10: INCENSE

THE BRIEFING

“This is the big one,” Harry Tombs said after he closed the conference room door behind him. “The blow-off.” He moved to his usual place at the table. “Everyone fit?”

No one rushed to fill the silence. Ike’s shoulder was still sore, and a little stiff, but he was certain it would not interfere with his ability to do his job. Beau had no real pain left from his injury, but the memory of pain, and a little tenderness in the region that might not have been completely imaginary, lingered. Frank felt as if he had slept four minutes instead of four hours. No one would admit, however, he was at less than one hundred percent. Only Rob had nothing slowing him down.

Tombs took silence for affirmation. He had worked with SEALs before. “Good. Most of the participants in the terrorist summit won’t reach the site until tomorrow morning, but we have hard intel that the meeting is on, and that—as hoped—it will be at the Port Sudan location. From what we have been able to determine, at least nine of the ten heads of organizations will be there. We know that Faud ibn Landin has left his refuge in Afghanistan and is enroute, though we don’t know his precise location. He will probably be the last to arrive. The opening session of the summit will be tomorrow afternoon.

“We’ll put you ashore tonight. You’ll have to find a place to go to ground in the hills behind the meeting site. The Sudanese government is providing heavy security for the terrorists, a full company of soldiers and perhaps as many as thirty members of the military security police, the force that provides bodyguards for the president of the Revolutionary Command Council. The convoy of troops is on the road now, perhaps an hour south of Port Sudan. A few members of the security police detachment are already in the city. Others will be accompanying delegates to the conference overnight and tomorrow morning. And we estimate that each of the ten principals will have two or three of his own people along for personal security.”

“In other words, the total opposition right at the site could be over two hundred,” Frank said.

Tombs nodded. “With perhaps another twenty or thirty local police available within minutes, and additional military forces within three quarters of an hour. We anticipate that the company of soldiers will be the best, and most reliable, the Sudanese government has available.”

“You pack our blue tights and red capes?” Rob asked.

“You’ll have what you’ll need to get the job done,” Tombs said.

“I’m not worried so much about getting the job done as getting out in one piece afterward,” Frank said. “I know what you’ve got in those locked crates. But once we hit that conference, the Sudanese are going to put everything they’ve got into nailing us. If we leave an RPB on shore when we go in, the odds are way too heavy they’ll find it. And they’ll have troops, ships, and police crawling all along that shoreline.”

“You’re right about leaving an RPB,” Tombs said. “You won’t. I’ll be riding in with you and bring the boat back to the ship tonight.”

“That still leaves the question of extraction,” Ike noted.

“Once you hit that conference, the need for secrecy ends. The United States will be ready to take credit for the strike. That means we can use any resources necessary to get you out. We’re preparing for a number of contingencies.” Tombs held up a hand to stave off an interruption. “That’s not just a vague generalization. The primary extraction plan calls for helicopter pickup, with whatever air cover seems necessary, including helicopter gunships or fighters off Roosevelt. Bellman will be in range to use its five-inch gun as well. Bellman will keep any Sudanese coast guard or naval assets from interfering. The ship’s launch and an RPB will be ready to make a surface pickup. And our friends from the Aden mission will be joining us within the next few hours. Pompano will have an SDV in the water with gear for the four of you. That’s also a fallback in case anything goes wrong with any of the other options. They’ll also have a backup team to put ashore if you need reinforcements.”

“No battalion of Marines?” Rob asked.

“No battalion of Marines,” Tombs said. “I was told you heroes wouldn’t like it.”

“We’re not heroes,” Frank said, very softly. “Just men doing a job that, maybe, has to be done. But, since you say that the government is ready to take credit, ready to use the entire Roosevelt battle group to get us out if necessary, why not just use them to take out the conference. Cruise missiles or bombs and rockets from the fighters?”

“You know the reasons as well as I do, Chief,” Tombs said. “We want to be sure we get the people we’re after, and bombs and missiles can’t be counted on for that. You know what we’ve tried in Iraq and Serbia. We need people in on the ground.”

“Just to get everything straight,” Frank said.

Tombs slid the target folder for the mission across the table to Frank. It was considerably thicker than any of the others had been. “This is a job that has to be done,” Tombs said. “If we can take out the leaders of the ten most militant terrorist groups in this part of the world, we’ll sow confusion in their ranks, maybe save hundreds of innocent lives in the next couple of years. Maybe it’s too much to hope that we might permanently cripple any of these organizations, but we can chop the heads off, get rid of the men with the juice, the ideas. That’s especially true with ibn Landin. He’s been a thorn in the side far too long, and the fact that he has seemed to have some sort of magic invulnerability has just made the man more dangerous. He’s a symbol. We show he’s just a man who can be killed like any other, it might take a little of the starch out of a lot of nasty people.”

“’Nough sermonizing,” Beau said. “Let’s cut to the cheese.”

“The meeting will be held in a large villa on the shore just north of Port Sudan,” Tombs said. “The place was built by one of the Egyptian colonial officials who ran the Sudan while Egypt and Great Britain ruled the country jointly. The man had grandiose ideas. Construction is stone and steel. The villa sits on a promontory sixty feet above the sea. The main building is four stories high, built long and thin to allow for cross-ventilation before anyone in these parts had air conditioning. Large dining room and ballroom on the ground floor. The ballroom has been set up with a large table. That’s where the main sessions of this conference will be held. There are enough bedrooms to sleep all of the principals and their aides. Part of the security plan is that once everyone arrives, everyone stays at the villa until the summit ends. Which makes it convenient for us. The domestic help, cooks, maids, and so forth, have all been brought in by the Sudanese government, the names circulated among the major groups coming to the conference for approval.

“On the inland side of the main building, there is a courtyard that’s a hundred feet square. Ten-foot-high walls, four to six feet thick. Garages and other outbuildings have been incorporated in the wall structure. Gate house outside the wall. That will be staffed with security people, and the military will probably have a machine gun set up somewhere nearby, as well as patrols extending out for several hundred yards.”

“Which means we’ll probably have to deal with the army before we can get at the terrorists?” Frank gave it the inflection of a question though it was more a statement of what he saw as an unavoidable fact.

“Before or simultaneously,” Tombs conceded. “Until you see the dispositions and movements firsthand, there’s no way to be certain. But it’s unlikely that these troops will be prepared for the sort of concentrated firepower the four of you will bring to bear.”

“Blow the crap out of them before they know they’re under attack,” Rob contributed.

“Something like that. Which brings us to the assault on the conference itself. And the contents of those locked crates the chief mentioned earlier,” Tombs said. He smiled. “I know that at least three of you have fired the XM18 for familiarization.” He turned his attention to Ike. “All but you, Jensen.”

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Ike said. “What the hell is an XM18?”

“The XM18 projectile launcher,” Frank said. “Picture a Thompson submachine gun that fires 40mm grenades. Holds eighteen rounds and you can empty the magazine in five seconds. Same kind of range and accuracy you’d have with an M79 or M203.” He turned to Tombs. “The kid can handle one. He’s fired other grenade launchers enough.”

“I made preparations based on that assumption,” Tombs said. “There are four weapons and three hundred and sixty rounds of ammunition—high explosive, armor piercing, incendiary, fragmentation. Concentrated mayhem. The four of you lay down seventy-two projectiles in five or ten seconds, you’ll have plenty of time to reload, move closer, or whatever else you need to do before the opposition knows what the hell hit them. As Rob said, ‘Blow the crap out of them before they know they’re under attack.’”

