"Okay, twenty-three is off, Noonan."

   "We're moving," Noonan said. The first walk took them twenty meters, and they stopped behind a concession stand. "Okay, we're at the popcorn building."

   The engineer flipped twenty-three back on, and then turned off twenty-one.

   "Twenty-one is off," Clark reported next. "Rifle Two-One, where's the guy on the root?"

   "West side, just lit up a smoke, not looking down over the edge anymore. Staying still at the moment," Sergeant Johnston reported.

   "Noonan, you are clear to move."

   "Moving now," the FBI agent replied. He and Vega double-timed it across the stone slabs, their rubber-soled boots keeping their steps quiet. At the side of the castle was a dirt strip about two meters wide, and some large boxwoods. Carefully, Noonan and Vega angled the ladder up, setting it behind a bush. Vega pulled the rope to extend the top portion, stopping it just under the window. Then he got between the ladder and the building, grabbed the treads and held them tight, pulling the ladder against the rough stone blocks.

   "Watch your ass, Tim," Oso whispered.

   "Always." Noonan went up quickly for the first ten feet, then slowed to a vertical crawl. Patience, Tim told himself. Plenty of time to do this. It was the sort of lie that men tell themselves.

   "Okay," Clark heard. "He's going up the ladder now. The roof guy is still on the opposite side, fat, dumb, and happy."

   "Bear, this is Six, over," John said, getting another idea.

   "Bear copies, Six."

   "Play around a little on the west side, just to draw some attention, over."

   "Roger that."

   Malloy stopped his endless circling, leveled out, and then eased toward the castle. The Night Hawk was a relatively quiet aircraft for a helicopter, but the guy on the root turned to watch closely, the colonel saw through his night vision goggles. He stopped his approach at about two hundred meters. He wanted to get their attention, not to spook them. The roof sentry's cigarette blazed brightly in the goggles. It moved to his lips, then away, then back, staying there.

   "Say hello, sweetie," Malloy said over the intercom. "Jesus, if I was in a Night Stalker, I could spray your ass into the next time zone."

   "You fly the Stalker? What's it like?"

   "If she could cook, I'd fucking marry her. Sweetest chopper ever made," Malloy said, holding hover. "Six, Bear, I have the bastard's attention."

   "Noonan, Six, we've frozen the roof sentry for you. He's on the opposite side from you." Good, Noonan didn't say. He took off his Kevlar helmet and edged his face to the window. It was made of irregular segments held in place by lead strips, just like in the castles of old. The glass wasn't as good as float-plate, but it was transparent. Okay. He reached into his backpack and pulled a fiber-optic cable with the same cobra head arrangement he'd used in Bern.

   "Noonan to Command, you getting this?"

   "That's affirmative." It was the voice of David Peled. The picture he saw was distorted, but you quickly got used to that. It showed four adults, but more important, it showed a crowd of children sitting on the floor in the corner, close to two doors with labels-the toilets, Peled realized. That worked. That worked pretty well. "Looks good, Timothy. Looks very good."

   "Okay." Noonan glued the tiny instrument in place and headed down the ladder. His heart was racing faster than it ever did on the morning three-mile run. At the bottom, he and Vega both hugged the wall.

   The cigarette flew off the roof, and the sentry got tired of looking at the chopper, Johnston saw. "Our friend's moving east on the castle roof. Noonan, he's coming your way."

   Malloy thought of maneuvering to draw the attention back, but that was too dangerous a play. He turned the helicopter sideways and continued his circling, but closer in, his eyes locked on the castle roof. There wasn't much else he could do except to draw his service pistol and fire, but at this range it would be hard enough to hit the castle. And killing people wasn't his job, unfortunately, Malloy told himself. There were times when he found the idea rather appealing.

   "The helicopter annoys me," the voice on the phone said. "Pity," Dr. Bellow replied, wondering what response it would get. "But police do what police do."

   "News from Paris?"

   "Regrettably not yet, but we hope to hear something soon. There is still time." Bellow's voice adopted a quiet intensity that he hoped would be taken for desperation.

   "Time and tide wait for no man," One said, and hung up.

   "What's that mean?" John asked.

   "It means he's playing by the rules. He hasn't objected to the caps he can see on the TV, either. He knows the things he has to put up with." Bellow sipped his coffee. "He's very confident. He figures he's in a safe place, and he's holding the cards, and if he has to kill a few more kids. that's okay, because it'll get him what he wants."

