The Rock

THE PLAYERS

The night was deathly still, the sounds of cars rumbling along the highway a kilometer to the east barely audible. The two-story mansion was set well away from the other buildings on the winding road, a sign of the money and power of the man who owned it. A concrete wall with a locked gate surrounded the spacious grounds. A light flickered in the doorway of the building inside-the guard there lighting a cigarette.

Squatting just inside the wall, Hawkins scanned the building carefully, listening to the muted hiss of the radio in his ear as his team members reported in.

"Puma ready. Out."

"Tiger ready. Out."

"Leopard ready. Out."

Hawkins's mind was calculating. Jaguar had thirty seconds. Then he would give the go with or without that element's participation.

"Jaguar ready. Out."

Hawkins stood, his tall, rangy build clad in black fatigues covered by a combat harness bristling with killing devices. His face was obscured by a black balaclava and the stubby snout of AN/PVS7 night vision goggles. The silenced MP5-SD submachine gun was intimately comfortable in his left hand. The stock of the weapon was collapsed and the thick metal tube of the suppressor followed in short arcs wherever his eyes went. He spoke into his boom mike as calmly as if he were reporting the weather. "Angel, this is Cheetah. Ready to roll. Over."

"Cheetah, this is Angel. You have final clearance. Go. Out."

Hawkins's face was expressionless beneath the cloth covering it. "Break. Mother, what is your status? Over."

The muted sound of helicopter blades sounded in the background of the transmission.

"Holding at eight klicks. All clear. Ready. Over."

"Mother, start final approach. The party's starting. Break. All elements, this is Cheetah. Start in ten, on my count." Hawkins moved forward, the three other men of his cell moving in perfect coordination with his vector toward the front door. He was taking the most dangerous way in-it was the way the commander should go.

"Five," he whispered. In the green glow of his night-vision goggles he could clearly see the muted glow of the door guard's cigarette as if it were a brightly lit flashlight. The man was turned sideways to their approach, ignorant of the coming storm.

"Three." He brought up his submachine gun. "Two. One."

His burst of 9mm subsonic bullets splattered the guard against the door, the gun giving off only the muted sound of the bolt working. One of his men leaned over the body and placed explosives just above the lock. They stepped back and ducked. The blast was brief and then they were sprinting in. The power went off as Hawkins charged through the door, and everything inside went dark. Through his night-vision goggles Hawkins could clearly see the confusion as the guards blindly reacted.

Hawkins fired a sustained burst at a group of men to his right, sending them tumbling. His three men fanned out as they proceeded to clear the first floor. He stayed off the radio, listening to the progress of his other teams. Puma had already secured the field in back for Mother. Tiger and Leopard were working the second floor from opposite ends, having rappelled from the roof into the hallway windows. Jaguar was watching for any outside interference, providing sniper support after having cut the power. He could see what his team-Cheetah-was doing.

"Tiger. Two down B-four." Hawkins knew that meant that Tiger element had killed two people in the room they had designated as B4. He heard the crump of explosions as more doors were blown in. No sound of firing yet. That was good-his men were all silenced, so that meant no return fire. They were three quarters of the way through the first floor when the deep-throated roar of automatic rifle fire split the silence-the first opposition.

A laconic voice came over the radio. "Ah, Jaguar, this is Leopard. We got us one in B-seven. We took the door down but he's stitching the wall here and I'm holding for a sec on going in. Do you have anything in there? Over."

"This is Leopard. Negative on NVG. Going thermal." There was a short pause. "Roger, Leopard, we got him. One hot." Hawkins tilted his head slightly as a deep shot sounded from outside the building. There was no way to silence the fifty-caliber sniper rifle-not if it was going to shoot through walls.

"Leopard, this is Jaguar. Room clear. Over."

"Roger. Going into B-seven.”

Hawkins' assistant team leader came out of the last room on the first floor with a thumbs-up. All clear down here. Hawkins spoke into his radio for the first time. "Mother, this is Cheetah. Status? Over."

