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put out.
    His producer shrugged her heavy shoulders. They made quite a pair: Kalheimer was long and lanky, all arms and legs, even his head was narrow and long-jawed. He always had a slap-happy grin on his face, even when he was furious. The producer was built like a squat teddy bear, short, heavy, given to sighs of long suffering.
    She sighed in her long-suffering way, then repeated, “No satellite pictures. Something’s screwed up. News reports say that all the satellites are down, malfunctioning.”
    “How in hell am I supposed to do the weather without satellite graphics? What’m I supposed to do, just stand in front of the camera and look stupid?”
    “That wouldn’t take much,” the producer muttered.
    “What?”
    Louder, she said, “You’ll have the local radar imagery and the National Weather Service’s forecast. Just read it off the monitor, like you always do.”
    “That’ll take ten seconds. What do I do with the rest of my two minutes?”
    “You’ll just have to wing it.” She knew that Kalheimer did not like winging it. Behind his facade of overweening self-confidence he was still as insecure as he’d been his first day in front of the cameras.
    “Heads are gonna roll over this,” Kalheimer growled. “And your head’s gonna be the first one!”
    “In five!” the floor manager shouted. “Four ... three ...”
    The overhead lights turned on and Kalheimer turned to camera one, his toothy professional grin spread across his long, bony face.
    “Hi there! It’s time for your up-to-the-minute weather report.”
     
    The Pentagon: Situation Room
    The first meeting of this emergency action team is convened”--General Franklin P. Higgins glanced at his Breitling wristwatch-- “at 11:46 a.m., 23 October.”
    The situation room was in the basement of the Pentagon, in the wing that had been rebuilt after being blasted and burned by the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. It was a small room; it felt crowded, tense, even with fewer than a dozen men and women sitting around the oblong table. Almost every one of them had opened a laptop or notebook computer on the table before them.
    Three of the room’s walls were floor-to-ceiling smart screens, showing various images from hardened Defense Department satellites. The ceiling was paneled with glareless lights. The seats around the highly polished table were dark leather, plush, comfortable. Each place at the table had a built-in phone jack and power plug.
    General Higgins was a big, morose-looking man with a flabby-jowled face and a bulbous nose that had earned him the nickname Possum when he’d been a cadet at the Air Force Academy. Although he was presently on detached duty with the Defense Intelligence Agency, he still wore his blue uniform.
    Zuri Coggins sat at the general’s right hand. She was from the White House, a member of the National Security Advisor’s staff, sent to this emergency action team as the West Wing’s representative. She was a tiny African-American woman, almost elfin, but very intense. Wearing a stylish short-skirted red jacket dress, she was the only woman in the conference room.
    The rear door opened and Michael Jamil stepped in, looking apologetic. All eyes around the oblong conference table turned to him.
    “Sorry to be late,” he said, his voice soft, contrite. “They held me up at the security checkpoint outside.”
    Jamil, a civilian analyst from the National Intelligence Council, was in a suede sports jacket and baggy, creaseless chinos. No tie, but a sleeveless V-neck yellow sweater beneath the jacket. He slid into an empty seat at the foot of the conference table, glancing at the displays on the smart screens that lined three of the room’s four walls. The images showed a satellite view of the missile launching site in the rugged mountains of North Korea, an electronic map of the North Pacific Ocean with each U.S. Navy surface vessel and submarine highlighted by a pinpoint light, and other satellite