“Be aware Recon-One has gone offline.” The pilot of the Blackhawk looked at his copilot and shook his head, then resumed the job of flying. “Recommend a cautious approach when you pass five miles in.”

“Affirmative.” The pilot replied to the controller, who was sitting in an Orion Tactical Command aircraft somewhere over the state of Nebraska. He negated his microphone and slipped a comment to the copilot as he watched the terrain move below, then scanned the night sky for electric lines. “Low and slow.”

“Roger,” the copilot replied, then passed the order on to the other Blackhawk in the formation and the two Apache attack helicopters ahead of them.

“Let’s think about EMP,” the pilot added as he banked the helicopter and found his navigation point as they passed over a small town. The suggestion that they might have to deal with an electromagnetic pulse had been part of the pre-mission briefing. The pilot suspected the spooks in the Recon flight had not paid enough attention before running to their ship. He mentally shrugged; God had a way of weeding out the idiots.

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A helmeted head poked between the pilots. “Any details?”

“Nothing yet,” the pilot replied to the squad leader’s question. “You’d better sit down and buckle up; we’re going nape of the earth.”

“Time to target?”

“Ten to fifteen minutes.”

“Affirmative.” The head disappeared, and the pilot reached up and flipped a switch on the communications panel, isolating his conversation to the copilot. “I do not care what those spooks said in the briefing; we do a circuit of the drop zone before we head in. We are not ending up like the Recon team.”