Prime

TWELVE

Everyone noticed the blonde woman.

She wore a tight beige T-shirt that clung to the firm contours of her breasts, exposing just enough of her décolletage to be enticing without being obvious, and a pair of dark green cargo shorts that had been rolled up a couple of times to reveal even more of her toned and tanned legs. Her long hair was pulled back — though hardly restrained — in a pony tail that conveyed that elusive girl-next-door allure; a seemingly effortless beauty, all the more desirable in its apparent innocence.

She seemed oblivious to the attention, yet there was something intentional about the way she leaned, almost seductively, over the perfume counter at the duty free shop. Every few minutes, she would ask the man behind the counter questions about price or request a tester bottle, spritzing a small amount of aerosolized eau de toilette into the air. Occasionally, her eyes would dart to the concourse outside the shop, often encountering a lascivious stare from a male passerby, or less frequently, a jealous sneer from less appreciative females. She would then, regardless of the expressions or gender of any onlookers, arch her back like a cat stretching after a nap — an action that drew even more attention to her breasts — and then return to perusing the perfume selection.

Wherever she went, everyone noticed the blonde woman, and a few of those who noticed took the added step of inquiring about her. Those who did would be informed that the woman was a Canadian humanitarian worker with the Red Cross…or maybe it was UNICEF… Her specific affiliation remained the subject of some debate. She had been in country for several months now, visiting clinics, dispensing vaccines and medical supplies…generally getting noticed, but somehow never staying in one place long enough to allow idle curiosity, or even a flush of arousal, to escalate into something more overt.

Everyone noticed her, and that was exactly what she wanted, not because she craved attention, but because while they were busy looking at her, they hardly noticed that she was looking back.

The three Caucasian men who got off the plane that had just arrived from Yangon certainly noticed her, even the one who had his arm draped possessively over the shoulders of his female traveling companion — a Eurasian woman who, for a change, paid the blonde woman no heed.

The blonde happened to look up at just that moment and met the man’s stare. She smiled, stretched, and then turned back to the counter. “This one,” she said, pointing to the fragrance she had most recently sampled. She laid a 100 kyat note — worth about fifteen US dollars — on the counter and took her purchase. “Keep the change,” she said, flashing the man the same smile she’d shown the three Westerners. She exited the store, joining the flow of disembarking passengers.

She moved casually, making no effort to hurry and no effort to avoid being noticed, but always keeping the three men in sight. It wasn’t difficult; like her, they stood out in the crowd of Asian faces. She moved with the crowd to the exit and got in the taxi line, while the Westerners climbed into a waiting sport utility vehicle. As their ride pulled away from the terminal building, she took out her cell phone.

“Red Toyota Fortuner,” she said, getting right to the point. “Brand new. Can’t miss it.”

“New?” came the response. New vehicles were a rare thing in Mandalay. The military rulers of the country imposed strict limits on the number of cars that could be imported. Only the very wealthy could afford to buy them, and in Myanmar, most of the wealth came from illegal activities — primarily from the drug trade. “Do you think our friends are involved?”

“As Lieutenant Ball would say: ‘Signs point to yes.’”

The man on the other end gave an easy laugh. “Any idea which flavor?”

“‘Reply hazy, try again.’”

“Well, at least this won’t be too much of a distraction. Might even be the break we’ve been waiting for.”

“‘Cannot predict now.’ Just keep your distance. The sooner we can hand this off to those Delta testosteroids, the sooner we can get back to our own mission.”

There was a momentary pause on the line, and then the man spoke again. “I’ve got them.”

“Then hang up and drive, pretty boy.”

“‘You may rely on it.’”

THIRTEEN

Shin Dae-jung kept a healthy interval between the red Toyota and his own Honda Rebel 250, though once his quarry left the urban environs of Mandalay, it was more a matter of trying to keep up with the Toyota rather than holding back. The other driver, evincing the kind of confidence that can only come with familiarity, maintained an average speed of about seventy miles per hour. Shin had to keep the speedometer on the motorcycle pegged to keep a visual fix on the red vehicle, which barely slowed through the series of hairpin turns that wound between the hills between Ongyaw and Thon-daung-ywa-wa.

It had come as no little surprise when the target vehicle had left Mandalay behind. Now, nearly sixty miles out and nearing the border of the rural and mostly uninhabited Shan state, he wondered if he had not been given a fool’s errand. He briefly lost sight of the red Toyota when the road straightened as it approached Pyin Oo Lwin, gateway to one of Myanmar’s very few — and thus far unsuccessful — tourist attractions, the Kandawgyl Botanical Gardens. His assignment in the country that many still called Burma had taken him to all of its major cities, but he rarely traveled those long distances by road, and so he was unfamiliar with the highways. He did know that the further out the target vehicle went, the less likely he would be able to successfully track them to their destination.

It was a white-knuckle ride, even for someone like himself, who routinely indulged in dangerous activities: combat in Iraq and Afghanistan; covert insertions into Pakistan to kill or capture terrorist leaders and North Korea, where he could pass as a native, to reconnoiter suspected nuclear weapons facilities; recreational SCUBA diving, particularly the exploration of sunken wrecks; and perhaps riskiest of all, maintaining his hard-earned reputation as a Korean Casanova.

He had actually been looking forward to just such an amorous encounter tonight at the Sunrise Hotel Mandalay, where he was supposed to meet with Giselle, a beautiful but slightly homesick Swiss Doctors-Without-Borders doctor. When he’d gotten word of this little errand for the Delta boys, he had expected that he would have to ask for a rain check, but then again, if the red Toyota slipped away, he might make it back in time for cocktail hour.

He spied the Fortuner, a red smudge that appeared for just an instant on the black ribbon of highway heading out of Pyin, and then it vanished over the horizon. With the throttle wide open, he blasted through the town. He continued along the highway, scanning the road ahead for another glimpse, but the Toyota was gone.

Damn it, where did they go?

He felt a growing sense of apprehension. He was a realist — sometimes, shit happened, and that was just the way it was — but he was also a soldier, taught to live by the simple, if simplistic slogan: “failure is not an option.”

His failure was not in his inability to match pace with the Toyota, but rather in choosing the motorcycle for the pursuit. In the urban environs of Mandalay, it was perfect for shadowing someone. How could he have known that the target would go for a drive in the country?

He was scanning the highway ahead so intently that he completely missed the narrow dirt road that veered off to the south. He did notice a cloud of dust settling, but he was half a mile down the road before it clicked.

Dust cloud.

They turned off.

He geared down, resisting the urge to squeeze the brakes. At seventy miles per hour, that was a good way to lose control, and he had no desire to end up smeared across a stretch of Burmese blacktop. Instead, he waited until he was only doing about forty, and then leaned forward and squeezed the front brake.

The front tire left a streak of rubber, but the back end of the Rebel lifted off the ground, the drive wheel spinning free. With a little wiggle of his hips, Shin swung the bike halfway around, pivoting on the front wheel, and as the rear tire touched down, he twisted the handlebars the opposite way and goosed the throttle again, accelerating out of the turnaround.

He felt a surge of excitement that was partly due to the realization that he hadn’t lost the Toyota after all, but mostly because of having pulled off a near perfect “stoppie.”

Too bad there’d been no one around to see it.

He raced back down the highway, and this time he had no difficulty spotting the dirt track. He also saw that the road was blocked by a metal gate. An old Bamar man wearing what looked like military fatigues, stood at the gate and watched Shin approach with unveiled distrust.

Shin weighed his options as he turned toward the gated road and brought the motorcycle to a stop a few feet away from the old man. He was a park ranger, Shin decided, or at least he was meant to look like one.

Putting on his most sincere smile, he addressed the man in Mandarin Chinese. “Is this the entrance to the botanical gardens?”

The old man blinked at him and then tried his best to reply in the same language. “No Chinese speak. Go away.”

Though conversationally fluent in the Burmese language, Shin was trying to pass himself off as a misguided traveler. Chinese visitors were about the only tourists who came to Burma, and some parts of the country had as many Chinese inhabitants as Burmese. Shin was Korean, but he doubted the Bamar man would be able to make the distinction.

“English?” Burma had been a British colony until 1947; the old guy might even remember the Colonial era.

The man nodded, but remained wary.

“I looking for gardens,” Shin continued in his best attempt at broken English.

The man pointed back down the highway. His own command of English was passably good. “The gardens are that way, five kilometers.”

Shin knew he was reaching his limit of questions, but he thought he could get away with one more. “What this place?”

“It is a wildlife refuge. No one is allowed inside.”

“Wildlife? What kind? Good for pictures?”

“Buru,” the man answered.

“Buru?”

The man nodded as if the question somehow signified Shin’s comprehension. “Nagas. Very dangerous. No pictures.”

Well that clears it right up. First buru and now nagas?

Shin knew of an ethnic group called the Naga that lived in the northwestern region of the country, but he didn’t think the old man was talking about them. Naga was also the name of a serpentine demon in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. The term was also sometimes translated as ‘dragon,’ which didn’t make much sense either. Maybe it was a spooky story concocted by the government or someone else with a desire to keep people off this road. Regardless, it was time to be moving on.

He thanked the old man and pulled back onto the highway. This time, he kept his speed to a nice safe forty mph, and as soon as he was out of the gatekeeper’s line of sight, he let go of the throttle altogether. He coasted the bike off the road and parked it in a stand of trees.

He shrugged out of his backpack and dug inside to retrieve his Garmin GPS unit and a paper map of the country. Neither showed the dirt road, much less indicated a wildlife refuge, but the map did show both the curves of the highway and the course of several rivers and streams that meandered through the valleys between the plateaus. He quickly plotted a course into the GPS that would eventually cross the dirt road — well away from the old man standing guard at the gate — and entered the waypoints into the device.

In addition to the navigations aids, his backpack contained what he had come to think of as essential equipment for any mission. There was enough gear to set up a hooch — a rainproof poncho and a quilted poncho liner, and some elastic bungee cords. There was food — a couple of granola bars, two MREs, a liter bottle of water and some iodine tablets for field-expedient purification if the need should arise, and it was looking like it might. What he didn’t have was a weapon, at least not in the backpack.

After checking to make sure no one was around to observe him, he wiggled the motorcycle’s seat cushion until it came free, revealing a hollow space underneath, which contained a few items of gear that he preferred not to have to explain at a police checkpoint: a SIG-Sauer 9 mm pistol, two fifteen-round magazines, a small set of binoculars and a PVS-14 night vision monocular. He loaded a magazine into the pistol and slipped it into his waistband, at the small of his back. The spare magazines went into a pocket and the PVS-14 went into the backpack.

The idea of the cross-country trek didn’t bother him in the least. Though he didn’t know exactly how far he would have to travel, he had a feeling he would catch up to the Toyota — and discover its occupants’ final destination — before nightfall. Dirt roads were difficult to travel, especially in this region, which was plagued by seasonal monsoon rains. It might take hours to negotiate the crevices and craters created by erosion. The vehicle might not be able to travel much faster than he could run.

But before he set forth, there was one last thing he needed to do.

He took out his phone and dialed a number. It rang once, and then he heard a familiar voice — her voice. “Hello?”

“Giselle, mon cheri. I am so sorry…”

FOURTEEN

4163…

Sasha ran through the factors in her head. She discounted three out of hand; the individual digits did not add up to any multiple of three. Seven? No. Eleven?

She ran through the division. Forty-one minus thirty-three leaves eight…eighty-six minus seventy-seven is nine…ninety-three… No.

Seventeen?Nineteen? Twenty-three?

Yes… Twenty-three from forty-one leaves eighteen, for one hundred-eighty-six. Eight times twenty-three is one-eighty-four…which leaves two…twenty-three!

4167…

The digits added up to eighteen. Three was a factor. Next.

4169…

Sasha already knew that the number was not a prime — she had memorized the first two thousand prime numbers — but when she was faced with a problem for which the solution was not readily apparent, she would work her way down the number line, testing every number to see if it was prime, a number that was divisible by only itself and one. The activity helped sharpen her mental subroutines and gave her brain a chance to process the problem in the background. Once in a while, the problem might relate to her work — a particularly tricky code that would not yield to a brute force attack — but more often than not, the problems that confounded her the most had nothing to do with codes or numbers or anything that could be expressed in the precise language of mathematics. Instead, her consternation arose from the chaos of human interactions. She would use the technique to stave off boredom, such as when forced to sit in a doctor’s waiting room. She was always punctual, and could never understand why medical professionals could not afford their patients the same courtesy. Other people would read magazines or play games on their cell phones… Sasha worked out the primes.

This situation was a lot like waiting at the doctor’s office, except it had gone on now for…how long? Long enough to get to over four thousand.

She knew she should probably be afraid. Rainer had killed Scott Klein, for no reason she could fathom, and it seemed likely enough that he would kill her too, but that prospect did not frighten her nearly as much as the ongoing uncertainty. More than anything else, she hated not understanding what was going on around her.

After leaving the helicopter in Syria, he and the other men had been polite, if a bit abrupt at times. She had not been mistreated at all, aside from the simple fact that she was their prisoner. Rainer had promised that he would explain everything once they arrived at their destination, so with every stop along the way, she had asked him again.

“Not yet,” he had told her as they deplaned in Yangon, and then they had moved through the airport to another concourse to wait for yet another flight. “Soon, everything will make sense. Trust me.”

Rainer seemed to understand that threats of violence were not the way to gain her compliance. He did not seem put out by her repeated inquiries; if anything, he regarded her almost playfully, as if he was in possession of a secret that he was dying to share with her.

Now, as she bounced between the other two men in the back seat of the Toyota, with Rainer in the front passenger seat along with the Chinese man who had met them outside the airport, she sensed the long-awaited answer would come very soon. Speculation about what it might be was almost as frustrating as the waiting.

She was contracted to work for the US government, and as such was privy to matters that were classified as Top Secret, but the men who now held her captive had access to the same materials.

Did they need her to break a code?

That seemed likely enough, and yet why the elaborate deception? Why lure her to Iraq and then subsequently spirit her off to Myanmar, when they could have just abducted her off the streets of Georgetown?

It was a human problem; imprecise and unpredictable. Human variables were too chaotic.

4171…

She was still sifting through the factors when the Toyota crested a hill, revealing a fenced compound with four buildings nestled in a valley between two lushly forested hills. As the Toyota drew near, two men rushed out to open the gate ahead of their arrival. They were wearing civilian clothes, but carried guns — maybe they were AK-47s, she really didn’t know for sure. She thought it might be some kind of paramilitary base, but it looked almost like a school yard; there was even a rickety looking playground in one corner of the compound.

They got out in front of one of the buildings and Rainer escorted her inside. This, at last, had to be their ultimate destination, and now he would tell her the reason for his actions. But Rainer offered no explanation. Instead, he motioned to a row of cheap, molded plastic chairs that lined the wall near the entrance, and then disappeared down a hallway, leaving her alone.

For a fleeting moment, she thought about simply getting up and leaving; it wasn’t like she was handcuffed to the chair. She could hide somewhere, bide her time and wait for an opportunity to sneak out of the compound…stowaway in one of the cars in the parking lot perhaps.

No. Too many unknowns, too much uncertainty.

Rainer returned a moment later, accompanied by a tall, handsome man. Although she seldom paid attention to the latest fashion, Sasha thought his clothes looked expensive. He smelled amazing too.

The man greeted her with a smile. “Ms. Therion, is it? A pleasure to meet you at last.”

Sasha didn’t know exactly how to respond. She couldn’t read facial expressions very well; smiles were just another unpredictable human variable. “Who are you?”

The man glanced sidelong at Rainer. “She doesn’t know?”

The turncoat Delta operator shook his head. “I didn’t tell her anything.”

“Well, it’s not that important.” The man flashed his smile again. “You’re not here to see me, after all.”

“I don’t know why I’m here.”

“You are here because I have a problem. You see, I’m used to getting what I want. It’s one of the perquisites of having more money than God. When I am confronted with a problem that I can’t solve, I bring in the very best people to solve it for me. That is why you are here.”

“Are you…offering me a job?”

He threw back his head and laughed. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

She was dumbfounded.

“This would be easier if I just showed you. Please come with me.” He beckoned to her, and even though she had decided that she wasn’t going to trust him, there seemed no alternative but to go along with him.

He guided her to a bleak-looking conference room. The chairs were the same as those in the lobby, and the table looked like something from a school cafeteria. He seemed to sense her train of thought. “I hope you’ll forgive the rather austere appointments. I usually spare no expense when it comes to decorating, but the secretive nature of our work here meant that I had to make do with what was available. But here, this is what I want you to see.”

He held up a small plastic rod, which she immediately recognized as a thumb drive. As if on cue, one of Rainer’s cohorts stepped into the room and set a laptop computer down on the table — her laptop computer, which she had not seen since setting out on the ill-fated raid more than twenty four hours previously. The man opened the hinged screen and tapped the power button.

After the device booted up, her host plugged the thumb drive into the USB port. Understanding what was expected of her, Sasha entered her password to unlock the computer and then opened the directory for the portable memory stick. The folder contained several image files.

“Try the ‘slide show’ option,” her host suggested.

She did, and after a few seconds the screen went black as the first image loaded. It was a photo, but of what exactly, she couldn’t tell. Misshapen and irregular, blackened and corroded, it looked like something recovered from a fire. The image changed, showing it from a different angle, but the mystery of what it was remained unresolved.

Except she did recognize something.

She moved her face closer to the screen, peering intently at something that protruded from the object. She couldn’t guess what its function was, but there was a symbol on it, a single character that she instantly recognized. Before she could process the information, the image changed again, and as if anticipating her desires, the next image was a close-up of the symbol:

“That’s the script from the Voynich manuscript!”

Her host smiled. “Yes, it is.”

She felt closer to an understanding of what was going on, but there were still too many unknowns. “Did the Iraqis find something that can decode the manuscript?”

