Spy

Papa Top looked at Khan and nodded. The doctor lifted Congreve’s right hand and bent the fingers backward at an acute angle.

“How much of this does Hawke know?”

“All of it. None of it. Choose.”

“I repeat. How…much of this…does Hawke know? Hmm? How much?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Very good, Inspector. I think that will be all for tonight, unless the doctor has any further questions? No? Good. We’ll see you in the morning? Don’t try to sleep by the way. It will be useless given what’s in your veins.”

“Wait!”

“There’s more?”

“There’s a woman. In England. I want to say good-bye. Please. Pen and paper. While I can still write…”

Top stared down at him for a few seconds, then looked at Doctor Khan before answering him.

“The doctor says ‘no.’ He doesn’t believe you’re telling the truth about Hawke. I will ask once more. Did you communicate with your friend Alex Hawke after you’d decoded the letter in its entirety?”

“No. Give me the bloody paper.”

“I believe him,” Top said to one of the guards, heading for the door. “For now. Give him what he wants. We begin again in the morning.”

68

LEE’S FERRY, VIRGINIA

I t was snowing, bad, just like Homer had said on the phone, coming down so hard Franklin could barely make out the shoulders of the road he was driving on. You could only see intermittently, through the fan-shaped area of glass left by the wiper. Every time it squeegeed a fresh coat of damp white stuff off the windshield, he leaned forward to see where he was. Wet snow mixed with sleet, heavy, about a foot of it already baked to a firm white cake on the hood of his car.

He was hardly doing twenty now, just blowing a thin layer of frosting off the cake. Up ahead he saw flashing yellow lights in the whirling snow, moving slow along the shoulder. The big plows were out, but clearly Route 1 South was not a priority. Not with a major corridor like I-95 just a mile away to the west. Even with the conditions, he was glad Homer had told him to take the old road south. Less traffic to deal with, and nobody was going anywhere fast to begin with.

He leaned forward over the wheel and squinted, trying to peer through the swirling stuff. This stretch of road he was on would be pretty near impassable to anybody not driving a big SUV. Or, a rented Jeep Cherokee 4X4, the last car left at the Hertz counter at Reagan Airport. “It’s red, is that all right?” the Hertz girl had asked him. He told her red was his favorite color.

A few miles back he’d seen the sugar-coated green signs for General Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon, and then the town of Woodbridge, so he figured to be getting close. Route 1 was the old eastern seaboard road to the Capitol and time had passed it by. There were still places called the Three Oaks Motor Hotel, little log cabins built in the trees around a semi-circular drive. There was maybe an hour of sun left in the sky. Then it would be dark and much harder to find Morning Glory Farm.

He hoped Homer was in his vehicle with the heat on. Temperature had been dropping since he’d landed. He reached over and turned the heater fan to high, wished he had his leather gloves. Glad he’d worn his duster.

Okay, there it is, he said to himself, seeing a frosted sign for River Road in the yellow cones of his headlights. He took a left. Another sign said, Lee’s Ferry, 1 mile. Good, we’re in business. He slowed way down now, to a crawl. Big old trees, huge dark trunks, bare branches heavily laden with snow. And through them, the river. The farm should be coming up on his left pretty soon.

To his left, he saw, there was what had to be a split-rail fence under a mound of fresh snow and then a white wooden sign coming up that said Morning Glory Farm.

The drive came up fast and he braked too hard. The rear end fishtailed, caught up with the front end and then he was spinning, headed straight for the ditch. He eased his foot off the brake and slid around to a stop, the headlight beams aimed at a weird angle. Well. Bad start. He put the thing in low and gunned it. Tried reverse. The wheels just spun like he was on oily glass.

He cursed under his breath, shut the engine off, swung out of the car, and started climbing the hill on foot. Cowboy boots made the walking trickier than it had to be. No fresh tracks in the drive, but it was snowing so hard a car could have driven up this road twenty minutes ago and you wouldn’t know it.

There was a long sloping white meadow to his left as he climbed. Up on the summit, a pretty two-story white farmhouse with dark shutters on all the windows. Nice views of the woods and town to the west and down to the river to the east. It would be pretty dark in the house now, sun was almost down behind him, but there were no lights in any of the windows. No movement around the house, no smoke coming from the two tall brick chimneys at either end of the roof peak.

There was a heavily wooded area to his right.

He figured Homer’s vehicle to be parked deep in those woods, just over the ridge. Some kind of river access road maybe. A public boat launch? He angled off the drive into the woods as he got close to the top, moving slowly through the trees now, expecting to come upon Homer or his car at any moment. The footing here was more difficult, big drifts piled up beneath the trees, and by the time he’d reached the top of the hill he was breathing pretty hard.

He saw Homer’s car.

It was parked in the trees down near the black, slow-moving river and covered with snow. He started down toward it, an unreasonable uneasiness suddenly pinging at his brain. He’d last spoken to the boy, what, five hours ago? Still, that was a long time to sit in your car, waiting, snow blanketing your windows.

Homer had the bone in his teeth now, and Franklin knew how it felt. You wanted to see how it ended. You wanted to end it. Still, the sight of that car made him uneasy. He quickened his pace, slipping and sliding, holding onto branches to stay on his feet.

Homer was not in the car. The driver’s side door was hanging open. There was a lot of snow on the seat. On the dash and on the floor. Something was missing besides Homer. Yeah. The Mossburg shotgun was not in its mount under the dash.

Franklin stood up, breathing hard. There had been a small access road to the river, he’d crossed it coming down the hill. He started moving back up in that direction, the only one that made any sense, until he reached the road. The road angled through the woods down to the river. And there was the boat ramp. And there was the trailer truck they’d stopped that night outside of Prairie. Homer’s ghost rider, the Yankee Slugger. The trailer was backed down the incline, the rear wheels a few feet from the water’s edge. The tractor was facing this way, uphill, and the headlights were on. A few feet away, an idling forklift was parked on the slope.

On the ground in the pool of light was his deputy.

He was on his back, staring blindly up into the light from the truck’s headlamps. The snow on the ground around him was soaked bright red. About a foot from his outreached hand, the Mossburg was almost buried but still visible. This had happened just before he’d pulled off the road. Within the last fifteen minutes or so. Maybe while he was spinning into the ditch.

Homer was still breathing.

Rapid, shallow breaths, but he was alive.

“Homer?” he knelt down and cradled the boy’s head in his arms.

“You made it.”

“Don’t talk. We have to get you to a hospital.”

“Too late for that, Sheriff. Don’t worry about it.”

“Who did this?”

“It was—the son. I was watching them unload the truck. Putting the thing in the river. Tried to stop them. The older one, on the forklift, saw me come out of the woods. He—he yelled something and the son just turned around and shot me. I shot back. I think I killed him. That’s all there is to it.”

Homer’s eyes were going far away.

“You’re going to be okay, Homer. You hold on, son.”

“No, listen. You have to…wait. You have to hear about the thing they put in the river. It’s—bad.”

“What is it, Homer?”

“Some kind of—what. I don’t know. A baby submarine. High tech. Nobody inside. Leastways nobody got in the damn thing. Just like the truck…remote control.”

“Still there? The thing in the river?”

“Hell, no. Hit the water and started to submerge. Headed upriver. Going pretty fast, too, and it—it—”

“Which way? Which way was it headed?”

“North I think.”

“Towards Washington?”

“I can’t…I’m not…”

“Don’t talk, Homer. Stay with it. Stay with me.”

“Can’t. I got to go.”

“Homer?”

FRANKLIN SAT in the snow with the dead boy for a good five minutes. Just let the tears come since they wouldn’t stop no matter how hard he tried. Teardrops and snowflakes fell on the boy’s cheeks, still tinged pink with the icy cold. Then Dixon got to his feet and took his duster off. Covered his deputy with it. Watched the snow softly falling on the still form of his deputy for a minute or so. Bent down to grab a handful of the white stuff and rubbed it all over his face, knuckles digging into his eyes.

He stood and saw Homer’s hand sticking out under the duster. Boy’s pistol still in his hand. Franklin gently pried the gun from Homer’s cold fingers and stuck it in the small of his back, inside his jeans. He stood for a second, breathing deep, put his head back and looked straight up into the dark sky full of snow. There was maybe a half hour of daylight left.

After a minute, he picked up the Mossburg and walked around the truck to where a dead Arab kid lay face down in the snow. There was a wide pool of blood similar to the one spreading beneath Homer’s body. Bright red, but that’s where the similarities ended.

He jacked a fresh round into the shotgun’s chamber and looked up at the farmhouse on the hill. He smelled smoke. They must have a fire going inside now. It was certainly cold enough outside.

69

RIVER OF DOUBT

H awke stood alone at the stern, hands clasped behind his back. It was early afternoon, just half past one, local time, and the sun was blazing overhead. He gazed at the twisting wake trailing behind his stern, his feet planted wide against sudden yaw or pitch. He was thinking on how matters stood aboard his vessel. It was now twelve hours since they’d departed Manaus.

He’d managed a few hours sleep in his small cabin, then gone once more into the tiny and hastily organized “war room” to confer with Stokely, Gerard Brownlow, and his Fire Control Officer, a Welshman named Dylan Allegria. One problem, now remedied, had been the engines. Minor mechanical issue with one of the three, overheating, but troubling all the same. With two engines, the performance parameters of this boat went to hell.

The bloody River of Doubt was living up to, even beyond, expectations. The mood aboard Stiletto had degenerated from restless to apprehensive. Now, it was tense. They were late, that was part of it. Some aboard would argue privately they were lost as well. The sheer density of the forest and the endless uncharted tributaries spiking off the cocoa-colored river was creating confusion and sensory overload among his men.

This was certainly not abnormal for men going into battle. It was, Hawke knew, unusual for this handpicked group of warriors.

These men were, for the most part, seasoned fighters, battle-hardened veterans, recruited for their experience in modern guerilla warfare. Many had been flown to Key West from Martinique, home of Thunder and Lightning, a mercenary outfit without parallel in modern jungle warfare. To them, this was just another opportunity to beat unbeatable odds and snag a hefty paycheck.

The ante was raised, however, when it suddenly became a hostage rescue operation to boot. And it was no secret to anyone aboard that the hostage needing rescue was the closest man on earth to Alexander Hawke.

Hawke had overheard bickering in the crew’s mess. It wouldn’t do. In an hour’s time, he would gather them all in the wheelhouse. Show them his belief in them and this mission. His optimism. His absolute conviction that they could and would overcome every obstacle and succeed despite any difficulty. They would find Congreve alive and get him out. They would destroy Top. Put an end to his intentions, whatever the hell they were.

Nec aspera terrent, as the lads of the King’s Regiment have it. That’s what he would tell them. Difficulties be Damned.

They’d been slowed by the bloody engine repair; but now they were slowed by the very river itself. Twisting, turning, endless. They’d been steaming nearly fourteen hours on the smaller rivers now, since they’d left the wide Amazon. Many hours on the much smaller Madeira, and now they were headed due south on the comparatively narrow Rio Roosevelt.

Many natives still called it by its original name, the River of Doubt. Now he could see why.

The wilderness had closed in on the crew of Stiletto just as the sea closes over a diver. Hawke and his men felt cut off from all they’d ever known; each man felt as if he were on a journey back to the beginning of time. They had entered a brooding world of plants, water, and, except for the deep rumble of the engines, silence. Everywhere you looked, a riot of vegetation. The big trees were kings of the earth this deep in the jungle. The forest air was thick and sluggish. The only sunshine was directly overhead and little comfort.

He’d forgotten, or erased, his well-stocked stores of bad memories of this hellish place.

All afternoon they’d been butting against shoals, trying to find the channel. Hawke had posted two men on the bow, looking for signs of hidden banks and sunken stones, some sharp, unseen edge that would rip the bottom out of this otherworldly craft and doom what was left of his hopes. To make matters worse, he heard the roll of drums inside the curtain of jungle now. And whether they represented war or peace or prayer he had no idea.

Xucuru scouts, maybe. Announcing his return.

Kill you, kill you.

Hawke tried to tell himself he was only imagining a vengeful aspect to nature here, but he couldn’t do that either. Couldn’t shake the notion that even bloody nature was deliberately conspiring against him. He’d felt this dreamy notion during his captivity. And, the deeper Stiletto traveled into the jungle, the more reality seemed to fade. He pressed his fingertips deeply into his eye sockets and willed himself to stop this foolishness. Only looking into Top’s eyes would end this bloody nightmare. And that moment could not come soon enough.

Suddenly, Captain Girard Brownlow was standing beside him at the stern rail.

“Skipper, sorry to disturb you.”

“Not at all, Brownie.”

“At roughly 0330 we will be approaching a stretch of river where Brock has indicated submerged mines may be protecting the main enemy compound. I’m ordering the crew to deploy the mine probes in half an hour.”

“Good. Take her speed down to fifteen as well, Captain. Mr. Brock has been known to be less than precise.”

“Aye, sir. Anything I can do for you?”

“The PAM system,” Hawke said, his eyes scanning the thick green vegetation, “Death from above. Missiles armed and ready?”

“Aye. Fire Control Officer Lewis confirms both PAM and LAM systems up and functioning normally, Skipper. We are currently mapping and tracking two targets.”

“What targets?”

“Appear to be two small unmanned vehicles, sir. Couple of bots pulling guard duty, I’d say. Mr. Brock’s recon report identifies these vehicles as Ogres. Mobile machine guns on tracks, really. Operating on either bank, parallel course, equidistant from the river, outbound range one mile. Our companions for the last ten minutes, sir, matching our speed and corrections. We did heat signatures on both vehicles. They definitely appear to be unmanned. Scouts, we think.”

“So. The enemy already knows we’re coming.”

“That’s accurate, sir.”

“Tell fire control to monitor the scouts. As long as they’re running parallel courses, leave them alone. They turn toward us, threaten the boat, take them out.”

“Aye, aye, sir. I’ll inform Fire Control Officer Lewis immediately.”

Brownlow saluted smartly, left the stern, and went forward to convey Hawke’s orders to Lewis. Hawke looked at the two ungainly black boxes mounted side-by-side on his stern. State of the art, Harry Brock had told him, missiles in a box. He just hoped the bloody things were all they were cracked up to be. Brock was convinced they’d need them where they were headed. And Brock had procured them.

Harry Brock, Hawke said privately, was a bit of a piss artist.

The two men had worked together a year ago in Oman. Hawke had rescued Harry from a Chinese steamer carrying the CIA officer back to prison in China. Then, to his credit, Brock returned the favor, getting Hawke alive out of the bloody jungle. That made them even, which is the way Hawke liked it. He had never liked the feeling of being beholden to anyone.

But now Hawke would have to rely on Brock’s boots on the ground intel about the enemy’s exact location, defenses, and fortifications. Harry was coming aboard Hawke’s boat for the final leg of the journey. Stiletto would make an unscheduled stop tonight, just after nightfall, at an abandoned river outpost called Tupo. With any luck, Brock would be there as planned.

Hawke had entered uncharted territory. He’d never ventured this far down river during his captivity. Much as he hated to admit it, he needed Harry now. Navigation from this point onward would be exceedingly difficult without someone aboard who knew what physical landmarks to look for on the river. Maps were virtually useless. Because of flash flooding, the beds of rivers changed constantly. The rivers, forks, and tributaries had become indistinguishable. Some rivers were mined and some were not. Harry knew. It was Harry who’d told him about the armed drones and robotic weaponry. Harry who’d sold him the big black boxes on the stern.

PAMs were the fifteen Precision Attack Missiles mounted in a second 4X6X4-foot black container just aft of the wheelhouse. Fire and forget, meaning once a target was acquired, it was dead. Realizing that, in the jungle, there would be many targets the boat’s myriad sensors wouldn’t pick up, Hawke had also ordered this second NetFires missile system installed, the Loitering Attack Missile, or LAM.

These mini-cruise missiles were the same size and weight as a PAM missile. Unlike it, the LAM missile can fly around an assigned area for forty five minutes looking for a target. If none is acquired, the missile simply crashes. If a target is detected by its built-in Laser Radar system, Ladar, and the onboard software recognizes the target vehicle as an enemy one, the missile attacks from above. Its warhead is sufficient to take out all but the largest Main Battle Tanks of any known enemy force.

At that moment, a flying object struck the PAM box, hard, and fell to the deck at Hawke’s feet. Hawke bent to pick it up. It was an arrow. A long one, maybe four feet, which meant the Xucuru warrior who’d fired it was not too deep inside the wall of jungle. Hawke leapt up into the protected Fifty-caliber machine gun turret just in time. The air around the boat was suddenly filled with poison-tipped arrows, a cloud of them, flying from both banks. Most bounced harmlessly off the carbon fiber hull or superstructure and sank. Still, it was unpleasant and there was always a chance someone could get hurt.

Hawke pulled the headset on and barked into the mouthpiece, “Nav! You have water under the keel?”

They could easily outrun this attack; it was simply a matter of not running hard aground or ripping the bottom out.

“Aye, Skipper. But not much. Shoals are—”

“Stand by, Helm.” Hawke said, “I’ll deal with it.”

A burst of speed wasn’t worth the risk to the boat. And besides, he owed these Xucuru chaps or their brothers-in-arms big time. Pity his old friend Wajari wasn’t around to see this turn of events.

Hawke gripped the joystick that controlled his turret rotation, turned the bubble to starboard, and squeezed off a long burst. The noise of the twin fifty-caliber guns ripped the silence. The hot rounds shredded the vegetation in a very satisfying manner. Another burst, then he swung the twin-guns over to the portside banks and opened up once more. The guns effect on the hidden Indians was instantly apparent. No more arrows from either side of the river. They were either all dead or had melted back into the forest.

The white devil had arrived.

“Heads up, Skipper, we’ve got a visitor,” Brownlow’s voice said in his earphones.

“What do you have now, Cap?” Hawke climbed down out of the enclosed gun mount and started moving quickly forward toward the wheelhouse.

“We’ve got a drone aircraft coming our way, sir. Flying straight toward us, nose-to-nose. Right down on the deck.”

“Range?”

“Uh, he’s a mile out now and closing. Altitude twenty-one feet. We should have visual contact any second now.”

“I’ve got him,” Hawke said, ducking inside the wheelhouse after spotting the drone’s approach. He moved quickly to the helm and stood beside Brownlow who was driving the boat. Both men were peering through the glass, watching the tiny spec a few feet above the water grow larger. Hawke grabbed the Zeiss binocs sitting atop the binnacle.

The drone looked like an upside down spoon with wings. Made of lightweight metals and composite plastic, driven by a small, propeller driven engine, the craft was painted a dull gray and had a top speed of only 150 mph.

Hawke said, “Definitely a drone recon. A UAV, streaming live video back to the command base, wherever that may be. It’s armed. Two Air-to-Ground Hellfire-type missiles on the wingtips.”

“Take him out, Skipper?” Lewis said.

“He’s currently broadcasting our arrival. Let’s give the folks crowded around the telly back home a great big bang.”

“Roger, that’s okay to launch.”

“Affirmative,” Hawke said, “Let’s see if these bloody things work.”

A second later, a red-tipped PAM missile screamed out of its launch container, streaking skyward. At an altitude of one hundred feet, the slender projectile nosed over and dove straight down toward its locked in prey. The men in Stiletto’s wheelhouse held their collective breath. This technology was so new it even smelled new.

Half a mile upriver, the air was split by a sharp crack as an intense ball of flame erupted about twenty feet above the river. The shockwave of the exploding warhead could be felt a second later by everyone aboard Stiletto. Spontaneous whoops of applause and high-fives erupted amongst the crew. The crew now knew that at least they had one effective weapons system aboard this as yet un-battle-tested warship.

“Nice shooting, Mr. Lewis,” Hawke said.

“Ducks in a pond, sir,” Lewis replied.

