"You know the Secretary?" the officer asked on the way in.

"Oh, yeah, from a short distance, anyway."

He had to wait half a minute in an anteroom, but only half a minute.

"Al, grab a seat. Coffee?"

"Yes, thank you, Dr. Bretano."

"Tony," the SecDef corrected. He wasn't a formal man most of the time, and he knew the sort of work Gregory was capable of. A Navy steward got coffee for both men, along with croissants and jam, then withdrew. "How was the flight?"

"The red-eye never changes, sir-Tony. If you get off alive, they haven't done it right."

"Yeah, well, one nice thing about this job, I have a G waiting for me all the time. I don't have to walk or drive very much, and you saw the security detail outside."

"The guys with the knuckles dragging on the floor?" Gregory asked.

"Be nice. One of them went to Princeton before he became a SEAL."

That must be the one who reads the comic books to the others, Al didn't observe out loud. "So, Tony, what did you want me here for?"

"You used to work downstairs in SDIO, as I recall."

"Seven years down there, working in the dark with the rest of the mushrooms, and it never really worked out. I was in the free-electron-laser project. It went pretty well, except the d.a.m.ned lasers never scaled up the way we expected, even after we stole what the Russians were doing. They had the best laser guy in the world, by the way. Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d got killed in a rock-climbing accident back in 1990, or that's what we heard in SDIO. He was bashing his head against the same wall our guys were. The 'wiggle chamber,' we called it, where you lase the hot ga.s.ses to extract the energy for your beam. We could never get a stable magnetic containment. They tried everything. I helped for nineteen months. There were some really smart guys working that problem, but we all struck out. I think the guys at Princeton will solve the fusion-containment problem before this one. We looked at that, too, but the problems were too different to copy the theoretical solutions. We ended up giving them a lot of our ideas, and they've been putting it to good use. Anyway, the Army made me a lieutenant colonel, and three weeks later, they offered me an early out because they didn't have any more use for me, and so I took the job at TRW that Dr. Flynn offered, and I've been working for you ever since." And so Gregory was getting eighty percent of his twenty-year Army pension, plus half a million a year from TRW as a section leader, with stock options, and one h.e.l.l of a retirement package.

"Well, Gerry Flynn sings your praises about once a week."

"He's a good man to work for," Gregory replied, with a smile and a nod.

"He says you can do software better than anyone in Sunnyvale."

"For some things. I didn't do the code for 'Doom,' unfortunately, but I'm still your man for adaptive optics."

"How about SAMs?"

Gregory nodded. "I did some of that when I was new in the Army. Then later they had me in to play with Patriot Block-4, you know, intercepting Scuds. I helped out on the warhead software." It had been three days too late to be used in the Persian Gulf War, he didn't add, but his software was now standard on all Patriot missiles in the field.

"Excellent. I want you to look over something for me. It'll be a direct contract for the Office of the Secretary of Defense-me-and Gerry Flynn won't gripe about it."

"What's that, Tony?"

"Find out if the Navy's Aegis system can intercept a ballistic inbound."

"It can. It'll stop a Scud, but that's only Mach three or so. You mean a real ballistic inbound?"

The SecDef nodded. "Yeah, an ICBM."

"There's been talk about that for years . . ." Gregory sipped his coffee. "The radar system is up to it. May be a slight software issue there, but it would not be a hard one, because you'll be getting raid-warning from other a.s.sets, and the SPY radar can see a good five hundred miles, and you can do all sorts of things with it electronically, like blast out seven million watts of RF down half a degree of bearing. That'll fry electronic components out to, oh, seven or eight thousand meters. You'll end up having two-headed kids, and have to buy a new watch.

"Okay," he went on, a slightly s.p.a.cey look in his eyes. "The way Aegis works, the big SPY radar gives you a rough location for your target-interception, so you can loft your SAMs into a box. That's why Aegis missiles get such great range. They go out on autopilot and only do actual maneuvering for the last few seconds. For that, you have the SPG radars on the ships, and the seeker-head on the missile tracks in on the reflected RF energy off the target. It's a killer system against airplanes, because you don't know you're being illuminated until the last couple of seconds, and it's hard to eyeball the missile and evade in so short a time.

