SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

1

Sam Phillips looked back across the tussocky desert landscape toward the tan speck that was the antique Toyota land cruiser, making sure for the sixth time in just under two hours that it still sat concealed behind a ragged row of poplar trees, far enough off the sparsely traveled two-lane highway to render it invisible to any traffic. He raised a pair of lightweight field glasses that hung on a soft nylon strap around his neck and rotated the knurled center knob until the boxy 4x4’s driver, whose name was Shoazim, came into focus. For a quarter of a minute or so, Sam spied on the bony Uighur.

He had rented Shoazim and his vehicle in Ürümqi, the autonomous region’s capital city. Like all official guides, Shoazim reported at the very least to the local police, or even more likely, to some department of MSS, the Chinese Ministry of State Security. And so Sam had kept the man at arm’s length. If there was something sensitive to discuss, he did it in private, or in French. Still, the guide had been helpful, negotiating their way onto a number of sites Sam’s three-man crew videoed for the travelogue he was ostensibly making.

Sam was pleased to see Shoazim leaning up against the near side of the vehicle, omnipresent cigarette between his lips, his right knee cocked against a tire, his right hand twirling the end of his long, stringy mustache — all body language that indicated boredom. Though compact, the glasses were powerful enough so that Sam could watch Shoazim exhale a plume of smoke from one of the strong black tobacco cigarettes whose nasty stench permeated the Toyota, even though they always drove with all the windows open, even at night when the temperature dropped below freezing.

It was in the low sixties now. Despite the mild weather, Sam was sweating. Between the unremittingly blue sky and the warm morning sun, both his shirt and the rucksack he carried were wet clear through, and the dampness had spread to the waistband of his cargo pants. They were all sweating, the four of them, struggling under the weight of the video gear, which was made all the heavier because of the nuclear sensors concealed within the camera’s bulky tripod legs.

The sensors were state-of-the-art, developed by a joint Department of Energy-No Such Agency task force. There were three, and they had to be positioned in a gentle, precise curve at two-hundred-meter intervals to do the job for which they’d been designed. They’d been fabricated out of a space-age nonmagnetic titanium-scandium compound that was harder and lighter than steel and more durable than carbon fiber. They were self-powered, and could operate for years without recharging. And they were programmed to send their readings in secure, coded microbursts to a trio of National Reconnaissance Office SPARROW HAWK stealth satellites launched covertly during one of NASA’s shuttle missions in 2000. The three invisible NRO birds sat in geosynchronous orbit twenty-two thousand miles above the earth. They were already receiving signals from other covert sensor pods, although Sam wasn’t cleared high enough to know how many had been inserted, or where they might be located.

Sam dropped the glasses back onto his chest, crested the scrub grass of the dune, and made his way along the far side. The soft padded canvas case holding the video camera banged against his right side as he lurched precariously down a steep embankment of packed sand, rocks, and brushwood to catch up to the other three. At the bottom, he took a long hard look at the next series of dunes, which were taller, rockier, and more heavily brambled than the ones they’d just crossed, listened to the protestations coming from his body, and held up his hand to call a momentary halt. ‘Time to check our position.”

“What’s wrong, Pops, you need another break?” The sensor tech, whose real name was Marty Kaszeta, even though his Irish passport identified him as Martin Charles Quinn, was a mere twenty-six. He flaunted his youth, Sam thought, quite unmercifully, including the maddening way he insisted on wearing his long-billed Tottenham Hotspurs cap backward. Kaz’s right shoulder was wet under the tripod case strap. But he’d set the pace for the whole group, even though his load was almost thirty-five pounds heavier than anyone else’s.

So Sam chose to ignore the dig. Instead, he untied the blue-and-white kerchief from around his neck, exhaled loudly, and wiped at his face with the salty wet cotton triangle. He’d always considered himself in pretty good physical shape. But five kliks of packed sand and scrub had just proved otherwise, hadn’t it? God, he was bushed. He reached around and dug into his rucksack for one of the three half-liter bottles of water he carried, took a long, welcome pull of the warm liquid, and consoled himself with the fact that he was so wiped because he was the Team Elder. The official CIA geezer.

The communicator, Dick Campbell, a sheep-dipped Marine captain who’d been TDY’d [1] from Langley’s paramilitary division (looking far too Semper Fi, which gave Sam some anxiety), had just turned thirty-one. Sam liked to tell him he couldn’t remember being thirty-one. At least the lanky, team security officer — his name was Chris Wyman but he liked to be called X-Man — was approaching adulthood: Wyman was thirty-five — three years Sam’s junior. He had the low-key approach to life you’d expect from a kid who’d grown up in Aspen, spending more time on the slopes than in the classroom. But Wyman was sharp, and thorough, and didn’t miss much. He’d done time in enough hardship posts — a countersurveillance assignment against the Iranians in Baku and a black program against al-Qaeda in Pakistan among them — for Sam to know he was good at his job.

Of course, it didn’t help Sam’s mental state to see X-Man wasn’t even breathing hard as he paused to scan the dunes for surveillance, then lifted his field glasses to make sure they weren’t being tracked by a UAV.[2] He finally caught Wyman’s eye, which was hard to do given the Oakleys. “I hate people like you, y’know.”

The security officer’s long, tanned face cracked a smile. “When we get home, I’ll wangle you an AARP membership at my gym, Sam.”

“When we get home,” said Sam, double-checking to make sure the screw top was tight then dropping the water bottle back into the rucksack, “I’m hanging up my spurs. Gonna put in for a desk job. I’m getting way too old for this crap.”

Kaz snorted derisively. “You, Pops? Never. You’re a gumshoe. You just ain’t the desk-jockey type.”

The kid was correct. At thirty-eight, Sam had been a CIA case officer for just over thirteen years — and served overseas for all but twenty months of that time. He’d begun his career with sixteen months of Pashto language training followed by a two-year posting under consular cover in Islamabad. From there, he’d volunteered for an eight-month immersion course in Kazakh, after which he’d taken on a three-year assignment no other case officer wanted: running the one-man station in Almaty.

Later, there had been tours in Paris, where he’d worked as the Central Asia branch chief, followed by two and a half years in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. There, he’d managed to pick up some Dari, as well as conversational Russian, bits of Uighur, and enough of what he called kitchen Mandarin to listen to Radio Beijing and understand about a quarter of it. He’d also recruited a productive network of Tajiks and a rare Russian — a lieutenant colonel assigned to the 201^st Mechanized Infantry Division.

Sam Phillips had natural people skills and learned and retained languages the way others quickly absorb music or art. His low-key approach to life, wry sense of humor, and the instinctive ability to read nuance and adapt to culturally unfamiliar surroundings made him a shrewd, capable operative. Indeed, Sam preferred working alone in back alleys from Bishkek to Berlin regardless of the potential for risk. It was preferable to what he knew from experience to be a more hostile environment than any denied area overseas: the political minefield at the George Bush Center for Intelligence at Langley, Virginia.

Which is why it was absolutely true he’d never willingly leave the streets for a desk. Not that he’d ever be asked to. In fact, if you looked at the situation coldly, at the relatively young age of thirty-eight Sam Phillips was considered something of a dinosaur at the digitized, computerized, techno-dependent Central Intelligence Agency of the early twenty-first century. He was seen as a throwback, a foot soldier slogging willingly through the Wilderness of Mirrors. In the flexi-time culture of latte drinkers and retirement-portfolio builders, Sam was the odd man out: the sort of old-fashioned case officer who was professionally indifferent to creature comforts, identifiable food, and other niceties. Sam Phillips existed completely, entirely, totally, to spot, assess, and recruit spies. And if it required that his living conditions be less than no-star, and his backup nonexistent, well then, so be it. He’d get the job done anyway.

Sam’s corridor file back at Langley pegged him negatively as a risk taker, a cowboy who too often pushed the edge of the operational envelope. Still, he had a reputation for success in the field. In Langley’s op-resistant culture, which had persisted even after the 9/11 intelligence debacle, the loss of agents through carelessness, neglect, or simple inattention to detail all seemed to be grounds for promotion instead of termination. But Sam Phillips could say — and did, with considerable pride — that over his decade plus of street work, he’d never lost a single one of his agents.

That kind of rep carried some weight. If not with the present crop of technocrat panjandrums occupying the seventh-floor executive suites, at least with the small remaining cadre of streetwise geezers who, like Sam, believed that satellites capable of reading a license plate from two hundred miles up were the solution to intelligence gathering only if you were prone to being attacked by license plates. Uncovering your adversary’s capabilities and intentions, Sam Phillips was unshakably convinced, required human-sourced intelligence. That meant putting your body on the line.

But Sam had also realized early in his career that risk taking did not mean the same as foolishness. A history and language major at Berkeley, he’d first read about Alexander Suvorov, the eighteenth-century Russian military tactician and philosopher, as a sophomore. Later, as a greenhorn case officer in his late twenties, he’d reread Suvorov, so as to better understand the intricacies of the Russian military mind.

Sam’s reading may have begun as an intellectual exercise to help him in making recruitments. It ended, however, with his enthusiastic acceptance of Suvorov’s strategic doctrine as the basis for his own intelligence-gathering operations. He took many of the field marshal’s dictums (“Speed is essential; haste harmful” and “Train hard, fight easy” were two of his favorites) to heart, and consciously employed them in the field. And so, what his deskbound superiors often thought to be impetuous, seat-of-the-pants decisions were in point of fact meticulously designed, boldly executed operations that resulted in the obtaining of valuable intelligence for the United States.

Sam’s capacity for audaciousness coupled with careful planning was a critical factor in his current role as team leader — at least so far as the three volunteers traveling with him were concerned. That was because SIE-1, which was Langley’s bureaucratic acronym for the four-man Sino Insertion Element No. 1 Sam led, was composed of NOCs.[3]

That meant Sam and his team entered China using real but nonetheless bogus British, Irish, and Canadian passports issued under aliases. They’d posed as a four-man independent TV crew shooting an “Outward Bound Trekking along the Silk Road” video for a London-based travel company that wanted to expand its “extreme sports” tour packages. Yes, their travel documents had survived the scrutiny of Turkish, Azeri, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Chinese border guards and other officials. And yes, if anyone had called the accommodation addresses and telephone numbers in London, Dublin, or Toronto that were printed on their business cards, drivers’ licenses, credit cards, and other miscellaneous wallet detritus and pocket litter, all of which had been provided by Langley’s document wizards, the team’s bona fides would have been authenticated beyond a doubt. But all of that didn’t lessen the knowledge that in plain English, nonofficial cover meant they were working without a net.

Their objective, precisely expressed in National Security Directive 16226, which had been signed by the president of the United States nine weeks previously, was, quote: “For officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and/or other officials of the United States government to covertly insert and position at a specific location inside the People’s Republic of China a technical means for ensuring that all the conditions of the current-draft nuclear weapons agreement between the United States and the People’s Republic of China will be met.”

The word covertly meant that for Sam Phillips and his team there was no diplomatic immunity. There was no Geneva convention. If they got caught, it was prison or summary execution. Full stop. End of story. Like the characters in the Mission: Impossible movies, the administration would deny any responsibility, etc., etc. Except what Sam and his crew were doing wasn’t Hollywood. It was real — and the consequences could prove fatal.

The operation was also complicated by the fact that there were four of them. Typically, case officers are solitary workers, meeting their agents only after taking exhaustive steps to ensure they have not been compromised by the opposition. NOCs generally work singly. Not always: sometimes, a pair of Honeymooners — DO[4] slang for husband-and-wife NOC teams — were assigned if the mission required it. A four-man covert infiltration crew was a rarity these days, especially a team like SIE-1, which had been assembled for this one critical mission. The fact that he, Kaz, X-Man, and Dick hadn’t worked together before made Sam a little nervous.

But the four of them gelled remarkably well during the two weeks of mission prep they’d been allowed before assembling in London to pick up their equipment and commence their Odyssey through Ankara, Baku, Bishkek, and points east. And Sam had watched with a critical eye as they made their way from Almaty, aggressively bargained themselves through the organized thievery that is Kazakh passport control, and crossed into the free trade zone just outside the ramshackle Chinese border post east of Khorgos. For kids who hadn’t had his years of training or street experience, the trio had handled themselves like real pros.

They had been diligent about their tradecraft. China is what is known in the intelligence business as a denied area. For SIE-1 it meant that even in Western China, two time zones from Beijing,[5] the Guojia Anquan Bu, or Ministry of State Security, still maintained aggressive technical surveillance on foreign visitors. So, Sam and his security officer, Chris Wyman, took it for granted that any hotel room they were given contained listening devices and even perhaps video. That meant they had to be careful about how they spoke and acted, even in private.

They’d been observant, too, noting the augmented military activity in the cities. Sam had been briefed on that before he’d left Washington. It was an additional operational wrinkle to fret over — that they might be compromised not because of Chinese suspicion about covert American operations but because of a recent increase of separatist violence in Xinjiang, to which Sam coyly referred in a cartoon Boston accent as terra irredenta. The past few months had seen an increase in ambushes, kidnappings, and even the occasional car bomb.

Indeed, Sam’s preinsertion research showed that Chinese-based Islamists were currently giving refuge and support to a panoply of terrorist organizations that ran the gamut from the complex and sophisticated, like al-Qaeda, to smaller, hit-and-run splinter groups such as ETIM — the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement — or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

ETIM was an unknown quantity. But Sam had worked against the IMU in Dushanbe. Despite the specificity of its name, IMU guerrillas had once ranged over a region that spread from Chechnya to the Mongolian border; and from Afghanistan through all the old Soviet “Stan” republics. In the 1990s the IMU had been well financed, supported by funding and weapons from Iran, and overt support from the Taliban. CIA’s counterterrorism analysts estimated that it had made millions more through smuggling, drug dealing, and kidnapping operations. But since 2002, the IMU had gone into a decline. Many of the group’s leaders, including its military chief, a former Soviet paratrooper named Juma Namangani, had been killed during America’s campaign in Afghanistan.

According to the CIA analysis Sam read in London, the IMU “currently presents no credible threat.” But Sam knew from experience how flawed Langley’s research could be these days. And so he did his own — and unearthed among other documents a broadside issued by a Tajik Islamist group in North London, hinting that a nucleus of IMU hard-liners had recently forged an alliance with the Uighur separatists of Xinjiang Autonomous Region. If true, that meant another bunch of no-goodniks to worry about during SIE-l’s insertion. At least, Sam rationalized, the IMU’s current numbers would be in the hundreds, not thousands.

“Let’s see where the hell we are.” Sam unlatched the Velcro flap of his deep thigh pocket and fumbled past the pock-etknife and the spare change until his hand closed around the Visor Handspring with its attached GPS module. He pulled the PDA out, snapped the cover off, switched it on, and watched as the screen came to life.

The Visor was indicative of how cavalier Langley was these days when it came to supporting operations that put human beings on the ground in denied areas. The damn thing had been handed to him in London with dead batteries. If he hadn’t taken the time to test it before stowing it, they’d be sitting out here with no way of knowing where the hell they were.

It was lucky they had the GPS, because the Agency’s classified maps certainly hadn’t helped get them where they had to be. The Western China branch chief in London — a white-haired former executive secretary from the moribund Division of Administration whose London posting was her first overseas assignment — had actually demanded that Sam sign a security document before handing over six three-foot-by-four-foot tactical charts stamped secret, on which Sam would plot the team’s infiltration and exfil, as well as contingency plans in case they were discovered in flagrante delicto.

Except, after Sam had spent seven precious hours working with the highly detailed l:100,000-scale documents (and been amazed at how primitive the road system appeared, given the escalating number of tourist buses working their way along the Silk Road these days), he happened to look at the fine print on the bottom left-hand corner of one of them. It was dated 1985. Then he checked the others. None was more current than 1992. The bloody things were a decade-plus old. Obsolete, outdated, and useless. So he’d summoned the branch chief to the safe house, returned the maps, and shredded his release form. Then he checked the phone book, located a travel-book store on Long Acre, and hiked the mile and a half from his hotel to Covent Garden.

Sixty pounds sterling later, Sam had purchased half a dozen commercial road maps and Lonely Planet guidebooks that showed all the new highways. (Like, for example, the very one they’d used this morning, which had originally been built in 1998 as a north-south military conduit and was nowhere to be found on the CIA’s oh-so-secret chart.)

Sam checked the handheld’s screen. They were within a half mile of the coordinates he’d programmed into the GPS unit.

He took a reading, showed the screen to Kaz, who, fist clenched, pumped the warm air with his right arm. “Right on course, Pops.”

“That’s the good news.” Sam swung the camera off the ground and onto his shoulder. “The bad news is that we’ve got to head southeast,” he said, his jaw thrust toward the intimidating dunes towering over them like tsunami. Then his voice took on a forcedly optimistic tone. “What the hell, it shouldn’t take us more than an hour.”

President Peter De Witt Forrest set his mug of decaf down on a coaster emblazoned with the presidential seal and turned to face his national security adviser as she came into the residence’s sitting room.

“Johnny, give us a minute, will you?” He waved the Secret Service agent out, waiting until the door closed behind the young man’s broad back. Then he rolled his shoulders and cracked his left-hand pinkie knuckle joint. “What have we heard from the team, Monica?”

Monica Wirth, who’d gone on to Georgetown law school after eight years as a Ph.D. CIA analyst, had worked on national security issues for Pete Forrest since he’d been elected governor of Virginia back in the mid-1990s. So she read his body language well enough to know that whenever the Leader of the Free World tried to mask tension, he cracked the finger joints on his left hand.

“Nothing, Mr. President. We’ve heard nothing because they’re maintaining radio silence until the job’s completed.”

“But they’ve been sending progress reports all along, haven’t they?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So why can’t they update us now?”

“They’ve been using steganography to throw the Chinese off-track, Mr. President.”

Pete Forrest blinked. “Steganography?”

“The communications officer has been sending digital pictures to an accommodation address in London on a daily basis,” Wirth explained. “A sort of visual ‘progress report’ on the travelogue they’re supposed to be making. The team’s reports are embedded in the images. That’s steganography.”

“Hmm.” Pete Forrest pulled on his left thumb until the joint popped. “But when they’re in the clear, Monica …”

“When they get to Yutian they’ll telephone the accommodation address in London and acknowledge.”

The knuckle joint of the president’s middle finger popped audibly. “But they do have a phone, don’t they?”

