Ever since he’d left Mogadishu, Jake had been focused on eliminating the weapon and killing Yaxaas. He knew that assaulting a larger and better armed force would be dangerous, and if he didn’t destroy the bioweapon on his first attempt, he might become its first victim. But Jake was disillusioned with Graves and the Agency and had devised his plan just after losing Athena and Pickens. He was willing to sacrifice his own life to save the people of Somalia. Surviving the mission had never been part of the plan.

But Pickens wasn’t dead.

And it was time for a new plan.

Jake valued nothing more than loyalty, and Athena’s death had unleashed in him a flood of emotions. The sense of loss and the void in his future were brutal, but what had nearly suffocated him was the self-loathing he’d felt about abandoning her and Giánnis so abruptly after causing her death. Leaving Pickens had been almost as hard. Jake had replayed the scene in his mind too many times to count—standing on the roadside, powerless to stop the shooting as his partner slumped forward in the seat, his blood splattered across the windshield—dead and abandoned on the streets of a foreign country.

Or so Jake thought.

He’d been given a second chance to get his partner back alive.

Whatever it took, Jake was going to make it right.

A one-man hostage rescue was just about the most difficult thing Jake could imagine. Surveillance, intelligence gathering, and operational planning were usually handled by teams of men with deep experience, extensive training, and nearly unlimited resources. The actual raid was usually carried out by a nation’s top special operations force—groups such as America’s Delta Force or SEAL Team Six, Israel’s Sayeret Matkal, or the pioneering British SAS.

And Jake was on his own.

As usual.

But it was pressure that had forged him into the weapon he’d become. He just needed a way into camp. The lightning had stopped, but so had the clouds and the heavy rains that had provided him with cover. Now with patrols scouring the hills and the machine gun nest covering the valley, crossing the clear-cut area around camp would be nearly impossible.

He needed a way in that no one would expect.

Something impossible.

Maybe something crazy.

He lay motionless, scanning the banks of the Jubba. The thirsty animals once again started to appear at dusk. At first there was only a small serval cat and a few dik-dik, cautiously approaching to take a drink, but more animals arrived as night fell, including a lesser kudu that appeared from the plains and bounded into the river.

The current was flowing swiftly from all of the runoff, and the antelope made slow progress as it tried to cross to the near side.

Jake peered through the night vision scope atop his rifle.