"Then he'll be fine," the MP said.

"I told him I'd be there. I told him I'd be there when he woke up." Unexpectedly, new tears and a fresh wave of panic ripped through Megan. She felt sick and her knees buckled. If the MP hadn't been holding on to her arm, she would have fallen.

"Come with me, Mrs. Gander," the MP suggested. "I'm sure we can sort this out in a little while."

"Cuff her," Boyd Fletcher snarled. He called Megan several unkind words, struggling against the man who held him and against the handcuffs that held him. "Cuff her. She did something with my son. Find out what she did with him."

Megan opened her palm and gazed at the tiny silver cross. She prayed. She prayed harder than she had prayed in years. Without another word, the big MP guided her toward the security Jeep. The flashing lights whirled through Megan's vision. She felt like she was in a terrible nightmare and she couldn't get free.

The Mediterranean Sea USS Wasp Local Time 0821 Hours

Only minutes after the last of the aircraft had lifted from Wasp's deck, Delroy Harte had returned to his private quarters to watch the unfolding development of the engagement along the Turkish-Syrian border. The combat information center had been reduced to using long-range satellite images because the carefully orchestrated Syrian attacks had taken out the primary communications lines with the first wave of SCUDs. Glitter City, with all its media personalities and support crews, had become a casualty less than three minutes after that.

Captain Falkirk and his intelligence teams had been reduced to tapping into the video feeds being pumped out of Glitter City. Those hadn't lasted long either. With the second wave of SCUDs, the feeds from Glitter City had been lost as well.

Delroy had barely switched on the television in his private quarters and started flipping through the news channels before those services were lost, too. He had sat quietly for several minutes, trying to take solace in the growl and thunder that was Wasp twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.The ship had been the major portion of his world for years.

Sailors green to Wasp hated the constant barrage of noise. Old hands took comfort in the sounds, knowing them all individually.

Within minutes, though, Delroy had known he couldn't stay in his quarters. He had taken his portable television set and returned to the medical department to try and attack the letter once more. His prayers to God weren't going very well either. Thinking about the young warriors in the field dying so far from home reminded the chaplain too much of Terrence.

The loss of his son was never far from Delroy's mind, nor was the fact that the loss and his own inability to deal with it had shattered his marriage after twenty-seven years. Actually, he was still married. He had never filed for divorce, and Glenda had never pressed him for one. He had simply stopped going home. He'd effectively cut off his ties to his family, though they still sent cards and letters.

But it was Glenda's ability to believe that their son was taken from them for a reason approved of by God's will that mocked his own belief. And yet, tattered and broken as that belief was, it was all Delroy had to cling to. He had put on a good face and made the best he could of his career and his life, but Glenda knew him as no one else ever had.

Except for my father, Delroy thought. Josiah Harte would have known what I'm thinking at a glance.

Glenda's own belief had shamed Delroy. And her ability to deal with his own decision to effectively end the marriage three years ago, two years after Terrence's death, had shamed him further. He still sent money home to help with the bills, but less than a year after he had stopped going home, Glenda had opened an account at the bank and put the money there. She rented the house out to make the mortgage payment and moved into a small apartment. She continued teaching and worked at Carl Bynum's produce market during the summers.

Seated again at the stainless steel table with the blank paper that was supposed to be the letter he was going to write to Dwight Mellencamp's family, Delroy stared at the television. Wasp had satellite hookups for television throughout the ship. The crew traveled in relative comfort.

Only moments ago, some of the news feeds in Turkey had come back on line. There had been a bit about a U.S. Army Ranger outfit that had helped evacuate Glitter City, then that feed had gone off-line when Syrian troops had arrived and started shooting. The cameraman had evidently been one of the first fatalities.

Now the television channels were full of late-breaking stories. Some of those stories centered on first-person accounts by reporters concerning the evacuation of Glitter City, the horrifying convoy back to Sanliurfa, and the attacks that had gone on within Sanliurfa. Some came directly from the border where reporters were pinned down by enemy fire just as the domestic troops, the U.N. peacekeepers, and the U.S. Army Rangers were.

Delroy glanced at the body bag that contained his dead friend. The chaplain couldn't help feeling that in a way Dwight Mellencamp was lucky he hadn't lived to see this day. It was certain that several of the Marines the chief had known and loved like sons wouldn't be coming back. By the time what was left of their people got back, Wasp would feel like a ghost town.

The body bag suddenly sagged, collapsing in on itself.

Goose bumps prickled across the back of Delroy's neck. His breath caught at the back of his throat. At first he thought he'd imagined the sagging, but as he looked at the body bag, he knew that he hadn't. Dwight had been a big man. There was no way he could fit in the body bag in the shape it was in now.

