“Thanks, Jon. My dad always told me everyone likes a good pickpocket—but just as a joke. It’s easy. I never picked a pocket to put anything in before, though.”

“The support aircraft will be ready to launch in about four hours, fully loaded with every weapon we can carry,” Jon said. “The bombers should be airborne a few hours after that. They’ll be loaded to the gills too with external weapons, so they won’t be stealthy, but we’ll have to risk it. I hope Patrick and Megafortress Two will be up there clearing a path for us.”

“Is this going to work, Doc?” Landow asked. “We’ve broken just about every federal law in the books already—we’re going to make it a million times worse by flying those planes to Libya. Libya is a prohibited country—technology export and import sanctions, terrorist support sanctions, money sanctions, travel and immigration restrictions, the works. If we don’t get our asses shot down by the Libyans, we could all be in prison for the rest of our lives.”

“Nah. Everything’ll be okay,” Jon Masters said confidently, giving Kelsey a reassuring hug. “You haven’t been with the company too long, John. We do this sort of thing all the time.”

“And you’ve never been caught?”

Jon shrugged, then gave Landow a sheepish grin. “Well... we’ve always gotten away with it before,” Jon admitted. “That’s just as good.” He turned to Kelsey. “Unfortunately, the only plane we won’t have with us is the second Dragon airborne laser aircraft. We can’t fly it in its current state unless we remove all the plasma-pumping equipment you’ve put on it and reassemble the diode pumping system on the laser. You gave it a good try, Kels.”

“Jon, I promise, it will work,” Kelsey said. “Don’t keep on thinking in two-dimensional ways. The plasma generator doesn’t need to be a multimegawatt monster—all we need is a large pulse for a hundredth of a second to excite the neodymium lasing amplifier chips. Let’s reassemble the plasma generators we have, install them, and try it.”

“We’re going to lose our lab in less than eight hours, Kels—”