“We’re going to try.”
Harry counted his own pulse silently. Two beats, three.
Then the general asked, “What’s your condition?”
“One engine out. Wing damaged. Cabin pressurization holding. So far. Boeing makes tough airplanes, General. You know that.”
There was something going on, Harry realized. Something between the two of them that went beyond the words they were speaking. It was like a couple of people talking in code, almost. Harry could see the tension on Colonel Christopher’s face, in her strained posture, the way she was gripping her coffee mug in both hands, like it was a life preserver or something.
“Well... take care of yourself,” the general said. “We’re doing everything we can from this end.”
“Sure. I know.”
A long pause this time. Then, “I’ll set up a priority link with Misawa. Call me the minute you touch down.”
She closed her eyes as she replied, “If I can, General. I’ll call if I can.”
The audio link went dead. For a long moment Harry heard nothing but the rumble of ABL-1’s engines and the clatter of the plane’s buffeting. He realized he had become almost accustomed to the shuddering vibrations.
“You know him?” he asked Colonel Christopher.
She gave him a curious, half-sad smile. “I knew him.”
“Knew?”
“Too well,” she said. “Not well enough.”
Harry felt puzzled but decided the colonel’s personal life was not a place he should be poking into.
She sat wearily beside him. “Are you married, Mr. Hartunian?”
“I was. “We’re separated.”
“Going to get divorced?”
Suddenly miserable all over again, Harry waved both hands in the air. “I don’t know. My wife wants a divorce. But we’ve got two daughters. I don’t know what it’d do to them.”
“Do you still love her?”
Harry thought he should feel uncomfortable talking about his private life with a woman who was practically a stranger to him. Instead, he heard himself admit, “I thought I did at first. But I don’t know if we ever really loved each other. Not like in a romance story. We were just kids when we got married.”
“And now?”
He shrugged. “Now it’s all over, I guess. Has been for years, I was just too dumb to recognize it.”
Karen patted his knee. “Welcome to the club, mister. Welcome to the goddamned club.”
He saw that her eyes were sad. And really beautiful. Light gray, almost bluish.
Before he could say anything, though, Colonel Christopher straightened up in the seat and said, “Now, how do we go about finding out which one of your people tried to screw up this flight?”
“I had a speech prepared for you,” said the President into the microphones on the dais before him, “but events have moved so swiftly that I’m going to toss that speech away and speak to you from my heart.”
The spotlights were glaring brilliantly on the President. The crowd filling the auditorium was in darkness, but he could sense them out there in the shadows, feel their presence, hear their breathing like one gigantic, expectant animal.
“So tonight we’ll forget about the teleprompters and the speech my staff worked so hard to prepare. Tonight I want to tell you about an extraordinary series of events, and about the brave and gallant crew of Air Force and civilian personnel.”
He could feel them leaning forward, holding their breath, hanging on his words.
“You know the old joke: I have good news and bad news.”
A few laughs scattered through the darkness.
“I’ll give you the bad news first,” the President said, smiling broadly to reassure his audience. “As you know”—his smile dwindled—”just about all the civilian satellites in orbit were knocked out this morning. It’s been a tough day, without satellite phone links, without satellite relays for information systems and commercial television. Why, this speech right here and now isn’t being transmitted any farther than Sacramento… or so I’m told.”
A few more nervous titters out there in the darkness. Good, thought the President.
“And things are going to be tough for a while. It will take weeks, maybe months or even a year or more, before we get full satellite services going again.
“What caused this enormous breakdown? A nuclear bomb exploded in orbit by a dissident element of the North Korean army.”
That got them! The audience gave a collective gasp. Rumbles and murmurs swept the shadowed rows of onlookers.
“I say again”—the President raised a slim finger— “that the bomb was set off in orbit by a dissident group of the North Korean army. Not by the government in Pyongyang. The entire civilized world has been attacked by a fanatical group of… well, they’re fanatics. What else can we call them?”
More grumbling and muttering from the audience. That giant beast out in the shadows was starting to growl.
The President held up both his hands, palms out,’ and the beast quieted. “The regular North Korean army is rounding up these dissidents. They’ll be captured and dealt with by North Korean justice. Which, I may tell you, is a lot tougher and swifter than our own.”
He hesitated a moment.
“But before these fanatics could be captured, they launched two more missiles. Toward America. We have every reason to believe those missiles were armed with nuclear warheads.”
Now they really stirred. But the President grinned and, raising his voice slightly, told them, “Now the good news. Both those missiles have been shot down. We’re not entirely sure where they were aimed at, because they were shot down within a minute or so of being launched. They might have been aimed right here, at San Francisco. They might have been intended to kill me. And you.
“But they were both shot down by an American plane flying over international waters off the coast of Korea. That plane was armed with a high-power laser that destroyed both those missiles within a minute or so after they were launched.
“So, the good news is that we have a missile defense system that works. The North Korean fanatics who launched those missiles are being rounded up and will be swiftly punished.”
They broke into applause. The audience rose to its feet like one single organism and cheered long and hard and loud. The President stood before them in the spotlights, smiling his boyish smile, thinking that the next thing he had to explain was that the North Koreans were in no way associated with Islamic terrorists. I don’t want this to spill over into a new war in the Middle East, he told himself. We’ve got to avoid that. By all means.
The rain had stopped. Cool moonlight beamed down out of a silver-clouded sky. The Secretary of State watched the clouds gliding across the moon as she listened to the President’s speech on the little plastic radio one of her aides had placed on her desk. His voice sounded scratchy, tinny, streaked with static. Cross-country television had been down since the commercial satellites were knocked out, but radio reception was still serviceable.
Sitting before her were General Higgins, freshly shaved and wearing a new, crisply creased uniform; Zuri Coggins, looking wilted in the same red jacket suit she’d been wearing all day; and that annoying Jamil fellow, with
