It led to a tunnel. Poured concrete floor fifteen feet across. Ceiling twelve feet high. There were tire marks and oil stains on the floor. This was a roadway and recently used. It ran in either direction to disappear into darkness beyond the reach of their lenses' powers to focus. It was miles long and ran straight as a string north and south.

  "When I joined the SEALs I knew I'd spend some days on the ground," Flame said. "But no one said I'd spend so much time under it."

  "Well, it's a better class of tunnel than we're used to," Chili offered.

  Heath took the lead this time and the team moved south at a trot.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  LANGLEY

  Agent Dana Morton wanted to rub her burning eyes except that would only make them redder. The mission was on now and the clock was ticking for the SEAL team inserted into hostile territory, and they were relying on her intel and guidance. Blair Freeman was official handler and the agent on site, or near site. But Dana was the intel center that Freeman would turn to for fresh insights and mission conditions. She was caffeinated up and her adrenalin was running like a marathon poker player on a roll.

  If only she'd had more than eight hours sleep over the past two days. But every time she closed her eyes her mind dropped into a Moebius loop of details and sequences and minutia about the mission projections and available intel. As always, it was what they didn't know, couldn't know, that could turn a pizza run into a disaster. She owed it to these guys to get it right the first and every time even though the odds of that ever happening were off the chart. Now she was in her techno-lair, her home away from home, and pacing between the half-dozen monitoring stations.

  The room had black walls and ceiling and dark tiled floors. The lighting was indirect so as not to interfere with the image quality on the many screens. The monitor stations were arranged in a half-moon formation to allow easy supervision. She once compared it to the bridge of the starship Enterprise to Waylon Griggs. Actually, to her, it was a much cooler place. Though it was messier. She never saw Spock's work area festooned with yellow and pink Post-its.

  "Signals are good," Bob Teranaka said from his place at the map monitors.

  Dana stepped behind him to look over his shoulder. On the big screen were four distinct red dots moving against a blue-tinted graphic of the eastern section of Sirte. It wasn't a real time sat image, just an interactive map with GPS references on it. But the satellite in geo-sync stationary orbit ten thousand miles above Libya was picking up the subcutaneous micro-transmitters each SEAL on the team had placed just under his right armpit.

  "Will the signal hold up underground?" Dana asked.

  "We'll see when it happens," Bob said, eyes on the screen and his right hand making minor adjustments to keep the four dots center screen. Each dot was specific to his host and their identity and profile would come up if clicked on.

  The dots were moving in a westerly direction parallel to the shoreline and nearing the position of that staggered row of tents Dana had caught on the most recent pictures from space. She gripped the back of Bob's chair.

  He glanced from the screen and up at her.

  "Are you shaking?" he asked.

  "Sorry," she said and released his chair back. Maybe she was too caffeinated.

  The dots continued west past the tents and hooked south for the coastal highway. She watched them cross at an angle and down the service road to the street they wanted.

  She stepped away and back to where Eric Bivens sat wearing noise suppression headphones before his own monitors. In his peripheral vision she gave a wave and he turned to her.

  "Nothing yet," he said in his outdoor voice that he thought was a whisper. "They'll call when they need something, Dana."

  Dana moved to behind Kimberley Bouchard and Wayne Spivey, the two Air Force cyber-jocks who were piloting two Predators over the mission's area of operations in Sirte. They sat at enclosures that mimicked the cockpit of a fighter plane only with cup holders. Their hands were on joysticks and keyboards and their eyes were locked on monitors showing live, real time video from the nose cameras of Thing One and Thing Two; their designations for their individual craft. Both of them were in the zone and Dana kept quiet.

  The drones had a forty-hour hover time. These two jocks would be spelled in a few hours by two other virtual pilots at identical stations in North Dakota. Dana hoped the need for them would be unnecessary by then. This mission was designed as a quick in and out.

