This was a scenario that would have been unthinkable only a year before.

  It wasn't always like this. Not so long ago, the Airport Road was measured in deaths per mile. It drew insurgents, like ants to a spilled sugar sack. They sniped and grenaded and rocketed the coalition traffic at every opportunity. When they weren't doing that, they were parking car bombs on the verges or setting IEDs.

  Clearing this road and keeping it free of attacks was both a necessity and a symbolic gesture. The highway needed to remain open or the airport would be cut off from the city, and Camp Liberty would be cut off from the the heavily fortified international zone inside Baghdad, known as the Green Zone. The road was an artery, and if it was compromised, Baghdad would bleed to death and the whole damn country soon after.

  The weekend warriors of the Fighting 69th were the ones tasked with keeping the artery open and the goods flowing. This National Guard unit had a sharp learning curve, and their casualty rate was high, but they soon became experts at finding and disposing IEDs and spotting suspicious movement. They developed the combat telepathy that let them anticipate--and thwart--attacks. The twenty-five miles of expressway went from playground to killing zone for any insurgents who dared show their heads within a mile on either side of it.

  The beast of a truck the SEALs were riding in was a fifteen-ton monster, and Blair Freeman's own personal taxi for tooling around Baghdad. He had it fitted with protected exterior cameras, satellite uplinks, color monitors, air conditioning, and a mini-fridge. The interior was leather-upholstered and looked more like the rear of a Vegas limousine than a military conveyance.

  "What did this ride set you back?" Chili asked, and channel-surfed on the 48-inch flatscreen that dropped down from the ceiling. Sports, news, sports, sports, and finally he left it on Megan Fox in a torn t-shirt, sharing a scene with some doofus in a gangsta fedora.

  "I never looked at the sticker," Blair said.

  "That's 'cause this is all on the taxpayer's dime," Heath said. "You don't get a ride like this honest. You have to promote it."

  "All you have is diet soda," Flame said as he squatted to peer into the mini-fridge.

  "You got all the sugar you needed last night," Manny grinned.

  "You heard about that?" Flame asked.

  "Heard about it?" Chili asked. "We all heard it. Live. That little jarhead was a screamer, bro. I had to turn up my tunes to drown her out."

  "What the hell were you doing to her, man?" Heath asked, and slid closer to Flame on the bench seat.

  "I like her," Flame said. "Don't laugh, okay? I want to see her again. This one's different."

  "That means you did her and she doesn't already hate your ass," Chili said.

  "That's a big part of it," Flame shrugged. "She thinks I'm charming."

  "A Marine finds you charming," Manny snorted. "They really are Uncle Sam's Misguided Children."

  "We're turning onto the Qadisaya exit, if anyone's interested," Blair cut in, turning from a monitor showing an image from a forward mounted camera. "Arrival in ten."

  "What's the deal, Blair? Why do we need to go to the embassy compound for a briefing?" Manny asked. "Liberty's secure enough, right?"

  "Nothing's as secure as the embassy," Blair said. "But it's a question of sensitive personnel over sensitive intel. You'll be directly briefed by some administration people, and we'd rather they not be seen entering Camp Liberty. There are...diplomatic considerations."

  "NSA wonks?" Heath asked.

  "No."

  "State," Flame said. "It's State, right?"

  "You'll find out when we get there, okay?"

  "Fuck. It is State," Chili said, his eyes never leaving the screen, as Megan Fox ran like a startled doe through a CGI storm of flying rubble.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE GREEN ZONE

  The American embassy in the Green Zone was square-foot by square-foot the most expensive building in the world. The complex of buildings, designed by architect Frank Gehry, was the size of Vatican City. It was also the most protected, fortified, and secure location on the planet. Getting in required a set of signs and countersigns to get through a triple perimeter of checkpoints and security posts. In addition, every entry needed to have a sixteen-character shifting code chosen at random by an algorithm created by Nanotel in Portland, Oregon, for use exclusively by the embassy.

