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  A few kilometers farther on, he slowed and pulled in behind a silver-gray late model Mercedes sedan parked just off the road. Dismounting, he stripped off his helmet and unzipped his jacket. Even in the shade provided by the trees, the summer heat was oppressive.

  At his approach, the driver of the Mercedes slid out from behind the wheel. With a silent nod, he opened the sedan’s rear door. A slight bulge in the man’s dark business jacket revealed the presence of a shoulder holster.

  Petrov raised an eyebrow. So even here in this rural backwater, his host felt the need for a bodyguard. Perhaps such vigilance was an inevitable by-product of the acquisition of great wealth. If so, he thought with satisfaction, he might someday soon learn the value of caution himself.

  He slid into the back of the air-conditioned Mercedes and nodded politely to the older, heavier-set man waiting there. “Everything is on track,” he said confidently.

  “There were no problems at the factory?”

  Petrov shrugged. “The Tupolev guys are pissed, but no one’s willing to stick his neck out to protest openly.”

  “They are wise,” the older man said, with the hint of an icy smile of his own. Dmitri Grishin was one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, a man who had made his fortune through close ties to Moscow’s political, industrial, and defense elites. Either on his own or through intermediaries, he owned significant stakes in many of the nation’s most successful and profitable enterprises. “Our president does not appreciate having his decisions questioned.”

  “Fortunately for us,” Petrov agreed, matching the oligarch’s wry expression. His eyes narrowed. “What about the other elements of our special project? Are they moving ahead?”

  Grishin nodded smoothly. “My people have everything well in hand. They’ve found a valley deep in the wilderness in Alaska that’s perfect for our purposes. All will be ready when you are.”

  “What about the Americans?” Petrov asked. “Is there a chance they could stumble across your team at work?”

  The oligarch shook his head. “Relax, Colonel. The Alaskan wilderness is enormous and almost entirely uninhabited. I doubt anyone’s even visited the site we’ve found since the end of the last Ice Age, more than twelve thousand years ago. The Americans won’t see a thing.”

  Reassured, Petrov slid back out of the Mercedes and then leaned back in. “Until the snows fall, then.”

  “And the icy winds blow,” Grishin agreed. He glanced up at the younger man. “Fly safe, Colonel. We both have a lot at stake here.”

  Petrov shot him a grin. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of the PAK-DA prototype like it was my very own.”

  Moments later, as he stood watching the limousine pull away, Petrov felt a sudden stab of pain lance through his left temple. “Fuck,” he muttered. He’d been resolutely ignoring a mild headache since leaving the Tupolev plant. But now it was getting worse. Frowning, he fumbled out a couple of aspirin tablets from a packet in one of his pockets and then pulled out a stainless steel hip flask. Embossed with the badge of the Soviet Union’s Red Air Force, it was the one item he’d inherited from his father that he genuinely valued.

  Impatiently, he downed the aspirin with a swig of vodka and then recapped the flask. This was no time for illness. Not when he was so close to making sure that he would be the one everyone remembered in the future.

  One

  Wizard One-One, over Southern Libya

  August

  Its shadow lost among jagged black peaks and spires of hardened lava, the dark gray U.S. Air Force HH-60W Jolly Green II helicopter flew low across the desolate wastes of southern Libya. Specially designed for service with CSAR (combat search and rescue) squadrons and named in honor of the HH-3E Jolly Green Giant made famous during Vietnam War rescue missions, this was the newest variation of Sikorsky’s versatile UH-60 Black Hawk series. Like its predecessor aircraft, the HH-60G Pave Hawk, the Jolly Green II was equipped with a hoist and retractable midair refueling probe. But upgraded avionics, engines, weapons, armor, and larger fuel tanks dramatically increased its capabilities, including extending its unrefueled range to more than seven hundred miles.

  The helicopter’s nose dropped sharply, descending fast as it sped down a bleak slope of black volcanic rock and sand. Along the horizon to the southwest, the terrain shifted dramatically—morphing into a seemingly endless, golden-orange sea of Saharan sand dunes. Heat waves rippled across a landscape baked by the harsh rays of the desert sun high overhead.

