Stephenie Meyer owns Twilight. I'm borrowing her characters, dressing them up in MARPAT, and giving them some guns. BilliCullen and Scooterstale are making sure they're ready for inspection.

June 18
30° 21' 1.5660"
34° 50' 48.7428"
Negev Desert, Israel

At thirty thousand pound-force of thrust and amplified between the valley walls, the noise was loud enough to wake the dead, let alone any who'd overslept.

But even at five forty-five in the morning and after barely a handful of hours of real rest, oversleeping wasn't a problem for Bella.

Wide awake, alone, and perched on top of an old metal table, itself banged up and decorated by at least a decade's worth of scripted names and notes scratched into its top, she watched a brown and tan fighter rip across the tarmac. As it shot past, a gust of cool air followed in its wake, smacking her in the face and carrying with it the acrid taste of dust and exhaust. Without conscious direction, Bella's arms hugged tight across her chest and her chin ducked inside the warm collar of the too-big, desert-colored fleece that had somehow found its way into her gear. The barest hint of a familiar aftershave lingered in the worn fibers, giving its owner away and threatening to draw her focus from the runway, down the row of tent-like barracks, to the quarters at the very end.

Wrong time, wrong place, she told herself, jerking back just in time to catch the jet's nose rising off the concrete at a sharp, upward angle that would have made even the most frequent flier queasy. Scarcely above the ground, its afterburner glowing hot, hellfire red and distorting the air behind it, the fighter suddenly rolled perpendicular, flashing its dove-colored belly as it banked a hard, nauseating left. It leveled out only long enough to streak over the low, craggy mountains to their south.

In a matter of seconds, the aircraft shrank to little more than a shadow against the pale gray morning sky, but Bella tracked its disappearing path anyway, searching for something to take her mind off the scrawled lines of complex equations and schematics she'd spent the last day and a half carefully recreating. No matter how many times she analyzed Riley's work from that bloody hellhole, no matter how many ways she approached it, the conclusion never changed. Nor did their chances of stopping the monsters that stole her weapon.

"Damn it…" she muttered under her breath, fingers twitching in agitation. Her resolve broke in less than a minute. Unable to stop herself, Bella reached inside the cargo pocket by her left knee, tugging out a small leather-bound journal and pen. Chewing on the already-mangled cap, she flipped through the pages for the hundredth time, stopping briefly to study the cage-like structure she'd discovered in grad school and carried with her to DARPA.

Near the end, she stopped again, this time on the page she'd filled in only last night. Glaring right back at her in stark black and white was an unmistakable figure, a sketched recreation of the image they'd found hidden below the dust on Riley's whiteboard.

The missile was long, with a high L/D. A pair of twin-sized fuel tanks occupied most of the body, and on its top was the telltale conical head. Only this one had a thin rupture plate that bifurcated the internal casing, tip to base, its dimensions unknown and noted merely as variables. Familiar, but not, Bella thought, as her pen flew to the margin and scribbled out a half dozen possibilities.

Ghazani... Rodong… Shahab... Scud...

"Where did they find one of you guys… And who the fuck modified it like that…" Her pen tapped a nervous rhythm against the page. "Has to be a binary system… That's got to be it… that's got to be how they're going to–"

A quiet crunch of gravel came from the shadows to her right.

An immediate, answering tremor shot down Bella's arm, and her pen fell through her fingers, hitting the tabletop with a loud, metallic clang! As it bounced to the ground, a tall, dark-haired figure in olive drab materialized at the other end of her table. Frozen and raw from the firefight in that awful desert hideaway, the breath Bella would have sucked in lodged in her throat as a split-second of surprised stillness ticked by.

Still obscured by the shadows, the man moved closer, his boots again crunching against the rocky earth. Forgetting where she was, Bella automatically tracked the sound. Her gaze slowly slid down a wide chest to the black utility belt slung around his waist, and then to the matte black semi automatic strapped to one thigh. A wicked-looking saw-tooth knife in a black webbing sheath sat flush against the other.

Bella watched as a tanned, weather-beaten hand lifted out from the shadows, reaching toward her, and that second of frozen stillness vanished with a wheezy scream. Like a shot from a cannon, her body moved faster than her mind could process. Scrambling backward in a tangle of flailing arms, Bella slid across the table's slick metal surface and tumbled clear over the edge.

