“I’ve known Mike since he was a wet behind the ears BUDS recruit,” Adams said. “Of course, so was I. But the point is, he’s human. God knows he’s human. And he’s replaceable. Everybody is. We do the mission. Maybe we find the WMD, maybe we don’t. But if the Boss calls, we do the damned mission. Period fucking dot.”

“Okay,” Nielson said, sighing. “You take the teams. I’ll stay back here and handle the details. I can do that long range. Who do you want?”

“I’m going,” Vanner said. “There’s some tech I’ve wanted to pick up in the States for a while, anyway. And I’d rather be on site to handle tricky stuff. I’ll take four of the girls.”

Vanner’s staff was mostly Keldara females, most of them under twenty. They had soaked up the details of communications and intelligence as if they’d been training in it from birth. Lately, Vanner had been picking up some pieces of intel that made him wonder if that wasn’t truth. While the Keldara men were top-flight warriors and many of them smart as hell, the Keldara girls were so smart it was scary. And they were sneaky in ways he was just beginning to souse out.

“I’ll take Oleg… shit,” Adams said, pausing. The Keldara’s top team leader had had his leg blown off by a mortar in the battle. He’d gotten a state-of-the-art prosthetic, but he still wasn’t in top shape. And his Team was shaky without him. His other top choice, Team Sawn, had lost its leader in the battle and was still shaking down. Padrek, another he would have liked for their technical expertise, had been ravaged. About half of them were dead or still recovering.

“I’ll take… Vil and Pavel. Daria? I could use somebody to handle the—”

“Details,” Daria said, dimpling. The Ukrainian girl had been picked up on a mission, a kidnappee being held in a snuff house in Montenegro, while the teams were hunting for another girl.