  Seated behind the HH-60’s cockpit and facing outward, Captain Nicholas Flynn felt his stomach floating as the helicopter raced downslope at more than 160 knots. Through the cabin window in front of him, he caught blurred glimpses of massive boulders zipping past not more than a few feet below. That only increased the sensation of uncontrolled speed. He swallowed hard and crossed his arms over the straps holding him in his seat. “Oh, what fun,” he muttered, realizing too late he was on the intercom.

  “What’s the matter, Nick?” the cheerful voice of the pilot, Captain Scott “FX” Dykstra, asked through his headset. “Don’t like flying?”

  Through gritted teeth, Flynn shot back, “Flying, I don’t mind. I just prefer my sky with a little less ground in it.”

  Dykstra chuckled. “See, there’s where I gotta disagree with you.” The helicopter banked hard left and then right again, as he steered around a massive ledge of basalt jutting out at an angle from the softer soils around it. “Clouds are pretty and all, but high altitude’s a happy hunting ground for hostile interceptors and missiles. Down here just above the dirt is the sweet spot, where any bad guys only get a couple of seconds to react before we scoot on past and out of sight.”

  “Oh, I understand the theory,” Flynn said, bracing himself as the HH-60 slewed sharply upward again and then leveled out a hundred feet off the desert floor. “It’s the practice that scares the shit out of me.”

  A new voice came on the intercom circuit. This one belonged to Technical Sergeant Carl Zalewski, one of the two PJs, or pararescue jumpers, riding with him in the Jolly Green II cabin. “Please tell me you’re not being literal, sir. Our guys just washed this bird before we took off from El Minya. If we bring it back all dirty, they’re gonna be seriously upset.”

  Flynn found himself grinning. “Just talking figuratively, Zee. Fear not, my camos retain their pristine nature, without any unsightly new brown blotches.”

  That drew a quick laugh from the rest of Wizard One-One’s crew. There were five of them all told: Dykstra; his copilot, Captain Kate “Ghost” Kasper; their flight engineer, Staff Sergeant Bill Wade; Zalewski; and the other PJ, Technical Sergeant Mike Camarillo.

  “Geez, Nick, if you’re gonna freak out, I might have to assign Wade to monitor you in between engine checks,” Dykstra joked. “It’ll give him something to do besides wail and gnash his teeth about his missing guns.”

  “I am not wailing, sir,” the powerfully built flight engineer said in mock protest. “Just sitting here sobbing quietly.”

  Before they’d lifted off from El Minya, an Egyptian Air Force training base in the Nile Valley, ground personnel had hurriedly removed the helicopter’s two door-mounted .50-caliber machine guns. Stripping the weapons and their mounts shaved off close to a thousand pounds of weight. Even with the HH-60W’s larger fuel tanks, every option to lighten its load and extend its range counted. This emergency search-and-rescue mission to a crash site in southern Libya was at the very outer edge of the helicopter’s capabilities—already requiring one midair refueling just to get them this far.

  Up to five hours ago, the crew’s primary focus as part of the Sixty-Fourth Expeditionary Rescue Squadron had been on weeks-long joint training exercises with their Egyptian and other allied counterparts. That had changed the moment they received a flash transmission reporting the crash of a U.S. Air Force C-130J Super Hercules deep in the Sahara Desert, some miles from the nearest inhabited place, the Wath Oasis. Despite being nearly nine hundred miles away, they were
the closest trained CSAR group. Parachuting in a team might have been faster, except that no one in their right mind wanted to drop a handful of rescuers into the unknown without a way to pull them out in a hurry if trouble erupted. So now the Jolly Green II and its specialist crew was en route to do what they could for any survivors from the aircraft that had gone down. Of course, as hours went by without radio contact from the crash site, it was looking less and less likely that anyone had made it out alive. But someone still had to go check.

