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  Whoever was responsible for starting the bomber war that led to the American Holocaust and the attack on Ryazan, McLanahan or Gryzlov, was debatable and probably pointless, but Gryzlov was definitely not an innocent bystander. A former commanding general of Russian long-range bomber forces, he had responded to an almost insignificant attack on Russian air defense sites by unleashing nuclear warheads and killing thousands of Americans in a sneak attack. These were not the actions of a sane man. When McLanahan captured a Russian air base in Siberia and used it to stage attacks on Russian mobile ballistic-missile sites, Gryzlov ordered another nuclear cruise-missile attack . . . but this time targeting his own Russian air base! His obsession with killing McLanahan resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Russians at Yakutsk, but McLanahan escaped and killed Gryzlov several hours later by bombing Gryzlov’s alternate and supposedly secret command post.

  “Give me the urn and the other items, Colonel,” Chirkov insisted. “I will return them at the appropriate time, and I will explain that you acted out of extreme emotion and have been sent back to Moscow for grief counseling or something that will hopefully arouse a little bit of sympathy.”

  “With respects, sir, I will not,” Ilianov said in a toneless voice.

  Chirkov closed his eyes and shook his head. Ilianov was a brainless stooge of Gennadiy Gryzlov and would probably die before handing over the things he had stolen. “What will the president do with them, Colonel?” he asked wearily.

  “He said he wishes to place the urn on his desk and use it as an ashtray,” Ilianov said, “and perhaps pin McLanahan’s medals inside his commode whenever he urinates. He deserves nothing less than a proper place of honor.”

  “You are behaving like a child, Colonel,” Chirkov said. “I urge you to reconsider your actions.”

  “The first President Gryzlov was forced to respond to McLanahan’s aggression or face more attacks and more killing,” Ilianov said. “McLanahan’s actions may or may not have been authorized, but they were certainly sanctioned by President Thomas Thorn and his generals. This is but a small example of what President Gryzlov intends to do to restore honor and greatness to the Russian people.”

  “What else are you planning to do, Colonel?” Chirkov repeated. “I assure you, you have already done quite enough.”

  “The president’s campaign against the memory of General Patrick McLanahan has only just begun, Excellency,” Ilianov said. “He intends to destroy every institution of which McLanahan ever had any part. Instead of celebrating and memorializing the life of Patrick McLanahan, America will soon curse his name.”

  Chirkov’s encrypted cellular phone beeped, and he answered it, saying nothing, then terminated the call a few moments later. “The American secretary of state was notified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the robbery in Sacramento,” he said tonelessly. “Your henchmen will probably be arrested within the hour. They will talk eventually.” He half turned again in his seat. “You know that if the American FBI obtains a warrant from a federal judge, they can enter your premises in Washington, and because your activity was not an official act you can be arrested and prosecuted. Diplomatic immunity will not apply.”

  “I know, Excellency,” Ilianov said. “I did not really think the Americans could react so quickly, but I planned for this in case I was discovered. I have already arranged for a private jet to take me from Woodland, California, to Mexicali, and from there home via Mexico City, Havana, Morocco, and Damascus. Diplomatic security forces are standing by to assist with local customs.” He handed the consul a card. “Here is the address of the airport; it is not far from the freeway. Drop us off, and you can continue to the consulate in San Francisco, and we will be on our way. You can deny all involvement in this matter.”

  “What else do you have planned in this escapade of yours, Colonel?” Chirkov asked after he handed the card to the driver, who entered the address into the car’s GPS navigator. “I sense it is a lot more serious than a burglary.”

  “I will not jeopardize your diplomatic status or career by involving you any further in the president’s activities, Excellency,” Ilianov said. “But you will know it when you hear of the incidents, sir . . . I guarantee it.” He produced the aluminum urn from his large grocery bag, running his fingers across the three silver stars on the side and the shield of the U.S. Space Defense Force on the lid. “What a joke,” he muttered. “Russia has had a true space defense force for almost ten years, while this unit was never activated, except in McLanahan’s twisted brain. Why did we fear this man so much? He was nothing but a work of fiction, both alive and dead.” He hefted the urn experimentally, and a puzzled expression crossed his face. “You know, I have never seen cremated human remains before . . .”