  She sat down at her own station and studied a divided screen recreating all the other monitors images in a grid. She twiddled a ball atop her mouse and one of the screens expanded to take up center screen. It was the map image. The four dots stopped a while then started moving again. Then split into two groups. They rejoined after a while at the rear of a building.

  And vanished.

  "Bob!" she called.

  "That's the building that sits above where the contractor indicates they put a tunnel entrance," Bob said as she stepped up beside him. "They're down under forty feet of dirt piled over girders and concrete slabs reinforced with rebar. The signal doesn't have the juice."

  There was some pressure put on the South African construction company to reveal all they knew of the Ahhamid compound project; in particular, the plans for the tunnel paths that were not made public. Agency personnel working at State found a few pressure points, a few carrots and sticks, to persuade Grozmann Solutions to be more forthcoming. They included Grozmann's part in a particularly nasty toxic spill they were responsible for in Ukraine and thought they had successfully covered up.

  The info they handed up was a complete set of schematics, specs and the location of all access points and vents.

  "Okay, we expected the signal to die," she exhaled. "So far, no surprises. And they're off the street."

  "Glass half full," Bob smiled.

  "Yeah," Dana said and flexed her shoulder to try and get the knots of tension there to release.

  "How are we proceeding?" asked Clark DeStefano as he entered the techno-lair with another man.

  "About as anticipated, sir," Dana said.

  "This is Dr. Marberry. He's overseeing this for State," DeStefano said. "This is Dana Morton, one of our most promising mission planners."

  As she held out her hand to shake the newcomer's, the tension in Dana's shoulders turned into twin flames.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  SIRTE

  They had to leave the vehicles and move on foot. They were close to the compound where the Wolf said they would find the Chinese man; the one who held the key to an Aladdin's cave of weaponry and secrets. Taahid asked six of his own men to stay with the trucks. He could no longer order them. He'd ceded that power to the charismatic Dhi'bun Mohammed. Unless armed men watched over them, the rebel convoy of technicals and guns would be gone when they got back.

  The streets were choked with the debris from buildings that had collapsed in the NATO sorties. The landscape of every city changed in the immediate areas around the Gaddafi loyalist strongholds. The fortresses, small and large, were like tumors and the neighborhoods all around had metastasized into blocks of unlivable rubbish heaps that stank of death. The smell of putrefying bodies buried in the wreckage hung like a fog in the air.

  The rebel fighters unloaded as much as they could carry and followed the Wolf on a crooked path between ruins. He was leading them north and east. It was the hours before dawn. It was as if they were the only living things on Earth, moving through the dark like animals driven to migrate by mindless instinct.

  Taahid stayed close to Ilse. She was carrying loops of belt fed ammunition now. She had become one of them and got furious when Taahid suggested she was making herself a target.

  "We are all targets," she said as if explaining to a slow child. "Do you think the bombs and missiles discriminate? Women and babies lie dead everywhere and you think professing my non-combatant status will act as a shield? "

  "Your hair," he said. "That head of yellow hair would be very attractive to any sniper happening to be watching."

  She pulled the hood of her cotton jacket up to cover her head and shouldered past him. She trotted to catch up with a Benghazi named Yusef who carried the AKM machine gun that required the rounds she carried crossed over her shoulders like a caricature of a guerrilla revolutionary. Despite all she had seen, Taahid realized, she still sees romance in this. Where his fellow fighters had become cynical and hard, this European child was acting as if this was theater. It wasn't her camera phone that filtered her from the nightmare all around them, it was her own fantasies.

  Shells were still falling in the blocks ahead of them in an infrequent pattern. Minutes would pass with relative quiet over the city followed by a sound like tearing cloth and a boom they could feel through their feet. An intermittent glow could be seen from beyond the buildings to the east and north. Sometimes they'd see a white flash through the windows of gutted buildings that stood between them and their destination.

