Bloodbath

Chapter Three

At the Berlin bureau headquarters of the Weisbaden-based German Federal Criminal Police Agency, the Bundeskriminalamt, otherwise known by the acronym BKA, which is the rough (but by no means exact) equivalent of the American FBI, they called Helmut Mauthner "Starsky" and his partner Karl Voss "Hutch." The two cops cultivated the association — Mauthner was a Bavarian with the dark hair, ruddy face and swarthy build of a mountain gnome, while Voss, whose lineage was Tyrolean, had blonde hair and a fair complexion — earning a reputation for playing it fast and loose on the job.

Today, on a windswept day in early October, with Mauthner behind the wheel of a blue Volkswagen Golf electric and Voss slouched in the green vehicle's passenger seat with his sneaker-shod feet propped on the dash, the cops were sitting on a stakeout on a residential street between the Pariser Platz and the left bank of the Spree river. It was a neighborhood of cheap housing that had sprung up from the rubble-strewn wasteland formerly in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Since the influx of refugees from the East after unification, the neighborhood had become a magnet for Berlin's growing population of foreign immigrants from the Balkans, Eurasia and the Middle East.

For the most part, and despite periodic outbreaks of neo-nazi skinhead violence, the denizens of the quarter lived harmoniously. But civil unrest and ethnic tensions were not what had brought Starsky and Hutch to the neighborhood. They were one team in three that was staking out a group of new arrivals to the vicinity. These newcomers had been brought to the attention of the BKA when a kilo-weight package of Semtex plastic explosive had been discovered by a DHL courier making a shipment to a neighborhood grocer when the shipping carton had accidentally opened before delivery.

Checks with Immigration and Interpol had disclosed that the grocer's cousin, a man named Farouk Al-Kaukji, had recently arrived from Damascus, Syria and was staying on a thirty-day visitor's visa. Al-Kaukji, who was missing his right arm and part of his right leg, had a history with Interpol that went back several years. Thus he had been watchlisted at Berlin Tempelhof Airport and the BKA notified of his arrival. Al-Kaukji was a bomb-maker for the radical faction of Islamic revolutionaries led by former Allah's Bloody Sword and Swift Death to All Unbelievers leader Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni.

Dalkimoni, who had long since broken with his early affiliations and become a free agent called Abu Jihad, had employed Al-Kaukji's services on several occasions, especially in bombs used to down jetliners, a specialty of Al-Kaukji's. The combination of Al-Kaukji and a kilo of Semtex added up to the possibility that Berlin was once again becoming a major terrorist bomb assembly entrepot.

Chief of Counter-terrorist Operations at the Berlin bureau of the German BKA, Inspector Max Winternitz had ordered a team to put the grocery under twenty-four hour surveillance. Another team began following Al-Kaukji as he emerged from the grocery and went about his daily rounds.

On the first day of the stakeout, the BKA team positioned behind the window of an Indian restaurant across the street from the grocery saw a late-model black Mercedes sedan pull up in front of the store. The Mercedes was driven by a stocky, goateed man who was later identified as one Farid Housek, a naturalized German originally from the Egyptian capital city, Cairo.

Housek had no record with Interpol, Europol or the BKA's INPOL or SIS criminal database systems, but the FBI knew a little about him from the high-rolling days of BMCI, the criminally bent Bank of Mercantile Commerce International. Housek had then been a minor bagman for BMCI's sprawling Bonn headquarters, used as a go-between in arms transfer deals. With the collapse of BMCI in the early 2000s, Housek had taken a job in the accounting department of Iran Airlines and had led a mostly clean life. Until now, that is.

A tail team had followed Al-Kaukji in the company of Housek to various destinations around town, most of which were to make purchases at a miscellaneous assortment of shops. At a large department store, Al-Kaukji inspected a number of alarm clocks, and bought four of them. At a computer dealer, Al-Kaukji came out with a laptop and was found to have ordered a desktop PC for delivery to the grocer's for the following day. Other items included a pair of stereo jam boxes, batteries, wire, a portable drill of Japanese manufacture and an assortment of screws, tools and other miscellaneous odds and ends.

Housek not only chauffeured Al-Kaukji around Berlin, but also brought the bomb-maker to other stops where they met with groups of other men, all of them of Middle Eastern nationality, and all but one of them with known links to fundamentalist and Islamist terrorist organizations.

In the gray Toyota van parked a half block down the street from Housek's apartment building in the more prestigious Gneisenau section of Berlin, the stakeout team had just started on the first round of coffee and danishes. The van was linked by spread spectrum cell communication and secure radio to each other and to the BKA's headquarters at 24 Leipsigerstrasse. Max Winternitz had just taken a call from Gerhardt Fromm, leader of the stakeout team.

Today was an important day. Winternitz had been about to give the order for the teams to move in and make arrests when a tap on Al-Kaukji's phone at the grocer's revealed that Abu Jihad himself, Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni, was expected to personally supervise operations in Berlin.

Dalkimoni had entered the country under an official government passport issued by the Iranian Ministry of Religious Affairs, but had been identified by a sharp-eyed BfV (Bundesampt für Verfussungsschutz or Office for the Protection of the Constitution) internal security watcher who scanned the daily biometric detection take from the airport's overt and covert cameras and sensors.

The phone tap had yielded a reference to the "cakes" that had arrived and how important it was to "bake them just right." Winternitz decided to postpone the bust until Jihad was in the area.

Winternitz answered the call to hear Fromm on the other end of the line.

"Blower just arrived in a cab."

"Blower" was the code name Winternitz's teams used to refer to Dalkimoni. "He's just paid the driver. Now heading up the walk and entering the building."

"Keep him in sight. Don't lose him," Winternitz instructed his men. "I'll be right over."

Winternitz grabbed his jacket and dropped the cell phone into his coat pocket. It was not usual for the Chief of Counter-terrorist Operations to be in on an impending bust, but this was different.

For one thing, Winternitz had a personal score to settle with Abu Jihad. He wanted to be in on the bust when it went down. In fact, he intended to collar Dalkimoni himself. It was a promise he'd pledged to keep five years before.

The black Mercedes S-Coupe pulled up to the curb with a screech of tires. Winternitz was out the door even before the driver had shifted into park. He looked once at the entrance to the apartment building on Marksbergerstrasse and then toward the van.

Inspector Buckholz, Fromm's second in command, had crossed the street toward the big boss.

"Are Blower and Oyster" — the latter their name for Farid Housek — "still inside?"

"Affirmative," Buckholz answered. "We have a laser detector on the window. We're listening to them in Oyster's living room right now."

Winternitz turned to one of the two men from the S-Class vehicle's back seat.

"Go around the back, make sure there are no other ways out of the place. Find the superintendent if necessary," Winternitz told them, adding, "I don't want any slip-ups, understood?"

"Don't worry, boss, there won't be any," said Rudy, the shorter of the two, and he motioned for the other man to join him. Winternitz watched the two raincoat-clad figures cross the street to the building's entranceway.

To Buckholz, he said, "Take three men from your team and cover the front of the building. Hans and I are going in the front as soon as Rudy and Rolf secure their end."

Buckholz nodded. Turning his back to the front of the building and pulling his police radio from his pocket, he began walking across the street. Winternitz leaned against the Mercedes and lit a cigaret. He'd been trying to quit for weeks but this was one occasion when he desperately needed a smoke.

Housek looked at the bullpup automatic rifle propped against the wall like it was something from another planet. Dalkimoni caught the look that told him what Housek didn't dare voice to the bomb-maker: that he was not a man accustomed to using the weapons he occasionally dabbled in selling, and that the realization that he was in way over his head had suddenly dawned on him like thunder.

"Don't crap out on me, Housek," Dalkimoni advised the other man with icy disdain, not failing to notice the beads of sweat standing on his forehead. "If necessary, you will use that to cover my escape."

He nodded toward the weapon.

"Don't worry. I'm okay," Housek assured him.

Dalkimoni doubted this seriously. But he had no other choice than to depend on the coward for backup.

They had made the cops staking out the building earlier that morning. They knew a bust was coming down. While the cops' laser bug monitored a laptop recording that Dalkimoni had made earlier, showing casual conversation inside the safe house Housek kept, the shooters had broken out their guns.

Dalkimoni cocked the bolt action on the AK-47 assault rifle he cradled, jacking a 7.62 millimeter round into the firing chamber. It was almost show time. He looked toward the rear window and licked his lips.

Winternitz stole a glance at his wristwatch. He'd given his three stakeout teams watching Al-Kaukji's friends in other neighborhoods enough time to get into position. Enough. He picked up the Philips short wave commo unit and hit the squelch.

"This is Winternitz to all teams. Team One, ready?"

A moment later two hi-lo tones came from the handheld's speaker followed by Hutch's voice.

"Ready to go, chief."

"Team Two, what is your situation?"

"We're in position outside Canker's — Al Kaukji's — apartment block," the cop named Bermann reported. "We're ready as soon as the girl with big tits walks by and Helmut shoves his eyeballs back in their sockets."

"This is not a party," Winternitz told the cop on the other end. "You're not being paid to fuck around. Get in position."

"Sorry, chief," Bermann said sheepishly. "Don't worry. Alles ist in ordnung — Everything's in order."

"It had better be."

Winternitz said no more. He was in no mood to be trifled with. His men knew very well that their usually easygoing chief was keyed up on this bust. Each had to admit that in Winternitz's position, their nerves would also have been on edge.

"Rolf, Rudy — are you gentlemen in position?" he asked the two men he'd sent around back of the apartment block, the other half of the third bust team.

"All in order," Rudy's voice came back.

"Then it's a go," Winternitz told all the teams. "Repeat. It's a go. I don't want any heroics, just good, clean police work. Viel glück zum allen. Good luck to you all. Winternitz, out."

