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Elliot Pettigrew sat in a comfortable chair at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs watching CNBC when he saw the headline roll. He called room service, ordered a shrimp cocktail and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, sat back and said, “Hell, yeah.”

Hayden heard the news upon returning from the grocery store from a message that Michelle left on his answering machine.

General Volskov was reading about the deal on the Internet in his office when Riga-Tech’s Zlotnikov called saying, “Guess what? Eatwell just approved the acquisition.”

“You’re a bit late,” Volskov shot back. “Nothing we didn’t expect. Good thing you’re not a journalist, Zlotnikov.”

In a small Dutch town known for its herring, a groundskeeper mowed the grass around Menno Kuipers’ grave.

Noon, Adirondack time, December, 2006. Hayden had taken some time off to do a little hiking, and was making his way up the side of the mountain on a pair of snow shoes.

The fight to root out terrorists and the Taliban in Afghanistan

continued. News of bombing raids was commonplace around American dinner tables. And New York had begun to compound on Hayden’s brain. Even five years after the towers fell, the destruction remained vivid. Transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson thinkers whom Hayden would have normally written off as selfabsorbed dropouts - had taken on an increased importance to him over the past few years. As complicated and unforgiving as nature could be, the two writers made sense at the moment. For Hayden, going into the woods seemed more like a return than a dropping out.

He had a backpack, a GPS device, some water, and a couple of protein bars. He liked the sound of the snow crunching underneath his snowshoes. The air froze his nostril hairs. A weak winter sun warmed his face as he rounded a bend. Hayden spotted a female, white-tailed deer inching her way into an opening in the woods. She was big. Hayden sat down on a log. She still hadn’t seen him, but she could smell him. Her wet black nose wiggled in the air, trying to zone in on him. Hayden remained as still as a mannequin until his right snowshoe slipped slightly from its resting position on a rock. The deer darted away, stopping momentarily under the cover of the woods to look back at him.

Hayden smiled and began to play with his GPS device. He was going to do some bushwhacking off the trail. It was a game that he’d played plenty of times before. The idea was to get completely lost and use the device to guide yourself out. He liked the risk of surrendering to the technology. He was fascinated by the concept of satellites far overhead guiding him out of peril – telling him the correct way to get from A to B when every instinct was to do the opposite.

The GPS device had saved Hayden before. A friend had once told him jokingly, “Feel the GPS, Hayden. Let it speak to you. Let it guide you. Don’t disrespect it. It knows better than you do which way to go.” And in those moments when the fog rolled in or the rain poured down or darkness fell, the friend had been right.

Hayden programmed the device, making the large boulder to his right home plate. Whatever he got up to, the GPS would guide him back to that boulder. He tied his bootlace, took a deep breath, and headed off the trail into the woods.

The snow was deep, sometimes rising up to his thigh. He had to slow his pace. He looked directly above into the blue sky. Even up in the mountains, even now, several years after the fact, he couldn’t shake the image of that second plane dropping out of a benevolent blue sky and slamming into the World Trade Center.

That’s what he hated most about the whole act. Somehow they had permanently taken away the innocence of the sky. Up until that day, blue skies were inherently good to Hayden, a protective dome. But having seen the destruction for himself, he knew that sinister elements now lurked behind that blue curtain, willing and ready to descend. Scratch it up to growing older or being overly sensitive, but it was just one more thing that ticked Hayden off.

He continued walking. As he walked, his thoughts wandered to childhood – childhood and evolution. It occurred to him that when you’re a kid and every other kid around you with a few exceptions has a mother and a father and a bully older brother, and you all play ball together and eat the same tuna casserole that your mothers serve for dinner and every other guy has a queasy feeling in his stomach for a girl named Lisa, you tend to think that the world evolves all at once, in unison.

Then you grow up and realize that sometimes not having a mother or a father can be a strength, or being teased can make you more determined, or that having sex at 16 didn’t stunt your best friend’s growth, or that being a Boy Scout isn’t always what is needed, or that everything you thought was right and normal was actually

wrong and abnormal and didn’t prepare you very well. And it’s right about then that you realize that there’s little morality attached to evolution, just a glacial move forward.

