.”

“Are you certain?”

Quang’s eyes shifted slightly, then refocused on the Secretary. “I can tell you this much. Three nuclear warheads were smuggled into the DPRK from Russia last month.”

“Last month! And your government didn’t inform us!”

“We confirmed the information only two days ago. The council was debating what our response should be when the Koreans set off one of the warheads in orbit.”

“We’re on the brink of war, for god’s sake!”

Shaking his head ever so slightly, Quang replied, “The People’s Republic of China has no intention of starting a war with you.”

“Nor we with China, but...”

Quang raised a stubby finger. “But you wish to strike at the Koreans.”

“We’ve got to do something,” the Secretary said. “They have two more missiles. And from what you say, those missiles are armed with nuclear bombs.”

“Pyongyang has sent troops to capture the rebels.”

“Troops? They should be sending in an air strike to knock out those missiles before the terrorists launch them!”

“They are not terrorists,” Quang said flatly. “Do not fall into the trap of painting all your enemies with the same brush. That’s how you got into Iraq, remember?”

“What are they then?”

“A faction of the DPRK army, apparently.”

“What do they hope to gain by destroying the whole world’s satellites?” the Secretary asked.

Quang shrugged his round shoulders. “That we will learn once Pyongyang’s troops have captured them.”

“And in the meantime they’ve got two nuclear armed missiles that can reach Hawaii! Or maybe even San Francisco!”

“Or Beijing,” Quang said tightly. “Or Shanghai. Believe me, we are just as concerned about this as you are.”

“So why aren’t you doing something about it?”

“The council is considering several options. We believe the missiles are under the control of a rebel faction of the North Korean army. The government in Pyongyang, such as it is,” Quang added with a sardonic sneer, “is seeking to avoid an outright civil war. They want to take the rebels with as little violence as possible.”

“They’re going to launch those missiles,” the Secretary said, her voice flat and hard. “Unless somebody stops them, they’re going to launch both those nukes.”

“If they attack China we will obliterate them,” Quang said flatly. “They know that.”

“But if they attack the United States . .”

Shifting uneasily in the armchair, Quang said, “That would be regrettable. And an American strike on the DPRK would be even more regrettable.”

“What do you expect us to do?”

“Think before you act. An American invasion of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is no more acceptable to China today than it was in 1950. And a strike against the DPRK would force us to retaliate… to say nothing of the effect the fallout would have on Japan.”

“We wouldn’t have to nuke them, necessarily,” the Secretary of State said. But her tone was subdued, tentative.

Quang replied, “If you attack North Korea in any way the pressures on my government to protect our Asian neighbor would be overwhelming. It is a matter of face, as well as realpolitik.”

The Secretary studied her old friend’s unreadable expression for several moments. Then, “You’d launch a nuclear strike against us?”

Quang stared back at her for a long, silent moment. Then he murmured, “You must realize that there are factions within our council as well. We have our own hard-liners, you must understand.”

“But that’s just what the terrorists want! Don’t you see, they want a nuclear Armageddon!”

“As I told you, we do not believe they are terrorists. They do not seek nuclear holocaust.”

“Then what do they want?”

“Control of the government in Pyongyang. Reunification with South Korea—under their terms. Economic aid. Neutralization of Japan. The removal of American bases and influence in East Asia.”

The Secretary sagged back in her chair. It was her turn to be silent now, thinking that what the North Koreans wanted suited the Chinese government perfectly. A stalking horse, she said to herself. Could Beijing be behind this? If we react against North Korea, will the Chinese use it as an excuse for striking back at us?

“They want the impossible,” she said at last. “What they’re going to get is pulverized.”

“Do not overreact, I beg of you.”

“If they nuke an American city…” The Secretary shook her head. “You saw our reaction to 9/11. And that was only a couple of buildings that were destroyed. If they wipe out Honolulu… or San Francisco… if they kill the President… For god’s sake!”

Quang leaned forward in his chair. The Secretary noticed a thin bead of perspiration trickling down his left cheek.

“Madam Secretary,” he said, his tone suddenly stiffly formal, “I agreed to meet with you because I—like you—wish to avert a nuclear confrontation between our two peoples.”

The Secretary nodded warily. There was more coming, she knew.

“However,” Quang went on, “if the United States attacks the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, my government will be forced to respond.”

“So we’re supposed to sit still while they nuke a couple of our cities?”

“The rebels will be caught and dealt with. Do not attack North Korea, I beg of you. If you do, China will be forced to respond.”

“And the Russians watch us destroy each other.”

“This has always been the weakness of the retaliation policy.”

“Mutual assured destruction,” the Secretary murmured.

“A policy intended to deter nuclear attack. It has worked very well between your nation and ours.”

“And the Russians.”

“Yes,” Quang agreed. “But when fanatics gain nuclear weapons, such a policy becomes useless. Mutual suicide.”

With that, Quang got to his feet. The Secretary rose on shaky legs and walked him to the door. They exchanged meaningless words, and he left her alone in the sumptuous suite, leaning against the tightly shut door, wondering if the world was indeed coming to an end.