The BKA chief clipped a photo ID card to the breast pocket of his navy blue topcoat and worked the action of his Sig-Sauer P226 9mm semiautomatic pistol. He slipped the gun in his right coat pocket, gestured to Hans and crossed Marksbergerstrasse toward the building's entrance.

Less than five miles to the east, on a street in the Mittel district, the blonde girl with the breasts like helium-filled balloons tipped with Chianti corks that had simultaneously given Helmut eyestrain and "der Ständer" — a hardon — was frantically explaining to a bearded man that they had been burned.

"I made them as cops," she told Farook Nasser, one of the three other men in the flat, all of whom had been part of another cell of Al-Kaukji's bomb-making terrorist brigades in Berlin.

"You're seeing cops in your sleep, Nikki," Nasser told the buxom blonde woman. "You're smoking too much hashish, I think. Probably fucking too much also. It's making you paranoid."

"I fuck men for a living. I smoke hash for fun. But I'm not paranoid," Nikki replied, miffed. "I know they're cops because I recognized the one who was ogling me," she told him, straining to appear calm. "He used to work vice when I strolled the Ku'Damm two years ago. My hair was dark then. He doesn't remember me, but I recognized him. He's a filthy pig, that one, a real tittengrapscher. Liked to feel up the girls — sometimes worse."

The three men eyed each other. Al-Kaukji nodded at Nasser. Maybe the bitch wasn't as paranoid as they thought after all. Best to take precautions. Al-Kaukji spoke a few words in rapid street Arabic to his companions. Each went to grab and charge their weapons.

"Starsky" Mauthner rapped on the closed door of the grocery. There was no answer. He gestured to his blond-haired partner to try the basement door. There was no answer there either. Since they both had probable cause, they decided to try to kick the main door in. Also, the door looked fairly easy to smash. "Eminently kickable," was Mauthner's term.

A few heel-and-sole boot smashes later, the two cops were hustling inside on half-crouches, weapons drawn. They found Al-Kaukji's cousin cowering in a corner of the room. He didn't give them any trouble as he was cuffed and read his constitutional rights under German federal law. They found a back room and the grocer let him in.

Mauthner gave out a low whistle. They had found something really interesting in here.

Winternitz walked up the service stairs; a sign on the ground floor elevator said that the lift was out of service. Oyster's flat was on the fifth and top floor of the apartment block and Winternitz had three more flights left to go. He was already beginning to get winded. It was those damned cigarets, that and the creeping effects of the aging process.

He'd been a cop for twenty-four years already, and he had another six years to go before becoming eligible for retirement, four if he opted for early retirement. Perhaps he would, after all, especially if… but he dared not let himself complete the thought. It might interfere with the job ahead. Winternitz was by no means a superstitious man, but after tragedy strikes and logic is proven wrong, superstition tends to creep in.

Some five years before, Winternitz's only child, his daughter Juliana, had been a flight attendant on a Lufthansa flight out of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia bound for the Black Sea port of Odessa. An hour into the five-hour flight, when the plane had reached its cruising altitude of 30,000 feet over the Persian Gulf, and the captain had turned off the seat belt and no smoking signs, a group of Islamic terrorists armed with rifles and grenades had seized control of the cabin and cockpit.

The episode followed the pattern of so many others that had taken place since the first early airline hijackings by the PLO faction, Black September in the early 1970s. In the end a strike by "Die Lederkopfen" — the German counterterrorist strike force GSG-9 — had ended a standoff on the tarmac of Helsinki International Airport.

No passengers were killed in the hijacking, in fact there was only one friendly casualty. This was Winternitz's daughter. She had died long before the Lederkopfen — Leatherheads — took the plane.

Juliana had died while trying to stop the brutal beating of an American onboard the plane. The man's passport had borne what the terrorists had thought was a name that meant "Allah has the genitals of a dog" in the dialect of South Syrian Arabic that one of them, a native of Damascus, spoke. This, the fact that the terrorist assigned to take passports from passengers was somewhat more deranged than his comrades, and the fact that the passenger in question had been carrying military papers, was enough to provoke a rampage.

No one had raised a finger while two hijackers punched, kicked and pistol-whipped the passenger. Juliana could finally stand it no longer, and despite the risks to her own personal safety, she intervened.

She received a bullet in the heart for her trouble. She had died almost instantly, but her efforts probably saved the life of the victim.

The American was one of the survivors. But Juliana, Winternitz's beloved daughter, had returned home in a pine box. Winternitz was shattered by the news and embittered when the man who had pulled the trigger was found to have escaped before the commando raid commenced.

He was later identified as a man named Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni, originally a Palestinian from Gaza whose first career had been as a veterinarian — thus the "Doctor" title — with ties to several terrorist groups.

Dalkimoni had dropped out of sight for years, then reappeared. By now he was an eminence gris among younger terrorists and dubbed by the honorific title of Abu, or father.

Jubaird Dalkimoni, murderer of Max Winternitz's daughter Juliana, was Abu Jihad, the man Winternitz had come here today to arrest — or kill.

Two floors above them, inside apartment number 5-11, as Winternitz and Hans trudged up to the landing of the apartment block's third floor, Jubaird Dalkimoni had pried the last corner of a roughly four-foot square sheet of heavily enameled galvanized aluminum framed by strips of plywood from a section of kitchen wall between the refrigerator and the ornate prewar molding that surrounded the kitchen entrance.

It had not taken Dalkimoni long to work the flat blade of the screwdriver beneath the seam of the rectangle, which had been painted in high-gloss white to match the wall in which it was set.

The emergency exit from the apartment had been Farid Housek's idea. He had noticed the frame when he had moved in the previous year. Because the building dated back to before the Second World War, Housek suspected that the frame was a patch put in to cover what had once been the door of a dumbwaiter shaft.

Since the apartment was about to be repainted anyway, Housek had decided to pry the panel loose and see what was behind it. As he'd suspected, the musty-smelling shaft stretched all the way down, ostensibly to the basement.

Still more surprising, the dumbwaiter itself was still in place, just over his head, moored there probably since the end of the Hitler era. Housek pulled on the heavy chain and lowered the dumbwaiter, finding it still in sound working condition.

Farid Housek decided that it might be useful in the event he needed to make a hasty getaway sometime. He spent the better part of a day testing to see if it would reliably support his weight. This it did, and Housek was in fact able to lower himself all the way down to the basement. Satisfied, he replaced the panel and had not touched it since the painters had come. But he had been incautious in blurting out his secret to Dalkimoni shortly after his arrival.

This had been a mistake. It was now Dalkimoni who had commandeered the dumbwaiter escape route to save his own neck. Housek was ordered to remain behind and sacrifice his life if necessary to cover Dalkimoni's escape. Adnan Khadouri, fanatically devoted to the cause, was left behind to insure Housek's loyalty and dedication did not falter.

"Allah akbar! God is great," Khadouri said to Dalkimoni as his leader stepped cautiously inside the narrow shaftway and placed one foot on the dumbwaiter. "Don't worry, my brother. We'll give you plenty of time to get away."

"Make sure I have at least five minutes," Dalkimoni curtly replied, climbing entirely into the dumbwaiter and crouching atop the shelf.

Khadouri blessed his boss again and re-sealed the opening with the now somewhat dented panel. Then he cocked the AK-47 cradled in his hands and went into the livingroom.

Farid Housek was sitting on the couch, his head propped between his palms, his body shivering. Clearly, he was a man without heart, a craven coward. Worse yet. In Khadouri's eyes Housek was a mahmoon, he who takes it up the ass.

Adnan Khadouri got the assault rifle from where it leaned against the wall and tossed it on the couch beside the gutless Housek. He told this spineless mahmoon to pick up the rifle and prepare to die like a man.

At that moment, Winternitz and Hans were reaching the landing of the fifth floor and crossing toward the apartment door with pistols drawn.

Winternitz took up a position to one side of the metal door frame. Hans crouched near the stairway landing, out of the direct line of sight of the eyehole at the center-top of the entrance door. Both cops' Sig-Sauer semiautomatic pistols were drawn and charged with a round in the chamber of each.

Winternitz held his gun in one hand while he reached out to rap on the door with the other. Hans clutched his weapon in a two-handed combat grip, his body planed sideways toward the door and his right eye lining up the twin white dots of the rear U-sight with the single red dot of the front sight in a direct line with the door at approximately the chest height of anyone who might open it.

Winternitz rapped on the door and waited a second or two. No answer came in response. He quickly glanced at Hans and tried again.

"Police!" he shouted. "Aufmachen! — Open the door. We have a warrant to search the flat!"

Both cops could now hear the telltale clink of eye hole covers to left, right and behind them being slid aside as occupants of the floor looked out to see what all the commotion was about.

One door at the corner opened a crack. Winternitz held up his shield and gestured at the woman in curlers and housecoat. The door quickly shut again, and he could hear the security chain ratchet into place.

Winternitz prepared to rap a third time.

A volley of automatic fire punched through the thin sheet metal skin covering the original hardwood door. The rapid series of pops echoed through the tiled hallway, the steel-jacketed bullets fragmenting as they ricocheted off walls, floor and stairway.

Winternitz knew he should call in the SWAT team at this point, but he was not about to step back and let some hot-shit heroes grab his collar. Let them sack him if they wanted. This was his bust or nobody's.

Winternitz had signed out a door-blowing charge from Ordnance and brought it with him, knowing it might come in handy. The small DM-12 Sprengmasse cutting charge (DM-12 being the German equivalent of the US C-4) was designed to clamp over the lock plate. Winternitz quickly put it in place, risking taking a hit, shouted a final warning, and took cover.

As the Sprengmasse detonated, the door blew in, coming right off the hinges and falling flat on the floor of the apartment's foyer. Hans charged through, tossing in two flashbangs, one after the other, just to make sure.

