Chapter Five
7:48 a.m.
Vance stared up the mountain, puzzled. The silence baffled him, and then he realized why. He was not hearing the usual high-tension hum of transformers; nothing was operating. They had shut down the power.
He heaved a sigh, then dropped down beside a tree trunk and clicked out the magazine of the black Uzi. It had about fifteen rounds left, so the time had come to start making them count. Here, amid the brush, he had a chance to lie low for a while and figure out what to do next. Besides feeling thirst and fatigue, he had a throbbing sprain in his shoulder, incurred somehow during the crash of the chopper. But the pain was helping to clear his mind.
Maybe, he thought, he could find some provisions stowed in the Hind, left or overlooked. A stray canteen or some MREs. But did he want to risk going back down?
The answer was yes because—even more important—the radio might still be operating. It was definitely time to activate the warranty on this job.
But first things first. Who are these creeps?
Hoping to find out something, he pulled out the leather packet he had retrieved from the terrorist's torn shirt and cracked it open. Crumpled inside was a wad of Yemeni dinars, and a crinkled ID card in German. On the back was a phrase scrawled in English ... it looked like The Resistance Front for a Free—it was smudged, but yes—Europe.
Back when he and Bates had first talked about the security question, Bill had insisted ARM focus on industrial security. Truthfully, there hadn't been any real thought given to antiterrorist measures. It had just seemed unimaginable. Looked at another way, though, Bates had been trying to be cost-effective, had gambled on an assumption. Now it was beginning to look as though that had been a bad bet.
Although for a ground-based setup Dimitri's handiwork— contracted out of Athens—was top-notch, it had made no provisions against aerial penetration. From land or sea. That haunting phrase kept coming back. But Bill had laughed it off, and the client was always supposed to be right.
Besides, the SatCom facility already had a nest of radars up on the hill, there as part of the Cyclops and also to monitor the local weather. Why clutter up the place any more? The fact was, these guys had probably come in under the facility's electronic eyes anyway, using the Hind's ability to detect an interrogation and keep low enough to avoid a significant radar signature. The background noise from the choppy sea must have been enough to mask their approach.
Maybe Spiros should have considered that, but at this point such meditations amounted to Monday-morning quarterbacking. So now the parameters of the job had changed, from industrial security to counterterrorism. SatCom was fortunate in its choice of security services, because an ARM job always came with a guarantee: if a problem came up, the boys would be there immediately to solve it. Which meant that alerting Paris was now his first priority. Until reinforcements arrived, though, he was ARM's on-site rep.
Lots of problems came to mind. First off, he was operating on the perimeter: he had no map of the facility, no idea where to find the hostages. However, the communications station up the hill represented a redoubt he probably could defend reasonably well, unless they brought up some really heavy artillery. Maybe there would be some way to disrupt the proceedings, provide a diversion.
Sooner or later, he figured, there's bound to be some action out of the U.S. air and naval base down at Souda Bay, on Crete. Hopefully somebody down at Gournes had picked up his Mayday.
But even if they had, could they send in a team? This was Greek soil, and Greeks tended to be fussy about their sovereignty. Now that NATO had no idea what its new mission was, America's heavy presence in Europe more and more looked like Yankee imperialism. They might convince the Greeks to let them bring in the Navy SEALs or even the antiterrorist Delta Force from Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, but that would require a lot of negotiation, might take days. Time could run out by then. And the Greeks had no capability themselves to do anything but make matters worse.
He looked down the hill, toward the half-visible wreckage of the Hind. Okay, he thought, time to see about that radio. Slowly he rose, chambered a round in the Uzi with a hard click, and started through the brush. The Greek scrub tore through his thin shirt and rasped at his skin, while the morning sun, glimmering off the proud silver spires of the vehicles at the other end of the island, beat down. The island remained eerily calm, the sleep of the dead. The takeover was complete, no question about that.
Through the brush the wreckage of the Hind showed its mottled coloring, a mix of grays and tans among the green of the branches. As he approached, he could discern no sign of his attackers, which either meant they were pros and lying in wait for him or they were amateurs and had fled.
