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ancient stone dwellings, built mostly on just two floors, all of them pockmarked with bullet and shell holes. Mack could see them clearly through his binoculars. Abu Hallah was an insurgent stronghold, no doubt—a place where Islamist fanatics came and launched attacks on U.S. troops before vanishing once more back into the desert.
     
    “Did you see where the missiles came from?” he asked Lieutenant Mason.
     
    “Nossir. But they came straight across the river, from one of those houses, and they did not swerve. Just came straight at us.”
     
    “Two only?”
     
    “Yessir. One hit the lead tank, clean as a whistle. The second one came in right behind it, smashed into the next tank, just as if they had been individually aimed from two firing posts.”
     
    “Were you stationary at the time?”
     
    “Nossir. We were making about thirty miles per hour. By the time my vehicle had stopped and I hit the ground, both tanks were blazing like a couple of goddamned bonfires. Except with that blue flame I mentioned. Never saw anything catch fire that quick.”
     
    “Jesus Christ,” said Mack. “And we don’t dare flatten those fucking houses across the river, because they’re probably full of unarmed civilians and someone will put us all in jail.”
     
    “And it’s hard to know if the missile men are still in there,” said Lieutenant Mason.
     
    “Tell you what, Barry. I can see a small group of vehicles just beyond the houses. I’m gonna drive back down this road and take a look. I’ll take my guys with me and turn around. If I see one sign of a hostile enemy on that side of the river, I’m taking them out.”
     
    “Probably make us both feel a whole lot better, right?”
     
    “Guess so,” said Mack, who was now conscious of the ever tightening knot of pure anger in his stomach, the old familiar one that heralded the hours of the wolf.
     
    He signaled for his driver to come forward and for the four tanks to follow. He climbed aboard the armored car and led the way down the road for four hundred yards, stopped, and instructed the tanks to turn around, back toward the fires, and to aim their main artillery at the buildings across the river.
     
    “Don’t fire. Just be ready.”
     
    Positioned now at the rear of the convoy, Mack trained his binoculars on the small gathering of Arabs and trucks on the other side of the water. There was a stone wall, however, between the SEAL commander and the insurgents, and Mack’s car backed up another fifty feet to improve the angle. Now he could see clearly.
     
    There were two unmistakable tripods placed in the ground midway along the wall. He could not identify the equipment mounted on top of the tripods, but since he was most certainly not looking at a highway surveyors’ unit preparing for a new freeway, Mack assumed the worst. He was looking at a missile sighting system and a guidance assembly, almost certainly identical to the ones that fired the new and improved French-made MILAN 3.
     
    Mack knew enough about the MILAN to understand it fires in two stages, the first burn being for one and a half seconds, just to eject the missile out of the launcher. The second stage burns for eleven seconds, accelerating the missile to two hundred meters per second. The guys in the U.S. tanks never had a chance.
     
    He had every reason to believe the secret Diamondhead may have been a shade faster, with perhaps a tougher cone protecting the warhead. As he stared at the small group across the river he suddenly observed the arrival of a new vehicle. And this was not a rough 4x4 desert truck; this was the sleekest of Mercedes-Benz limousines.
     
    He watched the chauffeur hold open the door for the man who occupied the rear seat. Out into the desert stepped an immaculately dressed Western man wearing a dark pinstriped suit, with a blue tie and a scarlet handkerchief stuffed into the breast pocket of his jacket. He was essentially bald, with slicked-back dark hair on either