Two time readouts glowed in the upper right corner. It was 1658 hours Eastern Daylight Time; wherever Lia was at the moment, it was just before one in the morning.

Radio chatter sounded from speakers overhead.

“Haunted House, Haunted House, Ghost Blue. Oscar Sierra, repeat, Oscar Sierra. They have a lock.”

“Copy that, Ghost Blue.”

William Rubens looked up as Charlie Dean walked in. “They’re okay,” he told Dean without preamble. “ She’s okay.”

“Good to hear it,” Dean replied, keeping his voice neutral. Rubens knew that he and Lia were close, but neither of them wished to say so aloud.

Dean was afraid that someday someone higher up the bureaucratic chain of command would declare that his and Lia’s relationship was somehow unprofessional. In the modern, Orwellian world, the illogical, whimsical boundaries of political and sexual correctness could be redrawn overnight.

“Jeff said they were in a shoot-out?”

Rubens nodded. “Things went bad. We think our contact was a dangle.”

The word was tradecraft slang for someone deliberately exposed to a hostile intelligence service in order to lure that service’s agents into a trap or a compromising position.

“For?…”

“Not now, Dean,” Rubens said, his voice brusque. “We’ve still got a… situation.”

Dean almost asked if the situation involved Lia but managed not to say anything. He knew Rubens well enough to know the Deputy Director would fill him in when-and if-he needed to know.

“Launch! Launch,” an anonymous voice said over the speaker. Dean could hear the stress behind the words. “I’ve got three missiles coming up, probably Guidelines. Maneuvering…”

Dean understood Rubens’ curtness better now. If an NSA asset-in this instance meaning an aircraft somewhere over the Gulf of Finland off of St. Petersburg-was being shot at, that was a serious situation indeed. The bad old days of the Cold War were long gone, but that didn’t mean there weren’t occasional problems with America’s new ally the Russian Federation. In the global arena, more often than not, Russia still reverted to her old role as America’s adversary. In fact, in some ways it was tougher now. In the Cold War, at least, you knew the Russians were the enemy. Nowadays, they were nominal allies in the War on Terror, as long as their cooperation didn’t interfere with their own agenda, such as dominance of the former Soviet republics, or the struggle for influence in the Middle East, or the developing international crisis in the Arctic…

Jeff Rockman was looking up at the big screen. Dean watched him a moment, then walked over to the coffee mess tucked away against one wall. He returned a moment later with two cups full. He set one on Rockman’s workstation desk.

“Hey, Charlie. Thanks.”

“Who’s shooting at whom?” Dean asked, looking up at the display. It was, at the moment, singularly unhelpful, showing a swath of satellite-revealed sea and land from Estonia to Finland. A white icon labeled “Akulinin and DeFrancesca” was blinking on the waterfront in St. Petersburg. Another, marked “Ghost Blue,” was drifting slowly north a few miles off the coast of Kotlin Island.

Rockman glanced at him, then back at the board. “The Russkies just popped three SAMs at our comm relay aircraft. It’s getting a little tight over there.”

“Sounds it.” He could see three icons marking the SAMs, now, painted in by the computers running the display. They were swiftly closing the range between Kotlin and Ghost Blue. Other icons showed in the area as well, some orange, meaning unknowns, others red, meaning confirmed potential hostiles.

“‘Russia shoots down American aircraft inside Russian territory,’” he said, mimicking a newscaster’s voice. “‘Details at eleven.’ The old man’s a bit worried about the publicity, you know?”

Dean did know. The National Security Agency and Desk Three were successful only insofar as they could elude the spotlight of public awareness. The encounter over the Baltic could well mean big trouble for the Agency.

Especially if the opposition managed to shoot the plane down.

As for the pilot hanging it all out for God and country at the top of the world… well, Charlie Dean thought, these Art Room chess players were pretty focused on the big picture. If the pilot got bagged, they would cry tomorrow. Or perhaps next week.

Ghost Blue Two miles northeast of Ostrov Kotlin 0059 hours

Major Delallo waited until the missiles were trailing him. He was passing fifty-eight thousand feet, now, but the trio of Guidelines was closing faster than he could climb. It was going to be damned close.

Past fifty-nine thousand feet. The missiles were five miles below him, still coming strong at three times the speed of sound.

Delallo had a tactical choice. He could keep climbing, hoping to get above the SAMs’ operational ceiling, and hope to hell the Russians hadn’t packed a surprise into those three birds, like some extra altitude. Or he could turn into the missiles and try to force an overshoot. The good news was that his F-22 was much more maneuverable than the missiles.

A major factor was those two MiG-31s back there. They were climbing, too, and coming fast. The MiG-31 Foxhound was the best interceptor in the Russian arsenal, and it could both outclimb and outrun the F-22. It would not be a good idea to let them get too close.

Delallo gauged the right moment, then popped chaff, hauling around on the stick and vectoring his engines sharply in a grueling, high-G Herbst maneuver.

The Herbst maneuver-also known as the J-turn-was only possible for high-performance aircraft like the Raptor. You needed post-stall technology, meaning vectored thrust engines and advanced computer-operated flight controls to manage a high enough angle of attack to pull it off. As he brought his nose around and down, his velocity fell off dramatically. The missiles were closing quickly-he could see their exhaust plumes out of the corners of his eyes as he concentrated on flying his plane.

An alarm sounded as he went into a stall; only his vectored thrust engines, delicately handled in sharp, precise movements, kept him properly oriented. In seconds he had the aircraft on a new flight path, down and into the missiles, which were about sixty degrees off his nose. He was forcing them into a maximum rate turn, a maneuver he knew he could win. Accelerating now at full throttle and assisted by the relentless pull of gravity, he was past the first Guideline before it could even begin to alter course… then past the second, then the third. All three had failed to hack the turn.

Now he eased off the throttles and made a gentle turn back toward his original heading, still descending and accelerating past Mach 2.

Grunting hard against the savage, crushing pressure of the G-load, Dick Delallo automatically swept his eyes over the threat indicator panel. It was blank.

So he was surprised when a missile he had neither seen nor known was tracking him exploded twenty feet below his right wing. Surprised? It was the shock of his life. After the flash and thump that rocked the plane, the surprise was that he was still alive.