Prime

ONE

They seemed to materialize out of thin air, like ghosts, or perhaps more in keeping with the superstitions of the region, like jinn—spirits of smokeless fire that inhabit the space between earth and heaven.

Not that there was anyone around to notice.

Even if the inhabitants of Ramadi had been inclined to venture out after dark, a curfew was in effect and the streets were patrolled by a combined force of United States military personnel and soldiers of the newly reinvented Iraqi Army. At two a.m., anyone wandering the streets was likely to be shot on sight.

The eight men who moved swiftly and soundlessly through the night weren’t worried about being discovered. They had timed their advance perfectly to avoid detection by the patrols, and it was unlikely that anyone glancing out a window into the darkness would have been able to distinguish them in their camouflaged uniforms with matching body armor and helmets. Peering through the monochrome display of their PVS-14 night-vision devices, they advanced to the front of the target house and assembled in groups of four on either side of the door, bunched together like coiled serpents preparing to strike, which was more or less exactly what they were.

The second man in formation to the right of the door whispered into the lip microphone of his radio headset. “This is Cipher Six. By the numbers. Last chance. Go or no-go? Over.”

The replies crackled in the earpieces of the headsets worn by all six men.

“Eagle-Eye One. Go. Over.”

“Eagle-Eye Two. Go. Over.”

“Eagle-Eye Three. Do it. Over.”

“Cipher Seven, good to go. Over.”

Cipher Six, a man named Kevin Rainer — formally Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Rainer, though no one had called him that since he earned his green beanie—nodded, a gesture that went unnoticed by the other seven men arrayed around the door. The gesture was seen by the three sniper teams — Eagle-Eye One, Two and Three — who watched over them all from a distance.

The Eagle-Eye snipers were literally able to see through the walls of the house with their thermal scopes, verifying that only two occupants were within, but heat signatures could reveal only so much. Were the men wide awake but lying still on their beds? Would they be instantly alerted to the presence of intruders and snatch up a handy AK-47 or activate the detonator on an IED? Were they even the right men?

“Danno, go.”

The third operator in the stacked group on the left side darted forward and knelt in front of the door. One gloved hand came up to test the knob. It didn’t move, but Daniel Parker had been expecting that; he would have been surprised if the door had opened on the first try. On any other night, he might have blasted the door off its hinges with a shotgun, used a shaped charge to blow out the latch plate or simply kicked the damn thing down, but not tonight. This mission demanded a more subtle approach.

Parker took a lock-picking gun from a pouch on his tactical vest and slid the metal pick into the keyhole. There was a faint clicking noise as he worked the trigger lever, but a moment later the cylinder rotated, allowing him to ease the door open a crack. He slid a hand inside the gap, probing for trip wires or some other booby trap. Finding nothing, he gave the door a push and then spun out of the way, as Rainer’s team moved fluidly inside.

There was the briefest pause and then Rainer’s voice whispered across the radio net. “Room clear. Move in, Jack.”

Parker fell into line behind his team leader, Jack Sigler, as the second group filed into the house. All but one of the members of the first group were spread out throughout the front room in tactical positions. The remaining operator stood guard over a figure that lay face down and motionless on a mattress in the corner, his hands secured behind his back with flexi-cuffs.

Just as they had rehearsed dozens of times…hundreds of times…Sigler’s team lined up on the corner of the hallway, and at a gesture from their leader, each advanced into the unknown space beyond. Sigler was the second man into the room, as was their protocol, and he broke to the right. Parker, in the number three position, peeled left behind the point man, Mark Adams. Another mattress was positioned along the far wall right in front of Parker, and a bearded man lay sprawled out atop it, snoring loudly.

Sigler and the fourth man in their stack, Casey Bellows, visually scanned the rest of the room, while Adams moved directly toward the sleeping man, with Parker close behind him. A narrow beam of green-tinged light — invisible to the unaided eye — lanced from the AN/PAQ4 targeting laser mounted on the upper receiver of Adams’s suppressed Heckler & Koch HK416 assault rifle. As seen through the night-vision devices each member of the team wore, it appeared as a bright, wavering point on the supine man’s forehead.

The sleeper stirred and opened his eyes.

Adams froze in mid-step. Below the brilliant spot of the laser, a pair of white dots appeared — the man’s pupils, fully dilated and reflecting only the infrared spectrum of light — staring right back at Parker.

Then the man rolled over onto his side, facing the wall.

Parker didn’t exhale the breath he was holding. Maybe the man was still asleep, maybe he was just playing possum; either way, in another three seconds he would either be bound and gagged, or bagged and tagged. Parker activated his own PAQ4, aiming at the back of the man’s head, as Adams moved in for the capture. Before the man could even begin to wake up, he was flipped onto his stomach. The flexi-cuffs were pulled tight around his wrists and a strip of olive drab ‘100 mile an hour’ tape was slapped over his mouth, to preemptively silence his uncomprehending protests and cries of alarm.

Adams gave a thumbs-up signal, indicating that the captive was under control, after which Sigler’s voice whispered across the net: “Room secure.”

“Roger,” Rainer answered. “Cipher Seven, we are ready for pick-up. Over.”

Cipher Seven, Doug Pettit, who presently sat behind the wheel of an up-armored M1151 HMMWV — a Humvee to the rest of the world — idling quietly with no lights showing, half a mile away, replied immediately. “Roger, Six. We’re on our way.”

“All right, boys,” Rainer said. “Clean up time.”

A falsetto voice cooed in Parker’s earpiece: “Knock, knock. Housekeeping.”

It was probably Jesse Strickland, who styled himself the team’s court jester. Someone groaned in response, but that was the end of it. The team went to work. Parker lowered his assault rifle, leaving Adams to look after the prisoner. He took a large green nylon pouch — a standard military-use body bag — from a pocket. He held it open so that Sigler could begin dropping stuff in. Everything but the furniture went into the bag: loose papers, books, articles of clothing and even a collection of empty soda bottles. There was no telling what might be worthwhile, and this was not the time or place to make such judgments. There would be plenty of time to sort through it all later, when they were back safely behind the wire.

Thirty seconds later, the eight men, along with two captives and three bags full of what might or might not be important evidence, hustled from the door of the house to a row of waiting Humvees. Parker heaved his burden through the rear door of the fourth vehicle in line and then climbed inside, slamming the heavy door shut and engaging the combat locks. Sigler settled into the front passenger seat and secured his door.

There was another round of radio check-ins, with each driver reporting their readiness, and then the convoy pulled away. Despite being in armored vehicles, the team remained vigilant. The mission had gone flawlessly to this point, but the last thing any of them wanted to do was jinx things with a premature round of self-congratulation. It took only a single roadside IED to ruin an otherwise perfect outing. They avoided the known patrol routes, where insurgents most often targeted occupation forces, and instead risked a course that led them through neighborhoods that were known to be sympathetic to the opposition, reasoning — or rather hoping — that Hajji would be less likely to blow things up on his own doorstep. Nevertheless, every man in the team knew that no amount of preparation and planning could guarantee success; luck always played a part.

This time, their luck held. Twenty minutes later, they rolled under the arch that guarded the entrance to Camp Blue Diamond. The mission had gone flawlessly. They had captured both of the al-Awda couriers and gathered a ton of evidence, without firing a single shot…or being fired at.

It was a great way to end their four-month deployment to Iraq.

TWO

The arrival of a helicopter at Camp Blue Diamond — formerly the An-Ramadi Northern Palace, where Saddam Hussein’s half-brother had once lived, and presently headquarters of US Marine Corps 1^st Division — was a common enough occurrence that Jack Sigler rarely took note. Something about this one was different, though. The deep bass thump of the rotors beating the air above the Euphrates River, as the bird made its final approach, resonated through his body like an alarm and fanned an ember of anxiety in the pit of his stomach. He poked at the food heaped on his tray — two hamburgers, a mini-pizza and an unopened bag of Cool Ranch Doritos — but his appetite had disappeared.

Daniel Parker, seated across the table from him, instantly picked up on Sigler’s discomfort. The team’s only African-American operator, Parker had a round, youthful face that was incapable of concealing his emotional state. “Someone just walk across your grave, Jack?”

“I just remembered something I need to take care of.” He stood, and in a single deft motion, scooped up the tray, dumped its contents into a nearby trash can and flung it like a Frisbee onto the tray rack. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

Parker stood as well. “Well that’s a coincidence. I just remembered that I need to take care of something, too.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“You tell me.”

Sigler regarded his teammate and friend with a wan smile, an expression that seemed completely alien on his rough, unshaven face. With his shaggy hair and hard expression, Sigler had been often told he resembled Hugh Jackman, or more precisely, that actor’s film portrayal of the comic book superhero Wolverine; Wolverine didn’t smile.

Before Sigler could answer, the Motorola Talkabout radio clipped to his belt crackled to life. “Jack, it’s Kevin. I need you at the TOC.”

Parker’s eyebrows went up. “Damn, Jack. Spidey-sense, much?”

“I’m wondering that myself,” Sigler muttered. The ominous feeling that had started with the approach of the helicopter was blossoming into something like paranoia. He keyed the transmit button on the radio. “Be there in five.”

It took him only three minutes to walk briskly from the dining facility in the main palace building, to FOB McCoy, the smaller, walled-off compound where Cipher element had set up shop. Above the always-locked metal door was a crudely painted sign that read ‘Animal House,’ presumably a reference to the college fraternity in the classic John Belushi movie of the same name: Delta Tau Chi — Delta House. The sign had appeared one night, a few weeks after they’d arrived in country — most likely some jarhead acting on a dare — but Kevin Rainer, Cipher element’s commander, had left it there. Although their unit designation was supposed to be classified, why bother denying what everyone at Camp Blue Diamond already knew; Cipher element was part of the 1^st Special Forces Operational Detachment-D, the US Army’s elite counter-terrorism interdiction unit, better known simply as Delta.

Sigler went directly to the tactical operations center (TOC) — known informally as The Lair—which served a dual purpose as both communications hub and conference room. Rainer was seated at the end of the long rectangular table, along with Doug Pettit and two other people — an athletically built, brown-haired man, and a woman — in civilian clothes. The man was Scott Klein, a CIA officer who had been working closely with Cipher element to disrupt communications between the different local insurgent groups, but it took Sigler a moment to recognize him; he was having trouble tearing his gaze away from the woman.

She was, in a word, stunning.

She was seated, but Sigler guessed that she was about the same height as Klein; the Company man was about 5’ 10”. Her blousy top mostly concealed her figure, but her arms, where they emerged from her rolled up sleeves, were slender and toned. It was her face however, framed in a cascade of long and straight black hair that arrested Sigler’s attention. Her almond-shaped eyes, the irises brown with flecks of gold, hinted at some recent Asian ancestry, as did her high cheekbones, but her face was longer, with a prominent forehead and a strong jaw.

“Hel-lo,” murmured Parker, slipping into the Lair behind Sigler.

Command Sergeant Major Pettit, Cipher element’s senior non-commissioned officer, directed a scathing look at the young operator, but no one else at the table seemed to notice, least of all the woman, whose attention was fixed on the screen of her laptop computer.

Klein rose and extended a hand to Sigler. “Jack, good to see you.”

Sigler accepted the firm handclasp, but his reply was guarded. “Scott. Why do I have the feeling that you’re about to ruin my day?”

Klein’s grin confirmed Sigler’s suspicions, but the CIA officer withheld further explanation until Sigler and Parker were settled in at the table. “First, congratulations are in order. The guys you nabbed last night turned out to be a lot more important that we expected.”

Sigler felt his apprehension growing; he could tell where this was headed. The couriers had given up something actionable — maybe a location for a high value target — and now Cipher element was going to have to postpone their rotation back to the States to take on one more mission.

Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have bothered Sigler. It wasn’t as if he had anyone waiting for him back home.