“Oh, good heavens, no. And if they did, they wouldn’t know what to make of it. I’m afraid the ruse in Iraq was necessary to draw you out into the open. You see, I knew the CIA would be very interested in any discovery relating to the world’s most famous unsolved code…interested enough to send their best person out to investigate, though I had no idea who that person would be. There are many so-called ‘experts’ with pet theories about the Voynich code, but I needed the very best.”

There was an infallible logic to the answer, and that appealed to Sasha, but it hardly justified what had been done to her. “You had all those people killed, just so you could get me here?”

Her host glanced nervously at Rainer, but then his expression hardened. “Maybe I haven’t made myself clear to you, Ms. Therion. I get what I want, no matter the cost.”

She swallowed. “I understand.”

“Good.” He put his hands on his hips and looked around the room as if to collect his thoughts.

“So what do you want? From me, I mean.”

The man gestured again at the computer. “The object in those photographs was discovered last year in a crypt in the Yunnan Province of China — just a few hundred miles from here, actually. As you can see, the artifact has markings on it that are identical to those found in the Voynich manuscript. It’s badly damaged of course, but there are eight definite matches, and another fourteen probable matches, to Voynich script. I’m sure you, of all people, understand how significant that is.”

She stared at the computer screen as it continued to cycle through the images of the strange object. “What exactly is it?”

“That is one of the questions I am hoping that you will be able to answer. Our best theory is that it is an antique code machine.”

Sasha pondered that. The existence of a machine designed to facilitate enciphering or deciphering was not beyond the realm of possibility, but it seemed unlikely in this instance for the simple reason that the Voynich script remained so unique. If it had been produced using a machine, then surely other documents would have been found utilizing the elaborate — and still impossible to decrypt — substitution alphabet.

More unknowns.

Then she realized that the function of the device didn’t matter nearly as much as the simple fact of its existence. It was tangible proof that the Voynich manuscript could be deciphered…it was meant to be deciphered.

By her.

Sasha felt as if someone had wiped her mental chalkboard clean. All the uncertainty surrounding her abduction, the actions and motives of her captors, even her ultimate fate when all of this was done…all of those variables had been erased.

“I need to see this machine. The real thing, not just pictures. Can you arrange that?”

The man regarded her with a taut expression, as if it was he that now harbored uncertainties about the situation. “Ms. Therion, because I want you to be able to solve this problem for me, I’m going to be straightforward with you.

“The sealed crypt in which this object was found, was infected with a particularly nasty strain of proto-bacteria — an organism very similar to the bacteria responsible for bubonic plague. The first people to enter were exposed and died in a matter of minutes.”

“There’s a connection between the manuscript and the plague?” Sasha recalled her earlier conversation with Daniel Parker. The document that had prompted the Agency to send her to Iraq in the first place, had suggested just such a link, but following Rainer’s act of treachery, she had assumed it to be just so much window dressing to sell the deception.

“There is…let’s call it a circumstantial connection. Archaeological sites contain all kinds of strange things — bacteria, fungi, viruses, even prions, which have been hidden away for thousands of years. Investigating those ancient mysteries is my specialty, though in this case, my motives are…” He trailed off as if realizing he’d said more than he intended. “I tell you this only because you need to understand that you can’t interact directly with the artifact. It’s here, in the facility, but it is still hot. Any attempt to decontaminate it would probably destroy it completely. Bio-safety level-four protocols are in effect. The closest you will be able to get to it is in a full environment suit.”

Sasha nodded in agreement without even considering the pre-condition. She didn’t care about the safety considerations; she was here for just one thing. The Voynich manuscript was a mystery that seemed unsolvable, a variable that kept the equation from balancing.

But she would solve it, and when she did, it would transform chaos into order.

FIFTEEN

Domenick Boucher sank wearily into the chair at the conference table in the White House Situation Room, and gestured for his traveling companion, Staff Sergeant Lewis Aleman, to do the same. Despite the fact that Aleman’s right arm was heavily bandaged and nestled in a protective sling across his chest, he looked alert and ready for action, which was more than Boucher could say for himself. He’d caught a few hours of sleep on the flight back from Iraq, but anxiety over the unfolding crisis had robbed him of anything vaguely resembling rest.

Despite his injuries and over the protestations of the doctors at the base in Tikrit, Aleman had insisted on accompanying Boucher back to the states. “I need to be a part of this,” the Delta sniper had argued. “If I can’t be in the fight, then at least let me coordinate the mission from the TOC.”

There was a lot to recommend granting the request. Aleman was familiar with the team and their protocols, but more importantly, he was already read in. With the full extent of the conspiracy still unknown, Aleman was one of a very few people that were above suspicion. Until more was known about the enemy, secrecy was paramount. That was why the President had directed the operation be run from the Situation Room.

Boucher was in the process of establishing a secure satellite link with General Keasling when the President entered the room. Aleman immediately snapped to attention and somehow managed to extricate his hand from the sling to offer a salute. Boucher also started to rise but Duncan waved him off.

“I’ve only got a few minutes, so let’s dispense with all the formalities.” Duncan nevertheless returned Aleman’s salute. “Sergeant, as one shooter to another…helluva job. I promise you that your sacrifices will not be forgotten, and I will see that the deaths of your teammates are avenged.”

“Yes, sir.”

Duncan turned to Boucher. “Do we have the General on the line?”

Keasling’s voice issued from the speakers. “I’m here, Mr. President.”

“Good. Let’s have the sitrep, gentlemen.”

Boucher went first. “We’ve conducted preliminary forensic testing on the intel recovered from Ramadi, but there’s nothing conclusive. The paper and ink are of the same type available for civilian use in Iraq. The only trace DNA evidence was from the people that we know handled it: the Delta team and our own analysts.”

“Wouldn’t that support the idea that it was a forgery?”

Boucher nodded. “The most likely conclusion is that Lt. Col. Rainer created the document and planted it during the course of the raid. But it’s also possible that the insurgents were working with him — sacrificial lambs, so to speak — to further reinforce the illusion.”

Duncan frowned. “Let’s cut to the chase. Is there a WMD lab out there somewhere?”

Boucher knew the President well enough to recognize that the man wanted a truthful answer, but he hated having to admit to his own uncertainty. “I wish I could say unequivocally that there is not, but…”

“I read you, Dom. Keep digging.” Duncan turned away, directing his voice toward the speaker box. “Mike, what’s your situation?”

“Sir, we’ve tracked Rainer and the others to Mandalay. Our people on the ground have placed them at a remote facility east of the city. We’re in the air now. Once we arrive and get the lay of the land, I will have a better sense of what our options are, and I’ll develop contingency plans.”

Boucher had no difficulty reading between the lines. Keasling was anticipating a covert assault on the Burmese facility, an action that was technically illegal and which carried enormous diplomatic risk, to say nothing of the danger to the Delta operators. Of course, that was the very reason why Delta had been created; sometimes, the strict letter of the law had to be broken in the interest of the greater good. Delta’s job was to take those risks in a strictly unofficial capacity, giving the President full deniability, and if things went south in the field, they were on their own.

“Contingency plans,” Duncan muttered, and then he shook his head. “We are in this mess because the system we’ve inherited — the way things have always been done — is completely ass-backwards. We’ve got too many agencies working at cross-purposes. Hell, sometimes actively working against each other. Too many ‘yes men’ who think it’s their mission in life to either tell me exactly what they think I want to hear, even if it means cooking up the evidence to support it, or to protect me from knowing the truth.”

It wasn’t the first time Boucher had heard Duncan utter some variation of those words. He’d told the American people as much during the campaign. The bitter pill he’d been forced to swallow upon assuming the office of Chief Executive was that it truly was impossible for one man, no matter how dedicated and passionate, to overcome the inertia of bureaucracy. It had nothing to do with the limits of Constitutional authority; there were simply too many moving pieces. Too many human parts.

But there was something different about the way Duncan said it this time. Boucher saw a faint gleam in his old friend’s eyes as he continued. “Enough. No more contingency plans. No more ‘cover your ass.’ As one of my predecessors famously said, the buck stops here.”

He looked Boucher in the eye. “Dom, I trust you implicitly, and I know it’s your job to keep me from going off the rails, but right now I need you to just shut up and listen.”

Boucher felt an electric tingle in his extremities. What the hell is he doing?

“General Keasling, we don’t know each other very well, but I think I’m a pretty good judge of character. I wouldn’t have given you that star if I didn’t think you were up for the job.”

Boucher knew that Duncan had been prepared to frock Keasling as a Major General — the rank associated with his new position as the leader of JSOC. It had actually been Keasling himself who had insisted he not be advanced three full pay grades, a promotion that would have ignited a firestorm of jealousy in the Army high command.

The satellite connection couldn’t completely mask Keasling’s guarded reply. “Thank you, sir.”

Duncan just smiled. “Oh, don’t thank me until you’ve heard the rest.”

SIXTEEN

Jack Sigler — callsign: King, climbed out of the taxi and scanned the street ahead. He turned a slow arc, checking the area, high and low, from the ten o’clock position to the three. The other men who had been sandwiched together in the back of the vehicle did likewise upon emerging, each checking a different quadrant, overlapping their sectors of responsibility to identify potential threats.

They had all exchanged their combat fatigues for civilian clothes. King now wore blue jeans and a black T-shirt with a picture of Elvis Presley, which Stan ‘Juggernaut’ Tremblay had purchased for him at an airport gift shop. To further reduce their visibility, it had been decided to move from the airport to the Mandalay safe-house in two separate groups. King’s group, which consisted of Tremblay, Silent Bob, and a sniper named Meyers, who went by the callsign ‘Dark,’ had taken the lead, traveling by taxi. General Keasling, ‘Irish’ Parker, ‘Roadrunner’ Bellows, ‘Race’ Banion — the other sniper from the Eagle-Eye team — and heavy weapons specialist Erik Somers, the last addition to their team, would follow in a pair of rented SUVs.

Somers had been brought on board just before leaving Tikrit. King knew him only as the big guy who had manhandled the M2 during the extraction the previous night, but he’d come with a personal recommendation from Parker. The two men had gone through Delta selection together. An intense but quiet figure, Somers was Iranian by birth, but had been adopted by an American family shortly before Ayatollah Khomeni’s government closed off Iran from the rest of the world. He was a former marine who had switched services to become a Ranger, and he possessed seemingly superhuman strength, which should have made him an ideal candidate for Special Forces. According to Parker, Somers had aced the course but hadn’t made the final cut. There could have been a number of reasons for that, not the least of which was team chemistry. That was something that weighed on King’s mind as he contemplated both the mission ahead and the other special assignment General Keasling had given him.

The street was bustling with activity, all of it seemingly harmless, but the men remained vigilant as they followed King along a maze-like path between the freestanding buildings and eventually up a rickety wooden staircase that led to the second story balcony. He found the door with the yellow smiley face sticker he’d been told to look for; someone had used a pen to add fangs and sinister eyebrows to the iconic image.

Tremblay, with a mischievous grin, nodded at the decal. “I’m going to fit right in here.”

King appraised him with a sidelong glance. It was still a little hard to reconcile this blond man with his punk-rocker goatee and an always ready one-liner, with the guy that had dropped out of the sky wielding .50 caliber death in both hands. He had no doubt of Tremblay’s ability in combat — he’d already witnessed it first hand — but a successful team had to be able to work together every day of the week, not just on the day of the big game.

Two hours ago, it wouldn’t have mattered. Two hours ago, his orders were simple: take the team you’ve got and go after the bad guys. But then, Keasling had taken him aside. “The President has ordered me to put together a new unit; fast, mobile, unlimited resources, non-existent radar signature, if you take my meaning. He and I both agree that you are the ideal candidate for field leader.”

King had been in the Army long enough to be extremely wary of ‘special assignments.’ “Sir, that’s already Delta’s job description.”

Keasling’s expression at that moment had spoken volumes. The general hadn’t seemed particularly happy about this development either, but he wasn’t about to contradict the President. He clearly expected the same from King. “Think of this as the Delta of Delta. The difference is that you will get your orders directly from a handler in the National Security office. Administratively, you’ll still be part of JSOC, but in all other respects, you will completely bypass the chain of command.”

King had decided to keep the rest of his opinions to himself. “When does this go into effect?”

“It went into effect five minutes ago, when the President told me to make it happen. Obviously, we’ve got some growing pains ahead of us, but arrangements are already being made for a live uplink to your new handler.”

Keasling hadn’t asked if he wanted the job; maybe that wasn’t even an option, but King figured the general had known all along that he wouldn’t refuse.

Which meant he now had to think about trying to select a team of operators for this ‘Delta of Delta,’ while at the same time planning for the mission already underway. It was evident that Keasling expected him to build his new team from the current group, but King knew that no matter how outstanding the shooters were as individuals, what really mattered was whether they could work as a team.

He tried the door — unlocked, as he’d been told it would be — and went in. The space beyond was dimly lit by sunlight filtering through the curtained windows, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the relative darkness. Cardboard boxes and blankets hanging from a web of clotheslines had been used to partition the area, but his attention was immediately drawn to the center of the large open, room where an impromptu assemblage of foam mats had been laid out in a square and bordered with ropes on all four sides. It was a boxing ring.

A strange repetitive noise emanated from the shadows — a slapping sound interspersed with grunts of exertion. He glimpsed a ratty-looking heavy punching bag hanging from a metal frame in a corner of the room. The bag quivered from persistent blows, and as he advanced toward it, he saw the person responsible for the assault on the other side.

Tremblay let out a low whistle. “I think I’m in love.”

King’s first impulse was to agree. The person pummeling the heavy bag was a woman — blonde and petite, wearing a tight-fitting T-shirt that clung tantalizingly to her curves and a pair of short shorts that covered just enough to set the imagination on fire. The perspiration running in rivulets from her face and dampening the fabric of her shirt did nothing to diminish the sheer sexiness of her appearance; in fact, it made her even more appealing.

The scene was surreal; the woman could have been a model, posing for a camera shoot, but there was nothing simulated about the punches she was throwing. She glanced up as they approached, but gave the bag several more hits in rapid succession before formally acknowledging their presence.

“You must be the Delta boys.” She offered a coy grin, and rested her boxing-gloved hands on her hips. “Sorry, you caught me in the middle of my workout. I wasn’t expecting you until later.”

Tremblay matched her smile. “And we weren’t expecting…you.”

“Down boy,” King muttered. He turned to the woman. “What’s the word of the day?”

She raised an eyebrow. “So, right to business? That’s okay. I like that in a man. The word of the day is ‘timberline.’” She paused and locked stares with him. “I’ve shown you mine…”

“The counter-sign is ‘grapefruit.’ I’m King. Laughing boy here is Juggernaut, and the other stooges are Bob and Dark. Are you Baker?”

It had not been made clear if that was her real name or a mission callsign, but when she nodded, Tremblay gave a little gasp of comprehension. “I’ve heard about…” He turned to King. “Do you know who this is? The Legend of Zelda?”

King shook his head, mystified. He didn’t think the other man was talking about the old Nintendo game.

Tremblay turned back to the woman. “That’s who you are? Zelda Baker. The first woman to ever make it through Ranger school.”

King’s brow furrowed. The statement didn’t make any sense. Females weren’t eligible for Ranger school because of the military ban on women in combat occupation specialties.

“I thought it was just scuttlebutt,” Tremblay continued. “G.I. Jane bullshit. Some general had the nutty idea that Spec Ops needed to be co-ed, so he set up a special pilot program to start training women for the Unit.”

King glanced at her. She was still smiling, but there was a dangerous gleam in her eyes. “I’ve never heard anything about this,” he said.

“A buddy of mine was an R.I. They wanted to keep it all very hush-hush in case things went horribly wrong…which is exactly what happened. Only one of the candidates made it through, which just showed what a stupid idea it was to begin with—”

Zelda cleared her throat. “Standing right in front of you, Prince Charming.”

The Delta shooter swallowed nervously. “Ah, sorry…but you know what I mean.”

“Actually I don’t. I’d love to see how you’re going to get out of that hole by digging deeper, but we should probably cut to the chase.”

King wanted to hear more about this woman — Zelda Baker, evidently the first and only female Army Ranger. Keasling had told him that their contacts in Myanmar were military intelligence; aside from that, he hadn’t known what to expect…but as Tremblay had so eloquently put it, he hadn’t been expecting her. But she was right; they were on the clock. “I was told that your people are maintaining surveillance on the subjects. Is that correct?”

“My people?” Her lips curled in something that might have been a wry smile or a sneer — he couldn’t say for sure.

She gestured for them to follow her into one of the partitioned areas, which had been converted into a makeshift office. There was a wall map of Southeast Asia tacked to one wall and a pad of butcher paper on an easel in a corner. A folding card table served as a desk, but most of its surface was taken up by electronic equipment — a military radio, a computer terminal and a fax/copier/scanner. The only decorative item in evidence was a stuffed toy sitting on the table right next to the computer. It was a Ranger Bear, just like those sold in the Post Exchange — a teddy bear in camouflage BDUs complete with a black beret, but this one had been modified. The bear’s head had been removed, and in its place was a Magic 8 Ball. King noticed that someone had pinned a silver rank bar to the beret.

Zelda saw him looking at the doll. “That’s Lieutenant Ball. He usually makes better decisions than a real officer.”

She stripped off her padded boxing gloves and tossed them down next to the disfigured bear, then sank into a chair. “Let me tell you about ‘my people.’ It’s just the two of us — me and Shin — and I really don’t have time for this bullshit.

“There’s a quarter of a million troops in Iraq ‘fightin’ the evildoers.’” She emphasized her contempt with air quotes. “But do you know where the tangos get their guns? Or the money to build IEDs to blow your asses up? Right here. This is where the evil begins.”

“Drugs.” King understood immediately what she was talking about. Opium trafficking in the Golden Triangle was keeping Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups flush with cash. He also knew that the CIA and FBI were actively working to shut down the criminal agencies that were facilitating those activities, but evidently Zelda saw her mission as more than just orders to be followed; it had become personal.

She waved dismissively. “Drugs. Sex slaves. Child soldiers…anything that can turn a profit for the triads.”