  In addition to layer after layer of protocols, the approaches to the embassy compound were covered by overlapping fields of cameras, scanners, and motion-sensitive detectors. Nothing larger than a lizard could move within the half-mile circle without someone in the hardened security bunker, six floors beneath the main embassy building, seeing it, marking it, and recording its progress.

  The luxury MRAP weaved through the rat maze of concrete barriers to the first checkpoint where Marines spoke to the driver, scanned ID, recorded the vehicle number, and ran video cameras under the frame and into the wheel wells. Stickers with the color of the day (aqua) were slapped on the front and rear bumpers, and the monster truck was waved through to the next post.

  At Beta post, the driver and co-driver were asked questions by a Marine. The questions seemed innocent enough but were designed by the psychology department at Stanford to determine stress levels in the answers given. The numbers, codes, and countersigns were checked against a list on a screen of a tablet computer. The vehicle was then waved over to a large plate in a side lane where it was weighed; the weight was recorded on the tablet.

  The MRAP moved on to the final checkpoint where a mix of Marines and civilian personnel in body armor and unmarked uniforms gave the vehicle and crew the once over, all over again. The civilians did all the talking and probing and checking while the Marines stood stony with fingers resting on trigger guards. This place was wired day and night. If the highway leading in was like candy to children, then this collection of buildings was like rock for a crackhead. Every paradise-bound jihadi nutcase in the region dreamed of lighting himself up with an assload of C-4 in this neighborhood. It was Shangri-La, Disneyworld, and the Playboy Mansion rolled into one. If you were going to kakk a bunch of American Satans, then this was the place that really mattered. Within this fence and wire, an aspiring virgin-fucker had a shot at CIA spooks, diplomats, lobbyists, and even American senators. Nobody summoned here bitched or even joked about the super-redundant, anal-exploratory level of security. If Iraq caught fire all over again, this acreage was the flashpoint.

  The vehicle left the checkpoint and pulled down a broad ramp that curved down into a basement parking area under one of the windowless buildings within the embassy grounds.

  The MRAP parked behind a couple of up-armored Humvees and a stout-looking limo with windows tinted almost black. All carried tiny metal flags on each front fender; the stars and stripes and the US Diplomatic Corps. Blair led the SEALs out the back hatch of the armored truck to an elevator set in a wall of the garage. He slid a keycard through a slot and they took the elevator up. Cameras, mounted in the ceiling, watched them.

  The SEALs were quiet upon exiting the vehicle and waited without expression for the elevator to arrive at its floor. Blair was relieved. It looked as though they were going to behave as guests of the embassy. Things were always tense between these hard chargers and the CIA operative. It was the natural state of things being that they were part of a warrior brotherhood and he would always be an outsider. But the friction between him and this particular brick went back to a botched mission in Tikrit a few years ago. The team went in on his intel and everything went as wrong as it could possibly go. A massive pooch-screw of mythic scale. And they wound up carrying the corpse of one of their own from the action.

  The most recent hunter/killer action in Borneo went better, but they still lost a man. Though his pre-insertion intel had been good and support all along had been strong. They couldn't blame him, or the agency, for their buddy's death. What did they call him? Re-Pete? The death was regrettable, but worth it in the rough mathematics of the war on terror. The insertion deep into the jungles along the Sarawak River took down an al-Qaeda cell that had been inspiring and directing lone wolf attacks across the United States and Europe. The charismatic leader of that cell was dead, and the data gathered at the scene allowed Homeland Security and counter-terror units in the United Kingdom and Germany to find and eliminate dozens of attacks in the making. The risky operation saved thousands of innocent lives in a clearly demonstrable way.

