Purpose of Evasion

1

Not a blade of grass, not a single plant, bush, or tree, nothing but burnt sienna sand stretched for miles across this wind-burnished landscape — nothing except a concrete pipeline that slithered over the dunes like an immense, sunbathing rattlesnake.

The infernal stillness was soon broken by the rising whisk of rotors. A Libyan Air Force helicopter came streaking low over the Sahara, sunlight reflecting off its windshield like a flashing strobe.

Saddam Moncrieff sat next to the pilot, staring at the endless miles of concrete pipe that passed directly beneath him, contemplating a problem. A hydrologist of international repute, the pensive Saudi had engineered a plan to solve Libya’s serious water shortage, a shortage compounded by the high salt content of rain-fed wells, the nation’s only source. Even in Tripoli, tap water had become barely drinkable.

Subterranean aquifers discovered beneath the Sahara by American geologists searching for oil were the key to Moncrieff s plan: hundreds of wells drilled in the desert would pump 200 million cubic feet of water a day, twice OPEC’s daily output of oil, through 2,500 miles of pipeline to Libya’s thirsty cities.

The sections of concrete pipe, each 13 feet in diameter and weighing 73 tons, were manufactured round the clock at a modern desert complex; and Moncrieff s aerial survey of wellheads and pipeline had confirmed that the project was right on schedule. Despite it, Libya’s Great Man-Made River Project was in jeopardy. The subterranean reservoirs were drying up. By the time the $20 billion undertaking was completed, there would be little if any water to pump through it; and the Saudi had just determined beyond doubt that the cause was a dam that had diverted its source — a dam built several years before in neighboring Tunisia.

Contrary to popular conception, Tunisia had plenty of water, as did neighboring Algeria and Morocco. The mountain ranges of the northern Maghreb — where ski resorts remain open well into April — were a copious watershed, supplying a string of oases that ran south to the city of Nefta. Here, hundreds of natural springs were funneled into an east-flowing tributary. It eventually drained deep into thirsty salt lakes, creating underground rivers that for eons had flowed hundreds of miles beneath the Sahara into Libya, feeding the subterranean Jabal Al Hasawnah water fields.

But Nefta Dam had blocked this tributary. Now, where there had been nothing, an immense, glass-smooth lake encircled by lush palm forests, olive groves, and fields of barley stretched to the horizon. Unfortunately, though a boon to Tunisia’s economy, the dam had cut off the supply of water to Libya’s reservoirs.

That was Moncrieff s problem; that and the fact that he was on his way to meet with Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi to decide how to deal with it.

The sun was burning through a light mist as the helicopter came in over the desert and landed at the Bab al Azziziya Barracks south of downtown Tripoli.

Moncrieff was ushered into the boldly patterned tent that served as Qaddafi’s personal domicile, joining the colonel, his chief of staff, General Younis, and several economic and industrial advisers.

Qaddafi wore a bulletproof vest and maroon beret embroidered with the Insignia of Islam. He sat on the edge of a desk beneath the soaring fabric and harsh fluorescents, digesting Moncrieff s report.

Ten years before, Qaddafi, the son of an illiterate Bedouin shepherd, had cut a shrewd deal with the Ivy League presidents of Western oil companies. The money provided free housing, education, and medical care for his people. But the lack of water threatened his vision for Libya’s future.

When Moncrieff and the members of Qaddafi’s staff were seated and had ceased to murmur among themselves, the Libyan leader looked up and broke the stillness. “We’re going into Tunisia,” he said quietly.

A stunned silence fell over the group.

A look flicked between Moncrieff and Younis.

The general was a short man with rigid posture that suited his title. “Send a military force across the border?” he finally asked, wary of Qaddafi’s impulsive bent for invading his neighbors. An attack on the Tunisian city of Gafsa in 1980 and the current war with Chad, a demoralizing struggle over a worthless strip of desert, were its most recent manifestations. True, the lack of water was arguably a more noble and justifiable motive but, as the general knew, Tunisia was a far more formidable adversary.

“We have no choice,” Qaddafi replied, going on to remind his staff that relations between the two nations were strained and that it would be unrealistic to expect even a staunch ally, let alone Tunisia, to destroy a multibillion dollar investment. “I suggest an air strike, carried out at night by bombers flying below radar at supersonic speed,” Qaddafi concluded. “In a matter of minutes that dam would be a pile of rubble; and it would be over before Tunisian Air Defense knew it had even happened, let alone who did it.”

Younis’s face stiffened with grave concern.

“You don’t agree?” Qaddafi challenged.

“On the contrary,” the general replied. “Unfortunately, we don’t have aircraft capable of it.”

Qaddafi’s eyes narrowed, forcing vertical creases deep into his forehead. After a moment, he removed a thick, soft-cover volume from a bookcase behind his desk.

The Military Balance was published annually by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. It quantitatively assessed the armed forces of more than 140 countries. The colonel relied on it to keep informed of the strength of enemies and allies alike, the latter with an eye to purchasing military hardware. He turned to the section where the Libyan Air Force was inventoried:

The list further enumerated helicopters, transports, and trainers. Qaddafi pointed to the total. “We have five hundred and forty-four combat aircraft,” he intoned. “None are capable of flying this mission?”

“Four hundred and fifty-one are inoperable, sir,” Younis said gently, citing a statistic in the report Qaddafi was conveniently ignoring. “We are woefully short of maintenance technicians, and spare parts. Only our SU-22s are—”

“Well, what about them?” Qaddafi challenged, zeroing in on the mainstay of his air force.

“A defensive weapon, nothing more,” Younis explained. “Even in broad daylight it can barely—”

“We’ve spent billions, billions, and still can’t take out an unprotected dam?” Qaddafi bellowed.

“Not at night. Not at supersonic speed. Not below radar. Not in Tunisia without getting caught, sir,” Younis replied evenly. “No.”

Qaddafi ran a hand through his wiry hair, pondering the problem. “The Soviets will never sell us these aircraft,” he concluded sharply. “They’re worried we’re defaulting on the five billion we already owe them.”

Moncrieff had been quietly observing and analyzing. “Moscow isn’t the only source,” he said calmly after a long silence.

Qaddafi’s eyes shifted to the Saudi. “Where else?”

“Washington,” Moncrieff replied softly.

Younis looked stunned.

The colonel concealed his surprise, his large head tilting back at the familiar cocky angle. He had no doubt Moncrieff was serious. He knew the Saudi could make things happen; that he had powerful international connections; that he was different, privileged.

The Saudi prince had been educated in Switzerland and France as well as the London School of Economics, where he had honed his exceptional analytical skills. Indeed, Moncrieff had been the first to realize that finding a solution for the lack of water, not milking the abundance of oil, was the key to economic growth in the Middle East. It was a theory that had brought him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a doctorate in hydrology.

“I’d be happy to explore the matter, sir,” Moncrieff said coolly.

“What would they want in exchange? My head?” Qaddafi cracked, knowing he had nothing that could induce the United States to give supersonic bombers to him, the financier of international terrorism.

“No, sir,” Moncrieff replied, not daring to laugh. “I’m quite certain acceptable currency can be acquired. However, delicate linkages would be involved. I’d need your help to secure them.”

“For example?”

“A meeting with Chairman Arafat would be essential — a private meeting.”

Qaddafi was considering it when the swish of a tent flap behind him broke his concentration.

An aide-de-camp entered and delivered a communiqué. “From the People’s Bureau in Rome, sir.”

Qaddafi took the envelope, broke the seal, and removed a cable, which read:

The colonel looked up, smiling, and announced, “It seems our friends in Rome plan to celebrate Easter with a bang.” Then he went to his desk to make a phone call.

Younis took Moncrieff aside. “These bombers — you understand, they must, must have electro-optical guidance,” he sternly warned, referring to the state-of-the-art system that allows a pilot to locate his target at supersonic speed in total darkness and destroy it with bombs that home on a laser frequency.

“It’s called Pave Tack,” Moncrieff replied.

2

The General Dynamics F-111 had Pave Tack. It had APQ 144 forward-looking attack radar, ASQ 133 digital fire control, and APQ 138 terrain-following radar.

The F-111 had everything; and Major Walter Shepherd, United States Air Force, lived to fly it.

An airborne stiletto, Shepherd thought, the first time he saw the bomber’s crisp edges, long, pointed snout, and swept-back wings. He knew it was a hot aircraft, one whose performance far outstripped its nickname; sure, the Aardvark was a bomber — a bomber with the speed and agility of a supersonic fighter.

The instrumentation was dazzling: navigation computer screen at left, Pave Tack radar at right joined by rows of flight systems gauges, topped by HUD, the heads up display system that projects data onto the canopy, allowing the pilot to keep his eye on the target while the weapons systems officer destroys it.

Walt Shepherd knew every square inch of his plane, every rivet, wire, computer chip, and data readout; his name was stenciled on the nose gear door. The United States government may have paid General Dynamics $67 million for it — but it was his plane.

Sixteen years ago, he was a twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant fresh out of flight school when he started flying them. Assigned to a special squadron during the last years of the Vietnam War, Shepherd flew dozens of F-111 missions. Indeed, while many protested and avoided service, Walt Shepherd was flying an untested bomber in combat, and counted himself lucky to have the opportunity. Military service was a family tradition — God, love of country, a strong national defense were its guiding principles. An Eagle Scout by age fourteen, he delivered newspapers with dedication and sang with the Friendship Church choir. Like many towns in the southwestern pocket of Oklahoma, towns with names like Granite, Sentinel, and Victory, Friendship’s economy was dependent on nearby Altus Air Force Base. As a teenager, Shepherd spent many afternoons watching military jets taking off; and despite his gentle nature, their thundering roar stirred something in him, something primal and raw that bonded with his unquestioning sense of duty, giving rise to a powerful yearning for combat.

Officially, Major Shepherd flew with the 253rd squadron of the 27th Tactical Fighter Wing at Cannon AFB in New Mexico. Three years ago in a TAC reshuffle, he came east to fly a routine operational readiness inspection. A clever and resourceful thinker with a flair for tactical innovation, Shepherd proved so adept at playing the enemy and penetrating radar defenses with his F-111 that he was assigned to the Pentagon to document his expertise and develop training programs. He had since been temporarily stationed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.

On this cold, crystal clear morning, he was in the kitchen of his home on Ashwood Circle, a wooded cul-de-sac in the officers’ family housing sector, helping his two-year-old into a snowsuit.

“Come on, Jeffrey, hold still,” Shepherd admonished in his easy drawl, finally getting it zipped up.

“Bathroom,” the squirming child protested, clutching his crotch with mittened hands. “Bathroom.”

Shepherd let out a sigh. “Take him, will you?” he asked Laura, who had bounded into the kitchen, donning a parka.

The thirteen-year-old took one look at her heavily bundled brother and presented Shepherd with an open palm.

“Two bucks,” she said with a grin.

“Fifty cents.”

“Hold out for a dollar,” her mother chimed in, fighting a roll of plastic wrap, one eye on the small television atop the counter tuned to the “Today Show.”

“Steph,” Shepherd protested.

The phone rang. Shepherd answered it. “Congressman Guth-erie’s office,” he said, handing it to Stephanie.

She wiggled her brows in anticipation, making him laugh, and moved aside with the phone. A bright, ingenuously sexy woman, at thirty-seven Stephanie Shepherd still had the freshness of the University of Denver journalism student who had caught Walt’s eye at an Air Force Academy mixer nearly twenty years ago.

“Wish we were going with you, Daddy,” Laura pouted, glancing at her father’s luggage next to the door.

“Me too,” Shepherd said warmly, “but you know—”

“Yeah, I know, I can’t miss school.”

“I’ll miss you, princess.”

“You’re going to miss the finals too,” Laura said, referring to her upcoming gymnastics competition. She was standing next to the television when Willard Scott’s folksy weather report segued to an update of the morning’s top news stories.

“A terrorist bomb exploded aboard a TWA 727 jetliner en route from Rome to Athens, yesterday,” the newsreader somberly reported. “Authorities said those responsible are believed to be supported by, if not actual agents of, Libyan strongman Muammar el-Qaddafi. The explosion tore a hole in the fuselage, killing four American passengers who were sucked out of the plane, and fell fifteen thousand feet to their deaths.”

Laura turned to her father, her face a bewildered mask. “How can people do things like that?”

“They’re uncivilized, sweetheart,” Shepherd gently explained, turning off the television. “They don’t play by the rules the way we do.”

The child nodded sadly, a dozen questions in her eyes, then she took Jeffrey’s hand and headed for the bathroom.

“The interview’s set for this afternoon,” Stephanie announced brightly, hanging up the phone. She worked as a reporter for the Capitol Flyer, the base newspaper, and Andrews was in the congressman’s district.

“I hope he voted for the ERA,” Shepherd teased.

A horn beeped outside. Their faces tightened apprehensively. They looked at each other for a long moment, then kissed.

“Something else you’re going to miss,” Stephanie whispered as their lips parted.

“You bet; twenty years with a sex-crazed journalist isn’t the sort of thing that just slips a man’s mind.”

“Walt,” she admonished gently, unable to suppress a girlish giggle. “I meant our anniversary.”

“I know,” he said more seriously. “We’ll do something special as soon as you come to England.”

They were still embracing when the children returned and the horn beeped again. Shepherd kissed and hugged each of them, then hefted the luggage and went out the kitchen door to the air force van in the driveway.

An hour later, Major Shepherd and his weapons systems officer, Captain Al Brancato, were at their lockers in the squadron life support room, donning flight suits, helmets, and inflatable G-suit harnesses that girdled their legs and torsos; then they strode down the flight line to a khaki and brown camouflage-patterned F-111F bomber. It had low visibility markings with black stencils. The tail code read: CC-179.

TAC had finally finished the reshuffle and they had been transferred to the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing based at Lakenheath Royal Air Force Base in England.

Brancato was a gregarious man whose taut physique shaped his flight suit. Like most aviators, he adhered to a fitness program of aerobic exercise and workouts in the squadron weight room, where a sign cautioned: THE FORCE IS WITH YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. Gravity was the force, and aviators who flew high performance aircraft viewed G-induced loss of consciousness as a lethal adversary. Well-developed musculature acted as a natural G-suit, augmenting the inflatable harness to raise G-tolerance and prevent GLC.

For the last eight years, Brancato had been Shepherd’s alter ego and wizzo. The latter in more ways than one.

“Name the island that has a quarter of a million less inhabitants today than it did a hundred years ago.”

“Ireland,” Shepherd answered hesitantly.

“Not bad… The American who had a long association with the Soviet Union as businessman and ambassador?”

“Armand Hammer.”

“Averill Harriman. Hammer was never ambassador.”

“You going to do this all the way to the U.K.?”

“Just for that, which famous composer poured ice water over his head to stimulate his brain?”

“Elton John,” Shepherd cracked, as they stowed their luggage on a rack in the weapons bay, empty because the plane was flown “clean,” without ordnance, on deployment flights. The crew chief, who for three years had overseen 179’s maintenance with customary fervor, hadn’t been transferred to England and he watched wistfully as the two aviators did their inspection, then slipped beneath the gullwing canopies into side-by-side red leather couches.

After forty-five minutes of systems checks and engine warm-up procedures, Shepherd radioed for clearance. “Andrews tower, Viper-Two ready to roll.”

“Viper?” Stephanie had asked when they first dated, thinking there was nothing at all venomous about him. “It certainly doesn’t suit you.”

“Well,” he replied, glancing skyward, “you have to understand I’m different up there.”

She hadn’t understood; indeed, she still didn’t. Despite being blessed with that rare combination of guts, skill, and judgment found in the best fighter jocks, killing was out of character for Walt Shepherd; conversely, call sign Viper had no trouble handling it.

Shepherd started the F-111 down the west runway; 30 seconds later, the sleek F model, hottest of the 111 series, was banking over Chesapeake Bay. Soon it was at 30,000 feet, streaking through the atmosphere at 750 MPH. The wings were at 16 degrees, standard for takeoff and climb. Shepherd set the indicator stop at 52, advanced the throttles, and eased back the handle in the sidewall; the wings swept at a rate of 10 degrees per second and the F-111 bolted forward.

“Yeah,” Brancato hooted as the acceleration slammed him back into his seat; it was a kick every time.

Speed was now Mach 1.75; precisely 1,250 MPH.

Shepherd guided the plane into a GAT-assigned commercial air corridor and engaged the autopilot; then he and Brancato settled in for the long haul.

Two hours later, the sleek bomber was 2,400 miles out over the Atlantic, 1,300 miles from its destination. Unlike practice missions, deployment flights had no tactical objective. Once on autopilot, aviators were essentially passengers in a supersonic taxi. Brancato passed the time reading, his nose buried in a biography of Churchill. Shepherd monitored the avionics.

“Mind watching the store for a while?” Shepherd asked, as he removed a palm-sized cassette recorder from a pocket in the leg of his flight suit and clicked it on. Years ago, the first time he and Stephanie were apart, he had wooed her via cassette, and he had been using it to keep in touch with home ever since: from Vietnam, the Philippines, wherever he was stationed without her.

“Thursday, three April,” he began in his easy drawl. “Real pretty up here, babe. We left the Grand Banks behind about an hour ago. Advance report for touchdown is rain and more rain. Sounds like we’re talking weather for ducks. Speaking of water, Al thought you should know that Beethoven used to pour ice water over his—” He paused, catching Brancato signaling to the multi systems display. “He’s waving at me like a matador. Not Beethoven, Al. Be talking to you soon.”

“Three bogies coming off the deck at a hundred miles,” Brancato said, eyes riveted to the MSD screen, where three blips had penetrated the radar envelope.

Far below and to the northeast, a Redfleet Surface Action Group was cruising the waters of the North Atlantic: four submarines, three cruisers, and six destroyers in escort of the Kiev-class carrier Minsk.

A radar operator in the Minsk’s attack center had picked up the F-111’s signal. Its speed indicated he was tracking a military jet. The chance to observe American military aircraft wasn’t taken lightly.

Three Yak-36 VTOL interceptors had been scrambled. They were far from the cutting edge of technology. But advanced Soviet interceptors hadn’t been engineered to withstand the stress of catapult launches and arrester-hook landings like their American counterparts, and the vertical-takeoff-and-landing Forgers were the only aircraft deployed on Redfleet carriers.

In the F-111’s cockpit, Shepherd was intently studying the three blips on his radar screen. “Nothing coming back on the IFF,” he observed. Identification friend or foe transponders were carried on all NATO aircraft; radar blips not accompanied by an IFF symbol were considered hostile. “Have to be Forgers,” he concluded. “Under or over? What do you say?”

“We have twenty angels on their ceiling,” Brancato replied, suggesting they climb to avoid contact.

“Going to be tight,” Shepherd said.

He pulled back on the stick, putting the F-111 into a climb. The Forger’s ceiling was 41,000 feet, the F-111’s 60,000. At a rate of climb of 3,592 feet per minute, the F-111 would reach clear air in 3 minutes 10 seconds. The F-111 kept streaking upward through the blinding whiteness. The beeps from the radar detector were coming faster. The altimeter had just ticked 37,000 when they blended into a screech.

“Three bogies dead ahead fifteen miles,” Brancato announced. “We’re not going to make it.”

At a combined closing speed of 40 miles a minute, the 15-mile gap closed in just over 20 seconds.

The two lead Forgers split at the last instant and screamed past; one above, followed an eyeblink later by the second below. The passes were dangerously close.

The F-111 shuddered and bounced, emitting loud, thumping protests as it slammed into the vortex of turbulent air that spiraled off the Forgers.

“Crazy bastards,” Brancato growled.

“Six months on a carrier’ll do it to you.”

The third Forger was still 10 miles away, closing on the F-111’s nose from below.

“I got a lock on the trailer,” Brancato said, which meant the F-111’s computerized attack radar system was targeted on the approaching Forger. It was a warning, a game of one-upmanship, a deadly way of making a point. Hell, the Russian had it coming.

“Squirm, turkey, squirm,” Shepherd drawled, at the thought of the Soviet pilot’s radar detector letting him know that, but for an aversion to starting World War III and a clean plane, he and Brancato would have blown him out of the skies.

They had no way of knowing that the Russian was a kid; that his wingmen had purposely set him up for an initiation, fully expecting he would get the “treatment” for their harassment of the F-111. Unfortunately, the treatment had an effect his wing-men hadn’t anticipated. The novice pilot froze in the cockpit, his eyes wide with terror at the thought of his young life being ended by one of the Sidewinder missiles he imagined hung from the hardpoints beneath the F-111’s wings.

“What the hell?” Shepherd exclaimed, realizing the planes were on a collision course, seconds from impact.

He turned hard right, executing the standard avoidance maneuver, expecting the Russian to do the same. He didn’t. Instead, he panicked and turned left across the F-111’s path, just beneath its nose.

The Forger’s wingtip slashed into the underside of the bomber’s fuselage just forward of the cockpit. A hailstorm of metal fragments filled the air as the wingtip disintegrated and the Forger continued past. Several of the projectiles punctured the F-111’s skin. One tore through the left sidewall beneath the auxiliary gauge panel and slammed into Brancato’s right shoulder.

“Al? Al?” Shepherd shouted, over the piercing whistle of rushing air as the cockpit depressurized.

Brancato groaned in pain. His hand clutched the blood-soaked shoulder of his flight suit. A crimson splash was creeping up the side of the canopy, turning it into a garish stained-glass window that gave a red glow to the cockpit.

Shepherd scanned the instrument panel: the master caution light was full on; the left engine tachometer was surging erratically, indicating the whirling turbine had ingested metal fragments; the utility pressure gauge had dropped to well below 1,000 psi, which meant the hydraulic system that deployed landing gear and activated speed brakes was also damaged.

Shepherd shut the malfunctioning engine down, pushed his oxygen mask bayonets tight into the receivers, then did the same to Brancato’s. “Al? Come on, Alfredo, talk to me!”

“I don’t know, I feel real weird,” Brancato muttered. “Better head home.”

“We’re past the PNR,” Shepherd replied, making reference to the point of no return, which meant they were closer to England than the United States. “Hang in there,” he said. He thumbed the radio transmit button and began broadcasting. “Four-eight TAC? This is Viper-Two. Four-eight TAC, this is Viper-Two. I have an in-flight emergency. Do you read?”

“This is Four-eight TAC,” Lakenheath tower replied. “Affirmative, Viper-Two. Go ahead.”

“Harassed and struck in midair by hostile aircraft. Assume Soviet Forger. My wizzo’s injured. We have frag penetration in the capsule; left engine and utility pump are out. ETA nineteen-thirty zulu.”

“Copy, Viper-Two. You have an immediate CTL. Repeat, immediate CTL. We’ll monitor.”

The three Forgers were nowhere in sight now.

Shepherd brought the wings forward to 16 degrees and set the throttle of the working engine to cruise speed; then he engaged the autopilot and unzipped Brancato’s flight suit, peeling it away from the wound. “How’re you doing?”

“Nothing a dish of fettuccine wouldn’t cure,” Brancato growled, fighting the pain.

Shepherd removed his squadron scarf, folded it into a thick wad, and pressed it against the bloody puncture. “That one T or two?”

“Huh?”

“How many Ts in fettuccine?”

“Two, dammit. You going to do this all the way in?”

