America

CHAPTER ELEVEN

An air force E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft on patrol two hundred miles east of Atlantic City, New Jersey, was the first to spot the Tomahawk missiles after launch. The crew picked up the first missile on radar just seconds after it came out of the water, then the second and third as they rose from the sea. The coordinates of the launch site and a rough intercept heading were broadcast to a navy P-3 Orion patrol aircraft, which was approximately a hundred miles to the south.

The Orion commander turned as soon as he heard the heading over the radio. In the back of the Orion, the tactical coordinator, or TACCO, typed the coordinates into the computer and called out a new bearing. The pilot made the correction, three degrees, and set the bug on his horizontal situation indicator (HSI).

At his console in the main compartment of the plane, the TACCO began planning his search and programming the sonobuoy panel. While the TACCO worked, the pilot and copilot restarted the number one and four engines, which they had secured earlier to save fuel. Only when both engines were developing cruise power and the temperatures were stabilized in the normal range did the pilot key his intercom mike. "How long until we get there?" At the time he was level at 200 feet above the water, making 250 knots.

"Twenty-three minutes," the TACCO told him.

The pilot was Duke Dolan, a graduate of Purdue University. His ambition had been to fly fighter planes from aircraft carriers, but the needs of the navy and his standing in his flight school class had conspired to put him in P-3s. There were worse fates, he often told his wife. "At least I don't have to go on a cruise on the big gray boat."

So now he was hunting one. USS America. She had gotten the name, he recalled, after the Kitty HawJ(-c\ass carrier named America had been scrapped. Rumored to be the quietest thing in the ocean, America would take some finding. The way to do it, he thought, was to actively echo-range, or ping, the sonobuoys.

But wasn't there another submarine out here someplace? No doubt the TACCO knew where it was, so the pilot didn't need to worry about it.

Indeed, the TACCO did know about La Jolla. He didn't know her exact position, of course, but he knew she was in this operating area. Which frosted him more than a little. With a friendly boat down there, he would need absolutely certain identification before he strapped on the pirate ship with a Mk-48 torpedo. Finding the damned boat was going to be tough enough, but an ironclad positive ID? And he wasn't going to be able to use active sonar because he might illuminate La Jolla for the bad guys. Hoo boy!

"Where did they say those missiles were going?" the copilot asked Duke.

"Probably don't know yet."

"Didya see the White House on TV after the bastards whacked it? Smoking hole, man."

"Yeah. I saw it."

"I hope they don't hit the O-Club, anything like that."

The copilot was an idiot, no question. How in the hell did he get in the navy, anyway? And by what twist of evil fate, the pilot wondered, did he wind up in my right seat on what is probably the only day of my naval career that I will hunt a submarine for real? Why me, God?

Five minutes after the first missile was launched, a pair of F-16 fighters, which had been on alert status at the end of the Dover Air Force Base runway, with their pilots in the cockpits, lit their afterburners and rolled. They made a section takeoff, raised their gear together, and punched into the overcast that blanketed the East Coast of the United States at about twenty-three hundred feet. Two minutes after takeoff they switched to the operational frequency of the E-3 Sentry aircraft, which was a Boeing 707 with a thirty-foot radar rotodome mounted atop the fuselage.

"We have three Tomahawks in the air," the mission commander aboard the Boeing told the F-16 section leader, whose name was Rebecca Allison. "Your vector to intercept is zero six zero. Estimated distance to intercept is four hundred twelve miles, recommend you use a max range profile."

"Roger that," Rebecca Allison said and noted the info on her knee board. She dialed the heading bug on her horizontal situation indicator (HSI) to the recommended heading and engaged the autopilot, which could keep the fighter in a smooth, steady climb while she punched the intercept data into her computer and checked the sym-bology on the heads-up display, or HUD. Each plane was carrying two six-hundred-gallon aux tanks, one under each wing, and each had a Sidewinder on each wingtip missile station.

The planes were climbing through cloud. Allison checked her wingman, Stanley Schottenheimer, who was tucked in nicely on her right wing.

They topped the clouds at ten thousand feet and continued their climb. Schottenheimer increased the distance between the planes so that he too could attend to cockpit chores.

