“I won’t mind taking this baby out for a spin,” Honwana said admiringly. He, Janson, and Hennessy were standing in the gloomy hangar, their eyes still adjusting from the bright sun outside to the shadows within.

The BA609 was a sea-landing-equipped tiltrotor aircraft; like the discontinued Ospreys, it had propellers that enabled vertical takeoffs and landings but that, when tilted to the horizontal position, would enable the craft to function like a fixed-wing airplane. Bell/Agusta had crafted the fuselage of this particular specimen not from steel but from a tough molded resin. The result was an exceptionally lightweight craft that could travel much farther on a liter of fuel than any conventional design—up to four times as far. Its versatility would be important to the success of the mission.

Now Honwana ran his fingertips over the nonreflective surface. “A thing of beauty.”

“A thing of invisibility, if the gods are with us,” said Janson.

“I’ll pray to the ancestors,” Honwana said, with no little mirth. A Moscow-educated die-hard atheist, he was sympathetic to neither indigenous nor missionaryspread forms of religiosity.

“There’s a full tank. Assuming you haven’t put on weight since we worked together last, that should just get us there and back.”

“You’re cutting things close. The tolerances, I mean.” The Mozambican’s eyes were serious.

“No choice. Not my timetable, not my locale. You might say the KLF is calling the shots here. I’m just trying to improvise as best I can. This isn’t a wellscoured contingency plan we’re looking at. More like, ‘Hey, kids, let’s put on a show.’”

“Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in a barn,” Hennessy put in heavily. “With a whole load of high explosives.”

The north coastline of Anura nipped in like a deeply grooved valentine’s heart. The eastern lobe was mostly jungle, sparsely inhabited. Honwana flew the tiltrotorcraft low to the ground through the Nikala jungle. Once over the sea, the plane angled upward, banking nearly forty degrees.

Despite the plane’s curious trajectory, Honwana’s piloting was extraordinarily smooth, anticipating and compensating for wind currents and updrafts. The nowhorizontal nacelles emitted a steady noise, something between a hum and a roar.

Andressen and Hennessy were up front with Honwana, part of the crew, providing essential navigational support; separated by a bulkhead, the two paratroopers were left alone on uncushioned benches in the rear of the aircraft, to confer with each other and go through their last-minute preparations.

Half an hour into the flight, Katsaris consulted his shockproof Breitling and swallowed a 100mg tablet of Provigil. It would adjust his circadian rhythms, ensuring late-night alertness, without the excessive stimulation and exaggerated confidence that amphetamines could induce. They were still two hours away from the drop zone. The Provigil would be in maximal effect during the operation. Then he took another small pill, a procholinergic that would inhibit perspiration.