   "Killing children." Clark shook his head. "I didn't think-hell, I'm supposed to know better, right?"

   "It's a very strong taboo, maybe the strongest," Dr. Bellow agreed. "The way they killed that little girl, though . . . there was no hesitation, just like shooting a paper target. Ideological," the psychiatrist went on. "They've subordinated everything to their belief system. That makes them rational, but only within that system. Our friend Mr. One has chosen his objective, and he'll stick to it."

   The remote TV system, the park engineer saw, was really something. The objective lens now affixed to the castle window was less than two millimeters across at its widest point, and even if noticed, would be mistaken for a drop of paint or some flaw in the window glass. The quality of the image wasn't very good, but it showed where people were, and the more you looked at it, the more you understood what initially appeared to be a black-and-white photograph of clutter. He could count six adults now, and with a seventh atop the castle, that left only three unaccounted for-and were all the children in view? It was harder with them. All their shirts were the same color, and the red translated into a very neutral gray on the black-and-white picture. There was the one in a wheelchair, but the rest blended together in the out-of-focus image. The commandos, he could see, were worried about that.

   "He's heading back west again," Johnston reported. "Okay, he's at the west side now."

   "Let's go," Noonan told Vega.

   "The ladder?" They'd taken it down and laid it behind the bushes on its side.

   "Leave it." Noonan ran off in a crouch, reaching the concession structure in a few seconds. "Noonan to Command, time to do the cameras again."

   "It's off," the engineer told Clark.

   "Camera twenty-one is down. Get moving, Tim."

   Noonan popped Vega on the shoulder and ran another thirty meters. "Okay, take down twenty-three."

   "Done," the park engineer said.

   "Move," Clark commanded.

   Fifteen seconds later, they were in a safe position. Noonan leaned against a building wall and took a long breath. "Thanks, Julio."

   "Any time, man," Vega replied. "Just so the camera gadget works."

   "It will," the FBI agent promised, and with that they headed back to the underground command post.

   "Blow the windows? Can we do that, Paddy?" Chavez was asking when they got there.

   Connolly was wishing for a cigarette. He'd quit years before-it was too hard on the daily runs to indulge-but at times like this it seemed to help the concentration. "Six windows . . . three or four minutes each . . . no, I think not, sir. I can give you two--if we have the time."

   "How sturdy are the windows?" Clark asked "Dennis?"

   "Metal frames set into the stone," the park manager said with a shrug.

   "Wait." The engineer turned a page on the castle blueprints, then two more, and then a finger traced dawn the written portion on the right side. "Here's the specs . . . they're held in by grouting only. You should be able to kick them in, I think."

   The "I think" part was not as reassuring as Ding would have preferred, but how strong could a window frame be with a two-hundred-pound man swinging into it with two boots leading the way?

   "What about flash-bangs, Paddy?"

   "We can do that," Connolly answered. "It will not do the frames any good at all, sir."

   "Okay." Chavez leaned over the plans. "You'll have time to blow two windows-this one and this one." He tapped the prints. "We'll use flash-bangs on the other four and swing in a second later. Eddie here, me here. Louis here. George, how's the leg?"

   "Marginal," Sergeant Tomlinson replied with painful honesty. He'd have to kick through a window, swing in, drop to a concrete floor, then come up shooting . . . and the lives of children were at stake. No, he couldn't risk it, could he? "Better somebody else, Ding."

   "Oso, think you can do it?" Chavez asked.

   "Oh, yeah," Vega replied, trying not to smile. "You bet. Ding."

   "Okay, Scotty here, and Mike take these two. What's the exact distance from the roof?"

   That was on the blueprints. "Sixteen meters exactly from the level of the roof. Add another seventy centimeters to allow for the battlements."

   "The ropes can do that easily," Eddie Price decided. The plan was coming together. He and Ding would have as their primary mission getting between the kids and the bad guys, shooting as they went. Vega, Loiselle, McTyler. and Pierce would be primarily tasked to killing the subjects in the castle's command room, but that would be finally decided only when they entered the room. Covington's Team-1 would race up the stairs from the underground, to intercept any subjects who ran out, and to back up Team-2 if something went wrong on their assault.

