At last, reeds gave way to clumps of grass and scrub brush bordering an area of dry, sandy soil. At the swamp's edge, the squad paused once again to rest, and to strip and clean their weapons right down to the springs and followers of their magazines. A blaze of light glared against the sky to the southeast, harsh and intrusive after the silent darkness of the marsh.

Roselli's pulse quickened as he studied the source of that light through a powerful pair of binoculars. Five hundred meters ahead, the modern airport of Shuaba had been constructed on land reclaimed from the dying swamp. From a low rise in the ground, Roselli could see the control tower and hangars of the civilian airport. To the right were more buildings and a smaller tower, as well as the barracks belonging to a military air base. Beyond that, against a hillside and barely visible against the glare from the airfield lights, was a small town, the village of Zabeir.

Directly in front of the civilian tower, pinned in the cross fire of a dozen powerful searchlights, sat a transport, a C-130 Hercules. Prominent on the plane's high tail was the pale blue flag of the United Nations.

Roselli let out a pent-up breath as he lowered the binoculars, but at the same time the fire in his veins burned hotter. The SEALs had reached their objective, parachuting into a lake, then trekking through Iraqi-controlled territory across kilometers of swamp, and they'd done it unobserved. Now, however, the real fun was about to begin.

0210 hours (Zulu +3)

Shuaba Airport, Iraq

Lieutenant Vincent Cotter studied the UN C-130 through his binoculars, carefully searching for the guards he knew must be there. The rear ramp was up and the cargo doors closed, but a civilian-type boarding ladder was still rolled up against the port-side door forward. Had Iraqi troops entered the aircraft? Were the hostages still on board? There was no way to answer either question from out here.

Third Platoon had been carefully briefed on the situation the previous afternoon at Dahran, and Cotter had looked at photographs of Shuaba Airport shot both from an orbiting KH-II spy satellite and from a high-altitude Air Force Aurora reconnaissance aircraft.

Both sources indicated that the Herky Bird was heavily guarded outside. As of the last radio contact with the UN plane's crew, some eight hours ago, the Iraqi troops had still been respecting the technical claim of extraterritorial sovereignty for the aircraft and had not gone aboard. That, Cotter reflected, could easily have changed in the past few hours. The SEAL team would have to proceed carefully, working on the assumption that armed Iraqi soldiers were now on the plane. As for whether the UN inspectors were still on board, that would have to be settled by a closer look.

The crisis had begun at 0930 hours the day before, when the C-130 had left Baghdad's Al Muthana Airport for Shuaba and an unscheduled inspection of a reputed chemical and biological weapons plant outside al-Basra. The tip that had led the UN weapons inspectors to that fourteen-hundred-year-old city on the west bank of the Shat Al-Arab River had been as solid as they come; German engineers who had helped build the facility ten years earlier had come forward with both the blueprints and photographs. The al-Basra facility was almost certainly being used to make and store CB agents, and the presence of an unusually thick concrete floor under part of the plant suggested that it might be tied in with Iraq's nuclear program as well.

Arriving unexpectedly at Shuaba, twenty kilometers east of al-Basra, fifteen UN inspectors had unloaded their Land Rovers and descended on the suspected facility, built halfway between al-Basra and Shuaba Airport and masquerading as a machine tool-and-die plant. There, the inspectors had brushed past surprised Iraqi guards and impounded a number of files and other physical evidence, then driven with them to the airport. They'd been in the process of loading the documents aboard the aircraft when Iraqi troops — reportedly members of the Republican Guard — had arrived, demanding the return of classified documents. When the Swedish commander of the UN team refused, a standoff had ensued. The Iraqis were point-blank refusing to allow the Hercules to take off unless the stolen files were returned.

Similar standoffs had occurred before in the wake of the '91 Gulf War. Until now, all had been resolved peacefully. This time, however, the situation was more urgent, and more deadly. Iraq's ruling military council, calling the incident a gross violation of national sovereignty, was threatening to destroy the plane rather than allow it to leave the country. Adding to the confusion, one of the UN inspectors aboard was an American, a CIA case officer named Arkin; the Company wanted Arkin out of Iraq and on his way to Langley for a debrief ASAP. From the tone of his operational orders, Cotter guessed that the Agency spook had stumbled across something in al-Basra pretty damned important.

SEAL Seven had been tapped by the Pentagon to carry out the mission, code-named Operation Blue Sky, a covert insertion into Iraq followed by a hostage rescue.

Cotter turned his binoculars toward the east, where two aging, rust-bucket buses had been parked across the runway, effectively preventing takeoff. A couple of jeeps were parked there as well, and the SEAL lieutenant could see the tell-tale orange sparks of a couple of lit cigarettes. He could smell them too. When the wind was right, it was possible to detect the odor of a cigarette at two miles; these were harsh and pungent, either Turkish or Russian, he thought.

"I make four hostiles at the roadblock, Skipper," Martin Brown whispered at his side. Brown had his Remington Model 700 unpacked, with an AN/PVS-4 nightscope already mounted over its breech.

"Let me have a peek, Magic." Cotter's night goggles could only distinguish human-sized targets to a range of about 150 meters. Taking Brown's sniper rifle, the L-T peered through the starlight scope, which extended his view to better than four hundred meters.

Yeah... there they were, revealed in an eerie glow of greens and grays, four Iraqi soldiers lounging by their vehicles, smoking, talking, but not appearing particularly alert.

Shifting the rifle-mounted scope to the C-130, he spotted two more soldiers sitting on the bottom steps of the boarding ladder. He counted three troops resting on the ground beneath the aircraft, and another on the control tower, standing on a railed outside walkway up near the top of the building. Ten in all... with the certainty that there were more nearby, possibly inside the terminal building or the hangars, possibly inside a trio of Iraqi army trucks parked next to the control tower's entrance.

He handed the rifle back to Brown, then checked his watch, carefully shielding its face with his hand as he uncovered the luminous numbers: 0215 hours. It was almost time.

Vincent Xavier Cotter, reserved, soft-spoken, oldest son of a devoutly Catholic family, seemed an unlikely warrior. During high school he'd actually considered becoming a priest, but then his father had died and he'd dropped out, going to work to support his mother and two younger brothers. Eventually he'd gotten his G.E.D. equivalency, then gone on to enlist in the Navy, figuring that he could send most of his pay home while the government provided him with room and board.

Navy life had agreed with him. Four years later, as an engineman second class, he'd "shipped for six" — re-enlisting for another six years — and put in for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL school at Coronado, California, at the same time.

He still wasn't entirely sure why he'd volunteered for BUD/S training, though he suspected it had something to do with proving himself to himself, a challenge to mind and body. SEAL training had been a challenge, all right, a nightmare of mud, exhaustion, humiliation, and grueling hard labor beyond anything he'd ever imagined, a hell-course designed to weed out the less than physically and mentally perfect.