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The Black Hawk set down, practically on top
of the hissing smoke grenade, once more shielding the Delta team while they
loaded their wounded men and dead. Sigler kept a mental tally; the score now
stood at three dead, including the pilot whom they’d been unable to free from
the wreckage, and three seriously wounded. He realized someone was missing.
“Where’s Aleman?”

He spied the lanky sniper, still in position
at the wrecked bird, and somehow firing an assault rifle one-handed. Sigler
switched to the Delta team channel. “Aleman, get your ass on this bird!”

Aleman’s voice came back, crystal clear.
“Sorry, did not receive your last.”

Sigler considered repeating himself, but then
thought better of it. There was no telling how long it would be before help
arrived; as long as Aleman was willing and able to pull a trigger, there was no
reason not to keep him in the game.

As the last of the litters was loaded onto
the Black Hawk, the crew chief leaned in. “If we dump some weight and get real
cozy, we might be able to get everyone on.”

“Dump some weight? You mean like the guns and
all the ammo?”

The crew chief shrugged. “I didn’t say it
would be pretty.”

The Black Hawk was rated to carry a maximum
of eleven troops along with its crew of four. Dropping the armaments and other
extraneous equipment might allow them to stretch that limit a bit, as would
leaving the bodies of the dead behind, but Sigler didn’t like the math. “Just
hurry back.”

The crew chief nodded solemnly and then
climbed aboard and slid the door closed. Sigler crouched low and hastened out
from under the rotor wash as the idling turbines began whining louder.

He was halfway to the wreck when he saw a flash
in the corner of his eye.

A small group of insurgents—or maybe it was
just a lone fearless soul, hell-bent on earning his virgins in Paradise—had
flanked them, circling around to the south of the crash site.

In the time it took him to turn his head, the
RPG crossed the distance to its target.

The warhead—a PG-7VR tandem charge
grenade—had been designed to destroy tanks with modern reactive armor. It did
this by first exploding a small shaped charge that released a high-velocity jet
of metal in a super-elastic state, which can cut through solid steel. The
second, larger high-explosive charge would then penetrate deep into the wound
and detonate inside the target.

The rocket snaked in under the rising
helicopter’s rotors and struck below the exhaust vent on the port side. The shaped-charge
blast cut through the Black Hawk’s exterior like it was made of tissue paper. A
millisecond later, the three pounds of high-explosives in the main charge
detonated, and Beehive Six-Four blew apart at the seams.

EIGHT

Washington, D.C.

The President’s palm came down on the tabletop with a resounding smack
that echoed like a pistol-shot in the crypt-quiet Situation Room.

The operational command center in the White
House basement was all but deserted. The President had only intended to observe
the Delta team operation, and so he had eschewed the normal cadre of advisors,
aides and support staff.
The were
only two other men
in the room besides Boucher. Lieutenant General Roger Collins, commander of the
Joint Special Operations Command, was a thick, beefy man with puffy, red
features and a poorly-kept secret love affair with the bottle. Collins’s aide
was a compactly built man with a silver-gray buzzcut, colonel’s eagles on his
epaulets and a black name plate that read ‘Keasling.’

Collins shook his head. “Well…shit.”

Boucher winced as the President’s eyes sent
daggers through the air at the three-star general. “Shit? That’s all you’ve
got? Shit?”

Domenick Boucher swallowed nervously and
returned his gaze to the television screen, where the crisis was playing out in
real-time. The feed was from an infrared camera mounted on a circling Predator
UAV, and the images were rendered in an eerie inverted black and white, with
the grayscale hues serving as an indication of temperature. The expanding cloud
of white smoke that now occupied the space where one of the Army helicopters had
been a moment
before,
could only mean one thing: the
Black Hawk had become an inferno.

Until the President’s outburst, Boucher had
felt as paralyzed as Collins. He’d watched in mute disbelief as the operation
had fallen apart before his eyes, turning from a simple raid into a full blown
battle. But Duncan’s anger galvanized him.

