The Third Option   ::   Flynn Vince

Looking out the window of thejet, Coleman's thoughts turned to a night several months ago. He had been at an Orioles baseball game with a date when he'd bumped into an old friend and his wife. They were sitting out in right field, having a beer and a hot dog. When the old friend went to introduce the other couple they were with, Coleman almost dropped his beer. There, sitting across the table, was someone he hadn't seen since he'd left the SEALs. At first he wasn't sure. Not at something as benign as a baseball game. But at second glance he knew it was him. He could see the recognition in his eyes. They were the darkest, most alert eyes he had ever seen, and they belonged to a living legend in the world of black operations. Coleman had seen him operate in the field twice and had heard others utter his name with a shake of their heads. He was at home in almost any city in the Middle East and much of Europe. He was perhaps America 's best assassin, and there he was sitting at a baseball game with a beautiful young reporter. It was almost too surreal to believe, but it was him, and now they were about to cross paths again.



11

Michael O'Rourke was tense. As tense as he'd been in several years. He clutched the leather steering wheel of his Chevy Tahoe with white knuckles, and as his eyes peered ahead, his mind searched for answers. He adored Anna Rielly. There wasn't much not to like about her. She'd been his wife's best friend since college, and she'd been a good one. They had been elated when she called the previous spring to tell them she was going to be NBC's new White House correspondent. That elation lasted less than a week.

On Rielly's first day at work, she had been caught in a terrorist attack that had almost cost her her life. A dozen Secret Service officers and agents had been killed in the attack, and in the ensuing drama that unfolded, Bill Schwartz, the president's national security advisor, was killed as well as his secretary and several others. The hostage standoff was ended after a bold takedown by the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. At least, that had been the story reported in the press.

As a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, O'Rourke was privy to information that even his fellow representatives were not. The official position taken by the White House after the hostage crisis was that SEAL Team Six and other counterterrorism units were used in an advisory role during the crisis and nothing else. Other counterterrorism units was code for Delta Force – the Army's ultra-secret Special Forces unit.