"Okay, but for an ICBM, the terminal velocity is way the h.e.l.l up there, like twenty-five thousand feet per second, like Mach eleven. That means your targeting window is very small . . . in all dimensions, but especially depth. Also you're talking a fairly hard, robust target. The RV off an ICBM is fairly st.u.r.dy, not tissue paper like the boosters are. I'll have to see if the warhead off a SAM will really hurt one of those." The eyes cleared and he looked directly into Bretano's eyes. "Okay, when do I start?"

"Commander Matthews," THUNDER said into his intercom phone. "Dr. Gregory is ready to talk to the Aegis people. Keep me posted, Al" was Bretano's final order.

"You bet."

The Reverend Doctor Hosiah Jackson donned his best robe of black silk, a gift handmade by the ladies of his congregation, the three stripes on the upper arms designating his academic rank. He was in Gerry Patterson's study, and a nice one it was. Outside the white wooden door was his congregation, all of them well-dressed and fairly prosperous white folks, some of whom would be slightly uncomfortable with having a black minister talk to them-Jesus was white, after all (or Jewish, which was almost the same thing). This was a little different, though, because this day they were remembering the life of someone only Gerry Patterson had ever met, a Chinese Baptist named Yu Fa An, whom their minister had called Skip, and whose congregation they had supported and supported generously for years. And so to commemorate the life of a yellow minister, they would sit through the sermon of a black one while their own pastor preached the gospel in a black church. It was a fine gesture on Gerry's part, Hosiah Jackson thought, hoping it wouldn't get him into any trouble with this congregation. There'd be a few out there, their bigoted thoughts invisible behind their self-righteous faces, but, the Reverend Jackson admitted to himself, they'd be tortured souls because of it. Those times had pa.s.sed. He remembered them better than white Mississippians did because he'd been the one walking in the streets-he'd been arrested seven times during his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference-and getting his parishioners registered to vote. That had been the real problem with the rednecks. Riding in a munic.i.p.al bus was no big deal, but voting meant power, real civic power, the ability to elect the people who made the laws which would be enforced on black and white citizens alike, and the rednecks hadn't liked that at all. But times had changed, and now they accepted the inevitable-after it had come to pa.s.s-and they'd learned to deal with it, and they'd also learned to vote Republican instead of Democrat, and the amusing part of that to Hosiah Jackson was that his own son Robert was more conservative than these well-dressed rednecks were, and he'd gone pretty far for the son of a colored preacherman in central Mississippi. But it was time. Patterson, like Jackson, had a large mirror on the back of the door so that he could check his appearance on the way out. Yes, he was ready. He looked solemn and authoritative, as the Voice of G.o.d was supposed to look.

The congregation was already singing. They had a fine organ here, a real hundred-horsepower one, not the electronic kind he had at his church, but the singing . . . they couldn't help it. They sang white, and there was no getting around it. The singing had all the proper devotion, but not the exuberant pa.s.sion that he was accustomed to . . . but he'd love to have that organ, Hosiah decided. The pulpit was finely appointed, with a bottle of ice water, and a microphone provided by the CNN crew, who were discreetly in both back corners of the church and not making any trouble, which was unusual for news crews, Reverend Jackson thought. His last thought before beginning was that the only other black man to stand in this pulpit before this moment was the man who'd painted the woodwork.

"Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I am Hosiah Jackson. You all probably know where my church is. I am here today at the invitation of my good friend and colleague, your pastor, Gerry Patterson.

"Gerry has the advantage over me today, because, unlike me, and I gather unlike any person in the church, he actually knew the man whom we are here to remember.

"To me, Yu Fa An was just a pen pal. Some years ago, Gerry and I had occasion to talk about the ministry. We met in the chapel at the local hospital. It'd been a bad day for both of us. We'd both lost good people that day, at about the same time, and to the same disease, cancer, and both of us needed to sit in the hospital chapel. I guess we both needed to ask G.o.d the same question. It's the question all of us have asked-why is there such cruelty in the world, why does a loving and merciful G.o.d permit it?