“Look, I get it. You’re fighting the good fight here, and you don’t appreciate being pulled off that to do favors for us. But we’re on the same side.”

She regarded him thoughtfully. “Are you sure about that? The guys we’ve been trying to take down — the 14K triad — they’ve got a particularly brutal revenue stream: they kidnap people off the streets and harvest their organs. Care to guess who buys them? Rich, connected people — people back in the states — who don’t want to have to wait for a donor match. Do you think the people in power really want to shut them down?”

King realized that he had to take charge of the situation. “It’s not our job to figure out what they really want. We follow the orders we’re given.”

“‘Ours not to reason why,’ is that it?”

“That’s what you signed up for, soldier.”

The faintest glimmer of a smile returned to her full lips, and then she did something completely unexpected. She arched her back and stretched lazily, like a cat rousing from a nap. “Well then, what are your orders, sir?”

“General Keasling will have those for you when he arrives. For now, I’d like all the intel you’ve got on the subjects. I understand your man — Shin — is currently conducting surveillance?”

“He checks in at the bottom of the hour, so it will be another forty-five minutes before I hear from him.” She tapped a folder on the tabletop. “He calls me, I don’t call him. That’s the rule. His communications logs are all here, so feel free to look through them. That’s all I’ve got for you really. If there’s nothing else, I’d like to finish my workout.” Zelda stood and picked up the boxing gloves, and then flashed her seductive grin again. “Actually, I could use a sparring partner. What do you say, King? Are you up for it?”

Tremblay made a low sound, like an exaggerated groan of pleasure. “My God, that’s so hot.”

King stared back at her in disbelief. To all appearances, she was coming on to him, but his instincts were shouting down his libido. He doubted very much that what she wanted was something as banal as sex. This woman was smart and tough — tough enough to survive one of the most difficult programs in the Army; she was someone who knew what she wanted and would blow through any obstacle in her way. It was a game to her…

No, he thought, not a game. This was animal behavior, the she-bear marking her territory.

I do not have time for this shit.

By making the first move, throwing down the gauntlet, she had already won. She had put him on a defensive footing, established the battlefield, dictated the terms of victory. If not for the fact that he had been unwittingly outmaneuvered, he might have applauded her decisiveness.

Worse, she had defined him: a soldier, following orders without thinking; an officer, inept and unworthy of respect; a man… Oh yes, that was it. That was the thing that bothered her the most.

He didn’t think she was a lesbian; even if she was…Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. That was the policy. Regardless, she definitely had issues when it came to men.

He realized that she wasn’t the only one watching to see what he would do and how he would play the game. All eyes were on him. If he played along, did what she wanted, he’d look weak, unable to say no to a pretty girl…

Okay, ‘pretty’ might be understating it. She’s Playmate-of-the-Month material.

Did he dare refuse? He had every right to, but his fellow Delta shooters were expecting him to stand and deliver. If he didn’t… Well, like the old saying went, you never got a second chance to make a first impression.

There was another saying he liked even better: The best defense is a good offense.

A smile slowly curled the corners of his mouth. “You know, maybe I should ask your CO what he thinks about this.”

A flicker of doubt dulled the mischievous gleam in her eyes. “My CO?”

He picked up the stuffed bear and rolled the black plastic sphere into his palm. “Lieutenant Ball. Should I play grab-ass with Baker?”

Zelda frowned.

He gave the ball a vigorous shake then turned it over and looked at the little window where the answer was displayed.

Reply hazy, try again.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, returning the toy to its place. “Lieutenant Ball says to go for it. I guess it’s on.”

SEVENTEEN

Shin Dae-jung considered it a matter of personal pride that he never complained about anything. Whether it was a duty station, another soldier, a particular mission…even Army chow in all its legendary inedibility, he faced each bump in the road of life with the implacability of a Buddhist monk.

But just this one time, he was tempted to make an exception.

It wasn’t that there was anything particularly miserable about the assignment. He had humped cross-country for a good ninety minutes, a distance of at least six miles over uneven terrain, but that was just a walk in the park for someone like him. At one point, his foot had broken through a thin crust of dirt concealing some kind of animal burrow, and he’d twisted his ankle, but that kind of thing was to be expected. The low valleys between the hills seemed to be riddled with similar pitfalls, and to avoid more stumbles, he’d kept to the high ground, which had added to the length of his journey, but that too was just something that had to be done. When he’d reached his destination, a low hill west of the fenced compound, he’d hunkered down on the hard earth under his camouflaged poncho, motionless, as various bugs, critters and creepy-crawlies meandered across his body — par for the course. His thermal poncho liner didn’t quite keep him toasty warm through the long chilly night, but he’d been colder before.

No, what had ramped up the misery factor was the fact that he could have…he should have…spent the night nuzzled up next to a very satisfied lady doctor.

Someone was going to get an earful when he got back; not Zelda — this wasn’t her crazy idea — but the Delta boys… Oh, yeah, they were going to hear about what he’d given up to run their errands. The thought made him smile; the Delta operators would probably be a lot more sympathetic to his sacrifice than the blonde Amazonian war-goddess.

Ah well, as Giselle might say: c’est la vie.

The arrival of the helicopter made him forget all his woes.

It had come just after his last check in. He’d been busy drawing a diagram of the compound, noting the position of each building, as well as the exact coordinates for everything: the buildings, the fenced perimeter and even what appeared to be an obstacle course in the northeast corner. With precise enough coordinates, the Delta boys would be able to draw a near perfect map of the compound from just his radioed description.

The sound of voices drifting up from the compound grabbed his attention. He scanned the compound with the binoculars until he found the source of the noise; a small crowd of people — twenty or more — milling around the area he had dubbed ‘the course.’

Everyone in the group had black hair and dark complexions, marking them as native to the region. Most wore simple clothing: dingy t-shirts and what might have been canvas trousers. All appeared to be male, but that was something he couldn’t confirm. What he could determine with more certainty, based on the differences in size, was that some of them were just children.

Shin immediately got the sense that they were all prisoners.

Two men however, were not wearing the “uniform” of the captives. They were also Asian, but they looked like they’d just stepped out of a hip-hop music video — baggy jeans, T-shirts with fashion-designer logos prominently displayed, caps with the visors turned sideways. The effect would have been comical if not for the Kalashnikov rifles they wielded.

Then something truly unbelievable happened. The milling group fell into a neat military-style rank in front of the two ‘gangstas,’ and then, two at a time, they headed into the obstacle course.

They moved with astonishing speed and alacrity, bounding over hurdles and scrambling up ropes like soldiers at boot camp.

Shin realized that was exactly what it was. He assumed the men were conscripts, taken against their will and brought here to be trained and indoctrinated as soldiers, but it was equally possible that they were volunteers.

So what was this place? Headquarters for a local warlord? A secret terrorist training camp?

He wasn’t due to check in for another thirty minutes, but this news seemed to warrant an unscheduled call. But before he could dial Zelda’s number on his satellite phone, the helicopter arrived.

Because he was peering intently through his binoculars, he heard the beat of the rotors and the strident roar of the turbines before he made visual contact, but after only a few seconds of searching the sky, he found it — a sleek black Bell 430, coming up from the south, right behind him.

He huddled under his blind as it passed overhead, then he trained the binoculars on the aircraft as it touched down on the roof of the structure he had designated ‘Building Two.’ As soon as its wheels touched down, the pilot killed the turbines and let the rotors spin themselves out, a process that took several minutes. Finally, when the long airfoil-shaped blades were completely still, the doors were thrown open and the passengers began disembarking.

They were all Caucasian, and although too far away for Shin to distinguish faces through the low-powered binoculars, there were enough clues for him to approximate what was happening. The focus of everyone’s attention was an infirm figure with thinning gray hair — Shin assumed it was a man — who was assisted out of the helicopter and into a waiting wheelchair.

Shin and Zelda had been investigating reports of people — children particularly — disappearing off the streets. There were a number of possible explanations, and all of them represented humanity at its most evil — young girls sold to brothels throughout Asia and young boys turned into infantrymen for warlords and rebel armies. There were even rumors that a Chinese criminal organization, the 14K triad, was abducting people, harvesting their organs and selling them on the black market.

Not just rumors anymore, Shin thought. But the triad wasn’t smuggling the organs out of the country, a time-consuming endeavor that could damage the tissue. Instead, they were bringing the recipients here, to receive their new organs fresh from the unwilling donor.

A paramilitary training camp and a secret organ transplant clinic. The triad had built a one-stop shop for the flesh trade.

He reached for the satellite phone, but before he could dial the number, it started to vibrate in his hand.

EIGHTEEN

At first, King wasn’t sure what would happen. That lasted about fifteen seconds.

Tremblay who had appointed himself referee and timekeeper, had leaned in close as a shirtless King clambered over the ropes. “So, what’s your plan? I mean, you’re not actually going to hit a girl, are you?”

King was still pondering the question as Tremblay gave a shrill whistle signaling the beginning of the first round.

Zelda was grinning as she darted to the center of the ring. The mouth guard clamped between her teeth made her lips seem unnaturally full, but there was an intensity in her unrelenting stare that was like nothing King had ever seen before, not even in the eyes of men who had tried to kill him. He approached the center cautiously, his gloves up and ready to fend off her attack.

She jabbed at his gloves, testing his defenses. He effortlessly batted her punch aside. She jabbed again, but it was a feint; as he tried to block, she side-stepped and then threw a left upper-cut that connected solidly on his chin.

For a second, all he saw was stars.

It wasn’t the hardest hit he’d ever taken. He’d had his bell rung plenty of times before. The difference this time was that he had — foolishly — not been expecting her to hit quite that hard.

He staggered back, flailing his arms to ward off her attempt to follow through, and when he could, he threw a wild cross-body punch that somehow made glancing contact.

Somebody gasped… He couldn’t say for sure who, but his vision cleared enough to see Zelda’s hair, flashing gold, as she moved in for another attack. This time he didn’t bother trying to block her. Instead, he went on the attack, and this time he didn’t hold back.

Hit a girl? Ha!

There were a lot of words that could be used to describe Zelda Baker — and she had probably heard them all — but ‘girl’ he decided, was not one of them.

Time passed in a blur of disconnected perceptions. In his more lucid moments, it would occur to him to press the attack. Sometimes it worked, and he succeeded in driving her back against the ropes, but invariably she would find a way to turn the tide. What she lacked in size and strength, Zelda made up for with skill; it was plainly evident that she’d received formal training. She was fast on her feet, flitting about the ring like a moth. She knew how to use the clinch to recover her wits when King landed a blow that should have put her on the mat.

At one point, as he sat slumped in a folding chair during one of the breaks between rounds, Tremblay knelt beside him. “Boss man, I got nothing but respect for you, but how long are you going to keep this up?”

Before King could answer, he heard Zelda’s voice, strained and breathless from the exertion, reach out from the opposite corner like another punch to the jaw. “Had enough?”

He met her gaze. “I was going to ask you the same.”

She laughed. “I’m just getting warmed up.”

King shrugged. “Couple more rounds then.”

Tremblay shook his head and handed King a towel to mop the perspiration off his face and shoulders. “Just in case you’ve lost count, we’re at six.”

Six? He had lost track.

Tremblay took the towel and gave another shrill whistle to mark the start of the seventh round. King hauled himself to his feet and waded once more into the fray.

It had stopped being a fight — it had never been much of a sparring match — and turned into something more like a marathon, a test of the limits of human endurance. It was a test, not of skill in combat, but of will. In both respects however, it seemed they were equally matched.

They circled, threw punches, fell against each other, and then repeated the dance, spiraling ever closer to total collapse. Zelda’s face was flushed and puffy, her lower lip looked like a piece of raw meat, and she didn’t seem quite as light on her feet now, but the determination in her eyes remained undimmed. King’s own arms felt like they were made of rubber, and the padded leather gloves felt as heavy as lead weights.

All his attention was focused on her. He watched her eyes, searching for that flicker of movement that would telegraph where and when the next blow would come. He watched the set of her body and where her feet went; it had taken him a while to realize that she would plant her feet in a variation of a shooter’s stance just before striking.

The rest of the world had ceased to exist for him. His only connection with anything outside the rope circle was Tremblay’s shrill signal that another round had come to an end. Perhaps that was why it took him a moment to process the voice that boomed like a thunderbolt in the dimly lit room.

“What the fuck?”

As the words finally penetrated the filter, King and Zelda, as if by mutual accord, relaxed their stances and turned their attention to the group of onlookers, which had more than doubled in size. The rest of the team had arrived, but it was General Keasling, glowering at the edge of the ring, who seemed to suck the oxygen out of the room.

Keasling’s face was a mask of barely contained rage. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”

The abrupt end of the fight sapped the last of King’s strength and for a moment, he thought he might collapse. But as he panted to catch his breath, he saw the other faces in the room. Tremblay was grinning in unabashed admiration. Parker was doing a slightly better job of concealing the same emotion. Even the big Ranger, Somers, looked impressed. Zelda was leaning wearily against the ropes, but her face wore the same expression.

He had proven something to her…to all of them.

He took a deep breath, let it out, then another. He straightened to the best approximation of a position of attention that his exhausted limbs could muster.

“Well sir, you instructed me to put together a new unit — the best of the best. I was just conducting tryouts.” And then, as if he needed to say nothing more in his own defense, he turned to Zelda. “She’s hired.”

Keasling continued to scowl at King, but the simple fact of his silence told King that he’d said the right thing. His new mission — the new unit, whatever it was — had already taken him out from under Keasling’s direct authority. After a moment, the general shook his head. “Fine. She’s all yours.”

Zelda’s eyes went wide in disbelief. “Now just a damn minute—”

“Deal with it.” Keasling kept his gaze on King. “Your new handler wants to brief you, ASAP. Get cleaned up.”

It didn’t appear to be in Zelda’s nature to “deal with it,” but she refocused her ire on the man chiefly responsible for it. She stalked forward and put a gloved fist against King’s chest. “You don’t own me, and you sure as hell don’t get to just claim me like some prize.”

King gently pushed her hand away. “Zelda… Sergeant Baker, I think you’re going to like the job I’ve got for you.”

“I already have a job.”

“Now you’ve got a better one.” He smiled. “Welcome to Delta.”

NINETEEN

There was just enough time for King to towel off the perspiration and get Parker to slap a butterfly suture on the cut under his right eye, before Keasling took him aside for the conference call with the new handler.

The general handled the introductions…sort of. “I have Jack Sigler — callsign: King — here with me.”

King didn’t know what to say, so he ventured a vague: “Hello?”

The voice that issued from the speaker sounded strange. It wasn’t just the normal crackles of squelch or the vagaries of radio transmissions. The voice had been electronically distorted, making it impossible to even begin guessing at the person’s identity. King couldn’t say with certainty whether it was a male or female voice. “King?” The distant unseen person seemed to be savoring the word. “A rather fortuitous choice. You can call me Deep Blue.”

“Deep Blue?” King could just imagine what Tremblay’s response to that declaration would be — something off-color, no doubt — and the thought brought a smile to his face. King however, correctly recognized the origin of the name. “Like the chess computer?”

“Exactly. It’s my job to know everything and be one step ahead of our enemies.”

The auto-tuned and digitally modulated voice could have been the voice of a computer, for all King knew. It was not a very comforting thought. The obvious implication was that this mysterious Deep Blue was going to be playing chess on a grand scale, with King and his new unit as the pawns. He didn’t like the idea of his fate being controlled by some mysterious entity, much less one that might not even be human.

“Or rather I should say,” Deep Blue continued, “to keep you one step ahead of your enemies.”

“I’m listening.”

“Operational Detachment Delta was created to give the President the ability to act — or react — rapidly, without having to wade through the mire of politics and command structures. But like everything else in government, it has gradually become a victim of the bureaucracy it was supposed to circumvent. Now, as you have personally witnessed, it has been compromised. The worst part is that we have no idea where this attack came from, much less who can be trusted. It will be General Keasling’s job to root out any bad actors still lurking in the shadows, but last night underscores the importance of having a quick response team — one with virtually unlimited resources — as a surgical option for the President to use as an alternative to the military.”

“You don’t need to sell me on this, sir.” King wasn’t sure if he was supposed to refer to his handler as ‘sir,’ but when in doubt… “What’s the mission?”

“First, build your team. From what the General tells me, you’ve already started recruiting.” The electronic distortion made it impossible to tell if Deep Blue was joking.

“Why me?”

“I think you already know the answer. Right now, you and your men are above suspicion. Additionally, the fact that you survived last night tells me that you are someone who can beat long odds.”

“I had a lot of help.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, King. You were thrown into an impossible situation, and you held it together.”

King wondered if the men who hadn’t made it back would agree with that assessment.

Deep Blue quickly switched gears. “However, our most pressing need right now is to bring those rogue operators down. Need I add, with extreme prejudice?”

King thought about what Parker had said earlier, during the first meeting with Keasling. “I think maybe we should be more focused on the question of why this happened, and what it is the enemy wants.”

“The CIA is working that angle, but gathering intelligence will be an essential part of the mission.”

“So you don’t have a clue?” It came out with more sarcasm than he intended, but Deep Blue let it slide.

“It would be dangerous to assume anything at this early stage. It appears that this action was completely unconnected to current military operations, but whoever is behind this was able to coordinate with the insurgents that attacked you last night. We can’t dismiss the possibility that this is a bold new terror plot.”

“The CIA contractor — Therion — was the target,” King said. “They wanted her for something. She’s a code-breaker; maybe they want her to hack into the Pentagon computers? Steal nuclear launch codes?”

“Now you understand why we have to act quickly and without full knowledge of our enemy’s goal.” Deep Blue must have sensed King’s earlier concerns, and after a pause, he continued. “You probably think that I’m playing a game with your life, and the lives of your men. Perhaps in a way that’s true, but it’s a game we have to win. In chess, you can never know exactly what your opponent is thinking, but you can draw conclusions from the moves he’s made. But you must never think that you are a pawn to be sacrificed for victory. As soon as I know something, you will know it, and when it comes to operational decisions, you have the final say.”

