Some deck crews moved other planes out of the way, making room for the full complement of Tomcats to be lined up at the runways, one of which ran from one end of the ship to the other. The second angled out from the port side.
Watching from the bridge, Felix saw the first Tomcat being readied, rolled to the flight line, and hooked to the catapult shuttle protruding from the deck in its slot, which ran the length of the runway. All around, jet engines fired up, blowing billows of exhaust out over the great ship’s sides. Hot fumes shimmered in the pink light of sunrise. Deck crews wearing heavy “Mickey Mouse” ear-protecting headpieces scurried around and under the Tomcats, the planes’ distinctive doublefinned tails wavering like mirages in the heat from their own (win engines.
In green jerseys and goggles, the men of the holdback crew squirmed under the F-14’s belly and attached a cable tying the craft to the deck until launch time. Ear-splitting noise prevented verbal communication on a carrier’s flight deck. Experienced hands waved signals with the sort of certainty gained from long practice. One man held the cable steady while a second lay on his back directly under the plane to slip the tension bar into place. Their task completed, they scrambled out and away.
In the Tomcat’s cockpit, the pilot applied light thrust to build up tension. Beside the runway, a yellow-clad plane director stood with hands on hips, awaiting signals relayed from the flight controllers atop the superstructure island.
On the bridge, Jensen handed the captain the phone receiver, connecting them to the control room one deck higher in the tower.
“Launch when ready,” Felix ordered.
The F-14’s engines thundered to full power. In five seconds the catapult fired, whipping the Tomcat to a speed of 160 miles an hour in less than three hundred feet. The holdback bar snapped, allowing the jet’s thrust to hurtle the plane toward the deck’s edge and into the air. Afterburners kicked in for maximum speed, and flaming exhaust lit the sky like matched, retreating suns.
The Tomcat rolled and climbed steeply to join the F-15 Eagles flying in a miles-wide escort and recon circle.
From his perch, Felix felt a poetry in the process of sending jets screaming off a carrier, but down on the flight deck, poetry was transcended by urgency. The next F-14 was ready to go, and the next one after that was swinging into place.
When a dozen were up, the Hawkeye radar plane broke its silence: “Visitor craft approaching, eleven o’clock.”
The terse message gave Captain Felix a chill. There would be combat after all. The call went to all ships and planes— battle stations!
The Hawkeye crew filled in the details—fifteen Visitor skyfighters approaching at high speed. Tventy-four American fighter planes split into groups designed to cover all angles of defense and attack. The Nimitz combat information center confirmed what Felix knew should be happening. The men flying those jets were superbly trained, the best in the service. He could only pray that would be good enough.
On the cruisers, destroyers, and frigates, guided-missile crews waited. They were the last line of defense if the planes couldn’t stop the Visitors.
And in the center of this ring of awesome air and sea fire power, the pair of oil tankers steamed along, their captains all too aware that the fates of their vessels were about to be decided by deadly force.
Lieutenant Commander Ricky Picolo flew the lead F-14. Craning his neck, he peered through the cockpit canopy. He still hadn’t made visual contact with the enemy, but his targeting computer sure had. It had picked six out of the two dozen it had been tracking. They were in his hundred-mile firing range and closing fast.
His dark mustache twitched inside his oxygen mask, the way it always did when he sensed it was time to do the job. “Leader Abel Twelve, ready to engage,” he said, his voice crackling over the speakers of all the planes and ships in the convoy. “And . . . firing!”
Picolo pressed the buttons and the Tomcat’s computers did the rest, sending a fusillade of electronically guided missiles rocketing toward the alien invaders. As the planes around him followed his lead, Picolo hoped they could grab the offensive by pressing the attack before the Visitors could get close to the ships down below.
At Mach two, it doesn’t take long to cover a hundred miles. The jet fighters veered off to avoid getting too near to Visitor lasers, while their air-to-air missiles homed in at three times the speed of sound.
