Dana Stabenow - Prepared For Rage

What was it that loser, Karim, had quoted Isa as saying? He said that Bush said that it was better to fight us on our ground than for the Americans to fight us on theirs. And then he said he thought Bush was right.

Instead of hitting the Far Enemy in Iraq, where the Far Enemy could hit them back, Isa was looking to bring the jihad back to the Far Enemy's backyard, where he believed it had belonged in the first place.

And the first thing he would look for was a target of opportunity, something universally recognized as a symbol of American might and power, something that symbolized everything the Far Enemy stood for that the true believers hated. Their technology. Their secularism. Their greed.

And their open, unabashed determination to corrupt the faithful.

He stared at the television, at the shuttle, white against the enormous fuel tank, flanked by the slender rocket boosters, steam curling up from the tail to make it look like the whole assembly was floating on air.

In the orbiter at this moment were five astronauts, two of them women, one of them black. One was a Protestant, one was Catholic, one was Bahai, and two were undeclared.

And then there was the sixth person on board.

One of the faithful.

One of the faithful, yes, Patrick thought, but from Isa's viewpoint also a Qatari, a citizen of a nation whose women would have the right to vote in the next election. A bona fide Muslim, scion of a powerful and influential Muslim family, a family that owned a controlling interest in a global media organization whose twenty-four-hour news feed could be found on every television in every coffeehouse in every souk in the near and far East.

An organization rich enough to launch its own satellite, which satellite was at this very moment tucked into the cargo bay of the shuttle he was staring at now.

Suddenly Patrick knew why Isa had boarded a boat in Haiti that was headed north.

"Fuck me," he said, and lunged for his cell phone.

ON BOARD FREIGHTER MOKAME

"Now?" Yussuf's whisper was agonized.

"Wait," Akil said, his voice a mere thread of sound. "Wait."

The migrants' attention was fixed fearfully on the Coast Guard small boat. They barely registered Akil and his men's presence. With every part and fiber of their being they wanted to be safely ashore in America.

The small boat came closer in an ever-narrowing circle. Once again the hail, "Attention, unknown freighter, this is the U.S. Coast Guard. This area is closed to all traffic, I say again this area is closed to all traffic. You must turn your vessel around immediately and leave this area."

The small boat's orange hull was twenty-five feet away from the Mokames stern, then twenty, then fifteen. "Safeties off," Akil said softly, "and remember, head shots. We need the uniforms."

He waited until the small boat had closed to within five feet of the Mokame, when he could see beyond the brightness of the spotlight to the members of the small boat's crew. He raised his gun and shot the coxswain between the eyes.

"The coxswain sits in front on the left," Bayzani had said, illustrating with the salt and pepper shakers, so eager to instruct, so eager to please. "He's the captain of the small boat, so to speak. The man on his right maintains communications with the ship."

Without pausing Akil shot the man sitting next to the coxswain, and one of his men, Mahmoud he thought, reached over the side with a boat hook and snagged the bow of the inflatable.

"What the fuck?" the man in the bow said, staring open-mouthed. Yussuf shot him. The bullet hit his shoulder, high and to the left, and Akil was irritated. "We need the uniforms!" he repeated.

He had to raise his voice over the increasing cries of the migrants, who after the first shock were scrambling, clawing, fighting to get away from the guns. One man, braver than the rest and more stupid because of it, made a clumsy attempt to tackle Yussuf. Akil's bullet caught him in the stomach and he skidded backwards, to sit down hard on the deck. He looked with surprise at the rapidly growing stain on the front of his shirt.

Those migrants below had panicked at the sound of the gunshots, pouring out on deck, with screams and cries and pleas to their gods, only to fall back in fear when they saw the guns.

One of the two men left alive in the inflatable was trying to pull the coxswain's body free of his seat. Akil shot twice and missed twice when the man ducked, but by then his men had found their range and the next time his head popped up three bullets hit it more or less simultaneously. Miraculously, they had managed not to hit the boat.

The fifth man stood up in the back of the inflatable, hands raised in the air, his face a white blur in the night. The flap on his sidearm had been unfastened but his hands were empty.

At least five guns spoke at once, and the man tumbled backwards over the edge of the small boat and hit the water with a splash. There were other splashes as some of the migrants went in, some voluntarily, others falling. By now the Mokame was listing heavily to starboard because all the migrants were crowding the starboard side gunnel, trying to crouch as far away from the armed men as they could get.

Akil cursed with a fluency that momentarily stopped them all in their tracks. "Secure the boat!" he said.

Mahmoud knotted the end of the small boat's bow line around one of the cleats on the Mokame. Five of his men half jumped, half fell into the small boat and began stripping the bodies.

ON BOARD THE SHUTTLE ENDEAVOUR

"T minus sixty."

The urge to urinate was by now all Kenai could think about. She still didn't trust the diaper, but her tonsils were floating. She ran a swift calculation. An hour to go till launch. From launch, it took ten minutes to get into orbit, when she could change into dry clothes. She would spend seventy minutes lying in her own pee if the diaper didn't work.

She decided to risk it. It took a few moments to convince her urethra that this was okay, prone on one's back not the most conducive environment for urination.

Her urethra got the message, and her bladder emptied out in a warm rush. The relief was immense, and she sighed. She sent out feelers for diaper failure, but her back was still dry, so far as she could tell.

All righty then. "Bring it on," she said.

"What's that, Kenai?" Rick said, his voice raspy over her headset.

"Nothing, sorry, Rick. Just hurrying up the count."

"Hear, hear," Laurel said.

"T minus fifty-five," said Mission Control.

ON BOARD USCG CUTTER MUNRO

"Less than an hour to go," Cal said to the Munros.

They smiled, their eyes glued to the binoculars. They didn't look or act apprehensive, but like any parent of any astronaut, they had to be thinking of Challenger, and Columbia .

He was.

When he wasn't monitoring boat ops on the bridge, that was. He went

back inside. "BMC?"

"Yes, Captain," Gilmartin said. "We haven't heard from Mun 1 since they sent their last ops normal call."

"When was that?"

"Five minutes ago."

They weren't overdue, and Garon's last communication had been to inform them that the contact appeared to be a sail-rigged coastal freighter

loaded with migrants. "The message sounded kind of garbled, like their radio was failing," BMC said apologetically. "OS2 Riley says the same."

"Oh, great," the XO said.

ET3 Lang, on watch during boat ops, said in a puzzled voice, "I don't know what can be wrong with the boat's radio, sir. I ran the morning check and it was fine."

They became aware of the presence of Admiral Matson standing in the doorway. "What's going on?"

Heads swiveled toward Cal. "We have a freighter that is refusing to identify itself inside the security zone, sir." He saw Barkley's head peering over Matson's shoulder. "We've launched the small boat to go over and take a look. The small boat's been out of touch for a little longer than we'd like, but that may be due to radio problems."