The canopy above Smith blew open and he felt himself being ripped from the cockpit. The tail just missed him as the plane continued to go end over end. The pilot wasn’t so lucky. The back of his ejection seat was struck and both it and he were cut in two.

Epilogue

Epilogue

Arlington National Cemetery
USA

Jon Smith looked away from the young family crying over a flag-draped casket and instead gazed out on the tombstones gleaming in the sunlight. With the help of a quietly grateful Chinese government, his pilot’s remains and those of the other airman killed in the dogfight had been recovered. Both were being interred with full military honors.

Of course, President Castilla couldn’t be here—it would have been suspicious for the commander in chief to show up to the funerals of two men killed in yet another vaguely described training accident. Fred Klein was absent too. As always, he preferred to remain in the darkness.

And then there was Randi. No one knew where she was. The deaths of the people on her team—particularly Professor Wilson and his students—had hit her hard. She’d been last seen somewhere near the border of Cambodia and Laos, but since then there had been no word. Not that it mattered. She always reappeared eventually.

That left him, or more accurately what remained of him, to quietly represent Covert-One. Mixed in with all the other uniformed servicemen, no one would pay much attention to a lone light colonel leaning on his cane for support.

He turned back and watched as the flag was removed from the casket and carefully folded for presentation to the pilot’s wife. She would never know that her husband was directly responsible for saving the lives of millions of innocent people.

One day, many years from now, the incident would be declassified so that historians could write theses and argue about its finer points over stylish drinks in stylish bars. He hoped someone would also have the presence of mind to formally recognize the people who had died. In his estimation, it was worth a few taxpayer dollars.

Until then, though, Klein’s carefully laid plans for the cover-up were working. The crash of Prime Minister Sanetomi’s plane had been explained away as a bird strike, and the inevitable demonstrations by Japanese and Chinese conspiracy theorists had been quickly broken up by their governments. Asian newspapers were now dominated by pictures of Sanetomi’s successor smiling and shaking hands with President Yandong. Everyone seemed to understand that the xenophobia angle had been pushed too far, and compromise was beginning to carry the day.

Ito’s facility was sealed off and would remain that way for centuries in order to let radiation levels subside. When the press noticed the rather uninteresting fact that Japan’s nuclear storage facility had been abandoned, the government would provide a bland story about concerns over structural instability.