Joshuas Hammer

CHAPTER SIX

In the ten days since the President had given his approval to the operation being called Meteor, the mood on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters had gone from one of anger and disbelief to one of quiet acceptance. If bin Laden had the nuclear device, and that was still a big if in a lot of people’s minds, then they had no choice except to send an emissary.

McGarvey sat in a window seat near the back of a half filled shabby Ariana Afghan Airlines 727 inbound for Kabul’s International Airport. It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and the flight out of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates was already an hour late. But no one aboard, most of them businessmen, a few of them diplomats from India and Germany, was in any rush to arrive. Afghanistan was not a tourist destination. He’d been thinking about Katy and their last night together. She’d clung very close to him, but she refused to press him for details. He was going out of the country, he couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about his assignment, and he’d already begun to withdraw to that special place of his where he went to distance himself from his friends and family. She was not a stupid woman, she had an idea where he was going and why. At Trumble’s funeral in Minneapolis last week, she’d been impressed to see a tear roll down her husband’s cheek, but she’d said nothing about that either, though just now McGarvey realized how hard it must have been for her not to reach out for him, to hold him and console him; tell him that everything would be okay. He probably would have snapped at her, he thought, and she probably had known that too.

He was torn in two directions, as he had been for most of his life. On the one hand he loved his ex-wife with everything in his soul; he wanted them to have a life together. A real life, because he had some alternatives. He didn’t have to go out into the field, almost no DDO before him had. In fact he didn’t even have to stay with the CIA. He could always go back to teaching Voltaire, maybe back at the small college in Delaware where he’d taught before. Or, he had enough money so that he could retire; they could travel, just be together.

Who the hell am I kidding, he asked himself. He could see Alien Trumble’s face in his mind’s eye. The man had no names, no conditions.

Elizabeth had come back from Paris for the funeral, and dealing with her had been even more difficult than her mother, because she was more direct. Word had spread around the DO that bin Laden was on the move and that her father was probably going after him. But no one outside of a handful of people knew the details.

“Otto won’t tell me what’s going on, and I suppose you’re not going to make it any easier for me to find out, are you, Daddy?”

“Just watch yourself, will you, sweetheart,” McGarvey said distantly. They were at the airport in Minneapolis to catch her flight back. She’d already said goodbye to her mother who stood a few feet away talking with some of Trumble’s family.

“Is there anything you want me to take back to Tom?” Liz asked. She was a pretty young woman of twenty-three with a round face, short blond hair and electric-green, inquisitive, sometimes mischievous eyes. McGarvey pulled himself back to the present.

“Things might get a little dicey in the next few weeks, so keep your head down, okay? Don’t take any chances.”

She smiled wryly and glanced over at her mother. “What’s Mother say?”

McGarvey shrugged. It was none of her business; she was trying to draw him out further. “She’s okay.”

She nodded. Her mother and father were her world, but they had decided not to tell her they were getting remarried. Not until this was over. “Give ‘em hell, Dad,” she said seriously, then she gave him a peck on the cheek, waved goodbye to her mother, and headed for the jetway.

He could see her reflection in the glass of the window. I am what I am, he thought A leopard cannot change its spots. And yet for a brief moment he felt a genuine stab of pain thinking what he was jeopardizing. What he had been jeopardizing all of his professional life.

Below, the mountains spread to a broad plateau and he could see the sprawling city of nearly two million people, and beyond it the international airport five miles to the northeast. Kabul, which was at an elevation slightly higher than Denver’s, was obscured by a pale brown haze and looked just as drab and colorless as the gray and brown countryside. After the Russians had pulled out in ‘89 and the Taliban had taken over, life in Afghanistan had become dreary and brutish. Women had to be covered head to toe, and they could not hold any jobs, not even as medical doctors. It was one of many cat eh-22s. Women could not be examined by male doctors, and since there were no female doctors, women were never Heated for any sickness or injury. The death rate among the female population was becoming horrendous, yet the Taliban ruling party did nothing about it, nor would it allow much of anything to be done by outside agencies. The entire nation of sixteen million fiercely proud people was spiraling downward into a dark age, its borders all but sealed off to the outside world, which for the most part seemed content to allow Afghanistan to self-destruct in civil war.

It was a dark country, McGarvey thought. A brooding place, filled with secrets and repressions and death; a perfect place for a man such as bin Laden and his fanatical followers to wage their jihad against the West.

Coming in, the American-built airport looked like any other around the world; long paved runways, a large fairly modern terminal and control tower, maintenance hangars, warehouses. But there were very few jetliners on the ground, and only a handful of cars and a few trucks in the parking lot. Definitely not right for a city this size; it was as if the place were holding its breath, waiting.

He closed his eyes as they touched down with a jolt and a sharp bark of tires, putting his family and that life completely behind him. Divorcing himself completely from one life of normal routines, for the other more dangerous existence in which the slightest misjudgement, the tiniest error, the briefest hesitation at the wrong time, the most innocuous miscalculation could cost him his life. It was a self defense mechanism, an instinct for survival in which he fell back on a set of skills that he’d honed over twenty five years in the business; automatic reflexes, an almost preternatural awareness of his surroundings and the dangers they held. When he opened his eyes again, the transformation was nothing less than startling. Had the French businessman seated next to him been watching he would have sworn that his seatmate on landing was not the same who’d flown from Dubai. But then the only differences were in McGarvey’s cold, gray-green eyes, and in the way he held himself; loosely erect, yet like a coiled spring ready to strike. He was back in the field.

McGarvey’s only luggage was a small overnight bag and a laptop computer in a leather case, both of which he had carried aboard. Bags in hand, he followed the line of passengers across the tarmac into the customs hall of the terminal. Armed military guards seemed to be everywhere, and unlike the security people in many airports he’d flown to or from, these men looked as if they meant business. They were alert, their attention constantly shifting from passenger to passenger as if they expected an attack to come at any second. Nothing sloppy here, McGarvey thought.

When his turn came he laid his bags on the low table in front of a uniformed customs inspector and handed over his passport The man looked up comparing the photograph to McGarvey’s face.

“Wait here,” he said, and he walked off In a military officer who was talking on a phone at a standup desk. When the officer was finished the customs inspector handed him McGarvey’s passport

The customs hall was a long, narrow room with windows facing the parked airplane, several doors leading to offices, a set of large swinging doors through which incoming baggage was brought in and a pair of turnstiles leading to a corridor marked: TO terminal in Arabic and French. A top line of print that had probably been in Russian was painted out. A pair of armed guards, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, flanked the exit They were checking everybody’s entry cards.

The military officer examined McGarvey’s passport and CIA-forged visa stamp, looked over at him and then made another brief phone call. When he was finished he came over with the customs inspector. Neither of them smiled, though the military officer didn’t seem as nervous or as belligerent as the inspector, and his British-accented English was much better.

“What is the purpose of your visit to Afghanistan?”

“Business,” McGarvey said. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that one of the soldiers at the turnstiles was watching them.

“This is a diplomatic passport. What sort of business?”

“Actually I’ve been sent over by my government to inspect our old embassy building.”

The officer’s thin lips compressed beneath his luxuriant dark mustache. “Open your bags.”

McGarvey did as he was told, and the officer rifled through the clothes, which included a pair of soft boots and bush jacket. He pulled out a toiletries kit and looked through it, then picked up a small leather pouch.

“What is this?”

“A camera,” McGarvey said.

The officer handed it to the customs inspector. “There are no cameras permitted in Afghanistan.” He turned his attention to the computer. “Switch it on.”

McGarvey did it, and Windows 98 came up on the LCD screen. A few seconds later the icons appeared. He brought up the file manager and clicked on one named: emb-k. A picture of the U.S. embassy in Kabul was displayed.

The officer was impressed despite himself. He gave McGarvey an appraising look. “You will need permission from the Ministry of Security before you can inspect this building.”

McGarvey held his gaze for a beat, then nodded. “I understand.”

“You will also be required to have an escort.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Take everything out of your pockets.”

McGarvey complied, laying his ballpoint, wallet, handkerchief, comb, several hundred dollars and change, penknife and satellite phone on the counter.

The officer eyed the money, but picked up the phone which was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. “What is this?”

“A telephone.”

“Portable phones are not permitted in Afghanistan,” he said, and he handed it to the customs inspector.

“In that case I’ll stay right here until the next flight leaves, and I’ll be on it”

“It is the law.” The officer straightened up.

“You have my camera, but I’ll keep my phone.” McGarvey took a hundred dollar bill from the pile and slid it across the counter.

“What is the meaning of this?” the officer said, recoiling.

“It’s for my telephone permit,” McGarvey said with a straight face. “It’s the same in most other countries. The money goes to your Ministry of Communications. It’s a licensing fee, do you understand?”

The military officer motioned sharply for one of the guards to come over. “Search hint.”

McGarvey spread his arms and legs, and the young bearded soldier quickly frisked him. When he was finished he stepped back and shook his head. McGarvey noticed that the hundred dollar bill was gone.

The tension in the hall was very high. Some of the other armed guards, seeing that something was going on, had unslung their rifles. Most of the other passengers had already cleared customs and were gone, but the few who were left behind looked over, then quickly averted then eyes. No one wanted to get involved.

After another few seconds, the officer took the satellite phone from the inspector and laid it down on the counter with McGarvey’s other things. “A car and driver will take you directly to the Inter-Continental, Mr. McGarvey. Do not leave the hotel until you are given permission to do so. It is you who must understand.”

It was the mistake McGarvey had waited for. He’d not mentioned the hotel, nor was it listed on his travel documents. Bin Laden’s reach was still in place with the Taliban religious government.

“Yes, sir.”

The customs inspector filled out an entry permit, inserted it in McGarvey’s passport and laid it on the counter. He and the military officer watched as McGarvey gathered his things, closed his bag and computer and headed for the turnstiles. He could feel every eye on him. But he was here in Kabul at bin Laden’s sufferance, and for the time being no one would interfere with him.

A filthy, battered Mercedes taxi was waiting outside the terminal for him when McGarvey emerged into the glaringly bright sunlight. There wasn’t a cloud in the crystal clear blue sky. The haze he’d seen from the air was not noticeable here on the ground. It was very hot, nearly a hundred degrees, but very dry, and the air smelted like a combination of burned kerojet, diesel exhaust fumes and something else, like burning charcoal in a backyard barbecue. A dusty, ancient, foreign smell with strange undertones.

On the drive into the city, made long because the roads were not very good, and because the young cabbie took his time, McGarvey caught his first good look at Kabul, which had been heavily damaged in the civil war and continued fighting since the Russians had left. The sprawling city, nestled in between rugged, treeless mountains was composed primarily of what looked like adobe huts and other small buildings hidden behind mud walls. They passed over the Kabul River several times, coming into the city center, but at this time of the year it was more like a muddy, dried up creek or open sewer than an actual stream. Nearly everything was old, ramshackle and run-down, even in a part of the city center he was able to see as they passed. Most of the bomb damage had not been repaired, and in some places the rubble hadn’t even been cleared from the streets and the cabbie had to maneuver around it. On either side of Bebe-Maihro Street were rat warrens of kiosks, shops and stalls along narrow dirt streets. It was Sunday afternoon, but traffic was very light, not many people out and about. McGarvey got the impression that people were hiding behind the walls of their compounds, waiting for something, or perhaps simply existing one day to the next. He’d never been to a place that seemed so cheerless, so devoid of life, so filled with dark for boding and the hairs at the nape of his neck bristled.

Coming in he had caught a glimpse of the old U.S. embassy building, but from a block away he could not see any real damage, though he spotted a military jeep and at least two soldiers out front.

Pushunistan Square at the city’s center seemed mostly intact, the four-story government buildings in reasonably good repair, though everything he’d seen so far that wasn’t shot up or broken was in bad need of paint or at least a good cleaning. There was more traffic here, and the parking areas in front of the buildings were filled with battered Russian cars from the seventies, a few older-model American cars and a number of Russian and Chinese jeeps.

A few minutes later the cabbie pulled into the driveway of the Inter-Continental. He turned around and gave McGarvey a shy, warm, toothless smile. “Mista, you will pay in American dollars?”

There was no official exchange rate between the afghani and the dollar, and in fact most of the economy now was based on what little foreign currency there was available. McGarvey handed the kid a twenty dollar bill, which seemed to make him happy. He held out another twenty.

“Is there a decent restaurant somewhere nearby?”

The cabbie took the question very seriously, and after a couple of seconds, he nodded and smiled again, then took the money. “This hotel has very good food. The very best You should stay here. You can get alcohol, and they have television.”

“Right,” McGarvey said, and returned the young man’s smile. An Afghani might slit your throat because you were the enemy, but first he would make sure that you were happy and that he hadn’t offended you. Honor was just as important to them as their pride, which was intense.

The Inter-Continental, which had been one of the only decent hotels by Western standards in Kabul, was now the only hotel for Westerners. Once upon a time it had been among the best public buildings in the city, but despite obvious attempts to keep up, the hotel was run-down and even shabby.

The lobby was deserted, and the only clerk at the long reception desk had a long, sad face behind his thick beard, as if he were getting set at any moment to burst into tears apologizing for the sorry state of the hotel. McGarvey signed the registration slip with his own pen. His gold VISA card was refused and the clerk would only accept two hundred dollars in cash for one night, being vague about payment for the remainder of McGarvey’s stay, which was supposed to be for five nights.

“We have a most excellent restaurant on the third floor,” the clerk said earnestly. “It is open tonight from eight until the curfew at ten.” He seemed suddenly very proud. Like the cabbie, he wanted to please. He handed McGarvey the key for 411.

“Can I make a telephone call from my room?”

The clerk looked at him as if he was from another planet. “Where do you wish to call?”

“The Ministry of Security.”

“Oh,” the clerk said, relieved, and he grinned. “In the morning you can make arrangements for your call.” But he wouldn’t be here in the morning, and the clerk knew it.

“Are there any messages for me?”

“No, there are no messages,” the clerk said. “Mista, why don’t you stay here in this fine hotel tonight. You will see that our hospitality is very good. You will enjoy your stay with us. Guaranteed. Eat some good food, get some good rest after your long journey. These things are very good for you.”

“Thank you. I’ll do just that.” McGarvey picked up his bags and crossed the lobby to toe single elevator that was working. The other two had our of order signs in Arabic, French and English posted on them.

As the door closed, McGarvey looked back at the reception desk in time to see the clerk in heated discussion with three other men, these in military uniforms, who’d evidently been waiting in back. One of them was the military officer from the airport customs hall. At the last moment the officer looked up and his eyes met McGarvey’s. Even at a distance of a hundred feet the expression on his face was clearly bleak. McGarvey might be an important guest of Osama bin Laden, who himself was a guest of the Taliban, but he wasn’t welcome.

McGarvey’s room was small but more or less clean, although there was only one pillow on the large bed, and only one hand towel in the bathroom. But there was plenty of hot water and half a bar of very strong disinfectant soap.

It was nearly nine o’clock by the time he had cleaned up and had a cigarette on a small balcony that looked toward the city center. Already the temperature had dropped to the high sixties, and it was still going down.

He went downstairs to what had once been a good restaurant. Two thirds of it was blocked off by wooden screens, and none of the handful of patrons bothered looking up as he walked in and was immediately seated alone at a window table by an old man in a dirty apron who kept staring at him.

The only items available on the menu were a stew of vegetables, lamb kebabs and the flat bread called nan. There were only two bottles of Heineken left, according to the waiter, and each cost eleven dollars for which McGarvey had to pay cash on the spot. But the beer was cool, and the food was warm, plentiful and very good.

At ten o’clock sharp the waiters came out with the checks, and cleared the tables in a big hurry, although not everyone had finished eating. It was the law, McGarvey’s waiter explained. In any event it was time for all good and pious people to go home for their evening prayers before bed.

Back upstairs McGarvey changed into khaki trousers, a thick turtleneck sweater over a tee shirt, thick socks and desert boots. He put a few packs of cigarettes in his bush jacket and laid it over a chair, then opened his computer on the bed. He removed the six small screws from the laptop’s back panel with his penknife, and took out his Walther PPK and one spare magazine of ammunition. He resecured the back panel, cycled the weapon’s ejector slide several times to make sure it worked smoothly, reloaded the gun, and then dropped his trousers and taped the gun and spare magazine high on his inner thigh.

When he was finished he took his cell phone out on the balcony where he lit a cigarette. Someone would be coming for him tonight, there was little doubt of it after the way the cabbie and desk clerk had treated him. The only questions were: who was coming for him, how thorough would their search be and how far up in the mountains was bin Laden’s encampment?

He hit the speed dial, the phone took a couple of seconds to acquire the proper satellite, and the call went through. It was eleven at night here, and although the city was lit, it was mostly in darkness, as was the surrounding countryside. It was two in the afternoon in Langley. Two different worlds, McGarvey thought. One of simple insanity, and the other, more complex, but just as insane. There were no absolute truths.

His call was answered on the first ring. “Oh, boy, am I ever glad to hear from you,” Otto gushed. “They didn’t take your phone. That’s good.”

“I gave them the camera so they wouldn’t come away empty-handed,” McGarvey told him. It’s exactly what they figured would happen, and he had no need of the camera in any event.

“Has anyone made contact with yon yet?”

“No, but I think it’ll be tonight.”

“Standby, I’m going to calibrate,” Otto said.

Because of the curfew there was no traffic on the streets, but McGarvey was surprised that absolutely nothing was moving downtown, not even military vehicles. Otto was back a minute later.

“You’re at the hotel. West side. Looks like twelve meters, plus or minus one, above ground level. Fourth floor?”

“Four-eleven,” McGarvey confirmed. He rubbed his left side where he had lost one of his kidneys a few years ago in an operation that had almost cost him his life. The cavity wasn’t so empty now. Six months ago McGarvey had quietly implemented Otto’s idea of surgically implanting a small GPS homing chip, not much larger than a postage stamp including its long-life battery, in every CIA field officer’s body. The GPS chips were uplinked with the National Reconnaissance Office’s Jupiter satellite system that had been ostensibly put up to monitor military communications over India and Pakistan. But the satellites were steerable, and in fact could be positioned to receive the GPS chip signals from almost anywhere in the world. It could be seen as a provocative act from the right point of view, just like a police informant wearing a wire, but already it had proved its worth, especially in Iraq.

In one instance infrared KH11 satellite surveillance had spotted three Special Revolutionary Guard troop trucks heading out of Baghdad at high speed toward a suspected chemical weapons development laboratory that a CIA field officer was in the process of penetrating. Word had been sent to the agent to get out, and he’d made it with more than a half hour to spare. Without the GPS chip to locate his actual position Ops would never have known where he was, and word for him to pull out would not have been sent. He would have been captured or killed.

The chips were not meant for administrative personnel; there was a certain danger of complications from the operation because of the batteries. But McGarvey had one implanted in his side because what was good enough for his field officers was good enough for him. And despite his promises to Kathleen, and to himself, he knew deep in his soul exactly who and what he was. He was not ready to retire from the field for good, and probably never would be. It was like a narcotic, intelligence work; or, according to a number of good men who had gone before him, like a religion. You had to take it on faith that what you were doing was good and right. Once you went down that path there was no turning back. At least that’s how he’d felt then; he wasn’t as sure now.

“How is it over there?” Otto asked.

“Dark,” McGarvey replied. “Anything new on the shooters?”

“They showed up in Havana, just like Rudolph thought they would, but then they disappeared, like you predicted. Chances are they’re already on their way back. The big question, kimo sabe, is where is back!” Otto hesitated a moment. “But there’s another problem coming your way.”

“The Carl Vinson?” “Correctamundo. The battle group is already in the Gulf of Oman, though nobody is admitting it to us. Could be they’re planning an end run.” “Not until I’m out of here,” McGarvey said, wondering if he really believed that himself. “Take it to Murphy, I want my back covered.”

“Will do,” Otto said. “But there is some good news in all this. Liz went back to Paris and started making a lot of noise, so Dick had Dave Whittaker pull her back here. They put her down in Ops.”

“She’s not cleared for Meteor.”

Otto chuckled, happily. “She’s the boss’s daughter, you can’t keep anything secret from her.”

There was no use fighting the inevitable, McGarvey told himself. And there was nothing he could do about it now. “Okay, keep an eye on her.”

“Dick Yemm is on it. “After Alien and his family, nobody is taking any chances around here.” Again Otto hesitated. “Oh, and Mac, congratulations.”

“For what?”

“You know,” Otto said playfully. “I think it’s great, that’s all. Just super, ya know.” He meant Mac and Katy getting back together.

“Thanks,” McGarvey said, but he didn’t know if he meant that either. He’d always managed to keep his family and personal life in a separate, very secure compartment when he was in the field. Looking across the dark city toward the even darker, bleak mountains, he was sorry that his secret place had been reopened. He suddenly felt very vulnerable, and very much alone out here.

“Watch yourself, Mac.”

“Right,” McGarvey said. “You too.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

McGarvey had been on the go for two days, catching only snatches of sleep here and there, mostly on airplanes, but he didn’t feel too bad yet. It was a few minutes after midnight when “be stubbed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. He’d been sitting in the darkness by the window looking down at the deserted street since he’d gotten off the phone with Otto, trying to clear his mind of his family.

A dark blue Volkswagen van appeared around the corner a block away, drove directly to the hotel and pulled into the driveway, disappearing under the overhang. From his position he could not see if anyone was getting out and coming into the hotel. But after a minute when the van did not drive off, he turned away from the window, switched on the bedside light, and put on his bush jacket.

He slipped the safety chain off and opened the door. The elevator was on its way up. His bag was repacked and sitting on the bed with the laptop computer. He pulled the chair away from the window, placed it in the circle of light and sat down, crossing his legs. The first few seconds of encounters like these were always the most dangerous because no one knew what to expect. He was offering them no surprises; sitting in plain view, his hands resting on the arms of the chair, his door open. No threat, no menace, no confrontation here.

The hotel was very quiet. He could hear the elevator arrive and the shuffling of several people coming down the hall.

Afghani mujahedeen, warriors of God, were as a rule a kind, but trigger happy-people, made that way because of more than twenty years of continuous righting since the Russians had invaded in ‘79 and the ongoing civil war that had been raging since the Russians finally pulled out in ‘89. Be careful with them, Mac, his DO briefing team had warned him. If you make a threatening move, if you piss them off, they’re going to shoot first and beg your forgiveness later. If you don’t make it in one piece bin Laden might throw a fit, but he won’t blame his own people, he’ll blame you, and expect that if we’re serious we’ll send somebody else who knows their customs.

They don’t separate their religion from their politics, and they don’t understand anybody who does. So watch yourself on that score too.

But if you show a weakness, any sign of it, they’ll jump on that too. Push them, and they’ll react violently. Make a mistake about religion, and they’ll pop off. Cower, and they’ll run you over.

