His parents weren't angels. His dad could have been any of the many "uncles" his mama brought home--or none of them. And home was anywhere he and his brother happened to wake up. When he was eight, and his older brother, Tanner, was ten, they found themselves on the street, unable to find their mother. They wound up wards of the county until an aunt claimed them and took them to her two-bedroom in the Brewster-Douglass Homes, in the most hard-ass section of Detroit.

  The brothers didn't know any better, so the stark towers of the Brew-Do seemed like heaven. It was cold in the winters, an oven in the summers, the elevators never worked, and the stairwells were a gauntlet of crackheads and take-off artists. The rats had the run of the place when the sun went down. But the boys slept in the same bed every night, and their aunt did her best to see them fed and shoo them off to school every day.

  It's an old story that a child doesn't have many choices in a situation like that, and the Heath boys were faced with the same devil's bargain. By their teen years, they were running rock for the gang that ran the tower they were in. They never used. They just took their weekly take in cash, and did their best to stay away from housing authority cops, and from the Dee-Nines--the rival gang that ran the tower nearest to them.

  At sixteen and with little formal education, Nathan Heath still managed to figure out that moving rock was for chumps. The Tiger Krew, the gang that ran Tower C, paid shit wages for long, unpredictable hours. He and Tanner could pull down more working at Mickey D's, with none of the risk of getting jacked by rival crews or getting locked up in juvie or going away to camp.

  They quit. They stopped coming around to corner where the cars pulled up to buy rock. They were out and not coming back.

  A week later they caught up with Tanner, who was coming back from the Korean market. City cops found him at the bottom of an elevator shaft in Tower A, half-buried in trash. He was there two days. He might have lived, even with two bullets in his lungs, if anyone had heard his weak cries for help.

  Nathan's aunt put Nathan on a bus to some far-distant cousins of his who lived in Memphis. He got off the bus in Louisville, and lived off the streets for about six months, working as a day laborer at construction sites and car washes. He was big for his age and no one fucked with him much. At least they never fucked with him twice.

  After a while, he got tired of being hungry, dirty, and alone. The Navy took him based on lies. He was good at telling a story. Nearly illiterate, he improved his reading skills enough to pass the minimum requirements. Once he was in, he busted his ass to make something better of himself and was soon an E-3 aboard the Lexington. He met Manny Levitz when both were Red Shirts; the unlucky bastards in charge of re-arming aircraft between missions. They bonded over a mutual hatred of serving on a rolling deck, with helos and fixed wings coming at them from every direction on an uncertain platform, packed with aviation fuel and ammo.

  Manny was known around the Lex as the "Kung-Fu Jew," for the awesome fighting skills that made up for his shorter stature. Lots of the ratings thought he was dangerous. Heath found him hysterical. No matter what kind of crap duty they were the middle of, Manny could always crack him up with some kind of sick shit.

  They volunteered for SEALs and shipped out for Coronado on the same flight. They were together for all of the initial 22-week BUD/s training. That's when their training officers spent five months trying to drown candidates' asses in water too cold for fish to live in. They learned explosives and how to keep from blowing themselves to bits. Their bodies either became steel or broke like pretzels as they were put through a torturous PT regimen every waking hour. And lots of guys broke. A surprising number of truly tough looking hombres washed out in the first few days.

  Heath didn't see that much of Manny in the additional twenty-eight weeks of hell that was qualifying training. SEALs weren't satisfied to be the best in the Navy; they had to be the best everywhere. So they toured Army, Air Force, and Marine bases, training in different specialties, and doing their damnedest to try and make their brothers-in-arms in the different branches look like candyasses and pussies. They jumped better than the Airborne at Fort Bennington. They showed up the jarhead sniper wannabes at Pendleton's marksman school. They out-rappelled the Air Force PJs at Kirtland AFB. They did their time on subs and helos and Humvees and MRAPs and fast attack boats. They went from dick-snapping cold to balls-broiling heat. They marched farther, swam longer, and ran faster than anyone, anywhere, in any uniform that bore the stars and stripes. They pissed in everyone's pool and made them like it. Their only rivals were themselves; they worked their nuts off to beat their own performance every minute of every hour of every day. They even slept harder than anyone else.