"This is Mother. On schedule. Two miles out. Over."

Hawkins turned and ran for the stairs. Tiger was outside B11. Their target was inside that room. "Jaguar, this is Cheetah. What have you got on thermals in B-eleven? Over."

"Still just two hot. Looks like they're hiding near the bed. Over."

A new voice cut in. "This is Tiger. Going in. Over."

As Hawkins turned on the second-floor landing, he was momentarily blinded as the blast taking out the door to that room overloaded his goggles.

"We got him!" An exultant voice came over the radio.

Hawkins ran into B11. Two of his men had cuffed and blindfolded their target: a fat, naked, blubbering old man. Hawkins looked at the second occupant of the room-a young woman. She lay there on the bed, covers pulled up to her neck, her eyes fearfully dashing from one dark masked figure to another.

"Get him out of here!" Hawkins brusquely ordered. Two of his men lifted the man off his feet and hustled him out the doorway, heading for the pickup zone.

"All elements. This is Cheetah. Pull back. Pull back. Over."

Hawkins swung the boom mike away from his lips and took a deep breath. Tiger team leader hustled his men out of the room and then came over to Hawkins. He didn't ask the obvious. He looked from the woman to Hawkins and then back to the woman, who was slowly sliding toward the far side of the bed, away from the invaders. "I'll take care of it, boss."

Hawkins flicked the selector switch on his MP5 and answered Tiger team leader's suggestion with one round through the middle of the woman's forehead, spraying brain and blood over the headboard. Hawkins stepped forward and ripped aside the sheet, uncovering a small derringer in the woman's right hand.

Hawkins briefly looked at Tiger team leader and shook his head. The two turned and ran for the stairs and out the back door.

The MH-53 Pave Low helicopter settled onto the lawn exactly on schedule and the members of Orion loaded smoothly, throwing their bound target in first. The back ramp closed as the bird lifted and they were winging for the coast, an Air Force escort of Stealth fighters flying cover overhead. The helicopter pilot kept them down in the treetops, using his terrain-following radar to keep off the Colombian Armed Forces radar screens. They would be back on board the carrier before anyone in the country even had an inkling of what had happened.

Hawkins walked to the center of the cargo bay where the old man lay, the red night lights on the ceiling reflecting off the pale skin. He'd fouled himself already, shitting all over his pudgy thighs. Hawkins slid up his night-vision goggles and slowly pulled his black balaclava down, exposing chiseled features and slate-gray eyes. He knelt down next to the man and stared. He knew the professional interrogators were waiting on board the carrier and they would extract everything from the man's memory, but he'd paid a high price to get this man and he'd been on the hunt now for two weeks. He wanted to know. His executive officer-Richman-who'd been Tiger team leader on the assault, knelt next to him.

"Did you buy one?"

The man looked at him in confusion. "What?" he replied in Spanish.

Hawkins shifted to that language and spoke just barely above the whine of the engines. "Did you buy one of the nuclear bombs?"

"What nuclear bombs?" The old man shook his head. "What are you talking about?"

Hawkins peered intently into the old man's eyes and felt a sinking sensation. His instincts told him the man was telling the truth. All this for nothing. He looked at Richman, who grimaced and shouted in his team leader's ears, "Another dry well."

Hawkins wearily nodded, the adrenaline of the mission rapidly dissipating.

Richman squeezed his arm. "Sorry about the girl. She was in bed with the man when we went in. I didn't see the gun."

Hawkins ran a hand across his brow. "It doesn't matter." He went forward in the cargo bay, away from the other members of his team. He slumped down on the cargo web seat against the side of the aircraft. He peeled off his thin black gloves and the glint of gold on his left hand caught his eye. With his right hand he twisted the ring, feeling it cut into the flesh beneath. His eyes remembered the fear in the woman's eyes in the room. He didn't know who she was or why she was there. He had spotted the derringer a second before he fired, but he had no way of knowing for sure if she had intended to use it. It had been reflex-the killing reflex that had been drummed into him for years.

