The Tin Man

Chapter Four

Mount Vernon Road,

Newcastle, California

Wednesday, 1 April 1998, 0905 FT

Jon Masters awoke to blackness. He found his hands and feet handcuffed to what felt like a chain-link gate, and a thick hood over his head. He had been stripped naked. He had a colossal headache, a result of the gas they had used to put him asleep, and he could smell vomit on the inside of the hood.

He lay there for what seemed like hours. Then he heard a door open and footsteps approaching him. “Guten Morgen, Dr Masters,” said a voice.

“You must be one of Townsend’s goons,” Masters shouted. “Let me go, jerk-face.”

A blow from a leather whip struck him across the face. “You will call me Major or sir,” said Bruno Reingruber. “You will conduct yourself like a man and not a comicbook character in my presence. Your situation is already dire enough without the added unpleasantness of being punished for rudeness.”

“Fuck you,” Jon said. “Let me go right now! Help! Someone help me! Help! Some goddamn German guy is going to kill me!”

“Sehr gut. Have it your way, Herr Doktor,” Reingruber said. Several pairs of rough hands grabbed Masters, unfastened his handcuffs, and forced him facedown onto the concrete floor. The handcuffs were refastened behind his back, and he was lifted up and shoved into a metal drum. As icy water poured over him, he cried out in shock. It filled the drum to the level of his mouth, and a grilled lid was snapped onto the drum.

“We know from experiments the Third Reich did during World War Two that a human can survive immersed in water like this for about an hour,” Reingruber said. “Of course, their subjects were concentration-camp prisoners, probably in far poorer physical condition than yourself. We shall be back in an hour and see how well you did.

“You should also know that we shall be exploring the spectrum of physical, psychological, and emotional torture. We shall learn together, we and you, of your fears, your nightmares, your weaknesses, and your thresholds of pain and stress.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” Jon cried through chattering lips. “What do you want?”

“Why, Doctor, you may feel free to tell me anything that you might think I would like to know,” said the Major. “But you are being punished because you seem to have this macho image of yourself that will undoubtedly prevent us from dealing with each other in a civil manner. You need to accept that this attitude is counterproductive and will not do.”

“Hey, you kraut bastard, face me like a real man!” Masters screamed. “Screw you!”

“Oh, and one more fact that I thought should be brought to your attention,” Reingruber said. “I have learned through my sources that your friend and colleague Brigadier General Patrick McLanahan was killed yesterday in the Sacramento County Jail.”

“What?” Jon Masters cried out, raising his head in shock and crashing against the lid. As he rebounded underwater, he inhaled a great snoutful of water, coughed, and fought for breath. “Patrick is dead? How?…”

“Apparently he angered a fellow inmate who happened to be a member of the biker gang he attacked.”

“You mean the one you attacked!” Masters screamed. “You killed those bikers! And they’ve killed Patrick because of you? Oh God, no!…”

“Most unfortunate,” Reingruber said in mock sympathy. “We are informed he is being cremated the day after tomorrow. If you cooperate, perhaps you may still have time to pay your last respects to your friend.”

“Wait!” Jon cried out. “You haven’t asked me anything! You haven’t told me what you want! Wait!” But Reingruber had already departed.

Jon screamed for help until his throat turned hoarse. He could not straighten his legs, but he pressed up against the lid with his head as hard as he could to force it open. It didn’t budge. If that wasn’t going to work, the important thing was to cope with the cold. He could handle it. Sure, it was cold now, but eventually his body heat would warm the water enough to prevent hypothermia. He swished back and forth like a washing machine, and sure enough, the sting in his legs and arms started to go away. The sonofabitch, Jon thought, he’s not going to beat me! Townsend’s goons might be cold-blooded terrorists, but they weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer.

If he stopped struggling, he found he could breathe slowly and more naturally while keeping his face above water. Perfect. No point in trying to escape; it wasn’t possible. Don’t panic. Relax. He closed his eyes, dreaming, remembering trips to Guam, to Australia, to southern California…

He woke up with a scream, then gurgled as water geysered out of his throat. He tried to take a breath and found his lungs filled with water. He panicked, fought the arms trying to hold him underwater.

“Easy, young man, easy,” said a soothing voice. He opened his eyes. A kind-looking gray-haired man was looking at him. “Don’t panic. I’m a doctor. I’ll help you.” The doctor’s hands pressed on his stomach, and great quantities of water poured from his mouth. He coughed, and found he could breathe again.

“Is he going to be all right, Doctor?” a British voice asked.

“Yes, yes,” the doctor replied. “He wasn’t under very long. The cold water slowed his breathing and heart rate, so there should be no brain damage.”

“We are just in time-you are very lucky, Major,” said the British voice, which then spewed out a stream of invective in German. Jon turned his head. Reingruber was standing at attention, his face impassive. “Get out of here before I throw you in that barrel!” Then the Brit stooped over Jon. “Are you all right, Dr Masters?” he asked, concern etched on his face. Jon’s teeth were chattering too hard for him to respond. “Get those blankets, Doctor, now.” He wrapped Jon in two large blankets, sat him up, and gave him a cup of chicken broth.

“You’re… you’re Townsend, aren’t you?” Jon asked at last, warmer now. The doctor was hovering nearby, and periodically checked his heart rate.

“Yes, Doctor.” Townsend saw the distrust, then the fear, building in Jon’s eyes. Jon looked at him hard, and what he saw in his face was pity and apprehensiveness. “Don’t worry,” Townsend said. “Major Reingruber is gone… for now.”

“Let me go,” Jon pleaded. “I swear I won’t tell anyone about you guys. I’ll pay any ransom you want, anything. Just let me go.”

The doctor spoke up: “Let’s not talk about that now. What you need, young man, is rest.”

“Of course.” Townsend gave Masters a reassuring tap on the shoulder. “We’ll speak later,” he said as he left.

“That was Gregory Townsend, wasn’t it?” Jon asked the doctor. “The international terrorist?”

The doctor scoffed. “Oh, sure. That’s what the various governments and tabloids have labeled him,” he said, “a terrorist, like Carlos the Jackal or something. Nonsense.”

“Really.” Jon narrowed his eyes. “That’s bullshit. This is an act, a ploy to get my confidence. You’re butchers, all of you, like that Reingruber asshole.”

At the mention of Reingruber’s name, the doctor blanched. “Take care, Dr Masters,” he said. “Major Reingruber is a dangerous man, very dangerous. Colonel Townsend keeps him on a very short leash, but he is unpredictable. Be very careful around him.”

“And Townsend is Mother Teresa’s sainted uncle, I suppose?”

“The colonel saved your life, young man,” the doctor said. “He came in just in time and saw what Reingruber had done. You could have drowned.”

“I fell asleep? Hypothermia?”

“Yes. You were in the water for about ninety minutes, and possibly three to four minutes underwater. Thankfully, your heart and breathing rates were already slowed down to next to nothing. Colonel Townsend dragged you out of the water and performed CPR on you until you came to.”

“Oh shit,” Jon exclaimed. The world’s master terrorist and arms smuggler saved his life? This was unreal-crazy-yet it had to be true. He had certainly been moments away from drowning. He looked at the physician, baffled. “And who are you?”

“Dr Richard Faulkner, internal medicine,” the physician said. He extended a hand. “Recently of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute…”

“Boston?” Faulkner nodded. “I’m an MIT grad. Where’d you go to school?”

“Dartmouth Medical School. Before that, Dartmouth College. I…”

“You’re kidding! I went to Dartmouth too! What in the world are you doing here?”

“Gregory… Colonel Townsend… did me an extraordinary favor years ago,” Faulkner said. “My father was in deep with loan sharks to pay off medical bills for my mother. They threatened to kill me, my sister, and my mother if we didn’t pay up. Gregory stepped in and got the loan sharks off my father’s back. In return, I help him whenever I can.”

“But… but Townsend’s a killer, a terrorist…”

“Never,” Faulkner said. “I know what’s said about him, but I promise you it isn’t true. He’s a professional soldier. He wants to do his job. Unfortunately, he has a tendency to get in with the wrong elements-Major Reingruber is an example. Reingruber’s the enemy here. This entire state would be in flames were it not for Gregory.”

“That’s sure as hell not what I heard about the guy.”

“Don’t believe the falsehoods, young man,” Faulkner said. “But you do need to watch out for Reingruber. He’ll be very angry now that Gregory has reproved him in front of you. Gregory will protect you, but you have to trust that this is so and you have to be watchful. Do you understand?” Jon nodded. “Good. Let’s get you out of here and into some warm clothes.”

Still puzzled and uneasy, Jon tried one more plea. “Why don’t you just let me go?” he asked. “It could be set up. We could make it look like I conked you on the head…”

“No way. Major Reingruber would kill me for sure,” Faulkner said. “No. Our best chance is with Gregory, believe me. I trust him with my life. I have reason to. We’d better get out of here before Reingruber catches us alone.”

Faulkner helped Jon out of the back room and into the central part of the building. The place resembled a small warehouse, with rooms like small offices opening off the main area. They glimpsed Reingruber in one of the rooms, cleaning guns. He got to his feet when he saw them, his rage at Masters evident in his eyes, but he did not come out. Faulkner led Jon into a small windowless room equipped with a cot, blankets, a floor lamp, and a couple of chairs. “You’ll be safe here, Jon,” Faulkner said. “The door locks.” From a pocket under his jacket he pulled out a newspaper conspiratorially. “Here,” he said. “Hide this under the blankets. You don’t want Reingruber to know you have it. I’ve got to go.”

“That bastard will come after me…”

“I’ll be right outside, and Gregory is nearby,” Faulkner said. “Don’t worry. Again, you can rely on us. Gregory’ll get you out of this in fine shape, but you’re going to have to do as he says and place your trust in him. Do you understand? Will you do that, Jon?”

What choice did he have? “I’ll try, Doc.”

“Good. Lock the door after I leave. You must open it when they demand entry, but you’ll have some privacy.”

Jon locked the door instantly, then sat down on the bed and wrapped himself in the blankets.

This is crazy, he said to himself. Reingruber is a madman. Even if what Faulkner said about Townsend was true, what kind of jerk was he, hanging around wackos like that? He’d saved his life, for which he was grateful, but it was baffling nonetheless. Still, he had the two of them to keep the psycho away from him, and they certainly seemed to mean it.

He unfolded the paper carefully. It was today’s pages 3 and 4 of the Sacramento Bee, tattered but still readable, with late-breaking details on the explosion in Wilton. As he read, he froze. He could not believe what he was seeing.

The coverage spelled out what it described as the Tin Man’s reign of terror. Patrick McLanahan had killed several Wilton residents, whom he suspected of being terrorists. He had misidentified the house as a hideout for meth cookers and terrorists when it was actually rented out by an itinerant farmer, his family of three kids, and his brother’s family with four kids. He had killed several of them, including three children, then set an explosive charge on a propane tank outside, causing the huge explosion.

