Drone Strike

1

They called the aircraft “Old Girl,” and not without good reason.

Turk Mako was used to flying planes that had come off the assembly line before he was born. This one had been retired two years before he was welcomed into the world.

It was an F-4 Phantom, a tough old bird conceived during the early Cold War era, when planes had more steel than plastic and a pilot’s muscles mattered nearly as much as his tactics in a high-g fur ball. So it wasn’t surprising that the retirement didn’t quite take. Within weeks of being tarped, Old Girl was rescued from the boneyard to run some data-gathering experiments at Nellis Air Force Base. She soon found her way to Dreamland, the top-secret development area still off limits in the desert and mountains north of Nellis.

In the years since, the F-4 had helped develop a wide range of systems, from simple missile-launch detectors to completely autonomous (meaning, no humans anywhere in the decision tree) flight computers. The sheer size of her airframe was an important asset, as was her stability in flight and dependability — the last as much a tribute to tender maintenance and constant small improvements in the systems as the original design. But in truth she was important these days as much for her second seat as anything else — Old Girl could easily accommodate engineers and scientists eager to see the results of their work.

She could also ferry VIPs eager to glimpse Dreamland’s latest high-tech toys in action. Which was the case today.

Captain Mako — universally called Turk — checked his altitude, precisely five thousand feet above ground level. He made sure of his location and heading, then gave a quick call to his backseater over the plane’s interphone.

“Admiral, how are you doing back there, sir?”

“Fine, son,” answered Vice Admiral Blackheart, his voice implying the exact opposite. “When the hell is this damn show starting?”

Turk ground his back teeth together, a habit some two hours old. Blackheart had been disagreeable from the moment they met for the preflight briefing. Turk strained to be polite, but he was a test pilot, not a stinking tour bus driver, and though he knew better than to sound off, he couldn’t help but wish for deliverance — he, too, wanted the exercise over ASAP.

“Well?” demanded Blackheart.

“Soon as the controller clears in the B-1R, sir. I believe they’re actually running exactly on schedule.”

“I don’t have all day. See if you can get them moving.”

“Yes, sir.” Turk had never met a man whose personality was better suited to his name. But he had to be polite. Blackheart wasn’t just a vice admiral — he happened to be in charge of Navy technology procurement. He was therefore a potential client of the Office of Special Technology, Turk’s military “employer.” Special Technology was a hybrid Department of Defense unit originally chartered to operate like a private company, winning contracts from the different service branches to supply them with new technology. Which meant Blackheart was potentially a critical client, and he had to suck up to him.

Or at least not offend him. Which, he had been warned repeatedly, was ridiculously easy to do.

Turk clicked his talk button, transmitting to the controller. “Tech Observer to Range Control One. Requesting approximate ETA of exercise.”

“Perpetrator is at the southern end of the range and preparing to initiate exercise,” said the controller, who was sitting in a bunker several miles to the south. He repeated some contact frequencies and general conditions, running down flight information Turk already had. By the time he finished, the B-1Q was in visual range, making a low-altitude run from the south at high speed. Turk nudged Old Girl’s stick, banking slightly to give his passenger a better view. The B-1Q was flying at two hundred feet above the flat sand of the glasslike desert range. Old Girl was about a half mile from its flight path, and would keep that distance for the duration of the demonstration.

Like Old Girl, the B-1Q was a flying test bed. She, too, had undergone extensive refurbishing, so much so that she now belonged to the future rather than the past. Having started life as a B-1B Lancer, the plane had been stripped to her skeleton and rebuilt. Her external appearance and performance were similar to the B-1R; like the updated Bone, she was capable of flying well over Mach 2 for a sustained period and carrying armloads of both air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons. But the B-1Q’s electronics were very different than those in the B-1R model, and her internal bomb bay held something more advanced than any of the missiles other bombers could unleash.

Turk glanced at the B-1Q as the bomb bay door opened. A gray cloud spewed from it, as if she had been holding a miniature thunderstorm in her belly. The cloud grew black, boiling, then dissipating. Black hailstones appeared, rising and falling around the airplane, until it was enveloped in a loose black cocoon.

“That’s it?” said the admiral. “Looks like a net.”

“In a way. Sure,” said Turk. It was the least cantankerous comment the admiral had made all morning.

“Interesting.”

The admiral remained silent as the cloud and the B-1Q continued downrange. Turk tipped the Phantom into a bank, easing off his stick as he realized he should keep the g’s to a minimum for his VIP.

Old Girl bucked with a bit of unexpected turbulence as she moved through the turn. Even she seemed a bit fed up with tour bus duty this morning.

The B-1Q started an abrupt climb. As it did, the black cloud began to separate. Half of it stayed with the bomber. The rest continued forward, forming itself into a wedge.

“So that’s the swarm,” said the admiral. Not only was he not complaining, he sounded enthusiastic.

“Yes, sir,” said Turk.

“You’re going to follow it, aren’t you? Yes? You’re following it?”

“Yes, sir. I, uh, I have to keep at a set distance.”

“Get as close as you can.”

“Yes, sir. Working on it.” Turk was already as close as the exercise rules allowed, and wasn’t about to violate them — hot shit pilot or not, that would get him grounded quicker than pissing off the admiral. He tilted the aircraft just enough to placate the admiral, who remained silent as the Phantom followed the black wedge.

The wedge — aka “swarm”—was a flight of twenty nano-UAVs, officially known as XP–38UVNs. Barely the size of a cheap desk calculator, the small aircraft looked like a cross between lawn darts and studies for a video game. With V-shaped delta wings, they were powered by small engines that burned Teflon as fuel. The engines were primarily for maneuvering; most of their flight momentum came from their initial launch and gravity: designed to be “fired” from space, they could complete complicated maneuvers by altering the shape and bulges of their airfoil. Though their electronic brains were triumphs of nanotechnology and engineering, the real breakthroughs that made them possible were in the tiny motors, switches, and actuators that brought the skeleton to life.

Dubbed “Hydra,” the nano-UAVs stood on the threshold of a new era of flight, one where robots did the thinking as well as the doing. They could be preprogrammed for a mission; their collaborative “brains” could deal with practically all contingencies, with humans in the loop only for emergencies. It was a brave new world… one that Turk didn’t particularly care for, even if as a test pilot he’d been an important cog in its creation.

Cog being the operative word, as far as he was concerned.

The nano-UAVs headed for a simulated radar complex — a vanlike truck with a dish and a set of antennas transmitting a signal that mimicked Russia’s Protivnik-GE mobile 3D L-Band radar. The L-Band radar was generally effective against smallish stealthy aircraft, including the F-35. The exercise today mimicked a deep-penetration mission, where a B-1Q and its swarm would cut past enemy defenses, clearing the way for attack planes to follow.

As a general rule, L-Band radars could detect conventional UAVs, even the RQ-170 Sentinel, because their airframes weren’t large enough to create the proper scatter to confuse the long wavelength of the radar. But the Hydras were so small and could fly so low, they were dismissed by the radar as clutter. Once past the calculated danger zone, the individual members of the swarm suddenly bolted together, becoming a literal fist in the sky as they pushed directly over the trailer housing the radar’s control unit.

“Looks like an air show,” said the admiral. “Or a school of fish.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So they scored a direct hit on that antenna, by the rules of the encounter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the van?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Narrow target, that antenna.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hard to hit from the air?”

“Well, um…”

Actually, taking out a radar antenna or van was child’s play with even the most primitive bomb, and a heck of a lot cheaper: the nano-UAVs cost about roughly $250,000 per unit; a half dozen would have been used to take down the antenna and another half dozen the van — a $3 million pop. In contrast, a five-hundred-pound Paveway II bomb, unpowered and outmoded but incredibly accurate under most circumstances, cost under $20,000.

On the other hand, as air vehicles went, the individual units were relatively cheap and extremely versatile. Mass produce the suckers and the cost might come down tenfold — practically to the price of a bomb.

Hell of a lot cheaper than a pilot, Turk knew.

The flock that had attacked the radar climbed and reformed around the B-1 as it neared the end of the range. The big bomber and its escorts banked and passed the Phantom on the left; Turk held Old Girl steady and slow, giving his passenger an eyeful. Having exhausted a good portion of their initial flight energy, the Hydras now used their tiny motors to climb in the wake of the B-1, using a wave pattern that maximized their fuel as they rose. The pattern was so complicated that Turk, who had controlled the UAVs during some early testing, would never have been able to fully master it without the aid of the nano-UAVs’ flight computers. As one techie put it, the pattern looked like snowflakes dancing in a thundershower.

As the Hydras closed around the B-1Q, Turk did a quick twist back, putting the Phantom on track as the second part of the demonstration began — two F-35s flew at the bomber, preparing to engage. When they were about twenty miles apart, the F-35s each fired a single AMRAAM-plus2, the latest version of the venerable medium range antiaircraft radar missile. The missiles were detected on launch by the B-1Q; a second later a dozen UAVs peeled off, forming a long wedge above the mother ship. As they continued flying straight ahead, the B-1Q rolled right and tucked toward the earth.

“Missiles will be at two o’clock,” said Turk. “Watch the swarm and you’ll see them come in.”

The electronics aboard the UAVs were marvels of nanoengineering, but even so, space aboard the tiny craft was at a premium. This meant that not every plane could be equipped with the full array of sensors even Old Girl took for granted. One might have a full radar setup, another optical sensors. The different information gathered could then be shared communally, with the interlinked computers deciding how to proceed.

All of the units contained small radar detectors, and while their power was limited, the size of the swarm allowed them to detect the radar at a fair distance. Thus, the UAVs knew that they had been locked on even before the antiaircraft missiles were fired. They remained in formation as the missiles approached, in effect fooling the AMRAAMs into thinking they were the B-1. Then, just as it looked as if the AMRAAMs would hit the swarm, the Hydras dispersed and the missiles flew on through them.

The radio buzzed with a signal meant to simulate the warheads exploding in frustration.

“Nice,” said the admiral.

Turk cranked Old Girl around the range as the demonstration continued. The UAVs were now put through a series of maneuvers, flying a series of aerial acrobatics. They were air show quality, with the little aircraft darting in and out in close formation.

“Impressive,” said Blackheart as the show continued. “Nice. Very nice.”

Thank God, thought Turk to himself as the aircraft crisscrossed above their mother ship. The admiral seemed soothed and even enthusiastic. Breanna would be happy. And tomorrow he could get back to real work.

Breanna Stockard resisted the urge to pace behind the consoles of Control Area D4. As head of the Department of Defense Office of Special Technology and the DoD Whiplash director, she knew very well that pacing made the people around her nervous. This was especially true of project engineers. And those in Dreamland Control Bunker 50-4 were already wound tighter than twisted piano wire.

Someone had started a rumor that the fate of the nano-UAV program they’d been working on for the past five years depended on whether the Navy bought in. To them, this meant their dreams and careers depended entirely on the tyrannical Admiral Blackheart.

Breanna knew that the situation was considerably more complicated. In fact, today’s test had nothing to do with the long-term survival of the program already assured, thanks to earlier evaluations. But if anything, what was at stake today was several magnitudes more important.

Not that she could mention that to anyone in the room.

The demonstration was going well. The feed from the Phantom played across the large screen at the front of the command center, showing the V-winged Hydras cascading around their B-1 mother ship. The maneuvers were so precise, the image so crisp, it looked like an animation straight out of an updated version of Star Wars: snip off the fuselage, extend the wings a bit, and the nano-UAVs might even pass for black-dyed X-Wings.

Almost.