“Yes, Mr. President, they’re carrying a cell phone. But the team leader doesn’t want to use it until they’re in the clear.”

“So we won’t get word until they’re where? Yuti-something, wasn’t it you just said?”

The National Security Council staff had, as always, made sure she was as prepared as he. “Yutian, Mr. President.” She took a quick peek at the three-by-five card in her left palm then slipped it into the pocket of her black pantsuit jacket. “It’s an old caravan way station on the Silk Road.”

Craack. “How long before they get there?”

His apprehension was contagious, and she began to pace behind one of the two facing Empire couches — four nervous steps followed by a quick reverse of course. “Tomorrow, sometime. They’re scheduled to implant the devices today. Then it’s a three-hundred-kilometer trip south on that new connector road, followed by another hundred on the main east-west road. And of course they have to stop and shoot video from time to time.”

“Video,” he repeated absently, and cracked the ring finger on his left hand.

The president had been anxious about this operation from the very start. Not that he’d ever wavered. The mission was critical to the nation’s immediate national security interests. Immediate because in just over six weeks he was scheduled to sign a nuclear treaty at a summit in Beijing. But there was no way Pete Forrest was going to affix his signature to the document unless there was a way to verify beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Chinese weren’t cheating by setting off ultra-low-level tests deep within the hundreds of miles of tunnels they’d dug over the last half century in the sandy flats around the Lop Nur test site’s prehistoric dry lake bed.

For maddening reasons Pete Forrest couldn’t begin to fathom, none of the National Reconnaissance Office’s current generation of satellites had the capability to distinguish an explosion that measured less than half a kiloton from a seismic anomaly. The president had a hard time with that, because a half-kiloton explosion is the equivalent of blowing a million pounds of TNT all at once. Which, as he had complained loudly to the director of central intelligence, who’d presented him with the bad news, makes for one hell of a seismic anomaly.

Worse, he’d been told there was no way NRO would be able to get an ultra-low-range-capable bird launched in less than three years. The existing ground sensors, which were located on the high mountain ranges of the Kazakh-Chinese border, had been designed to record the twenty-to eighty-kiloton underground tests the Chinese had performed in the mid-and late 1990s — tests that all measured 4.5 or above on the Richter seismic scale.

But according to the latest analysis, the current Chinese nuclear program was being directed more toward mini-yield tactical weapons than multi-megaton warheads. Which meant that the United States was essentially blind if Beijing decided to secretly test tactical nukes of a half kiloton or less. The president had concluded the only way to guarantee the Chinese weren’t cheating was to insert new ground sensors close enough to the tunnels to pick up the faintest of seismic readings emanating from the Lop Nur test site.

Which required a human element to infiltrate across China’s border and place the devices covertly. And so, a little over two months ago, he’d signed the finding that set the operation in motion, even though he knew he’d be risking a confrontation with the Chinese, as well as putting American lives in danger. It was his job as commander in chief, and he didn’t have to like it — he just had to order it done.

Still, commonsense, straight-ahead grit was characteristic of the man. Unlike the great majority of future politicians of his generation, Peter DeWitt Forrest had volunteered straight out of Yale to serve in the Army — one of only eight from his class who would serve in the military. He’d qualified for jump wings and seen combat as a platoon commander in Vietnam, where he earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. And he had returned from that mishandled war with deeply rooted beliefs about the use of force, and — just as important — about the quality of leadership.

Pete Forrest came away from Vietnam convinced the only difference between good leadership and poor leadership is whether the lives that leadership spends are well spent or squandered. In Vietnam, he saw too many squandered lives. It was those ghosts that shaped, tempered, and focused his modus vivendi.

As a banker and credit-card entrepreneur who’d once ranked sixty-seventh in the Forbes 500, he’d always demanded that those who worked for him be tough but fair. The hallways of Pete Forrest’s corporate headquarters were filled with posters promoting character and integrity. He demonstrated loyalty to his employees just as he demanded loyalty from them by sharing the company’s considerable wealth based on their performance, just as his remuneration was based on his own. Later, as governor of Virginia, he’d always tried (and most of the time succeeded) to be guided by a moral compass, as opposed to the amoral political pragmatism fashionable in the 1990s.

Perhaps most important, he never forgot the lessons he’d learned from his brothers-in-arms on the battlefield. Which was why Pete Forrest had taken a silent vow in the same breath with which he’d boldly affirmed the presidential oath. His hand on the family Bible, he swore to himself that as the nation’s commander in chief he would try never to squander a single American life.

And so, before putting Americans in harm’s way, Pete Forrest always took the time to consider the hard question of whether he was about to spend lives or squander them. If he determined it was going to be the latter, he found an alternative solution, no matter that it might be politically unpopular. But if it was the former, he never hesitated. Which was why, if the four CIA officers he’d put in jeopardy didn’t return from China, he’d be able to live with the fact that he had ordered them to their deaths. Their lives would not have been squandered, but spent in the pursuit of Duty, Honor, Country, just as so many other lives, snuffed out on Omaha Beach and Pointe du Hoc, on Mt. Suribachi, at A Shau and Plei Me and Mazār-e Sharif, had been spent, in the pursuit of Duty, Honor, Country.

Pete Forrest dropped onto one of the drawing room’s couches and stretched out his long legs, watching as his national security adviser did the caged-tiger thing. “Grab a seat, Monica, you’re making me itchy.”

Immediately, she dropped onto the couch opposite his. “I’m sorry, Mr. President.”

He eased up a bit. “One of the perks of this job is that people tend to do things when you ask ‘em to.” Then his face grew serious. “So, bottom line: we won’t know anything concrete until tomorrow.”

The national security adviser’s hands formed a steeple. “Well,” she said, “we’ll know when the sensors have been activated, because they’ve been programmed to transmit a baseline reading.”

“I want to be notified as soon as that happens.”

“I’ve already had the word passed to the operations center at Langley,” she said. “The duty officer knows she’s to give you a call immediately.”

“Good.” The president cracked another knuckle. “She knows not to be shy — no matter what time?”

“I made that abundantly clear, sir.”

He nodded affirmatively. “Good.” The president stood up and stretched. “Then get out of here, Monica. It’s past midnight. Go home. Get some rest. Like you said, nothing’s going to break until tomorrow.”

“I think I’ll just grab a combat nap in my office, sir. If you need me for anything—”

“I know the extension, Monica.” He gave her shoulder a gentle nudge toward the hallway. “Go.”

2

It was finally show time. Using what appeared to be two audio cables, Kaz ganged the video camera’s spare batteries together. Then he uncoiled a ten-foot-long, double-male-ended video cable and plugged one end of it into the batteries.

As he did this, X-Man was pulling the zoom lens out of its case. He handed it gingerly to Dick Campbell: “Hold this.” Then he turned the two-foot case upside down, reached inside, released the false bottom, and withdrew a small, cylindrical motor about the size of a soup can.

He handed the motor to Sam, who cradled it in his arms as gently as if it were spun glass. Next, as the communicator replaced the zoom lens, X-Man slipped the tripod out of its case. Using a pair of Allen wrenches, he disassembled the tops of the three legs from their hinges, removed the three support straps from the bottom leg collets, and snapped the pieces together, forming a four-foot six-inch drill shaft. He tipped one of the tripod legs over and unscrewed its spiked foot, which he reversed, revealing a drill bit. The bit snapped into the bottom of the shaft and locked into place with an audible click.

With Sam holding the power unit, the shaft was quickly attached by using a second spiked foot and locked tight with a pair of Allen bolts. As X-Man completed the drill shaft, Kaz was unscrewing the angled pan and slide-tilt head locking handles from the camera platform head. These he screwed into tapped receivers on either side of the power unit.

Sam checked his watch. The drill had taken less than five minutes to assemble. He looked over Kaz and X-Man’s handiwork. It sure was ugly, looking like the illegitimate offspring of a Dremel tool on steroids and the core-sample drills used by NASA’s Apollo lunar landing teams back in the 1970s. But it was also cannily, intricately, wonderfully ingenious. Designed, no doubt, by an engineer who’d been well inculcated in Goldbergian rubric.

Kaz hefted the drill, tested to make sure the connections were secure, and then pronounced it acceptable. “Let’s test it.”

The communicator handed the male end of the video cable to Kaz. “Insert Tab A into Slot B,” Kaz said as he screwed the connector home. He manipulated the switch on the motor’s top side, and the drill began to turn. “All right!” Kaz gave a thumbs-up to the rest of them and looked in Sam’s direction. “If Pops here will be so good as to verify our position, we’ll set the first of these babies so we can start getting home.”

Reflexively, Sam checked the digital watch on his left wrist again. It was well past midday. They’d been out for more than four hours now. They probably had more than an hour’s work to do setting the sensors, then burying the drill, followed by a two-and-a-half-to three-hour trek back to the Toyota. That would mean they’d be traveling at night. He didn’t like the idea. The Chinese increased their patrols at night.

A light sleeper, Pete Forrest heard the start of the distinctive ring, rolled to his right, and reached for the secure phone before the instrument completed its first cycle. “Yes?”

“Mr. President?”

“Yes.” He sat up, hooking the phone receiver between his neck and shoulder and squinting at the red numerals of the digital clock, which read 04:49.

“This is Carrie at the Operations Center, Mr. President.”

“What’s the news, Carrie?”

“Signal received, Mr. President. Loud and clear.”

Pete Forrest exhaled audibly. “Good. Anything else to report?”

“No, sir, nothing else.”

“Okay, then. Thank you.”

“Good night, Mr. President.”

“Good night, Carrie.” He replaced the receiver in its cradle, then reconfigured the pillows on his side of the bed into bolsters. Forrest sat upright, his head touching the headboard rail, and stared into the darkness.

Next to him, his wife, Jennifer, stirred, semiawake. “Anything urgent?” she murmured.

“Just an update on something, sweetie,” he said. “Nothing critical. Go back to sleep.”

She purred and rolled over. Idly, he stroked her shoulder. Then he cracked all the finger joints on his left hand, clasped both hands behind his head, and stared into the darkness. They’d done the job. God bless them. He’d have the team to the residence when they got back. Get to know them a little bit. Ask them about China. Listen to their stories. Let them know how much he appreciated what they’d done for the country.

But first, they had to get out. And exfiltration, Pete Forrest knew from his own combat experience, was the most dangerous part of every mission.

Sam saw the big truck blocking the highway only because he was playing with his night-vision monocular. They were driving, as was the habit in this part of the world, with running lights. So his device hadn’t been blinded by the Toyota’s headlamps.

They came over a gentle rise in the road, and there it was — straight ahead, maybe a mile away. “Shoazim—sür’ätni astiliting, sür’ätni astiliting—slow down, slow down,” he ordered. The Toyota eased to a crawl on the darkened highway. They drifted off the rise, and the truck disappeared from Sam’s view.

“Pull over. Stop.”

The driver steered onto the narrow shoulder. Sam reached across the Uighur’s body and turned the running lights off. “There’s something ahead — a truck’s sitting in the middle of the highway,” he said by way of explanation.

Shoazim squinted into the darkness. “A truck? Where?” he asked.

Sam pointed. “Maybe a couple of kilometers down the road.”

The driver flicked his cigarette into the darkness. “This is most unusual,” he said. “It is not my fault.” “I know it isn’t,” Sam said.

He reached up and turned off the Toyota’s interior light switch. Then he opened his door and clambered down onto the sandy shoulder. “I’m going to take a look,” he said.

Kaz opened the rear door. “I’ll keep you company.”

“Sure.” Sam trudged ahead, his eyes growing accustomed to the dark, Kaz’s footsteps scrunching the loose sand a few steps behind his right shoulder.

“Think we have a problem?” Kaz whispered when they were out of earshot.

It was Kaz’s first overseas assignment, and Sam could sense the kid’s apprehension. That was to be expected. Kaz was one of the Agency’s new generation of post-9/11 hires: an IT guy, whose degrees included a B.S. in physics from the University of Maryland and an M.S. in computer science from Duke. He wasn’t the case-officer type but a techno-wonk. He’d been talked into this little jaunt because he understood precisely how the sensors worked, and — more important — exactly how they’d have to be inserted to do their job.

“Don’t know,” Sam said, trying to sound reassuring. “But I want to see what’s going on.”

The two of them walked another hundred yards or so in silence. When Sam felt the grade increase, he slowed down and put the monocular up to his eye. It was a cheap, first-generation Russian device that Sam had bought in Turkey. But cheap or no, it was still amazing how bright things were through the lens. After another twenty yards, Sam dropped to his knees and silent-signaled Kaz to do the same. “I don’t want us silhouetted against the crest of the hill.”

Then he stopped. Dead in the water. Sam closed his left eye and refocused the night-vision scope. It had only two-power magnification. But that was quite sufficient for Sam to be able to make out the truck, its hood raised, straddling the two-lane highway at about a forty-five-degree angle, effectively blocking the road. Half a dozen uniformed figures, some of them carrying weapons, stood shuffling in the chill night air around the huge vehicle while one man, perched precariously on the front bumper, shone a flashlight on the engine with one hand and tinkered with the other.

Kaz’s hand touched Sam’s shoulder. “Can I have a look?”

Wordlessly, Sam passed Kaz the monocular. The tech peered through it for some seconds, then handed it back. “Army.”

“Yup, PLA,” Sam confirmed. “They’re in uniform — I could make out their hats clearly. Could you see any markings on the truck? I couldn’t.”

“Negatory.” Kaz shook his head.

The two of them backed off the crown of the rise. There was nothing wrong. At least nothing Sam could put his finger on. But the situation still made him uneasy. “I don’t like it.”

Kaz shrugged. “So what do you want to do?” Sam was already heading toward the Toyota. “Let’s talk it over.”

The X-Man was leaning up against the open front door when they got back. He pointed at Sam’s night-vision monocular. “Who are they?”

Sam said, “Let’s take a stroll.”

The four of them ambled past the Toyota’s rear bumper and turned west, into the desert. Their footfalls scrunching the sand, they walked about fifty yards. Sam hunkered down and drew a diagram in the sand with his index finger. “It looks like a PLA truck broke down.”

Kaz said, “Or, it could be a roadblock.”

“I disagree.” Sam wagged his head. “They don’t look like they’re set up to make a traffic stop. I think they broke down and they’re waiting for help.” He saw the disappointment on Kaz’s face. “Okay, Kaz has a point. Could also be they’re some kind of security unit checking road traffic.”

Kaz said, “Hell, Sam, this is the only north-south connector in three hundred miles.”

“So, what if it is a roadblock?” Dick Campbell asked.

“It means we’ll probably be shaken down,” Kaz said. “Remember the traffic stop in Dabancheng?”

“Traffic stop? It was more like highway robbery,” X-Man said. “They shook us down for two hundred bucks.”

“And three hours, while they went through every single piece of our equipment,” Sam said.

Dick Campbell folded his arms. “Hell, so what if we lose a few hours, Sam? It’s not as if we’re on a tight schedule.”

“You’re right,” Sam said. “It’s probably nothing. I’m being overly sensitive.”

“Oh, yeah,” Kaz said. “Sam, you’ve turned into a real Mr. Touchy-Feely.”

Sam smacked Kaz on the upper arm. But he wasn’t sanguine about this turn of events. He’d survived for more than a decade by trusting his instincts. And now his instincts were telling him something about the truck just … wasn’t … right.

“So?” X-Man hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. “What’s the plan?”

“I’ll think of something. Let’s get back before Shoazim gets suspicious.”

Sam mulled the possibilities as they walked back to the 4x4. Then he walked up to the Toyota on the passenger side. “Shoazim, back up. We’re turning around. I don’t want to drive through the Army checkpoint tonight.”

The driver crossed his arms. “No, Mr. Sam,” he said. “We cannot.”

Sam wasn’t in the mood to be contradicted. “Shoazim—” he began.

The Uighur tapped the fuel gauge. “Two hundred kilometers at least to where we can get fuel if we go back,” he said. “But fourteen kilometers straight ahead in Tazhong is gasoline. Turn around is impossible.”

“How much fuel do we have, Shoazim?”

“Just a little.”

Sam walked around to the driver’s window. “Let me see.”

The Uighur twisted the ignition key and Sam checked the gauge. It showed just under a quarter of a tank — maybe three, three and a half gallons. He did the math in his head and came up about a hundred kliks short. “Okay,” Sam said, improvising, “what we’ll do is, we’ll go around.”

Shoazim’s eyes widened. “Around? But it is the Army, Mr. Sam. They will not like it.”

“They won’t ever know.” Sam tapped the Toyota’s roof. “Four-wheel drive,” he said. “No problem.”

The Uighur’s expression showed he didn’t like Sam’s decision at all.

Sam said, “Hold on.” He reached into his pocket for the Visor, turned it on, then held it toward the sky. “Let’s see what Mr. GPS says about where we are and where we can go.”

Half a minute later, Sam shut the PDA down. “Dammit — I can pull map coordinates, but nothing topographical.” He took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s just do it.”

“Wait a sec.” Dick Campbell pulled the cell phone from his pocket and turned the power switch on. “Just in case we get stuck in the sand and have to call the office in London for a tow,” he said.

Sam nodded in agreement. “Good idea.” He climbed into the cab, pulled the door shut, turned on the interior light, and unfolded the road map. “Okay, here’s the plan.” His finger tapped the yellow line showing the road they were on. “We’re about here. We roll forward about half a kilometer. We’re still out of sight because of the rise in the road… “ Sam’s finger strayed off the yellow line. “We go west, across the basin.”

Sam saw the dubious look on the driver’s face. “Shoazim, there are no big dunes this far south. We’ll be just fine.”

“We are too heavy for the desert,” the driver said. “Too much weight. Soft sand.”

“I just tested the sand, Shoazim,” Sam bluffed. “We’ll be just fine.” Sam’s finger went back to the map and drew a half circle. “All we have to do is give ‘em a wide berth, then swing back onto the road.”

Kaz said, in French, “What if they see us?”

“If they see us,” Sam answered in the same language, “we’ll deal with it.” Then he swiveled in the front seat until his eyes settled on the X-Man. “Everybody’s documents in order, Mr. Chris?”

Chris patted the upper left side of his photographer’s vest, where he kept the group’s passports and visas in a zipped interior pocket. “Ready for inspection, Mr. Boss Man.”

