Chapter 8: The Briefing

Meanwhile, back at the FOB, a lieutenant commander named Ray Doss stood in front of a screen showing satellite imagery of a concrete structure sitting alone on the edge of a village nobody in the room could pronounce correctly on the first try, and told nineteen SEALs that they were going to get an American pilot back before day sixteen ran out.

“Lieutenant Megan Meyers,” Doss said, and clicked to a photo — her official ID picture, taken eleven weeks ago in a different life, hair regulation-short, eyes steady at the camera the way pilots learned to look at everything. “AH-64 pilot, shot down March twenty-fourth during the Karbala push. Her gunner, Chief Warrant Officer Daniel Ruiz, was killed in the crash. She was taken from the site and held at a compound approximately forty kilometers northwest of here for the last twelve days.” He clicked again, to the satellite feed of the truck on the desert road, grainy and gray-scaled but unmistakable. “This morning, a Predator flagged movement out of that compound consistent with a prisoner transfer. We tracked the vehicle to this location.” Another click — the concrete building, smaller, more isolated, no obvious defensive perimeter that the imagery could confirm. “We believe she’s being held here now.”

A chief in the second row, a broad-shouldered man named Petrosky who’d been running these briefings long enough to have opinions about all of them, raised a hand. “Why the move? They spook?”

“Unknown,” Doss said. “Could be nothing — rotating prisoners between locations is standard practice for some of these cells, makes them harder to target. Could be they picked up chatter that we’re looking. Either way, it changes our math. Fewer fighters at the new site based on thermal signatures, which is good for us. But we don’t have the pattern-of-life data we’d normally want before going in, which is not.”