As we were flying no more than a quarter mile off the deck, I looked at Mahegan. He had ripped his cold weather gear off his torso and was pulling a T-shirt over his head. His barbed-wire tattoo that encircled his right biceps expanded as he maneuvered the shirt. It sat just below the tattooed word TEAMMATES as if he were protecting them with the barbed wire and his massive strength. On his left shoulder was a grotesque eight-inch scar beneath his black-and-gold Ranger tab tattoo.

  I had selected Jake to accompany me on this mission for several reasons. First, he was the biggest guy we had other than Zion Black, who was injured, but recovering. Second, he grew up swimming the vicious currents of the Outer Banks, and we would be operating next to the Atlantic Ocean. Third, I trusted him as much as I did Hobart and Van Dreeves. And, finally, like me, he knew he was expendable. We all are expendable to a certain degree, but Mahegan and I were kindred spirits in that regard and always had been. I didn’t want any harm to come to any of us, but he and I could in good conscience give everything we have to defend the people we love. As the Croatan saying went, it was better to die a warrior than grow old.

  Teammates.

  It was right there on his arm. It was all that mattered.

  He lay on the floor of the airplane, rolled a couple of shirts beneath his head, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. The two most basic rules of being a Special Operations soldier were: sleep when you can and eat when you can.

  I looked at West, whom I had selected for one reason: he could fly anything that had wings. He nodded at me and then leaned back against a pallet of ammunition and went to sleep.

  I laid on the red webbing of the seats along the inside of the aircraft and fell asleep myself. My mind quickly spiraled into blackness.

  I awoke hours later, and Mahegan was doing push-ups on the floor of the airplane while West watched and shook his head. “You army guys,” he muttered.

  I rolled off the webbing and did some stretching. Feeling guilty, I popped out a few push-ups and sit-ups, feeling more tired than I should have. The reality was that the continuous operations often precluded military or physical training and sometimes those skills atrophied.

  “Thirty minutes, boss,” Mahegan said. He sat with his arms wrapped around his knees as he rotated his neck.

  West said, “Roger. Refuel, change crews, and keep going.”

  The pilots landed in the early morning hours at a private airfield at the old Dare County Bombing Range in the Outer Banks. Ten years ago, Mahegan had run into some ghost prisoners from Afghanistan there and gotten into a few fights over some found gold and devilish plans to attack the Hampton Roads military complex in Virginia. He had stopped all that from happening. We refueled there using some of X-Ray’s classified fixed-based operator guys and kept going.

  We stopped in Dare County because it gave us another chance to assess the intelligence. Misha confirmed that Drewson was meeting Blanc in France at the Carentan-les-Marais facility, where they would continue their collusion to steal my inheritance and use it to destroy all I had worked to protect over the years. The Global TransPark in Kinston, North Carolina, was most likely a sister facility for Blanc, who perhaps had used Drewson’s US citizenship as a bargaining chip with the bureaucrats. Having two facilities would give them the flexibility to avoid the scrutiny of the US and French law enforcement communities as he built out his global security state, which included China, Russia, and Iran. They would all have visibility into Blanc’s operations with little enforcement from the United States, ensuring they had access to the most sensitive technologies in the country.

  A weaker America made for a stronger Phalanx Corporation.

  West had coordinated with Maximillian and the Black Site X-Ray team to provide us two refueling locations, one in North Carolina and one in Norfolk County, England. Maximillian had assured us that his contact in England was not connected to the Sharpstone traitors and had the right kit we needed to execute our mission. As planned, the World Atlantic team shifted crews, all of whom were sworn to secrecy and none of whom said a word that would betray the plan.

  We rested, exercised, and planned some more as we flew the remaining leg into England. Traveling nine time zones, we had already burned twenty-four hours of our predicted forty-eight strategic surprise window. Knowing Drewson, he would have teams working overtime to confirm our deaths in the tunnel. The pilots landed at Coltishall Airfield, a former World War II landing strip in moderate use today. We taxied into a nondescript hangar and parked next to a Casa 212 Aviocar aircraft that had its ramp down showing crates of ammo, guns, food, water, and other necessary supplies. Two freefall parachutes and two rucksacks were positioned next to the gear. Maximillian, West, and Van Dreeves had coordinated the logistics well, it seemed.

