2

The land was rocky and arid, with windblown sand, sparse desert grasses, and jagged rocks. The wind had a bite, the elevated air thin and brittle. A nocturnal lizard scurried across his path. It reminded Patrick of some training runs he had done in New Mexico—a blend of mountains and desert and ramshackle huts.

The prison was on a dirt road on the outskirts of the city, rising like a fortress from the surrounding slums and rocky hills. Patrick had endured nearly a week of briefings, using a 3-D computer mock-up of the facility. Thick stone walls about ten meters high were topped with coiled barbed wire. An enormous arched steel door served as the front entrance. The outer walls of the compound ran at least four hundred meters on each side, with a number of rounded towers built into each wall like a medieval castle. The towers had small sniper slits on each floor and a guard perch on top.

That was just the first line of defense. Inside the perimeter, the compound was a labyrinth of concrete buildings enclosed by a chain-link fence. In the center, a sniper’s platform towered above the entire facility, complete with spotlights and sirens.

Over a thousand prisoners were housed here, separated into sections of forty to fifty each, with only two guards per section. The Houthi guards were mostly new recruits, poorly trained and young, many of them still in their teens. They would be armed with AK-47s but no night goggles and no rocket launchers. Maybe a few hand grenades. Most had never experienced combat.

Patrick and his men arrived at the outskirts of the facility right on schedule, and the snipers settled in. Two rocky ranges provided good cover and clean shots at the guard towers. A third sniper climbed up a fire escape to mount the roof of a nearby abandoned apartment building. A fourth climbed to the top of a warehouse and hunkered down behind a heating vent.

The other men scrambled into position—four per team, each team covering a side of the compound. Despite the brisk air, Patrick could feel the sweat on the back of his neck and the jagged breath of the man behind him. They stopped, checked around, then crouched and sprinted from one rock to the next, down alleys between cramped adobe houses, and across a road, positioning themselves behind some mud-brick utility buildings less than a hundred meters from the prison’s outer walls.

The snipers and team leaders checked in on the troop net, the channel used by the SEALs on the ground, monitored by Patrick through his right earbud.

“We’re at checkpoint Neptune.”

“Roger that, checkpoint Neptune.”

“Tex here. Checkpoint Neptune.”

“Roger.”

And so it went, one after the other. The air acrid and tense, Patrick’s breath short. He kept his voice calm on the radio, but his heart was racing. In a few moments they would unleash hell. In less than thirty minutes, it would all be over.

He turned to the man right behind him, his best friend in the SEALs and the undisputed workout champion of the team, a guy named Troy Anderson, known to all his teammates as “Beef.” Beef was stockier than Patrick and a few inches shorter, with broad shoulders and a square face. His body fat was a ridiculous 5 percent. Beef was the team prankster, but he was also intensely competitive, and tonight he was in his element. Patrick looked at him and nodded. It was time.

“Clear the towers,” Patrick said softly into the radio.

Seconds later, the snipers confirmed their hits on the tower guards. They had code-named them for American patriots.

“Jefferson down.”

“Madison down.”

“John Adams down.”

“Franklin.”

“Thomas Paine.”

Patrick tensed. The intel said there would be six Houthi guards in the towers. Five had fallen in rapid succession. A sniper cursed into the troop net, and a return shot rang out from one of the guard towers, a brief spark illuminating the night. The responding round from the SEAL sniper was suppressed.

“He’s down,” the sniper said a second later. “John Hancock.”

With a fist to his helmet, Patrick signaled for Beef to move forward. “Set explosives,” he said into his mic.

Beef’s job, along with the breachers from the other teams, was to scramble to the base of the prison wall and place the explosives. Four simultaneous blasts would open holes in the outer walls, and the assaulters would pour through from every direction. From there they would blast their way through the fence surrounding the compound, blow open the outer doors to the prison, and create chaos inside—grenades, flashbangs, and shots coming at the Houthis from every angle. The SEALs wanted to be in and out in a matter of minutes.

But before Beef could cross the road, the dry night air was split by the sound of sirens. A high-pitched wail filled the skies, accompanied by sweeping spotlights. A hail of gunfire peppered the ground around Beef as he sprinted back behind the utility buildings.

“Thanks for the cover, Q,” he gasped, hunkering down with Patrick and the others. “Next time, just tell me if you want to break up.”

Patrick kept his head low but could see flashes from the AK-47s inside the slits in the towers. The intel was flawed. There was supposed to be a total of six guards manning the towers, but it looked like there were dozens more, raining fire on the SEALs who had tried to set the explosives.

The other teams radioed in. They were engaged as well, pinned down outside the walls. There was no small amount of cursing.

“Resistance is heavy,” Patrick said into his command mic, sounding calm. “Permission to abort Surgery and commence Slingshot.”

There was a pause, a disappointed hesitation on the other end of the comm. “Slingshot” meant using a technological advantage, a reference to David’s slaying of Goliath. Patrick’s orders had been clear. The SEALs were to minimize bloodshed. Take out the snipers, breach the wall, keep the kills to a minimum, clear the cells, and get out. Politically, a targeted Special Ops insertion was preferable to a broader-scale attack. Surgery was preferable to Slingshot.

But not if it meant SEAL casualties.

“Permission granted.”

Patrick looked at his watch. It would take the drones at least two minutes. Two long minutes with bullets flying. He stuck his head out for the briefest of seconds and fired back at the towers.

This was going to get messy.