"Well, the answer to that question is found in Scripture, and in many places. Jesus Himself lamented the loss of innocent life, and one of his miracles was the raising of Lazarus from the dead, both to show that He was indeed the Son of G.o.d, and also to show His humanity, to show how much He cared about the loss of a good man.

"But Lazarus, like our two parishioners that day in the hospital, had died from disease, and when G.o.d made the world, He made it in such a way that there were, and there still are, things that need fixing. The Lord G.o.d told us to take dominion over the world, and part of that was G.o.d's desire for us to cure disease, to fix all the broken parts and so to bring perfection to the world, even as, by following G.o.d's Holy Word, we can bring perfection to ourselves.

"Gerry and I had a good talk that day, and that was the beginning of our friendship, as all ministers of the Gospel ought to be friends, because we preach the same Gospel from the same G.o.d.

"The next week we were talking again, and Gerry told me about his friend Skip. A man from the other side of the world, a man from a place where the religious traditions do not know Jesus. Well, Skip learned about all that at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, the same as many others, and he learned it so well that he thought long and hard and decided to join the ministry and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ . . ."

Skip's skin was a different color than mine," Gerry Patterson was saying in another pulpit less than two miles away. "But in G.o.d's eyes, we are all the same, because the Lord Jesus looks through our skin into our hearts and our souls, and He always knows what's in there."

"That's right," a man's voice agreed in the congregation.

"And so, Skip became a minister of the Gospel. Instead of returning to his native land, where freedom of religion is something their government protects, Skip decided to keep flying west, into communist China. Why there?" Patterson asked. "Why there indeed! The other China does not have freedom of religion. The other China refuses to admit that there is such a thing as G.o.d. The other China is like the Philistines of the Old Testament, the people who persecuted the Jews of Moses and Joshua, the enemies of G.o.d Himself. Why did Skip do this? Because he knew that no other place needed to hear the Word of G.o.d more than those people, and that Jesus wants us to preach to the heathen, to bring His Holy Word to those whose souls cry out for it, and this he did. No United States Marine storming the sh.o.r.es of Iwo Jima showed more courage than Skip did, carrying his Bible into Red China and starting to preach the Gospel in a land where religion is a crime."

And we must not forget that there was another man there, a Catholic cardinal, an old unmarried man from a rich and important family who long ago decided on his own to join the clergy of his church," Jackson reminded those before him. "His name was Renato, a name as foreign to us as Fa An, but despite that, he was a man of G.o.d who also took the Word of Jesus to the land of the heathen.

"When the government of that country found out about Reverend Yu, they took Skip's job away. They hoped to starve him out, but the people who made that decision didn't know Skip. They didn't know Jesus, and they didn't know about the faithful, did they?"

"h.e.l.l, no!" replied a white male voice from the pews, and that's when Hosiah knew he had them.

"No, sir! That's when your Pastor Gerry found out and that's when you good people started sending help to Skip Yu, to support the man his G.o.dless government was trying to destroy, because they didn't know that people of faith share a commitment to justice!"

Patterson's arm shot out. "And Jesus pointed and said, see that woman there, she gives from her need, not from her riches. It takes more for a poor man or a poor woman to give than it does for a rich man to do it. That was when you good people began helping my congregation to support my friend Skip. And Jesus also said that which you do for the least of My brethren you do also unto Me. And so your church and my church helped this man, this lonely minister of the Gospel in the land of the pagans, those people who deny the Name and Word of G.o.d, those people who worship the corpse of a monster named Mao, who put his embalmed body on display as though it were the body of a saint! He was no saint. He was no man of G.o.d. He was hardly a man at all. He was a ma.s.s murderer worse than anything our country has ever seen. He was like the Hitler that our fathers fought to destroy sixty years ago. But to the people who run that country, that killer, that murderer, that destroyer of life and freedom is the new G.o.d. That 'G.o.d' is false," Patterson told them, with pa.s.sion entering his voice. "That 'G.o.d' is the voice of Satan. That 'G.o.d' is the mouthpiece for the fires of h.e.l.l. That 'G.o.d' was the incarnation of evil-and that 'G.o.d' is dead, and now he's a stuffed animal, like the dead bird you might see over the bar in a saloon, or the deer head a lot of you have in your den-and they still worship him. They still honor his word, and they still revere his beliefs-the beliefs that killed millions of people just because their false G.o.d didn't like them." Patterson stood erect and brushed his hair back.

