“Grizz?”

  “I’m going to have to get out,” answered the other pilot. “I’m sorry. We just aren’t going to do it today.”

  “It’s cool.”

  “I’m going to try to get a little farther north.”

  “Don’t hold it too long,” said Turk.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

  The helicopter that had picked up the last SAS men was about ten miles farther east, and the AWACS controller had another SAR helicopter coming south. The F–16s had been joined by a flight of Eurofighters for air cover. And Shooters One and Two, having just completed their refuel, were heading in their direction as well.

  Turk got a radar indication. Something at the Castle was beaming them.

  “You see that?” he asked Grizzly.

  “Yeah. Bitchin’.”

  The radar was a SURN 1S91 “Straight Flush” used for target acquisition by SA–6s—not particularly welcome under the circumstances.

  The F–16s immediately went to work. But that didn’t make the sweat factor any less for Grizzly or Turk. They flipped on ECMs, hoping to confuse any missile that might be launched.

  But Grizzly had other problems.

  “My other engine’s ramping down,” he said.

  “I’m seeing smoke from the right side,” said Turk, noticing a wisp near the wing root.

  “Ah, shit, I got a lot of problems here,” said Grizzly. “Panel looks like a goddamn Christmas tree. Controls not responding. Damn.”

  Something flew off the right wing.

  “Grizzly—out! Now! Your wing’s coming apart,” said Turk. He was shouting over the radio. “Time to get out. Go! Go!”

  “Left engine failing. I think the fuel pump or something is going.”

  There was the understatement of the year, thought Turk. “Time to bail, damn you.”

  “I want a couple more miles.”

  “Get out now while you can. I’m seeing flames.”

  “Got another warning.”

  “I’m going to shoot you out if you don’t pull that damn handle,” cursed Turk.

  The answer was a small explosion from the aircraft as Grizzly abandoned his plane. A second later the A–10E’s right wing flew apart. The plane jerked hard to the left, then fell into a spin as flames enveloped the fuselage.

  Turk banked, watching the parachute descend. As he took his first turn, he got a launch warning—a trio of SA–6s had been fired in his direction.

  His first thought was to get away from the parachute—he didn’t want Grizzly to be hurt by the missiles. It wasn’t necessarily rational—the odds of the missile hitting the pilot were exceedingly small—but he nonetheless reacted automatically, pushing away from the falling canopy. He then turned to try and beam the missile’s radar—putting the plane on a ninety degree angle to lessen the odds of it tracking him. He fired metal chaff, accelerating, and finally pushing down hard on his wing.

  One of the missiles tanked, pushing down into the desert, where it blossomed in a mushroom of dirt and spent explosive. The other two sailed well past the Hog, losing it in the fog of electronic countermeasures.

  Turk turned back in Grizzly’s direction, hunting for the parachute. It wasn’t where he thought it would be. His heart lurched and a hole opened in his stomach: Where the hell was his wingmate?

  Finally he found the chute, farther east than he had thought. That was a good thing—it was farther from the city.

  “I have a chute,” he told the AWACS. “A good chute. He’s looking good. I have him.”

  A fireball rose from the direction of the city. The missile battery that targeted him had just been hit by radiation-tracking missiles.

  Turk settled into a wide orbit above the parachute. The AWACS vectored in more support aircraft; the SAR helicopter and the Blackhawk with the SAS soldiers both headed for a rescue.

  Turk spotted a pair of pickup trucks coming from the direction of the city. He dropped low and accelerated, heading in their direction.

  “I have two trucks approaching the landing area,” he told the controller.

  “Roger that. We’re seeing them.”

  “I’m hitting them.”

  “Stand by,” said the controller.

  The ROEs directed that Turk could only shoot at the trucks if they took hostile action. But there was no question in his mind what he was going to do. He rolled toward them.

  I should have hit the kids earlier.

  But they were kids.

  “Shooter Four, you are not authorized to engage.”

  “Give me a break,” snapped Turk.

  “Repeat?”

  “I’m going to protect my guy.”

  “Shooter, you are not cleared to engage. We have them under surveillance.”

  Where the hell was your surveillance when he was hit? Turk thought. But he didn’t say that. He forced himself to be logical—got back inside his calm pilot head.

  “I’m going to check them out,” he told the AWACS.

  “Predator is overhead,” said the controller. “We are looking at the truck. No hostile activity or indication at this time.”

  Turk tucked the A–10E toward the ground, riding up parallel to the road. The trucks were ahead.

  “Shooter Four, this is Shooter One,” said Ginella over the radio. Her voice was sharp. “Say your status.”

  “Checking out two trucks headed in Grizzly’s direction, Colonel,” responded Turk.

  “Be advised, Big Eyes is telling us those are civilian trucks. You are not to engage. Repeat. Do not engage.”

  “Negative,” said Turk, who was now close enough to see the vehicles. “Both have men in the back. Uniforms.”

  “Don’t shoot them, Turk. You are not cleared.”

