After a rendezvous with a KC-135 tanker plane about three hundred miles off the coast of Florida, they had begun their long flight east. Flying high over northern Morocco, they had been careful to stay out of sight of the extensive NATO military presence at Gibraltar, and then they had angled north up to the Mediterranean so they could trace a long path east over the sea, bypassing the airspaces of Southern Europe and Northern Africa all the way to Cyprus. Preferring to risk a flight over Turkey than either Israel or Egypt, they had then flown up over western Turkey, and from there they had entered the final part of their convoluted journey to the skies over Tibet and far northern India.

After eight hours in the air, Jack had finally acquiesced to the pleas of both his copilot and nature’s call and taken a break, leaving a nervous but resolute Martin to mind the plane’s systems and autopilot. Jack had insisted that he not be allowed to sleep more than an hour, and then he had clambered over the sleeping pilots into the bathroom.

The bathroom was a small cubby, three feet by two feet, with small seat built into the wall. Like a commercial airplane bathroom, only distinctly less luxurious. There was no sink, no running water of any kind, in fact, only some disinfectant wipes in a dispenser attached to the wall. Because of their two unwitting passengers, there was no way of closing the door to the toilet anymore, making the process even more demeaning, but military people were not known for their coyness, so Jack had matter-of-factly dropped his pants and done what he had to do before stepping back over the comatose captives and into the cot that ran the length of the small rear section of the flight deck.

Nearly three hours later, Martin felt he had gone as long as he could without Jack’s input. Reports had been coming over the radio of the conflagrations above Florida, Hawaii, and Singapore, and if their information was correct, then they should be approaching the first pod deployment area soon. When, after thirteen hours in the air, the plane’s powerful radar system started to pick up the first of the virus pods entering the atmosphere over the former soviet state of Turkmenistan, Martin knew he had given his friend as long as he could. He needed him on deck.