It was a long, sad, quiet flight back to the Catherine.

AKRANES, ICELAND
 THAT SAME TIME

“What in hell are you whining about now, Zuwayy?” the Russian shouted on the secure satellite channel. “This had better be important.”

“My missile base at Samah was attacked and nearly destroyed by commandos! American commandos/” President Jadallah Salem Zuwayy of Libya shouted in passable Russian. He was wearing a polyester blue and red warmup suit, with no shoes—the clothes that had been thrown to him as his security officers burst into his bedroom and snatched him literally out of bed into a waiting helicopter. At first, he thought it was an assassination squad—rampant fear was finally being replaced with white-hot anger as he realized he was safe. “They have set eighteen of the missiles on fire! There are nerve agents and radioactive materials spreading all across my desert!”

“Zakroy yibala! Shut your fucking mouth and stop blabbering on this line!” the voice shouted back. “This may be a secure channel, but if the Americans are indeed running an operation on you, they may have figured out how to crack the encryption codes. After all, they built the system we are using.”

“Did you hear what I said, tovarischl” Zuwayy retorted. “I am under attack! Thousands of square kilometers of my desert have been contaminated! Hundreds of my soldiers are dead! And the Americans certainly know all about those missiles and where I got them!”

“They know nothing of the sort,” Pavel Gregorevich Kazakov responded. Kazakov was sitting at a desk in a small, private apartment in Akranes, Iceland, a few kilometers north of the capital Reykjavik, sipping a cup of tea that an assistant had just fixed for him. His aide, a beautiful young Russian former army officer named Ivana Vasilyeva, deputy chief of staff to the former chief of staff of the army of the Russian Federation—who was just as talented on the pistol range and in a judo do jo as she was in bed—set a tray of sweet rolls and honey on the desk, gave Pavel an enticing smile, then departed. “If they knew anything at all, they would have destroyed the entire base. Just a few commandos—they could have come from anywhere—Israel, Algeria, even your so-called allies Sudan and Syria. Now, shut up and calm yourself.”

Kazakov took a sip of tea as Zuwayy started blathering something in half Russian, half Arabic. A phone call an hour before dawn? Kazakov thought bitterly as he sampled one of the pastries. Outrageous. Being in the witness protection program was hell indeed.