The 40-Minute War

Chapter 1

The P-3B AEW was an antisubmarine aircraft modified for early warning and control. It had a mission endurance of fourteen hours, a maximum range of forty-two hundred nautical miles, a maximum cruising speed of three hundred forty-six knots, and its takeoff distance of fifty-five hundred feet was approximately the same as the 727 full of multinational fact-finders it was escorting.

There all resemblance ended: the P-3B AEW’s primary mission capabilities included, as well as early warning, passive detection, surveillance, C3I (command, control, communications), over-the-horizon targeting that could detect fighters and small surface vehicles in excess of one hundred fifty miles to the radar horizon, search and rescue, and miscellaneous other capabilities that allowed its use as an emergency command post.

For maximum efficiency, however, its crew had to consist of a pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer, radar operator, and two air controllers, four of whom would always be working while two rotated aft to the galley or the pair of bunks provided.

This meant that, like everything else about Operation Tiebreaker’s early stages, necessity took matters out of Beck’s hands and put them squarely in Ashmead’s.

Beck had wanted to divide Ashmead’s people evenly between the two aircraft, the way the serum was divided, but Ashmead insisted on “full operational capability for the P-3B, Beck, or we might as well scrub this thing, here and now.”

“Here and now” had been three hours before takeoff, when Beck was harried by the intermittent arrival of forty-three dignitaries and trying to go over Yael Saadia’s outrageously detailed intelligence dossiers on each and every one of the IMF honchos, NATO guns, International Red Cross and UNESCO reps, and officers of the Japanese Ministry of Trade.

Saadia had puffy circles under her eyes and every now and then would bolt for the bathroom. During the third such incident, after which she’d come back with a freshly scrubbed face and smelling like a baby, Beck had voiced his fears to Ashmead: “Do you think it’s the serum, Rafic? A bad reaction? Or too many Rems?” Vomiting was an early warning sign he’d been hoping not to see.

“It’s worse than that,” Rafic had muttered; “she’s pregnant and she wants to have it. Best damned station chief I ever had, and Thoreau goes and knocks her up. Don’t say anything about it.”

The faucets, which couldn’t quite mask the sound of retching from the bathroom, were turned off; the toilet flushed.

Ashmead tapped the avalanche of paper on Beck’s desk: “Come on, we’ve got to shred this stuff. Cave. It’s my way or not at all: Thoreau’s the P-3B pilot, I’m the co-pilot, Slick’s the radar operator, Yael and Jesse are the flight controllers. That leaves room enough, even with what electronics we’ve pulled, for only six passengers—you, your girl Patrick, Morse, and three dips of your choice. Pick ’em out.”

“Rafic, I need to be on the 727; so does Patrick; I’d like Slick there too… and Saadia. If we miss this opportunity to tell these people what we want them to think, we may not get another. And Chris’s credibility isn’t going to be helped if she’s not on—”

“One more time, Marc, and then I’ll just assume you’re not listening: as far as I’m concerned, the 727 is a decoy. We can’t protect it worth a damn; it’s expendable. You’re not. My people aren’t; you tell me that Patrick girl’s not. If we had Zaki, maybe I could have done without a full complement on the flight deck, but we don’t. I need everybody. We’ve got to assume that both aircraft may not make it to Houston. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t put that case of serum on the 727, but I’m—”

“Rafic.” Beck gave Ashmead his best interrogator’s stare. “If you know something you’re not telling me—if this is another case, like the consulate, where you’re holding back informa—”

Saadia came back with murmured apologies and flopped bonelessly down on Beck’s couch: “Don’t stop because of me, guys.” She wiped swollen lips with the back of her hand.

“Yael,” Beck said, resisting an impulse to touch her knee, lecture her about the madness of going into radiation red zones pregnant: “I’m trying to convince Rafic that I can handle one flight controller’s station—probably both—and that I’d like you and Jesse on the 727 with Chris Patrick… we need your propagandist talents more than we need another scope-watcher: you and Jesse, as ‘reporters,’ have an opportunity to assess and cut out the targets from this herd of—”

“Beck,” Ashmead’s rough-hewn face was expressionless, his gaze fixed on Yael Saadia, who was looking at him hopefully: “Go with Yael to the P-3B. If she checks you out, you’ve got your deployment of assets. But don’t ever do this to me again. It was an intelligence failure that got us into this—yours. You want to go for two, that’s fine, but not while I’m involved. If you think this is some fucking democracy I’m running here, you’re deluded. Explain things to him, Yael.”

Dismissed as if he were a member of Ashmead’s team and not its controller, Beck had left quickly with Yael Saadia, who, in the hall of Beck’s apartment building as they waited for the lift, touched his arm gently and said: “Rafic’s never wrong about this sort of thing, you know.”

“I know. And I know it’s risky, but I want you where you can do the most good. Ashmead’s letting his personal feelings intrude. I can’t do that. I’ve got a mission to run.”

Just then the lift chimed and its doors slid back to reveal Slick, his respirator dangling from one side of his motorcycle helmet: “A mission? No shit, Casper? Going to reactivate the ‘Directorate for Science and Technology’s’ time travel project, are we? Roll the tape back and let us take those rag-heads out on the Riyadh runway like we wanted, like we could have done?” Slick’s finger was on the elevator’s “Emergency Stop” button and it was buzzing angrily.

“Slick, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and if I did, this is no place to discuss it.” Beside Beck, Yael busied herself hunting for car keys in her purse. Task Force 159’s time travel project had been an operational bust, just a flyer taken by a bunch of physics buffs with enough clout to convince a fondly permissive group of government agencies that their combined IQs were reason enough to fund their interagency project.

Slick’s sarcasm twisted his pleasant grin as he continued: “You were in Task Force 159, seconded to CIA for that project, so tell me that’s what this is really about, Casper. Otherwise,” Slick let the button go and stepped over the lift’s threshold, blocking their entry so that the doors closed, “you and I have to get one thing straight—”

“I can’t tell you that—it’s not true. 159 was bullshit; by God I wish it wasn’t, Slick, and I wish you’d stop this—”

“Bullshit. Too bad. But that figures. You can bullshit the rest of ’em all you want, but it’s clear to me that this whole half-assed operation of yours is just to ease your conscience, ’cause you can’t live with the way you fucked up. Which is about one hundred per cent. And now, since we understand each other, you go ahead and piss into the wind all you want. I haven’t got anything better to do, thanks to you, than watch from the upwind side.” Punching the “Door Open” button, Slick stepped out of their path.

When the lift had closed and Beck was alone with Saadia, she tossed her long auburn mane back from her breasts and said: “Don’t mind Slick; he’s the best there is when there’s something going down or if you’re under his command. It’s just that he’s not used to orders from anyone but Rafic.”

“You mean from someone he doesn’t respect,” Beck corrected, trying to shed his irritation but not quite succeeding.

“That’s right,” said Yael Saadia with equanimity. “Rafic keeps telling us how talented you are, but we haven’t seen any sign of it. We’ve been together a long time. You can’t expect us to just welcome you as a co-commander with open arms, not in this kind of life-and-death venue. Nobody’s got any reason to trust you but we’re stuck with you. Rafic’s told us to be polite….”

’That’s polite?” He flicked his chin in the direction of the floors above as the lift descended.

“For Slick, yes. The rest, you’ll have to earn.” She smiled to make her words less stinging. “If you really can handle the P-3B’s controller’s station, that’ll be a start. I’d much prefer to be rating those dips on the 727; I’ve done so much work on them it would be a shame to leave it to your Miss Patrick….”

Saadia’s smile was still there, but it was a Sabra’s smile, full of desert wiles and killer instinct, that made Beck wish 159 had had more than “mildly encouraging” results, so that he could turn back the clock and make everything all right the way he’d once been able to, so that he wouldn’t be in the unenviable position of placing his hopes and perhaps his survival in the hands of Rafic’s operations team, who held him personally responsible for the Forty-Minute War and who harbored a despite for State Department people that he’d never be able to overcome.

But then, he didn’t want to marry them; he wanted to deploy, enable, and activate them.

Which, in spite of Slick’s open hostility and Ashmead’s doubts and because of Beck’s affinity for electronic countermeasures and familiarity with early warning aircraft, he was able to do: when the P-3B and the 727 finally took off from Jerusalem, he and Ashmead had reached a compromise which allowed Beck to put Jesse and Yael Saadia aboard the 727, although Chris Patrick, as well as Slick, Morse, and five dignitaries of Beck’s choice, were on board the P-3B.

Nine hours into the flight and two hours after their refueling stop in Morocco, during which no one was allowed off their planes, he was grateful for the distraction Patrick and the diplomats provided: he kept thinking about Muffy and the kids. He hadn’t realized what so long a confinement away from the workload he’d been using as a buffer was going to mean to his state of mind: a solitary meditation on radiation effects and the degree to which the American damage estimates had been laundered was the last thing he needed.

So he watched Patrick try to work the passengers and pretend she disliked him and Slick make frequent trips aft to whisper familiarly in her ear or bring her coffee or a drink like a solicitous flight attendant until the NATO Southern Commander, Dugard, and a Magyar named Nacht from the IMF trapped him into a post-mortem of the war.

He found it distressing that the Magyar, a ComBloc millionaire from Pest, knew more about Soviet damage estimates than he did, but not as distressing as phantoms of Muffy trying to shield Jennifer and Seth with her own body from the firestorm so that all that was left of them was a many-legged black silhouette etched into the concrete of the walkway leading to his club.

He listened with half an ear to Nacht’s mid-European-accented English recitation of Soviet sites destroyed—Tyuratum, home of the Soviet shuttle program; the Sheremetyevo Airport; Moscow’s antiballistic missile sites and the Pushkino phased-array battle management radars at Pechora and Abalakova, as well as the Saryshagan test facility. “In fact,” said the Magyar with a degree of satisfaction Beck didn’t understand, “the entire Maskirova program—the word means concealing, or masking—is no more.”

It was Dugard, the NATO general, who said what Beck was thinking: “Why does this please you so, Nacht? Buda and Pest aren’t going to profit from any of this—what use is being the Monte Carlo of ComBloc if the money’s no good, those fancy pastry shops are baking with tainted flour, and all your capitalistic ventures depend on live consumers? Who will want a Rubik’s cube now?”

Nacht pulled on his broad pug nose: “You think, because I am IMF, and because our economy is—was—successful, that I am either a usurer or a traitor. Not so. But with a projected kill-rate of forty per cent on incoming ballistic missiles, as the Politburo claimed, they should have come though this is in better shape, nyet? They did not. So maybe it was the much-vaunted EMP, confusing their electronics once the first air burst exploded, or maybe it was a purer failure of their equipment. But let me tell you,” the Magyar sat forward, “the Bear has been neutered—nuked and neutered. No more will we stand in fear of eighty thousand soldiers of occupation in our country. No more will we send so much to the Soviet with so little in return. And, soon enough, while your American friends—” his watery gaze scalded Beck and returned to Dugard, “—were trying desperately to play the game of catch-up, the Soviet would have tried out their new and so-called ‘anti-ballistic missile superiority.’”

“So you’re saying, Secretary Nacht,” Beck couldn’t believe his ears and thus was considering all the reasons why someone would want to feed him this kind of disinformation, “that you’re just as pleased we had this little war?”

Dugard scowled at Beck disapprovingly, but Nacht sat back with a deep sigh and crossed his legs, toying with a plastic glass that still had a half-inch of vodka in it: “No war, Assistant Secretary Beck, is ‘little.’” The Magyar’s tone was severe. “But ask among the Third Worlders and those of us from satellite nations and you will find no sympathy for either your country or the Soviet Union. Ask Iraq, and you will see that they wish to use this opportunity to sterilize every mullah in Iran with their own ‘small’ nuclear capability. Ask Poland, and you will see that they know the price of freedom is always high. A reign of terror has aptly ended by terror. You will soon find out that none of us who are in a position to be on this tour are overly anxious to help either the US or the USSR to regain their former glory. Too long the superpowers have held the rest of us in thrall. Surely you realize, Mister Beck, that it is a different world now, and a freer one.”

Beck couldn’t think of a thing to say that wasn’t diplomatically inappropriate, so he just finished his coffee and hoped that Dugard would pick up the ball. If aid from the nations these men represented was not forthcoming—and if Nacht had his way, it would not be—not only the States and the USSR, but the entire world was in more trouble than it knew. Beck had expected some hesitancy, but not the elevation of generations of resentment into policy. It was madness, and he could do no more than mark Nacht as an enemy, one to watch, and smile patiently. Such was the nature of “frank and constructive” diplomatic dialogue: you let them insult you and you learned something.

Dugard was picking up on the Iraq–Iran angle, placing it in the context of a larger Middle East imbroglio that oil-consuming nations worldwide could ill afford, when Beck looked up and saw Slick, his hand on Chris Patrick’s shoulder, surreptitiously trying to catch Beck’s eye.

When Beck acknowledged him, Slick’s gaze flicked to Nacht and he made a quick thumbs-down that the Saudi whom Chris was mesmerizing did not see: Nacht had just been targeted, and Beck didn’t make a counter-motion which would have voided Slick’s suggestion: unless Nacht’s viewpoint changed drastically, he’d be better off dead than being allowed to spread his poison among the entire group.

“Excuse me,” Beck said, coffee finished, and headed forward; “duty calls,” stopping only long enough to ask Morse—who’d been segregated from the other passengers by being given orders to play sick and stay in one of the two bunks—if he needed anything.

Morse’s face, when the geneticist rolled over in response to Beck’s question, was swollen and streaked with tears: “Nothing you can provide, evidently, Mister Beck,” he said, and turned away again.

Since that was in general true, and Morse’s remorse was due as much to having indirectly caused the truck-bombing of the consulate as to the treatment Ashmead’s team was giving a “proven security risk,” Beck didn’t try to comfort Morse: now, after the fact, Morse had too many doubts about the side effects of the serum they’d all taken to earn him any sympathy. Ashmead had told Morse that if any of them died of these side effects, Morse would be next. Beck had been there, and hadn’t argued: if this whole operation were a wild goose chase, he’d probably draw straws with the others for the privilege of blowing Morse away.

In the midst of so much death, in past, present, and future tenses, Beck was beginning to understand the team’s operational fondness for dispensing it: chemically, one was forced to last resorts; emotionally, one became incapable of compassion; mercy was a rich man’s game, and these days they were all paupers of the soul.

The galley and expanded “lounge” were in the plane’s aft section, directly under the tail-mounted roto-dome; forward of the dome, the P-3B was still all business, and off limits to her passengers. Racks of electronics alternated with CRT terminals and scopes in narrow niches where chairs were bolted to sliding tracks.

Beck sat down at his traffic controller’s station and switched a toggle that took the system off automatic “scan and inform,” then put on a one-ear headset and spoke into his throat-pad mike: “Rafic, I’m back. Couldn’t take much more of that.”

He heard the static/clip of voice-actuation in his right ear, then Ashmead said: “Learn anything, cowboy?”

“That Nacht’s a risk to the project. Slick’s—”

Slick’s voice cut in: “—got it well in hand. Either of you two geniuses see that blip at two-ten o’clock on the horizon screen?”

Beck twisted in his seat and saw that Slick had followed him forward and was sitting at his radar station ten feet away, hunched over his control panel, his handsome head awash in red and green indicator spill. Beyond Beck’s view was the flight deck, where Thoreau and Ashmead were cloistered behind closed doors.

“Yeah,” Thoreau said, “now that you mention it, I can pull it in on my heads-up, but it’s not exactly heading straight for us.”

The P-3B had a “heads-up” display that allowed the pilot to superimpose on his windshield any of the electronics displays aft or, as a fighter pilot might want to do, the instrumentation in front of him. Unfortunately, none of that included active defenses: the P-3B had no missiles, cannon, or any other offensive weapons.

“Just for grins,” Thoreau continued with his accustomed insouciance, “I’m going to piggyback the 727 and make us both disappear—or try real hard, anyway.”

The P-3B had sufficient radar jamming and counter-jamming to make it invisible in all spectrums, including heat, to any but the most sophisticated aircraft, but whether that protection could be extended to cover the 727 was questionable: Thoreau would have to interpose his aircraft between the 727 and the approaching unidentified aircraft in such a way that the P-3B’s electronics masked not only its own radar-available signatures, but those of the differently shaped 727 also.