Otto had walked in on one session, and he hopped from one foot to the other. “You gotta act like you know something they don’t, just like stroking my computers, ya know. That’s the secret.”

A husky figure dressed in Russian combat boots, baggy trousers and some sort of long, duty tunic over which he wore a long vest, appeared in the doorway. He was armed with a Kalashnikov rifle, and his face was covered by a dark balaclava. He swept his rifle left to right, then charged into the room. Two others similarly dressed appeared in the corridor behind him.

“You Kirk McGarvey?” he demanded. His English was heavily accented, and he sounded young and angry, perhaps even frightened.

“Yes, I am. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Okay, you stand up now, Mista CIA.”

McGarvey got slowly to his feet, keeping his hands well away from his body. “Is bin Laden nearby, or do we have a long way to go?” One of the others in the corridor handed his companion his rifle and came into the room. A fourth, very slightly built figure came to the doorway, and stared at McGarvey, only his eyes visible behind the mask.

“Arms out, legs out,” the unarmed mujahed ordered.

McGarvey did as he was told, and the young man quickly frisked him. But he missed the gun and spare magazine taped to McGarvey’s thigh. He stepped back. The small one in the corridor motioned to the bag and laptop case on the bed. The mujahed quickly went through the bag, pocketing the phone and lingering for a minute at the computer, his fingers caressing the keys. He looked up. “You will show me how to use this, mista he asked diffidently.

“That depends on how you treat me,” McGarvey said with a straight face. It was like dealing with children in a toy store. Only these were armed and dangerous children who could lash out and kill him without a moment’s hesitation or thought.

The one holding the rifle on McGarvey laughed as if the comment was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Maybe if we treat you like a prince you will give it to us?” he asked, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

“What would you do with a computer?”

“Send email,” the mujahed replied nonchalantly as if it was something he did every day.

“What about my phone?”

“No portable phones in Afghanistan. It is not allowed.”

“If you damage it I will expect payment,” McGarvey warned sternly. “I have respect for my possessions, I expect the same from you.”

The mujahed flicked his rifle’s safety catch off.

“Whoever carries my telephone will be responsible for its safety,” McGarvey insisted, not backing down.

The small mujahed at the door said something, his voice so soft as to be barely audible. But the warrior with the phone handed it to him without hesitation.

The one holding the gun on McGarvey safe tied his weapon, and insolently stepped aside. “We go now,” he said sullenly.

McGarvey got the impression that something was going on between them; some power struggle between the one holding the gun and the slightly built mujahed at the door, which made an already volatile situation even more dangerous.

“What about my bags?”

“I’ll take them,” the one who’d frisked McGarvey said.

McGarvey walked out of the room and down the corridor to the waiting elevator, two of the mujahedeen in front of him, and two, including the sullen one, behind him. Downstairs, the lobby was illuminated by only one dim light behind the registration desk. No one was around, but he got the impression that they were being watched. When they got outside, McGarvey looked up at the perfectly clear sky. Because there were so few lights in the city the stars were brilliant, and because of the elevation it seemed as if he could reach up and touch them. There were no sounds in the city. None of the usual sirens you always heard in large metropolitan centers at this time of night; no rumbling trucks or buses, no airplanes flying overhead. Not even any wind tonight, and the air sine I led of burning charcoal mixed with a sweeter, fresher, more fragrant odor of gardens, maybe fruit trees in blossom, or flowers. Pleasant smells.

McGarvey’s bags were put in the back of the van, and he was waved into the middle seat. One of the other mujahed climbed in behind the wheel, the slightly built one in the front passenger seat. The other two got in the back seat behind McGarvey, once again sandwiching him in so there was no possibility of him causing any trouble. They gave him a filthy balaclava and motioned for him to put it on. It occurred to him that his escorts weren’t hiding their identities from him, but from someone they expected to encounter tonight. Perhaps a police or military patrol. The city was officially under curfew until four in the morning.

“When we are stopped you will do no talking,” the sullen one in back said.

“Whatever you say.”

“This is important,” the driver said. “Your life is in danger, and we must protect you. So you do as we say. Understand?”

The truce between bin Laden and the ruling Taliban religious party still ran deep. Bin Laden had left his family and his businesses in Saudi — Arabia in 1979 to help the Afghanis fight Russians. He’d been wounded several times, and he had gained the reputation of being a very brave, very fierce fighter. He was a hero of the people, much respected, especially in the countryside and small villages, but even his welcome was finally beginning to wear out. Afghanistan was an insular country that wanted as little to do with the outside world as possible. They wanted to tend to their own lives, which centered around Islam, and they simply wanted to be left alone. But bin Laden’s terrorist jihad around the world had brought unwanted attention to the Taliban for continuing to harbor him. It was one of the reasons, McGarvey thought, that he was so willing to open a dialogue with the U.S. If he was forced to leave Afghanistan he needed someplace to go. The logical choice would be his home in Saudi Arabia. But that would take U.S. influence; in fact it would probably take a great deal of pressure on the Saudi ruling family just to talk about it, and bin Laden knew it. If they were stopped by a police patrol a fiction could be maintained that the cops didn’t recognize anyone in the van. It was a truth through the back door. But if McGarvey showed his clean-shaven race, or if he spoke, it would be obvious that he wasn’t an Afghani, and the police would have to do something about him. So the only logical solution out of such a dilemma would be to shoot him and dump his body alongside the road. Not a perfect solution, but one that everyone could live with if they had to. An American came to Afghanistan, despite warnings from his own State Department, and bandits or opposition forces had kidnapped and killed him to embarrass the Taliban. It happened all too frequently to foreign visitors. Even bin Laden could claim that he wasn’t responsible. Someone had gotten to McGarvey before his people could reach him and guarantee his safety.

“I understand,” he said. He pulled on the balaclava.

“Very good, mista the driver said, and they pulled out of the hotel’s driveway and headed north the way McGarvey had come in from the airport. He looked back and caught a glimpse of a face in a third floor window of the hotel, but then they turned the corner.

All the cars parked at the government buildings were gone, only a blue-and-white Flat police car was left beside the fountain in Pustunistan Square. But nobody seemed to be in it, and they went around the traffic circle and hurried up Bebe-Maihro Street Like thieves in the night, McGarvey thought. They were tense, and no one said a word. But Kabul had always been the most dangerous place in all of Afghanistan because it was a crossroads between the West over the Khybar Pass, and Islam. The city was straining at its ideological seams, and could burst at almost any moment given the slightest provocation. No one in the van wanted to give them that.

The mujahed driving the van wasn’t as slow as the cabbie had been this afternoon, and they passed the road to the airport fifteen minutes after leaving the hotel. A Russian built BDRM-2 armored scout car was parked just off the highway, the Afghani white flag hanging limply from its whip antenna.

The slightly built mujahed said something to their driver, who immediately slowed down, pulled off the opposite side of the road and stopped twenty-five yards from the scout car. Again his voice was so soft that McGarvey couldn’t catch the words or even the tone of voice.

The scout car’s turret came around and its 7.62mm PKT machine gun slowly depressed to a point directly at them.

“Say nothing, mista one of the men in back warned. “Do not move.”

The slightly built one said something else to the driver, then got out of the van and headed across the highway as a man dressed in a military uniform climbed out of the scout car.

“Fool,” the sullen one in back whispered harshly in English, which struck McGarvey as odd.

The mujahed and officer met halfway in the middle of the highway. For a full minute it seemed as if they just stood there, but then the officer pointed at the van, and the mujahed shook his head. He took something out of his pocket and handed it to the officer. They stood there for another long minute, and then the mujahed turned and slowly walked back to the van, the officer not moving from his spot.

The way the slightly built mujahed moved also struck McGarvey as off; lightly on the balls of his feet, as if he was a ballet dancer, or as if his boots were a couple of sizes too small and he was getting ready to bolt at any moment

He climbed in the passenger seat, motioned for the driver to go, and then glanced back at McGarvey. For a brief moment their eyes met, and McGarvey suddenly knew what had bothered him, and the realization was staggering.

There was no traffic, and the mujahed drove at a steady sixty miles per hour in silence, leaving McGarvey to sit back, his eyes half-closed, as he tried to convince himself that he was wrong.

The highway was perfectly straight, but ran in ever rising undulating waves higher into the mountains. A hundred miles or so to the northwest was the Hindu Kush mountain range, which was the western extremity of the Himalayas. A no man’s land of some of the highest peaks in the world; snow-covered, treeless, where rock slides and avalanches dominated the upper slopes, while Afghani and Russian sown land mines dominated the approaches. A little farther north the forces opposing the Taliban waged their war of independence for a bleak country that had not seen any real peace since Genghis Kahn. A strange land of harsh, man killing contradictions in which Osama bin Laden, himself a man of many contradictions, had found his manhood, his God and his war.

There was nothing in the dossiers on the man that McGarvey had studied that gave any clue as to what had happened during the ten years he had been here fighting Russians. But something must have happened to him, because coming into Afghanistan he’d been the son of a billionaire father loyal to the Fahd family, and when he came out he’d become a religious fanatic and terrorist bent on kicking the royal family out of Riyadh, removing all foreigners from the Arabian peninsula and killing Americans whenever and wherever he could.

It was here in the mountains that he had set up his headquarters from where he ran his worldwide businesses and attacks. Voltaire had written that to succeed in chaining the multitudes you must seem to wear the same fetters. Bin Laden wore the same clothes, ate the same food and lived the same hard life as the people he led. And they were willing to follow him to the death.

Looking at the back of the head of the mujahed in the front passenger seat, McGarvey thought that he was beginning to understand at least one aspect of bin Laden. The man might appear to be insane, but he was not a fanatic; on the contrary he was probably a realist who was perfectly willing to use whatever resources were available to him, no matter what the Qoran and his God had to say about it. If he had the bomb it made him the most dangerous man on earth, because given the right push he would not hesitate to use it.

A half-hour after they’d passed the military checkpoint near the airport, McGarvey glanced out the window. In the distance ahead he spotted the green and white rotating beacon of Bagram Air Base. It had been built by the Russians during the war, for air operations around the capital city. Now the Taliban used it for what few military aircraft they had operational — a few French-built Mirage fighters, a number of MiG-21 Floggers and a few Russian Hind attack helicopters — and for the headquarters of their military high command. They also had a prison there just off the end of one of the runways, but to this point the CIA had almost no hard intelligence on the place. What few people the Company had managed to send out there had simply disappeared, and had never been heard from again. A hard place, in a harsh land.

A few miles farther on the van suddenly slowed down and turned onto a narrow dirt road that wound its way down a sharply sloping hill, across a shallow, rocky stream, then back up behind a low hill to a copse of gnarled trees. The partially bombed-out ruins of a large stone-and-mud house were hidden beneath a latticework of wooden poles supporting a thick tangle of grape vines that were in full leaf.

It was obvious that no one lived here, but the van stopped on a slight rise, its headlights flashing against what once was the front entrance of the house. They caught a glimpse of three small windows whose blue shutters seemed as if they’d been painted just yesterday. The middle shutter was open. The driver said something in Dari, Afghan Persian, and the slightly built mujahed apparently agreed, because they continued the rest of the way down to the house. The open shutter was a signal that this place was safe.

The driver doused the headlights and drove around to the back of the house where a dark brown, mud-spattered, late model Land Rover was parked in the shelter of an extension of the grape arbor. He pulled up beside it, and a minute later five mujahedeen came out of the house, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. They all wore balaclavas, and at least to a casual observer they could pass for McGarvey and the four who had taken him from the hotel. One of them was even wearing a bush jacket, and another was slightly built.

Without a word, McGarvey, his bags and his four escorts transferred to the Land Rover. The five from the house got into the van and drove off. He sat in the back seat between two of his escorts, but the driver made no move to start the engine.

The windows were down and the night had become very cold. A light breeze had started from the north and they could smell the snow from the distant peaks.

McGarvey lit a cigarette, and the driver turned around and looked at him, so he passed the pack around. When it came back it was empty.

“How much longer do we have to wait here?” he asked.

“Not long,” the driver said, contentedly drawing on the American cigarette. “If there is trouble at the checkpoint we will hear the gunfire.”

“Not from this distance. That has to be sixty or seventy kilometers.”

“It’s only five kilometers to Bagram. Sometimes there is trouble, but only sometimes.”

McGarvey had misunderstood. The van was not returning to Kabul as he had thought it would. It was continuing north as a probe to see if the highway was blocked. The five who had gone ahead were risking their lives to make sure that McGarvey’s group got through.

“What if they’re stopped?” he asked.

“There are other routes. But this way is faster.”

It was exactly as McGarvey thought. However they got him up to bin Laden’s camp, it would not be by the main route. “How much farther do we have to go?”

The driver started to answer, but the slightly built mujahed, the only one not smoking, said something and he turned away.

“The sooner I see him, the sooner the fighting will stop. That’s why he wanted the meeting.”

“The struggle will not end until all feringhi are dead, Insha’Allah” the sullen one beside McGarvey shot back angrily. It was the word for foreigners with a rude connotation.

“Is that what you want now — paradise?” McGarvey asked, pushing the man. He wanted to find out just how tight bin Laden’s control was on them. “If you want Paradise that badly, why don’t you put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger? Save us all some trouble.”

The mujahed yanked a Russian army-issue PSM pistol from inside his vest, pointed it an inch from McGarvey’s head and pulled back the hammer.

“Mohammed,” the slight mujahed warned softly.

The mujahed’s aim didn’t waver, but his eyes flicked to the front seat. McGarvey reached up, grabbed the man’s wrist and jammed his thumb between the hammer and the rear of the slide, making it impossible for the pistol to fire. He twisted the gun right, then sharply left breaking the man’s grip and pulled the gun away from him.

“The next time you point this toy gun at me, I’ll take it away from you again, shove it up your ass and fire all eight rounds.” McGarvey eased the hammer down and handed the gun to the momentarily stunned Mohammed who looked as if he wanted more than anything else to slit McGarvey’s throat.

He took the pistol and held it so tightly that even in the dim starlight McGarvey could see that the man’s hand had turned white.

The slight one from the front said something in Persian, and after several long seconds Mohammed slowly put the gun away. He stared at McGarvey a little longer, and then threw his head back and laughed almost hysterically, his hands now gripped tightly around the barrel stock of the Kalashnikov resting between his knees.

McGarvey figured that the man was insane, and he was going to have to keep a tight watch on his back for the remainder of the mission. The mujahedeen were very quick to take offense, and very very slow to forgive or forget, but they admired courage. And bin Laden’s control was anything but complete.

The night remained deathly still except for the light breeze. After another ten minutes the slightly built mujahed gave a nod. The driver started the engine and headed slowly back to the highway by the same dirt track across the narrow stream that they had taken to get here.

Mohammed sat forward, cradling his rifle and staring at McGarvey, while the mujahed on McGarvey’s right watched out the window.

They stopped on the slight rise just before the highway. In the distance across a flat plain the air base was only partially lit. The airport beacon was still flashing, but the runway lights were out and most of the low, hulking buildings were dark. But there were lights showing on what appeared to be guard towers and tall fences even farther in the distance, which McGarvey took to be the prison.

Nothing moved in either direction on the highway for as far as they could see, nor were there any signs of movement or lights in the sky. If there were an opposite side to the civilized world this was it. Dark, hidden, bleak, a perfect place for a man such as bin Laden. A desert scorpion in its nest ready to strike out with its poison.

The driver headed down the steep track then back up the deeply rutted path to the highway. He turned north and accelerated before he finally turned on the Rover’s headlights. They were so bright after they’d gotten their night vision that they were partially blinded for the first couple of minutes.

Passing the road to the air base they spotted several military vehicles parked just inside the gates about a half-mile away. The guardhouse was lit up, but they saw no signs of movement, nor was the Volkswagen van anywhere to be seen. This seemed to encourage McGarvey’s captors so that as they sped north into the night, putting the base miles behind them, the mood in the Rover got increasingly lighter, the tension melting away. They started to laugh and talk, obviously relieved. They had passed two hurdles, and looking toward the not-so-distant mountains, McGarvey could feel the biggest hurdle of all approaching: Osama bin Laden and his madness.

Something else from Voltaire came to his mind; something he’d written an entire chapter about in the book he’d been working on for nearly ten years.

Voltaire had almost no regard for governments, especially their institutions and bureaucracies. But he understood that governments were not buildings and monuments alone, but were made of people. Voltaire wrote that if a man wanted to obtain a great name, and be the founder of a sect or an establishment, it helped to be crazy. Be completely mad, he said.

“But be sure that the madness corresponds with the turn and temper of your age. Have in your madness reason enough to guide your extravagances; and do not forget to be obsessively opinionated and obstinate. It is certainly possible that you may get hanged; but if you escape hanging, you will have altars erected to you.”

Was that it, McGarvey wondered. Was bin Laden looking for an altar; some last act that would go down in history as so tremendous, so heinous that he would never be forgotten?

CHAPTER EIGHT

They passed through the deserted streets of a good sized town called Charikar about 2:30 a.m. The only evidence that the place wasn’t devoid of life were lights here and there behind the walls of compounds, and a few cars and trucks parked off the narrow streets. There was nothing that looked even remotely like an open hotel or restaurant, although in the city center there were several official-looking buildings in front of which were parked some army vehicles.

Charikar was the provincial capital of Parawn and was the scene of a substantial Russian effort to keep the puppet communist regime in power during the war. In a true Afghan tradition, the mujahedeen never fought in the city until near the end. Instead of confronting the Russian troops, the Afghani warriors manned an extensive series of ditches and tunnels that completely surrounded the place. Russians found it almost impossible to move in or out without heavy casualties. The communists said that they controlled the city. But the mujahedeen sentiment was as simple as it was direct: Do the men in prison control the prison?

His escorts did not seem nervous passing through the town, and McGarvey figured that the farther out of Kabul they went the less influence the Taliban had on the people, and the more bin Laden’s sympathizers were welcome. Listening to the talk flowing around him in Persian it occurred to him that if they had been high strung before, they were relieved and even happy now. Even Mohammed seemed to lighten up.

A few miles north of the city they crossed a stone bridge over a raging mountain river, and ten minutes later they pulled off the highway and bumped along a narrow, extremely rocky track that wound its way west and, as far as McGarvey could tell, south, back toward the river. The mountains were all around them now, and the early morning hour was very cold; perhaps in the high thirties.

At one point the driver stopped the Rover and shut off the headlights. They sat in silence for a full five minutes to let their night vision come back, and then started off again. Now the track rose so steeply in places that the driver had to switch into the low range of four-wheel drive, and even then the going was nearly impossible at times.

For a couple of thousand yards they followed what was probably a donkey path, very slowly, a fifty-degree slope rising on their right, and a shear cliff that dropped three hundred feet down into the river on their left. They could hear the low-throated roar and feel the tremendous power of the water rushing through the narrow gorge below, and even the mujahedeen seemed respectful of this place.

Gradually the walls of the steep cut began to widen, until they came dramatically out to a long, rising valley, the end of which rose suddenly toward a pair of snowcapped mountains that were probably still twenty-five or thirty miles away. The hills on either side of the valley were covered with brush and small trees in dark irregular patterns like long waves on a barren sea.

The path ended, finally, and the driver had to pick his way to the northwest toward a cut at the base of the valley, negotiating around the larger boulders, but driving over everything else with back-jarring bumps. It seemed as if they were at the top of the world here in this valley, even though the mountains rose far above them. The scale was impossible to accept.

A half hour later they crossed a wide, shallow stream, and turned north again, following its twists and turns, and finally after a long loop that ran with the contours of the hills, they came to the bombed-out ruins of a small village. Only a few mud and stone walls were left intact. Shattered bricks, splintered wooden poles and trees and glass and pottery shards littered the entire settlement. Even before the bombing — probably by the Russians if this had been a mujahedeen stronghold, McGarvey thought — this place had to have been a very mean spot in which to subsist. And yet as they came from the south he could see that the river went directly through the middle of the town where patios had been constructed, villagers could sit in the mornings with their tea, or in the late afternoons for their prayers beside the flowing water. He also picked out the remnants of several small fields of corn mostly gone to seed now, and perhaps a half-acre of grapevines in what was once a well-tended vineyard. There’d probably been goats and chickens and all the other basic necessities of a simple Muslim life. Laughing children playing in the dusty streets, old men talking Islam in the chaikhanas, tea houses, while then-veiled women went about their chores floating through the village like ghostly figures; seen but not seen except behind the walls of their homes.

They parked on the far side of the village in the ruins of a barn. The driver shut off the engine, got out and walked back about twenty yards to a clearing where he studied the sky to their south for a minute or so. When he came back he pulled off his balaclava and stuffed it in a pocket. He was just a kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen, with a thin mustache, scraggly beard and wide, dark eyes beneath finely drawn eyebrows.

He said something in Persian.

“In English, Farid,” the slightly built mujahed said. “For our guest.”

He took off his balaclava, and McGarvey saw that he had guessed correctly back at the checkpoint. The mujahed was a young woman, not a man, with fine features, high, delicate cheekbones, a clear complexion, full, rich lips and dark, almond-shaped eyes that were alive with simple amusement.

“The sky is clear. No one follows.” Farid’s accent was very strong.

“We have only two hours to make our first camp,” the woman said. “We’ll have to hurry.” Her voice was soft and cultured, she’d been educated in England or perhaps Europe, or at the very least tutored by someone very good. She turned and looked back at McGarvey. “You knew when we stopped at the airport, didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t sure,” McGarvey said. “It had to be very dangerous for you to come into Kabul, and then to talk to that officer.”

She shrugged matter-of-factly. “My father expects it of me. He’s a religious man, Mr. McGarvey, but he is a Saudi, and modern.”

“Are you Osama bin Laden’s daughter?”

“I am Sarah, his oldest child.”

The CIA had little or nothing of any substance about bin Laden’s family. He knew nothing about her.

Mohammed, who had taken off his balaclava to reveal a heavily pockmarked face under a thick salt-and-pepper beard, was angry. He scowled, and then said something in Persian to Sarah. He wasn’t as young as McGarvey thought he was from his voice. Sarah shot back a reply, her left eyebrow rising. He mumbled something else under his breath, and then climbed out of the car and stalked off.

“Not everyone has come to an equal understanding. But we can hope, Insha “Allah,” she said regretfully. She opened the door, then reached across to roll up the driver’s window, grab the keys and hit the door locks. “We have a long distance to travel before dawn, so we must leave now.”

