Flynn turned around to find one of the civilians who’d flown in ahead of them aboard the unmarked Mi-17 helicopter. The other man was almost skeletally thin. He’d introduced himself earlier as Anderson White—a name that was almost certainly fake, but which certainly matched his pale, washed-out eyes, gray crew cut, and thin, almost colorless lips. Whoever he really was, he was definitely the one calling the shots for the black ops team.

“And why is that, Mr. . . . White?” Flynn asked, adding a deliberate pause to show that he wasn’t buying the other man’s obvious alias.

“My team will retrieve those data recorders and make sure they get to the right people,” White said flatly, ignoring the dig. “I suggest your people focus on recovering those remains. It would be best if you leave everything else to us. This is not your show.”

Flynn didn’t like the sound of that at all. He deliberately allowed a little more of his native Texas drawl to slide into his voice. “Maybe y’all are forgetting this was a U.S. Air Force C-130.”

“Flying under my agency’s orders,” White countered smoothly. “And carrying a cargo we provided. Which makes everything on that aircraft aft of the cockpit solely our jurisdiction.”

Flynn fought down a scowl. Virtually the only piece of information the OGA black ops team had provided was that the Super Hercules had been coming in so low over this part of the desert because it was on approach to an old Libyan Air Force runway south of the Wath Oasis. A quick check of the map and data files loaded into his field tablet showed that was part of a base Gaddafi had built inside the Aouzou Strip—a sixty-mile-wide swath of territory along Chad’s border with Libya. Rumored to be rich in uranium deposits, the Strip had been the spark for nine years of military clashes between the two countries back in the late 1970s. It was just the kind of disputed turf that seemed likely to draw in some of the world’s bad actors, especially those interested in acquiring potentially fissionable ores for full-fledged nuclear weapons or improvised dirty bombs.

Right after they’d landed, he’d grabbed a quick look inside the C-130’s largely intact cargo compartment. Within a couple of minutes, one of White’s tough-looking paramilitary security personnel—whose tats and beard marked him as ex–Special Forces—had not so gently backed him out again. But not before Flynn got the chance to check out a few of the crates the big turboprop had been carrying, discovering what looked like a shitload of Russian-made small arms, ammunition, RPGs, and land mines.

He raised an eyebrow at White. “Your jurisdiction? Meaning what, exactly?”

“Meaning that you’re going to stand back and let my team complete its work without further interference,” the other man replied. He checked his watch. “From what I’ve been told, they should be done rigging the cargo and the aircraft with explosives in approximately one hour.” His lips thinned even further. “Which is why I suggest you rev your own unit into higher gear and get those bodies out, ASAP. Once our charges are set, we’re not going to sit around waiting on you and your people.”