But not this year and not this time. The satellite photos showed a few wispy clouds, but otherwise fair weather. For a few minutes he wondered if the Pacific Ocean, like Arkansas, was subject to fair-weather gales, but, no, that wasn't likely, since those adiabatic storms resulted mainly from variations in temperature and land elevation, whereas an ocean was both flat and moderate. He checked with a colleague who had been a Navy meteorologist to confirm it, and found himself left only with a mystery. Thinking that perhaps the information he had was wrong, he consulted his telephone book and dialed 011-671-555-1212, since a directory-assistance call was toll-free. He got a recording that told him that there had been a storm. Except there had not been a storm. Was he the first guy to figure that out?

His next move was to walk across the office to the news department. Within minutes an inquiry went out on one of the wire services.

"Ryan."

"Bob Holtzman, Jack. I have a question for you."

"I hope it's not about Wall Street," Jack replied in as unguarded a voice as he could muster.

"No, it's about Guam. Why are the phone lines out?"

"Bob, did you ask the phone company that?" Ryan tried.

"Yeah. They say there was a storm that took a lot of lines down. Except for a couple of things. One, there wasn't any storm. Two, there's an undersea cable and a satellite link. Three, a week is a long time. What's going on?" the reporter asked.

"How many people are asking?"

"Right now, just me and a TV station in Little Rock that put a request up on the AP wire. Another thirty minutes and it's going to be a lot more. What gives? Some sort of—"

"Bob, why don't you come on down here," Ryan suggested. Well, it's not as though you expected this to last forever, Jack told himself. Then he called Scott Adler's office. But why couldn't it have waited one more day?

Yukon was fueling her second set of ships. The urgency of the moment meant that the fleet oiler was taking on two escorts at a time, one on either beam, while her helicopter transferred various parts and other supplies around the formation, about half of them aircraft components to restore Ike's aircraft to full-mission status. The sun would set in another thirty minutes, and the underway-replenishment operations would continue under cover of darkness. Dubro's battle force had darted east, the better to distance itself from the Indian formation, and again had gone to EMCON, with all radars off, and a deceptive placement of their surveillance aircraft. But they'd lost track of the two Indian carriers, and while the Hawkeyes probed cautiously, Dubro sweated.

"Lookouts report unknown aircraft inbound at two-two-five," a talker called.