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when he first saw her fight.
    Brogan was Australian. Her country was overrun, her parents killed. If anybody had a reason to hate the aliens, she did. But she didn’t let emotion control her actions. Not at all. She was clinical in everything she did. She was a by-the-book soldier, but the “book” that she followed existed for areason. Many men and women had died so that the military could develop methods and rules for combat. She had never been selected for officer school, which surprised Chisnall, but she had quickly earned promotion to sergeant and was invaluable in that role. This mission was a chance for her to strike back at those who had killed her parents.
    Trianne Price was a ghost. The Kiwi Phantom. She could move through the night like a soft breath of wind, and even if you were looking for her, you would be lucky to notice that she was there. You never saw her coming; you never knew she’d been. That ability had got her selected for this, the first ever Angel Team recon operation. Chisnall knew little about her except that she had had a tough childhood. There were scars on the light coffee-colored skin of her arms, some of which looked like cigarette burns. She seldom talked about her upbringing, but, like Hunter, she had been forged in the fires of her youth. Her way of avoiding pain was to simply avoid being seen. To not be noticed. She was very good at it.
    But it was strange how the Bzadians had left New Zealand alone. A small country, sure, but right on their doorstep. It would have been like taking candy from a baby. Yet they hadn’t. Could the New Zealand government have entered in some kind of secret pact with the aliens? It seemed unlikely.
    Blake Wilton was Canadian. A champion snowboarder with an unusually wide face and small eyes. Wilton had been selected for one reason only. He was the best shot in the battalion, and that included the adult soldiers in the other recon teams. A specialist sharpshooter, but kind of a weird guy. Heoperated on a different wavelength than the rest of the team. Chisnall often thought Wilton felt he had to prove himself as tough as the others in order to be accepted. But it really wasn’t that that set him apart—he was just a little different. Chisnall had had to weigh up the odds carefully before including him on the team, but in the end it came down to his shooting. A rifle in Wilton’s hands was worth ten in anyone else’s.
    That left Specialist Panyoczki, Janos, known as Monster. The crazy, squat, barrel-chested Hungarian. His family’s escape from war-torn Hungary was the stuff of nightmares, and perhaps because of that he took life by the neck and squeezed every drop out of it. His jovial exterior did not quite hide a fearless, resourceful individual. And his sheer physical power made him invaluable in those kinds of situations where brute force was the only answer. Surely a spy or a traitor would try to be as unobtrusive as possible, and unobtrusive Monster definitely was not. Or was that the perfect cover?
    When Hunter had first arrived at Fort Carson, he had been ready to take on anyone who got in his way. He was on the verge of getting kicked out of camp, and Chisnall, recognizing some kind of potential in him, had tried to reason with him. Hunter had knocked Chisnall down. If not for Monster, Chisnall would have been in for a severe beating. But Monster had intervened and even Hunter was no match for the Hungarian. Somehow, after that, the three of them had become friends.
    Chisnall would have trusted any of the team with his life.He had trusted them all with his life. But one of them had betrayed that trust.
    Chisnall’s mind kept coming back to the hangar. If anybody could have slipped in and out of there without being noticed, it was Price.
    He had no evidence, though. And his gut instinct hardly even counted as a clue.
    The storm was a small one, just a baby compared to the huge sandstorms that could rage through the heart of Australia. Less than