“Yeah. Somebody once told me it’s impossible for a Sicilian to die while he’s talking.”

“God.” Brancato groaned, adjusting his position in the flight couch.

“That big G or little g?”

3

That same morning in Washington, D.C., while shock waves from the bombing of the TWA jetliner reverberated round the world, armored limousines converged on the White House. They snaked between the concrete barricades, depositing solemn passengers at the South Portico.

The hastily convened group sat with the president in the cabinet room as he read a memorandum. It listed the names, hometowns, and ages of the four Americans who had been killed. One was a fourteen-month-old child. The president’s lips tightened in anger; then, he set down the memo and looked up at his advisers.

“Is this Qaddafi’s work?” he asked softly.

“We can’t prove he gave the order, sir,” National Security Adviser Kenneth Lancaster said, “but we know he did.”

“I think it’s time to consider an air strike against Libya,” the secretary of state chimed in.

“Not in my book,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said firmly. “I’m going on record right now as opposed to any military response to terrorism. Frankly, I’m far more interested in talking about the Soviets,” he went on, chafing over the incident with the Forgers.

“As you very well know, Admiral,” the secretary of state lectured, “a protest has been filed and I expect an apology will be forthcoming. The incident has been overshadowed by these events and I suggest it remain so.”

“I agree,” the president said. “This is no time to take a hard line with Moscow over an accident.”

“Yes, sir,” the CJC replied dutifully. “But I respectfully submit we have no justification for attacking Libya.”

“What we have is a nasty problem,” Lancaster said. “Anyone care to suggest how we solve it?”

“With a pistol, Ken,” CIA’s Kiley replied coldly. The pressure had become intolerable of late, intensified by the fact that, despite CIA’s vast resources, Beirut station chief Tom Fitzgerald had vanished without a trace.

“That would put us in violation of twelve-three,” the secretary of state warned, referring to Executive Order 12333, which forbids sanctioning assassinations.

“Forget twelve-three,” Kiley said. “An attack on Qaddafi’s nerve center couldn’t be construed as an assassination even if it did kill the son of a bitch.”

The president thought it ironic that the civilians were in favor of using force and the military opposed. “It seems we have no proof Qaddafi gave the order. Is that right?”

“Yes, sir,” Lancaster replied, tamping his pipe. “Furthermore, the antiterrorist people in Rome and Athens have announced their investigation isn’t focused on Libyans.”

“Which means Qaddafi’s going to get away with it,” Kiley retorted, angrily. “We should bomb his Muslim ass right out of North Africa.” He saw the president grimace and added, “As Machiavelli once so wisely advised, ‘Never do an enemy a small injury.’”

“Well, no one would like to get him more than I,” the president said. “But first, I want evidence, hard evidence that Libya is behind these terrorist acts.”

“You’ll have it, sir,” Kiley replied, then he turned to an aide seated behind him, one of many who ringed the walls of the conference room, providing documents and data to their bosses. “That KH-11 we have parked over Poland — how fast can we adjust its orbit?”

Keyhole number eleven was a spy satellite equipped with an ultrasophisticated electro-optical surveillance system a hundred times more sensitive to energy in the infrared and visible light spectrums than state-of-the-art film or video cameras. It also had formidable signals intelligence capability and could intercept a broad range of electronic data: radio, telephone, video, and cable transmissions in the VHF, UHF, and microwave bands, among them.

An intense, physically compact man with military bearing stood in response to the DCI’s query and crossed to the table carrying a red binder. A Vietnam ace and charter member of a top-secret Special Forces unit formed after the failed Iran hostage rescue mission, Air Force Colonel Richard Larkin possessed the cool fatalism men who have often faced death acquire. The surge of terrorism had gotten him assigned to the White House as a consultant on antiterrorism; but in truth he worked for Bill Kiley.

Colonel Larkin set the binder on the table and found the section he wanted. “Three days, sir,” he replied in a resonant voice that emphasized the hard Ohio vowels.

“Good,” Kiley said. “Have them park it right over Qaddafi’s tent. We’re talking cast-iron coverage. He won’t be able to get a hard-on without us knowing it.”

Several days after meeting with Muammar el-Qaddafi, Saddam Moncrieff flew to Tunis, 300 miles northwest of Tripoli, taking a taxi to PLO Worldwide Headquarters.

Despite the grandiose title, it turned out to be a series of cramped offices in a shabby building near the university quarter. The Saudi was thoroughly searched by PLO guards, then driven to Yasser Arafat’s private residence. The nineteenth-century seaside villa was on a cul-de-sac several miles northeast of the city, near Carthage. The chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization had been living here since his expulsion from Beirut.

Now, in a sparsely furnished sitting room adjacent to a courtyard where several stunted pines rustled, the man with the large features and scraggly beard, who had made the checkered kaffiyeh a symbol of the Palestinian cause, listened intently as Moncrieff laid out a proposal that involved the PLO, Libya, and the United States. “The net result,” Moncrieff concluded, “would be a homeland for Palestinians in Libya.”

Arafat’s eyes widened with resentment. Despite being scattered throughout the Middle East and North Africa, despite decentralized leadership, despite being oppressed and demoralized, Palestinians had never lost sight of their goal. “Are you suggesting we relinquish our claim to Palestine?” Arafat asked incredulously.

“On the contrary,” Moncrieff replied, having purposely provoked him to make the distinction. “I believe this could go a long way to securing it.”

Arafat’s eyes softened with curiosity. “How so?”

“Think of it as a sanctuary; a territory, if you will, where you could gather your people and infuse them with a renewed sense of hope and purpose.”

Arafat mused as the implication dawned on him. He had long ago admitted, if only to himself, that the Israelis would never willingly grant Palestinians any degree of sovereignty. Indeed, they had recently begun resettling Soviet Jews throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “An unoccupied territory—”

“Yes, sir, precisely.”

“Free of Israeli scrutiny,” Arafat went on, becoming more intrigued with what he was envisioning. “One where, if I understand your thinking correctly, Palestinians and their leaders could regroup and launch an all-out effort to reclaim their homeland.”

“I’d say your view coincides with mine, sir, yes.”

Arafat settled back in his chair and spooned some honey into a cup of tea. The idea had merit, he thought. Divide and conquer was the oldest tactic in the book; and for decades, the Israelis had confined Palestinians to territories in southern Lebanon, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, which their forces occupied — territories that were thousands of miles from Tunis, where the PLO leadership had been exiled. Four frustrating years of it, not to mention decades as the titular head of a nonexistent nation, had convinced Arafat that reunification was vital. “I think it’s worth exploring,” he said after a long silence. “What does Qaddafi want? Or should I be asking, how much?” he added with a knowing smile.

“No, he’s not interested in money; but he would very much like to acquire certain ‘currency’ which you’ve amassed per Article Seventeen of the Intifada.”

Arafat stiffened as Moncrieff expected he would. The Intifada was the PLO manifesto, a top-secret document that after decades of impulsive warfare and rhetoric had precisely defined the movement’s goals and tactics, and given the Palestinian uprising its name. Only PLO leaders were privy to its contents.

“I proofed the first drafts, sir,” Moncrieff explained. “I met the author when I was at MIT; actually, I knew her quite well.”

“Then you also know Abu Nidal controls the currency you’re after, not I.”

“That’s why I came to you first.”

“Abu Nidal is no longer a member of the PLO. I’ve no power over him,” Arafat declared, splaying his hands resignedly. “To be blunt, you don’t stand a chance.”

“They said that about the Zionists in forty-eight,” Moncrieff replied, risking the insult to win his respect. He knew that the Palestinians’ hatred of their archenemy was tempered by grudging admiration. The Zionists had pulled it off—they had a homeland.

Arafat studied Moncrieffs eyes, gauging his intent. It was a guileless challenge, a forthright peering into one’s soul in the Arab manner. Then the PLO chairman’s expression softened, and he pulled himself from the chair. “We’ll take a walk,” he said genially. “And I will tell you what you’re up against with Abu Nidal.”

Arafat slipped through the arched doors into the courtyard and strolled off into the night with Moncrieff at his side. Two bodyguards appeared from the shadows and followed them across the pale gray marble. “It’s a horrid story,” Arafat began. “A story that would make a smart man abandon the idea. Of course, there’s always the fool who would find it encouraging.”

In Washington, D.C., the meeting with the president broke up just before noon. Colonel Larkin avoided the postmortem sessions in the White House corridors and drove to the Pentagon, just south of Arlington Cemetery, to initiate redeployment of the spy satellite.

Not gifted, not born to lead, Larkin grew up in a family where compassion went unrewarded and ruthlessness triumphed. He developed a tenacious, can-do mentality in an effort to satisfy the harsh standards. It was Larkin, deemed too small to play football, who starred on his college team, who won the hand-to-hand combat competition in survival training camp, who after being shot down and captured while strafing a North Vietnamese supply convoy in his F-4 Phantom, escaped from a POW camp and survived months in enemy-infested jungles, fighting his way back to American lines.

“What’s going on?” he asked his secretary as he entered his office in the Pentagon’s basement, where Special Forces personnel were inconspicuously housed.

“What isn’t?” she replied, brandishing a stack of phone messages.

“I need satellite tracking first.”

She was reaching for the phone when it rang. “Colonel Larkin’s office? Hold on please.” She covered the mouthpiece and said, “Mister Moncrieff.”

Larkin’s eyes widened with curiosity, then he reached across the desk and scooped up the phone.

“Moncrieff,” he said, brightening. “It’s been a while. What’s going on?”

“I’m having breakfast,” the Saudi replied, though it was evening at Arafat’s villa. “I had an insatiable craving for scrambled eggs and bacon.”

Larkin’s eyes flickered knowingly at the remark. “Coming right up,” he said, hitting the hold button. “Put this on the scrambler, will you?” he said to his secretary. Then he headed down the long corridor toward his office, reflecting on the blustery autumn morning in Boston when he recruited Moncrieff.

That was five years ago.

The Saudi was writing his doctoral dissertation at MIT at the time. He was walking across the campus alone when the precise man with the short, neatly combed hair and dark suit, whom he thought bore a striking resemblance to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, approached.

“I represent some people who are very interested in your work,” Larkin began after introducing himself. “You have a minute to chat?”

“Yes, sir, I do; but I’m afraid there wouldn’t be much point in it,” Moncrieff replied, having assumed Larkin was a corporate recruiter. “I’ve decided to go into business for myself and haven’t been interviewing.”

“Yes, I know,” Larkin said, privy to a CIA background check that informed him Moncrieff planned to return to Saudi Arabia and open his own consulting firm. “Have you ever considered working for the U.S. government?” he asked, showing him his identification.

“I can’t say I have, sir, no,” the young Saudi replied somewhat curiously. His English was impeccable, with a mild British inflection imparted by years of schooling in the United Kingdom. “I’m not an American citizen.”

“Not a requirement. Talent and intelligence are the criteria. I’d say you’re more than qualified.”

“So is everyone else at MIT.”

“They won’t have your positioning. Your work will be a natural entrée to situations we’d like to observe.”

“Observe—”

“Right. No assignments. You do business and tell us what you’ve seen or overheard along the way.”

“May I think it over?”

“Of course; discuss it with your family. I’ve no doubt they’ll approve.”

Nor did Moncrieff. Born into the Saudi royal family, he knew this was a chance to make his mark within the competitive and staunchly anti-communist family structure. Those who practiced Zakat, a pillar of Islam that obliged Muslims of wealth and social rank to almsgiving and involvement in affairs of state in the spirit of Western noblesse oblige, were well rewarded.

Since acquiring his Ph.D., Moncrieff had been “observing” those drought-stricken nations in Africa and the Middle East where his work had taken him. The political and economic climate, the mind-set of leaders, their state of health and personal happiness were all reported to Larkin; and bright fellow that Moncrieff was, he began seeing opportunities and proposing ways to exploit them.

Now, on this cool, April morning, Larkin entered his office, closed the door and lifted the phone. “Moncrieff — we’re clear. What’s on your mind?”

“You mean other than the fact that civilization is unraveling at the seams?”

“Tell me about it. This damned bombing’s got the president stuck in neutral.”

“Yes, rather nasty business, isn’t it?”

“Very. The DCI’s taking it pretty hard.”

“Perhaps I can help the old fellow out.”

Larkin brightened and loosened his tie. “You saying you have something on Libya for me?”

“I’m involved in a project with the colonel that might have a connection,” Moncrieff replied, encouraged by the anxious tone he detected. “In brief, you invest little and receive a substantial and immediate return.”

Larkin’s brows went up. “My kind of game. What’s the ante?”

“Bombers,” Moncrieff replied evenly. “Bombers with Pave Tack.”

“Christ,” Larkin said, stunned. “What’s his ante?”

“The hostages.”

4

“Why would we give bombers to a madman?” Bill Kiley asked incredulously before Larkin could explain.

Now, stunned by the reply, the DCI stared at the Polaroid of Tom Fitzgerald that he kept amid the top-secret folders on his desk, then went to the window.

The director’s office was in the southeast corner atop the seven-story, 1-million-square-foot headquarters building that looked out over a forested campus.

Bill Kiley loved Mother K, as insiders affectionately called Langley. Every morning he strode through the lobby, pausing at the south wall to ponder the memorial stars engraved in the richly toned Georgia marble. Each honored a CIA operative who had died in the line of duty. Kiley had known them all, in spirit if not in person, starting in Europe during World War II with the OSS; and it was the hallowed presence of these dedicated men and women that sustained him at these times.

“The hostages,” Kiley whispered hoarsely.

“Yes, sir.”

Kiley removed his glasses and cleaned them methodically with a handkerchief, taking the time to compose himself. Hostages had brought down one president and now haunted another, a nagging reminder that CIA’s vast intelligence resources had been beaten by diverse groups of rag-tag zealots: Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Force 17, the Revolutionary Justice Organization, Cells-Omar Mouktar Forces, Lebanese Revolutionary Faction. Each had claimed to have kidnapped at least one hostage. “Bull,” Kiley finally growled. “Qaddafi doesn’t have them.”

“He will.”

“All of them?”

Larkin nodded.

“Fitzgerald too?”

“That’s the deal.”

Kiley’s jaw dropped.

“Moncrieffs already cleared it with Libya and the PLO. The bottom line is the Palestinians get a sanctuary in Libya in exchange for the hostages. Qaddafi turns the hostages over to us in exchange for the bombers.”

“Christ,” Kiley exclaimed, his eyes flashing. “You mean we’ve been chasing all these factions, and Arafat has had the hostages all along?”

“Nidal, sir,” Larkin corrected gently.

“Nidal? How does Moncrieff know that?”

“He mentioned a connection in Beirut, sir.”

The DCI seethed. “Fitzgerald’s people scoured every sewer and rat hole…” He paused, then chortled, starting to savor the idea. “The Israelis will hate our guts for doing it without them. One problem — how do we know Qaddafi won’t screw us? How do we know he won’t take the bombers and welch on delivering the hostages?”

“Pave Tack is useless without ANITA,” Larkin replied. The acronym stood for alpha-numeric input for target acquisition, a transposition key used to program Pave Tack computers to find and identify targets. “You can’t enter target data into the computer without it. No hostages, no ANITA.”

“Sounds good,” Kiley mused, impressed. “But we’re not talking guns and bullets for the Ayatollah here. A couple of seventy million dollar bombers can’t get lost in OMB’s computer. This won’t mean a hill of beans until we figure out how to deliver and account for them.”

“An air strike is the only way I know, sir.”

The DCI nodded pensively. “Two planes downed over Libya — over the Mediterranean,” he said, quickly seeing the possibilities. “Sixth Fleet could handle the whole thing,” he went on, alluding to carrier-based bombers but a few hundred miles off Libya’s shores.

“At the risk of appearing self-serving, we already have air force personnel in place.”

“Good point. Who do you have in mind?”

“Paul Applegate,” Larkin replied, referring to a longtime air force and Special Forces colleague.

“Applegate,” the DCI echoed, recognizing the name. “Lebanon, three years ago.” Moncrieff had picked up some intelligence on the terrorist group that had bombed the marine barracks in Bei- rut. Larkin and Applegate had flown an unconventional air strike on their training camps. “You stuck it to those Shiite bastards.”

Larkin nodded, eyes ablaze with the memory.

“What’s Major Applegate up to these days?”

“Military intelligence with Third Air.”

“U.K.?”

Larkin nodded. “I touched base with him before coming over and took the liberty of bringing him up to speed. The major sends his regards and asked me to tell you he’d be more than tickled to take on Qaddafi.”

“Tripoli’s a long haul from Piccadilly.”

“That’s what the air force does, sir,” Larkin said with a little smile. “I realize it’ll be a bitch cutting the navy out of this.”

“We’ll give them their own target,” the DCI said, undaunted. “Air force gets Tripoli; navy gets Benghazi. The place is overrun with terrorist training camps. It’ll take the focus off Tripoli and reinforce the idea that this is nothing more than an antiterrorist strike.”

“A night strike,” Larkin quickly added. “We can’t deliver bombers to Qaddafi in broad daylight.”

“No problem. Defense has put billions into night-mission avionics and has never used them. They’ll jump at the chance to show off their hardware.” The DCI paused, his face taut with concern. “You know the president’s attitude toward an air strike.”

Larkin nodded solemnly. “Well, sir, I’m sure he’d approve the raid if he knew the hostages would be—”

“You bet he would,” Kiley interrupted. “But he can’t sign a finding on this one. Arms for hostages doesn’t bend the law, it breaks it in half.”

“How do we explain their release?”

“We claim,” Kiley began, assembling the pieces as he went, “that they had been shrewdly hidden in Tripoli — CIA found and rescued them. The air strike was a diversion to get them out.”

“That’d work,” Larkin said, smiling at his mentor’s facile mind. “Maybe we can take that to the president?”

“And State, Defense, the Joint Chiefs, everybody’ll have an opinion,” Kiley grumbled. “Before you know it, Congress and the media will be into it. We get these hostages out, Colonel, nobody will give a damn how we did it. Let’s keep it simple. CIA needs an air strike, CIA provides the president with the incentive to approve it.”

“I understand, sir,” Larkin said dutifully, reading between the lines.

“Considering the attitude of the Chiefs, we better come up with something that’ll get their attention too.”

“I’ll take care of it personally.”

Larkin was on his way to the door when Kiley called out, “Dick?” The colonel turned to see the DCI walking toward him.

“The Company needs this one—badly,” he said.

Larkin nodded grimly.

“They’re torturing him,” the DCI went on, referring to Fitzgerald. An emotional timbre, unusual for Kiley, was reflected in his voice. “God knows what they’re doing to him. I don’t care what it takes.”

“I’ve been proceeding on that basis, sir.”

Larkin left the office, went to an adjacent anteroom, and made three phone calls: the first two — to Major Applegate at 3rd Air Force Headquarters on Mildenhall RAFB in England, and to Moncrieff at Arafat’s villa in Tunis — confirmed that the project had the DCI’s blessing and was operational; the third, to the CIA station chief at the U.S. Consulate in Berlin, laid the groundwork for a plan Larkin had devised to obtain presidential approval for the air strike.

The colonel then drove into the District to a high-rise on Virginia across from George Washington University. He had leased an apartment here years ago after his marriage broke up, and had since lived alone. It was a small, low-maintenance unit that suited his spartan life-style and the transient nature of his work. Among the furnishings were his collection of handguns, a word processor, secure communications equipment, and an exercycle with 9,361 miles on the odometer.

After showering and changing into civilian clothes, he restocked his two-suiter, which was always packed, then drove to Andrews Air Force Base in neighboring Maryland, where he boarded a flight to Germany.

5

The F-111 was descending over the Suffolk countryside 10 miles north of London shrouded in darkness when Shepherd thumbed the microphone button.

“Four-eight TAC, this is Viper-Two. This is Viper-Two with in-flight emergency. Request immediate CTL.”

“Roger, Viper-Two. Cleared to land on six left,” the supervisor of flying in Lakenheath tower replied. The SOF was always a pilot, the duty rotating daily through the wing roster. “Repeat, six left; straight in; winds are two-four-zero at fifteen knots.”

“That’s a copy, Lakenheath.”

“Update your condition, Viper-Two.”

“Left engine is shut down; utility pump is down; I’ve still got my primary; hydraulic system indicators read seven-six-five and falling.”

“Roger that,” the SOF replied, thinking they might as well have read zero. “Emergency personnel are standing by. I’ll take you through the boldface for BAK-12 when you’re on short final,” he went on, referring to procedures for landing without braking capability.

BAK-12 arresting systems were part of every military runway. They were installed at the approach and departure end overruns; both had to be operating for a runway to be declared open. Like aircraft carriers, the BAK-12 used a cable stretched just above the tarmac to engage an arrester hook and bring the aircraft to a stop.

The F-111 was three miles northeast of Lakenheath when it dropped below the clouds. Shepherd smiled at the sight of the runway lights winking in the mist.

“Coming onto short final, Al,” he said to Brancato, who was slumped in his couch, his head against the canopy. “Al? Al, how many E’s in Beethoven?”

Brancato grunted unintelligibly.

“Come on, Alfredo, don’t die on me now.”

“Viper-Two, we have you on short,” the SOF said over the radio. “Let’s cover the boldface.”

“Roger,” Shepherd replied, coolly.

“Blow in doors closed.”

“Affirm.”

“Wing sweep at sixteen.”

“Sixteen.”

“Emergency extension on gear.”

Shepherd pulled the release. Compressed air from an emergency reservoir charged the system at 3,000 psi, blowing down the nose and main landing gear. His eyes darted to the position indicator lamps, which had just come on, informing him both were down and locked.

“Two greens,” he reported with relief.

“Verify green,” the SOF echoed. “Slats down.”

“Affirm.”

“Flaps down at twenty-five.”

“Flaps down; two-five.”

“Tail hook down.”

Shepherd reached to the yellow and black striped handle in the corner of the instrument panel and pulled hard. The arrester hook blew down at an angle from a fairing beneath the tail, the trailing end hanging several feet lower than the landing gear. Like many military fighters, not only those deployed on carriers, all F-111s had an arrester hook for emergency landings.

His eyes were riveted to the instrumentation now, monitoring angle of attack, sink rate, and air speed, which he kept at 160 knots—30 ks faster than landing with both engines — as the bomber came in at an angle against the blustery crosswinds. The tail hook touched down first; it dragged along the concrete, sending a rooster tail of blue-purple titanium sparks shooting into the darkness from below the F-111’s empennage.

Shepherd set the main gear of the 50,000-pound bomber on the ground with featherlike delicacy, then dropped the nose. The plane began rocketing brakeless down the 10,000-foot runway at 160 knots. It had traveled about 1,000 feet when in an eyeblink — bump-bump-wham! — the tires rolled over the inch-thick, braided steel cable and the arrester hook snagged it. A screaming whine rose from pits on either side of the runway as the cable unspooled from immense reels connected to a centrifugal clutch that absorbed the kinetic energy and brought the plane to a stop.

Ambulances and emergency fire fighting equipment were already racing toward it, their roof flashers sending splashes of colored light across the runway, their headlights serving to illuminate the area as they encircled the bomber.

A flight surgeon and several nurses clambered aboard a hydraulic platform with their equipment. It reached cockpit level just as Shepherd popped the canopies and released Brancato’s flight harness; he was pale and unconscious.