XM18 Projectile Launcher

“Takes a lot longer to reload than to empty it, kid,” Rob said. “Figure a minute to eject empties and replace them.”

“We’ll give you a chance to practice loading and reloading in the armory, kid,” Frank said. “We could all use a little practice before we go in. It’s been . . . since the build up to Desert Storm, I guess, since I handled one of these crackers. I didn’t know we had any in stock yet.”

“There are a few around,” Tombs said. “In brief, here’s the plan. You go in tonight, find a secure place to hide, then hit the conference just after sundown tomorrow, and we pull you out. Then we all go home.”

“One way or t’other,” Beau said.

THE PREPARATION

Ike Jensen whistled softly as Frank Lucan took the first XM18 out of the crate and handed it to him. Ike moved the weapon around, looking at it from every angle.

“This looks almost like a toy, something to shoot Ping Pong balls with,” Ike said.

“It’s no damned toy,” Frank said. “It’s one serious piece of ordnance. A little too heavy for regular use. I guess that’s why the Teams never formally adopted them. The first of these we used, some years back, were as shiny as the ends of a beer can. Glad to see they had the sense to give us a black finish on these.”

“Big appetite,” Rob said. “Eats ammo faster’n you can possibly reload.”

“Four of these going at once, we might be mistaken for a cluster bomb,” Ike said.

Beau chuckled, then pulled another of the weapons from the crate. “We make pretty music, I think,” he said.

Frank took Ike’s weapon back, and showed him how to open the drum magazine. “We’ll all take some time practicing loading,” Frank said. “Not too bad, once you get the hang of it.”

THE MISSION

“We’ve got one little extra bonus going for us this morning,” Tombs said when the team gathered in a red-lit companionway at 0130 hours. “All but one of our ops so far have started earlier. Even if the locals are concerned about something going on, they should be lulled a little by the time we get close. It’s nothing to take to the bank, but every little bit helps. At the moment, there’s a single boat patrolling the coast off Port Sudan. It’s a police launch. We’ll time insertion to put that launch at the far end of its beat, and the captain is going to provide a little distraction. The ship’s launch will be sent off to the south, close to the three-mile limit. Give the locals something to look at while we sneak you in.”

“What about patrols on shore?” Frank asked.

“The security police have set up a checkpoint between the villa and town, a half mile south of the villa. Closer in, the military has two outposts manned outside the walls, one off the northwest corner, the other a hundred yards up the road, toward town. Earlier, they were running two patrols, five or six men in each, but it appears that they’ve been pulled in. At least temporarily. We plan to make landfall two hundred yards north of the farthest limit they were patrolling before.”

“We trip over a patrol going in, it’s going to screw up the whole mission,” Rob noted.

“So don’t trip over them. That’s supposed to be your forte, isn’t it?” Tombs said.

“Yeah, but just for the sake of covering all the bases, what if we do hit trouble going in?” Frank asked.

Tombs hesitated for what seemed to be an extraordinarily long time before he replied. “Cover your asses and call for extraction. We’ll do whatever we have to in order to get you out. But that would leave a lot of people very unhappy. You get spotted going in and the conference is sure to be moved or cancelled, and we might not have a second chance. We may never get another opportunity this good to bugger these terrorists—especially ibn Landin. Washington wants him badly.”

“Not as badly as we want to keep our butts in one piece,” Frank said.

Waiting to board the RPB that would carry them to shore, the four SEALs looked as if they might have been posing for an editorial cartoon lampooning the military. Each man was heavily weighted down with weapons and ammunition—far more than a normal combat load. Each man carried an XM18 with its drum magazine loaded, and bandoleers and pouches carrying another fifty-four projectiles each. Rob and Beau also carried M-16 rifles with two of the hundred-round double drum magazines, and the team’s two radios. Frank and Ike carried Uzis with spare magazines. Everyone wore night-vision goggles, knife, and pistol as well, and, since they would be out for nearly a full day, the men had to carry canteens and rations. They wore desert camouflage BDUs and slouch hats, with visible skin painted in three colors.

Tombs looked at his watch. It was 0158 hours. “Time to go,” he whispered. Tombs was wearing a pistol on a web belt and carried an Uzi slung over his shoulder. He was going only as far as shore, and would be bringing the boat back. His position during the following twenty hours or so would be in Bellman’s CIC, the team’s liaison with the battle group.

The men filed out on deck single file and went to the Jacob’s ladder leading down to the RPB that Bellman’s crew had already deployed. The ship’s launch had been lowered and started out on its mission of deception fifteen minutes earlier. Climbing down to the RPB so heavily loaded took extra care on the part of the SEALs. This was not the time to fall. Shedding enough weight quickly to avoid drowning was an exercise none of them wanted to attempt.

Harry Tombs was the last man to step into the boat. He sat at the rear, near Beau Guisborne, who would handle the RPB on the way in. Above, on Bellman’s deck, the junior O.D. flipped a salute at the men as the boat pulled away.

Tombs wore a radio headset, to monitor traffic between Bellman and her launch for anything that might affect the insertion of Team Wolf. Low at his side, he kept clenching and unclenching his right fist, his only show of nerves . . . and he did all he could to keep any of the SEALs from noticing. He was not overly confident of the outcome of this mission. There was simply too great a chance of something going wrong. At the moment, his concern was over getting the job done, and getting the team back out safely afterward. Earlier, alone in his cabin aboard Bellman, he had allowed himself a few moments to consider the personal importance of the mission. If they succeed, I’ve got it made at the Agency. If they blow it, I might as well submit my resignation right away; I’ll be done anyway. He had fought the urge to go ashore with the SEALs, take part in the assault on the terrorists, do what he could to help insure that it was successful. But that would have been an unforgivable indulgence. It was far more important for him to spend the time on Bellman, make sure the men ashore got any intelligence that came through and—even more important—make sure they were retrieved when the time came. Extraction might prove extremely difficult, even if they were totally successful decapitating the terrorist Hydra. Besides, he had forced himself to admit that he was not even close to qualified for this mission. It’s their pidgin, as the Brits say, he had told himself.

Frank sat in his usual spot at the bow of the RPB, scanning the shore and water with binoculars. His hands had quit the trembling that had started during his smoking marathon the night before. Frank had smoked almost the entire pack, most of it in chain fashion. He still wasn’t sure why, or at least couldn’t admit that he did, not even to himself. He had smoked the last two cigarettes from the pack after a late breakfast, then had brushed his teeth and gargled. After that, he had not even felt an urge to smoke again. Good thing, he decided. I might need my wind before this job’s over.

Rob found it unusually difficult to concentrate on watching his side. An edge of anger kept trying to dominate his thoughts, and he wasn’t certain what he was angry about, or who it was directed at. His dislike for Harry Tombs had been instantaneous and nothing had happened to mitigate that, but Rob had made the necessary allowances; Tombs did, at least, seem to be competent. The terrorists? They were the enemy, but faceless and nameless, even though Rob had studied the photographs of the ten leaders expected to be at the meeting and gone through the names enough times that he could recite them from memory if necessary. The Navy? The Teams? His team mates? Rob shook his head, trying to force himself away from the distracting thoughts; emotion had no place on a mission. Just mad at life, maybe, he thought, and his eyes started sweeping the horizon again.

