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PART II

AFTERMATH

Rawley stood in the parking lot, the scene around him one of chaos. As the wail of approaching fire engines grew louder people poured out of the hospital. Somewhere above him a helicopter circled the building. People were shouting, pointing to the smoke and flames billowing from the sev­enth floor.

Nearby a group of onlookers gathered around two paramedics as they worked on someone, while two others lay sprawled on the concrete, their lifeless bodies covered from the waist up by a single white coat.

Amongst the confusion of voices someone called Montoya’s name. Rawley pushed his way through the crowd to the spot where the medics were helping the surviving gunshot victim onto a stretcher.

“What’s he saying?” he asked. “What about Montoya?”

“They took her,” someone said.

“Someone kidnapped the President of Mexico.”

“They’ve got her!” a third person added excitedly.

Suddenly he understood what had happened. The group Rawley fol­lowed into Mercy had come for Montoya. Kirby must have brought her out to the hospital, and they had followed.

He bent down beside the paramedics. “Estaba Richard Kirby contigo?” he said to Montoya’s bodyguard. “Él fue a encontrar la.”

“Si. Él se vino con nosotros.”

Kirby had been with them. But where was he now?

A voice rose above the chatter of the crowd. “What’s this guy up to?”

Rawley turned to see an unarmed security guard in a brown uniform staring up at the roof. He held an arm above his head to block the glare from the street lamps. Rawley followed his line of sight to the top of the building and saw the helicopter. It was hovering just above the roof.

“He can’t land there,” the guard said.

Rawley went over to him, thinking that a medevac unit was bringing someone in to the hospital. “Why not?” he asked.

“On the top of the building?” the guard said shaking his head. “There’s no place to put a chopper down up there. The helipad’s on the roof of the second floor.”

The guard was right. Rawley remembered having seen the rings of the helipad below him from the sixth floor. “Then what’s he doing?”

As they watched, the helicopter swung away from the main building and moved out over the walkway. Now they caught sight of a figure through the smoke — someone was standing on the roof of the stairwell tower waving the chopper in toward him.

“Where’d he come from?” the guard said. “He shouldn’t be up there!” He grabbed at a walkie-talkie on his hip.

It was difficult to see much from the parking lot. Rawley lost sight of the figure for a moment. When he saw him again, the person was carrying something over his shoulders. Not something, he realized. Somebody.

“Is that Montoya?” he wondered aloud. But even as he said it, a more frightening possibility suggested itself.

“We’ve got a guy on top of the west tower,” the guard spluttered into his walkie-talkie. “Get someone up there. Fast!” He turned to Rawley. “That ain’t Montoya,” he said. “The guy who grabbed her went out the gate in one of those four-wheel drives parked here. I know. I saw them go.”

Rawley stiffened as the figure on the roof lumbered across to the heli­copter. It was in the way he moved… Rawley recognized the man’s gait. He had seen it on the bridge when he had gone to Cassie’s aid. The big fellow in the overcoat. The phony Dr. Price.

“Cassie,” Rawley said, his voice a bare whisper.

He watched despairingly as the helicopter touched the roof, collected its passengers, and then climbed back into the air, the black sky above framing its red underbelly. Then it banked eastward, swooped over the lot, and vanished into the city skyline.

FREEWAY

The Navigator moved effortlessly amongst the freeway traffic. Kirby drove south along the I-805, with one eye on the red markers blinking on the dash. He had yet to spot the other car, but he knew he was close.

He had decided to hang back. The markers on the road map showed that Montoya was less than twenty seconds ahead of him. He needed to maintain his distance. Getting too close right now would only serve to give him away. He needed to wait until… Until what? Kirby hadn’t thought things through yet. At least if he stayed with the car up ahead he would know where to send help once it reached its destination. He could do that much, couldn’t he?

It was starting to rain, the windshield was spotting. Kirby flicked on the wipers and looked around again for a phone. But the car didn’t appear to have one. Montoya’s drivers must have carried their own. Damn.

