Night of the Hawk

SIX

General Lieutenant Anton Voshchanka, flying in a Mil-8D assault/transport helicopter configured as a flying command center and communications aircraft, saw plumes of smoke rising from Chernyakhovsk Air Base in central Kalinin. After ordering his pilot to descend and get closer for a better look — they were at four thousand meters altitude, near the maximum service ceiling of the heavily laden Mil-8 helicopter, to avoid sporadic ground fire from Russian infantry — he saw tanks on the airfield itself beginning to take up what appeared to be defensive positions around the air base’s perimeter. There was no mistaking the identification of those tanks — old, slow T-60s of his Thirty-first Armored Brigade, punching through what was very determined resistance by front-line Russian T-72 and T-80 main battle tanks. “Status of the operation against Chernyakhovsk?” he asked his executive officer.

The executive officer relayed the question to the radio technicians. “Very good, sir,” came the reply. “The Thirty-first reports that it holds the CIS command post, radar facility, and flight line. Several skirmishes still being reported, including the bomb-storage area and armory building. Several aircraft escaped, but our forces are in control of the airfield.”

“Casualties?”

“Light to moderate was the last report from Colonel Shklovski,” the exec replied. “He’ll have a detailed report for you, but he reports his unit is fully combat-ready and taking up defensive positions.”

“Very good,” Voshchanka replied. Speed and shock were key elements in this operation; by the time the Russians had realized what was happening, his forces were on top of them. Since Voshchanka hadn’t ordered a slaughter of Russian soldiers, resistance was useless. “I don’t want a bloodbath, and I don’t want to lose those munitions if possible. Tell Colonel Shklovski to isolate those areas and take a surrender. We’ll need those weapons.” The executive officer passed on the order. “Report on the status of Seventh Division in Kaliningrad?”

“Not yet contained, sir,” the executive officer replied, referring to his notes transcribed from radio messages constantly being received. “General Gurvich and Twentieth Amphibious Brigade control the headquarters building of the Russian fleet and have surrounded the base, and Thirty-third Armored Brigade controls Proveren Naval Air Base. Our aircraft attacked and heavily damaged one warship trying to leave port. The others are staying at dockside, except three that were repositioned, per your orders, to block the deep-water canal across Kaliningrad Bay. Most vessels examined report only one-third to one-half manned. Most soldiers and sailors are reportedly staying in their barracks or off-base and trying to decide what to do. This allows our forces more freedom to get in position. We control one television station and four radio stations in Kaliningrad. The city appears to be taking a wait-and-see attitude.”

Voshchanka nodded — that wait-and-see attitude had come about after a very stiff price was paid. The commanders of Kaliningrad Naval Base and Proveren Naval Air Base, the two main Russian military bases in Kalinin oblast, had each accepted bribes totaling almost a quarter of a million American dollars to stay out of the conflict. One reason why the air base at Chernyakhovsk was aflame was that there was no more bribe money to be paid to that base’s commander, and he resisted.

But it was money well spent.

One of the keys to his successful occupation of Kalinin oblast and Lithuania was the reaction from the Baltic city of Kaliningrad itself, the largest and strategically most important city in the Kalinin oblast and certainly the most important in this entire operation. With a population of over four hundred thousand in the city itself and nearly seven hundred thousand in the western half of the territory, including a great number of wealthy businessmen and retired politicians and military members, it was necessary to not threaten the civilian population while “subduing” the many military bases and installations in the area. Fortunately, because of the Byelorussian military presence on behalf of the Commonwealth, there were almost as many loyal Byelorussian soldiers in Kaliningrad as there were Russian soldiers and sailors. Voshchanka’s troops also found a good number of Commonwealth soldiers and officers from many other republics that agreed with the reasons for doing away with the Commonwealth’s influence.

His military takeover was beginning to turn into something of a revolution.

The work he was doing here in Kalinin oblast was not designed as a sweeping military victory: Voshchanka, despite General Gabovich’s assurances of cooperation and assistance, harbored no illusions about the power of the Russian Republic. They would not think fondly of having Kaliningrad invaded and occupied. But it was necessary to put the Russians in Kalinin in a “clinch,” tie them up, and take strategic pieces of ground so he would have very strong foundations to stand on when negotiations began. Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States had no money and no stomach for battle; Belarus had nothing to lose.

Voshchanka would win in Kalinin if he could take important strides without looking like a mad butcher.

But Lithuania was different.

It was necessary to occupy cities and towns, gobble up territory, and establish firm roots as fast as possible. The world would not stay stunned forever — eventually they would act, and they may vote to try to expel Byelorussian forces from Lithuania. Voshchanka had to move swiftly to consolidate his gains, and then prove that any attempt to try to kick him out of Lithuania would do more harm to Lithuania and to the surrounding republics than to Belarus …

… and part of that threat was his arsenal of SS-21 Scarab missiles now being dispersed throughout northern Belarus. Those small, road-mobile nuclear missiles were the keys to his success. The three nuclear-tipped missiles delivered to Voshchanka were deployed under heavy guard at a secret launch base in northern Belarus, and the others were being dispersed throughout the countryside. But while dispersing them to various launch sites was important, maintaining radio contact with each one of them was even more important.

“I need a report on the SS-21 deployment immediately,” Voshchanka ordered. It was risky using the radios to contact his headquarters about such a secret topic, but the pace of his deployment and what he would eventually order the Byelorussian president, Pavel Svetlov, to tell the world, all hinged on the successful deployment of those weapons. “Use the scrambled data link when we are within range.”

“That will not be for almost an hour, sir, until we are closer to Lida Naval Base,” the executive officer said. “The data link is not secure this far out.”

“Very well,” Voshchanka said. “But hay’, that report ready as soon as we arrive.” The faster he got those Scarab missile launchers safely tucked away, he thought, the faster this invasion could be completed.

“Lida Naval Approach, this is flight seven-one-one flight of two, forty kilometers southwest, one thousand meters, heading zero-niner-zero- correction, zero-niner-five. Over.” The young Belarus pilot who made the position report brushed an irritating drop of sweat out from under the hard rubber of his oxygen mask. The day’s security procedures dictated that all heading reports on initial call-up be given in odd numbers-he had almost forgotten that. There were about a dozen surface-to-air missile batteries along the Lithuanian-Belarus border that would let him know immediately if he made a mistake like that again.

“Flight seven-one-one, Lida Naval, fly heading zero-four-five for five seconds for identification, then resume own navigation. Acknowledge.”

“Seven-one-one acknowledge.” Flight Lieutenant Vladi Doleckis used two fingers of his right hand to gently bank his Mikoyan-Gurevich-27 fighter-bomber to the northeast, counted the required time silently to himself, then resumed his original course. His wingman, Flight Lieutenant Frantsisk Stebut, flying in close formation off his left wingtip in a “carp-mouth” Sukhoi-17 reconnaissance fighter, responded. Staying in pretty good fingertip formation, Frantsisk looked as if he were dangling on a string far below Doleckis, although he was only a few meters away.

Air-traffic control in the outlying parts of Belarus was poor these days — obviously Lida Naval Approach was not receiving his encoded beacon, but a primary radar blip only — and such small diversions were commonplace. The young, blond-haired, blue-eyed fighter-bomber pilot didn’t mind. Flying was fun for him, no matter what the rules and restrictions were, and he wasn’t going to let a little radar breakdown spoil his day.

“Seven-one-one, radar identified. Advise before changing altitudes. Flight east of meridian twenty-six prohibited until further notice. Lida Naval out.”

“Seven-one-one. I understand. Out.” That was fine with him — he didn’t want to get involved in the little skirmish brewing up in Lithuania anyway. The “ground hounds” of the Home Brigade from Smorgon were on the move to squash some sort of rebellion or uprising in Lithuania, and although the Smorgon air units had been activated and the Lida and Ross air bases were put on alert — General Voshchanka was in overall charge of all the northern Belarus military forces and was without question the most powerful and influential man in the Belarus military— Doleckis’s unit had not been tasked. Sending in high-performance bombers against the Lithuanians was like killing an ant with a wrecking up eventually, either to deploy to occupied Lithuania or to drive off attacks from the Commonwealth, from Russia, or from the Western nations. As much as he enjoyed the thought of pitting his skills against other MiG-27 pilots or foreign defense systems, he wasn’t looking forward to a war.

“Lida Naval,” Doleckis’s wingman grumbled on the interplane frequency. “What a joke. When are they going to change that name?”

“Whenever the bureaucrats and politicians finally decide to get off their lazy butts,” Doleckis replied with a laugh. The name of that base was one of the many incongruities of life in Belarus these days, one of the bureaucratic quirks that would one day be corrected.

Lida Naval Air Base, about one hundred and twenty kilometers west of Minsk and about two hundred and forty kilometers east of the Baltic, was once a large Soviet naval air base, in support of the Baltic fleet. Lida once had a squadron of twenty Sukhoi-24 fighter-bombers and MiG-23 fighter escorts, designed for tactical and naval reconnaissance, close air support, naval bombardment, and antiship missions in the Baltic. Of course, now independent Belarus had no navy and no naval air force, but Lida still held its “naval” designation. Stupid. One of the useless remnants of a defunct Russian society.

Well, maybe not everything about the Russians was so bad: they built some great warplanes, like this MiG-27 fighter-bomber. It was incredibly sleek and slippery, with a top speed of almost twice the speed of sound at high altitude and over Mach-i at low altitude. It could carry over four thousand kilograms of external stores and it had a range in excess of six hundred kilometers with external fuel tanks. This older D-model MiG-27 was fitted with some pretty fancy hardware as well: Doppler automatic-navigation units, an attack radar and laser rangefinder in the nose, a Sirena-3 radar warning system that could warn of nearby enemy radars, an infrared scanner for searching and attacking ground targets, and the upgraded ASP-5R solid-state fire-control system for the weapons and cannon. His D-model MiG-27 still had the titanium “bathtub” armor around the cockpit, which combined with the external bomb load took away his supersonic speed with weapons on board, but it was still a real hot rod. The thing was nearly as old as he was, but Doleckis loved flying it.

First Lieutenant Frantsisk Stebut’s single-engine, swing-wing Sukhoi-7 was a C-model, older than Doleckis’s MiG-27. It was configured for close air-support gunnery, with two 23-millimeter SPPU-22 gun pods on each wing, two 30-millimeter cannons in each wing root, and one large fuel tank on the centerline hardpoint; two of the SPPU-22 gun pods were configured to fire rearward, so ground targets could be attacked even after the SU-17 overfiew its target.

One unfortunate characteristic of Belarus’s Air Force was the strange amalgamation of aircraft in its inventory-they generally flew the castoffs of the old Soviet Air Force or the old Warsaw Pact nations, sparingly flying the aircraft that were serviceable and cannibalizing the others for spare parts.

Doleckis, one of the best bombardiers in the Belarus Air Force, with or without a laser rangefinder, had been scheduled for one of his four-a-month currency flights, but when he arrived at the base the squadron was on alert and his orders had been changed. His MiG-27 was armed to the teeth with a dazzling array of weapons: four cluster bombs on rear bomb racks, each with seventy little antipersonnel bomblets; two 57-millimeter rocket pods on air-intake hardpoints; one external fuel tank on a centerline hardpoint; and two AA-2 heat-seeking air-to-air missiles on the small outboard wing pylons. The big 30-millimeter ground-attack cannon in the belly held three hundred rounds of armor-piercing ammunition. It was the most armament he had flown with since graduating from fighter-bomber school in Tblisi …

… and, just like after flight school, the arming switches for all the weapons were covered and sealed with small steel wires and maintenance lead seals. He had been given strict orders not to activate any switch without specific permission — even breaking a safety wire without permission would lead to disciplinary action. No matter. The switches were out of the way, so accidental activation wasn’t usually a problem — but God, did he want to arm up those weapons and let ‘em fly! Here he was, by himself, loaded with several thousand kilograms’ worth of fine weaponry, but he had been given no orders except to stand by and wait. He knew he was being kept on hand in case he was needed by General Voshchanka, and he liked the idea of getting a frantic call for assistance from the General himself, but he knew that it was unlikely. Stebut’s camera pod had film in it, but neither of them had been briefed on exactly what to do, so they did nothing but fly. Stand by and wait. Bore some holes in the sky …

“Flight seven-one-one,” came the radio message from the approach controller from Lida, “fly heading three-two-zero, descend and maintain seven hundred meters and contact Lida naval command post on local channel nine. Acknowledge.”

“Flight seven-one-one, three-two-zero, seven hundred meters. Going channel nine. Good day.” Finally, maybe some action! This new vector would take him closer to the Lithuanian border, and the altitude would put him only one hundred meters above the highest terrain in the sector. A call to the command post while only a hundred meters above the beautiful forests of the Demas River valley meant something was happening …

Lieutenant Doleckis excitedly switched his radio to the new frequency: “Lida naval control, flight seven-one-one on channel nine. Over.”

“Seven-one-one, control, roger,” the silky female voice of their command post radio-duty technician replied. She was a red-haired beauty from Russia — another good Russian import — that Doleckis had been wanting to get to know for weeks. He could listen to her luscious voice all day long. Breathily, she said, “Seven-one-one, establish tactical orbit at coordinates poppa-kilo, kilo-juliett, five-zero, three-zero, and stand by. Over.”

“Seven-one-one copies all,” Doleckis replied, reading back the coordinates and pulling out a cardboard chart from his flight suit left-leg pocket. He found the coordinates on the chart, just north of a small village ten kilometers from the border. A standard tactical orbit was figure-eight racetrack with twenty-kilometer legs, 10 degrees of bank, no more than five hundred meters above ground level or as directed by tactical considerations. It was a good pattern for visually searching an area-he was definitely looking for something. He was allowed to vary the centerpoint of the orbit to avoid any chance of attack by enemy ground forces, but here there was little chance of that.

Doleckis configured his MiG-27 for a ground-attack patrol. He brought the power back to 60 percent, manually extended his variable geometry wings to full extension, and lowered one notch of flaps to maintain stability in slow flight — losing control at this relatively low altitude could be disastrous.

“Seven-one-one flight, flaps fifteen, wing sweep sixteen,” Doleckis warned his wingman. He waited a few seconds, then checked to make sure Stebut was configured properly — the standard wingman’s job was to “make your plane look like mine at all times,” but sometimes wingmen got complacent.

Stebut was on the job, settled in nicely with his own flaps and wings extended. The Sukhoi-17 was actually larger, faster, and could carry more weapons than the MiG-27, but the newer avionics and much greater accuracy of the MiG-27 made it the aircraft of choice for most ground-attack chores, especially in situations where low collateral damage or the presence of friendly troops in the area were concerns.

Doleckis had no useful landmarks to use except for the village — it was all thick forests below, the northern part of the world-famous Berezina Preserve — and if he had to find someone or something down there, it was going to be tough. He set the Doppler navigation set to the coordinates so he wouldn’t stray across the Lithuanian border. “Seven-one-one established in orbit,” Doleckis reported.

“Flight seven-one-one, roger,” the controller replied. “Report fuel status.”

He had been airborne for only twenty minutes when he got the call, and he had an external tank nearly full of fuel — at this low power setting, and so close to base to begin with, he could stay aloft forever. “Seven-one-one fuel status two hours.” His endurance was actually a bit longer, but if he said three hours they were probably going to be up there for three hours.

“Control copies, two hours,” the red-haired controller replied. “Stand by… Vladi.”

Well, well, at least she knows my name, Doleckis thought, forgetting about the(fact that he could very well be doomed to orbit that spot for the next two hours. He was going to have to look up that gorgeous redhead when he got back.

The clearing had to be no more than ninety feet wide at its widest point, because when Major Hank Fell, the pilot of the CV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft, nestled his beast into that clearing, there was virtually no room between the rotor tips and the thick, gnarly branches of the pine and spruce trees nearby — and the CV-22 had a clearance of about eighty-five-and-a-half feet. A sudden gust of wind, an errant whipping of a branch by his own rotor wash, and one of those branches could easily hit them.

The crew chief and door gunner on the CV-22 aircrew, Master Sergeant Mike Brown, was outside the aircraft, near the nose, wearing his helmet, with a long interphone cord attached and plugged into the jack near the entry hatch. He was scanning the skies with a pair of binoculars when the jet passed almost directly overhead. There was no chance the pilot would see them through the foliage unless they were very, very lucky, but Brown still crouched lower and half-expected a bomb or something to drop on top of them at any second.

“Got a real good look at them that time, sir,” Brown reported, breathing fast and shallow in the microphone, almost hyperventilating. He ‘cupped his gloved hands over his mouth, breathing in his own exhalations for a few seconds, and waited for his pounding heart to calm down before continuing: “A MiG-27 bomber and a Sukhoi-17 bomber. The leader’s outfitted for long-range close air support, and he’s got Atolls on the wings as well. I couldn’t tell what his wingman’s got, but they could be gun pods. I don’t think they saw us.” He started a timer on his wristwatch. “I’ll time their patrol pattern to see how much time we have to lift off.”

Hank Fell and Martin Watanabe, the CV-22’s copilot, were scared and nervous as well, so they knew exactly what Brown was feeling — they could easily hear the roar of those jets flying overhead, even over their own engine noise. “Copy,” Fell said. “He wasn’t transmitting anything, so I think we’re safe for now. Be sure to check the undercarriage.”

Fell, who had been flying the CV-22 PAVE HAMMER aircraft at treetop level since ten minutes before exiting Polish airspace for Byelorussia, had managed to drop his CV-22 into the clearing when they saw the Soviet-made planes suddenly pop into view about fifteen miles away. Fortunately the fighters were in a gentle turn, so he had a few more needed seconds to respond. He picked the clearing and dove for it. No sooner had his wheels hit the soft dirt than the fighters appeared. The eighteen Marines on board immediately exited the aircraft and took up defensive positions around the clearing. One squad had a Stinger missile, and was tracking the bombers every second.

“Undercarriage is underwater,” Brown reported as he examined the underside of the CV-22. The clearing was partially flooded by the spring rains, the nose gear was completely submerged, and water covered the lower part of the forward radome and bottom of the FLIR sensor ball. “Shut down the radar and FLIR or you’ll lose them.”

“Done,” Watanabe reported.

Luckily the rear of the aircraft was high and relatively dry, so the aircraft was not completely buried in mud. “It might take a high-power setting to free the nose,” Brown surmised, “but your aft trucks are free. It’ll be a hairy lift-off.”

“Great,” Fell said. “How far are we from the LZ?”

Watanabe punched up the computer flight plan on one of the big center multifunction displays. “A good seventy miles,” he replied. “Twenty to thirty minutes’ flight time.”

Fell looked out at his two rotors, spinning at idle power. A V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft burned a lot of fuel turning those big rotors, even at idle power, and that was something they could not afford now. Since lifting off from the U.S.S. Valley Mistress a few hours ago, they had flown almost three hundred miles in a circuitous route, avoiding radar sites in Kalinin and the Byelorussian military bases along the borders. The CV-22, with eighteen Marines and all their gear on board, had a combat radius of only five hundred miles — they carried no extra fuel and did not get an aerial refueling — but they were still a long way from their objective. Every minute they spent idling on the ground sapped a lot of their range, and no one relished the thought of walking through these swamps, being chased by the Byelorussian Army.

“We can’t afford to wait,” Fell decided. “Mike, get everyone back on board. When the Sukhois fly overhead heading eastbound, we’ll be right behind them. Hopefully when he makes his turn back to the west, he won’t see us.”

The Marines had just hustled back on board and were strapped in when Brown tapped on the pilot’s right-side windscreen and pointed to the sky. “Here they come!” he shouted as he dashed for the entry door. Fell pushed the power controls forward—60-, 70-, 80-percent power. Nothing…

“Overhead, ready, ready… now.

Fell pushed the power to 90 percent. The tail and main landing gear lifted off, but the nose gear was still stuck fast. He pushed it to 95-percent power. The tail swerved to the right from the rotor wash, and the aircraft began to vibrate so hard that the nose gear seemed as if it would snap off. “Careful,” Brown radioed on interphone. “Trees hitting the rudder.”

Fell pulled back on the cyclic-control stick to settle the main landing gears back on the ground. As he did so, the nose gear suddenly popped out of the mud and the CV-22 skidded backwards directly into a stand of pines.

“Tailplane in the trees!” Brown shouted. Stabilize! Stabilize!”

Somehow Fell managed to keep the CV-22 from whipping out of control. With the aircraft no more than a few feet above the ground, he nudged the CV-22 forward until the horizontal stabilizer was free of the foliage.

“I see a few branches stuck in the tailplane,” Brown said. “Want me to go out and get them off?”

Fell briefly switched the flight-control system to TEST, which would momentarily switch him out of helicopter to airplane mode so he could test the elevator. He felt no serious resistance. “No. Stay put,” Fell said. “I don’t think they’ll be a factor.”

The two pilots were never so relieved in their lives as they were when they cleared the treetops a few seconds later.

Fell retracted the landing gear and rotated the nacelles down to 45 percent, to the point when the CV-22’s computerized flight-control system transitioned from helicopter to airplane mode, then turned slightly right to get behind the Sukhoi- 17 that they could see a mile or two in the distance. They stayed right at treetop level, flying so close to the trees that they were skimming the bottom of the fuselage right at the tree’s tips.

Well, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to ignore the branches stuck in the elevator, Fell thought a few moments later. As the CV-22 transformed itself into an airplane, the effect of the tailplane and the branches stuck in it became more and more pronounced. “Shit. I’ve got some binding in the stick,” Fell said on interphone. It took a great deal of pulling on the control stick to move the elevator. “Christ, I hope those branches blow off or something. It’ll be a bitch to—”

“They’re turning right!” Watanabe shouted. Fell immediately turned left, trying to stay behind the Sukhoi-17s as much as possible. The Byelorussian pilots were turning tighter this time, and it was impossible to stay behind them. “Want to find another place to set down?”

