detail, her cameraman, and the safe house director had all been killed. She’d been dragged fighting and screaming from the building while the abandoned camera continued to broadcast from its tripod.
That had been the summer of 2009.
Javier had been at home in Coronado Beach when it happened. He’d seen the live broadcast, had found himself on his feet, helpless and thousands of miles away. Her screams had ripped him apart. They haunted him still. When Al-Nassar’s group had claimed responsibility for the attack and bragged that they’d decapitated her, there hadn’t been a U.S. serviceman anywhere in the world who hadn’t wanted to send Al-Nassar straight to hell —and that included Javier.
Now Delta Platoon was going to hit that target.
Javier had pushed hard to get his guns into this fight, had done everything he could to make sure Delta Platoon got tasked with this job. To this day, no one knew about his weekend with Laura, and he couldn’t tell them or they would question his ability to handle this operation. Did he want to bring Al-Nassar down? Hell, yeah, he did. For his country
Dirty son of a whore.
“Yeah, he killed her.” Javier met Krasinski’s gaze. “But she had a name, and it wasn’t Baghdad Babe. It was Laura Nilsson. Show her some respect, man.”
She’d been one hell of a journalist, an incredible lover, a smart and beautiful woman. She deserved that much.
Krasinski’s expression was hidden by shadows and by black-and-green face camouflage, but there was regret in his voice. “You got it, senior chief.”
A voice came over the speaker. “Forty-five minutes till drop.”
“Masks on!” Boss, known to the rest of the world as Lt. Morgan O’Connell, shouted out the order, making the motion with his hand.
JG—Lt. Junior Grade Ben Alexander—repeated it, as did Javier, before fastening his O2 mask in place.
The men breathed normally, inhaling one hundred percent oxygen to eliminate the nitrogen from their bloodstreams so that no one would die from the dramatic increase in atmospheric pressure on the way down. This was a HAHO jump—high altitude, high opening. The mountains were too full of insurgents for them to risk the noise of parachutes opening close to the ground.
As the minutes ticked by, Javier ran through the details of the mission in his mind. Al-Nassar knew how to hole up—that much was for damned sure. His lair was built on a plateau with a fifty-foot cliff at its back, elevation giving him a clear one-eighty view of the landscape below. Caves at the base of the cliff provided Al-Nassar a handy place to stash weapons, ammo, explosives, heroin—and men. They also gave him a place to hide should he see anyone headed his way.
That was why Delta Platoon wasn’t going to drive up and ring the doorbell.
They were being dropped over a mountain valley west of Parachinar about 3.5 clicks from Al-Nassar’s hideout. They would hike their way from the DZ to the cliffs. There, the Boss’s squad would divide into two elements. He, Howe, Force, and Murphy, the platoon sniper, would remain atop the cliffs with suppressed Mk12s, an FN M249 Para for suppressive fire, and a M72A2 LAW grenade launcher to watch the men’s six, while the rest of the platoon would fast-rope down to the compound. JG would take the caves with LeBlanc, Johnson, and Grimshaw, setting charges to demolish any ordnance they found, while Javier infiltrated the compound with his squad—Krasinski, Ross, Zimmerman, Salisbury, Wilson, Reeves, Desprez. When Al-Nassar was in custody and the compound was secure, three modified CH-47D Chinook helos would swoop in for extract. As they lifted off, JG would blow the caves to hell.
Of course, they weren’t being sent up against a high-value target like this without backup firepower and air support. They’d be in touch with their tactical operations center, or TOC, throughout the night. A drone with thermal/infrared capability would patrol the sky above the job site, giving them a bird’s-eye view of the action. If things got messy, two Marine Special Operations Teams—MSOTs—would arrive in Black Hawks to make them messier.
Provided nothing went wrong, it would be a piece of cake.
Forty minutes later, a voice came over the speaker. “Two minutes to drop!”
The men switched from the prebreathers to their bottled O2, careful not to inhale in the transition. Then both squads got to their feet, boots thudding dully against the steel plating, each of them carrying more than a hundred pounds of gear on his back. With an efficiency born of constant training, each checked his own gear and that of the man in front of him. They’d already passed a jumpmaster inspection, but in their line of work there was no such thing as being too prepared, too careful.
“Ramp!”
The ramp and door began to open, and icy, thin air rushed in. The two sticks of SEALs moved toward the yawning exit, waiting for the signal to jump. Javier touched a gloved hand to the chest pocket that held the photograph of his brother Yadiel that he carried with him on every mission.
The light flashed green.
The men moved together, tumbling almost as one into the slipstream, Javier leading his squad out of the Hercules and into the black night.
SHE KNELT ON the carpet facing Mecca, going through the motions of the first Rak’ah, doing her best to say each word of the Sura Al-Fatiha correctly so that no one would find fault with her.
She kept her voice quiet, barely a whisper. This morning while praying
But then Zainab always struck her.
“You will never learn, Hanan!” Zainab had shouted in her face. “You are as stupid as you are ugly!”
“I am sorry, Umm Faisal.” She never dared to call Zainab or any of the other women by their given names, for they would deem it disrespectful and beat her. “You must help me to do better, sister.”
She’d called Abu Nayef’s wives her sisters, but only Angeza, who’d been given to Abu Nayef by her Pashtun father in payment of a debt when she was only fourteen, had ever treated her with kindness. Angeza had sneaked her food, helped her study the Suras, even protected her from Zainab and Abu Nayef. Still, she was the least of all the women here, and that was why she prayed at the back of the room, behind all of the other women and girls. And yet Zainab still seemed to see every mistake she made.
The women bowed, and she bowed with them, standing up straight once more before performing
But as they began the third Rak’ah and prayed at last in silence, her heart began to pound. It was time for her nightly rebellion. She clenched her hands to hide their trembling, afraid that Zainab, Nibaal, Safiya, or one of the other women would notice her nervousness and guess what she was doing. If they knew what she was thinking, they would surely denounce her to Abu Nayef.
Then he would do what he’d always promised to do and cut off her head.
Pulse racing, she reached secretly for her Swedish and English, words she didn’t dare to speak aloud burning in her mind like a fever.
SHE LAY IN the dark in the corner of the small back room that was hers, her bed an old blanket, her head