Hawkins felt a black void open in his chest — a void he'd felt often in the past four years. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out all the memories, but failed. Unthinking, his right hand left the ring and stole down to his right hip and unsnapped the cover on his pistol holster. He pulled the Beretta 9mm out and instinctively flipped off the safety.

A tap on the shoulder startled him.

"Sir, we've got a message for you on SATCOM." A commo man stood there, holding out the headset for a satellite radio, looking curiously at the pistol in his commander's hand. Hawkins followed the man's gaze and blinked. He awkwardly put the gun back in its holster and took the headset. "Hawkins here."

"Hawk, this is General Lowry. We've got an F-14 waiting on board the carrier all fueled and waiting for you. As soon as you get on board you go to that bird."

Hawkins shook his head to clear it. "What about debrief?"

"Don't worry about debrief. Richman will handle it. Something's come up."

Hawkins felt the trepidation of another mission. "You have a line on the other nuke?"

"No." There was a slight pause. "You get on that Tomcat and you go wherever it takes you. That's all I've got."

"Can you give me an idea where it's taking me, sir?"

There was a long pause. "From what I understand, you're going to Australia."

"Australia? Why?"

"To tell you the truth, Hawk, I don't know what's going on. This is coming from the very top. Just do what you're ordered to. Out."

The radio went dead. Hawkins ripped the headset off and slammed it against the floor, ignoring the looks of his team members. He pressed his fists against his temples, trying to block out all the faces, and one face in particular-a woman still alive, at least physically, lying on another bed, covered with a white sheet up to her neck, her large eyes staring aimlessly straight ahead.

The five men at the table to the left of the band's stage had begun verbally grading the women going to the bathroom over thirty minutes before. Their scale ranged from negative ten to a seven for a mini-skirted young girl. Don Batson had ignored their raucous laughter. In the drunken glow of seven beers he was much more interested in the woman seated next to him. Linda was one of his graduate assistants and their relationship had recently become much more than professional.

Don looked much younger than he actually was, an almost indistinguishable sprinkling of gray in his black hair, a hint to his thirty-eight years. Black steel-rimmed glasses framed a remarkably unlined face and covered dark eyes that blearily took in his surroundings. Only in the light of day could the redness in his nose and sprinkling of burst blood vessels in his cheeks be spotted. He kept his body in good shape at the university gym and sweated out" the alcohol every day. Don Batson took everything life had to offer him with eager arms. At the present moment one of those arms was occupied with Nancy's thigh, squeezing the smooth flesh in anticipation of a night's pleasure.

Peter, one of Don's third-year undergraduate students at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, had just finished describing his experiences the previous summer during an internship with a mining consortium in Colorado. As the humorous story drew to a close, Don finished his mug of beer and then leaned forward.

"I've got a small problem that I want you to solve." The younger students groaned with mock horror while Nancy smiled, used to Don's favorite game-setting up problems that required innovative solutions. He looked at her. "I don't want you answering either-you've heard it before."

Sure he had their attention, he continued above the muted clatter of the bar. "You have a half-inch diameter, two-foot-long steel tube welded onto a steel deck, the tube standing perpendicular. The top is open. You also have a hanger, a pair of pliers, a four-foot piece of string, and a piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven typing paper.

"A Ping-Pong ball is placed in the top of the tube and slowly settles to the bottom. The diameter of the tube is barely one eighth of an inch larger than the circumference of the Ping-Pong ball. Your job"-he grinned-"should you choose to accept it, is to get the Ping-Pong ball out of the steel tube given what's available to you. And the Ping-Pong ball must be intact-no using the hanger to puncture it and pull it out."

Don sat back and listened to several of the usual solutions, pointing out how each one wouldn't work. Finally, he took pity on his students. "All right. Listen up. There's a teaching point here, as always. You all have focused on the material I gave you and not on the problem. You have tunnel vision. Someone give characteristics of the object you wish to remove from the pipe."