But then she straightened and headed for the phone. The President’s off on a macho trip to San Francisco, she told herself. The Vice President’s safely in the National Redoubt, as if saving his worthless hide means anything. I’ve got to get to the Speaker of the House and Senator Yanez. Somebody’s got to take control of this situation. Somebody’s got to start acting presidential, and it might as well be me.

Spokane, Washington: Lukkabee’s Supermarket

Phyllis Mathiessen was more annoyed than worried. Well, no, she really was worried—about the dinner she was planning for tomorrow evening. This was the third supermarket she’d driven to this morning, and none of them had pecans. She needed pecans for the pie.

Feeling nettled as she pushed her grocery cart along the fresh-produce aisle, she couldn’t for the life of her understand why a big supermarket chain like Lukkabee’s couldn’t keep pecans on the blessed shelves. Pecans! It’s not like she wanted something exotic. Just plain old pecans.

She saw one of the store’s employees staring glumly at a row of empty display cases, where they usually kept the lettuce and cabbage and carrots. The shelves were bare. The man looked as if he had nothing to do. His kelly green bib overalls were spotless, as if he hadn’t lifted a crate or carried a single package all morning.

Phyllis knew the man, at least well enough to smile at him when they passed in the store’s aisles. What was his name? She hated to peer at the tag pinned to the chest of his overalls, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember—

Giovanni! That was his name. Was it his first name, though, or his last?

“Good morning, Mrs. Mathiessen,” he said with a toothy smile. He was short, bald, round of face and body.

“Good morning, Mr. Giovanni,” said Phyllis.

“If you’re looking for lettuce, this morning’s order hasn’t come in yet.” Giovanni glanced at his wrist-watch. “They’re awful late today.”

“No,” she said. “I want some pecans. I’m going to bake a pecan pie.”

Giovanni made an elaborate shrug. “They were supposed to come in this morning, with the lettuce and the rest of the produce.”

“Will they be in later?”

Another shrug. “Mr. Andrews, he’s been on the phone all morning. Called the distributor. Called the trucking company. Called Mr. Lukkabee hisself, got him out of bed.”

“What’s the matter?” Phyllis asked.

“Everything’s all screwed up. Nobody’s computers are working. The trucking company says they can’t even tell where their trucks are because the GPS ain’t working.”

Phyllis had the vague notion that GPS had something to do with giving you directions when you were driving. Her husband had been hinting that he’d like one for Christmas.

“So you won’t have any pecans?”

“Maybe later today. I dunno.”

Phyllis tried to hide her annoyance. After all, it wasn’t Giovanni’s fault. But she blew her stack half an hour later when she pulled into the gas station and the pumps weren’t working. The warning light on her gas gauge was already blinking, and before she could pull out of line she got blocked in by another car behind her. When the impatient old jerk behind her started blasting his horn she jumped out of her car in a fury and told him to behave himself or she would call the police. It took nearly ten minutes to untangle the jam and get on her way home.

She ran out of gas on the way, right in the middle of the highway. Nervous as a cat, she glided the Cadillac to the shoulder of the road as cars and trucks swooped past her way above the speed limit. Then she couldn’t get her husband on her cell phone. Or anybody else. Not even the AAA. The phone seemed to be dead. Phyllis broke into tears when a police car coasted to a stop behind her, its lights blinking red and blue.

She had never had a ticket before in her whole life. And it was starting to snow.

The Pentagon: Situation Room

“Do you trust him?” Zuri Coggins finished pouring herself a cup of coffee before she looked up at General Higgins. The general had called for a coffee break, and almost immediately a pair of army tech sergeants had entered the situation room rolling a cart bearing three stainless steel urns, Styrofoam cups, and two trays of buns and pastries. He must have had the sergeants on call outside in the corridor all morning, she thought.

“Trust who?” she asked the general.

His eyes flicking across the room to where Michael Jamil still sat at the foot of the conference table, pecking away at his iPhone, Higgins whispered, “Him. The Arab.”

“I believe he’s Lebanese,” Coggins replied.

“Lebanese, Arab, they’re all the same.”

General Higgins had removed his tunic and loosened his necktie. His shirt was wrinkled and he looked sweaty. He could stand to lose twenty or thirty pounds, Coggins thought. But despite his physical appearance Higgins wore four stars on his collar and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had appointed him to head this emergency action team.

“He was born here,” she added.

Higgins nodded as he picked up a sticky bun. “He’s an academic. I don’t trust academics. They always think they know everything, but they don’t have any real-world experience. Ivory-tower eggheads.”

Coggins felt a mild tic of surprise. She hadn’t heard the term “egghead” since a graduate class in the history of American politics, nearly ten years earlier.

“Yet he’s made an important point, don’t you think? If the North Koreans are targeting San Francisco…”

Higgins snapped up half the bun in one bite. His mouth full, he still answered, “Scheib thinks that’s bullshit, and Scheib knows more about missiles than that Arab kid.”

Coggins nodded halfheartedly and stepped away from the general, as much to avoid the spray of crumbs from his mouth as to disengage from what could become an argument. I’m not here to argue, she told herself. I’m here to report to the National Security Advisor on what this team thinks we should be doing.