The surgeon dove beneath the blood-spattered Plexiglas, and cut away the shoulder of his flight suit, exposing the wound. “Prepare a bag of LRs and give me two grams of Monocid,” he said; then, taking the syringe, he shot the antibiotic into Brancato’s thigh.

Shepherd assisted in lifting him from the flight couch onto a gurney on the platform. It began descending immediately. One of the nurses wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Brancato’s bicep. The other hung a 1,000 cc bag of Lactated Ringers on the gurney, uncapped the IV needle, and slipped it into a vein in his forearm.

The platform bottomed out with a gentle thump.

In one continuous motion, they rolled the gurney off the edge, across the tarmac, and into an ambulance.

Shepherd watched it speed off into the darkness; then he glanced apprehensively at the technicians swarming over his plane.

“Major Shepherd?” a voice called out.

He turned to see two men approaching; one was a master sergeant he correctly assumed was a crew chief; the other, a broad-shouldered fellow with a friendly face and lumbering stride, was an officer.

“We’ll have her patched and on the flight line ASAP, sir,” the crew chief offered. “Long as you’re okay…”

“I’m fine. Thanks. I’d like to call my wife.”

“There’s no need for concern, Major,” the officer replied, taking charge. “Andrews has been notified of your status. I’m sure she’s been informed,” he went on in a high-pitched voice that was poorly matched to his big frame and gregarious demeanor; then he shook Shepherd’s hand and introduced himself. “Major Applegate, military intelligence. I’ll be debriefing you.”

That same afternoon in Washington, D.C., Stephanie Shepherd hurried across Independence Avenue toward the Rayburn Office Building, a banal, gargantuan edifice opposite the Capitol. She had trouble finding a parking place and was late.

Representative James Gutherie’s office was on the third floor. A nine-term congressman and ranking member of the House Intelligence and Oversight committees, he made two stops on his way to the Hill every morning: the first at Georgetown Rehabilitation Center to see his wife; the second at Holy Trinity R.C. Church on 35th Street to pray for her recovery.

Both avid skiers, the Gutheries first met on a chairlift at Killington. Twenty-five years later, the sport that had brought them together tore them apart. It was a low-speed fall, and there wasn’t a scratch on her, but his wife had been in a coma ever since.

The congressman had been a failed Catholic for years. The day the doctors said her recovery was in God’s hands, Gutherie went back to church; the day the polls revealed he had fallen behind his opponent, he began praying for two miracles.

Stephanie hurried from the elevator and down the endless corridors, long auburn hair flying behind her, turning several male heads in the process, which pleased her.

The congressman’s suite was a beehive. Phones rang incessantly. Harried staffers crisscrossed the reception area. The door to Gutherie’s office opened and a towering, ruggedly handsome man came toward her.

“Stephanie,” Jim Gutherie said, smiling. He hugged her as if they’d been close friends for years, letting his head fill with her perfume.

“Mr. Congressman, good to see you,” she replied stiffly as she disengaged. “Sorry I’m late.”

“That’s what you said the last time,” he teased.

“That’s not what I hoped you’d remember about me.” She had interviewed him during his reelection campaign two years ago, and was feeling more surprised that he had remembered than embarrassed.

“What’s somebody who can’t make deadlines doing as a reporter, anyway?”

“Beats me. The pay’s an insult, the pressure ages you, and congressmen only remember your faults.”

Gutherie broke into a hearty chuckle and showed her into his office. His opponent had been using his work on the Oversight Committee to imply he was antidefense and the congressman wanted to remind his 20,000-plus constituents who lived and worked at Andrews of his votes for military pay hikes and defense appropriations. They were halfway through the interview when his secretary reminded him of an appointment. “VFW luncheon,” he said to Stephanie with a facetious scowl. “Wouldn’t want to miss one of those.”

“It’s going to take a lot more than that this time, isn’t it?” Stephanie declared, suddenly serious, detecting he had lost his taste for battle.

“Tough one,” Gutherie admitted, lowering his guard. “I’ll have my secretary get in touch to reschedule.” He placed a hand on Stephanie’s shoulder and guided her to the door. “Maybe we can do it over lunch?” he suggested, his palm sliding to the small of her back, remaining longer than she thought appropriate.

“I’d love to, Mr. Congressman,” she said diplomatically. “But this girl hasn’t had lunch since she turned thirty and started splitting her jeans.”

Twenty minutes later Stephanie was in her brown Dodge station wagon, heading back to Andrews on I-95, when the WPTZ disc jockey interrupted Bruce Springsteen in midlyric for a news bulletin.

“Harassment of a United States Air Force F-111 bomber by Soviet interceptors resulted in a midair collision over the North Atlantic this morning,” the newsreader said. “Fortunately, both planes remained airworthy, and the F-111, on a flight from Andrews Air Force Base to Lakenheath, England, safely reached its destination. However, one member of the two-man crew was seriously injured. Their names are being withheld pending notification of next of kin.”

Stephanie’s heart raced. The media was always more efficient than the military in these matters and thoughtfully withheld the names of those involved; but the next of kin always knew. Now there were two families ridden with anxiety, instead of one. She rolled down the window, inhaled the cold air, and stepped on the gas.

Shepherd and Major Applegate drove the five miles from Lakenheath to 3rd Air Force Headquarters on Mildenhall RAFB, where the latter’s office was located.

“You did a hell of a job, Major,” Applegate said, after Shepherd finished briefing him on the encounter with the Soviet Forgers. “One question. How’re you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” Shepherd grunted, reflecting sadly on Brancato. “I wish I could’ve splashed the bastard.”

“Long time since combat—”

“Too long,” Shepherd replied, thinking he was one of the lucky ones; he’d seen combat, used his skills. How many highly trained and eager warriors never had? How many feared their careers would pass without a war to fight? Sure, he was proud to serve his country, to preserve peace and deter aggression; but down deep, it was far more satisfying to tackle it head on.

“The point is, the Forty-eighth’s been on alert for the last week,” Applegate said.

Shepherd looked at him, curiosity building.

“Rumor control says it’s Libya.”

“Qaddafi’s got it coming.”

“You’re on the mission roster, Major,” Applegate said. Then, testing him, because he had to know, he prompted, “Of course, after this, no one would fault you for wanting out.”

“All I want is a chance to do my job, sir,” Shepherd declared, his tone sharpening.

“Thought you might say that,” Applegate mused, concealing that he had his own reasons for wanting Shepherd to remain on the mission roster.

“Hard to do without a wizzo.”

“Maybe I can help,” Applegate offered, feigning compassion. “Turns out you and Captain Foster are in the same boat. His right-seater bit the dust a couple of days ago — literally. Broke an ankle sliding into home against the Eighty-first TAC. Hell of a game.”

“Well, if you need a good first baseman…” Shepherd offered, matching his grin.

“We need pilots,” Applegate replied, getting back to business. “We’re cutting orders to get Foster a new wizzo. We can cut yours at the same time. Be a hell of a lot easier to do now. Once you report to a new CO and his crew chief gets his paws on your one-eleven… Think about it. Okay?”

“I have, sir,” Shepherd said. “Count me in.”

“Good,” Applegate enthused, shaking Shepherd’s hand. He waited until he had left the office and was well down the corridor before lifting the phone.

The military transport that had left Andrews that afternoon for Berlin was in a commercial air corridor high over the North Atlantic when Larkin was summoned to the cockpit.

“Call for you, sir,” the flight engineer said, handing him the receiver.

“Colonel Larkin speaking.”

“Colonel?” his secretary said. “I have Major Applegate on satellite relay.”

“Dick? It’s A.G.,” Applegate said when the connection was made. “I got us a couple of one-elevens.”

“Way to go,” Larkin enthused.

“All we need is an order to deliver them.”

“I’m placing it tonight,” Larkin said, ending the call. “You still there?” he prompted his secretary.

“Yes. I have him on the other line,” she replied, having anticipated the colonel’s request.

Bill Kiley was in his limousine on his way to a meeting in the Pentagon, when Larkin’s secretary put the call through to his mobile phone; a fully secured cellular terminal, the STU-III/Dynasec was impervious to eavesdropping or intercept.

“Good work,” the DCI said when briefed on the bombers. “You talk to Moncrieff about payment?”

“Yes, sir,” Larkin replied, pleased by the praise. “He’s making the arrangements as we speak.”

6

An old Mercedes sedan raced along Avenue du General de Gaulle atop the palisades of West Beirut past the bombed-out hulks of hotels and high-rises that had once made the city the Riviera of the Middle East; the place where wealthy Arab women worked on topless tans and shopped for French perfume and couture while their men traded oil for tankers and tactical fighters between visits to the gaming tables at Casino du Liban.

Katifa sat behind the wheel, her hair snapping in the wind, her face aglow with the anticipation that had been building since the cable from Saddam Moncrieff arrived the previous evening. She guided the car through the sharp bend at Ras Beyrouth onto Avenue de Paris, past the British and American embassies, and parked on a promontory high above the Mediterranean.

A twisting wooden staircase led to the Bain de l’Aub, the beach at the base of the palisades.

Katifa hurried down the steps and set off across the sand with long, graceful strides. She had gone about a quarter-mile when she saw the stylishly dressed man near a rock jetty up ahead, saw his eyes tracking her, his smile growing in anticipation.

Moncrieff had spent the night at Arafat’s villa. After a three-hour flight from Tunis, he had arrived in Beirut late morning, then took a taxi from the airport.

As the Saudi watched the beautiful woman with the silken complexion and model-fine features coming across the sand toward him, he began reflecting on that day in Cambridge five years before, when he had last seen her.

They were graduate students and lovers, living together at MIT at the time. Katifa was dedicated to the Palestinian cause. Moncrieff had sworn to uphold Saudi law, which forbade members of the royal family to marry foreigners; he had also sworn another allegiance, an allegiance he couldn’t discuss. They walked the banks of the Charles on that humid Sunday afternoon, knowing it wouldn’t work, and said good-bye.

Now the Saudi took a few steps toward her and opened his arms, and Katifa ran into their embrace.

“Moncrieff,” she said, leaning back to look at him. “I still can’t believe you’re here.”

“I was concerned you wouldn’t come.”

“And if I hadn’t?” she asked with a smile.

“I would have pursued you relentlessly,” he replied with a grin; then, in a more serious tone, he added, “I would have had little choice.”

She studied him for a moment, recalling his habit of gently working a conversation to convey that something was on his mind. “This is business, isn’t it?”

Moncrieff nodded, offered her a cigarette, and took one himself, glancing about cautiously as he lit them. As he had anticipated when selecting Bain de l’Aub for the meeting, they were alone on the long stretch of sand. “I’m looking for your brother,” he finally said.

“Why?” Katifa asked, darkening.

“I have to see Abu Nidal.”

“My brother is dead,” she said, forthrightly.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“He died for our cause. He’s not to be grieved.”

“Then I’ll tend to business,” Moncrieff said, taking the opening. “This meeting with Nidal is of the utmost importance,” he began, his tone sharpening as he explained the arms-sanctuary-hostage exchange.

“What makes you think Abu Nidal has the hostages?” Katifa challenged when he had finished, concealing that, like Arafat, she thought the idea had merit.

“Does Article Seventeen ring a bell?”

“I think it might,” she replied.

They were in their last year at MIT when Katifa wrote Intifada as a tribute to her father. With eloquence and moving emotional fervor, her treatise not only called for the liberation of Palestine, but outlined a strategy to achieve it, a strategy of terror and intimidation designed to force the United States into pressuring Israel to provide a Palestinian homeland.

That summer, she left MIT and returned to Bir Zeit University, where she had done her undergraduate work. Located on Jordan’s west bank fifteen miles from Jerusalem, it was a center of PLO radicalism. When Katifa’s mentor in the political science department read Intifada, he knew his protégé had fulfilled her promise. A high-ranking PLO adviser, he brought the document to Yasser Arafat’s attention; and it was soon adopted as the PLO’s official manifesto. Intifada was more than brilliant; it was written by the daughter of a martyred leader.

Article 17, titled “Human Currency,” advocated hostage-taking and urged the creation of fictitious radical Muslim groups who would claim responsibility for the kidnappings: a tactic to cause confusion and deter rescue attempts, a tactic which the ruthless and cunning Abu Nidal had refined to an art. He had kidnapped them all; not to force the release of political prisoners, not to trade for money or arms, but to ransom Palestine.

“And if you’re wrong about Abu Nidal holding the hostages?”

“I have it on good authority that I’m not,” Moncrieff replied, quietly confident.

“State your source, Mr. Moncrieff,” she said, as if challenging one of her students.

“Chairman Arafat,” he said, playing the card.

Her eyes widened at his sagacity. “I had a professor like you once. No matter how I argued, he always had an answer.”

“You didn’t learn very much.”

“But he did.”

Moncrieff laughed. “My White House contact has to know,” he said, purposely invoking his sanction.

“He’ll have to wait until tonight.”

“I’ll be here,” he said, taking her hand.

They walked along the surf to the staircase and climbed to the palisades where Katifa’s Mercedes was parked, then drove to her apartment on Tamar Mallat in the Al Fatwa quarter. They spent the afternoon reliving old times and drinking araki, a sweet local liqueur distilled from wine. They talked for hours before their words gave way to desire, before Moncrieff gently pressed his lips to hers. Katifa had had no interest in having a lover since her brother’s death. The self-denial served as a form of punishment and emotional insulation; but the Saudi had always been a special and reassuring presence, and she surrendered willingly.

Soon they lay naked on her bed — Katifa lanquid and adrift in the sensations that began surging through her like gentle bursts of current; Moncrieff exploring the planes of her smooth torso, tending to every square inch of copper velvet, until her flesh quivered and the first explosion broke over her; and as the second rose, he brought their glistening bodies together, timing his entrance to the instant it crested. Katifa gasped at the sudden surge in intensity, lost in the way it used to be and hadn’t been since they were last lovers.

That evening, they drove to the Turk Hospital on De Mazraa, where Katifa picked up a package at the pharmacy. Sporadic flashes of gunfire winked in the darkness as the Mercedes crossed the Green Line at the Patriarche Hoyek checkpoint, heading north on Avenue Charles Helou and up the coastal motorway to Casino du Liban.

A group of Palestinian sentries met the Mercedes at the entrance and escorted Moncrieff and Katifa down the gangway to the dock.

Hasan, the terrorist who had been her brother’s lieutenant, signaled with a flashlight that they had arrived. The throb of diesels rose as the gunboat emerged from the blackness and nosed into the slip, slowing with a noisy reversal of its engines. Armed sentries were deployed on deck. Then Abu Nidal came from below, joining Moncrieff, Katifa, and Hasan on the dock. He had been grooming Hasan to assume leadership of the casino-based group, and gestured for him to accompany them as they walked along the rows of empty slips.

“No,” Nidal said after Moncrieff had revealed the three-way proposal. The terrorist had listened without comment, his expression noncommital throughout. “We don’t want another territory,” he said calmly. “We want our homeland. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“I’m aware of that,” Moncrieff replied, undaunted. “As I explained, this would be a significant step in that direction. I strongly urge you to consider it.”

“I’ll say this once,” Nidal responded evenly. “The currency you seek will be used to ransom Palestine, not to lease Libyan desert.”

“Unoccupied Libyan desert,” Moncrieff corrected, with the cool detachment of a diplomat brokering a treaty. “A viable alternative to living in police states; an end to violence and the slaughter of your young.”

“And the destruction of our homes, and confiscation of property, and demeaning identity cards,” Katifa interjected, bitterly rattling off the list of injustices.

“You overlooked curfews and unlawful detention,” Moncrieff said gently. “My point is, your people are tired of fighting tanks with stones. It’s hard to believe they wouldn’t flock to a sanctuary where they could lick their wounds and heal.”

“And become soft and complacent,” Nidal said in a derisive tone. “It’s the inhumanity that drives them.”

“Yes, in lieu of leadership. As I understand it, there are those who believe reuniting Palestinians with their leaders is vital to your cause.”

“Ah,” Nidal said knowingly, his face a haunting mask in the moonlight. “Arafat… you’ve spoken with him, haven’t you? Of course you have.”

Moncrieff nodded matter-of-factly, unshaken by the challenge. “He views the proposal favorably.”

“I’m not surprised. We’ve often differed on these matters.”

“With good reason, I’m sure. But the fact remains that despite your having the currency in hand, neither the Americans nor the Israelis have budged.”

“Yes, they’re still chasing Hezbollah, aren’t they?” he said with a sly smile. “They’ll do more than budge when they find out who really has the currency.”

“I disagree,” Moncrieff said, maintaining his cool demeanor. “It’s becoming clear that a strategy based on lawlessness will ultimately fail.”

“We think of it as courage,” Nidal snapped angrily. “We’ve fought for forty years and we’ll fight for forty more if need be; without the interference of outsiders. And if seven hostages aren’t sufficient…” He paused, letting the words trail off ominously.

“We’ll acquire more,” Hasan said intensely, unable to resist finishing his mentor’s sentence.

“Abu Nidal is right,” Katifa chimed in. Despite thinking the proposal of some value, despite her feelings for Moncrieff, her almost lifelong allegiance to Nidal gave undue weight to his argument. “The Americans and Libyans wouldn’t accept inequities. Why should we?”

“For your people. ‘A nation’s leader should never put his pride before them,’” Moncrieff answered, paraphrasing. “Mohammed.” Then, shifting his look to Nidal, he said, “The offer stands. Though I’m not sure for how long. Let me know if you reconsider.”

The terrorist glared at him with cold hatred, then broke it off and took Katifa aside. “Binti el-amin,” he began, addressing her as My loyal daughter to emphasize his disappointment, “why did you bring this shetan to me?”

“Because I don’t presume to speak for Abu Nidal.”

His eyes softened in approval, then drifted to his watch. “The Saudi is wrong,” he declared in conclusion. “Pragmatism is a poor substitute for passion.”

Katifa nodded dutifully and handed him the package of pharmaceuticals.

Nidal went up the gangway into the casino, continuing through the main gaming room to the amphitheater where he entered a backstage room that served as a communications center. A radio operator sat at a console. It was precisely 9:00 P.M. when the radio crackled.

“This is the Exchequer,” the caller said, using the code name Nidal had given the Palestinian in charge of the hostages. “This is the Exchequer. Do you read?”

“Yes, go ahead,” Nidal replied, taking the phone.

“Your currency is secure,” the Exchequer reported as he did daily at this hour, reciting the cipher that meant all was well with the hostages.

“Very well,” Nidal said, clearly pleased. He had no questions or instructions to impart and abruptly ended the transmission to minimize the chance of intercept.

After leaving Casino du Liban, Katifa and Moncrieff drove back to the city in stony silence.

Far from beaten, the Saudi was keenly aware of Katifa’s divided loyalties and decided to let her live with the ambivalence for a while before provoking her.

“Arafat was right,” he finally said as they entered her apartment and settled on opposite ends of a sofa in the living room. “Nidal is addicted to the violence. The day this is settled, he becomes nothing; a terrorist without a cause.”

“He just wants what is best for Palestinians.”

“No. That’s what your father wanted,” Moncrieff replied slyly, baiting her.

“My father?” she asked indignantly. She had often spoken of him when they were students and resented the inference. “What does he have to do with this?”

“If he had lived, Katifa,” Moncrieff replied, starting to reel her in, “if he had been captured by the Israelis, what would have happened?”

“They assassinated him,” she snapped bitterly.

“Humor me. What if they hadn’t?”

“He was respected by both sides. If anyone had a chance to resolve the differences between—”

“Right. He would have compromised,” Moncrieff interrupted; then he locked his eyes onto hers and pointedly added, “That’s why Nidal executed him.”

“What?” Katifa leapt from the sofa and hovered over him angrily. “How can you make such an accusation?”

“I have it on good authority.”

“Arafat?” she ventured cautiously.

“He was there, was he not?”

“So was I,” she retorted, lighting a cigarette.

“He doesn’t remember it quite the way you do,” Moncrieff said gently. “He told me the story just yesterday; he said that your father and Nidal were holding off the Israelis while Arafat loaded the settlers into a helicopter. As soon as they were aboard, Arafat began firing at the Israelis, pinning them down so that your father and Nidal could run to the helicopter. Nidal managed to get aboard; then the Israelis began firing at it. The pilot panicked and lifted off, leaving your father behind. When Nidal saw he was about to be captured, he went to the door with his machine gun and shot him.”

Katifa gasped, unwilling to accept it, the words of angry protest sticking in her throat.

“When Arafat demanded an explanation,” Moncrieff continued, “Nidal said he was concerned your father would break under torture and reveal the names of other Palestinian activists. Of course, he told you and your brother that the Israelis had killed him.”

Katifa was stunned. She turned away like a wounded animal, staring out a window into the darkness. “That is a vicious lie,” she finally protested in a dry rasp. “Abu Nidal took us in and raised us as his own children. He was everything to us.”

“That’s why you never suspected the truth. If Abu Nidal is so dedicated to your father’s principles, why did he turn me down?”

Katifa winced, knowing the Saudi was right. “There would be no currency without Abu Nidal,” she replied defensively.

“Granted; but he has served his purpose. It’s your fight now; you’re the one who must spend it. Where are they, Katifa?” he said forcefully. “Where are the hostages?”

She looked at him for a long moment, the smoke from her cigarette filling the space between them as she decided. “They’re not in Beirut.”

Moncrieff was stunned. CIA had long believed the hostages were being held somewhere in the southern slums; and he expected Katifa knew the exact location.

“Then where?” he demanded angrily.

Katifa shrugged. “They were brought to Casino du Liban and taken away on Abu Nidal’s boat.” She paused, deciding. “It was given to him by the Syrians.”

“Is that where they are? Syria?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve heard Abu Nidal say the shetans could turn the entire Middle East over stone by stone and never find them. No,” she went on, anticipating Moncrieff s next question. “It wasn’t a figure of speech. Nidal wasn’t bragging; he stated it as a simple fact.”

“The hostages are under Syrian control,” he prompted.

“Yes. It was part of the agreement for Assad’s support,” Katifa answered, referring to Syria’s radical leader.

“Assad can authorize their release?”

“Not without clearing it with Abu Nidal first. There’s a Palestinian in charge of the hostages who reports to him daily. He’d know if Assad went around him.”

Moncrieff nodded pensively. The more he learned about the hostages’ whereabouts the more of a mystery it became. He was thinking he should call Larkin and inform him of the impasse when his eyes came to life with an idea.

“Then Nidal must authorize it.”

“Impossible.”

“Is that what your father would have said?” the Saudi challenged, knowingly.

7

The storm that had been drenching all of Europe was blowing across the runways in sheets when the military 707 landed at Templehoff, the United States Air Force base in West Berlin.

The time was 5:26 A.M. when Colonel Larkin came down the boarding ramp and cleared passport control.

The CIA station chief in the American consulate on Clayallee had made several arrangements at Larkin’s request, ground transportation among them. The Audi sedan was waiting in slot T-44 in the terminal parking lot. The major found the keys under the floor mat, opened the trunk, and removed a rumpled Adidas gym bag. It contained $10,000.

He drove north into the city through the rain that slowed traffic on the Mariendorfer Damm to a crawl.

