Dog and his copilot, Lieutenant Sullivan, remained silent as they took the plane skyward. They hadn't flown together for very long, but the missions they'd been on had forged a strong bond between them. They had one thing above all others in common-both knew the Bennett as they knew their own hands and legs. The trio of men and machine worked together flawlessly, striding nose up in the sky, spiraling toward 20,000 feet.

With all systems in the green, they set a course to the southwest, flying in the direction of Bacau.

"Flighthawk commander, are you ready for launch?" asked Dog.

"Roger that, Bennett," replied Zen, sitting below in the Flighthawk bay. "I'm showing we have just over ten minutes to the planned release point."

"Affirmative."

"Beautiful day."

"Yes, it is," said Dog, surprised that Zen would notice, or at least take the time to mention it. Generally he was all business.

They turned the aircraft over to the computer for the separation maneuvers. Dog watched his instruments carefully as the Flighthawks dropped off the wings one at a time. The Megafortress continued to operate perfectly.

"Hawk One is at 10,000 feet, going to 5,000," said Zen. "Preparing to contact Groundhog."

Dog acknowledged. Groundhog was Danny Freah, who was introducing one of the Romanian units to the procedures required to interface with the planes. They planned on splitting their time this afternoon between two different units, going over the rudiments of working with the aircraft.

The Megafortress had two large air-to-ground missiles on its rotating bomb rack, but it was unlikely these would be used; even though they were very precise, there was too much chance of collateral damage. The Flighthawks, however, could provide close air support with their cannons if called in by the ground soldiers.

The focus of the mission was to provide intelligence: The Megafortress would use its J-STAR-like ground radar to follow troop movements or even vehicles, while the Flighthawks would provide real-time video of the area where the troops were operating. Though the Whiplash people could use their smart helmets to receive the video instantly, security concerns and numbers meant the Romanian troops would have to use special laptop units instead. Dog worried about their ability to receive the streaming video under battlefield conditions, but that was just one of the many things they'd have to work out as the deployment progressed.

With the Flighthawks away, he checked with his radar operators to see how they were doing. The men sat behind him on the flight deck, each facing a console arranged against the hull of the plane. On the right side, Technical Sergeant Thomas Rager manned the airborne radar, which was tracking flights within 250 miles. On the left, Technical Sergeant Jerry "Spiff" Spilani worked the ground radar. Rager had flown with Dog before; Spiff was new to the crew, though not to the job.

"Not too much traffic down there for rush hour, Colonel," said Spiff. "We have six cars in a five mile stretch."

"You sound disappointed," said Dog.

"Colonel, where I come from, we can get six cars in ten feet," answered the sergeant.

"And they're all stolen," said Sullivan.

"Generally." Spiff was a New Yorker. From da Bronx.

"Groundhog's on the line," said Sullivan, his voice suddenly all business. "Right on time."

On the ground in northeastern Romania

1630.

DANNY FREAH ADJUSTED THE VOLUME ON THE SMART helmet's radio, listening as the Romanian lieutenant completed the exchange of recognition codes with the Bennett. In person, the lieutenant's p.r.o.nunciation was nearly perfect, but the radio equipment made it sound garbled. The lieutenant repeated himself twice before Dreamland Bennett acknowledged.

"OK," said Danny. "Let's get some data from the Flighthawk."

The unmanned aircraft streaked a thousand feet overhead, riding parallel to the nearby highway. Danny listened to the Romanian and Zen trade information. The Romanian lieutenant had trouble understanding Zen's light midwestern drawl, but he was able to see the video from the small plane on his laptop without any problem.

As planned, the lieutenant asked Zen to check out a road a mile south of them; they did that without a problem. Then the Romanians called in a mock air attack on a telephone substation about a hundred meters from the field they were standing in. This too went off without a hitch. The Flighthawk dipped down above the Romanian position, straightened its wings, then zoomed on the cement building, which had been abandoned some years before.

Rather than firing his cannon, Zen pickled off a flare. It flashed red in the fading twilight directly over the building.

The Romanian soldiers cheered.

I must be getting old, Danny thought. They all look like kids.

Aboard the Bennett,

above northeastern Romania

1700.

ZEN PUSHED THE FLIGHTHAWK THROUGH ANOTHER TURN, then dipped its wing to fall into another mock attack. The hardest part of the whole exercise was understanding the Romanians' English.

They weren't very good yet at estimating distances, but since he could use the actual GPS coordinates from the laptops as well as the Flighthawks' sensor to orient himself, finding the target wasn't particularly difficult.

After what he'd had to go through on his last mission, though, what was?

What do you do for an encore after saving the world? he mused.

It was an arrogant, self-aggrandizing thought-and yet it was true, or at least more true than false. Their last mission had stopped a nuclear war; you couldn't top that.

But life went on. There were still enemies to fight, conflicts to solve. Whether they seemed mundane or not.

There were also problems to solve and annoyances to overcome. Zen had decided to wear the MESSKIT instead of the "old" chute. It felt bulkier around his shoulders-not enough to interfere with flying the Flighthawks, but enough that he would have to get used to it.

The Romanian ground controller called for a reconnaissance flight over a nearby village. Zen located it on the Megafortress's ground radar plot. A cl.u.s.ter of suburban-type houses sat south of the main road, the center of town marked by a fire station and a small park. He wheeled the Flighthawk overhead, low and slow. The houses, built of prefab concrete panels, looked like the condo development he lived in back home.

