“I’m fine,” Ross grunted, easing himself around and up into a sitting position at the bottom of the Cloak enclosure and taking quick stock of the situation. His flashlight was laying a couple of feet away, its beam buried in a fold of the black material. Pressed tightly across his chest and shoulder, the section of rope still hooked to his harness angled up to the cut he’d made in the Cloak and disappeared outside.

  “Where are you?” Talbot asked.

  “Where do you think?” Ross retorted. “I’m sitting on the bottom of the Cloak.”

  “I thought you were going for the gondola,” McPherson’s voice cut in.

  “I took a detour.”

  “So what now?” McPherson demanded.

  “Hang on,” Ross said. Gingerly, he picked up his flashlight and aimed it downward.

  It was as good as he’d hoped and as bad as he’d figured. The seam where the two ends of the Cloak had been fastened together, as he had feared, ran straight along the bottom of the enclosure in keel-line position. Precisely, in fact, where he was currently sitting.

  The good news was that Bakht’s men had clearly had more time and resources than Angie had. Unlike the small Cloak still tangled around his shoulders, this one had been more than simply tacked together with needlepoint thread. From the slickness of the seam, he guessed it had been sealed with a hot glue gun or something similar.

  Still, it was unlikely they’d designed the connection with passengers in mind. He needed to get off it before it ripped through and dropped him onto the pavement below.

  He aimed the light upward. There, too, the situation was decidedly mixed. “The good news is that I’m directly beneath the gondola,” he reported. “The bad news is that I’m ten feet beneath it.”

  “Can you climb up the Cloak material?” Talbot asked.

  “I don’t even know how much longer I can sit on it,” Ross countered. “This stuff’s carrying enough weight already without my pounds added in.”

  “What are you going to do?” McPherson asked.

  “Hope that the glorious spirit of the Lone Ranger hasn’t completely faded away,” Ross told him. Somewhere in the past minute, he saw, his flailing legs had broken the stitches holding his own Cloak together at feet and knees. Reaching to his chest, he ripped out the last remaining threads, freeing himself from the confinement of his cocoon. Removing the laptop from inside his coat, he set it aside, making sure the cable connecting it to his Cloak wasn’t tangled in either the rope or the harness.

  “What in hell’s name are you talking about?” McPherson demanded.

  “The Old West, of course,” Ross said. Sticking the flashlight back in his mouth, he started pulling in the rope. “I’m going to try to lasso the gondola.”

  ~

  Six had reached the corner and started around it when some premonition or subtle sound made him turn halfway around and look back.

  For a second he saw nothing. Then his eyes focused, and he jerked to an abrupt halt.

  Angling up from the street and disappearing into the air like a fakir’s magic trick was a thin rope. Even as he felt his jaw drop in amazement, he saw that the rope was in motion, being dragged down the middle of the street as if pulled by an unseen hand.

  Moving eastward. Toward the UN.

  He looked up. Against the hazy darkness of the New York night sky was a rectangular piece of still darker blackness where the cloaked dirigible should have been. In the center of that patch, looking like a tear in the fabric of space, was a narrow horizontal slit. A faint light shone through the gap, and as Six stared at it the light shifted subtly, revealing just a hint of the dirigible’s shiny gas bag surface and the stub-wing protruding from its side.

  The Cloak had been breached. Somehow, despite Six’s vigilance, Ross had gotten inside.

  And he was about to disarm the bomb.

  Cursing violently, Six snatched out his cell phone. He’d been mistaken earlier. Ross would indeed see one more sunrise.

  The one about to go off directly in his face.

  ~

  “Uh-oh,” the controller warned as he gazed through his binoculars out the ops room window. “The front starboard section of the Cloak has gone visible. And—damn—the rope hanging down is dragging along the street.”

  “How obvious is it?” Swenson asked, her fingers skating across the computer keys. Almost there.

  “Well, I can see it,” the controller shot back. “If Bakht still has spotters hanging around, they sure as hell can, too.”

  Swenson nodded. “I’m on it,” she said. A half dozen more keystrokes—

  Done. “Hang on,” she muttered, mentally crossing her fingers as she keyed in the final command.

  And to her immense relief and satisfaction, the entire Manhattan cell phone network quietly crashed.

  ~

  Slowly, Bakht lowered the phone. “What is it?” Two asked.

  “The phone system has gone down,” the general told him.

  Two hissed behind his mask. “You think they’re making a move against the bomb?”

  His answer was the sudden staccato of gunfire from the near distance. “I would say they’re making their move against the flankers,” Bakht told him grimly.

  But that was all right. The flankers were still protected by their Cloaks; and he didn’t need phones to give them their evacuation signal. “Fire the rooftop flares,” he ordered Two, stepping to the winch and the control box on the desk beside it. A quick confirmation via binoculars that the dirigible was still cloaked, and he lifted the safety cover on the switch. It was four minutes to seven, and four minutes should be enough time for the flankers to spot the signal and make it off their rooftops to relative safety.

  Kazi and his treason had four more minutes to live.

  ~

  With a vicious curse, Six hurled his phone against the ice-edged pavement. So the enemy had been a step ahead this time. They’d shut down the cell phone system, cutting off any chance he might have to warn the general and leaving him completely isolated.