About an hour and a half later he parked along the S-bahn tracks near the Tiergarten and walked through the flea market to No. 42 Potsdamer, an unkempt row house just west of the city’s infamous wall. He rang the buzzer for the street-level flat. Shortly, the security peephole flickered, then the dead bolt clanked.

The woman who opened the door had a tired face that Larkin had once thought attractive; she balanced a baby on her hip. The pocket of her apron sagged with the weight of a pistol.

“Richard?” she said with a warm smile. “I was surprised when I got the message you were coming. Wie geht’s?”

“Hanging in there,” Larkin replied as she bolted the door and led the way inside. His head filled with the aroma of gun oil and blued-steel that came from crates stacked against the walls of the apartment. He set the gym bag on a table and pushed it toward her.

“If you would,” she said, handing Larkin the baby. “He cries if I put him down.”

She unzipped the bag, removed the money, and put it in a drawer. Then she made a phone call, whispering just a few words in German before hanging up.

“He’s coming soon,” she said. “I’ll make some coffee.” She went into the kitchen, leaving Larkin holding the child, its tiny fist clenched tightly around a bullet.

Later that morning, after meeting with Larkin, a middle-aged man with sad eyes and a wispy mustache crossed the border into East Berlin and spent some time working with a colleague in the cable room of the Libyan People’s Bureau on Unter Den Linden.

That evening, the woman went to Kufurstendamm, the hub of West Berlin’s notorious nightlife. As always, it was crowded with tourists, prostitutes, and off-duty military personnel. She stood near the entrance to La Belle Club, her foot tapping to the beat of the rock music that boomed from within. It was 12:21 A.M. when she spotted a young, sensitive-looking American soldier hesitating to enter the disco.

“Go ahead. It’s a great club. You’ll love it,” she said. “My husband’s in the band.”

“It’s that obvious I’m new, huh?” the soldier replied with an embarrassed smile.

“No, you just looked a little uncertain.”

“Thanks,” he said, turning toward the entrance.

“Oh, could you do me a favor?” she asked, holding out a rumpled gym bag. “My husband sweats so much when he plays. He forgot his towels and change of clothes.”

“You want me to give that to him?”

“If you would,” she replied, gesturing to the baby sleeping peacefully in a canvas carrier slung across her chest. “The music will wake him if I—”

“Sure, no problem,” the congenial fellow agreed, taking the bag. “Heavy,” he said, somewhat surprised.

“The water. A big Thermos of it,” she explained shrewdly. “They take a break about one. Oh, how silly of me,” she said as if she had forgotten. “My husband is the drummer.”

“The drummer,” the soldier repeated with a smile, backing his way into the entrance.

The woman waved and hurried off.

The shy soldier went to a table, ordered a beer, and set the gym bag on the floor behind his chair.

Inside it, amid a few soiled towels, a cheap wind-up alarm clock lay ticking. The plastic lens that covered the face had been removed and a thin, pliable wire affixed with airplane glue to each of the hands. The insulation had been stripped from the tips, exposing about a quarter-inch of copper; one of these prongs had been bent slightly downward to ensure contact would be made when they coincided. As beer flowed and dancers gyrated, the minute hand slowly brought the tips of the two wires closer and closer together.

It was exactly 1:04 A.M. when the young soldier waved the waitress over again.

“Think this set’s ever going to end?”

“I sure hope so,” she said, leaning over so he could hear her above the music.

His eyes darted shyly to the swell of her breasts, the smooth skin almost brushing his cheek. He was hoping fervently it would and was fantasizing how it might feel when the clock hands moved to within a few ticks of coinciding, and an impatient purple-green spark jumped across the gap between the contacts.

The 9-volt charge surged through the wire and tripped the detonator, which was plugged into a 15-pound chunk of C-4 plastique called Semtex. It was part of a 20-ton shipment of the deadly explosive that one of the renegade CIA agents had procured for Qaddafi. RDX, the main ingredient of the off-white putty, was unmatched in destructive potential save for nuclear weapons.

It erupted in a thunderous explosion.

The music and blinding strobes masked the sound and flash of the blast, but the torn bodies hurtling through the air like dolls left no doubt as to what had happened. Within seconds, La Belle Club was a roaring inferno filled with screaming people.

Scores were injured.

Two American soldiers were killed.

8

The next morning, an entourage of civilian and military advisers assembled at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

The president had spent the weekend relaxing. He was dressed casually when he joined them in the library, where, despite the crackle of hand-split logs, a damp chill prevailed.

“Intercepted a few hours ago,” Lancaster said, handing him a red folder marked KEYHOLE TOP-SECRET TALENT, the code name given intelligence collected by KH-11 spy satellites. It contained a cable that read:

“When am I going to get one of these that will make me happy?” the president asked, settling in his chair. “I thought we had castiron coverage on these people?”

“We do, sir,” Kiley replied. “Repositioning that KH-11 really paid off.”

“Not for those two soldiers, it didn’t!” the president snapped in a rare display of acrimony.

“My apologies, sir,” Kiley said, stung by the reply. “I meant we can prove that cable was sent from the People’s Bureau in East Berlin to Qaddafi in Tripoli.”

The president’s posture softened, his head tilting slightly, re-considering his remarks.

“As was this one,” Lancaster said, exhaling a haughty cloud of smoke as he handed him a second cable. Like the others present, the NSA wasn’t aware of CIA’s involvement in the bombing and believed the cables to be genuine.

“That’s the exact time the disco was bombed, sir,” Kiley said incriminatingly.

“Do we have any proof that Qaddafi gave the order?” the president asked.

“I’d say it’s implicit, sir,” Kiley replied.

“In other words, Bill, we don’t have irrefutable evidence that Qaddafi was behind this.”

Kiley’s lips tightened in a thin red line. “No, sir.”

“Be advised,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, “the La Belle Club is a hangout for black servicemen. Libya has never targeted minorities. Pick off a cable going in the other direction — an order from Qaddafi saying, ‘Bomb a disco tonight’—then come talk to me.”

“Dammit,” Kiley snapped. “Why do you people always need a Pearl Harbor as an excuse to go to work?”

“Mr. President,” the secretary of state began in his ponderous cadence, “we’ve tried diplomacy, public condemnation, a show of military strength. None have worked. It’s time for military action.”

“We have an interservice strike force on alert,” the defense secretary chimed in. “It can be launched on short notice to drop a few hot ones right in Qaddafi’s lap.”

“Not from any of my aircraft,” the CJC retorted. “Not without a smoking gun.”

“You already have one,” Kiley said emotionally. “Hundreds of them. Two hundred and fifty-three marines! A navy diver murdered in cold blood! A man in a wheelchair thrown into the sea! Innocent travelers gunned down in airports! Blown out of planes! College professors, journalists, one of my own people kidnapped and tortured by these animals! Two soldiers blown to bits in a nightclub! How many more? The wrong guns are doing all the smoking! And I’m damned sick of it!”

Kiley’s passion drew a taut silence over the room. Twenty seconds passed before the president broke it. “So am I,” he said in a voice hoarse from tension. “It’s time to make the world smaller for terrorists.”

That afternoon a heavy rain was still falling at Mildenhall as a military transport, which had taken off from Berlin’s Templehoff an hour and forty minutes earlier, landed.

Colonel Larkin deplaned, cleared customs, and strode in a precise cadence to a gray government sedan parked adjacent to the MAC terminal. He tossed his two-suiter into the backseat and got in next to Major Applegate, who was behind the wheel.

“I hear business in Germany is booming,” Applegate said in his high-pitched rasp as he pulled away from the arrivals gate.

“So did the president,” Larkin replied with an intensity that set him apart from his affable colleague. “Talk to me about these crews, A.G.”

“Pilots,” Applegate corrected smartly, handing him a file card with two names, one of which was Shepherd. “No wizzos. I figure the fewer personnel involved the better,” he went on, explaining he had purposely selected two pilots, assigned to fly the raid on Libya, who had unexpectedly lost their weapons systems officers.

“Assigned to the raid…”

“That’s the beauty of it.”

“What do you have in mind?” Larkin prompted warily. “I mean, have you talked to them about this?”

“Not yet. But it might be worth a shot.”

Larkin’s expression darkened. “I don’t know. There isn’t a pilot alive who’d turn his plane over to the enemy without asking a lot of questions.”

“We’ve got some damn good answers.”

“What if they don’t agree? What if one of them takes his military oath too seriously; refuses to carry out an order that’s wrong? That’s illegal?”

Applegate’s prominent brows arched. “Good point. We’d be in deep shit if one of them turned out to be a whistle-blower.”

“Bet your ass. This cat gets out of the bag, it makes a beeline right for the oval office.”

“There are ways to make sure it doesn’t.”

“Just one,” Larkin said ominously. “Separate these guys from their planes and fly the mission ourselves.”

“Sounds like we’re talking hardball,” Applegate said, the stone-cold expression in Larkin’s eyes leaving no doubt as to his intent.

“You have a problem with that?”

“You know better,” Applegate replied; then, hunching his bear-like shoulders with uncertainty, he added, “It’s just that these guys are air force.”

“I don’t need to be reminded, A.G.,” Larkin said firmly. “The problem is, if we’re going to sell the idea that two one-elevens were lost in the raid, we have to release the names of the pilots that went down with them, the assigned pilots. And we can’t have these guys walking around saying otherwise.”

“What about incapacitating them somehow — a fender bender, food poisoning? Then we fly the mission, and release phony names and bios.”

Larkin shook his head emphatically. “It’ll never hold water. The media is going to be all over this thing. They’ll want to interview the dead pilots’ families. The air force will hold a memorial service. The president will console their wives and kids—”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” Applegate said, steering around some double-parked vehicles.

“Besides, it’s not sure enough. What if one of them gets his gut pumped and shows up on the flight line? We can use phony IDs to cover a couple of nonexistent wizzos but not these guys. We’re not dealing with just planes, we’re dealing with assigned planes and assigned pilots and we have to account for both.”

There was no more to be said on the matter. The scenario demanded stringent security. Extreme measures would be necessary to guarantee it wasn’t breached. The slightest chance that the top-secret mission would be revealed, the hostages imperiled, or the government compromised had to be eliminated in advance.

“A couple of details still have to be covered,” Applegate said, as he turned off Lincoln Road, parking in front of Building 239. The pedestrian, postwar structure served as headquarters for U.S. 3rd Air Force.

The place was buzzing with activity as the two officers cleared security and climbed a staircase to Applegate’s office at the far end of a second-floor corridor. The computer terminal was tied in to Mildenhall’s main frame. Larkin turned it on and typed in his security clearance code. The computer responded:

Next, Larkin accessed the mission file and scrolled through the personnel roster, finding:

He changed it to read WIZZO: ASSIGNED — ensuring a new weapons systems officer wouldn’t appear. He repeated the procedure for the second pilot, then, accessing their personnel files, deleted the name of their commanding officers and inserted his own. This was preventative damage control; any queries from those not privy to the covert subtext, which might threaten the mission, would come to him rather than to 3rd Air Force personnel.

Larkin was about to shut down the computer when something caught his eye. Along with personal information each file also contained a photograph. The images hadn’t registered during the data search, but now the colonel’s attention was drawn to the engaging smile and thoughtful eyes of Major Walter Shepherd.

Their forthright stare filled Larkin with anxiety. It wasn’t the unconventional nature of the mission that troubled him; nor was it what those in the trade called the Nuremberg Syndrome, the specter of Nazi officers executed for carrying out orders they knew to be wrong rather than question them. No, what bothered Larkin was that the men he’d be acting against were on his side.

He had steeled himself against it until now. A few minutes passed before he found the rationale. Yes, he could live with that, he thought, having convinced himself that the two pilots would be called upon to do no more than they had promised the day they were sworn into the military — indeed, no more than what might happen if they flew the mission; no more than Larkin, himself, would do should the need arise — die in the service of their country.

9

The following morning the rain had eased to a steady drizzle when Shepherd awoke in his quarters in the housing provided to newly arrived officers at Lakenheath Royal Air Force Base.

Four days had passed since the encounter with the Soviet Forgers. After being debriefed by Applegate, Shepherd had immediately phoned Stephanie at their home on Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and assured her he wasn’t injured. Having eased her anxieties, he decided not to mention in the same breath that he had been assigned to fly a mission.

Now, after showering and pulling on a jumpsuit, he settled back with a cup of steaming coffee and turned on his cassette recorder.

“Tuesday, eight April. How is my favorite little gymnast doing?” he drawled. “And how’s her mommy and brother? I went over to the hospital last night to see Al. He’s complaining the pasta isn’t al dente, so I figure he’s doing okay. It turns out that little sortie with the Russians was just a warm-up. We’ve got a real live mission on the boards now. It should be history by the time you get this; so should Qaddafi. I’m real sorry about messing up our anniversary, babe. Like I said, we’ll make up for it soon as you get here.” He paused at a knock and shut off the recorder.

The door was partly open, and he looked up to see a rain-soaked courier standing in the corridor.

“Major Shepherd, sir?”

“You got him, Corporal,” Shepherd replied, returning his salute and taking the envelope. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure, sir,” he said, saluting and hurrying off down the corridor.

Shepherd glanced to the puddle where the corporal had been standing and smiled. Well, they sure named this place right, he thought.

The envelope contained orders, informing Shepherd he had been transferred to Upper Heyford RAFB, and was to report that afternoon at 17:00 with his F-111.

Upper Heyford, one hundred and forty miles southwest of Lakenheath, was dedicated to the training and deployment of weapons systems officers and ECM technicians. Crews permanently stationed there flew EF 111-As, the Electronic Counter-Measures version of the F-111. They escorted the bombers during raids, jamming enemy defense and missile guidance radar.

It was just past 3:00 A.M. at Andrews Air Force Base. Shepherd decided to wait until after arriving in Upper Heyford to call Stephanie about the transfer.

About an hour later, he and Captain Mark Foster, the other wizzo-less pilot, arrived at squadron headquarters.

Square-jawed and blue-eyed with a thick shock of auburn hair, Foster had grown up on a ranch in the Texas hill country.

After processing aircraft and personnel transfer documents, the two pilots spent the rest of the morning plotting turn points for an orientation mission they would fly en route to Upper Heyford — an extended flight that would allow Shepherd to become familiar with the crowded and tightly controlled air corridors that crisscrossed the United Kingdom. When finished, they suited up and went to the flight line.

Shepherd’s F-111 had been repaired and had been on active status for several days now. He settled into the cockpit as the air crew hooked up the Dash-60, a pneumatic blower that wound the engines to start speed. At 17,000 RPMs, he lifted the throttles and the turbines came to life. After an hour of routine warm-up procedures and systems checks, he glanced wistfully to the empty seat next to him, and radioed the tower for takeoff clearance.

After altering the two pilots’ computer files at Mildenhall, Larkin and Applegate had gone directly to Upper Heyford. With CIA sanction, they took over a hangar in a remote corner of the field. In the next few days the offices and life-support room, which contained the aviators’ lockers and gear, were quickly painted and outfitted. A small group of Special Forces personnel — guards, aviators, technicians, clerical staffers — who would play various roles in the scheme to acquire the two F-111 bombers joined them.

“Better find out if either of these guys carries a weapon,” Larkin asked when reviewing the details.

“Done,” Applegate said proudly; he knew most pilots carried a sidearm only when flying combat, but there were those who carried one whenever they flew. “The Texan carries a thirty-eight. Shepherd flies clean.”

“Sequences your targets if nothing else,” Larkin mused. It also resulted in the selection of a sniper rifle as a weapon. Fired from a distant and concealed position, it would provide a margin of safety for the marksman and, requiring an imperceptible change of angle between shots, facilitate extremely rapid shooting.

That was three days ago.

Now, in one of the offices, Larkin and Applegate sat on opposite sides of a desk, the parts of a disassembled rifle spread out in front of them.

The Iver Johnson Model 300 was the finest of sniping rifles: a fluted and counterweighted barrel reduced vibration and whip; a short-throw bolt allowed a marksman to fire all four rounds in five seconds; an X9 Leupold scope ensured they would be bull’s-eyes.

Applegate had cleaned the IJ3’s parts and now, as he assembled them, he checked each for specks of dust or excess oil, making sure the action was working smoothly.

Larkin opened a box of 8.58 mm cartridges and examined them, his wintry eyes making certain that the bullet was properly seated in the case, that the primers were centered, that there were no imperfections that might result in a misfire. He selected four cartridges and handed them to Applegate, who began thumbing them into the magazine.

The rain had finally stopped as the two F-111s completed the orientation mission and streaked through swiftly falling darkness, landing side by side on Heyford’s north-south runway. At Larkin’s request, air traffic control directed them through the maze of taxiways to the remote hangar.

The colonel was waiting on the tarmac when the bombers emerged from the mist and taxied into view. With him were four members of the Special Forces contingent that he and Applegate had assembled: two crew chiefs who would tend to the aircraft, and two guards wearing Air Force Security Police uniforms who would patrol the area.

The crew chiefs guided the planes to a stop, then positioned ladders against the fuselages and assisted the pilots from their cockpits.

Larkin tensed slightly as Shepherd and Foster strode toward him in the darkness, removing their flight helmets. “Hope you’ll excuse the lack of drums and bugles,” he said genially after introductions had been made.

“President’s got to cut the deficit somehow,” Shepherd joked.

“We hear he’s got other priorities this week, sir,” Foster said with a smile.

“And we’re keeping them as low pro as possible,” Larkin replied brightly, stealing a glance at the pistol on Foster’s hip. “You’ll hook up with your wizzos and spend a few days getting in the groove. When the red light flashes you’ll brief with the EF crews and join the strike force en route.”

Larkin led the way toward the hangar. Shepherd and Foster followed him through the personnel door and down a long corridor, entering beneath a narrow balcony that ringed the hangar’s second-floor offices.

“LS room’s over there,” Larkin said, gesturing to the far side of the huge space. He began falling back, his heart pounding in his chest, as they crossed the empty, sound-deadened hangar, which, he and Applegate had reasoned, would not only contain the loud reports but also offer no cover to their targets.

Above and behind them on the darkened balcony, Applegate was waiting with the sniper rifle. He quietly set the forestock on the pipe rail, tuned the telescopic sight, and aligned the first target, the armed target; he let the cross hairs drift onto the back of Foster’s head, held a breath, and calmly squeezed off the round.

Shepherd heard the sharp crack and whirled at the same instant Foster pitched forward, spinning toward him in a shower of tissue and blood.

Simultaneously, Applegate jacked the IJ3’s bolt, made the quick shift in angle that put the cross hairs on Shepherd, and fired again. But in that split second, the unforeseen happened — Foster had spun into the line of fire. The round tore into his back as he passed in front of Shepherd. Larkin was reaching to his shoulder holster when Shepherd, having every reason to believe the colonel was also a target, made a lifesaving dive, knocking him to the ground.

Applegate saw the tangle of arms and legs and held his fire for fear of hitting Larkin, who had drawn his pistol and was fighting furiously to get to his feet. Shepherd saw the flailing weapon and then, their faces inches apart as Larkin broke free and went rolling out from under him, Shepherd saw, not fear and surprise, but determination and intent—murderous intent that told him he, not the sniper in the balcony, would be Larkin’s target. Shepherd kicked Larkin’s arm as he came up out of the roll into a firing crouch. The shot went wild. The 9 mm Baretta skittered across the floor.

Shepherd ran for the exit, glimpsing an obscure figure on the darkened balcony above. Applegate fired both remaining shots, but Shepherd had taken away the angle by running directly beneath him, and the rounds missed, chipping into the concrete floor.

Larkin retrieved his weapon and dashed into the corridor. Shepherd had already reached the opposite end and exited into the darkness. He spotted one of the security policemen, assumed he was bona fide, and sought assistance. “Hey! Hey, these guys just—” He bit off the sentence when the SP went for the pistol on his hip. Shepherd still had his flight helmet by the chin strap. He swung it at arm’s length. The rock-hard plastic connected with the side of the SP’s head. He fell to the ground, writhing in pain.

The flight helmet went bouncing across the tarmac.

Shepherd’s eyes darted to the SP’s pistol, lying 10 feet away. A lanyard trailed from the handgrip to the holster, which meant Shepherd couldn’t just grab the weapon and run. He saw Larkin exiting the hangar and sprinted toward a tanker truck that was parked beyond the two F-111s. Larkin opened fire but, in the darkness, he had little chance of hitting a moving target with a handgun. Shepherd didn’t know what was going on, other than that men in air force uniforms had killed Foster and were trying to kill him. Russians? Spies? Terrorists? The last thing that would occur to him was that they were Americans, officers who had fought for their country and were as committed to its defense as he was. The only thing he knew for sure was that he would be dead if he didn’t get out of there.

Shepherd climbed into the cab of the tanker, thanking the Al-mighty that most military vehicles had unkeyed ignitions. He turned the starter switch, slammed the transmission into drive, and roared off into the darkness as Larkin and the SPs approached on the run.

Applegate came out of the hangar an instant after the truck roared past. He lumbered to his sedan, drove across the tarmac, and pulled to a stop next to Larkin. “Mop up inside,” Larkin barked at the SPs. He got in next to Applegate, who floored the accelerator.

The truck had reached the far end of the huge hangar and was turning into an access road that ran alongside it. Shepherd was steering with one hand and fumbling across the dash in search of the headlight switch with the other. He had no knowledge of the base; no idea where wing or security police headquarters were located.

The side view mirror came ablaze with light.

Shepherd glanced to see the sedan in pursuit. His hand finally found the dash switch. The truck’s headlights came on, revealing a chainlink fence dead ahead. The gate was closed and padlocked. The truck smashed through it, littering the area with fencing, and came onto an unlighted, two-lane road that wound through the rural Heyford countryside.

The sedan rumbled over the fragments of twisted pipe and chainlink, in pursuit.

Shepherd had the gas pedal to the floor now, but the massive truck wasn’t made for speed. The headlights in the mirror were closing fast. They would overtake the lumbering tanker in a matter of seconds. Shepherd waited until the gap had closed, then slammed on the brakes. The truck’s huge stoplights came alive in an explosion of crimson light. Smoke spewed from the wheel housings. The tires streaked the macadam with rubber as the tanker shuddered violently to a stop.

As Shepherd expected, the sedan was directly behind him, heading for the massive steel bumper that stretched across the back of the truck, windshield high.

Applegate spun the steering wheel.

The sedan swerved, narrowly missing the truck. It went up on two wheels, traveling the tanker’s entire length before coming down with a jarring thump, and sliding sideways across the road in front of the cab.

Applegate had just slammed on the brakes when Larkin saw headlights bearing down on them; bearing down on his side of the car. “He’s going to ram us!” he shouted as the car jerked to a stop. Larkin fired his pistol at the truck. Several rounds popped through the windshield, whistling above Shepherd, who was hunched behind the steering wheel.

Applegate stepped on the gas. The car lurched across the road. The onrushing truck clipped the rear fender, spinning the sedan around.

Shepherd kept on going.

Applegate got the car turned around and pursued.

The truck came through a sharp turn. Red lights were flashing up ahead. A spiderweb of cracks radiating from the bulletholes in the windshield picked up the light. Shepherd could hardly see through the pulsing maze, but he heard the rapidly clanging bell. The truck was approaching a railroad crossing — so was a forty-car freight. Shepherd had no idea how close the train was and kept the accelerator to the floor. The truck blasted through the crossing, splintering the gate arm, bouncing over the tracks.