Farid and the other mujahed, who looked almost as young, pulled camo netting over the Rover making it practically invisible from the air even during the day. Sarah walked over to where Mohammed was waiting, his Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, and she said something to him. It was obviously a conciliatory gesture. He towered menacingly over her, and for a brief moment McGarvey thought he was going to strike her down. But then he looked away insolently. She reached out and touched his arm, and he stepped back as if he was getting ready to strike again. His hand reached for the pistol in his tunic, but Sarah stood her ground, and after several seconds he withdrew his hand.

She came back, pulling a round felt cap on her head, and stuffing stray strands of black hair inside it. She got her rifle from the other mujahed, named Hash, slung it over her shoulder, then came over to where McGarvey was standing just outside the barn.

She studied his face as if trying to read something from his expression. Her own expression was one of concern and weariness, as if she was tired of the struggle. And yet he could see clearly stamped on her face a fierce determination and pride.

“Have you come here to assassinate my father, Mr. McGarvey?” she asked directly, without guile.

McGarvey shook his head. “Just to talk,” he said. He was already beginning to admire the young woman.

“About what?”

“We want the killing to stop.”

She nodded her understanding. “Then I think that you must have a great deal to say.”

“I do. But am I going to be wasting my time?”

She thought about that, and took a moment to formulate her answer. She was being very serious. “My father is not the monster you in the West think he is. But he is a very hard man, as the Russians found out.” She smiled wistfully. “He too wants peace, but an honorable peace.”

“Will he listen to me?”

“Listen to an infidel?” she asked rhetorically. Then she cocked her head and pursed her lips. “Do you believe that the prophet Isa was God? You call him Jesus.”

“I didn’t come here to talk about religion.”

“Then your task will be doubly hard. For us, Islam is life.”

“I understand.”

Sarah gave him an odd, thoughtful look. “I don’t know if you can. But I hope so.”

McGarvey motioned toward Mohammed who had hunkered down and was looking out across the valley toward the mountains as he smoked a cigarette. “What about him?”

Sarah followed his gaze. “He is an Afghani, and maybe he is already too old to change. I think he is a spy for the Taliban.”

The admission of a weakness in bin Laden’s armor was extraordinary, and McGarvey wondered if she had told him that to get some kind of a reaction, or merely because she was young and naive. He didn’t think she could be much older than eighteen or twenty.

“Why not send him away?” McGarvey asked.

This time Sarah laughed out loud, the sound soft and throaty. “Better to have a spy you know in your midst, than one you don’t watching you from a distance.”

Farid and Hash had taken four bundles from the back of the Rover. They put McGarvey’s bag and laptop into one of them, and the mujahedeen, including Sarah, shouldered the heavy loads.

“I can carry some of that,” McGarvey said.

“You have your work to do, we have ours,” Sarah replied.

They headed north from the village along the base of the foothills that stretched up the long valley, Sarah and Farid in the lead, with McGarvey in the middle as usual, and Mohammed and Hash bringing up the rear.

Within the first fifty yards they fell into an easy, loping gait that for the first mile or two seemed unnecessarily slow. But as the floor of the valley continued to rise toward the distant mountains, sometimes hardpan and rock-strewn, at other times swampy, the ground muddy, McGarvey could feel the altitude in his lungs and his legs. He was in excellent physical condition, but he had to wonder how long Sarah and the others could keep up the pace, and if he could match it.

They spoke very little on the trek, though from time to time Farid would look back over his shoulder at the sky to the south and then shoot McGarvey a glance to make sure he was okay. He smiled each time and gave the thumbs-up sign.

Sarah was very small, maybe five-feet-two, and slender. Although her pack was as big as the others, and she carried a rifle and a bandolier of ammunition, it was she who set the pace, never once faltering or slowing down.

Around 3:30 A.M., the village already several miles behind them, they turned to the northwest into a steep arroyo down which a narrow stream bubbled gaily. They climbed for twenty minutes until the defile took a turn to the right, putting the valley below them out of sight for the first time. At a small flat spot beneath a long rock overhang that would protect them from the air, Sarah stopped and took off her pack.

“Five minutes,” she announced. She took a Russian made canteen from her pack and filled it in the stream. The others did the same.

This place had been used as a rest stop before. McGarvey could see the disturbed sand, and farther back beneath the overhang someone had built small campfires. The rocks

were blackened and the overhead was dark with soot.

Sarah came back and offered him a drink from the canteen. The water was sweet and cool. Simple pleasures were the best, the line came to him from somewhere, and he smiled at her. “Thank you.”

“How are your legs?” she asked.

“I’ll live. Is it much farther?”

She glanced at the defile, then back east. The sun rose here around 4:30 a.m. this time of year, and the tops of the distant mountains were already turning pink. “Another twenty minutes. But it is very steep.”

“Is your father’s camp nearby?”

She shook her head. “We have to stop for the day. It’s too dangerous for us to travel. But we’ll get there by tomorrow morning.”

Mohammed and the others were still at the stream and out of earshot. “Dangerous for whom?” he asked. “Not the Taliban, you have a spy with you.”

“I believe you call them Keyhole satellites.” She gave him a bemused look. “I think they might be watching us because of you.”

Actually the satellites’ infrared detectors could pick up the heat signatures of human bodies better at night. But the KH11 and12 series were in positions just now to watch the ongoing troubles in Yugoslavia, and one to watch a possible treaty violation in Antarctica. He didn’t tell her that.

McGarvey offered her a cigarette, but she declined. He lit one for himself. “Do you miss Saudi Arabia?” he asked.

The question startled her. She started to say something, but then changed her mind and shook her head. “I was born in the Sudan,” she said at length. “But I’ve never been to see my father’s family.” She lowered her eyes. “Have you been to Riyadh?”

She was holding something back, as if she were frightened. “Several times,” McGarvey said.

“Mecca?”

“Once.”

She looked up, a sad smile on her pretty face. “Then you have seen more than I have seen.” “We can change all that’ McGarvey said.

“I hope so,” she replied. “Before it’s too late.”

“What do you mean?”

She drew herself up suddenly realizing that she had said too much. “It’s time to go now.”

McGarvey wanted to reach out to her, to take some of the load of the world she was evidently carrying off her shoulders. Maybe in the early days in the Sudan when her mother had taken care of her while her father fought Russians here in Afghanistan, she’d had a normal life. But since moving here to be at her father’s side her life had to be anything but normal.

They shouldered their packs and followed the stream upward. Almost immediately the going became very difficult as the walls of the defile narrowed and rose sharply to a ridge a couple of hundred feet higher. A small waterfall tumbled from a rocky ledge, splashing on the rocks below, sending a mist rising into what developed into a thickening fog as they climbed.

All conversation became impossible because of the strenuousness of the ascent. For the next fifteen minutes McGarvey’s world was reduced to the next foothold below and hand hold above. The fog closed in so completely that he could no longer see the base of the slope or the ridge. The rocks were slippery and they had to take extreme care with each move lest they lose their footing. If they started to fall they would not be able to stop themselves, and it would probably kill them.

The sky behind them was turning light now, and McGarvey sensed an urgency in the others that had not been there before. Sarah and Farid began to outdistance him, and then two mujahedeed below pressed him so that he had to speed up, take chances and unnecessary risks.

His body needed rest, but thoughts were bouncing around inside his head at the speed of light; how much longer he could continue, exactly what he was going to say to bin Laden, hoping Kathleen wasn’t worrying too much about him, and that Liz was safe.

Afghanistan and the people he’d come in contact with so far were about what he’d expected from his briefings and the dossiers he’d read. But he’d not gotten the sense of isolation from his readings that he felt at this moment. He could have been on a desert island, or in the middle of Antarctica, completely cut off from civilization. Afghanistan had always been a difficult place, but now that the Taliban were mostly in control, and trying to make the country into an Islamic fundamentalist’s paradise, you could get killed simply because the hairs on your arms ran the wrong way. If you were a devout Muslim, and washed yourself for the five-times-a-day prayers, the hairs on your arms would all point down toward your wrists. If a man walked to the side of the road and urinated standing up, he could be shot to death on the spot. Muslim men always squatted to pee. It was crazy to the extreme. But he was back in the field, in one of the most isolated countries in the world, where a single wrong move could cause his death, to talk a madman out of using a nuclear weapon to kill Americans. Maybe Dennis Berndt had been right. Maybe he should just say the hell with alt the talking, and simply kill bin Laden the first moment an opportunity presented itself.

He reached for the next hand hold and pulled himself up, the muscles in his arms starting to shake.

He had to believe that this path wasn’t the only way to bin Laden’s camp. It would be impossible to bring supplies on a regular basis this way. And although his location would be secure, his comings and goings would be severely restricted. They’d taken this route to make it impossible for McGarvey to ever find his way back. Coming up from the valley they’d passed any number of arroyos that looked exactly like this one.

Of course with his phone and the GPS chip imbedded in his body he could easily pinpoint his exact location. But they didn’t know that, and he would have to make sure they didn’t find out.

A series of natural stone steps angled steeply to the right, and suddenly McGarvey was over the top where Sarah and Farid were already heading along a path around a broad pool. Mohammed and Hash came over the top and the three of them followed as fast as they could.

The sun was just appearing over the far wall of the valley behind them when they reached a much larger rock overhang than the one below. Sarah had already dropped her pack, and she hurried alone along the water’s edge until she disappeared in the fog twenty or thirty yards upstream.

“There will be no trouble from you now, Mista CIA,” Mohammed warned.

He and the two other men dropped their bundles but carried their rifles down to the pool. Stripping off their outer clothing and boots and socks, they hurriedly rinsed their hands, mouths, noses, faces, forearms and feet three times. Then, completely ignoring McGarvey, who watched from beneath the overhang above the pool, they knelt down on their vests, faced southwest toward Mecca and began the first of their five daily prayers.

At this moment McGarvey knew that he could pull out his gun and kill them all. They were as vulnerable now as a mother was during the act of giving birth; their conscious thoughts were turned inward to the task at hand; to Allah and to the belief that some day Paradise would be theirs. A Muslim believed that life on earth was nothing more than a reflection, a mirror image, of their real lives in heaven, so whatever they did here was holy.

McGarvey sat down cross-legged in the sand and watched the three men pray. Sarah had gone off by herself because Muslim men and women did not pray together, it was forbidden by the Qoran. But as he watched he wondered where and how it had all gone terribly wrong for so many of them. Why the jihads and fatwahs, the acts of terrorism, the senseless killings, the endless wars, the in tolerance that led a man like bin Laden to contemplate using a nuclear weapon against innocent men, women and children? He didn’t know if even Islam’s most religious leaders could answer that simple question, and yet it was probably the most important question they’d ever been faced with. One that he had come here to ask bin Laden.

Stop the killing, there was no need for it. A strange thought, he had to admit to himself, for an assassin to entertain. But he could not ignore reality.

He got up and went deeper under the overhang where the three mujahedeen by the pool could not see him, and untaped his pistol and spare magazine from his thigh. He pocketed the magazine and stuffed the gun beneath his bush jacket in his belt at the small of his back.

When he came out again Sarah was returning from upstream, and the three men were putting on their boots. Mohammed watched her pick her way down the rocky path, and then looked up at McGarvey, his face screwing up in an expression of deep hatred.

Sarah was refreshed, as if the march and hard climb this morning had been nothing to her. When she and the others came up to the campsite she smiled wistfully. “It’s too bad you don’t know what you are missing, Mr. McGarvey.”

“I’m happy for you that you have your faith,” McGarvey said.

“I think it’s not very different for you.” She was serious now, her round face radiant, her dark eyes wide and earnest, filled with a deep, almost sensuous expression. “First came Abraham and Moses, then Isah and finally Mohammed. All on the same path to Allah. We’re all traveling together.”

“Or should be,” McGarvey said.

Hash and Farid had gathered some wood and they were starting a campfire. They looked up curiously.

“Insha’Allah,” Sarah replied softly.

“Yes, God willing.”

Mohammed, who had been standing a little apart, watching and listening, said something sharp in Persian.

“Don’t blaspheme,” Sarah told him reasonably, and she waited for an argument. When it didn’t come she nodded in satisfaction. “We’ll have something to eat now, and then get some rest. Maybe we’ll catch some fish this afternoon for our dinner.”

Their breakfast was nothing more than some very strong black tea and the flat bread called nan. It was quite good and filling, but not satisfying. Mohammed took his meal down to a flat rock beneath the branches of a small tree at the water’s edge, and turned his back to them. McGarvey thought about trying to talk to him, but he didn’t think it would do any good. The man was like a volcano, or a time bomb, ready to explode at the slightest provocation. There was nothing McGarvey could say to him that would make the slightest difference. They could have come from different planets. They had no real common language, the very meanings of the words they used were completely different for each of them. Mohammed was a man like many others McGarvey had met in his career, filled with an unreasoning hate through which nothing could penetrate.

Even Farid and Hash sat slightly apart from Sarah, and while she was eating they avoided looking directly at her as much as possible. There were other subtle things going on between them as well; in the way they spoke to her, deferentially, but with a slightly irritating delay every time they answered a question or followed an order. When they did speak to her, they would look at each other first for support. Sarah was bin Laden’s daughter, and therefore she was a very important personage in their world. But she was a woman, and their strong Islamic upbringing made it almost impossible for them to deal with her on an equal, let alone superior, basis.

Still another subtle layer to the situation was the very fact that bin Laden had sent his daughter to help fetch McGarvey. It was a clear message that he was a modern man after all, whereas the Western media portrayed him as a rabid Islamic fundamentalist whose only mission in life was to kill the infidels.

McGarvey looked inward for a brief moment and he could see Trumble’s face. Alien had protested being pulled out of Riyadh and brought back to Langley, and yet McGarvey had read a measure of relief in the man’s eyes. Something had been going on in his life that he hoped coming home would help. Sending families over there was a double-edged sword for the CIA. On the one hand a wife and children provided a stabilizing influence on the field agent, even lent them a sense of legitimacy. On the other it was usually the agent’s families who cried uncle first. When that happened families came apart, and the agent’s effectiveness was diminished. There was a high rate of divorce in the Company, and a disturbingly high rate of suicide.

“Tell me please about Disney World and EPCOT,” Sarah said, bringing him out of his thoughts. “Have you been there?”

McGarvey looked at her, trying to gauge what she really wanted to know; if she’d brought this up now to tell him that she knew about the killings of Trumble and his family. But all he saw was a naivete; a genuine interest, even eagerness. No cunning.

“Not for a long time,” he said. “But how about you? There’s one just outside of Paris.” “I’ve never been to France,” she said. She exchanged a glance with Farid.

“Well, your English is good, you didn’t learn it in Yemen or the Sudan, did you?”

“I had tutors.”

“Haven’t you ever been out of the Middle East?”

She smiled wistfully. “I was allowed to attend school in Switzerland for just one year when I was quite young. But then my father wanted me to come home, and my mother agreed that it would be for the best.”

“Then you know at least a little about the West,” McGarvey said.

“I was watched very closely,” she said. “And I was never allowed to go off campus with the other girls.”

McGarvey knew what it must have been like for her. She’d been a rich man’s daughter, with bodyguards watching her every movement. It was a wonder that bin Laden had allowed her even that much freedom.

“My daughter went to school in Switzerland,” he said.

Sarah’s eyes lit up. “Tell me about her, please. Does she watch

MTV?”

“I don’t know, but I suppose she does,” McGarvey said laughing. “Have you seen it?”

“In Switzerland, but there are no televisions here.” A look of frustration crossed her pretty features. “Does she wear pretty clothes?”

“Sometimes.”

“Dresses.”

McGarvey nodded.

“Makeup?”

Again McGarvey nodded.

“She doesn’t listen to her father then,” Hash said sadly.

“How old is she?” Sarah, still enthused, asked.

“Twenty-three.” “Does she have a job? Does she earn her own money?”

For some reason McGarvey thought about Alien Trumble’s daughter, wondering what she would have grown up to do. Follow in her father’s footsteps like Liz was following in his; like Sarah following in her father’s? “She works translating Russian into English, and she’s become pretty good with computers.”

“She is like a Sabra woman then,” Sarah said as a statement of fact. “The Americans, like the Israelis, have at least that much right. Their women are allowed to be mujahedeen.” She looked again at Farid and Hash, who averted their eyes. “That is not possible here. Yet.”

“Or ever will be,” Mohammed said darkly at the entrance to the overhang. He was seething with rage. If he was a Taliban spy, Sarah’s talking so openly to McGarvey, let alone that she had spent time in the West, thought women should have rights, and wore no veil to cover her face, was a major insult to his religious, and therefore political, beliefs. If they’d been in Kabul now she would have been arrested and very possibly put to death, bin Laden’s daughter or not.

Sarah flipped her left hand at him, another Islamic insult, and he reacted as if he had been slapped, but he said nothing.

“It is time to get some rest now,” she said. “We’ll leave at dusk if the sky is clear of the enemy.”

“I’ll take the first watch,” Mohammed said, and he turned and walked off.

McGarvey slept fitfully until noon on the rough wool blanket they provided for him. Instead of warming up, the fog persisted and the day remained chilly and damp. When he opened his eyes Sarah and the others were leaving the shelter of the overhang with their Kalashnikovs.

He sat up. “Is there trouble?”

“It’s time for our prayers, Mr. McGarvey,” Sarah answered softly. “Go back to sleep.”

When they were gone, he got up and went to the entrance where he could just make out the misty figures of the three men by the pool. Sarah had already gone upstream.

Watching them rinse their bodies in the Islamic ritual he was once again struck by the contradictions of their religion and their war of terrorism. When they knelt down to face Mecca and began their prayers he wondered what they were thinking about, or if, as the Qoran instructed, they were giving themselves completely to the moment and to their God.

When they were finished Farid and Hash came back up to the campsite, but Mohammed remained behind. They passed McGarvey without a word, and curled up in their blankets.

Mohammed turned and looked up river in the direction Sarah had gone. McGarvey stepped a little farther back into the relative darkness of the overhang so that the mujahed would have to come halfway up the hill in order to see him standing there. But Mohammed never looked up, instead he unslung his rifle and started up stream.

McGarvey checked Farid and Hash. They were already dead to the world, their blankets drawn over their heads so that only their noses poked out. Taking care not to wake them he crept out of the campsite and went down to the water’s edge. He hadn’t noticed on the way up, but now he could see that the stream had been partially dammed to form the pool, meaning this was a regular stopping place. From the air it would look natural; only from up close could you see that someone had piled rocks across the stream. A narrow but well-used path skirted the edge of the river.

He followed the path for about thirty or forty yards until it angled away from the stream and disappeared into a thick tangle of brush and tall grasses. He stopped to listen, but the day was silent except for the soft gurgle of the creek off to his left.

Pulling out his pistol he headed slowly into the thicket, careful to make as little noise as possible, stopping every few yards to listen.

The path took an abrupt turn back to the left, and plunged down into a water-filled hole about twenty feet across. He could see footprints in the mud on the high side of the depression, and he followed these, coming again to the river’s edge in another thirty yards. Trees and even thicker, taller brush and grasses hung over the water so that McGarvey had to duck low to make his way through.

Somewhere just a few yards farther upstream, a man said something low, and urgent in Persian, which was followed almost immediately by Sarah’s equally low and urgent reply. McGarvey could not understand the language, but he knew from the tone of their-voices that something was wrong. He pushed his way through the last few feet of tangled brush until the path opened to a narrow beach along another, much smaller pool than the one below at their campsite.

Mohammed, his back to McGarvey, stood at the water’s edge. He was a few feet away from Sarah who’d been bathing in the pool. She was completely naked, crouching in a defensive posture in ankle-deep water. Mohammed’s rifle was leaning against a rock along with her rifle and clothing, fifteen feet away. He must have sneaked up on her when she was swimming.

He suddenly lunged, and she couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. He caught her arm and yanked her roughly onto the beach where he pawed her breasts.

She didn’t scream, but she snarled something at him in Persian. He pulled back a hand to hit her, and she raised her slender bare arm to ward off the blow.

The angle and the light were bad, but McGarvey raised his pistol and fired one shot, hitting Mohammed in the back of the hand, the wound erupting in a splash of blood. The shot echoed sharply off the wall of the cliff across the stream, and Mohammed bellowed in shock and pain. He let go of Sarah’s arm and pawed inside his vest for his pistol as he swung around like an angry bull.

“I’ll put the next one between your eyes,” McGarvey shouted.

Mohammed’s hand hesitated. Sarah said something to him in Persian, and he turned his head slightly so that he could see her and still keep an eye on McGarvey. Blood dripped from his wounded hand, but no artery had been hit. He was shaking with a barely suppressed frenzy.

“It was a mistake,” Sarah told McGarvey. She edged farther away from Mohammed, then straightened up, her slight figure almost boyish. “I should not have been here like this,” she said. Mustering up as much dignity as she could she turned her back on them, walked back to her clothes and started to get dressed.

“Are you okay?” McGarvey asked. Since the airport checkpoint he had a feeling that something like this might happen.

“Please go now.”

“What about him?”

Sarah put on her baggy trousers, and pulled her shirt over her head. She turned and McGarvey could see that she was crying. “It was my fault,” she said in a very small voice. “But Mohammed has respect for my father so nothing will be said.”

McGarvey’s heart went out to her. She was tough on the outside, but she was younger than Liz, still just a baby girl in a very wild and difficult world.

“Harlot,” Mohammed said in English, and McGarvey’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Sarah turned away in shame without replying.

“Take the gun out of your pocket and throw it on the ground,” McGarvey said in a measured voice. “Very carefully now, or I’ll kill you.”

Mohammed didn’t hesitate. He got the pistol out of his vest and tossed it up on the beach. McGarvey walked over, picked it up and put it in his pocket. He released the hammer on his own gun, switched the safety on and stuffed it in his belt at the small of his back.

“You will have to sleep sometime, Mista CIA,” Mohammed warned. His eyes were like a feral animal’s.

“How would you explain it to my father?” Sarah demanded, turning back once again. She had gotten her emotions in control. She picked up Mohammed’s rifle and brought it over to him. “We have a long way to travel. This is very important.”

Mohammed snatched the gun from her, and for a second it seemed as if he was going to hit her with it, but then he slung the rifle over his shoulder. “He shot me, how are you going to explain his weapon?”

“Did you expect him to come here unarmed?” Sarah demanded.

“It’s Hashmatullah’s fault for not searching him better at the hotel.”

“Mr. McGarvey will hand over his gun to me before I take him to my father. Your wound is a stupid accident.”

“What about mine?”

McGarvey took the pistol out of his pocket and tossed it to Mohammed who had to scramble to catch it with his good hand. “Like I told you before. If you pull it on me I’ll take it away from you, shove it up your ass and empty the magazine.”

Farid and Hash came crashing out of the bushes in a dead run, their rifles at the ready. They pulled up short in confusion, not sure what the situation was.

“Everything is okay,” Sarah told them.