The trees were heavier than ever in this area. There was only one choice — the river itself. “Crew, stand by for wet landing,” Fell shouted, swiveling the engine nacelles to go from airplane back to helicopter mode again. “I’m going for the river.”

There was definitely something out there, Doleckis thought. For the second time since starting his patrol orbit, he saw a shape, moving down low over the trees. But every time he focused on that spot, nothing was there. Strange.

“Flight, did you see some movement over there at five o’clock position?”

There was a momentary pause; then: “Negative, lead. I don’t see anything.”

Doleckis keyed his microphone switch: “Control, seven-one-one ah, are there other aircraft participating in this patrol out here?”

“Seven-one-one, negative,” the redhead replied.

“Are you showing anyone else on radar?”

There was a slight pause; then: “Seven-one-one, intermittent primary targets in your vicinity, slow-moving, altitude unknown. Possible bird activity in your area. Use caution.”

Birds? Possible, but not likely. It was spring, but not quite bird-migration time in northern Europe. “Control, I haven’t seen any birds out here. What exactly am I supposed to be looking for out here, Control?”

“Seven-one-one, would you like to speak with Alpha for a clarification?”

Talking with Alpha meant talking with the fighter wing commander, and that was never a really good thing to do unless you had an emergency. “Negative, Control. But I would like permission to alter my patrol orbit to look up and down the river. Over.”

“Request to alter patrol orbit on request, seven-one-one, stand by.”

Stand by… for what? He cursed silently. Christmas?

Doleckis strained to look in the area where he thought he last saw the… well, whatever it was there was nothing now. He considered just heading off over there to check it out, but if the wing commander was going to act on his request, the first thing he would do is check his radar track. If he already showed off course, it would look bad for him. The Demas River also curled northeastward very close to the Lithuanian border, and if the wing commander saw him flying toward the border he might really get upset. Better stick with the directed orbit until told otherwise …

But that was not his way of doing things.

Doleckis made a gentle bank turn to the right, carefully scanning to the east at the spot he had been seeing the motion.

There was something out there…

But his wingman had slipped out of position in the unexpected turn and had disappeared from sight behind him. “Lead, pull a little power for me,” Stebut radioed. Doleckis reduced power and made a few wide skidding turns, and Stebut eventually slipped back into formation, a bit wider and looser this time.

“Seven-one-one, Control, are you experiencing difficulty?”

Well, they noticed that I cut my orbit short right away, Doleckis thought. Too bad… “Negative. Seven-one-one is investigating a possible contact, near the patrol orbit reference coordinates. Will advise. Over.”

“Seven-one-one, roger …” The controller hesitated, obviously not prepared to issue a clearance for that action but hesitant to order him not to do it either. “Say your intentions, seven-one-one.”

“I intend to advise you when I’ve made contact or when I return to the patrol orbit, Control,” Doleckis said — then, to add a bit of sarcasm to the conversation, he added, “Stand by.”

Fell had maneuvered the CV-22 PAVE HAMMER to the south side of the river, as close to the trees as he could safely take it. The rear cargo door was open, and several people could be seen standing in it. While two Marines acted as helpers and another scanned the skies with binoculars, Sergeant Brown was trying to lasso the tree branch stuck in the elevator hinge. The CV-22 was still flying along at nearly sixty miles per hour, with the engine nacelles at 45 percent, and it made their efforts very difficult.

Brown had just looped his rope over the branch and was trying to decide the best way to work it free when the spotter pointed toward the sky. Brown followed his outstretched arm and gasped in surprise. “The MiG and the Sukhoi are back,” he reported on interphone. “Six o’clock, about seven miles. They’re low and slow. I wanna pull this branch out. Guard the controls.”

“Do it, Mike,” Fell said, “then close that cargo door!”

Brown took a good pull on the rope, and most of the branch came free. “There’s still some stuck in the hinge, but I don’t think it’ll flutter on you. Cargo door clear to close. Five seconds and you’re clear to maneuver.”

Watanabe hit the switch to close the cargo door, then turned to Fell. “What are we going to do?”

“No use trying to outrun or outgun them,” Fell said. “We hide.” Fell continued on for a few more seconds until he found a slight right-hand bend in the river, did a fast one-eighth turn until he was facing the oncoming Byelorussian planes, switched to full helicopter mode, then translated left until the tips of his portside rotor were whipping into the trees. He descended until the radar altimeter showed zero.

Brown was quickly switching from window to window, keeping an eye on the position of his aircraft. “Belly wet,” he announced. “Don’t move any farther left or we’ll be in the trees.” He moved over to the right side of the PAVE HAMMER aircraft. The rotors were churning up the narrow river into a white froth. “Whipping up lots of water on the right — he’ll spot that from the air.”

Maybe hiding wasn’t such a hot idea after all — we might have to fight our way out of this.

“Let’s have the Stinger and gun pods, Marty. I’ll take control of the aircraft and the Stinger pod; you got the cannon. Check our ECM and jammers are active.” Watanabe deployed the two weapons pods from the side sponsons, and Fell lowered the Target Acquisition and Designation System visor over his eyes. A yellow round aiming reticle called the “donut” was superimposed over his visor, indicating the field of view of the Stinger heat-seeking missiles. Meanwhile Watanabe activated the radar jammers and the ALQ-136 INEWS infrared jamming system, which set up invisible spikes of energy in all directions to decoy infrared-guided missiles like the Soviet Atoll.

The two Soviet-made fighters were now in full view, and Fell realized how vulnerable, how exposed, he was. Out the starboard window he could see the froth and the waves bubbling across the narrow Nemas River, and out the portside window he could see his rotors churning and dashing tree branches around. They were like giant neon signs pointing right at them. This entire daylight insertion mission was turning into a major nightmare. Fell’s thoughts drifted momentarily to the other CV-22 crew that launched from the USS Valley Mistress, tasked to approach Smorgon through northern Lithuania and southwestern Russia, and he hoped they were having an easier time of it.

“Stand by, crew,” Fell warned over interphone as the Byelorussian jets drew closer and closer. “This could get hairy.”

One of the busiest spots on Smorgon base that morning was the base fuel depot. Two lines of twelve tanker trucks were waiting at the fueling station — there were only two stations operating, out of the six normally available — and the wait was long. One line was for jet fuel, destined for the aircraft and helicopters on the fuel line that could not use the in-ground refueling equipment, and the qther was for diesel to refuel the numerous trucks, utility vehicles, and power generators throughout the base and in the Lithuanian deployment. The Home Brigade of the Belarus Army was taking nearly a hundred fuel trucks with it during the invasion of Lithuania to keep the convoys moving.

The fuel depot normally had two platoons manning the facility, but one by one the men had been reassigned to the convoys, so only a handful of workers and guards remained — most truck drivers ended up pumping their own fuel. So it was a great relief to the NCO in charge of the facility when a truckful of soldiers showed up and reported to him, saying they were ready to work.

“Excellent,” the NCOIC, Senior Sergeant Pashuto, said to the NCO in charge of the detail. “Your men can begin by getting the paperwork ready from all those drivers, so when they pull up to the pumps they are ready to go.”

The young detail leader nodded that he understood, saluted, and departed.

He wasn’t very talkative, Pashuto observed, but that was the first salute anyone had rendered him in quite some time, and he didn’t need another blabbermouth here anyway.

The operation went very smoothly after the fifteen-man detail arrived, so much so that Pashuto was able to sneak away for a cup of coffee and a few slices of bread while the detail worked. When he returned, the detail leader was back with a stack of fuel-authorization forms. “Good work, Corporal,” Pashuto praised the young detail leader as he signed off the fuel-requisition forms. “You have a real talent for this. Who is your commander? I’d like to speak with him.”

“Menako, cela,” the detail leader replied, thanking him in heavily accented, slow Byelorussian. The man’s voice sounded syrupy, hesitant, as if he were a bit retarded, but that certainly didn’t match his performance. “My commander’s name is White.”

“White? I’m not familiar with that name.” It was hard to understand the man because of his slow speech. “Please repeat your commander’s name again?”

“My commander is Colonel Paul White, United States Air Force,” the detail leader said, this time in very understandable Byelorussian. He withdrew a small submachine gun with a silencer from a small “fanny pack” and aimed it at Pashuto. “Raise your hands and place them on your head or—”

Pashuto didn’t wait for the rest — he immediately turned and sprinted for the rear exit, diving for the door and trying to swing it shut behind him before the bullets started flying. But as he reached the door, he ran headlong into two Home Brigade soldiers who were entering the building from the back. “Commandos!” Pashuto shouted, pointing at the man in front. “American commandos in front! Give me a gun!”

“Sorry, Comrade, can’t help you,” one of the Home Brigade soldiers said in English. Pashuto didn’t understand the words, but he knew he wasn’t going to get any help. The first soldier grabbed him and pinned his arms behind his back, and the other soldier placed a rag soaked with some sort of foul-smelling liquid over his nose and mouth. The world immediately turned dark and silent, and he was out of the conflict for a while.

“Trucks secure, Wilson?” Marine Corps Sergeant Thomas Seymour asked the man out front. Other Marines, members of Colonel Paul White’s MADCAP MAGICIAN strike team, entered the office and began checking desks and file cabinets.

“Yes, sir,” Corporal Ed Wilson replied. “Drivers were sedated, and our team members are on board ready to go. We’ve got three trucks destined for the flight line, one for the motor pool, and eight for convoys.

“We’ll need two more for the flight line and two for the command center,” Seymour said. “The convoys won’t get any, I’m afraid.” He turned to one of the other Marines rifling through the desks. “You find those change orders yet, DuPont?”

“Got ‘em,” the Marine replied. He sat down in front of an old typewriter and began to type in the new information, using a map of the base behind the desk as reference. When he was finished with the new orders, he spent a few moments practicing Pashuto’s signature until he had it down, signed the forms, then scuffed them on the floor a bit to make them look properly worn. Seymour found line badges and gate passes in a locked file-cabinet drawer and gave them to Wilson for distribution. Seymour briefed the plan one more time, then sent the Marines off to their destinations in the fuel trucks.

“About time you got here, Private,” the Byelorussian crew chief of the Mil-24 Hind-D assault helicopter grumbled as the fuel truck pulled up. As the private handed over his orders to be countersigned by the crew chief, he said, “Everyone was waiting on you fuel handlers. What’s the holdup?”

“Sergeant Pashuto made someone go back for proper orders,” the driver said. He placed the truck in neutral, engaged the parking brake, then jumped out and placed tire chocks under the wheels of his truck. After that, he went to the right side of the fuel truck, where assistant crew chiefs had already begun unreeling grounding wires from it.

The crew chief walked back to the private and stuck the signed orders back in his pocket. “These orders are freshly typed,” he observed, staring the private right in the eyes. “It was you who had the screwed-up orders, wasn’t it?”

The Marine Corps special operations commando had to struggle to remain calm. “It wasn’t my fault,” he replied in hesitant Byelorussian.

“Of course not,” the crew chief sneered. He looked the private over carefully. “You’re new here, aren’t y—”

Suddenly there was a cry from somewhere across the aircraft parking ramp. The crew chief looked toward the voices, saw men pointing off in the distance, and looked in that direction. A plume of dark smoke was pouring up from a radar dome a few kilometers away, on the other side of the runway. “A fire? Fire in the approach-control facility!” Just then a tremendous explosion tore the radar dome apart like a bursting dandelion, throwing off debris and pieces of radar into the sky like seeds. They saw the explosion before they heard it, but when the sound finally traveled across the runway it was as if a huge thunderstorm had just erupted right in their faces. “My God …

“I’ll call it in …” the private said, but as he turned to run back to the truck to get his radio, the crew chief grabbed him by his shoulder.

“Wait a minute, Private. I don’t know you. What’s your name?”

“Sir, let me call in the fire and I’ll call my NCOIC—”

The crew chiefs grip tightened, and now others nearby noticed the commotion. “I said, what’s your name, soldier? I don’t recognize you, and your accent sounds foreign.” He turned to one of his assistant crew chiefs. “Misclav, help me over here!”

Just then another cry was heard. Across the parking ramp from where the crew chief was wrestling with the fuel-truck driver, a torrent of jet fuel was gushing out from underneath a three-thousand-dekaliter fuel truck. A flood of jet fuel spread quickly across the parking ramp. “What in hell is going on—?” Suddenly, a soft bang! could be heard, and it seemed as if the entire contents of the fuel truck that they were standing beside emptied out onto the tarmac.

“Run!” someone shouted. A few more bangs! were heard as three more fuel trucks suddenly disgorged hundreds of tons of raw fuel onto the ramp. Soon all the Hind-D attack helicopters parked in that area were threatened by the fuel, their wheels several centimeters deep in it.

“Sabotage!” the crew chief shouted. The young private tried to run, but the crew chief held him fast. “No you don’t, you bastard! What’s going on?”

Marine Corps Corporal Wilson was not accustomed to being manhandled by anyone, and especially not twice in a row. While maintenance men and aviators were scattering to get away from the growing lake of jet fuel that was spreading across the entire parking area, the young Marine suddenly grabbed the crew chief in an iron grasp and, grabbing him as if he were pulling him away from the truck, thrust his right knee deep into the man’s groin. The crew chief let out a loud whoof! as loud as a dog and collapsed in Wilson’s arms. Wilson waited a few precious seconds until everyone else had run by, then prepared himself to make the run to the blast fence just one hundred meters away, behind the helicopters and in the opposite direction that everyone else was running. The crew chief was unconscious, slumped in his arms.

But as hard as Wilson told himself to just get the hell out of there, he couldn’t just let the guy go. The crew chief was just doing his job — he didn’t deserve to die in a fireball set by a bunch of foreigners. Instead, Wilson dragged the unconscious man back behind the Mil-24 and toward the fence. He told himself that if any of the guards took a shot at him, he was going to drop the crew chief — but not before. The man didn’t deserve to die.

It takes a very hot spark to ignite jet fuel — a small half-pound piece of C4 explosive, along with a white phosphorous charge did the trick — but the timer was set for only thirty seconds. Corporal Wilson should have set it for sixty. It was his last thought before there was an intense burst of light, a loud roar in his ears, and then a searing wall of fire engulfed them both.

Wilson never had a chance.

One by one, the explosion and fire ripped into the eighteen attack helicopters parked on this section of ramp, detonating the fuel in their tanks and adding more fire and fury to the holocaust. The fire trucks arrived a few minutes later, diverted from the radar site back to the aircraft parking ramp, but by the time they returned to the parking area all eighteen aircraft were destroyed or badly damaged. A few seconds later, the fuel depot itself was also destroyed by charges set by the Intelligence Support Agency Marines of MADCAP MAGICIAN.

The Marines, minus Corporal Ed Wilson, escaped the base and executed their pre-assigned escape plan. The second CV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft would pick them up in a few hours, and they would move on to their next target as nightfall grew nearer.

“I see them!” Flight Lieutenant Doleckis cried out on his interplane frequency.

What he saw was unclear — he could clearly see one turning rotor, and by the way the trees near the shore were shipping around, it appeared as if another set of rotors was very close beside the first. Two helicopters, practically side by side, hiding in the trees?

“Control, this is flight seven-one-one, I have two helicopters very close to the water on the south bank of the Nema. My position is …” He checked his navigation set. “About fifty-three kilometers west-northwest of Lida Naval Air Base.” By the time he made that transmission, they had flown over the sighting. “I will attempt to get a visual I.D. on the target. Recommend deployment of helicopter and infantry patrols to this location. Over.”

“Copy all, seven-one-one,” the female command-post controller replied. “Be advised, no other authorized aircraft have checked in. We are checking with Smorgon for possible patrols from Home Brigade. Maintain visual contact on the target and stand by on this channel. Acknowledge.”

“Seven-one-one, I’ll try,” Doleckis replied. “We’re heavy gross weight and low. Get some slow-movers or fling-wings up here to relieve us. Over.”

“Control understands. Stand by.”

There was obviously no one in the command post yet, Doleckis thought — they had been assigned a patrol without any command support. Great. “Control, I need an answer, dammit,” Doleckis said irritably. “They can be over the border in sixty seconds if they make a break for it.”

There was nothing on the channel for nearly a minute, in which time the stall warning horn blared once and Doleckis’s wingman complained several times about his airspeed and tight turn radius. Warning calls on all frequencies, including the international emergency channel GUARD, were useless. The contact stayed in the trees, stirring up branches and river water, obviously in a hover and holding his position. Finally: “Seven-one-one, Control, Alpha advises you to visually identify the aircraft, report, and close-pursue to keep the contact in sight. Authority to cross the Lithuanian border is granted. Stand by to engage if necessary. Acknowledge.”

“Visual identification, report, close pursue, Lithuanian border overflight authorized for seven-one-one flight of two,” Doleckis responded. “Seven-one-one flight, take a high orbit at one thousand AGL.”

“Two,” Stebut replied. The Sukhoi-17 fighter-bomber dropped behind the MiG-27, made a shallow climb so he could keep Doleckis in view, and took up an orbit position over Doleckis, varying his orbit pattern slightly so that he could see Doleckis and the contact at the same time.

“Ten minutes to bingo fuel, Hank,” Watanabe said cross-cockpit. “We gotta get out of here or we can’t complete the mission.” They also knew that if the fighter pilots spotted them, more aircraft and ground forces were on the way.

“Then let’s do it right now,” Fell said. On the cabin loudspeaker, he said, “Attention crew. We’re going to lift off and try some low-altitude maneuvering to get away from these two fighters on our tail. Secure all loose items and double-check your seat belts. Review your escape-and-evasion plans in case we go in. Remember to exit the aircraft straight back if you have to get out-the rotors and engines off to the sides will be hot, and the cannon and missile pods will be deployed. Hang tight.”

Doleckis could not believe his eyes — it was not two helicopters down there, it was one! “Control, seven-one-one, I see the bogey. It’s… it’s a large, cargo-type rotorcraft, painted in camouflage, with engines mounted on long wingtips. It’s heading—”

And suddenly the thing made a sharp turn, then accelerated faster than any rotorcraft he had ever seen. Frantically he searched the skies for the thing. No helicopter could move like that — it had taken off like a rocket. “Control, I’ve lost visual. It turned northbound and accelerated out of sight. Seven-one-one flight, get on an eastbound heading and search for this thing.”

“Two,” Stebut replied.

“Control, I’m switching to Lida Approach for radar advisories. Seven-one-one flight, go button ten.”

“Two.”

Doleckis switched radio frequencies, checked in his wingman, then said, “Lida Naval, flight seven-one-one of two with you tactical. Requesting vectors to unidentified aircraft last seen heading northbound, altitude approximately twenty to thirty meters.

“Flight seven-one-one flight of two, understand tactical,” the approach controller replied. After the “tactical” call, the controller’s responsibility now was to clear the airspace around the two fighters and work with them to find the unknown aircraft. “I have you radar-identified. Have your wingman squawk normal if you are no longer in formation.” A second later the coded identification beacon for the Sukhoi-17 popped onto the screen, flying nearly parallel with the MiG-27, but three hundred meters higher. “Seven-one-one Bravo, you are radar-identified.”

“Bravo,” Stebut replied.

“Be advised, seven-one-one flight, I show no other aircraft in your vicinity. If your contact is at thirty meters I will be unable to advise you unless he gets within thirty kilometers of Lida. Over.”

Damn! Doleckis swore. They were right on top of him, and they lost him! “Copy, Approach. If you have any intermittent contacts, advise us immediately—”

“Bravo has contact on the bogey!” Stebut interrupted. “He’s heading zero-four-zero, a few klicks north of the river … he’s banking right, heading for the river again. Shit, Vladi, it’s a tilt-rotor aircraft. He’s switched to airplane mode. An American tilt-rotor!”

Doleckis frantically searched the sky above him for the Sukhoi-17, finally spotting it. “I’ve got a visual on you, Frantsi. You’ve got the lead. Stay on this freq. I’m going back to button nine.”

“Copy. Bravo has the lead.”

Doleckis switched his radio to the command-post frequency. “Control this is seven-one-one flight of two tactical. We have contact with the bogey. It is an American tilt-rotor aircraft. It is crossing back and forth over the border, heading east-northeast at high speed. Seven-one-one Bravo has the pursuit. We are standing by to engage. Request further orders. Over.”

This time a very familiar male voice came on the line — the air wing commander. Finally a senior officer had taken charge of the chase. “Seven-one-one, I want both of you on this channel. Bring Bravo to this frequency immediately. Over.”

“Seven-one-one copy. Control, off frequency, monitor GUARD, report back.” Doleckis went back to the approach-control frequency, told Stebut to switch to the command-post freq, then switched back himself. “Control, seven-one-one flight of two tactical back on your frequency.”

“Seven-one-one, your orders are to force that aircraft down,” the wing commander said on the command-post frequency. “Smorgon is sending attack helicopters to assist, but their ETA to your position is unknown at this time. Bracket. him on both sides, give him warning shots, and attempt to disable him with cannon fire if you think you can do it without causing a crash. I want the tilt-rotor and its crew intact. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Doleckis replied.

“Bravo understands,” Stebut replied. “Bravo’s in a descent. I’ll take the left, Vladi, you take the right?’

“I’ve got a good visual on you,” Doleckis said, swinging over to the right as the big Sukhoi-17 began descending behind the tilt-rotor aircraft. “Clear to descend on the left.” Doleckis never practiced intercept procedures — he was an air-to-mud fighter pilot, not air-to-air — but it was clear what the commander wanted — he wanted that aircraft to …

Suddenly the tilt-rotor aircraft heeled sharply on its right wing, decelerated rapidly, and disappeared from view. It had been traveling nearly four hundred kilometers an hour, and in the blink of an eye it had slowed to half that speed and turned with an impossible tight turning radius. “Seven-one-one lost contact! Turning right to reacquire.”

“Bravo lost contact,” Stebut added immediately. “I’ve got a visual on you, Alpha, you’re in the lead.”