Hayden stopped to watch a hawk glide overhead. He tightened his snowshoes and set off again. The snow was even deeper here. He could only take between ten and twenty steps before he had to stop and catch his breath. He laughed at himself and his situation. Clouds began to move across the sky, the sun slaloming in and out. The temperature dropped. Hayden was now in the middle of the ridge in a sort of no man’s land equidistant between the point he had left and the place where he was heading. He pulled his hat down a little tighter over his ears, fixed his scarf, and decided to push ahead.

According to the GPS device, if he continued to the other side and looped around, he could follow the river back to the boulder. That didn’t seem right to him, but he wasn’t going to challenge the GPS. Besides, if he got to the other side of the ridge and the weather was bad, there were overhanging rocks. He could protect himself and wait it out. He still had a good six hours of sunlight left in the day.

Just then, a fresh snow began to fall — big flakes. His strides became heavier, more laborious. His breathing picked up. The wind began to twirl the falling snow around him like a blender. He stopped to check the GPS. It indicated that he was still pretty much on target.

He forged on, whipping his face, snot rolling out of one of his nostrils. The point was in sight. Another 20 minutes or so and he’d be there. He stopped again to catch his breath and to check his watch. He took a swig of water from his canteen and pushed on. The wind was steady now, and getting stronger. His cheeks were turning numb.

Hayden looked back. He could no longer make out the point under the spruce tree where he had set off. Things were rapidly entering the white-out stage. He brushed snow off the GPS screen. A couple quick steps to the left and he would be on target. Just then, his right leg became stuck in the deep snow. He stopped to dig it out. By now, the blue sky that had enticed him to traverse the ridge had picked up and gone home.

Almost there,
he thought
.
He found that if he closed one eye and squinted, he could make out where he was going. The snow came from every direction now, even from beneath him the way he remembered the rain doing once when he was at the top of the Empire State Building. He lost his footing and fell forward into a pillow of snow. Freeing himself was not a simple matter. The snow was like quicksand; the more he struggled the deeper he sank.

He tried to roll onto his back and dig the snowshoes into the ground, but there wasn’t any ground. It was hard to believe, but he had entered a place where the snow was taller than he was. He positioned himself upright. Slowly he began to move the shoes as if he was walking up a flight of stairs, one foot, then the other, slowly. He continued until he freed himself. He caught his breath, got up, and walked a couple paces.

Hayden’s heart raced. He leaned against a tree, exhausted. He couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of him. He checked his coordinates to pinpoint the boulders that he had programmed into the GPS earlier. The boulders were big enough to have crevices he could slip into, or even caves.

It was getting prematurely dark now. The GPS had a backlight, thank God. According to the machine, the boulders were about 50 yards southeast of where he was standing. But Hayden was certain that they must be farther than that. He reached for his canteen, opened it and took a swig of water. He needed to make it to those boulders if he was going to get through this thing. And so, he set off again, but this time slightly worried. He was doubting himself, or the machine – either way, he didn’t like doubt. He held onto tree limbs and young evergreens until there were no more to hold. He paused for a second. It felt like he was in an open field with no boundaries. He closed his eyes and looked at the GPS again. It told him to walk to the right
.

Hayden followed the coordinates exactly, walking until he could no longer feel the crunch of the snow beneath his feet. That was the last thing he remembered.

Fresh off the tanker’s teat with a full bag of gas, LT Pete Rand thought of the effort it had taken him to get to this point as a Navy navigator and radar intercept officer. This was his nugget cruise — his first combat mission. He was going into Afghanistan. Part of him wanted to write it all down as it was happening, but that wasn’t going to happen. He

needed to be focused, and he needed a good pilot. Luckily, his good friend, LT Vinny Simone, was sitting in front of him in the cockpit.

