Razor's Edge

Chapter 46

“Never ever talk to me that way when we’re flying. Never.” Breanna felt her heart pumping as she confronted her husband beneath the plane.

“I could have had those MiGs,” Zen said.

“The attack flight was our priority.”

“Those MiGs nailed the Tornado.”

“No way.”

“Listen, Bree—”

“No, you listen, Jeff.” Breanna clasped her hands together to keep them from shaking. “Anyone else talked to me that way, I’d have them thrown off the plane.”

“Oh, bullshit. I outrank you.”

“I’m in charge of the aircraft, not you.”

“Those MiGs nailed the Tornado, and I could have gotten them,” said Zen. He pushed his wheelchair back slightly on the pavement below the right wing of the Megafortress. “We could have prevented that.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it.”

“Bullshit yourself.”

“I have work to do.” Breanna turned, furious with him, furious with herself. She had done the right thing, she thought, and there was no way the MiGs nailed the Tornado. The F-15s would have been all over them.

Each stride was a grenade as she stomped toward the mess tent. Every glance pulverized the rocks around her.

The large tent was nearly empty; only Mack Smith sat in the far corner, nursing a cup of coffee. She took a bottle of water and a sandwich from the serving counter, then walked to the table farthest away from him, even though it was also the farthest from the heaters.

The wrapper claimed the sandwich was ham and cheese, though the meat looked suspiciously like roast beef. She bit into it; it tasted more like pastrami.

“Better than MREs, huh?” said Mack, coming over.

“Next Pave Low’s bringing steaks.”

“Leave me alone,” she snapped.

“Uh-oh, somebody’s in a bad mood. Tell Uncle Mack all about it.”

“One of these days, Major, someone’s going to knock that smirk so far down your throat it comes out your ass.”

“I only hope it’s you,” said Smith, taking another swig of his coffee.

Zen furled his arms in front of his chest. Breanna was right — he’d been out of line to talk to her that way in the plane.

He was right about everything else, but he still shouldn’t have talked to her that way.

But damn — he could have nailed both of those bastards. The Eagles claimed they chased the MiGs away — they said they headed into the bushes and ran back to base — but that was just cover-my-ass bullshit, he thought.

If the MiGs didn’t get the Tornado, who did?

There were a dozen candidates, starting with a stray Zeus flak dealer and ending with General Elliott’s Razor clone. Not to mention plain old mechanical failure or even pilot error; he knew of at least one Tornado that had pancaked into a mountain during the Gulf War because the pilot had lost his situational awareness.

Still, the Eagles should have made sure the MiGs were down. And out. He would’ve.

But Breanna was right about their priorities; where Quicksilver went was her call. His job was to escort, to protect her. Yes, he extended their reach, flushed out threats, and passed along the information to everyone else in the air. But his job, bottom line, was to protect her, not the other way around.

Had he wanted to nail the MiGs for the glory?

Bullshit on that.

But he could have nailed the mothers.

He owed Breanna an apology. Unsure where she’d gone, he wheeled himself toward the mobile Whiplash command post, then decided the mess tent was a better bet.

I’m sorry, he rehearsed. I was a hothead. I used to be cool but now I’m just a hothead. I’ve lost a lot of self-control since the accident.

No. Don’t blame it on the accident. That was bush league.

I’m sorry. I was out of line.

Zen was still trying to decide exactly what he would say when he entered the mess tent. Breanna was there, sitting next to Mack Smith.

Zen pushed himself toward the serving tables. A small refrigerator held drinks; there was a pile of sandwiches next to it and a large metal pot of soup, or at least something that smelled like soup. Zen took two of the sandwiches and a Coke and wheeled himself over to the table.

“Hey,” he said to Breanna.

“Hey there, robot brain,” said Mack. “Have fun this morning?”

“I always have fun, Mack.” Zen pushed his chair as close to the end of the table as he could get it, but that still left a decent gap between his chest and the surface.

He had to lean forward to put his soda and sandwiches down.

“Those sandwiches are about a week old,” said Mack.

“Check ’em for mold before you take a bite.”

Zen bit into them defiantly. He was halfway through the second when Danny Freah, Chris Ferris, Captain Fentress, and the two mission specialists crewing Quicksilver came in. Fentress had a map rolled up under his arm, along with a pair of folded maps in his hand.

“Majors, Captain,” said Danny. “Just talked with Major Alou. He’s inbound. We want to have a briefing over in the trailer as soon as he’s down. CentCom is going to nail that SA-2 site we picked up and they need our help.”

“Is that what got the Tornado?” Zen asked.

“No one’s sure,” said Danny. “At this point it’s possible he wasn’t even shot down. But CentCom wants to hit something, and it’s the biggest target in the area. Even if it didn’t get them — and I don’t think it did — it should be taken down.”

“How close were the MiGs Major Stockard saw?” Breanna asked O’Brien.

“It’s possible they could have gotten the RAF flight if they were using very long-range missiles,” said Chris Ferris, answering for the radar specialist. “But we didn’t sniff anything in the air, and as far as we know, the AWACS didn’t have any contacts either. Not even the Eagles could find them.”

“Nothing,” added O’Brien. “If they fired Alamos, we would have known it. Their guidance systems would have given them away.”

“Alamos with heat sensors,” suggested Zen. The Alamo missiles — Russian-made AA-10s — came in at least three varieties, including a heat-seeker. But the longest-range version known to the West, the AA-1 °C, had a range of roughly twenty-two miles and used an active radar, which would have been detected. The infrared or heat-seeking version would have a much shorter range.

“Million-in-one shot,” said Ferris.

“Alamos at twenty-five miles?” said Mack. “What the hell are you guys talking about?”

As Ferris explained, Zen looked at Breanna. She was still steaming, he could tell. He tried to send his apology via ESP, but it didn’t take.

“Had to be a laser,” said Mack when he heard the details. “Only explanation.”

“So where is it, then? With the SA-2s?” said Ferris.

“Shit, they’d hide it in a mosque or something,” said Mack. “You know these ragheads.”

“That might be right,” said Danny.

“Maybe it’s with one of these radars that flicks on and off,” said Zen.

“Possible,” said Ferris. “On the other hand, none of the sites seem large enough to house an energy weapon.”

“It doesn’t have to be that big,” said Zen. “Razor’s not big at all. It moves a tank chassis.”

“I don’t think the Iraqis could make it that small,” said Ferris.

“I bet it’s in a mosque,” said Mack.

“Whatever size, they’d try to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible,” said Bree.

“There — we look for what’s inconspicuous,” said Mack.

He meant it as a joke, but nobody laughed.

“Our best lead is the radars,” said Zen. “Because even if it were mobile, it would have to be getting a feed from them somehow. Maybe it can go from one unit to another.”

“Or they have a dedicated landline, with high speed connections, fiber optics,” suggested Bree.

“You really think the Iraqis can do that?” said Ferris.

“They’re doing something,” said Mack.

“I think I can narrow the area down on where that Slot Back radar was if you give me a half hour,” said O’Brien.

“It wasn’t briefed. There may even be another one down there, though the signal was really weak. I’ll tell you one thing,” he added, “either the operator is damn good or they’ve got some sort of new equipment down there, because the computer couldn’t lock it down.”

Jennifer Gleason folded her hands over her mouth and nose almost if she were praying. She had only a rudimentary notion of how the coding for the program governing the IR detection modes worked, and without either the documentation or the raw power of Dreamland’s code analyzers, she could only guess how to modify it. The secure data-link with Dreamland was still pending; once it was in place, she would be able to speak with the people there who had developed the detector. But the pilots wanted the plane to fly before then, and she thought it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out. She replayed the EB-52’s recorded inputs from the last mission, watching the coding to see how she might tweak the IR detector to find a momentary burst in the infrared spectrum.

Shorter than a launch, but stronger?

Jennifer reached for her soda on the floor of Quicksilver’s flight deck, pulling it up deliberately. She took two sips and then set it down, all the while staring at the blank multipurpose screens at the radar-intercept operator’s station. She ran the detection loops over again, watching her laptop screen where the major components of the code were displayed. The interface program took data from different sensors and configured it for the screens; it was monstrously complex because it had to accept data from a number of different sensors, which had been designed without a common bus.

Her laptop flagged a bug in the interface that had to do with an errant integer cache. It was minor — the interface program simply ignored the error.

Odd. It should have been trapped out by the interface.

The error handling section was comprehensive, and in any event included an “if all else fails” section where anything unexpected should have gone.

But it hadn’t. Jennifer traced the error to an ambient reading from the sensor. The detector had flicked onto something and sent a matrix of information about it on to the interface. The interface didn’t understand one of the parameters.

An error in the sensor that hadn’t been caught during the rigorous debugging of the interface at Dreamland?

Certainly possible. Happened all the time.

Except …

Jennifer reached down for her soda again. It could just be an error — there must have been a million lines of code there, and mistakes were inevitable.

But if it wasn’t a mistake, it would be what they were looking for.

Well, no, it could be anything. But anything wasn’t what she was interested in. She needed a theory, and this was it.

She could get a base line with some flares, see what happened, try to screw it up. Use those numbers to compare to the error, calculate.

Calculate what, exactly?

Something, anything. She just needed a theory.

If Tecumseh were here, she thought, he would tell her to figure it out. He would fold his arms around her and rub her breasts and tell her to figure it out.

Jennifer jumped up from the station, scooped up her can of soda, and ran to find Garcia.

Chapter 47

Torbin finished his Tae Kwon Do routine, bowing to the blank wall. He was alone in the workout room, still a leper despite the semiofficial admission from General Harding that his gear and the mission tapes checked out; he wasn’t at fault in the shoot-downs.

Not at fault, but impotent nonetheless. The Phantom remained grounded until further notice. Its next flight would undoubtedly be to the boneyard.

Torbin folded his arms at his sides, trying to maintain his composure. He belonged back in the rear seat of the Weasel, back over Iraq. They could nail the damn radars one by one, no matter what bullshit tactics they were pulling. Hell, maybe he could jimmy around with the gear somehow and scope out their tactics.

Whatever.

Something heavy roared off the nearby runway.

Ought to be me, he thought, deciding to run through his routine again.

Chapter 48

The heat was so high in the trailer, Danny felt sweat rolling down his neck as he studied the map. On the other side of the table Major Alou finished telling the others about CentCom’s plans. There was no doubt now that Iraq had some sort of new weapon or weapons. Six planes had been shot down; four men were still missing. The ratio of sortie to loss was just above twenty to one. Even the most conservative reckoning of the statistics from the Gulf War put the sortie-to-loss ratio well over a hundred to one. Maybe it wasn’t a laser, but something big and bad was going down.

“They’re bringing in a pair of U-2s from the States to increase surveillance,” said Alou, “but they’re worried about how vulnerable they’ll be, and in any event they won’t arrive for another twenty-four hours or so. The game plan in the meantime is to take out every radar and missile site we can find.”

“The bastards keep rolling them out,” said Chris Ferris.

“They’ve been keeping them in the closet, or what?”

“They’ve spent the money they got for food the past five years on rebuilding their defenses,” said Alou.

“Damn country’s starving while Saddam’s buying new radar dishes and vans. The missiles they’ve had. They just haven’t fired them until now.”

“They’re not on long enough to hit anything,” said O’Brien. “Has to be a laser.”

“They might be synthesizing the radar input,” said Ferris. “If you had a sophisticated computer, you could compile all of the inputs from a diverse net, then launch. No one radar would ever stay on long enough to seem like the culprit. They could move the radars around, use some and not others — that would explain why they duck the Weasels and the other jammers.”

“Pretty sophisticated,” said O’Brien.

“Jennifer said it’s doable,” said Ferris. “And then they barrage launch at the contacts. That’s what they’re doing.”

“We’re jamming like hell. Guidance systems ought to be confused.”

“Maybe they’ve improved them,” said Ferris.

“If that is what’s going on,” said Zen, “then what we should do is nail the coordinating site.”

“How do we find it?” asked Breanna.

“We follow the communications net,” he suggested.

“Listen in. See where the center is. That’s what Quicksilver’s good at.”

“I still think it’s a laser,” said Mack. “Got to be.”

“Sure,” said Zen. “But we can find that the same way.

Instead of looking for the weapon, we look for the guidance system. That’s how Weasels work, right? They nail the radar van.”

Danny straightened from the map. He felt like the odd man out as they continued to discuss the situation and what to do. He felt like he ought to contribute something, help plan a mission somehow. He and his guys were sitting on the ground playing babysitters — literally, with the Kurd kid Liu had plucked out.

Protecting the planes was an important job. Still, the Marines provided more than enough security, and the Navy Seabee guys they’d brought in with them were going great guns expanding High Top — if they had their way, it would be the size of O’Hare in another forty-eight hours.

So Whiplash was free to do more important things.

Like?

“All right,” said Alou. “Let’s work up some surveillance tracks to coincide with the missions for CentCom.”

“You know it seems to me that if this radar computer gear is that sophisticated, we ought to try to get a look at it,” said Danny. “Get pictures, data, that sort of stuff.”

“Hey, Captain, why don’t we just grab it?” said Mack.

He probably meant it as a put-down — Smith could be a real asshole — but the idea struck Danny as eminently doable.

Or at least more interesting than babysitting.

“If I can get a Chinook or a Pave Low in here, we could take it out, no sweat,” said Danny.

The others seemed to ignore him.

“I still think it’s a laser,” said Mack.

“That would be worth taking,” said Danny. “Big-time.”

Finally, everyone realized he was serious. The conversation stopped; they all turned and looked at him.

“We could,” said Danny. “Or at least get intelligence about it.”

“You serious?” asked Zen.

“Shit yeah.”

“Unnecessary risk,” said Alou. “Even if we could find it.”

“Risk is our job,” said Danny. He knew he was pushing further than reasonable, but what the hell — Whiplash was created exactly for missions like this. Besides, except for the target, it was a straightforward armed reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines. Anyone could do it.

Pretty much.

“We’re not even positive where the site is,” said Breanna. “We don’t have a target for you, Danny.”

“So get me one.”

