"Yes."

"And if you are right, it is a great sacrilege."

Stoner nodded.

"You will be with me in this group," the colonel told him. "Our helicopter will be the first down."

"Right."

Again Stoner wondered if it was a setup, if he'd been fooled. Perhaps the charges had been set weeks before and were waiting now for the troops-waiting for him.

Doubt gripped him. He thought about the Dreamland pilots, watching from across the border. He envied them. Their jobs were entirely physical. They could push their bodies to perform, rely on their trained reactions, their instincts. They trained and retrained for different situations, dogfights and bombing runs, missile attacks and low level escapes. But Stoner had no such luxury. There was no way to train for what he did. Knowing how to fire a gun into a skull at close range, to fake a language-these were important and helpful tools, but not the substance of his success. His test had come days before in Bucharest, when he'd stared into Sorina's eyes, when he'd stroked her side, when he'd gauged her intent.

That moment was dark to him, lost somewhere down the gap between the ledges he was jumping between.

"We are ten minutes away," the colonel told him.

"I'm ready," said Stoner.

Aboard EB-52 Johnson,

over northeastern Romania

2152.

ZEN NUDGED THE THROTTLE, PUSHING HAWK ONE CLOSER to the last of the helicopters carrying the Romanian troops. The chopper was flying just above treetop level, tail up, moving fast for a helo but slow compared to the Flighthawk.

"Border in zero-five seconds," warned the computer.

"Thanks," mumbled Zen. He pulled hard on the stick, banking away just before crossing the line.

"They have two targets," Dog told Zen, relaying the information pa.s.sed along by Stoner. "Sullivan is entering the coordinates. Both are a little more than fifty miles into Moldova. We won't be able to go there, but we can see what's going on."

Dog meant that the radars on the Megafortress would give them a good idea of where the helicopters and the trucks were, and would also allow them to warn the Romanians if a large force of guerrillas or Moldovan soldiers suddenly appeared. But as far as Zen was concerned, they were voyeurs at the edge of battle, watching helplessly.

Bacau, Romania

2155.

GENERAL LOCUSTA PUT DOWN THE SATELLITE PHONE AND raised his head, scanning his command center at the Second Army Corps headquarters. He needed to keep his head clear, needed to be as calm as possible. It was coming together beautifully, everything going exactly as he had hoped, as he had planned.

"Colonel Brasov has touched down," announced the captain coordinating communications from the a.s.sault teams. "No resistance yet."

"Yea!" yelled one of other officers.

"Who said that?" shouted Locusta.

The room fell silent. The general turned his gaze around the room.

"General, it was me," said one of his lieutenants, rising. The young man's face was red.

"This is not a time for youthful exuberance," said Locusta. The man's forthrightness impressed him and he tried to soften his tone. "We will each of us do our duty. We have jobs to do."

"Yes, General. I apologize."

"Accepted. Get back to work. All of you, work now. We will capture the criminals and make them pay."

Moldova

2155.

STONER TIGHTENED THE STRAP ON THE AK-47 AND WAITED as the helicopter closed in on the target in the dark. The pilots had night goggles, but even without them he could see the outlines of the spire in the distance.

Someone began shouting in the back. The helicopter bucked to the side. There was a rush of air.

Now!

Go!

The dim red of the interior lights gave the men just enough light to see as they jumped into the field, the helicopter just touching down.

There was an orange flash near the dark hull of the church, then small polka dots of yellow, tiny bursts of color that glowed into red curlicues.

They're shooting at us, he thought.

She wasn't lying. Thank G.o.d.

Behind him, the helicopter moved backward, escaping as a flurry of slugs began sailing through the air. Stoner ran forward, then threw himself down behind the last row of headstones in the large churchyard. Bullets exploded above his head.

The Romanian soldiers began moving up along the graves, yelling directions to each other. Stoner pushed himself to his knees, still struggling to get his breath. The stone to his right exploded into shards, raked by the heavy gun. He threw himself back down, working on his elbows and belly to his right.

The machine gun was in a stairwell next to the church. A low thud shook the ground. The machine gun fire stopped. One of the Romanians had fired a mortar point-blank into the stairwell, killing the gunner.

Someone shouted. Another person, to Stoner's left, shouted back. A flare went off, turning the night white and black.

Six, seven dark shadows ran to the building, jumped down the stairwell. Others came toward them from the road. The mortar fired again; this time it landed short, scattering the guerrillas but not stopping them as they flowed out of the church.

A squad of soldiers had fast-roped down onto the street. They came up now, guns blazing, catching the guerrillas from the rear unawares. Their attack had been coordinated with the mortarman; no sh.e.l.ls fell as they worked they way toward the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs.

A loud series of booms followed as the soldiers forced their way inside. A second group, this one from the cemetery, ran up to reinforce them.

Stoner waited, watching. If it was a setup, the place would explode now, b.o.o.by-trapped.

It didn't. He started in motion again, picking his way through the headstones toward the houses on the other side of the church, guessing that the rebels would be housed there.

The graves were laid out in a haphazard pattern, some very close together, others wide apart, and it took Stoner time to weave his way forward. As he turned to go through a tight cl.u.s.ter, he spotted four or five shadows to the east of the church. His first thought was that he was seeing clothes fluttering in the wind. Then he saw sticks waving with the clothes.

