Free First Team by Jim DeFelice, Larry Bond

had to leave the car about a mile from the house. They slipped it in under some trees, obscuring it from the Russian helicopter patrols; as a precaution against thieves Rankin pulled the wire from the coil and took it with him.
     
    Conners gazed at the stars as they walked, trying to orient the unfamiliar sky against his faded memory of an astronomy course he’d taken in high school a million years before. There was a time when knowing the stars would have been a critical talent on a deep insertion like this; compass, sextant, and a clear sky would help you work out where you were. But GPS gear had made the math obsolete; now the stars were just pretty things to look at.
     
    When they were a little less than a half mile from the farm building, they spread out into the field, approaching slowly to make sure they weren’t walking into an ambush. Guns told the Chechen to stay with him—and to stay nearby. He didn’t bother threatening the man with his submachine gun; their informant wasn’t happy but had already proven he was the sort of man who would stick around as long as the hundred-dollar bills kept appearing.
     
    Even when the infrared glasses told them the building was empty, they moved in cautiously, looking for booby traps and signs that someone had been there. They found neither. Ferg divided them into two shifts—him and Conners, Guns and Rankin—and told them they’d catch some Zs, Guns and Rankin first. Their guest took a sleeping bag and curled up in the corner of the basement; Guns and Rankin tied his hands and feet together, then positioned themselves so he’d have to step on one of them to sneak out.
     
    Upstairs, Ferguson swung the antenna up on the sat phone and called home.
     
    “Ferg?” asked a female voice on the other end.
     
    “Actually it’s Joe Stalin,” he told Lauren DiCapri, Corrigan’s relief on the desk. “If I sound a little faint, it’s because it’s damn hot down here in hell, even with the air conditioners cranked.”
     
    “You’re real late checking in. Major Corrigan was worried. I’m supposed to call him at home.”
     
    “Major’s not an honorary title,” Ferguson told her. “You don’t keep it after they kick you out, especially on a dishonorable discharge.”
     
    “How are things going?”
     
    “Shitty. I have some GPS coordinates on a guerrilla camp near here where our source is. I need satellite snaps ASAP. Not just library stuff—I need an 8X,” he added, requesting an up-to-date and detailed satellite image of the target area.
     
    “This is where you think Kiro is?”
     
    “Yeah.”
     
    “I have more information on him.”
     
    “Let me read you the coordinates first,” said Ferg. He actually didn’t “read” them—he’d recorded them using the phone’s GPS gear earlier and merely had to hit a key combination to send them over to her.
     
    “Got ‘em,” she said, as the transmission went through.
     
    “So how come the camp wasn’t in our brief?” he said.
     
    He could hear her checking back through their files to see.
     
    “Um, you’d have to ask Corrigan,” she said. “The notes here are that there was activity and probably a base.”
     
    “Cross out ‘probably.’”
     
    “It’s possible that the Russians don’t know.”
     
    “Right.”
     
    “FSB doesn’t.”
     
    “That I believe.”
     
    “Let me tell you about Kiro,” said Lauren.
     
    “Make it dirty.”
     
    “Is that supposed to be funny?”
     
    “It’s late over here.”
     
    “Kiro is on the FBI wanted list. He’s gotten al-Qaida funding and blew up the Carousel Mall in Syracuse, New York, more than a year ago. We want him. Slott’s already approved an extraction.”
     
    “I think we just got hit with a sunspot,” Ferguson said. “I’m in Chechnya, but you just said something about New York.”
     
    More patiently than Corrigan would have, Lauren explained that Kiro was believed to be Muhammad al Aberrchmof, an Islamic militant