Able One

ABL-1: Ranging Laser Housing

Harry stared at the empty space where the ranging laser’s optical assembly should have been. He heard Victor Anson’s urgent demand. Make it work, Harry. I’m counting on you. We’re all counting on you. The company’s ass is on the line.

He heard the lanky lieutenant’s voice. “You okay up there, Mr. Hartunian?”

“I’m fine,” Harry said, adding silently, But we’re all in real trouble.

With Lieutenant Sharmon helping him, Harry climbed down from the laser mount and closed its access panel. Then he headed for the beam control station downstairs, Monk Delany’s place. The ranging laser is Monk’s responsibility, Harry said to himself. And somebody’s sabotaged it.

Harry clambered down the ladder, brushed past Taki Nakamura, and ducked through the hatch into the beam control compartment.

Monk Delany looked up at him. “What’s the matter, Harry?” Delany had his usual half-quizzical smile on his stubbled face.

“We’ve got a saboteur on board.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“The forward lens assembly is missing from the ranging laser, that’s what I’m talking about.”

Delany’s jaw dropped open. “Missing? Whaddaya mean it’s missing?”

“It’s not there, Monk. That’s why the console’s reading a malfunction.”

“It’s gotta be there.”

“It’s not. I just checked it out.”

“Everything was okay last night. I checked it all out.” Delany’s usual smile was gone now. He looked frightened.

“It’s not okay now.”

Monk looked up at Harry, his face full of consternation.

“We’ve got spares. I’ll get right on it.” He got up from his seat and before Harry could say anything squeezed through the hatch, heading aft.

Harry didn’t move. He stood there in the nose of the plane, feeling it rise and fall slowly, majestically, like the big cruise liner he’d been on as it ploughed relentlessly through the sea. But his mind was racing. There’s a saboteur among us, he thought. Somebody doesn’t want the COIL to work. Somebody on board the plane, somebody who doesn’t want to get himself killed. So he disables the ranging laser. Without data on the target’s range and position the COIL is useless.

Who did this? Harry asked himself. Can Monk fix it before we get near North Korea? And if he does, what will the saboteur try next?

Santa Monica Airport

The place was a madhouse. Sylvia had decided to avoid LAX and take a commuter jet to San Francisco, but the usually quiet airport in Santa Monica was teeming with angry, yelling, ticket-waving customers. One look at the electronic status board showed Sylvia that half the scheduled flights had been canceled. Most of the others were badly delayed.

Her daughters seemed unimpressed by the furor boiling all around them as Sylvia left them in front of the status board to fight her way to the ticket counter.

“Don’t move from this spot,” Sylvia commanded. Both girls nodded dutifully. “And watch my bag!”

“Sure.”

As their mother plunged into the crowd, Vickie said, “Must be a lot of people trying to get to San Francisco today.”

“Or someplace,” Denise agreed.

“The place looks like a zoo.”

“This is where they filmed Casablanca?” Denise asked her older sister.

The two girls were standing in the midst of the bellowing, surging crowd like a pair of slim palm trees in the middle of a tropical typhoon. Vickie nodded. “The airport scene in the beginning,” she said.

A harried-looking, red-faced man lugging a bulging briefcase rushed past the girls and tripped over Vickie’s roll-on suitcase. He went sprawling, his briefcase popped open, papers fluttering in all directions.

Vickie and Denise helped to scoop up the papers. The man stuffed them back in his briefcase, his face sweaty and angry, as he muttered something about being late for the last flight to Sacramento. He dashed off, clutching the briefcase under his arm like a football.

“He never said thank you,” Denise complained.

“A jerk,” said Vickie.

Sylvia came out of the crowd, reached for the handle of her roll-on, and said grimly to her daughters, “Follow me.”

They pushed through the fuming, bawling crowd and up a flight of stairs, their roll-ons bumping with each step.

Sylvia pushed through a door marked FLIGHT OPERATIONS DIRECTOR, the two girls at her heels.

It was mercifully quiet inside the office. No one was there except a rake-thin, harried-looking man sitting behind a desk with a phone at his ear and both eyes staring at his desktop computer screen. He was in his shirtsleeves, which were rolled up. His tie was pulled loose from his wrinkled, soggy collar.

“It’s a total mess!” he was saying into the phone, his voice high, agitated. “Computers are down, phone lines are jammed, navigation system is kaput—a real mess!”

Sylvia stood before his desk, her two daughters flanking her, and waited patiently until at last the man put the phone down and looked up at her.

Before he could speak a word, Sylvia said sweetly, “Congresswoman McClintock is waiting for us in San Francisco. If we don’t get there to be with the President this evening there’s going to be a lot of trouble.”

“Congresswoman McClintock?”

“We’re due to be with the President of the United States this evening at the Cow Palace,” Sylvia said in a tone that you could pour over pancakes.

“The President?”

“The President,” said Sylvia sweetly. “And Congresswoman McClintock. And the chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee. Among others.”

The man groaned, but then said, “Wait right here. I’ll see what can be done.”

Sylvia gestured for her daughters to take the two wooden chairs in front of the desk. She herself remained standing while the badly stressed director of flight operations picked up his telephone again.

ABL-1: Cockpit

“Kamchatka Peninsula coming up.” Colonel Christopher heard her navigator’s voice in her headphone. The kid sounded more sure of himself since they’d made the rendezvous with the first tanker.

“There it is,” Major Kaufman said, pointing to a smudge of gray clouds on the horizon, at about the two o’clock position.

Christopher said into her lip mike, “Jon, we need to stay well away from Russian airspace.”

“Workin’ on it,” the navigator replied. “I’ll have a course correction for you in two minutes, Colonel.”

“Colonel, we’re getting pinged by Kamchatka,” said the communications officer. O’Banion’s voice sounded worried. “Oh-oh. Message coming in.”

“Pipe it to me,” she commanded. A smooth baritone voice said in flawless midwestern American English, “Unidentified aircraft, you are approaching Russian airspace. Please identify yourself.”

Christopher thumbed the comm switch on her control yoke and said crisply, “This is U.S. Air Force ABL-1. We intend to remain over international waters.”

“We have no information on your flight plan,” said Kamchatka, without the slightest trace of anxiety.

The colonel bit her lips momentarily, then replied, “We are on our way to Japanese airspace. We will stay well away from your territory.”

Silence for several heartbeats. He’s waiting for his superiors to tell him what he should say, Christopher reasoned.

Finally, “U.S. ABL-1, our air defense command has sent a flight of interceptors to accompany you away from Russian airspace. They have no hostile intent.”

“Copy,” Christopher said curtly. “No hostile intent.” Then she clicked off the radio switch and grinned at her copilot. “Bet they’ve got plenty of cameras on board.”

“They’ll have air-to-air missiles, too, count on it,” Kaufman muttered.

“Of course.” She turned the situation over in her mind for a few moments, then said, “We better make a left turn, Obie.”

“I guess so.”

Lieutenant Sharmon gave them a new heading and the big 747 turned southward twelve degrees. Not enough, though.

“Hey!” Kaufman yipped. “We got company.”

Following his pointing finger with her eyes, Christopher saw a trio of swept-wing jet fighters boring in on them from above and ahead.

“Fulcrums,” Kaufman said. MiG-29s, the mainstay of the Russian fighter forces.

“No,” Christopher said, eyeing the sleek, silvery fighters. “They look too new. More like MiG-35s.”

“There’s another one,” Kaufman said, “comin’ up fast.”

“That’s not a MiG,” said Christopher.

“Looks a lot like one of our F-15s.”

She nodded, making her flight helmet wobble slightly on her head. “Sukhoi SU-27. Photo recon plane.”

Kaufman had an Air Force catalog displayed on the small screen to his right. “Flanker. Supersonic.”

“She’s not carrying any missiles.”

“The other three are.”

“That Flanker’s a photo plane. Looks like a two-seater.”

The three MiGs pulled up alongside ABL-1 on the right, speed brake flaps down to slow them to the 747’s lumbering pace.

Kaufman said, “They’re keeping themselves between us and Mother Russia.”

“Just following orders,” said Christopher, “same as us.”

At that moment all three MiGs pulled their flaps up and roared ahead of ABL-1. The lead fighter suddenly jinked straight up, then sideways.

“He’s viffing,” Colonel Christopher said. Then she added for Kaufman’s benefit, “Vectoring in flight.”

“I know what viffing is,” Kaufman replied testily. “Like the Marines’ Harriers. They can take off straight up, like a helicopter.”

The three MiGs made a tight turn and circled around to take up a station off the 747’s left wing tip. Before Christopher could say anything, they zoomed ahead again and turned the other way, then settled into formation again off the right wing.

Christopher laughed. “They’re flying rings around us.”

“Showing off,” Kaufman grumbled.

The Sukhoi pulled up even closer. Christopher could see two helmeted heads inside its elongated canopy.

O’Banion’s voice piped up in her earphone. “They’re painting us with radar, Colonel.”

“I’ll bet they are,” said Christopher. “And with everything else they’ve got. They’d x-ray us if they could.”

She saw the pilot of the flanker looking over at her as he held the fighter alongside. On an impulse, she waved at him. After a moment he waved back.

“Next thing you know he’ll be asking for your phone number,” Kaufman muttered.

“That’s better than shooting at us.”

“Guess so.” But Kaufman didn’t sound convinced of it.

U.S. Route 12, Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho

The snow was getting thicker. Charley Ingersoll nudged the windshield wiper control and the blades smeared freshly fallen flakes across the SUV’s windshield.

The weather report on the radio had called for “cloudy and mild” all afternoon, with a chance of snow after sunset. We oughtta be home before sunset, Charley said to himself. Specially if we don’t stop for lunch.

Sure enough, Charley Jr. piped from the backseat, “I’m hungry! When are we gonna eat lunch?”

The boy must have mental telepathy, Charley thought.

“Me too!” Little Martha added. She never wanted to be left out of anything her older brother did.

Charley scowled at the thickening snow. The highway was still dry, nothing much had accumulated on the paving, but Charley knew it was only a matter of time before the road became slick and slippery.

“We got anything to feed them?” he asked his wife.

Martha gave him one of her you-always-blame-everything-on-me looks as she said, “No, dear. You said we’d stop for lunch on the way home, remember?”

“Okay, okay.”

The gas gauge had dipped well below half, Charley saw.

“Look out for a gas station,” he said to Martha. “One with a convenience store. You can get something for the kids to eat while I fill the tank.”

They passed a big sign for another RV park up the road. It looked like an old sign, beat-up and weathered. Just as they sped past the entrance to the park, Charley Jr. announced, “I gotta go.”

“Me too,” said Little Martha.

His wife turned in her seat and said sternly, “Just control yourselves for a few more minutes. Your father’s looking for a gas station. You can go there.”

The snow was getting heavier. Charley punched the radio on again. Still nothing on the satellite stations. Martha fiddled with the dial until they got the tail end of a local weather report.

“... cloudy and mild, with a chance of snow this evening,” a cheery male voice was saying. “Snow accumulation could be more than a foot in the upper elevations.”

“It’s snowing now,” Martha said, sounding a little nervous.

Charley saw a sign that announced a gas station five miles ahead.

“Five miles, kids,” he said. “Just hang in there for another few minutes.”

The gas station was nothing much: just a couple of pumps and a little building that looked barely big enough to hold an attendant. A sign saying NO CASH TRANSACTIONS was plastered by the door.

Charley pulled the SUV up to the pumps. Almost before he stopped the kids had the side door slid open and were racing for the side of the building. Martha got out and hurried after them, bundling her coat around herself as she ran through the thick wet flakes of snow that had already covered the parking area with white.

Charley was surprised by how cold it felt. A stinging wind cut through the light jacket he was wearing. His face felt cold, raw. Muttering to himself about weather forecasters, he slid his credit card into the pump’s slot. Nothing happened. The screen was blank.

Grumbling now, Charley stomped through the wet snow to the building and pushed its door open. A pimply-faced kid sat huddled in a tatty-looking wool coat. His hair looked as if it hadn’t been combed in a week and hadn’t been washed in Lord knows how long.

“The pump won’t take my card,” Charley complained.

“Yeah, I know,” the kid said, his voice raspy. “No electricity. We lost power ‘bout half an hour ago. Soon’s my pop comes to pick me up I’m outta here.”

“Don’t you have a manual pump?”

“Nope.”

“How do I get gas?” Charley demanded. “Beats me,” the kid said.

The Pentagon: Situation Room

“Where are they now?” General Higgins asked. “Over the Pacific, approaching Japan,” replied General Scheib, pointing to the electronic map on the wall screen. A tiny winking light gave the position of ABL-1, a thin trace of blue line showed its course so far. Scheib wondered if Higgins couldn’t see the map clearly; maybe he’s nearsighted or something.

Higgins had loosened his tie and hung his blue jacket on the back of his chair. The situation room looked lived-in, plastic coffee cups dotting the oblong conference table, the cart that once held pastries and other snacks now bearing nothing but crumbs and three empty stainless steel urns.

Zuri Coggins had moved from her seat at Higgins’ right hand down the table to be next to Michael Jamil, who was still bent over his iPhone. He had connected it wirelessly to the DoD computer that served the situation room and was slaving away over calculations of some sort.

On the wall opposite the big map, screens showed satellite views of North Korea. The two missiles still stood on their launch pads. No sign of the troops that Pyongyang had reportedly sent, but the satellite imagery was spotty, at best.

The admiral seated halfway down the table looked up from his laptop screen. “The Russian planes have turned back,” he said, looking relieved. Like Higgins, the admiral had long since taken off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair.

“They got a damned good look at our plane,” Higgins muttered.

General Scheib nodded. He was on his feet, pacing the length of the situation room as if he were doing his daily exercises.

“They can’t tell much from the exterior,” Scheib said, trying to sound reassuring. But then he added, “Of course, that turret on the nose could be a giveaway. There’s been enough publicity about the airborne laser that they’ll recognize ABL-1 from that potato nose.”

General Higgins shot an angry look at him and Scheib remembered the general’s “Possum” nickname. Smart, he berated himself. Real smart.

“Who’s flying the plane?” Higgins asked. “I hope we’ve got a good man at the controls.”

Scheib started for his chair and the notebook computer opened on the table in front of it.

“This was supposed to be a test run for them,” he said to Higgins. “They weren’t expecting this crisis.”

“Who the hell was?”

Scheib sat and pecked at his notebook. “Damned security red tape,” he muttered, his head bent over the tiny keyboard. “Slows everything down.”

Jamil looked up from his calculations. “I think it’s imperative that we send a warning to the civil defense operations in Honolulu, Hilo, Anchorage, Juneau—”

“Not San Francisco?” one of the civilians asked.