The rain grew heavier as he wondered how he was going to reach someone. If he stopped at a pay phone he risked losing track of Montoya. The only thing he could do was keep going.

On the display, Montoya’s car turned off the freeway at Telegraph Canyon Road and headed east. Kirby was surprised. Telegraph Canyon turned into Otay Lakes Road; Montoya was being driven out toward his own home.

He thought about Cassie — about how happy he was that she hadn’t been in her room when Montoya’s entourage had come under attack. Wherever she had got to, he was sure, Rawley had been with her. She had been kept from harm’s way, and for that he was thankful.

Montoya’s car remained on Otay Lakes Road. Kirby passed Eastlake Parkway, then the golf course across from his house. By now the number of cars ahead of him had thinned out. He could see three, the furthest of which probably carried Montoya. As they approached a strip of land be­tween the Upper and Lower Otay Lakes her car turned right, leaving the main road. Kirby checked the orange display and saw a single wavy line that wound south along the edge of Lower Otay Lake. It stopped abruptly at the bottom of the lake, the only route out the road itself going in.

He drove to the top of the road, pulled over, and cut his lights. It ap­peared to be a deserted stretch of road. If he drove down it with his head­lights on he’d almost certainly be detected. Instead, he lowered the driver’s window and checked that he could see the edge of the asphalt without using his lights. He could; the wet surface of the road glistened in the available light.

He turned off the main road and slowly started down.

Halfway down the road Montoya’s signal stopped moving on the display. Or if it was moving, it was moving slowly. Perhaps she had left the vehicle and was now walking, he thought.

When he came within a few hundred meters of her transmitter, Kirby pulled off to the side of the road and stopped the car. It was still raining, but it would be safer to approach on foot.

He set off down the road, rounding one curve, then another.

Finally he came to a gate. A sign stretched over the top of it announcing the entrance to the San Diego Olympic Training Center. It seemed to be closed.

A steep driveway rose away from the entrance. He had to climb this first, and then a muddy hill at the top of it, before he could see the layout of the Center. The buildings and training grounds were dark, the parking lots empty. But he saw the car. It was parked on the opposite side of an open field, beneath a large building.

Kirby jogged down the side of the hill.

At the bottom he headed out across the field. But before getting even halfway his beeper went off. Someone was trying to contact him. Rawley, he thought, reaching for the pager in his pocket. He stopped and checked it. He was right. The contact number had a 294 prefix, which he recog­nized as belonging to the hospital. Now he was more eager than ever to get to a phone.

He came off the grass and climbed up to the road that led to the build­ing he’d seen. It turned out to be a gymnasium. The abandoned car was parked next to stairs going up to the second level. Kirby was about to go up when he noticed a cluster of pay phones beneath them. He went over to them, digging inside his wallet for change. He found two quarters and dialed the number.

A Mercy Hospital receptionist answered.

Kirby cupped his hand over the receiver and spoke quietly. “This is Richard Kirby. Someone paged me from this number just a few minutes ago.” He gave the woman his pager number. “I think my wife may have been trying to contact me. Can you — ”

“I’m paging the caller now, sir…”

With a mechanical click his call was transferred. Music from a Beetho­ven symphony floated down the line. Kirby poked his head out and looked around. It was raining hard now, the water splashing off the stairs above him.

“Richard? Is that you?”

Kirby turned back to the wall. It was a man’s voice, but he had trouble placing it.

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Eugene. Listen, Richard. A lot of people are trying to find you right now. Where are you?”

It was Anders. What’s he doing at the hospital? Kirby thought. He checked his watch and saw that he had been gone over half an hour. “Have you seen Cassie?” he said. “She had a room on the seventh floor.” His eyes screwed shut as he remembered the explosion that had torn through the west wing. “Wait. They would have put her somewhere else.”

For a moment Kirby thought the line had gone dead. “Eugene?”

“She’s all right, Richard.”

“Are you sure?” Kirby felt tremendous relief. “She’s OK?”