“That won’t last long, Mr. Lewis. Stow that attitude.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

70

LEE’S FERRY, VIRGINIA

T here was smoke rising above the farmhouse. But it wasn’t coming from the chimneys. Black smoke, thick and acrid, was pouring from the three dormer windows up on the second floor. Franklin could see licks of fire starting to race along up under the eaves, climbing up the shingled roof, pools of flame spreading rapidly up to the peak, like hot liquid running uphill, melting the snow.

Franklin slogged up the hill as fast as he could, the crusty snow up to his knees as he climbed. There was one entrance on this back side of the house. Looked to be the kitchen, a big bow window and one of those double-dutch doors. No lights on in the kitchen, even though it had suddenly gotten very dark on the hillside.

The sheriff paused at the top of the brick steps, listening for any sound from inside. All he could hear was the crackling noise of the shingled roof burning, snapping and popping, growing louder every second. The wooden farmhouse had to be almost two hundred years old. It would not take long to burn to the ground. Along with any contents that might prove useful. The inhabitants, he figured, were gone. Out the front door, maybe. A car hidden in the barn he’d seen on the way in?

Maybe not.

The door was slightly ajar.

Franklin kicked the door open wide, nearly taking it off the hinges. Adrenaline fueled his anger, still seeing Homer’s pink cheeks with the snow on them. He went through the door in a blizzard of snow, the shotgun out in front of him, eyes scanning what looked to be a deserted room. Kitchen counters to his right, stovetops set in a bricked center island with a copper hood above it.

“Police, freeze,” he said, putting his gun on a woman slumped over a kitchen table. She’d been sitting near the bow window. She was pitched forward, arms hanging at her sides, her head down on the table. Her shoulders were heaving, and he knew she was sobbing, even though he couldn’t hear her. Strands of wild dark hair hid her face. Her hands were under the table. The right arm twitched.

“I need to see your hands, ma’am.”

“You killed my son,” she said, her head and twisted face slowly coming up from the table. “My son!” She stiffened in the chair, turning away from the window and the bloody scene below to stare at him. Hatred burning through the tears streaming from her eyes. Righteous fury.

Franklin steadied the gun on her. “Your son killed a police officer. Get your hands up where I can see them. Now! Do it now!”

“You want to see my hands?” she said, her voice shaking.

She rose up suddenly, leaping up from the chair and overturning the heavy table, dishes and glassware crashing to the floor, the stubby 9mm machine pistol coming up with her body.

“Drop the weapon!” Franklin said, sidestepping to get nearer to the door.

“Allahu Akbar!” she shouted, her voice raw with grief and hate. “God is great!”

Mad despair in her black eyes as she pulled the trigger two, three times. Franklin was moving fast now and the shots were going wide and high but she was still staggering toward him, the gun extended at the end of her arm, firing blindly in his direction. She found the selector switch for full auto. He had no choice. Franklin dropped to one knee and shot the woman in the chest, killing her instantly. Her body was thrown backwards onto the floor, collapsing among the broken bits and pieces of china scattered there.

Franklin rose to his feet and left the kitchen, headed toward the front of the house. Where was the husband? Passing through the darkened dining room, he saw a litter of take-out food strewn across the pretty cherry table. The smoke in the house was strong now, burning his eyes. The fire had spread to the inner walls. He pumped a round into the chamber and raced into the living room.

The drapes on either side of the large picture window on the west-facing wall were aflame. Two large overstuffed chairs were also burning, and the hooked rug beneath them was steaming, primed to ignite.

And there was a roaring fire in the fireplace.

Not wooden logs, but masses of documents were burning there. Sheaves of paper, only recently thrown in by the looks of it. Most of the documents were already turning to ash, but not all. Also in the iron grate, three laptop computers hissed and melted, dripping molten black plastic that hit the hot stone hearth with a sizzle.

Franklin cleared the room of hostiles with his eyes before placing the Mossburg on the mantel. Then he quickly bent to retrieve what he could from the flames. He reached into the fire and managed to pull a handful of loose paper out, still burning his fingers and singeing all the hair off his forearm. He was reaching in again, realizing that his shirtsleeves were burning, when he saw the shoes, then the khaki legs of the man coming down the stairway leading to the second floor. Now his belt, now his torso…

No time to grab the shotgun.

He turned and faced him, letting the burning papers fall to the floor behind the sofa. He moved his right foot slowly, not lifting his heel, stamping out the papers with his boot, saving what he could.

The man in the red cardigan sweater was smiling as he came toward Franklin, kicking away furniture. The sheriff had seen the man’s eyes light for a moment on the shotgun sitting atop the mantelpiece. He could have been a lawyer or a banker, a pediatrician come down from checking on the sick kids upstairs in their beds. But he wasn’t. He had his finger on the trigger of the semi-automatic rifle in his hands, a 30-round banana clip waiting to be expended on a long Texas sheriff.

In his other hand was a five-gallon plastic jerry can of gasoline. Gas was sloshing out of the can as the man descended the stairs and crossed the room.

“Put down the weapon, sir,” Franklin said, moving behind the heavy sofa.

Red Sweater shouted something, a curse, in Arabic, and then heaved the half-empty can of gasoline toward the window with the burning draperies. The whole wall erupted into flames.

The sheriff used the moment to dive behind the large velvet sofa. The staccato sound of automatic fire filled the room. Franklin hit the wooden floor hard, using his shoulder to break the fall. He could hear and feel the thump of rounds slamming into the furniture as he rolled away, his right hand going behind his back, going for Homer’s Glock, stuck inside his waistband. The man kept firing, short bursts, into the sofa. He felt the pistol stuck in his jeans and pulled it, got it out in front of him.

Gun in hand, he rolled onto his stomach and peered beneath the wide sofa.

Two feet in brown shoes, sagging orange socks, moving toward his end of the sofa.

Franklin put one round into each ankle.

The man screamed out his sudden agony as he came down hard before the stone hearth. Franklin was on his feet and moving around the end of the couch. The Arab was on his back, somehow grinning through all the pain as he moved the muzzle of his weapon toward Franklin. The two men locked eyes.

The Arab fired, point blank range, the round grazing Dixon’s forehead. It stung, dizzied him for an instant, but he stayed with it, stayed on his feet. Warm blood was running into his eyes, but he saw the man’s finger tighten around the trigger.

The sheriff put one round in the center of the man’s forehead.

He stood there a second, woozy, his heart thudding in his chest. He looked around him. Fire was racing up the four walls now. The timbered ceiling above his head was steaming, the paint curling and peeling. It was seconds away from bursting into flames. Time to go. Franklin stuck the pistol back inside his waistband, then gathered up the shotgun and grabbed the smoldering papers he’d saved from the floor. Then he raced back into the kitchen. The fire had not yet reached this side of the house. At least not the ground floor kitchen.

There was an old-fashioned black phone on the island. It was probably the one Homer had used eight hours ago, standing here, calmly eating an apple from the pantry, watching the gentle snowfall outside.

He put the papers down beside the phone. There were at least a dozen or more, some ruined completely, others intact. He scanned each one, his eyes running uselessly over the Arabic print mixed with unintelligible scraps of English. One of them, half-burned, caught his eye. It was a map of some kind with notations in red ink. He looked at it carefully, holding it up to his eyes, then picked up the phone and called information. He got a human for some reason. He asked for a number in Washington and got it.

He studied the exposed beam over his head while he waited. It looked hot.

“Federal Bureau of Investigation, how may I direct your call?”

He explained who he was and why he was calling to three people before getting put on hold a fourth time. Then he hung up and called the State Department and asked for Secretary de los Reyes, explaining that he was a law officer and personal friend, and that she would recognize the name from the Key West conference. And that this was an urgent emergency call involving national security.

“Sheriff Dixon, this is Consuelo de los Reyes,” he heard her say after a minute or so. “Thank you for calling.”

“Yes ma’am, thank you for taking my call. I can’t talk long because the house I’m standing in is on fire.”

“Sheriff, you’ve got to get out—”

“Please, ma’am, it’s important, just let me talk here a second. I’m at place called Morning Glory Farm. Lee’s Ferry, Virginia. It’s on the River Road north of Fredericksburg. I’ve got one dead—”

“What river are we talking about, Sheriff Dixon?”

“Uh, well, I’m not rightly sure. I guess the Potomac.”

“The Potomac River, go ahead.”

“Like I say, we need a coroner out here. EMS. I got a dead deputy. Two dead Arabs, maybe three. They put some kind of device in the river. Homer believed it to be an unmanned submarine.”

“Homer?”

“My late deputy.”

“Sheriff, hold on for one second please, I’m asking for some of my people here to pick up and listen in. Fire and EMS vehicles are already en route to your location. And State Police.”

“Yes, ma’am. Anyway, like I said, my deputy saw this high tech submarine they carried in the truck. The wood crate it came out of, it’s about the size of a small Volkswagen. One more thing, before I go. These people were burning documents and computers, but I saved what I could. I have one paper in my hand right now. Burned piece of a map of Washington with a squiggly red line on it, and the words, parade route.”

“Parade route. Everyone get that?” de los Reyes asked her people listening in.

“And, trucks. There may be a lot of tractor-trailer trucks headed your way. No drivers, I don’t think. I’m guessing they’re remote controlled too. I don’t know what they’re hauling, but it probably isn’t good.”

“Get out of that house, Sheriff. Local police and FBI agents from Quantico are en route to your location right now. Do not endanger yourself, but take every scrap of paper possible and give it to the FBI team. Tell them everything you know.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ve got to go. This beam here is about to give way on me.”

“Go. Get out.”

“These people killed a boy who was pretty near kin to me. I’d like to help out up there if I can.”

“I’ll make sure you get to Washington. We’ll put you to work, don’t worry. We’re pretty busy around here because of the Inauguration.”

“Inauguration. When is that exactly?”

“Day after tomorrow, Sheriff.”

71

THE BLACK RIVER

I ’d rather go down the river with seven studs than with a hundred shitheads.”

The little Frenchman laughed. “C’est geniale! Brilliant!”

“I’m not making this stuff up, Froggy,” Stoke said to his old war buddy, “You know who said that? The founder of fuckin’ Delta Force, that’s who. Charlie Beckwith.”

“A tough guy, non? A legend, this man Beckwith. Even in France.”

“Even in France,” Stoke said looking at him in mock amazement, “Imagine that, will you? Hey, Frogman, listen to me,” Stoke said, suddenly dead serious. “We still got a lot of shit to figure out, mon ami. We’re going up against some true pencil-dick assholes in this frigging jungle. And we ain’t got a whole lot of time left to screw around here.”

Stoke had seen the worried look on Alex Hawke’s face a few hours ago. The rivers weren’t always where they were supposed to be. Every time it rained hard, the topography changed. The latest GPS positioning had the boat smack in the middle of a damn forest. So, he was feeling a little guilty, hanging out back here on the stern with Froggy, having fun.

The two men were sitting cross-legged on the deck in the cramped space between the PAM and LAM missile launching stations. A scattering of dog-eared playing cards lay face up on the deck between them; a game of Texas Hold ’Em had ended. For the last half hour they’d just been shooting the shit. That’s how the little Frenchman put it, now that he’d learned another useful American expression.

It was late afternoon on the river, and the light was soft and gold. Cooler, too, and not too many mosquitoes at their current boat speed. Temperature dropping, somebody said, barometer dropping like a rock; you could feel the evil-looking cold front moving in over the jungle from the west. Heavy rain, high winds. For now, the palm fronds of trees along the bank drooped low, not a breath of air to sway them.

Captain Brownlow and Hawke remained on the bridge deck, taking turns driving the boat. Navigation at this point was a full-time obsession. And they were constantly talking tactics and adjusting strategies to changing conditions. The ability to arrive undetected on a hostile shore is essential. There was little hope of that now they’d been sighted by that drone they’d shot down.

Gunners were stationed in the turrets fore and aft. Every man aboard was armed and keeping a weather eye on the twin shorelines. For the last couple of hours they’d been lucky. No Indians, no drones, no nothing. Stiletto was bristling with firepower.

A young guy named Llywd Ecclestone was manning the .23 mm cannon up on the roof of the wheelhouse. Just a kid, Stoke thought, but the ex-Ranger came highly recommended by Froggy. “Hey,” Stoke said when he’d met the kid in Key West and seen the name stencilled on his flak jacket, “Your parents forget to put an o in your name?” Turned out Llwyd was Welsh, people who didn’t go in for vowels much.

Froggy, barely five feet tall in combat boots, was one of the charter members of the infamous counterterrorist organization known as Thunder and Lightning. The former Foreign Legionnaire commanded the group of seven Spec Ops commandos who had come aboard at Key West. These warriors, all ex-Legionnaires, Gurkhas, and Rangers, were justly considered the best anti-terrorist combat team for hire. As an added bonus, Froggy and his squad were by far the most successful freelance hostage rescue team in the world.

Froggy, the HRT team’s beloved squad leader, was dressed in his typical pre-combat uniform: khaki shorts, a faded blue and gold U.S. Navy SEAL T-shirt, and a sterling silver bo’sun’s whistle hanging from the chain around his neck. He had his trademark white kepi perched atop his shaved head and his trademark cigarette dangling from his lower lip.

Froggy puffed out a cloud of pungent blue smoke and noisily spat the stinky Gauloise butt overboard.

“Dites-moi,” he said, and then added in his heavy French accent, “Tell me about these assholes we’re going to fight. Just don’t speak so fucking fast.”

“Okay. These people we’re dealing with down here, been psyching themselves up about this for years. You’ll hear all about it tonight from Harry Brock. What you’ve got down here is a lethal mix of guerillas, okay? You got bikers and bangers, dopers and fanatic voodoo jihadists. And old-style commies, too, all tied into one neat little bundle, right? Now, what does that tell you?”

“What?”

“They’ve all got one thing in common. What is it?”

“They suck?”

“Of course they suck. But, one other thing. They all hate America.”

“Join zee fucking club, eh?”

“People like this, all these scumbags hating your ass so bad, that tells you something, right?”

“Tells me what?”

“America must be a pretty great fuckin country.”

“Pfft. If you like this kind of country, perhaps. America is no France.”

“Thank God for small favors. Anyway, these crazy bastards hate our ass, Froggy. And, to make it worse, they’re filthy rich. Twisted ideology is one thing. You back it up with oil money, drug money, illegal arms money, white slavery, it’s something else. Brock says they’ve got robots. Drone aircraft, tanks. How do we kill robots?”

The demolitions expert grinned. “Anything can be blown up, mon ami, anything.”

“Chrome don’t bleed.”

“Mais non, but it melts.”

“I guess. Problem is, we got to get my man Ambrose Congreve out of there before we blow up one damn thing. I hope Brock’s got a plan. I’m still not seeing exactly how that’s going to happen.”

“I’ve been talking to my squad about this subject all morning. We have an idea.”

“Don’t be shy. We ain’t got a lot of time.”

“We want you to offload us late tonight. A stealth insertion into the jungle. All eight of us. Upriver from the target compound. Four or five miles. I’ll show you on the map, the precise spot I have chosen. We will hike to the target through the jungle. Standard Operating Procedures. Night-vision gear, hand signals. Locate the hostage. Rendezvous with the main force above the bridge. Deliver the hostage to the boat and get him out of the combat zone. Then destroy the enemy.”

“Yeah. Sounds simple enough. How you plan to do all that shit, Froggy?”

“Take out the perimeter guards first, of course. Swift and silent. Infiltrate the village. Do a search. House-to-house. We’ll find your friend Ambrose, I promise you. With or without Monsieur Brock.”

“Brock’s Brazilian girlfriend says the whole damn enemy village is built up in the damn trees. Like a goddamn Swiss Family Robinson.”

“What goes up must come down, Stokely. Boom.”

Stoke nodded in agreement. “Plant Semtex gift boxes at the base of all the trees. Bury the linked fuses between trees, all feeding one detonator.”

“Boom, boom, boom.”

“Plastique, n’est ce pas, Froggy? Tim-berrrr! But look at these trees around here. They’ve got to be two hundred feet tall.”

“So? Kiss-kiss-bang-bang. Et voilà! Victory is ours once more.”

“Froggy, listen. This ain’t going to be as easy as you seem to think. We’ve got to find out where they have Ambrose first, right? Let’s assume he’s up in one of the treehouses. We have to locate which one. Get him down safely and get him the hell out of there before the shooting starts and—What? Don’t look at me like that.”

“I am zee famous Froggy. Do not insult me.”

“Chill. I’m just talking out loud. Hear how it sounds.”

“If he can be found, we will find him.”

“You sound like you don’t think I’m coming with you.”

“You want to come?”

“Is Paris a city? Two four-man squads. You take one, I’ll take the other. Fan out, go in. Hop and pop, just like the good old days, mi Corazon.”

“We must talk now to Commander Hawke and tell him what we think.”

“Yeah. Holy shit. What was that?”

Stiletto had shuddered to a halt, mid-river.

“What is it? We run out of river?”

“Dead stop. Something’s wrong. Let’s get forward.”

Hawke and Brownlow stood at the helm.

“Stoke,” Hawke said as they entered, “Take a look at this.”

Stoke joined him. “Aw, shit. Blockade.”

He was looking at the Indian war party two hundred yards further downriver. A solid phalanx of war canoes was waiting for them. Had to be a hundred canoes, rafted up, row after row of them, twelve abreast, covering the entire width of the river at its narrowest point. Completely blocking the river.

Waves of canoes stretched back, maybe twenty, thirty rows deep. It was hard to see just how many were waiting in the evening light. The dugouts were decked out in all kind of exotic combat regalia, flaming torches hung at the bow and stern, each boat loaded to the gunnels with painted warriors ready to rumble in the jungle.

Right now they were just beating the drums. Soon, the whole concert would get under way. Seemed like they only knew one tune, stuck in a groove.

Kill you, kill you.

Hawke said, “What do you think, Stoke? We’re already two hours late for our scheduled pickup of Brock. If he thinks we’re not coming and bolts, we’re finished.”

“Slow down. But don’t shoot.”

“No? Why not?” Brownlow said, “We’re being attacked. We could blow through those dugouts like a knife through butter.”

“Not in these shoals, you can’t. Besides, it’s not necessary,” Stoke said. “As long as everybody stays locked inside the boat, what can they do? Bounce spears and poison darts off the windows all night, that’s about it. Let’s just keep moving. Slow.”

“He’s right, Brownie,” Hawke said. Then, into his mike, “Crew. Clear decks and batten her down. Everyone get below and stay there. Do not engage the enemy.”

It took a minute or two to get everyone shut down inside.

“Not a lot of water under our keel, Skipper,” Brownlow said, pointing at the monitor displaying a depth-sounder’s 3-D depiction of the river bottom ahead. Ugly shoals filled the screen, a narrow channel snaked forward. It was barely wide enough to accommodate their slender beam.

“Look at those bloody shoals,” Hawke said. “The Xucuru picked this location deliberately. We’ll go through them dead slow.”

“Yeah,” Stoke said, “Keep us moving, Brownie. Rule of tonnage. You get hit by a truck, you get run over, kemosabe. We just stay in the channel, let them do what they gotta do.”

“One problem with that idea,” Hawke said, eyes on the canoes a hundred yards ahead, “At this slow speed they’ll board us. They’ll be climbing all over the damn boat.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Stoke said, “Stop the boat.”

“Spit it out,” Hawke said, watching the Indians through the night vision binocs now. The sun went down in a hurry on the river. Stoke looked at him and smiled.

“First, we disable our deck guns, lock up the missile boxes. Not that these fellas could use them, but still.”

“This plan sounds bad so far,” Hawke said.

“Wait. Then, we break out the carpet tacks.”

Brownlow said, “Did he just say, ‘carpet tacks’?”

“He did,” Hawke said, looking carefully at his friend.

“Secret weapon,” Stoke said, “Little low-tech trick I picked up on the dock in Manaus. Back in a flash.”