“We heard a shot,” Farid said, eyeing McGarvey suspiciously. Then he noticed Mohammed’s wounded hand, and he raised his rifle at McGarvey.

“It was an accident,” Sarah said. “I want you to take Mohammed back and bandage his hand. Then we’re going to leave.”

“Not until dark,” Hash objected strongly.

“It’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Sarah said. “You heard the shot, maybe somebody else has.”

McGarvey stepped aside to let Mohammed pass, and when he was gone with the other two, Sarah pulled on her boots and shouldered her rifle.

“If my father learns the truth he will not thank you,” she said. “I have brought shame to him, and somehow you managed to come here with a gun.” “What Mohammed did wasn’t your fault.”

She looked at him, her eyes unreadable now, but it was as if she’d aged suddenly into a mature woman. “Did you come here after all to assassinate my father?”

“Just to talk,” McGarvey said.

“Very well,” Sarah nodded. “Then the sooner I bring you to him, the sooner you can talk. In the meantime you will be safe. You are our guest.” She smiled sadly. “It is a matter of honor, especially among the Afghanis.”

CHAPTER NINE

Bin Laden’s camp came as a surprise to McGarvey, the size of it, nestled in a high mountain valley, with conical nomad tents, mud and brick buildings, a dozen or more army vehicles parked under shelters and a Russian Hind helicopter, its rotors tied down, beneath camouflage netting. It looked more like his military base at Kunar than an isolated hiding spot.

It was early evening but still light by the time they finally topped the last rise above the camp and stopped. Their forced trek through the afternoon had been made in complete silence. This time Mohammed was in the lead, with Sarah in the rear from where she could keep an eye on him. They’d stopped only once to drink water, eat more nan and a handful of grapes that Hash produced from his pack, and once again for late afternoon prayers. Afterward McGarvey passed the cigarettes around, their talk friendly as if nothing had happened.

Sarah took a small walkie-talkie out of her pack and radioed something in rapid-fire Persian. A few seconds later she got a reply.

“They’re surprised we’re here so early,” she said. “Please give me your gun, Mr. McGarvey.”

Mohammed watched closely, a strange, dreamy look on his face as if he had been biding his time, and very soon now he would get to act. McGarvey took the gun from his belt, checked to make sure the safety was on, and handed it to Sarah.

“Do you have any other weapons?”

“No.”

She handed the Walther to Hash. “Put this with his other things. I’m making you responsible for their safe return.”

Hash glanced at Farid, then nodded and put the gun in his pack. “Ali will want to inspect the computer.”

“I’ll tell my father,” Sarah said. Mohammed started to object, but she silenced him with a glance, and he turned away sullenly.

Sarah was no longer friendly and curious. Now she was brusque and businesslike. On the trail they had become travelers together. Now I’m the enemy, McGarvey thought. The infidel come from the other side of the world at her father’s summons. But he was a very powerful, dangerous American, which made her father’s authority even all the more encompassing.

Gone too was the eye-averting shame from the incident at the river. She was once again Osama bin Laden’s daughter, and therefore an important power among these men even though she was a woman. And power was one thing that mujahedeen respected and greatly admired.

The camp was two hundred feet below them, down a very steep, rocky hill. The path switched back and forth so that it was another half-hour before they reached the floor of the valley and crossed another shallow stream. McGarvey picked out a dozen armed men, their rifles at the ready, peering out of doorways and tents. Two men had been working on the helicopter, but they too picked up weapons and watched the incoming procession. He also spotted a microwave dish concealed beneath camouflage netting halfway up the steep hill on the other side of the narrow valley. From the air this place would look like just about any other mountain village, or perhaps the encampment of nomads. There were even a few camels hobbled behind a tent sixty or seventy yards downstream.

Security seemed very tight, as McGarvey figured it would be. But except for the few mud and stone buildings, this place could be dismantled and moved out within a few hours. Secrecy, mobility and utterly devoted followers had kept bin Laden a free man and alive all these years. There would be a road leading out of here, but in an all-out emergency bin Laden could be whisked away in the helicopter, leaving his people behind to fight a delaying rear guard action.

Despite all that, however, the camp had the look of permanence. He spotted garbage dumps indicating that people had been living here for a long time, possibly a year or more. Were they getting tired of always being on the run, he wondered, or did bin Laden feel safe up here?

A broad path wound its way through the middle of the camp, past the helicopter and some trucks. Without a word, Mohammed and the other two mujahedeen headed over to a low stone building, leaving McGarvey to continue with Sarah. On the other side they started up the steep hill, only this time there was no path; nothing to mark that this was a well-used route to anywhere.

McGarvey was tired of climbing up and down mountains, he was hungry and he was dirty, and now that he was this close he couldn’t put Alien Trumble and his family out of his mind. If a nuclear weapon, even a small one, went off in New York or Washington or any other major U.S. city, there would be tens of thousands of Alien Trumbles and families. For what? That was the question he wanted to ask bin Laden. Why? McGarvey had killed in the line of duty; he wasn’t proud of it, but he’d never taken the life of an innocent person, and that was the difference between him and men Uke bin Laden. It was that aim of terrorism that he could not get.

Terrorism had never furthered any cause. Never.

“Here,” Sarah said, stepping aside.

Two armed mujahedeen sat fiercely in the shadows behind a pair of large boulders that flanked the narrow entrance to a cave. A tall, slender man with a long, graying beard, thick lips and dark melancholy eyes stood in the relative darkness just inside the opening. A Kalashnikov was slung across his chest, and he held a cane in his left hand. He wore a white head covering and white flowing robes. He was barefoot but he wore a bush jacket against the chill mountain air.

“Good evening, Mr. McGarvey. I am Osama bin Laden,” the man said in English. His voice was soft, his accent British, but there was an underlying tension there, a tightening of his mouth, the corners of his eyes.

“Good evening,” McGarvey said. He did not offer to shake hands, but he felt that bin Laden was waiting for it, taking his measure.

“Salaam alaikum,” Sarah said deferentially. “Hello Father.” They embraced warmly, but then he gave her a stern, disapproving look that nonetheless could not hide his obvious love and pride for her. He was clearly vexed.

“Sallam alaikum,” he said. Peace be to you. “It is nearly time for prayers. We will talk later.”

“Yes, Father,” she replied, lowering her eyes. She turned without looking at McGarvey and headed back down the hill into the camp. Bin Laden watched her go, a wistful expression on his face that curiously made him seem very human, even vulnerable at that moment. His daughter was his weak link, as daughters were for many fathers.

“Children can sometimes be trying,” McGarvey said.

Bin Laden’s eyes zeroed in on McGarvey’s, his face suddenly filled with barely controlled hate and contempt. It was like being next to a volcano that was ready to explode any second. “They are our future.”

“All the worse when young lives are cut short unnecessarily,” McGarvey shot back. He was not willing to back down. That’s not why he had come here. The sonofabitch was responsible for killing a lot of innocent people. “But then there are casualties in every battle. The goal is to avoid the larger war.”

“We got your message, that’s why I’m here,” “I thought you might find it of some interest—”

“You got our attention, all right,” McGarvey cut him off. “There’s a contingent in my government who are chomping at the bit to send the marines in here to wipe you off the face of the earth. There wouldn’t be a whole hell of a lot of people who’d so much as blink if it happened.”

“I didn’t ask for this war,” bin Laden replied angrily. The guards flanking the cave entrance clutched their rifles. “My people did not create the situation. We would have been content to live the way we have always lived. But you wanted your precious oil and you didn’t care who you destroyed to get it. Nor did you hesitate to invent nuclear weapons and use them. Your government, McGarvey, not mine.”

“Are you trying to tell me that blowing up our embassies and killing or hurting thousands of innocent men and women is the solution?”

“Your government thought so in 1945 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

“Give me a break,” McGarvey said. “That was at the end of a very long war that we did not start. And as far as oil goes your own people are the ones who are profiting the most. Your own father made his billions because of it.”

Bin Laden’s hands went to his rifle. “Maybe I’ll kill you here and now, and send the bomb anyway.”

“Maybe you will,” McGarvey said. “Maybe that’s your plan, lure us out into the open one at a time and shoot us and our families down. Then send the bomb to blow up another one of our embassies, or maybe you’re crazy enough to try to get it to Washington and blow up the White House. Then what? Do you think that we’ll suddenly fold up our tents and go away? Are you that naive? Have you lived up here in the mountains for so long that you don’t know who or what you’re dealing with?”

“A great many people would die.”

“Yes, they would,” McGarvey said. “And not just Americans. We would strike back. The loss of lives on both sides would be terrible and unnecessary. It could even spell the end of Islam; certainly the end of your fanatical movements. Which is the real reason that you called me out here, and why I came.” McGarvey spread his hands. “The ball is in your court, pal. Either shoot me or let’s go inside and talk this out. Maybe we can figure out how to save everybody’s daughters.”

A play of emotions crossed bin Laden’s face, most of them impossible for McGarvey to read because of the vast cultural and religious differences between them. Bin Laden professed that everything he did was in the name of Allah. McGarvey on the other hand was an agnostic. He’d been so close to death so often that he could not believe in some afterlife in which half the people went to Paradise and the other half went to hell. If there was a God, he had decided early on, it rather than He had to be a force simply of creation. What was left was a dependency on civilization; on the good will of men, on the rule of law. Men were gregarious by nature. They formed villages, and communities, and finally states and nations, all predicated on the beliefs that being together was better than being alone; that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. And that the strong protected the weak. When religion spoke to the issues of the afterlife that was one thing, in McGarvey’s estimation. But when in the name of Jesus during the Crusades, and Allah nowadays in the struggle between Islam, Judaism and Christianity, innocent people were killed, that was another, reprehensible thing. The first gave comfort, the latter tore down civilizations.

Bin Laden looked up at the sky to the northeast where the sun was just touching the tops of the not so distant mountains. “It is time for prayers,” he said. There was anger, some fear, perhaps even some pain and something else in his eyes. Something that went even beyond the simple knee-jerk hate of the ordinary terrorist. Bin Laden was anything but a simple man.

“And talk,” McGarvey said.

Bin Laden nodded. “Yes.” He stepped aside, allowing McGarvey to go ahead of him into the cave. McGarvey had the fleeting feeling that he was stepping into the maw of a monster from which escape was utterly impossible.

A narrow, dark passage ran about fifty feet back into the hillside where it opened to a chamber at least forty feet in diameter. From this place and others like it scattered throughout the mountains of Afghanistan, bin Laden managed his war against the west with a very effective hand. But it was just a cave, after all, and the people living in it nothing but animals. The main chamber was dimly lit with hissing gas lanterns. Shadows played on the tall ceiling that sloped toward the back where another narrow opening led even farther back into the hill. Wall hangings were affixed to the rocks, the floor was covered with thick Persian rugs and along one curving wall dozens of cushions were laid out in a semicircle around a large cast-iron brazier on which live coals glowed. The chamber was warm, which was a welcome relief from the chill air outside, but not smoky because air funneled from the back of the cave and out the passageway.

From farther inside McGarvey thought that he could hear the muted hum of men in conversation, and perhaps computer printers; an dover the charcoal smell perhaps the distinctive odors of a great deal of electronic equipment. He could not hear a generator running, but it would be outside somewhere, under camouflage netting.

A tripod held a video camera pointed at the arrangement of cushions where the light was a little better. A cable snaked from the camera along the wall where it disappeared down the dark passage.

On the opposite side, prayer rugs had been laid on top of the carpets, beside which was a wooden stand that held a large ceramic bowl filled with water. Several small towels were neatly folded and lying on the floor.

Bin Laden motioned to the bowl. “Cleanse yourself,” he said. He laid his rifle next to one of the cushions and waited patiently.

The water was warm and scented and felt good, although a hot shower and a couple of beers would have been better. This was Arab hospitality. Bin Laden was watching him with an odd, almost ascetic smile. A Muslim warrior would slit your throat if you were his enemy, but if you were his guest he would treat you kindly. It was a matter of Islamic honor.

A pair of men brought fresh water and switched bowls. When they were gone, four armed mujahedeen came in and quietly hunkered down in the shadows, their rifles between their knees. One of them was playing with the safety catch.

Bin Laden indicated a spot for McGarvey to sit, and he graciously poured tea. “It is time for my prayers.” He gave McGarvey a baleful look. “Don’t make any sudden moves, your actions might be misunderstood.”

“The odds are in your favor.”

“They usually are.”

Bin Laden made a point of searing McGarvey within reach of the rifle he’d laid on the cushions. I’m the boss and I’m confident, his actions said.

McGarvey sipped the strong tea as bin Laden went through the Islamic ritual washing, then kneeled on a prayer rug facing southwest, and began his prayers, softly repeating the Sura Fatihah, which was the opening chapter of the Qoran, eight times.

Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe, The Compassionate, the Merciful, Sovereign of the Day of Judgment! You alone we worship, and to You alone we turn for help. Guide us to the straight path, The path of those whom You have favored, Not of those who have incurred Your wrath, Nor of those who have gone astray.

To succeed in chaining the multitudes, you must seem to wear the same fetters. The line from Voltaire ran through McGarvey’s head. Bin Laden was a common man here at this moment, but he was a major figure among Islamic fundamentalists, and had been ever since the ten-year war against the Russians. He was a Saudi rich kid, but he’d come to Afghanistan to help the freedom fighters, putting his money and his life on the line for them, and everybody loved him. He had been bright, soft-spoken, gentle — except to the Russian invaders — even pious and helpful. But all that had changed by the time the war was over and he came back home. He had become a rabble rouser. He wanted to pull the Saudi royal family from power, install an Islamic fundamentalist government and go back to the old ways. The best ways. He wanted to get rid of all foreigners from the entire Gulf region, especially Americans, and he wasn’t afraid to tell anyone who would listen that he thought Americans should be killed whenever and wherever possible, and with any means at hand.

Watching him praying, the words gentle, McGarvey tried to fathom what had happened here to change the man so profoundly. War changed people, but not like that. Something drastic had happened to him here; something so terrible that he had changed from the son of a multi billionaire construction boss who would inherit everything to a terrorist content to live in caves and eat unleavened bread so that he could kill Americans.

The U.S. had supplied money and arms to the Afghanis, and presumably bin Laden had come in contact with some of the CIA’s field officers out here. It was a reasonable assumption. But McGarvey had found nothing in the record about any meetings; no contact sheets, no incident reports, not even a fleeting mention. It was almost as if the records had been erased or had been altered. Or as if bin Laden himself had purposely avoided contact with the CIA.

Whatever had happened out here during the war was a complete mystery that only bin Laden knew.

Though he denied it, bin Laden had been implicated in dozens of bloody incidents against Americans; the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Khobar Barracks attack, the slaughter of fifty-eight tourists at the Valley of the Kings near Luxor and the bombing of the American-run National Guard training center in Riyadh, the capital city of his own country.

And now this. The biggest one of all. The attack everyone in the West had been holding their breath waiting for. And still McGarvey could not understand why. Where was the sonofabitch coming from?

McGarvey took a closer look at the way bin Laden was kneeling, the way he leaned forward to touch his forehead to the rug. There was something wrong with him. He moved like he was in pain. Was that it, McGarvey wondered. Was it that simple after all? Was bin Laden sick, maybe even dying?

Bin Laden got slowly to his feet with the aid of his cane, a satisfied, almost happy look on his face that was in total contrast to just a few minutes ago. His eyes looked distant, almost as if he was on drugs, and he moved very carefully. He came over and sat down on the cushions, the rifle between him and McGarvey. “It had to have been a long and dangerous trip for you,” he slurred.

“Like I said, we got your messages.” He could see that there was a pallor to bin Laden’s skin, and a slight tremble in his right hand as he picked up his tea.

“I did not order the killings of Mr. Trumble and his family. I don’t work on such a small scale.” His matter-of-fact tone was chilling, almost irrational.

“We identified one of the killers. He worked for you.”

Bin Laden dismissed it with a slight hand gesture, as if it was nothing of importance. “Trumble was a fool, and perhaps some people who believe in the jihad took it into their own hands to silence him.”

McGarvey stiffened. “I could silence you before your guards had a chance to stop me.”

Bin Laden smiled sadly. “You are not a martyr. That’s not why you came here.”

“Lives, even so few as four of them, are very precious to us.”

“Do you think that life is any less precious to me?” bin Laden replied mildly. “Do you think that I don’t weep each time blood is shed?”

“Soldiers are one thing, innocent women and children are something different.”

Bin Laden shook his head. “In this world there are no innocents,” he said blandly.

“Your daughter included?” McGarvey shot back, and he waited for a reaction. He wanted to get to the man where he lived.

Bin Laden’s face darkened, and McGarvey could see the obvious struggle he was going through to regain control. By degrees the same look of peace and contentment as before settled back into his eyes. His face relaxed, and the line of his mouth softened. “Women have a special place in our culture.”

“They do in ours too,” McGarvey said. “But I don’t think the Taliban are in complete agreement with you.”

Bin Laden seemed to think about that for a moment. “This has never been anything more than a temporary arrangement.”

His daughter was his weak point. Maybe he felt a little guilt because in a secret part of his soul he wished that Sarah was a man. And maybe even more guilt because he couldn’t provide a normal life for his family so long as he remained in hiding here in the rough mountains.

“Your daughter is a very special woman,” McGarvey said. “It took great courage for her to come for me in Kabul.”

Bin Laden shrugged, but McGarvey could see the pride in his eyes. “She is a foolish girl at times.”

“I worry about my own daughter. Sometimes she takes unnecessary chances. She’s headstrong.”

“But then you taught her to be that way. You are a headstrong man.”

“I wonder if we would worry less if they were men instead of women.”

“The worry would be no less, merely different,” bin Laden said. “This is a difficult world in which we live, difficult times. Dangerous.”

“Which is why I am here,” McGarvey replied.

Bin Laden looked at him like a snake might look at its dinner. “Perhaps it was a mistake, this meeting.”

“We’re here to avert a disaster,” McGarvey said, careful to keep his tone and manner neutral. He felt as if he was teetering on the edge of a deep abyss, the slightest misstep or wrong word would send him over the edge. “It’s time to stop the killing.”

“What then? What if we come to an agreement?”

“Your family could go home.”

“Saudi Arabia?”

“Yes.”

Bin Laden’s reaction was masked, but it was there: despair. “Not until American forces leave the Peninsula,” he said mildly.

“We’re talking about that in Washington. You know about it.”

Bin Laden became serious. “If the kingdom returned to its Islamic roots it might jeopardize your precious oil resources.” He was testing.

“We get oil from Iran, and will from Iraq once they agree to let us take a look at their weapons production facilities.” McGarvey put his tea down. “We don’t have a problem with your religion, except when you hide behind it to kill people.”

“Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama Canal.” Bin Laden watched McGarvey for a reaction. “We have our faith, Mr. McGarvey. What has driven you to ethnically cleanse your native population? Deny your blacks their rights?” He smiled disparagingly. “Ruby Ridge, Waco. The list is nearly endless. Tell me what fine principle you follow.” His eyes narrowed. “Christianity?”

“The terrorist’s litany,” McGarvey said. “Okay, do you want to take them one-by-one? Are we going to compare what we did as a nation a hundred fifty years ago, knowing what we knew then, to what you’re doing now, with what you know now? The Bay of Pigs and Vietnam were colossal mistakes on our part, but putting aside your cynicism about the West, we truly believed that the Cubans and the South Vietnamese wanted their freedom from oppressive government. We lost, and look at the systems they have now.”

Bin Laden was finally beginning to come out of his stupor, and he was getting agitated. “Are you trying to bait me?” he asked. “Freedom?”

“That’s right,” McGarvey retorted. “Why else do you think I would have come up here like this? But while we’re at it let’s check out the immigration numbers to countries like the U.S.” England, France and Canada compared with Iran, Iraq and Libya — all fine religious nations.” McGarvey measured distances between himself and the guards, and between himself and bin Laden’s rifle. “The Qoran is a wonderful holy book, but nobody is beating down the doors to Dar-al-Islam, especially after guys like Khomenni twisted it so out of all recognition.”

“Blasphemer,” bin Laden shouted. His guards brought their weapons up in alarm, not sure what was happening except that their boss was mad.

McGarvey girded himself to make a try for the rifle. “That’s your title,” he said. “And you earned it. Your hands are bloody with it.”

Before McGarvey could make a move bin Laden grabbed the rifle, his movements suddenly very precise, very crisp. He switched the safety off and pointed it at McGarvey’s chest, the muzzle only a few inches away. His face was filled with an insane light now. Either his lethargy had been a sham or he’d suddenly snapped out of it. There was no way of telling.

His guards jumped to their feet and pointed their rifles at McGarvey.

“Did you bring me here to kill me? Is that what all this is about? Or do you want to let your family go home? Get out of these mountains. Stop the jihad before it gets totally out of hand.” McGarvey sat forward. “Once you cross the line — the nuclear line — there’ll be no way home. Not for you, not for anyone connected with you. But we have a chance to stop the madness once and for all.”

Bin Laden regained control by degrees. But his face remained a mask of hate. “Killing you would give me more pleasure than you can imagine.” He said it so softly that only McGarvey could hear it.

“I would be replaced.”

“Not in your daughter’s heart.”

McGarvey was momentarily taken aback by the intimacy of the statement. He slowly shook his head. “No, not in my daughter’s heart,” he admitted. “But she knows that I came here to broker a peace agreement with you. If I have to die at least it will have been for a good cause.”

“A noble sentiment for a CIA assassin.”

His movements very slow, very precise, McGarvey poured two glasses of tea. He picked up one and offered it to bin Laden. “We got your message. I’m here.”

Bin Laden hesitated, not wanting to give up his anger. But finally a look of conciliation, even a hint of defeat, crossed his face. He was tired again, wan, drawn out, as if the brief outburst had sapped his strength.

He switched the safety on, casually laid the rifle aside and took the tea. “All American forces would have to immediately leave the Arabian Peninsula.”

“That would take some time, and my government would want safeguards in place against further trouble from Iraq.”

“We would deal with that situation in our own fashion.”

“It would have to be a mutual agreement.”

“Oil,” bin Laden said.

“Yes, oil,” McGarvey replied. “Your family would be allowed to return home to Saudi Arabia.”

“But not me.”

McGarvey shook his head. “We can lift the bounty from your head, but the best that we could try for would be a trial in the World Court at the Hague.”

“On what charges?” bin Laden demanded. It struck McGarvey as bizarre, almost surreal that bin Laden could ask such a question.

“International terrorism.”

“It’s war.”

“Not to the people you killed,” McGarvey said.

Bin Laden stared at him, a complex play of emotions across his lined, expressive face. “There can never be peace between us so long as your government supports Tel Aviv.”