As the others finished working out the details for the missions, Zen wheeled himself through the narrow door and down the ramp. A gray CH-46E Sea Knight or

“Frog” was just arriving, bringing in more Marines. The two-rotored helicopter looked like a scaled-down version of the more famous Chinook — though in fact the development had been the other way around, with the Frog coming first.

Darkening the sky behind the Marine helo was an Osprey, just tipping its wings and rotors to land. The MV-22 was Whiplash’s chariot of choice, twice as fast as most helicopters, with considerably longer range.

Zen wheeled toward Quicksilver’s parking area. He’d rejected numerous suggestions that he get a battery-powered chair — definitely a macho thing — but at times like this, skidding through potholes and ducking rocks, even he would have admitted it’d be useful.

He hadn’t apologized to Bree. He knew he’d have to, and the sooner the better — stale apologies were even more difficult to make.

Send flowers or something. Blow her away if he could get them up here.

Jennifer Gleason and Louis Garcia were standing beneath Quicksilver’s tail, pointing at the large black semi-sphere and wire guts of the coverless IR sensor above.

“Hey, how’s it going?” he shouted, rolling toward them.

“Lousy,” Jennifer told him. “I tried to recalibrate the programming and now there’s a bad circuit on the sensor.

It’s going to take at least an hour to get it working.”

“An hour? We’re supposed to take off then. Forty-five minutes, actually.”

“Oh,” said Jennifer.

“I can get this back together quicker than a rolling stone,” said Garcia. “But then I have to help prep the plane.”

“Okay.” Jennifer took a strand of her hair and pulled it back behind her ear. “We’ll toss flares off the Flighthawk.”

“What for?”

“I want to see what the data sequence should be.

There’s an error I’m trying to make sense of.”

“I can launch the flares, no sweat.” Zen glanced toward the U/MF already loaded onto the Megafortress’s wing.

“Good. I’ll grab something to eat and my flight gear.”

“Hold on, cowboy.” Zen whirled his chair across her path as she started to duck away. “Who says you’re coming with us? It’s a war zone.”

“And Somalia wasn’t?” Jennifer put her hands on her hips defiantly. “If there is a laser out there, you need me in the air. Don’t worry, Jeff, I can take care of myself.”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t.”

“Hmmmph,” she said, stomping away.

“I’m having a bad day with women,” Zen said softly.

“Honey, give me just one more chance,” sang Garcia.

“Huh?”

“Just a song, Major.”

“Garcia — is everything in life a Dylan song?”

“Pretty much.”

Chapter 49

“Test code checks, sir,” said the lieutenant at the communications desk in the secure situation room triumphantly. “You’re good to go.”

“Make the connection,” said Dog. He stood in the middle of the floor in front of the screen, waiting for the transmission from Turkey. The test pattern on the screen blipped blue. The words CONNECTION PENDING appeared in the middle of the screen.

He wanted to talk to Jennifer in the worst way. But of course that wasn’t what this was about.

“Hey, Colonel, good to see you finally,” said Danny.

The screen was still blank.

“Well, you can see me but — wait, there we go,” said Dog as the video finally snapped in. Danny Freah sat at the table in the Whiplash trailer. His eyes drooped a bit at the corners, but his face and hands were full of energy.

Before Dog could say anything, Danny launched into an argument for undertaking a ground recon of the Iraqi Razor clone.

“And hello to you too, Captain,” said Dog when he finally paused for a breath.

“It’d be a real intelligence coup,” said Danny. “We could use the helmets to beam back video. Then we can take key parts back.”

“Do we know where it is?”

“No, sir. But the missions they’re on now — they’ll find them.”

“Assuming, of course, it exists.”

“Hell, if we can get some help, we could grab the whole thing.”

“Let me get Rubeo and our Razor people down here to talk about this,” said Dog. “It may be useful.”

“It’ll be damn useful.”

“Relax, Captain. From what I’ve heard out of CentCom, they’re not even one hundred percent sure it’s a laser. No one can explain how Saddam would have built it.”

“If it’s not — let’s say it’s a radar and missile setup we don’t know about — we should take a look at that too,”

said Danny. “See what they’re up to. Jennifer Gleason suggested that they may have some way of taking a lot of different inputs and cobbling them together. Software for that would be worth grabbing too, don’t you think?”

“Captain, while I don’t want to dampen your enthusiasm,” said Dog, “why don’t we take this one step at a time. How about an update on your status?”

“Sure,” said Danny. He gave him a complete rundown, working backward from the last mission. Then he told him about the baby who’d been born the previous night. It sounded like just the thing the Pentagon PR people would eat up — except, of course, that the mission was code-word classified, and would undoubtedly remain so.

“Kinda makes you a grandpa, huh, Colonel?” said Danny.

“I don’t think so,” said Dog. “What kind of shape are our people in?”

“Top notch, sir.”

Danny’s mention of Jennifer gave him the perfect excuse to talk to her — he ought to hear about her theory from her, he thought. Certainly if it were Rubeo or one of the other scientists, he’d ask to talk to him directly.

But Dog hesitated. He didn’t want to cross over the line.

Of course he should talk to her.

“Is Dr. Gleason there?” he asked, finally giving in. “I’d like to hear her theory on the radars.”

“She’s up with the Megafortresses, sir,” said Danny.

“She’s going on a mission.”

“Mission?”

“Yes, sir. They’re modifying the IR detection gear to search for lasers.”

Dog pursed his lips but said nothing.

Chapter 50

Mission prepped, Breanna gave in to an impulse before heading back up to the Megafortress and jogged over to the baby’s tent after relieving herself in the Marines’ new latrine. She wanted to see the cute little guy before she took off.

For good luck. Just for good luck.

She expected mother and child would be sleeping, but as she neared the tent she heard laughter. The tent was crowded with Whiplash members and Marines, who were taking turns holding and cooing the infant.

“Guarding against a sneak attack?” said Bree, trying to squeeze inside.

“Can’t be too careful about colic,” said one of the men, deadly serious.

“Well, let me hold him for good luck,” she said, sliding near Sergeant “Powder” Talcom, who was holding him.

The sergeant gave the baby up very reluctantly.

“You’re a cute one,” she said, gently cradling the baby.

Little Muhammad Liu looked at her with very big brown eyes. Then he furled his nose and began to cry.

“Aw, Captain, you made him cry,” said Powder, immediately reaching for the infant. The other men closed in; Bree suddenly felt very outnumbered.

“There there,” she told the infant, rocking him gently.

“Aunt Breanna isn’t going to hurt you.”

The baby sniffed, burped, then stopped crying.

“You got the touch, Captain,” said one of the men.

“Well, I’m quitting while I’m ahead,” she said, handing the baby off.

Chapter 51

Musah Tahir rose from his prayer mat and bowed once more in the direction of Mecca before starting back to his post in the radar van. For the past three days Allah had been remarkably beneficent, rewarding his poor efforts at improving the Russian radar equipment with fantastic victories over the Americans. Volleys of missiles — a combination of SA-2s, Threes, and Sixes — had brought down several aircraft.

Or at least his commanders told them they had. Tahir was aware only of his own small role in the war as both technician and operator. He had studied engineering at MIT as well as the Emirates, and in some ways this job was a million times below his capability. But fate and Allah had brought him here, and he could not argue with either.

Tahir settled on his narrow metal bench before the two screens he commanded and began his routine. First, he made sure that each line of the Swiss-made system in the console on the left was working, punching the buttons methodically and greeting the man on the other line with a word of peace and a prayer. When he reached the third line, there was nothing — Shahar, the idiot Shiite, no doubt a traitor, once again sleeping at his post. Tahir waited patiently, speaking the man’s name at sixty second intervals, until after nearly ten minutes the observer came on the line.

“Planes?” Tahir asked, cutting off Shahar’s apology.

He knew the answer would be no — he had not received the warning yet from the spies at Incirlik that the infidels’ planes had taken off. But the question would serve as a remonstrance.

“No,” said the man.

“Remain alert,” snapped Tahir, hanging up. He sat back at his console, frowning as one of the guards walked past his doorway. There was only a small security contingent here, a half-dozen men; anything larger might have attracted the Americans’ attention. Besides, so far behind the lines, there was no need for troops. Tahir several times had considered the fact that the men had probably been posted here to keep an eye on him.

That was hardly necessary. He went through the other lines quickly. When he had determined that all were operating, he proceeded to the next set of checks. These were more difficult, involving the buried cables that ran from the various collection sites. More than two dozen radars and six microwave stations were connected to Tahir’s post via fiber-optic cable that had been buried at great ex-pense, in most cases before the infidel war. If it were laid out end to end it would no doubt reach Satan’s capital in Washington.

Only two of his sites had been hit in the morning’s bombardments. That was well within acceptable parameters. At this pace, it would take the Americans a full week to eliminate his radars. By then the army would be out of missiles anyway.

Tahir glanced at the television monitor in the corner, then picked up his cell phone and adjusted the headset. When that was on, he carefully placed the second headset — a Soviet-made unit older than he — over it. He had to position it slightly to the side so he could hear from both sets, but the trouble and the pressure against the edge of his ear and temple were worth it; he could talk and monitor his radar at the same time. Prepared, he let his glance sweep across the console before him one last time, then drew his body upward with a great breath, exhaling slowly as he delivered his trust to Allah, waiting for the alert.

Chapter 52

Zen held Hawk One exactly seventy-five meters behind Quicksilver’s tail, waiting for the signal to hit the flares. The Megafortress’s airfoil shed air in violent vortices, and holding the position here was actually more difficult than closing in for a refuel.

“I need another few seconds,” said Jennifer, fingers violently pounding one of the auxiliary keyboards at the station next to him. “Hang tight, Zen.”

“Yup.”

“You ready upstairs, O’Brien?” she asked. “I need you to initiate sequence two right now.”

“Sequence two initiated,” said the electronic warfare officer.

“Zen, on my signal …”

“Okay, Professor.” Zen nudged his power ever so slightly as the Megafortress tucked forward, riding an eddy in the wind.

“Now.”

“Bingo,” he said, punching the flares, which were ordinarily used to decoy IR missiles.

He couldn’t tell whether the test had worked or not, and neither O’Brien nor Jennifer said anything. Zen held his position, wanting to get on with things. But such was the life of a test pilot — weeks, months, years of routine, spiced by a few seconds worth of terror.

“All right. That worked well. I think we’re okay,” said Jennifer. “Let’s do it at one mile.”

“Two minutes to border,” said Breanna.

“Acknowledged, Quicksilver,” said Zen. He tucked his wing, hurling Hawk One toward the ground as he started to loop out to the launch point for the flare. Jennifer wanted him to pickle it as close to the ground as possible and had calculated a precise angle, twenty-two degrees from the sensor. Zen tucked down toward a wide rift, his altimeter marking his altitude above the valley at a thousand feet.

“I’m going to put it at fifty feet,” he told Jennifer. A large cliff loomed on his right; he nudged the Flighthawk onto its left wing, clearing the rocks by twenty feet. A wide valley opened up in front of him. A river sat near the center of it. His speed had dropped below 200 knots.

Sliding his nose forward, he ducked below seven hundred feet, six hundred, burrowing into the valley.

“Almost there,” he said as he passed through five hundred feet.

“Transmission!” yelled Habib, breaking in over the interphone circuit.

“You’re at the right angle,” Jennifer told Zen.

“Five seconds,” said Zen, concentrating as the Flighthawk slid down below a hundred feet.

“Transmission — I have an American voice — Guard band!”

“Hawk leader, hold off on the test,” said Breanna calmly. “Habib, give us a location.”

“Trying!”

“What?” asked Jennifer.

“We have one of the downed pilots,” Zen told her. He pulled level, did a quick check of his instruments, then started the preflight checklist on Hawk Two, still sitting on Quicksilver’s wing.

“He’s behind us. I don’t have the location — I can’t — he said he saw us fly overhead,” said Habib, his stutter no doubt matching his heartbeat.

“He saw Hawk One,” said Breanna, her voice almost quiet. “Zen, tuck back up the valley. We’re going to slide back around. Habib, get us a good location. Chris, talk to the AWACS and tell them what we’re up to.”

“I’d like to launch Hawk Two,” Zen told Breanna.

“Let’s hold that until we have a good location on the flier,” she said. “I don’t want anyone getting distracted up here.”

“Hawk leader.” Zen banked Hawk One back in the direction it had just come from. He had the radio at full blast but could hear nothing; reception in the Flighthawks was extremely limited. Then again, Quicksilver’s standard radio wasn’t picking up the signal either. Only the sophisticated gear Habib controlled was capable of finding and magnifying the faint signal, which was undoubtedly being distorted and weakened by the rocky terrain and towering mountains.

“You’re headed back toward him,” Habib told Zen.

“He can’t see you, but he hears something.”

“Could be bogus,” said Breanna.

“Aware of that, Quicksilver. RWR is clean.”

“I concur,” said O’Brien.

“You’re overhead — he thinks you’re at about fifteen thousand feet.”

“Tell him I’m about a fifth of the size of an F-15,” said Zen. “I’m a hell of a lot lower than he thinks.”

“I can’t talk back to him,” said Habib. His listening gear was just that — built for listening, not talking. They’d have to wait until they got close enough for Quicksilver’s set to make contact.

Zen magnified the visual feed ten times but saw nothing but large rocks. A cliff loomed ahead; he climbed, deciding to circle above the hills where he wouldn’t have to worry about running into anything.

“I still don’t have him on standard Guard band,” said Chris over the interphone. “Can you pipe your input into our radios?”

“Negative,” said Habib.

“Are you sure you have his location right?” asked Breanna.

“I don’t have it nailed down,” said Habib. “But we’re very close.”

“I have a radar,” said O’Brien. “Slot — no, I’m not sure what the hell it is.”

Zen’s RWR went red, then cleared.

“Clean,” said O’Brien.

“Hawk leader copies. I had a blip too. Jen?”

“I can’t tell if it was a blurp or the real thing,” she said.

“He’s lost you,” said Habib. “I lost him.”

“I’m going to goose a couple of flares over that valley where he must have seen me,” said Zen. “Let’s see if that wakes him up.”