Focus
, he thought.
What are the priorities
?

He’d never faced a crisis like this as the Director
of the Central Intelligence Agency. There was rarely a need for the DCIA to be
hands-on, but Boucher had come up through the ranks and witnessed some of the
nation’s worst moments from the other side of director’s desk.

I’ve
got people in the field
… He
shook his head; Klein and the crypto consultant were on the helicopter that had
taken off without warning. There was nothing he could do to help them; no way
to reach them.
Why? Why did that Black Hawk
go rogue? Who was giving the orders
?

He dug his cell phone from a pocket,
then
just as quickly put it away. The Situation Room was
shielded; no radio signals could get in or out. He would have to make do with
one of the hard-wired telephones, which like all the other technology in the
Situation Room, was painfully obsolete and actually less secure than Boucher’s
encrypted digital phone.

Collins was still fumbling for an answer.
“Sir, there’s not a hell of a lot I can do.”

“You can get those men out of there.” The
President’s voice was low and flat, a steel blade hissing from between clenched
teeth.

The general, perhaps without thinking it
through first, shook his head. “Mr. President, it’s not that simple. We’re not
coordinating with Defense on this, and if we make that call, we’ll have to
disclose the whole operation. We won’t be able to keep the mission a secret.”

“Do you think those men out there give a damn
about that?”

“That’s what we pay them for, sir.”

Boucher wasn’t the only man in the room
shocked into action. The general’s aide likewise leaped for a phone. The
President’s eyes followed him, but he made no move to interfere or ask for an
explanation; the man was doing
something
,
and Boucher knew that counted for a lot in Duncan’s book.

Collins finally seemed to grasp the concept as
well. He swiveled his chair toward Keasling. “Mike, get some CAS out there.”

Keasling looked up but didn’t pull the
receiver away from his mouth.
“Calling the Air Force now,
sir.”

“Doesn’t the 160
^th
have attack
choppers?” intoned the President, somewhat mollified.
“Little
Birds?”

Boucher recalled that Duncan had seen the Army’s
special operations helicopters in action when he’d served in Mogadishu, nearly
two decades earlier.

Keasling didn’t seem the least bit
nonplussed. “With respect, Mr. President, I think the Night Stalkers need to be
grounded.”

Collins was indignant.
“Mike,
what the hell?”

Keasling pointed to one of the screens that
showed an air traffic control radar map of Central Iraq. “Beehive Six-Six has
gone AWOL. I don’t know who’s in command of that aircraft or what they’re
doing, but I’d say there’s a better than even chance that at least one of the
crew is involved in this action.”

The announcement stunned Boucher. That was
the piece of this puzzle that refused to fit. Someone had set a trap for the
Delta team, that much was obvious, but the ambush at the site was only part of
the equation; someone had been working from within their ranks to make sure
that Cipher element was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He heard a voice in his ear and realized his
telephone call to the Director of Operations had finally gone through. “This is
Boucher,” he said in a low whisper. “We have a situation involving operations
with Cipher element. I need all hands on deck.”

There was a moment of silence at the other
end, and Boucher could imagine the DO biting back a river of questions.
“Understood.
I’ll sound the alarm. Will you be joining us?”

“Not sure. I’m with the President now. I’ll
either meet you there or set up a conference call.”

The President quickly grasped the import of
Keasling’s statement. “You think there are others involved?”

Keasling nodded. “Or the rogue agent might
have sabotaged the support aircraft. Either way, we need to keep the Night
Stalkers on the bench for now.”

“So what else can we do to help those men?”

“I’m trying to divert immediate close air
support, sir. And I’ve put the word out to all our operators in the region. 1
^st
Ranger is attached to 7
^th
Group at COB Speicher—al Sahra airfield,
near Tikrit. They can be there in a couple hours.”

