Bret smiled, but the effort involved was painfully obvious. Her husband was trying to make light of her departure but failing. He had refused any pain relief so as to be clearheaded when she called, and Caitlin knew him well enough to see that he was trying to hide a serious hurting from her. More important, she knew, he had not forgiven himself for the morning, no matter how many times she told him he had nothing for which to seek forgiveness. He was too much of a soldier to let it go, a ranger no less, no matter how much he tried to distance himself from that past.

He'll never forgive himself, she realized. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

A low-watt lamp on the shelf by his bed lit the hospital room. Full night had fallen a few hours ago, and the curtains were drawn. Monique gurgled a few times and fell asleep, snoring ever so quietly and all but breaking Caitlin's heart. She had fed her one last time. She gently eased herself down on the edge of the bed next to Bret and took his hand, linking her fingers through his, being careful not to dislodge the IV line or hurt any of his injured digits. She was dressed for travel in jeans, a thick woolen shirt, and her favorite black leather coat, whereas he lay in bandages and a thin cotton nightgown with no ass. It felt wrong, just wrong, to be leaving them, but she had to tell herself that she was not abandoning her family, she was protecting them. And that meant going out into the dark to hunt for monsters.

"That guy Dalby, he's not bad, is he?" Bret said in a quiet, almost croaky voice. "He told me about the arrangements for the farm and the safe house. We're gonna be good to go, Caity, so I don't want you to be worrying about us while you're working. Don't be thinking about having to call and check to see if Monique and I are squared away. Just get on with…"

His soft, battered beautiful face blurred as her tears came. Caitlin leaned forward over him, her tears falling freely onto his cheeks.

"How do you shut an idiot up?" she whispered. She kissed him hard, and for a brief instant everything faded from concern. Bret and Caitlin were the only two people in the whole world. When she pulled away, she could already feel her heart hardening to the task ahead.

"I love you both so much."

"I love you, too," he said.

"And I will be back as soon as I can," she promised. "I'll be fine. And we'll be fine. Everything is gonna be cool."

He squeezed her hand and smiled, but she could tell he did not believe her.

Air Force One, in transit, New York to Kansas City "Contact," the pilot said over the cabin speakers of Air Force One. Through his window Kipper watched the smaller plane, a fighter jet, take on fuel from their escort tanker. He never got tired of watching the in-flight refueling process. It was a marvel of the man-machine interface and testimony to the fact that almost any problem was amenable to rational thought and considered action.

Almost any problem.

"Refueling complete," the pilot of the smaller plane said over the radio. The fighter pulled away from the refueling probe, and a mist of fuel vaporized harmlessly over the fuselage as the pilot rejoined his place in formation against a clear blue sky. Kipper understood, however, that their plane, Air Force One, had no such capability. He had asked about it and argued with Jed for a different aircraft, one of the air force C-17s, but Culver and his staff had fallen on that suggestion like a sack of hammers.

"The aircraft that is Air Force One needs to be one that upholds the significance and prestige of the president of the United States," they said.

What prestige? Kipper often wondered as he boarded "his" plane at some lifeless airfield in the middle of nowhere. On this trip, for instance, they'd transferred from the Marine One chopper to Air Force One at an airbase in upstate New York a couple of hours after escaping the city. A grim, windswept outpost it was, too, manned by a heavily armed company of marines. He shook his head. This really wasn't how he'd expected to be coming home. Again he thought, What prestige?

After the brief interlude of the refueling operation, Kip dropped back into the padded leather chair across from his chief of staff and resigned himself to wrestling with a long list of problems for which no elegant solutions presented themselves. As he sat down, he knocked a book off his armrest: David McCullough's biography of Truman. He'd read over the section on the firing of General Douglas MacArthur for the fourth time that morning once they had cleared the dangerous airspace around Manhattan.

"I didn't fire him because it was the easy thing to do," Truman had said. "I fired him because it was the right thing to do."

"So, Blackstone," Kip sighed.

"Well, at least we don't have polling data," Culver said lightly, but he was tired and stressed, and his eyes failed to light up.

He was right, though. No one bothered to conduct polls these days. There were too many other things to do: food to grow, equipment to scavenge, salvage and clearance work, a nation to rebuild. Those with the number-crunching skills to run polls were put to better uses, such as trying to ration the food supply to keep the population fed or balance a federal budget floating atop an economy that had shrunk to a minuscule fraction of its former size and devolved in part to subsistence and barter. Running polls came in a very poor second. If the president of the United States needed to know what the people were thinking, he had only to go for a walk around Seattle or call up a talk radio station in Alaska, although he rarely did that because of the very real danger of being ambushed on air by Governor Palin.

Anyway, he didn't need a stack of polls to know that Blackstone was dividing the nation, literally and figuratively. How many times had General Franks warned him that if Blackstone secured control of the Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf Coast, their efforts on the eastern seaboard would be pointless? The true border of the United States would end right about where Kansas City rested in the heart of a dead nation. How many times had Kipper put off confronting this inconvenient truth?

The problem, as he understood it, was that a good many folks felt Blackstone was doing the right thing down in Texas. Even in Seattle, where he was regarded with equal measures of fear, scorn, and distrust, there had been some grudging support for his move to seize the Panama Canal back from the gang lords who had taken control of it after the Disappearance.

"Defend as far forward as possible," Mad Jack had argued. It was the sort of stuff that made headlines, or "generated political capital," as Culver said.

More unsettling than that, however, had been the foreign support he'd garnered. Eight countries, including Israel, had opened consulates in Fort Hood after Blackstone had secured the canal, and although their consuls were officially accredited to the federal government, it was no secret that the diplomats worked directly with Blackstone's people, cutting the State Department out of the process. Worse still, they were providing Blackstone with operating capital, technical expertise, and political support in exchange for the right to extract oil, technology, and salvage without the fees imposed by the federal government on the western seaboard.

Kip stared unhappily out the window at the plains of Ohio. All this and now a pirate war that may or may not be the start of a holy war the like of which had all but torn France asunder a few short years ago. The president had no doubt that Colonel Kinninmore would be turning the city upside down as he attempted to find any evidence that the fighting there was not just an opportunistic attack by a pack of scavengers who'd decided to band together for as long as it took to convince him the city wasn't worth retaking. But what if he did find evidence of a new threat on the eastern seaboard? Kipper almost wished the plane would never land, because then he wouldn't have to face the consequences of whatever was coming for him in the next few days.