First Sergeant Bradley Sims saw the army truck stop at a crossroads at the far end of the valley. Roadside lights cast the area in a golden glow. He turned off his headlights, slowed his car, and pulled behind an abandoned grain warehouse where he could observe the street through a chain-link fence. The soldiers began off-loading sawhorse barricades.

“No! Oh, god, no!” cried the young woman beside him. Rachel had a cinnamon colored shawl wrapped around her head and face, but the eyes that peered out from under the shawl were bright with new tears. “God, please don’t let them take us back.”

Top pasted on a smile that was filled with far more confidence than he felt. “Not a chance, darlin’.”

He removed a small pair of high-powered night-vision binoculars and steadied his forearms on the wheel as he peered at the men: checking their uniforms, their weapons, their body language, and apparent combat readiness. You can tell a lot about soldiers by how well they go about ordinary tasks. Mediocre ones slouch through it, as if laziness were the best part of down time. The best ones did everything with a degree of polish and professionalism so that even something as simple as erecting a roadblock was done right and done right the first time.

The men at the crossroads did not appear to be a gang of slackers.

Not good.

He tapped his earbud. “Sergeant Rock to Road Trip. On me. No lights. Stop and listen.” Behind him, scattered hundreds of yards apart, the other two cars crept slowly through the shadows, running without headlights.

“Okay, ladies and gents,” Top said into his mike, “this is about to get fun. Here’s what I need and I need it now. First, I need a volunteer—snake oil salesman, feel me?”

“I’m in,” said Khalid.

“Roger that, Dancing Duck. Green Giant, that means you’re Jack-in-the-box.”

“Rock ’n’ roll,” agreed Bunny, and he sounded happy about it.

“Converge on me. I’m Santa Claus.”

He tapped out of the channel.

Rachel grabbed his sleeve. “What was all that? What’s happening?”

Top held up a finger. “My orders are to get you three over the border and into Kuwait. To do that I have to get past that roadblock. I’d go a different way but every other route keeps us in country for at least an hour, and we don’t have that hour. I’ll be straight with you. Best guess is that Iranian military helicopters will be here in fifteen, twenty minutes—we need ten to make it to our LZ and that’s going all out, balls-to-the-walls crazy.”

“‘LZ’?”

“Landing zone. We got our own helo coming, but it can’t come this close to a town or we’d start a war that nobody wants. That means that we have to get through that security checkpoint down there.”