Sam grinned. But it wasn’t because he was happy. “Mr. Chris” was the private emergency signal he and X-Man had worked out in advance to indicate trouble. “Mr. Boss Man” was the confirmation. Which also meant that as they drove, X-Man’s left hand would be in his jacket pocket, wrapped around the emergency transponder sewn inside the lining. If the situation went south, he’d let Langley know they were in trouble — and more important, where they were.

“Okay,” Sam said. He extinguished the interior light, folded the map, then took one deep breath. His lips were dry. He could feel his pulse racing. But he fought for control so no one would notice his anxiety. “Let’s roll.”

He was specific with Shoazim. “Go slowly,” he instructed the Uighur, “until we reach the dip in the road half a kilometer ahead.”

He waited until the driver nodded in agreement.

“Then turn west, straight into the desert.”

“Chataq yoq,” Shoazim said. “No problem.”

“Then go two kilometers and turn south. After two more kilometers, head east until we hit the road again.”

The driver may have nodded obediently after listening to each sequence. But he obviously had no intention of following Sam’s directions. Because Shoazim drove straight through the dip in the road at forty kilometers an hour, crested the rise, and continued down the far side.

He finally stopped in full sight of the truck and its occupants. “Turn now, Mr. Sam?” he said facetiously.

Sam thought seriously about throttling the driver. “No — go straight,” he said through gritted teeth, resigned to an hour’s delay — probably more.

Shoazim grunted, put the Toyota in gear, and moved ahead.

They were less than fifty yards from the truck when Sam realized how badly he’d misjudged things. He and Kaz had spied half a dozen uniformed men. Now, even in the dark, he realized they weren’t wearing PLA uniforms, just PLA uniform parts.

He’d spotted the easily identifiable Chinese Army hats and jackets through the night vision. But up close, it was obvious they didn’t fit the people wearing ‘em. Not even remotely.

Sam glanced at the driver. Shoazim had obviously seen what Sam had seen, because there was a look of sheer panic on his face. The Uighur screamed something unidentifiable and slammed his foot on the brake pedal without taking the truck out of gear. The Toyota stalled out. Sam yelled, “Dick—”

He hadn’t needed to say anything. The communicator had already slapped the cell phone to his ear.

But it was too late. There was sudden motion on their flanks. A tide of armed men came out of concealed positions on either side of the road. They ran, screaming, at the 4x4.

Their hands were already on the vehicle when Sam saw — holy Christ — that these were Uzbeks, Tajiks, Afghans, Kazakhs.

The first to reach the Toyota wore a red-and-white kaffiyeh wrapped around his head like a Hizballah guerrilla. He stuck the butt of his pistol through the driver’s-side window and hammered at Shoazim’s head as the Uighur screamed and tried to twist away from the blows. Sam’s peripheral vision caught a beetle-browed youngster in a striped Russian uniform undershirt coming at him. Instinctively, he raised his arms to protect his face. The kid grabbed both his wrists, yanked hard, pulled Sam straightaway through the Toyota’s open window frame, leaving a fair amount of skin behind in the process. He punched Sam in the face. He kneed him in the gut. Then he body-slammed the American roughly onto the highway and kicked him savagely.

Sam was frozen by the sudden intensity of the violence. He regained his senses barely in time to see a heavy jackboot coming at his face. He rolled away but still took a steel-toed kick that sent a shock wave of pain up his spine. The butt of a rifle glanced off his shoulder. He tried to tuck into a fetal position and got a breath-stopping kick in the balls for it.

There was a lot of noise — yelling, cursing, and shouting — in a language Sam didn’t understand. There was shooting: quick, deafening bursts of automatic weapons fire and the raw smell of cordite mixed with dust. He thought he heard Kaz scream and then the kid’s voice cut off, abruptly.

Sam tried to crawl away from the barrage of boots and gun butts. But his attempts grew pitifully futile and he finally collapsed in a bloody heap, mercifully unconscious.

3

Mike Ritzik never felt completely comfortable in business attire. And so, the normal anxiety over where he was right now — the cozy hideaway office of the secretary of defense — was compounded by the fact that he was wearing his only dress suit: ten years old, navy-blue worsted, and very seldom worn. Oh, you didn’t have to look very hard to see the hanger marks imprinted just above the trouser knees, or get up close and personal before you caught the faint yet unmistakable cedar-tinged perfume of mothballs issuing from the jacket.

The suit still fit him well enough. That was to be expected. At the age of thirty-nine Mike Ritzik hadn’t put more than six pounds on his five-foot eight-inch frame since he’d graduated sixth in his class at West Point eighteen years before. He worked out daily: a constant but varying routine of distance running, weight-pile sessions, and the once-a-week torture of the obstacle course. He knew that sooner or later his body would betray him — lose the agility and elasticity that allowed him to trounce men half his age on the basketball court they’d built behind the razor wire of the CAG.

CAG, which stood for Combat Applications Group, was the Army’s neutral-sounding designator for the never-acknowledged First Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, otherwise known as Delta Force. Delta’s compound was buried well inside Fort Bragg, the huge, sprawling post that was home to the 82^nd Airborne Division, as well as the Joint Special Forces Command, and which sat a dozen or so miles northwest of Fayetteville, North Carolina.

But his body hadn’t betrayed him yet. And it wouldn’t — not for a while, anyway.

Ritzik unclipped the yellow plastic ID with its bold blue V for visitor from the lapel of his suit and examined the fine print. It told him that the badge — number 120342—was the property of the United States government, and its return was guaranteed if it was dropped into any postal box. If he’d been in uniform, he wouldn’t have had to wear it. His Special Forces photo ID with its smart chip would have gotten him through the thumbprint card readers and into the building. But at nine-twenty last night, the secretary’s chief of staff had called the Old Man, who passed the word down the chain of command. SECDEF himself wanted Major Michael Anton Ritzik in Washington. Posthaste. Forthwith. Chop-chop. Zero seven hundred in SECDEF’s office. And in mufti, please.

They’d sent a plane — a C-12—that had him on the ground at Andrews Air Force Base one hour and six minutes after departing Pope. From there it had been a twenty-six-minute ride in an anonymous black Chevy with red and blue flashing lights, driven by an anonymous driver who wore an anonymous Sig Sauer 228 in a shoulder holster under his blue blazer. The ride was followed by a six-minute walk escorted by a pair of DOD rent-a-cops that entailed jogging up one escalator, marching through four separate metal detectors, and showing his North Carolina driver’s license to three huge Marines and a prissy Air Force colonel, the secretary’s deputy military assistant.

The colonel, relatively satisfied about Ritzik’s identity, had ushered him reverentially into SECDEF’s ceremonial office, which was (Ritzik knew this because he’d seen it once before) about the size of a soccer field. There, the four-striper recounted, as if speaking from a TelePrompTer, the history of the secretary’s desk: “Made from the wood and hardware of a twin-masted British privateer bravely captured during the Revolutionary War.” He dragged a manicured finger languidly across the “Four Top” table, where, he said, SECDEF and his deputy had a twice-weekly lunch with the chairman and vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And, in an unctuous tone, he pointed out his personal favorites from the secretary’s Me Wall — that unvarying Washington political custom of displaying political relics, warmly inscribed photographs, editorial cartoons, and newspaper headlines relating to the VIP — for all to see.

The photos and headlines Ritzik could understand. But it had always baffled him to see the cruel caricatures so willingly displayed by the very butts of the cartoonists’ derision. It was, he thought, kind of like walking down the street wearing a huge sign that said KICK ME! Go figure.

From there, Ritzik was led down a short, private corridor to the holy of holies. Actually, he found the secretary’s hideaway office to be comfortable, even inviting. There were no VIP pictures or ego-boosting tributes on the walls. Instead, the cherrywood bookshelves bore framed family snapshots of the secretary’s wife, children, and grandkids. A fire crackled in the fireplace. An afghan, which bore the huge likeness of a black Labrador retriever, had been flung over the arm of a well-used leather wing chair, in front of which sat an equally well-used leather footstool.

“Sit, Major,” the four-striped major domo instructed, pointing schoolmarmlike toward a rail-backed wooden armchair placed at an oblique angle to a small, burlwood writing desk.

He complied. The colonel’s nose actually twitched as Ritzik passed downwind to drop into the chair, and the man’s face momentarily betrayed the fact that he’d caught a whiff of the detested eau de mothball. But he wasn’t a Pentagon staff puke military assistant for nothing. This guy was a pro. His expression quickly returned to neutral. Then he turned on his mirror-shined heel. “The secretary will be with you shortly,” he said to the hideaway office door, and left without waiting for a response.

Ritzik sat where he’d been ordered, his eyes scanning the small office. He played with his ID badge and was still looking at it when the thick wood door eased open and Secretary of Defense Robert W. Rockman, carrying a well-worn brown document folder tucked under his arm like a football, entered the room.

Ritzik snapped to his feet and turned toward the doorway. “Mr. Secretary.”

“Major Ritzik. How good to see you again.” Rockman gave him such a genuine, wide smile Ritzik could make out the gold crowns in the back of the man’s mouth. “Let me just toss—” He dropped the folder onto the wing-chair cushion, advanced to Ritzik, and pumped the younger man’s hand. “Thank you so much for coming on such short notice.”

As if he’d had a choice. “Good to see you again, too, sir.”

It wasn’t the first time they’d met. Back in 2001, Ritzik — then a captain — had been a part of Task Force 555, a joint Special Operations unit that had put Delta operators, CIA paramilitary personnel, and British SAS shooters inside Afghanistan weeks before the announced start of the ground and air campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Triple Five’s mission had been both clandestine and critical. First, to organize and synchronize the ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks who formed the core of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Second, to serve as “force multipliers,” providing weapons and training for the indigenous Pashtuns in the south. And third, once the campaign started in earnest, to use their SpecOps abilities for sneaking and peeking — getting close to the enemy without being seen — to provide real-time targeting information for American pilots and “light up” al-Qaeda and Taliban troops and equipment with their self-contained, handheld, state-of-the-art laser target designators.

Ritzik’s twelve-man First SFOD-D Troop Hotel — four three-man squads — had been inserted into northern Afghanistan by Task Force 160 chopper on September 21, ten days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. By chance, Ritzik and two of his Delta troopers had been ten miles outside Almaty, the Kazakh capital, on September 11, assigned to a JCET — Joint Combined Exchange Training — mission, schooling the Kazakh Special Forces in counterterrorist tactics to be used against the IMU and other extremist groups. Within twenty-four hours, they’d been joined by nine of their colleagues, and just over a week after that, they’d fast-roped out of an MH-53E Pave Low Special Operations chopper onto the lunar landscape of the Panjshir Valley.

Ritzik and his group had finally been extracted — under protest, let the record show — in March 2002. Twelve days later, after he’d been cleaned up and allowed to decompress a little, Ritzik was flown to Washington, where Rockman, the no-nonsense SECDEF, had offered him a newly created position on his staff: special assistant to the secretary for counterterrorism.

Respectfully but unequivocally, Ritzik declined. Not because he wouldn’t be able to make a difference as a staff officer, but because he honestly believed he’d be of greater benefit to the nation back at Bragg. Mike Ritzik understood his duty to be the business of making war, not making policy. And passing on the lessons he and his men had learned through six months of hard combat — their defeats as well as victories — would make his Army all the more effective in achieving its fundamental goals on the battlefield. So, despite Rockman’s entreaties and the promise of rapid advancement, Ritzik stood his ground, convinced he was better off returning to Bragg than taking an E-Ring office at the Pentagon.

That had been more than two years ago. He’d spent the intervening time commuting between the CAG and Fort Campbell, Kentucky, headquarters of the Special Operations Air Regiment’s Task Force 160, known as the Night-stalkers. It had been Ritzik’s assignment to fuse the SOAR pilots and crews seamlessly with Delta, to make sure that the multiple snafus that had taken place in Afghanistan did not repeat themselves elsewhere.

Now he’d been summoned to see SECDEF once more — without the faintest idea why.

“We have a serious problem,” Rockman said by way of terse explanation.

“Sir?”

“In Western China. A lousy situation with huge political consequences and unreal time constraints. When I was asked to fix it, you’re the one I thought of first.” Rockman’s lined face grew dead serious. “Take a seat, son, and I’ll explain. We’re due at the White House in an hour and a half.”

Robert Rockman had served as both White House chief of staff and secretary of defense long before Mike Ritzik had entered West Point. Rocky, as he was called in the press, was now in his mid-seventies. He’d been brought back from a successful business career by Pete Forrest to revitalize a military that had been both demoralized and marginalized during the 1990s. Rockman had been low-profile for the first few months of the administration, working the way he preferred: quietly, without publicity. But after 9/11, Rocky had become the reluctant but highly effective public face of America’s worldwide war against terrorism.

The long hours and seven-day weeks had taken their toll. Ritzik saw weariness in the secretary’s bearing. But he understood enough not to mistake fatigue for apathy. Rocky was a tough old bird, as insightful, astute, and shrewd a political operator as he’d been during his younger days. After four and a half minutes of the SECDEF’s monologue, Ritzik also had to admit that the man knew how to brief. There were no wasted words, no hyperbole, no polysyllabic bureaucratese.

The way Rockman laid it out, the national security adviser had pushed for the sensor-planting operation to ensure that the Chinese weren’t going to cheat. Rockman had agreed it was crucial. But then the mission had been assigned to the CIA over his objections. And, as with most Agency ops these days, the numbskulls at Langley hadn’t factored in Mr. Murphy. Yesterday, after successfully planting the sensors, things went sour. The team had been captured by terrorists — Uighur separatists, perhaps, no one was certain. The Agency panicked — no one notified the White House for six whole hours while they attempted to cover their butts. The president went ballistic when he found out the CIA had no contingency plan to get its people back, and he’d dumped the problem on Rockman at about five o’clock.

It got sticky, SECDEF continued, because the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to take things over, and he’d wasted valuable time derailing what he called their Machiavellian plottings — which is why he hadn’t been able to get hold of Ritzik until zero-dark-hundred.

And to make matters worse, the director of central intelligence was being stingy with intelligence. The secretary retrieved his leather document case from the wing chair. He opened it, revealing a red-tabbed folder. “I was only able to get these from Langley an hour ago — although they’ve been sitting on the DCI’s desk since last midnight.” Rockman opened the folder. It contained a dozen satellite photographs. “This’ll give you some idea of what you’re up against.”

“Do you have a magnifying glass?”

Without a word, the secretary reached in his desk drawer and withdrew one. He handed it to Ritzik, who used it to study the eight-by-tens. He counted trucks and people. “Looks like a force of about fifty — maybe sixty.” He shuffled the images. “Do we know where they’re going? Are the Chinese in pursuit?”

“We can track them by satellite,” the secretary said. “And so far as I know, the Chinese don’t know what’s going on — their satellite capabilities don’t allow them to shift their birds as quickly as we can move ours.” Rockman’s face hardened. “Of course, they may be privy by now. But since they’re playing this pretty close to the vest at Langley, I haven’t been told.”

‘That’s SOP[6] for the Agency.” Ritzik knew from bitter experience that the CIA did not like to share its wealth. They held on to intelligence like misers and doled it out the way John D. Rockefeller used to hand out dimes to street urchins.

But real-time intelligence was the key to victory in Special Operations. The essence of Special Operations, as Ritzik knew, was using small, well-trained units to achieve operational success in denied areas. The mission might be direct action, or it might be political, economic, or even psychological in nature. But no matter what the nature of the mission, Ritzik understood that without a constant flow of detailed, up-to-the-minute intelligence, any small and lightly armed force would be doomed. SpecOps Warriors cannot fight blind.

Rockman’s clear gray eyes met Ritzik’s. “I want you to go out and clean up the Agency’s mess — extract those four men covertly and bring ‘em home before the Chinese find out we’ve violated their territory.”

It wasn’t a question.

Ritzik’s index finger tapped the satellite pictures. “I’ll need real-time intelligence to get the job done, Mr. Secretary — information I can download onto my tactical laptops and handhelds.”

“Everything you need, you will receive,” Rockman said. He watched as Ritzik perused the pictures. “Now, before we leave for the White House, I want to hear from you a rough idea of how you’re going to bring those four men home.”

“I’d feint in the Pacific first, Mr. Secretary,” Ritzik said coolly. “Use the Navy to draw China’s attention away from Xinjiang. Once they were diverted, I’d go in by air and get positioned ahead of the sons of bitches. I’d employ speed, surprise, and violence of action. I’d hit when they least expect it. I’d kill them all, so there’s no one left to come back and bite us on the rear end later. I’d grab our people and run like hell to a predetermined, secure extraction point. And then I’d link up with some of our air assets and get across a safe border.”

“Can you be any more specific, Major? The president is going to want to hear more than high concept from you.”

“Sir,” Ritzik said candidly, “I’m going to need a secure phone so I can talk to my sergeant major before I go any further.”

“Why is that, Major?”

“Because Sergeant Major Yates and his cadre of senior NCOs will be the ones doing most of the planning for this mission, not me. They’ve forgotten a lot more about the specifics of putting these sorts of ops together than I’ll ever know.”

“What?” Rockman’s unflappable composure dissolved.

Ritzik understood immediately what he’d done. Rockman, after all, was SECDEF. Meaning that he was treated like some sort of god. He was “handled.” He was “guided.” He was “shielded” from certain … realities.

The shocked look on Rockman’s face told Ritzik that no general, no military assistant or SpecWar adviser had ever told him that Delta’s operations were developed and planned not by the guys with the scrambled eggs on their hats and the stars on their collars, but by the unit in question’s senior enlisted personnel.

At Delta the mission tasking might come down the chain of command from the president or secretary of defense to SOCOM — the U.S. Special Operations Command at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida — or through JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg. But once the tasking — which boiled down to the overall goal to be achieved — had been issued, all the hands-on mission planning was done by the unit’s senior noncoms. It was a system that Delta’s creator, Colonel Charlie A. Beckwith, had brought from his days as an exchange officer with the 22^nd Regiment Special Air Service. “Bottom-up planning,” Beckwith called it. At Delta, in fact, senior NCOs had more than once told JSOC or SOCOM staff puke colonels to shove it after said staff pukes had tried to impose mission-specific orders.

It made perfect sense, too. Ritzik had been at Delta for two tours totaling five years. Of that time, twenty-three months had been spent in language training inside the Delta compound — he spoke Uzbek, Kazakh, and some Dari, as well as a little Russian — and a series of specialized courses where he’d been taught such esoteric skills as breaking and entering (by a career criminal at the medium-security federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia) and guerrilla driving at West Virginia’s Bill Scott Raceway, just outside Charles Town.

