"What was that?" the gunner asked.

"We lost it!" the tower replied.

"The plane?"

"The radar!"

The men at the control panel punched in the last-known coordinates, and massive gears ground quietly as the massive black barrels were swung into position. They were still moving when a sonic boom announced that the arrowhead-shaped aircraft had arrived.

Guided by its forward-looking laser radar and a low-light TV screen, the F-117A easily found the ship that had attacked the Mirage. It was sitting on the runway with two other MiGs on either side.

The pilot reached to the left, right beside his knee, and pressed a red button set in a yellow square with diagonal black stripes. At once, the air outside the craft was torn by the loud hiss of the optically guided ABM-65 missile, the slender rocket ripping through the five thousand feet between the plane and the target in just under two seconds.

The MiG was lifted and torn apart in a titanic fireball that turned night into day and then day into flaming dusk. The planes on either side were flipped onto their backs and debris from the explosion was scattered in every direction, the blast itself shattering windows in the tower, the hangars, and in over half the twenty-two aircraft at the field. Flaming pieces of fabric and plastic fell everywhere, starting small fires in buildings and on the brush surrounding the landing strips.

One gunner was killed in the blast, his back pierced by a ten-inch shard of metal.

The commander managed to scramble four jets, but the F-117A had swung back toward the sea and was racing toward the Halsey before they were even airborne.

CHAPTER SIXTY

Wednesday, 3:45 A.M.,

KCIA Headquarters

Director Im Yung-Hoon was exhausted. Another cup of coffee would keep him going, if it ever got to his office. Along with the report from the lab. They'd fingerprinted the bastard fifteen minutes ago, and scanned it into the computer immediately. The damn thing was supposed to work at the speed of light, or some crap like that.

Yung-Hoon rubbed his cadaverously deep eyes with spindly fingers. He pushed his long graying hair from his forehead and looked around his office. Here he was, the head of one of the up-and-coming intelligence agencies, four floors and three basements packed with the latest analysis and detection equipment, and nothing seemed to work right.

They had fingerprints of all kinds in their database. From police blotters, college records, even pens and glasses and telephones touched by North Koreans. Agents of his had gone so far as to remove doorknobs from North Korean military bases.

How long should it take to find a match?

The phone rang. He poked the Speaker button.

"Yes?"

"Sir, it's Ri. I'd like to send these prints over to Op-Center in Washington."

Yung-Hoon exhaled hard through his nose. "Have you nothing?"

"So far, no. But these may not be North Koreans or known criminals. They could be from another country."

The second phone rang; his assistant Ryu's line. "Very well," the Director said. "Send them over." He punched off the first phone and poked on the second. "Yes?"