US Military Jet Flight 107
Atlantic Ocean
December 23rd, 2008

Captain John Seymour sighed as he looked around him at the other special ops soldiers, all tired faces and weary bodies. And why shouldn’t they be? They were off to another country to stop an assassin on Christmas Eve.

Not even home for Christmas.

Seymour was the in the room when the assassin called; that was one of the reasons why he’d been chosen for the mission. He recalled the argument right after the other line hung up. The first order was to get a team ready to go to Khartoum, but then other people started having second thoughts. Let’s let this play out, they said. At best, nothing happens. At worst, we have a major enemy off our hands.

We treat this as a normal murder case, Phillips said. This is the death of one human being at the hands of another. We intervene.

And so the the captain and his team were being shipped off to Sudan.

Seymour had to admit – right now, he was leaning with the others.