In any event, on-screen they looked more like animated toys than real aircraft. It was for precisely that reason that Breanna had insisted on putting the admiral in the Phantom — if he didn’t see it with his own eyes, the cynical bastard would surely think it was complete fiction.

The bunker, part of the Dreamland facilities leased by the Office of Special Technology from the Air Force, was about four times too large for the small staff needed to run the demonstration. That seemed to be an intractable rule of high-tech development: despite the growing complexity of the systems developed here, the head count only went down. Soon, Breanna mused, she’d be running the entire show herself from her iPhone.

Walking down to the UAV monitoring station, she checked on the large radar plot that showed where all the aircraft were on the range. Turk was doing a good job in the F-4. Flying the plane was the easy part; keeping his mouth free of wise-ass remarks was surely harder. But with the stakes high, she wanted a pilot familiar not only with the program but with combat in general, available to answer whatever question the admiral thought to ask.

Unfortunately, Turk had seemed somewhat moody of late. There was no doubt about his flying abilities, or his adaptability — whether flying an F-22 Raptor, an F-16 Block 30, or the mostly automated Tigershark II, he handled himself with equal aplomb. A bit on the shy side, he lacked the outsized ego that hamstrung many up-and-coming officers; he might even be considered humble, at least for a test pilot. But like a good number of his peers, Turk had a tendency to snark first and think later.

This tendency had increased since he returned from Africa, where he’d spent time as a substitute pilot with an A-10E squadron. Even though they’d been greatly upgraded since their original incarnation, the planes remained intense mudfighters at heart. Perhaps working the stick and rudder of the old-style aircraft in the middle of combat had woken something deep in Turk’s soul. He seemed frustrated by his taste of combat; Breanna sensed he wanted more.

“Almost done,” said Teddy Armaz, looking up from his station. His right leg pumped up and down. Breanna wasn’t sure if this was a sign of nervousness or relief.

“Good distribution on the computing,” said Sara Rheingold, working the console next to Armaz. Rheingold’s team had built the distributed intelligence system that flew the nano-UAVs. In essence a network of processors aboard the Hydras, it was the most advanced artificial intelligence flight system yet, an improvement over even the system used in the Air Force’s new Sabre UAVs, which were still undergoing field testing.

And which had so recently given Whiplash considerable difficulty in Africa.

The Hydras evidenced no such problems. Rheingold began talking about some of the performance specs, quickly losing Breanna in the minutiae. She nodded and tried to sound enthusiastic. Meanwhile, she noticed that the two men working the flight control board were punching their screens dramatically. A second later they called her forward to their station.

“They just had an event over on Weapons Testing Range Two,” said Paul Smith, acting flight liaison. His job was to coordinate with Dreamland control, monitoring what was going on elsewhere at the massive test center.

“Does it concern us?”

“It may,” interrupted Bob Stevenson, the flight controller. “It sent a magnetic pulse out across the range.”

“I have some anomalies,” reported Armaz behind her.

“Me, too,” said Rheingold. “The root connection to the mother ship is off-line.”

“Restore it,” said Breanna.

“Working on it,” said Armaz, hunching over his console and tapping his foot more violently than ever.

“Knock it off! Knock it off!”

The radio transmission came as a complete surprise. Turk steadied his hand on the stick of Old Girl, holding the plane on course at the eastern end of the test area.

“Knock it off,” repeated the B-1Q pilot. “I have a complete system failure. My control panel is blank. Repeat — I have no panel. Is anyone hearing me?”

The tower acknowledged, clearing the B-1Q to proceed to the main runway. But the malfunction aboard the B-1Q had an effect on the radio as well; the pilot could broadcast but not hear.

“Tower, this is Tech Observer,” said Turk, interrupting the hail. “I’m about three hundred meters behind Perpetrator, five thousand meters above him. He doesn’t seem to have any damage.”

“Roger, Observer. We copy. He’s not hearing our transmissions. Can you get close enough for a visual to the cockpit?”

“Attempting.”

Turk nudged his stick and throttle, putting Old Girl into a gentle dive, warily drawing closer to the bigger plane. He let the Phantom get ahead of the B-1Q’s cockpit, making sure the pilot of the bomber knew he was there before sliding close enough to signal him.

“Do you have eyes on pilot?” asked the tower.

“Working on it,” answered Turk.

Old Girl balked a bit as he slid closer. A buzzer sounded, and Bitching Betty began complaining that he was too close.

“What are we doing, Captain?” asked Admiral Blackheart.

“We’re going to lead him down,” said Turk. “But first I want to make sure he can land. His gear is— Shit!”

Turk pushed the Phantom onto her left wing as a black BB shot past his windscreen. For a moment he was back in Africa, ducking bullets from rebel aircraft.

That was easy compared to what happened next. As Turk came level, the nano-UAVs began buzzing Old Girl, flitting back and forth within inches not just of the plane but the canopy.

“Control, I need an override on the swarm,” said Turk. “They’re looking at me like I’m an intruder. They’re in Divert One. Get them out of it.”

Divert One was a preprogrammed strategy, where the nano-UAVs would force another aircraft down. The Hydras would continue to push him lower and in the direction of a runway designated by the mother ship. Given the B-1Q’s malfunctions, however, Turk couldn’t be sure where the aircraft thought they were going — and in any event, he had no intention of complying. He banked into a turn, aiming to get away.

The UAVs continued to buzz around him. Damn things were staying right with him — he saw a small orange burst from one; apparently they still had plenty of fuel aboard.

“Tech Observer, state your intentions,” radioed Breanna Stockard from the control bunker.

“I’m trying to lead Perpetrator in. The swarm seems to have a different idea.”

“Negative, Whiplash. I want you to divert to Emergency Runway Three. We have two chase planes moving to escort Perpetrator home.”

“Uh—”

“Not a point for discussion, Captain.”

“Acknowledged. But, ma’am, I have the swarm on me. They’re in Divert One and they want me to land.”

“We copy.”

“How’s their fuel?” he asked.

“No less than three-quarters,” she told him.

Turk knew the nano-UAVs could touch roughly a thousand kilometers an hour if they went all out. While Old Girl had been around the block a few times since she was built, she could still push Mach 2, twice the speed of sound and approximately 1,236 kilometers an hour. But if he accelerated away, he would risk losing the robot planes over the range. And besides, they were more an annoyance than a threat.

He tacked north, toward the airstrip. There was a possibility, he reasoned, that they might land with him.

“What’s going on?” asked the admiral from the backseat.

“I’m being directed to an emergency landing,” Turk said. “The B-1’s on its own.”

“What’s with these aircraft?”

“They’re following a program intended to make an intruder land if they’re in a restricted airspace.”

“They’re awful damn close.”

“Yes, sir. That’s their job.”

“This isn’t part of the demonstration, is it?” asked the admiral.

“Negative, sir.”

Breanna dropped to her haunches between Armaz and Rheingold. “Can we get them back?”

“The systems in the B-1Q are completely shut down,” said Armaz. “If I could communicate with them, I might be able to walk the mission specialist through a restart — it might be all we need. But at this point I’m getting no telemetry from them, let alone radio. That magnetic pulse knocked them out good.”

Breanna glanced down at the controller. Dreamland Control had just declared a total range emergency, stopping all flight operations. The problem had originated in a weapon designed to fire small magnetic pulses at cruise missiles, destroying their electronics and therefore their targeting ability. It appeared to be more effective than its designers hoped.

Breanna turned back to the computer station. “Jen, what do you think?”

“Are you talking to me?” asked Sara Rheingold.

“I’m sorry. Yes.” Breanna realized her mistake: Jen was Jennifer Gleason, who had held a similar position years before. It was a kind of Freudian slip she made only in times of stress, under exactly the kind of conditions that Jennifer had dealt with so effectively.

Ancient history.

“We may be able to take them back from the ground station,” she said. “I’m trying the overrides.”

“We’ll take this in steps,” said Breanna. “Let’s get Old Girl down first, then we’ll work on the Hydras.”

“Can Turk land with them buzzing around him?” asked Rheingold.

“That’s why he gets the big bucks.”

Turk held the stick steady as the small aircraft buzzed around him. It was like flying with a swarm of angry bees in the cockpit. The tiny aircraft darted every which way in front of him. Even though he knew they were programmed to get no closer than a foot, the psychological effect was intense.

“Control, the UAVs are still with me,” Turk radioed. “What’s their status?”

“We’re working to recapture them,” the controller said.

“Do you want me to land?”

“Negative at this time. Stand by.”

His altitude had dropped to 3,000 feet. He was lined up perfectly on the runway, a long, smooth strip marked out in the salt bed a few miles away.

“Tech Observer, can you remain airborne for a while longer?” asked the controller when he came back.

“Uh, affirmative — roger that. What’s the plan?”

“Turk, we want the B-1 to land first,” said Breanna. “We have a chase plane guiding him in. We think we can take over the UAVs when he lands.”

“Sure, but you know they’re still trying to force me down,” said Turk. “They’re pretty damn annoying.”

“Do you need to land?”

“Well, ‘need’ is a strong word. Negative on that.”

“Your passenger?”

Turk glanced behind over his shoulder, then selected the interphone.

“Admiral, they want us to stay up for a while more. That OK?”

“Do what you have to do, son. As long as these things don’t hit us.”

“Yes, sir.” Turk went back to the radio. “We can stay up.”

The B-1 was still without radio communications and, presumably, the bulk of its electronic gear. About half the nano-UAVs had stayed with it, flying behind the wings as it approached Dreamland’s main test runway. Turk caught a brief glimpse of it descending, wings spread, wheels down, as he began an orbit over Emergency Runway 3. He didn’t see much: the UAVs continued to pester him, buzzing in his path.

“What are these damn things trying to do?” asked the admiral from the backseat.

“They want us to land. The controller thinks they’ll break off when the B-1 puts down.”

“What do you think?”

The question caught Turk by surprise. “Not really sure, Admiral.”

“Are we in trouble?”

“Oh, negative, sir. It’s annoying, but I’ve seen this dance before. They’re actually programmed to fly very close, twelve inches close, but they won’t actually hit us.”

“This is a preprogrammed routine?”

“The command is, yes.” Turk explained that while the nano-UAVs used distributed intelligence — in other words, they shared their “brains”—the individual planes could also rely on a library of commands and routines, which was happening then. The first versions of the Flighthawks — much larger combat UAVs originally launched and controlled from EB-52s — had made use of similar techniques.

“So if it’s programmed, won’t the enemy be able to learn it and defeat it?” asked the admiral.

“They can be programmed for the specific mission,” said Turk. “And this — it’s kind of like a football team calling signals. They know they have to keep a certain position and get a certain result, which they all react to.”

“They seem angry,” said the admiral.

“Oh yes, sir.” Turk straightened the aircraft. “Definitely pissed off.”

The B-1 landed. If that had any effect on the UAVs, it wasn’t obvious.

“Control, what’s our status?” Turk asked when five minutes had passed.

“Still trying to get the connection broken, Whiplash.”

“Maybe I can break it myself,” offered Turk. “I’ll point my nose up and go afterburners. We’ll stay over the range, so if they drop into Landing Three Preset, they’ll come back to you.”

“Negative, Whiplash. Negative,” said Breanna sharply. “You have a passenger.”

“Roger that.” Turk toyed with the idea of explaining the situation to the admiral and asking what he thought — he suspected Blackheart, who was undoubtedly listening in, would approve — but decided he’d better not.

The controller guided him through a series of turns as they did whatever they were doing from the ground station, all to no avail.

As he continued to circle, Turk guessed that the engineers were trying to figure out what would happen when he landed — would the UAVs land with him, as they were programmed to do when landing with the B-1? Or would they reform and fly on their own? If that happened, there was no telling what they might do next.