The two cops were in after the non-lethal grenades went off with staccato reports and blinding, disorienting flashes.

Adnan Khadouri was on his feet, pointing the business end of an AK right at them. Triggering the Kalash, he blind-fired a multiround burst, striking Hans square in the chest. Hans went down with a groan of pain and Winternitz fired back, catching Khadouri in the upper chest and face area with a salvo of 9-millimeter hollowpoints.

As Khadouri's upper torso exploded into a raw hamburgerlike mass, Farid Housek flung aside his weapon. He was dazed and disoriented from the effects of the flashbangs, but he knew that he was not about to die for anybody's bullshit revolution. Not even for Allah.

Winternitz slapped the cuffs on Housek and then cautiously scoped out the apartment with pistol drawn and a fresh high-capacity clip in the mag well. Dalkimoni was nowhere in sight.

The chief returned to Hans and found that he was still alive. The Kevlar laminate ballistic vest under his coat had absorbed the impact of the bullets. Though Hans was grimacing in pain, it was probably a combination of shock trauma and several broken ribs. If a lung wasn't punctured, he'd be back on the job in two weeks.

Winternitz called for an ambulance for Hans on his handheld radio and took another look around the apartment. In the kitchen he noticed chips of old enamel paint littering the floor.

It took him another second or two to pry loose the wall panel and comprehend what had happened.

Inspector Helmut Offenbach was surprised when the busty mädchen he'd earlier seen on the street opened the door in response to his knock and his shouted identification as a police officer. She smiled innocently and told him she was alone in the apartment, and that they must have the wrong place.

Helmut insisted on taking a look around anyway, but had momentarily dropped his guard. Nikki had come to the door wearing only a sling bra and low-cut panties, and there was little left to the imagination, including the platinum blonde's incongruously dark bush. As he entered the apartment, a bearded man with unkempt black hair popped up from behind a sofa and fired a shotgun blast. At only a few yards distance most of the fan of thirty-ought-six steel balls caught Helmut in his upper torso.

Enough of the pellets hit beyond the zone of protection afforded by his bulletproof vest. A butterfly of five of them was enough to tear away most of his throat, including his larynx and lower third of his trachea. Helmut spouted a plume of blood and reached toward his mangled throat as though trying to stuff the flaps of hanging flesh and bulging masses of blood pudding back into it as the impact hurled him against the wall.

Outside in the hall, his partner Adolph Bermann heard the shotgun blast and the shrill woman's scream that followed it. He knew better than try and bull his way inside the flat. Instead he retreated down the stairs and radioed for reinforcements. The routine bust had turned sour in a hurry.

This was not turning out to be a very good day, now was it, he thought bitterly.

By the time the medics arrived, Winternitz was out the apartment door in a cold sweat. He shoved past them full-tilt to the edge of the landing.

"Wohein?" he shouted aloud. "Where?"

He meant where did Blower/Dalkimoni go, where could he hope to find the bastard before he slipped away for good?

Getting stares but no answer, Winternitz raced down the steps and out into the street, thankful for the force of gravity for making it much easier on the way down than it had been climbing up to the fifth floor.

"What happened up there?"

It was Rudy, one member of the stakeout team from the back. Winternitz had forgotten all about the two men he'd placed there.

"Blower got away," Winternitz told them. "He had a back way out. Through the basement. But he's still got to be somewhere close. Fan out. Cover the neighborhood. Be damned careful."

"Right, chief," Rudy said, he and Rolf already in motion.

Winternitz began running toward the streetcorner. But it was useless, he knew. Dalkimoni had outwitted him. He should have had a team of fucking Lederkopfen hit the place from all sides. Helicopters, APCs, the whole works. But there was no point in blaming himself. Felons sometimes evaded the tightest dragnets.

The cop slowed to a lope as he moved through pedestrian traffic on the avenue, his eyes tiredly scanning the gathering crowds for any sign of his quarry.

Suddenly Winternitz saw the dark-haired man crossing the street near the corner of Furstenstrasse, a half block down, right by the U-Bahn or subway station entrance. It was only a fleeting glance from a sizable distance, but Winternitz was hit by a gut feeling. He began running toward the man who, sighting him in pursuit, turned suddenly and then began running himself, racing pell-mell through rush hour traffic toward the subway entrance.

Winternitz didn't care if he had a heart attack. His entire being, body and soul, was fixed on catching up with the perp he'd just glimpsed.

Fortunately, the heavy traffic was making it hard for the escaping terrorist to cross to the other side. Cars were honking and drivers shouted at him as he made for the U-Bahn entrance. Winternitz held up his badge at one of the irate motorists and continued to give chase to the perp.

Dalkimoni hotfooted it down the concrete steps, shoving commuters out of the way in his haste to evade pursuit. Winternitz reached the top of the stairs seconds later. A crowd of passengers just disembarked from an arriving train were now rushing toward him up the steps. Despite his detective's ID, Winternitz had to fight them to the mezzanine level at the foot of the stairway.

Directly ahead, he now saw a maze of passenger tunnels, three of them branching off in different directions. The cop ran to the center tunnel and spotted a man running along it about twenty yards dead ahead. Winternitz took off after him. Putting on a final burst of speed that he feared would burst his overtaxed heart, he finally closed within shouting distance of the perp he'd chased to ground.

"Abhalten!" he cried out. "Polizei!"

But the man kept on booking and wouldn't stop. Ignoring the pursuing cop he knocked passengers out of the way, emptying his pockets on the run. Winternitz gave chase and finally caught up with his quarry after another brief sprint.

With his last remaining reserves of strength, the cop launched a flying tackle at the perp, managing to lock his arms around his calves and bringing him down to the hard floor of the subway tunnel.

Now both men went sprawling onto the concrete, Winternitz landing on top of the smaller, slimmer man. Fueled by adrenaline, Winternitz pulled out his spare cuffs and secured the suspect's wrists behind his back. He turned him over and immediately knew something was wrong.

The man was not Blower. He had fucked up. The scars on his arms marked him immediately as a junkie, probably an immigrant from Turkey or Morocco who had brought his habit with him and was spreading it around in his adopted homeland. Glassine envelopes, crack vials and drug works littered the dirty floor of the subway tunnel like bread crumbs from a Teutonic fairy tale.

The bomb-maker had given him the slip. Winternitz had collared himself ein Rottler — a two-bit hype.

On the S-Bahn elevated express to which he had transferred from the U-Bahn heading toward the commuter lines servicing the Leipsig rail junction, Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni stood grasping a handhold in the center of the crowded passenger train. He kept his face turned toward the advertising placards above the windows. Though sure he was safe, there was no sense in breaking tradecraft. Ever.

At the next stop, he got off, switched to another S-Bahn line, rode it three more stops, and then went up to street level amid the crowd of emerging commuters.

There, at the kiosk on the corner, he spotted a municipal transit bus arriving. The terrorist went onboard and paid his fare. He knew that the bus was going in the general direction of one of the safe houses maintained by MISIRI, the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and he had been given emergency passcodes to gain acceptance and aid from other cells if the operation went sour.

That was all, for the moment, that he needed to know.

Chapter Four

It was ten A.M. in the Berlin Tiergarten. Max Winternitz sat feeding the pigeons that clustered around his legs, cooing and pecking.

There was an aging hippy who sold postcards, souvenir knickknacks and bags of seed at one of the entrances to the sprawling park and Winternitz was in the habit of buying a bag from him for a half euro. He'd seen him there for years, a fixture of the park as much as the trees were.

Winternitz liked the pigeons. Though they squabbled and pecked at one another, he'd never once seen them draw blood. Less could be said about human beings.

A week had passed since the bust of Farouk Al-Kaukji and his bomb makers, and still the main actor, Jubaird Dalkimoni, was nowhere to be found. Unofficially, Winternitz had good reason to believe that he had made good his escape and was now safe in the Iranian capital, Tehran. Officially, though, the Arab terrorist chieftain was still at large.

Winternitz knew better. At the same time, the scum that his cops had rounded up in the raids were vanishing into the ground like earthworms.

One by one, their lawyers were getting them released on various legal pretexts. Insufficient evidence, improper search and seizure — any legal dodge seemed to suffice.

The Strike Day Investigation Report, compiled by the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the Strike Day terror attacks, and the US-instigated extraditions and trials that had ensued, had subjected European governments to outside pressures from all sides that they would rather not see repeated in any way.

The word had come down from Bonn — no one was to be tried. The problem was to be made to simply evaporate. And one other thing; the Americans were to be kept out of the picture.

Winternitz was in the Tiergarten to do just the opposite. Let them sack him if they liked. Not that they would.

There were factions in the BKA that were pro-and anti-CIA. Winternitz was representing a circle which was friendly to US intelligence and formed a nucleus of backchannel intelligence sources from inside the German intelligence and police establishments.

Winternitz flung the last handfuls of millet seed at the moving mass of gray, brown and white feathers on the octagonal cobbles of the pavement. When he looked up he saw a man approaching down one of the walks.

Winternitz lit a cigaret. Continuing to toss handfuls of seed to the pigeons which cooed noisily as they pecked it off the cobbles, he studied the man with a feigned casualness perfected over a lifetime of police work.

Colonel Stone Breaux took a seat on the park bench beside Winternitz and sat watching the pigeons pecking at their lunch. He'd been briefed on the meet by the spook Congdon — the same Congdon who had ordered the team into combat to locate and destroy classified advanced technology components of a crashed stealth aircraft a few months before, or at least one claiming to be the same intelligence agent.

Breaux recognized Winternitz from the three-position Bertillon intelligence photo he'd been shown. He'd been told that the cop would be feeding the pigeons. Well, here he was, birds and all.

Breaux went through the rest of the procedure.