In King’s experience, assurances like that came cheaply and were worth even less. He wished he could look the other man in the eye, read the sincerity — or lack thereof — in that promise. “All right, let’s talk about those resources. We know where Rainer is, but that’s about all we know.”

“I’ve already made contact with Shin Dae-jung — the man currently conducting reconnaissance on the target. With the GPS coordinates he gave me, I’ve tasked a KH-12 satellite to get some real-time satellite imagery. That should give you a better idea of what you’re looking at.”

For a moment, King thought he misheard. The nation’s network of ‘eyes in the sky’ was controlled by the National Reconnaissance Office, an independent and specialized agency that kept a very tight rein on its product — detailed satellite imagery — and was positively miserly about the satellites themselves. Requests for pictures of a target had to go up one chain of command and down another, a process that could take days and could be very costly in terms of political capital. Actually changing the orbit of a satellite, a procedure that required the craft to use up some of its very limited and irreplaceable fuel supply, was something that almost never happened.

Deep Blue wasn’t kidding about having unlimited resources.

Maybe this new team was going to work out after all.

TWENTY

The excitement Sasha had felt as she donned the level-four biohazard safety suit in preparation to enter the sealed room where the relic was being kept, climbed to a fever-pitch of elation as she got a chance to actually behold the object — real, tangible evidence that the Voynich code was not a unique occurrence. That was about all that it revealed.

She was able to touch and interact with the object — albeit with a barrier of latex rubber between her and it, but there was little to be gleaned from such physical contact. She laid her hands upon it, turned it this way and that and then poked experimentally at the strange protrusions that were marked with the distinctive letters of the Voynich alphabet. She could tell that the pegs extended into the larger body of the thing, and deduced that they were something like the keys on a typewriter. That would be consistent with the idea that the device had been a type of encryption machine, but somehow it didn’t feel right. She saw no evidence of gears and wheels inside the thing — the kind of things that would be necessary for a rudimentary cipher machine to work. Rather, the hollow body, broken though it was, contained only the remains of a few hollow tubes. The tubes and the wooden body of the thing reminded her of something, but what exactly that was, eluded her.

What she did know for certain was that eight of the keys contained exact matches to the Voynich script, and that was somewhere to start. She went back to an adjacent office just outside the containment area, shedding her environment suit. Rainer was there and began looking over her shoulder, but he otherwise let her work undisturbed.

Her laptop contained a complete version of the Voynich manuscript in digital form, along with a program that allowed her to plug in values for the distinctive characters of the mysterious alphabet. She highlighted the eight that were marked on the device. Without any context, they offered absolutely no insight.

It can’t be a code machine, she decided. If it was, other examples of the code would have shown up. So what did that leave?

What else has levers like that? Buttons? Keys…

“A piano has keys!”

Rainer threw an inquisitive glance her way.

“It’s a musical instrument,” she said, and she knew with absolute certainty that she was right. The wooden body was similar to a drum or a stringed instrument, hollow with thin curved panels to amplify the sounds. The tubes inside were like the pipes of an organ or a pan flute.

The Voynich manuscript was a book of music. The mysterious characters that had challenged code breakers for nearly a century were not enciphered letters, but musical notes; each symbol corresponded to a specific tone, a sound frequency.

Sasha didn’t have a deep aesthetic appreciation for music, but she did recognize its perfection as a mathematical language. If the code was an expression, not of individual letters but of sounds, then there would be a pattern to it.

There wasn’t enough of the device left to even approximate what specific notes each lever would have created, but the simple knowledge of the artifact’s purpose was enough to get her started.

She turned to Rainer. “Do you have a broadband Internet connection here? I need access to the Cray at Langley.”

He shook his head. “That’s not going to happen.”

She blinked at him in disbelief. “You want this cracked, don’t you?”

Rainer shrugged indifferently. “I can allow you supervised Internet access, but there’s no way in hell I’m letting you interface with the CIA.”

For a moment, Sasha couldn’t comprehend the reason for this, but then she remembered that she wasn’t here by choice. The Cray would have allowed her to employ a brute force attack, trying every permutation of the code, a grueling task that would have taken a lifetime using conventional methods, but would require only a few hours or days at the most, for the supercomputer. Denial of access to the agency’s resources meant that she would have to do this the old-fashioned way.

The idea was not without some appeal to her.

The subroutines weren’t discriminatory; the computer would treat every permutation as having equal potential, whereas a human cryptanalyst knew how to winnow out the obvious false trails.

But there were still too many variables.

She glanced through the window at the artifact — the instrument. If it had been a piano or a flute — something familiar — she would know the expected range of possible sounds, but there was nothing familiar about this device. She knew only its country of origin…

She turned to Rainer again. “This was found in China? Yunnan Province?”

“That’s what I was told.”

That didn’t make any sense. There was nothing in the manuscript that even hinted at a Far Eastern origin; everything — the artwork, the style and the distribution of the text, even the parchment on which it was written — pointed to Europe as the place where the manuscript had been created.

“I need to know more about where this was found.”

Rainer stared at her thoughtfully for a moment, and then he produced a cell phone. He dialed it and after a moment, he spoke. “She has some questions about the find.”

He nodded in response to an unheard reply, then set the phone on the desktop, pushing a button to activate speaker mode.

The voice of Rainer’s employer — Sasha couldn’t recall if she’d been told his name — sounded tinny as it issued from the mobile device. “What do you wish to know, Ms. Therion?”

“You said it was in a crypt? Whose crypt? Was there anything else there? Has it been dated?”

“We think it was the tomb of a Chinese prefect named Guo Kan. Several of the artifacts appear to be war trophies from his campaigns with the Mongol Empire.”

“Mongol?” Sasha tried to recall what she knew of the Mongolian era. “That would have been…12^th century?”

“A bit later than that. Historical records say that he died in 1277, during the reign of Kublai Khan.”

Kublai Khan. History had never held much interest for her, but that was a name she knew well. Kublai Khan had ruled most of Asia during the late 13^th and early 14^th centuries, but he was perhaps best known for being the exotic ruler described in The Travels of Marco Polo.

Had the Voynich manuscript and the strange musical instrument, which evidently held the key to unlocking its secrets, traveled on the Silk Road from Europe to China? Had the manuscript traveled back again?

It was another variable, and one that didn’t square with the carbon-dating of the Voynich manuscript to the 1400s, but it would place the device and the Voynich script nearly fifty years ahead of the outbreak of the Black Death.

“What else did you find? Was there anything that might explain where this artifact originated?”

There was a sound that might have been a sigh. “Just stick to deciphering the code, Ms. Therion. I’ve already investigated all the other angles.”

“It’s a musical instrument,” she blurted. “Did you discover that in your investigations?”

A long silence followed. “A musical instrument, you say? Could it be an organ of some kind?”

“Yes. A primitive one.”

“Some of Guo’s writings refer to an ‘urghan’—something he took as spoil from the siege of Baghdad. It’s a Persian word and possibly the root word from which we get the name ‘organ.’”

Baghdad. Iraq again. The search was bringing her full circle.

“I need to see everything you have on this urghan. If I am going to crack this code, I need to rebuild the thing.”

TWENTY-ONE

“King, this is Irish, over.”

In the front seat of the rented Ford Galaxy minivan, King keyed his throat mic. “This is King. Send it.”

“We’re moving out now.”

King consulted his mental map of the area in which his team would execute the raid — an image that had been burned into his brain during the hours spent planning the op — and visualized Parker’s vehicle concealed a hundred meters or so off the main road, about five miles southeast of the objective. “Roger. Radio checks every half hour. King out.”

In his mind’s eye, he saw Parker and the two snipers—‘Dark’ Meyers and ‘Race’ Banion — moving like dots across the terrain map. Their job was to rendezvous with Shin Dae-jung and establish over-watch positions around the compound. King would be leading the main assault force up the single road that connected the compound with the main highway.

He’d felt a twinge of regret at assigning his friend to lead the recon team. He and Parker had been working together for a long time. They were like brothers, and it felt strange to be going into a potentially hairy situation without Parker at his side, especially on a mission like this, where they were practically flying by the seat of their pants. But recon and over-watch was just as important to success as the assault, and there wasn’t anyone he’d rather have watching his back. Besides, it was a foregone conclusion that Parker would be his top NCO in the new team, and this was a chance for his friend to show his abilities as a leader. King had no doubt that Parker was up to the challenge.

He was less certain about his own ability to take the reins of command, especially with the motley group crammed into the Galaxy that now sped along the main highway out of Mandalay, traveling east into the deepening dusk. Zelda Baker — who thanks to their ‘sparring match’ now looked like a supermodel on her way to a domestic violence shelter — was at the wheel, a logical choice given her familiarity with the country and its roads. King sensed that she was secretly pleased by the invitation to join the new team, but it was just as obvious that she didn’t yet trust him. She wasn’t happy to have been handed over to him like a trophy of war.

Behind him, Tremblay chattered away easily, bemoaning the fact that he had been unable to find replacement ammunition for his recently acquired Desert Eagle pistols, and generally throwing out observations about the scenery and one-liners that weren’t nearly as funny as he seemed to believe.

King liked the solid Delta shooter and his ability to shrug off the uncertain and ever-changing circumstances in which they all now found themselves — that kind of adaptability was essential to special ops, but he wondered if Tremblay was bottling up negative emotions deep inside, hiding the grief at having lost two of his teammates behind a façade of humor. He worried about what might happen if and when that bottle finally overflowed.

Still, he preferred Tremblay’s near-constant monologue to the implacable silence of the other three men in the van. He’d served with Casey Bellows for over a year, so he was used to the man’s reserved nature, but he couldn’t say the same for the other two: Travis “Silent Bob” Roberts, Tremblay’s teammate from Alpha team, and Erik Somers.

Somers, in particular, concerned King. Although King had personally witnessed Somers’s extraordinary strength and unwavering dedication in the face of enemy fire, there was something unsettling about the big man. It wasn’t just that he was quiet. Silent Bob was a regular chatterbox next to Somers. There was an intensity to Somers. There was some unspoken passion or rage, smoldering just below the surface, like hot coals under a crust of ash, waiting for a stiff breeze to fan them into a full-blown wildfire.

King had briefly considered assigning Somers the callsign of “Terminator,” but he figured the big guy had probably had his fill of comparisons to ‘Ahnold.’ Instead, he pulled a different iconic name from the well of Hollywood inspiration; Somers was now ‘Eastwood,’ and given his personality, that seemed even more apropos.

It didn’t surprise King at all that Somers hadn’t been selected to a Delta unit. Operators tended to be extroverts by nature, able to kick back over a brew with their teammates after a mission, shedding the stress of combat as easily as dropping their gear. He couldn’t imagine what ‘kicking back’ would look like to Erik Somers.

Parker had recommended Somers, and that counted for a lot, but whether or not the big man found a place on King’s new team would depend on how tonight’s mission went.

I suppose that’s true for all of us, he thought morosely.

They passed through a small town, and King spied a billboard written in several languages, including English, indicating the National Botanical Gardens lay just ahead.

“Almost there,” Zelda announced. “Shin says it’s just a couple miles past Pyin Oo Lwin.”

Tremblay’s face appeared at her shoulder. “What a coincidence; that’s the name of my favorite noodle dish at PF Chang’s. Speaking of which, I’m famished. Is there a Mickey D’s hereabouts?”

Zelda purposefully ignored him, as did King. “All right. Let’s find a good place to park.”

A few minutes later, she pulled the van off road and threaded it into the woods, where it wouldn’t be readily visible from the highway. The trees shut out the last few rays of daylight, plunging them into a world of shadows. They would be making their final approach to the objective on the dirt road, but before they could begin that journey, they had to deal with the gate guard.

King, Bellows and Silent Bob left the van behind and hiked through the woods toward the guard shack. There was no sign of the old man Shin had reported meeting the previous day, but the windows of the small structure glowed with artificial light — probably from a television set. Bellows crept to one of the windows, cautiously peered inside and then used hand signals to relay what he had seen: one man, sitting near the wall, facing east.

Silent Bob nodded, and then, with the stealthy swiftness that had earned him his nickname, he swept through the door. King, half a step behind, glimpsed movement in the dark interior room — the guard reached for his rifle but Silent Bob’s suppressed MP5 coughed twice, and all motion ceased.

King scanned the small room, noting the old television set and a radio transmitter station that looked like little more than an off-the-shelf citizen’s band radio. He decided that was a good sign; the triad, or whoever was running this little operation, evidently didn’t think it warranted more aggressive security measures. He keyed his mic. “Legend, this is King. We have the gate. Move up now.”

Zelda, who had made her displeasure at the callsign he’d chose for her abundantly clear, answered with a terse: “Roger, out.”

King backed through the door and turned to Bellows. “Casey. You’re staying here. Set up an observation post and watch the door.”

Surprise and dismay flickered across his teammate’s face, but Bellows was too much of a professional to protest. Deep down, the man was probably relieved to be sitting on the bench for this raid. They had all used up a lifetime’s worth of luck, but Casey Bellows had a pretty wife and a newborn baby waiting for him back home. Every Delta shooter knew the risks that came with the job, even those with families, but King believed there were already too many kids without fathers in the world, and he didn’t want to be responsible for one more.

Bellows assented with a nod and melted into the woods behind the shack, while King and Silent Bob headed for road where Zelda and others were waiting.

TWENTY-TWO

The compound glowed brightly over the hilltops, or at least appeared to when viewed through night-vision goggles. It had been visible even from the road where they had parked their rented vehicle, but Parker had nonetheless let his Garman GPS guide him rather than relying on the distant source of illumination. The most direct route to their goal — a straight line — would have required them to climb hills and traverse the valleys in between, where the forest cover was thickest and the uneven terrain in between could easily cause injuries that would jeopardize the mission. Instead, they had programmed a more circuitous route into the GPS, one that kept them mostly on the high ground, at the expense of adding a couple of miles to the cross-country trek. The compound was still about five hundred meters away, but according to the GPS, they had reached the last waypoint marker, the place where they were to rendezvous with the forward observer.

A strident hiss issued from the darkness. Parker and the others immediately brought their weapons up, scanning the area for the source of the noise, but even with their night-vision, there was nothing to see.

“Take it easy, Irish.” The voice was pitched just above a whisper, but Parker couldn’t fix its location. “We’re all on the same side. Safe your weapons, and I’ll come out.”

Parker breathed a sigh of relief. It had to be their contact, but he remained alert. “What’s the word?”

“Nighteyes.”

It was the callsign that King had assigned to their advanced scout. Parker thumbed the safety on his MP5 and lowered the weapon, nodding for the other men to do the same. As soon as they did, something rose from the ground just a few steps from where he stood. The figure was man-shaped, but camouflaged with dirt and tree branches, so he was nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. The only indication that there was a real person standing before him was a broad smile that glowed like a Cheshire Cat grin in the display of Parker’s night vision.

“Took you guys long enough,” the man said, extending a hand. “I’m Nighteyes, but please, just call me Shin.”

Parker accepted the handclasp, and after a quick round of introductions, unslung his field pack and passed it over. Shin opened the pack and began sorting through its contents — a radio, a bottle of water and a partially disassembled M21 sniper rifle.

“Now we’re talking,” Shin muttered as he fitted the parts of the weapon together. In the dark, he had work by feel alone, but his fingers knew exactly what to do, and in less than thirty seconds, he was performing a dry-fire functions check. When he was done, he slid a magazine into the well and advanced a round, after which, he turned back to Parker. “Okay, here’s the good news. There’s virtually no security. No patrols, no cameras or perimeter sensors… Hell, I don’t even think they have a night watchman.”

“And the bad news?”

Shin shrugged. “This place is remote, and the triads don’t exactly follow military procedures…but there should be some kind of security here. The fact that there isn’t any has me worried.”

“You don’t believe in luck?”

“I don’t trust it.”

“Words to live by.”

Shin clipped the radio to his belt and fixed the headset in place. He turned his head away and whispered into the lip mic. “This is Nighteyes. Radio check, over.”

Parker heard the man’s voice as clear as day in his own earpiece, followed immediately by King’s voice. “This is King. Good copy, Nighteyes. Irish, you there?”

“Right next to him,” Parker answered. “We’re about to move out. Should be romeo-tango-golf in five mikes.”

“Waiting on you, Irish.King out.”

Parker turned to the other men. “Dark, you’re with me. Race, you and Nighteyes head to OP-Two. Call in when you’re set. You heard the boss; the clock is ticking.”

TWENTY-THREE

Zelda felt like she’d been reborn.

King, in inviting her to join Delta — or rather, as it had been explained to her, a new elite team within Delta — had done something no man had ever done so quickly before: he had earned her respect. One of the reasons she had joined the Army in the first place, was to be part of something big, something important. She had been relentless in her pursuit of that goal. She had certainly earned this advancement, but it still felt good to finally, at long last, be appreciated for more than just her looks. Of course, she wasn’t about to let the rest of the men in the van know how pleased she was to be ‘one of the boys.’

That was only part of the reason for the elation she now felt. Mostly, what had her feeling so energized — so alive — was the fact that she was charging down an unfamiliar dirt road, bouncing over potholes and ruts at nearly forty miles an hour and barely slowing for the turns, all without headlights and in near total darkness. She was aided by night vision technology, but she was trusting more in her memory of the satellite photos the team’s new handler had provided.

It was a pure adrenaline rush, made all the sweeter by the fact that, for the first time since meeting him, Stan Tremblay had finally shut up. He actually looked like he was about to throw up, but maybe that was just a trick of the night vision.

She didn’t actually mind Tremblay. In truth, she had passed the point where his relentless sophomoric humor was irritating; it was, strangely, almost charming, and while he still seemed unable to look at her without cracking a shit-eating grin, she sensed that he, like King, was beginning to see her as a teammate and a fellow soldier, first. She got the same sense from the others, particularly Somers, the dark and brooding Ranger, who she was given to understand, was very much an outsider like herself.