  Taahid still felt a responsibility to the Lions of the Wadi even though they marched behind a new leader. He trotted over the rubble until he reached the Wolf's side.

  "How will we get past the artillery?" he asked. "It will only increase when morning comes."

  "God will watch over us," the Wolf said and smiled smugly. "He has seen me thus far through this life and always brought me to the throats of my enemies without harm."

  "That is shit," Taahid said and the Wolf turned on him, the smugness replaced with cold fury.

  "You speak to me this way? You would be nothing but a blackened corpse was it not for my guidance. You and all your men. It is the divine providence of God in Paradise that led you from your own graves."

  "I do not doubt your faith. No man has the right to question what another believes in his heart. But that does not stop a man from lying about what is true and what is not and you are a liar."

  The Wolf stopped and stepped in Taahid's path. The rest of the men stopped as well, uncertain of what was happening. The silence was broken by a spray from an anti-aircraft gun somewhere to the west. Tracers glowed white against the black sky and fell away like dying stars.

  "Be careful of what you say next," the Wolf said.

  "I say that you know more of this compound and more of this Chinese than you are telling us. We are following you, Dhi'bun Mohammed. But we are not following a prophet."

  The Wolf turned his eyes to the men standing exposed in a rubble strewn intersection.

  "You are a very smart man, Taahid. I see why the Lions chose you to lead them. An educated man is not always a wise one."

  "Just tell us, Wolf," Taahid said. "Tell us what you know of the Ahhamid compound."

  Dhi'bun Mohammed stepped away to cross the intersection. He gestured for Taahid alone to follow him. They stood in the shadows of a sagging marquee away from the rest of the rebels who now took the opportunity to light cigarettes and sit down on the street and the hoods and trunks of derelict cars. Ilse alone kept watch on the two leaders, her brow knitted with curiosity but she came no closer. She was apparently taking to heart Taahid's warning to not draw undue attention to herself. She lit a cigarette of her own and squatted on the opposite curb, leaving the loops of heavy ammunition on her shoulders.

  "There is an entrance to a tunnel," the Wolf said and smiled showing teeth when they were alone. "One of the many al-Gaddafi built like the burrows a cowardly animal might. I know how to gain access. I know how to get within the core of the compound where the loyalist pigs will never expect us."

  "And how do you know this?"

  "A Libyan oil minister high in al-Gaddafi's favor chose to flee when he saw the will of the people would not be denied. He sought to flee through Nigeria where we have many friends. This man was very proud and would not at first speak with us. We killed his children while he watched. We killed his wife and he said nothing. Only when we went to kill him did he become talkative. And only then, after we sliced off one of his eyelids, did he babble like a woman."

  "He told you of the tunnels," Taahid said, trying to keep his voice level in the face of this madman who spoke of murder and mutilation with no more emotion than he would speaking of cutting an orange into sections.

  "This man told us so much," Wolf's eyes looked to one side as if he were looking back on the moment. "Some of it seemed fantastic. Unbelievable. But even when we hurt him more he insisted he spoke only the truth. And the most interesting, most vital, story he told was of the Chinese man and his visits to the Ahhamid compound."

  "And the tunnels?"

  "He knew only a little of that. But what he knew and what he told us was enough. An entrance that lies in the cellar of a fish market. That is where I take us."

  "Why do you not wish the others to know?"

  "I do not know who I can trust beyond my own mujahideen."

  "Then why do you trust me?"

  The Wolf reached out to clap Taahid's shoulder. Taahid could not help himself and flinched away from the other man's touch. Dhi'bun laughed and it was a rumble deep in his chest.

  "You do not have the courage to be a betrayer," the Wolf said and cuffed Taahid's face with a condescending pat. "I took your men, I took your leadership from you, and you rolled on your back like a whipped dog. But for all of that I value your wisdom and may seek your counsel."