“All right, fellas,” Picolo radioed, “get ready on cannons, time for a little down-and-dirty dogfighting.”
Explosions signaled the arrival of the missiles as five of the fifteen Visitor fighters were hit and destroyed outright. Picolo’s surprise had worked. “Don’t get cocky, boys. Abel Thirteen, Fourteen and Fifteen, cover me. I’m going right down their throats.”
Chapter 2
Given a choice, Nicholas Draper would have preferred leaving the government of the United States right where it had been for two hundred years or so. But the Secretary of State knew the Visitors had given them little choice. Washington, D.C., was simply too close to southern regions where the aliens were able to fight without being affected by the toxic red dust. Though the capital itself was under the toxin’s protective veil, President William Brent Morrow and his advisers had been forced to conclude that for safety’s sake, they’d better relocate to New York. It was almost like the Civil War, when the White House was little more than a carriage ride from the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, and within striking distance of Robert E. Lee’s gray-coated troops.
Abe Lincoln had stayed put, but the present-day analogy wasn’t what Draper could call exact. Visitors didn’t attack on horseback.
A dapper Virginian himself, Secretary Draper had learned to accept the rightness of the North’s Civil War victory, but like many southerners, he still harbored a wisp of sympathy for the Johnny Rebs who’d fought and died for Dixieland. He fell back on that vestigial patriotism to explain his vague unease at moving to the heart of Yankee territory—the home of Yankee Stadium, for crissak.es—with President Morrow and the rest of what was left of the country’s federal authority.
Nick Draper readily agreed that New York possessed other advantages in time of global war. It was still the center of world communications, for one thing. The three television networks based there had maintained news and entertainment broadcasts, on a somewhat curtailed basis, and the Freedom Network also operated from this most secure of human-held cities in America.
And the United Nations was located here, making this city the de facto capital of the World Liberation Front. Morrow had set up his offices in the UN, overlooking the East River. He and the other officials of his provisional government had taken up residence in the Grand Hyatt Hotel, a few blocks away at Forty-second Street and Lexington Avenue.
The diminutive Draper had turned to jogging for exercise and solitude long before the sport became obnoxiously common, and he’d cherished his early morning runs in the rolling hills surrounding his country estate in Virginia. Somehow, lacing on his Nikes had lost something in the translation to Manhattan Island. There were no grassy fields, except in Central Park, and the idea of solitary tranquility was laughable here. New York had retained much of its hurly-burly personality, and the streets were never empty. Garbage trucks still roamed from dumpster to trash can, although at less regular intervals. Cabs and buses still dueled fender to fender and horn to horn, vying like wild animals for the right-of-way on streets cratered with potholes.
And miraculously, people still came out each day to go to their jobs. Visitors or not, this comer of the globe went on with life as usual.
However, it wasn’t life without changes. Its status of secure capital made New York City the eventual goal of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the warmer states where the Visitor forces ravaged at will, undaunted by the red dust fencing them off at the frostline.
On this muggy morning at seven, Nick Draper found himself confronted with part of that new reality as he jogged near Penn Station with Stuart Ha
rt, the youthful acting Secretary of Defense, and Cynthia Sobel, Morrow’s press secretary. Wearing a U.S.A. T-shirt and blue shorts banded with red and white, Draper led his companions south on Seventh Avenue. Traffic was cordoned off inside a four-block radius because of the vast numbers of immigrants spilling up staircases and escalators from the railroad station’s extensive maze of underground arcades and platforms. Police on foot and horseback manned the barricades, keeping people from unauthorized passage out of the terminal zone. Without vehicular traffic to dodge, the trio of anonymous government officials jogged in the street.
As they slowed, Cynthia Sobel abruptly half fell, half sat on the curb. “Shit!” she hissed as she hit the concrete hard.
Tall buildings blocked the early morning sun from this portion of the sidewalk, and Draper leaned over her in the shadows. “Y’all okay, hon?”