El'azar's sure fingers locked around the flinging elbow of the captain's startled scientist in a lightning-quick display of reflexes. Spitting a juicy curse, he yanked her nothing weight up, countering her downward momentum just before her ass hit the dirt. He attempted to right her, but clearly blind to who he was, the woman twisted and fought against his grip, forcing out a few more grumbled curses. When a set of short-cut nails bit into his skin and bent his wrist back at an angle that joint had never been designed to see, El'azar winced. But then he chuckled at her sheer determination.

"It's just me, Neshama."

Bella stilled immediately at the Israeli's familiar purr and blew out a ragged breath. Too relieved to do much else, she went limp and let him tug her back up to the table.

But only for a moment. As soon as Bella's heart rate slowed, her shoulders abruptly straightened and she shot him a glare hostile enough that Rosalie would have been proud.

"God!" Bella snapped between gritted teeth, throwing up her hands and launching her journal across the table. "Do you people always have to do that shit?!"

Haloed by the dim light, El'azar's face split in two. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Bullshit." Beyond relief and now moving on to a full-on crimson blush, Bella huffed in aggravation and shoved a wild ribbon of hair behind her ear. "You know full well what I'm talking about."

"Ma?" Leaning against the edge of the table, the major winked in that slow, over the top way of his.

The man was the devil incarnate, Bella decided, but nonetheless the corners of her mouth curved up without her permission, ruining her best attempt at pissed off. Not bothering to even try to recover it, she just shook her head and rolled her eyes. "You and Captain Cullen both… He did the same crap to me a few days ago."

Bella stretched across the table and grabbed her journal, tucking it back inside her knee pocket. "Seriously, do you two get off on scaring people to death? Or is this sneaky routine just for me?"

The Israeli barked a laugh loud enough that a pair of passing soldiers stopped and turned to stare. In a complete 180, the man's expression suddenly morphed into a tight-lipped scowl worthy of any ticked off drill instructor on the planet, and he waved the two away with a clipped command that didn't need any sort of repeating.

"Eh," El'azar said, turning back to Bella after the two men scurried off, his face doing yet another 180 and going right back to that flirty grin. "I think it just comes with the territory, no?"

"You mean the scaring or the sneaking?"

One thick, dark brow cocked high. "There is a difference?"

Instead of answering, Bella studied the harsh planes of the major's face – the two-inch long scar that traveled along his hairline, the scatter of discoloration under his square jaw and down one side of his neck, the deep-set worry lines that crisscrossed the span of his forehead – before dropping to the straight line of the man's solid shoulders. They were so much like the captain's, she noted. Not in size, but in that same self-assured, no-nonsense bearing that he wore without thought. Two men a world apart but cut from the very same deadly cloth.

Bella tapped her bottom lip before quietly asking, "So if he's the Ghost, who are you?"

El'azar eyed the scientist in return, impressed yet again, this time by an intuition few civilians would ever possess, before glancing away and out across the open field of concrete. At the northernmost tip of the airstrip, a second camouflaged F-16 rolled out of its hangar, readying to join the first for a morning dogfight.

"Lahav. My call sign is Lahav." His expression turned inscrutable. "You know this word?"

He watched her give a slow nod out of the corner of his eye.

"I can see that."

And from the way the creases in his forehead deepened and the way his gaze automatically averted, staring off into nothing – again, just like Captain Cullen's had done when they'd sat together on that rock out in the middle of the Iranian mountains, her hand in his, as he'd given her a glimpse into the horrors that had made him who he was – it was clear that Major El'azar Dayan had witnessed his own share of nightmares over the years. It was no wonder they were friends.

A football field away, the second fighter's engine roared to life, its turbine spinning up to a high-pitched whine that drowned out all else. For a moment, the two observed it without speaking, following the aircraft as it chased the first and screamed down the runway. Like the other jet, for Bella, its take off was a maneuver out of an action movie, and her stomach gave more than one answering flip as it inverted and rolled.

When the jet climbed into the slowly lightening sky, now pink from the sun peeking over the low ridge behind the barracks, Bella heard the major say, "Remarkable, no?"

"Yeah, it really is." She tucked her chin and burrowed deep into the captain's fleece.

"Such formidable and lethal power..." El'azar mused, still staring out across the horizon. His right forefinger – his primary trigger finger, Bella realized – curled and released in an unconscious, repeating pattern against his opposite wrist. "Yet there is gracefulness and a kind of elegance in its design, no?"

She could say the same about certain people she knew.

But she didn't. Instead, Bella gave the soldier a playful bump on the shoulder. When that didn't draw him back out, she dug her elbow between his ribs, earning her a surprised grunt and look of mild shock. Before she could blink, that sly grin returned with a vengeance.

