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“Goddammit, Sanchez, stop being such a fucking idiot! What, you have some romantic picture of yourself as a renegade?”

“You don’t understand. I can’t let this happen.”

“You can’t let it happen? We can’t let it happen! A terrorist lunatic invading Suwaith? Suwaith is our ally. We would have no choice but to put boots on the ground in its defense.”

Dec stared at his CO, who took a deep breath.

“On the day of the event, I need six of our best men to get into the palace, neutralize Cyrus and hand him over to the Qarami opposition for trial. I need those same six men to capture and bring out a terrorist who is of great interest to our government.” Black paused. “And if, in the process, those six men find an American citizen who is being held captive and bring her home, they would have our government’s thanks.”

It took a few seconds before Dec understood what he’d been offered. He wanted to leap to his feet and cheer.

“Yessir,” he said calmly. “That sounds like a plan to me.”

“Yes,” Black said dryly. “I thought it might.” He flashed something that was almost a smile. “Get some sleep, put some food in your belly, and I’ll see you and the rest of Unit One back here in precisely four hours.”

CHAPTER FIFT

EEN

They had fewer than five days to put together a plan before they’d have to implement it.

Black gave it the code name Renegade. He said the name with a straight face, but his gaze lingered briefly on Declan.

Chay’s reaction to the time crunch was succinct. “Fuck,” he said.

That about summed it up.

But they weren’t new to this. They’d worked under tighter deadlines and cooperation from Black, from the alphabet-soup agency that had final approval over the mission and from the freedom fighters forming up inside Qaram helped grease the skids.

What they came up with was something basic. No bells or whistles—but it did have a lot of moving parts.

The so-called wedding of Princess Anoushka and the terrorist Altair Amjad would take place at twenty-two hundred hours Qarami time.

At seventeen hundred hours, a helicopter equipped with the newest Stealth technology would drop STUD One in high desert country a mile from the palace.

They would reach their final destination on foot.

A mile was nothing to men who did ten and fifteen mile training runs in full gear.

The important thing was to know as much as possible about their target location.

Satellite photos showed that the palace stood in splendid isolation on a hill with a commanding view of the ancient city below. The palace had been built five hundred years earlier, but Annie’s father had made changes that had moved it into the twenty-first century.

Modern plumbing. Modern electricity.

A very modern computer system.

Dec smiled, rolled up his metaphorical sleeves and went back to something he’d always been good at.

Hacking.

He pulled up classified schematics, graphs and charts along with copies of drawings of the palace that had been made when it was first built.

Soon, they could virtually see inside the centuries-old walls

“Hack and ye shall find,” Spanos said, and though they all laughed, they agreed it was true.

Before long, they knew the location of the guard stations as well as all the entry and egress points. They knew the palace contained twenty-six bedrooms and thirty-four bathrooms, a library, a ballroom, a state dining room, a throne room and a seemingly endless number of meeting rooms. The servants’ quarters were on the fourth level; the kitchen and laundry were in the basement.