Chapter 53

Danny Freah watched as the marines off-loaded gear from the transport helicopter, ferrying large bundles out the rear to a six-wheeled trolley that looked like something they’d borrowed from a Home Depot outlet. A separate crew of Marines, meanwhile, refueled the CH-46E from one of the barrels of fuel it had brought with it.

One of the pilots hopped out of the cockpit, ambling over to say hello.

“Have a cigar?” The Marine, tall but fairly thin, had left his helmet in the chopper. He had at least a two-day-old beard, so rare for a Marine in Danny’s experience that he wondered if the pilot was a civilian in disguise.

“Don’t smoke,” said Danny. “Thanks anyway.”

“Hey, not a problem,” said the pilot, who took out a pocketknife to saw off the end of the short cigar. “You’re Captain Freah, right?”

“Yeah?”

“Name’s Merritt.” He took out a Colibri lighter and lit the cigar, sending a pair of thick puffs into the air before continuing. “Friend of yours asked me to say hello. Hal Briggs.”

“You know Hal?”

“I do some work for him, every so often. A lot of these guys in the MEU do, SF stuff,” said the pilot, adding the abbreviation for Special Forces. Danny knew that his old friend Hal Briggs was deeply involved with covert actions for ISA, but operational secrecy meant he was hazy on the details.

The pilot exhaled a thick wad of smoke. There was a decent wind, but Danny still felt his stomach turning with the scent.

“Hal says you’re outta your mind if you’re predicting the Yankees make it to the World Series. He wants Cleveland,” said the helo pilot.

“Hal doesn’t know shinola about baseball,” Danny told the pilot. “Cleveland. Where’s their pitchin’?”

“Cleveland? Ha!” A laugh loud enough to be heard two or three mountains over announced the arrival of Captain Donny Pressman, the pilot of the MV-22. Pressman was a sincere and at times insufferable Boston Red Sox fan.

“Now, if you want to talk about a team—”

“Bill Buckner, Bill Buckner,” taunted the Marine, naming the first baseman whose error had cost Boston the World Series against the Mets several years before.

“Old news,” said Pressman.

“Yo, Merritt — we got a situation here,” yelled the other helicopter pilot from the front window.

Danny and Pressman followed the pilot back to the chopper.

“AWACS says one of the Megafortresses has a line on a downed pilot. He’s just over the border. We’re the closest asset to him.”

“Shit — we’re not even refueled.”

“We are,” said Pressman. “Let’s go!” He started to run toward his aircraft. “Get me some guys.”

Danny twirled around and saw two of his men, Powder and Liu, pulling guard duty at the edge of the ramp area.

“Liu, Powder — grab your gear, get your butts in the helo.

Now!”

“What’s up, Captain?” asked a short, puglike Marine sergeant a few yards away.

“Pilot down!” yelled the helo pilot. “We got a location.”

“We’re on it,” said the sergeant. Two other Marines ran up.

“Into the Osprey,” said Danny. He didn’t have his helmet and was only wearing the vest portion of his body armor, but there wasn’t time to pick up his gear. Danny, Liu, Powder, and the three Marines barely got the rear of the Osprey closed before it began moving forward on the short runway.

“We got a location from the Marines!” shouted the copilot, appearing in the doorway to the flightdeck.

“Twelve minutes, fifteen tops, once we get the lead out.”

Chapter 54

Though designed primarily to decoy heat-seeking missiles, the Flighthawks’ small flares were fairly conspicuous, even in the strong afternoon light. Zen shot off six, a third of his supply, then circled back.

He had a good feel for the layout now; the valley ran almost directly north-south, bordered on the east and west by steep mountainsides. A river ran in an exaggerated double Z down the middle; a small town sat along the apex of the second Z at the south end. There were two roads that he could see. One cut through the village and headed east into the rocks; it was dirt. The other was a hard-pavement highway that curved about five miles south of the village. It extended into an open plain and, from the altitude that he peered down at it, didn’t seem to connect to the town, at least not directly. But while he figured there’d be at least a dirt trail connecting them, he couldn’t find it. The rugged terrain gave way in the distance to relatively fertile areas. Zen glimpsed a patchwork of fields before reaching the end of his orbit and doubling back once again.

The pilot was most likely in the foothills at the northern part of the valley; farther south, and the people in the village would have tripped over him by now.

“Anything?” he asked O’Brien.

“Negative.”

“I’m going to take it down and ride along the river,”

said Zen. “See if I can find anything. Quicksilver?”

“We copy,” said Bree. “Be advised we have a helo en route. Captain Freah is aboard.”

Zen rolled the Flighthawk toward the earth, picking up speed as he plummeted. He’d take this pass very quickly, then have Jennifer review the video as he recovered. It was the sort of thing they’d done together plenty of times.

It was also the sort of thing he could have done easily with Fentress on the other mission, though he’d balked.

What did he have against Fentress?

Rival?

Hardly. The guy seemed afraid of his own shadow sometimes.

Zen put the Flighthawk to the firewall, maxing the engines and tipping the airspeed over 500 knots. At about the size of a Miata sports car, the robot plane was not overwhelmingly fast, but she was responsive — he pulled back on the stick and shot upward, tucked his wings around and flashed back southward. The entire turn had been completed in seconds, and took perhaps a twentieth of the space even the ultra-agile F/A-18 would have needed at that speed. Zen galloped through the air with his aircraft, looking for something, anything.

Light glinted near the village. He throttled back and plowed into a turn, trying to give the camera as much of a view to check it out as possible.

“Makeshift airfield there,” said Jennifer. “Two very large helicopters — about the size of Pave Lows. Three helos, sorry. Barracks. Uh, big enough for a company of men. Platoon — nothing major. Big helicopters,” she added.

“Hinds, I’ll bet,” Zen told her. “Get the location, we’ll have to pass that on — it’s a target.”

“Flare indicator — hey, I think I have our pilot!”

shouted O’Brien.

Zen continued northward along the valley about a mile and a half before spotting the flare’s contrail over a foothill on his right.

“Yeah, okay,” he said, pushing toward it. “Where’s his radio?”

“No radio,” said Habib.

“Our Osprey is ten minutes away,” reported Breanna.

“They’re holding for a definite location.”

“Those Hinds could be a problem,” said Ferris.

Zen cut lower, working the Flighthawk toward the rocks. Even at two thousand feet it was difficult to pick out objects. The river zigged away on the left side; a dirt trail paralleled it. Something was moving on the trail well to the north. The village lay behind him, roughly four miles away.

“I can’t see him,” said Zen. “I’m going to roll again and try my IR screen.”

He selected the IR sensors for his main view as he made another run over the hills. This side of the valley was still in the sun; finding the heat generated by a man’s body would not be easy.

“Got a radio — Iraqi,” said Habib. “Hey, he’s talking to someone, giving coordinates.”

“Must be a search party,” said O’Brien.

“Just necessary conversation,” snapped Breanna.

“Major, he’s giving a position five kilometers north of the village, a klick off the road. You see a road?”

Zen flicked back to his optical feed. “I see a dirt trail. I don’t have a vehicle.”

“He sees you,” said Habib. “You’re — he’s going to fire!”

“Missile in the air!” shouted O’Brien as Zen pulled up. “Shoulder-launched SAM. They’re gunning for you!”

Chapter 55

Danny Freah caught his balance against one of the Osprey’s interior spars as it pitched violently to the right, hurtling southward as low to the ground as possible. The MV-22 had many assets, but it wasn’t particularly easy to fly fast at low altitude in high winds — a fact made clear by the grunts and curses emanating from the cockpit.

Not that anyone aboard was going to object.

The aircraft started to slow abruptly, a signal that it was getting ready to change from horizontal to vertical flight.

“Get ready!” yelled Danny.

Powder and Liu were crouched near the door. They had their smart helmets as well as their vests, M-4s, a medical sack, and grenades. The Marines were standing along the side behind them, one private holding an M-16, the sergeant and the other with Squad Automatic Weapons, light machine guns whose bullets could tear through an engine block at close range.

“I miss the Pave Low,” said Powder as they began stuttering toward the ground. “Cement mixer smoother than this.”

“Pave Lows are for wimps,” barked the Marine sergeant. “You need a Marine aircraft.”

Powder’s curse-laden retort was drowned by a sudden surge from the engines as the Osprey whipped to the side and then shot up. All Danny could see out the window was a sheer cliff.

“We don’t have contact with the pilot yet, but we’re only two minutes out!” shouted the copilot from the flight deck. “Area is hot!”

“Just the way I like my pussies,” yapped the gunnery sergeant.

Chapter 56

Zen tossed flares and curled the Flighthawk to the right, jinking away from the shoulder-launched SAM.

The fact that he was actually sitting nearly 25,000 feet higher than the Flighthawk was of little comfort to him; he flew as if he could feel the missile’s breath on his neck.

More flares, a roll, hit the gas — the U/MF zipped within inches of a cliff wall before dashing into the clear beyond the row of mountains forming the valley.

“Missile self-detonated,” said Ferris, monitoring the situation from the flight deck. “You’re clear, Hawk leader.”

“Hawk leader. Thanks, guys.”

“He’s not on the air,” said Habib.

“Yeah,” said Ferris. “We’re still clear on Guard.”

“Maybe it was a decoy,” suggested Bree. “Trying to ambush.”

“Maybe.” Zen pushed back in his seat, scanning his instruments as he got his bearings. Fuel was starting to get a bit low. He had only two flares left. Full load of combat mix in the cannon, at least.

“The Iraqi’s transmitting again. He’s on the move,”

said Habib.

“Helicopter is ninety seconds away,” said Bree.

“Better hold the helo at sixty seconds, if he can,” said Zen. “I’m going to try following our friend in the vehicle.”

He circled back toward the north end of the valley, dropping back to three thousand feet. He saw a rift to his right, glanced quickly at the sitrep or bird’s-eye view to make sure it led to the valley, then whipped into it. As he came through he pushed downward but nudged back power.

“Iraqi is off the air,” said Habib.

“Another flare,” said O’Brien.

This time Zen saw it, about a mile on his left, ten yards at most from the dirt road. He still couldn’t see the vehicle.

“All right — I got something,” he said as he saw movement on the road. “Computer, frame the object moving on the rocks.”

Before the computer could acknowledge, he saw a brown bar of soap turn off the road.

“I think I see our guy in the rocks. Nailing this truck first,” said Zen. By the time the words were out of his mouth, he’d already squeezed the trigger to fire.

Chapter 57

The nose of the Osprey bucked upward and the whap of the rotors went down an octave as it cleared a rift in the hills. The pilot had just kicked up the throttle, nearly tripling its speed, but to Danny Freah the sudden change in momentum made it feel as if it had slowed down. Powder and Liu clutched their rifles. Danny realized how much he missed the smart helmet — no map, no real-time view of the battlefield. But much more important, he’d jumped aboard with only his personal handguns — a service Beretta in his holster, and a small hideaway Heckler & Koch P7 M13 strapped to his right ankle. That meant no MP-5 with its target scope slaved to his helmet; he didn’t even have his HK Mark 23 SOCOM with its laser pointer and thick silencer.

There was something to be said for the good old-fashioned feel of the Beretta in his palm. He took it from his holster as the MV-22 skittered forward, and peered through the window on his right at a narrow furrow of gray and black smoke.

“Flighthawk!” Liu yelled to him over the whine of the GE turboshafts.

Danny saw it too — a small white wedge twisted through the air about fifty yards away, red bursting from its chin as if it were on fire. It figured that Zen and the others would be in the middle of this.

Standard combat air rescue doctrine called for rescue aircraft to remain at forward bases until definitive contact was made with a downed airman. Occasionally, those procedures were relaxed to deal with difficult situations — on several attempted rescues during the Gulf War helicopters had actually waited inside Iraq during searches. But they were really freelancing here — according to what the copilot said, Quicksilver had heard the pilot but not seen him. They were listening to Iraqi units search, and had been fired upon.

Definitely could be a trap.

“Downed airman is near the road, near a truck they’re smoking!” yelled the copilot. “We got a spot to land right next to it. We’re going for it.”

“They talk to him?” shouted Danny.

“Negative, sir. They’re sure, though. Hang on!”

“Okay, ladies!” yelled the Marine sergeant, moving toward the door. In the next moment, the Osprey pitched sharply, pirouetting around and descending in nearly the same motion, dropping so quickly that for a half second Danny thought they’d been hit. Then there was a loud clunk and he knew they’d been hit. But they were on the ground, it was time to go, go — he fought back a sliver of bile and lurched toward the door behind his men as the door kicked down.

The Osprey settled harshly onto the uneven surface of the scratch road. Danny was the fifth man out. An acrid smell stung his nose; the Flighthawk had smoked a pickup truck, which was burning nearby.

“Yo, Marines — my guys on point! Whiplash on fucking point!” yelled Danny. It wasn’t a pride thing — it made much more sense to have the people with the body armor in the lead. The Marines finally caught on, or maybe they just grew winded as Liu and Powder motored past.

So where the hell was their guy?

The Flighthawk whipped overhead and wheeled to the right, then shot straight upward about three hundred yards away. But it wasn’t until the plane rolled and dove back down that Danny realized Zen was trying to put them on the downed pilot.

“There! There!” he shouted, pointing. “Powder, your right. Right! Right!”

No way the pilot didn’t hear the Osprey. So why wasn’t he jumping up to greet them?

They had to clamber over a twenty-foot-wide rock slide before finally reaching their man. As he cleared the rocks, Danny saw the pilot sprawled on the ground, his radio lying smashed on the rocks. Powder was just getting to him; Liu was a few yards behind Danny.

Powder threw back his helmet and put his head down in front of the pilot’s face. Danny noticed a black stain on the pilot’s right pant leg; congealed blood.

“Breathing. Shit, I thought he’d fucking bought it,”

said Powder. “Hit by something.”

Liu threw his medical kit in front of him as he slid close. He glanced quickly over the pilot’s body, then reached into his pack for the quick-inflate stretcher. He pulled a wire loop and held onto the side as compressed air exploded into the honeycombed tubes. Liu took a pair of titanium telescoping rods from the underside of his go-bag, then propped the stretcher on rocks next to the stricken man.

