A soldier in black fatigues emerged, his face covered with black greasepaint. “How the hell did you know I was there?”

  Without waiting for a response, he turned and began jogging up the path that led out of the ravine and toward the helicopter.

  I smiled as I hitched my duffel up on my shoulder and followed.

  The thump-thump of the helicopter became much louder now, and I saw that it hadn’t landed, but was hovering fifty feet above the ground. Its blades gave off tiny sparks in the night sky, reminding me of the sparks of static discharge I used to see sometimes when I brushed my hair in the dark of my room.

  Both a knotted rope and a rope ladder descended from the side of the helicopter.

  The soldier pointed up. “After you.”

  “Will the spook take the easy path or does he have something to prove?”

  I knew this was a test. I adjusted my duffel so it wouldn’t slip, then spit on my hands and grabbed the knotted rope. If this was some kind of test, there was no way I would give this guy the satisfaction of seeing me take the ladder.

  With a grunt I lifted myself up, used my feet to get leverage on the lower knots, and began pulling myself hand over hand up the rope. When I passed the halfway mark, the soldier below me cursed. I nearly burst out with laughter when I heard his thoughts.

  “Damned guy is climbing the thing just like the squirrel that he is.”

  Furthermore, now he had to climb the rope too. He’d just made his own job harder.

  My shoulders, biceps, and forearms burned as I continued heaving my two-hundred-and-thirty-pound frame up the rope. When at last I grabbed the edge of the metal platform, someone yelled, “Hey, Nate, that was quick! I’m surprised you took the rope…”

  A pair of hands helped pull me into the cabin of the hovering aircraft.

  “Sorry to disappoint,” I said, “but your friend is behind me. I’m Jeremiah.”

  There were several soldiers aboard, all of them dressed in the same dark fatigues and greasepaint, and none with any kind of identifying patches. They also all had facial hair, which I’d always thought was against Army regulations. I could tell by their thoughts that they’d intended to give me a good-natured ribbing for taking the ladder, and were disappointed to have missed the opportunity.

  The soldier who’d pulled me up shook my hand. “I’m Robert Johnson. Folks around here just call me Clean, because I’m the one who cleans up messes that others leave behind.” He smiled and touched his bald head. “Or maybe it’s because I look like Mr. Clean from those commercials.”

  He began making introductions, starting with a blond soldier who was staring at a communicator very similar to the one I’d been given. “That’s our comms sergeant—David James Wellington Stuart the third. But everyone calls him Bubba. Believe it or not, he’s from New York. I’m the one from Georgia, and he’s Bubba. Go figure.”

  Next up was the captain, who was whittling a piece of wood. He twirled the blade in his hand and slammed it into a sheath hanging from his belt, then clasped my hand. “Good to meet you, Jeremiah. The name’s Richter. Bravo Company, third battalion, fifth Special Forces group. It’s my unfortunate mission to lead this sorry squad of soldiers and keep everyone from dying.”

  At that moment the soldier from below finally pulled himself into the chopper. “Hey, I thought that was my job, Captain.”

  “And that’s Nate, our medic,” said Clean. “Looks like you shamed him into coming up the hard way.”

  Nate shook my hand. “Nathan Drawe, but only my mother calls me Nathan, and that’s usually when I know I’m in trouble.”

  Richter twirled his finger in a circular motion. “Pull everything up and let’s get the flock over to the airport.”

  Nate pulled up the rope and coiled it around a capstan while Bubba heaved up the ladder and stowed it in a compartment in the floor. I strapped myself in, and when Nate and Bubba had secured the cabin and grabbed their seats, the captain smacked a button on the wall. A light flashed, and the helicopter tilted as the pilot took us toward the airport.

  I couldn’t help but scan the grease-painted soldiers and wonder how it would look if the five of us walked through customs as-is.

  It turned out that I didn’t have to worry about customs. Instead of the commercial airport, the helicopter took us to Akrotiri, a Royal Air Force installation on Cyprus.