  Even though the op went well in the face of many difficulties, the SEALs knew Blair used the success of it to raise his stock within the agency. And that rankled the SEALs. They were soldiers first and always, and they did what they did out of their own brittle pride or macho expectations. Guys like that held career men like Blair in low regard. Well, fuck them sideways. He had a ten-year-plan to become agency director and their hard work paid off for him big time. He even had a letter from the vice president thanking him for his exemplary work on the op. A solid "attaboy." In fact, the veep even wrote that very word in, by hand, at the bottom of the typeset letter:

  Attaboy!

  J.B.

  A word from the POTUS would have been nice, but he'd take what he could get.

  In any case, Blair knew he still had a long way to go to earn the trust of the SEALs. And as long as he needed their deadly skills as gunfighters, earning that trust was a priority. This next mission was the kind of Hail Mary play they excelled at. In fact, the more difficult, the higher the stakes, and more punishing the mission, the better it would look in Blair's records; so long as they made the mission objectives.

  And if they didn't? Well, the unit and its operations were so damned secret that bad news never made it out of the offices of more than three people at the top. And with the strong possibility of a new administration coming in next year, past sins would be forgiven while successes were indelible.

  For now, though, he just needed Manny and the other three minding their best church-going manners for this briefing.

  The elevator opened into a wide room with high ceilings. Thick concrete columns lined the walls in imitation of a Roman forum. The illusion of stately splendor was diluted by the pool tables lined in the center of the room under drop lighting. A wooden bar with twelve stools was at the rear of the room, and there was a collection of deep leather chairs before a 64-inch HD monitor. A pre-season football game played silently--a delayed broadcast from a game played in Miami the day before.

  Behind the bar was a thin man in shirtsleeves and a tie. He was building a martini on the marble bar top, and the SEALs mistook him for the help; an embassy go-for.

  "I like mine with three olives," Flame said, in the man's direction.

  The room turned frosty, and Blair hunched his shoulders in an almost imperceptible hitch.

  "Gentlemen," Blair said, with ice in his voice. "May I present Denton Marberry, the United States Deputy Secretary of State for North Africa?"

  "Shit," Heath said under his breath.

  "Sorry, Secretary Marberry," Manny said. "We've been away from civilian niceties for a while."

  "Actually," Marberry said. "It's Doctor Marberry."

  This was not off to a good start.

  CHAPTER TEN

  "The situation in Libya is fluid," Marberry began, when they were all seated in those plush leather chairs. He sipped his martini and did not offer them anything of any kind to drink--or even welcome them to help themselves. Nor did it seem that he intended to.

  "That's a good thing and a bad thing, depending on your perspective," he continued. "Bad because conditions are changing on an hourly basis. Good because that allows us to take advantage of that situation and achieve some of our own goals before things simmer down on the ground. The country is in a civil war now that Gaddafi's center of power has, for all practical purposes, collapsed. The fighting is occurring in concentric rings around a handful of Libyan cities: Tripoli, Sirte, and Bani Walid. There's scattered fighting elsewhere, but most of that has little to do with the overthrow of Gaddafi and more to do with the kind of personal score-settling that always goes on in deteriorating scenarios like this."

  The men had seen this everywhere they'd served, where the control from the top had been overturned or absent. Take the strongman from power and you had neighbor killing neighbor with no ideological or political motive in play. Just the year before, they walked into a firefight in Anbar Province and thought it was a Shiite and Sunni deal. But the two sides were going at it over a goat stolen by one of their grandfathers, back when Iraq was still a Hashemite principality. It was Crips and Bloods, Iraqi style.

  "And things are not likely to improve any time soon," Marberry said, after a satisfied smack of lips over the frigid 'tini. "Colonel Gaddafi ran his country like a single parent. He relegated no authority to anyone but his sons, and there are no layers of national or local authority to enforce even the simplest form of governance in his absence. The rule of law is non-existent beyond a rudimentary tribal level. Add to that the influx of foreign fighters from all over Africa and the Middle East and you have a witch's brew that a small force could easily move around in unseen."

