“Ordinarily I’d say yes—but we just lost contact with one of our scout helicopters, which means everyone’s an enemy until we find out otherwise. Stay back: I’ll go have a chat with him. Everyone else, stay alert.” He ordered his men to dismount. Eight heavily armed Libyan soldiers ran out of the back of the APC and took up defensive positions on either side of the highway. The lead APC then began to roll forward toward the stranger.

The APC hadn’t gone fifty feet when suddenly two tanks, one on either side of the highway, disappeared in a ball of fire—the dismounts heard only a faint plink sound, and then the tanks exploded. The soldiers had just enough time to dive for cover in the depression on the side of the highway before they were showered with burning debris. Huge gushes of fire fed from ruptured fuel tanks poured across the desert floor, and the dismounts got to their feet in a hurry and retreated back toward the remaining APCs, firing in the general direction from where those projectiles came.

“Attention, Libyan soldiers,” he said through his electronic synthesizer and translation system. “I am Castor. I order all of you to surrender immediately. Do not traverse your gun turrets or you will be destroyed.”

“The east tank’s turret is moving toward you,” Briggs reported.

“Kill it,” Patrick said. Briggs fired a hypervelocity round into the tank, and it blew even more spectacularly than the first two. That’s all it took—one by one, the Libyan soldiers popped hatches and started climbing out of the tanks, hands upraised. “Your Highness, the Libyans are surrendering,” Patrick radioed to Sanusi. “You can move—”

The helicopter came out of nowhere, popping over the sand dunes only a few feet above the desert floor—a Mil Mi-24 attack helicopter, fully configured for combat with a four-barreled 12.7-millimeter remote-controlled cannon in the nose and two stubby wing pylons filled with a variety of rocket pods, bombs, and missiles. It was firing its machine guns almost as soon as it popped into sight.

Hal Briggs’s position was hit first, and the gunner’s aim was perfect. The hail of bullets from the gunship was like a massive swarm of fifty-caliber bees—they were beginning to sting, and after enough stings, they could kill. “Motherfucker!” Hal Briggs cursed. “That bastard got my rail gun. Chris has the only one left.”

The Libyan soldiers cheered and dashed back into their vehicles, ready to resume the fight. Chris Wohl turned and aimed his rail gun at the retreating helicopter gunship—but at that moment, another Mi-24 appeared from the east, no more than fifty feet above the desert, and launched a salvo of rockets at Wohl’s position, while the gunner started hammering at Patrick with the steerable cannons.