He looked around the copse of scrub cypress, then gingerly stepped through the open doorway. By some miracle the electronics were still lined up in rows of readiness, lights and LEDs glowing. A tough bird. And the radio was still operating, and on. Dawn had long since ripened the clear blue of the sky, and he could feel the beat of warm sunshine on the shattered bubble of the canopy. Now, he knew, the terrorists would be scanning the military frequencies, so it was time to be circumspect and use some caution for a change.
He checked it over. Good, it had sideband. That was perfect, because he figured they probably wouldn't monitor those offbeat marine frequencies. If he could raise Spiros in Athens, he could then contact Paris. They could put together a team overnight and fly it down.
He fiddled with the sideband channels, hoping. He heard some amateur action and a ship-to-shore—funny, he thought, that the minute yachtsmen put to sea they're anxious to get in contact with someone on dry land. What would Ulysses have done with a shortwave radio? Talked back to the Sirens? . . .
The broadcasts, however, were mainly about the weather. Sailors did not waste their time on world events. When that news finally trickled down, however, these sideband channels would probably no longer be safe to use—maybe they weren't now, but he had to take the risk. . . .
He tried a few frequencies and then he got lucky. It was a Greek ham operator, probably having a second cup of strong native coffee and waiting for the traffic in Athens to subside. As are all amateurs, he was delighted to talk. He sounded youthful and enthusiastic, eager to help.
"I read you, Ulysses. You're coming in loud and clear on SSB 432.124 megahertz. This is SV5VMS, Athens. What is your callsign?"
"Don't have a handle," Vance replied into the mike, in Greek. "This is a Mayday."
"I copy." The voice suddenly grew serious. "What is your location?"
He paused a second, wondering what to say. No, he couldn't take a chance. Who knew who else was listening in?
"Don't have that either. What I need is a phone patch to a number in Athens. Can you set it up?"
"No problem," came the confident response, using the international English phrase. Vance tried to imagine what he looked like. Probably mid-twenties, with the swagger acquired by all young Greek men along with their first motor scooter. They wanted to impress you with how wonderful their country was, and they also wanted you to know that they were the biggest stud in all the land. "But whoever you want may be gone to work by now."
"This guy probably won't even be out of bed yet. He's a night owl," Vance replied into the mike. He didn't add that the best thing Dimitri did at night was handle an infrared-mounted H&K MP5. "It's Athens city code and the number is 21776." He knew that Spiros kept a lovely whitewashed house on the western side of town, just out of the major smog centers.
Moments later the patch was through and he had Spiros on the radio. The patch was scratchy and hill of static, but not so much he couldn't hear.
"Michael, you woke me up. I hope the world just ended." It was Spiros's gruff voice. A thirty-year veteran of an antiterrorist unit in Brussels, he was as tough as he sounded. "By the way, everybody's heard about that Odyssey stunt of yours. Are you in trouble already? We've got a pool going
on you. I have ten thousand drachmas saying you'll never make it."
"I appreciate the confidence. Anyway, you can start spending the money. You'll be relieved to know I blew it. She sank on me."
'Too bad." He laughed. "So what was the problem?"
"Mostly it was some twelve-mil machine-gun fire. Took the wind right out of her sails. I took a swim and then I think a 57mm Euclid finished her off.”
“That's Russian." The voice quickly grew serious. "Sounds like vou made the wrong people mad. Who in hell did it?"
"Don't know, but they're very meticulous about their work. They used a false-flag approach and shelled an American frigate down here north of Crete. Should be making the news any time now."
"Sounds like somebody's getting hot about inviting the Sixth Fleet out of the Med." Then Spiros's pensive tone turned businesslike. "Are you okay? Where are you now?"
"I'm fine, I think. But you've got to get some of the boys down here."
"What do you mean?"
"Remember that job you did for Bill Bates?" Maybe, he thought, we can talk around the problem. "Looks like the security didn't stick."
"That was a good job," Spiros said with a growl. "Need some updating?"
