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  Copyright © 2015 by M.L. Buchman

  Cover and internal design © 2015 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover art by Don Sipley

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Also by M.L. Buchman

  The Night Stalkers

  The Night Is Mine

  I Own the Dawn

  Wait Until Dark

  Take Over at Midnight

  Light Up the Night

  The Firehawks

  Pure Heat

  Full Blaze

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  A Sneak Peek from Hot Point

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  Chapter 1

  There were few times that Colonel Michael Gibson of Delta Force appreciated the near-psychotic level of commitment displayed by terrorists, but this was one of those times. If they hadn’t been so rigid in even their attire, his disguise would have been much more difficult.

  The al-Qaeda terrorist training camp deep in the Yemeni desert required that all of their hundred new trainees dress in white with black headdresses that left only the eyes exposed. The thirty-four trainers were dressed similarly but wholly in black, making them easy to distinguish. They were also the only ones armed, which was a definite advantage.

  The camp’s dress code made for a perfect cover. The four men of his team wore loose-fitting black robes like the trainers. Lieutenant Bill Bruce used dark contacts to hide his blue eyes, and they all had rubbed a dye onto their hands and wrists, the only other uncovered portion of their bodies.

  Michael and his team had parachuted into the deep desert the night before and traveled a quick ten kilometers on foot before burying themselves in the sand along the edges of the main training grounds. Only their faces were exposed, each carefully hidden by a thorn bush.

  The midday temperatures had easily blown through 110 degrees. It felt twice that inside the heavy clothing and lying under a foot of hot sand, but uncomfortable was a way of life in “The Unit,” as Delta Force called itself, so this was of little concern. They’d dug deep enough so that they weren’t simply roasted alive, even if it felt that way by the end of the motionless day.

  It was three minutes to sunset, three minutes until the start of Maghrib, the fourth scheduled prayer of the five that were performed daily.

  At the instant of sunset, the muezzin began chanting adhan, the call to prayer.

  Thinking themselves secure in the deep desert of the Abyan province of southern Yemen, every one of the trainees and the trainers knelt and faced northwest toward Mecca.

  After fourteen motionless hours—fewer than a dozen steps from a hundred and thirty terrorists—moving smoothly and naturally was a challenge as Michael rose from his hiding place. He shook off the sand and swung his AK-47 into a comfortable position. The four of them approached the prostrate group in staggered formation from the southeast over a small hillock.

  The Delta operators interspersed themselves among the other trainers and knelt, blending in perfectly. Of necessity, they all spoke enough Arabic to pass if questioned.

  Michael didn’t check the others because that might draw attention. If they hadn’t made it cleanly into place, an alarm would have been raised and the plan would have changed drastically. All was quiet, so he listened to the muezzin’s words and allowed himself to settle into the peace of the prayer.

  Bismi-llāhi r-rahmāni r-rahīm…

  In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful…

  He sank into the rhythm and meaning of it—not as these terrorists twisted it in the name of murder and warfare, but as it was actually stated. Moments like this one drove home the irony of his long career to become the most senior field operative in Delta while finding an inner quiet in the moment before dealing death.

  Perhaps in their religious fervor, the terrorists found the same experience. But what they lacked was flexibility. They wound themselves up to throw away their lives, if necessary, to complete their preprogrammed actions exactly as planned.

  For Michael, an essential centering in self allowed perfect adaptability when situations went kinetic—Delta’s word for the shit unexpectedly hitting the fan.

  That was Delta’s absolute specialty.

  Starting with zero preconceptions in either energy or strategy allowed for the perfect action that fit each moment in a rapidly changing scenario. Among the team, they’d joke sometimes about how Zen, if not so Buddhist, the moment before battle was.

  And, as always, he accepted the irony of that with no more than a brief smile at life’s whimsy.

  Dealing death was one significant part of what The Unit did.

  U.S. SFOD-D, Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, went where no other fighting force could go and did what no one else could do.

  Today, it was a Yemeni terrorist training camp.

  Tomorrow would take care of itself.

  They were the U.S. Army’s Tier One asset and no one, except their targets, would ever know they’d been here. One thing for certain, had The Unit been unleashed on bin Laden, not a soul outside the command structure would know who’d been there. SEAL Team Six had done a top-notch job, but talking about it wasn’t something a Delta operator did. But Joint Special Operations Command’s leader at the time was a former STS member, so the SEALs had gone in instead.

  Three more minutes of prayer.