Jamil looked up the table at General Higgins. Very calmly, he replied, “I seem to be the only one here who’s worried about San Francisco.”

Higgins made a sound halfway between a grunt and a snort.

Gently, Coggins asked, “You still think it’s possible that they’ve targeted San Francisco?”

“I do. And we ought to be watching what the Chinese are doing. Watching very carefully.” “There doesn’t seem to be anything unusual—”

“They’ve put their missiles on high alert, haven’t they?”

“Well, so have we. And the Russians.”

“And the Iranians?” Jamil asked.

Coggins studied his coffee-colored face with its fringe of beard as she wondered, What’s he after? Why is he pushing us into his disaster scenario? And the answer immediately came back to her: because he believes it. He’s scared that we’re about to unleash a nuclear holocaust.

To Jamil she murmured, “The Israelis will take care of Iran.”

“Before or after Tehran launches its missiles on Israel?”

Coggins hesitated.

“We should at least warn the Israelis of the possibility,” Jamil urged with quiet intensity.

“And have those hotheads launch a preemptive strike on Iran? That would start your Sarajevo scenario all by itself, wouldn’t it?”

Jamil slumped backing his chair. “Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”

General Scheib called from his seat halfway up the table, “Okay, I’ve got it. The crew for today’s flight of ABL-1, civilians and blue suits.”

“What kind of experience does the pilot have?” General Higgins asked.

“Let me scroll down to…” Scheib’s face reddened, then went white.

“Well?” Higgins demanded.

His voice dead flat, Scheib replied, “The pilot is Lieutenant Colonel Karen Christopher—”

“A woman?”

“One of the best pilots in the Air Force,” Scheib said without looking up from his miniature computer’s screen. “She piloted B-2s in actions over Afghanistan and Iraq. Very experienced, decorated…” His voice fell off.

“What’s she doing driving a test program plane?” Higgins groused. “A pilot with that much experience and seniority.”

Scheib knew, of course. It wasn’t printed out on Karen’s dossier, but he knew that she’d been stuck in the airborne laser program as punishment for refusing to divulge the name of the married Air Force officer she’d been sleeping with. Her career’s been blighted because she was loyal to me, Scheib knew.

And now she’s flying right into what could be the start of a nuclear war.

What if she gets killed on this mission? he asked himself. That would solve a lot of problems.

And he hated himself for even thinking of it.

ABL-1: Beam Management Compartment

Monk came back through the hatch with both his hands full of black cases that held spare optics components.

“Relax, Harry,” he said. “I can get it put together again in an hour, maybe less.”

“You can work up there?” Harry asked. “It’s a tight space; I barely got into it.”

Delany grinned at him. “I know the layout inside out, Harry. All I gotta do is get my arm into the housing.”

“You sure of that?”

“If I need to I can get Taki to help me. She’s small enough to get in there with no trouble.”

Harry nodded but heard himself say, “And how do we test it?”

Monk stared at him.

“You put a new lens assembly in, but how do we know it’s aligned right? How do we know it’s working the way it should?”

“Jeez, Harry, I’m doin’ the best I frickin’ can.”

“Yeah, I know. But it might not be good enough.”

Monk put the boxes gently down on the workbench that ran along one side of the compartment. Turning back to Harry, he asked, “So what do you want to do?”

I want to go home and have a beer and watch the sun go down over the ocean, Harry thought.

“Harry?”

“Get to work,” he said. “I’ve got to talk this over with the pilot. She’s in command of this plane.”

“If we can’t be sure the ranger is okay, we’ll hafta turn back, I guess,” Monk said softly, almost as if talking to himself.

“We’re not turning back,” Harry said. “Not unless the woman in charge says so.”

“She doesn’t know shit about this technology.”

“She’s in charge. It’s her decision, not mine.”

Monk looked as if he wanted to argue, but he merely shook his head dumbly.

“You need help with this?” Harry asked him.

“Naw. Another pair of hands would just get in the way.”

“Okay,” Harry said. “I’m going up to talk it over with the skipper.”

Harry ducked out of the optics compartment.

Taki was at her battle management console, looking bored. But one glance at Harry’s face made her get to her feet.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Plenty,” said Harry. On an impulse, he said, “Look in on Monk, give him a hand if he needs it. He’s got to replace the ranger’s optics assembly.”

“Replace?” She looked startled. “Why? What’s wrong with the—”

“It’s missing.”

“Missing? How can it be missing?”

Harry thought she looked genuinely surprised, genuinely alarmed. “That’s what I’d like to know. You go in and offer Monk your help. Don’t leave him alone in there.”

Taki’s face, normally impassive, was wide-eyed with consternation.

Harry left her and started up the ladder to the flight deck, thinking, If Monk sabotaged the ranger, he probably won’t try anything else with Taki watching him. Unless she’s in on it, part of the plot. Hell, they could all be in on it. Maybe I’m the only one who isn’t.

The two blue-suiters were at their consoles, the lanky black lieutenant and the redheaded captain at the communications console. It seemed quiet up on the flight deck, the big jet engines muted to a distant background drone, the plane’s throbbing vibrations barely noticeable.

The redhead gave him a quizzical glance as Harry clambered up from the ladder.

“I’ve got to talk with the skipper,” Harry said.

Without a word to him, the comm officer tapped a key on his console and spoke into his pin mike. Then he looked up at Harry.

“Colonel Christopher will be right with you,” he said.

She came out of the cockpit, stretching her slim body as she stepped through the open hatch. Harry thought that sitting for hours on end at the plane’s controls must be hell on your body. His back twinged in sympathy for her.

Christopher looked up at him and smiled tiredly. “I was just thinking about taking a little nap.” She made it sound like an apology.

Glancing at the two officers at their consoles, Harry said, “Can we go down to the galley?”

The colonel nodded. “A little coffee might do me good.”

She gestured him to the ladder, then followed him down. They went past the empty battle management station; Taki was still in the forward section with Monk, Harry saw. The two of them were bent over the workbench, putting together the spare lenses of the optics assembly.

Once in the cramped little galley, Christopher went straight to the coffee urn and poured herself a cup.

“Almost empty,” she murmured. “I’ll have to get Sharmon to make a fresh batch.”

Unable to contain himself any longer, Harry blurted, “Somebody sabotaged the ranging laser.”

“What?” Christopher’s dark eyes flashed.

“My people are fixing it, but somebody took out the optics from the ranging laser. Deliberately.”

She sagged back against the curving bulkhead, as if her legs wouldn’t hold her.

“We’ll get it fixed,” Harry said.

“It couldn’t have been any of my guys,” said the colonel. “None of them would know how.”

Harry agreed with a nod. “It’s one of my people. But I don’t know who.”

“You’re sure…?”

“It was deliberate. The lenses were in place when we did our inspection last night. When I checked ten minutes ago they were gone.”

“Shit on a shingle,” Christopher muttered.

“Somebody in my team doesn’t want this mission to go ahead,” Harry said.

“You can fix it? We can go on?”

“Yes, I’m pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure?”

“I’m not worried about fixing the lens assembly,” Harry said. “What worries me is what the guy’s going to try next.”

“He could blow this plane out of the sky!”

Strangely, Harry felt calm, unafraid. “I don’t think so. Whoever did it picked the least damaging way to shut us down. Without the ranging laser the big COIL is useless. And the saboteur is aboard this plane, riding with us. He doesn’t want to kill himself, whoever he is.”

“You keep saying ‘he.’ You have a woman on your crew. She’s Chinese or something, isn’t she?”

“Taki Nakamura,” Harry replied. “Born in Phoenix, Arizona. Her family’s been in the States since the 1920s. She’s as American as you or me.”

Christopher digested that information in silence. Then, “You’re going to have to keep your eyes wide open, mister.”

“I know. But we have another problem.”

“Another?”

“We can fix the ranging laser. But we won’t know if it’s calibrated properly unless we can try it out on a real target.”

“Explain.”

“It’s a low-power laser. We use it like radar, to get a pinpoint fix on the target’s distance and velocity. We need a live target to test it on.”

Colonel Christopher almost smiled. “That’s easy. We’re due for another refueling rendezvous in”— she glanced at her wristwatch—“another seventy-three minutes. You can ping the tanker.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “That’ll work.”

“You’ll have the laser working by then?”

“We will,” Harry said, adding silently, Or I’ll jump overboard.

Japan: Misawa Air Force Base

“But you’re supposed to be the intelligence officer!”

“That doesn’t mean they tell me diddly-squat. Sir.”

Major Hank Wilson held a flimsy sheet of a decoded message from Andrews Air Force Base, back in the States, in one big, hairy fist. He glared down at Captain William Koenig, long, lanky, and as lean as a beanpole. Koenig glared right back at his commanding officer.

Brandishing the flimsy, Major Wilson grumbled, “That tanker’s due in fifteen minutes and we don’t know why it’s here.”

“It’s out of Chongju, I know that much.”

“But why’s it landing here? Where’s it heading? We don’t have anything up there that needs an air-to-air refueling.”

“Washington moveth in mysterious ways,” Keonig murmured.

College boy, Wilson thought. Give ‘era a degree and they think they know everything. But when you need information from them they can’t produce anything but crap.

Seeing the anger growing on his superior’s face, Koenig said, “We know the tanker’s out of Chongju. We know it’s on special orders from Andrews, relayed out of the Pentagon.”

“We knew that two hours ago,” Wilson growled.

“Everything’s slowed to a crawl,” the captain said. “Our commsats are overloaded with traffic. Messages are coming through late.”

“But the message from that mother-loving tanker came through loud and clear, didn’t it?”

“Yessir. It came directly from the tanker itself, not relayed by a satellite.”

“So they have engine trouble.”

Koenig nodded. “It’s an old bird, a KC-135. Been in service for thirty-some years. I looked up the tail number.”

“So it needs to land here and get its engine fixed.”

“Or replaced.”

“So it’s going to be late for its rendezvous with whatever it’s supposed to be refueling.”

Koening spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Nothing we can do about that.”

“But there’s a plane out there someplace expecting to rendezvous with that mother-humping tanker and the fucker isn’t going to be there!”

“That’s the way it looks. Sir.”

“We have to tell that plane that its rendezvous is going to be late.”

“Yes, sir, we certainly do.”

“But we don’t know what plane we’re talking about! We don’t know where the bastard is! How can we communicate with it when we don’t know anything about it?”

“I’ve sent an urgent message back to Andrews, sir. It’s in their lap.”

Major Wilson’s heavy-jowled face looked like a thundercloud. “By the time Washington gets your message and acts on it, that mystery bird could be in the drink.”

Captain Koenig said nothing.

“So why don’t you find out what plane we’re talking about and where the fuck it is?”

“I’ve queried Andrews, sir. No response, so far.”

Wilson restrained himself from jumping over the desk and throttling the captain. It’s not his fault, he told himself. Think of your blood pressure. Remember you’ve got a physical coming up Monday morning. It’s not his fault.

But he growled, “You’re supposed to be the intelligence officer.”

The Pentagon: Situation Room

General Scheib’s minicomputer chimed with the ding-dong melody of Big Ben. It sounded like a Munchkin version of the London clock’s sonorous tones.

Scheib hurried from the newly refilled coffee cart to his chair at the conference table. One of his aides from his office in the Pentagon was on the notebook’s miniature screen, a frown of concern etching lines between his brows.

“What’s up, Lieutenant?” Scheib asked, his own face tightening worriedly.

“Can we go to scramble, sir?” Scheib nodded. “Do it.”

The computer screen broke into a hash of colored streaks until Scheib tapped the password code on his keyboard.

The lieutenant’s worried face took form again. “Message incoming from Misawa, sir. Marked urgent.”

Misawa Air Force Base, Scheib knew. In northern Japan.

“Let’s see it.”

The lean, angular face of a captain replaced Scheib’s aide. The man looked more puzzled than concerned.

“We have a KC-135 asking for landing clearance here. They say they’re on a refueling mission but have developed engine trouble. Somebody needs to tell the plane they’re supposed to be refueling that the rendezvous is going to be late, but we have no information on what plane that might be or where it is.”

Scheib sank back in his chair. The timeline hack on the bottom of the screen showed that the message had been sent nearly two hours earlier.

He closed his eyes and suppressed the urge to rip out his aide’s intestines. Two hours to replay an urgent message to me! Scheib raged inwardly. Then he remembered that the commercial commsats were out and the military satellites were overloaded with traffic. The ABL-1 mission was classified Top Secret, Need to Know. Neither the tanker crew nor the base at Misawa knew what the hell was going on.

He sensed someone standing behind his chair. Turning slightly, he saw that it was Zuri Coggins.

“Is that going to ruin the mission?” she asked.

“Could be,” said Scheib. “What can I do to help?”

“Get me real-time comm links with that tanker, with the base commander at Misawa, and with ABL-1. We’re tripping over ourselves with the damned security regs.”

She nodded. “I’ll call my office.”

General Higgins came up, looking bleary-eyed and tired of the situation.

“There goes your laser, Brad,” said Higgins. “Looks like we’ll have to depend on the Aegis ships and the missile batteries in Alaska.”

“I’m not giving up on ABL-1, sir,” Scheib said tightly.

Down at the end of the table Michael Jamil watched the tense little minidrama going on around General Scheib.

Let them play their games, Jamil said to himself. What’s important is to find out who’s behind this crisis. Why have they knocked out the satellites? What do they want?

Again and again Jamil had played out every possible scenario he could think of in his mind. He didn’t need computers; he knew the players and their tactics. But none of this made sense. Why knock out the satellites? Why keep those two additional missiles on their pads when they know that regular troops are rushing from Pyongyang to their launching site? It’s been more than ten hours since they set off the bomb in orbit; why are they waiting to launch those other two missiles?

Every scenario he ran through his mind ended in the same way: they’re going to try to kill the President. They’re going to hit San Francisco with half a megaton of hydrogen bombs, but they have to wait until the President’s there. There can’t be any other explanation for what they’re doing. Knock out the satellites to slow our communications links to a crawl, then wait for the President to show up in San Francisco and blow the city off the map. Maybe the explosions will be enough to trigger an earthquake into the bargain.

Jamil looked up at the two generals and the others clustered around Scheib’s chair. They look grim, he realized. Something must have gone wrong.

The woman from the National Security office looked up and met his gaze. She detached herself from the crowd around Scheib and walked down the length of the table toward him.

Jamil got to his feet, and before she could say a word he urged, “You’ve got to get a warning out to San Francisco. You can’t let them fire those missiles without warning the Homeland Security people.”

Coggins stared at him for a long, silent moment. Then she drew in a breath before replying, “Are you really that sure that San Francisco is the target?”

“Yes!”

