PROLOGUE

      A torrential downpour had slammed into the six men for the past hour, soaking them to the bone, not to mention reducing visibility to such a point they could hardly make out their target.

      Alek Stezhnya had spent the better part of his career in the worst hellholes the world had to offer, but those spots had yet to beat May in Atlanta, Georgia. He wiggled his toes. The pressure squished water into the spaces between his wool socks and leather combat boots. Okay, so his employer paid him enough to stand here drenched, but that still didn’t excuse this sorry mess. The sooner he could get out of here and back to the comfort of shelter and warm, dry clothes the better his temperament.

      Stezhnya lowered the infrared night-vision device, flipped a switch to kill the power and then handed it to his aide for storage. Fortunately, that particular make of NVD was waterproof. Not that it mattered, since the rain washing across the lenses smeared any hope of a clear image. Stezhnya made a conscious effort not to let it bother him. Instead, he checked his watch.

      They could still do this thing by the numbers.

      Stezhnya held up two fingers, and the signal was passed along the line of men spread across the rooftop every ten meters. Their target, a three-story apartment complex in one of Atlanta’s seedier neighborhoods, stood directly across from them. According to Stezhnya’s intelligence, the New Corsican Front, a French Islamic terrorist group operating an underground smuggling operation inside the U.S., kept their human cargo in twin apartments on the top floor. And Stezhnya knew he could trust that intelligence since it had come from the former deputy director of the NSA, Garrett Downing.

      Stezhnya lost his position with an elite commando unit in the Russian army following the dissolution of the USSR. He immigrated to the U.S. with relative ease, since his American mother returned a few years prior after her husband succumbed to alcoholism. Downing’s connections inside the NSA led him to Stezhnya. When Downing offered him the chance to head up a new elite antiterrorist unit known as the Apparatus, Stezhnya immediately accepted. After many months of training and preparation, the Apparatus had its first assignment.

      “Take them down,” Downing had ordered. “All of them. Understood?”

      Stezhnya understood perfectly. He owed the terrorists payback for the lives of a few men with whom he’d served in Russia, not to mention for the loss of his home. Now a mere fragment of what had once been a glorious nation, the Soviet Union owed some of its demise to terrorism. The KGB had fought nearly every known terrorist organization over the past two decades. Only corruption, misery and death resulted, and now someone had to pay. Terrorist groups like the New Corsican Front seemed the logical choice.

      Stezhnya gave the signal as soon as the two minutes elapsed.

      One of the men stepped forward and raised a crossbow to his shoulder. He sighted through an IR scope that ran the length of the weapon, then squeezed the trigger. The lightweight grappling hook attached to the crossbow bolt sailed across the opening between his position and the opposing roof. The man waited for a few moments, then yanked up and back on the crossbow at a critical moment. The sudden change in direction caused the rope to loop around a thick, steel ventilation pipe emerging from the rooftop. Eventually it became entangled in the grappling hook. The bowman quickly tied off to a roof stanchion on their end and then nodded “all-clear” to Stezhnya.

      Stezhnya pointed at his aide, Lyle Prichard, and a man named Barry Galeton. He gestured for them to begin the perilous journey across the rope to the apartments. They were young, not as experienced as some of the other men in the Apparatus, but Stezhnya couldn’t afford to be selective right now. If the trip proved too treacherous, it was better to lose those with less talent than to risk the veterans.

      Prichard seemed intense, focused. The lanky black man swung his legs into position and proceeded across the rope with undaunted enthusiasm. Stezhnya had first met him when Prichard worked as a cop in L.A.

      Every man in the Apparatus had been hand-picked by Downing because their profiles matched the kind of men he sought: young, idealistic, impressionable. These were the key traits of revolutionaries. Downing trusted Stezhnya to lead them to victory, and there was no way he’d betray that trust. The Russian knew he would persevere even if it meant his life. They had to succeed simply because they couldn’t afford not to. America was under siege, and it was up to the Apparatus to do something about it. Downing would have enough trouble gaining support for his cause, and Stezhnya wanted to make sure the Apparatus was part of the solution, not the problem.

      Galeton waited until Prichard was about halfway across before following him. The rope was a twisted-fiber blend with a polymer sheath, rated to one thousand pounds. It would easily have held twice the weight presently testing it.

      Once both men were safely across, Stezhnya went next. He crossed the gap with the speed and efficiency of a practiced expert. The pair on point had a perimeter established by the time Stezhnya reached them.

      Stezhnya ordered Galeton to take point. They had left one man behind to cover their exit. Once they completed the operation, there wouldn’t be time to go back the same way they’d come. That meant a more conventional means of exiting the target area to facilitate rapid extraction, which in this case happened to be the back door. The getaway driver sat waiting in a panel van parked on the next block.

      It took less than two minutes for their Italian demo expert, Mick Tufino, to burn through the rooftop door lock with a high-temperature minitorch. The group descended the stairs, now producing the weapons they had stowed in waterproof bags. The old stairwell stunk faintly of urine mixed with industrial cleaners. It was pungent combined with the odors of sweaty men in wet clothes.

      They traversed the steps from the rooftop door to the third-floor landing without a sound. Galeton reached the door, waited for Stezhnya’s approval to open it and then stepped into the hallway. He tracked both sides with the muzzle of his weapon, a Spectre M-4, and then indicated the rest of the group could follow. At this point, they would split into two teams. Stezhnya would accompany Prichard to one apartment, Galeton and Tufino to the other. The last man on the team, a former Somali peacekeeper named Kofi Jamo, would provide rear guard action if required, and ensure no stragglers escaped. Of course, the idea was to make sure the terrorists never left their apartments.

      The two teams took out the flimsy apartment doors with well-placed kicks. Stezhnya tracked the room and quickly realized his eight targets ranged around a large table. The room smelled faintly of spices, a smell that wasn’t unfamiliar to Stezhnya. He’d fought and killed enough of this kind in the past to know their culinary preferences. That alone fueled the rage he felt as he and Prichard simultaneously triggered their weapons.

      Their enemy never stood a chance.

      The Spectre M-4s chattered their messages of death, spraying the hapless targets with 9 mm Parabellum bullets. The sound of autofire was thunderous inside the confines of the small apartment. Plaster dust and wood-chips were whipped into the stale air from rounds that went either wide and dug into walls, or ate into furniture. The Spectre M-4s were ingenious inventions, sporting special 50-round capacity magazines that looked like they held the typical thirty rounds. In less than fifteen seconds, Stezhnya and Prichard pumped one hundred rounds of