“That’s not likely to change anytime soon, and I think you know it,” McGarvey said. “But at least there can be an agreement between us. It’s as far as we’re willing to go-“

Bin Laden smiled faintly, and stroked his beard. “Your military is already in the process of leaving Saudi Arabia. The bounty on my head is of no real consequence because the Taliban protect my interests. And my family would never agree, to leave my side,” “But you would not have to remain in hiding,” McGarvey countered. He couldn’t tell if the man was toying with him, but it was possible. This was all some macabre game to him.

“What would I have to give you in return?”

“The bomb whose serial number you gave Alien Trumble.” Bin Laden sat calmly, not moving, waiting for McGarvey to continue.

“At first we didn’t know what the number meant, in fact it took us several days to figure out that it came from a weapon that’s missing from the Russian military depot at Dushanbe. Once we had that you had our complete attention.”

Bin Laden smiled again, almost coyly this time. “Does your President believe that I would use this device against Americans?”

“I wouldn’t be here otherwise. We would have done something else.”

“A serial number and the actual device are two different things. Having the one does not guarantee having the other. I may be lying to you.”

“We think not.”

“Perhaps I brought you here as a diversion, to give me time to place the bomb somewhere effective. My bargaining position would be stronger.”

The origin of evil has always been an abyss, the depth of which no one has been able to sound, Voltaire had written. McGarvey thought that no one in the West had any idea who bin Laden really was. We had deluded ourselves into believing that he was nothing more than another Islamic fundamentalist waging a holy war against the infidels. Just like in the thirties when we had deluded ourselves into thinking that Hitler was only interested in righting the wrongs of the Versailles Treaty, and gaining Lebensraum for his people.

“What else do you want?” McGarvey asked, keeping his voice even. Maybe Dennis Berndt and the others had been right. Maybe this was an exercise in futility that was going to get him killed.

“I can see what you are thinking, but you are wrong. I am a simple man who wants nothing more than an Islamic peace for my people.”

“Why did you give Alien Trumble the serial number? There has to be something else that you want, something other than what we’ve already talked about.” “There is,” bin Laden said. “But it is not an impossible condition.” He pursed his lips. “It’s possible—”

A short, slightly built man, wearing the baggy trousers, long vest and head covering of a mujahed came in from the back. He waved the four soliders to their feet and came directly to bin Laden. He wore a white-and-blue striped fringed scarf over his face so that only his eyes were visible.

“We have a potential problem,” he said, looking at McGarvey. He spoke English.

“What is it?” bin Laden asked, instinctively reaching for his gun. “I’ll show you.” He motioned for McGarvey to get to his feet. “In the center of the room.”

McGarvey hesitated. He had no idea what was going on, but he knew that he was in trouble.

The man with the scarf pulled out a gun. “If need be I’ll put one in your right knee. If you’re ever allowed to get out of here alive, the return trip would not be pleasant.”

McGarvey had the feeling that he’d heard the voice before. Something in the British accent, in the intonation of certain words, seemed familiar. Unlike the others who were armed with Russian weapons, this one held a Glock 17, certainly powerful enough to take off a knee.

He motioned with the pistol. McGarvey stepped around the brazier and went to the middle of the chamber. The armed guards watched him closely.

“Spread your arms and legs,” the man ordered.

McGarvey did as he was told. “I’ve already been searched.”

“Yes, I know. I found out how you brought your gun through airport security, and past our people. Very clever.” Hash had mentioned that a man named Ali would want to inspect the laptop. This was the same man?

Ali laid his pistol down next to bin Laden, took what looked like an electronic security wand used at airports from his vest and came over to where McGarvey was standing. He found the spare magazine of ammunition in McGarvey’s bush jacket and took it. Then he slowly moved the wand over McGarvey’s entire body. Just above the belt line on McGarvey’s left side the device emitted a high pitched squeal.

He stepped back. “Take off your jacket and sweater.”

Bin Laden and the guards watched with interest as McGarvey stripped to the waist. Coming here with the GPS chip had been a calculated risk, but Technical Services had assured him that its power was so low, its frequency so high and its bandwidth so narrow that it was virtually undetectable. They were wrong, McGarvey thought bitterly.

His torso was marked with the scars from several bullet wounds and other injuries, plus the removal of his left kidney. The expression in Ali’s eyes was unreadable, but he studied McGarvey’s body for a long beat.

“You’ve lost a few battles.”

“Some.”

Ali ran the wand over the kidney scar and the device squealed. “Even more clever.”

“What is it?” bin Laden asked softly.

“Mr. McGarvey has been fitted with a global positioning system transmitter. Surgically implanted where he once had a kidney. It’s the latest thing in the CIA.” McGarvey measured distances between himself and the guards, and to where bin Laden was seated. If any sort of an agreement was dead, he would have to kill the man before the bomb could be delivered and set off. But the guards had kept a clear field of fire. If he made a move they could shoot him without fear of hitting their boss.

“Then they know that he’s here.” “Not here in the cave, there’s too much rock above us. It blocks the signal. But they certainly followed his movements through the mountains.”

Ali was close enough that McGarvey could grab him. But unless the man was very important to bin Laden, the guards might not hesitate to shoot anyway.

“What do we do with him now?” Ali said, keeping his eyes on McGarvey. “A bullet would destroy the device, that’s for sure.”

“Nothing’s changed,” McGarvey said to bin Laden. “We can still make our deal. That’s why I came.”

“Why did you bring such a thing here?” bin Laden demanded.

“To pinpoint your exact location,” Ali answered before McGarvey could speak.

“That’s right,” McGarvey said. “We have ships standing by in the Gulf waiting for word from me. You didn’t think I was going to come here unprotected did you? You have your armed guards, I have my cruise missiles. But think it out. Nothing has changed. You made me an offer, and I’m going to take it back to my government.” Ali walked back and got his pistol. “We need to leave immediately,” he said. He cycled a round into the chamber and pointed the gun at McGarvey. Bin Laden said something to him in Persian, and he looked back, vexed.

“The signal is picked up by satellites. There’s enough of them in orbit so that there’s always at least three above the horizon.”

“Then they know for sure that he’s in this camp,” bin Laden said, switching back to English. “But the signal cannot penetrate this cave, you’re sure about that?”

“Absolutely.”

“If he were to be taken down into the camp, the signal would reappear in their monitors, is this also correct?”

Ali nodded impatiently. “What are you getting at Osama?”

“They know exactly where we are. If they wanted to attack they could do it at any time.”

“That’s right.”

“But Mr. McGarvey is a very important man to them. They wouldn’t attack us while he’s still here. While the device he is carrying in his body is still here.”

Ali looked at McGarvey with renewed interest. “Do you still want to send him home?”

“Yes,” bin Laden said. “Maybe he actually did come to offer us a deal as he claims, and not merely to lead a missile attack.”

“Keep me here, and let me telephone the President—”

Bin Laden dismissed McGarvey’s suggestion with a gesture. “No, you will return to Washington.”

“As soon as he leaves the camp, they’ll attack,” Ali warned.

“No,” bin Laden said, supremely confident.

“But they’ll track the GPS chip.”

“That’s correct,” bin Laden said. “Mr. McGarvey will leave tonight, but the device will stay here with us. So long as it’s here, the CIA will think Mr. McGarvey is also here, and they will not attack. Simple. It gives us maneuvering room.”

CHAPTER TEN

McGarvey looked for a way out on the way down the hill into the camp. The two mujahedeen escorting him were wide awake, ready for trouble. The camp seemed deserted, yet he could feel a hundred pairs of eyes on him; watching, waiting for him to make a move. He looked over his shoulder, back up at the cave opening. If anyone was standing there they were lost in the deeper darkness. The stars were very bright and large; somewhere up there a series of satellites had picked up his signal as soon as he’d emerged from the cave. Back home they knew that he was on the move again. His exact position was pinpointed to within a couple of meters. There was no telling what they made of the fact his signal had cut out during the hour he’d been under cover, but somebody had probably figured it out. At least he hoped so, because if they thought he was dead, the GPS chip destroyed, they would order the missile attack. That would be the worst possible thing they could do right now. There was no doubt, not even a lingering suspicion, that bin Laden had the nuclear weapon and would use it if they couldn’t come to some kind of an agreement. A missile attack now would not kill bin Laden so long as he remained in his cave. And if they missed there would be no going back. If for no other reason than that, he couldn’t leave now. He felt cornered.

At the bottom they passed through the silent camp. Just beyond the helicopter a mujahed was hunched in front of a low, mud-brick structure of the type very common in Afghanistan, used for everything from sheltering humans and animals to storing equipment and supplies. When they got closer McGarvey saw that it was Mohammed, and he was grinning maniacally. He said something to the guards escorting McGarvey. One of them grunted something in reply, and then they pushed a heavy wool curtain covering the doorway back, and prodded McGarvey inside.

The single, low-ceilinged room, lit by a couple of kerosene lanterns, was equipped as a crude emergency hospital. One of the lanterns hung over a narrow table that was draped with a none-too-clean sheet A tray with a few surgical instruments, gauze pads and tape was laid out on a small cart beside the table. A man in a long white gown, a bandana tied on his head, was pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. He gave McGarvey an interested look and said something to one of the guards.

McGarvey stepped back a pace and calmed down. He considered his options and his chances.

“The doctor says that if you promise not to make trouble for him, he will allow us to wait outside.”

Overpowering the two mujahedeen was possible, but then what? He had two choices: He could try to get back to bin Laden and kill him. Or, he could do as he was told. Let them take the chip out of his body, and then somehow find his satellite phone to call off the attack. Even if the operation wasn’t botched, the chip would go off the air within twenty-four hours after the delicate battery bit the open air.

The clock was about to start running, and he didn’t have many choices left The doctor said something.

“You are not to worry. The procedure will be sterile if we wait outside,” the mujahed said. “It is for your safety.”

McGarvey nodded.

Mohammed was at the doorway, the blanket pushed back, and he was practically licking his chops.

“Tell the doctor that I won’t make trouble. But I want to be awake during the operation.”

The mujahed said something to the doctor, who shrugged indifferently, and nodded.

“And keep Mohammed away from me,” McGarvey said sternly. “If he comes in here I’ll kill him.”

One of the guards glanced at Mohammed and then looked back, grinning. He was enjoying himself. “No one will bother you in here. Tonight.”

“Okay,” McGarvey said. He unbuttoned his bush jacket and laid it on a chair. Next he took off his sweater, laid it on top of his jacket and spread his hands to show the guards he was offering no resistance. The doctor said something, and the guards left the room, letting the wool blanket cover the opening.

The doctor had taken a needle out of his bag, and filled it with something from a small bottle. “Loosen your trousers, and lay facedown on the table. I’ll give you the injection. It’s just lidocaine.”

“You speak English,” McGarvey said, surprised.

“I was educated in London,” the doctor said indifferently. “You might become lightheaded, but you won’t feel any pain.”

McGarvey undid his belt and the top button of his trousers and climbed up on the table. It smelled strongly of disinfectant, which was a good sign.

The doctor swabbed alcohol on a spot on McGarvey’s left side and gave him the shot. “It’ll take a couple of minutes for the drug to begin to work.” He palpated the area on and around the kidney scar. “You’ve had this kidney removed, and the implant is in the cavity, is that correct?” Before McGarvey could answer, he probed deeper with his fingers. “Ah, yes, here it is, just a few centimeters under the skin.”

McGarvey looked over his shoulder as the doctor swabbed an orange disinfectant around the area of the scar tissue. He tossed the swab into the bucket and took a scalpel from the table. McGarvey tensed up.

“Turn your head, you’re tightening your muscles,” the doctor said. He probed the area with his fingers, but McGarvey could only feel a dull pressure, the area in his side was already numb.

“Why didn’t you stay in London?” McGarvey asked.

“Because they took my license from me,” the doctor said curtly. McGarvey could feel a tearing sensation in his side. Although there was no pain he knew that he was being cut. It was a disquieting sensation.

“I was fixing gunshot wounds, without reporting them. The authorities would rather have let them die,” the doctor explained, as he operated.

“Terrorists,” McGarvey snarled. His stomach did a slow roll.

“That’s what they called them. But they were very brave men.”

“Who liked to kill innocent women and children.”

Out of the side of his eye McGarvey saw the doctor toss the bloody scalpel into a small tray, then select a pair of curved forceps. He could feel his warm blood trickling down his side beyond where the lidocaine injection had taken hold. That too was an unsettling sensation.

“Why did you come here then, better pay?” The doctor laughed humorlessly. “I’m a Muslim, Mr. McGarvey, and this is where the jihad is being fought.” There was a sharp tearing deep in McGarvey’s side and he winced. “Be still,” the doctor ordered, sharply.

It felt as if his muscles were being pulled inside out, and another very sharp pain rebounded up to his chest and shoulder, making him catch his breath involuntarily. He grunted.

“There, I have it now,” the doctor said. The GPS chip was about an eighth the size of a credit card, but a little thicker. It was clamped in the bloody tines of the forceps. The doctor went to place it in the tray, but he missed and the chip and forceps fell to the floor, hitting the edge of the metal bucket. “Damn,” he muttered.

The clock was running. The batteries would go bad in twenty-four hours. But if the chip had been damaged it might already be off the air.

The doctor used another pair of forceps to pick up the chip. He held it over the tray and poured some alcohol over it, than laid it and both pair of forceps gently on a white towel. As far as McGarvey could see it wasn’t damaged.

“You should not have come here, Mr. McGarvey,” the doctor said brusquely, taking the first stitch.

“Neither should you have.” McGarvey could not feel the needle pricks, but he could feel a deep ache in his side that went all the way up to his collarbone. Even if the chip was already off the air the President would wait at least twenty four hours to order the attack. Murphy would see to that. Or at least McGarvey hoped he would. But Dennis Berndt was a power in the White House; the President had complete confidence in him. He might convince Haynes to attack immediately, and considering the risk that they were facing, McGarvey could hardly blame them if they did.

“I’ll give you a shot of antibiotics against a possible infection, but when you get back to Washington have someone look at this.”

That was nothing but a circular argument. He considered asking bin Laden to give back his satellite phone, or at the very least let him use the communications equipment here to call the White House. But the man was crazy, and there was no telling how he might react to such a request, especially since McGarvey had come here with the GPS chip implanted in his body. The U.S. military knew the exact position of this camp, and McGarvey might confirm that bin Laden was here and go ahead with the attack.

His only chance now was to get out of the camp as soon as possible and hope that his escorts brought his telephone with them. Short of that he would have to make it back to Kabul and somehow find a way to call Washington.

The doctor finished closing the small wound. He bandaged it, cleaned up the blood, gave McGarvey a shot and helped him sit up.

“When can I expect your bill?”

The doctor gave McGarvey an owlish look from behind thick glasses. He didn’t see the humor. He took off his gloves, tossed them in a bucket and handed McGarvey his sweater.

“Bin Laden is sick, isn’t he,” McGarvey said. He carefully pulled on his sweater, the simple effort causing sweat to pop out on his forehead.

The doctor turned his back to McGarvey, took the bandana off his head and began untying his gown at the back.

“I think he might be dying,” McGarvey pressed. “What is it? Cancer?”

The doctor turned on him. “Don’t push your luck,” he warned. “All your fancy gadgets and satellites and military hardware won’t save you if he wants you dead. This is Afghanistan, Mr. McGarvey, and you have no idea what that really means.”

“Are you giving our guest a geography lesson, Dr. Nosair?” bin Laden said from the doorway. He came in with the two mujahedeen who had escorted McGarvey from the cave. If anything his face looked even sallower than before, and it wasn’t just because of the kerosene light. The effort of coming down the hill had visibly tired him.

“The sooner this man is gone from here, the better I’ll feel,” Dr. Nosair said.

“Is he fit to travel?”

The doctor gave McGarvey a critical look. “I’ve seen our men march for three days with untended bullet wounds. This operation was nothing by comparison. When the anesthetic wears off he’ll be in some discomfort, but it shouldn’t slow him down much.”

Bin Laden held out his hand. The doctor picked up the chip and gave it to him. “To an Afghani farmer this is magic,” bin Laden said, studying the device. “It may well be, because now the satellites believe that I am Mr. McGarvey.” He pocketed the chip and smiled at McGarvey. “And you have suddenly become one of us. A nonentity.”

“What now?” McGarvey asked.

“The good doctor is right, of course. The sooner you are away from here the better we will all feel. You’ll leave immediately, back the same way you came.”

“Do we have a deal?”

“I think that we have the beginning of an agreement,” bin Laden said. “When President Haynes announces in the United Nations the withdrawal of all foreign troops from the Arabian Peninsula, the retraction of the bounty on my head, and the opening of negotiations with the Saudi government for the repatriation of my family, the first steps will have been taken. We will see it as a sign of good faith.”

“What about the rest of it?”

“If all of that comes to pass you have my word that I will make no further moves against the West.” Bin Laden was suddenly stern. “But only under those conditions, make that perfectly clear to your President.”

“It still leaves the most important reason I came here,” McGarvey said evenly. He was thinking of Alien and his family. The bastard was still bargaining for lives, and he was enjoying it “When the announcement is made, we will talk again about that and about another matter. You have my word on that as well.”

“Don’t make the mistake of underestimating us. If you go back on your word we will come after you personally with everything in our power.”

Bin Laden smiled benignly. “I am not afraid of death, Mr. McGarvey, are you?”

“I’m respectful of it.”

Bin Laden gave him a long, appraising look. “In sha’Allah” he said, and he turned to go.

“We want the other three men responsible for the attack on Alien Trumble and his family. That’s going to be a part of the deal.”

“I’ll think about it. But now it’s time for you to leave. I’ll be waiting for your President’s reply. Tell him not to delay.”

McGarvey looked at his watch as he emerged from the crude hospital, and he was surprised to see that it was only a few minutes after 10:00 P.M. After all that had happened he’d only been in the camp for a couple of hours. The anesthetic would wear off soon, but for now he felt okay except for the lack of sleep, proper food and the dull ache that seemed to have settled somewhere just below his left shoulder. He’d been in and out of so many hospitals in his career that he knew what to expect, and he knew how his body was going to react, how much strength he had in reserve, how fast he could move and when to husband his strength so that he’d have something left if and when he needed it. Which was going to have to be very soon if he was going to stop the missile attack.

Hash and Farid, packs slung over their shoulders along with their Kalashnikovs, waited in the darkness. Mohammed, also carrying a pack and a rifle, stood a few feet away, the same crazy look as before on his broad peasant’s face. They were to be his escorts back to the Rover parked in the village, and then back to Kabul. But whatever instructions bin Laden had given them about McGarvey’s safe passage were going to be ignored by Mohammed. McGarvey could see it in the man’s eyes. Mohammed was obviously itching to get out of the camp where somewhere in the mountains there would be an accident.

McGarvey glanced up at the entrance to the cave in the hillside. Bin Laden had the nuclear bomb hidden somewhere, perhaps even here. That was the only consideration now; getting it back.

“Who has my things?” he asked.

Mohammed raised his pack a couple of inches off his shoulder, but said nothing. His eyes were wild.

“We’ll go now, mista Hash said.

“I want to see my things first,” McGarvey said. “I don’t trust this bastard. He looks like a thief.”

Hash said something, and Mohammed opened the bundle and dumped the contents in the dust. McGarvey’s pistol and spare magazine of ammunition were wrapped in an old rag, but the laptop computer and telephone were missing.

“Where are the rest of my things?”

“The computer stays here. Ali has it,” Hash said apologetically.

“What about my telephone?”

Mohammed took it out of his pocket, then laughed uproariously. “I’ll give it back to you in Kabul, you’ll see.”

Hash and Farid in the lead, with Mohammed bringing up the rear, they headed single file through the seemingly deserted camp. But as before McGarvey could feel dozens of pairs of eyes watching from all around. There was no sign that they were getting ready to break camp and go to ground somewhere else, but that could happen as soon as he got out of sight, and it would only take them a couple of hours to bug out.

They crossed the shallow stream at the far side of the camp and started up the steep switchbacks to the crest of the hill two hundred feet above. McGarvey climbed slowly, stumbling from time to time as if he was having a great deal of difficulty. The only way he was going to get his phone back was to kill Mohammed. And with three-to-one odds he needed every advantage he could get, including instilling a false sense of security in them.

Halfway up, McGarvey stopped to catch his breath. He looked down the way they had come, and across the camp to the facing hill. For a second he thought he might be seeing the glow from the tip of a cigarette about where he figured the cave entrance might be. But then it was gone, though he could well imagine that bin Laden himself, or perhaps the man called Ali, was there watching him leave. Ali fit the general description that Trumble had given them of the man sitting silently in the corner at the Khartoum meeting. And bin Laden had been respectful of his opinions. Perhaps he was bin Laden’s chief of staff. It was a possibility.

They reached the top of the hill twenty minutes later, and McGarvey stopped again for a minute to catch his breath. The moon was just coming up over the distant mountains, casting a malevolent orange glow on the snow covered peaks. The doctor was correct about one thing; this was Afghanistan, and no one in the West had any real idea what that meant. The entire country was in chaos; the pressures of the modern world with its dazzling technologies clashing with the centuries-old insular traditions that had either defeated or swallowed every invader ever to cross the Khyber Pass. Even the Russians, with their brutality in the field, had failed to conquer the Afghanis. And there was a lot of doubt that the Taliban, with their fanatical interpretation of the Qoran, would be successful either. A strange place. A fitting place for a man such as bin Laden with his jihad and hatreds.

“Ready?” Hash asked respectfully.

“Yeah,” McGarvey said, and they started down the narrow, rocky path when a dark figure suddenly materialized out of the shadows behind some boulders.

Hash and Farid pulled up short and reached for their rifles when the figure said something in Persian, and scrambled up onto the path. It was Sarah.

“I’m coming part of the way with you,” she said in English.

“Your father will forbid this,” Mohammed told her, angrily.

“Very well. We will wait here until you return to camp and tell him.”

“I will use the radio—”

“That is forbidden except for an emergency,” Sarah warned sharply. “Or do you wish to disobey not only me, but my father too?”

Mohammed was fuming, but after a beat he shook his head. Maybe there would be two accidents, McGarvey thought. And he wondered if bin Laden knew just how unstable their situation was here.

Sarah carried a short-stock version of the AK-47 slung over her shoulder, the muzzle pointed to the ground. But she had no pack. She fell in beside McGarvey and for the first half-mile or so they moved through the night in silence.

A light breeze had come up, and although it was very cold McGarvey was sweating. The lidocaine had completely worn off and besides the ache beneath his shoulder, there was a very sharp pain in his side from the incision. It was like a toothache, only worse, and he could not completely put it out of his mind. That, and Mohammed’s presence at his back, made him edgy. The clock was still running.

“I’d like to ask you a favor,” McGarvey said, finally breaking the silence.

Sarah gave him a quizzical look. “What?”