"Anvil One, Eagle Four Two," Allison called on the secure UHF radio. "Do you have a projected destination for the bogies?"

"Looks like New York. Unfortunately, all three are on different flight paths. We'll put you down on the closest one."

"Do you have any other interceptors, over?"

"None that can intercept prior to the target area. You two are it."

"Why don't you split us up, give us each a target, over?"

"Okay. Wingman, state your call sign."

"Eagle Four Seven," Schottenheimer replied.

"Both of you stay together for now. We'll separate you in a bit, try to give you each a missile."

Three missiles, two planes. Uh-oh. And the missiles were Tomahawks, which flew right in the weeds. Allison tightened her harness straps and reached for her master armament switch. She would try for a Sidewinder shot, if she could get a lock on the missile's exhaust. If not, she would have to use the gun.

The control room was packed as America descended toward the depth Vladimir Kolnikov wanted, two thousand feet. Boldt was wearing the sound-powered telephone, so it was he who reported leaks in the engine room passing eleven hundred feet.

Kolnikov turned and glared at the crowd. "Have you never been on a submarine before? Check for leaks. Everyone should be at his post wearing sound-powered phones. Find 'em and fix 'em. Check every compartment." The control room emptied, leaving only Eck, Boldt, Rothberg, Turchak on the helm, and Kolnikov. And Hey-drich, who sat in the back at an unused sonar console doing and saying nothing.

Two thousand feet was three hundred feet below her certified depth, and everyone in the room seemed to be holding his breath. When the boat's hull creaked and groaned a bit from the stupendous pressure passing eighteen hundred feet, Kolnikov said, "That's deep enough. Take it back up to seventeen hundred and let's get the giggles and bangs out of it." When she stabilized at seventeen hundred feet, her certified depth, the noises stopped. Boldt reported that the boat had leaks here and there, but the crew was working on them.

"This isn't a dinner boat on the Seine," Kolnikov growled. Leaks were the bane of a submariner's life. They could develop at any moment.

"We'll not go lower than this unless we have to," Kolnikov said aloud, to no one in particular. "We must stay as silent as possible, or believe me, the Americans will find us." Kolnikov had not streamed the towed array. He planned to drift with no way on, so the array would end up hanging straight down on its half mile of cable, of little or no use.

At a nod from Kolnikov, Turchak let the submarine drift slowly to a stop. About two minutes passed before the inertial readout stopped going slower. The final speed was half a knot, which was probably the speed of the current at this depth.

The pumps that kept her trimmed seemed to work fine. She lay motionless in the sea, steady as a rock. Kolnikov put his head against the metal of the bulkhead to listen, then checked the computer screen that analyzed the ship for noise. Almost nothing. The ship was as silent as the sea itself.

"Just in case," Kolnikov said to Boldt, "while we are alone, have everyone make a head call, then secure the head until further notice. And let's flood tubes one and two and open the outer doors."

Turchak, at the helm, was also wearing a sound-powered telephone headset. He concentrated on monitoring the trim of the boat. He would ease the power lever forward for a few turns to establish steerageway — and plane effectiveness — if that became necessary. Eck and Boldt were busy with the computers, with Rothberg supervising, running from one to another, looking over shoulders, offering little explanations. Kolnikov stood mesmerized by the large, flat bulkhead-mounted sonar displays. Once again the impression that the displays were mere windows in the hull and he was actually looking at the ocean struck Kolnikov powerfully.

The screens were dark just now, for the sea at this depth was very quiet. Yet the darkness was not total — there were gleams of light here and there from the grunts and calls of sea creatures, fish and whales and dolphins, very faint and far away. The muted symphony also gave them tantalizing hints of hull and machinery noises, no doubt from distant ships and planes. And every now and then they were teased by low-frequency rumbling noises, perhaps from earthquakes or landslides, maybe deep-sea volcanoes.

He reluctantly left the sonar displays and was looking over Boldt's shoulder, studying the navigation data displayed there, when out of the corner of his eye he saw Eck press his earpieces tightly against his head. After a bit Eck held up a hand and said in almost a whisper, "I think I hear screw noises. Low-frequency beats." He removed the sonar audio from the control room loudspeaker so it wouldn't be returned to the sea.