She looked away, murmuring, “The city would go apeshit if we told them they’re going to be bombed. Mass panic. God knows how many people would be killed in the rush to get away.”

“They’ll all be killed if we don’t warn them,” Jamil said. Then he added, “And the President, too.”

Coggins shook her head. “I don’t know… I just don’t know.”

“Tell your boss, at least,” Jamil said. “Let him make the decision. He’s the National Security Advisor, isn’t he? Let him earn his keep.”

She smiled thinly. “When in doubt, buck it upstairs.”

Santa Monica Airport

The flight operations director put down his phone and made a weak smile for Sylvia, who still stood unmoving before his desk.

“Okay,” he said shakily, “I’ve got a plane to take you to SFO.”

“San Francisco?” Sylvia asked. Nodding, the operations director got up from behind his desk. “It’s a private plane. A friend of mine is flying up there on business and he’s agreed to take you and your daughters.”

“That’s wonderful!”

Mopping his brow with a damp handkerchief, the operations director said, “I had to call in a lot of favors for this. I hope you tell Congresswoman McClintock about it.”

“I certainly will,” said Sylvia.

The operations director glanced at his wristwatch as he said, “You go over to the general aviation terminal. There’s a bus outside that’ll take you there. Be quick now. He said he’ll wait for you, but he wants to take off no later than 4:00 p.m.”

Sylvia grabbed the handle of her roll-on. “We’ll be there. Tell him we’re on our way! And thanks!”

The three women hurried out of the office so fast the operations director didn’t have time to pull one of his cards from his wallet and give it to Sylvia so that she could show it to Congresswoman McClintock.

Air Force One

The President looked up from the text of the speech he would give at the Cow Palace as his chief of staff came into the private compartment and sat in the big comfortable chair facing him.

Leaning toward the President, Norman Foster said, “The pilot says we’re on the approach to San Francisco.”

The President glanced at his wristwatch. “Right on schedule. Good.”

“We can still turn around,” Foster said.

The President gave him the stare that often froze lesser men. Foster gazed back at his boss without flinching.

“They’re still worried about the city being nuked?”

“Took a call direct from your National Security Advisor. The admiral thinks the prudent thing to do would be to turn back.”

“I’d look like a damned fool if nothing happens.”

“You’d be dead if they nuke the city. Me too.”

With an easy smile the President said, “I’m going through with this. I can’t afford to look like a coward. I’d never live it down.”

Foster clenched his fists on his lap. “The plane could develop engine trouble. We could divert the flight to some other airport. A military base.”

The President’s smile faded. “You really think they’re going to hit San Francisco.”

“I think they might try.”

“Might.”

“If they do—”

“Norm, you’ve sat in on those intelligence briefings as often as I have. The North Koreans don’t have a missile that can reach San Francisco.”

“Maybe not.”

“Hell, the last time they launched a missile it flopped into the middle of the Pacific. Besides, I’ve checked the reports,” the President went on. “I haven’t been sitting back here playing solitaire, Norm. I do my homework. According to the latest intelligence estimates the North Koreans do not have a missile with the range to reach San Francisco. Nor the accuracy. And especially not the reliability.”

“And you’re willing to pin your life to that?”

The President hesitated for the slightest fraction of a heartbeat, then said firmly, “Yes. I am.”

Foster looked around the compartment, gathering his thoughts. Then he said, “There’s this guy from the NIC sitting in on the special situation team we put together—”

“In the Pentagon?”

“Right.” Foster nodded. “He’s insisting that the North Koreans are aiming for San Francisco, specifically because they know you’re going to be there tonight.”

“He’s running counter to the intelligence reports.”

“He’s got the representative from your National Security Advisor worried enough that she got him to put in another call to us here, warning us.”

“One guy from the NIC?” the President asked. “What’s his background? What does he know about the missiles the North Koreans have?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know his name. But he claims that if they could deliver a nuke into orbit and knock out all the communications satellites, the same kind of missile could hit San Francisco.”

The President leaned back in his chair and stroked his chin thoughtfully.

“One guy,” he muttered.

Foster nodded.

“What’s his background? Where’s he from? Could be a Republican who wants to make me look bad.”

Foster threw his hands up in the air. “For Chris-sakes! We’re talking nuclear war here!”

“We are talking,” the President said coldly, precisely, “about an unsubstantiated theory by some unknown guy from the National Intelligence Committee.”

“Look, there’s a lot at stake here. The chances of the gooks nuking San Francisco might be damned small, but the consequences if they do are huge! Enormous!”

“That’s what my science adviser says about global warming, for god’s sake.”

“Tell the pilot to divert to an Air Force base. Tell him to say we’ve got engine troubles. Tell—”

The pilot’s voice broke in from the intercom speaker set into the compartment’s overhead. “We are on final approach to San Francisco, sir. Please fasten your seat belt.”

The President glanced at the speaker grill, then back at the friend and companion who had guided him to the White House.

“Too late, Norm. We’re there.”

ABL-1: Laser Fuel Tank Section

Harry made his way aft, down the length of the big COIL, through a narrow hatch, and into the plane’s rearmost section, where the stainless steel fuel tanks full of liquefied oxygen and iodine stood man-tall and frosted with rime. Rosenberg and Reyes were right behind him. Harry could feel their resentment at his insisting that they check every square centimeter of the tankage all over again.

It took the better part of an hour, but at last Harry was satisfied that the tanks were properly filled, at their correct cryogenic temperatures, and—most important of all—not leaking.

Now the two engineers stood glumly before Harry, both of them waiting for Harry to explain what was behind his sudden insistence on this inspection.

Rosenberg and Reyes couldn’t look less alike, Harry thought. Rosenberg had a long, narrow face with teeth that looked a size too big for his jaw and a thick mop of tightly curled russet hair; his body looked soft, potbellied. But his tongue was sharp. Wally always had a quip or a wisecrack at hand. He could be cutting. Angel Reyes was built like a Venezuelan shortstop—small, agile, almost a full head shorter than Wally. Dark brown hair cut in bristling spikes, big liquid dark eyes like you see on sentimental paintings of little waifs. Angie was quiet, soft-spoken. At first glance he looked like one of those gardener’s guys who runs leaf blowers all day. But Angie had an engineering degree from Florida State University, where he had indeed played four years of varsity baseball for the Seminoles. Shortstop.

It felt chilly and cramped back here near the plane’s tail. Harry imagined that’s what a morgue would feel like: cold as death. He could see his breath forming little clouds of steam in the air despite the tanks’ heavy insulation. At least he didn’t smell any leaks.

Rosenberg caught his sniffing. “There’s no leaks,” he said, his voice resentful. “We’ve checked from end to end.”

“Good,” said Harry. But he was thinking, Should I tell them about the missing optics assembly? Should I tell them that we have a saboteur on board? Maybe one of them is the guy. Maybe they already know.

Somehow the steady growl of the 747’s engines was louder back here, Harry thought. Just like an airliner: first class is up front; the peasants sit in back.

“Okay,” he said to the two men. “I want you to keep your eyes open. We’ve… uh, we’ve got a problem.”

Reyes’s dark eyes went wider. Rosenberg looked skeptical.

“What problem?” Wally asked, almost sneering.

“Somebody tried to sabotage the ranging laser.”

“What?”

Reyes’s mouth dropped open but he said nothing.

“The forward optics assembly’s gone missing,” Harry explained. “Monk’s replacing it from the spares.”

“For crap’s sake, Harry, that doesn’t mean sabotage,” Rosenberg snapped. “What’s the matter with you? It’s not like you to go off the deep end.”

Harry studied Rosenberg’s face. Wally looks sincere enough, he thought. He’s sore at me for thinking it’s sabotage.

“Look,” he said. “Monk says he checked the ranger last night and it was all right. Now that we’re out here over the goddamned Pacific Ocean the forward optics assembly goes missing. Somebody took it out of its setting and hid it. That’s sabotage. Somebody’s trying to abort this mission. And it’s got to be one of us.”

“Jesus,” Reyes muttered.

Rosenberg, for once, had nothing to say.

Tapping a knuckle on the frosted side of the oxygen tank, Harry said softly, “It wouldn’t take much to blow this plane out of the sky. We’d all get killed nice and dead.”

“Jesus.” This time Reyes crossed himself.

“Watch everything,” Harry said. “And everybody.”

Reyes nodded. Rosenberg said, “And who’s going to watch you, el jefe?”

Karen Christopher heard O’Banion’s voice in her headphone, clipped and businesslike. “Message from Andrews coming through, ma’am.”

“Put it through,” she commanded.

“It’s printing out. No voice.”

Colonel Christopher glanced over at Kaufman in the right-hand seat. He’d just come back into the cockpit after flaking out on one of the bunks built into the rear of the flight deck. Still, he looked pouchy-eyed, weary.

“How do you feel, Obie?” she asked.

“I’m okay,” he said, clicking the safety harness over his shoulders.

Kaufman hesitated a heartbeat, then asked, “You know the routine for aiming at a missile?”

She nodded. “Point the nose at the rocket exhaust plume. Easy.”

He nodded back at her. “Yeah. Easy. In the simulator.”

Christopher heard the sarcasm in his tone. She thought about her copilot for a couple of moments, then decided to sweeten his life a little.

“Can you handle it by yourself for a few minutes?” she asked the major.

“Sure!”

Christopher smiled inwardly. That was every copilot’s answer whenever he was asked to take the controls. Sure! They want to fly, not watch the boss do the flying.

“Okay,” she said, unbuckling her safety harness. “It’s all yours.”

“Right,” said Kaufman.

The colonel slid out of her chair, took off the heavy flight helmet and left it on the seat, then stepped through the cockpit hatch. Lieutenant Sharmon was at his station, a stack of charts on his lap and still another map on his console’s main screen.

The lieutenant looked up at Christopher. “Rendezvous in fifty-three minutes,” he said.

“Fine,” said Christopher. She gave Sharmon a light pat on the shoulder and turned to O’Banion, who was pulling a freshly typed sheet from the printer built into his communications rack. She could see TOP SECRET emblazoned on it in bright red capital letters.

O’Banion passed it to her without reading it.

From Brad again, she saw. Major General B. B. Scheib, Deputy Commander MDA. Skipping past the formalities, she got down to the meat of the message.

Christopher made a swift mental calculation. We’ve crossed the date line; eleven hundred Zulu time is 9:00 a.m. here.

She stared at the sheet of paper, noticing that it was shaking like a trembling aspen in her hand.

I’ve got to decide whether we hang out here over the ocean and wait for the tanker to find us or abort the whole mission and land at Misawa.

I’ve got to decide if we try to stop those damned missiles when they’re launched or put down safely in Japan.

Brad’s left it to me to decide. He’s dropped the hot potato in my damned lap.

Spokane, Washington: Northwest Regional Electrical Power Headquarters

Karl Dieter Olbricht hated trees. It had not always been so. As a youth, growing up on the windswept prairie of Nebraska, he had loved to climb the lone apple tree on the front lawn of his house. But once he started working for the local electric utility as a rugged, handsome blond lineman, he began to acquire a hatred for trees. Not all trees. Only those close enough to electrical power lines to bring the lines down if they were blown over in a storm.

If Olbricht could have his way, every tree within two miles on either side of a power line would be cut down, carted away, its roots dug up or dynamited.

He was standing with his back to the big electronic wall map at the regional headquarters, looking out the windows on the other side of the big command center. Snow was whipping past and the trees out on the parking lot were swaying as their branches loaded up with ice.

The wall map was blank, and had been since the satellites had gone dead. Olbricht had to rely on the already overloaded telephone lines to get some semblance of a picture about the situation over the three-state area. And phone lines were getting knocked out too. Cell phone service was spotty, at best.

The National Weather Service was next to useless, and without satellite data to work with, the regional power combine’s own weather forecasters were no better. In short, this storm was going to cause a mess, a frightful, dangerous, perhaps fatal mess.

The president of the regional combine burst into the command center, stamping snow off her boots. She was a large black woman who had yet to prove that she was more than affirmative action window dressing.

“What’s the story, Karl?” she called to him as she pulled off her long fur-trimmed coat and flung it on the nearest desk. “Where is everybody?”

Fewer than half the desks were occupied.

“My people are having a hard time getting through the snow,” he replied as she came up close enough for him to smell her heavy perfume.

“Tell me ‘bout it,” she said. “Highway’s blocked by a jackknifed semi. I had to detour all around hell and back. Damned near got stuck in a snowdrift coming into the parking lot.”

“It’s going to be bad,” Olbricht said gloomily.

“It’s already bad.”

He nodded. “We’re getting calls from here and there about outages. It’s spotty so far, but...”

“It’s going to cascade, isn’t it?”

“Damned right,” Olbricht muttered through gritted teeth. “We could see half a million families without power before this is through. More.”

The president looked around the half-empty command center, then back at Olbricht. “Okay. Tell me what needs doing. Give me a desk and put me to work.”

His respect for her bounded upward several notches. But he still hated trees.

The Pentagon: Situation Room

Brad Scheib walked out of the situation room, past the two Air Police men lounging in the corridor who snapped to attention at the sight of a two-star general, and headed for the men’s room, two dozen paces down the hall.

He had written the order and sent it. Karen should have it in her hands by now, he thought, unless they’re still dicking around with Need to Know crap. No, the Coggins woman said her office has set up direct links, Top Priority. If the White House can’t get a message through to Karen nobody can.

In the lavatory he went straight to the nearest sink and started washing his hands. When he realized what he was doing he laughed to himself sardonically. How biblical, he thought. Like you can get rid of your guilt with a little soap and water.

Karen’s piloting ABL-1, he said to himself. I’d like to get whatever genius assigned her to that job and stuff his balls up his nose. Like that’s going to help.

She’s out there over the North Pacific, heading toward Korea. Probably over Japan by now or close to it. The tanker’s going to be late, if those guys at Misawa get it off the ground at all. So Karen has the option of loitering around waiting for the tanker to refuel her or aborting the mission and landing at Misawa.

She’s tough, Scheib remembered. Tougher than I am. When the shit hit the fan and the board of inquiry called her in, she didn’t say a word about me. Wouldn’t tell them a thing. They thought that’d crack her, sticking her with a bus driver’s job on a stupid test program.

But now she’s in the middle of a real situation. Nuclear war, maybe. It all depends on what she does. What she can do. She won’t abort the mission. Not Karen. She’ll stooge around over the water until that tanker shows up or she runs so low on fuel she’ll have to glide back to Misawa.

Scheib almost laughed as he went from the sink to the urinal. The brass thought they were punishing her, but they’ve stuck her in the hottest spot any Air Force pilot could be in right now. As he unzipped his fly, the general thought, She could come out of this a hero. Or dead.

