"The detail is absolutely amazing," an Army colonel remarked.

"Welcome to the twenty-first century, Colonel," one of the suits, a CIA liaison officer, said. "Warfare with all the comforts of home." He took a bite from a slice of pepperoni pizza, and some of the others chuckled.

Coburn said nothing, but continued to watch the stealthy deployment of his men on the screen. The comment about warfare in comfort rankled, but then, as friends of his in the Teams had often told him, "When an asshole gives you shit, you gotta consider the source."

Almost as though he'd read Coburn's thought, Mason winked at him.

Coburn rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, then leaned closer to the screen. "Could we see a wide-angle shot, please?" he asked quietly. The tight view requested earlier showed nothing but a single team sprinting toward the aircraft; there was a full platoon on the ground now, fourteen men, and he wanted to see the entire plan unfolding, not just one small part of it.

The technician typed in a command, and the C-130, huge on the screen, dwindled to a toy outside a tiny cluster of buildings.

According to plan, the two SEAL squads had approached the objective separately. Gold Squad was to neutralize the guards at the runway roadblock and in the control tower; Blue Squad would hit the guards outside the Hercules and board the aircraft itself. Coburn could just make out the flitting heat shadows of the two SEAL groups as they dispersed across the airfield. Two men appeared to be creeping up on the Iraqis at the roadblock. The others were moving to jump-off positions closer to the C-130.

"Fairyland, Tally Three" sounded over the room's speakers. "Hot Iron, repeat, Hot Iron."

General Bradley, one of the Air Force officers, cocked his head, listening to the murmured transmissions, relayed through an Air Force AWACS aircraft over northern Saudi Arabia. "Ah! There's Tally Three. Here we go!"

Tally Three was a pair of F-117 Stealth fighters circling south of al-Basra. When informed that the SEALs were going in, the black, arrow-head-shaped aircraft had swung north and commenced their approach. Their target was an Iraqi SAM site and command bunker dug into the hillside above the village of Zabeir. When the bunker went, the SEAL platoon would launch their assault.

The tension in the room was growing, tightening. Even here, in a darkened room thousands of miles from where the action was going down, Coburn felt the old combat reflexes kicking in. His senses were sharpened; it seemed that he could smell not only the pizza, but the breath and sweat and aftershave of each of the men present in the room. He could hear the tick and hum of the room's computers, the sigh of the air conditioner, the excitement in the anonymous radio voices of the AWACS crew as they noted the time and confirmed that Cowboy One, Two, and Three were all airborne.

He desperately wanted to be in the field again, on the ground with Third Platoon.

"Man, oh, man," the spook said, grinning. "This is the way to fight a war!"

Somehow, Coburn resisted the urge to drive that pizza slice down the man's throat with his fist.

0236 hours (Zulu +3)

Shuaba Airport, Iraq

"You got him?"

"He's dead meat, Skipper. He just don't know it yet." Brown lay prone at Cotter's side, the Remington braced on his left hand, motionless, his right eye pressed tight to the rubber shield of his starlight scope to keep the device from casting a telltale glow on his face. "Say the word 'n' I cap him."

Cotter checked his watch again. Tally Three ought to be sounding the starting gun almost any moment now. Invisible to radar, silent as death, an F-117 should have already loosed its Paveway 11, sending the one-ton smart bomb gliding in along an invisible laser beam and right through the SAM bunker's front door.

A yellow flash lit up the southeastern sky, sudden, startling, and utterly silent as it billowed skyward into an orange fireball unfolding from the hillside above Zabeir. Cotter kept his binoculars on the Iraqis near the C-130. All were standing in the open now, staring into the flames with gaping mouths. "Knock, knock," Higgins said. "Avon calling."

Then the sound of the bomb blast thundered down from the hill, and Cotter's hand touched Brown's shoulder. "Do it!"

The sniper's rifle bucked in the SEAL's hands, its crack swallowed by the distant waterfall roar of the explosion. On the control tower's deck, the lone Iraqi guard pitched backward, dropped his weapon, then collapsed unmoving onto the walkway. Brown had already shifted targets, aiming toward the Hercules where the guards were pointing at the explosion and calling to one another. He fired again, and one of the Iraqis, the red triangle of the Republican Guard plainly visible on the sleeve of his fatigues, spun back into the boarding steps, arms akimbo. Before his comrades could react, four night-clad figures, torsos bulky with unfamiliar gear, faces painted black and heads shrouded by balaclavas and the insect-glitter of night-vision goggles, materialized out of the shadows and opened fire.

Brown shifted targets again and, one by one, began knocking out the spotlights surrounding the plane.

0237 hours (Zulu +3)

Shuaba Airport runway, Iraq

Hollywood depictions to the contrary, no sound-suppressed weapon is completely silent. The MP5SD3s carried by the three SEALs in the aircraft assault element came close, though, the high-speed whiff of their bolts louder than the stuttering cough of their firing. Roselli sent two quick three-round bursts into the center of mass of one of the Iraqi soldiers at a range of fifty meters, jerking the man back and tossing him aside like a string-cut puppet. To either side, Doc Ellsworth and Mac MacKenzie loosed sharp, controlled bursts in synch with Roselli's, taking down the last three Iraqi guards in the space of a couple of heartbeats. Boomer Garcia backed them up, ready with his M-16/M203 combo as he scanned the darkness encircling the C-130.

Roselli raced to the parked Hercules, feeling vulnerable. The terminal building loomed beyond the aircraft, the slanted windows of the control tower dark and empty and threatening.

He ducked beneath the C-130's wing, pausing to put another three-round burst into the sprawled body of one of the Iraqi soldiers. Nearby, Doc made sure of another one.

During the mission planning, there'd been some discussion as to whether or not they should take prisoners, especially at this stage of the operation when some hard intel about whether or not the Iraqis had already boarded the aircraft would be damned useful. The final decision had been that there would be no time to interrogate prisoners, no time to cross-check their stories for confirmation. Better to just hop-and-pop, relying on speed and surprise to overcome any bad guys waiting aboard the Herk. As for taking prisoners, well... shooting POWs was a direct violation of the Geneva Convention. Third Platoon's written orders directed them to handle prisoners "according to SOP," which everyone understood to mean that there would be none. "Clear!" Ellsworth called from the other side of the aircraft.

"Clear!" MacKenzie called from the foot of the boarding ladder.

One Iraqi body lay on its back, left arm thrown across its chest in an awkward position. As Roselli approached, the arm slipped down and flopped limply onto the tarmac. Instinctively, he triggered a burst into the man's chest. "Clear!"

"Alfa, Bravo," MacKenzie said over his tactical radio. "Stage one, clear. Five tangos, five down. Going to stage two."

Tangos — SEAL talk for terrorists. These Iraqis weren't terrorists, Roselli knew. They were just soldiers, doing what they'd been told to do.

Unfortunately for them, the same could be said of Third Platoon, SEAL Seven. And the SEALs were very good at what they did, better, he thought with a natural and unassuming arrogance, than anyone else in the world.