“Yes,” Anders said. “I was just talking to her. She’s worried about you. We all are… Richard. Do you have any idea where President Montoya is?”

Kirby looked up at the stairs again, listening through the rain, his ears tuned for some half-heard noise. “I’m out at the Arco Training Center,” he told Anders. “I followed them here. I think the guy who grabbed her has a gunshot wound to the chest. He’s hurt, but I don’t know how bad. The car’s parked outside the gymnasium.”

“You’re out at the Otay Reservoir?”

“You know where it is?”

“Yeah,” Anders said. “I’ve practiced out there.”

It took a moment for Kirby to realize that by “practice,” Anders meant his discus throwing.

“Tell Cassie I’m all right, would you?” Kirby told Anders that he needed to hang up, so that he could call the police.

“No, no. Don’t bother,” Anders said. “I can do it for you. There’s a detective here at the hospital. Looks like he’s handling the case. I’ll talk to him. Meanwhile, you stay put and don’t do anything stupid. OK?”

“Fine. Just get someone out here.”

Kirby hung up. By now he was shivering. He was cold and wet, and even though he had promised to stay put, he needed to keep moving to stay warm. He went over and looked quickly at the car. It was locked. He went back to the building.

On a whim he climbed the stairs to the second level.

At the top was a walkway. He tried one door. Locked. He walked along and came to another. This one had part of a window pane broken out of it. The glass lay scattered on the wet concrete. He tried the door. It opened, and he stepped inside.

Kirby found himself at the top of a darkened auditorium. Rows of seats stretched down to the lower level. At the bottom was a stage, and to one side of it, an open door. Light filtered through from an illuminated hallway.

Moving quietly, Kirby descended through the auditorium toward the door.

NEGOTIATIONS

He had his back to her as he spoke on the phone, but she could hear his every word. All Montoya could do was watch, listen, and wait until he decided to loosen the rope about her wrists. He had tied her hands together on the far side of a thick pipe which came down through the roof at the corner of the room. Only the gag in her mouth stopped her from hurling insults at him as she had in the car.

“Five million,” he was saying. “That’s right five… No. What the agreement was based on was you providing us with the right information. It was supposed to be straightforward… No, I’m telling you. She never turned up!” He was yelling into one of four phones which adorned the large basement office where he had brought her. “That’s right. We ended up at the hospital… Are you kidding me? They’re all dead.”

He turned back to stare at her.

She stared back. She had no trouble guessing who it was he was talking to. The traitorous dog!

“Because you cost me a bullet in my side. That’s why,” he said. “No. Listen to me. If you want the job completed you’ll wire the difference by the morning… Dead? No, of course not.”

He untangled the phone line and brought the phone over to where she was standing. He put it down on a nearby desk and loosened her gag. “Say something.”

“Solano, you pig!” Montoya screamed. “I’ll see you in hell! You hear me? I’ll — ”

He pushed her gag back in place and picked up the phone.

“By nine in the morning,” he said. He walked back across the room. “Don’t worry. I’ll see to it. The president is dead. Just make sure the money’s there.”

He hung up, then turned to look at her. “How did you know it was him?”

Montoya’s eyes blazed. She turned away and faced the wall.

Kirby moved along the hall from door to door, checking the rooms. At the end he came to a stairwell leading from the basement below up to the next floor. He started up the stairs.

Somewhere above him he could hear rain hammering the roof of the gymnasium, its soft roar filling the stairwell. He could hear something else too. A rapid plink! plink! plink! He stopped and looked down. Coming up the stairs out of the dark was a figure dressed in black whose heavy boots made the same sort of sound Kirby had heard at the hospital. Apparently his bullet wound had not slowed him down any. And the ski mask he’d worn was gone.

A handsome clean-shaven Latino face appeared as the man he’d fol­lowed here threw his head back and looked up through the gap in the metal railing. Kirby’s adversary had stopped on the landing. “Who’s there?” he yelled out. “Identify yourself!”

