Mike had lost one of the hostages before he realized what the plan was, but he’d fought his way through to the rest and held the position until relieved, along the way wiping out a chemical weapons factory, the Syrian president and Osama Bin Laden.

This had earned him the grateful thanks of a nation, quite a bit of money and a price on his head from every Islamic terrorism group on earth. “Mike Harmon,” Team Name “Ghost,” had quietly disappeared, maybe alive, maybe dead, and “Mike Jenkins” had reappeared in his place.

After being the wrong place at the wrong time too many times, Mike had settled down in the Republic of Georgia, using part of his reward money to buy a pleasant little farm with a group of tenant farmers already in place. However, the security situation in the area being what it was, he’d taken the opportunity to train the retainers as a local “militia.”

The retainers, called the Keldara, had taken to it like so many ducks to water. A little digging turned up the fact that the Keldara were anything but simple farmers. According to his interpretations, they were, in fact, the last remnant of the Varangian Guard, the Viking guards of the emperors of Byzantium. The group had apparently descended from a small force of mixed Norse and Scots-Irish that had drifted down through the Mediterranean until encountering the Byzantine Empire.

They farmed quite well but at heart, like the Kurds and the Gurkhas, they were warriors first and foremost. A couple of million dollars in equipment and a similar amount in payroll for trainers and training had turned them into a formidable, if small, fighting force. They had taken on a Chechen “battalion” at nearly three-to-one odds and the prisoners and dead now being loaded into the Georgian military trucks were the result.

Mike suspected it wouldn’t be the last such battle for the group called “The Tigers of the Mountain.”

“Mr. Jenkins,” the Russian attaché replied, nodding. “Quite a battle for a little militia.”