“Flight indicators are all in the green,” said Armaz.

“Very good,” Breanna told him.

“Turk is checking in,” said Paul Smith, the team liaison handling communications. “You want to talk to him?”

Breanna touched the small earbud hooked into her right ear. It contained a microphone as well as a speaker.

“Channel B,” she said, and the computer connected her into the line. She listened as Turk finished describing their situation to the controller. They were camped on a ridge almost exactly five miles from each of the targets. The sun had just risen.

“Turk, how are you doing?” she asked when he finished.

“We’re good,” he said. His voice sounded faint and tired.

“You’re doing a good job.”

“Yup.”

Shouldn’t she say something more? Shouldn’t there be a pep talk?

The words didn’t come to her. “Good luck,” was all she could think of as the silence grew.

“Same to you,” said Turk. Then he was off.

“NASA asset is airborne and on course,” reported Armaz.

“We have a heat indication in Aircraft 5,” said Bob Stevenson, monitoring the swarm’s systems. “The system is moving to compensate.”

“Please isolate the image,” Breanna said.

The tangle of flight lines on the screen disappeared, leaving one blue line near the center. The line was evenly divided between solid—where the aircraft had gone—and dotted, where the plane would fly. A new line, thicker, but in the same color, appeared on the screen. This showed the actual flight, making it easy to see the variance between what had been originally programmed and what the flight system aboard the nano-UAV was now doing to compensate for the high heat.

“Can we override that?” asked Rubeo from the back.

“Still in a plasma blackout,” said Armaz. The aircraft had, in effect, a speed-and-friction-generated shield around it that prevented communication.

“You should add the general flight-flow vector to your image,” said Rubeo.

“Go ahead,” said Breanna.

The line showed the overall pattern of the swarm, ghosting it over the screen. The errant UAV, being tracked by radar aboard the ship that had launched her, moved parallel to the lower line, getting neither closer nor farther.

“What’s going on?” Breanna asked Rubeo.

“The indicator malfunctioned, not the aircraft,” said Rubeo. “The computer tried to compensate, but it still got the incorrect signal. It’s still trying to compensate, and still being told it’s not working.”

“What’s going to happen to it?” Breanna asked.

“I’d have to work the math,” said the scientist. He touched his ear, a tic Breanna knew meant he was suppressing nervousness—she guessed he had already run the numbers in his head. “But my guess is that it will end up well to the south of the target area by the time the plasma effect dissipates. At that point it will attempt to recorrect. It will be late to the party, if it doesn’t self-destruct.”

“Can we still accomplish the mission?”

“You can lose two more,” said Rubeo. “If they’re the right ones. Of course, nothing is guaranteed.”

24

Iran

TURK RUBBED THE TEMPLES ON BOTH SIDES OF HIS head. The download had finally finished and he was reviewing the plan to strike the sites. It was incredibly complex.

“I can’t decipher some of these flight patterns,” he told Sara Rheingold, who was going over the procedure with him from Whiplash. “I just can’t.”

“You don’t have to, not until that very last set.”

“I have to know that they’re moving correctly.”

“If there’s a problem, you select the alternatives, based on what you’ve seen.” She paused, then came back on the line. “Stand by for Dr. Rubeo.”

“Captain Mako, you have reviewed the overall plan?”

“Yeah, but—”

“The procedure until the final attack is no more difficult than the first attack you rehearsed. When the time comes for manual control, the final speed of the aircraft will be well under one hundred knots. You will have an easy time guiding them.”

“Well—”

“The flight control computer aboard the aircraft can slow their speed down to twenty-one knots if necessary. That’s the last command stored. You will have an easy time taking them over. You fly them in stages. The other aircraft have been programmed to orbit or stand by in a way that preserves their flight energy until given an order to proceed. Each XP-38 UAV will be ready for you when you need it.”

“Unless something goes wrong.”

“Captain, may I suggest that you spend the next thirty-eight minutes going through whatever points you are confused about with my staff, and review the diagrams of the target sites. You really don’t have much time to waste fretting over things you can’t control.”

25

Over Iran

VAHID TURNED THE MIG NORTHWARD, MOVING IN THE general direction of the ground team that had just contacted him. He’d crisscrossed the area so many times in the past hour that he had lost track. Both he and Lieutenant Kayvan, his wingman, had landed once and refueled “hot”—waiting on the runway as fuel was pumped into their planes so they lost little time. They were once more getting close to their reserves, without any tangible results.

“We’ll run into one of the mountains before we find anything,” said Kayvan.

“You better die if you do,” snapped Vahid.

“At least it’s getting light. Maybe I can see.”

Vahid nosed Shahin One through a thousand meters, looking for the ground unit he was supposed to be in contact with.

The unit had responded after another driver reported seeing a truck on the hillside. The report was vague and the location and descriptions haphazard at best. The ground troops as well as the MiGs had looked over dozens of hillsides without results. Granted, it was dark and the terrain rugged, but the MiG’s radar—reverse engineered from Russian equipment by the Iranians themselves—could detect a ground target the size of a truck or tank at some thirty kilometers. Nothing had appeared all night.

It didn’t help that he had never trained to perform a night search. His wingman had barely practiced ground attack at all, and Vahid wouldn’t have been terribly surprised to find that Kayvan couldn’t effectively handle the radar. He was hardly a gifted pilot; he’d gotten his spot in the air force solely because he was the son of a member of parliament.

Vahid scanned outside the cockpit, peering down at the bluish earth. The terrain looked like a blanket slung over a child’s bed. Here and there small tufts of black—rocks and bushes—poked from the fabric.

A narrow crevice appeared in the blanket. It widened slightly, spreading north.

“Ground Two, I am over the road,” he radioed. “Can you hear my engine?”

“Negative.”

“I am flying right over the road,” he said.

“We do not have a visual. Sorry.”

“Repeat your position.”

Vahid climbed, trying to locate the ground unit. He was at the coordinates they had given him; obviously, they were mistaken.

Idiots.

They were some fifty kilometers from Qom; the Tehran-Qom Highway was on his left as he came south.

Maybe the jerk was reading the coordinates backward, giving what should be the second set first. Vahid made the mental correction and changed course. Before he could resume his search, the radio bleeped with a call from the Pasdaran colonel, Khorasani. Vahid gave him as diplomatic a report as possible, before adding that he and his wingmate were very low on fuel.

“You are to stay in the area as long as the ground unit needs you,” said the colonel.

“I may need a divert field.”

“What does that mean?”

“A place nearby to land.”

“The closed air base—will that be suitable?”