"That is a naive and unprofessional position to take. This will go hard on you. I will make certain of that."

  "And do you imagine that I care about that one little bit, sir?"

  They were toe-to-toe in the middle of the techno-lair operations floor. The geeks at their stations studiously ignored the shouting to concentrate on the mission at hand. Dr. Marberry had already fled the room and the building and was probably on his way back to State as if being in the proximity of what had happened here presented a danger to his own ambitions. Career bureaucrats, Dana thought, may they all go to Hell and stay there.

  "Well, you may have time to re-think that when your ass is out on the street and your prospects have dried up like spit on a sidewalk in July, Morton."

  "If you'll excuse me, sir," she said curtly. "I still have a team in the field and an operation to oversee."

  "I wouldn't count on that."

  She turned back to him.

  "Who's going to take it on, sir? You? We both know that authorization to change executive position on an ongoing op at this level takes more juice than you have. You'd have to go all the way to Renegade. But you'll have to get him out of bed to do it."

  ‘Renegade' was the not-so-secret codename the current president had chosen for himself.

  DeStefano glared at her with open malice. She turned her back on him once more and stepped behind the drone control stations.

  "Status, people," she said evenly.

  She heard the automatic doors shush open then closed and her heart slowed, slowed, slowed back to its normal resting rate.

  "Nice shooting, Kim," she said and gave Bouchard's shoulder a gentle punch.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  THE HIGHWAY

  Things were heating up. The closer the team got to the coastal highway, the more activity there was in the street. Sirte was reaching a flashpoint.

  "Something going on," Heath said as they came to a stop once again to avoid slamming into civilians, both armed and unarmed, rushing across the street.

  "Has to relate to the Ahhamid's evacing, right?" Manny said and waved back a Toyota sedan trying to enter Mutassim Avenue. The driver shouted angrily at him. Everywhere vehicles were on the move. Cars, trucks, motorbikes and busses. They seemed to spring up out of nowhere. The Gaddafi loyalists were on the run and everyone wanted to play a part in it. When their grandkids asked where they were on this day, every Libyan wanted to say they were there in the thick of it and battling for liberty. Even those who'd been hiding in their cellars all this time. Especially those that had been hiding in their cellars all this time.

  "Maybe an alternate route," Heath said and leaned on the horn to clear some kids weaving back and forth in front of the Ford on motorized bikes.

  "It's a rat's maze on each side of us," Manny said as he checked the GPS. "We're almost to the highway."

  "I'm standing on the fucking horn and nobody's moving," Heath shouted and punched the dash.

  "Nobody in this part of the world listens to horns," Manny said and pushed his AK out the window and let off bursts into the air.

  Chili joined in and fired his own rifle into the sky, throwing in a rebel yell.

  A path opened before them and Heath threw the truck into second. All around them armed men shouted and laughed and began firing their own rifles over their heads.

  "Look what you started," Heath growled. But they were moving. The truck rumbled forward brushing aside jubilant Libyans, knocked aside a Hyundai and ripping the front bumper off a jitney loaded with angry clerics.

  The avenue ended at a "T" intersection with the coastal highway and Heath fought the Ford into third then overdrive and spilled Chili on his ass in the bed. They were in the middle of the six-laner and the traffic was thinner here and all of it rolling west, the pedestrians moved in streams along the verges of the road. It was like a bloody-minded pilgrimage. A reverse migration of lemmings; lemmings programmed to annihilate others rather than themselves.

  Manny held his door open and stood to look at the wide, straight road running west before them.

  "See a Saladin?" Heath called.

  "That's the trouble." Manny leaned back into the cab. "I see two of them."

  Two hundred yards ahead a Saladin rolled just before them. Another hundred yards on a second tore along the far right lane nearest the beach. More vehicles kept pace with them and Manny could only assume these were loyalists on the run.

