Razor's Edge

Chapter 18

Lieutenant Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian lengthened his stride as he jogged onto the long stretch of macadam that paralleled the razor-wire fence on the southeastern perimeter of the Dreamland “residential” area. This was inevitably his favorite part of the morning run, not least because the three-quarter-mile straightaway led to the last turn and the trot home. A boneyard of old aircraft lay to the right; the shadows seemed not so much ghosts as spirits urging him onward. In truth, he saw only shadows of shadows, since the skeletons were too far away in the dark to be made out. But even thinking of the old-timers disintegrating into the desert somehow comforted him. The bare skeletons reminded him that the ad-monition of “dust to dust” meant not only that conceit was ill-advised, but that everyone had a purpose and a role, and the reward of rest was guaranteed no matter how trivial your job in life, or how short you fell from your goal.

Not that Dog Bastian was a man who fell short of his goals. Indeed, his record since arriving at Dreamland the year before was one of astounding achievement.

And one conspicuous incident of direct insubordination — which had averted the destruction of San Francisco and Las Vegas.

A lot had changed since Dog had arrived at Dreamland. The base, then on the verge of being excised, was now charged not merely with developing weapons, but of using them in extreme situations. A new President had taken office, and with him there had been a new cabinet and a fairly thorough reshuffling of the civilian and military defense hierarchies. Dog’s patron — the NSC director herself — had lost her post. But he had remained and even thrived.

Temporarily, at least. Two months before, Dog had been placed “under review” by the three-star general who was his immediate and at the moment only military superior. Precisely what “under review” meant remained un-clear. Lieutenant General Harold Magnus had made no move to discipline him for disobeying orders against flying, and it was obvious he wouldn’t — given the circumstances, it would have been ridiculous. In the interim, a new defense secretary had taken over, along with a chief of staff from the Navy. “Under review” might apply to Dreamland’s status in the defense structure, which admittedly was hazy. While part of the Air Force, the base was not included under any of the normal commands. Its personnel were predominately Air Force, but they included many civilians, and a smattering of men and women from the Army and Navy as well. In developing weapons, Dreamland was in all practical effect a contractor — not just for the Air Force, but for the Army, Navy, CIA, NSA, and in one case, NASA. Its covert “action team”—aka Whiplash — consisted of a ground force commanded by Danny Freah and any other assets assigned to a mission by Dog himself. Once a Whiplash order was initiated by the President, Dog was answerable only to him or his designated deputy.

He knew that eventually all of this would change.

Dreamland and Whiplash were too important to be commanded by a puny lieutenant colonel. The latest rumors posited that Whiplash would be expanded to full squadron size and then placed under the Special Operations Command (USSOC). A two-star would take over the base, which would remain a hybrid command. While such a split was antithetical to the concept that had established Whiplash, as well as the reason Dog had been sent here in the first place, it had a certain Washington logic to it that made the rumor seem fairly authentic.

Yet it didn’t bother Dog. As a matter of fact, he no longer thought about his career in the Air Force. He even considered — albeit lightly and without focus — what sort of job he might take if he returned to civilian life. Nothing about the future bothered him these days, especially while he was jogging.

The reason waited a few yards ahead, stretching in the chilly morning air.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” said Dog as he approached.

“I had a late night,” said Jennifer Gleason. She paused in her warm-up routine long enough to accept a light peck on the lips, then fell into a slow trot alongside him. “I had to help Ray on some last minute coding for Galatica. The navigation section in the autopilot programs developed some nasty bugs when the spoof lines were imposed and the GPS signal was blocked. Major Cheshire’s supposed to fly it this morning, and we didn’t want her landing in Canada.”

“Spoof lines?”

“Well, the ECM coding in the three-factor section doesn’t interface with the GPS at all, but for some bizarre reason there was this variable table that was affected. It had to do with the allocation of memory—”

“I think we’re venturing into need-to-know territory,”

said Dog, picking up his pace. “And I don’t need to know.”

“Too technical for you, Colonel?”

“Nah.”

Jennifer tapped at him teasingly. He caught her hand, then folded it into his, her long, slim fingers twining around thumb and pinkie. They ran like that for a few yards, Dog luxuriating in the soft echo of her footsteps next to him.

“I get off here,” he said as they approached the narrow road that led to his quarters.

“You’re not running with me?”

“Hey, I’ve done my time.” Dog slowed to a trot and then a walk. Jennifer let go of his hand, but also slowed, trotting backward to talk a few more moments before saying good-bye.

“Come on, you can do another circuit.”

“Can’t. Chief Gibbs probably has the papers three feet high on my desk already,” said Dog. “Maybe we can meet for dinner?”

“How about lunch?”

“Can’t do lunch. How about off base for dinner?”

“Are you sure Gibbs will let you off base?”

“Ax works for me, not the other way around.”

“Have you checked the organizational chart?”

“No way. He drew it up,” Dog said, laughing.

Chief Master Sergeant Terrence “Ax” Gibbs was the colonel’s right-hand man; the chief tended to the p’s and q’s of the job and at times acted as a substitute mother hen. Ax came from a long line of top-dog sergeants, a chief’s chief who could organize a hurricane into a Sun-day picnic.

“The question is, can you get away?” said Dog.

“You’re the worst workaholic on this base, and that’s saying something.”

Jennifer jogged forward. Her long hair framed a beautiful round face, and even in rumpled sweats her body pulled him toward her.

“I will meet you at the Dolphin port at 1800 hours,” she said a few inches from his face. “Be there or be square.”

Dog laughed, then leaned in to kiss her. As their lips touched, he caught the flash of a blue security light in the distance.

“Now you’ve done it,” said Jennifer. “Chief Gibbs heard you talking about him.”

“I have no doubt,” said Dog. He turned toward the approaching truck, one of the black GMC SUVs used by the base’s elite security force. The Jimmy whipped so close before halting that Dog took two steps off the pavement, nudging Jennifer out of the way as well.

“Colonel, got a message for you,” said the driver. Lieutenant William Ferro, the security duty officer, was out of breath, as if he’d run instead of driven. “You have to, you have a secure call.”

“Relax, Billy,” Dog told him. “Gleason, I’ll see you at 1800.”

“You got it,” Jennifer told him, whirling and breaking into a smooth stride.

“Whiplash,” said Ferro as Dog got into the truck. “I didn’t know if I should say that, in front of the, uh, scientist, sir.”

“That scientist has seen more combat than you have,” said Dog, who might have added that her clearance was also considerably higher. “But you did okay. When in doubt, don’t.”

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant stepped on the gas and whipped the truck into a 180, shooting toward Taj, the main building at the base. Dog’s office and a secure communications bunker known as Dreamland Command were located in the basement.

The colonel ran his hands over his face as they drove, mopping the perspiration. His shirt had a wide, wet V at the chest. He’d change once he knew what was up.

“Do me a favor, Billy,” he said as the lieutenant screeched to a stop in front of the building. “Roust Captain Freah and ask him to meet me up in my office as soon as he can make it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Billy — slow down a bit, all right? This thing’s a truck, not a tank. You’ll get hurt if you hit something.”

The doors to Dreamland’s secure command center snapped open with a pneumatic hiss. As Dog stalked across the threshold, the automatic lighting system snapped on. He went to the bank of video consoles on the left, hunkering over the keyboard as he pecked in his password. The screen’s blue tint flashed brown; a three-option menu appeared, corresponding to the communication and coded protocols. Dog nudged the F3 key, then retyped both his password and the Whiplash activation code. Then he opened a small drawer beneath the desk and took out a headset.

“Configuration Dog One,” he told the computer that controlled the communications suite. “Allow pending connection.”

The screen popped into a live video from the situation room at the Pentagon. Lieutenant General Magnus, in his shirtsleeves, was conferring with an aide at the side.

“General,” said Dog.

Magnus turned toward him with his familiar scowl.

“Tecumseh. Sorry to wake you.”

“I wasn’t sleeping, General. I’d just finished my run.”

“We’re having some problems in Iraq,” said Magnus.

“Very bad problems. You’ll be hearing news reports soon.

We’re getting ready for a press conference upstairs. The executive summary is this — Saddam has shot down three of our planes.”

“What?”

“We recovered one of the pilots and had a quick look at the wreckage. We weren’t able to get a full team out there but we have some of the photos. One of your men happened to be in Europe and was routed out there by coincidence. Mack Smith. He looked at the wreckage.”

Dog nodded. Mack wasn’t a true expert on plane damage — though of course he thought he was. Still, he knew enough to give a lecture on it to terrorism experts and had commanded an investigation in the past.

“What did Mack say?”

“I don’t have the report yet, or the photos,” said Magnus. “This is still developing. Two of the planes are still missing. They’re definitely down.”

Dog felt a surge of anger as the news sank in. He’d flown missions over Iraq, commanded guys in both Southern Watch and Operation Comfort. If there were men down, there was a good chance he knew them.

Iraq should have been taken care of six years ago, steamrolled when they had a chance.

“Retaliatory strikes are under way,” continued Magnus. “We’re stepping up reconnaissance. We have satellite coverage, but we’ve pulled our U-2s until we’re sure they’ll still be okay. We need one if not two Elint aircraft there, and we believe the RC-135s might be vulnerable, at least if they stray close enough to hear what’s going on in Baghdad. It’s a precaution, of course, but until we know precisely what happened, we’d prefer to—”

“I can have a pair of Megafortresses in the air this afternoon,” said Dog.

“Two?”

“I believe we can have two,” said Dog, thinking of Raven and Quicksilver.

“Two would be optimum. We’ll want a black base, not Incirlik.”

“Okay,” said Dog, realizing that was going to be considerably more difficult than merely sending the Megafortresses.

“You’re not being chopped to CentCom on this, Tecumseh,” said Magnus. “You’re supplying them with information and support, but you remain an independent entity. This is a Whiplash operation. You understand?”

“Yes, sir, absolutely.”

“If you can find the radar and the missile sites, take them out,” added Magnus, making the implications of the order explicit. “Don’t bother going through Florida and pussyfooting with the political bullshit. Full orders will follow. Jed Barclay is going to bird-dog you on this, for the President. I’m only tangentially involved.” Magnus turned away from the screen briefly, nodded to someone behind him, then turned back. “Your orders should arrive no later than 1400.”

