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you never really knew who might be listening, no matter where you were.
    â€œYou know that asshole Rushton?”
    Ozzi nodded. General Jim Rushton. Assistant to the President on military special ops. A disturbingly incompetent human being, somehow left over from the Clinton administration, Rushton knew almost nothing about special ops despite his rank, yet was in a position to run roughshod over it.
    â€œWhile the boys upstairs were watching all this,” Fox explained, “the White House was watching it, too. Rushton was paging me before CNN took its first commercial break. He wants to know the same as everyone else: who are these people, who do they belong to, and how are they able to do these things.”
    Fox paused for a moment. The DSA was already running on eight cylinders, juggling many assignments. Another mission would only add to the burden. But Rushton was attached at the hip to the National Security Council. When he spoke, he was acting on the NSC’s behalf. Sort of…
    â€œAnd he wants to know before anyone else in this building knows,” Fox added. “So, bottom line, it’s up to us to find out who these guys are. Or more specifically, you have to find out….”
    Ozzi fought off a smile. Was he really going to get out of his rabbit box?
    â€œA field op, for me? Really?”
    â€œThink you can handle it?”
    Now Ozzi just laughed. “You know I can. Where do I start?”
    His boss replied: “Go home and pack a bag. I’ve already booked you passage to Gitmo.”
    Â 
    Two hours later, Ozzi was climbing onto a USAF C-12 aircraft at Andrews Air Force base, just outside Washington.
    It was the beginning of a scary, roundabout night for him. The plane took off just before midnight. It flew him south, to Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida, a two-hour journey plagued by heavy turbulence and rain the whole way. Once down at Jax, he was put aboard a Navy C-2 Greyhound transit plane and flown out to the aircraft carrier USS George Washington , lying 200 miles off Miami. This was another bumpy, white-knuckle flight. It ended by banging down on the carrier’s deck just after 3:00 A.M . Ozzi was immediately transferred to an SH-53, the giant naval version of the Army’s CH-53. Ozzi hated helicopters, simply because the first workable one had been designed by a Russian and he didn’t trust any Russian, even though he was a Russian himself. This helo especially looked too big, too old, too clumsy to fly.
    The SH-53 took him to a spot about twenty-five miles off the southeast coast of Cuba. There it entered the strict air corridor allowed by the Cuban government for the United States to travel to Guantánomo Bay, the unlikely, oddly placed American base found hanging by a nub off the eastern end of the communist island. This flight took about thirty minutes, ending as the chopper set down in the middle of a severe, if local, thunderstorm. This while the sun was just peeking over the horizon.
    Ozzi practically fell out of the old copter, the rain lingering just long enough to soak him to the skin. A Navy ensign was waiting for him. There was a flurry of ID checking, which ended with the scanning of the bar code on Ozzi’s new security pass. Then he was put in a Hummer; it left the airstrip with a screech.
    They drove up and over a hill or two and through several security checkpoints. Soon enough, up ahead Ozzi could see the detention camp set up for Al Qaeda fighters captured during American combat operations in Afghanistan after 9/11, and more recently other places. Though it was considered bad taste locally to call this place a prison, it was nothing but. A fortress of razor wire and wooden buildings, it looked surreal in the damp early-morning sun.
    His vehicle roared past the line of simple plywood barracks, all of them skewered by miles of electrical chain link and barbed wire. He spotted a few small figures wearing bright orange jumpsuits