The Gamma Option

Chapter 26

The mountain plateau of Masada rises ominously above the desolation that surrounds it. Standing on the border between the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea Valley, it is 1,400 feet from ground level to a rock-strewn summit that covers five acres. On the summit are reconstructed buildings dating back over two thousand years. The past lives and breathes on the desert wind that swirls the dust.

Israel’s past.

More than any other single symbol, Masada typifies the plight of the Jewish people through history. It was built originally as a royal sanctuary and fortress by King Herod, but it entered history over a half century after his death. Jewish Zealots who had revolted against Rome fled to Masada and held it for three years, the final one against continued onslaught from the entire Tenth Roman Legion. Outnumbered by more than ten to one, the Zealots outlasted the legion until the Romans constructed a ramp up one of the mountain’s sides and seemed on the verge of crashing through the fortress walls. Unable to accept either moral or physical enslavement, the Zealots denied the Romans their victory by taking their own lives. The Romans found nine-hundred-seventy corpses waiting for them inside the walls it had taken three years to penetrate.

Today the flow of natives and tourists to Masada is constant. So too is the army’s tradition of ending the training of soldiers with a charge up the serpentine Snake Path that winds from the mountain’s base to its buffeted summit.

The vast majority of visitors, though, opt for the faster and less tiring route offered by the cable cars that run up the mountain’s eastern side. The pair of vehicles work in perfect tandem, carrying visitors up and down throughout the day.

The twenty-five men who packed into the cable car at the base station on this Saturday had arrived just minutes before on a tour bus. They were dressed in baggy, comfortable clothing well suited for the heat, and many had camera bags slung from their shoulders. No words were exchanged during the five minute trek upward. The khaki-clad tour-group leader emerged first on the unloading platform and approached a young soldier leaning complacently against a steel rail.

“You will evacuate these premises immediately,” Yosef Rasin ordered him.

The soldier stiffened. “Excuse me?”

“You heard what I said. There are three more of your number atop the mountain as we speak. By now they have been approached by my men, as you have.”

“Your men?”

With that the soldier’s eyes scrutinized the two dozen men who had just made the trip up in the cable car. Those that he could see all had their hands tucked in their clothes or camera bags, intentions obvious, weapons a grasp away. Then he gazed at the long, winding line of patrons waiting to take the cable car down, disturbed by the sudden halt in its movement.

“Are we being taken hostage?” he asked.

“No, you fool. I want all of you off this mountain! You and the other soldiers will supervise the process but my men will oversee everything. We do not wish to make an issue out of this. Believe me, shedding Israeli blood is not our intention.”

“I … don’t understand.”

“We are not terrorists, we are patriots. At the base of the mountain more of us are waiting to be taken up. There is equipment they will transport upward with each shift. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“You will make no move to intercede. We are not enemies. It might not seem so now, but we are on the same side.”

The soldier looked at Yosef Rasin more closely. “I know you. I’m sure I do….”

“When you are away from the mountain,” the fanatic continued, “you will tell the Israeli people to look to Masada. You will tell them that the ultimate step to insure the freedom of our people and our nation is about to be taken. A new meaning will be brought to Independence Day when it dawns tomorrow. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“I … think so.”

“Be sure of it. You are blessed, young man, blessed to be the messenger of a holy mission. Go about your business now. Let us keep the people lined up beyond us calm.”

The soldier’s eyes widened suddenly. “I do know you. You’re—”

“I’m nobody, young man. But tomorrow will change that.”

“It’s done,” Isser reported to the prime minister, lowering the phone back to its hook. “He’s taken Masada, as planned.”

“What have you told the army?”

“To set up a perimeter but not to interfere in any way. The area must be sealed so Rasin can work his black magic undisturbed on that rock.”

“You sound disturbed.”

“He brought an army with him, Mr. Prime Minister, upward of sixty men. That was not part of the deal you made.”

“But it doesn’t surprise me. It’s a warning to us, another of his symbols. The scene will look much better tomorrow when the television stations arrive at dawn for the announcement of his appointment as minister of defense.” The old man paused. “Unless McCracken has something to say about it.”

“We’ve confirmed it was Isaac who sprang him and the Indian from our safe house in Jerusalem. We’re not trying to track him down. If he wants to walk away from this now, he can.”

“But you know he won’t, don’t you, Isser?”

“You’re probably right, and that’s as good a reason for maintaining a military presence around Masada as any. If McCracken so much as shows his face near the mountain, he’ll be shot on sight.”

It was just after twelve-thirty when Isaac at last gained confirmation of the worst from a government contact.

“Eisenstadt was right,” he reported. “Rasin and over fifty of his soldiers took Masada just after noon.”

“And the army’s supporting him, of course,” McCracken concluded.

“They’ve cordoned off the entire area around Arad. Nobody gets in. The whole Negev’s been closed down. The mountain belongs to Rasin and there’s nothing we can do to change that.”

A stiff wind rattled the walls of the Bedouin tribe leader’s tin house. Outside a rooster crowed incessantly.

McCracken turned his gaze on Wareagle, who had spread out a map of Masada over an ancient crate. “What do you think, Indian, can we succeed in less than a day where ten-thousand Romans failed in three years?”

Wareagle looked up at him. “The army’s presence has less to do with our problem than the fortress itself, Blainey. Slipping past the soldiers might be possible, but that would leave us with only these two routes of approach to Rasin.” With that, Johnny traced a massive finger, first up the serpentine Snake Path which wound up the eastern side of the mountain, and then traced the path the Romans had left up the western slope with the ramp they had used to gain entry at last to the fortress. “Both paths are easily defensible with far less manpower and weapons than Rasin has by all accounts brought with him.”

“Especially when he’s got just the two of us and four Haganah fighters to contend with. No offense, Isaac.”

“Give me a gun. Give all of us guns. We can still shoot.”

“For that you need a target first, and right now we can’t even get close to it. Okay, Indian, so ground approach is out. That would seem to leave us exclusively with air.”

Wareagle frowned in response to that suggestion. “The Israelis know you, Blainey, and they know you will try anything. They will be watching the skies. We’ll never get close.”

“How about a low-altitude drop?”

“Again, it might get us by the Israelis fortifying the mountain base, but unless we could come up with a way to disguise our parachutes, we would be exposed to Rasin’s troops the entire way down.”

“We need cover then.”

“Where cover plainly doesn’t exist.”

“Goddamn it!” Blaine roared. “We’ll climb the rock face if that’s what it takes to get up there. But we’re going to stop Rasin, do you hear me?”

“I hear you, Blainey, but your words fail to consider the realities of the limitations before us. We have looked to the obvious. Now the time has come to look deeper.”

“We’re deep now, Indian. Over our heads, as I make it.” Blaine stopped suddenly, obviously struck by something. “Okay, Indian, make believe you’ve got access to all the tech hardware in the world. Everything considered, could you find a way to get us on top of that rock?”

Wareagle turned his attention back to the map. At last he looked up and nodded emotionlessly.

“Yes, but it would take men as well as machines.”

“But there is a way?”

“A means without any guarantees. The spirits provide alternatives, not certainties.”

“That’s good enough for me, Indian.”

“Fudo-san,” Hiroshi said. “I can hardly hear you.”

“We’ve got a strange connection, Hiroshi. I’m talking to you from a Bedouin camp in the Judean Desert. Blame the bad reception on a radio signal traveling via land-line patch-through.”

“And that is where your trail has led you?”

“Among other places, yes.” McCracken paused. “Did you mean what you told me in Japan? Would you really do anything to right the wrong of your aiding Rasin?”

“I have violated my honor, Fudo-san. In days past that would be grounds for taking my own life.”

“There’s a way to regain your honor far more worthwhile than that.”

“Anything, Fudo-san. If it is within my power, it will be done. Just name it.”

“It’s a long list, Hiroshi. Better grab yourself a pad….”

When he was finished and the connection broken, Blaine acknowledged Johnny Wareagle’s slight smile and Isaac’s flabbergasted expression.

“Can this really be done?” the old man asked, incredulously.

“Hiroshi can pull it off. The only thing that might stop him — and us — is time.”

“A foe we will have difficulty staring down,” Wareagle reminded them.

McCracken checked his watch. “It’s one o’clock now. Hiroshi says he can be here with the equipment within ten hours. We’ll be cutting it close but we’ll have time. We can’t stop Rasin and the others from releasing their allotments of vaccine. But if we grab him on Masada, he won’t be able to unleash Gamma on the world on Independence Day.”

“And just how do you think he plans on doing that anyway?” Isaac wondered.

“If I’m right, the key is Tehran. Can you get a message to your people in the city?”

“I was about to contact our team leader. He can’t reach the individual cells directly, but there’s a signal he can employ meaning abort.”

“No! You can’t abort. Do you hear me? Firestorm is more important now than ever!”

Isaac looked totally confused. “Maybe you forget that the government was supplying the Apaches, and without them Firestorm has no chance of succeeding.”

“We’ll worry about them later. For now you’ve just got to trust me. Operation Firestorm must go on as planned.”

“Then why did you ask if I could get a message into the city?”

Blaine looked him in the eyes as he spoke. “You know where Evira is. I want her rescued. Send the word.”

“The risk! The danger!”

“It’s like this, Isaac. Without her, I might never be able to find my son. If she dies, he probably dies too. Sound simple? Let me put it another way. If I can’t save the kid, I might just help Rasin empty his cannisters filled with the Gamma virus.” And then he added to Wareagle, “I just can’t see the fucking point anymore.”

“But you see something the rest of us as of yet cannot, Blainey.”

“My eyes may be playing tricks on me, Indian. Let’s hope to hell they are.”

“Is there anything else?”

“No,” Yosef Rasin replied to the leather-clad Lace, “I believe you have everything covered.”

“Not quite,” returned the tall woman with the hard-muscled body. Her eyes turned toward the base of the mountain, where motion was visible amidst the floodlights the army had set up for itself. “But our friends down there are sure to cover anything we may have missed.”

“You still believe McCracken is alive?”

“I don’t believe he could have been killed as easily as your reports indicate.”

“So if he comes …”

Lace smiled and her neck muscles tensed. “Let him.”

And then she took her leave to rejoin Tilly in a sweep of the fortified positions she had arranged on Masada before night had fallen. Rasin had elected to concentrate his base on Masada’s northern front, just above the remains of Herod’s palace. Much of the large bathhouse, terraces, and labyrinth of storehouses had undergone extensive reconstruction and regained a measure of their original fortification. The remainder of structures on Masada were scattered across its rock-littered vastness. Rasin had expected the posting of their forces to begin at the guardhouse two hundred yards from the northern edge. But, fearing an attack, Lace had elected to disperse a number of guards along the entire perimeter so security could be maintained from all directions. If an attack came, they would know about it well in advance.

All the lights atop the mountain had been turned on, casting ancient Masada in an eerie, modern glow. Rasin was amazed by it. He could almost see to the ends of the mountaintop from his perch on the bathhouse roof. He had been wise to listen to Lace, wiser still to bring with him his personal commando force composed of outcasts like himself — a carefully chosen group of men tossed out of the military for brutality to Arabs. In short, a band of cutthroats. He did not fear an attack from McCracken as much as one from the government should it change its mind. His men were there as a deterrent against that. There was no way even the army’s most elite units could succeed in any assault on him. No way at all. Several of his commandos were armed with anti-aircraft weapons, for if an attack were to come, it would be from the sky.

Rasin breathed deeply and drank in the dry air. The power he had long sought, the power it had been his destiny to achieve, was now within his reach, thanks to Gamma. He checked his watch. Just five hours until he would fire his portion of the vaccine into the air. Around the same time a dozen others, placed strategically across Israel, would release their allotments to be swept by the wind across the small nation to render her safe from the imminent release of the Gamma virus. Since exposure to the ultraviolet rays of the sun would kill the vaccine organism instantly, the key was to time its release so it might spread as close to Israeli borders as possible by sunrise. It wasn’t an exact science, but it was close enough. Besides, fate was on his side.

He had outmaneuvered them brilliantly, of course; he had outmaneuvered everyone. If they ever suspected the lengths he had gone through to assure the success of his plan, if they ever realized the charade he had enacted for the world … Oh well, no sense in pondering over that. The charade was rapidly drawing to its conclusion.

The wind blew over the Dead Sea, smelling vital and alive to him. Perhaps even it would live again with the coming of the morning. Perhaps Moses had not performed the last miracle at all.

What Rasin was about to do proved that much at least.

“Well, old friend, can we pull it off?”

Hiroshi’s attention was so entrenched in Wareagle’s map of Masada spread over the crates in the tin Bedouin house that he barely heard McCracken’s question. Without speaking, he moved to a rip in the house’s metal that served as a window. In the desert land just beyond the camp, bathed in the spill of floodlights powered by portable generators, Hiroshi watched two dozen of his finest men assembling and preparing the incredible stores of equipment they had transported from Japan. A jet transport had managed the flight in eight hours, landing in a private field in Egypt where a pair of commandeered Israeli Sikorsky troop-carrying helicopters were waiting. The equipment was transferred and the flight to the Bedouin village negotiated without incident, arriving just after midnight.

“It can be done, Fudo-san,” Hiroshi replied finally without turning back. “The idea is brilliant, but …”

“Yes?”

“The elaborateness of it confuses me. A strafing run aimed at obliterating the stronghold would seem a far more logical strategy.”

“Too random,” McCracken explained. “If Rasin dies or makes it off Masada in all the confusion, we lose our chance of getting the Gamma cannisters back. That’s priority one.”

“I understand, Fudo-san, but the fact remains we’re going to be dropping into heavily fortified positions with little or no cover behind us.”

Blaine looked at Wareagle. “Leave that to the Indian. I’m more concerned with how we’re going to stop the soldiers at the base of the mountain from calling in the cavalry once they realize what’s going on.”

“Leave that to me,” Hiroshi said.

The flat desert plain beyond the Bedouin camp lay bathed in a darkness broken only here and there by the floodlights. The only sound breaking the still cool of the night was that of the Sikorsky armored troop carriers warming their engines as the moment of takeoff approached. Hiroshi was kneeling, hands on knees, facing his troop of samurai warriors who knelt before him in a straight line. All had dressed in black tops and black baggy skirtlike bottoms called hakama. Though most would be outfitted with modern automatic weapons, their focus now was rooted on the sheathed swords lying before them. On Hiroshi’s cue, they grasped the ancient weapons and pushed them through their belts, the collective motion eerie in its singular calm. McCracken stood nearby, reviewing once more the details of Johnny Wareagle’s plan.

“You can call me a schlemiel,” Isaac said, suddenly by his side, “but I thought you said dropping out of the sky was suicide.”

“I said parachuting down was suicide. This is different.”

Isaac humphed. “It’s still the sky.”

“And you?”

“I’m leaving now to pay Isser a visit. He won’t be able to dismiss me after what Eisenstadt told us. We don’t want you to succeed at Masada only to be killed by the real army.”

“The thought had crossed my mind, but you’ll have to reach him first.”

Isaac winked. “I got my ways. It’s just like checkers and now it’s our move. The enemy might have more pieces, but we’re the ones doing the jumping. Have a nice flight.”

“Shalom, you old devil.”

The Sikorsky helicopters streaked through the night sky at a routine altitude, making no effort to disguise themselves from either radar or visual contact.

“Two minutes to showtime, Indian,” McCracken said to Wareagle in the cockpit, the floodlit expanse of Masada growing as they drew closer. “Time to join the others in the back.”

Wareagle took a deep breath and Blaine noted the slightest smile force its way onto his features. “The hellfire, Blainey. Once again we join it.”

“You sound almost glad.”

