Free Jet by Russell Blake Page A

control. I’ll get back to you.”
    “Roger. Out,” she murmured.
    She continued watching the villa through her sniper rifle’s high-powered scope. Even though she was two hundred and fifty yards away, hidden on the roof of a construction site, she could still see the activity in the principal rooms. Whoever was running the security must have believed that throwing bodies at the problem would be sufficient, and hadn’t thought to shutter the windows. The ten-foot-high walls surrounding the main house probably had a lot to do with their sense of invulnerability. Besides which, nobody knew about this meeting, or would have recognized the men in the room, all of whom had been in Algeria for less than eight hours.
    Nobody, that is, except her team.
    It had been well over a year since she’d taken part in an operation with the full group, which was minus Rain, the code name of the operative who had gone into deep cover in Yemen six months prior.
    Jet, Tiger, Fire and Lightning had been called into this when Ariel had been alerted that five terrorist financiers were going to be meeting for an unprecedented conference on neutral ground. Such a gathering presented an irresistible opportunity – the chance to cut off funding to any number of terrorist organizations, many of which viewed Israel as Satan’s embodiment on earth.
    The planning was as good as it could be with six days advance notice. Resources had been allocated, personnel had been scrambled, and the team had been assembled and deployed.
    One of the negatives from Jet’s perspective had been the source of the intel. The CIA had alerted them and had insisted on an observer who could represent its interests. The condition hadn’t been negotiable. The combination of a short timeframe and the presence of an outsider hadn’t sat well with Jet or any of the rest of the team, but in the end it wasn’t their call.
    And now she was on a roof in North Africa, staring through a Hensoldt ZF 4 scope at a heavily fortified group that looked like it was ready for trouble. This wasn’t her ideal scenario. She preferred surgical strikes to brute force, but sometimes circumstances didn’t permit it.
    The earbud chirped, and then Fire’s voice returned.
    “We’re to hit them as soon as possible. Everyone is now in position. Engagement to occur in two minutes. Repeat. Engagement in two minutes. Are there any questions?”
    The com line went silent for several seconds.
    “Negative,” Jet said, and then a chorus of other voices, all male, repeated her statement.
    She depressed the timer button on her watch and waited. This would be a relatively clean operation if things went well. If they executed properly, there was no chance that any of the bad guys would make it out alive. Still, the team liked backup. On a mission this big, they couldn’t afford anything going wrong.
    At exactly the two-minute mark, a streak of flame shot from a building eighty yards away from Jet, where Fire and Lightning were concealed with a Kornet 9M133F-1 guided rocket armed with a thermobaric warhead.
    The dining room of the villa exploded outwards in a shower of glass, steel and white-hot flame – a direct hit had gutted the room. Jet peered through the scope as the guards stood stunned, first gaping at the destruction, and then alternating between darting towards the burning villa and sprinting for their vehicles. She watched as three of the men huddled and one pointed at Fire and Lightning’s hiding place with a radio raised to his lips, then four men ran for a van toting assault rifles.
    She tapped her earbud. “Alpha, you have heat headed your way. Repeat. You were spotted.”
    “Roger. Lay down cover for as long as you can, then get the hell out of there.”
    “Will do. Delta out.”
    Jet squinted through her scope and fired at one of the three men, obviously the supervisor of the guard detail, and took him out. The rifle’s stock slammed her shoulder, but she ignored the recoil and