  “Please, do not further desecrate the man’s remains,” Chirkov said. “Leave them alone. And reconsider leaving them with me. I can concoct some sort of story that does not implicate you, and the president’s anger will be directed toward myself, not you. Russian thieves and hooligans did the deed, but when they tried to sell them on the black market, we caught them and are holding them under arrest in the consulate. Sincere apologies, return of the artifacts, promises to prosecute those responsible, and an offer to pay to repair the damage and restore the columbarium should be sufficient to satisfy the Americans.”

  “I do not wish to implicate you any further, Excellency,” Ilianov repeated, “and I have no wish to return these things or restore that bastard’s monument to himself. Hopefully, having these things not properly interred will result in McLanahan’s soul wandering the universe for all eternity.”

  That, Chirkov thought, was exactly what he was afraid of.

  Ilianov hefted the urn once again. “It is much lighter than I thought,” he muttered, then twisted off the lid. “Let us see what the great General Patrick Shane McLanahan looks like after taking his last sauna bath at one thousand degrees Centigrade.”

  Chirkov did not turn to look, but stared straight ahead and fought to hide his disgust. But he soon became puzzled after several long moments of silence, and he turned to look over his shoulder . . .

  . . . to see the Russian air force colonel’s face as white as a consulate dinner tablecloth, his mouth open as if trying to speak. “Ilianov . . . ?” The colonel looked up, his eyes as round and big as saucers, and now Chirkov saw Korchkov’s face with an equally shocked expression—very, very unusual for such a highly trained security officer and assassin. “What is it?”

  Ilianov was stunned into silence, his mouth still hanging open. As he shook his head in utter disbelief, he slowly tilted the open urn toward Chirkov . . .

  . . . and that’s when the Russian ambassador could see that the urn was completely empty.

  ONE

  Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.

  —RAY BRADBURY

  MCLANAHAN INDUSTRIAL AIRPORT, BATTLE MOUNTAIN, NEVADA

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER

  “Is the guy asleep, Boomer?” the flight surgeon monitoring the crew’s physiological datalink radioed. “His heart rate hasn’t changed one bit since we put him on the monitors. Is he freakin’ dead? Check on him, okay?”

  “Roger,” Hunter “Boomer” Noble, the aircraft commander on this flight, replied. He left his seat, climbed back between the two side-by-side cockpit seats, walked through the airlock between the cockpit and cabin, and entered the small four-person passenger compartment. Unlike the more familiar orange full-pressure space suit worn by the two passengers on this flight, Noble’s tall, lanky, athletic body was covered in a skintight suit called an EEAS, or Electronic Elastomeric Activity Suit, which performed the same functions as a traditional space suit except it used electronically controlled fibers to compress the skin instead of pressurized oxygen, so it was much easier for him to move about the cabin than it was for the others.

  Noble, his mission commander and copilot, retired U.S. Marine Corps pilot Lieutenant Colonel Jessica “Gonzo” Faulkner, and
the two passengers were aboard an S-19 Midnight spaceplane, the second of three versions of the United States’ single-stage-to-orbit aircraft that had revolutionized space flight when the first, the S-9 Black Stallion, was made operational in 2008. Only three of the S-19s had been built, in favor of the larger experimental XS-29 Shadow spaceplanes. All versions of the spaceplanes could take off and land on runways built for commercial airliners, but each had special triple-hybrid engines that could transform from air-breathing supersonic turbofan engines to hypersonic supersonic ramjets to pure rocket engines capable of propelling the craft into Earth orbit.

  Boomer walked up to the first passenger and checked him over carefully before speaking. Through his space helmet’s visor he could see the passenger’s eyes were closed and his hands folded on his lap. The two passengers were wearing orange Advanced Crew Escape Suits, or ACES, which were full pressure suits designed for survival in case of a loss of pressurization in the passenger compartment, or even in open space.