“No, nor am I sad. I have learned that all exists to provide scale. The hellfire lends definition to who we are and were. The spirits are closest in times like these. They rise into the chaos, but to feel them you too must enter it. Never are their words clearer. Never do I feel closer to my ancestors.”

“Just so long as you don’t pick tonight to join them, Indian.”

Major Ben Shamsi, commander in charge of the security force deployed around Masada, lifted the walkie-talkie to his ear.

“I read you, Corporal.”

“Sir, I have a pair of troop carriers approaching from the south.”

Just then Shamsi’s ears picked up the familiar wop-wop-wop of two Sikorskys and he could see the flashing lights marking their path through the night.

“Lieutenant,” he called to the man behind him, “are we expecting reinforcements?”

“Not that I’m aware of, sir.”

The troop carriers dipped out of sight from the officers’ viewing angle at the mountain base station on the eastern side of Masada.

“Raise them on the radio,” Shamsi ordered. “Let’s find out what—”

“Sir!” came the frantic voice of the corporal based on the southern edge. “One of the troop carriers has released objects over Masada!”

“Objects?”

“Bats, sir, they look like huge bats!”

The guard Lace had posted on the southern wall of Masada had actually raised his hand to wave at the lead Sikorsky passing overhead when he saw the black figures plunge out and soar instantly over him. He ducked out of instinct the way one does from a swooping bird. The guard was still fumbling for his walkie-talkie when the first poof! sounded from the northern flank of Masada. When he turned back, the entire sky seemed filled with the black shapes spilling out from the guts of the Sikorskys.

The motorized hang gliders had been the centerpiece of Wareagle’s plan from the beginning. They were the only vehicles both quick and maneuverable enough to permit approach to Masada from above. Hiroshi had happened upon this lot by intercepting a shipment originally bound for Delta Force at Fort Bragg. But since he steadfastly refused to deal with the only market for them — terrorists — they had remained in his warehouse until now.

The gliders were truly a magnificent creation, far more technologically advanced than those used by Palestinian terrorists in raids over the Israeli border with Lebanon. Their black wingspan was barely six feet, and the weight of the small motor that propelled them was easily dispersed across the middle. Maneuverability was permitted in all directions, as well as rapid drops and climbs.

In the last moments before the initial drop, McCracken considered the strategy they were employing and how it had been arrived at. He and Wareagle had assumed from the start that Rasin would have lookouts posted all over Masada, not just to the north where his forces were concentrated. This ruled out making their way over by glider from a nearby ridge and necessitated an air drop from the Sikorskys.

“My greatest concern is the lights,” Hiroshi had warned from the outset. “The problem is double-edged. If we shoot them out, my warriors will have nothing to guide their landing. If we leave them as is, we’ll make inviting targets in the sky.”

“What about dropping gas ahead of our approach?”

“More problems.” Hiroshi shrugged. “First we must consider the possibility that Rasin’s troops will have gas masks, and even if they don’t, gas might work against us by supplying camouflage for our enemy and, again, obscuring our landing zones.”

“The air holds our greatest strategic advantage and also our greatest vulnerability,” Wareagle added.

“Grenades,” Blaine said suddenly.

Wareagle grasped his intent immediately. “Two waves, Blainey?”

“Separated by twenty seconds, at most. Say six in the first wave. It’ll be their job to scatter Rasin’s troops and take out the guards at the highest positions. Picture it. By the time they’re finished, Rasin’s men will be running every which way, easy pickings for the larger second wave. Once they’re sufficiently scattered, we land here and here,” McCracken explained, pointing to the storehouses on the eastern fringe and the open expanse in the plateau’s center.

Wareagle was nodding. “The first wave can drop smoke when they pass the exposed center.”

“I like it, Indian. Create a wall of smoke the second wave appears out of. It’s perfect.”

“Not perfect, Blainey, but as close as we can come.”

Hiroshi and his five warriors most skilled with the motorized gliders would make up the first wave. Twenty seconds later McCracken and Wareagle would lead the twelve samurai in their trailing helicopter down in the second. The remaining seven from Hiroshi’s Sikorsky would spill out to form the rear of McCracken’s attack phalanx on the northern front of Masada where Rasin’s forces were concentrated.

“After you, Indian,” he said to Wareagle as the southern edge of Masada appeared below and a wall of thick gray rose across the center of the fortress.

And together they plunged into the cool air, with another of Hiroshi’s lead team’s grenade blasts reaching them as hard rumbles in the night.

The first explosion brought Yosef Rasin from the hot room of Masada’s bathhouse, where he had been making the final preparations to launch his vaccine into the air. His plan was to fire the cannisters by specially constructed mortar from the bathhouse roof, and he was going through the arduous task of removing them from their heavily sealed packing when the initial grenade blasts stung him. He emerged into the open to be blinded and deafened at the same time by a grenade that was all light and sound. A pair of soldiers crumpled to the ground and Rasin staggered back against the ancient ruins, holding his ears.

Lace leaped down to his side as rubble from more grenade blasts showered down upon them.

“It’s McCracken!” she screamed above the chaos.

Rasin was in no position to argue, eyes clearing in time to see the huge black shapes swooping down from the sky and dropping grenades to scatter his troops.

He grabbed hold of Lace’s steellike arm. “You’ve got to hold them off! You’ve got to buy me time! The shells! I’ve got to fire the shells!”

“Not from here!” she screamed, pulling him away from the next blast. And then she seemed to realize something, easing back into the dust-smoked fray. “The lights! I’ve got to get to the lights!” She swung back to Rasin. “Get back into the hot room. Wait there.”

“Wait for wh—”

“You’ll see. You’ll know. Just do it!”

And Rasin obeyed as a fleet of the black-winged monstrosities crashed through the wall of gray smoke deployed a hundred yards away in the center of the mountaintop.

Chapter 27

“Say again, please!” the voice instructed from Jerusalem.

“I said,” Major Shamsi repeated from the base of Masada, “that Rasin’s forces are coming under attack on the mountain!”

“Did you say ‘attack’?”

“Yes! For the third time, yes!”

There was a brief pause. “Major, be advised that a detachment is en route. You are not to engage. Is that clear?”

“Mister, I couldn’t get up that rock if I wanted to.”

“You fool!” Isser raged, storming into the operations center. “You crazy fool!”

Isaac was standing by the window smoking a cigar, his withered frame lost in the confines of his baggy overcoat. A pair of soldiers looked on with rifles at the ready. Isaac had located Isser at a Mossad command post in the guise of a luxurious house in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem within sight of the Knesset building.

“Temper, temper,” he said to the Mossad chief, waving a chastising finger. “To think that friends should speak to each other in such a tone….”

“You could have walked away. I set it up so you could. But now you leave me no choice. You force the issue.”

“That’s the idea, old friend.”

“What are you saying? Did McCracken put you up to this? Where is he?”

“As of this moment, starting to clean up the mess you have made of our world.”

“Make sense!”

Isaac puffed away on his cigar. “I am. You’re just not listening. But now you’re going to. You joined forces with Rasin, and now it’s time you learned just what you’ve become a party to.”

“I don’t have to listen to this!”

“Yes, you do. It’s for your own good, you see,” Isaac told him, and opened his overcoat to reveal a dozen sticks of dynamite taped to his chest. Before the soldiers could respond, his cigar was a touch away from the instantaneous fusing. “Now why don’t you have a seat, Mr. head of Mossad? I’ve got a story to tell you….”

McCracken and Wareagle passed through the gray cloud side-by-side in the air, amazed at how easily the motorized gliders handled. The ten-horsepower motor hung directly over their heads, attached to a shaft extending the glider’s length. At the shaft’s end a propellor spun soundlessly. Speed was controlled by manipulation of a single handgrip, much like that of a motorcycle, on the right side of the frame the fliers were attached to by a harness.

Below the chaos wrought by Hiroshi’s initial six-man attack wave was already obvious to them. Rasin’s troops were scattering for cover, positions of stronghold abandoned, all semblance of organization gone. The airborne samurai coming in now knew exactly what their role was from this point on.

Suddenly Wareagle swooped down, firing his M-16 on full automatic. In the narrow area lit by one of the floodlights, Blaine could see a gunman struggling to regain position on the blasted-out top of the guard tower that looked over the entire northern quadrant of Masada. The Indian’s fire blasted the rocks briefly before locking onto the enemy. Blaine dipped his wings to drop next to Wareagle.

“That’s clearing the way, Indian.”

“The hellfire beckons, Blainey.”

Around them the remaining eighteen samurai had broken into a wide spread. Twelve were already firing toward positions where Rasin’s soldiers were deployed. The key was to keep the enemy splintered, keep him on the run. That way the vastly superior numbers came to no advantage at all. Meanwhile, at the first available opportunity, the remaining six samurai, armed with swords as well as rifles, would land and start the process of securing ground control from the south northward. At the same time Hiroshi’s team of six would close from the upper terrace of Herod’s palace across to the south. The dozen gun-wielding warriors under Blaine and Johnny’s lead would join the rest on the ground as soon as they had done as much damage as possible from above.

Blaine nodded at Johnny and the two of them darted through the air at divergent angles. McCracken had used conventional hang gliders on numerous occasions, but the feeling of this was totally different. He supposed it was as close as a man could ever come to flying, so effortless were the controls required to swerve and swirl through the air.

Down below in a high-walled section of the vast storehouses nearest the eastern wall, he caught sight of a small cluster of Rasin’s men struggling to get an M-60 properly mounted. Blaine kicked his legs up to dip into a dive and roared down at a forty-five degree angle with machine gun blasting, curling into a rise just as he passed over the neutralized target area. Manipulations with his legs controlled the maneuvers effortlessly.

In the sky around him, the rest of the flying complement swirled and crisscrossed through the air. Sometimes the extended glider wings of one nearly grazed another, but the samurai flew with an instinctive sense of distance acquired by men who had trained often and long together. For them the sense of battle was no different; only the locale and rules had changed. Blaine watched Johnny Wareagle actually twirl himself upside down to quicken his escape after diving into a strafing run with his M-16. McCracken kicked his knees up to drop fast and provide the Indian cover, then eased himself parallel to the ruins with machine gun aimed straight down. He fired in short, controlled bursts at areas of motion, and saw Johnny flash him the okay sign as he soared back upward already snapping a fresh double clip home.

A stray bullet pierced Blaine’s wing and he drove his glider into a rise to regroup. From that position farther over Masada the picture was akin to an ant farm constructed under glass. Rasin’s men were responding with true professionalism by ducking for cover into any of the labyrinth of ruins. They concentrated mostly in the area of the vast storehouse remains of the northeastern flank where they could form a new stronghold. A number of enemy combatants toted heavy machine guns and RPGs with them, just the kind of firepower Blaine had been most frightened they would encounter. The samurai continued to soar over the ruins, but the angle was no longer to their advantage and Rasin’s forces had regrouped sufficiently to fire up at them when they passed.

“Hiroshi, can you read me?” McCracken said into his wireless communicator.

“Loud and clear, Fudo-san.”

“We’ve got them pinned in the storehouses for the most part. I’m going down to look for Rasin. I’ll land between the inner wall and synagogue off from the northern palace lookout.”

“My men and I are already down. Be careful. Something bothers me about their number. I counted only forty in our initial passes.”

McCracken felt the familiar twinge of uneasiness creep through him, called up by the fact that Isaac’s intelligence indicated upward of sixty troops had accompanied Rasin to Masada. “You hear that, Indian?” he asked, soaring low to drop into his landing.

“Troublesome, Blainey. We’d be best to stay alert.”

Blaine hit the ground running, still in motion when he pulled himself from the harness and tore the glider off his back. In the process he was careful not to disturb the small earpiece and microphone rising from the rolled collar of his black turtleneck. He crouched low and charged into the remains of the synogogue overlooking the ramp path that had ultimately allowed the Romans to breech the fortress. The sound of rocks crunching beneath his boots seemed as loud as screams in the night to him, helpless as he was to silence his heavy footsteps. Pinning himself against one of the inside walls, he set about readying his weapons.

Above him, a complement of Hiroshi’s samurai under Wareagle’s leadership continued to wage the battle from the sky. They focused on the storehouse area where most of Rasin’s troops were concentrated, swooping in any direction additional fire came from. In a sense the strategy the motorized gliders allowed was a microcosm of war itself: they provided air superiority to better allow ground based troops to surround the enemy and attack from a position of strength. The clincher, of course, was that a primary weapon of attack here would be the sword in addition to the gun. In such narrow, serpentine confines, with much of the battle certain to be waged in exceptionally close quarters, it was a more practical and versatile weapon when wielded by experts. The six men in Blaine’s attack group were already closing from the south, Hiroshi’s party from the north.

Machine gun fire continued to split the night, the blend of ancient and modern weapons bizarre enough to be almost ludicrous. But the plan all along had been to reduce this to a hand-to-hand battle where Hiroshi’s samurai would have the undoubted advantage even against Rasin’s superior number of commandos. Blaine concentrated on the task of finding Rasin. As he eased back out through the synagogue entrance, though, the lights all over Masada died and the mountaintop was plunged into total darkness.

“Come in, Hiroshi!”

“I read you, Fudo-san.”

“There’s someone up here who’s good, sensei. They chose the same response I would have. And we must expect whoever it is to do more.”

“We must get the lights back on!”

“I’m going to call the Sikorskys down. Have them turn on their floods.”

“They’ll be sitting ducks!”

“Not if they stay on the move. Besides, what choice do we have? We’ll have to rely on your people to keep them from solidifying positions to fire their RPGs from. Where are you?”

“Outer wall of the bathhouse. My men are all within sight. Were,” Hiroshi corrected.

“Give me thirty seconds to turn the lights back on. Then we’ll finish the bastards once and for all. You get that too, Indian? Johnny?”

McCracken waited, his only sight that of the khaki-colored rock wall an arm’s distance away.

There was no reply from Wareagle.

“Come on!” Lace ordered, almost dragging Rasin as they rushed along beside a courtyard wall. They came to an open stretch by the building that had been the officers’ family quarters two thousand years before. The area was full of gray smoke the invaders had left in their wake.

“Where are we—”

Rasin stopped his question when Lace released her grip on him and drew a heavy scimitar from her belt. To use a gun now would be to risk exposure. If it came to battle, it would be with the sword. In her free arm she toted the heavy mortar Rasin needed to fire his containers of vaccine, held presently in a bag over his shoulder. But where could they fire from? Where was Lace taking him?

“You’ll see,” she whispered, responding to his unfinished question of seconds before.

They could hear the whirl of the motorized gliders soaring above them and then, louder, the wop-wop-wop of the Sikorskys that were speeding back onto the scene.

“I should have thought of that!” Lace lamented. “I should have!”

“Thought of what?” an exasperated Rasin asked.

“Hurry!” was her only reply.

They were running now through the uneven, rocky terrain, Lace doing her best to support Rasin. He felt the small cannisters that made up his ration of the vaccine clacking together in the knapsack strung over his arm. He had totally lost his bearings in the dark. He had walked Masada a thousand times since his youth, certain that in a past life he had died here among the Zealots, perhaps as the leader Eliezer himself. Only this time the cause would come to a far more fruitful end. The blackness deepened, and Rasin knew Lace had led him close to the southern wall; he was quite sure of it when the hovering Sikorskys switched on their lights, turning Masada ablaze. Lace had stopped, and now he followed her gaze forward and down.

They had reached the vast water cistern in the southwest corner of the fortress. The helicopter’s stray light was sufficient for him to see into the cistern’s vast depth. He realized Lace had led him to the perfect place from which to release his allotment of the vaccine.

But there was something else. Coming up from the depths to meet Lace was Tilly with nearly twenty of his soldiers behind her.

“We move,” Lace told her, and then she led the rush off in a chorus of crunching stones, leaving Rasin to the task before him.

