…Minus 020 and COUNTING… It could have been a bad dream, a ni

As the hijacked plane continues south, Ben Richards drifts in a half-awake state that feels like a nightmare or hallucination. One part of Richards's mind remains practical, focused on navigation and the danger posed by McCone, while another part imagines the Network's vast tracking machinery closing in.

Richards envisions servomechanisms, infrared systems, radar scopes, microwave dishes, and trucks moving through the night as operators lock onto the plane. The imagined tracking chatter places the aircraft over and beyond Albany, then farther south, while the Network keeps an executive hold in effect.

The vision expands into a picture of militarized coordination across the northeast: missile silos opening, radar stations relaying positions, and computers adjusting weapons toward the plane's blinking lights. The machinery suggests that Richards's bluff and hijacking have escalated into a full-scale lethal response.

Despite the horror of what Richards senses, the split in Richards's mind gives him a strange detachment. Richards continues functioning, moving his blood-crusted finger along the map as the plane passes south of Springfield and west of Hartford, aware that the Network may soon receive a final go/no-go order.