over fallen trees to a cropping of granite boulders protruding from the hillside. Red and blue macaws were perched on the jagged rock face like ornaments on a tree, and as he approached, they shrieked at the invasion. A dozen birds flew into the trees and gave away his position.
He was hoping no one was up at this hour.
Mike knelt on the boulders, and through binoculars scanned the area three-sixty.
No sign of the UAV. No crash site. Not even a piece of scrap metal. Bupkes. How could intel be this wrong? If not here, then where the hell did it crash?
And if this intel was this flawed, he’d bet the chopper wasn’t anywhere near where it went down. His gaze slid over the land, the Andean mountains in the distance.
So much for being invisible and getting in and out.
The Hellfires were still on the loose.
Ben Guerdane, Tunisia
0200 hours
The market on the border was empty. All that remained were discarded crates like fragile bones unearthed with the beat of the wind. In the day, traders came in carloads across the border of Libya to sell goods to Tunisian merchants. Now it was nothing but sand and stiff, arid breezes as officers of more than three intelligence agencies spilled out of the van. They didn’t pause to check their weapons or to say good luck, but took off in a dead run.
Antone Choufani led them here, his intelligence firsthand. He’d worked for over a year to infiltrate this faction, a bleed-off of the dragon that roared over the Middle East. He believed in Allah, believed in the Quran, but didn’t take it to such deep levels as so many others had done. Kill an unbeliever, an infidel, and get seventy-two virgins? He’d had a virgin; it was a tiresome experience. Besides, he loved life too much to strap a bomb to his chest and walk into a mosque. True Islam didn’t believe in the murder of their own.
At this storage building, unmarked crates had arrived, yet none left. Unusual because the weapons were always quickly divided, remarked, and sold so fast—by several different means—that they couldn’t be tracked once they left. No one spoke about what was in the crates: rifles, grenades, or explosives? He wasn’t trusted enough to be told, only to carry them inside.
Approaching the target, the men circumvented the building, one man running forward and setting explosives at the doors. They ignited, popping the hinges and locks. The doors fell and the agents swarmed inside. All Antone could see was the drift of smoke, hear the sound of gunfire and screams claw the night in vulgar spats of death.
Then, for a brief moment, there was complete silence.
The building lurched first. Five thousand square feet of concrete and steel looked as if it would fall in on itself, a giant indrawn breath. Even the lingering smoke from the explosives drew inside. Atone had never seen anything like it. A heartbeat later, the structure erupted like the regurgitation of the earth’s core. Flames shot up into the air in broad stabs of orange-red, the base of the explosion already blue hot. Several short explosions followed, driving anyone too close back with a punch to the middle. The fuel or gunpowder, Choufani thought as his fingers worked the grip of his gun. He waited behind the lines for anyone to come out.
The blast took no less than seven Interpol agents.
Someone had seen them coming.
Behind him, hidden before now, the remaining agents were for a moment stunned, then bolted to action. Radios howled with the call for doctors, for the coroner. But they knew the men were dead, that they’d failed.
No one was getting out alive.
Flames ate at the storage house, walls buckled and fell.
Choufani sank to the ground, his arms on his knees, his head in his hands.
Now we will never know.
Guaranguillo, Ecuador
Mike didn’t try verbal communication. While his Spanish was decent, his handle on the local Quechua dialect stank. The villagers forgave him, but communication was a lot of hand signals and half phrases. The villagers were meagerly dressed, but infinitely kind. Dark haired children sat on the ground outside homes and ate passion fruit, offering him a piece as he passed. He took it, knowing they’d share with a stranger when they had little. Women tossed out washwater as a few men headed into the coffee fields to the north, though Mike was pretty sure they weren’t growing java.
He paid for a warm soda from a tiny old woman sitting outside her home, beside her a rack of snacks that looked like they’d been around since the eighties. Popping the top, he drank it straight down in one shot and pitched the crushed can in a box near the woman. She offered him another and he smiled, overpaid, and tucked it in his pack. He strolled down the center of the village, an uneven dirt road no more than twenty feet wide. Buildings constructed of wood and corrugated metal sheets were sandwiched up alongside each other so tightly that if one fell, the others would go. His gaze moved back and forth, picking up details like the spent shells near a door, the black stain of blood on the wood frame. There was no shortage of guns. The men wore them openly.
Mike kept his concealed. No use in antagonizing the locals. But with no GPS beacon, and satellite photos murky because of the dense jungle, locating the UAV wouldn’t be simple. The chopper had crashed before reaching the last UAV location. A chopper without working avionics could drift for miles for a safe landing or drop out of the sky like a rock. Considering they had tape of the last radio contact, he assumed the former, and that his men were still alive.
He had priority orders. Jansen had done the assessing, and though Mike didn’t like it, he knew the colonel was right. UAV and Hellfire missiles, possibly Scuds, then bring the team home. In that order.
At least there wasn’t a little black box for anyone to find.
Mike sat on a rough bench near a welding shop and unlaced his boot. He kept his head bent, his gaze slipping over the village. He recognized the sudden tension in the air, most of it from a young boy about ten curled in the doorway of a house, barefoot and dirty. His big eyes watched him as he shook pebbles from his boot. Unlike the child in Farawa Island, this one was unarmed and scared. But if he were pointing a gun, could you kill him? The enemy has many faces, he thought, quickly lacing his boot.
Then Mike followed the kid’s gaze back the way he’d come. The street was suddenly empty. His gaze flashed to the homes, a couple of people he could see. They peered from behind curtains, taking cover in fragile homes. Then he heard the rowdy voices before he saw a man stumble from behind his shelter and run.
Mike didn’t need to be in the middle of a local firefight, and standing, he adjusted the rucksack on his shoulders before he headed out of the village in a casual stroll. The thick jungle closed around him, blocking sunlight, and cooler temperatures created a thick rolling mist over the forest floor. The beauty of it escaped him, his steps slower because he couldn’t see the ground well. He’d like to hack through it with his machete, but not enough to give away his position.
He was about thirty yards into the forest when the first shot came.
He went still and let his head drop forward. You’re not the police, you have a job. Yet Mike was heading back when he heard someone running toward him.
A few yards east of him, the kid shot through the forest like a baby gazelle, jumping over forest debris and shifting left and right. The boy would never outrun whoever was behind him, and Mike caught up with him, snatching the child off the ground and covering his mouth with his hand as he backed into a darkened area off the path. The child squirmed and Mike kept him tight in his arms, smothering a grunt when teeth sank into his palm.
He forced the boy to look him in the eye, and gave him a stare he reserved for terrorists. For a second, he thought the kid would wet his pants. The boy nodded, relaxed, and Mike released his hand. The boy opened his mouth to speak and Mike covered it.
“Not a word,” he warned in Spanish.
He released him and the skinny child folded to the ground. Mike motioned him to hide behind him in a burrow of vines, and the kid