struggle was taking place. Then the Sudanese closed his eyes for a moment and said, ‘Very well. What is done is done. But no harm will come to your wife and children. None.’
‘Very good,’ Henry said, confused. ‘But what does all of this mean?’
The Sudanese reached underneath his coat, pulled out a pistol of some sort, and Henry knew what was about to happen, could not believe it. He started to say a prayer and the shock of what the Sudanese said next — ‘Greetings from the people of the United States’ — caused him to halt in mid-sentence, just before a split-second flash of light preceded a final darkness.
The man known as the Sudanese was now in a men’s room, staring at a mirror. He had the room to himself. He looked at the dark face and brown, impassive eyes. Water was running in the sink, and before him was an open container about the size of a yogurt carton. He took a washcloth, dipped it in water, and then dipped it again in the container, and started rubbing at his face. Rub, rub, rub, and the dark color started to wash away, revealing a lighter skin, brown but not as black as before. More rubbing and something else began to emerge, a pattern, a display of scar tissue, of facial skin that had been badly burned, years ago. More rub, rub, rub, and when he was done there was no longer a Sudanese looking back at him from the bathroom mirror.
Instead, it was Montgomery Zane, of Tiger Team Seven.
‘Welcome back to the world,’ he whispered to the mirror.
Outside the restroom, Monty walked into a wide, open room with a low ceiling. There was country and western music being played somewhere, and in the middle of the room were a number of tables and chairs. Men were there, eating and drinking and smoking, and some were playing cards. Men were also two-deep at the bar, on the other side of which was a grill, open 24/7, where someone could order anything from frog’s legs to bacon and eggs to a milkshake to Maine lobster to caviar. Anything and everything. The men’s voices were loud and boisterous, though some of the men were quiet, sitting by themselves, reading or sleeping or listening to music through headphones or watching a movie on a handheld DVD.
Monty felt his body relax, for that was the purpose of this room. It was in a nondescript building stuck in the corner of a training facility at Hurlburt Air Force Base in western Florida — home of Air Force Special Operations — but there were about a dozen other facilities like it scattered around the world. Its purpose was simple: it was an oasis, a recharging place, a room to re-enter The World after doing the dirty work of the United States. For each and every man in this room was a member of an elite, either Special Forces or Delta Force or Navy SEAL or Air Force Special Ops or any other black-budget group, who in fact were known as the ‘point of the spear’, and here they relaxed for a while, after killing the enemies of the United States.
At the bar Monty leafed through a thick menu, ordered a plate of barbecued ribs. After getting a Sam Adams, he went back to a table and sat down. There was a day-old USA
Another swallow of the beer. But what kind of design lay behind his latest run? He had spent a fair amount of time over the past few years playing around with these contacts and others, passing along spoof information, knowing that it was for a good cause. The spoof information could cause enemy higher-ups to react, to make plans, to be caught on the radar of all the God-loving forces involved in this war on terror. So that had been the job, and he had done good with it, playing the devout Sudanese, paying attention to terrorist-wannabes.
So why were they whacked? What possible threat could they have posed?
Somebody kicked at his feet. He looked up, and smiled in recognition. ‘Yo, Bravo Tom, have a seat.’
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said the other man, a bulky redhead whose hair was cropped short and whose muscular shoulders looked like they were about to burst through his black T-shirt. Bravo Tom was a second-generation Croatian, whose father had taken him to the United States when the Yugoslav civil war began in earnest. He had a twelve-syllable first name that began with the letter ‘B’ and, thankfully, his middle name was Thomas. His last name was also a jumble of consonants and one vowel, and everywhere he was deployed he was just called Bravo Tom. Monty had met the man in a SEAL refresher course a few years back, and had run into him, off and on, all across the great globe.
‘Buy you a beer?’ Monty asked, and Bravo Tom laughed back at him. Everything was free, and buying a beer just meant walking up to the bar and retrieving same. Bravo Tom said, ‘Nope, I’m good for now. How you been?’
‘Good. And you?’
‘Just fine,’ Bravo Tom said. ‘Good to see your ugly mug. How’s business? Still with the Tiger Teams?’
Monty smiled at the easy give and take. This was one part of the military that civilians never quite understood. You made a friend, a good friend, and despite deployments hither and yon you could run into that friend in the most Godforsaken places and they’d show you the ropes and help you fit in and watch your Six. It was a big organization, the military, but it was like one big-ass family if you looked at it right.
‘Busy, quite busy, but it’s all right. Tiger Team is treating me okay. And you? Still with the Hymen Squad?’
Bravo Tom seemed to blush at that. Monty knew that his friend had been stationed with a secretive group that was tasked to provide quiet and clandestine support to the US Border Patrol and Customs. There were very strict rules against the use of military resources in domestic law-enforcement affairs — rooted in the old concept of the posse comitatus — but since a certain day in September 2001, rules were pretty much what whoever made them — and who could get a Federal judge, usually in secret, to sign off on them — wanted to make them. Officially, Bravo Tom’s group was known as the Border Support Task Force and, using Kiowa helicopters and cut- down armored Humvees, they worked both the Canadian and Mexican borders to interdict smugglers of drugs and smugglers of people. But since their job was, as some wise-asses had noted, to protect the purity and sanctity of the nation, their unofficial name was the Hymen Squad.
So far their work had gone well. They’d intercepted nearly a dozen teams trying to infiltrate, said teams either being killed in vicious firefights never reported in the news media or captured and sent to the tender clutches of the rapidly growing prison system in Guantanamo Bay.
Bravo Tom shrugged at the question and said, ‘Hymen Squad’s doing all right, I guess. I’m going on a thirty- day leave this weekend and, let me tell you, I am counting down the hours.’
Monty lowered his beer bottle to the table. ‘Leave? You’re going on leave?’
‘Sure. Why not?’
Monty looked at his friend to see if he was joking but there was no humor there. He said, ‘You’re going on leave. For thirty days. Tell me, you guys spun up about anything coming down in the next couple of weeks?’
Bravo Tom shrugged. ‘Nope. Everything’s about as normal as it can be, Monty. Some training down in Lower Baja, and some work going up north with the Aussie Special Forces, out in Montana, but that’s it.’
‘Regular schedule? Regular ops?’
‘Yeah. Hey, no offense, mind telling me what the fuck is going on?’
Monty toyed with the edge of the Sam Adams label. His fingers felt cold, his feet felt cold, the whole damn room felt cold. ‘Bravo Tom, you ever hear of something called Final Winter?’
His friend thought about that for a moment and said, ‘Nope.’
‘You sure?’
‘Damn sure I’m sure. Look, pal, I know who you are. Your name is Monty Zane. You sure as hell weren’t named for a street, but you should have been, ‘cause the traffic’s all been one-way. And if you don’t start yapping, I’m moving to a friendlier table.’
Monty was stuck but he knew that fair was fair. At this level of classification, Bravo Tom didn’t have a ‘need to know’, but Monty sure as hell needed to know what was going on with his buddy’s unit. If that meant horse- trading with information, so be it.
Still toying with the beer label, he said, ‘My Tiger Team has been riled by something coming up in a couple of weeks. Something known as Final Winter. Major attack on a number of cities. Those doing the attack are supposed to be Syrians, infiltrating through the borders. I did some background work, passed my recommendation up the