Beau paid attention to the job at hand, as always. He knew that his team mates considered his laid-back attitude a pose, and that was—when he dwelled on it, which wasn’t often—a laugh. In realistic terms, there was no place else he would rather be than in the Navy, in the Teams. Sure, there might be fantasies of a glamorous life in professional sports or in acting, but those had always been fantasies. This was a life that Beau knew he was good at. So maybe I don’t live to a ripe old age. Maybe I wouldn’t live so long fishing, or living on the streets back home. You take your chances. He had dismissed the thought that just maybe, this was a mission that not everyone would come back from.

Ike was worried, but there was a difference. This time, he wasn’t frightened, or nervous about the mission and how he might perform. He was worried because he couldn’t completely submerge the tingling of excitement, anticipation, that he felt heading in for what would almost certainly be the most dangerous mission he had been on in his time in the SEALs. I don’t want to be a combat junkie, he thought. He remembered one of the instructors at BUD/S who had seemed to get an almost sexual release from remembering and talking about his experiences in Grenada, Panama, and Iraq. I don’t want to get like him, ever!

“The deception seems to be working,” Tombs said in a loud whisper. “The police launch is tagging along, staying right with Bellman’s boat, about three quarters of a mile to the side. They’re a good seven miles south of us now.”

Beau’s response was to open the throttle a little more, give the RPB an extra mile per hour. The boat was still two miles from shore. The villa where the summit meeting was to take place was thirty degrees off the port bow. The villa was marked by several lights in windows, and a small searchlight was playing over the ground on the shore side of the complex.

Something Tombs didn’t mention, Frank thought, as he watched the operators moving the beam of light. We’ll have to take that out with the first volley.

Frank turned his attention farther north, toward the landing area they had chosen, more than a half mile from the villa. The searchlight should be no problem getting ashore and up the slope to the area where they would go to ground to wait for the next sunset. There was no sign of movement, no lights, nothing but rock and a few scrubby trees and bushes close to the edge of the sea.

We’ll have an hour and a half, maybe a little more, to find cover and get settled in, Frank thought, scanning higher on the rocky slope behind the narrow coastal ledge. After that, it’ll start getting light. There were several possible locations. The last time Bellman had passed Port Sudan in daylight, Harry Tombs had taken a number of photographs with a massive telephoto lens. It was just a matter of getting to the spots they had seen on those photographs, and making certain that they were indeed suitable. It was hard to determine the depth of any of the holes from the flat pictures.

Frank shifted his search again, looking along the shore toward the villa. There might be a patrol on the near side, or the men in the sentry post at the northeast corner of the compound might be looking with binoculars, even their own night-vision gear. He bent forward a little more, though he was already nearly as low as he could get in the boat. If they were seen going in, there would be no point in trying to go forward with the mission. They would have to abort. If they could.

Two hundred yards from shore, the RPB moved past a projection of land that cut them off from direct observation of the ground in front of the villa. If they didn’t see us before, they won’t see us now, Frank decided. He scanned the shore directly in front of the boat, then lowered his binoculars and checked the safety on his Uzi. The next ten minutes will tell the first tale, he thought, whether we’re going to have a chance.

Beau did not ease off on the throttle until the boat was within thirty yards of land, then he twisted it all of the way down to idle. The boat nosed against shore. Frank was first out, grabbing the painter to hold the boat steady while the rest of his team climbed out of the boat.

Tombs had taken the tiller from Beau. As soon as the last SEAL was ashore and Frank had pushed the RPB, starting it into a turn, Tombs put the engine in reverse and held the tiller over for a moment, then started the RPB forward again, away from the SEALs. There were no words of farewell.

The four SEALs went prone above the overhanging shore, clear of the mud at the edge of the sea. Although time was critical, Frank took five minutes to assure himself that they were not walking into a trap, that there were no hostile forces waiting to open fire. He also picked out the route he intended to take, scanning along it for any obvious difficulties.

Finally, he got to his feet and started moving forward, in what was nearly one fluid motion. He was conscious of all the weight hanging from his body, the extra burden it represented, but that could be borne. They were not going to make a twenty-mile hike or a six-mile jog.

The land they had to cross was empty. They might have been hundreds of miles from the nearest outpost of civilization instead of little more than half a mile. Even close to the edge of the sea, this was desert, rocky more than sandy, but with grit blowing on the breeze. An imaginative person might almost be able to think it was the Martian landscape rather than a part of Earth that had been inhabited for many thousands of years.

Frank moved as carefully as he could. A careless step, on a rock that might shift, could lead to a twisted ankle, or worse. And there was a chance—remote though it might be—that the Sudanese troops had put out listening devices against the possibility of intruders.

The others followed, spreading out but staying on the same line, two to three yards between men. Ike, Rob, Beau—every man focused entirely on the job at hand. They were professionals. There was no time for anything else, not if the mission was to be successful . . . if they were all to have a chance of getting out alive.

From the start, the trek was uphill, gently at first, then on an increasingly steep grade. Fifty yards from the water’s edge, the slope was twenty degrees, and it got worse soon after. The switch from walking to climbing was almost imperceptible. It became convenient to occasionally use a hand on the rocks ahead and above to move. Then it became essential.

Frank had started to angle to the left before that point. Going south would be more difficult the higher the SEALs got. And even starting as soon as he did, there came a point when Frank had to concede a few yards of altitude to find an easy route to get around a jutting outcropping of rock.

After twenty-five minutes, Frank sat down. He needed a break, a chance to take some of the weight off. Two minutes, he promised himself as the others also sat or squatted. Just two minutes. They could not afford to rest much longer than that, not before finding cover that would protect them through the day.

Frank did not need to consult his watch, but got on his feet a few seconds short of two minutes after he had stopped. Another sixty yards up, he thought, looking for the best route. Maybe a hundred yards horizontally. On the flat, it would have taken less than a minute, even loaded down with eighty or ninety pounds of gear. In the dark, on this slope, it might take all of the hour they had left before they had to start worrying about the first lightening of the sky in the east.

He took one more short rest—less than a minute—after they had covered slightly more than half of the remaining distance. His legs ached. The muscles on the backs of his calves and thighs felt as if they had been strained almost to the breaking point.

A few feet behind, Ike told himself, It’s still not as bad as Hell Week at BUD/S. It was the fourth time that thought had intruded on his concentration. He felt as if he were drowning in sweat despite the breeze in his face, a breeze that had strengthened over the past ten minutes. When Frank got up and started moving again, Ike groaned mentally . . . but he got up and followed without complaint.

The last twenty minutes were almost entirely vertical. There was no doubt at all that this was mountain climbing. Handholds and footholds were readily available, but each had to be tested before anyone could put all of his weight on it. At the end of that stretch, there was a narrow, rising ledge, three to six feet wide, that led toward the areas that Lucan and Tombs had circled on the photographs.

“This will do,” Frank said, after a cursory look inside the first hole. It was not really a cave. Part of the face of the hill had fallen, leaving an overhang above and a number of large fragments in front. It would shield the four men from observation except from one angle, from the air, and if a helicopter or airplane came anywhere near, they would have time to duck into better cover among the rubble in front of the gouge.