“A couple hours?
Our boys could be dead by then.”

A strange gleam lit in Keasling’s eyes. “Sir,
with all due respect, I wouldn’t bet on it.”

NINE

Aden, Yemen

A man in a white waiter’s uniform pushed a food service cart out of the
elevator and down the hallway. It was an hour after midnight, and the corridor
was still and silent. Upon reaching his destination, one of more than a dozen
nearly identical doors on either side of the hall, the waiter stopped and
consulted a slip of paper on the cart, as if to verify that he was in the
correct place. He stood motionless for a moment and could just make out a
murmur of voices—probably from a television set inside—then he rapped his
knuckles loudly on the door.

Several seconds passed. He was about to knock
again when a voice issued from behind the panel. The terse inquiry was in
Arabic, a language the waiter did not speak fluently, but the meaning was clear
enough.

“I have food,” he called out. He spoke in
English, but with an accent that might reasonably have been mistaken for
German. “You order room service,
ja
?”

The door opened a crack, and through that
narrow space, the waiter saw an unsmiling bearded Arab man, not quite as tall
as his own six feet. The Arab appraised the waiter with a laser-like stare,
taking in his dirty blond hair and long goatee—features that looked decidedly
out of place in the region. Then he opened the door wider and took a half-step
into the hall. Despite the late hour, the man was fully dressed, though he had
chosen western attire—a brown sport coat over a white cotton dress shirt and
khaki chinos—instead of the garb preferred by his kinsman. He glanced left and
right, then returned his attention to the waiter.

“No room service.”

The waiter picked up the slip of paper and
held it out for inspection. “You order food,
ja
? See right here?”

The Arab ignored the paper. “No.”

The waiter took another look at the slip.
“Did someone else in the room order? You have others in the room with you?”

A perturbed look crossed the man’s face, then
he stepped back inside and rattled off an inquiry in Arabic. The waiter seized
the opportunity to advance his cart into the room, but the Arab blocked his
entry, stopping the cart with such suddenness that the waiter had to steady
himself by grasping the door frame. There was an angry look in the Arab’s eyes
as he pushed the cart back into the hall.

“No order,” he said forcefully. To make his
point even more explicit, he drew back the lapel of his jacket, revealing
something metallic—the brushed chrome slide action of an enormous pistol in a
shoulder holster. “You go now.”

This time, the waiter offered no protest, but
almost scurried back, with one hand
raised
in a
gesture of surrender. The Arab watched the blond man retreat all the way to the
elevator, before turning back inside and slamming the door.

Instantly, the waiter reversed course and
hurried back to the same room’s door. As he moved, he tucked his chin against
his right shoulder, and when he spoke into the radio microphone clipped inside
his white uniform jacket, all trace of the quasi-German accent was gone. “This
is Juggernaut. Package delivered.”

A man’s voice—a laconic Texas drawl—sounded
in the flesh colored ear bud connected to the radio. “
Roger,
Jugs.
Receiving, Lima Charlie.”

Lima Charlie, the NATO phonetic alphabet
equivalent of the letters L and C, meant the signal from the tiny transmitter
that had been surreptitiously placed in the hotel room was being received “loud
and clear.”

A murderous gleam appeared in the waiter’s
bright blue eyes. “Damn it, Houston. I fucking hate it when you call me ‘Jugs.’”

The man at the other end of the
transmission—Sonny Vaughn, the team leader who went by the callsign
‘Houston’—didn’t take the bait. “You’ve got ‘em riled up. They aren’t buying
your bogus waiter schtick.”

“It was your stupid idea,” groused the ersatz
waiter—Stanley Tremblay, callsign ‘Juggernaut.’
“A German
waiter in a fucking Arab country?
Really?”

“I explained all this, Jugs. A lot of
European tourists come here. And half the workers in Arab countries are
foreigners. Besides, the whole point was to stir things up…whoa, standby.”
There was a long silence. “Bingo. These are our guys all right. Two men… They
know they’ve been made.”

