High Assault. Don Pendleton

on the top to start the five-second countdown.

      He inserted the initiator charge in the explosives molding and sprang back, turning his head to the side as the rest of the team fanned out to give the breaching charge room to detonate.

      In the C-130, Najafi gripped the edge of the table hard enough to turn his knuckles white. The bright cherry on the end of his cigarette flared like an airstrip beacon as he drew on it, and his eyes fairly bulged from their sockets as he soaked in every aspect of the pregnant seconds before the charge went off.

      The crack of the explosive detonating was sharp enough to hurt Ayub’s ears through the speaker pickups. The blinding flash of light was followed immediately by a billowing cloud of gray-white smoke. The car door shot straight off the frame and sailed outward ten feet like a cork from a champagne bottle.

      The bodyguard inside the rear compartment of the limo came out immediately, his MP-5K up in both hands and blazing. The 9 mm rounds tore the face off the secondary gunner and spread his brains and skull across his team leader. Blood and clumps of flesh struck the POV camera and smeared the lens, obscuring the leader’s feed.

      The bodyguard landed on the road and went to one knee, swinging the compact subgun around. From half a dozen directions AKMS assault rifles opened up in a brutal symphony. The bodyguard came apart like a grenade exploding and his submachine was shattered as his hands were torn from his wrists.

      “Wipe your camera! Wipe your camera!” Najafi screamed at the leader.

      Ayub didn’t know why Najafi was so excited as the feed from six other cameras showed the scene well enough. On the leader’s screen the Hezbollah assassin followed the frantic order of the brigadier general and wiped his screen clear. Smoke was billowing around them as the hit squad collapsed on the breach point into the target vehicle.

      Ayub’s eyes flickered to the tactical display clock on the wall next to the bank of television screens. Fifty-eight seconds had passed since the initiation of the ambush. The Hezbollah attackers were performing ahead of schedule.

      What happened next was ugly.

      The big, rough men came out of the car with Michael Suleiman between them. He tried to struggle and they pounded him brutally with fists until he was battered and dazed. The team leader struck him once in the face with the smoking muzzle of his AKMS, tearing the Lebanese politician’s nose as the kidnappers dropped him to the ground. One of the men came down with a knee on Suleiman’s back, causing the parliamentary leader to scream out in pain.

      As a plastic zip tie was tightened around Suleiman’s wrists, the man’s seven-year-old son came charging out of the ruined vehicle to protect his father. Ephraim Suleiman’s young face was twisted in anger, and tears formed tracks down his cheeks as he sprang on the closest Hezbollah killer.

      The Iranian-trained terrorist backhanded the boy and the child went tumbling backward. The explosives trooper stepped into the foreground and brought up his AKMS.

       CHAPTER TWO

      Suleiman screamed in protest, but his cry was cut off by the banging clatter of the Kalashnikov on full auto. The boy’s body came apart in chunks of flesh and gouts of blood and most of him ended up spread across the rear bumper and trunk of the limo.

      There was a scream so shrill and frantic it cut through the roar of the weapons, and the Hezbollah team leader’s camera snapped back toward the breach point on the limo. Suha Suleiman, looking disheveled and battered, clawed her way out of the swirling smoke inside the limo passenger compartment. Behind her the shell-shocked face of her daughter, Taraneh, stared out blankly.

      Suha screeched again as she saw the pitiful pile that was all that remained of her son. She opened her mouth and her beautiful face twisted into a mask of hurt and confusion in marked contrast to the tiny mirror image at her side, who simply stared at the trussed-up image of her father on the road.

      “Finish it,” Najafi said into the microphone, and this time his voice was a giggle.

      No one on the team hesitated. The terrorists turned their weapons on the wife and daughter of a known Israeli sympathizer. They fired. Michael Suleiman screamed. Green tracer rounds knifed through the roiling smoke. Colonel Ayub felt his heart lurch so painfully in his chest he thought he’d torn it. The woman and girl were punched backward into the vehicle. Suleiman screamed again, but it was only the beginning of the screaming he would do this day.

      Brigadier General Najafi moved his finger over and hit the button on the intercom system for the plane, putting him instantly in touch with the pilots of the C-130.

      “The package is acquired,” he said. “Put the plane down.”

      “Yes, sir,” the pilot answered.

      Behind Najafi, Colonel Ayub found his eyes once again drawn to the expensive attaché sitting on the table next to his commander. He thought about what it held. He closed his eyes.

      The plane made its descending approach.

      THE BIG CARGO PLANE landed on an improved runway controlled by a pro-Iranian Shiite militia. The pilot deftly leveled out and brought the massive bird down on the mile-long runway. As soon as the wheels hit the tarmac the load master in the cavernous bay initiated the cargo-acquisition procedures and the ramp began to lower even as the plane continued to taxi down the runway.

      The Hezbollah hit team’s Toyota Sequoia raced out from between two hangars and onto the runway. The ramp lowered into position just a few short inches above the pavement and the SUV, with Michael Suleiman trussed up inside, ran up on the platform.

      The vehicle driver gunned the Sequoia up onto the platform and drove it straight into the cargo bay of the lumbering C-130, which was large enough to hold five more just like it. Once the SUV was inside, the load master alerted the pilot and began closing the ramp. Instantly the cargo plane’s mammoth Allison Turbine engines changed pitch and began racing.

      Instead of holding down the speed the pilot applied full throttle, and almost immediately the blunt nose of the airplane began to lift. Inside the cargo hold the snatch team waited for takeoff and watched the load master, now in a jump chair, for the all clear to exit their vehicles.

      Inside the TOC both Najafi and Ayub surveyed the hold through a video feed, Najafi calmly smoking while his subordinate stood mute and sweating.

      Engines screaming, the C-130 completed its stump-and-jump running landing and left Lebanese soil, heading out to the west toward the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean Ocean.

      As the plane began a smooth ascent, the load master nodded to the Hezbollah agents in the Sequoia. They sprang into action as Najafi came out and stood on the scaffolding leading up to the TOC’s door. Ayub remained in the chamber, studiously avoiding looking at either the attaché case or the dentist chair. It took a considerable amount of willpower.

      Outside the door he heard Najafi taunt the prisoner.

      “Ah, Michael, so good to see you again,” Najafi said. He looked imperiously down from his perch at the top of the scaffolding. In his mind he was Xerxes surveying the beating of an insolent slave at the hands of his Immortals. The Hezbollah thugs jerked the Lebanese parliamentary member from the back of the SUV. His face was purple and black and swollen. Bloody drool hung in ropes from split lips, and he looked up at Najafi with the dull eyes of a wounded animal.

      He tried to speak as he was carried up the steps by the masked gunmen but could only manage to gag. His hands and feet had been secured behind him with white plastic zip ties and his business suit had been torn and splattered with blood. He could only manage mewling sounds as he was shoved through the TOC’s door and thrown roughly into the dentist’s chair.

      While the Hezbollah gunners cut the man loose from his restraints and then locked him into the chair, Najafi fitted his impeccable suit jacket on a hanger, then hung that from a hook on the wall. He maintained a calm, playful manner as he donned a blue apron and a pair of black rubber gloves.

      “I know we’ve had our difference, Michael,”