Kolnikov donned the headset and listened. Meanwhile Eck was typing on his keyboard, initiating a track, labeling it. A symbol appeared on the horizontal tactical display and on one of the bulkhead screens. The men stared mesmerized at the symbol, which almost obscured a faint gleam of light hiding amid the darkness.

Turchak, wearing the sound-powered headset, told Kolnikov, "Tubes one and two flooded, outer doors open."

Kolnikov climbed onto the captain's stool and lit a cigarette. He was staring at the dim gleam that Eck said was the noise of a submarine when a tiny light flashed on the surface in the other direction some distance away, perhaps six or seven miles.

Five seconds passed before Eck said softly, "Sonobuoy. We have a P-3 overhead."

There were eight sonobuoys in the water when Eck gestured toward the submarine symbol on the panel display. "That isn't where it is. There's a thermal layer distorting the sound."

"Can you identify it?"

"We need a little more noise. He's closing, that's certain."

Three minutes later Eck said, "Los Angeles-<\ass, according to the computer."

"Which one?"

"Still working on that."

A half minute later he said, "La Jolla. Her signature is in the computer."

"Jesus fucking Christ," Leon Rothberg said bitterly and sagged into an empty chair.

Toad Tarkington was at his desk in the Crystal City SuperAegis liaison office when the intercom buzzed. The unexpected sound made Toad jump. Without telephones ringing, the office was abnormally quiet, pleasantly so. The security officer in the lobby was calling. "Sir, there is a Mr. Carmellini down here asking for Admiral Grafton."

"Carmellini?" Toad drew a blank for several seconds, then he remembered. Oh yeah, the CIA guy from Cuba. "I'll be down to escort him," Toad told the guard. Carmellini. He was in Hong Kong with Admiral Grafton last year, Toad remembered, when the revolutionaries kidnapped Callie.

The building elevators were still out of service, so Toad took the stairs to the lobby. He recognized Carmellini and shook hands. "The admiral isn't here, but come on up," Toad said and led the way to the stairs. "Anything you'd tell him he'd refer to me, so you might as well eliminate the middleman."

"What floor are you fellows on?" Carmellini asked.

"Eight. I'm in training for the Boston marathon."

When they reached the office, Toad sank gratefully into the chair behind his desk and tried not to look bedraggled. He eyed Carmellini without enthusiasm. Several inches over six feet, with wide shoulders, impossibly narrow hips, and hard, callused hands, the guy looked to be in terrific physical shape. The eight-story climb hadn't made him draw a deep breath. His forehead wasn't even damp.

"Bet you don't get a lot of visitors up here with the elevator out," Carmellini said conversationally.

"You got that right. When most people drop by, I tell them to come back when the Redskins win their next home game. I hadn't been up the stairs in over an hour, so I made an exception in your case. To what miracle do we owe the honor of your presence?"

"I was in London. After the FAA grounded all the planes arriving on the East Coast, I was stuck. Flew to Montreal and rented a car, just got in."

"You came straight here?"

"Yeah. I have a story to tell the admiral, but since you're sorta his alter ego, I'll tell it to you, just in case my former employer figures I'm here and sends someone looking for me before he gets back."

"I'll let that alter ego crap go by if you'll tell me why the agency might be looking for you," Toad said.

"Let's put it like this. The folks at Langley don't know where I am and may or may not be in a sweat about that. I resigned Monday before I went to England, effective in a couple weeks, then I decided to quit early."

"I hope the bank doesn't repossess your car," Toad said, eyeing Carmellini skeptically. It was almost as if the man were too glib, too smooth. One half expected him to pull three walnut shells and a pea from a jacket pocket and ask if you wanted to make a friendly wager.

Tommy Carmellini casually glanced around to see who might be in earshot — there was no one — then began. "Antoine Jouany. The company sent me to England to raid his computer." He went on, telling Toad about it.

Captain Rebecca Allison's F-16 was pushing against Mach one when she dropped out of the overcast over the southern beach of Long

Island. Try as she might, she couldn't get her radar to pick the Tomahawk out of ground return. She shallowed her dive and began scanning ahead and below for a glimpse of the small missile.

