SEPTEMBER 23. NUBIAN DESERT, SUDAN. TWO HUNDRED KILOMETERS FROM THE EGYPTIAN BORDER.
The whole damn world is coming apart.
The green image in Captain Micah Hazor’s night vision goggles flickered as the filters kicked in to protect the delicate intensifiers from the explosion of white light in the valley below. Stones, scrubby grasses, and thin-branched desert bushes shot black shadows against the steep hillside he and his team were climbing.
They were all running on fumes. Micah turned, sweat pouring down his oxygen-starved body. The hoarse gasps coming from his men seemed loud. Instinctively they kept glancing back at the valley they’d just evacuated. Light, like popping strobes, illuminated the distant buildings.
Flipping his goggles up on his helmet, Micah watched the explosions that seemed to consume the small oasis. A series of white flashes dimmed into a yellow ball of fire, and rising flames silhouetted the mud-and-stone houses, steel prefab buildings, and the mosque.
Micah didn’t need to glance at his watch. Sergeant Luke Ranken had set his charges to go off at 0200 hours. The buried cache of surface-to-air missiles, Semtex, mortar rounds, and bulk explosives had been too good to pass up. Especially since the Mufa Jihad, as they called themselves, had buried the cache within meters of the town’s fuel storage tanks.
Around the base of the fireball, sparkles of smaller explosions, like a high-dollar fireworks display, twinkled and flashed.
“Yahoooo,” Marcus Beter attempted to crow between heaving breaths. The fact that the wisecracking private didn’t break out in maniacal laughter was symptomatic of his total fatigue, or the burden of the dead body he and Corporal Gembane bore on the makeshift carry-pole between them. Or maybe it was the awareness that the missions were coming too close. Some initiated even before the last one was finished. Like this mission, they were being thrown together at the last minute.
Two months ago Micah’s spec ops extraction group had consisted of twenty men. After tonight, four of them remained alive: Micah, Beter, Ranken, and Gembane.
We got lucky, Micah thought as the hollow booms finally reached them. Warheads, mortar rounds, and tank shells cooked off or detonated from concussion.
At the head of the line, Sergeant Ranken was looking back, his blacked-out face creased by a weary grin, his helmet brim casting a shadow across his eyes. The woman hanging on to his arm wore filthy civilian clothes. Her hair hung in brown tangles. She’d been pretty once. Maybe she would be again someday, but Micah suspected—given what she’d just been through—her nightmares were only beginning.
Her name was Yvette Duclair, twenty-eight, a French national working for the Associated Press, a woman who thought she could get “the inside scoop.” She’d gotten it all right, having been taken at gunpoint from her hotel room by the Mufa Jihad. Her image had been broadcast around the world, showing her on her knees before her captors, with a leash around her neck. Other images depicted her naked, short-chained to a filthy cement floor, masked fighters pointing machetes at her groveling body.
When Micah and Private Sully Hanson had shot their way into the four-room compound where she’d been held on the outskirts of the El Jauf training camp, they’d found more of a whimpering animal in her cell than a woman, though she’d begun to respond as they struggled to dress her and evacuate the building.
They’d just made it out the compound gate when a bullet caught Hanson full in the face.
Now his corpse rode the carry-pole borne by Beter and Gembane.
Billows of fire from the blast were fewer now, smaller, as darkness began to reclaim its fight for the night.
Micah flipped his night vision goggles down. “All right, soldiers. Let’s beat feet. We got a ride waiting on the other side of this ridge.”
“Roger that,” Colonel Joseph Logan’s voice spoke in Micah’s earphone. “We’re reading no less than twenty-three hostiles hard on your butt, Captain. And that detonation of their arms depot is probably going to supply them with a whole new sense of motivation.”
“Understood, sir.”
Micah watched his small command stumble forward up the goat trail, their booted feet slipping on the loose rock as they climbed.
Most of Europe was quarantined because of a weird-ass plague, and the American military was crawling all over northern Africa for reasons he couldn’t quite grasp.
From his position, he watched Yvette Duclair as she clung to Ranken’s muscular arm, her weary feet twisting and turning on the rocky trail. She tottered forward on the verge of collapse.
