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from Poole’s grip.
“They made me. I had to withdraw. We’ve got to abort.”
    Crocker cursed, hearing Seale echoing him. He swung toward the Duty Ops Desk. “Ron, MOD, now! Get me a patch to Candlelight, they
cannot
abort!”
    “Open line, sir.” Ron handed Crocker the telephone handset.
    Crocker put the phone to his ear, could hear the sounds of consternation coming from the Ministry of Defense’s operational command post. “D-Ops, who am I talking to?”
    “Lance Corporal Richard Moth, sir.”
    “Put Colonel Dawson on the line.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    From the speakers, Crocker could hear Poole cursing at Fincher.
“You’ve fucking blown us, you fool!”
    “They made me, dammit! What was I supposed to do?”
    On the screen, Crocker watched as Poole sat back, yanking the headset from his head. The expression he was seeing on Minder Two’s face was much like the one Crocker imagined was now gracing his own.
    In his ear, from the telephone, Crocker heard, “Paul? James. What the hell is your man playing at?”
    “God only knows. Listen, Colonel, you’ve got to give them the go order.”
    “If they’ve been blown—”
    “I understand the risk. They’ve got to move now, Colonel, there’s no choice.”
    “Hold on.”
    Crocker looked back to the video feed, watching. After a second’s pause, a squawk came over the speakers, and he watched as Poole hastily put his headset back into place.
    “Nightowl, go.”
    From the telephone, Crocker heard Dawson’s voice, distant, relaying the go, repeating the order twice, to make it clear.
    On the screen, through the speakers, Poole said,
“Nightowl confirms, we are go, repeat, we are go.”
    Crocker was sure he saw Fincher blanch.
    There was a rush of movement then, Poole reaching for the MP-5 that had been waiting for him as the camera jerked, heading to the doors of the van. The screen flared again, resolved, and now the view was jumping up and down, and Crocker could see Poole and the other two SAS troopers racing along the street, turning now between buildings, running hard, then slowing. They reached the door, two of the troopers taking entry positions, and the one wearing the camera made the breach, and Poole tossed the first grenade, and the sound of the explosion came back at them in the Ops Room, muffled by the speakers.
    Then the shooting started.

CHAPTER 3
    Uzbekistan—Tashkent—
Husniddin Asomov Avenue
    11 February, 1213 Hours (GMT+5:00)
    If he hadn’t been so focused on chasing the hare, Charles Riess supposed he’d have seen the car coming. But then again, if he’d seen the car coming, Ruslan Mihailovich Malikov might never have made contact with him, so all in all, Riess figured it more than made up for the scraped knee and sprained ankle.
    They’d started the run up on the northeast edge of Tashkent, about ten in the morning, just north of the Salor Canal, setting off in pursuit of a particularly sneaky son of a bitch from the Embassy’s Consular Division named Bradley Walker. Turned out his surname was more than a little misleading, and with the fifteen-minute head start that Riess and the twenty-seven other Hash House Harriers had given to Walker, he’d led them on a merry chase. Most times, you could count on the run being completed in about an hour, so everyone could get to the more serious business of drinking.
    Most times.
    Walker had been given the go, running with a bag of flour to lay trail—or more precisely, to lay false trail—and Riess and the others had stood in the freezing morning, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands. In another two weeks the winter would be over, and Uzbekistan’s traditionally temperate climate would return, but for now it was cold enough that Riess seriously considered forfeiting his participation altogether, just so he could return to his home on Raktaboshi Avenue and crawl back into bed. Another of the Harriers, joining them from the German Embassy, had seemed to read his mind, making a