Major Shamsi saw the huge troop-carrying choppers hovering over Masada to return light to a scene that had been plunged in darkness. Confusion continued to rush through him. Those were Israeli aircraft all right, but did that mean they were Israeli soldiers waging war on Yosef Rasin’s forces atop Masada? And if so, why wasn’t he informed? He grabbed for the radio yet again.

“Base, this is Major Shamsi. Come in. Over.”

“We read you, Major,” returned the voice he had heard over nine minutes before.

“All hell’s breaking loose here. Where are those troops?”

“They’re en route, Major. Your orders are to keep the area secure.”

“Secure? Secure from what? We need a drop on top of the mountain, do you hear me? There’s a situation — Wait … Who is this? Identify yourself.”

Static.

“Put Commander Herzel on now!”

More static.

“Damn!” Shamsi screamed to himself, tossing the useless mike down.

They’d been had!

He located his second-in-command nearby and pulled him aside.

“Take a jeep and get to a phone. Call base. Tell them what’s going on here. Do you hear me?”

The lieutenant looked confused. “But, sir, the radio, you—”

“Our frequency’s been jammed! No one besides us has any idea of what’s happening here!”

The troops Lace had held back had left a number of battery-powered lanterns behind in the cavernous water cistern, and Rasin arranged them in a semicircle around him to aid his final preparations. The cistern was located deep within the bowels of the mountain itself, accessible only by a steep flight of stone steps. As for firing the shells, there was a window high within the cistern’s south wall through which rain water had entered. That same window would now serve as the perfect exit route for his vaccine-loaded mortar shells.

Rasin checked the sights again. Mortars had been his specialty in the army, and that had been the very reason why he had opted for this means of release in the first place. Of course, firing them from the roof of the bathhouse was considerably different than angling the shots through a window-sized portal. Unhappy with the trajectory as presented, he had no choice but to prop up the mortar’s base precariously with a rock and his crumpled knapsack to achieve the angle of fire needed to pass through the opening.

Rasin worked fast, blessing the brilliance of Lace for holding a third of his troops back here in expectation of just this sort of eventuality. He now believed she was right about McCracken. No one else could have devised such a plan, and only Lace’s being present to anticipate it had saved his operation from ruin. But there was anticipation required on his part as well. His problems were still many and complicated. The mortar fire from the cistern would undoubtedly bring McCracken in his direction. Even if he managed to launch all twelve shells of the vaccine, what good would it do if he fell into the American’s grasp? His plan extended far beyond this night, beyond this place. He had to be able to escape.

Satisfied at last with the position of the mortar, Rasin moved back toward the explosives Lace had left for him at the foot of the stone steps.

The fresh lights of the Sikorskys allowed the battle to resume on the northern face of Masada, with Hiroshi’s warriors seizing even more of an advantage. In centuries past the labyrinth-like maze of storehouses had served as an enormous system for the stockpiling of many years’ supplies of weapons, food, and other essentials for life. It seemed fitting to McCracken that Rasin’s troops had chosen this maze of passages and rooms to make their last stand.

By now virtually all of Hiroshi’s samurai would be moving to enclose them and make the battle hand-to-hand. Gunfire continued to rage, but Blaine could tell by the cadence that it was wild and desperate. Screams periodically punctured the night as another of Rasin’s army of cutthroats fell to the silent approach and deadly swords of the samurai.

Blaine continued moving about. Rasin himself would stay beyond the battle, working frantically to fire his vaccine somehow into the air. Blaine had already searched the entire confines of the bathhouse and various ruins along the north and northwestern fronts. Coming up empty, he found himself gazing down from the northern palace lookout station at the three tiers of Herod’s palace. The uppermost tier stood at the summit, with the middle terrace some sixty-five-feet below and the lowest forty feet beneath that. The view from all, especially the lowest, was clear and spectacular.

The perfect setting for Rasin to work his black magic.

Blaine rushed to the winding, modern, man-made stairway that snaked down the mountain to the various terraces. The bottom terrace was his target, and in that moment he was certain Rasin would be there.

Hiroshi slid through the ancient corridors of the storehouse, gliding so as not to disturb the rocks that might give away his approach. He held his cherished katana high overhead. It had been handed down through his family line for generations, fashioned in the Koto period of Japan, known for the greatest swords in history. Twenty-nine-and-a-half-inches of promised death, silent as it was sure.

One of Rasin’s guards spun out toward him from an opening leading to a storeroom. Hiroshi brought the flat edge of his sword down on his rifle barrel, the bullets blasting errantly as he whipped the edge back up against the man’s throat. The man slammed up against a rock wall, gurgling blood, and Hiroshi mercifully finished him with a thrust through his heart. The man slumped. The old sensei continued on.

His years meant nothing now. His ancestors had fought on battlegrounds not much different from this, sometimes in their own service and sometimes that of a lord. The rest of his warriors came from similar traditions, and they moved as he did through the storehouse maze. There were sporadic bursts of gunfire, followed almost always by screams from the gun’s wielder as the samurai sent another to his death. Hiroshi continued on, licking the sweat from his lips and smelling the rusty scent of blood on the air. The battle refreshed and recharged him. He had been gone from the life of his ancestors for too long. This was where he belonged.

Something made Hiroshi stop still in his tracks. His ears caught a crunching sound, like that of horses carrying men on the attack. He rushed to the low point of the wall and peered outward into the dusty spill of light made by the Sikorskys’ floods.

Soldiers! Fifteen, maybe twenty rushing across the empty plain northward toward the storehouses. Where had they come from? The situation was about to change markedly. Hiroshi could see in his mind his men being mowed down as these reinforcements swooped unexpectedly into the area to the rear of his men. He had feared just such a development as this.

“Blaine,” he called into his communicator. His back pressed against the nearest wall, he broke the rule of radio silence they had set for themselves. “Blaine, come in! Where are you?”

“Down on the northern terrace. What’s wrong?”

“Twenty of Rasin’s soldiers are charging from the south. We missed them.”

“Because somebody made us miss them, the same somebody who killed the lights. Goddamn it….” McCracken put his lips closer to the microphone in order to whisper. “Johnny, can you hear me? Come on, Indian, I need you.”

“I’m here, Blainey.”

McCracken was about to ask where when he was interrupted by the abrupt and continuous fire of automatic rifles.

The sole source of the fire was Johnny Wareagle. He held in each hand an automatic rifle loaded with double clips, and was blasting away at the newly revealed troops. The news of the missing complement of soldiers had bothered Johnny from the moment he first heard it. He knew from the start they had to be hiding, and he was heading toward the scattered buildings to the south when he saw the troops led by a huge woman in black.

Immediately Wareagle darted back into the darkness, skirting the spill of the choppers’ floodlights. The ravaged guard tower rose before him and he charged up its steps to the highest point on Masada. A trio of soldiers had lost their lives trying to defend it at the battle’s outset, and Johnny added one of their Galil machine guns to his own M-16. Crouching low until the last, he waited for the sound of rocks crunching to tell him the troops were close enough.

McCracken’s call had come seconds before and left Johnny no time to explain. He simply rose in the darkness, unknown and unseen, and began firing away at the charge against the northern strongholds of the fortress.

He felt no kick of the rifles as he fired, nor did he hear the screams of the men he was killing. Their bodies dropped in waves between the officers’ family quarters and the stone quarry. It was several seconds before the return fire started, and by then the first of his clips was exhausted. Wareagle plunged downward to await the siege.

“No!” Lace screamed to the eight men who had survived the barrage. “Leave him! Follow me!”

Her eyes searched frantically for Tilly, finding her with a relieved smile propped behind a built-up storage hold in the ground. She rushed over and touched the smaller woman’s hair gratefully, then raised her scimitar overhead to lead what remained of the soldiers toward the battle in the storehouses.

She wanted to believe the gunman on the guard tower was McCracken. Not only had the person riddled their numbers, he had also denied them position on Masada’s most strategic point, from which the invaders could be cut down at will. That was his style, after all. But her feelings told her otherwise. This was someone else, equally dangerous to be sure. She would still have to find McCracken.

Hiroshi was ready when the fresh wave of Rasin’s soldiers reached the storehouses. Wareagle’s fire from the guard tower had bought him time as well as reducing the enemy’s number and alerting his men to their presence.

One of them leaped atop the jagged wall the old warrior had crouched behind. As soon as the man began to fire controlled bursts toward areas his samurai were rushing from, Hiroshi rose and, wielding his sword in a great arc, sliced through the man’s legs below the knees, toppling him over. Another soldier lunged rifle-first toward the wall, but Hiroshi extended his sword, and the man impaled himself on the blade.

A burst fired reflexively from the dead man’s gun caught the old sensei in the side and spun him. Hot pain flooded his midsection, and Hiroshi felt the spill of warm blood. The wound wasn’t mortal, but the blood loss would weaken him and make him a burden to his men. He had never lost grip on his sword’s hilt. With an effort he yanked it free of the dead man’s midsection and moved back down the corridor, using the wall for support.

“Hiroshi, what’s going on?” came McCracken’s desperate call.

“All under control, Fudo-san. Not to worry.”

This was spoken into a chorus of screams and machine gun fire as the remainder of Rasin’s men engaged Hiroshi’s samurai as best they could. The sudden influx of enemy troops had moved several of his men to switch from swords back to rifles. Some of them were being killed and this pained him, but they were dying the death of warriors, a most honorable passing that defined the very essence of their lives.

Hiroshi moaned into the microphone.

“You’re hurt!” McCracken cried. “Jesus Christ, where are you? Stay where you are!”

“Not to worry, Fudo-san. I can walk. That’s all I need for now.”

“I’m on the way. Just hold on,” Blaine answered sensing the sensei’s wounds were more serious than he would let on.

“Yes,” Hiroshi said, turning just in time to see a figure in black leather surge toward him.

He spun, leading with the sword. But his wounded side slowed his reaction, and even as his katana lashed out at the black figure he felt the strangely shaped blade he was powerless to block slice down at him. In the end he tried desperately to rotate his sword back to deflect the blow, but again his side betrayed him and his legs crumbled even before the scimitar sliced on a diagonal through his collar bone all the way to his heart. A bright flash of light followed and Hiroshi heard his ancestors calling as he spilled over.

Before Lace could move off, the muted voice of Blaine McCracken reached her ear, coming from the corpse’s wireless transmitter which had spilled from his head when he fell.

“I’m almost to the upper terrace, Hiroshi. Be with you before you know it.”

Lace smiled and sped off in that direction.

McCracken cursed himself as he rushed up the last of the steps that would bring him back to the upper terrace of Herod’s palace and then into the battle. The straight abutment of the northern palace had seemed the perfect place for Rasin to launch his vaccine into the air over Israel. Placing himself in the fanatic’s mind, he was sure of it. His mistake had been to forget that someone else was directing Rasin’s strategems up here for him, someone who would never have permitted such an obvious move. Damn! He had committed the cardinal flaw, that of underestimating his enemy.

If that was his first mistake, his second was to dwell on it and to let his fear for the life of Hiroshi blot out his normal alertness. He sped heedlessly up the final steps onto the semicircular terrace that looked down over the remainder of the mountain. A sudden burst of automatic gunfire clanged off the steel support rail. His hand was stung and he was reaching for his Uzi when another spray sliced through the darkness and banged against the gun, ricocheting madly and stripping it from his grasp.

McCracken reeled sideways and grasped for the railing as the tracing fire searched for his shape in the blackness. His hands found the rail but, still numb, they slid off. His last measure of balance was lost and he pitched over the side of Masada to the dark abyss at the bottom.

Chapter 28

Feeling himself airborne, Blaine had flailed desperately for a hold as he began to drop, but he brushed the steel rail with his fingers and that was all. Arms extended, he slid for a brief time straight down the rock-face side before his legs slowed his pace and then caught on a narrow ridge extending out from the mountain. He gathered his breath and checked his extremities. Miraculously nothing was broken. His hands and arms were scraped but functional. His thick pants had been torn and he could feel blood from the lacerations trickling down his legs. No broken bones, though, nothing to stop him from going on.

He inspected the area in the darkness around him. He had gone over the rail on the side of the northern terrace, leaving a straight drop of nearly a hundred yards if his perch gave way. His eyes probed above him in search of handholds in the rock face to take him back up. He could conceivably manage it, but the time it would take would be prohibitively long.

He then looked downward and spotted beneath him the set of steps winding from one terrace level to another. He could not hope to drop onto it, but he could ease himself down, a difficult and dangerous task but one requiring far less time. At once he began to lower his legs over the ridge that had saved him, shifting his weight to make him top-heavy as his hands replaced his legs on the ridge. He found a foothold firm enough for one foot but not two, and eased his bulk onto it as he began to dangle his left leg in search of another makeshift step. As he was feeling around blindly, his right foot slipped and he came close to falling again. Only his firm grip on the rocks prevented a disaster, and he hung there in space briefly to recover his bearings.

Somehow that flirt with disaster seemed to charge him. Inside, Blaine knew he was going to make it; he could almost see the rocky face with his legs and feet. He found a twisted rhythm, body never balanced the same way twice. When his feet at last grazed the safety rail bordering the steps, it seemed as if only a few seconds had passed instead of several minutes. He touched down, possessed by a strange calm that swallowed all the hurt and wounds.

But the trail of a mortar shell speeding through the air high over Masada stripped the calm away and Blaine threw himself into a rush back up the stairs.

From the base of the mountain, Major Shamsi contemplated the direction of the shells. He had seen battle often enough to know mortar fire when he saw it, but this shell had been fired apparently at nothing. The battle raging atop Masada already defied explanation. This just confused matters more.

Shamsi continued to gaze upward toward the sky, but it was his ears that snapped alert next, picking up a familiar pulsating sound approaching from the west. He turned to see the flashing lights of a quartet of helicopter gunships slicing toward Masada like buzzards over a corpse.

“It’s about time,” Shamsi said to himself. “About fucking time.”

Isser had issued the call-up five minutes into Isaac’s story, before he had even heard the tape containing the claims of Eisenstadt. They were airborne inside of twelve minutes and covered the distance to Masada in ten.

“Say something,” the head of Mossad said to the old man who was seated uneasily next to him in the rear seat of the cockpit.

“Like what?”

“Like telling me what fools we were to have joined forces with Rasin.”

“I hate repeating myself. Help McCracken catch Rasin on Masada and I might just forgive you.”

They were gazing at the Sikorskys hovering over Masada with floodlights blazing when a mortar shell flashed by the windshield, causing both men to shrink back instinctively with the certainty it was headed for them. Isser grabbed his handset.

“Ready drop displacement,” he told the commandos scattered through the four gunships. “Prepare to secure the area. We’re going down.”

Rasin could only follow the path of his fired shells briefly before angle and distance stole them from him. He had six more to fire, another three minutes work at most. In spite of the attack spearheaded by McCracken, he was on the verge of assuring the successful completion of the first stage of his plan.

But he felt no elation, for there was the second stage to consider. And to effect that he would have to make it safely off this rock to freedom. There would have to be a way. Fate had gotten him this far. Fate had blessed him first with his own resolve, then with Eisenstadt, and at last with the Gamma cannisters salvaged off the Indianapolis. Yes, all this was happening because it was meant to. His was a holy mission, a blessed one.

Masada had indeed been the perfect choice for the setting from which Israel would at last achieve true independence. And yet if he died here as the Zealots had, then all would be for naught. Rasin started to worry until once again the strange feeling of calm reassurance surged through him.

He wasn’t going to die. He wasn’t going to be captured.

He was going to finish the first stage of the plan here on Masada and then move on to the next to achieve his destiny. Fired by that thought, Rasin reached for the first of the final six shells.

