Brick Three held the LZ while Helo Two came down for a wheels-on-the-ground landing to unload its human cargo. It was followed by Helo One. The three groups of men moved out in a rough triangular pattern following Brick One. The Blackhawks made lazy circles above; the gunners in the bay doors keeping watch through their night vision lenses.

  Brett Santino led Brick One. Harv "Speed" Miller was his wingman. Speed kept scanning the ground before him, leaving Brett free to watch his GPS monitor and home them in on the signal location for the German female's smart phone. Intel told them that their target, codenamed: Appaloosa, would be in the near vicinity of the girl.

  One of the choppers spotted something on the ground, and fire erupted from the Gatling gun, sending a cone of red tracers down to their six. There was weak returning fire at first that was joined by looping arcs of white light flying upward from a hundred sources. The SEALs broke into a trot now and they could see the movement of men in the piles of brick and rebar around them. In the light of their lenses, these figures appeared to move like sleepwalkers; stiff, unseeing and unaware of the death that double-timed among them. There was no need to give away their locations. The SEALs wound their way through the enemy without firing, their eyes on the goal of the target building.

  A six-story apartment block. The signal said the source was somewhere inside. GPS doesn't work with altitudes. The target was somewhere within the building but no indication of which level. Ground floor, had to be. Anything above the horizon would be in line of fire from the convention center.

  "Brick One, entering target structure. Ground floor," Brett spoke low and his throat mike transmitted to the ear pieces of his own squad of five and the brick leaders of the other units.

  He moved, M4 rifle to his shoulder, and eyes sighting over the steel ring post at the end of the barrel. Brett sensed rather than saw his unit moving alongside him spaced twenty feet from each other.

  Fire erupted from a gaping hole in the face of the building they moved on. The choppy, brutal noise only AKs make. Speed went down, his head spraying jets of black in the greenish glow of the night vision goggles. The brick was down to five. They didn't miss a step, didn't hunt cover. SEALs don't engage in firefights, they end firefights. They pumped rounds as they moved over the scree of bricks and broken block at a run. The bad guys thought the dark would hide them as they popped up to snap off rounds in enhanced digital light as bright as noon on a sunny day. As each one showed himself, he dropped out of sight with a double-tap to the head or neck.

  To Brett's right, one of his brick let fly with a 20mm grenade launched from the tube slung under his rifle barrel. The fat round sailed into the gap and filled the building with hot metal shards. They charged inside and lit up anything that moved in the smoky dark. The room was wide with cabinets to one side and doors leading from it.

  Brett dropped to one knee and the others did the same, fanning out to cover him in a half-moon protective array. The GPS showed that their target was on the move, tracking further into the building. He picked a door and gestured to it, and the brick rushed forward firing controlled suppression shots as they moved. Lang, an E-5 new to the team, filled the hallway beyond the door with buckshot from a cut-down shotgun. He moved to one side and the rest of the brick moved one by one past him. They leapt the hacked up form of a young rebel twitching out his life on the floor.

  Flash/bang canisters were tossed in each open doorway as they moved swiftly through the bowels of the building. Brett divided his attention between what he could see past the aiming tang of his rifle and the GPS gripped in his gloved fist. Torrance, an E-6 who was a vet from his brick since its formation, crashed against a wall in front of him as if thrown. The narrow confines of the hall filled with plaster dust propelled into the air by automatic fire from in front of them.

  Lang stood over him and fed buckshot and rifled slugs toward the source of the tracers buzzing by them. The fire ended and Lang dropped down by Torrance.

  "Where's it hurt, Torrie?" Lang asked and felt for blood.

  "Just winded," Torrance gasped. "Fucker took me all up in my armor."

  Torrance was up and hobbled after the rest, cursing between sips of air.

  The little dot on the GPS screen was stationary now. Maybe they ran into a dead end inside the building where walls would be collapsed and doorways blocked.