He wasn’t really sure what ‘home’ was anymore. For the last eleven years of his life, home had been wherever the Army sent him, and somehow that seemed more real to him than his childhood home in Richmond, Virginia. His mother still lived there, but he didn’t visit often. There were too many bad memories at the house on Oak Lane: memories of his sister Julie who had always been there for him, and of his father who never had.

He’d been adrift back then, a punk, more interested in skating and hanging out with the other losers in the neighborhood, than in trying to be a good son. He didn’t care what his mother or his mostly-absent father thought of him, which seemed to suit them just fine. Julie, however, had refused to give up on him. In her own gentle but insistent way, she had equipped him to make his own path in life, encouraging him to find a dream and follow it, just as she had ultimately done.

When he was fourteen, Julie had joined the Air Force, intent on becoming one of the nation’s first female fighter pilots. Two years later, against all odds, she had succeeded. Then, just a few weeks before she was to wed her high school sweetheart, while on a cross-training flight in a Navy F-14, she crashed. Julie’s death had been the final straw for an already strained domestic situation. Three months later, Sigler’s father left abruptly and didn’t come back. Shortly thereafter, Jack Sigler left as well, to join the Army.

Unlike his father, Sigler wasn’t running away. At first, he’d thought that it was Julie’s death that had motivated him to enlist, but later he realized that it was really his memory of her life that was driving him. Military service had given her focus, a challenge she knew she was capable of meeting and beating, and that was what he felt he needed. His mother, though heartbroken, had agreed to sign the waiver that would allow him to enlist at seventeen.

The rigors of basic training had shown him what he was capable of accomplishing. His natural athleticism and agility made him a perfect candidate for specialized training — Airborne school, the Rangers — but he wasn’t content to simply test his physical prowess. While serving in the 101^st Airborne, he managed to earn a college degree, and then he attended Officer Candidate School. Not long after receiving his commission, he set his sights on a new goal: Special Forces selection.

The challenges…the successes…had transformed him.

He’d joined the Army because he wanted to make a difference, to do something that would have made Julie proud, and now here he was, leading a team of the most elite counterterrorist shooters in the world, saving lives by taking out the bad guys before they could kill innocents.

Making a difference.

The uniform was home. He preferred being on alert status, whether forward positioned as they had been for the last four months, or standing by in the on-deck circle at Fort Bragg, waiting for the shit to hit the fan somewhere.

Yet somehow, this time he’d actually been looking forward to going back to the States, and he wasn’t the only one.

Casey Bellows had seen his newborn son only via webcam. Mark Adams, the old man of the team at thirty-eight, was just two years shy of his twenty, and he had already received approval for transfer to a non-deployable headquarters unit. Even the Boss, Rainer, had made no secret of his plan to leave active duty and start up his own private security firm.

They’d had a good run, but maybe it was time to cash out and enjoy their success, not risk it all on one more throw of the dice.

Stow it, Sigler, he admonished himself. This is what you signed up for.

Sigler focused on Klein.

“Sasha can explain it better,” Klein continued, with a gesture to the woman. Then he hastily added, “Sorry, I skipped the intros. Jack, Danno, this is Sasha Therion. We brought her in to consult on this…”

He paused, as if expecting the woman to engage with the conversation, but she continued to gaze at her computer screen, seemingly hypnotized.

Sigler felt compelled to speak, if only to end the awkward silence. “Brought her in? I thought your new boss put the kibosh on outsourcing.”

It was no secret that Domenick Boucher, the new director of the CIA, under orders from the President, had put an end to the former administration’s practice of outsourcing the detainment, rendition and interrogation of suspected terrorists. It was partly as a way to restore accountability to the relevant agencies and partly to stop the hemorrhage of taxpayer dollars into what some journalists had taken to calling the ‘terror-industrialist complex.’ The President had made other changes too, some public and some under the radar, to streamline the nation’s intelligence-gathering apparatus and repair the lingering damage to America’s public image following too many incidents of abuse, brutality and torture — oft times with official sanction.

The President, a former Army Ranger, was by no means soft on national security issues, but he did have what one primary opponent had disparagingly called ‘an obsolete sense of integrity.’ Old-fashioned maybe, but not obsolete. Evidently the American people had liked the idea of a leader with integrity.

Klein shook his head. “This is different. But, I should let Sasha explain.”

When she failed to pick up the cue a second time, the CIA man laid a hand gently on her forearm, and as if speaking to a young child, he said: “Sasha, why don’t you tell the men about your work?”

The woman looked up suddenly, the spell broken. She glanced around the table as if just realizing that she wasn’t alone. “Uh, I do the math.”

Sigler stifled a laugh, but he noticed that Parker was now sitting up a little straighter. Daniel Parker, a self-confessed science geek, was the antithesis of most African-American stereotypes: a man who would count it a greater honor debating astrophysics with Neil deGrasse Tyson than playing one-on-one with Allen Iverson…though if push came to shove, he would probably acquit himself equally well in either situation.

“Sasha is, among other things, a cryptanalyst,” explained Klein. “We might have stopped outsourcing the dirty work, but we can’t afford to keep people with her talents on the payroll.”

Sigler connected the dots. “So we found some kind of coded message.”

Klein pursed his lips. “Not exactly.”

“This is what you found,” Sasha declared, as if abruptly deciding to take an interest in the conversation. She turned the laptop around and showed them the screen, and the image on it that had so captivated her.

The display showed what Sigler could only assume was a digital copy of one of the documents they had recovered during the previous night’s raid. It didn’t look familiar, but then he hadn’t really been looking when they’d done the collecting. He recognized the delicate curves of Arabic script, but there was a block of writing in the middle that looked like nothing he’d ever seen before. The letters might have been Greek or perhaps Cyrillic, but interspersed among the not-quite-familiar letters were other shapes that looked almost like Chinese characters:

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha replied, looking genuinely bothered by the admission.

The CIA man broke in impatiently. “It’s evident from the accompanying message that the enemy does know what it says, and that it’s critical to the development of a biological weapon.”

Sigler had been in the Unit long enough that such a declaration no longer surprised him. The stakes were always high. America’s enemies were bent on acquiring bio-weapons or loose nukes. It was the Unit’s job—his job — to nip those deadly aspirations in the bud.

“The intel you collected,” Klein continued, “doesn’t tell us what exactly, but it does tell us where: an old Republican Guard depot about thirty klicks northeast of Samarra.”

Sigler reviewed his mental map of the region, but the area didn’t ring any bells. Samarra lay between Baghdad and Tikrit, along the eastern leg of the Sunni Triangle, where nearly all of the insurgent activity had been focused lately. East of the triangle, there was a whole lot of nothing, all the way to the Iranian border.

“We had no idea this place even existed; it doesn’t show up on any of our satellite imagery, going back all the way to the First Gulf War, so we have to assume that it was decommissioned sometime following the end of the war with Iran. We should have a UAV over the site within the hour, but we’re thinking most of it’s underground. Saddam probably buried it to hide it from UN weapons inspectors. That’s probably why we didn’t find it sooner.” Klein shifted forward in his chair.

Here it comes, thought Sigler.

“The window of opportunity on this one is narrow. Once they figure out their couriers got nabbed, if they haven’t already, they’ll pick up and move. We need to hit this place ASAP.” Another pause.

“Tonight.”

Sigler didn’t question the assessment. Klein wasn’t asking for his opinion or advice; the CIA man was telling him to get ready. “I’ll tell the boys.”

“Slow down. There’s more.” He glanced at Sasha. “You’re going to have a ride-along.”

This time, Sigler wasn’t able to hide his dismay. “You’re shitting me, right?” He glanced over at Rainer, but the Boss was stone-faced. “You mean you’ll bring her in once we secure the site?”

Klein shook his head. “Miss Therion needs to be there with you.”

For the first time since her introduction, Sasha seemed to be aware of the discomfort her presence was creating. “The Iraqis know how to crack this code,” she said, tapping the computer screen emphatically. “And we don’t. We don’t even know where to begin. I have to be there. I have to be the first one inside.”

Rainer cleared his throat. “The decision is made, Jack.”

“With all due respect, sir, I would like to say for the record that this is a piss-poor idea.” Sigler hoped that his use of the military honorific — something that was almost never done in the Unit — would convey that this wasn’t just run-of-the-mill bitching and moaning.

Rainer’s reply was succinct. “Deal with it.”

Sigler glanced at Klein, who now seemed to be making a studied effort to avoid meeting his gaze, and then at Sasha. “I don’t suppose you’ve been trained for field work. Can you shoot?”

Before she could answer, Klein spoke up. “Don’t worry about that, Jack. I’ll take care of her. You guys just need to get us through the front door.”

A dozen different retorts flew through Sigler’s mind, but this time he checked himself. He stood up. “I’m going to need that imagery from the drone as soon as you can get it to me. The more I know about the site…” He let the thought trail off; there was nothing to be gained by stating the obvious. He motioned for Parker to follow, but to his surprise, his friend waved him off.

“Actually Jack, I’d like to have a word with Miss Therion.”

For a moment, Sigler wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly, but before he could inquire, Pettit snapped: “Parker!”

Usually, a stern look from Cipher element’s top NCO would be enough to put any member of the team in their place — even Sigler, who, as the platoon leader, outranked him. Pettit rarely had to chastise with words, but when he did, everyone sought cover.

Parker, however, didn’t even blink. He pointed at the computer screen and kept his gaze on Sasha. “I know what that is. So, either you can talk to me, one-on-one, and tell me what’s really going on here, or I can walk out that door and tell the rest of the team that we’re about to go put it on the line over an undecipherable medieval manuscript that’s probably a hoax.”

Sigler gaped at him. So did nearly everyone else. Klein swore softly under his breath.

Sasha shook her head. “It’s not a hoax. That much, I’m sure of. And this could be the closest anyone has come to cracking the code in over four hundred years.”

“What the fuck?” growled Pettit, turning to Rainer in disbelief. “Medieval manuscript? Is this shit for real?”

Rainer didn’t respond to his sergeant major. Instead, he stood abruptly and motioned toward the door. “Gentleman, let’s give Danno and Miss Therion a chance to get acquainted.”

THREE

Rainer’s abrupt declaration caught even Parker by surprise, and he didn’t hide his elation very well; he grinned so hard, his jaws started to hurt. As the others filed out of the TOC, Sasha just stared at him in what he guessed was complete disbelief.

Yeah, that’s right, he thought, nodding his head ever so slightly. The black man was the smartest guy in the room. Bet you didn’t see that coming, princess.

“So,” she said, when they were alone. “You know about the manuscript?”

He shrugged, but his irrepressible grin foiled his attempt to appear nonchalant. “Maybe. Or maybe I was just trying to find an excuse to be alone with you.”

She blinked, uncomprehendingly. “Why would you do that?”

That dulled Parker’s smile just a little. This girl wasn’t pretending to be aloof as a way of fending off unwanted advances; this was who she really was. “I’ve dabbled a little in number theory and mathematical codes. I like to do brain teasers. Lateral thinking puzzles, cryptograms…stuff like that. I must have come across an article about it somewhere and it stuck in my head.

“Probably when I was at Yale,” he added with a wink.

That seemed to penetrate her shield of inscrutability. “You went to Yale?”

His only answer was an airy wave. He hadn’t attended Yale as a student, but he had grown up in New Haven, where his father still worked at the University as a janitor. He’d spent a lot of time on the campus while growing up, and he had, for a short while, dared to dream of attending the Ivy League institution. It was a dream that could not withstand the harsh realities of socio-economics and race politics.

His higher education — still a work in progress — had come through distance learning programs, but Sasha didn’t need to know that.

“The article called it ‘the most mysterious manuscript in the world.’ An entire book written in a language that no one has ever seen before, and which no one is able to translate. Not even the NSA. That’s pretty crazy shi…ah, stuff.”

