LITMIR.BIZ

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coolers and insulated food bags, they emptied their contents—weapons and equipment—onto the floor, each man arranging his gear in a neat pile. Five Marines donned the coveralls and hats. In about five minutes, they’d load up in the van and leave, their faces hopefully obscured by the hats and the coming dusk.

      McCarter and the others readied their weapons. The Briton heard footsteps moving in clipped cadence approaching from behind. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a slender man, about five feet eight inches, his white hair trimmed close to his pinkish skin and flat on top, moving toward them. He halted about ten feet away and scrutinized each member of Phoenix Force with a hard gaze, saving McCarter for last. Scowling, he crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the Phoenix Force leader.

      “So you’re the hot-shit commandos the White House made us wait for,” he said. “God, give me strength.”

      “He just did, mate,” McCarter said, “in spades. You got a name?”

      “Colvin. Steve Colvin.”

      “You’re State Department?”

      Colvin nodded. “Diplomatic Security Service. And you’re Justice Department.”

      “Rick Cornett,” McCarter said, using his alias. He didn’t bother to introduce the other men. He didn’t plan to start a long-term relationship with Colvin.

      “You with the FBI? Hostage Rescue Team maybe?”

      “No.”

      “Delta Force?”

      “No.”

      “Care to elaborate?”

      “No.”

      His cheeks reddening, Colvin glowered at McCarter for a stretched second. Despite his rising impatience, the Briton didn’t avert his own gaze. Colvin reached into his breast pocket, extracted a crumpled pack of cigarettes and tapped one into his palm. Replacing the pack, he lit the smoke with a disposable lighter, inhaled deeply and gestured with a nod at the space behind him.

      “All right, Cornett,” the State Department man said, “why don’t you drag your Limey butt over here and I’ll brief you.”

      He turned and headed toward a table topped with a pair of laptops and three satellite telephones.

      McCarter glanced at Manning, who grinned. “‘Limey butt?’” Manning asked. “Not very diplomatic for the State Department, eh?”

       “He’s sizing me up,” McCarter said. “It obviously hurts his professional pride a little to have Washington send in outsiders to handle this mission. Probably wants to see whether we’re up for the job.”

      “Think we passed his test?”

      “I couldn’t care less,” McCarter said.

      Manning shot him a grin and they fell into step behind the State Department man, following him to a makeshift briefing area set up in the rear of the store. A table topped by laptops, architect’s drawings and scattered papers sat in the middle of the converted storeroom. Three technicians, two women and a man, all dressed in civilian clothes, were positioned around the table, working at computers.

      “Lynn,” Colvin said, “show us the layout.”

      A thirtysomething brunette nodded. She tapped a few keys and moments later an architect’s drawing of the embassy filled the screen. McCarter noted several X’s situated at various points on the image. A small laser pointer in his grip, Colvin rested the device’s red dot on a large rectangular room.

      “This is the first-floor lobby,” he said. “According to early security camera images, there were at least eight shooters in this area. Unfortunately the latter information is dated. Within thirty minutes of taking the embassy, they’d shut down the surveillance feeds to our satellites. Doing so creates a closed system. They can monitor every inch of the place, but we can’t see a damn thing. We can still track people by their body heat, but we can’t tell whether they’re the good guys or the bad guys.”

      “What about the second floor?” Encizo asked.

      Colvin nodded at the computer operator, who with a few keystrokes, changed the picture again. “Flyovers indicate a great deal of body heat here. And it’d make the most sense for them to keep hostages here. They can herd them into rooms, most of which have no windows, for security reasons, making it easier to guard the prisoners.”

      “What are your negotiators telling you?” McCarter asked. “What do these blokes want?”

      “Typical terrorist crap—release certain members of their group, cut U.S. aid to Israel, withdraw troops from the Middle East.”

      “In other words, the impossible,” McCarter said.

      “You got it. Frankly, I think they’re stalling. These guys may be fanatics, but they aren’t stupid. They have to know we don’t negotiate with terrorists. Especially in today’s climate. I don’t understand what their endgame is here.”

      “Probably doesn’t matter at this point,” McCarter said. “The only endgame I envision for these bastards is to go horizontally. How many hostages do we have inside?”

      “About fifty, including the six Marines killed during the initial fighting. When they seized the place, they let a lot of the locals go. Some of the staff was out of the compound, doing other things.”

      “The locals tell you anything?”

      “Depending on who you believe, they have anywhere between two dozen and thirty fighters in there. We’ve had U2s winging over the compound all day, snapping off surveillance photos. Near as we can tell there’s between a half dozen and ten terrorists patrolling the grounds or stationed on the rooftops at any given moment, just daring us to take them out. According to the people who got away, everyone else was herded into the main building.”

       “What other ways are there into the building?” asked James, the lanky former Navy SEAL.

      Colvin’s associate changed the screen again. A split-screen image pictured the embassy’s rooftop in one frame and a boarded-up hotel in the other. McCarter remembered seeing the hotel as they’d approached the embassy. His face must have betrayed his curiosity because Colvin immediately jumped in to explain.

      “Liberia was a damn mess for years,” he said. “A corrupt government, a civil war, drug-crazed rebels. At the same time, al Qaeda has hammered embassies on this continent and has more than its share of followers running around. Place is a security man’s nightmare.”

      “Only more so today,” James said, running the tip of his index finger along his pencil-thin mustache.

      “Sure. Compound that with other events like the attacks on the WTC and the takeover of our Tehran embassy in the 1970s, and you know the State Department’s been waiting on something like this to happen for years. We didn’t necessarily expect it here in particular, but we did expect it.”

      “The point?” McCarter asked.

      “The point is that we have more entrances into the embassy than we let on. The thinking was that we needed a way to get our people out of here in case of an emergency, an escape hatch, if you will. To do that, we built a tunnel that connects the embassy to this burned-out hotel.”

      “Get out,” James said. “You’re saying there’s actually a secret tunnel leading into the embassy?”

      “Of sorts. But it’s secure as hell. It stretches about three hundred yards, with battleship-steel doors every seventy-five yards or so. It also has a boatload of cameras, motion detectors and other protective measures installed. We designed it to get people out, but also to sneak commandos in.”

      “Any way they could know about it?” McCarter asked.

      “Only an idiot would guarantee that it’s foolproof.”

      “Then that’s the way we’ll go, at least some of us. I want to hit these

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