"So many birds," Breaux said in German, in which he was fluent from years of living in the country. "You must be wealthy to feed them these days."

He didn't like Berlin anymore. Germany had been a pressure cooker, the US military establishment all fucked-up with petty politics. If the Iraq War hadn't come along, Breaux figured he'd have probably wound up fragging a brass hat, maybe two.

"Not too many, really," Winternitz replied. "And, besides, it calms my nerves."

"Mr. Breaux, I presume," Winternitz added, switching over to English. "We shall sit here a minute longer while I finish up this bag of seed. Then you will get up, bid me aufweidersehn and walk toward that park entrance just ahead. Karl, one of my men, is waiting in a gray Audi. He will drive you directly to a safe house my office maintains. I shall arrive separately a short while after your arrival. Any questions, Mr. Breaux?"

"None," Breaux replied.

A few minutes later he was standing and waving aufweidersehn, then walking toward the park entrance. Winternitz turned his attention back to the birds, scattering seeds until the bag was empty. Then he too got up and left.

In the basement of BKA headquarters on Friedrichstrasse, a police clerk named Joachim Kneble sat inventorying the evidence seized during the counter-terrorist raids. The evidence was heaped across a row of three trestle tables stacked end-to-end against a wall of the basement storage area.

Behind Kneble stretched a square chamber made of reinforced concrete that was half the size of a football field and contained row upon row of battleship-gray steel shelves, most of which bulged with evidence seized during various police actions. Directly in front of Kneble was the black cabinet of a Blaupunkt stereo receiver.

Kneble was a pro audio fanatic and the receiver was a newer model than the Blaupunkt Kneble owned, in fact he recalled having just learned from the Web that this particular model had replaced his own, which had been discontinued. This group of factors proved to be a fatal combination. Kneble couldn't resist at least fiddling with the knobs and buttons on the face of the squat black box.

Sigfried "Siggie" Sonntag was phoning in an order for delivery at the local Thai take-out place for himself, his partner Freidrich "Fritzl" Ettinger and one of the sergeants on the night shift who was just leaving, when the light flashed on the other phone line. Sonntag quickly signed off and took the call, automatically tensing. It was a quarter past ten in the morning and nobody phoned the BKA's ordnance disposal unit at this hour unless it was a serious matter.

Sonntag slid a notepad across the chipped black paint of the metal desktop to the phone and penciled notes onto the ruled paper. By this time his partner had come up behind him and was looking over his shoulder as he hastily wrote. Sonntag concluded the conversation and hung up the phone.

Ettinger had grasped most of it from what he'd seen on the pad while looking over Sonntag's shoulder: An inventory clerk had clicked a knob on a stereo receiver confiscated as evidence. Nothing for a moment.

Then it began ticking. Clicking the knob back would not stop the sounds. The stereo receiver was presumed to contain a bomb.

Sonntag filled Ettinger in on the rest as the two grabbed their coats and went out the door of their office. The delivery boy arrived to an empty room. He shrugged, left the paper bag on top of a pockmarked steel work table and went back to the restaurant.

The Kevlar suits were designed to protect them against the effects of premature detonation of up to three tons of force per square inch. But Sonntag and Ettinger knew that nothing could guarantee their safety against the range of explosive devices that it was possible to manufacture, even using off the shelf components. They stood in the cinderblock-walled room and looked at the problem.

"Well, Siggie, what have we here?" Ettinger opined, "a bomb maybe?"

"Could be, Fritzl," Sonntag replied. "At least it makes a ticking noise like a bomb, jah?"

The stereo receiver lay in the middle of a steel table that was bolted to the cement floor. It was clearly, though faintly ticking, which meant that the bomb, whatever it was made of, was connected to a simple mechanical clock timer.

Sonntag and Ettinger pulled down the tempered Plexiglas face shields on their helmets and got to work. Throat mikes and armored videocams mounted on two corners of the walls recorded what they did and allowed other technicians in an adjoining room to feed back their comments.

"Have you ever wondered, Siggie," Ettinger said as he began to work on the screws holding the L-shaped top of the cabinet in place along the rear and sides of the receiver, "why anybody in their right minds would want to do our jobs?"

Hansl watched his partner intently as he unthreaded two, three, then four black carbide steel screws and set them on the tabletop, then set down the screwdriver and prepared to lift up the top section.

"Nobody in their right minds would want to do this work," Sonntag answered. "This is obvious, jah?"

"I guess we should have our heads examined, eh Siggie?"

"You are right about that, Fritzl," replied Sonntag. "We are both certifiable lunatics."

"But we enjoy it, don't we?"

"Jah, but not as much as a good piece of ass," Siggie told Hansl. "We are not that crazy."

"Nobody is that crazy," Siggie, Fritzl answered with a laugh.

The banter stopped as the job started getting hairier. Not finding a motion sensor the bomb disposal experts determined that it was safe to open the case. Ettinger gingerly held the metal cover about a half inch above the base of the receiver unit.

The ticking was audibly louder now and the two cops could see colored wires that had no place in a stereo set around the edges. Sonntag already was in position with a fiber optic probe attached to a video monitor, and he now moved the glowing tip of the probe along the interstices of the receiver.

The swing-mounted monitor on the wall showed them a magnified view of the guts of the set. On it they could clearly discern the main components of the bomb.

They could see the main charge, a four hundred gram cylinder of rolled Semtex plastique. The Semtex had been covered with foil and festooned with a bar-coded label to make it look like a legitimate part of the set. Colored wires trailed beneath a nearby circuit board to an "ice cube" timing device linked to a chemical initiator, all of which bore phony bar-code labels like the Semtex.

The components were connected to a travel alarm clock, hence the ticking, and a cluster of nine-volt batteries. It was a classic two-step bomb lash-up. Once the clock timer closed an electrical circuit, a pulse of power would heat the ice-cube — actually a cube of solid incendiary component — which would combine with another chemical to initiate a thermite flash hot enough to detonate the Semtex.

Apart from this, they found nothing — such as a mercury tilt switch or other motion-sensing device — to indicate that the bomb was booby-trapped against tampering, apart from the on-off button that had been rigged to start the bomb ticking if depressed. Ettinger breathed a sigh of relief. He now lifted the top of the bomb completely clear of the base and set it down on the work table beside it.

Suddenly the ticking stopped.

Ettinger and Sonntag had only a moment to look at each other before the approximate pound of Semtex went off with a tremendous bang. In the enclosed space of the room, the force of the explosion was magnified as it bounced off the cinderblock walls and the reinforced concrete floor and ceiling, blowing the steel-plate blast door clean off its hinges and out into the hallway. The blast ripped the two cops limb from limb, flinging pieces of their bodies against the walls, ceiling and floor despite their protective clothing.

Only the bolted steel table remained in one piece, though its top, which had reflected the blast wave upward, now bore a deep bowl-shaped crater in its center.

The lorry was marked with the name and lightning bolt logo of Zeus, a Bonn firm specializing in overseas freight shipment. Arrangements for the truck to pick up a standard rectangular cargo container for airfreighting to Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran, had been made the previous day.

The shipping firm had made all the arrangements and filed all the necessary paperwork, including the shipping manifests which stated that the eight-foot square module contained agricultural equipment manufactured in Germany.

The company had sent two men out on the job, who now sat at either end of the truck, one in the cab listening to a news station on the radio. The other loitered at the rear, directly above the pneumatically actuated step-hoist that had been lowered to the ground, awaiting the appearance of the cargo container.

The shippers in the small brown-brick factory building had told them to wait until they had completed loading and sealing the container, which would require another few minutes. The two truckers were now doing just that. Waiting.

Inside the dark recesses behind the loading dock, Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni sat inside the climate-controlled and specially padded freight container into which he had just lowered himself to the accompaniment of prayers for his safety and a swift journey to the sanctuary of his Arab brethren. The small factory was owned by a MISIRI agent-in-place; its staff had been dismissed early, and only trusted cadre remained behind. Dalkimoni's trip would not be all that long or that difficult, and it beat a stay in a Berlin jail cell any day of the week.

In minutes the bomb-maker saw hands lowering the airtight steel lid of the crate overhead and heard the thuds and snaps of heavy latches being pulled down and secured into place. Then, with a sudden lurch, he was picked up by a forklift and rolled out to the loading dock, where, with another series of juddering lurches the container was pneumatically hoisted to the level of the truck's floor, eased onto a pallet, and wrestled inside by its crew.

Minutes later the terrorist heard the clank of the truck's rear doors slamming shut and the motor start up; the monotony of the ride to the airport was broken by the entertainment of the fuck-video-loaded iPad that Dalkimoni been provided.

The cargo container passed through customs without incident. Its waybill was in order and the shipping firm was an old and respected concern which transported hundreds of tons of freight per week in and out of Germany for its various clients.

In a matter of hours, Abu Jihad was heading south by southeast at four hundred fifty miles per hour at a thirty thousand foot altitude on a flight trajectory that would land him at Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport at eleven A.M., local time.

Once the plane landed, his glory and influence would be assured. The container would be commandeered by a special contingent from MISIRI whose honcho reported directly to the office of Iranian President Faramoosh Mozafferreddin, whose contempt for the United States decades of rule had left unchanged. The agents of MISIRI would load the huge steel box on a military flatbed truck and whisk him to the agency's vast complex in Tehran's Piroozi district nicknamed the "the Hole of the Despoilers" by knowledgeable locals, a covert adjunct to the high-profile police and government complex at Toopkhaneh Square in central Tehran.

There, in one of the many soundproof, surveillance-proof floors sunk below ground level, the module would be opened and Dalkimoni would be accorded a hero's welcome which would culminate in the honor of a special audience with the president himself in his office at what had once been the US Embassy in Tehran and which had become the first of many presidential palaces built under the regime.