“I’ve got the lead,” Doleckis acknowledged. This cat-and-mouse game could go on for a long time, Doleckis thought as he banked hard right and strained out his canopy to spot the American aircraft. But he also knew that the longer they had this guy turning and stopping, the greater the chances that he wasn’t going to accomplish his mission. He was a very long way from home; and at that altitude, switching from airplane to helicopter mode the way he was, he was sucking a lot of gas.

But when he completed his turn, the tilt-rotor aircraft was nowhere to be seen. “Seven-one-one Alpha has lost contact.”

“Bravo has contact on the bogey, Vladi,” Stebut cried out on the radio. “He’s hovering right below you. He turned and then stopped… hey, it looks like he’s flying backwards. Damn, I’m going to overshoot… Bravo has lost contact. I’ve got a visual on you, Vladi, you’re cleared to maneuver.

“I’m maneuvering left and up, Frantsi,” Doleckis said. “Give me a few hundred meters.”

Doleckis increased his airspeed to his maximum flaps-down airspeed, banked left, and climbed. He gained three hundred meters, continuing his left turn until his airspeed had bled off nearly to approach speed, then pointed his nose down at the ground — at the end of his turn, he should be aimed back at the target.

“Control, I need instructions,” Doleckis radioed. “Fixed-wings are not going to be able to bracket him. We can keep him in sight, but we are not going to be able to fly with him. Request permission to—”

Just then Doleckis regained visual contact with the tilt-rotor aircraft, and at the same time he saw the Sukhoi-17 fighter-bomber peel off to the right, then swing back to the left to keep him in sight. The tilt-rotor aircraft was indeed hovering in place — and now he was pivoting to the left, tracking the Sukhoi with the precision of a radar-guided gun. “Bravo, tighten your turn, then reverse. It looks like that tilt-rotor is tracking—”

And at that instant a plume of smoke and a streak of light erupted from the tilt-rotor aircraft. A line of bright white smoke extended quickly right at the Sukhoi.

“Break, Frantsi, break! Flares!” Doleckis shouted.

Stebut tightened his bank to 60 degrees, but the tiny missile hit before he had a chance to pump out any decoy flares.

At first nothing happened — only a flash of bright light right near Stebut’s tailpipe, but soon black smoke began pouring out of the engine. Before Doleckis could say anything else, he saw the canopy fly off the Sukhoi-17, followed later by the ejection seat flying clear of the aircraft on a plume of yellow fire. It was the first time he had ever seen a stricken aircraft, the first time he had ever seen anyone eject from an aircraft except in the training films. It was horrifying, like watching someone getting hit by a car or getting gored by a raging bull. Stebut’s parachute opened, but it had time to swing only once or twice before it plunged into the trees. It looked like Frantsi hit pretty hard. The parachute disappeared in the foliage as if sucked inside by the trees.

“Control, Bravo’s down! Stebut’s down!” Doleckis shouted on the command-post frequency. “Position, approximately forty-two kilometers northeast of Lida Naval, north of the Nemas, almost on the border. Bravo was hit by a missile fired from the American tilt-rotor.” He paused, momentarily unsure what e should do next — but when he saw Stebut’s Sukhoi-17 disappear into the trees a second later and explode in an oily ball of smoke, he knew what he was going to do. “Seven-one-one is engaging.” If his wing commander said something over the radio in reply, Doleckis did not hear it.

“I can’t believe it,” General John Ormack said from the pilot’s seat of the Fisikous-170 stealth bomber. “I think I can fly this thing with my eyes closed.” Hal Briggs, Patrick McLanahan, and Dave Luger were with him in the cockpit of the massive, exotic aircraft, marveling over the controls and equipment. “It looks like an exact copy of the B-52’s cockpit. Everything’s in place — everything!”

He was right. The pilot’s left-hand crew station was an exact duplicate of a B-52’s pilot’s station, with the addition of one more cathode ray tube in the center of the instrument panel. The control wheel, throttle quadrant, arrangement of instruments, and even the material and shape of the aluminum-and-vinyl glare shield were all precisely the same as the B-52’s at the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center that Ormack and McLanahan worked with every day. But the more Ormack talked, the quieter Luger had become.

Patrick, sitting in the copilot/bombardier’s right-side seat, noticed Luger’s slumped shoulders and detached expression. “Dave, what’s wrong? This thing is incredible! It’s still flyable, isn’t it?”

Luger raised his eyes long enough to scan the instrument panel. “Hit the battery switch and main bus switches,” he said to McLanahan. The switches were on the copilot’s side instrument panel, exactly like on a Boeing B-52.

When McLanahan flipped the two switches, the cockpit lights and battery-powered gauges came alive.

Luger scanned the forward instrument panel. “It needs fuel… looks like no weapons aboard… might be a few access doors open in the back. Otherwise, yes, it’s flyable.” He sat back down in the seat and stared at a spot on the floor, remaining completely emotionless.

“Amazing.” Ormack sighed. “My God, I feel like double-oh-seven. Imagine… sitting in a Soviet bomber in a Soviet research lab. Man, I think I know how successful spies feel when they go back and see what their mission accomplished.”

Luger looked at Ormack as if the General had slapped him, then turned away before Ormack looked toward him.

When Ormack saw Luger’s ashen face he realized what he had been saying. “Hey, Dave, I didn’t mean—”

McLanahan finally realized what was eating his friend. “Dave, forget it, man. You were brainwashed. We saw what those bastards did to you, that chamber of horrors they hooked you up in. There was nothing you could have done—”

“I didn’t resist hard enough,” Luger said bitterly. “I could have tried harder. They got to me and I talked — almost from the first fucking day.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Briggs said. “You were alone, and injured, and confused. You were ripe for the pickin’. There was no way you could have resisted.”

“Yes, there was,” Luger insisted. “I caved in. I thought of nothing, nobody but myself. I betrayed everything I believe in, everything.”

“Dave, that’s not true—” McLanahan said.

“Look at this thing! Luger snapped, sweeping a hand across the cockpit. “I re-created the pilot’s and radar nay’s crew station from memory, in precise detail. I was obsessed with it. This isn’t the work of a tortured POW, Patrick, this is the work of a traitor. If I had tried harder to resist, if I had just let them kill me, I never would have done so much work for them.”

“Dave, you know as well as I do that it’s impossible to resist them for any period of time — especially the kind of torture they were using,” Ormack said. “You can resist for a few days or even a few weeks, but if they control your environment and your movements, eventually they’ll control your mind. You can’t resist. Eventually everyone talks, or they go crazy, or they die. You’re not a traitor — you’re a hero. You saved our lives and quite possibly helped fend off World War Three. So you helped build this thing? Well, now you can help us take it away from them.”

“And maybe even use it to fight off the Byelorussian invasion if we can get some weapons loaded on it,” McLanahan said. He searched out the cockpit windows. “Where did our Lithuanian helpers go? They were supposed to be wheeling some of those cluster-bomb missiles over here.”

“I’ll go find out,” Briggs said. “Sittin’ in this thing is makin’ me nervous anyway, especially when you start talkin’ about bombin’ stuff.” Briggs climbed down the short entry ladder and disappeared out the front end of the hangar. He returned a few minutes later with General Palcikas and an interpreter following close behind. Briggs donned a pair of crew-chief headphones connected by an interphone cord to the cockpit: “Bad news, boys,” Biggs said. “It looks like the Lithuanians are leavin’.”

“What?”

“Several long convoys of vehicles are heading out. Here’s the General.”

Palcikas put on the headphones, shrugging off his interpreter, and the crew in the cockpit had to turn down the volume to guard against Palcikas’ booming voice: “Hey, you spies, you look good in strange Soviet plane. Good you up there. We go now. Over.”

“This is General Ormack. Where are you going, General?”

“We going to meet General-Leytenant Voshchanka and Home Brigade in Kobrin town — or in hell,” Palcikas said. “He has crossed border with forty thousand troops and many tanks. He is moving very rapidly… may take Vilnius before my Iron Wolf get position. More may come from Kaliningrad and Chernyakhovsk. Not good stay in Fisikous. Over.”

“Can you spare some English- and Russian-speaking men for us? We’d like to load the plane and—”

“No. Very sorry, General,” Palcikas replied. “Not possible. We leave demolition team only to destroy Fisikous if Byelorussian troops advance. No soldiers stay. Maybe you go to embassy now. We go now. Over. Bye-bye.” Palcikas handed the headset over to Briggs, saluted the stealth bomber’s cockpit, and trotted off.

“Well, it looks like we load the plane ourselves,” Ormack said with resignation. “Dave, I’d like you to translate the refueling manual for Patrick first. Once we start pumping gas, Hal and I will see about loading weapons. Let’s go.”

Dave Luger was expending all his energy just climbing in and out of the aircraft and hobbling across the polished concrete floor of the hangar, and he had to rest several times as he explained the refueling process to Patrick. Finally McLanahan was unreeling the refueling lines from the pump bay and was pulling the hose across the hangar floor.

“Reminds me of when you did that in Anadyr, Patrick,” Dave said, sitting near the single-point refueling adapter on the left-front side of the Fi-170.

“I’m glad I don’t have to climb on top of this thing, that’s all — and the weather is downright balmy now compared to then.”

“You’ve got that right,” Luger said. He regarded McLanahan for a moment, then added, “I see you got a little plastic surgery for your frostbite.”

McLanahan touched the pieces of stiff plastic that now made up the tips of his ears — he had suffered only a little frostbite during the Old Dog crew’s entire ordeal. “Courtesy of the Air Force,” he said. “One less thing they have to explain to someone.

“Unlike me,” Luger said.

Patrick looked at his friend sympathetically and wanted to say something, but nothing came out.

“What do you think they’re going to do with me, Patrick?” Dave asked.

McLanahan hooked the hose into the refueling adapter on the bomber, activated the pump, then returned to monitor the fuel flow and switch tanks at the proper time. He carried one of the MP5 submachine guns left behind by the Marines. “Debrief you, I guess,” McLanahan said. “Get inside your head, find out what the fucking Soviets did to you.”

“Do you think they’ll kill me?”

McLanahan pretended he didn’t hear the question, not wanting Luger to see his own fear. Through all these weeks after he’d learned Luger was in Fisikous, through the training, the planning, all of it, McLanahan had consciously blocked out considering the consequences of Luger’s return. He had no idea what Washington had in mind, but knowing the inquiry the Defense Intelligence Agency had begun, Luger might have to go through really intense questioning about the Old Dog mission after he finished his debriefing. The shit Luger might have to endure once he was back in the States—if they even made it out of here — might be worse than anything the Soviets could have done. But the last thing he was going to do was let Luger know, or even suspect, those fears.

“Hey.” McLanahan smiled easily. “Don’t torture yourself, Dave. Don’t do a number on yourself, man. We got a job to do here.”

“Patrick, you gotta tell me what you know, what you think,” Luger insisted. “I’m scared. I feel like I’m totally alone.”

“You’re not alone, Dave,” Patrick said. “You have some pretty powerful friends. Wilbur Curtis is still Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Brad Elliott is still at HAWC and still a three-star, and Thomas Preston is Secretary of Defense. They all owe you big time.” He patted the smooth skin of the Fisikous-170 and added, “And, of course, helping to bring back this trophy won’t hurt.”

Dave said nothing just then. The original idea of actually launching Tuman instead of just stealing tech orders and computer data was of course Dave’s, and after they checked the weapons available — AA-8 air-to-air missiles and X27 runway-denial cruise missiles, a free-flying version of the British Hunting JP233 mine dispenser — it was his idea to try to use Tuman to hunt down and strike the Byelorussian invaders. General Ormack had approved the idea immediately. He was a pilot, not a ground-pounder — they all were. Making war from the skies was what they did best.

Launching the Fi-170 created the first real glimmer of energy Luger had shown since his rescue — but now the fire was fading. The closer they came to launching Tuman, the more guilt he was feeling for ever having created it. That crushing guilt was threatening to throw Dave right into a serious depression, and they needed him sharp to help fly the Soviet stealth bomber.

McLanahan was no psychologist, but he knew he had to talk Luger out of his funk or this flight was going nowhere. “C’mon — let’s get Hal started on those missiles,” he said. Then, pumping every bit of enthusiasm he could into his voice, added, “Man, you’re going to make the brass pee in their pants when they see us land this thing on a NATO base.”

“I get the feeling,” Dave said, “that they might prefer I never made it back.”

“You’re wrong, Dave,” Patrick said finally. He realized that he not only had to conceal from his friend what he thought, but convince him: “They wouldn’t have brought us out here if they wanted you eliminated.”

“Maybe they thought we’d all get eliminated.”

McLanahan’s heart skipped a beat. The idea had never occurred to him. It was a ridiculous idea — or was it? “Dave … you’re getting paranoid, man. Just chill out.”

Suddenly they saw a large truck roll across the compound outside the security fence that surrounded the aircraft hangars. McLanahan could see a large-caliber gun sticking out the back of the truck, and his blood froze. It raced along at high speed right for the closed and locked gate to the parking ramp and crashed through it. Patrick clearly saw the red star on the side of the truck.

“Heads up!” McLanahan screamed. “Soviet truck in the compound!” He pulled Luger to his feet and half-carried him to cover on the side of the concrete aircraft hangar, then took aim on the truck with his MP5. The gun in the back of the truck swung in his direction. All he had was two extra magazines, about ninety rounds total, to fight off an entire truckful of Soviet commandos.

“Hold your fire, McLanahan!” someone shouted. The passenger-side door swung open and Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Chris Wohl hopped off the truck. “Damn, Colonel, maybe you were listening during all my drills. I hate to say it, but you’re starting to impress me.”

“Wohl! What in hell are you doing here? I thought you’d be in the embassy by now.”

“We were in the embassy, McLanahan,” Captain Edward Snyder said, hopping out of the truck along with Wohl and Gunnery Sergeant Trimble. John Ormack emerged from the Fisikous-170’s cockpit a few moments later and both Trimble and Snyder rendered him a salute. Ormack accepted it with a hint of surprise. “We made it to the embassy and we dropped off the wounded and the dead… and then we came back.”

“What? Why…

“Don’t fucking ask, sir,” Snyder said. He shook his head as he looked at the Fisikous-170 stealth bomber before him. “Maybe we wanted to see what was getting you all fired up, sir. Now I see why you decided to stay. This thing is cosmic.” He shrugged his shoulders, then added, “And we also saw the Lithuanians packing up and getting ready to meet the Byelorussian Home Brigade coming out of Smorgon, and we figured you guys would be all alone out here and required some adult supervision.

“We’re here and under your command, General. We don’t have enough guys or weapons to secure this base or even this part of the compound, but if you’re going to launch this thing we figured you could use some muscle and someone who can read Russian. Tell us what to do to get you and this black beast under way.”

There was nothing the eighteen Marines aboard the CV-22 could do except hold on and pray — pray that their PAVE HAMMER pilot’s luck would hold out once more. A few of the COBRA VENOM commandos were stationed in the windows and wearing headsets, using the age-old “Mk 1” threat-detection system — the eyeball — to spot the enemy fighter bearing down on them. Even though they knew they could be dead by the time they ever saw the fighter, they felt that searching for the enemy and calling out his position was a more worthwhile activity than just sitting tight and hoping to escape.

“I’m staying north of the border until we get closer to the LZ,” pilot Hank Fell said on interphone. “Where is that bastard?” Fell had the graphic engine readouts on his primary multifunction display — that way he could see any severe changes in the engine’s performance right away. On his IHDS, or integrated helmet display system, which projected electronic images onto his helmet-mounted targeting goggles, he had the graphic readout of the CV-22 millimeter-wave radar, an ultra-high-frequency, short-range radar that easily detected very small metallic objects in the aircraft’s flight path, especially the scourge of low-flying special operations crews all over the world — power lines. Fell was flying the CV-22 literally at treetop level, and many times far below that, hedgehopping from clearing to clearing and changing directions constantly every time the MiG-27 pursuing them popped up on the threat-warning receiver.

“No contact,” Watanabe called out. “Last bearing was off our rear port quarter, heading east. He may be abeam us.” He had the INEWS (Integrated Electronic Warfare System) threat-warning receiver on his primary multifunction display — which indicated all radars in the vicinity — show the location of missiles fired at them, and even pinpoint and jam a targeting laser illuminating the aircraft. INEWS would send a different tone for every kind of threat jt detected — radar, infrared, or laser — through the interphone system, and Fell would change directions, however momentarily to turn his engine exhausts downward, and dive for trees when he heard the warning receiver bleep. Watanabe also had control of the Stinger missile system — it was he who downed the Sukhoi-17, so he and Fell each had one enemy kill since joining MADCAP MAGICIAN — and could take control of the Chain Gun pod for attacking ground threats that might appear.

“Heads up on the portside,” Fell said on interphone. “Find that damn fighter. Jose!”

“Go,” replied Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Jose Lobato, the COBRA VENOM team leader.

“You give any more thought to the idea of hotfooting it the rest of the way?” Fell asked.

“I told you, sir, we’re staying,” Lobato said. “Me and the boys don’t like the idea of slogging through fifty miles of Indian country. We paid for the plane ticket and we’re staying.”

“It’s your funeral.” He started a hard left turn and said, “Clear my left turn and find a clearing. We’ve got to—”

“Contact!” one of the Marines shouted on interphone. “Portside, high, about eight o’clock position, range three miles!”

Watanabe, sitting on the left side of the cockpit, saw the MiG-27 immediately. “Contact on the bandit. Break left, Hank!”

As he gave that command, he saw a flash of light from the MiG’s left wingtip, and the INEWS threat-warning receiver blared out a warning — it must have been blanked during the hard left turn and didn’t spot the radar-silent MiG-27 as it slipped within infrared-detection range.

“Missile launch!” Watanabe shouted.

INEWS had automatically activated its infrared jamming system, which modulated the head energy of the CV-22’s engine exhaust to cause the heat-seeking missile to break lock, and it ejected an electronic ARIES (Advanced Radar! Infrared Expendable System) decoy from a right-side ejector chute. The ARIES decoy was actually a small glider that transmitted RF energy throughout the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet, making it much more effective than standard flares or bundles of chaff — ARIES could jam an enemy fighter radar for several minutes, and it could even attract missiles from long distances or attract a missile that had missed its target and was turning to re-attack.

ARIES worked perfectly on the first missile. Flight Lieutenant Doleckis could only watch, first with astonishment and then in absolute helplessness, as his R-50 heat-seeking missile gracefully arced to the right into empty space and detonated nearly a full kilometer away from the American aircraft. Although he saw no bright flare, his missile was obviously chasing a decoy; the R-50 was an older model (the Byelorussian military rarely received top-of-the-line Commonwealth weapons — they were reserved for the Russians) and very susceptible to decoys. When he tried to turn left and lock his last R-50 on the CV-22, the missile’s seeker refused to stay locked on, even though he was less than four kilometers away from the target and right behind him. His radar-warning receiver was beeping at him, which meant the CV-22 was transmitting tracking or jamming signals.

Doleckis tried one last shot at a lock-on. At minimum range of about three kilometers, the last R-50 reported locked-on, and he fired. He immediately activated his radar in air-to-air mode, reset his heads-up display for aerial gunnery, and switched to his 30-millimeter cannon. Although his cannon had three hundred rounds, it usually jammed after one or two hundred were fired — but at close range, just a few of the sausage-sized rounds were deadly. Anticipating the CV-22’s next move, Doleckis used a bit of right rudder to point his nose slightly right to get a lead point on the target, placing his aiming reticle at the point he thought the aircraft would turn in just a few seconds.

The CV-22 banked sharply right, as Doleckis knew it would. The last R-50 wobbled a bit in flight, as if it were trying to go after another decoy launched to the left, but it stayed locked on. But apparently it momentarily locked on to the sun, a glint off the river below, or the first decoy launched by the CV-22, because the R-50 careened right over the CV-22, not attracted to its engines at all, and flew for several dozen meters before exploding.

The fwooosh! of the R-50 flying over the cockpit made Martin Watanabe duck and turn away instinctively, just as driving in a parking garage with really low ceilings made him hunch his shoulders, so he was protected from the brunt of the explosion as the missile screamed over the canopy. Hank Fell actually watched the thing pass by, so he was looking right at it when the missile exploded just a few yards away. The explosion shattered the right-side cockpit windows and right-front windscreen, showering the pilots with shards of Lexan. Fell felt the acrylic windscreen bite into his head, then felt the heat and pressure of the explosion slam into him — then he felt nothing as the concussion nearly blew him out of his seat.

Watanabe screamed and grabbed for the controls. The left engine had immediately gone to full power; when the explosion of the R-50’s fourteen-pound warhead destroyed the right engine, the computerized flight-control system of the CV-22 automatically applied full power to the good engine. The crossover linkage tried to apply power from the left engine to the right rotor, and when that did not respond, it unfeathered the right rotor and immediately began switching the flight controls from airplane to helicopter mode for a landing.

Watanabe had his hands on the controls, but he was not fully in control. The blast that had killed Fell and torn most of his face away had badly hurt the CV-22’s copilot. He had just enough time to consciously keep the wings level and the nose up when the CV-22 hit the trees. It flipped up onto its nose and threatened to cartwheel, but after hanging tail-up for several moments it settled back to earth right-side up. The right engine smoked and burst into flames, and one Stinger missile popped out of its launch canister and cooked off along the ground, but the automatic fire-extinguishing system kept the fire from spreading to the wing fuel tanks.

“Target down! Flight seven-one-one, target down!” Doleckis crowed victoriously on the command-post frequency. Damn, he thought. My first kill! He was breathing so hard that he felt he couldn’t draw enough air through his oxygen mask, and he whipped it off. God, was this exciting! Doleckis used to hunt deer and pheasant with his father and uncles in the Ruzhany forests of western Belarus, and he remembered the nearly overwhelming rush of excitement when he got his first kill, but this was a million times more exciting. All that heavy iron going down, all those souls on board screaming their last breath. He felt no remorse for them at all, only sheer happiness and elation that they had died by his hand. His persistence and patience had defeated America’s best technology.