   Sergeant Major Price and Chavez looked over the blueprints again, measuring distances to be covered and the time in which to do it. It looked possible, even probable, that they could carry it off. Ding looked up at the others.

   "Comments?"

   Noonan turned to look at the picture from the fiberoptic gear he'd installed. "They seem to be mainly at the control panels. Two guys keeping an eye on the children, but they're not worried about them-makes sense, they're just kids, not adults able to start real resistance . . . but . . . it only takes one of these bastards to turn and hose them, man."

   "Yeah." Ding nodded. There was no denying or avoiding that fact. "Well, we have to shoot fast, people. Any way to string them out?"

   Bellow thought about that. "If I tell them the plane's on the way . . . that's a risk. If they think we're lying to them, well, they could start taking it out on the hostages, but the upside is, if they think it's about time to head for the airport, probably Mr. One will send a couple of his troops down to the underground-that's the most likely way for them to leave the area, I think. Then, if we can play some more with the surveillance cameras, and get a guy in close-"

   "Yeah, pop them right away," Clark said. "Peter?"

   "Get us within twenty meters and it's a piece of cake. Plus, we kill the lights right before we hit. Disorient the bastards," Covington added.

   "There's emergency lights in the stairwells," Mike Dennis said. "They click on when the power goes down – shit, there's two in the command center, too."

   "Where?" Chavez asked.

   "The left – I mean the northeast corner and the southwest one. The regular kind, two lights, like car headlights, they run off a battery."

   "Okay, no NVGs when we go in, I guess, but we'll still kill the lights right before we hit, just to distract them. Anything else? Peter?" Ding asked.

   Major Covington nodded. "It ought to work."

   Clark observed and listened, forced to let his principal subordinates do all the planning and talking, leaving him only able to comment if they made a mistake, and they hadn't done that. Most of all, he wanted to lift an MP-10 and go in with the shooters, but he couldn't do that, and inwardly he swore at the fact. Commanding just wasn't as satisfying as leading.

   "We need medics standing by in case the bad guys get lucky," John said to Colonel Nuncio.

   "We have paramedics outside the park now-"

   "Dr. Weiler is pretty good," Mike Dennis said. "He's had trauma training. We insisted on that in case we have something bad happen here."

   "Okay, we'll have him stand-to when the time comes. Dr. Bellow, tell Mr. One that the French have caved, and their friends will be here .... What do you think?"

   "Ten-twenty or so. If they agree to that, it's a concession, but the kind that will calm them down-should. anyway."

   "Make the call, doc," John Clark ordered.

   "Yes?" Rene said.

   "Sanchez is being released from Le Sante prison in about twenty minutes. Six of the others, too, but there's a problem on the last three. I'm not sure what that is. They'll be taken to De Gaulle International Airport and flown here on an Air France Airbus 340. We think they'll be here by twenty-two-forty. Is that acceptable? How will we get you and the hostages to them for the flight out?" Bellow asked.

   "A bus, I think. You will bring the bus right to the castle. We will take ten or so of the children with us, and leave the rest here as a show of good faith on our part. Tell the police that we know how to move the children without giving them a chance to do something foolish, and any treachery will have severe consequences."

   "We do not want any more children harmed," Bellow assured him.

   "If you do as you are told, that will not be necessary, but understand," Rene went on firmly, "if you do anything foolish, then the courtyard will run red with blood. Do you understand that?"

   "Yes, One, I understand," the voice replied.

   Rene set the phone down and stood. "My friends, II'ych is coming. The French have granted our demands."

   "He looks like a happy camper," Noonan said, eyes locked an the black-and-white picture. The one who had to be Mr. One was standing now, walking toward another of the subjects, and they appeared to shake hands on the fuzzy picture.

   "They're not going to lie down and take a nap," Bellow warned. "If anything, they're going to be more alert now."

   "Yeah, I know," Chavez assured him. But if we do our job right, it doesn't matter how alert they are.

   Malloy headed back to the airfield for refueling, which took half an hour. While there he heard what was going to happen in another hour. In the back of the Night Hawk, Sergeant Nance set up the ropes, set to fifty feet length exactly, and hooked them into eyebolts on the chopper's floor. Like the pilots, Nance, too, had a pistol holstered on his left side. He never expected to use it, and was only a mediocre shot, but it made him feel like part of the team, and that was important to him. He supervised the refueling, capped the tank, and told Colonel Malloy the bird was ready.

