A distant flash of sunlight caught his eye and he leaned over the catwalk, looking down. Far below, a flight of jets, silver in the sun, went to afterburner and began to ascend toward them. Immediately, their speed increased, causing the whole complicated rig to shake. The soft movement of air rose until it was a wind screaming through the girders, tearing at the catwalk, quickly growing so powerful that it forced Mark to clutch the flimsy railing. It was coming from below, meaning the whole ungainly mechanism was speeding toward the jets.

In seconds, he could see details on the F-16s, markings, rivets, the dark glass of the pilots’ face masks.

With a shrieking roar, something bright shot up into the center of the great open ring.

It was a missile, but when it stopped, the fire of its engine did not fade, the shriek did not stop. Holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the glare, he saw the midfuselage wings and white nose of an AIM-type missile, a large one. Its engine still running, it simply hung there in midair.

Others followed it, three, four, five stars in the bright daylight. One after another, they all stopped, and one by one, their engines burned out. The jets, wheeling in tight turns a few hundred feet below the craft, shimmered as if they were underwater. Then their fuselages seemed to turn to liquid and spray off behind the airframes, leaving the structural components naked to the wind. The jets disintegrated into fluttering bits of metal and red haze that had been the pilots.

The six silver missiles the drone had captured seemed one by one to turn to water and drip away toward the ground. But their warheads did not turn to water, they remained hanging in the air, black, gleaming spheres.

Mark recognized them for what they were: nuclear warheads. So the missiles had been nuclear-tipped AIM-120s—Slammers—among the most powerful weapons on earth.

He did not often feel fear, but he felt it now, not because he was afraid of the missiles, but because of two other fears. The first was what the presence of nuclear weapons told him: The White House was absolutely desperate. What a horrible struggle the president must have had, to make the decision that had led to this attack. He would have sweated blood, knowing the damage that these weapons would cause on the ground, yet he had sent six of them against the machine.

Useless effort.

The second fear was even greater. The warheads could have been destroyed along with the planes, the pilots, and the missiles. But they had been captured instead. This meant only one thing to him: Somehow, at some point in this battle, they would be used.

Far below, Mark could see the unmistakable outline of San Francisco Bay. They had risen high and gone north, too, returning to the Bay Area.