The locomotive was 50 feet from the crossing. The engineer recoiled as the diesel’s headlight revealed the truck flashing past. He released the throttle and yanked hard on the emergency brake. A shower of blue-orange sparks exploded from every one of the train’s castiron wheels. The air filled with the high-pitched screech of grinding steel.

Since this was a rural crossing, the engineer hadn’t reduced speed as he would in a town or city. The 175-ton locomotive smashed into the rear of the tanker at full throttle. The tremendous impact knocked the huge truck aside like a toy. It pivoted around and began rolling back toward the tracks. Thousands of gallons of jet fuel were spewing from the buckled tanker.

The pursuing sedan came through the turn. Applegate slammed on the brakes. The sedan screeched to a stop a distance from the crossing, where, despite its brakes being locked, the freight was still streaking past, blocking their view.

“Son of a bitch!” Larkin exclaimed, thinking the truck had made it through.

“Come on, come on,” Applegate urged the train impatiently, eager to resume the pursuit.

Suddenly, the jet fuel ignited with a loud whomp. Flames shot into the night, high above the passing freight, which continued through and beyond the crossing, finally revealing the conflagration beyond.

The truck was on its side, almost parallel to the tracks, and totally engulfed in flames. The interior of the cab looked like the inside of a blast furnace.

Larkin and Applegate got out of the sedan and stared awestruck at the roaring inferno.

The intense heat kept them at a distance.

Larkin watched one of the fenders turn to a puddle of molten steel. His mind was racing, calculating all the factors: There would be no human remains, he reasoned, nothing to identify who had died. Shepherd would be cremated; his flight suit and dogtags would be ashes amid the debris. Furthermore, theft of equipment from military bases was an ever-growing problem. Investigators would have every reason to conclude that the truck and its valuable cargo had been stolen and that it was the thief who had perished in the fire.

While the flames raged, Larkin and Applegate searched the surrounding area, concluding beyond any doubt that Shepherd hadn’t been thrown from the cab.

The locomotive had come to a stop more than a mile past the crossing. By the time the engineer and fireman had shaken off the effects of the collision and walked to the burning truck, Larkin and Applegate were long gone.

They drove back to the hangar, joining the two Special Forces SPs who had completed the cleanup. Now, at Larkin’s direction, the SPs drove to a darkened corner of the airfield where a new runway was under construction and buried the pilot’s body, knowing that the corpse would soon be forever entombed beneath an 18-inch-thick slab of rock-hard concrete laced with reinforcing steel.

Larkin went to his office, thinking that Kiley would really be pleased, and sent a cable that read: BIRDS IN HAND.

It was time to get on with the business of delivering two F-111 supersonic bombers to Muammar el-Qaddafi.

10

That same afternoon in Beirut, Katifa sat at a table in the kitchen of her apartment with a package of insulin she had picked up from the pharmacy. She opened the box and lined up the vials on the table.

Moncrieff sat opposite her with a cup of water and a small pitcher of milk. He poured a little into the water and stirred it. Then added a few drops more.

Katifa peeled the wrapper from a syringe, pierced the first vial, and began extracting the insulin.

Moncrieff kept adding drops of milk to the water until the cloudy liquid perfectly matched the density of the insulin, which he was pleased to discover was odorless, sparing him the task of duplicating its scent; then he left the table to make a phone call.

In Tripoli, Muammar el-Qaddafi was in his tent at the barracks compound on As-Sarim Street, sulking over a devastating economic report issued that afternoon by the Libyan secretariat of industry.

The quarterly index stated that once fertile agricultural communities were failing; many factories — producers of ore, textiles, and foodstuffs among them — were shutting down; citizens were complaining that shops and market shelves were bare — all due to the frustrating lack of water.

Qaddafi reflected on his goals; on the dreams of grandeur that drove his ambition to unite the Arab world under the teachings of Islam and to destroy Israel, an ambition that justified his offer of sanctuary to Palestinians. Having helped ease tensions in the Middle East, he would not only gain military hardware but also stature as a statesman — stature he expected would lead to his being hailed as a modern-day Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had been his boyhood hero. The late Egyptian leader had had similar ambitions and had faced similar problems, irrigating his arid land with the Aswan Dam. Despite Qaddafi’s desire to emulate him there was no Nile, indeed, not even a single river, in Libya. Now, having found the solution, another nation — an Islamic nation — had nullified it. In his most lucid moments Qaddafi attributed the existence of Nefta Dam to a cruel twist of fate, not malicious intent; but when lost in the darkest recesses of his paranoia, he had no doubt it was a Tunisian conspiracy to deny him greatness.

The intercom buzzed several more times before the colonel set aside the report and tapped the button.

“Moncrieff is calling from Beirut,” the Bab al Azziziya operator announced.

“Moncrieff,” Qaddafi said, brightening, “I can usually count on you for some good news.”

“Not today, sir, I’m afraid,” the Saudi replied, going on to explain that Abu Nidal had scuttled the plan. “However, with your cooperation I’m quite certain it can be salvaged.”

That evening in Beirut, Abu Nidal’s gunboat was approaching Casino du Liban when Qaddafi called on the ship-to-shore radio. The conversation was short, contentious, and ended moments before the boat entered the marina, where Katifa and Hasan were waiting.

“Qaddafi’s called a summit,” Nidal said, gesturing they come aboard. “He wants to meet with Assad and Arafat in Damascus.”

“What about?” Katifa asked nonchalantly as she handed him the package of insulin.

“This sanctuary in Libya,” Nidal replied with disgust. “I’m not going. It’s a waste of time.”

“I agree,” Katifa said firmly before adding, “unless that’s exactly what Qaddafi wanted to hear.”

“What do you mean?” Nidal asked, his curiosity aroused as she had hoped.

“Well, your absence would make it much easier for him to turn the others against you.”

“Not Assad. Assad would never turn against me.”

“Forgive my boldness,” Katifa said gently. “But as a famous Palestinian fighter once said, ‘Loyalty taken for granted eventually leads to betrayal.’ ”

Nidal smiled, taken by her acuity and spunk. He had recognized early on that of the two siblings he had adopted, Katifa was the child of promise. She had the first-rate mind and cunning most akin to his own. He reflected for a moment, then shifted his look to his protégé. “Hasan?” he prompted, soliciting an opinion.

“Qaddafi is just trying to assert his power. It would be a sign of weakness to come when he calls.”

“I wouldn’t be so concerned with appearances, Hasan,” Katifa retorted. “Results are what count.”

“You sound just like the Saudi,” Hasan taunted.

Her eyes flashed with feigned anger. “How dare you compare me to the shetan who created this problem?”

“You’re the one who brought him here.”

“Enough,” Nidal snapped, his eyes darting to Hasan. “She would have been wrong to do otherwise; the decision was mine to make; as is this one.” He jerked his head, dismissing him, then turned to Katifa. “I think you’re right,” he said, his eyes softening with pride. “If I don’t protect our interests, who will? Make the arrangements for Damascus.”

A short time later, Nidal’s gunboat slipped out of the marina and into the night. Hasan was still seething when Katifa went up the gangway and through the casino to her car, taking the coastal motorway back to the city. He followed in his jeep.

The shower was running when Katifa entered her apartment on Tamar Mallat.

Moncrieff was just starting to soap up. The draft that blew through the apartment when Katifa opened the door billowed the shower curtain against his body.

“Katifa?” he called out.

“I’ll be there in a moment,” she replied.

Hasan had parked around the corner. He slid along the side of the coarsely stuccoed building to a window, peering between the shutter slats. His eyes widened as Katifa removed her dress and slipped out of her bra and panties. He was so intent that his foot dislodged a few small stones, which went tumbling down the hillside.

Katifa was on tiptoes, stretching her lithe body, when she heard the sound. She glanced curiously to the window, then crossed to it. Hasan leaned back into the darkness as her shadow fell across the shutters and she secured the latch, then crossed to the bathroom.

“Hi,” she said brightly, as she slipped into the shower with Moncrieff. “Nidal agreed to go. No thanks to Hasan,” she added, explaining what had happened.

Moncrieff wrapped his arms around her waist. She arched her back, forcing her pelvis against his, aroused by the needle-fine jets of water that stung her flesh.

Hasan had gone around the building to the entrance and down the corridor to Katifa’s apartment. He pulled his knife from its sheath and inserted the point between the door and jamb, quickly slipping the latch.

Moncrieff and Katifa were embracing passionately when Moncrieff felt the shower curtain blow against his torso again. He put his finger to her lips, then pointed to the billowing curtain. “Someone’s here,” he whispered.

Hasan was crossing to the hall that led to the bathroom when his eyes darted to something familiar. The paper wrapper was lying on the floor next to a wastebasket in which he found several used syringes, one still half-filled with milky fluid. He was examining it when he heard the creak of floorboards and whirled to confront Moncrieff, who was wrapping a towel around his waist as he came down the hall. An instant later Katifa appeared behind him, slipping into a bathrobe.

“Stop him,” she exclaimed. “If he gets to Nidal—”

Hasan lunged toward the door. Moncrieff went after him, got a fistful of his hair, and yanked him backwards into the apartment, kicking the door closed. Hasan pulled free and slashed at him with the knife. The Saudi sidestepped, grabbed Hasan’s wrist with one hand, and threw a punch with the other.

Katifa recoiled as they tumbled past her to the floor, fighting for control of the knife.

Hasan came out on top and tried to plunge the knife into Moncrieff s chest. The Saudi had both hands wrapped tightly around Hasan’s wrist, holding it off. Gradually, Moncrieff twisted it around until the point of the blade was facing Hasan. Moncrieff bent a knee, getting a foot under him for leverage, and tried to roll Hasan over. But the Palestinian’s elbow was planted firmly on the floor, securing his position.

Katifa slipped a bare foot behind Hasan’s elbow. He sensed what she was about to do and flicked her a horrified glance. Her face turned to stone. She kicked his arm out from under him. The tremendous pressure Hasan was exerting propelled him suddenly downward. The knife pierced his chest to the hilt.

Moncrieff pushed Hasan’s body aside, staggered to his feet, and studied her for a moment, then broke into a thin smile.

“I know,” Katifa said. “My father would have been proud of me.”

11

The snow-dotted hills of Scotland’s Southern Uplands lay basking in the warmth of a spring morning. Billions of water droplets, swelling until they could no longer cling to the basalt ledges, began plunging to the earth. Soon, a gentle gurgle rose, increasing gradually to a throaty roar as the rivulets formed streams that rushed across the moors. Finally, as they had for millennia past, they came together with thundering fury in a breathtaking cascade at the Falls of Clyde.

From there, the River Clyde flowed northward past Glasgow to the coastal Firth, where vessels steamed south toward the Irish Sea and English Channel, or north into the Atlantic Ocean and Norwegian Sea.

Centuries ago, this access to major sea routes spawned Glasgow’s legendary shipyards. More recently, it led the United States Navy to select Holy Loch on the west bank of the Clyde as a submarine base.

The USS Cavalla, a Sturgeon-class hunter-killer submarine, was stationed there. Assigned to an ongoing top-secret CIA covert action program, the Cavalla was outfitted with a hull-mounted dry deck shelter. The DDS housed a submersible vessel used to deploy the team of navy SEALs who were part of the crew. This highly trained and motivated special warfare unit was skilled in demolition, assassination, and counterinsurgency techniques.

Commander Christian Duryea was the Cavalla’s skipper. As a youth, the lanky, blue-eyed son of a New York City fireman dreamed of being a navy pilot; and he was well on his way the day the acceptance letter from Annapolis came. It was during his second year at the academy when he first noticed his vision had deteriorated.

“Twenty-sixty in both eyes, son,” the optometrist said a few days later, confirming that Chris would never fly military aircraft. “I’m sorry.”

Chris Duryea quickly decided that next to dogfighting, skippering a sub was the most autonomous command the navy offered.

Now, almost twenty years later, he was hovering over his chart table when a cable was delivered to the command center. His eyes went right to the Z prefix, which denoted FLASH priority.

Duryea tugged thoughtfully at an earlobe. Orders usually came via COMSUBLANT, commander of the submarine force in the Atlantic. CITE DIRECTOR meant they had come directly from the DCI. Something big was in the works.

“That’s tomorrow,” Duryea said to Lieutenant McBride, his executive officer. “Better juice the crew.”

The morning after acquiring the F-111s, Larkin boarded a flight at Upper Heyford for Holy Loch. The plane headed northwest over the English countryside to Scotland, arriving at the submarine base just over an hour later. A Royal Navy hovercraft was waiting. The powerful vessel rose up haughtily on its cushion of air, slid down the ramp into the Clyde’s oily waters, and whisked him across the immense loch. In less than fifteen minutes it was approaching the concrete refitting pier where the USS Cavalla was berthed.

Larkin stepped ashore, carrying a slim aluminum attaché case. He strode beneath the towering cranes used to lower ICBMs into submarine missile hatches and went up the gangway, boarding the Cavalla.

A brisk wind came up as Duryea greeted him and led the way down into the command center. “Where we headed?” he asked offhandedly as they came off the ladder.

“Tripoli,” Larkin replied flatly.

Duryea’s brows went up. “Don’t stop now, Colonel,” he prompted, intrigued as Larkin knew he would be.

The colonel used the DCI’s cover story to explain the mission: the hostages had been shrewdly hidden in Libya. CIA had found and rescued them. The air strike was a diversion to get them out — on the Cavalla.

“Why not fly them out?” Duryea wondered.

“One Stinger and it’s all over,” Larkin replied, referring to the shoulder-mounted mobile missile launcher favored by terrorist groups. He explained that the Cavalla would ferry the hostages to the USS America, an aircraft carrier based in the Mediterranean with the 6th Fleet. “We’re talking need-to-know rules, Commander. Nobody, not Sixth Fleet, Third Air, or Cinclant, knows about this yet,” he concluded, the latter an acronym for commander in chief of the Atlantic. “If word got out and it went bust—”

“I understand, Colonel.”

“Good. Only after we have the hostages aboard, and only then, will the America be notified. By the time we rendezvous, teams of physicians and psychologists will have been flown in to care for them.”

Duryea broke into a broad smile, pleased to have the challenge, and went to the electronic chart table, a large horizontal television screen linked to the boat’s powerful BC-10 computer. An inventory of surface and undersea charts were stored in its superfast bubble memory. He encoded at the terminal and a highly detailed chart of Tripoli harbor appeared on the screen.

“Right there,” Larkin said, indicating a desolate wharf near the Old City. “That’s the rendezvous point. The air strike will be keyed to your schedule. I need a guaranteed ETA.”

“Five days would be realistic.”

“The night of the fourteenth?” Duryea nodded.

“What about Redfleet surveillance?”

“My specialty.” Duryea was a genius at playing underwater hide-and-seek with his Soviet counterparts. It was the one source of pride his humble nature couldn’t suppress. “We’ll be there.”

“So will I,” Larkin replied smartly, handing him the attaché he’d brought. It contained ANITA, the key essential to programming Pave Tack computers. “Keep this in your safe. I’ll need it when we rendezvous in Tripoli.”

“You’re going in?” Duryea asked, surprised.

“Four of us. We’ll be leaving with you.”

“I can’t promise you a room with a view,” Duryea joked, shaking Larkin’s hand. “Good luck, Colonel.”

Larkin went to the communications room and sent a cable to Kiley confirming 14 April as the date for the air strike, then left the submarine.

“Cast off,” Duryea ordered in a soft, firm voice.

The departing hovercraft was still on the horizon when the Cavalla’s deck crew cut loose the hausers that had kept her lashed to the refitting pier. A stiff breeze tore at the lookouts standing on the hydroplanes on either side of the sail. Both wore safety harnesses cabled to the hull as they leaned into field glasses scanning the expanse of green-black water.

Several hours later, the Cavalla had left Holy Loch and proceeded down the River Clyde into the choppy Firth.

One hundred miles northwest, a Redfleet submarine was cutting through the North Atlantic’s cold depths. The titanium-hulled Alpha routinely tracked U.S. submarines emerging from the Firth of Clyde into North Channel, the turbulent body of water between Scotland’s southwest shores and Northern Ireland.

Captain First Rank Aleksandr Solomatin was her skipper. He was thumbing a fresh bowl of tobacco into his meerschaum when sonar notified him they had picked up the Cavalla’s signal.

“All ahead full,” he ordered, lighting his pipe.

The starpom echoed the command.

A blast of steam surged against the turbine blades and the sleek Soviet boat sprinted forward. The blazing 45-knot speed was achieved by its sleek profile and the use of a highly automated liquid-metal — cooled nuclear reactor.

An hour later the Cavalla was entering North Channel from the Firth. Duryea stood on the bridge scanning the horizon. “Depth under keel?”

“One eight five, sir,” McBride responded smartly.

“Take her down,” Duryea said. He took a deep breath of the crisp, salty air and exhaled slowly, savoring it.

“Clear the bridge,” he ordered. “Rig for dive.”

The whomping claxon joined the hiss of air rushing from ballast tanks. Plumes of water arched gracefully over the sea from the main vents. The bow tilted down sharply, sending water over the submarine’s deck in graceful swirls.

“Conn? Sonar,” came the voice over the bridge phone.

“Talk to me, Cooperman,” Duryea responded.

“Contact bearing one seven three,” the Cavalla’s sonarman reported, his left hand dancing over the entry panel keyboard, his right rolling the target designation ball, his ears tuned to the syncopated beat in his headphones that came from the twin screws common to all Soviet submarines. “Redfleet boat for sure, skipper.”

“Anybody we know?” Duryea wondered.

“She’s coated, sir. Squooshes instead of pongs.” The unusual echo was produced by the anechoic tiles on the Alpha’s hull, which absorbed sonar transmissions.

“That cuts it to Alpha, Mike, Sierra, or Viktor,” Duryea replied, knowing all had the new Clusterguard coating. “Can we narrow that?”

Cooperman pushed several buttons on his console, as he studied the patterns tracing across a monitor in the panel in front of him. A high-speed computer printer, built into the surface of the control console above the keyboard, was recording the images on a continuous printout.

Stocky and slow-moving, Marv Cooperman defied the classic profile of a sonar technician. He loathed electronics and wasn’t into music or video games, but had infinite patience and an exceptional memory for sounds.

“She’s cutting a big hole in the water, sir,” he reported. “Forty-four knots. Has to be an Alpha.”

“Good going,” Duryea enthused. Knowing he was up against the much faster boat would affect the evasive strategy he selected.

In the Alpha’s attack center, Captain Solomatin stood in a cloud of pipe smoke, smoothing the coarse beard that concealed his smile. No other submarine in the world could have gotten there in time.

“Keep him on a tight leash,” the Russian ordered. Whatever the Cavalla’s mission, it would have to get past him to carry it out.

12

A golden, late morning sun streamed through the curtained windows of Stephanie Shepherd’s kitchen.

She was loading the dishwasher when the phone rang.

“Stephanie?” the congressman said in his gregarious rumble. “Jim Gutherie. Glad I got you. Why don’t we have lunch and finish that interview?”

“I’m up against a deadline on a story,” she fibbed, “but I can drop by your office this afternoon.”

“My afternoon’s jammed. I’d sure like to knock this off today.”

She paused, her lips tightening as she wrestled with the decision. She’d be less than truthful if she denied she was flattered by the congressman’s attention; less than truthful if she denied she didn’t sometimes feel left out of her husband’s life. Oh, she was still madly in love with him; but over the years she’d come to realize that Walt loved his country, the air force, his F-111, and his wife in that order. She didn’t really mind, she just longed to be a part of it; to share it; to better understand it and him. Writing for the base newspaper was a less than satisfying attempt to do so. Funny, she thought, the things that made Walt so special to her were the things that got in the way. “Why not, Jim?” she finally replied.

“Good,” Gutherie enthused. “Twelve-thirty, Cafe Promenade at the Hay Adams.”

Stephanie showered and was wrapping herself in a bath towel when she caught sight of her naked torso in the mirror and poked an accusing fingertip into a ripple of flesh. The first time someone said she and her daughter, Laura, looked like sisters, she was flattered. But down deep, she knew it was because they dressed alike. Stephanie had been living in jeans, sweatshirts, and running shoes, and rarely dressed up anymore. She hated middle age. A harmless lunch would ease the pain of it.

She had just finished dressing and was evaluating the effect when the phone rang again. It was the gymnastics coach at Camp Springs Junior High.

“I’m afraid Laura took a little fall during practice this morning,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Oh my… Is she all right?”

“She’s fine; twisted her wrist when she landed. I think it’d be a good idea to have it X-rayed.”

“Of course. Thanks. I’m on my way.”

Stephanie called Gutherie’s secretary and canceled the luncheon; then, she left Jeffrey at the base day care center, and headed for Camp Springs Junior High.

It had never been any different, she thought. As soon as Walt left, the catastrophes began. It was the children’s way of letting him know he was needed. The syndrome was all too common among military families.

A half hour later, Stephanie had picked up Laura and returned to Andrews, driving directly to Malcom Grow Medical Center on Perimeter Road.

The emergency room doctor looked young, she thought. Too young, like a high school debater. He snapped Laura’s X-rays in front of a light panel and indicated a gray line on a bone just above her wrist, pronouncing it a hairline fracture of the lower radius.

It wasn’t a serious injury, but to a budding gymnast who had been training hard, it was terribly upsetting not to be able to compete.

At home, Laura settled gloomily in the kitchen with a tin of chocolate chip cookies.

“Builds strong bones,” Stephanie chided, pouring her a glass of milk.

“I really miss Dad,” Laura said wistfully, making circles in the crumbs on the counter.

“Me too. What do you say we call him?”

The teenager’s eyes brightened. “Mean it?”

“Of course. The number’s in the—” Stephanie cut off the sentence as Laura bolted from the kitchen. “Easy! You’ll have a cast on the other wrist,” she cautioned, hurrying after her.

Laura quickly found the package of transfer data and read the digits aloud as her mother dialed.

“Forty-eighth TAC,” a woman’s voice answered.

“May I speak with Major Shepherd, please?”

“Major Shepherd,” the woman said, encoding at a keyboard filling her computer screen with names. “I’m sorry but I don’t list an extension for him.”

“Are you sure? I talked to him last week.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, scrolling through the names again. “Let me transfer you to Personnel.”

Personnel had no trouble at all finding him. “Ah,” the clerk said, pulling the file up on her screen. “He’s right here on my transfer roster.”

“He’s been transferred?”

“To Upper Heyford. I have the number if you like.”

“Of course, please.” That’s odd, Stephanie thought, as she jotted it down. It wasn’t like Walt. He always let her know how to reach him. “Could it be temporary?” she asked, thinking that might be the reason.

“I doubt it. He’s got a new CO. According to his file, he reports to a Colonel Richard Larkin now.”

Stephanie wrote down the name, hung up, and called Upper Heyford. Informed Major Shepherd wasn’t in his quarters, she left a message.

At about the same time 90 miles west of London, the haunting whistle and rhythmic clack of a freight train, snaking through the Buckingham countryside, greeted the early twilight.

Shepherd thought he had died and gone to heaven, which he was surprised to discover smelled like a beer hall. The tangy scent of lager, strong and tart, the way he liked it, filled the air.