For a moment, Delroy was back in his grandfather's house, listening to the old man tell stories to his grandchildren that triggered fussy arguments from his wife. Grandpa Smith, on Delroy's mother's side, had been a constant joker. One night when the grandkids had been visiting, he'd explained about sitting up with the dead, and how sometimes in the old days before mortuaries embalmed the bodies and prepared them for burial, that sometimes the dead would sit up as well.

The first time Delroy had sat up with the dead with his father a few years later, he'd been frightened out of his mind, thinking the corpse of his great-uncle Darmon would sit up at any moment, maybe even come crawling out of the casket like a mummy in one of those old monster movies. His father had noticed Delroy's discomfort at once.

Reluctantly, Delroy had explained his fears. Quietly and patiently, as was his way except when frightening nonbelievers with visions of hell and eternal damnation in that roaring lion's voice of his, Josiah Harte had explained how in the old days the unprepared body would sit up. He had described in detail how the reaction was caused by rigor mortis setting in and tightening muscles due to the dead body's inability to process sugar. Sometimes, his father had said, trapped air was even expelled from the corpse's lungs, but the person was not actually alive, as uneducated and superstitious people thought.

Even though his father had been kind and understanding and informative, and even though Delroy was nearly fifty years older, he suddenly felt like that small eight-year-old boy sitting in near dark with only candles for light. He forced himself to breathe again.

Using his remote control, he muted the television and pushed up from the chair. His heart beat frantically as he made himself approach the much flatter body bag. Hand shaking, he pressed his palm against the body bag.

The bag sank beneath Delroy's hand, giving way immediately and not stopping till his palm reached the table.

"No." He didn't even recognize his own voice at first.

Quickly, struggling with all the emotions that were suddenly cascading within him, Delroy slid his hand down the length of the body bag. It was empty. At least, it was empty of a corpse. However, there was something inside the bag.

Before he could stop himself, Delroy reached for the zipper and tugged it down, freeing the zipper's teeth so the bag could fall open.

Empty. The realization filled the chaplain with a mind-numbing cold that the refrigerated room couldn't even begin to compete with.

With the bag open, Delroy saw the clothing lying inside. The lump he'd felt had been Dwight's favorite shoes, a pair of Birkenstocks that his wife had given him a few Christmases ago.

Stunned, his mind reeling and snatching at possible reasons for this unbelievable turn of events, Delroy left the empty body bag and crossed the room. He pulled the door open and stepped into the main hallway of the medical department.

Cary Boone, in his mid-thirties and one of the ship's best surgeons, stood in the hallway with a puzzled look on his face and a PDA in his hand. Tall and powerful with short dark hair, and right now a heavy five o'clock shadow, Boone was one of the regulars in Delroy's pickup basketball group when Wasp was in her homeport.

"Chaplain Harte," Boone greeted him distractedly.

"Dr. Boone," Delroy replied. Navy doctors were called "doctor" until they reached the rank of commander. "Do you know if anyone moved Chief Mellencamp's body?"

Boone looked irritated. "Why would anyone do that?"

"I don't know. But Dwight-" Delroy halted himself. "The chief,, body is missing."

"I thought you were in there with him." Boone covered ground rapidly, opening hatches along the hallway and peering inside.

"I thought I was, too, but just now, when I checked the bag, the chief's body was missing."

"I'll ask around." Boone tried another door. "Have you seen Nurse Taylor?"

Jenna Taylor was a favorite among the crew and the doctors. She was a vivacious young redhead from Ohio and one of the most levelheaded, kind, and considerate people that Delroy knew.

"No," Delroy answered.

"I swear that she was right here," Boone said distractedly. "I was going over these files with her, in preparation for the wounded we expect to take on from the border skirmish, and Jenna was talking to me from one of these rooms. She stepped in here to get something."

"She's been working this morning?" Delroy asked.

"Yes.

"Then maybe she'll know where the chiefs body is." Despite the calm, rational exterior he held carefully in place, Delroy felt frantic. No one would take Dwight's body. There was no reason. But the body had disappeared and he had no explanation for that. He joined Boone in his search, both of them calling out Jenna's name.

A pile of scrubs lay inside the second room Delroy checked. He froze, not believing what he was seeing. "Cary." His voice was a harsh desert croak that barely freed itself from his lips.

"What?"

"Come look at this. Tell me I'm not going crazy." Slowly, Delroy squatted, hearing his knees pop and crack, because basketball hadn't been the kindest of sports to his body.