  Farther on, rebels were pushing a burning car from a feeder road out into the path of the Saladin closest to the Ford. The big armored vehicle swerved but still t-boned the blazing four door, sending it spinning away to send rebels scattering. The Saladin continued on, one of its tires in flames. Heath gunned the Ford and brought them closer, driving through the black smoke trailing behind the truck, staying in its rear blind spot.

  "How the hell are we gonna know which one Flame's in?" Heath shouted.

  "As long as they're rolling the same way we can follow both," Manny called back.

  "As a plan, that sucks ass."

  "That's operation normal for us, bro."

  Heath grunted agreement and dragged the shift back to overdrive.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  For the past three months Sunny Wei lived day to day. Each time he awakened deep within the Ahhamid burrow was another day to be endured. Now, here, in the rear of this sweltering steel box he felt as though he were living second by second. Threats were near and threats were far and each multiplied in rapid succession.

  Outside their rolling shelter was a world of hostility, an environment inimical to the life of anyone even suspected of having Gaddafi sympathies. But what was a fragile refuge for Sunny, was also a cage. He was trapped in here as the unwilling guest of Major Ahhamid. And the man was unraveling before his eyes. His wife fought to stifle tears as he shrieked at her to show courage. The children gave off keening cries of terror at their father's rage and the thunderous sounds from without. The officers that had been chosen as the major's attaches rolled their eyes and pressed lips together and sweated in silence. They would do nothing to draw the major's attention to them.

  Sunny sat with his eyes partly closed; if he shut them all the way, he was made nauseous by the rocking motion of the Saladin. He fought to keep his gorge from rising. Were he to vomit here, he was certain the major would put a bullet in his brain. This thought only doubled his queasiness. He held a hand to his mouth as though to create a dam for the noxious mess surging and receding up his esophagus.

  The only one here who might count himself fortunate was the captive American. He lay on the floor between them lost in some kind of euphoric slumber. Nothing the major did could rouse him and so he was left in peace. Sunny wished he had some of whatever the American was on.

  The driver informed them that they had reached the coastal highway and they moved along at an accelerated rate and the ride became considerably smoother. The major moved up to the driver cab and stood crouched to peer through the view slits. All these conditions caused the passengers to relax a bit on their bench seats. The officers began having a conversation in subdued voices. The major's wife was only sniffing occasionally now and her children grew quiet.

  Sunny sat forward and regarded the sleeping American and wondered if he, Sunny, were a target for capture, or maybe even assassination. He hoped it was the former. It made sense that it would be. If they only wanted him dead, a missile or drone strike would have accomplished that and given NATO the luxury of plausible deniability if Beijing complained on his behalf. If the American gangsters abducted him, then his masters would respond by denying he ever existed. Sunny hoped there was still a chance that he could escape Libya intact and being whisked away to Guantanamo was not the worst of all the possible fates he could imagine by far. He could seek asylum. He was certainly not going to let them waterboard or rendition him. He was willing to tell them all he knew in exchange for his life and perhaps a home in Florida and a small annual stipend to live on.

  He was shaken from this fantasy by a shout from the major. The truck canted to one side as it turned right violently. The occupants were rocked on their seats and the unconscious American slid forward along the floor with a groan as they struck something head on.

  The fear returned, their temporary reprieve from the tension of their exodus abruptly evaporating. The children began moaning once more.

  Perhaps my life would be enough, Sunny thought, bargaining his own cause in his mind.

  He thought he could hear the furies laugh at his naivete.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  LANGLEY

  "They're close," Bob Teranaka said. On his screen the three dots were situated just behind the wayward fourth dot. The map morphed under the dots to stay current with their position on the freeway skirting across the northern end of the Sirte.

  "But they can't know that," Dana called from behind Kim and Spivey at the drone stations.

  "I'm not sure about that," Kim said and adjusted to keep the chase vehicle and pursuit target in sight. "They're maintaining their position on the Saladin's six."

