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  “I’m very sorry you feel that way, Major Summers, but I don’t really care at the moment. Did you bring my stuff?”

  Sybelle laughed. “I have to express my outrage at their sexist behavior. Yeah, I got it.” She nudged a booted foot against a titanium alloy gun case and a smaller secure briefcase. “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve got a get-out-of-jail-free card from the king, and I’m partnered up with his nephew. No worries.”

  She peered out beyond the distant rear of the aircraft. Men were pulling the tarps off of the APC and the loadmasters were laying markings to guide the machine aboard. A Marine sergeant climbed into the APC to replace the Saudi driver while Major Lassiter and Prince Mishaal bin Khalid worked through the papers.

  “That prince is a good-looking guy, but how good is he in a fight?” Sybelle asked. “I don’t like not being here to cover your back.”

  “Nice enough dude and seems capable. Bright guy, educated in Great Britain, went through our Army Ranger School and has become the trouble-shooter for the royal family. The princes only trust each other these days and I don’t trust anybody. Just in case, I want you to run a thorough background check on my new best buddy, Prince Colonel Mishaal bin Khalid, and his kick-ass aide, Captain Omar al-Muallami.”

  “Understandable,” said Sybelle. “Meanwhile, General Middleton wants to know if the Saudis have figured out what happened to the missing nuke over at Khobz.”

  “No,” said Kyle. “They are still blaming it on the terrorists. Tell the general that since King Abdullah is now on the same page with us, I recommend telling him that we have it in our possession. Take some worry off his shoulders. Now do I still have the Green Light for this, uh, other job?”

  “Middleton approved it. He is not passing it on to the White House. Pull it off without getting caught and we’re all home free. If you screw up, Middleton will cover it under a bunch of top-secret excuses.”

  “Don’t worry. Am I going to get this kid Jamal from the CIA as a backup? He’s good.”

  “Done. His contact number is in here.” She handed him a sealed manila envelope.

  “And the Lizard is tracking my target?”

  “You kidding? Freedman is having a ball with it and the NSA big ears are all over this dude. He’s operating on open frequencies and you could probably just follow him by watching television. His schedule for the next few days is in the package. Un-fucking-believably arrogant and stupid.”

  “Finest kind,” Swanson said. “I can let his ego work for us. Have the Liz keep Jamal up to speed on the guy until we get together.”

  They both turned as the APC moved to the bottom of the ramp, the engine was gunned and the armored vehicle growled aboard so the loadmasters could secure it with hooks and chains. Darren Rawls saluted the Saudi prince again and marched back up the ramp. “Y’all done here?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Kyle said. “I’m gone. Take this big bird away and secure that TNW. It’s the second of the five.” He stuffed the envelope into a vest pocket and picked up the gun case. “We should have the next warhead ready for pickup soon, but you may have to work a lot faster, so stay ready. See you then.”

  Sybelle had a look of concern. “Kyle, be careful. You’re alone out here, like a fisherman on a big ocean with a whale pulling on the hook.”

  “I got it. Really,” he said. He walked back out through the cargo bay, past the APC and down the ramp into the heat. The long gun case bumped against his thigh. His personal sniper rifle, Excalibur, was in it and that was a difference-maker as far as he was concerned. A smaller case contained a good map of Saudi Arabia, a battery-powered satellite telephone and a backup cell phone, a GPS tracking device, and a goody bag of things that might come in handy.

  At a shout from Darren Rawls, the lieutenant handling the security platoon saluted his own Saudi counterpart and the Marines hustled back aboard the plane.

  Kyle loaded his cases into the Land Rover as the Herc revved its engines, which had never shut down throughout the brief operation. It turned around and moved out to the vacant runway, already cleared for takeoff while the Saudi soldiers were dismissed and got aboard trucks.

  Mishaal returned to the SUV and started it, clocking the air-conditioning up to high. The chill breeze was delicious.

  “One down, Gunny. Three to go. One still missing. What’s in the fancy new luggage?”