Stoke left the bridge and disappeared below. While he was gone, Stiletto was locked down, all exterior weapons systems disabled, hatches closed and locked. A few minutes later Stoke reappeared on the bow, a heavy sack of carpet tacks on each shoulder. He was moving slowly, emptying the canvas sacks. He was laying down a thick carpet of tacks on the decks, all the way from bow to stern on the starboard side. Then he repeated the process on the port side, smiling through the window as he headed aft, spilling his tacks. When he was finished, he climbed the ladder and used the remaining tacks to cover the wheelhouse roof.

“That ought to do it,” Stoke said, dropping down into the wheelhouse a minute later. You may proceed whenever you’re ready, Cap’n Brownlow.”

“What the hell, Stoke?” Hawke asked and Stokely just smiled.

“Skipper?” Brownlow said, “Ready?”

“All ahead dead slow, Brownie,” Hawke said, “Easy as she goes, no course deviation.”

The waiting flotilla war party saw what Stiletto was doing. The otherworldly thing was advancing upon them, slowly, despite their blockade. Instantly, they unleashed the first wave of poison-tipped arrows toward the oncoming black boat. Those weapons expended, the archers gave way to a second force of warriors who stood and elevated their long blowguns.

Inside the wheelhouse, the noise was akin to being attacked by swarms of steel locusts, the incessant smacking noise of darts and arrows hitting carbon fiber. Stiletto had now sailed directly into the main force, encircled within the huge logjam of war canoes. The Xucuru were in full war cry, howling, giving vent to their frustration by banging with their fists on the sides of the sleek hull. Crude grappling lines made of twisted vines were thrown aboard the slowly moving powerboat. War canoes pulled alongside and warriors scrambled up the lines to the decks.

“They’re boarding us, Skipper,” Brownlow said under his breath. “Christ, they’re all over the damn boat.”

Screaming savages with torches appeared at the wheelhouse windows. The sounds coming from the howling Xucuru warriors were screams of anguish, not cries of war. The Xucuru appeared to be bouncing up and down beyond the windows; they hopped madly from one foot to the other on the carpet of tacks, grabbing their feet, howling and yipping in pain.

“Not staying long, I shouldn’t think,” Hawke said, grinning at Stokely.

“Look like they’re hopping mad out there,” Stoke said.

Most of the Xucuru, upon encountering Stoke’s unpleasant surprise, leapt immediately back into the river. Those few who remained, faces illuminated by torches, were yelping and beating angrily on the wheelhouse windows. Hawke thumbed a switch overhead and all the interior lights were doused. The deck lights remained on. Now they could see the attackers clearly.

Brownlow said, grinning, “We’ve got a million dollars worth of high-tech weaponry on this boat. But that was one hell of an idea, Stoke.”

“Best security system you can buy for four dollars a bag.”

A few seconds later, all the Xucurus were abandoning ship. Ten, fifteen, twenty leapt from the decks of Stiletto and into the Black River. No more boarded after that.

Brownlow looked at the surface of the river. The water was alive, frothing with darting and biting piranhas, swarms of them, lured by the sudden abundance of human blood in the water. The Xucuru, screaming, clawed the water, desperate to reach shore.

“Captain Brownlow, the river looks clear ahead,” Hawke said. “Let’s go get Mr. Brock. All ahead full.”

“All ahead full.”

Night had fallen in the jungle.

Soon, the torches of the war canoes and the cries of angry warriors were left astern, disappearing in the gloom.

Stiletto surged ahead, piercing the darkness, setting her course straight for the heart of the enemy.

72

WASHINGTON, DC

A ir Force One lands some where around here, doesn’t it? I’ve seen that on the news a few times.”

“Eighty-ninth Airlift Wing. Right over there, Sheriff,” Consuelo de los Reyes said, pointing out a large hangar complex across the wide, snow-covered tarmac to their left.

The Secretary of State and Sheriff Franklin W. Dixon were in the middle seat of the heavily armored black Chevy Suburban. There were two DSS agents from the Diplomatic Security Service up front and behind them three more. They were riding in one of six identical vehicles, their rooftops all bristling with antennas and sat dishes.

The convoy was just now exiting the main entry gate at Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland. Consuelo de los Reyes had been one of the small group of people standing in the freezing cold on the tarmac when the FBI chopper transporting Sheriff Dixon had touched down at Andrews ten minutes earlier. She had greeted the sheriff warmly, and expressed her condolences about the death of his deputy, Homer Prudhomme, in the line of duty.

His death had not been in vain, she told Dixon, and indeed Deputy Prudhomme was most likely going to receive a posthumous citation for bravery. Sheriff Dixon had told de los Reyes he’d like to handle all the funeral arrangements, take the boy back home to Texas with him.

“I’ll make arrangements for you and the deputy to fly home together, Sheriff.”

“’Preciate it. What’d they do about that truck?” Dixon asked.

“They’re putting it on a flatbed and taking it to Quantico. The technicians will take it apart bit by bit, see what makes it tick.”

“Making it tick. I hope that’s not a bomb.”

“We all do, Sheriff.”

As the convoy turned left and moved slowly through the small town of Morningside, heading northwest, Dixon was peering through the heavily tinted windows, trying to gather his thoughts and clear his head. The gunshot wound he’d received to the head had been purely superficial. A crease on his forehead. The EMS had stitched it up, splashed some brown stuff on it, and put a bandage over it. It still hurt pretty bad. More like a bad headache than a gunshot wound. He hadn’t had much sleep, either.

And it didn’t look like he was going to get much anytime soon.

“Where are we headed now?” he asked.

“There are some people at the White House who would like to speak to you.”

“We’re going to the White House?”

She nodded. “I’ve got a scheduled meeting there. They said you may as well come along. Tell me about that truck, Sheriff. How you came to find it.”

“We pulled the first one about three weeks ago. Homer insisted on calling it the Ghost Rider because we couldn’t find the driver anywhere. I thought he’d just run off into the desert. I’m afraid I didn’t do too good a job of looking for him. That was the night we found the, uh, my posse.”

“I know all about that, Sheriff. I’m terribly sorry about what happened to those brave boys. But I need to know everything you can tell me about those trucks before we go into this meeting with the President’s security people.”

“Homer stayed with it, no matter what I said. According to Wyatt Cooper, one of my deputies who talked to Homer, he followed one truck down to a town called Gunbarrel, right on the Rio Grande. That’s where they were coming across the border. They’d built a huge tunnel underground, came up inside a deserted warehouse.”

“They? Who built it?”

“Well, apparently, Mexicans, since that’s where the tunnel is from. But there was a fella from Prairie who was in it with them on the American side. Local man named J.T.Rawls. He must have been the one ran the operation on this side of the border.”

“What kind of operation? Had to be smuggling?”

“That’s what Homer told my deputy. I think they were bringing drugs in originally. Drugs and illegals. Had to be a pretty big outfit, too, all the money that must have been spent on that warehouse.”

“And a tunnel that size. We don’t understand the remote controlled aspect of these trucks. Tell me about that.”

“Heck, I don’t understand it either. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, the coyotes bringing in illegals that way. Or, drugs for that matter. Drivers and mules are dirt cheap down there. Expendable, too.”

“The one you found in Lee’s Ferry. The deputy told you that a small submarine had been placed in the river.”

“Yep. That’s what he told me.”

“He believed it to be an unmanned craft?”

“Yes he did. Said it took off with no one inside.”

“How’d you come to be there? At the farm.”

“Homer called me from the house where the terrorists were living. Right after I’d got back from your conference. My wife picked me up in San Antonio. She’d followed another truck herself up there. To San Antonio. Same black windows.”

“Where is that truck now?”

“I reckon she’s still looking for it. I haven’t had a chance to call her. Or, even Wyatt to tell him about Homer.”

“How do we get in touch with Mr. Cooper? We’ll do that for you. We’d like to speak with him as well.”

He gave her the Sheriff’s Office number at the Court House. The Secretary leaned forward and whispered to an agent in the front seat. Then she turned back to him.

“Homer told you there were a lot of trucks headed north?”

“Yes, ma’am. He said he’d followed about two dozen trucks out of Gunbarrel, moving in a convoy, all headed the same direction. They split up along the way. Taking different routes. He finally picked one and followed it to Virginia.”

“Northeast? All the trucks were headed that way? No one going south. Or, west?”

“He said north, ma’am.”

“He picked one truck and stuck with it all the way to Virginia.”

“He did.”

“The people living in the farmhouse. The doctor and his family. Tell me about them.”

“He was a doctor?”

“A pediatrician. Iranian. They’d been living in that house for four years. The son was in law school.”

“Well. A doctor. That’s something. You never know, I guess.”

“Don’t worry. We deeded the farm all the way back to a German ambassador and a small holding company in Dubai. This Iranian family, they were sleepers, all right. What your deputy did was the right thing. You, too.”

“You find that sub?”

“Not yet. We’ve got divers and salvage operations out from Fredericksburg all the way north to D.C.”

“It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“It’s always bad. Especially now that we’ve got the Inauguration coming up. Everybody’s a little tense. I’ve got to make a few phone calls, Sheriff. You put your head back and take it easy. We should be there in half an hour.”

73

S now day, huh?” Metro Patrolman Joe Pastore said. “Remember Snow Days?”

“The best, Joey,” his partner, Tom Darius said. “Man. I loved Snow Days. More than life.”

Joe said, “Snow forts. Snow wars. Your kids’ school close down, too?”

“It was on the radio at six or something, just as I was leaving the house. I think every school in DC is closed. Look at this shit coming down. Has to be a couple of feet already, right?”

“I hope it keeps snowing. Right through the frigging Inauguration. That way people will stay home and watch it on TV. Make our lives a whole lot easier, right? Hey! Watch out for that truck! You see that guy?”

“Is this fruit nuts?” DC uniformed Patrolman Tommy Darius said to his partner, Pastore, who was driving the cruiser. A huge tractor-trailer truck had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, turning into the road right in front of them, barely visible in the swirling snow.

Joey laughed and hit the brakes, nodding his head. Is this fruit nuts? You have to ride around in a car all day, it better be with someone funny. Like Tommy. The two of them had been together ever since the academy, hell, every since grade school in Silver Spring. Inseparable, even back in the day. Next-door neighbors. Spitshooters. Hellraisers. Crimebusters. Partners to the end. Close, that’s what they always said. Like wallpaper to a wall.

Their DC squad car, a white Crown Vic, followed the big tractor-trailer along a winding wooded road in the middle of Rock Creek Park. There were few people using the vast park today, because of the snowfall. They’d seen a few hikers, a couple of hardy folks on horseback, riding through the huge mounds of snow drifted up under the trees.

Darius and Pastore began following the truck on North Waterside Drive, headed southeast, the only two vehicles on the road. They’d only passed one other vehicle, a big Lexus SUV, going the other way. Not only were trucks not allowed in the park, ever, they especially weren’t allowed on Waterside. That’s because the damn drive was closed, all the way from Massachusetts Avenue to Rock Creek Parkway. Clearly marked “Closed,” and here was this guy.

Now the guy braked and hung a right on Beach Drive, going wide, and headed toward the Riley Spring Bridge.

“Hit the lights, Tommy,” Pastore said, “I’ve had enough of this dick-head.”

“Yeah, let’s pull him,” Darius said, firing up the light bar and red flashers. “Then we’ll go get some supper.”

This driver of this rig, who was apparently hauling frozen seafood from Louisiana, was either lost or smoked up or both. “Crawdaddy & Co.,” that’s what it said on the truck. Big pink crawfish or something painted on the back and sides. Didn’t look all that tasty. Looked more like big bugs.

The guy was crawling through the park, ten miles an hour, pausing to stop at every intersection and then proceeding through it, moving along as if he owned the road. The truck being from way down south in Louisiana, Darius and Pastore assumed nobody’d told this ragin’ Cajun that this was a National park, run by the Department of the Interior, and trucks weren’t welcome.

“He’s not stopping, Joey. What do you want me to do?”

“I’ll pull along side this asshole. Roll your window down and flag him over to the shoulder.”

“It’s fuckin freezing out there, Joe.”

“Just do it.”

“He won’t stop. Look at those tints. Thinks he’s a movie star. We ought to bust him for those limo windows, too.”

“He stops at stop signs but he won’t stop for us. Jesus.”

“Hey! Watch it! You trying to kill me?”

Joey had pulled one car length ahead of the truck’s cab, then put the wheel hard over, jumping in front of the truck and then getting on the brakes, slowing to five miles an hour.

“Is he slowing down?” Joey asked, looking in the rearview. You could hardly see because of the snow and fog.

“Yeah. I think.”

“All right, that’s it, I’m stopping.”

“He ain’t,” Darius said, turning around in the seat and peering through the frosted rear window. The red and blue flashers lit up the snow-covered cab. “Jesus, he’s pushing us off the road.”

“He skidded. That’s all. He’s stopped now. Okay. Let’s go introduce ourselves, make this cracker feel at home here in our nation’s capitol.”

They both got out of the car and went back to the truck cab. Big Peterbilt, bright red. The windshield so dark you couldn’t see a thing inside. Tommy stepped up onto the running board and rapped on the driver’s window with his flashlight.

“What’s this guy, playing possum or something?”

“Bang harder. Break the fuckin’ thing.”

“Police!” Tommy said, rapping harder. “Open your window!”

“This guy’s unbelievable. I’m going to get the ram out of the trunk. We’ll bust his window for him he doesn’t open up.”

Joey jumped down from the truck and came back with the lightweight metal ram they used for taking doors down in a hurry. Tommy looked at him, then jumped down from the running board, shaking his head.

“Still nothing?”

“Maybe he’s dead.”

“Fuck it. I’m freezing my nuts off out here.”

Joey climbed up and used the ram on the driver’s side window. The glass was unbelievably thick. It took three tries. On the third, the window imploded inward in a shower of Saf-T-Glass. A weird smell came from the cab. Not sour sweat stink and tobacco like Joey and Tommy were accustomed to, stopping these rigs. Nothing like that. More like machinery and hydraulic fluid.

Tommy aimed his Mag-Lite inside.

“Holy shit.”

“What?”

“Nobody in here. Get up and take a look. Fucking Buck Rogers.”

Joey climbed up and peered through the window. “What the hell is all that stuff?”

“Some kind of remote control driving thing. I don’t know. Weird shit, huh? Listen, it’s beeping.”

“I don’t like beeping.” Joey said.

Tommy played his light across the polished stainless steel steering mechanism; saw that there was more elaborate machinery mounted on the floorboard where the pedals and transmission normally were. A split-screen monitor on the console showed four live views: front and rear, and on both sides. The two police officers stared at the screen for a moment, transfixed.

“Is that TV snow? Or, real snow?” Tommy said.

“Can’t tell. Should we call it in?” Joey said, staring at the little red light that was blinking rapidly.

“You see any cameras? You think we’re on Candid Camera?”

“Off the air. Reruns only. We gotta call this in. I don’t like it.”

“Let’s go see what’s in the back first. Must be some freaking hi-tech seafood, man.” Tommy jumped down into the snowbank and ran toward the rear. He was pumped about the robot truck. It was bad. But it was cool, too.

“I’m calling it in first,” Joey said, running back to his squad car.

It was a Rol-R-Door, which meant it rolled up from the bottom like a garage door. Slid up into the roof. There was a big steel padlock securing the door to the truck frame. Tommy used the ram on the lock, basically just took out the bottom third of the door. Joey was back.

“Call this thing in?”

“They think I’m crazy, but, yeah, I did.”

“They sending back up anyway?”

“Beats me.”

Patrolman Darius nodded and stuck his flashlight inside the opening. He leaned forward and peered into the dark body of the trailer.

“What’s in there? Baby robot Jobsters?”

“I dunno, but it ain’t seafood. Something big. Black and shiny. Two of them. Heavy plastic sheeting covering them up, whatever the hell it is.”

“Rip it off. The plastic. You want my knife? Here.”

“Thanks…hard to get my arm far enough inside to—”

The horrific explosion killed the two young police officers instantly, vaporizing them. It blew down every tree within a radius of a hundred yards and created a black hole in the frozen ground fifteen feet across. The blast completely destroyed the truck from Louisiana and its contents, as well as the Crown Victoria cruiser parked in front of it on the shoulder. Automobile alarms a quarter of a mile away were activated. Windows rattled at Walter Reed Hospital.

No one seeing the black hole gouged in the earth could quite believe it. A lot of neighborhood kids came out to see it. It looked like a flaming meteor had hit. Debris was scattered in the snow as far as you could see.

It was January 17.

The Day of Reckoning was near.

74

THE BLACK JUNGLE

D eep below ground. In La Selva Negra’s heavily fortified underground communications bunker, Muhammad Top and Dr. Khan were silent eyewitnesses to history. Neither said a word. It was cold in the Tomb, but it was the safest place in the jungle. The walls were steel reinforced concrete, six feet thick. Hardened steel blast doors could be found on both the dormitory level and the one above it, where the electronic heart of Top’s world buzzed day and night. A massive antenna tower, disguised down to the rough bark and air roots as a tree, rose directly above the compound. It was, Top thought, a brilliant work of sculptural art.

The two men, bathed in soft blue light, stared with greedy eyes. They embraced the vision displayed on the monitors: a humbled America, blown apart at the heart. There, on multiple flat-screens mounted on a curving, twenty-foot wall, were images of violence, hatred, and destruction. A hot wind was blowing through America. Few realized yet that it was coming up from the south.

The bunker building had been designed by Khan. Men manning the five rows of ten monitor stations were facing northeast toward Mecca. Before dawn, each man in the room had washed himself according to ritual, then knelt and bent his head to the floor, praying for martydom. An attack could come at any time. They were ready.

It was succeeding. Top knew, because the hand of Allah was with him, lifting him toward the sun. Top had seen the future. All was going according to Destiny. His destiny. His alone.

Various monitors depicted units of the American National Guard units now manning the borderlines of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. Too little, too late, in the eyes of Top and Khan, this vain effort to suppress the violent eruptions along those fragile 2,000 miles.

It was only a feint, at any rate. Khan had predicted a full-blown war with Mexico over the border. For all they knew, it still might happen. Two nations, one border. Always an opportunity. For two years, Khan had held secret meetings with the Mexicans. These had been arranged with the help of a certain German Ambassador, a man named Zimmermann, now dead. Zimmermann, accompanied by certain high-ranking members of the government in Mexico City had traveled to Sao Paolo and brokered a deal with Khan.

The Mexicans’ motives were clear. It wasn’t the spread of Islam that ignited them. Or drew them into Khan’s coterie. With the exception of the German, it wasn’t even money. It was the chance to avenge the abuse and perfidy suffered at the hands of their northern neighbor. And to reclaim precious northern territories seized by the Yankees in the bitter U.S.-Mexican War of 1848.

The movement of the few remaining American reserves to hotspots along the southern border meant major cities, including Washington, DC, were woefully exposed to the impending attack. When the time came for the second wave of his planned attacks, there would be plenty of fireworks in Chicago, New York, Boston. But the Big Bang, as Top gleefully dubbed his first strike, was reserved for the sacred capital.

The only real misfortune thus far was the loss of the Muammar Massaouri family, three of the faithful, devoted sleeper comrades, who seemed to have been sacrificed at the farm in Virginia. The Massaouris had missed a scheduled sat com call with the UCB. This was to be an internet data burst, subsequent to the successful launch of the unmanned vehicle. The message never came. All attempts to contact them had failed. It was assumed Dr. Massaouri and his family had been killed.

To their everlasting glory, the Massaouris had successfully launched the unmanned underwater weapon. Even now, Bedouin was en route to the target thirty miles north of Morning Glory Farm. The video images streaming from the submarine’s nose camera were murky and dark but of no crucial importance.

The sophisticated UUV, an unmanned underwater vehicle developed over the years by Dr. Khan for littoral area incursions, was transporting the 150-kiloton nuclear weapon. After undergoing months of successful sea trials here on the Igapo River, Bedouin had been preprogrammed with GPS waypoints for navigating the Potomac en route to her destination in Washington. Every hour, a needle-thin antenna broke the surface for a data burst to the com sat traveling far overhead.

So far, God willing, the little torpedo-shaped craft was performing perfectly.