As they moved him to the stretcher, a second radio fell from his hand. His face had been bruised badly during the ejection, and his right hand burned; besides the leg there were no other outward signs of injury. Liu had his enhanced stethoscope out, getting vitals. The stethoscope had a display screen that could be used to show pulse rate and breathing patterns; intended for battle situations where it might be difficult to hear, the display also helped convey important information quickly to a full team. The downed airman’s heart beat fifty-six times a minute; his breathing code was yellow — halfway between shallow and normal.

“Leg’s busted,” said Nurse. “Compound fracture.” He checked for a concussion by looking for pupil reaction, then listened to make sure the pilot’s lungs were clear.

“Cut by something, but if it was a bullet, it just grazed him. Looks like that’s the worst of it. Not too much blood lost. Cold, maybe hypothermia. He’ll make it.”

Powder jumped up and trotted a few feet away, scooping something up from the rocks. “Pencil flares. Musta meant to shoot ’em, then the bad guys came.”

“Grab the radio and let’s get,” Danny told him.

Nurse secured the pilot with a series of balloon restraints, as much for cushioning as a precaution against back and spinal injuries. Danny took the back end of the stretcher and together they began making their way to the Osprey.

The Marine sergeant met them about halfway.

“Let’s go, ladies!” he shouted. “Uh, you too, Captain.

Something big’s kicking up some dirt up the road. Your pilot’s starting to get some twists in his underwear.”

Chapter 58

Zen pitched the Flighthawk back south when he noticed the three vehicles leaving the village on the dirt road. He was moving too fast to target them.

“Vehicles on the highway, coming out of the village,”

Zen told Breanna. “Alert the Osprey. I’m rolling on them.”

“You sure they’re not civilians?” asked Breanna.

“What do you want me to do, ask for license and registration?”

“I don’t want you to splash civilians,” said Breanna.

“Hawk leader,” he said.

Zen didn’t want to kill civilians either, but he wasn’t about to take any chances with his people on the ground.

The rules of engagement allowed him to attack anything that appeared to be a threat. He tucked Hawk One into a shallow dive, angling toward the lead truck. When it came up fat in the crosshairs, he fired.

One of the most difficult things to get used to about flying the robot plane in combat was the fact that the cannon provided no feedback, no shake, no sound. The pipper changed color to indicate the target was centered, and blackened into a small star when the gun was fired — that was it. He couldn’t feel the momentum-stealing vibration or the quick shudder as the gun’s barrels spun out their lead. But at least he could see the results of his handiwork: the lead vehicle, a four-door pickup truck with three or four men in the back, imploded as the bullets split it neatly in two. He nudged his nose upward and found the second truck, this one a more traditional military troop carrier; a long burst caught the back end but failed to stop it. Zen broke right, regrouping; as he circled west he saw the Osprey on the ground two or three miles away.

It had been hit. Black smoke curled from one of the engines. Zen tore his eyes away, looked for a target.

The third vehicle, another pickup, left the roadway, spitting along the riverbank. Zen swooped in on it from behind, lighting his cannon as the letters on the rear gate of the pickup came into focus. His first shell got the circle on the second O in Toyota; his next two nailed something in the rear bed. After that he couldn’t tell what he hit — the truck disappeared into a steaming cloud of black, red, and white. Zen flew through the smoke — he was now down to fifty feet — and had to shove himself hard left to avoid running into the Osprey, which despite the damage was lifting off, albeit slowly. As he came back toward the road, he realized the second truck he’d hit had stopped to let out its passengers. They were spreading out in the sand, taking up firing positions. He double-clutched, then put his nose on the clump closest to the MV-22 and pulled the trigger. His bullets exploded in a thick line across the dirt; he let off the last of his flares as he came over them, hoping to deke any shoulder-launched SAMs.

“Osprey is away,” Breanna was saying. “Osprey is away.”

“Hawk leader acknowledges. Osprey is away. They okay?”

“Pressman says he lost an engine but he’ll get back before Boston wins the Series.”

“Yeah, well, that could be a century from now at least.”

Zen continued to climb, flying east of the mountains, well out of range of anything on the ground, before easing back on the throttle and looking for Quicksilver.

“Fuel on ten minute reserve,” warned the computer.

“Hawk leader to Quicksilver,” said Zen. “Bree, I need to tank.”

While Zen brought the Flighthawk up to twenty thousand feet for refueling, Breanna polled her crew, making sure they were prepared to resume the search for the SA-2 radar. O’Brien and Habib seemed to be champing at the bit, riding the high from having located the pilot and helping rescue him. Chris Ferris was his usual cautious self, advising her on fuel reserves and shortened flight times, but nonetheless insisting they should carry on with the mission.

Zen was all for continuing. He’d fly the Flighthawks down closer to the ground, using the video input to check on any radio sources, and look for buildings big enough to house a laser. Jennifer Gleason, working on her sensor coding in between monitoring the Flighthawk equipment, as usual was almost oblivious to what was going on, agreeing to keep at it with a distracted, “Shit, yeah.”

The normal procedure for the Flighthawk refuel called for the Megafortress to be turned over to the computer, which would fly it in an utterly predictable fashion for the U/MF. Six months ago the refuel had been considered next to impossible; now it was so routine that Breanna took the opportunity to stretch her legs, leaving Chris at the helm. She curled her body sideways, stepping out gingerly from behind the controls, stretching her stiff ligaments as she slipped back toward the hatchway. A small refrigerator unit sat beneath the station for the observer jumpseat at the rear of the EB-52’s flight deck; Breanna knelt down and opened it. She took the tall, narrow plastic cup filled with mint ice tea from the door and took a steady pull. Refreshed, she turned back toward the front of the plane and watched over Chris’s shoulder as he monitored the refuel.

Zen had blown off her question about the trucks, but it was a real one. They were here to kill soldiers, not civilians.

True, you couldn’t ask for IDs in the middle of a fight.

And their rules of engagement allowed them to target anyone or anything that seemed to be a threat. But if they didn’t draw a distinction, they were no better than Saddam, or terrorists.

Was that a distinction God drew? Did it matter to Him that only soldiers were in the crosshairs?

Did it matter to the dead?

“Refuel complete,” said Chris as she slipped back into her seat. “Computer has course to search grids. I’ve downloaded the course to Zen. He wants to launch the second Flighthawk about five minutes from the grid.”

“Thanks.”

Breanna flicked her talk button. “How are you doing down there, Zen?”

“Fine. Yourself?”

“I wasn’t trying to be testy about the civilian trucks.”

“I know that. They were army or militia or whatever.”

“The Kurds use a lot of pickups.”

“Yup.”

“You okay, Jeff? Do we have a problem?”

Breanna realized her heart had jumped into overdrive, pounding much faster than it had during the action. She was worried about their relationship, not their job. A deadly distraction. She couldn’t work with him again, not in combat.

“Major Stockard?”

“Not a problem on my end, Captain,” answered her husband.

“Thank you much. Computer says we’re on course and ten minutes from your drop zone,” she said, trying to make her voice sound light.

Chapter 59

Musah Tahir sat before the enormous, inoperative screens, waiting. Kakii had called ten minutes ago, but Abass had not; it was possible that the planes had passed him by, but there had been no call from the airport at Baghdad, where the air traffic radar was still in full operation. The Americans might be attacking somewhere north or east of Kirkuk, but if so, it made no sense to turn on his units; they would be out of range.

Tahir envisioned himself as a spider, standing at the edge of a highly sensitive web, waiting for the moment to strike. He had been entrusted with great responsibility by the leader himself — indeed, by Allah. Turning on the radars, even for a moment, was a matter of great delicacy, since the American planes carried missiles that could home in on them; the decision to initiate the search and launch sequence was dictated by his sense of timing as well as his computer program.

Now?

No. He must wait. Perhaps in a few minutes; perhaps not today at all. Allah would tell him when.

Chapter 60

Zen took Hawk One to the end of the search grid, pulling up as he neared a cloud of antiaircraft fire from the Zsu-23. A pair of the four-barreled 23mm flak dealers had opened up just as he started his run; optically aimed and effective only to five or six thousand feet, they were more an annoyance than a threat. He came back south, running four miles parallel to Quicksilver. He would turn Hawk One over to the computer while he launched Two.

“Anything, O’Brien?”

“Negative,” said the radar detector’s babysitter. “Clean as a whistle.”

“I have a cell phone cluster,” said Habib. “Several transmissions, coded. Twenty-five miles southeast of your position, Hawk One. ”

“Okay. Mark it and we’ll get down there later,” said Zen. “Jen? You see anything?”

“Nothing interesting,” said the scientist, who was monitoring the video feed from Hawk Two, which was being flown by the computer. “No buildings large enough for a radar. There were two trailers parked beneath the overpass we saw, that was it.”

“Yeah, okay, let’s check those trailers out. They used to hide Scuds under the overpasses during the war,” said Zen. He jumped into Hawk Two, which was flying approximately eight miles to the north of One. He started to descend, approaching a town of about two dozen buildings nestled in an L-shaped valley. The overpass was just south of the settlement.

“Major, we’re getting down toward bingo,” said Chris Ferris.

“Hawk leader. We have enough to get over to that area where O’Brien had the cell phones?”

“We should,” answered Ferris.

“I’m still trying to get a definite fix,” said the radio intercept operator. “Roughly thirty miles south of us. Map says there’s nothing there.”

“That makes it more interesting,” said Breanna.

“Roger that,” said Jeff, still flying Hawk Two. He dropped through two thousand feet, tipping his wing toward the overpass. The two trucks looked long and boxy, standard tractor-trailers.

Undoubtedly up to no good or they wouldn’t have been placed here, but he couldn’t just shoot them up — as Breanna would undoubtedly point out.

“Trucks look like they’re civilian types,” he said. “We can pass on the location to CentCom.”

Zen turned Hawk Two back toward Quicksilver and told the computer to take it into a standard trail position.

Then he jumped back into Hawk One, streaking ahead of the Megafortress as it angled southward toward the coordinates O’Brien had given. Breanna had pushed the throttle to accelerate, staying close to the U/MF.

“I believe you’re ten miles north of the source,” said O’Brien.

“Roger that.”

The Megafortress flight crew, meanwhile, prepared their missiles for a strike, in case Zen found something worth hitting. The large bomb bay doors in the belly of the plane opened and a JSOW missile — a standoff weapon with a two-thousand-pound warhead that guided itself to a GPS strike point downloaded from the flight deck — trundled into position.

“We’ll nail the son of a bitch if we have a positive target,” said Bree, talking to Ferris. Between the open bay doors and the uncoated nose, Quicksilver was now a fairly visible target to Iraqi radar, though at nearly thirty thousand feet and stuffed with ECMs and warning gear, she’d be tough to hit.

The pilot they’d rescued probably thought the same thing.

“Zen, do you have a target?” asked Bree.

“Negative,” he said, eyes pasted on the video feed. A series of low-lying hills gave way to an open plain crisscrossed by shallow ditches or streams. There were no buildings that he could see, not even houses.

“It’s exactly five miles dead on your nose,” said O’Brien.

“I’m still looking for the building,” said Jennifer.

Zen saw a large, whitish rectangle on his right at about three miles. He popped the magnification and began to tell Bree that they had something in sight. But he’d gotten no more than her name from his mouth before Quicksilver shuddered and moved sideways in the air. In the next moment it stuttered toward the earth, clearly out of control.

Chapter 61

Mack Smith resisted the urge — barely — to kick the toolbox across the tarmac. “When is the plane going to be ready, Garcia?” he said.

“I’m working on it, sir,” said the technician, hunkered over the right engine. “You’re lucky I took this apart, Major. Big-time problem with the pump.”

“Just — get — it — back — together.”

“I shall be released.”

“And if I hear one more, just one more line that sounds like a Dylan song, that could be from a Dylan song, or that I think is from a Dylan song, I’m going to stick that wrench down your throat.”

“That’s no way to talk to anybody,” said Major Alou, walking over to see what the fuss was about.

“Yeah,” said Mack.

“Louis, I need you to look at Raven,” said Alou. “The pressure in that number three engine—”

“No way!” yelled Mack as Garcia climbed down off his ladder. “No fucking way. He’s working on my plane.”

“The Megafortresses have priority here,” said Alou.

“Garcia works for me. You’re a guest, Major. I suggest you start acting like one.”

“Yeah? A guest, huh? A guest?”

Mack booted the tool case in disgust. A screwdriver flew up and nailed him in the shin.

Chapter 62

Breanna felt herself thrown sideways against her restraints, the Megafortress plunging out from under her like a bronco machine on high speed. Pitched in her seat, she pushed her stick gently to the left, resisting the urge to jerk back and try to muscle the plane back level.

The plane didn’t respond.

She bent forward, right hand on the power bar on the console between the two pilots. The front panels looked like Christmas trees ablaze with caution and problem lights.

The engines were solid, all in the green.

Rudder pedals, stick, she thought. Stick, damn it.

“Computer, my control,” she chided.

The computer did not respond.

Zen’s head split between the Flighthawks and their plummeting mothership. Hawk Two had snapped out of trail, aware that the EB-52’s actions were not normal. Zen pulled Hawk One back toward the stricken plane, setting its course on a gradual intercept. Then he jumped into Hawk Two, tucking it down to get a visual on whatever damage had been done to Quicksilver. In the meantime, he checked the radar, scanning to see if they were followed or if other missiles were in the air. The threat bar was clean; somehow, that didn’t seem reassuring.

Quicksilver was still descending rapidly, her right wing tilting heavily toward the earth. Two streaks of red flared near the front fuselage.

They were on fire.

Hawk Two passed through five thousand feet; Quicksilver was about a thousand feet ahead. If they were going to bail, they were going to have to go real soon.

“Quicksilver? Bree?” he said.

There was no response.

Until now it had felt like a session in the Megafortress simulator in the test bunker. Breanna sniffed something — the metallic tang of an electrical fire — then decided the computer had either gone off line or malfunctioned. She hit the hard-wired cutoff, initiating the backup hydraulic system. The backup control gear had been installed thanks to a malfunction she dealt with some months before. Something clunked beneath her, as if she were driving a very large truck that had been switched on the fly into four-wheel drive. The stick jerked against her hand so hard she nearly lost her grip.