But Ritzik was the exception to the rule. Most junior officers spent only two years with Delta, using their tour as a ticket-punching way station on their way to a colonel’s command, followed by a general’s stars.

NCOs, however, could spend a dozen years or more at the unit, participating in hundreds of operations, drills, rehearsals, and call-outs, and more important, the hot-washes, those no-holds-barred, rank-has-no-privilege debriefing sessions that followed every op or full mission profile exercise. Sergeants were the ones who ran the ops at Delta Force. Junior officers like Ritzik were — as the senior NCOs liked to say — no more than overpaid RTOs (radio telephone operators).

“Mr. Secretary, it’s the truth. When we were in Afghanistan, I was the nominal troop leader. Sure, I worked on developing the unit’s mission concepts and fine-tuning its goals. But once we were tasked I deferred the operational planning to the master sergeant, Fred Yates, who was my team leader back then.”

Rockman hooked a thumb toward a heavy black telephone sitting on his desk. “Then get this sergeant major of yours — Yates, you say — on the line, Major, and do whatever head-shedding you have to do to come up with something workable. I need to hear specifics before we leave for the White House.”

Sam Phillips opened his right eye — which took considerable effort and caused him a fair amount of pain — and tried to figure out just where he was. He concluded, after some woozy seconds, that he was in a dark void, lying on his side, his head drooping into a puddle of something nasty. He thought, That road we were on must have been paved with good intentions, because I have obviously gone to hell.

He wriggled slightly — which caused a sharp twinge in his rib cage — and learned that his arms were bound tightly behind his back. He tried to straighten his legs, which were tied at the ankles tightly enough to hurt, and bent at the knees. But when he moved, a noose around his throat tightened, and he eased up quickly so as not to choke himself. The mothers had hog-tied him.

There was foul-smelling wetness under his face. He tried to open his left eye, but it was fused shut. So he lay there for some seconds, hoping that he’d get some degree — any degree — of vision back in his blurry right eye, and listening desperately for any clue that might indicate where he was. He heard snippets of muffled speech coming as if from a distance. But it was impossible to decipher what was being said.

How long had he been awake? Three minutes? Four? However long it had been, his eye wasn’t getting any better. And so he lay quietly, working hard not to panic, trying to regulate his breathing so he wouldn’t choke on the tape gag, letting his body and his brain recover by counting silently back from two hundred; a Zen exercise to steady himself.

By the time he’d reached zero, the sight in his right eye had finally unblurred enough for him to be able to make out worn floorboards below his nose.

Okay — that meant he’d been stashed in a vehicle or a house. There were no houses anywhere close by, unless they’d been driven into Tazhong. Which from the lack of ambient sounds was improbable. So, most likely, he’d been tossed into the bed of the truck that had been sitting astride the road. Or some other truck. After what had taken place earlier, Sam Phillips was not about to assume anything. Sam rolled right so he could look up. He was rewarded with a fuzzy image of canvas and metal. He raised his head, sniffed, and caught the faint but clear odor of diesel fuel.

A truck it was, then. Sam squirmed to his left, and made contact against something. He had to roll completely over now, scraping his nose across the wet floorboard. But finally his eye settled on X-Man’s photographer’s vest. He fought his way onto his shoulder — Whoa, that hurt — so he could see his teammate’s back. He watched, for a minute or so, and was hugely relieved to see that X-Man was taking shallow but regular breaths.

Then he forced his legs as far up as he could so he could see the security man’s legs without choking himself. X-Man was hog-tied, too.

Forcing his legs to comply, he scrunched forward until his forehead touched X-Man’s back. He tapped the security man’s back twice, knock-knock.

There was no one home.

He prodded the back of the photographer’s vest once more, grunting through gagged lips as he did.

Still nothing.

He squeezed up against the photographer’s vest and smacked his whole body against X-Man until he heard a short, muffled groan from his colleague. Sam moved back, until he’d put a foot or so between them. “Chris, try and roll over,” he said. “But be careful not to rock the truck and attract attention.” Of course, given the tape gag, it didn’t quite come out that way. But X-Man’s body told Sam he’d gotten the message.

It took perhaps five or six minutes, but they were finally face-to-face. Sam wriggled close and examined the cut over X-man’s eye and the bruises on his cheeks. Christ, he was a mess.

X-Man started to blink rapidly. Sam thought he was having a seizure, until he realized that the security man was transmitting Morse code.

Oh, Christ, Sam thought. He’d learned Morse back at the Farm during his initial training. They’d taught it so case officers could mark dead drops, or leave signals for their agents, or — the instructor had actually once joked—“Just in case two of you are tossed into adjoining cells and you want to communicate with each other.”

Sam remembered how the whole class had rolled their eyes at that one. Which was when the instructor said, “Well, smart-asses, that’s how we did it at the Hanoi Hilton.”

But Sam hadn’t used Morse for years.

He closed his eye and counted to ten, racking his befogged mind as he tried to remember the twenty-six dit-dah long-short combinations. It was useless. His brain was mush. All he could come up with was SOS—three short, followed by three long, followed by three short.

Which jogged his mind a little. Wait a second. H was four short. S was three short. I was two short. And E was one short. That was all the shorts. There was no four long. O was three long — he knew that. What the hell was one long? T.T.T was one long. And M; M was two long.

He opened his eye and waited until it focused on X-Man’s face. He blinked three short, four short, two short, and one long, then waited for X-Man’s reaction.

Three long, followed by long-short-long. O something. OK-OK-OK.

Sam opened his eye as far as he could and nodded. X-Man was transmitting again. Short-short. Long-long. Short-short-long. I-M-short-short-long. Sam shook his head. Negatory.

X-Man cocked his head toward the outside of wherever they were being held. Then he transmitted again. I-M-something.

U. Short-short-long was U. It was the IMU out there. He was telling Sam they’d been snatched by the IMU.

The IMU. That figured. Langley said the IMU was seriously weakened these days. Well, these guys didn’t appear very weak. Sam blinked T, then E, then I-S-T-S, because he couldn’t think of what the hell R was.

X-Man gave him an affirmative nod. Then he started blinking again. “I-s-i-t,” he said.

Thank God he was keeping it simple. But sitting? What if the truck moved? What if one of them outside saw it move?

X-Man didn’t give him a chance to object. He slithered backward to give himself some clearance. Then, knees bent, the security officer rolled onto his belly. And then somehow, incredibly, without garroting himself, he levitated and jerked himself upright, into a kneeling position. The move actually slackened the hog-tie cord between X-Man’s neck and his ankles.

Sam was still holding his breath. Jeezus. It was okay: the truck hadn’t moved. Not a millimeter.

X-Man’s eyes told Sam what to do next. Sam complied, squiggling forward until he’d put his face close up against X-Man’s butt and the soles of his feet. X-Man’s fingers found the back edge of the tape across Sam’s mouth and pried it loose.

The instant it came off his lips, Sam breathed so rapidly he began to hyperventilate.

Quickly, he fought to bring his body under control. “I’ll be okay, I’ll be okay,” he whispered, the sound of his own hoarse voice both reassuring him and giving him back some blessed degree of control over the situation, even though he was still bound hand and foot.

Sam swallowed hard. “X, do you know where Kaz and Dick are?”

Instead of answering, X-Man wriggled his butt and his shoulders at Sam.

Who finally got the message — and got with the program. He buried his face between X-Man’s shoes and worked with his teeth at the hog-tie knot just above the ankles.

They’d used cheap plastic line to do the job, and Sam was able to pull the frayed end out and release the knot in a few minutes without chipping any teeth. Then he attacked the thick roll of dark tape that pinioned X-Man’s wrists and forearms behind his back. He had managed to gnaw through two of the perhaps half-dozen layers of foul-tasting tape when the shooting started and the truck was rocked by nearby explosions.

4

National Security Adviser Monica Wirth glanced at the legal pad in her left hand. Then her eyes flicked in the president’s direction. A barely noticeable movement by Pete Forrest’s eyebrow told her exactly what he wanted her to do.

Wirth dropped the pad to her side, crossed the rug with its Great Seal of the United States, and moved behind the president, where she could focus on Ritzik. “I like your overall plan, Major. It’s simple and direct. But there is one huge flaw.”

“Ma’am?” Ritzik was shaken. He thought he’d covered all the bases.

“As proposed by you, there is only one service branch employed on the actual rescue — the Army. The other branches are used in support roles, or not included at all.” She dropped the pad out of sight. “The Navy wants a substantial piece of this, Major Ritzik. So does the Air Force. So does the Central Intelligence Agency. The Joint Chiefs chairman is strongly recommending — his staff has already drawn up a mission profile and detailed operation plan, I might add — that we assemble a company-sized unit made up of Army, Navy, and Air Force Special Operations personnel to do the job, as opposed to your twelve-man Army element with Air Force support.” Wirth paused. “So, Major, how do we deal with the chairman’s objections?”

Mike Ritzik glanced at the dark circles under the national security adviser’s eyes as she stood behind the president’s wing chair, and realized she’d probably been up all night. The president didn’t look too good, either. Neither did the SECDEF. “I don’t believe a company-sized force is a good idea for this mission, Dr. Wirth.”

“Why?”

“First of all, the size alone is cause for failure. Moving a hundred-plus people attracts attention. Second, I totally reject the chairman’s concept of a unit assembled specifically for this operation. Jointness is a concept that Congress first forced on the military for political reasons. Unlike most of the dumb ideas they come up with on Capitol Hill, this one actually worked — like when the Navy carriers served as forward basing for Special Forces during the Afghan campaign. But when it comes to the sorts of small-unit operations I do, jointness for jointness’s sake can be dangerous.”

“Dangerous, Major?”

“Dangerous, ma’am. I’m not talking about being able to communicate on the same radio frequencies — that’s a good idea. But so far as I’m concerned, unless you’ve trained with someone for a long time, it’s impossible to operate with that man successfully on a high-risk op. You don’t know what the other guy is thinking, how he works, or what he’s good at.”

“But we’re talking about our most elite forces, Major,” Wirth said. “You’re all professionals. Certainly that counts for something.”

“It does, ma’am,” Ritzik said. He paused just long enough to sneak a look at the president, who was staring at him intently. Strange that the man hadn’t said anything. Ritzik’s eyes shifted back to the national security adviser. “Working with strangers increases the chance of failure — increases them exponentially. Sure, symbiosis and integration — and those are a couple of the buzzwords you hear from the Joint Chiefs these days — can be achieved. ‘Integration’ is precisely what I’ve been doing for the past two years with the SOAR. But fluidity in combat takes months of work. The schedule the secretary outlined to me doesn’t allow any time for that kind of mission prep.”

“I’m still skeptical,” Monica Wirth said. “Admiral Buckley makes a strong argument that a joint strike force would be effective and successful.”

“The admiral would say that.” Ritzik almost had to laugh. Phil Buckley, the current JCS chairman, was a Navy sea systems manpower specialist who had spent twenty-eight of his thirty-one-year career behind a desk as a staff officer. According to the RUMINT[7] at Bragg, he’d been selected for chairman in the last months of the previous administration because he’d been the safe choice, a bureaucrat who wouldn’t rock the boat. Phil Buckley had spent the past decade and a half not commanding or leading, but writing legislative memos.

The role suited him, too. Buckley was precisely the sort of individual who looked good marching down the marble corridors of the Hart or Cannon office buildings. He was tall and lean and had the eagle-eyed stare of a Warrior. But in point of fact, the man had never seen a shot fired in anger. He was a manager, an apparatchik, one of the Pentagon’s detested professional paper pushers.

Ritzik knew the suggestion Chairman Buckley was putting forward was a recipe for disaster. But they all had to know it, too, didn’t they? He started to speak again. But the words caught in his throat, because Ritzik, openmouthed, caught something he hadn’t been supposed to see: an imperceptible signal, passing like electricity, between the other three.

That was when Ritzik realized what was going on. The president was testing him. Challenging him to prove he could succeed. This was all about will. Resolve. Tenacity. Determination.

Ritzik viewed Pete Forrest with fresh respect. And as a sign of that esteem, he’d give his commander in chief the unvarnished truth. At Delta, you always spoke your mind during the hot-wash sessions, no matter how much it might wire-brush the senior officers. Because as Ritzik saw it, the Warrior’s ultimate goal wasn’t getting promoted, but to prevail over your enemy and bring all your people home.

So Ritzik focused on the president and hot-washed. “Units like the one the chairman is suggesting do work out just fine — in Hollywood movies, sir. But in the real world, they get people killed. That’s why at CAG, our senior noncoms insist on doing the mission planning. Because every time some staff puke colonel or dumb-as-a-brick general comes up with a bright idea — we pretty much know it’s going to get our people killed.”

Pete Forrest looked intently at Ritzik. “I was a staff puke, Major.”

“Yes, sir, you were,” Ritzik said, his tone unyielding. “But before that, you were Airborne. You led a platoon in combat. You know I’m right.”

The shocked look Ritzik got from the national security adviser told him he’d probably just put an end to his career.

But he wasn’t about to back down. “The way I see it, sir, junior officers like you and me often end up sending good men home in body bags because somebody with stars on his collar wants a piece of the glory for his service, or his unit.”

Ritzik focused on President Forrest’s face. “Remember that Navy SEAL who fell out of the chopper in Afghanistan a couple of years back, sir?”

“At the start of Operation Anaconda,” the president said. “Chief Petty Officer Jackson.”

“Yes, sir.” Ritzik was impressed the man remembered. “Well, I was in the AO, sir. I knew that assault element hadn’t ever worked together before. It was thrown together — Rangers, Special Forces, and SEALs, with SOAR pilots and aircrews. All strangers. But you know how it was: we had all those alleged instant communications setups in operation, and so instead of letting some junior officer or master sergeant on the ground run things, all the staff pukes — excuse me, ma’am, the ‘joint operations advisory staff’ officers — a hundred miles away at Bagram Air Base, and the middle-manager pukes seven thousand miles away at Central Command in Tampa, they all put their two cents in on how things should be done.”

The national security adviser stroked her chin. “I never looked at it that way before — DOD never put it in those terms when they briefed us.”

“They wouldn’t,” Ritzik said. “But it’s the truth, ma’am. Bottom line is that the Navy micromanagers at CENTCOM wanted their service to grab a piece of the glory, and so did the Marines, and the Air Force, and my boss’s boss’s boss, and the rest of ‘em. So the mission was hobbled from the get-go. Worse, COMCENT[8] didn’t have the, the”—Ritzik caught himself up—“the guts to tell the paper pushers to butt the hell out. And then Mr. Murphy got himself added to the manifest.”

Monica Wirth said, confused, “CIA?”

“Of Murphy’s Law fame, ma’am. Of course, your briefers tend not to use that term. They prefer to talk about ‘the fog of war,’ or what Clausewitz called la friction. But it all boils down to what can go wrong usually does. At Takhur Ghar — that was the objective — first, the chopper, it was an MH-47E, developed mechanical problems, which delayed takeoff until very close to dawn. So the team lost one of its key assets, its ability to attack at night, when the enemy couldn’t see them coming. Then the weather changed — for the worse, naturally. But they kept going. The comms got spotty, because they were using line-of-sight radios, and the ridges got in the way. So they couldn’t stay in touch. The altitude presented new challenges, too. Takhur Ghar is twenty-one hundred meters high — that’s almost seven thousand feet. But the pilots hadn’t trained to fly combat missions at that altitude and under similar weather conditions, so they had virtually no idea how the choppers would react in the thin air, zero visibility, and turbulence. Then the intel turned out to be bad. The satellites and the Predators and the billion-dollar photo recon systems all missed the bad guys because al-Qaeda had done a good job of camouflaging themselves and their bunkers. And we didn’t have any HUMINT. So no one warned the assault element they’d be facing Chechens. No one told them the LZ was going to be hot. That’s why the pilot brought the chopper in a little flat, flying an admin approach, because it was easier to control in thin air. But he caught ground fire. The chopper was hit. The hydraulic systems went out, and the pilot panicked.”

“Panicked?” Wirth said. “That’s strong language, Major.”

“Yes, ma’am. And it wasn’t what the official reports about Takhur Ghar said. But that’s what happened. I was there.” He paused. “If you train the way you fight, your instincts will kick in when things go bad. You’ll be able to overcome the obstacles. You’ll outthink and outfight the enemy. And you’ll get the job done. On Takhur Ghar, the mission hadn’t been bottom-up planned by shooters, but top-down planned by staff pukes. On Takhur Ghar, no one had trained the way they were going to have to fight. So the pilot reacted badly. Instead of putting his people on the ground to suppress the fire and counterambush the hostiles, he retreated. He hauled butt. And I guess he thought he’d done an okay job getting everyone out of there. Except he hadn’t. Jackson had fallen out.” Ritzik paused, his eyes scanning the room. “And no one noticed Jackson was missing.”

He was pretty worked up by now. “Why was that? I’ll tell you something: why doesn’t matter. What matters is that somebody with stars on his collar back in Tampa wanted Navy SpecWar to get a piece of the glory that night, and so this patchwork-quilt unit that had never trained or operated together before was sent out to do a job. And when the you-know-what hit the fan, things went bad. Bottom line: seven men died. Seven. If you ask me, they were squandered, because no matter how good each of them might have been individually, the group didn’t have any unit integrity.” Ritzik caught his breath. “Mr. President, let me tell you about unit integrity—”

“Major,” Pete Forrest broke in, his tone rebuking, “I know all about unit integrity.” He didn’t need a lecture on the subject from this young pup, and the peeved expression on his face displayed it.

Ritzik realized he’d gone too far. “I apologize, sir, but I lost men in Afghanistan because … idiots back here made decisions based on political considerations, or pure ignorance about what was taking place on the ground.”

“Sometimes that’s the reality,” the president said.

“Yes, sir, it may be reality — but I don’t have to like it. The problem is that when screwups like that happen, the politicians and generals who caused the problems in the first place never pay for their mistakes. They get promoted. Me, sir, I’m the one stuck with the job of filling body bags. So if you don’t mind, I’ll take a pass on the politics. The way I see it, my only job is to make sure the mission succeeds, and my men come home.”

“And you say those two goals are impossible if we assemble a joint force.”