"There are those who say that what evil we see in the world is just the absence of good. But we know better than that. There is a devil in creation, and that devil has agents among us, and some of those agents run countries! Some of those agents start wars. Some of those agents take innocent people from their homes and put them in camps and murder them there like cattle in a slaughterhouse. Those are the agents of Satan! Those are the devotees of the Prince of Darkness. They are those among us who take the lives of the innocent, even the lives of innocent little babies . . ."

And so, those three men of G.o.d went to the hospital. One of them, our friend Skip, went to a.s.sist his parishioner in her time of need. The other two, the Catholics, went because they, too, were men of G.o.d, and they, too, stood for the same things that we do, because the Word of Jesus is THE SAME FOR ALL OF US!" Hosiah Jackson's voice boomed out.

"Yes, sir," the same white voice agreed, and there were nods in the congregation.

"And so those three men of G.o.d went to the hospital to save the life of a little baby, a little baby that the government of that heathen land wanted to kill-and why? They wanted to kill it because its mother and father believe in G.o.d-and, oh, no, they couldn't allow people like that to bring a child into the world! Oh, no, they couldn't allow people of faith to bring a child into their country, because that was like inviting in a spy. That was a danger to their G.o.dless government. And why is it a danger?

"It's a danger because they know that they are G.o.dless pagans! It's a danger because they know that G.o.d's Holy Word is the most powerful force in the world! And their only response to that kind of danger is to kill, to take the life that G.o.d Himself gives to each of us, because in denying G.o.d, they can also deny life, and you know, those pagans, those unbelievers, those killers love to have that kind of power. They love pretending that they are G.o.ds. They love their power, and they love using it in the service of Satan! They know they are destined to spend eternity in h.e.l.l, and they want to share their h.e.l.l with us here on earth, and they want to deny to us the only thing that can liberate us from the destiny they have chosen for themselves. That is why they condemned that innocent little baby to death.

"And when those three men went to the hospital to preserve the life of that innocent baby, they stood in G.o.d's own place. They took G.o.d's place, but they did so in humility and in the strength of their faith. They stood in G.o.d's place to fulfill G.o.d's will, not to get power for themselves, not to be false heroes. They went there to serve, not to rule. To serve, as the Lord Jesus Himself served. As his apostles served. They went there to protect an innocent life. They went there to do the Lord G.o.d's work!"

You people probably don't know this, but when I was first ordained I spent three years in the United States Navy, and I served as a chaplain to the Marines. I was a.s.signed to the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. When I was there, I got to know people we call heroes, and for sure a lot of Marines fall into that category. I was there to minister to the dead and dying after a terrible helicopter crash, and it was one of the great honors of my life to be there and to comfort dying young Marines-be-cause I knew they were going to see G.o.d. I remember one, a sergeant, the man had just gotten married a month before, and he died while he was saying a prayer to G.o.d for his wife. He was a veteran of Vietnam, that sergeant, and he had lots of decorations. He was what we call a tough guy," Patterson told the black congregation, "but the toughest thing about that Marine was that when he knew he was going to die, he prayed not for himself, but for his young wife, that G.o.d would comfort her. That Marine died as a Christian man, and he went from this world to stand proud before his G.o.d as a man who did his duty in every way he could.

"Well, so did Skip, and so did Renato. They sacrificed their lives to save a baby. G.o.d sent them. G.o.d gave those men their orders. And they heard the orders, and they followed them without flinching, without hesitating, without thinking except to be sure that they were doing the right thing.

"And today, eight thousand miles from here there is a new life, a new little baby, probably asleep now. That baby will never know all the hubbub that came just before she was born, but with parents like that, that baby will know the Word of G.o.d. And all that happened because three brave men of G.o.d went to that hospital, and two of them died there to do the Lord's Work.

"Skip was a Baptist. Renato was a Catholic.

"Skip was yellow. I'm white. You people are black.

