Chapter 1
The red warning lights inside the MH-47 Chinook chopped the dark cabin into bleeding slices of reality as we climbed toward ten thousand feet over the Yemeni mountains.
My name is Taylor Vance. Staff Sergeant, United States Navy, Tier 1 SEAL — the first woman to wear the trident, which was a fact that meant something to me and very little to Commander Thomas Hayes, who was currently leaning close enough that I could feel the heat of his breath against my ear over the rotor noise.
"That museum piece is going to get my men killed," Hayes said, his hand slamming down onto the chassis of my modified M110 K1. "This is an urban sweep. You should be carrying the HK416, not a fourteen-pound fishing rod chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor. It's too long, too heavy, and a death sentence in tight quarters."
I looked at him. I looked at the rifle in my hands. I did not argue, because argument was not going to produce anything useful at ten thousand feet over terrain we had been studying for eleven days, and because the reason I was carrying what I was carrying was not something I could explain to Hayes in the two minutes before insertion in a way he would accept without the evidence I was about to give him.
So I gripped the rifle and kept my mouth shut.
The target was a man named Tariq Al-Hassan, who ran a compound in the mountains east of Sana'a with the specific organizational discipline of someone who had been expecting company. The mission was the extraction of Jonathan Cole — burned CIA officer, callsign Kestrel — who had been held for nine days in conditions that the intelligence package described carefully and that I had read three times before declining to read a fourth.
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I had been selected for the mission because of my range qualification scores, which were the highest in the task force at that time, and because the terrain analysis had identified a possible overwatch requirement at distance that the standard kit could not service. Hayes had read the same terrain analysis and had concluded that the requirement was theoretical. I had read it and concluded it was not.
These were the positions we arrived at the compound holding.
