SIXTY MILES SOUTH OF BAGHDAD, REPUBLIC OF IRAQ

They owned the night. There wasn’t a team in the world better at operations that called for sheer audacity than the Blue Light element of Delta, the highly secretive commando and antiterrorist unit of the U.S. Army.

They had been briefed on their mission by the secretary of defense, himself. The plan called for a twelve-man incursion into the most unlikely weapons storage facility they had ever been called upon to strike. The storage unit was placed three stories below ground level in an area the Iraqis knew no one would ever suspect.

The HALO parachute jump had gone off without incident and the twelve Blue Light commandos settled easily to the desert scrub just outside of the ancient ruins. The facility had been hastily constructed and was lightly guarded and the strike team took advantage of the close in intelligence supplied to them from Iraqi informants inside their military.

The target: the ancient ruins of the city of Babylon.

The material was stored in an underground bunker originally built by Saddam Hussein during his tyrannical rule of Iraq. Since no one but the topmost chiefs of the Iraqi military knew what the material was, the area was virtually unsecured. The bunker’s few guards were easily dispatched with regret toward their innocence. Five soldiers in all silently, quickly killed without a warning being sounded.

Thirteen minutes later, the material had been found and tested, verifying the fact that it was indeed the same ore that had been removed from Brazil almost seventy years before.

An hour after the mission had started it was over and news relayed to the president of the United States that Iraq was no longer in possession of material that would enable that country to manufacture the world’s largest “dirty bomb.” The Iraqi government would have to defend themselves from Iran with the aid of a few well-chosen friendly nations instead.