“Oh, oh. It’s the Queen of the Night,” muttered a lance corporal. “We’ve stepped in it. They don’t use the Bride of Dracula on small jobs.”

“Count Dracula divorced her for spousal abuse,” whispered the man next to him.

“Shhh. Summers will kick your ass if she hears you.”

The experienced warriors of the Marine Special Operations Command (MARSOC) normally shied away from taking orders from women, but Summers was different. She wore a black jumpsuit with the silver railroad tracks insignia of her rank glinting on the collar of a turtleneck sweater and projected a maximum “don’t give me any shit” attitude as she walked to the podium and flipped open a file folder. Her short black hair, dark blue eyes, and lithe figure disguised the fact that she was the only woman ever to make it through Force Recon training.

“Settle down,” she snapped, and the MARSOC team quieted. “We are going after a High Value Target tonight in Iraq, and I don’t want any of you jarheads to screw this up. Mustapha Ahmed al-Masri has surfaced again, stirring up the Kurds in northern Iraq, and the intelligence pukes have pinpointed his location. They list him as the number two for al Qaeda in the region, which is why he has been designated an HVT and we have been assigned to stop him.”

She walked around the podium to the front and nodded to her left. A door opened and a man stepped in, also wearing a black jumpsuit and with his face covered by a pull-down mask. A long rifle of a sort they did not recognize was slung over his shoulder. Sniper.

“Batman?” whispered the lance corporal.

“Maybe a holdup,” joked his partner.

“CIA spook. Definitely.”

Summers spoke. “You guys will assault the house at 0500, and I’ll leave it to the other briefers to give you the details. By the time you arrive, this gentleman and I will already be on the ground, closing the back door. He is masked simply because you do not need to know who he is. The two of us have been attached as special operators for this mission. Far as you are concerned, we aren’t here, and we will go in and extract on our own.”