   Malloy pulled up on the collective, brought the Night Hawk into the air, then pushed the cyclic forward to return to Worldpark. From this point on, their flight routine would be changing. On arriving over the park, the Night Hawk didn't circle. Instead it flew directly over the castle every few minutes, then drew off into the distance, his anticollision strobe lights flashing as he moved around the park grounds, seemingly at random, bored with the orbiting he'd done before.

   Okay, people, let's move," Chavez told his team. Those directly involved in the rescue operation headed out into the underground corridor, then out to where the Spanish army truck stood. They boarded it, and it drove off, looping around into the massive parking lot.

   Dieter Weber selected a sniper perch opposite Sergeant Johnston's position, on top of the flat roof of a theater building where kids viewed cartoons, only a hundred twenty meters from the castle's east side. Once there, he unrolled his foam mat, set up his rifle on the bipod, and started training his ten-power scope over the castle's windows.

   "Rifle Two-Two in position," he reported to Clark.

   "Very well, report as necessary, AI?" Clark said, looking up.

   Stanley looked grim. "A sodding lot of guns, and a lot of children."

   "Yeah, I know. Anything else we could try?"

   Stanley shook his head. "It's a good plan. If we try outside, we give them too much maneuvering space, and they will feel safer in this castle building. No, Peter and Ding have a good plan, but there's no such bloody thing as a perfect one."

   "Yeah," John said. "I want to be there, too. This command stuff sucks the big one."

   Alistair Stanley grunted. "Quite."

   The parking lot lights all went off at once. The truck, also with lights out, stopped next to a light standard. Chavez and his team jumped out. Ten seconds later, the Night Hawk came in, touching down with the rotor still turning fast. The side doors opened, and the shooters clambered aboard and sat down on the floor. Sergeant Nance closed one door, then the other.

   "All aboard, Colonel."

   Without a word, Malloy pulled the collective and climbed back into the sky, mindful of the light standards, which could have wrecked the whole mission. It took only four seconds to clear them, and he banked the aircraft to head back toward the park.

  "A/C lights off," Malloy told Lieutenant Harrison.

   "Lights off," the copilot confirmed.

   "We ready?" Ding asked his men in the back."Goddamn right, we are," Mike Pierce said back. Fucking murderers, he didn't add. But every man an the bird was thinking that. Weapons were slung tight across their chests, and they had their zip-lining gloves on. Three of the men were pulling them tight on their hands, a show of some tension on their part that went along with the grim faces.

   "Where is the aircraft?" One asked.

   "About an hour and ten minutes out," Dr. Bellow replied. "When do you want your bus?"

   "Exactly forty minutes before the aircraft lands. It will then be refueled while we board it."

   "Where are you going?" Bellow asked next.

   "We will tell the pilot when we get aboard."

   "Okay, we have the bus coming now. It will be here in about fifteen minutes. Where do you want it to come?"

   "Right to the castle, past the Dive Bomber ride."

   "Okay, I will tell them to do that," Bellow promised.

   "Merci. " The phone went dead again.

   "Smart," Noonan observed. "They'll have two surveillance cameras on the bus all the way in, so we can't use it to screen a rescue team. And they probably plan to use the mountaineer technique to get the hostages aboard." Tough shit, he didn't add.

   "Bear, this is Six," Clark called on the radio.

   "Bear copies, Six, over."

   "We execute in five minutes."

   "Roger that, we party in five."

   Malloy turned in his seat. Chavez had heard the call and nodded, holding up one hand, fingers spread.

   "Rainbow, this is Six. Stand-to, repeat stand-to. We commence the operation in five minutes."

   In the underground, Peter Covington led three of his men east toward the castle stairwells, while the park engineer selectively killed off the surveillance cameras. His explosives man set a small charge on the fire door at the bottom and nodded at his boss.

   "Team-1 is ready."

   "Rifle Two-One is ready and on target," Johnston said. "Rifle Two-Two is ready, but no target at this time," Weber told Clark.

   "Three, this is One," the scanner crackled in the command room.

   "Yes, One," the man atop the castle replied.

   "Anything happening?"

   "No, One, the police are staying where they are. And the helicopter is flying around somewhere, but not doing anything."

   "The bus should be here in fifteen minutes. Stay alert."

   "I will," Three promised.