"It's going to be a little more than that. I think maybe a dozen hostiles, give or take, came in by chopper. A Hind-D. Had all the factory extras."
"Had?"
"It just met with an accident."
"And I'll bet you had nothing to do with it." He laughed. "So what kind of hardware do they have?"
"Uzis for sure. Probably also some grenade launchers. Also light machine guns, ZB-26. The odds are good they're going to be here for a while. They've dug in and it's a long swim to anywhere."
"Should we be having this conversation on the phone?" Caution was entering his voice. "Can we secure up these communications?"
"Right now we've got no choice," Vance answered. "Nothing where I am is secure." Including my skin, he thought.
"All right, then, give it to me fast." He was all business. "What do you have on nationality?"
"It has a Beirut feel about it. But I managed to get some material off one of them, and I think he was a former East German Stasi type. Whoever they are, they're operating under some phony front name."
"I read you. Usual terrorist MO?"
"Best I can tell."
'Then we have to worry about civilians. That's going to make it tougher."
"Bill may be among them. And all his staff."
"Bad news."
"He's a prize."
"What do you think their game is?" Spiros asked after a pause. "Ransom?"
"That'd be my first guess. Though it doesn't synch with the attack on the U.S. ship—unless it was intended as a deliberate diversion. Maybe they're planning something else. But my hunch is money's involved. Anyway, we'll find out soon enough."
"You're damned right we will." The line was silent for a moment as static intervened. "Well, this will teach us to guarantee our work. It's going to be an expensive insurance policy."
"Nothing in life is supposed to be easy."
"So we keep finding out." He seemed to be thinking. "You know, I sent the layout to Paris when the job was finished. For the files." He didn't want to mention Pierre Armont, the head of ARM, on an unsecured line. "I'll see what the office there can get together for us."
"Do we have any people left on site?" Vance asked.
"Just contract," Spiros responded. "Locals and probably not worth much."
"Well, whoever they are, chances are good they've been neutralized by now. As a matter of fact, I fear the worst."
"That's our motto. Assume everything will go to hell and then work around it."
"Time to get off the air. I'll try to raise you at 1700 hours. On 2150 megahertz. By that time you'd better have the team lined up and ready to move in. I owe Bates this one. A nice clean job."
"Right. Who do you think we ought to use?"
"Anybody who worked on the security here would be good."
'That's got to be me," Spiros said ruefully.
"Okay. Beyond that, we'll need a first-class SWAT team. This one is going to be rough. We need somebody who can handle explosives like a brain surgeon, maybe Marcel, out of Antwerp. Get him if you can find him sober. Also, we probably could use a negotiator. Somebody who can keep them busy while we get the real insertion in place. And a good sniper will be essential. Lots of friendlies."
"Okay. That sounds like Reggie. I'll run some names past Paris. But what are you going to do in the meantime?"
"Well, they know I'm here, but they don't know who I am. I'll concentrate on staying alive, and try to find out whatever I can about the MO. Catch you at 1700."
"Talk to you then," Dimitri said, and hung up.
Right, Vance thought. I'd definitely rather be in Philadelphia.
8:39 a.m.
"It's a go in five," Caroline Shaeffer announced in a stage whisper, leaning over his shoulder. A blond Ohio debutante, she was press secretary—a job she had fought for and loved —and she structured the President's media appearances with the bloodless efficiency of a Nazi drill sergeant. This hastily arranged breakfast speech at New York's Plaza was no different. She had put it together in less than ten days, and anybody who mattered in New York politics was in attendance, smiling their way through stale prosciutto con melone and soggy eggs Benedict, for an awe-inspiring hour of "quality time" with President Johan Hansen.