  But that wasn't enough. They went down to Honduras and Guatemala as part of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation program, and showed their little brown brothers who the baddest bad-ass motherfuckers in the bad bush were. They jumped out of choppers into triple canopy jungle and cut their own trails to get out. They ate bugs and asked for seconds. They made a home in snake- and gator-infested swamps. They drank their own piss and made shelters from the skins of the animals they killed.

  Then there were the guns. They learned to handle the weapons of their friends and enemies. They would spend hours and hours stripping, cleaning, and re-assembling machine guns, pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Then they would dream of bolts, hammers, trunnions, receivers, and recoil springs. Days were spent on the range zeroing in their pieces and honing their abilities.

  Each SEAL qualified on the sniping range. Some were better than others but every man in every unit was expected to be able to reach out and touch the enemy over long distances with either the huge Barrett .50 or more traditional arms like the Winchester Model 70.

  And they were taught what to do when everything goes to shit. Escape and evasion. Combat knife fighting. Empty-hand fighting. Improvised explosions. Stripped bare-ass naked with only his hands to defend himself, a SEAL was still the most dangerous fighting man in the world.

  When the many had been winnowed to the few, Heath and Manny were still standing tall. They had their tridents and their assignments. They'd earned their slots in DEVGRU-ST6, now designated by a name known only to the president, the CIA director, their immediate contacts in the Agency, and the eight souls who made up its very exclusive ranks.

  CHAPTER 6

  ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT

  Hajar Ghazalli was never a brave man. He prayed on it each day, prayed for courage. These were secret prayers known only to his god and himself. To all around him, the young men who looked to him for strength, he was a pillar. A rock. All of which was easy when you were talking others into walking into danger while you remain behind, safely anonymous. How many had he sent to their death or capture, with soothing words of comfort of his own or quoted from the prophet? How many times had he expressed bitter regret; the deep desire that it be he who belted on the suicide vest or hefted the Kalashnikov, rather than those he assigned the task?

  The truth was that he was a coward. He never stepped into the light. He never trusted a secret of his own to anyone whose life was not measured in days. He sent young men--and even women--to violent deaths with lies from his lips. He learned to smile benignly when sending the faithful to their deaths.

  To the world, and any and all who took an interest, Hajar ran a textile firm with a factory in Cairo and warehouses in Alexandria. He was married with children and grandchildren and appeared to be a successful businessman. He prayed at mosque and was considered to be a man of admirable piety and comfortable, if not extraordinary, wealth.

  But there was a part of himself he kept concealed even from his family. It was his allegiance with global jihad and those who worked toward the goal of a world under the guidance of Sharia. Not an outwardly bitter man and, in fact, even considered kind by business acquaintances and close friends, Hajar's heart was hardened by resentment and he hid his true face from all but his brothers in jihad. He aided them when he could and served often as a courier, and did whatever was in his power to facilitate the smuggling of people and weapons. And did so with all eagerness, so long as it was not he who faced danger or arrest. He justified this as being more effective if his part in the struggle was unknown.

  Hajar took only one calculated risk in his whole cautious life; when he went down to the pier in El Gabbari to make certain of the arrival of a contraband shipment of explosives for the cause. The container aboard the Mali-registered cargo carrier was manifested to be filled with laptop computers. In truth, two hundred pounds of its weight were bricks of Semtex explosives smuggled out of an arsenal in Lahore. His masters told him that this delivery was to be carted to a mosque in Chatby. He eagerly agreed that he did not need to know much more than that about it all. He promised that a van would meet the ship before it left port again the following day. The van would later be pushed off a dock and reported stolen. Such was his sacrifice for a world united under the one true faith.

