The booth felt good and there were three cheesy bobbleheads and a couple cool T-shirts to linger about buying, so it was almost an hour before she got back on the road. Meanwhile, the wind under the Prius shifted, and nanoswarm blew across the parking lot and on into Rapid City itself; more than a hundred more trucks, bound all over the northern United States, were infected, along with four big transporters hauling wind-generator blades to Fort Collins, a Gray Liner bound for Winnipeg, and seven diesel-electric locomotives, three headed into the DME system and four for the old Great Northern. Within twenty-four hours, nanoswarm from Marshalene’s Prius would spread from Manitoba to northern California and Vancouver to Little Rock. It so happened that Jason’s eggs were among the most efficient ones out there, producing some of the fastest-reproducing nanoswarm, and Jason had been right all along; Marshalene’s car was perfect for the job. In any evolutionary system, tiny advantages become gigantic population shifts; it was nothing more than that.
ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES LATER. ABOVE ANGEL STADIUM. ANAHEIM. CALIFORNIA. 4:20 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Well, I guess I’m seeing the World Series, after all, Greg Redmond thought, circling Anaheim at forty-three thousand feet, all the higher the old A-10 could go. What he’d been told back in Arizona, while the ground crews ran around madly, was enough to scare the shit out of any sensible man with a wife and three small kids—phrases like get there ASAP, you’re already late, vitally important to obey all orders at once, and the single scariest phrase in the military lexicon: This is not a drill.
The Navy had the front line. Somewhere far out over the horizon, F-18 Super Hornets out of North Island NAS and LeMoore were scouting up and down the coast, using the hastily-given tactical callsign “Noseguard.” They were highly capable planes, each carrying more-than-good radar and a full array of long-range and visual-range missiles, but there weren’t many of them. Still, if the enemy designated “Bad Dreamliner” happened to come in through any of the territory the Super Hornets were covering, they had the tools for the job.
That was the scariest part. The CO had told them that there was “Unlimited authorization to destroy that plane.”
Greg’s buddy Nate had said, “Sir, I’m not clear. Unlimited authorization means—”
“Unlimited authorization means unlimited. Nothing is off-limits as long as that 787 gets destroyed before it can get to where it’s going. Use the Sidewinders, use the big gun, hell, use the Mavericks or ram the sonofabitch if you have to.” Greg had swallowed hard; the Mavericks were used to take out tanks, and it did not sound like the CO was kidding about ramming, either. “Everybody who is out on this mission—and they have called out everybody—is carrying the full suite of weapons. They are there for you to use. Of course, avoid collateral damage if you can, but if you can’t—destroy Bad Dreamliner. There’s no such thing as exceeding this order. Clear?”
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.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 7:55 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
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.