“Oh, shit,” George “Zero” Tanaka muttered. He strained to take a look at the supercockpit display. “Looks like two planes still on the base, getting ready for takeoff.”

“Fighters,” Wickland said. “MiG-23s. Must be the last of the bombers’ air cover.” He flashed the LADAR on and off several times so he could keep watch on the fighters, taking a laser snapshot and then rolling and turning the three-dimensional image to pick up as much detail as possible. Soon he could see them rolling down the runway— the LADAR even detected their afterburner plumes. “Looks like they’re heading north—not toward us.” He turned to his aircraft commander. “Our mission was to try to destroy the bombers or crater the runway so the bombers couldn’t launch. We missed them. What do we do now? There’s no use attacking the base if the bombers are gone.” His eyes grew wide with fear as he started to guess what Tanaka had in mind: “You’re not thinking of going after the bombers, are you?”

“It’s our only chance of stopping them.”

“We’ve only got eight air-to-air missiles,” Wickland reminded his AC—not just for Tanaka’s benefit, but also to assure himself of how dangerous this plan really was. The EB-52 Megafortress carried eight radar-guided AIM-120 Scorpion missiles in stealthy external weapon pods, along with four AGM-88 HARMs (high-speed antiradar missiles). Internally, the EB-52 carried a rotary launcher with eight AGM-154 JSOW (joint standoff weapons), which were satellite- and imaging-infrared-guided thousand- pound glide bombs that could be targeted by the laser radar and attack computers; plus another rotary launcher with eight Wolverine powered “brilliant” cruise missiles, which could locate and attack their own targets. “It’s crazy. I think we ought to—”

“Listen, Wickland,” Tanaka interrupted angrily, “right now, I don’t care what you think.” He dropped his oxygen mask and looked at his mission commander with pure anger. “I asked you before we entered hostile airspace if you wanted to do this, and you said ‘press on.’ Now we’ve stirred up the hornet’s nest, we’ve got friendlies on the ground directly in harm’s way, and we are not going to back down now.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said, and I was right—this wasn’t our fight, and this is not our country,” Tanaka said. “But we’re committed. Do you understand that, Wickland? The time to back out was twenty minutes ago before Sanusi’s forces entered defended airspace, or even five minutes ago before we started jamming the Libyan SAM sites. Now we’re in the middle of the shit, and I’m not just turning around and going home. So you’d better do your job and do it damn well, or I won’t wait to be blown up by a SAM—I’ll put a bullet up your ass myself. Now give me a heading to those planes.”