They gave a female captain a scarred, Vietnam-era rifle with a cracked scope to humiliate her, until she unscrewed the optic and chose iron sights. / Chapter 25 / 40

Chapter 25 - INSERTION BENEATH THE BLACK SWELL

The night over the North African coast was black as pitch, devoid of stars. A Mediterranean squall had whipped the sea into eight-foot swells, throwing foamy white spray high into the dark.

Two MH-60M Black Hawks, flying completely blacked out with their exhaust suppressors muffling their turbine scream, skimmed barely six feet above the cresting waves. Inside the lead helicopter, Elena stood braced against the doorframe, her night-vision goggles flipped up over her helmet.

She preferred the raw darkness. Electronic night-vision tubes flattened depth perception and bloomed into blindness when bright flashes occurred. For the final approach, she relied on her own dilated pupils, trained by years of hunting in the Appalachian ridge woods.

Through the rain-streaked visor of her helmet, the rugged promontory of Qalat-al-Zayt appeared as a jagged black silhouette against the horizon. Perched atop a sheer, seventy-foot limestone cliff sat the embassy annex: a sprawling Mediterranean villa surrounded by ten-foot reinforced concrete blast walls, topped with razor wire and security towers.

"One minute to target!" the crew chief barked, raising one finger.

"Fast ropes!" Elena shouted back over the howling rotor wash.

The Black Hawks flared hard over the narrow, rocky beach at the base of the cliffs. The sudden deceleration pushed Elena's stomach into her throat. The heavy nylon fast-ropes were kicked out into the void, slapping down onto the wet boulders below.

Elena was the first on the rope. She gripped the thick braided line with her heavy leather assault gloves, her rifle slung tight across her back, and plunged into the darkness. She slid thirty feet in two seconds, hitting the slick beach rocks with bent knees, absorbing the impact, and immediately dropping into a low crouch with her weapon brought to bear.

Behind her, Company B rained down like shadows from the sky. Within forty-five seconds, twenty-four operators from the primary assault element were assembled beneath the sheer cliff face, their suppressors pointing into the swirling sea mist.

"Ropes away! Birds bugging out!"

The Black Hawks banked hard and vanished back out over the black water, their sound swallowed instantly by the roaring surf.

"Cliff face is sixty degrees, slick with moss," Torres whispered through the encrypted tactical radio. "No stairs. No path. How do we get up without alerting their radar?"

Elena unclipped a lightweight grappling launcher from her harness, loaded with a carbon-fiber anchor and silent pneumatic charge. She aimed at a fissure near the lip of the parapet seventy feet above.

*Thump.*

The anchor flew true, wedging itself deep into the ancient limestone. Elena tugged the braided Kevlar line twice. It held solid.