visible at twenty thousand feet, but on the surface there was still the semidarkness of nautical twilight.
One doesn't see ships from aloft, a fact often lost on both sailors and airmen. In most cases, ships are too small, and the surface of the sea too vast. What one sees, whether from a satellite photo or the unaided human eye, is the wake, a disturbance in the water much like an arrow with an oversized head—the bow and stern waves generated by the ship's passage through the water—and the foaming a straight line caused by the propellers is the arrow's shaft. The eye is drawn to such shapes as naturally as to the body of a woman, and at the apex of the V- shape, there one finds the ship. Or, in this case, many ships. They spotted the decoy group first, from forty miles away. The main body of COMEDY was identified a minute later.
THE PROBLEM FOR the ships was positive identification. Kemper couldn't risk killing an airliner, as USS Vincennes had once done. The four F-16s had already turned toward them when the radio call went out. He didn't have anyone aboard who spoke the language well enough to catch what they'd just said.
'Tally-ho,' the F-16 flight leader called. 'Looks like F-14s.' And he knew the Navy didn't have any of those around. 'Anzio to STARFIGHTER, weapons free, splash 'em.'
'Roger that.'
'FLIGHT, LEAD, GO Slammer.' They were too busy looking down instead of looking around. Recon flight, Starfighter Lead figured. Tough. He selected AIM-120 and fired, a fraction before the other three aircraft in his formation did the same.'Fox-One, Fox-One!' And the Battle of Qatar was under way.
THE UIR TOMCATS were just a little too busy for their own good. Their radar-warning receivers were reporting all manner of emitters at the moment, and the air-to-air radar on the Vipers was just one of many. The leader of the two was trying to get a count of the warships below and talking on his radio at the same time, when a pair of AM-RAAM missiles exploded twenty meters in front of his aging fighter. The second pilot at least looked up in time to see death coming.
'ANZIO, STARFIGHTER, SPLASH two, no 'chutes, say again, splash two.'
'Roger that.'
'What a nice way to start the day,' commented a USAF major who'd just spent sixteen months playing against the Israeli air force in the Negev.
'Returning to station. Out.'
'I'M NOT SURE that's a good idea,' van Damm said. The radar picture from John Paul Jones had been uplinked from the new ship via satellite to Washington. They were seeing things less than half a second after they really happened.
'Those ships cannot be stopped, sir,' Robby Jackson told the chief of staff. 'We can't take chances.'
'But they can say we shot first and—'
'Wrong, sir. Their missile boat shot first five hours ago,' the J-3 reminded him. 'But they won't say that.'
'Save it, Arnie,' Ryan said. 'My order, remember. The rules of engagement are in place. What now, Robby?'
'Depends on whether the Iranians got the word out. That first kill was easy. The first one usually is,' Jackson said, remembering the ones he'd made in his career, nothing at all like what he'd trained for at Top Gun, but there were no fair-play rules in real combat, were there? The narrowest part of the passage was just over a hundred miles between Qatar and the Iranian town of Basatin. There was an air base there, and satellite coverage said there were fighters sitting on the ramp.
'HI, JEFF.'
'What's happening, Andrea?' Raman asked, adding, 'Glad you remembered that you left me up here.'
'It's pretty busy with all this fever stuff. We need you back here. Got a car?'
'I think I can steal one from the local office.' In fact, he had an official car already.
'Okay,' she told him, 'come on down. I don't suppose we really need the advance work up there. Your ID will get you through the roadblocks on 1-70. Quick as you can. Things are happening here.'
'Give me four hours.'
'You have a change of clothes?'
'Yeah, why?'
'You're going to need it. We've set up decontamination procedures here. Everybody has to scrub down before getting into the West Wing. You'll see when you get here,' the chief of the Detail told him.
'Fine with me.'
ALAHAD WASN'T DOING anything. Bugs planted in his house had determined that he was watching TV, flipping channels from one cable station to another in search of a movie he hadn't seen before, and before going to bed he'd listened to CNN Headline News. After that, nothing. The lights were all out, and even the thermal-viewing cameras couldn't see through the curtained windows of his bedroom. The agents doing surveillance drank their coffee from plastic cups and looked on, at nothing, while discussing their worries about the epidemic, just like everyone else in America. The media continued to devote virtually all of its airtime to the story. There was little else. Sports had stopped. Weather continued, but few were outside to notice. Everything else rotated around the Ebola crisis. There were science segments explaining what the virus was and how it spread—actually, how it might be spreading, as there was still diverse opinion on that—and the agents with the headphones had listened to the latest installment over Alahad's own TV. It was all nature's revenge, one environmental advocate was preaching. Man had gone into the jungle, cut down trees, killed animals, upset the ecosystem, and now the ecosystem was getting even. Or something like that.
There was legal analysis of the court case Edward Kealty had brought, but there simply was no enthusiasm for lifting the travel ban. Stories showed airplanes at airports, buses in terminals, trains at stations, and a lot of empty roads. Stories showed people in hotels, and how they were coping. Stories showed how to reuse surgical masks, and told people that this simple safety measure worked almost flawlessly; most people seemed to believe that. But to counter that, most of the stories showed hospitals and, now, body bags. Reports on how the bodies of the dead were being burned ran without showing the flames; that was by mutual consent. The raw data was distasteful enough without the image of its reality. Reporters and medical consultants were starting to comment on the lack of data on the number of cases—which was alarming to many—but hinting that the space in hospitals to deal with the Ebola cases had not expanded—which was comforting to some. The extreme doom-and-gloom-sayers were still distributing their cant, but others said quietly that the data didn't support that view, that the situation might be stabilizing, though in every case they added that it was much too soon to tell.
They were starting to say that people were coping, that some states were totally clean, that many regions within those states that had cases were similarly healthy. And, finally, some people were coming forward to say with some authority that the epidemic had definitely not been a natural event. There was no public opinion on the issue that the media could really measure. People didn't interact enough, share thoughts enough to make informed judgments, but with the beginnings of confidence that the world was not going to end came the big question: How had this begun?
SECRETARY OF STATE Adler was back in his airplane, flying west to the People's Republic. While aloft, and in the Beijing embassy, he had access to the latest news. It had caused rage and, perversely, some degree of satisfaction. It was Zhang who was leading his government in this direction. That was fairly certain, now that they knew India had been involved—again—this time duped by Iran and China. The real question was whether or not the Prime Minister would let her partners know that she'd reneged on her part of the deal. Probably not, Adler thought. She'd outmaneuvered herself again. She seemed able to do that standing still.
But the rage kept coming back. His country had been attacked, and by someone he'd met only a few days before. Diplomacy had failed. He had failed to stop a conflict— and wasn't that his job? Worse than that, he and his country had been duped. China had maneuvered him and a vital naval force out of position. The PRC was now stringing out a crisis they'd made themselves, for the purpose of hurting American interests, and probably for the ultimate purpose of reshaping the world into their own design. They were being clever about it. China had not directly done anything to anyone, except a few air passengers, but had let others take the lead, and the risks that went with them. However this turned out, they would still have their trade, they would still have the respect due a superpower, and influence over American policy, and they planned to maintain all of those things until such time as they made the changes they desired. They'd killed Americans on the Airbus. Through their maneuvers they were helping to kill others, to do real and permanent harm to his country, and doing so entirely without risk, SecState thought quietly, gazing out the window as his aircraft made landfall.
But they didn't know that he knew these things, did they?
