Impossible Odds

that would give warning of a hostile presence. The SEALs all landed safely in one of the flat zones between mounds of scrub brush and the scraggly acacia trees not far from “The International City of Adado,” an oblong cluster of low-roofed buildings stretched about a mile in length and perhapshalf that in width. Its sparse population was a definite asset to the SEAL team. Unlike urban missions, in this one there would be no hordes of local fighters to spill out of nearby houses and plague the rescue. On this night there were no sounds but the faint noises of the squad switching out of their birdman rigs and into overland travel mode.
    The land was so dark at that hour that naked human eyes were useless beyond arm’s length. To the extent that the men remained silent in the inkpad blackness, they were invisible. But for those with state-of-the-art optical equipment, each man was marked by an infrared beacon on his helmet. To one another they were brightly apparent and far less likely to draw friendly fire.
    Within minutes, the two dozen SEAL warriors had stowed their gear and prepped for the silent hike to their target objective. They already knew they would be facing high-powered Kalishnikov assault rifles. Their sixty-pound vests included heavy ballistic plates for additional protection that could sometimes repel AK-47 rounds, under ideal circumstances. Because of them, pistol rounds, ricocheted rifle rounds, and even knife attacks were less of a threat.
    But ballistic plates and Kevlar helmets offer scant protection against heavy-gauge rifle fire. Each of the SEAL operatives knew the enemy had been seen with heavy machine guns, and they knew the kidnappers were financed well enough to possess Russian-made RPG-7 rocket launchers. A single round could take out a large portion of the attack force and eliminate the hostages at the same time. These heavy weapons meant all of the captors had to be incapacitated with such speed there would be no time to put such things into play.
    The SEAL attackers knew they were about to face such weapons because of detailed information gathered over the past three months. Each SEAL even wore desert camouflage matched to the local background. But these were the men you don’t see coming. Ifthey properly executed their careful plan there would be no need to hide. By the time daylight arrived they would have attacked unseen and disappeared in the same fashion.
    Of all the SEAL team’s weaponry, their best protection on this night was offered by their night vision capability. Better to see and avoid the enemy than have to deal with his bullets. In the most advanced available version, four infrared vision tubes instead of the usual two allowed for a better field of vision. They rendered depth perception superior to anything else in the field. They would clearly reveal the details of the photograph each man carried of their American quarry. The picture could identify her if she couldn’t speak for herself.
    The mission plan was to arrive at the site deep in the night, long after the new shift came on duty and the guards’ nerves were relaxed, their senses dulled. This might offer only the smallest battle advantage, but the SEAL team worked with whatever they could get.
    The challenge facing the SEAL warriors had been put to them by their commander-in-chief because of the enormous national prestige at stake, but they were expected to ignore political pressures in the execution of the mission. No matter what the political players might have to say about it, everyone involved knew the only definition of success for this mission was to annihilate the kidnappers before they could harm or kill the two hostages—and to do it without killing the hostages themselves.
    Once they were given the mission and cut loose, it didn’t matter who had sent them. The attack would be sudden, harsh, and unrelenting.
    Any assault force can minimize the risk of stray rounds by cutting down the number of bullets fired. But while knife attacks from the SEAL team might guarantee the hostages weren’t exposed to friendly fire, blades alone couldn’t be trusted to get the job done quickly enough to prevent any cries of alarm.
    Thus it was unlikely the SEAL team could thin the opposition by selecting the closest few guards and surprising them with blades to their throats while they slept. The potential silence-breaker would come from that one guy who didn’t die on the first slice and managed to get his hand