She grasped an amber beer bottle that appeared to be lying innocently in the road, held it out distastefully, then heaved it at a trash basket four feet away. It arced over the rim, rattled against the wire mesh, and clattered to a rest inside.
“I’ve been ambushed,” she said, waving in dismay at several other bottles, cans, and papers littering the curbside pavement. She adjusted the sweat-soaked headband holding her permed dark hair out of her eyes, then gingerly swiveled her ankle and winced in pain.
Stu Hart frowned in sympathy. His T-shirt hung loosely over his lanky frame. “Should we shoot you here, m’dear?” Hart’s erudite, pinched tone betrayed upper-crust origins and a youth misspent in prep schools.
Cynthia’s thin nose curled in frustration. “Manhandled by trash,” she grumbled.
“Humm, many’s the lady who’s made that claim,” he quipped, boyish eyes twinkling beneath brows bushy enough to require occasional combing. Those brows were the only incongruous features of a blandly handsome face.
“Funny man,” Sobel said sarcastically.
Draper reached out to help her up.
“Thanks,” she said, favoring the twisted ankle. “I suppose' it’s too much to ask to have the streets cleaned. I swear I hear garbage trucks plying the streets every night. Damned if I know what they’re doing out there, other than waking me up. ”
“Well, hon, we are a nation at war,” said Draper. “Just ask them.” He pointed toward Penn Station’s main entrance across the street from their resting place. Forlorn groups of new arrivals waited on the sidewalk, their eyes seeking help wordlessly, hopelessly.
The station’s aboveground edifice, classical nineteenth century architecture notwithstanding, had long since been bull-do7.ed to make room for the drum-shaped Madison Square Garden sports arena and its attendant glass and steel office lowers. But below Manhattan’s midtown streets, the train station bustled with travelers. Today’s passengers were different from the ones who’d made up the bulk of business here before the war.
In better times Penn Station had served as a commuter’s hub, accommodating workers going between New York’s central borough and their suburban homes in New Jersey and Long Island—several hundred thousand daily. Thousands of other passengers arrived and departed on longer-distance Amtrak journeys to and from all parts of the continent.
Draper had enjoyed train travel himself when he’d had the time, before becoming Secretary of State. With his keen eye for detail, he’d never minded whiling away free time at terminals like this one, just watching people go by. It wasn’t hard to tell different types of travelers apart. Local commuters carried slim briefcases and moved briskly, as if set on a track themselves, following identical routes every day, home to office and back again. Tourists lugged suitcases and tote bags filled to bursting, their weary arms hugging extra shopping bags filled with gifts for the folks back home.
Commuters’ faces encompassed two main expressions, it seemed—blase and dulled by the lull of routine transport; or annoyed, the result of trains delayed, schedules disrupted, meetings missed. Long distance voyagers’ faces were bathed in excitement or anticipation, depending on whether they were coming or going.
But the faces of refugees never seemed to change from war to war, earthquake to earthquake, famine to famine. African, European, Asian, or American, it didn’t matter. Draper had seen photos of earlier times and witnessed similar human suffering in person in various parts of the world. Never before had war forced Americans to flee their homes, and it shook him to find that citizens of the most powerful nation in the history of the planet could be reduced to this, faces shadowed by grief and fear.
We’re not immune, he thought.
“Where do they all go?” Stuart Hart asked, serious now.
Cynthia flexed her leg. “The lucky ones have relatives or friends in the area and stay with them.”
“What about the unlucky ones?”
“Haven’t you seen the billboards and TV commercials? ‘Take in a friend-—then make room for a stranger’?”
“Is it working?” asked Draper.
Cynthia nodded. “Pretty well, from what I hear. At the beginning people were just flooding into the city, living in subway stations and on park benches. It was like having bag ladies replicating like rabbits.”
“Yes, I noticed when I went running,” Hart said distastefully.
“Well,” Cynthia continued, “the mayor and the governor realized this couldn’t go on. That’s when they converted Madison Square Garden into a refugee center and blocked off Penn Station.”