Jon was stupefied. Their intelligence had been perfect, impeccable, accurate-yet, there it was in black and white: They had made a terrible mistake and eleven people had died because of it. There was a Reuters account, an Associated Press piece about the attack. And there was a big article from the Bee news service about Patrick’s death in the Sacramento County Jail, characterizing it as a kind of “suicide by inmate”-Patrick had apparently sought out a Satan’s Brotherhood prisoner and taunted him into the attack that led to the retaliatory killing. The story suggested he was so schizoid that he thought he still had the suit on-was invulnerable-when he attacked the inmate, proclaiming his innocence all the while. The body, it ended, was to be cremated and the remains taken to an undisclosed location.

Jon folded away the paper and sat on the bed, his face a mask of horror. Eleven innocent people had died at their hands. They were murderers.

“He’s falling for it,” said Faulkner. With Townsend and Reingruber, he was watching Masters on a closed-circuit TV monitor, broadcast via a pinhole camera in his room. “It was a great idea to have the computer print it out on newsprint. And can you believe how he took in all that crap about me being a doctor from Dartmouth? Now I’m his goddamn best friend. Still, I don’t see why you don’t just beat the information out of him, Colonel. He’s as sensitive as a pansy.”

“Because he will faint at the slightest injury and be quite useless to us,” Townsend replied. “The tank wiped him out. And drugs will only dull his mind, and we need that mind to be as sharp as possible. No, physical or chemical techniques will not work. This is the way to proceed. Scientific genius though he may be, he is obviously not trained in misinformation, propaganda, or interrogation-resistance techniques. He is reaching out for a friend, and he has found one in you, and soon in myself.

“His internal clock should be running on our timetable soon-that was programmed when we convinced him he was in the water for ninety minutes, not the fifteen it actually was. And as soon as that occurs, it will be easy to get the information we need.” Townsend walked over to the rack and examined the BERP suit hanging there. “You have not succeeded in discovering how it works?” he asked Faulkner.

“I discovered how to plug in the power and turn it on from the outside, and how to keep it recharged,” Faulkner said. “There are sensors inside the helmet that activate functions that are displayed inside. But I’ve got to figure out how to break the code. Well, we can probably get it from him. The way it’s going, you’ll have him babbling like a kid and squawking like a parakeet in no time.”

“There’s no certainty about that,” said Townsend sharply. “These misinformation and psychological techniques are not foolproof. I am relying on you to break the code and activate that suit. Masters can then fill in the pieces. You had better get back to work. We’ll discuss our next scene with Masters when that is done.”

He turned to Reingruber. “Gute Arbeit, Herr Major.”

The major clicked his heels and bowed.

“Status of the target?”

“Still under full security, Colonel,” Reingruber replied. “Departure has been delayed because of the explosion at the ranch. Security has been increased slightly, but not with any specially trained forces.”

“We may have to implement Phase Three of our plan after all,” Townsend said. “We must be sure the targets are not in ferry or decommission configuration. The weapons systems must be in maintenance preload status or else we may not be able to upload all the weapons we require.”

“I understand, Herr Oberst. Our informants are keeping close scrutiny on the targets at all times. The weapons systems remain in full maintenance preload status, and are not expected to go to ferry status until just prior to departure.”

“Very good,” Townsend said. “Keep me advised. Have you been able to get me confirmation on McLanahan’s death? Is it accurate that he was killed by a Satan’s Brotherhood member in the Sacramento County Jail?”

“It is accurate, Herr Oberst. It has been confirmed. The county coroner pronounced him dead this morning, and a state justice-department official also examined the body as well.”

“But not an independent report? I had hoped for word from an outside source, Major,” Townsend said. “Well, we cannot spare the manpower or risk discovery. But it does not seem he was an important factor in any case-without the suit, simply another desk-bound engineer.”

“I do not understand why we are wasting any time with Masters and his suit, sir,” Reingruber said. “It is not essential to our purposes.”

“Because it represents another profit opportunity for us,” Townsend said. “You need not worry, Major. It will not interfere with our timetable. Masters and his contraption are distractions; at best, the suit will prove to be useful. Your task is to keep careful watch on the targets and advise me as soon as they are ready.”

County Morgue,

Sacramento County Coroner’s Office,

Stockton Boulevard and Broadway,

Sacramento, California

the same time

“Welcome to hell, General.”

Patrick McLanahan opened his eyes, blinking through the pain. He saw Hal Briggs’s face beaming at him. “Where am I?”

“Dead,” Briggs replied. “How do you feel?”

“Dead.” Patrick touched his face gingerly and winced at his broken nose. Briggs helped him sit up on the table. “What happened?”

“What happened was either the most elaborate ruse ever created, or the strangest set of circumstances I’ve ever witnessed, General,” said another voice. Patrick was startled to see Sacramento Police Chief Arthur Barona standing next to him. “I’m still trying to make up my mind which is which.”

“You’re at the county morgue, Patrick,” Briggs said. “We set the whole thing up after we listened to your wiretap tapes and heard Captain Chandler talking to Gregory Townsend-that British guy who confronted you…”

“Townsend got to Chandler?” Patrick said.

“Looks like it. He found out about Chandler’s gambling debts, and he got Chandler to grab Jon Masters and the suit. No one’s seen Masters since he was released from jail yesterday morning. He never met his assigned driver.”

“Police security cameras photographed him getting into a car,” Barona added. “We couldn’t identify the driver or the passenger in the car, but we think it must have been Chandler-we haven’t been able to contact him. I notified your legal team of Dr Masters’s disappearance, and they contacted your guys Briggs and Wohl at the facility out at the airport.” He looked at Briggs and Wohl suspiciously and said icily, “Colonel Briggs then told me of his plan to spring you from the jail.”

Patrick looked at Briggs, who grinned. “Hey, nobody tries to frame my friends. What we decided was to give the chief your wiretap tapes. Then we let him know of my plan, and he got the sheriff on board. We had Sergeant Wohl dress up as a biker-how’d you like those tattoos?-and we planted him on your floor to ‘kill’ you.”

Patrick felt his nose again. “Good job, Chris. Very realistic.”

“My pleasure, sir,” said Wohl, looking pleased with himself.

“With a little help from some theatrical blood and a mild nerve agent that slowed down your breathing and heart rate enough to pass you off as dead, we got you out of there,” Briggs finished up. “But Jon’s disappeared. If he’s in Townsend’s hands, that’s bad news-we’ve got to find him and Chandler.”

“We can find Townsend,” Patrick said. He struggled shakily to his feet. “He probably took all of Jon’s gadgets away from him so we can’t use them to locate him, but we can use the suit’s tracking system to locate it. Assuming Jon stays near the suit.”

“I still find it hard to believe any of this,” Barona said. “The suit Jon Masters created makes the wearer almost invulnerable. He’s part of your team. Why would he go off with it to a guy like Townsend, who’s got some kind of secret organization? He’s a madman-he was associated with Henri Cazaux. And if it’s his operation that’s attacking the city and the motorcycle gangs, for what purpose? What’s he up to?”

“We don’t know yet,” said McLanahan. “I was told that Townsend and his so-called Aryan Brigade are not what they appear to be, but my informant died before he could tell me more than that. He’s a dangerous bastard. It’s urgent to locate Jon; that’s where we’ll find Townsend. Hal, I need one of your Pave Hammer tilt-rotors out at McClellan. What’s their maintenance status?”

“They haven’t started yet,” Hal said. “They’re just finishing work on the F-117 Night Hawk stealth fighters out there. Whatever you need, you got.”

“I want one MV-22, armed and ready to fly,” McLanahan said. “I’ll mount a locator unit to find the suit. Once we pinpoint it, we’ll send a Skywalker reconnaissance drone overhead to scope out the hideout, then hit it.”

“Hold it, hold it!” said Barona. “What are you jokers talking about? First of all, McLanahan, you’re not going anywhere, especially not on some secret armed aircraft. If you disappear, my ass is in deep trouble. Second, I can’t allow you to use any of these men, these commandos, to stage an operation in the state of California without coordination and permission of the proper authorities. Third…”

“You can stop right there,” McLanahan said. “In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Chief, we’re in charge of this operation, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to get out friend back, and that suit. If you continue to tell us what we can’t do, we’ll be happy to lock you in a nice cozy room in some undisclosed location until we’re finished. Or, you can cooperate.”

“Don’t you dare threaten me, mister,” Barona said. “I’m risking my career to help you. But I can’t stand by and watch you take the law into your own hands.”

Patrick considered it for a moment; then: “All right, Chief. We’ll cooperate as much as possible. Tell us what you want us to do. But you need to know I will not allow anything or anybody to get in the way of this rescue. That’s firm.”

Barona nodded. He spelled out what McLanahan needed to do so that this could look like an officially sanctioned joint law-enforcement operation. Then they all went on the phones to the various agencies, sometimes literally begging for cooperation and clearance. Patrick hung tough, and eventually they got what they needed.

“One more thing, McLanahan, and all of you,” Barona said sternly. “I need results, and I need them right away. My ass is already on the line for you. We could have prevented all this if you’d brought me the wiretaps on Chandler earlier. I’m going to have to explain not only why McLanahan is not in jail, but why he’s not dead as well. I’m going to give you twenty-four hours to wrap this caper up, and then I’m going to the district attorney and attorney general, tell my story, and let the chips fall where they may. If that’s the way I end up, I guarantee you I’ll do everything in my power to fry you all. I’ll come away with an embarrassing bloody nose for trying to cooperate with you-but you: You’ll all be in prison.”

Research and Development Facility,

Sacramento-Mather Jetport,

Rancho Cordova, California

Thursday, 2 April 1998, 0649 FT

Those brutal sons of bitches, Tom Chandler thought. This he’d never anticipated. Someone needed to teach those assholes a lesson.

When Chandler had heard that some woman was here to see Jon Masters, he figured it was his wife or girlfriend. He’d make up an excuse, maybe flash his badge, and send her on her way. When it turned out she was a high-ranking company officer, he shifted gears: She might prove useful for putting the pressure on, make a pretty good hostage, someone to help guarantee their safety until they made their escape. But Townsend’s men had different plans for her, once they too learned she was the corporate vice president, and they notified Townsend in Newcastle.

Chandler had listened to the sounds of Kaddiri’s cries echoing through his closed door from the chief-engineer’s room across the corridor until he could stand it no longer. He was barred from the scene, but it took no imagination to work out what was going on. He broke communications silence, picked up the telephone, and called the Newcastle number.

“Hey, Townsend, I am not going to be your goddamn wet nurse for another day.” He was calling from Patrick McLanahan’s office. Outside the office, several of Townsend’s people were hunting through the computer files at the workstations. But the heavy-duty work was going on in the office opposite, where two of the soldiers were busy working not on computer workstations, but on Helen Kaddiri.