Can we shoot down their missiles? she wondered. And if we do, would the North Koreans consider it an act of war? Would the Chinese come in?

For several moments she watched Jamil intently hunching over his iPhone. He was the only person still sitting at the table; everyone else was standing in little knots of two or three, either at the front of the conference room, where the coffee cart was, or toward the rear, where the doors led to restrooms out along the corridor.

Abruptly, she went to her own chair and opened her minicomputer. Not much bigger than a paperback book, it still had the power and speed of the best laptops. The Department of Defense’s internal data network did not depend entirely on satellite links; it was connected across the continent by hardened landlines. With a few touches of the little machine’s keyboard, Coggins pulled up Michael Jamil’s unclassified dossier.

Born in Baltimore, she saw. Only son of Lebanese parents who fled their country during the civil war there. They were already living in Baltimore when Israel invaded Lebanon. Graduated magna cum laude from Johns Hopkins in information technology. Hired by DoD, moved up to the Defense Intelligence Agency, appointed to National Intelligence Council last year. A bright young man, Coggins decided. Then she realized that Jamil was only a year younger than she. Well, she thought, I’m a bright young woman.

Clicking the mini closed, she got up from her chair and walked down the table toward Jamil. He was sitting alone at the foot of the table; it seemed as if all the others—military and civilians alike—were shunning him.

He looked up as she sat next to him. He seemed surprised, almost perplexed.

“I have a mini, if you need something more powerful than your phone,” Coggins said.

His expression changed. Still surprised, but now pleasantly so.

“I was just going over the figures for the Taepodong-2,” he said, almost apologetically. “General Scheib doesn’t believe it, but those birds could reach San Francisco, I’m pretty sure.”

With a slight smile, Coggins said, “‘Pretty sure’ isn’t going to impress Scheib. Or General Higgins.”

“I guess not,” Jamil admitted. His voice was soft, but he was clearly upset. “The thing is, I always thought that military men based their plans on the worst that an enemy can do, not on what they hope the enemy’s likely to do.”

“That makes sense.”

“We ought to recommend that the President stay out of San Francisco.”

“We’ve apprised him of the possibility.”

Jamil shook his head. “Not strong enough. It’s got to be a recommendation from this emergency committee. Full strength.”

“I’m afraid General Higgins doesn’t put much faith in your calculations,” she said, as gently as she could.

“He’s a jackass, then.”

Coggins broke into a laugh. “That may be, but he’s chairing this group.”

Jamil hunched forward in his chair, toward her. “You’re inside the White House. Can’t you make a recommendation to the National Security Advisor? On your own?”

Her laughter cut off. He was serious. Deadly serious. And he was putting her on the spot.

“I… I don’t know . . .”

He slumped back again. “You don’t believe me either.”

“It’s not that,” she said quickly. “It’s just... well, if you’re wrong, I’d look awfully stupid, wouldn’t I?”

Very seriously, Jamil replied, “No, you’d look awfully stupid if the President gets killed in a nuclear attack on San Francisco.”

She stared at him. He was intent, totally convinced that she had to stick her neck out and urge the National Security Advisor to get the President to turn back. Not his neck, Coggins told herself. Mine.

“All right,” General Higgins bawled from the front of the room, where the snack cart was parked. “We’re out of sticky buns. Let’s get back to work.”

U.S. Route 12, Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho

“Look! It’s starting to snow!”

Charley Ingersoll was passing an eighteen-wheeler when his eight-year-old son, Charley Jr., gave out his delighted squeak. It was getting close to noon, they were hours away from Missoula, and now snow was falling.

“It’s only a few flakes,” said his wife, Martha, sitting in the right-hand seat of the SUV. Charley Jr. and Little Martha, four, had the second bench to themselves. The rear was piled high with luggage and toys.

“Can we make a snowman?” Little Martha asked.

Cheerily, her mother answered, “If it’s deep enough when we get home, dearie.”

Snow, Charley thought. Bad enough to be driving all the distance from Grangeville with the two kids yapping every inch of the way. Now they’ve gotta give me snow to deal with.

He tapped the radio button but got nothing except hissing static. Hadn’t been able to raise Sirius Radio or XM all morning. He started to fiddle with the dial, trying to get a local station, but Martha slapped his hand gently.

“You pay attention to your driving, Charley. I’ll find us some music.”

“Put on one of my CDs!” Charley Jr. piped.

Over her shoulder, Martha said, “Your father wants to get the weather report, dearie. Isn’t that right, Charley?”

He nodded vigorously. The snow didn’t seem very serious, but out here in the mountains you had to be extra careful. He remembered seeing a sign a few miles back for an RV camp. If the weather turns really bad, Charley thought, we can turn in at one of them.

Charley craned his neck to look at the sky. Some heavy gray clouds out there, but still plenty of blue. Might just be a snow shower. Or if it’s a real storm, maybe we’ll outrun it. Storms usually come in from the west. We’re doing seventy, that’s faster than any storm can travel.