“My control. We’re on hydraulics,” she told Ferris.

She wrestled the plane for a few seconds, momentum and gravity working against her. The EB-52 began to shudder — the plane was approaching the speed of sound.

The rocks below grew exponentially.

Breanna felt herself relax as the pedals jerked against her feet. She ignored the panel of instruments, ignored the warning lights, ignored everything but the immense aircraft. It became part of her body; her face was squashed by gravity, her sides compressed by the buffeting wind. She brought herself to heel, leveling off at a bare two thousand feet, clearing a mountaintop by thirteen feet.

It was only when she came level that she realized they were on fire.

“Chris?” she said calmly. “Chris?”

When he didn’t respond, she turned and saw him slumped forward against his restraints. Bree looked over her shoulder — O’Brien was fighting off his restraints.

Long, thin ribbons of smoke filtered from one of the panels at the rear of the flight deck.

“Stay where you are,” she told O’Brien over the interphone circuit.

Either the circuit wasn’t working or he didn’t understand. Breanna waved at him emphatically; he saw her finally and settled back down.

The Megafortress was equipped with two fire suppression systems. One injected high-pressure foam into non-crew areas of the aircraft; this worked automatically. The other, a carbon-dioxide system designed to deprive a fire of oxygen, required a positive command from the flight deck, since anyone not on oxygen would be smothered along with the flames. Breanna could see that everyone was okay on the flight deck, but she had no way of checking downstairs. Zen would certainly have on his gear, but the techies who flew with him almost never did. Which meant that fighting the fire might very well kill Jennifer Gleason.

Her father’s girlfriend.

“Jen — get on oxygen,” she said. “Everyone — now! We have a fire.”

There was no acknowledgment. The plane’s com system was dead.

Breanna pressed the manual warning switch. The cockpit was supposed to flash red but it didn’t.

Smoke was now pouring into the cockpit. She had to put it out.

“Fire suppression!” she shouted as she reached over and thumbed the guard away from the button.

Jeff heard the metallic hush of the carbon-dioxide fire suppression system, then felt his teeth sting — the sound was remarkably similar to the sound of a dentist’s suction tool, amplified about a hundred times. The sudden change in the pressure as the gas whipped in made the cabin feel like a wind tunnel.

There’d been no warning light or tone.

Jennifer — she never wore the gear. She’d be breathing pure carbon dioxide.

“Trail Two,” he told the Flighthawk computer. He pushed up his visor and turned toward her station.

She wasn’t there.

Something cold hit him on his right shoulder. He turned and saw her standing there, shaking her head vig-orously up and down, a mask on her face.

Breanna restabilized the pressure in the cabin, restored the normal airflow, then began dealing with the caution lights on her panel, assessing the damage. Fuel tanks were intact. Environmental controls — the AC system — was on backup. Oil pressure in the number four engine was now high, but just barely in the yellow. The flight computer was off line, as were the interphone and the radios. All of her backup instruments were operating.

The flight controls felt a bit kludgy on hydraulic backup, but otherwise were fine. The interface with the Flighthawks, which forwarded data from the robots’ sensors, was out.

Small bits of shrapnel had burst through the cockpit; one had apparently hit Ferris in the helmet, knocking him unconscious. There was some blood on his arm, but judging from his breathing, he was okay. Habib and O’Brien both gave her thumbs up.

When Breanna pulled off her mask to talk to her two crewmen, her nose tingled with the metallic smell that lingered from the CO2 system. Power to the radar tracking station had been cut completely; Habib’s eavesdrop-ping gear had been knocked off line, but some circuits still had power. Breanna told O’Brien to go downstairs and see about the others while Habib worked to see if he could get something from the radio.

“God, let Jeff be okay,” she found herself saying as she ran a quick self-check on the INS. “Don’t let him die. Not after everything else.”

Jennifer held her mask to the side to tell Jeff what she’d found at the circuit locker at the rear of the Flighthawk deck. The breaker on the lines regulating the com link between the Megafortress and the Flighthawks had blown out and wouldn’t reset, but otherwise they had full power. Whatever had hit the Megafortress seemed to have taken out the right underfuselage quadrant of the Flighthawk’s wide-band antennas, but his backups should be sufficient.

“We have full power on the monitoring suite, but the interphone system is off line,” she told him. “I think they’re on backup.”

“The fire,” he yelled, still facing forward and controlling the U/MFs.

“I think it’s out.”

“It is if you can breathe.” Zen pulled his mask off and looked up at her. “What the hell hit us?”

“No idea. Should I go up and see if they’re okay on the flightdeck?”

“Yeah,” he told her. “Tell them I’ll survey the outside and pipe it up. Something hit the fuselage on the right side — I saw the fire. Jen—” He grabbed her arm as she started for the ladder. “It may be pretty brutal.”

“No shit.” She pulled free, then bolted for the ladder.

Someone was coming down. “Hey!” Jennifer yelled, stepping aside.

“Hey, yourself,” said O’Brien. “You guys okay?”

“Yeah — what’s going on up there?”

“My gear’s out. Captain Stockard’s okay. Captain Ferris got hit by something, knocked cold.”

“Radio?”

He shook his head.

“Where was the fire?” Jennifer asked.

“Not sure.”

“Come on, we have to check the gear in the rear bay.”

“I’ll go,” said O’Brien, spinning around and charging up the ladder to the rear area.

Jennifer clambered after him, reaching the top in time to hear him scream in agony.

“My hand! My hand!” he yelled, rolling on the metal grate of the floor and cursing in agony.

One of the equipment panels was open; Jennifer guessed that a short had juiced the panel. She reached into the small passage between the bay and the flight deck, grabbing the first aid kit off the wall. O’Brien writhed in pain so badly the first thing she did was stab him with the morphine syringe. She rammed it into his leg, right through his uniform. Then she dug into the box for the burn spray — a high-pressure can of antiseptic solution that was so cold as she sprayed, her own hands turned to ice. By the time she had gauze on his hands, O’Brien had calmed down. She helped him back onto the flight deck and got him strapped into his seat as his eyes closed.

“What happened?” asked Breanna.

“One of the panels is hot — there’s a short. Maybe if I had a schematic — can you access the on-line manual?”

“Negative — everything associated with the computer is out.”

“If you have control of the plane, we shouldn’t mess with it,” said Jennifer. “I don’t want to screw up something else.”

“Agreed,” said Breanna. “How’s Jeff?”

“He’s fine,” said Jennifer. “He should be giving you a visual.”

“I have no feed from him,” said Breanna. “The computer’s out.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, he’s fine. He was worried about you,”

she added. Jennifer thought of Breanna’s father, worried about him for a moment, even though he wasn’t the one in danger. “I’ll find out what it looks like and come back.”

“Good luck,” said Breanna. “We’re about ten minutes out of High Top. If the damage is too bad, we’ll have to go on to Incirlik. I don’t want to mess with a short-field landing.”

It looked like a giant had stuck his thumb onto Quicksilver’s fuselage just before the wing on the right side. The center of the thumbprint was dark black; streaks of silver extended in an oblong starburst toward the rear where bits of the radar-evading hull had been burned away. There were one or two long lines extending toward the back of the plane, along with a small burn mark on the panel where the rear landing gear carriage folded up.

There were some other pockmarks, including a large dent on the cover to the chute they needed to deploy to land on the short field.

“The thing looks bad, but it looks intact,” Jeff told Jennifer. “I don’t know about the chute, though.”

“Okay.”

“Tell Bree I think I should land the Flighthawks at High Top and we should go on to Incirlik. I should be able to talk to the AWACS through Hawk One in about thirty seconds. I’ll have the controller about a minute after that. You’ll have to play messenger.”

“Not a problem,” she said, starting back.

He checked his instruments. The U/MFs themselves were in good shape.

The only thing that could have done this sort of damage was a laser. Maybe they’d believe Brad Elliott now.

Chapter 63

Captain Fentress didn’t know what was going on until he saw Major Alou hustling toward his plane, followed a good ten yards back by the rest of his crew. He ran after them, shouting for information. Kevin Marg, the copilot, explained that Quicksilver had been hit by a SAM.

Zen and Bree and the others — oh God.

Zen.

“The Flighthawks — they’ll be in a fail-safe orbit if the control unit was blown out,” Fentress told them. “They can help us find them if they go down. Let me come with you?”

Alou yelled something that he took to be a yes. But as he ducked under the plane he heard the soft whine of a Flighthawk in the distance. Fentress trotted back out in time to see the robot tilt her nose up above the far end of the runway, skimming in like a graceful eagle hooking its prey. The second plane came in two seconds later, just as smoothly.

Would he ever be able to land like that?

He had fifty times — on the simulator.

“Hey, Quicksilver’s heading over to Incirlik,” yelled the copilot from the ladder. “We’re going to fly shotgun — Major Alou wants to know if you’re coming aboard or not.”

“I better look after the Flighthawks,” said Fentress.

“You got it, Curly.”

“I’m not Curly,” he shouted, starting to trot toward the robot planes.

Chapter 64

Zen watched from his wheelchair at the back of the Flighthawk deck as they carried O’Brien and then Ferris out. Jennifer had already gone down to see if Alou was landing or if she could talk to him over the radio; Raven had escorted them here but there had been no way to communicate outside of hand signals.

After he landed the Flighthawks, he’d had plenty of time to go back over the video. There was only one site in the area they had flown over that could have possibly held a laser — a dilapidated factory a half mile off a highway, a mile and a half from a fair-size town in northeastern Iraq.

Two trailers were parked outside of it. There were no defensive positions that they could see, but there was a long trench running between the trailers into the building. Cables might be buried there.

While the fire had cost them the data needed to coordinate it positively, it was at least roughly where the cell phone calls and radio transmissions had originated from.

It had to be where the laser was.

“Hey,” said Breanna, coming down the ladder. “You okay?”

“I’m okay.”

She glanced back upward, as if she’d forgotten no one else was aboard. “Listen, I’m sorry,” she told him.

“What for?”

“We haven’t — you and I have been kind of off kilter lately. I don’t know why.”

Zen shrugged.

“I love you,” she said.

“Yeah, I love you too,” he said. The words sounded odd to him, too rushed or too quick, not as sincere as he meant. But if she noticed, she didn’t say.

Chapter 65

Danny Freah glanced over from the communications section in the Whiplash trailer, making sure he was still alone; the HQ had become something like a rec room for the base personnel. Ordinarily he didn’t mind, but the conferences with Dreamland Command and Raven were to be conducted in total secrecy.

Bison was at the door, enforcing the secure protocol with his M16A3, full-body armor, and a day and a half’s worth of unshowered B.O. Danny gave him a quick wave, then turned back to the main com screen, adjusting the volume on his headset. The excitement of the rescue — and the harried ride back on only one engine — had been eclipsed by news of what happened to Quicksilver.

“The damage was done by some sort of energy discharge weapon,” said Alou, who was en route back to High Top Base in Raven. “I saw it myself. Had to be laser.”

“We concur,” said Dog.

“The radio transmission data points to a small warehouse complex, more like a building and some trailers in Box AB-04,” said Alou. “It should be just about big enough for a laser.”

“Give me the coordinates and we’ll look at it,” said Dog. “The mini-KH is now on line. We can have it maneuvered into place by morning.”

“I want to move right away,” said Alou. “I say we return to refuel, and go.”

“The colonel and I have been discussing another option,” said Danny before Dog could answer. “I’d like to get us in there and take a look at it before we blow it.”

“Why?” asked Alou.

“Because if we just destroy it, we’re not going to settle any of the questions,” Danny said. His words raced from his mouth. “I say we get on the complex ASAP, Colonel.

From what Jennifer Gleason relayed, it’s an easy shot.”

“You don’t know that the laser itself is there,” said Alou. “It’s probably mobile.”

“It may be mobile,” said Dr. Rubeo, who was in the secure room with Colonel Bastian. “If it’s as advanced as Razor. If — a big question.”

“See — we have to get that question answered,” said Danny.

“There’s no way you’ll have the Osprey repaired in time to join us,” said Alou.

“We’ll find other transportation,” said Danny, who already knew it would be several days before they had a new engine to replace the damaged one. “If this map is right, there are no defenses whatsoever. Nearest armed units would be in a town a mile and a half away. We’re in and out before they know what hit them. Ten minutes of video on the ground, maybe grab some pieces — that would be invaluable.”

“Big risks,” said Bastian. “Even just a bombing mission. Granted that Quicksilver was more vulnerable to radar, but Raven will still have to open its bomb bay to fire. That would make even a B-2 visible, at least in theory.”

“I concur,” said Rubeo.

“One thing I noticed,” cut in Alou. “And maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe it has to do with the radars, but the altitude of all the planes hit was at least twenty thousand feet.”

“And?” said Dog.

“Maybe it can only hit aircraft at that altitude or higher.

Maybe it’s optimized for that.”

“If this is a laser, it can strike anything from five centimeters to thirty-five meters off the ground,” said Rubeo.

His face filled the screen as he spoke, the video feed automatically concurring with the active voice feed. “I suggest we wait and plan a full raid,” added the scientist. “I agree with Captain Freah about the utility of a close inspection, but the operation should be properly planned.

We’ll have the mini-KH positioned in six hours.”

“They may move it by then,” said Alou.

“Unlikely,” said Rubeo.

“Razor’s mobile.”

“Pul-ease. We are dealing with Iraq,” answered the scientist. “Even if this is mobile, they can’t go scurrying around the countryside with it. They’ll hide it in a building.”

“I agree with Merce,” said Danny. “The sooner the better. They won’t be expecting it.”

“We’re not sure if this is the site, though,” said Dog.

“It’s got to be, right, Doc?” asked Danny, sensing the scientist would back him.

“Possibly. It’s within parameters. Even if they were a full generation behind — and let us say that is more likely — the building needed for the director would not have to be very large,” said Rubeo. “I believe anything above two thousand square feet would do, assuming some of the equipment were contained on a second level or even in an auxiliary station. The director itself is not particularly large, and at least a portion of it has to be exposed so it can fire. Razor, of course, can be mounted on a large tank chassis. That greatly increases the possible number of sites.”

