John Barnes - Directive 51

And all the Hog Drivers on the bench had nodded, and said, yes, yes, sir, clear.

Greg wondered if everyone remembered what he did. Not about his own plane, but about some of the others. Some Super Hornets, on a stop-at-all-cost mission, might be carrying nukes . Whatever was on that thing had to be a nightmare.

Behind the Noseguards, in the middle range, from just over the horizon to perhaps eighty miles out at sea, were the Tackles—the main interception force, still being gathered from a dozen air bases. Land-based Navy and Marine F-35s out of North Island, with their extra fuel and longer patrol times, were already flying search patterns up and down the coast; Air Force F-35s and F-22s out of Holloman AFB in New Mexico were arriving and joining them. The fence was getting thicker, but it still had holes.

Along the coast, where the public could see them, the Halfbacks were just getting organized. So far the Arizona Air National Guard had just come in, flying F-22s and even old F-16s that Redmond’s grandfather might have flown in one of Reagan’s little wars. Redmond laughed privately; most of the F-16s were younger than his own A-10, but “old” in a fighter was different from old in an attack bomber, kind of like a gymnast versus a golfer. The Halfback part of the defense would grow thicker as more ANG fighters arrived from New Mexico, and extend farther north as the California Air Guard’s fighters, up in Fresno, got into the air and spread out.

The colonel had said, unofficially, that the A-10s almost weren’t invited to the party. They were a close-air-support plane, intended to attack targets on the ground, and slower than the Dreamliner. But with the whole West Coast littered with potential good targets for attack, and minimal prep time, they needed Fullbacks, planes patrolling around any likely target—such as Game Seven of the World Series here in Anaheim—and the A-10 was meant to loiter: circle a battlefield slowly, waiting to be called into action.

It wasn’t yet dark down below, but they were turning the stadium lights on. He took another slow wide turn over Anaheim, nursing the fuel, and wished he’d hear that the Bad Dreamliner had been picked up and nailed. It would be nice to be headed home.

As he made a turn, he saw something out of the corner of his eye; in the setting sun, there was a black dot. He talked to his controller, got cleared to investigate, and came around, descending gently and dropping down almost to stall speed for a better look. The low late-afternoon sun made the black sphere much more visible; a stray radiosonde balloon, floating along at about twenty-two thousand feet, one of the two-meter ones that you could buy from any scientific supply house, but with no instrument package.

Redmond made a report; it gave him something to do. In return, the controller informed him that the Pirates had just finished batting without having gotten a man on base.

He banked around and saw that the stadium lights were clearly visible; potentially a great target for the terrorists.

Against the red glow of sunset, he spotted three more dots, and called it in. “I think we’ve got somebody out there launching balloons for fun,” he said. “Anybody in Japan who doesn’t know the war’s over?”

“I’ll kick it upstairs,” his controller said. “You never know what’s significant. Thanks for the word on the balloons, Fullback Fourteen.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Greg thought he might have seen a dot move abruptly, but when he looked it was gone. Probably just popped. Lord, let that be the most violent thing I see on this trip.

Visualized as a fan of great circle trajectories, the West Coast reached toward Jayapura like a vast splayed hand, with parts of the coast as much as forty minutes closer than others. But which extended finger would the viper strike?

Alaska continued to glow red; nothing happened there. A new red blob popped up in Coos Bay, Oregon, but no blow fell.

The red cancer had spread out from Coos Bay for a few minutes until Vancouver, BC, had become another possible center of attack; in a few minutes the two red blotches had joined and begun to sweep down the coast and inland. Nothing hit; probably the enemy was not aiming at Seattle or Portland. In the Northwest, the red area moved inland in a sharp curve. A long red finger from the northwest blob reached down the coast, nearing San Francisco.

No 787 appeared on any radar, on any ship, plane, or ground station. High-altitude satellites might have seen something, but if so, it had not yet emerged from the analysis; even the NSA’s quantum computers couldn’t instantly scan the imaging from so many millions of square miles for something that would fit into one city block. A couple of low-altitude satellites would pass over soon; maybe they’d have better luck.

No calls came in about explosions, planes crashing, planes where there should be no planes; nothing. Perhaps they were taking some longer way round, had found a hole in the defenses or were planning to make one?

The big red patch in the Northwest grew, and its finger slid down over the Bay Area and thickened into a wedge, and nothing happened.

In the safe aqua zone, Newport Beach, California, well down the south coast, blossomed red, another victim of geometry that made it stick out from a great circle perspective centered on Jayapura.

The new red blotch spread rapidly, engulfing Irvine, reaching toward San Diego, as the older, bigger malignancy crawled into the northern suburbs of LA. The whole American/Canadian coast would be solid red in another minute.

There were down spots in the Mexican radar fence, but the holes were temporary problem spots, not where anyone—

Check that assumption. Heather typed a quick note and posted it in general discussion: Some radars down in Mexico. NE1 chkd Y? &when?

About five seconds later she saw MISO from Cam—his personal abbreviation for “make it so.” Shortly after that, a note came in from someone at Homeland Security, saying DoD was getting an answer through their liaison with the ministerio del ejército in Ciudad de México.

Ejército , the Army? Why not Defense? Heather clicked up a footnote. Technically Mexico has no Defense Department: Army and Navy are separate, the Air Force is part of the Army, and so the Mexican official with the most defense radars under his control is the Minister for the Army. Pretty much the same setup as we had in the United States around 1940; but unlike us, the Mexicans haven’t had a lot of wars lately. Mostly because we’ve been behaving our asses, sorta, comparatively anyway.

Heather looked up. The West Coast was bright red from Bellingham to San Diego. Red was now spilling down Baja, spreading east over the deserts and mountains, and racing around the northern head of the Gulf of California. She was holding her breath, as if somehow she could hear a shot or an explosion from here.

A note popped up on her screen to say that the Mexican Army should soon have a complete report on the radars that were down. So far all reports were of people not getting the word to defer scheduled downtime; more pale green curves popped up along the west side of Baja.

At first, Samuelson hadn’t even been sure that the dark area coming over the horizon was land, but now below him, it was not just land, but a place he knew. From the air, the Bay of Sebastian Vizcaino has a distinct hooked-curve shape that is easy to pick out, and because buildable land is scarce along its shores, the town of Guerrero Negro sits in a distinct, unusual position north of and above the bay. Just south, the Baja Highway cuts away from the Pacific to the Sea of Cortez. Guerrero Negro is a major ecotourist jumping-off point for whale watching and for the Vizcaino Desert Biosphere Reserve. Samuelson had passed through a dozen times in his twenties and a few since then with Kim, especially during the early, traveling years of their marriage.