Sasha nodded. “It’s one of the greatest puzzles in cryptology.”

It was officially designated MS 408 of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, but it was more commonly known as the Voynich manuscript, so named for the early 20^th century antique book dealer who brought it into public awareness.

The book’s vellum pages, over two hundred and forty altogether, were decorated with elaborate full-color illustrations, mostly of plants, rendered with extraordinary detail — almost like a biology textbook — which had led many to believe that it was a book of herbal remedies from the Middle Ages. The pages also depicted star charts, along with more symbolic pictures — several of the paintings featured crudely drawn, almost cartoonish images of naked pregnant women, cavorting about in green pools, dancing along the edge of spiral star clusters, or emerging from plant root systems that looked suspiciously like the veins and arteries of a human body. What made the Voynich manuscript remarkable though was its text. The entire book had been written using a completely unknown alphabet system that had confounded all attempts at decipherment.

Theories about its origin were diverse. Some believed it to be the work of an herbalist or apothecary, who had developed the unique code to protect his recipes from competitors. Others believed it to be a hoax — created by a confidence artist during the reign of Queen Elizabeth or perhaps even by Voynich himself in the early 1900s — and opined that the reason the book’s code couldn’t be cracked was that the text had been generated randomly, to make it seem that the book contained some great mystery. Hoax or not, since its appearance in 1912, more than a few people had wasted years of their lives in a vain attempt to solve its riddle.

The mystery of the Voynich manuscript was exactly the sort of puzzle that captivated Parker. He had read numerous articles about the book, staying current on the latest research and theories about its origin, so he had immediately recognized the text excerpt on Sasha’s computer screen. On a personal level, he was intrigued by the admittedly bizarre notion that Iraqi insurgents might be on the verge of cracking the Voynich code. The fact that this beautiful, if somewhat socially awkward cryptanalyst not only shared his interest but was obsessed with finding the solution, made it even more appealing.

But it sure as hell wasn’t a good reason for Cipher element to risk their lives.

He shook his head. “The Voynich manuscript is almost certainly a hoax. The best theory I’ve heard is that it was produced by an English charlatan who claimed, among other things, to be able to turn lead into gold. The reason no one can read it is that there’s nothing there to read; it’s just a jumble of random symbols that don’t mean anything.”

“You are talking about the Edward Kelley hypothesis?” Sasha shook her head. “That has been categorically disproven.”

“Categorically disproven? I wasn’t aware of that.”

“At my request, the agency secretly tested pieces of the manuscript. Carbon-14 dating confirms that the parchment dates to between the 13^th and 15^th centuries, at least two hundred years before Kelley lived.”

“So it’s old. That proves nothing. Different crook, same scam.”

She pursed her lips. “You could be right. But the documents your team recovered indicate that al-Awda is in the process of decoding it. They believe it will help them create a new bio-weapon.”

Despite his desire to impress her, Parker couldn’t hide his incredulity. “Really? A medieval cookbook is going to tell them that?”

“You must be unfamiliar with the science of ethnopharmacology.” Sasha’s tone was flat, matter of fact, but the statement was a disparaging slap in the face to Parker. “It’s the study of traditional medicines used by different ethnic groups, to discover new drugs and medicines. Traditional knowledge is the basis of modern pharmacology; there’s every reason to believe that the Voynich manuscript might contain important new insights into healing medicines. However, if the information you recovered is accurate, the book might also contain important historical information about the plague.”

That got Parker’s attention.

If the Voynich manuscript did date back to the 1400s, then it wasn’t too much of stretch to believe that it might contain knowledge about the Black Death, which had ravaged Europe less than a century earlier. The plague bacteria had already been used as a bio-weapon; it was widely believed that the first outbreak of the disease in Europe had occurred after an invading Mongol army catapulted infected bodies into the besieged city of Caffa. Seven hundred years later, the organism that had caused the plague—Yersinia pestis—remained a pathogen with deadly potential for exploitation as a germ warfare agent.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter whether the Voynich manuscript really contained information about the plague, or even if it could be decoded at all. Somebody was trying to cook up a nasty new weapon, and it was his job — his team’s job — to identify them and put them in the ground.

“That’s good enough for me,” he said, rising to his feet.

Sasha’s face creased in confusion. “You…believe me? Just like that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe.” His grin was back, but this time it was a cold smile of anticipation. “I’ve got a job to do. It’s going to be a busy night.”

FOUR

Domenick Boucher waited patiently for the President’s daily national security briefing to conclude. As Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he’d been the first to speak, providing the Commander-in-Chief with a succinct snapshot of how the world had changed during the previous twenty-four hours. He had then listened attentively as other members of the National Security Council had done the same, but all the while his thoughts never strayed far from the one piece of information he had withheld; he clenched it in his mind, like a hand grenade with the safety pin removed. It was an apt simile. He was about to drop this particular grenade on Tom Duncan’s desk, and the odds were good that neither of them would be able to escape the shitstorm of political shrapnel that would follow.

When the President finally dismissed the meeting, Boucher stood with the rest of the attendees but didn’t join the exit queue. President Duncan settled into the executive chair behind the Resolute Desk and leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. “Something on your mind, Dom?”

Boucher pursed his lips. “Mr. President…”

“It’s just us, Dom. Spit it out.”

Easier said than done. Boucher wasn’t just the DCIA; he was also Tom Duncan’s friend, and that made this so much harder. He took a single sheet of paper from his leather portfolio and placed it in on the desktop. Duncan ignored it, maintaining eye contact with Boucher, compelling him to speak.

“Last night, a Delta team running CT operations in Ramadi captured two couriers working with the al-Awda resistance—”

“Refresh my memory.”

“Al-Awda is Arabic for ‘The Return,’ as in the return of Saddam Hussein. It’s a small group, made up of Ba’ath party members and Saddam loyalists. They’ve mostly been marginalized since Operation Red Dawn, but information recovered last night suggests that they are still active. We think they might have set up shop at a remote site east of Samarra…” Boucher paused a beat then dropped the grenade. “It looks like the place is an undocumented Iraqi bio-weapons laboratory.”

Duncan processed this for a moment then leaned forward, his palms flat on the desk to either side of the unread brief. “Undocumented? Christ, Dom, are you telling me that we’ve finally found the smoking gun?”

“I’m afraid it looks that way.”

In October 2002, after several months of evident non-compliance on the part of Saddam Hussein’s government with UN weapons inspectors, the United States Congress voted to authorize military action against Iraq. Four months later, the US Secretary of State, speaking before the United Nations Security Council, presented evidence of an ongoing Iraqi effort to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), with the intent of using them against Western nations. Shortly thereafter, the war began. Almost two hundred thousand soldiers from the United States and three other countries, swept across the border, and in just twenty-one days of fighting, toppled the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein.

But no WMDs were found.

As the triumphant victory turned into a prolonged occupation and a brutal campaign against insurgent guerillas — news pundits began calling it a ‘quagmire’—the rationale for the war came under intense scrutiny. What had, in the days leading up to the invasion, seemed like a ‘slamdunk’—damning evidence of an impending strike against American interests utilizing a deadly combination of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons — now seemed like a fallacious pretext for a war of imperialism.

It would later be revealed that much of the so-called evidence had been fraudulent, supplied by Saddam Hussein’s political rivals, who had — successfully it seemed — tricked the nations of the West into toppling the hated dictator from power. While many would subsequently argue that Saddam’s overthrow was justified, even absent the threat of illegal weapons programs, the perception that America had been deceived into starting the war haunted the former President to the end of his first and only term in office, and his decision not to run for a second term paved the way for the election of dark horse candidate Thomas Duncan.

Duncan, a former combat veteran, was intimately familiar with the very real cost of war, in both treasure and blood. His policy from day one in office was that there would be no hand wringing or recriminations over the miscalculations of the former administration, but he did intend to give the American people exactly what he had promised in the campaign — a government that was accountable for every dollar and every drop of American blood spent in the war effort.

Although there was no easy solution to the Iraq problem, Duncan was aggressively pushing his advisors for an exit strategy that would ensure long-term security and stability in the region. It was a politically popular position, and the war hawks in Congress, still stinging from the WMD fiasco, were keeping their heads down.

The discovery of a ‘smoking gun’—a secret bio-weapon production facility leftover from Saddam Hussein’s regime — would change all of that. A single shred of evidence, even circumstantial evidence, might be used to justify the war in the court of public opinion. Although doubts would linger, the uncertainty would undermine the President’s position. The hawks would demand a more aggressive approach to foreign policy, with pre-emptive military action as a tool of statecraft, and more American soldiers would pay the price with their lives.

Duncan shook his head. “It is what it is, Dom. I won’t lie to the American people. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the sooner we get this out in the open, the better.”

“In point of fact, we don’t actually know what it is. That’s what the D-boys are going to find out tonight.”

The President sighed, then lowered his eyes and scanned the brief. “What’s this about a cryptanalyst?”

Boucher stifled a laugh. “The code the insurgents are using triggered an internal protocol that’s been around since the days of the OSS. Sci-Tech says it’s a code that’s never been cracked, the holy grail of crypto. They begged and pleaded for me to deploy their expert with the team, and I saw no good reason to refuse. Her presence won’t put the mission at risk.”

The President did not pursue the issue. “I want to watch the game. Transfer control of this to the Situation Room. I want General Collins there, too. Those are his boys on the ground.”

Boucher frowned. Some in the media had opined that, if the President had a failing, it was that he didn’t like to relinquish control to his subordinates. The DCIA knew better; Duncan wasn’t a control freak, and he didn’t hire anyone without absolutely trusting them to get the job done.

He just misses the action.

“I’ll order the pizzas.”

FIVE

The three MH-60L Black Hawk helicopters from the 160^th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, arrayed in an echelon-right formation, cruised through the darkened sky high above the Mesopotamian flood plain, performing the very task that had earned them the unit designation of the ‘Night Stalkers.’ Huddled together with Parker and the rest of his squad in the middle aircraft, Jack Sigler peered through his night vision scope, looking over the shoulder of a Black Hawk crew chief seated behind an M240H machine gun. He could make out a distant glow — the lights of Baghdad — far to the south, but below them, there was only the flat featureless desert landscape.

Featureless, but not quite empty.

The reconnaissance drone had uncovered the desert’s secret: a low, cinderblock structure, half buried by windblown dust, just to the east of what the map called Buhayrat Shari Lake. The lake was now just a dry salt flat, two miles across and almost twenty miles long. The drone had showed them the target building, but revealed no sign of activity — no cooking fires burning, no vehicles, not even tire tracks. The facility looked abandoned, but looks could be deceiving.

After completing the initial sweep, the drone returned for refueling, but it was back in the air now, feeding real time infrared imagery to the PDA Rainer carried with him in the trailing helo. Sigler kept expecting the Cipher element leader to keep them updated, but Rainer had been uncharacteristically quiet. With the exception of Strickland’s sotto voce whispered: “Mommy, are we there yet?” comment, everyone else had remained quiet as well.

Maybe no news is good news, Sigler thought. Guess we’ll find out in about five minutes.

Four minutes and fifty seconds later, the crew chief at the gun twisted around and tapped him on the arm. The Night Stalkers crew members wore headsets that gave them access to their own radio net and internal comms, but as a matter of operational security, they didn’t have Cipher element’s frequency. The Delta team’s radios did include a separate channel so they could communicate with the Night Stalkers — who were using the unit callsign ‘Beehive’—but this close to the objective, the last thing Sigler wanted to do was mess with the radio settings. At this point in the mission, gestures and hand signals were the preferred form of communication.

Sigler passed the tap on to the rest of the squad, and almost in unison, they gave their equipment a final pre-combat inspection.

