echo teAm The pilot's voice crackled in my ear jack.

"Coming up on it."

Bunny pulled the door open and I peered out at the shattered

gray landscape.

"Oh, what fun to be back," muttered Bunny.

He'd done a couple of tours each in Iraq and Afghanistan

with Force Recon before he was scouted for the DMS.Whenever he mentions Afghanistan, it's by the name "that f.u.c.king place." Iraq is "that other f.u.c.king place."

Not a lot of love.

But I knew the other side. Bunny had bonded pretty heavily with a bunch of villagers. Even one or two who worked in the opium fields. Most of them weren't bad guys, and for the most part, they'd have been happy if the Taliban were all eaten by rats. But the Taliban provided work. Granted, sometimes it was forced labor, but there was a paycheck, and for a lot of these villagers that was the only paycheck they'd seen in years. Bunny, like a lot of soldiers, didn't heap blame on the blameless. He just hated the G.o.dd.a.m.n country.

Can't blame him.

I was out of the Army Rangers when 9/11 changed the world. I was a street cop with the Baltimore PD, working on getting my detective's shield. However, since taking charge of Echo Team, I've been here three times. Short missions, but when you do what we do, short is long enough.Top and Bunny were with me for two of those road trips, and I did one solo gig that still gives me nightmares.

I tapped my earbud to get Bug on the line. He was back in the DMS main headquarters at the Hangar on Floyd Bennett Field, but he was wired into a network of surveillance databanks, so he was on tap to give us real-time intel.

"We're two klicks out," I said. "Status update?"

"Same as before, Cowboy," he said, using my combat call sign. Bunny was Green Giant, Top was Sergeant Rock. "One strong signal and three intermittent beeps."

"What about hostiles? Who's making trouble in the neighborhood?"

Bug snorted. "Thermal scans show a lot of heat up there.You have a couple of villages in the lowlands and a s.h.i.tload of fourlegged critters.A bunch of two-legged signatures, too, but no one's flashing me their Junior Terrorist Club badge. CIA says that the locals are heavily infiltrated by the Taliban, so don't take chances."

"Not a chance," I said.

The pilot slowed the helo and we spent a little time doing visual recon as he made a careful circle of our landing zone. Bunny had the minigun locked and loaded in case somebody stuck an AK barrel out of a cave mouth. He was sweating and his eyes looked jumpy. An RPG could come out of nowhere and it would probably hit us. We all knew it.

From the air you could hardly tell this had ever been a town. Bug's intel said that over the last ten thousand years this town had been occupied by dozens of different groups, ranging from the Achaemenid Empire to the Sa.s.sanids. However as we circled we could pick out some eroded ruins, cave mouths that had been chiseled out to form orderly doors and windows, and a rough symmetry to some of the humped hills where buildings might have been hiding under a thousand years of sand and dirt.

"Looks calm," I said, giving that the irony it deserved.

The pilot brought the helo down to just above the deck. One of the chopper's crew took over for Bunny as we all clipped ourselves onto fast-ropes.

"Eyes open," I said. "Top, me, and Bunny. n.o.body fires unless you have eyes on a hostile. I'd rather not start something until there's something to start."

"Hooah," they said, which is the Ranger equivalent of everything from "copy that" to "f.u.c.k yeah."

Then we were out.

We stepped into the late-afternoon air and rappelled down the ropes, pushed by the rotor wash, eyes trying to take in absolutely everything, guns ready, fingers laid tight along the curved steel of our trigger guards.

Top hit first and moved away from the bird, tracking in a full circle with his M14, eyes hard and face as calm as if he was sitting in a lawn chair. Top is always the scariest when he looks calm.

I hit the ground a second later and then Bunny was on the deck. We broke apart and took cover behind tumbled rocks as the helo lifted away from us. It took away the noise, the blown-up dust, and the rotor wash-which gave us back our sense of hearing and a chance at stealth-but it took with it the h.e.l.lfire missiles and minigun, and any hope of an immediate withdraw if this was a trap.

The sun was a white hole in the sky and it threw weird black shadows over the landscape. We waited in the relative safety of cover, not knowing if we were being observed or if gun barrels were being aimed at us from any of the countless cave mouths that pocked the entire mountain range.The fact that no one was shooting at the moment was not a source of comfort.They could have been waiting for the helo to be totally out of range, or they could have been calculating our size, probable designation, and overall value as targets. h.e.l.l, we might even have lucked into finding cover that didn't offer any of the bad guys a clean shot, which meant that as soon as we broke cover, they might make their move.

In these situations, you really discover what being afraid means and what paranoia means. It's that way because you know d.a.m.n well that anyone out there might be a hostile, might be armed, might be strapped to explosives, might be waiting for the exact moment when it bests suits them to end everything that defines you.

But you can't hide forever, either.

I hand-signaled to my guys, then I broke and ran for a standing rock fifty yards up the valley, heading into the ruined old town. I did all the zigging and zagging the trainers drill into you.

No one shot at me.

I hit the wall, crouched, and turned in time to see Top duck and dodge his way across.Then Bunny.

I tapped my earbud.