A state of disobedience

10,000 feet over Austin, Texas

The Air Force wouldn't play; that had been made clear enough. Whether pilots insisted they were too sick to fly or ground crews insisted that the planes were too sick to be flown, virtually nothing in the Air Force inventory had taken any part in the troubles. Nothing had taken any truly aggressive part.

But there were planes . . . and then there were planes. There were air forces hidden within a number of nonmilitary entities.

The CIA was one such.

Unburdened with a fighter pilot mafia, equally unburdened with a close-air-support mafia, the Central Intelligence Agency had taken to Remote Piloted Vehicles, RPVs for short, with a vengeance.

The Predator III RPV was one such. Descended from earlier models which had, over and over, proven their value both for reconnaissance and attack in foreign and hostile places, the III model was larger, faster, carried more of a bomb load, and carried a greater variety of ordnance as well.

Two of these models, remotely controlled via secure satellite link from the CIA's main headquarters in Langley, Virginia, circled high above Austin, Texas. The pilots, sitting in a dimly lit control room many leagues away from Austin, watched their screens and waited for the word to engage.

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