The thick haze under the clouds limited visibility to about three miles. Finding out a tiny cruise missile was going to be extremely difficult, she thought, and wondered if she had already missed it and flown by.

"Should be dead ahead," the Sentry controller told her, "about two miles. The speed readout is five oh six." Oh, man, 506 knots. Right against the Earth.

She kept the fighter descending, glanced at her indicated airspeed__550—and quickly scanned her instruments. All well.

She concentrated on the view through the HUD.

"One mile, at your twelve."

She was down to three hundred feet on the radar altimeter now, and into the city suburbs. Streets and houses and schools flashed under the speeding fighter, giving her a sensation of speed that was sublime.

There!

Oh, so small! She was overrunning, so she picked up the nose and chopped the throttle, then dropped a wing to keep the missile in view. It was a hundred feet above the ground, maybe less, just clearing the highest obstacles as it roared along. Allison matched the missile's speed, then dropped down behind it into trail. It was so tiny, almost impossible to keep in sight.

She had never in her life flown so low and fast. The buildings were right there, she was barely clearing the roofs. Somehow she found the courage to glance at the weapons panel to verify the switch settings, then she squeezed the trigger on the stick to the first detent.

The Sidewinder gave her a tone, then dropped it as a cell phone tower whizzed past, only yards from the wingtip.

That rattled her for a second. She was right against the city, suicidally low.

Come on, Allison!

As she was trying again to get a heat lock-on, she realized that the missile was crossing over an airfield. It must be JFK! Without thinking she pulled up slightly, and in the blink of an eye was at five hundred feet. Below she saw the huge mat, runways, the control tower, the terminal with airplanes at every gate — she forced the stick forward and went rocketing by the control tower so low that she felt she could almost reach out and touch the thing.

The tower must have been a discrete navigation fix for the missile, she realized. Gritting her teeth, trying to ignore the blur under her, she added throttle, began closing the distance to the hard-to-see missile.

Stanley Schottenheimer found a missile, although unknown to him, it was not the one the Sentry controller had pointed out. Not that it mattered. There were three missiles, and if any of them could be shot down before they hit their targets, that would be a small victory.

The borough of Queens spinning beneath him unnerved Schottenheimer who, like Allison, had never flown so low and fast. No one did training like this — the risk was too great.

Schottenheimer gritted his teeth, forced himself to stay down on the rooftops and add throttle to close on the racing missile. With all the heat sources immediately below him, his Sidewinders also failed to lock on to the Tomahawk's exhaust, so he planned on using his gun.

Now the missile shot over LaGuardia Airport, the fighter only two hundred yards behind.

Closing, closing, he squeezed off an experimental burst from the twenty-millimeter Gatling gun mounted in the port wing root. And missed the tiny target.

The land fell behind as the missile shot out over the sound, then laid into a port turn. The radar altimeter went off, but the damn thing always did over smooth water.

He could see the missile plainly for the first time, unobstructed by haze and a cluttered background. And he wouldn't be hammering Queens with the twenty-millimeter. This was his chance!

He steepened his turn, tried to pull lead on the missile as the radar altimeter deedled insanely. He could see the shore coming up ahead, knew he had only seconds.

Over smooth water on a dark day it is always difficult to accurately judge one's height; in any event, Schottenheimer had too many things shrieking for his attention. Inevitably he slid inside the mis-

sile's turning radius. As he tried to nudge the pipper in the HUD onto the missile, the left wingtip of the F-16 kissed the dark water. Still traveling at a bit over five hundred knots, the wing of the fighter tore off as it cartwheeled along the surface of Long Island Sound. As the fighter decelerated, spinning like a Frisbee, the eyeballs-out G ruptured hundreds of tiny blood vessels in Stanley Schottenheimer's brain, killing him instantly. He was dead when the fighter disintegrated. The engine made a mighty splash. The cloud of jet fuel and pieces that had been the rest of the plane grew and grew as the components of the cloud decelerated at different rates. The pieces of metal and sinew, wire and fiber and bone struck the water gently, almost like snowflakes, amid the rain of fuel droplets.

