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mission profile briefing from Geneva as she flew.
    Dozens of planes were being sent against the aggressors, pilots from every available Peacekeepers' station were in their cockpits, hands on their flight controls. There were the usual delays and mix-ups, but Kelly suddenly felt free and happy, alone at the controls of an agile little flying machine, her every movement answered by a movement of the plane, her nerves melding with the machine's circuitry, the two of them mated more intimately than a man and a woman could ever be.
    The plane was as small as it could be made and still do its job. Using the latest in stealth technology, it flew in virtual silence, its quiet Stirling engine turning the six paddle blades of the propeller so gently that they barely made a sound. But the plane was slow, painfully slow. Built of wood and plastic, for the most part, it was designed to avoid detection by radar and infrared heat-seekers, not to outrun any opposition that might find her.
    To make it hard to find visually, Kelly was trained to fly close to the ground, hugging the hills and treetops, flirting with sudden downdrafts that could slam the fragile little plane into the ground.
    She thought of herself as a hunting owl, cruising silently through the night, seeking her prey. Everything she needed to know—rather, everything that Geneva could tell her had been fed to her through her radio earphones. Now, as she flew silently through the dark and treacherous mountain passes on the border of Eritrea, she maintained radio silence.
    I am an owl, Kelly told herself, a hunting owl. But there were hawks in the air, and the hunter must not allow herself to become the hunted. A modem jet fighter armed with air-to-air missiles or machine cannon that fired thousands of rounds per minute could destroy her within moments of sighting her. And the second or two delay built into her control system bothered her; a couple of seconds could be the difference between life and death.
    But they've got to see me first, Kelly told herself. Be silent. Be invisible.
    Despite the cold, she was perspiring now. Not from fear; it was the good kind of sweat that comes from a workout, from preparation for the kind of action that your mind and body have trained for over long grueling months.
    Virtually all the plane's systems were tied to buttons on the control column's head. With the flick of her thumb Kelly could make the plane loop or roll or angle steeply up into the dark sky. Like a figure skater, she thought. You and me, machine, we'll show them some Olympic style before we're through.
    She was picking up aggressor radio transmissions in her earphones now: she could not understand the language, so she flicked the rocker switch on the control board to her left that activated the language computer. It was too slow to be of much help, but it got a few words:
    ". . . tank column A . . . jump-off line . . . deploy . . ."
    With her left hand she tapped out a sequence on the ECM board, just by her elbow, then activated the sequence with the barest touch of a finger on the black button set into the gray control column head.
    Thousands of tiny metallic slivers poured out of a hatch just behind the cockpit, scattering into the dark night air like sparkling crystals of snow. But these dipoles, monomolecular thin, floated lightly in the calm predawn air.
    They would hover and drift for hours, wafting along on any stray air current that happened by, jamming radio communications up and down thousands of megahertz of the frequency scale.
    The Law of the Peacekeepers was: Destroy the weapons of war.
    One of the prime weapons of modem war was electronic communications. So the first rule of Peacekeeper tactics was: Screw up their comm system and you screw up their attack.
    Leaving a long cloud of jamming chaff behind her, Kelly swooped down a rugged tree-covered valley so low that she almost felt leaves brushing the plane's underside. A river glinted in the faint light. Kelly