  As the chopper landed on the tarmac, we all hopped off and jogged to a hangar, where we were greeted by a man in a flight suit.

  “It’s a beautiful night for a flight, gentlemen, don’t you think?”

  The captain saluted, and the rest of the men, including me, did the same. The man in the flight suit wore the oak leaf, signifying the rank of major.

  “Men,” said the captain, “this is Major John Sanders. He’ll be piloting the CV-22 Osprey that will fly us over our insertion point.”

  The major nodded. “Captain, the insertion point is sixteen hundred nautical miles away, so we’ll need about seven hours to get there. For the early-morning insertion you’d requested, we’ll have to leave here no later than twenty hundred local time. My crew will be ready and the aircraft fueled one hour before that in case you guys get a stiffy to leave early. Is there anything else you need from me?”

  “No, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  After another exchange of salutes, the major departed for a building on the far side of the tarmac.

  The captain put his hand on my shoulder. “Okay then. Who’s going to make sure our squirrel’s not going to get himself killed when we fast-rope out the back of the Osprey?”

  “I’ll do it, Captain,” said Nate, giving me a wink.

  “Good. The rest of you get some shut-eye.”

  Bubba and Clean hurried off in the same direction that the major had gone.

  “Once you boys are done, come to the map room,” said the captain. He looked at me. “You’re supposed to have an idea where we’re going in the city. I want you to go over the satellite photos we’ve got and let’s make a plan.”

  “I’ll bring him, sir,” Nate replied.

  “Good. Dismissed.”

  Nate clapped me on the back. “Come on, Jeremiah, let’s get this over with.” As we walked across the dark tarmac toward another hangar, he glanced over at me. “You’re pretty new to your operations gig, is that right?”

  “Yup, I’m not that far out of training. This is my first time overseas.”

  Nate whistled and shook his head. “Man, that’s crazy. You realize we’re inserting into a place that could become hot if anyone sees us, right?”

  “Hot—you mean folks could be firing on us?”

  “Don’t worry, if things go the way they should, we can at least get in without being detected. As to what happens afterwards, well… that’s why we do what we do. When the bad guys do bad things, who else can they call? Just remember to keep your head down if shots are fired, and follow our lead.”

  “Understood. Is there anything I have to worry about with this fast-roping stuff?”

  “Nah. You’ve already proven you have decent grip strength. That’s really all you need. The point is just to slide down as quickly as possible without killing yourself. We have to get down quick so the transport can get out of danger and we can get our butts in action without delay.”

  As we entered the hangar, Nate opened a cabinet and pulled out two pairs of gloves, one of which he gave to me. Then he gestured to a thick rope hanging from the fifty-foot-high rafters. Stairs led up the side of the hangar to a hop-off point near the roof.

  I pointed to the stack of thick mats at the bottom of the rope. “Why all the padding?”

  “Let’s just say that when you’re wearing those gloves, and you’ve never fast-roped… well, some folks squeeze the rope so hard they take forever to come down, and others don’t have a tight enough grip.” Nate smirked. “The mats are for the idiots who fall like rocks.”

  I nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  It didn’t take me long to get the hang of fast-rope descent. It was all about tuning my grip to the weight I carried and the conditions of the rope, since some were slicker than others. Overall, I just needed to get a feel for things. After three or four trips down, sometimes with a weighted pack on my back, I felt pretty confident. But Nate made me do it ten times without any hard landings before he allowed me to call it quits.

  He then escorted me to the map room, where the captain was poring over several poster-sized aerial photos of Yemen’s capital. They were amazingly detailed, featuring thousands of zigzagging streets. It seemed like it would be impossible to find anything within this rat’s nest of buildings, alleys, and highways.

  The captain waved me over. “Jeremiah, come help me plot our approach into Sana’a. HQ said you’ve got G-2 on where our bomb-maker is.”

  I recalled what I’d seen in Waleed’s mind. His memories started with arriving at the airport. “Sir,” I said, “where is the airport on these? I need to get my bearings.”

