Jim DeFelice - Threat Level Black

Howe had been there himself. You reached down at that moment and found what you had.

He watched the display. Viper Two couldn’t find the UAV, even as he closed.

“Turn,” snapped Howe. “Now.”

The F-16 stuttered in the display. Then it moved downward toward the water, pirouetting on its wing, 18,000 pounds of metal and machinery transformed into a graceful ballerina. The wings straightened and the dancer became a linebacker blitzing unmolested toward the fleeing quarterback.

“Range is five miles,” said Howe. “You’re dead on. Dead on and steady.”

“Roger that.”

Howe told the computer system to zoom in on the target. The screen blinked-and then went back to the large-area scan.

He started to curse, then saw the change was not due to a malfunction: A second contact had been spotted, this one behind him, only five miles south of the Statue of Liberty.

The only person in the room whose face wasn’t a mask of worry was the President’s. Blitz watched him from the other end of the suite, still working the phone as he talked to congressional leaders about an amendment to the Medicare Prescription Bill. Each call began the same way: Senator, how are you? Did you catch my speech? We need your support on this legislation.

It was impossible to tell from the President’s reaction whether the man or woman on the other line was for or against the proposal. Only when the call ended and he signaled one of his aides with a thumbs-up or -down could one judge the success of the call.

Meanwhile, the Secret Service detail, chief of staff, and military aides were walking back and forth, trying to appear calm. They had formulated and reformulated and formulated once again plans in case the alert proved real. They had flashlights, night-vision goggles, flak vests-everything they needed, Blitz thought, which only made the situation seem even more impossible.

The President finally put down the phone and got up from his chair.

“So, what do you think, Professor?” he asked. “Should we head over to the Garden?”

The Secret Service people began to protest en masse. The President raised his hand to shush them.

“What do you say, Doc? We getting over there or what?” asked the President.

“I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the professionals while they were doing their work,” said Blitz.

“Neither would I,” answered the President. “Come on. We’re not cowering in a hotel room.”

“Sir…” started the head of the Secret Service detail. “With all due respect, your safety-”

“My safety isn’t the question,” said the President. “The question is, who’s going to win this stinking basketball game? Syracuse or Kentucky? I have Syracuse. My national security advisor takes Kentucky. Now, let’s get our act together so we don’t hold up too much traffic, all right?”

Three people tried to speak over the same radio frequency at once. Howe sifted through the cacophony, eyes glued on the new triangle on the right side of the display.

How the hell had the system missed the contact earlier?

Maybe it hadn’t. Maybe this was just an anomaly, a screwup.

Or maybe it had been lost in the clutter until now.

Howe yanked at his stick, snapping back in the direction of the UAV. The Iron Hawk pulled nearly 9 g’s, testing the limits of his flight suit and its wing structure as it jerked onto the new course. A pair of fists smashed against Howe’s temples, gravity angry that he had dared to fight it. Momentum slammed against his chest, drove down against his groin; Howe fought through it, his brain swimming hard to keep up with the superbly engineered plane as she shrugged off the awesome forces trying to pull her back.

The aircraft won. Iron Hawk began accelerating.

Howe blinked his eyes and saw his target on the screen seven miles away, flying to his right now as he leaned on the throttle and strained against the stick.

Lady Liberty stood proud in the harbor, her arm holding a beacon to the oppressed of the world.

“Splash Target One!” reported the F-16 pilot. “Splash that motherfucker!”

“I have a new target,” reported Howe, belatedly realizing he had forgotten to alert the others. “Tracking.

The UAV dipped right. There was a Navy destroyer ahead, near the mouth of the harbor.

Someone was hailing him.

The Navy people couldn’t see the target, but they could see him: The targeting radars on their ship-to-air missiles were locking on him, ready to fire.

“Iron Hawk acknowledges,” said Howe, slapping at his Talk button. “I am in pursuit of an unidentified aircraft, probably one of our targets.”

The black shadow flew toward the center of the statue ahead.

Those bastards are going to blow up the Statue of Liberty, Howe thought to himself. And there isn’t anything I can do about it.

The corridor was a utility passage that connected to another set of tracks and opened directly across from a passage way below the Garden. The only way across was through a set of girders and then over the tracks; unlike the other tunnel, there was no walkway on the side.

According to the plans, the access had been closed off. Pretty much a dead giveaway, as far as Fisher was concerned.

He climbed down between the girders, trying to judge whether the rumble he felt was coming in his direction or not. Finally he decided to take his chances; with all these tracks down here, the odds were that it wasn’t.

But it was. Fisher was just reaching the metal plate that covered the opening when the yellowish-white light crept across the wall.

He pulled down against the plate, trying to get it to open. It didn’t budge.

Fisher took a step back. Ordinarily he would have reached for a cigarette so that he could fully contemplate the implications of the panel being secured in place. But the approaching train made such contemplation a difficult venture. The FBI agent kicked at the bottom of the metal with his foot.

It still didn’t move. The tunnel now practically quaked with the thunder of the approaching subway cars, the rattle moving the ground in a motion not unlike the steady, comforting perk-perk-perk of an old-fashioned coffeemaker.

The light filled the space, casting him in shadow. Fisher glanced to the left, admiring his growing length…

And finally spotting a second panel, six feet away.

He stepped over to it and saw that it was propped up at the side of the opening. The FBI agent slid in feetfirst, and found himself in a dank, water-filled hole.

Howe watched the UAV pass under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge like a rifle bullet moving at just over 275 knots. It nudged right slightly, its faceted beak aimed directly for the Statue of Liberty. Howe was flying more than a hundred miles an hour faster than the UAV, but even with that advantage he couldn’t close the distance between him and the UAV before it slammed into the statue.

And even if he did, he had no weapons aboard.

But he couldn’t simply pull off. He stayed on his course.

And then the UAV made a course correct, turning not right, which would have taken it over Manhattan, but left, flying toward northern New Jersey.

Howe didn’t understand for a moment. It seemed to him that the enemy plane-an unthinking missile-had had a change of heart, warned off by the glare of the statue herself.

Then he realized that it had never been programmed to strike the statue.

An E-bomb would be targeted for a power yard or a transformer station to have maximum effect on the power grid. It was possible to shield some devices against the weapon itself, but a close-range hit on a weak link could not be defended against. Even if the weapon proved not as powerful as its designers intended, a jolt directly over a concentration of power lines would fry the Northeast grid for months.