“Take notes, Beck,” Slick cracked, “we’re making aviation history and we need an unbiased observer.”

Again, Slick’s inference was that Beck wasn’t part of the team.

Again, Beck let it pass: he was too busy trying to plot the vector of the approaching aircraft precisely enough to help Thoreau—who was now on a secure channel to the 727, telling it exactly what he wanted it to do—block the unidentified aircraft’s view of the 727.

“This bogey of yours could be just another scheduled or nonscheduled flight, Slick,” Beck said with neutral precision: “Everybody’s having a rough time without radar handovers from ground controllers.” The vector on which the other aircraft was approaching was not one that was commonly used for commercial traffic; no international airports had been able to rejoin the grid of international control radars which had once handled transoceanic traffic: the various militaries had preempted all available replacement electronics in a futile attempt to make up for lost satellites.

“Yeah,” Slick gave back, “and your mother might have known your father.” Then: “Here’s the rest of their team—a trawler coming up over the horizon, three o’clock.”

Beck had been adopted by an American couple in the Foreign Service, just one of countless war babies from Eastern Europe. He was about to let Slick know that, as far as Beck was concerned, Ashmead’s deputy had just stepped over the line, when Ashmead cut in smoothly: “Come on, kids, this is no time for a family squabble. If I make this right, we’re about to be in a heap o’ trouble—that bogey’s way too fast for a commercial anything and the trawler’s there to pick up the pieces—the serum, if they’re lucky—and pick off the survivors. Listen up, all stations: we’ll hold this evasive course—” he gave new headings “—for five minutes. Over and out, El Al 10.” When the 727 was offline, Ashmead continued: “If after that time the bogey’s still closing, we’re going to veer off and get our tails out of here, maximum speed, maximum countermeasures.’’

Beck sat back and fiddled with his headset, casting a glance at Slick, who didn’t look up from his radars. Then he said: “I can’t let you do that, Rafic. Our responsibility is to bring that plane safely into Houston.”

“Our responsibility, Beck, is to bring this plane safely into Houston.”

“But the serum—”

“I told you,” Ashmead reminded him patiently, “that I would have preferred to have both cases on board this aircraft. I know I can get this one home; I’m not sure about El Al 10.”

El Al 10 was the flight designation for the 727.

“But Yael and Jesse…” Beck trailed off. Thoreau certainly knew that Ashmead was proposing to use the 727 as a decoy, sacrifice it and everyone on board in order to get the P-3B clear, and Thoreau wasn’t arguing.

But it was too late to call back the words: “If it weren’t for you, Casper,” Slick said into his com mike, “Yael and Jesse would be here with us and your Magyar buddy and that Saudi sweetheart Patrick’s mooning over would be with the rest of the sitting ducks.”

Beck thought he heard Thoreau swearing softly, as if his hand were over his bead mike, but that was all.

Beck wasn’t going to argue with Slick; he bent his head to his radars and worked desperately to come up with some piece of information that would invalidate Ashmead’s theory that the approaching plane was an enemy attack aircraft.

He couldn’t. Finally he sat back and said, “Look, let’s try the International Hailing Frequency—what could it hurt?”

“If they don’t see us any more,” Thoreau responded, “it could hurt a lot. Anyway, Ivan doesn’t let his pilots have International Hailing on the theory that it facilitates defection. I say we just stay on this heading and see if they fly by or indicate that they’ve scoped us. Three minutes, fifteen seconds more.”

“Soviets? ” Beck was trying to stay what seemed an ineluctable tide of paranoia coming over his headset in tight, short breaths. “Why assume that—”

“Beck,” Ashmead said wearily, “stay off this channel unless you’ve got relevant technical data. The rest of us are trying to save our butts up here.”

In the three minutes remaining, Beck thought of Yael Saadia, pregnant and exhausted, and the impeccable dossiers she’d prepared on every member of the fact-finding commission; and of Thoreau, who loved her; and of Jesse, the sharpshooter from the Galilee, most easygoing of the team.

At two minutes he thought he heard murmured off-mike a short argument, something about search-and-rescue capability.

Then he heard Slick light a cigarette, the scratch of the match loud in his phones, and say, “Damn, it’s gonna happen.”

Then the P-3B veered sharply, banked, and climbed, and there was nothing he could do but watch the blips on his scope until the 727 fell abruptly off it.

At least he wasn’t on the open com channel to hear the 727’s pilot—Beck’s pilot for the last three years—when he realized the P-3B was leaving him to fend for himself, or his attempts to contact the pilot of the attacking aircraft.

Watching it in silence wasn’t any easier to take, but the silence didn’t last long: from the flight deck came a heated argument between Thoreau and Ashmead as to whether it was worth it to go back and look for survivors.

“What’ll we do if we find any, Thoreau? Wave? Just get our butts out of here and count your blessings.”

It was another half hour before it was clear that the other aircraft was gone, on its way to Algeria or Libya, judging from its course, and Beck dared to leave his station long enough to go to the head and retch.

When he came back, Slick was standing by his console, headset collaring his throat: “Ready to go tell those five remaining dips how that 727 was shot down by a Soviet fighter escort, Casper? Or don’t you have the stomach for it?”

“You can’t prove it was a Soviet—”

“Look, Mister INR honcho, you’ve killed more friends of mine than the Forty-Minute War.” Slick’s eyes were very bright as he took off the headset. “I’m about out of patience with you altogether. If it weren’t that I figure Thoreau’s got the rightful first shot at you, I’d tell you just how and when you’re going to die. If you could have kept your MIT mouth shut, Yael and Jesse would be right here, with us, safe—not down there.” He pointed to the deck, below which was ocean. “Now, you and I have got to get something straight—smart doesn’t cut it with me; I was at Oxford, read what I needed to at Baliol, and all I learned was that grades don’t mean squat in the real world. And you’d better learn that when Rafic doesn’t tell you something, he’s telling you something.”

“You mean you people knew this was going to happen?”

“Nobody knows this kind of thing’s going to happen. We had some data, we interpolated, we took a calculated risk. What were we supposed to do, wait around to visually ID a Soviet Il-76 Mainstay AWAC fitted out to fuel-feed her Foxhound fighter escort, and get ourselves killed, maybe? Foxhounds have a look-down, shoot-down mode with radar-guided missiles. Now, you want to tell ’em, or shall I?”

“But why would the Soviets—”

Slick shook his head in disgust: “You just don’t listen, do you? You think they want us to haul this serum home? When we wouldn’t even share it with the Israelis? When they would have bought it from Dow for as many rubles as he could carry? Jesus, man, you’re just plain functionally inept, you know that? Now, if you don’t have enough balls to step out there and explain what just happened, I may not wait for Thoreau to decide whether he wants you for himself.”

Beck was about to suggest to Slick that the two of them have it out then and there when the flight deck partition slid back and Thoreau came through it unsteadily.

Beck heard Slick mutter, “Shit,” as he went to Thoreau and put his arms around him the way military men tended to do.

Rather than stand there gawking, Beck went aft to tell the five remaining diplomats that they were all alone up there.

Chapter 2

In the wee hours of the morning, when Nacht from the IMF, Dugard from NATO, Najeeb Thabet from the newly reconstituted UN, and Zenko Tsutsumi from Japan’s Ministry of Trade and Industry, were all asleep and Prince Bandar bin Faisal’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of amusing conversation had run down so that the Saudi prince sat staring moodily out the wing window, Slick came aft to see how Chris was doing.

“Hey there, sweetness, scoot over,” Slick said, and she did. She knew by now that Slick’s interest was professional; he described himself as her “handler,” whatever that meant. But Slick’s slow smile and his brilliant blue eyes in that handsome face had become a welcome sight; he made her feel safe and appreciated, like part of the team.

As Faisal looked up at them moodily from the window and then stared back out again, his expres sion obscured by his kefiya, Slick asked, “Did I ever tell you the one about the Iranian pilots? No? Well, these two Iranian pilots are coming in for a landing and the pilot says to the co-pilot, ‘That runway seems terrible short. Give me one quarter flaps.’ The co-pilot does, but thirty seconds later the pilot asks for half flaps, then says, ‘Still, is very, very short. Give me three-quarter flaps.’ The co-pilot does and it still looks like they’ll overshoot, so the pilot yells: ‘Full flaps, praise be to Allah!’ at the top of his lungs and with the help of God, full flaps, and some serious braking, they make a safe landing, their nosewheel right on the edge of the runway. The pilot says to the co-pilot, ‘Allah be praised, but this is the shortest runway ever I have seen.’ Then the co-pilot looks to his left, then his right, and he says, ‘Yes, this is so. But it is also very, very wide.’”

The Saudi, in spite of himself, chuckled. So did Chris: after the look on Beck’s white face when he’d come out of the crew’s compartment to tell them about the loss of the 727 and everyone aboard, she needed something to chuckle about.

She’d never seen Beck look that shaken; she’d seriously wondered if he was going to come apart. She’d wanted to go to him, comfort him, but Slick had been right there, reminding her of her job, of her pose as the nasty, wisecracking reporter, radiating moral support and intensity from every pore of his being.

And with Slick’s help, she’d gotten through it, somehow; the ten hours airborne since the loss of the 727 had seemed endless, even though Slick had recruited her to help him feed the diplomats and used the opportunity for a little playful neck ing in the galley, which she wasn’t entirely sure was an operational necessity. But with Beck sequestered in the off-limits crew area, she’d been grateful for Slick’s strong arms and his casual courage: Slick, unlike Beck, was at ease and unworried, telling her so with his fighter’s body.

Slick, she was beginning to realize, was about a dozen people, and he expected her to be able to play many roles as well.

He nuzzled her hair and whispered to her until the Saudi put on the spidery headset that provided a narrow selection of recorded music, the only amenity aboard the P-3B that in any way resembled commercial air travel.

Then Slick said: “In about five minutes, go to the head and leave your full cassettes there; there are new ones in the right-hand drawer. Find out anything urgent?”

“Prince Faisal’s offered to marry me, which would make me… let’s see… his fourth, I believe.”

“I’ll marry you,” Slick grinned. “Soon as we land, which will be in about an hour, hour and a half.”

She looked at her watch, still on Jerusalem time—Zaki had neglected to show her how to reset it and she didn’t want to break it. “Thank God.” She groaned and stretched, knowing he was watching her breasts appreciatively, and not minding.

“Thank Ashmead,” Slick corrected.

“Not Beck?” She got out her cigarettes and lit two with her new lighter, whose indicator was blithely green, then handed one to Slick.

“No comment. Look, when we land, you’re to stick close to me, no matter where the dips are taken. We’re going to risk letting you be a little late for the Presidential briefing because of a lovers’ tryst. Okay?” His lips were next to her ear, his breath tickled her neck.

“How’s Beck doing?” she asked. “He didn’t look too—” Then she realized the significance of what Slick had said. “You mean we’re over the US?” She knifed forward in her seat and put her nose to the glass so that the Saudi glanced at her quizzically. “But there’re no lights! There should be lights. Some lights. Some—”

“Easy, easy.” Slick’s strong hand was on her shoulder; he pulled her back and put his palms to her cheeks, forcing her to look at him: “No hysterics, okay? I’ll tell you when to worry. You can trust me to do that. There’s a lot of low cloud cover, that’s all.”

“You mean…” She sat back, trembling, feeling the sudden wetness of nervous perspiration under her arms. “…it’s not all dark—not the whole East Coast?”

His gaze didn’t waver. “I don’t imagine it’s anything like it used to look at night, but it’s not all dark, no.”

“Can you tell me how much worse it is than the garbage I’ve been feeding these dips?”

“Shh,” he warned, yet his gaze was fond and his expression teasing. “Let’s not take a chance that anybody’s awake, okay? Let’s get some coffee.”

She went aft with him to the galley in the P-3B’s tail, where he smelled the coffee which had been on its hot plate for hours, spilled it out, and started making a fresh pot.

“I’ll do that,” she said. “It’s something I can handle.”

“Ah, not liberated, to boot. You know, you just might be my dream girl, if I can get you away from Beck.”

She tore a plastic pack of coffee with her teeth: “Not a chance.”

“Just a friendly warning—don’t get too attached to him. He’s made an awful lot of bad judgment calls. In this sort of context, he may not survive all of them.”

“What are you saying?” She turned and stared at Slick, who was watching her with his arms crossed.

“I’m telling you that he’s accruing a lot of guilt he’s not built to handle. He’ll either toughen up real fast or we’ll lose him—I’ve seen men commit suicide lots of times, lots of ways that don’t look like it, for less reason than he’s got. So you be careful. Don’t go off with him alone. Make sure I know where you are when you’re with him, all the time, not just some of the time, no matter how innocent it seems. Copy?”

She poured coffee grounds from the plastic pack into the coffee maker: “Affirmative, Sir,” she said teasingly, to cover her fear: it was Beck she’d been holding onto all this time, Beck’s calm, Beck’s competency. To hear Slick coldly suggest that Beck was crumbling meant to her that what was left of her world was crumbling. When Beck had announced that the 727 had gone down she’d been dry-eyed and proud of it; now she blinked back tears.

“Hey, lady,” Slick said, and turned her to him, “I’m just trying to keep you informed. If you don’t want to—”

“No, that’s fine.” She pulled back and shook him off. “You do that—keep me informed. About everything. As a matter of fact, I’d like to be informed as to why you people arranged to have us overfly the East Coast at night, and how bad it really—”

Slick sighed, “Newsies. Chris, we honestly don’t know how bad it is ourselves. There’s probably some guy from Langley sitting in the Houston White House with lots of hypothetical damage estimates prepared before the war, reading whatever he likes onto a tape, which then goes to the White House briefing office. Do you understand? Nobody knows squat yet about how bad it is. But you can be sure right now everybody down there who’s expecting us is trying like hell to find as many undamaged or slightly damaged areas as possible to show these five guys we’ve got left, even though they only want to see the worst we’ve got to show ’em.”

“But I don’t understand. If we want their money and their help—”

“We want them to tell their countries that we’re in pretty good shape, still the big, bad US of A. We’ll show you some medium-rough stuff, but there won’t be any red zones in the official tour—too dangerous, politically if not physically. If you want that, come with us while we go after Morse’s family. But if you want in, you can’t print it. It’s that simple. Me, I’d as soon see you pass. Radiation may not be forever, but it sure can take years off your life. You never applied for this kind of job; don’t let Beck make you think you owe it to your country. Okay?”

“I—No, it’s not okay. I need to see as much as I can. As for what I report, I’ve agreed to security restrictions in exchange for an exclusive when… when…”

She turned away and began pouring water into the coffee maker.

Slick finished for her: “When it’s appropriate? That’s a long wait.”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“Fun of you? I’d like somebody I know to live through this, that’s all. You say you don’t care if it’s you, I’ve got to respect that. It’s just that I’ve lost a lot of friends in the last week.”

“So has everybody else, Slick,” came a voice from behind them.

“Beck!” Though she wasn’t supposed to, she launched herself past Slick and into his arms. And he hugged her tightly.

“Come on, you two,” Slick whispered urgently, “you’re going to blow this whole thing,” as he sidled past them to block any passing diplomat’s view.

Reluctantly, Beck pushed her away. His eyes were bloodshot and his mouth a thin white line: “How are you?”

“Fine.” She straightened her shoulders. “Just fine. Did you know that Ashmead’s sister is married to a Saudi prince? That Faisal, out there, says that whatever help he wants from their ministers, all he—that doesn’t mean the rest of us, or the Administration, or anyone else—has to do is ask?”

Slick spoke before Beck could answer: “There’s a slew of Saudi princes, lady. And Ashmead would never do that.”

Beck ignored Slick: “We’ll be landing in forty-five minutes. There’s a Presidential briefing scheduled for 0600; we’ve a rest period before that. If you’re not too tired, Slick will bring you to—”

“It’s all taken care of, Beck. Get out of here, back up to the flight deck where you belong.” Slick’s voice was soft but terse.

Wordlessly, on the verge of tears again, Chris turned away and pulled the glass coffee pot from its housing, thrusting a styrofoam cup under the fresh stream that had been dripping into the pot.

“Check,” Beck said evenly. “Just as soon as I get my coffee.”