Without warning, El'azar shoved off the table, spun on his heel, and offered his hand in assistance. "Come, Neshomeleh, we shall walk together."

Her face pinched in confusion, but with a soft chuff and shake of her head, she jumped down to follow. "Where to?"

"Breakfast, of course. After all…" He bowed with a dramatic, put-on flourish. "I swore to you Starbucks upon your return, did I not?"

Bella's jaw dropped. "You're kidding, right?"

"One does not make jokes about coffee." Straightening, he looked at her like she was crazy.

"Where the did you find Starbucks…" She waved a wild hand at the wide, dusty desert floor. "Out here?"

"What can I say? When I say something will be…" El'azar's shoulders rolled like a proud lion. "It will be so." And then the man's brows wagged hard enough to give Groucho Marx a run for his money, full of insinuation and making Bella blush all over again.

Which, as usual, just made the major howl.

"You're terrible, you know that?" she told him as they stepped out from the barrack's awning. "Screw Blade or anything bad ass like that, incorrigible is your real name. Stencil that on the side of your tank."

El'azar scoffed in mock protest as he motioned toward a worn, poorly lit footpath that wound its way between the rows of barracks to one of the larger tent-like structures near the hangars. "This way," he said. When Bella opened her mouth to reply, he shushed her. "One, I do not have a tank. Beautiful, I have tanks." Glancing down as they walked, he flashed her a row of pearly white teeth.

"And two, I prefer goal-oriented, an admirable trait by any account… And if you did not know it already, one that my American friend just happens to also possess." His lips mashed together. "Although in his case, in spades."

In that last bit, hiding behind that poorly suppressed amusement, there was a faint but very-much-there shade of warning. Warning of what or against whom, Bella didn't know, so she busied herself studying the overlapping patterns of boot prints embedded in their path.

"Trust me," El'azar said when the scientist looked away. "We are the type that if something or someone finds its way into our sights… it will not escape."

"You really think that?" Her throat bobbed, and inside the pockets of the captain's fleece, her fists squeezed together. "That we'll be able to stop them? In time?"

"Yehiyeh Asher Yehiyeh." El'azar shrugged. "But I wasn't really referring to those terrorist animals… if you know what I mean."

"Wha–" When she caught another exaggerated wag of his brows, Bella stopped herself. Burying her face in her hands to hide the sudden heat that spread across her cheeks, she let out a muffled groan. "Major, you're killing me. You're seriously killing me here."

"But it's true," he said, stopping in front of what Bella assumed was the dining hall. Leaning in close, the Israeli winked again. "Just ask my wife."

It took Bella a full second to process what he'd just said, but then it hit her like a ton of bricks. She halted dead in her tracks, threw her head back, and burst into a fit of laughter that earned them a dozen new observers. When her shoulders finally stopped shaking, they relaxed for maybe the first time since she'd left northern Virginia. Wiping her cheeks, not even bothering to hide her answering grin, Bella looked up to find a man very pleased with himself.

"No, incorrigible is absolutely the right word for you. Plus a few others that I won't say out loud."

El'azar's dark eyes danced as he inclined his head. "Bli safek, Dr. Swan."

"Let's go get my Starbucks." Halfway into a sigh, she yawned. "I could use a shot or four of caffeine. And you so owe me."

"As you wish." El'azar's easy smile was short-lived, quickly turning grim. As they entered a large mess hall filled with rows of empty tables and wooden benches, it disappeared altogether. "Unfortunately, ours must be a brief repast. In…" He glanced down at his wrist. "Forty-five minutes, there is a meeting with your general."

"Why?" Her face drained of color. "What's new? What did they find?"

June 18
Tactical Command Center
30° 21' 1.5660"
34° 50' 48.7428"
Negev Desert, Israel

"Sergeants, what do you see?"

Chin in her palm, Rosalie studied the three-dimensional rendering projected from the flat, digitized sand table situated between them. A range of desert-shaded plateaus and mountains ran across the northern and eastern regions of the map, creating a vast spider web of canyons and dried out watercourses. As the curving lines moved east, they flattened and dissolved into a wide, arid plain with not a hint of cover. Rocky cliffs and barely visible strips of beach bordered the southern coast. Here and there, villages and outposts sprinkled what inhabitable land existed.

