“Very well.” The lieutenant was one of the best battery commanders in the entire brigade. The lieutenant started out as a conscript after dropping out of high school at the age of fifteen. By the age of eighteen, he had accepted a regular enlistment, and just two years after that was made a noncommissioned officer. Being prior enlisted himself, he could handle his enlisted men, conscripts, and noncommissioned officers just fine. “Report your threat assessment and engagement to the brigade operations officer immediately after you’ve called off the alert.” There were a few clacks in the net; then, on the brigade-wide channel, the lieutenant heard, “All units, all units, Twelve has issued a general air defense warning for the brigade. Report and correlate all contacts now. This is Brigade, out.”

My God, what in hell is going on here?” Greg “Gonzo” Wickland, the mission commander aboard the EB-52 Megafortress, exclaimed. They had just launched from Jaghbub and had no sooner turned southbound on course than the entire Libyan air defense network seemed to light up all at once. “SA-10, SA-11, SA-5s—every theater and tactical air defense radar is on the air all of a sudden.”

“Sanusi’s men didn’t make it,” the aircraft commander, George “Zero” Tanaka, surmised. “The Libyans probably shot down the Mi-24, and that alerted the whole country.”

“What do we do?”

“We press on,” Tanaka said. “The Hind helicopter was just a feint—we can still go in on our own.”

Wickland shook his head. “This is crazy, Zero,” he said. “We’ve got the gas to get us all the way to Iceland—why didn’t he just order us to head west and link up with a tanker to send us home? We’re loaded down with crappy Russian bombs and missiles that probably won’t work; we’re surrounded by bad guys; and this isn’t even our damned fight!”

“Just button it, will you, Gonzo?”

“I’m serious here, man!” Wickland shouted. “What are we doing here? I’m an engineer, for Chrissakes! I’ve never been in the military! My job is designing and testing weapons and attack systems and writing software, not dropping bombs on Libyans who want nothing more than to shoot my ass off! I want to—”

“Gonzo, I don’t give a shit what you want,” Tanaka interrupted. “Just keep the computers humming and shut your pie-hole.”

“Sure, go ahead—bitch at me. You’re the ex-Air Force war hero—you get off on this shit, not me. It’s McLanahan who’s going to get our asses shot off! I didn’t come out here to ...”

“Wickland, I said, shut the fuck up” Tanaka said. “You knew exactly where we were going and what we were going to do, when we briefed this mission. You knew we were going to attack Libya, refuel and rearm, then attack again. You took the money, bought your Mercedes and your big house in Memphis, and got your big stock options. Now you gotta earn your money. So just fly the plane, keep those computers going and that nav system up tight, and shut up”