The MV-22 came in fast, then swung quickly to a low hover over the first smoking hole they had just created. Door gunners suppressed machine-gun fire from more rooftop security guards while the rear cargo ramp of the tilt-rotor motored down, and eight men in dark gray electronic battle armor, composite microhydraulic exoskeletons, and electromagnetic rail guns marched from the belly of the tilt-rotor aircraft.

One of the commandos felt bullets ricochet off his armor and instinctively dropped down and tried to take cover. “Don’t try to cover from small-arms fire unless your power drops below twenty percent,” Hal Briggs radioed over their secure commlink. “And don’t waste projectiles on infantry, or doors and walls your sensors can see through. We do different tactics here, gents: You work alone, you work quickly, and you let the armor defend you and feed you information. Follow the position signals, check every room. Let’s move out.”

“I’m getting a power-level warning,” one of the commandos said. “It’s reading twenty percent already.”

“You have a bad power pack,” Briggs said. “Withdraw, change packs, follow us down once it checks out. Move out.” The one commando went back inside the MV-22, where technicians in protective armor quickly helped the commando out of his exoskeleton. Meanwhile, the other Tin Man commandos split up into two groups and dropped through the holes in the roof to the floors below.

Hal Briggs led the first group of four. Holding his rail gun on his left hip, anchored to his exoskeleton, he walked quickly without running through the corridors of the Libyan Presidential Palace; the others split up, taking different corridors. Terrified workers and other persons, presumably relatives or other staffers, ran past him, some running headlong into him. He ignored everyone he didn’t recognize. Hal used his ultrawide bandwidth sensor to peer through walls and doors, and anytime he saw someone inside, he kicked the door open to see who it was. But he kept on moving, sometimes simply walking right through a wall or door to get inside an adjacent room.

“It’s hard to take stairs with this exoskeleton,” one of the commandos radioed.

“Don’t bother with stairs,” Hal responded. When he reached the end of the hallway, he simply turned, tossed an explosive charge onto the floor, blew a hole in the floor, and jumped through.