  A tall man wearing an olive sweater and gray pants over Doc Martens boots introduced himself as James Bond, which I presumed wasn’t his actual name, but matched the name we had been told to expect. Bond showed us to our gear and then to a small indoor shooting range at the opposite side of the hangar. This was obviously an SAS facility.

  Mahegan and I inspected our gear and shot the weapons in the narrow shooting alley. An ultra-compact individual weapon (UCIW), which was a stubby version of the M4 used by the SAS, and SIG Sauer P226 for each of us with plenty of ammunition. We also had Blackhawk knives attached by Velcro to our outer tactical vests. We used Misha’s satellite maps to rehearse several permutations of what we intended to do and what might happen, all the while using phones provided by West and the X-Ray team to speak with Misha, Hobart, and Van Dreeves, who were digging through intelligence on their side of the operation at Black Site X-Ray. Misha told me that Blanc had departed in his Dassault private jet from Teterboro, New Jersey, six hours ago and was headed “home” to the Normandy peninsula.

  Misha’s intercept of his call to Drewson had been a cryptic, “Je vais voir ma mère. Elle aimerait vous voir.” I’m going to see my mother. She would love to see you.

  Discussing Blanc’s moves with Misha over the secure Black Site X-Ray communications suite using AtomBeam Quantum Protection made me want to contact Evelyn, but that, too, presented an assortment of problems that could ruin our strategic surprise.

  Misha had done well, digging up open-source intelligence about the Normandy facility. The building was indeed a chip-manufacturing plant, and Blanc had used the land grant from France to my grandfather as his “headquarters,” so that he could claim the facility was being constructed on US soil. Misha said that Drewson leveraged his relationship with the president to get the approvals needed for the deal. Meanwhile, Misha indicated that Blanc railroaded the permit process through the French system, promising high-paying jobs and an increased standard of living for those on the peninsula.

  And thinking of mothers, the president was probably distraught over not hearing from Blair, but Blair, more than anyone, knew better than to communicate with her mother. Letting her think she was dead for a few days might be good penance for her, anyway, Misha had told me.

  Misha’s intelligence had tracked Drewson to the Normandy peninsula, following the tail number of his Hawker jet. Other than Maximillian’s SAS friend who had coordinated the logistics here in Coltishall, we had stopped communication with anyone from Sharpstone headquarters, which was unfortunate because Barbara Ruddy could have been a big help with her analytical skills. While I trusted her, I didn’t want to risk intercept of phone calls, emails, text messages, or radio transmissions. We had no way to determine who the other Sharpstone traitors might be. And we had to stay dead in the minds of Blanc and Drewson.

  Misha had provided a satellite image of the facility near Sainte-Mère-Église, France, that I had seen when Evelyn had flown me to the peninsula. To the north were farms and homes with a small private jet runway just to the south, near where Utah Beach was located. The planes, I presumed, could land north to south or vice versa given the predominant winds on the peninsula.

  The fresh satellite image showed a five-hundred-thousand-square-foot chip-manufacturing plant nearly completed, at least from the outside. We had some intelligence about the state of the interior based upon Misha’s hack of the surrounding video systems at the facility and in nearby French towns. The cameras showed a steady stream of flatbed trucks carrying heavy material and dozens of cars arriving and departing every day. Workers. Likewise, the rail spur showed daily rail activity. Flight logs showed hourly deliveries of heavy equipment to the airfield in Caen, with trucks ferrying the machinery to the facility.

  Once we departed Coltishall, we would be on listening silence, so it was important that we knew what each one of us was going to do. China’s drive to insidiously plant spyware on every chip manufactured by the United States would undermine US national security beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. Despite the weaponization of the American government bureaucracy, I would defend my country, the Constitution, and her people until my last breath. I equally cared about bringing Blanc and Drewson to justice. And, of course, I wanted personal vengeance for what they had done to Reagan.