“This is good,” King announced from the passenger seat. “Stop here.”

Zelda stamped the brake, stopping the minivan in the middle of the road.

King half-turned so he could see everyone. “All right, kids. The new boss is watching, so let’s make this look easy.”

The team had been outfitted with equipment and weapons from the cache at the safe-house: PVS-14s; sound-suppressed Heckler & Koch MP5s with M68 Aimpoint red-dot aiming sights and tactical body armor vests with load carrying pouches for spare magazines, grenades and their radio sets. They exited the vehicle in silence and made their way on foot up the final hill, with King in the lead and Somers bringing up the rear.

King called a halt at the top of the rise and radioed the sniper teams for a final visual report. Just as Shin had reported all afternoon, the compound was quiet.

King brought them all forward for a final brief. “We do this fast, quiet and by the numbers.”

There were four buildings in the compound. Buildings Two and Four were two stories each. The helicopter, which had arrived at midday, was still parked on the roof of Building Two, but most of the activity Shin had observed occurred in and around Building Four. Based on his description, Zelda felt certain that Building Four was a holding area for the triad’s captives — future slave laborers, child soldiers or organ donors. It was also where the team would probably face the stiffest opposition.

She couldn’t begin to guess what business Chinese gangsters had with rogue Delta operators. ‘By the numbers’ meant Building Four would be the last one they entered.

“There is one presumed non-hostile—”

Zelda recalled her brief glimpse of Sasha Therion at the airport the previous day. She had no doubt that the CIA cryptanalyst was a hostage.

“—so positive ID before you pull the trigger. The good news is, she’s the only one you need to worry about not killing.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Any questions?”

There were none.

“Irish, this is King. Give me a weather report?”

Zelda heard the echo of his transmission a millisecond later in her radio earpiece, followed by Parker’s voice. “Nothing moving on the south side. Nighteyes, how’s the north look?”

“All clear. Watch yourselves. It’s spooky quiet.”

King took a breath and then spoke again. “Deep Blue, this is King. Give the word.”

A weird electronic voice burbled in Zelda’s ears. “The word is ‘Go.’ Give ‘em hell, team!”

“Well, I guess it beats ‘break a leg,’” Tremblay muttered.

King gave the signal to move out. They walked in a straight line, staying about twenty feet apart. Tremblay took point, followed in turn by Silent Bob and King. Zelda was next in the formation, and Somers brought up there rear.

They reached the gate, where it took Tremblay all of ten seconds to cut away a section of wire mesh big enough for even Somers to slip through, and then they were moving again, dashing across the open ground to the front of Building One. As soon as they were all lined up outside the door, King gave another hand signal and they swept inside.

The reception area, like the rest of the structure, was dark and deserted, but they methodically cleared each room just to be sure.

The same would not be true of Building Two.

Although there were no windows, a thin strip of light was visible beneath the front entrance of the two-story building. King gave the order for everyone to switch off their night vision, and then he threw the door open.

Tremblay rushed inside, sweeping the area to the left with his weapon. Silent Bob went right and did the same, but there was no one to shoot at. The brightly lit hallway beyond was as quiet as a cemetery, but Zelda saw closed doors on either side.

King waved them all forward. “Juggernaut, Bob — take the right. Legend, Eastwood — left side. Leapfrog.”

Tremblay and Roberts hastened forward, and moved through the first door in the same dynamic way they’d come in through the front entrance. Zelda waited for the noise of battle, but heard only Tremblay’s voice in her earpiece: “Clear.”

Now it was her turn. She advanced to the next door and felt Somers tap her shoulder with the ready signal.

That was when it finally hit home for her. She had done this more times than she could count in training, but she had never been given the opportunity to test herself in combat. This was the real deal; this was what she’d been waiting for.

And she was ready.

She gave the go signal, and in a single smooth motion, she turned the doorknob, threw the door open and moved into the room.

This room was not empty.

She processed what she saw in large chunks of information. There were two people, right in front of her: a woman, sitting at a table staring at the screen of a laptop computer, and a man right behind her, mostly hidden from view. Zelda recognized them both; the woman was Sasha Therion and the man was Kevin Rainer.

Zelda adjusted her aim, putting the targeting dot on the narrow sliver of Rainer’s torso that was visible behind Sasha, but in the instant it took her to do so, he moved, ducking out of view.

With no shot, Zelda took a step back, bumping into the solid mass of Erik Somers who was entering the room right behind her, still unaware of what she had found.

“Contact!” she shouted.

Before either of them could move another step, Rainer’s arm extended past Sasha. There was something dark in his fist, and there was just enough time for Zelda’s brain to recognize that it was a gun, before Rainer pulled the trigger.

TWENTY-FOUR

Sasha was only vaguely aware of the intrusion, at least up until Rainer’s pistol thundered right beside her.

The noise was so loud it hurt her ears, and she jerked involuntarily in her seat. The blonde woman standing in the doorway jerked as well, stumbling backward as Rainer’s bullet punched into her chest. Rainer yanked Sasha to her feet and dragged her away from the table…away from her laptop.

Panic flashed through her, but it wasn’t fear for her life that set her heart pounding. “No!” she shrieked. “Not now. Let me finish!”

She couldn’t tell if she said it out loud; all she could hear was a ringing in her ears. Rainer gave no indication that he heard her. Holding her in front of him like a shield, he began advancing toward the doorway. The fingers of his left hand were curled around her biceps, but his right hand, which rested on her shoulder, no longer held a pistol. Instead, he clutched a round green object, about the size of a baseball — a hand grenade with the safety pin already removed.

No…let me finish.

This time there were no words. Sasha tried to look back, to reach out for the laptop, but her captor gave her a rough shake, asserting his dominance.

I was so close.

The variables swirled out of control in her head, screaming like white noise.

A large man dragged the blonde — Sasha couldn’t tell if the woman was still alive — out of the doorway, retreating from before Rainer, who advanced relentlessly behind his human shield. Rainer thrust her out into the open, staying behind cover. Sasha saw the large man and the blonde woman, as well as three other men, one of whom she recognized from Iraq. The woman was struggling free of the big man’s grip — evidently, she was not seriously injured, but the others had their guns aimed at the doorway…at her.

“Bravo, Jack,” Rainer called out from behind her. “You made it. I’m impressed. And you got yourself some new Mouseketeers. I guess there were some openings on the team.”

When no one answered his taunt, he continued, “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that you’ve got orders to keep this one alive, right? Otherwise, this place would already be a smoking crater. I’m right, aren’t I? Let’s test it and see.”

Sasha was nudged forward again, out into the open.

One of the men spoke. He was the one Sasha recognized. “Kevin, I want to keep her alive only a little bit more than I want you dead, so I guess it’s your lucky day. Let her go, and that will be the end of it.”

Rainer laughed mirthlessly. “You know, I almost believe you, Jack. You’ve got this whole ‘honor’ thing going on; it’s why I didn’t even think about asking you to join me for this paycheck. No, I think I’ll do this my way.” He waggled the hand grenade. “You might want to stand back.”

Sasha was abruptly yanked backward, down the hallway, deeper into the building’s interior. She caught a last glimpse of the five commandos before Rainer pulled her through another doorway and into a stairwell leading up. His earlier deliberate stride now gave way to a haste that seemed to verge on panic. He darted up the stairs, two at a time, nearly dragging Sasha along, but she barely noticed. The only thing that mattered to her was the ever-increasing distance between herself and the answer she had been so close to uncovering.

“You have to let me go back,” she managed to say. “My computer.”

“I’ll get you a new one.” Rainer didn’t slow. He reached the second-story landing and burst through the door into a hallway that was nearly identical to the one below. He pulled her to the second door on the right and threw it open. Sasha couldn’t see past him, but she heard him say: “Richard! Company’s here.”

“Who?”

Sasha recognized the voice of Rainer’s employer.

“Does it matter? We need to get out of here.” Rainer dragged Sasha to another door and barked commands to his two co-conspirators, ordering them to join him. Then he hastened back into the stairwell, hauling her up the next flight, with the other men close behind.

“Where are we going?” Richard demanded.

Rainer answered without looking back. “The helicopter. They’ll probably be covering it with snipers, but they won’t do anything to jeopardize her.” Then he added, “I hope.”

Sasha’s eyes found Richard’s. “I have to go back,” she pleaded. “My computer is down there.”

The man just shook his head.

“You don’t understand. The answers are on that computer. I’ve almost figured it out.”

The man’s face registered dismay, but only for a second. “Nothing we can do about that now. We can start over when we’re safely away from here.”

Rainer finally seemed to acknowledge her concerns. He paused at the top of the stairs. “There might be information on that computer that they can use against us.”

Richard shrugged. “It won’t matter. They’re not getting out of here alive.”

He took a phone from his pocket, and after dialing, he held it to his ear. “We’re being attacked,” he said, without preamble. “Turn them loose.”

TWENTY-FIVE

King watched Rainer disappear through the doorway with a cold knot of rage in his gut, but his anger wasn’t directed at the escaping traitor; he was mad at himself.

A litany of his failures ticked off in his head. We moved too soon… Should have gotten more intel… Should’ve planned better.

None of those measures would have really made a difference, and waiting would only have given Rainer a chance to slip away completely. No, this wasn’t a failure of planning or leadership; it was just plain bad luck, but that didn’t lessen the sting.

I should’ve just taken the shot, consequences be damned.

Glowering, he shouldered his weapon and started forward, moving toward the door through which his quarry had vanished.

“Jack?” an anxious voice called from behind him. It was Tremblay. “Talk to us, boss. What’s the plan?”

King ignored him and kept moving. Rainer had to be stopped, no matter what.

“Jack? Sigler? King!”

That stopped him.

King.

He wasn’t just Jack Sigler, pissed-off Delta shooter. He was King; he was their leader.

He pivoted on his heel. He saw, as if for the first time, Zelda leaning against the wall, struggling to breathe. “Legend, are you hit?”

Zelda winced, but there was fire in her eyes. “The vest stopped it. I’ve been hit harder than that.” She managed a grin and added, “Not by you.”

“Then on your feet, soldier. Eastwood, you and Legend head back and bring the van up. Juggernaut, Bob…you’re with me. We’re gonna get what we came for.”

A flicker of disappointment crossed Zelda’s pained visage — she probably thought he was benching her and blamed herself for not having taken out Rainer when she’d had the chance — but she grabbed Somers’s shoulder and pulled herself erect.

Tremblay likewise seemed heartened by King’s decisiveness. He and Silent Bob quickly caught up to their team leader and cautiously followed him through the doorway.

King swept the muzzle of his MP5 up the stairwell and checked for blind spots before heading up the steps. At the second floor landing, he waited for the other two operators to line up behind him before throwing the door open and moving through. His finger was tight against the trigger, ready to shoot, no matter who was on the receiving end or what the ultimate consequences were, but the hallway was vacant.

“Shit.”

He knew Rainer was too smart to retreat to a dead end, but he also knew that the turncoat Delta officer had not come here alone; were his co-conspirators waiting behind one of the closed doors, waiting to ambush them?

Only one way to find out.

Before he could approach the first door, a voice sounded from his radio receiver. “This is Nighteyes. We’ve got activity at Building—”

The transmission broke off in mid sentence, and for a moment, King feared that somehow the sniper had been discovered, but then Shin’s voice came back. “I don’t even know how to describe this. You guys need to get out of there right now.”

King heard the urgency in the man’s voice, but turning back wasn’t an option he was prepared to consider. The mission came first, and the mission was to take down Kevin Rainer and the other traitors; his own survival was a secondary priority.

He advanced to the first door, and as soon as Tremblay and Silent Bob were in place, he threw the door open and moved in. As before, he was poised to fire at the first target of opportunity, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw in that room.

Unlike the ramshackle interiors they had encountered in every other corner of the compound, this space had been scrupulously maintained. The walls and ceiling, and even the floor, were a brilliant, almost sterile, white. The effect was intensified by the bright overhead lights that blazed down with sun-like intensity. The place looked clean enough to be a surgical operating room.

Which was exactly what it was.

There were four people in the room. Two wore blue surgical scrubs, complete with caps and face masks that hid all clues to their identity. The other two were laid out on gurneys. One of the latter was barely visible; just pale white arms and legs protruding from a tent of blue fabric, transfixed in the glare of the lights; he was the focus of the surgeons’ attention.

The last person in the room was male, a dark-skinned Burmese man in his early twenties or perhaps younger. He lay naked on a stretcher, which had been pushed to one side of the room. He was unmoving, as if unconscious, but it was plainly evident that he wasn’t simply sleeping. His upper torso had been opened like the petals of a rose. King caught only a momentary glimpse into the man’s chest cavity, but it was enough to see that there was a dark bloody void where his heart and lungs ought to have been.

King had seen terrible things in his life — children blown apart by IEDs and American serviceman horribly burned in fuel explosions — but those raw savage experiences were nothing alongside the sanitized, precise and utterly inhuman evil he now beheld.

He brought his gaze back to the surgeon who stood above the patient — the recipient of the organs that had been taken from the body of the unwilling donor. The doctor’s eyes were fixed on King’s gun, but after a moment they flickered up to meet his gaze. He raised his hands in a supplicating gesture, his latex gloves painted with blood.

“I don’t know what you want,” the man said in a voice that was unnaturally calm. “But you have to leave, now.”

“Or what?” The question came from Tremblay, but it had none of his customary humor. He was as shocked as King.

“Or my patient will die,” was the haughty answer.

King took a menacing step forward, close enough to see inside the chest cavity of the patient; the stolen body parts lay flaccid and seemingly lifeless within. Only now was King aware of the complex web of tubes that sprouted from the supine form, connecting the man to IV drips and bypass machines — devices that were keeping the man’s blood oxygenated and flowing while the surgeons methodically spliced in the hijacked organs.

The patient’s face was hidden beneath a shroud of blue cloth, but King didn’t need to make a positive identification to know what sort of person lay on the operating table: a true human predator, someone who bought the organs of another living human to sustain his own miserable life, as casually as someone might order a cheeseburger.

“And why the fuck should I care about him?” King asked.

Parker’s voice abruptly sounded in King’s ear. “Movement on the roof. They’re going for the helo… It’s Sasha! I have eyes on Sasha.”

There seemed to be an unasked question there, but it took King a moment to disengage from the horror unfolding right in front of him. Roof?Helo? Then the picture came into focus; Rainer was about to slip through his fingers again.

For the briefest instant, he considered telling Parker to take out the helicopter. A burst of some 7.62 millimeter rounds into its turbine engines would probably disable it and leave their foe trapped on the roof.

Trapped… Backed into a corner… There was no telling what Rainer might do if that happened.

King keyed his mic. “Deep Blue, this is King. Will you be able to track that helicopter?”

There was a brief delay before the mystery figure answered, with no small measure of urgency: “Affirmative, King. You’ve done all you can there. Abort the mission and exfil immediately.”

Done all you can… Abort… King felt his earlier self-directed rage rising again, but he fought it back. “Roger. Irish, hold your fire. Let them go.”

On the other side of the operating table, the surgeon relaxed visibly, as if sensing that King’s radio transmission signaled the end of the incursion. “What we’re doing has nothing to do with whatever it is you want. Please, just go, so I can get back to saving this man.”

King adjusted his aim ever so slightly, and squeezed off a single shot. The only noise from the suppressed MP5 was a faint metallic click as the internal mechanism ejected the spent brass casing and ratcheted another round into the firing chamber. The sound of the surgeon, screaming in pain and disbelief, as the nine-millimeter bullet punched through the palm of his right hand, was much more satisfying.

King threw a mock salute with the smoking muzzle of the weapon. “Good luck with that.”

TWENTY-SIX

Ever since leaving his Ranger unit behind to join with King’s Delta team, Erik Somers had felt like the odd man out.

A change of assignment always brought with it a period of adjustment — it took a while to get used to new teammates and procedures — but the whirlwind of activity that had engulfed him in the last twenty-four hours was unsettling, especially for someone like himself, who kept a tight rein on his emotions. The private rage that defined him was always simmering just below the surface, but the rigors and routines of military life provided a purposeful way for him use that anger.

That was missing for him now. He had gone from being a Ranger with a clearly defined set of responsibilities and objectives, to being…what exactly? Even Zelda, a woman in a profession dominated by men, seemed to have staked out a niche for herself, but he was still waiting to see how he would fit in. From the moment he’d joined King’s team on the plane to Myanmar, Somers had the feeling that he was just a warm body filling an empty seat, and that uncertainty about his place in the scheme of things was eating at his self-control. He felt an almost overpowering urge to destroy something…anything.

He swallowed the bubble of rage down and turned to Zelda. “Can you walk?”

“Been walking most of my life, big guy,” she said, but the words came out in short bursts, as if she lacked the breath to utter a complete sentence.

He acknowledged with a nod and headed for the door, but she forestalled him. Moving stiffly at first, she hastened back into the room where they had confronted Rainer, and emerged a moment later, shoving the abandoned laptop computer into her backpack. “Might be something useful on this.”

“Good thinking.” It seemed like the right thing to say. Without further comment, he headed for the exit, only peripherally aware of Zelda a few steps behind.

He immediately sensed that something was different about the exterior of the compound. A low indistinct noise, like the hum of conversation in a crowded room, pervaded the still night. Before he could identify the source, he heard Nighteyes’s anxious voice warning of activity in the compound, and he knew that his ears had not deceived him.

As he and Zelda moved from the building, he saw a torrent of human figures pouring out of Building Four, less than a hundred yards away. Most of them looked like refugees, slack-jawed and dull-eyed, wearing clothes that were little more than rags, but there were a few men who stood out from the crowd, partly because of their garish attire and partly because of the AK-47s they held at the ready. The gunmen seemed to be herding the others, but their eyes were sweeping the compound, as if searching for targets. One of the gunmen looked directly at Zelda and Somers, and with a shout to the others, raised his rifle.