Tearing across the rooftops of Brooklyn at almost full throttle, Rebecca Allison succeeded in placing the HUD pipper on the tiny exhaust of the Tomahawk missile ahead of her and hesitated for a heartbeat. Some of her twenty-millimeter cannon shells were going to hit buildings and cars, doing God knows what in the way of damage. And if she succeeded in damaging the missile, it was either going to crash into a building or detonate immediately.

She certainly didn't have time to think about it as she streaked across the city, trying to keep the pipper on the missile and not smear herself across half of Long Island. They sent her to shoot down missiles — that was the mission when she and Schottenheimer manned the alert fighters. "Intercept and shoot down."

Someone else had made the decision. Someone who was paid a lot more than an 0–3 fighter jock.

She squeezed the trigger, held it down. A stream of twenty-millimeter shells vomited from the six-barreled cannon. For some reason, the stream was a few inches low, going under the Tomahawk. Instinctively Rebecca Allison moved the stick back a tiny fraction of an inch. . and the river of cannon shells slammed into the missile.

The missile exploded in a blinding flash. A trillion watts of electromagnetic energy raced away at the speed of light.

Even though the electronics in Allison's fighter were hardened against the electromagnetic pulse from nuclear blasts, the close proximity of this one burned through the protection and fried every circuit in the airplane. Then the airplane overran the cloud of decelerating bits and pieces of the missile and swallowed a hatful. The pieces went through the various stages of the spinning compressor in a thousandth of a second. Blades ripped loose and were flung through the skin of the airplane, fuel lines were severed, the unbalanced engine began tearing itself apart. All this happened in the third of a second after the missile exploded.

Before Rebecca Allison even realized what was happening, her fighter exploded. The fireball of fuel and pieces splashed into the buildings of Brooklyn with devastating effect. In a dozen seconds twenty city blocks were on fire. A giant column of black smoke formed as the raging fire sucked in air from every direction. Soon the fire became so intense that the asphalt in the streets caught fire. The inferno blazed without sirens or alarms of any kind, because every electrical circuit within three miles of the blast was destroyed.

The other two Tomahawks, the one that Schottenheimer had died trying to shoot down and the one that had not been intercepted, crossed the East River and exploded over Manhattan. One detonated over the New York Stock Exchange, the other over Rockefeller Center. The missile that Allison destroyed had been targeted to detonate over the Empire State Building. The fact that it didn't get there made almost no difference to the damage caused by the attack: Almost every electrical switch, circuit, and microchip on the island of Manhattan was destroyed by the two stupendous pulses of electromagnetic radiation.

Kolnikov fully appreciated how the presence of the Los Angeles-c\ass attack submarine La Jolla complicated the search problem for the P-3 overhead. No doubt before long other P-3s would be arriving. If La Jolla weren't there, the P-3s would go active, echo ranging or pinging with their sonobuoys. They had little chance of finding America if they listened passively, he suspected.

And that was a wonder. As quiet as La Jolla was — and it was quieter underway than a Soviet boomer tied to a pier — the Revelation sonar could still detect it. There it was on the bulkhead-mounted vertical displays—he could see it! It was a ghostly form in the gloom, illuminated by the sound of its hull moving through the water.

And La Jolla couldn't see him. His boat was too quiet for her sonar to detect passively. America was the ultimate stealth ship, so silent it was invisible to anyone without Revelation's ability to make sense of the massive data flows from the hydrophones.

Well, he reflected, America was invisible until someone went active, began radiating noise into the water and listening for echoes. She was deep, perhaps so deep that the radiating beams would be deflected before or after they echoed off her hull. Then again. .

If he sank La Jolla, removed her from the problem, the P-3s would be free to ping. Still, finding a deep-running boat this quiet under the thermal layers would be very difficult. With luck, they might pull it off. And Kolnikov and Turchak and their colleagues would be dead. Of course, with La Jolla out of the problem, Kolnikov would be free to maneuver America to the extent of her capabilities and use the built-in tricks, such as the noisemakers and decoys.

La Jolla was much shallower than America, perhaps eight hundred feet deep. She was making four knots, hadn't altered course. She was, Kolnikov concluded, running up a bearing line that she had established when she heard the Tomahawk launches. She undoubtedly had her towed array deployed, maximizing her listening capability, although of course he couldn't see the array on the sonar displays. Perhaps if he were closer…

Or went active.

