The area underneath the chopper's flight path was probably strewn with delayed-arming antipersonnel mines, so Lobato reminded himself to avoid it. He shouted, "Assemble foxtrot two, foxtrot two! Assemble!" then ducked and listened. After a few minutes he heard the familiar rustling of feet behind him and he knew his men were on the move.

Time to get the hell out of Dodge.

"Ladybug, target ten o'clock, three miles, altitude seven hundred feet, climbing, airspeed one-zero-five knots," the radar controller aboard PATRIOT reported. "Target turning left . . .

target turning left to intercept..."

The chopper appeared out of nowhere, but fortunately its appearance was telegraphed by a series of small flashes on the ground ahead-and then Fell wondered if the Marines might be down there under those flashes. But there was no time to think about them.

Fell saw that the chopper was doing more than turning to intercept-a second later he could see tiny winks of light and a few bright-yellow lines arc in the night sky. "Target shooting!" he cried out. He hauled back on his control stick, zooming up and over the tracers. The helicopter tried to climb and keep its muzzle pointing at Ladybug, but it didn't have the airspeed that the CV-22 did. Seconds later, after climbing less than two hundred feet, it suddenly lowered its nose again and banked hard to the right.

Fell was expecting that right turn-the pilot sits on the right side of most helicopters, even Eastern Bloc helicopters, so that's the direction chopper pilots prefer to turn-so Fell was banking hard left and descending as soon as he saw the hostile helicopter couldn't pursue.

"Stinger coming on-line," Fell shouted as he flicked the weapon-arming switch on his control stick. After one more turn to the right to line up on the helicopter, Fell heard the growl of one Stinger missile's seeker head locking on to the helicopter's hot exhaust. "One away!" he warned Watanabe as he pressed the trigger. The CIS chopper banked once more, hard to the right, but the tiny Stinger missile tracked it easily. There was a small puff of white flame, a tiny flicker of fire, then darkness.

"Ladybug, splash one," PATRIOT reported. "Area clear of airborne targets. Steer heading one-five-four for pickup, range six miles." Fell did not acknowledge-flying the suggested heading was acknowledgment enough, and there would be plenty of time to thank the crew of the E-3B after the assault team and RAGANU were safely on board the Valley Mistress.

He re-engaged the TFR system and resumed his nap-of-the-earth flight back to the pickup point.

The small dirt road they had worked around all night had a peculiar hairpin turn in it that showed up remarkably well on satellite photos they studied while planning this extraction, and now Lobato knew why-there was a small religious monument, a janseta, in the curve.

This was the "foxtrot two" assembly area, the closest one away from the area where the Helix attack chopper could have strewn mines. Lobato took up a position south of the janseta and sat and waited. After five minutes he used hand gestures to tell RAGANU to stay put, and he carefully inched his way toward the monument.