Countdown

BOOK ONE

Paris was a magical city. As lieutenant colonel Brad Allworth got out of his taxi in front of the Gare de I’Est and paid his fare, one part of him was sad to be leaving, while another part was looking forward to what was coming. Hefting his B4 bag, he crossed the broad sidewalk and entered the train station’s busy main concourse. He was a tall man, handsome in a rugged out-of-doors way, his stride straight and purposeful. He was a career Air Force officer and at thirty-five he figured he had a shot at full bird colonel within the year, and afterward … War College and his first star by forty. The concierge at his hotel had arranged for his tickets to Kaiserslautern in Germany’s Rheinland-Pfalz, so he went directly down to trackside. It was a few minutes past eleven thirty. His train was due to leave at midnight, getting into the German city by morning. He stopped at the security gate and placed his bag on the moving belt that took it through the scanning device. Something new in the last six months. He placed his wallet and a few francs in loose change on a plastic dish, handed it to one of the gendarmes, and stepped through the arch. “Your tickets, monsieur” the guard asked. Colonel Allwordi handed over his ticket as well as his passport. The gendarme quickly flipped through them, looked from the photograph to his face. Technically he could travel all over Europe using only his military ID. But because of the terrorist attacks in recent years, American officers traveling via civilian transportation were required to travel in civilian clothes and use their passports for identification. It had been dubbed Project Low Profile. Allworth didn’t mind. The gendarme handed back his passport and ticket, waved an arm vaguely in the direction of the gates, and as Allworth was collecting his money and B4 bag, the cop was checking the papers of the next man in line. Allworth crossed to his gate, and a porter directed him to his first-class car. He boarded, found his compartment, switched on the light, tossed his bag on the couch, and closed the window shades on the corridor and outer windows. Joanne had flown out from Omaha with him, while their two children stayed with her sister in Minneapolis. They’d had a lovely thirty days in Paris and the surrounding countryside; canal barge trips, ballooning through the Bordeaux wine country, a weekend on the Riviera, and they had relaxed with each other for the first time in what seemed like years. Too many years. But everything was all right between them now. He had seen her off from Orly this afternoon. She would be closing down their house, collecting the kids, and would join him at Ramstein Air Force Base within the month. It was, he decided, going to be a busy though lonely month. Someone knocked at his compartment door.

Allworth turned. “Yes”

“Porter, monsieur” Allworth opened the door. An older man in a crisp white jacket smiled up at him. “May I turn down your bed for you, monsieur”

“Not just yet” Allworth said. He pulled out a two-hundred-franc bill.

“Can I get a bottle of cognac and a glass”

“Naturellement, monsieur” The porter smiled, accepting the money. “It will be just a few minutes”

“No rush” Allworth said. Technically he was still on leave. He meant to enjoy his last day before he had to get back to work. Loosening his tie he took off his jacket, slipped off his shoes, and opened the bi-fold door to his tiny bathroom with its pull-down sink. He splashed some cool water on his face, and drying off he smiled at himself in the mirror.

SAC Headquarters at Omaha had been a career necessity. It’s what brought him a step closer to the bird, and as a direct result got him his new job as missile control officer, even if he hadn’t liked SAC. He was making progress, and that’s all that counted. He switched off the light in the bathroom, opened the outer window shade, and sat down on the couch. Lighting a cigarette he looked down at the rapidly clearing platform. The train would be pulling out momentarily, and for just a brief instant he felt a twinge of uncertainty. “Comes with the territory” his father the general had told him once. “You can’t move every few years without feeling dislocated. Make the service your home, then find a good woman and keep her. You’ll do just fine” Someone knocked at his door. “Porter” Allworth opened the door and took the cognac and glass from the man, received his change, and handed him back two ten-franc coins.

“Merci”

“I don’t think you’ll need to turn down my bed tonight”

“No”

“No” Allworth said with a grin.

“If you need anything else, just ring, monsieur. I will be happy to serve you”

“VAAT time will we get into Kaiserslautern”

“At seven, monsieur”

“Good, thanks”

“Oui., I Allworth opened the bottle and poured himself a stiff measure’ then sat down again by the window as the train lurched and pulled out of the station, slowly at first, but gathering speed as they came up into the city. He laid his head back and sighed deeply, the cognac spreading its warmth throughout his body, filling him with a sense of well-being.

It had been a long haul, he thought. This was the last step before the big move. The Pentagon, Washington, a city both he and Joanne loved. Not that they were people filled with pretensions, but they did enjoy the social whirl, being close to power. It was heady stuff for both of them.

Someone knocked at his door again, and Allworth assumed it was the porter. He went to the door. For a brief instant he simply could not believe what he was seeing. A tall man stood in the corridor facing him, a leather bag over his shoulder. He was handsome in a rugged, athletic way. In fact Allworth thought he was looking at his own double, or a man near enough to his own twin to be startling. “What Allworth started to say when the man raised silenced pistol and shot him in the middle of the forehead, huge thunderclap exploding in his head.

Inside the tiny first-class compartment Arkady Aleksandrovich Kurshin locked the door and closed the outer window shade. Working quickly, he opened his shoulder bag and withdrew a large, thin plastic sheet and spread it out on the floor. Careful to get no blood on himself or the carpeted floor e rolled Colonel Allworth’s body onto the sheet. Actually the wound had bled very little, nor had the low-grain, soft nosed bullet exited the back of the American’s head. But it had killed him instantly.

Kurshin was methodical. But then he was a professional and it was to be expected. It would be several hours before they neared the German border; nevertheless he did not waste any time. There was much to be done before he could rest. First, he stripped Allworth’s body of everything including the man’s underwear, his watch, his dog tags, and his gold wedding band, carefully inspecting each item in minute detail so that not only could he make sure nothing had been stained by blood or any other body fluids released at Allworth’s death, but to familiarize dead man’s possessions, which for the coming forty-eight hours would be his. Next, he removed all of his clothing, including a very expensive diamond-studded gold Rolex watch, a heavy gold neck chain, and a diamond pinky ring. He had just a moment of revulsion as he pulled on Allworth’s underwear, but he ignored his single, oddly out of place, sign of squeamishness and finished dressing in the dead man’s clothing, including his watch, dog tags, and wedding ring. He put all of his clothing on Allworth’s body. “Another, greedier, man might think to keep some of the considerable money, or perhaps some of the jewelry you will be carrying, Arkady” Baranov had told him. “After all, what use can a dead man have with such things? Besides, the first man to find his body might very well himself be a thief” Kurshin had sat with Baranov in a cafe on East Berlin’s Unter den Linden. He looked across his drink at the general. A rare, difficult man, he’d thought. But brilliant, and totally without conscience. “It is part of his identification” Kurshin said. “Exactly. We do understand each other” Kurshin smiled. “When I steal from you, Comrade General, it will be much more than a few thousand francs and a pretty watch”

“Oh, dear” Baranov had laughed, throwing his head back. “That is rich, that is rich indeed” Everything fit perfectly except for the shoes. His were too small for Allworth’s feet. Kurshin was vexed for just a moment, but then he shrugged it aside. Allworth’s shoes would be too big for him, but that didn’t matter. Had it been the other way around, it would have made things difficult. So far it was the only thing they hadn’t counted on. Kurshin set the shoes aside, on the plastic sheet, and from his leather shoulder bag removed a pair of latex surgical gloves, a very sharp switchblade knife, and a small pair of pruning shears which he laid beside Allworth’s body. Kneeling next to the body, he pulled the edge of the plastic sheet up over his legs and began his work. Kurshin had boarded the train on a French passport under the name of Edmon Railliarde, an import/export broker from Marseille. In actuality, Railliarde was a member of the French Mafia. He’d been snatched two days ago from his magnificent villa outside of Marseille and his body by now had been ground to small pieces and distributed to the fishes at sea.

Railliarde had many enemies. Using the handles of the shears Kurshin spent fifteen minutes knocking out Allworth’s teeth, destroying every bit of dental evidence that might prove he was not the French criminal, Railliarde. Next, he clipped off the tips of Allworth’s fingers, each one separating from the bloodless stump with a sickening snap. These he put in a small vial of acid he’d carried with him. This he would toss before they crossed the border. Finally, using the razorsharp switchblade, Kurshin removed Allworth’s face, just as an animal might be skinned. This tissue, which rolled into a surprisingly small ball, went into another small container of acid to be disposed of with the dead man’s fingertips. When he was done he sat back, his stomach rumbling a little. It had been nearly twelve hours since he’d eaten last. Though there was no blood, it had been gruesome work. But necessary. Very necessary if his fiction was to hold up for any length of time. At the window Kurshin opened the shade and looked out at the passing countryside. There wasn’t much to be seen. A few lights off in the distance. They were passing through the farm country east of Paris, not too far from Chfilons-surmaine. Perfect, he thought. He lowered the window, the noise and rushing air filling the cabin. Tossing his shoulder bag on Allworth’s chest, he wrapped the body in the plastic sheet, manhandled it up to the window, and levered it through the opening. It was gone in a sharp fluttering of plastic, and Kurshin closed and locked the window and closed the shade. For the next twenty minutes he inspected every square inch of the cabin, the floors, the walls, and even the ceiling for any trace that a murder and mutilation had occurred here. Satisfied at length that the room was clean, he sat down on the couch, poured a stiff measure of cognac, lit a cigarette, and started going through Allworth’s suitcase, item by item, mentally cataloguing every single thing so that he would know it as well as his own possessions.

The city of Kaiserslautern in Germany’s midsection had once been a crossroads and meeting place of kings. In more recent times it had been a major resupply and staging depot for Hitler’s armies. Since the war the area had come to contain the largest concentration of American Army and Air Force personnel anywhere in the world. Arkady Kurshin stepped off the train, hefted his single B4 bag, and walked out into the bright morning’s sun where he hailed a taxi, ordering the driver to take him out to Ramstein Air Force Base a few miles to the south. There had been absolutely no trouble on the train last night. But Kurshin had known that he would pass from the instant he’d seen the look on Allworth’s face when he’d opened the door. The only real difficulty would come at the base if he ran into someone who knew Allworth. It was possible. But the US. Air Force was a very large organization. And he only had to hold out for another thirty-six hours or so. Close, he thought with an inward smile. So very close. The cabbie was a garrulous old woman who tried all the way out to the base to engage him in conversation, but Kurshin sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. He had gotten no sleep on the train last night, and he forced himself to rest his mind for a little while. He was going to need his wits about him. But then he’d had the training. He had the intelligence. And he had Baranov’s backing.

Nothing would go wrong. Ramstein Air Force Base was a huge installation covering thousands of acres of German countryside. Much of it was underground in the old Nazi labyrinth of tunnels and storage caverns. It was the largest depot for US. and NATO nuclear weapons anywhere outside of the continental United States. Yet security on the base was very lax, these days. At the main gate he cranked down his window and showed the AP on duty his ID card, and the taxi was passed through to the Bachelor Officers Quarters across base. He paid the driver and went inside, where he signed in with the Charge of Quarters, handing over a copy of his orders. “Welcome to Germany, Sir” the young sergeant said. “Did you have a good trip”

“Tiring” Kurshin said. “What I need is a shower, a stiff drink, and a decent steak, in that order” The sergeant, whose name tag read LEVENSON, grinned. “Can do, Colonel, at least on the shower. You can get the drink and a good steak at the officers club just up the block.

“Sounds good”

“Have you signed in yet, Sir”

“No, I just got in”

“If you’ll give me four sets of your orders, I’ll have a runner take them over to base HQ for you. The commander’s off the base until Monday”

Kurshin dug out the extra sets of orders and handed them over. “How about transportation”

“I can get you a car and driver as well, soon as we get you signed in”

Kurshin grinned. The security was incredibly lax. The sergeant mistook the meaning of his smile. “No sweat, Colonel, we aim to please around here”

“So far so good” Kurshin said, his grin broadening. And he meant it.

Heat shimmered up from the desolate floor of the desert as the gunmetal gray Mercedes 560SE sedan fitted with United Nations flags on its front fenders appeared in the distance. Above, an Israeli Army Cobra gunship helicopter hovered at one thousand feet. Lev Potok, seated by the open door, lowered the powerful binoculars through which he’d watched the car and shook his head wryly. It had been only a little more than forty-eight hours since the incident and already the piranhas were gathering. “We’re in a delicate position here” Dr. Moshe Ben Avral, the facility director, had told him yesterday. “We’re operating what appears to the world to be nothing more than a fly research reactor, when in reality too many people know what is here”

“They can only guess” Potok argued. “And if they guess correctly they cannot know for certain that this is a storage depot”

“A guess is less damaging than a certainty” Dr. Avral asked. I “Of course” Potok replied, his mind for just that moment elsewhere.

Rothstein’s background so far was coming up clean, as was Asher’s. But there was no doubt that it was Rothstein who had crawled down through the intake air ducts and had let himself into the main vault. The blood on the louvered panel and inside on the floor of the air duct matched Rothstein’s, and the man had received a severe dose of radiation. So he had been to the vault and seen with his own eyes what it contained. The question was, had he had time to use the telephone in the gas station to call someone? His fingerprints were on the telephone. But had he had the time? “We were right on his tail, Major” the team leader-had reported.

“He wasn’t in that gas station for more than twenty or thirty seconds.

Time enough to make a call? Potok wondered. The shock waves of the possibility had reached the prime minister, and were coming back on them now. The depot must be moved, even though it would be impossible in under a year’s time without completely blowing security. “Then so be it” And now the UN’s Non-Proliferation Treaty Team had come knocking at their front door again. “Let’s get back” he shouted to the pilot, and the chopper peeled off to the south… God help us all if the secret was out, Potok thought. II would probably mean war. A war in which all the Arab State would almost certainly participate.

Dr. Lorraine Abbott sat in the backseat of the Mercede-, with Scott Hayes whom she had joined in London. He was with the British arm of the NPT Inspection Service. They’d been together almost continuously for twenty-four hours. First the briefings and then the travel to Israel, and she decided that she didn’t like him very much. “A waste of time”

he grumbled from where he sat slouched against the door. “They’re not going to tell us a bloody thing” Hayes was short, and dumpy-looking with long hair, a scraggly beard, and dull gray eyes. He was reputed to be a fair nuclear physicist and engineer and was a Greenpeacer, a combination Lorraine found oddly out of synch. “At least they’ll know that we’re interested, and that we’re keeping on top of things” she replied. Hayes looked at her with a little smirk. “Do you think they’ll bloody well care” Lorraine, who held her Phd. in theoretical physics from Berkeley, presently worked at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and was on call by the NPT Inspection Service as a field observer, a job which took her away from home half a dozen times each year. She was tall, slender, and attractive, with light California blond hair and wide green eyes. Her colleagues were always surprised by her chic appearance the first time they met her. “You don’t look like a physicist” they would invariably say. Her response, if she were feeling irascible, often would be: “You do”

“They definitely care she answered Hayes, but she didn’t bother pointing out the helicopter which had just turned to the south toward the En Gedi Nuclear Research Facility a few miles off. “So what are you going to ask them: “Say, old chum, mind telling us where you’re keeping the goodies these days” Lorraine smiled. “Something like that” she said. “Bloody hell” Hayes responded and looked out the window, a petulant set to his shoulders. Lorraine opened her purse and with long, delicate fingers took out a cigarette and lit it, drawing the smoke deeply into her lungs. Her former fiance, a surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center, had always been on her back about her one vice. “You’re too bright for that, Lor” he’d said. She hadn’t minded, though, even if he was right; his one vice was his harping. No one was perfect after all.

