"Pre-launch sweep," White called out to Operations Officer Knowlton. "In progress, Paul,"

Knowlton replied. "Radar reports negative. That Gagarin radar ship is over our horizon at one-five miles-Ladybug needs to stay below one hundred feet and no less than fifteen miles to stay outside of his normal radar horizon." Knowlton said "normal" because the Gagarin-class ship was reported to have shipborne over-the-horizon radars that they very well could employ. "Data being transmitted to Ladybug-he'll have it on his tactical computer and should have a course to keep him well out of range. His initial heading should be one-six-zero, no farther east than that. Pre-launch report from PATRIOT coming in now.~~

The pre-launch radar scan was worse than before: the helicopter was still in the target area, and there were more boats than before along the coastline. "Looks like fishing vessels to me," White said to Knowlton.

His operations officer gave him a questioning expression-how could White know they were only fishing boats?

"It's about the right time for them to head out," White added, as if he had heard Knowlton's unspoken question. Then again, they might not have been fishing boats-they could have been Soviet patrol boats. But no great numbers of patrol boats had ever been deployed like this before, so either they were indeed just fishe~en... or the Soviets somehow knew they were coming.

"Pre-launch from PATRIOT shows clear," Knowlton reported as a teletype machine on the bridge clattered away. He went to the small repeater scope, which had a smaller version of the Intel section's digital situation screen. "Can't tell about those boats-they're not traveling in much of a straight line, as if they're on a course to a particular spot. But only a few I can see are coming from the military docks-the rest look like they're coming from the commercial docks. No aircraft up, except for our friend-but it looks like he might be heading back to base."

"Must be refueling," White said. "How long does it take to refuel a helicopter?"

"Not long," Knowlton replied. "He'll be up again by the time Ladybug is feet-dry." He paused, looking at White with growing concern. "But we can't delay the launch or we'll run out of daylight."

"I know, I know," White exclaimed. "We're committed. If Fell or PATRIOT sees a problem developing, we'll wave Ladybug off, and RAGANU will have to go deep into hiding-or make a run for Poland.

Jesus, what we need right now is a good thunderstorm to hide in."

But they did not even have the good luck of bad weather to help them on this one.

White had reported that they needed to be no higher than one hundred feet to go under the radar from the Gagarin-class radar ship. One hundred feet would have seemed like a mile to Fell and Watanabe right now, because they were flying their CV-22 in full airplane mode only thirty feet above the Baltic Sea. The plane's engine nacelles swiveled down to full horizontal, so the helicopter rotors were now airplane propellers. Aided by the high-resolution infrared scene projected onto their helmet-mounted sights by the AAR-50