Directive 51 Read Free Page A

map of the Pacific. The nearest land was Guam, which they had left about forty-five minutes ago, taking off from Andersen AFB. As agreed, they fanned out in the Touch Hands formation, a slowly rotating equilateral triangle in which each plane was at its highest cruising altitude and just close enough to the others to put them three degrees above the horizon. In Touch Hands, they maximized their chances of detecting the white, unmarked Dreamliner that they had been told was designated Seagull; the mission itself was SCI, Sensitive Compartmented Information, a designation above Top Secret.
    The F-35, after a rocky start, had been thoroughly shaken down and its bugs worked out once and for all during the Second Iranian War. Its electronics suite had been redesigned and refined by the ten years of anti-terror patrol since the suicide attack on the carrier Franklin Roosevelt . The same routine anti-terror, anti-drug, and border patrols had trained the Air Force pilots to execute Touch Hands flawlessly. If the Dreamliner named Seagull was coming to its rendezvous at 151°6’E 11°23’N, Seagull Watchdog One would find it; the dark was no barrier. A typhoon would have been no more than a nuisance, but the sea was calm tonight.
    With their large drop tanks, Seagull Watchdog One could circle the rendezvous point in Touch Hands for more than an hour and still have plenty of fuel to complete the escort mission before turning the Dreamliner over to fresh escorts out of Hawaii.
    They had been warned that the Dreamliner might be as much as twenty minutes late; unofficially, the flight leader had been told they were coming out of some bush-league Third World airport to the south and west, the kind of place where delays were routine and anything could happen. When they picked up a plane on radar, they were to hail it via secure transponder code; once they had positive ID, they would close in to fly a protective formation around the Dreamliner. Until contact, or unless there were problems, they were to minimize radio contact with the controllers back at Andersen.
    At twenty minutes after arrival, the flight leader radioed in that there had been no trace, and called for a radar and satellite confirmation that they were in the right place. They were. Twenty minutes later he requested and received permission to try to raise the transponder buoy that Seagull would have released if it had gone down. There was nothing. At about 10:35 P.M., with safety margins for completing the mission running thin, they were relieved by another flight, Seagull Watchdog Two, and headed back to base.
    They went in for immediate debriefing by more high-ranking officers than any of them had ever seen in the same room, but they had nothing to report except that they had flown out to the rendezvous point, waited, and encountered nothing.
    “Was there anything that could have been a trace of Air Force Two?” a man in a civilian suit asked, and only then did they know what their mission had been and what was lost.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON, DC. 6:54 A.M. EST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
    In Washington, DC, wherever great hordes of Federal workers pour in and out of big, blocky office buildings all day long, there are more small coffee shops, cafés, and grills per block than in any artists’ quarter or bohemian enclave anywhere. They are nearly as essential to government operations as the Pentagon, the White House, or the Executive Office Building.
    People in private industry hold meetings to coordinate what people are doing, decide issues in which several people have a say, and gratify some boss’s ego, not necessarily in that order. Only the third purpose is the same in Washington.
    Decades of sunshine laws and open-government policies guarantee that anything discussed at any official meeting is eventually going to be public, so the most important rule for any meeting is to have nothing said that might ever attract any attention. Rather than coordinating or