The secretary responded seriously. 'He might be. If I find him, who should I say is calling? Did you say Weston -?'

'Victoria Weston. Tell him Hugh Weston's daughter, Nick Ramsey's friend. He knows about me - please hurry!'

'Let me put you on hold.'

Victoria, head throbbing, held on in limbo. The minute hand on her wrist.w.a.tch had moved again.

The operator broke in, and Victoria fed coins into the monster machine and waited. A cool and boyish cultivated voice was on the other end. 'Miss Weston?'

'Oh, yes!'

'Sy Rosenbloom. Sorry for all the trouble. Delighted to speak to you. Of course, I know all about you from Nick and from your wonderful father. Nick told me there was a chance you might call. Is there anything -?'

'Sy, listen to me, listen!' Victoria pleaded. 'The President, my father, Nick Ramsey, everyone on Air Force One is going to die any minute. We've uncovered a plot, an a.s.sa.s.sination plot now underway - don't tell me I'm crazy, I'm not crazy, it's all true - a plot for a stolen Cuban Air Force plane being piloted by a terrorist who's going to crash it into Air Force One.'

Victoria could hear the sharp intake of breath on the other end. 'You're serious? Positive about this?'

'Oh, Sy, I am, I am, believe me.'

'I do believe you. When is this supposed to happen?'

'Now. Any minute - in mere minutes.'

'I'd better get you through to Air Force One. It'll be faster. You can alert them. Where are you?'

'In New York, in a pay booth on Madison Avenue.'

'I'm putting you on hold,' snapped Rosenbloom. 'Stay right there.'

She became aware of two other persons standing outside the telephone booth, waiting to use it.

When Victoria did not leave the cubicle, one of them rapped on the gla.s.s angrily. Victoria refused to budge. Now they were calling back to the proprietor, and he was coming around the counter.

The proprietor hit his knuckles against the door of the booth.

Victoria folded it open a few inches.

'Lady, you can't hog the telephone forever,' the proprietor admonished. 'Come on out of there and give these people a chance.'

'I can't,' pleaded Victoria. 'I'm waiting to talk to the President of the United States. And don't call the b.o.o.by hatch.' She shut the booth door.

A voice came over the telephone.

Victoria pressed the receiver to her ear. 'Yes, it's me.'

253.

'It's Sy Rosenbloom. Hold on, Victoria. You're being put right through to Air Force One.'

Twenty-two minutes out of Andrews Air Force Base, riding serenely above the clouds and the blue Atlantic, the 747 jumbo jet designated Air Force One was in the early stage of its flight to London.

Inside the aircraft, Hugh Weston, the presidential press secretary, had been summoned from the copying machine to take a telephone call in the plane's communications center. As he entered, the master sergeant indicated the free telephone on the table. 'For you, Hugh.'

'Who is it?'

'No idea. Only know it's an emergency call patched through the White House situation room from somewhere else.'

Puzzled, Hugh Weston picked up the receiver and was astonished to learn that it was his daughter.

'Vicky, what's going on?'

She started to tell him, words tumbling out, and a-minute later he stopped her.

'Vicky, I don't want to waste a second. I'd better alert the President - and put Nick on to hear the rest of it. You say he has the background and you can shorthand it for him - and then Nick will be able to answer any questions President Callaway may have? Sit tight, Vicky. Nick'll be right on.'

Hugh Weston set the receiver down beside the phone, and tapped the master sergeant on the shoulder. The sergeant slipped off one earphone.

'Max, see that my telephone is left open.'

Weston rushed into the aisle, spotted a young man in a blue blazer, a flight steward, and flagged him.

'Listen, you get back to the press pool and get hold of Nick Ramsey and send him back here, on the double.'

The flight steward went scurrying off to the rear compartment, where a dozen reporters and columnists were playing cards, reading, napping. Within a half minute, a rumpled and breathless Ramsey stood before the press secretary.

'Hugh?'

'Nick, my girl's on the line from New York -'

'Vicky?'

'She just escaped being killed by Armstead. She's uncovered unimpeachable evidence that Armstead has sent up a stolen MiG fighter, manned by a terrorist, a kamikaze type, to blow us all up, the President, all of us. Could Armstead do a thing like this?'

Without hesitation, Ramsey said, 'Yes, he could.'

'Then you think it's true?'

'If Vicky says so, and has seen the evidence - Hugh, it's true.'

