Starfire. Don Pendleton

their journey.

      Briefly, he recalled the gift shop and diner, all the UFO paraphernalia, meant, he was sure, to further inflame and keep the fantastic alive. But, now that he thought about it, were they not aliens in their own right, invaders, no less? Ah, but considering the mission, they were poised to unleash an invasion of sorts, if not from another world, then just beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

      Spinning on his heel, he marched for Muyol, handing off the field glasses before plunging into the shadowy bowels of the three-man workstation. He found the computer brains hard at it, earning what was in his mind exorbitant fees, working laptop keyboards in a controlled frenzy. He sensed the tension, torqued up, higher than normal. The living room was barren except for the bank of five computers and the necessary modems that kept them online to their network of contacts, both overseas and in-country. Unfortunately, his knowledge of what they did was rudimentary at best, but he understood enough to know that Milo Serjac’s monitor shouldn’t be filled with pornography.

      “What is that?” Kytol snapped, skidding to a halt behind the trio in their wheeled high-back leather thrones. He noted the constipated look flashing over Serjac’s face, as if he—a man who held the power of life and death in his hands—was little more than an irritating mosquito in the geek’s ear.

      Fingers flying over his keyboard, Serjac declared over his shoulder, “It is a man and woman copulating.”

      “You get sarcastic with me?” Kytol felt his face flush with hot anger. “I can see that! Why is it on your screen?” he demanded, but feared he knew the answer already.

      “Three of our e-mail sites have been bombed,” Serjac said. “Melbourne, Tokyo and Barcelona, all compromised.”

      “By whom?”

      Serjac snorted, as if he’d been asked a stupid question. “It could be someone in Butte, Montana, for all I know. Or it could be NORAD or NASA.”

      “And bombing our supposed secured e-mail with porn?”

      “Perhaps a ruse while they attempt to trace us.”

      “I thought that was impossible. To trace us, that is.”

      “Nothing is impossible when it comes to computers and hacking into them. Especially when dealing with professionals.”

      “I want answers, Serjac, not to stand here and suffer your infuriating condescension!”

      Serjac moderated his tone. “There are something like twenty million skilled hackers around the world. There are over thirty thousand Web sites I know of that are set up for the express purpose of stealing information, especially classified information, since they are the most challenging, not to mention the most alluring and profitable. And those are just the amateurs. This would be a first in my experience. All transmissions were supposedly secured by a 128-bit encryption system—I will not burden you by telling you the near infinite number of quadrillion possibilities—but these were firewalls I personally built into our network. Suffice it to say this should not have happened.”

      “But it has, you insufferable jackass! Change passwords! Create another firewall! Add a more secure antivirus program!”

      “That is what I am in the process of doing. That, and trying to discover if other hot sites have been breached. Dear Comrade Kytol, what I am telling you is that whoever is doing this is good, maybe as good as we are. What you are seeing now is comparable to a chess game between masters, but one done in cyberspace.”

      Kytol ordered Muyol to secure the perimeter, but add another man to help Vishdal watch the cameras, then he barked at Serjac, “NSA? CIA? DOD? Give me your best guess.”

      Serjac shrugged as a happy face on a stick body and flashing the middle finger jumped onto his screen. “There it is again. London is now compromised. The last access code to put us online with Zenith was being transmitted when this popped on.”

      “So, you did get the codes?”

      Serjac ignored him, his grim stare locked on his monitor, fingers banging away as the happy-faced stickman mooned him. “This swine—taunt me, will you?”

      “Stop playing games and answer me, or I will have your castrated balls sitting on that keyboard!”

      Kytol, feeling his blood boil like hot lava in his veins, and who had little patience when it came to finessing a situation, computer or otherwise, wanted nothing more than to whip the .45 Glock from the shoulder rigging beneath his windbreaker and blow the machine into countless pieces all over the room. But the slightly built wiry man, he knew, had been an informal member of the notorious Crna Ruka. The Black Hand was responsible for hacking into the Kosovo Information Center in 1998, and from there it was a short cyberjump to break into NATO databases. For all the good it did, valuable intelligence was stolen from NATO right before the bombs began raining on Yugoslavia. He may not like these men, their superior attitudes, because he didn’t understand what they did or how they did it, but they were—in their parlance—super-cyberwarriors. They were the best at what they did, and at the moment he needed them more than the other way around. The days were gone, Kytol knew, when wars were won solely on brute force and overwhelming violence.

      Serjac finally deemed him worthy of an answer as he waved at the screen in front of the Russian. “You can see for yourself.”

      Kytol looked at the digital readout in the top corner of Anatoly Dyvshol’s split screen. Forty-two seconds and scrolling down. The Russian worked his keys with a renewed burst of energy, and the solar-winged silver ball enlarged after a flashing series of zoom-ins, the real observation LEO satellite, he knew, now monitoring its orbit. The satellite hung against the endless backdrop of outer space, and Kytol watched as a slender arm on the portside extended from the platform and locked into place, conical nose aimed at the blue planet.

      Thirty seconds.

      As the Russian began the final countdown at five, Kytol lost the smile. His eyes widened as a cone of fire burst from the rocket’s thrusters, instantly swallowed, it seemed, by infinite blackness.

      “Three, two…”

      It looked to Kytol like a giant silver spear.

      “One…”

      Then it was hurtling toward Earth, vanishing rapidly for the sea of clouds, a streaking javelin, but packed, Kytol knew, with fifty kilotons of fissionable devastation.

      THE SKY WAS FALLING.

      And it was all Boltmer could do to pry his eyes off the tumbling numbers on the watch engineered into the wrist of his spacesuit.

      Less than a minute to impact.

      Boltmer had never felt such pure cold terror. Trajectory, rate of descent, distance and potency of each ring to their observation-monitoring post all calculated—with supposedly no margin for error—it would blow, dead ahead, in their face. Grimly aware he would, in fact, be living just outside a nuclear fission blast—Boltmer could barely concentrate on the final chore.

      Lumbering in his robotic-like cocoon, he stepped up and snapped the supersuction cups mounted on the base of the black-tinted diamond shield to the floor with his boot. The list of a hundred-and-one things that could go wrong wanted to scream through his mind. They were on the outer limits of what the principals called the third ring. Instruments to measure wind and radiation levels likewise sewn into the arms of their suits—supposedly impervious to shock waves—with cameras to film the initial blast and its effects shielded inside a classified crystallized carbon composite and meant to bear up under flying debris and searing heat, the winds at this distance would still hammer them at over 200 mph.

      Blast. Heat. Radiation.

      The three big ones.

      The sudden flash jolted Boltmer, a cry of alarm trapped and echoing inside the reinforced bubble of his helmet. It was dazzling, then flared beyond brilliant, like a thousand suns rushing together for one infinite supernova, the burst of light piercing even both sets of protective covering enough he had to squint.

      Time