Part 1 Summary

Chapter 1: Lieutenant Roger Shawn stands at the side of the road, looking down over the town of Piedmont, Arizona with a pair of binoculars on a chilly night in February. All is quiet in the tiny town, which boasts a population of forty-eight souls. The narrator indicates that these are the last few moments of Lieutenant Shawn's life. Lieutenant Shawn climbs back into his Ford Econovan, rejoining his electronics technician, Private Lewis Crane. The men have been using the radio-directional equipment on the van to triangulate the position of the Scoop satellite, which it is their mission to recover. The triangulation procedure is time-consuming with a single van, but the Army felt that using more than one van might arouse suspicion amongst the locals. Now, six hours into their recovery mission, they have pin-pointed their quarry. Their equipment indicates the Scoop satellite is...