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It’s what I’m here for. It’s not like I did this for a boondoggle to Hawaii or something.” I started packing, saying again, “She’ll understand.”
    Knuckles finished what he was doing and walked out of the room, saying, “That’s what I said before my divorce.”
    I shouted at his back, “You married a stripper when you were nineteen! She left you three months after you tied the knot! Heather will understand.”
    Knuckles had already left the room, leaving me to say the last part as more of an affirmation than a fact. I stared at my kit, wondering if I was making a huge mistake. Knuckles was good. He was ready. I had been training him to take over after this tour anyway. I truly believed he could do it, but I also knew that the transition was six months early, and while he had the raw talent, he hadn’t been a team leader inside the Taskforce. An Omega operation wasn’t the time for him to figure out what that meant. The risks were too great. On top of that, the team—any team—develops its own personality, driven by the team leader. The members weren’t plug and play. We were clicking because of my leadership style. I’m not saying it was perfect, or even the best, but that was irrelevant. They were used to me, and now wasn’t the time to switch horses. It was one more birthday, but after this, I would be at them all.

9
    Tbilisi, Georgia
Four Days Later
     
    I heard my earpiece crackle, then the words I was waiting for: “Pike, Hedgehog is on the move. Should be passing you in about one minute.”
    I was sitting on a patio just off Rustaveli Street in downtown Tbilisi, sipping my coffee like the seven other patrons around me. I had to physically fight to suppress a smile. I absolutely loved this work and would have done it for free. I looked at my watch, realizing with a pang of guilt that today was Angie’s birthday. I consoled myself that I had made the right call. Kurt had been wrong. Azzam was going down tonight or not at all. If I had stayed behind, the team would have been forced to either conduct the operation without its full complement of people, including their team leader, or miss the opportunity altogether. Given the stakes, they might have attempted it, but odds were they would have decided to pass, wasting a year’s worth of work.
    “Roger. Break—break. Knuckles, this is Pike. Hedgehog’s headed home. You have execute authority.”
    “Roger all. About time.”
    Muslim names are always long, drawn-out, impossible-to-say things. Being the Ugly Americans, we usually gave a nickname to whoever we were tracking just to clean things up. Sometimes it’s simply his initials, as in UBL for Usama bin Laden, or AMZ for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Other times, it’s because the guy reminds us of someone. We had taken to calling Azzam the “Hedgehog” due to his remarkable resemblance to the porn star Ron Jeremy.
    Azzam was currently conducting a complicated Internet dance of challenge and counterchallenge with the Chechen who was providing the radiological material to ensure that each was who he said he was, and that neither was the enemy. The Chechen himself had entered Georgia through the contested Pankisi Gorge, with onward travel into Tbilisi. Intelligence indicators showed they were planning on conducting the transaction no earlier than a week from now, which ordinarily would have given me plenty of time to plan a detailed operation.
    Unfortunately, the Georgian interior police, with the help of a few choice pieces of intelligence from the United States, were set to arrest the Chechen tonight. This forced us to take down Azzam as well, as he would flee once he got word that the Chechen had been captured. You’d think we could just tell the Georgians to hold off, but the truth was that, while Georgia was a staunch ally of the United States, my team was inside the country without their knowledge. The Georgians had no idea about Azzam, and I’d just as soon keep it that way. Let them have