Doleckis radioed his estimated position, trying to pick out some definite landmarks and finally requesting a DF (direction-finding) steer to his position. As he flew closer to the plane’s impact point, he noticed the CV-22 seemed relatively intact — one small fire visible, but still generally in one piece. There was still dark fuel smoke rising, but already white smoke was replacing it — that meant automatic fire extinguishers had been activated. He needed to shoot it up some more in case there were survivors.

The young Byelorussian pilot immediately lined up his cannon gun-sight pipper on the downed airplane and fired off a two-second burst from his cannon — but all rounds missed, ripping up trees far above the CV-22. He finally realized he still had the gunsight mil settings for air-to-air. It was too late to correct by the time he dialed in the proper air-to-ground settings, so he overfiew the target, banked right to keep the CV-22 in sight, and set up for another gun pass. The rockets and mines he carried would do too much damage — he was sure his commander wanted this aircraft intact.

He was on the downwind leg of his re-attack orbit when a puff of smoke and a white shoestring suddenly leaped out of the forest near the impact site. Immediately, Doleckis threw his MiG-27 hard right and hit his chaff and flare buttons, ejecting bright magnesium flares from ejector racks under the tail.

The white streak spiraled right toward him …

It was going to hit …

The missile’s arc gradually became larger and larger. It zeroed in right at the trail of flares left in his wake and missed him by no more than a few meters. There was no proximity explosion. The crew of that downed CV-22 had fired a Stinger at him! Not only were the Americans not helpless and out of the fight, but they had attacked! “Control, seven-one-one, crew of downed CV-22 launched a man-portable missile at me! Advise all aircraft to exercise extreme caution.” The missile launch was actually a blessing in disguise, because by the time he had turned onto the base leg and was lining up for a gun pass, the smoke from the crash had subsided but the residual smoke from the Stinger-missile launch pointed right at the crash site.

Doleckis started his cannon run at one thousand meters, four hundred kilometers per hour airspeed, at a range of ten kilometers. At eight kilometers he lowered the nose, centered the CV-22 in the pipper, and watched the range counter click down. The range counter suddenly stopped, then counted down rapidly, then stopped again — the ranging radar was being jammed. No matter. He simply waited until he could clearly make out the outline of the CV-22 in the pipper and, at the proper moment, squeezed the trigger …

A sudden flash of motion caught his eye as he fired. He glanced to the left and saw what appeared to be a large insect, skimming just over the treetops — then there were two, then three, then three or four more on the right side. One by one the tiny insects jumped at him, with two bright winking eyes focused right on him. Doleckis turned his attention briefly to his ammunition counter — one hundred and fifty rounds gone. The impact marks were walking perfectly across the target — a perfect gun pass. All the rounds were hitting squarely on target. Little puffs of black were popping atop the CV-22, and the right wing sagged and dropped to the forest floor …

A terrific shudder tossed Doleckis against his shoulder straps — it felt like a giant wrecking ball had hit the side of his MiG-27. He pulled back on the stick and saw the insects flitting across his windscreen again — except this time he saw they were no insects. They were small two-man helicopters, with two machine guns mounted on the skids. They were all over him, surrounding him like bees around a hive… he would pass five or six of them in a second, only to be confronted by six more, each firing their machine guns at him. The small-caliber bullets peppered the armored sides of the MiG like rapid-fire sledgehammer blows. Doleckis knew they would not penetrate the fifteen-millimeter-thick steel-and-ceramic armor around the cockpit or penetrate the bullet-resistant canopy, but the rest of his jet was thin steel alloy.

Warning lights flashed inside the cockpit. The cannon gunsight went blank, replaced by a crosshatched caution bar. The banging that reverberated through the aircraft was now a solid shuddering. It was impossible to move the control stick, and even if he could, he could not hope to counteract the shaking in the flight controls. Doleckis activated the auxiliary hydraulic booster pumps and tested the rudder pedals — they were functioning normally. Already a little control-stick authority was returning… good.

Maybe there was time for one more pass …

Doleckis was so intent on saving his aircraft and making one more cannon or bomb pass that he never noticed the warning lights that told him his engine had been destroyed, never noticed the rapid loss of airspeed or altitude. He flew the MiG-27 right into the ground in a nose-high left bank, scissoring through the trees and exploding in a large mushroom fireball.

“I never believed in fucking Tinker Bell — until now,” Martin Watanabe said. He was lying on the soft mossy ground, being treated by Lobato’s corpsman for severe chest and facial wounds, but he was fully conscious. He watched as several small, buglike helicopters turned and flitted above them. “Who are they?”

“I don’t know,” the corpsman asked. “Gunny’s going to meet up with them.” Jose Lobato was going out to meet one of the helicopters that was landing in a clearing nearby.

With four or five helicopters hovering nearby — Lobato saw they were McDonnell-Douglas Model 500 Defenders, two-man, American-made light patrol helicopters, with an infrared scanner and two 7.62-millimeter machine guns mounted on the forward part of the landing skids-the leader of COBRA VENOM took cover behind a tree as one of the choppers touched down in a clearing. A soldier with a Soviet-made pistol drawn stepped out of the helicopter and approached him. Lobato raised his rifle and shouted, “Stop!” in English and Russian.

The soldier ordered the helicopter to cut its engine, and he stopped and raised his pistol. In a loud voice over the winding-down engine, he shouted, “You COBRA VENOM? American Marines? COBRA VENOM?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I am Mayor Balys Pakstas, First Brigade of the Iron Wolf, Third Air Infantry, Lithuanian Self-Defense Force. Are you Gunnery Sergeant Lobato, COBRA VENOM?”

Lobato couldn’t believe this guy had been out here looking for him and his team, but he still wasn’t ready to divulge any classified information. “What do you want, Major?”

“I was sent to escort you to your landing zone at Krovo,” Pakstas said. Lobato couldn’t believe his ears — this guy knew the exact location of their intended landing zone, a hamlet hidden near a forested butte near Smorgon Army Air Base. Could someone in the other assault team have been captured? “You will ride with us to your landing zone. We will assist in your mission.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lobato shouted. “You had better clear out or I’ll order my men to attack.”

“Gunnery Sergeant Lobato, I know your objective is to mark the command-and-control center at Smorgon for a laser-guided weapon attack and locate and destroy the SS-21 Scarab missiles garrisoned there,” Pakstas said. His English was very, very good, which only made Lobato that much more suspicious — to his knowledge, only well-trained intelligence agents had a command of the English language like that. “We have been briefed by your Colonel White on your mission and we are prepared to assist or take over if you are unable to continue. I need to transmit your team’s status to General Palcikas and to the American Embassy.”

“What crazy motherfucker told you all this?” Lobato shouted.

“The same one that will kick your ass all the way to Peabody’s Tavern when you get back,” Pakstas replied. He holstered his pistol and raised the middle finger of both hands at Lobato. The Lithuanian officer smiled and added, “Do you understand the meaning of this message, Gunnery Sergeant?”

Lobato had to subdue a laugh. “I sure do, Major,” he replied. He could see and feel every team member relax when the Lithuanian officer said those words and made that obscene gesture. One of Paul White’s quirks was the insistence on code words and phrases, backed up by a coded gesture. “Kick your ass all the way to Peabody’s Tavern” was a reference to a popular bar in Plattsburgh, the city in upstate New York where Lobato went to college — it was a code phrase that only White would use and only team members that knew Lobato would remember; and, of course, only Paul White would punctuate the message with the finger: not one, but two.

Lobato shouldered his rifle, walked up to Pakstas, and shook his hand. “We can sure use your help, sir. We have two injured, one seriously, and one casualty, and we need to destroy our aircraft.”

“Not necessary,” Pakstas said. “Golf Company will be here in five to ten minutes to transport your casualties. They have been briefed by your embassy on which black boxes to take from your aircraft in the event it was rendered inoperable. We’ll even try to transport your aircraft out of the area before the Byelorussians get it, but no guarantees on that. But we need to get moving — we have two fuel stops to make before sundown, and then we have to sneak into Byelorussian airspace after nightfall so you’ll be in position. With all your gear, we can only take one Marine per helicopter, but more are on the way.”

“Very well, sir. Thank you.” Lobato issued orders to his men, and they formed up to get on board the tiny Defenders. As the COBRA VENOM members climbed on board their assigned helicopters, Lobato asked Pakstas, “Your English is very good, sir. If you don’t mind me asking, where did you learn it so well?”

“No big deal. I was born in America,” Pakstas replied. “Shaker Heights, Ohio — my folks still live there. They were Lithuanian refugees from Hitler and the Russians in the thirties, just before the war. I grew up in Ohio but came back to Lithuania in 1991 after independence. General Palcikas made me an officer in the Self-Defense Force when I became a dual national. I graduated from Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania, class of 1978. Psychology major. I think I’ve even been to Peabody’s Tavern in Plattsburgh on a road trip to Lake Placid once — right down the street from Mother’s Night Club, right?”

“You got it, sir.”

“Sauletumas vandenys, as we say in Lithuania. Awesome party town. When this is over, I’ll take you guys to some clubs in Klaipeda — you’ll think you’re right back in Plattsburgh. We’ve got the best Feast of St. Patrick’s parties this side of Dublin — nothing like Boston or Plattsburgh, but pretty close. Meanwhile we’ve got a long way to go before nightfall. We’d better get moving.”

“The situation is changing rapidly, sir,” the Pentagon “War Room” briefer said. His audience was very small — only four persons in all, not including aides and staffers — but it was the top military leaders and Presidential advisers in the United States of America: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Wilbur Curtis; the Secretary of Defense, Thomas Preston; and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Vance Kundert. They were seated in the front row of the large, amphitheater-like National Military Command Center, the main communications center of the Pentagon. From here the decision-makers in the Pentagon and the White House could speak with almost any unit commander, any aircraft, or any foreign government or embassy, and receive real-time data on the progress of a military operation.

Right now the status of the Byelorussian invasion of Lithuania and the U.S. response were the main topics of concern. “As expected, the Byelorussian Army’s advance into Lithuania has taken place on two main avenues — externally and internally,” the briefer said. “Internally, the advances have been very slow and rather disorganized, mostly due to the guerrilla raids accomplished by the Lithuanian Self-Defense Force. The Byelorussians are occupying big chunks of land around their air base at Siauliai, but most other gains have been slowed by miscommunication and poor coordination. Guerrilla attacks by larger and better-equipped Lithuanian forces are continuing.

“The invasion of Lithuania from outside, however, is progressing very well. Unexpectedly, the Byelorussian Army has swept aside all challenges from the Russians in Kalinin oblast and in Kaliningrad itself, which has allowed the Byelorussian Army to advance towards Lithuania.

“The Russians offered no resistance at all?” Kundert asked, astonished. “What the hell is going on here? Why did that happen?”

“We assume it was a combination of factors, sir,” the briefer replied. “The Byelorussians’ strikes were swift and decisive, and resistance was probably useless. We are also not discounting the possibility of a deal struck between Voshchanka and the Russian generals in Kalinin. The territory has always been rather autonomous from Moscow and even more so from the Commonwealth — many local warlords have emerged in the confusion following the end of the USSR and the beginning of the Commonwealth—”

“I thought Kaliningrad was a Russian stronghold,” Secretary of Defense Preston interjected. “What makes it so divisive now?”

“Kalinin oblast has always been a part of Russia,” the briefer explained, “but it was historically part of the Polish-Lithuanian empire. It was taken from Poland during World War Two when the Soviets recaptured Poland from the Nazis. Kaliningrad is very much a Soviet/Russian city, but after the breakup of the USSR and the weakening of the Soviet military, the ethnic forces have taken precedence.”

“Faced with annihilation or cooperation, the ex-Soviet warlords in Kalinin obviously chose cooperation,” Curtis summarized.

“The Byelorussian forces are continuing along three main fronts outside Lithuania: along the coast, target the port city of Klaipeda; from Kalinin oblast, target the city of Kaunas; and from the east, target Vilnius,” the briefer continued. “Advance forces have already penetrated the border itself and are joining with supply groups from within Lithuania itself.”

“So we’re too late, then,” Secretary of Defense Preston said. “Whatever we do, it won’t stop the Byelorussians, will it?”

A second briefer stepped up to a podium on the other side of the stage, and the first briefer deferred immediately to him: “I don’t think so, Mr. Secretary,” Air Force Lieutenant General Brad Elliott replied. “My — our — Megafortress strike force can slow those three advancing armies down considerably.”

Preston inwardly scowled at Elliott’s remark. He knew that something dramatic had to be done to stop this war, but accepting Elliott’s plan and sending in high-tech B-52s was not his ideal solution. He disliked having to accept a military plan that he didn’t devise, and now he disliked having someone else — especially Elliott — supervising it. But the President and Wilbur Curtis had been won over, and it was their main defensive force right now. “I understand the objective of the EB-52 strikes, General Elliott,” Preston said, “but if the Byelorussians have advanced into Lithuania, what good are they now?”

“Satellite imagery reveals that the advance forces are light armored scouts, light vehicles, and helicopter patrols only,” Elliott explained. “The main tank battle forces are still some hours away. We can still strike some Byelorussian armor units before they cross into Lithuania.”

“With just a few B-52s? It doesn’t seem likely,” Preston said skeptically.

“The EB-52 Megafortress battleships each has the offensive punch of an entire wing of A-10 or F-16 tactical bombers,” Elliott said. “They may not be able to stop the entire force in one night, but if the first wave can be decimated it might help to call off the entire invasion.”

Preston grudgingly agreed with Elliott’s assessment — but he wasn’t about to tell Elliott that. Instead he said, “If the bombers find their targets. What’s their status?”

“We can expect the primary group of four bombers to go feet-dry in about forty-five minutes—”

“Feet-dry?”

“Cross the Baltic coast and heading inbound,” Elliott explained. “One Megafortress will travel across northern Lithuania to strike at the armored units coming out of Smorgon from the east. Two bombers will start across the north, but then cut through central Lithuania to strike at the Byelorussian air base at Siauliai and continue south to counter the armor units coming in from Chernyakhovsk against Kaunas. The fourth bomber will go against the armored units along the coast that are threatening Klaipeda. The strikes will occur within ten minutes of each other, approximately two hours after crossing the coastline.”

“What about the COBRA VENOM units that are already in Smorgon?” General Kundert asked. “I thought we were going to have air support for them as well.”

“Yes, sir, we will,” Elliott replied. “We have two Megafortresses in reserve. While the four primary birds are withdrawing, the two spares will proceed inbound. They are configured for air-to-air combat as well as ground attack. They will be able to help cover the primary group’s withdrawal, and they will establish contact with the Marine Special Operations teams within Byelorussia. Together, their task is to locate and destroy Voshchanka’s command-and-control system, including his nuclear-weapon-control network.”

“That is absolutely essential, gentlemen,” Preston emphasized. “We can knock back Voshchanka’s tanks and infantry all we want, but if he follows through on his threats and pops off a few nuclear missiles, we’ve lost the battle.”

“Sir, we need all the help we can get to locate those nuclear missiles,” Curtis said to Preston. “Secretary of State Danahall indicated that some State Department or embassy staffers from Moscow are trying to help. Is there any indication on their progress?”

“Well, our embassy’s political affairs officer, Sharon Greenfield, is probably the best Company operative we have. And she’s got a strong line into Boris Dvornikov, the former Moscow bureau chief of the KGB, but I wouldn’t count on any help from Moscow,” Preston said. “The President is counting on your Special Operations Marines and General Elliott’s bombers to knock out Voshchanka’s headquarters. If we miss, we could be looking at a full-scale nuclear war in Europe within a couple of hours.

“A messenger from Moscow, sir,” the doorman said on the intercom. “It is marked urgent, eyes only.”

General Viktor Gabovich hesitated. He had relocated to the twelfth floor of the Hotel Latvia in downtown Riga, once a run-of-the-mill Soviet-run Intourist hotel and a former KGB safe house, now converted into a rather lavish joint-venture Western-style hotel run by companies from Sweden and Germany as well as Latvia itself. Gabovich had left the confusion and danger of Lithuania and had escaped to Latvia to wait out the results of the Byelorussian invasion and to try to get a reading on Voshchanka’s actions from the Commonwealth ministers. Absolutely no one should have known that he was there. But he did expect that former KGB officers from around the Commonwealth would try to contact him, to try to get in ‘me for their piece of the new communist republic that Voshchanka was forming, so the message was not totally unexpected. Gabovich pressed the intercom button. “Bring the message up.”

“The messenger insists that he deliver it to you personally, sir.”

“Who is the messenger?”

“He has no name, sir, but his credentials are in order.”

That was the typical response for a KGB officer: no name, no identity. A KGB officer appearing somewhere in person would not want to identify himself to anyone not known to him personally or to anyone of lower rank, especially a doorman or guard — Gabovich would have been suspicious if the stranger had given a name. He said, “Very well. Show him upstairs.” Gabovich wished the hotel had a video security system, but Western-style hotels did not have such things, and Latvia and the rest of the Baltic states were becoming more and more Western every day.

Gabovich drew a Beretta automatic pistol from a shoulder holster when he heard the knock at the door — four knocks, then one lower on the door, a standard KGB entry code. Pistol at the ready, Gabovich opened the door.

“Greetings, General Gabovich,” came the hearty greeting.

Gabovich did not know whom to expect, but one person he never would have guessed would appear was General Boris Georgivich Dvornikov, the former director of the Moscow Central office of the KGB and once the highest-ranking field officer in the entire service. Dvornikov was now a top-level official with the Moscow City Police, though Gabovich knew from his own sources that Dvornikov did more than just handle police affairs. Rumor had it that he kept his hands in many pies after the collapse of the USSR, and his contacts were considered to be far superior and more loyal than even Gabovich’s own. It was also known that Dvornikov could be duplicitous at will and had on more than one occasion bent over backwards to help out the Americans. It was said he had a hard-on for the U.S. Embassy’s political affairs officer in Moscow, Sharon Greenfield. Gabovich could only imagine what a sadist like Dvornikov wanted to do to Greenfield…

“Well, Viktor Josefivich, aren’t you going to invite me in, or will we talk out here in the hallway?”

Speechless with surprise, Gabovich motioned for Dvornikov to enter.

“It has been a long time since I’ve stayed at the Hotel Latvia,” Dvornikov said casually as he removed his black leather gloves and glanced idly around the apartment. “Not anything like it was when Intourist ran the place, is it? The Ministry of the Interior and we in the KGB knew nothing of running hotels.” He noticed Gabovich’s hand in his right front pocket, smiled, and said, “Are you still carrying around those delightful little Italian automatics? You always did go for the best.”

Gabovich withdrew the pistol from his pocket and placed it back in his holster, snapping the securing band tightly. “This… this is a surprise, Comrade General …”

“Please, no more rank, Viktor,” Dvornikov said in mild protest. “At least not until the Union is restored — and then I will probably be inferior in rank to yourself. Only you have had the vision to actually do something positive to restore the Union to its former glorious position.” He hesitated, watching Gabovich’s eyes brighten with a smile. Yes, Gabovich was truly proud of his deeds these past few weeks. Never mind that he could be pushing the entire world to the brink of war — that wasn’t his concern. Dvornikov added, “I assume that is what you are doing regarding this pact you have made with General Voshchanka and the other berserkers in Byelorussia, no?”

Gabovich was clearly relieved. His plan, and so far its successful progress, had been noticed by one of the highest-ranking, most powerful men in the former Soviet Union. Dvornikov was actually deferring to him! “Y-yes, that is precisely what my plan was, Comrade General,” Gabovich said proudly. “I’m very glad you approve.”

“I should like to hear more, Comrade,” Dvornikov said. He motioned to a portable bar set up in the salon. “Perhaps we can toast your triumph.” Gabovich motioned to a chair in the living room, and Dvornikov took a seat. Gabovich poured him a snifter of brandy, and before he could say anything else, Dvornikov raised it to him. “To you and your operation, much success.”

“To the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” Gabovich said confidently. He drained his entire snifter, not noticing that Dvornikov barely wet his lips with his.

“Yes, it is quite a feat you have accomplished, Viktor Josefivich,” Dvornikov smiled. “Getting that pig Voshchanka to mobilize his troops against both Lithuania and Russia in the Kalinin oblast was a stroke of genius. Frankly, I’m surprised the old goat understood what you were telling him.”

“I think Voshchanka may have some dim inkling of the idea of a new communist state and the reunion of the fraternal Soviet republics under one government,” Gabovich said, “but what I knew he believed in was power. He was obsessed with it. Nothing was going to stop him. All he needed was the right tool, the right spark—”

“And you provided that,” Dvornikov said. “As director of security of Fisikous, you had much to tempt Voshchanka’s appetite, didn’t you? One prays for such an array of weapons to offer for sale or exchange— especially nuclear warheads. The KR-11 was a Fisikous product, if I’m not mistaken, along with the X-27 air-launched cruise missile. That is what you offered him, was it not?”

Gabovich was not surprised that Dvornikov had figured out or discovered his plan — he had a ten-year reputation of such unerring data collection. “Yes, it was,” he replied. “Not only the weapons, Comrade Dvornikov, but the command-and-control. systems as well. A simple system, really, highly automated and—”

“How many warheads did you transfer to him?”

“Three,” Gabovich replied, “with technicians to modify his existing nuclear-tipped SS-21 missiles to interface with the command-and-control system. Voshchanka has an option for nine more, as well as—”

“How many SS-21 missiles with nuclear warheads does Voshchanka have in the field?” Dvornikov asked, idly running his finger around the lip of his brandy snifter.

The repeated questions, and especially the last one, irritated Gabovich — and Gabovich also noticed that Dvornikov had not touched his brandy. This, he thought, was starting to take on the form of an interrogation. “Is there some problem, Boris Georgivich? Everything is proceeding according to plan. In just a few days Lithuania will fall. The Commonwealth will have no choice but to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Voshchanka and Svetlov.”

