PAVE HAMMER folded itself into a compact 58-foot by 18-foot by 18-foot unit that fit perfectly into the DSRV chamber on the Valley Mistress.

The V-22 family of tilt-rotor aircraft had made a name for itself in the fledgling U.S. Border Security Force, or "Hammerheads," which was to receive sixty of the hybrid aircraft for border patrol and drug-interdiction duty. Hidden within that appropriation bill had been six other birds,

modified by the Air Force, General Bradley Elliott's High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center (HAWC) in Nevada, and transferred to the Special Operations Command. This was to be one of its first actual missions

...

Ifit was to go at all.

In the cramped, cold interior of the second container that formed the new Intel offices aboard ship, Paul White watched as five days' worth of radar plots were replayed on a digital situation board. The map of the target area-a spot ten miles north of a small port and resort town called Liepaja, on the Baltic coast of Latvia, a few miles north of the Lithuanian border-showed numerous aircraft transiting the area. "Which one are we looking at?" White asked.

"PATRIOT says it's this one," an intelligence officer explained. He pointed at a persistent radar dot just north of the town, farther away from the other aircraft that seemed to circle near the town. "Liepaja has a large civil airfield here, called Liepaja East, used by the CIS

Baltic Sea Fleet to resupply the naval patrol base. Lots of helicopter activity. There's another base, a CIS air-defense fighter base, thirty nautical miles east-southeast of Liepaja at Vainode. Mostly older MiG- 19s and MiG-2 1 s-daylight fighters-but once in a while they'll deploy a couple of MiG-29s there. They've also deployed Sukhoi-25 'Frogfoot' attack planes and 'Hind-D' attack choppers, too. I'd assume they have 'em there now.~~

White nodded impatiently-he was well familiar with the deployment of the Commonwealth troops in the Baltic states. Technically those jets and choppers might have belonged to the CIS, but the pilots and commanders who controlled them were Byelorussian. In recent months Belarus had stepped up military activities in Lithuania, ostensibly to protect Byelorussian citizens moving out of Lithuania and to guard products and shipments being transferred across Lithuania from Kalinin, the small sliver of land on the Baltic Sea coast between Lithuania and Poland.

But Lithuania was no threat to Belarus. The real reason for the increased military activity, White feared, was a move by Belarus to at some point occupy Lithuania.

Like Iraq before its invasion of Kuwait, Belarus seemed on the brink of breaking out of its isolation and claiming some valuable, unprotected neighboring territory. All the elements were there, and the parallels between Iraq and Belarus were frightening: Belarus was industrially advanced but cash- and resources-poor; Belarus had a large, well-equipped, and well-trained military, whose officers had seen a great decline in their prestige and perquisites after it joined the CIS; Belarus had no outlet to the sea and had to bargain with others for access to ports and commercial overseas-shipping facilities; and it was very dependent on the CIS, Po