Which explained the flight of F-22s from nearby Nellis air base that were being vectored to the north side of the range. The radars that worked the Dreamland defense lasers were also tracking them.

“Whiplash Observer, how much fuel do you have left?” asked the controller.

“We’re good for another half hour or so,” he told the controller, looking at Old Girl’s gauges. The instruments were still old-school clock-style readouts. “Add twenty to that in reserve. You know. Give or take.”

“Give it another ten minutes, then plan to land. The Hydras will be low on fuel by then.”

“Gotcha.” Turk clicked off the mike, then remembered the admiral. “Roger that, Control. Copy and understood,” he added in his most official voice.

“We’re landing?” asked the admiral.

“Affirmative, sir. The swarm is just about out of fuel. Sir.”

“You knock off all the sirs, Captain.” Blackheart’s voice sounded just a hint less gruff.

“Thanks, Admiral.”

Turk took a few more lazy turns, circling and finally lining up on the runway for his final approach. Emergency vehicles were waiting a respectful distance — nearby, but not so close as to imply they didn’t think he’d make it.

Breanna folded her arms, watching the large screen as the Phantom made its way toward the long stretch of cement. They had switched the video feed to a ground camera mounted in an observation tower near the runway. From a distance, the F-4 seemed to have a black shroud above its body.

“They should be staying at altitude, shouldn’t they?” Breanna asked Armaz. “Why are they descending with him?”

“I’m not sure. They may not think it’s the right altitude.”

“You still can’t get them back, Sara?”

“I keep trying,” Rheingold said. “Short of sending another shock through the range, I don’t know what else to try.”

“Bree — Dreamland Control wants us to keep Old Girl in the air,” said Paul Smith, turning from his console. He was practically yelling. “They want to recover their tankers first. They’re worried the nano-UAVs will attack them.”

“For crap sake? Why didn’t they tell us that five minutes ago?”

“Ma’am—”

“Bob?”

“On it,” said the controller.

Turk eyeballed his instruments quickly as he continued on course for the emergency runway, then unfurled his landing gear. He tensed, then felt his breath catch — he’d been worried the UAVs would object somehow. But they seemed content to let him land, adjusting their own speed as he slowed.

“Tech Observer, abort landing,” said Stevenson, the controller. “Go around.”

“I have to ask why,” he said tersely.

“Dreamland has a couple of tankers they want to get down first,” said Breanna, breaking in. “They’re not sure what the UAVs will do when you land.”

“Well, in theory, they’ll land with me, right?”

“We agree, Whiplash,” said Breanna. “They’re just concerned. Can you go around, or should I have the tankers divert elsewhere?”

“Negative, negative, I’m good. Going around.” Turk tamped down his frustration as he clicked into the interphone. “Admiral—”

“I heard. Do what you have to do, son.”

“Will do. Thanks.”

Turk pushed his throttle and cleaned his gear, restoring his wheels to their bays. The aircraft’s speed picked up immediately. The UAVs started to scatter, momentarily left behind.

In the next moment, he heard a faint clicking noise on his right. It was an odd sound, something like the click a phone made over a dead circuit. He filed the noise away, too busy to puzzle it out.

Two seconds later a much louder sound on the right got his attention — a violent pop shocked the aircraft, seeming to push it backward.

And down.

Turk struggled to control the plane, hands and feet and eyes, lungs and heart, working together, moving ahead of his brain. By the time his mind comprehended what had happened, his body had already moved to deal with it, trimming the plane to concentrate.

“Captain, is there trouble?” asked his passenger.

“Slight complication, Admiral. We’re good.” Turk’s mouth was suddenly dry. His chest pushed against the seat restraints — his heart was pounding like crazy.

He was at 1,500 feet, 1,300. The nano-UAVs were still around him, though at least part of one was in the left engine, or what remained of it.

Like a bird strike, he thought. Deal with it.

“Whiplash Observer?” asked the control tower.

“I’m landing.”

“You’re on fire, Whiplash,” said the controller.

Ordinarily, that would have been the cue to pull the ejection handle. But Turk worried that his passenger wouldn’t fare well — they were low, there wasn’t much margin for error, and it was doubtful the admiral had ever parachuted from a plane.

And besides, he could land the damn plane with his eyes closed.

Come on, Old Girl, he thought. Let’s take this easy now. You’ve seen harder challenges than this.

He took the plane into a turn, realigning himself for a landing as quickly as he dared. Just as he straightened his wings, something popped on the right side. A shudder ran through his body, the rattle of a metal spike being driven into a bed of shale. He began moving his feet, pedaling, pedaling — he was three years old, trying to get control of a runaway tricycle plummeting down the hill of his parents’ backyard. The dog was barking in the distance. The world was closing in. Rocks loomed on either side; ahead, a stone wall.

“Stand by. Landing,” he said tersely.

Landing gear deployed, Turk felt his way to the strip, steadying the plane as she began drifting to the right. His nose started coming up; he fought the impulse to react too strongly, easing the Phantom down. The seconds flew by, then moved slowly, excruciatingly — the wheels should have touched down by now, he thought.

The nano-UAVs dispersed just as the rear wheels hit the smooth surface of the runway. He was fast, and little far along the runway, but that was all right — he had another 10,000 feet of marked runway to stop, and miles of salt flat to steer through if necessary. The emergency vehicles were speeding up from behind…

Turk’s relief vanished as a flame shot up from under the right side of the plane. The first nano-UAV had hit the belly, rupturing the tank there and starting a small fire.

He popped the canopies as the F-4 braked to a stop. Undoing his restraints, he pushed himself up from the ejection seat, helmet still on and oxygen still attached. He ripped off the gear and hopped onto the wing, leaning back to grab Admiral Blackheart. Black smoke curled around them.

“Out of here, Admiral, let’s go,” said Turk, grabbing the admiral under his left arm and lifting him out of the plane. He took a step back but slipped, falling backward onto the wing. The admiral fell onto his chest.

A cloud surrounded them, enveloping the two men in a toxic blackness.

“Almost home,” Turk told the admiral, struggling to get up. He reached his knees but the smoke was so thick he couldn’t see the tips of his fingers as he fished for a grip. He finally hooked his fingers into the admiral’s soft biceps. Turk pulled him to the edge of the wing, then tumbled with him to the ground. Blackheart’s head hit his chest as they landed, knocking the wind from him. Struggling to breathe, Turk turned to his belly and pulled up his knee, levering himself up and pulling the admiral with him.

The smoke drenched them both in inky soot, covering their mouths and poking at their eyes, a caustic acid. Turk pushed and pulled and pushed, finally getting his balance and then his breath. He had the admiral under him like a messenger bag, moving forward until finally the sky cleared and it was bright again, the sky a faultless blue.

There were trucks. A jet streaked overhead.

Someone grabbed him. Someone else took the admiral from him.

“I’m all right,” protested Turk.

“Move back,” said the airman who’d grabbed him. He was a parajumper, an Air Force special operations soldier trained as a medic. “Come on now. Get in the ambulance.”

“I’m OK,” said Turk. He turned back to look at Old Girl. As he did, one of the fuel tanks exploded, sending a fireball nearly straight up into the sky. Flames erupted from the fuselage, and two more fireballs shot from the sides.

“Old Girl’s going out with a bang,” he muttered, turning to find the ambulance.

2

Captain Parsa Vahid raised his arms upward as he walked between the two mounds of sand, stretching his upper body in a vain attempt to unknot the kinks coagulating his muscles. He had been sitting in his MiG on high alert for hours, waiting to fly. It was a ritual he had repeated for weeks now, the government worried that the Americans and Israelis would finally carry out their threats to attack Iran.

Or more specifically, the secret bases in the area of Qom, which lay many miles to the north. The fact that work on a nuclear bomb was being conducted was perhaps the worst kept secret in the world.

Vahid had never been to Qom itself. In fact, though his unit was specifically charged with protecting it, he hadn’t so much as overflown it — the government had laid down very strict rules some months before, closing an Iranian air base there and warning that any aircraft in the vicinity was likely to be shot down.

Besides, given the shortage of jet fuel plaguing the air force, Vahid rarely got to fly at all these days.

Qom was an ancient city, dwarfed in size by Tehran but still among the ten largest in Iran. More important than its size was its history. It was sacred to Shi’ites, long a center for religious study, and a site for pilgrims since the early 1500s. Though he was a Muslim, a Shi’ite by birth, Vahid did not consider himself devout. He prayed haphazardly, and while he kept the commandments, it was more for fear of punishment than belief in afterlife or even earthly rewards.

His true religion was flight. Vahid had dreamed of flying from the time he was three. Becoming a pilot had been a pilgrimage through the greatest difficulties, his barriers even higher because he had no connection with either the service or the government. His love had not diminished one iota. Even today, with the service’s chronic fuel shortages, problems with parts, poor repairs, bureaucratic hang-ups, and political interference — Vahid could put up with them all as long as he got a chance to get in the air.

The pilot paused at the crest of the hill. Two hours would pass before the faithful would be called to prayer with the rising sun. The words would stretch across the bleak, high desert air base, with its dusty hangars and dorms.

“Captain, you must be careful,” said a voice in the darkness. “You are very close to the perimeter.”

Startled, Vahid jerked back. A soldier was standing nearby, rifle at the ready. Vahid stared, then realized it was Sergeant Kerala, a man whom he knew vaguely from an earlier assignment. His Farsi had the accent of the South.

“I hadn’t heard you,” said Vahid. “But why are you working at night?”

“I made the wrong comment to someone.”

“Ah.” Vahid nodded. The wrong remark heard by any one of the half-dozen political officers assigned to the base, and the consequences could be quite severe. “I was just taking a walk. My legs are stiff.”

“Do you think there will be an attack?”

Vahid was taken off guard by the question. His first thought was that it was a trick, but there was little chance of that.

“I don’t honestly know,” he told the sergeant. “We are ready for whatever happens.”

“I don’t think the Americans will be so insane,” said Kerala. “The Israelis, them I am not sure about.”

“We will defeat them. Whoever it is,” Vahid assured him. “We’re ready. I’m ready.”

“Yes,” said Kerala. “We will have a great battle if they are foolish enough to try. God willing.”

3

President Christine Todd sat down on the small settee in the passage off the Cross Hall of the White House, listening to the hushed murmur of guests arriving in the State Dining Room a short distance away. Todd was hosting a dinner to honor the heads of several museums, part of a recent initiative to expand awareness of American history. It was a subject dear to the President’s heart, and she was especially looking forward to talking to the curator of a recent Smithsonian exhibit on George Washington. But history was hardly the only thing on her mind tonight.

“Decision made?”

Todd looked up at her national security advisor, Michael Blitz. Blitz looked like a walrus in his tuxedo — a gruff and grim walrus.

“Still working on it,” she told him.

“The Israeli ambassador is inside already.”

“Mmmm.” Todd patted the bench, signaling for Blitz to sit. Blitz’s voice had a tendency to carry, and she didn’t want any of the guests overhearing.

“There really are only two options,” said Blitz. “Let Iran have the weapon, or attack now. Stop the process.”

“But for how long, Doctor?”

Blitz had a Ph.D. in international affairs, but Todd tended to use the honorific sporadically. He’d told her several times that he took it as an indication of how she was feeling about him and his advice: if she used “Mister,” he was on thin ice; if she used “Doctor,” he was sunk.

“If we strike, we stop it for at least a year,” said Blitz. “Maybe as long as five.”

“Your staff estimated less than twelve months.”

“That’s too pessimistic. Even the Secretary of State thinks it will be halted longer than that.”

