Joe Catalanotto, commander of the Alpha Squad, glanced up from the explosives he and Blue and Cowboy were rigging against the Ustanzian Embassy wall. The city was lit up all around them, fires and explosions hellishly illuminating the night sky. It seemed unnatural, unreal.
Except it was real. Damn, it was way real. It was dangerous with a capital D. Even if Alpha Squad wasn’t hit by friendly fire, Joe and his men ran the risk of bumping into a platoon of enemy soldiers. Hell, if they were captured, commando teams like the SEALs were often treated like spies and executed—after being tortured for information.
But this was their job. This was what Navy SEALs were trained to do. And all of Joe’s men in Alpha Squad performed their tasks with clockwork precision and cool confidence. This wasn’t the first time they’d had to perform a rescue mission in a hot war zone. And it sure as hell wasn’t going to be the last.
Joe started to whistle as he handled the plastic explosives, and Cowboy—otherwise known as Ensign Harlan Jones from Fort Worth, Texas—looked up in disbelief.
“Cat works better when he’s whistling,” Blue explained to Cowboy over his headset microphone. “Drove me nuts all through training—until I got used to it. You do get used to it.”
“Terrific,” Cowboy muttered, handing Joe part of the fuse.
His hands were shaking.
Joe glanced up at the younger man. Cowboy was new to the squad. He was scared, but he was fighting that fear, his jaw tight and his teeth clenched. His hands might be shaking, but the kid was doing his job—he was sticking it out.
Cowboy glared back at Joe, daring him to comment.
So of course, Joe did. “Air raids make you clausty, huh, Jones?” he said. He had to shout to be heard. Sirens were wailing and bells were ringing and anti-aircraft fire was hammering all over Baghdad. And of course there was also the brain-deafening roar of the American bombs that were vaporizing entire city blocks all around them. Yeah, they were in the middle of a damned war.
Cowboy opened his mouth to speak, but Joe didn’t let him. “I know how you’re feeling,” Joe shouted as he put the finishing touches on the explosives that would drill one mother of a hole into the embassy foundation. “Give me a chopper jump into cold water, give me a parachute drop from thirty thousand feet, give me a fourteen-mile swim, hell, give me hand-to-hand with a religious zealot. But this…I gotta tell you, kid, inserting into Baghdad with these hundred-pounders falling through the sky is making me a little clausty myself.”
Cowboy snorted. “Clausty?” he said. “You? Shoot, Mr. Cat, if there’s anything on earth you’re afraid of, they haven’t invented it yet.”
“Working with nukes,” Joe said. “That sure as hell gives me the creeps.”
“Me, too,” Blue chimed in.
The kid wasn’t impressed. “You guys know a SEAL who isn’t freaked out by disarming nuclear weapons, and I’ll show you someone too stupid to wear the trident pin.”
“All done,” Joe said, allowing himself a tight smile of satisfaction. They’d blow this hole open, go in, grab the civilians and be halfway to the extraction point before ten minutes had passed. And it wouldn’t be a moment too soon. What he’d told Ensign Jones was true. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but he hated air raids.
Blue McCoy stood and hand-signaled a message to the rest of the team, in case they’d missed hearing Joe’s announcement in the din.
The ground shook as a fifty-pound bomb landed in the neighborhood, and Blue met Joe’s eyes and grinned as Cowboy swore a blue streak.
Joe laughed and lit the fuse.
“Thirty seconds,” he told Blue, who held up the right number of fingers for the rest of the SEALs to see. The squad scrambled to the other side of the street for cover.
When a bomb is about to go off, Joe thought, there’s always a moment, sometimes just a tiny one, when everything seems to slow down and wait. He looked at the familiar faces of his men, and he could see the adrenaline that pumped through them in their eyes, in the set of their mouths and jaws. They were good men, and as always, he was going to do his damnedest to see that they got out of this city alive. Forget alive—he was going to get them out of this hellhole untouched.
Joe didn’t need to look at the second hand on his watch. He knew it was coming, despite the fact that time had seemed to slow down and stretch wa-a-a-ay out….
Boom.
It was a big explosion, but Joe barely heard it over the sounds of the other, more powerful explosions happening all over the city.
Before the dust even settled, Blue was on point, leading the way across the war-torn street, alert for snipers and staying low. He went headfirst into the neat little crater they had blown into the side of the Ustanzian Embassy.
Harvard was on radio, and he let air support know they were going in. Joe was willing to bet big money that the air force was too busy to pay Alpha Squad any real attention. But Harvard was doing his job, same as the rest of the SEALs. They were a team. Seven men—seven of the armed forces’ best and brightest—trained to work and fight together, to the death if need be.
Joe followed Blue and Bobby into the embassy basement. Cowboy came in after, leaving Harvard and the rest of the team guarding their backsides.
It was darker than hell inside. Joe slipped his night-vision glasses on just in time. He narrowly missed running smack into Bobby’s back and damn near breaking his nose on the shotgun the big man wore holstered along his spine.
“Hold up,” Bob signaled.
He had his NVs on, too. So did Blue and Cowboy.
They were alone down there, except for the spiders and snakes and whatever else was slithering along the hard dirt floor.
“Damned layout’s wrong. There’s supposed to be a flight of stairs,” Joe heard Blue mutter, and he stepped forward to take a look. Damn, they had a problem here.
Joe pulled the map of the embassy from the front pocket of his vest, even though he’d long since memorized the basement’s floor plan. The map in his hands was of an entirely different building than the one they were standing in. It was probably the Ustanzian Embassy in some other city, in some country on the other side of the damned globe. Damn! Someone had really screwed up here.
Blue was watching him, and Joe knew his executive officer was thinking what he was thinking. The desk-riding genius responsible for securing the floor plan of this embassy was going to have a very bad day in about a week. Maybe less. Because the commander and XO of SEAL Team Ten’s Alpha Squad were going to pay him a little visit.
But right now, they had a problem on their hands.
There were three hallways, leading into darkness. Not a stairway in sight.
“Wesley and Frisco,” Blue ordered in his thick Southern drawl. “Get your butts in here, boys. We need split teams. Wes with Bobby. Frisco, stay with Cowboy. I’m with you, Cat.”
Swim buddies. Blue had read Joe’s mind and done the smartest thing. With the exception of Frisco, who was babysitting the new kid, Cowboy, he’d teamed each man up with the guy he knew best—his swim buddy. In fact, Blue and Joe went back all the way to Hell Week. Guys who do Hell Week together—that excruciating weeklong torturous SEAL endurance test—stay tight. No question about it.
Off they went, night-vision glasses still on, looking like some kind of weird aliens from outer space. Wesley and Bobby went left. Frisco and Cowboy took the right corridor. And Joe, with Blue close behind him, went straight ahead.
They were silent now, and Joe could hear each man’s quiet breathing over his headset’s earphones. He moved slowly, carefully, checking automatically