“Yes, sir.” He took a few seconds to consider what he was about to say, then continued. “Mr. President, if you think the Navy, or the Marines, or whoever, should take this job on, that’s up to you. You’re the CINC. My only recommendation is that no matter who you assign, please deploy a single unit — a group of operators who have worked together so long they can finish one another’s sentences and read one another’s body language — to do the job. Otherwise, you’re going to squander those men’s lives just the way they were squandered on Takhur Ghar.”

The president took his time before responding. He liked this compact, muscular young man. Liked the fact that he spoke his mind. Liked even more that he obviously put the welfare and safety of his people ahead of his own career. Loyalty down the chain of command, Pete Forrest knew, was a rare, even uncommon virtue in today’s military culture. “Point taken, Major.”

“Thank you, sir.”

After some seconds, the president said, “Outspoken youngster, isn’t he, Rocky?”

“I told you he was,” the secretary said, a Cheshire-cat smile on his face.

Pete Forrest leaned forward. “The only question I have remaining, Major Ritzik, is whether, as an operator, you really believe this is doable.”

“Mr. President, in almost twenty years in the military I’ve learned that nothing is impossible, given the right resources and, more important, the political will to get the job done.”

Pete Forrest stared across the low butler’s table separating him from the young officer, his eyes probing the man’s demeanor for any sign of weakness, indecision, or hesitation. So far, he’d sensed none. “Don’t worry about resources, Major,” the president finally said. “Or politics. Do you have the will to get the job done?”

Mike Ritzik’s response was instantaneous. He looked the president in the eye. “Sir, I will not fail. I will bring those four men home.”

After a quarter of a minute, the president’s gaze shifted to his secretary of defense, who was now sitting next to Ritzik on the couch. “Monica.”

“Mr. President?”

“This comes under the ‘Special Activity’ rule, doesn’t it?” “I believe so, Mr. President.”

“Then draft a Finding. I want this done by the numbers.” “Yes, sir.”

“And let’s keep it close hold: that means you, me, and the general counsel.” The president looked back at Rockman. “Rocky,” he said, “give this op a compartment.[9] Give the major whatever he needs to get the job done.” The president paused. “And both of you”—he swiveled in the chair until he caught Monica Wirth’s eye again—“both of you, you take whatever heat is necessary to protect this boy’s back.”

Sergeant Major Fred Yates tucked the handset between his bull neck and rippled shoulder, swung his boon-dockered feet up onto the coffee-stained gray steel desktop, and shouted into the mouthpiece, “Talgat, you Kazakh superman, assalamu alaykim.”

Yates paused, a wide grin spreading across his sun-reddened face. “Yeah, it’s me, Rowdy Yates. Salemetsiz be, Colonel — you okay?” He nodded his head up and down. “Jaqsë—I’m just fine, thanks. No”—he laughed—“my Kazakh is still lousy as ever. So how are you?” Yates waited for an answer. “She did? A boy? What’s his name?” Yates flipped to a clean page of the legal pad that sat on his lap, took a felt marker out of his BDU breast pocket, and wrote A-I-B-E-K in capital letters on the page. “Three-point-three kilos? That’s huge, Talgat, huge,” he boomed. “You gotta be very, very proud, buddy.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” Yates covered the phone’s mouthpiece, ripped the page from the pad, and waved it at the first sergeant whose desk sat opposite his. “Yo, Shep — he had a kid. We’ll get one of those pint-sized BDU shirts made up. This is the name that goes on the pocket strip.”

Gene Shepard looked up from his to-do list, flashed a toothy smile, and ran his fingers through curly dark hair. “Great idea, man. How is the colonel these days?”

“Like I said, he’s a new papa and proud as hell. Gonna raise himself a little soldier, just like his daddy.”

“Tell him assalamu from me, will you? And that I’m looking forward to seeing him again.”

Yates gave the first sergeant an upturned thumb. “Will do.”

Then-captain Talgat Umarov had been Ritzik’s initial contact in Kazakhstan’s small, underfunded Special Forces counterterrorist unit, back in 1988. That year, a four-man Delta element led by Mike Ritzik went to Almaty to cross-train with the Kazakhs and teach them cutting-edge tactics. Over the ninety-day deployment, the four Americans and their twenty Kazakh counterparts bonded the way soldiers who share similar passions, missions, and dedication so often do.

Over the ensuing six years, Ritzik and Rowdy Yates stayed in touch with Umarov, who had been the counterterrorist team’s OIC, or officer-in-charge. He’d been friendly, helpful, and outspokenly pro-American. In fact, Umarov impressed Ritzik so much that in the spring of 2000 they’d wangled a trip to Fort Bragg for the Kazakh and three of his senior NCOs, and sent them home after two exhausting but exhilarating weeks of blowing things up, jumping out of perfectly good aircraft, and long, beer-soaked nights in Fayetteville’s better barbecue joints, with three cases of premium sourmash bourbon and two sets of fourth-generation night-vision goggles — equipment that was impossible to come by in Talgat’s part of the world. In January of the following year, Ritzik had arranged another visit for Umarov, which included a month of English language training.

The rapport between the Kazakh officer, Ritzik, and Yates had, in fact, been crucial during the first days after 9/11, when it became imperative for the United States to insert huge numbers of Special Forces troops into Central Asia as part of its military buildup in the region. The Kazakh military had quickly agreed to support the American request in no small measure because of the tight personal relationship between Mike Ritzik, Rowdy Yates, and their close friend Talgat Umarov, who, in 2001, was a lieutenant colonel, a battalion commander, and most important, a trusted officer who had the ear of the chief of staff. And the COS was the cousin and confidant of Kazakhstan’s all-powerful president.

Yates shouted, “Gene Shepard says hello.” There was five seconds of silence. Then Yates bellowed, “Yes, Colonel, he still likes that awful Guinness Stout. Sometimes he likes it too much.”

Shepard gestured to the sergeant major, who cupped his hand over the mouthpiece again. “What?”

“Why the hell are you shouting like that, Sergeant Major?”

“Because it’s long distance, putz.” Yates uncupped his hand from the mouthpiece and said, “Uh-huh. Great, buddy. Yes, we accept. We’re honored. We’re all very honored.”

The first sergeant said, “Honored?”

“Affirmative. He wants us to be godfathers.” Yates extended a thick arm, snagged a huge mug of steaming, sweet black coffee, and sipped it gingerly. “How’s Kadisha doing? That’s just super.” He listened for about half a minute, his grin crescendoing all the while. “Sounds absolutely effing great, Talgat. I wish we could have been there with you.”

Yates plucked a pair of Wal-Mart reading magnifiers, set them on the ridge of his nose, and checked the scribbled list on the top page of the notepad on his lap. “Listen, Colonel, I’m actually planning to be in your neck of the woods soon, and I’m gonna need a little help.” He took another gulp. “Day after tomorrow, actually.

“Day after tomorrow,” Yates repeated, fighting for the Kazakh word. “Erteng, old buddy, day after erteng. That’s right.” The sergeant major swept his feet off the desk. “Yeah, it came as a surprise to me, too. But you know how these things are — they never tell us anything.” He juggled mug, notepad, and phone as he scrunched his chair up to the desk. “A bunch of us. The old crowd plus a few new faces.”

The sergeant major paused and listened. “Naw — nothing special. Talgat — Talgat, no!” Yates cupped his hand over the handset. “Jeezus, the son of a bitch wants to give us a big welcome party.” He exposed the mouthpiece. “Talgat, we gotta keep this quiet. So maintain OPSEC. Remember OPSEC? Yeah — good. That’s right.” Yates wriggled his eyebrows at the first sergeant and mouthed, “He finally got it.”

Shepard gave the sergeant major an upturned thumb.

“Naw,” Yates bellowed. “We’re just dropping in to see some old friends on the way to Afghanistan. That would be great, Colonel — absolutely terrific.” He tapped his pen on the legal pad. “Well, actually, I do. You got a pencil?” Yates paused. “You still have any of that Iranian 5.45-X-39 ammo left from our last trip? Yeah — about five thousand rounds should do.” He listened. “Uh-huh. Great. And can you have one of your people hit the bazaar? We need some of those Tajik shirts and hats we found last time. And maybe a bunch of Russkie cammo anoraks and those striped Russkie undershirts, too. All extra-large, Talgat. As big as you can find ‘em.

“Right — put ‘em all in that warehouse at the airport we used as our HQ last time we TDY’d.” Yates’s basso profundo suddenly dropped by twenty decibels. “And I’ll need to borrow a plane, too. Nope — not Army. Commercial. Remember your cousin Shingis from Air Kazakhstan who we worked with on jump exercises when we were over last year? Well, if you can make your usual subtle approach to him, let him know we’d make it worth his while if we could borrow one of Kazakh Air’s Yak-42s for a day or so.” He paused. “Yeah — a Yak-42. Nothing else will do. But it’s got to be done very, very quiet since we’re just visiting on an unofficial basis. Like no ripples anywhere, if you catch my drift. Use lots of OPSEC, Colonel. We have to keep this one in the family.”

Yates listened, then grinned. “No problem you say? Oh, I do like that, Colonel. I like that very much, sir.” There was another pause. Then Yates roared, “Anything you need from the States, old buddy? Don’t forget: I’m traveling at government expense — weight is no problem.” He laughed. “That’s easy,” he said. “You got it.” He rubbed a big paw over the top of his shaved head and looked at the wall clock he’d already set to Almaty local time. “I’d say by zero five hundred hours your time.” He paused. “Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Day after tomorrow, Colonel, see you. Sau bol, sau bol, Talgat — b’bye, b’bye.”

Yates slapped the receiver down. “Shep,” he said, “see how the system works? We don’t need to go to Congress and beg for no stinking foreign aid. We don’t need any damn striped-suit diplo-dinks negotiating for us. We don’t got to hijack anything, either. We got ourselves a plane, a pilot, some ammo, local duds, and all it’s gonna cost us is a kid’s shirt, a couple of cases of great bourbon, and a pallet load of Pampers.”

“Not to mention the suitcase full of cash.”

“Hell, yes. The well-known suitcase full of cash. The expediter. Hoo-ah!” Yates stood up, extended his big hand, and high-fived the first sergeant. “Is this a great friggin’ country or what?”

“Hoo-ah, a great friggin’ country, Sergeant Major. God Bless America.” Shepard gave Yates a quizzical look. “But why did you ask for the Russian uniforms. And how come you didn’t tell him about the Rangers?”

Yates plucked a tiny, well-worn copy of Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War from the breast pocket of his BDU shirt and brandished it in Shepard’s direction like a talisman. “The Master says, ‘Use deception to throw your enemy into confusion,’ Grasshopper. We were on an open line, Shep. People listen in on open lines. And I want anybody listening to believe we’re headed for Afghanistan. Besides, if Talgat knew we were bringing a security force, he’d realize we had something serious going on.”

“Talgat’s no dummy, Rowdy. The minute he sees that C-5, he’s gonna know.”

“By then,” Yates said, stowing the book, “the Big Suit at the White House will have put the fix in at the Kazakh presidential palace and we’ll be slicker than deer guts in a pine forest. Besides, we’ll have all them young pecker-wood Rangers making a cordon sanitaire around us, so who’s gonna complain?” He stood up and rapped his scarred knuckles on the desk. “Remember the holy trinity, Shep: speed, surprise, and violence of action.” The sergeant major unsheathed his marker, flourished it like a sword, and thrust at the legal pad, drawing a quick Z through a trio of items. He scanned the remainder of his to-do list. “That leaves sixteen for Zorro. How you coming, Sancho Panza?”

“I think you’re mixing your characters.” Shepard flipped through half a dozen sheets of paper. “Okay: I finally located the chutes, masks, and O-two prebreather units,” he said. “There are two dozen RAPS[10] out at Marana the CIA was saving for some black op. Two tandems, sixteen masks, and sixteen double-bottle units. The Air Force bitched and moaned, but SECDEF has the juice, and they’re already on the way. ETA is about fifteen hundred. Then we have to get the chutes out to the rigger’s shed and go over ‘em before we repack and stow.”

Yates’s head bobbed up and down once. “Get Curtis, Goose, Marko, Tuzz, and Dodger on it. They’re gonna be jumping the damn things; they might as well make sure they’re sound.”

“Wilco, Sergeant Major.”

“Equipment?”

“Good to go equipment-wise: Russian Kirasa-5 tactical vests. Everybody already has GSG-9[11] boots. I’ve got French Nomex coveralls, Russian web gear, and Bulgarian AKs. We can’t use MBITRs,[12] so I found fourteen secure CipherTac satellite-compatible radios. They were made for a Kraut contract. They’ll work with our duplex system and the satcom chips, so the comms are good to go. And the Chinese claymores are up at Dam Neck — they’ll be here by close of business today.”

“Hey, asshole,” Yates growled, “we never close. Remember that.” He swallowed the last of the sweet coffee. Departure was scheduled for twenty hundred hours — not enough time, he worried, to get everything done.

At least, Rowdy thought, they’d be comfortable on the trip over. The big C-5 was one of the Air Force’s SOLL–II, or Special Operations Low Level II aircraft, capable of landing, unloading, and taking off under complete blackout conditions. It was coming in from the 436^th Airlift Wing at Dover, Delaware. The plane’s upper deck had reclining seats for seventy-three, as well as a galley and real heads. That beat the canvas strap benches, piss tubes, and chemical buckets on the C-130s they usually flew.

Plus, the C-5’s cargo bay was huge. If they had to, they could check and repack all the chutes in the belly of the Galaxy. It might be awkward working around the pallets, but it could be done. Rowdy shook himself out of his stupor. What the hell had Shep said about Chinese claymores? “Shep?”

The first sergeant said, “Yo?”

“Chinese claymores?”

“Coming from Dam Neck.”

“Good. Pack three or four blocks of Semtex, too.” Semtex was the old Soviet-bloc equivalent of C-4 plastic explosive. Originally made during the Cold War in Czechoslovakia (for which reason Rowdy liked to say it was great for canceling Czechs), it was durable, malleable, and stable. And forensically, it would leave behind no indications that those who’d employed it were Americans.

Shepard made a note. “Roger that.”

Rowdy glanced up at the clock, thinking again how there’s never enough effing time. He had to scramble one of Delta’s six-man 1ST — intelligence support teams — to run the tactical operations center at Almaty. And he still had his research to do. The unit kept case study files on operations running all the way back to World War II. Colonel Beckwith had insisted on maintaining the case studies — and they’d always proved valuable in the past. Rowdy wanted to look at some thirty-year-old SAS operations in Oman. The geography was roughly similar to the Tarim Basin — except for the huge Tian mountain range ringing the Western Chinese desert. He pulled the reading magnifiers off his nose and stuck them in his pocket. “Be back in about half an hour.”

“Gotcha. I’m just about finished with the comms.”

“Good. You get hold of any RPGs?”

“Not yet. I sent Bill Sandman to dig ‘em up. All he could find was LAWs.”

“Crap.” Yates scratched a large spider bite just below his sunburned ear. “I’ll take care of it. I think I know where I can lay my hands on a dozen or so.” He chicken-scratched the acronym on his legal pad. “What about IR strobes?”

“Got ‘em.” Shepard gave the sergeant major a wicked grin. “One less item on my list.”

“And one more on mine. Now, if the sons of bitches at Langley ever give us some of their precious intelligence, we might be able to get this show on the road.”

“Knowledge is power, Sergeant Major.”

“If we don’t know where to look we’re going to be running around that desert in circles with our dicks in our hands — and right now the latest poop is eight hours old.”

“Loner said he’s got it covered.” Shepard used Ritzik’s call sign.

“Loner’s dealing with all those sharks in Washington,” Yates growled. “I’ll believe it when I’ve got real-time satellite images downloading on my laptop, and no assholes from Langley deciding what I can receive and what I can’t.”

“Amen to that.”

“When’s Mickey D supposed to arrive?”

Gene Shepard scratched his head and consulted his note pad. “Mick? Fourteen hundred at the latest. He’s bringing the strobes.”

“Primo.” Chief Warrant Officer Michael Dunne was a chopper pilot who worked out of the SOAR at Fort Campbell. For the past six months he’d been working closely with Ritzik’s Sword Squadron to help merge the Delta shooters and the Task Force 160 aircrews into a seamless, unified operation. He’d been brought in by Ritzik, who had first worked with the young warrant officer during cold-weather combat-readiness exercises in the Sierra Nevada, three weeks after Ritzik had been pulled out of Afghanistan in March of 2002.

Because the ops had been so rough in Afghanistan, Ritzik had pushed hard to change the SOAR’s training parameters. The 160^th had gone to Afghanistan using by-the-book training guidelines: pilots were not required to fly in visibility of less than two miles and a ceiling of less than five hundred feet. But combat had forced the SOAR to deliver SpecOps troops in zero-zero conditions: zero visibility and zero ceiling (not to mention unpredictable downdrafts, crosswinds, and wind shears).

Back at CAG, Ritzik argued that unless a unit trained the way it would fight, the training was essentially useless. Delta trained that way. So did most SEAL units. Ritzik maintained that SOAR’s pilots wanted to push the training envelope, but that a cabal of play-it-safe desk jockeys in the Army chief of staff’s office was holding them back, afraid of losing one of SOAR’s multimillion-dollar MH-53E aircraft. Ritzik took his case to the three-star who ran JSOC — the Joint Special Operations Command — at Fort Bragg. The result was an experimental, three-week, balls-to-the-wall, high-altitude training session under brutal weather conditions, sleep deprivation, and scores of zero-zero landings in rough terrain. It was during those twenty-one days that Ritzik and Rowdy Yates concluded WO-2 Michael Dunne was the best damn chopper pilot they’d ever seen.

Which was why within a minute and a half after he’d spoken with Ritzik from Rockman’s office, Yates put in a call to the SOAR and had Dunne TDY’d to Bragg on a SECDEF Priority One.

Yates’s draft op plan called for Mickey D to accompany the main contingent to Turkey. That way he could be briefed on the operation’s problems and add his input to the solution. At Diyarbakir, the CIA’s air base in southeastern Turkey, Ritzik and his people would pick up the last of their supplies, then fly on to Almaty, Kazakhstan.

In Turkey, Mickey D would rendezvous with an unmarked, unscheduled transport from Fort Campbell, which he’d ride to Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. From there, he and a four-man Task Force 160 aircrew would fly the radar-defeating covert-ops Black Hawk chopper that was co-cooned in the transport to an old Soviet paratroop-battalion command post at Tokhtamysh, within twenty-five miles of the Chinese border. There, they’d install fuel bladders that would triple the chopper’s range, and wait for the signal to exfiltrate Ritzik’s unit. The two dozen battery-powered infrared strobes Dunn was bringing with him would allow Ritzik to guide him to the LZ without using conventional lights.