“The planes will be en route by then, General.”

“Very good.”

The screen went blank.

Chapter 19

“Where you goin’, my blue-painted pain in the you-know-what?” twanged Staff Sergeant Louis Garcia, half singing, half cursing at the errant wires in the hard-point assembly he was trying to adjust. Breanna rolled her eyes and took a sip of her Diet Coke, painfully aware that anything she said would not only further delay their takeoff but elicit a riff of bad Dylan puns from the man on the portable scaffold.

“How’s it looking?” asked Merce Alou, keeping his voice down.

Breanna shrugged. “Something about the wire har-nesses fouling up the hydraulic fit,” she told Major Alou, Quicksilver’s pilot.

“New antennas in the nose okay?” asked Alou, nodding toward the gray and silvery front section of the plane. Thanks to updates in their electronic intelligence, or Elint, gear, both Raven and Quicksilver had new blunt, almost triangular, noses. The faceted proboscis not only accommodated the latest array of sensors, but would also facilitate a false-echo electronic countermeasure system still being developed and scheduled for installation next fall. The new nose was not yet coated with its radar-deflecting Teflon paint, which took several applications and could ground it for some time.

“Checked and rechecked,” said Breanna. “Least of our problems.”

Alou grunted noncommittally. He’d done much of the work shaking down the new gear in Raven, his usual mount, and he seemed to be remembering those teething problems.

“We only have a clear satellite window for another hour and a half,” he said finally. “We’ll have to scrub if we’re not ready to fire the Hydros in forty-five minutes.

I’m not sure we can even preflight by then.”

Breanna took another sip of her soda. Russian satellites crisscrossed overhead on a predictable schedule. The Megafortress was no longer considered top secret — both Jane’s and Airpower Journal had written articles on the aircraft in the past few months. Many of the details were wrong, but that was undoubtedly the idea of whomever had leaked them. Newsweek had published a grainy photo following the so-called Nerve Center affair, and Time had run not one, but two artists’ sketches.

The Hydros they were to launch from the bulky hard-point, however, were very secret. From the distance, they looked like sleek red tubes with a slightly swelled rear. In fact, they could easily be confused for water or gas pipes, were it not for their aerodynamic noses and tiny fins at the back. But the thin, titanium-ceramic bodies held a pair of gossamer copper-carbon wings and a large tube of hydrogen. After the Hydros were dropped, the wings were inflated either by remote control, timer, or preset altimeter. The foot-long stubs allowed the tubes to glide back down to earth. While still in its early stages, the Hydros were expected to form the basis of next-generation disposable sensor devices or even bomb kits. And the implications of the technology — airfoils on demand, as one of the scientists put it — were far-reaching.

“Knock-knock-knockin’ on heaven’s door,” said Garcia. He stood back triumphantly.

“That mean we’re ready?” Alou asked.

“One more cup of coffee ’fore we go,” sang Garcia, apparently meaning yes.

“Can we mount the Hydros?” asked one of the scientists who stood in front of the knot of ordies and the Hydro.

“Just don’t go mistakin’ heaven for that home across the road.”

“One more song lyric and you’re going to heaven,”

said Breanna, “and it won’t be in an airplane either.”

Thirty minutes and at least a half-dozen song allusions later, Breanna and Alou had the Megafortress on the taxi-way. A black SUV Jimmy sat ahead at the turn into runway one. They trundled toward it then braked; they had to wait for Galatica to land.

“Holding at Heaven’s Gate,” said Alou.

The controller acknowledged. Galatica was on final approach.

Breanna curled her arms in front of her chest, undecided about whether to watch “her” plane land or not. She looked up at the last moment, just in time to see the plane drop into view. Her undercarriage and tail had been severely damaged in the crash landing, but there was no way to tell now; she descended toward the dry lake bed like a dark angel with her wings spread, her Teflon-coated surface smooth and sleek black.

“I’ll be with you as soon as I can,” Bree muttered to the aircraft.

“Don’t worry, I’m still saying my prayer too,” said Alou.

Breanna felt her face flush, embarrassed that she had spoken out loud.

“Okay,” said Alou. He held up his thumb, then gave a wave in front of the window to the crewman at the security truck. They removed their brakes and stepped to the line, toeing along the back apron of the runway for a moment before giving Quicksilver the gas. Breanna scanned the glass wall of instruments in front of her; all systems were green as they skipped lightly into the air.

Breanna’s disappointment at not being the first to take Galatica disappeared as soon as her stomach felt the impact of the two g’s or so that Quicksilver pulled getting off the runway. She’d missed that rush of adrenaline these past few weeks. The maneuvers in the simulator had touched eight negative g’s, a fairly hard shove — yet they hadn’t felt as sharp, as nice, as warm as this.

“Preparing to clean gear,” she told Alou.

“Proceed.”

“Computer — raise landing gear,” she said.

“Raise landing gear,” repeated the automated flight assistant. They worked through their flight plan, bringing the Megafortress to ten thousand feet over the northernmost test area. They reached it about ten minutes ahead of schedule and had to wait for the recovery team to get ready on the ground.

“I didn’t know you were religious,” said Alou as they began a wide orbit around the range. “I saw you pray before takeoff. That happen after the crash?”

Bree grunted, not caring to get into a discussion. She hadn’t actually been praying.

“God had to be watching out for you that day,” said Alou. “Peter, you ready back there?”

Peter Hall, the engineer in charge of the Hydro test, replied that he was. Breanna concentrated on her instruments. She hadn’t thought about what role, if any, a higher power had played in her survival. She rarely if ever thought about God at all. Not that she was an atheist; she and Zen had been married in a church, and after his accident she had often found herself praying. For him, though. Not for herself. And probably more out of habit than any firm conviction.

Lying on the stretcher, waiting for the ambulance to take her to the hospital, she’d thought at first she’d lost her legs. She hadn’t prayed then.

“How’s our altitude?” Alou asked.

“Ten thousand feet precisely,” she said. “Clear skies.

We’re set.”

“Quicksilver is ready when you are, Hydro Team,” said the pilot.

They hit their mark and turned the aircraft over to the computer for the launch. The handles grasping the long pipe snapped open as the plane nosed upward in an alpha maneuver, a shallow dive and recovery that transferred launch momentum to the Hydro. The missile’s nose angled toward the earth at precisely fifty-three degrees once loosened; the angle increased slightly as it fell. The pilots watched the flight with the aid of cameras in Quicksilver and the nose of the Hydro; it wobbled unsteadily as it continued to pick up speed.

“Gonna be a problem when the wings deploy,” said Peter. “Deployment in five, four …”

Breanna watched the screen as the tube seemed to burst apart. The screen showing the feed from the Hydro’s nose whipped into a frenzy.

“Just a spin,” said Peter. “It can deal with that.”

“Coming to our turn,” said Alou, who’d retaken control of Quicksilver from the computer.

By the time they came out of their bank, the onboard controller for Hydro had managed to recover from the spin and turned the craft toward its designated landing area. Breanna and the others watched on their monitors as it skidded into a rough landing about two hundred yards beyond its target line — not great, but not horrible either, especially since they weren’t particularly worried about accuracy. The Hydro’s nose camera showed the recovery crew’s vehicle kicking up dust as it approached.

“Want to take the wheel?” Alou asked.

“Oh, sure, let me drive now that all the fun stuff is done.” Breanna laughed, but then pulled back on the stick abruptly and hit the slider for maximum power, pushing the big plane into a sharp climb.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our pilot is now Captain Breanna ‘Rap’ Stockard,” said Alou over the interphone in his best tour guide voice. “Fasten your seat belts, please.

Remember to keep hands and body fluids inside the car at all times. Things are likely to be hairy. The all-time record for climb to eighty thousand feet is in jeopardy.”

Breanna had in fact started to level off. But a remark from Garcia about working on a farm — another obscure reference to a Dylan song — did encourage her to add a quick invert to the flight plan.

Chapter 20

Dog met Major Cheshire as she came down Galatica’s access ramp in the Megafortress bunker.

“Better than new,” Cheshire told him. “I think the tweaks on the engines add ten knots to the top speed — we’ll break the sound barrier in level flight yet.”

“Major, come here a second,” he said as another crewman started down the ladder. They walked a few yards away, where he could tell her about the Whiplash order.

“We’ll need the two Elint planes, Raven and Quicksilver,” he said after giving her a brief overview of the situation. “Assuming Quicksilver can go.”

“She’s fine. The new nose hasn’t been coated because we didn’t want to take her out of service during the Hydro tests, but she can fly fine. The increase in the radar profile won’t make much of a difference.”

Dog nodded. He had already considered that, but wanted to make sure Major Cheshire agreed. The increase in the radar profile compared to a standard Megafortress had been calculated at roughly thirty-five percent, which was still a considerable improvement over a standard B-52. Given that unstealthy planes flew over Iraq all the time, it would not be much of a handicap.

“Major Alou and I will be ready to fly as soon as the planes are serviced,” said Cheshire.

“You’re not going,” said Dog. “Sending you will disrupt too many things. We still need to select a team for the Unmanned Bomber Project, and the congressional inspection of the new Megafortresses is set for Tuesday. I need you here.”

Cheshire’s face turned to stone. “With respect, sir, I believe I should be on the mission. I have the most experience of the Megafortress pilots.”

“You’re also project officer for both the Megafortresses and the XB-5 Unmanned Bomber.”

“I’m giving the XB-5 up.”

“We’re going to need someone on duty in the secure center twenty-four hours a day,” said Dog. “You may have to sit in for me there, and help with some of my other duties as well. I want you to take charge of drawing up the deployment plans. I would imagine Major Alou should head the mission. Choose another crew. Danny’s already on his way over.”

Though still unhappy, Cheshire was too good a soldier and knew Bastian too well to argue further. Her sentiments could only be read in the crispness of her “Yes, sir” before she left to change.

Chapter 21

They had just come back level when the controller hailed them.