The head table had the usual crowd: Mayor Jarvis, senators, representatives, state senators, state officials of every stripe, even the borough presidents. Hansen was almost as popular as Ronald Reagan had been in his heyday. The election was coming up in less than six weeks, and Johan Hansen held a commanding lead—twenty-eight points if you believed the latest Newsweek/Gallup poll. A "nonpolitical" event in the middle of the campaign allowed everybody to show up for a photo, regardless of party. President Hansen's speech was scheduled to begin at 8:44 a.m. sharp, perfectly timed to let Today and Good Morning America carry the opening remarks live eastern and central and not have to look like the networks were trailing CNN, indeed wiping its ass, yet again. In any case, it would definitely make the evening news on all three. Precisely as Hansen intended.
Johan Hansen, whose perfect white hair and granite chin made him look every inch a chief of state, had mixed feelings about his trips to the Big Apple. He relished the automatic media attention they received (Caroline claimed that whereas $2-million-a-year network anchors usually considered themselves above travel, in New York one or two might deign to show up), but chafed at the mechanics—the helicopters, traffic jams, awesome security. He also despised political food, which was why Caroline had packed his own private breakfast of shredded wheat and skimmed milk, to be downed discreetly while everybody else was busy clogging their arteries.
He was speaking on worldwide nuclear disarmament, and he intended his address to be a warm-up for one at the United Nations General Assembly three weeks hence (which meant another damned trip to New York). Alter opening with his standard stump remarks, all partisan digs excised, he would then go on to assure his audience that the New World truly was here—which always got everybody in a receptive mood. He would then remind them that three years earlier (i.e., "When I assumed this office"), America was still spending $7 billion a year on new nuclear warheads. He had put an end to that, but now it was time to take the next step. Total nuclear disarmament worldwide. It was a stance that normally received polite applause at best, and stony silence at worst. But it never failed to make the news.
This morning the broadcast networks and CNN had combined their resources—after all, the space was limited—to provide pool coverage. Although the usual ganglia of lights and wires were reduced to an absolute minimum, the back of the room still looked like a makeshift convention bureau. The broadcast correspondents all had their own "instant analysis" cameras set up, and the print people were all next to their own newly install
ed, dedicated phones.
Johan Hansen's acquisition of the Oval Office had come at the end of a hard-fought election battle that saw several firsts in American politics. For one thing, it proved, finally, that America truly was the land of opportunity. He was a first-generation Danish American, and he was Jewish—the latter being a part of his heritage that seldom, if ever, got press play.
He scarcely noticed either. In truth, it was only on his father's side—which in Judaism did not really count. Hansen's father, Joost, had been a young Copenhagen college student in 1943 when the people of Denmark one night heroically evacuated all the country's Jews to Sweden, out of the looming grasp of the Nazis. Shortly thereafter he had married Hansen's mother, a Swede named Erica who had helped in the evacuation, and then, after the war, they had immigrated to America. Joost Hansen had finished his doctorate in physics at Princeton—being a promising physicist was one of the reasons he could so readily get into the United States—and then had gone to work at Los Alamos.
On the liner that brought them, the birth of Johan Hansen was due any minute, and one hour after it docked on the pier on the west side of New York, he came bawling into the world—a brand-new citizen and native-born, thereby eligible by a matter of minutes to be President someday. Who could have known?
Young Johan remembered little of Princeton, New Jersey, but in Los Alamos he had gloried in the clear air of the mountains, had loved the old White Sands rocket test area where they vacationed, had loved everything about America. He'd gone on to try engineering at M IT, but he had soon realized he didn't have the makings to follow in his father's technical footsteps. He cared too much about human affairs to stay in the bloodless world of formulas and machines.
As a result, he shifted to political science, and after graduating he became an aide to one of Massachusetts's liberal congressmen. Eventually he ran for the House on his own. The Democratic primary was a model of rough-and-tumble Boston politics, but he won a squeaker and became a full-fledged member at thirty-one.
Thus began a career that continued through the Senate and, after two terms, to the Presidency. He had achieved his ambitions, and his soaring popularity was all the more amazing for accruing to a man who had restructured the military during the painful transition of the United States to a post-Cold-War economy. Turning swords into plowshares was never as easy as it sounded, but America's excess armaments capacity had gone back to reinvigorate her high-tech sectors. If you could make an F-15, he had declared, you could by-God make anything. Now retool and get on with it. America had.