Dalkimoni only had to endure the cramping of this enclosed space for a little while longer. He patted the specially made vest he wore beneath his loose clothing, its six pouches containing as many hard cylindrical objects. Yes, he thought, these precious gifts would insure that his welcome would be as glorious as he surmised.

Chapter Five

Breaux studied the road in front of him from behind the wheel of the rented Mercedes sedan. The road he traveled was picturesque, winding its way through high Alpine meadows dotted with quaint cottages, steepled churches and fruit tree orchards awaiting the first thaws of early spring.

Beyond everything, shrouded in dense mists, loomed the snowcapped peaks of the Alps. Breaux knew they were mere foothills, called the Glarner Alpen by natives, that the true Alps began farther north. Then again, this was Tyrolean Switzerland, and to the Tyrols a mountain was the Matterhorn; anything less was merely a hill.

The road was more than a picturesque route through photogenic Swiss countryside, though. It was part of the body of a snake. The snake was long, with its fanged head in Germany and its rattled tail thousands of miles and half a world away in Pakistan.

The Bonn-Karachi truck route used this stretch of road through the high Alpine passes, just as it used dusty mountain roads in Afghanistan, and other roads in yet more remote places. Here, in the land of bread and chocolate, the snake's scales sparkled in the noonday sun. But there were other parts of the reptile that were far less pleasant to the eye.

The snake was a survivor. Nothing could break its back. Not wars, not famines, not madness, not death. Down it plunged, through the chaos in the Balkans. Not even the fierce ethnic warfare that divided Croats from Serbs, Kosovars from Albanians, Slavs from Turks, and that had in 2018 again drawn in the US and NATO to police it, not even this fierce conflict could stop it.

On it slithered, through Greece and into Turkey, and along the northern tiers of Syria and Iraq. Into Iran it weaved its serpentine track, and then down, down it burrowed, all the way to its final destination, Pakistan.

Day in, day out, year in, year out, convoys of trucks passed along this multinational trade artery between East and West that was the 21st century's version of the caravans of bygone eras. Only a global war might shut it down. Nothing less ever would. The truck route was too vital, too efficient, too useful to the constellation of nations which it serviced.

The overland route was easily a fifth as long as the comparable sea route — one that would need to cross the Mediterranean, pass down the length of the Suez canal, reemerge into the Red Sea, and then hook around into the Persian Gulf — and only a fraction of its cost. No other commercial artery existed in the world that was as direct, as economical and as beneficial to the trade of as many nations. The truck corridor would be kept open, come what may. Too many global customers depended on continued access to it in order to move their industrial output to customers around the world.

But the snake's continued existence came at a price. Refrigerators, televisions and computers, hothouse-grown produce, new cars, and other commodity items and durable goods flowed along its back. Yet hidden beneath its underbelly there moved a considerably different type of traffic.

Here passed heroin, and the raw opium base needed to manufacture the drug, and virtually any and all forms of embargoed goods and contraband. Along this same route Iran was now receiving components for its ongoing clandestine nuclear chemical and biological weapons programs.

The snake was deadly. Its fangs dripped poison. But it had many powerful friends and allies, and no one had ever dared to undermine it. All this was about to change.

Breaux turned the Mercedes off the road and swung the silver luxury sedan onto a narrow dirt track that ran straight across the meadow toward the small adzed-beam cottage a quarter mile ahead. A few minutes later the car had reached its destination.

Breaux parked on the gravel drive and the team emerged from the Mercedes, the five men stretching their legs, hauling luggage from the trunk and unfastening pairs of skis from the rack at the top of the roof. To any observer the men, dressed in après ski gear, would have appeared to be tourists out to catch the last shusses of the fast-waning winter season.

Anyone interested in, and capable of, checking further, would learn that the group had come from Eastlake, Ohio, a municipal subdivision of greater Cleveland, and that they were all local real estaters working for Century 21 on a week-long European ski junket.

The only discrepancy noted would have been a black vinyl body bag that two of the men carried inside. The body bag contained roughly a hundred pounds of aluminum beer cans and crushed ice. But it was an Eagle Patcher tradition to drink your hydraulic sandwiches out of a body bag, and that was that.

The chalet, which was short-stay rental property leased to visitors by a local landowner, had been paid for in advance through a well-known travel agency. The Mercedes was also a rental, also booked in advance through an internationally reputed firm, which had also arranged for international drivers licenses for two members of the ski party.

That would have ended scrutiny of the five men, and so none would have been made suspicious by one of the five who, shortly after the other four had entered the chalet and drawn the blinds, stepped outside to have a smoke and admire the scenery.

Top kick Death did indeed admire the Alps, which reminded him of the Catskills, in a funny way, except that none of the hotels served brisket of beef or prune juice. Sgt. Death also kept his eyes peeled for anybody on their way to the chalet while the team unpacked and checked the gear.

Breaux's checklist of weapons, explosives, timing devices, NVGs and other equipment had been precise and calculated down to the last battery and bullet.

With the blinds drawn, Breaux and the other members of the squad took everything out of the luggage in which an employee of the car rental company — a longtime CIA proprietary — had packed the stuff. It took the better part of an hour for all the gear to be checked out, put together, then broken down again and stowed away, but when it was finished Breaux was pleased to note that everything he'd ordered was there and ready.

For the greater part of the rest of the week, the team would play the role of dumb, drunk, horny, loud but good-natured and fun-loving Americans on vacation. Some of that would be real, since it would be a vacation from military life and the special warfare battlefield. Other parts of it would be the application of hard tactical lessons.

Their objective was the Deutsche Wehrteknik plant situated just outside the nearby ski town of Chur. By the end of the week the team would have secretly entered the factory and destroyed weapons components that DWT was thought to be manufacturing and secretly shipping to Iran along the Bonn-Karachi truck pipeline.

Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni relaxed in a Jacuzzi hot tub with nubile whores catering to his every whim. The wide screen HDTV was above the whirlpool bath, tuned to CNN. Dalkimoni fondled the large breasts and protuberant nipples of the blonde Swedish girl while admiring the swaying ass on the black English girl who licked the blond's snatch while he watched TV.

The girls, the champagne, and the beautiful villa — it was as if he had awakened to a living dream of paradise promised in the Q'uran. It was rumored to have been the same villa in which Carlos had lived before his capture and imprisonment by French agents. Once a promising operator, and a rising star after his brilliant work at the Munich Olympics of 1972, he'd gotten too full of himself to remain effective. Besides, he had not been an Arab. How could an infidel nonbeliever ever truly support the cause? Absurd. And besides all that, ancient history by now, and thus a subject unworthy of the doctor's continued musings.

Earlier, Dalkimoni had met with the presidential heir-apparent, Bashar Mozafferreddin, at the former Saabgheranieh Palace, in what had once been the summer harem of the Shah.

The palace, now renamed the Niavaran Presidential Palace of the People's Islamic Revolution — but still sumptuously decorated to please the bevy of beautiful harem girls whose talents at belly dancing and sucking cock had earned them apartments there — stood within the Niavaran Palace Complex in Tehran's Shemiranat district in the northeast quarter of the city, cooled in summer by vagrant breezes from the Elburz mountains and warmed in winter by the the body heat of its horny female inmates.

Bashar was in his fifth floor office feeding his prize Siamese fighting fish, which he kept in a large tank that had been specially built into one of the office's imported hardwood walls — with the fabled cedars of Lebanon long gone, the wood for the walls had come from the Brazilian rainforest.

Bashar bred the fighting fish himself, and they had won him renown throughout the Middle East and the jet-set capitals of Europe. Bashar beckoned Dalkimoni to join him by the tank as he admired his finny warriors.

"It has been scientifically demonstrated that fish grow balls when successful in warfare and lose them when disgraced or defeated," Bashar declaimed, staring into the tank and ignoring his visitor. "In defeat, the fish also shrink in size."

"This is most interesting, Excellency," replied Dalkimoni, standing at a respectful distance from his benefactor. "Most interesting, indeed."

Bashar continued to ignore the bomb-maker while he carefully sprinkled live, wriggling mealworms, beetle larvae and other small insects onto the surface of the water in the tank. Their struggling movements quickly attracted the predators below.

Bashar had a team of insect farmers in the basement on his payroll. The team did nothing except breed insects as food for Bashar's prize fish. At each morning's feeding, the choicest bugs were gathered by his breeders and delivered to Bashar's office in a medium-sized jar.

It was from this jar that Bashar was plucking tasty morsels with a pair of tweezers when the bomb-maker had come in.

"You see," Bashar went on, speaking toward the tank as if Dalkimoni were not even in his presence, "the defeated fish must either find a way to regain their balls or suffer annihilation. The only way for a fish to achieve this transformation is to fight. Thus, the fish are constantly at war with each other. They live out their lives in a state of perpetual combat."

Bashar had dropped another few wriggling bugs into the tank, smiling as the fish jostled and pushed each other aside, struggling to be the first to snap up the life-giving morsels. The bomb-maker realized that Bashar was deliberately withholding most of the contents of the insect jar, forcing the Siamese fish to crowd one another so that the less aggressive ones would end up starving to death.

Finally, Bashar turned to face the bomb-maker. In his eyes Dalkimoni saw the same strange fire that he had witnessed in a rare interview with the Rais (a word of Urdu derivation variously meaning president or Supreme Leader, and in the Mozafferreddin years, a combination of both). One day soon, Bashar would assume the mantle of his patron and engenderer. Whether he would last very long was an open question.

Unknown assailants had already voted against his stewardship by attempting to shoot his car out from under him, landing him in the hospital for months. Bashar, Dalkimoni reflected, might well prove even more ruthless than even the long-dead master of cunning and treachery, Saddam; but he was far less popular and perhaps less cunning. Still, time would tell the tale.