The NPT had gotten its preliminary report that something might be amiss here at En Gedi from the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade. An unusual amount of activity had been observed from one of the KH-series flyby satellites. Photos had been sent over to the National Photographic Interpretation Center, where analysis suggested that some sort of an alarm might have been set off two and a half days ago, around three in the morning, local time. There had been no apparent damage, no fire, and certainly no detectable radiation leaks. In addition, the Israelis had so far made no announcement about any trouble at their research reactor facility-though it would have been highly unusual for them to do so.

They had been extremely tight-lipped about their involvement with nuclear energy. Still, they had not seemed overly surprised to learn that an NPF team was being sent out to look over the situation. Her instructions were simple, as they had been for each of her inspection trips: Keep your eyes and ears open for anything out of the ordinary.

Israel had the capacity to produce plutonium from her two research reactors, and presently she had operational one enrichment plant, one heavy water plant, and one reprocessing plant, so she also had the capability of producing weapons grade material. The question was, of course, had Israel actually taken the next step? Had she constructed a nuclear weapon or weapons? The NPT wanted to know. God only knew, she thought to herself as their driver brought them over the crest of a hill, the En Gedi plant off in the distance, they had the reason to build such weapons heir survival.

The En Gedi Nuclear Research Station was about average for a facility of its nature. The reactor itself was housed beneath a four-story fiberglass dome inside a slightly larger reinforced concrete containment building. To the east was a small venturi-shaped cooling tower. On the north side of the installation, which was enclosed behind a double line of tall electrified fences, were the various research laboratories and the main administration center. To the west were a small dispensary, dining hall, and housing units for the science and technical staff and the squadron of military guards. Syria, after all, wasn’t very far away.

Security here was, of necessity, very tight. They were met at the front gate by a husky, goodlooking Army officer in a major’s uniform, a hard hat on his head. “Lev Potok” he introduced himself. “I’m the Crises Management Team Supervisor. Welcome to En Gedi, Dr. Abbott, Mr. Hayes”

They shook hands. “We understand you had a little trouble the other night” Lorraine said. There was no use beating around the bush. In that, at least, she agreed with Hayes. Potok managed a tight smile. “It was nothing, actually. But I expect you’ll want to see for yourself”

“Naturally” Hayes said sharply, and Lorraine shot him a warning glance which he ignored. “If you will come along, then, our facility director and chief engineer are waiting to meet you” Potok said. They had gotten out of the Mercedes. The heat at this hour of the afternoon was intense.

Potok gave them hard hats, radiation badges, and visitor tags, and they climbed into his waiting jeep and were whisked across the facility to the three-story administration building. Inside they were ushered into a conference room where two men looked up from a set of blueprints they’d been studying. One was a much older man with longish white hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and the bemused look of a college professor. He was the facility’s director, Dr. Moshe Ben Avral. Lorraine had heard of him.

He’d done a number of papers on the development of nuclear power sources for the third world.

“Pleased to meet you, Dr. Avral” she said, shaking hands. The other, much stockier, much younger man, was Samuel Rosen, the facility’s chief engineer. “A Brooklyn transplant” he said with a smile and a thick New York accent. “A report has been sent along to Washington, Dr. Abbott, so we’re just a little surprised that you’re here” Dr. Avral said gently.

Although Israel had never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1969 (of course at that time they had had no immediate plans for entering the nuclear race), they had come to an informal agreement with the United States to inform her ally what she was doing, and to submit to NPT inspections. “I haven’t seen that report” Lorraine said. “Nor have I” Hayes added. Dr. Avral nodded patiently. “No, of course you would not have seen the report. By the time it was sent, you were unfortunately already in transit” Rosen was looking at Lorraine, an odd, almost anxious expression on his face. He was hiding something, she decided. She turned to him. “You didn’t experience much of a problem, then” she asked. “Not really” Rosen said. “It was a nonradioactive steam leak”

“There was an alarm” Hayes said. “Yes. You can’t believe the safety networks and backups we’ve got here. A valve chatters and a dozen alarms go off. “Your team was called in” she asked Potok, who had so far maintained a stony silence. “SOP” Potok said. “We’re dealing with nuclear energy here, Doctor. It scares a lot of people”

“Me included” she said. There was an awkward silence, which Hayes finally filled by stepping forward and glancing down at the blueprints spread out on the conference table. “We might just as well take a look at this supposed leak, then, all right”

Rosen and Potok exchanged a look, which Lorraine caught. Again she had the impression that they were hiding something. Perhaps something important. I “Yes, of coursedr. Avral said, and he stepped aside to let the engineer take over. For the next fifteen minutes Rosen went over in detail exactly what had happened the night when a steam line valve had supposedly popped loose. Lorraine stood back and pretended to study the diagrams while in actuality she was watching Potok and Dr. Avral.

There was more here than met the eye. Potok was concerned and Dr. Avral was frightened.

On the way back to Tel Aviv she told Hayes that she thought the Israelis were lying. “I don’t think so” the Britisher said smugly. “That Rosen isn’t bad, for a Jew. He knows his engineering” There was more than a simple steam leak” Lorraine said. Hayes looked at her with renewed interest. “Are you going to put that in your report”

“Yes. I I “On what basis”

“I don’t know” she said softly. She looked up at him. “But I’m going to find out”

Kurshin sat in the officers club finishing the last of his steak. It was two in the afternoon. He’d taken a shower, changed into Allworth’s uniform, made a brief telephone call to town, and had his driver, a young airman, take him on a brief tour of the base before dropping him off at the club. He’d dismissed — the young man, but kept the car. “Colonel Allworth” someone said at his elbow and Kurshin looked up, an automatic smile painted on his face. “Yes”

“Tom Mccann. I’m your number two” Mccann was a youngish-looking man with a baby face and bright red hair. He was wearing a pair of tan slacks and a light blue pullover sweater. They shook hands and Kurshin motioned him to have a seat.

“Is it captain” Kurshin asked. He knew nothing about the man.

“Major” Mccann grinned. “The OD heard you were on base and called me.

The old man will be up in Berlin until Monday so I thought I’d stop by and welcome you aboard”

“I appreciate that, Tom. As a matter of fact I was going to come snooping around myself as soon as I finished lunch”

“You want to do some homework before you see the Boss”

“Something like that” Kurshin thought the younger man’s expressions were boyish. “No sweat, Colonel. Your clearance won’t be posted until Monday, but if you don’t mind tagging along with me on a visitor’s pass, I’ll give you the tencent tour” Kurshin nodded. He pushed his plate away, finished the last of his beer, and looked Mccann directly in the eye. “What if I was an impostor” he asked with a straight face. “You’d give me the keys to the bank vault just like that” Mccann’s grin widened. “We got your package six weeks ago” he said. “Including your photograph. If you’re an impostor, Colonel, then you’re Brad Allworth’s twin. Are you ready”

“Just have to make a quick phone call” Kurshin said.

Ramstein was divided into four major sections. Near the main gate were base housing, the clubs, movie theaters, dining halls, hobby shops, class six liquor stores, and the commissary. On the east side of the base were the runways and alert hangars for the several fighter interceptor squadrons that made up the wing. To the west were the supply depots and Support functions such as electrical generating plants, communications and radar squadrons, sewage treatment plant and other housekeeping functions. Most of the sprawling wooded land area, which was enclosed by tall barbed wire-topped fencing and watched around the clock by mounted perimeter guards, served as the storage and staging area for the store of nuclear missiles including the Boeing AGM-86B Air Launched Cruise Missile, which the Air Force used, and 17 of the Army’s 108 Mobile Launched Pershing 11 missiles. Missile Control was housed in a cast concrete bunker constructed into the side of a hill. The situation room and operational control center were located two hundred feet back into the bedrock, impervious to anything but a direct hit with a thermonuclear device. No one felt really safe, however, as Mccann explained. “Doesn’t matter how much rock you’ve got overhead once you know that you’re their number-one target” They signed in with the OD, Kurshin was given a visitor’s pass, and Mccann started toward the elevators. Kurshin stopped him. “Let’s start outside and work our way back in” he said. Mccann shrugged. “There won’t be much to see”

Kurshin allowed the smile to die from his face. “In here is support. Out there is the real thing. I want to see the hardware itself, as well as the security. I want to know who’s minding the store and just how good they’re doing their job”

Mccann stiffened slightly. “Yes, sir” he said. It was the first time he’d used proper military address. Back outside they climbed into Mccann’s blue station wagon and headed on the main transport road into what appeared to be nothing more than an empty tract of woods, open grass fields here and there, and dirt tracks leading through the brush every few hundred yards or so. Except for the paved road there was no sign that this area was anything more than some backwoods country, the dirt tracks used by forest service people, Jaegermeisters. “What would you like to see first, Colonel, our ALIMS, or the Army’s Pershings”

They’d been driving in silence for a few minutes, the afternoon warm and very pleasant, only a few puffy white clouds overhead. “Listen, Tom, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot here” Kurshin said apologetically. Mccann glanced at him, not sure if he should reply.

“This is an important assignment for me” Kurshin said.

“But I’m not going to be an asshole about it, if you catch my meaning”

“I’m not quite sure, Colonel “)you can can the colonel shit. The name is Brad. What I mean to say is that I’m sorry I was such a shit back there.

I was out of line”

Mccann relaxed, his grin back. “You had me just a little worried”

“Let’s take a look around, and then get back to the club. I think by then it’ll be time for me to buy you a drink”

“You’re on” Ten minutes later they reached the southern edge of the base just as a jeep with two Air Force Security Specialists drove down the dirt track that paralleled the fence. They disappeared into the distance as the fence jogged to the left. “How often do we have a patrol past any given point on the perimeter” Kurshin asked. “Twelve minutes tops” Kurshin shook his head. “That’s going to have to be tightened up”

“Bob Collingwood is in charge. Do you want to see him this afternoon”

“Monday will be fine” Kurshin said. They turned left and headed down a gravel road that opened five hundred yards later into a clearing in which a low concrete bunker was built back into the hill. A large steel door covered the opening. Trees and grass grew on the roof. “We have seventeen of these scattered around out here. Each contains a Pershing II”

“How about their mobile launchers, and the rigs to haul them”

“All hooked up and ready to go within five minutes’ notice or less. A couple of the teams back here can get them out in under four minutes”

“How about the teams” Mccann smiled wryly. “There’s the rub. They used to be housed back here. These days they share quarters with the Air Wing’s on-duty alert crew”

Kurshin sighed theatrically. “That’s going to change as well” he said.

He got out of the car. “Let’s take a look”

“Right” Mccann said, jumping out of the car. Kurshin went ahead to the big steel doors beside which was a much smaller personnel hatch. It was extremely quiet out here. Even the jet sounds from the distant runways were faint. He stepped aside as Mccann came up, opened a small access panel beside the door, and punched in the five-digit entry code. The hatch lock cycled and Mccann pulled the narrow steel door open. “No one else back here” Kurshin asked. “The patrols come around once a shift”

Mccann said, stepping inside and flipping on the overhead lights. “Have they been by yet this shift”

“They usually do it first thing” Mccann said, turning. His eyes suddenly went wide. Kurshin was holding a silenced automatic on him.

“Thanks” the Russian said, and he shot Mccann in the forehead.

In missile control’s situation room a red light began to wink on one of the panels. “We have a missile bay door open indicator” the technician called from his console. The Officer of the Day, Captain Gerry Stewart, put down his coffee and came across the room. He studied the board for a moment or two. The indicator was definitely winking. It was one of the Pershing II’s. “Try the alarm test function” The tech flipped a switch and pushed a button that tested the validity of all their alarm systems. The lights across his board winked green, indicating the system was in proper working order. One of the missile bay doors was actually open.

Then Stewart remembered that Mccann was running around out there showing their new squadron commander around, and he allowed himself to relax a little. “Hold on to it for a minute, I think it’s Tom” Stewart said and he went over to his console where he punched in Mccann’s car radio frequency and picked up his phone. “Little Bird, this is Whiz Bang, you copy” he radioed. There was no answer. “Anything else on the rest of the board” he called across to the technician. The other four duty officers had looked up from their monitors. “No, Sir”

“Little Bird, this is Whiz Bang, you copy, over” Still there was no answer, and Stewart slowly put down his handset. If Mccann had wanted to show their new CO the inside of one of the missile bays, that was well and good. They would have entered through the maintenance hatch. So why the hell had they opened the main bay doors? He picked up the Missile Ready red phone and punched in the number for the missile bunker with the open door. The instant the connection was made, an extremely loud Klaxon would sound in the bay. Loud enough to wake the dead, he thought, though just how close to the truth he was, he could not expect as yet.

His alert crew phone buzzed, and Stewart picked it up with his left hand while still holding the Missile Ready phone with his right. “Operations OD” he answered. “Gerry, this is Jim Hunte, we’ve got a missile bay open light on our board over here. Ah, Six-P-Two”

“We’re showing the same thing” Stewart said. Captain James Hunte was the Army’s on-duty alert crew chief on this shift. They were old friends. “Is it an alarm malfunction”

“Doesn’t look like it. Our new CO showed up today. Tom is out showing him around. Looks like they opened the door”

“Well, raise them and tell them to close it. That’s Army property, old top, remember”

“I tried, Jim. No answer”

The line was silent for just a moment. In his other ear Stewart could hear the soft buzz indicating the missile bay Klaxon was still blaring.

“Did you try the missile bay red line”

“I’m on it right now. It’s ringing through, but there’s been no response. “All right, Gerry, no screwing around now. Should I call Colonel Collingwood or will you send someone out there to see what the hell those guys are doing”

Stewart was an engineer out of Cal Tech. He had taken the Air Force Officers’ Command Course, but he was not a decision maker unless it involved complex electronic circuitry. Interservice rivalry notwithstanding, this time he made a yery bad decision. “I’ll go myself” he said. “Collingwood could have one of his people there in a lot less time than it could take for you to drive out”

“Let’s not blow the whistle just yet. It’s my CO and Tom Mccann”

“You’re calling the shots, Gerry” Hunte said coolly. “But I don’t mind telling you that the situation is making me nervous. That’s an armed nuclear missile out there”

“Yeah” Stewart said. “I’ll get right back to you. “Do that” Hunte said, and he hung up. Stewart put down both telephones and grabbed his uniform blouse. “I’m heading topside, be on TAC ONE” he told Lieutenant Hartley, his Fire Control Board officer. He took the elevator to the surface, signed out with security, and jumped into his station wagon, peeling rubber as he pulled away from the Missile Control bunker and headed back into the staging field. “Whiz Bang, this is OD One, any change on the board” he radioed back to the situation room. “That’s a negative”

“Keep me advised” The afternoon was warm. Stewart drove with the windows down. He had been in Germany for thirty months, only six more to go and he’d be rotated back to the States, a move he was looking forward to, though so far this assignment had been a piece of cake. Why now, he asked himself. He did not want to get into a fight between his new CO and Army security, but he had a feeling it was coming. Shit runs downhill, he thought wryly. And at this moment it was two lieutenant colonels, a major, and another captain versus his own two bars. He was definitely at the bottom of the hill. He brightened a little with the thought that this could be nothing but a test of his own abilities. It was possible the new CO was pulling a little impromptu test simply to see what the OD would do about it. If only it turned out to be that simple, he thought. A quarter of a mile from the missile bunker he slowed down and turned onto the gravel road that led back into the woods. If he didn’t know better he would have sworn that something very heavy had recently come up the road. Something with wide tires.

