Complex 13

THE FINISHER

The commander of the team stepped forward.

His name was Lieutenant John T. Armstrong, a quiet but effective man who excelled at unusual missions.

Among other things, he’d tracked down Saddam Hussein to a tiny hole outside Tikrit; he was also the one who’d captured bin Laden after a gigantic firefight in a cave in Tajikistan. America had not yet released that information to the world.

He was the man the Marines called in for the hard missions, the tough ones.

His call-sign: the Finisher.

Armstrong called in his team’s only piece of heavy equipment: an M-19B tunnel-boring machine. It looked like a tank fitted with a big cone-shaped drill-head on its main cannon.

The tunnel-borer roared to life, started cutting into the mountainside.

Within an hour, it had penetrated two hundred metres into the landslide…

…where it struck iron.

The doors of Complex 13.