  Fine. He would deal with this on his own.

  His motorcycle was twenty meters away. By the time he kicked it to life, the trailing rope was making its way across First Avenue, much to the consternation of the Friday night traffic. Only a handful of drivers had actually noticed the rope, but their startled panic stops had snarled everything for a block in both directions. Taking advantage of the frozen traffic flow, Six roared across the lanes, weaving around the halted cars as he chased after the rope.

  He caught up with it at the far side of the street. Skidding to a halt, he grabbed the end and wrapped a quick bowline around his handlebars. Then, gunning his engine, he roared off toward the north, at right angles to the dirigible’s motion. Whatever the rope was for, it wasn’t going to be there for long. Moreover, if the general was paying attention to the tether line readings, yanking the rope loose might also jolt the dirigible enough to get his attention.

  Or maybe the rope was still attached to Ross. In that case, he might even be able to pull him bodily through the cut he’d made and into a hundred-foot freefall.

  He rather hoped that would be the case.

  ~

  It was the last thing Ross had expected, and it nearly killed him before he could even react to it. One minute he was hauling in the rope, trying to decide how much he would need; the next, the rope had been snatched out of his hands and he was being yanked up along the side of the Cloak again. “Watch out!” someone shouted belatedly as he scrabbled uselessly for a grip on the smooth sides of the enclosure. “Someone’s trying to pull you out.”

  “He’s on a motorcycle,” Swenson’s voice cut in. “Ross?”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Ross grunted. Abruptly, the tension vanished, and he went sliding again to the bottom of the enclosure. “What’s happening?”

  “He’s swinging around,” the first voice said. “Turning south—probably going to get up a head of steam and try again.”

  Ross hissed between his teeth, looking for inspiration. Something to grab onto, or to belay the rope around. Anything.

  But there wasn’t anything. And as the rope abruptly snapped taut and again yanked him upward he knew with the acrid taste of defeat that there was only one thing he could do. Groping at his chest, he found the harness’s quick release and popped it.

  The rope snaked up and through the opening and vanished into the night. “Ross?” Swenson called.

  “I’m okay,” Ross told her as he once again slid to the bottom.

  But this time the landing was different. As his feet hit bottom there was a faint sound of tearing cloth. A two-foot gap appeared in the black material along the edge of the center seam, revealing the network of thin wires and tiny fibers inside.

  With nothing beyond it but the distant ground.

  Instantly, Ross twisted around to get his feet away from the tear, rolling onto his back to spread his weight as evenly across the material as he could. He slid to a halt, and for a moment lay motionless, listening for the sound of more tearing. Directly above him, the belly of the gondola hung mockingly, as inaccessible as the far side of the moon now that his rope was gone.

  He took a deep breath. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said quietly. “I think we’re in trouble.”

  ~

  The tension in the rope abruptly vanished, overbalancing the motorcycle and nearly throwing Six over the handlebars. He caught his balance and hit the brake, spinning around to a halt as the rope snaked to the ground around him. Neither Ross nor anyone else was tied to it.

  He looked up. The crack in the side of the Cloak had gone mostly dark, but there was still a hint of light there. Ross, he guessed, had lost his flashlight during the turbulence he’d just been through. It was too much to hope he’d been incapacitated; on the other hand, it was likely he was at least temporarily dazed.

  Dismounting from the motorcycle, Six crouched down on the side away from the UN building and drew his gun. He’d always liked dazed targets. They tended to hold still.

  Flicking off the safety, he braced his arm on the handlebars, aimed toward where the bottom of the dirigible’s Cloak enclosure ought to be, and opened fire.

  ~

  “He’s shooting at him now,” Swenson’s frantic voice reported in Talbot’s ear as the elevator indicator flicked from five to four.

  Talbot squeezed the grip of his gun. “Get some people out there,” he ordered.

  “Already on their way.”

  The elevator light flicked from four to three, and Talbot glanced at his watch. Three minutes to seven. Damn, and damn, and damn again.

  ~

  The first bullet slapped through the Cloak less than a yard from Ross’s head. The second, before he could even react to this new threat, whistled past no more than six inches from his ear. “Madison!” he yelped.

  “Hang in there,” Talbot’s voice came back. “We’re on our way.”

  Ross braced himself. But the third shot tore through the Cloak a good two feet past his shoes, with the fourth farther along still. The methodical sort, Ross thought as he consciously relaxed his muscles and tried to get his brain back into gear. The shots continued on for another few seconds, then stopped. Probably changing magazines, he decided, wondering distantly how heavily armed the attacker was.

  And now, in the ringing silence, he heard a new sound: a soft hissing noise coming from somewhere above him.

  The bullets, having missed their intended target, had instead punched a set of holes in the gasbag.

  He shook his head in disgust-edged amazement. Whoever this guy was, he had a truly amazing sense of overkill. Two minutes from nuclear detonation, and he was doing his damnedest to sink the dirigible.

  Or maybe all he was trying to do was sink Ross. Carefully, mindful of the increasingly fragile material between him and a long first step, he rolled up onto his side.