Chris handed the cup to him, oblivious of the scalding liquid that dripped onto her hand as she pulled the cup back and replaced it with the pot. “See you later, then,” she said hopefully, and realized as she did that the possibility of a Presidential briefing with herself as the only reporter in attendance was nothing compared to the possibility of even twenty minutes with him alone.

When he’d gone, she told Slick she had to fix her face and spent half the time remaining before she was to meet Beggs, the new President of the United States, face to face, crying her heart out in the cramped rest room of the P-3B.

Chapter 3

Ashmead’s aircraft was in a blind spot, as far as ground control and radar contact, and he didn’t want to think about why. Fort Bragg Control had told him not to worry about it—the P-3B would be picked up by Lackland Air Force Base and then handed over to Houston.

There was just this little, lonely space to get through, a solitary overflight of Alabama and Mississippi. After that, the P-3B would have an F-15 escort the rest of the way to Dugout, the Houston White House—as they’d had a Special Forces honor guard from Bragg until the squadron leader had peeled off with a cheerful, “Have a nice day, fellas: we burn fuel about as fast as our tankers can pump it, so this is as far as we go,” and headed back to base, leaving Ashmead with the feeling that he was flying this mission over the Sahara or Central Africa, listening to virgin static in his phones.

It was downright disconcerting to find dead air even on the prerecorded flight information channels when all the pre-war flight charts they had aboard told them that they were in busy air corridors dotted with Prohibited and Restricted sectors over which a dozen civilian and military controllers ought to be keeping caerful and possessive watch.

Thoreau kept punching in new frequencies from those suggested on his area sectional, trying to raise some tower chatter or even ATIS weather advisories; but otherwise, the ex-SEAL pilot was holding up better than Ashmead had any right to expect, considering that Yael had been carrying his child and it was Ashmead’s decision—not Beck’s—that had put her on the doomed 727 when he ought to have known better and that they had only forty-five minutes’ worth of fuel to spare; not much room for error in the projected landing at the secret facility west of Houston.

“Go get some coffee, Thoreau. Stretch your legs. Hit the head. And bring me a cup, black, when you come back,” Ashmead said easily.

“Great, thanks,” Thoreau said without enthusiasm, slipping off his headset and slipping out of his crash harness to stand, slumped so he wouldn’t bump his head, hand to the small of his back. Then he touched Ashmead’s arm. “Rafic… I… It’s nobody’s fault.”

“Hold that thought, Thoreau, and we’ll get through this just fine.”

“Yes, sir. Want Slick up here while I’m gone?”

“Beck, actually.” Ashmead craned his neck to watch his pilot.

Thoreau grimaced: “Just don’t let him touch anything while you’re debriefing him. One degree off heading and we’re looking at a dead-stick landing, which I could do without, considering they expect me to put this baby right in the decontamination washbay. On second thought…” Thoreau leaned forward, punched buttons, and stood up again, “leave it on autopilot while he’s up here. You know where the revert-to-manual is, if you need it.”

“Unfortunately, I’m not going to need it,” Ashmead said gently. It was time to talk about what they were both feeling: “Real eerie, up here, like having the East River Drive all to yourself.”

“Yes Sir, well… jet fuel’s got to be at a real premium. Back in five,” Thoreau promised with a desultory salute.

Alone, Ashmead leaned back, staring at the control-studded panels above the windshield, then closed his eyes and rubbed them with the palms of his hands. The worst part of this mission was that no one had any privacy in which to react to the various tragedies as they occurred—twenty-one hours of flight time, plus the Moroccan stopover the slow P-3B had needed because its mission-capability limit was only fourteen hours, was altogether too long sitting around on low-level alert status to do any of his team much good.

What was left of his team, he amended gloomily, and told himself that Thoreau’s and Slick’s morale was holding up better than his own: he kept trying to find a way to justify the sacrifice of Zaki, Yael, and Jesse to Beck’s cockamamie mission, and he couldn’t; the only way to do that was to win unequivocally, and all the data he was collecting told him that wasn’t possible. There was too much wrong and not enough chance that they could restore the status quo ante. It would take a miracle to do that, and he wasn’t a miracle worker.

In spite of twenty-two years of government service and a top-secret verbal report from an analyst named Watkins whom Ashmead knew to be close to infallible, the lack of seaboard lights and air traffic had shocked Ashmead to the core. He’d known it was bad, but he was an optimist in his way, as a field commander must be, and he was also human: damage estimates were just words and concepts; his mind kept minimizing their significance until he saw the dark swath in the Northeast Corridor with his own eyes.

When Beck came in and slipped into the pilot’s seat, Ashmead couldn’t help thinking that, if not for Beck, he and his team would be somewhere in the Persian Gulf, happily greasing terrorists where, if they took casualties, those casualties would have been acceptable, taken in a venue and for a reason all of them could easily understand.

Beck said: “I’ve been listening to Chris’s tapes. She got some good stuff from Dugard on NATO’s extant war-fighting capability; he and that Nacht from IMF got into an informative little wrangle about relative throw-weights in NATO and the Warsaw Pact and the possibility that NATO might yet launch if it feels their—or our—remaining interests are threatened.”

“Shit, Beck, what are you telling me? That those fools haven’t had enough boom-boom to suit them?”

“That there’s still violent polarity, and where there’s polarity, there’s room for diplomacy and, in this case, a chance of freezing the balance of power… national identities, integrities—borders, if you will.”

“Well, that makes me feel a whole lot better.”

“Good.” Beck grinned ingenuously. “That’s what I’m here for.”

“Life goes on, eh?”

“Let’s hope so, Rafic. Otherwise, this whole thing…”

Beck spread his hands and then curled them around the P-3B’s yoke so that Ashmead snapped to: the return-to-manual was on the yoke and Ashmead wasn’t entirely sure that Beck was taking this as well as he pretended: crashing a plane is the easiest thing in the world.

“…Tiebreaker, I mean,” Beck continued, “is useless. And I really don’t want to think that. It’s cost us so much already…”

“You know what Thoreau said to me just now?” Ashmead was watching Beck’s hands. “He said it’s nobody’s fault. And he’s right. It’s real natural to get solipsistic at a time like this—I’m fighting it myself. You think it’s all your fault. So does probably everybody else in positions similar to ours.”

“But if I’d countered the negatives on your report, pushed it through…” Beck’s knuckles were white and as he spoke he was staring out into the 0200 dark. “There wouldn’t have been any nuking of Home Plate, no—”

“And if I’d ignored the pull-back order,” Ashmead said wearily, “same thing. God knows I’ve done it before. But intelligence failures happen; they’re a consequence of a bureaucracy removed from the action and overly sensitized to non-operational matters: political repercussions, budgets, adverse publicity. We thought somebody else would take over, that they wanted a clean kill over the ocean with no one to blame rather than a counterterrorist operation at the Riyadh airport where, if the bomb was detonated during the action, a lot of moderate Arbas would have been very unhappy. We reacted in a politico-military context which doesn’t exist any more—all of us, you as well as me and my people. It’s easy to forget that now that we’re stuck with the consequences and the context is so radically altered.”

“Slick sure has.” Now Beck was looking at him, and Ashmead could see the results of his impromptu pep talk: Beck’s stare was bright and steady; the dull defensiveness of shock was gone; Beck was beginning to let his emotions cycle—a healthy sign.

Seeing that, Ashmead began to relax: he needed every watt of Beck’s mental power plant for what lay ahead: “Slick is… Slick. When we need him, you’re going to appreciate him. Until then, don’t take him too seriously. He always bitches when he has nothing much to do, gets depressed if he’s not in the middle of a high-risk operation or a fire fight. But under pressure, I’ve never seen anybody with as much—”

Just then Ashmead heard somebody come forward and twisted in his seat, at first seeing only Thoreau, who hadn’t brought his coffee.

“Thoreau, where’s my damned coffee? Do I have to—”

Then he saw that Thoreau was not alone; in back of the tall pilot was Morse, the fat little geneticist.

Thoreau said, “I’m sorry, Rafic, I’m really sorry, but this guy’s got a homemade bomb he says will—”

Beck didn’t even turn around; with one hand he rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger and with the other casually punched up the intercom.

Morse was saying, “Just shut up, pilot, if that’s what you are.” The little man’s voice was high and shaky with pent-up hostility and fear. “We’re going to change course, land in Atlanta, and find my family—now. Or I’ll blow us all to—”

“We can’t do that,” Beck said smoothly, slowly turning in his seat. “Tell him, Ashmead.”

Ashmead had been noticing that Thoreau’s sidearm wasn’t in his cross-draw holster anymore and wondering if he could risk either a shot from his own pistol, which might or might not go through Thoreau and kill Morse, or a leap at Thoreau, which might pin Morse to the deck but which would probably also end in the pilot’s death or the abrupt depressurization of the cockpit from a shot gone wild or the detonation of the bomb—most likely all three. Even if the bomb didn’t go off, and if Ashmead emerged unharmed, he doubted his ability to wrestle what would then be a rapidly crashing aircraft back onto some acceptable heading.

So he said to Morse: “Beck’s telling you the truth. We were stretching it, anyway, from Morocco to Houston. I’ve only got forty-five minutes’ worth of reserve fuel at cruising speed, and that’s not enough to get us back to Atlanta. If you’d have pulled this little stunt an hour ago, you might have had a chance. As it is, you’re just giving us a choice of ways to die, and I’d rather be blown up than crash in a red zone.” The point, he knew, was to keep Morse talking, so he added, “What kind of a bomb did you whip up, anyway? And why? We’ve been taking care of you pretty good.”

“Taking care of me?” Morse’s voice approached soprano. “Never you mind what kind of bomb I’ve got, just take my word for it, unless you’re a chemist. And I don’t believe you about the fuel, any more than I think that the way you’ve been treating me is acceptable or that you really have any intention of helping me get to my family once you’ve delivered your precious cargo to that murdering President, who’s got no right to special treatment, not on my sweat, when somewhere my wife and—”

Slick grabbed Morse in a choke hold, his elbow crooked around Morse’s throat with a force that snapped his neck back, his other hand twisting a vial from the little geneticist’s left hand, then released the choke hold in time to grab Thoreau’s gun as it fell from Morse’s limp fingers.

The geneticist slumped to the floor.

“Sometimes,” said Slick, stepping over Morse, who lay motionless, his neck at an unlikely angle, “I wonder how you guys ever got along without me.” He handed Thoreau his pistol, butt first. “Good thing the safety was on.” Then: “Whoever turned on that intercom was thinking on his feet.”

“Beck,” Ashmead said. “Let’s see the bomb.”

“Beck? No shit?” Slick grinned wolfishly as he maneuvered around the prostrate geneticist and Thoreau in the narrow confines of the flight deck and carefully handed Ashmead the vial of yellow liquid.

“He’s dead,” came Thoreau’s uninflected judgment from where he crouched over the corpse.

“I had to save your ass, didn’t I?” Slick said defensively. “Otherwise I would have had to stand there while he told me if I didn’t let go and give him back his bomb he’d shoot you.”

“No problem,” Beck told them. “We got the formula from the Israelis; even if we hadn’t, we could always analyze—”

“Piss,” said Ashmead critically, holding the vial up and shining his penlight into it. Then carefully he began to open it.

“Don’t do that,” Thoreau objected. “What if it’s air-activated?”

“I told you,” Ashmead said, “it’s piss. And there’s a half-inch of air in this bottle. He didn’t have anything, not a damned thing. Just scare tactics.”

“He had my gun,” Thoreau said sheepishly.

Slick grabbed for the vial: “Let me see that.”

Ashmead gave it to him: “Go pour it in the toilet.”

“Sure thing, Rafic,” said Slick, eyes downcast.

“And, Slick? Nice job.”

“Thanks to Beck, yeah, not bad.” Slick clapped Beck on the shoulder as he scrambled aft, muttering to Thoreau to help him get Morse back into his bunk without alarming the dips.

“Too late for that. Beck, you’d better go tell them what happened.” Ashmead glanced at the intercom control. “When did you turn that off?”

“As soon as Slick grabbed him. Don’t worry, they’ll be glad he’s dead. As far as the bomb being nonexistent, let’s not tell anybody.”

“Fine. Thoreau, after you’ve helped Slick, get back up here. And bring my damned coffee this time.”

Chapter 4

Touchdown at Dugout, west of Houston, was so surreal that Beck had his hands full shepherding the five remaining diplomats through the decontamination tube and out of the washbay without incident. He couldn’t help wondering what he would have done if the 727 hadn’t gone down and he’d had the entire original complement to deal with.

As it was, with no one on hand to greet them at 0300 hours except security people intent on performing intensive searches that brought to light Chris Patrick’s.25 caliber Colt, Beck’s charges’ feathers were seriously ruffled.

The NATO general, Dugard, demanded to see one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to personally lodge a formal complaint when his uniform was confiscated and he was issued a stiff white contamination suit with wristband dosimeter just like everyone else. Bandar bin Faisal wouldn’t give up his kefiya, despite the fact that his hood didn’t fit well over it and thus his breathing equipment couldn’t pass its final checkout. Nacht from the IMF demanded a personal bodyguard and the UN rep, Najeeb Thabet, insisted that he’d come here to see the UN’s “putatively destroyed” site with his own eyes and he had no interest in Presidential breakfasts or anything else but an overflight of New York, posthaste.

And Zenko Tsutsumi, with consummate politeness, told Beck to fuck off: “All that we see here is a further result,” the pockmarked Japanese declared, “of your nation’s sakoku ishiko,” looking around him at the pure white arrival lounge where armed guards in respirators were stationed at intervals. “Until this changes, nothing will avail you.”

Sakoku ishiko translated as closed country consciousness and the Japanese minister was telling Beck to expect no help from the Japanese.

The Morse incident had shaken Beck’s five charges more than the shoot-down of the 727: none of them was certain of their security. In fact, Beck admitted glumly, they were scared half to death, and when diplomats are frightened they turn aggressive and hostile and that didn’t bode well for what was to follow.

Even Chris Patrick, usually the bright spot, was so angry and flustered over the discovery of her gun and her subsequent body search by a horse-faced matron that Beck was afraid he’d lost her. So he got her gun back and pulled her aside as they were being herded into a tunnel which came out at what looked like a twenty-first-century subway station.

“Sorry about that, Chris. If you’d have told me about it, we could have avoided—”

She snatched it from his hand, her face flushed: “You can’t expect to treat people this way, Secretary Beck, and get away with it. If you want any kind of neutral press, especially on that Morse story, you’d better do something about it, and fast.”

The dignitaries were close at hand and here, underground where no one needed to wear headgear, they could all hear her.

He backed away, wondering if she realized how much power she had at that juncture, if she was still playing his game or her own, and whether she was cueing the others or taking her cues from them. Then Slick went smoothly into gear, stepping into the ugly pause and possible breach by going up to her, putting an arm around her waist, and whispering in her ear.

Operation or not, Beck didn’t like it when Chris turned in to the embrace of Ashmead’s deputy.

Great. I asked for this. He honestly couldn’t tell at that moment if she was acting or not.

Forty minutes later, with the dignitaries safe in their quarters, an armed guard at each door, he found out.

“Twenty minutes, you two, okay?” said Slick easily when Beck opened his door. “Everybody else is already in the situation room but we’ll cover for you.”

Chris stood uncertainly beside Slick in the doorway, looking like an errant schoolgirl in her baggy white coveralls with her shoulder bag held by its strap in front of her so that it nearly dragged on the floor. She didn’t say a word or look up from her rubber-soled boots.

Beck said, “Thanks, Slick. We’ll be right down.”

“You’re bringing her? There’ll be somebody from DDS&T there, lots of other types—it’s going to get real classified.”

DDS&T was the Agency’s Directorate for Science and Technology.

“Perhaps not, then. We’ll see,” he said, and turned to Chris: “If you’ll come in now?” It sounded too formal, but he didn’t know if Slick was trying to warn him off her, or just playing a part for the sentries stationed in the hallway.

He found that his mouth was dry and although he almost never drank he was wondering what his room’s bar was stocked with. As Slick closed the door he turned and headed toward it, saying over his shoulder: “Chris, I’m terribly sorry about—”

And then she was in his arms, demanding that he hold her tight, and dry sobs were wracking her.

He ran his hands up and down her spine, feeling relief flood over him: he really needed her; she was possibly the only person who could turn this diplomatic disaster into a victory.