"Terrain's a motherfucker." The gunny double-tapped the screen controls, zooming to the interior region near their primary target. "These sons of bitches know what they're doing. Look at this… One route in…" Zooming further in, she pointed at a thin, manmade trail that hugged tight to the sides of the canyon walls and terminated at what appeared to be just another plateau. But there was nothing natural about that block of desert brown. And unfortunately, none of the recon drones had been able to penetrate its camouflage, either.

"It'll be a bitch to go in from the north," she added, gesturing to the wide band of sheer, solid rock walls. "Or the west. I'd say our best bet is somewhere in here… to the southeast a ways out. What do you think, Bear-man?"

Chucking an inch-thick file to the side, Emmett stepped up to the table. He stared down at the image, quickly evaluating the rough terrain. After a second of contemplation, he touched a small, brightly lit LCD panel along the table's edge, and the scene abruptly rotated, tilting 20 degrees on its Z-axis. "Agreed," he said as he flipped the topographical plane again, searching for the better view that didn't exist. "We'll have to do a drop, unless you want to do a beach landing. Means a hell of a lot further to go, though." He made a sour face. "And fuck, Captain, you know I hate getting my shit all soggy."

Lit only by the glow of map and the red button switch panels above the massive screens along the walls, the captain's expression was severe as he slowly straightened. "Just how do you think we're going to drop with a civilian?"

"Doc can piggy back me." Emmett shrugged. "Can't weigh much more than all the gear I hump every fuckin' day anyway. You think it'd be any easier dragging her through the surf?"

Edward didn't answer right away. Instead, he leaned down again, concentrating on the span between the southern shoreline and the camouflaged compound in the middle of the higher plateaus. The staff sergeant was right, he thought, quickly calculating the distance and time. And he was definitely right about Dr. Swan. The woman weighed about as much as a matchstick, not that he'd noticed. But either way, an amphibious landing was off the table.

"Tink? How close can we get?"

The lieutenant's head popped up from a stack of flight paths. With a quick push off the table, she crossed the room to join them, picking her way through the dark to the side opposite Emmett, and squatted level with the screen. "You can probably get a Black Hawk," she said, tilting her chin. "Or a maybe a Super Huey down in that hole, but it won't be quiet, not even with stealth panels and blades. Too much echo off the rock."

"Then where?"

"We'd need to drop up top, say… 5 klicks out." Standing, Alice skimmed a short pink nail across the landscape, stopping on a small flat square of dirt on top of an adjacent plateau. "That'd be a decent extraction point too."

The captain nodded once, a quick, all-business dip of his chin, before glancing over his shoulder to the gray-eyed corporal hunched over a desk in the back of the room. "Anything new?"

"Not yet, sir." Hidden behind a high-tech, multi-screen workstation set up against the far wall, Jasper squinted at one of the screens and frowned. "Langley's dragging ass on gettin' the last round of shots. But, Captain…" The frown deepened. "I don't like what I'm seeing so far."

Edward's jaw rolled and his voice came out like a punch. "Elaborate."

When Jasper clicked the touchpad, one of the large wall-mounted screens behind them flickered to life and briefly lit the darkened room. "You see that?" His pointer hovered over a five-car train of white SUVs en route to the compound. All late model Range Rovers from the looks of them. "Now look at that." Another almost-identical line of white SUVs appeared in a second shot. "And that," he said, clicking again. "Every single day, same vehicles been coming in and out. Like clockwork."

Moving closer, intent on the series of overheads, Rosalie asked, "Where are they coming from?"

Jasper's fingers flew across the keyboard, sending up another cluster of photographs. With each frame, the harsh, natural landscape vanished, replaced by an endless tile work of brown and tan squares separated by a network of narrow streets and darker alleys.

"Ah, damn it!" Emmett muttered, running a quick, irritated hand over his scalp. "I fuckin' hate that city."

With a soft chuckle, Alice danced around the sand table, sidled up close, and slugged him in the bicep. "You hate lots of things, Big Man."

"Whatever." Still preoccupied by the screen, Emmett gave a haphazard swipe, hitting nothing but air when the lieutenant quickly sidestepped and ducked under his arm. "That place…" He shook his head and spat. "Goddamnit. I swore I'd never go back there."

"Oh, come on, it wasn't that bad."

"Fuck that," he growled. "Last time, I came out of there with a lung full of sand and a shoulder full of lead." The staff sergeant smacked the right side of his chest to make a point. "Couldn't they have picked somewhere else? Somewhere nice for once?"

Alice snorted, palming a leftover water bottle lid from a nearby desk. "What? Like the Bahamas?"

