Cyclops One

Chapter 1

Howe shut down his aircraft, slowly working himself out of the restraints, moving with great deliberation as if he were reluctant to leave the plane. He’d flown nonstop to Kabul, Afghanistan, refueling by air along the way. Ten thousand miles, give or take; it was a serious haul, even in the pilot-friendly Velociraptor, coming on top of several hours of intensive planning and then hustling to leave. By all rights and normal flight rules, he was owed some major sack time, but nothing about this operation could be called “normal.”

There was no way he could go to bed until he made sure the operation was under control; a slew of details had to be attended to if they were going to be ready to take off tomorrow night, the analysts’ best guess about when the Indians would launch their attack.

Howe extended his arms and stretched his back, twisting his muscles. Deciding he had officially caught a second wind, he pulled himself out of the cockpit and onto the ladder that the ground crew had brought over. The men had been waiting for some hours for his arrival and were already swarming like ants on a jelly sandwich. The Velociraptors’ “home” team was due to arrive in another few hours from North Lake, but the crew here — residents and others gathered as the ad hoc operation was pulled together — gave up nothing to them in terms of skill, speed, and precision. With a wide range of experience in various aircraft, the maintainers could probably have rebuilt the aircraft from the ground up if necessary.

It wasn’t. The Velociraptor and its sister, now being secured by Timmy a short distance away, had performed perfectly. If he hadn’t been there, Howe would almost have doubted that the glitch that killed the controls on his original aircraft had even happened.

“Man, do I have to take a leak!” yelled Timmy by way of greeting as he climbed down from the plane. “Piddlepack’s full up, and I had my legs crossed the last thousand miles.”

Howe shook his head and began walking toward a pair of Humvees waiting nearby. By the time he had ascertained that they’d been sent to bring him over to the base commander, Timmy had joined him.

Part of the air base had been given over to the operation, in effect quarantined from the rest of the world. A two-star general had come over from CentCom to take charge of the operation and was waiting for Howe in a suite down the hall from the base commander’s headquarters. Eight F-15Cs and a KC-135 tanker were tasked to the group, along with Cyclops Two and the Velociraptors. An AWACS and its escorts were due in shortly from Saudi Arabia, along with an E-3 upgraded Rivet Joint aircraft code-named Cobra Two, which could provide real-time intelligence from intercepted electronic transmissions, including radio and telemetry. There were two different SAR packages already here, manned by troops from Special Forces Command and including not only Air Force PJs or pararescuers but Army SF troopers as well. The packages were built around a pair of MH-60s, modified Blackhawks used for long-range missions; within a few hours they were expecting a long-range MC-130 that could be used for long-distance operations as well.

Compared to the way the military ordinarily did things, the operation was thrown together. But the force it was able to project was, pound for pound, one of the most potent ever assembled, short of a nuclear-strike team. The warfighters were relying on not dozens but hundreds of highly skilled personnel backing them up: aircraft mechanics, survival shop specialists, weapons orderlies, fuel handlers, cooks, clerks, security people, communications whizzes, drivers, and gofers. The pilots might get any glory that was handed out, but in reality they were a very small piece of the pie.

Major General Alec Liu had been briefed on the mission by the planners who had helped Howe outline it back in the States, as well as by the Pentagon and even Dr. Blitz. According to the latest estimates, the Indians would hit the radar site within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The attack would be made at night, but as yet it had been impossible to get a better idea of when. That meant a twelve-hour patrol, on top of the time it would take to prep the mission and get into position.

Liu, an Air Force officer, realized how far that would push the flight crews and kept shaking his head as they traced the expected flight area on the map. There was no way to provide proper relief crews for the main elements of the mission: Howe, Timmy, and the crew of Cyclops Two were going to have to fight through their fatigue for the marathon mission.

Liu’s borrowed command center had been a recreation room twenty-four hours before; the general and Howe stood over a large Ping-Pong table as they reviewed the tasking order and other data relating to the mission. Other officers gradually filtered in, and what had started as an informal brief took on a more comprehensive tone, complete with a weather report from one of the general’s staffers. Liu, shorter than Howe and a bit pudgy, was a roll-up-the-sleeves kind of guy, and gave the impression he could run out on the tarmac and drive the fuel truck himself if the ground crew turned up a man short.

Captain Atta Habib, the commander of Cyclops Two, arrived just as the briefing was breaking up. He’d left some hours ahead of Howe, but his slower aircraft naturally had taken longer to arrive.

Habib looked as if he’d run the entire way. His eyes drooped and he seemed to be tottering on his legs. Howe didn’t even bother recapping the latest intelligence reports; he told Atta to go and hit the sack.

“That sounds like a good idea,” Liu added over Howe’s shoulder. “As a matter of fact, I think it should be an order for all flight personnel.”

“I wanted to check on the weapons for the Velociraptors,” said Howe.

“Taken care of, Colonel. Go get some rest. Now. We have just under twenty-four hours before this thing goes off.”

Chapter 2

At some point in every investigation, it became necessary to journey to the heart of enemy territory, to brave destruction in the quest for the truth. You could gird your loins with body armor, arm yourself with all manner of weapons, but in the end, it came down to two things: luck, and timing. Luck could not be controlled. Timing, however, could be managed. Fisher, relying both on precedent and clandestine reconnaissance, adjusted his plan accordingly and plunged into the abyss, also known as FBIHQ.

Thanks to his careful preparation — and luck — he made it over to his destination in the great bowels of the enemy camp without incident. In the deepest, dankest basement corridor, in an area once reserved for industrial waste — or worse — he found his quest: Betty McDonald, a true believer, pure of soul and smoky of lungs.

“Cut the bullshit, Andy,” said Betty, who headed a forensic accounting team that worked on national security projects but was actually assigned to the government crimes section of the Criminal Investigation Division, probably because someone had hit the Tab button incorrectly when preparing the last organizational chart. Betty had helped Fisher several times in the past and apparently didn’t have the pull to be permanently unassigned from such duty.

That or she’d lost the paperwork in the pile that flowed from various portions of her desk.

“Just tell me what you want,” she said as he closed the door to her office, battling a bag filled with shredded paper. The remains inside the clear bag looked suspiciously like candy wrappers.

“I’ll take a cigarette for starters,” said Fisher.

“You can’t buy your own cigarettes?”

“On what they pay me?”

Betty’s laugh sounded something like the snort of a hippopotamus.

In a good way.

She rose from her desk and went to the lateral filing cabinets, where a large air-filtration machine sat. She poked the side and the smoke-eater began to whirl.

“You don’t really think that does any good, do you?” asked Fisher, taking a cigarette from her.

“Keeps the boss happy,” she said, sitting back at the desk. She opened the top drawer after she lit up, taking out a bag of Tootsie Rolls, which she habitually chewed while smoking. The combination kept her teeth a healthy black.

“Did you get those financial profiles?” Fisher asked.

“No.”

“Didn’t DOD send over those authorizations?”

“I got the data you asked about, Andy. They’re not financial profiles. They’re barely disclosure statements. Do you have any idea of what we do down here?”

“Besides the orgies?”

Another hippo snort. “If you’re looking for bribes, you want to go over to U-Rent and get a metal detector,” she told him. “You’ll have better luck digging up coffee cans in their backyards.”

“You’re getting funnier, Betty. You really are.”

“It’s the nicotine talking.” She reached down into the nether regions of her desk, digging out a file she had had prepared for him. NADT mandated annual security checks for all its personnel, and the checks routinely included credit reports as well as asset listings. A member of Betty’s team had gone over the data.

“If they know their accounts are being checked, they’re unlikely to hide any money there,” said Betty, handing over the information. “We did comparison sheets where the records were deep enough. Three years.”

“Boring as hell, huh?”

“Your missing pilot’s rich. I’d like to be in her will.”

“So I hear. These are the same forms they had out at North Lake?”

“You’ve seen them already?” Betty’s tongue nearly got tangled in her candy. “God damn it, Andy, you know how short-staffed I am?”

“So, how rich is York, anyway?”

Betty began rattling numbers through the smoke rings, calming somewhat. The family was among the top thousand in the country, depending on how their holdings were valued. On the one hand, she had no close relatives — her parents were dead and she had no sisters — but on the other hand her “real” money was parked in trusts.

“You can’t even tell how rich these people are from the statements,” said Betty. “That’s my point. They’re basically the same bullshit forms Congress uses, and you know how revealing they are.”

“Like your shirt.”

While Betty inspected her clothes, Fisher looked at the sheets, which — contrary to what he had insinuated — were somewhat more detailed than the data available at North Lake. York’s included a long list of trusts that she had an interest in.

“Can you find out what these trusts hold?” he asked.

“After you get the subpoenas and double my personnel line, sure.” Betty popped another Tootsie Roll. “Overtime pay would be nice too.”

Fisher leaned forward. There was a cup of coffee at the edge. Something appeared to be growing in it; otherwise, he might have taken a sip.

“I have this other idea,” he said. “But it’s a long shot.”

“What idea of yours isn’t?”

Fisher reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a three-page list of names. “These are the companies that are involved in Cyclops,” he told her. “Just the weapons part. I was wondering if we could get an idea of any relationships they have.”

“What are you, a marriage counselor?”

“Watching Jay Leno is really paying off for you, Betty.”

She took the list and immediately started to frown. “Are these all private companies?”

“I don’t know. What’s the difference?”

“Well, for starters, it’s as hard getting information on private companies as it is for individuals.”

“So, it’ll be a snap, huh?” Fisher took a long draw on the cigarette. Betty smoked no-name cigarettes, and this particular one reminded him of horse dung. But insulting her would not be particularly productive. “There may be paperwork over at DOD that lets us look at their financial records.”

“Did you ask?”

“Not directly.”

“Have you talked to GSA to see if there have been any audits?”

“See, that’s why you’re the expert. I didn’t even think of that.”

“Do we have grounds to look at their books?”

Fisher shrugged.

“That means no. This is a lot of work, Andy. Even without going in and looking at their books.”

“I’d also be interested in whatever else they’re doing, what other project they’re tied into. Also, I’m looking for real estate records. I’ve hit a dead end on that side.”

She tried to hand the paper back to him. “This isn’t really accounting, Fisher. This is something you should be doing yourself.”

“You know me and numbers,” said Fisher.

Betty turned aside to one of the three computers lined up on the side of her desk — she had a laptop and a PDA on the desk itself — and pressed a few buttons.

“Hmmmm,” she said.

“See. I knew you could do it.”

“It’s going to take longer than I thought. No way.”

“Great,” said Fisher, jumping up. “Call me, okay?”

“Andy. Andy!”

In retrospect, Fisher realized that he had made a tactical mistake in managing his exit, for undoubtedly Betty’s rather sonorous voice had set off some sort of deep vibration within the Bureau’s clandestine internal security system. Nonetheless, he almost succeeded in escaping completely from the complex — but then,almost only counts in horseshoes and grenades.

Actually, the latter would have been an appropriate metaphor.

“Andrew Fisher!”

When faced with a difficult situation, Fisher knew, there were only two possible ways of dealing with it. The first was to face it bravely. The second — infinitely preferable — was to run away as fast as you could.

Given that his way down the hall was barred by several security types, Fisher chose the former.

“Hey, boss,” he said, swirling around. “What’s happening?”

Jack Hunter’s red face glowed in the corridor, his mouth open while his brain worked to string together a sentence of passable coherence. Hunter was executive assistant director for National Security — Special Projects, a kingdom that had been carved out of Counterintelligence when no one was looking. It was often said that Hunter was old-school Bureau, though no one could figure exactly what school that might have been. In any event, he was among the most deliberate speakers in Washington; several field agents believed that talking to Hunter was the best way to prepare for a lifetime as a Zen Buddhist monk.

Fisher, for one, had never put much store in Eastern religion and believed that patience was overrated. Still, with no avenue of escape open, he waited for his boss to get to the point.

“A camel, Fisher? A camel?” said Hunter finally.

“Yeah, bit me,” said Fisher. “Ain’t that a bitch?”

“It should have bitten your head off. And what was this about water?”

“Hey, Egypt’s in the middle of a desert. Had to buy water.”