He had put the SUV on cruise control once they had hit an area of the highway where there were only a few other cars on the road. Charley didn’t mind traffic, although he couldn’t use the cruise control when he had to keep hitting the brakes all the time. It’s those dratted semis, he complained silently. Specially when it rains, they sploosh up beside you like a dratted tidal wave.

Martha found a local station playing country and western songs. Charley relaxed a little. If there was a bad storm coming they’d be putting out a warning instead of playing their regular music. He decided to wait until the top of the hour, when they played the news and weather. And sports. Martha didn’t know it, but he had bet money on the Seahawks.

ABL-1: Crew Compartment

“We’re at cruising altitude.” Colonel Christopher’s voice came through the intercom speaker in the compartment’s overhead.

Harry clicked his safety harness release and the straps slid into their receptacles on the back of his seat. To Rosenberg he said, “Check the tank pressures, Wally.”

Rosenberg nodded sullenly and got to his feet. “Angel,” Harry said to Reyes, “I want you to purge the oxygen line.”

Reyes gave him a questioning look. “Purge it?” Standing in the narrow aisle between the facing seats, Harry said, “There was a speck of grease in the oxy line when the rig blew up. I want to make sure the line’s absolutely clean.”

“That was three years ago, Harry! We haven’t had any trouble since.”

“Because we’ve been extra careful,” Harry said. “Purge the line, Angie.” With a slight grin, Reyes got out of his chair. The top of his head barely rose above Harry’s shoulder. “Okay, jefe. I’ll purge it.” Then he added. “Again.”

Nakamura came to her feet, too, even shorter than Reyes. “I’ll check out the board.”

She had the most critical job, Harry knew. The battle management system had to find the boosting missile and lock the laser onto it. He thought of little Taki as a sharpshooter. But her rifle weighed tons and took up most of the 747’s interior volume.

This was supposed to be a test flight, Harry said to himself. We don’t have a full crew aboard and we’re supposed to shoot down a real missile. A real missile that’s carrying a real hydrogen bomb. He wondered if they could do it. Make it work, Anson had told him. But now it’s more than the company depending on us. This time it’s for real.

As his teammates slowly started for the compartment’s hatch, Harry said, “Wait a minute. I’ve got something to tell you.”

They looked at him questioningly.

“The North Koreans set off a nuclear bomb in orbit this morning, and it looks like they’ve got more missiles ready to fire at us.”

“Us?”

“You mean America?”

Delany growled, “Goddam gooks, we should’ve wiped them out long ago!”

Nodding slowly, Harry said, “We’ve been ordered to fly to the Sea of Japan and shoot down any missiles the North Koreans launch.”

“Shoot down real missiles?” Taki’s voice was breathless with surprise.

“That’s right,” Harry said.

“They can’t order us!” Delany snapped, nearly shouting. “We’re civilians, for chrissake! They can’t—”

“The North Koreans have missiles with nuclear warheads. They’re getting set to fire them at American cities. We’ve got to stop them.”

“Now?” Angel Reyes asked. “On this flight?”

“Right.”

“How many missiles?” asked Rosenberg.

“Don’t know.”

“How far do we have to go?”

“As far as it takes,” said Harry. “So let’s make sure that everything—I mean everything—is in perfect condition. We’re heading into a real battle engagement.”

Delany looked stunned. He sagged back down onto his seat. Rosenberg, for once, didn’t have a wisecrack to offer.

“Let’s get to work,” Harry said.

Taki started for the forward hatch; Monk Delany got to his feet and followed her. Harry and the two other men headed aft. The plane’s engines throbbed smoothly; Harry barely felt any vibration as the jumbo jet lumbered through the stratosphere.

The laser bay was crammed with pipes and wiring. Harry insisted on keeping the area as neat as possible, but there were always loops of wire festooned from the overhead, spare parts tucked here and there along the narrow walkway. The clutter was inevitable: Harry remembered the old maxim that if a lab was spic-and-span, it meant no creative work was going on in it.

Rosenberg and Reyes went about their tasks, barely saying a word. It’s hit them hard, Harry realized. One minute we’re on a routine test flight and the next we’re heading into a war. He wondered why he didn’t feel excited. Or scared. He felt numb instead. It’s too much, he thought. It’s just too fucking much.

Slowly Harry walked the length of the laser bay, looking over every pipe, every wire, every weld on the tanks that held the volatile chemicals. Most of the laser itself was hidden behind all the plumbing; only its active lasing cavity was clearly visible and available for immediate adjustment or repair.

He stared at the lasing cavity. Built of thick slabs of solid copper with water-cooling channels drilled through them, that chamber was where the chemical energy of the combined iodine and oxygen was converted into megawatts of infrared energy. Leading into it was another copper section, built like a miniature wind tunnel: that’s where the mixed chemicals roared through at supersonic speed, entered the laser cavity and gave up their stored energy, then flowed out to be vented outside the plane.

Harry remembered the first time the Anson scientists had shown a blueprint of the COIL system to a group of visiting Air Force brass. One of the colonels stared at the wind tunnel section and shook his head.

“That’s a lousy design for a rocket,” he said. “You’ll never get much thrust out of it.”