"Man, I wish." A meaty fist shot out, closing around the lieutenant's plastic arsenal when she flicked it. "You gotta admit, though, it would be a nice change of pace."

Without a hint of grace, Alice plopped down into an old, busted up office chair. She twisted sideways, kicked her boots over the armrest, and wrinkled her nose. "Nah…" Even quicker than the staff sergeant, she plucked the returning lid out of the air no more than an inch away from her face. "I really don't want to see you in swimming trunks."

Emmett just rolled his eyes and leaned against the edge of the table, one ankle over the other. "You only wish."

"No, seriously," Alice fired back, palm flying to her throat as she faked a shuddering gag. "I don't need to see that shit… like ever." She shivered again. But then she glanced over to the tall gunnery sergeant, who was still poring over the scenes on the monitors and pretending that they didn't exist for all she was worth. Alice's lips curled up. "Now… I bet Blon–"

"Okay! Never fucking mind!" Before Alice could start up again, the big man jumped forward, grabbed the back of her chair, giving it a hard rattle, and roughly spun her like a top. The chair squawked in protest but it still made a solid four rotations before finally slowing to a stop. When it did, the lieutenant just leaned back and folded her arms behind her head, unperturbed, unapologetic, and still wearing the same evil grin. "Awesome. Do it again."

"Jazz," Edward went on, ignoring Emmett's and Alice's never-ending banter. Dodging the sand table, he strode through a graveyard of rickety chairs and approached the screen. Stopping beside Rosalie, his hands dropped to his hips, assuming an all-too familiar pose. "That fourth pic, zoom in on that caravan."

The corporal made quick work of the shot, cutting out what noise the software could handle and filling in the missing pixels. The image wavered and blurred, but then with another stroke of the keyboard, the lines sharpened enough that Edward could read the black Range Rover lettering written across the tops of the noses.

"That as low as you can go?" the gunny asked.

"Yep, that's it. All you can really get is straight down. Not even half a plate, if they've even got 'em at all. With all the high rocks around, there's too much shadow and shit and the angles are all wrong."

"Damn it."

"Can't grab any of the targets to compare against that initial set either. No clue if that blond fucker is there or not." Jasper's pointer moved from vehicle to vehicle. "See, all the windows are tinted and they always keep 'em rolled up." A new image came up on an adjacent screen, an enhanced cutout of another photo. "Best I got was a fuzzy pic through the windshield of a newspaper sitting on the dashboard. USA Today, of all things."

Edward blew out an aggravated breath. "Can you get 'em when they're exiting?"

"Sorry, Captain. I got nothing in that compound. They've camo'd that shit up tight. And in the city, they pull up under a carriage house type of entryway. Like Blondie said, they're not stupid. Whoever this is, they're pros, all the way."

"What about the building itself?" Edward's focus bounced from image to image, committing every last detail to memory. "Tell me we've got something there."

"Oh, yeah. Definitely."

Another series of shots flipped to the top of the deck, quickly centering in on a large, white, flat-top roof located in the far western sector where the city's handful of larger homes and villas hid behind thick concrete walls and iron fences. In other words, a regular Who's Who neighborhood of crooked politicians, warlords, and arms dealers.

Like its neighbors, the target villa was heavily fortified, with double-coiled razor wire along the top of the perimeter wall and covered turrets securing each corner. At least half a dozen private guards, all in black fatigues and carrying wood-trimmed automatics – seasoned mercenaries from the looks of them – roamed the rooftop of the main house, as well as two smaller buildings located across the courtyard. A kidney-shaped pool with bright teal water – the height of luxury in this godforsaken place – sat in the middle, surrounded by a line of perfectly ordered loungers.

Jasper stood with a stretch and crack of his back and moved out from around the workstation. "Place belongs to some businessman out of Europe. CIA says the paperwork and shit is buried under an alias, so we don't have a name yet. But the European connection fits with what Laurent told you." With a tip and twist of his chin, the younger man's neck let out a volley of cringe-worthy pops. "No worries, though, I'm working on it separately. El'azar called in a favor and gave me a serious contact at King Saul Boulevard, so I've got inquiries in there. I'll have something credible by the end of the day."

Just as the captain started to answer, the outside door creaked open, introducing a pale gray strip of light that stretched across the entire length of the darkened room. A pair of shadows slipped through – one wide, familiar, and a head taller, the other no less unmistakable.

"Seren?"

"Speak of the devil, and he appears," Edward muttered, raking a hand through his hair.

"Eh, better the devil you know than the one you don't. Isn't that the phrase?" El'azar tapped his forefinger to his head in mock salute. "And Boker Tov to you, too."

