If not for the unusual maneuver the aircraft would have collided. Instead they missed by several feet, but there was a horrendous metallic crunch as the landing gear grazed the whirling rotors. The rotors disintegrated, and the helicopter seemed to hang for a moment before it plummeted back to the ground, where it exploded in a ball of flame. The wing wobbled from the impact, but Zavala got it back under control. He kept climbing before he leveled off at five thousand feet.

Zavala realized he had forgotten to breathe. He puffed out his cheeks and gulped air into his lungs so quickly the effort made him dizzy. Austin asked him to do a damage check. He did a visual inspection of the plane from his perch. The fuselage was riddled with bullet holes. Scraps of aluminum continued to peel off, and a second engine was starting to smoke.

“She looks like a wedge of Swiss cheese, but she's a tough old bird.”

He put the flying wing on a course that would take them into the vicinity of Nome. There was no need for altitude, and he kept the plane at a few thousand feet. After a while he started laughing.

“What's so funny, compadre?” Austin called out from his perch, where he was fiddling with the radio.

“I was just wondering what they're going to say when we come tooling in all shot up with a fifty-year-old stealth bomber.”

“Simple. We'll say we were flying a mission and were kid napped by a UFO.”

Zavala shook his head. “That's almost as unbelievable as the real story,” he said.

The arrival of the bullet-riddled flying wing had been the biggest event to hit Nome since the original Iditarod. Word of the odd shaped black plane that had landed without landing gear on a sheet of foam had spread like wildfire, and before long it was surrounded by curious townspeople. Austin had called Sandecker from the airport to report his findings and to request some muscle power. Sandecker got in touch with the Pentagon and learned that a Special Operations team was on maneuvers at Elendorf Air Force Base outside Anchorage. The team was ordered to fly into Nome. After Austin briefed the Special Ops leaders at a strategy session, they decided to send the helicopter ahead to scope the situation out, with a quick followup by the main assault force.

It was something of a coincidence that Austin and Zavala returned to the secret blimp base in a Pave Hawk helicopter. The sixty-four-foot-long aircraft was the same kind of helicopter that patrolled Area 51, the top-secret location that UFO buffs say holds alien remains and a spaceship that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. The helicopter had come in alone at a speed of a hundred and fifty miles per hour, flying low over the tundra to avoid detection. As it came up on the base, it made one pass over the water-covered airstrip, scouring the ground with its motion and vibration sensors. Finding no signs of life, the chopper went into a wide circling pattern. On board was a crew of three, eight heavily armed Special Operations troops, and two passengers, Austin and Zavala, who scanned the skies expectantly. They didn't have long to wait. A fixed-wing plane appeared from the direction of the sea and passed over the base. The four-engine turboprop Combat Talon was especially designed for inserting a Special Operations Team under any conditions. Dark objects dropped from the fuselage and within seconds blossomed into twenty-six parachutes. The paratroopers floated down into the low hills behind the flying wing hangar.