Far behind them, in a fairing between their aircraft’s twin V-tails, a small oblong cylinder detached itself from its mounting and began to trail behind the aircraft on a thin carbon-fiber-reinforced fiber-optic cable. The tiny object, soon trailing several hundred feet behind the AL-52, was an ALE-50-towed electronic countermeasures decoy. Just three feet long and six inches in diameter, it was invisible to the Libyan air defense radars that surrounded them at that moment.

The aircraft was a modified B-52 Stratofortress bomber— not a U.S. Air Force warplane, but an experimental aircraft modified by Patrick’s company, Sky Masters Inc., called an AL-52 Dragon. The warplane he was sitting in was so advanced that even Patrick, who had been involved in its development both in and out of the Air Force for years, was truly amazed. What he was really sitting in, he realized with a mixture of awe and glee, was ... the future. “Star Wars” was no longer a Reagan-era pipe dream or the name of a hugely successful science-fiction motion picture series—it was right here, right now. The AL-52 Dragon combined the absolute state-of-the-art in laser technology, high-speed computers, miniaturization, stealth systems, and systems integration to produce the world’s first true twenty-first-century weapon system, using technology that had never been deployed on an aircraft before.

The airframe itself was based on the EB-52 Megafortress modification of the B-52H Stratofortress bomber, with stealthy composite fibersteel skin and frame, four powerful turbofan engines replacing the original eight turbofans, a V- tail stabilator replacing the big cruciform tail, and an advanced self-protection suite, including radar and infrared jammers, towed arrays, decoys, and Stinger aerial land mines. The original six-person crew had been replaced by enough state-of-the-art computers and artificial intelligence systems that now only two crew members, an aircraft commander and a mission commander, were required to be on board—and, in an extreme emergency, either could bring the plane home alone.

The Megafortress was designed as a stealthy flying battleship, able to penetrate heavily defended targets deep behind enemy lines and employ every air-launched weapon in the American arsenal—and a few that had been dreamed up just for it—with great precision. The Dragon variant of the Megafortress battleship retained the conventional attack capabilities—it could carry up to twelve thousand pounds of ordnance on wing hardpoints, including cruise missiles, air-to-air missiles, and even antisatellite and antimissile weapons. Patrick knew all about the devastating warfighting capabilities of the EB-52 Megafortress—he had spent more than fifteen years of his life working on it. Sky Masters Inc. still flew several versions of the EB-52 for flight test and research purposes, still hoping that the Air Force would someday take the roughly one hundred B- 52H Stratofortress bombers in flyable storage out of mothballs and have the company convert them to either EB-52 Megafortresses or AL-52 Dragons.