“What the hell is the director?” asked Danny. “The command post?”

Rubeo gave him one of his best “what a bonehead I’m dealing with” expressions.

“The director focuses the laser or high energy beam,” explained Colonel Bastian. “It’ll look a little like a very large searchlight. It will have some baffling on it to prevent ambient light from changing the focus during daylight.”

“Precisely,” said Rubeo. “We will feed you some con-ceptual drawings that you can use for a target. It’s the easiest part to destroy. Now, if the Iraqis are more than a generation behind—”

“Then it wouldn’t work at all,” said Colonel Bastian.

“Precisely,” said Rubeo. “Thank you, sir.”

“Good,” said Danny.

“The director itself is interesting, but not the highest priority for intelligence,” said Rubeo. “The software that controls it would be extremely interesting. We’d want to ID the gas makeup, of course. An exact signature could help us determine who built it and—”

“I’ll get you everything you want,” said Danny.

“The chemical warfare sniffers you carry can be modified to give us a reading,” said Rubeo. “You’ll have to find Sergeant Garcia and tell him to follow the directions I send.”

“Whoa, not so fast boys,” said Dog. “You haven’t outlined the risks, and we haven’t solved the problem of getting there, or of grabbing intelligence for the strike.”

“We can use the Flighthawks for intelligence,” said Alou. “They’re at High Top.”

“Zen isn’t.”

“Captain Fentress is there. He’ll fly them,” said Alou.

“The risks are worth it, Colonel,” said Rubeo. “If this is a laser, intelligence on it would be overwhelmingly valuable.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Dog. “What are the risks?”

“Well, the risks — we could fail,” said Danny, leaving it at that.

“And you get there how?” asked Dog.

“I was hoping to chop one of those Marine transports, but we won’t have any inbound until daybreak,” said Danny, who’d checked twice. “But I have something else in mind, something much better, that we could use right away.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind, Freah. Out of your fucking mind.” Mack Smith shook his head, then slapped the side of the OV-10. “You want to ride in the back of this?”

“Plenty of room. Garcia tells me four or five guys can fit, with full gear.”

Garcia, who had been hovering nearby, tried to inter-ject. Danny waved at him to be quiet.

“The Marines did this all the time in the Gulf War,” he told Mack. “The building isn’t ten feet from the highway, which is long and flat, plenty enough for you to land. You come in, zip around, take off. Easy as pie.”

“Pie, huh? Apple or peach?”

“You’re awful touchy today, Major,” said Danny. “You were looking for action — well, here it is.”

“Action and suicide are different.”

“You don’t think you can do this?”

“I can fuckin’ do it. There is nothing I can’t fly. This — this is a piece of cake.”

“Great. How long before we’re ready to take off?”

Chapter 66

Colonel Bastian walked back and forth behind the console, waiting for the connection to go through. He’d decided to give CentCom’s commander a heads-up about the Razor strike.

Like all of the U.S. joint service commands, CentCom was headed by a four-star general, in this case Army General Clayton Clearwater. He was an old-line soldier with a reputation both for daring — he’d been with an airborne unit in Vietnam — and stubbornness. Dog had met him exactly once, during a three-day Pentagon seminar on twenty-first century weaponry. Clearwater had given a short address during one of the sessions, talking about force multipliers and asymmetric warfare. While the speech had been aimed at the Joint Services Special Operations Command, his ideas were in line with the Dreamland/Whiplash concept.

Of course, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t view the Razor mission as interfering with his domain. But his reaction was beside the point. Bastian wasn’t calling him to ask for permission — the Whiplash order clearly gave him the authority to proceed.

Still, touching base was politic.

“Nothing?” Dog asked the lieutenant handling the center communications board.

“Just getting through now, sir.”

The lieutenant spent a minute haggling with his equiv-alent at CentCom’s communications center before being transferred to the general’s line. A tired-sounding Marine Corps major — CentCom didn’t have the high-tech secure video gear Dreamland used — finally came on the line.

“Bastian?” he said curtly.

“I need to talk to General Clearwater.”

“You’ll have to talk to me,” said the major. He was an aide to the general’s chief of staff — pretty far down the totem pole and undoubtedly lacking code-word clearance to talk about Whiplash, let alone any of Dreamland’s weapons.

“I need to talk to the general himself,” Dog told him.

“I’m sorry, Colonel, I can’t put you through.”

Dog folded his arms in front of his chest, trying to mar-tial his patience. “This is a top priority item. It involves a matter of immediate importance,” Dog told him.

“Then explain it to me,” said the major.

“I can’t,” said Bastian.

“Then this conversation is over,” said the major, who snapped off the connection.

“Asshole,” said the lieutenant in a stage whisper.

Dog began pacing again. In fairness to the major, he probably didn’t understand why a “mere” lieutenant colonel would need to speak right away to a four-star general, especially since that colonel was ostensibly calling from Edwards Air Force Base, where the duty roster showed he was assigned to support squadron.

Ordinarily a good cover, but in this case perhaps a bit too good.

Magnus could get through to Clearwater, he thought, and would appreciate the heads-up himself. But Dog hadn’t been able to hunt him down in D.C. He’d had to use the secure e-mail message system to tell him about the damage to Quicksilver and the fact that it had been forced to land at Incirlik, and still didn’t have an acknowledgment.

Dog glanced at his watch. Less than fifteen minutes until takeoff for the mission.

No way he was going to delay it.

“Listen, Lieutenant, I’m going to go catch a breather.

Page me if General Magnus or General Clearwater calls, and if there’s anything from Whiplash or the Megafortresses. Otherwise, I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

Chapter 67

“You take that knee out of my side right now, powder, or I’m going to twist it back behind your head.”

“If you had room to twist it behind my head, Bison, it wouldn’t be in your goddamn side.”

“That ain’t his knee,” said Liu.

“Real funny, Nurse,” said Powder.

“We taking off today or what?” said Egg, the fourth member of the Whiplash team crammed into the rear of the Bronco. He wagged his flashlight toward the roof, throwing bizarre shadows across the M-4 carbines, grenade launchers, and MP5s they’d lashed there.

The Marine Corps had outfitted several OV-10s for special operations, turning the rear area into a passenger compartment. While no Marine was ever heard to complain — at least not within earshot of his commanding officer — the accommodations hardly fit the definition of spartan, let alone cramped. And that was in a plane specifically designed, or at least modified, to their specifications. This aircraft made the Marine versions seem like 747s. Sitting on their rucksacks, each man had his helmet and backup oxygen in his lap. There was no light, and no communication with the cockpit.

“Which one of you didn’t take a shower?” Bison asked.

“Hell with that,” said Egg. “Liu had some of that soup.”

“Jesus,” groaned the others together.

“About time,” said Powder as the airplane’s engines started up with a roar. The vibration from the engine worked into his spine and skull.

“Man, this is nuts,” said Bison. “Powder, take your damn elbow out of my ribs.”

“Where do you want me to put it?”

“You want me to tell you?”

“You don’t watch yourself, I will.”

The plane jerked forward as the engine noise jumped fifty decibels.

“Man, I gotta go to the can,” said Egg.

“I think we’re taking off!” yelled Bison. He dropped his flashlight as the plane stuttered upward, and the Whiplash assault team was left in temporary darkness.

Just as well, thought Powder. Dinner roiled in his stomach. He’d gone over to the Marine mess and scoffed up a few helpings of roast beef and mashed spuds. He thought now the gravy had been a mistake.

“Whoa — we’re up,” said Bison.

“I been in trucks smoother than this,” said Egg.

“Sixty-seven minutes away,” said Powder.

“Hey,” said Egg. “Anybody smell roast beef?”

Danny braced himself as the Bronco pulled nearly four g’s, turning around a sharp crag in the mountains en route to their target.

“Captain, are you still with us?” asked Dr. Ray Rubeo over the Whiplash circuit, which was being fed by the tactical communications satellite into his smart helmet.

“Yes, sir.”

“As we said before, video of the director unit would be very useful. We want measurement of the focusing appa-ratus, but you needn’t bother with taking parts from it.

Simply blow it up.”

“Right.”

“The chemical samples, the readings — those are higher priorities. The disk array is what we specifically want. Now, if the weapon is Razor size, you can expect the computer gear to be fairly small. On the other hand, if it’s stationary, I would imagine you’ll be hunting for something about the size of a large cabinet, similar to some of the memory devices we use here with the work stations.”

“Gotcha,” said Danny. They had already gone over the priority list and the likely layout of the weapon and any facility housing it twice.

“We’ll be right here, watching what you do,” added the scientist as Mack warned that he was going to take another sharp turn.

“Great,” groaned Danny as gravity knocked him sideways.

Mack smith checked the engine gauges again. The turbos were maxed out, but with all the extra weight, they were barely doing 190 knots. Fortunately, they didn’t have to climb; he’d laid out a zigzag course through the passes and then a straight run down to the site. The night was dark, with only a small sliver of moon, but he figured that was in their favor — the darkness would make it tough for anyone on the ground to hit them.

Once past the last peaks ahead, he’d have a clear shot.

Landing on the road, though, was going to be a bitch — he figured he’d have to drop a “log” flare on a first approach to see the damn thing, then hustle back in before the light burned out or anyone on the ground nailed him.

At least he wasn’t flying completely naked. He’d managed to talk Alou out of a pair of Sidewinders. Garcia had mounted them on the OV-10’s launcher.

He almost hoped he had a chance to use them. This sucker turned on a dime. He’d lure a MiG onto his butt, turn quick, then slam the two heat seekers right down his tailpipe.

All in all, he had to admit the Bronco was a lot of fun to drive.

Drive, not fly, he thought. You couldn’t really call moving under 200 knots flying.

“We’re running behind,” said Danny, who was sitting in the copilot-observer’s seat behind him.

“Really?” he replied over the Bronco’s interphone circuit. “Well hold on while I hit the rocket power.”

Chapter 68

Fentress felt his chest implode as Major Alou counted down the seconds to launch, taking Raven through the alpha maneuver to exert maximum separation force on the Flighthawks.

People’s lives depended on him doing his job without fucking up. That had never been true before.

Alou thought he could do it. To Alou, there wasn’t even a question.

And Zen?

Fentress hadn’t asked. As far as he knew, no one had.

Alou was in charge of the mission. He thought he could do it. He would do it.

“Alpha,” said Alou.

Fentress’s pinkie jerked with some kind of involuntary reaction on the joystick controller, even though he’d turned the launch over to the computer.

“Flighthawk launched,” confirmed the computer.

Though it was night, the view from the robot was as clear and defined as if it were day. In fact, he could tell the computer to present it as a cloudless sky at high noon and it would do so. It was best to keep it in the greenish starlight-enhanced mode, however; it helped keep him oriented.

Zen’s advice.

“You’re looking good, Hawk leader,” said Major Alou.

“Wild Bronco is twelve minutes from target.”

He hesitated before acknowledging — it felt odd to be called Hawk leader; that was Zen’s title.

“Twelve minutes,” he said. He was going to overfly the building, check for last second developments. The Megafortress was five miles from the building, the Flighthawk now a little closer.

“Low and slow like we planned,” said Alou.

“Low and slow,” he repeated.

“Gun radars two miles ahead of you, just came on,”

warned the radar operator a second before the warning flashed in the Flighthawk screen. “North of that town.”

“Got it.”

Chapter 69

Torbin Dolk had just climbed into bed when the knock came at his hotel room door. He thought about pretending he was already sleeping but figured that wouldn’t save him; though nominally a private hotel, the building was reserved for military use, and the only person knocking this late would be here on official business.

“Yup,” yelled Torbin, still hesitating to get out of bed.

“Captain Dolk?”

“The same.”

“Lieutenant Peterson, sir. General Paston sent me over.”

Paston was a two-star Army general, the ranking CentCom officer at Incirlik. Dolk realized he was about to be fried big-time.

Very big-time.

Shit. Harding had told him he was in the clear.

Worse thing was, they didn’t even have the decency to hang him in daylight.

“Give me a minute.” He slid out of bed and got dressed, fumbling as he pushed both feet through the same pant leg. His eyes were a little fuzzy and he had to tie each shoe twice.

“You awake, Captain?” asked the lieutenant when he finally opened the door.

“Yeah. Uh, maybe we can grab some joe in the lobby.”

Two Army MPs stood behind the lieutenant in the hall.

Two other soldiers with M-16s were standing a short distance away. They all followed as Torbin and the lieutenant walked to the elevator, where two Air Force sentries were stationed. No one spoke, either in the elevator or in the lobby, where Torbin sniffed out the boiled grinds in the overheated carafe next to the front desk. Then, cup in hand, he followed the lieutenant to a staff car outside.

The soldiers followed in a Humvee as they raced through the security perimeter and then back to the base.

Torbin thought several times of telling the driver to slow down; five minutes one way or another wasn’t going to make much difference. But at least he managed not to spill his coffee.

Security at Incirlik was ordinarily very strong; even when Iraq was quiet, it probably ranked among the most heavily guarded facilities outside of the U.S. During the past few weeks, the troops guarding it had been doubled, with a number of high-tech snooping and identity-checking devices added to prevent saboteurs and spies from getting in. And now the security had been heightened further.

Two companies of heavily armed soldiers stood outside the fence; another platoon of men and a pair of tanks stood along the access road. A short line of vehicles waited at the gate to be searched. The fact that a two-star had summoned him didn’t allow them to cut in the line either.

“Wasn’t this crazy before,” said Torbin when they were ordered out of the vehicle for the security check.

“What’s up?”

The lieutenant didn’t say anything, nor did the MPs looking them over. Finally cleared, the lieutenant didn’t wait for their escorts. He took the wheel himself and drove toward a hangar area at the far tip of the base. As they approached, Torbin realized why the security had been tightened — a huge Megafortress sat in the middle of the access ramp. Passing through yet another security cordon, they approached the plane slowly, having been warned that the guards in front of the aircraft had orders to shoot any suspicious vehicle.

Torbin had never seen a Megafortress in person before.

