“What’s the armament configuration on this bird?” he shouted at the cockpit.

“One M230 chain gun, two Hydra rockets,” came the reply.

“What about Hellfire missiles?” Luke said.

“They weren’t loaded,” Rachel said. “You were just going to interview someone, remember? We weren’t going to need all that muscle.”

Luke grunted. Lesson learned. Always load up the weapons. Overload them if necessary. Too much was better than not enough.

“Oh, man,” Ed said. “Stone, you better see this.”

Luke went to the bay door. Ed pointed at the ground toward their right. In the last of the fading daylight, Luke saw a tiny figure in bright orange go running by, headed toward the cliffs. Just behind that figure was where the shooting began.

Another figure was firing back the way the orange figure had come. From that direction, at least two dozen others were approaching. Some were running fast, some were stopping and shooting. The bright muzzle signatures of automatic weapons lit up the night like fireflies. The faraway blat of machine gun fire came to Luke on the wind.

“Oh my God,” he said.

“The girl,” Ed said. “Elizabeth.”

It was. It was a girl in an orange jumpsuit. Just like Elizabeth had been shown in an orange jumpsuit in the video.

It took Luke a long second to process the information. A wave of unreality washed over him. All this time, he had been focused on the telephone, finding it, capturing the person holding it, and then asking more questions. The right questions, put to the right person, could bring them closer to Elizabeth. He never thought, not for one second, that Elizabeth would be in the same place as the phone.

Luke jumped up and poked his head back into the cockpit.

“You gotta put us down there. Did you see that? The President’s daughter is down there, running for the cliffs. They’re right behind her. You gotta drop us. Somehow, you gotta put us on the ground.”

The two pilots turned and looked at him.

“What?”

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

11:05 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (7:05 p.m. Arabic Standard Time)

The Situation Room

The White House, Washington, DC

The insanity rolled on. Lawrence Keller watched it unfold with increasing alarm.

“The Russians are overreacting,” General Stark said. “And they’re overplaying their hand.”

Stark was a madman, and Mark Baylor was just a step behind him. How did this happen? How had Keller himself gotten this so wrong?

They were better off with a do-nothing like David Barrett.

NSA and CIA listening stations had started picking up chatter from inside the Russian strategic command. Instead of simply allowing the United States to attack its allies in Syria and Iran with impunity, Russia was ready to go the mat. They had emerged from the disastrous 1990s in a weakened state geopolitically, militarily, and economically, but they did have one last card up their sleeves.