  His hip banged into something solid as he did so. The laptop, lying uselessly where he’d set it down earlier.

  The irony of it struck him oddly. Even if he’d still had his Cloak on, invisibility didn’t do a bit of good when your opponent was firing blind anyway. He pushed the laptop out of his way, his hand brushing against the cable as he did so.

  The cable . . .

  Suddenly, the mental fumbling and uncertainty were gone. The Papa Bear Cloak covering the dirigible had a cable and a computer, too. But Bakht would surely not have simply left the laptop lying loose on the bottom of the enclosure, no matter how good with a glue gun his people were.

  It had to be somewhere else. And the only possible somewhere else available was the gondola.

  He sat up sharply, fears about ripping through the material abruptly forgotten. Somewhere along the way he’d lost his flashlight, but all that motorcycle-assisted yanking on the rope had carved a new rip in the Cloak, perpendicular to the one he’d made with his knife, and the resulting pair of loose flaps was letting enough street light in for him to see.

  There it was, a taut dark line angling up from the bottom of the Cloak about two yards back from the gondola, with the other end disappearing through a channel that had been drilled around the edge of the door.

  Putting a hand against the side of the Cloak for balance, Ross headed back toward the cable. The upward rain of bullets resumed as he hurried along, one of the shots tearing through the Cloak just ahead of him, another smashing through the laptop that had started him on this chain of thought in the first place.

  And then he was at the cable. Hoping the connector had been fastened solidly into the back of the computer, he got a grip and started to climb.

  ~

  The men were coming from the UN toward him across the frozen field, Six saw as he shook the empty magazine from his gun: two jeeps worth, plus three motorcycles. Some of the soldiers, he noted with mild astonishment, were shouting at him to stop. As if he might actually obey.

  He smiled grimly as he slapped another magazine home and crouched a bit lower beside the motorcycle. Let them come. The body of the motorcycle would protect him from any distance shots they might try, and in one more minute they’d all be part of the same cloud of superheated plasma anyway.

  But before that happened, he would at least have the personal satisfaction of finishing off Ross. Releasing the slide, keeping half an eye on the incoming soldiers, he braced his arm again and commenced firing.

  He’d sent five shots into the sky and was deciding where to put the next pattern, when something from the opposite edge of his peripheral vision caught his attention. He spun his head around—

  The man riding the motorcycle toward him skidded to a halt just past First Avenue, dropping the machine to the ground beneath him and lifting his gun in a two-handed marksman’s stance. “FBI!” he shouted over the noise of the traffic and the echoes of Six’s own shots. “Drop it!”

  Reflexively, Six spun his gun around toward this new threat. The FBI man’s first shot was wide, careening off the metal of the bike beside him. Smiling tightly, Six fired back, his shot twitching the shoulder of the other’s coat.

  And then, before he could adjust his aim, there was a flash of light and fire above his right shoulder, and a wave of sudden heat washed over him.

  The nuke! was his first reflexive thought. But even as he flung himself away from the heat, and the fire fell with him, he realized his attacker’s first shot hadn’t simply ricocheted away as he’d thought. It had instead punctured the gas tank, and the flash or ejected casing from Six’s own shot had ignited it.

  His arm and shoulder were on fire.

  He was writhing on the ground, trying to roll out the fire as he centered his gun on the approaching enemy, when the FBI man fired one last time.

  ~

  The connection cable was a lot thinner than it looked, at least as far as climbing purposes were concerned, and there was no place for Ross to brace his feet or even get a purchase on the cable with them. But at least the shooting from below seemed to have stopped.

  He grunted his way up, hand over hand, painfully aware that there was probably nothing anchoring the other end of the cable but a couple of tiny screws and whatever support the gondola door was providing. He had the vague sense that someone was calling his name, but his headset had gotten knocked off in that last mad scramble and was banging against his hip with each surge upward.

  It seemed to take forever, hanging and twisting in midair, but it was probably no more than half a minute before he reached the gondola. Swinging his left foot up and over, he got it braced on the nearest rear wheel of the tricycle landing gear; and with a half kick, half surging pull upward, he lunged up and got a grip on the door handle with his right hand.

  For a moment he hung there, gathering his strength. Then, with another lunge, he tripped the latch. The door swung open—

  And his left hand, still gripping the cable, suddenly lost all support as the laptop sitting on the seat inside the door flew out and disappeared beneath his feet.

  With a curse, Ross let go of the cable and grabbed for the edge of the door. He got half a handhold, squeezing hard as his right hand scrabbled for something more solid to hang onto. But the door was too smooth. He could feel his foot starting to slip off the wheel; and with one final all-or-nothing surge, he kicked upward off the wheel with all his strength, his right hand stretching toward the top of the door.

  For a single terrifying heartbeat he thought he wasn’t going to make it. Then his fingertips got a grip, just enough, and he swung his legs up, twisting his body around, and got his left foot on the door sill. The door swung farther open in response, but with the bulk of his weight now supported he was able to dart his left hand up and get a firm grip on the top of the door. The right hand followed, freeing up his left to grab the gondola frame above the door opening and pull the door he was straddling partially closed.