When Townsend learned that the woman Chandler had captured was the company’s vice president-that this was the organization that had developed the astounding weaponproof suit-he had given orders to postpone the evacuation of the R amp; D center. If threats, torture, or bribes succeeded in presuring Kaddiri to unlock the company’s extensive computer files, he would have access via the Internet to thousands of companies and government agencies all over the world. One password from Kaddiri-that was all it would take-to open many of the West’s most critical engineering and research files: data on weapons, aircraft, new designs in the pipeline, intelligence information. And there it would be, at Gregory Townsend’s fingertips.

“Your soldiers are going to kill Kaddiri if they keep this up,” Chandler warned. “For Christ’s sake, pull them out of there.”

Townsend was furious. “You are not in charge, Chandler. I am! I must have access to those computer files before we evacuate. I need access long enough to change the password or enter in my own back-door password.”

“We can’t wait. This is Masters and McLanahan’s company. Look at the charges against them! I can hold off the sheriff’s department and DA investigators only so long,” Chandler warned. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m out of my jurisdiction. What do we do when more investigators show up? And Masters has government military contracts here-we’re likely to have the FBI and the Defense Investigation Service here any minute.”

“Then I’ll turn Kaddiri over to you. You get across to her the grave situation she’s in. You get her to cooperate. Tell her anything you want, but get that password.”

“You’re going to kill her anyway, aren’t you?” Chandler asked.

“Once I have what I want, Kaddiri is free to leave,” said Townsend. “I prefer not to kill women, but I will do anything necessary to protect my organization. Now go!”

Chandler slammed down the receiver. Bullshit, he thought. Kaddiri was going to die-and probably so was he-the second they got access to those files. In fact, Kaddiri was far more valuable to Townsend than he was. He had twenty thousand dollars waiting for him in a Cayman Islands bank account-not nearly enough. For another hundred thousand it had seemed worth the tricky effort of keeping the DA and the sheriff’s department out of the facility, but now that he’d actually seen Townsend in action, he realized he wasn’t likely to live to get his hands on the money. Past time to get the hell out.

He dialed the number for the Sacramento office of the FBI. It rang once, then a voice with a German accent came on the line: “Who are you trying to call?” He slammed down the receiver. Shit! Townsend’s men were monitoring all phone calls from the security office. His life span was even shorter than he expected. He had to get a message out to somebody, fast!

Looking at the phone at McLanahan’s desk, Chandler saw a button marked WENDY VM. He picked up the phone and hit the button. It was a direct computerized link to Wendy McLanahan’s voice-mail system-it could not be intercepted or cut off by the security office. He spoke fast into the recording. “This is Tom Chandler. I’m at the Sky Masters research facility at Mather Jetport. Townsend’s men are trying to break into the company’s computers. You’d better get someone out here, right now, or Helen Kaddiri is dead. There are twelve of Townsend’s men here. They’re…”

The office door burst open. “You!” shouted a German soldier. “Stop! Hang up that telephone immediately! Orders from Oberst Townsend!” He complied. There was a submachine gun pressed against his face.

Time had just about run out.

Mount Vernon Road,

Newcastle, California

the same time

Townsend hung up the phone after speaking with his lieutenant in charge at the Mather site. Sure enough, Chandler had tried to call someone right after he got off the phone with him. He ordered the lieutenant to cut off all communications from the R amp; D facility except for secure radio communications, and to place Chandler under arrest. He had outlived his usefulness. He would dispose of him before long.

It was just about time to complete the final phase of this operation and get out of the area.

He went into the mess hall. Reingruber was waiting for him, ready to give a report, and Richard Faulkner came over and sat down. “How are you progressing, Faulkner?” Townsend asked. “We need to be able to operate that suit now.”

“Not quite yet, Colonel,” Faulkner replied. “But Masters is falling into line very well. I think he is cooperating fully.”

Reingruber agreed. “It does appear that he has turned into a proper little soldier, sir.”

“Small doses of you and large doses of me do seem to be working,” Townsend said. “But it is going much too slowly. I want a demonstration outdoors in two hours, Major. If Masters is not ready, you will ask the reason for the delay-forcefully ask. Then I will pull you out before he turns into a blubbering infant. That will put the pressure on. That suit must be working for us before the final phase of our plan is put into motion. Get in there now, Faulkner.”

After Faulkner left, Reingruber warned Townsend: “We may be running short on time, sir. Our informants tell us that the targets are entering final inspections prior to buttoning up. Sign-offs could be completed by this afternoon or tomorrow morning. The targets could be ready to depart within twenty-four to thirty-six hours.”

“No better estimates than that, Herr Major?”

“I am sorry, sir,” said Reingruber. “Security is still very tight, especially with the National Guard troops. The normal security forces appear to be deployed the same, but the forces outside the target area have increased.”

“Very well then, we will put the Phase Three contingency plan into action at once. Assemble your men, Major. H-hour will be at zero two hundred hours local time. Instruct your men at the Sky Masters research facility to start confiscating all the materials they can carry and rendezvous with us here immediately. Have them bring Kaddiri with them-and execute Chandler just before they depart.”

“Very good, Herr Oberst,” said Reingruber. “We will be ready to go in two hours. It will be a glorious operation. And what about Masters, sir?”

“We may have use for Dr Masters in the future; his psychological reprogramming has been very successful. Bring him along too.”

Townsend walked over to the room where Jon was working on the suit. He was eating breakfast. Faulkner was wearing the suit, experimenting with its mobility. Jon put down his coffee cup and stood at attention. “Good morning, sir,” he said.

“Good morning to you, Dr Masters.” Townsend extended a hand, and Jon shook it, formally bowing his head and standing until Townsend had seated himself. Reingruber passed by the open door and Townsend saw the fear in Masters’s face. “Has the Major been bothering you, Doctor?”

“No, not really,” Masters replied. “But I’m always afraid he’s going to hurt me. He keeps watching me, and he speaks to some of the men while they’re working with me. It’s as if he’s plotting to hurt me and make it look like an accident.”

“You need not worry about him. Stay close to me and it will be all right,” Townsend said. “I am the one in command here.”

Jon seemed reassured.

Townsend was pleased. They had organized the psychological dismantling of Jonathan Masters well. Reingruber had had another session with him yesterday afternoon, after the water drum, pressuring him to tell how to work the electronic suit. Masters did a creditable job of resisting the threats, but the pressure took its toll. Reingruber barely even touched him, but he was terrified. When Townsend appeared, he was ready to run into his arms like a child.

From then on, he confided in Townsend, describing his inventions to the point of forgetting who he was talking to, where he was, and the fact he was a captive. Before long, he began to explain the intricacies of the suit-the real evidence of a successful indoctrination, Townsend decided. He and Faulkner had made him feel included, liked, respected. He was eager to please them in return. The belligerent John Wayne attitude was gone. He agreed to let Faulkner wear the suit, and got up before dawn that morning to start working with him, explaining all its systems.

“How is everything progressing?” Townsend asked. “I understand Dr Faulkner is having a little trouble with the suit.”

“It’s going well, sir,” Masters said. “Richard’s a fast learner and he’s patient.”

“But he doesn’t seem to be learning to use the systems as well as I’d hoped.”

“It takes time,” Masters said. “The coordination necessary to use the eyeball sensing menu system is complex. It may take another day or two. But we should be able to try a test outdoors tomorrow morning, perhaps even with live ammunition.”

“We really need to do it much sooner than that. We have very little time to waste. Can you set it up for early this afternoon?”

“I’m not… yes, sir. We’ll make it work. Sir…”

“Yes?” Townsend said patiently.

“I wondered-have you reconsidered perhaps having the suit fitted for you? It will take some time, but I think I can do it.”

“Perhaps later, Doctor,” said Townsend. “Now get back to work.”

Masters jumped to his feet, snapped to attention, and hurried back to Faulkner, who was about to try on the gauntlets. The helmet lay on the table; it would come next.

As Townsend walked off, one of Reingruber’s lieutenants came running up, out of breath. Reingruber was following, as angry as Townsend had ever seen him. “Wir haben ein Problem, Herr Oberst,” the lieutenant said.

“What is it?”

The lieutenant held up a portable receiving unit. “This. We did a routine electromagnetic security sweep this morning. We found this.” A needle on the receiving unit was oscillating across the scale. “It is a high-power omnidirectional UHF satellite uplink,” the lieutenant explained. “A tracking beacon.”

Townsend didn’t need to be told more. “Get your men assembled and out the door immediately!” he ordered Reingruber. He drew his Calico automatic pistol and went back into the room where Masters was working with Faulkner.

Masters saw his livid face and froze. Faulkner, oblivious, raised his arms proudly. “What do you think, Colonel?” he said. “I get a shock every time I get hit, but the sucker works.”

“Oh, it works, all right,” Townsend said. “Very clever, Doctor. Pretending to be brainwashed so you could get your hands on the suit and activate some sort of tracking beacon, correct?”

Jon Masters positioned himself behind a confused Faulkner. There was no point in dissembling. “Listen, Townsend,” he said, “I spent enough years with real military guys to know when I’m being brain-drained. Hell, if the only way to survive was to let you think you screwed with my head, it was worth the try.” He looked at Faulkner mockingly. “And you a Dartmouth grad? Not in a million years, loser. A child could see that newspaper was phony.”

Townsend raised the automatic. “Well, your friends are too late to save you, Doctor,” he said. “And they’re too late to save your friend Helen.”

Jon blanched. “What did you say?”

“Did I forget to tell you?” Townsend asked. “Yes, Dr Helen Kaddiri is a guest of mine. An unexpected bonus. She will be my insurance policy. If your friends try to come after me, she will die. As for you…”

An enormous blast shook the room and the wall behind Masters crashed down. The concussion threw the three men to the floor, and as the sound of the blast subsided they heard heavy rotors coming close. Masters curled himself up behind Faulkner, as if willing himself to become even smaller than he was.

“You bloody bastard!” Townsend shouted. He lifted himself on one arm and pulled the trigger on the Calico, but the shots went wild as heavy cannon fire erupted outside. Townsend fired again, raking the floor with automatic gunfire. The suit protected Faulkner, and Masters behind him, until one shot hit Faulkner in his unprotected head. Another missile hit the building, then another volley of heavy-caliber cannon fire.

“Herr Oberst!” Reingruber shouted. “Helicopters! We must get away fast!”

Townsend leaped to his feet, reloading a fresh magazine into his autopistol as he fled. “Remember, Doctor,” he shouted, “I have Kaddiri. Tell your friends to back off or she dies!”