With one last fleeting look at the bank of screens, Edward turned to the corporal. "Keep on those idiots at Langley, but don't wait on 'em. You do whatever you need to and if you get any pushback, let me know." His voice dropped low. "I want every goddamned thing we can get on that compound and whoever owns those SUVs. And I don't give a fuck how we get it."

"Will do, sir."

One hand light against the small of her back, the major motioned Bella forward. "Your delivery, O Mighty One."

Just inside the door, Bella paused, giving herself a moment to adjust. It took a handful of slow blinks before shapes began to form out of the darkness. A handful more, and she could finally see well enough to name their location.

All the way across the room, behind the captain and his gunny, a floor to ceiling bank of computer monitors, all larger than her living room flatscreen at home, occupied an entire wall. To the right, was a long row of modern workstations, each station decked out with arrays of smaller screens and double keyboards, and to the left, a wide whiteboard hung, surrounded on all sides by a half a dozen paper maps. Beat up chairs and random tables littered the tiled floor.

But it was what sat in the very center that grabbed Bella's attention. Drawn to the glow from the strange horizontal screen, she took a careful step forward and then slowly threaded her way through the maze. Ignoring the Marines in the room, fascinated by the translucent, three-dimensional topographical interpretation that seemed to literally jump out at her, Bella leaned over the sand table. She reached down, gingerly, grinning like a cat when the image parted like curtains around her hand.

"That's… pretty slick."

"It's handy, yes."

Bella's head shot up, searching. She stopped, however, when her scan landed on the screens to Edward's immediate right. "That's… a satellite shot?" Wheels turning, she licked her lips and swallowed. "Holy shit. Remind me to never, ever, ever go outside again."

Edward's lips threatened to curve at her parted ones as he came up beside her. He studied their scientist in the glowing light for a long, quiet moment before that almost-smile turned down quick when he caught the plum-gray swipes of color in the hollows of her eyes.

So softly she almost didn't hear, Edward said, "You didn't sleep enough."

"Couldn't." She chewed her bottom lip before extending something in his direction. "Here, I brought you this."

"What is it?" he asked, not looking away from her tired, pretty face as his palm locked around something smooth, cylindrical, and warm.

One brow jumped up in a graceful arc. "Coffee."

Hearing his own words echoed back at him, the captain bit back a laugh – a first for the day, or maybe even the week – as he peeled off the lid. "Touché, Doctor, touché, but… thank you."

Expecting the usual Israeli-special, Edward slugged back a shot with a preparatory wince, only to choke when his tongue met something else altogether. This time it was his jaw that dropped. "Where the hell did you get this?!"

Fighting a smile, Bella thumbed toward El'azar, who'd taken up residence on a desk beside Alice. Covering her mouth, the lieutenant whispered something to the major that made him slap his hand against his thigh and laugh. "That guy. He promised me." A second later, Bella's face twisted toward Edward. "Did you know he's married?"

Edward gulped back half his coffee.

"You did," she accused, shoving as much scandal into her voice as she could.

"Maybe," he said after a second gulp.

"You two are just… unbelievable." Shaking her head, Bella grumbled something under her breath – something about men and humor and baseball bats – before cutting herself off mid-sentence. "Let me guess… he has kids, too."

"Three little girls." Edward gave her a rare second of a grin, looking half a decade younger and nothing like the weary, battle-worn man she'd witnessed in the mountains. Gone were the bruises and blood and voice haunted by horrors. No, he was again the freshly shaven, straight-shouldered commander, and she couldn't help but replay the conversation she and El'azar had had before breakfast. With another flash of a smile, Edward tossed back the rest of his coffee, crumpled the paper cup, and launched it across the room, hitting the Israeli square in the chest. "And for full disclosure, one of them plans to marry me."

El'azar belted a laugh and batted the paper back, missing by a mile. "Sorry, Captain. You're, as they say, old news. Tan's moved on to that Beaver kid."

A muffled, accidental, "It's Bieber," came from the left, where the staff sergeant stared a hole through a stack of paperwork. The room went deathly silent, broken only when Rosalie made a noise somewhere between a cough and a snort and Alice simultaneously erupted into a fit of girlish giggles.

"Whatever his name is." El'azar fingered the knife by his hip with a huff. "I see one more poster in her bedroom and I will most surely kill him."

"Fine by me."

A few minutes and a dozen jokes at Emmett's expense later, waiting for the signal from the general, Bella reached down into her cargo pocket, withdrew her journal, and quietly asked the captain, "You have a second?"