"But Jesus doesn't care about any of that. We have all heard His words. We have all accepted Him as our Savior. So did Skip. So did Renato. Those two brave men sacrificed their lives for The Right. The Catholic's last words-he asked if the baby was okay, and the other Catholic, the German priest, said 'yes,' and Renato said, 'Bene.' That's Italian. It means, 'That's good, that's all right.' He died knowing that he did the right thing, And that's not a bad thing, is it?"

"That's right!" three voices called out.

There is so much to learn from their example," Hosiah Jackson told his borrowed congregation.

"We must learn, first of all, that G.o.d's Word is the same for all of us. I'm a black man. You folks are white. Skip was Chinese. In that we are all different, but in G.o.d's Holy Word we are all the same. Of all the things we have to learn, of all the things we have to keep in our hearts every day we live, that is the most important. Jesus is Savior to us all, if only we accept Him, if only we take Him into our hearts, if only we listen when He talks to us. That is the first lesson we need to learn from the death of those two brave men.

"The next lesson we need to learn is that Satan is still alive out there, and while we must listen to the words of G.o.d, there are those out there who prefer to listen to the words of Lucifer. We need to recognize those people for what they are.

"Forty years ago, we had some of those people among us. I remember it, and probably you do, too. We got over all that. The reason we got over it is that we have all heard the Word of G.o.d. We've all remembered that our G.o.d is a G.o.d of Mercy. Our G.o.d is a G.o.d of Justice. If we remember that, we remember a lot more besides. G.o.d does not measure us by what we are against. Jesus looks into our hearts and measures us by what we are for.

"But we cannot be for justice except by being against injustice. We must remember Skip and Renato. We must remember Mr. and Mrs. Yang, and all like them, those people in China who've been denied the chance to hear the Word of G.o.d. The sons of Lucifer are afraid of G.o.d's Holy Word. The sons of Lucifer are afraid of us. The sons of Satan are afraid of G.o.d's Will, because in G.o.d's Love and in the Way of the Lord lies their destruction. They may hate G.o.d. They may hate G.o.d's word-but they fear, they FEAR the consequences of their own actions. They fear the d.a.m.nation that awaits them. They may deny G.o.d, but they know the righteousness of G.o.d, and they know that every human soul cries out for knowledge of our Lord.

"That's why they feared Reverend Yu Fa An. That's why they feared Cardinal DiMilo, and that's why they fear us. Me and you good people. Those sons of Satan are afraid of us because they know that their words and their false beliefs can no more stand up to the Word of G.o.d than a house trailer can stand before a springtime tornado! And they know that all men are born with some knowledge of G.o.d's Holy Word. That's why they fear us.

"Good!" Reverend Hosiah Jackson exclaimed. "Then let's give them another reason to fear us! Let G.o.d's faithful show them the power and the conviction of our faith!"

But we can be sure that G.o.d was there with Skip, and with Cardinal DiMilo. G.o.d directed their brave hands, and through them G.o.d saved that innocent little child," Patterson told his black congregation. "And G.o.d welcomed to his bosom the two men He sent there to do His work, and today our friend Skip and Cardinal DiMilo stand proudly before the Lord G.o.d, those good and faithful servants of His Holy Word.

"My friends, they did their job. They did the Lord's work that day. They saved the life of an innocent child. They showed the whole world what the power of faith can be.

"But what of our job?" Patterson asked.

It is not the job of the faithful to encourage Satan," Hosiah Jackson told the people before him. He'd captured their attention as surely as Lord Olivier on his best day-and why not? These were not the words of Shakespeare. These were the words of one of G.o.d's ministers. "When Jesus looks into our hearts, will He see people who support the sons of Lucifer? Will Jesus see people who give their money to support the G.o.dless killers of the innocent? Will Jesus see people who give their money to the new Hitler?"

"No!" A female voice shouted in reply. "No!"

"What is it that we, we the people of G.o.d, the people of faith-what is it that we stand for? When the sons of Lucifer kill the faithful, where do you stand? Will you stand for justice? Will you stand for your faith? Will you stand with the holy martyrs? Will you stand with Jesus?" Jackson demanded of his borrowed white congregation.

And as one voice, they answered him: "Yes!"

Jesus H. Christ," Ryan said. He'd walked over to the Vice President's office to catch the TV coverage.

