From the author of Skin Deep (1983) and For the Defense (1988), the story of Colombian cocaine overlords who wage computer warfare on America's air-control system--all in order to smuggle in a really, really big load of their corporate product. Did you know that the radar images that our overworked air-controllers stare at are from digitally encoded computer renderings of the actual signals generated by air-control radars and echoed back by airplanes? Probably not. But computer weenie supreme Darius Whitney--who made millions from the sale of his computer programming firm to heartless MBAs--knows all about it and, to the delight of Senor Cordero of Medellin, is willing to figure out a way to program those computers to overlook certain of Senor Cordero's cocaine flights. For a price. But, as anyone who has ever had the slightest contact with computers knows, there will have to be some debugging in the design phase, and the little glitches that show up in that process are enough to alert taut, tough, computer-security consultant Scott Vandenburg, hired by the feds to track down the hacker who sabotaged the entire US air travel reservation on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Each of the duelling computer specialists has a lovely, computer knowledgeable, user-friendly assistant, Vandenburg's is, unsurprisingly, lovelier. Vanderburg figures out what Whitney is up to--but he may be too late to stop the Boeing 747 from landing its deadly cargo. This is what happens when writers become entranced with their new word-processors.