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  We were parked in two cars, one in front, one in back. The streets were empty. It was nearing the time for Isha’a, the evening prayer, last of the five prayer times of the day.

  Eight men in the police station’s front room. Top made sure to show us as he turned to appeal to one officer after another in his distress about his tires. MindReader provided us with a floor plan. One door in front, one in back. Ten cells. Thermal scans from a satellite confirmed the eight men up front and four more in the back, plus three thermal signatures in the holding area. The hikers each separated into different cells.

  Twelve to five, and if we blew the snatch or let them raise the alarm, we were going to fill those empty cells. Even though none of us carried any ID, and although our fingerprints and DNA were in no databases anywhere, thanks to MindReader, it wouldn’t be a stretch for anyone to guess where we came from. We were potentially bigger political currency than the three college kids, even if one of them was a senator’s only son.

  “Okay, Top,” I murmured as we got out of our cars. “Party time.”

  The easiest way to do this would have been to kick the doors, toss in a couple of flash-bangs and kill everyone in a uniform. That would also be barbaric. We weren’t at war with Iran, and we certainly weren’t at war with a small regional police station. The officers in there were nowhere near the policy level. They were probably working schlubs like me and my guys; like my brother back in Baltimore PD.

  So we went with Plan B.

  The flash-bangs? Yeah, okay, we did that. But, hey, everyone likes party favors.

  When I gave the word, Top and Lydia jammed their palms against their ears, squeezed their eyes shut and dropped to the floor. Khalid came through the station’s front door and lobbed a flash-bang in a softball underarm pitch that arced it over the intake counter and landed it right on the duty officer’s desk. I was right behind Khalid and I had a second’s glimpse of the officer staring in unbelieving horror at the grenade.

  Then… BANG!

  The flash-bang is designed to temporarily blind and deafen anyone in the blast radius. It feels exactly like getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer made of pure light. You don’t shrug it off. You scream, you go temporarily but intensely deaf and blind, and roll around on the floor. If you’re up close and personal it can burst your eardrums.

  Everyone in the room was staggered.

  I raised a Benelli M4 shotgun and opened up. I wasn’t firing buckshot-my gun was loaded with beanbag rounds. That sounds fun. It isn’t. The rounds are small fabric pillows loaded with #9 lead shot. They won’t penetrate the skin, but it feels like you’ve been punched by the Incredible Hulk. You do go down and you do it right now.

  There was one officer who hadn’t gotten his eggs scrambled by the flash-bang and he had a pistol halfway out of the holster. I put a round center mass and knocked him into a row of filing cabinets. He rebounded from the cabinets and fell flat on his face making tiny croaking sounds. Khalid and Top flanked me, drawing and firing X26-A Tasers, which have a three-shot magazine with detachable battery packs. The twin sets of flechettes struck their targets and the battery packs sent fifty thousand volts into each man. The men dropped and the shooters released the battery packs to allow their guns to chamber the second rounds. The packs would continue to send maintenance charges through the flechettes until the batteries ran dry, say about twenty seconds. Four down, four to go.

  Lydia pulled another shotgun from under her billowing black chador and hammered an officer into the wall with the beanbags. I pivoted and fired two shots at a screaming cop trying to crawl toward a desk with a phone on it, hitting him once and missing once because he went down that fast. Khalid and Top used the Tasers on the other two.

  In the space between the flash-bang and my first shot, I heard an explosion in the cell area. Bunny blowing the back door off its hinges with a blaster-plaster. Then the sound of shotguns and Tasers.

  And that fast it was over. Eight men up front, four in the back. All of them down, no fight left in anyone.

  I turned. “Warbride, secure the door. Sergeant Rock, Dancing Duck-bag ’em and tag ’em.”

  We were using combat call signs. Lydia was Warbride, Top was Sergeant Rock, Khalid was Dancing Duck. I was Cowboy.

  Immediately Top and Khalid produced plastic flex-cuffs, which had been designed to hold pipes together but have become a staple of law enforcement worldwide.