In his most important contribution to history, however, John Hansen had presided over the dismantling of more than half the world's nuclear arsenal. It's easy, he'd declared to the Russians, we just do nothing. And in so doing, the tritium in all those warheads will simply decay. End of bombs. You monitor our plants at Oak Ridge and Savannah River; we monitor you; and together we watch the nuclear threat to humanity simply tick away.
It was working, he often noted with pride. Maybe we're not going to melt the planet after all. Not only would future generations thank him; there would be future generations. But would they know enough history to appreciate what he'd done? he wondered ruefully. Only if the dismal state of American education could be improved. . . .
It was now 8:40 a.m. and the television lights had been switched on, turning the fake gold leaf on the ceiling into an intense white. The TelePrompTer had been readied, and the Secret Service detail was making last-minute checks around the room as unobtrusively as conditions would permit. Correspondents, for their own part, were poring over an advance copy of the text that Caroline's aide had just passed out, making notes for the brief question period scheduled to follow.
The time was 8:41 when she walked up behind him and laid down a large gray envelope marked Top Secret. It was, she whispered, a couple of pages fresh off the secure fax that had been installed in the room just down the hall.
What was it? he wondered. Some eleventh-hour revisions by Jordan McCormick, a young new speechwriter from Harvard who liked to tinker till the very last minute? Puzzled, he ripped open the envelope. The first page was a covering memo from his personal secretary, Alicia Winston. Miss Winston, as she insisted on being called, was a spinster, fifty- eight, who guarded access to Johan Hansen with the ferocity of a pit bull. Get past her, junior members of Congress often declared, and you're home free. It was, however, more often a dream than a realization. Seduction was frequently discussed.
Alicia's note was brief and pointed. The second page, it said, was a copy of a fax that had just arrived on her desk from Ed Briggs, head of the Joint Chiefs. Hansen's chief of staff, Morton Davies, had asked her to fax it on to New York immediately. They both knew Morton was not a man to squander time.
Hansen glanced over to see a white phone, complete with scrambler, being nestled next to the official text of his speech. When he scanned the second sheet, he knew why.
"He's on the line," Caroline said.
He nodded and checked his watch. Eight forty-three. Shit. "Caroline, tell them there's been a five-minute hold. And see if you can have them kill those damned lights."
"You've got it." She signaled to the pool producer, pointed to the lights, and made a slashing motion across her throat. With a puzzled nod, he immediately complied, barking an order to his lighting director.
Hansen picked up the phone. "Ed, what the hell is this about? I'm looking at the fax. You say this happened over six hours ago?"
"Mr. President, that came in about ten minutes ago from naval intel. They've been trying to get the story straight. The BBC was carrying a rumor, but it was soft. We wanted to get all the facts before—"
"It was in the Med?" Hansen impatiently cut him off. "Why so long—?"
"They claim they took all this time trying to nail down who's responsible, and they still don't know for sure. All they've got that's hard is what I sent you. A frigate under contract to NSA got hit. About fifty known casualties. It could be our friends the Israelis, up to their old tricks, or it could be somebody who wants us to think it's them."
"Ed, I'm staring down half the press in the country right now, as we speak. I can't do anything till I get back. But check with Alicia. I think I'm scheduled in around noon, and I'd like to try and have a statement out by three today."
"All right, Mr. President, we'll do what we can. Let me secure-fax Morton everything I've got so far, and he can forward anything he thinks might help. But we've got to talk. This could be a tough call."
"What are the Israelis saying?"
'Their military intel told Morton they don't know a damned thing about it. But their embassy here's already on red alert, getting ready to start pushing out smoke."
'Typical." Hansen had no love for Israel. In his view, their intransigence had caused the lion's share of America's problems in the Middle East. They never told the truth about anything until three days later, when it was too late to matter. In the meantime, they just did whatever they wanted.
"Well, this time I almost think they may be straight," Briggs said. "It doesn't have any of their trademarks. For one thing, it had their name all over it—not their style."
