Cautiously, he pushed his face down to hers. She was breathing.
“Bree?” he said, pulling back upright. “Bree?”
She didn’t say anything, but he thought she stirred.
“I’m here, baby,” he said, leaning back down as close as he could. “I’m here.”
“Search pattern is complete, colonel,” Englehardt told Dog as the Megafortress completed the last orbit. “Nothing.”
“The
His men were subtly telling him that it was time to get on with the rest of their mission — finding the warheads. They had roughly six hundred miles to go before getting into the search area.
Dog pushed a long breath from his lungs.
“All right.” Dog couldn’t quite force enthusiasm into his voice; he had to settle for authority. “Mikey, get us on course. I’m going to take another shot at taking a nap. Wake me up when we’re starting the search.”
“You got it, Colonel.”
Dog tapped the back of the pilot’s seat and started for the upper Flighthawk bay. Daly put up his hand and stopped him as he passed.
“We’ll find her, Colonel. Starship or someone will get her. And Zen. Don’t worry.”
Dog patted the sergeant on the shoulder.
“Thanks,” he told him. “I know we will.”
III. Finders Keepers
General Mansour Sattari paced the long hall of the mosque’s auxiliary building, waiting for word of his son.
That Captain Val Muhammad Ben Sattari had launched the final phase of the elaborate plan, there could be no doubt. India and Pakistan were at war, and had spent the day before trading accusations at the UN that each had tried to annihilate the other. The American President had gone on television and claimed that the U.S. had prevented nuclear weapons from exploding after the missiles were launched and would now work for peace, but CNN also reported that the power grids in both countries had been wiped out — a sure sign to General Sattari that several nuclear weapons had exploded, regardless of what the U.S. said. That meant his son had succeeded in his goal.
Now, if only Allah, blessed be His name, saw fit to carry Val back to him unharmed. Then he would launch his own goal — overthrowing the black robes who had ruined his life, and his country.
The general continued to pace, his shoes squeaking on the tile. He was alone in the building, and knew he would be for several hours. This was good — he did not want others to see his impatience as he waited for news from his son. He believed that a general must always maintain an image of calm and control, even in the most trying times.
Unlike the prayer hall of the mosque, this building was nearly brand new, and while the architect had preserved the ancient style of the older structures, no expense had been spared on the lavish interior. The floors were marble from the best quarries in Italy. The walls were wood veneer taken from East Africa. Even the furniture, hand carved by Iranian craftsmen, was finely wrought.
General Sattari stopped his pacing as the music from the television in the assembly room suddenly blared, announcing another bulletin. He folded his arms and listened as an American anchorman began running down the “latest” on the situation. This turned out to be primarily a rehash of earlier reports, the only exception being the news that the U.S. President had sent an aircraft carrier to the region.
Sattari frowned. He considered going into the room and changing the channel to Sky News, the British network. But he’d done that twice already, only to realize that CNN’s information was more up to date. And so instead he simply resumed his pacing, noting to himself that the fact that news was simply trickling in was an indication of how complete the destruction had been.
The Marine Corps Osprey fluttered left and right, ducking in and out of the spotlights as it descended toward the deck. At eighty-four feet counting the spinning rotors, the aircraft’s tilt-wings extended well over the sides of the narrow-beamed ship, so it looked to Danny as if the Osprey would tip the
“Dancer, we meet again,” shouted Danny to the trim figure that led the way forward.
“I had a feeling you’d be in the middle of things,” said Lieutenant Emma “Dancer” Klacker, shaking Danny’s hand. “This is Major Behrens from the general’s staff. He’s the general’s intel geek.”
“Major.”
“Captain Freah’s the Dreamland crazy who helped stop the pirates a few months back in the Gulf of Aden,” Dancer told her companion. “I told him another operation like that and we’d make him an honorary Marine.”
“This may be his chance, then,” said Behrens.
Danny led the way to the
The U-2 had spotted two missiles in a mountain valley south of the Pakistan-India border. Fired by India, the weapons had crashed in the high desert two hundred miles from the coast. The
“This area has the most promise,” said Danny, pointing to a spot in the southern Thar Desert. “You can see from the projections there may be as many as six here, all launched from Pakistan. The
Danny explained that both countries lost their power grids, throwing them into chaos. Things were even worse in the wide swath of territory affected by the EEMWBs, where all electronics had been wiped out, even those that ran on batteries or could be connected to backup generators off the grid. It included all of the areas where the missiles were thought to have gone down. With the exception of three small radars on the west coast, the military installations in the rest of India were either using their radars intermittently or not at all because of power problems. The Indians had two phased-array, long-range warning radar aircraft. One had been wiped out by the T- Rays and crashed near Delhi. The other was patrolling the east coast of the country, helping to monitor a Chinese fleet there.
The Chinese, meanwhile, had ordered the stricken aircraft carrier
“Our real handicap right now is low-level reconnaissance. The Megafortress isn’t equipped with Flighthawks. That should be remedied by this evening. Which brings me to another problem — we need to get our top Flighthawk pilot down to Diego Garcia so he can help out.”
“Where is he?”
“Catching some z’s in a rack,” said Danny.
“He’s aboard ship?” asked Dancer.
