“The Dauntless has that many exo-atmospheric missiles?” said the colonel, whistling at the scale of the armament. Jesus, the British took the navy seriously. That ship was a veritable missile barge. But if what John had said about the amount of missiles they would need in order to take out the satellites was true, then even the massive arsenal aboard the Dauntless would not be enough. He went to speak but John was one step ahead of him.

“It is classified, but yes, the Dauntless has that many exo-atmospheric Ship Launched Anti-ballistic Missiles, or SLAMs” he smiled at the acronym, “Now, that is still not enough to get through the satellites’ laser defenses unless all forty-six are shielded, a process that will be even harder aboard a ship than it will be at the GBMD sites, and one which I will need help with from outside.”

He went on. The room listened and each person spoke up as other points came up. There were recaps of a sort but no one needed to point out the vast holes that still remained.

They bandied other options around: launching a battery of Nuclear Ballistic Missiles from Turkey or the Black Sea and hope that Russia does not retaliate; find a way to assume control of either the Royal Navy’s second Type 47 Destroyer or one of the US’s new Arliegh Burke class satellite killers, neither of which was even afloat yet.

They were stalling, everyone could see that. They clearly needed to do more research here and rather than let the meeting flounder on the seemingly impossible task of co-opting the Russian missile system the colonel moved the agenda on to other areas.

They each had a role on the team, a niche they filled, and leadership was the colonel’s. He was a decision-maker, and for the next twenty minutes or so helped focus their attention on planning the next nine months of everyone’s life. As he did so, it was clear to them all that those nine months were going to be the most challenging they had ever known, and yet still even a glimmer of true hope seemed almost too elusive to grasp.

* * *

As the meeting entered its final hour John’s internal clock let him know how little time he had left for his long journey back to San Diego. He had one very important topic he had to discuss with the team, and it was time he got to it.

“If I could change gears for a moment, there is something I need to update you on while before I need to leave.” They turned to John Hunt, “I hope you have been able to use the information I gave you on my seven colleagues around the world to track some of them down, and hopefully without incident.”