   "Okay," Noonan said. "That's a time-stamp. Mr. One calls Mr. Three about every fifteen minutes. Never more than eighteen, never less than twelve. So-"

   "Yeah." Clark nodded. "Move it up?"

   "Why not," Stanley said.

   "Rainbow, this is Six. Move in and execute. Say again, EXECUTE NOW!"

   Aboard the Night Hawk, Sergeant Nance moved left and right, sliding the side doors open. He gave a thumbs up to the shooters that they returned, each man hooking up his zip-line rope to Drings on their belts. All of them turned inward, getting up on the balls of their feet so that their backsides were now dangling outside the helicopter.

   "Sergeant Nance, I will flash you when we're in place."

   "Roger, sir," the crew chief replied, crouching in the now empty middle of the passenger area, his arms reaching to the men on both sides.

   "Andre, go down and look at the courtyard," Rene ordered. His man moved at once, holding his Uzi in both hands.

   "Somebody just left the room," Noonan said.

   "Rainbow, this is Six, one subject has left the command center."

   Eight, Chavez thought. Eight subjects to take down. The other two would go to the long-riflemen.

   The last two hundred meters were the hard ones, Malloy thought. His hands tingled on the cyclic control stick, and as many times as he'd done this, this one was not a rehearsal. Okay . . . He dropped his nose, heading toward the castle, and without the anticollision lights, the aircraft would only be a shadow, slightly darker than the night better yet, the four-bladed rotor made a sound that was nondirectional. Someone could hear it, but locating the source was difficult, and he needed that to last only a few more seconds.

   "Rifle Two-One, stand by."

   "Rifle Two-One is on target, Six," Johnston reported. His breathing regularized, and his elbows moved slightly, so that only bone, not muscle, was in contact with the mat under him. The mere passage of blood through his arteries could throw his aim off. His crosshairs were locked just forward of the sentry's ear. "On target," he repeated.

   "Fire," the earpiece told him.

   Say good night, Gracie, a small voice in his mind whispered. His finger pushed back gently on the set trigger, which snapped cleanly, and a gout of white flame exploded from the muzzle of the rifle. The flash obscured the sight picture for a brief moment, then cleared in time for him to seethe bullet impact. There was a slight puff of graylooking vapor from the far side of the head, and the body dropped straight down like a puppet with cut strings. No one inside would hear the shot, not through thick windows and stone walls from over three hundred meters away.

   "Rifle Two-One. Target is down. Target is down. Center head," Johnston reported.

   "That's a kill," Lieutenant Harrison breathed over the intercom. From the helicopter's perspective, the destruction of the sentry's head looked quite spectacular. It was the first death he'd ever seen, and it struck him as something in a movie, not something real. The target hadn't been a living being to him, and now it would never be.

   "Yep," Malloy agreed, easing back on the cyclic. "Sergeant Nonce-now!"

   In the back, Nonce pushed outward. The helicopter was still slowing, nose up now, as Malloy performed the rocking-chair maneuver to perfection.

   Chavez pushed off with his feet, and went down the zipline. It took less than two seconds of not-quite free-fall before he applied tension to the line to slow his descent, and his black, rubber-soled boots came down lightly on the flat roof. He immediately loosed his rope, and turned to watch his people do the same. Eddie Price ran over to the sentry's body, kicked the head over with his boot, and turned, making a thumbs-up for his boss.

   "Six, this is Team-2 Lead. On the roof. The sentry is dead," he said into his microphone. "Proceeding now." With that Chavez turned to his people, waving his arms to the roof's periphery. The Night Hawk was gone into the darkness, having hardly appeared to have stopped at all.

   The castle roof was surrounded by the battlements associated with such places, vertical rectangles of stone behind which archers could shelter while loosing their arrows at attackers. Each man had one such shelter assigned, and they counted them off with their fingers, so that every man went to the right one. For this night, the men looped their rappelling ropes around them, then stepped into the gaps. When all of them were set up, they held up their hands. Chavez did the same, then dropped his as he kicked off the roof and slid down the rope to a point a meter to the right of a window, using his feet to stand off the wall. Paddy Connolly came down on the other side, reached to apply his Primacord around the edges, and inserted a radio-detonator on one edge. Then Paddy moved to his left, swinging on the rope as though it were a jungle vine to do the same to one other. Other team members took flashbang grenades and held them in their hands.

