“We’re sixty seconds to initial point, Stalker,” Franken responded on the secure satellite command channel. Thankfully Lindsey was feeling all right now, because Franken had now run out of flying gloves—he hoped he wouldn’t have to eject now. “We were chased by Libyan MiGs a while ago, but we’re clear. Unfortunately every air defense site in eastern Libya and western Egypt is looking for us, and both sides are on full alert. We had to go low and stay low, so our time in the box will be much less. I estimate only twelve minutes until we bingo. Sorry, Stalker.”

“No sweat, Headbanger,” Patrick replied. “I don’t plan on staying very long anyway. We’re in position and ready for some fireworks. We’re glad you’re here.”

“Glad to help, Stalkers. Watch the skies. Headbanger clear.”

The Libyan town of Jaghbub was located one hundred and twenty miles south of Tobruk. Jaghbub was an oasis fed by an occasionally dry river, which for most of its two thousand years of history never had more than a few hundred persons living there. But the area was one of the best farming regions in the northern Sahara, with many different types of fruits, vegetables, and nut trees in abundance, and travelers and nomads going across northern Africa found Jaghbub to be a rich and inviting place to stop and rest before continuing their trek across the wastelands. It had therefore developed over the centuries as a crossroads of many different nationalities, religious sects, political identities, and schools of thought from all over the known world.

So when an obscure descendant of the Prophet Muhammad was forced to flee his home in Fez, Morocco, by French colonists in the early nineteenth century, he escaped across the burning sands of the northern Sahara desert, following the ancient nomadic routes over fifteen hundred miles back toward the holy land, and came upon this little oasis. There he found a home for his own particular style of Islam. Instead of the wild, untamed “whirling dervish” being practiced in many Islamic sects, this holy man, who called himself Sayyid Muhammad ibn ‘Ali as-Sanusi, preached a return to strict Muslim practices—abstinence, prayer, and strict adherence to the words of the prophet in the Quran. He built a mosque, then a university, and finally a fortress on the banks of the little river, and the holy city of Jaghbub was bom.