"It's round," one student drunkenly declared.

"True," Don acknowledged. "What else?"

"It's white," another announced to laughter.

"What else?" Out of the comer of his eye Batson noted that the men near the bathroom had now written numbers on napkins and were holding them up as women walked past.

"It bounces."

"Good. You're on the right track. More physical characteristics. How would you describe a Ping-Pong ball to someone who's never seen one?"

"It's a hollow plastic sphere."

Don smiled. "All right. What does a hollow plastic sphere do?" Seeing the frowns, he tried explaining further. "You've already said it bounces. What else?"

"It floats."

"Exactly!" Don looked at the student who'd come up with that. "How can you use that to get the ball out of the tube?"

"Well, you pour water in and it will float to the top." The student shook his head. "But you didn't give us any water as part of the material we could use."

Don shook his head. "That just reinforces the teaching point. You have to examine the problem without constricting yourself by given or known parameters. What do you always have with you when you approach any problem?"

"Your mind?"

"Yes," Don replied. "And your body. Isn't your body capable of producing fluid sufficient to get the Ping-Pong ball out of the tube?"

"Oh, gross," one of the students commented as he realized what Don was saying. "You mean take a leak in the pipe?"

"Exactly!"

With that, two men in three-piece suits slowly walked in the front door and gazed about, referring to a photo the lead man held in his hand. They looked out of place among the cowboy boots and hats.

"And speaking of that," Linda announced, "I have to take a little trip. Get me another beer, please," she whispered in Don's ear as she got to her feet.

Don's eyes followed her as she wove her way through the tables to the ladies' room. As she passed the rednecks, they held up their numbers. Don was pleased to note that she rated as high as the mini-skirted girl but dismayed when Linda stopped and tipped their pitcher of beer over, soaking half the men as it splattered across the table.

Don leapt to his feet and was halfway to the table as a fat drunken man with a large silver belt buckle jumped up, cursing Linda. "You fucking bitch! Who the hell do you think you are?"

"Screw you!" Linda yelled back. "I should be able to go to the bathroom without getting harassed." "Hey! Let's chill out here," Don suggested, grabbing Linda's arm. "She with you, asshole?" The fat man wasn't waiting for an answer, looming over Don's slight frame.

Don looked up and smiled weakly. "Come on. Let me buy you another pitcher." He fumbled for his wallet.

Another man from the table cast a tall shadow to his right. "Fuck you. We're gonna make you and your girlfriend here lick our table off."

A large callused hand grabbed the back of Batson's shirt and he tried to remember some of the karate he'd taken in one of his inspired moments several years previously. Unfortunately, nothing of use carne to mind. "Listen, guys, there's no need to-"

The hand pressed him forward, lowering his head toward the wet table. Linda was kicking and biting at the man trying to hold on to her, his hands roaming toward intimate parts of her body.

A voice cut through the room. "Freeze! Breathe and you're dead." The cowboys became statues, their eyes mesmerized by whoever had yelled to Don's rear.

The hand on his back let go and Don slowly stood up and turned. The two men in suits were standing there, one holding a mini-Uzi on the group, the other a large, wicked-looking pistol. The man with the pistol looked at Don. "You Professor Batson?"

Don nodded.

"Come with us, please."

The please sounded incongruous, considering the firepower. "Let's go, Linda," he said, tucking his shirt back in.

They made their way to the door-the two men covering their retreat-and went out into the parking lot.

"Who are you guys?"

The man put his pistol away and flipped his ID card out. "National Security Agency. We need you to accompany us."

"What for?" Don glanced at Linda, who was still shaking from the confrontation. She was eyeing him in a manner he couldn't quite figure out. He shook his head trying to clear it.

The man was leading him toward a black Bronco with tinted windows. "That will be answered when we get where we're going, sir. This action is authorized by your involvement with the Hermes Project."