“Just look carefully before you sit or lay down,” Frank added. “I don’t know just what kinds of snakes we might run into, but you can bet your ass they’ll be mean and poisonous.”

“As if the snakes with feet aren’t bad enough,” Rob whispered, peering into the darkness of the hole, trying to see everywhere at once. “I don’t like snakes.”

“And, for God’s sake, if you do see one, remember not to use a gun on it,” Frank said. “Give it a chance to get out if you don’t feel up to taking it with a blade.”

The warning was enough to set all four men to poking very carefully about the limits of their hideout. Ten minutes of searching turning up nothing reptilian, which let them all breathe a little more easily.

“I’ll take the first watch,” Rob offered. Snakes were his weak point. His fear of them approached phobia. It had almost washed him out of one survival course the Teams had sent him on, in the jungle of Costa Rica.

“Okay, two hours,” Frank said. “Wake the kid then. By the time he gets his time in, it’ll be daylight.” He paused. No one saw his grin in the darkness. “That’s when the snakes start getting active.”

“Very funny,” Rob muttered.

Even without mention of snakes, Rob would have had no difficulty staying awake. The adrenaline rush of a mission guaranteed that. Perhaps if he had gone for two or three days without sleep it might have been difficult, but not for less. He lay down his XM18 and stripped off the bandoleers of projectiles as well as his canteens and the pack with his MREs. After that, he felt almost light enough to float away.

He moved outside the sheltered overhang and prowled around for a few minutes, carrying his M-16, looking for the best vantages and checking out the immediate vicinity for threats and possibilities. He was careful about exposing himself to view from below, and especially from the area of the villa. With Sudanese soldiers on site, someone might be searching with night-vision gear.

Routes in. Routes out. Zones of fire. Looking for those was a reflex. Know where the enemy might come at you from. Look for ways to evade the enemy or get in position to counterattack.

Once Rob was confident that he knew the layout, he got in position on the ledge and kept watch with binoculars, studying the disposition of forces in and around the villa. He was high enough to have a good view inside the courtyard walls. He saw five men come out of one of the secondary structures built into the wall, leave through the main gate, and relieve the fire team on duty at the nearest guard post. The men who were relieved went into the building the others had come out of.

There’s a target to remember, Rob thought.

Frank was surprised to find himself waking just after sunrise—surprised because he had not expected to sleep, certainly not soundly enough that he had not wakened at every real or dreamed noise in the night. He pushed the night-vision goggles up off his eyes, then took them off and rubbed at his eyes for a moment. He stretched in place, then rolled over and got up, slowly. Ike was out on the ledge, his attention somewhere below. Rob was sitting on a rock under the overhang, looking around within the hideout, as if he were still uncertain that the SEALs were not sharing their hole with any snakes. Only Beau appeared to be still sleeping.

“The head’s about ten yards south,” Rob said when Frank got to his feet. “If you stay low, there’s no chance of anyone seeing you from the villa.”

“You get any sleep at all?” Frank asked.

“Not so’s I could notice. You and your damn snakes.”

“Sorry about that, but they are a danger here. Why not catch some shuteye now. The rest of us will make sure nothing crawls into your pants.”

“Maybe later. I don’t really feel the need yet.”

“Suit yourself, but you’d better get some sleep today.”

Frank went out on the ledge and stretched out next to Ike. “Any activity yet?” Frank asked.

“They changed the guards about twenty minutes ago,” Ike whispered. He did not take the binoculars away from his eyes. “I think the first contingent of the day just arrived. Three men in an old British jeep—Land Rover. There’s a boat patrolling two hundred yards offshore, running back and forth, about a mile past the villa either way. Two heavy machine guns on deck, a half dozen men in uniform visible.”

“Police or navy?” Frank asked, looking out over the water for the boat. It was not in sight at the moment.

“Police, I think,” Ike said. “Can’t be sure, though.”

“Right. Go give Beau a kick. Tell him it’s his watch.”

“I’m awake,” Beau said. Frank turned his head. Guisborne had not moved.

“Then get out here,” Frank said. “Take your watch. We’ve got a room with a view. Enjoy it. I’ll relieve you.”

The first Sudanese helicopter flew overhead an hour after sunrise, heading north from Port Sudan. The SEALs did not actually see the aircraft. As soon as they heard it, they pulled back into the best cover they could manage. The helicopter appeared to be following the ridgeline west of the overhang that sheltered the intruders. Ten minutes later, the sound returned, then faded away to the south.

It was fifty minutes later when it came back. That established the pattern. The helicopter passed over twice, ten or fifteen minutes apart, more or less each hour throughout the day. The actual interval varied. Activity on the ground increased as well. Patrols of ten to twelve soldiers followed the shoreline north from the villa for a mile, then moved inland to the last easy trail on mostly flat rock. They went south to a point just past the villa, then went back inside the courtyard. A few minutes later another squad—the SEALs assumed that the patrol duty rotated among squads—came out and made the same trek. A different group, only occasionally visible, patrolled south of the villa. That duty seemed to be divided between soldiers and the security police detail.

Different groups of people arrived at unpredictable intervals during the morning. Shortly before noon there was a major commotion in the courtyard and around it. Troops were rousted from the buildings where they were billeted, and formed up into ranks. A large Mercedes, preceded and followed by Land Rovers with machine gun-armed guards, drove into the courtyard. Several men, apparently officers, came to attention as a rear door on the Mercedes opened and a thin man dressed in a camouflage uniform got out.

Rob Rhodes was manning the binoculars at the time. “Hey, it looks like the big cheese just arrived. That has to be Landin.” He passed the binoculars to Frank, but the chief didn’t get a chance to verify the sighting. The helicopter was approaching again and the men had to retreat out of sight.

The ledge was shrouded in deep shadows more than two hours before sunset. After the heat of the morning and midday, shade gave at least an illusion of coolness for the men waiting for the coming of night. The rocks around them no longer seemed to be radiating more heat than they received, and there was an occasional hint of breeze around them.

All four SEALs had managed to get at least a little extra sleep, though the routine passages of the Sudanese military helicopter meant that no slumber went undisturbed for long.

“One little SAM,” Rob muttered after one flyby. “Why couldn’t we have brought along one little SAM to take care of the odd buzzard?”

“Because we couldn’t have settled for just one,” Frank said. “We’d have wanted enough to take care of three or four fighters as well. Maybe a torpedo to eliminate their navy, too. If that thing’s still buzzing around when we get ready to strike, keep your eyes open for a chance to pop it.” He gestured at Rob’s XM18. “It would make a pretty show.”

Rob looked at the weapon. “Yeah, it would.” He tried to calculate just how difficult the shot would be—whether it would be worth the effort. Maybe, he decided. It would depend on how fast the helicopter was moving, how close it was, altitude . . . and luck. On the plus side, any kind of hit was almost guaranteed to bring a small helicopter down.

Sleeping, watching. In between, the men cleaned their weapons to make certain no sand or dust would clog the action when the time came. They ate. They drank enough water to keep from getting dehydrated. Leg cramps could be a major distraction, and in the desert heat, they were all too possible.

The shadows moved toward the sea, across the villa, finally out over the water. Just after 1900 hours, several men came out of the main building of the villa in two groups. They walked around in the courtyard, stretching, looking at the sky, apparently talking among themselves—the groups separate. These were not soldiers or security police, but the men who had come to the conference.