“What were you going to get out of all this, Viktor Josefivich?” Dvornikov asked. “Fisikous has fallen to U.S. Marines and to Dominikas Palcikas — surely you know that by now — and the scientists there have been arrested by the Lithuanians. You could not have possibly expected Fisikous to stay intact once the invasion was on, especially after the massacre Voshchanka’s troops engineered there — Palcikas made Fisikous Lithuania’s equivalent of the Alamo or the Bastille. What did you hope to accom—” And then he stopped, finally realizing what Gabovich wanted, and it had nothing at all to do with Fisikous.

“I think you have guessed what I want — and I think you agree with me, Boris Georgivich,” Gabovich said. “This damned Commonwealth, the weak-kneed Russian bureaucrats in Moscow, the pathetic sheep in the Council of Ministers in Minsk — they all know what will happen, what has to happen. The Commonwealth cannot survive. It will eventually tear itself apart. Riots in the Nagorno-Karabakh, civil war in Georgia, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the eventual incorporation of Armenia and Turkmenistan into Iran and the incorporation of Moldova into Romania, absolute poverty all over the countryside, even the breakup of the Russian Federation itself — how can the Commonwealth hope to survive …?”

“I agree,” Dvornikov said, nodding. “The Commonwealth must eventually fail. But giving a megalomaniac like Voshchanka nuclear warheads? You know he will do only one thing with them.”

“Yes. Use them,” Gabovich said simply. “Against the Commonwealth armies, against the Russians, against Minsk, against anyone who dares attack him. And when that first warhead explodes, chaos will break out in all of Europe. The Commonwealth will rip apart.”

“And you are here in Riga because … you expect Voshchanka to target Minsk as well as the Russian and Commonwealth armies?”

“Of course he will,” Gabovich said matter-of-factly. “He has no military apparatus in Minsk — everything has been moved to Smorgon, and will soon be moved to Kaunas.”

“Because Vilnius…” Dvornikov prodded. “He intends on destroying Vilnius as well?”

“All remnants of Russian influence will be destroyed, including in his own country,” Gabovich said. “But he will have most of his one-hundred-thousand-man army and air force with him, deployed safely to western Lithuania and Kaliningrad.”

“The Russians will crush him.”

“Do you think Voshchanka believes that? He does not. He thinks he is invincible. He thinks God will guide his sword, deliver him from evil, and all that mythological crap. It doesn’t matter if it’s logical or tactically wise, Comrade, he will do it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has rolled a few missiles into Russia and has targeted Moscow.”

“What about Riga? Latvia is almost as Russian as St. Petersburg.”

“I think he harbors some thoughts about taking Latvia and Estonia,” Gabovich explained. “In any case I am monitoring his SS-2 1 unit’s movements. So far none of those units are within range of Latvia, except perhaps Daugavpils.”

“So you know where the nuclear-tipped missiles are?” Dvornikov asked. “You can pinpoint their location?”

“Of course,” Gabovich said, pouring another snifter of brandy. “I was very concerned that the old war-horse would try to come after me. I think he believes I am in Minsk, which is why he has moved all three nuclear-capable missiles to the pre-surveyed launch point in Kurenets — that is, within optimal range for both Minsk and Vilnius for the SS-21.”

“And so you think that by killing several million persons and destroying two European capitals, the Commonwealth will end and the Union will be restored?” asked Dvornikov.

“Of course it will be restored,” Gabovich said testily. “Russia will certainly occupy Belarus after the attack. After that, Russia will have no choice but to subdue all the other republics that still have nuclear weapons — the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. The Commonwealth will end, to be replaced by a strong, dominant Russia — as it should be.”

Dvornikov studied the dark amber liquid in his glass for a moment; then: “And the deaths of millions of people, including your fellow Russians, don’t concern you?”

“Concern me? Comrade, I am counting on it,” Gabovich said. “What better way to begin a fresh start than with a nuclear release? What better way to purge the land of reformists, reactionaries, nationalists, imperialist, and capitalists? Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no liberals after a nuclear explosion. Imagine the ramifications: higher prices for Russian oil; newer, stronger military to counter the West, which will certainly want to rearm against the ‘new Soviet threat’—the list is endless. The people will realize that a divided union will only lead to more chaos. Everything will be as it once was, with Russia regaining the respect and power and authority it once had, with the foreign influences removed and with the central government firmly in command.”

Dvornikov realized now he was sitting across from a very cool, very collected, but totally insane man. Gabovich’s reputation as a tough, no-nonsense officer had preceded him for years, but there had been hints, strong hints, that he was more than just that. He was, in fact, probably many times more mad than Voshchanka. And yet… there was a spark of logic in what Gabovich was saying. Was it possible that Gabovich’s twisted plan could actually work? He wondered …

“I see your plan now, Comrade,” he said finally. “I was very concerned about you for a while: I believed you were actually selling out to Voshchanka, selling out the Union—”

“Never!” Gabovich retorted.

“I realize that,” Dvornikov said. “But how can you be sure that Voshchanka will turn the keys? He may be committed to his plan, but we have seen that he is not the most intelligent commander that ever got off the shitter. To say he’s primitive is being kind. Where is his command center at Smorgon? Can he communicate with his forces and send a launch message via radio or data link to his command center?”

“Of course,” Gabovich said smugly. “The Fisikous command network is the world’s most sophisticated system. But I don’t think you need to worry about Voshchanka pulling the trigger — he will do it. We will get a report in just a few hours that a weapon has been launched.”

“I wish I had your confidence that all will proceed normally, Viktor Josefivich. I like to be sure.”

“I doubt that. You want to know where the command center is because you really want to stop him from launching those missiles,” Gabovich surmised. “But why? Why do you want to stop him? Don’t you care about the Union, Comrade? You were a powerful man in the old Soviet Union, Boris Georgivich — would you like to see it come back?”

“I would feel better if those weapons were in your hands rather than a nut case like Voshchanka’s, that’s all.”

Gabovich regarded him warily. The flattery didn’t suit Dvornikov. It had, in fact, blown him completely. “Don’t try and placate me,” Gabovich snarled. “You’re lying. You no more want me to have charge of those weapons than Voshchanka. You think I’m crazy, don’t you? Fool! You don’t want them launched at all, do you? You care nothing about the future! The glorious future that will be ours—mine!”

Gabovich reached for the pistol in his holster, but he was far, far too late. From his greatcoat pocket Dvornikov withdrew a Walther P-4 automatic pistol fitted with a large cylindrical suppressor that was longer than the gun itself and fired twice into Gabovich’s heart from close range. The heavily suppressed, small-caliber subsonic rounds made virtually no noise. Gabovich stumbled backwards, his eyes wide with surprise and insanity; he was dead before he hit the floor.

“You had the power of life and death in your hands, you stupid bastard,” Dvornikov said to the corpse, “and you screwed it up. I only hope Voshchanka goes through with his plan now, or all this will turn into nothing but an incredible waste.”

Dvornikov holstered his gun and began rifling through Gabovich’s papers. The fool had an entire stack of information on the weapons, including their location, in his briefcase—I could have had the floor mother steal this stuff for God’s sake! He removed the files, ripped them into several pieces, tossed them into a metal garbage can, and dropped a match onto the papers. Well, he thought wryly, Gabovich wasn’t much of a spy anyway, but his plan was going to go forward despite his stupidity. He was going to be sure that—

“Freeze, Boris. Raise your hands and get away from that desk.”

Dvornikov stopped ripping papers, dropped them, and raised his hands. “Well, well, Sharon,” he said. Despite her warning, he turned and faced CIA agent Sharon Greenfield with his usual disarming smile. “At last we are alone, and in more pleasant surroundings.”

“Get away from that desk, I said.” He stepped away a single step, moving toward her. “Left hand, fingers only, remove your gun from the holster and throw it over here.”

“Really, Sharon …”

“Now!” she ordered.

He shrugged his shoulders, reached down with his left hand, withdrew the gun from his holster, and tossed it to her feet. She stooped down and stuck it in her coat pocket. Greenfield then motioned to the other side of the room with her gun. “Move over there.” He circled away a few pacer, but he was still the same distance to her. “You’re getting lax, Boris,” Sharon said, going over to the waste can, kicking it, and stomping on the burning papers. “Former KGB honcho like yourself, getting caught by a tail like me. You were much slicker, more careful in the old days, Boris. But thank God you’ve gotten lazier. Makes my job a lot easier.”

Dvornikov ignored the jab. “Sharon, you’re really making a mess of the new carpeting …”

“Shut up, Boris.” She checked Gabovich. The two bullet holes in his chest were hardly bleeding — he was very dead. His gun was still in his holster; she left it there. “Why did you kill Gabovich, Boris? If what our reports say is true, he might have sold nuclear warheads to Voshchanka in exchange for clemency after the invasion of Lithuania was completed. He might have known where the warheads are…

“He knew nothing. He was crazy. He reached for his gun, and I shot him.”

“How can you be so sure? Did he say anything to you?”

“Nothing.”

Greenfield frowned at Dvornikov, not sure whether to believe him or not, then motioned to the bullet holes in Gabovich’s chest. “Pretty good group, Boris. Did you ever think about putting that group in his shoulder or leg so we could question him?”

“Is that what you will do to me, Sharon? Will you just wound me or will you shoot to kill?”

She bent down to examine the burnt papers. The top papers were charred, but the bottom ones were still mostly intact. “Neither, if you behave.” Her Russian reading skills were poor, but she soon recognized what the papers said. “Boris, these papers… they show the location of Voshchanka’s missiles. Why were you—”

Dvornikov moved with the speed of a cheetah.

He kicked Greenfield’s gun hand, sending the gun flying. One more step, driving with his legs and hips, and he punched at her face with an expert karate blow. She cried out and went cartwheeling over. He was on top of her, pinning her arms to her sides with his legs. He slapped her across the face once, twice, and finally felt the fight go out of her body.

“You have no idea, bitch, how long I’ve waited to do this,” Dvornikov gasped. There was no hint of the civil, refined, sophisticated man-about-town anymore — now he was a shaking, wild-eyed attacker.

It was a side of Dvornikov Sharon had always feared but never actually seen. The times they had met on business over the years in Moscow had always included heavy-handed sexual inferences from Dvornikov, inferences Sharon had just as heavy-handedly rejected. Knowing his sadistic reputation both in his professional and personal life, she had always worried that he would someday pounce …

He pulled her coat open, then ripped her blouse apart, revealing her breasts. “Oh, yes, lovely Sharon. I knew you’d be this beautiful …”

She tried hard to concentrate, to distract him, refocus him, all the while squirming beneath him, not giving in. She had kept tabs on him since Moscow, tailed him all the way to damned Latvia, and she was sure as hell not going to let him blow her mission for a quick and unwelcome fuck.

“Why were you helping Gabovich?”

“Because I realized he was right,” Dvornikov said. He groaned in ecstasy, trying to undo his pants. “Voshchanka is going to destroy Vilnius and Minsk. When he launches those missiles, the world will change — again — back to the way it was before all this reform and glasnost and openness and capitalism that has been creating so much confusion and disorganization in my country all these years. Russia will retake the republics and reassert its dominance over Europe once again — and I intend to be part of it. All I have to do is make sure no one finds out about the missiles. When I return to Moscow, I’ll be the chief of the KGB.”

He fondled her left breast, twirling the nipple between his thumb and forefinger. His grasp suddenly tightened, and she caught her breath as his fingers tightened. Dvornikov’s eyes narrowed, and his lips twisted into an evil leer. “You want a little pain, dear Sharon?”

There were three short, muted puffs! of sound, but the ex-KGB officer’s body jerked as if it had been hit by three consecutive hammer blows. Dvornikov’s right rib cage exploded in a cloud of gore and bright crimson, and his eyes grew wide in shock. He looked down at his side, saw bone and pieces of his right lung hanging out of his body, then turned to Greenfield. “Sharon, my love,” he croaked, blood flowing from his dying lips, “what did you do?” His eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped over.

She stayed on her back for several long moments, the smoking gun in her right hand, listening to his heavy, gurgling breathing. She did not move until the gurgling stopped. Dvornikov had forgotten about the gun that she had put in her coat pocket — his gun.

The sadistic bastard was finally dead.

When she felt strong enough to move, she crawled back to the desk and the pile of half-burnt papers lying on the floor. From what she could tell, these were Gabovich’s notes on the sale of three nuclear warheads to General Lieutenant Voshchanka of the Byelorussian Army and surveillance records on the location and technical-system setup for the SS-21s on which they were to be carried.

Sharon moved painfully to her feet, buttoned herself up, collected the papers, stuffed them in her coat pocket, and left the room. The Byelorussian Army’s attack was under way and the counterattack would be beginning shortly after sunset. If Voshchanka was going to make good on his threat to launch those missiles, he would do it then. She didn’t have much time, but there was still a chance. She had to get the papers to the U.S. Embassy there in Riga, have them decoded and translated, and hope they could lead the Marines to the location of the missiles.

The Osmanskaja Vozvysennost, or Osmansky Highlands, which lay between Minsk and Vilnius, was called the “Highway to Heaven” by the people of northern Byelorussia because the rugged, rolling glacial valleys, hills, and buttes led from the marshy, dark wetlands of central Byelorussia to the fertile, well-drained valleys and farmlands of Lithuania and the Baltic Sea region. But the Highlands were also rugged, rocky, windswept hills, which made it very difficult to bring wagons or heavily laden horses across it. As such, they were a favorite spot from which to stage an ambush. Between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, several key battles between the Lithuanian-Byelorussian defenders and foreign invaders were won because the defenders swept down from the Highlands to overwhelm the invaders traveling on the marshy, unprotected valley plains below.

Lithuania’s Grand Duke Gediminas’s main castle was built on a hill that was part of the western terminus of the Osmansky Highlands. The Iron Wolf Tower, the main guard tower of the castle, was perched atop the hill and was itself ten stories tall, making the tower the highest elevation in all of Lithuania, with enough visibility to see nearly fifty miles into Byelorussia north and south of the Highlands.

General Dominikas Palcikas had taken advantage of this and had put an old war-surplus Royal Navy Type 293 air-and-surface-search radar atop the main tower to track helicopters and vehicles traveling along the highways and lowlands. Because the radar was old and very unreliable, however, Palcikas, just like his warrior brethren of ages past, had not forgotten to keep human sentries up on the tower to keep watch and report any activity they saw.

Palcikas, being a student of history, assumed that all professional, Soviet-trained generals were the same. It was a surprise, then, for him to find General Voshchanka’s Home Brigade moving rapidly along the main east-west highway north of the Osmansky Highlands. All armies that have taken the “low road” through Byelorussia — the Teutonic knights, the Mongols, the Crusaders, even the Russian conquerors — have gotten nailed from defenders coming out of the Osmansky Highlands.

Of course this was now the age of helicopter and jet warfare, of tanks that could climb mountains and guns that could dig out even the most entrenched troops. So it was not going to be an easy fight.

“Radar contact, aircraft, numerous targets, bearing one-zero-three degrees, range twenty-eight nautical miles,” the radar controller in a van parked on the grounds of the Lower Castle reported via radio. “Heading westbound at eight knots. They’ll be over Vilnius East in a few minutes.”

Dominikas Palcikas, on board his Mil-8 assault/transport/command helicopter, nodded nervously when the report was relayed to him. The helicopter, along with twenty others belonging to his First Battalion, were parked atop Dokshitsy Butte, ten miles east of the Lithuanian border. The Mil-8 was a standard attack/assault craft, carrying ten security troops, a battle staff of four, and four 57-millimeter rocket pods, but Palcikas had it upgraded with extensive communications gear to serve as his forward command ship.

With his air-cavalry unit were about two thousand troops and a hundred vehicles, from tanks to armored personnel carriers to World War Il-era Jeeps, armed and ready to charge. “Ninety knots airspeed — could be attack helicopters,” Palcikas mused. “But if our patrols haven’t spotted the initial spearhead of tanks yet, those helicopters are probably scouts.

“No reports of attack helicopters up anywhere,” Colonel Zukauskas, Palcikas’ deputy commander, added. “Perhaps the American Marines’ raid on Smorgon was a success?”

“Perhaps,” Palcikas said with a dim smile. There was actually a lot of evidence that suggested that the Marines were very active in Byelorussia — the command team that was picked up by one of Palcikas’ helicopter cavalry companies, the unexplained return of the Marines to Fisikous, and the reports he heard about a large-scale explosion and fire at Smorgon Army Air Base itself.

But the Byelorussian Army that was advancing on Vilnius from Smorgon was still large and very powerful; they had as many scout helicopters as Lithuania had helicopters of any type, and they probably had as many mechanics and garbage collectors as Palcikas had trained soldiers. There was no way that Palcikas could hope to face Voshchanka’s army head-to-head. Voshchanka could lay waste to the city with ease, using just his helicopters …

… so Palcikas wasn’t going to face Voshchanka’s troops head-to-head. He had learned from long years of experience as well as from the realities of life that he had faced since becoming commander of Lithuania’s young army that he could not do anything he wanted. No amount of prayer, positive thinking, or planning was ever going to make the Byelorussian Army turn tail and run. Palcikas needed an alternate plan, and he was putting that plan into motion at that very moment.

Despite the speed advantages for Voshchanka’s troops of traveling on the superhighway that ran from Minsk to Vilnius, the one disadvantage lay in maneuvering — it was easy and convenient to leave the highway only in certain places. Trying to maneuver laterally once the convoy got moving was nearly impossible. Palcikas had decided to borrow a page from Byelorussia’s early history:

When the Mongol invaders swept across the territory toward the Baltic, the Rus inhabitants were able to cut off their supply lines as well as their rear and flanking guards by making lightning-fast hit-and-run attacks down from the Highlands, then escaping back into the rugged hills. Using his light tanks, armored personnel carriers, and assault/transport helicopters, that was precisely what Palcikas had planned — instead of trying to face the Byelorussian Army head-on at the border, he had moved his entire division from Vilnius, nearly six thousand troops, across the border into the Osmansky Highlands of Byelorussia and was now in position to attack the troop column’s flanks and rear. Visibility was poor, but through the cold, driving rain Palcikas could see the columns of tanks and armored vehicles speeding across the Minsk-Vilnius Highway westward.

The poor weather had obviously hampered Voshchanka’s scouting operations, because at least one patrol helicopter flew within two kilometers of First Brigade’s hiding place and failed to spot them. Now most of the scouts had moved ahead, tightening their search patterns as they moved closer to Vilnius.

“Radar reports more helicopters inbound,” Zukauskas said. “Multiple inbounds, faster than the first group. It’s got to be the assault helicopters. Position is very close to Third Brigade’s.”

“Signal Third Battalion to stand by to attack when the helicopters pass by,” Palcikas said. Messages were sent between Palcikas’ units via old-style field telephones, since a radio broadcast originating so close to the Byelorussian troops would have been detected and pinpointed immediately. Palcikas walked, then crawled over to a small knot of soldiers lying on the very rim of the butte, studying the Byelorussian armored column through a large telescope. “You got us a target yet, Sergeant?”

Sergeant of Infantry Markuc Styra looked up, saw that it was General Palcikas himself lying in the mud next to him, and gulped. “No, sir. I see the vehicles all right, but I can’t make out the missile vehicles or ZSU-23-4 units.” His telescope was a large, bulky, Soviet-made CSR-3030 night scope, able to amplify tiny amounts of light to illuminate the entire scene and allow them to “see in the dark.” Unfortunately, the older device needed a lot of light to be useful, such as moonlight, and with a full-blown spring thunderstorm on top of them, it was going to be all but useless.

“Hang tight, then. We’ll have to get you some illumination.” He crawled back out away from the crest of the butte, then said to his deputy, “Colonel, get the helicopters ready to attack.”

It was not any of the troops in the armored column below, but the weapons officer aboard a Byelorussian Mil-24 assault helicopter flying south of the highway who first issued the warning: “Brigade, brigade, this is flight one-five-four. Enemy helicopters atop the butte to the south. I have them in sight — closing to attack.” The gunner had locked his infrared scanner on the very hot profile of the helicopter below. “Target!” he cried out.

“Call out range,” the pilot responded. “Rocket pods coming hot.” In a Mil-24, the gunner usually controlled only the infrared TV sensor in the nose and whichever weapon the pilot would let him have. But since most pilots did not like to retake control of a weapon only to find no more ammunition in it, most retained full control over all weapons — relegating the gunner to the role of a high-tech observer.

The gunner used an optronic device in the infrared scanner to judge range: “Estimated three kilometers … two kilometers … left three degrees … coming up on one kilometer …”

But something was wrong. The object he thought was a helicopter was not looking anything like a flying machine now. “Stand by.”

It wasn’t a helicopter! As they got closer, the gunner saw it was a truck, apparently with a broken axle or two flat front tires, with some ammunition crates behind it to form the outline of a large helicopter and some sort of weathervane-type device mounted on the roof to make it look like a helicopter’s rotor. A few strategically placed flares made it look like an idling helicopter through the infrared scanner. “It’s not—”

But he wasn’t adamant enough about making the withholding call. “Missile away,” the pilot said, and let fly a salvo of ten 57-millimeter rockets. The explosion was spectacular — too spectacular. The thing must have been loaded with oil or gasoline, because the truck exploded with a great big orange fireball that lit up the night sky like a beacon — it was bright enough out there to see the armored column a good two or three kilometers away.

“Good hit, good secondaries,” the pilot radioed.

“It wasn’t a helicopter,” the gunner reported. “It was a decoy! Let’s climb out of here and—”

It was too late.

The Mil-24 was hit a few seconds later by a Soviet-made SA-7 missile fired by one of Palcikas’ infantrymen as the attack helicopter flew overhead — at a range of less than a thousand meters, even the relatively unreliable SA-7 Strela missile could not miss. The infantryman even knew enough not to wait until the helicopter passed by, but to hit it as it was moving abeam his position since the Mil-24’s engine exhaust is diverted sideways and downwards to(deter heat-seeking missiles fired from astern.

The Mil-24 continued flying after its destroyed left engine was shut down, but it crashed several kilometers away moments later.