Hansen scanned the fax again, noting the large-print Top Secret across the top, and tried to make it sink in. Concentration was difficult, considering the expectant stirrings in the room, the clank of silverware. But this was nothing short of a major episode. What did it mean?
"Okay, Ed, I want to see you first thing. And bring Bob with you"—Robert Barnes was his assistant, Navy—"in case we need to scramble out of Crete."
"Roger, sir. I'll have Alicia get everything we need set up in the Sit Room."
"Good." Hansen hung up the phone and looked around the room. Damn. Who was trying to screw up the Med? Already he had a bad feeling it might involve terrorists, but where did they get the Soviet helicopter?
Okay, he told himself, time to call in all the heavy guns, all the advisers who get paid so much
to do your thinking.
He would face his first problem when the press got hold of the story. He could already see the cartoons, that bastard in the Moonie-owned Washington Times who was always accusing him of being a pansy on defense. They'd want blood, an eye for an eye, while he was trying his best to change that way of thinking.
This latest stupidity damned sure wasn't going to make it any easier.
With that grim thought, he smiled his widest smile and signaled Caroline to alert the pool producer to switch on the television lights.
8:14 a.m.
"What happened?" Ramirez asked. Helling had alerted him by walkie-talkie and summoned him to the lobby. There the Germans were returning, Henes Sommer covered with blood and being carried by Rudolph Schindler and Peter Maier.
"Henes got caught in a firefight. Then he tried to take the chopper . . . and fell." Schindler was struggling to find the words, thinking that he would have to be the one to tell Henes' wife, in what used to be East Berlin. Henes Sommer, forty-five, had joined Ramirez's operation out of idealism, as a step toward driving the Zionist scourge from Europe. Ramirez had made the operation sound so easy.
"It's even worse," Helling said slowly, addressing his words to Ramirez. "He must have been a guard who escaped our notice, but he managed to start the Hind. Then he crashed it against the hillside."
"Why didn't you go after him and kill him?" Ramirez asked quietly, his anger smoldering.
"There was no need. He's trapped up there. For now he can rot." An uncomfortable pause ensued before he continued. "Besides, he's armed. We probably should wait till nightfall. What can he do?"
He can do a lot, Ramirez was thinking. This could be trouble.
The three Germans had been brought along as a favor to Wolf Helling, and now they had demonstrated just how worthless they actually were. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have shot them all on the spot, as an example to the rest of the team.
"You say the Hind has been crashed?" he went on, his eyes hidden behind his shades.
"We don't need it any more. What does that matter?" Helling shrugged, not sure he believed his own words. "In any case, this is what comes of having amateurs involved."
Schindler's eyes darkened in resentment. It had never really occurred to him until this moment that his and his friends' lives were at risk.
Ramirez was trying hard to mask his own chagrin, telling himself he should never have sent these untried goons out to do a man's work. A good attorney never asked a question in court that he didn't already know the answer to; and you never turned your back on an operation if you weren't already fully certain how it would turn out. That was one mistake he didn't plan to make again.
"Life is never simple," he said, turning back to the German threesome. The wounded man was wheezing from a hole in his chest. "There's only one thing to do with him."
He withdrew a Walther from inside his coat and, with great precision, shot Henes Sommer directly between the eyes, as calmly as though dispatching a racehorse with a broken leg. The body slumped into the arms of Rudolph Schindler, who looked on in horror.
"It was merely a minor miscalculation, but now it's been handled." He turned to Helling. "Now go back and watch the hill. And try to act like a professional."
The German nodded. He dared not tell Ramirez the true extent of their trouble. Not only had the mysterious stranger escaped with Henes' Uzi, he also still might have a radio, if the Hind had not been totally wrecked. Helling, their boss, didn't seem yet aware of this problem. If it was still working, what would he do?
"Now," Ramirez continued, "rather than waste our time on fruitless recriminations, we must proceed."
He turned and walked back through the doors leading into Command. Across the room, past the rows of computer
terminals, Bates sat at the Main Command desk, talking to Dr. Andros.