  Misha had provided satellite imagery of the collapsed tunnel. It appeared that Drewson was sparing no expense in digging out the rubble. Helicopters were buzzing above two cranes that were lifting boulders and moving them off the pile. They appeared to be making better progress than perhaps we had anticipated, which meant that we had no more than twenty-four hours before we lost the element of surprise.

  At midnight, nearly twenty-four hours after escaping a baited ambush in a tunnel rigged with explosives, Mahegan and I were in the back of the Casa airplane, having packed our rucksacks and strapped into our parachutes. West climbed the aircraft to twenty thousand feet, flying over the English Channel, as our brethren from the Eighty-Second and 101st Airborne Divisions had done seventy years ago. The winds buffeted the airplane the entire flight. Rain lashed at the windscreen, but West bore through the night, as I knew he would. We stood when West began lowering the ramp. He talked into our headset.

  “Heavy winds, guys. Out of the rain, but winds are twenty knots. Be careful.”

  “Roger, thanks, Jeremy,” I said.

  Mahegan nodded. We walked to the ramp, and I gave Mahegan the warrior hand to forearm shake and nodded. There wasn’t anything to be said. We knew the mission.

  The green light flickered, and we both stepped from the plane into the night, opening our parachutes immediately so that we could steer to our objectives. We had jumped several miles offset to the north to avoid the radar warnings and other tracking devices that Blanc and Drewson surely employed. Again, though, we assumed their defenses were down, believing that we were buried beneath the collapsed tunnel.

  I watched Mahegan drift away to the south toward Omaha Beach as I steered to the west in the direction of Utah Beach. The cold air was rushing against my face, stinging my eyes despite the rubberized goggles I was wearing. The wind howled, causing my jumpsuit to flap loudly as I descended toward the northern edge near the facility. Before I landed, I flipped my night vision goggles down when I heard the whine of jet engines about a mile to my east. The Atlantic Ocean glimmered below me.

  I toggled hard right until I missed my landing zone south of the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, close to Evelyn’s home, and slammed hard into the bluff to the east. I slid down and tumbled onto the beach. The wind caught my parachute and began dragging me across the rocky shore into the crashing waves. I unsnapped my quick release assemblies to break free of the drag, but the parachute twisted around me when a wave pounded me into the rocks. I was nearly in a straitjacket until I was able to use my knife to slice my way out of the suffocating material.

  “Not my best landing,” I muttered to myself, realizing I was standing on Utah Beach where so many men perished saving the free world from Nazi Germany. I checked my gear and miraculously still had everything I needed: rifle, pistol, knife, and night vision goggles. Climbing over the rocks, I scaled the cliff using a ravine cut into the side that offered me an agreeable incline and sufficient hand- and footholds to go the fifty meters without falling back onto the rocky shoals.

  Once on the plain, the wind howled, but the rain stayed out at sea. I leaned against a jagged rock and caught a breath on one knee. I trusted that Mahegan had a much better go of it than I had as I assessed the physical damage to my body. A few fractured ribs to go with those bruised by Blanc’s stun gun. Twisted ankle. Bruised shoulder. Unbuckling the Future Assault Shell Technology Helmet, my finger pressed into a huge gash in the shell, which had probably saved my life. I stood and lifted my night vision goggles to my eyes.

  A small jet wobbled as it landed in the wind shear on the adjacent runway to the chip-manufacturing plant. Its engines cycled hard in reverse and the airplane’s running lights winked in the green haze of the night vision goggles. Despite my troubles, we were on time, just before 11:00 P.M. local time, the time the flight plan indicated Blanc’s jet would touch down. The time was also important because Black Site X-Ray was to use its satellite capabilities to jam communications inside the facility at the top of the hour, freezing the cameras and perimeter sensing devices so that we could cut a hole in the fence and slide through unnoticed. It was scheduled to be a one-minute freeze, the kind of thing where the security guard uses his index finger to flick the screen, saying, “Come on.”