He was lying on his stomach, atop a mountain of hops in an open freight car, one of many on their way to a London brewery. As he slowly regained consciousness, his mind filled with confusing flashes of memory: the scream of grinding steel, the pain of brutal, bone-jarring impact, the sting of searing sheets of flame.

His presence on the train was a matter of simple physics and decisive action. For as the locomotive collided with the rear of the tanker truck, knocking it out of its path, the front went pivoting around back toward the tracks. The vehicle came to rest on its side, the cab literally within inches of the passing train. The impact had torn open the driver’s door, wrenching it back on its hinges into a nearly horizontal position; and while the flame and smoke from the roaring inferno at the rear of the tanker blocked Larkin and Applegate’s view, Shepherd pulled himself out of the cab and climbed onto this “platform.” He was spattered with burning fuel; but his flight suit, made of Nomex — the same fireproof material used to outfit astronauts and race drivers — protected him. Despite the pain from the battering he’d taken in the tumbling cab, he was fully conscious and able to think. He had no doubt the men who had tried to kill him were waiting on the other side of the tracks; he also knew, injured and unarmed, he didn’t stand a chance on foot. He crouched there staring at the wall of flames shooting up around him, then glanced to the open gondolas rushing past just below and made his decision. The inferno was literally licking at his heels, as he crawled to the edge of the door and jumped.

He landed in one of the gondolas atop a mound of hops. It cushioned the impact, but couldn’t overcome the momentum of the train. He clutched desperately at the crumbly cones that offered no handhold and went rocketing into the steel sidewall. His head smashed against it, knocking him unconscious.

Hours later, he was still out cold when British Railway officials, who had been dispatched from London, arrived on the scene, disconnecting the damaged locomotive and detaining its crew for questioning. The train spent the night on a siding, as did Shepherd, who was concealed in one of the forty gondolas. He slipped in and out of consciousness several times, though he had no recollection of it.

The following morning another locomotive and crew were assigned to take the cargo to its destination.

Now, as the freight moved slowly through the countryside, Shepherd was gradually accepting that he was alive. His head pounded. His bruised muscles protested the slightest movement. His mind fought to comprehend what had happened to him. He turned over and struggled to a sitting position. Excruciating pain shot through his battered limbs. Everything began whirling about. He fought the rising nausea and put his head between his legs, which steadied him. Slowly, methodically, he undid the zippers of his G-suit and discarded it. He made his way through the hops to the edge of the open gondola and peered over the side.

The darkened countryside whistled past in a blur.

The right-of-way ran parallel to the A40 motorway. An illuminated sign at an interchange was visible through a break in the trees. The letters were three feet tall but a severe case of double vision prevented Shepherd from reading them. He shook his head, trying to clear it, to no avail. Finally, he covered one eye with his palm and squinted. The jumble of letters merged. For a brief instant he could make out: LONDON 45K. The letters gradually blurred and everything started spinning again. He slumped against the side of the gondola and passed out.

A short time later, he awakened beneath a star-dotted sky. The temperature had plummeted and he was shivering from the dampness and cold.

The piercing sound of an air horn announced that the freight was entering the yards just south of Hackney Wick Stadium on the desolate eastern outskirts of London. The engineer began guiding it through the myriad of signals and switches.

Shepherd crawled to a standing position. Lights from distant buildings looked like tiny balls of illuminated fuzz. The canted roofs of sheet metal warehouses marched into the gritty darkness, blending with the endless acres of rolling stock parked on sidings. Shepherd swung a leg over the side of the gondola and fought to keep his balance while his foot searched frantically in the darkness for the first tread on the ladder. Finally secured, he straddled the edge for a moment, then swung his other leg over and began making his way down.

The train snaked between darkened maintenance sheds, then jerked through a series of switches.

Shepherd lost his grip on the ladder and started falling backward. The train lurched in the opposite direction, propelling him toward the ladder again. He clung to it fiercely, waiting for the freight to slow. An eternity passed before it braked to a 5 MPH crawl.

A flickering light on the other side of the yard pierced the ground fog that draped over the tops of the buildings and boxcars. It caught Shepherd’s attention. He could vaguely see several figures gathered around it. Trainmen? Yard workers? A conductor? he wondered, his spirits rising as the ghostly forms seemed to materialize, then vanish in the haze.

Shepherd didn’t have the strength to jump. He let go of the ladder and hit the ground hard, rolling across the chunky gravel and tall weeds sprouting between the ties and spurs. His aching body came to rest against the ungiving concrete base of a yard signal. He lay there for a moment gathering his strength, then pulled himself upright and leaned against it, squinting into the darkness to get his bearings.

The light was on the other side of the yard.

Shepherd took several deep breaths and started walking toward it. A sharp ringing rose in his ears. Light reflecting off the landscape of polished steel rails intensified the serpentine pattern, heightening his feeling of vertigo. He began swaying but pressed onward, struggling to maintain his balance.

The flickering light came closer and closer.

It came from a fire in a trash pail just outside an abandoned switchman’s shack — a source of warmth for the derelicts huddled around it. One wore a rumpled military surplus officer’s cap. The other had a filthy ponytail and was snaking uncontrollably, not from the cold but from heroin withdrawal. He wrapped a tattooed fist around the neck of an empty beer bottle and watched expectantly as Shepherd stumbled toward him.

13

“Where is Hasan?” Abu Nidal asked as he stepped from the gunboat onto the dock at Casino du Liban. The meeting with Qaddafi, Assad, and Arafat was that afternoon; and he had expected Hasan to drive him to Damascus.

Katifa thought Nidal would be flat on his back in his cabin. For two days he had been injecting himself, not with insulin but milky water. She couldn’t believe he had held on this long.

“We haven’t seen Hasan for days,” one of the young terrorists replied with a baffled shrug.

“Not since you chastised him,” Katifa responded, feigning she was equally perplexed.

Following the confrontation at her apartment, she and Moncrieff had bound and gagged Hasan’s corpse and left it in the trunk of an abandoned car in the Ammal sector, making it appear he had been killed by enemy militia.

Katifa, Nidal, and his bodyguard walked up the gangway and through the casino onto the grounds. They were approaching her car when Nidal stumbled.

“Are you all right?” Katifa asked, alarmed. The words rang true, despite her relief that he was, at last, on the verge of acute ketoacidosis, a condition that occurs when blood cells are forced to burn fat and protein instead of glucose which requires insulin. As a result, the blood becomes saturated with glucose and potentially lethal waste products called ketones.

“I feel lightheaded,” Nidal explained, as they steadied him. “It’s been like this for several days.”

“Are you taking your medication?”

“Of course,” the terrorist leader snapped, impatient with his poor health. “It doesn’t seem to help.”

“Perhaps I should drive you to the clinic?”

“When I return from Damascus. Should Assad and the others learn of my illness, your prophecy might come true.”

“If Hasan were here, he could go in your place,” she suggested, planting the idea of a substitute.

“Hasan isn’t ready yet. He may never be,” Nidal replied, his eyes considering the obvious alternative.

“I’d prefer to remain with you,” Katifa said, not wanting to appear eager.

“You shall,” Nidal said decisively. “Someone has to drive me.” Then, iron will supplanting the lack of insulin, he began walking toward her car.

Damascus was 50 miles southeast of Beirut beyond the Bekaa Valley on a flat expanse of Syrian desert. It was well over two hours by car from the casino.

Nidal was sitting alone in the backseat, fighting a rising nausea as the Mercedes crossed the Beirut River and headed south on the Gemayel Motorway, skirting the city.

Katifa glanced often and anxiously to the rearview mirror as she drove. If Abu Nidal prevailed, if he somehow made it to the meeting, he would voice his opposition to the plan, forever destroying it. Her mind raced to find a way to make sure he didn’t.

“How is he now?” she prompted the bodyguard sitting next to her, purposely distracting him. The instant the burly fellow turned to check on Nidal, she reached to the dash and turned on the car’s heater.

Soon, the warm air coming from the floor vent had Nidal sweating profusely. His tongue thickened, as did his saliva, which was now the consistency of honey.

They had just turned into Rue de Damas, the boulevard that leads to the Damascus Motorway, when the bodyguard felt the air rising. “You have the heater on?”

“No, the control is broken,” Katifa lied boldly, jiggling the levers. “It doesn’t work when it should and does when it shouldn’t.”

The bodyguard grunted and rolled down the window.

Abu Nidal leaned forward, letting the breeze blow against his face. But a tingling sensation was already creeping up his legs into his torso; shortly, everything went black and he slumped against the seat.

Katifa saw him in the mirror. “He’s lost consciousness,” she said with alarm.

The guard glanced back at Nidal. “To the hospital, immediately,” he blurted, clearly shaken.

Katifa made a U-turn and drove straight to the Turk Hospital on de Mazarra. By the time they arrived, Abu Nidal was in a severe diabetic coma.

As always, he was admitted under a pseudonym.

After handling the paperwork, Katifa left Nidal with the body-guard and drove to Damascus.

It was late afternoon when Katifa arrived at Hafiz al-Assad’s villa; its limestone walls radiated the pale peach tones of fading sunlight. She was shown to an opulent meeting room, where Assad, Muammar el-Qaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and their aides were gathered in front of several large maps of Libya that stood on easels along one wall. On each, various sites for the proposed Palestinian sanctuary had been delineated. After the introductions had been made, they dispensed with the maps and took seats around a conference table.

Katifa began by explaining Abu Nidal’s absence.

Arafat lightly drummed his manicured nails on the arm of his chair as he listened. “I’m sorry he’s not well,” he said when she finished.

“As am I,” Assad declared, clearly annoyed. Syria’s president had a retiring demeanor that belied his ruthlessness. An inordinately large cranium capped his narrow face. “We certainly can’t proceed without him.”

“We must,” Qaddafi retorted, flicking a veiled glance to Katifa. “I must have a decision today.”

“You can have it now,” she offered. “Abu Nidal’s instructed me to approve the plan on his behalf.”

“Then it’s settled,” Qaddafi said, relieved.

“One moment,” Assad countered. He crossed to the wall of limestone arches that framed the windows and looked out over the rugged countryside, deep in thought.

For decades, his confrontational policies had neatly meshed with the Soviet Union’s Middle East strategy. Moscow supplied the weapons, Assad the turmoil that kept the United States mired in the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. Forced to take sides, the Americans appeared anti-Arab, giving the Soviets the Middle East entrée they sought. But Moscow’s priorities had changed rapidly. Fueling regional conflicts wasn’t high on Mikhail Gorbachev’s agenda. Assad knew that without Soviet backing, the Palestinians would soon become a thorn in his side — the hostages more so. And he saw the deal as a graceful way to dump both on Qaddafi. But the scope of the decision made him cautious. He knew of Katifa’s lineage; knew she had authored the Intifada. He had no reason to doubt she was Abu Nidal’s bona fide emissary; indeed, no reason whatsoever to suspect she was conspiring against him; but this was no time for expedience. “No offense,” he said to Katifa as he turned from the window. “But I can’t approve this without speaking to Abu Nidal.”

“The man is incapacitated,” Qaddafi protested, his cape whirling about him. “I don’t have time for this.”

“I agree,” Arafat chimed in, getting to his feet. “We’ve missed too many opportunities.” For years he’d been criticized for backing proposals that went nowhere. This one had promise; and now that it had come this far, he was determined it succeed. “You have Abu Nidal’s decision,” he said to Assad sharply. “Act on it.”

“Not without confirmation,” the Syrian replied, with the even temper of the fighter pilot he once was.

“This is a delicate linkage,” Qaddafi complained, confronting him. “And your foot-dragging is going to—”

“Gentlemen? Gentlemen, please?” Katifa implored in a soothing tone, unshaken by Assad’s demand. She and Moncrieff had foreseen the possibility. They also knew that Damascus and Beirut had outdated telephone equipment. The fidelity of transmissions was predictably poor, exacerbated by the fact that the system in war-torn Beirut wasn’t well maintained. “Abu Nidal said we were to call him if there were any problems,” Katifa went on, jotting the number on a slip of paper that she handed to Assad. “He’s in room seven thirty-six. Under an assumed name, of course. Ask for Mr. Bargouthi. Farouk Bargouthi.”

Assad went to the phone. Qaddafi picked up an extension.

“Turk Hospital private clinic,” the switchboard operator answered after the connection was made.

“I would like to speak to one of your patients, please,” Assad said. “A Mister Bargouthi.”

“That would be room seven thirty-six,” the operator said over the crackle on the line. “Just a moment.”

“Yes?” a weak voice said after several rings.

“This is Assad calling. I’m sorry you’re not well.”

“Thank you, brother. I’m just tired, very tired.”

“I’m sure you’ll be yourself again soon,” Assad said reassuringly. “I won’t keep you long. I just wish to verify that Katifa Issa Kharuz speaks on your behalf.”

“Yes, of course she does,” came the tired reply.

“And you’re in favor of this proposal?”

“Yes, yes, fully.”

“Thank you, brother. Take care of yourself,” Assad said, ending the call.

“I always do,” Saddam Moncrieff said to himself with a smile after hanging up the phone in hospital room 736. It had been years since he’d had a complete physical. And several days before, when Katifa warned that someone at the meeting might insist on confirmation from Abu Nidal, the Saudi decided the solution was to check into the Turk Hospital’s private clinic and get one. He did so under the name Farouk Bargouthi. Of course, Assad had no idea he had just spoken to Moncrieff, and not Abu Nidal.

In a room on the floor below, the steady drip of an IV alleviating his severe dehydration, the diabetic terrorist leader was sleeping like a baby.

Moncrieff swung his legs over the side of the hospital bed, lifted the phone again, and dialed. “Yes, I would like to send a cable, please?”

Before the meeting adjourned, Katifa suggested that that evening when the Exchequer contacted Casino du Liban, the call be routed to Assad’s villa so Assad could give the order to release the hostages. Indeed, she knew that Nidal couldn’t contact the Exchequer, though she didn’t know why; and, despite the hostages’ being under Syrian control, she had correctly assumed that Assad couldn’t either.

“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary,” Assad responded with a thin smile, surprising her. “The Exchequer makes two calls each evening.”

Almost forty-eight hours had passed since the USS Cavalla had put to sea. Proceeding at top speed, 200 meters beneath the surface, the submarine had crossed the Biscay Abyssal Plain and was off the coast of Portugal entering the complex range of trenches just west of the Straits of Gibraltar.

Commander Duryea scooped up the phone in the command center. “Sonar? Conn. Where’s Alpha now?”

“Bearing one seven nine, range ten miles,” Marv Cooperman reported. The patient sonarman had spent the better part of two days in his electronics-lined cubbyhole, tracking the Redfleet boat on the towed array.

“Stay on him,” Duryea said, then whirling to McBride he ordered, “Break out a brit.”

The AN-BRT1 was a radio-transmitting buoy that contained a cassette recorder and laser transmitter capable of sending a four-minute message. Transmission could be delayed up to an hour. This meant a submarine could be far from the source of the signal when sent, thereby communicating without revealing its position.

Duryea shrewdly planned to do just the opposite. He drafted a short message and gave it to the radio officer. “Set the timer for max delay,” he ordered.

A short time later, the BRT was released through an aft airlock. It rose to the surface and was carried south by the swiftly moving Canaries current.

“Where’s the TC?” Duryea asked, referring to the thermocline, a layer of abrupt temperature change between colder bottom and warmer surface currents; it acted as a barrier to active sonar, deflecting outgoing signals and trapping returns from the few that managed to penetrate.

“Three hundred forty meters, sir,” McBride replied.

“Okay, let’s see what he’s made of,” Duryea said. “Rig for dive and take her down to four hundred.”

The Cavalla’s ballast tanks filled, her dive planes angled sharply, the propeller cut a massive vortex in the water, and she headed for the bottom.

The Alpha’s sonarman detected the surge in cavitation and change in depth, and then the silence. “We’ve lost contact, Comrade Captain,” he soon reported.

“Thermocline,” Solomatin scowled, knowing that pursuit would be futile. Once lost, the Cavalla could run in sea trenches undetected. It was up to Redfleet strategic reconnaissance to pick up her trail now.

Cooperman’s sonar arrays were strangely, pleasantly silent. “Clear water astern,” he reported.

“He’s waiting and wondering,” Duryea said to McBride firmly. “Come to zero six five. All ahead full.”

The Cavalla turned hard to port, steam from her reactor driving the twin turbines ever faster. Now, dead-centered on the Straits of Gibraltar, she began proceeding east toward the Mediterranean at top speed.

An hour later, when the BRT transmitted Duryea’s message, the swift currents had already swept it more than 15 miles south of the Straits. SSIX, a satellite dedicated to submarine communications — one of five in geosynchronous orbit that made up the fleet satellite communications system — received and relayed it.

Seconds later, inside a massive concrete blockhouse at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the ground link where intelligence from spy satellites is gathered, a high-speed printer in the message center came to life.

A clerk tore the cable from the printer and took it to a tracking room, where pensive technicians sat at rows of consoles, studying their VDT screens.

The RTS prefix stood for real time surveillance. Keyhole series satellites used a charged couple device to provide it. The half-inch-square CCD contained 640,000 pixels that continuously collected and transmitted data — which meant these were real time images.

The technician monitoring the sector of ocean in question was given Duryea’s cable. He entered the geographic data on his keyboard, directing the satellite’s optical system to the appropriate grid square and coordinates; then he began searching for a specific surface pattern created by a dived submarine’s propeller.

Simultaneously, a Soviet EORSAT spy satellite had detected the BRT transmission and sent the data to a similar tracking facility in Pechenga on the Kola Peninsula. The coded message couldn’t be deciphered but the signal’s geographic coordinates were immediately radioed to the Alpha.

“He’s south of the Straits,” Solomatin said. He had no way of knowing the signal had come from a BRT and, as Duryea had planned, assumed it came from the Cavalla. “Come to zero two zero. All ahead full.”

In Fort Belvoir’s KH-11 tracking room, the technician reacted to a line of side-by-side swirls that had surfaced from the Alpha’s twin props and were tracing across his screen. Though not detectable from ships or planes, the pattern was clearly visible to a high-altitude satellite and had measurable speed and direction. The technician dispatched the following to the Cavalla:

McBride whistled when he saw it. “He took the bait, sir. He’s really cutting a hole in the water.”

“Not to mention his throat,” Duryea said.

At about the same time in Upper Heyford, the sun hovered low over the English countryside.

A good omen, Larkin thought, as the golden rays streamed through the canopy, warming the cockpit. He dipped a wing, putting the bomber on a heading for the air base, and thumbed the radio transmit button.

“Upper Heyford, this is Viper-Two,” he said. “Request clear to land.”

“We have you, Viper-Two,” the tower replied. “You’re CTL on one seven west. Winds are at one three five; ten knots.”

“Copy that, Heyford.”

The two F-111s circled to side-by-side landings and taxied to the hangar at the far end of the field. Larkin popped the canopy and climbed down from the cockpit. The name on his flight suit read MAJ W. SHEPHERD. All uniform badges and insignia were fastened with Velcro and easily changed.

He and Applegate had test-flown the F-111s several times since Larkin’s return from Holy Loch. Special Forces aviators served as their weapons systems officers.

A cable was waiting for them in the office when they got to the hangar. Larkin tore it open, smiled at Moncrieff s message, and handed it to Applegate. It read:

14

Shepherd had been comatose for several days when his eyes finally fluttered open. He was in an unfamiliar bed, an IV sticking into his arm, the suffocating smells of illness filling his head.

Two security guards, making their morning rounds of the train yards, had found him — he was blue from the cold and naked, save for a torn T-shirt and a pair of skivvies. The derelicts had picked him clean: flight suit, boots, watch, dogtags, tape recorder, and wallet.

The guard with the metal chevrons pinned to his black cableknit returned to the security office at the gate, scooped up the phone, and dialed 999, London’s toll-free emergency number.

A short time later, a white ambulance, its blue roof flasher glowing eerily in the ground fog, came racing down Leyton Road. The clumsy-looking van went round the eighteen-wheelers queued at the entrance to the yards and across the flyover that bridged the expanse of tracks, continuing to where Shepherd had been found.

Shepherd was taken to The London Hospital on Mile End Road. The dreary buildings of soot-blackened brick were well suited to the tough East End neighborhood, which had been terrorized by Jack the Ripper a century before. Since the end of World War II, Whitechapel’s traditionally ethnic population of European Jews had gradually given way to Indians, who were now being supplanted by poverty-level blacks and Pakistanis.

The men’s ward was on the second floor of the main building. The glossy white walls had long ago turned a pale nicotine yellow. A single row of lights hung overhead, the illumination dimmed by the dead flies in the bottom of the milk glass globes. Forty beds, separated by clothes lockers, lined the sides of the long, narrow room. A rectangular card at the foot of each bed displayed the patient’s name in letters boldly printed with a black marker. Shepherd’s name card was blank.

Administrators had no clue to his identity. But that wasn’t unusual among the many indigents treated here. Like them, Shepherd was dirty, battered, and unshaven. The fact that he wasn’t emaciated or suffering from exposure led them to conclude he was a victim of an all too familiar scenario: New arrivals to the street were constantly being preyed upon by the bands of hardened regulars. The army of homeless that roamed the city was growing at an alarming rate; engineers were becoming almost as common as laborers. Following standard procedure, London’s Metropolitan Police had been notified; a check of their missing persons files shed no light on Shepherd’s identity.

A nurse making her rounds noticed Shepherd pushing up onto an elbow and hurried to his side.

“Go easy now,” she whispered, delighted that he had regained consciousness.

“Where am I?” he wondered feebly.

“In luck is what I’d say,” the sprightly woman quipped, before hurrying off to fetch a doctor.

“Can you tell me who you are?” the doctor asked in a gentle singsong cadence as he leaned over Shepherd, examining him. He was a rail-thin Indian with coal-black eyes and a soft smile.

“Walt, Walt Shepherd,” Shepherd muttered, his head throbbing. “Major, United States Air Force.”

“I see,” the young doctor replied with the amused smile of a man accustomed to hearing grandiose claims: Jesus Christ and John Lennon were the most common.

Shepherd heard the skepticism in his tone and slowly recited his serial number, adding, “I’m a pilot.”

“Well, you’ve been with us for several days, Major,” the doctor said, beginning to sense that Shepherd’s claim might be genuine. He went on to explain how Shepherd got there and that they had been unable to identify him. “I’ll be happy to let your people know you’re with us, if you’ll tell me who to call.”

Shepherd just stared at him blankly, suddenly overwhelmed by the terrifying events that started coming back in a chilling rush: a montage of gunfire and blood; of screeching rubber and steel; of bone-crunching collisions and exploding fuel; and of hope, dashed by the cruel shattering of glass against his skull.

“Major Shepherd?” the doctor said, testing his response to the rank. “Major, are you all right?”

“Oh, sorry,” Shepherd finally replied, coming out of it. He winced in pain, his hand going to the bandage on his forehead, where he’d been struck by the bottle. “Hurts. It hurts like hell.”

“Yes, you’ve had a rather nasty knock on the head; actually, more than one,” the doctor replied in his clipped musical cadence, having treated Shepherd for a severe concussion, scalp lacerations, and minor burns on his hands and face. “Now,” he said in a gentle challenge, “you were going to tell me who to call—”

“Applegate,” Shepherd finally replied in a dry whisper. “Major Applegate — Lakenheath.”

