Those were things agencies within the Department of Defense had been set up to handle. Even knowing that those agencies had already contacted the dead man's family didn't help him. Dwight's family would expect a letter from his chaplain and good friend; a sad announcement would carry a more personal touch than the standard military communications. But the emotional cost of writing that letter was higher than Delroy had believed possible. He'd never, in his years in the military, been put in the position of writing one like it before. Letters for the dead, yes; he'd written those. But never a letter for someone who'd been his best friend.

The chaplain closed his eyes, aware of the familiar noises of Wasp coursing all around him, and tried to remember how his father had handled deaths within his small Baptist congregation in Marbury, Alabama. But Delroy Harte found no solace there. Josiah Harte had known every member of his congregation, all those souls who sat in the pews every Sunday to hear the hard-fisted, hellfire-and-brimstone sermons his father had delivered. His father had also known all of the townspeople who never darkened the door of the church till they were carried inside in a box.

Delroy had known the man who now lay in the black body bag on the stainless steel table a few feet away. Known him well and admired him greatly. He shifted and gazed at the body bag, hoping that an answer would somehow appear there. But it didn't.

His father had been ten times the pastor Delroy had turned out to be. Josiah Harte had watched over his congregation and his family with love and wisdom, leading them with a stern hand and a gentle touch, guiding so many of them to fulfilling lives enriched with a sense of purpose.

Tense and fatigued, a condition that was hard to get into and almost impossible to escape, Delroy stood and stretched his legs. He stood six feet six inches tall. In high school, he'd been a power forward, one of the greatest basketball players the school had ever seen. People had believed he'd never make it through college without being drafted by the NBA. But that had been before he lost his father. Somehow in the deep and terrible confusion of that loss, Delroy had found the Lord in ways he had never imagined.

But you didn't stay walking close to the Lord, did you, Delroy? No, you turned away from Him. And you are too afraid to tell anyone because you don't know what would become of you without this mission in your life.

He rubbed his chin. The stubble that had grown there let him know he'd been at his task much longer than he would have guessed.

His eyes burning with exhaustion, he gazed at his blurred reflection in the stainless steel table where he'd been working. His skin was dark, nearly blue-black, and his image flowed like a dark pool across the metal surface. His hair was cut military style, high and tight, as it had been for thirty years, since the day he'd entered the navy. He wore his chaplain's service dress blue uniform, but he'd left his white gloves and his tie in his pocket. The tie would go back on before he left this room.

Officially, he was off duty right now. Writing the letter to the dead man's family was something he was doing at the request of the dead man himself. Back in sick bay, before the emergency surgery that had been ordered after Dwight had complained about severe chest pains and shortness of breath late last night, Dwight had asked him to take on this task-just in case ...

Waiting in the medical department while the medical personnel worked on his friend, Delroy had expected to sit for hours till the doctors and nurses performed the surgery and got Dwight stabilized. The medical staff told Delroy there was nothing to worry about outside of the normal risks of bypass surgery-and given Dwight's comparative youth and overall fitness, those were pretty small. At least, that was what they told him before they started cutting.

Delroy had believed them. Dwight had been in great shape, he was only fifty-two years old-only three years Delroy's junior-and the doctors were top-flight military surgeons tempered by previous service in combat conditions. When she was in home port in Norfolk, Virginia, Wasp was counted as the fourth largest hospital in the state. She was part of the state's disaster relief plan. Military medical aid didn't come much better than the facilities on LISS Wasp.

But the doctors were wrong this time. Fifteen minutes into the surgery, Chief Petty Officer Dwight Mellencamp had died on the table. Thirty minutes after the surgery had begun, the surgeon had been out in the waiting room, explaining everything to Delroy, and despite his personal grief, the chaplain had followed most of the medical jargon. The docs had done their best.

But it was still nearly impossible to understand that Dwight was gone. No longer would he play chess or share historical mystery novels or argue religion with the chaplain. Dwight had been a Christian of the old school-believing every word of the Bible as the literal truth. The book of Revelation had been a hot topic between them as they tried to imagine what the world would be like after the Rapture. Dwight was convinced that they were living in the end times, that the world had reached the point of no return when believers and nonbelievers would be separated by God's own hand.