  "So they know what vehicle they want," Spivey said. He was maintaining a higher altitude and giving them a bigger image area of the chase and the highway ahead.

  "They know what kind of vehicle," Dana said. "But not which one specifically. They have no idea how close they are. Gaddafi bought shitloads of Saladins from the Brits. They're like V-dubs in a college parking lot."

  "Let's shrink their options then," Kim said.

  "Targets of opportunity," Dana smiled.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  THE HIGHWAY

  The Ford dogged the nearest Saladin. Manny kept in sight the other one running fifty yards ahead. He hung out the window with the GPS in one hand and a pair of binoculars he found in the Ford's center console in the other hand.

  "Saladin Two is catching up to a bunch of other vehicles also heading west at speed," Manny reported. "We're coming up on a roundabout in a klick and a half."

  "An organized loyalist getaway?" Heath said from behind the wheel.

  "Looks like it," Manny said and glassed the sky. "We have an increased air presence. Looks like everyone knows what's up but us."

  In the clear skies above Rafale, jets with French markings soared in broad circles. Their wings loaded with nine tons of laser-guided bombs and missiles. They moved through the sky in loose following formations at five thousand feet.

  "They're waiting on clearance for something," Manny said.

  "We have to wrap this shit up, bro," Heath said and leaned over the wheel to squint up at the jets banking overhead. "Those frogs are going to rain on us. Precision strikes are not their thing. I do not want to go collateral today."

  Chili leaned around to the driver's window.

  "Honk the horn, Heath!" he called over the rushing wind.

  "What the fuck?" Heath said. "What's that going to do?"

  "It's something, man!" Chili called back. "Let him know we're here!"

  Heath laid on the horn, blasting long bleats at the rear of the Saladin. He was driving close enough to be in the big truck's airstream.

  "Flame!" Chili called out over the roof of the cab, hands cupped around his mouth. "Yo, Flame! Flame!"

  "Hopeless," Heath shrugged.

  A black shape threw them into shadow and shook the windows of the cab with its passage. The three SEALs ducked instinctively. It was a Predator drone buzzing them at less than fifty feet above the road surface. It sped away west and stood on its tail to rise high into the sky, waggling its wings back and forth.

  "That's Langley," Manny said. "That was for us."

  "Hell, yeah," Heath said. "But what's it mean?"

  As if in direct answer, a second drone dropped down behind them to the right and leveled off at two hundred. Hellfires exploded into action from beneath its wings and made for the farthest Saladin on parallel trajectories. The missiles impacted simultaneously and the armored truck vanished in a flash of white. The flash formed a cone of blinding light and engulfed other vehicles that drove into it. Arcs of blazing fuel shot into the sky and the asphalt cooked off all around.

  "Now we know which truck we want," Manny said with a fierce grin.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  A DISPLAY OF POWER

  The drone strike tipped the scale.

  The Rafale jets that were circling in the sky like buzzards began to dip their wings to lose altitude. They moved to draw up in a row to the east, lining up on the highway. Vapor contrails from the tips of their wings described their passage through the cooler air above the water. Despite moving at half of Mach, they appeared to be moving slowly, lazily to attack position.

  Three roads met at the roundabout where the coastal highway ended to break up into smaller thoroughfares heading south around the western edge of Sirte and west to continue on to Bani Walid. There were fewer buildings here on the fringes of the town. The land was flat and featureless and presented an ideal shooting range for an air strike. The fleeing loyalists appeared to fully grasp that they were stand-out targets on a field of sand. With the sudden destruction of the Saladin most of the convoy of almost one hundred vehicles tore across the roundabout to follow the southern road. A few vehicles broke away to continue on the shore road.

  The Rafale F-3s came in at two thousand feet and banked away behind the cloud of dust raised by the fleeing trucks and cars. They appeared to the relieved loyalists to have been called off. Was this the reprieve they prayed for?