Rainer’s voice squelched in his earpiece. “Eagle-Eye, this Cipher Six. Let me know when you’re in position. Over.”

A few hundred yards ahead, the lead Black Hawk executed a tricky near-vertical descent, flaring into a hover just a few feet above the arid terrain. Though he couldn’t see them, Sigler knew that the six Eagle-Eye snipers were piling out of their ride and establishing a defensive over-watch position a kilometer away from the target.

The helicopters were quiet, but the desert was a big empty place and sound carried. Even at this distance, the insurgents in the building were probably sitting up and taking note. The Black Hawks were always at their most vulnerable during touchdown, when they were close to potential hostiles and unable to execute any kind of evasive maneuvers. It would be the job of the snipers to deal with any opposition during the interminably long half-minute or so required for other two Night Stalker birds to debark their passengers.

The snipers gave the ‘all-clear’ a moment later. Immediately, Sigler heard a change in the pitch of the turbines, and then he felt his stomach lurch and rise into his throat as the helicopter dropped like a runaway elevator. The downward motion stopped abruptly, and Sigler saw the crew chief waving, giving his all-clear.

The ground looked tantalizingly close, but Sigler knew from experience that night-vision devices screwed with depth perception, and with forty-odd pounds of gear strapped to his body, it paid to err on the side of caution. With his knees bent slightly to absorb the impact, he jumped from the hovering helo. As soon as his feet made contact, he dropped into a low shooter’s stance and began moving forward, sweeping the foreground with the barrel of his HK416 assault rifle.

The squared-off outline of the building was visible about fifty meters away, but it looked as desolate as the rest of the bleak landscape.

“Last man out!” someone behind him shouted into the radio, and then the Black Hawk’s turbines roared and the downdraft of the helicopter’s ascent nearly blew Sigler over. When the maelstrom began to subside about ten seconds later, he keyed his mic. “Cipher Six, this is Cipher One-Six. We’re in position. No sign of rain. Over.”

“Roger, One-Six. You know what to do.”

Sigler gestured for his team to line up behind him, and he began advancing toward the building. He stayed in his hunched over stance, his gaze flitting between the front of the building and the ground directly in front of him.

“Cipher element, this is Eagle-Eye two. Nothing on thermals.”

Sigler frowned in dismay but kept moving. The cinderblock structure, unlike the shoddy house they had raided the previous evening in Ramadi, was an effective enough insulator to mask heat signatures from the thermal scopes.

The six men reached the front of the building. Sigler lined up beside the entryway — there was no door. Three operators were behind him, while the remaining two men posted at the corners to watch the sides and the rear of the building.

Unit SOP called for a dynamic entry, moving in fast, identifying and eliminating hostiles in the blink of an eye, but Sigler hesitated. The open doorway, a dark hole in the green-gray of the building, beckoned him. Without a door to kick down, it would be the smoothest entry ever. What could be easier?

Too easy.

Instead of giving the signal that would start the countdown, Sigler eased forward and peeked around the doorpost.

Someone behind him hissed a warning. Almost from day one in basic training, soldiers were taught to never present a silhouette target to an enemy. If the insurgents were inside, waiting to meet the attack that they must surely suspect was coming, then he was a dead man.

No shot came.

The green display of his night vision showed what looked like sleeping forms, wrapped in blankets. There was no sign of movement within.

Sigler eased back. Nothing about this felt right.

It was decision time; he had to either go now or abort. His instincts were screaming for him to do the latter, but he didn’t have a shred of evidence to back up that call.

Rainer’s voice scratched in his ear. “Jack, why are you still on the wrong side of that wall?”

Sigler ignored the question. He activated his PAQ4 and directed the laser beam into the room, easing out once more into the danger zone. The green light stabbed into the dark interior, illuminating the space but revealing nothing more…

Something glinted in the laser light, right in front of him. A thin strand of monofilament was stretched across the door frame just above ankle level.

He keyed his mic. “All Cipher elements, this is One-Six, I’m calling the game. Fall back to rally one.”

“Jack?” Rainer didn’t bother with brevity codes.

“This is a set up, Boss.”

Sigler wasn’t sure what Rainer’s reaction would be. Another SOP was that anyone could pull the plug on a mission for any reason — he might catch hell in the after-action review if it turned out to be nothing but a case of jitters — but this close to the objective…

“It’s your call, Jack.”

Sigler led his squad back out, taking care to step only in the boot prints that marked their initial approach. Rainer was waiting at the designated rally point, two hundred meters from the building, along with Pettit, Klein and Sasha.

Sigler got right to the point. “It’s wired. We were expected.”

Sasha spoke up. “You don’t understand. I need to get inside.”

“No ma’am,” Rainer said. “You don’t understand. There’s nothing in there. This was a trap.”

“Shit,” growled Klein. “Can we at least sweep the place for NBC residue?”

If the facility had been used as a bio-weapons laboratory, it was conceivable, however unlikely, that trace evidence might be found.

“Negative. We’re done here. I’m calling the birds,” Rainer said.

Best news I’ve heard all day, Sigler thought.

SIX

Sasha Therion stumbled along behind Klein, trying to make sense of what was happening…trying and failing.

She’d come here to learn about the Voynich manuscript. It wasn’t just a book of herbal remedies. It contained something so much more fantastic than that… It had to. That was why its author had gone to such extraordinary lengths to encipher the text. The insurgents knew it, too. They had cracked its code, or were close to doing so, and planned to use its centuries’ old secret to make a weapon that could destroy life.

So why were the soldiers leaving?

Sasha didn’t like it when people changed the plan at the last minute. Plans were good; they were the only way to ensure orderliness. Changing plans meant introducing uncertainty into the equation, and uncertainty was a sure path to chaos. And chaos was relentless…insidious.

If they would just let me do what I came here for…

The helicopter swooped down, beating the earth all around her with its rotor wash. She felt Klein’s hand on her shoulder, urging her to duck low. She didn’t like it when people touched her, but she complied. A few seconds later, she was bundled inside and guided onto one of the bench seats. Klein sank down next to her, and a moment later, the Black Hawk climbed back into the sky.

She peered through the eyepiece of the night vision monocular the Delta operators had supplied her with, looking first at the Agency man and then at Rainer. She had to explain it to them, make them understand how important it was that they accomplish their goal.

One of the helicopter’s crew leaned back and craned his head toward Rainer. He was shouting, but his voice was barely audible over the strident whine of the turbine engines. “What happened?”

“A complication,” Rainer answered. “The plan is the same.”

Sasha didn’t understand. How could the plan be the same if they were leaving?

The crewman just nodded.

“Do it!” Rainer shouted.

Sasha was still trying to make sense of this when the Delta team leader brought his carbine up and fired two shots.

Klein jerked in the seat beside her. Sasha flinched, as a hot blast of sulfurous exhaust sprayed her face. Then she felt something else, something warm and wet on her shoulder. Klein had slumped against her with blood trickling from a pair of tiny holes in his forehead, and gushing from the enormous opening in the back of his skull.

The crewman Rainer had spoken with stretched out his arm, pointing across the cabin in the direction of his counterpart on the opposite side. As the other crewman started to turn, a tongue of flame leapt from the pistol in the first man’s hand. The second man slumped forward over his machine gun. At almost the same instant, there was another report from the cockpit.

“What the—” the man Sasha knew as Pettit stiffened on his seat, trying to get his own weapon up, but Rainer was already swinging his gun around. Two more shots erupted from Rainer’s carbine and punched into Pettit’s face.

Sasha didn’t know what was happening…except in a strange way, she did. It was exactly what she’d been afraid of; they had changed the plan, and now chaos was descending.

They’re going to kill me next, she thought, and maybe that was okay. Everyone died, no matter how they fought against that inevitable outcome. Life, with all its endless unpredictable possibilities, always reduced to zero in the end, the final victory of order over chaos.

But the Delta team leader didn’t shoot her; he didn’t even point his gun at her.

“Sorry you had to see that,” he shouted. “But if you’ll just sit tight, everything will make sense in a little while.”

Sasha very much doubted that.

SEVEN

Sigler was the last to climb aboard the second Black Hawk. As he got in, he flashed a thumb’s up to the crew chief and shouted: “Last man!”

Then the crew chief did something unexpected. He held up his hand with forefinger and middle finger extended, just like the peace sign, or V for Victory…or, Sigler realized, the number two. The crew chief was telling him to switch to channel two on his radio, which was preset with the Night Stalkers’ frequency.

“This is Cipher One-Six,” Sigler said when the he’d made the switch. “Do you have traffic for me?”

“Cipher, this is Beehive Six-Four. I’ve lost contact with Beehive Six-Six, and they are presently heading away from our position on a bearing of three-three-zero. Do you know what’s up? Over.”

Beehive Six-Six was the Black Hawk with Rainer’s group, and the compass heading meant they were flying north-northwest. Ramadi lay to the south.

“Standby.” He switched to the Delta channel. “Cipher Six, this is Cipher One-Six. Come in, over.”

No answer. He tried two more times, unsuccessfully. He was about to switch back to update the pilot, when a voice sounded in his earpiece. “Cipher One-Six, this is Eagle-Eye Three. What the hell’s going on?”

Even without the callsign, Sigler recognized the voice of Lewis Aleman. The tall, athletic sniper shared Parker’s interest in science and technology, and the two men often hung out together, salivating over the Sharper Image catalog like it was the Sport Illustrated swimsuit issue.

“Wondering that myself, Eagle-Eye. Are you guys on the bird?” Sigler saw the crew chief motioning for his attention again, but waited for Aleman to answer in the affirmative. “Roger, Eagle-Eye. Standby.”

He switched to the Night Stalkers’ frequency. “Go for Cipher element.”

“Cipher, this is Beehive Six-Four. Beehive Six-Six is…they’re bugging out, and they ain’t taking our calls. This is your show, Cipher. What do I do?”

Sigler’s brow furrowed in disbelief; there was no protocol for a situation like this. He leaned over the crew chief’s shoulder and stared out the door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the departing Black Hawk, as if visually confirming what he’d been told would give him some insight about what to do next.

He didn’t see the helicopter. Instead, he saw a flash on the ground, perhaps a mile to the west, then another.

Abruptly, the display in his night vision device flared bright white, like a high intensity spotlight beaming directly into his retina. He reflexively tore the monocular away, but the damage was done; a greenish blue spot filled his right eye.

His left eye however, fixed on the source of the light: two parachute flares, fired from mortar tubes, were blazing like tiny suns in the night sky.

“Shit! Get us out of here, Beehive!”

His warning was unnecessary; the pilots had seen the flares as well and were already taking evasive action.

Two deep booming sounds reverberated through the airframe, the reports of the mortar launch finally reaching them, and then Sigler’s good eye detected more flashes on the ground, and pinpoints of light streaking into the sky. Sigler recognized them instantly; RPGs…rocket propelled grenades.

The effective range of the RPG was only about a hundred meters. Beyond that, there was less than a fifty percent chance of hitting a stationary target. At a thousand meters, the grenade would self-destruct. Sigler’s helicopter was well outside that radius, but Beehive Six-Five was a lot closer to the source. The air around the helicopter carrying the snipers suddenly came alive with flashes, as the grenades began exploding. Sigler thought the helicopter had weathered the barrage, but a moment later he heard a voice over the radio: “Shit! We’re going in.”

Beehive Six-Five wobbled in the air and began corkscrewing downward.

There was a thunderous eruption right in front of Sigler; the crew chief had opened up with his M240. Red arcs — tracers — described the path of the 7.62 millimeter rounds as they lanced toward the source of the RPGs, but it was impossible to distinguish a target or judge the effectiveness of the fire.

A puff of dust below marked the spot where Beehive Six-Five finished its fateful plunge. Sigler knew exactly what he had to do next. “Six-Four, get us as close as you can. We’ll do the rest.”