“Quicksilver, we have a message for Major Alou and Captain Stockard,” said the controller. “You’re needed back at base, stat. Priority Whiplash.”

Alou clicked the mike to answer but Breanna cut him off. “Acknowledged,” she said. “We’re inbound.”

“I have it,” said Alou.

“Sorry,” said Breanna. She concentrated on turning the big plane onto a new course for the runway as Alou cleared the security protocols to allow a coded communication with Major Cheshire. The direct link was available on their com sets only.

“We have a deployment situation,” Major Cheshire told them as soon as the line snapped on.

“I’m ready,” Breanna said.

“We both are,” added Alou.

“It’s a Rivet mission over Iraq,” said Cheshire. “Rivet”

was shorthand; it referred to Rivet Joint, top-secret Elint missions they had both flown in RC-135s. Two Megafortresses, Raven and Quicksilver, had been equipped to undertake similar missions, though under considerably more dangerous circumstances.

“Not a problem,” said Alou.

“Major, I’d like to speak to Captain Stockard alone.

Would you clear off the circuit?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Alou, who voided his connection with a verbal command. Bree felt her cheeks flashing red, embarrassed.

“Breanna, do you think you can handle a mission?”

Damn sure, she wanted to say. Let’s go kick some butt.

But instead she answered, “Yes, ma’am. Not a problem.”

“I want you to be honest with me.”

“I try to be. I was out of line the other day.”

“That’s forgotten. I want you to be honest with me.”

“Piece of cake, Major,” said Bree lightly. Then she asked about her plane.

“Engineers and ground crew did a great job,” said Cheshire. “I want you to pilot Quicksilver,” she added, changing the subject. “Do you want Chris with you?”

Chris Ferris was Galatica’s — Breanna’s — copilot.

He’d flown with her on every important mission she’d had at Dreamland.

“Yes. When are we taking off?” Bree asked.

“As soon as possible.”

“You ready?”

“I’m not going,” said Cheshire. Her words were so flat her disappointment was obvious. “Colonel Bastian wants me here to help monitor things from the command center.

Major Alou will lead the mission in Raven.”

Alou?

Of course Alou. He ranked her, even though she had more combat hours in the Megafortress than anyone, Cheshire included.

Why did that bother her? Because she’d shown him the ropes on his first few orientation flights in the Megafortress? That was three months ago.

“The deployment may last awhile,” Cheshire told her.

“Meet me in my office in the hangar bunker as soon as you land. Both of you.”

Chapter 22

If it weren’t for the wind or the stickiness of the black vinyl cushions against his face or the thousand thoughts rushing through his head, Mack Smith might have caught a quick nap on the couch in the lounge while waiting for General Elliott. Instead he spent nearly three hours sliding back and forth on the thoroughly uncomfortable chair, kicking against the rail and wedging his head in the crack at the back. When he finally drifted off, the lights flicked on.

“Sorry, General,” he said, rolling upward. But instead of Elliott he saw a tall man in chinos and white shirt.

“Garrison. CIA,” said the man. He frowned, as if Mack were sleeping on his time. Or maybe his couch.

“Smith. USAF,” said Mack, annoyed.

“I’d like to speak to you about what you saw at the crash site.”

“Yeah, you and the rest of the world,” said Mack. “But I’m not talking to anybody except General Elliott.”

“General Elliott is busy,” said Garrison.

Mack got up slowly, his body kinked from the couch.

At six feet, he was tall for a fighter pilot, but Garrison had at least six inches on him. The spook’s hair was so white and thick it looked like a carpet.

“I’ve already been debriefed. Twice,” said Mack.

“Sometimes details have a way of slipping away.”

“Don’t you have some insurrection to start?” said Mack. He started toward the door, deciding he was hungry.

“Major.” The CIA agent grabbed his sleeve.

Mack spun and stuck his finger in Garrison’s chest.

“These aren’t my clothes, Jack. Don’t rip them.”

Garrison let go so sharply — maybe it was a spook technique, Mack thought — that he nearly fell backward.

“You’re a real jerk, you know that?” Mack said.

“That’s what they say about you.”

Shaking his head, Mack turned toward the door, where he nearly knocked into General Elliott.

“General—”

“Mack, I see you’ve met Agent Garrison.”

“We were just getting introduced,” said Garrison.

“Real personable spy,” said Mack.

“I’d like to hear you describe the wreckage,” Elliott told him. “Agent Garrison should listen too.”

Mack frowned, then began recounting what had happened.

“We don’t need a blow-by-blow of your courageous encounter with the Iraqi army,” said Garrison caustically when Mack began to describe what had happened when the tanks came.

“I just wanted to show that we didn’t have enough time for leisurely inspections,” Mack said.

“Burn marks?” asked Garrison.

“No,” said Mack.

“The edges of the metal where it sheered off — powdery white?”

Mack shrugged. “Look at the pictures.”

“They’re blurry as hell. You need photography lessons.”

“See how good you are at taking pictures when a tank’s firing at you.”

“Mack, did you see any trace of the missing wing?”

asked the general.

“No,” said Mack. “I didn’t see it in the area, and when all hell broke loose, we had too much else to worry about.

How’s the PJ?”

“He’s fine. They’re a tough breed,” said Elliott.

“This is inconclusive at best,” said Garrison. “I’d still like to get in there.”

“Not possible,” said Elliott.

The frown Garrison had been wearing since waking Mack deepened. He stared at the general for nearly a minute, then walked from the room.

“What the hell’s up his ass, sir?” Mack asked, adding the “sir” belatedly.

“Mr. Garrison and his agency are going to have to defend some rather rash predictions they made,” said Elliott.

“I expect that accounts for a small portion of his hostility.”

“What’s going on, General? Do the Iraqis have a new missile?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” said Elliott.

“How did they target those planes? The SA-2 radars?

Impossible,” said Mack. “The F-16, sure, okay. The Weasel operator let it slip through and the Iraqis got seriously lucky. But two Eagles? And what got them? I have a hard time believing they could get nailed by flying telephone poles.”

Elliott said nothing.

“How did they do it?” asked Mack.

“How do you think they did it?” asked Elliott.

Mack had flown over Iraq during the Gulf War and nailed a MiG-29 in air-to-air combat. He’d had several encounters with SA-2s, including one where he had seen a missile sail within five or six hundred feet of his canopy.

But he couldn’t imagine how a pair of Eagle pilots could get shot down in the same engagement, especially with a Weasel flying shotgun; it just shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t happen.

“Honestly, I don’t know what hit the F-16 I saw,” he told Elliott. “Maybe it was a new kind of missile, something like the Russian SA-4 with a proximity fuse and shrapnel, or maybe just a fluke whack that got the wing, shattering it without exploding or at least without a fire.

But I don’t know, operating in a bizarre radar band the jammers didn’t see? And that not even the AWACS could track? I really don’t think it’s possible.”

“Neither do I,” said the general.

Chapter 23

Danny looked at the caller ID screen, trying to puzzle out the number. It had a New York City area code but wasn’t Jemma’s apartment or school. It might be Jimmy Ferro, or even Blaze, his buddy from the bad days in Bosnia.

Then again, it probably wasn’t.

He grabbed it just before it would have rolled over into the answering system.

“Danny Freah.”

“Daniel, hello. Jim Stephens.”

Danny couldn’t place him.

“I used to be Al D’Amato,” said Stephens. It was obviously meant as a joke, but the name still didn’t register for Danny. “I worked for the senator. I was his alter ego. I was talking with your wife Jemma the other day and I told her I’d call.”

Oh yeah — the politico. “Hi,” said Danny.

“Listen, I’d like to sit down some time and talk about your future.”

“My future?”

“I like to think of myself as something of a scout. I have a lot of friends, a lot of people who are interested in giving other people the right kind of start.”

In his junior year of high school Danny had been briefly — very briefly — recruited by two colleges, which offered athletic scholarships for his football skills. That was his first introduction to the wonderful world of unadulterated bullshit. He fought off the flashback.

“I don’t need a start,” he told Stephens.

“No, you’ve actually got it all started already. Headed in the right direction, definitely. Can I talk frankly? There aren’t many people like you in government right now.

Straight-shooters. Honest. Military background.”

“That’s a plus?”

“I checked with some friends in Washington. You have quite an impressive record, Captain.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Long-term, you could make important contributions to your country, very important contributions. There aren’t many of us in important jobs right now,” he added.

“And the Republican party is wide open. Believe me, Captain, you have a real future. An important future. The country needs a wide base of people in government. Congress. There are too many lawyers and milquetoasts there now. We have a duty to straighten it out.”

Stephens sounded sincere; he probably was sincere, Danny thought. And the duty card, if not the race card, did resonate with him.

But he wasn’t quitting the Air Force, certainly not to become a politico.

Could he stay in here forever? Away from Jemma?

It was important, and it was thrilling, but it was dangerous, very dangerous. And it made it very difficult to raise kids.

Which he did want.

“A job in D.C. helping a committee make the right choices for the military, hop from that into an election inside a year,” Stephens continued. “Fast-track to Congress if we pick the right district. From there, who knows? The sky’s the limit.”

“Yeah,” said Danny finally. “You know what? You got me at a bad time.”

“Oh, not a problem, Captain. Not a problem at all. We should talk in person sometime. Have lunch. No pressure or anything like that — this is a thing you’d want to think about for a long time. Talk with Jemma about, of course.”

“Yeah. Well, listen, I have your number here. I’ll give you a call soon.”

Stephens hesitated ever so slightly, but remained up-beat. “Great. Think about it, Captain.”

“I will,” said Danny, hanging up.

Chapter 24

Colonel Bastian sat back from his desk as Gibbs barged into the office.

“Your meeting, sir,” said Ax. “Everyone’s down in the torture chamber wondering where you are. But you didn’t sign my papers.”

“I’ll get them later, Ax.”

A frown flew across the chief master sergeant’s face.

“Let’s take them in the elevator,” offered Ax. “You can sign them on the fly and be done.”

“I have to read them.”

“Ah, these aren’t reading ones. I didn’t read half of them myself.”