Something very big. And his heart began to thump in his chest, a tight feeling at the pit of his stomach. Coming into the bunker yard he slammed on his brakes and sat for a long moment. The missile bunker doors were open, and the bunker was empty. The Pershing II missile and its transporter were missing. It was hard to keep his thoughts straight.

He jumped out of the car and raced across the yard and into the bunker itself. Major Mccann lay on his back, his eyes open, a small black hole in the middle of his forehead. “Oh, shit” Stewart swore.

The transporter itself was nothing more than a flatbed truck on which the thirty-four-and-a-half-foot missile lay in its launch cradle. The tractor was a low-slung, armor-plated tenwheeler in which the driver and normal launch crew of three rode in bucket seats. It drove like a semi truck but steered almost like a tank, capable of speeds up to eighty miles per hour on the open highway, and twenty-five miles per hour over open terrain.

Only the largest of trees or reinforced tank traps could stop it.

Kurshin barreled down the main transport road in excess of fifty miles per hour. He had timed his departure from the missile bunker so that the last perimeter patrol had passed five minutes ago and would not be back for another five to seven minutes. He hunched forward so that he could see better through the forward Lexan-covered slits as the paved road gave way suddenly to a narrow gravel track that split abruptly left and right. The tall wire mesh fence was less than fifty yards straight ahead. Kurshin eased up on the accelerator and downshifted so that at the moment of impact he would have more reserve power. The transporter lurched over a big hump in the unpaved road and as he recovered, the sixty-two-ton rig hit the fence, cutting through it like a hot knife through soft butter. He was in a line of small trees an instant later, crashing through them almost as easily as he had the fence, and then the covering fringe of forest gave way to a long, narrow field that sloped downward toward the Stuttgart Autobahn about four miles away. Kurshin slowed the big machine even further so that he was going barely twenty miles per hour. No doubt there was a sensor on the missile bay door that would have rung an alarm in the Missile Control situation room. There were probably perimeter breach alarms as well. By now they’d know that one of their nuclear missiles was missing. The question was: What would they do about it? From what he had seen so far, security was so incredibly lax that they might not do anything for several precious minutes. Time was on his side. Twelve minutes, he figured, from the moment he’d hit the fence until he was at the autobahn. With one hand on the control column, he activated the rig’s rearward-looking television cameras. He could see the path he’d taken through the woods and down the grassy field. There were no pursuers so far. Next, he activated the skyward radar. Immediately several blips showed up on the narrow screen, but none of them seemed to be converging on his position. After a moment he decided that as incredible as it might seem no one was after him. The hill steepened, a shallow creek crossing at the bottom before the land rose sharply upward about fifty feet to the autobahn. The big tundra tires rolled easily across the bed of the creek, the heavy trailer and eight-ton payload lurching behind him, and then he was grinding up the hill, toward the cars passing along the divided highway. He spotted the gray Mercedes 220D parked on the paved shoulder about fifty yards to the south, and he immediately angled that way, downshifting again, crashing the gears, the big tires biting into the soft dirt, the machine giving a final lurch as it came up over the crest of the hill and crashed through the knee-high aluminum safety barrier at the side of the road. He crossed both lanes of traffic and dipped partway down into the grassy median strip before he got the big machine straightened out. A dark blue Fiat was suddenly there, and he crashed into the car, the big tires climbing up and over the small car, crushing it. A Citron truck, braking hard to avoid crashing into the transporter, fishtailed, hit the median strip sideways and flipped end over end into the oncoming traffic in the opposite two lanes, bursting into flames as it disintegrated. Kurshin skidded the transporter to a halt opposite the waiting car, the brakes locking, the big tires jumping. Traffic in all four lanes was screeching to a halt, in some cases skidding out of control, sliding down into the median, crashing off the security rail, or tailending other cars. It was pandemonium. Two armed men got out of the Mercedes, one of them rushing back to the rocket on its trailer. Kurshin opened the door and jumped down onto the road.

“You’ve actually got it” Ivan Yegorov said, his eyes bright. He’d changed his name, but he was a swarthy Georgian with deep-set dark eyes.

“Cover our back” Kurshin snapped, and he hurried back to where Dieter Schey, a former East German rocket engineer, was setting up the plastique explosives around the rocket casing, about two feet forward of the recessed vanes. Schey worked methodically as if this were his normal duty. He strapped a broad plastic collar around the forty-inch rocket, and to this he attached the separate shaped plastique charges into which he inserted a radio-controlled trigger. He was finished within ninety seconds, and Kurshin helped him down from the trailer bed. “Now it begins” Schey said. His eyes seemed dead, totally devoid of any human expression. Kurshin nodded. “Everything is in readiness” Schey shrugged, the thinnest of smiles coming to his bloodless lips. “Ivan”

Kurshin shouted, and the three of them hurried back to the tractor and climbed inside, Yegorov getting behind the wheel. The instant after Kurshin had closed and dogged the hatch, Yegorov slammed the tractor in gear and headed down the highway, the road banking into a long, sweeping turn, a pine forest coming up darkly on both sides of the cut through a shallow hill. Schey took the backseat, pulling out the radio controller for the explosives, and Kurshin took the righthand seat, studying the radio equipment for just a moment before switching to the Missile Control Squadron’s TAC ONE frequency. “Whiz Bang, this is Flybaby Six-P-Two, you copy” Kurshin said into the microphone.

Kirk Collough Mcgarvey had known for several days that someone was coming for him. Call it a sixth sense or simply the intuition of a man who had been a long time in the field, he had begun picking up signs on Wednesday outside the Louvre at the edge of the Tuileries, when he spotted someone watching him. It had lasted only a fleeting moment. A short, nondescript man in a sport coat, his tie loose, was getting into a cab as McGarvey was coming out of the museum. The man gave a quick backward glance and then was gone. McGarvey had stepped back into the building, remaining for a few minutes just within the doorway, watching, waiting for someone else to show up. It had been a front tail, he’d been almost certain of it at the time.

On Thursday, coming out of his apartment just off the Rue de la Fayette in the Tenth Arrondissement, he’d spotted a Mercedes sedan slowly passing, and he’d been even more certain that someone was coming. The man in the passenger seat had changed his coat and now wore no tie, but he was the same one from the Louvre. McGarvey was a tall, well-built man with a thick shock of brown hair and wide honest eyes. Although he was in his early forties, he maintained an almost athletic physique, not because of any regular workouts-though he tried to make a practice of running a few miles each morning-but more because of the luck of some genetic draw. He was a loner these days, more out of circumstance than out of choice. He had come out of Kansas State University more years ago than he wanted to remember and had joined the Central Intelligence Agency as a case officer. An operation that had gone sour for him in Santiago, Chile, during the Carter days had cost him his job. They were bad times, he remembered now walking from his apartment toward the quaint Cour des Petites tcufies. To this day he remembered the face of the general he’d been sent to assassinate. The man had been responsible for thousands of deaths in and around the capital city and the only solution was his elimination. But McGarvey’s orders had been changed in midstream without him knowing about it. He returned to Washington not a hero but a pariah. He had run to Switzerland where for five years he’d maintained a relatively quiet life operating a small bookstore in Lausanne, and living with Marta Fredricks, a woman who’d turned out to be a Swiss Federal police officer assigned to watch him. Ex-CIA officers, especially killers, made the Swiss very nervous. Across the narrow street from the Brasserie Flo, McGarvey stopped a moment to adjust his tie before he crossed and entered the restaurant’s charming courtyard. McGarvey, pour deux, s’il vous plat the told the maitre d’. The strait-laced Frenchman glanced over McGarvey’s shoulder to see if the second person in his party was coming. “Monsieur”

“It’s a friend. He’ll be arriving shortly”

“Very well” McGarvey followed the maitre d’ back through the courtyard to a pleasant table and ordered a bottle of red wine. He sat back and lit a cigarette while he waited, the pressure of his gun reassuring at the small of his back. They were missing on Friday, but they had been there this morning down the block from his apartment. Watching. Waiting to see if he was alone, to catalogue his moves. The same man as before was behind the wheel, but someone else had been seated in the back.

Because of the angle from his secondfloor window he could only see the man’s waist and a part of his torso, but he knew who it was and he knew what was coming. He even had a fair guess what his old friend was coming here for. It had happened almost like this two years ago, he remembered as the steward brought his bottle of wine and opened it for him, pouring half a glass. It was a house special wine so he was not invited to taste it. “Mercy” McGarvey said politely. The steward nodded and hurried off.

It was noon and the popular restaurant was beginning to fill up.

McGarvey caught the maitre d’ giving him severe glances. If monsieur’s friend didn’t show up soon, McGarvey figured he would be asked to move to a smaller table. Then, in Lausanne, as now, he’d been watched for several days so that his habits and routines could be established before he was picked up. Then, as now, the moment he realized that something was about to come down he had run for his gun. It’s what had ruined Switzerland for him. “Only assassins who are still active run for their weapons” Marta had told him. Unlike Lausanne, where after five years he had become complacent, these past two years in Paris had been different.

He’d not allowed himself to lose his edge. It was simple survival, he told himself often. Because the business that had begun in Lausanne had never been finished. Not in Washington, not in Miami, and certainly not in Mexico City. He was still out there. Waiting. Biding his time. The familiar face and figure of John Lyman Trotter, Jr., a thin briefcase in his left hand, appeared at the entrance to the courtyard, hesitated a moment, and then said something to the maitre d’, who turned. Trotter followed the man’s gaze, spotting McGarvey seated alone, and he nodded, said something else, then threaded his way between the tables. McGarvey didn’t bother to stand. He hadn’t seen his old friend in two years, but the man had the same look on his face as he had had in Switzerland-one of worry and concern. “Hello, Kirk” Trotter said. He was a tall, very thin man, all angles, with a huge misshapen nose and bottle-thick glasses. He could have been classified as truly ugly, but he’d always had a sharp mind. He had begun his career with the CIA but then had gone over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working his way up to an associate directorship. “I thought it was you” McGarvey said. Trotter sat down, laying the briefcase on his lap. Languidly, McGarvey reached out and poured him a glass of wine. Their waiter came, handed them menus, and left. “Don thought you might have spotted him on Wednesday.

“Outside the Louvre” Trotter nodded. “And Thursday outside my apartment. Not very professional. II Professional enough” Trotter said, looking around at the other diners. “Nice place”

McGarvey shrugged. “I can watch the door from here” Trotter managed a slight smile. “Nothing changes, does it”

“How about you, John, still with the Bureau” Trotter shook his head.

“I’m back over at Langley. Assistant deputy director of operations”

“Larry Danielle still there”

“Seventh floor. He’s our new deputy DCI. Phil Carrara is my boss. I don’t think you knew him. He came over last year from NSA”

“A technologist” Again Trotter managed a slight smile. National Security Agency types were very often electronic freaks. “He’s a good man” McGarvey sipped at his wine. To this point Trotter had studiously avoided any direct eye contact. McGarvey stared at him. “It’s Baranov, isn’t it, John. That’s why you’ve come” Trotter nodded grimly. “He’s on the move again”

“it looks like it. Larry suggested you this time, though, not me. I swear to God. I told him that you’d had enough. That you wanted to be left alone”

“But he didn’t agree”

“No”

“Why all the pussyfooting around again, John”

“We didn’t know your circumstances” Trotter replied simply. At this point McGarvey could have been a changed man, could have turned into almost anything. They had to make certain that he was clean, and that the opposition hadn’t gotten a line on him. As Trotter unnecessarily explained: “Valentin Baranov has got a very large grudge against you, Kirk. Now that he is director of the KGB he has the power to do something about it. “You’re here to save my skin, is that it” McGarvey asked, feeling some of his old meanness coming back. His stomach was sour. It was the thrill of the opening moves of a hunt he’d been waiting for. “To save all of our skins. The man has got to be stopped. This time McGarvey had to smile. “What do you want this time, John? Am I to go to Moscow and assassinate the director of the KGB”

“If only it were that easy I’d say yes”

Trotter shook his head and glanced again at the other diners. “I don’t know if we’ll ever really stop the man in that sense. It’s become a continual mop-up operation. You know how it is”

” Yes, I do” McGarvey said pointedly. “So what’s the sonofabitch up to this time”

“We don’t know. Leastways not for sure yet. But we need your help”

“Why” The direct question startled Trotter but he recovered nicely.

“We’re in over our heads, I don’t mind admitting that. And you know Baranov better than any man on our side of the fence. His habits, his methods, the way his mind works”

“And your people are spotted”

“Yes. “And if I start after him, it might draw him out. I’d be bait.

Trotter nodded. He opened his briefcase and took out a thin file folder.

He handed it across and relatched his briefcase. McGarvey opened the file folder which contained a summary of a KGB officer, with several photographs, one of them a head shot, the others obviously obtained in the field. The man was tall, goodlooking in an athletic sort of a way, with deep eyes that even in the photographs seemed cold, distant, and very professional. “Formerly a Department Viktor hit man. One of the best. Baranov took him under his wing just after he returned to Moscow from the Powers thing, and the man has been busy. I’ve included a summary of his … feats. “Who is he”

“He’s been called the chameleon, because he can be or do damned near everything. His real name is Arkady Aleksandrovich Kurshin. “What’s he done now that has you coming here to me”

“We tracked him as far as Marseille, and it looked as if he was getting set to come up here. “But”

“He killed two of our people and then disappeared. Not a trace”

“He’s come out to do something for Baranov”

“Presumably. Baranov was spotted two weeks ago in East Berlin, at the same time, we believe, this Kurshin was there. “One man …” McGarvey mused. “One man” Trotter said. “He has us worried because he’s … an assassin. The very best in the business. And when a man like him goes on the move, and then disappears, it gets us all worried. Find him, Kirk.

Stop him. Find out what he’s up to. And quickly”

ABOARD THE TRANSPORTER

Arkady Kurshin was just a little surprised that they had actually gotten this far, though he was professional enough not to show it. “Trust in me, Arkasha” Baranov had told him warmly that night in East Berlin. Kurshin could almost trust in the man, though at this moment he knew that he was closer to death than he’d ever been in his life. He had little doubt that they would be able to pull this off, but it was afterward that weighed on his mind. Their escape. It was typical of Yegorov not to care, not to look beyond the immediacy of the situation, and the East German was such a cold fish that it was impossible ever to tell what he was thinking. But Kurshin worried about the future … his future.