Delroy didn't believe that, and their arguments had sometimes grown heated because Dwight believed so fiercely. Dwight had accused Delroy of hiding his head in the sand, of denying a truth so obvious that any child should be able to see it. Dwight had been growing in his faith, seeing things and making connections that Delroy was just unable to accept. Delroy thought that by debating the future with Dwight, he was defending the faith. Sometimes, though, after one of their discussions, he wondered in the dark of the night if Dwight was right. Perhaps he was the one hiding the lack of strength of his faith. Maybe he was only giving lip service to the beliefs his father had taught him so long ago.

"God help me, Dwight," Delroy said in a choked voice. "I am going to miss you so much." He placed a hand on the body bag, knowing that a few of the young Marine corpsmen and navy sailors on board Wasp would never have thought of willingly touching a corpse, even through the body bag.

Being with the dead man didn't bother Delroy the way he knew it had bothered some of the other men who helped carry the corpse into the room. Back home in Marbury, the farming community he had grown up in, sitting up with the dead before the burial was a long-established practice. Delroy had sat up many nights, with his grandparents and his father and the people of his father's parish.

But you didn't get the chance to sit up with Terrence, did you? Despite the long years that had passed, tears stung Delroy's eyes. Remembering was so confusing. Images of Terrence as a baby, as a gaptoothed four-year-old holding a chamois and helping Daddy wash the family station wagon, as a young man playing high school basketball, and finally as a Marine corporal in a dress uniform festooned with ribbons and medals. No chance at all.

Five years ago, his son, Lance Corporal Terrence David Harte, had come home from the Middle East sealed in a box that had never been opened. The military had handled the burial with pomp and splendor and brevity. Delroy, stationed elsewhere, had been flown home in time for the funeral.

After the funeral and most of the requisite bereavement leave, Delroy had opted to return to his post sooner than required. His wife had never understood that he couldn't stay there in the home that he and Terrence had remodeled. Terrence had been everywhere in that house-in the pictures hanging on the wall, in the sink stand that was a half-inch longer on the right than it was supposed to be because Terrence hadn't cut the exact center from the countertop. The mistake had been his and Terrence's, and they'd waited years for someone to notice. Delroy's wife never had.

Tenderly, Delroy folded the old memories and put them away. He enjoyed them because they were all he had left of the son he'd loved so much, but he resented that they could intrude into his thoughts, into his life, without warning and sometimes without provocation.

Today, though, there had been plenty of provocation. He returned to the tall stool next to the stainless steel table where he had been composing the letter Dwight had charged him to write. It had almost been a joke between them last night as Dwight was prepped for surgery.

"Write to her, Chaplain Harte," Dwight had said. "Write to my wife and my kids. Tell them how much I love them. If this thing goes sour, I want them to know that I was thinking of them. And that I'm sorry I couldn't be there more."

Delroy had tried to allay his friend's fears. Serious military man that Dwight was, he had been torn between family and duty all his life. He had always said God would let him know when he'd had enough of the navy-or when the navy had had enough of him.

Someone rapped on the door to the small room.

"Come," Delroy said. He set his face, automatically reaching for the tie in his pocket in case the length of time he'd spent with the dead man had attracted the captain's attention. Captain Mark Falkirk was a by-the-book navy officer, but he was also a man who realized his crew and staff were human.

The door opened and a hesitant young man stuck in his head. "Chaplain Harte."

"You know I don't stand on formality when I'm not at post, Tom." Delroy's military rank was commander, but the proper verbal address for all military chaplains remained Chaplain.

"Yes, sir." The young midshipman stepped into the room. Tom Mason was one of the aides Falkirk had assigned to coordinate between the chaplain and the staff. "It's just that. .." He looked at the sheet-covered corpse, then back at Delroy. "You're working."

Delroy shook his head. "I'm just doing a favor for an old friend. Come on in."

The midshipman held up a cup. "I brought you coffee. Cream, two sugars. Shaken, not stirred." It was an old joke, but he meant well.

"Bless you." A real grin twisted Delroy's face. He accepted the cup Tom handed him.

Tom stood between Delroy and the door, coming no closer to the corpse than he had to.

Delroy sipped his coffee, finding it sweet and hot. "You don't have to be nervous, Tom. He's dead. He can't hurt you."

Tom scratched at his shirt collar with more than a little nervousness. "I know that, Chaplain Harte."

"You watch too many horror movies." Delroy knew that several of the crew passed DVDs around the ship, sharing and trading with each other as they did with books and video games. Tom was a horror movie aficionado.