  Then seven minutes to help move the trainees into their quarters where they would be locked in u
nder guard for the night, as they were still the unknowns.

  Or so the trainers thought.

  Three more minutes to move across the compound through the abrupt fall of darkness in the equatorial desert to where the commanders would meet for their evening meal and evaluation of the trainees.

  After that the night would get interesting.

  Bismi-llāhi r-rahmāni r-rahīm…

  In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful…

  * * *

  Captain Claudia Jean Casperson of the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—commonly known as the Night Stalkers—finally arrived at the aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Aden after two full days in transit from Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

  The Gulf of Aden ran a hundred miles wide and five hundred long between Somalia in Africa and Yemen on the southern edge of the Arabian Peninsula. The Gulf connected the Suez Canal and the Red Sea at one end to the Indian Ocean on the other, making it perhaps the single busiest and most hazardous stretch of water on the planet.

  Claudia tried to straighten her spine after she climbed off the C-2 Greyhound twin-engine cargo plane. It was the workhorse of carrier onboard delivery and, from the passenger’s point of view, the loudest plane ever designed. If not, it certainly felt that way. Shaking her head didn’t clear the buzz of the twin Allison T56 engines from either her ears or the pounding of the two big eight-bladed propellers from her body.

  A deckhand clad in green, which identified him as a helicopter specialist, met her before she was three steps off the rear ramp. He took her duffel without a word and started walking away, the Navy’s way of saying, “Follow me.” She resettled her rucksack across her shoulders and followed like a one-woman jet fighter taxiing along after her own personal ground guidance truck.

  Rather than leading her to quarters, the deckhand took her straight to an MH-6M Little Bird helicopter perched on the edge of the carrier’s vast deck. That absolutely worked for her. As soon as they had her gear stowed in the tiny back compartment, he turned to her and handed her a slip of paper.

  “This is the current location, contact frequency, and today’s code word for landing authorization for your ship. They need this bird returned today and you just arrived, so that works out. It’s fully fueled. They’re expecting you.” He rattled off the tower frequency for the carrier’s air traffic control tower, saluted, and left her to prep her aircraft before she could salute back.

  Thanks for the warm welcome to the theater of operations.

  This wasn’t a war zone. But it wasn’t far from one either, she reminded herself. Would saying, “Hi,” have killed him? That almost evoked a laugh; she hadn’t exactly been chatty herself. Word count for the day so far: one, saying thanks to the C-2 crewman who’d rousted her from a bare doze just thirty seconds before landing.

  The first thing she did was get into her full kit. She pulled her flight suit on over her clothes, tucking her long blond hair down her back inside the suit. Full armor brought the suit to about thirty pounds. She shrugged on a Dragon Skin vest that she’d purchased herself to give double protection over her torso. Over that, her SARVSO survival vest and finally her FN-SCAR rifle across her chest and her helmet on her head. Total gear about fifty pounds. As familiar as a second skin; she always felt a little exposed without it.

  Babe in armor.

  Who would have thought a girl from nowhere Arizona would be standing on an aircraft carrier off the Arabian Peninsula in full fighter gear?

  If anyone were to ask, she’d tell them it totally rocked. Actually, she’d shrug and acknowledge that she was proud to be here…but she’d be busy thinking that it totally rocked.

  The Little Bird was the smallest helicopter in any division of the U.S. military, and that made most people underestimate it. Not Claudia. She loved the Little Bird. It was a tough and sassy craft with a surprising amount of power for its small size. The helo also operated far more independently than any other aircraft in the inventory and, to Claudia’s way of thinking, that made the Little Bird near perfect.

  The tiny helo seated two up front and didn’t have any doors, so the wide opening offered the pilot an excellent field of view. The fact that it also offered the enemy a wide field of fire is why Claudia wore the secondary Dragon Skin vest. The helicopter could seat two in back if they were desperate—the space was small enough that Claudia’s ruck and duffel filled much of it. On the attack version, the rear space would be filled with cans of ammunition.

  In Special Operations Forces, the action teams rode on the outside of Little Birds. This one was rigged with a bench seat along either side that could fold down to transport three combat soldiers on either side.

  Claudia wanted an attack bird, not a transport, but she’d fight that fight once she reached her assigned company. For now she was simply glad to be a pilot who’d been deemed “mission ready” for the 160th SOAR.