They were racing down the autobahn, heading north at eighty miles per hour. It had been nearly twenty minutes since the missile bay doors had rumbled open and still no one had come after them, nor had Ramstein Missile Control answered their query. Traffic was heavy, but no one passed them, so that the road ahead was clear. The speed limit even on an autobahn, this close to a city, was 120 kilometers per hour, which was about 75 miles per hour. On the opposite side of the median strip, southbound traffic moved at a normal rate. The sight of a missile transporter on the highway was nothing unusual. Germans had seen it often. “Whiz Bang, this is Flybaby Six-P-Twokurshin radioed again.

Yegorov motioned toward the skyward radar. “We’ve got company” he said tersely. The radar showed two strong targets incoming from the base, flying low and relatively slow. They were helicopters, Kurshin figured.

He was about to key the microphone when the radio blared. “Flybaby Six-P-Two, this is Whiz Bang. Colonel, what in hell are you doing”

“Who is this speaking” Kurshin asked calmly. “For Christ’s sake, stand down immediately. Do you realize what you’re toting around out there”

“I repeat” Kurshin radioed. “Who am I speaking to” There was a pause.

“This is Whiz Bang, god damnit. Officer of the Day, Captain Gerry Stewart. And I repeat, Sir, stand down. Pull over to the side of the road immediately. Kurshin glanced again at the tiny radar screen. The two blips appeared to be directly behind them. He keyed the radio.

“Listen closely now, Captain Stewart, because I’m not going to repeat myself, and there are a lot of lives at stake here, so I don’t want you making any mistakes. Are you ready to copy” Again the radio was silent for a long second or two. “We’re coming up on our turn, Yegorov said beside him.

“Slow it down a little” Kurshin replied, keeping his eye on the radar screen. “You’ve hijacked a missile” Captain Stewart radioed shakily.

“Do you know what that means? And Major Mccann. He’s dead”

“Yes” Kurshin radioed back. “At this moment there are two aircraft just behind us, I assume they’re helicopter gunships. Tell them to back off immediately”

“Negative” the OD shouted. “Pull over immediately, or we will destroy your transporter” Kurshin smiled slightly. “I don’t think you’re going to want to do that, Captain, even if those aircraft were capable of it.

We have placed fifteen pounds of plastique explosives around the body of the missile itself, twenty-four inches forward of the recessed flight vanes. If you know that missile, you will realize that should the plastique explode, it will spread the warhead’s fissionable material over quite a large area. There was no answer, nor did the blips move off. “We have control of the explosives from within the tractor, and we mean to fire them in the next twenty seconds unless you do exactly as I tell you” Again there was no answer. “The clock starts now” Kurshin said, and he sat back in his seat. He looked over at Yegorov who glanced nervously at him. “They’re not going to risk trying to take us now”

Kurshin said. Yegorov smiled thinly. “They’re damned fools if they don’t, considering the alternatives”

“Who the hell is this” another voice blared from the radio. “Your worst nightmare” Kurshin radioed back. “Fifteen seconds. “Pull over now, or I’ll give the order to blow your ass all over the highway”

“Asses” Kurshin corrected. “There are three of us in control of this missile, and we’re about to take the next exit ramp. Ten seconds”

“This is Colonel Robert Collingwood, chief of Ramstein Security. And you listen to me, you bastard, I’m giving you five seconds to pull over or we’ll blow you away”

“Seven seconds” Kurshin spoke calmly into the microphone. Yegorov was downshifting, the big rig slowing, their exit. barely half a kilometer away. “Five seconds” Kurshin said. “Four Three … Two …”

“There” Yegorov shouted in triumph. Kurshin’s eyes flicked to the radar screen in time to see the two targets peeling off left and right and gaining altitude. He breathed his first sigh of relief and glanced over his shoulder at Schey whose expression had not changed, his thumb over the electronic trigger for the explosives. That one, he thought, would just as easily flip the switch he was holding as he would a light switch. But then, what good was a threat unless you meant to carry it out? “Thank you, Colonel Collingwood” Kurshin radioed. “Your transporter has a range of less than one hundred fifty kilometers, so you’re not going to get very far” the security chief radioed. Kurshin figured he was in one of the helicopters that were still behind them, but now a couple of kilometers off. Yegorov downshifted again, the big transport shuddering as he turned off the superhighway and they rolled down the exit ramp which was marked KAISERSLAUTERN, 12 KM. “We’re not going very far, Colonel. Now listen carefully again to me”

“We’re right behind you, I’m listening” Colonel Collingwood said tightly. “We’re going to bring this missile into the city, where we’ll set it up on Hauptbahnhof Strasse, directly in front of Colonel Collingwood sputtered the train station. “Like hell you will.

“I suggest for the safety of the city that you immediately see about evacuating at least the area surrounding the train station. If we should get nervous and blow the missile, there will be many casualties”

They had reached the bottom of the long ramp, and ignoring the traffic, Yegorov hauled the big transporter onto the highway leading into the city, sideswiping a small Volkswagen sedan, shoving it off to the side in a mangled heap. “What do you want? Who are you” Colonel Collingwood shouted. “Clear passage into the city, for the moment. Believe me when I tell you, Colonel, that although we wish to hurt no one in Germany, we are determined and well trained”

“And then what”

“Then we shall see” Kurshin said.

McGarvey had taken an air-inter flight from Paris to Marseille on the Ceted’azur, and a cab into town where he set up at a sleazy little hotel. Trotter agreed to remain in Paris at least through the next forty-eight hours to provide backup, especially information from the CIA Paris Station and, through their liaison services, from the SDECE-the French Secret Service. He sacrificed stealth for speed in his search, though it wasn’t likely that Kurshin was still here. And it didn’t matter if he found out that questions were being asked. McGarvey wanted him to know that someone was dogging his heels. Still, it took the better part of three hours and seven waterfront bars before he came up with the name of a man who could be bought for a few francs and a cheap bottle of wine. Every city had such men. Marseille was no exception. “Mon dieu, the Russians mind their own business here just like the rest of us do” the old man said. He and McGarvey were seated across from each other at a small table. The bar was very noisy. Traffic on the nearby Canebiere was intense. “Nothing has happened in the city in the past few days, mon vieux” McGarvey asked, pouring a little more wine. The old man shrugged. “Many things happen in Marseille, monsieur”

He sipped at his wine. McGarvey took out Kurshin’s photograph and slid it across the table. The old man looked at it for a long moment or two, but then shook his head. “Non”

“You say the Russians mind their own business here, like everyone else”

McGarvey said, masking his disappointment. “Is it because of the French Mafia” The old man smiled slightly, his face wrinkling, his lips parting to show his brown, chipped teeth. “There is no such organization, didn’t you know”

“But everyone behaves” Again the old man shrugged. “They sometimes do not” McGarvey waited. “A few days ago, for instance, a very bad man disappeared to no one’s sorrow. It happens, tant pis”

“Who was this man”

“Edmon Railliarde. His loss will not be mourned, let me tell you”

“He simply disappeared”

“Oui” McGarvey sat back, a vague connection beginning at the back of his mind. Trotter had called Kurshin the chameleon. “Do you know what he looked like, this Railliarde? Can you describe him to me”

“Yes, of course” the old man said, glancing again at Kurshin’s photograph. “Much like this one. Of course I cannot tell his bulk from a simple photograph, but Railliarde was a large man. A very bad man”

“And he is missing”

“Yes, but as I say no one will mourn that one” McGarvey laid a fifty-franc note on the table, snatched the photograph, and got up.

“Mercy mon Vieux. You have been of inestimable service” Outside, McGarvey turned away from the waterfront and hurried on foot up the main boulevard finding a public telephone box five minutes later. He placed a call to Trotter at the embassy in Paris on the Avenue Gabriel. “I think I have a line on Kurshin” McGarvey said. “It’s possible he’s assumed the identity of a French Mafia boss from Marseille by the name of Edmon Railliarde” He quickly explained what he had learned. “Are you certain about this, Kirk” Trotter asked. He seemed oddly subdued, almost as if he were disappointed by McGarvey’s news. “Of course not, but it’s a start. What’s up” Again Trotter hesitated… “There is a developing situation at this moment in Germany. Ramstein Air Force Base. We were getting set to follow it up”

“I’m listening” McGarvey said. He had learned the hard way never to underestimate a Baranov plan. The man was as brilliant as he was convoluted and devious. “An Army Pershing H missile has apparently been hijacked from the base”

“By whom”

“Apparently an Air Force colonel by the name of Brad Allworth. He’s got help. But what started us thinking is that Allworth was here on leave in Paris until yesterday”

“What does he look like”

“We’re getting it off the Associated Press wire. Tall, well built, goodlooking, an all-American” The connections were suddenly completed in McGarvey’s head. “It’s him” he shouted. “Kurshin has got that missile”

“I thought you said he took on the persona of this Mafia boss. “Listen to me, John. I’m going to get up to Ramstein as quickly as I can. I want you to meet me there. You’re going to have to open some doors for me.

But in the meantime ask the French if they have turned up a mutilated body somewhere in or around Paris within the past twenty-four hours.

“Mutilated … ” Trotter asked. “Yeah” McGarvey said. “My guess would be that his fingerprints, dental work, and face would have been destroyed. Perhaps in an accident. Sudden understanding dawned in Trotter’s voice. “Railliarde” he said. “He’ll be carrying the man’s identification” McGarvey said. “But my guess is he will be Colonel Allworth. Railliarde’s body will probably never be found”

“Good lord..” Trotter started to say, but McGarvey had hung up the telephone and was rushing down the street to the nearest cab stand.

The silence was eerie in the Hauptbahnhof Plaza across from the large train station a few blocks north of the city center. For nearly three hours the missile transporter had remained motionless in the middle of the square where it had been carefully positioned. “We must give them time to stabilize the situation” Kurshin explained. “I don’t want some nervous sharpshooter or overzealous polizei opening fire” Schey had said nothing, and although Yegorov had become clearly impatient, he too understood the wisdom of Kurshin’s order. They had switched off the radio so as not — to be disturbed. The three hours had also been necessary so that the means of their eventual escape could be put in place. Kurshin had been smoking a cigarette. He ground it out on the floor and then turned up the gain on the radar set. Three blips appeared, two to the south and one north. All three of them appeared nearly stationary. Helicopter gunships, he figured.

Next he glanced at the transporter’s rearward-looking television monitor. Across the square, about one hundred fifty meters away, he could see that all the streets entering had been blocked off by armored personnel carriers, uniformed police, and US. soldiers standing behind the barriers. He leaned forward and peered out the Lexan-covered slits.

The streets leading into the square from the north and northeast were also blocked off. In addition, he spotted at least half a dozen armed soldiers on the roofs of nearby buildings. “We’re hemmed in” Yegorov said. “Exactly. We’ve no means of escape so they’ll have calmed down by now” Kurshin said. He glanced over his shoulder at the East German, whose eyes were shining for the first time. He was still holding the trigger. “Are you ready” Schey nodded. Turning back, Kurshin switched on the radio. “Colonel Collingwood, this is Flybaby Six-P-Two. Do you copy”

“That’s affirmative” the radio blared immediately. “May I assume that you have this part of the city evacuated by now, and that you have positioned only disciplined troops around the perimeter”

“You may” Collingwood responded. “Very good, Colonel. Within the next sixty seconds two of us will be stepping out of the transporter and we will be going back to the missile itself. Let me remind you that one of our number shall remain at all times protected within the transporter, his finger on the device that controls the plastique. Do I make myself perfectly clear”

“You do” the Air Force security chief replied. “What are your intentions”

“In due time, Colonel. For the moment suffice it that if anyone tries to interfere with our operation in any way, disaster will strike”

“What do you want, god damnit” Collingwood shouted. “Make your demands”

“Again, in due time, Colonel. But you have my word as an officer and a gentleman that we mean no harm to either the German or American peoples”

“Then stand down”

“I’m afraid that is not possible. You will understand very soon what we mean to do. I will explain everything to you at 2000 hours. But one final word of caution. We mean to raise the missile into its firing position now. But nothing, absolutely nothing will happen if you and your men show restraint. Until 2000 hours” Collingwood was shouting something when Kurshin switched off the radio. He turned again to Schey.

“Give Ivan the trigger. It is time for us to get to work”

McGarvey was met at Frankfurt’s Rhine-Main Airport by the CIA’s number two out of Bonn, a husky but studious-looking man dressed in a dark blue blazer. ‘ “Todd Kraus” he introduced himself. “I’ve got a chopper standing by for you, Sir” It was a little past six in the afternoon. The airport was extremely busy but McGarvey had been passed through customs immediately. He followed the younger man across the terminal where they got in an Air Force sedan and sped to the opposite side of the field which housed the U.S.

Rhinemain Air Force Base. A Bell AH-IW Super Cobra ground attack helicopter was already warming up for them. “We’ll get you down there in under twenty minutes” Kraus said as they climbed aboard.

“In the meantime I’ve got a couple dozen questions for you” McGarvey said. “Yes, sir, I expect you do. I’ve been instructed to brief you on the way down. Mr. Trotter is already on site” The instant they’d strapped in, a crewman jumped aboard, closed and dogged the hatch, and went forward into the cockpit leaving them alone. They lifted off with a sickening lurch and swung left as they climbed, the helicopter taking a nose-down attitude as it rapidly picked up speed. The pilot was sparing nothing. Kraus reached up behind him, flipped on a small overhead light, and turned back to McGarvey. He pulled a map of downtown Kaiserslautern from his jacket pocket and spread it out between them. “I’ll give you the broad strokes first” Kraus began. “A man identifying himself as Air Force Colonel Brad Allworth managed to steal a nuclear-armed Pershing missile and transporter from Ramstein Air Force Base. He drove it off the base and onto the autobahn where he was met by two other men …

identification at this point unknown. They placed what appears to be a plastique explosive around the outside of the missile body itself, which they promise to blow if we make any threatening moves. From there they drove directly into the city of Kaiserslautern where they parked in front of the train station. They haven’t moved since”

“Any casualties” McGarvey asked” Major Tom Mccann was found shot to death in the Pershing’s missile bay”

“Anyone else”

“Eleven German nationals were injured and three killed on the autobahn just outside Ramstein. The transporter ran over one car and touched off a chain reaction. Four of them are in critical condition in the base burn unit”

“They mean business” McGarvey said. “Yes, sir, that they do”

“Any communications with the transporter” k aus nodded. “Colonel Bob Collingwood, the man in charge of Ramstein security, has been talking with them … or at least with the one who has been identified as Brad Allworth”

“He’s not” McGarvey said.

“Sir”

“He’s not Brad Allworth. His name is Arkady Kurshin”

“Russians” Kraus asked, his eyes widening. “Sonofabitch. What the hell are they up to”

“Whatever it is, it’s not going to be pleasant, I can tell you that much. And I can also tell you that Kurshin is a pro. He’ll have this entire operation figured out to the last detail, including his escape”

“Pardon me, sir, but I don’t think that’s possible”

“Perhaps not, but Kurshin evidently thinks so” McGarvey said. “What’s the present situation”

“As of 1630 the missile and transporter were parked, as I said, in the middle of the square in front of K-Town’s main railroad station. Two men, one of them apparently this Arkady Kurshin, and another man, have been outside the transporter doing something to the missile’s control units” McGarvey nodded. “Reprogramming its guidance system, no doubt, and probably disarming the fire control officer’s abort function.

