“And then what do we do?”

“This is what you will do, Zuwayy,” Kazakov said. “You will do exactly as I tell you to do, and you had better not slip up, or I will see to it that a lot more than your damned nose is smashed.”

“You will not speak to me this way!” Zuwayy shouted. “I am the king of united Libya—!”

“Zuwayy, the quicker you get that fiction out of your head, the better we will all be,” Kazakov interjected. “You are nothing but a second-rate army officer who deceived, murdered, and bribed your way into the presidential palace. It was a brilliant scheme—until you actually started to believe the shit you were feeding your fellow Libyans. Now, you are nothing. Even Qadhafi had a better reputation than you do right now—before you had your men put a bullet in his eye and string him up from the flagpole in broad daylight. You had him and his family pleading for their lives on your living room floor, and you still didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger yourself.

“Now, I will tell you what to do, and by God you had better do this mission right this time, or I’ll see to it that you end up like your so-called ‘ancestors’—your bones will be tossed out into the desert as vulture food.” Kazakov outlined the targets he wanted struck and the way he wanted it done. Afterward, the line went dead.

Pavel Kazakov nearly turned over his entire desk in sheer fury. “That incompetent ass!” he shouted. “I want him, dead, dead, dead! I want his friends dead, his mistresses dead, and I want it public, messy, and I want it done now!”

Ivana Vasilyeva appeared—again—as if she was going to have another orgasm. She was a good aide and a fierce lover, Kazakov thought, but how could anyone with the kind of psychosexual dysfunctions that she had rise so far in the Russian army?

“Send me,” Vasilyeva breathed. “Send me to Libya. I can get close to this peacock. I will pull his feathers for you—one by one, slowly and painfully—and then cook him for you.”

But Kazakov wasn’t paying attention to Vasilyeva’s psychotic panting right now—his mind was occupied with trying to figure out who was attacking Libya.

It had to be the Tin Man organization, the same ones that had destroyed his Russian oil empire, Metyorgaz, and captured him. Kazakov’s sources said most likely it was a private group, not government, with access to the latest high-tech military hardware. Well, they needed access to not just a few guns and futuristic body armor with jets in the boots to destroy two Libyan military bases—they needed access to large precision-guided bombs and the heavy, long-range aircraft to deliver them.

Mersa Matruh was the key. Zuwayy suspected they might be operating from there—if they were, he could track them down, follow them, and find a way to destroy them.