She weighed just less than two tons. She was powered by a large bank of lithium batteries, quiet and undetectable. In the busy river, the noise of Bedouin’s propulsion system would also be unnoticeable. The underwater robot’s forward-looking radar allowed it to make constant course corrections to avoid obstacles or other craft in its path. At its current speed, twenty-two knots, it would reach the Tidal Basin in Washington, DC, well ahead of schedule. The thick lead shield inside the hull would prevent its detection by any nuclear-sensitive probes along the way.

Once inside the basin, Bedouin would remain there, inert and immobile, buried in the mud a few thousand yards from the White House until the appointed hour.

The Appointed Hour. It was drawing nigh. Top sighed, and gazed at the over-sized digital clock above the monitor bank. It continued to roll down inexorably to the zero hour, now a thousand minutes away. He was thinking in minutes now. Even seconds. And every one counted.

“Where is Hawke?” he shouted to one of the technicians manning the perimeter defense system. “Get the map up on the screen.”

“The blinking orange dot is Hawke’s vessel,” Dr. Khan pointed out.

“I don’t want a fucking dot, I want a live picture.”

Khan looked at him, but held his tongue. They had come a long way together. It was no time to let the man’s intemperate behavior distract him from his destiny. Any blasphemy could be tolerated now. In a few hours, it would be his finger on the button.

A technician said, “We have no drone on him at this moment, sir.”

“Why not?”

“The enemy shot it down, sir. A missile.”

Silence, save the electronic hum of the equipment, settled over the room.

“He has missiles on this fucking speedboat? Why was I not informed?” Top asked, trying to keep his voice low and controlled.

The short technician with the bushy beard was visibly trembling now. “It only just happened, sir. A few minutes ago. I thought you’d been told.”

Top waved him away. “Assuming the vessel maintains current speed, when does the enemy enter the mined portion of the river?”

“Two hours, perhaps less.”

“Track his speed. Any change, let me know.”

Suddenly, Khan’s hand was on his shoulder and his lips were close to his ear. “I think you should take him out with attack drones,” Khan said softly, eyes up on the screen. “Take him out now, my brother, and be done with him.”

Top’s eyes flashed. “Did you not hear what this man just said? He’s got a missile defense system! The acoustic mines will protect us from this mosquito. Nothing could survive that stretch of water.”

“With all due respect, my dear brother, I imagine we have more drones than he has missiles. His is not a warship, after all.”

“You imagine! What if you’re wrong? What then? I’m left defenseless.”

“Muhammad, calm yourself. We’ve been at this too long without sleep. I’m going to rest in my quarters until the final hour approaches. Please let me know should anything develop that requires my immediate attention.”

Without another word, the robed man strode toward the elevator at the back of the darkened room. Top watched him leave with some satisfaction. He had no need of him now. Destiny was in his hands alone.

“Any word from the Xucurus?” Top asked the room.

“Nothing yet,” a controller murmured, afraid to look up.

Before reaching the small elevator, Khan paused at the last row of flat-screen monitor workstations. Each workstation was a semi-enclosed pod and comprised a small, virtual-reality environment for the controllers. The key components were screens displaying live streaming video from the trailer trucks en route to Washington.

Once the trucks resurfaced inside the cartel-owned garage at Gunbarrel, Texas, they had been driven northeast by diverse routes to the American capital. Live video superimposed upon 3-D situation maps using satellite photos, made the controllers work possible. GPS coordinates and a multidirectional live video feed from each vehicle were fed to a COMS satellite positioned over the East Coast of the North American continent.

Inside each monitor pod sat a controller and a sensor operator. The man on the left actually drove the vehicle; while the other monitored every kind of road, traffic, and weather condition. He ensured all traffic laws were strictly obeyed. In combat, he would also provide constant battleground feedback, giving second-by-second direction to the controller. These were the men who actually operated the remote machines, using a large joystick resembling something in an arcade.

“I’d mind your trucks if I were you, Muhammad,” Khan said, just loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room. “One of them appears to be lost.”

“What?”

“See for yourself, my brother,” Khan said, tapping the monitor in question. “This one appears to be lost in the snow.”

Khan stepped aside for Top who peered intently at the image. There was so much snow whirling around the camera lens that it was difficult to see what was being broadcast. “You’re lost?” he said to the young curly-haired controller, whose name was Yashim.

“Only momentarily, God willing,” Yashim said.

“Shit. Police. Two of them. How did this happen?”

He leaned in to scrutinize the scene. Two uniformed officers could now clearly be seen standing at the rear of the truck. Both were looking up at the rear door. One appeared to have some sort of battering ram in his hands.

Khan said, “The truck was stopped by police? Why? And you alerted no one?”

Yahshim trembled visibly and said, “I am most sorry, sir. In the storm, we lost the route through the park. A wrong turn perhaps. The snow. I thought I could find it again. But, then I—”

“Where is the truck located?” Top shouted, “Now! Put up the GPS map! Show me!”

“Here, sir. In Rock Creek Park,” the sensor operator said, his voice shaky. “About three miles from its rendezvous point in this heavily wooded area.”

“What’s this large building? The one here?”

“Walter Reed Hospital. Veterans’ facility.”

“Blow up the truck,” Top said evenly. “Use the anti-tampering explosive device in the trailer.”

Each truck was equipped with an anti-tampering system that could be triggered remotely. Or, in the event that the primary contents of the truck were in any way disturbed, the explosive package would destroy both the vehicle and its contents automatically. So far, the police had only broken a window in the cab. It had not been enough to trigger the automatic explosion.

“Now?” Yashim asked.

“You’d like to wait for the two policeman to discover the contents and alert their superiors? Yes, now. Do it!”

The controller pushed a button marked FIRE and the resulting violent explosion instantly caused the screen to go black.

“Your mission is complete,” Top said to the man seated before him. He put the muzzle of his pistol to the back of the controller’s head and fired one round into his brain. The sensor operator seated next to him screamed and shoved his chair back, struggling to get to his feet.

“Yours, too,” he said to the second man before he killed him, putting the muzzle to his chest and pulling the trigger.

Top made his way to the front of the room, every eye glued to him.

“That was unfortunate. But, necessary. Victory is near. I assume there will be no further trucks lost in the snow. Correct?”

“God willing!” the controllers all shouted in unison. It was standard Arabic courtesy to give God the benefit of the doubt.

“God willing you will all be alive to share the fruits of our victory in a few hours. Now, get back to work. All trucks should be at their designated rendezvous locations and unloading their precious cargo in the next hour. Does anyone in this room see a problem with that? Tell me now.”

Silence.

“Good. Let it be.”

“A thousand pardons, sir,” a technician in the front row said, breaking the silence.

“Yes?”

“Hawke’s vessel has stopped. Here. At an abandoned village called Tupo.”

“How long has he been there?”

“Just pulled in. There’s a dock. Could be loading or unloading.”

“Tanks nearby?”

“One, sir.”

“Send it to the location. And order four drones up. Attack drones. Perhaps Dr. Khan is right. Nevertheless. I want to sink that sitting duck. Now.”

Khan smiled and slipped quietly from the room.

An old song popped into his head and he sang a lyric softly as he entered the elevator.

Send in the drones…

75

THE BLACK RIVER

B rock was late for his scheduled river rendezvous with Alex Hawke. He’d been making his way through the jungle to the outpost at Tupo when he got into a life or death race with some tanks. He’d accidentally tripped a sensor and a whole squadron of Trolls had been sent out to find him. He seemed to have confused most of the joystick jockeys when he’d crossed a wide ravine, deftly tightrope-walking a fallen tree to the other side. Now he realized another of the little bastards was still on his butt.

Before he’d found the ravine, this last group almost got him. He’d carved one out of the pack and tried to climb aboard and bull-ride the damn thing like he and Saladin had perfected. The smartass controller had applied full throttle forward to one track, full reverse to the other. The Troll spun like a goddamn top on its axis and flung him off into the bushes.

High fives in the control room, oh yeah.

This new guy was seriously spitting lead. The air was full of tracer rounds, too, the shrubbery getting chewed to pieces all around him as the guy tried to find his range. Head down, pumping his knees high, bobbing and weaving, Harry ran for his life. He was seeing sunlight ahead now. The river was close. There was the dock through the trees. He could make out a boat, a crazy looking black boat, had to be a hundred feet long, waiting at the end.

Had to be Hawke. Nobody else he knew would have a boat like that. He’d almost missed his ride. Fucking Troll remote operators had gotten their shit together, all right. All that practice with Harry and Saladin had made them a lot better at this game. Harry ran for daylight.

He tripped over a big root, cursed as he went down. Now he was up and running for his life again. The tank was still on his ass, spitting lead at him. He dodged and feinted, using the thick undergrowth as cover. He was almost to the clearing.

Now he had to sprint across open ground. There was dilapidated shed at the foot of the dock, about a hundred yards away. As he got closer, he saw machine gun turrets on Hawke’s boat. Shoot back, you assholes! Get this tank off my ass! Fifty cals on the bow and stern. Christ, there was even one up on top of the wheelhouse! What the hell was going on? Were they all asleep?

No, they were just busy.

Unseen by Harry Brock, armed drones were approaching the black gunship moored at the end of the dock. Hawke was up on top of the wheelhouse with Ecclestone who was manning the .23mm cannon. Both men were keenly focused on enemy craft approaching from every compass point. Hawke had his glasses on the tiny black specks dead ahead, another drone flying low over the water toward his bow. Hawke was straining his eyes, trying to determine if there were missiles on the wingtips or if these were just more recon flights. He’d no intention of wasting another PAM on a mere recon.

“Radar showing four small drone aircraft approaching out of the west-southwest, sir, altitude two hundred feet, speed fifty-five knots,” he heard Fire Control Officer Lewis say in his headphones. “Range one mile.”

“Four bogies?” Hawke said.

“Four, roger. Three bogies are breaking formation. Climbing. Looks like they intend to circle around behind us, sir. The lead one, too, seems to be climbing. Appears to be circling. Looks like a holding pattern.”

Why send four when one would do? Hawke wondered.

“Awaiting further orders, I expect. Keep an eye on them, Lewis.” He told the Fire Control Officer.

Then he heard rapid machine gun fire from the bank and saw Harry Brock emerge from the jungle. He’d been waiting nearly an hour and was about to give orders to shove off. He’d no desire to remain a sitting duck any longer than he had to. But, here Harry came, running flat out toward the clearing. Somebody was shooting at him, but who, or, what?

A tank. Small, but fast and firing twin machine guns at his friend Harry. One of the two robots that had been shadowing them no doubt.

“Ecclestone,” Hawke said to the gunner seated inside the heavily armored Plexiglas turret.

“Sir!”

“Do you think you can take out that little tank without killing Mr. Brock?”

“Aye, aye, sir. I think I’ve got a shot.”

The turret instantly rotated ninety degrees west and the GUN DISH got a lock on the approaching robot Troll. Hawke felt the deck shudder beneath him as Ecclestone squeezed off a burst from the .23mm cannons. The muzzles flashed, spouting flame as they recoiled. Hawke saw the small tank lifted up high in the air by the exploding rounds, disintegrating in a perfectly symmetrical ball of fire and flaming debris.

Harry kept running down the long dock.

“Come along, Harry,” Hawke shouted through cupped hands from the roof, “We’re about to shove off without you!”

“You can’t leave me! I’m your ticket to Paradise, Hawke,” Harry said, pounding down the rotting boards of the sharply canted structure.

“Let’s get out of here!” Hawke shouted, his focus back on the rapidly approaching drone. “Cast off all lines!”

The crew hastily cast off the bow, stern, and spring lines made fast to the dock pilings. Harry Brock, seeing the water opening up between himself and Hawke’s boat, had to leap for it. He made it, arms pinwheeling, and a waiting crewman wrestled him safely aboard.

“Hello, Hawkeye,” he smiled up at Alex who was standing on the cabin top looking down at him. “Permission to come aboard, sir?”

“Hello, Harry. Permission granted.”

A nearby explosion rocked the boat on its beam and a geyser of water shot fifty feet in the air. The dock where Harry had been standing seconds ago, was no more. Harry and the crew stowing lines on the starboard side were knocked to their knees and had to scramble to stay aboard.

“I should have mentioned we’re under attack. You might want to get inside where it’s nice and safe, Harry.”

“Is there no peace?” Brock muttered, getting to his feet.

“We’ve got four confirmed armed drones, Skipper,” Lewis said in the phones. “Fore and aft, and two more on our stern quarters, sir. Closing at eighty knots. Armed with Hellfire-type missiles. Request permission for immediate launch PAM weapons system, sir.”

“Denied. These things are slow moving. Ecclestone and the fore and aft turrets should be sufficient. Save PAM for when we really need it. Fire when ready. I’m going to the bridge.”

Hawke stepped on to the top rung, lightly gripped the stainless ladder rails, and slid down onto the bridge deck. Brownlow was at the wheel, Harry and Stokely were embracing just aft of him, pounding each other on the shoulders.

“Break it up,” Hawke said, clapping Harry on the back. Despite his misgivings about the American, he was very glad to see him. Brock stuck out his hand and Hawke shook it. “Been a while, Harry. Good to see you.”

“Likewise. I didn’t think—”

Harry’s sentence was interrupted by the muffled but still loud chatter of both fore and aft twin fifty calibers opening up at the same time, a metallic cacophony enhanced by the heavy thudding of the cannon directly overhead.

“Incoming!” Brownlow shouted. “Hit the—”

Hawke saw the missile streaking directly for the wheelhouse. A second later an explosion directly overhead rocked the boat, sending all three men inside the wheelhouse to the deck. Hawke scrambled over to the ladder and climbed topside. The cannon turret had taken a nearly direct hit and Ecclestone was slumped forward over his weapon, blood pouring from a deep gash in his forehead. Hawke pulled the man from his station and saw that he was wounded in several places but still very much alive.

“Get below,” he said to the dazed man, helping him to the ladder. Off to his left he saw one drone explode, brought down by fire from the stern gunner, whose turret was now rotating clockwise to take out the drone on their aft starboard quarter.

“Can’t walk too well, sir,” Ecclestone said. Then Stokely emerged at the top of the ladder, lending a hand.

“I’ll take him below, boss,” he said, and Hawke steered the wounded man to his waiting arms. He heard a nearby explosion as another drone was blown out of the sky by the Stiletto stern gunners. The boat was moving rapidly through the water now, thirty knots perhaps, making her harder to hit. The one remaining drone, the one that had fired the initial missile, had circled back again and was now on another approach coming directly at them low out of the sun.

“Let’s see if this damn thing still works,” Hawke said, slipping into the seat inside the damaged turret of the 23mm anti-aircraft gun. The weapon was equipped with its own GUN DISH radar, capable of acquiring, tracking, and engaging low-flying aircraft, like the drone now attacking Stiletto. It fired full auto, but Hawke had ordered the gun set at bursts of two to three rounds to conserve precious ammunition. No time to change that now.

He squinted his eyes, trying to use the conventional optical sight, aided by the GUN DISH. The sun was fierce and blinding, but he thought he had the little bugger. A sharp beeping tone agreed. He had target acquistion. He had the bastard in his sights now, centering it in the red crosshairs, seeing the one missile remaining on the port wing, knowing it would be fired at any second…and squeezing both triggers simultaneously, he blew the drone out of the sky.

HALF AN HOUR later, Hawke, Stokely, the Frogman, and Brock were huddled in the boat’s tiny war room, deep into refining their plans with the aid of Brock’s much-needed information. It had already been decided that, instead going in with two squads, Stoke and Froggy would mount a combined operation.

Best of all, Brock had even created a rough but reasonable facsimile of the compound itself, rendered in black pencil on the back of a map of the Amazon Basin’s Mata Grosso region. Because of the canopy, Mick Hocking had been unable to get any aerial recon photos. Now, at least, the team could visualize the objective.

“A large force here to the north?” Hawke asked, studying the crude map.

“Saladin has his scouts tracking the main body of Top’s troops. He has begun moving them out.”

“I’D SAY THE TROOPS remaining inside the compound number about a hundred right now,” Brock said. “The hard core Imperial Guards, let’s call them. The vast majority of troops have moved north and west, using these jerry-built highways you helped build in the jungle. I saw three armored divisions pull out late last night.”

“Headed where?”

“Central America is all I know. All the way to Mexico, maybe, join up with forces in the mountains up there. The idea is, once they take the Great Satan out, that’s the signal. Then the troops fan out into the countryside, get the populations to rise up, and they all march together on the cities. Knock them down one by one. Take the capitals.”

“They all want to be the next Bolívar,” Hawke said, rubbing his chin.

“These guys want it all. And they think now’s the time to go for it. Who’s going to stop them?”

“You got inside,” Hawke said, smiling. “Good work, Harry.”

“I’ve still got someone inside. A woman named Caparina. She could probably take Top down all by herself.”

Hawke looked at Brock’s baggy pajamalike fatigues. “Disguised like that?”

“Exactly. Except she’s wearing a fatigue hat pulled down over her ears. And these green camo pajamas like all of Top’s grunts in there. She’d be hard to spot. We all look equally bad.”

“You don’t know where they’re keeping Ambrose Congreve, do you, Harry?”

“Hard to say.”

“Christ, Harry, what’s this woman doing in there?”

Harry spun the hand-rendered chart of the compound around on the table so that it was facing him. He knew this was Hawke’s primary objective now. “Hold your horses. Let me look at this thing a second.”

“Talk to me.”

“All right. Based on Caparina’s last radio transmission, I’d say there is a good chance they might stow any hostages right here.”

His finger was pointing to a cluster of tree houses at the edge of the compound, hard by the main bridge.

“Why there?”

“Caparina managed to get herself assigned to some scutwork on the bridge. Raking debris from all this rain. She said she heard a lot of very unpleasant noises coming from the three houses by the river.”

“When was this?”

“1100 hours. She’s got a radio stashed somewhere.”

“Ambrose was still alive at 1100 hours,” Hawke said, looking at Stokely and then his watch.

“We’ll get him out,” Stoke said to Alex, “Don’t worry.”

“Tell me about this structure here,” Hawke said, pointing to another location a few hundred yards from the river.

“Communications and Control. Call it the ‘Tomb’. About twenty feet underground. Steel blast doors, reinforced concrete walls six feet thick. It’s a bitch, all right.”

“Any tomb will do,” Hawke said, “Where is Saladin now?”

“Moving his squad through the jungle toward this location here. Airstrip I found two miles from the west perimeter. He’ll wait there for our signal before moving into the compound to rendezvous.”

“Rendezvous point?”

“Right here. I told Saladin we’d hook up half mile above the bridge connecting the two sectors.”

“No river mines there?”

“None. The mines are all here.”

“Where we’re headed now.”

“Exactly.”

“Christ.”

Froggy said, “Now that we have an idée where Congreve might be, his rescue is perhaps not impossible.”

For the first time since Ambrose had been kidnapped, Hawke felt a surge of hope.

It had started to rain. Hard. A heavy drumming on the cabin top over his head. Maybe it was a good sign.

God knew he could use one.

76

WASHINGTON, DC

T he phone rang. Dixon reached over and grabbed it before it could ring again, looking at his glow-in-the-dark watch as he did it. Almost eleven. He’d been sleeping for an hour. Couldn’t even stay awake long enough to tell Daisy about meeting the president of the United States; even if he only stuck his head into a meeting to say hello. He’d told her about Homer. That was about all he could manage. Out the window, he could see the vapor lights of the hotel parking lot. It had stopped snowing.

“Hello?”

“Sheriff Dixon?”

“Speaking.”

“Sheriff, this is Secret Service Special Agent Rocky Hernandez, assigned to the president’s detail. I was with the team that greeted you and Secretary de los Reyes at the White House earlier this evening?”

“Yes, sir. I remember you. One of the K-9 fellows.”

“Right. Sorry to disturb you, but my boss just asked me to call. He said to tell you there’s just been an explosion in Rock Creek Park.”

“I thought I heard something. About a fifteen minutes ago? Woke me up. I thought it was normal.”