'She says it's going to happen in nine minutes. I'd better notify the President. Vicky's on the phone to give you details. Get them, fast as you can, and come to the President's suite. I'll be in there with him.'

254.

Little more than sixty seconds later, Ramsey had jammed down the telephone receiver and rushed into the aisle and to the presidential suite forward. The gold-and-blue presidential seal was painted on the door panel, and Ramsey hit it with his fist.

'Come in!' called out the President. 'Door's open.'

Ramsey hustled inside to find President Callaway on the very edge of his leather swivel chair, palms flattened on the polished desk, the beribboned Army General Judson, highest-ranking military presence on the plane, standing stiffly beside him, and Hugh Weston, positioned expectantly in the leather chair on the opposite side of the desk.

Without any greeting, the President said, 'Are you convinced Miss Weston has her facts right?'

'No question, Mr. President,' said Ramsey. 'She held the evidence in her own hands, the story Armstead had written for tonight's edition, headlining the news that Air Force One was blown up in a midair collision.'

'How?'

'Using a stolen Cuban Air Force fighter plane, with some kind of suicidal ex-kamikaze as pilot.

Armstead has a professional terrorist group on his payroll, to make news exclusively for him. Miss Weston has been onto Armstead for some time. Now he's got his terrorists to steal one of Castro's fighter planes, install in it an ex-kamikaze pilot, and send him to blast us out of the sky.'

'When is this supposed to happen?'

Ramsey's eyes shifted to the wall clock. 'In eight minutes, Mr. President.'

The Chief Executive swung his chair sideways and looked up at General Judson. 'What's our protection on this flight, General?'

'Nil, sir, as you probably know, following our policy of recent years to downplay any military security. We're supposed to resemble a civilian flight. There may be some Duck b.u.t.ts - Air Rescue Service cargo planes in the area -'

'They won't do a d.a.m.n bit of good,' snapped the President. 'I'm asking about protection.'

'We'd better make sure the MiG is stolen and in terrorist hands.'

'Make sure fast,' said the President, shoving his white telephone at him. 'If it is, find out if there are any of our fighter aircraft within range, in the air or aboard carriers. You should be getting an answer in microseconds. Because if there is no help -'

General Judson was already on the white telephone, contacting the National Military Command System center at the Pentagon.

Buckled tightly to his seat in the c.o.c.kpit of the sleek MiG-27F interceptor as it hurtled through the sky, the helmeted Lieutenant Yosuke Matsuda kept his eyes fastened to the onboard computer readouts. He had punched in the time data and the longitude/lat.i.tude coordinates at takeoff, along with the coordinates for the intercept point he had calculated. The computer, working with the inertial navigation system, would digest the inputs, display continuously corrected readings for both the distance remaining and the time left before he would make his glorious dive from 70,000 feet, the 255 MiG's optimum ceiling. In the final minutes, his forward-looking radar would pick up the President's blip on its screen as the American 747 flew at 35,000 feet on its path over the Atlantic Ocean. Then he would take over from the autopilot for the moment of destiny that had eluded him for so long.

His obliteration was drawing closer and closer, and yet Matsuda was smiling, gratified by the million dollars in the Tokyo bank that would support his family, and pleased that after so many decades he would absolve himself of the dishonor that had haunted him all his life.

In his death, he could be good father and great hero, at last.

The final ride was a dream. He had no worries, no confusion. There was no necessity to employ further radar, computers, display scopes to fire off a missile at the target.

In this instance he and the plane were the missile, the projectile itself, that would destroy the enemy American President, and his party, and his plane.

Matsuda noted that the machmeter had settled down to a steady 2.3, well below the 2.8 redline speed at which the designers could no longer guarantee the ship's integrity when it carried missiles.

He ignored the fuel gauge. With a full load the MiG's range was over 1,600 miles, more than ample for his one-way flight. The powerful Turmansky twin turbojets would get him there just after the presidential plane reached a point 120 miles off the Delaware coast.

For some minutes Matsuda's thoughts drifted back to his family - to their immediate grief, their ultimate security - as his jet flew along the prescribed heading. Then, as a warning beep broke in on his reflections, he saw a blip suddenly appear on the radar, indicating an object 150 miles ahead.

Eyes on the radar, he absently reached into his inside pocket for the color snapshot of his wife, Kieko, and their three children, that he had carried with him. He glanced at the picture, a last loving farewell. He could imagine them venerating his memory at the sacred Yasukuni Shrine. Then, the final moment at hand, Matsuda dropped the photo into his lap, disengaged the automatic pilot and took over the control stick manually. He dipped his left wing slightly for a better view and peered downward through the canopy.