“Roger, Cipher.” The pilot’s voice was steady and professional, without a trace of hesitation. “I’ll try to make it a short walk.”

Sigler switched channels. “Eagle-Eye, do you copy?”

There was an interminably long silence, but then someone broke squelch. Sigler heard several seconds of gunfire, then a cough. “Cipher. Could use a little help here.”

It was Aleman.

“On our way, Eagle-Eye. What’s the count?”

“Two and two.” Two dead, two injured badly enough to be out of the fight. After a beat, Aleman amended: “I think. Having trouble telling which way is up right now.”

“Sit tight, Eagle-Eye. Help is on the way.”

The Black Hawk set down about fifty yards east of the crash site, well out of RPG range, but in between bursts from the M240, Sigler could hear the distinctive crack of bullets ricocheting off the armored exterior of the helicopter. As soon as the crew chief threw open the door on the sheltered side, Sigler’s team poured out onto the desert floor.

When the last man was out, Beehive Six-Four rose again into the sky, and the door gunner continued to hurl bullets in the direction of the muzzle flashes. Sigler’s men broke into pairs and began moving toward the crash using the tried and true individual movement techniques taught to every soldier: three to five second rushes, measured out to the rhythm of the mantra I’m up, he sees me, I’m down… Then drop to the prone, roll left or right, it didn’t matter which as long as you didn’t get into a pattern, and give your buddy some cover fire so that he could make his move.

There was another pair of booms and two more flares appeared in the sky overhead. The enemy probably thought that lighting up the sky would level the playing field, removing the technological advantage of the Delta team’s night vision. And maybe it would do that, but stealth and darkness weren’t the only tools in the Delta toolbox. One Delta operator was easily worth ten…twenty…or even fifty insurgents.

Sigler tried to do the math as he dropped to the prone once more, rolled left, and then squeezed a pair of shots in the direction of a distant muzzle flash. His eyesight was almost back to normal, and he could easily distinguish at least twenty separate jets of flame. Maybe fifty to one was pushing it a bit. He didn’t know how many hostiles they were facing, but it was evident that someone had put a lot of thought into this trap, which meant these weren’t run of the mill durka-durkas sprayin’ and prayin’.

Inside job.

He bounded up and made another rush. He was close enough to the crash site to see men huddled behind the wreck, popping up every few seconds to provide covering fire. Two more rushes would get him there, maybe one if he didn’t stop…he was close enough now that the wreck would cover his approach.

Someone in Beehive Six-Six was working with the enemy. Klein. It had to be Klein. The Company man had sold them out, sacrificed them…but why?

He reached the downed helicopter and went immediately to the nearest man. It was Lewis Aleman. The Delta sniper had his H&K PSG 1 sniper rifle beside him, but his left hand was clutching a Beretta M-9 handgun. It took Sigler only a moment to realize why Aleman had opted to use the pistol; his right hand, cradled protectively against his abdomen, looked like a mass of raw meat.

Sigler took a mental step back and assessed the situation. The Black Hawk sat upright on the desert floor, but the crash had crumpled its frame like a beer can. The doors had sprung open, leaving an open space through the middle, and two men — one wore an olive drab flight suit, marking him as a surviving crewmember, and the other was a Delta sniper — were working the fixed machine gun on the far side. Sigler also saw a body inside, a crewman impaled on a piece of metal.

There were two other motionless forms on the ground outside the Black Hawk. Both wore desert camouflage, torn and dark with spilled blood. Sigler couldn’t tell if they were alive or not. He turned back to Aleman. “Sit rep?”

The sniper grimaced. “Pilot’s alive…at least he was…trapped in the cockpit. Co-pilot has a broken leg…maybe some ribs.”

“Our guys?”

Aleman motioned to the still forms on the ground. “Bell’s hurt bad. Broken back, I think. Martinez is done.”

“Did you get a look at the other side?”

“Yeah. There’s a whole fucking lot of them.”

The rest of Sigler’s team reached the wreck and fanned out to join the Black Hawk’s defenders. Sigler took charge. “Danno, Jess…get that second 240 back in action. Jon, I need an LZ. Casey, Mike, get the wounded ready for transport.”

As the men quickly went to their assigned tasks, Sigler called up to the remaining Black Hawk, which continued to circle high above them. “Beehive Six-Four, this is Cipher. We’re establishing a casualty collection point fifty meters from my location. Will pop white smoke when ready for pick-up. How copy?”

“Good copy, Cipher. Stay on this channel. Have requested CAS, but no word on ETA.”

CAS — close air support — was exactly what they needed right now, but Sigler wasn’t going to hold his breath and hope for someone to come pull their asses out of the fire. He turned back to the wreck, where Parker and Strickland had succeeded in liberating the M240H from its pintle mount. Strickland cradled the machine gun in both arms, while Parker gathered up full cans of ammunition — two in each hand. Sigler gestured for them to set it up at the nose end of the helicopter, and then he moved forward to the cockpit door.

The pilot sat unmoving in his chair, the control panel closed over his legs like the jaws of a devouring monster. His head lolled to the side and blood dripped from the bottom edge of his helmet. Sigler turned away.

He joined Parker and Strickland just as the latter opened up with the M240. Parker was right next to his teammate, ready to slap in a fresh belt of ammo as soon as it was needed. Sigler dropped down next to him.

“How many?”

Parker craned his head to answer. “I make out three different groups…at our ten, twelve and two.”

The mortars boomed again, throwing another pair of flares into the sky, and this time Sigler was able to mark their location, positioned behind the line of riflemen.

“I don’t like this, Danno. Pretty soon, they’re gonna figure out they can do more with those cannons than just pop flares.”

“So we can’t stay here. What’s the play?”

Sigler did a rough head count. There had been ten men aboard the Black Hawk. Even if they left the dead behind, a thought that galled him, he didn’t think the remaining bird could get them all out. “We evac the casualties, then fall back to the original objective. Buy some time until another bird gets here.”

Parker nodded, but before he could say anything, the ground in front of them erupted in a spray of dust. Sigler instinctively dropped, but just as quickly, he rolled into a prone shooting position and triggered a few shots of suppressive fire. He expected to hear Strickland jump in with the 240, and when that didn’t happen, he called out: “Danno, Jess, still with me?”

“Jack,” Parker called. “Jess is hit.”

Sigler muttered a curse and spider-crawled back to the impromptu machine-gun emplacement where he found Parker with both hands pressed to the Strickland’s neck in what seemed like a futile effort to stanch the rhythmic spurts of blood.

“Keep pressure on the wound,” Sigler instructed. “I’ll pull him behind cover.”

At a nod from Parker, he grabbed the stricken soldier’s legs and began hauling him back behind the shadow of the helicopter. Parker kept one hand on the wound and dug a field dressing from his tactical vest with the other. It was probably a wasted effort, but Sigler didn’t tell Parker that; Delta operators never gave up, especially when it came to saving one of their teammates. Braving the kill zone once more, Sigler crawled out to retrieve the 240.

“Jon! Where’s my LZ?”

From about fifty meters away, Jon Foley on one end of a litter carrying an immobilized Delta sniper, shouted: “Open for business!”

Sigler helped Parker carry Strickland to the casualty collection point, and then he keyed his mic. “Beehive, this is Cipher. Watch for smoke.”

The Black Hawk set down, practically on top of the hissing smoke grenade, once more shielding the Delta team while they loaded their wounded men and dead. Sigler kept a mental tally; the score now stood at three dead, including the pilot whom they’d been unable to free from the wreckage, and three seriously wounded. He realized someone was missing. “Where’s Aleman?”

He spied the lanky sniper, still in position at the wrecked bird, and somehow firing an assault rifle one-handed. Sigler switched to the Delta team channel. “Aleman, get your ass on this bird!”

Aleman’s voice came back, crystal clear. “Sorry, did not receive your last.”

Sigler considered repeating himself, but then thought better of it. There was no telling how long it would be before help arrived; as long as Aleman was willing and able to pull a trigger, there was no reason not to keep him in the game.

As the last of the litters was loaded onto the Black Hawk, the crew chief leaned in. “If we dump some weight and get real cozy, we might be able to get everyone on.”

“Dump some weight? You mean like the guns and all the ammo?”

The crew chief shrugged. “I didn’t say it would be pretty.”

The Black Hawk was rated to carry a maximum of eleven troops along with its crew of four. Dropping the armaments and other extraneous equipment might allow them to stretch that limit a bit, as would leaving the bodies of the dead behind, but Sigler didn’t like the math. “Just hurry back.”

The crew chief nodded solemnly and then climbed aboard and slid the door closed. Sigler crouched low and hastened out from under the rotor wash as the idling turbines began whining louder.

He was halfway to the wreck when he saw a flash in the corner of his eye.

A small group of insurgents — or maybe it was just a lone fearless soul, hell-bent on earning his virgins in Paradise — had flanked them, circling around to the south of the crash site.

In the time it took him to turn his head, the RPG crossed the distance to its target.

The warhead — a PG-7VR tandem charge grenade — had been designed to destroy tanks with modern reactive armor. It did this by first exploding a small shaped charge that released a high-velocity jet of metal in a super-elastic state, which can cut through solid steel. The second, larger high-explosive charge would then penetrate deep into the wound and detonate inside the target.

The rocket snaked in under the rising helicopter’s rotors and struck below the exhaust vent on the port side. The shaped-charge blast cut through the Black Hawk’s exterior like it was made of tissue paper. A millisecond later, the three pounds of high-explosives in the main charge detonated, and Beehive Six-Four blew apart at the seams.

EIGHT

The President’s palm came down on the tabletop with a resounding smack that echoed like a pistol-shot in the crypt-quiet Situation Room.

The operational command center in the White House basement was all but deserted. The President had only intended to observe the Delta team operation, and so he had eschewed the normal cadre of advisors, aides and support staff. The were only two other men in the room besides Boucher. Lieutenant General Roger Collins, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, was a thick, beefy man with puffy, red features and a poorly-kept secret love affair with the bottle. Collins’s aide was a compactly built man with a silver-gray buzzcut, colonel’s eagles on his epaulets and a black name plate that read ‘Keasling.’

Collins shook his head. “Well…shit.”

Boucher winced as the President’s eyes sent daggers through the air at the three-star general. “Shit? That’s all you’ve got? Shit?”

Domenick Boucher swallowed nervously and returned his gaze to the television screen, where the crisis was playing out in real-time. The feed was from an infrared camera mounted on a circling Predator UAV, and the images were rendered in an eerie inverted black and white, with the grayscale hues serving as an indication of temperature. The expanding cloud of white smoke that now occupied the space where one of the Army helicopters had been a moment before, could only mean one thing: the Black Hawk had become an inferno.

Until the President’s outburst, Boucher had felt as paralyzed as Collins. He’d watched in mute disbelief as the operation had fallen apart before his eyes, turning from a simple raid into a full blown battle. But Duncan’s anger galvanized him.

Focus, he thought. What are the priorities?

He’d never faced a crisis like this as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. There was rarely a need for the DCIA to be hands-on, but Boucher had come up through the ranks and witnessed some of the nation’s worst moments from the other side of director’s desk.

I’ve got people in the field… He shook his head; Klein and the crypto consultant were on the helicopter that had taken off without warning. There was nothing he could do to help them; no way to reach them. Why? Why did that Black Hawk go rogue? Who was giving the orders?

He dug his cell phone from a pocket, then just as quickly put it away. The Situation Room was shielded; no radio signals could get in or out. He would have to make do with one of the hard-wired telephones, which like all the other technology in the Situation Room, was painfully obsolete and actually less secure than Boucher’s encrypted digital phone.

Collins was still fumbling for an answer. “Sir, there’s not a hell of a lot I can do.”

“You can get those men out of there.” The President’s voice was low and flat, a steel blade hissing from between clenched teeth.