“No, sir. Not normal. It was a huge explosion. People are very jumpy around here tonight because of the Inauguration tomorrow. Threat level high, internet chatter over at NSA is going through the roof. Police are headed to the scene. I was off duty and headed home to Maryland when I got the call from the White House.”

“How can I help you, Agent Hernandez?”

“Call me Rocky. I’m turned around on the Beltway and headed back to the White House. Your hotel is on my way. Agent-in-Charge was wondering if I could come by and pick you up? There was apparently a big semi truck involved in the explosion and he thought maybe you and I could swing through the Park over there and—”

“How long?”

“Two minutes.”

“I’ll be out front.”

The Secret Service agent’s car pulled up in front of the Doubletree lobby and Dixon climbed inside. It was a Jeep Cherokee with a wire cage in the rear and a dog back there.

“I appreciate this, Sheriff,” Hernandez said, pulling out of the lot.

“No problem at all. What kind of explosion was it?”

“That’s what we want to find out. Looks like a tractor-trailer rig and a DC squad car were involved. A collision, is what they’re thinking so far.”

“Pretty big collision to make a bang like that.”

“That’s what we think, too.”

“That your dog back there? Or, an official one?”

“That’s Dutch. Mandatory retirement after eleven years service. He’s got one year to go.”

“Dutch, huh? Good name.”

“Named after my first boss, President Reagan.”

“Dutch still goes to work?”

“All the K-9 dogs get to go home every night with their handlers. Part of my family, Sheriff.”

“What is he? Looks a lot like a German Shepherd.”

“He’s a Belgian Malinois. That’s all we use now. Trained to detect drugs, explosives, firearms.”

“Explosives, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, too.”

“Great minds think alike,” Dixon said, and, looking out the window at Washington in the snow, he added, “And so do ours.”

There had to be twenty squad cars and emergency vehicles already at the scene. Tape was up, surrounding a big black hole in the ground. The surrounding snow-covered trees were lit up with flashing blue and red lights. Dixon noticed two vehicles marked BOMB DISPOSAL parked near the blackened center of the explosion. On the far side, a large FBI crime scene van was a hive of activity.

He and Hernandez climbed out of the car and fetched Dutch out of the back. Once he was on his lead, they went up to an officer standing inside the tape and showed their shields.

“White House dog?” the D.C. uniform asked Hernandez, rubbing Dutch’s coat.

“Yes, he is.”

“Glad to have him at the scene. You gentlemen let me know if you need anything.”

“Two vehicles involved, officer?” Dixon asked the uniform before he could turn to go.

“Correct. We’ve got tracks of only two vehicles leading to the scene. Most likely a DC Metro cruiser and an eighteen-wheeler. Not much left of either one as you can see. I suppose the gas tanks on both vehicles blew when they collided.”

“Collided,” Dixon said, pushing his short brim back on his forehead and looking at the hole.

“That’s what it looks like.”

Dixon said, “Anything else you can tell us?”

“Well, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but an Officer Darius called in with something about a remote-controlled vehicle here in the Park. What’s that all about? Some kid flying a toy plane? Nobody knew what the hell to make of it. A couple of minutes later, boom.”

“Have you heard from Officer Darius?”

“No, sir.”

Dixon and Hernandez looked at each other, thanked the officer, and walked away. There was a small group of uniformed officers and others who stood looking down into the hole. Three men in HAZMAT suits were down at the bottom taking soil samples or whatever it was they did. Dixon looked around. A bomb disposal technician was playing with a little robot back in the trees where the road had been cordoned off to protect any tire tracks in the snow.

The hole was nearly fifteen feet across and ten feet deep. Hernandez released Dutch and the dog took off at a trot, circling the crater and the dirty black snow all around the edge, all fired up.

“How good is he?” Dixon asked, watching with admiration as the dog worked.

“They learn to detect almost nineteen thousand individual scents. After twenty-six weeks of training, Dutch scored 650 out of a possible 700 points. He’s good.”

“I think I’ll stroll back down that road a ways. Take a look around. Let Dutch here do his job in peace.”

“I’ll be right here, Sheriff.”

The scene had been carefully protected for about five hundred yards. The two-lane road curved back and disappeared into some trees. There were still two sets of tire tracks in the snow, lightly covered with fresh snow but you could still make out two distinct tread patterns. Dixon bent down and looked at a point of intersection between the two. He got his pocketknife out and stuck the blade into the snow. He’d seen something while staring at the treads. He pried it out and picked it up with his handkerchief. It was shiny, maybe some kind of glass.

Black glass.

“What have you got, there?” the bomb technician said, walking over with his robot in tow.

“Piece of glass.”

“Lots of that around. A lot of this black shiny stuff. Kinda weird, isn’t it? Here, hold your piece up to my flashlight. See that? Something inside, like another layer or something.”

“Yep. I do. It’s mirror.”

“Mirror. That’s what I thought, too. Now, what do you suppose that is all about?”

“Excuse me, will you please?”

Dixon turned and hurried back through the deep snow to the crater. Hernandez was still there, working the dog.

“Could you take a walk with me over here a little ways? The trees over yonder.”

“Sure.” Hernandez followed the sheriff to a nearby tree, away from the crowd. “What have you got?”

“Got your flashlight?”

“Right here.”

Dixon showed him the piece of glass he’d found, turning it over in his hand so it caught the light. Hernandez said, “You’re seeing something here, Sheriff. I’m not.”

“That truck Homer and I stopped that first night? The Yankee Slugger. Had heavily tinted windows. Blackouts with a layer of mirror in the middle. I tried to see inside that truck’s windshield, with my light right up against the glass just like this. Couldn’t see through the stuff. Just like this piece right here.”

“You check the truck in Virginia?”

“Identical glass in the cab. That bomb technician over there says this glass is all over the place. Lots of it.”

“So, you think this truck was one of the remote-controllers?”

“I’d bet on it.”

“Keep an eye on Dutch for me? I’m headed to my car to get the boss on the radio. Tell him what you’ve found. See what he wants us to do about it.”

Dixon nodded, “Won’t let him out of my sight. Borrow your flashlight while you’re gone?”

Dixon took the Superlight and walked back to the crater. He watched Dutch working something on the far side of the crater. Nobody in the crowd was paying any attention but he was on to something, all right. Dixon wasn’t a trained dog handler. But you didn’t need to be. You could see the whole thing in his body language. He was all over something or other.

“Hey, Dutch,” Dixon said, rubbing his ears, “What have you got, boy? Huh?”

There was a jagged piece of blackened metal lying between the dog’s feet. Dutch was guarding it, but decided to let Franklin look at it. Dixon took out his hanky again and held the thing up to the light. Twisted metal, burned, but you could make out some letters stamped into it.

R-O-L-E.

“The dog found this,” he said to the FBI man standing in the open door of the van.

“Who are you, sir?” the skinny man with the thin black tie asked. Franklin told him as he flashed his shield, climbed up a step to hand the piece of steel to him. “Where’d he find it, Sheriff?”

“Near the crater. He’s a White House K-9 dog, name of Dutch. That sticky stuff on the other side there’s probably bomb residue, way he’s acting. I’d take him seriously if I were you. He’s pretty good.”

“We’ll add it to the pile. Check it out when we can. Thank you, Sheriff.”

“I was thinking. Those letters? R-O-L-E? Could be the middle of a word. Chevrolet.”

“Chevrolet. Well, that’s an interesting idea. But hardly likely. There were two vehicles involved in this explosion. We’ve seen the tread marks. A Ford Crown Victoria and a Peterbilt tractor trailer rig riding on Goodyear. That’s confimed all the way to the top.”

“Well, you may be right.”

“Thanks again.”

The man turned to go back inside the crime van.

“There could have been a vehicle inside the truck,” Dixon said to his narrow white back.

“What’d you say?”

“I say there could have been another vehicle inside the truck. Truck that big, could have been two vehicles inside of the trailer. Two Chevrolets.”

“Two Chevrolets.”

“I rode in one just this evening. Over to the White House to meet with the President. Big black Chevy Suburban belonging to the Secret Service. You know the ones I’m talking about?”

“I know the ones.”

“I’ve been seeing a lot of them since I got up here to Washington. All over town. I guess for the Inauguration?”

“I guess.”

“All with blacked-out windows.”

“Right.”

“A lot of busted black glass on the ground over there. I found this piece down the road a ways.” Franklin handed him the piece of glass he found.

“Will you look at that? Huh.”

“Well. It’s just an idea. Add it to the pile.”

Dixon turned and headed back to the crater to find Agent Rocky Hernandez, Dutch trotting happily along right beside him.

Good dog.

77

THE BLACK JUNGLE

S tokley Jones stuck the flat of his hand in the air. His patrol froze at the signal. Ten minutes had elapsed since the squad’s insertion into extremely dense terrain. Two-hundred-foot trees loomed above their heads; he’d never seen anything like it. The squad was moving out carefully in patrol formation. They were moving much too slowly for Stoke, but there wasn’t much he could do about that.

It was raining up there somewhere. The water streaming down from above made the jungle floor a boggy mess. And there were tripwires everywhere.

Stoke was acting as point man, followed by Froggy, who’d been designated patrol leader. Right behind them was the radioman/grenadier, now using a back-up PRC 117 emergency VHF radio providing instant communications with the boat; he was giving Stiletto’s fire control officer the exact coordinates of the squad’s location. He could call for fire support if needed, but he didn’t want shells landing in his own backyard.

Behind the radioman was the first of three heavily laden M-60 machine gunners whose job it was to lay down a base of fire of 7.62 rounds if the squad got hit. His objective was to use the heavy machine gun to keep the bad guys with their heads down until the squad either flanked the enemy or got the hell out of there. Bringing up the rear was another M-60 man and a second point man covering the squad’s six. Should they need to reverse direction, he automatically became the new Point.

It was rough going, wet and muddy, but Stoke felt good. If there was a tougher, better trained, meaner Hostage Rescue Team on earth, Stokely had yet to hear of those lying sons of bitches.

Stoke had a CAR-15 with an M-203 grenade launcher slung over his shoulder. He was also carrying a Mossberg shotgun loaded with buckshot. It would give him a broader kill zone in the tight confines of jungle combat. The shotgun could also come in handy clearing foliage in the event of a firefight. Each man also carried a machete to hack through the dense undergrowth. All were wearing identical woodland cammies, jungle boots, and floppy bush hats.

“Tripwire,” Stoke said softly into his lipmike. It was the fifth one he’d seen in the last ten minutes. They were all over the place, slowing them way down. Some of them were even strung with little Voodoo dolls and spooky artifacts so you couldn’t miss them. Keep the natives from bothering Papa Top, he figured. Problem was, some of these little trinket clotheslines were real live wires. Blow your bottom half off. Some were not. So you had to take them all very seriously.

Froggy, the designated PL, was maybe 20 or 30 yards behind him. He was carrying a GPS handheld as backup navigation; his job right now was to keep them moving in the right direction. The Frogman also had a CAR-15 with grenade launcher. Like every man, he was carrying an NVD or Night Vision Device. As the PL on this mission, he was trying to use it sparingly so as to give his eyes time to maintain his natural night sight.

Stoke was the true eyes and ears of the squad. It was up to him to alert the squad of impending danger. Not that he could see much of anything in this shit. The combination of rain, fog, and foliage made it so you couldn’t see your nose in front of your goddamn face.

“Alors,” he heard Froggy say in his headphones, “Merde and merde again!”

Well said, Froggy. Shit and double shit.

It was a good thing he’d stopped the squad in their tracks. He heard something mechanical, caught a glimpse of a foot patrol of heavily armed guards approaching at double time along a narrow trail just below the ridge that the squad was descending. Looked like maybe an eight-man squad. They were preceded on the trail by two of the weirdest looking war machines Stoke had ever seen. Had to be the Trolls, remote controlled tanks Brock had told them about. Moving slowly, just in front of the enemy patrol. Out looking for his squad probably.

Stoke made a slashing motion across his throat and stepped lightly as he could over the tripwire. The men behind him carefully did the same and began moving down the hillside sloping down to the twisting trail. The darkness, foggy rain and thick vegetation provided all the cover they needed. Stoke’s flat hand shot into the air again when they reached a spot twenty yards above the muddy trail.

“Get down,” he said, dropping to one knee and pulling two grenades from his belt. He set the timers on sixty seconds, checked his sweep second hand, and heaved the grenades underhanded. Plop-plop, into the muddy center of the trail. The two robot vehicles and the goon squad were still double-timing toward them. Using hand signals, Stoke directed his guys to move into ambush formation.

Thirty seconds remained on his dive watch. The Troll tanks were advancing rapidly now, the barrels of the twin machine guns up front swiveling toward the incline where Stoke and his men waited, low in the undergrowth. Had they been seen? Sensors, maybe, on the jungle floor. Stoke moved the selector on his assault rifle to full auto and waited. He saw the first tank come around the bend, treads slogging through the thick brownish mud.

C’mon, c’mon.

Stoke’s two grenades exploded almost simultaneously. The two tanks were blown off their treads and over-turned. The enemy patrol scattered, diving into the thick underbrush on either side of the trail.

“Boomer! Bassman!” Stoke shouted to the two machine gunners, “Move up!”

The M-60 is a very heavy weapon and each man carried nearly a thousand rounds of linked 7.62 ammunition adding to his burden. Normally, they don’t move too quickly because of that load. This time they did. Boomer and Bassman, both seasoned veterans and ex-Navy SEALs, raced to the position indicated by Stokely and laid down a murderous wall of fire on both sides of the trail. There was no possibility that anything had survived. The vegetation, shredded and smoking, showed no signs of life.

“Move out,” Stoke said when he was satisfied no further threat existed. The squad moved down the hill and onto the muddy trail where the enemy had just died.

Froggy, paused at Stoke’s side, looked at his compass and GPS handheld.

“Allons vite, mes enfants, allons vite!” Froggy said, “Quickly, children, quickly!”

“ALL BACK ONE THIRD,” Brownlow said, eyes on the narrowed river ahead. It was raining so hard it was difficult to make out the vine-shrouded banks on either side. Only radar kept him on course. His depth-sounder depicted nearly impassable shoals and less than ten feet of water beneath his keel. Stiletto slowed to idle speed, barely moving, churning muddy black water at her stern. Any advantage afforded by the boat’s power and speed was long over.

The twisting stretch of river that lay just beyond these shoals was mined. If they could even reach that stretch of water. Any time now, they’d be deploying the two minesweeper probes. According to Brock’s chart, the heavily mined portion of the Black River lay only two miles distant.

These small minesweeper sensors had been developed by the Royal Navy’s Admiralty Mining Establishment, a quaint name for one of the most technically advanced mine countermeasures departments on earth. MCM had developed the two probes now aboard Stiletto. Mounted at the bow, launched underwater much like a torpedo, the probe raced ahead of the boat and sent back a detailed visualization of the minefield. The drone’s electro-optic system provided very high resolution 3-D images for positive mine identification and location.

On paper, AME had shown a vessel could successfully navigate a minefield, even in littoral zones, confined straits, or choke points. But that was on paper. It had never been attempted in the field or under combat conditions. Hawke had readily agreed to be the guinea pig when C had suggested he try the damn things out.

Hawke and Brock appeared moments after the boat slowed, both men outfitted for night jungle operations.

“Talk to us, Cap,” Hawke said, “Are you ready to deploy the probes?”

“We’ve got another problem, sir. We’ve run out of water.” Brownlow tapped his index finger on the 3-D depiction of the river bottom.

“Christ,” Brock muttered.

Hawke leaned over Brownlow’s shoulder and studied the monitor.

“I see what you mean.”

“Whitewater rapids ahead, sir. Judging by the bottom, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. I’d say we’re looking at maybe a mile of very rocky whitewater before it opens up again.”

“Any ideas, Harry?” Hawke said.

“Keeps raining like this, the river keeps rising at this rate, we just might be able to get through.”

“Praying for rain is not an option. We’ll take the bloody canoes.”

“What? And leave all these expensive weapons systems behind?” Brock grinned and cocked an eye.

“We’ve got no choice. Skipper, all stop.”

“Aye, sir. All stop.” Brownlow hauled back the throttles and Stiletto ghosted to a stop.

“Mr. Brock, tell the crew on deck to launch all four canoes. Then go forward and inform our team to check their weapons. We shove off in fifteen minutes.”

Hawke headed below to his tiny cabin to retrieve his weapons and ammunition.

“Sir?” the radioman said, sticking his head out into the companion-way just after Hawke passed.

“What is it, Sparks?”

“Call for you, sir. On the scrambled line.”

“Who?”

“Washington, sir. State Department. Urgent.”

“Put it through to my quarters,” Hawke said and went two doors down into his cabin.

“Alex?”

“Hello, Conch.”

“Alex, listen carefully. This is the deep shit call. Where are you now?”

“Still on the bloody river. It’s impossible to go further. We’re launching canoes for the final leg. Weather is socked in. Good, because it keeps the drones from pestering us. Bad, because you can’t see a bloody thing. And how are you doing on this lovely January evening?”

“Insane. The president walks down the steps of the Capitol to be sworn in at noon, less than twelve hours from now. Rumors of some kind of attack are flying so fast you can’t keep track. The Secret Service’s Joint Operations Command has assigned a threat level of most serious and credible. Your idea is only one of many we are running down right now.”

“My idea.”

“A feint on the Mexican border. Originating in the Amazon. An attack on a major city. Washington.”

“Washington? How do you know that?”

“Think about it, Alex.”

“The Inauguration. Christ, Conch, of course. That has to be it.”

“It gets worse. Six hours ago that nice sheriff from Texas called me. His deputy followed a convoy of remote-controlled trucks to Virginia. In one truck was some kind of remote-controlled sub. It was placed in the Potomac. We’ve been dragging the river from Fredericksburg to the Pentagon Yacht Basin. Divers are down everywhere. We haven’t found it yet.”

“What about the airborne minesweepers? Those new helos that laser scan from above?”

“Nothing. There is a move afoot to evacuate key government officials from the city. One more thing. I just got a call from FBI Chief Mike Reiter. He says explosion in Rock Creek Park turns out to have involved at least one Chevrolet Suburban packed with Semtex explosives. Secret Service vehicle, Alex.”

“You’ve got assassins inside the Secret Service?”

“That’s certainly one possiblility, however remote. The other is, someone went to a whole lot of trouble to duplicate a government Suburban. We even found pieces of light bars, the same heavy door armor the Service uses. Before the bomb went off, this Chevy was being transported in a remote-controlled tractor-trailer rig. Just like the one that ferried the sub to Virginia.”

“You said, ‘convoy.’ How many of these big rigs, Conch?”

“According to Sheriff Dixon, a dozen remote-controlled trailer trucks are known to be headed to the northeast from Texas.”

“All going to Washington?”

“I hope not. But we have no way of knowing that. I wish to God we did. We have no idea what we’re looking at here. It’s too bizarre for even me.”

Alex was silent for a long moment and then he said, “Conch, this jungle compound I’m about to take out. It is mecca for combat droids. Armed drones, tanks, you name it.”

“I know. I just read Harry Brock’s report. That’s why I’m calling you, Alex. I think there is at least the ghost of a chance that these remote-controlled trucks are a Muhammad Top operation. Perhaps even controlled from his jungle complex.”

“That could well be it. Brock says there is a heavily fortified command-and-control bunker. Twenty-feet down. Two-hundred-foot antenna disguised as a tree.”

“A tree?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Theoretically, I’ve got a dozen or more phony Secret Service vehicles driving around, each identical to the real thing. And possibly packed with high explosives. Could be plastique, Semtex, could be nuclear for all we know. Perfect bombs, Alex, hiding in plain sight. Movable. And, another weapon, possibly nuclear, may be buried in the muck in the Potomac River. I’ve got to run along now.”

“Conch? One thing. They’ve got Ambrose. When they took him, he was deciphering a code log that could make a difference. The man who wrote the code was trying to stop these people.”