Boone joined Delroy in the open hatch. "What?" the navy doctor asked.

Delroy pointed at the blue scrubs lying on the floor inside the supply room. Right on top was a name badge with Jenna Taylor's name and rank on it.

"She left her clothes here?" Boone asked.

"The chiefs clothes were still inside the body bag," Delroy said in a low voice.

"That doesn't make any sense."

"No," Delroy admitted. "It doesn't."

Running feet slapped against the steel floor. A young midshipman in scrubs rounded the corner at the end of the hallway. "Dr. Boone," he gasped.

"What is it?" Boone replied.

For an insane moment, Delroy thought the young man was going to say that the chiefs body had been found, or that Jenna Taylor-as impossible as it sounded-had been caught streaking through the medical department or had even made it out onto the flight deck. Stress did strange things to people, and the coming hours and probably days of dealing with wounded troops and the battle that raged along the Turkish-Syrian border promised plenty of wear and tear on the nerves.

"They've disappeared, sir," the midshipman said.

"Who?" Boone asked.

The midshipman shook his head. "I don't know exactly, sir. Dozens. I've found piles of clothes throughout the medical department. The missing people are leaving their clothes behind. But nobody's seen them. It's like they disappeared right off the ship! "

United States of America Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, Colorado Springs Local Time 2321 Hours In the last six months of his new posting in the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, twenty-eight-year-old U.S. Air Force Technical Sergeant James Franklin Manners had never before seen an attack as large as the one now spinning across the huge wall screen monitors. The feeds came directly from the satellites watching over the action that had broken out along the Turkish-Syrian border. The other men and women around Jim worked diligently at their assigned tasks, collating the real-time information and moving it on to the command post in Turkey.

Buried two thousand feet beneath the mountains that gave the complex its name, Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center remained the backbone of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). The United States and Canada had jointly maintained the command post since 1957, with subdivisions responsible for delivering warnings about aerospace dangers, missile attacks launched against North America or the United States, surveillance and protection of U.S. assets in space, and geopolitical events that could threaten the U.S. as well as troops abroad. The command center gathered, assembled, and interpreted data from numerous sources.

Jim tapped commands on his keyboard, bringing up the information from the geosynchronous satellites as well as the low-earth orbit satellites that still maintained a visual window on the aggressive combat theater that had erupted eighty-seven minutes, forty-three seconds ago. He adjusted his headset and listened to the ground communications streaming through the computer links.

"Excaliber, this is Phoenix. Are you prepared to take on wounded?" The transmission was slightly garbled by the cacophony of explosions taking place around the speaker. Despite the dire straits he'd found his group under, First Sergeant Samuel Adams Gander performed his job and reported the events as they occurred.

"Affirmative, Phoenix. Excaliber is ready, willing, and able to transport wounded back to Wasp. The cap'n has the ship's hospital standing by if we can't make use of local resources in Sanliurfa."

Jim studied the terrain, spotting the wing units put into the air from USS Wasp's deck out in the Mediterranean. The Marine pilots kept their aircraft flying smoothly, staying close to the hard deck. Tracking the Marine wing had been Jim's primary job, and the task had been relatively simple-until now. Once the Syrian forces were engaged, tracking would become complicated. One of his main priorities was to keep the friendlies separated from the hostiles.

Jim's guts churned as he watched the aircraft moving. He tagged them again with the computer, converting the visual feeds into digital tactical information that showed on the wall screen in front of him. A Syrian MiG popped onscreen as well. Jim noted that he already had a designation for the craft but reaffirmed the tag with frantic trackball movements and a couple keystrokes. He glanced at the computer monitor on his right.

The computer monitor showed the American air forces as blue triangles. The Syrian forces were red. Any unknown aircraft, and thank God there were none of those, would be rendered in green, all of them marked with digital readouts of elevation from the hard deck. The resulting effect would be viewer friendly, like a kid's video game.

Suddenly, many of the blue triangles veered from the LZ the Rangers had set up along the ridgeline behind the border. In a heartbeat, that tightly knit group of helicopters became a tangled confusion.

Glancing back at the satellite visual, Jim watched in disbelief as highly trained Marine pilots somehow managed to crash their aircraft into each other. Only a few escaped the immediate destruction. Even so, others dropped from the sky without ever being touched.

In one split instant, the rescue effort became a catastrophe. What had once been efficient fighting machines suddenly became ripped and twisted debris. As Jim watched in stunned amazement, one of the Cobras blew up when it struck the ground. Somewhere in the areas of his mind that cataloged, identified, and reasoned out such occurrences, Jim knew that the Cobra's ordnance must have blown. Fire wreathed the battered hulk, letting him know there would be few-if any-survivors.