Somers started to bring his MP5 around, but before he could put the red dot on his chosen target, the man’s head snapped back in a spray of red. Someone was looking out for them.

Another of the armed men was downed by a quiet but deadly shot from the distant sniper. Yet even as the shepherds were felled, some of the herd revealed their true nature. Their eyes were no longer dull, but focused on the fleeing Delta operators like laser beams, and with a noise that sounded almost like the braying of coyotes, a dozen of them lurched forward.

Somers grabbed Zelda by the arm and propelled her ahead of him, even as he broke into a run. “Go!”

She seemed to grasp the urgency of the situation. After a few faltering steps, she sprinted ahead, racing for the gap in the gate and the perceived safety that lay beyond. She easily outpaced Somers, but it wasn’t because she was lighter or more athletic; he was intentionally hanging back, just in case the pursuing horde caught up to them. Without even looking, he crooked his arm backward and triggered a long burst from the MP5 into the oncoming mass of bodies.

Zelda slipped through the fence and resumed her dash up the road. In the moment it took for Somers to thread himself into the gap, she vanished completely into the darkness. A spur of metal snagged his shoulder, raking his skin through the fabric of his shirt, but he wrestled free and ran after her.

Behind him, there was a metallic rattle of bodies hitting the fence, and he risked a look back. Some of the pursuers were squirming through the hole, but several more were scaling the fence, as nimble as squirrels on a tree trunk. Somers fired out the magazine, but the rounds from his silenced submachine gun seemed to produce about as much effect as a swarm of gnats.

There was no time to reload. He kept his grip on the weapon as he bolted up the hill, but the seconds he had spent getting through the fence had cost him his scant lead. Before he’d gone twenty steps, they were on him.

He felt it first as a weight crashing against him, and then something wrapped around his legs. The impact wasn’t enough to knock him down — he was too big and too powerful to be taken down by a hit from just about anyone but an NFL linebacker, but the grip that tightened around his legs was fierce enough to break his stride. He swiped at the clutching arms, using the MP5 like a club, but even as his assailant fell away, another body crashed into him, and then another. Then he was buried under a deluge of human flesh.

They swarmed over him like warrior ants guided by a common mind, attempting to immobilize his limbs and render him defenseless. Against almost anyone else, this tactic would have achieved its intended purpose, but he was not just anyone else. The ferocity of the attack catalyzed him, burning through his practiced self-restraint, releasing his fury in a titanic eruption.

The next thing he knew, he was free of their grasping hands, kneeling in the center of a circle of broken bodies. His ability to think rationally returned by degrees…

I was supposed to be doing something… The van…

He stood, aware that some of the bodies that lay around him were moving, stirring from the stunning violence he had inflicted on them. Despite the darkness, he could distinctly make out that the attackers were small-bodied — some of them looked like very young teenagers — but their arms and legs were thick with muscle, almost grotesquely so. Clothes had been torn away in the struggle, revealing torsos that ballooned with the kind of unnatural tissue growth that was a side-effect of steroid abuse.

But that was the only the tip of the iceberg.

Enormous scars mapped their bodies, white and purple marks with crisscrossing patterns like the laces of a football. The coarse black hair that covered their scalps was patchy in places, revealing where incisions had been made. Some of the wounds were not completely healed, but oozed fluid; plastic tubes sprouted from some, external veins that ran around their bodies and disappeared again somewhere else. In some distant corner of his mind, he registered the fact that these weren’t merely child soldiers. They were living science experiments, enhanced with chemicals and probably lobotomized, stitched together like something from Frankenstein’s laboratory. Whatever had made them human once, was now gone completely.

Somers felt a different kind of fury welling up inside him.

What the hell is this place?

He wanted to turn back, storm the compound and tear it down to its foundations. He wanted to find the monsters responsible for such atrocities and rip them limb from limb…but that wasn’t why he was here.

He was vaguely aware that he had lost his weapon in the battle. His radio set had also been torn away, leaving him deaf to the needs of the rest of the team. More of the… What should he even call them? ‘Frankensteins’ was the first thing that came to his mind… They were rushing up the road from the compound, but the majority of them were massing at the entrance to Building Two, where King and the others were pinned down.

He had to get to the van, join Zelda and then get the others out of the compound. The mission was his first priority, and right now his team needed him.

TWENTY-SEVEN

King’s satisfaction at disrupting the macabre surgery was short-lived. As he returned to the main hallway, he heard the low rumble of footsteps in the nearby stairwell, a sure sign that trouble was approaching. Then, even that sound was drowned out, as the roar of engines coming to life sent a tremor through the entire building.

Rainer was getting away, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

Suddenly, the door to the stairwell burst open, and human shapes began rushing through. King had his MP5 up and ready to meet the attack, as did Tremblay and Silent Bob, but for a moment, all three were too stunned by what they beheld to pull a trigger.

Christ, they’re just kids, King thought.

Except they weren’t. They might once have been innocent children, but not anymore. In the hallway lighting, he could clearly see what Somers had only been able to glimpse — the sprouting tubes, the surgical scars and mismatched limbs and muscles bulging from artificial growth hormones. The children they had once been were as dead as the young man whose organs had been callously harvested, and in their place there were only these monsters.

In an instant, they swarmed over Silent Bob, who stood nearest to the stairwell. He scrambled back at the last second, swinging his submachine gun like a club, but then he was gone, buried under a wave of bodies. The unmistakable violence brought King out of his horror, and he squeezed the trigger, hurling lead soundlessly into the onrushing mass of human flesh. Some of the monsters flinched as the bullets tore into them, but driven by steroids and raw primal fury, they did not slow. Before he could even think about changing his tactics, the leading edge of the wave crashed into him.

Suddenly, King was yanked backward. He struggled for a moment before realizing that it was Tremblay who had seized hold of him, dragging him into one of the rooms that opened off the hallway. The Delta operator slammed the door shut and braced it with his back. A moment later, the entire wall shook as the attacking mob began hammering against the barrier.

Tremblay grimaced. “Any bright ideas, boss man?”

“Working on it.” King gave the room a quick look. It contained a few desks and chairs, but nothing that seemed to offer a way of holding off the attackers, much less an escape route. The door shook again, and a long dark line appeared in the wood as it began splitting in two. The walls rattled with the relentless pounding, and then even floor began to shake.

Okay, we can’t stay here and we can’t get out… What does that leave?

The flimsy construction gave King an idea, and in a rush of inspiration, he tipped one of the desks over and slid it toward Tremblay, positioning it so the desktop was facing away from him.

“I don’t think that will hold them for very long,” Tremblay said.

“It’s not supposed to.” King dipped a hand into a pouch on his vest and brought out a green-gray spherical object identical to the one Rainer had used to effect his escape.

Tremblay’s eyes went wide. “Oh, you’re not.”

King’s only answer was to pull the safety pin on the grenade. “Better get down.”

As Tremblay slid to the floor, seeking cover behind the desk, the top of the door split completely apart. King tossed the grenade underhanded, so it arced through the room to drop near the far wall, and then he threw himself down next to Tremblay, likewise bracing the door. Grasping arms slipped through the gap above their heads, trying to force the opening wider. It seemed inevitable that they would succeed.

And then the world exploded.

The detonation unleashed a storm of kinetic energy in all directions, compressing the air into a wall as hard as steel, which expanded outward in a millisecond. The overpressure wave superheated the air in the small room, and would have vaporized everyone inside if the walls had been made of stiffer stuff. Because the building was little more than plywood on a stick-built frame, the side of the structure was blasted open, relieving some of the pressure. The shockwave picked up loose furniture and hurled it away from the blast center. The walls bulged outward, as if the room was a balloon being inflated by a breath from a giant. The broken door was blasted off its hinges, which not only hurled the attacking mob back, but also caused King and Tremblay to fall backward. This proved fortuitous, because it helped protect them from a deadly spray of steel fragments that surfed the leading edge of the blast wave. The nearly molten metal shredded everything it touched, including several of the monstrosities massed in the hallway beyond. The desk caught some of the fragments that would have ripped into the Delta operators, but even as it did, the cheap wood was smashed apart by the blast, and the two men were pummeled by the broken pieces.

Although they had done everything they could to prepare for the blast, their survival was as much a matter of luck as it was forethought, and it took them a few seconds to recover their wits. King rolled over to find Tremblay also shaking off the effects. The blond soldier mumbled something — probably one of his trademark one-liners — but King couldn’t hear anything except a loud and steady high-pitched tone inside his head. He gave Tremblay a thumbs-up, and when the other man returned it, he gestured toward the gaping hole where the wall had been. The two men crawled forward, skirting along the edge of a newly created opening in the floor, and lowered themselves into the compound.

For a few seconds, they had only the dead for company. Several bodies — many of them Asian men dressed like wannabe hip-hop performers with AK-47s clutched in their dead hands — lay scattered about the courtyard, felled by sniper fire. King realized that he and Tremblay were now probably in someone’s scope, but with his ears still ringing, there was no way to make contact.

He chose the shortest path back to the gate and motioned for Tremblay to follow, but before they had gone fifty feet, a glimpse of movement revealed one of the living atrocities prowling the compound. The thin figure — a patchwork that was equal parts teenage girl and professional wrestler — just stared at them for a moment, and then she tilted her head back and opened her mouth, as if she was trying to catch a raindrop on her tongue. King didn’t need his faculty of hearing to know that she was sounding the alarm. The silent scream lasted only a few seconds, after which the thing lurched toward them.

Suddenly, monstrosities were all around them. They did not charge this time, perhaps having learned wariness, but they circled like a pack of wolves. King slapped a fresh magazine into his MP5 and started firing. A few went down, but the 9-millimeter rounds seemed to be more of an irritant than anything else; the pack pulled back and began to move faster, orbiting the Delta shooters like a cyclone.

Try as they might, King and Tremblay could not watch every approach, and before long, the things attempted to attack from their blind spot. King spied movement and whirled to find one of the things dead on the ground just a few feet away; the snipers were still watching out for them. Another of the monsters went down in a spray of red as a high-velocity rifle round tore the top off its head, but for every one that fell, two more crept out of the shadows to join the circle.

Then, without any warning and for no discernible reason, the circle began to close. It was if some kind of critical mass had been achieved. King fired out a magazine, and two of the monsters stumbled forward and died at his feet, but the rest engulfed him. He swung the MP5 wildly like a club, but a dozen grasping hands wrapped around his arm, arresting any further movement. They grabbed his other arm, and then his legs. Then they began to pull in opposite directions.

King howled, more in frustration than in pain, though there was plenty of the latter. He felt his joints grinding in their sockets, his tendons stretching like rubber-bands pulled to the breaking point… They were going to pull him apart like a wishbone from a Thanksgiving turkey.

And then, just as quickly as they had seized him, the fury of the attack began to wane. King twisted free of his assailants’ hands, and scrambled away, flailing his arms in an attempt to drive back any other would-be attackers.

There weren’t any. The only people still standing were himself, Tremblay and the hulking form of Erik Somers.

In the stillness that followed, he became aware of the van, idling about a hundred feet away, Zelda Baker behind the wheel. The front end of the vehicle showed scratches and dents, presumably from having plowed through the gate leading into the compound, but King also noted streaks of red on the fenders and bits of fabric caught in radiator grill.

Somers’s face was uncharacteristically animated, and it took King a moment to realize that the big man was shouting at him.

If we make it out of this alive, everyone is learning sign language, King decided. Executive decision, number one.

He pointed to his ear and shook his head. Somers shouted even louder and began gesturing wildly toward the van. King could just make out a few words this time; it was faint, as if Somers was shouting into a pillow. “We need to get the hell out of here!”

Oh. Well, obviously.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Can this night get any worse? Zelda Baker thought to herself as King, Tremblay and Somers climbed into the van. King shouted for her to drive, a bit louder than necessary, she thought, but she chalked it up to adrenaline. Things clearly had not gone well inside Building Two, and it did not escape her notice that they were short one man. She didn’t ask. If Silent Bob wasn’t with King, it meant he wasn’t coming back. Period. Full stop. End of story.

Zelda stomped the accelerator and cranked the steering wheel around. The van’s tires threw gravel as it carved out a wide U-turn and headed back toward the gates — or more precisely, the gateposts, since she’d flattened the actual moving parts of the perimeter defense a few moments earlier.

She spied movement in the rearview mirror. The things Somers had taken to calling ‘frankensteins’ were regrouping and giving chase, but even at a full run, they couldn’t hope to keep up with the van. By the time the vehicle crested the hilltop, the frankensteins had vanished into the night.

She was just about to allow herself to breathe a little easier when the radio came alive. “King, this is Roadrunner.”

‘Roadrunner’ was the callsign for Bellows, the man that had been left back at the gate. If he was calling in, it couldn’t be good news.

King didn’t reply, and after another half a minute, the voice repeated, but again the only answer was silence. Zelda glanced sidelong at the man in the passenger’s seat. “You gonna take that call?”

He was staring straight ahead, but after a moment seemed to realize that she was addressing him. He turned and shook his head. “I can’t hear you!”

His shout was loud enough to make her wince, and she could tell from his excessive volume that he wasn’t kidding. She craned her head around and saw Tremblay and Somers both scanning the darkness, oblivious to the radio message or anything that had been said.

She keyed her transmitter. “Roadrunner, this is Legend. Send your traffic for King.”

“Legend, be advised that two five-ton trucks just rolled past me, headed your way. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re military.”

Before Zelda could respond, the distorted voice of the mysterious Deep Blue broke in. “That’s affirmative. I’m now monitoring their army radio net. Rainer must have tipped them off. They’ve dispatched a company of infantry soldiers to investigate.”

Christ. It never rains… In her mind’s eye, she saw the trucks with their big wheels rolling effortlessly over obstacles that had slowed the van to a near crawl. There were no other roads, no places to turn off and let them pass. If they stayed on the road, they would run headlong into the army trucks. She’d dealt with the Burmese military a few times in the course of her posting here, and she knew that if they were caught, the best they could hope for would be a swift death. The alternative was an indefinite stay in Myanmar’s infamous Insein prison — the name said it all — where they would be subjected to brutal tortures, or worse, turned into propaganda puppets.

She turned to King. “More trouble! The Burmese army is headed our way!”

He shook his head and spread his hands helplessly.

Wonderful. For a moment, she wondered how she was going to make him understand the situation; should she try writing it down for him? Did she even have paper to write on?

“Oh, screw this.” She stomped on the brake and threw the van into a three-point turn.

She heard the immediate protests from the others, but since there was no way to explain herself to them, she ignored their shouts. There were more important things to do.

“Nighteyes, this is Legend, do you read me?”

Shin’s voice came back, sounding both concerned and relieved. “Loud and clear, Legend. Are you turning back?”

“You know it. There’s no way out of here except on foot. If we ditch the van in the compound, the army might not even know we were here.”

A new voice cut in. “Negative, Legend. The place is crawling with hostiles.” It was Irish — the guy leading the sniper teams and King’s acting First Sergeant.

Zelda felt the hairs on the back of her neck bristling. Was he actually trying to give her orders? She swallowed down her rising anger and with all the coolness she could muster, replied: “I guess it’s a good thing you guys are looking out for us, because unless someone can find me an exit, we’re doing this my way.”

To her surprise, Deep Blue cut in. “Irish, Nighteyes… The road is closed. You need to provide cover for the rest of the team. Rendezvous in the woods and proceed to the second vehicle as Legend recommends.”

The vindication was cold comfort. The truth of it was that they were now caught between a rock and a hard place. Somers had successfully beat the frankensteins off twice now, but this time there wouldn’t be a moving vehicle to come to the team’s rescue.

In seemingly no time at all, she found herself at the hilltop, staring down into the compound.

“Stop here,” King said.

His comment surprised her, and when she looked over, she saw him nodding his head. “I caught some of what you said,” he confessed. “My hearing’s coming back a little bit. You made the right call. But I have an idea.”

She glanced down into the compound where the massed frankensteins had noticed their return and were starting to move toward the gate. “I’m listening, but make it quick.”

“Everybody out!” This time, King’s shout was intentional. He leaned toward Zelda, and in a less strident tone, he added: “Leave it in neutral.”

At last, Zelda understood. She straightened the wheel, shifted the gear selector to ‘N’ and then applied the parking brake before sliding out of the driver’s seat. When everyone was out, she released the brake, whereupon Somers gave the van a hearty push and sent it careening down the hill.

Many of the monstrosities leapt out of the way, but nearly a dozen of them decided to meet the charge head-on — wild dogs facing down a charging elephant. Broken bodies went flying in every direction. The multiple impacts caused the vehicle to veer slightly to the right, and as it reached the compound, the front bumper crashed into one of the gateposts with a crunch that reached their ears a moment later.

“I guess we’re not getting our deposit back,” Tremblay said.

TWENTY-NINE

Shin watched the van crash into the gateposts, and then he lowered his eye once more to the rifle’s scope. Human forms flitted across his field of view, moving past the crosshairs, but they never lingered in one place long enough for him to take a shot.

The men with the Kalashnikovs — the ‘gangstas’—had been the first priority targets. They were armed, and to all appearances, they had acted as the leadership element. They were the head of the serpent, as it were — for the larger body of unarmed slave soldiers. Taking the leaders out had been easy enough. Even when their comrades in arms had begun to fall, they had done what men in combat always do; they sought cover and started looking for a place to direct their answering fire.

Unfortunately, cutting the head off the snake had not killed the snake. Shin realized that he had misinterpreted the relationship between the triad officers and the slave force. They were not leaders or shepherds, marshaling a force of unwilling conscripts; they were the leash restraining a pack of wild animals, and now that they were gone, the beasts were running wild. Deprived of intelligent leadership, they simply reacted to anything that moved. Right now, their collective attention seemed to be focused on the small group escaping into the woods surrounding the compound.

There was nothing more for him to do. “Time to go,” he announced.

‘Race’ Banion, acknowledged with a nod and stowed his spotter’s scope in his backpack, as Shin broke down his rifle and prepared to move out.

