Sherri fell asleep fast that night, not troubled by horny dreams of the man she couldn’t have. Instead, her dreams were populated by images of her and Griffin in her favorite settings—lying on a beach, hiking in mountains, making slow, lazy love on a gently rocking sailboat—

A hard hand pressed over her mouth, and she jerked awake.

A combat wake-up. Which meant hostiles were nearby and silence was imperative.

Griffin bent over her cot. He murmured, “We’ve had word from downrange. The attack on Haddad is going down. Cal wants you to watch and learn from the live feed of the Reapers’ body cameras.”

Sherri nodded and threw back the blanket, climbing out of bed quickly. Griffin didn’t step back quite quickly enough, and she brushed against him as she stood up.

Their gazes met in a brief, private smile, and then he stepped away to wake up Anna and Lily.

The women dressed quickly and followed him outside into the chilly night. Sherri’s breath hung in the air as she hurried after Griffin, appreciating his muscular shoulders. God, she loved hanging onto those shoulders while he took her to the moon and back.

Kettering and the other men were waiting in the conference room, and all three video monitors on the wall were lit up in lime green. They showed a barren landscape below. The Reapers must be lying on top of some sort of ridge, looking down into a valley. None of the images were moving at the moment.

“Where are they?” Griffin asked tersely.

“Hunkered down, waiting for the air assets to come on location,” Cal answered. “I’m gonna pull up the audio feed from Ops. You ladies will hear everything the SEALs hear in real time.”

The way Sherri understood it, the SEALs themselves would say basically nothing from the time the op started until it concluded. Silence was the world of the SEAL in action.

Over the next few minutes, a steady stream of information flowed into the SEALs’ earpieces, however. Estimates of how long it would take for the surveillance and attack drones to come into place overhead. Reports of sentry activity outside the farm compound in which Haddad was sleeping and which the attack team planned to take down.

A final readiness check was called for, and the various groups of operators verbally checked in with brief mutters or replied with single clicks over their microphones to indicate their readiness to roll.

The DEVGRU guys were going to attack the cave complex on the other side of the valley, a hairy and incredibly dangerous mission inside tunnels and caves likely to be inhabited by hostiles and booby-trapped up the wazoo. The three Reapers and two other strike teams from SEAL Team 8 were apparently going to sweep down out of the hills from both sides and take the cluster of mud-walled buildings.