  Multiple streaks of white reached for the convoy from the place in the sky where the French jets broke off from their flight path.

  Six laser-guided AASM air-to-surface rocket propelled bombs crashed into both wings of the convoy. This was ‘fire and forget it' ordnance. The bombs would find their pre-picked targets on their own. The Hammers weighed in at 250 kilograms and struck their assigned marks in spite of the high rate of speed of the escaping vehicles. Nothing could hide from them. Nothing could outrun them. Explosions erupted all along the heart of the twin ranks of the convoy. To the west, the smaller group of vehicles disappeared in a dome of heat and light surrounded by the sudden concentric rings of concussion. The air all around was compressed and thrust outward by the vacuum created at the heart of the blast. A wave of super-heated air moved away at ballistic speed.

  The larger portion of the convoy was caught on a street lined with residential buildings, apartment blocks, along one side. The multiple blasts struck square on the chosen victims and ripped a fiery gap in the middle section of the procession. Fingers of fire and dense white smoke extended away between the apartment blocks strung along the thoroughfare.

  The lead vehicles of the convoy fanned out. Some remained on the road while others found their own pathways across the rough open country to the west. Dense clouds of dust joined the pall of black smoke rising from the twin infernos burning just beyond the roundabout. Trucks at the rear of the column came to a halt at the edge of the devastation and instantly ensnared one another in a tangle as they attempted to turn away or find a route around. Their confusion abruptly ended when a second round of Hammers dropped in among them.

  Flaming trucks were thrown end over end to either side of the road. Secondary blasts from full fuel tanks sent a wall of fire all around and blackened the faces of the buildings facing the road. From the vantage point of the sortie of Rafales drifting high above, small figures could be seen running from vehicles either stalled or trapped at the fringes of the field of destruction. They ignored these pitiable wretches. Certainly they would be found and taken care of by the rebels now swarming from the town.

  The jets lined up to pursue the remainder of the convoy rushing away from Sirte in a chaotic pattern bearing west and south. These poor bastards fell prey to the GIAT 30mm cannons mounted in the nose of each of the Rafales. Lead fell all around at a rate of eight hundred rounds a minute. The air was foggy with choking dust raised by thousands of rounds seeming to fall simultaneously over the rapidly dissolving column of trucks like a ballistic hail storm. Vehicles simply collapsed to the ground as tires shredded to the rims and the entire surface area was thoroughly sieved in an instant. Others rolled unguided to come to lumbering stops like beasts shambling to a final resting place where death could overtake them.

  Their sortie at an end, the flight of French jets snapped away north doing victory rolls each in turn over the shimmering Mediterranean. They would return to the Charles DeGaulle, their home carrier waiting at anchor off the coast of Crete. There they would re-fuel and re-arm for another patrol. But among the fighter group the feeling was that this sortie might be their last action in this campaign. There was a sense that something was ended by this last attack.

  In the wake of the air strike a few vehicles managed to survive and remain mobile. Among these was a metallic green Mercedes SUV that continued across a construction site followed closely by a pair of light trucks bearing the markings of the Libyan army. The SUV was crippled by a cannon round through the hood. The glass was blown out all around. It trailed smoke that grew darker as it moved, slowed and finally came to rest in the shadow of a ditch. Black smoke rose through the holes that peppered the hood.

  The trucks pulled up behind and disgorged armed men in uniform and civilian dress. A solitary figure climbed from the rear of the SUV and ran stumbling for a row of concrete drainage pipes. Dropping to his knees, the man crawled into one of the pipes. The armed men dropped back to seek cover behind their trucks as the first bullets of a ground assault struck around them.

  Men on foot and men in trucks streamed from the buildings by the hundreds to converge on the trio of vehicles in the run-off ditch.

  Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, the Lion of Libya, the Mahdi, the Brother Leader was only just beginning the longest hour of his life, and his last.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHANGE IN DIRECTION

  The major was shouting again.