The scientists laughed tolerantly and explained that the wind tunnel wasn’t designed for thrust. It was intended to feed the iodine and oxygen into the chamber where the lasing action took place.

Now, flying toward the Sea of Japan at more than thirty thousand feet, heading into a possible war, Harry studied the laser assembly with the critical eye of a worried father. It’ll work, he told himself. We’ll make it work.

But in his mind’s eye he saw the rig in the desert explode into white-hot flames, saw Quintana being roasted alive, felt the agony of his ribs cracking as he slammed against the back wall of the control room.

It should’ve been me, not Pete. I should have been out there. I should have checked the oxy line myself, made sure it was clean.

He shook his head to clear the nightmare vision. Well, Harry said to himself, if she blows today it won’t matter where I’m standing. We’ll all be dead.

ABL-1: Flight Deck

Lieutenant Sharmon unconsciously pressed one long finger against his headphone as the data for their first refueling rendezvous came through. The information was being fed into his navigation computer, but he listened to the beeps and boops of the electronics even while he watched the data rastering across the small screen of his nav console.

They were over the Bering Sea now, just past the miserable rock of Attu, the last island in the Aleutian chain. Nothing but open water for the next zillion miles, Sharmon knew. With the surprising tailwind pushing them along, they’d reach the Japanese islands in five hours, he figured. But first he had to find the Air Force tanker that was heading for a rendezvous with them.

Sharmon was plotting their course by dead reckoning, as well as homing in on the radio signals from as many Air Force bases as he could find with the plane’s radio equipment. The satellites were down, but he could triangulate their position from the radio fixes. Would that be good enough to find that one tanker plane in all the broad emptiness of the northern Pacific?

If it’s not, we’re all dead.

“Coffee?”

Sharmon flinched at the sudden interruption in his increasingly morose thoughts. Captain O’Banion was standing over him with a steaming plastic mug in one hand.

“It’s just coffee,” said the redheaded communications officer. “I wouldn’t poison you, man.”

Sharmon tried to grin as he accepted the mug. “Thanks, Captain.”

“Brick,” O’Banion said amiably, pointing to his rusty red hair as he sat himself at the comm console.

“I’m Jon,” Sharmon replied. “Without an aitch.”

O’Banion chuckled. “I haven’t used my real first name in so long I forget what it is.”

He’s trying to make me relax, Sharmon figured, as he took a sip of the coffee. It was scalding hot. “Wow!”

“I made it extra strong,” said O’Banion. “We’re gonna need to stay bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

“Guess so. You hear anything more about. ..” Sharmon was going to say about the war, but he realized that there might not be a war going on. Not yet, leastways.

“All the civilian satellites are off the air. Our mil-sats are workin’, but they’re swamped with traffic.”

“You hear anything about North Korea?”

O’Banion shook his head. “Not a peep. Except our orders.”

Sharmon sipped again at the coffee. It was black and unsweetened. What the hell, he thought. Who needs cream and sugar when they’re going into a shooting war?

“Where’s that tanker?” Colonel Christopher said into her pin mike.

“Should be out there.” Lieutenant Sharmon’s voice sounded decidedly shaky in her headphone.

The colonel clicked off the intercom connection. Should be, she echoed. But where the hell is it?

She looked out through the windscreen. Nothing in sight but empty gray ocean. I could break radio silence and call them, Christopher thought, but I don’t want to look like some dumbass who can’t find her way to the toilet. Besides, it would tell Sharmon that I don’t have any confidence in him. Better to wait. Another few minutes, anyway. We ought to maintain silence as much as we can if we’re on a war footing. This might not be a war, not yet, but we’re sure ready to get into one.

The flight helmet felt heavy on her head; her neck muscles were tensing up. She’d have a headache soon, she knew. As if I don’t have enough of a headache already, she thought, flying into a war with a planeload of nerds downstairs.

Glancing at the fuel gauges on her control board, Christopher thought, If we don’t find that bird in another fifteen minutes, I’m going to have to call.

She looked across at Kaufman in the right-hand seat. He caught her eye and ostentatiously tapped a stubby finger on the fuel gauge panel.

“I know,” Christopher said. “I just hate to undermine the kid.”

Kaufman huffed. “His job is to navigate properly, not get us drowned.”

“It wouldn’t—” A glint of light sparkled against the endless gray of the ocean. “Hey, look!”

And there it was. A big, fat, beautiful KC-45, chock-full of fuel for them.

Colonel Christopher punched the intercom. “Lieutenant, you can stop sweating. We have the tanker in sight. Nice work.”

She could hear Sharmon’s relieved sigh even through her headphone.

The Pentagon: Situation Room

“We’ve got to warn the President in the strongest terms that he should not land in San Francisco.”

Zuri Coggins was surprised to hear herself speak those words, especially since her voice carried none of the doubt that she felt.

General Higgins looked surprised, too. The situation room fell absolutely silent. Coggins could hear the soft murmur coming from the air-conditioning vents up in the ceiling.

After several heartbeats, General Scheib said, “I disagree. Those missiles can’t reach San Francisco. They don’t have the range or the accuracy.”