But the downing of the Mil-24, although a real bonus for the Lithuanians, was not the main objective — Palcikas’ men needed a big distraction and a bright source of illumination while they searched for specific vehicles in the armored column, and they found it after the gasoline-laden decoy went up in flames. Layered within most Soviet-style armored columns were air-defense weapons, usually surrounded by other vehicles to disguise and protect them — but when the column reconfigured to deal with the “attack” from the Osmansky Highlands, the protection broke apart.

The spotters on the ridgeline above the column finally saw their objective: spaced every ten vehicles or so were four SA-8 road-mobile surface-to-air missile units, with four short-range antiaircraft missiles per unit; every fifteen vehicles was one SA-6 tracked surface-to-air missile unit carrying three medium-range missiles, along with its “Long Track” and “Straight Flush” surveillance and tracking radars and maintenance-support vehicle chugging alongside; and spread out laterally from the column every five vehicles were two ZSU-23-4 air-defense-artillery tracked units.

As well as learning lessons from historical battles, Palcikas had learned a lesson from the more recent Persian Gulf War — hit an objective with heavy, sustained firepower, then move. That is exactly what he did. As soon as the air-defense vehicles revealed themselves, Palcikas ordered his tanks and attack helicopters to attack. The Lithuanians streamed out of the Osmansky Highlands, opening fire on the air-defense vehicles before they had a chance to react.

The Lithuanians had nothing more powerful than mortars, bazookas, and rocket-propelled grenades, but their targets were not heavily armored main battle tanks but the fairly lightly armored air-defense vehicles. The truck and Jeep-mounted RPGs did the most damage, moving in to very close range before opening fire, then darting away.

The ZSU-23-4s were hit hard.

Palcikas’ few tanks, all older-model T-55 and T-62 units, created enough distraction to allow the smaller vehicles to close in for the kill. Once the ZSU-23-4s were out of the fight, his helicopters hit next, blasting the SA-8 and SA-6 units with cannon fire and 40-millimeter grenades launched by the copilots. The Byelorussian SA-8 and SA-6 missiles could be disabled by heavy-caliber gunfire or even a grenade exploding too close, and the SA-6 was vulnerable to a hit on its companion radar vehicle, so they were easily put out of commission.

The Byelorussian trucks were having considerable difficulty deploying to defend their column by the time Palcikas’ troops all along the Osmansky Highlands completed their fast attack. There was a deep, water-filled ditch on either side of the highway, and tall, strong fences beyond that kept stray cattle and blowing dirt, rocks, and debris off the highway. Even the heavy T-64 and T-72 tanks had trouble crossing the wide, deep ditch, and the lighter vehicles had no chance. Any vehicle hung up in the ditch or the fence for even a moment was easy prey for the Lithuanian cannons and RPGs.

“We’ve got them pinned down!” Colonel Zukauskas said to Palcikas, now airborne in the Mil-8 patrolling the highway in search of any unit that needed help. “Third Battalion reports several fuel and ammunition vehicles on fire, and it appears that several vehicles in the lead have stalled or broken down. We can target the heavier tanks and APCs now.”

“No,” Palcikas said. “Issue the retreat order. Tell all units to pull back to the Highlands and rally at point Victory for withdrawal instructions.”

“But, sir, this can be a great victory for you,” Zukauskas said. “We didn’t anticipate the success our first thrust would be. Our casualties have been very light, only a handful of vehicles from the entire division — now is the time to press our advantage.”

“Our casualties were light because we did not engage the heavy armor,” Palcikas said. “That was the plan. We cannot afford heavier losses. The tide can turn quickly on us, and if we are trapped this far in Byelorussia we can lose our entire force. As long as this thunderstorm continues overhead, now is the time to withdraw, not attack. We’ve accomplished our mission.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Zukauskas pressed, “our mission is to protect Lithuania. If we stop this armored column now, Lithuania is saved. I recommend we proceed with the attack.”

“Your objection is noted,” Palcikas said. “Now issue the retreat order immediately.”

Zukauskas nodded, although he looked as if he was ready to continue arguing. But seconds after he turned back to the radio net, Zukauskas turned to Palcikas once more: “Sir, Third Battalion reports that they have crossed north of the highway and are beginning a rear attack on the main battle tanks. Colonel Manomaitis reports six T-72s destroyed or disabled.”.

“Damn, “ Palcikas swore, loud enough for the pilots to hear him in the front of the noisy cabin. “If Manomaitis doesn’t die from his stupidity, I’ll wring his neck when we get back!”

“We can tell him to withdraw,” Zukauskas said, “but then we’ve got to support his withdrawal with elements of Second Battalion or with the helicopters. But if we re-engaged with all forces we could—”

“You’re getting too blood-hungry, sitting up here warm and dry in a helicopter, Colonel,” Palcikas said angrily, “while sixteen-year-old volunteers running through knee-deep mud are getting shot at by Byelorussian tanks. The helicopters are running low on fuel and will have to return to Lithuania, and we don’t have many more Strela missiles left — did you think of that? I want First Battalion to withdraw to point Whirlwind and turn to cover the west flank. Third of the Second will also withdraw and provide covering fire. Get Alpha and Bravo companies of Second Battalion moving east to help cover First Battalion’s withdrawal. Then I want—”

The Mil-8 swerved and dipped precipitously as the hull was pounded by heavy gunfire. The cabin began filling with oily, stinging smoke.

“We’re going in, General!” one of the pilots called back as the lights flickered, then died in the cockpit. “Brace for impact.”

Palcikas saw the rocket pods being jettisoned as the pilots fought to find a safe, soft landing spot, as far into the protection of the Highlands as possible but not so far up that they would land on rocks.

The big Mil-8 assault helicopter landed hot and heavy, but the fixed tricycle landing gear stayed intact and the big helicopter remained upright. No one was hurt in the impact. With the ten security troops deployed as a covering guard, Palcikas and his battle staff collected their classified charts and papers, retrieved their portable communications gear, and exited the helicopter.

“Up the hill,” Palcikas called out to his troops. “Radio, see if you can contact Colonel Manomaitis. Tell him we’re on the ground and order him to supervise an orderly withdrawal to rendezvous point Lightning or Overlord. Then contact Sparrow Ten and have him pick us up. Use light signals — stay off the transmitter as much as possible or the Byelorussians will home in on your—”

The unmistakable impact of heavy-caliber bullets against rocks and dirt nearby made them all leap for cover. The Byelorussian armored columns were starting to organize their counterattack. Several T-72 main battle tanks were rushing toward them from the west — it was hard to tell distance at night, but Palcikas thought they were now less than four kilometers away, well within main gun range — and First Battalion was fleeing from their heavy 125-millimeter guns. Already two Lithuanian tanks had been hit and were burning fiercely. “Get up into the hills!” Palcikas shouted. “Stay hidden, but don’t get caught in a crevasse. Move!”

Palcikas paused to count heads as they ran up the hill toward the summit of the Osmansky Highlands, then grabbed the radio pack from one of the security men. He had to risk a radio transmission or else they’d be gunned down or overrun within minutes. “Second Battalion, this is Alpha, free up Seventh Armor and move west to counter four to six T-72s heading east. First Battalion is trying to withdraw. He needs—”

Palcikas heard a loud ccrrackk! and he felt as if his left leg had been shot off — there was no pain, only numbness and a warm, damp feeling that began to spread. He hit the ground hard, and the pain hit with the force of a blast furnace. His left hand felt for the wound, and it was a big one — blood was gushing out of a two-centimeter-wide hole like a ruptured high-pressure hose. Never in his life had he ever felt such excruciating pain. He rolled on the ground, vomiting and screaming and choking, hoping that a Byelorussian tank would just roll over his writhing body and end it for him.

“General Palcikas!” someone shouted. It was Colonel Zukauskas. He had run back to find his commanding officer. Palcikas felt hands grasping the epaulets on his field jacket, and he was being dragged across the rocks and dirt behind a clump of boulders.

“No … no, Vitalis,” Palcikas screamed, “don’t stay here. Run. Take command of the brigade.” But Zukauskas’ hands were still on his jacket. “That’s an order, Vitalis. You can’t help me. You have command of the brigade. Go!”

Palcikas reached up to try to pull Zukauskas’ hands off his jacket. One released easily. “Now go, Vitalis. That’s an order.” One hand was still on Palcikas’ jacket, and that one would not let go — and Palcikas soon found out why. Zukauskas’ head and chest had been chewed apart by machine-gun fire and he had fallen behind Palcikas with his hands still clutching his commander’s jacket. The corpse was hardly recognizable as a man, much less a Lithuanian officer.

Palcikas dragged himself behind the boulders and retrieved Zukauskas’ AK-47 and an ammunition pouch, but even as he checked the magazine and chambered a round, he knew any attempts at fighting were useless. He checked his aviation survival vest for some field dressings, but they had all been lost. He tried stanching the blood with his left hand, but that was useless as well — he finally grabbed a handful of mud and gravel and slapped it in place. If the loss of blood didn’t kill him now, he thought wryly, the infection from the dirt would.

As his blood-starved brain fought to maintain consciousness, the commander of the Lithuanian Self-Defense Force thought about this, his greatest battle — and his worst defeat. How quickly the tide of battle can change. It was a bold plan, rushing nearly one hundred kilometers in less than eighteen hours across hostile territory, right in the face of an oncoming army at least ten times bigger than his own, just to specifically target its air-defense weapons. They had actually struck a hard blow against the column of tanks and armored vehicles. Palcikas counted at least two dozen destroyed or damaged ZSU-23-4 antiaircraft-artillery vehicles and mobile surface-to-air missile units, plus another dozen tanks and other vehicles and two Mil-24 attack helicopters.

Pretty good for a tiny band of patriots …

The patter of rain on his flight helmet was being displaced by the roar of approaching tanks and the chatter of machine guns. Palcikas recognized the sounds: the T-72 main battle tank had that characteristic high-pitched squeal when the turret was traversed, no matter how well you tried to keep the bearings lubricated, and its V-12 diesel engine always sounded like the wheezing of an old man. Palcikas peeked over his cover of boulders. My God, he thought, there were at least four of them, all less than two hundred meters away — he was close enough to see the red-and-green Byelorussian flag flying on the leader. Some infantrymen were following along behind the tanks, shooting into the hills. The tanks had to stop in a few meters, Palcikas thought, so the infantry would be exposed soon. He could pin down the infantry with his AK-47 until his ammunition ran out or until the main gun of one of those tanks blasted him out of his rock hiding place — no way in hell was he going to be captured alive by the damned White Russians …

The main gun on one of the T-72s fired, the blast dislodging rocks and dirt around Palcikas and causing him to scream aloud in pain. The sheer thunder of that blast numbed his entire body. He barely heard the scream of compressed air as the shell flew through space, then a flash of light and a huge secondary explosion from somewhere above him — the gun had found a truck or had finally destroyed his disabled Mil-8 helicopter …

… But the scream of the artillery shell seemed to continue, except it was no longer flying over his head toward the Highlands, but from the east toward the column of Byelorussian tanks. Palcikas saw nothing, only heard the strange screaming noise — then suddenly two of the T-72s right in front of him exploded in huge balls of fire. The massive explosions threw the other two tanks over onto their turrets and they began rolling down the canyon toward the highway, finally coming to rest on their blackened sides.

It took several minutes for Palcikas’ head to clear after the maelstrom of fire before he could pull himself back up onto the rocks protecting him and look out over the Minsk-Vilnius Highway below.

What he saw was incredible. It seemed as if every armored vehicle in the Byelorussian Army’s column was on fire.

It was like some eerie holiday lantern chain, stretching for thousands of meters. He saw rivers of burning fuel spilling out onto the highway, roasting the bodies of thousands of soldiers that were strewn about the roadside like so many stones. Ammunition was cooking off everywhere, and he had to take cover behind his rocks again to protect himself.

He was sitting deep in the crevasse, listening to bullets pinging off the rocks around him, when he looked up into the gray night sky and saw an incredible sight — a massive aircraft with huge wings roared barely a hundred meters overhead — it seemed as if it was close enough to touch, so low that he thought it was going to land on the highway.

It was obviously an American B-52.

It had released some kind of anti-armor mines or bomblets that had decimated the Byelorussian armored column in one swift stroke.

It was not until then that General Palcikas understood the meaning of the message he had received from Lithuanian President Kapocius, just before he left Vilnius on his way east to ambush the Byelorussian Army — Kapocius had told him that he had received word from an unnamed foreign source that did not want to be identified. It said that if Palcikas could attack and destroy the air-defense units belonging to the invading Byelorussian Home Brigade forces, help would arrive. Palcikas thought it would be help from Poland, or even Russia or the rest of the Commonwealth — he never expected help to come from the United States of America.

The sounds of explosion and popping ammunition subsided, to be replaced a few minutes later by the sounds of boots on rocks.

“General Palcikas!” someone shouted. “General! Where are you?” There was a slight pause; then the voice shouted, “I wish the punishment, so that I may prove myself worthy!”

Palcikas smiled, filled his lungs with damp, cold air, and shouted, “To receive the power!” It was his officers’ personal code-phrase, borrowed from their knighthood ceremony. Soon he was being helped out of the crevasse, and medics were tending to his wounded leg.

“How bad is it?” Palcikas asked.

Captain Degutis, Palcikas’ headquarters intelligence staff officer recently promoted from lieutenant after the Fisikous raid, held a poncho over Palcikas’ face to keep the rain out. “Your leg is in bad shape, sir, but I think you’ll be—”

“Not my leg, damn you, Pauli. The brigade. Do you have a report?”

“Sorry, sir. The brigade has formed up at rendezvous point Whirlwind and is proceeding back to Vilnius at best speed. We lost approximately three hundred personnel in the battle, mostly from First Battalion when the Byelorussian tanks in the front of the column turned and attacked. Second and Third battalions came out very well — there was enough confusion in the rear to allow Third Battalion to escape. Your helicopter and one Defender were lost, along with four tanks and eleven APCs and trucks. Would you like an estimate on Byelorussian casualties and an estimate of the Home Brigade’s offensive capability, sir?”

Palcikas felt a needle prick in his left gluteus, and he knew that the medics had drugged him so they could start removing pieces of bullets from his leg. “Only… if you can make it… quick, Captain,” Palcikas gasped through the pain as he felt forceps dig deeply into his left thigh and blood spill down his leg.

“Yes, sir, it’ll be quick,” Degutis said with a smile. “Home Brigade losses: one hundred percent, Unit offensive capability: zero percent.”

“I’ve got sensor contact on the return,” Patrick McLanahan reported. The Fisikous-170 Tuman stealth bomber’s telescopic forward-looking infrared scanner, slaved to the attack radar, had picked up a column of tanks moving northeastward near the small town of Kazly Ruda, just twenty nautical miles from Lithuania’s second-largest city of Kaunas. McLanahan used a tracking handle, very similar to the old ASQ-38 radar tracking handle in the B-52G bomber, to center a set of crosshairs on the lead tank, then pressed a trigger. A white box centered itself around the tank. “Locked on, showing one-fifty to go.” He turned to General Ormack in the pilot’s seat. “Any luck over there, John?”

“No, damn this thing,” Ormack cursed. He was struggling with the electric trim button on the bomber, which kept on driving itself first to the full nose-down, then suddenly to the full nose-up position. “Dave, dammit, are you sure I can’t disconnect the flight-control system?”

“Not until after weapon release, sir,” David Luger replied, sitting in the instructor pilot’s seat between Ormack and McLanahan. “Flight control system needs to be in ACTIVE if it’s not faulted.”

“Well, can’t you pull a circuit breaker or something?”

“I tried that,” Luger said. He was dressed in no less than two flight suits and a thick, winter-weight leather flying jacket to keep warm-his emaciated body simply could not generate enough heat. “Something’s still energizing the trim drive system. Try the secondary hydraulic-system switch again.”

Ormack took a firm grip on the control wheel with his right hand, reached down to the instrument panel near his left knee, and flipped a switch. A red light on the forward instrument panel marked GEAR UNSAFE — in English, McLanahan was surprised to see — had been on since takeoff. The red light went out and a loud rumbling in the forward part of the Fi-170 subsided — for about five seconds, when the red light popped back on and the rumbling returned. “Nose gear flopped back down,” Ormack said. “We’ll leave it where it is for now. Any restriction on releasing weapons with gear down?”

“Maintain zero sideslip and no turns or descents for ten seconds,” Luger replied.

“Easy for you to say,” Ormack said. “I’m fighting this trim wheel. It’ll kill us for sure.”

“Just don’t let it descend after release — a slight climb is okay,” Luger said. “Patrick, you’ll have to open the doors manually to avoid putting the whole hydraulic system into standby. The switch is right below the window lever, to the right of the weapons-selector switch.”

“Got it. One-twenty TG.” McLanahan quickly inventoried their remaining weapons: two semiactive radar-homing AA-8 air-to-air missiles in the far outboard weapons bays and two cluster-bomb cruise missiles in the center bomb bay. At first they had no intention of attacking anything — they were going to fly Tuman out of Lithuania and into Sweden or Norway. The bomber had numerous malfunctions, and as in the Old Dog mission of years past, they had no flying safety equipment, no charts (except for the computerized navigation system), and no real plan of action except to survive.

But as soon as they were airborne they heard radio messages from Lithuanian Self-Defense Force units all over the country, pleading for assistance.

Towns and cities were under attack everywhere, mostly from Byelorussian troops that were already stationed in the country as part of the Commonwealth defense forces, but more and more from Byelorussian armored units from Kalinin oblast. They had enough fuel for several hours of flying, and verified targets were popping up on radar and on the infrared scanner, so they went to work.

In less than thirty minutes McLanahan and crew had attacked a column of tanks close to Vilnius with two cluster-bomb units, and they had hit a Mil-24 attack helicopter with an infrared-guided AA-7 missile shortly after takeoff. One more attack and their debt to the Lithuanians for securing Fisikous would be paid and they’d be flying for themselves and their own survival.

“One hundred TG,” McLanahan announced. “Center the needle, ten right.” He did some rough mental calculations — range to the target, altitude, and speed — then designated a second target about three thousand feet from the first. He planned on dropping the second cluster bomb right at the edge of the bomb’s destructive radius in order to take out as many of the tanks as possible. “I’ve got the second target set,” he said. “TG is counting down to second weapon release.” The time-to-go indicator jumped to one hundred and twenty seconds. “I’ll drop the first CBU manually at thirty TG, then switch to auto for the last release. Our escape turn will be a right turn at max bank, heading three-four-zero, and a descent to four hundred feet — er, I mean one hundred and twenty meters.”

“Our emergency MEA is four hundred meters,” Luger added. “That’ll clear all terrain and towers all the way to the coast.”

McLanahan pointed to the threat-warning receiver as a circle appeared on the screen. On an American threat-receiver, a warning tone would be heard on the interphone and the threat would be identified by its radar characteristics — antiaircraft artillery, surface-to-air missile, fighter, or search radar — but since this was a Soviet aircraft, there was no warning, so everyone was watching the scope carefully: only “enemy”—i.e. American or NATO-threats would be identified. “There’s a radar in that armored column, probably a triple-A. If we overfly that column, we’re dead. They don’t seem to be locked on us right now.”

“Remember, guys, when the bomb doors come open, our radar cross-section will jump,” Luger said. “The bomb doors are composites, but the bomb racks and inner structure are steel — our RCS will go up by six hundred—”

Suddenly a second circle appeared on the threat scope, this time behind them. “Got a radar behind us,” McLanahan said. “He’s changing positions back there … looks like a fighter.” He made sure that the four push-on light switches underneath the radar-warning receiver’s display unit were on. “Jammers are active.”

“Remember, we’ve got track breakers only,” Luger reminded them. To avoid being detected by undue electronic emissions, the jammers on the stealth bomber were rather simple “track breakers,” designed to momentarily disrupt only missile uplink signals, not search or tracking radars. “He can still track us and close to gun range.

“Sixty TG. Doors coming open at forty TG.” The small circle on the radar-warning receiver disappeared. “He’s gone into standby — he might have us visual or locked up on infrared. You got an infrared-warning mode on this thing, Dave?”

“Mode switch to KF — don’t ask me what KF stands for — and press the quadrant button on the lower-left side three times. It’s a full three-sixty scanner but it only looks in one direction at a time.” The screen changed — now it showed a simple T in the center of the screen, with a single bright dot at the two o’clock position. “It’s like the AAR-47 now,” Luger added, “so imagine you’re sitting facing backwards, so when the dot is on the right side of the scope the threat is on the left side of the—”

Suddenly two large red lights began blinking just above the threat scope. “Missile launch!” McLanahan cried out. “Where’s the chaff and flares …?”

“Don’t break!” Luger said. “Stay on the bomb run. We don’t use flares. Hit that button right there.”

From a launcher in the tail, a small, slender rocket shot into space behind the bomber. Steered by a small pulse-Doppler radar in the tail, the rocket maneuvered until it was heading directly for the incoming enemy missile; then, when it was within a hundred meters or so from the missile, it exploded. The ten-kilo high-explosive warhead ignited a cloud of aluminum powder, blinding the missile’s seeker head, and the warhead also sent a cloud of small pellets into the path of the missile.

The crew didn’t see any of that, however — what they saw was the bright dot on the infrared warning receiver wildly turn away until it was off the scope. “Whatever you punched out, it worked,” Ormack said. “I’m centered up. Bomb doors!”

“Doors coming open,” McLanahan acknowledged. He hit the electrically operated door-unlatch switch, which allowed the selected bomb-bay doors to free-fall open. “Centerline doors open… five seconds… three, two, one, release.” He hit the MANUAL RELEASE button, letting the first Fisikous X-27 cruise missile fly.

Unlike its smarter cousins from the United States, the X-27 could fly only straight ahead, and it had to be pre-programmed for its release points, but once deployed it was a devastating weapon. Like the JP-233 cluster-bomb unit from England, the X-27 sowed several different types of bomblets in its flight path: antitank and antipersonnel bomblets and delayed-action antivehicle mines.