“One’s the Hezbollah guy, with two of his guards, I guess,” Beau said. He was the one on duty with the binoculars. “I think the other group’s the Libyans, but I can’t be sure. I can’t see their faces.”

“The only thing we have to be concerned with now is if any of the groups leave before we hit,” Frank said. “We want all the chickens in the roost.”

“Nobody moving for any of the cars,” Beau said.

“Just stretching their legs after a long session of planning how to kill women and children,” Rob suggested.

He moved back a couple of steps, deeper under the overhang, as he heard the helicopter coming south again. The others moved as well. This time, the helicopter was flying slowly along the shoreline instead of along the ridge. It was less than a thousand feet above the water, moving in a zigzag pattern. Looking for folks like us coming in, Beau thought. This was the best view the SEALs had had of the helicopter all day. They could see machine guns mounted in the side doors of the aircraft, uniformed men hunkering over the weapons, looking for targets.

“We’re gonna have to deal with that, one way or t’other,” Beau said.

“Looks that way,” Frank conceded. “Just something else to remember when the time comes. At least there are no rocket pods on that chopper.”

“There might be more than one of them,” Ike said. “We don’t know it’s been the same bird flapping back and forth all day. Could be two or three, taking turns.”

The helicopter moved out of sight to the south, past the villa, toward the city. The SEALs continued waiting.

Lights were on in many of the rooms of the villa. Outside, the soldiers had moved their searchlight to the shore side. The light was moving slowly across the water, out to about two hundred yards, looking for waterborne intruders. The earnestness of that search gave Frank a feeling of relief. They don’t have any idea we’re already here, he thought. They’re watching for anyone coming in. It might give the team a few extra seconds of surprise when the attack started. Perhaps the first response of the forces guarding the villa would be to look for attack from the sea. That confusion would not last long, except by the wildest chance, but seconds could make the difference between success and failure . . . between life and death. And the SEALs wanted every fragmentary assist they could get.

Except for the man on watch, the SEALs held off donning their night-vision goggles for as long as possible—as long as there was any remnant of daylight out on the Red Sea within their sight. The equipment was second nature for the SEALs—so much of their work was done in the dark—but there was something about the retreat to the green-glow world of infrared vision that gave the men pause. It was different, going from daylight to night rather than starting on a mission when it was already dark. Not a man in the team could have explained what that difference was, or why it affected them, but each of them felt it.

One by one, though, they slipped the night-vision gear over their heads and plunged into the world of green light and shadow. The time for action was approaching.

“We work our way down and to the right,” Frank reminded the others as 2100 hours got near. “From the recon photos, it looks as if we’ll have good cover until we get within two hundred yards of the villa. That’s close enough for the XM18s. We’ll spread out as much as we can without losing sight of each other, and I want all four of us popping the trigger at the same time when we start. When we do open up, Ike, you and I will concentrate on the troops and police guarding the place. You handle the people on the right, I’ll take the left. The guard posts outside the villa, the searchlight and machine guns, then we work on that building inside on the south that they seem to be using as a barracks. Rob and Beau, start working on the main building right from the start. Get your range and do as much damage as you can. Go for windows and doors as much as possible, that’s easier than trying to knock holes in stone walls, even with the rounds we’ve got. Ike and I will add our bit as soon as we can.”

“What’s the cut-off?” Rob asked. “When do we stop worrying about blowing the hell out of that compound and start worrying about getting our asses out of harm’s way?”

“We’re going to have to play this by ear,” Frank said. “Bellman will see the first explosions and know it’s time to get ready to lend a hand. Once we don’t have to worry about radio silence, I’ll get on the horn and make sure Tombs knows what’s going on. Even if we knock out all the security at the villa in the first few seconds we can’t count on having more than five minutes before the Sudanese get more troops in. The helicopter, whatever they’ve got on the water, and more. So we need to save some of the popcorn for that.”

“We supposed to go inside for a body count, or to ID the targets?” Ike asked.

“Much as Tombs would like confirmation, we only go through the villa if that looks like the safest route home,” Frank said. “Tombs can get his information wherever he’s been getting it before. We’re not going to try for fingerprints and pictures.” Wherever he’s been getting it: Frank had spent some time wondering about that. The intel had been so accurate that he suspected much of it had to be coming from ibn Landin’s inner circle, someone who knew where and when the renegade millionaire was going to move. Maybe someone in the villa with him now, Frank thought. If he hasn’t found a way to get himself out.

“There’s the helicopter!” Ike whispered. “Out over the water again. Must be a half mile out.” The others looked, saw the beam of the light the helicopter was shining on the surface of the Red Sea. “They’re still looking for somebody coming in.”

“Helicopter, police launch, and that searchlight on shore,” Rob said. “Might make the assault easier for us, but it’s gonna complicate the hell out of getting home.”

There had been no synchronizing of watches. The attack had been planned to start at about 2130 hours, but the exact time remained up to Frank. He kept looking at his watch, let 2130 slip past. 2135. 2140. The team had been ready for a half hour. Everyone had slipped back into their field gear, donned the bandoleers of projectiles, web belts, and the rest of it. Their trash, the remnants of the meal packs they had eaten during the day, had been concealed under rocks; there wasn’t enough loose dirt or sand close by to bury the garbage properly.

“Let’s go.” Frank got to his feet and started along the rough ledge leading south from their hideout. It was 2146 hours. He pushed his wrist-watch farther up on his left arm so that the luminous dial could not give them away.

Ike was second out, followed by Rob and Beau. They had all looked over the first part of the trail they would follow during the day, knew where the obstacles were. But as soon as they were forty yards away, they were on ground they had not been able to see, feeling their way along the side of the rock-strewn slope. Frank moved slowly, stopping occasionally to look ahead, trying to find the best route. He did not want to get to a dead end and have to backtrack.

Somewhere out to sea, Bellman would—Frank assumed—be moving closer, getting into position to provide cover with its deck gun, and to launch boats to come in to pick up the SEALs. Pompano would be out there as well, perhaps just more than three miles out; the SDV was probably out of the DDS already, maybe no more than a few hundred yards offshore, waiting to find out if they would have to make the pickup. Roosevelt and the rest of the battle group were farther away, at least a hundred miles from Port Sudan, but it would not take fighters from the aircraft carrier long to get to the scene if they were needed, even if they weren’t already in the air as part of the battle group’s normal air cap.

It might get hairy, but we’ll get out, one way or another, Frank thought. He needed the reassurance, and hoped that he wasn’t lying to himself. By this time, a few minutes past 2200 hours, all of the battle group’s assets should be on alert and watching for the first sign that the attack on shore had started.

Something moved near Frank’s feet, scooting out of the way, under a rock. Frank did not see what it was, but had the impression that whatever the animal had been, it had moved on feet. Lizard or rat, something like that, he thought. Not a snake to spook the Farmer. The barest hint of a smile flitted across Frank’s face and quickly vanished.

He kept moving.

It was just after 2230 hours when Frank decided they had reached the best location they were likely to find. He motioned for Ike to move past him, then gave Beau the signal to hold his place. The team spread out across thirty yards. They were near the bottom of the slope, behind the last cover to hide them from anyone looking out from the positions around the villa. From here, they would have to slide into firing position on hands and knees, perhaps even on bellies.