Looking down at his penis as he stood at the urinal, Scheib muttered, “See the trouble you’ve gotten me into?”

At Misawa Air Force Base, Major Hank Wilson glared red-faced and fire-eyed at one of his oldest friends, Major Joe Dugan. Like Wilson, Dugan was squat and burly, built like an old-fashioned fireplug.

“In one hour?” Dugan squawked. “Are you nuts, Hank?”

“In one hour,” Wilson said, his voice murderously low. “I want that frickin’ tanker out of here within sixty minutes after it lands.”

The two men had known each other since their Air Force Academy days. Now they were rushing— sprinting, almost—across the tarmac toward the base maintenance depot.

“Can’t be done, Hank,” said Dugan, puffing slightly from the unaccustomed exertion. “My guys’ll need—”

Wilson stopped suddenly and Dugan trotted several steps before stopping and turning around to face his old friend. The sky above the airfield was turning gray, but the only thundercloud Dugan could see was Wilson’s slab-jawed face.

Looking around to make certain that no one was within earshot, Wilson lowered his voice a notch and explained, “Joe, I got a message straight from the frickin’ White House. The National Security Advisor signed the order personally. Absolute top priority.”

“That don’t mean—”

“What it means is that we gotta get that tanker back in the air one hour after it lands. Or quicker. That’s what it means.”

“But we don’t even know what’s wrong with its engine!”

“Get another engine on the flight line. Swap it out.”

“That’s crazy! We can’t—”

“The hell you can’t. I want a crew ready to swap out the engine soon’s that tanker rolls up to the apron.”

Dugan looked as if he’d just swallowed a dose of rancid cod liver oil. He glanced up at the sky. “It’s gonna rain,” he grumbled.

“Clear out a hangar and roll the bird into it.”

“Hank, this is crazy and you know it.”

“Yeah, yeah. But get it done.”

San Francisco International Airport

Sylvia tried to keep her terror hidden from the girls. She had never flown in a plane this small. Commercial airliners were so big that she never felt afraid. It was like sitting in a bus, really, especially if she had an aisle seat and didn’t look out the windows.

But this flimsy little thing was barely big enough for herself and her daughters. And the pilot. He was a good-looking older man, his short-trimmed hair silvery gray. And he had a sporty little moustache the same attractive color.

Sylvia was sitting in the right-hand seat, her daughters behind her. She couldn’t help looking out the windshield at the mountains down below, and the ocean. What if the engines stop? she wondered. We can’t land on a mountainside—or in the water. We’ll all die!

The pilot kept up a friendly chatter, but she had stopped listening to his words as she sat rigidly and felt every bump and shudder that the plane went through. There’s nothing between us and those mountains but empty air! Sylvia realized. She fought down an urge to vomit.

“Oh-oh,” said the pilot.

“What’s wrong?” Sylvia squeaked.

Tapping the bulbous earphone on the left side of his head, he said over the rumble of the plane’s twin jet engines, “Traffic control’s ordered us to orbit the field.”

“Orbit? In space?”

He laughed. “No, it just means they want us to ride around the airfield for a while.”

“How long?”

“Until Air Force One lands.”

From behind them, Denise said, “Air Force One? The President’s plane?”

“Yep,” said the pilot. Pointing past Sylvia’s nose, he said, “There she is, right there.”

Sylvia saw a huge four-engined plane painted sky blue and white. It looked terribly close, she thought.

“All traffic in and out of SFO is suspended until the President gets out of his plane,” the pilot said, as if he hadn’t a worry in the world.

Sylvia wondered how long they’d have to stay in the air, waiting. And if they had enough fuel.

ABL-1: Battle Management Compartment

“You’re probably wondering why I called you into this meeting,” said Harry. He knew it was weak to the point of inanity, but he couldn’t think of any better way to break the ice.

Wally Rosenberg snorted derisively. Taki Nakamura made a polite smile, obviously forced. Monk Delany looked disgusted and Angel Reyes looked worried.

Harry had brought them together in the battle management compartment. Usually manned by six people, it had more seats than any other section of the plane except for the cramped compartment where his team stayed during takeoffs and landings. Now they sat at the row of silent consoles, turned around to face Harry, who stood grimly before them.

“You all know that somebody pulled the optics assembly out of the ranging laser,” Harry said.

“It’s all fixed now,” said Delany. “No problem.”

“You replaced the assembly?”

“Yep. No sweat.”

Rosenberg asked, “How’d you get that fat ass of yours into that cramped little housing, Monk?”

“All I had to do was get one arm in. The assembly slides in and clicks in place nice and easy. It’s designed that way, Wally.”

Taki pointed out, “You’ll have to check the alignment when the tanker shows up.”

“No problem,” Delany repeated.

“That’s not the point,” said Harry. “The point is that one of us deliberately tried to screw up this mission. One of us” he emphasized, waving a finger at his four teammates.

“What do you want to do about it, Harry?” Reyes asked, his voice small, soft.

“I want the person who did it to stand up and admit it and swear that he won’t do anything else to mess us up.”

“He?” Delany asked, turning slightly to look at Nakamura.

“Whoever,” Harry said. “I figure that the guy did it before we were told we’re going against a real live missile. I don’t know why he did it and I don’t care. I just want to know that he—or she—won’t try anything more.”

Dead silence, except for the vibrating drone of the plane’s engines.

“No questions asked,” Harry promised. “Whatever happened, for whatever reason, it’ll be strictly among us. Nobody else has to know.”

“You told the pilot, didn’t you?” Rosenberg asked, almost accusingly.

Harry nodded. “I had to. But I can always tell her I made a mistake, that the optics assembly was taken out for inspection.”

“And that Air Force colonel’s gonna believe a cockamamie story like that?” Delany challenged.

“She’ll have to, if we all stick together on it.”

Silence again. Harry stared at the four of them, wishing he were a mind reader.

“At least tell me there won’t be any more of this crap,” Harry pleaded. “We’re going to a shooting war, for Chrissakes, we don’t need somebody trying to screw us up.”

They glanced back and forth at each other. Nobody said a word.

Then Rosenberg cleared his throat noisily and said, “Well, I’m not going to mess with anything, Harry.”

“Me neither,” said Reyes.

“I didn’t in the first place,” Taki Nakamura said, almost defiantly.

Delany broke into a lazy grin. “Hell, it’s dangerous enough up here without trying to louse up the works.”

Harry heaved an involuntary sigh. “Okay,” he said. “I have your word on it?” They all nodded.

“Good enough.” Harry realized that this was the most he was going to get from them. “But from now on nobody works alone. Understand that? I don’t want any one of you out of sight of one of the others.”

“Cheez, Harry, that ain’t gonna work,” Delany complained. “We’ve each got our own stations and—”

Harry cut him off. “Until we get into a real battle situation, you guys work in pairs. I’m not kidding. I want you to keep an eye on one another.”

Reyes nodded solemnly. “Okay, Harry. But who’s going to keep an eye on you?”

It took Harry a moment to realize that Reyes was smiling gently. Gruffly, Harry said, “Don’t worry about me.”

They broke up. Nakamura went with Delany forward to the optics station, Rosenberg and Reyes aft toward the COIL and its fuel tanks.

Harry stood alone in the empty battle management section, thinking that one of his four team members must have sabotaged the laser at the field test out in the Mohave and killed Pete Quintana in doing so.

Karen Christopher was stretched out on the bunk in the rear of the flight deck. Her eyes were closed, but she couldn’t sleep.

The tanker’s delayed. That one thought kept running through her mind. That and an image of the fuel gauges on ABL-1’s control panel. We’re over Japan now. We could break off this mission and put down at Misawa, nice and easy. Nobody gets hurt and nobody would blame me for aborting the mission.

And the North Koreans launch their missiles.

We could stop them! She knew that as certainly as she knew her heart was beating. If I can get this clunker of an airplane into the proper position we could shoot down those bastards before their rocket engines cut off.

But you need another long drink of fuel to get there, she said to herself. You need that tanker. And if you stooge around over the ocean long enough waiting for it, you could run out of fuel and go down into the ocean.

That’d be a great career move, she thought. Sink a billion-dollar airplane, the only one of its kind. Sink your career in the Air Force with it.

Christopher wondered how much of a career she had to look forward to. She remembered the board of inquiry, the cold, hard faces of the Advocate General’s panel of judges.

“You refuse a direct order to name the officer you’ve been sleeping with?” The crusty old brigadier was smirking at her, seeing dirty pictures in his mind.

“My activities while not on duty are not subject to Air Force jurisdiction, sir,” Karen had replied, knowing it was a pathetically weak defense.

“They are subject to United States Air Force jurisdiction when they reflect dishonorably on the service!” the judge had snapped at her.

Karen lapsed into silence. Her USAF-appointed lawyer, a light colonel like herself, had advised her that silence was her best defense.

Not that it did her any good. They couldn’t get Brad’s name out of her, so they bounced her out of her job with the B-2 squadron and stuck her in a dumbbell assignment driving a cargo plane on milk runs.

But the cargo plane turned out to be ABL-1. Nobody expected the plane to do anything but fly racetrack courses over the open ocean and shoot its laser at simulated targets. Nobody expected the North Koreans to start World War III or ABL-1 to be sent on this mission to stop the war before it started. Nobody expected Lieutenant Colonel Karen Christopher to be placed at the pivotal point of world history.

“Uh, Colonel, ma’am?”

Karen snapped her eyes open. Lieutenant Sharmon was standing over her, looking a little embarrassed.

She pushed herself up to a sitting position. “What is it, Jon?”

“I’ve got the numbers on how long we can stooge around waiting for the tanker. They don’t look good.”

U.S. Route 12, Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho

Out of the corner of his eye Charley Ingersoll noticed the gas gauge’s warning light flicker. The highway was blanketed with snow now; the clouds were low and dark. We ought to be outrunning this dratted storm, Charley fumed to himself, but instead it’s just getting worse. He wished he’d put in new wiper blades before starting on this stupid trip; the wipers were smearing his windshield so badly he could hardly see outside.

They’d stopped at two more gas stations, but both of them had no electricity, either, so they couldn’t pump gas. We’re not going to make it home unless we can fill the ever-loving tank, Charley knew.

The warning light glowed steadily now, a little yellow eye that told Charley he was in real trouble. What to do? What to do? Push on until we run out of gas or pull over and keep the car heated until a snowplow comes by?

Martha was still fiddling with the radio, trying to get a local station.

“Try the cell phone again,” Charley said. His wife shook her head. “It doesn’t work. I’ve tried it a dozen times and it doesn’t work.”

“Try it again, dammit!”

She looked shocked at his language, but picked the cell phone off the console between their seats and pecked at it.

“Nothing,” she said, almost as if she were happy about it.

At least the kids were quiet in the backseat. They’d peed and eaten a couple of granola bars. That ought to keep them satisfied for a while, Charley thought.

“Stay in the middle!” Martha yelped as Charley maneuvered the van around a curve. There was no guardrail and she was on the open side. The snow was so thick now that Charley couldn’t see how far a drop it was on her side.

“I’m only doing forty,” he growled. He didn’t tell her that the road felt slick, slippery in spots.

The radio crackled with the distant voice of a sportscaster reporting that the Seattle Seahawks expected to have perfect football weather for Sunday’s game against the San Diego Chargers.

Big fornicating deal, Charley grumbled to himself.

At least a snowplow had been through this stretch of highway, Charley realized. There was less than an inch of snow on the roadway. Good, he thought, leaning a little more heavily on the accelerator. Fifty miles an hour. That’s better than—

There was ice under the coating of snow and the van suddenly spun a full circle before Charley could do anything about it. Martha screamed and the kids yelled. The van smacked sideways into a mound of snow on the shoulder of the road, with Charley jamming both his feet on the brake.

Charley could feel his heart hammering beneath his ribs. Martha was sobbing. Glancing over his shoulder Charley saw that both the kids seemed okay. White-faced and wide-eyed, but unhurt. Their seat belts had kept them from being banged around.

“You okay back there?” he asked, surprised at how his voice shook.

“Yessir,” said Charley Jr. “I think so.”

“Me too,” Little Martha echoed.

“How about you?” Charley asked his wife.

“My chest hurts.”

“The seat belt must have caught you.”

“I think I’m having a heart attack.”

“You’re not having a heart attack. It’s just the seat belt. I bet I’m bruised too.”

From the backseat Little Martha piped up. “Can we go outside and make a snowman?”

Japan: Misawa Air Force Base

Major Joseph E. Dugan, USAF, had learned one vitally important thing in his military career: when you need a job done, and done right the first time, get an experienced noncom to do it.

He stood in a lightly misting rain in front of the hangar closest to the flight line and watched befuddled maintenance crews towing planes out into the drizzle and parking them helter-skelter across the apron.

Standing beside him was Technical Sergeant Aaron “Scrap Iron” Clinton, hard-eyed and humorless, his skin as dark as an eggplant, fists planted on the hips of his rumpled fatigues, an unlit cigar clamped in his teeth. The “seegar,” as Clinton called them, was Clinton’s hallmark. He never smoked them. He chewed them.

When Joe Dugan’s old friend and senior major, Hank Wilson, had commanded him to have the incoming KC-135 refitted with a replacement engine in one hour or less after its landing, Dugan fell back on his crucial piece of military wisdom. He sprinted over to the base maintenance center and hollered for Sergeant Clinton.

“Sergeant,” he bellowed, “there’s a KC-135 tanker due in here in twenty minutes. It’s got to have an engine replaced and be back in the air in one hour.”

Sergeant Clinton had been through a lot in his Air Force career. Twice he had been broken down to airman for getting caught with his pants down in married women’s bedrooms. Three times he had been offered a chance for a commission—and refused.

“I ain’t officer material,” he had insisted in his stubborn Arkansas drawl. “I work for a livin’.”

Now this white major was demanding the impossible. Clinton saluted and said, around his unlit cigar, “One hour. Yes, sir!”

That was why, as the ailing KC-135 taxied right into the hangar that had been emptied for it, its pilot stared goggle-eyed at the small army of technicians in Air Force fatigues who swarmed around the plane even while its engines were wheezing to a stop.

“Holy shit!” the pilot exclaimed. “It looks like a pit crew from the Indianapolis 500 out there!”

ABL-1: Cockpit

“Colonel, I’ve got the fuel bingo calculated.” Karen Christopher nodded as she sat at the controls of ABL-1. “Plug it into the flight plan, Jon,” she said to her navigator.

Shannon’s voice in her headphone sounded reluctant. “I don’t have really good numbers for wind velocities, Colonel. With the satellites down and all...”