It made perfect sense to call him. Shepherd never saw who shot at him from the balcony and had no reason to think it was Applegate. On the contrary, the major was with military intelligence and had conducted a bona fide debriefing after the incident with the Soviet Forgers. Besides, though Larkin and the others who had attacked him were wearing air force uniforms, it went completely against Shepherd’s grain to accept that U.S. military personnel were involved. His unquestioning sense of patriotism wouldn’t allow it.

That same morning, five hours before its scheduled launch, the raid on Libya was given the final go-ahead.

In the hangar at Upper Heyford, Larkin and Applegate were in a planning room, reviewing mission data at a map-covered plotting table, when one of the Special Forces clerks informed Applegate he had a call. The major left and crossed the hangar to his office to take it. His eyes widened at the doctor’s message, his mind racing to cope with the knowledge that Shepherd was alive.

In The London Hospital, a nurse was at the foot of Shepherd’s bed writing his name on the blank card when the doctor returned. “I’m afraid he insists on talking to you, Major,” he said, displeased at the idea. “I told him more than once you were in discomfort.”

Shepherd nodded and pushed up shakily onto an elbow. His double vision was gone but the moment he sat up, the room started spinning. They lifted him into a wheelchair and took him to the doctor’s office.

“Can you identify these men, Major?” Applegate asked after Shepherd had explained what happened.

“Just one of them,” Shepherd replied weakly. “His name was Larkin… Colonel Larkin.”

“Larkin…” the heavyset intelligence officer repeated coolly, glad that Shepherd couldn’t see the panic in his eyes. “Doesn’t ring a bell. You sure they were in the military?”

“They looked and sounded like Americans, but—”

“Americans from Charm School,” Applegate interrupted, referring to a Soviet KGB facility that was an exact replica of an American town: Only English was spoken; only American food was served; only American clothing was worn; only KGB agents, being trained to impersonate Americans, lived and worked there. “For all we know that run in with the Forger wasn’t an accident,” Applegate concluded, shrewdly embellishing the lie. “We’ll have you picked up and taken to a military hospital as soon as possible. Meantime, I don’t want anyone else to know you’re alive. Whoever they are, whatever they’re up to, they want you dead. Talk to no one, Major. That means nobody. Not even your wife. They may be watching her; may have tapped her phone trying to get a line on where you’re hiding. Got it?”

“I understand, sir,” Shepherd replied dutifully.

“Good. Now, put the doc back on,” Applegate instructed, going on to impress upon the doctor the need for absolute secrecy and cooperation.

The nurse wheeled Shepherd back to the ward. He fell onto the bed, exhausted. Moments later, she returned carrying his flight suit, name stripe still affixed. It had been washed and folded. His cassette recorder and an envelope were on top of it.

“I think these belong to you, Major,” she said, explaining that a comatose derelict several beds down the line was wearing the flight suit over his clothing when brought in the previous evening. The London Hospital’s casualty room served the entire East End, and there was no other facility in the area where the derelict, who, like Shepherd, had been found comatose in the train yard, could have been taken.

Shepherd’s wallet, credit cards, and identification were gone; but the envelope contained what was left of his cash: $63 and a few British pounds that the derelict, who had assaulted him, hadn’t spent before succumbing to a drug overdose.

In upper Heyford, Applegate had given the news to Larkin, who shuddered at the implications. “This whole fucking mission’s on the bubble,” he lamented bitterly, thinking about Fitzgerald and the DCI’s emotional mandate.

“No need for it to burst,” the big intelligence officer counseled. “Shepherd’s just laying there groggy, waiting to be picked up; and we’ve got people who can handle it.”

The two Special Forces guards who had played the role of SPs were given the task. “Kill him and use the same method of disposal,” Larkin ordered; then he and Applegate returned to the computerized data that had been prepared for each F-111 crew by mission planning in Lakenheath.

Each package had been tailored to a specific target. It contained reconnaissance photographs; a foldout route book of the flight plan; and a sequential list of fly-to-points: latitude, longitude, elevation, and brief description of each, the last of these being the target itself.

ANITA was used to enter the alphanumeric target data into a computer in mission planning headquarters. Once encoded, the entire program was copied to tape; the cassette was inserted into a mission data loader, which was taken to the aircraft and cabled to an input port left of the nose wheel, adjacent to the com-cord jack; then with the push of a button, the target data was transferred from the MDL to the Pave Tack computer.

This entire operation was handled by mission planning technicians; however, neither they nor the MDL were indispensable. The data could have been entered directly into Pave Tack computers by pilot or WIZZO via the nav-data entry panel, an alphanumeric keyboard in the cockpit used routinely to correct and update target information in flight.

Larkin and Applegate completed their data review, suited up, and were soon climbing into their F-111s.

The time was 5:13 P.M. when they took off from Heyford with the EF-111 radar jammers. As they streaked skyward, KC-135 tankers were lumbering into the air from Mildenhall. They rendezvoused over Land’s End at the southeasternmost tip of England with twenty-two F-111F bombers from Lakenheath and one E2C Hawkeye.

The latter was the strike control aircraft, a flying radar installation that housed the mission commander and his staff. A saucer-shaped antenna atop the fuselage picked up the transponder signal of every F-111 in the strike force and displayed it on a radar screen. Strict radio silence would be maintained throughout the mission, which meant this was the only contact mission command would have with the bombers.

In precisely 7 hours 11 minutes, the F-111s and their Pave Tack systems, capable of acquiring, tracking, and bombing surface targets at high speed in total darkness, would be doing just that — all but two of them.

15

The time in Washington, D.C., was 12:32 P.M.

Congressman Jim Gutherie had put in a morning’s work and was heading across town in his chauffeured car.

A week had passed since the bombing of the West Berlin disco. Rumors of military reprisals had been rampant but Gutherie hadn’t given them much credence. A hostile act against another nation would have to be cleared with Congress — with his committee — in advance, and no effort had been made to do so. He had spent the weekend with campaign aides, mapping out strategy to reverse his continuing slide in the polls.

For years, his wife had been his most trusted political adviser. Since her accident, it was but one of many things in the congressman’s life that had changed. Monday afternoons were another.

The women with whom he spent them were stunningly beautiful, with faces like models, which they sometimes were. Save for fiery tresses and galaxies of freckles sprinkled over her white skin, the redhead was always naked when he arrived. The blond worked in lingerie. Black stockings hugged her endless legs. Garters framed a tuft of golden wool glistening in the shadow of a bottomless teddy. Its bodice skimmed her upright nipples, which were all that kept it from falling.

The idea of being with another woman, while his wife — a passionate sex partner with whom he was still in love — lay in a hospital bed barely alive, tormented him, and he had sought professional guidance.

His committee work and his exposure to top-secret data narrowed the field to a handful of psychiatrists in the District who had the necessary security clearances.

Dr. David Kemper had been recommended by the CIA. His office was in a mansard-roofed structure on Connecticut Avenue. Its separate entrance and exit spared his patients the embarrassment of running into colleagues.

“You know, I’m wired all the time,” Gutherie said as one session began. “I jog, I work out. It still takes me hours to fall asleep. I’m not myself.”

“Well, what do you think it means?” Kemper asked from behind his neat moustache.

“Beats me. I’m still in love with my wife and everything. I mean, I don’t even know what that’s got to do with it; but lately, I don’t know.”

“Well, what I hear you saying, Jim,” Kemper said with a trace of a smile, “is that you need to get laid.”

“Yeah? Yeah, I guess I do.”

“Anybody in mind?”

“Sort of.”

Six months had passed since Dr. Kemper supported Gutherie’s suggestion that he visit the turn-of-the-century townhouse behind the wrought-iron fence in the 2000 block of Decatur Place just north of Dupont Circle.

Now Gutherie lay in an elegantly furnished room, the blond’s fingertips tracing over his trembling lips, “lost,” as Sister Mary Janice, his eighth-grade teacher once put it, “in the depraved sins of the flesh.”

Gutherie’s breathing quickened in expectation as the redhead straddled his waist with her freckled thighs, then began sliding slowly backwards, capturing the head of his penis inside her. He shuddered as she continued inching back until her tight wetness consumed him. The soothing sense of security and well-being that Gutherie craved spread over him like a warm blanket.

“Oh, yes,” the blond moaned softly, slowly undoing one of the pastel bows on the front of the teddy; soon her pointed breasts were free of it and one of her large nipples was in Gutherie’s mouth.

“Oh, yes, yes; do we want to make it happen now?” the redhead prompted in a breathy whisper, segueing into a circular motion astride him.

“Yes. Oh God, yes, yes, now. Make it happen now.”

He arched his pelvis, forcing her to grind against it, then began bucking beneath her until he emitted a series of long moans and collapsed into their arms. The congressman was wholly oblivious to the stress of public office and private pain, when suddenly a muffled twitter came from beneath the pile of clothing on the other side of the room.

Gutherie sat up, somewhat disoriented, trying to clear his head. His secretary had strict orders not to beep him at this hour except in an emergency; and she hadn’t, not once, in six months. The congressman pulled the bedding around him, then took the phone from the nightstand and called his office. “What is it?” he asked anxiously when his secretary came on the line. “Something happen to my wife?”

“No, sir,” she replied. “The White House called.”

“The White House?” Gutherie echoed, feeling suddenly out of touch and wondering what was going on.

“You have a meeting with the president at the OEO in half an hour. Twenty-five minutes, now.”

As a ranking member of the Intelligence and Oversight committees, Gutherie was often summoned to such meetings, but rarely on short notice.

The time was 3:58 when he arrived at the Old Executive Office Building across the street from the White House. He was ushered to a conference room, where congressional leaders, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security adviser, the CIA director, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had assembled.

“As you know,” Lancaster began, “the War Powers Act requires, and I quote, ‘that the President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities,’ and that’s why you’ve been invited here today.”

The congressmen sat up straighter in their chairs.

The president entered and, reading from typed notes, explained that the recent wave of terrorism had prompted him to authorize preemptive action. Tripoli and Bengahzi were the targets. When he finished reading, he pocketed his notes and left the meeting.

Lancaster presented the intercepted cables as evidence linking Libya to the Berlin disco bombing, then laid out the details of the operation.

“What about civilian casualties?” a senator asked.

“Every effort has been made to minimize collateral damage, sir,” the chairman of the joints chiefs replied.

“Where do our allies stand?” another wondered.

“France and Spain have denied us use of their air space,” the secretary of state replied.

“Frogs,” Kiley muttered bitterly.

“Israel, Canada, and Mrs. Thatcher, of course, are with us,” the secretary concluded.

“She better be,” a congressman intoned. “She owes us one for the Falklands.”

“She owes Qaddafi one for that cop he murdered,” Kiley said, referring to Constable Yvonne Fletcher, who was gunned down outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in 1984. He didn’t remind them that the pistol had been traced to a shipment of weapons procured by renegade CIA agents.

“How much time we have?” Gutherie asked.

“ETA to target is two hours fifty minutes,” Lancaster replied boldly, fully anticipating protest.

“Our bombers are in the air?” Gutherie exclaimed.

“Correct,” the CJC replied. “F-111s are en route as we speak. Intruders have yet to be launched.”

Uneasy glances flicked between the congressmen.

“Now that Congress has been consulted,” Gutherie said sardonically, “what if some of us object?”

“The attack can be called off within ten minutes of strike time,” the defense secretary replied.

“If that objection is unanimous,” Kiley chimed in slyly, knowing the chance for such an accord was zero.

No objections were voiced, let alone a unanimous one. For in truth, none denied that the United States had been pushed to the limit or that the evidence was compelling. But Gutherie and the others were wondering: Why at night? When despite popular conception, daylight bombing techniques afforded a much higher degree of accuracy; a fact the Israelis had recently demonstrated by destroying eighteen Syrian missile batteries — against antiaircraft defenses far superior to Libyan installations — without losing a single aircraft. Furthermore, why use F-111s from faraway England? Why not hit both targets with carrier-based bombers?

It was pointless to ask now, to cross-examine the president’s staff in the tense hours just prior to the strike. The media would do that. Indeed, within hours the litany of thorny questions would be asked.

Only Bill Kiley knew the answers would be lies.

The DCI had been feeling the strain of his years lately but he bristled with energy now. Fitzgerald and the other hostages would soon be delivered from their harrowing nightmare. He had no doubt that the cost, however steep, was more than worth it, and that CIA would get the credit. Victory and vindication. It was so close Kiley could taste it.

16

A late-afternoon Sirocco had subsided to a gentle breeze and by nightfall the temperature in Tripoli had dropped to a humid 81 degrees. The time was 11:16 P.M. on Monday.

At the Bab al Azziziya Barracks, Muammar el-Qaddafi, his wife, and their children went down a staircase into the basement of their porticoed home. The colonel led the way through a long tunnel to an underground garage that housed an armored personnel carrier. The garage was located well beyond the compound’s walls to provide Qaddafi with an escape route should his citizens or disloyal military officers one day turn against him.

The vehicle, an all-wheel-drive Transportpanzer, had been manufactured to special order in West Germany by Thyssen-Hen-schel. Fitted with a cupola-mounted machine gun and eight huge puncture-proof combat tires, the TTP was fully amphibious. The rear troop compartment had been gutted and the interior comfortably outfitted as a mobile home, with a small galley and sleeping quarters. It was stocked with food, water, and clothing.

“Allah has willed this,” Qaddafi said, referring to the raid, urging his family to take solace in Islam, which requires submission to the will of God. On another day, or at another hour, he might have reacted with raging anger. Neither his aides nor his wife of eighteen years could predict his mood swings, which ranged from submissiveness to his religion to enthusiastic support of terrorism — of the Islamic Jihad or holy war — in its name.

As soon as Qaddafi and his family were aboard, the Transport-panzer drove off, escorted by an armed military convoy. Its destination was the desert town of Hun, where a new national capital, its future dependent on the water that would one day flow through the Sahara pipelines, was under construction.

The leader of the People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya sat deep in thought. Although he was the nation’s leader, he had retained the rank of colonel and held no formal government office, to emphasize his kinship with the common people of his birth; other than his family, only General Younis and staff members involved in the scheme to acquire the supersonic bombers had been forewarned; and though Qaddafi had been assured the upcoming raid was designed to “minimize collateral damage,” he knew Libyans would die this night and he had agreed to it.

Fifteen hundred miles to the west, the spectral glow from F-111 cockpits streaked through the blackness. The bombers flew in tight RRC formations, one tucked left, right, and beneath each tanker. If detected by defense radars, the return from each radar resolution cell would appear on the screen as one aircraft, not four.

The strike force was approaching the Straits of Gibraltar when the high-speed extensible booms of the Stratotankers began lowering for the second of four refuelings. Minutes later, thousands of gallons of JP-4 fuel had been pumped simultaneously into each bomber.

When refueling was completed, Larkin, Applegate, and the members of the other F-111 crews each ingested a 5-mg amphetamine capsule to ward off drowsiness brought on by the long flight, ensuring they would be at peak sharpness over the target.

About an hour later, the inky blackness was broken by specks of light twinkling in the distance, where the port cities of Tarifa, Spain, and Punta Cires, Morocco, pinch the Straits to a width of 8 nautical miles.

The attack force was now 1,375 miles from Tripoli. ETA to target was 1 hour 42 minutes.

In the watery depths below, the USS Cavalla was 500 meters beneath the Mediterranean, just off the Libyan coast. The continental shelf is unusually narrow here, extending less than 10 miles from shore before dropping off sharply. This meant the Cavalla could make a deep-water approach, minimizing the chance of detection.

To further diminish it, Duryea rode the currents that swirl counterclockwise from Tunisia and Sicily into Tripoli harbor, moving silently into position.

The submarine’s interior had been in redlight since sunset, a daily event on dived boats, giving the crew a sense of day and night. It also preserved night vision for periscope surveillance should it surface.

Duryea was hunched over his chart table, his face bathed in the eerie glow from the luminous screen. He scooped up the phone and punched the button labeled Sonar.

“Talk to me, Cooperman—”

“I’m doing a three-sixty now, skipper,” the sonarman replied. He was absorbed in the fuschia-colored readouts and the sounds of the sea singing in his headset, while he methodically switched through the various sonar arrays. “Usual surface traffic, nothing else.”

“Good. Anything weird turns up, anything, I want to know right away.”

“Aye-aye, skipper.”

“Let’s take her up to a hundred and go in,” Duryea said to McBride firmly.

The exec relayed the command to the duty officer in the control room, and the planesmen who controlled the boat’s depth and angle went to work.

The hiss of high pressure air and the rush of water being forced from the ballast tanks reverberated through the hull. The bow tilted upward, and the Cavalla began rising from the depths. She had just leveled off when the BQQ-5 dish in the bow detected another submarine.

Cooperman immediately reported it to the captain.

“One of ours?” Duryea prompted anxiously.

“Beats me, skipper,” Cooperman answered, studying the acoustic signature pattern that was tracing across his monitor and printing out, simultaneously, on the console below. “This is going to sound weird but it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard before.”

“Nuke? Diesel? Twin screw? Single? Take a shot,” Duryea prompted, unsettled by the threat an unidentified submarine represented.

“Twins,” Cooperman replied, pressing a key on his console to store the data in the boat’s computerized acoustic signature library. “Probably a diesel. I’d put my money on a clunker; a real old one.”

“What are the chances this antique is tracking us?”

“Slim and none, skipper. She’s way out there,” Cooperman replied, pressing a hand against one side of his headset. “She just cut back her engines. My guess is she’s surfacing.”

“Okay, talk to me if she starts getting nosy.” Duryea hung up, swiveled to his keyboard, and encoded a command. A pulsing cursor appeared on the electronic chart table, marking the mystery sub’s location. He watched it blinking at him for a moment, then turned to McBride and said, “Let’s move into final position.”

The America’s prow cleaved through the Mediterranean like Excalibur’s blade, the broad flight deck at its hilt broken by silhouettes of A-6 Intruders lurking in the steam that belched from launch catapults. Its air group of eighty-five warplanes could deliver more destructive power than the entire navy in World War II.

In the combat center — a computerized maze of video monitors, Plexiglas charts, and status boards — tense young men, many still in their teens, were about to launch the air strike against Benghazi.

“Ready to launch!” the air boss barked.

On deck, the taxi director, alienlike in green helmet, goggles, earmuffs, and kerchief tied outlaw-style over his nose and mouth, dropped to one knee and thrust his right arm to the black sky.

The pilot of the A-6 in the catapult responded with a thumbs-up and shoved the throttle to the stops. The turbojets seared the pop-up exhaust baffle with blue-orange flame. The bomber strained at the massive steel hook until the engines had built up enough power to keep it out of what fliers call the box — too much speed to stop, too little to become airborne.

The instant launch-pressure had been reached, the catapult operator released the hook.

In less than 2 seconds, 25 tons of exotic metals and electronics were accelerated from a dead stop to 150 miles an hour. The bomber was 60 feet above the water when the Pratt and Whitney turbojets took over and sent the gleaming-white Intruder climbing into the blackness above the Gulf of Sidra.

In Washington, D.C., the sun had set, leaving a luminous lilac haze in the sky. The time was 6:47 P.M.

In the oval office, technicians were adjusting lighting and camera positions in preparation for the president’s address, which would follow the raid.

The chief executive sat in an anteroom, reviewing the script with his writers while a television makeup artist added some color to his complexion. When he was finished, the president headed for the situation room in the basement, where Kiley, Lancaster, and his other civilian and military advisers had gathered. He had just settled in his chair beneath the presidential seal when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who had taken a call, announced, “Intruders are in the air. ETA to target nine minutes fifty-three seconds.”

At Okba Ben Nafi Air Base, a former U.S. Air Force installation on the coast just east of Tripoli, a platoon of infantry ringed hangar 6-South, where the two F-111s would be housed. Once called Wheelus Field, it was the most well equipped and defended of Libya’s air bases, hence its selection as the landing site.

Inside the hangar, in an office that had been set up as a command post, General Younis anxiously awaited word that the bombers had arrived. His attention was riveted on an aide who was in communication with air traffic control in the tower.

“SAM batteries are ready, General,” one of his officers reported, referring to the antiaircraft missiles that would defend the airport during the raid.

“You checked each and every one?”

“Yes, sir. Guidance radar is off. Only adjusted sixes have been mounted.”

“Good. We wouldn’t want to blow up our F-111s before we get our hands on them.”

Indeed, Younis had been faced with the problem of shooting down two bombers without shooting them down. Antiaircraft fire was required to explain their loss during the raid and couldn’t be curtailed; and though Libyan missile defense batteries would be forced to turn off their ground radar to prevent air-to-ground HARM missiles from homing on the signal, greatly diminishing their accuracy, the chance of a lucky hit had to be eliminated. Younis knew that both heat-seeking and radar-homing SAM-6s were fitted with proximity fuses, which detonated just prior to impact, and had ordered them adjusted to maximum sensitivity. This meant they would detonate, not just prior to impact, not even close to impact, but on the slightest detection of the flares and metallic chaff that would be released into the air by each bomber to confuse missile guidance.

In the cockpit of the lead F-111, the pilot glanced at his flight navigation monitor.

“Thirty miles to target,” he announced.

The wizzo grasped the Pave Tack control handle in the sidewall and thumbed one of the buttons. A long cylindrical pod pivoted out of the plane’s belly. Its spherical head began scanning the horizon with radar and infrared cameras, using the preprogrammed alphanumeric data to search for its target.

The pilot put the bomber into an attack dive. He leveled off at 500 feet and thumbed the countermeasures release button. Bundles of missile-distracting flares and chaff were ejected into the slipstream from ports beneath the stabilizers.

“One plus thirty,” the pilot announced.

The F-111 was slicing through the darkness toward downtown Tripoli at 595 MPH when the wizzo reacted to the image of the Bab Al Azziziya Barracks on his screen. Columns of alphanumeric data flanked the image; one fixed, the other changing rapidly.

“One minute,” the pilot said, turning over command of the bomb release mechanism to the Pave Tack computer.

“Target acquired,” the wizzo replied, pressing a button that fired a pulsing red laser from the Pave Tack pod to the ground. The pencil-thin beam locked onto the target and began measuring the range, relaying the ever-changing alphanumerics to the Pave Tack computer. “We have a lock,” he called out when the target indicator became fixed on Qaddafi’s compound.

“Twenty seconds… ten… five… four—”

Electrical impulses activated the ejector feet on the bomb release units below the F-111’s wings and, in a programmed sequence, four 2,000-pound GBU-15s were unleashed from the hardpoints.

The pilot punched the throttles to avoid the upcoming explosion. The agile warplane accelerated up and away but the Pave Tack pod, swiveling in its gimballed cradle, kept the laser locked on Qaddafi’s compound.

Sensing devices in each bomb began making adjustments in the moveable tail fins. This kept the bombs homing on the laser’s frequency, as if they were traveling on a wire stretched between warplane and target.

The time was 1:57 A.M. when the first percussive blast blew out the front wall of Qaddafi’s residence.

“Yeah!” the wizzo exclaimed, having no reason to think Qaddafi wouldn’t be at home. “Kiss it good-bye!”

In downtown Tripoli, in the deluxe Al Kabir Hotel on Al Fat’h Street where the international media was housed, the force of nearby blasts set chandeliers swinging and guests scurrying for cover.