  Retrieving the bolt cutters, I waited until the second hand tripped my watch to 11:00 P.M. I then snipped a three-foot section of the fence, which I peeled back, slid through, and then replaced using metal twist ties to make the aberration invisible to the naked eye. As I was manipulating the ties, my ribs bit back at me with sharp pain. Definitely broken. In the distance, the chip plant shimmered with heat. At the far south end, the jet that landed pulled into yawning hangar doors, which began closing as soon as the tail cleared the opening.

  There were two guards on the east end of the hangar, the direction from which Mahegan should be arriving. I moved along a drainage gulley that ran parallel to the runway and angled to the southwest. Following this terrain feature for about a quarter mile put me a hundred meters away from the side entrance, where a metal staircase switched back and forth the entire five stories of the facility.

  Misha had found a blueprint that Blanc had submitted for approval to the appropriate French mayors and prefectures. The Phalanx construction permit application, the demande de permis de construire, was sufficiently vague with primarily exterior dimensions, size of the slab, drainage areas, electric and plumbing requirements, dimensions of the private airfield, and a host of other technical construction data. Importantly, it was scheduled to create five hundred jobs, which was most likely what got this behemoth passed on what once was considered sacred ground. The application had been submitted shortly after Coop passed away.

  Regardless, based upon what our review of the blueprints showed, we were targeting a large conference room on the top floor that connected the runway hangar and the factory.

  The private jet passenger airfield next to the manufacturing facility made sense provided these were true and accurate drawings. The Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, and Russian intelligence operatives could come in unnoticed and ensure that they were inputting the requisite software and codes into the chips that would be shipped all over the world as US-compliant chips. Blanc could fly whatever he wanted from his Normandy semiconductor plant into his Kinston, North Carolina, free trade zone. Then he could distribute the semiconductors to his Department of Defense customers, who would believe they were receiving pure, made-in-the-USA chips for installment on the most sensitive military technologies. Blanc and Drewson themselves would want to hide within the secure confines of the facility, perhaps the house across the airfield with the wood-burning fireplace.

  I stared at my target, the metal staircase and the guard standing on the top landing. A similar staircase was on Mahegan’s side of the building. The Black Site X-Ray satellites were to warn us of any rooftop snipers or guards, and for the moment there were just the two guards, one on each landing. Any deviation and we would be getting a call from Colorado, but so far, we’d had no break of the listening silence. I trained my goggles on the open construction areas, noticing stacks of lumber and plates of steel next to dozens of pallets of drywall throughout the bays. High-tech machinery was hidden in wooden crates as far as the eye could see. The construction crane swiveled and turned, bright lights highlighting the work below.

  I processed what I was seeing as we waited until midnight, which was the coordinated time for Mahegan and I to simultaneously approach the opposing stairwells and disable the guards.

  Lots of things happened at the top or bottom of the hour, such as shift changes, conference calls, and meetings, which we were counting on. Dozens of cars were coming and going, workers pulling the graveyard shift from midnight to 8:00 A.M. Renaults, Peugeots, and Citroëns funneled in and funneled out. This was a serious effort if Blanc and Drewson were running three shifts. A light flicked on in the transition area of the building. My instinct was that whoever had landed was now upstairs, presumably Blanc and Drewson.

  I looked to my far right and the two-story farmhouse had smoke curling from the chimney. I wondered if that was where Blanc and Drewson would be meeting. Or would they be in the business area that we were targeting? To our knowledge, no one had crossed the airfield to the house.

  The guard at the top of the landing looked familiar. He was one of the large men from the video that Misha had shown me, which told me that Mahegan would have similar resistance on his side of the complex and that there would be at least two more inside the building.

  At midnight, we had coordinated another camera and sensor freeze from the Black Site X-Ray satellite, this time for five minutes, giving us time to approach, ascend, and enter the building. About a minute before midnight, the guard stepped inside the hallway.