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aloft, but, he had just learned an hour before, all of those were deployed up north. Today, there would be a fight. It would not be the sort of thing Aegis had been designed for, or quite what he’d been trained for, but that was the Navy for you.
The decoy group he ordered south. Their job was done for now. With the sun up, there would be no disguising what COMEDY was and where they were going, he thought.
“HOW SURE OF this are you?” POTUS asked. “Christ, I’ve been alone with the guy a hundred times!”
“We know,” Price assured him. “We know. Sir, it’s hard to believe. I’ve known Jeff on and off–”
“He’s the basketball guy. He told me who was going to win the NCAA finals. He was right. His point spread was right on.”
“Yes, sir.” Andrea had to agree with that, too. “Unfortunately, these items are a little hard to explain.”
“Are you going to arrest him?”
“We can’t.” Murray took that one. “It’s one of those situations where you know, or think you know, but can’t prove anything. Pat here had an idea, though.”
“Then let’s hear it,” Ryan ordered. His headache was back. No, that wasn’t right. The intervening, brief period without a headache had ended. Bad enough that he’d been told of the vague possibility that the Secret Service was compromised, but now they thought they had proof–no, worse, he corrected himself, not good enough for proof, just more fucking suspicion!–that one of the people trusted to be around him and his family was a potential assassin. Would this never end? But he listened anyway.
“Actually, it’s pretty simple,” O’Day concluded.
“No!” Price said immediately. “What if–”
“We can control that. There won’t be any real danger,” the inspector assured everyone.
“Hold it,” SWORDSMAN said. “You say you can smoke the guy out?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I actually get to do something instead of just sitting here like a goddamned king?”
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“Yes, sir,” Pat repeated.
“Where do I sign up?” Ryan asked rhetorically. “Let’s do it.”
“Mr. President–”
“Andrea, you’ll be here, right?”
“Well, yes, but–”
“Then it’s approved,” POTUS told her. “He doesn’t get near my family. I mean that. If he even looks at the elevator, you take him down yourself, Andrea, got that?”
“I understand, Mr. President. West Wing only.”
With that, they walked downstairs to the Situation Room, where Arnie and the rest of the national-security team were watching a map display on a large-screen TV.
“OKAY, LET’S LIGHT up the sky,” Kemper told the CIC crew. On command, Anzio and the other four Aegis ships flipped their SPY radars from standby to full radiated power. There was no percentage in hiding anymore. They were right under a commercial air route designated W-l 5, and any airline pilot could look down and see the small box of ships. When one did, he’d probably talk about it. The element of surprise had its practical limits.
In a second, the three big screens showed numerous air tracks. This had to be the busiest hunk of airspace outside O’Hare, Kemper thought. The IFF scan showed a flight of four F-16 fighters deployed northwest of his formation. There were six airliners aloft, and the day had scarcely started. Missile specialists ran practice tracks just to exercise the computers, but really the Aegis system was designed to be one of those supposedly all-powerful things that could sit still one second and raise hell the next. They’d come to the right place to do that.
THE FIRST I RAN IAN fighters to head into the sky that day were two aged F-14 Tomcats from Shiraz. The Shah had purchased about eighty of the fighters from Grumman in the 1970s. Ten could still fly, with parts cannibalized from all the others or procured on the world’s lively black market in combat-aircraft components. These flew southeast,
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overland to Bandar Abbas, then they increased speed and darted south to Abu Musa, passing just north of it, with the pilots driving and the backseaters scanning the surface with binoculars. The sun was plainly 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.
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THE U1RTOMCATS 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, STARF1GHTER, 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 hun-
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dred 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