Screwing the cap back on the jar and laying the tweezers atop the lid, Bashar stepped away from the tank and went to his cigar humidor. As if by magic, a lackey appeared and snipped the end off the cigar, lighting up his master, and then vanishing into a side room.

Concentrating on his cigar and still completely failing to acknowledge the presence of the bomb-maker by so much as a single glance in his direction, Bashar issued his last proclamations on the subject of Siamese fighting fish.

"There is a lesson here. An important one. We must always fight and we must always prevail. We must never tire, lest we should lose our balls. For if we should lose our balls, we shall no longer be men, and then we shall inevitably lose our lives as well."

"You are truly wise, Excellency," the bomb-maker had then replied, and after a respectful pause, added, "Have you perchance reviewed the plan I presented?"

Bashar replied that he had, and that it had gained his approval.

"You may proceed," he told Dalkimoni, continuing not to look in his direction. But added, "You have left out the traitor Farouk Al-Kaukji. The Rais himself has asked that something be done about this poisonous little toad."

"Don't worry about Farouk." Dalkimoni now spoke confidently, for he had already made ironclad arrangements to deal harshly with the traitor. "You may assure the Rais that he shall be taken care of quite soon."

"You meant immediately, did you not?" Bashar asked.

"Yes, Excellency. Of course. Immediately. Do not fear. It shall be done. Immediately."

"Good. I had not doubted this."

Bashar had then left the office without uttering another word, leaving the bomb-maker standing by himself just inside the open door inhaling a sour cloud of second-hand cigar smoke.

Dalkimoni now understood that he was dismissed. He too left the building for his villa.

Back in Berlin, Farouk Al-Kaukji had been released by the German cops due to pressure from above. The federal government did not relish the dirt that a trial would dredge up.

Germany's notorious scandal sheets and tabloid television media would have a field day — Der Stern, he'd already learned, was already working on a cover story — and some of the displaced muck would certainly wind up covering a few powerful men in the Bundestag who had strong business and political ties to Tehran. This could not be permitted to happen.

With charges against him dropped, Farouk Al-Kaukji disappeared immediately. He was spirited through various safe houses to Frankfurt, where another air-freight escape was being prepared by a surviving cell of the terrorist underground.

"Go with Allah," Farid Housek — who had been released on bail — bid him, hugging and kissing Al-Kaukji as he eased himself into a shipping container similar to the one in which his leader had fled Germany. "For those among the holy shall be blessed with everlasting grace."

Al-Kaukji kissed and hugged his cousin in return, then checked his oxygen supply and the seals on the pressurized interior lining and made sure that the freight module's interior light worked.

Everything seemed in order. The container might have been cramped, but he had been supplied with all the comforts of home for his journey. There was a pocket-sized edition of the Q'uran, plenty of snack food and canned soda, his iPad full of American porn, even some old Playboys and a bottle in which to take a leak when it became necessary.

There was also a roll of toilet paper, but he didn't see what it would be for, unless for wiping his dick if he got too carried away from watching all the fucking and sucking. Al-Kaukji tried to make himself as comfortable as possible. After all, for the next fifteen hours or so, this crate would be his home.

Two hours later, the crate was being forklift-loaded onto the baggage compartment of Brussels Airlines flight number 787, Frankfurt-Tehran.

At the same time, a passenger named Sadoon Daher, a Cairo college student, bid so-long to his new girlfriend, Ulrike. She'd met him on the Ku'damm and had proven to be an expert in the Teutonic art of playing the blue-veined piccolo.

It had been an unforgettable two weeks of magic flute practice, with memories of Ulrike's flying ass and bouncing boobs enough to last him through many weeks of wanking material. Until he could find another blonde girl with humungous lungs to play the flute with, that is. And Ulrike had given him a new iBippy-capable boom box as a parting token of her affection.

The boom box went into Sadoon's luggage, and was placed only a few feet from where Al-Kaukji's freight container was located, with Al-Kaukji inside flipping through the Playboy as he ate sparingly, crumbs falling on the naked crotches of the blonde twins that the caption said were from the American town of Modesto, California, home of locally produced wines of international distinction.

The Brussels Airlines flight 787 was a direct flight whose route swung it steadily southward. The jet airliner's flight plan called most of the journey to be made over water, crossing first the Adriatic and then the Mediterranean seas before transiting land again, hours later, as it passed over the littoral coast of Lebanon. The Alpine regions of Switzerland would mark the plane's last overflight of land for another five hours of travel time.

The flight passed over the Arlberg valleys at eight in the morning at twenty-five thousand feet. It had reached its cruising altitude forty-five minutes before the lovely Ulrike's present did what the MISIRI action cell in Berlin that used her as a convenient gofer and frequent pump had programmed it to do.

A combination of flight time and altitude — this bomb had a dual timer/barometric blast initiator mechanism — triggered the ice-cube fuse of the bomb which had been secreted in a sheet metal-sided cargo hamper in forward baggage compartment 14L, located just aft of the pilot's cabin and below the "B" in the Brussels Airlines logo.

Farouk Al-Kaukji was arguably the first casualty of the explosion, feeling the blast effects a third of a second before anyone else on the plane was incinerated. Altogether, it was a strange way to die.

Melting, shattering, exploding — all three at once. Without warning or preamble. Without absolution or transition. Dying in the flash of a moment, dead even as the realization of what was happening was making its way along nerve channels leading to the brain.

After that, he was nothing. No Allah, no Islamic paradise of Behesht Zahra, no ageless harlots to warm eternity awaited him. Unlike Sadoon Daher, Al-Kaukji didn't even have the most fleeting memory of Ulrike's winsome smile and nubile ass to speed him on his one-way trip to nowhere. The overtaxed and overstimulated neurons of Al-Kaukji's cerebral wetware were far too busy registering the panic at the death of his body for anything as complicated as that.

Far below, twenty-eight thousand feet below, to be exact, it was ski season in the picturesque valleys, mountain passes and high meadows of the Glarner Alpen. On the snow-covered slopes around the trendy Swiss Alpine village of Chur, colorfully dressed skiers were startled by the sudden fireball in the skies and the thunder of multiple explosions that quickly followed the sighting.

For most the experience would begin and end there. For less fortunate others, it would have lasting consequences or be the cause of sudden death amid the festive atmosphere of a carefree ski holiday. As the plane broke apart in midair, jagged fragments of fuselage, gouts of flaming fuel and falling debris of every kind subjected the ski slopes to an unexpected aerial bombardment.

At least one skier had his limbs torn off by flying chunks of razor-edged steel, and several more had their brains bashed in by miscellaneous objects, including the decapitated head of one of the flight attendants, which crashed into the hapless skier it chanced to strike like a cannonball made of meat and bone.

In another case, an entire row of seats from the economy class cabin plunged through the roof of a ski chalet to crush two men and a woman engaged in three-way sex, flattening the trio and fusing their mashed corpses together, making it extremely difficult to separate them for autopsy later on.

For the next several weeks, morgue details were pulling arms, legs and various other assorted body parts out of the snow around Chur, and it would not be until spring came and the edelweiss again bloomed that the entire mess could be finally cleaned up and Chur return to normal as a magnet for the international jet-set and the globe-trotting rich.

After having had time to mull over his master's performance at the Niavaran Palace earlier that day, the chief bomb-maker had absorbed the full meaning of Bashar's lecture about fish and balls.

The point was not lost on Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni — he needed a success. Failure would not be tolerated.

The operation had been technically successful — the Columbine Heads had been assembled in Berlin from stolen Israeli weapons plans and brought intact to Tehran. But the operation in Germany had needed to be closed down due to the carelessness of Dalkimoni's accomplices.

Nevertheless, Dalkimoni knew that Berlin was still the optimum place in Europe to assemble bombs. Much of the municipal police force was corrupt there, and the government had no stomach for risking the ire of rogue Arab states — there was far too much money invested in defense and construction contracts with Middle Eastern despots both officially and privately. There were also plenty of ex-nazis still alive and well in the Arab world, and they were powerful middlemen who had to be appeased as well.

For now, though, Berlin was too hot. It would still be months before operations could resume. But resume they would. Dr. Dalkimoni decided that if he wanted a place in the coming action, he had better not fuck up in his present assignment. But he would not. He was on the beam and would stay that way.

Suddenly Dalkimoni's attention snapped back to the present. The imported Swedish talent with a set of perfect, creamy 38D's was playing a stimulating pizzicato on his violin neck, getting him ready for a broadside across her tonsils. Right around when he thought he'd solo, the reporter cut away to CNN headquarters where coverage of the breaking story of the bomb that had blown up a 747 jumbo-jet over Switzerland was in progress.

Dalkimoni laughed out loud, something he always enjoyed doing while getting good head from a talented whore. He laughed now for a good reason: he had succeeded, and Farouk, the little mahmoon of a traitor, had paid in full measure for his cowardice and treachery.

The bomb-maker now also realized that Bashar had been absolutely correct concerning his little Aesop's fable too. He now understood that it was with men exactly as it was with Siamese fighting fish. This was completely true. Dr. Dalkimoni knew this for a certainty, for in the space of a split-second, his balls had surely grown to twice their former size and girth.

Now he pulled the giggling girl's head underwater, and felt her do what she did best. The bomb-maker orgasmed violently, pushing the Swede's head onto him as video footage of the fireball erupting over the Swiss Alps caught by a tourist with a camcorder filled the large, flat-panel screen. He held her head down for quite a long time as the girl struggled for air, releasing her finally just before she went completely limp.

Among those witnessing the fiery bolide in the Swiss skies were five men. Two of them were in a waiting Mercedes, the other three moving quickly and silently across the deserted grounds of the Deutsche Wehrteknik munitions plant.