“It’s all right,” he told her over and over until she stopped shaking her head when he said it, then risked kissing her gently on the brow and tipping her chin up so that he could see her face.

“Dear Christ, I was so frightened when it came over the intercom…. Morse, the bomb, everything. And you were so calm. How can you be so calm?”

“I wasn’t. I’m not. I’m just good at pretending. You’re not really angry about the strip-search? The gun? If you want a gun, we’ll get you something with real stopping power—”

She was shaking her head again so that her hair flew about her face: “I don’t want anything, I just want you. I want some time alone. I want to forget all this. I haven’t fucked—screwed up, have I? Anything? Slick said it was okay, what I did back there, but… I’m so confused.” This last was a whisper, and he was already unzipping her contamination suit.

Even if he hadn’t felt the same way, though she didn’t realize it, there was nothing she could have asked for that he wouldn’t have given her just then.

Her firm breasts and her honest healthy sweat let him forget everything—the excessive security procedures in effect at Dugout (which, his belt-mounted Geiger counter told him, was cleaner than Jerusalem had been), the silent sentries in the hall, his diplomats and his family, whom he either would or would not be able to find during this trip.

And he really wanted to forget it all.

It was as if she were starving for him; she was frenzied and demanding so that he felt like some prisoner’s last meal and pulled her up by the hair: “Hey, hey, slow down. We’ve got plenty of time. It’s not the end of the world.”

It was the wrong thing to say: she shuddered, crouched over him, and suddenly collapsed on him, weeping. “Oh, Christ,” he heard her say. “I love you. Isn’t that ridiculous? The human spirit, against all logic, finding things to hold onto.” She was talking to his armpit, trying to burrow into it.

“It’s not ridiculous,” he managed, forcing her head up gently so that he could look into her bleary eyes. “But we’ve got a classified briefing in ten minutes and I’d like you to be there,” he said softly, kissing her temples, the bridge of her nose, her cheeks, and finally her lips. “So we’d better finish this and get going, or it’ll be all too obvious what we’ve been doing up here.”

Neatly having avoided declaring himself or voicing his own confusion, he let his hands do the rest of his talking for him. At least he had enough confidence in her now to bring her to the briefing; love had motivated more successful agents than money or patriotism.

As for the rest of it: “Chris,” he said as they toweled off from the world’s fastest shower and he looked at his watch, “I’m going to propose a side trip: I have to know how my family is… if they’re safe.”

He saw her stiffen, one leg in her suit. Then she pulled it up around her thighs: “Of course.”

“Now don’t go all defensive and distant on me. What about you—parents, siblings?”

“No, thanks. I don’t want to know. My mom’s dead and my dad is—was—a practicing drunkard who remarried. It would be hypocritical of me to put people in danger to find someone I went out of my way to avoid….”

“I understand.”

“What about Morse’s—”

“We don’t owe him anything at this point. Not after what he tried to pull. Come on, we’re late.”

On the way out, she said, “Can I go with you, to find them? Good human interest story.” Her tone was pure investigative reporter, there in the hall with two soldiers who looked like snowmen with M16s ahead of them and two more behind.

“We’ll see.”

Inside a red door marked RESTRICTED: NO ACCESS WITHOUT PERMIT above a slot into which Beck slipped his laminated access card, Ashmead’s team was waiting, seated on one side of a table by two empty chairs.

On the other side sat President Beggs himself.

The President, the only one in the room not dressed in white, was shaggy-haired and harried-looking, polishing eyeglasses which had left angry red indentations on either side of his nose. On his left was Watkins from Tel Aviv, who had an analyst’s noncommittal smile on his face as he stood up in the presence of a lady; on his right, a thirtyish Navy commander Beck didn’t know and, on the commander’s right, Sam Nye from the Agency’s Directorate for Science and Technology, looking no older than he had when he and Beck had been running Task Force 159 out of Langley’s basement together.

Nye left the table to greet them, a wide grin cracking his Teutonic face, arms outstretched to hug Beck: “Man, you and your cloak-and-dagger cliffhangers. If you ever scare me like that again, I’m going to trash you worse than I used to at practice.”

Disentangling himself from Nye’s long-armed hug, Beck said, “Nye, here, was a tight end at—”

“He still is,” Beggs boomed in his best campaign-trail voice. “Ours. Will you introduce the lady so that we can sit down, Mister Beck?”

Beck couldn’t quite tell if Beggs was annoyed that he’d brought her—Ashmead should have filled them in on her status by then. But Beggs would naturally disapprove of women in meetings of this nature. He ignored it, introduced her as his “best and at this moment only asset,” and went around the table until he came to the Navy man.

“I’m sorry, Commander, but I don’t believe we’ve ever met.”

“My old boss,” Thoreau said easily before the clear-eyed man with the military haircut could speak for himself, “Richard McGrath.”

“Mac will do,” said the Navy SEAL commander with a slight inclination of his head; “this is pretty informal. Miss Patrick, are you sure you want to stay for this meeting?”

Beck put a hand to the small of her back and prodded her toward the two empty chairs; Nye, on her other side, whispered, “Don’t let them intimidate you, Madame,” so low that no one at the table could hear.

She took her cue from Nye: “Why wouldn’t I, Commander McGrath?”

Beggs was watching surreptitiously while he reamed his pipe.

Watkins said with a disarming smile, “I’ll handle this, Mac. What the commander is trying to say is that if you sit in on this meeting, Miss Patrick, you’ll be giving up your First Amendment rights: you’ll have to sign a short secrecy oath which we’ve prepared.” He tapped a file folder in front of him. “You’ll hardly be the impartial reporter.”

“She’s not that now,” Beck said, remembering Watkins and Dow in Tel Aviv and wondering what the hell was going on here. “And she’s already signed everything but exit papers.”

“You can speak for yourself, can’t you, Miss Patrick?” Beggs said suddenly.

“Ah… yes, Sir, Mister President. And I realize that nothing I learn here can become public knowledge.”

“Fine,” Beggs sighed. “Give her the paper then, Watkins, and we’ll get on with this.”

Beck wished fervently that Chris was a real operative, that she could spot a factional dispute when she saw one, realize that it was significant that no one from the State Department was present while CIA had two supergrades—three, if you counted Ashmead, which Beck was hesitant to do—at the table.

When Watkins slid the form across the table to Chris, Beck saw the Agency crest on its letterhead and took a deep breath. Hardball they wanted, hardball they’d get: “There’s no need for this; she’s on State’s role already.”

Ashmead, for the first time, looked Beck’s way with a cautionary glance. And Beck, reading the urgency there, began to worry about the Administration’s reaction to the shoot-down: after all, they’d lost a whole 727 full of multinational fact-finders. If there was to be an attempt to apportion blame or minimize damage, even a discussion of possible lateral escalation, then muzzling Chris or removing her before the fact made good sense.

Watkins said smoothly, “Yes, well, that was before the airborne… incidents. We need more stringent control of—”

“Watkins, unless you want to talk about Tel Aviv, back off. Excuse me, Mister President, but this is unnecessary and divisive.” He turned to Chris: “Miss Patrick, until now your contribution has been voluntary, with limits decided between us—flexible, if you like. Once you’ve signed that document, you’ll be subject to Agency pre-publication review for the rest of your life. That’s no way to win a Pulitzer Prize.”

Slick crossed his legs and took out a pocket fingernail file, head down, a smile flickering at the corners of his mouth.

Chris scanned the document, looked up blandly, and smiled: “In that case, gentlemen, I’m afraid I’ll have to leave.”

Ashmead said quickly: “Good idea. Slick, take your lady friend to her room and come right back.”

Everyone sat in silence until they’d gone, then Nye got up and ostentatiously took Chris’s vacant seat next to Beck.

Watkins said, “Beck, you traitorous bastard. Now she can go tell it on the mountain—all about Morse and the way an Agency Covert Action team killed an American citizen—a goddam hero, if that serum’s all it’s cracked up to be.”

“She’s my asset, Watkins. I trust her.”

“All right, gentlemen,” Beggs said. “Whatever your personal feelings, it’s done now. Is it acceptable to you, Ashmead, that she be allowed to continue in whatever capacity without signing that document?”

Ashmead grunted: “It was fine with me before; I haven’t changed my mind. Can we get through this debrief, please? All my people are tired and cranky, Beck included.”

It was a gentle way to find out he’d been demoted, but Beck stiffened. Then Nye’s hand touched his thigh under the table and tapped insistently until Beck reached down and took the pack of cigarettes Nye was using to prod him with.

“Fine with me,” Beggs was saying impatiently. “Let’s have the rundown on these dips you’ve brought, then we’ll open the table to comments.”

As Ashmead began reciting Yael Saadia’s dos siers from memory, Beck got out his lighter, put the cigarettes next to it on the table, and lit a cigarette, near the front of the pack, which had a crimped filter. His hands were shaking.

Casually, as Ashmead talked, Beck watched the coal burn up past the old Morse-code SOS scribed in brown fine-point marker near its tip.

When Ashmead had finished, Beck added nothing to his briefing, uncertain as to what Nye’s warning could mean. There was a possibility that any negative assessment of the surviving fact-finding party’s motives or attitudes given in the tense mood of this room could lead to the loss of the five dignitaries left from “natural causes.” Until Beck was sure that wasn’t what Nye was trying to tell him, he would keep his own counsel.

He had a good excuse: he’d been a working flight controller for the entire trip, and his agent had been refused accreditation. He used it and Watkins grew livid.

That didn’t bother Beck; he’d cut his teeth on paper wars.

Beggs was impatient with the whole process: “Commander McGrath, will you give us the intinerary you’ve prepared and fill us in on your security preparations? I’ve got a breakfast meeting with those dips and I’d prefer not to be late.”

As McGrath got up, telescoping a pointer to its full length and stepping toward a screen where he punched up prepared computer maps filling half of one wall, on which “clear” zones comprising about forty percent of the nation and “survivable zones” comprising another forty were clearly marked, Beggs said: “Mister Beck, this baby’s your brainchild and you’ve said almost nothing during this entire meeting. Would you like to tell me why that is, or make some relevant comments?”

“Mister President, I’ve been the flight controller on the P-3B for the last twenty-odd hours. Before that, I had the work of ten people to do. I can’t remember when I last had a good night’s sleep. It seems to me that you’re pretty well informed as it is.”

Beggs leaned forward: “Watkins, here, can be a little prickly, but I want to thank you personally for bringing that serum home where it belongs.” Beggs patted his left arm and winced slightly. “A job well done. With Ashmead’s team members aboard that 727, no one can accuse us of a cover-up or suspect a sacrifice play. We’ve got the P-3B’s tape and picture verification that the 727 was shot down by Soviet aircraft and, believe me, those Russkies are going to pay through the nose for it—it wasn’t just Americans they murdered: this is a crime of international proportions. So, by and large, we’re very grateful. Grateful enough that when Ashmead proposed we take the second helicopter we aren’t going to need for diplomatic taxi service and use it to try to find your family, we agreed that, under the circumstances, we ought to make it a national priority.”

President Beggs sat back, beaming as if he’d just kissed three orphans and opened an old-folks’ home.

Beck’s gut had tensed when Beggs started talking about retaliation. He’d known that Beggs was dangerous. He stared at the President, wanting to demand reassurances that Beggs wasn’t about to touch off a second nuclear exchange—the new Commander in Chief was capable of it, in Beck’s estimation, and so was America: the second-strike capability would have been the first thing to be put back on line, no matter how much damage the country’s war-fighting hardware had taken.

But Beck’s training wouldn’t let him say any of that. He said, “Thank you, Sir; that’s very kind of you. But I have to stay with my diplomats. Maybe when they’re—”

“Don’t argue with me, Beck,” said the President. “I’m not Watkins. You and your teammates are going to go find your family while Miss Patrick and her multinational buddies get the guided tour of what sights are fit for them to see. Capiche?”

Beck did, and he didn’t like the sound of it one bit.

Just then Slick came back and squeezed his arm as he slid into his seat: “She’s a good guy, Beck. She knows just what to do.”

He sat bleary-eyed and dry-mouthed through McGrath’s detailed briefing, listening with one ear to mileage stats and radiation-hardness estimates for the Black Hawk helicopters, each of which could carry eleven people and had been modified to burn methane and brought up to helicopter-gunship specs.

When the meeting finally adjourned, he said casually to Nye, “I can’t face any more bureaucratese on an empty stomach and with all these honchos to coddle those dips, they don’t need me. Let’s get some breakfast, Sam, and talk over old times.”

“I’d like that, Marc,” said Nye heartily. “Just hold on a minute while I clear it with the Chief.”

Nye went not to Watkins but to Beggs himself and came away with a clap on the back: “All set. We’re excused from the breakfast.” Then, without moving his lips: “Just you and me, nobody else.”

So when Ashmead, with a quizzical smile, asked them if they wanted company, Beck begged off: “Not unless you’re up for a nice long talk about such scintillating subjects as spacetime manifolds, electron slip, and geochronometry. Us eggheads have got to relax every once in a while, and we like to do it with numbers. It’s been too long since I’ve been around somebody else who speaks math.”

Nye, when Beck turned back, had a sour look on his face that said Beck had chosen his words badly, but Beck didn’t understand why until they were alone in a lived-in looking suite that Nye had been occupying, he said, “for the past three weeks.”

“So long? You were here before the Forty-Minute War?”

Nye was stretched out on his leather couch, jacket off, tie off, shoes off. “Sure was. And this room is absolutely secure, though I can’t vouch for anyplace else in the building. Punch up a 6-5-7-3-9-K there by the door and watch what happens.”

Beck walked over to the normal-looking computer-lock panel and did as he was told. An LCD screen appeared beside the lock-plate and started checking the security system, which consisted of six components. When it had run through every wavelength its electro-optics could scan, it hummed and winked green, then went blank.

“Okay,” Beck sighed, “I’m impressed, Sam, but I wasn’t kidding—I’m dead tired.”

“I know. So tired you didn’t even notice when they slipped figures by you that normally you’d have questioned. It’s worse than they’re telling you, Marc—all that intelligence is E-5.”

E-5: Information the accuracy of which was improbable, from an unreliable source—in this case, the United States Government.

“I know that. But you didn’t bring me here to cry in our beer.”

“Do you know that those maps were bogus—that we’ve got maybe nineteen per cent clear zones and forty-seven per cent survivable—if you’re willing to accept the new definition of survivable, which knocks twenty years off the average lifespan of American citizens? Do you know that plenty of our citizens aren’t willing to accept it—that a significant portion of the population has decided the hell with the funny suits and masks and are just running around in their street clothes—not to mention the loonies cavorting jaybird naked except for their “Impeach Beggs” placards? Or that the good old Communist Party USA is having a field day, so much so that Beggs is scared to death that there won’t be an American government by the time his term’s complete—that he’ll be the guy who goes down in the history books as the man who killed democracy? Do you know that the red zones include not only Seattle, the Colorado Space Defense Command, NORAD, Groton and Newport News, but Langley—all our bases?”

“What are you worried about, Sam? Where to spend your next vacation? Try Kansas City or Denton.”

“I’m worried that Beggs is going to do something stupid. Lord knows he’s capable of it. I’m not the only one, either—the Agency’s trying to keep him in line, but everybody’s nervous about him—whatever else he is, he’s still our President.” Nye sighed glumly and shook his head. “Coffee. Come on, let’s make some.”

Beck almost wept for joy when he saw Nye’s espresso maker; as it was, he bent down and rested his cheek against the brass: “I should have known I could count on you,” he murmured with ersatz passion.

“Brioche, too. I can get anything I want—except what I need.”

“What’s that? Come on, Sam, don’t play me. Just tell me what the SOS was about.”

“You almost blew it back there—’talk math.’ Shit, didn’t you realize that that’s exactly what I want to do—that we’re about it… all that’s left of 159?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Beck took the can of espresso Sam handed him and began filling the strainer.

“Ask me that when you’ve analyzed the real damage reports and when we’ve estimated the probability of follow-up strikes or unrelated detonations in the Middle East and elsewhere. Since we’re never going to get a chance to build a Ballistic Missile Defense now, and when we could those cheap sons of bitches in Congress wouldn’t let us, 159’s about the only hope we’ve got left.”

“What are you saying, Sam? You’re not seriously considering reactivating 159? We couldn’t send a paper clip back through time when I left the project.”

