but a massive gas formation, still condensing though not nearly thermonuclear enough to shine like Earth’s sun. Imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope only as recently as 1995, the dark nebulosity was more widely known among the deep space stargazers as “the Pillars of Creation.”
Keitel flashed the digital wall map of North Dakota over the emblem, framing four red circles, then enlarging the targets with a few taps on his keyboard.
With one ear, chain-smoking now that all the PC air was cleared, Horn listened to the colonel shout a litany of questions laced with orders, but he was more intent, fascinated, in fact, by the sight of the gun cameras framing in real-time the prairie sweeping below. Again, Jeffreys demanded to know the new targets, what might be the number of projected civilian casualties, railing next at Keitel to initiate some sort of abort action.
“It’s too late for that, Colonel! The damage is already done!”
“The hell you say. You people created it, do something to uncreate it! Or we are all in a world of hurt none of us can begin to even fathom!”
Horn smiled around his smoke, enjoying their sweat and panic, these pompous asses who often looked down their noses at him, a wolf among sheep who held the power of life and death. The snooty broads, too, often thinking they needed some R and R with a real man who could launch them into some deep space they couldn’t begin to get from their wonder toys. Maybe soon, figure the ladies might need a comforting shoulder to lay their distress on. Hope sprang eternal, and now on more fronts, he knew, than in his loins.
The gathered herd here didn’t know it, but he had his own plans.
He listened to Keitel’s ominous report. It looked like the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation was slated for one big bang, Jeffreys groaning as he heard the guesstimate for dead and maimed Native Americans. If there was any good news to be grabbed from this vision of hell, it appeared the westbound warhead would detonate on some rancher’s spread near the eastern leading edge of the Badlands. On that front, Jeffreys barked for numbers on family members, Horn now sensing the colonel was on the verge of fainting as the virtual reality of the body count kept on piling up in his churning desk-lifer mind, higher, he imagined with a puff and grin, than every piece of shredded document or deleted CDROM he was probably the first blast away from racing to. Another ranch on the Four Points’ feeding frenzy, but far larger in terms of cattle as imaged by a satellite parked over the state, was up for some more cluster dusting. Finally, there was a town, population twenty-six, but one of the geeks informed them at that hour the saloon was a big-ticket draw, Horn filing the man’s name away, wondering how he came by that information. When Horn caught the town’s name, another grin tugged at the corner of his lip.
Little Big Horn.
It was most definitely cover-the-assets time before some twenty-first-century scalping got in full swing, he knew, perfectly albeit horribly understandable, given that more than careers were at stake.
Talk about Black Holes.
Already, though, as he saw the watching eye on the Black Hawk closest to one of the civilian targets framing what was a row of small wooden buildings on a barren stretch of plain—assume Little Big Horn—the solution to the grim problems of the immediate future was shaping up, and in sweet accord with his own dreams. Funny, he thought, how a little patience and fortitude could find destiny smiling when a man decided to stand his ground.
As the Black Hawk closed to monitor the coming inferno, Jeffreys reached a level of near hysterics, ordering Keitel to fall to Plan IFA.
“You’re kidding, right? Unless you want to order Major Holloran to crash Lightning Bat out there, and with what’s going to happen if they do, do you really want to explain one more nightmare than we already have to deal with? You do know what’s on board that craft? You do know what fuels that jet?”
“I’m fully aware of the gravity of the situation, mister!” Jeffreys fumed, Horn again believing he could read the man’s tortured thoughts, what with all that gyrating body language and panic like neon signs in the eyes. Damage control, without question, time to place the SOS to DOD, the Pentagon, get the blame game cranked up, heating to thermonuclear critical mass, but in all directions other than his starched uniform.
Horn heard Holloran shouting from Keitel’s com link, the hooked-in intercom likewise now blaring the major’s voice. But he was locked on to the monitors, worked his spectating view between the gun camera and the Black Hawk relay.
And it happened, but far more spectacular than he could have imagined.
The gun camera winked out first as its cluster avalanche slammed into what Horn believed was the broadside of the first building in a Little Big Horn replay of that fateful and very gruesome day for the white man, but with total annihilation here for all present, indiscriminate of race, sex and age.
Complete and absolute obliteration, Horn saw, boiled like the smoke and fire of the Apocalypse, straight for the Black Hawk’s relay.
Just about all done, he knew, except for the cover-up.
Apparently, Horn found, Jeffreys had seen more than enough, the colonel wheeling, striding for the exit. A finger flick of his smoke, arcing it across the room, and he was marching hard for the intercept. Barking for Colonel No-Stones to halt, Horn grabbed him by the arm as the doors hissed open.
“Get your hands off me,” Jeffreys warned, wrenching his arm free.
“Listen to me, Colonel, and hear me but good. This fiasco, which, technically, falls under your responsibility, has a solution.”
“Solution?” He paused, the jaw going slack, the dark look betraying thoughts he knew what was about to be dumped in his lap. “No…”
“Yes. Now, you want to make some phone calls. I’ll give you a number you’re already aware of to someone who will, in no uncertain terms, inform you that what just happened lands square in my department.” It was Horn’s turn to breach personal space, as he put himself nose-to-nose with Jeffreys, and said, “The next words out of your mouth, Colonel, better be what I—what we all—know we need to hear, or, ‘sir,’ there could be more for you to dread than testifying before a bunch of fattened calves on the Hill. Oh. I see I have your full attention.”
“I’m listening.”
“Okay. Now, if it makes you happy, here’s what I propose to do….”
CHAPTER THREE
Aaron Kurtzman wondered what it would be like to walk again. Maybe it was the ten cups and counting of coffee he’d consumed, all that tar floating in enough sugar to wire a small army, electrically hyper-charging the caffeine-soaked thoughts off on grim tangents best left alone. Maybe it was working through the night at his computer station, by himself, for the most part, locked up in his head, most of the world sleeping, including some of his comrades and co-workers at Stony Man Farm, though he couldn’t say for certain. Intensely private, he was not a man to dump emotional baggage on others, wear suffering on his sleeve or to cast blame like a human storm raging about until the misery was spread sufficiently to the four corners of the globe, but the thoughts and feelings were there, just the same, and he couldn’t deny them.
At that predawn hour, staring at the monitor of his computer, he suddenly imagined himself out of the bowels of the new-and-improved Computer Room, removed from this trapping of time and space, free, unconfined, able-bodied. And there he was, up top, strolling the grounds, sans wheelchair, the barrel-chested, powerfully built titan he recalled from the ghosts of years past, that Big Ten champion heavyweight wrestler of the University of Michigan, a young lion. Breathing in the cool, crisp air of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, he imagined, sun on his bearded face, drinking in the lush greenery of the Blue Ridge Mountains, unshackled from the shell that imprisoned him. He pictured himself on a leisurely jaunt, down a wooded trail, maybe a dog by his side for company, he’d always had a fondness for German shepherds….
Enough, he told himself. No, it never hurt to dream, he thought, or to pray even for a miracle, as long as