Even in the shadowy lighting of the stairwell Kirby was able to make out the nozzle of the revolver that appeared beneath him. He turned and bolted up the stairs.

“Is that you, doc?”

Instead of opening out onto the next level the stairs continued up. Kirby was forced to keep climbing as the footsteps resumed beneath him.

“Man. That is you, isn’t it?”

The stairs ended at a door. Kirby grabbed at the handle, threw it open. The light from the stairwell picked out a narrow catwalk suspended over a dark void. A bank of heavy overhead lighting equipment ran the length of it. He stepped inside and quickly found himself in pitch darkness as the door closed automatically behind him. He was somewhere in the rafters of the gymnasium, high above the floor, and unable to see how to get down. He had no choice but to move toward the end of the catwalk.

The walkway rattled under his feet, the metallic clang! of his footsteps echoing through the empty space below him. He used the handrail to guide him, his brain calculating his position in relation to the illuminated seg­ment of the catwalk he had seen in the moments before the door had closed. He slowed as his certainty wavered about his knowledge of what lay beyond.

The dim stairwell seemed to flood the walkway with light as the door behind him opened again. Without hesitating, Kirby set off down the catwalk, running toward the shadow that stretched away from his feet. But within seconds he again found himself in the dark.

“Where are you going, Richard?” The sound of footsteps moving slowly along the walkway. “You think you can get down from this thing in the dark?”

Kirby remained silent. He continued moving backwards, feeling his way along the handrails. He wondered how high they were above the floor.

The gunman began talking to him in the dark. “You know what I can’t figure?” he said. “What a smart guy like you is doing chasing a man with a gun? You know, if I’d taken your wife, well, that I would understand. But this… It doesn’t concern you. Maybe your wife. Maybe your kids, even. But not you…”

My kids? Kirby thought.

The voice got closer. “At least they have Mexican blood…”

Kirby came to the end of the walkway. His hands touched a cool con­crete wall as he felt around for a way off.

“You’re not saying a lot, doc. You still there?”

He was moving slowly now, he was near.

Kirby searched frantically for a latch to another walkway. He tried to find the edge of a ladder, any means of escape. At the same time, he was feeling around for anything that he could use as a weapon. His hands stopped on something. A rounded surface. A panel jutting from the wall. Row upon row of switches.

Switches for what?

The boots stopped on the catwalk. “Sorry, Richard, but I believe this is where the two of us part company.”

Kirby held his breath, took a gamble, and tripped the switches. As he had hoped, the powerful lamps overhead lit up instantly, pouring blinding light down over the walkway. Kirby was prepared for it, but his assailant recoiled. Only for a moment, but long enough for Kirby to grab the hand­rails and kick out with his feet with all he had. He caught Montoya’s ab­ductor square in the chest, throwing him back against the opposite rails where he lost balance and went over. The revolver clattered on the catwalk not far from where Kirby landed on his side. Rolling over, he saw a hand clinging to the bottom handrail. Then the other hand appeared.

Kirby watched as the other man’s grip slowly weakened, his chest wound seemingly sapping him of strength.

“Help me,” he pleaded.

Kirby got to his feet. He kicked the gun further down the walkway and looked over the rails. Now he could see the floor of the gymnasium; it was well below them.

Kirby hesitated, and then he leaned down over the handrails. “Give me your hand.”

But the moment he extended his arm, the other man sprung to life. He leaped up and grabbed Kirby’s sweater at the shoulder. The sudden weight on his upper body dragged Kirby off his feet, and he was pulled over the rails. He didn’t have time to stop himself. He was in the air, falling, grab­bing for anything he could find.

A last tug at his shoulder, and the other man released his grip, hoping to get back to the rails. But Kirby caught his wrist in mid air and held on. The next moment, the two of them were tumbling uncontrollably in the space above the floor. Kirby saw lights in his eyes, a blue floor mat. He was turning in the air. The roof again. And then a blinding pain in his back as he struck the floor and everything went black.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1

GULF OF MEXICO

Neil Catalano was roused from sleep by the unwelcome sound of a fist hammering on his door. He rolled over in his bunk and checked the alarm clock. It was five to five in the morning. Hell, he thought — the alarm had failed to go off and he was due up top for the 5 A.M. shift.