“That’s right, we couldn’t. When you left the project. Marc, forgive me if I change the subject—we’ll have plenty of time to come back to it later, but there’s something you’ve got to know… and I might as well tell you before somebody you don’t know does: Muffy and the kids were with Jeanie at my house.”

Beck dropped the strainer full of espresso on the floor. Ignoring it, he put both hands on the counter of Nye’s little pullman kitchen and leaned there, vertigo threatening to topple him, his stomach lurching.

Nye put a steadying hand on Beck’s shoulder. “It’s fine if you want to fall apart here. I did.”

But he didn’t: “In Georgetown. You’re sure?”

“Wish I wasn’t. I’ve already checked fringe-area hospitals. They didn’t make it to any. But we can go there, if you want.”

“Is that what you want?”

“It is.”

“Just to collect the ashes?”

“No.” Sam Nye’s square jaw quivered. “I want to go down under Langley with you and see if any of that equipment from 159 is salvageable.”

“Are you crazy? We wouldn’t last a day. It’s red hot there; even McGrath’s maps, the ones you say are sanitized, showed that whole area as a red zone.”

“When you’ve seen what I’ve got to show you, or seen some of what I’ve seen, it won’t matter.”

“I don’t believe this. Sam, everybody dies.”

“For something or because of something, yes—I mean, that’s acceptable. Look, I didn’t mean to do it this way. If I can’t convince you, then…” Nye shrugged and Beck, watching his face closely, began to notice signs of strain: deep webbed lines around Nye’s eyes, pinned pupils, bloodless lips.

Concerned that his friend was going to commit suicide trying to resurrect a dead project for no better reason than a delusion that the project might in turn resurrect his incinerated family, Beck said, “Sure thing, Sam. You tell me and we’ll go over the numbers. The least I can do is brainstorm it with you.”

Then he got down on his hands and knees and began scooping up the spilled espresso grounds with his hands.

Sam Nye crouched down beside him, dustpan and whisk broom in hand: “You think I’m crazy, flipped. You won’t. I’ve got time… as much as anybody else, at any rate. Here.”

Beck took the whisk broom and the dustpan and realized that Nye was shaking worse than he was.

But he had to ask: “What I saw in the situation room, that’s not it, is it—what’s left of the Cabinet?”

Sam Nye laughed a trifle hysterically. “I wish it were. We’re the sane ones. Old Beggs doesn’t trust anybody much, not since his Vice President hijacked Air Force Two to Brazil and the next guy in line tried to kill Beggs. We’ve got plenty of people spread out at the different sites, but there’s too much trauma in the ranks. We need time and we haven’t got it. We’ve got martial law and riots over paper masks that you used to be able to buy by the boxful—I told you, the whole damned country’s falling apart.”

“But what about the clean zones? Even if the percentage is smaller, there’s bound to be some stable areas.”

“Sure, but the people in them are all armed to the teeth and protecting their year’s worth of food—remember the survivalist movement?”

“So what are we going to show the IMF and—”

“You heard McGrath—mostly overflights. Those damned diplomats of yours are bound and determined to see the worst, not the best, we’ve got. We’ll try to reason with them, but the UN in Syd ney has forwarded explicit instructions—they don’t want clean zones, they want America on her knees… you know how the UN loves us.” Nye smiled sourly. “At least Prick McGrath will be going with them himself—he’ll make the best of it. He’s a good man. You can trust him.”

“And Watkins?” Beck asked, testing the waters.

“The National Intelligence Officer? He’s—”

“What! ” Beck was horrified. “NIO in charge of what?”

“Soviet Union and Domestic Affairs—everybody’s had to double up.”

Beck just stood up and resumed the process of making espresso. If Sam was telling him the truth, then the United States was in the hands of one shell-shocked bureaucrat too many; Beggs and Watkins added up to a disaster Beck wasn’t capable of contemplating objectively.

But then Sam Nye, who’d given him a coded cigarette and thought that the answer to all their problems lay under tons of radioactive rubble in the old 159 lab at CIA headquarters in Langley, might be unwittingly giving Beck tweaked data: for all Beck knew, Nye could be certifiably non compos mentis. He’d been under a terrible strain.

But then, who hadn’t?

Chapter 5

Dick McGrath, the Navy SEAL commander, could have been Supreme Allied Commander–Europe by now if he’d wanted the job, Ashmead knew; the fact that he’d sidestepped promotion to stay in his operational berth accounted for his youthful appearance, his behind-the-back nickname of Prick, and Ashmead’s recognition of him as a kindred soul.

Mac was forty-odd and a straight arrow; even though Ashmead had leveraged Thoreau away from him five years before, McGrath qualified as the single person in the above-ground Houston White House—or below it for that matter—that Ashmead knew he could trust implicitly.

“What say we rescue Patrick and qualify her with a serious handgun? I can’t have one of my people running around with a pea-shooter, especially if I’m not going to be there to back her up,” Ashmead said to him once he’d mashed his Eggs Benedict sufficiently that it would seem as if he’d eaten some.

Mac put a linen napkin to his lips. “Sounds good to me. We’ve got some new ammo you might like—depleted uranium instead of lead shot as an upgrade—that gets the density back up where it ought to be. Bring your boys and we’ll see if any of them can hit the paper with it.”

Real casual, real nice. Ashmead collected Slick, Thoreau and Patrick, telling Chris to put her watch on transmit as soon as they saw daylight in case anything transpired he’d later like Beck to hear, and they all trailed along behind Mac into an elevator which took them back underground to a RESTRICTED—REQUISITIONS BY PERMIT ONLY warehouse full of everything from armored personnel carriers to miniaturized microwave-surveillance shotgun mikes until they stopped before a counter under a stenciled sign that said ORDNANCE where Mac rang a bell to summon the duty officer.

When a big-eared fellow with no neck and his hair shaved almost to the skin said with a grin, “Yes, Sir, Mac, what’ll it be?” the SEAL commander turned to Chris Patrick.

“Hold out your hand, Miss Patrick.”

Ashmead held his breath but Chris extended her right, not her left with the watch clasped to it.

Mac asked her to squeeze his hand as hard as she could and then to try to hold his hand down as he raised it so that he could assess the strength in her wrist.

Then he turned back to the ordnance clerk: “Give me a Detonics Mark VI in nine millimeter, and a Galco Jak-Slide… cross-draw, I guess.”

“Right,” the clerk was filling out the form: “Jak- Slide 2 holster.” He looked up inquiringly, waiting for the rest.

“What’s your waist size, Miss Patrick?”

“Chris; call me Chris. It’s… ah… twenty-four,” she said.

Behind her, Slick leaned an elbow on the counter, grinning fondly at her.

“Twenty-four ?” Mac rubbed his neck and told the clerk: “Give me the smallest Gelco belt you’ve got and a hole-puncher, two spare magazines in a Seventrees magnetic holder, an Aim-Point that’ll fit and a mounting kit, and three boxes of Glaser DU.”

The clerk looked with a pained expression at Ashmead’s team. “Sir, you know we don’t have any DU—”

“Mister, this man,” he gestured to Ashmead, “has a security clearance with four T’s in front of the S. Let’s not play ‘I’ve Got a Secret.’” He turned to Ashmead: “You still carrying that SIG in.45, Rafic?”

“Yep,” Ashmead said. “We’re all standardized as to caliber.”

“Good enough. Add five boxes of DU.45ACP, and that’ll be it.”

“If you say so, Sir,” said the clerk doubtfully; he was still shaking his head as he disappeared between the tall rows of shelves to his rear.

Mac leaned on the counter facing the team: “DU’s still classified, Miss Patrick, but under the circumstances your word will be a sufficient guarantee.”

Chris looked at him with a dazed expression: “I have no idea what you’re talking about, any of it. I’ve never shot a gun… I just bought that one when I realized suicide might be a viable alternative to… to…” She bit her lip. “So I’m going to look pretty foolish in front of all of you.”

“Don’t worry about it. Everybody starts sometime,” Mac assured her avuncularly. “You’re getting a cross-draw with no thumb-release strap because you’re a beginner and we don’t want you to shoot yourself when you draw fast; and if you can’t punch paper without it, we’ll mount the Aim-Point—it’s a scope that puts a red dot on the target so that you can’t miss, as long as you can hold your weapon steady with the extra weight.”

“Aim-Points are for old guys whose eyes are failing so they can’t focus on three things at once,” Slick told her. “You won’t need it.”

And, on the outdoor range, under Ashmead’s tutelage, she proved she didn’t, once they’d gotten around the problem of her small waist and the curve outward below to her hips.

While she stood at the firing line with Thoreau and Slick, all three wearing ear protectors over their white radiation hoods, and shot paper bull’s-eyes at twenty-five yards, Ashmead and Mac sat in Mac’s hardened staff car with one eye on the clock: “I don’t want them out in this three-Rem wind more than another few minutes,” Ashmead said, jingling spent brass in his palm from his own trial firing of the DU. “So let’s get serious.”

“What do you want to know, Rafic?” Mac turned sideways behind the wheel and met his gaze.

“Why Beggs and Watkins are so anxious to cut Patrick out of my herd—you’re not going to grease those dips, are you?”

“I’ve no orders to that effect at present,” the Navy commando leader said levelly, “but you never can tell.”

“I want to take her home with me in one piece.”

“Then keep her with you. It’s nasty out there—not the radiation so much, but the public mood. Civilians…” His mouth twisted. “We’ve got the National Guard out trying to get the wrecks off the roads, and our citizens are looting everything in sight as well as sniping at those of us who’re trying to help them. You’d think we were the enemy. They’ll kill each other for a priority placement in a Medevac line or a hospital bed or even a pound of rice or a jug of bottled water. No discipline, no morality. There’s just not enough standing army to maintain order, and the local cops are as bad as the people they’re supposed to be policing. It may calm down now that they’ve got their telephones and TV reception back—it took us too long to get something like a network with regular programming and controllable news up and running. They felt cut off, I guess. Scared. And the Emergency Broadcast Network—when and where it functioned—didn’t help much. All you need is a couple hysterics and it spreads like chemical warfare.”

Ashmead could see Mac’s frustration; every soldier fears anarchy more than death. “Keep her with us, you said. Any idea how I might be able to do that without disobeying a direct Presidential order?”

Mac cocked his head, “Did you hear an order like that? In all the commotion, you must have been mistaken.” His teeth flashed: “From the heart, Rafic: do what you damn well please where, in your judgment, national interest isn’t at stake. What we’ve got left of an Administration doesn’t know its best interest from a latrine. If I were you I’d get in that P-3B and haul ass back where I came from with what’s left of that team of yours and do what you know how to do: covert action includes dropping right out of the picture, doesn’t it?”

“Could be. Want to join us?”

“I’d truly love to, but I’ve got too many boys to look after and I can’t bring them all with me. What the hell happened, anyway? You don’t make mistakes like the one that fried Home Plate.”

“That’s right, I don’t. But other people do. I followed an order I should have ignored because I’d been taking a lot of heat over insubordination.”

Mac was looking out the window now, binoculars up to his eyes, “Damn, but that Slick can shoot.”

“You should have seen Jesse.” Ashmead, too, looked out at Slick’s white-suited figure limned against the new spring grass of the outdoor range, the horizon distant and empty beyond him. Empty was about how Ashmead felt: the loss of Elint, Jesse and Yael was something he’d come to terms with later. Maybe it was for the best, kinder; maybe Morse’s serum wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It certainly wasn’t going to be efficacious against the sort of radiation hazard they’d be exposed to in Georgetown. But, like Slick and Thoreau, Ashmead had to believe that the sacrifices were worth the price.

“I heard,” Mac was saying. “Did you train him?”

“Slick? He trains me, half the time—he’s a natural. Want to rate Watkins’s record for me?”

Mac put down the glasses slowly and shook his head: “I can’t think of a single nice thing to say.”

“Gotcha. That’s what I thought. But what about Watkins and Beck? Why the vendetta? Without Beck, none of you guys would be sitting around rubbing your inoculations.”

“Something happened in Tel Aviv, Beck said. Beyond that, I don’t know anything except that Beggs trusts Watkins like I wouldn’t trust my own mother. It’s like CIA’s running the country—no offense personally, of course.”

“None taken. Suits or no suits, I’m ready to get those kids in out of the wind. Then I’d like to go over the Black Hawks, inside and out, with you.”

“I’ve got my own people standing over them—there won’t be any tampering. Everybody’s so high-tensile, I couldn’t sleep if I’d done it any other way. But you don’t have to take my word for it—I’ll be in one of those birds; I’d as soon get a hands-on, myself, before we take your dips sightseeing. And we don’t have much time.” Mac looked at his watch. “We’re cleared for takeoff in three hours for the first leg.” He started the Lincoln’s engine and looked straight at Ashmead: “When we get to Bragg, there’ll be plenty of time to stage enough of a little mixup that Patrick will end up in your Black Hawk instead of mine—just in case I’m getting complacent in my old age and you’re right about a scratch order coming down.”

“Thanks, Mac. I owe you one.”

“If this inoculation’s what it’s cracked up to be, I’m going to do my damnedest to find you in a year or two, when things calm down, and collect.”

“You’re on,” Ashmead promised with real affection. Then he opened the car door, whose armored windows wouldn’t roll down, and motioned to Slick, who was reloading and looking their way, to bring the team in out of the radioactive spring wind blowing in off the panhandle.

Chapter 6

Beck had finally put Sam Nye’s story into perspective and two and two together: it wasn’t that Nye was addled, it was that he was acting under orders.

Sam hadn’t admitted it, of course, which just proved that the Agency was still paranoid and Beck, more than ever with Watkins running the show, was still considered an outsider.

But the Agency, and Nye, who had worked on 159 for two years after Beck had left, apparently thought it was feasible to revive 159 in a last ditch attempt to turn back the clock, to literally correct the intelligence failure that had led to the Forty-Minute War before it occurred.

Beck still didn’t believe it could be done, but Nye had evidently convinced the Agency that it was worth a try. That was why Chris Patrick was on the other chopper with the sightseers rather than in the Black Hawk carrying Beck, Nye, Ashmead, Slick and Thoreau to Fort Bragg that night, and that was why it was going to be very difficult to get any time alone with her at Bragg or find a way to sneak her aboard his chopper in the morning.

And Beck wasn’t so sure he wanted her along. Not only was the mission at a security level that defied classification, but it was almost certainly one from which none of the participants would return.

Langley was simply too hot. No radiation suit, not even the black ones which they’d been issued to separate them from the dips and Patrick in their white ones and provide some operational cover if they ended up running through city streets at night, could protect them totally in a red zone like Langley, where ambient ionizing radiation was the least of their worries. If, by some miracle, he got out of Langley alive, it wasn’t just a matter of a shortened lifespan: Beck wouldn’t be producing any more children; Morse’s serum wasn’t effective against genetic damage or sterilization.

He was feeling resentful and paranoid; he knew he was shocky with grief over Muffy and the kids, but the Agency could have leveled with him, not tried to manipulate him like a civilian and use his best friend to do it.

Still, if Nye was right and President Beggs was seriously considering a second strike, what difference did it make?

Two years ago, when the ancient cat he’d gotten Muffy on returning from their honeymoon had been put to sleep, Beck’s wife had broken down so completely she was sure for a number of hours that the vet had just told them their cat had to be put to sleep so that he could sell it to an animal experimentation program: that sort of paranoia was a function of physiological grief and, though intellectually he understood what was happening to him, Beck couldn’t help but wonder if Nye was telling him the truth about Muffy and Seth and little Jen. For all he knew they were really alive somewhere, in an Agency holding facility or a burn hospital like the one they’d taken the dips through earlier today en route to Bragg in a nicely orchestrated bit of psychwar that silenced all accusations that the fact-finding tour wasn’t going to be shown anything embarrassing to America.

The burn hospital had done more than that: it had silenced all conversation and brought Dugard, the NATO honcho, to tears.

For Beck, it had been a personal nightmare: he kept looking for familiar faces among those laved in cream and gel and once, standing above the bed of a woman who had only one side of her face left and merely a handful of remaining hair, he’d thought he saw one.

But the woman wasn’t his wife; not only the chart at the foot of her bed but the look in her single eye told him that.

