No one talked much. They didn't need to.
Steele reviewed the mission packet again, though he knew it cold by now. Had memorized every detail during the flight from Pope. Had run through it a dozen times in his head while the C-17 crossed the Atlantic and then the Mediterranean.
Nazari. Perimeter wall. Three meters high. Reinforced concrete. Two gates. Guard rotations at 0600, 1400, 2200. They were hitting at 0200. Two hours into the night shift. Guards settled but not yet tired.
Possible tunnel under the western office. Heat signature on thermal. Could be a tunnel. Could be nothing. They'd know soon enough.
Wife and child in the residential wing. Eastern side of the main residence. Pattern-of-life said they stayed there. Didn't leave. Didn't interfere.
Capture preferred. Intel wanted Nazari talking. Wanted names. Buyers. Supply routes. The whole network. Kill authorized if hostile. If he reached for a weapon. If he ran. If he made them choose between mission success and bringing him in alive.
Simple on paper. Never simple in practice.
The engines droned on. Steady. Constant. The kind of sound that disappeared into background noise until you tried to sleep and realized how loud it actually was.
Steele let his mind run through the operation one more time. Not the official plan. The real one. The one that accounted for Murphy's Law and human error and the fact that no plan survived first contact.
They'd hit the ground three hundred meters out. Ghost would jam cellular towers thirty seconds before breach. Give Nazari's guards just enough time to notice their phones were dead before the gate blew and it stopped mattering. Hawk would peel off to the southeast. Find his overwatch position. A residential building with a clear sight line to the compound. He'd clear it fast, get into position, provide eyes and cover fire if things got ugly.
Bulldog would blow the north gate. Frame charges. Enough explosive to turn steel-reinforced barriers into scrap metal. The blast would wake up everyone in a kilometer radius but by then they'd be inside and it wouldn't matter.
Steele and Bulldog would take point into the main residence. Fast and violent. The way they'd trained. The way they'd done it a hundred times before in compounds from Afghanistan to Syria to places that didn't officially exist in any report.
Ghost would follow, monitoring communications. Listening for guards calling for backup. For Nazari trying to reach someone on a landline they didn't know about. For local militia responding to the noise.
Risk would secure the entry point. Establish a casualty collection area if anyone went down. Be ready to treat wounds or restrain prisoners depending on how the night went.
Joker would keep the vehicle hot. Engine running. Ready to move the second they called for exfil. Ready to come in guns blazing if the situation went completely sideways and they needed extraction under fire.
And if Nazari ran for the tunnel, if Hawk saw movement toward that western office heat signature, they'd adjust. Blockthe exit. Force him back inside. Corner him. Because they weren't leaving without him.
Too many Americans had died because of the weapons he sold. Too many more would die if they let him slip away.
Somewhere over eastern Europe, Bulldog had asked about exfil routes. Not because he didn't know. Because talking through it one more time meant one less thing that could go wrong.
Steele had walked him through it again. Primary ground transport to Erbil. Eighty kilometers through Kurdish-controlled territory. Clean vehicles. CTS credentials if they hit checkpoints. Two hours if they pushed hard. Secondary helicopter if the route was compromised. If local militia blocked the roads. If Iraqi security forces decided the CTS credentials weren't good enough. Call sign already established. Landing zone pre-positioned. Tertiary was find a hole and wait for the situation to cool down. Which really meant find a hole and hope the situation didn't get worse before help arrived. Nobody liked tertiary plans.
Over the Black Sea, Ghost had run signal tests. Pulled out his tablet and checked frequencies. Made sure the jamming equipment would work at altitude, at ground level, in urban density with multiple cell towers competing for bandwidth. Made sure they could kill every cell tower in a five-kilometer radius and keep them dead long enough to matter.
"Six minutes of dead air," Ghost had said. "Maybe seven if we're lucky. After that, backup systems kick in or someone physically drives to the towers to check what's wrong."
"Six minutes is enough," Steele had replied. It had to be.
Somewhere over Turkey, Hawk had field-stripped his rifle and put it back together in the dark. Muscle memory. The kind of thing you did when you needed your hands busy and your mind quiet.
The rifle came apart in his hands like it was made of pieces that wanted to separate. Bolt carrier group. Upper receiver. Lower receiver. Barrel. Each piece checked. Each piece cleaned even though it was already clean. Each piece reassembled in the correct order without hesitation.
When he was done, Hawk had cycled the action three times. Listened to the sound it made. The mechanical precision of metal moving against metal exactly the way it was supposed to. Then he'd loaded a magazine. Chambered a round. Put the weapon on safe. And gone back to staring at nothing while his mind ran through wind calculations and sight pictures.
Risk had read. Some medical journal about trauma care in austere environments. The kind of reading material that would put most people to sleep but kept Risk engaged because the information might save someone's life someday. He'd taken notes in a small notebook he kept in his cargo pocket. Short sentences. Abbreviations only he could read. Things he wanted to remember when he got back to base and could update his medical protocols.
The man never stopped learning. Never stopped preparing for the moment when everything went wrong and he'd be the only thing standing between a teammate and a body bag.
Joker had slept for real. Two hours of actual unconsciousness that Steele envied. The ability to shut down completely and trust the team to wake you if something mattered. The man could sleep anywhere. In helicopters. In trucks. On the ground during a firefight if there was a lull long enough. He'd close his eyes, regulate his breathing, and be gone in under a minute. It was a skill Steele had never mastered.
Steele hadn't slept. He'd thought about the mission. Ran through contingencies. Calculated risks. Weighed probabilities. Thought about Nazari. About the three American advisors who'ddied two weeks ago because this man thought selling weapons to people who killed Americans was just business.
About the wife and kid in the residential wing who were going to wake up to gunfire and wouldn't understand why. Who'd be terrified. Who might do something stupid out of fear that would get them hurt.