  Wizard One-One’s pilots, Dykstra and Kasper, were combat-tested veterans of several daring missions to extract wounded U.S. and allied personnel under fire and deep in hostile territory. Bill Wade was along to keep the helicopter’s engines, hydraulic systems, and other equipment operating smoothly during an extraordinarily long and grueling flight. And as pararescuemen, Zalewski and Camarillo were graduates of one of the toughest training programs in the entire U.S. military—nearly two years’ worth of rigorous courses covering emergency medicine, parachuting, mountaineering, combat diving, wilderness survival, tactics, helicopter operations, and half a dozen other valuable specializations. If there were injured survivors still trapped in the wreckage of the C-130J turboprop, their expertise would be crucial to extracting the wounded and getting them back to base alive.

  Nick Flynn’s own role in the mission was less clearly defined. After graduating from college with an ROTC scholarship, he’d undergone intensive training to qualify as a Special Tactics Officer in the Air Force Special Operations Command—earning the right to a scarlet beret, similar to the maroon beret worn by the rest of Wizard One-One’s crew. But there the similarities ended. Thanks to an ear for languages and a gift for quick study, he’d been quietly recruited into Air Force intelligence operations shortly after completing the STO course. He’d come to Egypt with the squadron as one of its combat rescue officers. But that was just a cover story. His real mission was to gather HUMINT, human intelligence, on the Egyptian and other foreign nationals involved in the exercises—focusing on those who might someday be recruited as potential intelligence sources. Or, conversely, on those who might be open to working with terrorists or other groups hostile to U.S. interests.

  Ostensibly, his language skills were the reason he’d been assigned to this flight. None of the others in the helicopter crew knew enough Arabic to liaise with locals if that proved necessary. But the lieutenant colonel in charge of the Sixty-Fourth had his own motives in putting Flynn aboard. “You’re a spook, Nick,” he’d said quietly. “And whatever’s actually going on out there is really fucking spooky. Right now, no one higher up the chain of command will tell me what the hell one of our C-130s was doing off on its own so deep in Libya. All I’m getting is static about how I don’t ‘need to know.’ Well, that’s bullshit. So there’s no damn way I’m sending my folks out on a limb without a specially trained pair of eyes and ears along to ride herd on this situation. Which is where you come in.”

  Flynn couldn’t disagree with that line of reasoning. More than a decade after the brutal civil war that ended Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s authoritarian rule, Libya was still a cauldron of rival armed factions. There was no real central government, only fluctuating coalitions of regional groups, tribal militias, and die-hard Islamists. Chaos and conflict were the stuff of everyday life throughout most of the fractured country. That was especially true in the sparsely populated far south, hundreds of miles from Libya’s more densely inhabited coastal strip along the Mediterranean. All of which made the region the very last place you’d expect an unarmed U.S. Air Force cargo plane to be operating.

  Reflexively, he patted the M4A1 carbine slung from his tactical body armor. Whatever they found at the crash site, this sure wasn’t going to be another boring day spent schmoozing Egyptian, Saudi, Iraqi, and other foreign officers over endless cups of tea.

  A soft ping through his headset signaled an update from the helicopter’s navigation computer. From her position in the cockpit’s left-hand seat, Kate Kasper relayed the new data as it appeared on one of her big multifunction display panels. “Heads up, whiz kids. We’re about eight minutes out from the estimated crash site. Check your gear and stand by.”

  Flynn took a quick pass through the accessory pouches attached to his body armor. Extra magazines for his carbine and Glock 19 sidearm. Check. His Panasonic Toughbook tablet field computer was ready to go with a full battery. So were his pocket laser range finder and multiband tactical radio. He was set.

  In the pair of seats behind him, Zalewski and Camarillo were doing the same thing with their personal weapons and trauma kits. Satisfied with those, the PJs went rapidly through the array of compact cutting and lifting tools packed in their individual rucksacks.

  “Two minutes,” Kasper called. “Radar’s picking up objects on the ground about six miles out, at our twelve o’clock.”

  “I don’t see any smoke,” Dykstra commented matter-of-factly. “Any fires must have burned out by now.”