The aircraft seemed very different from a B-52, even though it had supposedly been built from one. Its long nose — silver, not black like the rest of the plane — extended toward the car as they approached; the aircraft seemed to be watching them. Perhaps the shadows made the plane seem bigger than it actually was, but the Megafortress definitely stood several feet higher than a stock B-52. Its wings seemed longer, sleeker. Her engines were single rather than double pods; with fins along the underside, they looked more like rockets than turbofans. The plane’s V-shaped rear stabilizer or tail rose above the nearby hangar, a pair of shark’s fins waiting to strike.

A soldier dressed in camo and wearing a green beret walked to the center of the roadway as the car approached, holding out his hand. The lieutenant immediately stopped and got out. Torbin followed, trailing along as several other Special Forces soldiers appeared. The lieutenant presented credentials; the soldier nodded grimly and stepped back, allowing them to pass toward the tail area of the plane. A figure in a flight suit approached; Torbin was surprised to find it was a woman.

And a very beautiful one at that. Five-six maybe, 120 or so — could be a little less.

Eyes like heat-seekers.

“You’re Dolk?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m Captain Stockard. Breanna.” She held out her hand. She gripped his more firmly than any hand that smooth had a right to grip. “I understand you’re an electronic warfare officer, a pitter. You fly in Weasels?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We need some help,” she told him. “You had an engineering degree too.”

“Well, uh, yes ma’am.”

“I realize you don’t have clearances. We’ll backtrack later. If there’s any reason you can’t help, you tell me now. If you don’t — well, if you don’t want to get involved right now for any reason, any reason at all, turn around and go back to bed. No questions asked. If you come with us and something comes up — you’ll be fried. No one will bail you out. You understand?”

Her eyes held him. What was she talking about?

God, she was beautiful.

“Captain Dolk?” she said. “Staying or going?”

“I, uh — I want to help.”

“Good.” She smiled. “We’re trying to get things put back together, and we need someone to help our technical person. She’ll tell you what to do.”

Breanna started walking away, then spun back toward him.

“Yo — get your butt in gear, Dolk,” she barked. “Onto my plane. We have work to do.”

Dolk hadn’t been spoken to like that since basic training, perhaps not even then. He snapped to quickly, breaking into a full run but failing to catch her as she disappeared up the ladder of the black Megafortress.

Chapter 70

“Barclay, what the hell are you doing out in the goddamn lobby when I need you in here?”

“General Clearwater, I was—”

“Get your butt in here, Barclay, without back lip.”

Jed Barclay had been told to wait in the outer office by Clearwater’s chief of staff, who had conveniently melted away before the four-star general appeared. But he’d been dealing with the head of Central Command a great deal over the past few months — he’d been told about not using back lip at least ten times already — and so he took the ad-monition in stride, following along as the general walked briskly down the hallway of his Florida headquarters.

“You see that report from Elliott?” asked Clearwater.

The general was in his early sixties and looked at least ten years older. But he walked fast and was rumored to work around the clock.

“Yes, sir,” said Jed.

“Well?”

“Uh, I agree. The damage to the first plane was almost certainly a laser. And since the Iraqis don’t have the technology—”

“Who says they don’t?”

“Uh, everyone says they don’t.”

“Everyone’s the CIA. Those spooks couldn’t read the writing on a billboard at twenty paces. Why in hell would the Iranians be attacking our planes?” continued the general. “We’re in Iraq. Why would Iran attack us?”

“I didn’t say they did. I said the Iraqis—”

“Brad says they did. Iranians, not Iraqis.”

“He thinks they may have sold it to them. The Iranians as well as the Chinese have shown interest in Razor, and as a matter of fact—”

“Lasers. Fancy Dan Bullshit.” Clearwater practically spit. He was a foot soldier at heart; last week he had lectured Jed for ten minutes on the value of a rifle that never jammed. But while he claimed he didn’t go for “fancy Dan bullshit,” the record showed that he’d made sure his men and women were equipped with the latest technology, including hand-held GPS devices, satellite phones, and laser-dot rifle scopes.

“If there’s a laser, why haven’t the satellites seen it?”

Clearwater asked, echoing the CIA’s main legitimate argument against the laser.

“There’s only one launch detection satellite near enough to cover that part of Iraq,” said Jed. “And it’s not designed to detect laser bursts.”

“Fancy Dan bullshit.”

Clearwater turned the corner and entered a conference room. Jed followed along. There were six other people inside, none lower than a brigadier general.

“You boys know Jed,” said Clearwater. “NSC sent him down to keep our noses clean.”

“Well, uh, that’s not exactly my, uh, job, sirs,” said Jed.

Admiral Radmuth, sitting next to Jed, gave him a wink.

The men, who headed different commands organized under CentCom, apparently knew that Clearwater himself had asked to borrow Jed for his technical expertise — not to mention his backdoor access to the White House.

“Gentlemen, let’s get this donkey cart in motion.”

Clearwater slapped his hands on the table. “I want a full update, starting with what we’re hitting this axlehead Saddam with, and what we can expect in return. You have ten minutes. Then Boy Wonder and I are on the plane for Incirlik.”

“On the plane?” Jed’s voice squeaked involuntarily.

“I’m going to Turkey?”

Clearwater turned and smiled at him, probably for the first time ever. He clicked his false teeth, then turned back to his lieutenants. “Gentlemen, I believe pride of place belongs to the Air Force. We have nine and a half minutes left.”

Chapter 71

Captain Fentress leaned to the right with the Flighthawk as he came out of the turn, nudging the throttle slide to max. The Flighthawk picked up speed slowly at first, but once it got through 330 knots, it seemed to jump forward, slicing toward the target building. The metal warehouse sat to the left; as he approached, Fentress saw that the sides were missing from one of the two trailers, revealing what looked like a pair of generators. The Flighthawk whipped past, following Fentress’s prompts as it slid above the empty roadway parallel to the building. He backed off the thrust and began to turn, misjudging his speed and ending up far wider than he’d planned for the next, lower run over the area.

Piloting a Predator typically took four people, and that was a slow-moving, low-flying aircraft, relatively forgiving of mistakes. Light-years more complicated, in some ways the Flighthawk was actually easier to fly — its sophisticated flight control computer, C3, did myriad things for the pilot. But in other ways piloting the U/MF at speeds close to Mach 1 was as demanding as doing a bi-nomial equation in your head while pushing a tractor-trailer through an uphill maze. His thoughts were consistently a half second behind the plane, and his reactions another second or two behind that.

Not bad for a rookie, maybe, but the six men in the Bronco needed him to be a hell of a lot better.

He’d die if he screwed up. Just die.

C3 noodled him, showing how far off course he’d gone with a dotted red line. Fentress brought it back, kept his speed low, getting a look at things.

“Whiplash team is ninety seconds away,” said Alou.

“We’re patching your feed through.”

Fentress felt his heart pound.

“Hawk leader, this is Whiplash,” said Danny. “The vehicles on the east side beyond the parking area of that second building — can you take a pass so we can find out what they are?”

Vehicles? He hadn’t seen any.

“Roger that.” Fentress slammed the Flighthawk into a turn so abruptly that the computer gave him a stall warning. He eased off, took a breath — it wasn’t a big deal; Zen got those warnings all the time. The computer was just a big sissy.

He knew that Zen would have fried his ears off for that.

But Zen wasn’t here.

Concentrate, he told himself.

Fentress told the computer to switch the viewing mode on the main screen from starlight to IR, which would make the vehicles easier to spot. He found his course, following the dotted line drawn up by the computer, and dropped through five thousand feet, nudging his speed back until he was just under 200 knots. Running toward the site from the northeast corner, he saw nothing but a flat field and a torn fence, but as he pulled overhead and began to turn he spotted two tanks dug into the ground about a hundred yards from the building, right near the road the Bronco was supposed to land on.

He’d have to take out the tanks.

“Hawk leader, this is Whiplash.”

Fentress could get them both in one pass, but it would be easier, surer, to take them out one at a time. Go for the sure thing.

Zen would agree.

He was already lined up.

“Weapons,” he told the computer. The screen changed instantly, adding crosshairs, targeting data, and a bar at the bottom that could automatically indicate whether he should fire or not once he designated the target.

“Hawk leader?”

Something buzzed into the top left of his screen.

Fentress felt the blood drain from his head directly to his legs. He was nailed, dead.

No — it was the Bronco!

“Captain Fentress?” said Alou.

“Tanks, two tanks, on the road, dug in,” he said.

Tanks? Or the Razor clone?

Tanks — he could see the lollipops on top.

By the time he had it sorted out, he’d overflown them.

He started to bank.

“They’re definitely tanks,” said Fentress. “Nothing else down there, nothing big enough for Razor, at least outside of the building. I’m going to take the tanks.”

“Whiplash copies,” said Danny. “We’ll hold for your attack.”

Fentress banked to the right, sliding toward the warehouse to get it in view of the sensor. As he did, a yellow light erupted from a low hill on the right.

“Flak!” yelled a voice he hadn’t heard before. It had to be the Bronco pilot, also plugged into the circuit.

Flak, a Zeus firing 23mm slugs. Not even — something lighter, a machine gun.

Take that out too, after the tanks. People there, another vehicle.

Razor? Razor?

Calm down, damn it. Just a pickup.

Fentress pushed on, scanning the warehouse through his turn before starting for the tanks. He got his nose onto the first one, tried to ignore the pounding of his heart. His target bar flashed red.

Fire, he thought. Fire.

His fingers cramped. He couldn’t move them.

He was beyond the tank.

“What’s going on, Hawk leader?” demanded the Bronco pilot.

“Targeting tanks,” said Fentress. He cut southward, came back quickly — too fast. The tanks blurred.

Just fire!

He pressed the trigger and bullets spewed from the front of the Flighthawk. Extended bursts took quite a bit of momentum from the small aircraft, but the computer compensated seamlessly.

Beyond it. He was beyond it. Had he missed?

Get the other one.

“Hawk leader?”

“Keep your damn shirt on,” he told the Bronco as he looped back to get the second tank.

Chapter 72

Danny grabbed the side of the cockpit as the plane wheeled away from the gunfire. He tried to ignore Mack’s voice over the interphone and concentrate on the view in the smart helmet, which showed bullets flaring and then erupting in a fire.

“Any day now, Fentress,” said Mack.

“Relax,” Danny told him, watching the screen as the Flighthawk circled back over the road. Both tanks had definitely been hit. There was no one near the building, as far as he could see.

“Let’s get down,” Danny told Mack.

“About fuckin’ time. Hold tight — there’ll be a bit of a bump before we stop.”

The engines revved, then died. the plane pitched forward and seemed about to flip over backward.

Powder was sure he was going to die. Someone began to scream. Powder opened his mouth to tell him to shut the hell up, then realized it was him.

The aircraft stopped abruptly. There was a loud crack on the fuselage and the rear hatch slammed open. Bison fell out of the plane and Powder followed, slapping down the visor on his smart helmet so he could see.

“Let’s go!” yelled Captain Danny Freah. “Let’s go — the building’s there. Two tanks, road behind us — they’re out of commission. Come on, come on — Liu, Egg, Bison — run up the flank like we planned, then hit the door. Powder — you’re with me. This ain’t a cookout! Go!”

Powder trotted behind the captain, his brain slowly un-scrambling. His helmet gave him an excellent view of the hardscrabble parking area near the building. A small white circle floated just below stomach level, showing where his gun was aimed.

“Okay, flank me while I check the back of the building,” said Danny.

Powder trotted wide to the right like a receiver in motion, then turned upfield. The building sat on his left. It looked a bit like the metal pole barn one of his uncles had built for a car shop back home, though a little less faded and without the exhaust sounds. Powder scanned the field behind it, making sure it was empty. He turned to the right, looking down in the direction of the road and the tanks.

“Looks like we’ve got the place to ourselves, Cap,” he said.

“For ten minutes, tops. Watch my back.”

Danny began making his way toward one of the two doors they’d spotted on the side of the building. Powder saw something move near the road out of the corner of his eye; he whirled quickly, then realized it was the airplane they had landed in, taxiing for a better takeoff position.

Bastard better not leave them. Then again, considering the ride down, walking home might be a better option.

“Powder?”

“Yes, Cap?” Powder turned back toward the building, spotting the captain near the wall.

“Flash-bangs. Window halfway down,” said Danny, who gestured toward it. “I’ll take the window. You go in the door on the left there. See it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t move until I give the word.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

Chapter 73

Danny took the tape off the grenade as he looked at the window. Best bet, he thought, would be to knock the glass out with the stock of his gun, toss, jump in after the explosion.

Not a tight squeeze. Landing would be rough, though.

He could hear Rubeo talking to someone back at Dreamland in the background on his satellite channel.

The scientist had warned him that there ought to be at least a dozen technical types running the laser, maybe even more. Danny didn’t expect much resistance from them, but you could never tell. Some of the people at Dreamland could be pretty nasty.

“Front team ready,” said Bison, who had come out around the corner to liaison.

“Powder?”

“Hey, Cap, this door isn’t locked. We might be able to sneak in.”

“Bison, what about the front?”

“Hold on.”

As he waited, Danny switched to infrared mode and tried to see beyond the window inside. He couldn’t make out anything.

Might be a closet. Would there be a window in a closet?

How about a john?

A top-secret facility without much security and an open back door?

No way the laser was here. Danny felt his shoulders sag.

“Front door’s locked, Cap. We’re going to have to blow it.”

“All right, the way we rehearsed it.” Danny slid the window open and readied his grenade. “One, two — go!” he said, breaking the glass. He popped the grenade through, then hit the side of the building as the charge flashed. In the next second he rose and dove inside. A burst of gunfire greeted him. He leveled his MP-5 and nailed two figures about fifty feet away. As they fell, he realized the gunfire had come from the other direction; he whirled, saw he was alone — another automatic weapon went off. He was hearing his own guys, firing up the enemy.

A pair of tractors for semitrailers sat alone in a large, open area. Otherwise this part of the warehouse was empty.

Danny slapped his visor to maximum magnification.

The tractors were just tractors.

No laser.

No stinking laser.

Powder was on the floor to his right, working toward him on his hands and knees. They couldn’t see the others — there was a wall or something between them.

Empty. Shit.

“Wires all over the floor,” said Powder. “Phone wires and shit.”