  Brett was the first one out into a wide lobby area with most of the ceiling lying where it fell when much of the upper floor collapsed. He swept the area as the rest of the brick hustled in behind him. He raised his M4 to sweep around the wide opening torn out of the ceiling and saw the blur of movement there.

  He turned at a clattering sound to his left and trained the rifle there in time to see a stick grenade caroming down a section of collapsed wall board. Two more followed and bounced past him to land somewhere in the debris.

  There was no time to warn the others as he threw himself to the floor. He never reached the floor as the first blast lifted him bodily and flung him hard against a wall. Brett never heard the second and third grenades that killed his team. His ear drums were burst. His armored chest and back plates saved him from the killing steel but his skull was fractured and his jaw hung from its place by stings of meat, and he was drowning in his own blood. Brett fought to stay conscious and was only dimly aware in the seconds remaining to him of an intense man with a scarred and bearded face speaking soundlessly to him. Behind the man was a girl with white blond hair. She was aiming a smart phone at him; her pale eyes viewing him through the monitor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Taahid stood over the body of his friend Rab lying in the filthy hallway.

  The men with the glowing eyes and the helicopters they came on were gone now. They fled under a frenzy of fire from every direction. Rebels from all around descended on the apartment block, believing it to be an extended loyalist night attack. The skies lit up with AAA fire and illuminated the black, unmarked helicopters banking away and climbing.

  The Lions awakened in confusion with Dhi'bun Mohammed ordering them to resist. Many were firing their weapons without any idea of who was approaching. The Wolf fled into the darkness of the building with his mujahideen onhis heels. Ilse followed behind. The Lions covered their withdraw and died.

  Six of Taahid's men were dead now and more than ten wounded. He knew he should see to them but he could not leave Rab behind. Big, blustering Rab. He now lay silent. His body looked so small, as if it had collapsed on itself. He looked as though he was only napping except for the dark stain of blood covering him from the waist down. Taahid was wounded himself. Blood ran down his arm from either a gash or grazing bullet wound. He could not feel it; he only felt an empty space in his chest. What would he do without Rab's jokes? Rab's stubbornness?

  "Americans!"

  Someone was shouting. It was the Wolf. Taahid left the body of his friend and walked wearily into the lobby. Four dead attackers lay in a row on the lobby floor. They had been stripped of their body armor, ammo webbing and shirts. The Wolf stood over them as a circle of rebels came closer.

  "These were Americans who came for us!" the Wolf shouted. "Look at them and tell me I lie!"

  The dead men on the floor looked ghostly pale from massive blood loss. Their bodies were punctured and torn by the grenades. Clearly visible on arms and chests and backs were tattoos. One man had an anchor drawn on his upper arm with a vicious looking eel wrapped about it. Another wore over his heart a grinning skull clutching a dagger in its teeth. A third wore the words SEALS across his back, the intricate letters in a kind of scroll unraveled over a pair of crossed rifles. They were all marked to greater or lesser degree with images of American flags, cutlasses, barely clad women and cartoon characters.

  "It is as I told you!" Spittle flew from the teeth of the Wolf as he stood, gesturing grandly, over the corpses. "They say they helped us topple Gaddafi! But only so that they could take his place! They remove one boot upon your throat to replace it with their own! They turn Libya into a slaughterhouse! Is not all I told you the truth?"

  The men spoke up with words of agreement. They kicked at the dead and spat on them as their anger and grief took hold.

  Taahid knew that the jihadi zealot was right. Only none of it made sense. The Americans did help them throw off Gaddafi with bombs and missiles. But what was this about? Why send men and machines to attack at random a rebel unit in Sirte? And how did they find us? How did they choose us?

  The Wolf gestured and spoke and the men looked on with feverish expressions, emotions running high, eyes ablaze with righteous anger. One man, one of Taahid's own recruits from Misrata, howled in outrage and emptied his rifle into the bodies in one long burst. This only stoked the mood of the men higher. They would charge down the throat of the devil now, their anger was so great.

  And who would they follow?