The MV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft swept over the rolling wooded terrain. The pilot had activated the helmet-mounted targeting system, which directed the 20-millimeter Hughes Chain Gun onto a target when he turned his head and pulled the trigger. The targeting system also gave him a virtual targeting reticle for the MV-22’s pylon-mounted laser-guided Hellfire missiles. Once he designated a target by looking at it and pushing a button, the targeting computer locked on to the target and illuminated it with a laser beam. One push of a button, and a Hellfire missile leaped off the Pave Hammer’s weapon pylons, followed the beam of laser light, and scored a direct hit.

“They’re scattering!” the MV-22’s copilot shouted. “I see a helicopter lifting off to the northwest, and several vehicles heading west. Do you want me to go after them?”

“No!” McLanahan shouted. “I want to get Jon Masters first! Set it down by the building where the tracking signals are coming from.” Minutes later, the MV-22 had transitioned from airplane to helicopter mode and set down a few dozen yards from the main building on the isolated Sierra Nevada-foothill ranch.

The first ones off the MV-22 were California Highway Patrol SWAT officers, who surrounded the landing pad and moved out to secure the landing zone. This was done deliberately. It was highly illegal for the federal government’s Intelligence Support Agency to run any operations within the United States, but it could fly support missions for state or local law-enforcement authorities. As long as the ISA was in a support function only, its men could fly and fight inside the United States.

Lieutenant Colonel Hal Briggs led the way into the main building, armed with his.45-caliber Uzi submachine gun. Right behind him was the commander of the California Highway Patrol Special Weapons and Tactics Detail, Deputy Chief Thomas Conrad, followed by a sergeant representing the Placer County Sheriff’s Department’s SWAT team. Gunnery Sergeant Chris Wohl and Patrick McLanahan followed behind, guarding their rear. Three more four-man squads of SWAT officers fanned out across the ranch and began to search the grounds, but there were no signs of resistance. Afraid of booby traps, Briggs recalled the teams as soon as they completed their sweeps.

To Briggs’s amazement, he found Jon Masters running through the main house, darting from room to room. “Jon!” Briggs shouted, lowering his weapon. “What in hell are you doing?”

“I’ve got to find a phone! I’ve got to find a phone!” he was screaming. Briggs grabbed him and held him tight. “Let me go, dammit!…”

“What in hell are you talking about, Doc?”

“Helen! They’ve got Helen!” he cried. “We’ve got to find her!”

“Jon!” Patrick McLanahan shouted when he caught up with them. “My God, Jon, are you all right? What’s that about Helen?”

“They got her,” Jon told him. “Townsend and Chandler grabbed her. I don’t know how, I don’t know where, but they’ve got her.”

“We’ll find her,” Briggs said. “Don’t worry. We’ll scour this whole state until we…”

“No! You can’t!” he shouted. “Townsend said he’d kill her if we tried to interfere!”

“That’s exactly why we must go after her,” Briggs said. “They’ll kill her anyway. We’ve got to find her before they try to harm her.”

“No!” Jon shouted. “We can’t take the risk! Oh God, it’s all my fault. I called her after I got out of the jail. I told her… told her I wanted to see her. She must’ve come to Sacramento.”

“Jon, we’ll do everything we can,” Briggs said. “We’ll save her if it’s at all possible. But you’ve got to be prepared for the possibility that she’s dead. I’m sorry, man-I promise we’ll do everything we can…”

Patrick’s earset communications beeped. “McLanahan.”

“General, this is Sky Masters Security Operations Center,” said the caller. Patrick recognized the voice; it was the chief of the company’s security division at their headquarters in Blytheville, Arkansas. “I’m patching an urgent call through to you from Dr McLanahan.” There was a beep; then: “Go ahead, Dr McLanahan.”

“Patrick?” Wendy asked.

“Wendy, are you all right?” Patrick asked. “Is Bradley all right?”

“We’re okay, Patrick,” Wendy said, but he could hear the fear in her voice. “Listen: A few minutes ago, I got a message on my voice mail.” The company voice-mail system automatically notified the recipient via nationwide pager when a message came in. “It was from Tom Chandler, that police captain from Sacramento PD.”

“What? Chandler called you? What did he say?”

“He said he was out at the research facility at Mather,” Wendy said. “He said someone better get out there right away or Helen was dead. He said there were twelve of Townsend’s men out there, going through the company’s computers.”

“Helen at Mather? We’ll get right on it-thanks, love.” Patrick turned to Briggs. “Get everyone on board, Hal, now. Chandler and Helen Kaddiri are out at the alert facility at Mather.” Hal radioed his tactical ground crews to return to the MV-22, then notified the cockpit to get ready for liftoff. “Jon, where’s the suit?”

“In the room over there,” said Masters, and brought Patrick over to where the body of Richard Faulkner lay. They stripped off the suit, hoisted the body on board the MV-22, and were airborne moments later.

Research and Development Facility

Sacramento-Mather Jetport,

Rancho Cordova, California

a few minutes later

“Ja, Herr Oberst! I understand. We will be airborne in fifteen minutes!” The senior officer hung up the secure cellular phone, then got on his handheld radio and ordered everyone to the helicopters and prepared to repel attackers. Then he dashed to the main administration offices and the room where Helen Kaddiri was being interrogated. She was still conscious, but barely, strapped to a chair with a hood placed over her head. She did not look as if she had been injured, but the lieutenant knew there were many ways of torturing a prisoner without leaving visible signs. The screen of the laptop computer on the desk beside her showed lines of error messages, indicating the unsuccessful attempts to gain access to the classified Sky Masters files.

“Get her to the helicopter!” the lieutenant ordered. “Take that computer too!” He drew his sidearm and headed across the corridor to the senior engineer’s office, where the renegade police captain Chandler was being held. His orders were explicit: to execute him immediately.

He unlocked the door and stopped in his tracks. On the desktop, lying faceup, was the body of Thomas Chandler, his hands still handcuffed behind his back, his eyes open and staring up at the ceiling. A streak of black-and-red crossed his neck, and a pool of red spread out across the desk. The dirty work had already been done for him, probably by the guard assigned to watch him-it was a violation of orders, since no one had given the order to kill Chandler until now, but the lieutenant wasn’t going to complain. He turned toward the admin section and brought his handheld radio to his lips…

Chandler brought the metal chair down on the German bastard’s head as hard as he could, and slammed it again and again until he was dead. The trick had worked. He had used a hidden handcuff key to get out of the handcuffs-he had several of them hidden on him and knew how to use them even with his hands behind his back. Then he had opened up the color ink-jet printer in the office and spread the ink on his neck and the desktop to make it look as if his throat had been slit.

He picked up the officer’s pistol and ran out. Through the engineering offices, a security door opened on an upsloping concrete ramp that led to the flight line, the same covered ramp that SAC bomber and tanker alert crews used to run to the flight line and their waiting planes. Chandler didn’t know what was going on, but it was sure as hell time to get out and he was damned if those Nazis were going to leave with a hostage.

The only way he could possibly redeem himself, he figured, and save himself from spending the next ten years in prison, was to start doing his job.

The German-speaking soldiers had left their posts and run to the flight line in front of the half-underground R amp; D facility, where two surplus UH-1 Huey helicopters were waiting for them, rotors turning. When Chandler emerged from the tunnel, he saw two guards no more than fifty feet away, half-carrying, half-dragging Kaddiri through the alleyway between two hangars toward the waiting helicopters. He took cover just inside the doors to the ramp, raised the pistol, aimed, and fired.

The soldier on the left cried out and fell, clutching his lower back. The other turned toward Chandler and opened fire with his submachine gun, but the shots went high and right. Chandler fired several rounds to throw off his aim, then threw himself back into the tunnel as bullets pinged off the outer security doors. Lying on his belly, he peeked out the doors. The soldier had propped up Helen, who looked semiconscious, using her as a shield while he checked his comrade.

“Helen! Kaddiri!” Chandler shouted, his gun poised to fire. “Get up! Now!” He was afraid she would be too weak to act, but she heard him and had enough strength to roll free of the soldier’s grasp. Chandler dropped the second soldier on his first shot.

He ran to her. “Come on!” he said. “I’m going to try to get you away!”

Heavy machine-gun fire rippled the ground not five feet away from them, shot from one of the helicopters on the flight line. Chandler fired two rounds toward the helicopter, picked Kaddiri up, and ran for the rear of one of the hangars. Placing her on the ground behind the hangar, he tried to make a run for one of the submachine guns dropped by the soldiers who had taken Kaddiri, but a burst of gunfire drove him back to cover. Two soldiers had dismounted from the helicopter and were headed straight for them. Chandler took aim and fired but his gun clicked empty. He threw it away, looped one of Kaddiri’s arms up over his shoulder, and ran down the ramp behind the hangars. It was their last, their only, chance.

“I’ve got one of the helicopters lined up!” the pilot of the MV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft called out on interphone. “Give me permission to shoot!”

“No!” Jon Masters shouted. “Helen might be in one of those choppers!”

“Put me right over the lead helicopter,” McLanahan radioed. “Target the second helicopter’s tail rotor with the cannon. Try to keep it on the ground, but don’t hit it!”

The MV-22 was flying about sixty miles an hour in helicopter mode as it swooped across the two parallel runways at Mather toward the R amp; D center. Patrick knew their altitude, about thirty feet above ground, and their speed. He relied on his experience as an Air Force bombardier for the rest.

As the MV-22 swept in on its targets, Patrick stepped out through the left crew door onto the left main landing gear sponson and steadied himself against the left weapon pylon. At just the right moment, he let go and flung himself out into space, jumping right down onto the spinning rotors of the first UH-1 Huey helicopters.

He looked like a doll tossed from a speeding car onto a busy freeway when he hit the rotor disk. He landed right-shoulder-first onto the left side of the rotor, but the BERP suit protected him from being sliced into hamburger. His body skipped across the rotor disk, hitting again on the blade tips just forward of the cockpit canopy before being thrown a hundred feet into the air.

The helicopter’s blades bounced like palm fronds in a hurricane. One blade snapped and flew off into space; the others dipped so low that they struck the ground and then the tail, snapping off the tail rotor. Unbalanced, the entire main-rotor assembly cracked off the hub and shattered. The transmission screamed into high rpm’s, then it too shattered and disintegrated. The transmission burst into a globe of shrapnel, shelling out the turbine engine with a huge explosion.

Patrick landed up against the steel post of one of the facility’s ballpark lights. He knew he was alive because the ferocity of the electrical surges through the suit had set his entire body on fire. He writhed in pain and tried to relax his muscles, let the energy move through him and dissipate; but the more he tried to relax, the harder the waves of electricity came.

It felt like hours before they stopped. He didn’t dare move at first, thinking he was sawed into pieces. The vision of those rotor blades rushing up to his face was imprinted on his eyeballs. But when he opened his eyes, he saw hangars, lights, and gray cloudy skies. He was alive.

