Harry nodded wearily. “He wants to know what we’re doing. He’s got a lot riding on this system.”
For once, Rosenberg did not have a flip retort. He merely nodded, then clambered up the shaky aluminum ladder. Harry gave up on the dead phone, stuffed it into the pocket of his bulky coat, and started up the ladder after him. His back twinged with every step.
“They can’t
“Every last one of them, I’m afraid,” Scott said softly.
Travis glared at him as he paced feverishly between the rows of useless consoles. The great man had come down to the monitoring center, the first appearance he’d ever made below the top floor of the office tower, as far as Scott knew. The wall screens were still dead, the monitors still showing nothing but hissing static.
“For what it’s worth,” Scott continued, standing in front of his useless console, “every other satellite constellation is down, too. GeoStar, Intelsat, Galaxy, AMC… all of them.”
“XM, too?” Travis asked. “I got money in XM.”
“XM, too. They’ve all been wiped out.”
“Sweet Jesus!”
Scott waited for the outburst. Travis was famous for his volcanic temper.
The great man stopped his pacing and whirled on Scott. “You get the White House on the line! I wanna talk to the President! Pronto!”
Scott wondered how he could break the news to his boss that he’d called Washington an hour ago, trying to reach the corporation’s office in the capital, only to find that all the satellite communications links were down and the landlines were jammed with frantic, urgent calls.
Zuri Coggins closed the phone link on her book-sized minicomputer, which she had plugged into the Pentagon’s communications network. Cell phone reception was too spotty for this call; besides, the landline was more secure. Looking up at the people sitting tensely around the table, she said, “The Oval Office says the President’s already on his way to San Francisco. Air Force One took off twenty minutes ago.”
“Then call it back,” General Higgins snapped.
Shaking her head annoyedly, Coggins said, “Only the President himself has that authority.”
“You’ve got to get him to turn back,” said one of the civilians on the other side of the table.
“I’m trying,” Coggins said. “I have a call in to him aboard the plane.”
Down near the end of the conference table, Michael Jamil muttered something.
“What was that?” General Higgins demanded.
Looking suddenly embarrassed, Jamil said, “The President has a sort of macho reputation. Maybe the terrorists—or whoever has those missiles—are counting on him going on to San Francisco despite the risk.”
Higgins’ thick-jowled face darkened. “How do you know they’re going to hit San Francisco?”
Jamil shrugged slightly. “It’s only an educated guess, General, but San Francisco’s the logical target. The place where they can do the most damage to us.”
“How do we know they’re terrorists?” Higgins demanded. “From what we know about this, they’re a faction of the North Korean army.”
“A faction that wants to plunge the world into nuclear war,” Jamil argued.
“Fanatics?” asked Higgins’ aide.
“Muslim jihadists?”
“The Koreans aren’t Muslim.”
“They’re Communists,” Higgins said firmly. “Atheists.”
Coggins said, “But the fact is that, for whatever reason, they’ve knocked out just about every un-hardened satellite in orbit around the entire world.”
“It could be the Chinese behind it all,” Jamil suggested. “The North Koreans could be pawns for the Chinese.”
“But why would China…?”
Unconsciously going into a lecturer’s tone, like a schoolteacher, Jamil said, “The Chinese have been hit by this global recession harder than we have. Their people were starting to expect a rising economic tide. Now they’re facing cutbacks, unemployment, economic slowdown.”
“Who isn’t?” General Higgins retorted.
“There’s been a lot of unrest, especially out in the provinces. Riots, even. And Beijing blames us for it. They claim the recession started in America and then spread to China and elsewhere.”
“And for this they’re willing to go to war?” Coggins asked, clearly unconvinced.
“Their government isn’t monolithic. They have factions, just like everywhere else. The hard-liners in Beijing have long maintained that they could survive a nuclear war,” Jamil replied. “They’ve got more than a billion people, and they’ve built extensive underground shelter complexes deep in the mountains of their western regions.”
“Are their government leaders moving to those shelters?” General Scheib asked.
“How would we know?” replied the man from the National Reconnaissance Office. “Both of our recon birds looking down at the region have gone dark.”
“Like the civilian satellites?” Higgins asked.
The NRO man shook his head. “No, it’s more like their optics have been degraded. Maybe by a laser beam.”
Jamil tapped a fingernail on the tabletop. “Maybe that’s why they’ve knocked out the other satellites as well. So we couldn’t see them heading for their shelters.”
Coggins looked down the table at him. “What did you call that doomsday scenario?” “Sarajevo,” said Jamil. “Sarajevo,” she whispered.
Aboard Air Force One, the President was frowning at his chief of staff. Norman Foster was accustomed to such scowls from his boss: the President did not take kindly to bad news.
“Turn back?” he asked. “Why?”
The two men were facing each other, sitting in plush chairs in the President’s private quarters aboard the massive airplane. Foster was tall and lean, his head shaved totally bald, the expression on his face as hard as the President’s.
“They think the gooks might hit San Francisco with a nuclear missile,” he said.
“Gooks?” The President frowned with distaste. “You mean the North Koreans, don’t you?”
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” Foster replied, his voice dripping irony. “Yes.”
“Why would they do that?”
Foster shrugged his lean shoulders. “Some analyst from the NIC came up with the idea.”
“And I’m supposed to turn tail and run home because some academic has a theory?”
“It’s a long shot, maybe, but—”
The President jabbed a forefinger at Foster’s ice blue eyes. “Norm, I’m not going to run away from a goddamned theory.”
“If they do hit ‘Frisco…” Foster left the thought dangling.
“And if they don’t I’ll look like a goddamned coward!” the President snapped. “I’m supposed to be the leader here. Hell, the real reason I’m going to San Francisco is to calm the people down over this satellite business.”