“Give me three estimates,” said Colonel Christopher. “Best case, worst case, and the average between them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In a few minutes numbers began to flicker on the control panel’s central display screen. Christopher watched them scroll by, then they steadied and held still.

In the right-hand seat, Major Kaufman grunted, glanced at the panel’s digital clock, then checked his wristwatch. “Thirty-eight minutes. Then we gotta turn back for Misawa.”

“That’s the worst case,” the colonel said. “If the winds don’t buck us too hard we can stretch it another ten, fifteen minutes.”

Kaufman said nothing, but the look on his face told Christopher what he thought of stretching their luck. She gave him a faint smile. “Think we should put on our life vests, Obie, just in case?”

“That ain’t funny,” Kaufman muttered.

Christopher tapped the side of her helmet where the headphone was built in and called, “Brick, anything from Misawa about our tanker?”

O’Banion’s voice replied, “Nothing since they reported the bird landed, Colonel.”

Kaufman grumbled, “Misawa can’t talk to us, so they send the word to Washington and Washington relays the poop to us. Helluva way to run a mission.”

“Communications are snarled up,” Christopher said. But inwardly she agreed with her copilot. Communications were vital and this Top Secret mission was at the end of a long and very shaky tether.

“Wind velocity’s picking up some,” Sharmon reported.

With a nod, Colonel Christopher realized that they were facing the navigator’s worst-case option. Fuel bingo in twenty-nine minutes, she calculated. Looking out at the swirl of gray clouds covering the ocean below, she thought, If we go down it’ll be into a nasty bit of weather. Ditching a plane this size into a cold ocean in the middle of a major storm. Not a good career move.

Harry was sitting by himself in the cramped little galley beneath the flight deck. There were no windows to see outside, but he sensed that the plane was turning, leaning slightly to the left side as it made a wide, cumbersome turn.

Are we turning back? he wondered. Maybe I should check with Colonel Christopher. If we’re going back, then I could make it known to whoever tried to screw up the mission that he can relax, the mission’s scrubbed.

As he grasped his lukewarm mug of coffee with both hands Harry asked himself for the thousandth time: Who is it? Which one of them tried to stop this mission? Who took that optics assembly?

He sat in one of the galley’s undersized bucket seats and tried to puzzle it all out. Beam control is Monk’s job. He knows the most about it; it’d be easiest for him to take out the lens assembly. But he couldn’t have gone up there once we took off—the flight crew would have seen him. Whoever it was must’ve removed the assembly before we took off. And he hid it somewhere on the plane, most likely. Where? Maybe if I can find the lens assembly it’ll tell me something about who took it.

But Harry shook his head. Maybe if I could dust it for fingerprints. Not even then, he realized. Monk, Taki, Wally, even Angel had enough time to sneak up to the flight deck last night while we were doing the preflight and take the assembly out of the ranging laser. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to lift the assembly out of its fitting. It’s designed to pop in or pop out, just like Monk said.

Why? Harry demanded silently. Why would any one of them want to scrub this mission? Is he a spy, for Chrissakes? With a disgusted shake of his head, Harry reasoned, No, that couldn’t be it. None of us knew we were flying into a shooting war when we took off. We all thought it was going to be just another milk run.

Not a spy, then. Not an enemy agent. No James Bond stuff. But then why the hell did he do it?

And did he cause the explosion out on the Mohave? Did he kill Pete?

Harry sat there mulling his thoughts over and over again. Slowly he began to think that he really didn’t want to know. One of my people is a saboteur, at least. Maybe a murderer. I don’t want to know who it is.

But he realized even so that he had to know. He had to find out. I can’t let him try again. He might kill us all, for god’s sake. Or her. Maybe it’s Taki. Is there something in her background that I don’t know about? Something that makes her willing to commit suicide to stop this mission? She’s third - or fourth - generation American, but is there some of the kamikaze spirit inside her?

He gulped at his tepid coffee, got to his feet, and went to the tiny stainless steel sink to rinse out the mug. You’re going nutso, he said to himself. Absolutely dingbat. Taki’s no Japanese spy, for Chrissake.

But somebody removed the lens assembly. One of my people. Somebody who figured that would be the simplest and least dangerous way to abort the mission. Knock out the ranging laser and we’re out of business.

Who? Who?

Harry leaned against the sink, his mind spinning. Then he stood up straight and went to the galley’s hatch. Instead of standing around asking yourself questions, he reasoned, go out and do something. Find the missing lens assembly. Maybe where the guy hid it will tell you who it was.

It wasn’t much, but it was all that Harry could think of doing.

The Pentagon: Situation Room

Zuri Coggins looked up from her mini’s screen and announced, “The President’s landed at San Francisco International.”

Michael Jamil turned in his chair to face the wall screen that showed CNN, Fox News, and three other news channels. None of them was showing the President’s arrival in Air Force One. There must be a crowd at the airport to greet him, Jamil thought, his brows furrowing. That’s why he landed at the commercial airport instead of a military base. Why aren’t the news nets covering his arrival?

And then it hit him. The satellites are out. No instant news coverage from the West Coast. I’ll bet they don’t even have coaxial cables anymore to carry TV across the continent.

General Scheib was also bent over his laptop screen. “The tanker’s taken off from Misawa,” he said. “Should make rendezvous with ABL-1 in about one hour.”

General Higgins came down the table and bent over Scheib’s shoulder. “Will your plane have enough fuel to make the rendezvous?”

Without looking up at Higgins, Scheib muttered, “That’s a decision the pilot has to make.”

“The tanker’s on its way! Took off ten minutes ago!” O’Banion called so loudly that Karen Christopher could hear him through the open cockpit hatch even with her helmet on.

“ETA?” Christopher said into her lip mike.

It took several moments before O’Banion replied, more softly, “Sixty-eight minutes.”

Major Kaufman leaned toward Christopher. “That’s way past our bingo point.”

The colonel nodded slowly, her mind racing. “We have enough fuel to wait for the tanker. Once we make rendezvous we can refill our tanks.”

Kaufman’s face showed what he thought of that. “And what if the goddamned tanker breaks down again? What if it misses the rendezvous? There’s a big storm blowing down there. We can’t sit here and wait till our tanks run dry!”

“The tanker’s on its way,” Colonel Christopher said firmly.

“And we’re supposed to orbit around here and hope the damned tanker finds us?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s crazy!”

“The tanker will be here before we run dry, Obie. This is no time to panic.”

“So when is the time to panic? When we’re in the drink, in the middle of a goddamned typhoon?”

A fragment of memory flashed through Colonel Christopher’s mind, a legend she had heard while in the academy about a B-17 mission over Germany during World War II. With Nazi fighter planes swarming in on them, the copilot of the Flying Fortress screamed that they had to turn back, get away. The pilot unlimbered his service revolver and threatened to blow the copilot’s head off if he didn’t shut up and do his job. Karen regretted that she hadn’t packed her service pistol on this flight.

“I’ll tell you when it’s time to panic, Obie,” she said coolly. “Now keep your voice down, you’re frightening the kids.”

Kaufman stared at her, his baggy-eyed face a mixture of anger, fear, and disbelief.

“You’re gonna stooge around here until we run out of fuel?” he asked, his voice lower.

“Until the tanker shows up,” Christopher corrected. “And then we’re going to shoot down any goddamned missile those goddamned gooks launch.”

ABL-1: Lavatory

And there it was, tucked in behind the spare packs of toilet paper.

Harry had searched the galley and the compartment where he and his team sat during takeoffs and landings, knowing that whoever took the lens assembly wouldn’t stash it in such an obvious place but looking in the obvious places first. He worked his way back along the COIL’s long, bulky length, sticking his nose into every corner and cranny he saw. Nothing. Rosenberg and Angel Reyes watched him with some bemusement on their faces as Harry sniffed and peeked and ducked under the tanks that held the big laser’s fuel.

He started back, intending to check out Taki’s station. Somebody could stick the lens assembly inside one of the consoles there, or even between consoles; the assembly wasn’t much bigger than the palm of his hand.

The plane seemed to be turning again; Harry felt the sway as the lumbering jet slowly banked right. Again he wondered if he should ask Colonel Christopher what was going down, but again he decided that she probably had her hands full and didn’t need anybody pestering her. She had made it painfully clear that she regarded Harry and his team as a bunch of tech geeks. Well, he mused, that’s what we are, really. Besides, I’ve got my own job to do.

He had to urinate. The lavatory was next to the galley and Harry pushed through the accordion door. On an impulse he bent down and opened the sliding door to the compartment that held the extra toilet paper and paper towels. The boxes looked jumbled, not in a neat stack. Harry pulled a couple of them out and there was the lens assembly.

Harry squatted down and stared at it, his need to urinate forgotten. In his mind he tried to re-create the scene. Whoever yanked the assembly out of the ranging laser must have done it last night, while we were going through the preflight inspection. He knew the rest of us were in the plane and he only had a couple of minutes to hide it. He could carry it down from the flight deck and right through the battle management station, even if Taki was sitting there. She’d be focused on her console with her back to whoever was passing through the area. Besides, the assembly was small enough to hold in your hand, and even if she turned around or glanced over her shoulder she probably wouldn’t have noticed it.

Or maybe not, Harry thought. Maybe it was Taki herself.

He carefully restacked the paper goods cartons and started to leave the lavatory. Then his bladder reminded him of why he’d come into the lav in the first place.

The President stood at the forward hatch of Air Force One at the top of the stairs while the band played “Hail to the Chief” and the crowd that had gathered on the tarmac roared its greeting.

It was crisp and cool in San Francisco. Woolly gray clouds were building up along the row of hills that fronted the ocean. The President could not see either the Golden Gate or the Bay Bridge from where he stood, which disappointed him. But the familiar cadence of “Hail to the Chief” always gave him a lift.

He smiled his brightest and waved both arms over his head while a phalanx of secret service agents, most of them in dark topcoats, filtered through the crowd. His team of security technicians was setting up the portable podium down at the bottom of the stairs, with the teleprompters and blast-proof screens.

Standing beside him, the President’s chief of staff rubbed a hand over his shaved pate.

“It’s always cold in ‘Frisco,” Norman Foster complained. “Mark Twain said the coldest winter he’d ever spent was one summer in San Francisco.”

The President laughed and said, “The crowd’s nice and warm, Norm.”

Foster agreed with a vigorous nod. “That they are, Mr. President. That they are.”

The two men started down the stairs toward the knot of news reporters and photographers clustered by the portable podium, Foster a respectful two steps behind his chief.

It’s supposed to start raining in an hour or so, Foster thought. We’ll be at the Cow Palace by then. But he couldn’t help thinking that conditions would get much, much warmer if those two North Korean missiles reached the city.

Across the Bay, at the Oakland office of the National Weather Service, Sam Weathers riffled through the reports that were trickling in to his desk. Reports on paper, most of them radioed or teletyped in from weather observation posts from California to Idaho.

Weathers was a compactly built black man of forty-six, his shoulders wide and his gut still tight, thanks to weekly sessions on the basketball court at his local YMCA. He wasn’t especially tall, but he was fast and had good hands. He would flash a big toothy grin whenever he worked the ball around one of those tall, gawky giraffes and scored another basket.

He wasn’t grinning now. His desk was covered with a slowly growing glacier of papers, none of them bearing good news.

Sam had never intended to be a meteorologist. With his last name being Weathers, he thought it would be ridiculous to work for the National Weather Service. Weathers from Weather. He could hear the snickering wherever he went. So he had majored in geophysics in college, then somehow gotten interested in atmospheric physics as a graduate student. By the time he had earned his Ph.D., jobs in atmospheric physics were scarce. So he took a temporary position with the Weather Service in his college town, Berkeley, hoping to transfer to NOAA’s atmospheric physics section when the job market loosened up. Twenty-two years later he was still with the Weather Service. Weathers from Weather.

With the satellites down and phone service jammed up the kazoo, Sam had turned to the service’s radio system to get reports on the storm that had swept in from the ocean. Even that was hit-and-miss: radio reception was mostly poor because of the storm, and more and more stations were going off the air because of power outages.

Sam had rounded up a couple of kids who knew how to run the computer that fed the big electronic wall map. Even so, the map had large blank spaces in it. The low-pressure center of the storm had moved inland with surprising swiftness and was dumping snow in the higher elevations across the northern Rockies. A surprise autumn storm. There’ll be a white Hallowe’en, Sam thought bitterly. And that means trouble.

The last satellite data he’d received had shown the storm’s center still out over the Pacific. Then the weather satellites had gone dead and Sam felt blinded, groping in the dark, reverting back to communications systems that hadn’t been used, really, since before he’d started in college.

“How’s it look, Weather Man?” Sam’s boss still had his sense of humor.

Sam looked up from his littered desk and gave him a sour expression. “Major storm. We’ve got warnings out but a lot of the area is getting hit with blackouts. We got real troubles, Eddie.”

The boss shrugged. “Do your best, Weather Man.”

“Sure. What else?”

“The President landed at San Francisco International okay. Got in before the rain started.” “Rain?”

“Yeah. Don’t you read your own forecasts? It’s pouring cats and dogs outside.”

The boss walked off toward his office. Sam straightened up and headed for the windows, up the hall from his desk and the wall map.

Sure enough, it was raining out there. Raining hard.

Washington, D.C.: State Department

For some reason that has delighted generations of cynics, the United States Department of State is headquartered in a part of the District of Columbia called Foggy Bottom. The Secretary of State’s spacious office was on the top floor of the handsome building. The Secretary had come directly to her office after her meeting in the Jefferson Hotel with her Chinese contact, Quang Chuli, still wearing her low-key gray pant suit and pearls. From her desk the Secretary could see across the Potomac River and its busy bridges to the glass-and-steel office towers of Virginia and the row upon row of white crosses lined up in military precision along the rolling green turf of Arlington National Cemetery.

As she sat at her broad, uncluttered desk, however, the Secretary of State was not looking out her windows. She was glaring at the image on her wall-sized display screen of a young brown-skinned upstart with a trim beard tracing his stubborn jawline.

“The Sarajevo scenario?” the Secretary repeated, in the icy, scornful tone that could send senators and White House officials scurrying for cover.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Michael Jamil.

General Higgins, whom the Oval Office had put in charge of this special situation team, was sitting beside Jamil and leaning toward the civilian so he could get his face in the picture that was on her wall screen.

“For what it’s worth, Madam Secretary,” Higgins said, in a tone that was little short of pompous, “this is Mr. Jamil’s personal assessment, not my team’s idea.”

“Thank you, General,” said the Secretary of State, putting on her sincerest smile. Shifting her eyes back to Jamil, she asked, “Is your scenario approved by the National Intelligence Council, young man?”

