Executive Orders

"To say what?"

"Try to get them calmed down, defuse the situation."

"You're really sure 1 hat they deliberately—" "Yes. Robby is positive, about as much as you are with a diagnosis," her husband confirmed, staring up at the ceiling.

"And we're going to negotiate with them?" SURGEON asked.

"Have to."

"But—"

"Honey, sometimes—hell, most of the time a nation-state commits murder, they get away with it. I'm supposed to think about 'the big picture, 'the larger issues, and all that stuff."

"That's awful," Cathy told him.

"Yes, it sure is. This game you have to play by its own rules. If you mess up, more people suffer. You can't talk to a nation-state the way you talk to a criminal. There are thousands of Americans over there, businessmen and like that. If I get too far out of line, then things might happen to some of them, and then things escalate and get worse," POTUS explained to her.

"What's worse than killing people?" his physician-wife asked.

Jack didn't have an answer. He'd come to accept the fact that he didn't have all the answers for press conferences, or for all the people out there, or even for his own staff sometimes. Now he didn't even have a single answer for his wife's simple and logical question. Most powerful man in the world? Sure. With that thought, another day ended at 1600 Pe

EVEN IMPORTANT PEOPLE got careless, an eventuality made easier by a little creativity on the part of more careful folk. The National Reco

But they couldn't watch everything everywhere, and one place they didn't watch was Bombay, western headquarters of the Indian navy. The orbits of the American KH-11 satellites were well defined, as were their schedules. Just after the newest satelite swept over the area, with the other new one on the far side of the world, came a four-hour window, which would end with the overhead passage of the oldest and least reliable of the trio. Happily, it also coincided with a high tide.

Two carriers, their repairs recently completed, and their escorts, slipped their mooring lines and stood out to sea. They would be conducting training exercises in the Arabian Sea, in case anyone noticed and asked about it.

DAMN. THE COBRA representative woke up, feeling a little feverish. It took him a few seconds to orient himself. Different motel, different city, different room lights. He fumbled for the proper switch, then put on his glasses, squinting in the uncomfortable light, and spotted his bag. Yeah. Shaving kit. He took that into the bathroom, pulled the paper cover off the glass, and half filled it with water. Then he worked the childproof top on the aspirin bottle, tipped two tablets into his hand and washed them down. He ought not to have had all those beers after di

STORM TRACK AND PALM BOWL were co

"Here's good news, Major," the American lieutenant said, handing over a telex. The UIR SNIE had generated something positive for a change.

Two hundred miles northwest of Kuwait, at a spot five miles south of the "berm" — actually a man-made dune— that marked the border between the Kingdom and the UIR, a deuce-and-a-half truck stopped. The crew got out, attached the extension to the launch ramp and fired up their Predator drone. But «drone» was an obsolete term. This mini-aircraft was an Unma

The product of three decades of research, Predator was fairly stealthy, difficult to detect on radar due to its small size, the inclusion of radar-absorbing material in its design, and the fact that its operating speed was so slow that modern computer-controlled radars, if they caught it at all, classified it as a bird and erased it from the operator's scope. The paint covering the airframe was the same IR-suppressive product the Navy had taken to using. It was both ugly and prone to provide a sticky home to anything that touched it—the technicians had to brush sand off their baby all the time—but that was balanced by the fact that the color blended in with the sky exceedingly well. Armed only with a TV camera, this one soared up to ten thousand feet, and cruised north under the control of another team at STORM TRACK, the better to keep an eye on the UIR exercises. It was a technical violation of the new country's sovereignty, but two pounds of explosive in the UAV would ensure that if it hit the ground in the wrong place, no one would be able to tell what it was. A directional ante

The fiber-optic data link crossloaded the same signal to PALM BOWL, and when a USAF enlisted woman switched on the room's monitor, they were looking down at a nearly featureless landscape while the Predator was guided to its destination by its operators.

"It'll be good to see if they know what they're doing," the lieutenant observed to Major Sabah.