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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2014 M.A. Lawson

PROLOGUE

It began with a text message.

Alpha texted Bravo and the burner phone in Bravo’s pocket vibrated. Bravo looked at the message: Transfer complete.

Bravo punched numbers into the same phone, calling Charlie. He let the receiving phone ring twice, then disconnected the call. No words were necessary.

The man designated as Charlie removed his phone from a leg pocket in his cargo pants, punched in five digits, and hit call—and a transformer at a substation half a kilometer away disintegrated, sending bolts of white light a hundred feet into the sky. Witnesses later said that lightning—on a clear, cloudless night—had struck the transformer.

Delta didn’t need a text message or a call to tell him to perform his task: the power going out in the compound was his signal. He put on night vision goggles and slipped into the house. He caught the old man just as he was coming out of his bedroom to investigate the power outage, and Delta slit his throat as if the old man were a newborn lamb. He dragged the body into a closet and left the house.

Delta called Bravo’s phone and it vibrated twice. Again no words were needed to tell Bravo that Delta had completed his mission.

Bravo didn’t use the burner phone for his next call. He used his personal phone, because it didn’t matter if his next call could be traced. He dialed a number and spoke for less than ten seconds. Then he counted slowly to sixty—sixty seconds should be plenty of time. If he was wrong, a man Bravo needed to live was going to die. At the count of sixty, he reached into his pocket and, without looking, punched the # key five times.

The package erupted inside the house. Stainless-steel ball bearings and roofing nails spread outward faster than the speed of sound, and an odorless flammable gel inside the package ignited. The people in the room, some sitting no more than two feet from the bomb, were ripped asunder in an instant. Their flesh was burning seconds after that.

Bravo was confident that no one had survived; nothing made of flesh and bone could have survived.

Bravo was wrong.