“Five trainloads of water?”

“I think it was only four. You better send somebody over to check that one out.”

Hunter’s face shaded even redder. “Why does Colonel Gorman want to talk to me?”

“Sounds like a personal matter,” said Fisher. The way was now clear, and so he hustled toward it.

“Fisher! Stop this instant.”

Fisher obeyed, but only because he could no longer afford to waste time discussing Bureau finances. He pulled his cigarettes out.

“You can’t smoke in here. It’s a federal building!”

“Right, chief,” he said, turning and heading toward the doors.

“Fisher!”

“I’m going, I’m going.”

Chapter 3

The transmission clearly belonged to a Russian aircraft. Even Luksha, no expert, could see from the graph how the query to the Russian satellite for its position matched the pattern of a dozen other aircraft, including his own. Luksha could also see that the geopositioning gear that made the query had once been in a Tu-160; this match was also perfect.

But according to the three intelligence people fidgeting before him, no Tu-160 had been flying to make the query. The few currently operating with Voyenno-Vozdushnyye Sily’s Long-Range or Frontal Aviation units — officially there were six of the aircraft the Americans dubbed the Blackjack, but in reality only two had actually flown in the past six months — had both been grounded when the query was made.

“So is this a Tu-160, or just the GPS system?” asked the general.

“It is impossible to know for certain, of course.” Chapeav nestled his hands on his potbelly. “Several Tu-160s from the Ukraine were sold for parts some years ago. It is likely that this came from that lot. Some airframes were sold in those transactions, but given the location over the Pacific, we rule this out as an actual Tu-160. It’s simply a GPS unit, and perhaps related avionics, that’s been placed in another aircraft.”

“We rule it out because it’s not the answer we’re seeking,” said Luksha, as usual becoming impatient with Chapeav’s know-it-all manner.

It was possible that one of the Russian military’s development commands or even an aircraft factory was operating a Tu-160 for test purposes or covert missions that his people were not privy to. The bomber, though oldish, was a large, relatively stable platform that was quite usable if kept in good repair. But Chapeav dismissed this with a wave of his hand, claiming that his impeccable sources would have made it clear already if this were the case.

“It is possible that one of the Middle Eastern governments — Iran, I would think — has refurbished an aircraft or two and is conducting long-range testing over the Pacific,” conceded Chapeav, almost as an afterthought. “But our inquiries have not lent support to that theory. That is why we believe the GPS unit itself is all that is involved.”

“Why would the Americans use our satellites?” asked Luksha.

“Assuming it is the Americans, it would make it harder to detect or defeat.”

“By them, not us.”

Chapeav smiled faintly, then turned to the short bearded man on the right, a specialist who had worked for the PVO. The man reached into a folder and laid out a set of satellite images showing a bare island near the water.

“Among the islands included in the agreement with Japan for oil exploitation in the Kuril’skije Ostrova was one once intended as a relief base,” said Chapeav. His right hand began to shake; it occurred to Luksha that were it not for this physical disability, the intelligence expert would be intolerable. But the disease softened his hard opinion of him.

“This is a photo of the island,” added Chapeav, pushing the picture at the far right of the series in front of the general, “taken within the past week. And this one is from an aircraft before the leases to the private companies, some years ago.”

As Luksha compared the two photos, Chapeav spoke of the island. It had been used during the 1950’s and sixties as a base for spy flights over Japan and the Pacific, gradually falling out of use during the 1970’s. A brief round of activity in the 1980’s brought improvements to the base under a plan to operate long-range bombers with cruise missiles in answer to the American deployment of the B-1B. The bunkered hangar, cut into the rock, could hold six aircraft, and the access was angled in such a way as to avoid exposure to American satellites then in use — an advantage, Chapeav noted, that continued to this day.

There were obvious differences in the photos Luksha was examining. The older one was black-and-white, and taken at a slightly different angle. A rectangular patch of metal and machinery, which appeared to be an oil rig, sat at the right side of the island in the new photo. But Luksha could not see anything else of significance. He put them down and held out his hands. “The oil derrick?”

“They have reactivated the hangar,” said the intelligence expert triumphantly.

“How can you see that?”

The photo interpreter proceeded to explain, pointing to a thin line at the lower right of both photos. The field itself was camouflaged by shadows that appeared to be rock outcroppings. The line, a reflection of the closed hangar blast door, was not present in the middle series of photos.

“It is not part of the oil-drilling process, which, as you can see, was abandoned,” added Chapeav. “I would believe they timed the work according to the satellite coverage, possibly using the oil derrick as a cover. The small boats that came in and out at that time — they would all have appeared to be part of the oil project, which stopped six months ago.”

“But the base is now in use?” Luksha asked.

“We believe so.”

“By the Japanese?”

“There are no indications that the Japanese Self-Defense Force is involved, but they cannot be ruled out.”

“You’re telling me that whatever used the Tu-160 GPS flew from this island,” said Luksha, “and that it was the 767 aircraft that housed the laser weapon.”

“No,” said Chapeav. “We have not made that connection…but it is an interesting guess.”

His tone was triumphant, as if they were playing some parlor game. Clearly the intelligence expert had made that guess himself: The GPS reads began only twenty-four hours after the laser plane had disappeared.

An interesting coincidence, but no more.

“Can that airfield be used by an airplane as big as the 767?” asked Luksha.

“Yes, though it is not as easy as it seems,” said the third expert, who until now had not spoken. His area was aeronautics; he proceeded to explain how difficult it would be for a plane to take off and land on the strip. The bomber, though heavy, had the advantage of variable-geometry wings. But he ended the discussion of impossibilities by saying it could be done.

“Who owns the lease?” said Luksha.

“We are examining that,” said Chapeav. “It is under Japanese authority by treaty, which makes the information slower to obtain. According to their official records, it is abandoned.”

Luksha leaned back in his seat, considering all that he had been told. In order to do anything further, he would have to travel to Moscow personally to ask permission and gather additional resources.

“It would be useful to visit the island,” he said finally, knowing it would elicit another parlor-game smile from Chapeav. “I will begin preparing the arrangements.

Chapter 4

Blitz sat down at the small metal table across from the large stove in the White House kitchen. It was nighttime, and he could see both his reflection and the President’s in the window next to the refrigerator as D’Amici fixed himself a cup of herbal tea. He could, of course, have gotten an aide to do it; Blitz imagined most presidents would have. D’Amici not only liked to do things himself, he liked places like the kitchen — places normally out of bounds for the chief executive. They reminded him, he said, of the real people he was working for.

Corny, but Blitz had known him since he was a governor, and knew he meant it.

The dark window showed there were deep lines in the President’s face; the mirrored view showed none of its usual confidence and self-assurance. Earlier, D’Amici had spoken to the leaders of both India and Pakistan, strongly hinting that he knew they were at the brink of war. Neither had done more than mouth a few platitudes, and intelligence reports since indicated his calls had accomplished nothing.

The Cyclops Two battle group was in Afghanistan, awaiting the President’s final, personal call to proceed.

Or not.

“So, do we go through with it?” asked D’Amici, bringing his cup of tea back to the small table.

“I think we should, yes.”

Blitz could smell the strong mint of the tea as D’Amici held the steaming cup to his face. He put the cup down; it was too hot to drink.

“If it goes sour, we’ll lose people,” said D’Amici.

“The weapon and the F/A-22Vs,” said Blitz.

“I don’t really care about the machinery,” said D’Amici. “I care about the lives.”

Blitz understood, even though the equation was lopsided: A dozen or two dozen Americans against the possibility of a million, many millions, of Pakistanis and Indians.

“I think we should do it,” he told the President. “I think we have the potential — it could change a number of things.”

“The end of war,” said D’Amici. His tone was somewhere between tired and gently mocking. “You’re starting to sound like a brochure for the augmented ABM system.”

“I don’t think it’s the end of war,” said Blitz. “I’m not naïve. And I’m not pushing a weapons system. But I do think it’s a chance. It’ll show people we’re determined. It could have an enormous impact.”

D’Amici got up and began pacing through the room. “I think about Lincoln sometimes, walking upstairs the night his son was dying. He had all those men in uniform on the battlefield. Roosevelt, pushing himself along in a wheel-chair, or being pushed. And Ike, ordering the overflights of Russia, even as they kept taking shots at his planes. They all faced difficult decisions.”

“Thank God they made the right ones,” said Blitz.

“Sometimes they didn’t. That’s the point.” The President picked up his cup, blowing into it to cool it. “You remember during the campaign, the first time you briefed me on India? You predicted this.”

“I predicted difficulties,” said Blitz. “Not this specifically.”

D’Amici sipped his tea, then put the cup down. “Come on,” said the President, starting back upstairs. “I have to get the order out now if it’s to do any good.”

Chapter 5

Captain Atta Habib completed a fresh round of checks with his copilot, then undid his restraints. His neck had stiffened under the weight of his helmet. He took it off as he rose, stowing it in his seat before stretching his legs on the flight deck. While the 767 could — and usually was — flown in shirtsleeves, the accident that had claimed Cyclops One had reinforced the importance of survival gear. Unlike “normal” 767s, the Cyclops aircraft were fitted with special ejection seats, specifically designed adaptations of the ACES II model standard in fighters like the F-15. The seats ejected upward through large hatchlike cutouts in the roof of the plane. The metal pins, along with tags to manually blow the hatches if the automated system didn’t work, were visible above each seat.

Atta wondered if York and her crew had thought about the ejection mechanism too. He remained convinced that they had been lost in an accident: He didn’t buy the hijacked plane theory at all; no one who knew Megan could.

Atta felt his vertebrae crack as he leaned backward, all of the muscles stretching. The flight decks on the Cyclops warplanes were more spacious than their civilian counterparts, thanks to the modifications necessary to carry the weapon. Originally designed for a three-person crew, the two-man cockpit in production 767s was a comfortable executive office; in Cyclops it was a veritable suite. Behind the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs were four crew stations for the laser, two apiece facing consoles along the wall. The configuration allowed for decent walking space to the back galley. The walking space covered the access points and one of the wire tunnels for the laser gear, but these were covered by a carpet, and the crew joked that there was enough room for a regulation bowling alley, an exaggeration that nonetheless hinted at its spaciousness. The galley included a rest room and a small kitchen area complete with a microwave and a thermos coffeemaker supposedly rated to stay inside its fitting at negative 10 g’s. Future versions of the aircraft would probably include a second crew compartment, where a reserve team could catch a snooze on a long mission.

The Boeing people hadn’t planned on making a revolutionary warplane when they drew up the 767; they were looking for an economical way of moving people around the globe. But just as they had done with the venerable 707, their fundamental engineering values had created a versatile airframe capable of going far beyond even the visionary’s dreams. The engineers and contractors working for NADT had a good basis to work on, and credited the original designers for most of their success. Habib had taken this airframe through a stress test — ostensibly for the laser nose — that included a barrel roll and an air-show loop. Granted, it wasn’t a sleek F/A-22V or a teen-series fighter, but the big jet was surprisingly nimble and extremely well behaved, even at the far edge of its advertised design limitations. Habib felt confident it would perform today.

He thought the same of his crew. The four of them together had over fifty years in the service and had spent the last year on the Cyclops project.

The same things could have been said of everyone on Cyclops One.

Atta paused behind the designating station. While the pilot actually made the shot, the designating specialist — Technical Sergeant May Peters, in this case — guided the computer as it worked with the various inputs and prioritized potential hits.

Had she been male, Atta would have given her a good-natured slap on the side or back. But he worried about doing that with a woman — worried it might be misinterpreted or, worse, that he might actually hurt her. Even though he knew Peters rather well — had met her husband and even had dinner with them once or twice — he remained formal.

“Good work, Sergeant,” he told her.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, her tone not quite as rigid as his but still well shaded toward formality.

Atta went over to the other station, which was manned by another tech sergeant, Joe Fernandez. Feeling he had to treat Fernandez the same as Peters, he repeated the same words and received precisely the same response. Satisfied, he looked over his domain one more time, pausing before returning. He had thought of making a little speech as a morale booster. Colonel Howe had given one on the tarmac earlier and he’d been impressed. But Atta wasn’t that good a speaker in front of crowds, even tiny ones; he felt something growing in his throat and decided not to chance it.