  He turned to look at the prince. “A secure telephone and some personal shit. Brought along my own weapon because it is custom-made and I might find a use for it. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Mishaal smiled. “Not at all. I’ve heard my uncle bragging about you, so I would love to see if you’re up to Ranger standards.”

  Swanson grinned as the cool air made life worthwhile again. “I’ll try not to disappoint you.”

  An off-key chirp of little bells sounded in the back seat, from the cell phone on the belt of Captain al-Muallami. He flipped it open, identified himself, and grimaced as he listened. Then he closed it, dropped it on the seat, wrote something on a small notepad, folded the page in half, and handed it up to the prince. “From headquarters, sir,” he said.

  Mishaal read it. “I may get to see you work sooner than expected, Gunny. All hell has broken loose down in Ash Mutayr, a divisional headquarters on the southern border near Yemen. The troops have mutinied and heavy fighting is underway. They seized some armor.”

  Swanson let his head slump forward. “Ash Mutayr? That was going to be our final nuke pickup site,” he said.

  “It just moved up the list to be our next stop. It’s more than four hundred miles from here, beyond the biggest desert on earth.” The prince popped the Land Rover into gear and accelerated toward the flight control building. Captain al-Muallami was already on his radio, ordering up a private jet with a fighter escort.

  Kyle was silently changing his own plans. He had hoped to go directly over to Jeddah, meet up with Jamal, and go take a look at the guy heading the Religious Police, who was the other half of his Green Light Package. Swanson had to make a decision on whether the man was a true danger, or just a dupe; to kill him or let him live. That trip had just flopped right in the shitter with the uprising at the southern base. Jeddah would have to wait.

  38

  THE PENTAGON, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  L IEUTENANT C OMMANDER B ENTON F REEDMAN, the Task Force Trident electronics expert known as the Lizard, chewed on the smooth plastic of a blue U.S. Navy ballpoint pen as he read the Bloomberg business Web site. Small importers in America were howling about the disruption of shipping from China.

  Kara Henderson in Santa Barbara, California, was experiencing the same problem that was bugging Charles Tyson in Seattle and Eileen McNamara in Chicago. Their ship had not come in. That wasn’t normal and the Lizard was always itchy when “one and one” did not add up to “two.” He checked the source story from the Associated Press, which had gathered specific incidents of the curious small-business crisis from its bureaus across the nation.

  The compiled report stated that Kara ran an upscale clothing boutique, Eileen sold leather purses to department stores, and Tyson was a toy distributor. Each had made their annual trips to Japan and China earlier in the year, met with manufacturers, studied the catalogues, attended trade shows, and placed thousands of dollars worth of orders. Christmas would be coming in a few months and time was required to fill those orders, pack the containers, and ship the goods. In the U.S., Henderson, McNamara, and Tyson were already taking advance orders from their own customers. Reliability was important.

  Then all three had received startling e-mails from the Chinese shipping agent, a bland, so-sorry announcement that the giant cargo ship Peh Shan was no longer available. Reasons unexplained. Efforts were being made to reassign their cargoes to a South Korean carrier, but a delay of at least thirty to sixty days could be expected.

  “Sixty days from now, I may be out of business,” Eileen McNamara complained to the reporter. “If the big sto
res don’t get those purses that I promised, they will cancel my order and buy from somewhere else.” Tyson had bet the farm on a full container load of the latest surprise toy that was going to sweep the nation during the Christmas season. “What am I going to do with a half-million Marko Giggle Birdies in January?” he asked. Kara’s situation was equally dire: Her boutique would fall behind the fashion curve if those new rags did not arrive on time.

  Their protests went unheeded and the three business owners, among many others just like them across America, watched helplessly as their Christmas marketing plans fell disastrously behind schedule.

  Freedman knew that it was not at all like the Chinese business world to falter on something this important, but nevertheless the Peh Shan had been unexpectedly removed from commercial service. It was the sixth Chinese container ship in a week to be sidelined without explanation. None were in shipyards for repair. They were just sitting at anchor near the coast, apparently empty.