True to his callsign, Banion sprinted ahead, and Shin, still nursing a sore ankle, had to push himself just to keep the man in sight. Worse, the Delta sniper wasn’t following their original route, staying on the high ground where the terrain was more solid and there was less foliage, but he chose a direct route, bushwacking through the woods. Shin gave up trying to dog the man’s footsteps, and kept to the longer but more familiar path he had used earlier.

The noise of the helicopter, which had been steadily powering up for several minutes, abruptly changed in timber and pitch as the aircraft lifted off the roof of Building Two, and for a moment, the deafening thump of its rotors beating the air overwhelmed all other sounds. Then, just as quickly, the sound began to diminish. Shin glanced skyward and saw the running lights of the helicopter moving away to the southwest.

Just before the din of the departing craft vanished altogether, Shin heard a rustling noise in the undergrowth, from the general direction Banion had gone. He stopped for a second, craning his head to locate the source of the noise, but the woods had already gone silent again.

“Race?” He spoke in a stage whisper. This far from the compound, there wasn’t a need for absolute stealth. He didn’t want to use the radio, preferring to keep the net open for communication with the rest of the team. “You out there?”

No reply.

He listened a few seconds longer, then he resumed his trek. In his night-vision display, he could see several glowing objects directly ahead, and he correctly guessed that they were infrared chem-lights Parker had deployed as a beacon to guide the disparate elements of the team to the rendezvous. A minute later, he saw Parker and ‘Dark’ Meyers, both in the prone firing position and facing in opposite directions.

Parker glanced up at him and then looked past him, searching the woods with his gaze. “Where’s Race?”

“He took a shortcut. I expected him to be here already.”

Parker frowned. “Damn it, doesn’t anybody pay attention to what I say?” He keyed his mic. “Race, this is Irish. Do you copy?”

There was no response.

Shin’s forehead creased in concern. It wasn’t impossible that Banion had gotten turned around in the dense undergrowth and wandered off in the wrong direction, but if he wasn’t responding to the radio, it portended something more dire. Shin thought about the injury he had suffered moving through the low areas in broad daylight; Banion could have similarly fallen and been knocked unconscious.

Parker repeated the message again, with no more success, then shook his head with a scowl. “King, this Irish. What’s your ETA?”

Zelda’s voice came over the radio. Her words were in short, clipped bursts, and Shin thought she might be running as she spoke. “This is Legend. King’s comms are out. Estimate five mikes to the rally point.”

“Roger, Legend. I have to go collect one of my wayward children. The rally point is marked with IR glowsticks, but we’ll try to be back and waiting for you.”

“Good copy, Irish. Legend out.”

Parker rose to his feet and faced Shin. “Do you remember where you lost him?”

Shin felt a twinge of irritation at the implication that he was somehow responsible for what had happened, but he let the misdirected criticism pass without comment. Instead, he simply waved for Parker and Meyers to follow.

He had no difficulty retracing his steps, but as he returned to the spot where he had been standing when the helicopter had taken off, he realized that he couldn’t recall exactly when he’d last seen Banion. He gestured down a gentle slope at the general area where he had heard the rustling noise.

Parker peered into the unlit shadows. “Race! You out there?” When there was no answer, he turned to the others. “Okay, spread out. We’ll walk a police line. Maybe we’ll trip over him.”

Shin moved to Parker’s left and placed himself about twenty feet away. Meyers moved to the other side. At a signal from Parker, they all started down the slope. After just a few steps, the tangle of vegetation broke up the orderliness of the effort, but Shin could still see Parker, and less distinctly, Meyers through the trees.

There was sudden thrashing in the foliage. Meyers let out a yelp and then simply vanished, as if a trapdoor in the forest floor had opened beneath him. A squeal of static and noise burst over the radio, followed by loud staccato cracks overhead — the sound, Shin realized suddenly, of bullets striking and breaking tree branches.

Parker, closer to the source, reacted first. He brought his MP5 around and moved toward the disturbance, shouting Meyer’s name.

“Watch it!” Shin called out, moving quickly but in a low crouch, just a few steps behind Parker. “He’s shooting wild!”

The random gunfire ceased. Shin reached Parker’s side a moment later, and even though he knew that something bad had happened, nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.

Meyers appeared to have fallen into a waist deep hole, but that alone could not account for his look of raw terror. He thrashed wildly, directing frantic blows into the hole as if trying to beat out flames.

Parker thrust a hand out. “Take it.”

Meyers looked up at him, his face twisted with both desperation and pain, but before he could reach out or do anything else, something moved beneath him, and he was gone, sucked completely into the dark void.

Meyers’s screams rose up from the opening, but then were abruptly silenced, replaced by a very different sound — the sound of bones crunching.

Parker pulled back involuntarily, but then he started forward, as if intending to go into the hole after Meyers. Shin hastily threw his arms around the other man to prevent him, because he had caught a glimpse of something moving inside the hole. Something that wasn’t Meyers…

Something that wasn’t human.

Then he saw more movement, not in the pit that had swallowed the Delta sniper, but in the undergrowth all around them. Shapes were squirming out from beneath the trees all around them…serpentine…reptilian…enormous.

Shin recalled the words of the old gatekeeper. “Buru… Nagas… Very dangerous.”

So this is what he was talking about.

THIRTY

As they moved, King tried to assess the team’s operational capability. The outlook was not good. Zelda had emerged unscathed — if bruised ribs could be considered unscathed — and she retained most of her gear, but she was the exception. In their respective scuffles with the frankensteins, he, Somers and Tremblay had either lost most of their equipment or it had been destroyed. They had a decent supply of ammunition in their vest pouches, but only two MP5s between them. Zelda had the only working radio and the only remaining night-vision device, which meant they all had to stay together or risk becoming hopelessly lost in the woods. To further complicate matters, the monstrosities were beating the bushes to pick up their trail.

The one piece of equipment King did still possess was his GPS unit, and he consulted it now to locate the rally point where Parker and the rest of the sniper team would be waiting. He focused on the dot in the backlit display that showed the direction of their destination. It was the only thing that mattered now.

The mission was a complete disaster; Rainer had slipped away, Sasha Therion was still a hostage, Silent Bob was almost certainly dead and it had all happened on his watch. Even worse, the night wasn’t over yet; there was still a lot that could go wrong.

King’s hearing had returned sufficiently that he could now hear the hooting of the frankensteins behind them and the snap of tree branches breaking from their passage. They were close, and even arrival at the rally point would not necessarily guarantee safety. Speed alone would save them, speed in reaching the rendezvous and speed in getting through the woods to the waiting vehicle.

They moved together in a tight knot, with Zelda leading the way and everyone else lined up behind her, close enough to maintain physical contact. In the darkness, it was the only way to keep from being separated.

He heard her voice and realized she was getting radio traffic. After a few seconds, she looked over her shoulder and relayed the message that Parker had just sent.

“Are they under attack?”

“I don’t think so,” Zelda breathed. “Sounds like someone got lost.”

Damn, King thought. More problems. “Just get us there.” He pointed in the direction indicated by the GPS. “That way, about five hundred meters.”

“It’s overgrown. Shin said he was able to move faster on the high ground.”

A blistering retort rose to King’s lips, but he bit it back. She was right, of course. Trying to blaze a trail, in the dark no less, was an exercise in futility. “You pick the route, and I’ll keep us moving in the right general direction,” he said. “But if we get lost, you have to promise not to blame the officer.”

Zelda actually laughed. “Deal. This way.”

She guided them up a hill where they could see the compound. The place looked completely deserted. A glow appeared in the distance, in the direction of the road, and then it abruptly rose like a tiny sun over the crest of the hill. It was the headlights of a Burmese army truck. A second pair of lights followed right behind it. As the truck charged down the hill, a few of the abominations stirred from their refuge in the shadows, and went out to meet the arriving forces. With a little luck, King thought, the Burmese would be so occupied with the frankensteins, they wouldn’t even realize that his team had been there. He wanted to watch the chaos unfold, but a bestial hooting sound from behind them, answered by several more similar cries from all around, reminded him that most of the monstrosities were already in the woods and hunting him.

Another two hundred meters brought them to the place marked on his GPS as the rally point. Zelda picked up a plastic chem-light tube, which gave off light only in a spectrum visible through her night vision device, and confirmed that they had arrived.

“Those things are everywhere,” Tremblay remarked without his customary humor. “We can’t stay here.”

King was about to agree when another cry tore through the night, only to be silenced as abruptly as the fall of a guillotine blade.

Zelda immediately keyed her mic. “Irish, come in.” She listened for only a moment before raising her head to the other. “They’re in trouble.”

“Where?”

Zelda asked the question of Parker at the same moment King asked her, and when the reply came, she didn’t bother to put it into words, but broke into a run, heading northwest.

Though Zelda had only been given a rough approximation of where Parker, Shin and the others were, the noise of a disturbance in the underbrush, growing louder as they moved, brought them to the spine of a low ridge. In the darkness, King could barely make out two human shapes struggling to climb the slope below. He started down to assist them, but Zelda snagged the back of his shirt.

“Wait!”

It wasn’t her grasping hand or her admonition that stopped him, but rather her tone; she didn’t sound frightened exactly — King didn’t think anything could frighten Zelda Baker — but she was definitely rattled.

“There’s something down there.”

“What?”

“I–I can’t tell.”

The men on the slope were definitely fending off some kind of attack, alternately shooting into the darkness below their feet and trying to advance up the incline.

“You’ll have to give me a better answer than that.” King started to pulled free, but Somers was faster.

Moving with a speed and agility that seemed unnatural in someone so big, he charged down to the other men and grasped one with each hand, heaving them bodily halfway up the hill. It was the boost the beleaguered Delta operators needed. Bounding to their feet, the two men — Parker and Shin — scrambled up to join the others.

Somers started to follow, but he had time only to turn around before something snatched his feet from under him. The big man toppled like a tree, crashing heavily to the ground. He was whisked away into the underbrush.

THIRTY-ONE

Somers felt as though his left foot had been caught in a bear trap. Only the heavy leather uppers of his combat boots had prevented the vise-like jaws from snapping his ankle.

Jaws — yes, he’d been grabbed by something with jaws and teeth. It was an animal of some kind, impossible to identify, but low to the ground like a crocodile or alligator. The beast was dragging him back, into the thicket where, presumably it would do more than just nip his ankle.

Not today you won’t.

Somers drove the heel of his free right foot into the ground and tried to wrench his trapped left foot loose. He was only partly successful. The creature didn’t let go, but his mighty heave overcame the power of its retreat, and for a moment the beast was lofted into the air, still clinging to his foot. Somers caught just a glimpse of a thick, torpedo-shaped body with stubby legs paddling at the air and a long thrashing tail before his leg and the attached animal crashed back to the ground.

His earlier comparison to an alligator wasn’t far off the mark. He judged it to be some kind of crocodilian reptile, easily twelve feet long from tip to tail.

The impact accomplished what Somers’s initial display of strength could not. He felt the pressure around his ankle vanish; he was free. But he did not scramble back to the relative safety of the ridgetop. Instead, he twisted around and dove down the hill, probing with his hands until his fingers felt the rough, scaly skin of the thing that had attacked him. The creature wasn’t moving, stunned perhaps, but Somers wasn’t going to take any chances. He wrapped his arms around the thick body and wrestled it out into the open.

As soon as he lifted it off the ground, it began thrashing like a live wire, slamming its tail into the ground with such force that Somers nearly toppled over.

Nearly…but not quite.

When he had charged into the fray, he had released the cork on the bottle of his primal anger. There was no turning back. Driven by an inner fire that the ancients had once called berserkergang, Somers just squeezed even harder.

He felt his arms start to burn with the build-up of lactic acid. He was hugging the beast against his chest so tightly that he couldn’t even draw breath. The creature’s thrashing seemed to build to a feverish climax, and then, with a hideous cracking sound, its bones snapped and its torso deflated like an empty balloon. Somers held on through its death throes, but when he was certain of his victory, he heaved the carcass into the bushes from where it had originated.

The reptilian body landed with a crash amid a rustling of broken vegetation, but Somers’s victory was short lived. A cold sliver of doubt insinuated itself into his battle-rage as he saw three more shapes dart out from the thicket to avenge their fallen brother.

Oh, he thought. Shit.

He backpedaled, but the things moved like dark lightning across the open ground. Then, seemingly without reason, the nearest of the things began to jerk spasmodically. Its tail swept out, knocking one of the remaining animals off course, sending it tumbling back down the slope. The third creature seized the advantage and hastened forward, only to suffer the same fate as the first.

Something had killed these two scaly behemoths.

He glanced up the hill and saw the silhouettes of the rest of the team — five in all — including a short man standing next to Zelda, aiming a large rifle into the thicket.

Somers felt the tide of his fury start to wane. “Good shooting,” he said, his voice a low rumble that might not have even been audible from where the team now stood.

“Just returning the favor,” replied the man with the gun. “It was the least—”

The rest of his words were lost as the din of automatic rifle fire erupted in the distance. The Burmese troops had engaged the frankensteins in the compound. Almost simultaneously, several dark shapes appeared on the ridge line and charged the team’s position.

THIRTY-TWO

Zelda wheeled and unleashed a burst from her MP5 that nearly tore the head off the frankenstein leading the charge. Parker also fired into the horde, but his shots were less precise, only wounding the attackers.

Unable to clearly see the abominations, King and Tremblay could do little more than step back and let the others carry the fight, but in an instant, two of the monstrosities broke through and closed with them.

King drew his only remaining weapon, a razor sharp KA-BAR combat knife, and thrust it forward. The frankenstein impaled itself on the blade, but its momentum knocked King back, and both tumbled down the hill. Somers bounded forward, arresting King’s fall and hurling the frankenstein into the underbrush that concealed the reptilian creatures’ nest.

Tremblay faced the remaining foe, but as it reached for him, he deftly stepped aside, grasping its ragged shirt as it passed, and redirected its momentum to send it crashing headlong into a tree trunk.

Just like that, the skirmish was over, but the threat was far from past. King recovered his footing and hastened back up the hill.

“We’re out of here,” he rasped. “Buddy up, everyone. Nighteyes, you know the way. Eastwood, stay with him. Juggernaut, you’re with Legend. Danno, you lead me.”

They moved out without further discussion, running — at least to the extent their various injuries made that possible — where the terrain would allow. For King, Tremblay and Somers, the journey was surreal; a game of blind man’s bluff, requiring absolute trust in their guides, who not only had the ability to see in the near total darkness, but could also talk to each other and to the distant Deep Blue.

The long silence was too much for Tremblay. “What the hell were those things? They looked like alligators.”

He had hoped the mostly rhetorical question would ease the tension with a little soldierly commiseration, and the only soldier within earshot was someone with whom he was particularly interested in commiserating.

“Shin says the locals call them buru.”

Zelda’s answer indicated that she had already asked the same question and received an answer. While informative, it wasn’t quite the banter for which Tremblay had been hoping. “You mean he knew about them? Nice of him to share.”

She didn’t respond, and he decided to let it drop. Being attacked by some kind of weird mountain crocodile wasn’t the craziest thing that had happened tonight. As he mentally ticked off the litany of horrors they had witnessed and the sacrifices that had been made, the fact of Silent Bob’s death finally sank in. The realization led to another: he was now the last surviving member of Alpha team.

Damn.

After that, Tremblay wasn’t much in the mood for bantering, even with the lovely Zelda Baker.

THIRTY-THREE

General Keasling was waiting for them at the safe-house. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, saying nothing as the thoroughly dispirited Delta operators filed into the room and collapsed wearily onto the floor.

Ten had gone out. Only seven had come back.

They had reached the van after a harrowing hour-long cross-country trek. On three different occasions, they had encountered buru—the crocodilian species was evidently a nocturnal predator — waiting in ambush along their chosen route, but in each case, Shin spotted them in time to avoid a repeat of the earlier battle. The frankensteins had dogged their steps relentlessly for the first half-hour, but after that, the noise of pursuit had dwindled. When they finally reached the rented van, they climbed inside with barely a word exchanged among themselves. Zelda had handed her radio over to King, who promptly informed Deep Blue that they had reached the extraction point. He hadn’t added that the mission was a complete failure; that was self-evident.

They picked up Casey Bellows on the return trip. Despite the fact that his role in the night’s disastrous events had been peripheral, he shared their sense of defeat. Now, back in the relative safety of the Mandalay op center, there seemed little left to do but lick their wounds.

Keasling continued to survey the team with a stern look, then turned on his heel and scooted a large blue Igloo cooler into the center of the room. He threw back the lid to reveal several brown glass bottles sloshing about in a bath of ice cubes.

As if by unanimous accord, the members of the team stared at the offering like it was a crate full of spent nuclear fuel rods.

Tremblay finally edged forward and picked up one of the bottles. “Samuel Adams Boston Lager. General, I could…” He stopped in mid-quip, as if recognizing that this most definitely wasn’t the time or the place, and instead he commenced distributing the beers. When he had completed that task, he raised his bottle. “To missing friends.”

Everyone raised their drinks to the toast, but when they finally began to imbibe, it was perfunctory. King just stared at the bottle and shook his head. He raised his eyes to Keasling. “Sir, I’d like a word with you and Deep Blue…in private, please.”

Keasling regarded him thoughtfully, as if divining King’s intent. “Want to call it quits, son?”

“I blew it, sir. Three men are dead, and nothing to show for it.”

“The fact that you made it out of there is a testament to your abilities.” He gestured around the room. “That goes for all of you. So you got your asses handed to you; shit happens. The important thing is that you took the fight to the enemy, and he’s the one that ran. You were ordered to run him down, and that’s what you’ve got to do.”

King remained unconvinced. “So, we’re just going to watch and see where he lands next, and then go charging into another little shop of horrors? Do we just keep doing that until we finally run out of bodies to throw at him?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

Parker spoke up unexpectedly. “Jack, it’s not just about beating him or getting payback. He’s got Sasha. As long as she’s alive, we have to keep trying.”