Far off, but enlarging rapidly, he had his first visual sighting of the aircraft known as Air Force One. With a golden grin Matsuda prepared to push the control stick forward, which would send him into a screaming dive toward his target.

In the conference room, adjacent to the presidential suite of Air Force One, the three of them were bending, pressing their faces against three windows, waiting for the moment of extinction. At one window, President Callaway, at the next window Hugh Weston, and at the third window Nick Ramsey. Beyond the open door beside them that led to the communications center, their fourth member, General Judson, was frozen before the radar equipment, reporting to the President on the intercom amplifier the movement of the blip now plainly visible on the radar screen.

From their windows in the conference room, President Callaway, Weston, and Ramsey could see nothing in the blue beyond, not even a speck in the sky.

The pilots and crew had not been consulted. There was hardly time, and evasive action would have been impossible. Their plane was a sitting duck. Nor had any pa.s.sengers been warned. They were helpless, and if informed would only die in fright and panic.

256.

The plane's communications center had already delivered word, and a warning, from the National Security Agency that, via spy satellite, an unidentified airplane with characteristics of a fighter had been detected and was closing on Air Force One at great speed. Appropriate actions was being attempted.

Judson's super-emergency call had also alerted the high command to contact the nearest defense capability, summon American cover fighters in the general area, but there was no way of knowing exactly when the collision would occur and whether help could reach them in time.

Results indecisive. All hope up in the air, as they floated through the air, the target of a madman loosened by another madman.

For Ramsey, at the window, immediate death remained unacceptable and an unreality. His intellectual mind ticked off his losses: never to love and make love to Vicky, never to write the book he had under way, never to enjoy another aperitif at Fouquet's, never to be a father and perpetuate his name. To know only nothingness. Inconceivable.

The amplifier crackled. Ramsey heard the general's strangled voice attempting the countdown of doom from the radar. 'b.a.s.t.a.r.d's a hundred miles away... eighty miles... sixty...'

No sooner had the reverberation of General Judson's voice ceased than he ran into the conference room, uncontrollably furious, stumbling toward the windows. He pushed himself next to Hugh Weston at the middle window. With the others, he scanned the empty, forbidding sky.

At his own window, Ramsey strained his eyes, seeking their executioner. There was nothing, only innocent clouds. Instantly he was chilled by the general's outcry. 'Hey, up there, look up there! The sonofab.i.t.c.h is coming down at us like a bat out of h.e.l.l!'

Heart hammering, Ramsey squinted off to the left, lifting his sight, and could make out the sliver, the ominous sliver, in the blue sky, distant but pointed at them, coming from above at incredible speed, diving, growing in his vision until he could see it was the feared configuration of a MiG fighter.

'Je-sus, like a f.u.c.king bat out of h.e.l.l,' the general was gasping. 'Coming two thousand miles an hour straight for us!'

'We're goners,' the President groaned.

Ramsey had caught another sliver, two slivers, out of the corner of his eye, and staring down through the window, he shouted, 'Look - look below!'

They had burst out of a cloud formation, the two of them, zooming and screaming upward.

'F-15 long-range fighters!' the general bellowed. 'Our own!'

'By G.o.d, lookit!' the President yelled.

They all saw the Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles leave the defending planes - the AMRAAM's come bursting out - sizzling through the sky like twin avengers, going with the speed of lightning, homing in on the oncoming attacker.

Awed, mouth agape, Ramsey could see the kamikaze destructor almost upon them and the twin missiles almost upon the kamikaze destructor.

Which would hit and obliterate first? He steeled himself for the impact of carnage and death.

257.

But before his eyes the blue sky grew into a huge orange ball - the kamikaze MiG exploding in a ma.s.s of flame and debris, debris sailing off, debris falling toward the ocean, no full part of the attacker in the sky, only smoke, and bits and pieces floating away.

Air Force One had shuddered violently under the pressure of the nearby explosion.

It was shaking still, but now leveling out, and continuing uninterrupted to London.

And four men were hugging each other and dancing in the big warm room.

Finishing her call to Air Force One, Victoria had only one more thing to say, 'I'm praying for you and Dad,' she said, and then she blurted out, 'Nick, I love you.' But she had realized that the phone was dead, that Nick had already hung up and was doing what could be done.