The general, perhaps without thinking it through first, shook his head. “Mr. President, it’s not that simple. We’re not coordinating with Defense on this, and if we make that call, we’ll have to disclose the whole operation. We won’t be able to keep the mission a secret.”

“Do you think those men out there give a damn about that?”

“That’s what we pay them for, sir.”

Boucher wasn’t the only man in the room shocked into action. The general’s aide likewise leaped for a phone. The President’s eyes followed him, but he made no move to interfere or ask for an explanation; the man was doing something, and Boucher knew that counted for a lot in Duncan’s book.

Collins finally seemed to grasp the concept as well. He swiveled his chair toward Keasling. “Mike, get some CAS out there.”

Keasling looked up but didn’t pull the receiver away from his mouth. “Calling the Air Force now, sir.”

“Doesn’t the 160^th have attack choppers?” intoned the President, somewhat mollified. “Little Birds?”

Boucher recalled that Duncan had seen the Army’s special operations helicopters in action when he’d served in Mogadishu, nearly two decades earlier.

Keasling didn’t seem the least bit nonplussed. “With respect, Mr. President, I think the Night Stalkers need to be grounded.”

Collins was indignant. “Mike, what the hell?”

Keasling pointed to one of the screens that showed an air traffic control radar map of Central Iraq. “Beehive Six-Six has gone AWOL. I don’t know who’s in command of that aircraft or what they’re doing, but I’d say there’s a better than even chance that at least one of the crew is involved in this action.”

The announcement stunned Boucher. That was the piece of this puzzle that refused to fit. Someone had set a trap for the Delta team, that much was obvious, but the ambush at the site was only part of the equation; someone had been working from within their ranks to make sure that Cipher element was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He heard a voice in his ear and realized his telephone call to the Director of Operations had finally gone through. “This is Boucher,” he said in a low whisper. “We have a situation involving operations with Cipher element. I need all hands on deck.”

There was a moment of silence at the other end, and Boucher could imagine the DO biting back a river of questions. “Understood. I’ll sound the alarm. Will you be joining us?”

“Not sure. I’m with the President now. I’ll either meet you there or set up a conference call.”

The President quickly grasped the import of Keasling’s statement. “You think there are others involved?”

Keasling nodded. “Or the rogue agent might have sabotaged the support aircraft. Either way, we need to keep the Night Stalkers on the bench for now.”

“So what else can we do to help those men?”

“I’m trying to divert immediate close air support, sir. And I’ve put the word out to all our operators in the region. 1^st Ranger is attached to 7^th Group at COB Speicher — al Sahra airfield, near Tikrit. They can be there in a couple hours.”

“A couple hours? Our boys could be dead by then.”

A strange gleam lit in Keasling’s eyes. “Sir, with all due respect, I wouldn’t bet on it.”

NINE

A man in a white waiter’s uniform pushed a food service cart out of the elevator and down the hallway. It was an hour after midnight, and the corridor was still and silent. Upon reaching his destination, one of more than a dozen nearly identical doors on either side of the hall, the waiter stopped and consulted a slip of paper on the cart, as if to verify that he was in the correct place. He stood motionless for a moment and could just make out a murmur of voices — probably from a television set inside — then he rapped his knuckles loudly on the door.

Several seconds passed. He was about to knock again when a voice issued from behind the panel. The terse inquiry was in Arabic, a language the waiter did not speak fluently, but the meaning was clear enough.

“I have food,” he called out. He spoke in English, but with an accent that might reasonably have been mistaken for German. “You order room service, ja?”

The door opened a crack, and through that narrow space, the waiter saw an unsmiling bearded Arab man, not quite as tall as his own six feet. The Arab appraised the waiter with a laser-like stare, taking in his dirty blond hair and long goatee — features that looked decidedly out of place in the region. Then he opened the door wider and took a half-step into the hall. Despite the late hour, the man was fully dressed, though he had chosen western attire — a brown sport coat over a white cotton dress shirt and khaki chinos — instead of the garb preferred by his kinsman. He glanced left and right, then returned his attention to the waiter.

“No room service.”

The waiter picked up the slip of paper and held it out for inspection. “You order food, ja? See right here?”

The Arab ignored the paper. “No.”

The waiter took another look at the slip. “Did someone else in the room order? You have others in the room with you?”

A perturbed look crossed the man’s face, then he stepped back inside and rattled off an inquiry in Arabic. The waiter seized the opportunity to advance his cart into the room, but the Arab blocked his entry, stopping the cart with such suddenness that the waiter had to steady himself by grasping the door frame. There was an angry look in the Arab’s eyes as he pushed the cart back into the hall.

“No order,” he said forcefully. To make his point even more explicit, he drew back the lapel of his jacket, revealing something metallic — the brushed chrome slide action of an enormous pistol in a shoulder holster. “You go now.”

This time, the waiter offered no protest, but almost scurried back, with one hand raised in a gesture of surrender. The Arab watched the blond man retreat all the way to the elevator, before turning back inside and slamming the door.

Instantly, the waiter reversed course and hurried back to the same room’s door. As he moved, he tucked his chin against his right shoulder, and when he spoke into the radio microphone clipped inside his white uniform jacket, all trace of the quasi-German accent was gone. “This is Juggernaut. Package delivered.”

A man’s voice — a laconic Texas drawl — sounded in the flesh colored ear bud connected to the radio. “Roger, Jugs. Receiving, Lima Charlie.”

Lima Charlie, the NATO phonetic alphabet equivalent of the letters L and C, meant the signal from the tiny transmitter that had been surreptitiously placed in the hotel room was being received “loud and clear.”

A murderous gleam appeared in the waiter’s bright blue eyes. “Damn it, Houston. I fucking hate it when you call me ‘Jugs.’”

The man at the other end of the transmission — Sonny Vaughn, the team leader who went by the callsign ‘Houston’—didn’t take the bait. “You’ve got ‘em riled up. They aren’t buying your bogus waiter schtick.”

“It was your stupid idea,” groused the ersatz waiter — Stanley Tremblay, callsign ‘Juggernaut.’ “A German waiter in a fucking Arab country? Really?”

“I explained all this, Jugs. A lot of European tourists come here. And half the workers in Arab countries are foreigners. Besides, the whole point was to stir things up…whoa, standby.” There was a long silence. “Bingo. These are our guys all right. Two men… They know they’ve been made.”

“Is the kid here?”

“Negative.” Pause. “Someone’s making a call.”

“Shit.”

Tremblay swept the stack of neatly folded dinner napkins off the cart. He reached down and plucked up the Beretta 9 mm semi-automatic pistol equipped with a suppressor that nearly doubled its barrel length, concealed beneath. He gave the hotel room door a gentle push — the strip of tape he’d surreptitiously slapped over the strike plate during his first attempt to enter, had prevented the latch from engaging — and moved inside like the Grim Reaper in stealth mode.

In the space of two seconds, he fired four shots — two pairs of bullets for each of the two men standing in the front room. The big Arab that had met him at the door had only enough time to whirl around in surprise before the Beretta gave him the kiss of death. The other man, also of Arab ancestry, but smaller in stature, didn’t even have time to look up from the cell phone he was dialing.

With the gun still held at the ready, Tremblay quickly moved to the second body and scooped up the phone in his left hand. He could hear a tinny voice issuing from the speaker, but he ignored it and thumbed the ‘end’ button.

“Got a number, Houston. Find a name to go with it.” He started to read the digits from the phone’s display, but before he could finish, it started vibrating in his hands. “Shit. He’s calling back. How do you say ‘butt-dial’ in Arabic?”

“Never mind that, Jugs. Hold the phone next to the radio. I’ll try to bluff ‘em.”

The phone squirmed like a living thing in his hands. Tremblay hastily unplugged the mic and earbud wires from the radio unit clipped to his belt, then held the cellular phone next to it and hit the button to accept the call.

The conversation that followed was brief and incomprehensible. Despite his southern roots, Vaughn did a passable job of mimicking the voice of the phone’s former owner — an imitation based on the snippets of conversation he’d overheard from the listening device — but when the call ended, there was a note of urgency in his next transmission.

“They’re spooked, pardner. I got an exact GPS location from the call: Mualla, the port district.”

“The kid is there?”

“Hope so. But we can’t wait for you.”

Tremblay scowled. “Story of my life. I do all the work, but you guys get to have all the fun. Come pick me up when you’re done.”

“Roger, out.”

Tremblay tossed the phone aside and turned for the door. His disappointment at being left behind by his teammates was sincere, but the clock was ticking, and the two minutes it might take him to exit the hotel could mean the difference between rescuing the kid or recovering his headless body.

The ‘kid’ was the adult son of the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He’d been abducted while vacationing in the area — sailing or some other damn fool diversion of the idle rich. Tremblay and his three teammates from Delta’s elite Alpha team had managed to identify the kidnappers. They were al-Something-or-other…there were so many damn terrorist groups in the Arab world that he’d given up trying to keep them straight. Alpha had tracked them here to Aden’s Gold Mohur Resort, but evidently the bad guys had split up. Two of them had been living it up here at the hotel, while an unknown number were babysitting the hostage on the other side of the city.

The attack came before he took a single step.

Something tipped him off. The creak of the floor as the man attempted to sneak up behind him, a shadow moving on the wall, the rush of wind as the man drew back to hit him… Whatever it was, the premonition saved his life. He half-turned and threw up a hand to block the chair that his assailant was about to smash down on his head.

There was a splintering sound as the chair came apart on impact. Pain throbbed in Tremblay’s forearm and the pistol flew from his nerveless fingers, even as he staggered under the blow. Then, like a player in a slapstick movie, he tripped over one of the bodies on the floor and fell squarely on his backside.

The attacker pounced on the gun.

There wasn’t time to seek cover, so Tremblay did the only thing he could think of: he grabbed the body he’d tripped over — the corpse of the big man that had met him at the door — and hauled it front of him like a human shield.

Something heavy fell out from beneath the man’s jacket and slammed like a sledgehammer into Tremblay’s crotch. Even as he grimaced against this fresh wave of pain, he heard a faint coughing sound and the rasp of the Beretta’s bolt sliding back and ratcheting another round into the firing chamber. There was a faint tremor as the bullet punched into the dead man, but Tremblay barely noticed. His attention was fixed on the thing that had just punched him in the nuts.

It was a Desert Eagle Mark XIX. The weapon was a monster. Its ten inch barrel was almost as long as the Beretta with its attached suppressor, and at about five pounds, it weighed more than twice as much as the standard issue military sidearm. A cursory glance at the half-inch diameter of the barrel confirmed what Tremblay already suspected: the Desert Eagle was outfitted for the .50 caliber Action Express round.

He grabbed the pistol in his left hand, awkwardly reinforcing his grip with his still half-numb right hand, and shoved the enormous pistol against the back of his very dead human shield, pointing it in the direction of his assailant. His thumb swept the safety off and his finger pulled the trigger.

The report sounded like cannon-fire. It felt like it too…or maybe like holding a stick of dynamite. Because he’d been in a sitting position, there had been no way to brace his body against the recoil. Newton’s Third Law of Motion ruled against him and he toppled backward, barely keeping the gun in his clenched fist. He still fared better than his attacker though. The bullet had punched through the dead man’s soft abdomen, and continued forward undeterred, striking the man halfway across the room, spattering both men’s blood onto the walls and even the ceiling.

Tremblay quickly shook off the effects of both the unexpected attack and his stunning rejoinder, and scrambled to his feet. The report from the Desert Eagle had been loud enough to wake the dead, to say nothing of the other guests at the resort, and that was going to make getting out a bit trickier than he’d planned. He hastened to the room entrance, which was still open after his violent intrusion. In the hallway beyond, doors were opening and a growing tumult of voices was audible, but he didn’t step out to investigate. Instead, he stripped away the piece of tape he’d used to confound the latch bolt, and firmly closed the door. That would buy him a few minutes to figure out what to do next.

