Complicity spread like a brown, stinking cloud through the traumatized rump of a Congress and Senate who were themselves the survivors of a lethal attack on the Capitol. WARBUCKS had insured that the opposition would vote the way they were told; the PAPUA bill was as efficient an enabling act as had been seen anywhere in the world since 1933. A few dissenters—pacifists and peaceniks mostly—spoke out against the far-reaching surveillance and monitoring regime, but the press and the public were in no mood to put up with their rubbish about the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments; with the nation clearly under attack, who cared if a few whining hippie rejects talked themselves into a holiday in Club Fed? Better that than risk them giving aid and comfort to enemy infiltrators with stolen nukes. Rolling out the new identity-card system would take a couple of years, and until it was
in place there'd always be the risk that the person walking past you in the street was a soldier of the invisible enemy. An eager Congress voted an ever-increasing laundry list of surveillance and control orders through with unanimous consent, each representative terrified of being seen to be weak on security.
And when the president went before the House Armed Services Committee in secret session to present certain legal opinions and request their imprimatur upon his war plans—the full House having already voted to declare war on whoever had attacked the capital city—nobody dared argue that they were excessive.
Midmorning in Gloucestershire, England. It was a bright day at Fairford, and behind the high barbed-wire–topped fence the air base was a seething hive of activity. Officially a British RAF base, Fairford had for decades now provided a secure forward operating base for USAF aircraft staging out to the Arabian Gulf. Newly upgraded to provide a jumping-off point for operations in Iraq, boasting recently upgraded fuel bunkers and a runway so long that it was designated as a Space Shuttle transatlantic abort landing strip, for three weeks Fairford had been playing host to the B52s of the Fifth Bomb Wing, USAF.
The Clan couldn't reach them in England, ran the official thinking. Not without international travel on forged documents.
Now they were queueing up on the taxiways: The aircraft of the Fifth Bomb Wing had been ordered to fly home. But first they were going to make a little detour.
For the past week, C17s had been flying in nightly from Stateside, carrying anonymous-looking low-loaders, which were driven to the bomb storage cells and unloaded under the guns of twitchy guards. And for the past two days technicians had been double- and triple-checking the weapons, nervously working through the ringbound manuals. Yesterday there'd been a hiatus; but in the evening the ordnance crews had turned out again, and this time they were moving the bombs out to the dispersal bays, under guard. Finally, around midnight, a last C17 arrived, carrying a group of specialists and a trailer that, over the following hours, made the rounds of the readying air wing.
Nobody outside the base saw a thing. The British authorities could take a hint; the small and dispirited huddle of protesters, camped by the front gate to denounce the carpet-bombers of Baghdad, had been rounded up in a midnight raid, hauled off to police cells under the Terrorism Act, to be held for weeks without counsel or charge. The village nearby was cowed by a military police presence that hadn't been seen since the height of the Troubles: Newspaper editors received discreet visits from senior police officers that left them tight-lipped and shaken. Fairford, to all intents and purposes, had vanished from the map.
At 11:00 A.M. Zulu time, the first of thirty-six B52H Stratofortresses ran its engines up to full throttle and began its takeoff roll. It was a hot day, and the huge jet's wing tanks were gravid with jet fuel; it climbed slowly away, shaking the ground with a bellowing thunder like the onrushing end of the world.
The Atlantic Ocean was wide, and the jet streams blowing west-to-east over Ireland slowed the bombers as they climbed towards their cruising altitude of forty-eight thousand feet, high above the air corridors used by the regular midmorning stream of airliners heading west from the major European and Asian hubs. The operations planners had seen no reason to warn or divert those airliners; when CARTHAGE was complete they would, if anything, be safer.
Over the next seven hours the BUFFS shadowed the daily commuter herd, tracking along the great circle route that took them just south of Greenland's icy hinterlands before turning south towards Newfoundland and then on towards Maine. As they neared the coast, the bombers diverged briefly from the civil aviation corridor, skirting around Canadian airspace and then flying parallel to the regular traffic, but farther east, staying over deep water for as long as possible. It was more than just the diplomatic nicety of keeping aircraft engaged on this mission out of foreign airspace: If anything should go catastrophically wrong, better that the cargo should ditch in the Atlantic waters than scatter over land.
As they passed the southernmost end of Nova Scotia, the bombers finally turned west. The final encrypted transmission came in: Meteorological conditions over the target were perfect. Downstairs from the pilot and copilot, the defensive-systems operators were busy at last, running the activation checklist on their ARMBAND units—gray boxes, bolted hastily to the equipment racks lining the dark cave of the bomber's lower deck—and the differential GPS receivers to which they were connected by raw, hand-soldered wiring looms. Meanwhile, their offensive systems operators were running checklists of their own; checklists that required the pilot and copilot's cooperation, reading out numbers from sealed envelopes held in a safe on the flight deck.
A hundred miles due east of Portland, the bomber crews completed their checklists. It was nearing three o'clock in the afternoon on the eastern seaboard as they lined up. At a range of fifty miles, the largest city in Maine was spread out before them, glittering beneath the cloudless summer sky. An observer on the ground who knew what they were looking at—one with very sharp eyes, or a pair of binoculars—would have seen a loosely spaced queue of aircraft, cruising in echelon far higher than normal airliners. But there were no such observers. Nor did the civilian air traffic control have anything to say in the presence of the FBI agents who had dropped in on them an hour ago.
Overhead without any fuss, the bombers were going out.
Another day, another world.
In the marcher kingdoms of the North American eastern seaboard, life went on. A frontal system moving in from the north was bringing cooler, denser air southeast from Lake Ontario, and a scattering of high cloud cover warned of rainfall by evening. The daily U2 reconnaissance overflight had reported a strong offshore breeze blowing, carrying dust and smoke out to sea; it was expected to continue for at least twenty-four hours.
The wheat harvest was all but over, and rye, too; the peasants were still laboring with sickle and adze in their strip fields, and the granaries were filling, but an end to toil was in sight. Their lords and masters busied themselves with the summer hunt, wild boar and deer fat and heavy; the season of late-summer parties was in swing, as eligible daughters were paraded around before their fathers' friends' sons, and barons and dukes sought surcease from the stink of the cities by touring their estates and the houses of their vassals.
There was quiet unrest too. Among the hedge-lords, whispered rumor spoke of the upstart tinker families becoming absent neighbors. Houses were mysteriously empty, houses that had weathered the campaign by the late pretender and survived the subsequent wave of murders that had engulfed the Clan. Some spoke of strangeness; families with children sent away, the parents' bright-eyed cheer covering some grim foreboding. Rumors of tinker Clansmen in their cups maundering about the