Deep Sky

its details were still vague. Every camera up top was either snug with the ground or raised above it by no more than a foot, which meant that when focused on a distant, nearly ground-level subject, they all looked through curtains of heat-ripples rising off the baked landscape. The effect was present now on every screen in the room, reducing the distant 747 to no more than a shimmering blob with wings.

Evelyn turned to Paige again as if to say something, but stopped herself. She’d noticed something on her desk display. She keyed her headset.

“Air Force One, I have you changing to heading zero-eight-seven. You are outside the glide path. Please acknowledge.”

Her eyes narrowed as she waited for a reply. She didn’t appear to get one.

“Air Force One, acknowledge change of heading. You are not on course for the runway.”

“He’s climbing,” one of the techs said. “And increasing airspeed. One-eight-zero knots. One-eight-five.”

“Air Force One,” Evelyn said, “if you are aborting approach please acknowledge. Say again, please acknowledge this transmission.” She looked around at the others. “Why the hell can’t he hear me?”

“One-nine-five knots,” the tech said. “Still climbing. If he’s aborting for a retry he should’ve turned by now. Still tracking dead straight on heading zero-eight-seven.”

Travis picked out the wall screen with the best image of the aircraft, and stepped closer to it. As it climbed and drew nearer, its shape began to resolve. So did its color.

Which was uniform gray, not blue and white.

Someone behind him said, “What the hell?”

At that moment the ripples diminished by a fraction, and the plane’s outline, even head-on, became clear. Not the massive bulk of a 747’s body with its wings tying in at the bottom. This was a narrower, sleeker form, and its wings met near the top of the fuselage.

Travis understood that he’d been wrong about Holt’s intentions: they weren’t subtle. They were as far from subtle as they could get.

“That’s not Air Force One,” Travis said. “That’s a B–52.”

Chapter Twenty

Colonel Dennis Pike hadn’t slept much during the night. Along with his wife and older daughter, he’d been up past midnight watching CNN’s coverage from D.C. Then he’d gotten a phone call—one he’d expected—and five minutes later he’d logged in at the front gate of his post: Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. In response to the attack on the White House, all branches of the armed forces were stepping up their levels of readiness. Pike had to oversee the status change for his own command, the 83rd Bomb Wing. It took about six hours, after which he’d gone home and caught ninety minutes’ sleep before another call came in. This one he hadn’t expected.

The man on the other end was the Air Force chief of staff, with orders coming directly from the new president. Strange orders. A wargame of some kind, to be conducted immediately by Pike himself. It would take place at a target range in eastern Wyoming—a location Pike had seen on maps throughout his career, though it had never been labeled as a practice area. It hadn’t been labeled as military property at all, but simply as Restricted Airspace—Undesignated. The president wanted Pike, without a copilot or navigator aboard, to fly a B–52 to the center of that place and test his ability to deploy a very unorthodox weapon, only two of which were even stored at Minot. Stranger still, Pike would relinquish control of his comm system for the entirety of the flight, setting it to a remote-access channel which would allow the Air Force chief and the president—or anyone they selected—to use his radio and do his talking for him.

“Don’t ask,” the chief of staff had said. “All that matters is that we’ll be evaluating your performance. Do this right and we’ve got something very special in mind for you.”

The target was in sight now, less than half a mile ahead: a seemingly arbitrary GPS point ten yards south of what looked like a pole barn, the only structure for miles around. The weapon was to impact that spot of empty ground precisely. Which it would, of course. Given the perfect visibility, low altitude and near-stalling speed, a trained chimp could’ve hit this target. It occurred to Pike, though only briefly, to wonder what the hell his superiors were evaluating. He’d performed the strange set of approach maneuvers exactly as ordered, but he could’ve done it drunk. So could every pilot in his command. There was no logic to it. Now, climbing and accelerating in the final seconds of the run, he realized this wouldn’t even make for a good story at the Officers Club. Whatever it was, no doubt it would be classified forever.

Well, strange was better than boring.

He reached for the weapons system panel.

Paige was already running, even as Travis got the last word out. Others in the room were scrambling for their desks, pulling up the defensive controls in seconds, as their training had taught them to do. But Paige’s solution would be faster. And simpler.

She all but crashed into the rack-mounted instrument cabinet she’d been aiming for, bolted to the wall near the entry. She pressed her palm to the scanner above the cabinet’s door, and with every tense muscle in her body she willed it to respond quickly.

A quarter-second later the cabinet clicked open.

Paige yanked the door aside to reveal a single, coaster-sized red button. It looked exactly like the kind Travis remembered from electrical shop in high school. There’d been one every six feet along the classroom wall, rigged to kill the power in case some freshman touched the wrong wire and started cooking.

The red button in Border Town had a different purpose.

Paige slammed it as hard as she could.

Pike felt a thud reverberate through the airframe as the bomb-bay doors locked open. Felt the sudden increase in drag as the slipstream passing under the plane churned and whirled through the complex interior geometry of the bay. He knew that in another second he’d feel the most dramatic change of all: the instant loss of nearly five thousand pounds of weight. The GBU–28 was a heavy son of a bitch, though only a small fraction of its mass was explosive. Well over four thousand of its pounds were just dumb, solid steel. For good reason.

Pike’s hand was already on the bomb release when everything changed. One instant the desert floor was bare and lifeless. The next, it burst open at half a dozen places, long, rectangular sections of ground being heaved aside from below. Pike had the crazed impression of casket lids coming up through the topsoil of a cemetery.

Half a second later he understood what he was seeing—a reality many times worse than a graveyard come to life.

Kill everything.

That was what the red button did. It deployed every weapon concealed in the desert and gave the system a universal, exceptionless command: target and engage any moving object within range.

Travis had already turned his eyes from Paige back to the wall screens. The bomber had come so much closer in the past five seconds it seemed surreal. Its apparent distance before must’ve been a trick of camera perspectives and shimmer.

Now, as the aircraft continued to swell on screen, Travis saw that its bomb doors were wide open. Even as he noticed, he felt the building shudder, and on every television in the room, multiple rocket-exhaust trails raced up out of the ground toward the plane.

Pike spent the last second of his life numb. He didn’t feel what his hand was doing on the bomb release, if anything. Didn’t bother to reach for the electronic countermeasures switch either—it probably wouldn’t have saved him even if there’d been time to use it.

He found his brain doing exactly two things at once—each half acting on its own, he imagined. The left half recognized the flight profile and outlines of the Patriot missiles that had come up out of the desert to meet him. His eyes went to the one that would reach him first, its RF seeker head having apparently locked onto the B–52’s nose. He tried to remember the trigger distance for a Patriot’s proximity fuze. Five meters? Ten? Did it matter? The thing