Still, he’d had all he could do not to bolt when he excused himself to find the men’s room, and then he’d seen Chris Patrick, a white-swathed lonely figure in the hall, packing a Detonics in a strap holster and leaning her head against the tiled corridor wall while tears streamed unheeded down her face.

He couldn’t help himself; he took her in his arms and held her head against his chest: if he’d broken her cover, he didn’t care about it at that moment; any man would have held a total stranger in those circumstances.

She said to him, “What I don’t understand is why the sky looks so friendly. The clouds are white, the air smells sweet, and it’s all a lie.”

“Shh,” he said. “Shh.”

“If it weren’t for you, I’d use this thing,” she pushed her hip, where the pistol nestled, against him. “Please, let’s get out of here, go home, go back to Israel, together, alive.”

“We will,” he’d promised. “In three days’ time. Just hold on. We need you so badly. America’s counting on you.”

“Fuck America.”

He didn’t say that America was pretty well fucked already; he said: “I’m counting on you.”

She could relate to that. She pulled back from him of her own accord as they heard footsteps and pushed her way into the ladies’ room, a gamin if puffy-lipped smile on her face: “Right,” she said in an imitation of Slick. “Check.”

It wasn’t until they’d piled back into the two Black Hawks waiting outside the burn hospital and lifted vertically into a magnificent sunset that Beck began to feel guilty about lying to her, about caring about her when his own family remained unaccounted for, about the degree to which her presence made him willing to accept at face value Nye’s—CIA’s—assurances that his wife and kids were dead in Georgetown.

The rest of the trip to Bragg had been a nightmare the like of which he had never experienced—not during the entire aftermath of the war.

He couldn’t talk; if he opened his mouth he was going to start screaming; he just stared out the window at the sparse lights below and listened in his radiation hood’s phones to Ashmead’s people bantering; even though he should have been trying to pinpoint a moment in time at which Ashmead’s team could change history, he didn’t bother. Nye’s plan seemed like a hopeless, absurd game, the only result of which would be more death: his, Ashmead’s, Slick’s, Thoreau’s. And Nye’s, but that was okay because Nye didn’t care any more.

He kept seeing a death’s head grin on Slick’s beautiful face and Ashmead with only half a head of hair and wondering if he was finally going mad.

But he wasn’t that lucky. He calmed down and the cowboy talk around him became no more than an annoyance as his body cycled him into a different phase of shock, in which he could float, detached, superior and at ease: he knew what was going to happen; none of these macho types around him had any idea what lay in store for them.

At Bragg, among the Delta and Ranger personnel on post, life seemed almost normal except for the radiation precautions—respirators and gloves and raincoats and boots, no worse than Jerusalem had been: Bragg, due to serendipity and favorable winds, was a low-risk survivable zone.

Bragg’s commanding officer had them to dinner and showed Beck’s dignitaries that life at an American military base could be civilized. NATO General Dugard had retrieved his uniform and strutted around happily, at ease in his bailiwick, and his gratefully gleeful mood infected everyone but the Japanese: Zenko Tsutsumi remembered Nagasaki and Hiroshima and his eyes were full of ghosts as he came up to Beck and pulled him aside.

“Secretary Beck,” the Japanese trade minister said, “I apologize most sincerely for my boorish comments and my insensitivity of yesterday. We will do all we can to help your people, even though…” Tsutsumi squeezed his eyes shut; his pockmarked cheeks quivered. Then he opened them and said: “I have a confession to make. I had expected to enjoy this, to see your country suffer as it made my country suffer. But revenge is sour when one stands eye to eye with such horror. Accept my apologies and the condolences of my people, please.”

“Accepted and understood, Minister. We’re all a little shaken,” Beck said gently, his mouth on diplomatic autopilot while his mind dwelled on his own problems, of which the little Japanese didn’t then seem a part. “Try to distance yourself from it. It sounds heartless, but it’s all we can do. From now on, you’ll just be overflying sites, not staring casualties in the face. In fact, for most of the rest of your time here, radiation suits will be optional except when directly over red zones: the Black Hawk’s hardened and there’s no reason for you or any of the others to feel apprehensive. It should be easier from here on in, but we had to prove to you we aren’t pulling any punches. If you’d simply take our word for it that we’ve lost both coasts but that the country is by-and-large intact, it would be easier still—on everybody. Have a pleasant evening, Sir.

Walking away, Beck caught Ashmead’s eye and the two of them retired to a corner, drinks in hand, of the officers’ mess. “I have to talk to you, Rafic.”

“Talk.”

There was low music playing, the chatter of men and even a few officers’ wives.

“If we had it to do over again—the interdiction of the Islamic Jihad and their bomb—what would be the last possible moment at which you could have turned things around?”

Ashmead’s brooding eyes measured Beck soberly. Then he said: “Hypothetically? Twenty-two hours before that plane took off from Riyadh, Slick and I were sitting in our hotel room with the team deployed and Elint called in and I had to tell him we’d gotten a pull-back order. Three hours after that we were in our Jetstream on the way to Nicosia. That close enough for you?”

“Rafic, I need numbers—a spread of time, 0600 to 0900, or whatever. That sort of thing.”

“Fuck all, Beck, are you asking what I think you’re asking?”

“Probably. Can you give it to me?”

“Can you tell me if giving it to you is going to do any good, or just end us up digging through hot rubble in Langley?”

“Certainly the latter; as to the former… who the fuck knows? Didn’t Watkins brief you?”

“Not on this, which is a good sign. Okay, let me get my two boys and we’ll see if we can’t get down to hours, minutes, and seconds for you.”

Ashmead turned away to do just that.

“Rafic,” Beck called softly.

Ashmead came back, hands on hips: “Yeah?”

“Tell me it’s not worth the risk and I’ll blow it off. I still can—I’m the only one who can.”

“Why should I tell you that? You’re the walking brain trust. Let’s give it a go.”

Ashmead gave him a thumb’s-up and began col lecting his operations team from the video games in one corner of the officers’ mess.

Four hours later, after the team had left his room and Beck was trying to fall asleep in the stuffy guest room whose air purifier sounded like a Formula-1 car, there was a knock at his door.

In just his briefs, he opened it: he’d been told to sleep fully clothed, but he was still full of grief and resentful, questioning everything, especially whether he wanted to undertake a foray into Langley for CIA, Nye or no Nye, second strike or no second strike.

When he opened it, Ashmead was standing there with Chris Patrick, who was as white as her radiation suit.

“I thought you two ought to have a talk before we split up tomorrow. Unless Chris is coming with us?” Ashmead’s voice was gruff but his eyes were smiling.

“You bastard. All right. Come in, Chris. This is terrible security, Rafic.”

“Tsk, tsk,” said Ashmead as he reached in to pull the door shut after Chris had stepped inside.

“What is it?” she whispered, obviously terrified. “This morning Rafic was going to move heaven and earth to keep me off that diplomatic Black Hawk, now everything’s changed. What’s happening? What do I have to know that he couldn’t tell me and Slick wouldn’t tell me?”

“A number of things. Sit down, please, Chris.” Beck could have strangled Ashmead with his bare hands. He remembered Slick’s warning that when Ashmead wasn’t telling him something, he was telling him something. Beck had no idea how much Ashmead knew of what Nye had told Beck, or what he expected Beck to tell Chris Patrick. But Beck wasn’t going to tell her any more than she needed to know. He didn’t have the heart for it.

“Oh, Christ, don’t give me that State Department voice. You’re scaring me half to death.”

“On the bed, okay?” He sat beside her and slapped a cassette into the tape deck on the nightstand without bothering to see which one it was. “Do you still have your lighter?”

She fumbled in her purse for it with a plucky grin and lit a cigarette before she showed him its green light. “Safe as can be, see?”

“First, I have to explain about the shot that Elint gave both of us in Jerusalem,” he said quietly.

When he’d done that and she finally realized that she’d been given a dose of serum which, augmented by reasonable precautionary measures on her part, would reduce her chances of developing cancer to even less than they had been before the Forty-Minute War, she was overcome with joy, effusive in her gratitude, ready to crawl into his lap: “So we do have a chance—for a normal life, I mean,” she exulted. “You and me. That is, if you’re… if your family… oh, Christ, you know what I mean…”

“A chance, yes.” Then he started to tell her the fable that duty demanded, composed partly of truth and partly of wishful thinking, which he wanted her to disseminate to the dips and to her newspaper—if Nye was right and a second strike was imminent, it was useless disinformation, but it might buy them some time; if Nye was wrong, protecting America by projecting a perception of relative strength was the most important thing he could do right now, surely what Ashmead wanted him to do. “I’m going to begin by explaining that no one actually knows yet what our current state of readiness is or how extensively our war-fighting capability’s been damaged, let alone how long it will take to put America back on track….”

He talked to her for two and a half hours and when he was done he still couldn’t bring himself to tell her about the trip to Langley, so he didn’t, just intimated that tomorrow’s trip was too dangerous for her and that he’d catch up with her and the dignitaries later.

And then he took her to bed. If he was going to sacrifice everything tomorrow on a long shot, he wanted to leave something behind, even if it was only a pleasant memory.

Chapter 7

When Slick came to Beck’s room to get Chris it was an hour before sunrise and she was so groggy with sleep that she didn’t have the presence of mind even to tell Beck how much she loved him. She just struggled into her radiation suit and cursed security measures of every sort.

Never mind, she’d have plenty of time to tell him later, now that she was sure that he loved her too. He’d loved her all along, or else he’d never have given her a dose of the precious serum that was earmarked for those crucial to the functioning of the US Government.

In the dimly lit barracks hallway with Slick she was almost euphoric, hardly listening. He had to tell her twice to activate the tracer—“homer,” he called it—that was part of her black chrome watch, so that they could find her if anything went wrong and she got separated from her party, and to re member that if she wanted to contact him, all she had to do was speak into it.

“I’ve got a vibrator on my belt,” he grinned, showing her a metal clip, “that will let me know if you’ve activated the transmitter or if you’ve switched the homer on or off. So don’t fiddle with it unless you’re in trouble.”

“Right. Never cry wolf,” she nodded.

“Now, when we get out there, we’ll take off our masks and I’m going to give you a big goodbye kiss in front of Mac and the others, and you’re going to return it, okay? You’ve still got your job to do with those diplomats and we have to protect Beck’s cover.”

They were coming out onto the barracks steps and as they did, Slick finished settling his own mask on his head and checked hers, paying special attention to the filters below her jaw.

“Good enough, you’re getting the hang of it; great, considering that this is just a drill and you know it’s not much worse than Jerusalem out here. That’s what we want you to do—build up habitual reactions, even if the dips aren’t smart enough to follow your lead,” he said, his voice sounding odd because she was receiving it through her hood’s communication system as well as through the air.

“That’s nice to hear.” She let him take her hand, feeling detached, as if everything beyond the plastic in front of her eyes was happening on a video screen, as if none of it were dangerous, as if none of it could hurt her.

Beck loved her; she’d play her part. She shied away from thinking about his family—her woman’s intuition told her that they were dead and that she shouldn’t be happy about it, but she was. They were going to get through this and go back to the Middle East and live as normal a life as possible.

All the way to the chopper pad where the fact-finding tour was assembling, she kept seeing Beck’s face: his deep eyes with their inherent calm and soothing intelligence, his quick smile, the way he could make you pledge allegiance with a stare. Not only did he care about her as a woman, he respected her as a person—he’d brought her along because she could be useful, because she was capable, because he respected her.

She hadn’t been so optimistic since before she’d heard the first rumors of the war.

In front of the diplomats and their Delta bodyguards, she and Slick took off their masks and kissed fervently; she thought she even felt his penis stir against her and wondered just how far Ashmead’s deputy would go for operational verisimilitude. She liked Slick, she really did; he just wasn’t Beck.

Commander McGrath broke up their theatrical embrace: “That’s enough, you two. You don’t have to make the rest of us feel lonely. Save it for tomorrow night, when we get back here.”

Slick gave her a long, regretful look as he fitted his mask over his face and she let Mac lead her to the Black Hawk.

Once inside, strapped into a makeshift passenger seat between Zenko Tsutsumi and Dugard, her elation over the events of last evening quickly faded. Across from her sat five flinty-eyed bodyguards, Delta commandos of the same stripe as the Saiyeret she’d encountered on the dirt road north of Jericho when Beck had let her go with him to the interdiction site. All of that made better sense now, but the presence of these black-suited fighters, armed to the teeth and bulky with electronics and she-didn’t-know-what strapped to their chests and waists, made her nervous, especially because they had their masks hanging around their necks like horse collars as if to say: Who gives a shit what happens in twenty years; we don’t expect to be around long enough to worry about it.

Chris was incapable of not worrying about it: she wanted to have a baby, some day—soon, if she could. Beck’s baby, if he was willing. Hesitantly, when Commander McGrath came up to her and gently told her to take her mask off, saying, “It’s safe as a grave in here, Chris, you’ve got my word on it,” his eyes kind but teasing, she complied.

Only Mac was a friendly face; Bandar bin Faisal ignored her, nursing his injured pride: how, his eyes seemed to say, could she have chosen the attentions of such a person as Slick over his own? Such men, in his country, were bought by the kilogram, expended as Allah willed.

Once the Black Hawk lifted off with a shiver and an escalating whine of rotors and Mac, his mask dangling around his neck and his harness unbuckled, had convinced the dignitaries to do the same and relax while the pilots gave them a running commentary on points of interest over the intercom, he invited her “aft” with him.

Aft they went, crouching in the diminished headroom toward the chopper’s tail, where he assured her it was safe to smoke a cigarette and offered his calloused palm as their common ashtray.

Crouched on her haunches, the handgun Mac had chosen for her jabbed her hip; the holster which secured it to her belt was merely a strap of molded leather, unidentifiable as what it was when no weapon rested in it.

They talked about her “qualifying shoot” for a while, going over the procedures Ashmead had taught her while Mac had stood by.

“Just remember,” Mac said now, “that it’s got no grip safety and one up the spout, so if you squeeze that trigger while it’s cocked and your thumb safety’s not engaged, it’s going to go bang.”

“Bang?” she repeated, looking down at her side askance.

“That’s right, soldier. Bang. So let’s not have any accidents.”

He was still looking at the weapon on her hip and finally she realized why and engaged the thumb safety as she’d been taught.

“Thank you,” said the SEAL commander with equanimity. “I feel a lot better now. This may be none of my business, but if you and Slick aren’t a permanent item, I might be tempted to pull out all the stops myself.” He watched her as he spoke, his pale eyes cool and glinting with amusement and something more intimate.

“Sorry,” she said firmly. “I’m flattered, but I’m an old-fashioned girl.” She hadn’t been, not until Beck.

“Me, too. War makes people forward….”

“I bet you’ve got a girl in every port. Isn’t that the Navy way?”

“Yep. But on board this bird, I don’t. Just so you’ll know there’s no hard feelings, I’m going to appoint myself your personal bodyguard for the duration—you have any problems, you come directly to me with them. Rafic thinks very highly of you and that’s an automatic rating in my book.”

Just then one of the commandos came toward them, crouching as he got closer: “Sir, somebody on board’s using electronics that are fouling up the pilot’s instruments.” The commando was eyeing her steadily.

Her hand went to her watch, cradling it. She didn’t know whether to surreptitiously turn it off or explain.

Mac said, “Shit, I thought we searched that bunch,” rising into a crouch. Then she tugged at his sleeve and he looked at her over his shoulder and shook his head infinitesimally. “I’ll handle this, Lieutenant. You stay here with the lady.”

Uncertain as to what she was supposed to do, she tapped the winding stem which would silence her watch’s homing device and wriggled sideways so that the Delta commando would have room to sit without touching her.

He had longish hair and a short beard and through it he said, “Old Prick’s going to have our butts for breakfast tomorrow about this, lady. If you’re one of Rafic’s little girls, make my life easy—turn whatever you’ve got off before we crash into some damn tree or a mountain peak. This is no terrain for a three-day hike with a hot wind blowing.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Lieutenant,” she said and saw from his narrowing eyes that he didn’t believe her but that for some reason his esteem for her was increased.

Almost immediately, after talking quietly to each dignitary in turn, Mac came back and said: “All taken care of, Lieutenant. And it’s time all of us rejoined the others. Miss Patrick is from The New York Times and she’s got work to do that had better not include interviews with any of us.”