Rand’s job was to operate the aircraft’s weapon systems in order to put the right ordnance on the right target. Tonight they were carrying a full load of JDAM’s, or GPS guided weapons. They had a little time to kill while enroute.

“So tell me again,
why
the hell did you get married
before
going on deployment?” Simone asked, laughing.

“I don’t know,” Rand said. “I guess it was important to lock in a good thing. Plus, she’s hot.”

Simone laughed as he keyed the mic. “Yeah, I supposed you’ve clued her into the fact that you’ll never see each other?”

“No.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll be able to blame the Navy for f-ing up her career.”

Simone and Rand had been buddies since the Academy and they stayed in touch throughout flight school. They wound up in the same fleet squadron after finishing their respective training tracks. Now they were crewed together for their first combat mission.

For tonight’s flight, CDR Toby Collins was their lead aircraft. He was the squadron’s XO, and he had a no-nonsense reputation born from years of combat flying.

As the two aircraft pressed toward their assigned kill-box, Collins called for a fuel check. “Voodoo 11, Voodoo 12, 17 point 5, good tapes, good feeds.” The precisely formatted statement was also Collins’ request for information from his wingman, LT Simone. Periodic calls like this were also made in order to ensure that no one became complacent during these long missions.

“Voodoo 12, Voodoo 11, 17 point 6, good tapes, good feeds,” Simone responded with his serious voice.

The flight was now far enough into Afghanistan that Collins could contact the local command network. Collins keyed his mic, hoping something interesting was going on. “Long Horn, Voodoo 11 checking-in, flight of two Tomcats proceeding to kill-box Tango Bravo, awaiting further instructions.”

“Voodoo 11, Long Horn, contact Raven 89 on his freq, how copy?” There was an imperative tone in Long Horn’s call.

“Voodoo 11, copy all, switching.” Collins was familiar with the Raven call sign. Raven was a Predator, an unmanned aerial vehicle, so there was no telling where the operators might be. They could be local; they could be back in the States. Either way, chances were good that they had their eyeballs on something good.

“Raven 89, Voodoo 11 checking-in,” Collins said.

“Voodoo 11, Raven 89’s got you loud and clear. Stand by for a SitRep.”

Raven 89 was definitely not local. The delay in the transmission and the strange side tones meant that his voice was being bounced from a post far from here. While Voodoo flight waited intently for the situation report, Simone looked out from his canopy to the complete darkness in front of him. He didn’t know it, but somewhere down there a woman was making soup for dinner. Her husband played with their baby girl in the corner of their small house made of mud and straw. Their boys — one eight, the other ten — played outside. A donkey was hitched to a tree in front of the house. Thirty people lived in their tiny village — thirty people, one water well, several farming plots, a raisin-collecting silo, and a radio transmitter constructed by the Taliban that was off limits.

Recently, jets in the sky overhead had transcended from science fiction to commonplace for the oldest boy. His friends said the planes had come to punish the unbelievers. The jets normally flew by on their way to the larger cities. They had no business with his tiny village. Often, the planes flew so high that the boy could only hear them. But today, the planes were getting louder. They had never been this close. Even his mother was surprised as she came outside to have a look.

“Voodoo 11, Raven 89, SitRep as follows; we’re currently looking at a radio tower that we would like you to take out. This is a CENTCOM Priority One tasking that needs to be serviced immediately, how copy?”

Collins knew that if Raven was talking directly to CENTCOM, there were a lot of people watching this happen, real time.

“Raven 89, Voodoo 11, copy all, standing by for 9 Line.”

Raven passed all of the target’s information via the 9 Line format and Voodoo flight put that information into their targeting systems. So far, all was going smoothly. Regardless, anxiety was starting to creep into Simone and Rand’s cockpit.

“Ok, those coordinates look good; that’s exactly what I wrote down,” Simone reassured Rand.

“Yeah, I think it’s good. I want to double check in the INS, make sure we have a stable platform.” Rand was trying to use every second he had available.

“I can’t believe they want all four JDAM’s on the same target,” Simone said.

“Yeah, I guess they really want to…”