“Annie, there’s a timer on this thing.”

“Yes, I understand that. Well, either you or Sergeant Bison has to take it apart. That’s the first step. Undo the booby-trap component and then we’ll tackle the timer. This way maybe we can see which of the wires are obviously fake.”

“You don’t think the booby trap might set it off?”

“Always a possibility.”

Danny stood up.

“I can get the C-4 off no sweat, Captain,” said Bison.

The weapons expert stooped over the bomb. Bison worked quickly—a little too quickly, it seemed to Danny.

“All right, get some screwdrivers,” the sergeant said finally. Danny went over to the side of the hangar where there was a large tool case. He didn’t realize until he was walking back that Bison had only sent him on the errand to make himself less nervous.

“Wasn’t even connected,” said the demo expert, pointing to the plastic explosive. “Just there to fake us out. I think.”

“Maybe the whole thing is a fake.”

“That I wouldn’t count on.”

Powder gingerly held up the small clock dial and touched one of the buttons on the side with the blade of the screwdriver. “Still giving me the local time, 0636. Still set to go at 0650. I think anyway. Could be a second sequence, like a countdown from there.”

“Probably the detonation,” said Annie when Danny told her over the Satcom.

“Can we stop it?”

“Long shot.”

“Thanks.”

“Just trying to be optimistic. Would you like to know what happened on Jeopardy tonight, or should we get to work?”

Aboard Galatica

Over Colombia

8 March, 0536 local (0636 Brazil)

ZEN DRIFTED IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS FOR A while, strange visions twisting in his head.

He walked in midair toward the large crimson sun. His legs felt solid and strong.

A warning flashed. Bogeys. F/A-18’s.

Zen’s head cleared. He was at the U/MF observer station, the technician’s bench next to the control seat. Two American F/A-18 Navy fighter-bombers were approaching. They might have caught something on their radar, though the threat screen indicated they hadn’t picked up the lead Flighthawk, which was on an intercept vector from the southeast.

The Hughes APG-73 digital programmable radar of the F/ A-18’s rated among the best conventional radars in service; were the Flighthawk a conventional fighter, it could have been detected at no less than a hundred nautical miles, even in look-down mode, which tended to lower the range. But the Flighthawk was much smaller and considerably stealthier than a conventional plane. Its pilot also had the advantage of seeing exactly where the radar fingers were groping. By the time the Hornets finally detected the U/MF, it was less than eight nautical miles away.

It took nearly twenty seconds for the Navy pilots to realize the odd, unidentifiable returns on their radars were definitely a bogey. One of the pilots fired an AMRAAM, even though the Flighthawk screen showed he hadn’t locked; Zen reflexively reached for the button to dispense chaff.

Madrone didn’t bother, apparently realizing that he was so close and so fast that the missile, even if properly aimed, wouldn’t be a threat. He was correct; C3 flicked it off with a quick buzz of its ECMs, barely breaking a sweat as the missile sailed past, self-detonating about two miles away.

Madrone pressed a heads-on attack against the lead plane. The Hornet pilot handled it well, waiting until the Flighthawk began firing to make his move, a rolling dive to the right. Under ordinary circumstances against nearly any other plane, his tucking roll would have brought him behind the aggressor, leaving him with an easy Sidewinder shot. But against the U/ MF, the Hornet pilot would have been better off pulling the yellow handle at the side of his seat.

Madrone tucked his nose and threw his tail out a bit, the vectored thrusters on the Flighthawk yanking it around so quickly that he closed on the Hornet’s tail before the other plane completed its maneuver. He was within two hundred yards when he began firing the cannon again; two seconds later the back end of his target exploded.

As quickly as it happened, nailing the Hornet still took time. Had the pilot of the second plane been a coward or perhaps simply more prudent, the second F/A-18 could have escaped. But the Navy lieutenant in the trail plane was either brave or reckless, depending on the perspective; he pressed on toward the fresh contact his radar locked on eight miles away—the Megafortress.

Zen guessed that Gal’s RWR had buzzed upstairs, for the plane suddenly lurched eastward. He reached to flip’the screen into Gal’s sensor array, which he could view but not control through the diagnostic station. Before he could complete the sequence and bring up the image, Madrone had begun to close on the Hornet’s twin tailpipe.

The F/A-18’s wing flared. He’d launched an AMRAAM. A second dropped off the rail. Then a long stream of red appeared, arcing from the nose of the Flighthawk. But Madrone had started to fire a few seconds too soon to score a fatal hit—the targeting control on C3 had always been slightly optimistic.

The Hornet veered upward, perhaps to try and outclimb its pursuer. All Madrone had to do was nudge his nose slightly to alter his aim and keep coming; the Flighthawk had built enough momentum to smash bullets through the right wing of the McDonnell-Douglas fighter, shearing it off between the outboard and inboard stores pylon.

Zen saw the Hornet’s canopy fly away as the plane began to spin. The Flighthawk veered off.

Then he remembered the AMRAAMs.

“AIRCRAFT TARGETED. RADAR MATCHED FROM LIBRARY. ECMs prepared.”

Minerva stared at the legend in the screen at the right side of the dash as the RWR continued to clang. The Megafortress had not only detected the missiles, but computed the proper response.

But it wanted her to authorize it. How?

“Activate ECMs,” she said into her headset.

Nothing happened.

She twisted back to Breanna, then realized she wouldn’t help.

“Use the word ‘computer,’ “ said Mayo.

“Computer, activate ECMs,” Minerva said.

“Acknowledged,” responded a programmed voice.

The tone stopped. There was a flash in the sky two miles off their wing.

“Why are we not to go over ten thousand feet?” said Mayo.

Minerva turned toward her lieutenant. He stared at her. Before she could say anything, he pulled back on the stick. With one hand, she reached for the controls. With the other, she drew the gun from her belt.

Mayo threw himself on her before she could retrieve the revolver. The plane lurched left as they struggled, the nose rising before abruptly pitching downward.

BREANNA HUNKERED DOWN AS BEST SHE COULD AS the two struggled. The plane rolled on its wing, pitching itself wildly toward the earth.

Gravity slammed her from two directions at once. The plane began to spin. She heard something pop a few feet away, and then a dark cowl tightened around her head, the violent g forces depriving her brain of blood.

“Let the computer fly it,” she said, or maybe just thought—she didn’t want to say anything, didn’t want to help them. Negative g’s tore at her body, twisting it like a bag of loose Jell-O; her head snapped back against the seat while her legs flew outward.

She remembered the night in the hospital with Jeff after his accident, the night that turned into a week that became a year, a dark hood around her head that had never completely cleared, a cowl she’d clawed and pushed and punched away.

The Megafortress stumbled through an invert and blood rushed to her head, and now Rap knew she was going to die, felt the grim weightlessness that precedes the final auger-in. The back of the plane lurched upward, a fish snapping its tail in the air as it arced over the water.