Flynn looked up and spotted twin contrails arrowing westward across the sky, coming their way.

“Wizard One-One, this is Hammer Three-Five,” a crisp voice called over the radio from one of the two U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles vectored to this location. “Can you confirm the target is clear?”

“Wizard One-One confirms the target is clear, Hammer Three-Five,” Kate Kasper replied. “Anyone still breathing down there is a bad guy.”

“Copy that,” the Strike Eagle pilot acknowledged. “Target locked.” And then. “GBU Thirty-eights away.”

Flynn blinked, not sure if he’d actually seen several small specks falling off the distant F-15s or not. GBU-38s were five-hundred-pound gravity bombs converted to precision-guided munitions by bolting on control surfaces and combined inertial guidance–GPS systems. Once released at high altitude, they were capable of steering themselves to targets up to fifteen nautical miles away.

He leaned farther out the door, staring to the west and silently counting seconds. It should be any moment now—

“Impact,” the Strike Eagle pilot reported.

Orange flashes rippled across the desert in rapid succession as bomb after bomb plummeted down out of the sky and detonated. Huge clouds of smoke, sand, and debris billowed high into the air. When they drifted away, there were only overlapping craters where the wrecked C-130, its cargo of illicit weapons, and the burned-out black ops helicopter had once been.

Flynn sat back with a sigh.

“Don’t get too comfortable, Captain,” White said bitterly. “Your recklessness triggered this disaster. And I’m going to make sure you don’t just walk away from the mess you’ve created.”

For a moment, Flynn stared back at the pale-eyed intelligence officer. Was the other man really serious? Or just desperately hunting around for someone else, anyone else, to take the fall for his own obvious failure? Then he shrugged and looked away. Let White stew in his own rage and pain. There wasn’t any point in arguing with the man right now. There’d be time enough to make sure the facts were straight when they were all debriefed. Instead, he closed his eyes and leaned back against the door, steeling himself for the long flight to an emergency extraction point deeper in the Sahara.

But deep inside, Nick Flynn couldn’t quite shake a growing sense of unease . . . and the uncomfortable awareness that not all enemies necessarily wear different uniforms or speak different languages.

Three

The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

Some Weeks Later

Doing his best to control his nerves, Captain Nick Flynn followed the uniformed Pentagon police officer escorting him down a long basement corridor. Overhead LED lights glowed brightly, illuminating a bare concrete floor and walls painted a faded institutional green. Other than a firm, but polite “Follow me, sir” uttered right after they met at the entrance, the sergeant hadn’t said a single word to him. Nor had any of the multitudes of people hurrying onward in all directions paid him the slightest attention. More than twenty-five thousand military personnel and civilians were employed inside the enormous building. And in a place where Army, Air Force, and Marine generals and Navy admirals were a dime a dozen, a junior officer, even one with a police escort, apparently didn’t rate so much as the flicker of an eye.