Yates started for the door. “I gotta get out of here.” Halfway, he stopped cold. “Oh, crap — I forgot the RPGs.” Yates plucked up the handset and punched a series of numbers into it. “Keep me posted.” He looked up at the twenty-four-hour clock above the door. “Christ Almighty, we’re running out of time, Gino. I wish Loner’s ass was here with us, not up in D.C. playing with the suits. I don’t like working in a vacuum.”

5

SECDEF looked up from his meeting notes and switched off the limo’s right-rear reading light. He scribbled a telephone number on a Post-it, swiveled toward Ritzik, and handed it to him. “That’s my cell-phone number — the one my wife uses.” Rockman cracked a self-conscious grin. “She calls it my electronic leash. I pick it up — no one else.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now you have it. It’s not a secure line, so be careful what you say. But you call me with an inventory — everything you need — within two hours, and I’ll see that it gets to Fort Bragg, or wherever else you want it sent, by the end of the day.”

“Roger, Mr. Secretary.” Ritzik memorized the number then rolled the Post-it into a ball and swallowed it. His head was spinning. The logistics were overwhelming — and there were already strictures on what he could and could not do. Before they’d left the White House, the president arranged for saturation satellite surveillance of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, which would be up and on-line within sixteen hours. The pictures would provide Ritzik real-time intelligence about how the CIA people were being held, and where they were being taken.

That was the GN — the good news. The bad-news list was much longer.

BN-1 was the fact that there’d be no time for rehearsal. Whether it was hitting the Modelo prison compound in Panama to free an American national who’d operated an anti-Noriega TV station at the behest of the CIA, or going after terrorists holed up in Iranian-built barracks in Lebanon’s Bekáa Valley, Delta would work with the techno-wizards from CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) to build a full-scale model of the target and practice assaulting it until the operational wrinkles were ironed out. There’d be no rehearsal time for Xinjiang, which would increase the chances that Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame would insinuate himself into the proceedings from the get-go.

BN-2 was that they’d be going in sterile. That meant no U.S. equipment. From bulletproof vests to boots to web gear, to the very weapons and ordnance they carried — none of it could be traceable back to the United States. There was some sterile equipment at Fort Bragg. But most of it was going to have to come from CIA, which maintained a warehouse full of non-American gear for its paramilitary units. From previous experience, Ritzik knew that CIA didn’t like to share its wealth — whether it was information or gear. Even when the poor sons of bitches who’d been snatched were Agency people.

Which brought up BN-3: secure comms were going to be a problem. Delta had several tactical multichannel systems that allowed Ritzik to communicate with a forward base, as well as Washington if necessary, no matter where in the world he might be. But since they’d be operating with sanitized equipment, most American-made systems were out of the question.

Christ, what a mess. Ritzik hoped Rowdy Yates was making progress, because he obviously wasn’t.

He looked up. They were crossing the Memorial Bridge. Ahead, Arlington National Cemetery lay spread out in front of the limo. Ritzik could see up, past the rows of white grave markers, to where the Lee House stood. He never failed to stop at Arlington when he passed through Washington. But there would be no time on this trip.

His thoughts were interrupted by the shrill, distinctive double ring of the red telephone mounted between the jump seats of the armored vehicle.

Rockman snatched the phone from its cradle. “This is the secretary,” he said. Rockman clapped his free hand to his left ear to drown out the road noise. He listened carefully for about half a minute. Then he said, “Yes, sir. Will do. I’m on my way.”

The SECDEF slapped the phone onto its cradle, reached forward, and slid the glass divider open. “Danny,” he said to the security man riding shotgun, “we’ve been called back to the White House.” He slid the divider closed and settled back in his seat as the big car negotiated the traffic circle and headed back across the Memorial Bridge.

Ritzik said, “Is there any way I can take a pass, Mr. Secretary? We’re on an incredibly tight schedule. It’s critical I get my people forward-based so we have some operational flexibility during the next thirty-six hours. I also need to see whatever satellite photos are available — right now — and I’ll need to create secure uplinks to track the Tangos on a full-time.” Ritzik checked his watch. “And I need your office to pull the military attachés in Ankara and Dushanbe into their offices so I can talk to ‘em on a secure line.”

“You can move your people anywhere you want. And I’ll get you the intelligence that you need. But there’s been some kind of development that affects the situation over there. So like it or not, son, you’re coming with me.”

The irritation in Ritzik’s voice was unmistakable. “I guess I am, sir.”

A cloud came across the secretary’s face. He removed his gold-rimmed aviator-frame glasses, extracted a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, and cleaned the lenses. “You’re a very outspoken fellow, Major. I might even say uncomfortably blunt on occasion. I don’t mind that — it’s been said that bluntness is one of my signature traits, too. But when I say you’re coming with me, that’s the way it is. One more thing: where we’re going right now I don’t want you uttering so much as a single syllable unless I ask you to say something first.” Rockman folded the handkerchief and shoved it back into his pocket. He slipped his glasses back on, then cocked his head, hawklike, to look Ritzik in the eye. “Am I understood, Major?”

“Understood, Mr. Secretary.”

Sam Phillips finally managed to open his left eye. It hurt like hell and the vision was blurred. But at least he could see. He’d passed out again. For how long he had no idea. But it was night again. He guesstimated the truck was moving at about twenty miles an hour. From the way his kidneys and ribs were being punished, they were driving on an unpaved road, or caravan track, or through a wadi. He and X-Man were finally free of the hog-tie nooses that had bound them, although they kept the cords around their necks and the ends buried between their feet.

They’d hunkered down on the truck bed during the fighting, flinching as rounds tore through the wood and canvas. He resumed chewing at the tape around Chris’s wrists only after the truck began rolling. Sam figured it had taken him an hour and a half, maybe more. After that, it was a matter of minutes until they’d loosened their remaining bonds. But they’d been careful to resecure a single strand of the thick tape around their wrists and ankles so they appeared to still be trussed.

As soon as Chris had freed him, Sam had asked the security man about Dick and Kaz.

X-Man’s bloodied face was grim. “No idea,” he whispered. “I never saw what happened to them. I hit the panic switch — God knows whether it transmitted or not — and then three guys yanked me out of the truck and beat the bejesus out of me. I passed out. Next thing I knew, you were trying to hump me awake.”

The two of them had gone over what they did know. And it wasn’t much.

First, the gunfight at dawn had been intense, even though it had lasted only a matter of minutes. Sam knew it had been intense because in the morning light he could make out dozens of bullet holes in the canvas over their heads. After the shooting stopped, there’d been a lot of shouting. Some of it had been in Uzbek, and so Sam had understood enough of it to grasp that whoever was in charge wanted everybody to haul butt quickly before the army showed up.

Within a short period of time — he didn’t know how much because the crystal display of Sam’s digital wrist-watch was smashed, and someone had taken X-Man’s — the truck they were in was slammed into gear, and they began bouncing across what Sam took to be the desert basin.

From the way the dawn had broken, he’d decided they were heading west. Sam listened to the sounds of the convoy as it ground through the high desert. If he was correct, he thought he’d identified the sounds of three trucks, maybe four. X-Man concurred. But they couldn’t be sure — and in any case however many trucks there were didn’t matter. Moreover, there was no way either of them was going to risk a peek through the canvas to find out.

He’d spent a long time as he lay there trying to reconstruct a map of the region in his mind’s eye. He was reasonably certain the bad guys would ultimately move northwest, heading for Afghanistan or Tajikistan. His reasoning was twofold. First, because the Afghan and Tajik borders were more porous than the Kazakh or Kyrgyz ones. Second, the mountain passes to Tajikistan had scores of unmarked, narrow roads that had been used by smugglers for decades. During his tour in Dushanbe, Sam had even been taken across into China — for a kilometer or so of bragging rights — on a precarious, rutted, cliffside smuggler’s road by Halil Abdullaev, the muktar of a small village on the Chinese border and one of Sam’s most productive Tajik agents.

He’d been certain they wouldn’t head south. The southern border — with India — was heavily fortified because of an ongoing Sino-Indian boundary dispute. And the Hindu Kush region that led to Pakistan was not hospitable to the IMU.

But Tajikistan was in a state of political flux, and the IMU, although weakened, still enjoyed support among the Muslim population. And northeast Afghanistan was still in a relative state of war. Remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban roamed more or less unhindered, shielded by the local tribes.

“Chris, Chris… “ Sam used his knees to shake the X-Man until he stirred.

The security man finally responded. “Christ, how long have we been passed out?”

“I don’t know. Hours.” Sam grunted as the truck bounced. “We can’t just stay here like this.”

X-Man whispered, “Sam, I don’t want to do anything precipitous until we know where Kaz and Dick are.”

“Agreed.” Sam swallowed hard. “God, I wish we had some water.” The two of them lay there for some minutes in silence. Then Sam said, “Thank God at least they don’t know who they got their hands on,” he whispered.

X-Man rolled over. “What do you mean, Sam?”

“Jeezus, X, think how much the IMU could get for us if they sold us to al-Qaeda. Or the Iranians.”

“Don’t even say that as a joke.”

Sam forced a wry expression. “Hell, at least the people who have us are moving in the right direction.”

X-Man snorted. “I was taught by the nuns always to be grateful for small blessings.”

Sam whispered, “Let’s hope they get across whatever border they’re heading for before the Chinese catch up with ‘em. I—” He started to say something else. But the truck braked to an abrupt stop.

Fifteen seconds later, Sam heard movement outside. And then the rear flap was lifted, and he was rendered blind by a sudden shaft of incredibly bright light.

“Goddammit, Loner, if that’s the way it’s gotta be, then that’s the way it is. But I tell you, this sucks. And if you won’t tell those suits to go screw themselves and let you get back where you belong, then put me on the friggin’ phone with ‘em and I will — and that includes the goddamn secretary of defense.” On the Long List of People Rowdy Yates Does Not Like, suits was his comprehensive term for all self-important, limp-dicked, spineless, backstabbing, politically motivated individuals including (but not limited to) most flag-rank officers and virtually all politicians, attorneys, and CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations. In fact, the only two categories of humanity Rowdy Yates detested more than suits were traitors and cowards.

The bad news, which Ritzik was relaying from the secretary’s car, was that he was probably going to miss his connections because they were being called back to the White House and the secretary had just indicated that he wasn’t going to be leaving Washington until the evening. And so he’d just told Rowdy to unlock his cage and grab his gear while he met with whomever. With the secretary’s help he’d catch a commercial flight out of Dulles to Frankfurt. There, he’d catch the Lufthansa flight direct to Almaty. If all the planes were on time, he’d beat Rowdy and the C-5 by two and a half hours.

The sergeant major was not convinced. “This op has already turned into a huge Charlie Foxtrot, Mike, and I’m still sitting behind my friggin’ desk.” Yates balanced the reading magnifiers on the tip of his nose and scribbled on a notepad. “I know you’ve already been promised coordination, but maybe you’d like to know anyway that I haven’t heard friggin’ word one from Langley. Not that it would make a bit of difference. Those self-important pencil-pushing sons of bitches wouldn’t know real intelligence if it walked up and bit ‘em on the ass.” He paused. “Yes, sir, Major, sir, you can put me on the speakerphone and I’ll say the same thing to SECDEF.”

Yates paused and listened. “Yes, Mike. Okay. Will do. We’ll pack each Fire Team One laptop, and every man gets a handheld and GPS module. I’ll make sure Talgat has clothes for us, too.” Yates made another series of notations on the legal pad, then cradled the telephone. The effing suits in Washington were going to get them all killed. There was no doubt about that whatsoever.

6

Mike Ritzik followed Robert Rockman as they descended a narrow, carpeted stairway, turned right, then left, past a warren of offices. The secretary led Ritzik down a short corridor lined with framed photographs of the president and first lady on their overseas trips. At the end of the hallway, Rockman waited as a Secret Service agent opened the unmarked Situation Room door and stood aside so they could enter.

Rockman’s palm thrust Ritzik forward. The room was smaller and narrower than he had expected. He’d envisioned high-backed, hand-tooled leather judge’s chairs, lots of telephones and laptop computers, and high-definition flat screens displaying real-time satellite images. What he saw was a long, narrow, wood-paneled space dominated by a basic table with a dozen spartan leather armchairs around it. A single judge’s chair sat below the wall-mounted presidential seal at the head of the table. In front of each chair a notepad and a blue ballpoint pen, both bearing the presidential seal, had been carefully positioned. In front of the president’s place sat a black leather legal-pad holder, imprinted with the Great Seal of the United States, as well as a large universal TV remote-control unit.

There were two multiline telephone consoles — one at each end of the table. At the head, there was also a single secure telephone. Two wall clocks were hung high on the walls at opposite ends of the room. There were three small TV sets jammed into a utilitarian cabinet at the rear, opposite the doorway. The screens displayed the Fox News Channel, CNN, and Sky News, but there was no sound coming from any of them. Stacked against the wood-paneled walls were perhaps two dozen plastic chairs, randomly scattered in stacks of two or three.

There were already a few officials sitting at the long table. The national security adviser was there, half glasses perched on the end of her nose, engrossed in a red-tabbed document as she sat at what Ritzik assumed to be the president’s right hand. She said, “Mr. Secretary,” but didn’t acknowledge Ritzik’s presence. Next to Wirth sat Nick Pappas, the rumpled, chubby former congressional staffer who was now director of central intelligence. Next to him sat a middle-aged, slightly overweight woman with a severe haircut and thick, retro eyeglasses. Three chairs down from the DCI, Admiral Phil Buckley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, scratched an itch just above the starched collar of his uniform shirt and stared at the wall, pointedly ignoring the SECDEF. At the far end of the table, an attractive young Chinese-American woman was listening to a middle-aged man whose face Ritzik had seen on the evening news but couldn’t identify. As he whispered, the woman’s head bobbed up and down as she made notes on a yellow legal pad.

Rockman nodded at the man at the far end of the table, then commandeered the armchair closest to the head of the table, directly opposite the NSC adviser. Ritzik started to sit next to him, but the secretary’s quick shake of head and abrupt hand signal indicated that he “park it” on one of the black plastic chairs up against the wall instead.

He did as ordered, sitting silently, idly fingering the visitor’s pass clipped to his lapel and scanning the faces, absorbing the surroundings. The young woman conferred with her colleague, then scribbled even more feverishly. Monica Wirth passed the red-tabbed document to Rockman, who flipped it open and read its contents, his expression devolving into a hound-dog frown.

Then the door opened. Without fanfare or announcement, the president strode in. Twenty-eight casters rumbled across the linoleum tile in unison as everyone in the warm room scrambled to their feet.

“Everybody sit, sit, please.” Pete Forrest pulled the high-backed swivel chair away from the table and dropped into it.

Over the sound of chairs being settled into, the president said, “Give us the latest news, Nick.”

Pappas opened a leather folder and glanced down at the file inside. “The locator signal activated by the Sino Insertion Element is still transmitting strongly. The team is being moved in a northwesterly direction across the Tarim Basin.” The DCI paused long enough to run a stubby finger inside the collar of his white button-down shirt. “We believe the kidnappers to be from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU. Our assessment was that SIE-1 was being taken toward the Tajik border.”

“We knew most of that eight hours ago, Nick,” Robert Rockman growled.

The DCI’s dark eyes flashed in SECDEF’s direction. But his neutral tone never changed. “Here’s the latest news, Rocky. Three hours after SIE-1 was snatched up, the guerrilla contingent that took them ambushed a small, lightly armed PLA convoy that was clandestinely transporting an obsolete weapons package to the underground nuclear storage facility located southeast of the Lop Nur test site. We believe the operation is part of an effort by the IMU to reconstitute itself after years of decline. And we have revised our assessment. We now believe that the IMU plans to detonate the weapon inside China.

“Jeezus H. Kee-rist, Nick,” Rockman exploded. “ ‘Three hours after’ is five hours ago. How the hell can you keep that kind of information to yourself? You know what we’re trying to do.”

“We had to verify the information,” Pappas said. “There is a formal process that has to be followed, Mr. Secretary, before raw information can become intelligence.”

“Screw the process, Nick — just get the damn information disseminated.”

“That’s enough, Rocky.” The president’s voice betrayed irritation. “Go on, Nick.”

The DCI reached into the center of the table for a black-and-silver plastic thermos pitcher that sat on a salver surrounded by a half-dozen empty glasses. He poured himself a glass of water, sipped, then continued. “Anyhow, because of its ambient nuclear activity, the convoy was being dual tracked. From overhead by a FORTAE[13] satellite operated jointly with the British, and from our unilateral monitoring station in Sumbe Tekes, Kazakhstan. Shortly after the PLA convoy was intercepted, gradient effluvium readings from both satellite and unilateral monitors intensified exponentially, indicating to us that the package had been—”

“Nick,” the president said, “use English, will you?”

“The terrorists broke the seals on the protective container, Mr. President. They are currently in possession of a first-generation nuclear weapon — from the looks of it, it’s a fifteen-kiloton MADM, or medium atomic demolition munition, from the late 1970s or early 1980s. From our other unilateral overhead assets in the region, we know for sure they have already been playing with it.”

Rockman said, “Playing with it?”

“Fiddling with the dials, or whatever’s on the damn thing,” Pappas said. “At least that’s what it looks like on the photos I’ve seen.”

President Forrest massaged his forehead. “Okay, Nick, now give us the good news.”

The DCI didn’t miss a beat. “That was the good news, Mr. President.”

The president peered down toward the end of the table. “Roger,” he said, “you’re my well-paid secretary of energy. You do nuclear. What’s your department’s take on this mess?”

“I’ve brought Tracy Wei-Liu with me to shed some light on that, Mr. President.”

Pete Forrest said, “Welcome, Miss Wei-Liu. What do you do for a living?”

The young woman stammered, “I’m deputy assistant secretary of energy for national security policy, Mr. President.”

“That’s a hundred-dollar title, young lady. What does it mean in buck-and-a-half words?”

“I keep track of nuclear weapons, Mr. President.”

“Ours or theirs?”

“Everybody’s, sir.”

“Okay,” Pete Forrest said. “What can you tell us about this alleged fifteen-kiloton medium atomic demolition device Nick just told us about?”

“I’d like to see a picture of the device, if I could.”