“Oh, God, Alex. Poor Ambrose.”

“If he’s still alive, we’ve got a chance.”

“In eleven hours and change, the president puts his hand on that bible and takes the oath of office. That moment in time is the single most vulnerable few seconds this country faces every four years. The vice president, Congress, hell, the entire government is out there on the street standing with him. Tens of thousands of schoolchildren and—oh, Holy God.”

“Conch, listen to me. Can’t you get the president to postpone the ceremony? Move it?”

“Since General George Washington took the oath in 1789, the swearing-in ceremony has only been moved once. Bad weather and Andrew Jackson was ill. You think Jack McAtee is going down in history as the guy who called off his own inauguration at the last minute? What’s your next idea?”

“I see what you mean.”

“With or without that code, Alex. Take out Muhammad Top. I wish to God I could do it for you. But I can’t.”

78

ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND

J ust before dawn, Agent Rocky Hernandez swung the old Cherokee into the parking lot of an all-night diner. Across the street, the Annapolis harbor looked quiet, sailboats riding at their moorings, peace and tranquility disturbed only by the sound of halyards flapping against aluminum masts in the gusty wind.

The two men climbing out of the car looked frustrated, haggard, and worn. The excitement over Dixon’s breakthrough discovery in Rock Creek Park was long faded. Time was running out. They had spent the last five hours combing the countryside, coming up empty. There was hardly a park, isolated farm, or stretch of rolling Virginia or Maryland woodland within thirty miles of the capital that they had not yet searched.

“Ten minute break,” Hernandez said, “You go ahead inside. I’ll call in, see what’s going on. Please order me a black coffee and a couple of donuts. Maybe they’ll give you some water for Dutch, too.”

Dixon entered the empty diner and took a stool at the counter. He ordered coffee and donuts and a bowl of water for the dog. Abigail, a perky high school senior, brought him the food and drink. “What kind of dog is it?” She stood on tiptoes with the bowl in her hands, looking out the window.

“He’s a hero,” Dixon said, managing a smile.

“Can I take the water out to him?”

“I guess. Truck’s open. He’s in the back. His handler’s out there making a call.”

“Dutch says thanks, he was thirsty,” Hernandez said, taking a seat a few minutes later. He took two gulps of coffee and bit into his donut.

“How is it back in Washington, Rocky?”

The agent looked over at Dixon, his eyes red with strain. “It’s bad,” he said.

“I figured.”

“Chaos. A lot of pressure from the First Lady and others in the Service to evacuate, postpone, or at least move the swearing-in ceremony. Take the whole show inside. Some secret location they’re working on. Outside of Washington. My guys are going crazy right now. The media smells blood and they’re hounding the White House every step of the way. It’s a lose-lose situation.”

“What do you mean?”

“We postpone, we move, we evacuate? And nothing happens, we’re idiots. Don’t evacuate, don’t postpone, and something happens, we’re idiots.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Doesn’t matter how I feel. I know how the president feels. In five hours, he’s going to walk down those capitol steps in the sunshine and put his hand on that bible. Period. End of report. I know that man better than I know my own soul.”

“I guess we were wrong about wooded areas,” Dixon said, taking a sip.

“We’ll keep looking, that’s all. The Virginia truck, the Rock Creek truck. Both wooded areas. Secluded. Where the hell else are you going to secretly unload something as big as a Suburban?”

Franklin stared down at his cup in silence.

“A garage,” he said quietly.

“What?”

Dixon, looked at him, his tired eyes alight. “Rocky, how long you figure it takes to run a cross-check on every garage and body repair shop in Washington? Cross-check the ownership? Match the owners against all the names on the DC counter-terrorist watch list?”

The agent slammed his fist on the countertop. “A garage. Jesus. Why didn’t I think of that? Let’s get started.”

Franklin put five dollars on the counter and headed for the door.

HALF AN HOUR later, they were on their third garage. The first two had been small one-man body shop operations, no way to back an eighteen-wheeler inside. The one they were headed for now was off Massachusetts Avenue, near Union Station. It was called the Teapot Dome Body Shop.

“This one feels good,” Rocky said as they cruised by the place and pulled around the corner to park, “I don’t know why, but it does.”

They got Dutch out of the back and sprinted around the corner to the entrance. They were moving fast, Dutch racing ahead as if he knew the schedule was tight. They had eleven more garages on their A list, six more on the B list. It was seven-thirty a.m. on what promised to be a clear blue Inauguration Day. The president’s address was now less than five hours away.

A tiny bell above the door tinkled when they pushed it open. The office reeked of sweat and oil. Old-fashioned nudie calendars hung on the walls. A fat dark-haired man in filthy white mechanic’s coveralls sat behind a battered wooden desk, littered with invoices, catalogs, and greasy automobile parts. He had an Arabic newspaper spread across his lap and looked up from it slowly.

“Help you?” he said, a smile spreading across his moon face.

“Secret Service,” Hernandez said, flipping open his badge. “Special Agent Hernandez.”

Franklin tipped his hat. “Dixon. Prairie County Sheriff.”

“Yeah. So. What can I do for you two?”

Dutch had something. Inside the desk. On the man. And behind a door on the right. He went for the door.

“Where’s the garage?” Franklin asked the man, moving quickly toward the closed door just right of the desk. “Through here?”

“Private property, cowboy. You got a warrant?”

Franklin ignored that, put his hand on the knob and turned it. Dutch bolted ahead of him through the narrow crack.

“Hey! I said, this is private—” The fat man was coming out of his chair.

“Gun!” Hernandez shouted, “Gun! Get down!”

Franklin shoved through the door and dove to the cement floor. He rolled twice, heard two loud shots explode inside the office, and pulled his weapon. Through the door he saw the gun still in the mechanic’s hand, his arm coming up, even though the upper part of his coveralls were soaked with blood.

Franklin shot the fat man in the head.

He looked through the doorway at Agent Hernandez. On the floor behind the desk, but he was getting to his feet.

“You hurt?” Dixon said.

“Not bad. Grazed my shoulder. What have you got in there, Dutch? It better be good.”

“You won’t believe it.”

“The Teapot is the Jackpot,” Hernandez said, smiling at Dixon and moving quickly past him to catch up with his dog.

The garage was cavernous. You’d never know it from the facade on the street outside. Inside, it looked like two or three old warehouses had been combined into one. You could easily get twenty tractor-trailer rigs inside.

It was now empty except for the three black Chevy Suburbans with blacked-out windows parked along one wall. Dutch was running back and forth alongside all three vans. They were sheathed in clear thick plastic covers. Hernandez crossed the greasy floor and approached the first one, running his hand along the smooth black fender where the plastic had been partially peeled away.

“Dutch! Come!” Dixon said. He’d found something interesting on the far side of the garage. The dog raced over to him, started pawing through the stuff in the corner.

“Will you look at this?” Rocky said, ripping back the torn plastic covering one of the big vans, his voice a mix of admiration and dread. “These things are perfect! Light bars, antennas, running boards, grab handles, the whole nine yards right down to the five star U.S.S.S. decals on the doors.”

“Stay away from that thing, Rocky!” Dixon said, keeping his distance. “Don’t touch it!”

“Why?”

“Two cops already died finding out. Come here and see what Dutch has got. Huge pile of plastic wrappers over here in the corner. Maybe thirty or forty of them. That means the rest of the vehicles are already on the streets.”

“Yeah…”

“Don’t do that!”

“Aw, c’mon, Sheriff, we’ve got to find out what’s inside these things, don’t we? I mean—”

The explosion was blinding.

79

THE BLACK JUNGLE

T op was ecstatic as he left the prisoner alone in his room overlooking the river that morning. He and Khan had just pushed the man to the edge of endurance and beyond. The Englishman was near death now and would probably expire before his scheduled beheading at sundown. Pity. Still, both Top and the doctor were now fully convinced the English detective had not communicated anything to this man Hawke; or to anyone else.

Their plans thus intact, with no need of dangerous last minute alterations, he and the doctor rushed across the rope bridge leading to the subterranean bunker.

The rain was heavy.

His drones, sadly, were grounded. Even the patrol tanks were having a rough go of it in the deepening mud that carpeted the jungle floor. The river was rising. It was possible an early flash flood might occur. This was of no concern. His bunker was secure and his fortress built in trees for just this kind of situation. He who has the high ground, reigns, Top reminded himself.

The hour was at hand. He was surprised to find that he was wholly at peace. Unconcerned with trivialities or small setbacks such as had occurred on the farm in Virginia and in Rock Creek Park. It was too late for the Americans. They just didn’t know it yet. Nothing could stop him now. He had built his fortress well. Nothing could stop his machines.

There had been scattered reports of incursions on the northern perimeter. There had been probes along the western front as well. Let them probe. His men were ready. His remaining Guards would fight to the death. He was also unconcerned about an attack by this nobody named Hawke. His vessel was now stopped, stymied by the rapids just as Top had expected it would be. He’d seen her size on the live feed from the aerial drones. There was no way a boat that size could navigate this stretch of the Black River.

Hawke was nothing but a runaway slave and when he was found, he would be dealt with in a manner befitting his station and his sins.

Four entire divisions had moved out from this camp as well as the satellite camps in the jungle. His soldiers, wearing the new red patches proclaiming them BOLIVARISTAS, were on their way north, en route to Colombia. There, in the jungles outside the city of Medillin, his forces would join a large battalion of FARC guerillas and launch their assault on the first stepping stone in Central America, Panama. After the fall of Panama City, the unstoppable Bolívaristas would advance into Costa Rica and Nicaragua where they would be joined with yet more of their brethren.

And then into San Salvador they would march, gathering strength as they moved into Guatemala for the final surge before joining their comrades in the mountains of Mexico. The final push would, of course, be north across that beleaguered borderline, north, always north, until the lost territories of his friends in Mexico City were at long last recovered.

What Simon Bolívar had begun in 1820, Muhammad Top would finish. A united continent, brothers-in-arms, true believers all, faithful soldiers of Allah.

Now, to the matters at hand.

He and Khan entered a short tunnel, brilliantly disguised inside a large flowering fern, and came to the blast door that protected the elevator.

Seconds later they were inside and descending to the bunker.

Khan and Top entered the Tomb. They could hardly contain their joy at the images on the multiple screens. His black Chevrolet war wagons were circling the American capital. Their cameras were sending back pictures of a cloudy January morning in Washington. A holiday. Parade marshals were directing traffic around the capital building itself. High school marching bands gathering on side streets, tubby children tooting their tubas. Even now, joyful Americans were lining up three deep behind the ropes that lined the parade route from the White House.

Top looked up at the digital clock he’d positioned so carefully where all eyes could read it.

9:59 a.m.

In two hours, the president of the United States would place his hand on the bible and swear to uphold the Constitution and defend his country. At that exact moment, America, its entire government decapitated, would go crashing to the ground with a sound that would be heard around the world.

The bible was a nice touch, Top thought. One of Khan’s better ideas.

“IT’S TIME,” Saladin said, handing the field radio back to his radioman. He’d just talked to Brock. The canoes were on the river, headed for Top’s compound three miles distant. Saladin moved his men quickly east through the jungle. The rain was heavy, but they’d trained in worse. At his hand signal, the men halted just inside the tree-line. The wide ravine lay ahead. And the great rope bridge.

Thanks to Caparina, who had shaved her head and disguised herself as a lowly foot soldier inside the compound, he now knew this was the weak link. It was the back door of Top’s compound. A lot of troops had moved out, and were marching north. His scouts had pinpointed the position of the main force and communicated the troop’s position to Fire Control aboard Stiletto.

The compound would be primarily guarded by Trolls now. But he and his demo experts had figured out a way to reduce the Troll population of the Black Jungle.

Now, Saladin ran from man to man, making sure the main body of his squad was well situated within the tree line and knew their orders. Then he looked at the two young Brazilian Spec Ops guys who would accompany him across the bridge. They had volunteered for the most dangerous part of this mission. “Ready?” he whispered

They nodded, their faces smeared with camo paint.

Into the jaws of death, Saladin thought, but he kept those dark words to himself.

“We go.”

Saladin and his two volunteers sprinted across the open ground and raced out onto the swaying bridge. He’d left the main body of his squad inside the trees, weapons ready. When it was time, they would strike. At the far end of the bridge, they could see the enemy forces aligned, waiting for them. Each of his two comrades had been told to hold his fire until his signal. They would get as close to the far side as they could before engaging. That was the plan.

Halfway across, running hard, they could see the robot tanks forming up to defend the western perimeter. Saladin and his men kept running, weapons at the ready. A hundred yards, now, fifty…still, no one fired. The burned-out bunker had not been returned to action. But there were more enemy troops moving up through the trees. Why didn’t they shoot? He and his two men kept running toward them, weapons poised, fingers itching on the triggers.

Twenty yards from the end of the bridge, Saladin raised his hand and signaled for the two men with him to halt. They each dropped to one knee, covering him. He ran ahead alone across the bridge. He was firing his weapon, spraying the oncoming tanks now streaming toward the bridge. The tanks returned fire, troops moving in behind their advance.

Saladin went down. As the tanks advanced, his two comrades raced forward and grabbed their leader under each arm, retreating back across the bridge on the run, firing as furiously over their shoulders as they were able, knees pumping, running hard for the safety of the jungle where their squad was waiting. The tank controllers, seeing all this disarray, would be filled with glee. And speed men and machines across the bridge for the kill.

Saladin craned his head around, looking back over his shoulder. The tanks were rolling onto the bridge in high-speed pursuit of the enemy.

“Excellent!” Saladin shouted, as they dove, pulling him headfirst into the foliage. Everyone had played his part perfectly. They now turned and watched the enemy tanks and men behind them streaming across the bridge toward them. The suspension bridge was sagging under weight it was not designed to hold. But it would hold, the engineer in Saladin told him. That was the idea.

“Ready, sir?”

“Five seconds, Sergeant,” Saladin said. “Wait for those last three tanks to roll on—okay—now!”

The young soldier pushed the old-fashioned plunger. The charges his team had so carefully placed beneath the bridge blew in perfect sequence. Three massive charges exploded: one at either end of the bridge, and finally one in the exact center. The explosions tore the heavy rope bridge to pieces, sending at least fifteen Trolls and thirty of the enemy guards plummeting into the deep ravine below.

Saladin allowed himself a grim feeling of satisfaction. He had just struck a serious blow against his enemy. Bolívaristas, my ass. It was a narco-criminal terrorist army, financed and led by foreigners with no interests beyond their own benighted religious fantasies of a humbled America.

Now, Saladin’s squad would all descend into the ravine, cross the river, and begin the tough climb up the other side. Such a climb under fire would be hell. But this recent action, and the one that would surely follow it, had drawn resources from the center to the western perimeter. And destroyed them. The first blow against Top had been struck.

Saladin believed his actions now would give Hawke and the men on the river a fighting chance later.

80

WASHINGTON, DC

P resident is waiting in the Oval,” Betsey Hall said. Jack McAtee’s pretty ash-blond secretary was standing just outside the office. She was frowning at her watch as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs approached. General Moore, a lean six-footer in his dress blues, did not look happy. In fact, nobody looked very happy on this Inauguration Day morning.

“Sorry,” Moore said, “We couldn’t get here any faster.”

“You’re all right. He just got back from across the street. Morning worship service at St. John’s. He’s only been in there ten minutes.”

“How is he?” Moore asked her, pausing before he went in.

“In a word?”

“Yeah.”

“Pissed. At everybody.”

“He’s not postponing?”

“He’s not postponing and he’s not canceling and that’s that. You talk to him. He listens to you.”

“What did you tell him to do, Betsey?”

“I’m not in the habit of telling the president what to do.”

“Right,” Moore said, smiling and squeezing her shoulder. He snapped off a salute at the two marines standing guard at the door and went inside.

The president stood by the windows with his back to the door, looking out into the snow-covered Rose Garden. “Hello, Charley,” he said without turning around.

“Morning, Mr. President. I got here as quickly as I could.”

“Town’s a mess. Another Inauguration Day, you know. What will they think of next?”

Moore laughed. “We’re lucky to be here, sir. It could easily have been the other guy.”

“Not that easily,” McAtee huffed, “Take a seat, General.” He walked around his desk and collapsed into the upholstered sofa by the fireplace. Moore sat opposite him and picked up a silver urn.

“Coffee?”

The president waved the question away and Moore filled his own cup. “Mr. President, what do you intend to do?”

“You’re the tenth person to ask me that question in the last goddamn hour.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Charley, I like you. Always have. You were the guy I most looked up to at Annapolis. Hell, I still look up to you and I’m the damn president. A lot is riding on this decision. If I run, everybody runs. Park Police estimate there are already half a million people out there on the parade route. The media is already going apeshit. Positively salivating at the chance to see me slip out the back door. What the hell would you do? You going to rain on my parade, too?”

“What are the options, sir?”

“Marine One is warming up its engines out on the lawn. Ready to fly me to Site R in Raven Rock Mountain. There are also two identical Secret Service motor-cades waiting for me. One of them is going to Camp David. The one at the North Portico will take me to the Capitol steps where I will be duly sworn in for my second term. Pick one.”

“Intel right now points to a possible WMD in that Potomac unmanned sub.”

“What sub? Nobody’s seen it. We’ve got sensors on every bridge. The most advanced electronic countermeasures on earth can’t find a radiation signature! Nobody can even guarantee me the damn thing exists. I’m going to cancel because some kid lawman from Texas told some sheriff he saw some bad guys put something in the river? C’mon, Charley, you know me better than that.”

“What about Rock Creek Park?”

“What about it? Somebody trucked a couple of Suburbans packed with conventional explosives into the park and blew them up. Rattled some windows at Walter Reed. BFD.”

“The Suburbans were designed to exactly replicate Secret Service vehicles. Very sophisticated plan of attack, I’d say. Hide your bombs in plain sight.”

“Everybody’s all over that, Charley. Media says I shouldn’t have sent all those troops to the border. Left the capital unprotected. Unprotected from what? So far, nobody’s been able to find a single heavily armored black Chevy Suburban in this town that does not belong to the Secret Service.”

“I still don’t like it. One of those look-alike machines could roll right up alongside a bunch of Iowa cheerleaders and no one would think anything of it.”

“Hell, I don’t like it either! But I’ll be damned if I’ll run based on any of this airy-fairy crap I’m hearing from the boys at Langley.”

“What’s the First Lady say?”

“Aw, you know Lynn, Charley. She only wants to protect me.”

“So do I.”

“I know that. So, what the hell do I do? No, I’ve got a better question. What the hell would you do?”

General Moore took a long time to answer. He’d known he’d be asked this question. It was the reason he’d been called to the White House. One of those pivotal moments history is so fond of throwing our way. The president’s safety versus the country’s need to see presidential resolve and courage in the face of adversity. By chance, Moore’s gaze fell upon the small bust of Churchill standing at one end of the great Lincoln Desk. The set of his shoulders, that bulldog expression. He looked at his old friend of thirty years.

“Grab your hat, Mr. President. We’re going to the Capitol.”

“Thank you, Charley. Either way.”

“I hope and pray it’s the right answer, sir.”

The president stood and straightened his tie. “Want a ride? I’ve got plenty of room in the limo. No former presidents full of phony platitudes this time.”

Moore smiled and said, “One call, Mr. President. I’ll be right behind you.”

McAtee strode from the Oval Office. Betsey Hall and Scott McComsey, the White House Press Secretary, were waiting to hear what they would now tell the world. Moore reached over and picked up the phone from the coffee table. He speed-dialed the president’s direct line to the JCS office at the Pentagon.

“This is General Moore. Belay my previous orders. The president has decided not to go to Zone R. The swearing in will take place as scheduled on the Capitol steps. No delays. I want a combat air patrol scrambled and over the city. I want the surface-to-air-missile batteries at both the Capitol and the Pentagon activated. And I want to expand the no-fly zone around the city. Take it sixty miles. Anybody find that goddamn sub? Harbor Police? No? Good God, somebody better start praying.”