   "Two-Lead to Six-lights!"

   In the command center, the engineer again isolated the power to the castle and shut it off.

   Outside the windows, Team-2 saw the windows go dark, and then a second or two later the wall-mounted emergency lights came on, just like miniature auto headlights, not enough to light the room up properly. The TV monitors they were watching went dark as well.

   "Merde, " Rene said, sitting and reaching for a phone. If they wanted to play more games, then he could-he thought he saw some movement outside the window and looked more closely

   "Team-2, this is lead. Five seconds . . . five. . . four . . . three-" At "three," the men holding the flash-bangs pulled the pins and set them right next to the windows, then turned aside. "– . . . two . . . one . . . fire!"

   Sergeant Connolly pressed his button, and two windows were sundered from the wall by explosives. A fraction of a second later, three more windows were blown in by a wall of noise and blazing light. They flew across the room in a shower of glass and lead fragments, missing the children in the corner by three meters.

   Next to Chavez, Sergeant Major Price tossed in another flashbang, which exploded the moment it touched the floor. Then Chavez pushed outward from the wall, swinging into the room through the window, his MP-10 up and in both hands. He hit the floor badly, falling backward, unable to control his balance, then felt Price's feet land on his left arm. Chavez rolled and jolted to his feet, then moved to the kids. They were screaming with alarm, covering their faces and ears from the abuse of the flashbangs. But he couldn't worry about them just yet.

   Price landed better, moved right as well, but turned to scan the room. There. It was a bearded one, holding an Uzi. Price extended his MP-10 to the limit of the sling and fired a three-round burst right into his face from three meters away. The force of the bullet impacts belied the suppressed noise of the shots.

   Oso Vega had kicked his window loose on leg-power alone, and landed right on top of a subject, rather to the surprise of both, but Vega was ready for surprises, and the terrorist was not. Oso's left hand slammed out, seemingly of its own accord, and hit him in the face with enough force to split it open into a bloody mess that a burst of three 10-mm rounds only made worse.

   Rene was sitting at his desk, the phone in his hand, and his pistol on the tabletop before him. He was reaching for it when Pierce fired into the side of his head from six feet away.

   In the far corner. Chavez and Price skidded to a stop, their bodies between the terrorists and the hostages. Ding came to one knee, his weapon up while his eyes scanned for targets, as he listened to the suppressed chatter of his men's weapons. The semidarkness of the room was alive now with moving shadows. Loiselle found himself behind a subject, close enough to touch him with the muzzle of his submachine gun. This he did. It made the shot an easy one, but sprayed blood and brains all over the room.

   One in the corner got his Uzi up, and his finger went down on the trigger, spraying in the direction of the children. Chavez and Price both engaged him, then McTyler as well, and the terrorist went down in a crumpled mass.

   Another had opened a door and raced through it, splattered by bullet fragments from a shooter whose aim was off and hit the door. This one ran down, away from the shooting, turning one corner, then another-and tried to stop when he saw a black shape on the steps.

   It was Peter Covington, leading his team up. Covington had heard the noise of his steps and taken aim, then tired when the surprised-looking face entered his sights. Then he resumed his race topside, with four men behind him.

   That left three in the room. Two hid behind desks, one holding his Uzi up and firing blindly. Mike Pierce jumped over the desk, twisting in midair as he did so., and shot him three times in the side and back. Then Pierce landed, turned back and fired another burst into the back of his head. The other one under a desk was shot in the back by Paddy Connolly. The one who was left stood, blazing away wildly with his weapon, only to be taken down by no fewer than four team members.

   Just then the door opened, and Covington came in. Vega was circulating about, kicking the weapons away from every body, and after five seconds shouted: "Clear!"

   "Clear!" Pierce agreed.

   Andre was outside, in the open and all alone. He turned to look up at the castle.

   "Dieter!" Homer Johnston called.

   "Yes!"

   "Can you take his weapon out?"

   The German somehow read the American's mind. The answer was an exquisitely aimed shot that struck Andre's submachine gun just above the trigger guard. The impact of the .300 Winchester Magnum bullet blasted through the rough, stamped metal and broke the gun nearly in half. From his perch four hundred meters away, Johnston took careful aim, and fired his second round of the engagement. It would forever be regarded as a very bad shot. Half a second later, the 7-mm bullet struck the subject six inches below the sternum.