The pounding resumed on the door.

“I’m coming!” he yelled.

Catalano was a rig foreman for Starfield Atlantic, a Houston-based oil company specializing in offshore oil and gas recovery. Catalano was working off Starfield Atlantic’s Trident Spar IV, a deep-water drilling and processing oil platform perched over the edge of the Campeche Shelf in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil and gas was drawn from fourteen separate wells to the top of a 200-meter-high steel cylinder that floated vertically in the water one kilometer off the sea floor. But news of an approaching hurri­cane the day before had spurred talk that SA might be forced to shut down the operation and evacuate the crew to the mainland.

Catalano dressed and hurried upstairs. He passed Trident’s drilling superintendent on the way, a crusty Scotsman by the name of McEwan whose deep sea oil exploits in the North Sea were near legendary. McE­wan looked grim as he strode past Catalano. “Meet me in the doghouse,” he said.

“Have to wait,” Catalano said, starting up a steep ladder. “I’m going on the deck.”

“Forget that,” McEwan said. “This is more important.”

“But I’m already — ”

“Jesus. You haven’t heard, have you?”

Catalano stopped on the ladder. “Heard what?”

Catalano followed McEwan into his office. McEwan switched on a small TV set on top of a refrigerator. “Televisa broke the news about ten last night,” he said. “If it’s true, that hurricane may be the least of our problems.”

“Do they know for sure she’s dead?”

McEwan fiddled with the antenna. “For our sakes, I bloody hope not.” The picture cleared and they were looking at a live broadcast from outside the National Palace in Mexico City. McEwan pointed at the screen. “Not if we’re going to have to deal with this guy.”

Soldiers of the Mexican army were keeping the press at bay as Sergio Solano spoke in the square. He seemed to have assumed the presidency in Montoya’s absence.

“Who elected him?” Catalano said.

“He did, by the sound of it.”

Instead of calling for calm, Solano was fanning the flames by strongly hinting at an orchestrated U.S. conspiracy to remove Montoya from power.

“What’s he talking about?” Catalano said. He understood now why McEwan was worried. The Trident was only one of eight international rigs to have entered the Campeche region since Montoya’s privatization of the Mexican oil monopoly Pemex. With her abduction the political stability that allowed companies like Starfield Atlantic to operate in the area could no longer be counted on. Catalano and McEwan were a long way from home, and the prospect of having Solano spew his absurd “conspiracy” theories to an emotionally vulnerable Mexican public made both men nervous.

On TV, Solano described as “brutal and cowardly” the slaying of Ramirez — now confirmed to be dead — and the bodyguards traveling with him. He stressed that Montoya also was believed to have been butchered at the hands of her assailants, promised to find those responsible, and swore “on her blood” to avenge her slaughter.

“How can he say that?” Catalano said. “He doesn’t even know if she’s dead yet.”

“Aye,” McEwan said raising an eyebrow. “For someone who’s suppos­edly suffered a loss, the man does seem somewhat eager to bury her.” He exchanged a glance with Catalano. “Perhaps a little too eager.”

When Catalano came back outside the dawn sky at the horizon was a mass of purple cloud tinged at the top with pink, and the gusting air from the water’s surface chilled his face.

A yellow flame burned at the end of the flare bridge, indicating that the platform was running as usual despite the problems on the mainland. Hopefully they would be able to sit tight and ride out the coming storm. But Montoya was another matter. With her out of the picture, life could easily turn difficult for the Trident’s crew of ninety. All oil and gas ex­tracted by the platform was first processed on-site before being piped along the ocean floor to the company’s petrochemical refinery at Cosolea­caque. The problem was the Cosoleacaque complex had been acquired from Pemex in the break up and was subject to the vagaries of government cooperation for its day to day operation. The Trident depended on the refinery’s smooth running to keep its pipeline open. Without it they would quickly be out of business.

