Drone

“No, sir. Not that I can tell.” Myers and her team were focused on the Bravos and at this point they had too much information to keep track of even if they wanted to keep tabs on the Iranian. Ian had to create his own data-mining software package in order to sift through the tsunami of intel coming out of the Utah Data Center.

“And he definitely got on the bus?”

“Yes. And the bus is sold out. Packed like a tin of sardines, I’m sure.”

Pearce heard the concern in Ian’s voice. “Don’t worry. He’s not going to blow it up. He would’ve just planted a bomb or ambushed it along the way if that was his target.”

“Want me to contact the local gendarmes? Pull him off?”

“No. Can’t take the chance they’ll lock him away and we won’t get a crack at him. Besides, if he gets cornered, he might shoot it out and then there really will be a massacre. Let him come all the way to Los Angeles, and we’ll see what he’s up to. Good work, Ian.”

Pearce clicked off, turned around, then jogged toward his condo two miles back on the beachfront. His mind began racing through checklists, preparing for a showdown with the Iranian.

But a nagging thought dogged his steps. Why did Ali suddenly appear out of nowhere? He was too careful to let himself get caught on a ticket-counter camera, even at a bus station. It was too damn convenient. Ambush? Feint? Or something else?

Washington, D.C.

Congressman Gorman gaveled the House Armed Services Committee hearing into session. The gallery was full. A parade of expert witnesses handpicked by Diele appeared one after another all morning.

Each of the witnesses had impeccable defense and intelligence credentials with prior government service, and each of them currently occupied a prominent position in the defense industry or academia. And each scripted answer they gave was designed to draw the inevitable conclusion that President Myers was incompetent, negligent, and quite possibly dangerous—charges that could easily rise to the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Myers’s defenders on the committee offered up the best arguments they could before the hearing was gaveled to a close, but it was the damning quotes of the anti-Myers experts that lit up the news cycle all day.

No one in the mainstream media either noted or cared that the experts who testified against Myers all had skin in the game if she suddenly found herself impeached.

Gulf of Mexico

In 1950, the American merchant marine fleet comprised nearly half of all shipping vessels at sea, but in the twenty-first century that number fell to the low single digits. The U.S. merchant fleet was probably the first great American industry completely outsourced in the twentieth century.

In 2013, there were fewer than three hundred American-flagged cargo ships, and one of them was the Star Louisiana, a fifty-one-thousand-ton Panamax containership hauling Pennsylvania- built high-tech power-generation and transmission equipment destined for Shanghai, China.

The captain of the Star Louisiana, Angela Costa, was a third-generation merchant mariner, the child of a Portuguese sailing family with roots in Massachusetts and, generations before that, the Azores. Fifteen minutes earlier, she’d greeted a new day standing on the outer bridge wing sipping hot coffee while watching the great silver disk of the sun rise out of the gray gloom. The long, white foamy trail churning behind her vessel reached straight toward the eastern horizon. Sunrises and coffee were her morning ritual, and she’d performed it on every ocean she’d ever sailed. She savored this morning’s sunrise ritual especially. There wouldn’t be many more for a while. When she got back to home port, she would inform her husband that she was, indeed, finally pregnant. It was time to exchange the chart table for a changing table, at least until the little skipper started school.

Captain Costa was in the galley securing another cup of freshly brewed dark roast when she was summoned on the intercom by her anxious first mate. A Mexican Azteca-class naval patrol boat was closing fast at twenty-five knots.

The big radar-controlled 40mm Bofors deck gun on the Joaquin began firing just as Captain Costa reached the bridge. The first round tore into the thin steel skin of the six-hundred-foot-long freighter ten feet above the waterline. The whole ship shuddered with the strike. Another shell followed five seconds later, slamming into one of the big stacked containers on deck. It tumbled overboard with twenty tons of diesel motor parts inside. The splash leaped thirty feet into the air.

The captain bellowed orders to the radio operator to send out a Mayday to the naval air station in New Orleans and report they were under attack.

Minutes later, a pair of F/A-18 Hornets flown by the River Rattler squadron scrambled into action.

Captain Costa ordered the helmsman hard to port, trying to turn her big ship’s bow toward the Mexican warship to reduce her target profile. It was a completely futile gesture on her part, but it was better than doing nothing.

The Joaquin, traveling at more than twice the speed of the freighter, turned to starboard, drawing out into a wider circle to improve its angle of attack. For a brief moment, the two ships actually were bow on, but the radar-controlled gun continued to fire. The armor-piercing round struck the topmost container on the bow and blew it to pieces, turning the machine parts inside to shrapnel that sprayed the surface of the water like shot pellets.

The two ships were now only a thousand yards apart as their bows separated on the point of axis, and the patrol boat’s L70 Oerlikon 20mm cannon opened up, raking the Star Louisiana’s superstructure with withering fire at the rate of five rounds per second. The 20mm rounds shattered the thick marine window glass and shredded the bridge like tissue paper. The helmsman standing at his post took a round square in his broad chest. His upper torso disintegrated in a spray of blood and bone as shards of glass and steel pinged around the cabin.

The captain and the first mate had instinctively hit the deck, both barely escaping decapitation by the molten lead scythe roaring above their heads. They were safe for the time being. The Mexican warship was low in the water relative to their position on the deck inside the high bridge superstructure. But that would last only until the Mexicans came full around and could fire on her exposed port side.

Right now, though, Captain Costa’s ship was drifting to a halt. Man-size wooden ship wheels and brass- plated engine-order telegraphs had disappeared decades ago, replaced by an array of computer monitors, control sticks, and track balls that looked more like the bridge of a spaceship than a merchant vessel. Now that the helmsman’s torso was sprayed over the back wall of the bridge and his station smashed, the engines were cycling down and the ship’s rudder returned to neutral position.

Costa belly-crawled toward the helmsman’s station. She had to find a way to switch the systems back to manual and get the ship under way. Her elbows bled as they scraped across the razor-sharp glass and metal fragments on the rubberized deck.

Another 40mm round slammed into the sky-blue hull of the Star Louisiana and the ship shuddered again. The chief engineering officer’s voice shouted over the loudspeakers that the number one engine had just been destroyed. Costa knew that the chief was shouting because the engine room was so damn loud, not because the old salt was panicked. She kept crawling, and wondered what the adrenaline dump into her bloodstream was doing to her baby.

* * *

The bridge of the Joaquin was in significantly better shape than the bridge of the Star Lousisiana, though the dried blood from the slaughtered Mexican crew on the steel deck wouldn’t have passed the lieutenant’s inspection under normal circumstances.

“Two aircraft, closing fast, six hundred knots, lieutenant,” said the radar operator in Farsi.

“That’s it, then. Helmsman, come hard to starboard. Let’s ram the great fat bitch,” the lieutenant ordered.

The young Iranian naval officer was surprisingly calm for his first action, the senior helmsman noted. Under normal circumstances, he would have nominated him for a hero’s medal. But there was no need now. Martyrs received their rewards from the hand of Allah himself.