Jamil felt uncomfortable with General Higgins sitting beside him down at the end of the conference table and the eye of the computer camera staring at him unblinkingly. The others in the situation room were all on their feet, standing over to one side. Zuri Coggins was standing beside General Scheib, who was in front of the satellite image of the North Korean missiles, blocking Jamil’s view. But he could see the Secretary of State clearly enough, both on the computer display in front of him and on the wall screen on the other side of the room. No one stood in front of her image. He could see her brittle smile and hear the condescension in her “young man.”

“We’ve run many different scenarios at NIC,” he answered tightly. “The Sarajevo possibility is one of them.”

“But no one else at NIC has associated that scenario with the present situation,” the Secretary said, still smiling. “Only you.”

Feeling his insides clenching, Jamil replied, “I’m the only representative of the NIC present at this meeting, Madam Secretary.”

“I see,” she said.

“It’s the scenario that fits the facts best,” Jamil insisted. “A rogue attack triggers a full-scale nuclear exchange.”

“And you believe that the Chinese are behind this?”

Jamil hesitated. He knew the Secretary of State’s reputation. People didn’t get to challenge her more than once.

Carefully he answered, “I believe that the Chinese are prepared to profit from it. If we attack North Korea they will respond against us. If we allow the North Koreans to destroy an American city without retaliating, the Chinese will back North Korea’s demands. They want to eliminate our influence in Asia and this is the way for them to do it and keep their hands clean.”

The Secretary started to reply, but Jamil suddenly added, “We know they’ve placed their ballistic missile forces on alert. We should try to ascertain if their political leadership has left Beijing and gone to shelters.”

The Secretary’s eyes flared. “Do you expect me to believe that the Chinese government is ready to have a nuclear exchange with us? That they are willing to start World War III?”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s exactly what I expect you to believe.”

In her office, the Secretary of State stared hard at this young intelligence analyst. He looks like an Arab, she thought. How can I trust him? He might have all sorts of security clearances, but he could be a plant, a mole who’s been working inside our intelligence apparatus for years, waiting for this chance to launch a nuclear jihad.

She took a deep breath to calm herself. Stay cool, she told herself. Every word you say is being recorded for history. You want to come across as concerned, informed, on top of this situation. You want to look presidential. He’ll run for reelection next time around, but you’re young enough to have a good chance for the nomination four years afterward, especially if you come out of this looking presidential.

She glanced at the data bar running along the bottom of her wall screen as she said carefully, “Mr… eh, Jamil, has it occurred to you that I have sources of information that you do not?”

Jamil’s lips became a thin, hard line.

“Has it occurred to you,” the Secretary went on, “that I have unofficial sources that place me in contact with the highest levels of the government of the People’s Republic of China?” Struggling to keep her voice cool, presidential, she went on. “Has it occurred to you that my contacts assure me that China has no wish to attack the United States? Shouldn’t you rethink your scenario in the light of those facts?”

Despite the Secretary of State’s measured words, Jamil could almost feel her cold fury radiating from the conference room’s wall screen. And he felt angry, too—outraged that this woman refused to see the obvious.

“Has it occurred to you, Madam Secretary,” he retorted, “that your sources are lying to you? Or at least not telling you the entire truth? Have they told you that China will not under any circumstances launch their missiles against us? Have they offered to stop the North Koreans? Why do you think you haven’t been able to speak directly to the Chinese leadership? They’re probably in their underground city right now, waiting for the bombs to start falling! While the President’s in San Francisco preparing to give a speech!”

For a flash of an instant the Secretary of State looked flustered, but she immediately regained her icy composure. “Thank you for your frank opinion, Mr. Jamil.”

The wall screen went blank.

General Higgins pushed his chair away from Jamil and heaved himself to his feet. “You sure know how to make friends in high places, kid,” he said. Then he headed back to his place at the head of the table.

Jamil sat there alone. Why don’t they understand? he asked himself. It’s as if they don’t want to understand.

As the others took their seats around the conference table, Zuri Coggins came up to Jamil and placed a hand on his shoulder. “You’d better update your resume, Michael,” she said, shaking her head. “Nobody talks to that woman like that and lives to tell the tale.”

Jamil agreed with a morose nod. But as he looked up at Coggins, he saw the wall screen behind her. “Look!” he said, pointing with a trembling hand.

“They’ve got a bunch of people working around the missiles.”

Every eye in the situation room turned to the satellite view of the North Korean site. The two missiles stood on their pads as before, but now teams of men in coveralls were clustered around the base of each missile.

“Final checkout,” said General Scheib. “They’re starting their countdown. They’re going to launch those birds.”

San Francisco: St. Francis Hotel

“Wow!” exclaimed Vickie as she turned completely around, taking in the suite’s sitting room with its beautiful draperies and handsome furniture. “Can we afford this?”

Sylvia laughed, delighted that at last something had impressed her sixteen-year-old. “It’s only for this one night. And besides, the party committee’s paying for it.”

Denise went to the bedroom door and peeked in. “Twin beds,” she noted. “Queens.”

Before her younger daughter could ask, Sylvia explained, “You two sleep in there. I’ll use the pull-out sofa.”

Vickie and Denise glanced at each other. Before they could say anything, their mother said, “I don’t want you two arguing over who sleeps where. You each get one of the beds, share and share alike.”

With a shrug, Denise changed the subject. “When do we eat?”

Their landing at the airport had been delayed because of the President’s arrival, and then it had been hell getting a taxi in the drizzling rain. The highway was clogged with slow-moving traffic and now it was dinnertime and their luggage hadn’t come up from the lobby yet.

“As soon as the bellman brings our bags we’ll grab a quick bite someplace close by and then head out to the Cow Palace.”

“If we can get a cab,” Vickie said.

Denise went to the desk, where a few glossy magazines were arranged in a fan. “I’ll look up a good restaurant.”

Denise was always the practical one, Sylvia thought.

ABL-1: Cockpit

“Any word from the tanker?” Colonel Christopher asked.

“Not a peep,” O’Banion replied.

Christopher glanced at the fuel gauges, then over at Major Kaufman, sitting as grim as death in the right-hand seat.

“They’ll be here, Obie,” she said.

“If you say so, Colonel.”

She restrained an impulse to whistle at the hostility in Kaufman’s voice. Or maybe it’s fear, she thought. The major was staring straight ahead at the swirl of dirty gray clouds far below them. The tanker might be having trouble getting through that soup, she thought. Winds must be pretty strong down there. She leaned back in her chair and lifted her helmet partway off. The headache was getting worse. Stress, she knew. Try to relax. Chill out. At least we haven’t gotten word that the tanker’s not on its way to us.

“Take over, Obie,” she said, unstrapping her seat harness and getting up from the chair. “I’ll be back in five.”

Kaufman nodded and mumbled something about a potty break.

Damned creep, Christopher thought. She stepped through the hatch onto the flight deck, where Sharmon and O’Banion sat at their stations. They both looked pretty strained. So different, Christopher thought. Skinny black kid and chunky redheaded Irishman. But they’re both wearing Air Force blue and that’s what matters.

Placing a hand on each of their shoulders, Colonel Christopher said, just loud enough for them to hear her over the drone of the engines, “You heard the major and me hollering at each other.”

O’Banion shrugged and Sharmon nodded solemnly.

“That was a difference of opinion between the two of us. It’s all straightened out now. And forgotten. Understand?”

Sharmon blinked several times before saying, “Yes, ma’am. Forgotten.”

O’Banion broke into a lazy grin. “I gotcha, Colonel. No problemo.”

Christopher smiled down at the two of them. “Good. Now where the hell is that tanker?”

Harry saw that Monk was sitting beside Taki at the battle management station. There were four consoles lining one curving bulkhead of the compartment; in a real battle situation four Air Force blue-suiters would be working battle management, with two backups behind them. For this flight, which started out as a routine test mission, Taki had the station all to herself.

Seeing the two of them talking together, grins on their faces, gave Harry a pang of apprehension. Are they both in on it? Are they working together?

Then he heard Delany finishing one of his stories, “So the highway patrolman sees the guy’s too drunk to drive and he asks him, ‘Do you realize that your wife fell out of your car three blocks down the street?’ And the driver, he’s Irish, he says, ‘Thanks be to God! I thought I was goin’ deaf!’ ”

Monk hooted at his own joke and Taki laughed politely. Harry had heard the story before, and besides he was in no mood for laughter. But he got a sudden idea.

“Monk, I need to check out the ranging laser with you.”

Delany frowned up at him. “Again?”

“Again,” said Harry. “When that tanker gets here we’ve got to test the ranger on it.”

Pushing himself up from the bucket seat, Delany grumbled, “Your taking this el jefe crap too damned serious, Harry.”

“Maybe,” Harry agreed. “But let’s make certain the laser’s ready to ping the tanker.”

Once they were in the beam control section, Harry plucked at Delany’s sleeve. “Monk, I’ve got an idea about how to find out who dismantled the lens assembly.”

Delany gave him a dubious look.

“If we can find the missing assembly, there’s probably fingerprints on it,” Harry said. “Once we get back to Elmendorf, we can get the Air Police to check ‘em out.”

Delany’s expression phased from dubious to thoughtful. “Cheez, Harry, my prints are all over that chunk of glass.”

Nodding, Harry said, “Yeah, sure. But if there’s somebody else’s prints on it, too, then that somebody must be the guy who took it!”

“Maybe,” Delany said slowly.

“Gotta be,” said Harry, convincing himself as he spoke.

Delany shook his head. “You’re turning into a friggin’ Sherlock Holmes, pal.”

Harry accepted it as a compliment, thinking, If Monk took the assembly he knows there’s nobody else’s prints on it. He’ll go back to where he stashed it and wipe it down, clean off any fingerprints on it.

But then he thought, Maybe he was smart enough to wipe it down before he stashed it in the lav. Maybe I’m not a Sherlock Holmes after all.

And he realized that Monk was only one possible culprit out of four. So what do I do now? He wondered.

“Message from the tanker!” O’Banion sang out.

“Pipe it to me,” said Karen Christopher.

“ABL-1, this is your friendly flying gas station. Sorry we’re late.”

“Better late than never,” Colonel Christopher said happily into her lip mike. “Where are you?”

“Three miles behind you and four thousand feet below. We’re coming up as fast as we can.”

Kaufman twisted around in his chair and did his best to look behind and below the plane.

“Very good,” said the colonel. “We’re glad to see you. We’re running on fumes, just about.”

“We’ll take care of that. You need anything else, Colonel? Windshield wiped? Oil change? Tires rotated?”

Karen laughed. “Just fill our tanks, thanks.” She turned to Kaufman. “Feel better, Obie?”

He gave her a halfhearted grin. “You should’ve been a test pilot: more guts than brains.”

Colonel Christopher nodded. More guts than you’ve got, butterball, she retorted silently. Then she puffed out a heartfelt sigh of relief.

The Pentagon: Situation Room

“They’re definitely getting ready to launch,” said General Scheib, his eyes fixed on the wall screen that showed the latest satellite imagery from North Korea.

Zuri Coggins was speaking hurriedly, urgently, into the hair-thin headset she had attached to her minicomputer. Talking to the White House, Michael Jamil guessed. General Higgins was on his feet, his shirt rumpled, his face pasty.

Jamil wondered if the fatheaded general would send an alert to San Francisco now. The President arrives there and the North Koreans start their missile countdown. That can’t be a coincidence. It can’t be.

Then he asked himself, How did they know that the President landed? With all the commercial comm-sats out, there’s no worldwide news coverage. And we certainly aren’t sending data from our milsats to the DPRK.

They must have one or more satellites of their own watching San Francisco, Jamil concluded. Then he shook his head. The North Koreans didn’t have any satellites in space. The bomb they had launched was the first time they’ve gotten a bird into orbit successfully.

I need access, he realized. Seeing that the Coggins woman had taken off her headset and was watching the satellite imagery along with everybody else, he got out of his chair and went up the table to her.

“May I use your mini for a few minutes?” he asked.

Coggins cast a suspicious look at him, annoyed at being interrupted from her concentration on the wall screen’s imagery. The scene looked semi-weird, distorted. The surveillance satellite must be getting close to the local horizon, Jamil figured. It’ll be out of the area in a few minutes.

“My computer?” Coggins asked.

“Only for a few minutes. Please.”

She hesitated a heartbeat, then gestured to the mini. “Go ahead. It’s connected to the Defense Department’s information web.”

“Fine. Thanks.” Jamil slid into the chair next to Coggins and pulled the book-sized computer in front of him.

Coggins got up and stretched. Tense as a tightrope, she said to herself. Why not? You’ve got a lot to be tense about.

She walked over to the coffee cart. All three urns were empty again. We’re drinking too much of it anyway, she thought, even though she wished she had a cup to hold in her hands.

“Coffee’s gone again?”

Turning, she saw it was General Higgins glowering at the cart. He waved to his aide and pointed ostentatiously to the stainless steel urns. “I’ve got to tell him everything,” Higgins complained.

Coggins half-whispered, “Do you think they’re really targeting the President?”

The general shook his head stubbornly. “Scheib says those missiles don’t have the range or accuracy to hit San Francisco. He’s our local expert.”

“Then it’s Honolulu.”

“Or Fairbanks. Or Manila. Or Shanghai.” Higgins looked back at the screen, muttering, “Our next recon bird won’t be over the area for another ten minutes.”

She stepped across the room to where General Scheib stood staring at the wall screen while he gnawed his lip.

“How soon before they launch?” Coggins asked.

Scheib cocked his head to one side, thinking. Then he replied, “No more than an hour. Ninety minutes on the outside.”

“Can they hit San Francisco?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But if that’s their target, can your people stop them?”

General Scheib looked down at her. He still wore his tunic, ribbons displayed across his chest. Except for a shadow of beard, he looked almost as sharp as he had in the morning, when the group first convened. But he was gnawing his lip.

“Wherever they’re aiming for, we’ve got four Aegis ships in the Pacific and our land-based antimissile batteries in Alaska and California.”

“Can they shoot the missiles down?”

He started to shake his head, caught himself. “You have to understand the problem. Once those ballistic missiles’ rocket engines burn out, they’re on a coasting trajectory to their target.”

“So you can track exactly where they’re heading,” Coggins said.

“Yeah, but they separate the warhead from the body of the missile, release decoys if they’re carrying any, even break up the missile’s tankage to make a cloud of images, confuse our radar. Our guys have to pick out the warhead from that cloud of crap.”

“Can you do it?”

“It’s not easy. The best way to discriminate the warhead is when the stuff reenters the atmosphere. Air drag slows down the decoys and fragments; they’re lighter than the warhead. Then we can pick out which incoming body is carrying the bomb.”

“When it’s diving onto the target? How much time do you have to decide which is which?”