Coggins looked across the table at the general. “Are you willing to bet the President’s life on that?”

“Yes,” Scheib snapped, without an instant’s hesitation.

“I’m not,” said Coggins. Clasping her hands together on the tabletop, she tried to be more reasonable. “Look, General, the chances that they can hit San Francisco might be very small, but the consequences if they do will be extremely large. The prudent thing to do is to tell the President not to land there.”

Scheib started to reply but held himself in check. Clearly he didn’t like what she was recommending.

General Higgins said, “Ms. Coggins makes a good point.” Then he added, with a grin, “If nothing else, we’ll be covering our asses.”

A few chuckles rose from around the table.

“The President’s not going to like this,” Scheib said. “He’ll think we’re making him look like a coward.”

“It’s his decision to make,” Higgins said firmly. “We can’t force the man to turn around.”

“Turn tail, you mean,” Scheib muttered.

Higgins shot him a disapproving look.

“All right,” said Scheib. “If we’re going to advise the President to stay clear of San Francisco, we should also send a fighter escort to cover ABL-1 as it approaches Korean airspace.”

“Fighter escort?” asked one of the civilians.

“That 747 would be a sitting duck for enemy interceptors,” Scheib said. “We’ve got to protect it.”

General Higgins nodded. “Send the recommendation to the Air Force chief of staff. With my approval.”

“Yes, sir,” Scheib said, and he bent over his laptop.

The National Security Advisor raised his hands prayerfully in front of his pursed lips as he stared at the smart screen on his office wall. Zuri Coggins looked so damned solemn, so convinced she was right.

“And that’s the recommendation of the full emergency team?” he asked, his voice silky smooth. It was a tone that had terrified Navy officers for many years. Here in the White House, the civilians had been slow to understand its depths, but they figured it out—after a few bloody examples.

“We didn’t take a vote,” said Coggins. “But General Higgins agrees with me.”

“You’re not calling from your cell phone, are you?” the Security Advisor asked.

“No, this is a secure videophone center in the Pentagon.”

“Good.”

“Will you make the recommendation to the President?” she asked.

He hesitated. The President won’t like being told he should run away from San Francisco, he knew. Especially if it turns out that the city isn’t bombed. Maybe this is all some piece of North Korean gamesmanship to make the President look bad: he backs out of the San Francisco speech and the North Koreans don’t launch their missiles. Leaves egg on the President’s face.

The Security Advisor sighed heavily. Damned tricky business here. Damned tricky. On the other hand, if it’s bombed with The Man in it, then Parkinson becomes President and who knows what that moron will do?

“What does General Scheib have to say about this?”

Coggins’ lips pressed into a thin, hard line. At last she answered, “He doesn’t believe the North Korean missiles can reach San Francisco. He thinks Honolulu is their likely target.”

“I see,” said the Security Advisor.

Urgently, Coggins pleaded, “We’ve only got a half hour or so before he’s scheduled to land. You’ve got to warn him.”

The Security Advisor wasn’t accustomed to making snap decisions. All his life he’d waited until all the available information was in his hands before putting his reputation on the line.

But he said, “I’ll put in another call to Air Force One. You know, he’s not going to like this.”

“Better fled than dead,” Coggins said with a grim smile.

When she came back into the situation room, the group had again broken into separate little knots of people, except for General Scheib, who sat at his place with a plug in one ear, tapping furiously at his laptop keyboard. And Jamil, who still sat alone at the end of the table. Maybe somebody put glue on his chair, Coggins thought.

General Higgins called to her from the front of the stuffy room. “Well? What happened?”

“He’s calling Air Force One and urging the President to turn back.”

Higgins nodded. “Okay. That’s done. Now we sit and wait.”

Slowly, everyone returned to their seats. Turning to General Scheib, Higgins asked, “Did you get the fighter cover you want?”

His face like a thundercloud, Scheib said, “They’re bucking the request to SecDef.”

“The Secretary of Defense?” Higgins frowned. “He’s a civilian.”

Coggins didn’t know whether to laugh or growl.

General Scheib said, “Nobody wants to take the responsibility.”

“Hell, I’ve already taken the responsibility,” said General Higgins. “Did you tell them I approved the request?”

“I did. They’re bucking it up the chain of command.”

“To a politician,” Higgins grumbled. “And he’ll just buck it up to the Commander in Chief.”

Scheib looked disgusted. “They’d better make the decision pretty damned quick. If the North Koreans send interceptors after ABL-1, that’s plane’s dead meat.”

“You’ve done as much as you can, Brad. Now it’s up to the politicians.” Higgins turned to the admiral sitting across from Coggins and asked, “Has Honolulu been alerted?”

Nodding, the admiral replied, “Emergency teams are being notified. We’re telling them this is a surprise drill.”

“You’re not letting them know that they may be attacked?” Coggins asked.

“And start a panic?” the admiral snapped. “More people would be killed in the stampede to get out of the city than if the city really was nuked.”

Coggins saw that Jamil slowly shook his head. He knows better, she thought. He knows that if they nuke Honolulu a couple of hundred thousand people will be killed instantly. At least.