Moore stood, and spent a minute gazing around the Oval Office, remembering happier times in this room.

What is happening to our country? the general thought, and headed for the door.

“YOU FEELING okay, now, sir?” the blond kid said to him. He looked around. Dixon didn’t feel too good. His head hurt, for one thing. He reached up to rub his forehead and felt something wrapped around it. Bandage of some kind.

He was half-sitting, half-lying in the street, his legs straight out in front of him. Bloody. There was a line of vehicles in the street. A motor-cade of Black Suburbans. Lights flashing. Men were standing at all four corners of each vehicle with guns drawn, pistols and submachine guns. Big men, all wearing some kind of black jumpsuits and body armor.

“Who are they?” Dixon asked the blond kid.

“CAT, sir. Counterassault team. Secret Service.”

“Where’s Agent Hernandez?”

“He didn’t make it, sir. I’m sorry. You want to try and stand up again? You tell me.”

“Hernandez is gone?”

“Yes, sir. I’m afraid so.”

The door to the vehicle right next to him was open and he could hear scratchy voices on the radio. “Roger, Rawhide is rolling. Repeat, Rawhide is on the move. Rolling to the Punch Bowl.”

“Everybody copy that?” the blond kid said into his sleeve. “Rawhide is rolling. Looks like it’s going to be showtime after all.”

“Who are you?”

“Agent in charge, sir. Andy Hecht. We’ve been ordered to move you to a secure location, sir.”

“You’ve got to look inside that building first. I’ve got to show you something.”

“What building, sir? It’s gone.”

Dixon craned his head around and looked over his shoulder. Half of the building where he’d last remembered being had collapsed to the ground. There was a smoking pile of rubble two stories high. The site was crawling with men wielding axes and picks, digging through what was left of the garage. He must have been out for quite a while.

“You want me to get in that truck?”

“Yes, sir, I’d appreciate it. We’re going to get you further medical attention.” Hecht helped the sheriff get to his feet. He swayed a bit, then steadied himself and looked back at where he’d been when the truck exploded.

“Inside that building were three vehicles exactly like this one. Except they weren’t. They were remote-controlled bombs. And I found evidence in there of a lot more. If you keep digging, you’ll find it.”

“We believe you, sir. We’re looking for those trucks right now. Step this way, sir. Take it easy.”

It was a struggle just to stay on his feet. Dixon was determined to climb up into the back seat under his own steam. He had a lot of work to do yet, finding those things. He was the only one left who really knew what to look for.

“What will you do if you do find more of these things?” Dixon asked.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that. I’m going to close the door now, sir. Agent Ross is going to take care of you from here on in. Good luck, sir.”

Hecht went to close the door but Dixon put out a hand and stopped it mid-way. He leaned halfway out, his red-rimmed eyes searching the rubble across the street. Then he looked down at his boots and his whole body seemed to sag.

Dixon said, “I’m sorry.”

“Something wrong, sir?”

“Where’s the dog?”

“Dog?”

“Dutch? Did he make it?”

“Sheriff, maybe you better lay back down for a little—”

“Hernandez had a dog, son. His name was Dutch.”

“Oh, okay, hold on a second,” Hecht said and spoke into his sleeve once more. “This is Agent Hecht. Anybody at the scene find a K-9 dog? Answers to the name of Dutch? What? Repeat, I didn’t copy that…yeah, got it.”

He looked at Dixon, shaking his head.

“Gone?” Dixon said.

“Wait a minute…no. I believe that might be him over there, sir. Some of my men were patching him up and getting him some chow.”

Dixon swung his boots out of the back seat and looked back down the street.

Dutch was trotting slowly toward him. He was bandaged up pretty well, and he was limping a little bit, sure, but he looked darn good, all things considered. At least his tail was still wagging.

“Good boy,” the sheriff said, bending down to hug the dog around the neck. “Good boy, Dutch.”

81

THE BLACK RIVER

H awke’s radio squawked.

It was bloody tough going on the river. Driving rain, icy cold. The four canoes kept getting pinned against boulders by the raging torrents. Hawke pulled his paddle from the turbulent water and picked up the field radio lying between his feet. It was Saladin, reporting in, to Hawke’s great relief.

“Hawke. Do you copy? Is that you?”

“Go ahead, Saladin,” Hawke replied, “I told you I’d come back. Glad you’re still with us. I was beginning to worry. What’s your current position?”

“We just blew that primary west bridge. A lot of armor and troops went into the drink.”

“Well done!” It was the first good news in a long time. “Casualties, Saladin?”

“Minimal, but that could change rapidly. We are going up the side of the ravine en route to our scheduled rendezvous with Froggy. We are taking heavy fire now, but we should be there in twenty minutes. Some of us, anyway.”

“I look forward to our reunion.”

“One more thing. My forward scouts report heavy troop movement north of the camp. It’s Top’s main force, Alex. They’re moving out.”

“Give me that position, Saladin. I’ll take care of it.”

Saladin gave Hawke a description of Top’s main body of forces and the GPS coordinates. Hawke jotted down the fresh intel in a soggy notebook and jumped back on the radio. His canoe was about to smash into a large boulder and he shouted a warning to his crew. They managed to avoid the thing, barely.

“Stiletto, heads up, fire control, this is Hawke. We have heavy enemy troop movement headed north. Approximately six miles northwest of my current location on the river.”

He gave Dylan the exact GPS coordinates.

“Roger that, Skipper, target description, sir?”

“Ground troops, Dylan, the main body is on the jungle road north. The force consists of various types of armored robotic vehicles, and hundreds of five-ton troop transports holding twenty soldiers each. We can’t stop them, but we can slow them down a bit. Acquire targets and launch LAM missiles now.”

“Affirmative, sir.”

“One more thing. This road the troops are taking. It’s limestone and I can personally vouch for the shoddy construction. Launch PAM missiles. Try and take out the highway two miles north of the troops. Destroy it, and we could halt their progress for at least a week.”

“Roger that, Skipper, Acquiring and launching as ordered.” Hawke picked up his paddle and started digging with new resolve. He could hear dull thuds to the north. He took grim satisfaction from the fact that the road he and others like him had slaved on was now being destroyed. The PAM missiles would slow the troop advance for a while. Conch could figure out what she wanted to do about that later.

Meanwhile, Stiletto’s Loitering Attack Missiles would remain airborne above the enemy troops for forty five minutes searching for moving targets. When a LAM acquired a tank or an armored troop carrier, it would automatically nose over and destroy it.

Death from above.

And from the river, if they could stay afloat.

“Watch out!” Hawke cried.

Hawke and his crew dug their paddles deep into the roiling river, paddling furiously. It was too late.

The roaring currents of vicious rapids had finally pinned their canoe hard up against two huge boulders. The power of the water was so strong, it was all Hawke and the four others could do to keep the canoe from overturning and spilling them out. Had the five men been in a wooden dugout, and not the sleek carbon fiber craft, the hull would have been shattered to splinters long ago.

He gritted his teeth and plunged his paddle again and again into the roiling water. The sudden surge of energy he felt was frightening in its intensity. He worried it might be another feverish illusion, but he’d kept the fear that the fever might be spiking again to himself. Hawke had said nothing these last days, but the first signs of returning malaria had appeared.

Of the four five-man canoes launched, only three had successfully been run through the rapids. Harry Brock, in the lead, was now navigating his own and two other canoes through the mined stretch of river guarding Top’s lair. Harry’s charts told him they were less than three miles away. Mercifully, the weather was so atrocious, that drones, either from above or along the shore, were not hounding them.

Hawke, trapped near the bank, saw only one escape. Trees bent low over the water, strangled with twisting vines as thick as cables. If he could reach one of the looping vines, called bejucas, he might be able to pull the canoe off the rocks and get the prow headed back into the channel Brock had found and successfully navigated. But he’d need to get out of the boat to do it.

He informed the crew of his plan and swung himself over the gunwale and into the river. He found his footing and saw that the water was up to his armpits. Somehow, he had to dislodge the canoe without overturning it or having it catapult downriver and smash on the jutting rocks twenty yards further ahead. He could see Brock’s channel now. It was narrow, but if he could get them properly aligned, they might make it.

Keeping a firm grip on the canoe, he started to make his way toward the thick vine hanging over the river. It was hard sledding against the current, his feet slipping over the moss-covered rocks and he stumbled twice on the sharply uneven river bed. But he managed to grab the vine with his free hand. Now that he had leverage, he started pulling the canoe toward the bank. The men saw what he was attempting and started paddling with a will.

The current that had pinned them to the rocks was now in their favor. The canoe was moving slowly but surely toward him.

“That’s it!” Hawke cried to the men. “You can do it, lads!”

Yes. Pull the canoe straight for the bank, keep the bow pointed into the current as much as possible, let the bloody river swing the stern around until the canoe was parallel to the bank and pointed in the right direction. Now! The men were holding her fast to the bank, and Hawke swung himself back aboard.

This time, they managed to stay within the narrow confines of the channel. Hawke’s watch put them at maybe twenty minutes behind Brock’s group. The fact that they’d heard no mines exploding downriver was a great comfort.

Hawke could no longer tell if the water in his eyes was rain or fever sweat. But he paddled harder and so, too, did his crew. Stoke and Froggy had to be getting close to Top’s compound now. They might have already found Congreve. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the unbidden words:

“Hang on, Ambrose,” Hawke muttered.

Hang bloody on.

82

THE BLACK JUNGLE

S toke caught Frogman’s eye and raised one hand into the air, palm flat. Then he clenched his fist. Enemy ahead. Nobody move. The two jihadistas were one hundred yards away. Smoking cigarettes, their hands cupped over the butts, talking to each other at the base of the enormous tree. Standing sentry, it looked like, in their dark green camo fatigues under ponchos. The wide black river was just to the right. Ambrose’s hut was supposed to be by the river. The tree looked good. The sentries guarding it made it look even better.

A great bridge arched over the river. A real bridge, not one of the typical wood and rope one-day wonders you saw everywhere in this jungle. Not much traffic. A platoon of guards marching double-time, couple of soldiers on bicycles, two or three of the little robot tanks Brock called Trolls. There were pickets out, and probably electronic sensors in the jungle. But nobody on the bridge seemed to be aware that not only had their perimeter been breached, some bonafide badasses were on the prowl inside the henhouse.

Probably because all the pickets were dead.

Froggy and his guys were crouching in the heavy bush fifty yards to his left. For an hour, they had moved swiftly and silently through the jungle, taking advantage of the plentiful natural ground cover, moving from tree to tree. They had left in the bloody wake behind them a large number of seriously dead individuals, scouts and pickets who’d gotten in the squad’s way as they advanced deeper inside Top’s jungle fortress. They’d used assault knives to cut the wire fences and silence the enemy. And silenced CAR-15 submachine guns, the selector set to 3-round bursts, when they couldn’t get close enough for the knives.

Stoke and Froggy still had all their guys, and all their guys still had all their fingers and toes. So far it was Good Guys 17, Top 0. He’d heard Brock’s guy Saladin talking on the squad radio. He was moving in from the west and sweeping up any bad guys who got between them and their rendezvous point just a mile north above the bridge.

Stoke looked up at the underside of the dripping canopy. Treehouses, if you could believe that. A whole damn village up in the trees. It was weird. But, Stoke had to admit, strangely beautiful. Magical, like that movie he’d seen as a kid. Swiss Family Robinson, that was it. Name a kid who ever saw that movie and didn’t want to live in a treehouse. Maybe Ambrose Congreve, but that was about it.

Stoke was ready to take the tree. He looked at his feet. He was standing in ooze that covered his boots, felt like it was sucking him down. They were on high ground now. In some places, the water was already up to your knees. The rain still came and the river was rising rapidly. In many places, camp was already flooded. That’s why the treehouses, dummy, Stoke said to himself, looking over at Froggy.

He caught his eye and then pointed at the two tangos smoking at the base of the tree. They still had their backs to Froggy. Stoke gave his patented hand signal, pointing his index finger at the side of his own skull and lowering his thumb hammer twice. Froggy nodded. Understood. Two headshots.

The Frogman rose up to his full height of five-foot-five and raised the CAR-15, sighting, and, almost instantaneously, firing. Pfft-pfft. The two guards crumpled to the ground, dead before they hit the mud. Good guns, these Colts. Now. When Stoke first used this weapon in the Delta, it had been too loud. Guys went deaf firing that gun. And the muzzle flash was too bright, blinding his guys at night and giving away their position to the enemy. They’d fixed all that, now. Had a longer flash suppressor that actually worked.

Stoke moved quickly to the tree, his eyes scanning the trunk, looking for the thin slash mark that would tell him he’d found the right tree. He did a three-sixty around the base. Nothing at eye level. Wait a minute. That was his eye-level. Harry’s girl, Caparina, who’d cut the bark for them, would have a lot lower eye-level, wouldn’t she? Unless she, too, was six-six. He doubted it. He’d heard she was a total babe.

He bent down and went round again, running his index finger lightly over the bark as he circled, a foot lower this time.

There. A thin diagonal slash, fresh greenish white wood showing.

He took a deep breath. Ambrose Congreve was at the top of this tree. Whether he was dead or alive was the question. He waved Froggy and the squad in closer, circling the wagons with his index finger. There was heavy ground cover and good scrub not ten feet from the tree. Froggy could lay low there, cover his butt for at least the ten minutes this might take. He was going up the tree alone.

There was a funky hand-operated elevator. Basically, you just stepped onto a four-by-four-foot metal platform, grabbed the handrail, and pushed the red button on the controller hanging from the rail. Zip, you were airborne.

He looked up as he rose from the ground, his weapon at the ready. The treehouse was a round structure, supported by trusses underneath. The thing was built right around the trunk. Another house, slightly larger and a few feet higher up, was connected to this one by a small ropewalk. The houses had corrugated metal roofs, raised up to let the air flow in this tropical heat. There were narrow verandas that went all the way around.

He saw a head bending out over the rail, looking straight down at him, the guy obviously wanting to say something to whichever of his buddies was on the way up.

“How you doing?” Stoke said.

He saw the guys eyes go wide, looking straight down into the muzzle of a light alloy CAR-15 commando rifle that must have been growing bigger and blacker by the second.

Stoke squeezed off a shot, hoping the guy would not tumble forward and fall from the railing. He didn’t. He collapsed half way over the rail and stayed there.

He stepped off the platform onto the circular porch. All clear so far. The door to the house was a quarter of the way around. He moved that way in a semi-crouch, gun out front. The dead guard was hanging there, blood dripping from what was left of his head. The sliding metal door was closed. To the right was a window. There was a light inside, but curtains blocked the view.

Stoke did a three-sixty around the veranda, not taking any chances. He moved in fractions of inches, trying not to make any noise, and then edged back around to the door. He looked at the steel window again, trying to peer beyond the edges of the black-out curtain. Couldn’t see diddly.

He put his hand on the door, pausing to control his breathing. Slowed the system way down, just the way he’d been trained to do at Heat & Skeet, down in the Keys.

Then he slid the door along the track. Slowly. One inch at a time until he could get a look-see.

No bad guys inside. Only a room with no furniture except a picture hung on the wall. There was a hospital gurney on the far side of the little round room. A pool of light from a lamp on a steel table lit the whole room. There were surgical instruments in a tray on the table. And a man was lying on the narrow gurney, his hands and legs shackled to the frame. An intravenous tube ran down to his arm from a bag of liquid hung on the trolley. Stoke’s heart beat a little faster.

From a distance he looked a whole lot like Ambrose might look, if he hadn’t eaten in a week. Stoke moved quickly to the gurney and looked down at the gray-faced of the man on the gurney.

It was Ambrose Congreve, all right.

He looked a whole lot dead.

A voice behind him caused him to spin around and tighten his trigger finger at the sight of the soldier. Not squeeze it, which was good, because this soldier was wearing a long white coat over jungle camos. The figure framed in the doorway yanked off a floppy hat revealing a recently shaved head. It belonged to a beautiful woman. She was carrying an armful of medical supplies instead of a gun.

“Stokely Jones?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Caparina. Harry Brock’s friend.”

“Is he dead?” Stoke said, looking at Ambrose.

“Not yet.”

“You think you can do anything for him, Caparina?”

“I’m going to try.”

Stoke pulled out the small handheld radio and hit speaker.

“Hawke, Hawke, copy?”

“Stoke, where are you?”

“He’s alive, boss. I’m with him now.”

“Hurt?”

“Yeah. He needs an exfil, pronto. We’ve got to get him to sick bay.”

“Your job is to keep Ambrose alive, Stoke. Whatever it takes.”

“Can you stay in position? I’m on the river. The canoes are ten minutes away. Has Brock made the rendezvous?”

“Negative. Haven’t seen him.”

“He’s upriver, ahead of me. Should reach you any minute.”

“Where’s Stiletto?”

“Navigating the minefield with the probes. She’s maybe twenty minutes out, depending on how bad it is. I’m assuming there’s enough water to get there.”

“We’ll do what we can for Ambrose till you get here. Meanwhile, I got another report of troop movement from Saladin’s guys. They’re all headed north.”

“Stiletto’s got them dialed in. Saladin’s scouts radioed the position. Fire Control is launching everything we can spare. Take care of him, Stoke. Keep him breathing.”

“You heard the man,” Stoke said to the woman bending over her gravely injured patient.

“What’s his name?” she asked, resting a cool hand on his forehead.

“That’s Ambrose Congreve of Scotland Yard. He’s the only man on the planet who might know how to keep Papa Top from pulling the trigger.”

83

WASHINGTON, DC

F ranklin zipped up his last pair of clean blue jeans and pulled the t-shirt and sweater over his head. It was a tight squeeze with the bandages and all. His only clean clothes he had left in the bag he’d taken to Key West. He put on his boots. He was ready to go home, soon as this mess was over.

The Secret Service had been kind enough to invite him to attend the Inauguration ceremony. He’d said he’d rather help than watch but they said no, somebody would pick him up. After that, they’d take him to Reagan Airport for the flight back home.

He sat down on the edge of the hotel bed and reached for the phone. Right now, all he could think about was talking to Daisy. Hearing that sweet voice on the phone. A song where the music was more important than the lyrics.

“Hello?”

“Hey. It’s me.”

“Oh, my lord! Franklin! Where are you, baby? Still in Washington? June and I got the TV on. They showed your picture this morning! I can’t believe what all they’re saying.”

“You never should.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’ll tell you later. You got my messages about staying away from those trucks? I left three or four there for you on the machine.”

“I got them, Franklin.”

“Tell me you and June stayed away from that one in San Antone. I’ve been so worried about that.”

“We found that sucker, honey. Big Orange.”

“I was afraid of that. Is everybody okay? June? What happened?”

“Franklin, we found that damn Big Orange truck! Can you believe it, the thing was parked right outside of the Alamo. Isn’t that perfect? The Mexicans blowing up the Alamo? June said, ‘Shoot, why didn’t we think of that?’ ”

“You didn’t go near it?”

“After what you said? Heck, no! June called the San Antone PD on her cell. They told us to go straight inside to warn all the tourists to get out of there. And you’ll never guess what happened.”

“Tell me,” Dixon said, lying back on the bed, cradling the phone to his ear. Now that he knew she was all right, he just wanted to listen to the words.

“We went straight to the souvenir shop, of course, because that’s where all the tourists head first anyway, right? So, we go over to the counter and there’s this really beautiful cashier girl, a dead-ringer for that June Carter actress, Reese Witherspoon, and you will never believe who she was talking to!”

“Davy Crockett?”

“No! She was talking to the Big Orange himself! A really cute blond guy with a Big Orange logo on his shirt! He was the Big Orange driver himself, all the way from Lakeland, Florida!”

“What was he doing in Texas?”

“Took a detour to see his best girl who worked at the Alamo Gift Shoppe! Isn’t that the funniest thing you ever heard in your life?”

“What about his truck?”

“Regular old truck. Blacked-out windows, but not the mirrored kind. My mistake, Franklin.”

“I love you, Daisy.”

