The rain beat relentlessly down, but there was almost no wind. Whitman, glancing up at the roiling clouds, hoped that the poor weather would continue as the forecast predicted. It was the time of the full moon, and he had argued for waiting until the waning crescent, but King Cutler had insisted they move at once.

“For the first time we have positive intel concerning Seiran el-Habib’s whereabouts,” Cutler had told Whitman. “He’s too big a catch. We can’t wait.”

But the weather had turned in their favor, the night black and impenetrable as pitch. Whitman fired up the GPS, plugged in the coordinates of the private villa where el-Habib was currently holed up, and, silently signaling to his team, took point as they headed out.

Their landing site was approximately a mile from their target. The villa was in the center of an armed compound, walled and wired. This much they knew for certain; the rest they would have to find out when they arrived.

It was a long, hard slog, along muddy lowlands, then over rising, rocky hillocks, tufted plateaus, and narrow overlooks. Not that they could have seen much of anything without their next-generation night vision goggles, provided by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to which Cutler had inside access, but using them for long periods of time was fatiguing on the eyes, inducing dizziness and, often, headaches. Cutler was forever shoving the newest weaponry—“toys,” as he called them—at the team.

“Red Rover is my blackest of black ops unit, so far off the radar that no one on Capitol Hill knows of your existence. No one even knows NSA is hiring people like us,” he’d tell them. “You deserve the fruits of the best and brightest sparks our government has to offer.”

Despite the utter darkness and the filthy weather, the team had no difficulty negotiating the terrain. After all, they had spent hours traversing it in a three-dimensional simulation built up with photos and videos from numerous drone overflights. As a consequence, the ground was as familiar to them as their own backyards.

This was just as well, because Whitman’s mind was firmly set on Seiran el-Habib, the Saudi-born terrorist mastermind who was their current target. According to the intel Cutler had shared with him that came direct from Omar Hemingway, their contact at NSA, el-Habib was highly connected—to what or whom was a mystery they had been sent to unlock.

If it had simply been a matter of taking el-Habib out, a drone could have done the deed almost as well. But their brief was to extract el-Habib from his compound, then rendezvous with the helo.

“El-Habib isn’t like your other targets,” Cutler had told Whitman. “He’s a very special case that needs to be handled with kid gloves. You get me?”

“As always, boss,” Whitman had replied.

Cutler’s green eyes had bored into Whitman. “I hope to Christ you do, Gregory.” He was the only person since Whitman’s father to call him that. “We’re getting triple our fee for the extraction, but we will get a shitload of money—even for us—once you unlock this sonuvabitch’s mind.”