What if…?

"Let's find out how quiet this boat really is," he said to Georgi Turchak. "Ahead one-third, begin an ascent, then turn in behind La Jolla, staying at least a hundred feet below her wake so we won't get tangled in her array."

"Are you crazy?" Turchak hissed.

"Sooner or later this guy may go active. He won't see us unless he does. If he does, we want to be below and slightly behind him. And we want to stay there. Now let's do it."

"Why don't you just torpedo him now?" Heydrich asked conversationally, "before he knows we are here. Escaping this P-3 afterward should not be difficult."

"I signed on for the money, not to kill sailors."

Turchak looked at him askance. "Vladimir Ivanovich…"

"I have to sleep nights, goddamn it! Ahead one-third."

Without another word Turchak pushed the power lever to the one-third-ahead setting and began the process of ascending as the boat accelerated. La Jolla was at one o'clock, crossing from left to right at a forty-five-degree angle, so he should be able to rendezvous without exceeding La Jolla's speed. Apparently she had not detected the beat of America's prop. If he had to speed up to catch her, the frequency would change, and detection might follow.

Let's be realistic, Turchak thought. America was going to be right behind her! He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. In all the years he had known Kolnikov he hadn't realized that the man was willing to bet everything in one wild, suicidal gamble.

Both men were watching the computer presentation in front of Turchak, and the forward-looking sonar display, so they didn't see Rothberg staring unblinkingly at their backs.

The explosion of the two Flashlight E-bomb warheads over Manhattan caused a complete, total, massive power failure in the heart of the most wired city on the planet. At the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchanges the indexes had already fallen the maximum amount allowed in one day and the authorities had suspended trading minutes before the trillion-watt electromagnetic pulses destroyed the computers and communications equipment that made trading possible. The television and radio broadcasting network nerve centers in Manhattan were destroyed, leaving people all over the globe wondering why the video and audio of their program had suddenly disappeared.

Telephone switching units, Internet servers, mobile telephone transmission towers, heat and air-conditioning units, office equipment — the devastation was as total as that which had struck Washington, but affected more people since New York was a larger, denser city and the hub of so many of the world's networks.

Of course the power grid in the affected area failed. The fused switches and massive short circuits dragged down the power grid throughout the northeastern United States. All of New England temporarily lost power, as well as upstate New York, New Jersey, and much of Pennsylvania.

Electric trains all over the area coasted to a stop. Within a three-mile radius of the blasts, the electric motors in subway trains and regular locomotives were destroyed.

Fortunately the FAA administrator had grounded non-emergency private and commercial flights east of the Mississippi River — visiting a financial disaster upon the airlines and their employees and stranding and outraging a large portion of the traveling public — so no airliners packed with people fell from the sky. The electrical systems and navigation gear in the airplanes parked at Newark and JFK were totaled by the E-warhead blasts. The electromagnetic pulses from the blasts were sufficiently weak by the time they hit the aircraft parked at LaGuardia that they only damaged them, destroyed some delicate avionics, and left better-grounded or — shielded boxes unharmed.

Two police helicopters, airborne when the warheads detonated, went into uncontrolled autorotations, killing all aboard when they screwed themselves into the ground; a medevac helicopter transporting a heart attack victim crashed on final approach to a hospital landing pad; and a private jet descending into the New York area with a cargo of human organs for transplant went nose-first into the Hudson River.

In the minutes following the blast, millions of Manhattan office workers waited impatiently for power to be restored. Of course, the recent attack on Washington was common knowledge, so many immediately assumed the worst. As people discovered that even battery-operated devices no longer worked, the realization that New York had been attacked by E-warheads from USS America spread like wildfire.

When emergency generators failed to restore any level of electrical service — the emergency generators' were themselves dead — the dimensions of the disaster began making themselves felt as people tried to exit their buildings. Elevators were stuck where they had been when the pulses arrived. Those in transit were hung up between floors. Emergency crews began working to extract the passengers, a task that would take as long as twenty-four hours in some cases. The vast bulk of the people trapped in the office towers of Manhattan began trekking down endless dark staircases.