Pete Forrest shot an angry glance at the DCI. “Didn’t you messenger the photos to Energy?”

“I couldn’t verify that Miss Wei-Liu had the appropriate clearances,” Pappas said. “Goddammit, Nick—”

The DCI passed the folder to the Joint Chiefs chairman, who slid it below the salt to where Wei-Liu sat. The young woman took a magnifying glass out of a briefcase at her feet and examined the photos. “This device is a J-12—the largest of the Chinese MADM series, with an explosive power of fifteen kilotons. The J-12 was developed in the late 1970s. It was known as the Icebox, because it looked like one of those old-fashioned refrigerators with the compressors on the top.” Wei-Liu paused long enough to draw a deep breath. “The J-12 was intended as a tactical weapon to be used against India and Taiwan. It is based on an early Soviet design.”

Rockman waved a hand at the young woman. “When I was secretary back in 1974, I decommissioned all of our MADMs because they were obsolete. You mean the Chinese only began to use them after that?”

“Mr. Secretary, you have to understand that until the Chinese intensified their technical espionage programs in the 1980s and 90s, they’d always been fifteen to twenty years behind both the U.S. and the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons development. Both we and the Soviets discarded the MADM by the mid-1970s because we’d moved on to smaller, lighter, and more precise tactical devices. The Chinese kept their MADMs operational until 1988. That year, one of the smaller J-series weapons detonated as it was being taken from a bunker on the Indian border during a military exercise. Shortly after that, all thirty MADMs were abruptly removed from China’s tactical inventory.”

The president asked, “What caused the 1988 incident?”

“Our best guess,” Wei-Liu said, “was the weapon’s primitive detonation system.”

The president said, “How primitive are we talking here?”

“Somewhere between Cretaceous and Jurassic, Mr. President,” Wei-Liu said. “Today, sir, we achieve detonation through highly precise electronic means. In the 1970s, the Chinese were still technically unable to accomplish this. And so they made do — until relatively recently — with what might be called an IED, or improvised explosive device. The Chinese inserted a series of thin wires into an eighty-five-pound core of an explosive that’s similar to our military Pentolite, which is a fifty-fifty mixture of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN plastic explosive, and TNT. The Chinese use a slightly different formula, which makes theirs more volatile. The Pentolite we use has an explosive power of one and a quarter times TNT. The Chinese version is two and a half times more powerful than TNT, which was what they needed to achieve an explosion generating critical mass. They initiated the Pentolite by vaporizing the wires in a precise sequence, using a huge surge of electrical current generated by a series of powerful capacitors.”

“What’s the problem with that?” Monica Wirth asked.

“First,” Wei-Liu said, “it was technically efficient but unwieldy — similar in many ways to the detonation system on the atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project. If you look at the photograph—” She slid the magnifying glass and one of the prints down the table to the chairman, who slid it to Monica Wirth, who passed it to the president. “See, sir, that boxlike attachment bolted onto the top of the device — it’s roughly two feet by three feet.”

Pete Forrest moved the glass back and forth across the photo. “Yes,” he said. “I see it. Cumbersome.”

“That’s the electrical component for the detonation package, sir.”

“Uh-huh,” the president said.

“So, as I said, it’s unwieldy. Second, under certain conditions the Chinese version of Pentolite can degenerate and become unstable, similar to the way mishandled dynamite sweats nitroglycerine. Third, there are the capacitors. They require a bank of storage batteries to keep them fully charged. And despite insulation, batteries can still generate both volatile fumes and static electricity under certain conditions. Static combined with fumes can result in a spark, which in turn can set off the Pentolite if the explosive has begun to deteriorate.”

“Give us the situation in a nutshell,” Rockman said.

“We’re basically talking about your terrorists driving around Western China with the equivalent of a thirty-million-pound mason jar of nitroglycerine in the back of their truck,” Wei-Liu said, matter-of-factly.

The president said, “Well, Miss Wei-Liu, thank you for putting all this in such unambiguous terms.” He paused. “Thank you for coming. And thank you, too, Roger.”

The energy secretary rose and slid the photos back toward Nick Pappas. “You’re welcome, Mr. President.”

The room remained silent as the two of them made their way out. As Wei-Liu passed Monica Wirth, the NSC adviser handed the young woman a note, which Wei-Liu read, folded, and dropped into the pocket of her jacket.

After the door clicked closed behind them, the DCI raised his hand. “Mr. President—” The CIA director was churning his legs and squirming uncomfortably in the chair, reminding Ritzik of the poor guy in the Preparation H commercials.

“Yes, Nick.”

“I can also report that NSA’s technical capabilities have confirmed Beijing has activated its rapid reaction forces and assigned them the task of hunting the terrorists down and retrieving the weapon.”

“Jeezus H. Kee-rist.” Robert Rockman’s palm slapped the table surface. “What made you wait until now to give us that piece of intelligence? What’s next, Nick?”

“Just hold on, Mr. Secretary,” Pappas interrupted. “There also happen to be two pieces of hugely positive intelligence.”

The SECDEF crossed his arms and hunched his shoulders — body language that told Ritzik Rockman didn’t believe a word of it. Rockman rolled his chair across the floor. “And they are?”

“First, the Chinese are incapable of tracking the guerrillas by satellite because their birds take up to a week to be shifted.”

The secretary’s hand slapped the table. “I know that, Nick.”

“Last night, Chinese intelligence used its front companies to call every commercial satellite operation in the world in order to secure one-meter imagery of Xinjiang Autonomous Region. They tried the French. They called the Belgians, the Finns, the Germans, the Canadians, the Japanese, and finally all our own American companies.” Pappas tapped his pen on the table. “But CIA anticipated the move and successfully preempted Beijing. Last week, through half a dozen cover firms, CIA bought up exclusive rights to every bit of commercial European and Asian satellite imagery with a resolution of twenty-five meters or less, covering the western Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Then I had NSA exercise shutter control over all the American-owned commercial birds in the same target area. So the Chinese are blind.”

The president visibly perked up. “Good work, Nick.”

“Thank you, sir. And now …” Pappas flicked through the papers in his leather binder until he came to a white-covered folder that had a single, thick, diagonal blue line running from top left to bottom right. He opened the dossier. Inside sat a thin stack of National Security Agency paperwork. “Second, NSA transmitted these Zulu-grade intercepts to me not half an hour ago. China’s Central Military Command has just assigned the task of interdiction and retrieval to its Army Aviation Unit.” The DCI’s stubby fingers played air piano on the NSA documents. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is very good news.”

SECDEF’s eyes narrowed belligerently. “What’s so good about it?”

Pappas said, “I will let Margaret Nylos explain.” He paused to acknowledge the middle-aged woman sitting next to him. “Margaret is the national intelligence officer for China. She is responsible for keeping me up-to-date on all of China’s internal politics.”

The president said, “Miss Nylos?”

“Mr. President, this is hugely positive news because we believe it demonstrates irrefutable evidence of the growing rift within the PLA, a schism my people have been predicting for more than a year now. That split — between the elders who lead China’s conventional forces and the young generals who control its Special Operations units — has long-term strategic and tactical implications for us. It is a situation the United States can exploit to great advantage as we enter the next stage of our relationship with Beijing.”

Pappas noted the look of impatience on the president’s face, sipped at his water, and cleared his throat. “Thank you, Margaret. Of more immediate interest to us this morning, the assigning of AAU as the retrieval force is noteworthy because, unlike our American special operations units, the Chinese have never fully integrated their air and ground special operations forces. The AAU’s operations are highly centralized. They are headquartered in the Beijing Military District. Every one of the unit’s assets lie within sixty miles of the Chinese capital. And not one AAU aircraft has the capability of reaching the Xinjiang Autonomous Region without multiple refueling stops.”

Rockman interrupted: “Can’t they refuel in the air?”

Margaret Nylos said, “No, sir. The Chinese lag far behind the West in helicopter technology. In fact, most of the current operational Chinese helicopter designs have been adapted from Soviet or French models. As you will also recall, the United States sold China a squadron of MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters in 1991, in return for Beijing’s allowing NSA to establish six Russian listening posts in the Tian mountain range. But those helicopters lack spare parts, and our statistical models indicate that today, the majority of them are inoperable. I also think—”

“Thank you, Margaret.” The DCI squirmed awkwardly. “The bottom line is that this development buys us the time we need to extract our people,” he said.

“Nick.” Rockman cupped his chin in his hand. “Refueling a squadron of aircraft can be accomplished in a matter of minutes. It seems to me we’re not going to gain but a few hours.”

The DCI’s head wagged negatively. He tapped the NSA intercepts with his middle finger. “Mr. Secretary, what we have here proves otherwise. The commanding officer of the Army Aviation Unit is China’s youngest major general. His name is Zhou Yi. Zhou just turned forty — a real up-and-comer. He has been pressing the political leadership to allocate more resources to such areas as Special Operations, information warfare, and other unconventional methods and tactics. He has many supporters within the CCP, and it’s expected that within the next six to eight months he will be put forward as the next chairman of the PLA’s Central Military Command.”

The DCI sipped his water. Margaret Nylos picked up the narrative. “Zhou’s strongest rival for that post is the commanding general of the Beijing Military District, an army four-star named Yin Zhong Liang. Yin is sixty-eight, married for forty-one years. He’s very old guard and tied closely to President Wu Min. Now, General Yin stumbled a few years ago when he lied to the political cadre about who was responsible after that Chinese F-8 fighter hit our EP-3 reconnaissance plane, and Beijing held twenty-three of our Navy personnel for eleven days. But since then, his position has been strengthened because he’s kept dissent in the capital under control, and he’s mended his fences with the leadership. In fact, Yin has single-handedly built such a cult of personality around the president that I can now state we believe Wu will remain in power for the foreseeable future — more significantly, he will not, as previously thought, relinquish his chairmanship of the committee that oversees the military. Equally significant, Yin has made strong political alliances with the generals in charge of the Nanjing, Jinan, Guangzhou, Shenyang, and Lanzhou military districts. All these commands stand to lose massive funding if the budget reallocations young Major General Zhou Yi is advocating go through.”

“Miss Nylos, stop right there,” the president interrupted. “I think I already heard a lot of what you’re saying on CNN last week.” The president glared at the DCI. “Nick — can you people please get to the point.”

“Of course, Mr. President.” The DCI’s voice took on a pedantic tone, and he tapped the tabletop with his pen for emphasis. “Point: General Yin believes he is vulnerable to a challenge from Zhou. Point: Yin’s political allies control every military installation and every liter of aviation fuel between Beijing and Xinjiang. Point: There is no way they will make things easy for the young upstart Zhou.”

Rockman’s eyes went wide. “Even though there’s a loose nuke, Nick?”

“Yes,” the DCI said confidently. “Even so.”

Pete Forrest rapped his knuckles on the table edge. “Enough political theory. There are lives on the line. How much time do we have? How much time?”

Margaret Nylos said: “A minimum of four days, Mr. President, from the sample of message traffic we managed to skim this morning. Possibly as many as five days. I’ll know more after the intercepts are translated.”

The president’s jaw dropped. “Miss Nylos, aren’t you the national intelligence officer for China?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“And yet you can’t read Chinese.”

“Mr. President,” Nick Pappas interjected, “I promoted Margaret for her analytical skills, not her language capability.”

Rockman raised his hand. “Nick,” he said.

“Yes?” The DCI shifted his gaze.

Rockman pulled at his earlobe. “I don’t want to sound like a doom-and-gloom kind of guy, but how do you know that the Chinese aren’t putting out false message traffic?”

Pappas said, “False message traffic?”

Monica Wirth cocked her head in the DCI’s direction. “Disinformation, Nick.”

Ritzik watched as Rockman’s right hand slipped into his inside jacket pocket and retrieved a thin paperback. The secretary flipped to a page that he’d marked with a yellow Post-it, slipped a pair of half glasses out of his breast pocket, perched them on his nose, and read: “ ‘When strong, appear weak. When brave, appear fearful. When orderly, appear chaotic. Draw your enemy in with the promise of gain, and overcome him through confusion.’”

The secretary dropped the paperback on the table. “That, ladies and gentleman, is Sun-Tzu — the granddaddy of all Chinese generals, including General Zhou and General Yin.”

Nick Pappas’s cheeks grew red. “What’s your point, Rocky?” he asked.

“I guess,” Rockman said dryly, “my point, Nick … and Margaret, is that everything the two of you have told us so far appears to be the result of technical intelligence gathering. But what if Beijing is playing with us — sending out false message traffic in order to deceive us and suck us into a situation that will embarrass the United States? There’s a summit in six weeks, and the Chinese are good at mind games. What’s the hard evidence that your intercepts are genuine? I’ve seen reports from our military attachés in Beijing that describe a possible schism — and I underline the word possible—within the PLA. But the mere appearance of a rift between factions isn’t good enough for me. I’d like to know if you have reports from agents on the ground in China who have verified the situation you’ve just described.”

“Jesus Christ, Rocky,” the DCI exploded. “What the hell are you doing here? You’re tossing a wrench is what. Goddammit, you’ve been trying to undermine me from the get-go, and I—”

“Gentlemen, that’s enough.” Pete Forrest’s voice took command of the room. “What has been decided has been decided.” The president stood. He glanced quickly in Mike Ritzik’s direction. “I think we all have a lot of work to do.”

Rockman was first on his feet. “Yes, Mr. President.”

The president focused on Nick Pappas. “Nick, I want you to deliver any information Rocky wants — anything he asks for — without delay.”

“There are certain procedures—” the DCI began.

“I don’t give a damn about procedures,” the president interrupted. “These are your people we’re talking about. If Rocky wants something from you, he gets it. Immediately. No questions. No waiting. No bureaucratic delays for ‘procedures.’ “ He paused. “Have I made myself crystal clear, Nick?”

Pappas glanced around the room. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“Good.” Pete Forrest wheeled and left the room.

There was about a quarter minute of dead air. Rockman caught Monica Wirth’s eye. “Can you spare me a few minutes, Monica?”

“I was about to ask you the same question, Mr. Secretary.” The NSC adviser closed the document folder in front of her. “Mr. Director?”

“Monica?”

She held her hand out, palm side up. “I’m going to need those photographs and whatever else you have in that folder.”

The DCI started to object but then thought the better of it. Without a word, he handed the folder to Wirth.

“Thank you, Nick.” The national security adviser turned toward the doorway. “Mr. Secretary, let’s adjourn to my office, shall we?”

7

At least Kaz and Dick Campbell were alive. Sam Phillips thanked God for that. They looked like hell. But then, he and X-Man looked worse.

Sam and X-Man were yanked out of the truck, tossed onto the rocky, cold desert floor, and kicked and beaten for having freed themselves. Then they were dragged over to their commandeered 4x4—where Kaz and the Marine stood, still bound and gagged.

All the camera equipment as well as their luggage had been dumped onto the ground, illuminated by headlights from four big trucks with numerals and Chinese characters on the doors. Sam took a fast reading of the situation. The video equipment was still in its cases, sitting on the ground.

Sam gave his team a quick glance and saw in their eyes that they were ready to follow his lead. He wished he had one.

Shoazim. The guide was nowhere to be seen. Sam realized he was probably dead. Brutal as it might sound, that made sense. These people had to know that guides reported to the police. That made Shoazim a collaborator. Also, Shoazim was of no material value — in fact, he was a drain on whatever rations and supplies the terrorists might have. But they were passing as Brits, Irish, and Canadians — Westerners who could be ransomed.

He smelled cigarettes. Sam’s eyes swept a hundred and eighty degrees, trying not to make direct contact with any of the bad guys, but able to see half a dozen red spots in the darkness as they pulled on their smokes. No one spoke. The four of them were on display. The boss man, whoever he was, was probably trying to figure out how to deal with them. Sam hoped boss man wasn’t a Chechen. Brutality was a way of life in this part of the world, but the Chechens were the worst. In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s Chechen fighters had tortured and mutilated every American they’d gotten their hands on. According to one report Sam had read at the time, the Chechens at Takhur Ghar had cut the ears and privates off a Navy SEAL they’d captured before finally putting him out of his misery with a bullet to the brain. Even the Russian light colonel he’d recruited in Tajikistan had warned him to steer clear, “Sam, out here is what we call dikiy-dikiy vostok — the Wild, Wild East. Out here, the Tajiks, Turkmen, or Uzbeks, they take no prisoners. But compared to Chechens, Tajiks and Uzbeks — they are nice guys.”

Sam’s mind was racing. His most important job was to keep everyone alive. To do that, he knew that he had, somehow, to establish control. Control was the key. That was the first rule of case-officerdom he’d been taught at the Farm.

No matter how desperate or dicey the situation might be, the instructors told them over and over, you always try to gain control. Just the way you control your agents, your developmental — everyone you deal with. And even if you’re captured, or detained, you work to establish some form of control over the people who grabbed you. You come up with a tactical strategy — and you find a way to execute it.

It’s like that old cartoon, one instructor’d said, the one in which two guys are manacled to a wall, hand and foot, suspended twenty feet above a pair of hungry lions. There’s no window to their cell, and the lions are between them and the door — which is locked from the outside — and besides, they’re chained up. So one guy is saying to the other, “Now, here’s my plan…”

Sam understood that he had to find a way to establish control over the lions who were holding them hostage. Even though the lions had just beaten the crap out of them. Even though the lions were holding automatic weapons.

And so, he struggled to his feet.

From somewhere, a heavy boot swept his legs out from under him. Sam went crashing face first onto the desert floor.

Scattered laughter erupted from the darkness beyond the truck headlights.

Establish control. Sam fought the pain and the panic that was rising in his throat. He pushed himself off the sand.

A shadow loomed in front of him. Sam looked up. He was a large man, with a Saddam Hussein mustache and a single, prehominid eyebrow. He was dressed in a PLA uniform jacket and what looked like U.S. Army-surplus woodland-camouflage BDU trousers. Even in the nighttime coolness he reeked of sweat, garlic, and tobacco. In his left hand was an AK-47, its barrel pointed at the ground.

Slowly, Mustache Man brought the weapon up, up, up, until its muzzle was even with Sam’s clavicle. “Tökhtang—stop.”

Sam raised himself farther off the ground.

The AK’s front sight jabbed against his chest. “Tökhtang!”

Sam fought to keep his eyes steady and his voice even. “Siz Inglizcha gaplashasizmi? Do you speak English?”

In response, he received another shove with the AK’s muzzle.