“Is the kid here?”

“Negative.” Pause. “Someone’s making a call.”

“Shit.”

Tremblay swept the stack of neatly folded
dinner napkins off the cart. He reached down and plucked up the Beretta 9 mm
semi-automatic pistol equipped with a suppressor that nearly doubled its barrel
length, concealed beneath. He gave the hotel room door a gentle push—the strip
of tape he’d surreptitiously slapped over the strike plate during his first
attempt to enter, had prevented the latch from engaging—and moved inside like
the Grim Reaper in stealth mode.

In the space of two seconds, he fired four
shots—two pairs of bullets for each of the two men standing in the front room.
The big Arab that had met him at the door had only enough time to whirl around
in surprise before the Beretta gave him the kiss of death. The other man, also
of Arab ancestry, but smaller in stature, didn’t even have time to look up from
the cell phone he was dialing.

With the gun still held at the ready,
Tremblay quickly moved to the second body and scooped up the phone in his left
hand. He could hear a tinny voice issuing from the speaker, but he ignored it
and thumbed the ‘end’ button.

“Got a number, Houston.
Find a name to go with it.” He started to
read the digits from the phone’s display, but before he could finish, it
started vibrating in his hands. “Shit. He’s calling back. How do you say ‘butt-dial’
in Arabic?”

“Never mind that, Jugs. Hold the phone next
to the radio. I’ll try to bluff ‘em.”

The phone squirmed like a living thing in his
hands. Tremblay hastily unplugged the mic and earbud wires from the radio unit
clipped to his belt, then held the cellular phone next to it and hit the button
to accept the call.

The conversation that followed was brief and
incomprehensible. Despite his southern roots, Vaughn did a passable job of
mimicking the voice of the phone’s former owner—an imitation based on the
snippets of conversation he’d overheard from the listening device—but when the
call ended, there was a note of urgency in his next transmission.

“They’re spooked, pardner. I got an exact GPS
location from the call: Mualla, the port district.”

“The kid is there?”

“Hope so. But we can’t wait for you.”

Tremblay scowled.
“Story of
my life.
I do all the work, but you guys get to have all the fun. Come
pick me up when you’re done.”

“Roger, out.”

Tremblay tossed the phone aside and turned
for the door. His disappointment at being left behind by his teammates was
sincere, but the clock was ticking, and the two minutes it might take him to
exit the hotel could mean the difference between rescuing the kid
or
recovering his headless body.

The ‘kid’ was the adult son of the US
Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He’d been abducted while vacationing in the
area—sailing or some other damn fool diversion of the idle rich. Tremblay and
his three teammates from Delta’s elite Alpha team had managed to identify the
kidnappers. They were al-Something-or-other…there were so many damn terrorist
groups in the Arab world that he’d given up trying to keep them straight. Alpha
had tracked them here to Aden’s Gold Mohur Resort, but evidently the bad guys
had split up. Two of them had been living it up here at the hotel, while an
unknown number were babysitting the hostage on the other side of the city.

The attack came before he took a single step.

Something tipped him off. The creak of the
floor as the man attempted to sneak up behind him, a shadow moving on the wall,
the rush of wind as the man drew back to hit him… Whatever it was, the
premonition saved his life. He half-turned and threw up a hand to block the
chair that his assailant was about to smash down on his head.

There was a splintering sound as the chair
came apart on impact. Pain throbbed in Tremblay’s forearm and the pistol flew
from his nerveless fingers, even as he staggered under the blow. Then, like a
player in a slapstick movie, he tripped over one of the bodies on the floor and
fell squarely on his backside.

The attacker pounced on the gun.

There wasn’t time to seek cover, so Tremblay
did the only thing he could think of: he grabbed the body he’d tripped over—the
corpse of the big man that had met him at the door—and hauled it front of him
like a human shield.

