"I feel the need. . . the need for speed! I tell you, this is the life. Splashing Super Hornets in Delta IVs! We came, we tally-ho'd, and we kicked their asses!" Dudley Dursley—or, as he was addressed now, Flight Lieutenant Dursley—slammed his mug down on the bar counter.

The bartender looked nonplussed. "Get your excitement out while you can. I doubt your commanding officer is going to want to see you like that," he said, glaring at Dudley.

"You must not get very many RAF guys here, am I right?"

"Don't bother with him," said the man sitting next to him, John Winthrop. Like Dudley, Winthrop was a Wing Commander, but he was a great deal more reserved and calm (and boring, as Dudley thought privately). The two of them had been friends ever since they had met in training camp, but it wasn't thanks to Winthrop that Dudley had undergone such a dramatic change from the way he had been earlier—at least, not entirely. Dudley had been through quite the transformation over the past twenty years. As a child and a teenager he had been an absolute menace, a bully and a thug of the most despicable kind. When he was 17 years old, his family had been forced to leave their home at No. 4, Privet Drive, Little Whinging for their own safety, and it was after this that his parents finally, belatedly, began taking steps to mold him into a good citizen. This included sending him to a military academy to be "made into a real man", in his father's words. At first, Dudley hated the military academy. For someone who had spent most of his childhood being waited on hand and foot by his parents (and, when he wasn't at Hogwarts, his cousin), the idea of lifting weights and doing drills was torture. But as Dudley rose in the ranks he soon discovered the one thing about it that made it all worth it to him—tormenting and bullying the new arrivals in the lower ranks. By the time he graduated, Dudley was feared by almost every other student at the military academy. And he enjoyed that reputation. It made him feel powerful, just like he had as a teenager when he'd been a gang leader.

That had been years ago. Now, Dudley's temper had mellowed out considerably. He still wasn't exactly on speaking terms with Harry, to be sure, and he doubted if Harry would ever truly forgive him, but he was happy that he had found something to do with his life other than being a fat, spoiled bully. Not that any of it mattered to Winthrop, of course.

"So, Big D," Winthrop said.

Dudley chuckled. "Big D" had been his nickname as a teenager, and it was a total coincidence that Winthrop was now calling him this too.

"You know, the Delta IV's a great old bird, but up against Super Hornets? That just isn't fair. That stuff you did today was wizzo[1], but I don't believe for a second that if those Delta IVs we're flying were in a real battle, they'd get slaughtered. It's a good thing they're replacing them."

"Replacing? What do you mean?" asked Dudley. "I mean, I know about the Super Hornets, but those aren't interceptors, so. . ."

Winthrop grinned. "Let's just say you and I might be getting a trip to America soon. A long one." "What do you mean by that?" said Dudley. He got up from his seat at the bar and moved to a table, gesturing for Winthrop to do the same.

"Platform upgrade. To Raptors."

Dudley's mouth hung open, too. "The F-22 Raptor? That's one of the world's hottest fighters!"

Winthrop nodded as the two of them moved to a more open area of the pub. "Sure is. The export license just got cleared a few days ago, and you and I are going to be the first British pilots to try it on. Now, how's about we head back to base? Tomorrow, we're really going to show those Super Hornet jockeys what British planes can do."

Dudley had never actually flown a combat mission, since his unit was dedicated to weapons testing and combat training. For the most part, this consisted of flying air combat maneuver drills against the more advanced planes of the RAF's combat squadrons. The fact that they had been chosen to fly F-22s, of all things, struck him as odd to say the least. The F-22 was one of the greatest fighters in the world, but as an air superiority fighter it was not designed for the interceptor role the way that the Delta IV had been. It was true, admittedly, that pure interceptors were a dying breed, but the Delta IV's ruggedness made it a useful second-line fighter.

So the call to scramble that went out just an hour later came as a total surprise to him. He and Winthrop had been sent up to investigate an unidentified aircraft that had penetrated restricted airspace over the Boscombe Down proving ground, where they were stationed.

