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the final premission brief. Then it was time to go.
    The long night had to begin with one of the aerial fill-ups, though, as both Harriers were low on gas. They’d been told the weather above the ship was clear up 5,000 feet, but after that it would be solid overcast for a while. They went through the first cloud layer with no problems. The cumulus was moving fast, as it always did above the Med at night. They were promised a full moon after 12,000 feet. The tankers always flew at 20,000.
    They were going nearly straight up, Ryder out front, Phelan off his right tail, exactly where he was supposed to be. They had reached 11-5 when suddenly an enormous silver shape came out of the night and went over their heads. It was moving so quickly, Ryder and Phelan had no chance to react. It was not the tanker. It was an Italian airliner, Alitalia Flight 7544, Rome to Tunis. Ryder and Phelan had come within 500 feet of it—but it never saw them because the Harriers were ghosts; their signatures would barely register on a military radar. Never would they show up on an airliner’s screen.
    This crisis passed only to be followed by another. They popped through the cloud layer at 12,000 feet but found no moon. Wrong forecast? Wrong time? Wrong altitude?
    Nope. The moon was being obscured—by an oncoming sandstorm. A big one.
    The Africans called them haboobs. Clouds of desert sand and dust that looked like gigantic fists, rising with the wind and the heat of the day. Blowing unobstructed across the Med, they could make flying very unpleasant.
    Ryder had ridden out two of these monsters already and he wasn’t looking forward to a third. He guessed that the sandstorm would arrive in their part of the sky in about ten minutes. They still had to find the gas truck, hook up, get a drink, and split. Was it possible to do all that in such a short amount of time?
    They climbed to 20 Angels and found the tanker just a minute later, right where it was supposed to be. How Murphy was able to arrange these secret refuelings no one knew, but the tankers had not failed them yet. It took another minute for the Harriers to get the right speed and altitude, communicating only through the quick blinking of their navigation lights. The KC-10 could only serve one ship at a time, so Ryder hooked up first. He was full in three minutes. With one eye on the sandstorm, he unhooked and drifted off the nipple.
    Phelan went up and in and fucked the duck. But then the Extender started shaking, and Phelan started shaking with it. The windspeed at 20,000 feet had suddenly doubled. Phelan was smart enough to break off contact and then reinsert once the big tanker settled down. But the turbulence came again, not once, but twice. Ryder was riding right alongside Phelan, but there was little he could do except watch his wingman bounce all over the sky, a long nasty stream of fuel spurting from the Extender’s boom. Phelan kept his cool, though. He finally hooked a fourth time and hung on long enough to take a full gulp. Then he flashed his lights once and disengaged.
    The tanker immediately banked south, its ordeal over, and disappeared into the clouds, intent on escaping the worst of the haboob .
    Ryder and Phelan turned north.

Chapter 7
    Lower Sicily
Two hours later
    The huge explosion rocked the tiny village of Sardarno just after midnight.
    The village police chief was thrown from his bed by the force of the blast. He landed in the far corner of the bedroom, a dresser smashing against the wall next to him. His wife, all 327 pounds of her, was also hurled to the floor, their modest bed stand collapsing on top of her. Every window in their house blew out instantly; their kitchen ceiling came crashing down. Outside, half their flock of pet geese died on the spot—of heart attacks. All this in just a few seconds, and the ground was still shaking.
    The chief—his name was Roberto Tino—thought it was the end of the world. Anything less wouldn’t have sounded so