  Yep, Boomer thought, this is one cool cucumber—his first trip into space and he was either sleeping or on the verge of it, as if he was on a wide-body airliner getting ready to take off for a vacation in Hawaii. His companion, on the other hand, looked normal for a first-time space passenger—his forehead glistened with sweat, his hands were clenched, his breathing rapid, and his eyes darted to Boomer, then out a window, then at his companion. Boomer gave him a thumbs-up and got one in return, but the man still looked very nervous.

  Boomer turned back to the first passenger. “Sir?” he asked via intercom.

  “Yes, Dr. Noble?” the first man replied in a low, relaxed, almost sleepy voice.

  “Just checking on you, sir. The flight doc says you’re too relaxed. You sure this is your first time in orbit?”

  “I can hear what they’re saying. And I don’t think I’d forget my first time, Dr. Noble.”

  “Please call me ‘Boomer,’ sir.”

  “Thank you, I will.” The man looked over at his companion, frowning at the man’s obvious nervousness. “Is Ground Control worrying at all about my companion’s vital signs?”

  “He’s normal for a Puddy,” Boomer said.

  “A what?”

  “A Puddy—a first-time astronaut,” Boomer explained. “Named after Don Puddy, the guy at NASA that used to give shuttle astronaut candidates the good news they’d been accepted to the astronaut training program. It’s natural to be supernervous, even for veteran astronauts and fighter jocks—if I may say so, sir, it’s kinda creepy to see someone as relaxed as you appear.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment, Boomer,” the man said. “How long before takeoff?”

  “The primary window opens in about thirty minutes,” Boomer replied. “We’ll finish the pretakeoff checks, and then I’ll have you come up to the cockpit and take the right seat for takeoff. Colonel Faulkner will be in the jump seat between us. We’ll have you go back to your seat here before we go hypersonic, but once we’re in orbit you can go back up into the right seat if you wish.”

  “I’m perfectly happy to stay here, Boomer.”

  “I want you to get the full effect of what you’re about to experience, and the cockpit is the best place for that, sir,” Boomer said. “But the G-forces are pretty strong as we go hypersonic, and the jump seat isn’t stressed for hypersonic flight. But when you unbuckle to come back up to the cockpit, sir, that will be a moment you’ll never forget.”

  “We’ve been hooked up to oxygen for an awfully long time, Boomer,” the passenger asked. “A few hours at least. Will we have to stay on oxygen on the station?”

  “No, sir,” Boomer replied. “Station’s atmospheric pressure is a little lower than sea-level pressure on Earth or the cabin pressure on the spaceplane—you’ll feel as if you’re at about eight thousand feet, similar to cabin pressure on an airliner. Breathing pure oxygen will help purge inert gases out of your system so gas bubbles won’t lodge in your blood vessels, muscles, your brain, or joints.”

  “The ‘bends’? Like scuba and deep-sea divers can get?”

  “Exactly, sir,” Boomer said. “Once we’re on station you can take it off. For those of us who do space walks, we go back to prebreathing for a few hours because the suits have an even lower pressure. Sometimes we even sleep in an airlock sealed up with pure oxygen to make sure we get a good nitrogen flush.”

  Takeoff was indeed thirty minutes later, and soon they were flying north over western Idaho. “Mach one, sir,” Boomer radioed back on intercom. “First time going supersonic?”

  “Yes,” the passenger said. “I didn’t feel anything abnormal.”

  “How about Mach two?”

  “We just went twice the speed of sound? That quickly?”

  “Yes, sir,” Boomer said, the excitement obvious in his voice. “I like to loosen up the ‘leopards’ at the beginning of every mission—I don’t want to find out at Mach ten or Mach fifteen that there might be a problem.”

  “ ‘Leopards’?”

  “My nickname for the hybrid turbofan-scramjet-rocket Laser Pulse Detonation Rocket System engines, sir,” Boomer explained.

