“Mogadishu’s five hundred miles southeast of here.”

“My point exactly.”

Breanna didn’t think that they would be lucky enough to find them on the ground. But she did want to see if her theory was at least possible. A-1 was a little more than seventy-five miles away, a straight line back toward the northwest. While they didn’t have particularly fat fuel reserves, she figured they could get close enough to get a look at the airstrip before turning back to shepherd the Ospreys home.

“We’ll be within FUR range in five minutes,” she told her copilot.

“Four and a half. I’ve already computed it,” he told her. “Man, I could. go for a cigarette right about now.”

“I thought you gave up smoking.”

“Stuff like this tickles my throat,” he said. “Shit, we got something in the air.”

Chris seemed to be operating on a sixth sense, picking up something before the high-powered detectors had sniffed out the radar. But he was right—a Jay Bird radar had flicked on ahead. The computer poked a green puff in the radar-warning screen. It was below them, which seemed impossible since they were at only a thousand feet.

“The source is far off,” said Chris, hunkering over the screen and working the computer to refine the read. “This is on the ground, Bree. Shit, this has to be a MiG-21. Off, it’s off.”

“On the ground? Has to be A-1.”

“Yeah. Like it was a maintenance check or something. Or a decoy.”

“We’ll be close enough to find out pretty soon.”

“Be nice to have a pair of fighters covering our butts about now,” Chris said.

“We can deal with a MiG-21 ourselves,” said Breanna. “Ground radar?”

“Negative. Scope’s clean. No ground stations. Nothing. Of course, they could take off and turn it on once they were in the air. We’re sitting ducks here.”

“The MiG radar can’t find a standard B-52 at twenty miles,” said Bree.

“What I’m worried about are those MiG-29’s we saw before,” said Chris. “Maybe they’re Libyan fighters. Qaddafi’s got a bunch of them.”

For once, his fear was well-founded. The passive sensors on the MiGs could theoretically allow the interceptors to target Fort Two from long range, possibly even before being detected by Fort Two’s own passive arrays.

“I think those MiGs we saw before are out there,” said Chris. “I thinking they’re waiting to ambush the Ospreys. They could be in those mountain ranges to the west.”

“If they came from Libya, they’d never have the range to linger,” said Bree.

“What if they launched from A-1? If it’s long enough for a MiG-21, they’d have no problem.”

Breanna leaned closer to her stick. They were about thirty miles from the airstrip.

“I think there’s something stalking us, maybe twelve miles off,” said Chris. “What do you think of turning on the active radar?”

“If there is something out there, it’ll tell them we’re here,” said Bree. “And it’s expressly against orders.”

“Well, there is that,” said Chris. “But getting shot down is too. If we hit the radar we can get a clear picture. We see something, we launch the Scorpions. I swear something’s watching for us, Bree. They’re to the west, right there.” He pointed across the cockpit. “I can feel it.”

“We’ll see them first,” said Breanna.

“Maybe not. They could circle out through the hills, duck around us, go for the Ospreys. The rotor engines are monster signals for any IR seeker. They’ll be sitting ducks.”

Less than sixty seconds now separated them from the small airstrip where Breanna believed Smith and the others had been taken. Turn on the radar and they might never reach it.

On the other hand, if the MiGs were where Chris thought, the Ospreys would be sitting ducks.

“Go to search and scan,” she ordered.

“On it.”

Chris was wrong. The MiGs weren’t in the mountains to the west.

They were hugging the ground forty miles to the east, running south like all hell. There were four of them, and while two were within striking distance of Vector, they didn’t seem to be interested in the Ospreys—they were going for the F-117’s, just arriving on target with their Paveways as Breanna clicked the radio to broadcast a warning.

Northern Somalia

23 October, 0430

AS THE BUS WOUND DOWN OUT OF THE HILLS, THEY could smell the scent of the sea through the open window. The moon and the stars were fading, the sky blending into the early dawn.

“There’s an air base down there,” said Gunny, who was at the window. “Shit, Major, come tell me what I’m looking at.”

Smith pulled himself up from his seat and stepped over Jackson, who was sleeping in the aisle. Howland was hunched two rows back, snoring into the seat back. Mack’s head had stopped hurting, but his ribs throbbed worse than ever. He slid in the seat behind Melfi, his leg irons clanking as he pushed his face to the window.

A long strip of black jutted roughly parallel to the sea, lit by the full moon. A phalanx of heavy earthmovers worked on one end, pushing and leveling. On the other, crews were erecting a shelter of some sort; from here it looked like a curved pizza box. There were planes lined in a neat row near the middle. They were far away and the light was poor, but one was definitely an airliner or similar transport. There were at least two others, smaller military jets, possibly MiG-21’s. The bus bounced and turned around the road, its path taking them out of view.

“The strip’s being extended. They’ve paved it pretty recently,” Mack told Gunny. “We had a small airstrip on the map up north here somewhere when we briefed the mission; I think we had it pegged as a dirt strip. It’s a lot bigger than that now.”

One of the guards at the front of the bus grunted an instruction to keep quiet. Mack held up his hand as if he would, then leaned close to Gunny.

“There’s a transport down there, an airliner. I can’t tell in the dark what it is, but I’d bet they’re going to fly us out.”

“I say we don’t,” hissed Gunny. “I don’t think they’re going to be taking us home. And I don’t want to star in this trial the raghead is talking about.”

“I agree,” Mack said. He felt his ribs tug at him, as if to remind him they weren’t exactly loaded with options. “I don’t know what sort of chance we’re going to have, though.”

“Were you thinking of that when you slugged the raghead’s guard?”

“No,” said Mack. “But I should have.”

“You make a move, we’ll follow,” said Melfi solemnly. “Should we stall getting off the bus?”

What would that get them? A few more minutes? For what?

Odds were the Iranian would just shoot them and be done.

Preferable to being turned into cowards and traitors. That was where this was headed.

Mack grunted noncommittally, unsure what to say, much less do. He put his head back against the stiff seat top. The anger that had exploded inside him had disappeared; it seemed foreign now, as if it belonged to someone else—Melfi most likely. He was a pilot—logical, careful, precise.

Except when he let himself get shot down. That had been a fuck-up, despite what Gunny had said.

Unlike him. He was too damn good to get whacked so easy. Too damn good to do something stupid.

So what the hell was he doing sitting here?

As the bus started down the winding road, the moon stabbed his eyes. Mack sighed, but didn’t close them.

Northern Somalia

23 October, 0430

FORT TWO SQUEALED AS IT TUCKED AND ROLLED through the air, almost as if the Megafortress welcomed the seven-g back flip. Breanna felt her world narrow to a small cone as she rolled into a dive and recovered in the opposite direction. She had become the plane, pushing through the air like a force of nature, turbines spinning, wings slicked back. It took several seconds for them to gain momentum in the new direction; she rode the air current gracefully, plunging her nose down and picking up speed. By the time the MiGs reacted to their radar, they had narrowed the gap to thirty miles, the outer edge of the AMRAAMs’ range.