  One of the officers began to stir. Maybe the Taser flechettes hadn’t lodged deeply enough for him to take the full shock, or maybe he was one of those rare types who can bull their way through it, but he lunged at Lydia and tried to tackle her. Lydia is five eight and one forty. Solid for a woman but far smaller than the cop. However, she stepped into his rush and hit him three times-nose, solar plexus, and groin-in less than a second. The cop went down like he’d been poleaxed. Lydia spun him onto his stomach and cuffed him, then bent and whispered, “Next time, pendejo, don’t let your balls get your ass in trouble.”

  Once he was down, my team cuffed the officers by the wrists and ankles and then connected those cuffs, leaving everyone hog-tied. Sponge balls with elastic cords were used to muffle voices. The cops would be able to spit them out once they got their wits about them, but I intended for Echo Team to be a memory by then. Lydia locked the door and pulled down the slatted metal security shutters. Then she started ripping out phone lines, smashing laptops, and crushing cell phones under her heel.

  I ran past her, through the security office and into the holding area. Bunny was finishing the last of the hog-tying while John Smith searched the officers for keys. He found them and tossed the set to me as I ran past.

  “Green Giant,” I yelled to Bunny. “Talk to me.”

  “Last one.”

  “Chatterbox, watch the door.”

  John Smith nodded and crouched down by the shattered rear doorway. There were people on the street, poking their heads out of doors and second floor windows to see what the fuss was about.

  “Drawing a crowd,” he said.

  “Out front, too,” called Lydia. “ Truchas! Neighbors are coming!”

  The three hikers were in the cells. They looked terrible. Haunted faces, emaciated bodies, fresh bruises, and healed-over scars. However, I noticed that the jailers had provided each of the young prisoners with a big plate of fresh food and plenty of clean water. It was a small courtesy, but it said a lot about the men we’d just roughed up. Human beings. They couldn’t do anything about what had been done to the hikers, and they had no say in what was planned for them-a bullshit trial and either execution or life in a much more terrible state prison-but here, on the street level, these were frightened, starving young people and the cops did what they could to take care of them. They’d even rigged blankets on the bars to give the girl, Rachel, a measure of privacy and dignity. Top saw me looking at that and when I noticed him looking, he flicked an eye to the front room and nodded. I nodded back. There was nothing else to say or do.

  The college kids, however, were jabbering and screaming and yelling. The panic was such a huge thing for them that they’d lost all control. Bunny kept trying to calm them down, but his voice was lost beneath the barrage of theirs.

  From the doorway, Top yelled, “ Shut the fuck up!” with all the volume that his leather-throated drill instructor’s voice could manage.

  The hikers shut up at once and stared at him, goggle-eyed.

  I said, “We are United States Special Forces. We’re here to take you home.”

  They started yammering again, rushing the cell doors before we could even open them.

  “Stop!” I snapped, and they did. Scared as they were, they paid attention, which I knew was going to help make this work. Hysteria would get everyone killed. I was also reassured by seeing them all on their feet. I’ve heard horror stories about prisoner rescues where the people the SpecOps forces liberated were broken and catatonic wrecks who had to be carried out.

  One of them, the only woman amon
g them, stepped forward. She wore a scowl that was half anger and half hope. “They tricked us once with something like this. How do we know-?”

  “Smart question. When you were ten your mom gave you a guinea pig for your birthday. You named it Olivia.”

  Her eyes stayed hard, but they grew wet as well. She nodded.

  “God, thank you-” she began, but I cut her off.

  “Listen to me. We will get you out of here but you need to do exactly as you’re told. No questions, no talk.”

  Khalid produced a PDA and called up photographs, matching them against the faces of the prisoners. “Three for three,” he confirmed and handed the device to me.

  I unlocked one cell and handed Top the keys.

  “Each of you will go with one of my team. You’ll get into separate cars and you’ll be taken out of the country. You’re going home. This is for your own safety,” I said. “If any one car gets stopped, the others will get away. Now, no more talk… let’s move.”

