Hot Minute

HOT STATUSFrank Halbert is having a bad day.The fact is, this man's day of heartbreak and missed opportunities was already a lost cause, even before those F-16s made their low pass over their rogue air defense radar site. The old barn dissolved in an ocean of fire, leaving blackened bodies everywhere.Now Frank's anguished path takes him out of the woody highlands northwest of Gettysburg, past legions of combat-ready FBI agents, and into a city of weeping people.He manages to get the limping old Army vet (the only other survivor of their hopeless mission) onto the bus for home. He risks exposure to call his dead brother's fiancée, telling her to forget she'd ever met him. He knows there will be evil times ahead, now that he's a federal terror suspect on the run.After the call, he takes precious moments to dismantle his too-hot-to-use cell phone, dumping the pieces into a trashcan outside the Lincoln Diner. He looks up to see a cop staring right at him.Time to start running again.A little background: In the early 1970s, about the time New York's World Trade towers were being completed, the last of the Army's air defense missile sites closed down, their radars and missiles boxed up and hauled away. The threat from Russian bombers was over.MAD MINUTEForty years later the new threat is from hijacked airliners, but there's no defense readily available: a fact not lost on Jeff Breen, NYC's Commander of Counterterror.Breen seeks out Frank Halbert, former FBI agent (and current federal fugitive), hoping to create an air defense missile site of his own, built with scrounged-up Army surplus hardware and manned by old-time missile vets.Along for the ride: Warner McGlaston, 78-year-old ex-Army warrant officer.(The man remembers the equipment ...pretty much.) "Krakatoa" Jack Tilsen, a missile tracking operator of talent. (So he's a tad volatile.) Cindy Faber, a 22-year-old computer tech in cut-off jeans. She has her eye on Frank. And Gwen Goddard: ex-lingerie supermodel, whose mega-rich fiancé died in the North Tower. She's the bank. She's also Frank's sister-in-law. Sort of. Be good if he could control his hopeless devotion.On the opposing side: CIA agent Phil Rosen, who worms his way into the Nike crew. ATF agent Joyce Kapinsky, pursuing our heroes in order to nail their source of forbidden hardware, an international gunrunner. And DEA agent Hubble Strand, who just wants to spend a little quality time with Joyce, if he can get her to ease off the job a little. (Good luck with that, Hub.)The crew goes to work setting up an installation in Northern New Jersey, within sight of the old Army air defense base out on Sandy Hook. (It's now a federal park, complete with a nude beach). They scour the world for viable equipment, ending up in the highlands of Colombia in a life-or-death struggle with a local drug lord.Their troubles are only just beginning....HOT MINUTE combines the revised texts of HOT STATUS and MAD MINUTE. 116k words