King looked like he was about to throw up his hands, but instead he just rubbed the bridge of his nose as if trying to massage away a headache. “Kevin told me something back there; he talked about a paycheck. He’s just the hired muscle. We need to know who’s writing that check and why they need Sasha. Maybe if we can figure that out, we can get ahead of him. That’s the only way we’re going to win this.”

There was a loud pop as Zelda smacked a hand against her thigh. She shrugged out of her backpack and rooted in it until she produced a laptop computer. “I completely forgot about this. I grabbed it from the room where we ran into Rainer. She was working on it when we walked in.”

Parker reached out for it, and after a nod from King, Zelda surrendered it. Parker opened the computer and hit the power button, but a moment later he let out a frustrated sigh. “Password protected.”

“If anyone can figure it out,” King said, “it’s you, Danno.”

Parker however wasn’t quite as enthusiastic. “Sasha Therion is a mathematical genius and a professional cryptographer. I think her password is going to be a little more complicated than the name of her pet goldfish.”

“Is there another way to get around it?”

Parker stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Well, Lew taught me a few tricks… He’s the guy you really want working on this.”

“Done,” declared Keasling. “It just so happens that Staff Sergeant Aleman has been assigned to the headquarters element of our new team. You should be able to link up with him using the equipment here.”

“Crack that nut, Danno.” King’s expression was no longer that of a defeated commander ready to tender his resignation or fall on his sword. Whether it was Keasling’s exhortation or Zelda’s revelation, he had a little of his fighting spirit back. “Figure out what that bastard wants, and where he’s going to go next, and just maybe, we’ll be able to get her back.”

THIRTY-FOUR

The password turned out to be child’s play, relatively speaking anyway. Sasha’s user settings were protected by factory-standard security software, which was not in itself unsophisticated. There was no way around the password lock without reformatting the hard drive and overwriting the disk’s contents, and the password options were virtually unlimited, but it had one weakness that Lewis Aleman was able to exploit, and in short order, he opened Sasha’s computer like it was Pandora’s Box. That weakness was that there was no limit to the number of attempts that could be made to enter the correct password.

Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have mattered. Even with unlimited guesses, it might take a lifetime to physically enter all the possible combinations. A skilled hacker might be able to accomplish the same task in a matter of days instead of decades, but it would nevertheless be a daunting task even for the fastest commercially available computers.

Deep Blue had given Aleman access to something even better: the National Security Agency’s XT3 Red Storm supercomputer.

The most time-consuming part of the process involved creating a virtual clone of Sasha’s computer inside the NSA’s system, a procedure that was limited by the download speed of the satellite Internet connection at the safe-house. The cloned version eliminated the laborious chore of manually entering all possible password permutations, or waiting for the laptop’s comparatively ponderous Intel Core processor to run the security subroutine.

It took all of three minutes.

Trying to make sense of the contents of the computer took slightly longer; about half an hour altogether.

“It really is about trying to decode the Voynich manuscript,” Parker announced after scanning the most recently created document files.

King, exhausted and sporting a veritably mummy’s wrap of bandages over cuts and abrasions too numerous to count, didn’t look particularly impressed. “Alright, Danno, you’ve been talking about this manuscript for a couple days now. What is it?”

Parker took a breath and affected his best professorial manner. “In 1912, a rare book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich came across a very unique book in a church in Italy. It was an antique, hand written on parchment and illustrated with full color paintings. That was pretty common for books from the Middle Ages, before the invention of the printing press, but what made this book really special was the fact that it was written in cipher text.”

“Symbols instead of letters? Like the page we supposedly found in Ramadi?”

“Right. At a glance, you might think it’s just another language or a different alphabet, but the symbols in the manuscript have never appeared anywhere else. Even so, there are ways to break a cipher, and usually the longer the message, the easier it is to crack. All you have to do is figure out which characters appear most frequently, and then compare them to the letters of the alphabet that are most often used, and you’re on your way to breaking the cipher.”

“Just like Wheel of Fortune; you start with RNLST and E. But what if it’s not written in English?”

Parker shook his head. “That’s not as important as it might seem. But in the case of the Voynich manuscript, professional and amateur code breakers from all over Europe have been trying to crack it for nearly a hundred years. The fact that no one has succeeded has led many to believe that it’s a fake — a randomly generated message, created by a medieval con man.”

King frowned. “Okay, for argument’s sake, let’s say that it’s real. What difference does it make? What are we talking here: lost books of the Bible? Templar treasure maps, or something else? What makes this thing so damned important? What makes it worth killing for?”

Parker took a deep breath. “Remember how I said the manuscript was illustrated? It’s full of detailed drawings, mostly of plants, but other things too, like star charts and animals. The popular theory is that it was a book of herbal or alchemical lore. That would explain why it was coded in the first place; it’s a book of secret recipes, and who ever wrote it didn’t want those recipes falling into the wrong hands.”

King nodded slowly. “Secret recipes. Like the formula for some kind of nerve agent?”

“Or worse.” Parker turned the computer around so that King could see the file he had been looking at. The screen displayed a picture of a badly damaged wooden box with several levers sticking out from the sides. “This was found in a crypt in China. It has markings that are identical to the cipher used in the manuscript. The crypt where they found this thing was hot with a strain of plague bacteria. In fact, the place where they found it might have been ground zero for the Black Death back in the fourteenth century.”

“Okay, now you have my attention.” King pointed at the image. “What is it?”

“It’s a musical instrument, similar to an organ. The code isn’t cipher text. It’s musical notation. That’s why no one has been able to crack it. The letters don’t correspond to any alphabet; they’re musical notes.”

King just stared at him.

“Sasha figured it all out…well, almost. She couldn’t verify any of her historic suppositions because they wouldn’t let her have outside Internet access, but it all checks out.”

Parker tapped the screen again. “This is what started it all. Some kind of primitive pipe organ, found in the crypt of a Chinese general who led the Mongol armies that destroyed Baghdad in 1258; it was a war trophy taken from the House of Wisdom.”

“That was almost a hundred years before the Black Death,” King pointed out. “How could they be connected?”

“Maybe they’re not, but somebody obviously thinks they are. That’s why they want Sasha to decode the manuscript.”

King still didn’t appear convinced. “Back up. You said it’s musical notation. What did you mean by that?”

“Think of it as another layer of code. Each symbol corresponds to a specific musical note — we even use letters to symbolize those, A to G — so music is a form of language. The Voynich notation is obviously more complex, but that could be the difference between octaves or semitones — sharps and flats. I don’t understand it all, but Sasha did. She was in the process of trying to create a virtual copy of the organ when you showed up tonight.”

“Would that have worked?”

“The original was badly damaged. There wasn’t enough of it left to even begin guessing how the symbols and notes corresponded. But Sasha was researching someone named Nasir al-Tusi, a Persian scientist and an advisor to the Mongol ruler. Al-Tusi was the Leonardo Da Vinci of the Islamic world. No, scratch that… He was more like Leonardo and Galileo and Isaac Newton all rolled into one. Based on what Sasha turned up, he’s a good candidate for having been involved in the creation of the manuscript. He was also present at the destruction of Baghdad, and he even managed to save some of the documents from the House of Wisdom. Sasha wanted access to al-Tusi’s writings, to see if the plans for the organ were there somewhere, but she never got a chance.”

King considered this for a moment. “Those documents he saved; where did they go?”

“A place called Maragheh. It was an astronomical observatory, and after the destruction of Baghdad, the last bastion of science and learning in the Islamic world.”

“I don’t suppose it’s still around today?”

“Yes and no. It’s currently undergoing restoration.” Parker clicked a few keys and the picture on the display changed to show an enormous white geodesic dome. “Everything in Sasha’s notes indicates that she expected to find a copy of the plans for the organ in the archives of the Maragheh Observatory. There are thousands of documents there, but hardly any of them have been preserved digitally.”

“So, the only way to get the specs for the organ is to physically visit this observatory.” It was more a statement than a question, but King’s next inquiry wasn’t rhetorical. “The organ is the only way to decode the manuscript?”

Parker nodded.

King’s lips curled into a smile that was both grim and satisfied. “Rainer will have to go to Maragheh. And we’ll be waiting for him.”

“Jack, there’s a problem. Maragheh…”

“Yeah?”

“It’s in Iran.”

King blinked at him. “Oh. I guess that is a problem.”

THIRTY-FIVE

When he finally found a map that showed Maragheh, King’s first thought was that it wasn’t as bad as he’d first thought. The ruins of the ancient astronomical observatory were located in the remote northwestern part of Iran, only about a hundred miles from the borders with Iraq and Turkey, and at least four hundred miles from Tehran.

When he’d showed Keasling, the general had just rubbed his forehead as if the news had given him a migraine. “God damned Iran,” he muttered. “Well, it’s not my call. You’ll have to take it up with your new boss.”

Deep Blue received the news with no discernible reaction whatsoever; one of the advantages to being little more than a disembodied voice was that you could always just hit the ‘mute’ button if you didn’t feel like letting the person at the other end of the line know just how pissed off you were. After a longer than expected pause, Deep Blue said simply: “What do you need?”

King explained his plan for the team to execute a High Altitude, High Opening (HAHO) jump. Unlike the High Altitude, Low Opening jump that Tremblay and Alpha team had used to get on the ground fast by free-falling most of the way and opening the parachutes at almost literally the last second, at HAHO jump required a paratrooper to deploy his chute at around 25,000 feet, and then glide the chute to a drop zone as far as thirty miles away.

“That will get you in unnoticed,” Deep Blue replied, “but you’ll still be a good fifty miles from the objective. Let me see if I can’t come up with a better alternative.”

The mysterious handler didn’t give any details, but directed them to proceed immediately to the airport, where Keasling’s plane would bear them to their next, as yet unrevealed destination. With that, Zelda and Shin packed up what few personal belongings they had accumulated during their time in Mandalay, and buttoned up the safe-house. Forty minutes later, they were in the air, and four hours thereafter, they were on the ground at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan.

A five-ton military transport truck, driven by a pair of US Air Force enlisted personnel, rolled out to meet them on the tarmac. Bagram was a primary entry point for Afghanistan, and over the course of his military career, King had spent more than a few days cooling his heels in transitional housing there while waiting for a connecting flight or ground transport to some remote FOB. This time however, they didn’t leave the flight line. Instead, the truck delivered them to one of several non-descript semi-cylindrical hangar buildings along the perimeter of the airstrip; the only noticeable difference about this particular structure was the fact that it was shrouded in darkness.

With only the beams of the airmen’s flashlights to guide them, they were escorted into the Quonset-hut style hangar and up the boarding ramp of a large aircraft. King suspected it was some kind of stealth plane, but its interior looked more like a cargo transport. When they were all aboard, the ramp closed and the interior space became filled with an escalating whine as the aircraft’s engines started powering up.

As if to answer the question King knew better than to ask, Keasling gestured airily about the hold. “I know I don’t need to tell any of you that you were never aboard this plane. Officially, it doesn’t exist.”

“And unofficially?” asked Zelda, beating everyone else to the punch.

“Unofficially… Welcome aboard the CR-41 SR, stealth reconnaissance and transport aircraft, code named ‘Senior Citizen.’”

Tremblay snorted disdainfully.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” the general said, without missing a beat. “Once we’re aloft, we’ll be flying at Mach 2—which should put you at the drop zone in a little less than two hours. That’s how long you’ve got to get ready. Oh, and King…got some Christmas presents for you.”

Keasling gestured to a stack of large plastic containers that were secured to the deck with heavy nylon straps. King immediately went about loosening the straps so he could remove the lids. Inside the containers, nestled in hollows cut from protective foam, was all the equipment they would need for their mission, but this wasn’t just the replacement gear he’d asked Deep Blue to provide. The box held the newest, most cutting-edge — and most expensive — military hardware available.

One box held five sets of AN/PSQ-20 infrared/thermal night-vision devices, ASIP satellite radio sets with earbuds and lip mics and two ruggedized laptop computers. Another contained a bulky olive drab pack, labeled with stenciled letters that read: ‘STARS.’

King was impressed with that. Deep Blue had actually signed off on his crazy plan.

A third was opened to reveal five XM8 carbines equipped with custom sound suppressors — one was also outfitted with an XM320 grenade launcher, and King passed it to Somers, who inspected the weapon almost reverently.

Beneath the top layer of foam lay dozens of plastic box magazines. These were already loaded with 5.56 rounds for the XM8s. There were also several ammunition cans containing grenades and other ordnance. King picked out a cardboard box that was not rendered in bland military olive green, like the others, and he handed it over to Tremblay.

For a moment, Tremblay stared at it uncomprehendingly, but then his eyes lit up as he deciphered the strange code printed on the label: .50 AE. “Oh, Santa,” he crooned. “Stan was a very good boy.”

As if transported to heaven, the blond Delta operator sank into one of the jump seats, took out his Desert Eagle pistols, and began pushing rounds into the empty magazines.

The normally quiet Shin watched him for a moment, and then with a grin said: “You’ll shoot your eye out.”

Tremblay threw him a one-fingered salute.

King indulged in the laughter that followed, but only for a few seconds. He wasn’t looking forward to his next task. “Danno, Casey…a word in private.”

He could see in their faces that they’d already done the math; seven Delta shooters, but only five sets of gear. Bellows’s expression momentarily creased in disappointment, but then just as quickly transformed into a poorly disguised mixture of guilt and relief. Parker’s eyes however, flashed dark with rage. Keasling seemed to sense that an eruption was building and stepped over to join the men, but he did not speak; this was King’s show now.

No point in sugar coating it, King thought. Just tear the band-aid off. “You guys are staying in the rear on this one.”

Parker, who was incapable of concealing his emotional state, trembled visibly with the effort of holding back an explosion of anger. In a tight voice, the words scraping past the knot in his throat, he said, “May I ask why, sir?” The last utterance was filled with palpable contempt.

King regarded his friend coolly for a moment, but then he turned to Bellows. “Casey…”

“No need to spell it out boss. There’s always gonna be bad guys that need killin’ but I’ll only get this one chance to hug my kid.”

He offered his hand, and King took it. “It was an honor serving with you, soldier. Now, make us all proud and do something really important: change some diapers, and shit like that.”

The joke lightened the mood, but only until Bellows moved off to rejoin the others, who were now making a conspicuous effort to look busy by taking inventory of the new equipment. When he was gone, Parker wheeled on King. “What the fuck, Jack? You wouldn’t even have this lead if not for me…and now you’re leaving me behind?”

“Danno, that’s exactly why I have to keep you back.”

Parker blinked, uncomprehending.

“There’s too much that we don’t know, like what Rainer plans to do with the manuscript once he’s decoded it. The only way to get a step ahead of him is to figure out a way to translate the manuscript first. That computer we recovered contains everything we know about the Voynich manuscript, how to read it and what it can be used for. And you’re the only person who can make any sense of it.”

“Sasha can.” As soon as he said it, something seemed to click in Parker’s head. “God…you’re going to kill her, aren’t you? That’s why you won’t take me.”

“At ease, soldier,” barked Keasling.

Parker stiffened, but his ire was approaching full boil.

King wasn’t sure what tone to take with his friend; he’d never seen the man so spun up before. Parker continued to glower at him, breathing rapidly. “You don’t need to leave me behind. In fact, you need me with you.”

King shook his head. “No. If everything goes to hell — and lately, that seems to be happening a lot, I don’t want that computer falling into the wrong hands. I need it, and you, to stay somewhere safe.”

“Someone else can—”

“There is no one else. Just you.” He gripped Parker’s shoulder. “Dan, I’m going to do everything in my power to bring her back safe.”

King could tell by the subtle shift in his friend’s demeanor that he had chosen the right pressure point. There was more to Parker’s outburst than his schoolboy crush on the stand-offish cryptanalyst, but it was certainly a factor. And that, perhaps more than anything else, was why King didn’t want his friend in the field on this mission.

Because if it came down to it, and there was no other alternative, King absolutely would kill Sasha Therion.

He let the matter drop, sensing that further discussion would only rub salt in the wound. Instead, he moved back to the others. They had almost completely pilfered the contents of the containers, and now they were all settling into their jump seats in preparation for take-off. King braced himself against a bulkhead as the aircraft lurched into motion, beginning its short taxi to the runway.

“If I can get your attention please,” he said to the others. “We’re going to skip the standard pre-flight briefing—”

“Good,” chortled Tremblay. “I think we all know that our seat cushions will do fuck-all in the event of a water landing.”

King nodded, but kept talking. “I do have a couple of administrative announcements that might be of interest to you. As you know, in about ninety minutes, we’ll be invading a sovereign nation — one that would very much like to tangle with us, if only to show the rest of the world that they’ve got the balls for it. If all goes as planned, we’ll do what we need to do and beat feet out of there without anyone being the wiser. But you all know how quickly things can go FUBAR, so we need to be ready for anything.

“Each of you should now have an AN-M14 TH3 incendiary grenade. You have this for one reason only. If you are killed in action, one of your teammates will use it to cremate your remains and completely destroy all your equipment. There can be no evidence whatsoever connecting us and what we are about to do, with the government of the United States of America. Is that clear?”

There was a scattering of somber nods.

“If you are about to be overrun or captured, you will use your incendiary device to ensure that no evidence remains. Do I need to repeat that?”

He didn’t.

“One last thing. We all kind of got thrown together without any preparation; it sucks, I know, but we’re all professionals. The only constant is change, and you either roll with it or get rolled over. Here’s the latest order.” He made a purposeful decision not to look at Parker. “We have a new team designation, and each of you will have a new operational callsign. Tremblay, you will be called ‘Rook.’ Shin, you are now ‘Knight.’ Somers, henceforth, you will be ‘Bishop.’ Baker, you’re ‘Queen.’ I will continue to use the callsign: ‘King.’ And just in case it’s not already clear — Tremblay, pay attention, this is for you — those are all chess pieces.

“Kids, we are now the Chess Team.”