Todd glanced toward the hall, where one of her Secret Service agents stood, making sure no one wandered down the wrong way. A light scent of food wafted in; the amuse bouche maybe, or else a figment of Todd’s hungry imagination — she’d skipped lunch.

“We need two years before the ABM system is fully operational and can protect Israel,” said Blitz. “Iran knows that. That’s why they’re trying to move so quickly.”

“If there was a guarantee of success — or even a probability,” said Todd, “then the decision would be easier.”

“The Israelis will attack if we don’t. The result of that will certainly be war — declared or undeclared. And as I said this afternoon, the probability of Iran actually using the bomb at some point goes up to one hundred percent in that scenario. Bad for your second term.”

Todd managed a smile.

“If you’re concerned, we should move ahead on the covert plan first.” Blitz himself preferred that option, and had in fact been pushing it. Todd saw the attraction, but didn’t like the odds.

“A twenty percent chance of success?” She sighed. “And that’s if we’re not discovered.”

“Better odds than anything else out there. Has Blackheart checked back with you?”

“No. I expect he’ll be positive. But I doubt the odds will change.” Todd heard her husband clunking down the stairs. She rose just in time to see him step out from the landing. His eyes twinkled as they caught hers — all these years, and she still felt her heart kick up a few beats.

“We’ll talk,” she told Blitz, holding her arm out for her escort.

Two hours later todd found herself in a corner of the formal dining room, listening to a museum trustee describe funding problems. It was a litany she had heard many times in the past, and while she was sympathetic, there was little she could do about it. Her next budget — sure to be declared dead on arrival in Congress in any event — held arts appropriations steady from the year before. This in effect was a decrease, given inflation, but it was far better than Congress was likely to do. Even the defense budget would probably be cut in the coming year, something Todd was adamantly opposed to.

She listened for a while longer, then politely excused herself, deciding she would check in on her husband and work an early exit. She spotted the Israeli ambassador across the room, and turned to her right: she had artfully avoided conversing with him all evening, and aimed to keep that record intact.

She bumped into a short, thin man in his mid-thirties, who managed — barely — to avoid dropping his drink or, worse, spilling it on her dress.

“I’m sorry, Madam President,” he said, clearly embarrassed.

“Oh no, dear, I’m sorry. I turned without looking.” She smiled, trying to remember who he was.

“Mark Tacitus,” said the man. He held out his hand. “I, uh, I’m the son-in-law of—”

“Oh yes, yes, I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.” His father-in-law was Simon Rockwell, a member of the Metropolitan Museum Board of Trustees in New York and one of her biggest contributors in the Northeast. “So — the last time we met, you were working on a book.”

“Finished. Yes.” He smiled awkwardly. “The book on Nimitz.”

“Of course.”

“He was an interesting man,” said Tacitus noncommittally. He seemed to think she was only making polite conversation.

“Do you still think the Nautilus was his most difficult decision?” Todd asked.

“Well…” The author flushed, probably trying to remember their last conversation. The submarine Nautilus became the world’s first nuclear powered vessel of any kind, and the decision to build it was extremely controversial. “I think in a way it was his hardest. There were a lot of decisions we could single out. Some good, some bad.”

“A lot good.” Todd caught sight of her husband. “Though not always obvious at the time, even to him. We’ll have to talk more in depth sometime,” she told Tacitus. “I was interested in what you had to say about his wife.”

“You read the book?”

The President laughed. She had read the book, lingering over the war chapters, where she admired how Nimitz had persevered, taking calculated risks but always sticking to his vision.

Set a course, and move ahead. Good advice for anyone, even a President.

Delay Iran by whatever means. Short-term risks that could pay big dividends were better than no risk that offered none. That was what Nimitz had to say to her.

“We will talk,” she said, patting Tacitus on the shoulder and starting across the room. “Thank you. One of my people will get in touch.”

Her husband was waiting. “Calling it a night?” he asked when she arrived.

“I’m thinking of it. There was a curator I wanted to see.”

“Sandy Goldman, in the blue dress over there. George Washington expert.”

“You read me like a book.”

“Thank you, Madam President.”

“I think I’ll have someone sneak her up to the library for a little chat. What do you think?”

“You’re the President.”

“Could you whisper in her ear? I have to talk to Blitz for a minute.”

Her husband slipped away. Blitz was only a few feet away, talking with two men from the Dallas Museum of Art. As President Todd walked in his direction, Blitz excused himself. They stepped aside.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” she told him.

“Not a problem.”

“It should move ahead.”

“What made you decide? The Israelis?”

“I haven’t talked to them about it, and don’t intend to.”

“What then?”

“Admiral Nimitz.”

Todd cherished the confused look on Blitz’s face all the way upstairs.

4

Even though the engineers had reached a tentative conclusion about what happened within minutes of the B-1Q and UAVs touching down, the mission debriefing lasted well into the night. Two of the UAVs had been destroyed and a third damaged when they were unable to anticipate the Phantom’s last second landing abort. The others returned to the airstrip where their mother ship had landed, landing in perfect formation and taxiing behind it. Analysis of the computing logic was still ongoing, but it appeared to have followed the proper protocols and decision trees — except for the switch to the intercept. That signal had apparently been inadvertently ordered by the B-1Q’s control unit when the pulse hit: a flaw in the B-1Q controls or perhaps the human overseeing them, not the UAVs.

Breanna ducked out after an hour to see to Admiral Blackheart. She was shocked to find him not only in good spirits but almost giddy about the prospect of the Navy using the nano-UAVs.

“You have a hell of a lot of work to do,” said the admiral. “But those things have promise. The Navy wants to be involved. The technical people are right — this is the future.”

If the admiral was enthusiastic about the UAVs, he was even more impressed by Turk.

“Your pilot did a hell of a job saving the plane. Write up a commendation; I’ll sign it.”

Breanna summarized what they had found so far and offered to let the admiral sit in on some of the debriefing session; he wisely demurred.

She saw the admiral to his Pentagon-bound aircraft, then took a quick detour to pick up a salad. She stopped at her office to double-check e-mail, then headed back to the briefing room. Her secure satellite phone rang as she was about to open the door. The number display told her it was Jonathon Reid, codirector of the Whiplash project.

“Jonathon?”

“Breanna. I heard you had an incident.”

“There was a magnetic pulse problem on the range. A new weapon. We think the Hydras themselves were fine. But the pulse affected the antenna of the B-1Q. That project may be set back.”

“I see.”

She heard ice cubes clinking in the background. It was well past five back in D.C., but still, she was surprised that Reid was actually at home — he would never drink at either the Agency or in the Whiplash center.

Old school to a fault, Reid retained a certain professional distance with Breanna, even though they had come to know each other over the course of the past year and a half working together. When they started, Reid was a special “consultant” to the CIA; he had soon been named a special assistant to the deputy director of operations. Now, with the Agency in turmoil and under political pressure, he was rumored to be in line for the director’s job. But he refused to discuss it.

“The President spoke with Admiral Blackheart,” he told her. “She wants Roman Time to proceed.”

“OK. But—”

“From what I understand, Blackheart described the incident very briefly to her. We’re satisfied that the Iranians don’t have anything like the weapon that caused it.”

“Of course not.”

“So it’s not a factor.”

“No. But I think — I think it mandates having a trained pilot in the loop, as we’ve said all along,” she told him. “And a review of the programming systems. But because the routes on Roman Time would be already set out, I don’t think it would be a problem. Of course—”

“There is a complication,” interrupted Reid. “The timetable has to be accelerated.”

“By how much?”

“Greatly. We have, at best, a matter of a few weeks.”

“That’s too short to train any of the Delta people.”

Breanna knew what Reid was going to suggest before he said anything else. “Captain Mako is the obvious choice.”

“He’s too valuable,” Breanna said.

“Given the target, I’d say that’s not true. Not at all.”

“He’s a pilot, not a snake eater.”

“Who else, then?” asked Reid.

There was no one else. Aside from Turk, the only people who had flown the nano-UAVs were civilian engineers. Even if they were to volunteer, all but one was well into his forties and not exactly in the best physical shape.

The lone exception was eight months pregnant.

“Turk has to volunteer,” said Breanna.

“And then what do we do if he doesn’t decide to go?”

“I don’t know. But I can’t order someone to take a mission with such long odds on survival. This isn’t the sort of thing he signed up for. It’s ordering him to his death.”

“If he doesn’t volunteer, you may have to.”

5

Today was going to be a great day, Turk Mako decided as he rolled out of bed. Or at least as great a day as you could have without flying.

Heck, he might get some flying in. His only officially scheduled duty was to sit through a boring engineering session on the nano-UAVs. Then he was officially off-duty, free, liberated, unchained, for seventy-two hours, which would be spent in the delicious company of Li Pike, his girlfriend.

She was flying in this evening. Li, an Air Force A-10 pilot attached to a unit Turk had hooked up with in Africa, had managed to wangle leave from her own unit so they could be together.

Which reminded him — he had to check on the hotel reservation. And the car.

He couldn’t cruise Vegas with the Office of Special Technology Malibu he’d been assigned as personal transportation. A vintage Mustang convertible would be much more like it.

Dinner reservations. He needed to make dinner reservations. A quiet place, not too far from the hotel, but not in the hotel. He didn’t want to seem too anxious.

Turk turned the coffeemaker on and headed for the shower. The “single occupancy/officer/temp duty” apartments at Dreamland dating from the late 1990s were drab and boring. Worse, they had paper thin walls. Not appropriate for how he hoped the night would go.

Turk’s good mood was threatened a bit when he emerged from the shower to find that the coffee machine had malfunctioned, sending a spray of liquid and grinds around the counter area. He managed to salvage a single cup, which he downed while cleaning up. No big loss, he decided: there was always better coffee in the engineering bunkers. The geeks might not be much to look at, but they brewed mean java.

Turk’s spirits remained high as he approached the guards to the Whiplash building. He waved his credentials at them, then submitted to the mandatory fingerprint and retina scan set up just inside the door. Cleared, he sauntered down the long ramp to the main floor, pausing at the small coffee station near the elevator. He’d just finished helping himself to an extra-large cup when Breanna Stockard called to him from down the hall.

“Turk? Can we talk for a minute? In my office?”

“Sure boss, but, uh, I got a meeting downstairs.”

“This won’t take long.” Breanna ducked back inside the doorway to her office.

Turk topped off his coffee and went on down the hall. While Breanna was generally at Dreamland at least once a month, her office there had a temporary feel to it, and was radically different from the high-tech command center she used on the CIA campus. Even her Pentagon office, which was modest by command standards, seemed spacious if not quite opulent compared to the Dreamland space.

“You’re not going to make me pay for Old Girl, are you?” said Turk, plopping down into one of the two stiff-backed wooden chairs in front of her desk.

“Pay?” Breanna asked as she closed the door.

“Just a little joke.”

“You did a great job. The admiral wants to give you a medal.”

“Really? The tight-ass admiral?”

“Turk.”

“I didn’t call him that to his face.” Turk retreated quickly. Blackheart actually had one of his aides buy him a drink, so he wasn’t all bad. For an admiral.

“I need you to be serious, Captain.” Breanna was sitting ramrod straight.

“Yes, ma’am.” Turk took a sip of coffee and copied her posture.

Breanna had an entire mental script memorized and rehearsed, but for some reason couldn’t seem to get it started. She looked into his face, found his eyes, and forced herself to talk.

“We… have a special assignment. It’s very dangerous,” she started. “It involves… flying the nano-UAVs.”

“Flying them?”

“Directing them. As a backup, actually. But as you saw yesterday, we still need someone in the loop in an absolute emergency.”

“Yup.”

“I need a volunteer. I— You’re probably the only one qualified.”