  He flashed by.

  “Shooter Four, what’s your status?” asked the controller.

  Turk didn’t respond. He pulled the Hog around, checked the air around him, looked at the ground, then put the A–10’s nose directly over the road.

  If he wanted, he could take both trucks with his gun in short order.

  And maybe he should do that.

  Was he compensating for having screwed up earlier? But he hadn’t screwed up—he’d done the right thing. They had been kids. Surely.

  He knew what he saw. And yet the other Hog had been hit by a missile. The facts were the facts.

  “Turk, acknowledge,” said Ginella. “Where are you and what are you doing?”

  “I’m looking at them. The trucks. They’re on the road. They’re a mile from where Grizzly’s coming down. Going in that direction.”

  He was sure they must be soldiers—rebels wouldn’t be coming out from the Castle.

  Maybe they’d shoot at him. He pressed the plane down, went over the trucks at barely fifty feet.

  No flash, no launch warning. Not a peep.

  By the time he banked away, the trucks had stopped dead in the road. Both made quick U-turns and headed back in the direction they’d come.

  “Still think they’re sightseers, huh?” said Turk.

  “Not the point, Shooter Four,” responded Ginella.

  “I have helicopters inbound,” said Turk, spotting the approaching birds. He could hear them calling Grizzly on the Guard or emergency band. Grizzly acknowledged, then waved.

  “SAR assets in contact,” reported Turk. “They’re in contact.”

  “Let the choppers do their work,” said Ginella.

  “That’s my plan.”

  Shooter Squadron escorted the helicopter to the coast, then split away as the chopper headed for the Italian carrier Garibaldi.

  Turk got a fuel warning when he was still twenty miles from Sicily. He contacted the tower and the entire squadron was bumped up, allowing him to land right away.

  He pulled himself out of the cockpit, feeling as if every part of his body had been pounded.

  Ginella met him on the tarmac.

  “What the hell happened?” she asked.

  “We were north of the hamlet. They’d just made the pickup of the SAS guys.” Turk held his hands wide, trying to sort it out in his head. It had been so vivid when it happened, yet now it seemed clouded. “There was a group of kids—”

  “Start from the beginning. What happened with the SAS guys? Did they find the pilot?”

  Turk realized he wasn’t even sure, though in fact they had. As he recounted the story, he realized he had either blanked out or simply forgotten vast portions.

  Given how much debriefing he’d been doing over the past few days, he ought to be getting better at this, but for some reason it seemed worse. More details would occur to him as he went, and he had to backtrack and revise.

  “How did you let him get hit?” she asked finally.

  “I—I didn’t let him get hit,” said Turk. “He turned right. I told him to break left. He went into their path.”

  Would that have saved him, though? Turk wasn’t sure.

  She shook her head.

  “The only people I saw on the ground were kids,” added Turk.

  “Kids with a launcher?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  Ginella stared at him.

  “You think I screwed up?” he said.

  “You didn’t see the missile on the ground?”

  “I saw kids. That’s what I saw.”

  She turned and walked away without saying anything else.

  4

  Tripoli

  Kharon’s collaboration with the Russians had brought him any number of complications over the years, and he knew better than to trust them any more than absolutely necessary. And so while he could have asked Foma to arrange for access to Russian satellite intelligence on the war, he decided it was much safer to simply steal it.

  Russian hackers were arguably the best in the world at getting into secure systems, even better than the Chinese groups that tended to dominate news reports. But the security on the Russian government’s own systems left much to be desired. The feed sent to certain Spetsnaz units in Chad and southern Libya used a common and easily defeated encryption. Getting past it was child’s play.

  Finding that out had taken a bit of work on Kharon’s part, but now he enjoyed the benefits, looking at near real-time satellite images as they were relayed to the unit. He sat at the console in his university lair, flipping through the quadrants as they loaded.

  Nothing much had changed in the past two weeks. The reinforced lines were still where they had been for days. The only exception was in the east, where a number of tanks were poised to strike near Sawknah, a small city liberated by the rebels early in the war. Wisps of black smoke drifted in the area.

  Zooming in for detail, Kharon could see irregular troops lining the ruins at the southwest corner of the road. The buildings immediately behind them were badly battered. Many were heaps of rubble. The one three-story that remained intact on that side of the street had several men on the roof, obviously snipers.

  It was impossible to predict the outcome of the battle from the image. But the fact that the government felt strong enough to fight back there surprised Kharon. Everything he had seen to this point had led him to think they were not only losing, but on their last legs. But launching an attack some two hundred miles from their strong point implied they were stronger than he believed.

  The government leadership had just been shaken up as well. Maybe there was life left in them after all.

  But Kharon was not really interested in the direction of the war; he was looking for Rubeo.

  He delved into the Russian intelligence bulletins, searching out information. The name didn’t jump out. Nor were there details about the UAV incident. The Russians seemed not to care about it—at least not tactically.

  That made sense. It had little impact on anything the Russian special ops troops would be involved in.

