Read Peacekeepers (1988) for Free Online Page B

mercilessly destroyed.
    All her sensors were alive and scanning now, as Kelly gently, deftly flew the tiny plane down one twisting valley after another. She felt tense, yet strangely at peace. She knew the stakes, and the danger, yet as long as she was at the controls of her agile little craft she was happy. Like being alone out on the ice: nothing in the world mattered except your own actions. There was no audience here, no judges. Kelly felt happy and free. And alone.
    But the eastern sky was brightening, and her time was growing short.
    The sensors were picking up data now, large clumps of metal buried here, unmistakable heat radiations emanating from there, molecules of human sweat and machine oil and plastic explosive wafting up from that mound of freshly turned earth. She squirted the data in highly compressed bursts of laser light up to a waiting satellite, hoping that the Eritreans did not have the sophisticated comm equipment needed to detect such transmissions and home in on her plane.
    There were many such planes flitting across the honeycomb of valleys, each pilot hoping that the Eritreans did not catch its transmissions, did not find it before it had completed its task and flown safely home.
    Small stuff, Kelly realized as she scanned the data her screens displayed. None of the dumps she had found were terribly important. Local depots for the reserves. Where was the big stuff, the major ammo and fuel supplies for the main forces? It couldn't be farther back, deeper inside the country, she reasoned. They must have dug it in somewhere closer to the border.
    The sky was bright enough now to make the stars fade, although the ground below her was still cloaked in shadow.
    Kelly debated asking Geneva for permission to turn around, rather than continue her route deeper into the Eritrean territory.
    "Fuck it," she muttered to herself. "By the time they make up their minds it'll be broad daylight out here."
    She banked the little plane on its left wingtip and started to retrace her path. Climbing above the crest of the valley, she began a weaving flight path that took her back and forth across the four major valley chains of her assigned territory.
    There's got to be a major dump around here somewhere, she insisted to herself. There's got to be.
    If there was not, she knew, she was in trouble. If the main supply dump was deeper inside Eritrea and she had missed it because she had failed to carry out her full assignment, she would be risking the lives not only of Eritreans and Sudanese, but Peacekeepers as well. She would be risking her own career, her own future, too.
    The plane's sensors faithfully picked up all the small dumps she had found on her flight in. Even this high up, they were detectable.
    But where's the biggie? Kelly worried.
    She felt a jolt of panic when she noticed the shadow of her plane racing along the ground ahead of her. The sun was up over the horizon now, and she was high enough to be easily visible to anyone who happened to look up.
    Gritting her teeth, she kept stubbornly to her plan, crisscrossing the valleys, back and forth, weaving a path to the frontier. She could see columns of tanks and trucks below her, some of them moving sluggishly forward, others stopped. Long ugly artillery pieces were firing now, sending shells whistling across the border into the Sudan.
    The attack had begun.
    They've actually started a war, Kelly said to herself, feeling shock and anger flooding through her. Can we stop it? Can we?
    Far ahead, she saw columns of smoke rising black and oily into the brightening sky. Men were dying there.
    Quickly she flicked her fingers across the display controls.
    Forward and rear observation scopes: no other aircraft in sight. So far so good, she thought. I haven't been found. Yet.
    The infrared scanner showed an anomaly off to her left: a hot spot along the face of a steep rocky slope that plunged down to the riverbed. Kelly banked slightly and watched the sensor displays