Probably the only one? Breanna silently scolded herself: she hadn’t planned on saying that at all.

“Where is this assignment?” he asked.

“I have to tell you — it’s very dangerous.”

“Great. I’m in.”

“Uh—”

“It’s combat, right? I want in. Definitely.”

“It’s… it is a combat operation,” said Breanna, surprised by his enthusiasm, though she realized now she should have expected it. “I can’t give you many details until — unless — you decide to do it.”

“I already decided. Where am I going?”

“It’s in Iran,” she said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Iran? Hell, yes. Hell, yes.”

“You’d have to start training right away. It’ll be intense.”

“Right away when?”

“We have a site in Arizona. We’d need you there as soon as possible. Tonight, preferably.”

“Tonight?”

Finally, she thought, he was listening with his brain rather than his heart.

“You can still back out,” she told him.

“No, no. It’s just, I kinda had plans for this weekend.”

“It’s not a question of being brave,” said Breanna, not quite parsing what he said. “This is voluntary. I mean that. Walk out of my office and I’ll have forgotten the whole thing.”

“No, I’m doing it. It’s tonight, though. That’s all I need. The night. I’ll report first thing in the morning.”

Breanna recognized the furrowed eyebrows and locked mouth — Turk had dug in, afraid that in some bizarre way his manhood was being questioned. She’d seen that look on the face of practically every male pilot she’d ever dealt with, including her husband’s. Once set, there was no way for them to back down.

But he did genuinely want to do it. She could read that as well.

“You can report tomorrow?” she asked gently.

“Deal.” He jumped to his feet and held out his hand to shake. “Thanks, boss.”

Breanna rose. His handshake was firm and enthusiastic.

“I’ll have Lisa make the arrangements,” she told him. “You’ll have a civilian flight to Arizona — the tickets will be in your e-mail queue by this evening.”

“Thanks.”

Oh God, she thought as she watched him leave. Did I do the right thing?

Turk kicked himself all the way down the hall. He could have gotten the entire seventy-two hours off if he’d been smart about it.

But he wanted to get back into the swing of things. Feel the adrenaline he’d felt over Libya. He wanted to get back into combat.

Li wasn’t going to be happy about the timing, though. They’d planned this for weeks — months, since they’d met.

But he’d be back in the thick of things, flying. Controlling the nano-UAVs meant he’d be in the air close to them.

And Iran — this was going be something real.

Turk met Li at the baggage claim. her lips were softer than he remembered, her hug more delicious. Oblivious to the crowd passing on both sides, they wrapped themselves together, merging their bodies in long delayed desire.

By the time their lips parted, Turk felt more than a little giddy. He was tempted to blow off the dinner reservations and go directly to the hotel, but Li’s appetite prevailed. Halfway through dinner at the fancy rooftop restaurant the glow on her face convinced him he’d made the right choice.

But it also made it hard to tell her that he had to leave in the morning.

It got harder with every minute that passed. Turk ordered himself another beer, then a glass of rye whiskey when she ordered dessert.

“It’s a beautiful view,” said Li, glancing toward the window. With the sun down, the rooftop patio was no longer oppressively hot, and when she suggested they have a nightcap at the bar there, Turk readily agreed. Words were growing sparser and sparser, and yet he knew he had to talk — had to tell her what was up. But he felt paralyzed.

Every day at work, testing planes or in combat, he made dozens of decisions, immediately and without hesitation. His life, and often those of others, depended on it. He’d learned long ago that worrying too much about whether a decision was right or wrong was worse than making no decision at all. You were always going to do something somewhere sometime that might be wrong; you did your best to keep those numbers down, but you didn’t obsess. Otherwise you did nothing.

And yet he couldn’t move now.

Just blurt it out, he thought. And yet that seemed impossible.

The alcohol was just enough to make him a little sloppy; he held Li’s hand awkwardly as they sat at a small wooden table near the edge of the roof, staring at the city spread out before them.

“Great night,” said Li.

“Definitely.”

“It’s still early.”

“The hotel is pretty close.”

“Is it?”

Her smile made it impossible to say anything else. Turk paid the bill and led her to the car, and a half hour later they were in bed. Time had completely disappeared, and conscious thought as well — for Turk there was only her skin and her scent, her hair and the inviting softness of her breasts.

He drifted off, only to wake with a start an hour later. He still hadn’t told her. Li was sleeping peacefully. Turk got up, pacing the hotel room — he had to tell her, but to wake her up?

He didn’t even know what time he had to leave. He turned on his laptop, angry with himself — what a fool, what an absolute idiotic, ridiculous fool. A damn teenager. An imbecilic middle school kid.

As he tapped his password into the screen, he suddenly found himself hoping the mission had been called off. When he didn’t see the e-mail among the first few entries, he nearly yelped with joy: maybe he had a few days reprieve. Even twenty-four hours, even twelve, would suffice.

But there it was, down at the very bottom, between a nudist site link a friend had sent and an advertisement for car insurance.

Turk took a beer from the minifridge and paced back and forth through the room. He had to tell her, and he had to wake her up. And God, how was he going to tell her?

He could lie and say it had just come up. He just got the e-mail — not in itself a lie, actually.

Technically.

“What are you doing?” Li asked from under the blankets.

He looked at her. Her eyes were still closed.

“I, uh — damn.” Turk sat in the chair opposite the bed.

Li opened her eyes. “What?”

“I…” He knew he was only making it worse by delaying. He ordered his mouth and tongue to speak — better to blurt it out. “I have to leave in the morning on an assignment. It, um, just came up.”

“Huh?” She pushed herself up, propping her head with her right hand. “What’s up, Turk?”

He hated himself. If he was a braver man, he’d leap out the window and disappear.

“I have — something came up today, something important.”

For a moment he thought he would lie — just show her the e-mail and say nothing else. But he couldn’t lie to her. Something in her eyes, in the look she was giving him: it wasn’t disappointment entirely; there was more — loss and vulnerability. He was hurting her, and lying would only make that worse, much worse. Because he didn’t want to hurt her. He loved her, though he’d never used that word.

“I’ve been putting off telling you. They need me to do something really important. I have to leave for Arizona in the morning. I’m sorry. I should have told you, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to ruin the night.”

Li slipped out of the bed, naked. She walked across the room and put her fingers to his lips.

“It’s OK, Turk. I understand. I know it must be important.”

She kissed him, and they folded their bodies together, hers warm, his cold. They went back to bed and made love, though their thoughts were already both moving far apart.

6

This was not what he had in mind. Not at all.

Turk kept his head down as he ran through the scrub at the foot of the hill. Two men were following him, but he was more concerned about what lay in the hills. The curve ahead looked like a perfect place for an ambush.

When Breanna told him that he’d start training right away, he assumed she meant working with the nano-UAVs. But he hadn’t seen the aircraft, or any aircraft, since arriving at the “camp” in the Arizona scrubland. Instead, training had been more like SERE on steroids.

SERE — Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape — was the Air Force survival course designed to help prepare pilots who bailed out over enemy territory. It had never exactly been his favorite class. He’d taken the course twice at Fort Bragg, and nearly washed out both times.

This was a hundred times worse. He’d been here five days and trained the entire time; no breaks. The sun beat down relentlessly during the day. Nighttime temperatures dropped close to freezing. The ranch covered thousands of acres, with hills of all sizes and shapes. There was a dry streambed, an almost wet streambed, and a raging creek. Name a wild beast and it was most likely hiding behind a nearby crag.

The remains of ranch buildings abandoned some thirty or forty years before were scattered in various places. Turk had visited them all, running mostly, occasionally under live fire. For a break the first day, he’d spent two hours on a target range with rifles and pistols nearly as old as he was. That was fun, but as soon as his trainers saw that he was a comparatively good shot — he’d won several state marksman competitions as a Boy Scout — they replaced the gun instruction with more survival training.

They were very big on running, especially from armed pursuers, as he was doing now.

Turk slowed as he reached the crease of the hill, trying to catch his breath and listen. He needed to keep moving, but he didn’t want to fall into a trap.

It was morning, or so he thought — his watch had been taken from him upon arrival. Assuming it in fact was morning, he put the sun over his shoulder and faced what he reckoned was north. His objective lay in that direction.

As he turned, he thought he saw something flickering on the ground in the pass ahead.

A trap?

He couldn’t retreat; the two men chasing him were no more than five minutes behind. Going straight over the top of the hill and trying to ambush whoever was hiding probably wouldn’t work either; he’d been caught in a similar situation the day before, ambushed in his own ambush by a lookout.

Turk stooped and picked up a few small rocks. Then he slipped along the face of the slope, moving as quietly as possible. When he was within three feet of the point where the side of the hill fell off, he tossed two of the rocks down in the direction of the trail. Nothing happened for a moment. Then the barrel of an AK-47 poked around the side of the hill, eight feet below him.

He waited until a shoulder appeared, then launched himself.

The gun rapped out a three-shot burst. Turk’s ears exploded. His fist landed on the side of the man’s face and both of them went down, Turk on top. He punched hard with his right fist and felt the other man’s body collapse beneath him. Turk gave him another punch, then leapt for the rifle, which had fallen to the ground.

He had just reached the stock when something grabbed his leg. He flailed back with the gun, gashing the man he’d jumped hard on the forehead. Blood began to spurt. Turk got to his feet as the man collapsed, horrified yet satisfied as well.

“Hey!” Turk started to yell, his shout was cut off by a thick arm that grabbed him around the throat and began choking. He kicked, then remembered one of the techniques he’d been taught on day two. He grabbed at the elbow with both hands, pushed his chin down, then tried to hook his leg behind his enemy’s, turning toward the arm holding him. But his attacker anticipated that and managed to move around with him. Turk kept trying, shrugging and pulling his shoulders as the other man tightened his grip. Finally, the uneven ground became an ally — they fell together. Turk tried rolling away but the other man’s arm remained clamped to his neck.

“Knock it off! Knock it off!” yelled Danny Freah, appearing above them. Freah was the head of Whiplash’s special operations ground unit and ostensibly in charge of the training, though Turk had only seen him on the first day, and then for about thirty seconds. “Knock it the hell off! Now!”

Turk’s attacker gave him one last squeeze, then pushed him away. Turk coughed violently as he caught his breath. Meanwhile, two men in black fatigues ran out from behind the hill and began attending to the man Turk had bloodied. The man was sitting upright, his entire face a thick frown. As soon as the medics saw he was OK, they started teasing him.

“Pilot beat the shit out of you good, Jayboy,” said one.

“The geek owns your ass now,” said the other.

“Fuck yourself,” said Jayboy. He was in green and brown digi-camo, like the man who’d been choking Turk. “Both of you.”

“I’d say you gentlemen are doing a good job.” Danny put his hands on his hips. “An excellent job. A Delta Force job.”

Jayboy grumbled a curse under his breath. Turk offered his hand to the man who’d been choking him. The soldier frowned and brushed past, joining the knot of soldiers who’d been trailing him and were just now catching up.

“Hey, Grease, no hard feelings,” Turk yelled after him. “You taught me that release. I almost got it.”

Grease — Jeff Ransom — didn’t answer. That wasn’t uncharacteristic, and in some ways was even an improvement: the six-six Delta Force sergeant first class was generally openly antagonistic. But it peeved Turk — in his mind, he’d fought to a draw against big odds. That meant he had gotten the better of his trainers, finally, and the soldiers ought to admit it. They’d sure ranked on him when they had the advantage.

Jayboy — his real name was Staff Sergeant Jayson Boyd — knelt with his head back now, clotting the bleeding in his nose. Turk went over to him and apologized.

“I’m sorry I bashed you,” said Turk.

