They hadn’t failed. They had succeeded beyond calculation. The bunker exploded and the ground swelled, then collapsed with a tremendous explosion.

Turk forced himself to concentrate. The mission wasn’t finished—he had two more aircraft to take care of.

“Thirty-six, trail leader 35,” he said, then put his hand over the microphone. “We’re done,” he told Grease. “We’re good. We’re good.”

A warning blared in his ear. An aircraft near UAV 36 was using its radar.

A Russian air-to-air radar. The nano-UAV’s radar detector identified the signal tentatively as coming from a Russian N-O19 unit, meaning it could be anything from an ancient MiG-23 to a much more capable MiG-29. But that really didn’t matter—anything the Iranians had would be more than a match for the unarmed Cessna.

“Get us out of here,” Turk told the pilot, looking up. “Get low and stay low. There’s a fighter in the air five miles west of us.”

14

Over Iran

THE ANALOG RADAR IN THE MIG WAS FAR FROM STATE of the art, but it was all Captain Vahid had ever known. The fact that his contact flickered on and off in the display didn’t alarm him, nor did he jump quickly to any conclusions about the unidentified aircraft he had on his screen. It was flying low and it was going very slow. The profile fit a small, civilian-type aircraft, but what would one be doing here and at night?

Most likely it was a drone, he thought, but there was also a (distant) possibility that it was a Stealth Fighter flying a very erratic pattern, its radar signal disguised.

He heard his breath in the oxygen mask. It was all in a rush; he must be close to hyperventilating.

Vahid slowed his breathing down, tried to conjure One Eye’s voice in his headset: Stay calm. Stay on your plan.

His eyes hunted for the enemy. It would be close, the return confused by the stealthy characteristics of the aircraft. A black shape floated by his right, about where the contact should be. Then there was another, and another—he was seeing and chasing shadows.

“UP! UP!” SCREAMED THE ISRAELI IN ENGLISH. THE Cessna’s nose jerked almost ninety degrees, the wings jostling as the windscreen filled with shadows of black and brown. Wings fluttering, the light plane cleared the barely seen peak, just missing disaster.

Turk flew the UAVs toward the Cessna, looking for the fighter. The sky was dark, but both planes were equipped with infrared sensors as their viewers. He saw a ridgeline ahead of Hydra 35. A cross rose from the rocks, a good hundred feet above the tip.

The Cessna.

“You have to stay low!” said Turk as they continued to climb. “We’re being followed by a MiG.”

“Any lower we’ll be dead,” muttered the Israeli before translating.

VAHID’S RADAR FOUND THE AIRCRAFT ONLY FIVE MILES away, rising through the mountain ridges on his left. He began a turn, planning to lock up the aircraft and fire one of his radar missiles. But the light plane disappeared from his radar, once more lost in the clutter of the reflected radar waves.

Vahid came level out of his turn, then reached to the armament panel and selected the heat-seekers. It would be easier to use the infrared system to take them down.

He found nothing for a few moments, then he realized what must have happened—he misinterpreted the other plane’s direction. It wasn’t flying toward Natanz at all; it was going east, flying away from the scientific site.

Unsure how to interpret this, he called the controller and reported the contact as he brought the MiG back to the point where he had first seen the other plane. The controller bombarded him with questions. Most of them were unanswerable.

“The contact has been extremely intermittent,” Vahid told the major. “I can’t get a good radar fix in the mountains—he’s very low.”

“Are you using your infrared?”

“Affirmative. Weapons are charged and ready. Do I have permission to fire?”

“Affirmative. You are cleared to fire. I thought I made that clear.”

“Affirmative. Do I need to visually identify it? If it’s a drone and—”

“Just shoot the damn thing down,” said the controller.

THE LITTLE PLANE JERKED FEROCIOUSLY AS THE PILOT yanked at the yoke, once more missing the side of the mountain by a few feet. Turk knew their luck wasn’t going to hold much longer. If they couldn’t get the MiG off their backs, they would either pancake into the side of the sheer rocks all around them or be blasted out of the sky by an Iranian air-to-air missile.

As they had just demonstrated, the small UAVs could fly a precise, preprogrammed course. But freelancing was a different matter entirely. They generally relied on outside radar to guide them to a target. Without that he would have to rely on their native sensors—which meant they would have to stay close to the Cessna until the MiG showed up on the infrared.

By then it might be too late.

Turk hit on the idea of widening the search area by putting the two aircraft into a long trail—the first UAV, 36, could stay within four miles of the Cessna, and 37 could stay four miles away from 36. That way they’d see the MiG before it got too close to escape.

Hopefully.

Several minutes passed as the Hydras stretched out behind them. Their air speed was starting to become critical.

There was the MiG, two miles from UAV 36.

A MiG-29 Fulcrum. Iran’s best.

“Control,” said Turk, putting both hands on a control stick and flying the planes simultaneously. “Designate unidentified contact oh-one as target.”

The computer complied, marking the Iranian with that legend. The computer analyzed the aircraft, using the library in the control unit—essentially the same database used by the Sabres and Flighthawks. It ID’ed two R-27 air-to-air medium-range missiles and six short-range heat-seeking R-73s.

The MiG was moving south about 5,000 feet above them, only a mile to the west. Their direction, eastward, was almost exactly abeam of it. Apparently it couldn’t see them.

Yet. It was only a matter of time.

The nano-UAVs were at 10,000 feet. He pushed both noses downward.

“Show intercept,” he told the computer. “Fuel full use.”

The computer plotted the course. Turk nudged the trail plane to the right, but otherwise he was dead on.

“Intercept in thirty seconds,” predicted the computer as the speed of the small aircraft increased.

As the MiG turned left, the computer began recalculating. Turk altered course as well, then realized why the MiG had made that maneuver.

“He sees us!” yelled Turk, raising his head as he yelled at the pilot. “Turn west. Tell him to turn west!”

“OK, OK,” said the Israeli, starting to speak in Farsi.

Turk ducked back down. “Contact range critical,” the computer told Turk.

“Complete intercept,” Turk told the computer. “Autonomous.”

The Hydra engines slammed to life. As UAV 36 twisted toward the MiG, Turk saw two flares light under the MiG’s wings, then two more. They’d just been fired at.

“TWO MISSILES LAUNCHED. REPEAT MISSILES launched,” Vahid told the controller. “I—”

He heard a sharp snap behind him. In the next moment the plane seemed to fall away from him, the left wing veering down. Vahid forgot about everything else—the aircraft he was pursuing, the nuclear research facility, the missiles he had just launched—and fought to recover the plane.

The dive sent him earthward so quickly that he felt light-headed. His breathing was shallow and sharp, reverberating in his head.

One Eye spoke to him from beyond the grave, advising him to roll out, to get his nose attitude right and keep his power up. He recovered from the unexpected roll as if he’d planned it all along, except of course he would never have planned to go down to just barely 2,000 feet, lower than most of the peaks around him. He turned back west and felt the plane thumping. There was something wrong, definitely wrong.