Catalano descended to the deck, but stopped when he heard the familiar patter of rotor blades being carried on the wind. A chopper? he thought.

His surprise stemmed not from the presence of a helicopter so far from land — the company ran several decommissioned Sikorsky Eagles between its rigs daily — but at the hour. It was barely light yet. He was even more surprised when he spotted, not one, but eight helicopters sweeping in toward the rig. They flew in a V formation and he knew right away who they belonged to.

Catalano swore and started back up the stairs.

One of the trailing helicopters broke away from the formation and descended toward the helipad above Catalano’s head. McEwan was al­ready at the top of the stairs when Catalano got there.

“What do you think?” the foreman said as they watched the army chop­per drop toward them.

“What do I think?” McEwan said. “I think the shit’s headed for the bloody fan, son.”

The big Sikorskies on route from the mainland were MH-60Ks — special operations aircraft equipped with terrain-following/avoidance radar, a missile warning receiver, radio and infra-red jammers, and a variety of both air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles. In addition, each chopper carried eleven fully armed troops ready to disembark the moment they reached their individual destinations.

The Trident was the first on their list.

“Go!” McEwan yelled as he prepared to lock the outer door. “I’ll see if I can’t slow the bastards down.”

Catalano ducked inside the doorway. He sprinted down the hall, turned right, sprinted down another. He slid down a ladder. Started running again.

He came to the communications room and looked inside for a radio operator. But it was empty. He leaped down the hall and barged into a sleeping compartment. Shook a communications engineer from sleep.

“You know how to put out a Mayday call?”

“Mayday?” the youth said as he tried to hide his eyes from the overhead light. “Are you kidding me?”

“Don’t bother dressing,” Catalano said. “I want that radio going in thirty seconds! Less if you can do it.”

“What’s going on?”

“Thirty seconds!”

Catalano turned, ran back down the hall, stepped outside onto an obser­vation deck. Above him the helicopter touched down on the platform. Immediately the doors flew open and armed soldiers began jumping out. He counted four of them before he stepped back inside, pulled the door to, and locked it. When he got to the communications room the operator he had roused from sleep was shaking his head in confusion.

“I don’t understand it,” he said scanning the spectrum. “There’s inter­ference on every setting.” He offered his headphones to Catalano, who took it and listened in. A loud buzzing noise confirmed his fears.

“They’re jamming us,” he said handing back the headphones.

“Who?”

“Just find me a way to get a message out,” Catalano urged. “And do it fast!”

The radioman fiddled with the settings again.

Where were they? Catalano thought nervously. He expected to see an armed soldier burst through the door at any moment.

“Here. Try this. Can’t guarantee anyone will here us, but — ”

Catalano grabbed the microphone.

“Mayday. Mayday,” he began. “This is a possible Mayday…”

USS RONALD REAGAN

“Here. You take a listen. It came in about twenty minutes ago.”

“Twenty minutes?”

“It was on the edge of the band. I just got to it.”

The petty officer leaned over the radioman’s desk in the communica­tions room of the USS Ronald Reagan, as it floated east of the Bahamas and San Salvador. They both grew quiet as the tape was replayed.

“This is a possible Mayday. This is foreman Neil Catalano of the Tri­dent Spar IV. We are a U.S. offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, at west ninety-two degrees twenty-five minutes, north twenty degrees, twenty-nine. Please alert U.S. authorities that uninvited Mexican soldiers bearing arms are currently boarding our platform. I repeat, this call is a Mayday. This is Neil Catalano of the Trident Spar. I wish to advise– ”

The transmission ended mid-sentence.

“That’s it,” the radio operator said. “It just stops.”

“Twenty minutes ago would make it just after five. Get on the horn. See if you can raise them. Otherwise I’ll take it up to the CO.”

