President Mailer is seated on a leather sofa in his private office, his limbs shaking, his mind struggling to seal away his personal grief, if only for a few minutes. Outside his office, Secretary of Defense Dick Pryzstas and General Fecondo huddle with Pierre Borgia.

“The president’s in shock,” Przystas whispers. “Pierre, as senior Cabinet member, protocol demands you take over.”

“NORAD’s detected an air wing of Russian stealth fighters heading toward Alaska. Our Raptors are en route to intercept. Are you prepared to issue launch codes—”

“No!” Mailer emerges from the office. “I’m still in charge, Mr.Pryzstas. Initiate Global Shield. Secretary Borgia, I want to speak with Viktor Grozny and General Xiliang now. I don’t care if you have to personally fly over to Moscow to get Grozny to pick up the goddam phone, just do it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sinai Desert,
Israel

The 747-400F freighter traces a figure-eight pattern 42,000 feet above the Sinai desert. Despite appearances, this is no mere jumbo jet. Within its rounded proboscis nose cone is the Air Force YAL-1 Airborne Laser (ABL), a weapon designed to intercept SAMs, cruise, and tactical ballistic missiles.

Major David Adashek stares at his station module as the Lockheed Martin beam director and Infrared Search and Track (IRST) system scans the northeastern skies.

Ten targets appear on his screen.

“Here we go, people. Ten ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, now coming into range. Three hundred kilometers and closing fast.”

“Illuminator beacon has acquired targets, sir. We’re locked on.”

“Light the coil.”

With a brilliant flash, the Boeing multimegawatt TRW COIL laser engages, igniting a brilliant orange beam from its nose cone. The beacon cuts across the night sky at the speed of light, turning the first Iranian missile into a plummeting fireball.

In the next thirty seconds, all nine remaining missiles will be destroyed.

Space

The sleek, black-and-white spaceplane rolls gently into its new orbit, soaring high above the Earth in silence and solitude. Unlike its distant NASA cousin, the Lockheed Martin Venture Star, a reusable space vehicle built and launched with much public fanfare, this craft, known simply as the SMV (Space Maneuver Vehicle) to its Boeing North American designers, has never seen the light of day. Conceived in the final days of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the SMV was funded in secrecy by the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Military Spaceplane Office and, ironically enough, launched atop a purchased Russian Proton rocket. Able to remain on station for up to a year, the fully automated and pilotless vehicle carries no commercial payload, nor has it ever serviced the International Space Station or private-sector interests. The SMV was designed for one purpose—to hunt down and destroy enemy satellites.

Concealed within the SMVs twenty-five-foot structure is a truss-mounted platform supporting the TRW Alpha high-energy hydrogen-fluoride laser and Hughes four-meter beam-projection telescope.