Dog pushed his chair back and rose, shaking his head.

But instead of picking up one of the three piles of forms and files on Bastian’s desk, the chief put up his hand.

“Colonel, a word.” Gibbs’s voice suddenly became uncharacteristically officious. “I have the identity of the F-15 pilots. Back channel, of course.”

Bastian nodded.

“Both on temporary assignment with the 10th. Major Stephen Domber.” Ax paused to let Bastian run the name against his mental file of friends and comrades without finding a match. “Wing Commander Colonel Anthony Priestman. They call him—”

“Hammer,” said Bastian.

“Yes, sir,” said Ax. “Looks like DIA.”

Bastian walked quickly out of the office suite, nodding at the secretaries outside but not pausing to say anything.

Ax followed him out. Inside the elevator car, the chief held up papers, pointing to where they should be initialed. Bastian gave each only a cursory glance before signing off.

Chapter 25

The second Zen took a sip of the soda, he knew it was a big mistake. The ice cold soda hit the filling in the back of his mouth like a Maverick missile unbuttoning a T-72 main battle tank. Trying to stifle his yelp of pain, he ended up coughing instead, sending a spray of soda over the video display at the console in Dreamland’s secure center. Fortunately, Major Cheshire had just begun her presentation, clicking a large map of northern Iraq onto the screen at the front of the room. She swung the combination remote-control laser pointer around, flashing its arrow at the upper-right-hand corner of the screen.

“The first aircraft went down in this vicinity,” said Major Cheshire. “The pilot was recovered approximately here. The F-15s were struck while they were following this route. Barrage-launched SAMs, at least some of which were unguided at launch, are thought to have taken them out. The missile bases on the next screen have been struck.” A political map with a half-dozen radar dishes covered by explosions appeared. “You’ll have to forgive the graphics. Our friend Jed at the NSC prepared them for, uh, for some VIPs,” she added tactfully. “I won’t run through the entire radar sets or the missiles, but SA-2s, some Threes, and a Roland launcher were struck this afternoon, their time. Iraq is ten hours ahead,” she added, “which makes it an hour after Turkey.”

“It’s midnight in Baghdad,” said Danny Freah dryly.

“In more ways than one.”

Zen had flown over Iraq in the war and knew exactly how dangerous it could be. The fact that there was still some doubt about what had shot down the fighters bothered him, as well as the others, even though that sort of thing sometimes took days to figure out. Obviously the Iraqis had some sort of new strategy or missile, or maybe both. The Flighthawks would be close to immune, but there had been no time to complete the complicated painting of Quicksilver’s nose necessary to help deflect radar.

While the plane would still be comparatively stealthy, he knew that Bree would be in that much more danger.

So would he, of course, flying the U/MFs in their belly.

But he ordinarily didn’t think of himself as even aboard it — he was in the Flighthawks. Besides, he didn’t worry about himself.

“There will be an additional round of strikes in the morning. CentCom is ramping up,” said Cheshire. “An operation to recover the two Eagle pilots is ongoing.

There was no word at last report.”

“The prospects aren’t very good,” said Danny.

“This operation may continue for quite a while,” continued Cheshire. “Iraq has ordered UN weapons’ inspectors out of the country, and the President is considering a wide range of options. In the meantime, we’ve been asked to deploy two Elint-capable Megafortresses to provide CentCom with round-the-clock real-time surveillance of the Iraqi radio net, command communications, and other electronic transmission data. Two specialists familiar with Rivet Joint missions have been detailed to join us in-country; we’re hoping to get two more. Jennifer Gleason and Kurt Ming will accompany us to help facilitate their familiarization with the gear, which of course they’re not up to speed on. Let me cut to the chase,” she said, pressing the small clicker in her hand.

A large map of southeastern Turkey appeared on the screen.

“To the extent possible, we’d like to preserve operational secrecy regarding our deployment. Additionally, from a strategic intelligence perspective, the Elint-capable model of the Megafortress remains highly classified. As such, we’d like to find another base to operate from besides Incirlik. Danny Freah and I, along with Colonel Shepherd from the Material Transport Command, have come up with a solution involving a small, disused airstrip twenty miles from the Iraqi border.”

Cheshire clicked her remote again. An arrow appeared in the right-hand corner of the map — extremely close to a wide line showing the Iraq-Turkey border.

“There’s a village nearby, connected by a donkey road through the hills. It’s called Al Derhagdad. We’ll designate it ‘High Top,’ unless someone comes up with something better.”

Zen and some of the others snickered when Cheshire said “donkey road,” but she wasn’t making a joke.

“We’re close to the border, but the terrain is almost im-passable except by foot,” said Cheshire.

“Or donkey,” said Danny — he wasn’t joking either.

“Security will be provided by a Whiplash team, to be supplemented by a detachment of Marines from the 24th MEU(SOC) available for reinforcement. We’re still hanging on the Marine timetable. They may come with us, they may not; we’re still working that out.”

“For the uninitiated,” said Bastian, “which included myself until a half hour ago, MEU stands for Marine Ex-peditionary Unit, and SOC means they’re special operations capable. The 24th has been in the area before; they kicked Saddam out during Operation Provide Comfort.

They’re our kind of guys,” added the colonel, “even if they are Marines.”

Everyone laughed except Cheshire, who remained stone-faced as she flipped through a series of satellite photos of the airstrip and surrounding terrain. Zen nudged the keyboard at his console, getting a close-up of the last photo in her sequence.

“Nancy, is this scale right?” he asked. “Six hundred feet?”

“The strip is presently six hundred feet,” she said.

“I can’t even land the Flighthawks there,” said Zen.

“We’re going to make it longer,” she said. “This area here is flat and wide enough, with the exception of this ridge here. The ridge only stands about eighteen inches high; if we get rid of it, we think we can get it to fifteen hundred. Danny has worked out a plan. Incirlik is our backup, but for security reasons we prefer not to fly the Megafortresses out of there.”

Zen glanced toward Breanna as Cheshire continued.

She’d obviously gone over this earlier, but even so, her lips were pressed tightly together.

“Taking off should be no problem. We can use the Flighthawks and/or the short-field assist packs. Since we’ll have access to the tankers out of Incirlik, we can keep our takeoff weight to a bare minimum fuelwise. And of course we’ll have braking parachutes. They’ll work,”

added Cheshire, apparently seeing some skepticism in the pilots’ faces. Though the chutes had been used in B-52s, they were not exactly standard equipment on the Megafortress.

“So how do we get rid of that ridge?” said Zen, ignoring his receding toothache. “And even if you do that, I see maybe seven hundred feet you can lay mesh over, but what about that hill at the end there?”

“We have something special planned.” There was a note of triumph in Cheshire’s voice. She pressed her remote and the satellite photo morphed into a live feed from one of the Dreamland weapons development labs. A small, white-haired woman frowned in the middle of the screen.

“Dr. Klondike.”

“That would be Mrs. Klondike,” said the weapons scientist testily.

“Hi, Annie,” said Danny.

The old woman squinted at a monitor in the lab.

“Captain.”

“Dr. Klondike,” said Cheshire, “if you could explain—”

“That would be Mrs. Klondike.”

“Mrs. Klondike, if you could explain about the special application JSOW—”

“Yes. In fact, the configuration of the Joint Standoff Weapons was tried last year and found to be wanting, so we redesigned the delivery vehicle around a standard AGM-86 ALCM frame. But the key was—”

“What Mrs. Klondike is talking about,” said Major Cheshire, losing her patience, “is a controlled explosion to blast the rock into bits. They create a field of explosive powder by exploding very small weapons, focusing the blast in such a way that they can control the shape of the force. I’m told it’s similar to the principle of an air-fuel bomb.”

“That is most inaccurate,” said Klondike on the screen.

“We’ll move a bulldozer in, lay the steel mesh, and land the planes,” continued Cheshire.

“As Jeff pointed out, most of the runway is already there,” said Danny, looking at Zen. “Annie’s bombs will take care of the rest. She knows her stuff.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“We’ll run the ’dozer over it before we pop down the mesh,” said Danny. “Once we’re established, we ought to be able to expand a bit more. Some Pave Lows used the site yesterday or earlier this morning, and the Turks landed helos and light aircraft there in the eighties. I honestly don’t anticipate too much of a problem.”

“You don’t have to try landing a Megafortress on a postage stamp,” said Ferris.

“How long’s this going to take?” asked Major Alou.

“Two days? Three?”

“Two hours,” said Danny. “Maybe four.”

“Two hours?” Alou laughed. “Right.”

“The area will have to be examined before the explosion,” said Mrs. Klondike testily. “And then the detonation points calibrated and adjusted prior to the launch of the weapons. The captain is, as always, optimistic concerning the timetable.”

“Nah. I have faith in you, Annie.”

“It’s not the weapon I’m referring to.”

“You’re getting a bulldozer in there?” asked Zen.

“That part’s easy,” said Danny. “C-17 slows down and we kick it out the back.”

“Who works it?”

“My equipment guy, Egg Reagan.”

“Oh, the Pave Low pilot,” Zen said, laughing. He’d heard two different versions of the Whiplash team member’s stint as a helicopter pilot the other day. One claimed that he’d almost put the bird into the side of Glass Mountain; the other claimed that he did.

“Don’t worry,” said Danny. “You’ll be pulling operations there twenty-four hours from now. We may use two

’dozers, just to be sure.”

“Even if we take off in thirty minutes,” said Chris, “it’ll take twelve, fifteen hours to get there.”

“Fourteen,” said Breanna. “With refueling. We can push it a little faster. Raven will launch the tactical sats to maintain communication with Dreamland Command.

Quicksilver will take the Flighthawks and the AGMs.”

“I have a question, Colonel,” said Zen, trying to ignore the stab of pain from his tooth as he spoke. “Why the hell is Saddam shooting at us now? What’s his game plan?

Beat up on the Kurds?”

Bastian had been involved in the planning for the air war during the Gulf conflict and had spent considerable time not only in Saudi Arabia but behind the scenes in D.C. That didn’t make him an expert on Saddam Hussein — in Zen’s opinion the dictator was certifiably in-sane — but if anyone on the base would have a good handle on the conflict there, it was the colonel.