“Mohammed has my things, I would like to have them back.”

She shrugged. “When you get back to Kabul. He’s been told.”

“I’d like them now.”

“No,” she said. “I have my orders too. We all do. You will have to wait until Kabul.” She looked into his face. “I’m sorry Mr. McGarvey. I know about the electronic device that you brought with you. Its significance was explained to me. And it was explained that you must not communicate with your people until you are a long way from here. I think we will be moving from this camp. It will make us all feel better. Safer. Do you understand?”

McGarvey nodded. “We want the killing to finally stop.”

“Then I hope you are able to convince your President of this when you get home.”

They walked for a long time in silence, the night bitterly cold. McGarvey settled down, concentrating on the march because there was nothing else he could do for the moment.

“Now that you have met my father, what do you think?” Sarah asked innocently at one point.

The path had dipped below the crest of the hill that overlooked the camp, and it started back up again, the slope gentle at first, but steadily rising. What few trees were here were stunted and gnarled in the thin topsoil. At this altitude they were just below the treeline. McGarvey took a long time to answer. Bin Laden was a monster, but to Sarah he was her father.

“I think that he’s getting tired of hiding here in the mountains,” McGarvey said. “He wants to go home.”

“Wouldn’t you?” She smiled wistfully. At that moment she looked like a tomboy, and McGarvey was reminded of his own Liz at that age. “Was the operation painful?” she asked.

“A little, but I’ll live. What did your father say about the — incident?”

Sarah stole a glance over her shoulder. Mohammed was far enough back so that he was out of earshot if they spoke softly. “He didn’t say anything. I think he is disappointed.” It was a very tough admission for her to make.

But it wasn’t your fault. If that’s what the Qoran is teaching you it’s all wrong. “The Taliban are fanatics. But do you suppose they would condone what he tried to do to you?”

“Probably. But sometimes it gets confusing.”

“Welcome to the club,” McGarvey said. He felt sorry for her, and he wondered about her mother, and her father’s other wives and all the siblings. Dinner at the bin Ladens’ would be quite a spectacle, if such mixed eating arrangements were possible in a fundamentalist’s household.

She looked at him questioningly. “Club?”

“I meant it’s the same for everybody. Nobody has all the answers, especially not young people.”

She picked up on that with eagerness. “Tell me more about your daughter. Aren’t you afraid for her safety because of all the violence in America?”

McGarvey stifled a laugh. “The newspapers have some of it wrong. They like to exaggerate.” He swept his arm around the wild mountain scenery. “This isn’t exactly a safe haven. And for you Kabul must be even worse.”

The comment hurt her. She lowered her eyes. “We don’t choose to stay here.”

“If you could leave Afghanistan where would you like to go? Riyadh? You have family there.”

“London,” she said without hesitation. “I’d like to go to school there. My English is good enough, I think.”

“Your English is very good.”

“I would like to study in school in London, and in the evenings I would go out to see plays, and attend grand openings, and eat in restaurants with my friends. On the weekends we might go driving in the country, maybe go swimming where it’s permitted. I would like to see the ocean, and the English Channel. Maybe we could go to Paris through the tunnel on a very fast train.” She half closed her eyes happy for that moment. “We wouldn’t always eat at McDonald’s, there are other places. Places where I might be able to wear a dress, makeup, nylons. And there would be magazines, and television.” She smiled. “And movies.” She gave McGarvey an excited look. “Does your daughter do all of that?”

“That and more,” McGarvey said.

“Does she obey everything you tell her?”

This time McGarvey did laugh. “No. She’s a lot like you.”

Sarah’s face fell and she averted her eyes. McGarvey had said the wrong thing again. “It’s against the Qoran for a daughter to disobey her father. It brings great shame to the house.”

“It’s the same in America, but we’re just a little more tolerant of our children,” McGarvey said gently. “What would you study in school?”

“Construction engineering and economics so I could continue my father’s businesses.”

There it was again, McGarvey thought. “You don’t have any brothers to take over?”

“They’re all too young, and besides I already know more about the business than they do.”

“School takes time, maybe four years.”

Sarah shook her head adamantly. “I could learn everything I need to know in one year. Maybe less if I studied hard.”

McGarvey felt like a heel manipulating her that way, but they needed hard information. If bin Laden was dying, and didn’t have much time left — which apparently he didn’t from the things Sarah was saying — then he was getting desperate now. He’d gotten hold of a nuclear weapon and he meant to use it as a lever to assure his family’s safety.

“Then what, after you finish school?” he asked. “Would you make your headquarters in Riyadh?”

“Maybe,” she said breezily. “Maybe Yemen, or the Sudan. Of course my family has interests in a lot of places. Germany, Brazil, Japan.”

“The United States,” McGarvey suggested.

Her moods were mercurial. “Did you know that the original McDonald’s is in Downey, California?”

He had to smile. “No, I didn’t.”

“It is. I’d like to go there to see it.”

Western culture was infectious. A lot of people, her father included, thought it was a disease to be stamped out, or at the very least, to be contained. He didn’t think she spoke like this with him.

“But first there has to be peace,” McGarvey said. “The killing has to stop.”

She gave him a sharp, shrewd look. “To you my father is a terrorist. To us he is a warrior for justice, just like you claim you were in Kosovo.”

“Helping Muslims.”

“Yes, that surprised us at first,” she admitted. “But it was just a matter of influence. Washington over the rest of the world.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“What else can we believe?” she shot back. “The list of people you have dominated either with your military or with your economics goes on and on, and there’s no end in sight.”

“Do you think that your father has the answers by killing innocent people?”

“There are no innocents in the world.”

It was the same circular argument used by terrorists around the world. On the one hand they claimed to hate the United States government, but not the people. Yet their mission was to kill those people. What they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — understand, they attacked; what they couldn’t build, they destroyed. And they had no tolerance for any view but their own. The author Salman Rushdie had to go into hiding for years because of something he’d written.

Two hundred years ago Voltaire wrote that more than half the habitable world was still peopled with two-footed animals who lived in the horrible state approaching pure nature, existing with difficulty, scarcely enjoying the gift of speech, scarcely perceiving that they were unfortunate, and living and dying almost without knowing it. Nothing much had changed since then, McGarvey thought. The real problem was that the United States had the audacity to live well and to show the rest of the world what it was missing.

They fell into a troubled silence as they continued up to the saddle in the mountains that formed a pass. They’d crossed over it on the way up here, and it was the highest point on the trip. From there it would be downhill to the resting place at the stream, and below that the long valley leading down to the village where the Rover was parked.

McGarvey could see that Sarah was puzzled. She was trying to reconcile the things he had come here to represent with what her father had taught her. On the one hand she wanted to go to the West to see with her own eyes what it was all about. While on the other hand she wanted to believe that everything in the West was bad. But it was hard for her to understand how music, and fashion, and light and life were evil, while the mountains of Afghanistan and what they were doing from here was good. She was mature enough to understand that what she was being told wasn’t necessarily all true, but she was still young enough so that she couldn’t make up her own mind. Part of that was the culture into which she’d been born, repressive to women, but a large part of it was that she was still just a kid.

There was some snow on the path for the last hundred yards or so, but the wind was blowing strongly enough that their footprints from earlier were already gone. A long, ragged plume of snow was blowing from the top of a distant mountain, lit by the bright moon so that it looked as if there was a forest fire raging up there. The scene from the top, looking both ways toward the valleys on either side was primordial. There were no lights, no roads, nothing to suggest that people lived up here, or ever had come this way except for the snow-covered path they stood on.

Sarah took Mohammed a few yards farther along the path and they had a long conference while McGarvey smoked a cigarette.

When she was finished she came back, leaving Mohammed looking even more sullen than before.

“Mohammed understands that you are bringing a very important message back to your President from my father,” she said. “No harm will come to you. He knows that he would have to answer to all of us if it did.”

“Thank you,” McGarvey said.

A faint smile creased her lips. “But don’t provoke him, Mr. McGarvey. Men such as Mohammed are creatures of-passion.”

It was an odd thing for her to say, but then she was a young woman of very great contrasts because of her un bringing.

“I’ll behave myself.” McGarvey returned the smile. He put out his hand.

She hesitated, but then she shook his hand, hers tiny and cool in his. “Goodbye,” she said. “Allah go with you.”

“And with you,” McGarvey said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The beam of a flashlight bounced off the narrowing walls of the cave, and a moment later Osama bin Laden, stoop-shouldered, shuffled into sight. He stopped and leaned heavily on his ornately carved wooden cane, a gift from Sarah, and shined the light back the way he had come. He held his breath to listen for sounds of footsteps behind him. But the tiny chamber he’d come to was silent, as were the passageways behind him. He couldn’t even hear the sounds of the generator lost behind millions of tons of solid rock.

He turned back, and played the flashlight beam into the narrow grotto that they’d discovered at the extreme end of the system of caves. It was at a higher elevation than the rest of the chambers, and was completely free of water. Cold, but dry as a desert, yet he thought that he could feel heat coming from inside. He shivered in anticipation.

The Americans had come as he knew they would. First the ineffectual fool from Riyadh, and then the man from Washington, who was a much more dangerous adversary than they’d ever faced, if Ali was to be believed. And his chief of staff was to be believed; the man never made a mistake. Never. He was a heathen, but a very useful tool. Do not blame the rapier for its penetrating insensitivity, it’s not the sword that kills the enemy, it is the hand that directs the thrust.

He stooped so-that he would not hit his head on the low roof and entered the inner chamber. About ten meters long and barely three wide, the grotto was nothing more than a passageway deeper into the mountain. But it stopped at a solid wall of rock. There was little or no airflow back here, and the air smelled ancient, indicating that there was no other way in or out except by the series of passages from the front.

For all of his life bin Laden had been surrounded by people; sometimes by his enemies, but for most of the time by his friends. But he’d always felt desperately alone. Five times a day at his prayers, and then at night with sleep that usually came only after a very long struggle, he was isolated with his own thoughts, which for the most part centered on dreams of hate and especially absolution, a concept he’d never really understood as a young man, but one that had become increasingly important to him as he grew older, and especially in this last, horrible year.

Except for a fiberglass case about a meter and a half on a side and half that deep, which rested on a slightly larger wooden crate, the chamber was empty. Bin Laden hesitated for a minute or so at the entrance, his light playing on the container.

In the beginning the struggle had seemed so simple to him. It had never been about religion, at least not in the sense that Westerners thought it was. Islam, Judaism and Christianity were fundamentally the same; they all believed in one God and the same prophets. It was a matter of interpretation, and a matter of living within a religion. The Jews blamed everyone else for their problems, as they always had, and they arrogantly believed that they, and they alone, were the chosen people. They wanted to take over their corner of the world, which in reality had always belonged to the Arabs, and they were willing to murder anyone who stood in their way. He hated them with everything in his soul. The Christians, on the other hand, led by the Americans, only paid lip service to their religion. For them the one true God was money. Their only aim since the Crusades was the rape and pillage of the world. In some ways even more important than the need for oil was the need to dominate the entire planet. To do this they were engaged in the systematic poisoning of the world with their industrial pollution, their technology and worst of all with their warped ideas. The struggle, in bin Laden’s estimation, was for nothing less than the minds and souls of Muslims to practice their lifestyle wherever they lived.

Lately, however, he had begun to question the methods he had used in the jihad. Every blow he’d struck had turned out to be nothing more than a pinprick. Bows and arrows against tanks. Valiant, but meaningless.

But it was difficult, and maybe even impossible, for him to let go of the hate and fear and even shame that he had carried deep inside of him for so long.

He closed his eyes for a moment. The woman’s name was Lynn Larkin, and she worked for the CIA as a field agent, though her being in Afghanistan was insanity. Most of the time she hid her identity as a woman as she went from the site of one firefight to another, bringing the latest intelligence information on Russian positions and troop movements to the freedom fighters. When she was in Kabul she wore the proper clothing, and although there were rumors, no one knew for sure that Lynn Larkin, the woman in Kabul, was the same person as Lawrence Larsen, the CIA spy in the field.

It was during the battle for Charikar that bin Laden came head-to-head with her. He wanted to attack the city because he had a gut feeling that the attack would be successful. The troops he was leading had had no clear cut victories in several months, and they were beginning to question the Saudi rich kid’s abilities as a battlefield commander. The CIA, however, advised against the attack. The city was too well fortified. The Russians had secretly brought in extra troops and heavy guns over the past several days in anticipation of just such an attack.

“You’ll get yourself and your men killed if you go in there now,” the woman insisted.

She was right, and bin Laden was wrong. In the attack he’d lost eighteen out of twenty of his men, and would have been killed himself except that the woman had crawled across a hundred meters of no man’s land in the middle of the night, and half-dragged, half-carried him back to safety.

“You stupid fool,” she said, bandaging his wounds. In the fight she’d lost her hat, and her blond hair fell around her ears and forehead revealing who she was.

Bin Laden remembered the deep, deep shame he’d felt at that moment. The other two men who’d she’d brought back started to laugh, and something snapped inside of him. He pulled out his pistol and shot both of them in the head, killing them instantly.

Lynn Larkin reared back and struggled to reach her gun as bin Laden turned his pistol on her and shot her pointblank in the face.

Before morning he burned her body, and then walked twenty kilometers to the nearest enclave of freedom fighters where he told them that the CIA had betrayed them, and that the Russians weren’t their only enemy. The Americans in fact were worse.

He opened his eyes. A slight sheen of sweat dampened his forehead from the pain of his illness, and from the pain of his humiliation.

He approached the container, dragging his left leg behind him. The legend stenciled on the top cover was in English. Written below that was made in china. That brought a smile to his lips. Life was a matter of interpretation, he’d come to understand in the last year. It was nothing more than a mirror reflection of then-everlasting existence in heaven; a wonderous gift not to be taken lightly. It was to be appreciated, to be honored. He’d sometimes seen that idea reflected in the eyes of his wives and children, but he’d never seen it so strongly and so fiercely proud as he saw it in the eyes of Sarah.

He closed his eyes again, and his lips compressed in pain. How to reconcile the jihad with her smile? How to understand Mohammed Toorak’s brutal attack on her body? Or McGarvey’s actions at the river. Believe in me and I will be your salvation. Sarah had been wrong to expose herself so wantonly. But Mohammed had twisted their religion to justify his animal lust And McGarvey had acted… how, bin Laden asked himself. Like a father? Would he have done the same thing if it had been McGarvey’s daughter? It was a question that he could not answer, because Sarah was much more than just a daughter to him; when he looked at her it was as if he were looking into the mirror image of himself.

Of all his children she was the only one who had remained at his side without question since his name had been linked to terrorism. Even when he said publicly that all Americans should be killed whenever and wherever they could be found, she did not turn away from him. Never once had he seen a questioning look in her eyes for something he’d said or done. She was his flesh and blood by birth, but she was also his flesh and blood by word and deed, right down to the bottom of her heart and soul.

When she was twelve in Khartoum, bin Laden had called her to his sitting room to punish her. Her brother, Sa’lid had caught her reading a years-old issue of an American teen magazine called Tiger Beat, and brought the magazine to their father.

When she came into the room she bowed her head, but there was a look of defiance on her face. Bin Laden held up the magazine.

“Is this yours?” he demanded.

She raised her eyes. “Obviously,” she told him, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

For a moment a black rage threatened to blot out his sanity. But then he regained his control. “Where did you get it?”

She said nothing, but she didn’t look away.

“You will answer me.”

She shook her head.

“What did you expect to learn from this filth?” he demanded, “Tell me at least that much.”

“The truth.”

“The truth,” bin Laden muttered. He was amazed. “What truth?”

“There are no Godless heathens in that magazine. No murderers of Muslims. No Jews. Only children like me having fun—”

“Stop!” bin Laden roared. “You know nothing about the truth.” He threw down the magazine, picked up the long, whippy willow stick lying beside him and went to her. She looked up at him, no fear, only rebellion in her eyes. “You will tell me the name of the person who gave you the magazine.”

“No, Father,” she said.

Bin Laden pulled her around by the arm, and struck her in the backs of her legs with the willow stick. She took a half-step forward, but she did not cry out.

“The name,” he said, but she did not answer him, so he struck her again on the backs of the legs, and then on her buttocks, and back, and legs again. He was crazy with rage and with fear that he was losing the most precious thing in his life to the very system he had dedicated his life to destroying.

She was wearing a white chad or Bin Laden’s upraised hand stopped in mid swing There was blood on her back. He let go of her arm and stepped back, aghast at what he had done to his child. In the name of Allah, he had hurt her.

She looked up at him. “I’m not afraid of the truth, Father,” she said in a very strong voice. “Are you?”

He lowered his hand, and let the willow stick fall to the floor. “No, child, I am not afraid of the truth,” he answered. An overwhelming shame for what he had done, and tenderness for his daughter came over him. He wanted to protect her, and all he had done was cause her pain.

He held out his arms for her, and without a moment’s hesitation she came to him and he held her close.

“I’m sorry, Father,” she sobbed.

“Don’t be,” he comforted her. “But I want you to be wary of the truth — or what seems to be the truth — until you are old enough and wise enough to recognize lies for what they are.”

“Yes, Father,” she said. “I’ll try.”

Bin Laden opened his eyes. Nothing was ever more clear to him than his love for his daughter, then or now. Yet at this moment he felt as if he was seeing everything with a crystal purity, something never possible before. Years ago the infidel British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that for centuries we’ve been told that God can move mountains, and a lot of people believed it. Nowadays we say that atomic bombs can move mountains and everybody believes it.

What did he believe, bin Laden asked himself. What was the truth this time? The gates to Paradise were never more bright, but the path never more dark.

Laying his cane aside, and awkwardly holding the flashlight under his right arm, he undid the four catches at the corners of the container, removed the top cover and laid it on the floor. He unfolded the thick rubber and fabric covering, exposing an inner aluminum cover. This he unlocked with a four-digit code on a keypad. The panel swung open, revealing four metal catches, which he slid back, releasing the top of the case. He pulled this off with some difficulty because it was heavy, and set it on the floor.

He was sure that he could feel the heat coming off the exposed mechanism now, even though he knew it was just his imagination. In this state the nuclear weapon was perfectly harmless; cool to the touch, leaking no radiation, impossible to accidentally detonate, and just as impossible to detect by any means other than disassembly.

Most of the device was shrouded by sealed covers, only some brightly colored wires came together in neatly bound thick bundles to the control mechanism, which was about the size of a hardcover book, attached to the lower right corner of the inner case. A display screen with room for twelve digits and symbols topped what appeared to be the keypad for an advanced scientific calculator. The first code activated the control circuitry. The second code determined how the weapon was to be fired: by a direct timer with as much as a thirty-six-hour delay; by a remote control device that could, depending on conditions, be effective up to five miles away; or by an incoming signal to the weapon’s onboard satellite receiver. The frequency, duration and built in code in the remote firing signal could be determined by the weapon’s keypad.

Complicated, but exquisitely failsafe and simple. Once the weapon was activated nothing could stop it.

Bin Laden’s eyes strayed to the metal identification plate to the right of the keypad. On it was stamped the serial number and the factory where the bomb had been assembled.

The irony would have been sweet, he told himself. And this would have been only the first of many blows. But he was getting tired of the fight, and he felt a deep sense of awe and even dread standing this close to so much power. He was going to have many difficulties convincing the others of his change of heart. But in time they too would come to see the wisdom of his decision.

He reassembled the bomb case, making sure that all the locks and catches were firmly in place, then picked up his cane and headed back. Deep down he felt a sense of failure, and yet he was looking forward to the new challenge. He didn’t have much time left so he would have to work hard to convince a skeptical world that all he wanted was a Muslim peace. And he would have to work even harder to control his hate, which at times threatened to block out all reason and sanity. But it could be done, because it had to be done.

The grotto was nearly a half-kilometer into the mountainside, so it took him almost ten minutes to make his way to the front chambers. It was two in the morning and everyone but a few guards were down for the night. He felt a little sorrow for his men, most of whom would have nowhere to go after he quit. Some of them would probably join the rebels in the north to fight the Taliban. But for many of them there would be nothing. They would be disappointed, even angry, but it could not be helped.

“Insha’Allah,” he murmured softly. He switched off the flashlight, pocketed it and shuffled down the final tunnel to the opening in the hillside. He needed fresh air after the confines of the cave.

The two guards outside were wrapped in blankets against the chill night air. When bin Laden appeared they started to get up, but he waved them down.

“All is quiet tonight?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” one of them replied.

They were safe here, yet bin Laden, out of long habit, studied the brilliant sky for the fast moving pinpoint of light from a satellite passing overhead, even though he knew that the next one wasn’t due for another two hours. They’d learned to time their movements by the satellite passes, and schedule their most important work for when the skies were overcast and the satellites were blind.

Someone came out from the medical hut and started up the hill. Instinctively bin Laden stepped back inside the cave, his eyes narrowing as he watched the man approach. But then he recognized it was his chief of staff and he relaxed.

Ali Bahmad, whose voice had often times been the only one of reason, had surprisingly been against opening negotiations with the Americans. He predicted it would lead to more trouble than they could imagine. His predictions were disturbing, all the more so because Bahmad had worked in the West, and he knew the Western mind as well as any Muslim could.

As bin Laden watched Bahmad make his way up the hill he realized that after eight years he really didn’t know his chief of staff as well as he should. Brilliant, highly trained, capable, efficient, but as cold as the winds off the high peaks of the Hindu Kush. And yet bin Laden had seen Bahmad do so many little kindnesses for the few children in the camp, and especially for Sarah. She was smitten by him because he had lived in the West and wasn’t afraid of it like so many others here. They would sometimes sit for hours talking about London and Washington where Bah mad had once been stationed with the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Bin Laden had also listened to Bahmad play the violin; his long, delicately thin, perfectly manicured fingers caressing the strings as if they were a woman’s thighs. Yet for all his talents, including combat training, and his ruthlessness — it was he who had ordered and engineered the killings of Alien Trumble and his family — Bahmad could have passed for a shopkeeper almost anywhere in the world. His skin was pale, his English perfect, and his mannerisms Western. Quiet, mild, even studious looking, he was very short, with plain features, a round undistinguished face, balding, with a slight paunch, he posed no threat to anyone.

Born of an Egyptian mother and a Yemeni father, he was in his forties now, but he came up the hill with the grace of a gazelle, his movements like everything else about him, surprisingly swift and sure.

He’d been educated at the American University in Beirut, but after his parents had been killed in an Israeli bombing raid, he’d slipped out of the city to work with a PLO cell. After a couple of years of killing silently in the night, he came to the attention of Arafat who recognized not only his unique intelligence and special skills, but his burning drive and utter fearlessness. Bahmad was the perfect soldier.