“Well, I love you, too! When are you coming home?”

“I’ve been invited by this nice lady at the State Department to attend the Inauguration. She’s swinging by here to pick me up in a few minutes. Then I’m headed to the airport.”

“How exciting! June and I’ll be looking for you on the television. We heard they might call it off and then it was back on again. All right, I can tell you want to get off the phone. One more thing, did you hear what they found in that underground garage down in Gunbarrel?”

“Nope.”

“Homer opened a can of worms. It was an old Chevy dealership. Owned and operated by Mr. J. T. Rawls. Selling SUVs to the Federales last couple of years. Had a tunnel. Had a shop, too, and he was customizing those SUVs to make them look like official cars. He was in cahoots with the Mexicans the whole time! Isn’t that something?”

“Homer would have been a fine lawman.”

“He already was, Franklin. You know that.”

FRANKLIN got picked up out front of the Doubletree ten minutes later. It was a State Department sedan with a driver who looked like she just got out of college. Her name was Holly Rattigan and she was from Seattle. Said she worked in the Secretary’s office but had the day off for the Inaugural Parade and had volunteered to drive the sheriff around.

“I’m honored to meet you, Sheriff Dixon,” she said, checking traffic and then pulling out into it. “Everybody’s talking about you. Call me Holly.”

“’Preciate that, Holly.”

They drove in silence, headed for the Capitol Building. Downtown Washington was fortresslike. Ten-foot-high barriers lined the park in front of the White House. Security and bomb removal vehicles were everywhere. A hundred city blocks were closed. Franklin imagined there was a lot more security you could not see. He knew surveillance cameras were everywhere, sending pictures to a joint command center at a secret location in Virginia. Forty agencies there were monitoring sensors testing for chemical, nuclear, or biological agents.

Holly’s official sedan and credentials got them through the checkpoints and roadblocks easily enough. A DC Metro policeman waved them into a special lane on Constitution Avenue. They drove toward 1st Street to a lot where they had special parking for Government employees.

“Isn’t it exciting? Holly said, “They’re expecting 11,000 people to march in the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.”

“It’s exciting, all right,” Franklin said as Holly pulled into an empty parking space. He checked his watch climbing out of the car. The president would be sworn in in twenty minutes.

Their seats were in a roped-off section in a small park near the U.S. Grant Memorial. Seemed like all of Washington had showed up. Security on the west side of the Capitol was everywhere you looked. All the roads were blocked off with huge concrete barricades. Everyone approaching the site of the president’s speech was subjected to metal detector screening and inspection by security personnel.

It was January 20. The weather forecast for the president’s Inaugural speech was thirty degrees, cloudy, and light snow flurries. Franklin stood there beside Holly, listening to the beautiful music and admiring the beauty of the west steps of the Capitol, hung with red, white, and blue bunting. The State Department folks had provided pretty good seats. Still, you couldn’t see much from this distance. Holly and Franklin excused themselves, and started moving through the crowd, trying to get closer to the podium.

Franklin was glad he’d come. It was festive and grand, and he liked seeing the mounted Park Police and their beautiful horses, moving slowly through the crowds keeping an eye on everything. One mounted patrolman had paused under a tree where Franklin was standing.

“Is that the president?” Franklin asked the officer, when he heard someone speaking solemnly over the public address.

“No, sir, that’s the vice president. He goes first.”

Franklin looked at his watch. It was a quarter to twelve. At noon, the president would take the oath.

“Oh my God,” Holly said, grabbing his arm. “What’s going on back there?”

Franklin turned to see. The crowd was surging forward around him. You could hear cries of panic coming from the direction of the Grant Memorial, a few hundred yards behind where he and Holly were now standing. There was a small reflecting pool behind the monument, and parked alongside the pool were four black Suburbans belonging to the Secret Service.

A fifth Suburban had pulled away from the curb and was moving slowly across 1st Street at a weird angle. It wasn’t speeding, but people were shouting warnings and jumping out of its path. The black truck plowed ahead, gaining a little speed. It appeared to be headed right toward the wooded park area directly in front of the West Steps. People were running, panic-stricken, scattering in all directions now.

The police and security people Dixon could see seemed to be momentarily frozen in place.

He instantly understood their reaction. Maybe it was a truckload of agents racing toward the podium on orders from the Secret Service com center. Maybe someone had spotted a bomb or an armed man in the crowd. It was an impossible situation. No one knew what was going on. How could they?

You couldn’t distinguish the legitmate vehicles from the remote-controlled version. Perhaps this Suburban rolling across the grass really had been ordered into the crowd. It was going to check out a threatening individual. Or perhaps it had been ordered into the crowd to disarm a madman and shield the president? It was impossible to be certain.

At that exact moment, the sun came out from behind a snow-filled cloud. Brilliant beams lit up the Capitol building. In that instant Franklin knew for sure.

He’d seen the sun hit the black Suburban’s mirrored windshield. He was the only man alive in Washington who had seen these windows close up. This one didn’t look right.

The crowd had parted now, leaving a clear path for the vehicle now picking up speed and headed right toward him.

“Officer,” Dixon said to the mounted policeman, “You’ve got to stop that vehicle. Now!”

“Me? I’ve go no authority to—”

“It’s packed with explosives. It’s headed for the Inaugural stand. They mean to kill the president and the whole damn government.”

“Who the hell are you?” the mounted cop shouted at him. He was in high panic, half-listening, half-talking into his radio, trying to make sense of this craziness. He was looking to find somebody with the authority to tell him what to do in this bizarre situation.

Franklin grabbed the horse’s reins and managed to hold on to the man’s gaze an extra second. “I’m nobody. A Texas county sheriff. But I’m telling you the truth, officer. You’ve got to stop that thing right now!”

“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

“I guess I’d better do it,” Franklin said.

In a second, he’d reached up and grabbed the man’s arm and hauled him down out of the saddle. The surprised cop was on the ground, going for his weapon but suddenly Holly was on top of him, knees on his chest, flashing her State Department I.D. right in his face. Franklin heaved himself up into the saddle, reining in the frightened horse and turning him around.

“Giddyup,” Franklin said, clicking his tongue and touching his boots to the horse’s flanks.

There was open ground between him and the Suburban. Franklin galloped straight toward the oncoming truck. He swerved out of its way at the last moment, then reined the horse sharply left and circled back. The horse was fast enough, and the sheriff caught up with the truck in a hurry. He matched the vehicle’s speed and got the horse right alongside the right hand side of damn thing.

“One shot at this,” he told his horse.

He swung his right leg up and over and jumped.

It was an English saddle, which made getting off a lot easier. He’d timed it pretty good, got one boot down on the running board, and grabbed the handrail on the roof. He could see the mirror inside the glass and knew at least he’d not made a complete fool of himself. He hauled himself up onto the roof and rolled flat onto his stomach. He grabbed one of the satellite dishes and pulled himself forward.

On the truck he’d seen in the garage, he’d noticed the middle light on the light bar was black instead of red like it was supposed to be. That had to be the camera lens.

He grabbed the light bar with his left hand and held on tight. The truck was veering right to left, trying to throw him off maybe. He whipped off his short brim with his right hand and inched forward a little more so that he could do what he had to do. There were agents running alongside him now, guns drawn, all shouting at him and threatening to shoot him, he guessed.

But he had an idea and figured, at this point, it was worth trying.

He held on with his left hand, grabbed his cowboy hat in his right and reached all the way forward. He was just close enough to cover the lens. He stretched all the way forward and slapped his hat in place over the camera.

The damn truck kept going a second, then slowed way down. It made a wobbly left-hand turn, plowing up grass, then a right. Finally it just rolled to a dead stop. Franklin stayed put, keeping the lens covered with his Stetson, blinding whoever it was who wanted to kill his president.

He saw the familiar face of Agent Hecht standing there on the ground with all the other agents, every of them looking up at him and shaking their heads, all with a big smiles on their faces.

“That’s Sheriff Franklin W. Dixon of Prairie, Texas,” Hecht said to his men. “He’s the one who first found these damn things.”

“Howdy,” Franklin said to them.

“BLOW IT!” Top screamed at the top of his lungs. The Washington controllers staring at their suddenly black screens just looked at him. “Blow that fucking truck up now!”

“There’s no provision for that, sir. We are no longer able to perform that function. All of the modified Chevrolet trucks have been keyed to the main timing device.”

“What?” Top screamed, his face turning bright red. “Who authorized that?”

“Dr. Khan, sir.”

“Why? Why did he do that?” Top was breathing hard, trying to control his raging emotions.

“He said he wanted to eliminate any possibility of human error, sir.”

“Khan did that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Top drew his sidearm and pointed it at the nearest controller. “Put it back. Go to manual override.”

“I’m sorry. I cannot do that, sir.”

He blew the man’s head off.

“Next?” he said, looking around wildly.

84

THE BLACK JUNGLE

M erde! Merde! Merde!”

Froggy felt no need to translate: Shit was shit in any language. His squad had been flanked. Somehow, the bastards had gotten behind them. He couldn’t see them yet, but they were coming. He could hear those fucking mini-tank engines revving as they approached, crashing through the underbrush. And the war cries of Xucuru Indians.

Indians? He thought Stiletto’s firepower had killed most of them upriver. They were determined bastards, he’d grant them that much. They were either on Top’s payroll or simply offended at the idea of uninvited guests in their pristine jungle. He hand-signaled Bassman and Boomer to spread out and get turned around; they needed to get the heavy M-60 machine guns into position for an attack from their rear.

“Hold your fire until my signal,” Froggy said into his lipmike when the squad was set.

It had all started when an arrow, five-feet long and, no doubt poison-tipped, had thunked into a tree a foot above Froggy’s head. He’d just looked down at his map. Now, he had seconds to reposition and fight a rear-guard action. And he needed to warn Stokely who was up in a treehouse a hundred feet above his head.

“Stoke, this is Frogman.”

“Parlez, Froggy.”

“You have the hostage?”

“I’ve got him. He’s alive, barely. Not mobile. I’m going to try and bring him down. We need to evac him to Stiletto pronto.”

“Negative! Negative! We’ve got tangos down here, approaching from the rear. Tanks and Indians.”

“Tanks and Indians?” Stoke said.

“You heard me, goddamn it!”

He let that go, thinking he’d misunderstood, and said, “Hawke’s ten minutes out, Froggy. Brock should be even closer. We need to get a perimeter around this tree and hold it until they get here. I’m coming down alone.”

Froggy waved his men to him with a circular hand signal, and they rapidly formed up around the fifteen-foot wide base of the tree. By the time Stokely stepped onto the platform and began his descent, the first wave of painted warriors was almost upon them in the heavy green stuff.

Froggy’s guys still hadn’t opened up.

Arrows whistled through the air, many of them aimed at Stokely. He was in plain sight on the slowly descending lift. He also had a perfect field of fire spread out below. He raised his CAR-15 and mowed down eight or nine war-painted archers who were stepping forward out of the thick green wall of undergrowth to launch their arrows.

“Fuck it, fire!” Froggy said, seeing Stokely’s predicament. The M-60s erupted in heavy, thumping fire. Now the indiscriminate barrage of lead ripped up vegetation and flesh with equal ferocity. Backs to the river, every man was unloading ammo on the enemy. But still the warriors came out of the jungle. And now the Trolls approached, four of the lead tanks spitting lead from their rapid-fire machine guns. One of Froggy’s men screamed and went down, cut in half by the vicious fire.

Stoke was halfway down the tree. He still had a good angle on the Trolls. He attached the grenade launcher and aimed at the nearest tank. Fired. Whoosh. A long trail of white smoke and the tank disintegrated in a massive ball of flame. Stoke fixed another RPG on his weapon’s muzzle and took out a second tank. He was down to his last grenade. He heard fire from the river and looked over to see three canoes bearing Harry Brock and his squad of fourteen commandoes. They were firing their weapons at the tangos they could see in the jungle.

“Merde diabolique!” he heard Froggy cry in his headphones. “Holy shit!”

“Froggy?” Stoke said, “What’s up?”

“Zee fucking bridge, mon ami! Look over there!”

Armed troops poured out of the jungle compound barracks on the far side of the river. They formed up in a long column, ready to cross the bridge. In front of the troops, advancing slowly toward the bridge was a clanking monstrosity. It was a mechanized vehicle unlike anything Stoke had ever seen outside of a movie theatre.

It was a tank, all right, a ridiculously oversized main battle tank, like an Abrams on major steroids, with what looked like two 120mm cannons. Eight-inch-diameter gun barrels were protruding from two turrets mounted on either side of an upright superstructure bolted to the chassis.

Stoke kept firing with his left hand, got his radio to his ear with his right. “Stiletto! Stiletto! Do you have GPS coordinates on the main bridge here at LZ Alpha? Copy?”

“Affirmative,” Fire Control Officer Dylan Allegria responded.

“I need a missile locked on that target now, copy?”

“Uh, roger that, sir. We, uh, yes. PAM missile is locked on.”

“Don’t fire…I want this thing on the bridge when we blow it.”

“What is the target, sir?”

“War of the Worlds, Dylan. I wish you could see this mechanical monster before you destroy it…ready…Fire now!”

Stoke held his breath. The mammoth war machine was halfway across the bridge now. There were maybe twenty tangos trotting right behind it and more right behind them.

The PAM missile’s laser targeting device kept it on track after firing. It nosed over and hurtled toward the target. It struck a second later and the tank exploded violently. Through the black smoke and flame, Stoke could see the thing was not destroyed but certainly disabled. The men nearby on the bridge had been killed. Others retreated back down the road or melted into the jungle on the far side. Stoke didn’t wait for the platform, he jumped the last few feet.

He opened up on the few remaining jungle warriors who’d managed to survive the withering fire laid down by the two M-60 machine guns. Most of the Xucurus and uniformed troops had fled back into the jungle. Regrouping. They’d be back as soon as they got their shit together for another attack.

“Blue Goose, Blue Goose, where the hell are you, Mick?” Stoke said into his radio.

“Blue Goose, Stokely. What can I do for you, mate?”

“Mick. I’m in a hot LZ with a critically injured hostage. I need to exfil him now and Stiletto is not an option. What’s your location?”

“Five miles due East of the LZ. I can see smoke rising from the bridge.”

“Mick, I know the river here is too narrow for your wingspan. It widens out upriver. But Ambrose won’t survive a jungle trek to the plane.”

“Ambrose is the hostage?”

“Affirmative.”

“Who says it’s too narrow, mate?”

“I do. Can’t you see it? There’s no way, Mick.”

“I’ll do a flyby and take a look.”

“Watch out for bullets.”

“HOLD YOUR FIRE!” Froggy yelled.

At that moment, Stoke saw Alex Hawke swimming rapidly toward shore, then clawing his way up the riverbank. His canoe had been blown into pieces by fire from the opposite shore. The remains now lay floating on the top of the water, drifting with the current downriver. Two of Hawke’s four crewmen were swimming toward shore. Two men were floating face down.

“Stoke!” Hawke cried, running toward the little band at the base of the tree, “Where is he? Where the hell is Ambrose?”

“Up there,” Stoke said, “Climb aboard and watch your step.”

They swiftly rose to the top, Stokely pointing out all the scenic attractions of Top’s jungle compound. Hawke jumped off and raced inside to find his friend.

“Ambrose, it’s me,” Hawke said leaning over him, his face grave and full of worry.

“I’m sorry,” the girl named Caparina said. She could have passed for a man in her camos. But her face was lovely in the dim light.

“Has he spoken? Stokely asked her.

“You have to give him a minute,” Caparina said, “He’s coming around.”

She was holding Ambrose’s hand to her bosom, gazing at the old fellow. “I gave him something to counteract the truth drugs. Ten minutes ago. It should be—”

“Are you a doctor?” Hawke asked her.

“Just a night nurse from Manaus.”

“Will he be in much pain?”

“I’m afraid he will.”

“Alex,” Ambrose said, his eyelids fluttering.

“I’m here. Come to take you home.”

“Home,” he sighed. His eyelids closed again.

“Ambrose. Please. You have to stay awake for a few minutes.”

“So tired.”

“The code, Ambrose. Remember the code. When and where?”

“Top’s attack.”

“Yes. Where is Top going to attack?”

“Washington.”

“When?”

“The president. All of them. The government.”

“When, Ambrose?”

“January the…twentieth”

“That’s today,” the beautiful girl said. “Holy Mother of Mary.”

“Ambrose, listen carefully,” Hawke said, “What time is the attack? Do you know?”

“Swear on the bible. Don’t let him,” Ambrose croaked.

Hawke looked at Stokely and said, “Swear on a bible? The Inauguration. They’re going to attack the Amercian government on the steps of the Capitol. What time is it?”

“Almost noon, boss. I don’t’ know how much time we’ve got.”

Hawke shook his head and put a gentle hand on Congreve’s shoulder. “Ambrose. The code, what is it?”

“The code.”

“Yes. What is the code? Those numbers we worked so hard on? That bloody book?”

Ambrose smiled weakly, “The da Zimmermann code?”

“Yes, Ambrose. That’s it.”

“Numbers make letters, Alex. Will of Allah. Da Vinci.”

“What?” Hawke said, his mind racing, looking at Stoke for help.

“Will of Allah,” Stoke said, “That sounds like a password. So what’s Da Vinci?”

Ambrose nodded.

“He shouldn’t talk anymore,” Caparina said, looking at Hawke.

Stoke grabbed Hawke’s arm. “We got to go, boss. Caparina will take good care of him till we get back. Let’s go.”

“I want him out of here. Now. Stiletto’s not even close! Where the hell is that seaplane?”

Stoke shook his head and handed Hawke his radio.

“Mick! It’s Hawke. Copy?”

“Copy, Hawke.”

“Can you land that bloody thing? Here? Now? I’m about to lose him!”

“No worries, sir. I’ll splash sideways.”

“Sideways?”

“Little trick I learned in the bush. I’m coming in now.”

Hawke looked at Caparina. “You stay with him. Someone’s coming.”

HAWKE AND STOKELY stepped onto the platform and began their descent. For the moment, Froggy’s men seemed to have staunched the flow of troops. A few were still using the bridge, climbing over the blown tank. There’d been a brief effort to maneuver sponson pontoons across the river, but the M-60s were discouraging a lot of that kind of activity.

They heard a loud engine roar to the right, just above the bridge. The Blue Goose swept in low through the thick black smoke, just a few feet above the smoldering tank hulk on the bridge. Mick Hocking’s wingtips were catching clumps of foliage on either side of the river. For a moment, both men thought he’d surely catch a wing and go down.

He mangaged to keep the the Goose on course, God alone knew how, and flared up for a landing. At the last possible moment, Mick lowered one flap and spun the big plane a few degrees on its axis. The slight angle was enough to clear the heavily wooded banks. The Blue Goose splashed down on the river.

It came to a very quick stop. Mick opened the door and climbed down onto the pontoon, a machine gun cradled in one arm. He swung an anchor, tossed an anchor line into the trees, and started hauling the airplane close to the bank.

“Cover that seaplane!” Stoke shouted in his radio. “Form up! Don’t let anyone near it.” Hawke was reassured by the sight of two men with M-60 heavy machine guns racing along the bank, headed for the waiting seaplane. There was sporadic gunfire from the bridge and the M-60s opened up, silencing it.

Froggy was at the bottom of the tree, waiting for them.

“Froggy,” Hawke said to the little Frenchman, as he and Stoke stepped off the platform.

“Mon ami,” Froggy said to Hawke, bowing from the waist. Hawke smiled and squeezed his old comrade’s shoulder.

“Froggy, get two men up there immediately. Ambrose is badly hurt. Tell your men to be very careful bringing him down. Soon as he’s safely loaded inside the plane, tell Hocking to fly back downriver to Stiletto and get him to sick bay.”

“It is done, Monsieur Hawke,” Froggy said, already on the radio to two of the biggest guys he had.

“Let me borrow that satphone, Froggy,” Hawke said when he signed off, “We might need it.”

The Frenchman handed it over.