Micah stumbled along behind them. At the moment, he’d trade the whole stinking world for a good night’s sleep. They’d been up for nearly two days straight since their insertion into Sudan. Most of that had been humping hard to get into, and now out of, the El Jauf area.
Duclair had managed all right as they crossed the flat agricultural fields down in the valley, but she’d played out quickly, and now was staggering uncontrollably.
Should have fixed a separate litter for her. Now’s a good time to think of it.
But that was the problem. As good as Micah and his team were, they’d lost the edge. Been pushed too hard, for too long. All of the teams were that way. He and what was left of his people hadn’t been rotated out of theater for more than two years.
He hadn’t been home in almost three.
“Mama? You still got a house in Atlanta? Or is that only a dog-tired soldier’s hallucination?”
Stop it. You’re talking to yourself.
Ahead of him, Yvette tripped over an angular rock sticking out of the trail. She almost pulled Sergeant Ranken down with her.
“Miss Duclair, you all right?” Ranken asked as he tried to help her up.
“I just…” The woman panted. “Just. Can’t go any further.”
“Here,” Micah told her, kneeling down. Gembane and Beter stumbled up behind him, the heavy weight of Sully Hanson’s body swaying from the pole.
Mindful of the trauma she’d been through, he patiently explained, “Miss Duclair, I’m going to lift you up. Do you understand? You’re safe. We’re the good guys. When I pick you up, I’m carrying you to safety. Do you understand?”
She blinked in the darkness, her face glowing green in the night vision goggles. She couldn’t seem to focus her eyes. “Yes, please, please just get me out of here!”
“We’re going to do that, ma’am.” Micah took a deep breath, lifted her, and slung her over his shoulder, saying, “Okay, you worthless pukes, let’s make time.”
With the first steps he knew he was in trouble. She couldn’t have weighed more than 110 pounds, but his anaerobic muscles screamed at him.
Gotta do it. He sucked his lungs full of air. When you’re at the end of your rope tie a knot and hang on.
Reaching down into what he called his “deep core,” he willed himself up the slope, one leaden step at a time, placing his feet as carefully as he could.
The woman over his shoulder broke into hollow sobs, whispering, “Please, Captain Hazor, I want to go home. I want to go home.”
“I’m going to make sure that happens, ma’am. Just hold on.”
In the distance another detonation boomed into the night.
The narrow trail grew steeper as Micah fought for breath and tried to ignore the ache in his calves, thighs, and back.
Got to make that narrow gap in the ridge. Then it’s down the other side.
“Captain?” Beter’s hoarse voice barely carried over the grinding of loose stone under his feet.
“What, soldier?” Micah managed through an exhale. Where the hell was the top of this damn trail, anyway?
“Gotta rest, sir,” Beter wheezed.
“Negative,” Micah managed. “Bad guys closing.”
“But we almost … dropped Hanson,” Gembane croaked.
Micah blinked against his own weary dizziness. Duclair’s weight felt like solid lead. Her swaying limbs kept throwing Micah off balance. “Three … beautiful … words…” Micah’s throat had gone dry, his lungs working like bellows. “Forward … operating … base.”
“FOB, FOB, FOB,” Beter began chanting under his breath as he scrambled up the exposed bedrock.
Ranken gasped, “Gonna get … to sleep … at FOB.”
“Sleep for days,” Micah assured them, desperately hoping that single promise would get them across the divide. Hell, they could drag Yvette Duclair down the other side to the waiting chopper if they had to.
He winced at the thought of doing the same to Sully Hanson’s body, but their old comrade’s head had been turned to pulp. He wouldn’t feel a thing. The hard part was that Sully’d been a solid guy. The kind who had his shit wired tight. The kind who shouldn’t have taken a bullet through his face to blast out the base of his brain.
It feels like the End of the World, I swear to God.
But he’d worry about it after they made the FOB and found the luxurious cots that waited in the dark interior of some camo-draped tent. He might even manage to fumble his combat gear off before he collapsed into the sack.
“FOB, FOB,” Beter’s voice continued to chant over the breathless weeping of the journalist.