  She went through the preflight, found the bird as clean as every other Night Stalker craft, and powered up for the flight. Less than a hundred miles, so she’d be there in forty minutes. Maybe then she could sleep.

  * * *

  As the rapid onset of full dark in the desert swept over the Yemeni desert, Michael and Bill moved up behind the main building that was used by the terrorist camp’s training staff. It was a one-story, six-room structure. Concrete slab, cinder-block walls, metal roof. Doors front and back. The heavy-metal rear one was locked, but they had no intention of using it anyway.

  The intel from the MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone that the Night Stalkers’ intel staff had kept circling twenty thousand feet overhead for the last three nights had indicated that four command-level personnel met here each night. Most likely position was in the southeast corner room. Four of the other rooms were barrack spaces that wouldn’t be used until after the trainers had all eaten together at the chow tent. The sixth room was the armory.

  Dry bread and water had been the fare for the trainees. Over the next few months they would be desensitized to physical discomfort much as a Delta operator was. Too little food, too little sleep, and too much exercise, especially early on, to weed out the weak or uncommitted.

  He and Bill squatted beneath the southeast window that faced away from the center of the camp; only the vast, dark desert lay beyond. Shifting the AK-47s over their shoulders, they unslung their preferred weapons—Heckler & Koch HK416 carbine rifles with flash suppressors that made them nearly silent.

  Bill pulled out a small fiber-optic camera and slipped it up over the windowsill. As they squatted out of sight, the small screen gave them a view of the inside of the target building for the first time.

  Not four men but eight were seated on cushions around a low table bearing a large teapot. Michael recognized five from various briefings, three of them Tier One targets. They’d only been expecting one Tier One.

  A long table sported a half-dozen laptops, and a pair of file cabinets stood at one end. They hadn’t counted on that at all. This was supposed to be a training camp, not an operations center.

  They were going to need more help to take advantage of the new situation.

  Michael got on the radio.

  * * *

  “USS Peleliu. This is Captain Casperson in Little Bird…” She didn’t know the name of the bird. She read off the tail number from the small plate on the control panel. “Inbound from eighty miles at two-niner-zero.”

  You didn’t want to sneak up on a ship of war that could shoot you down at this distance if they were in a grouchy mood.

  “Roger that, Captain. Status?”

  “Flying solo, full fuel.”

  “In your armor?”

  “Roger that.” Why in the world would they… Training. They’d want to make sure she wasn’t ignoring her training. Kid stuff. She’d flown Cobra attack birds for the U.S. Marines for six years before her transfer and spent two
more years training with the Night Stalkers. She wasn’t an—

  “This is Air Mission Commander Archie Stevens.” A different voice came on the air. “Turn immediate heading three-four-zero. Altitude five-zero feet, all speed. You’ll be joining a flight ten miles ahead of you for an exfil. We can’t afford to slow them down until you make contact, so hustle.”

  She slammed over the cyclic control in her right hand to shift to the new heading.

  Okay, maybe not so much a training test.

  Exfil. Exfiltration. A ground team needed to be pulled out and pulled out now. She’d done it in a hundred drills, so she kept calm and hoped that her voice sounded that way. She expected that it didn’t.

  “Uh, Roger.” Claudia had dozed fitfully for six hours in the last three days, and most of that had been in a vibrator seat on the roaring C-2 Greyhound. No rest for the weary.

  Once on the right heading, she dove into the night heading for fifty feet above the ocean waves and opened up the throttles to the edge of the never-exceed speed of a hundred and seventy-five miles per hour.

  The adrenaline had her wide-awake before she reached her flight level.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Claudia rolled up behind a flight of three birds moments before they crossed over the beach and into Yemen. The FLIR night-vision gear painted an image across the inside of her helmet’s visor of two Little Birds and a Black Hawk.

  No, it wasn’t a Black Hawk, it was a DAP—a Direct Action Penetrator, the nastiest gunship ever launched into the sky.

  Well, weren’t they going to have some fun tonight.

  One of the Little Birds was the attack version; that’s the one she wanted. The other was a transport like the one she was flying.

  Odd. Neither the DAP nor the attack Little Bird showed up on her radar as more than signal noise, though the transport Little Bird did. It was as if they weren’t there, but she could see them. No time to think about it now.

  “Captain Casperson”—a female voice—“take right flank off Merchant. You’ll be taking the southeast corner of a one-story building. Merchant, you’ll take the team from off the northwest. May, expect the LZ to be hot, especially near Merchant, so be ready to suppress it hard.”