  He called up the specs on the vessel. It was a monster, stretching almost a quarter-mile in length and wide as a football field. The Lizard cocked his head as he stared at a picture of the monster ship and its massive deck. “I wonder…What if…” he whispered to himself, gnawing harder on the plastic.

  He logged onto an internal Pentagon network to read the Navy’s study on its own Maritime Pre-Positioning Force. Alarm grew as he felt the pieces of the puzzle click into place, and he dug deeper into the current status of the Chinese Navy. U.S. satellites had fresh images of two new Jin-class nuclear submarines on the surface, one in the Arabian Sea while the other almost leisurely sunned itself in the Indian Ocean. A dozen JL-1 SLBM missiles and plenty of torpedoes were aboard each. A pair of Type 052C Luyang-II class destroyers were churning at high speed into the area, with no effort to maintain radio silence. Almost as if those carrier-killers wanted to be seen, he thought.

  The cargo ships kept forcing their way back into his thinking. Cargo ships by definition carried things. The big beasts could hold thousands of troops in their vast holds. As his mind grappled with the possibilities, his computer brought up recent satellite imagery that clearly showed a Z-10E attack helicopter, the newest powerful war bird in the Chinese inventory, parked on the deck of the Peh Shan, with sailors folding the blades and lashing it down. When he saw it, he bit all the way through the plastic and he had to stop to spit the remains from his mouth.

  “Stop playing with your food, Liz.” The booming voice of Master Gunnery Sergeant O.O. Dawkins came from over his shoulder. Dawkins was a large presence in any room, and he shared this office with Freedman. One of the few men in the Marine Corps to hold the highest enlisted rank, “Double-Oh” was Trident’s chief administrator. He had watched Freedman chew the pen to pieces, a habit that surfaced only when the Lizard was onto something quite unusual. Dawkins walked over to Freedman’s desk and looked over his shoulder at the rapidly flashing computer screen. His dark gray eyes could not keep up with the images that flipped across the computer screen as the Lizard darted about in his electronic world. “Have you gotten something new on Swanson’s mission?”

  “Unh-unh. That target hasn’t moved in hours and the CIA has humint eyes on it.”

  “Okay,” Dawkins replied. Human intelligence was the best kind of recon. “Having some dude on the ground watching the target is a good thing.”

  “I’m keeping Gunny Swanson updated.”

  “Then why are you flying at warp speed?”

  “Something is going on that doesn’t make sense. So I’m putting together a briefing for General Middleton. He’s going to think I’m crazy,” Freedman said absently as his printer spun out more paper.

  “We all think you’re crazy. What have you got?”

  “Take a look.” The Lizard scooped up a stack of pages from the printer tray and verbally sketched the information he had downloaded so far.

  Dawkins listened to the Lizard’s excited recitation of data without comment as he thumbed through some of the sheets, patiently waiting for Freedman to get to the point. Usually, that took a while. Freedman barely took his eyes from the screen. Click, change sites and databases, click, point, click, drag, print, again and again. The stack grew.

  When the Lizard finally ran out of breath, Dawkins said, “I understand where you’re going with this, Liz, but China doesn’t have a blue-water navy. They only have one aircraft carrier, which is still at its home port. They are not going to try to force a path through the Strait of Hormuz with just a couple of submarines and destroyers when we have a carrier battle group plugging that gap. And loading thousands of Chinese troops in those cargo ships? Even if they tried, it would take them forever to get to Saudi Arabia: That’s more than four thousand miles! Sorry, commander, but in my opinion, you’re way off base on this one.”

  “I’m not quite finished, Master Gunny. Look at these land and air traffic patterns of some of China’s key military units. Planes are surging toward forward bases. There is significant activity around both large and medium landing ships along the coast.”

  “Liz. Listen to me. They may be making a lot of noise, but they aren’t about to take their fleet on a long trip over to invade Saudi Arabia.”