The team had found what they were looking for at DWT. Within a secure, vaulted room of the plant, Breaux and two of his men had discovered a cache of Columbine Heads. These were rapid initiation devices, something like the Kryton switches for nuclear detonation secured by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein years before.

Columbine Heads were used for conventional explosives. But not just any kind of conventional explosives.

You needed Columbine Heads to trigger the ignition of air-dispersed effluents. You needed Columbine Heads, in short, for use with chemical, nuclear and biological agents or even fuel-air explosives.

Breaux and his team had left a calling card. The skull-and-crossbones Ace of Spades would be discovered later on by one of the guards, or before, if the one they'd tied up managed to free himself of the gag and handcuffs that now secured his arms and legs. Actually, they had left two calling cards — the first one and something else besides.

Breaux and the other two SFOD-O personnel hustled into the Mercedes, which gained the road from the nearby grove of fruit trees in which it was hidden and drove off in the direction of Italy. The team would not be returning to the leased chalet, nor would the car be returned to the Swiss rental office. It would be picked up by someone else, on the other side of the Italian border near Ticino.

Behind them, a few minutes on the road, there was a sudden explosion. In just a little while, the local fire department had its hands full dealing with yet another five-alarm blaze in a morning that had been nothing short of a pyromaniac's dream. This particular one happened to have taken place at the Swiss headquarters of Deutsche Wehrteknik.

It apparently had nothing to do with the downing of Brussels Airlines flight 787, for the site of the explosion was far from any of the falling aircraft debris. Months would pass before the details were fully known, because at the moment the Swiss authorities had enough on their plate just sorting out the aftermath of the airline bombing.

In the meantime, Deutsche Wehrtechnik would find itself facing some very disgruntled customers from the Islamic Republic of Iran, causing the company president, Heinrich Alois Schmetterer, to leave for a protracted stay in the Canary Islands, where the sea breezes were said to be exceptionally healthful at that time of year. Certainly more healthful than facing a MISIRI hit squad dispatched from the Old Presidential Palace or even, at his age, pussy from the Niavaran pleasure dome in Shemiranat.

But no one would ever figure out why a body bag full of melted ice and crushed beer cans was found in one of the chalets in a picturesque valley near the trendy jet-set ski town of Chur.

Chapter Six

Secretary of Defense Lyle Dalhousie — dubbed by a heartless media "Lyle the Lousy" after allegations of post-Strike Day reluctance to sanction military reprisals against the Mahdi's terror bases in Indonesia — sat in the rear of the black Lincoln town car that rolled along Pennsylvania Avenue through backed-up midmorning traffic and cold, relentless rain. Dalhousie's destination was the West Wing entrance of the White House building complex where the president and members of the National Security Council were awaiting his impending arrival.

To the SecDef's chagrin he realized that most of the morning was already gone and that it was approaching noon. Dalhousie had not eaten except for the vanilla ice cream sandwich he'd had for breakfast, bought at the Pick 'N Pay at the Pentagon Mall. Mountains of ice cream and seas of black coffee kept the Pentagon going; the Building thrived on caffeine and sugar. At least, Dalhousie knew, there would be sandwiches and soft drinks served at the White House.

Dalhousie did not find it at all strange to be preoccupied with his stomach in the midst of a regional war and a deepening international crisis, but this too went with the territory. As SecDef, he weathered whatever storms the Department of Defense weathered, and these were always legion.

The Building was like a ship in troubled waters, constantly buffeted by the gales of discord that blew in from the four corners of the globe. Keeping that ship trimmed to an even keel required a mental compartmentalization that kept things in perspective. Napoleon had likened this to opening one drawer of a filing cabinet while closing another, and Napoleon, Dalhousie reflected, was a commander who could go to sleep in the midst of a battlefield if he chose.

Dalhousie checked his watch, and stared out the window, preparing himself for the approaching meeting at the NSC situation room in the White House basement beneath the Oval Office. He estimated another ten minutes, maximum, before he reached the West Wing gate. Meanwhile the SecDef's thoughts turned back to the events of the morning.

The early meeting in Dalhousie's third floor E-ring office had been mandated by the events transmitted over the global SPINTCOM and CRITICOM (special and critical intelligence communications networks, respectively) the previous night. Along these intelligence nerve channels had poured scattered reports of Russian NBC weapons deployment in the Caucasus, but these previous day's reports had been disproved. Not so the reports of last night.

As the hours passed, the network of computers, fiber optic cables and secure radio links that made up SPINTCOM/CRITICOM fed data from battlefield reports, spysat imaging, and electronic intercepts to crisis management centers in the United States, including the Pentagon's NMCC and the Emergency Command Center at the White House. These reports made the picture dismally clear. The Russians had almost certainly used chemical artillery strikes against Uzbeki rebels near the town of Igdir.

Unfortunately, this fact alone wasn't very surprising, only the potential of confirmation. Since the start of the Second Balkan War the previous year after worsening tensions in Macedonia, the Russian army had swept into the Southern Caucasus and breakaway Azerbaijani republics in an attempt to stem the flood-tide of ethnic rebellion that threatened to eat away at the flanks of the former Soviet empire.

The neo-Soviet presence in Bulgaria had set Yugoslavia ablaze with war and tied up NATO and European Self-Defense Initiative forces in that regional theater. It had been deliberately calculated to divert the world's attention from the neo-Soviet Union (NSU) counterinsurgency campaign on Russia's southern flank. As a diversion, Moscow Center's strategy had been fairly successful, though otherwise it had proved a dismal failure.

Instead of destroying separatist guerilla enclaves, the campaign had merely broken them up and dispersed the survivors to found new fighting cells. Ethnic rebellion had spread rather than waned, driving separatist exiles into border enclaves in northern Iraq, southern Turkey and northern Iran, where they formed liaisons with Peshmerga — Kurdish rebel forces — scattered in these areas. Ethnic unrest was now spreading into the Middle East and toward the flanks of NATO, and this latest news from the front showed that the Russians were in desperate straits.

The Soviet debacle had been the subject of the breakfast meeting in the SecDef's office, attended by the chiefs of staff, the CJCS, the DepSecDef, and other deputies and assistants.

Dalhousie had sat at his customary place behind the enormous Pershing desk that had bolstered the dignity — and more often the feet — of his predecessors at the post, and while his secretary served fresh coffee and a polite young Marine officer wheeled in a tray of bagels, danishes and muffins, Dalhousie had begun the discussion about strategies, options and political damage control.

CJCS Starkweather had as usual argued for his pet project, the Snake Handlers. But "Bucky's SMF's," as they had come to be called by the chairman's critics at the Building, had temporarily fallen out of favor. The special missions unit led by Ice Trencrom had caused a crisis in the Pacific the previous month on a mission to stem China's acquisition of silent Kilo-class submarines equipped with cruise missile delivery technology. The subs no longer posed a problem, but the destruction of a multibillion dollar sub pen complex off the coast of Kinmen Island had created political fallout that the president was still ducking.

Trencrom's crew was not an option this time, thought the SecDef. But there were other hole cards that the US might yet pull out of its sleeve. These would be discussed at the White House with the president and members of the NSC. Later that afternoon, after Dalhousie's return to the Building, there would be further discussions with the assembled chiefs in the Tank.

First things first, though. Just ahead, out of the late morning fog, loomed the black iron gate of the West Wing entrance. The Lincoln slowed, the gate was opened for the vehicle flying the DOD chief's flag, and the big limousine rolled inside, onto the White House grounds.

The National Security Council Situation Room is a small, soundproofed meeting chamber buried two stories beneath — but not behind, as some claim, confusing it with the Cabinet Room — the president's Oval Office. The Situation Room is flanked by an operational command center staffed by military personnel and which has available secure Hammer Rick communications links — commonly known as the "hotline" — direct to the Kremlin in Moscow.

The NSC Situation Room, which was constructed following the establishment of the National Security Act of 1947 which, among other things, created the CIA, has played host to numerous meetings prompted by international crises.

It is a cramped chamber dominated by a large square meeting table and lit by overhead light panels. The sit room is not a place conducive to comfort. It is a place of decision, a seat of judgment, and it looks and feels the part.

As the Secretary of Defense was ushered into the West Wing entrance of the White House, the NSC chamber was occupied, as it had been on many a crisis before, during and after the Cold War, though not by the president or his chief advisors.

A group of mid-level cabinet deputies manned the situation room this morning, providing a skeleton staff in the event of a new emergency. President Travis Claymore preferred to meet with advisors in the Oval Office whenever possible; the sit room made him claustrophobic.

Today was no exception, and the SecDef was informed upon arrival at the White House that the meeting was to be held in the Oval Office. A Marine guard soon ushered him into the famous circular room, where he found the small circle of the president's closest advisors already seated in the customary horseshoe arrangement of chairs just in front of the fireplace. The seating arrangement placed all advisors in positions facing the president's desk.

"Lyle, come in," said President Claymore. "We've been expecting you. Sit down. Help yourself to coffee. The turkey sandwiches are pretty good today."

Dalhousie took a BLT off the buffet that had been set up by the entrance and sat in a vacant seat, his customary one beside State near the center. The SecDef bit into the sandwich as the president leaned back in his desk chair and steepled his palms for a moment. Damn, he was hungry.

"Lyle, you know the shit that's been mellowing in the Caucasus. As of this hour we've got a hopper full of confirmed reports the Russians have used chemical weapons on the Uzbeks. I've already taken calls from the Europeans… President Le Blanc, Prime Minster Benchley, and several other heads of state have phoned to express grave concerns.

"I'm concerned about the possibility of the ESDI going off on its own hook and doing something dumb. In fact Prime Minister Kelly LeBrock was on the line just before you arrived. As you know she's been a strong opponent of the ESDI right from the start. She gave me a few ideas and I've enlisted her to take the pulse of the European military and political establishment on this issue."

