The pilots had warned all the men in the premission briefing what would happen next. The helicopters banked sharply around a turn in the mountain pass and accelerated into a steep dive, hugging the terrain as the face of the mountain gave way to a valley approximately 3,000 feet below.

The isolated village rushed up to meet them. There was no sign of life at this early hour. The pilot in the lead chopper marked the target and began to pull up while the other three Little Birds continued their ground-hugging ride in a race against the clock to deliver their deadly warriors before the enemy could respond and put up a fight.

GENERAL KEVIN HARLEYfocused intently on the grainy screen before him. He had three to choose from, but for now his attention was on the middle one. The other two screens wouldn't have anything important on them for another minute or so. The four helicopters came into view at precisely the expected moment. Harley watched as the Little Birds decreased speed and broke formation. Three of them hugged the deck while the fourth gained altitude. It was hard to tell from looking at his screen since the image was being shot by a small reconnaissance drone circling 10,000 feet above the village, but it was Harley's battle plan and he knew every minute detail.

General Harley was wearing a bulky in-flight headset so he could communicate with his people over the loud General Electric engines growling just a few feet above his head. In the thin mountain air the engines had to work extra hard to keep the command-and-control bird from dropping like the 12,000-pound stone that it was. The UH-60 Blackhawk was aglow in a wash of modern circuitry and flat-screen monitors. The floor of the bird was covered with bulletproof Kevlar panels, and each man wore a flak vest, even though their intent was to stay out of the action in order to orchestrate the modern military ballet from above. The advanced airborne command-and-control bird had become a second home to five of the six men strapped into the troop compartment.

Several of them had been stationed in Afghanistan for nearly two years logging countless hours at their airborne consoles. They'd hunted al-Qaeda members, the Taliban, drug dealers, and bandits-anyone who tried to undermine the authority of the new U.S.-backed government, but most of all they hunted al-Qaeda.

Members of al-Qaeda were at the top of these soldiers' lists, the rightful targets of genuine retribution and hatred. To a man, their reasons were both personal and patriotic. While their fellow Americans went on with their lives, these Special Forces operators were on the other side of the planet stoically settling a score. To refer to them as simple vigilantes would be an insult to their level of sophistication and training, but even they would admit that they were on a mission of revenge. They were here to send a very clear message that America would not tolerate the slaughter of 3,000 of its citizens.

The sixth passenger in the troop compartment was an outsider, but a welcome one, and a man they all respected. Mitch Rapp had heard of this outfit before. Men and women from the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) would return from Afghanistan and tell stories about Task Force 11, an amalgamation of Special Forces bad-asses from the various branches of the U.S. military. They were well funded, well equipped, exquisitely trained, highly motivated, and feared by anyone with enough sense to understand that they were quite possibly the most seasoned, potent, mobile fighting force in action today.

The DO operatives, no shrinking violets themselves, were in awe of the bravado and skill this group brought to bear against the enemy. Their fighting spirit was buoyed by the knowledge that their abilities as a unit were unmatched, they feared no one, and held nothing back, for their enemy only understood one thing-brute force. Their kill ratio was off the charts. Having lost only a handful of men since their deployment, they had done serious damage to their enemies, inflicting casualties in the thousands.

The task force had operated in relative anonymity until someone in Washington decided the PR was too much to pass up. Their accomplishments were leaked, and after that the job had gotten a little more difficult. Reporters began nosing around, wanting to know how the group operated. Politicians and Pentagon officials wanted briefings, and a few even made the effort to travel to Afghanistan.

All of it was a distraction from Task Force 11's mission. Fortunately for the group, everyone's attention soon shifted to Iraq. Shortly after the war started an innocuous statement was released by the Pentagon stating that Task Force 11 was being disbanded. A few of their assets were actually transferred to the new theater of war, enough to give credibility to the story but not enough to harm the group's effectiveness. With the attention of the world focused elsewhere, Afghanistan turned into the perfect place for the Special Forces to hone their skills-and General Harley and his men had done exactly that.

Rapp had never met the general before, but the two clicked almost immediately. As soon as Kennedy had given him the go-ahead, Rapp was on the phone to the Joint Special Operations Command telling them what he needed. By the time he landed in Afghanistan, Harley and his men were ready to go. Harley was skeptical of Rapp's plans at first. He'd been in Southwest Asia for the better part of two years and had been rebuffed so many times for asking to cross the border into Pakistan that his superiors back at MacDill Air Force Base told him to cease and desist, or he'd be reassigned.

Rapp suspected that sometime between his departure from Washington and arrival in Kandahar, Harley had realized that this was probably going to be his one and only chance to set foot in Pakistan. The operation that Harley had drawn up for him was far more than a simple snatch and grab-it was a full-blown assault. Rapp had been involved in enough of these types of operations to understand that it was never a bad idea to take into account what the military commander thought was the best way to crack a nut, but he'd been thinking of something smaller, something less complex. Harley's plan was neither. It involved a force five times what Rapp had imagined and it was absolutely ballsy.

The Special Forces community, more than any other asset in the American military, was forced to constantly refine their abilities and strategies. They looked for ways to either avoid repeating mistakes or to minimize the effect of things they could not control. This zeal to avoid repeating the mistakes of those who had gone into battle before them meant that no single modern engagement had been analyzed more thoroughly than the incident in Somalia in 1993 where nineteen Army Rangers and Delta Force operators were killed in a daytime raid that had spun disastrously out of control. There wasn't a special forces commander on active duty who hadn't studied every last detail of that Mogadishu operation, and they'd all come away with the same conclusion: never operate during daylight if you don't have to, and if you're not sure what you're up against, don't go in without close air support, or armor, or both.

For political reasons the close air support that Harley wanted to bring along wasn't an option. They were supposed to get in and out without alerting the Pakistanis, and if Harley brought in an AC-130U Spooky gunship it would immediately be picked up by radar. The mountainous terrain and the brevity of the mission dictated that armor also was not an option. That left General Harley in the difficult position of trying to launch a helicopter assault into a hostile village numbering approximately 1,000 people without armor and without fixed-wing close air support. And this wasn't just any village. According to intelligence reports from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, this was an al-Qaeda stronghold. These people were not going to simply hide in their huts and wait for the Americans to leave. They would put up a serious fight.