His eyes, astute, intense, and bright even in the shadows, flew to hers. "What do you have?"

Moving over to a nearby wooden table and gesturing for him to follow, Bella cracked open her journal. "I spent some time reanalyzing the paperwork we recovered, as well as the diagrams that had been erased from the whiteboard," she explained. Fingers shaking, she sped through the handwritten pages, this time not bothering to stop until she hit the last one. "You see that?" Her finger traced the telltale outline. "What does that look like to you?"

Standing perpendicular, Edward leaned in close enough that the air felt a little warmer. Bella took an involuntary breath, and the same faint, masculine scent that lingered on the jacket she wore overwhelmed the staleness of dust and hot electronics.

"Missile. Maybe short-range," he finally answered, reaching down to flatten the page. When his fingertips skimmed the back of her hand, they both stilled, but neither moved away.

"Not just any missile." Bella took a shaky breath. "Think SS-1."

"How do you know that?"

"You've heard the old saying, with brilliance comes eccentricity, right?" she started, slow at first but gaining speed. It reminded Edward of the determined excitement he'd witnessed when she and Jasper tore apart her NVGs and found a way to read the unreadable.

"Riley was both of those. Brilliant and definitely, without a doubt, eccentric," she went on. A strand of hair escaped Bella's ponytail and snagged on her lip. Distracted, she shoved it out of her face, only to have it fall back down the second she tilted her head. When her hand lifted to repeat the motion, the captain beat her to it, rolling the silky strands between two fingers before carefully tucking it behind her ear.

"Go on, Doctor," he told her, his voice low and strangely soft.

"It's proportional."

Edward's forehead folded. "How do you mean?"

"He was obsessive about proportion in rendering – drawings, schematics, diagrams, whatever. If it came out of his pen, it was already to scale. And he had to have a picture in front of him to work. Riley couldn't think otherwise and he'd obsess until he'd gotten it perfect. It's probably why they gave him that whiteboard in the first place." Bella stared off into space, eyes suddenly glassy. "He was probably going crazy without it."

When Edward's fingertips brushed across the back of her hand again, Bella's gaze dropped to the page. "Look at the shape of it," she whispered. "It's right around 13 to 14:1, height over diameter."

Edward stared at the drawing, following the lines as he ran through years' worth of study and real life practice. "There's only a handful of missiles that meet that criteria."

She nodded. "Exactly. Couple that with the taper and the fins on the tail… it has to be either an old Scud or some variant built off the same platform. I'm sure there's a black market for old Soviet weapons, not to mention all the copycats out of Iran and North Korea, but… maybe it narrows down the field…"

"It does. It also gives us a radius for the potential launch sites. We're talking… only a few hundred miles, so they're going to have to have a plan to get it in the country or off the coast. Excell–"

"That's not all, Captain. See that centerline drawn inside the warhead?" Bella pointed to the thin, dotted line that split the head down the middle.

"Yeah, looks like a rupture plate to me. Like what they used to use in the old Bigeye bombs."

"I think so, too." Bella rubbed the grit off her face with a grimace. "That's one of the methods you can use to load up VX. Two precursors, one on each side. You rig a trigger – time, airspeed, or something like that – and the plate will fail mid-flight, allowing the two components to mix and react." A pang pulsed across her temples. "By the time the warhead strikes, it's at full strength with a shitload of pressure behind it…"

Edward swore. "They can do the same with XR-5?"

Bella's throat bobbed and she hugged one arm around her middle. "VX is what I used for the basis when I came up with it to start with. They behave almost identically because they're structured so similarly. XR-5 is like…"

"A bad ass bigger brother."

"Pretty much… that's precisely what it is. Just much bigger. And much more bad ass."

"Dr. Swan?" he said when Bella abruptly looked down again. He waited until her chin came up, but those sharp, intelligent eyes of hers stayed glued to the table. His hand covered hers, gently squeezing and forcing them back up. "This isn't your fau–"

"Captain?" Jasper called from across the room.

Swearing again, Edward reluctantly backed away, only then realizing just how close they'd been. He turned to the corporal. "You got something?"

"One of those inquiries just paid off."

"A name?"

"Not quite." The screen closest flickered blue, and then in its center the same grainy shot the CIA had handed over that day in the general's office appeared. Jasper slid the photograph over, adding a second beside it. Only this one was far less dark and far less fuzzy.

