While the crew finished up their preflight checklist, the Striker men went through their own inventory. In addition to his own gear-- camouflage uniform, otherwise unmarked, a nine-inch knife, and one Beretta 92-F 9-mm automatic pistol, also unmarked-- each man was responsible for bringing items the team would require, from the cardboard-box meals of ham sandwiches and candy bars to the field phones to the all-important TAC SAT radio with a parabolic antenna that unfolds for a satellite uplink.

Leaving the men, Squires and Rodgers headed for the cockpit followed by Sgt. Chick Grey. The Striker team had no special needs for the flight, but it was up to the Sergeant to find out if the flight crew required anything of the men, from weight distribution-- not a problem on this mission, where they'd be rattling around the cabin-- to the use of electronic equipment.

"You want to brief him?" Squires asked Rodgers-- with a bit of an edge, the General thought. Or maybe he was just yelling to be heard over the four loud 21,000-pound st Pratt & Whitney TF33-P7 turbofan engines.

"Charlie, I told you-- you're the head chef. I'm just here for dinner."

Squires smirked as they made their way down the ribbed cabin to the open door of the flight deck and introduced themselves to the pilot, copilot, first officer, navigator, and communications officer.

"Captain Harryhausen?" Sgt. Grey repeated the name as the Lieutenant Colonel booted the computer, the navigator looking over his shoulder. "Sir, are you by any chance the same Captain Harryhausen who flew a United DC10 to Alaska last week?"

"I'm that very same Captain Harryhausen, U.S. Air Force Reserves."

A grin tore across the Sergeant's beefy face. "Now if that ain't one for Robert Ripley. My family and me were on that plane, sir! Jeez-- what were the chances?"

"Actually very good, Sergeant," said the Captain. "I've had the Seattle-to-Nome route for seven months now. I put in for this assignment so I could finally fly into someplace with warm sunshine and no ice, unless it was in iced tea."

As the Captain proceeded to tell Sgt. Grey what he already knew-- that his men should refrain from using Disc-mans and Game Boys until he gave the word-- Squires pulled a cable from the laptop, plugged it into the navigator's console, pushed a button on his keyboard, and dumped the data into the C-141B's navigation computer. The process took six seconds; even before he'd closed the Toshiba, the onboard computer had begun matching the flight path with weather reports that would come in every fifteen minutes from U.S. bases along the route.

Squires faced the Captain and patted the computer. "Sir, I'd appreciate your letting me know the minute we can fire this up again."

The Captain nodded and returned the Lieutenant Colonel's salute.

Five minutes later they were taxiing down the runway, and two minutes after that they were banking away from the rising sun, heading southwest.

As he sat beneath the swinging light bulbs inside the wide, nearly empty cabin, Rodgers found himself reluctantly contemplating the downside of what he was doing. Op-Center was just half a year old, its modest twenty-million-dollar annual budget skimmed from CIA and Department of Defense budgets. On the books they didn't exist, and it would be an easy matter for the President to erase them if they ever screwed up big-time. Lawrence had been satisfied, if not impressed, with the way they handled their first job, finding and defusing a bomb onboard the space shuttle Atlantis. Their technoweenie, Matt Stoll, had really come through on that one-- much to the pride and frustration of Director Hood, who had a deep and abiding distrust of technology. Probably because his kid was always whipping him at Nintendo.