"Bogey off to starboard! I repeat, bogey off to starboard! Do you read me, Big D?"

Winthrop's voice crackled in Dudley's radio.

"I read you, Guinness One. Do you have visual?" Dudley peeled his fighter off from the other two and headed in the direction of the radar signature. Whatever it was, it was big—he estimated it had to be about the size of an airliner, and moving at a speed of at least 200 kilometers per hour.

"No, I don't. Do you?"

Dudley craned his neck to look behind him. "Yes. I have got visual. It's huge, and it's not an aircraft. It's. . it's. . ." He never got to finish his sentence. The radio feed from Winthrop's jet had been cut off and replaced by static. Frantically, Dudley looked on either side of the cockpit, and saw no sign of any unusual activity.

"Guinness One, are you there?"

There was no reply.

"Come in, Guinness One! This is Big D! Have you made contact with the bogey?" Winthrop still gave no reply.

Now fearing the worst—that Winthrop had collided with the unknown aircraft—Dudley turned back and returned to the base. But as he did so, he saw the thing he had been sent out to investigate.

It was, as Winthrop had said, not an aircraft. On the contrary, it looked for all the world like a gigantic bird, with a wingspan of nearly sixty meters, and a bald head like a vulture. And it was moving at a truly incredible speed—if his radar was any indication, it was flying at over 200 kilometers per hour. Just like ground control said, Dudley thought. The Delta IV, of course, raced along at 800 kilometers per hour, so Dudley had only a brief glimpse of the huge creature. But what he saw, he would never forget.

Was that a man, riding on top of it? Ordinarily, someone in Dudley's position would have dismissed all of this as impossible, but Dudley had a greater than average amount of experience with things most people deemed impossible. I've seen some weird things in my life, no doubt about it. Disappearing glass. A pig's tail growing out my arse. My aunt inflating. Something sucking all the happiness out of my mind. But this just might take the cake.

When Dudley landed, he had some unexpected visitors. A group of men in black suits, wearing black sunglasses, were waiting at the base. As he emerged from the cockpit, one of them spoke to him. "You saw it, didn't you?"

The man spoke with an American accent, and for a moment Dudley wondered if they had anything to do with the F-22 Raptors that he was supposedly going to be flying soon. That though soon left his mind, replaced by the more immediate concern of what had happened to Winthrop.

"Don't worry," said one of the men, his tone almost robotic in its flatness. "Winthrop is fine. He ejected from his plane before it was destroyed. However, he was injured and requires time to recover."

"Destroyed?" Dudley asked. "What do you mean by—"

"Do not speak unless spoken to!" barked the man, suddenly raising his voice. Dudley refused to look intimidated by this, and simply stared at the man with an almost defiant expression on his face.

"We are here because you have seen something very important. We know you have seen such things before, but this is extremely sensitive. As such, we will need to see to it that no one knows about it."

Before Dudley could react, the man raised a wand and whispered, "Obliviate."

Dudley felt his mind suddenly become fuzzy, as if he were simultaneously awake and asleep at the same time. When he finally regained full consciousness, the men in black suits had vanished. He struggled desperately to remember anything that had happened in the past few hours, but somehow drew a blank.

The next day, Dudley spoke with Winthrop to find out what he had seen. Unfortunately, the memory-modifying men had apparently gotten to him too.

"It was an airliner," he said. "An Airbus A318 that had gone off course and wandered into restricted airspace. I flew too close to it, trying to escort it away, and the turbulence from its wake vortex caused my plane to spin. I had to eject to save my own skin."

Even though Dudley no longer had any memory of what had happened that day, something told him this wasn't true. If the mystery aircraft had been an ordinary airliner, surely it would have been recognized as such? And the wake vortex of an A318 wasn't strong enough to damage a Delta IV. However, he knew better than to go around questioning something like this. If it was the official story, it probably had been put out for a reason.