“What about people who don’t come in by train?” Hart said.
“A lot of them wind up here anyway, once they find out it’s a place to stay—and a place where they’ll help you get more permanent housing. I’m from New York,” Cynthia boasted, “and we’re pretty good at coming through when the chips are down.”
“What about people who don’t get taken in?” Hart said.
“Well, they go to camps out in the suburbs. Old military bases, unused college dorms, hospitals or prisons that were closed down. Some are just tents and Quonset huts.” She took a deep breath. “The President sent me out to one on Long Island last week. All things considered, people are making the best of it. The worst part is, there aren’t anywhere near enough jobs for all these people—and more and more keep coming.”
Just then, a slightly battered Cadillac limo pulled over to the curb in front of the main station entrance. The doors swung open. Draper squinted, straining to make out faces.
“It’s the mayor,” Cynthia said with a grin. “You’re totally useless without your contacts, Nick.”
He glared at the press secretary momentarily, then jogged across Seventh Avenue. “Hey, Alison!”
Hart followed and Cynthia hobbled after them. “Hey, no aid for the cripple here?”
Mayor Alison Stein slammed the car door and turned at the sound of the Secretary of State’s familiar drawl. They shook hands warmly. Draper noticed her hair was up in its usual braided bun—did she ever let it down?—but she’d lost some weight, and the gauntness around her eyes made her appear a little older and much more weary than the last time they’d met. But the smile lighting her face was genuine.
“Our government leaders are out exercising awfully early, aren’t they?” she said.
Cynthia smiled sardonically. “It’s the only time that slave driver of a President lets us out of his sight.”
“How’re things going here?” asked Draper. “Looks like your city’s as popular as ever.”
Alison raised her eyebrows in an ironic arch. “I guess they all figure if the Big Apple’s good enough for the President, it’s good enough for them.”
“It may be early to be jogging,” Stuart Hart intoned, “but doesn’t that make it doubly early for you to be out working?” Alison Stein snorted. “Damn right. But we’re starting something new today. You know that we’ve got our own little Ellis Island set up inside the Garden, right? We’ve got cots and doctors and counselors and social workers. People can stay here for a few days until they get their bearings.”
“But how can
they get in touch with people they know?” asked Cynthia. “When I was out at one of the camps last week, more than a few people complained about that. There’s so much confusion.”
“Ahh, that’s why I’m up so early. The phone company’s setting up a whole bank of phones for outgoing calls, and we’re installing a computerized directory-assistance station—and the whole thing’ll be free.”
The other officials nodded their approval. “That should help a lot,” said Cynthia.
A dirty Ford Tempo with government-seal decals on its doors swung over and stopped alongside the mayor’s limo. The driver leaned across the front seat, a mobile-phone receiver in his hand.
“Mr. Secretary,” he called.
Draper and Hart turned simultaneously. “Yes?” they chorused.
“They always do that,” said Cynthia. “If vaudeville ever comes back . .
Draper eyed his taller colleague. “I thought you were going to answer to ‘Mr. Acting Secretary.’ ”
“I would, but I can’t train these Secret Service fellows to say all that.”
The agent behind the wheel punctuated the exchange with a sharp blaaaat on the horn.
“I think he wants us,” said Cynthia.
“/ don’t,” the agent said, sounding annoyed. “The President does—right away. Get in. I’ll drive you back.”
Mayor Stein waved to them as they clambered inside the government car.
“I get the front so I can stretch out my terminally damaged leg,” Cynthia cried, hopping in with sudden vigor.
She had her door closed and locked before Draper and Hart had even moved. They traded suspicious glances.
“I don’t think she’s hurt at all,” said Draper as he slid into the rear compartment.
“Indeed,” Hart agreed. “We’ve been had.” He closed his door and the car accelerated away from the sidewalk. “Do you attribute this mendacious behavior to the fact that she’s a female of the species or to the fact that she used to be a reporter?”
path to conquest Page 2