Three more shells had been fired before McCracken reached the plain of Masada once more. He stumbled briefly, suddenly dizzy, and had to lean against one of the ancient walls to steady himself. He still had a grenade, an Uzi he was able to pick up on the way, and a pistol. Enough. Plenty. But there was Hiroshi to consider as well, wounded somewhere and in need of help.

“Come in, Hiroshi. Sorry it took so long. Where are you? … Do you read me, Hiroshi? Come in.”

There was no response, and another mortar blast pierced the air as the helicopter gunships sprinted through the air above him. If Hiroshi’s plan to jam the Israeli soldiers’ communications had failed, reinforcements would have reached here significantly sooner, which meant the gunships had come courtesy of Isaac’s visit to the Mossad. But that did not insure the occupants of the choppers would be friendly. Blaine eased himself forward and waited for the next mortar shell to pin down where they were being fired from, his key to finding Rasin.

When it came, he was ready. He sprinted forward, with the last of the battle between Hiroshi’s warriors and Rasin’s soldiers still raging. The fact that gunfire sounded only weakly and sporadically was evidence that the tide of the battle had turned toward the samurai. All that remained was for McCracken to do his part.

He sped between the last wall of the storehouses and the higher one of a courtyard housing public toilet facilities. From there he darted past the quarry and into the open where the next mortar blast froze him in his tracks.

The water cistern! It was coming from the water cistern!

Blaine had started forward again when the rocks at his feet were kicked up by a burst from a machine gun. He hit the ground hard and rolled, bullets tracing him as he fired token return volleys in a wide spray. He didn’t have the gunman pinned down and was starting to plan how to accomplish that when the figure of Johnny Wareagle rushed into the open, firing toward the area of a water station forty yards to the left.

“Go, Blainey! I’ll keep him occupied!”

McCracken didn’t argue, just rose and sped off again with Johnny’s rifle continuing to spit fire. When the hammer clicked on an empty cylinder, he discarded the rifle and drew the massive killing knife from the sheath on his belt. He stood there holding it menacingly high so the gunman would know that rifle or not, he wasn’t giving an inch. The arriving gunships dipped lower, kicking up huge clouds of ancient dust and rocks that Wareagle had to squint his eyes to see through.

“This is the Israeli army!” a voice hailed over a PA from within one of the choppers. “Throw down your weapons and stand with your hands in the air.”

The warning completed, doors opened on all four of the helicopters to allow dozens of slick ropes to drop out and Israeli commandos to slide down toward ground level with guns at the ready. But by now their presence was superfluous. Those remaining to acknowledge them were a dozen of Hiroshi’s warriors who had survived and their twenty prisoners who were being herded forward even then. Wareagle heard a rustle and turned back toward the water station.

He saw the huge figure in black leather quite clearly, saw her as she stooped to lift up and support the gunman grazed by one of Johnny’s bullets. With the weight of the body taxing it, the figure in black could do nothing but gaze at the huge Indian with the large knife extending by his side.

Gaze and smile.

Then in the next instant the light from the Sikorskys wavered as they shifted to free landing space for the gunships, and by the time the area was lit again the two figures had disappeared.

Yosef Rasin had heard the choppers and the warning that had come from one of them and knew his stand on Masada was finished. The army, and thus the government, must have turned against him. He had been double-crossed!

But what had changed the government’s mind? What had turned their reluctant sanction of his plan into sudden disavowal? McCracken again no doubt, and the old men who had turned out to be real thorns in his side, too. And yet they of all people should have supported what he was trying to do. Traitors! They were all traitors! He alone could set Israel on the proper course now. One more shell to fire and then he would flee the cistern and find a way off this rock before the army could find him.

Rasin reached out and dropped the final shell down the barrel.

The shell blasted outward when Blaine was ten yards from the start of the steps that led down into the water cistern. Holding the Uzi tight before him, he glided the rest of the way, not wanting to alert Rasin to his presence.

“Hold it right there!”

The call sounded from his rear and McCracken knew instantly it had come from an Israeli soldier. The sudden grinding sound of additional footsteps stopping against the rock surface told him the speaker had been joined by two others. He turned slowly, hands and Uzi in the air.

“Where’s your commander?”

“Drop your weapon!”

“Call your commander here now. Is it Isser? Call Isser!”

“Drop your—”

The speaker’s command was cut off when the figure of Johnny Wareagle crashed into him, spreading his arms to take down the two others as well. Blaine didn’t wait to see the rest. He rushed the final stretch to the entrance of the water cistern and was halfway down the stairs in the pitch blackness when he heard Rasin’s voice.

“I’ve been expecting you.”

McCracken stopped, searched for the voice’s point of origin.

“Rasin?”

“You shouldn’t have come down here, but since you have why not come all the way down?”

McCracken stopped at the bottom step. The pungent scent of mortar fire singed his nostrils. There was something wrong here, wrong with the scenario, wrong with where Rasin’s voice was coming from.

“I can’t see you.”

“You’d like to, wouldn’t you? You think you’ve won.”

“Plenty of people died here tonight. Nobody wins.”

“Israel can, now that I’ve released my vaccine. Israel can win at last.”

“Only if hundreds of millions more die. That doesn’t count.”

“You’ve spoken to Eisenstadt.”

“Give yourself up.”

“Sorry.”

McCracken finally pinned Rasin down to the far wall directly opposite him. But his voice had a strange echo, as if he were speaking down from a point on the wall.

Blaine realized what was happening in time to start his sprint back up the steep stone steps. Maybe Rasin didn’t hear or see him. Maybe he just had to say one last thing.

“Good-bye, Blaine McCracken.”

The explosion came as he cleared the final step and lunged headlong through the air to carry himself as far as he could from the cistern. The stairs crumbled instantly and the entire ancient structure trembled, as fragments of the walls cracked and splintered in the last instant before the cistern collapsed upon itself, leaving Blaine to gaze back at the rubble.

“He climbed out, I’m telling you,” Blaine insisted to Isser while Isaac looked on. “He must have had a rope ladder or something extended from one of the portals.”

“He hasn’t left this rock, that’s for sure. We’ll find him.”

“I want him when you do,” Blaine said bitterly, thinking of the news Wareagle had brought him about Hiroshi. “There’s a score to settle now.”

“We’ll settle it later.”

McCracken looked up with frigid eyes. “Just find him, Isser. I figure you might be able to handle that much. But you’ve got to take him alive. Otherwise we don’t find out where he stashed the cannisters of Gamma gas and we might be facing this whole scenario again real soon.”

“I’d rather not think about that.”

“You’d better.”

Blaine had barely finished the warning when one of the gunships fired up its engine, propeller and rotor blades springing to life.

“I didn’t authorize anyone to leave,” Isser said in puzzlement. “What the hell is …”

McCracken was already running, charging toward the chopper which was nearly ready for takeoff. He knew in that instant the huge woman in black leather would be at the controls, knew she would have disabled the other gunships to prevent pursuit as well.

A group of soldiers reached the readying chopper ahead of him and were blasted back by machine-gun fire coming from just inside the door. Blaine approached on an angle that kept him from the gunman’s sight, and was almost there when the chopper lifted off suddenly. At the last moment he leaped to grab hold of the chopper’s landing pod as it rose, but his hand slipped off the steel. He plunged back down to the dust of Masada with the gunship shrinking into the blackness of the night.

Chapter 29

Evira lay on the floor in her cell in the palace basement. Time had lost all meaning to her; she slept, she woke. There was little else to do. Kourosh lay against her, using her shoulder as a pillow. Occasionally in his sleep, the urchin would whimper and grab for her. Evira was more than happy to hug and soothe him, her own desperation eased in the process.

How long had it been since Hassani had finished with them, since the reports of McCracken’s death? At least one day, perhaps two or more. Evira didn’t know why they were being left alive, unless it was to let them starve slowly to death. In all the hours they had been there, no one had come with food or water. She had long gone beyond being hungry, even thirsty. Her strength had depleted, and with it her resolve. Hassani had won, Rasin too. McCracken was dead and she was here. How idealistic she had been to believe the two of them were capable of defeating the plans of two madmen on their own.

By her side, Kourosh whimpered again, long hair matted to his forehead by the sweat caused by the unremitting heat of the air about them. This boy had become her burden. Watching him die would be her punishment for how she had involved Blaine McCracken. The gods worked in strange ways, but always with method and purpose. She knew another day without food or water would bring severe pains and cramps to the boy. Such an awful way to die, feeling yourself wasting away. She had resolved that before her own strength ebbed too far she would end the urchin’s pain by killing him. It would be the last act of her suddenly feeble life and the hardest to fulfill.

Evira felt herself nodding off again and hoped for a long, dream-filled sleep this time. She wrapped her arm around the boy and held him close to her. Her eyes slid closed.

A sound from somewhere jarred her. How long had she been out, if at all? A dream, it must have been a dream that reached her in the state between consciousness and sleep.

No, the sound came again, that of metal being worked; a scratching, grating sound. Her ears tried to focus in, eyes useless in the near-total darkness of the basement prison.

Suddenly there was a loud echo of metal being forced aside. A wide beam of light darted haphazardly across the far wall. Men were entering through some secret passageway or tunnel. She remembered Kourosh describing it to her. But who were they? Why had they come?

The single beam became four. The beams were joined by voices exchanged in a whisper, someone giving instructions, a search underway.

They were looking for her!

Over here, Evira tried to say, but her mouth was too dry to push the words out. She forced up some saliva and cleared the refuse from her throat.

“Over here,” she managed hoarsely. “Over here.”

Instantly a pair of the flashlights turned in the direction of her cell.

“Yakov, we’ve found her!” a voice followed in an excited whisper.

“Alive?”

The light found her, blinded her, and she shrank back to shield her eyes.

“Yes. Quite.”

A third flashlight joined the first two. Evira struggled to gaze past the beams at the men who held them.

“Can you hear me?” came the voice of the one called Yakov.

“Yes.”

“I’m going to blow the lock on your cell. Back up as far as you can in the corner.”

She did as she was told and dragged Kourosh along with her. The boy started to stir, barely awake.

“It’s okay,” she soothed. “We’re being rescued.”

She held him close to her as a fizzle came, followed by a flash, and a poof! One of the men kicked at the cell door and it reeled inward to allow the group to enter.

“How long since you’ve had anything to eat or drink?” Yakov asked her.

“Two days, I think. Maybe three.”

“Then that’s our first priority,” he said, helping her to her feet, while another of the men supported the urchin. “I assume the boy is with you.”

“He is. Who are you? What brought you here?”

“A long story. For now I’ve got a message from Blaine McCracken. He says you should have stayed an old hag in Jaffa.”

“What?” Isser blared at McCracken’s assertion of the final piece in the mad plan of Yosef Rasin. “That’s insane!”

“Of course it is,” Blaine told him. “It’s Rasin.”

“But if what you say is true …”

“Then everything makes sense. Everything becomes clear.”

“How could he have pulled it off, though? Think of the logistics.”

“Forget logic. It doesn’t matter anymore; it never did. We’ve got to think like him if we’re still going to have a chance to win.”

They were seated in Isser’s office in the squat, innocuous complex of buildings outside Tel Aviv near the Hebrew Country Club that formed the permanent headquarters of Mossad.

“You know, Isser,” Isaac started, “I think he’s got a point.”

“It’s crazy,” the head of Mossad persisted. “And you want me to risk everything based on this … hunch.”

“Not a hunch and not everything. Just me and Operation Firestorm. I go into Tehran and get Rasin. All you do is let Firestorm proceed as planned.”

“Including the Apaches, of course.”

“More than ever, since one of them’s gonna serve as my taxi in.” He turned back toward Isaac. “So when’s show time?”

The old man turned an empty gaze out the window where the first signs of light were still an hour or so away.

“Dawn,” was all he said.

The Shah’s secret tunnel ran nearly half a mile and ended beneath a street beyond the square that fronted the royal palace.

“You’re Israeli,” Evira said as they made their way forward with flashlights slicing through the darkness.

“Born and raised.” Yakov laughed, taking his turn at carrying Kourosh.

Evira recalled her suspicions brought on by the comic books purchased in Israel. “But what are you doing here?”

“We’re here to start a revolution. Several hundred of us were planted over a year ago amidst the young, the poor, and the students to organize their discontent into rebellion — and to supply them with the means to fight.”

“Weapons …”

“No revolution is complete without them.”

“An Israeli-inspired revolution?”

“Supported would be a better choice of words. It is the people’s will. We are merely helping them exercise it.”

“ ‘We.’ Mossad?”

“Let’s say we’re an independent group working with their sanction. Easier to disavow involvement that way. Less likely to have leaks with an operation required to take place over such a long period of time.”

“Jews working with Iranians. Incredible …”

“Not really. People working against oppressive, murderous regimes is never incredible. You must agree. You came here to kill Hassani yourself.”

Evira stopped suddenly, and Yakov’s men bringing up the rear nearly collided with her. “How did you know—”

“Because an order was sent by the mission controllers to insure you failed. With Hassani dead, the people would have lost their symbol to rise against. There would be no Firestorm.”

“No what?”

“Code name of this operation.”

“Then it was your people who betrayed that cell in Naziabad.”

“Regretfully,” Yakov acknowledged softly. “This boy, he saved your life?”

Evira nodded. “And to return the favor I’m going to get him out of this country. With your help, of course.” Thanks to Blaine McCracken, she almost added but didn’t. The fact that he had somehow arranged this rescue could only mean that he had fulfilled his end of the mission. Whatever happiness she might have felt over that, though, was tempered by the failure she had experienced at her end. But maybe it wasn’t too late….

“You’ll have to be patient. The hour of Firestorm is upon us.”

“When?”

The other end of the tunnel appeared as a grating in the ground that allowed the first light of the morning to cast a checkerboard pattern downward.

“Dawn.”

“You up for another run, Indian?”

Wareagle’s gaze was noncommittal. “How strange it seems that we spend so much of our lives trying to reconcile ourselves to the hellfire that forged our spirits. And yet each time it beckons we return to it without pause.”

“You once told me the hellfire wasn’t a place, it was a feeling.”

“It is even more than that, Blainey. Our manitous are cleansed by the hellfire. It recharges us, gives us our worth. We lapse from it too long and we become the things we feared it would make us.”

“Kind of like a fix, an addiction.”

“More like an impulse to breathe. We cannot stop ourselves even if we try.”

“This is no time to stop trying,” Blaine said, gritting his teeth. “Someone’s going to answer for killing Hiroshi, and I’ve got to get my son back.”

“Dropping ourselves into a revolution might pose a difficult setting to accomplish either. The palace is our target, but even the spirits cannot lead us into it through the chaos and the crowds. We’re going to need something more this time, Blainey.”

“Precisely why a little present’s going to be waiting for us on the aircraft carrier Kennedy when we land to pick up the Apaches.”

The small group climbed out of the tunnel into the street with the first of the light and the first of the chaos. Already people were taking to the streets, haphazardly, with no real sense of purpose yet, as if some word had reached them and they were waiting for further instruction. Evira had been a party to such scenarios before. But the fervor she sensed in the morning air here was almost palpable in its commitment. The Israelis had done their job well.

“It is happening,” said an Iranian student leader named Rashid who had been waiting for them at the escape hatch. “It is truly happening.”

“And this is only Niavarin,” Yakov reminded them. Then he added to Evira, “The uprising will be focused in Tehran proper, spreading outward from there.”

“A good strategy, if Hassani’s Revolutionary Guard doesn’t stop you in your tracks.”

“We’re not totally alone here,” he told her. “Fifteen Apache helicopter gunships will strafe the strongest of enemy positions, starting at the estimated height of the battle three hours from now.”

“And in the meantime?”

