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bar into place. Their task completed, they scrambled out and away.
    In the Tomcat’s cockpit, the pilot applied light thrust to build up tension. Beside the runway, a yellow-clad plane director stood with hands on hips, awaiting signals relayed from the flight controllers atop the superstructure island.
    On the bridge, Jensen handed the captain the phone receiver, connecting them to the control room one deck higher in the tower.
    “Launch when ready,” Felix ordered.
    The F-14’s engines thundered to full power. In five seconds the catapult fired, whipping the Tomcat to a speed of 160 miles an hour in less than three hundred feet. The holdback bar snapped, allowing the jet’s thrust to hurtle the plane toward the deck’s edge and into the air. Afterburners kicked in for maximum speed, and flaming exhaust lit the sky like matched, retreating suns.
    The Tomcat rolled and climbed steeply to join the F-15 Eagles flying in a miles-wide escort and recon circle.
    From his perch, Felix felt a poetry in the process of sending jets screaming off a carrier, but down on the flight deck, poetry was transcended by urgency. The next F-14 was ready to go, and the next one after that was swinging into place.
    When a dozen were up, the Hawkeye radar plane broke its silence: “Visitor craft approaching, eleven o’clock.”
    The terse message gave Captain Felix a chill. There would be combat after all. The call went to all ships and planes— battle stations!
    The Hawkeye crew filled in the details—fifteen Visitor skyfighters approaching at high speed. T\venty-four American fighter planes split into groups designed to cover all angles of defense and attack. The Nimitz combat information center confirmed what Felix knew should be happening. The men flying those jets were superbly trained, the best in the service. He could only pray that would be good enough.
    On the cruisers, destroyers, and frigates, guided-missile crews waited. They were the last line of defense if the planes couldn’t stop the Visitors.
    And in the center of this ring of awesome air and sea fire power, the pair of oil tankers steamed along, their captains all too aware that the fates of their vessels were about to be decided by deadly force.
    Lieutenant Commander Ricky Picolo flew the lead F-14. Craning his neck, he peered through the cockpit canopy. He still hadn’t made visual contact with the enemy, but his targeting computer sure had. It had picked six out of the two dozen it had been tracking. They were in his hundred-mile firing range and closing fast.
    His dark mustache twitched inside his oxygen mask, the way it always did when he sensed it was time to do the job. “Leader Abel Twelve, ready to engage,” he said, his voice crackling over the speakers of all the planes and ships in the convoy. “And . . . firing!”
    Picolo pressed the buttons and the Tomcat’s computers did the rest, sending a fusillade of electronically guided missiles rocketing toward the alien invaders. As the planes around him followed his lead, Picolo hoped they could grab the offensive by pressing the attack before the Visitors could get close to the ships down below.
    At Mach two, it doesn’t take long to cover a hundred miles. The jet fighters veered off to avoid getting too near to Visitor lasers, while their air-to-air missiles homed in at three times the speed of sound.
    “All right, fellas,” Picolo radioed, “get ready on cannons, time for a little down-and-dirty dogfighting.”
    Explosions signaled the arrival of the missiles as five of the fifteen Visitor fighters were hit and destroyed outright. Picolo’s surprise had worked. “Don’t get cocky, boys. Abel Thirteen, Fourteen and Fifteen, cover me. I’m going right down their throats.”

Chapter 2
    Given a choice, Nicholas Draper would have preferred leaving the government of the United States right where it had been for two hundred years or so. But the Secretary of State knew the Visitors had given them little