  When I said the word “separate,” they looked terrified and suspicious, but they did not panic. I found myself liking them. I’d had reservations at first-like a lot of people, I guess-because they had put themselves in harm’s way by going on a science field trip in a war zone. But now I understood. These were very tough young people. Resourceful and capable. If they had a fault, maybe it was that they had too much faith in people. I’m not about to slam anyone for thinking that other people will aspire to their higher values. It’s just too bad they got caught in a moment when the Iranian soldiers were not listening to their better angels.

  Khalid stepped into the cell with the senator’s son. “Jason McHale?”

  The young man saw Khalid’s Arab face and hesitated, but I stepped close.

  “He’s an American soldier. Go with him or stay here. Decide fast, kid, ’cause your dad’s waiting for you in Kuwait City. He wants to see ‘Ranger.’”

  That did it. “Ranger” was Jason’s nickname as a little boy. Tears welled in his eyes and he tried to hug me. I pushed him gruffly back. I felt for him, but this wasn’t the time.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “No need to be sorry, brother,” I said. “When we get out of this I’ll buy the first round.”

  He smiled. It was a good smile, conflicted in the moment but that was a veneer over a clear and evident openness. “The next one’s on me.” He allowed Khalid to guide him out of the cell.

  Top entered Rachel’s cell and held out a hand toward her, palm up. An invitation rather than a command. “Come on, darlin’” he said in the fatherly way he has. He’s the only Echo Team member with kids. “You can tell me everything I need to know about rare tigers on the way to Kuwait.”

  Rachel stared blankly at him for a moment. He had warmth, and you knew on an instinctive level that it was genuine. Then she smiled-maybe her first real and unguarded smile in months.

  “Asiatic cheetah,” she corrected as she took his hand. He grinned back at her.

  The kid in the last cell, Bryan, was the youngest of the three. His twentieth birthday had happened behind bars. He was also the most clearly damaged, and he stared through the open cell with sunken eyes. It was pretty obvious that the experience had fractured something inside him. Maybe-with luck and the right doctors-he’d find his way out of the dark. Top put a hand on his shoulder.

  Top started to say something, but Rachel stepped past him.

  “It’s okay, Bryan,” she said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you anymore. We made it. We survived. We’re free. ”

  He took a small step forward but that was all. Then Jason stood next to Rachel and said, “You beat them, Bry. Remember what we said after they took us? We’re innocent and no matter what they did to us we were going to stick to the truth. You said that, and Rachel and I went along with you. Well, check it out, brah, you saved our asses with that. You held the line for all of us. Now they’re here to take us home.”

  Bryan’s empty eyes gradually filled with something. Hard to put a name on it, because there was a lot of wreckage in the way. Maybe he had gone inside his head to hide from what they were doing to him, but here, in this moment, I think he looked through the shadows and saw the faint light from the door he’d left open.

  “Tick-tock, Jefe,” said Lydia quietly, and I nodded.

  Bryan took a ragged breath and then took a step forward, reaching through his personal darkness. Taking Rachel’s hand, taking Jason’s. Top helped guide him out of the cell, and I could see the broken boy becoming the man who had walked through hell and survived.

  As he passed one of the cops who lay trussed on the floor, Bryan suddenly knelt beside him. At first I thought he was going to lash out at him, but he didn’t. Instead he rolled the man onto his side so that the restraints didn’t cut as deeply into his wrists and ankles. Either kindness to local cops who had been relatively kind to the prisoners, or a statement that compassion should be a factor whenever one person has power over another. It was a small thing, a minor kindness in the middle of a dreadful experience; but it might be the defining moment in the entire experience for the young man.

  I was proud of him and I saw the looks in the eyes of Top, Khalid, and Bunny. This was why we do what we do. Not to punish the bad guys, but to make sure the good ones have a real chance.

  The silence in the cells was cracked apart by the sound of sirens approaching.