He got to his feet and looked over the R amp; D facility flight line. Soldiers were streaming out both crew doors of the disabled Huey, some holding injured comrades. The MV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor was directly over the second one-it could fire straight down with its chin-mounted Chain Gun, but no one on board the Huey could shoot straight up because they’d be shooting through their own rotor disk. The second Huey’s tail rotor began to disintegrate as 20-millimeter rounds chewed it to pieces, and in seconds it was unflyable.

Soldiers began firing at the MV-22. “Hal! You’re taking ground fire!” Patrick shouted into his helmet radio. “Get out of there now!” As the MV-22 moved away, Patrick hit his thrusters, aiming straight at the soldiers firing on it. He plowed into them going full speed, knocking them over like an out-of-control truck.

Then he heard shouts of “Halt!” in German through his omnidirectional microphone-and cries of “Help!” in English. He hit his thrusters in the direction of the cries, jumping across the ramp behind the second hangar. He could see two soldiers chasing someone and recognized the running figure of Tom Chandler, carrying a woman down the fenceline behind the hangars. The soldiers had fired a warning shot in the air, but Chandler wasn’t stopping. One of them raced after him as the other knelt down and began to line up his shot.

Patrick hit his thrusters again but discovered they hadn’t recharged yet. He ran toward the kneeling soldier, shouting, “Chandler! Gun! Behind you!” with his electronically amplified voice. Chandler turned, pushed Kaddiri to the ground next to the fence, and raised a pistol. At last, a “Ready” indication. Patrick hit his thrusters and speared the kneeling soldier with his flying body just in time. The other soldier had thrown himself on the ground when he saw Chandler’s gun, trying to find cover.

Patrick got to his feet, made sure the one he had downed was out cold, and yelled “Stop!” at the second soldier. But he was too late. Chandler went down just as Patrick reached the guy and put him out of commission.

Patrick went over to Helen, lying where she had fallen when Chandler dropped. She looked semiconscious. “Helen! It’s Patrick! Are you all right?”

She opened her eyes. “Patrick?” she said groggily. “Patrick! I… I think I’m okay.” She turned her head toward Chandler. “He saved my life, the son of a bitch. How is he?”

Patrick checked him over. He had a bullet in his upper chest and left shoulder. “Not good,” he said. He tore off one of Chandler’s pant legs and stuffed the cloth into his chest wound to stop the bleeding. They heard the sirens of approaching police cars and fire trucks. “We’re going to have to get him out of here. And you need to be checked over too.”

The MV-22 had swooped over the R amp; D facility, firing at soldiers on the ground, but now it touched down on the ramp behind the second disabled Huey. Patrick carried Chandler out onto the ramp, with Helen hobbling beside him, just as the Sheriff’s Department and California Highway Patrol cars and county fire trucks roared up. The officers ran out, weapons drawn, and aimed at Patrick. “Put him down,” they ordered. “Hands in the air!”

“Hold on, hold on!” It was the commander of the Highway Patrol’s SWAT team, Thomas Conrad, who ran up, followed by Masters and Briggs. “Let him go, boys. He’s one of us.” Then he pointed to Chandler, still in Patrick’s arms. “But not that man. He’s under arrest. Get him to the hospital but keep an officer with him at all times. And this lady needs medical help too. But hold it just a sec…” Conrad went over to where Chandler was lying, withdrew something from his pocket, and put it in Patrick’s right hand. “Here,” he said. “You deserve this a hell of a lot more than he does.”

Patrick looked at it. It was Chandler’s gold captain’s badge.

Jon Masters was focused only on Helen. He took off his jacket and gently wrapped it around her. “Oh God, Helen,” he kept saying. “Are you all right? Oh Helen, I’m so sorry…”

“I’m okay, Jon, I really am,” she reassured him, smiling at him weakly. “I… I must look like hell, but I’m not really hurt.”

“You look beautiful to me,” he said. “But you’ve been through hell, and we need to get you to the hospital right away.” The paramedics moved him out of the way and helped Helen onto a gurney. As they began to wheel her to the ambulance, she reached out a hand and grabbed at his sleeve. “Don’t leave me, Jon,” she said.

He took her hand and walked beside her. “I won’t, Helen,” he said. “Never again.” He realized he was deliriously happy. “You crazy kid, you’re still in love with me.”

“Yes, you crazy kid,” she replied happily, “I’m in love with you.”

Research and Development Facility,

Sacramento-Mather Jetport

several hours later

Hal Briggs thought it was the weirdest sight he had ever seen. There sat Patrick McLanahan in the chair in his office at the R amp; D facility, taking sips of coffee and working on the computer-with a cord running from him to a wall outlet. Of course, he still had the BERP suit on. But weird was the word, like Patrick was some kind of futuristic half-man, half-machine, both parts getting refreshed at the same time.

It had been a very long day. After the shootout with Townsend’s men, the R amp; D facility had been overrun with sheriff’s deputies, then Highway Patrol investigators, then FBI and ATF officers. Since Townsend was so fond of using booby traps, the whole facility had to be evacuated while the place was searched. Then the interviews began, one agency after another gathering statements from all of them. Additional security units were on the way from Sky Masters, Inc.’s facilities in Las Vegas, San Diego, and Arkansas to secure the Sacramento facility, but until they arrived the place was being guarded by Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department deputies, augmented with National Guard troops.

“Out of the twelve soldiers that Chandler said were here,” Briggs said to Patrick, “we got seven, Sacramento County Sheriff’s got one, and Folsom police got another one. That leaves three unaccounted for. Not a bad day’s work.”

“It’s not them I’m worried about-it’s Townsend and Reingruber I’m after,” Patrick said, seated at his terminal. He was fingering Chandler’s seven-pointed gold star thoughtfully.

“Unfortunately, I think the only way we’re going to learn what he’s going to do next is to wait,” Briggs said. “He’s probably got a dozen more hideouts in the area that we don’t know about. He could be anywhere. If he were smart, he’d be long gone.”

“No,” Patrick said. “He’s after something here. This whole caper of his never made any sense. First he’s into armed robbery, but he only hit one place. Next he’s into drugs, but then he blows it all up. He raids this place, but it looks like this was just a target of opportunity. He’s an arms smuggler and dealer, not a drug dealer. What’s he doing here?”

“Nothing against your hometown, partner,” Briggs said, “but there ain’t a helluva lot here. You’ve got Intel, HP, Packard Bell, Aerojet, and a couple of other high-tech companies, and you’ve got the state capital. Except for a couple of bases outside of town, all of the military bases here are closed or will be closed soon. There’s nothing here.”

“Henri Cazaux was involved in some pretty elaborate schemes to cover his real objectives,” Patrick pointed out. “Maybe Townsend is doing the same thing.”

“But what? Cazaux was supposedly out to avenge himself on the United States and the US Air Force for screwing up his twisted little head when he was a kid,” Briggs said. “You think Townsend wants revenge on Sacramento? What for? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Makes as much sense as anything else he’s done,” McLanahan said. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t help us figure out what he’s going to do next or help us catch him.”

“Hey, I say let’s leave it up to the FBI now,” Briggs said. “My bosses at ISA are screaming their heads off, asking what the hell I’m doing flying support for the local yokels. No one has any sense of humor anymore.” Patrick kept flipping through computer records. “What are you doing there?”

“Just trying to figure out what Townsend’s men were looking at. They were obviously accessing all our Internet stuff, trying to find a way to access our company network, looking for passwords, downloaded messages, journals, notes, that sort of thing. I should be able to backtrack and find out what they were looking at.”

“Say what?”

“They were looking for clues about where users stored their passwords,” Patrick explained. “Remember when you could look around the doorsills and inside desk drawers around any combination safe in the Air Force and find the combination to that safe? Guys had trouble remembering the combination, so they wrote it down near the safe itself.”

“Now, that’s stupid.”

“Stupid but commonplace,” Patrick said. “Computers can do the same thing, but they do it electronically. You just need to know where to look.”

“Can you see if they broke in to your system?”

“The security offices in Arkansas should be able to tell us that when they do a security audit,” Patrick said. He called up several Internet-access programs and browsers. “Judging by how much they hurt Helen, they weren’t able to get in.” He paused, lost in thought. “They were definitely looking at the engineers’ individual Internet-access applications, looking for stored passwords. The company prohibits storing passwords and our applications don’t allow it, but some guys get careless or lazy and program them in anyway, using macros.”

“You lost me, man,” Hal Briggs said. “That computer stuff is for the birds. Give me a gun and a chopper any day, and I’ll solve all the problems of the world.” But curiosity got the better of him, and he peeked over Patrick’s shoulder. “You got something?”

“Not about our network, but something else,” Patrick said. “This is an Internet browser program, for accessing articles on the World Wide Web-that’s the global network of computers, all linked together. Browsers save pages in files called caches, which allows the pages to load faster. You can look back through the cached pages and see what they were looking at. Pages accessed from secure sites aren’t cached, but articles accessed over nonsecure sites are. Look at this.”

Hal studied the screen. “That’s weird,” he remarked. “What’s CERES? The name of a town? You think that’s where Townsend is?”

“No,” Patrick replied. “CERES stands for California Environmental Resources Agency. They do studies on the use of land, water, air… holy shit, look at this.”

“I’m lost, Patrick,” Briggs said, shaking his head. “This is more environmental stuff. The Bureau of Reclamation? Why would they be looking up all this?” But Patrick flipped to the next cached page on the browser, and he started to understand. “Hey, that’s the dam right near here, right?” he asked. “Folsom Dam? What’s all this about?”

“Never mind!” Patrick shouted. “Get the MV-22 ready to fly right now! We’ve got to get out to the dam!” He hit the print button on the keyboard, printed out a copy of the diagram, and raced out onto the flight line.

Near Folsom Lake,

twenty-five miles northeast of

Sacramento, California

a few minutes later

“This is the forensic-summary report on the Gate Number Three rupture back a few years ago at Folsom Dam,” Patrick said on interphone. He and Hal Briggs were sitting in the rear of the MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft, heading northeast toward the large concrete dam. “The support structures on one of the spillway Tainter gates broke and sent half the volume of the lake into the American River. The river canyon contained the water from that break…”

“So you think Townsend is going to blow up these Tainter gates?” Briggs asked. “Heck, why not just blow the dam itself?”

“The dam is concrete, probably thirty feet thick. How much dynamite would it take to blow that wall?”

“Probably ten thousand pounds of TNT.”

“It would probably take a lot less trouble and explosives to duplicate the 1995 accident and blow those struts on the Tainter gates,” Patrick said. “That forensic report they downloaded from the Internet spelled out exactly where they could set the charges to dislodge those gates. And if more than two or three of those floodgates let loose, with a nearly full dam it would cause a massive flood downstream. Christ, it could wipe out a half-dozen towns along the river and inundate most of downtown Sacramento. The lake is near capacity right now from all the rains and runoff.”

“But I still don’t get it,” Briggs said. “Why do all this? Is he just plain crazy?”

