“I do think that,” he said.

“And you’re mad. I can hear it in your voice. It’s angry.”

“I’m not mad.” But even while saying this, Zen heard his tone. She was right; he did sound angry. “I’m mad a little.”

“Just a little?”

He started to laugh. That was the problem with being in love with Breanna—you just couldn’t be mad at her, no matter how hard you tried, or how justified you were.

“I guess I’m mad at you, but I’m not really mad at you,” he told her. “I do love you. A lot.”

She came close and hugged him, wrapping her arms around his head.

“What’s with the parachute gear?” she asked, noticing that his emergency equipment was different.

“It’s the new gizmo Annie Klondike worked up. I told you about it. MESSKIT.”

“Is it ready?”

“More than ready,” he told her. “Come on, now, get lost.

We gotta get goin’.”

“I’m out of here. Kick some butt.”

Breanna smiled at him, then disappeared down the ladder to the tarmac.

Aboard EB-52 Johnson,

over northeastern Romania

0030

THE MIG PILOT, CONFIDENT THAT HE’D SHAKEN THE FLIGHT-hawks and knowing that the Romanian air defenses could not touch him, backed off on his speed in order to conserve 382

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fuel for the long trip home. He was at 15,000 feet, descending gradually, no doubt intending to glide right at his target, Starship thought, pop up as he pickled his bombs, then gun north over the border and head home.

As long as he stayed on his present course, Hawk Four would meet him exactly eight miles from his target—roughly a mile and a half before the MiG was in range to fire the air-to-ground missiles. And as an added bonus, Hawk Three would come back into Starship’s control a few seconds later.

The enemy plane would be caught between the two Flighthawks, its escape routes cut off.

A perfect plan, except for the fact that the Bennett was jinking hard to duck a pair of radar-seeking missiles.

The Russian weapons were Kh-131A radar-seeking mini-Moshkits. Based on the air-to-ground Kh-31P, the large anti-radiation missile used two stages: a standard solid-rocket engine for the first stage, with a jet engine taking over for the final stage. The jet engine was no ordinary power plant; it gave the missile an enormous burst of speed on its final approach, propelling the warhead to Mach 4.5. The acceleration was designed to make the missile more difficult for antimis-sile systems such as the Patriot to intercept.

There were several ways to deal with mini-Moshkits. Ar-guably the most effective was the simplest: turning off the Megafortress’s powerful radar, to deprive the missile of its target. But doing that would essentially blind Starship, since the Flighthawks relied on the mother ship’s radar for everything except firing their guns or scanning very close targets.

Starship left it to the Megafortress to deal with the missile as he concentrated on the MiG heading toward the gas pipeline. The computer’s tactical section diagrammed the best angle of attack in his screen, suggesting that the Flighthawk pivot and swoop in directly on the fighter’s tail. It was a no-brainer, and yet another example of the advantage the robots had over traditional planes. In a manned plane, the maneuver would knock the pilot unconscious.

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Just as Starship reached the point where he had to start the cut, the Megafortress turned hard to duck the missiles.

At the same time, the plane dropped about a hundred feet in a fraction of a second. He slammed against his restraints and, despite his pressure suit, felt his head start to float as the mother ship dropped sharply in the air.

Stay on him, stay on him, Starship told himself, trying to hold the Flighthawk to the proper path. The small plane made its turn, jerking its nose hard back toward its right wing, literally skidding sideways in the air. For a brief moment the plane’s aerodynamic qualities were overcome by the laws of gravity and motion; it dropped more than two hundred feet, more like a brick than a plane. As the Flighthawk began to accelerate, the MiG popped into Starship’s screen.

The pipper went red. The pilot pressed the trigger. Bullets flew past the MiG’s right wing. Starship nudged his stick, working the stream toward the body of the target.

“Disconnect in five seconds,” wailed the computer.

“Bitch,” yelled Starship.

“Unrecognized command.”

“Johnson!”

“Stand by to lose external radar,” replied Englehardt.

That was about the last thing Starship wanted to hear.

UP ON THE FLIGHT DECK, LIEUTENANT ENGLEHARDT AND

his copilot had managed to duck one of the radar homing missiles by their sharp maneuvers. But the other one kept coming, and was now just over twenty miles away.

“Radars are off,” Terry Kung, the copilot, told Englehardt.

“Chaff. Turn.”

As the copilot fired canisters of metal shards into the air to confuse the missile, Englehardt threw the Megafortress into a sharp turn south, then rolled his wing down, plunging like a knife away from the cloud of decoy metal. The maneuver was second nature in a teen-series fighter; the Megafortress, even 384

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with all its improvements over the standard B-52, groaned and shuddered.

The mini-Moshkit following them had a backup semi-active radar, which Englehardt expected would take over once it realized it had lost the signal it was following. If that happened, he hoped the radar would “see” the cloud of tinsel in the air, think it was the plane, and dive on it.

“Still not terminal,” said Kung. The flare as the missile fired its hypersonic jet engine would be picked up on the Megafortress’s infrared launch warning.

Englehardt pushed the Megafortress lower, then swung back to the east, trying to “beam” the missile’s search radar and make it harder for the enemy to see him. But they were too close—he could feel the missile coming in.

Presidential villa,

near Stulpicani, Romania

0040

GENERAL LOCUSTA RESISTED THE URGE TO KICK THE DEAD

bodies that been placed near the back of the garage at the president’s mountain house. It wasn’t out of respect for the dead that he didn’t. On the contrary, he had no respect for any of the bodyguards, Voda’s men all. But the soldiers looking on might not understand.

“These are the only people you found in the house?” he asked them.

“General, it wasn’t us who found them,” replied the sergeant who was standing with the two other men, both privates. “The special forces men who reached the house first placed them here.”

According to Major Ozera, the special unit that had staged the attack had lost a dozen of their own, hastily evacuating them before the regular army arrived. In a way, thought REVOLUTION

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Locusta, it was good that so many commandos had died: It sharpened the survivors’ lust for vengeance, for they had changed into their uniforms and now made up the party of searchers hunting the president.

Locusta walked toward the cave where Voda had supposedly hidden after the initial attack. He examined it, and despite the broken door had a difficult time believing Voda had been here. The cistern system Ozera claimed he had used to escape was closed with heavy metal panels; a weakling such as Voda would never be able to lift them.

The entire back of the house had been flattened by the mortars. More likely the president was buried under there. If the dogs were tracking anything, it was one of the bodyguards who’d been sleeping or had run away out of fear.

His satellite phone rang.

“What is it?” he snapped, answering before the first ring died.

“General, all of the Dreamland planes have taken off from Iasi, including the Osprey,” said his chief of staff.