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minutes.”
    â€œAnother one bites the dust.”
    â€œBut it might not bite the dust. It might make a nice soft landing in the desert,” Patrick said worriedly. “And if it does . . .”
    â€œThen those Taliban goons or anyone else who gets their hands on it will have themselves the latest in American UCAV technology,” Rebecca said. “In forty minutes it’ll be halfway to the Persian Gulf. Can’t you self-destruct it?”
    â€œI have no control over it at all,” Patrick said. He thought for a moment; then: “Follow it.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œMaybe if we can get closer to it, it’ll respond to our direct datalink signals.” He spoke commands into the computer, and the heading bug on Rebecca’s multifunction display swung westward. “There’s your heading bug. Center up.”
    â€œNo way, General,” Rebecca said. “That’ll take us over . . . hell, General, that heading takes us over Iran!”
    â€œWe’ll stay in the mountains—fly some terrain-avoidance altitudes,” Patrick said. “We’ve got to cut off that UCAV before we lose it.”
    â€œWe’re not authorized to fly over Pakistan, and we’re sure as hell not going to overfly Iran,” Furness repeated. Because the United States had had to take the “war on terror” into its former ally, Pakistan, to hunt down the last remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorist cells, a rift had developed between the two nations. Pakistan now prohibited overflights by any military aircraft, and it regarded any military combat aircraft flying over Afghanistan as hostile.
    Despite this ban, President Thomas Thorn had authorized McLanahan to launch a StealthHawk unmanned aircraft to patrol Afghanistan, even though it obviously had to overfly Pakistan to reach its patrol area. One or two unmanned aircraft flying over a remote part of Pakistan were not a threat—at least that would be the Americans’ argument, if the stealthy UCAVs were ever discovered.
    But a high-tech B-1 bomber was a completely different story.
    â€œGeneral, we can’t remain hidden long enough,” Rebecca argued. “We stay in the mountains a short time, but eventually we get over the desert, and there’s nowhere to hide. . . .”
    â€œRebecca, it’s now or never,” Patrick insisted. “If we fly over the Mach above the unpopulated areas and slow down near the populated areas, we’ll catch up to the StealthHawk in about twenty minutes. We’ll have just enough time to get it turned around before we have to bingo and refuel.”
    â€œGet approval from the Pentagon first.”
    â€œThere’s no time,” Patrick said. “Center up on the bug, push it up to Mach zero point nine, and descend to COLA to penetrate the coastline. I’ll get a new intel satellite dump, and we’ll pick the best course.”
    â€œOh, God, here we go again,” Rebecca muttered as she commanded the bomber to accelerate and descend to COLA, or Computer-generated Lowest Altitude. The flight-control system commanded a twenty-degree nose-down pitch, automatically sweeping the EB-1’s wings all the way back and altering the curvature of the fuselage to gain as much speed as possible.
    As soon as they headed northward, the threat-warning receiver blared, “Caution, SA-10 search mode, ten o’clock, one hundred ten miles, not in detection threshold.”
    â€œThe Iranian coastal-defense site at Char Bahar,” Patrick said. “No factor.”
    â€œ ‘No factor,’ huh?” Rebecca retorted. “Aren’t those things capable of shooting down a bomber-size aircraft at treetop level?”
    â€œNot this bomber, it won’t.” They were headed for the Pakistani coastline between the towns of Kapper and Gwadar, just fifty miles east of the Iranian border—well within range of the