"Problem?" Bates asked, looking up. Although he had not slept all night, his blue blazer remained immaculate. "Having some trouble, you son of a bitch?"
"You will be relieved to know nothing is amiss," Ramirez replied as smoothly as he could manage. "One of your guards, it would seem, decided to make a nuisance of himself. But he has been neutralized."
Bates did not believe it. He had overheard the broadcast on the BBC, and now he was starting to put it all together. These thugs had come in by chopper, after attacking a U.S. ship. They must have left the attack helicopter out on the pad. But somebody got to it . . .
"Now, Miss Andros . . ." Ramirez lifted a clipboard from her desk and examined it. "My, my, today we all have a busy schedule. Review the test data from the power-up, final calibrations of the Cyclops, flight prep of the vehicle. . . ." He put it down. "Yes, it does look like a busy day. For us all. All you have to do is cooperate, and no one here will be harmed."
The second chopper is on its way now, he was thinking, if everything was on schedule. The next item was the launch vehicle.
He estimated they would need a day and a half to make the retrofit. The scheduled first test launch had been programmed for three days away—now it was two—so there was ample time . . . exactly as he had planned.
9:27 a.m.
Vance leaned back against the scrub cypress and listened to the whistle of the light wind through the granite outcroppings. He had perched himself on one of the rugged cliffs, from which he could see virtually everything that went on aboveground. Around him ants crawled, oblivious to the heat of the sun, which now seared the bone-colored rocks on all sides, while down below the languorous surf beckoned. How ironic, and tragic: all the violence and killing, right here in the middle of paradise.
He had managed to remove the battery-powered radio from the Hind; it would serve as his lifeline to the rest of the world. The military channels were all scrambled now, which told him that plenty was going on out there over the blue horizon. Trouble was, all communications had been secured. He had no idea what was happening.
What the hell to do next? He was barefoot—with nothing but an Uzi, a 9mm, and a radio.
He felt waves of grogginess ripple over him as the sun continued to climb. He was dead tired, and in spite of himself he sensed his mind drifting in the heat, his body losing its edge. Pulling himself together, he snapped alert. This was no time to ease up. He noticed that some of the men had left the command section and gone down to Launch Control, the flight-prep sector. They were carrying AK-47s now. Much better for sniper work.
They know I've only got an Uzi, he reminded himself, which is why they realize they're in no danger. From up here it'd be next to useless. But with a scope, those Kalashnikovs are bad news. . . .
At that moment he heard a dull roar, coming in from the south. Was it somebody who'd picked up his radio Mayday? He squinted against the sun and tried to see. As he watched, a dark, mottled shape appeared over the blue horizon. It was another helicopter—not a Hind this time.
As it came in for a landing at the pad down by Launch Control, Vance checked it over. It was a Sikorsky S-61R, military, with a main rotor almost sixty feet across, a retractable tricycle landing gear, and a rear cargo ramp. It went back to the sixties—the U.S. had used them to lift astronauts from the sea—but it was a warhorse and reliable as hell. It had an amphibious hull, twin General Electric turboshaft engines located up close to the drive gearbox, and an advanced flight-control system. Whether or not this one had the latest bells and whistles, he did know its speed was over a hundred and sixty miles per hour and its range was over six hundred miles.
What's that all about? he wondered. Is this the getaway car?
Whatever it was, they were not landing on the regular pad; they were putting her down as close as they could to the vehicles.
No, he decided, what they're doing is setting up something, getting ready for the big show.
He already had a feeling he knew what it was going to be. The modus was standard operating procedure. But this was going to be a waiting game, at least for a while, and he thought
about trying to catch a couple of winks. There was nothing to be done now. He'd have to wait till dark.
To pass the time, he clicked on the radio again, to see if they were using walkie-talkies. After scanning the civilian channels he finally got a burst of traffic. They were chatting, all right—a lot of coded talk in a mixture of German, English, and French.