“Sir.” The Delta commando scrambled away from her and forward, and she followed. Mac was right: she had work to do.

But without using her tape recorder, Mac warned her: “The old way—take notes. That’s an order.”

She didn’t ask why, and since no one mentioned the electronics Elint had given her again, she assumed she’d done the right thing. The most infuriating part of dealing with these people was that they hardly ever told you anything. It was as if declarative sentences were against their religion.

The dignitaries weren’t much better: Zenko Tsutsumi’s eyes were bloodshot; the little Japanese was still upset over what he’d seen the day before and every time the intercom crackled with instructions to look to their left or right, he started in his seat. Nacht, the IMF ComBloc rep, was bellicose and defensive, spewing the party line at her whenever she asked a question. Najeeb Thabet was obviously in fear for his life, twisting his fingers in his lap, the knuckles fish-white against his dark Mediterranean skin. And the Saudi prince and Dugard from NATO were involved in a long, unpleasant wrangle about how much of the burden of rebuilding the US would be taken on NATO’s shoulders and how much borne by the Arab League.

She should have recorded all of that, and since she couldn’t, her fingers and wrist soon numbed as she took longhand notes.

Every so often, when she looked up, she caught one of the Delta commandos staring at her and was glad Mac had gone to the trouble of demonstrating his personal interest in her. She tried to tell herself that she was the only female aboard and thus the most interesting thing to look at and that they meant no harm, but she was uncomfortable under their scrutiny. They sat so still, with their shooters’ eyes resting on her like a target. She was glad she wasn’t.

To cheer herself up, she thought about the serum again—she’d never get cancer; she’d survive all this and set up housekeeping with Marc Beck. It would happen; she’d make it happen.

Hours wore on, the drone of the rotors and the disconcerting banking of the helicopter as it swooped low to show the occasional functioning hamlet making her stomach queasy, until well after noon, when the Delta team started to bring out sandwiches and Thabet complained that he was airsick as it was and couldn’t eat unless they put down on solid ground.

Mac handed him a Dramamine without a word.

Thabet took it, turning the tablet in his fingers until one of the Deltas handed him a canteen.

As he put it to his lips, one of the pilots in the cockpit called out, “Mac, you’d better take a look at this—I’ve got a visual on a non-registering bogey at fifty feet, underflying radar, headed our way just like trouble!”

Mac unfolded himself with uncanny speed and, crouched low, headed for the flight deck, where the pilots were now whispering together in an urgent undertone.

One of the Deltas stumbled to the window in the sliding door as the chopper veered suddenly and said, “Aw, shit.”

Somebody on the flight deck called out: “Incoming! ”

Then an explosion rocked the Black Hawk and flame spouted before Chris Patrick’s eyes.

She had time for a momentary indrawn breath which brought fire into her lungs and to throw herself backwards as her vision registered a final image: flung bodies as silhouettes before an orange fireball.

Then she was falling, along with the tail-section of the Black Hawk, toward the trees, unconscious.

When she woke, she wished she hadn’t. It was nearly impossible to breathe and something wet kept spouting up in her throat, choking her.

She couldn’t see anything, couldn’t tell if it was day or night. Her left arm was pinned under something and no matter how she tried she couldn’t free it to activate the homing device on her left wrist; her right leg felt as if it were being twisted from her body.

Sitting up was out of the question; she was trapped. She’d never experienced so much pain. She’d never thought you could hurt that much and still be alive.

Mostly, she wanted to clear her throat, take a deep breath, but she couldn’t do either. Whatever was welling up in her throat was salty and it just kept coming. After an interval, when she realized the gurglings she was hearing were coming from her, she decided that she was choking in her own blood.

She wondered how long it was going to take her to die. Then she tried to call Beck’s name. Nothing came out but awful retching sounds, like a dying animal.

Then she thought about Jerusalem and everything she’d almost had.

And that caused her to remember that she had a side arm and that all she had to do was pull it out and thumb off the safety and it wouldn’t hurt any more.

Her limbs were beginning to twitch of their own accord by the time she got it out of the holster; her body seemed like someone else’s, but that person was in terrible pain.

She really wanted to say goodbye to Beck, to see him leaning over her, just in time, to have him stare at her in that way he had and tell her that everything was going to be all right. Even now, if he did that, she’d believe him and take the gun barrel out of her mouth.

But he didn’t come.

Though Chris didn’t know it, she was all alone on a Kentucky hillside except for dead bodies and pieces of helicopter and a sick horse that hid among the trees, flanks quivering, where it had run when the helicopter had exploded above its head.

The sound of the gunshot sent the horse bolting once more, toward a broken fence through which it had escaped days ago and the safety of its barn.

Chapter 8

In the Black Hawk as it circled over Georgetown, now a suburb of a red zone so close that the devastation beneath the descending chopper looked like the amorphous blob of a tightly shot group on a paper bull’s-eye, Beck’s nerves reached saturation and professionalism took over: he became completely calm, resigned to what lay ahead. He was part of the problem and its solution, a victim and a perpetrator, and yet none of these: his crisis management training demanded that he compartmentalize his emotions, divorce himself from the horror that lay ahead in order to function in its midst.

Once you’ve seen one holocaust, you’ve seen them all. Georgetown reminded him of Sabra and Shatilla—except that in Lebanon the dead were outnumbered by the living, who walked around in masks with dull eyes and impassive voices, as if sensory overload had made them deaf and blind to the human cost before them.

Even the charred woodframe homes and burial mounds of shattered concrete office and apartment buildings resembled Beirut, and that was a blessing—Beck knew how to deal with human tragedy on the scale of Georgetown. It was the overflight of Ground Zero Washington and its surroundings which left him breathless and numb, so that he found himself grateful when Thoreau put the chopper down on what was once a Georgetown street.

No one in the chopper had said a word since they’d decided to overfly the capital except Thoreau, who occasionally murmured positions into his helmet mike for the benefit of Fort Meade’s ground controllers.

Now Sam Nye, beside Beck, fingered his Zone-I Class radiation mask, resembling a pilot’s helmet with its clear plexiglass visor and throat-level filtration units above the seal that met his black contamination suit’s collar: “Jesus, I’d give anything to wipe the sweat off my face. You’re sure you want to go out there, Marc? We can still go straight to Langley.”

Ashmead and Slick had their helmeted heads together, talking privately by means of the wave propagation that contact afforded, their com units off, on the flight deck, Ashmead squatting by Slick’s co-pilot’s seat.

“I need to see for myself, Sam. It won’t take long.” He’d said the same thing to so many distraught foreign nationals during his Mediterranean tours that the sense of déjà vu he experienced was comforting.

He’d gotten through at least a dozen scenes like this—earthquakes in Turkey, revolutions in Iran, camps on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border—that he knew he could get through this one. It wasn’t part of his mission, after all, just a prelude to clear his mind and put things in perspective.

“You’re certain? It’s going to be rough; Muffy wouldn’t want you to risk your health; we’ve got to live for them, not die for…” Nye broke off.

Beck wondered how to explain. He didn’t feel the need to exhume his family’s corpses and hold them in his arms; he’d never been the type who got relief or absolution from funerals. When he had to go to them, he tried to avoid open caskets. Dead was forever and it didn’t look anything like life on the bodies it claimed. Consonant with his world-view, he preferred his last memories of people he loved to be memories of them filled with life, not empty in death.

And yet there was a chance, vanishingly small, that someone—his kids, Nye’s kids, his wife, Nye’s wife—had survived: if they’d been in the cellar of Nye’s solid brick home, it was barely possible. That was all he wanted to know—that he wasn’t snuffing out a dim spark of life in order to save himself some grief. Once he’d seen that survival wasn’t possible in Georgetown, he could leave for Langley.

He said only: “You’re welcome to stay here with the chopper, Sam. I won’t take offense and somebody probably should keep Thoreau company.”

Through the double-thick, darkened glass of the Black Hawk’s windscreen Beck could see jumbled wreckage as Thoreau put them down in the center of a street littered with cars and twisted hulks of metal much less recognizable.

There was a snap-pop as Ashmead and Slick reentered the com circuit: “Okay, Beck,” Ashmead told him, “let’s go ruin your day.”

The Black Hawk’s rotors slowed but did not stop; its powerful engines idled: Thoreau wasn’t taking any chances that a mechanical failure would trap them here.

Slick unbuckled his harness and came aft to get shovels while Ashmead slid back the door: “Let’s go, ghouls.”

Thoreau’s voice crackled in his ears as Beck hopped down onto the greasy, cracked pavement: “Good luck, Casper; hope you find what you’re looking for.” The tone, more expressive than Thoreau’s flip words, said: Us family men have got to stick together.

“Thanks, Thoreau, we won’t be long.”

However long they’d be, they wouldn’t be without recourse: along with shovels and pickaxes, Slick distributed Ingram M-10s with folding butt stocks and full thirty-round clips, demonstrating their use deftly: “Just in case, okay?”

Sam Nye looked at the weapon in his hand with distaste and gave it back to Slick: “I’d probably shoot my foot off.”

“Bugger all, Rafic,” Beck heard Slick mutter, “if he could fly we could leave him here and bring Thoreau.”

“But he can’t,” Ashmead said as Beck rotated the cocking handle of the bolt through ninety degrees to safe the weapon and hung it over his shoulder by its web strap as Ashmead had long ago taught him.

Perhaps it was the shouldered weapon, but Beck began to perspire so that salty drops ran into his eyes and the sides of his viewplate began to fog.

Slick, weapon at his hip, waved them forward, a map in one gloved hand; Nye paced Beck and Ashmead fell in behind them with a deep sigh that said Nye wasn’t playing by Ashmead’s rules.

But it was Sam who recognized the house—or what was left of it, among the ruins gleaming in the spring sunlight.

Above, the sky was “high,” as pilots say, blue and cloudless, giving every shattered brick and downed telephone pole and shard of glass a hard, unnatural edge.

The pile of rubble that had been Nye’s home of brick and finely fretted white woodwork was blackened and tumbled as if a giant’s hand had swept it aside in a fit of pique. Not one wall stood higher than Beck’s calf and two chimney stumps rose like amputated limbs from either side.

Support beams had fallen and floors were compacted upon one another.

Slick said needlessly: “This be it, gentlemen. I swore an oath never to step on anything looking remotely like that, and you should too: if what’s left of that ground floor gives way, we’ll never dig you out in time for you to thank us.” But even as he spoke, Slick was unwinding coils of black nylon rope from around his waist.

They were standing on what had been the walkway. Beck could see a hole that had once been a basement window—just a darker shadow among the tumbled beams.

Ashmead came up to him and put a hand on his shoulder: “Talk to me, Beck. Quiet isn’t good at a time like this.” An uplifted palm stayed Slick’s offer of a safety line. “You don’t have to prove anything. You’re here; there’s not a sign of life. If you were one of mine, I’d order you back to the Black Hawk about now.”

Sam Nye said suddenly: “Did you see that?”

“See fucking what?” Slick demanded curtly.

“The basement window—I could swear something moved.”

“Rubble settles,” Ashmead said to Nye. “Well, Beck?”

“I’ll just… look in the window,” Beck heard himself reply. He was telling himself he could see something in there—a gleam, a glow of eyewhites—something worth keeping the rest of them at risk. His heart was pounding like the Black Hawk’s composite rotor blades as they cut the air.

Slick tossed him the rope and Beck, feeling foolish, hooked it to the safety harness at his waist.

Nye said: “I’m coming with you.”

Beck shrugged.

Slick said: “Hold onto his line, then, fella—two heroes is more than I was prepared for.”

Ashmead slapped the buttstock of his Ingram so that it unfolded and nestled the weapon, muzzle heavenward, in the crook of his arm. Then he gestured with it: “Gentlemen, be our guests.”

Beck was already moving, not up the crazed walkway, but across the littered yard with Nye beside him.

When he stepped carefully over something and Nye gulped in a sharp breath as if he’d been struck, Beck realized that it was the handlebars of a tricycle.

He remembered asking Nye, back in Dugout, if this trip was just to collect the ashes.

Moments later, he was down on his knees and wishing that ashes were all there was to collect.

In the imploded window’s frame was a hand. It was impossible to tell if an arm was still attached to it because it disappeared into blackness and the hand itself was blackened. In places charred bones showed through crispy skin, not white bones, but gray-brown like those of a well-cooked chicken.

On the hand’s third finger was a single ring, a square-cut two-carat ruby that Beck had given Muffy because he’d not wanted a double-ring ceremony and the very idea of wedding bands distressed him. It was from Harry Winston’s and there certainly wasn’t another like it on this street in Georgetown.

He was on his knees, peering at it, unwilling to touch the dried and wizened finger for fear it would come off in his hand and he’d vomit all over himself inside the radiation helmet.

He just knelt there, his palms pressed against his knees, conscious that Nye, beside him, was breathing heavily.

After a time, Ashmead snapped: “What the fuck’s going on over there?”

“I… found her.”

“Damned convenient,” Slick said. “You’re sure?” And then, to Ashmead: “Here, hold the rope. If I don’t get them out of there, they’ll sit there till sundown.”

He felt rather than heard Slick’s footsteps and when he could see the toe of Slick’s combat boot he reached out to take his wife’s ring, eyes slitted almost closed.

“Aw, shit,” Slick whispered as the entire hand came free in Beck’s grasp and he sat back, holding it, face averted, so that he didn’t see the dog, fangs bared, lips curled, come barreling out of the hole.

He first realized what was happening when Slick pushed him out of the way and he sprawled across some jagged brick.

The dog had its teeth in Slick’s wrist and Slick was trying to lift it off the ground and shoot it with his free hand without shooting himself.

Beck’s training reasserted itself: he had the Ingram by its pistol-grip, safety disengaged, the bolt already slamming home before he knew it.

The.45 caliber report was so loud that he could hear it through his helmet. What he couldn’t hear was the howl of the shot and dying dog and the growls of its three compatriots—shepherd mixtures—who were leaping through the window after the leader of the pack.

Beck yelled to Nye to run but Ashmead countered: “Hit the dirt, fool,” and then there was time only to shoot the dog leaping for his throat and roll out from under it, fully aware that Ashmead’s bullets must be whizzing above his head and ricocheting off the rubble.

“Clear,” came Ashmead’s voice in his ears again. “Everybody out of there, now.”

Beck was watching Slick, who was looking at his torn, bleeding wrist and the tatters of radiation suit around it.

“Well, fuck,” said Ashmead’s deputy, “that’s that, I guess.” His breathing was labored.

Tuning out Nye’s sudden burst of hysterical non sequiturs, Beck said, “No—it doesn’t have to be.” He got up and went to Slick, who was staring doubtfully at his freely bleeding wrist. “The blood’s washing it. We’ll get you right back to the chopper and scrub it down, tape the suit…. Worst case, it’ll cut a year off your life, and if you’re going with us into Langley, you ought not to be too worried about that.”

Nye toed one dog: “It’s rabies, not radiation he’s worried about,” Nye said. “You can’t always tell from looking at a dog whether or not it’s rabid.”

Slick retorted: “I’m not worried, Nye; I’m dead on my feet, like Beck says, one way or the other. But come on, let’s go. I want to see you guys safe to Langley—that’s what I’m here for.”

Ashmead had a hand on one hip and his Mac-10 on the other. Even from a distance, Beck could tell he was shaking his head in disgust while he covered their retreat from the building.

When Slick reached him, Ashmead lowered the gun, grabbed Slick’s wrist, and then put an arm around Slick’s shoulders. “After you two.” Ashmead motioned with the weapon in his other hand and his voice was metallic: “Let’s go; on the double.”

Thoreau was already preparing to lift off as they scrambled aboard and Ashmead slammed the slider shut.

Only Nye strapped in. Wordlessly, Beck exchanged his M-10 for the medikit and they went through the motions of scrubbing Slick’s exposed and bitten skin and then taping up the rents in his suit.

Slick, despite his protestations and even logic, looked worried, as white as a sheet.

While Ashmead fussed over Slick with the obsessiveness of a mother, Slick said: “Okay, Beck, maybe now you’ll tell me just what it is in Langley that’s worth all this.” Sweat glittered among the stubble on the deputy’s jaw.

“He can’t…” Nye said.

“He’s got a right to know, Sam,” Beck interrupted, and was shocked to hear his own calm, decisive tone.