  Manny thought of the Detroit teenager he had read about on a website; the youth had told his mom and dad he was going on a camping trip, then traveled to Libya to join the rebel movement. It was anything-goes there.

  "That leaves us with a tempting array of possibilities," Marberry continued. "State has a laundry list assembled for us by the NSA and other agencies of achievable goals within Libya in the areas of intelligence, sabotage, elimination, and even the abduction of key terror suspects and persons of interest. You can imagine that there is a wealth of desirable assets that the Colonel closeted away in the decades since we've had any kind of access to Libya's interior."

  Achievable goals. Sounds so nice and neat; especially if you don't see the blood and shit that goes with achieving those goals.

  So, it's a snipe hunt, Manny thought to himself.

  "And we aren't alone in our wish to take advantage of these cascading events. Other countries and agencies, some friendly, some not-so-friendly, and some openly hostile to American national interests, will want to gain these assets for their own purposes or make efforts to hide their complicity in Gaddafi's criminal regime over the years."

  A snipe hunt with elements of a race, Manny revised his opinion to this new reality.

  "Is there a specific target you have in mind for us?" Flame had had enough of this inside-the-beltway pussy-speak.

  "The Doctor's coming to that," Blair said between clenched teeth.

  "I was coming to that," Marberry said with equal impatience.

  The football game was gone from the big monitor and in its place was a grid of photographs. Some were as clear as vacation snapshots. Others were obviously long-range surveillance images with no depth and digitally-enhanced details. In each was a chubby Asian guy in his twenties or early thirties, maybe. Each was taken in a warm climate, with backgrounds and people that looked to be taken in Arabic or Near East locales.

  This guy didn't look like the kind of fanatic they usually targeted. There was no wild-eyed stare or sneer of defiance. He looked like a conventioneer on a toot more than anything else. In some pictures he was even laughing. In a few he wore the nervous expression of someone in over his head. In most he looked bored.

  "His name is Sun Yi or Sun Li," Marberry said, and freshened the images from his Bluetooth-enabled tablet. "We believe he's a Chinese national working for some state agency. If you add up the locations he frequents with events that seem to happen in those same locations soon after he arrives, you come up with the sum total of a player. This man makes things happen. Bad things. We're not sure of his role in events. He's a fixer or facilitator of some kind."

  "Could you be more vague, sir?" Flame asked, with a smile so polite his cheeks practically gleamed.

  "He works for the People's Republic," Blair cut in. "He's been seen in Iran, Nigeria, Syria, and Libya over the years. They roll out the red carpet for him every time, and his visits always coincide with a spike in terror network traffic about radioactive materials and heavy ordnance."

  "So, this is about WMDs?" Manny asked.

  Blair blanched at that.

  "We avoid using that term wherever possible," Marberry sighed. He wore an expression a parent might, when explaining a complex issue to a backward child.

  "Yeah, I know it's not the term du jour after Shock and Awe turned to Shuck and Jive, but if we're not looking for the makings of a dirty bomb or worse, then what's the interest in this guy?" Manny asked. His level of impatience was quickly rising to match Flame's.

  "We would like to know what he knows," Blair said. "Sunny's most likely a player for the PRC and holds the key to a network of procurers and weapons caches. We don't want the Gaddafi stockpiles going viral through the region."

  "Starting with who he is and confirming who he really works for and why he's cozy with Gaddafi and a host of other rogue leaders," Marberry added.

  "It's a snatch job," Heath said. None of the SEALs reacted at that, but there was an invisible sense of letdown. Snatches weren't clean, like kills. They could break wide and the mission parameters could creep all over. They also took more intel, more coordination, and often turned into clusterfucks in a hurry. The evac was always complicated by hauling an unfriendly along.

  "I have much more data for you to go over," Marberry said. "You can review it to discern the best approach to abducting this character. Our agency friends are constantly gathering fresh intel to factor into your mission."

  "And time is an element here," Blair said.