The time was 2:03 A.M. — 7:03 P.M. New York time.

On the ninth floor of the Al Kabir, a CBS News correspondent crouched next to the window of his room, talking by phone to anchorman Dan Rather, who had just started his nightly telecast.

“Dan,” he reported. “Tripoli is under attack.”

In Washington, D.C., Congressman Gutherie and his staff were also watching the report on CBS.

“Put your microphone out that window and let us hear it,” Rather urged the correspondent in Tripoli.

Sounds of explosions boomed from the television.

“Perfectly timed for the evening news,” Gutherie cracked. “Only thing the White House didn’t do was list it in TV Guide. Must be killing them they couldn’t.”

On Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, Stephanie Shepherd and her children were in the den, surrounded by Walt’s air force memorabilia: recruiting posters, photographs of military jets, a large American flag, flying helmets, trophies, and academy citations and awards.

She had finished the Gutherie interview that afternoon by phone and was at her desk working on it — one eye on her word processor, the other on the television news. She stiffened as Dan Rather said: “Informed sources have told CBS News that United States Air Force F-111 bombers based in England are carrying out the surprise attack.”

“Come up here with Mommy,” Stephanie said to Jeffrey, who was playing with his trucks. “Come on,” she coaxed, as she pulled him up onto her lap.

Five days had passed since she and Laura had phoned Walt and learned of his transfer to Upper Heyford. He never called back, and the feeling of not really being part of his life had begun haunting her, though now Stephanie thought she understood why he hadn’t called.

High above the Mediterranean near Sicily, 300 miles from Tripoli’s laser-slashed skies, the Hawk-eye strike-control aircraft was in a holding pattern, monitoring the action on radar. It was out of skin-painting range, which meant pulse-doppler scanning couldn’t pick up raw radar returns from the F-111s; only radio transponder signals, using special frequencies not detectable by enemy radar, were being tracked on the screens in the electronics-packed fuselage — alphanumeric data next to each blip denoted tail code, altitude, and air speed.

Radio silence had reduced C3—command, control, communications — to waiting. No signal to commence attack had been given by the mission commander; none would be given to cease. Each crew was on its own; each flew the sequence points to its target, bombed it, and proceeded to a holding area to regroup. All but two.

Colonel Larkin was approaching his target, a military installation in the desert, when he reached to the fuel control panel, lifted the red safety catch, and threw the toggle used to dump fuel.

At the rear of the aircraft, directly beneath the vertical stabilizer and centered between the engine exhausts, the conical fuel mast opened, releasing a burst of JP-4 into the bomber’s slipstream.

Larkin flicked the toggle to off; then, capitalizing on a technique called torching, sometimes used by pilots to distract heat-seeking missiles, he hit the afterburners, igniting the fuel, which erupted in a massive fireball a distance behind the F-111. To any of the other crews that might be observing — crews concentrating on high-speed bombing and evasive maneuvering in total darkness — it would appear that one of the bombers had been hit by a surface-to-air missile.

The instant the fuel exploded, Larkin put the F-111 into a steep dive, pulled out at extremely low altitude, and shut off his transponder.

In the Hawkeye, one of the eight radar operators monitoring transponder signals stiffened apprehensively as an F-111 in his sector began losing altitude rapidly. Suddenly, the blip vanished from his screen. “One-eleven down, sir,” he reported in a choked voice.

“Tail code?” the mission commander asked, knowing the crew wouldn’t have broken radio silence even if able.

“One seven nine, sir.”

The MC scanned his computerized roster. “Shepherd.”

An operator at an adjacent console winced as a blip vanished from his screen. “Bastards got another one, sir.”

Immediately upon acting out their crash scenarios, Larkin and Applegate made sweeping low-level turns onto headings for Okba ben Nan and walled the throttles.

At Okba Ben Nafi Air Base, an air traffic controller, keeping a vigil for the F-111s, picked up the raw return on his radar as they came within skin-painting range.

“Two aircraft approaching,” he reported to his anxious superiors in the hangar command post.

General Younis lit another cigarette and went outside to see the fast-moving, aerodynamic shapes emerging from the darkness; then, in an eyeblink, two fully armed United States Air Force F-111 attack bombers touched down and roared past in a startling blur.

Younis smiled, nodding to personnel who began rolling back the huge sliding doors. Soon the black needlenose of an F-111 stabbed into the hangar, followed by a second.

Libyan Air Force maintenance and ground crew personnel were waiting for them. They rolled ladders up to the cockpits the instant both bombers were safely inside. Larkin and Applegate popped the canopies and climbed down the ladders, followed by the Special Forces aviators who had acted as their wizzos. Each carried a small gym bag that contained civilian clothes.

“They’re all yours, General,” Larkin said to Younis, who came forward to greet them.

“You have brought ANITA with you?” the general asked, referring to the Pave Tack programming key.

“On the sub,” Larkin replied, not too exhausted to share a little smile with Applegate. “I’ll turn them over to Moncrieff soon as the hostages are aboard.”

Younis grunted, led the way to the command post office, and placed a call to Qaddafi at his quarters in Hun. While the general reported the good news, an aide went to another phone, dialed, and handed it to Larkin.

In Tripoli harbor, on a desolate wharf where the hostages would be released, Saddam Moncrieff and Katifa Issa Kharuz stood in the darkness, scanning the expanse of choppy water.

That morning they had boarded a regularly scheduled Middle East Airlines flight in Beirut, arriving in Tripoli just before noon. They had spent the remainder of the day at the Bab al Azziziya Barracks, going over details of the exchange with Younis and other members of Qaddafi’s military staff.

Now, as a steady breeze blew across the harbor, Moncrieff and Katifa waited. Soon, two vessels — the Cavalla and Abu Nidal’s gunboat, which was delivering the hostages — would emerge from the foggy blackness and tie up on opposite sides of the narrow wharf; the hostages would walk the short distance between them. They had just spotted the gunboat’s running lights streaking toward the wharf when the radiophone that Moncrieff was carrying twittered.

“Yes?” he answered in Arabic.

“Moncrieff, it’s Larkin,” the colonel said, the exhaustion evident in his voice. “We’re here.”

“So are the hostages,” the Saudi replied, watching the gunboat making its way between two Libyan Navy patrol boats stationed in the harbor.

“Thank God,” Larkin replied. “What about the Cavalla?”

Moncrieff glanced to the other side of the wharf.

The immense submarine was lurking just beneath the brackish water. Duryea had taken advantage of the fact that Tripoli harbor has some of the highest tides in the world, and moments earlier had quietly slipped into position at periscope/antenna depth. Only the upper head of the boat’s main scope was visible. The command center had switched from redlight to blacklight — a condition of total darkness broken only by the dim glow of essential instrumentation — which dilated Duryea’s pupils, maximizing his night vision.

The lanky skipper had his face pressed to the eyepiece of the periscope, panning it slowly as he tracked the gunboat across the harbor.

“Take her up,” he ordered as the vessel reached the end of the wharf and began pulling into position.

The black water erupted into a tumultuous bubbling as the football-field-long hull began rising.

“Colonel? Cavalla just broke the surface,” Moncrieff reported as water cascaded off the sub’s sail. “It’ll be good to see you.”

“Tell me about it,” Larkin said. “On our way.”

Larkin, Applegate, and the two Special Forces aviators quickly exchanged their helmets and flight suits for the civilian clothing in their gym bags in order to maintain the cover scenario Larkin had given Duryea. Then the group piled into an unmarked Libyan Air Force helicopter that wasted no time in lifting off and heading for Tripoli harbor.

In Beirut, on the sixth floor of the Turk Hospital, Abu Nidal’s physician sat in his office studying a lab report. It baffled him, as had the previous one — which had prompted his order that the test be repeated. His notorious patient’s health was an all-consuming concern and he had waited anxiously for the results. He pondered their implication, then headed down the corridor to one of the VIP suites in the private clinic.

Despite the late hour, Abu Nidal sat propped up against the pillows in his bed, reading reports from terrorist groups around the world that were faxed to Casino du Liban and delivered to the suite daily.

“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked.

“Better. Much better,” Nidal replied, delighted at his progress. “It’s like a miracle.”

“No, it’s called insulin,” the doctor said with a smile, shaking a finger at his patient admonishingly. “All you have to do is take it regularly.”

Abu Nidal’s brow furrowed. “I was taking it.”

“Certainly not as prescribed.”

“Yes, of course,” Nidal said adamantly.

“You’re positive?”

“Yes, yes, absolutely positive. Why?”

“Well,” the doctor replied, clearly baffled, “your blood workup found no evidence of it.”

“None?”

“That’s correct. I ran the tests twice just to be certain. I know it sounds odd but it was as if you hadn’t been taking any at all.”

“That doesn’t make sense. I just started a fresh supply.”

“I’d very much like to see one of those vials.”

“I’ll arrange for it right now,” Nidal said, his eyes narrowing in suspicion at an upsetting notion that struck him. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, lifted the phone, and dialed. “Mobile operator, please.”

In Tripoli harbor, the breeze had died and a taut stillness prevailed. The two vessels flanked the wharf.

Duryea stood on the Cavalla’s deck. The team of navy SEALs armed with AR-16 assault rifles was deployed around him.

Directly opposite, heavily armed PLO terrorists, faces concealed by checkered kaffiyehs, lined the rail of the gunboat. The canvas shroud had been peeled from the 14-mm deck gun, which was loaded and manned.

Moncrieff stood alone on the wharf between the two vessels. His nerves crackled with tension as he watched Katifa walk up a gangway onto the gunboat’s deck and disappear into the cabin.

Moments later she emerged, leading the hostages. They paraded behind her like a line of obedient schoolboys, uncertain as to their fate.

They were all men — faces gaunt from malnutrition and anxiety; pale from months — and, for some, years—of confinement in darkness. Seven men with atrophied muscles and minds who had been deprived of life’s sweetness, their hope destroyed by the fear of being forever lost to the forces of political extremism and religious fanaticism. They stood there timidly, heads bowed, staring blankly into the night.

They were close, so close, Duryea thought, as he watched the deckhands roll a gangway into position. So close he could almost touch them. His eyes caught Fitzgerald’s and he smiled, nodding reassuringly.

The haggard station chief was just committing his heart to the scenario, just starting to believe that he and the others were actually being released, when the ship-to-shore phone in the cabin behind him buzzed, shattering the tense silence.

It was Abu Nidal calling.

The gunboat captain’s eyes filled with panic as they spoke. The instant he hung up, he began shouting in frenzied Arabic at the terrorists on deck. They sprang into action, descending en masse upon the group of hostages, and began roughly pushing and shoving them back into the cabin.

“What are you doing?” Katifa demanded, trying to stop them. “What’s going on?”

The captain slammed the transmission into reverse and gunned the engines. The gunboat lurched and roared away from the wharf. “Shoot her!” he shouted, seeing Katifa’s interference. “Shoot her!”

Katifa heard him and ran across the deck, intending to dive into the water to escape. One of the terrorists stepped out from behind the cabin, blocking her way, and fired a burst from his Skorpion. The rounds tore into Katifa’s body, but her momentum carried her into him.

They both went over the rail into the sea.

Katifa was wracked with searing pain that radiated from each wound like internal flashes of lightning. The plunge into the chilly water had a pleasurable, numbing effect; she went into shock and lay there, floating face down, motionless.

The Palestinian went under and stayed under, fighting to shed the heavy cartridge belts girdling his chest, which were dragging him down.

“No! No, hold your fire!” Duryea shouted, concerned the terrorists would kill the hostages if the SEALs returned the fire.

Moncrieff was already sprinting across the wharfs rough-sawn timbers. He tossed the radiophone aside and dove into the oily water, remaining submerged as he began swimming toward Katifa.

Terrorists on the departing gunboat began spraying the surface with bursts from their Skorpions.

The helicopter carrying Larkin and the others had come in over the Old City, which borders the west end of the harbor. It had circled the wharf and was just touching down when the gunfire broke out. The four Americans piled out of the chopper and dashed up the gangway onto the Cavalla’s deck.

“What the fuck happened?” Larkin exploded.

“I don’t know!” Duryea shouted over parting bursts from the Skorpions. “Shit just hit the fan!”

“Bastards!” Larkin exclaimed bitterly. “Let’s get out of here.”

“They your people?” Duryea asked, pointing far across the wharf to the water on the opposite side.

Larkin turned to see Moncrieff and Katifa in the center of a widening pool of blood. The Saudi was struggling to keep her afloat and swim toward the wharf.

“No,” the colonel replied coldly, unwilling to risk the time it would take to maneuver the sub into position to rescue them, or to risk that once aboard they would inadvertently blow the cover story he had given Duryea. A hollowness grew in the pit of Larkin’s stomach. He couldn’t believe it had gone so wrong.

“Cast off!” Duryea shouted to McBride, who was standing on the bridge atop the sail.

The Cavalla was already slipping away from the wharf as Duryea, Larkin, and the others scrambled down deck hatches. The black-hulled submarine cut swiftly through the water and vanished in the night.

17

The air strike was over.

For eleven and one-half minutes, the early morning silence had been rudely shattered by the thunderous roar of supersonic bombers and earth-shaking explosions, then replaced by the wail of countless sirens.

Flames were raging through the Bab al Azziziya Barracks on As-Sarim Street; dazed and panicked, Libyans were emerging from the rubble that covered downtown streets where the air was ripe with the pungent odor of cordite and death; the crews of F-111s were settling down for the seven-hour return flight to England; the mission commander was conducting an accountability check, confirming that two F-111s had been lost; navy Intruders were landing on the decks of carriers; and network anchormen were just wrapping up their evening broadcasts when the president took his seat behind his desk in the oval office.

“We Americans are slow to anger. We always seek peaceful avenues before resorting to the use of force, and we did…” the president said in his smooth, perfectly paced delivery, pausing just long enough before adding, “None succeeded. This raid was a series of strikes against the headquarters, terrorist facilities, and military assets that support Muammar el-Qaddafi’s subversive activities. It will not only diminish his capacity to export state-sponsored terrorism, but will also provide him with incentives and reasons to alter his criminal behavior.” He paused again, his lips tightening into an angry red line. “I’m sorry to report,” he went on gravely, “that two of our aircraft were shot down and four of our brave young men gave their lives in the fight against terrorism. We have done what we had to do. If necessary we shall do it again.”

That night in London, two Special Forces agents arrived at The London Hospital on Mile End Road. White uniforms and maroon baseball caps with military insignia identified them as air force medical personnel. They had wasted no time in getting there; but it had taken hours to acquire the proper vehicle, attire, and identification, and several more to drive the 140 miles from Upper Heyford. It was 10:45 P.M. when they approached the nurse’s station, pushing a gurney.

“We’re here to pick up Major Shepherd,” one of them announced genially.

“Oh, my,” the nurse replied, glancing to the ID tag clipped to his pocket. “We weren’t expecting you at this hour. There’s a form you’ll have to fill out,” she said, hurrying off to fetch it. “I won’t be a minute.”

A patient, returning from the men’s room at the end of the corridor, overheard them. He returned to the dimly lighted ward and crossed to Shepherd’s bed.

“Shepherd?” he said, shaking him. “Hey, Shepherd?”

“Uh?” Shepherd awakened from a deep sleep. “Yeah, yeah, what is it?”

“Some people here for you.”

“People?” Shepherd wondered groggily, the meaning of it finally dawning on him. “Oh, oh, yeah, thanks.”

He pulled himself from the bed, intending to go to the bathroom. His knees buckled slightly and he fell back against the pillows to gather his strength.

The phone at the nurse’s station was ringing when the nurse returned with the form. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, handing it to one of the Special Forces agents as she answered the phone. “Men’s ward,” she said brightly, wincing at the reply. “I’m sorry, doctor, we’re quite understaffed at night, and — Certainly, doctor,” she replied, jotting on a pad.

At the far end of the corridor, Shepherd, feeling steadier now, was pushing through a door on his way to the bathroom when he froze in his tracks, recognizing one of the ambulance attendants at the nurse’s station. It was the SP he had bashed with his flight helmet the night he escaped from Upper Heyford.

Shepherd had no doubt they had come to kill him; nor that Applegate had sent them. Indeed, as Applegate had ordered, Shepherd had told no one else where he was, not even Stephanie, and now he knew why Applegate had wanted it that way. He leaned back behind the half-open door, closed it slowly, and returned to the ward, his mind racing in search of a way to elude them.

A few minutes later, the agent finished filling out the transfer form and signed it. The nurse was still on the phone. “Be all right if we get Major Shepherd ourselves?” he prompted.

“If you don’t mind?” the nurse whispered, covering the mouthpiece. “The patients’ names are on the beds. They’re fast asleep. Go about it quietly, if you will?”

“No problem.”

“Oh, lovely,” she said, relieved, gesturing to the set of battered double doors at the end of the corridor. “I’m sorry, doctor. Could you repeat that?”

The agents had no trouble finding Shepherd’s bed. One of them removed Shepherd’s flight suit from the open locker and folded it. The other positioned the gurney to make the transfer, then peeled back the bed covers and slipped a pistol from his shoulder holster. He had the butt poised to render the sleeping occupant unconscious when he noticed the ponytail flopped across the pillow and recoiled at the sight of the comatose derelict.

“This isn’t Shepherd,” he said in a tense whisper.

They had Shepherd to thank for it. On returning to the ward, he had exchanged name cards with the derelict who had attacked him; then, he removed his hospital gown and, knowing he would be conspicuous in his flight suit, he put on the shirt and blue jeans that were in the derelict’s locker, leaving the flight suit in their place. He slipped out a door at the far end of the ward, made his way to a service entrance, and went down one of the black wrought-iron staircases that led to Mile End Road. A street market filled the median between the east-and west-bound lanes. It was deserted at this hour, the voices haggling over prices silenced, the boxes of merchandise locked away. Shepherd was stumbling toward it when he saw a bus approaching. He waited in the shadows of the curbside shelter and flagged it down.

The conductor thumbed the clumsy ticketing machine that hung at his waist, watching with amusement as the apparently inebriated passenger struggled to climb aboard; the aging fellow’s grin turned to a sour scowl as Shepherd stuffed an American dollar into his fist and plunged unsteadily down the aisle into a seat.

About a half hour later, the red double-decker bus had crossed Stepney and was winding through Poplar. Shepherd was feeling woozy. He feared passing out in public and falling into the hands of authorities again. The bus turned into Preston’s Road, where the Isle of Dogs juts boldly into the Thames, bending it sharply. The street was lined with rundown hotels. Shepherd got off the bus at the corner. He took a room in the Wolsey, a grim edifice with crumbling plaster and torn, yellowed curtains, paying cash in advance. The lumpy mattress felt like a waterbed, and he fell asleep instantly.

The following morning in Camp Springs, Maryland, Stephanie Shepherd’s station wagon came down Perimeter Road and turned into Ashwood Circle. She had driven her daughter to school, then delivered her piece on Congressman Gutherie to the Capitol Flyer offices. Unable to sleep after the reports of the air strike, she had worked late into the night on the article.

“Mrs. Shepherd?” a man’s voice called out softly as she got out of the station wagon.

Stephanie freed Jeffrey from his seat belt, and turned to see three air force officers approaching from a government car at the curb. One was a chaplain.

“Can we give you a hand with those?” he asked, gesturing to the groceries.

She had seen casualty notification teams knock on other doors; seen the solemn faces and somber cadence; and she knew before another word was said that something had happened to her husband.

“Yes. Thank you,” she replied evenly, recalling she had promised herself she would respond with dignity and strength should this moment ever come. She handed them the groceries, scooped up Jeffrey, and led the way inside. They sat in the den amid the military memorabilia and toys. Jeffrey began playing with a truck.

Stephanie couldn’t imagine the truth, nor could these officers tell her. Indeed, their emotion was genuine as they reported precisely what 3rd Air Force Command and Pentagon officials believed had happened.

“Your husband died in the service of his country,” the chaplain said.

“Yes, I know,” Stephanie replied weakly.

It was a common response. Families of men in combat often subconsciously accept their deaths as inevitable, in defense against the terrible shock.

“His one-eleven was hit by a surface-to-air missile during the raid on Libya,” one of the officers said. “We have no reports of the crew ejecting.”

“I understand,” Stephanie said, his words dispelling any hope that Shepherd might eventually be found alive. She tilted her head thoughtfully, taking small comfort in the knowledge that he had died doing what he loved.

“Major Shepherd’s effects will be forwarded as soon as possible,” said the other officer. “On behalf of the president and the United States Air Force, we extend our condolences and sympathy.”

“Thank you,” Stephanie said, voice cracking with emotion. “Thank you very much.”

“God bless you,” the chaplain said.

Stephanie responded with a fragile smile. She showed them to the door, closed it, and stood there traumatized, fingers knotted, the tears running in a steady stream down her cheeks, the shattering words echoing over and over, “Your husband died in the service of his country; your husband died in the service of; your husband died; died; died; died…”

She was pulling a sleeve across her eyes, trying to regain her composure when a toy truck rocketed across the floor, startling her. An instant later Jeffrey came crawling after it. He looked up at her, his head cocked to one side, open-faced and innocent. Her lower lip started to quiver, then the grief overwhelmed her. She slid to the floor numbly and hugged the child to her bosom.

That same day, on London’s Isle of Dogs, it was well past noon when Shepherd awoke to the sounds of the bustling waterfront streets below. He dragged his aching body out of bed and down the corridor to the bathroom. His elbow brushed the wall, sending a cascade of peeling paint chips onto the floor like confetti. The face that stared back from the cracked mirror startled him. He had a heavy growth of beard, a small bandage across one side of his forehead, and a purple discoloration on his jaw. He took a cold shower, which invigorated him, then headed for the nearest pub and ordered a roast beef sandwich and a cup of coffee.

The Great Auk’s Head on West Ferry was buzzing with the lunchtime crowd of dock workers, aproned market clerks, and seamen. The air strike on Libya was the topic of conversation; and the president of the United States was on the television above the bar, holding a press conference.

Shepherd watched in disbelief as the chief executive announced that he and Captain Foster had died in the raid on Tripoli. Despite the fact that he was alive, that assassins were hunting him down, the president was telling the world that he had died heroically. Shepherd didn’t know why; and he still didn’t know if those trying to kill him were spies, terrorists, or renegades within his own government; but he was certain that military, diplomatic, and law enforcement officials were to be avoided until he did. Having paid for the hotel, he had $43 in cash and no credit cards. The only people he could trust were unavailable: Brancato in a hospital bed; and Stephanie, 3,500 miles away. Shepherd glanced across the pub at the phone booth, aching to call her, aching to say, “Hi, babe, I’m alive. I love you. I need your help.” But he knew how they worked: their phone would be tapped; mail intercepted; family surveilled. Applegate had told him; he just failed to mention that his people would be doing it.

Shepherd sat there, absentmindedly stirring the coffee, searching for a way to contact her safely; and then the pieces began falling into place. Whoever they were, he would appear to play right into their hands; do exactly what they expected; their zeal and professionalism would do the rest. It was a long shot, but the risk factor was low and it was all he had. He finished the sandwich and returned to his hotel room. It was a dump, to be sure, but the sun streaming through the window gave him a good feeling. He took his cassette recorder from a pocket and turned it on.