Wine or blood?

“No, listen to me,” he said calmly. “It’s not your fault. I understand. Totally. This wasn’t part of the deal.”

His hands started to tremble. He reached to put the glass of beer on the table in front of him; it slipped halfway, falling to the floor.

“Oh, Jeff, no,” she said, throwing her arms around him.

“I want a divorce,” he told her. “For your sake. For mine too. It’ll help us move on.”

“No, Jeff, no.” Breanna buried her head in his lap, sobbing. He bent over, fingers running through her hair, his eyes blurry with the leaping flame of the candles on the table.

Ethiopia

22 October, 0350

SERGEANT MELFI SETTLED INTO THE CANVAS SEAT AS the Chinook jerked into the sky. The large engines on the big-hulled Boeing helicopter had a distinctive whomp that seemed to push the twenty Marines down between the tubular supports of their seats. Gunny scanned the row of men toward the front of the chopper. The dim red interior lights added more shadows to the darkened camo faces, making the unit look like a collection of ghosts riding in the night.

If the operation went smoothly, it would seem as if ghosts had carried it out. Within two hours, the Iranians would lose most of their ability to launch a preemptive strike against Gulf shipping.

Assuming everything went off as planned. The intelligence bothered Gunny; they’d been given satellite information that was several hours old. That might be okay for the big stuff—blowing up another Silkworm missile battery wasn’t a big deal. But the Iranians could easily have airdropped some light armor, or added more machine guns near the bluffs overlooking the Silkworm battery.

Too late to worry about it now.

“Zero-five to LZ,” barked the helicopter crew chief.

“Hang tough, girls,” said ,Gunny, cinching his helmet strap. “We do this dance the way we rehearsed it.”

KNIFE NOTED THE WAY MARKER AND DID A QUICK SCAN of his instruments. He had the volume on his radar-warning receiver near max; his air-to-air radar was set at wide scan. The sky was clear ahead, the sea and coastline peaceful.

Not for long, he thought. The helo was cutting a course bare inches from the scrub trees and jagged hilltops twenty miles to the west. Further along the coast, a flight of F-117’s was cutting over the Gulf of Aden, aiming for another secret Iranian base on the Somalian coast. All hell was about to break loose.

“Poison Flight, time to twist,” said Smith to his F-16 wingmen.

“Three.”

“Four.”

The two F-16’s peeled off, their exhaust nozzles swelling red in the dark sky as they accelerated northward. Knife pushed his nose down, beginning a glide toward their target area. His wingman fell in behind him.

The Chinook would broadcast a signal when it was ten seconds from the LZ. Anything before that was trouble. Smith made sure his radio was set, then quickly checked his GPS page, double-checking to make sure his navigational gear was functioning properly. The INS would conjure a diamond in his HUD to show the target area when he rolled in; he wanted to make sure it would be accurate if he had to roll in with the dumb bombs in a hurry.

His heart beat like a snare drum. He was swimming in sweat. He jerked his head back and forth, practically screwing it out of its socket, checking for other fighters, for missiles that had somehow managed to defy or trick his gear.

Wasn’t going to happen. But knowing that didn’t relax him, and certainly didn’t stop the sweat or the drumbeat.

He’d felt this way in the Gulf, though not on his first mission. His first mission—the first three or four, really—had been tremendous blurs. He was so consumed with the minutiae, the tankings, the radio calls, simply checking six, that he hadn’t had a chance to get nervous.

Mack had also lost about ten pounds in three days, so obviously he’d been sweating a little.

His first kill came on the first patrol he flew, a fluke.

Not a fluke. A product of a zillion hours of training. It was a push-button, beyond-visual-range kill with a Sparrow radar missile. He’d ID’d, locked, and launched in the space of maybe three seconds.

Skill. That was definitely how he nailed splash two—though the F-15’s tape had screwed up, depriving him of credit.

He wasn’t getting a shoot-down tonight. The Somalians didn’t have an air force and the nearest Iranians were well over two hundred miles away. And besides, he was driving an F-16 configured for ground-pounding.

“Bad Boys to Poison Leader, we are one-zero, repeat, one-zero. All calm.”

Before Smith could acknowledge, his RWR began bleating and an icon appeared in the middle of his receiver scope. An instant later, his wing mate yelled a warning over the short-range radio circuit.

“SA-2 battery up! And two more. Shit. There’s four batteries there, not two. Sixes! SA-6’s! Shit-fuck! Where did those bastards come from?”

GUNNY HAD RUN TWENTY FEET FROM THE REAR DOOR of the Chinook when the flare ignited overhead. He began cursing, immediately understanding what had happened.

“Team One, Team One!” he shouted, pushing his old legs hard as he ran forward. “Listen up! The defenses are on the south end of the field. They moved everything beyond the ditches. Come on, come on—everybody move it! Let’s go!”

As he ran forward, Melfi caught sight of the first muzzle flash from the enemy lines: a streak of red that flared oblong in the black smear. The ground shook, but the explosion was at least a half mile away from the LZ. The Somalians had zeroed their weapons in on the highway, obviously expecting the attack would be there. They had fired the flare as well.

“They don’t know where we are!” shouted Gunny to his men. “Come on, come on, they can’t see us. Let’s go. We got about ten seconds to get across their ditch. Mine team! Mines! Come the fuck on! Blow the field so we can advance. Come on!”

The different elements of his assault team began fanning out, remembering the instructions for this contingency. They were sluggish, weighed down by their equipment and hampered by the dark.

Or maybe it just seemed to Gunny like they were moving in slow motion. The two buildings where they’d expected resistance lay twenty feet ahead, across a large ditch lined with antitank obstacles. The buildings were quiet.

Which didn’t mean they were empty, of course.

The missile launchers had apparently been moved closer to the water, nearly four hundred yards further south of the spot briefed. Small-arms fire was coming from that direction. The finicky light from the Somalian flare showed pointed shadows around the slight rise there, but they were too far away to see anything, let alone attack it.

There was a thud, then a series of thuds.

Nothing.

No mines.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” shouted Gunny. “They moved everything to Purple site.”

“Incoming!” yelled someone ahead. “Tank!”

Gunny threw himself to the ground. A large-caliber shell, possibly from an M47, splashed through the trees at the right. The sergeant pushed himself back to his knees, and for the first time realized all hell was breaking loose at the north end of the site, where Captain Gordon and his team had gone.

“Get the SPG on that tank,” yelled Gunny. “Corn! Corn!” he added, calling for the radio specialist. “Where the hell are the F-16’s?”

As if to answer, a tongue of fire lit from behind the Somalian lines and two huge fists leaped from the earth.

“TWO LAUNCHES, ELEVEN O’CLOCK!” SHOUTED SMITH AS he saw the missiles flare off their launchers. His RWR skipped out warning bleats as he jinked hard and kicked out tinsel, metal chaff designed to fool the radar of the acquiring missile.

In some respects, the Somalians had done them a favor by turning on their radars and firing the missiles. Powering up his HARM missiles, the pilot of Poison Two calmly dotted the offending radar van on his threat scope and released the antiradar missiles. With the targeting information downloaded into their miniature onboard computers, the radiation-seeking missiles were in can’t-miss mode—even if the radars were to turn themselves off, the missiles would fly directly to the target points and obliterate the gear.