He paused a minute, even picked up the mike, attached by a coiled black cord to the radio, and pushed the red button. But then he thought better of it and clicked it off. The time would come soon enough to get in on the fun, but not yet.
9:32 a.m.
Jamal Khan, the younger brother of Salim, watched as the Sikorsky set down, then pushed the starter button on the white electric cart, urging it to life. This was the moment he had been waiting for. Nothing he had ever done in years past matched up to this, not even the airline hijackings. The only drawback was his comrades. Like, for example, this wise-ass Israeli, Peretz.
Dore Peretz, for his own part, waited until the cart—a three-wheel, on-site mover—had started, and then he swung onto the back. Neither spoke as they silently motored through the sunshine, the breeze in their hair, headed for the just-landed helo.
The sparkling morning did not improve the atmosphere between the two men: only the sunshine contributed warmth to the moment. Peretz had contempt for the Iranian's arrogance and intensity; the bearded Iranian resented the Israeli's technical skills, his attitude, and the fact that he was Israeli. None of it could easily be forgiven. Jamal further could not forgive the Israeli for having no commitment to driving the Americans from the Middle East, for being here only for the money.
When they reached the Sikorsky, now settled on the tarmac, Jamal pulled the cart to a halt, then switched off the motor and stepped down. It would take all hands to manage the off-loading.
Helling and the two other Germans were already waiting in the sunshine, and as Jamal looked them over, he found himself liking them even less than he did Peretz. The truth was, they were little more than bureaucrats, regardless of whatever they called themselves. They ranted about America being the prisoner of the Zionists, but it was just rhetoric. . . .
The door of the Sikorsky was opening now and "Abdoullah," the first of the three Pakistani engineers, was emerging, followed by "Rais" and "Shujat." All three had their dark hair swathed in a traditional Palestinian black and white kaffiyeh, part of their "disguise."
Jamal tried not to smile as he watched them—grim-faced college boys—awkwardly slam clips into their Uzis and look around, as though they were about to lead an assault. It was a wonderful joke.
"Abdoullah" actually had a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from Berkeley. While in America he had developed a taste for the good life—cars, designer clothes, and gold jewelry—and then when he came back and went to work at Kahuta, Pakistan's top-secret uranium enrichment plant, he had discovered sex.
The instrument of this discovery was a hard-eyed Palestinian girl, Ramala, whose fiery politics were matched only by her skills in bed. He became a convert to her and then to her cause—which played directly into the hands of Ramirez. Ramirez had, Jamal knew, been working on this setup for five years. Money here, information there, it all had finally paid off.
Of all Ramirez's recruits, "Abdoullah's" contribution had been the most crucial, since he had been the one who had arranged the theft of the two items now crated and ready in the cargo bay of the Sikorsky. He and his two engineer-colleagues spoke English by choice, and to Jamal they looked almost identical, all with new coal-black beards and designer "commando" sweatbands under their kaffiyeh. They were trying to get with the look of revolutionary chic, he thought with disdain. They'd just made the big time, but they still thought they were in a Chuck Norris movie. Fortunately, they'd already served their main purpose. In two more days, they would be totally expendable.
The Sikorsky had landed approximately fifty yards from the entrance to the blockhouse of the launch facility, placing them a mere two hundred yards away from the SatCom space vehicles, VX-1 and VX-2. Those spires seemed to preside over everything, casting long shadows, and the three Pakistani engineers paused, still gripping their Uzis, to gaze up and admire them.
"Don't stand there gawking." Peretz curtly brought them to attention. "We've got to get moving. If anybody has started any satellite recon of this place, we could be on TV by now. A U.S. KH-12 can read the address on a fucking postcard." He signaled for the pilot to release the rear entry ramp. "Let's get going. We're taking them in immediately."
The Pakistanis saluted in paramilitary style, secured their Uzis into their black leg-holsters, and moved expectantly to the rear of the helo. As the ramp slowly came down, there strapped and waiting in the aft bay were two wooden crates cushioned in a bed of clear plastic bubble-wrap, each approximately a meter square and weighing just under a hundred kilos.
Phase four had begun.