“Good,” Patrick acknowledged. David looked at his friend and former commanding officer with great concern. Patrick looked bone-weary, with large dark circles under his eyes, his face drawn and haggard. He still wore the Tin Man battle armor—he had taken it off for only a few moments for an inspection several hours earlier before donning it again—and he kept it and the exoskeleton, standing near the bulkhead in quick reach, plugged in and fully charged. “Any word yet from anyone on Wendy?”

“No,” Luger replied. “I’ve put in several back-channel requests for support to the Intelligence Support Agency, Muck, but our status is only a little bit better than the Libyans themselves. They don’t go for freelancers, even if it’s experienced operators like us. They wouldn’t like us even if the White House and Pentagon were supportive— but Thom and Goff are out gunning for us too, which makes matters even worse. Too many heads will roll if they get caught helping us.”

Patrick looked discouraged, rubbing his eyes and lowering his head wearily. “Screw ’em,” he growled. “Between Dr. Masters’s photo recon birds and UCAVs and a few soft probes by us, we’ll find her.”

“If she’s still alive.”

“She’s alive, dammit.”

“I hear you loud and clear, Muck,” David Luger said pointedly. “But I want to make it clear to you, at the same time, that we have no hard information that she survived the attack. The Egyptians say they found bodies, including women—”

“They never made a complete search.”

“I know—the ship went down in Libyan waters, not Egyptian waters,” Luger corrected himself. “But it went down close enough to Egypt to examine wreckage that has drifted east. They have not found any survivors. If she somehow survived and the Libyans got her, they will keep her tightly under wraps until they’re done interrogating her, and then they’ll dispose of her.”

Patrick’s head snapped up, and he glared at his longtime partner with pure seething anger. But he also knew what David had been through in his life—he definitely knew what he was talking about.

Fourteen years earlier, while flying their first secret mission in the modified B-52 Megafortress bomber nicknamed “Old Dog” out of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center in Nevada, then-Air Force first lieutenant and B-52 bomber navigator David Luger was left for dead at a Russian air base in eastern Siberia after they made an emergency landing. He survived and was systematically brainwashed and interrogated for years. The KGB eventually convinced Luger he was a Russian aerospace engineer, and he worked to advance the state of the art of Russian stealth warplane technology by several years. After he was rescued, it took three years of intense psychotherapy to return him to normal.

“She’s alive, Dave,” Patrick said earnestly.

“You don’t know that, Muck.”

“I said she’s alive!”

“Patrick, I’m not going to argue with you,” David said. “I will help you tear that country apart to find her. But I will not let you risk your life or any of the team’s lives to go in to attempt a rescue unless we get some hard intelligence information.”