  Taahid's face turned red and his throat began to close with his shame and anger so that he could not answer. The Wolf turned his back and returned to the men who stubbed their cigarettes out and re-pocketed them. Ilse flicked hers away only half smoked into the street. One of the mujahideen picked it up and placed it in a pocket after pinching the end. They all gathered their guns and gear and followed the Wolf away down the street.

  After a while Taahid followed as well.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  BENEATH SIRTE

  "We're not alone," Heath said and dropped to one knee in the total blackness of the tunnel.

  Manny joined him and both sighted down the tunnel over the iron ring posts on their AKs. In the high contrast imagery of their night vision lenses they could see blurry movement. In the distance; shadows on walls and the flicker of lights. Would they have regular patrols down here or was this a special event? The image through their lenses was without depth so it was impossible to judge how far they were. The newcomers were between them and the tunnel's horizon line.

  Chili came up even with Manny and Heath and slipped the Dragunov from its carpet sheath. He sat and steadied his back against a wall, trained the rifle into the darkness and looked though the long scope. The seated position was optimal here. It brought Chili's line of sight even with center mass of his targets. As he was taught on the ranges back at Pendleton, he positioned himself; knees bent, elbows resting in front of his knees and feet flat. It was the kind of posture he could rarely use in the field, but here he had an unsuspecting enemy and a perfectly flat field of fire free from obstructions.

  The 30X scope brought the approaching force into focus; dudes in a mix of civilian and military outfits. First guess? Rebels. But they could be loyalists hoping to slip away in mufti. Who the hell knew in a combat environment this intensely fucked up? A number of them sported full beards so the rebel guess was the strongest.

  He turned to the others and opened his hand, all fingers flexed, three times. Fifteen spotted. Maybe more.

  Manny's GPS told him the Ahhamid compound was between them and the approaching armed men. They couldn't reach it before the rebels without discovery. They damned sure weren't going back. It was a mile behind them to where they entered the tunnel and they hadn't passed another exit in all that time. And there was no opening or side chamber between them and the unfriendlies coming their way.

  Besides, a SEAL's first instinct is to run to a fight, not away.

  The only option was to make the unknown force back down. Manny leaned close to Chili and spoke low.

  "Take a couple down and see what they do."

  Chili jacked a round into the rifle and braced the Dragunov firmly into his shoulder and brought the barrel slowly down on the lead figure walking toward him. The PSO-1 read the range at just over eight hundred meters. Chili raised the crosshairs one mil bar over the target's chest placing the reticle above his head. No adjusting for windage in the dead air of the tunnel. It would be like hitting pins in a bowling alley.

  The men moving toward them were officially good guys in the eyes of Western media and political leadership. But in the brutal reality of the team's mission, they were an obstacle. The main mission priority was the capture and retrieval of Frodo and nothing else took precedent. There was no room for sorting out good guys from bad guys. And, in the end, it didn't present much in the way of a moral struggle for the men of the SEAL team. It was men like those moving toward them who had killed Brett Santino and his brick.

  The team had no way of knowing it was the very same rebels now nearing their position.

  Chili brought in a deep breath and let it out slow then took in the target as he brought his heart rate down for the shot. The guy was bearded and wearing knit skull cap. He had a tattered long sleeve cotton shirt with a combat vest packed with AK magazines worn over it. Chili sighted on the rebel's head. The trajectory would carry the slug to a spot at the top of the target's sternum above the ammo vest packed with steel magazines. The target walked moving his head side to side and the AK held loose in his fists; wary but not agitated. His eyes glowed white in the ghost light of the night vision lenses. His mouth a black hole moving open and closed. He was talking to someone. Chili took his finger from the trigger guard and placed it on the trigger and began to apply slow, steady pressure until...

  "Hold." Low but urgent behind him. Flame.

  Chili maintained; the crosshairs on point on his target's face.

  "What is it?" Manny.

  "Listen." Flame. "Hear that?"

  Chili strained his ears even while his eyes remained unmoving on the target growing larger in his scope.