He thought of saying a prayer but worried that might be taken the wrong way: He was a Muslim, and maybe Christians would think he was imposing his beliefs on them. So instead he stretched one more time and went back to his seat.

“We’re looking good,” he told them over the interphone after he slipped his helmet back on. “Looking real good.”

Chapter 6

Airborne and on course, Howe worked his eyes across the dimming purple sky, scanning for enemies. The integrated sensors in his aircraft would surely alert him to another plane well before he could see it, but there was no way in the world he would feel secure, no way he could fly, without using his eyes. Part of him believed, truly believed, that they’d see something the radar and infrared would miss; part of him was convinced that even the powerful radars in the AWACS and Cyclops Two were no replacement for his own Mark One eyeballs. Howe was not so superstitious — or foolish — about this that he wouldn’t trust the display on his gee-whiz tactical screen, much less forgo the very real benefits of technology. Both of his kills had come from beyond visual distance; he hadn’t seen either target before launching. But still, his eyes hunted the darkening space around him, a miner’s pan sifting for danger.

The overall plan was laid out almost exactly as the exercise dubbed Bosnia 2 had been over a year ago, allowing for differences in geography. As the Velociraptors worked over the Pakistani border near Indian Kashmir, they would feed data back to Cyclops Two, which would remain in Afghan airspace. Their low-probability-of-intercept radars could not be detected by the gear believed to be aboard the helicopters or the front-line Indian aircraft that the planners thought would be nearby; at the same time, the F/A-22Vs would be able to slide through the rough terrain, overcoming the clutter that shadowed part of the likely approach. The laser aboard Cyclops Two would make the hit, but the two Velociraptors would be close enough to strike the helicopters if it missed.

The radar in the F/A-22Vs had been developed from the original APG-77 perfected by Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, the first active-array antenna radar fitted into a fighter aircraft, but the Velociraptor version was nearly as far from its ancestor as the APG-77 had been from its own predecessors. Unlike old-fashioned radar “dishes,” the radar signals were sent and received through nearly two thousand short antennas carefully arranged around the aircraft’s hull. The embedded array allowed the radar to operate in a variety of modes at once, essentially giving complete and instantaneous coverage while still employing low-probability-of-intercept tactics. In an older radar the sweep of the beam and spikes in the energy levels provided easy detection points for a careful enemy. The F/A-22V — and even the “stock” F/A-22—could use its active radar and still not be detected by most interceptors until it had already fired air-to-air missiles — in other words, until it was far, far too late. The aircraft’s eighteen different modes were capable of working together so that a long-range target might be found, identified, and targeted seemingly instantaneously. The targets were passed along immediately through the intraflight data link (IFDL) to Cyclops, which would then use the information to nail them.

The tough thing, the almost impossible thing, was the length of the mission. The planners were convinced the attack would go off as soon as it was completely dark, which would be roughly an hour from now. But there were no guarantees, and even the long-legged F/A-22Vs would eventually get thirsty. Howe and Timmy had worked out a plan to swap off on refuels several hours into the flight; the complicated fuel matrixes were stored in the Velociraptors’ computers, and the flight computer had a preset panel that would show their fuel profiles throughout the mission.

Maybe it wouldn’t come off at all. The diplomats were supposedly burning their own dinosaurs on the ground, trying to cool things down.

“Bird Two to One,” snapped Timmy. “Hey, boss man, how’s it looking?”

“We’re clean,” Howe told his wingman. “Eight minutes to border.”

“Roger that.”

Timmy was flying at a five thousand feet offset a mile off his right wing at 38,000 feet. Once over the border, they were going to run one circuit through the mountainous area together to get their bearings, then split up to cover more territory, in case the analysts’ guesses were off the mark. The automatic ground modes on their radars would hunt for any hidden bases, allowing the Cyclops Two operators to rule out — or in — possible surprises.

The AWACS checked in, relaying a report from one of the Navy surveillance craft helping to monitor the peninsula that the Indians were launching one of their Russian Beriev A-50 “Mainstay” radar aircraft from a base to the southeast, near the coast. The Mainstay was more than five hundred miles from their patrol area, and its radar range was less than two hundred miles. Unless it got considerably closer, it was unlikely to pinpoint the stealthy F/A-22Vs, and still less likely to be able to vector anything toward them.

Even so, Howe felt himself leaning forward on the seat. He edged his thumb along the top of the sidestick, watching the computer count down the time to the border in the course module above his left multiuse display. Howe checked the aircraft data, took a slow breath, and flexed fingers on the throttle. It was getting fairly dark now, and so he push-buttoned the HUD into synthetic view, the hologram rendering the outside world at a one-on-one scale/first person. The fishbowl before him duplicated what he would have seen if it were a perfectly clear day. He stared at it a second, mentally orienting his eyes and brain to accept the synthetic data, then flicked into one-on-ten, which felt a little like watching an O-scale train layout instantly downsize to HO. He enabled verbal commands, then had the Velociraptor’s computer pencil in some geography and flight plan data. He could see the border etched out on the virtual ground ahead.

Megan wasn’t gone from his memory, but she’d been pushed back, his anger and other feelings corralled.

Corralled, not eliminated.

“Bird Two, we have thirty seconds. You ready, partner?”

“Piece of cake,” said Timmy.

Howe counted down the last few seconds, then goosed the engine. The two F/A-22Vs rocketed over the Indian coast, knifing through the darkness.

Two minutes later the radar detector in Howe’s plane began to bleat. The system identified and located the radar, an early-warning ground station southeast of Charsadda, rendered as a purple dish icon in the far reaches of the hologram’s dusty 3-D hills. The radar was attached to a Crotale 2000 surface-to-air missile system, a relatively short-range mobile SAM intended primarily for point defense of airfields and other strategic targets. The radar could not see the Velociraptors, nor would the missiles it guided present much of a challenge to the aircraft’s ECM suite if it came to that. Nonetheless, the avionics system made note of them, opening a file and storing the data for the pilot’s reference. If Howe wished, he could direct the computer to present him with a list of options for eliminating the radar and its missiles; one button and one verbal command later, a small-diameter GPS-guided bomb would spit from the Velociraptor’s belly and the radar would be history.

If Howe wished.

“Bird One, this is Big Eyes,” said the AWACS controller. “Be advised, Indra is airborne.”

Indra was the code name they’d settled on for India’s northern-based Phalcon AEW aircraft, arguably the only serious threat to the mission. The 767’s multisensor radars could provide early-warning and tracking data, serving in a somewhat similar capacity as an AWACS. While not the equal of American systems, it was still impressive — and in theory capable of finding the F/A-22Vs, or at least their radar transmissions. Indra flew regularly, and its launch was not unexpected — in fact, just the opposite. Howe took it as confirmation that the mission was a go. The AWACS would keep tabs on the aircraft, which presently was several hundred miles to the south of Howe’s flight path.

“Bird One,” acknowledged Howe.

Chapter 7

McIntyre unfolded himself from the helicopter seat and walked unsteadily across the cabin. The damn thing shook like a washing machine, and the metal was so thin he worried he’d put his hand through the side as he steadied himself before stepping out onto the tarmac with his bag. If it wasn’t the oldest helicopter in the Indian inventory, it had to be in the running. As he stepped out, grit flit into his eye; he walked forward blindly, half expecting to be decapitated by the rotors even though he was bent forward.

The helicopter fanned the air behind him, rushing away in the dusk. The mountains cast an odd green-purple glow over everything as night fell; the dim light made him feel even more tired, and McIntyre was glad this was his last stop for the night. He’d been to several bases over the course of the day, each one duller than the rest. Hopefully the CIA guys were gathering better information.

A figure in brown stood to the right, blurring into the dusk. McIntyre worked his thumb against the corner of his eye, trying to clear it.

“Damn dirt has glue in it,” he said, trying to make a joke.

The blur didn’t speak. McIntyre finally pushed his eyelids apart, trying to bring the blur into focus. All he could see was the man’s frown.

“Name’s McIntyre,” he said, letting go of his eye and holding out his right hand to shake. The man, a captain, didn’t take it.

“I’m to show you around,” said the officer.

“Let’s start with the john, then,” said McIntyre. He grabbed his bag and waited for the blur to move. By now his eye was tearing uncontrollably; McIntyre realized that he ought to just let the tears clear out the grit, but it was difficult to avoid the urge to rub. Finally the Indian captain began to move toward a gray cloud on the right. McIntyre followed, gradually gaining his sight as he went.

He’d been kept from the bases where the Su-27s and Su-30s were, and hadn’t seen a MiG. When he’d come as an assistant to a congressional party a year before, the Indians had eagerly shown off the aircraft. Admittedly, they’d emphasized their defensive abilities, and talked quite a bit about how much easier life would be if they could only purchase F-15s, but still, the difference now was obvious. He’d asked to see one of their Israeli-built Phalcon radar planes but had been told that the aircraft were out of service for maintenance, a fact that he knew was a lie.

This place — a landing strip with no helicopters and no access roads. They were obviously parking him here for the duration.

McIntyre followed his laconic captain toward the low cloud, which soon came into focus as a building. He was not unsympathetic to the Indians; they had their own priorities and concerns, he knew, and in some ways their fierce attitude toward their northern neighbors were justified by history, both recent and ancient. But sympathy wasn’t why he was here.

He was a little late calling Blitz. He hoped his minder would leave him alone in the john so he could make the call.

Captain Jalil had made his decision as soon as the American stumbled from the helicopter. The colonel had left the option up to him, saying any contingency could be covered.

The man’s ineptness, however, seemed too much an opportunity to let pass. The Americans would be sympathetic when they learned that one of their own men was killed during an inspection of the border area; it would prove to them finally where the danger really lay.

The buzz of the helicopters approaching removed any doubts that Jalil might have had. The captain stopped in front of the empty barracks room and pushed the door open. “You will leave your bag here,” he told McIntyre.

“Looks like a monastery,” said the American. No longer rubbing his eye, he sauntered inside, walking the way all Americans walked: as if he were a great prince visiting part of a far-flung empire. “No locks, huh?”

“There are no need for locks here,” said Jalil. “Come.”

“You know what, I think I’m going to take a nap before dinner, if that’s okay,” said McIntyre. “And I still have to hit the john.”

“No,” said Jalil.

“No?”

Jalil smiled at the American’s surprise. They were not used to being contradicted.

“I believe you’d like to see the helicopters that are arriving,” he told him.

“Maybe later.”

Jalil reached to his holster and pulled out his gun. “Now would be a much better time, Mr. McIntyre.”

Chapter 8

Timmy double-checked his position as they came over the border, accelerating to stay on the dotted line the computer provided. The flight indicators were all in the green; every system aboard the aircraft was working the way the manuals said it should. Timmy’s aircraft could have been used to benchmark the fleet.

Which meant everything was boring as shit. Timmy had no doubt they’d nail those suckers if they came up, but he did seriously doubt they’d make their play. The intel people were always — always — overaggressive. They never saw one threat where they could imagine three or four.

More than likely, they’d be orbiting up here for twelve hours straight, back and forth, twiddling their thumbs. He was already feeling a little tired.

Wait until tomorrow, he thought. He kicked himself for not bringing the MP3 jukebox. He’d left it on the bench when Howe saw it and frowned. Mandatory flight equipment from now on.

The colonel had always been the serious type. He was a good pilot, a good leader — a warfighter with scalps on his belt. But serious, very serious.

Losing Cyclops One and Bird Two had hit him pretty hard. He’d been hung up on York; that was obvious.

Pretty quiet about it. Timmy didn’t figure she was a traitor — they’d probably find her and the others smacked against a mountain any day now — but it still was a lot of shit to take.

Keep him awake, though. The pilot clicked the computer to look at his fuel matrix, then put his eyes back on the synthetic view hologram, set at max magnification.

Howe was just reaching the end of the patrol area when the radar picked up two contacts coming hot out of the north, about 122 miles away. Relatively small and moving fast, the two aircraft were either F-16s or Super-7s. Built with Chinese help, the S-7s were multipurpose fighters roughly comparable to early-model F-16s.