“Forget it,” grunted Jayboy.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m getting better, huh?”

“Fuck you, Pilot.”

“Turk, you’re with me,” shouted Danny. “Everyone else, knock off for the day. We’re done.”

Finally, thought Turk. Playtime is over. Now I get to fly.

Tired and sore but floating on a wave of triumph, Turk fell in behind Danny. He walked as fast as he could manage but quickly lost ground. His clothes were sopping with sweat and every muscle in his body ached.

He’d considered himself in good shape until this week. The Delta trainers had ragged him about that: “Come on, Pilot. You’re in good Air Force shape. Now it’s time to live with real standards.”

Pilot.

It was the first time Turk had ever heard that used as a slur.

When Danny reached the Humvee, he waved the driver out of the vehicle and got in behind the wheel. He backed the Humvee into a U-turn and waited for Turk.

“I see you’re getting the hang of things,” Danny said as Turk climbed in.

“I didn’t mean to bash him so hard.”

“Hell no, hard is good.” Danny smiled as he put the Humvee in gear and sped away. They skipped the turnoff for the cafeteria — a barn that had been very slightly modified — and headed toward the county highway that divided the property in half.

Maybe we’ll get lunch someplace nice, thought Turk. But when they reached the road, they went straight across, driving along a scrub trail.

“Pretty country,” he told Danny.

“Very nice.”

“So I guess you’re going to tell me what’s going on soon, right?”

“We’ll be there in a few.”

Minutes? Hours? Danny didn’t say. Turk knew better than to press the colonel any further, and contented himself with gazing out the window, looking for the rabid coyotes the Delta boys had warned him about. The parched scrubland became somewhat greener as they drove south along the trail, the hilly land husbanding runoff in underground aquifers. About halfway through the pass, the road narrowed and the sides of the hills sharpened. A week before, Turk would have looked at the etched sandstone and thought how pretty it looked; now he saw it as a perfect place to ambush someone.

The Humvee kicked up a good cloud of dust as they came through the pass. Danny turned to the right, leaving the trail and driving through a flat piece of land. Boulders were sprinkled amid the thigh-high grass; Danny veered left and right to avoid them, navigating to a dry creek bed. Here he turned right, following up it a hundred yards before finding a trail on his left; the trail led to a road, dirt but hard-packed and relatively smooth. Finding the going easier, he sped up.

A sharp curve took them to the head of a valley. A house spread out along the crest of the hill ahead rested like a giant with its arms saddling the rocky top. The sun, now almost directly overhead, glinted off the massive window at the center, the rays pushing aside the massive wooden beams that framed the facade and held the green steel roof and its solar panels in place. The exterior was all glass and logs, though the place could not be called a log cabin without a great deal of irony.

The road stopped about a third of the way up the hill. Danny turned right across a stretch of rough rock bed, bumping his way up a slight incline and around another bend until he came to a driveway of red gravel. This led him toward the house in a series of switchbacks, until at last the back of the structure appeared. An immense portico shaded a cobblestone driveway that circled around the entrance.

Danny parked in the center and got out. Turk followed him into a wide hallway, where they were met by a man in black fatigues. Though imposingly large, the man had no visible weapons, not even a sidearm; he gave Danny an almost imperceptible nod as they moved through a small room and into a narrower hall, passing steps on either side and a pair of bathrooms before entering a large great room faced by the windows Turk had seen from the Humvee.

Four massive couches with attendant armchairs and tables failed to fill the room. The floor’s large flagstone tiles, irregularly shaped and each covering at least five square feet, were overlaid by hand-woven rugs. A pair of fireplaces, each large enough for a man to stand up in, flanked the sides of the room.

Ray Rubeo stood in front of the fireplace on the left, arms folded, staring at the tangle of unlit wood in the iron pit.

“Hey, Doc,” said Danny, walking toward him.

Rubeo turned slowly, apparently lost in thought. The scientist headed a private company, Applied Intelligence, one of the Office of Special Technology’s prime contractors. It was responsible for the AI that guided the Hydras, but that was far from its only contribution to either the command or its Whiplash subcomponent. Rubeo had personally worked on a number of projects Turk had been involved in, including the Tigershark II and the Sabre unmanned attack plane. He was an austere man, peculiar in the way geniuses often are. He was also, as far as Turk knew, rich beyond his needs. But the scientist seemed deeply unhappy, constantly frowning, and acerbic even when generous levity would have been more appropriate.

Rubeo stared at both of them for another few seconds before finally offering a greeting.

“Colonel.” He nodded. “Captain. Have you eaten?”

“I haven’t,” said Turk. “I’m famished.”

“We have a tight schedule,” said Danny. “Things have been pushed up.”

“Yes,” said Rubeo, in his usual withering tone. He was the only man Turk had ever met who could make yes sound like a curse word. “You can eat while I talk,” Rubeo offered. His tone was nearly magnanimous, certainly in contrast to what had come before. “Let’s see what Wendy can make for you, and then we’ll go downstairs.”

Ray Rubeo had asked if they wanted food as a way to delay the briefing, if only for a few moments, but now as he watched Turk Mako eating the turkey sandwich he couldn’t help but feel worse, as if he were watching a condemned man’s final meal.

At least in that case the man would have deserved his fate.

“How much have you figured out on your own, Captain?” asked Rubeo, walking to the side of the basement conference center, a secure area dug deep below the main floor of the house. The building belonged to one of Rubeo’s companies, as did the range where Turk and the Delta team had been practicing. Occasionally used by Special Technology to test out equipment, the property was mainly leased to Delta and SOCCOM, the U.S. Special Operations Command, for various training and practice exercises. It had once been three separate ranches; Rubeo bought them all and merged them to make a property large enough to keep the curious far at bay.

“I’ve been too busy to make guesses,” said Turk. “They’ve been running me nuts. But if we’re talking Iran, I assume we’re going to strike their nuclear facilities.”

“One facility,” said Rubeo. “Just one.”

“This one is special,” said Danny. “It’s hard to get to, and it’s their newest facility. We need to move quickly, while we still have a chance. Even more quickly than we anticipated a week ago.”

“OK, sure,” answered Turk.

Rubeo rubbed his earlobe. There was a small gold-post earring there, its tiny surface smooth from his habit of touching it whenever he encountered a difficult moment, large or small. He waved his hand in front of a small glass panel on the side wall. The lighting dimmed and the wall at the front of the room turned light blue, a presentation screen appearing as lasers in the floor and ceiling created a visual computer screen that took up most of the space. “This should answer most of your questions. It will show the target and the general theory. Please wait until it has finished to ask questions.”

“OK.” Turk took another bite of his sandwich.

Rubeo folded his arms as the video presentation began. There was no sound; he supplied the running narrative.

“The target is accessible through a set of air shafts, utility conduits, and hallways. The main obstacles are at the mouth and a pair of air exchange mechanisms about fifty meters into the facility. Once you navigate past those, the rest becomes easy.”

The screen showed a louvered metal air scoop about three feet high by eight feet wide. The next image showed a mesh screen behind the louvers; this was followed by a schematic.

“We haven’t actually seen the face of these,” added Rubeo, hitting pause by pointing at the lower left corner of the screen. An infrared camera read his gestures. “Due to some technical problems with detecting fine mesh. That means it’s possible there will be no screen. But we are planning for a screen.”

He lowered his finger and the video continued.

“The first thing you’ll do is blow a hole through the screen,” said Rubeo. “There are no electronics in the area of the intakes, and we assume therefore that there are no detection devices, and the explosion will go unheard. In any event, it’s doubtful that there are any measures they can take to stop the attack.”

“I’m hitting it with missiles?” Turk asked.

Rubeo halted the show and glanced at Danny.

“The nano-UAVs,” said Danny.

“That’s why you’re here,” said Rubeo. “Why did they say you were chosen?”

“The Hydras are still being tested.”

“They’re the only weapon that can destroy the bunker,” said Rubeo. “Because of the configuration. You’re going to fly them right into the deepest part of the facility and blow it up.”

Turk left the rest of his sandwich on the plate as Rubeo continued. The mission he was outlining was radical in the extreme. A small group of nano-UAVs would enter through air shafts hidden in a cave. After breaking through an air exchanger and flying down a series of conduits, they would enter the work space and find a room with the targeted equipment. When they ignited, they would set off a large explosion, weakening and hopefully destroying the entire structure.

There was an incredible amount of intelligence behind the presentation Rubeo was moving briskly through. The amount of detail on the air shafts was stunning — dimensions, material, even details on soldering flaws. Turk could see that the operation must have been in planning for months.

Even so, the intelligence had not been perfect. Danny made it clear they were pushing up the timetable.

“What am I flying these from?” Turk asked. “The Tigershark?”

“No,” said Rubeo. “That’s too risky. You’ll get a helicopter in Iran.”

“A helicopter? I can’t fly one. I mean, I can learn—”

“You’re not going to fly it,” said Danny. “We have a team in place to help you.”

“It’s regrettable,” interrupted Rubeo, “but the UAVs have a very limited control range, as you know. In a few months, we will have that solved. But for now…”

He shook his head.

“I have to fly them into the facility?” asked Turk.

“You are not actually flying them, Captain. Your only function is to guide them if there is trouble. You are the override.” Rubeo’s lips curled in a smirk. “Their roles and routes will be preplanned, but if there is a problem, or a contingency we haven’t planned for, we will need you there. You have done this before.”

“I’ve done more than that.”

“You’ll have to get within five miles of both sites,” said Danny, interrupting. “A Delta team is already in-country to help assist you. They’ve been scouting the sites.”

“Five miles is the absolute limit of your range,” said Rubeo. He looked over at Danny. “Closer would be better. May I continue?”

Danny nodded. Neither he nor Turk interrupted again.

Rubeo spoke mostly about the control unit and how the modified UAVs differed from the ones Turk had worked with. The technical aspects were far from Danny’s domain, and he felt like a bystander. And in fact he was, removed from even the actual attack itself.

The plan was the latest of a long campaign to thwart Iran’s dogged efforts at building a nuke. It was the most recent variation in a line of contingencies aimed at taking down the hidden installation. It was better protected than any of the others involved in the Iranian program, deeper and more cleverly constructed. The team inside Iran hadn’t been sent to plot the nano-UAV strike; they were actually in place to assess the effects of a nuclear strike if the President ordered it to proceed. This attack was a recent brainstorm; it had been proposed by Rubeo after he was asked to consult on the analysis of some of the Iranian equipment detected at the site.

Because of that, the ground operation remained a Delta Force show. That meant there would be no Whiplash people at all on the mission. Danny had no doubt about Delta’s professionalism or capabilities; while by design Delta avoided publicity, its handpicked members represented the elite of the world’s military. He himself had worked with Delta on several occasions, with very good results.

However, he had also witnessed some culture clashes when different units worked together. In this case, the fact that the ground unit would be working closely with an Air Force officer they didn’t know could potentially be a problem. Turk would have to quickly earn the team’s respect. Danny wondered if that was doable.

It wasn’t that Danny didn’t think the pilot was a good warrior; on the contrary, he’d already proved himself in battle. But those battles had been in the air, where Turk was a real star. The ground was something different. Even Danny, who as an Air Force officer was constantly dealing with pilots, had trouble dealing with some of their egos. If the head didn’t match the hat, so to speak, there was bound to be trouble.

If everything went as planned, the men would have relatively limited contact with Iranian civilians, and none at all with the military. But nothing ever went as planned.

“All right, I think I have the gist of the thing,” said Turk finally. “When do we start practicing?”

“There’s not going to be any practice,” said Danny. “We have new intel from Iran. We have to move ahead immediately.”