The X-27 covered forty thousand square feet with explosive devastation, punching holes in main battle tanks and destroying light vehicles; the delayed-action mines, spread out several dozen meters away from the cruise missile’s flight path, would ensure that the entire roadway was closed off by destroying any vehicles that tried to pass around the destroyed or damaged ones.

Thirty seconds after the first missile was released, and just a half-mile from the column, the second one was released. McLanahan motored the bomb doors closed, and Ormack turned the American-designed, Soviet-made bomber northwest toward the Baltic. With the flight-control system out of BOMB mode, the flight-control computers could be deactivated and Ormack could hand-fly the huge bomber without the spurious autopilot inputs.

A few moments later the radar-warning receiver bleeped again. “Bandit at six o’clock again,” McLanahan called out. “I think that fighter’s back. Why is he tracking us so well?”

“That nose gear stuck down wipes out our stealth characteristics,” Luger said. “He can track us around all day just locked on to our nose gear.

“Let’s launch another one of those rear-firing missiles at him,~~ McLanahan suggested. “We can’t let him hang on our butts too long or he’ll eventually close the distance and gun us down. Chop the power, suck the guy in, then fire a missile at him.”

“It’s worth a shot,” Ormack said. “Dave, get ready to give me a hand with the instruments if I get bollixed up.”

“Gotcha,” Luger said. He turned to McLanahan and smiled. “Hey, Patrick, just like Bomb Comp, huh?”

“Yeah,” McLanahan agreed, “except we’re playing for real marbles now.”

Ormack tightened his shoulder harness, trying to get comfortable in the narrow, stiff ejection seat. “Ready, Patrick?”

McLanahan put a finger on the missile-launch switch. “Ready.”

“Power coming back … now.” Ormack pulled the throttles back to idle power and raised the nose slightly. The airspeed bled off rapidly. As he pushed the throttles back up, he shouted, “Now!”

McLanahan hit the LAUNCH button — and suddenly the bomber shuddered, the tail flipped up as if caught in a huge tidal wave, and lights in the cockpit flickered and died. “Jesus!” Ormack screamed. “Lights! Dave, check my airspeed!”

Luger punched a button in the overhead instrument panel, turning on a bright-red, battery-powered emergency light. “We lost the number three and four engines,” he shouted. “One and two are good. The missile must’ve detonated when it left the launcher. Get your nose down! You’re still flying, but you need airspeed. You’ve got a compressor stall on three and four-the decoy exploding right on the tail must have stalled the engines. Throttles three and four to CUTOFF.”

Ormack yanked the two right throttles to IDLE, removed a safety bar, and moved the throttles to CUTOFF.

“Good. Patrick, watch the EGT gauges.” He pointed out their position on the instrument panel. “Ten seconds, if the temp doesn’t come down out of the yellow range, we’ll have to pop the fire extinguishers. I’ll dial in your elevon trim for you, General. Watch your airspeed. Shallower banks — remember, the wings are supercritical. She flies like a pig on two engines, but she flies. Be careful.”

“Sage advice,” said Ormack.

“That fighter’s got himself a nice bright target now,” McLanahan said. He looked at the EGT, or exhaust gas temperature, gauges once again. “No luck — temp’s still up. We’ve got a fire back there. Fire extinguishers, three and four.” Luger guarded the one- and two-engine fire handles so Ormack wouldn’t accidentally activate them, and watched as McLanahan pulled the fire extinguisher handles. “Pulled.” All of the instruments — navigation, threat warning, bombing, weapons control — were dark. “How do I get my stuff back? Where’s the generator-reset switches?”

“On two engines you won’t get them back,” Luger said. “The generator will stay in TIE, and all available power will go to the flight controls, radios, emergency equipment, and stuff like that. We’re out of the bomber business. Our MEA is four hundred meters, General — we’d better get up there.”

“That fighter is probably moving back in,” McLanahan said. “If we climb, we’re sitting ducks.”

“I can’t see a thing out there, Patrick,” Ormack said. They were out of the clouds, but the ground was dark, the horizon was obscured by fog and drizzle, and the rain was pelting the bomber’s windscreen hard, completely blotting out the view outside. “I’ve got no choice — we’ll smack into the ground if we don’t climb.” Ormack pulled back on the control column and climbed to four hundred meters, the lowest they could fly safely without seeing the ground.

Luger was busy tightening up the straps of his parachute. “Well, this is one thing I’ve never tried in this thing,” he said. “Manual bailout from a stealth bomber. Reminds me of training in the simulator with Major White, doesn’t it, Patrick?”

“Jesus, Dave, I’m sorry we got you into this,” McLanahan said, worried about Luger’s physical condition. “We should have let you go back with the Marines. You’d be safe by now.”

“Vi nyee ahshiblyees—uh, sorry — don’t be crazy, Patrick,” Luger said. “I wanted to go. I had to go. This was my way of getting back at those fuckers Gabovich and Teresov and all the sons of bitches who kept me locked up in Fisikous all this time, building this piece of shit. Maybe if I had built a better bomber, we’d be safe by now.

“Can you bail out of the bomb bay in this thing?”

“No access to the bomb bay from the cockpit,” Luger said. “I guess they didn’t want … holy shit, look!”

They looked out the right-side windows.

A MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter was flying close formation just forward of the Fi- 170’s right wing. It had a fighter-intercept identification light on its left side, which shined a bright light into the cockpit. “Man, this is just great. It’s like déjà vu all over again. Wasn’t it a MiG-29 that was chasing us around after the bomb run on Kavaznya? The one that blew my leg to shit?”

“That’s the one,” McLanahan said. As they watched, the MiG-29 let out a burst of cannon fire from its portside 30-millimeter cannon. The identification light blinked-once, pause, twice, pause, once, pause, then five times. “One-two-one-five. He’s telling us to go to VHF GUARD channel.”

“Maybe we can talk our way out of this one,” Ormack said. “I don’t think we can fly out of it.” He switched over to the international VHF emergency channel, 121.5, and keyed the mike: “Attention MiG-29 fighter aircraft, this is Tuman. We are an authorized flight over sovereign Lithuanian airspace. State your intentions. Over.”

The voice that responded was in Russian, with no English attempted. “He is from Byelorussia,” Luger translated. “He says he has authorization to shoot us down if we do not follow him. He is ordering us to fly a heading of one-five-zero at an altitude of three thousand meters and lower our landing gear. He will pursue. If we do not comply, he will shoot us down.”

The MiG-29 wagged its wings once, then disappeared from sight.

“I guess we don’t have any choice,” Ormack said. “We can’t see him, and we’re barely flying already as it is. What do you guys think?”

“I think we should make a run for it,” Luger said. “Try to descend and try to outlast him. If he fires on us, you guys eject. They don’t get the bomber, and you at least make it out.”

“But you won’t make it,” McLanahan said. “Forget it, Dave. Let’s put it down on the ground and—”

Suddenly there was a terrific explosion and a blinding burst of light. McLanahan and Luger strained to look out the right-side cockpit windows and saw a blazing ball of fire careening through the sky. “It’s the MiG!” Patrick shouted. “It blew up! What’s going on?”

“I think I found out,” Ormack said. “Look over here.”

A few moments later a huge object appeared out the left-side window, overtaking the Fi-1 70 and flying a few hundred feet above it. It was a dark, massive shape, flying close enough and with enough power to vibrate the crippled Soviet bomber.

“My God … I don’t believe it!” Luger shouted. It was an EB-52 Megafortress, flying in tight formation with the Fisikous-1 70. It had sneaked up on the unsuspecting MiG-29 and used one of its heat-seeking missiles to blow the MiG out of the sky from behind. A few moments later a second EB-52 appeared off the right wing, flying alongside. It was one of the most incredible sights any of them had ever seen — three massive, futuristic bombers, flying near one another less than two thousand feet above ground. “Two of them! You built more Old Dogs?”

“Damned right,” Ormack said happily. “I just never thought I’d see one this side of hell.”

Unseen by them, two more were far above the low-altitude planes, acting as high combat air patrol as they exited Lithuanian airspace. They stayed off the radios to avoid being detected by the enemy, containing their joy at the unexpected escort. Minutes later the group was safely over the Baltic, on their way to Norway and a safe recovery.

The Byelorussian sergeant ran up to his unit commander, Captain of Rocket Troops Edlin Kramko, saluted, and gave him a message. He read it silently, then reread it. His NCOIC swore that his commander’s face went white, even under his camouflage makeup and helmet. “Sir …?”

“We’ve received the alert order,” Kramko said. “All missiles are to be ready to launch within ten minutes. And we’ve received retargeting orders as well.”

Kramko handed the message over to his NCOIC. His eyes bulged in sheer horror when he read the new targets. “Sir, this must be a mistake. The first two targets are the original ones — Vilnius and Jonava, in Lithuania — but this last target has to be an error. Machulische? That is a Commonwealth air base in Minsk! We must—”

“I will call for confirmation,” Kramko said. “But this fits with the radio messages we have received about air raids and commando raids inside Belarus itself. These bases may have been overrun by Russians or Commonwealth forces — we’ve heard rumors that even Ukrainian bombers have crossed the border and are invading. If this is true, we may be the last line of defense for the capital.”

“But we are firing on the capital!”

“That’s enough, Master Sergeant,” Kramko interrupted. “I will get a confirmation if it’s possible — the radios have been heavily jammed all night — but in the meantime set these new coordinates and alert the detail to prepare the missiles for launch.”

The NCOIC saluted and trotted off to the control trailer.

Kramko’s company commanded a total of twelve SS-21 Scarab missile units, three of which had nuclear warheads. For maximum reliability, all twelve units were interconnected with each other and with the command trailer by an armored telephone cable as well as by standard VHF radio. A microwave data-relay system allowed the command trailer to exchange position, targeting, and atmospheric information with the headquarters command center, and that was what Kramko wanted to check first before risking a radio transmission for confirmation of the retargeting orders. “Status of the relay channel?”

“Open and active, sir,” the launch technician reported. Kramko checked the targeting data himself — it was verified. The retargeting information he had received by radio was the same as what was being fed into the missiles by the microwave link — two independent confirmations. “All units acknowledging the alert order.”

“Very well. Notify me on the pager when the spin-up order is received. I am going to inspect the special units.”

The spin-up order was really the launch order, but the SS-21 missile system required widely varying time periods to spin up their gyroscopes in preparation for the flight-as short as three minutes, but as long as five, depending on the age and serviceability of the units and environmental conditions. The nuclear-armed SS-21s had the most reliable gyros. Kramko had set up the nuclear-armed SS-21s within a few hundred meters of the command trailer, mostly for security reasons, and he was going out to give them a once-over.

There was nothing more for Kramko to do except wait — wait and wonder what in hell General Voshcharrka was doing aiming a nuclear warhead at his own capital, Minsk.

In a scene reminiscent of old World War II movies, Voshchanka had set up a room-sized map of Belarus and the Baltic region on the front “stage” of his command post, in the battle-staff area. Radio operators on the floor moved tiny blocks of unit and national flags around the map with long croupier sticks. He and his battle staff, sitting in a glass-enclosed balcony overlooking the stage, could easily watch the progress of the battle, like gods watching the human tragedy from Mount Olympus. Behind and above the stage were four rear-projection screens on which overhead transparencies, films, photographs, maps, and checklists could be presented.

The mood in the command center at that moment was one of incredible shock and surprise. The single crimson block representing the forty-thousand-man Home Brigade deployed from Smorgon had first been divided into six battalion blocks when the report of the Lithuanian commando attack had come in, with one battalion block removed and an RC, or “reduced capability,” flag placed on two other battalions.

After a short time more RC flags appeared.

Suddenly, inexplicably, all of the battalion blocks were removed, to be replaced by two company blocks with RC flags on them. The air-battalion block from Smorgon had an RC flag on it as well, although it had been removed from the board almost from the outset after the commando attack on the airfield and fuel depot. The same thing had happened south of Vilnius — three battalions sent to attack the capital city of Lithuania had been suddenly attacked by unidentified aircraft.

“One aircraft was identified by our fighter pilots as a Russian experimental-research aircraft,” the Air Force commander had reported. “The aircraft attacked Thirty-third Battalion with cluster bombs. The pilots spoke English but identified themselves as Russians.”

Russian aircraft involved in this war — that was unthinkable, completely unexpected at this early stage. Although Voshchanka and his staff had no positive identification of the aircraft that had attacked the Home Brigade or the other Byelorussian tank columns, they were assumed to be Russian or Commonwealth bombers as well — there had been no radar contacts from aircraft trying to penetrate Lithuanian airspace from the west. That meant they had to come from Russia or the Ukraine, the only two republics that flew heavy bombers.

“Has Kurenets acknowledged the retargeting order?” Voshchanka asked.

His commander of rocket troops looked at his colleagues on the battle staff. They remained silent — they were not going to back him up. He decided to forge ahead anyway. “Sir, they have acknowledged the retargeting order, and the command channel is open and active.

“Good. Then I want—”

“But I must re-emphasize my objection, sir. The missile targeted on Machulische is less than five kilometers from Minsk. A direct hit will cause much damage and destruction in the city, and claim perhaps thousands of lives. But if the missile misses, or falls short of its target — sir, the devastation would be tremendous!”

“General, that base is the main Commonwealth … no, the main Russian military base in Belarus,” Voshchanka said. “It has twenty thousand troops, two dozen fighters, and a hundred attack helicopters based there.”

“None of which have been used, sir. The forces there have not even been put on alert.”

“That can change very quickly,” Voshchanka argued. “Moscow refuses to confirm or deny the presence of heavy bombers over Belarus and Lithuania — they say they are investigating. That is unacceptable. Completely unacceptable!”

“I urge you to wait for confirmation before attacking a Commonwealth military installation, sir. If you wish to attack now, then use the conventionally armed missiles. The aircraft at Machulishche are still on the ground and are vulnerable — a single high-explosive warhead can do great damage.”

“If its accuracy is perfect. We both know the SS-21 is not an accurate weapon, especially with a conventional payload.”

The much-heavier high-explosive payload on the SS-21 reduced its maximum range by one-half, and also doubled its CEP, or circular error probability. In contrast, the lighter, more advanced guidance system on the Fisikous KR-11 thermonuclear warhead actually increased the normal range of.the SS-21 by 20 percent, to almost two hundred kilometers, and decreased its CEP to less than two hundred meters.

“Then we will fire a salvo on the base,” the Air Force commander argued. “A volley of twelve missiles from Baranovichi or Kurenets will destroy all the aircraft and most of the aircraft-support facilities. Or we can stage our own air assault from Lida. But a nuclear weapon…” He had to hesitate — the very thought of releasing a nuclear device was unthinkable for him. “Sir, you must reconsider—”

A loud, insistent beeping phone interrupted him. Voshchanka scowled at his air boss as he turned to his operations officer, who answered the phone.

“Air-raid warning, sir,” the operations officer said. “Numerous aircraft at low altitude, about twenty kilometers away, identification unknown.”

The Air Force commander picked up a telephone that connected directly to his air division commander, based there at Smorgon. After a few seconds he reported, “We’ve got a brief radar plot on the target — they’re probably helicopters, hedgehopping across the border. I’ve got Number Nineteen squadron dispatched to intercept.”

As he spoke, a red block shaped like a five-blade helicopter rotor moved out from Smorgon — a composite air squadron consisting of six Mil-24 helicopters that had survived the attack on the flight line at Smorgon, and MiG-27 fighter-bombers from other bases in northern Belarus.

Voshchanka’s earlier anger and frustration subsided a bit. Yes, they were knocked back on their heels a bit; yes, they had lost a lot of tanks and vehicles in a very short period of time. But he now took a moment to look at exactly what he did have out there — and it was still impressive.

Although Kaunas and Vilnius, Lithuania’s two main cities, were still unthreatened — except of course by his SS-21 missiles — the port city and third-largest city in Lithuania, Klaipeda, was under virtual occupation by his forces, and the fourth-largest city in Lithuania, Siauliai, with its huge air base and high-tech electronics businesses, firmly belonged to him. That was the plan: his forces in western Lithuania would remain safe and secure while the bulk of the Lithuanian resistance was destroyed in the east. Along with the fact that Kalinin oblast and the city of Kaliningrad were virtually his, the entire operation was still going as planned. The involvement of Russian and / or Ukrainian troops and air forces was unexpected, but he still had enough troops in reserve to handle that threat.

All in all, the operation was still proceeding nicely …

“Perhaps it is a bit premature to launch the SS-21s,” Voshchanka said. He could see a genuine sigh of relief from each and every one of his battle staff officers. “I will keep the units on alert status, but I will withhold the final launch-commit order until I speak with the President and representatives from the Commonwealth. I will not tolerate interference from anyone — the Commonwealth, Russia, Poland, or the NATO countries. If I cannot receive assurances of their noninterference, I will commit the SS-21s immediately.”

There were approving nods all around the battle-staff table, punctuated by the rocket troops commander: “Very wise decision, sir. The SS-21s are a much more effective weapon of intimidation than an actual destructive weapon.”

“Sir, radar reports the inbound targets are fifteen kilometers out,” the operations officer said. “Seventeen Squadron is still two minutes from intercept. I suggest we go down to the air-raid shelter.”

“Very well,” Voshchanka said. The staff officers hurried to their feet, impatiently waiting for Voshchanka to leave. He purposely slowed his pace, watching with amusement as they jostled each other in their anxiousness to depart.

A heavy steel door sealed off the battle-staff area itself. Voshchanka led them through the doors and into the command post itself, which contained the main communications system for the base as well as the microwave data-relay system for the nuclear weapons. Voshchanka glanced at the one silver key already in the command panel — he had inserted it an hour ago and turned it, which activated the command channel to the microwave-relay network to the missiles. The second key, the launch key, was in his pocket. He wished President Kapocius of Lithuania, President Bykov of the Commonwealth of Independent States, President Svetlov of Belarus, President Miriclaw of Poland, and even the President of the United States could see that key in its lock — it, and the other key so readily available, were proof of his determination to succeed in this endeavor.

A light-steel-sheathed wooden door with a bulletproof window was at the entrance to the communications center, followed by a long corridor entrapment / inspection area, then a heavy steel grate door at the opposite end so security guards in the command post could see anyone entering the building. Another heavy steel door protected the other side of the entrapment corridor, but so many people were moving in and out of the command post that the door was kept open and a guard posted. Normally only one person at a time was allowed in the entrapment corridor, but when the senior staff was present they were allowed to go in and out together. Beyond the door was a small security office with a simple glass office door, and beyond that was the front foyer to the headquarters building. Several soldiers, heavily armed and outfitted for combat, were stationed both inside and outside the front doors to the building. Voshchanka could see all the way to the circular driveway and ceremonial flagpoles outside. He noticed it was dark outside and realized he had been hard at it for well over twenty-four hours — maybe he would just stay in the bunker, three floors down in the basement, and take a nap.

Voshchanka had just entered the corridor, and the guard at the other end had just opened the grate door for him, when a tremendous explosion shook the walls as if they were made of tin. A series of explosions had ripped open the front doors of the headquarters building, right in front of Voshchanka. The blasts shattered the glass doors of the security office, but he was not hurt. Smoke and debris flew everywhere. Shots were fired, most from soldiers inside the headquarters but some from outside.

Soldiers flooded into the foyer, taking cover against the wall. Several soldiers, carrying bulletproof shields, ran into the security office and pushed Voshchanka back inside the communications center. “You’d be safer inside, sir,” one soldier told him. The members of the battle staff had already run back inside, and Voshchanka wasn’t going to argue either.

He met up with his officers back in the battle-staff room. The radio operators on the stage had disappeared. The staff officers were herded back into the battle-staff room and the door was locked behind them, with one soldier on guard inside with them. Voshchanka was on the phone immediately. “What’s going on out there?”

“Unknown, sir,” came the reply from the chief building-security officer. “We’re investigating the area of the senior-staff parking lot — one of my men thought they saw a muzzle flash. There’s no large force and no sign of any other activity.”

“Like hell there’s no other activity!” Voshchanka screamed. “I want a full armored detail dispatched to sweep this entire area! I want this area secured!”

At that instant two tremendous explosions ripped open the ceiling just above the stage, virtually in front of the battle-staff officers. The glass surrounding the battle-staff area exploded, the lights snapped out, and the entire area began to fill with acidic smoke that burned the eyes, throat, and all the way into the lungs. Emergency lights snapped on. Through the smoke, flying debris, tears, and confusion, Voshchanka saw men descending by ropes onto the map stage below. The stage was soon filled with at least twelve or fourteen soldiers dressed in black, with gas masks and large bulbous devices over their eyes. Voshchanka saw them rush the doorway leading off the map stage just before one of them shot out the emergency lights, plunging the entire area in darkness.

The lone Byelorussian soldier in the area went a little crazy, sweeping the stage with automatic gunfire, but he succeeded in doing nothing more than pinning down the officers beside him — a single shot, so far the only shot fired by the enemy, killed him instantly. Voshchanka crawled past him, opened the steel protective door, and crawled into the communications area.

Those bastards, Voshchanka cursed. How dare they attack my headquarters! He did not know who the attackers were, but it didn’t matter— he would deal with them right now.

Voshchanka crawled over to the communications panel, over to the microwave network-relay system for the nuclear-armed SS-21. Shaking— more from anger and excitement than from fear — he removed the second silver key from his pocket, stuck it in the communications panel, and—

“Stoy!” a voice shouted behind him in Russian. A black-suited soldier, wearing a weird helmet with large, bug-eyed goggles and a breathing apparatus, pointed a small submachine gun at him. Then, in what Voshchanka recognized as Lithuanian, the soldier shouted, “Uzeiga Lieutuvos! Lithuanian Army!” Then, in Russian again, he said, “Nyee dveghightyes. Don’t move!”

“You are too late, you Lithuanian bastard,” Voshchanka said — and he turned the key. The soldier immediately ran over to Voshchanka and pushed him to the floor. More soldiers, all dressed in the futuristic garb, rushed in behind him. The first soldier turned the key and removed it from the panel.