Don halted, staggering slightly. "I'm not going anywhere until I know where we're going."

The man turned an impassive face to him. "Sir, we would very much like it if you cooperated. If you do not cooperate we are authorized to use force, and I'm sure none of us will like that very much. You agreed to participation in the Hermes Project. I can assure you that everything will be all right. All will be explained at your destination."

The other man stepped up close behind Batson, his manner calmly threatening.

"How long will we be gone?"

"I don't know, sir. A day at least."

"All right. I'll go along for the time being. Let's take Ms. Porter home first. We can drop her at my place while I get some stuff."

The man swung the truck door open. "We've already been by your house and have packed for you."

"How'd you get in?" Don protested.

The man looked slightly surprised, as if it were a stupid question. "We went in the door, Professor. Now please get in the truck. We have a plane waiting at the airport. Ms. Porter can take your car home. We have already notified the university that you will be on a leave of absence.

Don turned to Linda. "I'll give you a call as soon as I find out what is going on."

"Don't bother," she spat, grabbing the keys and walking over to his car.

The lecture hall was filled to capacity and people were even standing along the back wall. Debra Levy let the curtain slip back into place with a twitch of nervousness.

"I didn't know there would be so many!"

The coordinator from Oxford made clucking noises, presumably to soothe her. "Your reputation is unmatched. Your work is at the very cutting edge." He smiled. "In fact, you are beyond the cutting edge, as far as I am concerned. I am not sure I understood your last paper on the quantum theory of gravitation and the physics of the cosmos. Most especially the section on…"

Debra grasped her notes tighter in damp hands and pushed her glasses up on her nose, tuning out his words. That all these people should be here to listen to a twenty-three year old Jewish girl from Brooklyn! It was all so strange to her. Having lived her life, she didn't understand that others found her amazing. After graduating from high school at nine, she'd completed her doctorate in physics at MIT at fifteen. Since then she'd added several other degrees, but still kept her concentration in the world of physics.

It never seemed to occur to those around her that as much as they didn't quite comprehend her, she didn't quite comprehend everyone outside of herself. To her it was quite natural to have progressed the way she did and unnatural that people her own age were still struggling in the graduate program she'd completed almost a decade ago. The egocentrism of the average human mind never ceased to confound her.

"Two minutes," the coordinator whispered to her, his body unnecessarily close.

He irritated her. She knew she was far from pretty but she also knew she wasn't ugly. Five and a half feet tall, the one hundred and ten pounds sparingly applied to her frame gave her an acceptable body, as far as present societal standards went, where it was always better to be on the lesser side of the weight scale than the greater. Debra couldn't have cared less, but her brain acknowledged that it sometimes mattered to others, most particularly men. Her face, devoid of makeup, was very pale and smooth. Her eyes were hidden behind functional thick glasses that were hopelessly out of style. Her dark hair was drawn back severely in a bun with a small ribbon and had never known the graces of a stylist's scissors.

"One minute."

Two figures appeared near the door to the stage wing, one of the professors trying to stop their entry. They pushed past him as if he didn't exist. The taller of the two men walked up to Debra.

"Miss Debra Levy?"

She nodded as the coordinator and several others hovered worriedly about, asking questions that went unanswered.

"I'm Agent Stone from the Defense Intelligence Agency." He pushed a very official-looking ID card under her nose. "We have reason to believe that your life might be in danger and have orders to take you under protective custody."

Debra blinked in confusion. "What?"

They didn't even stop to explain. One on either side, they hustled her out of the lecture hall through a back door, ignoring the howls of indignation from the Oxford people. She was in a dark car and speeding away from the curb before the reality of what had happened caught up with her.

The computer screen cast an eerie glow across the hardwood floors of the large den. Francine Volkers was facing the screen but her eyes were unfocused-she didn't need to see the numbers portrayed, because she'd created them and they were indelibly etched in her mind. She took another sip of her coffee and sighed as a light went on in the guest bedroom. Her husband padded out, his bathrobe half thrown on.