"Yes, sir," Tom agreed. "I do."

The men aboard Wasp had seen a lot of action in recent years, even if most of it had only been lying in wait off the coast. They were familiar with death, but most of them weren't comfortable with it.

The matter wasn't helped by the fact that Chief Petty Officer Dwight Mellencamp had been aboard ship for years and was a personable man. Over twenty-six hundred men and women crewed aboard Wasp since the ship had been retrofitted with fern mods, upgrades that allowed the quartering of the female Marines and sailors that amounted to 10 to 25 percent of the crew. But most of that crew had known Dwight, or known of him.

Delroy put the coffee cup down. "What brings you here?" "Captain Falkirk."

Delroy examined the paper in front of him. He'd chosen not to use the notebook computer he had back in his quarters. A message like this needed the personal touch. Dwight would have wanted a letter, not a fax or an e-mail, sent to his family.

"And what did the captain want?" Delroy asked. He thought Falkirk was going to suggest strongly that he stand down for a time. "A eulogy," Tom answered.

Delroy frowned, feeling overwhelmed.

"A lot of people knew Chief Mellencamp," Tom explained. "Captain Falkirk feels that addressing the situation, what happened to the chief, with a small service would be better than letting the crew deal with it alone. As big as Wasp is, we're like a community. The captain believes everybody aboard ship would feel better if we said a proper good-bye to the chief."

Despite the additional pressure the situation put on him, Delroy had to agree with the captain's assessment. The situation along the border between Turkey and Syria was gut-churning for Marine troops and navy crew, who lived with the fact that they might be called into immediate service at any time. Wasp, with nearly twenty-seven hundred souls aboard her, not counting the crews of the other six support ships in the ready group, held almost the same population as Marbury, Alabama. But the crew aboard Wasp lived on a world that measured 820 feet long and 106 feet wide, a very small island. Marbury was spread out considerably more, and folks still managed to keep up with each other's business. When Delroy had been a boy there, all the funerals were standing room only, the pews packed with family and friends.

"All right," Delroy said. "Does the captain have a time frame in mind?"

"Captain Falkirk said to leave it up to you. But he also said that something like this, it's better to deal with it sooner than later." Delroy nodded.

"The captain said to take your time," Tom went on. "He knows you and the chief were close." The midshipman hesitated. "I suggested that the captain get someone else."

"No." The reply was out of Delroy's mouth before he knew it, and the answer was also sharper than he'd intended. There's no one else I would assign this to.

Tom took a step back.

"Easy," Delroy said. He rubbed the back of his neck with a big hand, hoping in vain to ease some of the tension there. "Nobody's going to do that eulogy but me. Tell the captain to give me a call at his convenience later. We'll iron out the details then."

Before Tom could reply, a warning Klaxon screamed. The banshee wail filled the room, echoing in the larger medical department on the other side of the open door.

It was, Delroy thought, loud enough to wake the dead. But it didn't this time. The flesh that had once been Dwight Mellencamp lay unmoving in the body bag.

Tom turned and charged out the door.

Delroy followed at the younger man's heels as they pounded through the medical department and ran out into the hall. A stream of men and women hurried through the halls and climbed the stairs leading up to the flight deck. They strapped on protective gear-vests and helmets-as they quickly filed upward.

"What's going on?" a sailor asked a Marine.

"Dunno," the Marine corpsman said. "Our general orders are to assemble on the flight deck and stand ready to deploy."

"Deploy?" The sailor caught the stair railing and yanked himself around. "Deploy where?"

"The border," the Marine replied. "That's where the heat is. Don't you keep up with current events?" The Marine shook his head.

"Man, that's crazy."

Pausing, Delroy let the last of the crewmen and Marines climb the stairs. He fell in behind them, sprinting up through the 02 level. In seconds, he was on the flight deck, coming up inside the island that housed the bridge.

Delroy surveyed the activity that swept the landing helicopter dockship. Movement filled the LHD as deck crews dressed in colorcoded jerseys-primarily red for fuel and ordnance and yellow for spotters-ran to their assigned posts. Marines erupted from flight deck ramp tunnel, moving at a dead run with their gear tied securely around them and their assault rifles held at port arms before them. In the old days, military jeeps had been able to drive up those ramps, but the Humvees they used now were too wide. The next generation of landing helicopter dockships had already worked appropriate changes into the redesigns.