Dog got up and walked toward the front. He began slowly, deliberately, but as he came down the steps to the center of the semicircular room, his movements sped up.

An ominous majesty seemed to descend over him even before he spoke.

“I don’t know why the Iraqis are trying to provoke us.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s irrelevant.” He was standing erect as he spoke, yet somehow seemed to draw himself even taller and straighter before continuing. “Getting to the Gulf is not going to be a picnic, and neither are the missions. But we’ve just lost three planes, and unofficially it doesn’t look good for two of the men. That toll may increase by the time you get there. This is precisely the sort of job we were created to handle. We’re going to do it, and do it well. Questions?”

Chapter 26

An hour after Colonel Bastian’s speech, his daughter sat in the pilot’s seat of Quicksilver, going through her final preflight checks.

“Check, check, double-check, green, green, green, chartreuse, green,” sang Chris Ferris, her copilot.

“Chartreuse?” asked Breanna.

“Did you know that chartreuse is green?”

“Well, duh.”

“I never knew that. Honest to God. I thought it was pink or something. Red.”

“Any more colors on your chart today?”

“Negative. Ready to take off, Captain. Good to have you back.”

“Good to be back, Chris.” Breanna hunched her shoulders forward against her seat restraints, unlocking her muscles. She remembered Merce Alou’s preflight prayer.

What the hell, she thought. Then she laughed, realizing it wasn’t exactly righteous to be using the word hell in connection to prayer, even in her mind.

Then she prayed.

Lord, help us today, she thought, then turned to Ferris.

“Ready, Captain?”

“And willing.”

“Major Stockard, are you ready?”

“I’m ready for you anytime, baby,” said Zen, who was sitting downstairs in the U/MF control bay.

“A little decorum, Major,” snapped Breanna. She checked with each of her passengers in turn, making sure that they were all snugged and ready to go. Behind Breanna and Ferris on Quicksilver’s stretched flight deck were the two specialists who would handle the electronics sniffing gear, Master Sergeant Kelly O’Brien and, on loan from an Army SOF unit, Sergeant First Class Sereph Habib.

An Arab language specialist, Habib had been at nearby Edwards Air Force base for a joint services exercise and still seemed dazed at how quickly he had been shang-haied. He answered, “Present, ma’am,” when Breanna asked if he was ready to go.

The upstairs or back bay of Quicksilver—the domain of the defensive weapons operators in a standard B-52—ordinarily contained two additional Elint stations, as well as space for the collection computers that processed and stored the gathered intelligence. The secondary control panels for the gear had been removed to save space, as had some of the black boxes. In their place sat a collection of spare parts, two medium tents, sleeping bags, and enough MREs to ruin appetites for a week. In between the supplies were Jeff Hiu, one of the electronics wizards responsible for Quicksilver’s “Deep Drink” ALR-98 intercept receiver suite, and Staff Sergeant Louis Garcia, who’d brought along a Walkman and a sizable portion of his Bob Dylan collection.

No change of clothes, though.

Sitting next to Zen downstairs in what would have been the radar navigator/bombardier’s post on a standard B-52 was Captain Michael Fentress, Zen’s apprentice and gofer on the mission. Zen had included him in the mission reluctantly — after being ordered to do so by Colonel Bastian.

“For those of you who aren’t regular passengers, Quicksilver is not quite an airliner,” Bree told them.

“Please keep your restraints on until we reach altitude.

We have a long flight, and a bit of weather along the way, but we should be well over it. I’ll wake you up when we’re getting close to Turkey. Any questions?”

“Where’s the bathroom on this thing?” asked Habib.

There were a few snickers.

“Chris, can you help the sergeant out once we’re under way?”

“You got it.”

“Can you cross your legs until then, Sergeant?”

“Guess I’ll have to.”

Quicksilver’s four single-podded power plants were a special set of Pratt & Whitneys, highly modified from the engines originally developed for the F-22 Raptor. This latest variation on engine configuration for the Megafortress traded off a bit of speed for greatly increased range, but the thrusters could definitely get the plane off the ground in a hurry. Cleared by Dream Tower, Breanna pushed the slider to maximum takeoff power, released the brakes, and pointed Quicksilver’s new and still unpainted nose toward the wild blue. The plane lifted off smoothly, her wings drooping ever so slightly because of the weight of the Flighthawks strapped below. Breanna felt a brief flutter of apprehension as the indicated airspeed dropped a few seconds off the runway, but the problem was momentary, maybe even just an indicator glitch.

“We’re green, we’re green,” said Chris quickly.

“Clean the gear,” said Breanna.

The plane began picking up speed as the massive wheels slid up into their bays.

“Looking good, crew,” she said as they climbed through five thousand feet. “Just thirteen hours and fifty-nine minutes to go.”

Chapter 27

Among Dreamland’s less glamorous projects was designing a replacement for the venerable C-130 Hercules transport, a capable and highly versatile aircraft that came in an almost endless series of flavors. The Hercules was such a successful aircraft, in fact, that the wizards at Dreamland could not hope to fully top her — though even Herky bird partisans might claim they had come close with the MC-17B/W, which was taking Danny Freah and his six-man Whiplash advance team to Turkey. Based on the short-field capable C-17, the MC-17B/W had been thoroughly refashioned. Besides the dark black paint job, the most noticeable difference between the Whiplash mutation and the standard Globemaster III was the multicon-figurable wingtips that made up about a third of the outer wing, just inside the winglets. The leading and trailing edges had double trapezoid panels that generally operated as standard leading and trailing edge slats, functioning much as the C-17’s considerably smaller ones did.

But the slats also had narrow hinge stakes, allowing them to be set as miniature wings; when set, they looked a little like small biplane sections at the end of each wing. The effect increased the aircraft’s ability to land on short airfields, even with a full load. Where the standard C-17 could deliver 150 troops or 81,000 pounds of cargo to an airstrip of 625 yards — an incredible achievement in itself — the MC-17B could land the same load in half the distance. The stock P&W PW2040s with their 41,700 pounds of thrust could get a fully loaded C-17 into the sky at 1,200 feet; the Whiplash version needed a hair under eight hundred, though that involved a bit of prayer and a stiff wind. And the notoriously turbulent airstream that made certain parachuting deliveries difficult — especially those involving troops — had been tamed by the Dreamland experts.

To the seven men in the cargo area of the big plane, however, the major difference between the Dreamland mover and all others came down to eight regulation-size cots, one large-screen TV, and one oversize poker table, all squeezed into a self-contained, motorized trailer that had been designed to fit in the rear bay. Not only did it fit, but it left room for two large, skid-mounted bulldozers, which were to be air-dropped in a low-and-slow insertion at the temporary base.

Which they had never practiced from the aircraft.

Danny Freah was not worried about the drop; the mission specialists aboard the MC-17B/W had more than twenty-five years of experience between them, the pilot and copilot had been flying together for years, and, at least in theory, he thought the Whip Loader ought to be at least as good at delivering “packages” as the standard model. Nor was he concerned about Annie Klondike’s special-order AGM-86s; the diminutive weapons scientist had demonstrated her far-ranging talents often in the past. Freah wasn’t even bothered by the fact that “his”

MV-22 Osprey, which was too large to fit in the MC-17, wouldn’t be arriving in theater until a day, or maybe even more, after he arrived. After all, they weren’t expected to go anywhere.

Freah’s worries had to do with intelligence, or rather, the lack of it. His entire store of information on the area they were flying into amounted to a single paragraph, which itself could be summarized in one word: mountainous. The area to the south was populated by Kurds, and it had been surveyed by American forces during Operation Provide Comfort in 1991. But things had changed dramatically there in the past five or six years. Some of the Kurds the Americans had helped in their rebellion against Saddam Hussein were now allied with the dictator. Others were involved in an all-out war with the Turks. And the CIA backgrounder he had on his notebook computer said that the Iranians were funding two other Kurd groups, trying to foment revolution, or at least give their old enemy Saddam Hussein headaches.

The Iranians weren’t likely to be friendly. The Iraqis definitely were enemies. The Kurds might or might not be, depending on their mood. The Turks, ostensibly allies, were arguably the most deadly of all.

He had six men to hold the base with. The Marines wouldn’t be available for at least forty-eight hours.

“Read ’em and weep,” said Sergeant Kevin Bison at the poker table just beyond the cot where Danny was reading. “Ladies over jacks. Full house.”

“Nice, but not as good as four eights,” said Sergeant Lee Liu.

Bison threw down his cards. “You musta had that up your sleeve, Nurse.”

Liu laughed. He’d gotten the nickname “Nurse” because of his paramedic training, though in fact all of the Whiplash team members could pull duty as medics.

“Down your pants, more likely, Bison,” said Powder.

“Screw you,” snapped Bison.

“All right, boys, think about getting some sleep,” said Freah, snapping his laptop closed. “We have a long day ahead of us. We’re jumping in six hours.”

“Hey, Cap, can I ride the ’dozer down?” said Powder.

The others laughed, but he wasn’t necessarily kidding.

“Tell you what, Powder,” answered Freah. “I hear anything out of you or anybody else that doesn’t sound like a snore, I’ll strap you to the blade and push you out myself.”

Chapter 28

Colonel Bastian glanced at his watch and jumped from his desk — he was supposed to meet Jennifer at the Dolphin dock ten minutes ago.

Then he remembered she’d deployed as part of the technical team supporting the Megafortresses. She was in Alou’s plane to monitor the launch of their tactical satellites — one to ensure wide-band instant communications between the team and Dream Control, the other a small optical satellite officially known as a KH-12/Z sub-orbital surveillance platform, and more generally as the KH-12-mini. Propelled by solid-fuel boosters, the sats would be launched from Raven over the Atlantic. Their low orbits and small size meant they’d only “live” for a few weeks before burning up in the atmosphere, but that was perfectly suited for the mission.

Dog sat back down in his seat slowly. He was done with Chief Gibbs’s paperwork for the day, but he had a pile of reports to look at on the right side of his desk. At the very top was one dealing with ANTARES, or Artificial Neural Transfer and Response System, the once-promising experiment to use human brain impulses to control aircraft.

