The man with the eye patch was the president’s pilot. Once, while making love to a beautiful young woman, he had left the patch on, kidding around, pretending to be a pirate of old. But after, in the hush following the storm, she had asked him to take it off. The patch frightened her, she told him, an augury of the perpetual hush that would follow a nuclear explosion, the bomb’s airburst, “brighter than a million suns,” blinding all aboard the “Doomsday” plane except the man with the protected eye-killing all below. Leaving the president in charge of what? Seeing her distress, the pilot had quickly removed it. Trembling with fear, she asked him to hold her and he did. It would be more than a year before he would see her again.
Before he had met her, he had never heard of her two brothers — or anyone else in the Brentwood family for that matter-but then, people all over the world had never heard of the family, and there was no reason they should have, that is until, like the Brentwoods in America and Major Tae in South Korea, everybody suddenly found themselves swept into the maelstrom when, whether anyone liked it or not, ordinary human beings would be called upon to do extraordinary things.