“That’s our best guess. “Have they made any demands, given us any sort of a time limit”

“No demands so far, other than to leave them alone. They’ve promised that they would make their intentions clear at 2000 hours” McGarvey glanced at his watch. They had a full hour. “But” Kraus said. “And this is the part that has everyone worried. They say they intend raising the missile into launch position. McGarvey sat back in his seat and lit a cigarette. “Kurshin wouldn’t have taken the risk of stealing a missile unless he intended launching it”

“We’re hoping not, sir” Kraus said. “Collingwood seems to think that they’ll make some demand and when it’s met have us provide them transportation into the east zone”

“No” McGarvey said, Baranov’s picture rising up in his mind. “He’ll launch the missile and then make his escape”

“Launch it where, for God’s sake”

“The sixty-four-dollar question” McGarvey said, shaking his head.

“What’s the Pershing’s range, a thousand miles or so”

“This is a Pershing IIA. She has a range of more than two thousand miles”

“The warhead is armed” Kraus nodded glumly. “You can say that again.

Five hundred kilotons”

“But it’s a cruise missile”

“Not quite, sir. It’s RADAG controlled … Radar Area Guidance. It’s set for a latitude and longitude, and once it gets near its target the radar unit compares the returns it’s getting from the ground with what’s programmed into it”

“What’s its target”

“That’s highly classified McGarvey just looked at him. “Kiev”

“They’ll change it”

“They’d have to have a systems expert with them. None of ours is missing. It’s the first thing we had Langley check. There aren’t many men around who have that knowledge”

“Whoever is working with Kurshin does” McGarvey said. “You can bet your life on it”

Kurshin looked up as another helicopter came in for a landing a couple of blocks away in what he was assuming was the market square they’d passed through on the way in. It made the third since he and Schey had gotten out of the tractor and climbed up on the trailer with the missile. “How much longer” he asked the East German. Schey looked up from the open hatch in the missile’s side.

“I was finished ten minutes ago. You asked me to stall for time. “It’s set on the new target”

“Yes, of course, providing the data you supplied me with is correct”

“It is” Kurshin said curtly. “What about the abort mechanism”

“Disconnected”

“At this point then, once the missile is launched there is no way for their Missile Control facility to recall it or destroy it” The East German shook his head. “Short of sending a fighter interceptor after it and shooting it out of the sky-an almost impossible feat-no. “Very good” Kurshin said, glancing over his shoulder again toward the blockade at the south side of the plaza. “Button it up, let’s begin”

Schey closed and relocked the small hatch on the missile’s radar guidance system, and then replaced the section of outer skin he’d removed, dogging it down with a dozen flushmounted fasteners. “What about the plastique collar” Kurshin asked. “It will fall harmlessly away within the first few seconds after launch”

“There will be no effect on the missile’s course”

“None that the guidance system won’t correct for”

“Good” Kurshin said, his eyes hard. He jumped down from the trailer bed and one at a time lowered the hydraulic stabilizing jacks at each corner, while Schey was connecting the four launch control umbilical cords. If there was going to be trouble, Kurshin thought, sweating lightly, it would come now. They would be fools not to try to stop what was happening here. But then they had been fools at the base with lack of security. This would never happen in the Rodina, not even now, though if it ever did it would shake up those pricks in the Kremlin even nwre than the German kid had done by flying his little toy airplane into Red Square.

Ten minutes later, Schey checked all the wires and steadying jacks to make certain everything was in order, then opened a control hatch at the side of the trailer and flipped a switch. The Pershing missile began to slowly rise from the trailer bed.

“Oh, Jesus Christ” Colonel Collingwood said as the missile began to elevate from its transport trailer. McGarvey had been looking through binoculars at the two men. The taller of them, dressed in an Air Force uniform, had turned several times, giving him a good look. He had the same bulk and general appearance as Kurshin, but his face was different. From here he looked very much like the photographs McGarvey had been shown of Brad Allworth. He lowered the binoculars.

“Blow the missile now” he said. Trotter, who had met him when the chopper had set down, stepped back a pace and Colonel Collingwood’s eyes widened. “Is this the hotshot who was supposed to come up with the good ideas” the security chief spat at Trotter. He looked coldly at McGarvey. “Do you know what such an action would mean? Do you know what it would do here”

“You say the civilians have been pulled out. Clear the rest of your men except for one volunteer sharpshooter who can hit the plastique. And blow it now before it’s too late”

“It would spread radioactive materials for hundreds of yards”

Collingwood growled. “There would be a three-block area of no-man’s-land for a long time to come”

“Yes” McGarvey said, watching the missile rise. “And probably a number of casualties. An increase in the cancer rate over the next twenty or thirty years. The news media would be on your ass. The Pentagon would probably set you out to dry. You’d be a scapegoat”

“You’re goddamned right.

“What do you suppose five hundred kilotons is going to do when it explodes on whatever target they’ve programmed it for”

“They won’t launch it” Collingwood said, but he wasn’t as sure as he had been a moment earlier. McGarvey looked at him again. “Yes they will, unless we stop them”

“Is it Kurshin” Trotter asked. “I don’t know for sure” McGarvey admitted. “I think so, but he’s wearing a damned good disguise. Had to if he was able to fool the people at the base”

“We can’t destroy that missile here, Kirk” Trotter said emphatically.

Collingwood was closely watching the exchange. McGarvey turned back to him. “If they do launch it, what’s the possibility of shooting it down”

“About one in a thousand” Again McGarvey stared at the missile which by now was nearly at the vertical. “Well, I’d suggest that you inform your people to at least give it a try in case we fail here and that thing actually gets airborne. That was a logic the colonel could understand.

“Will do” he said, and he turned to his radioman and began issuing orders. McGarvey raised his binoculars and slowly began to search the entire square foot by foot, from the front of the train station all the way across to the missile transporter. It was Kurshin. He could feel it in his bones. Trotter had reported that the French police had indeed discovered a mutilated body along the railroad tracks fifty miles east of Paris. “Along the same line that Brad Allworth took to get here”

Trotter had said. That fact clinched it in McGarvey’s mind. But that meant that Kurshin had had some very good intelligence information. He’d known Brad Allworth’s orders, what he looked like, and what train he would be on. He also had the information needed to reprogram the missile. It was not beyond Baranov, coming up with such information. But the risks he had taken to get the data, and then so openly display that fact here like this, meant Baranov had a very large prize in mind. A very large prize indeed. “Get the city engineer here” McGarvey said.

Kurshin and the other man went around to the side of the transporter, the hatch opened and they climbed inside. “What” Trotter asked. “The city engineer” McGarvey repeated. “I know how Kurshin means to escape.

ABOARD THE MISSILE TRANSPORTER

It was coming up on fifteen minutes before eight. Night had fallen, but the transporter was bathed in lights that had been hastily strung up around the perimeter of the square and on some of the rooftops. Shadows were long. Where there wasn’tlight, the darkness by contrast was almost absolute. Schey had pulled the main panel from the fire control board where he had worked with a test instrument and a soldering pencil for the past half hour. He sat back and looked up, an expression of satisfaction on his face. “There” he said. “It is finished” Kurshin swiveled around and looked into the tangle of wires behind the panel. A small electronic device had been wired into the firing circuitry. “Once the fire switch is thrown, the delay circuitry will give us ten minutes to make our escape, no more” Schey said.

Yegorov had been watching as well. “What if we are delayed” he asked.

The East German managed another of his pinched smiles. “Then it will be too bad for us, because there is no way of reversing the firing order”

“Pull out the wires” Schey shook his head. “Any tampering with the circuitry from that point will cause the missile to immediately fire”

Baranov had insisted that Schey be a part of the team. Kurshin could see why now. Not only did he have the technical expertise to pull it off, but he also had nerves of steel. Nothing seemed to agitate him. But then again he had no love for the Jews. Kurshin glanced at his watch. “Put it back together and change your clothes” he told Schey. He got up and went to the back of the transporter where he pulled out the civilian clothes that Yegorov had brought along. The other Russian joined him, a broad grin on his face. “Fuck your mother, but the bastards will never know what hit them” Kurshin took off the uniform blouse and laid it aside. He handed Yegorov a small minor. “Hold this up” Taking a handful of skin at the back of his neck, Kurshin dug his fingernails in and ripped it apart, tearing it below his shirt collar and opening his scalp all the way up the back of his head. Yegorov let out a small chuckle.

Pulling the hair and skin apart, Kurshin carefully pulled the latex life mask forward off his cheeks and temples, and then straight up from his chin, the rubber making sucking and tearing sounds as it peeled away from his real flesh. He’d worn the mask for twenty-four hours now and the suddenly cool air on his face felt wonderful. Big patches of glue and latex were stuck on his face. He cleaned these off with a towel dipped in alcohol. When he was finished, he took out the contact lenses that made his eyes blue, revealing his own pale green eyes. Yegorov lowered the mirror, They looked into each other’s eyes. “it has been a pleasure working with you, Comrade” Yegorov said so softly that Schey could not hear him. “What about him”

Kurshin’s cold eyes flicked to the East German who was just finishing with the panel. “Leave him to me”

“He is excess baggage now. Dangerous to us” Kurshin nodded. “Yes”

Something in Kurshin’s eyes, however, made Yegorov back down. “As you say” he mumbled respectfully, and they finished changing into their civilian business suits in silence. Schey worked his way back and hurriedly changed his clothes as Kurshin went forward and sat down in the righthand bucket seat. He turned on the radio, but waited until the other two were ready. They looked at each other in silence, and then Kurshin picked up the microphone. “Colonel Collingwood, this is Flybaby Six-P-Two. Do you copy”

“That’s affirmative” Collingwood’s voice came back. “Our demands are simple, but you have only sixty minutes from this moment to comply with them or we will fire the missile. Do you understand this”

“We understand”

“First, we will require one of your Cobra gunship helicopters to land here on the square within twenty meters of this transporter. Only the pilot and copilot must be aboard. No other crew”

“Go on” Collingwood radioed, and they could hear the tightness in his voice. “Secondly, we will require one million US. dollars in gold bullion. This can be arranged within the hour through the Credit Suisse Bank here in Kaiserslautern. The gold is to be loaded aboard the gunship”

“Do you realize how much that will weigh … “

“Yes” Kurshin said. “At the current rate of four hundred thirty-eight dollars per ounce, that comes out to a little less than one hundred forty-three pounds. I believe that will present no burden on your helicopter”

“I will see what I can do” Collingwood radioed. “But one hour may not be enough time”

“I sincerely hope it is, Colonel, for your sake. Believe me” Kurshin said. There was a longish silence on the radio. “What else” Collingwood finally radioed. ““That is all” Kurshin replied. “At exactly 2100 hours, I and my crew shall step out of the transporter, cross to the helicopter, and the crew will fly us across the East German border. Your crew, should they not misbehave, will be allowed to return unhamied to the West. The helicopter will remain behind”

“No, you listen to me, you bastard” Collingwood shouted, finally losing control. “No, Colonel, you listen to me very carefully” Kurshin responded calmly. “You have two further items to consider before you make your decision. The first is the plastique that we have placed around the body of the missile. It has been rewired to be exploded not only by our triggering mechanism, but also by a signal transmitted over a common military frequency. A frequency that the Cobra helicopter you are sending us is capable of transmitting on. From a long distance. If anything untoward should happen we will not hesitate to send such a signal” When Collingwood came back on the radio he was subdued. “You mentioned two items”

“It would be most unfortunate if we were to find that any of the helicopter’s electronic equipment … its radio equipment … had been tampered with”

“The second item, you sonofabitch. “Yes. The second is that the missile firing control has also been rewired to a similar set of signals. We will be able to fire it from a long ways out. And, once we have left the IT vicinity, should you decide to make an attempt at disarming either the plastique or the missile firing mechanisms, you will be in for a nasty surprise. Very nasty”

“Then you have made a very large mistake. That missile is targeted on a Soviet city”

“That is no longer so” Kurshin said. “We have reprogrammed its target to a city in Libya. Tripoli. Downtown”

“You’re insane” Collingwood said softly.

“He’s lying” McGarvey said. He’d been huddled with an extremely nervous Klaus Kistner, the chief sanitation engineer for the city of Kaiserslauterm. The man had been located, hauled away from his dinner, and brought unceremoniously to the square. When Kurshin came on the air, McGarvey had broken away. “It makes sense to me”

Collingwood said. “There is no reason to disbelieve him” Trotter shook his head. “This time I’m going to have to go along with Kirk”

“There’s not a whole hell of a lot we can do about it, no matter what”

Collingwood shouted in exasperation. “The bastard is calling the shots.

So we go along with him for now”

“He’s given you an hour. Long before that time is up, that missile will be fired” McGarvey said. I I At Tripoli … an American nuclear missile. Christ, we’d be done in the Middle East for the next hundred years”

“Maybe Tripoli” McGarvey said, looking across at the missile. “Maybe not…”

“Where then” Collingwood demanded. “I don’t know, but they’ve reprogrammed the missile’s guidance system, in that I think he’s telling the truth”

“But if he launches before the hour is up we’d have no reason to comply with his demands” Collingwood argued. “He doesn’t care about the gold”

Trotter said.

McGarvey nodded his agreement. “No, a man like him wouldn’t. Nor would he take the risk of something going wrong in the air between here and the east zone. We own these skies” Collingwood was looking from McGarvey to Trotter. “Would someone mind tellin me what the hell is going on then”

“If he means to actually fire the rocket, Kirk, what’s his target”

Trotter asked. “What’s Baranov up to”

“And if he doesn’t need the chopper to escape, how the hell is he going to get out of there? We’ve got the entire square surrounded. I’ve got my people everywhere”

“You have the surface of the square covered” McGarvey said. Collingwood glanced at the city engineer who was cowering a few feet away from them, his eyes as wide as saucers. He understood enough English to know at least the gist of what was about to happen here. “The storm sewers”

McGarvey said. “The transporter is parked directly over a sewer grate. I saw it before the light failed. “Jesus H. Christ” Collingwood swore.

“They’ll have a car waiting for them a few blocks from here, and while we’re waiting..”

“Is there a hatch in the floor of the transporter”

“Just unplug the umbilical cords”

“Too dangerous. They might have someone watching. If we make a move to tamper with the missile from the outside they might go ahead and blow it anyway. Is there a hatch in the bottom of the transporter”

“Yes there is, siran Army captain who’d been standing in the background spoke up. He came forward. “Who are you” McGarvey asked.

“Jim Hunte. I know that missile, sir. I’m one of the alert crew chiefs.

In fact I was on duty when that sonofabitch walked off with it”

“He can disarm the missile when it’s secured” Collingwood said. “In the meantime we’ll cover all the sewer exits.

“No” McGarvey said. “They’ve still got the trigger for the plastique.