Scheib made a sound that could have been a snort. “A minute, if we’re lucky.”

Coggins felt her eyes widen. “One minute or less? Can you hit the warhead in that time span?”

“We’ve done it in tests,” Scheib said. Then he added, “About half the time.”

“Saints and sinners!” Coggins exclaimed. “Half the time?”

“That’s why ABL-1’s so important,” said the general. “If we can hit the missiles with that laser while they’re still boosting, while their rockets are burning, before they deploy their warheads and decoys…”

Coggins saw the uncertainty on his face. “Does the President know all this?”

“He’s been briefed. More than once. I made the presentation myself last year when they were considering the budget for MDA.”

He’s toast, Coggins thought. If those missiles reach San Francisco the President is toast. Along with half a million other people.

Back at the conference table, Michael Jamil had finally found the information he wanted. He had tried to check through official Defense Department files but found them too slow and cumbersome for his purposes. All DoD’s security regulations do is slow down access to the information you need, Jamil complained silently. So he’d turned to the Internet site of Aviation Week magazine. He’d heard guys at Langley call it Aviation Leak because it often published information that Washington would have preferred to keep away from the public.

And there it was, in last week’s issue. The People’s Republic of China had launched a quartet of scientific research satellites into polar orbits. Beijing announced that the satellites were part of China’s expanding space exploration program.

Space exploration my pimpled ass, Jamil snarled to himself. Those are surveillance satellites. Hardened birds, so they wouldn’t be knocked out by the nuke the North Koreans set off. They pass over California every half hour. They’re watching San Francisco and feeding the info to the North Koreans, telling them when to launch their missiles so they’ll catch the President.

Jamil pushed his chair away from the table and looked for Zuri Coggins in the group clustered before the wall screens.

The Chinese are behind this! He was certain. The North Koreans are fronting for Beijing. We’re heading smack into a nuclear war.

U.S. Route 12, Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho

Charley Ingersoll had to make a decision. The van was stuck in the god-dratted snowbank on the shoulder of the road. The more he tried to pull out of the snow, the deeper his tires spun into the ruts they were making.

Martha was ashen-faced, barely keeping herself from sobbing. The kids seemed okay, but they were strangely quiet. Scared, Charley thought.

I’m scared too, he realized. Stuck here in the middle of infernal nowhere with the snow coming down harder than ever and the van running out of gas. Stupid phone doesn’t work and there hasn’t been a snowplow through here for God knows how long. Lord have mercy! We could freeze to death! He tried the radio. Nothing but hillbilly music or blaring rock that made him feel as if his eardrums were about to explode. No news. No weather reports.

“It’s ten minutes to two, Charley,” his wife said, her voice small, frightened. “They’ll have news and weather on the hour.”

Like that’s going to do us any good, Charley thought. But he didn’t say anything out loud. He sat and waited. The van was eerily silent. Only the soft purr of the engine and the moaning wind outside. The snow was coming down heavier than ever.

How long will the gas last? Charley asked himself. Once it runs out and the heater goes, we could all freeze to death.

“Can’t we go out and make a snowman?” Little Martha asked again.

“No!” Martha snapped. “Stay in here, where it’s warm.”

For how long? Charley wondered.

“Your headlines on the hour,” a man’s deep voice intoned over a blare of trumpets. “Surprise blizzard blankets the region with snow! Widespread electric outages reported! Network and cable television still out of service!” He sounded positively happy about it all. “And now the details.”

Charley listened in growing impatience as the voice told how television service had been out all day except for local stations. Come on with the weather, Charley prompted silently. Come on!

“A surprise autumn storm has struck the region with more than a foot of snow, and still more on the way.” The guy sounded overjoyed about it, Charley thought. “Snowplow crews have been struggling to keep the interstates open, but secondary roads have been officially closed to all but emergency traffic . . .”

“Secondary roads?” Martha asked. “Are we on a secondary road?”

Charley shook his head. “Damned if I know.”

Martha glared at his language. Charley was surprised at himself. He glanced back at the kids.

“I’m cold,” Little Martha said from the backseat.

“I’ll turn up the heat, dear,” said Martha. Charley saw that the heater was already on maximum.

Suddenly he heard himself say, “We passed a gas station a couple miles back.”

“But they couldn’t pump any gas,” his wife said.

“Yeah, but I think I saw a tow truck there. They could pull us out of this snowbank and siphon some gas into our tank.”

“But we don’t have their phone nu—” Martha stopped herself, realizing that their cell phone wasn’t working anyway.

“I’ll go back and get them,” Charley said.

Martha’s eyes popped. “Outside? In this blizzard?”

“It’s only a couple miles. I can make it.”

“Charley, no! Don’t!”

But he had made up his mind while he was speaking the words. Anything would be better than sitting here doing nothing. Even freezing out in the snow.

“Charley, please! Don’t leave us!”

As he reached for the door handle, Charley said, “I’ll be back in an hour or so. With a tow truck.” He tried to sound confident. He certainly didn’t feel it.

ABL-1: Beam Management Compartment

“Got it!” Monk said, grinning.

Leaning over his burly shoulder, Harry saw the return blip from the ranging laser on the readout screen of Delany’s console. Numbers rastered down the screen’s side. The laser was working fine and pinging the tanker plane with low-power invisible infrared pulses.

Harry grabbed the headset hooked to the console’s side and slapped it onto his head. Thumbing the intercom button on the console, he called, “Hartunian to the communications officer.”

“Comm here,” said O’Banion’s voice in the earphone.

“I’m piping our ranging laser’s data to you. Please confirm against your radar.”

“Will do, Mr. Hartunian.”

Monk looked up at Harry, his lopsided grin almost a smirk. “I told you I’d get it working. No sweat.”

Harry nodded absently. It was one thing to put the little laser together and make it work. It was another to make it work right. Using the tanker plane as a target was a good test, although the plane was practically in their laps and the real test would come when they had to get the range on a missile boosting from a hundred or more miles away. But if their laser results matched the plane’s regular radar—

“Mr. Hartunian,” said O’Banion.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sending our numbers down to you. They look good to me, sir.”

“Okay, okay.” Harry felt his hands trembling slightly as the radar numbers began to appear on Monk’s screen, alongside the numbers from their ranging laser.

“On the button!” Monk crowed. “Look at that!”

Harry saw that the numbers differed only on the fourth decimal place. Good enough, he thought. Good enough.

“You’re right, Monk,” he said, forcing a smile. “We’re in business.”

“Better tell that flygirl skipper, pal.”

“I will,” Harry said, straightening up. “After I check with Taki.”

Monk’s grin shrank as Harry left him and ducked through the hatch to the battle management station, where Nakamura sat peering intently at one of the four consoles.

Sliding into the chair beside her, Harry said, “Monk got the ranger working.”

“I can see that,” Taki said, tapping a lacquered fingernail against the console’s main screen.

“Is it good enough for you?” he asked.

Nakamura nodded, but Harry saw that her lips were pressed together tightly.

“Problem?”

She looked away from him for a moment, then turned back to the console and its array of screens. “Harry, I can’t do this. Not all by myself.”

“I know.”

As if she hadn’t heard him, she went on. “I mean, it’s one thing to run a test, just fire the COIL at a spot in the empty air. But now we’re going to try to hit real missiles? Come on, there’s supposed to be four people at these consoles. I’m only one person. I can’t do everything.”

“I’ll be beside you, Taki. I’ll be right here with you. We’ll do it together.”

Nakamura focused her dark eyes on Harry. He saw doubt in them. And he understood what was going on in her head. It all depends on her, Harry thought. Wally and Angel can fire the COIL. Monk can make the ranging laser work. But it’s Taki’s responsibility to run the sensors that acquire the infrared signature of the rocket exhaust plume, point the COIL at the target, and get off enough shots to take out the missile before its engines cut off and we lose the infrared signal from the plume.

“Taki,” he said softly, “what it takes four blue-suiters to do, the two of us can do.”

“You think so?”

“Sure. You’ll get an Annie Oakley medal for sharp-shooting.”

Her brows knit. “Annie Oakley? Who’s she?”

The tension broke and Harry laughed. “I’ll tell you all about her after this is over.”

As he got to his feet, Monk came through the hatch and passed through the compartment. “Kidney break,” Delany said.

The lens assembly! Harry thought. He’s going to wipe down the lens assembly! He watched Delany duck through the hatch, wondering what he should do.

“I’ve got to talk to the pilot,” he said to Nakamura, and followed Delany out of the compartment.

Instead of going upstairs to the flight deck, though, Harry watched Delany step into the lavatory, then he went into the galley, sat tensely at one of the bucket seats, and kept his eyes on the lav hatch.

Delany came out in less than a minute. He didn’t have time to do anything with the lens assembly, Harry thought. Hell, he didn’t even take the time to wash his hands!

But Harry entered the lavatory anyway, kneeled down, and opened the cabinet. The cartons of toilet paper were stacked just as he had left them. Taking the top few out, Harry saw the lens assembly still sitting behind them.

As he put the packages back Harry thought that so far he had proven nothing. As a detective he was a total flop.

ABL-1: Cockpit

“Message incoming from the Pentagon,” O’Banion reported. “I’m running it through decrypt now.”

“Let me see it as soon as decrypt’s finished,” Colonel Christopher said.

“Right.”

Lieutenant Sharmon’s softer voice sounded in her earphone. “We’re approaching North Korean territorial waters, Colonel.”

Karen Christopher frowned slightly. They had flown past the storm swirling across the Sea of Japan and were now over open water. Through the windscreen Christopher could see nothing but empty ocean, gray and rippled with waves. No sign of land.

“We’re twelve miles off the coast of Korea?”

“No, ma’am,” Sharmon replied. “The North Koreans claim territorial rights out to two hundred miles.”

“Two hundred? Is that legal?”

“I checked the regs, Colonel. Twelve miles is the international standard for territorial rights, but some countries claim exclusive economic rights out to two hundred. They don’t allow fishing boats or stuff like that.”

Colonel Christopher puzzled over that for a moment. “Better check with Washington and see what they recommend.”

“It’ll take awhile; communications are still all fuck… er, all snarled up.”

The colonel nodded to herself as she thought, We need to get this bird as close to the shoreline as possible. When those gooks pop their missiles we’ve got to be close enough to nail them right away. Close enough to take more than one pop at them if we have to.

O’Banion came back on the intercom. “Colonel, Mr. Hartunian’s asking to talk to you.” “Where is he?”

“Down in the battle management compartment.”

She turned to Kaufman. “Obie, take over. Stay on this heading until we’re twenty miles off the coast. Holler if I’m not back by then.”

Kaufman looked resentful, as usual. But he said, “Twenty miles. Right.”

Colonel Christopher nodded at her navigator and communications officer as she went through the flight deck and down the ladder to the tiny niche between the beam control and battle management compartments. Hartunian was standing behind the Asian-American girl, the expression on his face somewhere between grim and determined.

“Any problems, Mr. Hartunian?” the colonel asked, barely loud enough to be heard over the rumble of the plane’s engines.

Hartunian gestured toward the galley as he said, “I think we’re ready, Colonel.”

“You think?” Christopher felt her brows knitting. She had wanted to make her tone light, not accusative. No sense making the nerd get sore at you, she told herself. But her words had come out as challenging, demanding.

Hartunian seemed not to notice as he stepped through the open hatchway and waited for her to enter the galley. Then he closed the hatch behind her, softly, as if he didn’t want anyone to hear it shut.

“Well?” Colonel Christopher said.

“The hardware’s in operating condition. We tested the ranging laser on the refueling plane and it’s working okay.”

“Good.”

With a shake of his head, Hartunian went on, “But I don’t know about the people. We’re just a skeleton crew. And one of us tried to sabotage the mission.”

“You still don’t know who.”

“No idea.”

Christopher thought it over for all of two seconds. Then she muttered, “Well, let’s hope it’s not some fanatic who’s willing to kill himself.” Then she added, “Or herself.”

Hartunian said, “I’ve been thinking about that. Whoever it was tried to screw up the mission in the least dangerous way possible. Knock out the ranging laser and we’d have to abort the test and turn back for home. But now that he knows this mission is for real...” His voice trailed off.

Christopher went to the coffee urn and poured herself a mug. “If you’re right, that means whoever it was sabotaged your laser when he—or she— thought this flight was only a routine test.”

“Right,” Hartunian agreed. “Which means that whoever it is wanted to give Anson Aerospace a black eye. He’s not an enemy agent, he’s just a damned industrial spy, working for one of Anson’s competitors.”

The colonel stared at Hartunian for a long, silent moment. Then, “You think so?”

The engineer smiled bitterly. “Either that or we’re all dead.”

San Francisco: St. Francis Hotel

As he spoke earnestly into the telephone, the President hardly glanced at the magnificent view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the penthouse suite’s windows. It was raining out there anyway, a steady, gray, cold-looking rain.

Norman Foster sat on the luxurious Louis XIV sofa and ran a hand over his bald pate as he watched his friend and boss chatting away on the phone, charming one moment, intimidating the next. Moscow, Tokyo, NATO headquarters in Belgium: he’d been trying to get world leaders lined up with him despite the maddening slowness of the battered global communications system.

At last the President put the phone down. Before he could get out of his chair, Foster said, “The Air Force wants to send some F-15s to escort ABL-1.”

“A fighter escort?” the President. “Why do they want a fighter escort?”

Foster knew that they’d have to change into fresh suits before heading out to the Cow Palace. He glanced at his wristwatch before replying, “The laser plane’s a big four-engine 747. If the North Koreans or the Chinese try to intercept it, she’ll be a sitting duck.”

“This request came from NSA?”

“From the special situation team. They sent it through the Air Force, who passed it up to the Secretary of Defense,” Foster said.

“From Lonnie Bakersfield?”

“None other.”

“This request came direct from Lonnie himself?” the President asked.

Spreading his hands in a gesture of uncertainty, the President’s chief of staff replied, “Nothing’s direct just now. Communications are in a mess. SecDef sent this request nearly an hour ago.”

“And you just got it?” the President snapped.

“It came to Air Force One and they transferred it to your security team’s briefcase.”

“God Almighty! How can we manage this crisis when we can’t even get telephone calls through?”

Trying to calm his boss, Foster said, “The communications system is working; it’s just slower than normal, that’s all.”

“That’s all? You said this request came from that situation team you put together, through the Air Force chain of command, up to the Secretary of Defense, and now to me.”

“That’s right.”

The President glared at his old friend. “Where’s that laser plane now?”

“According to the latest report, it’s over the Sea of Japan, heading for the coast of North Korea.”

“You think the North Koreans might try to shoot it down?”