  The captain pulled one of the giant photos forward and pointed to a location north of the city. From there, I traced the road as I remembered it, mentally unrolling Waleed’s memories. It wasn’t easy, though, as Waleed had had no reason to remember many details about a boring trip from the airport. What I possessed was almost like a film with major sections chopped from it.

  “Where is Al’neser Road?” I asked. That name had appeared on a street sign in one of the remaining bits of film.

  The captain tapped on a highway snaking through the eastern portion of the city. From there I shifted south, finding Ring Road, which led west into the city. But now I was stuck. Waleed’s memories here were of buildings, not roads.

  I turned to the captain. “Do we have any street-level photos of this part of the city?”

  “Hold on.” The captain thumbed some reconnaissance photos on another table, then pulled several of them from the stack. “We do—although it’s actually from the internet.”

  He laid the street-level photos on the table, and I studied them, trying to figure out how they were organized. Then it hit me. They were wide-angle shots of the street corners, organized to match the same grid pattern that the aerial surveillance showed.

  I started at one of the intersections of Ring Road and went west from there. Every once in a while, one of the buildings looked familiar, and I knew I was in the right area. When I passed Amru Bin Ma’adi Karab Street, I veered left; Waleed had frequently passed the cemetery at that intersection, and had always turned left. Soon I found my way to an area where the buildings were built much closer together. The area was familiar, but I didn’t see any photos of the white building I was seeking.

  I frowned as I tapped on the spot on the aerial photo. “I’m afraid I can’t be certain of the precise location from the photos we have. But I think our target is within spitting distance of this location.”

  The captain marked the spot with something that resembled a red crayon. “That’s good enough, Samuelson. We’ll just have to track down the target once we’re in the vicinity.” He tapped on a couple of nearby locations and grunted in disgust. “Look at this. A bomb-making operation in the same neighborhood as a children’s hospital and a girls’ school.”

  “Sir, what exactly is the goal once we get him?” I asked.

  The mission commander smiled. “This is a snatch and grab. I was hoping to blow his operation to smithereens, but it looks like that won’t be practical. If we can, we want to find out where this guy is getting his supplies, or if he’s making them himself.”

  I felt a wave of self-doubt. These guys were putting themselves in danger based on the mere fragments of memories that I’d pulled from a bomber.

  The captain clapped me on the back. “Go get yourself some sleep in the barracks. We’ll meet in the mess hall at fourteen hundred for some grub and our pre-combat inspections.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I tilted my head as Bubba approached with a bulb injector in one hand and a set of tweezers in the other.

  “Okay, Squirrel, don’t get too fidgety on me or we’ll have to do it all over again. The liquid silicone I’m gonna inject in your ear will feel like warm snot. Just deal with it. It’ll harden quick enough.”

  I gritted my teeth as Bubba held a tiny electronic device in my right ear and injected the goop around the device. As I felt it expanding to fill the gaps and crevices in my outer ear, Bubba sang some nursery rhyme about boogers.

  “Bubba, I thought this was supposed to help me hear. Right now I can’t hear crap.”

  “Don’t worry about that. The silicone’s just oozed over the end of the audio tube. I’ll shave off the excess.”

  He yanked the plug out of my ear, scraped at it with a knife, then gave it back to me. “Put it in, and let’s test it out.”

  I put the device up against my ear, and it slipped right in. I could hear fine, and I could barely even feel it was in there.

  Bubba pressed his throat-mic.

  “Testing one, two, three…”

  His voice came through the earpiece loud and clear.

  The others looked up—they’d been looking over the mission plan—and the captain asked through his own mic, “Do I have a thumbs-up on the chatter?”

  I gave a thumbs-up, as did the rest of the crew.

  “Mic check,” said the captain. “Bubba is good. The rest of you sound off.”

  “Clean.”

  “Nate.”

  I pressed the button on the elastic band that held the microphone flush against my throat. “Jeremiah.”