“Right now?”

Danny nodded.

“You shouldn’t have to take over the aircraft,” said Rubeo. “We have maps and other data prepared. You’ll be able to study them on the plane to Lajes.”

“Lajes?” asked Turk.

“In the Azores,” said Danny. “You’ll fly from there to Iran. Direct.”

“Direct? What kind of commercial flight is it?”

“It’s not a commercial flight. It’s a B-2. You’ll parachute in a man bomb.”

7

Some ten hours later Turk stood in the light rain outside a hangar at Lajes Field, trying to shake out the charley horse that had taken hold of his leg. He’d spent nearly the entire ten hours studying the data on the nano-UAVs and the mission. Contained on a slatelike computer, the information was considered so secret that the program displaying it automatically changed its encryption scheme every ten minutes; Turk had to reenter his password each time and press his thumb against the print reader to unscramble it.

The password was the same as his “safe word”—Thanksgiving. He was supposed to work the word into a conversation if there was a question about his identity.

He had never been on a mission where he needed a safe word. Whiplash command had various ways of identifying him, including a special ring on his finger that marked his location to within a third of a meter when queried through a satellite system. Thinking about the contingencies where the system might not suffice was somewhat unsettling.

He was wearing a plain khaki uniform, a bit frayed at the cuff and worn at the knee. He guessed it was an Iranian-style uniform, though he hadn’t bothered to ask.

A half-hour before, a Gulfstream had dropped him off in front of a hangar where an officer waiting in an SUV rolled down the window and said two words: “Wait here.” Then the truck sped off, leaving Turk completedly alone. The rain started a few minutes later. Fortunately, the hangar was open, and he’d waited at the doorway, just out of the storm. Even so, the spray seemed to weigh him down, washing away the surge of confidence that had built on the way there. He didn’t doubt that he could direct the nano-UAVs — it wouldn’t be much harder than any of a dozen things he’d done in the past two months. But surviving on the ground — was he really ready for that?

The whine of jet engines nearby shook away his doubts, or at least postponed them. Turk stepped up to the corner of the hangar doorway as an SUV approached. Right behind it he saw a C-17 cargo plane, a big, high-winged transport. He folded his arms, admiring the taxiing behemoth. He’d once shared the typical fighter jock prejudice against transports and their drivers, thinking the big planes were little more than buses requiring little skill to guide. A few stints in the cockpit of an MC-17R undergoing testing had disabused him of that misperception. On his first flight, the commander had made a turn tighter than a Cessna 182 might have managed on a good day, plopping down on an airfield that looked to be about the size of a bathtub. From that point on he had nothing but respect for Air Mobility jocks and their brethren in general.

Turk moved toward the hangar wall as the plane neared. The C-17 stopped about twenty yards past the hangar. The rear cargo bay opened and the ramp descended slowly, the four “toes” at the end unfolding to the ground. With the engines continuing to whine, two men trotted to the tarmac; both were armed with automatic weapons. The one closest to Turk eyed him quickly, then touched the side of his helmet and began talking into the headset. Meanwhile, a crewman checked the ramp and the sides, making sure they were secure. Moments later what looked like a fat torpedo came down the ramp, propelled by electric motors at the wheels and controlled by a crew chief holding a wired remote. He stopped at the base of the ramp, looked around quickly, then shouted something to the two men with the guns. One of them did something with his hand — a signal to proceed — and the torpedo began making its way to the hangar, flanked by the two guards.

Another man came down the ramp then, a rucksack on each shoulder. He was tall, and silhouetted in the light looked almost like a science-fiction robot rather than something of flesh and blood. Turk stared at him as he approached, then realized he’d seen the saunter before — it was Grease, the Delta Force sergeant he’d trained with. The sergeant ignored him, walking into the hangar behind the cart.

“Grease,” said Turk coming over.

“Captain.” Grease turned back and inspected the cart and its cargo.

“Here’s our chariot, huh?”

Grease’s expression was somewhere between contempt and incomprehension.

“You use the man bomb before?” Turk asked, trying to start a conversation. Danny had already told him that Grease had used the contraption three times.

“Idiotic nickname. Don’t call it that,” muttered Grease.

The man bomb — officially, SOC Air Mobile Stealth Infiltration Non-powered Vehicle JH7-99B — sat on its skid upside down, exposing the belly and a clamshell door. The outer skin was covered with radar absorbing material. If Turk were to touch it — neither he nor anyone else was supposed to do so unnecessarily — it would have felt like slick Teflon.

“We gonna fit in that?” Turk asked.

“One of us will.”

“Just one?”

Grease didn’t answer. The man bomb was designed to hold one person, but it could in a pinch hold two. The pressurized container fit into the bomb bay of a B-2 Spirit, once the aircraft’s Rotary Launcher Assembly was removed.

Contrary to the nickname, the device was not dropped from the aircraft. Instead, its passenger (or in this case, passengers) fell from the container when its target area was reached. After falling a sufficient distance they opened their parachutes and descended to their target in a standard HALO jump, if any High Altitude, Low Opening free-fall could be termed “standard.”

Turk had parachuted and was in fact officially qualified for HALO jumps, though he did not have extensive practice doing so. But because of the importance of the mission, the limited availability of B-2s, and the dangerous area they would be jumping into, the mission planners had decided he would jump in tandem with his Delta guide — Grease.

A tandem jump basically tied both jumpers together in a single harness. This was a fine practice when leaving a plane; there was plenty of room to maneuver to the doorway, and any feelings of paranoia because someone was standing over your shoulder were literally blown away by the rush of the wind as you stepped off. But the man bomb hadn’t been designed with tandem jumps in mind. The two men would have to cradle in each other’s arms during the flight, which even at best speed would take close to eight hours.

Grease dropped his packs a short distance from the hangar and hulked over their transport. He opened the top of one and took out a large, T-shaped metal key, which he inserted into a panel near the front of the man bomb. He turned it and the claw doors opened. He took out two large packs — their parachutes — and some bags of gear from the interior. Satisfied that everything was there, he turned to Turk.

“You have briefing data?” he asked.

“In here.” Turk patted his ruck.

“Hand it over.”

Turk gave him the slate computer. Grease went back to his packs. He took out what looked like a large padded envelope, put the computer inside, then walked to a trash barrel just outside the hangar.

“Hey!” managed Turk as Grease dropped the bag into the can.

Fire shot from the top of the barrel. Turk ran over to rescue the slate computer, only to be grabbed by Grease before he got near. He was pulled back as the can rumbled with an explosion.

“Can’t risk it,” Grease told him. “Had to be destroyed.”

“You gonna blow up the controls, too?”

“Not yet,” said the trooper.

Forty minutes later the two men snuggled uncomfortably together as the man bomb was twisted upside down and then locked in the bay of a freshly fueled B-2. Turk had never felt so claustrophobic in an airplane before.

“Get sleep now,” said Grease as the plane began to move. “We ain’t gonna have much chance once we’re in Iran.”

“Pretty hard to sleep like this.”

Grease made a snorting sound. They were both in flight suits, wearing helmets and oxygen masks. Their sound systems were hooked into the plane’s interphone system; the crew could hear every word, so they were not supposed to talk about the mission.

“You do enough of this,” said Grease finally, “you learn to sleep anywhere, even on your feet.”

It was good advice, but Turk couldn’t take it. The bumps and the whine of the plane as it taxied, the sudden g forces as they rose, the strange sensation of being in a flying coffin — it all offended his innate sense of what flight was all about. He should be at the stick, and if not there, then at least able to sit upright and look around. He felt he needed to control some part of his destiny. Here, he was no more than a soon-to-be-dispensed part.

Turk tried to clear his mind as they flew, but this was futile, too. His thoughts drifted from the mission to Li, then back to the mission. He hadn’t quite memorized the maps; he didn’t realize they’d be destroyed.

As Grease slept, Turk felt as if he’d been packed into a bear’s den, and was stuck through hibernation season. The only thing worse than sleeping, he thought, would be waking up.

A half hour from the drop point the pilot spoke to them for the first time since takeoff, asking if they were awake.

“Yes,” said Grease, his voice thick and groggy.

“Captain Mako?”

“Uh — yeah.” Turk had drifted into a kind of fugue state, awake but not focusing his thoughts in a conscious way. He mumbled something in response, then began struggling to get his mind back in gear.

“We’re ready,” added Grease.

“Release point in twenty-nine minutes,” said the pilot. “We’re on course.”

“Thanks.”

“You sound cheery,” Turk told Grease. He meant it as a joke; there was no emotion in Grease’s voice. But Grease took it literally, and his voice sounded more enthusiastic than Turk could remember.

“I’m ready. We’ll do it.”

The next twenty-eight minutes passed so slowly they felt like days. Then time sped up. Turk braced himself as the bomb bay doors opened. The aircraft bucked — and then there was a whoosh, air rushing around him. His arms flexed involuntarily; Grease folded his own around him, cocooning Turk with his body as they fell.

“Arms out,” Grease reminded him.

Turk struggled to get his arms into the proper position, jerking them against the wind. It was as if something was holding them back — they were cramped and compressed, his muscles atrophied by the long wait in the hold of the plane.

“Just relax,” said Grease.

“Trying.”

“Do it.”

Opening the bay door made the B-2 visible to some radars, and while the flight plan had been designed to minimize the possibility of detection, there was still a chance that the bomber would be picked up by an alert Iranian crew. The plan, therefore, was to avoid opening the parachute until the plane was a good distance away. In effect, this meant waiting. And falling. It was dark, and stare as he might, Turk could not see anything on the ground, not even the little pinpricks of light the briefing had suggested he would see.

The altimeter on his wrist said they were at 17,000 feet.

“We using the chute?” he asked Grease.

“We’re not there yet.”

Turk closed his eyes, waiting.

Finally, it came: a sharp tug back into Grease’s chest as the chute deployed and the straps pulled him tight. His groin hurt where one of the straps pulled up sharp. He told himself it was better than the alternative, and tried to shift to relieve the pressure.

Now they were an airplane, flying to their drop spot. Turk was a useless passenger again, trying to stay as neutral as possible as Grease steered the chute with his togs.

There were lights in the distance, many lights. A city.

They turned in the other direction. Turk thought back to the satellite images of the landing zone, trying to see it in his mind. They were supposed to fall into a valley, right along a rarely used road.

Be just my bad luck to land when a car is coming, he thought.

But that didn’t happen. They hit the ground a fraction of a second sooner than he thought they would; he fell off to the side and Grease followed, thrown off by his passenger’s disarray. The sergeant quickly unbuckled the harness that held them together, unlatched the bags they’d jumped with, then began gathering up the chute.

By the time Turk had taken his helmet off, Grease had the nylon wing bundled and ready to hide. With their packs, they walked toward a rock outcropping about thirty yards from where they’d touched down. Turk remembered it from the satellite image — Grease had come down within millimeters of the planned spot.

As they started to dig, Turk heard a vehicle approaching in the distance.

“Our guys?” he asked Grease, clutching for the pistol in a holster under his jumpsuit.

“Should be. Stay behind the rocks.” The sergeant opened one of the large packs and took out a pair of rifle sleeves. He handed one to Turk. “AK. Don’t shoot me.”

The gun was an AK-47 assault rifle. The external furniture, folding paratrooper stock and all, was old and authentic; the guts of the forty-year-old weapon, however, had been refurbished with precise replacements.

Turk took the gun and ducked behind the rocks. He pulled off his jumpsuit, exposing his Iranian fatigues. The vehicle was still a decent distance away, coming from the south. It was a truck.

Not Delta, he thought. Not our guys. So relax. Just relax. It’s not real until our guys get here.