Frank waited until the others were as spread out as he wanted, then started moving slowly toward their target. It was an awkward crawl—slightly downhill, around one large boulder and into position between two rocks that were each about the size of Volkswagen Beetles.

Give them a few more seconds to get ready, Frank told himself. His would be the first shot. As soon as the others heard the sound of that, they would pull the triggers on their projectile launchers. That first volley should hit in a tight bunch, and after that, they would work through the magazines as quickly as they could line up targets.

Frank took aim on the machine gun post at the northeast corner of the villa. He had the gun itself in sight, the slight motion of heads behind the waist-high barricade of sand bags about a hundred and seventy yards away. He adjusted his aim, then counted silently to three.

Now!

Frank pulled the trigger, felt the recoil, heard the sound of the shot. He moved the XM18 back into position and sent a second round on the same trajectory, before the first had a chance to reach the target, before he heard the reports of the other projectile launchers.

Total concentration. Barely controlled chaos. Fire and smoke. Noise, an all-out assault on ears and nerves. Frank concentrated as tightly as he had ever concentrated on anything as he moved his aim from one target to the next, methodically, being as efficient in his movements as possible. He kept pulling the trigger until his XM18 clicked on an empty cylinder. It had been no more than seven or eight seconds since the first explosion.

Frank ducked back, opening the drum magazine as he moved, shaking the weapon to dump spent casings. He started pulling new projectiles from a bandoleer, shoving each into place. His fingers trembled a little as he reloaded. He was halfway through the task when he realized that all of the other XM18s had stopped firing as well. Everyone had to be reloading at the same time. He could hear gunshots from the villa, and around it, but the enemy didn’t seem to know where the attackers were yet. The gunfire was ragged, uncoordinated. Blind.

When Frank finished reloading and lifted his head to look for targets again, he could see that the bombardment had already had considerable effect. There were several small fires burning inside the main building, and a larger blaze from the smaller building that the soldiers had been using as a barracks.

Frank was more selective about targets with the second magazine of projectiles. He looked for concentrations of soldiers or police, but sent most of the rounds into the villa’s buildings. He used his radio to call Harry Tombs, and left that connection open. He had attention to spare for more of the team’s surroundings as well, and spotted the approaching helicopter when it was still a half mile away, its searchlight feebly reaching out toward the hillside behind and above the SEALs, looking for targets from too far away.

“The helicopter!” Frank shouted, uncertain whether any of his men would hear his warning.

The helicopter had not quite reached the villa when it suddenly exploded. The range was too extreme for any of the XM18s to have reached the aircraft.

“One from the fleet,” Tombs said over the radio. “You’ve got three Tomcats in range. They’ll handle the gunboat too.”

“Give them my thanks,” Frank said, keying his transmitter just long enough for the sentence. It was time to reload his weapon again.

“Work your way toward shore, a hundred yards north of the villa,” Tombs instructed as Frank filled the last chamber in the XM18. “Two whirlybirds coming in, one for pickup, one to ride shotgun.”

“Take us five or ten minutes,” Frank said. “There’s still a little opposition between us and the water.”

“Ten minutes will work out fine,” Tombs said. “We’re getting great pictures. Doesn’t seem to be anyone getting away from the villa.”

“Any reinforcements on their way in?” Frank asked.

“Not close enough to worry about yet,” Tombs said.

A grenade exploded fifty yards in front of Frank, close enough to make him duck, too far to be overly threatening. There were still soldiers ready to fight.

“Time to shag ass,” Frank said. He was talking to himself, not over the radio.

“Ike!” he shouted. “Let’s go!”

“Aye!” Ike shouted back, “I’m ready.”

As soon as Ike reached Frank, the chief motioned him on toward the north. “We go out around that side of the villa. Our ride home is on the way in, with cover.”

They picked up the other two men on the way, and kept moving. The SEALs did no firing once they started leaving their positions. There was still some gunfire behind them, but nothing that came close enough for any of them to notice. Several grenades went off, getting closer to the positions they had evacuated. Within the courtyard, there was a major explosion as the gas tank on one of the vehicles parked there cooked off. Thirty seconds later, a section of wall crumbled from the main building, falling into the courtyard, exposing the fires burning inside.

Hell on Earth, Rob thought, stopping for a second to look.

Once the team moved away from the cover of the scree and boulders at the base of the hill, a few of the villa’s defenders spotted them. Automatic rifle fire came at the SEALs. They went to ground, turning to face the enemy. A dozen forty-millimeter projectiles slowed the rate of incoming fire for a few seconds, but not long enough. There were more men coming at them.

An explosion behind the SEALs dropped bits of stone among them. It was followed by another explosion, just seconds later.

“Hell, they’ve got a mortar working on us!” Rob shouted. “Must be coming from behind the main house.”

“More men coming in from the south too,” Ike said.

The villa was fully engulfed in flames now, fire spouting through doorways and windows, smoke curling around the eaves. One section of roof collapsed inward, sending a torrent of sparks up and out. Night had disappeared from the area. The fire was so bright, and hot, that the SEALs all pushed their night-vision goggles up onto foreheads. It was easier to see without them.

“Hey, Tombs, we’re not going to be able to get down to the shore,” Frank said into the radio—not quite a shout. “We’re going to have to pull back, try to work our way north and west, away from all the shit here. They got their reinforcements in faster than we expected.”

“Working on it already,” Tombs said, almost calmly.

“Frank, look toward the main gate.” That was Rob. A small group of men was moving away from the gate, due west, toward the slope about fifty yards south of where the SEALs had been forced down. “That’s ibn Landin in the middle. I got a good look.”

“Aw, shit,” Frank said under his breath. He keyed his radio transmitter again. “The big cheese is making a break for the high ground, Tombs. Him and maybe a half dozen others. Looks like he’s running, and not back toward the city.”

“Can you get him?” Tombs asked.

“Get these other bastards off our backs and we’ll try.”

A dozen separate fires were burning in and around the villa, casting dancing shadows. The SEALs heard the popping sounds of ammunition being ignited by the flames. Twice they heard gasoline tanks explode. In the distance they heard the growing wail of sirens, pulsed tones moving closer.

“The helicopter crews have your position located,” Tombs reported over the radio. “The gunship pilot suggests you move farther north, immediately.”

Frank did not question Tombs. He simply got his men up, and started jogging. With so much of the ammunition for the XM18s already expended, the men all felt considerably lighter—more than could rationally be explained by the precise weight of that ammunition.

Twenty-five seconds after Tombs’s warning, Frank and Ike spotted twin fiery streaks coming out of the darkness over the sea. Two missiles smashed into the main building of the villa and exploded inside. Through that noise, they heard the rapid stutter of a gatling gun, ripping across the level ground through the nearest group of Sudanese soldiers.

Although the SEALs were two hundred yards from the rocket blasts, they all instinctively dove to the ground and covered their heads at the sound, before debris started to rain down around them.

“Come on. We’ve still got work to do!” Frank shouted, after just a couple of seconds. Lighter bits of debris were still coming down.

“They’re heading straight for the top of the hill,” Rob said. “Must be about a dozen of them now.”

“That bastard must have planned an escape route,” Frank said. The team was moving again, heading west now, climbing the slope again, hurrying as fast as they could. “A bolt hole, some kind of transportation.”

The four men gave little attention to the scene behind them now, no more than an occasional glimpse—as often as not unintentional. Ike was the only one who saw the helicopter gunship explode, a hundred yards from shore, hit by a surface to air missile fired from somewhere in the vicinity of the burning villa.