  Hajar never intended to drive the van. Never intended to sign for what the manifest papers represented to be a gross of Korean computers. Never meant to be anywhere within the area of the docks when the pick-up was made. Never wished to be anywhere where secret police agents might take an interest in him.

  This is what happened and nothing could change that. Now, Hajar lay on a cold concrete floor in the basement of a building,contemplating a life of cowardice; a life that, God willing, would not last much longer.

  It was men of Mukhabarat who had been holding him now for three days. These were agents answerable only to the president in Cairo. And even though Mubarak was gone and the soft revolution had finally calmed and the streets returned to the work-a-day scramble for survival, little had really changed. Those in power in Egypt had no interest in their country turning into the free-fire zone that Libya had become. They would take steps with people like Hajar.

  Step One was to slip a black hood over Hajar's head and load him into the rear of an unmarked Land Rover for a rapid and bumpy ride lasting thirty minutes or more. He was walked, dragged, sweating and blind, to this basement room with its cold floor and dusty air. They tore off the mask and left him alone in the windowless room, and here he reviewed his life of deep fearfulness and brittle bravado.

  Day One was a good day. His only tormentor was himself. Why was he so stupid? Why did he not lie and say he could not find a van? Or the van broke down? Or he was sick that day? Why? Because he was just as afraid of his brothers in the cause as he was of the secret police. Perhaps more so. He lived in fear each day that his comrades would discover that he was a coward in the face of God.

  Day Two was far less pleasant. Two men entered the room, and Hajar awakened from the dull stupor he'd fallen into in place of sleep. They grasped his arms and re-placed the hood on his head. He was walked/guided from the room to an elevator. From the elevator he was taken to another room that was so brightly lit he could see a white glare, even through the black muslin wrapped tight around his head.

  He was lain on a frigidly cold metal surface with straps drawn down across his chest, hips and legs. One arm was kept free, and he felt it jerked away from his body at a ninety degree angle and put to rest on another cold metal surface and secured with straps. It was then that the hood was removed and he squinted into a harsh overhead light. Hajar whipped his head back and forth and saw that he was in a large room enveloped in gloom, except for the pool of light around him. The walls were tiled and there was a sharp chemical smell in the air. Like a hospital. Between the figures moving in close to him he could see the row of tables beside him. Shiny, clean steel, with furrows on either side that led to a drain.

  The kind of tables they lay dead men on.

  There was the clink of steel tools being arranged on a tray by his outstretched hand, which was painfully strapped down to a kind of metal arm extending from the table surface. No one said a word. The movements were practiced. Everyone here knew their place and what was expected of them. Even Hajar.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and could hear the steady gurgle of his own urine running from under him and down the drain at his feet.

  Then they turned their attention to his hand.

  Day Three found him back in the room without windows. Each time he dared to move, his hand was a source of constant agony . He could feel his heartbeat racing the length of his arm. They worked on his hand for what seemed like hours on end. No words from them but short phrases to one another. He felt blades on his bones, wedging between the joints of his fingers, probing nerve endings at the base of his thumbs.

  He screamed, he begged, and he cried like a terrified child. Finally he howled like an animal until he thought his lungs would burst and his throat would tear. Each time he passed out, they brought him around with an ammonia-soaked rag over his nose and mouth. Once, he awoke to find a rubbery ball secured firmly in his mouth, with a belt around his head to keep it in place.

  And never once did they ask him a question or even speak to him directly. They seemed to have no interest but to create hell for him. He lost consciousness one last time, and awoke alone in the dark, with the useless bloody thing at the end of his arm sending excruciating daggers through his body.

  On the fourth day, the men returned and took him to a different room, without placing the hood on his head. He was taken to what looked like the kind of office that an insurance man or petty bureaucrat might work in. High along one wall there were windows at street level. He could see sunlight through the filthy glass and the shadows of passing pedestrians above.

