Manuel hurriedly reached inside the crate, his hands ripping layers of fibrous packing material out by the wad until, at last, they found the Stinger surface-to-air missile launcher.

The pilot of Batter Two had remained in a circular hover-and-support pattern above the field as Batter One had alighted, lowering its aft cargo ramp to discharge its strike team.

With only a dozen or so hostiles in the runway area, most of them incapacitated by the Sunbursts and Peace-maker rounds, there was little for the team to do but cleanup work. Minutes after Batter One landed, Graham radioed up word that the field was fairly well secured.

"Thanks for the assist, Batter Two," he said. "Good luck in the valley below."

"Roger, on our way," the pilot of the airborne Osprey said, and veered off toward the ledge where it would drop its rappellers.

That was when Manuel stepped out onto the loading ramp of the DC-3 transport, the man-portable SAM launcher on his shoulder.

Manuel had little to decide in choosing his target: The Osprey on the ground had already discharged its men, and the one still in the sky was full of them.

His eye to the sight of the lightweight fiberglass launcher, his hand on its grip-stock, he angled it toward the flying aircraft and activated its argon-cooled IR seeker unit with the touch of a switch. A shaved second later he heard the beep tone indicating a lock-on, and pulled the Stinger's trigger.

His heart stroked once, twice in his chest.

The missile shot toward the departing Osprey with a whoosh of propellant gas.

The pilot and co-pilot of Batter Two did not see the plume of the heat-seeking missile as it streaked toward their fuselage, but the sensor pods on its nose and tail did, and instantly informed them of the threat via readouts on their dashboard and HUDs. At their low-level height above the plateau, the missile would only take a matter of three or four seconds to close, too quickly for an evasive maneuver, or for the limitations of human reaction time to allow either crew member to engage the Osprey's IR countermeasures set.

Which was why its GAPSFREE avionics were failsafed to do so automatically.

Two independent defenses awakened at once: a thermal chaff/decoy dispenser on either wing that ejected bundles of aluminum strips and incendiary flares into the air, scattering infrared bogies to confound the missile's nose-cone guidance system, and an infrared pulse lamp that accomplished much the same thing with tiny gusts of energy emitted at right angles to the fuselage.

The Stinger missile tracked yards wide of its mark to finally detonate against a blank wall of sandstone in its declining arc, harming nothing but the weeds and brambles clinging to its face.

Though Ralph Peterson had been with Sword for almost three years without ever having needed to use a weapon off the target range, his first shots fired in action would be lethal ones.