“My team,” he shouted, twisting back.

“We’re all here!” yelled Liu. “Come on, Captain.”

A massive black cloud hung over the hangar at the other end of the field. The Delta Osprey was taxiing away from it, toward them. An APC was rumbling thirty yards away.

Danny stood motionless as the armored personnel carrier’s turret began to revolve in the direction of the Delta Osprey. Then he started to run toward the APC with all his strength.

“Captain! Captain!” shouted Liu.

As Danny ran, he reached into his pocket for the grenade.

Nothing but MP-5 clips.

Cursing, he kept running. He remembered he’d used the grenade in the airplane, and reached for the other pocket, retrieving a stun grenade. The grenade wasn’t powerful enough to do anything to the exterior of the vehicle; it would have to be thrown inside.

He fumbled with the taped pin as he bolted atop the APC. It was an ancient vehicle, a BTR-60P with an eight-wheeled chassis and a 12.7mm gun mounted in a turret at the front. The gun barrel lurched back, firing toward the Osprey. Danny grappled with the hatch, but there was no way to open it once locked from the inside. He threw himself on top of the gun turret, thinking he might stuff the grenade through the gun opening. But he saw there’d be no chance of that as the gun fired again; desperate, he pulled his Beretta out and stuffed the barrel against the small viewing slot at the side of the front of the truck. He fired several times as the APC lurched to the side; Danny fell to the ground. The Osprey was revving its rotors furiously, pulling away. Danny rolled the grenade beneath the APC and ran back for his own craft, expecting at any moment to be shot. The ground rippled near him and he felt himself flying into the air.

Liu and Hernandez caught him just before he hit the ground, stumbling but managing to keep their balance as their Osprey lurched backward toward them. The others grabbed them and Danny felt himself suddenly pulled upward, the rotorcraft taking off with its bay open.

“We’re in! We’re in!” yelped Talcom.

Bison stood near the open doorway, firing his SAW. The APC continued to fire at them.

“Shit,” said Freah.

“They got away,” said Liu. “They got off okay. Vector One.”

“Good.”

“We got the Iranian, he’s alive,” added the medic. “We’re all here. Scratch the airliner. Hangar’s gone. F-117’s toast.”

“Pilots?”

Liu shook his head.

“Pair of MiGs gunning for us,” said Reagan, who was back near the cockpit. “We’re not home free yet.”

Danny pulled himself to his haunches, then lifted himself to the canvas rack that served as a seat in the battle-rigged MHV-22.

“What’d you do, Captain, try and blow up an APC with a smoke grenade?” asked Bison, turning around now that he’d gone through his clip. The rear doorway began to close behind him.

“I think it was a concussion grenade,” said Freah. “Oh, that’s different,” said Bison.

“Probably gave them a good headache,” said Danny. And he began to laugh.

So did the others. They must have laughed for a good ten minutes.

When the pilot called back that they had eluded the MiGs, the laughs just got louder.

Northern Somalia

23 October, 0505

“LEAD MIG HAS US SPIKED.”

“Yeah,” said Bree. She held her course steady. They had to suck the MiGs away from the Ospreys before the enemy fights saw the defenseless aircraft.

“They’re buying it. Both of them coming for us.” Breanna glanced at the radar screen. The MiGs were about twenty miles out to sea, closing fast. The Ospreys were just getting off the ground.

“Be ready with the Stinger air mines,” Bree said.

“Max range of the Stingers is three miles,” warned Chris. The Stinger air mines were the Megafortress’s last remaining defensive weapons. In place of the standard B-52’s tail guns, the Megafortress had a cannon that fired small explosive rockets. The cannon was steered by an aft-scanning radar and the missiles fired in an attacking fighter’s flight path. At a proper range determined by the fire-control computer, the rockets detonated, creating a cloud of shrapnel in the enemy fighter’s face several dozen meters wide.

The problem was, the air mines were short-range weapons. An enemy fighter had to close within knife-fighting range before they were effective. The Megafortress’s stealth characteristics usually forced an enemy fighter to forgo radar-guided missiles and use short-range heat-seeking missiles or cannons, and that was when the air mines worked the best. Bree and Chris would have to survive a long-range attack before they’d be close enough to use the weapons.

As long as the Ospreys got away, she thought, her fingers cramping tight on the flight controls.

“We’re in range,” said Chris. “They haven’t locked us, though. Shit. The Ospreys will be on their scopes any second. They’re going to think we’re a blip or a ghost and go for the Ospreys.”

Breanna cursed. If only she still had two AMRAAMs in the weapons bay.

“Switch on the targeting radar,” she said. “Lock them.”

“Rap?”

“Do it!”

“Okay, okay.” Chris worked the controls quickly, not quite realizing what Bree was up to. “They have us. They’re locked. Shit, the MiGs are launching!”

“Kill the radar. Batten down the hatches,” she said. Breanna splashed out chaff and pushed the plane over. The air was filled with electronic fuzz as the Megafortress shot downward, Breanna yanking and banking for dear life. The MiGs and their missiles flashed somewhere overhead as the Megafortress continued her evasive maneuvers, turning back in the opposite direction, then pulling five or six g’s through a fresh set of zags. If a standard B-52 could have somehow found the momentum to make the maneuvers, its wings would have sheared off at the roots.

“We’re clean. MiGs have turned. They bought it—they thought we were targeting them. Good call, Bree. Shit, I should have thought of that.”

“Take out the runway—now,” she ordered.

“Bay,” warned Chris, dialing up the final air-to-surface missile. While not optimized for runway-crashing, the large hunk of explosive molded into the front of the missile would create a rather large and hopefully unavoidable hole in the middle of the Somalian field.

“Airliner is smashed. Another plane down there, off to the side,” warned Chris.

“The runway. Now,” demanded Breanna. The computer warned that one of the MiG radars had again targeted them, measuring their distance for a fresh attack.

“Launching. Gone. Good. Buttoning up.”

The radar-warning tone blipped. “Tail radar warning,” said Bree. “Here they come.”

“Air mines ready,” said Chris.

Breanna fired off her last flares and tinsels and inverted the big plane, rolling her down toward the ground like she was an F-16 on a practice range, yipping and yawing to get away from some frisky students.

“Two MiGs within range … Stingers firing!” Chris shouted. The fire-control computer began launching Stinger air mine rockets at their pursuers, one every three seconds, sowing clouds of deadly tungsten chips in the MiGs’ flight path.

One of her “students” launched a heat-seeker toward their tailpipe. The other let go of his last radar missile.

Gravity slapped Breanna hard across the face as she slid the Megafortress a hairbreadth above the waves of the Gulf of Aden. Lights flickered in her eyes, stars or a Christmas light or the sun peeking through the hills. The stall warning yelped, but she was on top of it; one of the engines coughed loudly from a compressor stall, but she compensated beautifully. Chris monitored the computer’s automatic clearing procedure.

Bree recovered, picking the big plane up by its wing roots. She banked south, lost the MiGs on the FLIR as they searched to the north.

The air mines were just as effective against air-to-air missiles as they were against fighters. As the MiGs’ missiles closed in on the Megafortress’s hot exhausts, they were shredded by the air mines’ deadly debris. As the MiG pilots tried to close the distance for one last try at their quarry, they too fell prey to the silent, invisible invaders. Without warning, the tiny tungsten chips splintered turbine compressor blades, cut fuel lines, and shattered windscreens. Crippled and almost out of fuel, both MiGs broke off their attacks and headed for the closest emergency runway.