A familiar percussive boom thundered across the desert — an RPG launch. He didn’t see the rocket, but a moment later, the grenade impacted the front end of the lead truck. The high-velocity jet cut into the engine block like a Jedi lightsaber, and the subsequent detonation flipped the Humvee onto its side.
Parker was halfway in the truck when the grenade hit. The force of the explosion spilled him out, and he fell next to Sigler, who had thrown himself flat. The armored vehicle rose above them like a looming wave, and they scrambled to avoid being crushed beneath it. The soldier manning the machine gun was catapulted from the turret and hurled against the side of the building.
Then something extraordinary happened. The soldier sat up, shook his head like a football player trying to shake off a hit and then slowly climbed to his feet and stalked toward the wreckage of his vehicle. He was big, at least as tall as Sigler but broader, and in his full body armor he looked like a walking mountain. He strode past the two Delta operators, glancing their direction as if to verify that they weren’t seriously hurt. Then he went right back to his weapon.
Sigler wasn’t sure what the big soldier expected to accomplish. With the Humvee on its side, the M2 was useless. The heavy machine gun was hanging from its mount like a broken wing, its long barrel jammed into the ground, but the soldier approached it like this wasn’t even a minor inconvenience and pulled the quick release pin on the swivel mount, wrestling the gun into his arms.
Parker whispered something, a name perhaps, and Sigler saw the look of recognition on his friend’s face, but there wasn’t time to ask for clarification. He didn’t know what the walking mountain planned to do with the Ma Deuce — it wasn’t the kind of weapon you could shoot from the hip — but figuring that out wasn’t his problem. He got to his feet and raced to the turret hole in the Humvee’s roof and stuck his head inside to check for survivors.
The vehicle’s only occupant was the driver, who was dazed but alive and apparently unhurt. Sigler could hear rounds plinking off the armored underside of the Humvee, but as long as the insurgents didn’t hit it with another RPG, they were safe for the moment. As he helped the driver extricate himself, he heard the M2 booming again.
The big soldier had somehow braced the gun against the Humvee’s tire, and Parker was right next to him with a spare can of ammunition.
“Leave it!” Sigler shouted. “Time to go.”
Sigler wasn’t sure the walking mountain had heard the order, much less that he would follow it. The guy looked completely zoned in. Sigler had seen soldiers get all jacked-up on adrenaline, screaming obscenities and lost in the fog of war, but this was different. The big soldier reminded him of Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movies — intense but dispassionate, methodical, efficient…unstoppable.
But it was time to go.
There was an incendiary grenade mounted on the Humvee’s center column — a self-destruct measure in case the vehicle had to be abandoned, which was exactly what they were going to have to do. Sigler didn’t bother to remove it from the mount; he just pulled the pin and let it burn.
“Fire in the hole!” he shouted as he ran past Parker.
A tiny supernova erupted inside the vehicle, spilling blinding radiance and intense heat through the opening as the thermate grenade, burning at over 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, vaporized synthetic fabrics and plastic, and set the very metal itself on fire.
The big man just nodded, and then with the same degree of effort that someone might use to drop a hamburger wrapper in a trash can, he stuffed the M2 into the turret and ran after Sigler.
The big guy and the driver piled into the next truck in line, while Sigler and Parker ran for the one behind that. The turret gunners were firing at a cyclic rate, burning through ammo to keep the enemy from shooting any more RPGs, but with everyone aboard, the drivers took off.
The sound of bullets smacking into the armor plate was strangely comforting — like rain on a tin roof, but in a few seconds, they were well out of range of the insurgents’ rifles.
The quiet was even better.
ELEVEN
The mood in the Special Forces compound at Contingency Operating Base Speicher was somber. The Delta shooters busied themselves with maintenance tasks — cleaning their weapons, inspecting their equipment to ensure that all was ready for the next mission and even grabbing some food and shut-eye — but hardly anyone spoke. The brief sense of elation that accompanied their salvation was tempered by the knowledge that, for several of their friends, the help had arrived too late.
Every career Spec Ops shooter had experienced the emotional conflict that occurs when not everyone makes it back from a mission, but this instance was on a different order of magnitude. Only three members of Cipher element remained. Four of the snipers had survived, though two were wounded — including Lewis Aleman, whose crushed hand would almost certainly spell the end of his career as a Delta operator. Of the eight men comprising the flight crews of two Night Stalker Black Hawk helicopters, only one had made it back. Everyone on Beehive Six-Six was MIA. Perhaps even worse, the survivors knew that their lives had been bought with the blood of those who had come to save them, including Sonny “Houston” Vaughn, the Alpha team leader, who had caught a bullet on his way to the Humvee and died in Stan Tremblay’s arms on the ride back.
Sigler’s black mood wasn’t just due to survivor’s guilt, though. He was angry. The deaths of his teammates weren’t just the fortunes of war; someone had set them up and sent them into a trap.
He was going to find out who that someone was. Then, he was going to kill them.
They’d returned to the regional base just as dawn was breaking in the east. The 7th Special Forces team — the guys that had come riding to the rescue — had given the survivors a hut to recover in, but Sigler had been kept busy with administrative tasks, seeing to the needs of the wounded and of course, reporting the details of the disaster to headquarters. Thus far, JSOC had not responded to his requests for information that might help identify the persons responsible for the attack.
As he sat with the tattered remnants of Cipher element, Eagle-Eye and Alpha team, meticulously disassembling and cleaning his weapon — an activity that was, for a soldier, something akin to meditation — he searched his memory to see if the answer lay somewhere in the events of the previous night. He was physically exhausted, but his mind would not let go of the mystery.
Someone had set a trap for them…why? He rejected the obvious answer — to kill them. There were plenty of ways to accomplish that.
But if killing Cipher element wasn’t the primary objective, then what was?
He was working through the possibilities when two men he didn’t recognize strode into the room. One of them was wearing civilian clothes — khakis and a long-sleeve, pale-blue dress shirt — the other was wearing ACU fatigues. The name-tape over his breast pocket said ‘Keasling,’ but it was the rank badge in the middle of the man’s chest that got Sigler’s attention: a single black star.
He jumped to his feet and was about to call the room to attention, but the general waved him off.
“Stand easy, men.” Keasling regarded each man in turn, and finally brought his attention back to Sigler. “I won’t bullshit you. We are at condition FUBAR. Sixteen hours ago, the President did two things: He asked General Collins for his resignation, and he hired me to run the Joint Special Operations Command. I’m your new boss.”