The battle was joined at last.

Djemma knew the odds were long. To win he would have to beat back the American attack and then hit them hard on their own land. To succeed he would have to accomplish what no country had managed to achieve in almost two hundred fifty years: he would have to force the Americans to back down.

As he considered this multiple explosions lit the dark horizon, and Djemma Garand knew he had drawn first blood.

SEVERAL THOUSAND MILES AWAY in the Pentagon’s Situation Room, the same group that had gathered twelve hours before watched and waited as the attack on Sierra Leone unfolded in real time.

Dirk Pitt couldn’t remember a feeling so tense, perhaps because the events were beyond his control at this point, perhaps because at least two of his people, Paul and Gamay, were out there in it.

After two flights of Tomahawks had been destroyed and a radar-jamming aircraft had been destroyed as soon as it got into position, a second wave of attacks had been initiated.

On-screen, Pitt watched as icons representing a squadron of F-18 Hornets approached the coast of Sierra Leone from different directions. The aircraft were converging on an imaginary line, the Event Horizon. It was believed the particle beam weapon could incinerate anything that crossed beyond that line, but they couldn’t grant Djemma free reign without testing it first.

A few miles from the line, the Hornets released a flight of Harpoon missiles, the Navy’s fastest nonballistic weapon. By attacking from different angles at the same time, they hoped to overwhelm the system’s capacity to respond, but as one missile after another stopped reporting telemetry Pitt began to sense the failure of step two.

At the bottom of the large screen, video from an onboard camera recorded the flight of a missile approaching from the south. Three other missiles were ahead of it by various distances, all of them deliberately traveling on slightly different courses.

In the distance an explosion appeared well to the left of the missile. It began as a flash, and then a cloud, and then a burning arc of rocket fuel igniting spread across the frame. Seconds later, two similar explosions followed, ahead and to the right this time. And then a flare in the lens and nothing but static and a black screen.

“What happened?” Brinks demanded, though everyone certainly knew.

“The missiles are gone,” one of the telemetry operators said.

Radio calls in the background confirmed that the pilots were seeing the same thing. And then all of a sudden one pilot radioed with trouble.

“Experiencing control failure—”

The signal cut.

A second pilot reported something similar, and then his signal went dead.

“Large explosions, bearing one-five-five,” a third pilot said. “We have two, maybe three aircraft down—”

The squadron commander cut in. “Drop to the deck, pull back.”

Before his orders could be followed, two more signals were lost. And moments later he confirmed five aircraft down.

“Apparently, we drew the damn line in the wrong place,” he said.

With a red face, and veins popping out on his neck, Brinks looked as if his head might explode. A sense of unease crept over everyone else in the room as well.

The submarines would move next, along with an end run attempted by Dirk’s two civilians. But this attack would happen in slow motion.

As they waited an aide came into the room and spoke with Vice President Sandecker. He passed a note.

Sandecker looked up, concerned anew.

“What is it?” Brinks asked.

“Contact from Moscow,” Sandecker said.

“Moscow?” Pitt asked.

Sandecker nodded. “They’re claiming to have just uncovered information suggesting that Washington, D.C., is about to be attacked. The threat comes in the form of a particle beam weapon. Apparently, the same one we’ve just failed to destroy. They insist that the intelligence is highly credible and that the threat is valid. They urge we do everything possible to defend or evacuate.”

“What in the name of…” Brinks began.

Sandecker looked up. “If the information’s accurate, the attack will come within the next ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes?”

“Nice of them to get us a warning so early,” someone else grumbled.

“We can’t evacuate the city in ten minutes,” someone said. “We couldn’t do it in ten hours.”

“Emergency Broadcast System,” someone else said. “Urge everyone into shelter. Basements, underground garages, the Metro. If this is true, people will be safer in those places.”

Brinks shook his head. “If this is true,” he said sarcastically. “This is a joke. And if we start crying that the sky is falling, a thousand people will die in the panic for nothing. Which is probably just what they want, along with our citizens worrying whether we can protect them or not.”

“What if we can’t protect them?” Pitt asked. “Are we just going to let them die in their happy ignorance?”

Brinks squirmed. “Look,” he said. “Garand may have taken this round, but there’s no way they can hit us here. Every one of our experts concludes that. Their weapon fires in a line of sight. It simply cannot hit anything over the horizon. Even the F-18s were safe, once they dropped back a few miles.”

The Vice President looked around. “Anyone have anything to add? Now’s the time if you do.”

There was silence for a moment, and then another staffer from the NSA spoke up, a slight man with frameless glasses. “There is one possibility,” he said.

“Spit it out,” Sandecker ordered.

“Particle beams are aimed and directed through the use of magnets,” the man explained. “One study concluded that an extremely powerful magnetic field placed along the target line could bend a particle stream, redirecting it onto a new target. In essence, giving it the ability to shoot around corners.”

Pitt didn’t like the sound of that. He stepped forward, though it wasn’t really his place. “What would it take to hit us here?”

The man straightened his glasses and cleared his throat. “The power output of a small city channeled into a vigorous magnetic array of some type.”

“Where would this magnetic array have to be?” Pitt asked.

The man didn’t hesitate. “It would have to be located roughly halfway between the weapons emitter and the target.”

That made the threat seem less likely. There weren’t any islands out there, certainly no place big enough to generate the kind of power this man was talking about. Then again…

Pitt turned to the Pentagon staffer who was operating the tactical display. “Widen the screen to show the entire Atlantic,” he demanded.

No one objected, and the task was accomplished in two quick strokes of the keyboard.

On the big screen the familiar profile of the American East Coast appeared on the left-hand side. Africa and Western Europe took their places on the right.

The battle group and the Quadrangle continued to be marked by a series of tiny icons in the lower right-hand side, just under the bulge of West Africa.

“Show me the location of the Liberian tanker Onyx,” Pitt said. “Based on Kurt Austin’s last report.”

It took a few seconds and then a new icon appeared in a blue tint, one so pale it looked almost white. A tiny flag next to it read “Onyx: Liberia.”

Dirk Pitt stared at the icon along with everyone else in the Situation Room.

It sat almost dead center of the screen, exactly halfway between the Quadrangle off the coast of Sierra Leone and the city of Washington, D.C.

“My God,” Sandecker said. “When do our submarines attack?”

The Navy’s attaché answered. “Thirty minutes just to get in range. They won’t be able to stop it.”