Bullets from his pursuers zinged past his head and he dived to the ground, getting a mouthful of sand for his trouble.

When he looked up, he heard the whump-whump-whump of helicopter rotors, close now.

The first rescue chopper landed and Kallis and his Delta shitheads boarded it. The second chopper hovered overhead, covering the first.

Jack knew it was a long shot to get there in time but he forced himself to get up and run—

—just as a shoulder-launched missile shoomed low over his head, fired from somewhere on the desert plain behind him, and slammed into the second hovering helicopter!

Explosion.

Smoke.

The chopper lurched in the air, engines screaming, trailing a death-plume of black smoke, and it crashed in a heap at the end of the abandoned airfield’s runway only fifty metres from Jack.

Jack looked from the crashed chopper to the other one and his eyes met those of Cal Kallis, standing in its side door.

Kallis just turned away and ordered his pilot to leave.

The door slid shut and the rescue chopper lifted off, departing into the glare of the rising sun.

Fucking Delta.

His pursuers then crested the horizon behind him: three hundred furious enemy troops.

Jack dashed over to the crashed chopper.

It was crumpled and burning.

The lead pilot was dead, impaled on the spiked edge of the broken windshield’s frame.

The only other crew member groaned. The copilot. He was bleeding badly, but alive.

Jack grabbed him, threw him into a fireman’s carry and hauled ass to the only place he could go: the hangars of the abandoned Iraqi airfield.

He grunted as he ran.

The copilot was a big guy, heavy as shit.

Jack kicked open the door to the hangar, peered inside and halted in surprise.

In addition to the usual rats, cockroaches and spiders, there was something else in here.

A plane.

A big plane.

A glistening white, brand-spanking-new, perfectly clean Boeing 747 with islamic republic of iraq emblazoned on its side.

It was a beautiful thing and totally out of place here in the scrubland wastes outside Basra.

‘Okay, I wasn’t expecting that,’ Jack said aloud.

It turned out that this was a very secret place, known only to an elite few in Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, and this was a very secret plane: one of Saddam’s own personal escape planes.

It’s my escape plane now, Jack thought.

The aircrew stationed here—like most of the Iraqi Army—must have fled as the U.S. tanks rumbled into Basra.

As he climbed the airstairs, heaving under the weight of the chubby helicopter copilot, the unconscious man woke.

‘What the—where am I?’ he said.

The accent was unmistakable. New Zealand.

Jack put the Kiwi copilot down in the doorway of the plane.

The guy had a big beard, a round face and wide kind eyes.