Dreamland

One of the men pointed to the floor, indicating they should sit. Gu

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 Gu

“Yeah. You’re probably right,” said Gu

“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.” Gu

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 Gu

At the end of the hall, Gu

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

“Am I dreaming?” Gu

“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. Je

Je

“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, ru

“Drop point at zero-two,” said Brea

“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 Brea

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. Da

Talcom gripped his SAW so tightly Da

“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,” Da

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.

Brea