He still dreamed about that damned bell sometimes.

It had been set up on a post at one end of the parade ground, "the grinder," as it was better known to the recruit boat crews who'd drilled and exercised there. All any BUD/S trainee had to do to quit, at any time of day or night, was walk over to the bell and ring it three times. During the sleepless days of physical challenge officially known as Motivation Week — it was never called anything but Hell Week by the trainees — two BUD/S recruits had actually been detailed to carry the bell everywhere the boat crews went. He'd wanted to ring it. Oh, how he'd wanted to ring it! There'd been times when Cotter had wanted a shower and clean clothes and an uninterrupted eight-hours sleep so badly he would have done anything, anything to win them.

Except quit. He'd stayed the course and graduated, one of twelve out of an original complement of sixty. After the usual six months' probation, he'd finally won the coveted "Budweiser," the eagle/trident/flintlock-pistol emblem of the SEALs worn above his left breast.

For the next year he'd served with SEAL Team Two, stationed at Little Creek, Virginia, and participated in the SEAL raids on Iranian oil rigs during the so-called "Tanker War" of the eighties. In 1986 he'd qualified for NESEP, a Navy education program that put him through four years of college, with ten weeks of OCS the summer before his senior year. After BUD/S, college had been a vacation, and his stint of Organized Chicken Shit in Providence, Rhode Island, had been sheer luxury. He'd even managed to find time to get married and have a daughter. Graduating as an ensign in 1990, he'd immediately returned to the Teams, serving with SEAL Four in the Gulf War, then going on to command the newly formed SEAL Team Seven's Third Platoon.

He checked his watch again: 0230 hours. It was time.

Switching on his Motorola, he spoke quietly into his lip mike. "Gold, this is Blue. Authenticate, Sierra Tango one five."

"Blue, Gold" sounded in his headset. The voice belonged to Lieutenant J.g. Ed DeWitt, Cotter's 2IC, his second-in-command. "Copy. Authenticate, Tango Foxtrot three niner. Lockpick."

DeWitt's squad was in position and ready to go. "Roger that, Gold. Stand by."

Slipping quietly through the darkness, he joined EM2 Higgins, who was putting the finishing touches on the unit's tiny satellite transceiver, plugging the HST-4 sat comm into the KY-57 encryption set. The antenna, a folding umbrella just twelve inches across, had already been set up and aligned with a MILSTAR satellite 22,300 miles above the equator. "so, L-T," Higgins said quietly. "Is it going down?"

"That's a roger. Unless Washington has something else to say about it." He took a handset the size of a cellular car phone.

"Fairyland, Fairyland," he called softly. "This is Blue Water."

"Blue Water, Fairyland" sounded over his headset a moment later. "We read you."

"Fairyland, Blue Water. Lockpick. I say again, Lockpick."

"Blue Water, Lockpick confirmed. Cold Steel. I say again, Cold Steel."

Adrenaline coursed through Cotter's veins. The mission was still go! "Roger, Fairyland. Cold Steel. Blue Water out."

Cotter replaced the handset in its rucksack, locking eyes with Higgins as he did so. "Looks like it's a go," he said.

Higgins — known as "Professor Higgins" for his bookish habits between missions — replied with a killer's maniacal grin, teeth gleaming in a black-painted face out of nightmare.

1835 hours (Zulu -5)

Joint Special Operations Command Center

The Pentagon

During the first hours of the Desert Storm land campaign, one observer had wryly pointed out that Iraqi spies might have noted that something was afoot by the large number of pizza deliveries to both the White House and the Pentagon. True or not, this night several delivery cartons were open on the table, revealing half-eaten pizzas. The room's occupants, however, were paying less attention to their dinner than they were to a large television monitor on one console. The uniforms represented several services, Army, Navy, and Air Force, and the civilians among them included liaison officers with the CIA and one undersecretary to the Secretary of Defense.

Captain Phillip Thomas Coburn felt somewhat out of his league with the suits and the flag-rank brass, but he took comfort in the fact that he was a SEAL, and what was going down on the screen was a SEAL op. A twenty-five-year veteran, he'd started out with SEAL Two in Vietnam. Now he was the commanding officer of SEAL Seven, an elite and highly classified unit organized into four platoons of fourteen men each.

The room's lights were out, and watchers' faces were illuminated by the eerie phosphor glow of the screen. In the background, a whispering murmur of many voices could be heard, the relayed comments of aircraft pilots and of the SEALs themselves as they spoke to one another over their tactical radios. Operation Blue Sky was a large and complex mission, one involving far more assets than just the SEAL platoon now on the ground.

The scene on the television monitor was a bird's-eye view of an airport; a large, four-engine aircraft, seen from almost directly overhead where it sat on the runway, was clearly visible. The points of light moving toward it were antlike in comparison.

But Coburn felt a thrill as he watched the screen. Those were his men moving like shadows across the television monitor. God, how he wanted to be with them! "Feeling your age, Phil?" a soft voice murmured at his side.

"Stuff it, Paul," he whispered back, and the other man grinned in the darkness.

Captain Paul Mason was Coburn's single friend and confidant in the room, and another veteran of the Teams in Nam. A training injury had knocked Mason out of the jump and PT quals twelve years back, though he still thought of himself as a SEAL. The Teams were like that. Once you were one of them, you never left, no matter what your current duty assignment might be. Now Mason was a staff officer, serving as a voice for the Teams with USSOCOM, the U.S. Special Operations Command that managed all SPECWAR groups, including the Army Special Forces and Delta Force, as well as the Navy SEALS.

Shared experience had made the two men friends. Mason was no longer qualified as a SEAL, while Coburn, though he'd maintained his quals over the years with a fiercely dedicated daily regimen of running, exercise, and workouts, was stuck behind a desk. His last field assignment had been Grenada, and at fifty years of age he could feel the inner clock ticking away. Damn it, he thought, staring at the monitor. I should be there, not nursemaiding a bunch of suits and flags in a Fort Fumble basement!

"I'm still not sure what the hell I'm seeing," a Navy admiral complained. His name was Thomas Bainbridge, and he was the commanding officer of NAVSPECWARGRU-Two, the Little Creek-based headquarters of the East Coast SEALS.

"Real-time thermal imaging, Admiral," Mason said smoothly. "Computer-enhanced and corrected to give a steady image from a single angle. Right now our Aurora is circling above Shuaba at ninety thousand feet... so high up you couldn't even see it from the ground in broad daylight, much less in the middle of the night. Its scanning infrared sensors are incredibly sensitive. What you're seeing is the body heat from our SEALs as they deploy for the assault. This lone guy here on the control tower is probably an Iraqi soldier. These white glows up here look like warm engines, probably a couple of jeeps parked there in the past couple of hours. And... looks like four more guards by the jeeps."

"There they go," an Air Force general said, pointing to the left side of the screen. "Can you get a close-up of that?"

A computer technician typed several characters, and the image on the screen changed, zeroing in on four ghostly shapes moving with short, leapfrogging rushes across the dark blue ground toward a cluster of green buildings. Three other shapes remained in place in the rear. Close inspection revealed one of them to be a man bracing a dark, elongated object atop a low hill. That would be the team's sniper.