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the west, and the MH-53 roared in just above the treetops on the other side of the runway. The double-bladed helicopter settled onto the PZ with a massive blast of air. The back ramp was already down, and the team began running for the bird. In the confusion, the three rescued prisoners were practically being ignored. One man remembered his assignment and grabbed Davis’s wife to lead her to the bird, but Davis and the nanny were on their own at the tail end of the pack. Riley grabbed the commo man, who had just begun to head for the bird. “Put your antenna down!” he yelled above the whine of the turbine engines. The radio operator sheepishly disconnected the long antenna, which was poking up high enough to get caught in the rotors.
    Riley brought up the rear and signaled thumbs-up to the crew chief waiting there. The MH-53 lifted and sprinted to the east for home. Riley walked along the center of the helicopter, past the team members who were seated on the web seats facing inward, until he reached Davis. Gesturing for the team member who sat next to the prisoner to move over, Riley sat down in between. He leaned over and yelled in Davis’s right ear: “What do you think?”
    Davis shook his head and lifted his hands. He had managed to break the plastic bindings the team members had put on him when they’d burst into the hangar.
    “When did you do that?” Riley asked.
    “On the way from the hangar to the airfield,” Davis replied.
    “No one checked you in all that time?”
    “Nope.”
    Riley slumped back in the web seat and closed his eyes. It was early in the morning and all he wanted to do was get some sleep. But he had a feeling it was going to be a very long day.
     
    NICHOLAS M. ROWE TRAINING FACILITY CAMP MACKALL,
    NORTH CAROLINA
    24 OCTOBER, 6:12 a.m.
     
    The MH-53 landed at the helipad across the street from what generations of Special Forces soldiers had called Camp Mackall, but in 1992 had been re-designated in honor of Colonel Rowe. The students quickly off-loaded the helicopter and moved out to the tin shacks that made up the forward operating base (FOB) for debriefing.
    The sprawling compound was named after Col. Nick Rowe, a Special Forces (SF) officer who’d spent five years in captivity in Vietnam before escaping. He’d then led the way in the development of the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) course in the Special Forces School before being assassinated in the Philippines in 1989 while on attaché duty.
    The first Special Forces students in the fifties had lived at the compound under poncho hootches. As time went by, the facility had grown, with tar-paper shacks, then tin, being added. But despite the slow upgrade in facilities, the school still had the same aura about it— intense men working with all their guts to earn the right to wear the Green Beret.
    Chief Riley had earned his beret in 1980. At that time, only SF-qualified men wore the beret with full flash—the small cloth shield pinned in front under the SF crest. Non-SF-qualified personnel assigned to a Special Forces unit for support purposes wore the green beret with a “candy stripe” across the flash to designate their different status. Even that was a sore point with many old veterans of Special Forces who felt that the beret should be reserved for those who had earned it. As the eighties dragged on, even that small distinctive piece of cloth was lost as the “Special Forces tab” was introduced. Sewn onto the left shoulder, just like a Ranger tab, this tab was designated to be the only way to tell if someone was Q-course qualified. That opened the door for the beret to be worn by anyone assigned to an SF unit, from cooks to truck drivers to clerks.
    At the present moment Riley just didn’t give a damn. He’d worn the beret with pride for well over a decade and had given his blood for his country on more than one occasion; in doing so, however, he had learned that his country was just as ready to crap on