“I don’t know,” Patrick replied. “But we’ve got to stop him first.”

“You ever think about the possibility that this might be a trap?” Hal asked. “What if he planted that information on the computer so you’d find it and chase him out there? What if this is another diversion?”

“We’ve got nothing else to go on, Hal,” Patrick said. He put on the suit helmet, activated the BERP system, then clicked open the radio commlink: “Drop me off at the top of the dam,” he said to the pilot over their command channel. “Then get as close as you can to the face of the top of the dam. Watch out for power lines.”

“We’ve got the power lines on radar,” the pilot reported. The MV-22 used a millimeter-wave radar that could detect power lines as small as a half-inch in diameter in time for the pilots to steer over or under them.

The big aircraft settled into a hover just ten feet above Folsom Dam Road atop the huge concrete dam. Patrick, fully suited up, jumped out of the right-side cargo door. He could see the level of the lake on the northeast side of the dam-it was just a foot from the top, 465 feet above mean sea level. No doubt about it: If the dam let go, it would create a monumental disaster for miles downstream on either side of the American River.

Patrick landed on the road, climbed over the guardrail, and jumped down onto a catwalk. The catwalk ran across the top of the spillways, eight steep concrete chutes that plunged 340 feet down into the American River gorge. All the spillways appeared dry, with no more than small rivulets of water running down the steep faces. That meant that the entire discharge from the lake was being diverted to the hydroelectric turbine chutes to make electricity.

Right below the catwalk were the tops of the eight Tainter gates. The Tainter gates were huge curved steel doors fifty feet high and forty-two feet wide, with support struts in the middle that attached the gates to trunnion pins on each side; the pins were mounted on the concrete supports on both sides of the spillway. Each gate had two large chains, resembling huge bicycle chains, that lifted the gates when necessary and allowed water to flow down over the spillway to relieve hydrostatic pressure from the reservoir side of the dam.

From the catwalk, Patrick could look down the back of the Tainter gates at the chains, using the infrared scanner visor on his helmet. Everything looked normal. He ran down the catwalk and inspected the top of each gate. Still nothing. “I don’t see anything yet,” Patrick radioed to the MV-22. “You guys see anything?”

“Not yet,” Briggs replied. The pilots were using the infrared scanner in the nose turret to scan the face of the dam. “We’re getting as close as we can, but those transmission lines will keep us at least two hundred feet from the dam. We’ll see if we can slip in between the lines and the dam, but it’ll be tight. We’ve got dam inspectors and National Guard on the way to secure the dam. Their ETA is about fifteen minutes.”

“Copy,” Patrick answered. “I’m going to have to go down the face of these gates, Hal. The way they’re designed, blowing the chains would prevent the gates from opening.”

“Roger that,” Hal acknowledged. He was rereading the computer printout as the MV-22 began to maneuver over the transmission lines. “According to this forensic report you got off the computer, when that gate let loose back in 1995, it was friction from one of the trunnion hinge pins on the sides of the gate that caused the strut braces to buckle. The braces hold the gate against the spillway opening. Once they bent, the water pressure and the weight of the gate just pushed the gate out. Check the struts on each gate. If I was going to blow anything, that’s where I’d set the charges.”

“Copy,” Patrick said. He looked over the edge of the catwalk. There was another catwalk forty feet below him, at the same level as the trunnion pins on which the Tainter gates pivoted. Patrick considered trying to jump down to the lower catwalk, but if he missed, it was a three-hundred-foot fall down the face of the dam to the river below. “Hal, come back to the top of the dam and pick me up,” Patrick radioed. “It’s too far to jump to the lower catwalk.”

“On the way,” Hal replied.

Patrick hit the thrusters and jumped easily to the road above. He saw the MV-22 climb and start toward him, maneuvering easily over the transmission lines. With remarkable speed and agility for a bird its size, the huge tilt-rotor aircraft moved smoothly toward the road.

Then a streak of fire arced across the sky from the lower catwalk and plowed directly into the right engine. The engine disintegrated, a shaft of fire blowing downward from the right rotor as burning fuel streamed out and was caught in the rotor wash. The MV-22 dipped down below the rim of the dam. Patrick heard the left engine spool up to full military power, and the bird veered right, missing the lower catwalk by just a few feet.

“Will!” Patrick screamed into his helmet radio to the pilot. “Pull up!”

“We got it! We got it!” one of the pilots radioed back-Patrick couldn’t tell who it was because the voice was so high and squeaky. But it didn’t look as if he had control. As he watched, the aircraft slipped to the right, barely missing the power lines across the gorge in front of the dam, and dropped.

But the MV-22 had a crossover transmission system that allowed power from one engine to drive both rotors, and as it fell down into the gorge, power was coming up on both rotors. What started as a barely controlled crash quickly turned into a powered glide. It was still going down but the pilot was back in control. Just in time, the pilot pulled back on the control stick and flared the aircraft as it hit the water a few yards from the rocky shoreline. It skittered across the rocks, spun around facing upstream as the dead right-engine nacelle struck the water, and came to rest on the edge of the shore, with the right wing and right-engine nacelle dipping into the American River.

“We’re okay! We’re okay!” Hal radioed. “We’re evacuating the aircraft!”

Patrick’s relief gave way to a rage that rose up out of his chest and flooded his brain with hatred. He was past thought or calculation-he reacted. He used his helmet’s infrared scanner to pinpoint the location of the terrorists on the lower catwalk-one of them was still holding the red-hot rocket launcher so spotting them was easy-and he hit his thrusters. He bounded over the railing on the road and soared out into space, aiming for the terrorists in the darkness nearly a hundred feet below.

His aim was perfect. He landed on his chest and face right on top of the guy holding the spent rocket-launcher tube. He went down hard, but so did Patrick, who then crashed over onto the catwalk. The electrical surges coursing through the suit startled him with their force. Screaming in the effort to clear his head, he reached up to grab the handrail of the cat-walk…

… and the bullets struck him in a high-speed drumming on his back, then his helmet, then his chest. Within seconds, two terrorists, in front and behind him, emptied their thirty-round magazines of 9-millimeter automatic-weapon fire on him. The suit kept him safe but electrical pulses nearly overwhelmed him. He struggled to his feet as the gunmen reloaded fresh magazines and opened fire again. A warning flashed in his heads-up display-he was already at reserve power levels from the long fall from the road, followed by all the bullets at such close range. He ran forward and grabbed the gunman in front of him, head-butting him, crunching his jawbone, and knocking him out-and was hit square in the chest by a LAWS man-portable antitank rocket, fired from about fifty feet away down the catwalk. He was blown thirty feet back, up and over the catwalk’s safety railing, and onto the number five Tainter gate.

Patrick opened his eyes after several long moments and checked the systems in his armor. The check did not take long: The report on the heads-up display simply read EMERGENCY. That explained why he wasn’t feeling any feedback shocks from the suit: It no longer had enough power to electrocute him. The infrared-scanner visor was dead, so he retracted it. The environmental system was shut down, and he felt as if an elephant were standing on his chest. He managed to roll onto his hands and feet, desperately trying to get his balance back. But he was alive, goddammit, alive!

A hand grasped the bottom of his helmet and jerked his head up and back. He grabbed the hand, but found he didn’t have the strength to pull it free. Then he felt the point of a knife right under his sternum.

“Well, well, General McLanahan,” said a voice with a heavy German accent. “We meet at long last. I am Major Bruno Reingruber. I understand you have been looking for me for some time now. Unfortunately, our meeting will be shortlived. I am sorry I was unsuccessful in killing your brother or your friend Dr Jon Masters, but killing you will compensate for those previous failures.”

Patrick swung at Reingruber with his free arm, but the blows had no effect. “It seems your armor is no longer functioning,” Reingruber said. He slowly pressed the point of the knife against the suit and up toward Patrick’s chest, a fraction of an inch at a time. “If my man’s report is true,” Reingruber went on, “your suit will not activate if it is not struck. In that case, we will do this nice and slow…”

The knife pierced the fabric. Environmental-system-conditioning fluid gushed forth. “He said not to be fooled, that this is some kind of coolant in the suit and not blood, ja? But a little more, and the Tin Man will not disturb us ever again.” The knife point pierced the suit, the cotton undergarment, then pressed against his chest. Patrick cried out. “Auf Wiedersehen, General.”

Through the stars clouding his vision, Patrick activated the heads-up display in his helmet. He canceled the EMERGENCY readout and called up the status display. All systems were shut down. Everything was dead…

The knife penetrated the skin…

No, not every system was down. The thruster gas accumulators were fully charged. Patrick coughed inside the helmet as the pain intensified. Just as the knife started to pierce through the skin to muscle, Patrick summoned up the last volt of power left in the suit, braced his feet squarely against the number five Tainter gate, and activated the thrusters. They pushed Patrick, with Reingruber clutching him, up off the gate, over the lower catwalk, and out into space.

Reingruber screamed as they plummeted three hundred feet down the spillway and into the American River. In his terror, he kept a tight grasp on Patrick the entire way down, and it was his body that absorbed the brunt of the impact with the icy-cold water.

The strong current running from the hydroelectric power plant swept Patrick downstream. There was enough air in the helmet to breathe, although cold water was leaking into the suit through the knife puncture. The weight of the backpack power unit dragged him under, but scrabbling desperately, his fingers found the releases for the spent unit and he freed himself of it. His helmet burst above the surface. He kicked and paddled and found he was strong enough to keep his head above the water, so he unlatched the helmet and pulled it off. Cold, damp air never tasted so sweet. The cold water filling the suit was starting to numb his legs, but he was breathing, and he was alive.

Now, where was the nearest shoreline? He heard a shout: “Patrick! Over here!” It was Hal Briggs. Spotlights lit up the river, and they turned right on him. Somehow Briggs had managed to see the fight up on the catwalk, and to find Patrick in the swirling river. Rescue teams came after him, and minutes later, Sacramento County Sheriff’s deputies and California National Guard soldiers dragged him out of the water and began first aid.

“Check the dam, Hal,” Patrick said through chattering teeth. His face was white, and his hands, lips, and legs trembled uncontrollably. “Have them check the dam!”

“They’re doing it right now, Patrick,” Briggs said. They were carrying him into a minivan ambulance that had pulled down the American River Bike Trail to the river’s edge. “They already got a couple of the charges. You were right, man-Townsend was going to blow up the gates on the dam.”

“Tell them to find Reingruber,” Patrick said urgently. “If I survived that fall, he might have too.”

“Don’t worry about it, Patrick,” Briggs said. “You’re done for the night. Let the National Guard and FBI…”

Bright flashes of light lit the sky behind them, followed seconds later by loud booms, the noise of cracking steel-and the sound of rushing water.

