thousand feet per second, like Mach eleven. That means your targeting window is very small ... in all dimensions, but especially depth. Also you’re talking a fairly hard, robust target. The RV off an ICBM is fairly sturdy, not tissue paper like the boosters are. I’ll have to see if the warhead off a SAM will really hurt one of those.” The eyes cleared and he looked directly into Bretano’s eyes. “Okay, when do I start?”
“Commander Matthews,” THUNDER said into his intercom phone. “Dr. Gregory is ready to talk to the Aegis people. Keep me posted, Al” was Bretano’s final order.
“You bet.”
The Reverend Doctor Hosiah Jackson donned his best robe of black silk, a gift handmade by the ladies of his congregation, the three stripes on the upper arms designating his academic rank. He was in Gerry Patterson’s study, and a nice one it was. Outside the white wooden door was his congregation, all of them well-dressed and fairly prosperous white folks, some of whom would be slightly uncomfortable with having a black minister talk to them—Jesus was white, after all (or Jewish, which was almost the same thing). This was a little different, though, because this day they were remembering the life of someone only Gerry Patterson had ever met, a Chinese Baptist named Yu Fa An, whom their minister had called Skip, and whose congregation they had supported and supported generously for years. And so to commemorate the life of a yellow minister, they would sit through the sermon of a black one while their own pastor preached the gospel in a black church. It was a fine gesture on Gerry’s part, Hosiah Jackson thought, hoping it wouldn’t get him into any trouble with this congregation. There’d be a few out there, their bigoted thoughts invisible behind their self-righteous faces, but, the Reverend Jackson admitted to himself, they’d be tortured souls because of it. Those times had passed. He remembered them better than white Mississippians did because he’d been the one walking in the streets—he’d been arrested seven times during his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—and getting his parishioners registered to vote. That had been the real problem with the rednecks. Riding in a municipal bus was no big deal, but voting meant power, real civic power, the ability to elect the people who made the laws which would be enforced on black and white citizens alike, and the rednecks hadn’t liked that at all. But times had changed, and now they accepted the inevitable—after it had come to pass—and they’d learned to deal with it, and they’d also learned to vote Republican instead of Democrat, and the amusing part of that to Hosiah Jackson was that his own son Robert was more conservative than these well-dressed rednecks were, and he’d gone pretty far for the son of a colored preacherman in central Mississippi. But it was time. Patterson, like Jackson, had a large mirror on the back of the door so that he could check his appearance on the way out. Yes, he was ready. He looked solemn and authoritative, as the Voice of God was supposed to look.
The congregation was already singing. They had a fine organ here, a real hundred-horsepower one, not the electronic kind he had at his church, but the singing ... they couldn’t help it. They sang white, and there was no getting around it. The singing had all the proper devotion, but not the exuberant passion that he was accustomed to ... but he’d love to have that organ, Hosiah decided. The pulpit was finely appointed, with a bottle of ice water, and a microphone provided by the CNN crew, who were discreetly in both back comers of the church and not making any trouble, which was unusual for news crews, Reverend Jackson thought. His last thought before beginning was that the only other black man to stand in this pulpit before this moment was the man who’d painted the woodwork.
“Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I am Hosiah Jackson. You all probably know where my church is. I am here today at the invitation of my good friend and colleague, your pastor, Gerry Patterson.
“Gerry has the advantage over me today, because, unlike me, and I gather unlike any person in the church, he actually knew the man whom we are here to remember.
“To me, Yu Fa An was just a pen pal. Some years ago, Gerry and I had occasion to talk about the ministry. We met in the