To say that the experiment had failed was incorrect, or at least imprecise. What it had done was make its subject into a paranoid schizophrenic who’d actively participated in a plot to destroy an American city with a nuclear device. Intercepted before he could reach his target, he’d tried to strike Dreamland itself.

If it were up to Dog, the ANTARES equipment and all of the records would be ground into little pieces. But it wasn’t up to him. His job was only to make a recommendation to the NSC. He picked up the report, written by Martha Geraldo, who had headed the program, and began reading.

The potential of the human mind is awesome and incredible. We have seen its darkest side as a result of the ANTARES experiments and the so-called Nerve Center affair. In the future, artificial neuron connections may allow for the control of an entire squadron or wing of aircraft. At present, however, we clearly do not understand enough about the human brain to continue in the vein we have undertaken.

Dog realized that even though it sounded negative, Geraldo was gearing up to make an argument to continue the program, albeit in a drastically changed fashion.

Maybe she was right — maybe a great deal of good could come from it. But he just wasn’t in the mood to read an argument in favor of a project that had cost one of his best people and nearly killed his daughter. He tossed the report down on his to-be-read-later pile on the floor. It was already nearly a foot high.

He knew that Tony Priestman, aka Hammer, would have told him to deal with it right away. That was his main philosophy as a flight leader — attack.

Maybe that’s what got him shot down over Iraq, Dog thought.

He had been a freshly minted hotshot jock when he met Hammer. Then a captain, Hammer wasn’t all that much older than he was, and nowhere near as good a pilot. However, he did have five years more experience — five years that included a short but eventful stint over Vietnam at the very end of the war. Dog served as his wingman in an F-15 squadron, one of the first to fly what was then a hot new aircraft.

Hammer hadn’t been particularly kind at first. In fact, he’d never been particularly kind. It took Dog two days to get over the first dressing down — the new F-15 pilot had failed to keep his separation during their flight and had landed a bit fast. It was petty criticism. For weeks after-ward, anger mixed with the fear of really screwing up every time he prepped a flight, though they melted once he was in the air — he was, after all, a good pilot, and he knew it.

Gradually, Dog came to realize that Hammer’s harassment was a reaction of his own fears. Hammer was much harder on himself, something Dog learned when he sat in on a briefing for the wing commander following a training exercise. Later that same night they found themselves left at a bar together after the rest of their group drifted away. Dog told Hammer he thought he’d done pretty well, certainly better than Hammer seemed to think when he’d told the boss.

Instead of answering, Hammer flicked a cigarette out of the pack in front of him on the bar. He stared at it a moment, then took a silver Zippo lighter from his pocket.

“This lighter belonged to one of my commanders,” he said after a drag on the cigarette. “Left it to me when he went home.”

Dog expected a story would follow about the lighter or the commander, but instead Hammer slid the Zippo into his pocket and took another puff of the cigarette. Then he sipped his seltzer — he didn’t drink, at least not that Dog ever saw. After a few minutes, he went on.

“I got a MiG one afternoon. It was pretty funny, in a way. I should have been nailed myself. They had this tactic — this is end days in the war, remember; I’m just about the last guy out.” Hammer sounded almost rueful about the war ending. “Anyway, we go in, drop our sticks la-di-da, and just as we’re turning home — well, no, we had recovered and we were still in the process of getting bearings. I’m a little bit back of my lead and we’re about to saddle up when this MiG appears. MiG-21. Anyway, they have this tactic where basically what they would do was run one guy out as a decoy, suck you in. They get you to follow, or at least pay attention for a moment — they can turn like all hell, I mean, it’s like trying to follow a motorcycle with a tractor trailer. I’m in a Phantom, of course.”

“Right,” said Dog.

“So anyway, like an idiot — and I mean a true idiot — I bite. My Sidewinder growled on the guy — I’m that close.

It happens bing-bang-boom. My lead’s here, the MiG comes up out of the bushes there, I’m here.”

Hammer gestured in the smoky air of the bar, trying to conjure the remarkable fluidity of a three-dimensional dogfight with his hands. Dog could see it, or imagined he could — the glittering knife of the enemy plane cutting up out of the ground clutter, the tight cockpit of the Phantom, the Sidewinder screaming at him to fire.

“So he starts to turn — I slipped outside the firing envelope.” Hammer’s hands started to mimic not the flight of the planes but his action on the stick. “So I start to bite because I want the shot and then I realize — and maybe it was actually my backseater or even somebody else in the flight yelling at me, I don’t really remember — anyway, I suddenly realized there was going to be another one of these suckers coming at my butt. Because that’s what they did. You’re here, you start to follow, they get you flat-footed. So instead of following, I flick down — yeah, as incredible as that seems, I roll and duck, and I’m not kidding, I look up and I’m six hundred yards from the second MiG’s nose. Nose on nose. He winks — big balls of red and black pop out in front of me. It’s not slow motion. It’s more like I’m looking at a painting. Everything’s stopped. Those flashes are — you ever see that Van Gogh painting of stars at night? ‘Starry Night’ or something?

That’s what it is, and it’s the middle of the day. And I mean, he’s right here, I could have flown right into him.

Popped the canopy and shook hands. But I didn’t use the gun. It happened so fast, I couldn’t.”

Even if his weapon were charged and he was ready to fire, the likelihood of scoring a heads-on shot under the circumstances Hammer described were slim. But he sus-pended his story, blowing a deep puff of smoke into the air from his cigarette to underline his failure.

“So, I turn,” he continued finally. He turned his head to the left, as if watching the MiG pass. “He goes that way.

I’m — slats, flaps, I would have thrown out an anchor, if I could have, to turn and get on his tail. I would have put the engines into reverse. Rewind.”

A long pull on the cigarette took it down to the filter.

Hammer put it in the ashtray thoughtfully and picked up the pack for another.

“So I come out of the turn and the first MiG is right there, three-quarters of a mile. Sidewinder growls again.

Bing. Launch. And just about then the second MiG

splashed my flight leader.”

That was the end of the story, and though Dog waited for details — such as what happened to the two men in the Phantom that went down — Hammer didn’t offer them.

After a few minutes of silence, he added a postscript:

“Never underestimate the importance of luck.” Then he left the bar, without lighting the second cigarette.

Hammer’s criticism didn’t seem quite so harsh after that. In spite of it, Dog and he became reasonably decent friends. Dog was in his wedding party and had been invited to Hammer’s son’s christening, though he was in Germany at the time and couldn’t attend. The boy, whom he’d met several times, would be four or five now.

Hammer and his wife had waited to have kids, largely because he thought what he did for a living carried a hefty risk for a young family. He’d wanted to wait until he was close to retiring. Then he’d enjoy the kid and be safe — safe for him and the wife.

“Penny for your thoughts,” said Ax, materializing in front of his desk. “I knocked, Colonel — sorry.”

“It’s okay, Chief.”

“Secure line for you. It’s back channel.” Ax pointed to the phone.

Dog hesitated, suspecting the call was from someone in the Pentagon looking for inside information he didn’t have.

“You’re going to want to take it, Colonel,” said Ax, who’d retreated to the doorway. “It’s Brad Elliott. He’s in Turkey.”

Dog nodded, then reached for the phone as deliberately as Hammer had sipped his soda that night.

“Hello, General,” said Dog.

“Colonel, I have some information I’d like to give you, so that you have a full understanding of the situation over here,” said Elliott.

Dog had only spoken to him once or twice; never had Elliott introduced small talk into the conversation. Which was just fine with him.

“It’s unofficial, of course,” added Elliott.

“Yes, sir, General.”

“I’m not in the Air Force and I’m not your superior,”

said Elliott. “I don’t believe the planes that went down were hit by missiles, contrary to what the analysts are saying.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” said Dog.

“Tecumseh, how much do you know about Razor?”

In any given week, ten or twelve of the pieces of paper that came across his desk dealt with Razor, the favored nickname for the S-500 mobile deuterium chemical laser system. Ground-based, it was being developed as an antiaircraft weapon and had an accurate range of roughly three hundred miles. Aside from some niggling problems in the cooling system and some glitches in the targeting computer and radar, the system was ready for production. Indeed, Dreamland was slated to receive some of the first production units for its own air defense system any day now.

“I know a little about it,” said Dog.

“My suspicion is that the planes were taken out by a clone. It would account for the fact that the radars weren’t on long enough for a missile to acquire the target. The damage is consistent with a Razorlike weapon.”

“Everything I’ve heard points to missiles.”

“Everything you’ve heard is driven by CIA estimates and conventional thinking,” said Elliott. “The problem is, no one believes Saddam has a laser, so naturally they’re looking for something else.”

Deuterium lasers were cutting-edge weapons, and it was difficult to believe a third world country like Iraq could develop them or even support them. Then again, few people had believed Iraq had a nuclear weapons program until the Gulf War and subsequent inspections.

“If this were the Iranians or the Chinese,” continued Elliott, “everyone would connect the dots. Let me let you talk to someone who was there.”

Before Dog could say anything, Mack Smith came on the line.

“Hey, Colonel, how’s the weather back there?”

“Mack?”

“Hi, Colonel. I bet you’re wondering why I’m not in Brussels. General Elliott borrowed me. He’s on some sort of task force thing, investigating a shoot-down, and since that’s my area of expertise, I hopped right to it.”

Dog rolled his eyes. Elliott obviously said something to Mack, and Mack’s voice became somewhat more businesslike.

“So what do you want to know, sir?” asked Mack. “I’ll give you the whole layout. I saw it. Wing came off clean.

Has to be a laser. Iraqis must have stolen it.”

“Did you take pictures, Mack?”

“Yes, sir. Being processed now. CIA has its head up its ass, but what else is new, right?”

Elliott took back the phone. “You know Major Smith,”

he said, in a tone one might use when referring to a way-ward child.

“Yes,” said Dog. “I’d like to get some of my people on this.”

“I agree,” said Elliott. “Dr. Jansen—”

“Jansen’s no longer here, I’m afraid,” said Dog. Jansen had headed the Razor development team at Dreamland.