“Explosions on the dam!” someone shouted. In the glare of the searchlights illuminating the huge concrete dam, they could see pieces of the Tainter gates tearing off and flying into space. One thirteen-ton gate popped off the wall of the dam and fluttered through the air like a playing card tossed into the wind. A shaft of water shot through the opening like a massive lateral geyser.

Boots scrambled on rock and gravel, car and truck doors slammed, and the vehicles raced up the access road and away from the river just as the torrent raged over everything in its path.

Watt Avenue and Elkhorn Boulevard,

Sacramento, California

a short time later

“What we’re looking at, ladies and gentlemen,” said the radio announcer, “is a terrorist disaster of monumental proportions. Four of the eight gates of Folsom Dam have apparently been blown apart by terrorists. Here’s what we know so far: Police and FBI were at Folsom Dam after receiving information about possible sabotage of the dam. This is linked to the shoot-outs reported out at Mather Field earlier today. Sheriff’s-department bomb squads removed several explosives from the dam but were not able to reach all of them before the remaining charges were detonated, apparently by a timer or by remote control. Eyewitnesses at the dam saw several explosions; some described them as demolition charges. The dam has all but ruptured at this point. We repeat, Folsom Dam has suffered a major accident and has ruptured. Outflow from the dam is in excess of one hundred and fifty thousand cubic feet per second, over twenty times the normal outflow, and is spilling over the banks of the American River Canyon.

“All residents living within two miles north and south of the American River are being ordered by the state Office of Emergency Services to evacuate the area immediately,” the announcer went on. This includes all residents of the cities of Folsom, Rancho Cordova, Fair Oaks, Gold River, Carmichael, and West Sacramento. In the city of Sacramento, evacuations are being ordered for all areas south of Arden Way east of the Capitol City Freeway, and south of El Camino Boulevard west of the Capitol City Freeway. In addition, all residents in areas north of Kiefer Boulevard, north of Fourteenth Avenue to Highway 99, and the entire downtown district north of Broadway are ordered to evacuate.

“At this time the flood surge has reached the western edge of the city of Folsom and is now approaching the Gold River and eastern portions of Rancho Cordova. It is spilling over Nimbus Dam and the fish hatchery. The Rainbow Bridge in Folsom has collapsed, and the Negro Bar and Hazel Avenue bridges are threatening to weaken or even collapse. In Folsom, all areas north of the river appear safe so far, but south of the river in low-lying areas the destruction is extensive. Old Folsom and indeed all areas south of the river and north of Blue Ravine Road are under at least four feet of water. We do not have any estimates of loss of life at this time, but the explosions came with no warning. The Aerojet-General rocket plant is underwater, and the safety and environmental hazards are very great. There are reports that tanks of rocket fuel and propane gas are adrift in the floodwaters and could present a highly dangerous explosion hazard.

“The flood surge is moving at a rate of approximately five miles an hour, and is expected to reach the city less than three hours from now. Evacuation orders are mandatory and will be enforced by California National Guard troops. Highway 50 and Folsom Boulevard have been closed east of Watt Avenue, so everyone should travel either north or south on major surface streets away from the American River and stay off Highway 50 and Folsom Boulevard. California National Guard units will be blocking off the freeway to aid in evacuations, so please do not use these thoroughfares. We repeat, all residents of flood-prone low-lying areas within two miles of the American River are ordered to evacuate immediately, and residents within five miles of the river are urged to evacuate as a precaution.”

The passenger in the front seat of the California National Guard Humvee turned off the radio as the vehicle approached the Elkhorn Boulevard gate of McClellan Air Force Base in the north part of the city of Sacramento. Three more Humvees followed. The gate was a madhouse as security guards scrambled to keep track of the vehicles streaming in and out. The four Humvees took their place in a long line of military and civilian trucks trying to enter the base. Under the press of traffic, the security guards began waving all military vehicles through with cursory checks of ID cards, and the Humvees entered without difficulty.

One of them split off and headed east on the base, stopping at the security headquarters and the central communications facility, then going around the west side of the base to the power transformer farm near Roseville Road. The others headed north around the runways toward the hangars on the northwest side. Again, one split off, dropping off four soldiers in full-camouflage battle-dress uniforms and combat gear at strategic locations on the access roads leading to the hangars. There was virtually no security anywhere on the base except for the southeast side, where air rescue and relief activities were beginning to gear up in response to the rupture of the dam and the anticipated flooding of the city of Sacramento.

Gregory Townsend and eighteen of his soldiers dismounted from the remaining vehicles and ran to the edge of the security fence around the four target hangars. When all his units were in position, Townsend issued the order to go. Explosions destroyed the base’s central communications facility, and more explosions at the power transformer farm on Roseville Road cut off power to most of the base. This did not affect power inside the target hangars, but it deactivated the security systems surrounding them, slowing down any response from elsewhere on the base. Then he blew open the security gates and headed for the hangars.

There were eight of them, but Townsend had targeted only the four on the west side and assigned four soldiers to each hangar. On his signal, they entered the hangars simultaneously by blowing open the outer doors, then rushing inside, neutralizing the Air Force guards, and mopping up the remaining armed resistance.

The guards in the hangars had managed to sound the alarm, but the base’s central communications system and security-police headquarters never received it. Still, Townsend knew that before long someone would realize they were missing a scheduled security report or check-in, and there’d be some form of response. But with the frantic preparations for coping with the flood rapidly approaching Sacramento, he calculated he had at least an hour’s leeway. His men could easily deal with any roving or curious security-police unit that happened by in the meantime, and an hour was all he needed. His men set to work on their final objective.

The complex on the northwest side of McClellan Air Force Base had changed hands many times over the years. Back in the 1950’s and 60’s, the area had been used to decontaminate spy planes that were flown over American, French, Russian, and Chinese aboveground nuclear-weapons explosions. In more recent years, flight-test squadrons built and tested new air weapon systems there, such as the 4,700-pound GBU-28 “bunker-buster” bomb used to try to kill Saddam Hussein as he hid in his deep underground shelters in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

In addition to the classified weapon and flight-test work done there, the complex had another secret activity: It contained a small but full-scale nuclear reactor, which produced gamma rays used for NDI, or nondestructive inspection, of military aircraft. Although magnetic eddy current fields, X rays, lasers, radar, and plain old eyeballs were still useful in detecting cracks and fatigue in aircraft structures, they weren’t reliable or adequate for the new crop of composite “stealth” aircraft, so gamma-ray inspections were developed to check these planes without having to disassemble them first. Fifteen years ago, McClellan Air Force Base had been the first aircraft-maintenance depot in the world to use gamma rays for aircraft NDI, and it was still the main nuclear NDI facility in the free world.

And the latest clients ready for their annual nuclear NDI inspection were sitting right there before Gregory Townsend and his soldiers: four F-117A Night Hawk stealth fighter-bombers. All four of these odd-looking planes, with their multifaceted, pyramid-shaped fuselages, short pointed wings, and thin, highly swept tails, were Gulf War veterans, each having performed more than thirty missions in the heart of stiff Iraqi air defenses without a single casualty. Although they could carry only five thousand pounds of ordnance-usually two two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs-and were more than fifteen years old, they were still in good condition. And because they were virtually invisible on radar and invulnerable to most modern air defense systems, they were four of the deadliest warplanes on earth…

… and they now belonged to Gregory Townsend.

While several of his soldiers began to refuel the planes and brought over ground power “start carts,” Townsend and three of his other men, all trained combat pilots, stepped up the special access ladders designed for the F-117 stealth fighters, opened up the cockpit canopies, and got to work preflighting their aircraft. The preflight checks went quickly. Because the Night Hawks’ cockpits were so cramped and uncomfortable, they were designed from the outset to be highly automated, relegating the human on board to being a system monitor rather than a pilot.

Besides, these pilots were not concerned about getting the planes ready to go to war. They simply had to make sure they had enough gas to fly a few hundred miles to an isolated airstrip in southwestern Nevada, where more fuel was waiting. A thousand miles at a time, and the aircraft would eventually end up in South America, where eager international arms merchants and foreign countries were waiting to start the bidding on the auction of the century.

On a signal from Townsend, all four F-117 engines were started inside the hangars themselves, in preparation for taxiing. There was no concern about the exhaust damage-it didn’t matter what the hangars looked like after they left-and none of them bothered with flight-control or engine checks. The F-117 Night Hawk stealth fighter was inherently unstable in all flight axes-there was no such thing as “dead-sticking” an F-117 to an emergency landing. The aircraft needed at least one flight-control computer and one engine to fly. If it lost more than that, the pilot had a single option: eject. But a foreign government such as Libya, Iran, Iraq, or China would still pay hundreds of millions of dollars for an F-117 stealth fighter even with only one engine or one flight-control computer.

“Report ready to taxi,” Townsend ordered. When the other three pilots reported, the four hangar doors were manually opened. Guards stationed themselves in front of the hangars and along the taxi route, prepared to repel any security forces that might come along. Each was armed with an M-16 assault rifle fitted with an M-206 grenade launcher for fighting off heavy response vehicles or trucks. “Release brakes now,” Townsend ordered.

At that moment, the pilot of the number four F-117 moving from the westernmost hangar saw a blur of motion off to his right. A soldier in full combat gear and helmet appeared out of nowhere directly in front of his hangar, carrying what looked like two large duffel bags. He dropped both bags on the tarmac, then reached down with his left hand and threw one of them under the nose gear of the aircraft. “Nein!” the pilot shouted. “What are you doing? Clear the way!”

Then the pilot looked again and realized that these were not duffel bags being thrown under his wheels-they were bodies! Soldiers’ bodies. This… this stranger was throwing bodies under the wheels to prevent him from taxiing! “Warning! Intruder alert!” he called. “I am stopped! I can’t move!”

“Unit four, go to full power!” ordered Townsend, who could not see what was happening from his cockpit. “Taxi immediately! All other units taxi at maximum speed!”

The number four pilot shoved his throttles up to full military power, trying to taxi over the bodies of his dead comrades. But the intruder had disappeared under the nose of the F-117 and seconds later the pilot felt four hard bangs. The aircraft shuddered and dropped. Before the pilot’s stunned eyes the intruder reappeared, one of the dead soldiers’ sidearms in his hands. He had shot out several of the tires.

The pilot pulled the throttles to idle, opened his canopy, and jumped out of the plane. He watched as the intruder calmly walked over to the number three aircraft. Then he crouched down to get the M-16 assault rifle slung across the body of the soldier under his left main gear, checked it, loaded a fresh magazine, and fired from a range of fifteen meters. There was no way he could miss-yet the man did not go down. He turned around to look at the pilot even as the shots struck him, then continued on his way.

It was him, the pilot realized. The Tin Man. He was alive! He had been killed in the dam explosion but he was alive!

The Tin Man reached the number three F-117 and fired several rounds into the left main landing-gear wheel. The outside tire popped, but the inner tire kept the plane moving. As the plane’s pilot watched in astonishment, he saw the helmeted figure leap fifteen meters across his windshield and land on his left wing.