Two years after that, he showed up suddenly at Oxford on beautifully forged papers with a solid background, where he studied for and received his degree in Middle East studies. He was recruited by British intelligence right out of school, and for a few years he worked in London as an analyst. In the late eighties he was sent to the U.S. on an exchange program to work for the CIA and National Security Agency, generating Middle East position papers for the National Security Council.

But then he resigned, and quietly slipped back to Lebanon and Arafat when he felt that some uncomfortable questions were about to be asked of him. Besides, he admitted to Arafat, he felt that he could do more for the PLO than simply pass along intelligence information.

The fact of the matter, Arafat told bin Laden, was that Bahmad wanted to kill people. He needed to kill, perhaps as a retribution for his parents’ murders.

But because of the Camp David Accords and other agreements, Arafat’s position on the West began to soften, and he no longer had need for men such as Bahmad. The feeling was mutual. It was then, after the Russians had pulled out of Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union had disintegrated, that bin Laden had quietly recruited him. Since that time Bahmad had been the mastermind behind every terrorist attack that the West blamed on bin Laden. But his planning had been so good that no Western police agency had ever been able to come up with solid proof that bin Laden had been behind any of the attacks. Nor did any Western intelligence agency know about Bahmad’s connection, or even his existence: His death had been faked in an Israeli raid in Lebanon.

Bin Laden stepped out of the cave as Bahmad reached the entrance. “You’re up late tonight.”

“So are you,” Bahmad said mildly. “Your toy is still safe?”

Bin Laden nodded. “Is everything all right?”

Bahmad glanced at the guards, his expression bland, as if he was a tailor measuring them for suits. “It’s a good thing for us that I didn’t destroy McGarvey’s satellite phone as you ordered. He’s going to need it. The transmitter we took out of his body no longer works.”

Bin Laden’s jaw tightened. “What happened to it?”

“The stupid doctor admitted he dropped it on the floor.”

“The American monitors will believe that it has malfunctioned, either that or it’s out of range, its signal blocked. Where is the problem?”

“The problem is, Osama, that there is a third possibility they may be considering,” Bahmad said cooly. “McGarvey may have been killed, his body destroyed and the transmitter with it. But the exact location of this installation has already been pinpointed to within a couple of meters.” He shrugged. “They know exactly where you are, and for whatever the reason McGarvey is no longer a consideration for them. Do you see where I am taking this?”

“He came here to bargain with me, not lead an attack.”

Bahmad smiled slightly. “It was really quite brilliant of you to give them that serial number. It got their attention. But now they will do anything to stop you from using it. If they believe McGarvey is dead, they’ll try to kill you.”

“Send someone after McGarvey.”

“I already have. But the transmitter has been down four hours now, I think that we should leave immediately, at least until we get word that McGarvey has made his call.”

“Do you expect me to scurry off someplace else to hide?” bin Laden demanded.

“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”

“I’ll go back to my quarters—”

“McGarvey’s device transmitted the exact coordinates of this very spot. Their smart bombs are accurate enough to come right down the tunnel. You would die, and the cave would be sealed for all time.”

“Send Sarah to me, we’ll talk.”

“Sarah is gone,” Bahmad said.

“Gone? Where?”

“She was worried about Mohammed, so she decided to go with them at least part of the way.”

“And you let her go?” bin Laden roared.

Bahmad was unmoved. “You have very little control over your daughter, what do you expect of me?” His expression softened. “If something were to happen here tonight she’s better off away from the camp. I sent one of my men after them. He’ll get word to McGarvey and bring Sarah back here.”

Bin Laden looked up at the sky. If the Americans attacked tonight the jihad would already have been lost. Any further talks between them would be impossible. The only thing left would be retribution. A strike or strikes so devastating that no American would ever feel safe again. So devastating that the American government would have to retaliate with all of its might, with every means at its disposal. It would finally be a war that bin Laden knew he could not win.

He shook his head. “I don’t think the Americans will attack us so soon. They take time to think about actions like that. Talk them over with their military commanders, and maybe some key Congressmen. When your man gets word to McGarvey he can make a telephone call to the CIA to let them know he has not been harmed.” Bin Laden spread his hands and smiled. “You see, there is no problem.”

“Are you willing to bet your life on it, Osama?” Bahmad asked.

Bin Laden nodded without hesitation. “Yes, I am,” he said. “Insha’Allah.”

CIA Headquarters DCI Roland Murphy put down his White House phone and looked up as the connecting door from the deputy director of Operations office opened, not at all surprised to see Otto Rencke standing there, his wild red hair flying everywhere. It was coming up on 6:00 p.m. “I haven’t heard anything new, but you already know that.”

“Oh, boy, I think they’re getting set to make a big mistake,” Rencke gushed. “They’ve got some of the right reasons, but the wrong int erp They’re not looking close enough, ya know.”

“By they, I take it you mean the White House,” Murphy said. He’d seen Rencke in one of his “moods” before, but nothing quite like this.

“The National Security Council. They’re on their way over there right now. You gotta stop them, General.”

“I just got the call myself, Otto. We’re going to have a teleconference in ten minutes, and the President’s going to want my best recommendation.”

“I want seventy-two hours,” Rencke said.

Murphy shook his head. “I don’t think they’d give me twelve. Mac is off the air, and unless you have something for me, we have to assume that he’s dead and the chip has been destroyed. You’ve seen the data.”

“All right, forty-eight hours then. At least long enough for Mac to get back to Kabul. Someplace where he can call us.”

“If he died four hours ago, they’ll be getting set to move out of there. The President wants to hit the bastards right now. Show them that we can move fast when we want to.”

“You don’t understand, General, Mac is still alive.” Rencke was deeply distressed. Murphy didn’t know what Otto was going to do, but when geniuses suddenly started getting excited and raising their voices, you listened.

“You have ten minutes to convince me.”

Rencke came around the desk, and Murphy moved aside so that he could get to the computer. Otto brought up an action file that moved in slow motion. Along the bottom of the screen was a time-elapsed bar starting forty-eight hours ago. Displayed on the screen was a detailed map of the section of Afghanistan northwest of Charikar. It was constantly shifting to keep a small red icon that was moving through the mountains centered, and the time bar filled in.

“Okay, they take him from the Inter-Continental, and they head north past the airport, where they stop once—” Rencke looked up. “Probably a military patrol. But no problemo, they’re bin Laden’s boys. Around Bagram they stop for awhile.”

“Another checkpoint,” Murphy suggested.

“They switched cars,” Rencke said. “After they made the second stop, Mac’s transmitter moves about five meters to the west, but at a direct ninety-degree angle to the line it was moving in.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When a car makes a turn, even a sharp turn like at an intersection, there’s a radius of curve. Cars just don’t turn on a dime like people do.”

“You’re saying that they stopped the car, Mac got out and walked over to another car, which took off in the opposite direction twenty minutes later.”

“Right. And now you know what I’m looking for here. The anomalies that tell us something,” Rencke said. “They head north after that, past the air base, and then northwest, but very slowly now. They’re off the highway and probably off even dirt roads. They’re in the mountains.”

“Then he goes on foot,” Murphy said.

Rencke used the mouse to speed up the sequence until about eight hours ago. With a few keystrokes he brought up a topographic overlay so that they were seeing elevations as well as the simple north-south orientation.

“This is bin Laden’s camp,” Rencke said. “We’ve had one satellite pass to confirm that there’re a lot more people down there than you’d expect to see in a nomad camp.” Rencke looked up. “Anyway, the only reason nomads go up into the high mountains in summer is for grazing land.” He grinned like a kid. “But they screwed up this time.”

“What do you mean?”

“No goats,” Rencke said. “Lots of people, a couple of big animals, maybe camels, a couple of horses, but no goats.”

The analysts over at the NRO had missed that one, but then Otto wasn’t working for them. “All right. In the next couple of hours Mac’s signal disappears once, reappears less than an hour later, then disappears for good. What’s your take on that sequence?”

“Look at the overlay,” Rencke said. He sped up the sequence. The icon moved down into the valley, and then back up the hill on the other side where it disappeared. “Bin Laden’s den of iniquity. He invites Mac in for a bite to eat and a chat. But something happens in there, and Mac’s signal suddenly reappears.” Rencke looked up again. “Too soon, too soon, General, don’t ya get it?”

“They weren’t in there for very long.”

“Exactamundo. Bin Laden tells us he’s got a nuclear weapon and he wants to parley. But they only chat for a few minutes? Wrong answer, recruit. Something went haywire in there, and you just gotta ask yourself what that might be, ya know.”

Rencke hit another couple of keys and the screen was suddenly split, the new half showing a pair of squiggly lines moving left to right, traces on an oscilloscope. “Okay, this is a recording of Mac’s uplink with our satellite. The top line is before he went into bin Laden’s cave, and the bottom line is when he came out.”

Murphy studied them. “Are they different?” he asked. “Because if they are I don’t see it. They look the same to me.”

“Did to me too, at first,” Rencke admitted. “So I put both signals through a spectrum analyzer.” He brought up a new display with two sets of signals running left to right. This time it was clear that the bottom signal was slightly different from the top one. It looked as if the spikes had shifted a tiny amount to the right.

“It’s a phase shift, actually. But the guys downstairs are big time for sure that this wasn’t caused by low battery strength, or a component’s tolerance variation in the chip. This was an induced shift.” Rencke grinned like a kid at Christmas. “I told them to try a metal detector, like we use downstairs at the front door, on one of the test chips.” He brought up a third trace, which exactly matched the one directly above it. They were identical. “Bingo,” Rencke said. “They got wise to something, ran a metal detector over Mac, and found it.”

Murphy looked at the screen in amazement. Rencke wasn’t afraid of taking an idea and running with it wherever it might go, unlike just about all of official Washington. He didn’t give a damn about his job, his only concern was for McGarvey’s safety. Murphy looked away from the monitor. “All you’re telling me is why they killed him, Otto. I’m sorry—”

“Another wrong answer, recruit. That’s two in a row.” Rencke restored the map with its overlay and started the time bar again. “Okay, he moves out of the cave and down the hill into a hut.” Before Murphy could ask how he knew it was a hut, Otto pulled up a second overlay on the map. This one was a screened down image taken of the camp by one of the satellites. The position of the icon exactly matched a small building. “That picture was taken later, but the positions match up,” Rencke said. “A few minutes later the signal disappears for good.”

“So they took him inside a building and killed him,” Murphy said.

“No, sir. An earlier picture shows a man in a white gown entering the building. A doctor. That’s a medical hut. They took Mac in there to remove the chip. Then they destroyed it. Don’t you see? Mac is still alive.”

Murphy let out a pent-up breath. “Is that it, Otto?”

Rencke realized that he had not made a good case, and his expression dropped. “General, I know he’s alive. I can feel it in my gut.”

“I understand. But that doesn’t alter the fact that we’re dealing with a madman who apparently wants to play games with us over a nuclear weapon. A man who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands of people including Alien Trumble and his wife and children.”

“Give him a chance—”

“I’ll present this to the President, but he’s not going to buy it, Otto. He’ll want more.”

“But we need time, General. Goddamnit, we have to give Mac more time before we go charging in.”

“Is there any way that you can get through to him on his satellite phone?”

Rencke shook his head. “I tried, but he’s still got it switched to the simplex mode — send only. He’s in a position where he can’t call out, and he doesn’t want an incoming.”

“Or he’s dead,” Murphy suggested softly.

“He’s not,” Rencke snapped. He looked desperately over at the White House phone that connected directly with the President. “I could pull down the entire White House communications center so that the order couldn’t go out.”

Murphy said nothing, though he suspected that Rencke was probably not exaggerating.

“I could even get into the fleet’s command and control system so that they couldn’t so much as fart let alone launch a cruise missile.”

“I imagine you could.”

“I could shut down this entire town, and it’d be easier than you can possibly imagine.”

“I’m sure of that too, Otto,” Murphy said tiredly. “I’ll try to buy us as much time as I can. But I don’t think he’ll listen to me unless you come up with something more convincing. There’s just too much at stake.”

Rencke gave Murphy a bleak look. “Tell them not to miss. Because if they do, and bin Laden survives, he’ll come after us with a vengeance,” Murphy nodded. “Don’t say anything to his wife or daughter, okay?”

“Yeah,” Otto replied glumly. “Whatta bummer.”

CVN TO Carl Vinson The eastern horizon over the Arabian Sea was starting to show the first hints of a cloudless dawn when the battle group commander, Admiral Steph Earle, the Duke of Earl, put down the telephone on the bridge. He’d had a five-minute conversation with the President of the United States. There was absolutely no doubt in his mind about the mission.

He turned to the Carl Vinson’s skipper, Captain Robert Twinning. “Final Justice is a go, Captain. You’re free to launch on your command.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Twinning said. He reached for the growler phone.

“Give ‘em hell, Bob,” Earle said.

Twinning looked up and grinned. “That bastard’ll never know what hit him.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

They reached the first stopping point at the pool above the waterfall just as dawn reached the upper peaks. Hash and Farid, who had taken the lead, had talked in soft tones during the all night trek, but Mohammed in the rear had not uttered a single word. McGarvey had watched for an opening, but it was useless. In order to get to his phone he would have to kill all three of them. But he had needed their help to get this far. Looking around now at the somewhat familiar surroundings he was sure for the first time that he could find his way back to the Rover, and then down to Kabul from here.

They had stopped a couple of times to eat some nan and drink cold tea, but they’d been anxious to get down from the snow and cold in the high passes, so they hadn’t lingered long.

They had made good progress, and providing that the chip was still working, McGarvey figured they might even make it into Kabul before the twenty-four hours were up. He’d been counting on that up until now, because there was no other choice. Nothing would give him more satisfaction than going head-to-head with Mohammed, but he didn’t want to hurt the other two. There was no reason for it. Despite the operation and his lack of sleep he felt surprisingly good, and with the morning sun his spirits were somehow buoyed up. It might be possible after all to avert the worst disaster the U.S. ever had to face.

“We’ll rest here for one hour,” Hash said, and Farid nodded his approval.

“Sounds good to me,” McGarvey agreed.

Mohammed laid down his pack and went down to the river to fill the canteens as Hash and Farid gathered some wood and started a small campfire. They worked together with a quiet efficiency at something they had done many many times before. Wherever bin Laden had recruited them from they were truly Afghani mountain men now; a fiercely proud, self-sufficient people whose strength seemed nearly boundless. They were as comfortable here as an American teenager would be at a mall back home. The cultural gap was almost beyond bridging. Yet, sitting on a rock and smoking a cigarette as he watched them work, he was struck again by the contradictions Sarah was facing, which somehow made her seem fragile. She was as tough as a woman in this culture had to be, and yet there was a tender side to her that was painful to observe. He’d seen it in her eyes when he was telling her about food and fashions in the West, and especially about his own daughter, Elizabeth. And in the way her father had so peremptorily dismissed her at the cave entrance after her ordeal. No love there, or at least no outward signs of it, and her eyes had dropped in disappointment and resignation. If it had been Liz in the same situation, McGarvey knew that he would have given her a hug, told her that she had done a terrific job, and would have taken Mohammed apart piece by piece.

Another line from Voltaire came to him: He who is merely just is severe. Was that part of bin Laden’s ethic up here in the mountains? Was he looking so hard for a Muslim justice that he couldn’t allow himself the tender emotions of a father?

For a time he had considered the idea that the incident at the upper pool had been staged. But he decided against it. The look of self-righteous anger on Mohammed’s face, and Sarah’s fear and shame had been genuine. No acting there. Mohammed had been trying to rape her. So why the hell hadn’t bin Laden done something about it? The cultural gap was vast, but goddammit, being a father was the same everywhere, wasn’t it?

“How are you feeling now, mista Hash asked. The climb down to the valley wouldn’t be easy, but after that it’d get better. McGarvey had thought about that last climb all the way back from the camp. The wound in his side ached, and his left shoulder continued to give him trouble, but his legs were still fine. Fencing did that for him.

“If we get something to eat first, I’ll be okay,” McGarvey said. “Unless you’re planning to starve me to death.”

Mohammed, who had come back from the river, laughed uproariously. It reminded McGarvey of the wildlife films he’d see in which hyenas laughed as they circled in for the kill. Mohammed was waiting for the excuse, any excuse to go head-to-head with him.

“We’ve got plenty of food, you’ll see,” Hash said. He gave Mohammed a nervous look. “Pretty soon you’ll be home and everything will be AA-okay.”

Farid put two tin pots of water on the fire to boil. Into one he threw a handful of black tea, and into the other a couple of handfuls of brown rice and bits of something that might have been dried lamb or maybe fish. Almost immediately it began to smell good, and McGarvey decided that he had been gone from home way too long. Then the dark thought came to him that Alien Trumble had probably felt the same thing when he got back to Washington with his family.

“It’s time for prayers,” Mohammed told them. He and the other two went down to the pool to wash up, and this time he took the bundle containing McGarvey’s gun with him.

McGarvey watched them for a couple of minutes, looking for an opening, some way to separate Mohammed from the others and kill him. But at least for now that was not possible.

He sat down on the soft sand, his back against a rock and started to put together exactly what he was going to tell Murphy to stop the attack. That came first, but when he got back to Washington he would be facing an even tougher challenge; convincing the President and his National Security Council, and especially Dennis Berndt that bin Laden did not want to use the bomb, but would if he was pushed.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and he saw the bloody GPS chip falling from the doctor’s hand. He could hear the metallic clink as it hit the edge of the bucket. Until he was back in Kabul and his telephone was returned to him, the chip was his only link with the CIA. He hoped that it hadn’t been damaged. If it had malfunctioned God only knew how the President was reacting.

Bin Laden’s Camp Talking with McGarvey had been in some way more disturbing to Sarah than Mohammed’s nearly successful attempt to rape her. Had he succeeded he would have been sent back to Kabul, but she would have borne the brunt of her father’s rage, and that of all the mujahedeen. She should not have insisted on going to Kabul in the first place. She had no business out in the mountain wilderness alone with four men — one of them an infidel. And she should not have bared her body so wantonly. She had no modesty. She could hear the words coming from her father’s lips. It was a sentiment that would be shared by her mother and especially her younger brothers. She’d brought dishonor to the House of bin Laden, and no deed of hers could ever erase the stigma.

It hadn’t been like this in Switzerland. She’d been watched very closely of course, but she’d been allowed to read books, attend classes with the other girls, watch television. It was wonderful. Free. Easy. Happy. Relaxed. And yet if she had known then what she would have to come back to, she wondered if she would have gone to Switzerland in the first place. Or, once she was there, if she wouldn’t have run away, to London or Paris or Rome, somewhere they could not find her. Where she could have started a new life.

Topping the last rise above the camp at the same moment the sun appeared between a pair of snow-covered peaks far to the east, she pulled up. The return trip had taken longer because she had been lost in thought, struggling with a host of new emotions and new ideas. She’d also been delayed for a few minutes when she’d spotted someone coming up the trail toward her. She’d hidden herself in the rocks until she got a good look at the man as he passed, recognizing him as one of Ali Bahmad’s special soldiers. She had debated following him to find out what he was up to. But in the end she decided that she’d done as much as she could, and it was time to get back.

McGarvey’s presence had been so disturbing to her because he had given life to her most secret dreams about someday leaving the mountains for good. He was the first American man she had ever met, and certainly the first Western man she’d ever spent any length of time with. He was older than her own father, and she had no romantic illusions about him, or at least not many — he had seen her naked — but he had turned her head with his easy attitude and relaxed self-confidence as completely as the most ardent suitor could ever do.

The camp below was dark, and it struck her all at once that it was horribly dreary and isolated. Despite her strong will, and her deep faith in her religion and in her father, she began to cry. She didn’t close her eyes, nor did she wipe away her tears, she simply stood looking down into the camp and wept, her shoulders unmoving, her back ramrod straight. She couldn’t remember the last time she had cried, but it must have been when she was a little girl in Khartoum. Nor could she remember what it had felt like. But now a great sadness came over her like a thick blanket of fog falling into a deep valley, obscuring everything. She didn’t know what she was thinking at that moment; she was just feeling sad, lost, depressed, melancholic. She wanted her mother. She wanted someone to have tea with, someone to brush out her hair and braid it, someone to listen with a sympathetic ear. But her mother had returned to Khartoum in secret two months ago and there’d been no mention of when or if she was coming back.

McGarvey had been ready to kill Mohammed. She had seen it in his eyes, and in his deep anger. He wasn’t ashamed of her, nor had he blamed her for the attack. He had simply been a father protecting a girl. Squeezing her eyes shut she could imagine her father at the pool, see his flashing eyes on her, and on Mohammed. She could see his disappointment in her, his scorn, his anger. But at her, not Mohammed. As hard as she tried, however, she could not imagine her father doing what McGarvey had done for her. And she felt guilty for wanting such a thing. Ashamed. Sad.

But she loved her father with every fiber of her soul. As long as he stayed here in the mountains she would remain with him. Gladly. Wherever he was, that’s where she would be. She did not feel complete except when she was at his side. Nor could she feel warm except in the glow of his approval. Which was why she was having such a terrible time of it now.

McGarvey coming here was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She didn’t think she would ever get over it.

The sun began to feel warm on her face as she started down the steep switchback trail. It was almost time for morning prayers and, afterward, bed. There were moments when the five-times-daily ritual seemed too much to bear, but this morning she felt a great need for the comfort of Allah. Repeating the Sura Fatihah forty times each day was an intensely personal connection between her and God that sometimes made her forget everything except the moment. She needed that surrender now more than she had ever needed it before.

By dint of great willpower, Osama bin Laden began to clear his mind for the morning ritual as he came into the main chamber. He felt an overpowering sense of doom and a strong, almost desperate need for the comfort of prayer. His plan had to work if he was going to be allowed to make his final trip to Mecca and then to Medina. It was the last condition he was going to impose on his enemies before he turned over the bomb, and it was an absolute.

He had been nothing more than God’s warrior, and he found himself now longing for the peace of Paradise. There had never been any innocents in the struggle, it was something they didn’t understand in the West. Nor did they understand that when an infidel died he simply went to hell for a period until his soul was finally cleansed by the fire. Then the gates of Paradise would open even for him. In the end they all would become brothers in one; all children of a merciful God.

Ali Bahmad came into the chamber and stood respectfully in the shadows without speaking until bin Laden noticed him.

“Yes?”

“Your daughter has returned.”

“Alone?” bin Laden asked softly. He was relieved.

Ali Bahmad nodded. “She’s coming down the hill now.”

“Thank you for letting me know. After prayers have her come to me.”

“As you wish.”

“What about Hamed? Have you heard anything from him?”

“He passed Sarah on the trail. But she was on the way back so he didn’t stop.” Bahmad explained. “She hid from him.”

Bin Laden suppressed a smile. His daughter was independent, for which he was both proud and fearful. “When he reaches the others I want to know.”

