He moved back to his original spot and leaned against the wall. Nearby he spotted where his hat had been knocked off. He dusted it off as well as he could with his hands bound and tugged it back on, felt much better for doing so.

He wouldn't mind a song just to cheer up his crew, but what he really wanted to do was let Kara know he was alive.

She must be worried sick.

"What we know..." Kara turned away from the console and faced her team. "One, no vehicle transported them off-site last night."

Her team. She liked the sound of that, because she really needed them right now.

"Two, no obvious transport during daylight hours. Three, our last estimated location for Justin's hat..."

That earned her a few chuckles.

"...is in the Baptistery at the head of the colonnade. This area is masked by a tarp, but the tarp is showing higher-than-ambient temperatures right now, suggesting that there may be multiple people under it. Recommendations?"

"You're the boss man, lady." Trisha spoke up. "You tell us."

Yeah, right! Kara almost said, appreciating the irony. But it wasn't ironic. These were some of the most skilled fliers and, between Michael and Tanya, operators in any military. And they were looking to her for a mission plan.

Her.

She was about to send a combined Delta-SOAR-Kidon team into the fray to recover Justin and his crew, combined as she saw fit.

Every minute that pa.s.sed increased the danger to the captives and the chance they were about to be moved.

What was needed was clear, at least to her. And she was the Air Mission Commander, so her plan was going to be it-even if she still wasn't used to the idea.

"Fine. Here's what we're going to do."

But this time she wasn't going to be sitting in some quiet little corner.

Chapter 29.

Kara sat in the back of the DAP Hawk cargo bay with a ScanEagle portable command station set up in front of her.

Lola piloted the heavily weaponized Black Hawk with her husband, Tim, as copilot and weapons specialist. The DAP was unique to SOAR and about the deadliest d.a.m.n machine imaginable...deadly to the enemy.

Connie and Big John sat at the two side-mounted miniguns at the front of the cargo bay.

Kara liked having all of that wrapped around her.

Michael was aboard Claudia's Little Bird Maven II along with Tanya.

Trisha and Bill, the other SOAR and Delta couple, were in the May.

All three craft were stealth modified and moving at top speed mere feet off the dirt of the Negev.

Kara had watched hundreds of flights from on high. In SOAR training, she'd ridden along on a number of familiarization missions aboard each of the 160th's crafts.

Never before had she flown into a battle zone where everyone was putting their lives on the line. And this time they were doing it based on the belief that her intelligence a.n.a.lysis was accurate and her action plan sound.

It wasn't just her desire to finally partic.i.p.ate in the fight that had sent her aloft. Her nerves hadn't let her stay aboard the Peleliu. She didn't know why, but they were jangling there.

Of course the team hadn't told LCDR Ramis that they were flying a mission; what the Navy didn't know wasn't going to get them court-martialed. In fact, no one aboard the ship knew that Kara was even aboard this "training flight." Not Tago and definitely not Wilson. As a precaution, she'd even changed the coffin's security code so that Wilson couldn't browbeat Tago into providing him access. If she died on this mission, well, it wouldn't be her problem to figure out how to break back in without triggering an automatic all-systems erasure.

There hadn't been time to prep and fly the Tosca the three hours down from Incirlik. The ScanEagle was a much simpler craft. It had no payload other than its cameras and comm gear. No h.e.l.lfire missiles, no signal jammers, complex navigation systems, or other heavy-duty systems. It didn't even have landing gear; recovery required snagging a rope line with a wingtip.

It was designed to fly and peek without being spotted; and the stealth modification made it very good at that.

She circled it down from twenty thousand to ten thousand feet, doubling her image resolution.

The arched room of the Baptistery still registered warmer than the rest of the structure. At this alt.i.tude, she should be able to see an individual person in motion out in the open.

The flight of helos was still twenty-five miles out when she spotted trouble. She clicked on the intercom.

"I have a truck arriving at Avdat parking lot. It's big enough to move the whole crew and a number of guards."

"Any chance that it's normal traffic?" Lola asked.

"Four hours after the park closes and it's too dark to see your own nose? Get a grip."

"You are from Brooklyn, aren't you?"

Kara reviewed her words. They didn't sound that rude to her, but maybe they were. How was she supposed to know?

"Brooklyn, New Yawk!" She did her best to channel Justin. "Best dang city in them there union of states."

"Your accent sucks, Kara," Big John rumbled from his minigun. Right, the big man was from Oklahoma.

"So, I've been told." And she was just going to keep believing that she'd be seeing the man who'd told her so real soon. "We're twenty miles out. If we jump to never-exceed velocity, we'll cut nine minutes down to six."

"We can't outstrip the Little Birds," Lola informed her, but Kara could feel the helicopter nosing down to gain speed. "They're carrying our snipers. I'm accelerating to their V-max. As a result, we're all going to be flying several feet higher. Hope the Israeli radar is watching the other horizon."