They made him think of Breanna. He shut down that part of his mind and became a machine, focused on his job.

Switching on his mike, Zen described what he saw, four-sided roofs atop sugar-cube houses aligned in eight L's around the crest of a hill. He described two cars he saw moving into the complex, the row of parked compacts at the far end of the lot. He saw two people moving on the lawn below the easternmost house: kids kicking a soccer ball around.

"Very much detail," replied the ground controller.

"Thanks," he said. "Next."

UP ON THE MEGAFORTRESS'S FLIGHT DECK, DOG TURNED the controls over to his copilot and got up to stretch. In remaking the plane so that it had a sleek nose rather than the blunt chin the B-52 had been born with, the flight deck had been extended nearly twenty feet. Calling it s.p.a.cious would have been an exaggeration, but the crews had considerably more elbow room than in the original.

Dog walked to the small galley behind the two radar operators, poured himself a coffee from the zero-gravity coffeemaker-one of the Dreamland engineers' most cherished and appreciated inventions-then took a seat next to the ground radar operator to see what things looked like from his perspective.

"Place looks pretty peaceful," Spiff told him. "You sure they have a revolution going on here?"

"Don't let that fool you," replied Dog.

"No, I won't, Colonel. But we could be looking at the Vegas suburbs here. Minus the traffic. Kind of makes you wonder why these people want to fight."

Dog went across the aisle to check on Rager, who was monitoring airborne traffic around them. The rebels weren't known to have aircraft; Dog's main concern was that a civilian plane might blunder into their path inadvertently. The commercial flight paths to and from Iasi lay to the north and east of where they were operating.

"Here's something interesting on the long-range scan," said Rager, flipping his screen display to show Dog. "These two bad boys just came into the edge of our coverage area."

Two yellow triangles appeared in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. Rager hit another switch, and the ghost of a ground map appeared under the display, showing that the planes were south of Odessa over the Black Sea, 273 miles away.

"Just sitting there," said Rager. "Doing a racetrack pattern."

"Ukrainian?"

"No. Russian. Computer, ID contacts Alpha Gamma six-eight and Alpha Gamma six-nine."

Small boxes appeared next to the yellow triangles; they looked like dialogue balloons in a comic strip.

MIG-29.

RS.

ARM-4AA11, 2AA10 The computer's tags identified the aircraft as Russian MiGs carrying four heat-seeking AA-11 Archer or R-27R missiles and two radar-guided AA-10 Alamo or R-27R missiles.

"Russian air defense," said Rager. "I think they're shadowing us."

"Long way from home."

"Yeah."

"You sure they're watching for us? They're pretty far away."

"True. But if I wanted to sit in a spot where I thought I couldn't be seen, that's where I'd be, just at the edge of our coverage. They may not think we can see them," Rager added. "Two hundred and fifty miles is the limit of their AWACS ships."

"Do they have one out there?"

"Can't tell, but I suspect it. Maybe another hundred miles back. This way, if we come in their direction, it sees us and vectors them toward us."

"Keep track of them."

"Not a problem, Colonel."

Dog went back to his seat. If Rager's theory was correct, the Russians must have been alerted to the Megafortress's flight by a spy at Iasi.

"Ground team's done, Colonel," said Sullivan as he strapped himself back into his seat.

"All right, folks. We're going to knock off," said Colonel Bastian. "Danny, job well done. We'll talk to you in the morning."

"Thanks, Colonel. Groundhog out."

"Set a course for Iasi, Colonel?" asked Sullivan.

"No. Let's do a couple more circuits here. Then I want to break the pattern with a dash east."

"The MiGs?"

"Let's see how they react," said Dog.

Dog told Zen what was going on, then prepared to make his move. He waited until they were coming south, then jammed the thrusters to full military power and turned the plane's nose hard to the east, heading toward the Black Sea. Given their position and the circ.u.mstances, it was far from an aggressive move-but the MiGs reacted as soon as they were within 250 miles.

"Turning east," said Rager. "One other contact-Tupolev Tu-135-I see what's going on now, Colonel."

"Where are the planes?" asked Dog. Rager's theories could wait.

"They're all turning."

Dog flicked the long-range radar feed onto his display. The Russian planes were definitely reacting to him; all three contacts had headed east.

"The Tupolev is tracking our radar transmissions," said Rager. "That's how they know where we are."

The Tu-135-a Russian aircraft similar in some ways to a 727-was outfitted with antennae that detected radar waves at long range. It could detect the Megafortress a few miles beyond the EB-52's radar track because of the way the waves scattered at the extreme edge of their range. There wasn't much that could be done about it, aside from turning off the radar.

"All right," said Dog. He put the plane into a casual turn back toward Iasi, as if they hadn't seen the Russians at all. "Now that we know the neighbors are Peeping Toms, there's no sense calling them on it. Let's get back to the barn for the night."

Bacau, Romania

1825.

GENERAL LOCUSTA OPENED THE FOLDER AND BEGAN running his finger down the list of regimental and battalion commanders and subcommanders, mentally checking off each man he thought he could count on once he made his move. His division commanders had already been taken care of, with promises and bribes. But in some ways these men were even more crucial-they were closer to the troops, and would be directly responsible for acting when he gave the word. All but a few owed their present positions to him, but he knew that was no guarantee they would fall into line. It was important that the groundwork be properly laid.