Back against the far wall was the large gun safe where Pickens had stored sensitive electronics, classified materials, and even batteries. Jake had given his partner a hard time for leaving millions of dollars of weapons loose in the basement and locking up twenty dollars’ worth of batteries, but the big man had protested with his big laugh that he liked to keep them with the electronics for convenience.

Pickens’s eight years in IED-ravaged Somalia had made him an expert in security, and in explosives. Using detonating cord, a blasting cap, and a thermate grenade, he’d wired a self-destruct system to the safe’s electronic lock. While the grenade wouldn’t explode violently, it would burn at over four thousand degrees Fahrenheit, ensuring that nothing in the safe, or anyone near the safe, would survive if he entered the wrong combination.

Jake wiped his sweaty hands on his pants and began slowly punching in the code.

Like most Special Activities officers, Jake had been taught the basics of identifying, building, and defeating various explosive devices by members of the Agency’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal team. He knew that thermate had low sensitivity to external impulses, but he also knew that some of the third-world blasting caps used to ignite the grenades did not, and he didn’t want a drop of sweat or a spark of static electricity to trigger it by accident.

The safe beeped twice and the lock clicked open. Inside were bricks of U.S. dollars and euros, shelves filled with batteries and electronic gadgets, and two boxes of manila folders.

Jake found what he was looking for in the second box—a folder containing the overhead reconnaissance images Major Steve had shared at their first meeting. They’d been taken when an Air Force U-28 turboprop and a pair of RQ-1 Predators had searched the region looking for the three trucks with fake Kenya Defence Forces markings.

Analysts from SOCOM had reviewed the take from the aircraft, including the multispectral and ultra-hi-res images Jake didn’t have access to, and instead of thirty-six facilities, they’d narrowed the list down to two.

Jake glanced at the two photos and immediately agreed with Pickens’s earlier assessment of the facility outside Jilib. It was a disused commercial farm, dried up and probably abandoned sometime during the drought.

Jake examined the second image. His partner had dismissed it as an empty livestock farm, based on its stockade walls and location bordering a river near rural Dujuma, but Jake gave it a hard look, and his trained eyes spotted features inconsistent with a cattle ranch that hadn’t been used in years: The fences were solid, high, and in good repair. The dirt roads were well worn in an area otherwise overrun with vegetation. Though it was near a river, there was no pasture or grazing area. It was located in a hilly region, ill-suited to raising cattle.