One of the men pointed to the floor, indicating they should sit. Gunny lowered himself reluctantly, wondering if he ought to fight. But even if they made it past these gorillas, there were at least six soldiers with automatic rifles in the hallway outside.

A soldier—this one short and frail-looking—entered carrying two trays of food. Each tray had a large bowl of fruit, another of mushy buckwheat, a third of grilled lamb. There were picas and large bottles of cold water.

Howland picked up one of the bottles as the steel door slammed shut. They were alone.

“They’d just shoot us,” the pilot told Gunny as he drained about half the bottle. “They wouldn’t waste poison.”

“Yeah. You’re probably right,” said Gunny, still eyeing the food. “Assuming this shit is edible.”

“It’s probably pretty good,” said Howland, poking the meat with the bread. “The condemned always eat well.”

“Yeah. That’s one way of looking at it.” Gunny picked up what seemed to be an orange, peeled away the skin, and took a bite.

It was an orange, or close enough. He devoured it. Then he ate some of the fruit and two pieces of the pita bread. Satiated, he put his head back against the cement wall. He’d caught some z’s on the plane and didn’t think he was particularly tired, but he began to drift off. At one point he woke to Howland’s loud snore, then nodded off again.

At some point, he dreamed that the door reopened. The man who had brought them the food reappeared, taking the trays. Then the gorillas appeared and pulled both Gunny and Howland roughly to their feet, pushing them back into the hallway. Gunny seemed to fly to a narrow flight of stairs, descending down another passage covered on all four sides with a thick brown coir carpet.

At the end of the hall, Gunny saw that Howland was with him. They stepped into an eight-by-eight room with smooth whitewashed plaster walls and a thick tan wool carpet. The room had been turned into a television studio—two chairs were set up beneath a lighting bar. Two cameras with camera operators stood opposite them. Monitors were positioned so anyone sitting in the chairs could watch themselves. The six soldiers who had been escorting them filed in behind.

“You will sit in the chairs and respond when questioned,” said a voice from above. “Your trial will begin shortly.”

“Am I dreaming?” Gunny asked Howland.

“No. They’re going to televise this,” said the pilot. “This is happening.”

“Shit,” said Melfi, shaking his head, trying to get his wits back. He was truly awake; all of this was real. “And I always wondered what it would be like to be on TV. Shit.”

Libya

24 October, 0920

IT TOOK NEARLY FOUR HOURS TO COVER THE ROUGHLY two thousand miles from their base in Ethiopia to southern Libya, not counting the aerial refuel shortly after takeoff. Jennifer Gleason and Jeff spent the entire time running through a set of changes for the Flighthawk programming that would keep the UM/Fs separated from their mother ship during fail-safe mode. Jennifer’s fingers dashed over the small keyboard at her station, stopping only so she could wade deeper into the notes she’d made on her yellow pads. Jeff helped read back some of the commands and numbers. Most of it was in machine-code assembler level; he didn’t have a clue what he was reading.

Jennifer also had an idea about adding to the compression routines in the command system, in essence widening the communications bandwidth and lengthening the distance they could operate from the mother ship. At one point she started to explain it, but Jeff just waved her off.

“Tell me what to do,” he said. “I don’t have to understand it. There’s no time.”

She gave him a tap on the shoulder and went back to work. They completed the work with fifteen minutes to spare before the drop point.

Jeff climbed aboard the Hawks, running through the preflight checks. He was so tired now that fatigue felt like a piece of clothing around his upper body, heavy and warm.

“Drop point at zero-two,” said Breanna over the Mega-fortress’s interphone circuit.

“We’re here already?” answered Jeff, honestly surprised.

“Looks like it.”

They ran through the flight and weather data, following their launch protocol precisely. With everything dash-one, Cheshire put the plane into a zero-alpha maneuver, nosing in as she accelerated. The Flighthawks dropped off the wings on cue and Zen began working them onto their flight paths, roaring downward across the still-peaceful Libyan countryside. The sun glinted in his view screen as the planes picked up speed. They were at eighteen and twenty-two thousand feet respectively, well separated in the cloudless sky.

“SEAL commander on the circuit,” advised Cheshire. “Along with Cascade.”

“Hawks are green,” said Zen.

“So’s Big Bear,” said the SEAL commander, using the SEAL team’s call sign.

“Acknowledged.” Jeff thought the voice sounded vaguely familiar, but it belonged to Cascade, a crewman aboard the JSTARS electronic command plane in the southern Mediterranean. Cascade was communicating with Raven and the SEALs through a secure satellite system, linking the feeds from the Flighthawks to the Navy commandos. “Silent corn until zero-two.”

The line snapped clear. The gear seemed to have a way of scrubbing sound right out of the wires, as if the airwaves were erased.

Jeff clicked the button to get back to his intercom circuit.

“Twenty minutes,” he told the crew. “Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.”

“As long as they’re not your sneakers,” answered Breanna.

Jeff laughed. She used to say that all the time.

* * *

THE OSPREY’S TILT WINGS BEGAN PITCHING UPWARD AS the craft banked toward the mountain pass. Danny could feel the heat of the desert through the skin of the plane as he waited for it to land. The plan had called for them to land on a small plateau on the other side of the hill, but the pilot had seen someone there as they approached.

Talcom gripped his SAW so tightly Danny thought he was going to snap his fingers through it. He reached over to the sergeant and gently put his hand on the machine gun.

“Nice and easy,” he told Powder.

Sand and pebbles began whipping against the body of the Osprey. Talcom and some of the others winced, obviously thinking it was rifle fire.

“Nice and easy,” Danny repeated to his men as the rear door began to open.

BREANNA KEPT ONE EYE ON HER INSTRUMENT PANEL and the other on her commander. Cheshire was definitely tired, but she was on top of her game. She’d held Raven steady through the Flighthawk release, performing the launch maneuvers flawlessly and without help from either Rap or the Megafortress’s autopilot. She continued to work carefully, reviewing nav data and making a minute adjustment to her course.

The radar-warning receivers in Raven had several times the range and about ten times the selectivity of Fort Two’s. They were now within a hundred miles of two large ground-intercept radars just south of Tripoli; the threat screen painted their rays bright green ahead. Toggling the screen showed that Raven could get within twenty miles and still look like a misplaced seagull to the ground radar; after that, the computer painted a “path of least observance” that would take the EB-52 to within about five miles before it was likely to be detected.

The real value of the fancy gear would come when the assault started. Raven would put its custom-made gallium arsenic chips to work jamming the sensors, adding its fuzz to the electronic noise from a pair of Navy EA-6 Prowlers. Every radar and most of the TVs in North Africa would be toast.

“Hawks are zero-five from commitment. We’re green all around,” said Jeff.

Breanna, who always had a hard time thinking of herself as a copilot, began to click her mike button to respond, then let go as Cheshire acknowledged. The major gave her a smile, then turned back ahead, studying the clear sky.