“I just meant that he wouldn’t understand it,” Nye said thickly.

“Try me,” Slick challenged.

“We’re going to try to get a message upstairs to Langley—the operational Langley of sixteen days ago: that’s about all we can expect to handle, somewhere in the vicinity of a sixteen-day temporal skew. Nye says they managed a two-week send from computer to computer in the building during test—”

“They’re not cleared for this….”

“Nye, shut up.” Then, to Slick: “The basement computers have gallium arsenide circuitry; that gives us a better chance that they’ll have survived the pulse… that and the fact that they were probably shut down. But there are problems: it’s going to be hot in there. Even if the emergency generators are all working, we won’t be able to spare power for air conditioning, so we’ve got to do it right the first time, before the heat starts affecting the computers and we begin getting garbage or outright equipment failure. Which means lots of sitting around while we get everything up and running and do systems checks in a red zone which is going to read off the scale on that belt Geiger counter of yours. So it doesn’t matter about the dog bite, unless you were going to sit outside in the chopper.”

“I wasn’t,” Slick said easily. “But what about paradoxes—time travel, I mean… What’s going to happen to us if it works?”

“Good question. This isn’t a test signal we’re sending—it’ll change things if it works. Rafic, got a scratchpad?”

Ashmead did and when he handed it to him, Beck saw that Ashmead’s eyes were bright and their lower lids flame-red. Slick was his favorite and bandaging Slick’s wounds had brought ghosts of too many others out where Ashmead had to deal with them. Fighters will tell you that in their occupation they become inured to death, that your first kill is the one that haunts you and all the rest line up faceless behind, but that’s the way it is only with enemies. With friends, and especially with a team like Ashmead’s, losses cut as deep as in any family.

“You might want to see this too, Rafic—it’ll make more sense to you… everything, I mean.”

Nye was glaring at Beck fixedly, as if a security breach could endanger anything at this stage.

Beck was about to say something very hostile to his best friend when Thoreau interrupted, from the flight deck: “I’d really like Rafic up here. Not that I can’t handle this bird single-pilot, but she’s not really built for it.”

Rafic’s heavy features registered something like relief and he left them.

Beck took the scratchpad and began drawing a leafless tree with a thick trunk and many branches, on an axis like cross-hairs. As he drew, he said: “What will happen to us, on site, is most likely terminal overexposure—in this particular future. What we’re going to do is try to create or hook into another future, one in which your team took out the Islamic Jihad who nuked Home Plate before they got out of Saudi Arabia. If it works, some theories suggest that we might not even have time for a long leisurely death.” Beck pointed to the tree trunk and drew a line on the positive axis toward the future that meandered up the trunk and swung left onto a short branch that ended abruptly: “It could be that in a forced, unnatural situation like this, everything we know and are will just… stop. Zero, zilch, zip—end of the world. And, of course, if that son of a bitch Beggs goes ahead with his secondary strike, it might be just as well.”

“Beck!” Nye’s pejorative had a tinge of hopelessness.

“I’m telling you, Sam, it doesn’t matter. CIA suggested that something like this might be possible in order to distract President Beggs from his primary intent: a second strike against the Soviets. Beggs authorized this little adventure, gentlemen, in order to instigate a pre-emptive strike against the Soviets.”

“Shit,” Ashmead’s voice came out of Beck’s helmet.

“But Nye—CIA—and I have an understanding,” Beck continued. “We don’t think there’s a chance in hell we can make something like a pre-emptive strike work, or that it would make any substantive difference if we could—probably the same, or a very similar, time-line to this one would be the result. And that, we agree, is unacceptable.” Beck took his pencil off the abruptly ending branch and tapped another, one a bit longer, which nevertheless dead-ended. “Like this one.” Then he moved the pencil again: “However, we think that if we can stop the terrorists, we we might hook back into a time-line that has a chance of continuing.” With the pencil, he traced a line from the bottom of the tree trunk that went up the main branch and disappeared off the paper: “An open-ended temporal flow, if you like.”

“No shit,” Slick grinned. “Well, we’ll be alive again, then, right?”

“You bet, Slick. We may be, somewhere, anyway, doing that instead of this—multiple novels, remember? I can give you the math, run it down to you in positives and negatives….” He began to jot x’s and y’s and complicate the diagram, but Slick put out his hand.

“That’s fine, Casper. I’m convinced—and Ashmead’s probably right about you being so smart you’re worth all this trouble. But run that by me again: we’re alive somewhere else?”

“Well, just mathematically, as far as I can prove. In the real sense, if we do this—make a temporal correction—we’ll be alive in the there-and-then trying to prevent this particular here-and-now from ever occurring.”

“So you’re not sending any body—” Thoreau’s voice entered the conversation, “—any person, that is, back in time. That’s good news. I don’t think you can do that—I mean, you’d be in two bodies at once, and that can’t happen.”

“That’s right, Thoreau, it can’t. But, even though we’ll never find out if this works—because, if it does, we’ll either just blink out of existence or die soon, wondering about it—you and Saadia and Jesse and Elint and Slick are going to get a second chance to save the world a lot of grief.”

“You mean to take out our Islamic Jihad targets. But we won’t know about any of this?”

“If you do your jobs, it will never have happened. We’ve never sent anything but test messages. It may not work. Langley may ignore my priority ‘go’ order—I certainly am not going to risk trying to send them an explanation. Or it may work but not change anything—the future may be fixed, the end result the same whatever we do. Interdicting the Jihad may trigger a superpower nuclear exchange by means of a nuclear terrorism variant scenario; all it would take is for the Jihad’s bomb to go off in Riyadh and—”

Nye cut in, “What he’s trying to say, gentlemen, is that all we can do is counterfeit an order that could well have come from Beck, an override that will cancel your pull-back order either before it’s sent or after. It won’t matter. There’s a chance that Beck will be contacted and deny it, that the past can’t be changed. But we think we can time it so that there won’t be any opportunity for that sort of thing until after the fact. There’s also the chance that you’ll fail, for one reason or another….”

From Ashmead, on the flight deck, came a chuckle: “Beck, I hope your counterpart in the past isn’t going to dump responsibility for this in my lap.”

“He may well, Rafic—if it works. There’s going to be a priority-flagged go order that should turn your people loose. What happens from then on is anybody’s guess.”

“Talk about long shots,” Slick breathed. “Well, it’s nice to know that you guys believe in what you’re doing. As far as I can tell, it’s going to make not one shit bit of difference to us in the here-and-now.”

“But if you do your jobs in the there-and-then, it might make a hell of a difference to the civilized world,” Nye said softly.

“If your message gets sent, and if somebody forwards it to us—they didn’t, if you’ll remember, which might mean they won’t—and if we can interdict successfully,” Slick said.

“I don’t think,” Beck replied, “that just because it didn’t happen means it can’t happen. If there’d been some attempt at floating a priority go order with my name on it, I’d have heard about it. So it hasn’t happened—yet.”

“You guys are making me dizzy,” Thoreau complained.

“All I’m saying, Thoreau, is that mathematics—and logic—bear little relation to reality. They’re just tools, and very limited tools at that. What happens—success or failure—will depend on reality, not mathematics.”

“And if it does work, we’ll never know it?” Slick’s cowboy grin was firmly in place, but his face was still white and he clutched his injured wrist with his good hand. “Damn, think of the promotions we’re going to miss—let alone raises, intelligence stars, tickertape parades….”

The fact that everyone was accepting his child-simple explanation made Beck feel better. He still didn’t really believe it was going to work. But now, with so much sacrificed, he couldn’t bear to call it off—Ashmead and Slick had a right to die for something, and Slick, at least, was surely going to—that taped suit wasn’t up to what Langley had to offer. Then he thought about Muffy’s charred hand and the ring that was somewhere in the ruins at Georgetown and admitted that he did, too.

He said, “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” and meant it. The Langley basement station was going to be hard to get into and hard to work in; it was probable that they’d never come out. At least he’d been able to divert Chris; he’d never have had the guts to go through with it if she were there beside him. She made him too anxious to live.

He looked outside, at the destruction below, and saw not destruction, but clean water.

Even as he was letting the chop of the sea below soothe him, Thoreau said, “We’re out here so we can take off this headgear for a few minutes and relax a bit—it won’t hurt us much. I’d suggest we all take this opportunity to pick our noses or whatever. And Beck, would you come forward?” Thoreau’s voice sounded funny—sharp and clipped, not his usual slow drawl.

Ashmead slid out of the co-pilot’s seat: “Sit down but don’t touch anything. We’ve got something to tell you.”

“I do,” Thoreau said, his eyes never leaving his displays. “Slick lost Chris Patrick’s homer before we put down in Georgetown. I’ve been working with a rescue team to try and find out why, and why we lost contact with the other Black Hawk.”

Ashmead took over: “Beck, we’ve got people at the crash site in Kentucky now. There were no survivors.”

Beck pulled off one glove after the other and palmed his eyes. “Sabotage? That bastard Watkins?”

“Maybe,” Ashmead answered; “maybe not. These methane-fueled engines are new, chancy. Could have been natural causes.” Then he grinned bleakly. “But we don’t think so. We think it was Watkins and, since I’ve killed people on suspicion of a lot less, I took the liberty of radioing a friend of mine—in my business it’s handy to have as many friends as you’ve got enemies. So, just for your information, Watkins is as good as dead in the water. Prick McGrath,” Ashmead added ruefully, “and I went over every inch of both birds, and we couldn’t find any sign of tampering. We did that because we knew damn well that if Beggs wants to scream bloody murder about the Russian shoot-down, it’d be more convenient if there weren’t any survivors to mention Morse and argue that we let the 727 go down in a sacrifice play. I’m sorry about Chris Patrick—we all liked her—and sorrier than you’ll ever know about Prick, but at this point, if you believe what you’re telling us, it ought not to matter.”

Beck took his hands away from his face and looked into the blue, cloudless sky. “You know, there isn’t anybody on earth I’d rather be doing this with than you and yours, Rafic.”

He got up, went aft and, to take his mind off Chris Patrick, said to Nye: “Let’s get going on those numbers. We don’t have much time.”

Nye, who’d heard the discussion on the flight deck, nodded. Then he said soberly: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

“Let’s hope,” Beck corrected, feeling as if his entire body were encased in cotton batting and his mouth belonged to a lizard.

When they put down in a park where a low stone building still stood among leafless trees, though the stenciled sign that had said PARK COMMISSION MAINTENANCE: NO ADMITTANCE was gone, everybody knew exactly what to do.

Slick forced open the building’s steel door with Ashmead’s help while Thoreau shut down the chopper and booby-trapped it with a radio-detonating device as well as a tamper-trigger.

When they’d slid the heavy door aside, Beck stepped in and shone his halogen lamp around: the emergency route in and out of Langley seemed untouched by the blast. But that was what its architects had intended.

Even the emergency generator functioned when Slick found its circuit breaker and tripped it, flooding the tunnel, its tracks and electric car, with red light.

Nye fed his Langley access card into a slot in the wall and the car whirred. Beyond it, a three-inch-thick steel door drew back to reveal the beginnings of the more than two miles of tunnel hewn from solid rock.

There wasn’t a rockfall on the track for as far as they could see; the disaster-bracing above had held while hell broke loose on the surface.

And yet, somewhere, there was a breach: Beck’s digital Geiger counter ran out of digits and he tapped Ashmead to bring it to the Covert Action Chief’s attention. For some reason, he was hesitant to speak, as if he were in a tomb.

Ashmead didn’t say anything either, just shrugged.

They all piled into the electric cart, Nye and Beck in the middle with the team around them, shielding them with their bodies from whatever they might encounter, Thoreau facing behind, Ashmead driving, Slick standing with legs spread and weapon at the ready, though everyone else in the car was seated.

Somehow, though Beck was sure no one could have broken in here and survived for long, the tactical caution of the team around him made Beck feel better.

Twenty minutes later, because the car crawled at a snail’s pace and once in a while they did find a rock on the tracks which had to be moved, they drew to a halt before the door to Langley’s sub-basement, where Nye had to perform a more complicated entrance procedure: hand and voice print as well as card ID.

Beck saw him shiver as he took off his glove to press the plate and wince once he’d done it: hot is hot, and Langley was hot as hell. Like stigmata, red weals appeared on Nye’s palm.

Beck saw them as he gloved it once more and touched his friend, who slumped against him, then recovered: “All in my mind, no doubt,” Nye joked lamely as the door slid back and, leaving the cart, they stepped inside.

Above their heads was the executive garage and tons of collapsed building: Thoreau had given them a description of a photo-reconnaissance shot he’d seen to explain why he didn’t want to bother with a flyby.

Beck couldn’t have cared less about what existed or no longer existed above ground.

Down here, where 159 had flourished and then died of budget problems and lack of tangible, usable results, the condition of things mattered terribly.

Every time Beck saw crumbled concrete fallen from the ceiling it was as if someone jabbed him with a hot poker. When a passageway they needed to enter was blocked by a buckled steel door that would not be moved, Beck began to swear in Greek, the foulest of his store of epithets, until Nye told him, “Relax, we’ll just go in the other way.”

The two additional years Nye had spent down here had seen many changes. Without his first-hand knowledge, they’d never have made it to the proper corridor.

But eventually they did and, though everyone’s breathing was raspy, Nye laughed like a delighted child: “Looks good as new.”

It wasn’t, behind the black door that demanded lock-plate and voice identification, but it was close enough.

They fired up the emergency power source and they all held their breath.

When the red lights came on and the dust covers came off the equipment, Slick said: “Looks like we’re rolling,” and stretched out in an ergonomic chair, his feet up on a communicator’s Telex that wouldn’t be telling anyone anything because there was no one upstairs to tell and soon there wouldn’t be enough power left in the entire building to draw any of the steel doors back, let alone send out a message.

Looking around in the red light, with perspiration rolling down his skin so that it crawled, Beck said: “Okay, gentlemen. Time for the good news/bad news. The good news is that whatever we can do, we’ve got the power to do. The bad news is that once we do it, we’re trapped in here.”

“That ain’t news to me, Casper,” Slick said.

“Well, Nye and I think that there’s no reason you can’t leave now if you want to: you too, Ashmead. Take your team and get out.”

“We can’t get past the voice ID. And you’ll need all the power you can coax out of these things,” said Ashmead, his face glistening with sweat in his helmet. “Don’t get all humanitarian on us, kid. We’re here to see that you do your job.”

With a flick, Ashmead’s submachine gun was trained on him. A glance out of the corner of his eye showed Beck that Thoreau had Nye similarly covered.

Slick yawned and stretched: “Not that we thought you’d punk out, but you never know how somebody’s going to act under pressure.”

“We’re here to help,” Thoreau put in, “and for the duration. So why don’t you two brains get started?”

Suddenly, Beck remembered Slick telling him that if not for Thoreau, Slick would have killed him on the plane after Beck’s intransigence had led to the deaths of Jesse and Yael.

And yet he didn’t feel betrayed, or even nervous: there were all kinds of courage, and there were moments ahead in which he might well lose his nerve.

It was nice to know that Rafic and his boys were there to make sure that the job got done.

“Well, Sam, come on then, don’t let them intimidate you.” Beck bared his teeth and leveled his best stare at Nye, who was standing very still and breathing shallowly. “Time to get to work.”

It took an hour and a half to make sure everything was ready and all systems go. Intermittently Beck thought about Chris Patrick, his wife and kids, and the casualties from Ashmead’s team. But it didn’t hurt his concentration—it may have helped it.

Finally Beck said, “Well, Sam, I think that’s got it.”

“Me, too,” said Nye, “and just in time. I don’t know about you, but I’ve about had it. Go ahead, Marc—push the button.”

Beck, too, was feeling queasy from the heat, queasy enough that when the lights flickered, he wasn’t sure if they really had or if it was eyestrain. Surges wouldn’t bother this system, which had a backup emergency supply, but when it went down, it would be down for good.

“Ashmead?” Beck asked. “Thoreau? Slick?”

Only Ashmead answered: “Give it your best shot, Beck.”

Slick had his head on his arm, slumped over a nonoperational console and Thoreau, on the floor with his back against the wall and the M-10 balanced on his updrawn knees, didn’t open his eyes.

Beck tapped the “run” button on the mainframe computer before him and saw his reflection staring back at him. He gave it a thumbs-up.

Then the lights went out.