The queue for probing, prodding, and scanning before being allowed to proceed to the departure lounge at the airport was lengthy. It wound its way down past the bookstore and coffee bar, and finally came to an end just outside the gift shop. Occupying the terminal position was a young man dressed in sporty, comfortable traveling clothes which signaled an experienced flier. He was rather short, with a dark complexion and pleasant features. His carry-on baggage was a brown distressed leather laptop case and a nice woolen sweater. He looked like a young professional on business travel, or perhaps a graduate student on his way to an academic conference. He spoke only when spoken to, but his replies were cordial and courteous. He seemed relaxed and at ease, and his lack of anxiety about the flight and its attendant indignities spread to those near him. By the time they reached the security checkpoint, they were a fairly congenial crowd.

His laptop case seemed to have rather a lot of components in it, but nothing that looked particularly out of the ordinary. He was carrying nothing else even remotely suspicious, and so while the security screener would have liked to spend more time checking out the contents of the laptop case, the passenger's pronounced Hispanic appearance made the officer wary of being accused of racial profiling, and he passed him through without further ado, boarding Flight 821 at gate C-8.

He was assigned to a window seat in the second row of first class. As he sat down, he deftly removed several components from a velcro-secured compartment of the laptop case and hid them in the folds of his sweater. He slid the case under his seat, buckled in, and relaxed.

About thirty minutes into the nonstop flight from SeaTac to Rio de Janeiro, he took out his laptop. He brought up a crowded spreadsheet, and for all appearances began to get some work done. This particular laptop had a USB connector on the front panel, and into this he plugged a cable that disappeared into the jumble of interconnected components hidden under the sweater still on his lap. Unnoticeable to any casual observer, three blank fields at the bottom of the spreadsheet suddenly contained numbers. One of them was a continuously updating pair of coordinates supplied by the GPS unit built into the laptop. The other two were simple countdowns. He watched as the proximity numbers counted down, decreasing somewhat irregularly as the tracking program calculated the plane's airspeed and heading from the GPS coordinate information.

By the time the proximity countdown had reached 10, he was beginning to perspire lightly, despite having taken two rather powerful tranquilizers a few minutes earlier. Still, his expression remained placid, and he had the presence of mind to ask the flight attendant for some soda, to make sure she would not be near him when the time came. Twelve seconds later, the countdown reached zero. He closed his eyes and uttered a short prayer under his breath, then pressed a key on the laptop. A loud pop emanated from under his sweater, and the lights in the cabin all went out at once. The plane seemed to shudder with disbelief, then without warning the 747 dropped out of the sky like the proverbial stone. The crew tried to restart the engines or at least to guide the plane to a controlled crash landing, but the powerful electromagnetic pulse had disabled every electronic system on board. They met with no more success than someone trying to steer an ocean liner with a canoe paddle. They couldn't dump fuel effectively, or even declare an emergency.

Six miles below and a few ahead of the doomed aircraft, several thousand people enjoying the wide variety of rides, performances, and other attractions at one of the larger amusement parks in the country, sprawled across 200 acres of South Texas limestone in the bed of a former quarry, were blissfully unaware of rapidly approaching Armageddon. The day was overcast, with a ceiling of about a thousand feet. With the engines off, the 747 was surprisingly quiet as it plummeted toward earth. The air being forced up through the control surfaces whistled in a peculiar fashion, but not loudly enough to be heard from more than a couple hundred feet away.

A few people noticed the plane when it broke through the cloud cover, but those directly underneath couldn't easily tell it was in free fall. It was being tracked on radar from San Antonio International, of course, but since the transponder and radios were inoperative, there wasn't anything the air traffic controllers could do but wonder what in blue blazes was going on. The sudden loss of radio contact and transponder signal couldn't help but put everyone in mind of September 11, but there weren't any government targets around here, unless they were aiming for Camps Bullis or Stanley. It wasn't until they plotted the position of the aircraft and its descent vector that someone realized where the plane was going to come down. They tried to warn the park officials, but it was too late to take any sort of action.

The 747-400 had nosed forward into a dive by the time it broke the cloud ceiling; it hit the ground at a little over 400 kilometers an hour and loaded with roughly 200,000 liters of jet fuel. The resulting superheated fireball virtually vaporized everything within a hundred meters of the impact site and launched flaming debris as far as half a kilometer. The impact site was almost at the geographic center of the park–whether by luck, skill, or a pact with the Devil, the terrorist had managed uncanny accuracy in his aim.

The death toll was horrific. The vast majority of these victims died instantly in the fireball, but several dozen were injured severely enough, either by the superheated shock wave or by falling structures, to die later in the hospital. The scene was one of absolute devastation–like the aftermath of a tactical nuclear attack. Body parts, charred pieces of twisted, unrecognizable wreckage, and slabs of melted plastic were spread thickly in a circular wave front centered on the crash site and extending out for several hundred meters. Not a single structure in the park was left undamaged by the titanic concussion and blast wave.

Ash witnessed this entire horrifying episode in the virtual reality headpiece. The heat from the conflagration was so widespread and intense that it seemed to be creating its own local weather. Clouds were building over the park, and the wind was picking up, rushing in to feed the insatiable oxygen demand of the hellish flames. A fire storm of epic proportions was being born, one that threatened to destroy the rest of the park and move off into the surrounding upscale neighborhoods as an unstoppable force of nature.

He was too traumatized to think clearly or act. All he could do was stare in near comatose shock at the masses of twisted, blackened wreckage that blazed throughout the park. Occasionally a superstructure would collapse in on itself, sending up a shower of flaming debris and sparks. He was dizzy and sick to his stomach.