Something heavy fell out from beneath the
man’s jacket and slammed like a sledgehammer into Tremblay’s crotch. Even as he
grimaced against this fresh wave of pain, he heard a faint coughing sound and
the rasp of the Beretta’s bolt sliding back and ratcheting another round into
the firing chamber. There was a faint tremor as the bullet punched into the
dead man, but Tremblay barely noticed. His attention was fixed on the thing
that had just punched him in the nuts.

It was a Desert Eagle Mark XIX. The weapon
was a monster. Its ten inch barrel was almost as long as the Beretta with its
attached suppressor, and at about five pounds, it weighed more than twice as
much as the standard issue military sidearm. A cursory glance at the half-inch
diameter of the barrel confirmed what Tremblay already suspected: the Desert
Eagle was outfitted for the .50 caliber Action Express round.

He grabbed the pistol in his left hand,
awkwardly reinforcing his grip with his still half-numb right hand, and shoved
the enormous pistol against the back of his very dead human shield, pointing it
in the direction of his assailant. His thumb swept the safety off and his
finger pulled the trigger.

The report sounded like cannon-fire. It felt
like it too…or maybe like holding a stick of dynamite. Because he’d been in a
sitting position, there had been no way to brace his body against the recoil.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion ruled against him and he toppled backward, barely
keeping the gun in his clenched fist. He still fared better than his attacker though.
The bullet had punched through the dead man’s soft abdomen, and continued
forward undeterred, striking the man halfway across the room, spattering both
men’s blood onto the walls and even the ceiling.

Tremblay quickly shook off the effects of
both the unexpected attack and his stunning rejoinder, and scrambled to his
feet. The report from the Desert Eagle had been loud enough to wake the dead,
to say nothing of the other guests at the resort, and that was going to make
getting out a bit trickier than he’d planned. He hastened to the room entrance,
which was still open after his violent intrusion. In the hallway beyond, doors
were opening and a growing tumult of voices was audible, but he didn’t step out
to investigate. Instead, he stripped away the piece of tape he’d used to
confound the latch bolt, and firmly closed the door. That would buy him a few
minutes to figure out what to do next.

Remembering that he’d been caught off guard
once already, he spun around with the Desert Eagle at the ready and quickly
checked the suite to make sure there were no other occupants waiting in ambush.
There were no more surprises of that sort, but he did find an open door leading
to an exterior balcony where he suspected the third man had been lurking. The
balcony also gave him an idea on how to make his exit.

He returned to the front room to retrieve his
Beretta, a much more efficient weapon for field work than the overly powerful
Desert Eagle, but as he was about to discard the latter, he hesitated.

Stan Tremblay had a deep appreciation for a
well-engineered piece of killing technology. True, the Desert Eagle was about
as useful to a stealthy Delta operator as a Lamborghini Diablo was to a soccer
mom, but that didn’t make it any less a thing of beauty. Besides, the Fates had
literally dropped it right in his lap, and not a moment too soon…obviously, the
universe wanted him to have it.

Despite the urgency of his situation, he
flashed an approving grin at his unassailably logical conclusion, and searched
the body of the big Arab for spare magazines. To his utter delight, he found
that the dead man’s shoulder holster rig contained not only four more
seven-round magazines, but another identical pistol on the opposite side.

Tremblay let out a low whistle. “Holy shit,
pal. Trying to overcompensate for something?”

Since breaking up a matched set seemed like
bad luck, and it was probably dangerous to just leave them lying around, he
appropriated the holster for himself and once he’d looped it around his own
shoulders, he returned the first pistol to its place. He shifted the rig
experimentally; the added weight felt strangely comfortable.

He lingered in the suite a moment longer,
searching the closets until he found a baggy windbreaker jacket that would both
conceal his new acquisitions and be a little less conspicuous than the white
waiter’s outfit. Then he headed back to the balcony and swung over the rail.