And unless I miss my guess they’ll be programming the missile for a delayed firing”

“Then what the hell do you want”

Collingwood shouted. Captain Hunte wore a military .45 strapped to his hip. “Do you know how to use that thing, Captain” McGarvey asked. “Yes, sir. “Have you got the tools to disarm the missile”

“In my car”

“Get them” Hunte’s eyes were shining. “We’re going to kick some ass”

“We’re going to try to save some. Now, move yours”

“Yes, sir” Hunte snapped, and he hurried off. McGarvey took his Walther out of its holster at the small of his back and cycled a round into the firing chamber. “I’ll start by moving my people out of here now”

Collingwood said. “No” McGarvey responded. “The moment he sees that, he’ll set the missile to fire. “Well, at least I’m going to send a few of my people with you”

McGarvey shook his head. “Just hold the fort here, Colonelhe said, and he turned and hurried off into the darkness. Collingwood was fuming.

He turned to Trotter. “Just who the fuck does he think he is”

Trotter managed a very tight little smile. He took off his thick glasses and cleaned the lenses with his handkerchief. “You don’t want to know, Colonel. Believe me”

Captain Gerry Stewart was still on duty in Missile Control’s situation room. He was not a smoker, but in the hours since he had discovered Major Mccann’s body in the empty missile bunker he had gone through nearly a pack of Marlboros.

The base had been placed on alert. The situation room hummed with activity. A red light suddenly began to wink on the Six-P-Two Launch Board. “We have an A Key indicator on the Flybabythe technician called out. The Pershing missile, like most NATO nuclear weapons, was operated on a dual key system. It took two separate keys to activate the weapon for launch. Stewart jumped up and hurried to the console just as the B Key light came on. He stared at the board in disbelief. Both keys had been activated. Christ. The missile was live now, and starting through its firing cycle. “Impossible” he breathed. The rest of the board began to light up. “We have a firing sequence countdown the technician started to say, but then he stopped in midsentence. “It’s stopped, sir” he said, looking up. The firing sequence had stopped halfway through. Something was holding it. Stewart turned around and rushed for his console where he snatched up his comms phone. “I want Colonel Coilingwood. Now” he shouted.

The launch control board had come alive.

For the first few moments Kurshin had thought something was wrong. The fire sequence lights had begun coming on, one at a time toward a ten-second countdown. Suddenly they stopped. “Thereschey said, looking up. “The counter is running. In ten minutes the missile will launch”

“You’re sure” Yegorov asked, even his voice hushed now. “Of course”

Schey replied. “Nothing can stop it” Kurshin asked. Schey shook his head. “Nein”

“Thank you” Kurshin said. He raised the pistol he’d been hiding behind his leg and shot the East German in the face, the man’s head slamming backward against the bulkhead. He slipped off the bucket seat and crumpled in a heap on the floor. Yegorov hurriedly pulled up the floor panel, and then, getting down on his stomach, reached through the opening and removed the storm sewer grate, shoving it aside. The street beneath the transporter was in deep shadow. He looked up and Kurshin nodded. Yegorov levered himself down into the cool stonn sewer, his feet searching for and finding the metal rings set into the concrete. When he looked up again, Kurshin handed down the trigger for the plastique.

“Just in case” Kurshin said, and he too started down into the storm sewer.

One block off the square the side streets were in darkness. McGarvey and Captain Hunte had removed the grating from the storm sewer the city engineer assured them connected with the tunnel beneath the missile transporter, and McGarvey was lowering himself into the black hole when they heard someone running down the street. Hunte spun on his heel, yanked his .45 out of its holster, and levered the slide back. McGarvey was halfway through the opening. He braced himself and pulled out his pistol. “Mr. McGarvey” someone shouted from the darkness. Seconds later the figure of Todd Kraus emerged” It’s all right” McGarvey said to Hunte. “Here” he called to Kraus.

“Christ, am I glad I made it in time” Kraus said, skidding to a halt.

“You can’t go through with it”

“What’s happened”

“We just got word from the situation room at the base. The missile is in countdown mode. Both keys have been activated. “How much time do we have”

McGarvey snapped. Kraus was shaking his head. “No one knows, but it could happen at any second. The countdown has stopped halfway through its sequence. Once it starts again, the launch will occur in ten seconds”

“There’s no way of telling if they’re still in the transporter then”

“Trotter wants you back now. Collingwood is startin to pull his people out”

“They could be rigging some kind of delay circuit” Hunte said. “It would give them time to get out of there” McGarvey thought it out, weighing the risks versus his chances of success. “Tell Collingwood to try to reach Kurshin on the radio. We can’t risk sending the technicians over there until we’re sure he and his people are gone” He turned to Hunte. “I’m doing this one alone”

“Like hell you are” Hunte said. “I could order you to stay behind”

Hunte grinned. “I’m lousy at taking orders” he said. “Besides, that’s my missile out there” Kraus was looking at them, shaking his head.

“You’re both crazy. But I’m coming with you. There are three of them”

“No” McGarvey said. “Get my message back to Collingwood. If you want, you can stand by at the square. If we make it up to the transporter, we may need your help”

Kraus was obviously disappointed, but he nodded. “Good luck” he said, and he turned and hurried back to the square. “I’ll be right behind you, Mr. McGarvey” Hunte said, uncocking his pistol and reholstering it.

“The name is Kirk” McGarvey said, and he climbed the ten feet down into the collection vault, which was a round concrete chamber about fifteen feet in diameter. The vault itself was probably new, but the storm sewer lines radiating off at four odd angles to match the haphazardly angled streets above, were very old, constructed of brick with vaulted ceilings. The floor was covered with a few inches of water; a small stream trickled down from one of the sewer lines. When Hunte made it to the bottom, McGarvey motioned for him to keep still as he peered into the darkness down the tunnel that led back to the square. There was a sound. Very far away. Very distant. Hollow. As if he were hearing the scrape of shoe leather against brick. Hunte heard it as well. He pulled out his gun again. McGarvey cocked his ear and continued to listen.

There. He heard the noises again, only this time they seemed to be receding. “It’s them” he said, climbing up into the tunnel. “They’re heading in the opposite direction”

“That means the countdown clock is definitely running”

“Yeah” McGarvey said tersely, the hair on the nape of his neck crawling as he started into the darkness, his pistol in his right hand, and his left brushing the rough brick wall of the tunnel for guidance. He’d never liked dark, enclosed spaces. When he was in high school he and some friends had explored a cave in southwestern Kansas. They’d gotten lost and it had taken them nearly eight hours in the absolute darkness to find their way out again. Standing in the open that night, he’d vowed never to get himself into such a situation ever again. But then, he thought wryly, who of us ever keeps the promises we make to ourselves?

About fifty yards down the tunnel, McGarvey thought he could see a faint glimmer of light ahead, and he stopped. Hunte was right behind him.

“What”

“Quiet” McGarvey ordered. He’d thought he’d heard someone moving out ahead of them again, but now the tunnel was ominously silent except for the very distant sound of what he took to be a siren.

“It’s a siren” Yegorov whispered. Kurshin held up his hand for silence as he too listened. Twice he’d thought he heard another noise. Distant.

He switched off the dim red penlight he carried and held his breath. The sirens seemed to fade. He could hear water trickling somewhere, softly, slowly, but nothing else at first. Then he heard it again, someone or something sloshing through water. Back the way they had come. Yegorov heard it too. “Someone is back there” he said softly. “Yes” Kurshin said, thinking it out. By now the missile’s launch mode would have shown up at Missile Control. But they could not know about the delaying mechanism or how much longer before the missile launched. “Have they figured it out then? Do they know we’re gone”

“It would appear so” Kurshin said absently. One part of him had to begrudgingly admire whoever, it was coming up the tunnel. He must have a strong will. The East German said that the delaying circuit was foolproof. No way to stop the rocket from launching. How far to trust the man’s judgment? There was nothing foolproof … nothing! Kurshin had seen the opposite to be true too often for him to believe otherwise. He switched on his light and looked at his watch. They had eight minutes before launch. More than long enough to get clear. Schey had warned them that when the missile took off, its tremendously hot exhaust gases would rush down into the storm sewers, probably killing anyone who was within a hundred-meter radius. He shined the light on Yegorov’s face. The man was sweating lightly. “Whoever is back there might be able to stop the launch somehow” Kurshin said. “Then we’ll destroy the missile” Yegorov said, raising the trigger.

“No” Kurshin said softly but sharply. “It must be launched. We will not fail”

“Then what” Kurshin listened again. The sounds of someone coming were louder. “We go back and kill them before they can interfere”

“There could be a dozen of them. More”

“I don’t think so”

“But the rocket”

“We go back” Kurshin said, pulling out his silenced Graz Buyra automatic. It was a very large, ominous-looking weapon. A KGB Department Viktor assassination device. “Now. I I Yegorov was obviously torn between his fear of being roasted alive, and Kurshin whose ruthlessness was well known within the KGB. “I have no desire to be caught down here when the missile is launched” Kurshin said. “But I have even less desire to return to Baranov a failure” Yegorov nodded. He pulled out his silenced pistol. “Then let’s do it quickly, Comrade, so there will be time for us to get clear. I don’t wish to become anyone’s martyr”

“But softly, Ivan” Kurshin said, once again dousing his penlight and pocketing it. “If we can hear them, it’s a safe bet they can hear us.

Being careful to make as little noise as possible, Kurshin started back the way they had come. Within thirty meters they had Come to an intersection. Above, a dim light showed through the grating. Kurshin stopped a moment to search his memory of the sewer blueprint he’d studied. The lines all interconnected. He turned back to Yegorov. “You head straight toward, the transporter. I’ll take the righthand tunnel.

I believe it will circle around. If I can get behind them, we will have them in a cross fire”

“Just remember where I will be standing”

“Yes” Kurshin said. “And you had better be standing there, Ivan.

Twice more McGarvey stopped to listen, but the tunnel was silent. Either the Russians were by now out of earshot, or they too had stopped to listen. McGarvey had heard them, had the Russians heard their pursuers?

The light grew brighter in the tunnel ahead, until McGarvey stopped at the vault beneath the transporter. He could see that the grate above had been removed, and he could see up into the interior of the transporter itself, red and green lights flashing from the instruments on the launch consoles and radar screen. Hunte was just behind his right shoulder. He whispered in McGarvey’s ear. “If we’re standing here when that bird launches, we’ll be cooked meat” McGarvey nodded, but he was still listening. Had he heard a sound up the tunnel to his left? “What are we waiting for … ” Hunte started to say, but McGarvey backed up against him and shook his head. Hunte’s eyes narrowed. He was getting jumpy.

McGarvey led him a few feet farther back into the tunnel. “I think they’ve come back” he said, his voice barely audible. Hunte glanced toward the vault. “We’d be sitting ducks, do you understand” Hunte nodded. “I want you to go back down the tunnel for about fifty feet as quietly as you can. Then turn around and run like hell back here”

“You’re going to try to flush them out”

“Something like that. Now go. I don’t know how long we’ve got before that missile will fire” Hunte turned and disappeared into the darkness, making absolutely no noise. McGarvey waited for a couple of moments, then turned and edged back to where the tunnel opened into the vault beneath the transporter. Remaining in the shadows he checked to — make sure his pistol was ready to fire, and brought it up, steadying it against the greasy damp brick wall.

For a long time nothing seemed to be happening. Once again in the distance McGarvey could hear a siren from the streets above. It would take Hunte a minute or so to get into position and start back. Kurshin had lied about wanting the helicopter and the gold, and he had almost certainly lied about the intended target. But where, if not Tripoli? The new Pershing had a range of more than two thousand miles. That covered a lot — of territory, all the way from the British Isles to parts of the Middle East, including some important oil fields. Was that Baranov’s game? Interrupt the industrial West’s major supply of crude? It was certainly possible. The radio in the transporter above blared. “Flybaby, Six-P-Two, this is Colonel Collingwood, do you copy” There was a movement in the tunnel to the left, as if someone had taken a step backward. McGarvey stiffened. “Flybaby Six-P-Two, this is Collingwood, talk to me, you sonofabitch” Whatever the Air Force colonel was or was not, if he was still in the square, McGarvey had to admire his guts.

“The chopper is ready and your gold is on its way” Collingwood’s voice boomed in the collection vault. Hunte was taking too long. McGarvey started to turn when he heard the distinctive soft plopping sound of a silenced pistol shot. There was a flash of movement from the collection vault. McGarvey turned back in time to see a large burly man leaping out of the left tunnel, a big pistol in his fight hand, a small black box in his left. McGarvey fired twice, the first shot catching Yegorov in the chest, the second in the side of his neck, bursting his carotid artery, the bullet deflecting off a bone, and finally destroying his throat. The big man crashed backward against the concrete wall, and the triggering device fell into the water. The tunnel was suddenly silent. McGarvey turned around and dropped to one knee, his pistol up, but the darkness behind him was absolute. Almost too late he realized that he was outlined by the light behind him, and he dove forward at the same moment something plucked at his sleeve and he heard another silenced shot. He fired twice down the tunnel. At this point he didn’t think there was much fear of hitting Hunte. The captain was probably dead. Again the tunnel was in silence. Even the sirens topside had stopped. McGarvey started to edge forward, keeping to the far left wall. Something moved ahead of him, and he fired two more shots into the darkness, quickly scrambling to the right side of the tunnel as two answering silenced shots were fired. McGarvey held his breath to listen. There were no sounds ahead. He concentrated on the darkness, his gun up, ready to fire the moment he spotted the pinpoint of a muzzle flash. “We’re running out of time, you and me” he called softly into the darkness. Another silenced shot was fired, the bullet ricocheting with a whine off the brick wall. The flash was to the right. McGarvey aimed slightly left and squeezed off a shot, then quickly shifted sides to the left and immediately back to the right. There was no answering fire. “Who are you” a voice came from the darkness, speaking English with a flat Midwestern accent. McGarvey could not pinpoint the voice. He turned his head left so that his own voice would bounce off the opposite wall of the tunnel. “Are you sure you want to know, Arkady Aleksandrovich”

“You have me at a disadvantage”

“Yes” McGarvey said. “You and Comrade KGB Chairman Baranov. He and I are old friends, you know” McGarvey thought he heard a splash of water straight down the tunnel, but then there was silence. He waited ten seconds and then started forward. “I’m coming for you, Arkady, he said.

Still there was silence.

Forty feet farther down the tunnel he came to a body. It was Jim Hunte.

McGarvey could tell from his uniform, and the tool kit slung over his shoulder. He felt the man’s body, his fingers discovering a small amount of blood and a bullet wound on his face just above the bridge of his nose. Christ! In the dark! McGarvey leapt to his feet. “Kurshin” he shouted, his voice echoing and reechoing off the tunnel walls and ceiling. “Kurshin, you sonofabitch, I’m coming for you” There was no answer. McGarvey turned on his heel and, mindless now of the noise he was making, raced down the tunnel toward the collection vault. There had been three of them. Two were accounted for. The last one was probably long gone by now. There probably was little or no time left before the launch. In the collection vault McGarvey snatched up the electronic trigger that Yegorov had dropped, and stuffing it in his pocket climbed the metal rungs up the side of the vault and pulled himself into the transporter. If need be, he told himself grimly, he would destroy the rocket if it actually started to lift off. A slightly built man dressed in civilian clothes, blood streaming down his face, was bunched up beside the bucket seat in front of the firing console. He rolled over and groaned. McGarvey nearly shot the man before he realized that he was no threat, and was probably very near death. Lights were flashing all over it fire control panel in a bewildering sequence of reds and greens and ambers. Whatever was happening was occurring at an increasingly rapid pace. “Answer me, you bastard” Collingwood’s voice boomed from the radio speaker. McGarvey found the radio console at the front right seat and yanked the microphone off its hook. “This is McGarvey. I’m in the transporter. The Russians are dead or gone, and so is Hunte. This thing looks like it’s ready to launch, get someone over here on the double” He threw down the microphone, undogged the main hatch, swung it open with a metallic clang, and turned back to Schey, gently turning the man over on his back and straightening out his legs. The man’s eyes fluttered open. “There isn’t much time” McGarvey said. “Do you understand” Schey’s eyes seemed to come into focus and he looked up at McGarvey. “Your friends are dead. How do I interrupt the firing sequence” The East German managed a tight little smile of triumph.

