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  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. 1st Ranger is attached to 7th 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 h
is 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.

  Despite his size, or maybe because of it, he moved down the exterior of the hotel like King Kong on the Empire State Building. He’d grown up with the woods of New Hampshire as his playground; climbing was second nature to him. He swung between balconies, made dynamic leaps between the patios when necessary and finally dropped the last ten feet to the concrete deck that surrounded the entire building, whereupon he immediately melted into the shadows.

  He considered trying to steal a car from the parking lot, but rejected the idea. Someone was bound to contact the authorities in response to the shooting; the last thing he needed was to roll up to a police checkpoint with a hot ride, a small arsenal and a bogus Canadian passport. Instead, he employed the method of travel that had served soldiers like himself well for untold millennia. He started walking.

  The airport was only about six miles away, a distance he could have traversed in about an hour without even breaking a sweat, but when he emerged from the hills that separated the Gold Mohur coastal area from the residential areas of Aden, he was able to hail a taxi cab and shorten the journey. Forty minutes after leaving the hotel, he was on the tarmac at Aden International Airport where a
USAF C-17 waited. As he hiked up to the open rear ramp of the enormous cargo jet, Vaughn stepped out to meet him.

  Vaughn was a little shorter than Tremblay, but solidly built. He had wavy brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard that was—like Tremblay’s goatee—against Army regs, but Delta wasn’t like the regular army. Unit operators needed to be able to blend in with the general population as much as possible, and that meant some rules had to be bent a little. The Texan’s expression was uncharacteristically grim.

  Tremblay nodded to him. “Houston, we have a problem?”

  “Shake a leg, Juggernaut. There’s a fire.”

  Tremblay’s brows creased but he withheld his questions until he was on the ramp. “What the fuck, over? Didn’t you get the kid?”

  “We got the kid; zero complications. Handed him off to State fifteen minutes ago. This is something else.” Vaughn waved to one of the flight crew, then ushered Tremblay forward to where the rest of the team was waiting. When Tremblay was seated, Vaughn spoke again. “You know about Cipher element, right?”

  “The CT unit working with the Agency.” Cipher element wasn’t a unit, per se, but rather an assignment, and the plan was for every Delta squad to get their turn. Most of the current Cipher roster were from Bravo team, but Tremblay knew a few of them.

  “That’s right. Well, we just got word that they are in the shit. Right now, as we speak.”

  Tremblay frowned, trying to recall the names of the men he knew who were currently deployed with Cipher. “What went wrong?”

  “What didn’t? All I know for sure is that they are stranded in the desert and they could use a few more shooters.”

  He let it hang right there, and Tremblay couldn’t tell if Vaughn was ordering them into the fight or asking for volunteers.

  It didn’t matter really. Either way, he was going.

  TEN

  Iraq

  After their initial success, the tide of the battle had shifted against the insurgents. They still had superior numbers on their side; the original force of one hundred and eighty-five mujahideen had been whittled down to about a hundred and thirty, while by their best estimates, the surviving Americans numbered less than a dozen. Their greatest asset however, the element of surprise, had been thoroughly expended. The Americans had suffered heavy losses in those first few minutes of combat, but once the initial sting had worn off, the Americans’ superior training and technology had swung the pendulum in the other direction.