“Cut ’em,” said Danny. “Cut the fuckers. Two guards up there, maybe someone else beyond the wall.”

The explosions had pierced Musah Tahir’s dream as he slept on the cot not far from his equipment, but his mind had turned it into an odd vision of water streaming off the side of a cliff. He saw himself in the middle of a large, empty boat on a bright summer day. A calm lake stretched in all directions one second; the next, the water turned to sand. But the boat continued to sail forward. A large pyramid came into view, then another and another.

It began to rain, the drops suggested to his unconscious mind by the gunfire outside.

Tahir bolted straight up. Gunfire!

His AK-47 was beneath the bench near the computer tubes. He needed to get to it.

There were charges beneath the desk. He could set them off if all else failed.

As Tahir pushed out of bed, something incredibly cold and hard slammed into his chest. As he fell backward onto the cot, he saw two aliens in spacesuits standing before him. They held small, odd-looking weapons in their hands; beams of red light shone from the tops of them.

The alien closest to him said something; too frightened to respond, Tahir said nothing. One of the men grabbed his arm and pulled him from the bed, and the next thing he knew he was running barefoot outside, pushed and prodded toward God only knew where.

“Got an Iraqi, Captain,” Danny heard Liu say. “Three guards, dead. Doesn’t seem to be anyone else. Screens, black boxes, whole nine yards. This must be the computer center.”

“Record everything you see, then pull whatever you can for the plane. Computers especially. Look for disk drives, uh, tape things, that sort of stuff. Go!” said Danny.

“What do we do with the Iraqi?” asked Liu.

“Bring him with you. We’ll take him back and question him.”

“Hey, Cap, no offense but where’s he going to sit?”

“On your lap. Go!”

Chapter 74

“Why take a prisoner?” said Rubeo. “Is he supposed to be our consolation prize?”

The others stared at Dog from their consoles. The feed from Danny Freah’s smart helmet, relayed through the tactical satellite and the Whiplash communications network, played on the screen at the front of the situation room. It showed him searching the large warehouse behind the scientist.

“He can tell us what they’re doing there,” Dog said.

“If he’s not the janitor,” said Rubeo. “It’s a parking garage.”

“I believe it’s a covert communications facility,” said one of the scientists. “The trenches outside indicate large cables. The work stations—”

“We have more complicated systems working the lighting,” said Rubeo. “Obviously, we made a mistake — this isn’t a laser site.”

“The section at the left of the bench area included two radar screens. This must be where they’re coordinating the missile launches from,” insisted the other scientist.

“Don’t be so dismissive.”

“I’m being a realist,” hissed Rubeo. “Missiles didn’t bring down those planes. They’re merely wasting them, just as we are wasting our time here.”

“Bull.”

“All right, everybody take a breath,” Dog said. “We’ve got a ways to go here. We’re not even off the ground.”

Chapter 75

Mack leaned down from the plane as Danny Freah ran up, the props still turning slowly. He had what looked to be the CPU unit of a personal computer in his arms.

“So?” he yelled to him.

“We got a prisoner and some gear. We’re grabbing all the computer stuff we can grab. I’m going to throw this on the floor of my cockpit.”

“You have to secure it or it’ll shoot around the cockpit when we take off.”

“I’ll sit on it.”

Shit, thought Mack. These Whiplash guys were all out of their minds. “So are we taking the laser or what?”

“There’s no laser here. It may be some sort of communications site, maybe not even that. Can you get the plane closer?”

“Yeah, I guess. Wait — what do you mean, a prisoner?” demanded Mack.

Freah ignored him, tossing the computer piece into his end of the cockpit.

Two of the assault team members ran up with pieces of equipment. They looked like looters who’d hit an electronics store during a power blackout.

“Where we going to put this prisoner?” Mack shouted.

“Shove him in the back with the guys,” said Danny.

“That’s too much weight.”

“We’re taking him back, Major. One way or the other.

I’ll strap him to the wing if we have to.”

“Shit, Danny—”

“You’re telling me you’re not a good enough pilot to get this crate off the ground, Major?”

“Hey, fuck yourself,” said Mack, but Freah had already disappeared. He kicked the dirt once, then turned back to the airplane.

This wasn’t like driving a truck. Weight was critical, especially if they were going to make it over the mountains. He’d worked it out to the pound before the flight, figuring they’d carry away only two hundred pounds of gear.

No way they were going to hold it to two hundred.

Shit. They could start an electronics shop with this stuff.

Grousing to himself, Mack reached into the cockpit for his flight board. An experienced Bronco pilot would know where he could cheat, but he had to rely on the specs.

The Iraqi added how much? Another 150.

Hopefully.

The tanks were another problem. The explosion had pockmarked part of his runway. Stinking idiots did that on purpose, just to make his life difficult.

Mack worked over the numbers, trying to make sure he could make the takeoff on the small runway. The problem was, he had to climb almost right away, and had no face wind to help. He wasn’t going to make it. Had he screwed up his calculations before? He was close to 500 pounds too heavy.

There had to be more margin for error. Somewhere.

Drop the Sidewinders. That’d do it.

Shit, fly naked?

Who was he kidding, though? The only thing he could use the heat-seekers for was as booster rockets.

Mack turned back to see two of the Whiplash people hauling a sack forward. They were almost on top of him before he realized the sack was a person.

“Hold,” he said, walking to them. “How heavy is he?”

The two troopers were wearing helmets and apparently couldn’t hear him. He grabbed hold of the Iraqi, whose eyes were so wide and white they looked like flashlights.

He held him up, shaking him a bit.

A hundred fifty, maybe a little more.

“You’re lucky,” he told the EPW after dropping him on the ground. “Few more pounds and we woulda had to cut your leg off to get airborne.”

Chapter 76

The computer flew Hawk One in the orbit around the area at eight thousand feet as Fentress took a break.

His heart wasn’t beating so crazily anymore and he felt good, damn good — the ground team confirmed that he had nailed the tanks.

Actually, they’d turned out to be armored personnel carriers. Same difference.

Zen would be proud of him.

“Bronco is ready to take off,” said Alou.

Fentress retook the stick and began to come back north. Smith grumbled something over the open circuit about wanting wind. Fentress banked, watching as the Bronco struggled to get airborne, its nose bobbing up and down violently as it approached a curve in the road. Fentress felt a hole open in his stomach — he’d never seen an airplane crash before, not in real life.

He didn’t now. The Bronco kept going straight, apparently airborne, though just barely.

“Bronco is up,” he told Alou.

“Good. How’s your fuel?”

He checked his instruments, running through a quick scan before reporting back that they were right on the mark as planned. They traded course headings, double-checking the positions the computers plotted out for them as the Bronco slowly began picking up speed.

“I didn’t think he’d make it,” Fentress told Alou. “Take off I mean.”

“Mack Smith always cuts it right to the bone,” said Alou. “That’s the way he is.”

“A little like Zen.”

“In a way.

“Mack helped develop the Flighthawks,” Alou continued. “He’s never flown them, but I’d guess he knows them as well as anyone, except for Zen. He helped map the tactics sections.”

“Why didn’t he fly them?”

“Doesn’t like robots.”

Fentress had Hawk One flying above and behind the OV-10, following the slow-moving plane much as he would follow a helicopter. He would arc behind at times to maintain separation, while still keeping close to his escort. At the same time, he had to stay relatively close to Raven, which was flying a kind of spiraling oval back toward the base at high altitude.

“Mack was in the air when Jeff had the accident that cost him his legs,” said Alou. “Not that they got along too well before that. But, uh, I’d say there’s still some bad blood there.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. Not the sort of thing you want to bring up in casual conversation with either one of them, I think.”

“Yes, sir.”

Alou laughed. “Hey, relax, kid. You’re one of us now.

You kicked ass down there. Zen’ll be proud of you.”

“Yes, sir. I mean, uh, right.”

Alou guffawed.

Fentress tucked the Flighthawk’s wing toward the ground, rolling around and back to the south before circling back. He scouted the valley as he flew; at eight thousand feet, he was lower than many of the mountain peaks ahead. The Bronco, weighed down with its passengers and climbing to get through the hills, continued to lag behind. Just as Hawk One drew back into its trail position, the RWR blared.

“Zeus ahead,” Alou warned Mack. “Can you get higher?”

“Not without divine intervention.”

A green and yellow flower blossomed in the darkness before him, then another, then another. An upside-down cloud rose from the ground — there were a half-dozen Zsu-23s down there. Fentress accelerated over the exploding shells. “I’ll take out the flak dealer,” he told Mack.

“I’m counting on you, Hawk boy,” said Mack. “Get ’em quick — I don’t want to waste any more gas turning around.”

Fentress tucked left, zigging as another emplacement opened up. He was about two thousand feet over the effective range of the guns — though probably close enough for a lucky shot to nail him. The radar operator on the flight deck warned that there were at least two other guns farther up the valley that hadn’t started firing yet.

Shells exploded above him — heavier weapons, Zsu-57s maybe. Unguided but nasty, their shells could reach over twelve thousand feet, about twice as high as the Zsu-23s.

Fentress realized he was boxed in by the antiaircraft fire. He started to dive on his first target anyway.

“I’m going to run right past them, real low,” said Mack.

“Keep their attention and—”

The rest of his sentence was drowned out by the warning tone of the RWR. A new threat screen opened up — the passive receiver had found a helicopter radar ahead.

“Bogey,” Alou told Mack. “Low. Closing on you. It just came out of nowhere.”

“I’ll get it,” said Fentress, flicking his stick left as C3

marked out the contact as a Russian-made Hind helicopter. He began to accelerate, but as he went to arm his cannon, his screens went blank.

Chapter 77

The mushrooming arcs of green-tinted antiaircraft fire suddenly flared red. There was a flash of light so bright that Danny Freah thought a star had exploded.

“Jesus, what was that?” he said.

“Something just nailed the Flighthawk,” said Mack Smith.

“Shit.”

“We got other problems. Hang tight. This is going to be a bitch.”

“We’re flying through the flak?”

“Close your eyes.”

It was a worthless gesture, but Mack pounded the throttles for more speed, hoping to somehow convince the lumbering aircraft to get a move on. The air percolated with the explosions of the antiaircraft guns; the wings tipped up and down, and the tail seemed to want to pull to the right for some reason. Cursing, Mack did his best to hold steady, riding right through a wall of flak.

The helicopter was dead ahead, four miles, and coming at him, fat and red in the Bronco’s infrared screen.

Served him right for leaving the damn Sidewinders on the ground, he thought. Son of a bitch.

“Bronco, stand out of the way so we can nail that Hind,” said Alou.

“Thanks, Major, but where exactly do you want me to go?”

“Circle.”

“Fuck off. I can’t afford the gas, and sooner or later these bastards are going to nail me.”

The Bronco bucked upward, riding the currents into a clear space beyond the flak. Another ball of tracers puffed about a mile ahead.

“Take out the guns,” said Mack.

“Helo’s first,” said Alou. “They’re stopping the flak — they don’t want to hit him.”

“How sweet,” said Mack, tucking his wing to the left as sharply as he dared, then back the other way as the helicopter closed. He could feel the plane’s weight change dramatically and tried to compensate with his rudder, but the plane slid away from him. They flopped back and forth, the OV-10 alternately threatening to spin, stall completely, or roll over and stop dead in the air. The helo began firing, barely a mile from his face.

Chapter 78

Somewhere far above him the flight crew traded snippets of information on the location of the helicopter and the triple A. There was a warning — an AMRAAM flashed from the belly of the Megafortress.

Fentress had only a vague sense of the world beyond the small area around him. His eyes were focused on the gray screen in front of him, his consciousness defined by the two words in the middle:

CONTACT LOST.

He was dead, nailed by the flak dealer.

Mack Smith saw the gauge for the oil pressure in the right engine peg right and then spin back left. It could have been tracking the weight distribution of his plane — he could feel the assault team rolling back and forth in the rear with his maneuvers.

“Tell your guys to stop screwing around back there,”

Mack told Danny.

The captain made a garbled sound in reply, either cursing or puking into his mask.

Mack wrestled the stick to try to get back level. The Hind passed off to his right, its gunfire trailing but missing.

The stinker was probably going to fire heat-seekers next.

So where the hell was Alou and his magic missiles?

They weren’t that stinking close, for cryin’ out loud.

Mack pushed the stick forward to throw the Bronco into a dive. He tossed diversionary flares. A second later something whipped past his wings, trailing to the right after a flare. Something else exploded well off to his left.

A fresh volley of tracers kept him from gloating. The helicopter was still on his butt.

Mack slapped the stick and jammed the pedals, pushing the plane almost sideways. The Hind shot past, arcing to the right so close that Mack could have taken out his handgun and shot the bastard through the canopy. Instead he lurched left, figuring the helicopter was spinning for another attack. He tucked his wing and picked up a bit of speed and altitude north before tracers flared on his right once again. He thought he heard something ting the aircraft, but it could have been one of the Whiplash crew kicking against the side.

“Hey, Alou — any fuckin’ time you want to nail the raghead is okay with me,” he said, slapping the plane back left.

As he did so, a sharp downdraft pitched his nose toward the rocks. An AMRAAM from the Megafortress had found the Hind.

“Hey, there’s two more helicopters on the ground down there,” said Freah.

“We’ll save them for next time,” said Mack, pulling the plane level.

Chapter 79

Jennifer turned from the equipment console and put her head down to the laptop screen, rechecking the sequence she had to enter. She typed it without looking, cursed as she made a mistake, backspaced, then reentered. The others on the flightdeck — Breanna, General Elliott, the handsome but somewhat stuck-up colonel from CentCom, and the RIO they’d borrowed to help work the gear — all stared at her.

“Just a second,” she told them.

“We’re waiting for you, young lady,” said the CentCom colonel.

General Elliott looked like he’d strangle him. She’d always liked him.

Jennifer studied the map again, then entered the last set of coordinates. She hit Enter; the laptop spit back the numbers without hesitation.

“So?” asked Breanna.

“It was definitely a laser flash. The gear got a pretty good read. But it wasn’t in that building Whiplash targeted,” Jennifer told them.

“Where was it?” asked General Elliott.

“According to the data, fifty miles inside of Iran.”