But it was very real. Grease perched near the road, gun ready. The truck’s lights swept the valley to Turk’s left as it came down the curve. It was a troop truck, an army transport of some sort, slowing as if the driver had seen something.

Turk’s finger tensed against the trigger guard.

The truck’s lights blinked as it approached. Grease stood up and ran to the vehicle. He spoke to the driver, then hopped on the side as the truck turned off the road and headed toward Turk.

Maybe it’s all been an exercise, Turk thought. Just a rehearsal, to make sure I’m ready. We aren’t really in Iran. We aren’t really in danger. I’m back in Arizona, still being tested.

He’d half convinced himself of that by the time the truck pulled up. Grease jumped off the running board and jogged over to him to get the packs. A man wearing plain green fatigues opened the passenger side door and hopped down.

“You’re the pilot?” he asked, holding out his hand to help Turk hook his left arm into the strap of the bag that had contained the guns; it was light now, filled only with ammo. He pulled the ruck for the control unit onto his other arm.

“Turk Mako.”

“Dome.” He said it as if it were the sort of name everyone used. “You’re right on time. Good work. I’ll take your packs.”

“No, no, I got them.” Turk had been told not to let the control unit out of his possession, and he wasn’t giving it up for anyone. His own gear was with Grease in a smaller ruck. He started walking slowly toward the truck.

Dome pushed him gently.

“Come on, we gotta run. Don’t want to sit out here too long. Iranians got a little training unit just up the road. Sometimes the Guard does night maneuvers.”

“Revolutionary Guard?”

“Yeah, well, not the Coast Guard, right? You’re wearin’ their uniform,” Dome added. “We all are.”

Grease got in the cab while Dome helped Turk to the back of the truck, which was empty. They lifted the bags in, then scrambled up after them. The inside of the truck smelled like cow manure.

“Nice flight?” asked Dome.

“I had better.”

“Grease is a lot of fun, huh?”

“Cracked jokes the whole way. Are you two the only guys on the team?”

“The others are watching us, don’t worry.”

They drove for about a half hour. Turk used the time to check his pistol — an Iranian SIG-226 knockoff, known in Iran as a PC-9 ZOAF, with authentic furniture and substituted parts like the AK — then filled his pockets with ammo from his personal ruck. But otherwise the time passed like sand slowly piling up on a beach. His legs had stiffened during the long flight and now felt like they were going to seize up. He flexed them back and forth, then got up and walked around the back of the truck, trying to keep them from turning into steel beams.

“Getting spasms?” asked Dome.

“Yeah.”

“You oughta do yoga. Helps.”

“Really?”

“Shit, yeah. Every morning. Dread’s got some muscle relaxers if you need ’em,” he added. “Tell him.”

“Who’s Dread?”

“Petey Rusco.”

“How come he’s named Dread?”

Dome shrugged. “Not sure. Just is.”

“How come you’re Dome?”

“I used to shave my head. Plus my first name is Dom — Dominick Sorentino. Turk’s your real name?”

“Yup.”

“I thought all you Air Force guys had names like Macho and Quicksilver Hotshot and like that.”

Turk smiled. “Turk’s enough.”

“Yeah,” said Dome. “Call me anything. Just as long as it’s not asshole.”

Camp was a small farm in the side of a hill some twenty miles south of where they had landed. Two soldiers met them near the road and guided the driver as he backed into a ramshackle barn. Dome introduced Turk around, then got him some food.

The team consisted of seven men. All but one was a member of Delta Force, though they never identified themselves as such. It was obvious from their easy camaraderie that they’d trained and operated together for some time; Turk knew they’d been in Iran for several weeks.

The seventh man, Shahin Gorud, didn’t announce his affiliation, but Turk guessed he was CIA. His beard was longer and thicker than the others’, and he was at least ten years older than the next oldest man, David “Green” Curtis, a black master sergeant. Turk couldn’t speak Farsi — sometimes called Persian, Iran’s primary language — but he guessed Gorud was fluent.

“You speak Russian?” asked Gorud warily when they were introduced.

“Yes,” said Turk. “A little. My mother was from Russia.”

Gorud said something quickly; it sounded like, Where did she come from?

“Moscow.”

“Say it in Russian.”

Turk did so, then added, in slightly hesitant Russian, that he didn’t remember much of the language.

“You’ll do. You know more than the Iranians. Just keep your mouth shut unless I say to talk.”

“How did you know I spoke Russian?”

Gorud smirked.

Green was the father figure of the team, and while not technically the highest in rank, was the de facto leader, the first one the others would look to for direction. The officer in charge, Captain Thomas Granderson, was surprisingly young, just a year or two older than Turk. He spoke Farsi and Arabic fluently, though a notch less smoothly than Gorud and Grease. Dread — Petey Rusco — was one of two advanced combat medics on the team. The other was Tiny — Sergeant Chris Diya — who in time-honored style was the exact opposite of “tiny” at six-eight, even taller than Grease. While in a pinch all of the men were capable of doubling as medics, Dread and Tiny could have done duty as doctors in any emergency room on the planet.

Red — the truck driver, whose hair (now dyed black) gave him the nickname — was a sergeant from Macon, Georgia, and sounded like it, too, at least when he spoke English rather than Farsi. The last member of the team, Staff Sergeant Varg Dharr, was a pudgy soldier who did much of the cooking, and was responsible for the spiced goat that Turk devoured after arriving. All of the men looked at least vaguely Iranian, and all but two had Middle Eastern roots on at least one side of their family.

After he’d eaten, Turk got rid of his jumpsuit, then checked his personal gear. There wasn’t much: aside from a change of underwear and socks, he had an off-the-shelf GPS unit, water, and first aid essentials. Most important was a satcom unit that looked like a standard Iridium satellite phone but was programmed with a more advanced encryption set. He shouldn’t need much more: the reason he was here was the larger rucksack he kept close at hand, which contained the control unit, its antenna, and a backup battery. If all went well, they’d be back home in three days; five tops.

Turk took out the control unit and ran it through its diagnostics, making sure it hadn’t suffered during the trip. The controls consisted of three pieces — a nineteen-inch flat screen, a sending unit, and a panel that held the actual flight controls. This looked like a miniature version of a Flighthawk, with a few extra joysticks attached to either side. A standard keyboard sat in the middle; at the top was a double row of function keys, whose purpose changed depending on the situation and the program. Two touch pads sat at the bottom; these were similar to the touch pads on a standard laptop. Dedicated keys on the right controlled the general flight patterns and swarm commands; three extender keys on the left changed the function of each. The joysticks were flightsticks or throttles, as designated by the user. In theory, up to eight nano-UAVs could be directly guided at any one time, though it was impractical to override the computer for more than a few moments if you were flying more than two.

Even one was difficult to work at all but the slowest speeds. If he had to take over, Turk knew he would designate the course and allow the computer to fly the plane along it. Assuming, of course, there was time.

Granderson and Gorud squatted down on the floor next to him as he finished his tests.

“You’re ready?” asked Gorud.

“Yes.”

“They want us to go into action tomorrow night,” said Granderson. “There are two windows, one starting at eleven, the other at three. I’d like the eleven. Gives us a lot more room to maneuver. But the schedule will be tighter getting to the airport where we’ll meet your ride. We’ll have to travel while it’s still daylight. Just for an hour or so, but still.”

“It’s not a problem,” replied Turk. “Not for me.”

“Good.”

The “windows” were times when an X-37B delivery vehicle would be in the vicinity overhead and in range to launch the nano-UAVs. The X-37B was an unmanned space shuttle. While the X designation was supposed to indicate it was experimental, in fact the shuttle had been flying missions since 2011. Just over twenty-nine feet long and nine and a half-feet high, there was more than enough room for the three dozen nano-UAVs in each spacecraft’s cargo bays. The X-37Bs had been launched about the time Turk was landing in the Azores.

“So where’s my helicopter?” he asked.

“We’re meeting it in Birjand,” said Gorud. He took a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolding it stiffly. The paper was thick and stiff, treated with a waxy substance that would make it burn quickly. The map printed on it was a hybrid of a satellite image and a more traditional road map.

“Why?” asked Turk.

Gorud gave him a look that told Turk he was not used to being questioned. Turk had seen that look before, from Nuri Abaajmed Lupo, the lead CIA officer on the Whiplash team. It must be common to all CIA employees, he thought, implanted when they got their IDs.

“Because it’s convenient,” said Gorud. “The security there is also nonexistent. It’s close enough to where we have to go that we won’t stretch fuel reserves. And it’s the way I drew it up. Enough reasons for you?”

“Do they teach that look in the Agency?” retorted Turk.

“What?”

“I asked a simple question. You don’t have to get all shitty about it.”

Grease clamped his hand on Turk’s shoulder, attempting to calm him. Turk brushed it away.

“It’s already arranged,” said Granderson quietly. “The helicopter’s going to be waiting.”

“What is it?” asked Turk.

“A Russian Mi-8. It’s leased to a Russian company. It will fit with your cover story, if that’s ever needed.”

“How far is it from Birjand to the target?” He looked at the map. Turk wasn’t a helicopter pilot, and far from an expert on Russian helicopters like the Mi-8, an old workhorse that came in dozens of variations. But he knew helicopters in general, and he knew that the distance between Birjand and the target area would test the chopper’s range.

“Roughly four hundred and fifty miles,” said Gorud. His tone remained hostile. “Yes, it’s far. We’ll carry extra fuel, and refuel halfway. The flight itself shouldn’t be a problem. The Russian oil exploration company that uses it makes that flight through the area all the time. We get it at 2000 hours, refuel by midnight, begin the operation at 0100. Then we fly on to the farm near Dasterjad, wait out the day, and leave.”

“Disney World after that,” said Granderson. He got a few smiles, but no laughs.

Turk visualized the map he’d half memorized on the flight out to the Azores. The target was a hidden complex in Abuzeydadab northeast of Nantz, which itself held a major facility, though its existence had been made public by the West years before. Abuzeydadab’s had not. The Iranians believed the U.S. didn’t know about it, and had studiously avoided anything that would draw attention to it. That gave the operation certain advantages; chief among them was the absence of serious air defenses or a detachment of troops. They’d have to worry about shoulder-launched weapons — MANPADS, or Man Portable Air Defense Systems — and grenade launchers, but if things went well they wouldn’t be close enough for those to be a problem.

The actual penetration of the plant and the final attack were preset with the computer, so assuming nothing went wrong, Turk believed the toughest part of the job would be “picking up” the nano-UAVs as they descended. This was as much a matter of being in the right spot as pressing the proper buttons when they needed to be pressed. When prompted, the control unit broadcast a lower-power signal for the aircraft to home in on. But to make sure he got the connection, he’d have to start broadcasting well before the UAVs were due to arrive, and stay within a two-mile-square box. Once the assault began, two UAVs would circle above the attack area, relaying the signals to the rest of the swarm. They would self-destruct when the last signal from the swarm members was lost, a security precaution hard-wired into the units and that could not be overridden.

Two miles sounded like a large area, but a helicopter flying in the vicinity for nearly twenty minutes as the mission unfolded was certain to attract attention. Fortunately, the area to the east of Abuzeydadab was desert and largely empty. Even if they were heard, it would presumably take the Iranians a while to respond.

“Problem!” said the man at the door of the barn. “We got a car coming down the driveway.”

“Lights,” said Granderson, even as they were doused.

Grease grabbed Turk by the arm and began tugging him toward a window at the back. “Stay close to me.”

“Who’s in the car?”

“Just come on.”

Turk tried to object, but it was useless — Grease pushed him to the ground, smothering him with his body as gunfire erupted at the front of the house.