The computer placed the two contacts in the far end of the outer circle in the main tactical display, too far away to show on the HUD hologram. There were three circles, which represented a hierarchy of threats: Anything in the outer ring could be tracked by the F/A-22V, but was not yet close enough to be targeted; the middle ring represented aircraft that could be targeted without detection; the inner ring or bull’s-eye represented aircraft whose sensors were definitely capable of seeing the F/A-22V, though of course combat conditions (and active and passive jammers) might prevent the enemy from actually acquiring or locking on the plane.

“Bogeys,” Howe told his wingman.

“Yeah,” said Timmy. The contacts had been shared through the IFDL and appeared simultaneously on the displays of both aircraft. Nonetheless, standard procedure called for the pilots to alert each other to the new contacts, maintaining situation awareness.

“Turning,” said Howe.

“Two,” acknowledged Timmy.

The Pakistani planes were still flying in a straight line south toward the border. It was possible they were intending to cross over and take out the Indian AEW plane, though much more likely they were meant either as an answer to its launch or were even oblivious to it and flying a training mission.

The Velociraptor’s sensors sniffed out a burst of energy that matched the signature of a Phazotron radar from the airplanes. That allowed the system to positively ID the planes as S-7s and gave the artificial intelligence-based tactics section something to work with as it presented its pilot with a variety of options for attack.

They were roughly fifteen minutes away from an intercept, unless they went to afterburners, and even then they probably wouldn’t be able to find the F/A-22Vs unless they had a way to home in on the radars.

“They don’t see us,” said Timmy.

“No, they don’t.”

“What do we do if they find the helicopters?”

“Let them shoot them down,” said Howe. His orders had been explicit on that point. It was far better for the Pakistanis to do the heavy lifting on their own, without U.S. help.

“I’m getting a contact south,” said Timmy, “in grid alpha-alpha-two. Fighters. MiG-29s. Four of them.”

“I see it,” said Howe.

“Four more aircraft. This may be it.”

“No, it’s a diversion,” said Howe. “It’s out of the target area. Stay on track.”

“Looks real to me: Sukhoi-30s, four of them — eight! Attack package, and these motherfuckers are moving.”

Chapter 9

There was a bright side to all of this, McIntyre thought to himself as the helicopter hurled itself through the looming shadows of the mountains: He had done his job very, very well. He now knew exactly what the Indians were up to.

Well, not exactly. He assumed they were going after a radar site, though there were any number of other possibilities. He guessed he’d find out fairly soon, however.

Unless they decided to dump him out the door of the helicopter before they got to where they were going. That might not even be such a terrible option, since they weren’t all that high — maybe only six or seven feet over the ground. If they threw him out now, it would be more like falling from a train than an airplane.

Assuming the train was moving at two hundred miles an hour.

The captain had taken his phones, but what galled him was having to hand over his wallet. What the hell — did the bastard plan on stopping at an ATM along the way?

The Russian-made Mil Mi-26 tilted on its axis. McIntyre slid on the bench, grabbing for the metal at the bottom of his seat to steady himself. The helicopter was relatively large. The two dozen troops inside it filled only about half of the bench seats. The other helicopter looked to have roughly the same number of men.

McIntyre glanced sideways toward the captain who had forced him aboard. He’d strangle the bastard with his bare hands, then kick his face black and blue.

Next lifetime, maybe.

Chapter 10

Howe put the HUD hologram to max mag to watch the Pakistani S-7s as they altered their course and began tracking toward the Indian MiGs. There was no way they could have seen the aircraft with their own radars; if they knew they were there, the planes must have been picked up by one of the ground-based early-warning units farther west.

That told him this had to be a diversion.

He was tempted, sorely tempted, to radio the Pakistani fighters and tell them what was going on.

Two more fighters took off from a base near Lahore, these ID’d by the AWACS as F-16s. Their flight path ran in a direct line toward Howe’s.

Ground defense radars were spiking up all across Pakistan. The Indian MiGs, meanwhile, kept coming north, though they were still a good distance from the border.

Howe reminded himself the helicopters were the real prize. This was a diversion: It was going to happen soon.

“Indian MiGs are ten minutes from the border,” said Timmy.

“They’re not the story.”

“Roger that.”

“Eyes, those Pakistani F-16s — do they have a target?” Howe asked the AWACS.

“Negative as far as we can tell here.”

“They don’t know about the MiGs?”

“Not sure, Colonel,” answered the controller. “Uh, we’re — Hold on: fresh contacts.”

The controller gave Howe fresh data: A pair of Mirage IIIs were taking off from a base farther north and coming south.

“Hell of a picnic,” said Timmy. “Are they putting everything they have in the air, or what?”

“Colonel, be advised, the Pakistani flights may be following routine patrol patterns,” said the AWACS supervisor, stepping in. “They tweak each other regularly.”

Howe acknowledged.

“What do we do if those MiGs don’t turn back?” asked Timmy.

“You’re going to have to follow them while I concentrate on the helicopter,” said Howe. While the Indian planes were out of range to attack Cyclops Two, they could in theory get much closer by juicing their afterburners. There were four F-15s guarding the laser plane, but Howe wasn’t about to lose it.

“PAF aircraft don’t seem to be going after the Indians,” said Timmy. “What’s up with that?”

Howe guessed that the various aircraft were playing chicken. If the Indians went over the border and used their weapons, the Pakistani Air Force planes would as well.

“Hold on: MiGs, all Indian planes, are turning,” said Timmy. “They were just looking for attention.”

The S-7s remained on course for a minute longer, turning away just shy of the Indian border. So did the F-16s.

This all fit, Howe realized. The Indians had launched a flight that was sure to be picked up. That would not only decoy the Pakistanis but get them used to the idea that the crazy Indians always did this if they happened to find the real attack package a little while later. At the same time they probably knew what the Pakistanis had as reserves: He guessed there would be a window of opportunity as these planes returned to base; the PAF simply wasn’t big enough to keep launching aircraft all night.

If he was right, the helicopters ought to be closing in.

So where were they?

There, right there: 122 miles south, just coming north near the border area east of Gurais.

“Bird One to Cyclops. I have your target approaching the southeast corner of box alpha-alpha-three. Advise me whether you can arrange a shot.”

“Cyclops Two acknowledges contacts,” answered the pilot. “They’re about two minutes from our target area at their present course and speed.” There was a pause. “We’re moving in to set up a better shot.”

Howe hesitated before acknowledging. The closer Cyclops got to the border area, the more vulnerable it became.

The F-15s, not wanting to attract attention, were flying to the northwest but could close the gap in a heartbeat. So could he, for that matter.

One SAM missile — one freak shot from a Pakistani aircraft that thought the lumbering American 767 was an attacker — and he’d have lost his third jet.

Cyclops Two could fend for itself. Nothing could touch it. Nothing.

“Go for it,” he said finally.

Timmy had just turned back east to close the gap between him and Howe when the audible warning on his radar alerted him to fresh contacts: four MiG-27s, much lower to the ground and flying out of the south. They were slewing into a combat trail; this must be the attack package the helicopter attack was going to prepare the way for.

“Bird One, we have four — whoa, wait up, six, eight aircraft. Looks like they’re saddling up for an attack, probably going to follow that helo strike in,” Timmy told Howe.

“One.”

“I can take them down, boss,” Timmy added.

“Negative,” replied Howe. “Keep track of them. If they get close to the border and it looks like they’ll make it through, then we’ll let Cyclops Two nail ’em.”

“Two. Just saying I’m ready if things don’t go according to plan.” Timmy adjusted his course slightly, edging a little southward so that when they swung back to the west, he’d still have the MiGs close enough to take in a quick dash.

It’d be over in about thirty seconds. The basic MiG-27 design dated to the 1960’s; it was essentially a ground-attack version of the MiG-23. The Indians had upgraded the design with avionics that allowed for night and all-weather attacks; they’d also improved the power plant. But it was still a relatively slow aircraft with limited radar — easy pickings for the Velociraptor.

The radar continued to track the eight aircraft, watching them as they slipped into a mountain pass. The HUD hologram had them as small dots that shone through the hulking mountains, as if the plane had X-ray eyes and could see through the rocks. The helicopters, meanwhile, were hugging the valley, approaching the border, and just now entering range for the laser weapon nearly three hundred miles away.

“Stand by for Cyclops firing,” warned Howe.

As Timmy pressed the mike button to acknowledge, a new contact blipped onto the far edge of his tactical screen, a green-hued cluster of mismatched pixels. The computer tagged it as a large, unknown aircraft flying at 45,000 feet, identity unknown. Too slow for a bomber, the plane’s profile was similar to that of the AEW aircraft India had launched earlier — except that it seemed to be flying in from the coast.

“Somebody’s coming to watch the show,” he told Howe. “That one of ours?”

“Unknown,” said Howe. “Probably an airliner.”

They’d briefed the scheduled airliners and routes, and Timmy knew without looking that it wasn’t on the sheet.

“Eyes on the prize,” added Howe before he could point that out. “Cyclops is thirty seconds to target point.”

Howe checked his position, waiting now for the crew on the laser plane to confirm they were ready to fire. It was exactly like the war game exercise they’d run a year ago — except that time was with Megan.

The bitch. He’d strangle her.

Unless she was already dead. Then he’d simply mourn her forever.

“Cyclops Two to Mission Leader,” said the laser plane’s pilot, contacting Howe. “Permission to engage.”

“Engage,” said Howe.

Chapter 11

Captain Jalil checked his watch. They were within five seconds of their schedule — nearly perfect. The operation was moving along as easily as any of the practice runs.

Ideally, he’d find a Pakistani weapon to kill the American with, then take the body back. The story would be easily concocted: They were on a routine patrol, showing the American the dangers, when firing began.

The man would end up being a hero to his people. The irony brought a smile to Jalil’s lips.

Would he feel good when he shot the first Muslim?

Yes. It would feel very, very good.

McIntyre coughed, then worked his tongue toward the back of his mouth. It felt as if something were lodged there, or as if the junction of his throat and mouth had been lined with cardboard — disintegrating cardboard. He coughed again, shook his head.

“Could I have some water?” he asked, looking toward the Indian captain.

He coughed again. The captain hadn’t heard him over the whine of the engines.

“Water?” asked McIntyre, getting up. He had to put his tied hands up against the racks at the top of the cabin area to keep his balance in the helicopter, which danced left and right as it moved through the rugged terrain.

“Water?” he said to Jalil. He tried to clear his throat, holding his Adam’s apple with his fingers.

Jalil looked up at him as if he didn’t understand.

“Water,” said McIntyre. As he let go of the rack to gesture with his hands, he felt his anger building up suddenly. He fought an urge to start pummeling the bastard.

Then he thought to himself: Why not? He’s going to kill me anyway.

“Water,” he said.

Something cracked at the top of the helicopter. McIntyre was thrown sideways as something long and hard smacked the side of his right calf. There was an explosion and a shout behind him, and in the next instant he felt himself tumbling into purgatory.

For one bewildering second, Captain Jalil thought he was six years old again, a child in his village, back on the day when his mother was killed.

Except that this time he was in the house, and the flames were grabbing for his clothes. He tried to beat them back with his hands, fight them off, but they were too fierce.

Escape!he screamed at himself.Escape!

Then he realized he was not six years old. Anger sprang from the center of his chest. He would avenge himself against the Muslim bastards. He would have the full revenge he was entitled to.

“Yes,” whispered a voice in his ear. He recognized it as his mother’s.

Jalil turned to see her but found only blackness.

Chapter 12

“They’ve fired,” the weapons operator reported. “Two targets down.”

“Are they still tracking?” Megan asked.

“The radars are all active.”

She pushed her eyes across the instrument panel, forcing her thoughts away from Tom. He’d be out there, thinking about her.

That should have been her, firing the weapon.

She saw him now: the way he looked at her on the access ramp outside the aircraft, puzzled. Why was that what she thought about — not their date rock climbing, or the time she’d had him take her to an opera.