“It’s over” McGarvey said. “You’ve lost. How do we shut this goddamned thing down” Schey’s eyes closed and he gave a big shuddering gasp. At first McGarvey thought he was dead, but the man’s breathing steadied out. McGarvey got to his feet as the first of Collingwood’s people showed up at the hatch. “I don’t know what to do” he shouted. “This thing is on a countdown” The first technician through the hatch shoved McGarvey aside and quickly scanned the board. The second man came through and crowded in beside him. “They’ve got a timer on it” he snapped, pulling a screwdriver out of his pocket. The other man did the same and together they unfastened the dozen screws holding the firing control panel in place. The first man gingerly lifted the panel away from the console, stretching out the wires beneath. They both sucked air a second later. “Twelve seconds” one of them said. The other was pawing through the wires. He looked up. “It’s on a failsafe” he said.

“Impossible” the other man replied. “This sonofabitch is going to launch in another ten seconds, and there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it” McGarvey had backed up to the hatch, other technicians and security people crowding around the transporter. The two technicians at the console leapt up and bodily shoved McGarvey out the door. “Clear the area, this sonofabitch is about to launch” one of them shouted.

Everyone scattered. McGarvey rushed around to the side of the transport trailer, the umbilical cords snaking out from the tractor to an electrical panel beneath the missile. Baranov had planned something.

Whatever it was, it would be brilliant and devastating. What? He had taken a huge risk not only by having Kurshin and the others steal the missile, but by so openly displaying the depth of his intelligence information. Whatever target they had programmed the missile to hit would be important. London? Paris? Where?

The technicians and security people were halfway across the square.

Someone was shouting. The delay circuitry was failsafe, the technician had shouted. McGarvey pulled out the trigger for the plastique. The seconds were ticking. No time. Christ, there was no time! He tossed the trigger to the pavement and stepped forward to the four umbilical cords.

Each was connected to the firing panel by a thick electrical plug.

McGarvey grabbed one of the large cables and yanked it out of its socket. There were a lot of sirens. He yanked the second plug and the third. His time had run out. Ten seconds had to have elapsed. He yanked the last plug out of its socket at the same moment a big spark jumped from the contacts to the side of the trailer, and nothing happened. For several long seconds McGarvey stood there, his knees weak, his heart hammering in his chest. But nothing had happened. Nothing!

“The sonofabitch just pulled the plug” Phil Carrara, deputy director of operations, said, his voice tinged with a bit of awe.

“At that point he didn’t have anything to lose” Trotter replied.

“Except his life”

The two of them had ridden up to the seventh floor and when they stepped off the elevator they crossed directly to the DCI’s conference room adjacent to his office. It was a few minutes before eight in the morning, but Trotter, who’d gotten no sleep on the military jet over, was still on European time where it was early afternoon yesterday. He was dead tired. They were met in the anteroom by the director’s security people. Trotter turned over his pistol before they were allowed inside.

The room was long and broad, big windows looking out over the new section of headquarters which had just been completed the year before, and beyond, the rolling wooded hills of the old Bureau of Public Roads property. The DCI, Roland Murphy, who had retired from the Army as a major general to take the assistant directorship, was hunched over the long conference table looking at a series of maps and photographs. He was a very large man, with a bull neck, beefy arms, and thick eyebrows over deep-set eyes. He’d taken over as DCI two years ago after the death of Donald Powers. With him at the table were Lawrence Danielle, the new deputy director of central intelligence, and Howard Ryan, the Agency’s general counsel. In contrast to Murphy, Danielle was a small man with a permanently pinched expression on his face, and a voice that was so soft listeners often had to strain to hear him. He’d worked his way up through the ranks over the past twenty years, and had even served as an interim DCI a number of years ago before Powers had been hired for the job, and again for a short period before the president had talked the general into taking over the helm. Ryan was relatively new to the Agency. Like Carrara he had come over from the National Security Agency.

He was an extremely precise man, whose father ran one of New York’s top law firms. “This sort of excitement is better for the blood than corporate law” he was fond of saying. And he was sharp. They all looked up when Trotter and Carrara entered the room and approached the long table. “You look like hell” Murphy rumbled brusquely. “No sleep on the flight over, General” Trotter said. “I just got in, as a matter of fact”

“Coffee”

“Yes, sir. Ryan went over to the sideboard to pour him a cup from the silver service. Trotter’s eyes strayed to the maps and photographs. “Has Phil briefed you on the latest”

“No, sir” Trotter said, looking up. “Just that there have been some new developments overnight”

Actually Carrara had told him that this was a council of war. “That’s the understatement of the year” Murphy said, shaking his leonine head.

“I’ve got to see the president at nine-thirty, which gives us just a little over an hour to figure oui what the hell we’re going to do” Ryan came back with the coffee and handed it to Trotter. “Thanks” Trotter said. “What’s happened”

“First things first. What about this free lance of yours, McGarvey? Is he all right”

“Disappointed. He’s on his way back to Paris by now, I suspect. We had no reason to hold him”

“Kurshin just disappeared into thin air” Danielle asked, his voice soft. Trotter nodded glumly. “By the time we got everything sorted out, he was long gone. No trace whatsoever except for the latex mask he had worn. We found it along with Brad Allworth’s uniform in the transporter”

“We have a confirmation that the body the French police found along the railroad tracks outside of Paris was Allworth” Ryan said. “He was shot in the forehead at close range. Ninemillimeter slug. Almost certainly a Graz Buyra. The SDECE has been very cooperative”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing. McGarvey saved our asses” Murphy said.

“In a very big way”

“Sir” Trotter asked. “The technicians pulled that Pershing apart overnight. Its guidance system was reprogrammed just as you expected.

But the target profile was not for any city. No one could make any sense of it until they pulled the flight coordinates out of the inertial guidance system”

“Where” Trotter asked. Murphy glanced down at a message flimsy on the table.

“Latitude thirty-one degrees, five minutes north, and longitude thirty-five degrees, twenty-four minutes east. Too far north and east for it to be Tripoli” He turned the map around so that Trotter could see it, and he stabbed a blunt finger at a spot along the southern edge of the Dead Sea. “En Gedihe said. “More specifically the Israeli nuclear research facility eight miles from the town” Trotter didn’t understand, and it was evident on his face. “What is it” Danielle prompted. Everyone was lookin at him. Trotter felt as if he were on stage, his audience waiting for his next line. “From where I sit that doesn’t make much sense” he said. “Go on” Murphy ordered. “Israel has two such installations in addition to their facilities for enrichment and reprocessing of nuclear fuels, as well as at least one heavy water plant.’$ “Get to the point” Trotter glanced at the map. “We’re fairly certain that this was the big operation we were expecting from Baranov.

Kurshin is his handpicked man. Frankly I don’t think he’d bother with a simple research reactor”

“Why” Danielle asked. “For one thing, he placed Kurshin in a high-risk situation. He wouldn’t have done that for such meager pickings. In the second place, by reprogramming that missile he’s tipped his hand that tie’s got a damned good pipeline either into the manufacturer of the guidance system “Goodyear” Ryan interjected. “Yes. Either that or into the Pentagon itself” Danielle and Murphy exchanged glances. “The Pentagon” the DCI said. “Do we know who it is” Trotter asked. “Not yet, but the list is narrowing”

“But don’t you see, General, that’s my point. Whatever the KGB has got going in the Pentagon, and of course we’ve long suspected something like this, Baranov wouldn’t tip his hand merely to destroy one of Israel’s two research reactors.

Murphy sighed deeply and shook his head. “No, he wouldn’t”

“There’s more” Trotter asked. “You bet” Murphy replied. “Four days ago an NSA satellite picked up what was believed to be an alarm situation at the En Gedi facility. It was turned over to the Non-Proliferation Treaty Inspection Service. They sent two of their people over to have a look; one of them coincidentally was Lorraine Abbott who has done a little work for us in the past. The other was a Brit” Trotter said nothing.

“Scott Hayes, the Brit, reported that he was satisfied that the Israelis were telling the truth. Apparently a leak in one of the steam valves.

Nonradioactive”

“Dr. Abbott didn’t believe them”

“No. As a matter of fact she’s still over there snooping around. She’s convinced they’re lying. She has a feeling that whatever happened was a hell of a lot more important than a simple steam leak” Why”

“She’s being watched by the Mossad, and the Israelis have all but ordered her out of the country The clincher came out at the facility, though. She and Hayes were@ shown around by a man who identified himself as a Crises Management Team leader. Lev Potok. He’s Mossad. “What are they hiding”

Trotter asked. “Something important enough for Baranov to go after it”

Murphy said. “We think that Israel has a stockpile of battleready nuclear weapons” Ryan said. “We’ve suspected that for some time now.

But there’s been no proof..” Trotter stopped. “En Gedi” Murphy nodded. “That’s our best guess “

“Then the Russians know about it. Baranov would have to be sure about his information to take such a risk”

“And he won’t stop” Murphy said. “No.

“You and McGarvey are our resident Baranov experts” Murphy was saying.

Trotter was thinking ahead of the DCI. Baranov would certainly not stop with one failure. He would keep at it until he succeeded. With Israel’s nuclear capability destroyed there would be no stopping an all-out-Soviet-backed-attack. This time the Arabs would probably succeed, and the entire region would join the Soviet bloc-oil and all.

“The ball is in your court” Murphy said. “Why not tell the Israelis what we know” So that they could prepare themselves” the DCI asked.

Trotter nodded. Murphy shook his head. “No good. We’re in a very delicate balance over there, you know that, John. Almost anything could tip the scales one way or the other, and there’d be an all-out shooting war. It’s a gentleman’s agreement between us. Call it a politically necessary fiction. If we acknowledge to Israel that we know they have battleready nuclear weapons, they will be forced into doing something.

They would have to for their own sake. Just as we would be forced into demanding they dismantle those weapons”

“Which they would not do”

Trotter said. “No” the DCI agreed. “As I said, the ball is in your court. “I don’t know if McGarvey will agree to it”

“Convince him” Murphy said. “But his primary mission is going to have to be confirming that the Israelis actually do have nukes, and that they’re stored at En Gedi”

“We’re going to spy on our allies”

“It’s a tough world”

Kurshin held the telephone tightly to his ear as the secure connection to Moscow via the embassy’s satellite communications link was completed, and Baranov came on the line. He did not sound happy.

“What are you doing in Paris”

“I failed” Kurshin said simply. He was calling from a telephone booth at the end of a narrow side street off the Rue de la Fayette in an area of nice apartment buildings. “Yesl What about the others?”

“I disposed of the East German as you directed me to do. But Ivan was shot to death in the sewers”

Kurshin’s grip tightened on the telephone receiver. The man had come to the secondfloor window across the street. The line was silent for a long time, but Kurshin didn’t really mind. He was content for the moment to watch the man in the window above looking down at the street. He was evidently searching for something or someone. Here I am, Kurshin muttered to himself. “Tell me everything that happened, Arkasha”

Baranov was saying. “How did they know about the sewer? Did Schey say something to someone? Perhaps one of his friends”

“I don’t know, but there were two men in the sewers. One of them was wearing an Army uniform. Captain’s bars. But the other one The window curtains fell back and the man above was gone. “Yes” Baranov prompted.

Kurshin turned back to the telephone. “The other one knew my name”

“Impossible. “Nevertheless it is mm. And he knew your name. He said that you and he were old friends”

“All that in a dark sewer? You talked to him then. You perhaps became friends? So much so that you decided to spare his life? What, Arkasha?

Tell me, I am listening”

“I tried to kill him, and yes we had that discussion. But he was very good. He was willing to wait there in that tunnel with me to die when the rocket took off. “Which it did not. And you cannot tell me what this one looked like”

“Oh, yes” Kurshin said. “I did not leave the area. When I came up to where the car was waiting I drove immediately back to the square, to see … if he was successful”

“He was”

“Yes, he was” Kurshin said, the thought still terribly rankling. “He came out of the transporter and pulled the umbilical cords from the missile. Schey told us the launch was impossible to stop. But this one did it with his bare hands. There was a low, harsh sound on the telephone. Kurshin almost thought the KGB director was chuckling. “It must have come within a split second of the firing impulse, but the missile did not launch”

“You got a good look at him”

” Yes, I did, Comrade Chairman. A very good look. It is a face I shall never forget”

He looked up. The man had come back to the window. “In fact I am looking at him again this very moment, and as soon as I hang up I shall kill him. “What” Baranov suddenly screamed. “You are in Paris you’re calling from outside the embassy”

“Yes” Kurshin replied, the first inkling that he had made a mistake coming to him. “Describe him to me” Baranov ordered. Kurshin did. “You say you are looking at him now? Can he see you”

“I don’t think so” Kurshin said. The man had gone again from the window. “No, he is gone now”

“Then hang up the telephone, you idiot. The man you have described is Kirk McGarvey. And since you have already come up against him and are still alive, you may consider yourself extremely lucky”

“But “Get out of there now, Arkasha. We will meet twenty-four hours from now in the usual place. But go before it is too late”

The Soviet Union maintained no embassy in Israel, although they had been one of the first nations to recognize Israel’s legitimacy as a state in 1948. Instead, their affairs were looked after by the Soviet Interests Section of the Hungarian Embassy, a situation that was starting to come apart. For the past seventy-two hours, telephone calls in and out of the embassy had been closely monitored from the King David Hotel a block away. It was early afternoon. The other technicians were taking a break. Abraham Liebowitz, headphones on his ears, looked up as the tape recorder automatically came on. “It’s him again” he said. Lev Potok had been gazing out the window of their seventh-floor suite, thinking about Lorraine Abbott and her meddling.

He turned and hurried over to Liebowitz, taking the headphones from him.