  Taahid had no doubt as he looked at the Wolf. The mujahideen leader's mouth moving to form the words that would seduce the Lions to take whatever path he chose. He could no longer hear the words the Wolf was speaking. To Taahid they were only animal sounds, the baying of a wolf and answered by his brothers in the pack.

  The German girl shrank back into the shadows, until the only part of her that was visible was the shiny black slab of her phone, the eye that never blinks.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  USS ENTERPRISE RED SEA STATION

  The Predator drone launched off the deck in a steady sea as the moon dropped to the horizon.

  It quickly climbed to a cruising altitude of four thousand feet and began its silent course westward.

  Arriving over the port city of Sirte four hours later, it descended into a wide circling pattern at one thousand feet over the rooftops. It banked invisible in the lightening sky and waited for target acquisition updates sent directly to its electronic brain from Langley. Its operator sat in the UAV control room at Camp Anaconda in Iraq. But the orders for when to shoot and who to shoot would come directly from the agency. The Air Force remote fighter jock directing the Predator's flight through a monitor and joystick controls would not have any of that intel. His job was to get the forty million dollar robot plane to the target area and back. Who they were whacking was someone else's business.

  The craft tightened its bank and the remote pilot plotted a course relayed to him from Langley.

  Inside the drone a satellite uplink opened and details were relayed to the sensor system that would relay target information to the twin Hellfire missiles slung beneath the wings.

  GPS coordinates gave a clear target profile to the sensor system which sought and acquired a signal transmitting from the ground. The drone's onboard navigation systems went active and it was now in control of its own flight path; choosing the attitude and altitude best for the shot it would be taking. The Hellfires would launch the instant that the drone determined it was in the slot.

  Sensors locked on to the beacon; a positioning signal coming from an Apple iPhone located in a building south/southeast of the drone's current position at a distance of ten miles. The drone slowed to glide speed and the missiles were away in a sequence that placed one five seconds behind the other in case of last minute course corrections or a change in the target area conditions.

  The first missile struck the building at a speed exceeding Mach 1 with a shaped charge that blasted a hole in the building near its base. The second missile roared in just behind the first through the broad hole in the concrete and the interior of the building instantly heated to over two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. A lethal concussive wave turned the floors above and below the strike to powder and the entire structure collapsed in on itself.

  The rebels in the surrounding vicinity could only assume a team of loyalist sappers had gotten among them. No one saw the missiles' trajectory or the drone now silently rising in the sky and turning north.

  The deadly blast occurring only hours after the disastrous SEAL strike had the added advantage of killing many of the rebels who had witnessed that attack as well as obliterating any embarrassing evidence.

  At Welte Presse Agentur in Berlin, the video stream of Isle Strasser went black.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CAMP LIBERTY

  They spoke Arabic exclusively now when on exercises.

  Manny was most fluent and Flame was next. Heath could get along pretty good. The weakest was Chili but he could always play dumb in Farsi or one of the African dialects in which he was more fluent. The rebel crowd in Libya had been joined by insurgents from all over and the dialects and differing languages had to have created a Babel on the battlefield. Who'd notice four more strangers?

  Their appearance was another problem. With his curly black hair, hawk nose and olive complexion, Manny could pass for Arab. After all, he shared the same genes with them going back to Abraham. Heath could be mistaken for sub-Saharan African. Flame and Chili posed more of a difficulty. They were both rednecks, Alabama and Florida panhandle respectively; their posture, their gestures and even their walk would be alien to any observant hadji. Their best option was to hang in the background and let Manny take lead. Flame's blue eyes could be covered by sunglasses. His red hair wouldn't be a problem in the region as some Berbers were redheads. But his high-and-tight haircut would stand out so he shaved his head. Fortunately, they'd spent most of the last few years in desert regions and the three white boys were sporting deep, layered tans.

  Chili's hair was almost jet black thanks to his Cherokee ancestors. He just cropped it close in the style of so many of the young rebels raving it up on the streets in Libya.

