“It’s possible they saw Katamora’s plane fly overhead,” Mark suggested. “Realizing it was in trouble, they might have decided to investigate.”

“And they just happened to run into a border patrol?” Linda’s comment was more a dubious statement than a question.

“Not a border patrol,” Linc countered, sensing where Linda was heading. “The terrorists sent out teams along the projected flight path to eliminate anyone who saw the plane.”

“Judging from where the ambush took place, the State people were well south of their own base camp,” Mark pointed out. “They were in the right place only it was the wrong time.”

“What do you want us to do?” Linc asked Linda Ross.

As the Corporation’s vice president of operations, she was the ranking member on the team. She considered calling Max and leaving the decision up to him, but Hanley hadn’t seen the condition of the body, couldn’t feel what she’d felt at that moment when she realized what it was. When it came to tactical matters, Linda rarely allowed her emotions to interfere with her decisions. No good commander does. However, this time, looking at her companions, she knew the right call was to go after the butchers who did this. With luck, they would take one alive. It was doubtful a foot soldier would know the overall plans these people had for the Secretary of State, but any intelligence was better than nothing.

“They’ve got a hell of a head start,” she said, her jaw barely moving because of her anger.

“Don’t matter to me,” Linc said.

“If it makes it easier,” Mark said, “there’s a fifty-fifty chance the two other Americans were taken prisoner when the Libyans took their truck.”

Linda hadn’t thought of that, and it was the last piece of information to cement her decision. “Mount up.”

Tracking the drill truck’s tire tracks across the desert was as easy as following the dotted lines on a country road. The vehicle was heavy enough that the marks hadn’t yet succumbed to the constant scouring of the wind. And when the sun sank over some distant mountains, Mark activated the Pig’s FLIR system. Designed for attack helicopters, the Forward Looking Infrared system could detect ambient heat sources and would give them a warning many miles off if they approached the warm engine of the truck.

Linc strapped a pair of night vision goggles over his head. Using both passive and active near-infrared illuminators, he could drive comfortably in total darkness if necessary. However, the quarter moon rising behind them gave the third-generation system more than enough light.

No one spoke as they drove across the wasteland. There was no need. All three of them shared the same thoughts, the same concerns, and also the same desire to avenge the dead man. None of them cared about the bumps and ruts that the powerful truck bulled through. What the massive shock absorbers couldn’t take, their bodies would.

“How far are we from the Tunisian border?” Linda asked after a couple of hours.

Mark checked their position on his computer. “About eight miles.”

“Keep sharp. I doubt they’ll cross it.”

The ghostly shadows cast by the risen moon suddenly winked out as a curtain of clouds crossed in front of it. Linc’s NVGs didn’t have enough light to process, so he keyed the active illuminators, sending out wavelengths in the near-infrared spectrum that were undetectable to human vision but which showed clearly in his goggles.

They drove like that for another mile. Mark Murphy was well aware that the active signal from Linc’s goggles could be seen by anyone else equipped with a night vision device, so he never took his eyes off the FLIR. So far, the desert ahead remained completely dark on the thermal scans.

And then a tiny blip showed itself. It was too small to be a man, he thought, and he dismissed it as some nocturnal animal when suddenly a burst of light exploded in the truck’s cabin across nearly every wavelength.

The hot exhaust from an RPG showed like a streak of white lightning on Mark’s screen while Linc’s NVGs were nearly overwhelmed by the blast of the rocket motor. They had stumbled into a perfectly laid ambush, and had the man with the grenade launcher fired a moment sooner they would have been blown apart in the opening salvo.

FIFTEEN

THE PIG WAS AT THE CREST OF A HILL, SO THEY COMMANDED the high ground, but without cover it did them no good. Their forward momentum didn’t give Linc enough time to jam the transmission into reverse, so he took the only option open to him. As the rocket came at them on its unguided, flat trajectory, the former SEAL mashed the accelerator and charged down the slope. He pressed a button on the dash to activate the hydraulic suspension, lowering the vehicle’s center of gravity by pushing the wheels out well beyond the fenders.

Murph no longer had the ground clearance to engage the .30 caliber machine gun mounted under the front bumper, but Linc’s move had given the truck enough stability to race across the face of the dune without tipping. Linc hit another switch to lower the curtain of chains behind the rear tires to cover their tracks. At the speeds he was hitting, the heavy lengths of chain hurled up a dense cloud of billowing dust, something their FLIR could see through but which the grenadier’s NVGs could not.

The rocket-propelled grenade impacted the earth where the Pig had been seconds before, blasting a harmless fountain of dirt and debris into the air. Tracer fire began to knife out of the darkness, converging on the rampaging truck like fire hoses.

“Linda—” Linc started to say, but she cut him off.

“I’m on it.”

She opened the door to the rear cargo area and launched herself through feetfirst. She went immediately for the switch that opened the top hatch, and the instant it was opened she pushed the secondary machine gun up and onto its roof mounts. The hatch covers gave her protection from the sides, so she aimed for the gunmen firing at them straight ahead. The .30 caliber roared in her hands, and spent brass arced away from the breach in a shimmering blur. She poured rounds into one particularly dense area of fire. In the darkness, she couldn’t tell what was happening a hundred yards away, but the stream of tracers racing for the Pig withered away to nothing.

She swung the gun to counter Linc’s erratic driving, ravaging another foxhole. There must have been a grenadier with the men firing assault rifles because the position was blown apart by an explosion that sent shattered bodies high into the sky.

Another RPG blasted out of the night, but the aim was so far off that Linc could afford to ignore it. He pointed the Pig at a long mound of sand that was giving several attackers perfect cover. He went up its face at an angle, and when he reached the top he threw the heavy truck into a four-wheel drift so that when they reached the bottom on the far side Linda had the entire row of gunmen in her sight’s crosshairs. She walked her rounds up the defile, tearing apart the defensive positions in a fury of destruction.

“I’ve got a massive thermal image here,” Mark said, staring at his computer.

“Range?”

“Five hundred yards. It’s partially obscured by the topography, but there is something big out there, and it’s getting hotter.”

“Missiles,” Linc ordered.

Even bouncing over the rough ground, Mark didn’t miss a keystroke as he worked his computer. Hydraulically operated panels opened along the Pig’s sides just enough to reveal the blunt nose cones of four FGM-148 Javelin antitank missiles. Normally a shoulder-fired weapon, the Javelin carried a seventeen-pound warhead, and had proved capable of defeating any armored vehicle it had ever engaged.

The Javelin was an infrared-guided fire-and-forget weapon, so as soon as Mark locked his computer’s targeting reticle on the unknown heat signature, the missile was ready.