He took the risk of getting shot by pushing back. “Siz Inglizcha gaplashasizmi?”

After what seemed to him like a decade, the pressure of the AK barrel on his chest was reduced slightly. “Inglizcha?”

Sam pushed himself on to his knees, and then stood up as straight as he could, looking directly into Mustache Man’s black eyes. He anticipated the boot coming at his legs again, but nothing happened. “Kha,” he said. “Yes, Inglizcha.”

“Men Inglizcha. Uzbekchada, Ruscha, Tojik.”

Mustache Man’s accent was Uzbek, not Chechen. A huge surge of relief washed over Sam. But outwardly, he showed nothing.

The Uzbek’s eyes bore into him. Sam realized he had to speak — the team’s lives depended on what he’d say, and how he’d say it. But he didn’t trust his Tajik or Uzbek. “We are English,” he said in halting Russian. “Journalists. Media. We work for a television company in London. We do not understand why you have taken us”—he tugged at his brain for the right word—“prisoner,” he finally said. He paused, translating in his head before he spoke. “Please free my friends. Please give us all some water, or tea, and some rice. It has been a long time since we have had anything to eat or drink.”

Mustache Man said nothing. But he stepped back three paces and lowered the AK’s barrel. Sam was relieved until he realized the muzzle was pointed directly at his crotch and Muzzle Man’s finger was still wrapped around the trigger.

There followed what could only be described as a long, unnatural pause. And then Mustache Man lowered the muzzle of the AK until it pointed into the desert floor. He looked at Sam and said in Russian, “Journalists?”

“Television journalists,” Sam said.

“Television. BBC?”

“Yes, just like BBC,” Sam said.

Mustache Man said, “You make television of us?”

“Of course,” Sam said. “We can make a video of you. An interview. And then, after we leave, we can show it on television. The whole world will see and hear you.”

Mustache Man said, “Show me.”

Sam looked at his three companions. “Free them. Give us water and rice. And then we will be happy to show you.”

“You show me now.” Mustache Man swept the AK’s muzzle across Sam’s body. One-handed, he fired a long burst into Dick Campbell’s chest. The Marine was blown two yards backward, dead by the time Sam screamed, “No!”

“I said you show me now.” Mustache Man butt-stroked Sam with the AK, knocking him onto his face. He reached down, grabbed Sam by the collar of his shirt, and started dragging him toward the video equipment.

Sam twisted free of Mustache Man’s grip. He rolled onto his hands and knees, crawled to get away. But the Uzbek followed. Sam tried to struggle to his feet. He got a roundhouse kick that sent pain from his hip into his eye sockets.

Mustache Man stood over him. The AK started to come up. Sam’s palms went up. “Please,” he said. “I’ll show you. But I’m going to need help.” Sam’s brain wasn’t being helpful. Suddenly he’d lost every bit of Russian he’d ever known. He fought to remember the vocabulary, then, like some kind of demented child, spoke slowly, in a monotone. “They have to help me.”

There was a pause. Sam chanced a quick look up at Mustache Man, wincing in anticipation of a rifle butt — or a bullet. Mustache Man’s face told him the guerrilla was debating whether or not to shoot them all.

Finally, the Uzbek said, “Da. Show me.” He flicked a glance into the darkness. Kaz’s gag was pulled off, and his arms freed. Sam looked into the kid’s eyes and knew he was in shock. Well, Kaz wasn’t the only one. Sam had never lost an agent. But now he’d just killed a colleague. Dick was dead because of him. Because of his stupidity. His game playing. Stupid goddamn game playing.

Sam’s eyes lost focus. He started to hyperventilate. It was X-Man who brought him back. Chris took him by the shoulders and shook him. “Sam,” he said. “Sam, we have to get to work. The man’s waiting.”

Sam blinked a few times. “Get to work.” He looked over at the Marine’s bound, gagged corpse. There’d been no time for anything. Not even a good-bye glance. Now Dick was dead. Murdered. The rage started to build inside Sam now. His eyes grew wide. His fists clenched. And then Sam’s training took over and he shut down the partition inside him that hurt more than he’d ever realized anybody could hurt, and he nodded his head and said, numbly, “Okay, Chris.”

Revenge would come. But later. The shock of seeing his teammate murdered would hit him hard. But not now. Sam couldn’t let anything touch him now. His only job was to keep himself, Kaz, and X-Man alive.

As quickly as they could, the three of them set to work. They pulled the camera out of its padded case and checked the battery. It was weak — drained from the earlier drilling.

Sam’s hip throbbed painfully. “How much time do we have on the battery?”

“Don’t know,” Kaz said. “Maybe eight, ten minutes.” He gave Sam a grim look. “The spare’s dead.”

Sam gritted his teeth. “Maybe they have a generator.”

“If not, I can recharge using the cigarette lighter in the Toyota.”

“Good.” Sam watched as Chris set up the tripod. Kaz placed the camera on the tripod head and secured it. Sam unpacked the zoom lens and twisted the bayonet mount until it clicked. Chris screwed the audio cable into the back of the camera.

Kaz found the hand mike and attached it to the cable. “Good to go.”

Chris positioned himself behind the camera and took a quick squint through the eyepiece. He nodded at Sam. “Ready when you are.”

Sam beckoned to Mustache Man. “We are ready.” He took the mike out of Kaz’s hands and waved it in the guerrilla’s direction. “What would you like to say?”

“Not here.” Mustache Man shouted something in a dialect Sam did not understand. Someone climbed into one of the PLA trucks, turned it around, and backed it in a half circle until the headlights of the truck in which Sam and X-Man had been held lit up the canvas covering the tailgate.

Mustache Man’s boots scrunched across the sand and stone. He stood twenty feet from the truck. “Put the camera here.”

Sam limped over to where Mustache Man stood. “C’mon, chaps, let’s do it.”

Mustache Man gave more orders. The canvas was pushed aside and the tailgate dropped. Half a dozen men slung their weapons and clambered aboard. Another four stood below.

Sam waited as the camera was brought up and set where Mustache Man wanted it. He got behind the tripod, sidled up to the eyepiece, and squinted through the viewfinder He adjusted the focus, then zoomed in on the knot of bodies struggling to wrestle a large, rectangular object that looked somewhat like one of those 1930s refrigerators — the ones with the compressors on the top — out of a cumbersome storage container.

They pushed and pulled for perhaps half a minute. Sam was about to shut the power off when the cluster of men separated long enough for him to catch a fleeting glimpse of the yellow-and-black nuclear radiation symbol stenciled on the storage container. He said, “Oh, my God,” and involuntarily took a big step backward.

X-Man said, “What’s up?”

Sam rubbed his face. “I don’t bloody believe this.” He watched as they wrestled the fridge out of the truck and lowered it onto the ground.

“Now,” Mustache Man said. “Now you give me the microphone.”

It was at that instant that Sam Phillips understood that he was a dead man, too. That they were all dead men. Dick Campbell wasn’t going to be SIE-l’s only casualty.

Ritzik was surprised to find the young woman who’d briefed in the Situation Room waiting for them in the national security adviser’s inner office. Monica Wirth said, “Mr. Secretary, Major Ritzik, this is Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy Tracy Wei-Liu.”

Ritzik said, “Michael Ritzik. Nice to meet you.” He extended his arm and got a cool, firm handshake in return. She certainly was attractive, Ritzik thought. She had almond eyes and the well-conditioned body of an athlete under her well-tailored black pantsuit. Wei-Liu was probably, he decided, in her early thirties. Ritzik caught himself staring and self-consciously shifted his gaze toward SECDEF, who was looking at him quizzically.

Rockman said, “Major Ritzik will be leading the unit that’s going to bring the CIA sensor team back from China.”

Wei-Liu’s expression didn’t change a whit. “Not an easy job, Major, given the latest developments.”

“No, it’s not. But it can be done.”

“I certainly hope so. They’re brave men. We should do everything we can to bring them home.”

“I feel the same way.”

Monica Wirth’s heels tapped the wood floor as she crossed her office and dropped into a high-backed upholstered leather wing chair that faced away from the tall, narrow windows. “Why don’t we all sit down where it’s comfortable.” Wirth indicated the upholstered couch in front of which was a coffee table piled with foreign-policy journals.

‘Thank you, Monica. My old bones could use a comfortable chair.” The secretary eased into the wing chair facing Wirth. Ritzik and Wei-Liu stepped over his knees and settled somewhat self-consciously into the soft sofa cushions.

“So, Major,” the NSC chairman asked, “what did you think of our RIG?”

“Rig, ma’am?”

“Restricted interagency group.”

“I was wondering,” Ritzik said, “whether Admiral Buckley is always that quiet at meetings.”

A single, acidic cackle broke from the back of the national security adviser’s throat. “We call him the stealth chairman,” she finally said. Then her expression changed. “Major,” Wirth asked, “is there anyone in your unit who has experience in dealing with medium atomic demolition devices and the disarming of nuclear weapons under tactical situations?”

Ritzik didn’t have to think very long about that one. “We have trained with the Department of Energy’s counterterror NEST teams, ma’am. We have also worked counterterrorist scenarios in which nuclear warheads were tactical factors, and so we are familiar in a general way with the arming and disarming of such devices. But the weapons we’ve been exposed to are current generation — not thirty-plus-year-old MADMs.”

The national security adviser shot a quick glance in Rockman’s direction. “I see,” Monica Wirth said.

“So defusing the stolen weapon could present a problem.”

“It might,” Ritzik said. “But I’m confident that if Miss Wei-Liu draws a detailed diagram and explains the problem to me thoroughly, we’ll be able to deal with the situation efficiently.”

Wei-Liu swiveled toward Ritzik. “It’s somewhat more complex than just drawing a diagram, Major.”

“An IED is an IED,” Ritzik said. “A detonator is a detonator. An ignition wire is an ignition wire.”

Wei-Liu said, “Major, I may defer to you in all things military. But I have been dealing with these sorts of devices for more than fifteen years now. I have demilitarized Soviet ICBM warheads, dissected their cruise missiles, and examined the innards of the second-generation MADMs they left in bunkers in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. I have even worked on the ignition sequencing for our own current generation of weapons. And believe me, this is not a matter of ‘Do I cut the red wire first or the blue wire first?’ Because there are no colored wires, Major. Not on the J-12. Moreover, as I started to explain in the Situation Room, capacitors can be very unstable. And the battery packs emit both acid and static, which can result in sparks and explosions. The J-12 is tricky and problematic. It is complex in its simplicity, if you know what I’m saying. You have to understand the gestalt of the J-12—be totally comfortable in its instability — or it is altogether likely that in the course of rendering it safe, you will cause an unintended detonation.”

Ritzik’s expression told Wei-Liu he wasn’t convinced.

“I’m telling you the truth, Major. I’ll draw you anything you want — and more. But believe me: you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

“Yes, you do, Major,” Monica Wirth said. “Because the implications of an unintended detonation are extremely far-reaching.” The national security adviser shot a glance at Rockman. “Mr. Secretary, don’t you agree?”

“I do,” Rockman said. “And I think I know where we’re headed now — and I concur.”

“Thank you, Mr. Secretary.” Monica Wirth smiled in Ritzik’s general direction and noted that the major had no idea at all where she was headed.

So she told him. “Major, Miss Wei-Liu has just joined your insertion element.”

Mike Ritzik didn’t have to think too long about that one either. “No, ma’am, she has not.”

Monica Wirth gave Ritzik a hard look. “You don’t get a vote here, Major.”

Wei-Liu pushed herself to the edge of the cushion. “What about me, Dr. Wirth? Do I get a vote?”

“You’re the only one who does,” the national security adviser said. “You get the option of volunteering.”

“Ma’am,” Ritzik began.

“Shush, Major. You don’t know the full story.”

“Frankly, ma’am, I don’t give a damn what the full story is. I’m wasting my time here. I should be back at the compound, with my men, trying to anticipate everything that might go wrong so that we can deal with it. This device is just another problem. It can be overcome.”

“No, Major, this is different.”

Ritzik set his jaw. “I don’t think so. Let me be brutally honest, Dr. Wirth. Let’s say we get as far as the convoy, and we rescue our people, but we screw up with the MADM and it goes off. So what if it does?”

“So what? Ka-boom. Mushroom cloud, Major. And then—”

Ritzik cut her off. “Exactly, ma’am. Ka-boom. And when we vaporize, all the evidence that Americans were ever on Chinese territory goes with us. So far as the Chinese are concerned, it’s another nuclear accident caused by a bad detonator — just like the one in 1988.” He paused when he saw Wirth’s shocked expression. “Nobody here wants to die, ma’am. That’s not the point. The point is—”

Monica Wirth’s tone turned frosty. “You have no idea what the point is, Major. The point is way above your pay grade.”

Condescension was a quality Ritzik didn’t like. “Since I’m the one putting his men’s lives on the line, perhaps you’d be kind enough to fill me in, then … ma’am.”

Wirth didn’t give an inch. “I’ll let Miss Wei-Liu ‘fill you in,’ Major. She’s the nuclear expert in the room.” Wirth said, “Please, Miss Wei-Liu — give him a thumbnail.”

The young woman shook her head self-consciously, cascading longish, black hair around her shoulders. “I’ll certainly try, Dr. Wirth.” She turned to Ritzik, her hands folded on her lap. “Major, five years ago I had a small part in a program that designed the prototypes for the low-yield sensors the CIA team just inserted.”

“Congratulations.” Ritzik’s tone indicated he wasn’t in the mood for a history lesson.

Wei-Liu continued, undeterred. “In 1996 the Chinese stopped testing weapons with a yield greater than one kiloton.”

“In 1996,” he repeated, frustration evident in his voice.

“Yes, Major. But they didn’t stop testing.” “How did you know?”

“We didn’t — for sure. And the previous administration wasn’t interested in finding out. So the sensor program languished, until 2001, when it was revived.”

Ritzik nodded blankly, wishing she’d get to the point.

“Major, these sensors were designed specifically to identify ultra-low-level nuclear blasts — one kiloton or less.”

“So?”

“The MADM I saw in this morning’s photograph is a fifteen-kiloton device, Major Ritzik. The sensors were planted two hundred and sixty miles from the tunnel complex where we expect the Chinese to test their low-level nuclear capabilities. I checked the map over there.” Wei-Liu pointed at an easel where a thick green atlas sat open. “The distance from where the sensors were placed to the mountain range along the Chinese border is slightly less than four hundred miles. If the MADM explodes anywhere within that radius — whether you do it by accident, or the terrorists do it by design — the seismic shock wave, which will be somewhere in the four-point-six to four-point-eight Richter area, will jolt the sensors’ internal readers severely enough so as to render them essentially useless.”

The national security adviser broke in. “So your samurailike offer of seppuku, Major, is noted and appreciated, but respectfully declined.” She gave Ritzik a quick triumphal glance. “Not because it wasn’t heartfelt, either, I’m sure. But now you see that if you screwed up, you’d not only throw away your lives and the lives of the men you were sent to rescue, but you would, in fact, be doing the national security interests of the United States a great deal of damage.” Wirth paused. “A great deal of damage. And that, Major, is the point.”

It took Ritzik some seconds to digest what Wirth had said.

Finally, he replied. “I accept your premise, ma’am. And I apologize for jumping the gun.”

Wirth gave him an unexpectedly gracious smile. “Accepted, Major.”

“But I have to insist that taking a civilian along on such a hazardous mission is never done.”

“You’re wrong about that, too, son,” Rockman broke in. “It has been done — and successfully.”

Ritzik was shocked. “When?”

“During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis,” Rockman said. “A CIA missile analyst was assigned to accompany a Navy SEAL infiltration to Cuba.”

Rockman’s eyes crinkled. “The SEAL component commander, by the way, didn’t argue about it. He gritted his teeth and said, ‘Aye-aye, sir.’”

Ritzik winced internally. “Point taken, sir.”

“It was no cakewalk, either,” Rockman went on. ‘Two SEALs and the CIA officer were transported by the submarine Sea Lion to within two miles of the Cuban coastline. Then they locked out of one of the hatches and surfaced. Then the SEALs swam in — towing the analyst, by the way, because the fella couldn’t swim himself. Finally, they made their way ashore past the Cuban patrol vessels, right into Havana Harbor. The SEAL mission was to identify the warehouses used by the Soviets to store the missiles out of sight of our U-2 overflights so they could be attacked by aircraft without causing collateral damage to the civilians nearby. The SEALs did their job. Then they broke into the warehouses, which allowed the spook to get detailed photos of the missile components and warheads. Those pictures gave President Kennedy an accurate assessment of how far the Soviets had been able to develop their guidance systems and other design elements relating to ICBMs.”

The secretary paused to draw a breath. “So you won’t be the first to do this sort of thing, Major. Nor the last.”

Maybe not. But the original plan was out the window. They’d be dodging the Chinese now — and they couldn’t risk a chopper extraction. Not with Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy Tracy Wei-Liu in tow. Ritzik cursed silently. Now, because of Wei-Liu, every step of the op was going to have to be viewed through a political prism. Every move now had to be seen as a potential headline in The Washington Post.

The political aspects meant Ritzik would now be doing a lot of improvising. Which made him extremely nervous. Improvisation got people killed.

But Ritzik didn’t say any of that. Instead, he said, “Except we won’t be doing any swimming, Mr. Secretary.”

He turned to Wei-Liu. “We’ll be using parachutes during the course of our mission, Miss Wei-Liu.” Ritzik paused, then flat-out lied: “I hope that doesn’t trouble you, ma’am.”

Unfortunately, it didn’t trouble her at all. “That’s all right, Major. I’ve jumped out of a plane.”

He was astonished. “You have?”

“Yes.” She smiled at his obvious discomfort, and a tinge of pride crept into her voice.

In spite of himself, Ritzik noted for the record that it was a lovely smile. “How many jumps do you have under your belt, ma’am?”

“One, Major. On my thirtieth birthday. From five thousand feet. Floating down from a mile in the sky was the thrill of a lifetime.”

“I’m glad you thought so,” Ritzik said coldly, “because I’m about to increase your thrill factor by about five.”

She looked at him quizzically. “Five what, Major?”

“Five miles, Miss Wei-Liu, five long, freezing, windy, oxygen-deprived, dangerous miles.”

Ritzik’s words were followed by a long silence. Wei-Liu panned slowly, noting Rockman’s impassive face and Wirth’s tacitly encouraging expression. “It would seem the major’s made me an offer I can’t refuse,” she finally said.