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replacements? He got them. He needed equipment? Whatever he wanted, including experimental weapons, even ten Stinger surface-to-air missiles just in case some flying thing came out of those gates. Resupply? Transport? Air support? Same deal. Ogden took orders from Murray Longworth. Murray interfaced directly with the Joint Chiefs and the president. It was a heady bit of power, truth be told—no requisition, no approval, just tell Corporal Cope to place a request and things showed up as if by magic.

The blank check for men and equipment was key to mission success. So was an open-ended flexibility that let him move instantly, without orders, without approval, to wherever the danger might lie. He had to be flexible and fast, because the Mather engagement showed a clear change in hatchling tactics. They had expected an infantry assault. They had learned from the first encounter, learned and adapted.

That chewed at Ogden’s soul. His men had killed all the hatchlings in Wahjamega, and they hadn’t found anything that might be communication equipment. How had the Wahjamega hatchlings communicated with the Mather hatchlings?

Despite the change in tactics, the hatchlings still lost at Mather, which meant they’d likely change tactics again—so what was Ogden facing this time? His men had scanned the trees. Scanned everything. Normal vision, night vision, infrared, advance scouts. Nothing other than the hatchlings on the construct. No picket line, no perimeter. Odgen couldn’t figure it out. They seemed to be waiting for his men to come in.

He had his objectives, his attack options. The first option, use infantry to take the construct intact. Should that fail, hit it with the second option—Apache rockets. If needed, the Strike Eagles would deliver the third option: dropping enough two-thousand-pound bombs to turn a one-square-mile patch of Ohio into a burning crater. That would kill all his men and Ogden himself, but if it came to that, they’d have already been overrun.

Should that third option fail, the president would have no choice but to authorize what had been dubbed simply Option Number Four .

And Charlie Ogden really didn’t want to think about that.

He checked his watch again. Fifty minutes. Normally he’d attack as soon as the men were in position. He could still do that if he saw the need, but this time things were going to be a little different.

This time he’d have an audience. A career-making audience, the kind that could move him from a colonel’s eagle to a general’s star.

Charlie raised the night-vision goggles again and stared at the glowing construct. He hoped Murray could keep things on schedule at his end, because in fifty minutes, president or no president, Charlie Ogden was going in.

TAD, MEET MR. DAWSEY

Tad’s shivering brought him out of it.

He rolled on the grass, wondering if he was already dead. His shoulder hurt real bad. He didn’t feel dead—he was still moving. When people jumped out of windows on TV, they hit the ground and didn’t move. He rolled to his butt. Cold water seeped into the seat of his jeans.

Tad slowly stood. His legs hurt real bad, too. He took a deep breath, the rain and bits of ice splashing inside his wide-open mouth. He looked up, at the second-story window open to the night sky. Weird—it seemed like such a big drop from up in his room, but from down here it was about as high as a basketball hoop.

It didn’t matter how high it was or it wasn’t. He was out. Out of the house.

Okay, so he wasn’t dead . . . but he wasn’t going back in there, either.

Tad ran. His legs hurt, but they worked, and that was enough. He sprinted out to the side of the road and turned left. He pounded down a sidewalk cracked by tree roots and slick with slush.

He sprinted hard. He looked up just before running headlong into a man.

A huge man.

Tad stopped, frozen on the spot. The man was so big that Tad momentarily forgot about the house, his mom, his dad, his sister, even little