Fort Bragg, Fayetteville, North Carolina, 1500 GMT (1000 Local)

Lieutenant Colonel Loonfeather sat at the long table in the operations office on the second floor of the 82d Airborne Division Headquarters on 91 Gruber Road at the end of the old All American way. He closed and rubbed his tired eyes, then opened them again. He had not slept in over thirty hours, other than the few hours of fitful dozing in the cramped seat of the air force transport that had brought him back from London. His eyes felt itchy, and he had a throbbing pain in his neck, but it didn’t matter. What did matter was that in the less than four hours since landing at Pope Air Force Base, adjacent to Fort Bragg, he had managed to get his op-order out and have it approved, with maximum priority by the long chain of command all the way through the Joint Chiefs, and disseminated. All the units, all of the men and equipment he would need to execute the Airborne Armored Raid on Uqba ben Nafi, were pledged to him, either at Pope or Bragg or on their way, moving toward him.

The operation as conceived was not large. The Airborne Armored Raid had been around, as a concept, for years, and one of its intended missions was to seize and hold an airfield intact. The concept had always had its detractors, most of whom thought the force was too light to get the job done. Most airfields were very large in area, and an enemy would be able to reinforce or render the airfield useless by means of standoff weapons. Still, the Fourth of the Sixty-eighth, the only unit in the Army with the air-droppable M-551 Sheridans, kept practicing.

Shit, it was a long shot, mused Loonfeather. The Sheridans were no match for anybody’s main battle tank, but hell, Libyans? It was certainly clear from the dispositions of the Libyan armor that they expected any attack to come from outside the perimeter. The most recent satellite and aerial recon photos showed some tanks and more guns being moved toward the north end of runway 03/21, probably expecting an assault from the sea. Anyway, Loonfeather knew his operation had to be limited to the area in the immediate vicinity of the Operations Building, where the hostages were being held, and had given his reasons to the senior planning group in London, and they had been accepted.

Loonfeather would land his force, consisting of A Company, First Battalion, 502d Parachute Infantry Brigade, and eight Sheridans from his own 3/73 with their eight four-man crews, on the long runway, 11/29. The men would form the defensive perimeter, surrounding the area of the Operations Building and securing the northern three-quarters of runway 03/21 for the marine rifle company to come in and for everyone to go out. As soon as the paratroopers and the Sheridans were assembled and disbursed into fighting positions, the Navy would crater both runways south and east of their intersection, to prevent tanks from crossing from their positions to the south in any kind of order.

Rufus Loonfeather propped his feet on the desk and closed his eyes. He sensed that his whole military career, even his own life, had been preparing him for this single, unique operation. He drifted back to his childhood, to being raised by his grandfather, John Walking Wolf, after his mother and father had both died while Rufus was very young. His grandfather had raised him in the old ways, as much as he still knew them, and the two of them had hiked and camped and trapped and hunted the wild country around Manistique Lake and along the Tahquamenoc and the Fox Rivers, in the birch and evergreen woodlands of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Walking Wolf claimed ancestry from the Dakota Nation of the West Rivers, which had roamed the territory of Montana and Idaho and the Dakotas, and north into Alberta and Saskatchewan, long before the white men had come and named those places. Walking Wolf had been brought to upper Michigan by his own grandfather, a man already old, in the great dispersion of the Plains Indians, which began in 1876, after the battle the white soldiers had forced on Red Cloud and Sitting Bull at the Little Bighorn.

Rufus smiled as he remembered long evenings with Walking Wolf, sitting close to the crackling fire wrapped in their robes of wolverine and badger fur against the bitter cold of early spring or deep autumn. Walking Wolf taught Rufus how to remember the Old Ones and how to call their spirits. Walking Wolf told Rufus of the Ghost Dances, as he had heard of them from his own grandfather, and he taught the boy that the Old Ones would never disappear as long as living people needed them and remembered them. When Rufus went to school, and later to the University of Michigan, he had told the others, the whites, about the Old Ones. Some had laughed, but not many. Some had asked him whether he believed in the stories and the magic. Rufus had never understood the question. It wasn’t believe or not believe; one kept the Old Ones, or one lost them forever. Rufus would not lose them.

Rufus became a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve in the summer of 1965, receiving his commission through the ROTC program at the university. He had never thought to make a career in the military, but he had enjoyed the training and the spartan life, and he had done well, first commanding a cavalry platoon in Vietnam and later an Armor company. He found that in the Army, his race was an advantage; it made him a curiosity. In Vietnam, Loonfeather had a reputation for knowing where the enemy was and where he wasn’t, and when he told other soldiers that the sensitivity came from the Old Ones, they didn’t understand, but respected it, because it worked. Rufus’s sureness had allowed him to dash across places where the enemy wasn’t and concentrate his tanks and his men where the enemy would be.

He discovered another fact of life in the military: An officer or man who did his job well could pursue other interests without regard to any military peer pressure to conform. Rufus Loonfeather left Vietnam in 1974 a very young major with important battlefield decorations. It was recorded in his service record that he had learned, and could speak fluently, Spanish, French, and German. It was not recorded that he wrote poetry and played the piano exceptionally well. Rufus Loonfeather had applied for transfer into the regular Army and was one of not many Vietnam-era reserve majors to be accepted and promoted thereafter. Rufus Loonfeather was an achiever, and he knew that it had all come down to Fire Arrow and the deadly challenge of Uqba ben Nafi Air Base. For as long as he had commanded the 3d of the 73d, he had pored over maps of air bases in Poland and Czechoslovakia and European Russia, training himself and boring himself to distraction, and now he had a shot at a real live air base, defended by enemy tanks.

Loonfeather opened his eyes, yawned, and picked up the top secret op-order. His eight Sheridans would be carried by eight C-130s. Two larger C-141s would drop the paratroopers. Marine Sea Cobra helicopters and navy carrier-based bombers were receiving additional antitank munitions, and a squadron of air force A-10 Warthog antitank aircraft was already at Rheinmain, awaiting permission from the Italian government to move to the Italian air base at Brindisi, close enough to attack inside Libya. The German government had quietly given approval for use of its facilities for assembly, but not for the launching of the actual attack, unless the hostages were seen to be in imminent danger of harm. Same with the Italians. So where the hell else do we launch from? wondered Loonfeather. Still, he figured that unless the politicians pulled a rabbit out of a hat, the Abu Salaam crazies would begin killing the hostages, and that should be enough “imminent danger” for the most squeamish NATO government.

Loonfeather had briefed his officers on the operation at morning officers’ call. The briefing had taken less than an hour. They had been over it so many times, they just had to learn the locations of the objectives and the specific assignments of the individual units. There had been few questions and many smiles.

Rehearsals on the mock-up of the area of operation (AO) of the mission, which had been set up on the western end of Pope, would begin at 1300.

Damn, thought Loonfeather, shaking his head to clear the fatigue, we can do this!

He emptied his mind and called out to the Old Ones.