"Told you my Pap was good at this stuff. h.e.l.l, I grew up with it over the dinner table, and he still gets inside my head," said Robby Jackson, wondering if he'd allow himself a drink tonight. "Patterson is probably doing okay, too. Pap says he's an okay guy, but my Pap is the champ."

"Did he ever think of becoming a Jesuit?" Jack asked with a grin.

"Pap's a preacherman, but he ain't quite a saint. The celibacy would be kinda hard on him," Robby answered.

Then the scene changed to Leonardo di Vinci International Airport outside Rome, where the Alitalia 747 had just landed and was now pulling up to the jetway. Below it was a truck, and next to the truck some cars belonging to the Vatican. It had already been announced that Renato Cardinal DiMilo would be getting his own full state funeral at St. Peter's Basilica, and CNN would be there to cover all of it, joined by SkyNews, Fox, and all the major networks. They'd been late getting onto the story at the beginning, but that only made this part of the coverage more full.

Back in Mississippi, Hosiah Jackson walked slowly down from the pulpit as the last hymn ended. He walked with grace and dignity to the front door, so as to greet all of the congregation members on the way out.

That took much longer than he'd expected. It seemed that every single one of them wanted to take his hand and thank him for coming-the degree of hospitality was well in excess of his most optimistic expectations. And there was no doubting their sincerity. Some insisted on talking for a few moments, until the press of the departing crowd forced them down the steps and onto the parking lot. Hosiah counted six invitations to dinner, and ten inquiries about his church, and if it needed any special work. Finally, there was just one man left, pushing seventy, with scraggly gray hair and a hooked nose that had seen its share of whiskey bottles. He looked like a man who'd topped out as a.s.sistant foreman at the sawmill.

"h.e.l.lo," Jackson said agreeably.

"Pastor," the man replied, uneasily, as though wanting to say more.

It was a look Hosiah had seen often enough. "Can I help you, sir?"

"Pastor . . . years ago . . ." And his voice choked up again. "Pastor," he began again. "Pastor, I sinned."

"My friend, we all sin. G.o.d knows that. That's why he sent His Son to be with us and conquer our sins." The minister grabbed the man's shoulder to steady him.

"I was in the Klan, Pastor, I did . . . sinful things . . . I . . . hurt nigras just cuz I hated them, and I-"

"What's your name?" Hosiah asked gently.

"Charlie Picket," the man replied. And then Hosiah knew. He had a good memory for names. Charles Worthington Picket had been the Grand Kleegle of the local Klavern. He'd never been convicted of a major crime, but his name was one that came up much of the time.

"Mr. Picket, those things all happened many years ago," he reminded the man.

"I ain't never-I mean, I ain't never killed n.o.body. Honest, Pastor, I ain't never done that," Picket insisted, with real desperation in his voice. "But I know'd thems that did, and I never told the cops. I never told them not to do it . . . sweet Jesus, I don't know what I was back then, Pastor. I was . . . it was . . ."

"Mr. Picket, are you sorry for your sins?"

"Oh, yes, oh Jesus, yes, Pastor. I've prayed for forgiveness, but-"

"There is no 'but,' Mr. Picket. G.o.d has forgiven you your sins," Jackson told him in his gentlest voice.

"Are you sure?"

A smile and a nod. "Yes, I'm sure."

"Pastor, you need help at your church, roofing and stuff, you call me, y'hear? That's the house of G.o.d, too. Maybe I didn't always know it, but by d.a.m.n I know it now, sir."

He'd probably never called a black man "sir" in his life, unless there'd been a gun to his head. So, the minister thought, at least one person had listened to his sermon, and learned something from it. And that wasn't bad for a man in his line of work.

"Pastor, I gots to apologize for all the evil words and thoughts I had. Ain't never done that, but I gots to do it now." He seized Hosiah's hand. "Pastor, I am sorry, sorry as a man can be for all the things I done back then, and I beg your forgiveness."

"And the Lord Jesus said, 'Go forth and sin no more.' Mr. Picket, that's all of scripture in one sentence. G.o.d came to forgive our sins. G.o.d has already forgiven you."

Finally, their eyes met. "Thank you, Pastor. And G.o.d bless you, sir."