Higgins turned the discussion to emergency rescue tactics. Coggins opened her minicomputer and, looking toward Higgins all the time, reopened Jamil’s file.

He’s a Christian, she saw with a quick flick of her eyes to the tiny screen. His whole family is Christian. That must be why they fled Lebanon and came here. And Higgins thinks he’s an Arab. She smiled to herself. She wondered what General Higgins would think if he knew that Zuri Coggins was a Black Muslim.

Maryland Heights, Missouri: Provident Trust Bank

Linda Suwazi saw her career going down in flames. The baby’s due in four months, she groaned inwardly, and this is gonna get me laid off, for sure.

Sitting in front of Linda’s desk, Mrs. Markley radiated cold fury. “You are the branch manager, aren’t you? Why can’t you get the machines fixed?”

Mrs. Markley was the seventh customer to barge into her office in the past half hour, complaining that the ATMs were down. Linda had tried to phone the local service company, but she’d gotten nothing but a busy signal. In desperation she had called corporate headquarters in Houston. No use. The line was so jammed with other calls that all she got was an automated message advising her to call again later.

“I want access to my money!” Mrs. Markley was hissing. “It’s bad enough that your machines aren’t working, but your tellers refuse to cash my Social Security check!”

“Our computers are down,” Linda tried to explain. “It’s only temporary, I’m sure. If you could come back later…”

Mrs. Markley rose grandly to her feet, practically twitching with rage. She reminded Linda of a beady-eyed rat.

“If you can’t run your bank properly you should be replaced!” Mrs. Markley snapped. Then she swept out of Linda’s office.

Linda sank back in her swivel chair and fought down the urge to burst into tears.

ABL-1: Laser Bay

“You scared, boss?”

Startled, Harry half-turned and saw Delany’s big, bearlike form lumbering up the narrow walkway toward him. Harry had slowly worked his way past the lasing cavity and mixing chamber, heading tailward along the tanks that held the liquid oxygen and iodine toward the cramped little monitoring station where Wally Rosenberg sat, checking pressures and tankage levels.

“What are you doing back here?” Harry demanded. Monk’s station was up in the nose, at the beam control compartment.

“The optics are all okay,” said Delany. “I was just wondering how you guys’re feeling. You nervous about this?”

“Nervous? Kind of,” Harry admitted. “Aren’t you?”

Delany shrugged. “Why should I be nervous? The gooks are about to start World War III and we’re in the middle of the action. What’s there to be nervous about?”

Harry wanted to laugh, but the best he could do was to crack a thin smile.

“You checked the optics?” he asked Delany. “Everything’s on the tick. No problems.” “Where’s Taki?”

“Up at the battle management console, where she should be. Maybe they’ll give her an Air Force commission if she nails those gook missiles.”

Harry knew that he and the other civilians were manning the laser only because this was supposed to be a test flight. We’re only a skeleton crew at best, he thought. When the system’s declared operational, Air Force personnel will take over. With more than twice the number of their five-person team, at that.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go up forward and see how she’s making out.”

Delany gave him that sloppy salute of his. “Aye, aye, skipper.”

Harry shook his head. “This isn’t the Navy, Monk.”

“We ain’t the Air Force, either.”

The COIL’s channel ran through the length of the plane, past the crew compartment and galley, beneath the flight deck and cockpit, and into the bulbous turret that made the plane’s nose look like a potato. Taki Nakamura’s station was up forward, at the electronics consoles that monitored the plane’s sensors and the laser’s output beam.

Taki’s battle management compartment was directly beneath the flight deck. Harry scanned the row of consoles, most of them dark and unused until they powered up the laser. The plane’s slight swaying was more noticeable up here near the nose. Like a ship at sea, Harry thought. This big lunk of an airplane must weigh a hundred tons, but it still pitches up and down a little.

Nakamura was sitting at the main console, her fingers flicking across the keyboard, her eyes focused intently on the display screen.

“Everything okay, Taki?” asked Harry.

She looked up at him, her lean, sculpted face utterly serious. “Everything’s in the green, jefe.”

Harry nodded to her. He remembered that Pete Quintana was the guy they originally called el jefe, the boss. Harry inherited the title when Anson put him in charge of the team, after Pete was killed. An gel Reyes had even gotten his wife to stitch the title onto some of Harry’s T-shirts and coveralls. Victor Anson had never seen it, thank god. There was only one god in heaven, Anson always said, and one head of Anson Aerospace. Yet Anson had never come out to the desert to see the test rig, never even made his way down to the working section of his own company’s laboratory in Pasadena. He stayed in his office. People came to him.

Harry patted Taki’s slim shoulder and moved forward, past the battle management compartment and into the nose of the mammoth airplane. Here was the beam control station, Monk Delany’s domain, the business end of the COIL, where megawatts of infrared energy fed through the ball-shaped turret in the plane’s nose and lanced out toward the target.