Remembering that he’d been caught off guard once already, he spun around with the Desert Eagle at the ready and quickly checked the suite to make sure there were no other occupants waiting in ambush. There were no more surprises of that sort, but he did find an open door leading to an exterior balcony where he suspected the third man had been lurking. The balcony also gave him an idea on how to make his exit.

He returned to the front room to retrieve his Beretta, a much more efficient weapon for field work than the overly powerful Desert Eagle, but as he was about to discard the latter, he hesitated.

Stan Tremblay had a deep appreciation for a well-engineered piece of killing technology. True, the Desert Eagle was about as useful to a stealthy Delta operator as a Lamborghini Diablo was to a soccer mom, but that didn’t make it any less a thing of beauty. Besides, the Fates had literally dropped it right in his lap, and not a moment too soon…obviously, the universe wanted him to have it.

Despite the urgency of his situation, he flashed an approving grin at his unassailably logical conclusion, and searched the body of the big Arab for spare magazines. To his utter delight, he found that the dead man’s shoulder holster rig contained not only four more seven-round magazines, but another identical pistol on the opposite side.

Tremblay let out a low whistle. “Holy shit, pal. Trying to overcompensate for something?”

Since breaking up a matched set seemed like bad luck, and it was probably dangerous to just leave them lying around, he appropriated the holster for himself and once he’d looped it around his own shoulders, he returned the first pistol to its place. He shifted the rig experimentally; the added weight felt strangely comfortable.

He lingered in the suite a moment longer, searching the closets until he found a baggy windbreaker jacket that would both conceal his new acquisitions and be a little less conspicuous than the white waiter’s outfit. Then he headed back to the balcony and swung over the rail.

Despite his size, or maybe because of it, he moved down the exterior of the hotel like King Kong on the Empire State Building. He’d grown up with the woods of New Hampshire as his playground; climbing was second nature to him. He swung between balconies, made dynamic leaps between the patios when necessary and finally dropped the last ten feet to the concrete deck that surrounded the entire building, whereupon he immediately melted into the shadows.

He considered trying to steal a car from the parking lot, but rejected the idea. Someone was bound to contact the authorities in response to the shooting; the last thing he needed was to roll up to a police checkpoint with a hot ride, a small arsenal and a bogus Canadian passport. Instead, he employed the method of travel that had served soldiers like himself well for untold millennia. He started walking.

The airport was only about six miles away, a distance he could have traversed in about an hour without even breaking a sweat, but when he emerged from the hills that separated the Gold Mohur coastal area from the residential areas of Aden, he was able to hail a taxi cab and shorten the journey. Forty minutes after leaving the hotel, he was on the tarmac at Aden International Airport where a USAF C-17 waited. As he hiked up to the open rear ramp of the enormous cargo jet, Vaughn stepped out to meet him.

Vaughn was a little shorter than Tremblay, but solidly built. He had wavy brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard that was — like Tremblay’s goatee — against Army regs, but Delta wasn’t like the regular army. Unit operators needed to be able to blend in with the general population as much as possible, and that meant some rules had to be bent a little. The Texan’s expression was uncharacteristically grim.

Tremblay nodded to him. “Houston, we have a problem?”

“Shake a leg, Juggernaut. There’s a fire.”

Tremblay’s brows creased but he withheld his questions until he was on the ramp. “What the fuck, over? Didn’t you get the kid?”

“We got the kid; zero complications. Handed him off to State fifteen minutes ago. This is something else.” Vaughn waved to one of the flight crew, then ushered Tremblay forward to where the rest of the team was waiting. When Tremblay was seated, Vaughn spoke again. “You know about Cipher element, right?”

“The CT unit working with the Agency.” Cipher element wasn’t a unit, per se, but rather an assignment, and the plan was for every Delta squad to get their turn. Most of the current Cipher roster were from Bravo team, but Tremblay knew a few of them.

“That’s right. Well, we just got word that they are in the shit. Right now, as we speak.”

Tremblay frowned, trying to recall the names of the men he knew who were currently deployed with Cipher. “What went wrong?”

“What didn’t? All I know for sure is that they are stranded in the desert and they could use a few more shooters.”

He let it hang right there, and Tremblay couldn’t tell if Vaughn was ordering them into the fight or asking for volunteers.

It didn’t matter really. Either way, he was going.

TEN

After their initial success, the tide of the battle had shifted against the insurgents. They still had superior numbers on their side; the original force of one hundred and eighty-five mujahideen had been whittled down to about a hundred and thirty, while by their best estimates, the surviving Americans numbered less than a dozen. Their greatest asset however, the element of surprise, had been thoroughly expended. The Americans had suffered heavy losses in those first few minutes of combat, but once the initial sting had worn off, the Americans’ superior training and technology had swung the pendulum in the other direction.

Two groups of American soldiers, working in concert with some hidden observer, had flanked their position and destroyed the mortar emplacements before they could be used to deadly effect. One of the fire teams had been cut off and annihilated, but the damage was done. With the mortars gone, the insurgents had lost their ability to light the battlefield, to say nothing of having the capacity to rain down destruction from a safe standoff distance.

The battle had begun with a cacophony of shots and explosions, but now, as the various pieces on the chessboard moved to gain strategic advantage, silence dominated the night, with only occasional scattered gunfire — spooked insurgents, shooting at phantoms. The American rifles and machine guns had not been heard for nearly half an hour.

The insurgents, motivated more by impatience than courage, advanced to the site where the helicopters had gone down. Smoke still seeped from the burned-out remains of the Black Hawk helicopters, which had both been completely destroyed with incendiary charges. Using hooded flashlights, they scanned the area and quickly discovered the trail left by the retreating soldiers — a trail of blood from bodies dragged across the dry floodplain. The Americans were fleeing to the old lake monitoring station — the bait that had been used to lure them out into the desert in the first place. The mujahideen set out at dead run, confident that victory was nigh.

There was no sign of activity at the concrete building, but a faint glow was visible inside. The bulk of the fighters spread out, taking up over-watch positions, while a small knot crept forward, their weapons trained on the door. The leader of the group noted the deactivated tripwire, lying on the sand of the entryway. He dug a Russian-made F1 fragmentation grenade from his satchel, pulled the safety pin and lobbed it through the open doorway.

The grenade detonated with a dull thump. The concrete walls withstood the blast, but the explosion blew the metal shutters off the windows, sending them spinning like shrapnel into the night. A column of dust and smoke vomited from the door.

No one inside could have survived, but the insurgents needed to be certain. After waiting a few seconds for the smoke to clear, they rushed inside. A few moments later, one of them emerged and called out with his report.

No bodies. The building was empty.

More of the fighters came forward, as if to confirm for themselves.

That was the moment for which Jack Sigler had been waiting.

He pumped the M57 firing device three times, but once was enough to send a small electrical charge through a fifty-meter long strand of insulated wire and detonate the blasting cap in the M18 Claymore anti-personnel mine.

A storm of steel pellets obliterated the advancing group. At the same instant, the surviving Eagle-Eye snipers reached out with their rifles and started picking off targets of opportunity. The men searching the building rushed out, only to be met by a hail of bullets from the Delta operators concealed in low fighting positions less than a hundred meters away.

Primal fear momentarily overcame fundamentalist zeal; the insurgents abandoned their defensive positions and fled.

Sigler keyed his mic. “Cease fire, I say again, cease fire and move to zero.”

He didn’t wait for confirmation. Everyone knew the plan.

After Beehive Six-Four had gone down, the priorities had changed. Up to that moment, the plan had been to simply stay alive long enough to get everyone out. Survival and victory were the same thing now; staying alive meant defeating this enemy, destroying them completely.

Sigler possessed the ability to think analytically — strategically — even under the worst conditions. His instructors at OCS had quickly recognized his innate talent, and they had sharpened it by running him through increasingly difficult scenarios and simulations. He’d learned how to outwit his opponents, overcome seemingly impossible odds and perhaps the hardest lesson of all, when to gamble with the lives of his men.

Half a world away, observers at Joint Special Operations Command painted a picture of the battlefield from real-time imagery, supplied by the UAV circling overhead. Sigler had divided the survivors into four groups. One group, comprising most of the remaining snipers and the lone surviving crew chief from the downed Black Hawk would fall back to the original objective to disarm the booby-trap and set up an ambush of their own. The rest of them — six men, including Sigler and Aleman acting as spotters — would flank the insurgents and take out the mortar emplacements.

They’d succeeded in accomplishing that task, but one of the forward teams — Jon Foley and Mike Adams — had been cut off during their retreat. The disembodied voice from JSOC had confirmed their deaths.

There were just eight of them left now — four snipers, including Lewis Aleman, whose right hand was broken and useless; one warrant officer from the Night Stalkers; and the three surviving members of Cipher element — Daniel Parker, Casey Bellows and Sigler. They were desperately low on ammunition, and every shot had to count. That was the bad news. The good news was that help was on the way…or so HQ kept telling him.

Sigler sprang to his feet and hurried to the corner of the building to provide covering fire for the rest. Parker appeared beside him, still hauling the M240. A loop of ammunition, about twenty inches long, hung from the feed tray; fifty rounds, maybe less…after that, they might be able to beat someone to death with it.

The snipers had the farthest to run, and before they could reach the relative shelter of the structure, the insurgents seemed to collectively recover their nerve. Sigler heard the low crack of Kalashnikov rifles firing, and then realized that rounds were ricocheting off the cinder block walls behind him. The snipers were zigzagging, trying to stay one step ahead of the incoming fire.

“Move your ass!” Sigler shouted, more out of frustration than anything else, and then he fired in the direction of the muzzle flashes closest to the running men. Beside him, Parker ran out the last of the ammo belt, and then immediately switched to his carbine.

With a howl of divinely inspired ardor, a dozen insurgents broke from cover and started running toward the building, sweeping their AK-47s ahead of them as they ran, firing at random intervals. A round caught one of the snipers in the leg, and he went down in the open. The other man skidded to a halt, trying to reach his fallen comrade, but was driven back by a storm of lead.

Sigler held his ground. Two shots, new target…two shots, new target. Enemy fighters went down, one after another, but not all of them stayed down. Two shots, new target…two shots, new target…

Click.

It wasn’t a surprise. He habitually counted his shots so that he could be ready for a fast reload. The problem was he didn’t have any more magazines.

“I’m out!”

“Well you ain’t getting any of mine,” Parker shouted back, firing with the same rhythm.

Then his weapon fell silent, too.

Six of the original twelve mujahideen were still on their feet, still advancing.

Sigler drew his KA-BAR knife from its sheath. “Danno, let’s teach these assholes that you don’t bring a gun to a knife fight.”

“Foxtrot Alpha,” Parker replied, drawing his own blade — a standard issue M7 bayonet — and standing beside Sigler to meet the charge.

Something popped in the air high above them. For a moment, Sigler thought it must be another flare, but the sound repeated twice more in the space of a second, without any other accompanying fireworks. Just as Sigler started to look up, something big slammed into the ground fifty meters north of their position.

Suddenly, the head of the nearest insurgent exploded like a watermelon at a Gallagher show. A loud report echoed from above like thunder, and then there was another, and another, and one by one the charging fighters went down, their bodies erupting in geysers of blood.

A dark figure dropped out of the sky, landing less than twenty meters from the corner where Sigler and Parker were preparing to make their stand. He wore a black jumpsuit and helmet, but Sigler could distinctly make out a wisp of blond hair sprouting from the man’s chin. The paratrooper wielded a pair of enormous pistols, one in each hand, and as he fired them out, the last of the charging insurgents went down.