“I’ll have to check with Dr. Rubeo to get the people together. If we could look at the damage ourselves—”

“Wreckage was blown up in the tangle Mack got involved in,” said Elliott. “Some of the people from Liver-more who worked on high-energy weapons have been analyzing it for the CIA.”

“And they don’t think it was a laser?”

“They hem and they haw. The NSA has been picking up information about new radars, and the Iraqis have been working on adapting the SA-2,” added Elliott.

“What’s CentCom’s opinion?”

“Their intelligence people are split. There were a lot of missiles in the air, and at one point the AWACS does seem to pick up a contact near the F-16. On this other shootdown, the AWACS had moved off station and the F-15s were temporarily out of range. Heads are rolling on that.” Elliott’s voice had a certain snap to it, the quick un-derstatement a commander used to indicate someone down the line had screwed up royally. “Their view is that it’s irrelevant to their planning — they have to proceed no matter what the threat. Saddam can’t get away with this.”

Dog agreed that CentCom had to press its attacks, but a weapon like Razor changed the tactical situation a great deal. Razor had considerably more range and accuracy than conventional antiaircraft weapons, and defeating it was much more difficult. Most SAMs would be neutralized by jamming their radar. In Razor’s case, however, that was problematic. The jammer itself was essentially a target beacon, alerting a sophisticated detection system to the plane’s location, giving it all the coordinates needed to fire; once the weapon was fired the electronic countermeasures were beside the point — the ray worked essentially instantaneously. On the other hand, waiting to turn the ECMs on until the laser’s targeting radar became active was nearly as dangerous. In theory, though not yet in practice, Razor could work on a single return — by the time the radar was detected, it had fired. Other detection systems, including infrared and microwave located far from the laser itself, could also be used to give the weapon targeting data, making it even more difficult to defeat.

But he knew there was no way Saddam could manage the sophistication needed to develop such a complicated weapon, let alone field it. He couldn’t even build a secure phone system.

“Is ISA involved?” asked Dog.

“No. We’re up to our ears with China and the rest of the Middle East right now. This is CentCom’s show. Things are ramping up quickly here, Colonel,” said Elliott. “I wanted you to know what you might be up against. The Megafortresses would be prime targets.”

Dog leaned back in the chair. The seat, the desk, everything in the office had once belonged to Brad Elliott. He’d built this place, fashioned it into a high-tech center comparable to the fabled Lockheed Skunk Works, maybe even Los Alamos, if you adjusted for the difference in budgets and the times.

Then he’d been kicked out, sacrificed because of politics. No, not entirely, Dog amended. Elliott did bear some responsibility for the so-called Day of the Cheetah spy scandal, if only because he was sitting at this desk when it happened.

He’d landed on his feet with ISA, and yet …

“I appreciate the information, General,” Dog told him.

“I’m going to take it under advisement.”

“I don’t want our people, your people, getting surprised,” said Elliott.

“That’s not going to happen,” said Dog, sharper than he intended.

Elliott said nothing. It occurred to Dog that the retired general had probably had a hand in getting the Whiplash order issued — in fact, it may have been the reason he’d been sent to investigate in the first place.

“Thank you, General,” Dog told him. “I appreciate the heads-up.”

“You’re welcome.”

The line went dead. Dog keyed his phone. “Ax, get Rubeo over here. I need to talk to him.”

“Dr. Ray is on his way,” said Ax. “How ’bout lunch?”

“How’d you know I wanted to talk to him?”

“Musta been a coincidence,” said the chief master sergeant. “Ham or roast beef?”

“Neither,” said Dog.

“Yeah, I know you want a BLT. I was just testing you.”

Dog was tempted to call Ax’s bluff by saying he’d have something completely different, but before he could, there was a knock on the door and an airman entered with a tray.

“Ax,” said Dog, still on the phone, “if—”

“Light on the mayo, easy on the burn,” said the chief, sounding a little like a short-order cook. “Anything else, Colonel?”

Chapter 29

Torbin dressed quickly and then headed over to the squadron ready room, skipping breakfast. Though he’d managed nearly six hours of sleep, his body felt as if he’d spent the time driving a jackhammer into several yards of reinforced concrete. He walked with his head slightly bent, nodding as others passed without actually looking at them. He’d gotten a few steps into the building when a lieutenant called his name and told him that General Harding wanted to talk to him.

Harding was in charge of the wing Glory B was assigned to. Torbin didn’t know where his office was and had to ask for directions.

“General, I’m Captain Dolk,” said Torbin when he finally arrived. He stood in the doorway of the office, one hand on the doorjamb.

“Come in, Captain. Close the door, please.”

The general began talking before Torbin sat. The first few words blurred together — rough out there, all hell breaking loose, a difficult job. “The Phantom is an old airframe,” continued the general. “I used to fly them myself, back in the Stone Age.”

“Yes, sir,” said Torbin.

“Things have changed tremendously. Hell, we’re using AWACS, standoff weapons, GPS — we’re even going to have a pair of Megafortresses helping out. The Wild Weasel mission belongs to an earlier era.”

He thinks I fucked up, Torbin realized.

“These days, we can jam radars with ease. Locate ’em, knock ’em out before they turn on. That’s the way to go.

Much safer than waiting for them to turn on. I have a pair of Spark Varks and a Compass Call en route.”

“General, we can still do the job.”

Harding drew himself up in the chair and held his round face slightly to the side. His cheeks, ruddy to begin with, grew redder. “There’s no mission for you today, son. You’re to stand by until further notice.”

Torbin waited for the general to continue — to ball him out, to say he screwed up, to call him an idiot. But he didn’t.

“I didn’t screw up, sir,” said Torbin finally. “I didn’t.

My pilot didn’t and I didn’t.”

Harding stared at him. He didn’t frown, but he sure didn’t smile. He just stared.

“I’ll do anything I can,” said Torbin finally. “Anything.

The radars that came on, the missiles — they were too late and too far to hit those F-15s.”

“I appreciate your sentiments,” said Harding.

Torbin felt the urge to smash something, kick the door or punch the wall. He wanted to rage: No way I screwed up! No stinking way!

But he took control of himself, nodded to the general, then walked slowly from the office.

Chapter 30

Zen felt a sudden shock of displacement as the Flighthawk slipped away from the Megafortress, launching herself as the mothership rose on the stiff wind’s eddy. No matter how many times he did this, it still took a moment to adjust to the difference between what his body felt and what his eyes and brain told him it should feel.

And then he was in the Flighthawk, seeing and feeling the plane through his control helmet and joystick. He fingered the speed slider and nudged toward the rift in the peaks where the scratch strip sat.

“Systems in the green,” said Fentress, monitoring the flight from his station next to Zen.

“Thanks.” Zen pushed the Flighthawk downward against the violent and shifting winds. A thick layer of clouds sat between the Flighthawk and the airstrip, but the synthesized view in his screen showed every indentation in the rocks and even gave a fairly accurate rendering of the brownish-gray concrete that formed the landing area.

It looked to be in much better shape than they’d expected.

Still, even if Danny’s plan worked, the strip was going to be on the narrow side. Zen slid the Flighthawk into a bank, gliding five thousand feet above the shallow ridge that formed the main obstacle to lengthening the runway.

“I’m going to get under the clouds so we can get the precise measurements,” he told Breanna over the interphone.

“Go for it.”

“Looks narrow down there, Bree,” he added.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Zen slipped under the clouds and manually selected the video feed for his main display. Mountaintops spread out on the horizon, giants sleeping beneath green and brown mottled blankets.

“Bree could slide pickles into an olive jar,” said Chris Ferris, the copilot.

“Watch your language,” joked Breanna.

“I didn’t say you couldn’t handle it,” Zen said. “I said it would be tight.”

“I thought you slept on the way over,” said Breanna.

“I did. Why?”

“You sound a little testy.”

“Airspeed dropping,” said Fentress.

“No shit,” snapped Zen, turning his full attention back to his plane. Indicated airspeed had nudged below 300 knots. He backed his power off even more, letting it slide through 250. The small-winged U/MF became in-creasingly unstable as its speed dropped, but Zen needed the slow speed so they could get a good read on the target area. “Computer, begin dimension survey as programmed.”

“Computer,” acknowledged the Flighthawk’s C3 flight system. “Dimension survey initiated.”

“Captain Fentress, give the feed to the flight deck,” said Zen.

“Aye aye, sir,” said Fentress, apparently trying to joke — a new development that Zen had to leave unremarked, as the Flighthawk hit a gnarly gust of wind. He ramped up thrust but was nudged off course and had to start the whole run over again.

“If we had more altitude, I could get a better angle for Captain Freah,” said Fentress, who was giving Freah the feed so he could plot his jump after the missiles did their work. “Save some time.”

“Curly, let me fly my plane, okay? We’ll do it like we rehearsed.”

“Yes, sir,” said Fentress.

They were silent until he reached the end of the runway area and began recovering.

“We’ve got it up here, Jeff,” said Breanna. “Glitch downloading the targeting data to the missiles. Take us a minute.”

“Flighthawk commander acknowledges.”

“Getting awful formal,” said his wife.

“Just doing my job, Quicksilver leader.”

Breanna didn’t answer. Chris Ferris marked the location on the Megafortress’s automated targeting system, then opened the bomb bay doors. The two hand-built missiles whose noses looked like spherical clusters glued together sat on a massive rotating bomb rack in the rear of the plane.

Ferris gave a countdown to launch, handing the process to the computer at five seconds. A sharp metallic trrrrshhhhh sounded over the interphone circuit as the first missile launched; 3.2 seconds later the second tore away.

“Ground wire loose somewhere,” said Louis Garcia, who was sitting in the rear bay. “Going to have to fix that when we get down.”

“Three seconds to target,” said Ferris. “Two, one—”

Chapter 31

When the back door of the MC-17 opened, the temperature inside the hold dropped dramatically. The cold bit at Captain Danny Freah’s skin despite the layers of thermals and special drop suit he wore. But at least it meant they’d be getting to work soon — the worst part of any operation was the wait.

