Threat Level Black

He was surprised to realize he was a little disappointed. He had no right to be: No doubt the men fighting the blaze down there were in every bit as much danger as he would have been, if not more. He pulled back gently on the stick, starting to recover.

“Iron Hawk, Falcon One is escorting this aircraft out of the restricted zone. Pilot appears lost,” said the F-16’s pilot.

Howe acknowledged. He switched the radar back to its standard settings; the F-16 and the private plane were at the top of the scan area, heading to the northwest and a small airfield where a squad’s worth of regular Army soldiers would be waiting along with local police and a federal marshal. The small plane’s pilot was about to spend several of the most uncomfortable hours of his life.

Howe cut back east, heading in the direction of Connecticut. The replacement F-16s were now on station. Howe checked in with the new pilots, one of whom he thought he knew from a temporary assignment in Alaska nearly a decade before.

Before he could ask, a civilian ground controller broke into the circuit.

“We have a landline threat, a phone call,” said the man, his words rushing together in his excitement. “A hijacking on Qual-Air Flight 111 out of Boston!”

The Viper commander acknowledged the communication calmly, then checked with his military ground controller. The Qual-Air flight was legitimate, a charter plane that had just taken off. The civilian controllers were still in the process of contacting the pilot to see what was going on, but there was no indication that the plane had been hijacked.

A hijacking?

More likely, a ruse intended to cover the real attack, thought Howe.

The airspace over the corridor was effectively locked down; controllers began holding takeoffs and diverting anything that might come even remotely close. The two F-16s on the ground in New Jersey took off. Viper flight began tracking north, one airplane on a direct intercept with the other hanging back in reserve.

Howe tracked southward over the Hudson River, certain that this was a trick. But where would the real attack come from?

The west, he thought, where there were plenty of places to launch the UAV. He banked ten thousand feet over the George Washington Bridge, turning in that direction. As he did, the radar buzzed with a contact forty miles beyond the clutter of the land. It was low, close to the water. Howe stared at the display, where the red triangle for the unidentified object glowed like a pinpoint in the long-range scan.

Probably another bird, he thought.

He waited for it to disappear from the screen.

It didn’t.

Chapter 6

Blitz nearly jumped when the phone rang. He glanced across the room at the President, then picked it up.

“Nothing new,” said Brott, the NSC military aide who was monitoring the situation from the Pentagon. “Civilian plane, false alarm.”

“Right,” said Blitz.

The Secret Service had asked-demanded, really-that the President leave the city when the alert came through three hours before. The President had folded his arms across his chest, listened patiently to their arguments, and looked at Blitz.

“I think you should go,” Blitz had told him. Even as the words left his mouth, he knew D’Amici wouldn’t.

“With due respect, gentlemen, fuck yourselves,” said the President. It was the only time in his life that Blitzcould remember the President using that particular profanity, at least since he had been elected to office. “The people of the United States did not elect me to run away and hide from terrorists,” continued the President. “And if something horrible does happen here, then this will be exactly where I should be.”

He was a stubborn son of a bitch. That’s what it came down to. It wasn’t the fact that he thought his place was here; it wasn’t that he thought the political ramifications of running from a rumor of danger were immense. The real reason he was staying was that he wouldn’t back down from any confrontation. In his heart of hearts, he probably wanted to go down on the streets and work with the details trying to catch these jerks.

Blitz admired that instinct, even as he questioned the wisdom of it.

“Keep me informed,” he told Brott.

“Yes, sir. Mozelle wanted to talk to you.”

Blitz pushed down the button on the receiver and called his aide at the White House.

“You okay up there?” she asked as soon as she heard his voice.

“Not a problem here,” he said.

“ Lot of calls. One in particular I thought you’d want to know about,” said Mozelle. “Your friend Kevin Smith called. He was mad that you didn’t tell him you were coming into the city.”

Smith was an old friend; they often got together when Blitz was in New York or he was in D.C., but security and the press of business had prevented him from calling this time. Blitz made a mental note to call Smith later on and tell him he was sorry.

“He said he had tickets to the NCAA championship game tonight,” Mozelle continued, “and he would have taken you instead of his brother-in-law.”

“Oh,” said Blitz softly.