The junior man selected the same communications channel over which the message had been transmitted. “Trident Spar. Your transmission has been picked up by a U.S. warship. Please verify Mayday status. Over.”

No reply.

“Neil Catalano of the Trident oil rig, do you read this transmission? Over.”

At 5:35 A.M., while returning from a pre-dawn exercise over the waters of the Cayman Islands, Captain Kristin “Bugsmasher” Miller received new flight instructions. She was asked to turn her aircraft due west to investi­gate the possible armed seizure of a U.S. oil platform in the Gulf of Mex­ico. At the time she was no more than a hundred kilometers north of Hurricane Iris as the eye of the storm was being funneled toward the mouth of the Gulf at an unimpressive rate of eighteen kilometers per hour.

For Miller, who had been returning to the aircraft carrier Reagan in the ship’s only F-22N Raptor, the hurricane seemed about as mobile as one of the islands below her. Even the Reagan was capable of significantly out­pacing it if needed.

Not so easy for Miller to dismiss was the uneasy feeling that, at least when it came to oil rigs, she lacked the necessary reconnaissance training. Miller had graduated from Florida Institute of Technology with a master’s in electrical engineering. She was thirty-four years old, had been through test pilot school at Pax River, and for most of the last three years had spent her time flying role-modified F-18s for the Navy as part of its aviation reorganization program. The exception to this was the last two weeks, during which time Miller had been asked to demonstrate how the new F-22N was everything the Secretary of Defense had claimed it would be. She was a first-rate pilot, but she had never been briefed for visual inspection of an oil rig.

Neither had her flight companion Lieutenant Lynne “Paddles” Philips, who was trailing Miller by five seconds in an F-18. They were simply the only two in the air within an hour of the oil rig’s location.

Miller cued Philips and the planes turned together. They had already been heading toward the Yucatan Channel to avoid overflying Cuba when the order to check out the oil platform had come in. Now they flew on a direct westerly setting, away from the sun.

Miller looked over her left shoulder and saw the comforting sight of Philips’ contrail. They were presently flying at a height of eight kilometers and would add another two to put them beyond visual range by the time they passed over Mexico’s sparsely populated Yucatan Peninsula.

“Bugsmasher, this is Paddles. Where’d you hide the twinkie bars? I’m starting to nibble on my mike over here. Over.”

Philips was the joker of the two. She once said that if the Navy ever reversed its decision to allow women to fly off carriers she would try out for her own sitcom. “I mean, if Ellen Degeneres can do it, why not me?” The only thing Philips seemed to enjoy more than flying was getting Miller to laugh. Miller was her trial ABC audience.

“Paddles, this is Bugsmasher. Don’t worry, if I come across a twinkie big enough to fill that cakehole of yours, I’ll send it your way.”

“Gee,” Philips said, unfazed by the insult. “Guess you must have eaten your mike, huh? Because I haven’t heard one of those cakehole remarks of yours all morning. Nope. Can’t hear a thing from over here…”

Miller ignored Philips as she wondered about the target.

Her radio crackled. “Bugsy? Little buddy. Where’d you go?”

“Listen,” Miller said. “Do you know what we’re really looking for?”

“You mean, what does an oil rig look like? Don’t fret, I’m sure we’ll recognize it. Bunch of steel pipes. Looks like one of those contraptions the dentist sticks in your mouth. But smaller…”

Miller laughed. “Copy that.”

CAMPECHE SHELF, 6:25 A.M.

In the fifty minutes it took them to fly west, the hurricane formation was left far behind. By the time Miller and Philips cleared the Yucatan Penin­sula they had needed only to made a small bearing change to bring them on course for ‘Sea Crab’ — the radio-name the Reagan’s CIC had designated for the unnamed oil platform.

“Maestro, this is Banjo Zero-Zero-Three,” Miller said reverting to the code names of the morning’s exercise. “We have Sea Crab in sight. Ma­neuvering for south-side flyby now. Acknowledge. Over.”

