Mike Maden - Drone

Miraculously, the president wasn’t killed or even injured when one of the wheels from the landing gear broke loose and slammed against the pulpit where he had been standing seconds before. The members of the audience who hadn’t fared as well were wailing with pain. Medics rushed in to treat the wounded. Dozens of cell-phone cameras recorded the carnage, most of them focused on the American flag still visible on the wrecked fuselage. The big television cameras inside the church caught everything in glorious 1080p HD broadcast quality.

Hernán watched the live breaking newscast with keen interest. It was on every channel; the attack was played over and over again. With any luck, he thought, this would become Mexico’s Twin Towers moment. Then the people would rally around his brother.

But that wasn’t the plan.

Hernán wondered why the missiles weren’t fired at the church. If they had been, the church would have exploded in flames and Antonio would have been crushed beneath the smoking rubble.

That was the plan. And then the people would rally around him .

Hernán picked up his cell phone to find out what went wrong. He’d give Ali one more chance to kill heaven’s favored son.

Ali’s phone rang. He answered it with a question.

“What went wrong?”

Mo Mirza was on the other end. “It was the cheap Chinese crap. Missiles wouldn’t lock on. Had to improvise. I’m sorry.”

Ali shrugged. “It was already written in the Book.” He clicked off.

Gulf of Mexico

The looming shadow of a Cuban fishing trawler rose and fell in the swelling sea. It was just after midnight.

The ARM Joaquín approached cautiously. The Mexican skipper of the Azteca-class patrol boat had spotted the stranded trawler on his radar thirty minutes earlier. No distress signals were flashing on his radio. Lights out on the vessel meant no electricity. But not even a backup battery? His radioman tried to raise them, but got no response.

The dark outline of the ship looked familiar through his night-vision binoculars. It was a sturdy East German design built back in the ’70s. A limp Cuban flag hung off the stern. His radar man confirmed they were the only vessel within a reasonable distance of the stranded trawler.

A moment later, a red distress flare arced from the trawler deck. That was a good sign. He had been worried he was going to find a murdered crew or an abandoned ship that would be hell to deal with in these conditions.

The skipper gave orders to the radioman to report back to their base at Veracruz that he was lending assistance to the Cuban boat and that he would let them know when the fishing vessel was either secured or the crew rescued.

That was the last time the authorities in Veracruz heard from the captain or crew of the Joaquín .

Coronado, California

Pearce was running on the beach. Sunrise wasn’t for another twenty minutes. Keeping in shape was one of the few things he had any control of at the moment. His cell phone rang. He clicked on the earpiece but kept running.

“We found Ali.” Ian was on the other end.

Pearce stopped in his tracks. “Where?”

“Greyhound bus depot in Stockton, California. Caught him on camera at the ticket counter. Purchased a one-way ride to L.A. just under two hours ago. Bus pulled out at four-twenty this morning. Scheduled to arrive at twelve-thirty.”

Pearce marveled at Ali’s ingenuity. Security would be lax at a bus terminal compared to the airports.

“Anybody else know about this?”

“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.