Kara knew the Little Birds would a.s.sess the DAP Hawk's changed flight and adapt rapidly without the need to risk a radio transmission.

She watched the truck's leisurely approach. Reinforcements would not be a good thing right now. But neither would firing a long-range missile and risking blowing up a World Heritage Site if they missed the truck.

The truck eased up to the gate.

"Come on, guys," Kara encouraged them softly. "Get into an argument over who has to climb down and open the gate."

Which appeared to be exactly what they did.

They repeated the act at the second gate and began driving up the winding road toward the temple. The road switchbacked sharply, which the driver had difficulty following in the dark.

She wanted to scream for Lola to hurry up, but the SOAR pilots were the very best people at doing their job, so rather than watching over their shoulders, what should she be doing?

Watching the air base!

She spun her cameras to look east.

No jet patrols.

Except for the two jerks roaring down the runway and up into the air.

She held her breath and clicked her boot heels together three times.

It appeared to work; as soon as they were aloft, the two jets turned away toward the Egyptian border, moving away from them and the Avdat site as if on a routine patrol.

SOAR continued its invasion of Israel without any notice.

She spun her view back to the truck. Old enough that even the low grade at the front of the temple appeared to be slowing it down.

Justin listened to the truck grinding up the hill toward them. Full dark, you didn't need to tell him they were in trouble. As long as they were at Avdat there was a chance of getting back to the helo. Or of someone finding them.

It had been a full day; someone must have noticed they were missing.

But there'd been no rescue at full dark. Two hours later, there still hadn't been a rescue after the amount of time necessary to cross the Israeli border and the Negev after dark.

Once their captors moved them, there wasn't a chance in h.e.l.l of them being found. He really didn't want to end up as a shaky videotape on Al Jazeera. He didn't want his mother to see that, and he definitely didn't want Kara to see that.

His military life was a risk. He knew that every time he flew to battle. A combination of realism seasoned with a touch of denial let him keep flying. He knew that he protected his country in some way or other with every flight. This time taking out a terrorist cell, hopefully. He hoped the ground team had made this whole mess worthwhile at least.

And he was good at his job. He knew what he did counted.

The denial was there though, the need to believe that he was untouchable. The explosion that had killed his first crew had disproved that, but something like that didn't happen twice to the same guy.

Except this time it had.

Justin knew that if he had the chance to do it again, he would. If he could make Kara and her family one minute safer by doing this duty, he would.

But that truck really worried him.

It stalled, backfired, started, and ground forward once more.

No question it was bad news.

Then there was a loud bang followed by a high hiss and the truck halted again.

Their guard had sat calmly and hawk-eyed throughout the entire approach.

At the latest noise, he sighed.

It sounded like the truck had just gotten a flat tire.

"Nice shot, Michael."

Kara could see the truck sagging down at the front left. Nice shot, h.e.l.l. He'd punched out a truck tire from a hovering helicopter a half mile from its target with no one the wiser. The shot was out near the theoretical limit of his PSG1 sniper rifle.

With the truck momentarily disabled, the two Little Birds split wide and went to ground.

Kara took one last look at the air base-still quiet-and concentrated on the World Heritage Site.

Michael, Bill, and Tanya hit the dirt moving before the helos were fully down. No need for Tom from The Activity on this mission. This wasn't gathering intelligence; this was pure action.

This time, Kara felt no compunctions about what was going to happen. "Take 'em down hard," she'd told the team during planning.

The Little Birds pulled up and back; the 5D was not going to lose another helicopter on the ground tonight. They started a slow orbit of the site, far enough out that there wasn't a chance of them being heard. Close enough they could respond in seconds.

Kara offered a play-by-play over the DAP Hawk's intercom as the two Delta operators and one Kidon agent worked their way forward: "Inside the perimeter.

"Michael is coming in from the very back of the temple.

"Bill and Tanya are in position on opposite sides of the truck.

"Michael through the temple, closing on Alpha One."

Before they engaged, they wanted to make sure that the people they were looking for were present and alive. A body recovery operation would be...something she wasn't going to think about.

"Michael outside the Baptistery."

Justin wished that the guard would at least blink. Not that he was going to start a rush on him, but it was unnatural for a man to be so watchful.

Maybe he slept with his eyes open.

Justin shifted slightly to one side and the guard's gaze snapped to him, his rifle rising a few millimeters before settling back across his lap.

The boredom must be really setting in for Justin to even try something that dumb. The headache had worn off, but now he was getting plain old stupid. Don't antagonize the man with the gun. Good rule. He must remember to tell it to Kara when he saw her. If he ever saw her again.

At least she knew how he felt about her. She had to.

He wished he'd proposed. Wasn't that something a girl would want to know? That someone loved her that much. Seemed an important thing a man ought to say once it was true, whether or not she had high fences to deal with.