On the street they found that the sound of the city had completely changed. Not a single gasoline or diesel engine was running. The sounds of the streets were voices, angry, unhappy, some panicked, as everyone stared at streets crammed with dead vehicles. The gridlock nightmare extended from the Battery to Central Park and beyond. Many vehicles contained people trapped by electronic door locks that wouldn't open. Policemen used gun butts to shatter the safety glass of vehicles with people trapped inside. Since there were not enough police, volunteers attacked windows with anything handy.

Times Square, the beating heart of the city of New York, that pop-art cathedral to tacky outdoor advertising, was dark and strangely quiet. Theater and movie marquees and the giant electronic billboards were blank, the human energy gone. Under an overcast sky, New Yorkers and pilgrims alike stood stunned amid the ominously dead buildings, unsure what to think or do.

Endless columns of frightened, claustrophobic people trudged through Stygian subway tunnels to escape stalled trains and climbed the stairs from dark stations. They formed unmoving crowds at the subway exits, trapping those still underground, as they stared dis-believingly at the traffic jam from hell that blocked the streets.

Reports trickled in via messengers to police stations and City Hall. An absolute electrical failure — even water had ceased to flow through many of the city's supply pipes since the pumps that moved it were disabled. Without water, the sewage system would stop carrying away waste products.

The authorities quickly realized that they faced a catastrophic disaster of the first order of magnitude. Approximately eight million people were trapped in the affected parts of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Manhattan, and New Jersey, unable to escape from a city that in one terrible moment had been rendered incapable of sustaining human life. Worse, getting outside help to the people who would need it would be extremely difficult; in fact, in many places, getting food and water in would be impossible for days to come — perhaps even weeks. Eight million people would need a lot of help. The usual disaster assistance organizations were going to be totally inadequate.

Gradually the authorities came to the realization that New York City, the beating heart of high-tech America, had become a death trap.

The warehouse in Newark that housed Hudson Security Services was far enough away from the epicenter of the two Tomahawk blasts over Manhattan that most of the computers inside escaped damage. Surge protectors and backup batteries worked as advertised, soaking up excess voltage. Two hard drives crashed, only two. Zelda grabbed the telephone, felt relief wash over her when she got a dial tone. Then the power failed. Although the Hudson employees feared the worst, seven minutes later the electricity came back on.

As the crew divided their attention between diagnostic efforts and the television monitors, Zip Vance told Zelda, "That was too damned close."

Indeed, had they known when the Tomahawks were coming, Vance could have had all the equipment shut down and grounded. And immediately inflamed the suspicions of everyone in the room. Coincidences like that don't just happen. So it worked out for the best, Zelda thought. She picked up the telephone, checked again for the dial tone. Still there, although the switches would soon be overwhelmed with people calling relatives.

It took several hours to verify that the main storage units were unaffected, with their files intact. Only when that was done did Zelda shoo out the employees. They charged for the elevator, anxious to go to their homes and ascertain the damage there.

When the last elevator load was out the front door, Zip brought the elevator back up and killed the power switch. "So far so good," he said and dropped into a chair.

"I thought we were going to have to use the rope," he added. "Always wondered if Freda could make it down." Freda was forty pounds overweight, the heaviest woman in the crew. "She always said she wouldn't try. Guess you would have had a roommate for the duration."

Zelda didn't want to talk about Freda or the rope.

"With incentives, Jouany owes us more than four hundred million," she said lightly. "Or did before those Tomahawk missiles hit. By tomorrow the number will be over five. Think of it! A half a billion dollars!"

"Money? Is that all you think about?"

"In America money is how you keep score. We're winning big, baby."

"There's more to life than money," her partner shot back, meeting her eyes.

"Zip, we've been through all this before. I just never thought of you that way."

Vance got out of his chair and headed for the elevator. He talked as he walked. "In two or three weeks this will be all over, one way or the other. We'll be in jail or filthy rich."

He threw the switch to power up the elevator, opened the door, and climbed in. "What are you going to do with the rest of your life, Zelda? Have you even thought about it?"

He didn't wait for an answer. The elevator hummed, and down he went.