Miller was just over three nautical miles from the target, with Philips flying parallel to her one mile south.

“Zero-Zero-Three. What’s your fuel state?”

Miller looked at her fuel gauge. She had barely enough to make it back to the carrier without midair refueling along the way. “I don’t know,” she said. “Can this thing swim? I’ve got about ninety minutes of fuel left.”

“Banjo, you’re cleared for one pass only. Keep your eyes peeled.”

“Roger.”

Miller would have preferred not to be the one providing reconnaissance intelligence on Sea Crab. She would have preferred it if they had used one of those high-flying U-2s to snap their pictures from overhead, rather than send her in there with nothing more to rely on than her eyesight and mem­ory. The F-22N was the Navy’s most sophisticated fighting machine, with a top speed in excess of 800 knots at sea level, and here she was, coming in at 180 knots to maximize her intelligence take, and feeling uneasy that there wasn’t a big carrier deck beneath her in case she happened to drop out of the sky.

Here goes nothing, she thought. She had dropped to within 200 meters of the water.

The plan was for Philips to make a more casual inspection as her F-18 passed the rig from further out. Miller would get a better look, but she would have less time to do it.

As she flew toward it, the yellow rig grew slowly before her eyes. Sea Crab was much larger than Miller expected. Bathed in a golden light which cut through the water, the structure of the massive flashlight-shaped spar could easily be made out beneath the waves.

“Maestro, Zero-Zero-Three reporting. I’m looking at the base of the platform now. We are negative for sea vessels on the eastern side… Nega­tive on a chopper. I see the pad now and it is empty. So far nothing to — ”

Suddenly on her side display, a circle with a solid red pentagon at its center appeared, indicating that an SAM radar had been switched on di­rectly ahead of the aircraft. An instant later a piercing tone filled the cockpit and all Miller’s displays went red as the missile early-warning system kicked in.

Miller looked back up with a mix of dread and amazement and saw a puff of white smoke appear in front of the oil rig. Jesus, she thought. “Missile launch,” an insistent female voice warned her automatically. Miller watched in horror as the smoke twisted around in a lazy clockwise loop.

“SAM launch!” Philips screamed over the radio.

The missile had been fired from somewhere beneath the platform deck, using a shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile launcher. Miller had little time to react. She pulled up hard on the control stick. The missile changed course too. But not quickly enough.

The missile barreled past beneath Miller as she powered into a steep climb almost directly over the rig. All she could see was the blue of the sky above her.

“Multiple missile launch,” the voice stated insistently in her head­phones.

“Missile in the air! Missile in the air!” Philips screamed over the top of it. “Kristin. Behind you!”

Miller scarcely had time to assimilate the information. She glanced at her defense display and saw red arrows rising toward her plane’s icon at the center of the screen.

Not like this! she thought. I don’t want to die like this!

Instinctively she dumped heat flares and chaff and banked hard to port, believing she could still divert the missiles from their target. But one re­mained locked onto her. It’s got me! she thought, reaching at last for the ejection seat lever. But by then it was already too late to make a difference.

It was still dark on the Pacific side of the U.S. when Kirby was dragged from the rear of a car. While the motor was left running he was propped up against a solid wall. The driver of the car had no difficulty ignoring his involuntary moans, as this had been going on for several hours and still Kirby had not fully regained consciousness. He had thought about admin­istering chloroform — there was a bottle in the glove compartment, next to which Montoya was sleeping — but decided against it. Too dangerous. Without supervision he might have choked on his own vomit, and that would not do at all. He needed Kirby alive if he was to be of any further use to him.

After straightening Kirby against the wall he stood upright again. A second look about the alley confirmed that they were alone. Satisfied, he returned to the vehicle and checked on the ropes he’d used to bind Mon­toya’s hands and feet. As a precaution he also checked her airway. He didn’t want her dead. Not yet.

When he was done he went around to his side of the car. He hopped in, checked his rearview mirror, and then backed slowly out of the alley.

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