  The two men who escorted stood against one wall, behind him. A third, balding man, in a white shirt and black jacket with no tie, sat behind the desk and placed a tiny microphone pointed at Hajar. It led to a small digital device much like the one on which Hajar received his orders from his jihad masters.

  "Can you help us?" the man asked. His voice was calm; even kind.

  "I will help in any way I can," Hajar said. He was surprised at how level his own voice sounded. Whatever happened now, this was the end of it all.

  "And how much can you help us?" A smile of concern that said, "Help us help you."

  "Young-El," Hajar said in the tiny, quavering voice of a man crushed by his own shame. "I know of Najib abn Young-El."

  CHAPTER 7

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Griggs used the juice of the hot new lead to take over a section in one of the sub-basements at CIA central. Within six hours he had a fully wired-up cyber war room and a collection of geeks to do the spade work. They even had a casual code name: Bullrush.

  He walked into a room dimly lit by a three-sided bank of flatscreen monitors in super Hi-Def. At the center of the room was a flat table monitor measuring seventy-two inches, with an interactive world map on its screen. The other screens around the room were monitoring the Young-El sites live, and using classified search programs to comb through all content, emails, and links. This data was on a primary review screen that was updated second by second; capturing snapshots of the underworld communications net of this corner of Al Qaeda. And all of this represented only the tip of the iceberg. There was a far more primitive network beneath all of this, a world-wide jungle telegraph that only high-risk undercover operations and HUMINT could tap into. It was a parallel universe where terror outfits of all kinds communicated and cooperated despite their disparate goals.

  Dana Morton greeted Griggs as he settled into a high-backed leather chair and set down his coffee mug on a broad tabletop set up to be his desk. Its surface would soon be covered in stacks of paper files, faxes, and maps. The Agency still liked its old-fashioned shredable intel. Griggs looked around at his cyber-team hard at work and fixated on their screens.

  "You must feel like Jean-Luc Picard in that chair, Agent Griggs." Dana smiled a feral smile that looked slightly out of place on the petite blonde. Anyone who got to know her saw the predator lurking behind those pale green eyes.

  "Picard was a pussy," Griggs said. "Kirk was the only captain the Enterprise ever had."

  "Well, I can see why you're not at State anymore," she said with a chuckle.

  "Where are we, Dana?" Banter was over. Time for business.

  She paced around the room, using the images on the various screens to illustrate her points. The nine geeks, all of them astonishingly young men, sat at their posts, tapping keys, operating joysticks, and moving mice with no regard for anything but their own corner of the puzzle. Even the athletically-built Dana, in a tailored business suit, couldn't turn their attention from the images, codes, and text morphing before them.

  "That intel from Egypt was strong," she said. "It let us fill in some mile-wide gaps in the profile of Young-El and his operation."

  "Do you have a locale?" Griggs asked.

  "Not a specific location," she said. "We've nailed down his digs on the web but an actual earth location is going to take longer. He could be piggy-backing or using shadow servers. Even if we found any of his hardware it would only lead us on a snipe hunt. If we could have some fresh human intel it would help. But we've uncovered one thing we didn't expect."

  She walked to the tabletop monitor and began swiping and tapping at the world map on display on the sixty-inch screen. Griggs joined her and watched as she narrowed the view down to southern Asia.

  "Sifting the Egypt data and the connections provided, we rendered Young-El's base down to three possible locales." She tapped a manicured finger and turned three countries on the map to red. "Malaysia. The Philippines. Indonesia. That's where he overlaps with more traditional Al Qaeda operatives out of Iran or Yemen"

  "That's not very narrow, Dana. We're talking a billion people and millions of square miles."

  "It's a start." She looked up at him and brushed a strand of cornsilk hair from her eyes. "From little acorns..."

  "That analogy sucks, girl." Griggs frowned deeply. "Trees take their sweet time growing. We have a target with a big megaphone and a message that lots of sick assholes are listening to. We can link Young-El directly to at least four incidents in the last six months. Three domestic and one in the UK. And his influence is growing. No idea how many more he's greasing that are ready to pop."