The creepy-crawling sensation on the back of the lieutenant’s neck was raging now; he crushed the cigarette out with a stamp of a foot. “Radar . .. ?”

“He just disappeared off the scope, sir,” the radar operator reported. “I had his transponder signal and primary target just a moment ago—now it’s gone.”

“Any ELTs?”

The radio operator switched his intercom panel—and sure enough, they heard a pingpingpingping! signal on the international emergency frequency. The ELT, or emergency locator transmitter, activated automatically upon impact if the helicopter crashed.

“Shit,” the lieutenant cursed, “he crashed. I thought he said he was bingo fuel—he should’ve had at least a thirty-minute reserve. Those hot dog helo pilots would rather kill themselves than admit they screwed up and stretched their fuel past safe tolerances. Give me a bearing to the signal, notify Units Ten and Nine and have them triangulate his position, then send it to Brigade to organize an immediate rescue.” He picked up the command phone. “Brigade, Twelve.”

“Go ahead.”

“Sir, we have lost contact with Lion Seven. We are picking up an ELT; he may have crashed. He reported he was low on fuel, but he first reported that he . ..”

“Sir, unidentified fast-moving aircraft inbound, range thirty-five kilometers and closing!”

“Release all batteries! ” the lieutenant shouted, still with his finger on the phone’s call switch. He threw the phone into its cradle. “Release batteries and fire!” He looked at the radar screen—it was a hopeless jumble of streaks, dots, swirls, and radiating electrical noise.

“We are being jammed, sir! Heavy jamming, all frequencies!”

“Switch to optronic control, search along the last known bearing. Switch the radar to short-scan multifrequency to simulate missile guidance uplink—let’s see if he switches his jammers to counter the uplink. Where’s the optronic crew? Report, dammit!”

“Optronics crew searching along predicted flight path ... Sir, optronic crew has detected a fast-moving target!”

“Match bearings and reacquire in medium-scan mode!”

“Target reacquired... target locked in medium-scan mode.”

It was a crapshoot after this: time for the missile to fly to its target minus ten seconds, the minimum amount of time it took to lock on with the more precise short-range scan, then transmit the uplink data to guide the missile to its target. No time for guessing now .. . “Release batteries and launch two.”

The deputy commander hit the “LAUNCH” alarm, flipped a switch guard, and then reached down inside the switch to a covered button underneath. Moving the switch set off another alarm in the command cab; the lieutenant silenced the horn with a commander’s “pickle switch” that he held in his left hand, which issued a consent command to the launch controller.

Outside, at a launcher two hundred meters away, a three-thousand-pound missile popped out of its launch tube from a slug of compressed nitrogen. The missile flew straight up for about seventy feet before the solid-rocket booster ignited, quickly accelerating the missile to well over five times the speed of sound.