“The streets will be barricaded to slow the soldiers down, buildings will be burned to bring the people out. Those who have lived in fear and oppression for more than a decade will welcome the chance to rise up and be heard. I have been in this city for a year now. Believe me, I know.”

“Where do we go from here?”

“The starting point for our revolution: Talegahani Street, also known as Takht-e Jamshid.”

“The American Embassy …”

“Fitting, don’t you think?”

During the thirty-minute drive across the city, Kourosh and Evira were able to gulp a restorative meal of bread, cheese, and water. The driver of the car maneuvered skillfully down side streets to avoid the throngs already beginning to spill out with screams of defiance. The Revolutionary Guards were restrained and fearful, unsure of the proper response to make. Clearly, they knew something was brewing. Reinforcements had undoubtedly been called in, but with the streets barricaded and, judging by the smoke spreading in the sky, some already burning, passage would not come easily.

“This is as far as we can go,” Yakov announced when they reached an intersection that was barricaded in all directions. The barricades were constructed of wood, furniture, cinderblocks, abandoned cars, dumpsters, and garbage cans wedged firmly into place. An exultant mass of people was standing atop the heaps, shouting and waving their rifles.

“Soviet Kalashnikovs, American M-16s, and Israeli Galils,” Evira noted. “Impressive.”

“We got them everything we could lay our hands on.”

“Revolution!” a freshly revived Kourosh yelled jubilantly as they exited the car, thrusting a tight fist into the air. “Kill the bastards! Kill them all!”

His long hair danced in the wind, small face taut in its resolve. His feelings mirrored those of a nation frustrated by watching a reconstruction effort that had left the people worse off than ever before. The frustration was rampant now, set to brew by the Israeli plants but boiling over on its own.

“What about McCracken?” Evira asked of Yakov as they shouldered their way through the masses, which grew thicker the closer they got to the former American Embassy. “Did he say anything else, anything about Yosef Rasin?”

“All I know is that he arranged for your rescue.”

“Is he coming? Is he here?”

“I know nothing more than what I’ve told you.”

Evira realized she had lost track of Kourosh and almost panicked. She located the boy rallying with a group of children his own age holding clubs and mallets as weapons. He was cheering them on and might have been all set to join them when Evira arrived to pull him back to her side. She marvelled at the restorative effects a bit of food and water had had on both Kourosh and herself. Of course, the fervor and excitement they were in the midst of deserved a measure of the blame, too.

“It’s wonderful!” The boy beamed. “Isn’t is wonderful?”

She wanted to tell him that war was many things, but it was never wonderful. Innocent people were unquestionably going to die there today. The Israeli plot had as its primary aim the toppling of Hassani from power. The loss of Iranian life to accomplish that end was simply a means, accepted and condoned. The people, the masses Kourosh was cheering for, were mere pawns, sacrifices to a greater end.

These thoughts turned Evira cold. Was it no different for her rallying of the Arabs of Israel, urging them to organize and work toward a greater voice in the government? Yes, her means were nonviolent, but people had similarly been hurt working toward a higher cause they could not wholly grasp. She was using them, just as the Israelis were using the Iranians, to fulfill her own ends and goals.

They continued forcing their way through the swelling mass, more people joining it by the second. The plan would be for those in the street to smother the Revolutionary Guard as best they could by neutralizing the guards’ superior weaponry and keeping them from the strategically placed barricades for as long as possible. It was a numbers game, one of bodies as well as bullets, and success depended on the people wearing the guard down and outlasting it until the Apaches arrived. At that point the powerful attack ships would strafe positions of Revolutionary Guard strongholds in the hope of opening a clear path for the masses to their ultimate target: The royal palace in Niavarin. To be overrun, ransacked, destroyed.

A red-faced man struggling for breath spotted Yakov and approached. Evira recognized his features as Israeli as well.

“The guardsmen are taking control at the embassy area,” he reported grimly.

“Already? How?”

“They responded quicker and better than we anticipated.”

“Perhaps they knew, were warned.”

“They didn’t hesitate. They fired their guns into the crowds without a single warning. It was awful. The people fled in all directions, stampeding over the bodies left behind. I’m just ahead of them.”

“The word will spread, then,” Iranian student leader Rashid said. “Others will scatter and run when their own deaths confront them.”

“All right,” Yakov conceded. “Give Hassani round one. What do you hear of Shah Reza Boulevard?”

“The barricade is forty feet high at the head of the square. The people are chanting and are ready to burn buildings as soon as the guardsmen show themselves.”

“We’ll make our stand there, then. A different start for the revolution, maybe even an improvement.”

They were changing direction now, fighting to make their way through the frenzied masses blocking the route to Shah Reza Boulevard. Evira grabbed Kourosh by the arm and held him tight, his eyes still gleaming at the sights around him.

“Come,” Yakov beckoned her. “We can get to the boulevard quicker this way. It’s only a few blocks from Talegahani Street.”

And the Revolutionary Guard, Evira thought.

In McCracken’s mind the Apache was without question the finest attack helicopter ever built, the latest generation AH-64A model’s maneuverability matched only by its power. In appearance it was a species all to itself, sleek and narrow down the body with no bit of wasted space. It had a top speed of over one-hundred-eighty miles per hour and could maintain a five-hundred-mile flying range with the new fuel it was burning. The Apache’s armaments included dual sets of four Hellfire missiles and nineteen aerial rockets suspended beneath each wing and a 30-millimeter chain gun mounted on the underside.

Blaine figured the chain gun would be the most crucial weapon at the start, followed by the Folding-Fin Aerial Rockets once Revolutionary Guard strongholds were effectively pinned down. Commands to fire both these and the superpowerful Hellfire missiles were channeled directly by the copilot-gunner through a TADS (Target Acquisition and Designation Sight) directly into the fire-control computer. The margin of error was almost nonexistent as a result. From a defensive standpoint, the Apache’s armored shell could tolerate rocket hits that would fell any other helicopter gunship and was virtually undetectable to incoming infrared missiles.

The only real problem facing them was fuel consumption. To circumvent part of this, the plan was to use the aircraft carrier Kennedy, on its patrol in the Persian Gulf, as the operation’s staging ground. And even then one midair refueling would be required to reach Tehran and a second needed to return to the carrier upon the mission’s completion. The jet carrying Blaine and Johnny Wareagle landed first on the Kennedy’s deck, which had been cleared of everything but the Apaches.

“This way, gentlemen,” a barrel-chested soldier with an unlit cigar stuck in his mouth said after they had climbed down. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the idling jet engine. “I’m Gunnery Sergeant Tom Beeks. Got the equipment you requested all ready.”

He led them through a hatch and then down a short corridor into a conference room deserted except for the materials laid out on the table.

“To begin with,” the sergeant started, reaching down for a thick black bodysuit with the bulk of a catcher’s chest protector and the look of long underwear, “this is a Kevlar bodysuit. Armors you from chest to ankles with added reinforcement in vital areas. It can stop ordinary and hollow point bullets of virtually any caliber. But the drawback is it’s very hot and uncomfortable and the most you can wear it is a half hour before you literally bake alive.”

“An eternity,” Wareagle noted to McCracken.

Blaine accepted one of the suits from Beeks and ran his hands through it. “What about the firepower I asked for, Gunny? To take the palace we’re gonna need something special.”

“That was a tough one. Had to use my mind a little, but fortunately these babies just came in.” He pulled back a dark plastic cover to reveal a pair of long weapons dominated by a thick cylinder with slots for six separate barrels on its end.

Blaine’s eyes bulged. “Vulcan 20-millimeter miniguns. What’d you do, pull these off your antiaircraft stations? Not exactly light issue, Gunny.”

“Lighter than you think, sir. These were designed to cut response time and fire differential. Teflon coated with extra-thin titanium construction. They’re not really made to be hand-held, but when you described what you might be facing, I figured we’d better improvise.” He pointed to the cylinder’s multi-barreled front. “Fires 1,000 rounds per minute, but if you try that you’ll end up with a melted casing. Short, controlled bursts are your safest bet, no more than five seconds in duration with a half second in between.”

“I can handle that. How do the rounds get fed?”

“Through the pack worn on your back.”

“Weight?”

“The ammo about sixty pounds and the gun assembly about seventy, down from over twice that.”

Blaine didn’t look convinced. “Which makes the Vulcans fine for firing straight ahead, but as soon as we try to maneuver them sideways the force of the cylinder rotation will kick either up or down.”

“I considered that too, sir,” the gunnery sergeant said as he lifted a leather strap with hooks on either end from the table. “One end of this fastens into a belt you’ll be wearing. The other attaches to the Vulcan to take up all the slack. Gun might want to kick, but it won’t be going anywhere.” Beeks noted Blaine’s approving stare. “Ever fire a minigun before?”

“Only from choppers.”

“It’s pretty simple,” Beeks said, and moved closer. “Just lock the main cylinder home and turn it until you hear a click.” The sergeant did just that and showed Blaine how to position his hands to repeat the motion. “Safety’s here. Click it off and you’re ready to go. Rotation of chambers assures no pause in ammo expulsion. Perfect for urban encounters with unfriendly masses.”

“I should say so.”

“Only thing that ain’t perfect is what a 20-millimeter shell does to man at this velocity. Gonna make a hell of a mess by the time you’re finished.”

“Gotta make one to clean another up, Gunny,” Blaine returned. The ready horn sounded on the Kennedy’s deck. “Come on, Indian, we’ve got a plane to catch.”

“The Apaches took off from the Kennedy ten minutes ago,” Isser reported to the prime minister.

“You didn’t come here just to tell me that,” the old man said knowingly.

Isser didn’t hesitate. “If McCracken’s hunch is right, we stand to lose even if he succeeds in Tehran. Never mind the problems Rasin can cause us if McCracken brings him back. The fact is we cooperated with him. In the end we sanctioned his madness, and that reality can destroy us as surely as Gamma.”

“And McCracken?”

“McCracken knows. McCracken knows everything.” The Mossad chief took a deep breath. “We cannot allow him to leave Tehran alive.”

Chapter 30

The crowd was cheering loudly when the small party led by Yakov finally reached Shah Reza Boulevard. It wasn’t hard for Evira to pin down what the cheering was all about: at every corner, the street signs originally put up by Khomeini’s Revolutionary Council were being replaced by crudely painted signs that returned the boulevard to its former name during the time of the Shah.

Those on the street not watching the small ceremonies taking place had their attention fixed on the completion of the massive barricade at the head of the boulevard. Nothing had been spared. It measured over three stories high and was sixty feet deep, stretching from the south side of the boulevard to the north, running from building to building to totally seal that end of the street. The construction was hardly thought out, the piled elements mundane, but the structure was awe-inspiring. The people rallied and packed toward it like bees to their hive, renewing and recharging their enthusiasm at its mere sight. The piles of wood and steel were stacked upon lower layers of cars both new and old. Where any holes appeared down low, cinderblocks were being jammed into place. The higher it grew, the lighter the debris composing it became, heap piled atop heap until the sky seemed a reach away. It looked invincible, but Evira knew this to be a fantasy that the first bomb would shatter.

A pair of Iranian jets streaked through the air above, causing only a temporary lightening in the enthusiastic, fervid cheers.

“Just a show of force,” Yakov said.

“They would never bomb Tehran,” Rashid agreed.

“Pride?” Evira wondered.

“No,” the Iranian student leader told her. “Practicality. They have no bombs for their jets. They’ll keep buzzing us, though, try to scare the people off.”

They continued to make their way toward the huge barricade. The going got tougher the closer they got, the true fanatics of the uprising unwilling to yield their cherished spots. Rashid and Kaveh had taken the lead now, ordering the crowds aside in Iranian, knowing just the proper phrasing to use. The two other Iranian students in their party brought up the rear, effectively boxing Yakov, Evira, and Kourosh amidst them to keep them safe from the crowd.

“We’re not natives,” Yakov told her. “That could cause problems if we’re spotted.”

“I am a native!” Kourosh claimed staunchly, as if hurt.

“You don’t look it, boy. Too western. Today, appearances are everything.”

“I’d join them if I had a gun!”

“If we’re successful here today, you’ll never have to hold a gun. Not ever,” Yakov assured him, which drew an angry stare from Evira, who knew his feelings for the Iranian people extended only as far as the need of Israel to make use of them.

“I want a gun,” the urchin persisted, the demand too insistent to carry even a hint of cuteness with it.

“If things go poorly, we’ll need every hand we can get,” Rashid said, turning back toward them. “Let’s all pray they don’t.”

They reached the barricade moments later. Rashid signaled those on watch and a car forming a moveable gate was driven aside to let them enter. The impetus of the swelling throng forced more in after them, and these were not so politely turned back and the car was driven back into place to seal the barricade once more.

Evira gazed around her and marvelled at what she saw. The confines of the barricade made for a stark contrast with the chaotic rabble they had just left on the far side. Weapons and ammunition were laid out neatly on planks laid over crates and cinderblocks. Posts had been set up for both food and the attending of wounded. There was a communications center in the form of a table lined with radios and walkie-talkies, linking the Israeli-led rebel leaders with every major sphere of the revolution as it progressed through the city.

The barricade had been built with its back to the very head of the boulevard where it jutted off into narrow, easily blocked-off side streets. The effect was that of enclosing those within on all sides. Evira felt claustrophobic from it all and only slightly reassured by the numerous gunmen posted atop the barricades facing every direction. Still, she had to admit they were formidably armed, what with the grenade launchers, RPGs, bazookas, heavy machine guns, and even several hand-held surface-to-air missiles to use against possible attacks from aircraft. Yes, the Israelis had thought of everything, but without the prompt arrival of the Apaches to lend air support it might not be enough.

“It goes well, Rashid!” another student leader she had not met said to the one who had escorted them here. The two young men embraced.

“The word was bad from the embassy,” Rashid returned. “Have you heard anything since?”

“Who has had time to talk? There was the barricade to finish.”

Yakov was already making his way over to the communications station. He looked nervous. The Apaches would be overdue in a scant fifteen minutes, and as of yet there had been no word from them. Evira followed him, close enough when she stopped to hear his side of the conversation into one of the radios he picked up.

“What do you mean?” he demanded into the receiver. “How did they get through? … That many? Oh God … No, it’s too late.… Yes, we can still do it. Just stay where you are and keep me updated.” He lowered the receiver to the table.

“Bad news?” Evira asked lamely.

Yakov’s eyes were glassy. “Hassani’s forces responded in far greater numbers than we expected, quicker as well. There are between five and ten thousand in the streets already and more coming. Talegahani Street is totally theirs. They’re heading this way.”

“You must have a plan, a contingency,” she said, watching Kourosh helping to put the finishing touches on the barricade that would be under siege in a matter of minutes.

“Yes. The Apaches, damn it! The Apaches!”

“No word from them?”

“None at all.”

Evira and Yakov looked at one another, both afraid to speak the obvious, that the Apaches weren’t coming and they had been abandoned.

“We’ve got to do something!” Evira insisted.

“Yes,” Yakov acknowledged, and raised a walkie-talkie that connected him to the members of his team scattered among the Iranian masses down Shah Reza Boulevard. “This is Yakov. Commence the burning.”

The Apaches looked like huge june bugs floating lazily beneath the sun, all black and steel. Over ninety minutes before, the Persian Gulf had given way to Iranian landfall, but McCracken was resting no easier. He gazed nervously at his watch.

“We haven’t made up enough time,” he said to Johnny Wareagle. “I figure an hour late minimum, Indian, maybe closer to an hour and a half.”

“The battle will still be there when we arrive, Blainey.”

“You sound pretty certain.”

“Isn’t it always?”