Atop the engine inlets were blow-in doors, which provided additional inlet air to compensate for the reduced airflow through the large main inlets caused by the radar-absorbing mesh screen covering them. Before the pilot’s eyes, the Tin Man dropped the empty pistol into one of the open blow-in doors on the left engine. Sucked into the engine, it shredded the first-stage compressor blades in a matter of seconds, and the disintegrating remnants shot out in all directions, puncturing fuel and hydraulic lines and blasting apart the entire engine and part of the left fuselage.

The number one and two F-117’s were taxiing away fast. The Tin Man sped down the right wing of the stricken number three, jumped onto the ground, ran toward the taxiing fighters, then leaped as soon as his thrusters were recharged. He landed right on the canopy of number two, but with nothing to grasp and the groundspeed building up rapidly, he beat on the glass canopy panels. His left fist broke through a side panel with ease. The glass of the forward panels was much thicker and stronger, but several crushing blows broke it too. He reached in, shattered the heads-up display atop the instrument panel, then grabbed for the pilot. “He is on my aircraft!” the pilot shrieked into his radio, evading the grasping arm.

Unable to reach the pilot to disable him, the Tin Man grabbed the overhead curtain ejection handle on the ACES II ejection seat, then hit his thrusters to blow himself clear of the plane. The pilot shot up through the broken canopy on a column of fire from the rockets in his ejection seat. He was blasted 150 feet into the night sky. His parachute fully deployed, but there was time only for one swing under it before he hit the taxiway. The plane continued straight ahead. But starting the ejection sequence had automatically cut off fuel and power to the engines, so it rolled forward until it hit a blast fence on the north side of the main runway and came to a stop.

The Tin Man got back to his feet, scanning the area with his infrared visor. It was too late to reach Townsend in the number one F-117. By the time the thrusters were fully charged, Townsend had already lifted off into the night sky. The one he really wanted had escaped.

“Well, General McLanahan,” he heard in his helmet radio, which was set to monitor the emergency UHF channel. “Yours was a valiant effort. But one plane will still make my buyers very happy. Good night, and enjoy what is left of your city.”

But astoundingly there was one last chance. A UH-1 Huey helicopter with CA NATIONAL GUARD markings touched down on the apron directly in front of the security hangars where the F-117’s had been parked. It had arrived as planned to pick up a few chosen members of Townsend’s assault team, and the soldiers ran to board it. The Tin Man shot across the runways, and as the fully loaded helicopter was lifting off, he jumped up and grabbed on to the right skid, then the belly cargo hook, straddled the skids, and held on for the ride. The pilot didn’t even notice the additional weight because the aircraft was already wallowing from its heavy load as it lifted into the sky.

The Huey headed almost directly east, climbing to eleven thousand feet as it cleared the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It took all the Tin Man’s strength and concentration to hold on in the frigid night air whistling around him at 120 miles an hour. Two hours later, the helicopter swooped across steep, rocky crags and flew low through a high-desert valley. An airfield came into view. It was surrounded by what appeared to be abandoned military hangars and industrial structures. As the helicopter moved low over a group of wooden buildings, the Tin Man dropped free, using his thrusters to break his fall.

The place had a weird look to it; it was like stepping into an abandoned city. The hangars were large enough to hold the biggest military or commercial aircraft, but they were empty and falling apart. He saw the twisted, rusted hulks of what might once have been an oil refinery or large factory. The ground was covered with cactus, tumbleweeds, and thick dust. There was a long unlit runway ahead, and a very large aircraft-parking ramp lit by blue taxiway lights. The only other lights were on a lone building on the northern edge of the ramp, which had a rotating airport beacon and several radio antennas on top, a few scraggly trees in front, and a fuel truck parked nearby. The Tin Man headed for it.

A sign indicated that the building was a general-aviation fixed-base operator-an FBO-called Tonopah Flying Service. He knew there was a Tonopah, Nevada, a small desert town in the southwestern part of the state, midway between Reno and Las Vegas. This had to be it, and from the look of it, he guessed the airport must once have been a military base.

Moments later, the UH-1 Huey helicopter touched down on the ramp in front of the FBO building and Townsend’s terrorists dismounted. Within minutes, the Tin Man could hear shouts in German coming from inside-they were taking over the facility. He peered through a side window and was startled to see a terrified woman cowering in front of a man with a gun.

At the sound of a muted whistling out on the runway, the white runway edge lights snapped on. Then an F-117 Night Hawk stealth fighter swooped down, paralleling the long runway on a downwind leg. He switched to his infrared visor to watch as it touched down at the very edge of the runway, careened down it, and stopped just in time at the north end. Then it turned off on the taxiway, swerved around as soon as it had room to maneuver on the aircraft apron, and taxied right back onto the runway, now heading south. The fuel truck drove out in its direction.

The Tin Man’s first concern was the hostage, not the F-117. No one was in sight when he sneaked to the front of the building and looked through the glass door, which meant that the gunman had to have taken the hostage inside the office behind the short counter. He dashed inside, hit his thrusters, and jetted directly at the office door. It crashed in, and he discovered it had come right down on the terrorist himself, knocking the gun he was holding out of his hands. One punch from the gauntleted fist, and the man was out cold.

“You’re all right now,” the Tin Man said to the frightened woman. “But these are terrorists taking over the airfield. You’ve got to get out of here quietly and call for help. Is there a phone anywhere?”

She nodded. “There’s one behind the building,” she said, her voice quavering.

“Tell the police that the terrorists who stole the stealth fighters from the Air Force base in Sacramento are here, and they’re going to refuel and take off again. Then hide yourself until help comes.” When she left he grabbed the terrorist’s gun, peered out the door, and crept outside.

“Hurry up, damn you!” Townsend shouted.

“The pump on this truck is very slow, sir,” the soldier answered. The base obviously wasn’t used often, and the Jet-A truck even less.

Townsend cursed again. The guard he’d stationed inside the FBO had missed a second five-minute check-in-an ominous sign. A burst of fire, then an explosion, tore into the Huey. Gunfire erupted from the rear of the FBO building but was silenced moments later. “Disconnect!” Townsend shouted. “Prepare to repel attackers!” Silence. Where were his men? He looked toward the fuel truck and saw all four of them lying on the ground. My God-when had that happened? Dammit, he hadn’t heard a thing and he was right here!

He had just put on his helmet and finished strapping himself into his seat when a voice came over the UHF guard emergency channel: “Townsend. Gregory Townsend. Can you hear me?”

Quickly Townsend checked his switches and skimmed through the checklist, but realized it would be suicidal to try to take off. He lowered the cockpit canopy. “The Tin Man, I presume? Very good of you to see me off, General McLanahan. My men reported that you had been killed by Major Reingruber.”

“Indeed. As you can see, I’m here. But I am not seeing you off. You are going nowhere, Townsend. It’s time you paid for all the death and destruction you’ve caused.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll pay for, General,” Townsend said. “I’ll make you the same deal I made before, only better: you and I as partners. With one phone call, General, I can wire ten million dollars into an offshore bank account in your name. Moreover, I’ll give you half of whatever we can negotiate for the sale of this aircraft. We should be able to split two hundred, perhaps three hundred million dollars. I make one phone call and it’s yours.”

The response was a burst of automatic gunfire. The left main landing-gear tires blew out. Then the nose-gear tires exploded and the aircraft’s nose wheel settled into the asphalt up to its hubs. “You may as well shut ‘em down and come on out, Townsend,” said the Tin Man. “You’re going to prison.”

With an angry yank, Townsend pulled the throttles to cutoff, threw open the canopy, unfastened his seat belts, and climbed out of the Night Hawk. He stood directly in front of the dark-clad figure, shaking with rage. “You miserable cretin!” he snapped. “You’ve just thrown away millions of dollars for us both.”

“You’re not going to need money where you’re going, Townsend.”

“Is that so?” Townsend retorted. “Tough talk for someone hiding behind an electronic suit of armor. Coward! Why don’t you take that thing off and let’s have at it, you and me, man to man. Or are you too cowardly for that?”

Stunned, he watched as the figure dropped the backpack power unit off his shoulders. “Well, well. You do have some sporting blood in you after all, General…”

But the surprises were not over. As the Tin Man unfastened and removed his helmet, Townsend saw before him not General Patrick McLanahan but his brother. He could not believe his eyes. “Good Lord! It’s Officer McLanahan! Following in your dead brother’s footsteps, I see.”

“Patrick is very much alive, Townsend,” Paul said coldly. “He survived the fight on the dam. Major Reingruber did not.”

Townsend managed to maintain his composure. “Be that as it may, Officer, you are here and he is not. And there is still a business accommodation we can make, you and I. It would be worth ten million dollars to me for my freedom right now. You have the stealth fighter and all my surviving men, including the ones who killed your fellow officers in downtown Sacramento. As I understand it, you also have no job now, nothing but an inconsequential disability pension. There are no witnesses out here. One single phone call, and a secret Cayman Islands bank account will be established in your name, ten million dollars in it, all for you. You can go back to being a lawyer, or you can live out your lifelong fantasies in a country where the law can’t touch you.”

“I’ve got an even better idea for you, Townsend,” Paul said. He walked over to one of the soldiers lying unconscious next to the fuel truck and withdrew the combat knife from his leg sheath. “You kill me, and you keep your ten million dollars and walk away free.”

Townsend smiled a satisfied grin and pulled out his knife with theatrical flourish. “You are a sporting man, Officer McLanahan,” he said-and attacked with the speed of a cobra.

The fight appeared to be over before it had begun. Townsend feigned a slash to Paul’s head, then reversed the knife and brought it down full force on his left shoulder. Paul made no effort to counterattack; he simply raised his left arm in a feeble attempt to block the assault. But he was far too late. Townsend’s knife buried itself to the hilt. Townsend laughed right in his face, then tried to remove the knife-and found it stuck fast…

… and before he knew it, Paul’s own knife lashed up and deep into his belly.

Townsend dropped to his knees, clutching his midriff. He watched dumbfounded as Paul McLanahan jiggled the big knife in his shoulder and freed it. There was no blood. Not a drop.

“Ironic, isn’t it, Townsend?” Paul McLanahan asked. He removed his gauntlets, opened the suit front, and shrugged off the left sleeve. Underneath was a dull aluminum prosthesis. It moved like a real arm, but it was definitely not human. It was one of the prototype Sky Masters, Inc. prosthetic arms, attached and activated without any cosmetic enhancements. “I owe you thanks for this,” he said. “Your bloodthirsty attacks gave it to me. I felt sorry for myself and I told them I didn’t want it, but I’m glad they helped me change my mind. What do you think of this, Colonel?”

But Gregory Townsend was a long, long way from being able to answer.