"What just happened?" someone demanded.

"Man, this reminds me of what happened to the Russian air force when they tried to pull off that surprise attack on Israel in January last year.

"Yeah," someone else said nervously. "But that shouldn't happen to us. We're the good guys."

Jim remembered the Russian attack and the way the Soviet aircraft had been swatted from the sky as if by an invisible hand. Footage of the failed attack still rolled on the Learning Channel and on The History Channel when Cold War programs aired.

Spinning in his chair, Jim gazed back at the observation post where the officers stood. Brigadier General Hamilton Farley stood with Canadian Brigadier General Victor Williams. General Farley was commander of the Cheyenne Mountain Command Center and General Williams served as second-in-command. Both men were stem and alert, not showing any signs of having been rousted from bed.

Jim looked for Colonel Morris Turner, the Canadian officer in charge of Charlie Crew, which was currently on duty. Colonel Turner had been standing in his customary position behind Jim, who was the newest member of the team. When he didn't spot the colonel there, Jim glanced around the room. At present time, Charlie Crew consisted of thirty-seven individuals. Even considering that someone might have stepped away from their post, an event that Jim figured was never done during an alert situation because he'd never seen that happen, losing a person in the room was next to impossible.

Then he saw the uniform lying on the floor only a few feet from his chair. Colonel Turner's name badge poked out from one of the buffed shoes.

Despite the training Charlie Crew had undergone, despite the stress that the team had faced on a number of occasions that threatened North American security, the men and women manning their posts came undone. As it turned out, several people were missing.

"It's like they got beamed out of here," Sterling Thompson said. He was a couple years Jim's junior but had such an affinity for all things cybernetic that he had been a natural candidate to post at Cheyenne Mountain. Sterling was also big into science fiction. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and looked at Jim. "There's no other explanation, man. We're two thousand feet down in solid rock, locked up tight behind doors that weigh twenty-five tons each."

"Calm down," Jim advised, pushing himself to his feet. The satfeeds streaming in from Turkey had faltered as well, but he wasn't sure if the problem lay there or within the Cheyenne Mountain complex. "There's an explanation."

"Yeah," Sterling agreed wholeheartedly. He tapped keys on his keyboard, bringing up a view of space. "And we're going to find it out there. Man, we thought we had problems in Turkey?" He shook his head. "I think we're about to be invaded. These people missing? They're just a sampling for whoever 's waiting out there." He pointed at the screen full of stars.

Jim barely handled his own rising panic. He reached down and touched Colonel Turner's uniform, trailing a finger along the edge of the name badge. It felt real, but this couldn't really be happening. He watched as Sterling flipped through the different sectors of space available to them through the satellites they had access to.

General Farley strode from the observation post and stopped near Turner's uniform. "Attention." His voice was crisp and powerful.

The command center crew obeyed immediately. There was nothing like a general's voice to bring an enlisted man up short.

"I've notified security. Whatever this matter is-" Farley glanced down at Turner's abandoned uniform-"it's being looked into by professionals. At this moment, I need all of you to be professional, to be the soldiers you were trained to be in this field, and I need that from you right this instant. Do you understand that?"

"Yes, sir!" The reply boomed from the twenty-three people left in the ranks.

"I need those information lines back up and running," Farley said. "You've got American soldiers and our allies dying over there. If we don't watch over them, give them some kind of heads-up, we're going to lose more of them." He paused. "I'm not going to stand for that on my watch. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Then get back to it. I want everything you can find out, and I want it yesterday."

Jim settled back in at his console. This was why there were generals, he thought. When the world got crazy, an order was still an order. But he remained uncomfortably aware of the vacated uniform lying behind him at the general's feet.

He slipped his headset back on and cued the audible stream.

"Phoenix Leader, this is Alpha Two. We've lost men, Goose." The man's voice cracked with rising hysteria. "They've disappeared! There are empty uniforms everywhere!"

Jim lifted his head and gazed across the empty seat where Donna Kirkland had once sat. She had been warm and friendly and helped him familiarize himself with the demands he faced. Only her uniform remained in the chair now. He locked eyes with Sterling. "You listening to this?"

Sterling nodded. "It's happening everywhere, Jim. It wasn't just us."

For a moment, Jim felt a little relieved that the disappearances weren't held just to the Cheyenne facility. Then, a millisecond later, he realized that the other disappearances indicated that whatever enemy they were up against could strike possibly around the globe-at the very least on the other side of the world-at the same time and with apparent impunity. How were they supposed to deal with something like that?