“ … June thirtieth, yes I understand” the same voice as before was saying. He spoke English with a Russian accent. “It is vital now that a very close watch be kept, you understand this”

“ Yes. “We are to be advised of any unusual activity in or around the target facility. Of course you can well understand the need to keep our … friend advised of such happenings”

“Yes” the Russian said. Potok glanced down at the tape machine. The call was outgoing from the embassy. The man giving the instructions was obviously Hungarian. He was at the embassy, the other one was somewhere within the city. Liebowitz was on the other telephone speaking with their technician at the telephone exchange. He looked up. “We have the first three digits” he said. “They are the same as before” Potok nodded. They had picked up half a dozen calls like this one from the embassy to the same voice. So far, however, the calls had been as brief as they had been enigmatic, allowing the telephone people to trace only the first two or three digits of the number being called. “Now more than before this has become an extremely important project to him” the Hungarian said. “Especially after our German failure”

“Yes, I understand this. Everything will be as you ask” the Russian said. Potok held the earphones tighter. What German failure? he wondered. And what was the significance of the date in June? That was barely two weeks away. Liebowitz held up four fingers. The telephone system within Israel used only six digits. They were close now. “If something comes up you will use the normal contact procedures unless it is an emergency, and then you know what to do”

“Certainly” the Russian said. “But there may be others involved now, so we must be very careful”

“We’re well aware of the delicacy, just you be aware of the importance”

Liebowitz held up five fingers. He was grinning. “Enough,’” the Russian said. “I will hang up now. But it is you who must keep me advised of any changes” Hold on, Potok said to himself. “You forget yourself..” the embassy speaker said, but the other one interrupted him. “Don’t tell me my job. If there hadn’t been a failure we would be finished here. Don’t forget your position” The connection was broken. “Damn” Potok swore, yanking the earphones off his head, but Liebowitz was smiling triumphantly, and holding up six fingers. “We’ve got the sonofabitch”

he said. He turned back to the telephone. “Yes, go ahead” he said. He quickly scribbled an address on a pad of paper. “We owe you guys a dinner” he said. “A big dinner”

He hung up, ripping the paper off the pad and handing it to Potok. “It’s an apartment on King David Street not two blocks from here! Second floor in the rear” Potok grabbed his jacket, tore out of the room, and was halfway down the corridor by the time Liebowitz came running after him.

The elevator was on the ground floor so they took the stairs, pounding down them two at a time. On the ground floor they turned right and raced out to the rear parking lot” drive potok ordered, jumping in on the passenger side. He yanked the radio handset from its hook as Liebowitz got in behind the wheel, started the engine, and peeled rubber out of the parking lot. “Central, this is Cold Shoulder Operation, we need a backup immediately” Potok radioed. He read the address off the paper.

“We’ll have someone there within ten minutes” the radio dispatcher at Mossad’s communications center on Hamara Street in Tel Aviv said. They would probably be sending either local civil police or possibly someone from Knesset Security, but it didn’t matter. Potok wanted backup in case something went wrong. “We’re going in first, so tell them to watch out for us” Potok shouted. “Will do” Traffic was heavy, nevertheless it took Liebowitz just under two minutes to make it to the apartment building where he screeched to a halt half up on the sidewalk. Potok pulled out his gun and entered the building, Liebowitz, his gun drawn, right behind him. An old woman had come out of her ground-floor apartment. “Get back” Potok warned as he headed up the stairs. The woman, startled, stumbled back into her apartment and slammed the door.

Another door slammed upstairs and someone came running down the hall.

“Watch out” Potok shouted as he lurched left, flattening himself against the cracked, dirty plaster wall. Two shots were fired from above, the bullets smacking into the wall just above Liebowitz’s head.

Potok shoved forward and fired three shots in rapid succession. A car horn honked out on the street and someone shouted something from below, and then the apartment building fell silent. “You can either throw down your gun right now, or come out of here feet first” Potok shouted. “But you’re not getting away. He glanced back at Liebowitz crouched below him on the stairs. After a moment he nodded, and girding himself leapt up the last few steps into the narrow corridor. A figure of a man was just disappearing around the corner at the end of the hall when Potok snapped off a shot, the bullet hitting the man in the back of his left leg just behind his knee. He cried out and crashed to the floor. Potok rushed forward and coming around the corner he dropped into a shooter’s stance, both hands on his pistol trained on the center of the man’s forehead.

The Russian was short and squat with thick dark hair and narrow pig’s eyes. With one hand he was holding his leg, in the other was a big pistol. He was looking up at Potok, a thin sneer on his lips. He started to raise his pistol. “Is it worth it, Comrade” Potok said evenly.

Liebowitz was just off his left shoulder. In the distance they could hear a lot of sirens. The Russian’s eyes flicked to him, and after a tense moment he shook his head and slumped back, letting the gun slip from his hand. Potok stepped forward and gingerly kicked the gun out of the Russian’s reach. “Call an ambulance he told Liebowitz. “But keep everyone else out of here. We don’t want to disturb any evidence of this one’s drug dealings, do we”

It was late evening and in the past three hours they had made very little progress. The bullet had been removed from the Russian’s leg, his wound patched up, and he had been taken immediately to the military side of Lod Airport outside of Tel Aviv. AMAN, Israel’s Military Intelligence Service, had of course agreed to cooperate with the Mossad and had lent the use of one of the prisoner interrogation units. The building was off on its own and absolutely secure. A search of the apartment had turned up nothing more than the Russian’s forged Israeli passport under the name of Norman Katz. But Mossad files across town had come up with his photograph and a brief dossier identifying him as Viktor Nikolaievich Voronsky, a minor KGB legman who had last been spotted working in Damascus. He had apparently disappeared from view six months ago, but he had been considered of such minor importance that no search had been made for him.

Voronsky sat in an ordinary wooden chair across the table from Liebowitz. He had been given no drugs for his wound, and it was evident on his face that he was in considerable pain. Potok leaned against the door on the opposite side of the small smoke-filled room. So far they had not revealed the fact that they knew Voronsky’s real name, or that they had been monitoring Ins telephone conversations for the past several days. “Just your name” Liebowitz started again patiently. “I’ve told you a hundred times, you bastards, my name is … “Voronsky” Potok interrupted from where he stood. The Russian’s head snapped up, his eyes opening wide for just a moment, but then narrowing. He shrugged and sat back in his chair. “So, ji4ck you” he said in Russian “And your mother” Potok replied in the same language. Again surprise showed on Voronsky’s face. Potok came forward, pulling the extra chair around so that he could straddle it, his arms draped over the back. “Viktor Nikolaievich, you are in very deep shit at this moment. But I suppose you know that” Voronsky shrugged. “Deport me” Potok smiled. “Oh, no, Niki, it is not going to be that easy, unless of course you wish to cooperate with us”

“I’m a spy, if that’s what you want. I will be exchanged within thirty days in any event. We have a number of your friends rotting at this moment in Damascus. You can’t believe the conditions Potok smiled gently again. It stopped the Russian. “Ali, but you should ask some of your PLO terrorist friends what our internment camps are Ue” The Russian looked to Liebowitz. “I demand to speak to someone from my interest section in the Hungarian Embassy” he said. Liebowitz spread his hands. “Seems to me that you’ve already done enough talking with them, Comrade Voronsky. “What are you talking about? What is this”

“We’re gangsters, Niki” Potok said. “Isn’t that what you’ve been calling us for the past ten years or so”

“Then I demand to speak with your supervisor. I want these proceedings recorded” Voronsky glanced at the tape recorder set up on the table.

“Just a few questions” Potok said. He nodded at Liebowitz who switched on the tape machine. I I … June thirtieth, yes I understand”

Voronsky’s voice came from the speaker. Liebowitz reached out and switched off the machine. “Let’s begin with that date, Niki. June thirtieth. What is going to happen on that day? Something very bad for Israel” Voronsky reared back as if he had been slapped, the sudden movement hurting his leg, and he nearly cried out in pain. “Sonofabitch … I demand my rights”

“What rights”

“Under Israeli and international law Potok was shaking his head.

“Israeli law applies only to Israeli citizens. Not you, Niki. And we do not recognize your so-called international law. But then neither do you.

Here you are completely beyond any law. June thirtieth”

Voronsky shook his head. Liebowitz shifted the tape forward. 11 …

advised of any unusual activity in or around the target facility”

“The target, Niki, is it going to be attacked on June thirtieth? Is that it” Potok asked. He nodded for Liebowitz again. Now more than before this has become an extremely important project to him. Especially after our German failure. “Who is this man spoken of, Niki? And what German failure? What happened in Gennany” Voronsky was still shaking his head.

Potok got up from his chair, withdrew his pistol, cocked the hammer, and, before Voronsky could move, jammed the barrel into the side of the Russian’s head. Liebowitz jumped up and tried to stop him. It was part of the routine.

“Nyetthe Russian cried. “Talk to us, Niki. his all we ask”

“Lev” Liebowitz said urgently. “If you don’t want to watch, then get the hell out of here, but I’m going to blow this bastard’s brains all over this cell unless he talks to me”

“Lev” Liebowitz said again, pulling Potok aside. “Outside. Now” There was something in Liebowitz’s tone, in the expression on his face, that penetrated. Potok stepped back, and nodded. Something was wrong. It wasn’t part of the script. Outside the cell, the door closed, Liebowitz was shaking. “The German failure they talked about. I know what it is”

“Yes”

“It was on the news, for God’s sake. But it didn’t mean anything to me until just now. I swear ““That””

“The terrorists at Ramstein Air Force Base. They stole a Pershing missile. Set it up downtown” Potok suddenly did see it all, and he could feel the blood draining from his face. “En Gedi”

“Yes” Liebowitz said. “They know! The bastards know, and they’re going to try again There was a tremendous crash and the sounds of something breaking from within the cell. Potok clawed the door open in time to see that Voronsky had smashed the tape recorder on the floor and had a long, jagged shard of plastic casing in his right hand. “No” Potok shouted, leaping forward, but he was too late. Voronsky in a last desperate act drew the edge of the plastic shard across his neck, once, twice, a third time, blood spurting everywhere as he sliced through major arteries, and his breath suddenly giving a big slobbering gurgle as he actually managed to cut through his windpipe.

McGarvey had arrived at Tel Aviv’s Lod airport shortly before six in the evening. At seven sharp he paid off his cabbie and strode into the Uri Dan Hotel, his single leather overnight bag slung over his shoulder. On the flight over from Paris he had asked himself a dozen times why he had agreed to Trotter’s assignment. And each time he came up with the same answer: Baranov. It was an unfinished business for him.

The Russian would not give up so easily. And since Kurshin had disappeared, it was a safe bet that he would be involved in whatever else happened. “Baranov’s handmaiden perhaps” an extremely strungout Trotter had said. “But Kurshin in his own fight is a very accomplished man. A very dangerous man”

“So I understand” McGarvey said dryly.

They had met this time at a small anonymous sidewalk cafe on the left bank. It was noon and the place was crowded. No one paid any attention to them. “They’ll try again. I don’t know where or how, but I do know the target”

“Not Tripoli” Trotter glanced around at the other patrons in the cafe and at traffic along the busy Boulevard St. Germain. “En Gedi” he said softly. “In the Middle East somewhere” McGarvey asked. He’d never heard of the place. “Israel. South shore of the Dead Sea”

“What’s there” Again Trotter hesitated. “Ostensibly a research reactor”

“Ostensibly” Trotter leaned forward. “Kirk, this is top-secret information. If you open your mouth at the wrong time or place they’ll have your ass” McGarvey said nothing. “We think it’s a weapons stockpile”

“Nuclear” Trotter nodded. “Then it’s true after all” Again Trotter nodded. McGarvey looked away, across the boulevard as a truck rumbled past. “It’s something Baranov would go after”

“We think so” Trotter said. “We’d like you to stop him. McGarvey had managed a tight smile and looked back at his old friend. “And what else, John”

“We’re not sure about the stockpile theory. We want you to confirm it”

“How”

“You can start with Dr. Lorraine Abbott”

The Ufi Dan, fight on the beach, was one of Tel Aviv’s largest and best hotels. Crossing the big lobby McGarvey automatically scanned the mostly casually dressed people coming and going, immediately picking out a small, dark complected man in shirtsleeves obviously watching a tall, goodlooking blonde woman seated alone in the cocktail lounge. He had only briefly glanced at the woman, but as he came up to the desk he looked back again. “Sir” the desk clerk asked politely. “McGarvey.

Reservations have been made” The clerk punched his name into the reservations computer, looking up a moment later. “Kirk McGarvey”

“Right. “Yes, sir, we have your reservation. And a package has arrived for you from your embassy. If I may see your passport, sir” McGarvey handed it over. His gun and a few other things had been sent ahead in the diplomatic pouch. “Do you have a Dr. Abbott registered here”

“Yes, sir” McGarvey motioned across the lobby to the open cocktail lounge. “I haven’t seen her in years. Is that her over there? The blonde” The desk clerk gave him an odd look, but then nodded. “Yes, sir, that is Dr. Abbott. If you would just sign here, please” McGarvey had his bag sent up to his room, and with his package in hand angled across the lobby toward the cocktail lounge, passing the man in shirtsleeves, who looked idly up at him. McGarvey stopped. “You know, pal, it’s considered impolite to stare” The man just looked at him, and McGarvey turned and continued across to the lounge and around the railing to Lorraine Abbott’s table. She looked up at him, a questioning expression on her face. “You don’t look like a physicist” he said. Her eyes widened slightly, and her nostrils flared. “Neither do you”

McGarvey laughed. “That’s because I’m not. May I join you”

“I think not” she said, starting to gather her purse and rise. “I bring you greetings from the general” She stopped. “The general” she asked.

“Roland Murphy” It took her just a beat to catch her breath. “Then someone is listening” she said, sitting back. “Yes, they are. May I sit down”

“Of course” she said absently. “I don’t think I caught your name”

“McGarvey. My friends call me Kirk” He reached across the table and they shook hands. “Mine call me Dr. Abbott” she said. “What can I do for you, and the general, Mr. McGarvey”

“First of all, are you aware that you’re being watched” She nodded over her shoulder. “I think his name is Larry. Mossad. They’ve been back there ever since “En Gedi” he finished the sentence for her. “Yes”

she said, looking at him with renewed interest, her right eyebrow raising. “But if you know the significance of that, then you must have come here to tell me something. McGarvey decided that she was a lot like his ex-wife Kathleen; outwardly haughty and self-assured, beautifully coiffed, made up and dressed, which he thought might be nothing more than a cover-up for a slight inferiority complex. Women were not supposed to be physicists. At least not beautiful ones. “Do-you read the newspapers, Doctor? Watch television news” The questions startled her.

She nodded. “Then you are aware of what happened recently in West Germany. The business concerning a terrorist attack on a Pershing missile”

“I think I may have seen something or other” she said vaguely, still not catching his drift. “The missile had been reprogrammed to strike En Gedi” She sucked in her breath, a little color coming to her lightly tanned high cheeks. “Why”

“I was hoping you could tell me that” McGarvey said. He leaned forward in his chair. “What do you think is going on out there” She glanced over his shoulder toward where the Mossad legman had been seated, but he was gone. McGarvey had spotted him leaving a minute ago. “He’s run off to report that you’re having a drink with a so far unidentified man”

McGarvey said. “But I asked you a question”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. McGarvey, or whoever the hell you are. But I think this conversation has gone as far as it’s going to go “The general is waiting for your call, Doctor. But please do it quickly. I think we’re not going to have much time here. She hesitated, obviously torn between wanting to believe he was who he presented himself to be, and reluctance to discuss these highly secret matters so openly. “Let me tell you first” McGarvey said. “We think that the Israelis have hid in or very near their nuclear installation at En Gedi their entire stockpile of battleready nuclear weapons. And we think that the incident our satellite picked up last week may have involved a Soviet penetration of that secret. “oh, Christ” Lorraine Abbott said. “Yes” McGarvey replied. “Oh, Christ”