Some opera. It was a traveling company in a gymnasium. He’d hated it — just about fallen asleep — but pretended to be interested when she started talking about it later, nodding in all the right places.

She was right, and she had done the right thing. This proved it, didn’t it?

Others wouldn’t see it that way. Tom wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

“ETA to the target area is now five minutes,” said the weapons operator.

“Yes,” she said, still struggling to focus.

Chapter 13

“Only a partial hit on target two,” reported Cyclops as Howe swung his aircraft toward the shoot-down. Both helicopters had disappeared from the screen seconds after the indicators flashed on Howe’s screen, indicating the weapon had discharged. “They’re definitely down, though.”

“I’m going to take a look,” Howe told them, slapping the throttle into afterburner. The flood of fuel into the rear chamber — tweaked and perfected after literally thousands of man-hours of fuss — ignited with a smooth, incredibly powerful ripple that nearly doubled the aircraft’s speed. The nozzle at the front of the engine was wide open, changing the world’s most efficient-at-speed jet engine into the world’s fastest jet-fueled power plant. The F/A-22V covered over thirty miles a minute, a proud cheetah running down her prey on the Africa savanna.

Howe’s heart beat lackadaisically, keeping time like the bass drum in a band, its cadence lazy enough for the hottest summer day. But his stomach felt the brief burst of acceleration — his stomach and the muscles in his arms, the tendons at his knees, his ribs, his joints, the small fibers of hair below his ear. They felt the acceleration and they thrilled to it. This was flying, moving through the air as fast as a Greek god, the leading edge of sheer thought. The aircraft strapped on his back was one of the best—the best—pieces of machinery ever perfected by man, attached through an electronic umbilical cord to a weapon as powerful as Zeus’s lightning bolts.

And it had just been used to avert World War III.

Thomas Howe, and the nearly thousand men and women connected to the mission, had just saved several million lives.

The idea was as intoxicating as the speed.

“Doesn’t that sound like a worthy thing to do? It’s something I’d die for. Truly.”

Howe pushed Megan’s voice back into the rush of the jet as he eased back on the gas, swooping to give the radar’s ground mode a good look at the wreckage. They needed to make sure the helicopters truly were down.

Timmy checked in, updating him on the attack package that was following the helicopters toward the border. The lead plane was now about twenty minutes from Pakistani airspace; they’d planned the attack very closely, giving the ground people ten minutes to take their targets.

Would they go ahead with the attack if the radars were still working?

No one knew. If they did, Cyclops Two and the Velociraptors would take them out.

“I have the lead plane,” said Timmy.

“Stick to the game plan,” Howe told him. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

He tucked his wing and plunged toward earth, flicking off the holographic HUD projection. The night was dark but clear, and he could see a pinpoint of fire at about ten o’clock in his windscreen, one of the targets burning after it had crashed.

“Splash one, definite,” reported Howe.

He was moving too fast and still too high to see much, even if it had been daytime. He went back to the synthetic view as he slid around the valley. The radar hunted the ground as if it were in its free-form attack mode, developed to help the next-generation attack planes turn up Scud missiles in tinhorn dictators’ palaces. The ground radar that the Indians had been targeting was only a few miles ahead; his RWR noted that it was active and hunting through the sky, though the Velociraptor had not yet been detected.

Push a button, and he could take it out himself.

Howe slapped the side stick, banking away. He hadn’t found the wreckage of the second helicopter, but he also hadn’t found it flying, either.

“Those MiGs are coming hard,” warned Timmy. “Eight of ’em.”

“We have them all,” said the Cyclops pilot.

“Hold on,” said Howe. “Wait until they’re at the border.”

“Hey, Colonel, you see that contact Unk-2?” said Timmy, referring to the computer tag on the large unknown aircraft flying northward near the Indian coast. “What’s his game, you figure?”

“Has to be a spy plane,” suggested Howe, just as he had earlier.

“Not Indian, though. Came off the ocean.”

“Could be the Russians.” They were a bit too far away to get good information about the aircraft, but its size and speed made it fairly obvious that it wasn’t part of the attack package.

Advising them, maybe, though one of Howe’s own ELINT aircraft ought to be picking up signals in that case. Cobra Two reported that the Indian forces were still flying silent com. The Pakistanis, meanwhile, did not seem to know anything was amiss.

“Lead MiG will be in range of the Pak radar in zero three,” said Timmy. “I don’t know…. He’s pretty low; hemight just get through.”

“We wait until he’s committed to crossing the border,” said Howe. He’d begun to climb now, swinging around the coverage area of the radar site. All of the Pakistani flights had returned to their bases; the only thing that the PAF had in the air were two Mirage IIIs back near Lahore. Besides the attack package closing in on the Kashmir border, the Indians had their 767 radar plane and its escorts flying near the border to the west, giving them coverage just about to Afghanistan.

Howe suspected that the Indians had other groups of planes airborne to the south, out of his task force’s detection range; they’d be preparing a follow-on strike once the first group of planes took out the sites. At the moment, though, they were too far off to see or worry about.

“One minute to border,” said Timmy. The two Velociraptors had separated about fifteen miles, Howe to the northeast and Timmy to the southwest of the lead MiG. They could divvy it up between them if they had to.

“Cyclops is tracking. We’re ready anytime, Colonel.”

“Bird One.”

“MiGs are slowing — turning! Shit,” said Timmy.

“Don’t sound too disappointed, my friend,” said Howe. “This just means we did our job.”

“Yeah, well, figures they’d wimp out,” said the wingman.

Howe laughed. His joints cracked; he hadn’t realized how tense he’d become.

“Bird One, be advised the strike force you’ve been tracking has used the word abort,” radioed Cobra Two.

“Bird One acknowledges. Well done, team. Kick-ass job, everybody,” said Howe. “How we looking out there, Timmy?”

“All I see is fannies with tails between their legs, scurrying home,” replied the wingman. “Our UFO’s still coming north, though. Sucker’s going to be at the border in, like, zero-five.”

“Yeah, I see,” said Howe.

“Maybe we ought to check him out,” suggested Timmy.

“Negative,” said Howe. “Cyclops, you’re cleared to head back to the barn.”

“That would be cave,” said Atta, the Cyclops pilot.

“Just don’t run into Ulysses,” said Howe.

Cyclops banked north, heading for its temporary Afghanistan base. The other aircraft checked in; Howe listened to the AWACS escorts working out a tank with Budweiser, the KC-135 assigned to make sure they didn’t go dry.

“Hey, that unknown contact is hitting the gas,” said Timmy. “They should be on Pakistani radar by now.”

“Bird Leader, be advised Mirage flight is being vectored south,” said Eyes.

“Confirming that,” said the AWACS controller. “Not sure what they’re doing. Could be heading for that unidentified contact, R2.”

The Pakistani airplanes would be picked up by the Indian radar plane quickly.

“Shit!” yelled Timmy. “MiGs are turning back.”

For a second, panic surged through Howe: the irrational fear he’d felt in the wake of the accident.

Then it was gone. He squeezed his hand on the stick, felt himself relaxing ever so slightly, giving himself over to the plane.

“MiG flight is receiving new orders,” said Cobra Two. “They’re being told to proceed…. They’re proceeding!”

“Understood,” said Howe. “Cyclops, give me status.”

Chapter 14

NADT’s headquarters was not marked from the highway, although Fisher surmised he was in the right place by the strategic rock formations that sheltered video cameras along the driveway. A half-mile in from the road, a row of closely spaced trees partially hid a picket fence extending around the property; the pickets themselves half camouflaged a grid of wires, probably electrically charged.

A guard post sat where the fence and one-lane access road met. Two security officers in nondescript uniforms stepped out to flag Fisher’s car down.

His Bureau credentials did not work their usual magic, but the guards did grudgingly admit him after calling for instructions. Fisher drove through the gate, over a bridge, and past a moat with geese that looked as if it had been stolen from a Disney movie; he almost expected to find Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs waiting for him at the front door.

Close. A woman in a black business suit, her skirt cut so high it had less material than a napkin, flagged him down near a long concrete apron punctuated by cement barriers.

“Mr. Fisher?” She leaned into his car, filling it with so much perfume, Fisher would have gone for a gas mask if he’d carried one. The top of her shirt was strategically arranged to highlight the natural skin tones of her chest; NADT obviously didn’t fool around.

“I was this morning,” said Fisher from his car.

“Very good, sir. Will you follow me?” Her tone was somewhere between officious and luscious. “Someone will come for the car.”

“Why not?” Fisher got out and followed Snow White to the one-story black glass building. The dwarfs were nowhere to be seen.

A single security desk stood in the exact center of the vast space; there was no other furniture, not even a potted plant on the first floor. Fisher’s guide smiled at the guard — he looked to be at least eighty and very possibly was the evil queen in butch disguise — then turned abruptly toward a ramp that opened in the floor nearby.

“You won’t want to smoke in here,” warned the woman as they strode down the ramp toward a single elevator. “Sets off alarms. Nasty things come down from the sprinklers.”

“Water?”

“Some sort of gas,” she said.

Fisher was tempted to test the system but held off, worried that the gas might be an even stronger version of her perfume. There were no buttons in the elevator, and no floor indicators. The car moved smoothly downward for about thirty seconds, then stopped.

Still no dwarfs. Snow White led him down a long hallway to a large reception area, where another young woman in an equally short skirt sat at a glass-topped table, her nipples poking rivet holes through her blouse. Fisher began to wonder if he had somehow made a wrong turn and ended at a brothel.

“General Bonham is not here, Mr. Fisher,” said the woman at the desk.

“I can wait.”

“You really should have called ahead.” She traded a smile with Snow White. Fisher realized that his knowledge of Disney films was severely lacking; he couldn’t figure out who she was supposed to be.

Figaro, maybe? But that would make him Pinocchio.

Ouch.

“I’m afraid you’ll be waiting a long time,” said the woman. “I believe he’s in Montana.”

“Is he?” Fisher had already checked: Bonham was in fact en route to D.C. Not that he actually wanted to talk to him. “Maybe you could check for me.”

“I’m never wrong,” said the woman.

Fisher spotted a pot of coffee on a credenza nearby. “Can I have a cup?”

“I’m sorry — the coffee is cold,” said the woman.

“I drink it cold.”

She smiled indulgently.

“Actually, I’m looking for Justin Pierce,” said Fisher. “I understand he’s the titular head of the agency.”

The word came out smoothly, despite the innuendo.

“Mr. Pierce is never in,” said the woman.

Fisher scratched the side of his head, emphasizing his confusion.

“Lice?” asked the woman.

“I think they’re gone, actually,” said Fisher. “Shampoo worked wonders. I want to talk to Megan York’s boss. I believe that would be the head of the technical support team. His name was Lee, I think.”

“Her name is Sylvia Lee, and she is in Hawaii for a conference.”

“ABM tests?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Personnel records?”

The woman curled her lips. Now he remembered who she was supposed to be: Cruella, the dog-hater in 101 Dalmations.

“Our personnel records are confidential. Unless you have a court order, of course. That’s the law.”

“Yeah, the law’s a funny thing,” said Fisher. “Who deals with the contractors, Miss—”

“That would be Ms.”

“You deal with them?”

“Only the general.”

“Your accounting office is which way?” said Fisher.

“Accounting is handled by an independent firm,” said the woman.

“Organizational chart?”

“It’s being redone. Anything else?”

“If you let me take a shot at that coffee,” said Fisher,

“I’ll bark for you.”

The halls of the Rayburn Building were proportioned in such a way as to impress mere mortals as they walked down them, and not even Fisher was immune to their spell. He felt imbibed in the spirit of democracy as he found Congressman Matt Taft’s office; though a poor government worker himself, Fisher understood the inherent importance of his role as public servant.

That and the fact that he had a slight caffeine buzz on, due to the consumption of not one but two Dunkin’ Donuts Big Gulps on the way over from NADT. Cruella had denied him her own blend, even after he’d demonstrated a howl pro bono.