  Flynn leaned back in his seat, craning his head sharply to look through the helicopter’s forward cockpit canopy. With all the heat haze, it was difficult to make out many details. But there was definitely a blackened scar stretching across the orangish desert sand. At one end of the scar, he could see a big, crumpled gray cylinder partially buried nose-first in a large dune. A debris field of torn and bent pieces of blackened metal—scorched wing panels, twisted propellers, and shattered engine mounts—stretched away for hundreds of feet on both sides of the wreck.

  Dykstra whistled softly. “Looks like that Herky Bird slammed in almost horizontally. The wings ripped off, but the fuselage seems mostly intact.” He tweaked the cyclic, pedals, and collective to reduce their airspeed as the Jolly Green II swung through a gentle, level turn to come in behind the downed C-130.

  Abruptly, as they came out of the turn, Flynn spotted a twin-turbine helicopter, a Russian-manufactured Mi-17 medium transport, sitting parked on the sand not more than a hundred yards from the Super Hercules’s torn fuselage. Oddly, its desert camouflage paint scheme showed no obvious national markings or other identifiers. Several Western-looking men in civilian clothing were visible around the helicopter and the C-130 wreckage. Some carried a mix of small arms and wore military-grade body armor.

  “Son of a bitch,” Kasper muttered. “We’ve got company.”

  A new voice crackled over the helicopter’s ARC-210 communications system. “Wizard One-One, this is Rocking Horse Six. Suggest you land on the other side of the wreck. We’ll confer further once you’re down.”

  “Copy that, Rocking Horse,” Kasper acknowledged tightly. Her fingers danced across her multifunction display, inputting the call sign they’d been given. She switched back to the intercom. “The computer confirms that ‘Rocking Horse’ is legit. But that call sign belongs to an OGA.”

  Flynn snorted. OGA was military jargon for “Other Government Agency.” In practice, that usually meant the CIA’s clandestine service and its paramilitary contractors.

  “You know anything about these guys or what they’re up to out here, Nick?” Dykstra asked, making small adjustments to the helicopter controls to veer off and circle back around toward the suggested landing site. “Wearing your other hat, I mean?” That was a not-so-subtle reference to Flynn’s covert status as an Air Force intelligence officer.

  “Not a doggone thing, FX,” Flynn said truthfully. His hands moved to the quick-release buckle on his seat straps. A rotor-whipped cloud of swirling sand and dust billowed up as the HH-60 flared in and then settled lightly on its main landing gear. His eyes narrowed in concentration. “But I can promise you that’s about to change.”

  Two

  At the C-130J Super Hercules Crash Site, Southern Libya

  An Hour Later

  All three U.S. Air Force crewmen aboard the downed aircraft were dead. Confirming that had required Zalewski and Camarillo to painstakingly work their way into the half-buried nose of the big cargo turboprop, first digging through compa
cted sand and then carefully cutting through jagged layers of impact-crushed metal. Once they’d gotten close to what was left of the C-130’s cockpit, they’d spotted the broken remains of its two pilots and loadmaster wedged in amid the twisted wreckage of instrument panels, wiring, consoles, and seats.

  “How’s it look, Zee?” Flynn asked when Zalewski wriggled back outside to report.

  Stretching cramped shoulders, the big pararescueman shook his head gravely. “Bad, sir. A real mess. It’s gonna take a hell of an effort to get the bodies out.” He stripped off his helmet and gloves, then rubbed a weary hand through his short-cropped, sweat-drenched hair before taking a long swallow through the tube of his hydration pack. Under the late afternoon sun, it was well over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and it was even hotter inside the C-130 wreck’s tight, confined spaces.

  Flynn nodded. He lowered his voice. “So what do you think? Was this crash an accident? Or enemy action?”

  Zalewski’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “If I was a betting man, sir, I’d put my money on bad guys,” he said at length. “The Herc’s forward section is all torn up. Even more than I’d expect from the impact when it smacked into this sand dune.”

  Flynn frowned. “Like maybe the plane was hit by a missile?”

  “Either that, or else somebody set off a bomb right behind the cockpit,” Zalewski suggested. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the C-130’s tail section. “Once we get ’em back to the tech experts, info from the flight data and cockpit voice recorders should pin down exactly what happened.”