“Very well,” Bahmad said, and he turned to leave as a tremendous explosion shattered the early morning silence. It had come from down in the camp, and for a millisecond bin Laden wanted to believe that there’d been an accident in the fuel storage pit across from the helicopter.

A second explosion, then a third and a fourth shattered that illusion. McGarvey had not come here with a deal! He had been sent with his GPS chip to find this camp and guide the missiles to it!

Bahmad had already turned and was racing up the tunnel to the entrance, as three guards clutching their Kalashnikovs came running from the back.

Bin Laden grabbed his rifle and half-limped half-raced after Bahmad as so many explosions ripped into the camp that it sounded like continuous thunder. They were Tomahawk missiles; he well remembered the sound, like an incoming jet airliner, followed immediately by a very sharp slap as the burst shoved a wall of compressed air outward followed immediately by a mind-numbing blast.

Sarah was out there. Bin Laden was sick with fear and impotent rage. The Americans had always fought by then own sense of rules; fair play they called it. They had never gone after a man’s family, or even after an enemy leader, only the soldiers and weapons. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Bahmad lay on the floor of the tunnel just within the entrance, watching the attack. Dozens, maybe more, of the missiles rained down on the camp, the bright flashes lighting up the entire valley even brighter than day. Bin Laden could think of nothing other than his daughter. She was down there, her body naked to the devastation falling all around her.

Bin Laden stepped around Bahmad’s prone figure, when his chief of staff reached up, grabbed a handful of pant leg and pulled him back.

“Get down, you fool!” he shouted over the terrible din.

Bin Laden batted Bahmad’s hand away with the butt of his rifle. “Get everybody out of the cave, I’m going after my daughter.”

“You’ll get yourself killed! They’re targeting the camp not us up here!”

The three guards came from behind and tried to drag bin Laden back from the entrance. He swung his rifle viciously catching one of them in the face, pushing him back against the other two.

“You know what to do,” bin Laden snarled at Bahmad, and he stumbled outside as the missiles continued to fall on them, one after the other, sometimes in pairs, sometimes so many at once they could not be counted.

Keeping as low as he could despite the terrible pain in his knees, bin Laden scrambled down the steep hill into the maelstrom, as he searched the far side of the camp and the opposite hill for his daughter. It was hard to make sense of what was happening. The bright flashes and concussions made it nearly impossible to think. The helicopter was already destroyed, as were many of the buildings. Debris rained down in an area at least four hundred meters in diameter. Dust filled the air, and black, oily flames shot a hundred meters or more into the cloudless sky from the cache of fuel that had been dug into the ground and covered by camouflage netting.

He had fought for ten years against the Russians in these mountains, but he’d never seen anything as bad as this. He wanted to strike back, raise his rifle and lash out at the monsters who were doing this to them. But he was helpless.

At the bottom of the hill, he started through the bombed out buildings, his right arm over his head to protect himself from the dirt and rocks and brick and steel falling all around him, when a bright flash bang erupted directly in front of him. He was thrown back by a blast of hot air that felt like a brick wall. As he fell he could hear or sense pieces of metal softly whispering past his head like a thousand jagged pellets from a huge shotgun.

He’d lost his rifle when he’d been thrown back, and his head boomed as if he was inside a kettle drum when he picked himself up and started forward in a daze. At that moment the missiles stopped coming. In the deafening silence he thought he could hear men crying out, some of them screaming in agony. Three of them appeared from behind a low brick wall, all that remained of one of the buildings, and started toward him, blood streaming from dozens of wounds.

Too soon, the thought crystallized in his brain. He desperately waved his men back. This was just a pause in the action, the missile attack wasn’t finished. There would be a second round.

Others were pulling themselves out of the rubble when he spotted Sarah, the mangled stump of her left arm spurting blood, stumbling across from where the helicopter had been. He was instantly gripped with such nausea and fear that for a brief moment he was unable to move, when a missile struck fifteen or twenty meters behind her, throwing her body forward in a spray of rocks and debris and blood.

More bombs fell around them now, all through the camp, in a rolling thunder that hammered off the hills. Staggering forward, totally oblivious to the destruction around him, bin Laden reached his daughter’s body and fell to his knees beside her.

Her right leg was shattered, a big rock was embedded in her right shoulder, and her face was a mass of cuts and torn flesh. But she was still alive. There was still some awareness in her dark, pretty eyes.

“My Sarah,” bin Laden whispered as the missiles continued to rain down on them. He knew that she couldn’t hear him, but her eyes lit up in recognition.

“Father,” she mouthed the word, blood welling from her mouth.

Bin Laden, tears streaming down his face, gently cradled his daughter in his arms. Not this one, he prayed. Please God, not Sarah. But it was useless. She was going to die here and now, and no power on earth or in heaven would save her. No miracle would be enough.

He looked into her eyes as he held her, watching her life run out, feeling it in the unnatural looseness of her muscles. “Peace, my little one,” he said. “Insha’Allah.”

Sarah’s face went utterly pale, and blood stopped bubbling out of her mouth at the same time the last missile struck a hundred meters away, destroying the nomad tent.

Bin Laden threw back his head and screamed a cry of anguish from the bottom of his soul, while in another compartment of his brain he could feel his heart already hardening for the terrible task that lay ahead of them.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

President Haynes glanced at the clock when the direct line from the CIA chirped. It was 10:05 p.m. Waiting with him in the Oval Office were his national security adviser Dennis Berndt and his chief of staff Tony Lang. He’d been in a blue funk all evening, ever since he’d agreed to the missile attack on bin Laden’s mountain camp. “This isn’t a war game, Dennis,” he’d peevishly told his NSA earlier. “Real people are going to get killed up there.” “Sometimes things like this have to be done, Mr. President,” Berndt had replied.

The problem was that he saw no other way out of the gravest situation the U.S. had faced since Pearl Harbor. The President put the call on the speakerphone. “Good evening, Roland.”

“Good evening, Mr. President,” Murphy replied, tiredly. He sounded resigned. “The attack just got over, and it looks good. From what we’re seeing the camp was completely wiped out. There won’t be many survivors.”

The President looked at his advisers. “Was there any indication of a secondary nuclear explosion?” It was something he’d worried about.

“No, sir. My people tell me that even if we had hit the package, it would not have caused a detonation. But we’re putting a drone on target now to check for radiation.”

“No accidents this time?” the President asked. “We didn’t hit anything we weren’t supposed to hit?”

“No, sir. There’s nothing in the near vicinity of bin Laden’s camp,” Murphy assured him. “We’re putting together the damage assessment now. Should be ready in a couple of hours once we get the data back from the drone. I can bring it over to you tonight.”

“That’s not necessary, Roland. It’s too late for any sort of an announcement tonight in any event. I’m scheduling a news conference for eleven in the morning. If you can get over here by nine it’ll be plenty of time.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“I’m sorry about McGarvey, he was a brave man. What he tried to do for us out there was very courageous. But he never really had a chance.”

“You’re probably right, Mr. President.”

“I’ll call his wife—”

“Mr. President, why don’t we wait on that until morning,” Murphy said. “I haven’t told his daughter yet either.”

“You can’t think there’s still hope.”

“McGarvey’s come out of tough situations before. He’s a survivor. Let’s wait.”

Berndt was shaking his head in disgust, and for some reason it irritated the President and he shot him a dirty look.

“Okay, General, we’ll hold it until morning,” the President agreed. “But I want you to know that if there’s any sign that McGarvey’s still alive I’ll give you anything you need to get him back. Anything.”

“Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.”

“Try to get some sleep, Roland. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.”

“You too, Mr. President.”

In the Afghan Mountains McGarvey crouched in a depression above the path waiting for them to come after him. As soon as he’d heard the first batch of what sounded like incoming jets down in the valley he’d slipped away. He knew what they were, but Mohammed and the others had jumped up and run down river to the cliff to look.

It was just his bad luck that they’d had the presence of mind to take their weapons with them. But he had managed to grab Mohammed’s pack and get out of there before they came running back. As soon as he’d found a suitable vantage point from which to defend himself, he’d retrieved his gun and spare magazine of ammunition from the bundle of filthy, stinking clothing, blankets and food. The gun was oily and gritty from something that had gotten all over it, but he pumped a couple of rounds out and the mechanism worked okay.

McGarvey watched the path carefully, as he considered his options. He was pissed off, but his anger would have to wait. For the moment his biggest challenge would be saving his own life and then somehow getting out of Afghanistan. The time for talking had ended when the first cruise missile had struck. If bin Laden had survived he would use the bomb. There was no doubt about it. Their only hope now was to stop it before it got to the States.

For that he needed a phone to warn Otto, and to work out a means of getting out of the country. That’s providing he could first survive the three-to-one odds he was facing now, and then make it down to Kabul without running the car off the mountain cliffs.

He thought about trying to reach Pakistan over the mountains, but that would be next to impossible without guides and provisions. And it would take far too long. Because of the missile attack they no longer had the luxury of time.

What the hell were they thinking? They could have waited for at least a couple of days. He didn’t want to get into a firefight with his mujahedeen. He was outnumbered and outgunned. But he didn’t think Mohammed was going to simply give up and scurry back to camp. The man had a score to settle and it was going to be here and now.

McGarvey raised his head a couple of inches above the rim of the depression in time to see Farid dash up the path and duck behind a large boulder. They were about five hundred yards from the camp, just beyond the copse of trees and the pool where Sarah had almost been raped. The stream tumbling over the rocks just below the path made a lulling sound, but from farther up he could hear the deeper throated roar where it fell down a series of cataracts.

“We have to go back now, mista Farid called up.

McGarvey studied the path and the rocks and brush below it. He could make out the flash suppressor on the end of Farid’s rifle, but he could not spot the other two mujahedeen.

Farid suddenly leaped up and darted another ten yards up the path, throwing himself into the ditch. A second later Hash sprung from the trees and keeping low raced to the protection of the boulder Farid had just left. He leaped up and fired a sustained burst into the rocks and boulders about twenty yards farther west from McGarvey’s position, the gunfire shockingly loud in the narrow defile, bullets ricocheting all over the place.

They knew that he was up here somewhere, and they were trying to draw him out to pinpoint his position. He was at a triple disadvantage; they not only outnumbered and outgunned him, but these were their mountains. They were just as at home here as McGarvey was in Paris or Washington.

Except for the sounds of the stream a stillness descended over them. The problem was Mohammed. He was out there somewhere too, and between the three of them they had probably hatched some sort of a plan.

He checked over his shoulder, but so far as he could tell nothing moved on the steep, rock-strewn slope that rose four hundred feet to the top of a hill studded with scraggly wind-bent trees.

They wouldn’t want to stick around here too long. It was the one weakness in their plan. They knew that they had to get back to the camp as soon as possible to see what had happened, help with the wounded and pack up what remained to bug out. Unless Mohammed forced them to stay until McGarvey was dead they might not come after him if he doubled back, climbed down to the valley and made it to the Rover.

He dumped the contents of Mohammed’s pack on the ground and hurriedly searched through the greasy, filthy clothes for the car keys or anything else he could use, while keeping an eye on the path below. There was nothing for him among the mujahed’s meager possessions. It was Farid who had driven the Rover, so the keys would either be in his backpack at the camp by the pool, or with him in a pocket. If he could make it down to the Rover he would find something to pop the ignition lock and hot-wire the starter.

Farid jumped up and fired a burst into the hill to the west of McGarvey. An instant later Hash fired another sustained burst walking his shots east. McGarvey had to duck down and cover his head as the shots hammered the rocks directly below him. Too late he realized that they knew where he was hiding and they were pinning him down. He looked over his shoulder when a rifle muzzle was jammed into the side of his head.

The firing from below suddenly ceased and Mohammed laughed wildly. Blood dripped from the filthy bandage on his wounded hand, and his face was cut up from flying rock chips. “I warned him about you,” he shouted triumphantly. “But he wouldn’t listen.” He stepped back a little, the rifle never wavering from McGarvey’s head. “Put your gun down. Get to your feet.”

McGarvey carefully laid his gun on a flat rock and got up, spreading his hands out to either side, letting a calmness come over him. Mohammed’s eyes were red and they kept flicking from McGarvey to the path below. He held the Kalashnikov in a white-knuckled death grip. His clothing was dirty and ripped from his climb up the hill over the rocks. The butt of his pistol had worked itself half out of his vest, the hammer snagged on the corner of a pocket. If he tried to pull it out in a hurry it would catch. “So now what? Are you going to take me back to bin Laden?”

“You’re not going to leave this place alive.”

“That would be a very big mistake—”

“You didn’t come here to talk,” Mohammed shouted.

“That’s not true.”

“Where else did your missiles hit, mista Mohammed demanded. He was working himself up.

“I don’t know,” McGarvey replied calmly.

“Liar,” Mohammed snarled. “Come up here now,” he called down to Hash and Farid.

McGarvey figured he had only a couple of minutes before the other two got up here and then the odds against him would be impossible. He smiled. “I’ll tell you what, Mohammed. If you turn around right now and get the hell out of here I won’t kill you.”

Mohammed was surprised and then enraged. He poked the rifle muzzle sharply into McGarvey’s chest. It was a mistake.

“Just go, and you’ll live to fight another day,” McGarvey said, in an infuriatingly relaxed tone. “But if you poke me again I will kill you. For Sarah.”

The mujahed’s face turned purple. “Slut,” he shouted wildly. He pulled the rifle back, his left hand on the stock, his wounded right hand near the trigger guard, and he swung the heavy butt at McGarvey’s head. McGarvey ducked the blow and drove his shoulder into the man’s chest, knocking him off his feet. McGarvey yanked the Kalashnikov out of Mohammed’s hands and spun around.

Hash and Farid were halfway up the hill, aware that something was happening above them, but not quite sure what it was. McGarvey fired a couple of rounds over their heads, and they hit the ground, scrambling for cover. Mohammed was clawing for his pistol. McGarvey turned back to him. “You can still leave here alive.”

Mohammed got the pistol out of his pocket, fumbled for the hammer and raised it. McGarvey shot him once, the bullet plowing into his forehead.

Not necessary, McGarvey thought with disgust. Yet this was one killing he knew that he would never regret.

Hash and Farid started firing wildly up the hill, the bullets whining off the rocks all over the place. McGarvey dropped down into the protection of the depression and waited until they stopped shooting.

“Mohammed is dead,” he called down to them. He got his pistol and stuffed it in his belt. “I didn’t order the missile strike, and I mean you no harm now.” He ejected the Kalashnikov’s magazine and checked the rounds. There was one in the chamber and seven in the clip. “Go back and tell bin Laden that we can still work a deal. The missiles were a mistake. My government thought I was dead.”

McGarvey checked over the rim of the depression. One of the mujahedeen was directly below him, the other had moved back about fifteen or twenty yards to the east. They were trying to box him in, get him in a crossfire. Whatever their previous orders had been they meant to kill him now.

He popped up and fired three shots at the man crouched behind the rocks below him. The other one jumped out of hiding and started up the hill. McGarvey calmly switched aim and squeezed off two shots, the second catching the man in the side, knocking him down. “Goddamnit,” he muttered, pulling back. It was senseless.

A silence fell over the defile again, and except for the burbling stream there were no sounds.

“It’s only you now,” McGarvey called out. He crawled over to Mohammed’s body, took the PSM pistol, then crawled back to the rim. “We can stay here and fight it out, or you can go back to the camp.”

“I can’t do that, mista It was Farid. McGarvey recognized the voice, and he sounded frightened.

“Yes, you can,” McGarvey said. He checked the load in Mohammed’s pistol. There was one in the chamber, and eight in the magazine. “I didn’t want to shoot Hash, but I had no other choice.”

“You brought the missiles.”

“No, I didn’t. My government made a mistake. I was sent here to stop the killing, and we can still do that if you tell bin Laden that I’ll make it right when I get back to Washington. Something like this won’t happen again. You can give him my word.”

“Liar,” Farid shouted, and he fired several rounds up the hill.

“Shit,” McGarvey said. He rose up and emptied the Kalashnikov on the rocks where the mujahed was hiding then ducked back. “Sooner or later one of us is going to get lucky,” McGarvey said. He laid the rifle aside and picked up the Russian pistol. “Since I have the high ground it’ll probably be me.”

The defile was silent again.

A minute later McGarvey cautiously rose up so that he could see where Farid was hiding. Nothing moved. He rose a little higher, but he still couldn’t see any sign of the mujahed down there.

“Farid,” he called.

There was no answer.

He swept his eyes across the rocks and path. Hash was still lying where he’d gone down, but to the west McGarvey was just in time to see Farid keeping low and moving fast then disappear over the crest of a hill.

McGarvey lowered the pistol and allowed himself to come down. Now it begins, he told himself morosely as he stared at the empty path back to bin Laden’s camp and listened to the pleasant sounds of the stream.

Bin Laden’s Camp Bin Laden, with his daughter’s bloody body in his arms, her long dark hair hanging loose, made his way slowly through the camp. His two dozen remaining mujahedeen parted respectfully for him as he passed, then gathered behind him in a funeral march.

As the procession started up the hill Ali Bahmad, dressed for travel in khakis, came back to the cave entrance, a two way radio held loosely in his left hand. He glanced into the sky to the east. An unmanned reconnaissance drone had passed over the camp fifteen minutes ago to assess the damage the missile strike had caused, and at this moment the CIA’s spy satellites were looking down on them, passing their high-resolution real-time images back to Washington. Bahmad had once even stood in the National Reconnaissance Office’s operations center, and had been shown a tiny part of what the machines were capable of. It was nothing short of miraculous.

At the bottom of the hill bin Laden stopped to gather his strength for the climb. Although he clearly needed help no one came forward out of respect for him. This was a task meant only for a grieving father, and his followers had more love for him at this moment then they’d ever had before. The experience was almost religious, Bahmad could see it in the way they stood, heads up but in silence.

A pall of smoke hung over the valley, and flames still rose from a dozen fires, including the one at the fuel dump, which would probably burn all day and into the night. The drone had come in low enough to get clear pictures of everything not under cover, and the satellites were capable of very sharp infrared imaging. The Americans knew what damage their strike had caused, and more importantly who had survived.

Bahmad had warned Osama that this might happen. He had advised either using the bomb as it was intended to be used, or get rid of it. “But don’t try to bargain with him,” he’d cautioned. “Once they know that you have it they won’t stop until you’re dead and the bomb is either destroyed or in their possession.”

Time to leave now, he told himself. Not only from this camp, but perhaps from these mountains and even from the jihad. Bahmad had toyed with the notion of slipping away ever since bin Laden’s agents had gotten their hands on the bomb. But something inside of him had made him stay. Like a moth drawn to a flame he had been seduced by the power of the device. In one act of terrorism they could finally strike fear into the hearts of every Westerner who’d dared to come to the Middle East with their insatiable appetite for oil; with their infectious culture and ideas that were far more dangerous than any deadly virus. He could finally strike a decisive blow for the deaths of his parents that had scarred his soul more deeply than even he could admit to himself. They had been his entire world. He’d been a shy, delicate boy whom his parents had protected. When they were killed by the Jews he’d almost drawn inside of himself, into a nothingness, into a deep depression from which he knew he would never have survived. Instead, his heart had turned to stone, and he had begun the long fight against Israel and every nation that supported it that would, he understood on a pragmatic level, not end until he was dead. But the fight had been glorious at times. And there was still one more blow to be delivered, if bin Laden could be kept from going completely insane and ordering the impossible.

The procession started up the hill at the same moment the radio squawked softly.

Bahmad stepped closer to the cave entrance for better radio reception. “Yes,” he answered.

“There is trouble,” Hamed came back.

“Is McGarvey dead?”

“No.”

“Where are you now?”

“At the cataracts.”

That was a spot on the path about a kilometer above the first rest area before the valley. Bahmad worked to keep his anger in check. “What happened?”

“I’m not sure. But there was a fight and he killed Mohammed and Hash. Farid just showed up, he’s with me now.”

“Was McGarvey wounded?”

“Apparently not,” Hamed replied.

Bahmed who had picked his inner circle very well, had complete faith in Hamed. “He’s probably on his way to the Rover. Stop him before he reaches it. Whatever you must do, kill him, is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Hamed said. “Is everything all right up there?”

“No,” Bahmad said softly. He pocketed the radio, and took out his phone as bin Laden reached the cave opening. Their eyes met, but he could read nothing in bin Laden’s other than a father’s despair. Bin Laden turned to his followers who were gathered a few meters below.

“Final justice will be ours,” bin Laden shouted, his voice surprisingly strong.

Bahmad stepped back out of sight and pushed the speed dial button for a number in Kabul.

“No American will be safe from our wrath. When we strike it will be in the infidels’ homeland.”

It was what Bahmad had expected and feared most. Bin Laden was crazy and he meant to take them all down with him. But there were plans. Possibilities. Even targets, because he had been working on the problem for several months now.

“No one will ever forget,” bin Laden shouted.

The call was answered on the second ring. “Hello.”

“Do you know who this is, Colonel?”

“Yes, I do,” the man said in a guarded voice. In the background Bahmad could hear a great deal of commotion. “We’re still trying to find out where the missiles hit. Was it you?”

“Yes, it was. We’re leaving here in a few hours, but there’s something you must do for me.”

“Listen, the Shura is finally going to demand that he leave Afghanistan. All foreigners are going to be expelled within the next forty-eight hours for their own protection. The rioting has already started down here. We can’t have this any longer. You must make him understand!” The Shura was the ruling council.

“We do understand, and we are leaving,” Bahmad said, keeping his voice reasonable. “But there is one last thing that you must do for me.”

The phone was dead for a moment. Bin Laden was quoting the Qoran, his voice like Bahmad’s, clear, calm, unhurried. He was a teacher instructing his eager pupils, a shepherd showing his flock the way.

“What do you want?”

“The American Kirk McGarvey may be on his way back to Kabul in the Rover.”

“You should have killed him,” the army colonel said bitterly. “We tried but failed,” Bahmad admitted. “He is a very resourceful man. If he reaches Kabul I want him killed. At all costs. Do you understand me?”

“Who is he?”

“Just a CIA field agent. But he came here for one purpose only, to kill Osama. For that he has to die.”

“Was his mission a success?”

Bahmad was looking at bin Laden. “No, it was not,” he said. “Will you do this one last thing for us?”

“Yes,” the colonel said without hesitation. “If he gets this far he will die. I guarantee it.”

“Thank you,” Bahmad said and he broke the connection.

“The walls of Jericho will come tumbling down,” bin Laden told his people. “But this time there will be a hammer-Joshua’s hammer — swung by an Islamic fist for all the world to see and respect. Insha “Allah.”

Yes, Bahmad thought. Insha’Allah. God willing.