Besides drinking the coffee, Fisher had used the trip to bone up on who exactly Congressman Taft was, besides being Megan York’s cousin. His briefing came courtesy of a newspaper reporter at The Washington Times who owed him a few favors and thirty bucks from a Super Bowl bet gone bad. Fisher had frankly expressed his ignorance, which for some reason never failed to impress newspaper reporters, and had received a detailed description of the congressman’s career, only partially condensed from the newspaper’s computer morgue.

This had taken all of two minutes. Several janitors at the Capitol Building had higher profiles than Megan York’s cousin. The twenty-ninth ranking minority member on the House Armed Services Committee, his name had appeared in exactly two stories over the past twelve months, and one was about rolling eggs on the White House lawn.

The congressman was not in his office, which wasn’t particularly surprising. His legislative assistant, a short, gnomelike man with a beard that reached to his chest, agreed to see him after growling at the receptionist, who reacted by cracking her gum somewhat louder than before. Fisher took one look at the gnome’s brown-stained hands and reached into his pocket.

“Why don’t we go outside?” he said, holding up his cigarettes.

The legislative assistant nearly bolted through the door. They were barely on the steps before he reached back and took a cigarette from the agent’s pack, jabbing it into his lighter.

“Been trying to quit,” said the gnome.

“Gee, and you struck me as a reasonable guy,” said Fisher. He followed the gnome down the steps, watching as the man’s entire body underwent a transformation. Five minutes ago he had been an exploited career bureaucrat; now he was a maker of men.

“No way I’m quitting,” said the assistant.

Whatever else happened that day, Andy Fisher had saved another soul.

“This about Megan?”

“In a way,” said Fisher.

“They found her body?”

“Nah,” said Fisher. “You think she’s dead, huh?”

“After all this time? You don’t really think she’s still alive, do you?”

Fisher shrugged.

“Look, Matt’s in an awkward position,” said the gnome. “Obviously he wants her, uh, recovered. But he can’t put pressure on a top-secret project. Technically he probably isn’t supposed to know about it, since he’s not part of the intelligence committee.”

“Do they know about it?” asked Fisher.

“I don’t know.”

“What about his calls to NADT?” said Fisher.

“Which calls to NADT?”

“He didn’t try to get General Bonham?”

“He knows Bonham, of course; maybe he called and I didn’t know.”

“How does he know Bonham?” asked Fisher.

The gnome’s eyes opened a bit wider, then slunk back in their sockets as if retreating into a cave. “They’ve known each other for a while. But from where, I don’t know.”

“Does the congressman vote on appropriations for NADT?”

The gnome did a very interesting eye-rolling thing where his eyes seemed to disappear in the back of his head, then reappear at the bottom of his feet. The effect made it seem as if his eyeballs had traveled all around his body, a not unimpressive skill and certainly one that would be appreciated in Washington, where eyes had to be rolled several times a day, at least.

“His business interests are in blind trusts, if that’s what you’re getting at,” said the gnome. “The Tafts and Yorks and Rythes — the family owns a lot of high-tech stuff. Yeah, they’re connected. But they’re big in consumer goods and oil, energy: You’d expect it.”

“That’s what I figured,” said Fisher. “What board was he on, Ferris or something?”

“Ferrone? Nah, he resigned that.”

“You have a list of his family holdings?”

“Have to talk to the trustee.”

Fisher nodded. “He doesn’t like Megan, does he?”

The gnome shrugged, then drew his cigarette down to the nub. “Sure he does. She was close to his father, General Taft.”

Fisher shoveled out another cigarette. “Who was Taft? Like, the same guy who was president?”

The eye roll again. Fisher thought it was a real winner. “Fill me in,” he prompted, giving the aide another cigarette.

General Taft — part of the same family as William Howard Taft, president and jurist, but well removed — had been a bomber pilot in World War II and had actually written a book about his experiences — self-published, of course. He and his brother-in-law, Megan’s father, made a fortune adapting early computers so they could be used in targeting devices. That alone would have made them rich, if they hadn’t been rich already.

“So they struggled through the Depression all right?” said Fisher.

“Struggled? Ever hear of the Rubber Trust?”

“Prophylactics?”

The eyes again. “Rubber rubber. Before synthetics, it was as big as oil. Bigger. The family was hooked in. Great-great-grandfather of the congressman made a killing supplying Germany and France in World War I. When Wilson declared war, they stopped selling to everybody except the U.S.”

“How can Megan York be the daughter of somebody who fought in World War II?”

The gnome’s smile wasn’t nearly as interesting as his eye roll, and it had the unfortunate effect of ejecting an even greater than normal whiff of his bad breath.

“She’s a third-tier baby — you know, third wife. And it was the brother who fought in World War II. Megan’s father was younger, and that was a different marriage, which is why the names are different.”

“This is a close family?”

“Depends on your definition of close.”

“What’s the book called?”

“Flying through Fire.I’ll lend you a copy: We got tons of ’em. Came out ten years ago and we can’t give ’em away, even on the campaign trail. Too big to stuff in people’s mailboxes.”

Fisher nearly passed on the book, expecting it to be a rambling self-congratulatory rumination on a life spent making a killing by selling weapons of destruction. Part of it may in fact have been that, but the opening chapter was anything but. In fact, it was a rather moving account of what it was like to fly the low-level incendiary bombing raids over Japan, knowing that the acrid smoke choking you was coming from things that ought never be burnt.

Taft spent considerable time talking about the effect on the victims, eloquently talking about how badly their lives must have been ruined. At the end of the chapter he wrote that he understood the raids had been ordered as part of an overall war effort. He did not regret his role in them, but at the same time he admitted they had killed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. This was the face of battle, he said, a condition of modern warfare where the lines between civilian and combatant were no longer clearly drawn. It was the reason, he said, that America must be strong to deter future wars and that, eventually, war must be made obsolete.

Four chapters from the end of the book, he explained how this would be done with a variety of weapons, including an ABM system.

Fisher, who’d started reading the book while standing on line for a burger and was now sitting alone at a table eating, flipped to the notes at the back. There was a section thanking everyone who had helped, including a long list of scientists and military consultants.

Bonham was on the list — as a colonel.

So was Megan, who got her own sentence: “One of the few who truly understands and is dedicated to the future.”

Unable to figure out exactly what that might mean, the agent tucked the book under his arm and went to work on the burger.

Chapter 15

In the space of ninety seconds, everything had gone from perfect to seriously fucked up. Not only had the Indian MiGs resumed their course northward, but another group of planes — a mixture of MiG-29s and Su-27s, obviously an attack package with escorts — had just come into the large outer circle of Timmy’s tactical display. And the Pakistanis weren’t sitting on their hands either: The AWACS was reporting F-16s taking off from the base near Lahore, and four S-7s mustering over Islamabad, the capital.

Radars were coming up all across the subcontinent. The Velociraptor’s audible warning system sounded like a frenetic synthesizer, bleating out tones: A missile battery had just come to life about two miles south of Timmy. The computer ID’d it as an SA-8, a Russian-made mobile SAM with a range to about 42,500 feet and approximately ten miles. It hadn’t been briefed: There had been no mention of SA-8s in the Indian inventory. Nothing had locked on the slippery F/A-22V, but he wasn’t feeling particularly warm and fuzzy.

Timmy slid the Velociraptor eastward, pushing to get into an attack position to hit the MiGs at the end of the formation. They’d bunched as they came back north, but were now stringing out into the loose trail they’d flown before. The targets were easy to pick, but the sheer number of planes complicated the attack.

Not for Cyclops. The laser plane’s pilot gave a warning and the oversexed flashlight in its nose went to work. Timmy flexed his fingers on the side stick as Cyclops picked off the members of the flight one by one, taking them at precise fifteen-second intervals. The laser’s operator used his ultrasophisticated targeting gear to create a hot spot in the planes’ wings where their fuel tanks were; it was like putting a balloon against a thousand-watt lightbulb.

A kerosene-filled balloon. Even at fifteen miles away, Timmy could see the fireballs as the first planes in the formation popped. The third plane began to turn; that bought it perhaps ten seconds. Timmy looked at his tactical screen as the aircraft began to separate, aware now that they were in deep, unprecedented shit.

He had five octagonal targets in the middle circle. The MiG closest to him — twelve miles ahead on a direct line from his right wing root — blinked in the screen, then disappeared as the laser firing indicator lit. The other planes ducked east and west; one disappeared, apparently running into a mountain as it tried to escape.

Timmy pulled the Velociraptor south with a sharp bank and roll, acrobatically sliding around to follow the farthest plane if it got out of Cyclops’s range. It was unnecessary; he’d barely gotten his wings back level when the last Indian exploded. Poor fucking bastard.

It had taken just under three minutes to eliminate eight aircraft. Captain Robinson, who would objectively rank no lower than the top five percent of fighter pilots in the world and who was flying unarguably the world’s most advanced jet, would have taken at least twice as long to shoot down half that number from close range — and even then would have had to consider himself incredibly lucky, and his opponents incredibly stupid.

I’m surplus war material,he thought to himself.Washed up at twenty-five.

Howe steadied the Velociraptor at 35,000 feet, quickly reviewing everyone’s position as Cyclops finished off the Indian attack force. It had been easier than any of the tests they’d conducted over the past several months.

There wasn’t time to gloat, much less analyze it all: Both the Indians and the Pakistanis were filling the air with attack planes. Lucy — an American Compass Call electronic jammer that was also controlling a number of remote jamming drones — came south from Afghanistan to fill the air with electronic fuzz, making it difficult for the combatants’ radios and radars to work; they’d thought it a necessary precaution if things started to get out of hand, since it helped shield the easily seen Cyclops Two. But there was a definite downside, as both the Indian and Pakistani air forces interpreted the jamming as hostile acts by the other side. The jammers, meanwhile, degraded Howe’s ability to communicate with some of the far-flung members of his task force, though he had full secure communications with Timmy and Cyclops.

The question now was: What next?

His orders covered this contingency: If both sides went crazy, he was supposed to stand back and let them go at each other.

“Missiles in the air!” warned the AWACS operator. The Indians had detected and were targeting one of the ECM drones as it flew south over their border.

Losing the UAV was no big deal, but sooner or later his real aircraft were going to be in danger. At least two dozen Indian aircraft were now headed north; the Pakistanis had almost as many coming south.

They’d been so damn close. One radar blip, one general’s decision to rush ahead, one chance move somewhere, too subtle to be tracked down, had turned the MiGs around and started World War III.

There was still a chance. If he took out the Indians’ radar plane, the Indians would be blind. They’d have to pull back.

Hitting the plane would be exceeding his orders.

“Bird Two, you have EW1?” he asked Timmy, using the computer’s reference for the Indian radar plane.

“Roger that. I have him at about a hundred and fifty miles, coming north. He’s trying to vector their fighters. For escorts, Su-27s.”

“We’re going to take him out.”

“Now you’re talking.”

Howe told Cyclops Two what was going on, telling them to remain in their patrol pattern over Afghanistan and to let the two sides go at it. As they were talking, the Indian SAM struck the drone, destroying it.

“Should we take out Unk-2?” asked Timmy, referring to the unidentified contact.

The plane was now in a two-mile orbit over the Himalayas. Still unidentified, it seemed to be hugging the Chinese border, which to Howe meant that’s who was probably operating it.

“Negative,” he said. “They’re not a factor.”

“I think that’s what the Paks were reacting to.”

“If so, that’s because they’re clueless,” said Howe. He laid out his course and plan of attack to take the Indian AWACS. There was no need to be fancy; he and Timmy could take it straight at the Indian plane, which, despite its high-tech gear, probably wouldn’t detect them until they were about fifty miles away. At that point it would be within AMRAAM range, though he’d want to launch from inside forty miles to guarantee a hit.

“You want fat boy or the guard dogs?” Timmy asked.

“I’ll take the radar plane,” said Howe. “Target the closest interceptors, but don’t take them out unless they get hostile.”

“Guard dogs are mine.” Timmy’s tone guaranteed the planes would end up being considered hostile.