  “Your invention, I believe?”

  “I was the lead engineer for a very large team of Air Force engineers and scientists,” Boomer said. “We were like little kids in a candy store, I swear to God, even when the shit hit the fan—we treated a huge ‘leopards’ explosion as if we tossed a firecracker into the girls’ lav in high school. But yes, my team developed the ‘leopards.’ One engine, three different jobs. You’ll see.”

  Boomer slowed the Midnight spaceplane down to midsubsonic speed and turned south over Nevada a short time later, and Jessica Faulkner came back to help the passenger into the mission commander’s seat on the right side of the cockpit, get strapped in, and plug her suit’s umbilical cord into a receptacle, and then she unfolded a small seat between the two cockpit seats and secured herself. “How do you hear me, sir?” Faulkner asked.

  “Loud and clear, Jessica,” the passenger replied.

  “So that was the ‘first stage’ of our three-stage push into orbit, sir,” Boomer explained over the intercom. “We’re at thirty-five thousand feet, in the troposphere. Eighty percent of Earth’s atmosphere is below us, which makes it easier to accelerate when it’s time to go into orbit. But our tanker has regular air-breathing turbofan engines, and he’s pretty heavy with all our fuel and oxidizer, so we have to stay fairly low. We’ll rendezvous in about fifteen minutes.”

  As promised, the modified Boeing 767 airliner emblazoned with the words SKY MASTERS AEROSPACE INC on the sides came into view, and Boomer maneuvered the Midnight spaceplane in position behind the tail and flipped a switch to open the slipway doors overhead. “Masters Seven-Six, Midnight Zero-One, precontact position, ready, ‘bomb’ first, please,” Boomer announced on the tactical frequency.

  “Roger, Midnight, Seven-Six has you stabilized precontact, we’re ready with ‘bomb,’ cleared into contact position, Seven-Six ready,” a computerized female voice replied.

  “Remarkable—two airplanes traveling over three hundred miles an hour, flying just a few feet away from one another,” the passenger in the mission commander’s seat remarked.

  “Wanna know what’s even more remarkable, sir?” Boomer asked. “That tanker is unmanned.”

  “What?”

  “Sky Masters provides various contract services for the armed forces all over the world, and the vast majority of their aircraft, vehicles, and vessels are unmanned or optionally manned,” Boomer explained. “There’s a human pilot and boom operator in a room back at Battle Mountain, watching us via satellite video and audio feeds, but even they don’t do anything unless they have to—computers do all the work, and the humans just monitor. The tanker itself isn’t flown by anybody but a computer—they load a flight plan into the computer, and it flies it from start-taxi to final parking without any human pilots, like a Global Hawk reconnaissance plane. The flight plan can be changed if necessar
y, and it has lots of fail-safe systems in case of multiple malfunctions, but the computer flies the thing all the way from start-taxi to engine shutdown back at home base.”

  “Amazing,” the passenger said. “Afraid your job will be given to a computer someday, Dr. Noble?”

  “Hey, I’d help them design the thing, sir,” Boomer said. “Actually, the Russians have been sending Soyuz and unmanned Progress cargo vessels up to the International Space Station for years, and they even had a copy of the space shuttle called Buran that did an entire space mission unmanned. I think I’d rather have a flight crew if I was flying into orbit on a Russian spacecraft, but in a few years the technology will be so refined that passengers would probably never notice.”

  As the passenger watched in absolute fascination, the spaceplane glided up under the tanker’s tail, and a long boom steered by small wings lowered from under the tail down toward the spaceplane. Guided by green flashing director lights and a yellow line painted under the tanker’s belly, Boomer moved forward under the tail until the green director lights went out and two red lights illuminated.

  “How do you tell when you’re in the right position, Boomer?” the passenger asked.

  “There’s a certain ‘picture’ between the tanker’s belly and the windscreen frame that you learn to recognize,” Boomer replied. “Not very scientific, but it works every time. You get a feel for it and recognize if you’re too close or too far away, even at night.”