The villa and the ground around it could have passed as some wildly morbid vision of the gates of Hell. Explosions and fires, dirty clouds illuminated from within, orange and red flames curling around each other. Tracer rounds streaking through the night, up and down. The defenders on the ground had not been destroyed, despite the mayhem that had been dropped on them. Beyond there were the sounds of distant sirens. More troops were approaching. Two helicopters came up from the south, and these were hostile, not friendly. Over the radio, Tombs relayed news that the Sudanese had scrambled two of their precious few MiG fighters.

Near the top of the slope, the SEALs had to stop for a moment, mostly to catch their breath. All turned to look back down toward the sea.

“Sweet Jesus,” Rob whispered, his voice hoarse and labored. He was having trouble sucking in enough air. “How can anyone live through that?”

Frank lifted his head—a little. “Not our problem. We’ve still got ibn Landin to get. You see where they went?”

“No. Lost sight.”

“They be seventy—eighty—yards south, maybe a bit higher than us,” Beau said.

“Can’t leave them above us,” Frank said, pushing himself back to his feet. “Let’s go.”

The plateau was a rocky wasteland with virtually no living plant life that the SEALs could see. They had all donned their night-vision goggles again. Away from the flames, the night seemed darker than it ought to be.

Distance muted the noise behind the SEALs, dull thumps and thin cracks. They were able to hear the Sudanese helicopters coming in low over the plateau before they saw them. The helicopters were close before the lead bird turned on a searchlight and started moving it back and forth across the rocky terrain.

“What happened to the Tomcats that were supposed to keep off enemy choppers?” Rob asked.

“Too busy worrying about the MiGs,” Frank said. “We’re going to have to take care of these birds ourselves.”

“Are they after us or looking to pick up ibn Landin?” Rob asked.

“Either way, we’ve got to stop them,” Frank said.

“I’ve only got one grenade left in my XM18,” Ike said, “and I think that’s incendiary.”

“I’ve got two HE,” Frank said, looking at the drum magazine of his projectile launcher. “Rob?”

“Zip.”

“Beau?”

“Two, one frag, one HE.”

“It’ll have to do. Let’s go. And keep your eyes open for the bastards on the ground.” Frank got up and took the point, heading south.

He moved cautiously but fast, darting from one bit of cover to the next. The broken rock field atop the plateau gave plenty of protection. It was almost a maze. The SEALs moved a little farther inland, away from the precipice and—Frank hoped—a little farther from the group of armed men with ibn Landin. Take care of the choppers first, Frank told himself. We can worry about the men on the ground afterward. While he led his men south, he kept one eye on the helicopter he could see clearly, the one with the searchlight.

He almost didn’t see the second helicopter before it was too late. That aircraft had circled around on the east. It came in low and fast, without lights. It was within two hundred yards before Frank saw it and yelled, “Hit the deck!” just as the helicopter’s machine guns opened up. The gunfire was too accurate to be random. The gunner had to be operating with his own night-vision system.

Ike had been on the right flank. He was the man nearest the helicopter. For a couple of seconds, Ike could scarcely hear the sounds of gunfire over the pounding of his own heart. Bullets had come far too close for comfort. Ike was so pumped up that he didn’t even realize that his right arm had been nicked by one of the slugs. There was no pain yet, just the first real gut-twisting fear he had ever experienced. A convulsive shudder. Ike sucked in a deep breath and pressed his eyes shut—just for an instant. When he opened his eyes again, he lifted up on one knee, bringing his XM18 up into firing position, tracking the blinking lights of the machine gun in the waist of the helicopter. The round was barely away before Ike dropped the launcher and swung his Uzi around into position.

The explosion seemed to catch him by surprise, a hundred feet up and little more than sixty yards away horizontally, as the incendiary round exploded inside the helicopter. Ike ducked, wrapping his arms around his head as flaming debris erupted from the aircraft.

Beau was the only SEAL who did not duck. As the glare of the explosion lit up the sky, he raised up, aiming his XM18 at the second helicopter, farther away. He pulled the trigger twice, as quickly as he could make aimed shots, before dropping behind a large boulder and rolling as far under its edge as he could. He felt something burn his back, but the feeling was transient. It was several minutes later before it returned, and he realized that he had been hit.

Frank ducked, moved around the side of a rock, away from the debris, then crawled forward, coming up to his knees just as Beau stopped moving. Neither of Beau’s projectiles had hit the second helicopter. They fell back to the ground before detonating.

Frank fired one HE round, and waited—unwilling to use the last round unless it was necessary.

It wasn’t. The first round hit the nose of the last helicopter and blew it out of the air. There was no fire, but the aircraft started to rotate under its rotor, spiraling into the rocks. The larger explosion didn’t come until the helicopter hit the ground.

Frank started moving back, scooting along the ground. “Everyone okay?” he called in what amounted to a stage whisper.

“Yo,” Rob said. “Hey, Beau’s hurt.”

“I be okay,” Beau said.

Frank moved toward the voices. Beau had crawled back out from under the edge of the boulder. He was lying on his stomach, and Rob was bent over him.

“How bad?” Frank asked.

“Looks like somebody pressed a fucking iron against his back,” Rob said. “Piece of wreckage from the first chopper, I guess. Looks nasty, but he’ll live.”

“I be okay,” Beau repeated.

Ike reached the others. Frank looked up and saw the wet, sticky area on his right arm. “What happened to you, kid?” Frank asked.

“What?”

“Your arm.” Frank pointed. Ike reached up with his left hand and touched the spot, then pulled his hand away and looked at the blood on it.

“Shit, I didn’t even know. Can’t be bad.”

“Let me look,” Frank said.

Beau moved around, sitting up, flexing his back and shoulders as if testing his limits.

“Just a scratch,” Ike said as Frank leaned close to his wounded arm. “What about the bad guys? We’ve still got work to do.”

“Yeah, man,” Beau said, using his rifle as a prop to help him get to his feet. “Got to do them ’fore they do us. They be here, close. I kin smell ’em.”

“You need a shot for pain?” Frank asked.

“Later.”

“Leave the launchers here together,” Frank whispered. “We get a chance, we’ll retrieve them later.”

Who’s hunting who? Frank wondered, as he started moving again. He put Beau and Ike in the middle. Ike’s wound was insignificant, but Frank didn’t want to take chances with the young man. His nerves might be about shot, Frank thought. Let him look after Beau. That left Rob on rearguard.

Frank had lost all track of time. He wasn’t certain how many minutes had passed since they had first taken on the helicopters. Dealing with the aircraft and then the wounds had robbed the chief of the time. Glancing at his watch didn’t help. It told him the current time, but not how much had passed.

Where are you, Landin? he asked in his head. Are you running to save your ass or coming after us? Were the helicopters your ace in the hole? Or do you have something else here?

The questions did not detract from Frank’s alertness. He moved slowly, cautiously, stopping after almost every step, listening hard for any sounds that didn’t belong. His eyes kept moving, scanning the terrain ahead and to either side. The barrel of his Uzi moved with his eyes, an unconscious mimicry that meant that if he did spot anything, the submachine gun would already be pointed in the general direction of any target.