  One odd thing stood out—the government had fired antiair missiles overnight in the same area where the Sabre UAVs had operated. They had claimed they shot down two aircraft, but NATO had not acknowledged any losses.

  A coincidence?

  Kharon went back to the satellite imagery, examining the grids linked to the summary.

  He spotted two large pickups parked well off the road behind a ridge of sand and rock. There were tents nearby.

  He zoomed to the trucks. They were large American vehicles, unlike the small Japanese models common in the region.

  Rubeo?

  It had to be.

  Damn, he thought. Right under my nose.

  5

  Sicily

  “Looks like Dreamland isn’t the superhero he’s cracked up to be,” said Paulson when Turk walked into the squadron’s ready room.

  “What the hell does that mean?” snapped Turk.

  “It means what it means.”

  “That’s enough,” said Ginella. She was at the front of the room, poring over a paper map.

  “Excuse me,” said Paulson. “I didn’t mean to insult teacher’s pet.”

  “Knock it off, John.” Ginella went to the coffeepot at the side of the room, walking between the two men. She poured herself a cup, even though the coffee was clearly cold. Everyone else took a seat.

  They went through the squadron debrief mechanically. All of the squadron’s pilots and a lot of the enlisted personnel, including Beast and the others who were still suffering from the flu, came in to hear what had happened.

  Turk had always felt a bit like an outsider, but it was worse now, much worse. No one said anything, but he felt that they were all blaming him for Grizzly being shot down.

  What could he say?

  It wasn’t his fault. But that sounded lame. Better to keep quiet.

  He played the scene over and over in his head, trying to re-create what had happened. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t see a missile, or any weapon for that matter—nor a shadow that looked like one.

  The bastards had hidden it somehow.

  “Grizzly will be back tomorrow,” announced Ginella. “I spoke to him right after I landed. He claims he’s going to steal a helicopter off the Italians if they don’t let him go. I’m sure they will send him back—it sounds like he’s eating them out of house and home.”

  The others began applauding. Somehow, that just made Turk feel worse. He slipped out the door, heading in the direction of his car.

  He was already in the lot when his phone began to vibrate. Dreading talking to Ginella or anyone else, he hesitated before pulling it out.

  It wasn’t a call. It was his calendar, reminding him of the appointment he’d made to play soccer with the kids.

  Dead tired, all he wanted to do was pour himself into the car and go home to the hotel. He walked to the car, unlocked it, and got in.

  His key was almost in the ignition when he pulled it back, deciding he just couldn’t blow off the kids. Ten minutes of running around—even twenty—weren’t going to make him that much more tired than he was.

  Hell, maybe he’d just call a taxi anyway. Get a ride to the hotel, grab a few beers and collapse.

  Turk walked over to the day care center, where the children were just coming out for their recreation break. The boys’ shouts cheered him up, and for the next half hour he forgot how tired he was, how depressed he was, how out of sorts he’d been. He laughed and joked with the children, lost in the game. When he was done, he told them he would be back, though this time he was smart enough not to make an exact appointment.

  Turk went to the fence, preparing to hop over. Li was standing there, a big grin on her face.

  “Playing soccer again?” she said.

  “Uh, they’re playing. I’m more of a spectator.”

  “You seemed to be holding your own.”

  “Thanks.” He put one foot in the chain links, then lifted the other over the top bar. Tired but determined not to fall on his face in front of her, he lifted his body over, sliding down slowly.

  “I’m sorry about what happened with Grizzly,” said Li.

  “Yeah.”

  In an instant his spirits sagged. Not only did his fatigue return, but he felt depressed and defensive.

  “I heard Paulson talking,” Li told him. “He was out of line. Everyone knows you did what you could.”

  “I guess everybody thinks I screwed up. That I missed the missile.”

  “No one thinks that,” said Li. “We all know you would have done everything you could.”

  “I was—I flew right over that group, a couple of times,” said Turk. “I was close to them—there was no weapon there. I was close enough to see that they were kids, you know? Older than these guys”—he gestured toward the children in the yard—“but still kids. And there wasn’t a gun. Let alone a rocket launcher.”

  If he’d been in the Tigershark, the aircraft’s AI sections would have ID’ed the weapon for him.

  Maybe he’d grown lazy, relying on the machine to do his job.

  “I really didn’t see anything,” he said.

  Li’s eyes seemed to have grown larger.

  With disbelief, he thought.

  “I gotta go,” he said, turning in the direction of his car.

  “Hey. Wait. Captain—” Li trotted after him.

  “People are pissed because I took their slot, I guess,” said Turk. “I’m sorry—if I thought those kids were a threat, believe me, I would have shot at them. With or with permission.”

  “You would have shot at children? Even with a launcher?”

  Turk pressed his lips together. The truth was, he would have a hard time doing that, even with permission.

  But if he’d seen a missile launcher, if he’d seen something capable of taking down a plane, he would have done it. Definitely. To protect a fellow pilot.