"Are you going to get any sleep?"

Francine shook her head. For the past forty-eight hours she'd had to face her own numbers and she didn't like them one bit. She'd transmitted them as required on the secure modem as soon as the calculations were complete. Now she could do nothing but look at them.

"No."

Her husband cursed under his breath. Their marriage had been one of convenience for many years now and she was currently an irritant-upsetting the unspoken truce. "Jesus Christ, Fran! You've been sitting in front of that damn computer since I got home. The glow is coming right in my door."

"Then shut your door." She was surprised he'd noticed how long it had been. He worked on Wall Street, crunching his own set of numbers and all he truly cared about was that they turned out in the black, and in at least six digits a month. The numbers had brought them together fifteen years earlier in college, but had subsequently taken them in radically different directions. His had ended on Wall Street. Hers had taken her to Columbia University, where she had helped pioneer the field of statistical projection. She took facts and figures, collated them into numbers a computer could read, and then tried to project out what the possibilities of various future events would be. Right now they read very poorly.

A few years ago a group that had kept what they called a Doomsday Clock had moved the minute hand back from two minutes before midnight to almost fifteen minutes prior to midnight. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the worldwide cutback in military spending had been the impetus. Fran had disagreed with that move, but kept it to herself. Her own calculations would have edged the minute hand a shade closer to the dark hour. The loss of the relative stability of the Soviet Union and the formation of numerous splinter countries all armed with nuclear weapons certainly did not bode well for mankind in her mind or in her calculations. Nor did the world economic condition. The haves were teetering and the have-nots were getting angrier.

She didn't even bother to look at her husband. "Go to bed, George. You need your rest so you can make money tomorrow, or should I say later today."

A year before he would have retorted angrily to the dig, pointing out that his money paid for their exclusive Central Park West apartment. It was a sign of how low things had sunk between them that he simply turned and stalked back into the bedroom, slamming his door behind him. Fran was in her mid-thirties; a tall, slender woman whose dark hair was now streaked with gray-a sign of premature aging she refused to color. As a result of that and the creases around her eyes and mouth, she looked almost ten years older than she really was. It wasn't something to concern her. Such trivial matters bothered her little when weighed against what her numbers told her day in and day out.

She was not overly surprised when the building intercom buzzed. She got out of her chair for the first time in hours and walked on stiff legs to the voice box near the door.

"Yes?"

"Mrs. Volker, this is Ed, downstairs. There are two men here to see you. They say they're from the government. They do have IDs."

"Send them up, Ed. It's all right." She unlocked the apartment door and swung it open. Then she headed for her own bedroom and started packing. It took the men a few minutes to appear.

"Mrs. Volker?"

She nodded as she pulled clothes out of the closet. "Yes."

"Ma'am, we're here to escort you. This is sanctioned under the Hermes Project."

"I know. I've been waiting for you."

The two looked relieved that she was cooperating.

"Are we going to Washington or to the center in West Virginia?" she asked as she sat on the edge of her bed and pulled on a pair of boots. The numbers had gone to D.C., but they usually met in the bunker burrowed under the hills of West Virginia.

The agents' faces were impassive. "Neither, ma'am."

That was the first surprise for Fran. She stood and looked at them. "Can you tell me where we are going, then?"

The two exchanged looks. Finally one replied. "Australia, ma'am."

"Australia? Why are we going there?"

The one who had answered, shrugged. "We don't know. Our job is to get you there. We have military transport waiting at LaGuardia." Fran considered what she knew about Australia-factoring in that it was summer in the southern hemisphere-and placed some T-shirts and shorts in her bag.

She threw a bag over her shoulder while one of the agents grabbed the other. "Can I tell my husband I'm leaving?"

"Yes, ma'am, but not your destination."

"Oh, hell," she said. "I'll just leave him a note on the fridge."