Luke crouched low and moved to a ridge of stone thirty yards from the cliff face. He took cover and aimed his gun at the bad guys.

Two men were moving slowly across the rocks, guns out, stepping carefully. Their heads swiveled back and forth, looking for the girl, looking for the enemy.

Luke fired on them, killed them both.

An instant later, a rocket came screaming out of the night.

Luke ducked and rolled away just before the rocket hit his ridge.

BAM!

The sound was more than deafening. His ears rang. He went deaf for a long moment. Fragments of stone flew into the air and showered down on him.

Doonk!

From somewhere to the left, Ed had fired back at them.

BOOOM!

Machine gun fire strafed the spot where Ed’s muzzle signature had been. Hopefully, Ed wasn’t there anymore.

And so it went, tit for tat.

Luke crawled forward, like a worm, and shot another Al Qaeda in the head.

From somewhere ahead of him, a flare launched. Luke was silent. The militia was going to probe with that flare and see if they could spot Ed’s or Luke’s location. In the brief glow of the launch, Luke thought he saw perhaps a dozen men crouched by a low stone wall.

The flare began its slow ascent, lighting up the night.

An instant later, a line of bombs dropped from somewhere in the heavens. They came screaming down, a violent rain, invisible, pounding the place where the flare had just gone up.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

A hundred yards of fire and fury, a field of death, briefly turned night into day. The explosions echoed across the mountains, and back. In the aftermath, there came the crackling of flames as something burned, possibly a small building, and possibly the bodies of whoever had just been positioned there.

Drone strike. Beautiful.

Hours passed.

In the first bleak light just before dawn, a squad of United States Marines appeared like ghosts out of the mist. They moved carefully across the rocky terrain.

Luke ducked behind the ridgeline again. This was when people got shot by accident.

“Americans!” he shouted. “There’s Americans over here!”

Luke threw the rifle away. He heard them running toward him. He kept his empty hands in the air, where everyone could see them. Two helmeted Marines came around the ridge, rifles pointed at Luke.

“I’m an American!” he shouted again.

“Don’t move!”

The Marines charged him, flipped him over onto his stomach, and began to search him. A heavy foot was planted on his back. The muzzle of a gun was at his neck. Rough hands roamed his body.

“Agent Luke Stone,” he said. “FBI Special Response Team. The President’s daughter is thirty yards or forty yards from here, on a ledge hanging off the cliff. She’s wearing a bright orange jumpsuit. Don’t shoot her.”