Beau, second in line, was a little to Frank’s left as well as three yards behind him. Beau moved with his teeth gritted against the growing pain of the burn on his back. When he eyes started to tear up he had to stop and rub the tears away—a few dangerous seconds of less than full attention. God, we got to get this over fast, he thought.

Ike’s wound had started to sting, but it was only a minor irritant, more a wonder to the youngest member of the team than anything else. I got shot and didn’t even feel it. That amazed him. He was a little to Frank’s right, but only two steps behind Beau, close enough to catch him if he started to fall. How can he keep going with that? Ike wondered. He had seen how severe the wound on Beau’s back was. The burn went through the skin to the meat below.

Rob let himself drift farther back than he usually would have on rearguard, leaving more than ten yards between himself and the two men in the middle. He ranged a little more freely from side to side as well, looking for a better angle, looking for any extra edge to help him see their targets before the targets saw them . . . and started shooting first.

It was a near thing.

Rob saw—or thought he saw—a hint of movement off to his left, no more than thirty yards away. He shouted, “Down!” as he pivoted and opened fire with his M-16, just as at least six men started firing toward the SEALs. Rob dropped to the ground in what was almost slow motion, his finger riding the trigger of his rifle the whole way, spraying bullets across the muzzle flashes. He heard bullets whiz by, heard them chipping rock, felt splinters of rock against his face. He also heard someone scream—one of the terrorists.

By that time, the gunfire was general. The other SEALs were firing back.

Rob did not wait around. He started crawling away, back north, going as quickly as he could on hands and knees. There had been no orders, no communication at all with Frank. But with the two groups so close together, there was no time for that. Rob wanted to get an angle, flank the terrorists—get somewhere he could have a clear shot at them.

He needed five minutes to get into position. He climbed up on a rock, careful not to expose himself any sooner than he had to. He could see five men seventy yards away.

Ducks in a pond, he thought as he switched the selector on his rifle from automatic to single shot. He rested the barrel of the M-16 on the rock and lined up his first target. There was so much noise going on that the terrorists might never notice that one gun was shooting from ninety degrees away from the rest.

One bullet, one body. Rob fired quickly but accurately, working his way down the line. Four men went down before anyone even thought to look his way. The fifth man went down as he brought his AK-47 around to bear.

There were more of the enemy, out of Rob’s view, but they were fully occupied by the other SEALs. Rob could make out the sound of the two Uzi submachine guns, combining to make a sound almost like a buzzsaw.

Then Rob heard a man start shouting in Arabic. Rob could not see him, so he missed the finale.

Frank had started trying to work his way around to the right, unaware that Rob was moving left. He was unable to get far. There was an open space, and the enemy had it marked too closely for him to make it across. Frank gave up the attempt. When he heard the report of single shots from an M-16 at some distance, he guessed what had happened, and worried less about his own ability to flank the enemy. He put a fresh magazine in his Uzi and worked to keep the terrorists pinned down.

Ammunition was getting short. Frank only had two more thirty-round magazines, so he was as sparing as he could be of it. A second single shot. A third. Frank knew how good Rob was with a rifle, even if the M-16 wasn’t a usual sniper weapon.

Frank raised up a little higher than he had been, and got off a short burst at one of the men shooting at him. Got him! There seemed to be only two or three of the terrorists still firing.

He ducked back down and brought the radio to his mouth. “Tombs! You ready to get us the hell out of here?”

“Soon as you give the word it’s safe to bring a chopper in, Chief.”

“Getting close. Just a couple hostiles left here, I think.”

“You get ibn Landin?”

Frank almost missed Tombs’s question.

Bullets started hitting all around him, coming from his right—the south. Frank fell flat and twisted around, yelling for Ike and Beau to watch out as he moved.

Two men were running straight at Frank, firing their AK-47s on full automatic, screaming as they raced toward the SEALs. Frank started firing back, spraying across the two men. For impossibly long seconds, nothing seemed to touch the running men. Frank heard an M-16 firing past him from behind, also on full automatic—Beau. And Ike’s Uzi joined in almost as quickly.

Still the two men came on, as if they were untouchable. They were within thirty feet of Frank before one of them fell. The other kept coming. Frank’s magazine went empty. There was no time to reload. He dropped the Uzi and drew his pistol, but he knew he was not going to have time to get it up before the last terrorist—ibn Landin himself, Frank realized—got to him.

Frank could see the murderous rage on the Saudi terrorist’s face, a hideous contortion of his features. He was screaming unintelligible words. Frank got up on his knees, ready to rise to tackle ibn Landin.

“Down, Chief!”

Frank dropped and Ike Jensen moved up level with him, firing point blank into the terrorist. Frank could see where a half dozen bullets hit, stitching a pattern across ibn Landin’s chest. The man stumbled. The muzzle of his rifle drooped, then the weapon fell from his hands. Two bullet holes appeared in his face and ibn Landin stumbled again, then fell. He twitched several times, then his entire body was wracked by a massive spasm before he quit moving.

Half a minute or more passed before Frank realized that all the shooting had stopped. Slowly he got to his feet, never taking his eyes off the dead man not more than three yards away from him. It wasn’t until he heard someone stumbling around behind him—noisily—that Frank turned.

Beau was doing the stumbling, a crooked hesitation step. His rifle dragged on the ground. His head was tilted back, as if he were studying the stars. “I got the last one,” Beau said, his voice sounding dreamy. Then he collapsed, falling heavily to his knees. Before he could tip forward and fall on his face, Ike got to him and eased him more gently to the ground.

Frank reached for his radio again, but there was only wreckage left. “Kid, you still got the backup radio?”

Ike found it intact and handed it to the chief.

“How’s Beau?” Frank said

“Been shot. Bullet in the side. I’ll get pressure bandages on,” Ike said.

“Farmboy?” Frank shouted.

“Yeah. Coming.”

Frank keyed the transmitter. “Come and get us, Tombs.”

POST-MISSION

“You did it. You really did it.” Harry Tombs stood over the body the SEALs had brought back with them. The corpse was lying in the companionway at the aft end of Bellman’s superstructure. Beau and Ike were already being tended to, ready for transportation to the better medical facilities aboard the aircraft carrier.

“It is him, ibn Landin, isn’t it?” Frank asked.

“It’ll take a couple of days for a positive ID, but I don’t think there’s any doubt,” Tombs said. “I’ve spend hours staring at photographs of him.”

“Funny thing is, he could have gotten away again,” Frank said. “If he hadn’t tried to come after us, he could have survived, gone back into hiding.”

“Maybe he was just too pissed off at what we’d done to think straight,” Rob suggested. “We rained all over his little parade back there.”

“Crazy, pissed off, or just too damned fanatic to stand seeing his plans destroyed,” Tombs said. “Let’s get him into a body bag so the helicopter can take him over to the carrier. They can keep the stiff on ice there until we get home.”

“We going home now?” Ike asked.

Tombs nodded. “The job’s finished. All but the celebrating.”

“Too bad we don’t get all that reward money the government was offering for this bastard,” Rob said, giving the corpse a nudge with his toe. “Five million bucks.”

Tombs chuckled. “I can’t get that much for you, but I think the Agency will be able to cover the price of a damned good celebration and a month’s leave to give you a chance to recover from the celebration.” And there would be a little more. Tombs had discretionary funds at his disposal. I’m going to come off smelling like a million-dollar rose, he thought. I can spread a little of it around.