At their present course and speed, they’d be in range to fire in just under five minutes. The two American fighters streaked through the sky, their dagger-shaped wings cutting through the thin, icy air. Far below, millions of people slept through the night, completely unaware that their fates were being decided while they dreamed. Pakistan had twelve nuclear-tipped missiles and a single airdropped bomb; India had twice as many. The analysts who had briefed Howe had made a point of noting that it was very possible not all of the weapons would work if used. Both sides had had problems constructing and testing their weapons, and J.D. Powers wasn’t around to help improve quality control. But even if only half the weapons worked half as well as advertised, several million people would still die.

When he closed within seventy-five miles of EW1, the radar receiver caught the power spikes from the Sukhoi radars and painted them in the outer circle on Howe’s tactical scope, confident of their location. The radar in the big plane, meanwhile, continued to grope the sky unsuccessfully, its long fingers not quite sticky enough to grab him.

At sixty seconds to firing range, the computer had the attack completely mapped out for him; all he had to do was choose the option and push the button.

“I have something,” warned Timmy. “Shit — I’m spiked.”

“ECMs,” said Howe.

A ground unit had just come on to the west. It wasn’t an ordinary radar: Working with a microwave transmitter, it had managed to find Timmy’s stealthy profile. The electronic countermeasures quickly snapped the invisible chain that was trying to latch on to his wingman’s plane, but the damage had been done; the Indians knew they were under attack.

Not that it would do any good. He was thirty seconds from firing range.

“Guard dogs are coming for us,” warned his wingman.

“Yours,” said Howe. “Fire at will.”

Timmy tucked his wing down, angling toward the Sukhois as they separated from their mothership. They were roughly seventy miles away, each plane a mile right and left from his wings. He figured they’d go for some sort of bracket once he made it clear which plane he was going to attack; that pilot would move to engage while the wingman swung out, ready to pounce when the other broke. If Timmy kept coming down the middle — something they’d have to figure he might try, given the juicy target behind them — they could simply turn and have at him as he came past, confident that their Lyulka AL-31F turbofans would allow them to catch up in the unlikely event that they misjudged his speed; the Russian-built jets had an awesome capability to accelerate, matched by only one or two airplanes in the world, and exceeded by only one.

Which happened to be the plane they were going against. The fact that the Indian pilots apparently thought they were facing a lone Pakistani F-16 gave Timmy a tremendous advantage, as did their likely weapons set: The Indians were not known to have the most advanced Russian R-77 or AA-12 missiles, and while their R-27 Alamos were very potent, all of the radar versions were well known and could be knocked off by the Velociraptor’s ECMs. IR missiles, of course, were a different story — even the most obsolete heat-seeker could be a pesky PIA under the right circumstances — but Timmy didn’t intend to get close enough for the Sukhois to launch any.

He made a cut south, purposely taking the fighters away from his flight leader. That put him temporarily on the nose of the plane on his right, which didn’t react. The radar locked both bandits tight and the Velociraptor prompted him to fire. Timmy waited a few more seconds, riding in so he’d be positioned better to hunt the other planes.

“Fire one, fire two,” he said finally. The interceptor seemed to grunt its approval: The AMRAAM vertical ejector launcher spit the missiles from the ventral bay with a force of roughly 40 g’s. Timmy didn’t make the traditional radio call warning that he had fired; the shared radar and weapons system took care of that for him, giving Howe an audible tone as well as designating the targets and showing the missile tracks on his screen.

As soon as the missiles were away, Timmy hit the throttle and accelerated, his focus now on the two Sukhois that had hung back with the AEW plane. He knew they’d be somewhere between the 767 and him, but he wasn’t exactly sure where: ECMs, apparently aboard the big plane, had managed to significantly degrade his sensors.

Something for the tech guys to work on.

The radar plane was about ten degrees to the southeast with its gas pedal to the floor and descending. He guessed the other Sukhois would be near its tail. He checked Howe’s position — running in from the east, no more than ten seconds from firing — then decided that he would just hold his course for a bit until his targets turned up.

The Velociraptor gave him a buzz. His first missile had hit home. Target one was history.

Something had gone wrong with the second shot, however. The Sukhoi was turning and accelerating, trying to solve the mathematical equation that would give it a shot on his tail. Timmy’s RWR went ape shit: The Sukhoi fired a pair of Alamos from twenty miles. Timmy threw the Velociraptor into a set of hard zigs, chaff exploding behind him to confuse the radars in the missiles’ noses. He lost one almost immediately, but the second was working with super glue: It hung on his back even though he was taking nearly 8 g’s with his evasive maneuver.

Timmy felt his heart smack against his ribs: This was what he liked about flying. He jabbed at the ECM controls, even though the fuzzbuster was already singing songs in fifty different languages at once. A hard turn west, more chaff, a flick on the stick and he came clear, the missile detonating itself about two and a half miles from his right wingtip.

There wasn’t any time to celebrate — the RWR called out a new warning: A pair of SA-2A SAM missiles had just been launched five miles ahead, and damned if one of the Sukhois he’d been looking for hadn’t chosen this moment to turn up — three miles behind his butt.

Smack in the middle of heat-seeker range, a point which the Indian pilot underlined by launching two missiles, then following up with two more.

Howe waited until Timmy had engaged the Sukhois to make his move. The Indian AEW aircraft wasn’t particularly difficult to follow. As he closed to twenty miles Howe’s holographic HUD caged the target with a rectangular “fire” cue, showing that it was now in easy range for the AMRAAMs. He waited a second longer, making sure the gear wasn’t being overly optimistic, then dished out a pair of AMRAAMs; within seconds the missiles were galloping forward at Mach 4.

Howe turned his attention to his wingman, who was drawing a lot of interest to the southwest. One of the two fighters Timmy had engaged had dodged his missiles and was sweeping around from the north, angling for a rear-quarter attack. The RWR lit with fresh contacts, this time from ground-based radars; the Indians were throwing everything into this one, launching SA-2As, their best long-range anti-aircraft missiles. Timmy danced in the right corner of Howe’s screen, another Su-27 behind him.

“Two, your six!” warned Howe. “Break!”

“Yeah, I see the asshole,” replied Timmy. “Fucker’s dead meat.”

Howe wasn’t too sure of that, but he was too far away to help his wingman with that pursuer. Instead he went for the throttle, aiming to keep the northern Sukhoi off. With his momentum down he didn’t quite have a shot; he had to build more closure or momentum toward the enemy or his arrow would be shrugged off at long range.

And where the hell was the other Sukhoi?

Howe’s AMRAAMs struck the radar plane in quick succession. One of the warheads ignited fumes in the plane’s fuel tank, and the explosion broke the aircraft into several pieces, five of which were big enough for Howe’s radar to track as they disintegrated. Howe barely noticed, however, focusing on the northern Sukhoi as he tried to decide whether the Indian was running away or angling for an attack. He didn’t want to waste a missile on someone who was already out of the game.

The HUD’s rectangular piper jammed the Sukhoi into its sweet spot. Howe fired, figuring better safe than sorry; as the missile shot away he got a fresh warning on the SA-2s, one of which had managed to sniff out his airframe and was heading in his general direction. As Howe jinked left, the F/A-22V’s radar gave the AMRAAM a fresh update on the targeted Sukhoi, still flying a perfect intercept, apparently unaware that it had already been caught in the crosshairs.

The SA-2B was an ancient weapon; early versions had been targeted at B-52s over Vietnam, and it was an SA-2 that had taken out Gary Powers’ U-2 in 1960 at the height of the Cold War. That had all happened an awful long time ago, and while the missile — code-named Guideline by NATO — had been updated, it was thoroughly understood by the people who had put the Velociraptors’ ECM suite together. Even so, it had to be respected: With a warhead that weighed just under three hundred pounds and a velocity that could top Mach 3.5, its boom could definitely lengthen a pilot’s day.

Howe pushed back south as his aircraft’s electronic warfare suite played with the missile’s mind. It told the missile it was beautiful and sleek, the most powerful thing spinning through the universe. Then it pointed down the block, claiming that it had set up a date with the fattest, juiciest target it had ever seen, a veritable Daddy Warbucks that would make a perfect match. It slapped the missile in the rear end and told it to go have some fun; by the time the missile realized it had been had, it was at nearly sixty thousand feet and several miles from its intended target. It wailed in frustration, so distraught that it immolated itself, its remains trailing to the ground like the shreds of a funeral shroud.

Howe, meanwhile, struggled to sort the cacophony and chaos around him into a coherent map of the battle. The graphical representations of the battle on the HUD and tactical screen showed that Timmy had not only broken the enemy’s attack but was now launching his own; the cockpit pulsed with the shot warning. And here was the Sukhoi that had managed to hide earlier — five miles south of Howe, headed back east.

With the Indian taking himself out of the fight, Howe started to turn toward his wingman. Before he could tell him he was coming, a transmission from Cyclops interrupted him.

“Bird One, be advised missiles are in the air. We’re taking evasive action.”

Cyclops was under attack.

Chapter 16

The launch indicator flashed. The Pakistanis had obviously mistaken the 767 for a Chinese spy plane and were determined to take it down.

Megan looked at the large tactical screen next to her, waiting for Cyclops Two to target and destroy the four missiles. They were early-model American HAWKS — easily handled.

So why the hell weren’t they firing at them?

They had to see it. They had to.

They had to fire quickly. The missile spread increased the difficulty of aiming, and at this short range they had a relatively short window of opportunity.

She could take it out herself. But she, too, had only a limited opportunity.

The plan was to wait until they couldn’t be intercepted, then to simply fire once. But they hadn’t foreseen this; they hadn’t thought the Indians and Pakistanis would go this far.

She should get into the mix now. This was exactly the situation Cyclops had been invented for, the sort of future she’d foreseen.

And yet, she’d be risking it all if she did.

Risking what? Only herself.

The ABM shield as well. Everything.

Was that more important than saving the lives of her friends?

They weren’t her friends anymore.

If it were Tom, would she hesitate?

Megan put her index finger on the touch screen, designating the rising missile. But just as she opened her mouth to give the verbal confirmation to fire, Cyclops Two obliterated the missile on its own.

“Thank God,” she said to herself.

Chapter 17

Perhaps it was a premonition, or maybe his brain just worked out the logic on its own. But even as Cyclops took out the last of the HAWK missiles that had been aimed at it, Howe found himself putting the throttle out to the firewall and clicking in a warning to Cyclops without stopping to think exactly what he was doing.

“They’re going to launch ballistic missiles,” he said. “Stand by for ballistic missiles. Take out anything that’s flying.”

Howe slapped his radar out of dogfight mode and into the wide-range tactical feed for Cyclops.

“Timmy, we need to be north,” he said tersely.

“Roger that,” acknowledged his wingman.

“Bird One, be advised we have missiles launched, Indian missiles launched,” warned the Cyclops Two pilot.

He didn’t have to say ballistic missiles.

“Take them out,” said Howe.

“Not in range.”

“Come south. This is it. Get everything you can get.” Howe told the F-15s to accompany the plane and pulled two more off the AWACS. Not only did he expect the Pakistanis to take another shot at Cyclops, he expected them to launch their ballistic missiles as well.

Good God, what suicidal idiots.

A flight of MiG-29s headed toward the Pakistani border to his north. They were low and hot, probably in fighter-bomber mode.

He fired two AMRAAMs at them, reserving his last one. The missiles sped toward the first and second aircraft in the formation, which were apparently unaware they’d been chalked up on his screen.

“North, Timmy, north,” he radioed, a basketball coach barking at a forward to get back and guard the basket. “The Indians are launching a nuclear attack, and the Paks are sure to retaliate. Cyclops has the missiles.”

“Two.”

The first AMRAAM hit the lead MiG, but the second missile missed its target. The planes kept coming.

No way in the world could Howe’s team prevent every aircraft from crossing the border. They were playing Russian roulette: If one got through with a nuke, what then?

The intelligence people had said confidently that most of the two countries’ nukes were in missiles. “Only one or at most two,” they felt, were likely to have been made into bombs, which were harder to deliver and easy to defend against.

What if they were wrong? Cyclops Two carried only enough laser fuel for roughly thirty shots, depending on the duration of the blasts.

The Pakistanis were most likely to use a bomb; he’d look for an F-16 flight.