Set against a white plaster backdrop, the male target was no more than forty with long, stringy blond hair pulled together at the nape. Prominent, hawk-billed nose, deep-set eyes, and with a heavy ridged scar down his right cheek, he wore the demeanor and lethal grace to match the weapons tucked behind his waistband. "That was taken outside that villa in Mogadishu two days ago," Jasper said as he brought up a handful of other images, each one showing the very same man. "That's pretty clear confirmation, don't you think?"

"Agreed." Edward took in the man's easy but ready gait, the set of his shoulders, the knowledge in his gaze, and he knew that initial assessment was dead on.

Another screen lit up. "And there's this one, too."

Near one of the small buildings across the villa's courtyard, a group of militants in black fatigues – the same mercenaries who guarded the rooftops – gathered around the blond. It was the best full face shot they had, but that wasn't what now commanded Edward's attention.

Standing in the far corner, half hidden beneath an awning and partially covered by a charcoal scarf, stood a new figure.

A woman. And he could just make out the wild mane of her fiery red curls.

When he started to move closer to the screen, five slender fingers suddenly locked around Edward's forearm. Edward glanced down just in time to see Bella point, mouth agape, and hear her say, "I know her!"

.

.

.

Notes:

Hebrew (transliterated):

Neshama – recall from chapter 4, means "soul" and is used kind of like darling.

Ma? – huh? What?

Lahav –blade, or flame. Figuratively, a sharply polished blade or point of a weapon.

Neshomeleh – another term of endearment that means something like sweetheart.

Yehiyeh Asher Yehiyeh – what will be will be.

Bli Safek – without a doubt

Boker Tov – means good morning.

Glossary:

Afterburner – if you ever see a bright red fireball that looks like it's in a fighter jet's exhaust pipe, more than likely that's an afterburner in use. Basically, it's an extra combuster that can be tacked on to a military jet's main powerplant downstream of the turbine to increase thrust. It's not at all fuel efficient, but it's a feature that can be turned on for limited periods of time to help with short / fast take-offs or when an extra boost is needed in-flight. For example, a normal F-16 turbofan might produce around 18,000 pound-force of thrust, but with full afterburner, that cranks up to around 30,000 or so.

Binary Chemical Weapon – because of the instability and reactivity of some chemical weapons compounds, including nerve agents like sarin and VX, it's sometimes safer/easier to synthesize the toxic material after the weapon has been deployed. To do this, two final precursors are loaded into two sections of the warhead, separated by some kind of physical partition. A control mechanism is applied, which when specified, will remove the partition and thus cause the two precursors to mix and react together inside the warhead mid-flight and prior to detonation.

Black Hawk – or the Sikorsky UH-60 utility helicopter, used primarily by the US Army. There are numerous utility and special purpose variants and configurations. Two specially modified stealth Black Hawks were used in the raid on Osama bin Laden. As an aside, one of my favorite movies is Black Hawk Down.

King Saul Boulevard – is a reference to the Mossad headquarters, located just off that street in Tel Aviv.

L/D – is just a common way engineers of varying disciplines refer to the ratio of the length of an object to its diameter. Something with a high L/D means the object is tall and skinny. A low L/D means it's short and squatty.

Missile – is a generic name for any self-propelled, guided weapon. There are several types, meant for varying purposes, but they all generally have the following main parts: an engine and fuel (to move it), a flight system (to drive it), a targeting system (to tell it what to hit), and a warhead (to destroy its target). Shape-wise, they're almost always cylindrical with a cone-shaped warhead on top, but dimensions can vary quite a bit. Ranges vary from a hundred meters or so in the case of small anti-tank missiles like the FGM-148 Javelin all the way up to intercontinental, such as in the case of the LGM-30 Minuteman III ICBM. The names Bella listed (Ghazani. Rodong. Shahab. Scud) are all tactical ballistics missiles, capable of around 300 km or so, and can be fitted with a variety of warheads, including high explosive, incendiary, chemical, radiological, penetrating, etc.

Sand table – is an old term for using sand/dirt/rocks/etc in a confined area to create small-scale maps or mock-ups for educational and/or coordination purposes. They're used to model terrain, plan artillery and troop movements, target locations, etc. Today's "sand tables" can be rather sophisticated, using the latest and greatest imaging hardware and software in lieu of actual sand or dirt. But even today out on battlefields, units may make their own quick planning maps using by drawing in the dirt.

Super Huey – or the Bell UH-1Y Venom utility helicopter, used currently only by the USMC. It will eventually replace the Corps' UH-1N Twin Hueys.