Danny moved his hand up to the visor of his combat helmet, clicking the control to increase the resolution on the feed he was receiving from Zen’s U/MF. A fair amount of smoke lingered from the explosion, but the weapons seemed to have done their job perfectly.

“We’re up next,” said the transport pilot. The communications and video were piped in through a hardwire; the MC-17B/W did not yet have an internal wireless connection. “Should be good to go in zero-one minutes.”

“Show’s under way,” Danny told the others in his team.

“Look alive, look alive,” said Hernandez, the team jumpmaster. Though he’d already checked everyone’s equipment twice in the past five minutes, he began one last inspection.

“First pass is for the ’dozers,” Danny said, though the reminder wasn’t necessary.

“Sure I can’t ride one down?” asked Powder.

“Next jump,” said Danny.

“He just wants to make sure he gets his turn driving,”

said Egg Reagan. “Trying to bump me.”

“I ain’t bumpin’ you. It’s Nursey who shouldn’t be at the wheel. You ever ride in a Humvee with him?”

“I’m not the one who lost his license,” answered Nurse.

“Who lost their license?” asked Danny.

“Just a rumor,” said Powder.

“We’re cleared,” said the MC-17B/W pilot. “Dust is settling. Okay, boys, look good.”

One of the loadmasters near the tail ramp waved a fist in the air, then pushed a button on the thick remote control panel in his hand. The bulldozer closest to the doorway jerked forward on its skid; lights flashed above the opening. In the meantime, the MC-17 slowed dramatically, its jet engines whining and shuddering. Danny tightened his grip on the rail behind him as the plane turned herself into an elevator, gliding down ten stories in the space of a few half seconds. The two bulldozers lurched forward on their automated launch ramp. They slowed as they cleared the door, seeming to stop in midair before bobbing outward, one after another.

Danny turned his gaze back to the top half of his visor and its feed from the Flighthawk. A lot of dust, nothing else. Then a large black rock furled into view, followed by another. As the U/MF flew past, smoke and dust started to clear and Danny saw the drogue chutes chuttering off to the right, the ’dozers sitting on the ground.

“Fuel’s up,” said the loadmaster. Two more crates made their way toward the door. These were perfectly square. Four barrels of diesel fuel for the ’dozers, along with some hand pumps and additional equipment, were contained inside custom-made cylinders packed into the spidery interior lattice of the special shock-absorbing crates. Following the fuel were two more skids with jackhammers and assorted gear. After they were out, the MC-17 began climbing to give them a little more room for their jump.

“Wind’s a bitch out there, boys,” said Hernandez. “Be sharp.”

“As a pin,” said Powder.

Danny took a breath as the yellow light came on above the door, indicating that they were almost ready. He took his place in the second line, still holding the rail as they waited for Hernandez’s signal. The seven men on the team went out practically together, two teams abreast holding hands.

A “normal” rig for a recreational parachuter always includes a special altimeter device to deploy an emergency parachute once the jumper passes a preset altitude in case the main chute fails. A device that worked on essentially the same principles in the Whiplash jumpers’ gear deployed their MC-5 ram-air parachutes based on a preprogrammed glide course. Sending GPS data as well as altimeter readings to their combat helmets, the “smart rigs” turned the Whiplash team members into miniature airplanes. They steered the boxy, rectangular chutes through the swirling winds, their bodies lurching as counterweights as they fought through the difficult fall. All seven men came down within ten yards of each other — a tight squeeze between the equipment and the work area, though if this had been an exercise at Dreamland or the Military Free Fall Simulator at Fort Bragg, Danny would have made them repack and jump again.

Stowing his chute quickly, the captain cleared his rucksack off the work area and recalibrated his smart helmet’s com set, waiting while it searched for the tactical communications satellite deployed by Raven. That took only about five seconds, but by then the others were already pumping fuel into the ’dozers, which seemed to have come down okay. Danny walked over to the pile of rubble created by the AGM-86s.

There were rocks all over the place. Annie had promised a fairly even pile.

But the ridge itself was gone, and the pockmarks from the explosion seemed a few inches deep at most. They’d have it flattened and meshed in no time.

“All right, get the ’dozers, let’s go,” yelled Danny. “The rest of you guys, get the equipment squared away and then get ready for the mesh. Should be here in thirty minutes.”

“You sure we can get it all down, Cap?” asked Bison.

“Timetable’s tight.”

“Bison, if you had a problem, you should have spoken up before,” said Danny.

“No sir, not a problem.”

“He’s just trying to slow things down because he’s got the latest time in the pool,” said Powder.

“What pool?”

“We bet on how long it would take,” admitted Bison sheepishly.

“You guys get to work before I make you take out hammers and pound these boulders into dust,” Danny told them.

Liu fired up his bulldozer first, moving it off the thick planks of its landing crate. The sergeant had claimed that he had worked two summers with a construction firm; as improbable as that seemed — Liu stood perhaps five-six and weighed 120 soaking wet — he had demonstrated at Dreamland that he knew how to work the ’dozer, slamming the levers around like an expert. He pushed ahead now, angling the rocks straight off a shallow cliff at the right side of the strip.

Egg had trouble getting his ’dozer started.

“Hey, use it or lose it,” shouted Powder from the ground as Egg fumbled with the ignition.

“What’s the story?” shouted Danny.

“Something’s screwed up with the engine,” said Egg.

He pulled off his glasses, cleaning them on his shirt, then pushed back his cap on his bald head as he studied the machine. He looked more than a little like an owl in cam-mies.

“Pull out the doohickey,” said Powder.

“Shut up,” snapped Egg. He leaned over the front of the ’dozer, looking in the direction of the engine.

“Loose wire or something?” Danny asked.

“You got to pull the doohickey out. It’s basically a Volkswagen with a big ol’ blade on it,” said Powder.

“What the hell is he talking about?” Danny asked Egg, who by now was strung over the front of the machine.

“Got me, Cap.”

“Can I try?” Powder asked.

Danny was about to order him to help square away the rest of the gear when Egg jumped down. “You want to try it? Go ahead, fucker. Be a wise guy.”

“Captain — if I get it going, can I drive it?”

“Go ahead,” insisted Egg before Danny could say anything. “Come on, know-it-all. Let’s see you start it up.

This is a diesel. It’s not a Volkswagen. It’s a bull-fucking-dozer.”

“Bull-fucking-dozer,” laughed Powder, clambering into the seat.

“He’ll never get it going,” Egg told Danny. “No way he’s going to. I think the—”

The rumble of the second ’dozer coming to life drowned out the rest of what the team’s heavy equipment expert had to say.

Chapter 32

Zen eased the Flighthawk back behind the Megafortress then gave the verbal command, “Trail One,” telling the computer to put the plane into a preprogrammed escort course behind the mothership. They had refueled just before approaching the target area; assuming things went well on the ground, they’d have nothing to do for the next two hours. A pair of MH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters were en route out of Incirlik, escorting Chinooks carrying runway mesh. O’Brien and Habib, meanwhile, had finished testing the combat configuration on Quicksilver’s Deep Drink sensor suite and were scanning Iraq for signs of trouble.

The Deep Drink gear, which was carried by Raven as well as Quicksilver, could be divided into two broad cate-gories. The first was a set of radar receivers and jammers.

A passive-detection system swept six bands and was capable of finding radars five hundred miles away, depending on their strength and profile. A high-powered detector could analyze A-J radar bands simultaneously, delivering real-team target data directly to GPS-based munitions or to B-1 and B-2 bombers equipped to receive it. And there was a combination repeater-transponder-noise jammer that worked like the ALQ-199 ECM unit.

Deep Drink’s second set of capabilities were based around a wide net of wires and dishes embedded in the Megafortress’s skeleton, turning the plane into a giant radio antenna, a combat version of an E-3 Elint gatherer. A dozen intercepts could be processed at once, with Quicksilver’s onboard computer able to handle one channel of 64-byte coding on the fly. The Deep Drink gear included what its designers called “hooks” to allow the data to be transmitted via a broadband satellite network back to an NSA or military analysis center, but neither the satellite nor the transmission system had made it off the drawing boards yet.

Additionally, Quicksilver carried IR detectors designed to monitor missile launches. With a little bit of fine tuning they could pick up the flare of a shoulder-launched SA-3

from a hundred miles away. The gear was stowed in the bay normally used for Stinger antiair mines on other EB-52s, including Raven.

O’Brien took the radar detection duties, while Habib began making and plotting intercepts. Zen, meanwhile, clicked his own radio through American frequencies, listening in as a pair of patrol planes cruised south of them, just over the Iraqi border. F-16 jocks, they mixed irrever-ent banter with terse instructions and acknowledgments, flying a simple “racetrack” or extended oval the length of their patrol zone. An AWACS control aircraft flew about a hundred miles to the northwest of Quicksilver, scanning for radars in the area as well as watching for enemy aircraft. Zen hailed them all, asking how things were going.

“Quieter than my mom’s bedroom,” said one of the Eagle jocks. “Where are you from, Flighthawk One?”

“Edwards,” answered Zen. It was SOP to mention the large base just south of Dreamland rather than Dreamland itself.

“Meant where’d you grow up, homeboy,” answered the pilot. “I’m guessing Virginia.”

“Spent a lot of time there,” said Zen.

“You northerners are all alike,” said the other pilot, who had a deep Georgia twang.

“Who you calling a northerner?” countered the other pilot.

“What are you flying there, Flighthawk?” asked the Georgian. “And what’s your location?”

“I’m in Turkey, and you wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Zen.

The pilot’s undoubtedly sarcastic response was overrun by the AWACS controller.

“Gold Flight, break ninety!” he yelled.

Before either plane could acknowledge or the controller could explain further, O’Brien cut over the interphone. “SA-2 radar active in box alpha-alpha-six.

Refining calibration.”

They’d divided Iraq into squares or boxes for easy reference; AA-6 referred to a northeastern portion about 150

miles from Quicksilver—and maybe seventy from the F-16s. But the next thing Zen heard was the shrill anguish of the AWACS controller, screaming over the open mike.

“Oh my God, they’re gone. Oh God, they’re gone.”