  Freedman hit the keyboard one last time and stood up. “No, no, no. Yes, you’re right, of course. Four thousand miles. Ridiculous. It would not be Saudi Arabia! Could not be that.” He walked to a map of the world that dominated the far wall and put a finger on the coast of China. “But look at this port, Fuzhow, only 155 miles from Taipei. While our attention is riveted on the crisis in the Middle East, the Chinese are making exactly the preparations they would need to jump across the Strait in a lightning move and invade Taiwan!”

  Dawkins looked at the map, dumbfounded. “So those Chinese subs and destroyers are prowling around in the Middle East waters to keep us busy watching them instead of getting ready to fight for Taiwan?”

  “Yes. Absolutely,” replied the Lizard. “It’s the only logical answer. And unless we commit to fight for Taiwan, Beijing will put a couple of hundred thousand troops on that island pretty darned quick. Taiwan won’t stand a chance alone.”

  Slowly, Dawkins reached into the shirt pocket of his uniform and withdrew a plastic ballpoint pen bearing the eagle, globe, and anchor symbol of the Marines. He gave it to Freedman. “Here. Eat,” he said. “Then pull this World War Three shit into coherent shape while I go find the general.”

  The Lizard grabbed Master Gunnery Sergeant Dawkins by the elbow, almost jerking the large man off balance. He stared at him through the big glasses for a moment, released him, got up and began to pace, talking to himself. Counting off items on his fingers and clenching his fists.

  “What the fuck now, Liz?” Dawkins was impatient to get this information to the man who needed it most.

  “I’m a naval officer. You other people in Trident are not.”

  “Correct. You’re a squid and we are spec ops.”

  “Yes, of course. Squid. Giant squid, from the family Architeuthidae. Largest eyes of any creature. Sorry.” He flapped his arms. “One thing I have learned from you, Double Oh, and from Sybelle and Kyle and the general, is how highly you value deception, to make the enemy look the other way while you execute your tasks.”

  Dawkins said, “That’s exactly what the Chinese are doing. We look left and they go right. I’ve got it, Liz. Our forces in the Pacific have a lot of work to do in a hurry.”

  “Yes.” The skinny lieutenant commander hurried over to the closed door and stood before it, blocking Dawkins’s path as if he might actually impede the master gunny’s progress if he tried to pass. “No.”

  “What in the hell are you trying to say, man! Say it!”

  Freedman held his hands at about chin level, palms parallel and shaking. “I’m wrong, master gunny. Stupid, stupid. The Taiwan thing is the deception! What better way to launch a special operation than to hide it within a massive buildup and a shifting of all of your forces? Our intelligence sources are wonderful, but
we can’t track everything, and they are throwing all of this into motion at once. It’s a beautiful ploy to overwhelm our capabilities. Or, that’s what I think they are thinking that they want us to think.”

  Dawkins gently placed a large paw on each of Freedman’s shoulders and moved him gently to one side of the door. “Calm down, Commander Freedman. Don’t crack up on me now. Anything else?”

  “No. That’s all.” He licked his lips and looked at his wristwatch. He took a deep breath. “Okay. My assessment is that the Chinese are going to drop a bunch of paratroopers on the Saudi oil fields in about seventy-two hours.”

  39

  ASH MUTAYR, SAUDI ARABIA

  T HE A R R UB’AL K HALI Desert is a quarter-million square miles of sand, with dunes as high as a thousand feet, fearsome hot mountains that move with the winds. From a small plane sailing high above the Empty Quarter, the marching dunes reminded Kyle of a restless ocean. A man could drown in either one. There was nothing worthwhile down there in those waterless, blistering hot sands along the Tropic of Cancer; nothing other than some of the biggest oil fields in the world. Villages and dry tracks were built to help suck the oil from the sands. Just thinking about living under such harsh conditions was enough to make one sweat.

  “It might as well be the end of the world,” he said to Prince Colonel Mishaal bin Khalid.

  “Not to us,” Mishaal replied, taking a sip of fruit juice. “Our history is down there. Bedouins are in every walk of Saudi life today, but thousands of them still live in the great desert. That lure of the sands is magical and never leaves us. Even in cities, it is not unusual to see the owner of a home have a tent in his garden.”