The pilot was slumped over the control yoke. But there was another person in the plane.

An injured pilot and a hijacker? Or an injured pilot and a scared, nonpilot passenger.

The person in the first officer’s seat was much smaller and moved around.

The rest of the plane appeared empty.

No bomb that the gear could see.

“Guard Sixteen, pilot of target plane appears unconscious. There’s a passenger. Looks like a kid,” added Howe. “He’s light on fuel as well.”

“How the hell do you know all that?” demanded the Guard pilot.

“NADT Flight to Guard Sixteen,” said Howe, hoping his call sign would provide a clue, “I’m afraid I can’t go into details. But I do know it.”

There was a spar and a compartment behind the cockpit area painted solid by the AMV: The gear couldn’t see inside. It was possible that it was a bomb.

“NADT Flight Hawk One, Hawk Two, Guard Sixteen, we have additional data on the intercepted flight,” said the ground controller before the F-16 jock could respond. “Pilot is a thirty-four-year-old male, one passenger, ten-year-old girl, his daughter.”

“Shit,” said Storey.

“All right, let’s think on this a second,” said Howe. “How many terrorists are going to take their daughters with them on their final flight?”

“How do we know that’s really who they are?” responded Guard Sixteen.

“The person in the first officer’s seat is pretty small,” said Howe. “Yeah, it’s definitely a girl. She’s got long hair.”

Howe slid closer, riding inside twenty yards, ten, worried that the turbulence off his aircraft might upset the plane. He didn’t need the high-tech AMV system any more: He could see the girl pretty clearly through the large window in the relatively new plane. He tried to signal for her to speak, but she didn’t seem to have a headset. He tried a few times to mime that she should take her father’s, but he knew that wasn’t likely to help much. Whatever happened in the movies, in real life the odds of talking a ten-year-old into a safe landing had to be a million to one.

“How much fuel does he have left?” Storey asked.

One of the ground controllers thought he was talking to him and replied that, if the flight plan was correct, he ought to be able to fly for another half hour or so. Howe thought the estimate fairly accurate based on the scan, though it was difficult to tell without more details about the airplane and its engine.

“That should take it out of the restricted area,” said Storey.

“Then what happens?” said the ANG pilot.

“I think it’s a Cirrus SR22,” said Storey.

“And?”

“If that’s a Cirrus SR22, it has a parachute,” explained Storey. “All we have to do is get the kid to pull it when she’s clear of the capital.”

The controller confirmed that the plane was designed to carry a parachute-but added that there was no way to know if it had one.

“Where is it located?” asked Howe.

“Behind the cabin area,” said Storey, describing the compartment.

“It’s there,” said Howe. “I say we give it a shot,” said Howe. “Better than shooting down a ten-year-old kid over the Potomac.”

“Stand by,” said the ground controller.

The Capitol building loomed ahead. Two more interceptors were flying up from the southeast, along with a police helicopter.

“We have a company representative on the line,” said the controller finally. “We think it might work. Can you hang with them?”

“Not a problem,” replied Howe, exhaling slowly into his oxygen mask.

“Good advertisement for the I-MAN system,” said Storey.

I-MAN was an emergency piloting system that would allow the controls for a private plane to be taken over in an emergency such as this. It was another NADT project. Until this moment he hadn’t thought that much about it-and certainly hadn’t seen it as important or even worthwhile.

But it might be. If he took the job, he could find out. He could help all sorts of people, not just the Air Force, not just the military. It was an important job.

Just not his.

“You have to get that passenger on the radio,” said the controller, explaining that they would need to instruct her to kill the engine and then deploy the chute. Howe acknowledged, then closed in.

“Radio,” he said, miming how she should take the headset from her father and put it on. It took several tries before she finally got it. But she still didn’t acknowledge the broadcasts.

“Wave your hand if you hear us,” said Howe.

She did.

“Okay, ground,” said Howe. “For some reason she’s not transmitting, but she can definitely hear. Do we have an easy place to land ahead somewhere?”

The controller mapped a spot in Virginia. They were a good ten minutes from it when the aircraft’s engine began to cough. That at least solved one problem: They didn’t have to tell her how to cut power.

Howe listened as the controller, speaking in what had to be the calmest voice he’d ever heard, told her to tug on the emergency handle. It took forty pounds of pressure to pull the lever; Howe watched anxiously as the girl pulled down with all her weight.

Nothing happened for a second. And then the panel at the rear of the cockpit seemed to mushroom upward. The parachute appeared as if it had come down from above, snagging the aircraft in a harness. The airplane slowed abruptly and Howe lost sight of it for a moment as he banked to the north. By the time he came around, the Cirrus was descending calmly toward the ground, more like a balloon than a skydiver. It landed against a patch of trees near a baseball field; a Coast Guard helicopter that had been scrambled as part of the rescue effort closed in.

“Time for lunch, Colonel,” said Storey.

His flight suit was soaked. He’d been sweating his brains out, worried about the kid and her father.

“Colonel, we going home?” asked Storey. “We’re, uh, getting low on fuel ourselves.”

Howe glanced at his instruments and realized with a shock that he was already far into his fuel reserves; he had something on the order of ten minutes of flying time left.

“Roger that,” Howe said, plotting the course to the airfield.

Blitz dove into the e-mails on his desk, trying to clear away the most important business before his next round of meetings. But it was no use; he was about two messages deep when Mozelle buzzed with a call from the CIA deputy director of operations. The calls multiplied, and Blitz found his head swimming in a myriad of details and distractions.

Just a few months earlier the U.S. had forcibly prevented nuclear war from erupting between Pakistan and India. In the first wave of optimism after the trauma, commentators had hailed a new era of peace. Now things seemed as chaotic and volatile as ever. North Korea was Exhibit One: The supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, was reportedly sick and hadn’t been seen for several days. Some intelligence reports claimed he had been poisoned; others noted that revolt was a common topic in army circles. Satellite data showed several different units on the move.

Blitz wanted more than regime change in North Korea. American interests in Asia ultimately depended on reunification. Not only was this the only way to effectively prevent war, it was the best short-term solution to growing Japanese restlessness about its constitutionally limited military establishment. Unlike some of his predecessors, Blitz realized that a rapidly rearming Japan presented a grave danger in Asia. China would have to react, and inevitably this would lead to further confrontation.

Blitz knew his goal; the difficulty was that it looked impossible to achieve, short of war. War in Korea would inevitably kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, even if the nuclear warheads the country was believed to have were not used.

While many worried about the nuclear weapons, ironically they were relatively easy to neutralize or at least target. Central Intelligence had confirmed that North Korea had two warheads loaded on Taepo-Dong 1 missiles that could hit Japan but that the CIA had concluded were currently aimed at South Korean targets. For the past eighteen months the country had been reprocessing uranium, or at least claiming that it was, turning it into bomb material. There was considerable debate about how much weapons-grade material the North Koreans had made, but the consensus was that the country probably had enough for four or six more weapons. Among the many reports on Blitz’s desk was one updating the likelihood that these had been placed on the Taepo-Dong 2 two-stage missile, a long-range weapon theoretically capable of striking Alaska. The missile wasn’t very accurate, but as the head of the Air Force pointed out, you didn’t have to be very accurate with a nuclear warhead.