The fires spread quickly down Shah Reza Boulevard, chaos growing out of chaos as the frenzied masses grabbed flaming objects and flung them through plate-glass store windows. Smoke rose in a shroud over the center of Tehran as if to cordon it off from the rest of the city and the world. The flames had the pronounced effect of further fueling the mass’s rage. Whereas before many had been running without purpose, chanting with hands in the air, now no set of hands was without some sort of weapon. Yakov and his Operation Firestorm team had given out approximately 2,000 firearms beyond the barricades, but it was impossible to tell how many of those possessing them were concentrated here. Reports from other areas of the city indicated heavy exchanges of fire with Hassani’s Revolutionary Guard, the latter emerging victorious at every turn. Their casualties were high, but for now the guards seemed not to care, fighting with a passion and heart Yakov and the students had never expected. When Firestorm had been conceived, some had gone as far as to suggest that the guards would actually join the side of the masses. Now nothing could have been further from the truth.

Evira found Yakov searching the sky hopelessly for the Apaches he now believed were not coming.

“They’ll be here,” she insisted.

“You don’t understand. They haven’t called and we can’t raise them on the established frequency. That means the rules have changed.”

“Only because whoever’s leading the mission would never break radio silence and alert the Iranians to his approach.”

“That wasn’t the plan.”

“Things may have changed,” Evira said, clinging to the hope that McCracken was coming on the Apaches, though clearly she had no reason to. “They’ll be here,” she persisted. “We’ve just got to hold out.”

“We’re going to try,” Yakov told her.

In the next instant he had summoned the student leaders to his side. His orders were simple: they were to take to the barricade with their various units and prepare to make their stand here and now. The young Iranians’ faces grew red with excitement and fury. Their time had come, and they rushed off to gather their people. The word spread. There were screams of joy, of glee.

How naive, Evira thought to herself. How foolish…

Wooden crates were pried open and additional weapons distributed and ammo readied amidst the hooting. Evira hung back from it all. She had seen this scene before. Different countries, different causes, but always the same result: futility.

Armed now, the Iranians charged by her to their positions within and atop the huge barricade. She had lost sight of Kourosh again in all the excitement and feared he had wandered off into the streets to be swept away by the masses and lost forever. Her heart had begun to thud when she caught sight of him arguing up a storm with a man issuing rifles who had refused to give him one. Evira hurried over and dragged him away.

“I want to fight!” he protested. “I want to shoot the bastards!”

“You want to die?” she demanded, words coming with her thoughts. “You’ve seen what it’s like. Is that what you want?”

“I’ll kill them first!”

“Not all. You can never get them all,” she said, still holding him back.

“I’m not a coward! I want to fight!”

“It won’t come to that,” she said, trying to sound confident, eyes on the sky as if to make the Apaches appear. “It won’t.”

But she knew the sureness had left her voice.

Yakov grimly accepted the reports from his spotters scattered throughout Tehran.

“They are using heavy armaments!”

“The barricades are falling!”

“The people are running away!”

“The Revolutionary Guard is massing toward Shah Reza Boulevard!”

The final report was superfluous. Climbing to the top of the barricade, Yakov could see the first of the dark-clad Revolutionary Guardsmen pass onto the smoke-filled street before him. These first waves were set upon by the masses and crushed beneath the fury of fists and sticks. The screams of the anguished and frustrated became even more frenzied. The crowd tasted blood and wanted more.

In reprisal, the next blood spilled was their own. The initial barrages of fire that came from the second wave of guardsmen reached Yakov as soft thuds to his ears. In the huge congregated swell, men and women began to crumble and lurch backward, chests opened and heads spewed bone and brains. The smoke obscured much of the view, but Yakov saw enough. The enraged masses would hold out as long as their ammo and resolve held up, which was only as long as the truth of their plight’s hopelessness could remain hidden from them.

More guardsmen charged onto the boulevard from the intersecting side streets. Yakov didn’t have to pick up a radio to know that his was now or would very soon be the last standing barricade in the city. He had more than two hundred men to defend it, but the endless waves of Hassani’s troops would wear them down, outlast them and blow them to hell in the end. He climbed down from the barricade and found Evira waiting for him.

“I think you and the boy should get out.”

“To where?” she came back. “You think anywhere in the city is safe?”

“You’re resourceful and he knows the city.”

They both looked toward Kourosh, who had given up hoping for a gun and was busy distributing extra ammunition to his more fortunate countrymen who’d been blessed with one.

“What kind of world is it we make for our children, Israeli?” she asked Yakov.

“It was made by our fathers,” he returned. “Made in a shape we are helpless to alter. The madmen come and go, always the same causes, the same rhetoric.”

“Lies. To themselves, to all, and in the end the people pay.”

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The explosions sounding in quick succession seemed to shake the barricade. Yakov nimbly vaulted back to a perch where he could peer out through a break in the structure. The sight sickened him. The Revolutionary Guard was firing rockets and grenades into clusters of the Iranian people still massed before the barricade. Screams raged, the high-pitched wails of women and children rising above the others as the entire city bled with agony. Yakov could not help but tremble as a fresh wave of Hassani’s troops fired indiscriminate bursts of machine gun fire into the wounded and dying to silence them. The drab gray-black of the Revolutionary Guard uniform was now the dominant color in the street, blending with the smoke. As the guards launched their attack on the barricade, their charging numbers stepped heedlessly upon the freshly slaughtered bodies that littered the asphalt.

Yakov leaped back down.

“Prepare to fire!” he shouted into cupped hands, and the word was passed through the length of the barricade, thanks in large measure to Kourosh, who ran up and down the lines repeating it in his boyish squeal.

“Prepare to fire!”

The fifteen Apaches zeroed in on Tehran like locusts making for a wheat field. They had sped over Iranian territory much too low to be picked up by radar, and, as expected, the uprising in the capital city had opened the back door for them. Even the midair refueling had left them undetected and, more importantly, had resulted in only a minimal delay.

The pilots and gunners had drilled over and over again to meet the strange conditions of this mission. They were to restrict their targets solely to concentrated positions of Revolutionary Guardsmen and avoid civilian casualties at all costs. Thanks to the TADS system, if selective strikes were ordered, a soldier could be hit by chain gun fire with a civilian standing a yard from him spared. The whole strategy was based on intensifying the chaos and riddling the guards’ numbers long enough to give the masses the edge they needed. Their numbers were sufficient to overrun the troops if the troops were divided and cut off from each other. And no machine of war could have been more perfect for that task than the mighty Apache.

“Christ,” the pilot of the lead Apache reported to McCracken after checking his radar and noticing the smoky area now coming clearly in view, “the center of the city’s lit up like the goddamn Fourth of July. This is gonna get awful hot, sir.”

“You get to like the heat after a while.”

The plan was for this Apache to break off from the convoy at the earliest possible time and make tracks for the royal palace so Blaine might fulfill his part in the mission. He and Johnny had just donned their Kevlar body armor suits and were already sweating heavily in them.

“How long?” McCracken asked the pilot.

“Three minutes to the battle zone and eight to the royal palace.”

Blaine turned to Wareagle. “Well, Indian, it’s back to the hellfire.”

The masses in Shah Reza Boulevard began a full-fledged retreat, slowed by the huge and sickening collection of bodies littering the streets. Many were the corpses of soldiers, but far more belonged to the people. The guardsmen continued their steady advance on the barricade, their fire unrestrained and wild. Anything that moved was shot. Meanwhile, the initial bursts and volleys fired from the barricade met with great success. Soldiers seemed to be taken wholly by surprise, hordes of them dropping in their tracks as more rushed forward.

Evira watched it for a time and could barely keep down the contents of her stomach. She had never seen such carnage, and could liken it only to a feeding frenzy by sharks.

A woman holding a child by the hand was shot in the back. The child leaned over her and was shot twice.

Teenagers hurling stones were cut down en masse by soldiers, who were then caught in a hail of 50-caliber machine gun fire coming from the top of the barricade.

“You’d better take this,” Yakov called to her, tossing an M-16 her way. “They’ll be on us in seconds.”

Kourosh saw the rifle in her hands and rushed over with a trio of spare clips.

“So we fight on the same side, Israeli,” Evira said to Yakov.

“You can still get out,” he returned.

“Help is coming.”

He shook her off, and her statement this time was not followed by a hopeful sweep of the air with her eyes.

The boulevard before them was empty now of all but the bodies and charging guardsmen, close enough for the enemy to use their own grenades and bazookas.

“Down!” Evira screamed, and lunged from the position she had taken amidst the barricade to tackle Kourosh to safety before the first bursts made impact.

The impregnable barricade blew inward in several areas like a dam springing leaks. More heavy fire resounded against it with deadly thuds while waves of Hassani’s troops charged forward. They rushed into the unbroken fury of the bullets pouring out from cracks in the huge pile of debris, willing to sacrifice themselves if the next wave could get closer.

Yakov’s strategy here had been brilliant, for he had made sure to hold back firing of their heaviest arms until it was certain that the soldiers had passed the point of no return. He ran up and down the beleaguered barricade encouraging the defenders and shouting orders to commence with their small artillery fire. Almost immediately, Shah Reza Boulevard exploded in huge chunks as bodies were blown apart, more corpses added to the mounting pile. The firing from both sides was nonstop, its appetite insatiable. The battle became one of position versus numbers, and there was no doubt numbers were going to win out as the screams multiplied from all levels of the barricade. The dead plunged off; the wounded did their best to climb down. All those who could hold guns continued to do so.

Those within the barricade were making a truly remarkable stand. But the waves of Revolutionary Guardsmen were endless, blurring out the asphalt now. And suddenly the familiar sound of helicopters split the morning air.

“The Apaches!” Evira sang out from her perch near Yakov on a platform a third of the way up the barricade.

“No,” he returned flatly, gazing ahead. “Look.”

“Oh God,” she muttered. “Oh God …”

“I got blips dead ahead,” the lead Apache pilot told McCracken.

“You got a reading?”

“Look like Iranian gunships to me. The old Hueys from Nam we sold them.”

“Shoot ’em out of the fuckin’ sky, son.”

“Not in range yet, Dad.”

“Then get us there! Fast!”

Yakov was among the first wave of those within and on the barricade who fell to the barrage blistered down from the Huey gunship as it swept overhead. A few atop the debris turned upward and bravely fired on it, only to be sliced apart by the machine gunners spewing bullets out both sides. Evira managed to find cover during the first pass and slid back outward as a second gunship came in for its attack run.

“Not yet, you bastards!” she raged. “Not yet!”

A surface-to-air rocket launcher lay just before her. She grabbed for it, strapped it round her shoulder, and climbed to the first platform of the barricade. The second gunship was coming fast as the first swung back around and made tracks in its wake. Orange began to spit from the machine gun bores of the now lead Huey as it crossed over the head of the barricade. Evira had time only to steady herself and raise the launcher to her shoulder before the chopper’s fire pinpointed her. She fired without time to properly aim, fired up and to the right in the desperate hope the heat-seeking missile would launch close enough to lock on. There was a whomp! and the Huey’s tail exploded, pitching it into a swirling dive.

But there was no time to celebrate. The second Huey roared overhead and she had no second rocket to fire its way. She saw a launcher on the platform to her left and leaped for it just as the orange flashes tore into her. She felt a series of kicks to her ribs and chest and then she was falling, tumbling, still searching for something to grab onto.

Evira felt no pain and maintained firm hold on her vision long enough to record the impossible sight of the second Huey being blown out of the sky as it hovered directly over the barricade. She tried to turn toward what she knew must be the Apaches, but her head wouldn’t move and neither could the rest of her.

“Got him, sir!” The pilot beamed exuberantly after his Hellfire missile impacted squarely in the Huey’s side.

“There’s more where that came from.”

“Can’t wait to meet them.”

“Just step on the gas,” Blaine said, reaching for his binoculars with the barricade a mere ten seconds away.

The barricade was a shambles tumbling over upon itself. Well over a hundred dead and dying lay piled in heaps, some crawling back to their posts with weapons in hand and trails of blood left behind them. Those the battle had thus far spared clung to whatever positions they could forge out of the remnants of their fallen fortress, firing upon the onrushing soldiers until their bullets ran out or a stray shot found them.

Kourosh had been trembling in shock behind a fallen section of the barricade when Evira had tumbled. He screamed her name and rushed to her side as the smoke and bullets surged by him. Blood had splashed on the rags he wore for clothes, and its coppery scent was thick in his nostrils even before he reached Evira. Whether she was alive or dead he could not tell. He only knew that she was bleeding very badly. He spoke her name softly and stroked her hair, then wailed again.

The resistance within the barricade was breaking down due to the loss of leadership and manpower. The next wave of soldiers was closing, coming fast through the smoke. Catching a glimpse of them, Kourosh grabbed the closest rifle he could find and burst through a jagged hole in the crumbling barricade before him.

Blaine tore the binoculars from his neck, not believing what they had shown him as the Apache had passed over the remnants of the barricade.

“Circle back,” he ordered the pilot. “The Indian and I are making an unscheduled stop here.”

“Say again, sir.”

“You heard me.”

“I have no orders to—”

“I don’t give a shit, son. You do what I say or I’ll drop you into that corpse field and drive this thing myself.”

“What about the others?”

“Order ten of them to proceed with Operation Firestorm as planned. Have three or four others cut off the far end of this street from the rest of the world. You maneuver around above us and use your chain gun to help cut down anything in uniform.”

“Whatever you say, sir. But it’s your funeral,” the pilot warned, bringing the agile Apache around.

“Save your flowers.” He turned to Wareagle while he strapped the Vulcan minigun over his shoulder and attached its harness to his gunbelt. The Kevlar bodysuit he’d just donned was already baking him, the sweat clammy on his flesh. “Let’s call ourselves a taxi, Indian.”

The buffer between the waves of Revolutionary Guardsmen and the barricade was shrinking rapidly to nothing. There were simply too few defenders left to do the job adequately, and many of those that remained lacked the strength to fire, or even reload.

Blood rushed down Yakov’s face from his spill off the barricade. He had managed to climb back up to a fortified position, firing out with a mere pistol. Two shells were left when a single bullet split his skull and killed him. Of the Iranian leaders, only Rashid remained, untouched in his roving position, still giving orders up and down the lines to fewer and fewer fighters.

Kourosh hadn’t fired his rifle when he emerged from the barricade. Unexpected terror had kept him still and hunched, and for a few moments that saved his life. Then a band of soldiers spotted his quivering form, saw the gun in his hands, and prepared to fire. The boy cringed and closed his eyes to the certainty of his own death. Instead of gunfire, though, he heard a powerful metallic clanging and felt himself being shoved backward against the remnants of the barricade.

McCracken and Wareagle had slid down from the specially adapted lead Apache on a pair of drop lines just seconds before, under cover from the attack ship’s 30-millimeter chain gun. Blaine had glimpsed the fallen Evira through his binoculars and clung to the hope she was still alive. She was his only chance of ever seeing Matthew again, and he found that well worth facing off against a thousand soldiers charging headlong up the street.

He and Johnny allotted only one hand to guide their slide down, the other already steadying their Vuicans to assure they wouldn’t be cut down upon landing by the soldiers nearest. Blaine’s landing placed him between a boy wielding a gun almost as big as he was and a group of charging guardsmen. He was able to shove the boy backward behind the shield formed by his body without missing a beat on the Vulcan. It felt surprisingly light and maneuverable, and after a few seconds he forgot about the weight altogether.

McCracken had never known such a battle, such a feeling. Virtually none of the onrushing swarm of guardsmen had noticed his drop. From a distance it had been camouflaged by the black smoke and soot filling the air. The soldiers must have thought the Apache was one of theirs until it opened fire on them. Furthermore, their attention was too focused on the remnants of the barricade and its defenders to notice anything else. They charged forward in an unstoppable wave. He and Johnny had landed within ten yards of one another and were firing in the controlled bursts Gunny Tom Beeks had advised. Bodies didn’t just fall in the paths blazed by the Vulcans’ 20-millimeter shells and the 30-millimeter rounds coming from the Apache; they rocketed backward, limbs blown off or huge cavities left where chests had been. Death came fast enough to leave the guardsmen without even an expression of shock or pain, just an open, glazed stare as body piled atop body.