The controls for the ranging laser were there, too. Perched in a housing atop the flight deck’s hump, the ranger was a smaller carbon dioxide laser that was used like a radar to fix the location of the target and feed that data to the big COIL for the kill. Slaved to the sensors that spotted the missile’s hot rocket plume, the smaller laser pinpointed the missile’s position and distance. The turret in the plane’s nose moved in response to the data from the ranging laser and then, zap! the COIL fired and the missile was destroyed.

Harry noticed that the ranging laser’s console was not powered up. Idly, he sat at the console and flicked it on. The central screen glowed to life, and the words SYSTEM MALFUNCTION burned themselves onto it.

What the hell? Harry thought. System malfunction?

“What’re you doing, Harry?”

He looked up and saw Monk Delany looming over him.

“Something’s wrong with the ranger.”

Delany leaned over his shoulder and pecked at the console’s keyboard, SYSTEM MALFUNCTION glowered at them.

“Shit,” said Delany. “You been screwing around with my program?”

“No, I just turned the console on,” Harry said.

Mumbling unhappily, Delany nudged Harry out of the seat and took over the console himself. After several moments he shrugged in frustration.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

“No kidding.” Harry knew that without the ranging laser to feed targeting information to the COIL, the whole system was useless.

“Lemme fiddle with it,” Monk said, still looking at Harry as if it were his fault.

“I’ll go check the rig,” Harry said.

“You can’t check it while we’re in the air,” Monk growled.

Harry patted his muscular shoulder. “You can’t, ape-man. You’re too big to squeeze in there. But I’m small enough to do it.”

“You’ll break your stupid ass.”

Harry heaved a sigh and said, “It’s got to be done, Monk. Otherwise we’ll have to turn around and go home.”

Monk said nothing, but the look on his face told Harry that he wouldn’t mind returning to Elmendorf, not at all.

ABL-1: Flight Deck

Harry left Monk sweating and swearing at the ranging laser console and clambered up the ladder to the flight deck. The two Air Force officers looked startled to see him.

“I need to check the laser assembly,” Harry said, pointing overhead.

The redheaded captain said, “Colonel Christopher ought to know about this, sir.”

Nodding, Harry said, “Let her know, then.” The captain spoke into his pin mike and an instant later Colonel Christopher popped through the hatch from the cockpit.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Hartunian?” She looked nettled.

“I’ve got to check the ranging laser.”

“In flight? I thought that unit was sealed off while the plane’s pressurized.”

“The laser housing is pressurized too,” Harry explained. “This won’t endanger the plane.”

She looked unconvinced. “Is this really necessary, or are you just...” She let her voice trail off, but Harry got the implication loud and clear: Are you nerds just playing around with your techie toys?

“It’s completely necessary,” he replied. “Without the ranging laser we can’t lock onto a target.”

Planting her fists on her hips, Colonel Christopher asked tightly, “Are you telling me that the ranging subsystem is down?”

“That’s right. We’re trying to find out what’s wrong with it and get it fixed.”

She stood there before him, her face set in an angry frown. Abruptly she turned to the young lieutenant and commanded, “Jon, you’re the tallest guy we’ve got. Give Mr. Hartunian all the help you can.”

Lieutenant Sharmon got up from his console, his close-cropped hair nearly brushing the overhead.

“Thank you, Colonel,” Harry said.

“Get it fixed, Mr. Hartunian.”

“Harry,” he said automatically.

Colonel Christopher looked as if she wanted to breathe fire. “Mr. Hartunian,” she repeated.

With Lieutenant Sharmon’s help, Harry unscrewed the plate that covered the ranging laser’s mount.

The tubular housing for the ranging laser was too tight for Harry to do more than stick his head through the opening. The plane’s engines sounded louder up here, the vibrations heavier. It felt cold, too. Harry realized that there was nothing between him and the subzero stratosphere out there except a thin sheathing of aluminum.

Teetering on a makeshift ladder that Sharmon had created by stripping one of the crew’s relief cots and leaning the metal frame against the bulkhead of the flight deck, Harry wormed one arm up into the shadowy housing and played the beam from his pocket flashlight down the length of the carbon dioxide laser. Everything seemed okay. No loose connections. Seals looked tight.

Turning carefully to inspect the forward end of the laser, Harry froze. The forward lens assembly was gone. Where the fist-sized unit of collimating lenses should have been there was nothing but a gaping emptiness.

Somebody’s taken the lens assembly out of the laser, Harry realized. He stared, trembling, at that empty space where the lens assembly should have been. Somebody’s taken the lens out of the laser, he repeated to himself. Without the lens assembly the ranging laser can’t work, and without the ranging laser, the big COIL can’t be aimed properly. The whole system—the whole plane—will be useless.

There’s a saboteur on the plane! The thought made Harry’s knees weak. But there was no other explanation. That lens assembly didn’t remove itself from the ranger; somebody deliberately took it out. Then he remembered the explosion at the test rig, the accident that had killed Pete Quintana and nearly broken his own back. It wasn’t an accident, Harry realized. It was deliberate sabotage. By one of my crew.

As Harry stood there, wondering what to do, how to handle this terrible new knowledge, he heard Victor Anson’s voice in his mind:

Make it work, Harry. I’m counting on you. We’re all counting on you.