“Yes . . . yes, I think you would do very nicely,” Kazakov said to Vasilyeva. “You shall leave immediately.” But finally her orgasmic rush was too much for him to bear, and he reached out for her hard, sexy body. “Well,” he said with a smile as she began to unbutton her blouse, “perhaps not immediately.”

CHAPTER 5

MERSA MATRUH JOINT MILITARY BASE, EGYPT

A FEW HOURS LATER

Patrick McLanahan stared blankly at the computer image, flipping back and forth through stills of several FlightHawk overhead photographs downloaded from the latest surveillance flights. He was sitting in a small, unair-conditioned but secure little semi-underground building in an isolated part of the Egyptian military base set aside for them by General Baris. Their facilities were spartan, but they had access to Egyptian communications and intelligence information via computer, also courtesy of Baris.

Since returning from his infiltration at Jaghbub, Patrick had been reviewing each and every minute of aerial reconnaissance from the stealthy unmanned reconnaissance aircraft flying over Libya. The strain was definitely showing. Patrick didn’t know if he was eventually just going to totally collapse or end up throwing the computer against a wall in disgust. But he felt that the conflict was drawing to an end. Zuwayy had to release the prisoners now ... he had to.

“Hey, man,” Hal Briggs said softly, “let me and the sergeant take a look through those images. You go take a nap.” Patrick ignored him. “You hearing me okay, Muck?”

“I heard you,” Patrick said, rubbing his eyes wearily. “But I want to go over the last batch of images, the ones of daybreak over that Libyan naval base where Wendy was probably taken....”

“There’s at least three bases she could have been taken to in the past twelve hours, Muck,” Briggs pointed out. “Or she could still be on one of the ships.” Left unsaid was the other obvious possibility—Wendy was not in Libyan custody at all. “We’ve got trained guys waiting to look at those pictures. Why not let them do their jobs?”

“I gave them a job to do—plan a nighttime infiltration of those three military medical facilities,” Patrick said irritably. “But we need to target the most likely one, because once we go in, the Libyans will be alerted.” He looked angrily at Hal and added, “And I asked you to check on the aircraft and the weapons, Hal.”

“The sergeant is on it,” Briggs responded. “But he asked me to talk to you....”

“I’m not stopping this, Hal,” Patrick said, his irritation quickly growing into anger. “We’ve got eight hours until sunset. We need a target in that amount of time so we have enough time to brief the infiltration, extraction, and exfiltration, then launch and—”

“Obviously the entire Libyan armed forces are on full alert.”

“I know that, Hal.”

“If you did, Muck, you’d be suspending plans to go in until the situation stabilizes,” Hal said seriously. “C’mon, man, think about it.”