Captain Lindell’s voice barely registered in her earphones over the roar of the engine and the deep, thrumming bass note of the chopper blades. It was as though the tension had strangled his voice down to a clenched murmur. Royse held up her hand with all five fingers splayed and nodded at the spook. She was already preparing herself, but nodded back anyway. Michelle had watched the woman take inventory of her load before they lifted off from the container ship, three hundred miles off the coast. She watched her repeat the performance now that they were almost at their destination.

A minute later, obviously having reassured herself she had not forgotten her passport, wallet or Gerber Mark II fighting knife, the woman closed her eyes and let her head loll back until her helmet touched the bulkhead behind her. It was the first human gesture, the first intimation of weakness, or fear, or exhaustion that Michelle had seen her make, and as quickly as it came, it passed. Her head snapped back up. Her eyes blinked once.

‘Two minutes out.’

The woman chambered a round in her HK-417, a metallic kerrchung that never failed to lay a cold finger at the base of Royse’s spine. The 5.56 mm HK-416s she had seen here and there, but the 417, with the heavier 7.62 mm round, had been a rumour until tonight. The spook’s brand-new Heckler & Koch was another sign that she wasn’t your standard-issue self-loving, spec-ops asshole, whispering, ‘For I am the baddest motherfucker in the Valley.’ No piece-of-shit M16 or M4 for this chick.

Fuck it, she figured. Another day, another dollar.

Michelle readied herself at the door, training the electric M134 minigun over the treetops, which rippled beneath her feet at a hundred and forty knots. Her knees bent to compensate for the sudden twisting, diving flight path as Lindell began to track the nap of the earth, heading for a small clearing marked on their maps as Objective Underwood.

‘Thirty seconds.’

The Black Hawk pivoted, seeming to turn on a dime, as if Lindell were trying to throw them both out the rear hatch by way of momentum. The woman braced herself against the bulkhead, holding tight to a grab bar over her right shoulder. Royse sank deeper into a squat, until her knees were bent almost at right angles. Then the inertia bled away swiftly as they came to hover over a patch of field between two clusters of trees. Michelle checked the ground beneath them and reported that the aircraft was clear. She signalled to the woman to step forward and hook up.