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the sergeant agreed flippantly.
    “What do you think it is, Sergeant?”
    “Looks like a flying saucer to me, General, but I just work here.”
    “Darned if it don’t,” the general said. He straightened, checked the lat/long coordinates on the screen, nodded at Captain Sullivan, then walked away.
    • • •
    In less than an hour a computer printer spit out a sheet of paper in a windowless office on the ground floor of a hangar in Nevada, at an airfield that wasn’t on any map, in a place known only as Area 51.
    Two hours later a pilot wearing a helmet and full pressure suit manned an airplane that had just been pushed from the hangar. The airplane was all black and shaped like a wedge, with seventy-five degrees of wing sweep. An enlisted crew helped the pilot get into the cockpit, then strapped and plugged him in.
    The airplane was receiving electrical power from a piece of yellow gear. The pilot set up his cockpit switches, then spent fifteen minutes waiting.
    Only when the minute hand of his wristwatch was exactly on the hour did he signal the ground crew for an engine start.
    Precisely ten minutes later he advanced the throttles of his four rocket-based, combined-cycle engines and released the brakes. The noise from the engines almost ripped the sky apart. Even snuggled in the cockpit under a well-padded helmet, the pilot found the noise painfully loud.
    As he rolled down the runway, the engines were burning a mixture of compressed air and methane, augmented with liquid oxygen. As the plane accelerated, the mixture would be automatically juggled to maintain power.
    The spy plane rolled on the fourteen thousand-foot runway for a long time before it lifted off. With a flick of a switch the pilot retracted the gear. Then he pulled the nose up steeply and climbed away at a forty-five-degree angle.
    Passing Mach 2, the pilot toggled a lever that hydraulically lifted an opaque metal screen to cover the windshield and protect it. He had been using computer displays as his primary flight reference since liftoff, so being deprived of an outside view was of no practical consequence.
    He watched his airspeed carefully, and at Mach 2.5 monitored the computer-controlled transition to pure ramjet flight. The air compressor inlet doors were closed and the flow of LOX secured. When the transition was complete, methane burning in the free airflow through the four ramjets provided the aircraft’s propulsion. Fifteen minutes after lifting off, the plane leveled at one hundred twenty-five thousand feet above the earth and accelerated to fifty-four hundred miles per hour.
    The pilot kept a careful eye on the computer screen that displayed the temperature of various portions of his aircraft. He was especially vigilant about the temperatures of the leading edges of the wings, which he knew were glowing a cherry red even though he couldn’t see them.
    Despite the deafening roar of the engines and the shock wave that trailed for miles behind the hypersonic plane, a placid calm had descended upon the cockpit. Engine noise reached the pilot only through the airframe. Amazingly, almost none of this noise reached the ground. The sonic wave of aircraft flying above one hundred thousand feet dissipated before reaching the ground, as did ninety-nine percent of the engine noise. And at this altitude the stealthy plane was invisible to radar and human eyes. Only infrared sensors trained skyward could detect it, and there were few of those.
    The pilot ensured that his two Global Positioning System (GPS) devices agreed with each other, then coupled the primary autopilot to one of them. The autopilot would take him to the first tanker rendezvous over the Atlantic. He would drop down to thirty thousand feet and slow to subsonic speed on the turbine engines to refuel from a KC-135 tanker, then climb back to altitude while accelerating to hypersonic cruise for the flight across Africa.
    The night would not yet have passed when he arrived over the