It might have been an eternity, or maybe less than ten minutes before Ranken puffed out the news: “Here’s the top, Cap’n. Hand her over to me. I can schlep her down the hill.”
“We’ve got you on visual,” Colonel Logan’s voice informed through Micah’s ear. “Rustle your asses, boys. You’ve got pursuit beating feet right behind you.”
Micah turned his goggles down the slope, seeing the two helicopters no more than two hundred meters below. Pilots were already spooling them up, the turbines whining as the blades began to spin.
On rubbery legs, Micah started down the hill. He only looked back after Beter’s feet went out from under him. The soldier landed with an “oof!” and Hanson’s blanket-wrapped body tumbled, breaking the carry-pole they’d slung it from.
“Shit!” Gembane cried as his grasp on the pole toppled him onto the body. Corpse and soldier slid down the loose gravel and onto Beter.
“Sergeant, go!” Micah pointed to the helicopter and Ranken teetered past with Duclair’s body swaying.
Micah forced himself to scramble back up the slope to where Beter pulled frantically at the blanket, struggling to get it untangled from the corpse.
“Captain?” The tinny voice in his ear warned, “You’ve got hostiles topping the crest. Move it!”
“You two,” Micah told his exhausted soldiers, “head for the chopper. I got Hanson.”
He almost collapsed as Beter and Gembane wobbled to their feet, skating on the loose shale, and stumbled, fatigue-stupid, down the slope.
“Come on, Sully, old buddy. I’m not leaving you,” Micah whispered, reaching down.
It took three tries before Micah managed to toss the heavy body over his shoulder. A rock rolled under his foot, but he caught himself at the last moment.
Then he was staggering down the hill.
Just as the first of the pursuing Mufa Jihad fighters started down the ridge behind Micah, the door gunner opened up with the Dillon minigun, and streaks of tracers and bullets shredded the air no more than four feet over Micah’s head. With wooden resolve, he pounded down the slope, his knees ready to buckle.
Lights glittered behind his eyes, as though he were about to pass out. His heart was beating the blood through his veins so fiercely that he could hear it in his ears.
Ten meters to the UH-60’s door.
Five.
Hands were reaching for him, pulling Hanson’s body in.
On the verge of collapse, Micah felt Gembane and Beter lift him by his body armor. The ground fell away as he was dragged onto the helo’s deck. The hollow pocking sound of rifle bullets hitting aluminum aircraft skin vied with the ear-splitting blat of the minigun shooting back.
The next thing Micah knew, Colonel Logan was leaning over him, his wrinkled face coated with dust.
“Hell of a good job, Captain,” the colonel barked over the helicopter’s roar.
Micah blinked, took two tries to pull himself upright and into a sitting position. “Just get us back to the barn, Colonel. Wake us up sometime next week.”
In the dim red light of the chopper’s interior, he saw Logan shake his head, a bitter smile on the colonel’s thin lips. The headphones were pressed down on his short gray hair. Red light had bleached all the color out of his blue eyes, leaving them washed out and pale. “No such luck, Captain.” Logan tapped his watch. “You’ve got twelve hours before they want you and your team on another bird.”
“Another mission? Not possible, sir,” Micah said through a coughing fit. “We’re toast.”
“Then you’d better turn yourselves into some goddamned frosty toast. This comes from JSOC, eyes only, highest priority. Don’t know who picked you, but they’ve got some pretty big cojones to do it without consulting me.”
“What’s the op?” Micah whispered wearily, defeat and despair sucking the last of his energy dry.
“Your team’s specialty. Religious extremists. You’re headed to some flyspeck village in Egypt. No other info at this time,” Logan told him. “You tell your guys to wrap their shit and get ready. You’re going back into the grinder.”
Micah’s gaze fixed on Hanson’s body where it oozed blood onto the deck. His old friend’s ruined face seemed to be staring at him, as though to say, Christ, I’m glad it’s not me.
He reached out to pat Hanson’s shoulder, and rasped through cracked lips, “I should have seen that sniper, buddy. My fault. All my fault. Too many goddamned mistakes.”