“Or force it to land in North Korea. It’d make terrific propaganda for them. Not to mention the technology they’ll be able to get their hands on.”

“We’re staring nuclear war in the face and you think they’re aiming for propaganda?”

Foster made an exasperated grimace. “Yeah. What the hell do I know.”

Standing in the middle of the sumptuously furnished room, the President scratched at his long jaw once, then decided. “No fighter escort.”

Foster could feel his brows hike up.

Waving an extended forefinger like a schoolteacher trying to get a lesson across to a backward pupil, the President said, “You get our fighter jocks into the same airspace as their fighter jocks and you’re going to start a war.”

“But if they launch those missiles we’ll have a war anyway. A nuclear war.”

“The laser plane’s supposed to shoot the missiles down.”

“Suppose the North Koreans shoot down the plane instead?”

“Then they launch the missiles and we go to war. But I don’t want to have some fighter jock get us into a war if we can avoid it.”

Foster got slowly to his feet. “Mr. President, that just doesn’t make any goddamned sense.”

“Maybe not to you, Norm. But that’s my decision. If there’s a way to avert this disaster I’m willing to take it. Now let me see if I can get the British Prime Minister on the phone before we have to head down to the Cow Palace.”

The Pentagon: Situation Room

General Scheib looked up from his laptop. “No fighter escort,” he said, his face dark, grim. General Higgins stepped over to where Scheib was sitting and stared at the decoded message on Scheib’s screen, as if he couldn’t believe it unless he saw the words for himself.

“From POTUS,” he muttered. With a shake of his head he added, “Can’t go any higher in the chain of command than that.”

Scheib looked up into Higgins’ florid, big-nosed face. “ABL-1 will be a sitting duck if the North Koreans send out fighters.”

Zuri Coggins, standing by the newly replenished coffee cart, spoke up. “Maybe they won’t. If Pyongyang honestly wants to prevent the rebels from launching those missiles, they won’t interfere with our plane.”

“How do they know what our plane is?” Scheib snapped. “What if they think it’s a strategic bomber, the first part of our counterstrike against them?”

“We’ll have to tell them,” Coggins said.

“How? Send ‘em a frigging telegram?”

Coggins looked stricken, realizing that there was no North Korean ambassador in Washington, no diplomatic relations with the DPRK at all.

“We’ll have to go through China,” she said. “Get the message to Beijing and have them relay our intentions to Pyongyang.”

Scheib gave her a disgusted look. “And by the time that’s done ABL-1 will be sinking to the bottom of the Sea of Japan.”

“Maybe not,” Michael Jamil said.

Scheib glared down the table at him, but asked, “What do you mean?”

Jamil licked his lips before answering. “Whoever’s orchestrating this has some pretty good intelligence sources. Maybe they know about ABL-1.”

General Higgins plopped into the chair next to Scheib. “You’ve given the plane a lot of publicity, Brad. I bet there’s some gook intel officer who reads Aviation Week.”

“Or an intelligence officer in Beijing,” Jamil said.

Higgins gave him a sour look. “You still think the chinks are behind all this? Dr. Fu Manchu, maybe?”

Jamil’s brows knit. “Who’s Dr. Fu Manchu?”

The general rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.

But Coggins headed down the table toward the young analyst. “Do you really believe this situation is being orchestrated by Beijing?”

“Yes, I certainly do.” Jamil started ticking off points on his fingers. “The North Korean nuclear program hasn’t produced anything more than a test device. They don’t have nuclear warheads; they had to get them from somewhere else.”

“China?” Coggins asked, taking the chair next to Jamil’s.

“Or Russia. Second point, Pyongyang’s government is in turmoil, but it would be suicide for a group of their army officers to steal those missiles and launch them at the United States.”

“They’re fanatics,” General Higgins snapped. “Orientals. They don’t have the same values that we do.”

“But they’re not fools. They must believe that they have the backing of someone powerful enough to protect them from their own government.”

“China,” Coggins said again.

Nodding, Jamil went on. “China launched surveillance satellites two days ago. I’m betting that they’re hardened against the North Korean nuke and they’re in orbit to watch the President’s arrival in San Francisco.”

Scheib growled, “Not that again! They can’t hit San Francisco. We know that for a fact.”

Jamil ignored him. “They knocked out our own satellites so we couldn’t see their government leaders heading for their underground shelters.”

“Our milsats are still working,” Higgins objected. “We haven’t seen any such movement.”

“Have you looked?” Jamil challenged. “Have you ordered the NRO analysts to specifically look for a flow of high-up government vehicles out of Beijing?” Higgins fell silent.

“The Chinese have wanted Taiwan since 1949,” Jamil said. “It’s a matter of national pride to them. A matter of face.”

“And they’re willing to risk nuclear war over it?” Coggins demanded.

With a shake of his head, Jamil retorted, “That’s not the question. The question is, are we willing to risk nuclear war over it?”

“Aw, that’s just nonsense,” Higgins insisted.

But Coggins murmured, “I’m not so sure.”

“Look,” Jamil said, almost pleading for understanding, “The Chinese economy is in the toilet—”

“Whose isn’t?” Higgins muttered.

“There’s a lot of unrest in China. People got accustomed to a rising economy, rising expectations. Now they’re sinking. Getting Taiwan would be a great boost to the government in Beijing.”

“And you think Beijing is willing to let a few hundred million of their people die in a nuclear exchange ?”

“You still don’t get it, General. Are we willing to lose a hundred million people or more over Taiwan?”

General Scheib spoke up. “But Taiwan’s got nothing to do with this! It’s North Korea that’s threatening us.”

“I know, I understand that. But look at the big picture. North Korea attacks us. We have the option of retaliation or negotiation. If we retaliate, if we hit North Korea, China will come in on their side. They’d have to. They can’t sit and do nothing while we attack their next-door neighbor. Remember how they came into the Korean War when it looked like we were going to conquer the north.”

Coggins nodded slowly, reluctantly agreeing with his logic.

Jamil continued. “If we let the North Koreans get away with attacking us, killing the President—or maybe just blowing out Honolulu or Fairbanks— then our influence in Asia goes down to zero. So we have the choice of nuclear war with China or allowing China to remake the map of Asia.”

Higgins shook his head ponderously. “I just don’t believe it.”

Coggins said, “They’d reunify Korea, with North Korea in command. China would take over Taiwan. They’d force Japan to get rid of our bases there . . .”

“Chinese hegemony in the Far East,” Jamil said. “And we’re humiliated worldwide.”

The conference room fell absolutely silent. Jamil could hear the faint buzz of the air circulation fans in the ceiling.

General Scheib broke the spell. “Okay. So what do we do if they shoot down ABL-1?”

ABL-1: COIL Bay

Harry ran his hand along the smooth, cool metal tubing that ran the length of the COIL bay. The mixture of iodine and oxygen gases would flow down the main tube at supersonic speed when the laser was activated, producing more than a million watts of infrared energy once it raced through the lasing cavity. More than a megawatt, Harry thought. Sounds like a lot, but it’s about the explosive equivalent of a lousy hand grenade.

Still, slap a hand grenade against the side of a boosting rocket and you blow it apart. That’s what we’ve got to do, Harry told himself.

Wally Rosenberg sidled up to him with his usual crafty grin.

“El jefe’s down among the peons, huh?” Rosenberg pronounced the word “pee-ons.”

Ignoring Wally’s sarcasm, Harry said, “A pinpoint leak anywhere along the tubing could louse up the COIL. Maybe blow up the plane and us in it.”

“We ran a nitrogen purge through the system not more’n twenty minutes ago. No leaks.”

Angel Reyes came up, looking intent, totally focused on his job. “Don’t worry, Harry. Everything back here is okay.”

Harry nodded absently. “We’ve got to make this baby work right. The first time. We won’t have the chance to tinker with her and try again.”

Reyes straightened up to his full height, barely taller than Harry’s chin. “It will work,” he said. His voice was soft, but the intensity in his eyes was iron-hard.

Harry looked at the two of them: Reyes standing as if he were facing a firing squad; Rosenberg in his usual slouch, his sly grin fading into something less certain.

“I’ve got to ask you both,” Harry said slowly, “and I swear to you this’ll go no further than the three of us: Did one of you pull the lenses out of the ranger?”

Reyes looked surprised, then hurt. Rosenberg gave Harry a disgruntled huff.

“I haven’t gone farther forward than the fuckin’ galley since we took off, Harry,” said Rosenberg.

Then he amended, “No, wait, I took a piss in the forward toilet.”

“I used the toilet back aft here,” Reyes said, clearly insulted at Harry’s suggestion.

“I’m sorry, guys,” Harry said. “I had to ask. One of us tried to screw up the mission and—”

“It wasn’t me,” Rosenberg snapped. For once he looked serious.

“Or me,” said Reyes.

Harry puffed out a weary sigh. “Then it had to be Monk, or Taki.”

Rosenberg’s crafty half-grin returned. “What’s Tiki-Taki’s religion, Harry? She wouldn’t be a Muslim, would she?”

In the cockpit, Colonel Christopher said into her lip microphone, “Brick, where’s that message from Washington? Haven’t you got it decoded yet?”

“One more minute, Colonel,” the communications officer replied. “This one’s in a red priority code.”

“Jon, how far from the coast are we?”

Sharmon’s deeper voice immediately answered, “One hundred and fifty miles, ma’am.”

Christopher nodded. Off on the horizon she could see a smear of clouds that must have marked the coastline. Her flight helmet felt as if it weighed a ton. But we’re too close now to take a break, she told herself. Got to sit here until we’re finished.

She glanced across the console of throttles at Major Kaufman. Obie looks calm enough. He had the sweats when we were waiting for the tanker, but he looks okay now.

“You need a kidney break, Obie?”

He shook his head hard enough to make his helmet wobble.

“Won’t have time for it once the shooting starts,” she prompted.

Kaufman frowned, then grumbled, “I was okay until you mentioned it.” He unstrapped and hauled himself out of the copilot’s seat.

Christopher chuckled to herself.

“Got the scoop from Washington, Colonel,” O’Banion called.

“Hand it to me.”

The redheaded comm officer ducked through the hatch and gave Christopher a flimsy sheet of paper. She read its two lines quickly. “North Korean missile launch imminent. No fighter cover for your mission.”

Fighter cover? Christopher was surprised at the idea. She hadn’t even thought about having fighter planes escorting her. But it made sense. We’d be a sitting duck if the gooks sent fighters up to intercept us.

“Incoming message,” O’Banion said, his voice sounding tense, urgent.

“Pipe it to me.”

A calm, reedy voice said in British-inflected English, “Unidentified aircraft, this is Air Defense Command of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. You have entered DPRK airspace. You will identify yourself and depart DPRK airspace at once. Respond immediately, please.”

ABL-1: Battle Management Station

Taki Nakamura looked up from her main console as Harry stepped through the hatch. “I’ve done the dry run sixteen times, Harry,” she said before he could get a word out of his mouth. “I’m pretty sure that the two of us can handle the mission.”

He sat at the console next to hers, noting that all its screens were alight, displaying data.

“I mean, it’s only two missiles, right?” Taki chattered on. “If it was more I’d say we needed a full crew, but for only two of ‘em we can handle it. Really, I’m sure we can.”

Placing a hand on her arm, Harry felt her trembling slightly. “I know you can, Taki. I don’t have any doubt of it. And I’ll be right here with you.”

Silently, he added, If there’s going to be any problems, they’ll be here, at battle management. Monk can’t do any damage to us unless he hauls out the COIL’s entire optics bench or smashes it to pieces, and he’s not going to reveal himself by doing that. If he’s the one. Wally and Angel know they’d blow up the plane if they mess with the fuel system feed. So Taki’s the one who could mess us up, and I’m going to stick right here beside her.

She was saying, “I’ll get it done, Harry, I really will. Don’t worry about this end of it.”

Harry smiled wanly. “Taki, I’m worried about everything. All of it.”

She seemed to focus on him for the first time. More softly, she said, “Yeah, I guess you are. Can’t say I blame you.”

Taking a deep breath, Harry asked, “Um, has Monk come through here in the past hour or so?”

Taki seemed surprised at the change of subject. Her brows nettling, she replied, “I think so. Can’t say the time, exactly, but he did come through. Said he had to use the toilet.”

Harry nodded. He had checked the lavatory again before entering Taki’s station. The lens assembly was still in the closet where he’d found it, apparently undisturbed since the last time he’d looked.

“You still looking for the lens assembly?” Taki asked.

“I’m looking for whoever took it.”

“Oh. Sure.”

Before he could think about it, Harry blurted, “Taki, was it you?”

Her eyes went so wide he could see white all around the deep brown irises. “Me?” Her screech was an octave and a half higher than before.

Feeling miserable, Harry said, “I had to ask, Taki. I asked the others first. It won’t go any further than the five of us. But I’ve got to know. I don’t care why, I just have to know that we’ll get through this mission okay.”

Clearly seething, Taki hissed, “You think because my great-grandfather fought for the Emperor that I’m a fuckin’ kamikaze?”

“No! I...” Harry could see the fury in her face. “I don’t know what to think. One of us tried to screw up the mission and I’ve got to find out who.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“I didn’t think it was.”

“So why’d you ask?”

Shaking his head, Harry answered, “I don’t know what else I can do! Christ, Taki, this is awful.”

Her shoulders relaxed slightly, but she said, “Don’t tell me you’re just doing your job, Harry.”

“Believe me, Taki, being a detective isn’t a job I want.”

She almost smiled. “For what it’s worth, you’re not very good at it.”

He almost smiled back. “I know. I know.”

Colonel Christopher unconsciously pressed one hand against her helmet earphone as the smooth male voice repeated, “Unidentified aircraft, this is Air Defense Command of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. You have entered DPRK airspace. You will identify yourself and depart DPRK airspace at once. Respond immediately, please.”

Kaufman, standing at the cockpit hatch, was staring at her. “Well?” he asked. He had heard the message from the speaker on O’Banion’s console.

Christopher’s mind was racing. Clipped to the control panel in front of her was the message from Washington. Missile launch imminent. No fighter cover.

“Well?” Kaufman said again, more demanding. “What are you going to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Stay on course. Make no reply to them. Radio silence from here on in.”

“They’ll shoot us down! The goddamn gooks shot down a civilian airliner a few years ago, didn’t they? They’ll send out fighters and blast us out of the sky!”

“Go to the toilet, Obie, and get back here as fast as you can. I’m going to need you here.”

“You’re gonna get us all killed,” Kaufman muttered.

Trying to ignore her copilot, Christopher called to O’Banion, “Brick, radio silence. Nothing goes out unless I say so.”

The communications officer’s voice came through her headphone, “Not even a Mayday when they shoot us down?”