“That won’t help, you idiot,” Voshchanka said. “The missile launch is unstoppable now.”

Another soldier placed a large, backpack-looking device underneath the communications console and pulled a lanyard.

Voshchanka was dragged to his feet and half-dragged, half-carried outside.

Small helicopters, ones Voshchanka recognized as Lithuanian Defender light attack helicopters, were flitting all over the sky, shooting at Byelorussian troops on the ground. The soldiers knelt down near the doorway, taking cover as two more Defenders swooped across the parking lot, blasting away at anything that moved. There seemed to be dozens of the little two-man helicopters buzzing around. Just then a bright flash of light and a loud, rolling boom! made them all jump and take cover.

Voshchanka recognized it instantly: it was one of his T-72 tanks responding. He could see it speeding across the outer parking lot, going toward the headquarters building. Its 12.7-millimeter antiaircraft gun was blazing away, keeping the Defenders away. The small-caliber guns on the little Defender helicopters weren’t going to stop it, Voshchanka gleefully realized.

Suddenly the tank disappeared in a terrific explosion — the turret popped right off it as if it had been lifted off by a giant can opener.

Seconds later, as the Defenders swept across the parking lot searching for advancing infantry, a massive aircraft appeared overhead. It moved incredibly fast, then suddenly stopped in midair and fired two missiles into the darkness beyond the outer parking lot. More explosions followed — obviously two direct hits. The huge rotorcraft wheeled and made a sweep of the area around the headquarters building before settling down on the grassy quadrangle outside the building. Voshchanka realized what it was when it turned on landing lights just before touching down- it was a CV-22, an American CV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft!

Men began running toward the open rear cargo ramp of the CV-22. Voshchanka knew he was next. He considered breaking free from the soldiers guarding him and making a run for it — but to his surprise the soldiers released him. One of them even saluted him and said in Lithuanian, “Aciu, General Voshchanka, uzteks. Viso gero. Thank you, General, we’re finished. Good-bye,” before turning and dashing for the CV-22.

His first impulse was to run into the headquarters building, but that would have been foolish — those were obviously bombs they had planted in there. He could do nothing but stand and watch as the CV-22 lifted off and, escorted by waves of Defenders, sped off to the west. As soon as they were out of sight, he hurried away from the building. He made it across the senior-staff parking lot when a tremendous explosion, then two, three, four, five more explosions, rocked the headquarters building. Sheets of fire flew into the sky, and the roof and several walls collapsed seconds later. The rumbling he felt beneath his feet told him that they had even destroyed the underground weapons-storage facilities, power generators, and alternate-communications equipment. In less than ten minutes his entire central-command facility was gone.

But he had the last laugh.

The SS-21s were in launch commit — nothing was going to stop them now. Vilnius, Minsk, and Jonava — in five minutes, they would be no more.

He heard helicopters approach and quickly darted behind a tree as they came closer. But these were not Defenders or CV-22s — they were Mil-24s! He ran happily out to the parking lot and waved for them to land.

Finally his men were responding…

But as the helicopters settled in for a landing, he realized they were not Byelorussian — they had Russian and Ukrainian flags with white diamonds on their fuselages. Commonwealth troops, but obviously not under his command any longer. Soldiers leaped out of the three helicopters that had landed. Voshchanka turned and hustled for the headquarters building — maybe he could lose himself in the ruins before the soldiers—

“General Voshchanka!” a voice called out to him. “Stop! This is General Ivashova!”

The commander of the Commonwealth Defense Forces—here? With Mil-24 attack helicopters and dismounting troops, Voshchanka knew Ivashova wasn’t here for a social call, so he ran harder.

“Stoy!” a new voice shouted. “Stop! Stop or I’ll shoot.”

Panic made Voshchanka run even faster now. He heard a sharp crraack!, then a dull thwap, then a sharp pain in his back. He never felt the pavement hit him in the face because he was dead before he even hit the ground.

Captain Kramko was on his way to inspect the second of the three nuclear-armed SS-21s when his walkie-talkie beeped. “Alpha, this is Control, commit message received at Zero-three-two-one,” his NCOIC reported.

Kramko acknowledged the report. Dammit, he thought. They’ve really done it. They’re going to launch the missiles. Unbidden, his eyes filled with tears, and a lump of sorrow formed in his throat. A nuclear war — begun by Belarus. It was too much to believe.

The horror that he was about to unleash was—

Suddenly a flash of light popped off to his left, and a yellow flare arced skyward, disappearing in the cloudy sky, then descended to earth on a small white parachute. It was a perimeter-warning flare — there were intruders nearby! A shot rang out, then the sound of a rifle on full automatic. Kramko instinctively ducked as he felt the pressure of slugs whizzing near his head. He pulled out his walkie-talkie: “Security, this is Alpha. Report!”

“Intruders in the perimeter, unit one, north of my position at about three hundred meters.”

Oh shit, Kramko thought. What a damned nightmare! He didn’t want the missiles to launch at all, but now that there was someone out there trying to stop the launch, he wanted them to fire off immediately! “All security units, set condition red,” he radioed. “Stand by to repel. Missile launch in approximately two minutes. Alpha clear.” Kramko then bolted for the security trailer.

A guard was hiding in the shadows near a tree a few meters away from the trailer, scanning the buildings near the airfield itself. The rest of the guards must have gone to their defensive positions, Kramko thought. He rushed into the trailer. “Status of the launch, Sergeant—?”

Heads turned toward him — but they weren’t Byelorussian soldiers. They were dressed in black and wore thick bulletproof vests and face masks. Three men were sitting at the launch-control console with their masks off, talking in English. Two soldiers grabbed Kramko and secured his hands behind him with plastic handcuffs. “Kto tam?” Kramko said in Russian. “Myneyeh ehtah nyee nrahveetsah. Who are you? Stop what you’re doing!”

“The thing’s locked, Gunny,” one of the soldiers said. “Won’t accept operator inputs. I tried resetting the system but it’s not responding.”

“Great,” Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Lobato said. He turned to Kramko and said in Russian, “Captain, we are American Marines. Do you understand me?”

Kramko’s eyes widened with surprise. “Americans? Here? How did you get here?”

“Captain, do these missiles have nuclear warheads?”

Kramko hesitated One of the soldiers slapped him in the chest. Kramko replied, “I will not answer. I am a Byelorussian soldier. I will not—”

“These missiles are going to launch in about forty seconds, Gunny,” one of the Marines said. “I can’t stop the countdown.”

“Captain, you understand that if these missiles launch your country will have started a nuclear war,” Lobato said. “You must help us stop the launch.”

“Gunny, I got the target file. It’s locked and I can’t change it, but here’s the target coordinates… hey! One of the missiles is heading south! These bastards are launching a missile south… no, southeast of here. The only thing within range is—”

“Minsk,” Lobato said to Kramko. “One of those missiles has been targeted for Minsk. Do you understand, sir? You’re about to fire a missile off at your own people.”

Kramko was confused, and now frightened. “I am Byelorussian soldier … my orders come from headquarters…

“Call off your security troops,” Lobato told him. “We can stop the missiles from launching.”

“No one can stop them!”

“We can stop it!” Lobato said. “A bomber is on station — it is ready to attack. But we need to mark the target. Call off your security forces. Let us get close enough to mark the target!”

Kramko hesitated. These American Marines could have killed him, but they didn’t. They seemed as if they truly wanted to help. Could this be the help he was looking for? Could this be the way he could stop this madness?

“I will do what you ask,” Kramko finally said. He motioned at his hands, and the handcuffs were cut off and his walkie-talkie returned to him.

“All units, all units, this is Alpha,” Kramko shouted into the radio. Then, twisting away from the Marines that held him, he shouted, “Repel! American Marines on the perimeter! Repel!” Lobato snatched the radio away, and his hands were bound behind his back once again.

“You stupid fuck,” Lobato said. “You just condemned millions of innocent people to death.” His breathing was labored, as if he had just run a marathon. He reached into his ALICE vest pocket and withdrew a tiny transmitter.

The members of COBRA VENOM standing with Lobato were helpless — all their training, all their experience, were useless if they couldn’t get near enough to the missiles. “What do we do now, Gunny?” one of them asked.

“Tsehrkahf,” Lobato said in Russian, glaring angrily at Kramko.

He raised the transmitter to his lips. “Pray … that the Air Force can find those fucking missiles down here.” On his walkie-talkie, he said, “All units. Blanket the area. Flares and HE. If you get a position on those missile units, mark it. You got about twenty seconds. Do it!”

“Coming up on launch point,” navigator Captain Alicia Kellerman reported. “Thirty seconds. Ready with final release check.”

The pilot, Major Kelvin Carter, the senior project officer of the EB-52 Megafortress program from the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, looked at his copilot and frowned in his oxygen mask. In his unmistakable Louisiana bayou accent, he asked, “We get a confirmation message from those jarheads yet?”

“Nothing,” his copilot, Captain Nancy Cheshire, replied. General Brad Elliott’s classified-research group at HAWC was not a real combat outfit, so that many of its crew members were women — but the four women on board the upgraded Old Dog strategic-escort “battleship” aircraft were prime examples of the success of women in combat; they were highly intelligent engineers and scientists as well as fully qualified aviators. “We punch these puppies out anyway.”

“Checks,” Carter said.

“Final release check,” Kellerman announced.

Step by step, Kellerman and radar-navigator bombardier Captain Paul Scott ran down the eight-step checklist in preparation for launching the AGM-145 missile at the target. The AGM-145, also called MSOW (Modular Standoff Weapon), was a small, turbojet-powered missile with a five-hundred-pound warhead and an imaging infrared (IIR) seeker that transmitted pictures of the intended target back to its launching aircraft. Like its predecessor, the AGM-65 Maverick missile, MSOW was a “fireand-forget” weapon that allowed the EB-52 to attack from long range with pinpoint accuracy; but unlike Maverick, MSOW could actually hunt for targets. Its infrared scanner, combined with a high-speed artificial-intelligence computer, compared pictures of targets it found with a catalog of desired targets, and it would identify each target it discovered and report its findings to crew members on board its own plane, on another aircraft, or even to troops on the ground. It could select its own target based on a target-priority list, or humans could override the selection and choose the proper target. The EB-52 could “ripple-fire” several MSOW missiles at a selected area, and each would find its own target and report to the carrier aircraft what target it found; then it would pick the highest-priority targets and attack.

MSOW was perfect for this mission because Kelvin Carter’s crew was not given a specific target. As one of the “flying spares” on this mission, it and another modified B-52H were not sent into Lithuanian airspace until well after the four other EB-52s used on the late-night raids into Lithuania and Byelorussia were safely out. But since there were still American Marines involved, Carter and his crew were sent back into Lithuania and Byelorussia. After they were airborne, they were ordered to attack a small airfield between Minsk and Vilnius-not Smorgon, which had been their original target, but a smaller airfield suspected of being a short-range-missile launch site. The order had come not from Washington, but directly from a female CIA agent in Latvia.

The EB-52 carried eight MSOW missiles for the attack on a rotary launcher in the forward part of their sixty-foot-long bomb bay; it also carried eight AGM-88 HARMs (High Speed Anti-Radar Missiles) missiles in a rotary launcher in the aft part of the bomb bay. All but two of those missiles had already been launched when the EB-52 penetrated the radar-dense combat environment of occupied Lithuania, destroying surface-to-air missile-site-tracking and guidance radars.

The Megafortress had also carried eight radar-guided AIM-120 Scorpion AMRAAMs (Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles) and four AIM-9R Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles on wing pylons; two Side-winders and four Scorpions had already been launched by the crew “gunner,” Dr. Angelina Pereira, a veteran of the original Old Dog mission. Pereira designed the Megafortress’s unique guided-missile tail defense system that replaced the B-52’s tail guns with accurate, destructive guided flak rockets.

“Ready for launch,” Scott reported. The MSOW missile’s maximum range was about thirty nautical miles; at twenty-eight miles, he hit the LAUNCH button. The four missiles went into five-second countdown cycles as aircraft position and velocity data was transferred to them. The missiles’ batteries were activated and their gyros spun up, and their stabilization system was aligned and leveled. Then the bomb doors were opened and the missiles were ejected from the rotary launcher. The launcher rotated until the next missile was in position and then it too was ejected. In twenty seconds all four missiles were on their way, and the fibersteel radar-transparent bomb doors were closed.

“Missiles away,” Scott reported. “Good track on all missiles.” His large, four-color attack display activated, showing images transmitted from all four missiles. He immediately passed control of two missiles to Alicia Kellerman — Scott had, as radar navigator and bombardier, the final say on which targets were struck, but Kellerman was equally qualified to employ the missiles. “I’ve got good data from one and two.”

“Good data from three and four.”

“Message on the tactical channel,” Dr. Wendy Tork, the fourth woman on board the Megafortress and the crew electronic-warfare officer, suddenly interjected. Tork, an electronic-warfare-systems designer, was another veteran of the Old Dog mission. “Button three, Kel.”

Carter activated the channel-selector switch on his interphone panel. He heard: “Tiger, Tiger, Tiger, flares away.”

He keyed his microphone: “Tiger, say target. Over.”

“Tiger, thank God … Tiger, your target is three mobile missile-launchers. SS-21 missile launchers. We cannot designate them. Repeat, we cannot designate them. Hostile enemy forces in the vicinity. We have fired flares in the vicinity but we cannot pinpoint the unit’s location. Are your missiles in the air? Can you identify them? Over.”

“Tiger, I understand, SS-21 missile launchers,” Carter repeated. “Stand by.” On interphone, Carter said, “We’re looking for three SS-21 launchers, Paul. They’re wheeled mobile missile units. No designation for us, but he says he’s fired flares in the area.”

“Still looking,” radar-navigator bombardier Paul Scott replied. “Still fifteen seconds of missile flight time.” The scene on his attack monitor showed nothing but trees, farmland, and the airfield itself, all very plain-looking. Nothing of target value showed at all.

“I got something — it’s a vehicle — no, a trailer,” Kellerman announced. When MSOW spotted the target, it immediately zoomed into it so it would get a close-up picture, then zoomed back out to continue searching. The close-up picture was stored as a still image in one corner of Kellerman’s attack monitor; Scott could transfer the image to his monitor to study it as well. “Designating missile three on the trailer. Pilot, try to get a bearing from—”

“I see gunfire!” Scott shouted. Only ten seconds to impact, several targets were popping up on the screen now. Suddenly one flare was fired across a section of a runway, and MSOW zoomed in on an SS-21 launcher unit highlighted by the glare. “I got one! Designating it on missile one.”

“I got one also!” Kellerman said. Scott immediately cross-checked the two targets to be sure they weren’t the same ones, but the artificial-intelligence computers that controlled MSOW knew precisely what each missile was looking at and had immediately concluded that.they were different targets. “Designating missile four.”

Scott’s last MSOW missile didn’t lock on until seven seconds before impact. “Tiger, Tiger, we got three SS-21 launchers and a command trailer!” Carter radioed back. “Stand by and—”

Suddenly the third SS-21 missile disappeared from the attack monitor in a bright flash of yellow fire. “Shit!” Scott cried out. “The third SS-2 1 blew up before missile impact!”

“No!” Cheshire shouted. “It launched! There it is!”

Directly ahead, about nineteen miles away, a streak of light, pulled away from the dark horizon. It appeared to be flying directly overhead, heading west.

“Impact on missile one,” Scott reported. “Where’s that other one?”

Cheshire tried to watch it, but the SS-2 1 accelerated rapidly and quickly disappeared into the clouds. “Looks like we’re too late.”

“Tiger, Tiger, you gotta stop that missile!” Lobato radioed on the tactical channel. “It has a nuclear warhead on it and it’s heading for Vilnius. You gotta stop that missile!”

Carter reacted instantly. He pushed the electronically controlled throttles to full military power, waited a few seconds to build up airspeed, then threw the Megafortress into a hard climbing left turn. “Wendy! Angelica! Lock on to that thing and nail it!”

Pereira immediately activated the Megafortress’s APG-165 attack radar. The APG-165 was a derivative of the Hughes APG-65 dual-purpose fire-control radar aboard the F/A-18 Hornet fighter-bomber that could provide information for both air-to-air and air-to-ground attacks, with the addition of terrain-following navigation, computer position updates, and automatic landing modes. It interfaced with the Megafortress’s AIM-120 missiles to provide initial target position. It took Pereira just a few seconds to find the SS-2 1 and lock on to it.

“I got it!” she announced. “Range is twenty-eight miles — that’s near the Scorpion’s maximum range.” She didn’t hesitate to fire off two of their remaining AIM-120 missiles at the SS-21.

The worst-engagement profile for an air-to-air missile chasing a target is a tail chase — the advantage is with the hunted and not the hunter. Both missiles were accelerating as they climbed, but the SS-2 l’s larger booster motor gave it an advantage even though the AIM-120’s top speed of Mach-4, or four times the speed of sound, was much faster than the SS-2 1.

“First missile’s off course,” Pereira reported. Carter had leveled off the EB-52—they had climbed to nearly ten thousand feet in the twenty seconds it took to launch the missile — and was now in a shallow descent back to low altitude. “Lost track … second missile tracking … active radar engaged …”

Unlike most air-to-air missiles, the AIM-120 used its own on-board radar to guide it into its target, and it used a boost-sustain rocket motor that powered the missile throughout its entire flight. It needed every erg of energy to catch up with the SS-21 and hit, just a fraction of a second before the motor was exhausted.

Suddenly, in the wink of an eye, it became daytime.

It was as if the sun were suddenly overhead and the clouds were gone — the light was as bright as high noon on a perfectly clear day. It lasted only a fraction of a second, but it flash-blinded everyone on the EB-52’s upper crew deck. “Jesus!” Carter cried out. “What in hell… I can’t see! Nancy, I can’t see!”

“Me either,” Cheshire said. “I can see the panel, but I can’t read the—”

Just then an incredible rumbling, like the sound of an approaching freight train, could be heard throughout the bomber and the EB-52 heeled sharply over to the right. It seemed to be skidding, its nose pointed one way but flying in a different direction. Carter had no choice-because he was blinded, he didn’t dare touch the controls to compensate for fear of sending the bomber into a spiral. With no visual references, flying by feel was deadly. “Nancy!” he shouted. “Don’t touch the controls!”

“I … won’t…

The turbulence continued for a few more seconds. It took all of Carter’s and Cheshire’s willpower to stay off the controls. They were all praying that the bomber’s natural stability would keep it upright until the turbulence passed. When he felt it was safe enough to move around the crew compartment, Carter clicked on the interphone: it was dead. “Station check!” Carter shouted at the top of his lungs. “Is everyone on? Report!”

“Offense is okay,” Scott shouted back.

“Defense checks,” Tork shouted in reply.

“Paul! Alicia!” Carter shouted. “Get up here and help us!”

Scott and Kellerman went upstairs. “Everything is out downstairs, and I mean out—not faulted, but dead. We got some of that light down there, but we’re okay.” He saw Carter with his hand off the single sidestick controller — he was afraid to touch the controls while he was blind, for fear of putting the plane into a dive or spiral. Scott saw that they were still in the clouds — it was imperative to reactivate the flight instruments before they crashed. “We’re in the soup, Kel. What do I do first?”

“Check the controls,” Carter said. “I can’t see a damned thing, and I think the flight-control system is out.”

“Defense is flash-blinded too,” Kellerman said after checking Tork and Pereira. “I don’t think it’s too bad.”

Scott shined a penlight at the electronic flight-information-system screens and digital engine readouts. “Everything is dead,” he said over the roar of the engines. “EFIS is completely out.”

“It sounds like the engines are still running,” Carter said. He tried moving the electronic throttles. “I don’t seem to have control of them— they must be in analog override. Check the standby gauges.”

Scott checked the standby instruments, a row of conventional mechanical engine- and flight-information gauges. “Okay, Kel, it looks like you got a compressor stall on number eight, but I’ll leave it for now. All the other engines look normal. The standby artificial horizon is dead. The altimeter reads nine thousand feet, the vertical velocity indicator says you’re in a three-hundred-foot-per-minute descent, and the turn indicator says you’re in a very slight right turn into th~e dead engine.”

“Not too bad — we have a few minutes to get everything running again,” Carter said. “Alicia, open the emergency checklist.”

With Kellerman reading the checklists and Scott monitoring the aircraft, Carter and Cheshire reactivated the engine-driven generators, reactivated the flight-control system and autopilot, and managed to get the standby flight instrument and backup mechanically actuated throttles to respond.

“What the hell happened to us?” Cheshire asked.

“The SS-21,” Pereira replied. “When the Scorpion hit it, it must’ve cooked off at least part of the nuclear warhead. It obviously wasn’t a full yield — I don’t think we’d be flying now if it was — and it was far enough away that it didn’t do any real harm.”

“But the electromagnetic pulse killed all our electronics that had antennas exposed to the outside,” Wendy Tork added. “None of our experimental avionics are hardened against EMP — the only stuff that’s hardened is the older flight-control system. The analog devices and mechanical systems aren’t affected by EMP.”

“That must mean… shit, that must mean electronic stuff is out all over the entire region,” Kellerman said. “All those troops out there, their radios, the telephone system, thousands of things — it must be like the turn of the century down there.

“Well, I think it’s going to be a real quiet flight out of here, then,” Kelvin Carter said. “It’s a pretty good way to stop a war, too — everything on the battlefield with the exception of a rifle uses electronics, and the EMP would have fried most of it. We’ll have to navigate visually. The bases of the clouds were about four thousand feet, and if I’m not mistaken we can fly all the way to Norway at four thousand feet and not hit any terrain.

“And as soon as we’re out of range of the EMP effect, we can use the survival radios to contact someone,” Tork said. “I just tried one, and it looks like it survived the EMP effects. I should be able to hook it into an external antenna and talk to someone on the ground.”

The rest of the three-hour-long flight was made in virtual silence. They knew what they had done, and the crew realized what might have happened. It was far too terrible for words.