These two Corsicans were familiar with every hectare of the quarter-mile-wide peninsula, from these fields to the higher ground at the seaward end where the main house, outbuildings, and broad lawns perched on the cliffs. Born and raised nearby, they had poached game on the peninsula since they were boys with the same shotguns they had strapped to their backs. When, at a distance of three hundred meters, they saw the faint silhouette of the first stone hut that guarded the single-track road, they unzipped their duffel bag and spread out the contents: a high-capacity gasoline-powered air pump and a large sheet of plastic fabric that looked like the makings of a tent but was in fact an inflatable decoy.

* * *

“GO!” JANSON SAID into his lip mike.

Daniel opened the throttle and the RIB increased speed. Janson felt the parachute rise higher, whisking him above the loom of the land. He tugged the elevator lines attached to the lifting slots in back of the canopy and it shot up another hundred feet.

He pulled his panoramic digital sensor-fusion/enhanced night-vision goggles over his eyes. The surface of the peninsula appeared green, the radar dome a dull circle, the house and the helicopter darker. He saw a flicker of tiny bright figures—the infrared enhancement of flesh and blood.

SR fighters were running from the house to the helicopter.

Janson found it hard to believe that Securité Referral’s radar was sensitive enough to detect the almost nonexistent targets presented by the parasail and his body. More likely, a guard had stepped outside the house and heard the RIB’s motor. But whatever it was had raised the alarm.

Janson drew a grenade launcher from the basket beside him. Choppier seas near the cliffs were rocking the boat and jerking the towline. The parachute shook. He targeted the helicopter and fired. The flash from the fiery rocket motor ignition reflected on the thirty-foot canopy of parachute cloth above his head. The high-explosive fragmentation warhead dropped short of the helicopter and exploded on the ground.

He had missed a direct hit and could only hope that the flying fragments of shrapnel that scattered the fighters had put some serious holes in the helicopter. Janson dropped the empty launcher into the sea and grabbed the second. The SR fighters stopped running, scanned the sky, having been alerted by the flash, and started firing pistols and bullpup rifles in his direction.

* * *

THE CORSICANS IN charge of inflating the decoy did not hesitate when they heard Janson’s first grenade, though now came the dangerous part, starting the noisy gas-powered air pump. They positioned the exhaust pipe facing away from the blockhouse, stood in front of it to further muffle the racket, crossed themselves, loosened their shotguns, and jerked the start cord.

The motor started on the first pull. It didn’t sound as loud as they had feared and the plastic began to inflate. In seconds, it ballooned into the massive shape of a full-size T-90 battle tank. Invented by the Russian Army to confuse enemy reconnaissance satellites and intelligence operators on the ground, the decoy’s plastic fabric was impregnated with chemicals that reflected targets to both radar and thermal-imaging devices.

They felt in the dark for the tie-downs and knotted them around shrubs before the wind could pick the thing up and blow it away. When the Corsicans were sure they had it securely tied down, they slithered away through the brush, putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the balloon.

* * *

THE SERB MERCENARIES guarding Securité Referral’s first blockhouse had no radar repeater in their position, but they had thermal imaging and night glasses and a night scope for their Dushka.

What they saw three hundred meters out in the dark was the chilling silhouette of a Russian T-90 battle tank complete with a 135mm smoothbore cannon jutting from its turret. Lesser men would have run for their lives. These were Serbs with long years of bloody history behind them, and while they knew it would ultimately prove futile, if not lethal, they opened fire with the forlorn hope of a lucky shot penetrating a view slit.

A blizzard of armor-piercing half-inch bullets crossed the maquis and tore through the balloon. To the Serbs’ astonishment, the “tank” jumped in the air, sagged weirdly, and then collapsed flat on the ground. For a second they couldn’t believe their eyes. Then, through their night glasses, they saw plastic flapping in the wind.

“Balloon!”

“Balloon!”

They started laughing but quickly sobered. Someone was out there, someone who would pay dearly. They dragged their machine gun out of the confines of the stone hut so they could pivot the barrel in every direction and began traversing the dark.

* * *

“THANK YOU, GENTLEMEN,” whispered Jessica Kincaid.

At five hundred meters a child could disable the machine gun with her Knight’s sniper rifle braced on a bipod. She sighted in on the Dushka’s feed mechanism and touched her trigger. The Serbs jumped like circus clowns and looked everywhere at once for the source of the sudden change in their situation. To be positive that she had reduced the machine gun to scrap metal, Kincaid fired again, destroying its dual triggers.

By now, the Serbs knew they were in the sights of a sharpshooter.

Brave, but not fools, they ran inside the stone blockhouse.

Kincaid ran, too. Scooping up the fifteen-pound Knight’s, glassing the rough ground through her panoramic goggles, she charged full speed deep into the peninsula, hunting for SR’s second machine gun.

* * *

PAUL JANSON TRIGGERED his second grenade. The rocket ignition lit him up again, but before the SR men could concentrate their fire the grenade spiraled into the helicopter. It exploded, thunderously. The shock wave lifted the parachute several feet and blew out all the windows in the house. Janson immediately grabbed the Bushmaster and the shotgun and pounded the quick release on his harness.

As he fell, he jerked the rip cord of a landing chute strapped to his back. It popped open; he steered as far as he could from the SR men who could see his new chute by the light of the fireball consuming the helicopter.

* * *

KINCAID STRUGGLED THROUGH thorny brush to the top of a low rise. When she spotted the second blockhouse, a stone hut similar to the first, she flung herself flat and planted the Knight’s bipod. She flipped back her goggles and got the blockhouse in her sights, but before she could acquire the DShK itself, it acquired her and the once-heard, never-forgotten earsplitting din of a stream of .50-caliber bullets was bracketing her head.

“Fuck!”

Alerted by the explosions and the roar of their sister gun up the road, the SR gunners must have been looking for whoever had started the battle to blunder into their field of fire. She slid backward down the rise, dragging the Knight’s with her, and tore madly to the right even as the Dushka got the range and gouged holes in the ground where she’d been one second before.

She knew two ways to deal with them. One would be to leave the Knight’s and advance through the brush with pistol and knife. But that would take way too long. She had to find a new shooting position, fast. Bursts of small-caliber gunfire in the distance told her that Janson had his hands full at the house. And silence behind told her that the Corsican contingents were sensibly waiting for the all clear.

She pulled on her panoramics again and inspected the lay of the land. It was less flat than at the beginning of the peninsula and offered more shooting positions, but each of those would be visible to the men manning the Dushka. She kept crawling to the right, taking care not to shake tall bushes that the machine gunners could see. A tree, one of the very few, appeared in her vision. She slithered to it and got the Knight’s in approximate position before she raised her head to look around it.