Fighter jets, AV-8B Harriers, rolled off the flight deck, dropping out over the dark sea then rising like kites caught by the wind. Wasp had nine takeoff and landing positions on the deck for helicopters, six to port and three to starboard. The port and stern elevators brought up CH-46E and CH-53E helicopters and the Harriers two at a time.

The CH-46Es, designated Sea Knights, had the distinctive twin prop design. The CH-53E Sea Stallions had the more traditional appearance of a main rotor backed by a tail rotor and were currently ranked as the fastest helos the Marines handled. As soon as the helos were in place and had been boarded by Marine troops, they leapt into the sky.

No voices could be heard over the din that filled Wasp's flight deck. Jet turbines on the Harriers screamed, competing with the whirling rotors on the cargo helicopters used as troop transports. Navy crew outfitted the aircraft as they rolled on deck from the elevators.

Delroy kept moving toward the island, which was what most of the crew called the bridge structure on the ship's starboard side. As chaplain for the ship, Delroy had to remain available to help out where he could. He raced up the stairs and through the coded doors leading to Primary Flight. Pri-Fly was Wasp's nerve center for air operations.

Commander Kelly Tomlinson stood watch this morning. Designated the air boss, he'd served in the same capacity for a handful of years. He was tall and muscular with a shock of blond hair and a surfer's tan. He also held the current record for bench presses down in the ship's fitness center and had been a fierce surfing competitor in Hawaii before giving up that dream and stepping into the military life.

The commander glanced at Delroy then resumed watching the deck activity through the heavy-duty glass. "Good to have you, Chaplain."

"Thank you, sir." Delroy moved to his usual place back of the shipboard computers. He stood with Lieutenant Gabriel Morales, who was in charge of the Landing Signals Officers. They'd shared stories in the galley about small towns and family.

Morales's LSOs remained grouped and ready to assist with aircraft landing. Each man and woman was clothed in deck gear, including helmets and goggles. The lieutenant was lanky but muscular. He had grown up on a working cattle ranch in west Texas and sported a mustache that pushed the envelope on navy regs.

"What's up, Gabe?" Delroy asked.

"The Syrians just launched a full-blown attack across the border," Gabe said in a low voice. "They took out the communications towers with SCUDs and FROG-7s. From what I understand, the U.N. peacekeeping forces and the 75th Rangers are taking a beating."

Delroy glanced at the state-of-the-art weather forecasting equipment that was the heart of the Pri-Fly area. Weather affected every operation. A small television monitor mounted next to the computer screens showed a battle in progress. The tagline read TURKISHSYRIAN BORDER.

"What triggered the attack?" Delroy asked.

Gabe shrugged. His dark brown eyes flashed as he watched the aircraft lifting off Wasp's flight deck. "Who knows? It was waiting to happen, Del. Only a matter of time. The intel I was looking at, man, you just knew the Syrians were gonna jump some time."

"What are we doing?"

"Air and troop support. Those gunships are herding jump troops. We're also providing medical corpsmen to handle on-site wounded. Once a triage is established, the wounded that can travel will be sent back here. From what we've heard so far, there are a lot of casualties. Gonna be a lot more."

Glancing at his watch, Delroy did the math. With the border two hundred miles away, give or take a handful, the trip in-country would take time. "The border is an hour and a half away."

"An hour and twenty minutes," Gabe corrected.

As Delroy watched the television screen, coverage shifted to Glitter City. Several of the specials about the ongoing conflict had been shot there and in the field featuring military men involved in the border patrol, and almost everybody in the ship had watched them when they aired. Over the last few tense months, Delroy-as well as the rest of the world addicted to news services-had watched the dead city rise from the dust and become a thriving if threadbare metropolis of journalists and local residents trying to make a living from the meager opportunity the media invasion had brought them. One of the newsmagazines was planning to do a special on the impact the journalists' presence had on the area.

The camera panned down the single road that cut through Glitter City. People were panicked, some of them abandoning vehicles while others loaded gear and passengers aboard, evidently thinking they were going to flee before the missiles reached them.

In the next instant, absolute carnage tore through Glitter City. SCUDs landed in the small town, and the resulting explosions collapsed a building.

