Gallantly he held out his elbow. “It’s been a lovely evening out on the town, my dear. Shall we?”

“I don’t go out with Romeos,” she told him, smiling. “At least… not with any old Romeo…”

Together, they started for the building entrance that would take them through to the cruise ship.

Ghost Blue Ten miles west of St. Petersburg 0056 hours

Dick Delallo was holding his F- 22 in a gentle right turn above the Gulf of Finland when the threat receiver lit up and the warning tone sounded over his headset.

“Haunted House, Ghost Blue,” he called. “The Oscar Sierra light is lit. Do you copy?”

“Ghost Blue, Haunted House,” came over his headset. “Copy. You are clear to get out of Dodge. Over.”

“Ah… roger that.” He was already tightening his turn, trying to identify the source of the threat. “On my way back to the barn.”

“Oscar Sierra” was a pilot’s inside joke, using the phonetic alphabet letters for O and S to represent the words “oh, shit.” It meant someone was painting him with a target acquisition radar and that a missile launch could be imminent.

The signal from the threat radar, though, was weak and intermittent. The frequency suggested that he’d been briefly painted by the acquisition radar code-named Spoon Rest by NATO, which meant they were trying to target him with an SA-2 Guideline.

Guideline was the NATO reporting name for the Lavochkin OKB S-75 surface-to-air missile-ancient by the standards of modern military technology but still deadly. Gary Powers’ U-2 had been downed over Sverdlovsk in 1960 by a barrage of fourteen SA-2 missiles, a barrage that had also managed to take out a MiG-19 trying for an intercept.

Just because Delallo was being painted didn’t mean the Russian radar operator could see him. In fact, the operator probably didn’t. The whole point of stealth technology was to prevent the energy of the threat radar from returning to the emitting dish, rendering it blind. Still, the pucker factor for Major Dick Delallo was rising.

Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0058 hours

Akulinin and Lia walked up a low concrete ramp toward the entrance to the cruise ship wharf. The ship, the North Star Line’s St. Petersburg 2, was tied up on the pier just beyond the high chain-link security fence, her lights ablaze stem to stern, like beacons promising refuge and safety.

To get to that promise, they needed to go through the security checkpoint and customs. A pair of Russian MVD police eyed them suspiciously as they approached.

“Good evening!” Akulinin called in his most jovial dumb tourist’s voice. “Some fog out tonight, huh?”

One of the men pointed his weapon, an AKM, at Akulinin’s chest. “You stop, please,” the man said in thickly accented English. “Passports.”

Akulinin and Lia both handed their passports over.

The guard grunted as he looked at the stamps, then added, “Your other papers. ID. All.”

When these were produced, the guard went through them with microscopic attention while the other watched the two with a sullen expression.

“Your papers not in order,” the first said after an interminable examination.

“Why?” Akulinin said, putting on his best naïve-American expression of surprise and confusion. “What’s the matter?”

“Our papers were perfectly in order before,” Lia said. “What the hell is going on?”

“Papers not in order,” the Russian said, his broad Slavic features betraying no emotion. “You come with us.”

“We’re alerting Mercutio,” Rockman’s voice said in Akulinin’s ear… and presumably in Lia’s as well. “Stall them.”

Stall them, Akulinin thought. Right. Maybe I should do a little soft-shoe?…

“Mercutio”-Romeo’s best friend in Romeo and Juliet-was running Magpie’s support operation in St. Petersburg, the stage crew behind the scenes who let Lia and Akulinin play their roles. The support team was on board the cruise ship, which was serving as a kind of impromptu safe house for the op.

Of course, in the original Romeo and Juliet Mercutio had been killed in a duel.

Akulinin hoped to hell it wasn’t going to come to that.

Ghost Blue Twelve miles west of St. Petersburg 0058 hours

Major Dellalo pushed the throttle forward as he brought the stick back, sending the F-22 higher and yet higher into the thin, cold air. The SA-2 Guideline had a range of about thirty miles and a ceiling of sixty thousand feet. Thirty miles from the SA-2 site on the western end of Kotlin Island would reach to the far end of St. Petersburg to the east and halfway back to the Finnish border to the west.

His F-22 had two advantages if the Russians could actually see his plane and target it-speed and altitude. The top speed of the F-22 Raptor was classified, of course, but his baby could crowd Mach 2.5 and have knots to spare. Her service ceiling was sixty-five thousand feet.

It should be possible to get above a Guideline’s reach, and while he couldn’t outrun one-the SA-2 had a velocity of about Mach 3-the speed of his Raptor would make it nearly impossible to catch if the missile was launched from a stern position.

His major disadvantage at the moment was the fact that Kotlin Island, with its SAM base, lay only eight miles ahead, and perfectly blocked his route back to international airspace out over the Baltic Sea. If they wanted to, they would get at least one clear shot at him.

How had they spotted him? His radar screen showed a number of targets in the immediate vicinity, all at lower altitudes. Most of them were civilian aircraft, but a few had the characteristic signatures of Russian military aircraft. A JOINTSTAR E-3 Sentry AWACS over the North Sea was feeding him data on possible threats. There were two radar returns that worried him in particular… streaking in over Vikulova, from the south. The Sentry was identifying them as MiG-31s.

His threat receiver lit up again, and this time it stayed lit and he heard a high-pitched warble in his ears, which meant that the threat radar had switched to a high PRF tracking mode. So the Russians did see him, after all.

“Haunted House, Haunted House, Ghost Blue,” he called. “Oscar Sierra, repeat, Oscar Sierra. They have a lock.”

“Copy that, Ghost Blue.”

He suppressed a momentary flash of anger. It would be nice if “Haunted House,” the radio handle for the op controllers at Fort Meade, had something constructive to say.

The warning tone wailed away incessantly. A launch, a dim flash of light in the gloom immediately below…

By lowering a wing he could see the exhaust plume of the missile climbing through the fog, its exhaust illuminating the white haze below. A second missile rose close behind the first, followed by a third.

He was still climbing, passing through fifty-four thousand feet.

It was time to go balls to the wall. He slammed the Raptor’s throttles full forward, angling his thrust to increase his rate of climb.

Behind and below, the missiles began angling toward their high-flying target.

The question for tomorrow, Dick Delallo thought, was how did the Russians see this stealth aircraft? The pressing question of the moment, however, was how to avoid being shot down.

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1658 hours EDT

Charlie Dean walked past an Army sentry at the door and stepped at last into the Art Room, his glance taking in the dozens of technicians and communications specialists huddled over consoles around the room, the numerous monitors, and the huge central display on the back wall. Currently the main display showed a satellite map of a large city, but he couldn’t tell, offhand, which city it was. A river snaked in from the right, then split to flow to either side of a large triangular island. Major highways were highlighted with yellow or white lines.