The Vulcans continued to clang metallically, hell on the ears, with the large shells speeding from their six rotating barrels. As Blaine and Johnny swept the area before them, wave after wave of dark-clad soldiers fell to their onslaught. Those trying to circle for better position were cut down by the Apache’s gunner hovering above, who made all those not directly in the Vulcans’ line of fire his targets.

Nonetheless, Blaine and Johnny’s assault would have been finished hundreds of rounds before if not for the Kevlar. McCracken felt a fourth bullet and then a fifth smack his bodysuit, yet with the extra balance weight supplied by the minigun, he barely gave any ground. Three of the Apaches, meanwhile, had launched an all-out attack on the large concentration of guardsmen further down the boulevard. The result, just as he had hoped, was to splinter Hassani’s marauding troops and catch those who remained in a crossfire between the attack ships on one side and the Vulcans and the lingering Apache on the other.

The miniguns continued to spit their metallic fire. The ceaseless intensity of the battle was the only thing that saved McCracken from being sickened by the incredible bloodshed before him. He had seen battle a hundred times before, but never anything like this. The bodies were two, even three deep in spots, and the smell of blood and death raked his mind. The stifling heat inside his body armor proved a worthy distraction, seeming to grow hotter with each bullet the Kevlar stopped.

He no longer felt the Vulcan as it pulsed in his hand, the heat generated by its rotating cylinder blowing back into his face. The reduced pounding to his back told him well over half his ammo was exhausted, more than five-hundred rounds, and who knew how many kills to count for that. He continued to fire for a time after there was no real target left, the barricade behind him secured again by the surviving troops. At last Wareagle came to his side and pried his finger away from the trigger. The multi-barreled cylinder spun to a halt. All of the Apaches but the one hovering above them had roared to their assigned runs throughout the city. Johnny rotated his eyes and the Vulcan with deadly awareness, as Blaine turned and followed the boy whose life he had just saved through one of the many breaks in the barricade’s structure. The boy made straight for Evira who was lying wounded on the street.

Her eyes were open but dim.

“Better late than never,” she managed when her eyes found McCracken.

“You blackmailed the right guy.”

She coughed painfully and writhed back toward unconsciousness. Blaine looked to Wareagle, who by then was kneeling by her side.

“Indian?”

“Deep wounds, Blainey, but no vital organs touched. She’ll live if medical attention is prompt.”

“What are you doing here?” Evira asked, as if suddenly realizing his presence.

“I came to rescue a damsel in distress, of course.”

“There’s … more.”

“Okay, I’ve got an appointment beyond the barricades at the royal palace,” Blaine relented. “Which I happen to be late for.”

“Hassani?”

“Long story. The Indian’s calling our taxi down to get you the hell out of here.” He glanced at the boy. “I assume the pup here goes along for the ride.”

Evira nodded and found strength to reach up and grasp Blaine at the elbow. Her stare was intense through all her pain, as she fought to remain conscious.

“Why did you come?” she demanded.

“You up to hearing it now?”

Another nod. “Tell me.”

Blaine obliged and Evira felt the shock of his revelation numb her along with the pain as the Apache lowered overhead with a stretcher dangling from its underside.

“What can you tell me about the rest of the city?” Blaine asked the Apache pilot while the gunner who doubled as a paramedic tended to Evira.

“Thanks to the Apaches, most of it’s a fucking fire zone,” he reported. “We’ve cut the soldiers off from their strongholds and splintered them. As planned. The people are everywhere. Looks like the revolution’s working.”

“And the palace?”

“The Revolutionary Guard has pulled back to make a last stand there. Best estimates say they can hold it for an hour, ninety minutes at the outside.” The pilot paused. “Gonna be tough for the two of you to get inside.”

“You just get us there and we’ll worry about the rest.”

Chapter 31

Johnny and Blaine moved to the back of the Apache where they stripped off the stifling body armor that had saved their lives. McCracken resisted the temptation to count the impressions made by what surely would have been mortal wounds and simply discarded the suit atop the Vulcan miniguns in the corner. What he was just starting to consider was the fact that he and Wareagle had gone the limit with equipment that had been meant to get them into the palace. Without the Vulcans and Kevlar body armor, gaining access was going to be difficult indeed.

“There’s a tunnel,” a drugged Evira rasped after overhearing discussion of their dilemma.

“What tunnel?” Blaine asked as he moved back toward her.

But her eyes closed and unconsciousness claimed her before she could answer.

“Well, I guess that pretty much determines we take a more direct route, Indian. ’Less, of course, your spirits or somebody else can fill us in on this tunnel.”

“How about me?” the boy Kourosh said from the corner.

With the Apache pilot acting on Kourosh’s instructions, Blaine quickly transferred some of the supplies from his canvas duffel into a shoulder bag. Gazing out, McCracken could see the work accomplished by the rest of the Apaches. They had divided the city into grids and had proceeded to strafe the major pockets of guard positions. Most were roaming at present, flying low to the street to rely more on their chain guns and Folding-Fin Aerial Rockets. The Hellfire missiles were used only sporadically now that the guardsmen had dispersed into smaller groups and seemed most concerned with finding cover rather than retaliating. Besides the regiment standing steadfastly round the royal palace, no stronghold remained. The people were winning.

Blaine’s Apache streaked through the smoke-choked sky. At last the palace came into view and he found himself blessing his luck that the masses surging into the area had not yet overrun it, for this would have rendered the rest of his plan impossible. The pilot’s estimates were probably off, though. It was doubtful the palace guard would be able to hold their lines for the hour he had estimated.

The Apache hovered over the side street Kourosh had indicated and once again the drop lines were lowered. McCracken almost had to have the copilot restrain the boy to keep him from following, making him think of Matthew. Evira had started to mention something about his whereabouts but Blaine had cut her off. He didn’t want to hear a thing about Matthew until his mission was completed. If he survived the raid on the palace, his reward would be the boy’s location. If he didn’t, Johnny Wareagle would take over.

“Meet us on the roof in forty minutes,” was Blaine’s final instruction to the pilot.

“I’ll be there.”

McCracken and Wareagle had both opted for Uzis this time, weapons they hoped they wouldn’t need, thanks to their covert entry into the palace. The street they dropped into was strangely deserted, a kind of temporary oasis in the desert of battle they were a part of. It was a small street with enough buildings to hide their drop from all who might have been following the Apache’s path. McCracken made sure his shoulder sack and its contents were securely in place and then rushed toward the tunnel entrance’s position as Kourosh had described it.

The wails and screams of the approaching masses were growing louder by the second and he had begun to fear they might storm the street before the two of them could climb down. But they located the entrance easily and Johnny lifted the grating up and placed it back into position as soon as they were both safely inside. The Indian joined Blaine at the foot of the ladder and together they started down the tunnel, flashlights illuminating their way toward the royal palace and General Amir Hassani.

“How are we to get out of here?” the Syrian delegate demanded of Hassani, moving from the library window that showed the last complement of guardsmen preparing to make their stand against the onrushing masses.

“There is a way prepared,” Hassani replied calmly. “I assure you.”

“It is difficult to accept the assurances of a man whose government is toppling,” shot out the delegate from Libya.

“Revolution is good for the soul at the proper intervals,” Hassani told the seven of them. “It cleanses a nation’s system and reveals the traitors in our ranks.”

“But you’re losing!” the man from Jordan blared. “Your ‘people’ will be upon us in no time.”

“The losing is a mere illusion, easily corrected in barely any time at all. Besides, what does it matter? What do any of our countries or movements matter individually so long as we must all live in fear of a small and brutal neighbor? It will all change after tomorrow. You’ll see. That’s why you are here.”

“You should have provided the details of your secret weapon before,” the delegate from the PLO chastised. “Instead you called us here at the risk of our own lives, knowing full well your nation was crumbling.”

“We’ve been through this before,” Hassani returned. “It is all behind us while this, my friends, is what lies ahead.”

Hassani moved to the table that had been set up in the center of the circle the seven men formed. Placed atop it were seven identical leather cases. The general opened one of them to allow his delegates to see the ten eight-ounce glass vials contained inside. A few shifted about to better their views. Others just sat there stupefied.

“You mean this is your secret weapon?” one of them blurted incredulously.

Hassani smiled like a teacher in front of his class. “Not quite. Two days from now I will release a deadly virus over Israel — the ultimate creation of chemical warfare. That is the secret weapon I’ve held back for this long.” He pointed toward the table. “You see, a leak within our ranks might have allowed Israel to come up with a version of this: a vaccine that will render your people immune from the virus once it is released into the air. Within each of these cases are your allotments of that vaccine. Make sure the contents of these vials are dropped into the various water-treatment facilities of your respective countries and within twenty-four hours, ninety percent of your populations will be protected from what will destroy Israel in a similar period.”

“What of the other ten?”

“Sacrifices to a much higher cause. Consider those who the vaccine does not reach to be casualties of a war we alone can win now.”

“And what if we become casualties ourselves before leaving the confines of your … country?” the representative from Saudi Arabia demanded.

“You won’t. The escape route is all prepared. You have nothing to fear.” Before the Saudi could protest he added, “You have provided your subordinates with contact arrangements as I outlined in the event you do not return. If it becomes necessary to utilize them, additional vials will be made available from backup points.”

Hassani waited to see if there was further protest. When none arose, he continued.

“Now, we have already gone over the precise details and agenda. If there are no questions, the …”

“… time has come for you to take your leave in pursuit of our destiny. My troops will buy you the time you need. I will summon your escort to take you to the escape tunnel….”

There was more, but McCracken focused all his attention on opening the latch for the electronic dumbwaiter that had allowed him to reach the second floor library unnoticed. He had found the controls for it in the kitchen, along with the convenient button marked “Library.” Isser had informed him of the meetings that had taken place there over the last few weeks and Blaine knew that’s where Hassani would choose to play his final card. Wareagle had chosen a more direct route through the palace itself, the two of them serving as insurance for one another. One of them had to reach Hassani. The madness had to be stopped here and now, buried in the rubble of the royal palace.

Hidden in the dumbwaiter, McCracken began to make out the voices as he rose toward the library. He couldn’t capture the context of the heated conversation, though, until the dumbwaiter slid to a halt before its slot in the wall. None of it surprised him. The whole scenario was almost as he expected it would be. He managed to get the latch freed and went to work on the slot in the wall. He pried his fingers about to find the handhold needed to slide it open to the library beyond. He had decided to wait until the delegates had gone before making his move. The proper finish for this was just him and Hassani.

“From the escape tunnel,” the voice of the general droned on, “escorts will be waiting for you in the street. They are disguised as beggars and will lead you safely to the airstrip. Clothes for you to blend with the chaos are waiting in the basement. Go with Allah, my friends. Go forth to achieve our destiny.”

In the dumbwaiter, McCracken heard feet shuffling, farewells exchanged, and then the heavy door being opened and closed. A single pair of feet, belonging surely to Hassani, padded across the lavish carpet toward what McCracken guessed would be the window where he could survey the last stand made by the Revolutionary Guard. The time had come.

The dumbwaiter opened into the room’s large alcove, dominated by books that provided further cover. Blaine slid the freed wall cover up and could see nothing before him other than dark, jammed-full bookcases running from wall to wall, with narrow aisles between and down the middle of them. The alcove was perhaps forty feet square, the bookcases taking up virtually all of that.

With the quick silence of a big jungle cat, McCracken slid out to the floor, kneeling with his pistol in hand since the cumbersome Uzi had been left behind in the basement. He glided forward, using the matched Oriental runners to hide his footsteps. He could tell exactly where the window was from the way the rays of sunshine streamed through. And there was a shadow, Hassani’s shadow.

He reached the edge of the forwardmost bookshelf and spun round it in combat position ready to fire.

“Don’t move!” he screamed.

And found himself facing off against a black marble bust of the Ayahtollah Khomeini that had been placed to cast just the shadow it had. Before he could turn, another voice echoed through the huge library hall.

“Drop your gun, Mr. McCracken,” Hassani ordered.

Blaine obliged and then drew his hands into the air.

“Now turn around. Slowly. And keep your feet spread as well.”

Again McCracken obeyed and found himself standing fifteen feet from General Amir Hassani who was holding a submachine gun.

“You have been quite a nuisance, Mr. McCracken, I must say.”

“We meet at last, General,” Blaine returned icily. “Or should I say we meet again … Yosef Rasin.”

The uniformed figure’s reaction was shock first and then hearty laughter. His free hand edged to his face and tugged a good portion of his beard away to reveal a much tighter growth and lighter shade of hair beneath it. A few more pulls and pinches on the theatrical makeup and the face shown was unmistakably that of Yosef Rasin.

“My regrets that you were not named minister of defense,” Blaine taunted.

“I suppose I have you to blame for that, Mr. McCracken. But don’t fret. There’ll be plenty of other ceremonies I’ll be attending before long.”

“Funerals, Rasin, all of them your doing.”

“Hardly. I’m going to be a hero. The people of Israel will rally to me once the truth of what I’ve done becomes obvious.”

“Millions of deaths?”

“Perhaps.”

“You’ll be likened to Hitler, not Moses.”

Rasin stood there and tried very hard to show no emotion. McCracken had to keep the madman distracted any way he could. While the two had been talking he had begun stealthily to close the distance between them. He’d already made up one yard, and with one more covered he’d almost be within lunging distance. If he could only keep the exchange going a little longer …

“Lace,” Rasin called toward the door.

The double doors parted and the biggest woman McCracken had ever seen entered. A half foot over six feet at least. She was decked out in black leather beneath a pale face and stubbly blond hairdo.

“You!” Blaine exclaimed, recognizing her from Boston and Masada, realizing in that same instant this was the woman who had killed John Neville, Henri Dejourner, and Hiroshi, and kidnapped Matthew.

Lace’s reaction to him was to stand to the rear and right of Rasin and fold her arms. A variety of weapons worn through her belt clanged together for an instant after she stopped moving. Blaine recognized one of them as a scimitar.

Hiroshi had been killed by just such a blade.

“You bitch,” McCracken muttered under his breath.

The huge woman grinned at him.

“There were two of you, weren’t there?” Blaine spit at her. “What’s the matter, the other one getting it from someone else on the side?”

Lace’s smile grew taut. The leather jacket worn over her midsection was tight enough to reveal long, hard bands of muscle bred from years of bodybuilding. Rasin might be a slouch, but this woman was anything but. McCracken was going to have to rethink his strategy, especially since the bruises inflicted by bullets pounding the Kevlar body armor at the barricade promised to steal some of his strength and quickness.

Go ahead, make your move, Lace’s eyes told him, but Blaine fought to keep his hate for her down. Improperly channeled, hate could make you respond the wrong way at the wrong time. Stick to the subject, he urged himself, stick to the subject!

“How’d you do it, Rasin?” he asked. “How’d you pull off the greatest hoax in history since Elvis got himself embalmed just to fool his fans?”

“It was quite simple, really. The real Hassani contacted my people in search of asylum in the closing days of the lost war effort. Figured he might as well sample the good life now that his country was falling, and my hatred for Arabs had him thinking he had plenty to trade in return.”

“And he did, didn’t he? Far more than he ever suspected.”

“He told me everything I needed to know to take his place. Days, weeks of interrogation. Early on, the plot was just a fantasy, but the more I listened the more I started to believe with the proper preparations it could work. The military coup in the wake of Khomeini’s death became an incredible stroke of fortune. When the Revolutionary Guard called to Hassani to return from exile, it was I who appeared.” His face glowed with triumph. “Imagine having Hassani contact me barely a month after Eisenstadt came to me about Gamma.”

