Rapp wasn’t sure who had spoken but recognized the accent as Dutch. The tent was packed—not just with Scott Coleman’s core team but with the other operators they’d managed to bring in. A few had been left on the perimeter but everyone else was here, heating up the confined space and permeating it with the stench of sweat.

“That operation is completely black—probably put together by the president and the head of the Joint Chiefs personally. We don’t even know who they are, and no one wants to push the issue.” Rapp scanned the faces around him. “And that brings me to a related subject. It’s my understanding the president wants us out of here. More than that, he’s pretty much ordered us out of here.”

Many of the men shrugged. A few laughed. Not surprising, since the majority weren’t American and had no reason to concern themselves with the wishes of Anthony Cook. Rapp turned his attention to Coleman. “Scott?”

“Are you saying he’s offering to buy out my contract with Ward?”

“Nobody’s told me about there being any money on the table.”

“Then I don’t work for him and he can kiss my ass.”

Based on their expressions, everyone on his team felt the same way.

“All right. Then let’s move on. If those soldiers are out there, Auma’s aware of it. He’ll be tracking their movements in case they know something about Chism that he doesn’t.”

“That puts us in a tough spot,” Coleman said. “If we start up a big operation on top of them, Auma might see them as having outlived their usefulness and attack.”

“I agree, but there’s nothing we can do about it at this point. If Chism and his people are alive, their clock is ticking.”

“So, the American force is on its own,” someone said.

Rapp nodded. “Chism’s our mission. If we find ourselves in a position to help the others, we’ll do it. But it’s a secondary consideration. Understood?”

Murmurs of assent.

“All right,” Rapp said. “That brings us to the question of how we’re going to do it.” He tapped a black circle on a map propped on an easel. “This is the hospital Chism theoretically escaped from. Because of difficult terrain and a best-case estimate of their capabilities, we think they’re inside this perimeter. If we disregard some of the steeper terrain that wouldn’t be navigable by them and keep in mind that they’d need to be reasonably close to a water source, that leaves the areas shaded in red. Not an insignificant amount of territory to cover, but also not half the country.”

“From a difficulty standpoint, though, you’ve got to multiply it by fifty,” Joe Maslick said. “I mean, we could walk within five feet of them and never know it if they weren’t making noise.”