Dwight's voice came to Delroy in that moment. "We're living in the end times now, Del. God is going to deliver his people from the war and strife that's going to consume this world. We're going to live to see the Rapture. "

Dwight had been wrong, of course. He hadn't lived to see it. But as Delroy Harte watched the stark images relayed on the television monitor, the chaplain found the idea of the Rapture being close at hand much easier to believe.

But then, Delroy denied that, refused to believe it. This was just a military engagement, not the end times. Perhaps a war would even come of it. Men would die and he would pray for them because that was what he had signed on to do.

Turkey 30 Klicks South of Sanliurfa Local Time 0657 Hours

A SCUD-B surface-to-surface missile's rockets burned for eighty seconds, more or less. While in the air that eighty seconds, the SCUD-B traveled one hundred and seventy-five miles.

The distance to Glitter City from Aleppo, Syria, was less than eighty miles, less than half the distance the SCUD-Bs were capable of. When he'd gotten the call from Captain Remington, Goose had been three minutes away from the tent city that housed support personnel as well as media. Even picking up the pace in the RSOVs to the point of risking life and limb, the Rangers arrived two minutes and forty-eight seconds after the first wave of SCUDs blasted into the landscape.

Goose sat buckled into the passenger seat and peered at the huge dust cloud that had been raised around the area from the impact and detonation of the SCUDs. Bobby Tanaka whipped the vehicle hard to the left just as Goose yelled, "Something's in the road!"

The yellow dust cloud had concealed the long steel body of an unexploded SCUD missile. Goose knew from hard experience that SCUDs didn't always detonate. The failure rate for the Russian-designed weapons was something U.S. military forces would never have allowed. But the thirty-foot-plus missiles remained in the Syrian army's arsenal. And they had done their share of damage today.

The RSOV skidded wildly in the loose sand. The rear quarter panel came around and smacked the SCUD. When he heard an ear-splitting blast at almost the same time, Goose figured that he and his unit had just been blown to smithereens.

Instead, the RSOV skidded in the opposite direction from the impact as Tanaka overcorrected. The SCUD in the roadway remained a dud. It would have to be removed by bomb disposal teams later.

Glancing over his shoulder, Goose watched the second Ranger vehicle avoid the SCUD by several feet. Then realization kicked in that if the detonation he'd heard hadn't occurred at their twenty it had to have happened elsewhere. He glanced forward again and saw a new cloud of dust curling up a hundred feet and more from the desert.

Clods of hard earth and debris tumbled back down from the sky. They drummed against the RSOV with the force of sledgehammers. The cacophony rolled over Goose, deafening him.

Holding his left forearm over his face, Goose took as much cover as he could from his helmet and Kevlar vest. Rocks and clods pinged off armor as well as flesh, leaving welts, scrapes, and bruises. Goggles protected his eyes from the grit that swirled in the air, but the yellow dust matted and stuck to the kerchief he'd pulled up over his nose and mouth. Perspiration and saliva had made the kerchief wet enough to turn the dust to mud.

The fallout from the SCUD detonation continued for a few seconds, then immediately started again as at least two more missiles struck the high ridges of broken earth that surrounded Glitter City. Ages ago, when the town had been little more than a trading post for travelers, small stone buildings had been constructed against the sides of the bowl that contained the meeting place. The surrounding hills forming the natural bowl had always protected the village and the traders from the wind and the sandstorms that sometimes rose up. The town had provided a place of relative peace, a little shade, and a natural spring that was work to get to but had provided the townsfolk with their share of cool water.

Since the arrival of the American troops and the international media, Turkish traders had opened up a market again. They offered local cuisine and trinkets for souvenirs, bartering those things for American and European products such as cigarettes, Coke and Pepsi, and even military MREs. Most American fighting men only accepted the meals-ready-to-eat when nothing else was available, but Turkish traders found a ready market waiting to sample the meals.

Several buildings had existed on those hillsides, some of them decades old. Most of them were in some state of disrepair. After the media had encamped there, local construction teams had been hired to provide more adequate shelter. With things heating up on the border, most of the reporters wanted to stay on-site rather than make the trip between Diyarbakir and Sanliurfa, the closest metropolitan cities.

The repaired buildings had filled with the international reporters, enterprising Turkish merchants, and support personnel subsidized by the spending habits of the Turkish and American troops. When members of the U.N. relief crews and peacekeeping efforts had arrived, the overflow had been set up in tents. The tents ranged from cutting-edge technology to sheets of canvas put up with sticks. All of them offered shade from the unforgiving sun.