“You saw the connection immediately, of course,” Blaine said, but his eyes lingered on Lace, who was still standing there, huge and menacing.

“Certainly. Gamma was indeed a tremendous find, but to accomplish my true goal of leading the next generation of Israel, I needed a rationale to employ it.”

“You wanted to be a hero, so you worked up a means to make yourself one.”

“If you choose to put it that way, yes. Hassani and I were the same height and build. A professional makeup artist did the rest. Once I went into self-imposed exile four months ago, the impersonation was simple. Before then, and often even since, a double was utilized. The woman who drew you into this killed him.” He laughed again. “I might say she was quite shocked when I apprehended her at the airport on the verge of her escape. She didn’t recognize me. I didn’t realize how effective my disguise truly was until I interrogated her.”

“But it all worked out, didn’t it? You had the militants of the Arab world eating out of your hand and begging for seconds. Must’ve been a hell of an acting job.”

“It was passion, McCracken, something a man like you should appreciate even if no one else can. I loathed them all so much. They could see the fire in my eyes and mistook it — I made them mistake it — for passion for ‘their’ cause. I’ve lived most of my life coming to terms with who these people are, what makes them tick. Their entire lives are fueled by dreams of destruction. Life to them is death. They have no appreciation for simple pleasures and absolutely no desire ever to live in peace. Believe me when I tell you that. There will never be a negotiated settlement, and if there is they would subvert and destroy it. Barbarianism has been their way of life, of death, for five thousand years. That won’t change.”

“So the unified ‘invasion’ ends up helping you on two fronts. First it provides the reason for the Israeli government to embrace you and your weapon. And second it gives you the means to get Gamma released in all the countries at the same time through those vials you gave your ‘delegates.’ ” Blaine took a deep breath before continuing. “You who claim to cherish life so much, how could you go through with this knowing what Bechman’s findings showed and what stopped the Americans from utilizing Gamma when they had the opportunity?”

“Go through with it?” Rasin asked, quite shocked. “My dear, Mr. McCracken, that is precisely what I’m hoping for.”

“The end of humanity?”

“Hardly. Other countries, countries we choose, can be provided with the vaccine too … if they are willing to pay a premium, of course.”

“This isn’t about running Israel, it’s about running the world.”

“Israel will be running the world, with me as its leader,” Rasin qualified. “And don’t we have—”

Rasin stopped when Lace turned suddenly toward the door.

“There’s someone in the corridor coming this way,” she told him.

“Tilly perhaps, coming back from escorting our friends to the tunnel.”

“No. Someone … bigger.”

“Check it out.” When she seemed reluctant to leave he added, “I’ll finish with Mr. McCracken myself.”

Johnny Wareagle had lost count of how many guards he had encountered en route to the voices. It hadn’t been necessary to kill any of them, although considering the fate that awaited them once the enraged masses beyond brought their fight within these walls, that fate might have been more merciful by comparison.

He had discarded the Uzis early into his stalk because of the noise they made clacking against each other on his back, but he was hardly weaponless. He had broken off the business end of a thick broom on the second floor, which left him with a shaft handle formed of olive wood nearly five feet long and a weighty inch in diameter. Not the finest staff he had ever wielded, but it would more than do and already had.

Rounding the hallway on the third floor, Wareagle could hear the voices clearly. One of them was McCracken’s, and one was unfamiliar. Beyond the sound of the voices, however, Wareagle sensed an evil presence both cold and ominous, as deadly as any he had ever felt before. He grasped the staff tighter and continued on.

“And assuming Bechman was right in his conclusions and your … plan works as you hope,” McCracken probed, “what then?”

“Civilization rebuilds, virtually from scratch, with proper guidance this time. So long the object of scorn, persecution, and holocaust, the Jew will be in a position to control all. A world without Arabs, Nazis, and with no one to replace them.”

“Not quite,” McCracken followed, his meaning obvious. “I’ll give you credit for this much, Rasin. I’ve met up with a lot of madmen in my time, but your aims seem more genuine than any of the others. A shame they won’t be realized.”

“Don’t be childish. Even you cannot change the inevitable now.” Yet the expression on Blaine’s face indicated assurance and determination. Rasin was suddenly unnerved. “The clothes you’re wearing, I know those clothes.…”

“These? Happened to pick them up at the end of a certain tunnel the Indian and I used to get in here. Figured they had been left there for a number of Arab gentlemen to aid in their escape from the area.”

“No! You’re bluffing!”

Blaine showed the miniature detonator he had pulled from his pocket thirty seconds before. “I figure they’ll be well into the tunnel by now. Don’t worry, I was sure to place my plastic explosives at key structural stress points. Assure an even and fair collapse that way.”

“You can’t press it! You can’t!”

“Drop your gun, Rasin.”

“No! … Lace, stop him!”

The leather-clad woman giant lunged back through the double doors at the same time Blaine turned toward them. The gun he had been forced to discard was only a yard away. He dropped for it as she whirled a chain from her belt in his direction.

It can’t be on target. She had no time to aim….

Blaine looked away from the blur, hand going for the pistol. The ease of reaching it surprised him, for he didn’t realize that Lace’s intended target was his other hand, the one holding the detonator. He felt the gnarled edges of the link dig into his wrist, powerless to maintain his grasp of the detonator against the pain. It flew outward, and Blaine felt his wrist explode in fiery agony as he was yanked away. He had the pistol briefly, but the vicious thrust of Lace’s motion stripped it from him.

Stunned, McCracken awaited certain death as he watched Rasin bring the machine gun up to fire. Suddenly a second huge shape charged through the open double doors. Johnny Wareagle’s staff preceded him and smacked hard into Rasin’s ribs, which caused his first burst of fire to stitch a jagged design in the far wall.

Instantly Lace released her grip on the chain digging into McCracken and sped inside the second strike, which Wareagle had aimed for her. The miss carried Johnny sufficiently off balance for the huge woman to pound a shoulder into him with force sufficient to propel both of them through the door into the corridor.

Blaine saw Rasin staggering, machine gun dangling from the shoulder strap supporting it. He knew the madman was struggling to right it on him again and just as fast made the decision to go for the detonator and not the pistol. He couldn’t take a chance that the Arab delegates carrying the Gamma vials would make it out of the tunnel while he and Rasin were fighting. He dove headlong and slid off the carpet onto an exposed portion of the hardwood floor to where the detonator had come to a rest. His outstretched hand just managed to find the red button when Rasin’s desperate burst coughed fragments of wood everywhere around him. He was rolling to avoid the next burst when the floor in the hall began to shake, the tunnel underlying the royal palace caving in on itself under the force of the blasts. The explosion blew out a number of windows in the library, turning the glass into flying shards that fell over a prostrate McCracken and then slid harmlessly to the floor.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Rasin’s scream barely preceded the rat-tat-tat of his machine gun fire aimed at the downed figure of McCracken. But Blaine was already in motion away from it, rolling over the shattered glass that had coated him toward the cover promised by the long shelves of books.

Wareagle still felt the battle was his to win. In close, the advantage of his staff was negated, but there was strength to consider at this proximity, and the woman’s was no match for his. Strangely, the thought that he was battling a woman never crossed his mind. His feelings revealed to him a spirit as black on the inside as her leather garb was on the outside.

Johnny felt his back smash up against the wall and drove his knee hard into the rippling muscles of the woman’s abdomen. The move drove her from him and started to double her over; the Indian’s next intention was to dip behind and loop the staff round her throat to crush it.

He saw the scimitar sweep up at him only after he had committed himself to the move. A heavy sword with a sharply angled edge, it could be wielded accurately only by the strongest of warriors. He managed to backpedal at the last moment, sliding enough to the side to allow him to block the sword with his staff. The heavy blade dug into the wood but couldn’t cut all the way through.

Lace was quick to pull it free and send the scimitar at him a second time in roundhouse fashion. But Wareagle anticipated the move perfectly and countered by darting to the innermost point of the strike. This allowed him to accept the blow at its weakest with the lower end of the staff while he crashed its upper end downward against the woman’s face.

Lace wailed in agony, her cheekbone shattered. Wareagle went for the finish, a thrust to the throat while she was dazed. But Lace managed to duck under the move and used a sweep kick to take out Johnny’s left knee. He went down, maintaining the presence of mind to keep his grip on the staff, so when she charged at him, snarling, wielding the scimitar in a downward blow, he was ready.

He jammed the staff up to meet the blow and felt his elbows lock tight an instant before the clash came. This time the wood split on impact, leaving Johnny with a segment in either hand. Lace wasted no time and swung the scimitar round again.

If he had tried to regain his feet, death would have been the inevitable result. But Johnny did the last thing expected of him by remaining on his knees and actually closing into the blow while he jammed the more jagged piece of the staff hard against the woman’s blade-wielding wrist.

Lace screamed again, the sound still piercing Johnny’s ears when he slid behind her and lashed the hard wood into her kidney through the padding of her leather jacket. Impact separated him from the more brittle portions of the staff, and he succeeded in smashing the woman’s already-damaged face straight into the wall. She spun around with the left side of her mouth curling up from the bulging swell of her broken cheek. Her leather pants were tight enough to let Johnny see the rippling tension in her leg muscles as she came forward, stalking him, clip-clopping on her boots and waving the scimitar through the air.

It was instantly clear to Wareagle that those high-heeled boots were anything but ideal for rapid motions, and he seized this for his next strategy. She came at him when he expected her to — as he was climbing back to his feet. She came at him with the left side of her face swollen twice the size of her right.

Johnny stopped rising, went down all the way to the floor, and swept the staff half he still held back at her as she passed. The blow broke the heel off her right boot. But Lace didn’t realize it until she planted to steady her next swing. With her heel gone, her leg buckled. She went down and Wareagle spun over her, brandishing the jagged staff half aloft, making ready to plunge it into her.

The second shape lunged atop him from behind just as he started his motion. A scream punctured his ears and he felt himself going down, the weight of another, smaller woman enough to strip his precarious balance away. He struggled to pry her off while before him Lace had risen to her knees, almost to her feet, scimitar in hand, readying to come for him.

“I’ll kill you, McCracken! I’ll kill you!” Rasin raged, and Blaine felt the machine gun fire skid close to him as he sped between the first and second book-lined aisles.

The bullets followed him as far as the end of the row when he rounded the shelves and pressed himself against the books in the next aisle. Instantly, more rapid fire spit books from their places around him, pages torn from bindings and set to flutter free. McCracken went down but kept moving, propelling himself on his elbows. Another burst fired just over him showered Blaine with more book fragments. Rasin spun round one end of the book-lined aisle just when Blaine climbed back to his feet at the other. Again he was moving amidst the books, varying his path and target while Rasin’s bullets splintered the shelf into fragments and scattered classics everywhere.

McCracken heard Rasin jam a fresh clip home an instant before another burst covered him with books jetting out under the bullets’ force. He pinned down Rasin’s position and steadied himself. He had to put some distance between the fanatic and himself and he had to do it fast, if he hoped to emerge from this alive.

Blaine crept to the end of the aisle and pinned his shoulders up against the wood. Total camouflage this way. Rasin wouldn’t see a thing when he swung into the last aisle before the wall, and by then it would be too late.

Now!

McCracken swung hard to the right and bolted for the third aisle down. With Rasin’s gunfire struggling to right itself, he gathered momentum and slammed his right shoulder into the shelf of books directly before him. That shelf toppled into the next under the force of the collision, creating a domino effect that sent books and wood crashing backward. McCracken thought he heard a scream as Rasin was buried by the debris, and then there was nothing.

With the smaller woman still yanking on his throat while holding on to his shoulders, and the big one fighting to regain her feet, Johnny Wareagle seized the only move left to him. He jammed the jagged edge of the staff piece he still held back toward where he judged the smaller one’s throat to be. He closed his eyes for an instant and pictured it perfectly. The sharp wood parted the soft flesh and cartilage beneath the small woman’s Adam’s apple and sprayed him with blood. Her hands flailed from their grasp to stem the flow of the life pouring from her. It still took all his strength to toss her writhing body from him.

By then, though, the huge woman had regained her feet with a scream of incredible rage born of watching her lover die. In the flash of an instant, he found the scimitar rising in her hand and then dipping into a straight downward motion as she lunged for him. Johnny started his arm upward into the strike, no choice but to sacrifice a limb and hope he could fight down the shock long enough to win.

He felt the calm resignation flow through him a blink before a trio of deafening roars split his already-seared eardrums. Directly over him, Lace spasmed in her tracks, eyes bulging. She was still trying to force the scimitar down at him weakly when a fourth shot rocked her head forward. Blood exploded from her mouth as fragments of skull and brains coated the ceiling and walls.

She fell straight over, legs thrashing in death, at Johnny’s feet to reveal Blaine McCracken kneeling in a combat crouch a dozen feet away with smoking pistol still clutched in his hand.

“Nice for me to be able to save your life for a change, Indian,” he said, rising.

McCracken lowered an arm to help Wareagle up, but his eyes stayed on Lace and the three scarlet holes stitched down her back.

“That was for Hiroshi, you bitch.”

After digging Rasin’s unconscious body out from the rubble of the broken shelves and fallen books, they climbed to the palace’s top floor and reached the roof through a skylight. Wareagle held Rasin while Blaine waved frantically for the hovering Apache to sweep down and pick them up. Around the outer wall of the royal palace, the Iranian masses had taken the battle to the last stronghold of Guardsmen. Blaine heard the gunshots, the screams, the wails of both fervor and pain, and found himself looking away. This portion of the palace roof was flat, and with no wind to impede him the Apache pilot was able to bring his ship to a point where his landing pods were only a yard from touchdown.

“Lower!” Blaine ordered upward, as he started to push Rasin’s unconscious frame ahead of him into the attack ship.

He never heard the gunshot, felt only the thud of impact as Rasin’s body smacked against him, the back of the fanatic’s head blown totally away. The kill shot was much too precise to be random, the mark of a top grade sharpshooter.

“You bastards,” Blaine muttered, turning away from the Apache. “You fucking bastards!”

Wareagle grasped Blaine at the shoulders and shoved him upward.

“Now, Blainey! We must go now!”

The corpse of Yosef Rasin slid from his grasp and McCracken finished the climb into the Apache on his own.

“Hell of a shot for an Iranian,” the pilot noted somberly, lifting the Apache upward.

“It wasn’t an Iranian.”

“Huh?”

“Just take us up, son, and blow the shit out of this place.”

“The … palace?”

“Unless my eyes deceive me.”

His gaze turned toward the first of the masses who were starting to clear the outer wall. “But the people …”

“Keep wasting time and you just may have to kill them. Fire your missiles now and they’ll get the idea.”

The pilot shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

“Then we agree on something anyway,” Blaine said, and leaned back against the Apache’s bulkhead, indifferent to the rest of what transpired.

It took all eight of the Hellfires fired in the space of twenty seconds to reduce the royal palace to flame-soaked rubble and leave whatever remained of Gamma to smolder within the debris.

“This is Shooter,” the report came from the marksman on the roof of the building two-hundred-fifty yards from the royal palace.

“What is your report, Shooter?” asked the voice that would relay the message back to Israel.

“Rasin won’t be coming home. Dispatch complete.”

“What about McCracken?”

“Sorry. No could do.”

“I didn’t copy that,” the voice of the contact came back.

“No could do,” Colonel Yuri Ben-Neser repeated into the microphone held in his single hand. His punishment had been exile to Tehran as part of Operation Firestorm, a sniper once more. “McCracken saved my life in Jaffa Square ten days ago. I owed him one.”