He brought the AK-47 up and fired, screaming as he did.

"The guerrillas! They're coming from the other side of the church!"

He shot the magazine so quickly he was surprised when the bolt clicked open. The guerrillas quickly got down and fired back.

Stoner reloaded, then began moving again, sure he would be killed if he stayed where was. He caught part of his arm on a crumpled rosebush. The thorns ripped his flesh.

He kept going, moving to the left. There was more gunfire now, not only in front of him but behind.

Pulling himself along the ground, Stoner felt his hand sc.r.a.pe on cement. He'd come to the path that ran along the east side of the church and went up toward the back of the houses.

The gunfire intensified, rifles flashing back and forth, occasionally interrupted by a grenade blast. Stoner tried to sort out where the forces were. He was facing south, crouched at the corner of the cemetery. The church was in front of him and to his right, a little to the west of his position. The guerrillas had come from a yard to his left.

But the real danger, he thought, was the houses behind him. If there were guerrillas there, they could come in and attack the attackers from the rear. The colonel had detailed a squad to come through the cemetery and head in that direction, but apparently they had been pinned down somewhere along the way.

Stoner turned around so that his back was to the church. Then he began crawling back along the cement walkway.

A line of thin bushes provided some cover to the right, throwing him in shadow. They thickened into a row of hedges after fifteen or twenty feet. Stoner hunkered next to them, trying to listen hard enough to sort the sounds of the night into some kind of sense. But he couldn't hear much over the echoing gunfire behind him.

Stoner rose upright about halfway, just enough to see shadows moving on the other side of the hedges. Dropping to his knee, Stoner sighted the AK-47 along the row of bushes. The cold of the night froze him into position, pushing away time, pushing away fear and even adrenaline. It swathed him in its grasp, and he waited, a stone in the night.

Finally, shadows pushed through an opening thirty yards away. One, two...Stoner waited until five had come through, then pushed his finger hard on the trigger, moving across to his left, taking down the black shapes. Cries of pain and agony rose over the fierce report of the gun. The Kalashnikov clicked empty.

Stoner cleared the mag, slammed in a fresh one, and fired in what seemed to be one motion, one moment. The cold of the night intensified, freezing his breath in his lungs as the shouts and screams crescendoed.

His rifle once more empty, Stoner stomped his right foot down and threw himself to the left, spinning amid the gravestones.

He lay on his back, reloading. Stoner heard a rocket-propelled grenade whistle over his head; the sound was more a hush than a whistle, and the explosion a dull thud against the wall of the church.

A second grenade flew past, even closer. But there was no explosion this time; the missile was a dud.

Meanwhile, the squad that had been pinned down rallied to fight the guerrillas near the hedge. The next ninety seconds were a tumult of explosions and gunfire, tracers flashing back and forth, the darkness turning darker. The mortar began firing again, the thud-pump, thud-pump of its sh.e.l.ls rocking the ground.

Cries of the wounded rose above the din. Finally, a pair of soldiers ran forward from Stoner's left-Romanians, rushing the last guerrillas. Three more followed. A man ran up to Stoner and dropped next to him, putting his gun down across his body, obviously thinking he was dead.

"Hey, I'm OK," Stoner said.

The Romanian jumped.

"It's OK," said Stoner. "It's the American. I'm all right."

The soldier said something in Romanian, then got up and followed the others surging into the other yard. Stoner rose slowly. When he saw that the soldiers wouldn't need his help, he turned toward the church.

The trucks had finally arrived, and soldiers were now swarming into the area. The church had been secured; soldiers climbed up the stairs, boxes of doc.u.ments in their arms. Two guerrillas, bound and blindfolded, sat cross-legged a few feet from the bas.e.m.e.nt entrance. The Romanian soldier behind them raised his rifle toward Stoner as he approached, then recognized him and lowered it.

Stoner pulled his small flashlight from his pocket and shone it into the men's faces, which were bruised and swollen; both looked dazed.

"You speak English?" he asked them, kneeling so his face was level with theirs. "What are your names?"

Neither man said anything.

"English?" Stoner asked again. "Tell me your names."

Nothing.

"I can get a message to your families that you're OK," Stoner said. "If I knew who you were."

Their blank stares made it impossible to tell if they were being stubborn or just didn't understand what he was saying.

Stoner switched to Russian, but there was no recognition. The men were Romanian.

"It would probably be better for you if people knew you were alive," he said in English. "There'd be less chance of accidents."

But the men remained silent.

Two other prisoners had been taken, both of them superficially wounded. Neither wanted to talk. At least thirty guerrillas were dead. The Romanians had lost only three men.

With the church and the immediate ground secured, squads of soldiers worked their way through the nearby houses, searching for rebels or anything they might have left behind. Stoner watched them move down the nearby street, surrounding a house, then rousting the inhabitants. Meanwhile, the papers and a computer that had been found in the church bas.e.m.e.nt were loaded into a truck, to be transported to the helicopters and then flown back to Romania.

"Ah, Mr. Stoner," said Brasov when the colonel found him at the front of the church. "Good information, yes. Good job, American."

"What are you going to do with the dead guerrillas?" asked Stoner.