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The nation would be told the NSC vote was unanimous in favor of the strike.

Technically, there had been one “no” vote. But since the director of the CIA was barred by law from providing policy recommendations—he was restricted to intelligence and analysis—Clarke insisted that Stephens’s vote against didn’t count and that it was vital they not allow the media to pick up any whiff of dissension.

Clarke signed the written order Defense Secretary Foster had prepared in advance. Foster, in turn, notified the National Military Command Center, deep beneath the Pentagon. From there, the order flashed to the combat information center of the USS Nimitz, steaming across sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean, just south of Italy.

The first of four stealth fighter jets shot off the deck of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier under a bright afternoon sun. Without radio chatter, they were effectively invisible and undetectable even in broad daylight. Powered by two Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines, the F-35C Lightning—the Navy’s version of the joint strike fighter—quickly reached its service ceiling of fifty thousand feet, then banked hard to the south, streaking toward its target at twice the speed of sound.

At twenty-nine, Commander Bobby “Wolf” Mitchell was one of the most experienced F-35 pilots in the American military. He was certainly the most experienced aviator on the Nimitz. True, he had never conducted a bombing raid in North Africa. Nor had any of his three younger colleagues. But the mission was a dream: vaporize the headquarters of Kairos.

Mitchell reveled at the chance. Barely a week earlier, Abu Nakba had ordered his loyalists to launch a brazen raid on the Israeli-Lebanese border. After a brutal firefight, the jihadist cell had captured two Americans—one of them a highly valued CIA operative—as well as the nephew of the Israeli prime minister. That, in turn, had triggered what had already been dubbed the “Third Lebanon War,” a massive missile and ground battle that had wreaked havoc on both sides of the border.

Somehow—and no one seemed to know for sure, though all manner of rumors were buzzing about—the CIA officer had escaped and organized the rescue of his colleagues. A cease-fire was now in place. The missiles were no longer in the air. The tanks were retreating back to their bases. Still, Mitchell was stunned by the scale of destruction in so short a time. Hundreds of Israelis and Lebanese were dead. Thousands more were wounded. Scores of homes, hospitals, factories, farms, synagogues, and mosques had been damaged or destroyed.

But now Abu Nakba and his senior commanders, the men responsible for all the carnage, were going to pay, and they would not even see it coming.

The complicator—and to Mitchell it was not insignificant—was a massive sandstorm consuming the airspace over their target and for thousands of miles in every direction. Brewing for days in the Bodélé Depression, a bone-dry lake bed in the Republic of Chad, the storm was now surging westward across the Sahara, through Libya and Algeria, headed at high speeds for Mauritania and Morocco. Burying everything in its path, it was also reducing visibility on the ground to nothing at all.

Mitchell scanned his instruments, triple-checking that his craft was still invisible to all possible enemies and that his weapons were cocked, locked, and ready to drop. It was. And they were. Yet he could feel his heart beating in his chest and the perspiration forming inside his Nomex flight gloves. He was, after all, responsible for an aircraft that cost the American taxpayers a cool $110 million to buy and a blistering $36,000 an hour to fly. The Pentagon was touting the plane to the public as the most advanced strike fighter ever built and deployed, and it was. But Mitchell knew every bug the engineers had found in the avionics software, every flaw they had found in the tailhooks, every detail of every F-35 that had crashed, and the name of every pilot who had died, as well as those who had ejected just in time.

He also knew that no F-35 had ever been sent into combat in a sandstorm, and he knew why. The plane’s designers worried its engines could flame out—that is, stall with no recourse—if they became choked with particles of phosphorous, iron, silica, and more. They worried, too, that the supersecret coating that helped make the plane invisible to enemy radar could be effectively sandblasted off. What’s more, they worried that the weapons bay doors could jam, making it impossible for a pilot to complete his mission even if he made it safely to the target.

Mitchell forced aside such thoughts. He had a job to do. Making a wide berth around Tripoli, the Libyan capital, with all of its civilian and military air traffic, he banked east, still over the Med. Two minutes later, he banked south again, aiming for a point almost equidistant between the cities of Misrata to the west and Benghazi to the east.

Slipping successfully into Libyan airspace undetected, Mitchell remained on a southward trajectory. Flying over a barren swath of no-man’s-land that was largely uninhabited and nearly uninhabitable, he soon entered the sandstorm. This was it, he reckoned. If he crashed and lived, it could be days—even weeks—before anyone would come rescue him. If an F-35 couldn’t make it through this beast, a Navy Seahawk helicopter certainly had no chance.

For the first several minutes, everything seemed fine. But about a hundred miles out from the Chad border, as Mitchell banked westward, his plane began to shimmy. It was almost imperceptible at first, but as he hugged the border with Niger, the plane began to shudder. Mitchell scanned his instruments. He was only sixteen minutes out. But his fears of not making it to the target, much less back to the carrier, were growing. This was not a test of the plane, he told himself. It was a test of his character, courage, training, and resolve.

Approaching the southwestern corner of Libya—close to the borders of Niger to his left and Algeria directly ahead, Mitchell and his wingman broke to the north, approaching Abu Nakba’s lair from the south. The already-wicked shudder he was experiencing now worsened. But so far, both planes were still in the air, still hurtling over an empty expanse of desert, without a single city, town, or village anywhere on their scopes. And coming in behind them were the other two F-35s ready to finish whatever they failed to do themselves.

Suddenly Mitchell saw the city of Ghat light up on his radar. He wasn’t worried that the airport was open or that he might be detected. That was impossible in this weather. Still, he made a slight course correction, moving now on a north-northwesterly heading, just fifteen miles out.

Then fourteen miles.

Then thirteen.

Twelve.

At ten miles out, Mitchell fired off his thousand-pound GPS-guided JDAM smart bombs. Banking eastward and flooring it, the commander watched the video feeds from the nose cones of the two missiles until they both scored direct hits, obliterating the main complex of buildings in the center of the compound. That was it. He had done it. He had accomplished his mission. The plane had survived. And so had he.