"She's a grand lady, and a damn good ally to have in our corner, Travis," replied the SecDef after swallowing a bite of the sandwich. "If anybody can reign in the hawks in the ESDI — and I can think of two offhand —"

"— Caillou and Potenza," interjected Russ Conejo, the White House National Security Advisor.

"— And let's not forget our friend 'Falcon' Hull," put in Dougless Galvin, the Secretary of State, technically outranking the SecDef but more often requiring the coordination of the National Security Advisor between the two major foreign policy departments. "That sonofabitch's been spoiling for a fight ever since the damn Gulf."

"All three. Certainly," agreed the SecDef, sandwich now finished. "Field Marshall Hull especially. 'Whale' Weisskopf threatened to punch him out to stop him from making a unilateral move on Sumatra."

That remark brought a laugh. Someone remarked, "It would have been a hell of a bout, though. In this corner, the Whale. In this corner, the Falcon."

"You were there, weren't you, Lyle?" chimed in State, after a fresh round of laughter.

"Damn right I was, Mike," answered Dalhousie. "And didn't Hull raise a stink over it too. If we hadn't kept as close a lid on the fucking press as we did back then, who knows what would have happened. It could have blown the "special relationship" right out of the water. And mind you, Hull was only a chickenshit two-star then. Today he's a field marshall."

"Gentlemen," the president interjected, silencing the byplay, "all this inside baseball bullshit notwithstanding, we've gotta craft a policy on this issue. When this is over it's my intention to phone Premier Starchinov and address the issues directly. I want to be prepared." The president leaned forward. "Lyle, your assessment, please."

"Mr. President," replied the SecDef, "this morning I conferred with the Chiefs of Staff. As you know, we have been monitoring the situation closely. We are gravely concerned about the implications of this action on the part of the Soviets, but more along the lines of ancillary or corollary actions that might flow from it than the action itself."

"Explain."

"Mr. President, as Burt may have already told you (he referred here to Burlington Downes, Director of CIA), while we have confirmed the Soviets' deployment of a chemical weapon — delivered by long-range artillery — all evidence so far points to the agent's being a fairly benign, if I may use that word, form of antipersonnel agent."

"We'd discussed the agent, CS-X, with the president just before you arrived, Lyle," added the CIA director, addressing Dalhousie."

"OK. Then Travis, you already know that what we're dealing with here's essentially a very concentrated form of tear gas, which in military strength can cause severe vomiting, dizziness, and shortness of breath."

"Yep, I heard that, Lyle," answered Travis from behind the presidential desk. "But CS-X is also like a nerve gas in some ways, isn't it, and can be lethal."

"Travis, Mr. President, yes, yes it can," replied the SecDef. "That's true. I don't want to give you the false impression that it's not a powerful or potentially deadly weapon they used. But I want to put it into perspective. Compared to chemical agents we know the Soviets to have available to them —"

"— The binary shells?"

"— Yes, Mr. President, the binary weapons, or binary artillery shells, if you will, these binary weapons can disperse truly horrendous nerve agents such as tabun or sarin, which are many orders of magnitude deadlier than those which the Soviets have used. They also have stocks of biologicals including anthrax and chimeric botulin available. Truly deadly, horribly deadly, agents."

"You said this word?"

"Chimeric?"

"Right."

"That means, Mr. President, that the viral or biological agent is an artificially mutated strain."

The President leaned back, silent a moment.

"Bucky wanted to turn loose those lunatic Snake Eaters on this Kamera facility out near Sebastopol somewhere. That's where all this germ shit they got's supposed to come from. What do you think of that?"

"Snake Handlers," the Secretary of State corrected.

"Right, Bucky's Snake Handlers."

"Mr. President, I have just a short while ago conferred with Chairman Starkweather and I can report that he and the chiefs of staff firmly agree that a strike on the Kamera, or any other Soviet installation of its kind, would be neither strategically sound nor politically expedient at this time."

"Then what?"

"We believe that the use of CS-X agent was due to the indiscretion of a particular field commander acting under the authority of the FSB. As you know, the Kremlin has been frustrated by lack of progress against rebel forces. Control of many sectors has been taken from the GRU and placed it in the hands of the state intelligence service, the FSB. The field commander in question is believed to have been recalled to Moscow.

"What concerns us is the threat of command and control slipping from Soviet military forces in theater, leading to the use of deadlier weapons of mass destruction farther down the line. Secondly, we're worried about the ESDI overreacting and doing something foolish. Thirdly, we're gravely concerned about the escalation of the Caucasus fighting to the fringes of neighboring countries, and fourthly —"

Suddenly there was a knock and the door of the Oval Office was opened by a Marine guard.

"— Sorry I'm late," the CJCS said as he came in, accompanied by an aide carrying an assortment of maps, charts and audiovisual aids. "There was a really bad accident on the way. We got stuck in traffic."

"That's okay, Buck," said the president. "Have a seat. We'll fill you in. Lyle?"

"Actually, Mr. President," said Lyle Dalhousie, "the chairman's got all the presentation materials to fill you and the working group in on the fourth point I was about to get to. I think we should let him have the floor."

"Buck, how about it?" the president asked.

"Be happy to, Mr. President," replied the CJCS, and stepped to the fireplace where his aide was already setting things up.

The Premier and General Secretary of the Neo-Soviet Communist government replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle and sat for a few moments gazing out the window of his dacha, across the grand, sloping greensward that ran parallel to the Moskva River for almost half a kilometer before the view was obscured by the beech woods surrounding the country estate.

The dacha was situated only a few miles from Moscow Center, yet was blessed with all the peace and solitude a man could want. A short ride from his Kremlin office, there was this solitude, and the General Secretary took advantage of this fact whenever possible. Boris Andreyevich Starchinov now watched a freight vessel pass along the darkened river, its running lights revealing the ship's ghostly outline against the deeper darkness of night.

The General Secretary's mind flashed back to his first encounter with the dacha, during the height of the November Revolution of a decade past. What heady days they had been! As a young FSB agent, loyal to Oleksandr, the director, he had been among those who had been hand-picked to detain the traitor Kuzmin and his foul-mouthed wife Anastasiya under house arrest.

Had he been given instructions to carry out the execution of the two traitors to the Party, Starchinov would have done so with pleasure. But the order had never come. Instead, there had been the ignominy of defeat and the ascendancy of the doddering bizhdenok Chapayev and his Vlasti — Oligarchs — to power at the Center. That had been the beginning of the end, though only for a time.

Little had he dreamt on that day, when both the birthmarked one and Anastasiya were in his grasp, that he would one day occupy this place some years later. He could thank the squint-eyed ferret Lebed for the honor.

The fool had preferred him and all the while he worked against him. Of course, this is precisely what Lebed's own sponsor, Semyan Chapayev, had done with Stepashin, Lebed's chief rival, promoting the poputchik to fill the spot for which he was actually grooming the ferret. If nothing else, Chapayev had been a master second only to Stalin in the fine art of using poputchiks to do his dirty work.

After disposing of Lebed, Starchinov had hunted down Chapayev and had him executed. In Red Square, the people had cheered. Lebed had been his first poputchik. There had been several others since then. Tomorrow, there would be yet more. Such was the equation of power that it demanded poputchiks at every stage.

Boris Starchinov turned from the window, the ghost ship having disappeared into the gloaming. The eternal Moskva was again silent, the night still, and broken only by the chirping of crickets in the grass and trees. The Soviet Premier and General Secretary of the Party turned to his assembled advisors.

"I have considered the words of the US president," he told them. "We have larger goals, and this incident must not be allowed to interfere."

"But the chernozhopyi rebellion. It must be crushed. And quickly. We are running out of time. This has turned into a real bl'adki." Some raised their eyebrows at the speaker's boldness in his choice of metaphors.

"Yes, it surely has become a circle jerk, Misha, I know this. And besides we seem always to be running out of time," Starchinov replied with sangfroid. Yet his lens-like eyes stared out, assessing the faces of his advisors, one by one, taking their measure in his gaze as it slowly passed across their faces.

Starchinov stood and snapped his fingers, a signal for his personal valet to hand him a vodka martini, his favorite drink. He sipped the alcohol and set the glass down on the desk.

Again his gaze crossed the faces of his advisors.

"Tovarischi — Comrades," he began. "Here is what I propose."

He began to tell them his plan, leaving out the fact that he had decided upon whom his next poputchik would be. When he would finish, the advisors would be asked their opinions.

No matter what their true thoughts, each would strive to outdo the other in voicing their wholehearted approval.

Twenty-five miles north of Tel Aviv, an unmarked limo with bulletproof glass, armored transmission gearbox, and tires capable of rolling at high speed even if struck by grenade shrapnel, nimbly ascended a steep, winding road. Its destination was a series of low-rise whitewashed buildings strung along the crest of a low bluff.

The complex, which included an Olympic-sized swimming pool, could easily be confused with any number of resort hotels throughout Israel. The concealed snipers who monitored the limo's ascent up the serpentine drive suggested strongly that it was anything but that. In fact, the complex was the main — though not the sole — headquarters of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.

The vehicle was expected. The concealed surveillance/sniper teams were officially told only that it contained a VIP. However, the teams were familiar with the prime minister's personal car by this time and knew that Gershon Simchoni was paying a visit to the head of Mossad, former General Yehuda Peretz.

No one besides Simchoni, Peretz and a handful of close advisers knew the reason for the meeting, but those in the know had not slept well because of the knowledge they possessed.

Once again, Israel's existence was threatened by the Arabs surrounding it. Israel would have to launch defensive plan Ken Tsa'rot — "Nest of Hornets." The operation might well prove to be the most desperate one in that nation's history.

Ken Tsa'rot would have to work the first time. There would be no second chance. But then, Peretz mused, since when had it ever been otherwise for the holy land?