  The prisoners looked toward the rear door, new fear blossoming in their eyes.

  “Okay, everybody out of the pool,” said Bunny, dialing up the wattage on his Southern California smile. Bunny has a great blend of impressive size, movie-star looks, and surfer-boy charm; but at the same time you know you’re safe with him. It takes a lot of guys to outnumber someone like him.

  The sirens were coming fast.

  “Warbride?” I called.

  “We’re drawing a crowd,” she reported tersely. “We need to get into the wind most riki-tik.”

  I ran to the door and peered out. People were pouring out of their houses and converging on the police station. Half of them were yelling into cell phones.

  “Dark and stormy night,” I said to Smith, and he nodded. He fished out a smoke grenade and threw it. And another and another. Dense black smoke boiled up from each one. Lydia lobbed flash-bangs into the smoke. Between the thick smoke and the sudden explosions, the crowd screamed and began to scatter, running in every wrong direction, colliding, creating very useful panic.

  “Go! Go! Go!” I barked.

  Top, Khalid, and Bunny, each guiding a freed hostage, flipped down their infrared visors and ran like hell for the cars we had parked on different side streets.

  People were still in the streets but when they saw men with automatic weapons, they stumbled backward toward their houses.

  Lydia ran behind them, and immediately cut left and vanished into an alley. The plan was for her to circle the block and reenter the scene as a pedestrian. She looked like every other woman in this conservative part of town. She’d blend in with the crowd and help confuse things with a little whisper-down-the-lane distortion of the facts. Were there six men or twelve? Didn’t they drive away in a white van? The men were bearded. Was that Afrikaans they were speaking? Any good crowd of confused and angry people could be worked like a conductor with a baton.

  John Smith covered everyone with his rifle and infrared scope. He was good with every kind of firearm, but as a sniper he was the hammer of God. If anyone made a move on our teams they would get the real thing, no beanbags, no Tasers. Now was not the time to play.

  My earbud buzzed and I heard Top’s voice. “One away.”

  “Two away,” said Khalid.

  “Down the road and gone,” said Bunny.

  But by then John Smith and I were already in motion. Our visors showed the heat signatures of the fleeing civilians. And it also showed the heat from the engines of at least a dozen police cars coming at us from different directions. They were closer than we anticipated, and that was not good news.
Our window of escape had slammed shut. In twenty paces we were going to be out of the smoke and as visible as gnats on a bedsheet.

  “Chatterbox,” I growled, “escape three. Go!”

  We had four different escape strategies. The first two were now for shit, and number four involved shooting our way out. Three was less lethal but not much more comforting. We split up, went for the first cover we could find to get off the grid as quickly as possible. It meant dumping all of our gear. Everything.

  We each popped a final smoke grenade and ran into the cloud. As they burst, we hit quick release buttons on our belts and shed holsters, cross belts, bandoliers, and harnesses packed with expensive and very useful equipment. Even the iSee devices and earbuds. It all clattered to the ground. When I dropped my helmet I lost sight of John Smith. I crouched while running and tugged at the seams of my trousers. With a screech of Velcro, the pants split apart and flapped behind me. I repeated the action with the shirt. The last thing I did was to grab the medallion hanging around my neck and press the sculpted design in the center. It sent a signal to the gear-weapons, equipment, and even clothing-that released hundreds of tiny thermite micro charges. I heard the whoosh as all of it exploded into flame. Then I yanked off the medallion and tossed it away.

  When I staggered backward out of the smoke, faking a cough, I was an Iranian in ordinary street clothes. I yelled in Persian and bellowed for the police, pointing toward the smoke and flames.

  Just like every other ordinary citizen was doing.

  Chapter Five

  Starbox Coffee

  Tehran, Iran

  June 15, 7:41 a.m.

  That was how it ended. At least for me. Top, Bunny, and Khalid still had to get the college kids out of the country, but circumstances cut me from that team. I knew it was going to be a nail-biter for the guys, but Top was the best team leader in the business. If there was a way, he’d see it done.