The newcomer shrugged out of his parachute harness before the canopy could settle around him, then hastened to join Sigler. He kept his pistols aimed in the direction from which the attack had come, but the balance of the enemy forces were well beyond pistol range, even a pistol as massive as the Desert Eagle. When he reached Sigler’s side, they all hastened into the relative safety of the concrete building.

“Heard you guys were throwing a party,” the blond man said, grinning. “Hope you don’t mind us crashing.”

Sigler was almost too stunned to reply. “The more the merrier, but I hope you brought some beer. We’re out.”

One of the other paratroopers stepped forward. “No beer, but we have these.” He passed over a clutch of magazines. “Sonny Vaughn, call me ‘Houston.’ Smiling boy over there is Stan Tremblay — Juggernaut.” He jerked a thumb toward the third paratrooper. “That’s Silent Bob. We’re Alpha team.”

In a rush of understanding, Sigler realized that these men had performed a HALO — a high altitude, low opening — parachute jump. The dangerous technique, which involved jumping out of a jet aircraft from an altitude of 35,000 feet, freefalling for two minutes, and then popping a chute just three hundred feet above the ground, was usually reserved for stealthy insertions into enemy territory, but it was an effective way to get a shooter onto the battlefield in a big hurry.

Alpha team…HALO jump… These guys are Delta.

For the first time since the battle had begun, Sigler felt a ray of hope. He took one of the magazines and reloaded his carbine. “Any more of you guys on the way?”

“Cherry should be around here…” Tremblay started to say, but Vaughn cut him off.

“Cherry burned in. What you see is what you’ve got.”

Sigler remembered the loud impact that had preceded the paratroopers’ arrival. There were no second chances with a HALO jump. You could get hypoxic during the long free-fall, or giddy with nitrogen narcosis… Your hands could freeze… Your chute could malfunction…and that was it. Game over, permanently.

“Aww shit, really?” Tremblay shook his head.

Three men. Sigler’s candle of hope flickered a little. Still, they were Delta operators, and that was nothing to sneeze at.

Parker clapped Tremblay on the shoulder. “You saved our asses with those hand cannons of yours. Is that Alpha standard issue? Jack, you gonna get us some of those?”

Tremblay sucked in a breath and then stoked his grin back to life. “I found these babies just lying around. They were too shiny to pass up.”

“Hang on to them. You’ll probably get another chance to use them.”

Sigler cleared his throat. “If you girls are done fixing your makeup, there’s work to do.”

“Roger that, boss. What’s the plan?”

Sigler had been pondering that very question. The enemy knew where they were, and the odds were good that they were already planning another mass attack. He hastily outlined his defensive plan: two sniper teams on the roof, shooters at every window.

Each of the Alpha team shooters had brought along eight thirty-round magazines, and they divided these so that everyone had at least two full mags. The newcomers had also brought along another five hundred rounds of loose ammunition. Everyone immediately set about reloading empty magazines, but it was a tedious chore, and Sigler doubted very much that enemy would give them time to complete it.

They got about four minutes.

The insurgents had used the brief lull to send a flanking element around to approach from the south. When one of the snipers on the roof spied their approach and started picking off targets, it was like opening the floodgates. The enemy fighters charged like a swarm of warrior ants.

The small concrete building seemed to vibrate with the rising crescendo of gunfire. The Delta shooters were the best in the world at their job, but for every insurgent that went down, five more advanced another ten meters, pouring lead at the defenders. The air was thick with sulfurous smoke and dust; the relentless assault pulverized the concrete walls.

Then a different sound cut through the tumult. There were long eruptions of noise that overpowered the random staccato pops of the AKs and HK 416s. It was the distinctive report of a Browning M-2 .50 caliber machine gun — affectionately nicknamed “Ma Deuce.”

And Ma Deuce never traveled alone.

Someone let out a whoop. “Hot damn. Now it’s a party.”

For a second, Sigler thought it was Jess Strickland, but then he remembered that Strickland had died when the helo blew up.

Must be the blond guy, Tremblay.

He didn’t dare look back. Twenty fighters…maybe more…were attempting to cross the last thirty meters to reach the building. There wasn’t even time to aim; he just kept pulling the trigger.

Out of nowhere, a blocky shape blasted through midst of the charge.

It was a Humvee.

Bodies went flying, and some were crunched under the heavy tires as the armored vehicle rolled to a stop between the besieged structure and the advancing horde. The Humvee’s gunner swept left and right with the .50 cal, but right below him, the rear door flew open and a soldier emerged, waving frantically to the men in the building.

Sigler got the message. “Our ride’s here! Move out.”

The Humvee was the first in a line of five similar vehicles, which had deployed in a semi-circle between the building and the two advancing fronts of enemy fighters. While the turret gunners laid down suppressive fire from their M240B and M2 machine guns, the rear doors on the sheltered side were thrown open to admit the beleaguered defenders. Sigler directed the wounded to the nearest trucks, and then with Parker right beside him, he headed for the front vehicle.

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.”

Glances were exchanged but no one spoke. Keasling gestured to the civilian. “This is Domenick Boucher, the Director of the CIA. Gentlemen, we are here to fix this train wreck.”

Stan Tremblay folded his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. “You’re the new JSOC? That’s a three-star billet. That must have taken some grade-A ass kissing.”

Keasling’s right eye twitched, and for a moment, Sigler thought the general was going to blow a gasket, but then the twitch went away. “I guess the President liked my smile. Now, if you’re done busting my chops, sergeant, there’s work to do. We’re in the dark, men.”

Sigler pointed a finger at Boucher. “Why don’t you start by talking to him? It was his people that sent us out there in the first place. Last I heard, they were both aboard the Black Hawk that went missing.”

Boucher glanced at Keasling, as if silently asking for permission to answer, and then cleared his throat. “Then let me update you. After leaving you, the helicopter designated Beehive Six-Six crossed the border with Syria and continued on to Damascus. The pilot flew nap-of-the-earth to avoid ground radar, but we were able to track him from an AWACS plane.

“Our assets in Syria searched the abandoned helicopter and found the remains…” He swallowed, as if this was the first time he’d put it in words. “They positively identified the remains of Officer Scott Klein, along with two members of the flight crew, and one of your men.”

One? The implications of that punched Sigler in the gut. “Who?”

“Sergeant Major Pettit,” said Keasling. “He was executed; they all were. Point blank range; no sign of a struggle. We have to assume that everyone who was not found dead on that helo is on the side of the enemy.”

Sigler felt his blood go cold. The enemy now had a face and a name: Kevin Rainer, his commanding officer. Rainer had led them into the trap and left them there to die.

Boucher continued. “Three Caucasian men and a Eurasian woman were spotted at Damascus International Airport, boarding a flight to Doha, Qatar. From Qatar, they caught a connecting flight to Yangon—”

Tremblay scratched his goatee. “Yangon? That’s somewhere in East Butt-Fuck, right?”

“Close,” Sigler said. He wasn’t sure about Tremblay’s impulsive need to turn everything into a joke. Sometimes, it was good to have someone around to help lighten the mood, but there was such a thing as too much. “Most people still call it Rangoon. It’s in Myanmar…which most people still call Burma.”

“Goddamn,” Tremblay muttered sourly. “Can’t these people just pick a name and stick with it?”

“They’re in the air right now,” Keasling said, steering the discussion back on point. “We don’t know if that’s their final destination, but our assets in Yangon will pick up their trail.” He looked around the room again, once more making eye contact with each man in turn. “I’m acting under the assumption that some of you here might be interested in payback.”

Sigler could tell that Keasling had been hoping for a cheer or a rousing “Fuck, yeah!” but the subdued mood persisted. After a few seconds, Parker broke the awkward silence.

“Mister…Boucher, is it? Why don’t you tell us what’s really going on?”

Keasling frowned and looked as if he was about to tell Parker to shut up, but Sigler quickly backed his friend up. “I think we all deserve some answers, sir.”

Boucher sighed. “Honestly, I wish I knew. I had the same intel as you going into this. I’ve got a team conducting forensic analysis of the documents you recovered in Ramadi. Our working theory is that the message that sent you out there — the message about a bio-weapons factory — was probably planted.”

By Kevin Rainer, Sigler thought. The promise of a WMD was irresistible bait for the trap. But why?

Why had the Delta commander sold out his men?

“You’re all missing the most important thing,” Parker interjected. His expression was taut, like he was about to explode. “The message wasn’t just about bio-weapons.”

Keasling looked to Boucher for confirmation. The Director of the CIA nodded. “The message contained a specific reference that led to one of our cryptanalysts being sent along.”

“Sasha Therion,” Parker supplied.

“That’s right. We’re considering the possibility that she might have been involved.”

“Bullshit.”

Sigler coughed to get his friend’s attention and flashed a warning glance. Take it down a notch, Danno.

In a more subdued voice, Parker continued: “That reference to the Voynich manuscript… There was a reason for that. They…whoever they are…needed your expert on the manuscript.”

The Delta operators in the room stared at Parker in disbelief; it was as if he’d suddenly grown horns or begun speaking in tongues. But Boucher just nodded. “That’s a scenario we’re considering.”

“Considering? Well consider this. Someone turned at least three operators to make this happen. Whoever is behind it has money and influence, and for some reason they think that a medieval manuscript that no one can read is worth all this trouble. So what you should be considering is: what do they know that we don’t?”

Parker’s comments had aroused Sigler’s curiosity; he wasn’t sure if his friend was really on to something or if his concern arose from a schoolboy crush on the enigmatic Sasha Therion, but he made a mental note to ask his friend for further clarification.

Keasling shook his head. “That doesn’t matter. All that matters is stopping them. That’s your new mission.”

Keasling’s final statement went through Sigler like an electric shock.

Your new mission.

My new mission.

As if reading the unasked questions in the faces of the men in the room, Keasling continued. “Sigler, you’re Cipher Six now. Organizational structure is at your discretion. Tremblay and Roberts, you’re TAD to Cipher element for the duration of this mission…” He glanced at Sigler. “Unless you have an objection to that?”

Sigler glanced at Tremblay and the man he knew only as “Silent Bob,” but their faces were unreadable. Even though Delta operators were consummate professionals, every team relied upon the unique chemistry of its individual members. It was impossible to predict whether the remnants of Cipher element and the survivors from Alpha team would mesh seamlessly, or burn up in a fireball of friction. “No objection from me.”

“If you need additional personnel, you can draw from 7^th Group. I’ll travel with you to Myanmar and liaise with our assets on the ground.” The general checked his watch. “It is now 1630. I want to be in the air no later than 1800. Now, if there’s nothing else…”

Sigler recognized that was Keasling’s way of signaling that the discussion was at an end, but he knew this might be his only opportunity to show everyone in the room that he was ready to be their leader. “Actually, sir, there is one thing.”

Keasling frowned. “Go on.”

“I’d like to change the mission designation. We’re not really Cipher element anymore, so it doesn’t make sense to keep using Cipher callsigns.”

“Bad juju, is that it?”

Sigler shrugged. “If you like.”

Keasling waved his hand as if the matter were of no consequence. “Fine. Use your Delta handles. Make sure to submit an updated roster. Just out of curiosity, Sigler, what’s your callsign?”

“Elvis, sir.”

Keasling made a face. “How on God’s green Earth did you get tagged with that?”

Tremblay gave a theatrical gasp. “Sir, are you disrespecting the King of Rock and Roll?”

Sigler couldn’t help but grin. “I’ve always kind of been an Elvis Presley fan. TCB—‘Taking care of business’—is sort of my unofficial motto.”

“I loathe Elvis Presley. My ex-wife ran off with an Elvis impersonator,” Keasling groused. He squinted at Sigler. “But in the interest of getting this show on the road, let’s say we compromise. Your new operational callsign is—”

“Pelvis!” Tremblay chortled.

Keasling ignored him and spoke just one more word: “King.”