  The others nodded.

  The captain stood and made a circular motion with his hand that meant for us to gather up our stuff and get ready to go. In seconds we were out the door and jogging to our plane.

  As we approached the plane, the pilot was going through his preflight inspection, as were the three others who formed his crew.

  Captain Richter fell in step beside me. “I was just notified that your former prisoner managed to get himself on a flight to Pakistan instead of Yemen, so we won’t be able to trail him to the location. That means you’re our only navigator. I just hope your information is reliable. I’d hate to risk the lives of my squad on a wild goose chase.”

  The pilot turned to us and began briefing the team on the weather conditions and the 0300 insertion time seven miles from our eventual target. Self-doubt gnawed at me.

  What if I’m wrong and the bomb-maker isn’t at that white building?

  I looked frantically through the dusty Arab market, but couldn’t find the team. One moment I was following them, right on the heels of the bomb-maker, and the next moment they had all disappeared into the crowd. I’d heard one of them say “Make sure the squirrel doesn’t get lost,” but that was about a minute ago, and the squirrel had clearly gotten lost.

  I searched with all my senses. I was angry at the team; here I was in a foreign city, bad guys potentially all around, and they just left me behind.

  The market swelled with even more people, lots of whom looked at me strangely as they passed. For some reason, most gave me a wide berth. I clenched my fists, ignoring their stares, and searched their minds for information on my team.

  And then I sensed that someone in this sea of Arabic speakers was thinking in Russian.

  KGB!

  I spun around to face the agent, only to find myself standing in front of a mirror, and I screamed at the sight of my reflection…

  I woke with a start. The captain was speaking in my earpiece.

  “All right men, that’s our fifteen-minute warning to insertion. Check your gear and do your final prep. When the cargo bay drops, I want all our asses on the ground in thirty seconds.”

  I shook my head, trying to shake clear the uneasy feeling I had from that ridiculous nightmare, and looked to the rest of the team. We all sported beards and wore traditional ankle-length Yemeni tunics with checkerboard scarves around our necks. Everyone was checking their weapons and reseating the small arms hidden under their robes. I did the same.

  In a shoulder holster, I carried a .45 caliber handgun; I’d only trained a few days with firearms while I was in Langley, and I wasn’t sure how proficient I’d be, but I had no qualms about using it if I had to. I was more confident in my skills with the long knife sheathed against my waist. My martial arts training with Chaim had included mock weapons that were about the same size as the six-inch blade.

  I meshed my fingers together, making sure my gloves were snug, then grabbed at the hand strap bolted to the side of the cabin. I felt our descent, and heard the engines whine as they rotated to make the aircraft hover like a helicopter.

  As one of the Osprey’s crew prepped the launch ropes, the pilot’s voice came over a speaker. “It’s 0300 and FLIR shows nothing within a two-klick radius. I have what looks to be a herd of goats about three klicks from our drop zone. The sky is clear, and the wind is calm. Mission leader, are we good to drop?”

  The captain looked at his men. “Ready?”

  We all gave the thumbs-up.

  The captain smashed a large green button on the wall. The other men grabbed straps, and I followed their lead.

  “Roger that, Captain,” said the pilot. “Breaking through five thousand feet. We are going dark. Good luck, men.”

  The lights went out, plunging the cabin into complete darkness, and my stomach rose in my throat as the plane plummeted toward the ground below. The plane’s rotors went nearly silent as the pitch of the blades was adjusted.

  Our descent slowed, and the instant we stopped, I heard the metallic click of latches popping open and the back of the Osprey yawned open like a giant mouth and warm air rushed into the cabin. The barely visible crew shoved the ropes out the back of the plane, and the captain spoke in our earpieces.

  “Okay, boys, let’s hit it.”

  I grabbed the nearest rope and backed myself toward the lip of the opening. I had questioned my sanity, but when I saw the first man jump out, I didn’t hesitate. I adjusted the grip of my trailing hand, took a deep breath, and jumped.

 

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