The AWACS warned of one flying south out of Islamabad, a two-ship formation streaking due south. As Howe got it on the wide screen with its shared data, Cyclops started plucking Indian IRBMs out of the sky.

“North Two, get north.”

“I’m on your six.”

Chapter 18

Atta looked down from the heads-up screen to the more detailed target list at the left side of his glass panel. There were six live targets, two of them SAMs and the rest ballistic missiles. The computer — with Sergeant Peters’s approval — ranked the SAMs first. But the ballistic missiles were higher and farther away, which meant they were much more complicated shots.

And more critical. Besides, the SAMs were ID’d as early-model Crotales, which had a maximum effective altitude about twenty thousand feet below where he was flying.

“Override one, override two,” he told the computer, punching the screen quickly to confirm the shots. “Acquire.”

The computer buzzed its acceptance. Atta could feel the laser turret whirling in the nose ahead of him, trying to lock on the new target. A second tone sounded and the triangle in his HUD blinked green, showing he had a lock.

“Fire,” he said, though this was superfluous: His finger had already pushed the button at the top of his grip, and in combat mode the computer accepted either command.

The laser shot was practically instantaneous. The beam tracked with the rising target for an infinitesimally small time, a highly focused blowtorch rubbing the skin of the missile. The beam heated part of the fuel tank in the second stage of the Indian Agni rocket, expanding it so quickly that it exploded in the space of half a second. The computer cycled up the target list, once more putting the SAMs on top; Atta quickly reprioritized them and took his shot at another ballistic missile. This was a harder shot; the laser caught the solid propellant first-stage motor but failed to destroy it immediately, sending the rocket off course but leaving it intact. Atta had to verbally order a fresh shot, since the computer was programmed to accept sending a missile off target as a hit.

“We’re locked and being tracked,” said the copilot. “Pak SA-2 battery.”

Unlike the Crotales, this missile was fully capable of reaching the Cyclops aircraft, especially since it had to fly a predictable path for the laser. But Atta held off ordering the ECMs, fearing that they would degrade the radars helping him target. By the time he fired and destroyed the third target — another Agni — the Pakistanis had fired two missiles at them.

They probably saw this as a holy war against the infidels.

Idiots.

The computer moved the missiles to the top of the list. Atta hesitated a second, then approved the selection of the first one.

“More Crotales — where the hell did the bastards get all these missiles?” the copilot asked.

The first SAM went down easy. The second SA-2, however, tracked off its expected course, and the computer seemed to take forever to get a lock. Atta felt his cheeks puffing out with his breaths as he finally fired and took it out.

More SAMS, various contacts; the adrenaline buzzing in Atta’s brain started to shake his concentration. He felt confused, fatigue overwhelming him.

The target list offered an SA-2 climbing through five hundred feet.

Another Agni had just launched.

Atta overrode, took out the ballistic missile.

“Captain!” His copilot’s voice went up an octave.

The pipper was yellow: no shot.

“ECMs,” said Atta. He took the yoke from the computer and swung around much tighter than the automated pilot would have allowed, pulling 6 g’s to get back in the firing track. Stabilizing, he went back into firing mode, allowing the electronic brain to hold the plane steady. The piper went red and he fired — a good hit on the first blast. The missile imploded.

Atta heard a popping sound that seemed to come from behind him. At the same time the left engine whined and the plane seemed to fall into his hands.

“We’re hit — shrapnel in the left engine,” said the copilot.

Unlike before, his voice was extremely calm. Atta interpreted that as a bad sign.

Chapter 19

Timmy angled westward, following Howe back toward the border. The AWACS operator screamed out contacts, Cyclops Two chopped down missiles, the radio crackled with talk from the F-15s. The chaotic jumble was music to Timmy’s ears.

Howe had sorted through the confusion and come up with a coherent plan. A pair of F-16s were charging toward the Indian border well to the west.

“We’re going to take those planes out,” the lead pilot told him. “They’re the only aircraft on the board that may have nukes. I have the plane on the right.”

“Two.”

The F-16s were just over two hundred miles away, streaking perhaps fifty feet off the ground as they approached the Thar or Great Indian Desert in the center of the border area. The gear aboard the Velociraptor not only allowed the aircraft to “see” them — incredible in itself — but gave hints on how to best counter them.

Not that Timmy thought he needed the hints.

The F-16s were moving at over six hundred knots, and the gap between them closed at something over thirty-three miles a minute. But they might just as well have been moving backward as far as he was concerned.

“Your man is turning,” warned Howe as the Falcon cut to the east.

“On him.”

Timmy nudged his stick, pushing to his right to stay with the F-16. It wasn’t clear whether the Pakistani was merely changing his position behind his leader or striking out on his own course. The planes were now roughly a hundred miles ahead, a bit over a minute and a half from firing range, depending on what happened in the next thirty seconds.

The HUD painted in its holographic display, a yellow dagger at about eight o’clock, relative to his position. The tactics section shaded an intercept attack point at his request, helpfully plotting a turn that would bring him onto the bandit’s tailpipe.

And then the F-16 disappeared.

Was it lost in the ground clutter, simply obscured by irregular terrain or jumbled returns or some anomaly in the coverage area, which was being cobbled together from three different inputs? Or had the pilot flown a bit too low and bought it in the darkness?

Timmy stayed on the course the computer had plotted, figuring it was by far his best option. Two Indian MiGs were in the vicinity, but he did his best to ignore them. Howe said something over the radio that he didn’t quite catch; Timmy leaned forward and started to rock gently, willing the F-16 back into the sky.

When it finally appeared, they were separated by less than twenty miles. The Pakistani pilot had managed to get down below ten feet, a mark of either superior flying ability or tremendous stupidity — maybe both. The piper’s boxed fist closed around the Pakistani plane and held it there as the AMRAAM popped out from the Velociraptor’s belly and flashed toward its target.

Timmy was only vaguely aware of the Velociraptor’s applause when the missile rammed home. He was too busy ducking two Indian MiGs that had been vectored into the area to find the F-16 but found him instead. The MiGs launched homers; he countered with tinsel and laid on the revs, spooling the turbos to max power and escaping north.

Howe, meanwhile, had taken out his F-16 and was running back toward Cyclops. As they crossed the Pakistani border, a pair of Mirages turned out of the northwest, coming to meet them. They were at twenty-seven and thirty thousand feet, below Howe but above Timmy; their turn took them between the two aircraft — and right into Timmy’s screen.

“I got ’em,” he told his leader. The computer had already brought up the weapons bar indicating the AIM-9M all-aspect Sidewinders were ready to fire. The audible indicator growled, telling him it was ready to fire; Timmy push-buttoned the first Mirage to death, the missile slapping out of the F/A-22V’s side. The second Mirage slid to the right as the first one blew apart; Timmy couldn’t find it and decided to leave it be; he was low enough on fuel to dial up the bingo matrix on the variable-use screen. As he started to look down toward his dash, his eyes caught the glow from several fires on the ground.

“Looks like World War III down there,” said Timmy, laughing a little.

“Hopefully not. Cyclops is hit.”

Howe’s voice sobered him. He found his leader’s wing and scanned for bogeys.

Chapter 20

Whatever had nailed the 767’s left engine had torn through the housing and wrecked the blades but left the wing itself undamaged. There hadn’t been a fire, either; in many ways they’d been incredibly lucky.

Atta and his copilot worked to compensate for the loss of the engine, trimming Cyclops Two and taking it lower. They ran quickly through the rest of their systems, making sure they hadn’t sustained any other damage. While undoubtedly there were more pockmarks in the skin of the aircraft, all their systems were functioning properly.

The plane retained considerable maneuverability with just one engine, and Atta and his copilot routinely practiced handling exactly this sort of situation, both in a simulator and in the aircraft. What they hadn’t done was use the laser with only one engine; standard procedure called for a stricken plane to return to base ASAP.

But standard procedure didn’t take into account a fresh volley of ballistic missiles, this time from the Pakistanis.

“Two missiles,” said Sergeant Peters as Atta finished his controlled descent to 25,000 feet.

“Yes,” said Atta, glancing at the target priority screen. The missiles were the only items on the board.

“Captain, we’re on one engine,” said the copilot.

The few words describing the obvious fact represented a novel’s worth of meaning: Not only was Atta being reminded that they were in serious danger, but his judgment was being questioned. He might have barked at his subordinate or ignored him, but he was a mild man, and confident besides.

“We’re all right,” he said, pushing the button to laser the target.

The lower altitude made the plane more stable, but it also made them an easier target for interceptors and missiles. More important, it cut down on the laser’s range. Atta got the second missile, but just barely; he turned southward, pushing on a direct line toward Islamabad as the radars caught two more probably ballistic missiles coming up off the ground. One of the pilots in the F-15s escorting them barked something into his ears; Atta was too busy trying to get the shot lined up to make sense of it, let alone respond.

He had to get these missiles now. He had to take them all out. Miss one, and he might as well have missed them all.

“SAMs up,” warned the copilot.

Atta pushed southward, setting up a new firing track. He turned the airplane over to the computer and then fired. He caught the first missile at five thousand feet; the second was nearly level with the plane when the laser finally destroyed it.

Two Pakistani interceptors had been scrambled to try and take them down. The F-15s were responding.

“SAMs are launching,” said his copilot. There was another barrage of missiles from the Indians, unidentified by the sensors: probably more ballistic missiles.

Six of them.

They were going to run out of fuel for the weapon soon.

Atta started to override the target selection, then froze. There were too many targets, spread over too wide an area.

He glanced back at the HUD, fired — a mistake, since he hadn’t locked. The blast missed.

Atta took a breath and waited for the laser to recycle and position itself. He fired, taking out the first SAM. But the second was coming hard, and he didn’t have a firing solution: It was locked on one of the Eagles.

I should let it go,he thought to himself.The nukes are more important.

But he didn’t. He banked the 767 hard, momentarily forgetting that the plane was flying on only one engine. He recovered quickly, but the craft shook violently and it took precious seconds to stabilize before he could set it to fire. The cursor went red and he nailed the warhead about twenty seconds away from impact.

Atta put the plane on its wing, a bit more gently this time, hoping to hold an angle that would cover a wide arc of the sky. But the computer wouldn’t keep the plane like that: The programming insisted on straight and level on one engine. He wasted time going back, and then even more overriding the weapon system’s insistence that he give up helm before firing. He had six missiles but time to take out only four.

The first two were easy. His hands began trembling on the third, and by the fourth he had to give the plane back to the computer to make the shot. They took out the missile just before the second stage separated — the last possible moment.

It was too late for the others. Atta, now deep into Pakistan, turned to go north, cursing himself. He looked at the targeting screen to see if there were more targets.

The screen was blank. So was the missile-tracking radar.

“What happened to the other two missiles?” Atta asked Peters.

“Five and six are gone,” said Peters.

“Were they decoys?”

“I don’t know,” replied the sergeant. “I have secondary strike indications; did you shoot at them?”

She knew the answer as well as he did, but Atta said no anyway.

Chapter 21

Howe pushed northward, running toward the laser plane. The contact screen was now completely blank; they were the only aircraft left in the sky. In fact, except for a few stray bubbles of flak, they were the only anything left in the sky. Cyclops had taken out all of the nukes.

“How you looking, Bird Two?” he asked his wingman.

“Disappointed. I got a missile left.”

He didn’t sound like he was kidding.

“I assume that means you’re in one piece,” answered Howe.

“Oh yeah.”

The Velociraptors were now way low on fuel, and Howe checked with the tanker to make sure they could catch a refill.

The AWACS and the eavesdropping aircraft assured him that both sides had called it quits. They had also shot their wads: Both had used all of their nuclear weapons.

“Good work, Cyclops Two,” Howe told Atta as he closed on the plane ahead. “We just saved a couple of million lives.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” snapped Atta. “One thing: Uh, we lost two of the contacts in the last box. And that unidentified spy plane — that’s gone too. We’re going to have to sort it out on the ground,” he added. “But we’re pretty sure the contacts we lost were ballistic missiles.”

“They hit the spy plane?”

“Negative. They were separated by about a hundred miles. Here’s the thing: When those missiles disappeared, our gear recorded laser strikes, just like ours.”