  Going in stealth was of paramount importance. The DoD were enforcing a strict "no boots" policy for US uniformed personnel. The French and the Brits had some of their people on the ground calling in air strikes. They were also trying to help the rebels coordinate attacks through a radio network. By all accounts the effort was spotty. Getting angry guys from almost twenty different tribes to act in concert was like herding cats. Close coordination of military actions was problematic even with highly trained troops. Throw in variables such as insurgents who want to go home once their truck is full of loot, mobs of murderers and rapists recently freed from Gaddafi's prisons, foreign fighters spreading Wahabism from the barrel of a gun, and ambitious amateurs looking to build a political consensus and you have a clusterfuck on the march at double time.

  The team kept up a truncated PT schedule; running, calisthenics and weights. Most of their days were spent looking at maps, satellite images and any available video footage. The locale for this Sunny Wei was an enclave in the eastern portion of Sirte, outside the main city and closer to the shoreline than the more fortified convention center. That was a break for them and they knew they couldn't count on many more. Most of the rebel forces were concentrated around the convention complex as well. That would make for an easier approach and less exposure.

  But Operation Moondance was still going to be an unforgiving bitch of a hunt.

  And a hunt it would be since the intel placing Wei in the eastern compound was sketchy at best. That's why the team would go for the softer approach of a night time beach landing. The normal strategy of dropping in and fast roping off stealth-enhanced Blackhawks was out. It was a trick they could only do once, and if Wei wasn't where they thought he was, they'd have no choice but to give up as a dry hole. There'd be no second chances after their quarry was alerted and the neighborhood was aroused to Americans in the AO.

  The only alternative was a creep and peep. After Sarawak the team was considered the masters of this kind of fluid mission. Rule One in the military is never volunteer. Well, too late for that, assholes. Rule Two was never excel at a shit job or every shit job will have your name on it. Manny and the brick now had the rep of being Old School champs of the Vietnam Era brand mission of slipping in on the enemy and living close enough to smell his farts until they found their target.

  That's what went down in Sarawak the month before. They had traveled upriver for a day and a half through some of the world's thickest jungle to the back of beyond. They hung around for two days confirming the presence of their subject; a terror cell leader commanding a global web network that was inspiring lone wolf killers half a world away. They lost Re-Pete, the architect of the mission, on that one. And Pig got himself busted up, leaving them at two-thirds strength.

  That combat math worked for them, though. The smaller the unit, the better their chance of success on a beat like this. And, failing getting to their target, they'd still have gathered valuable intel on the Ahhamid Brigade.

  They hit the rifle range before the sun was up over the city and before the air turned oven hot. The night before, they'd stripped down their pretty purloined rifles and made sure they were oiled and greased to a fault. When re-assembling them, they switched furniture on each piece; exchanging the high tech Rynex polymer stocks and foregrips for worn and scratched wooden parts. After that they distressed the steel with files and sandpaper until the finish looked as worn as a well-used weapon would after years of hard use in the desert. The rifles weren't showpieces anymore, but inside, where it counted, they were zero defect killing machines.

  As the sky lightened behind them, they ran magazines to empty through the AKs and made any adjustments that were needed. The accuracy was better than it would be from those crap Chinese weapons, and the guys were satisfied. They were using specially modified and loaded 7.62 ammo provided for all special ops. These were domestically produced rounds manufactured under government contract by a supplier based in Missouri. They provided more consistency and reliability than ammo out of China or former Soviet satellite states but were indistinguishable from other AK ordnance. They even bore Romanian and Chinese markings on the rims.

  The remaining three watched with interest as Chili sighted the Dragunov in at zero; making sure the scope and barrel were aligned properly so the bullet would land as close to where the shooter wanted it as his patience and talent would allow. Chili was tapping nails into the man target at five hundred yards with a tedious regularity and invited the others to get accustomed to it. If Chili's luck ran out in Libya, one of them might need to step up to give the team the advantage of a long range weapon.