   For Andre, it seemed like a murderously hard punch. Already the match bullet had fragmented, ripping his liver and spleen as it continued its passage, exiting his body above the left kidney. Then, following the shock of the initial impact, came a wave of pain. An instant later, his screech ripped across the 100 acres of Worldpark.

   "Check this out," Chavez said in the command center. His body armor had two holes in the torso. They wouldn't have been fatal, but they would have hurt. "Thank God for DuPont, eh?"

   "Miller Time!" Vega said with a broad grin.

   "Command, this is Chavez. Mission accomplished. The kids uh oh, we got one kid hurt here, looks like a scratch on the arm, the rest of 'em are all okay. Subjects all down for the count, Mr. C. You can turn the lights back on."

   As Ding watched, Oso Vega leaned down and picked up a little girl. "Hello, querida. Let's find your mamacita, eh?"

   "Rainbow!" Mike Pierce exulted. "Tell 'em there's a new sheriff in town, people!"

   "Bloody right, Mike!" Eddie Price reached into his pocket and pulled out his pipe and a pouch of good Cavendish tobacco.

   There were things to be done. Vega, Pierce, and Loiselle collected the weapons,safed them, and stacked them on a desk. McTyler and Connolly checked out the restrooms and other adjacent doors for additional terrorists, finding none. Scotty waved to the door.

   "Okay, let's get the kids out," Ding. told his people. "Peter, lead us out!"

   Covington had his team open the fire door and man the stairway, one man on each landing. Vega took the lead, holding the five-year-old with his left arm while his right continued to hold his MP-10. A minute later, they were outside.

   Chavez stayed behind, looking at the wall with Eddie Price. There were seven holes in the corner where the kids had been, but all the rounds were high, into the drywall paneling. "Lucky," Chavez said.

   "Somewhat," Sergeant Major Price agreed. "That's the one we both engaged, Ding. He was just firing, not aiming-and maybe at us, not them, I think."

   "Good job, Eddie."

   "Indeed," Price agreed. With that they both walked outside, leaving the bodies behind for the police to collect. "Command, this is Bear, what's happening, over."

   "Mission accomplished, no friendlies hurt. Well done. Bear," Clark told him.

   "Roger and thank you, sir. Bear is RTB. Out. I need to take a piss," the Marine told his copilot, as he horsed the Night Hawk west for the airfield.

   Homer Johnston fairly ran down the steps of the Dive Bomber ride, carrying his rifle and nearly tripping three times on the way down. Then he ran the few hundred meters to the castle. There was a doctor there, wearing a white coat and looking down at the man Johnston had shot.

   "How is he?" the sergeant asked when he got there. It was pretty clear. The man's hands were holding his belly, and were covered with blood that looked strangely black in the courtyard lighting.

   "He will not survive," Dr. Weiler said. Maybe if they were in a hospital operating room right now, he'd have a slim chance, but he was bleeding out through the lacerated spleen., and his liver was probably destroyed as well .... And so, no, absent a liver transplant, he had no chance at all, and all Weiler could do was give him morphine for the pain. He reached into his bag for a syringe.

   "That's the one shot the little girl," Johnston told the doctor. "I guess my aim was a little off," he went on, looking down into the open eyes and the grimacing face that let loose another moaning scream. If he'd been a deer or an elk, Johnston would have finished him off with a pistol round in the head or neck, but you weren't supposed to do that with human targets. Die slow, you fuck, he didn't say aloud. It disappointed Johnston that the doctor gave him a pain injection, but physicians were sworn to their duty, as he was to his.

   "Pretty low," Chavez said, coming up to the last living terrorist.

   "Guess I slapped the trigger a little hard," the rifleman responded.

   Chavez looked straight in his eyes. "Yeah, right. Get your gear."

   "In a minute." The target's eyes went soft when the drug entered his bloodstream, but the hands still grabbed at the wound, and there was a puddle of blood spreading from under his back. Finally, the eyes looked up at Johnston one last time.

   "Good night, Gracie," the rifleman said quietly. Ten seconds later, he was able to turn away and head back to the Dive Bomber to retrieve the rest of his gear.

   There were a lot of soiled underpants in the medical office, and a lot of kids still wide-eyed in shock, having lived through a nightmare that all would relive for years to come. The Rainbow troopers fussed over them. One bandaged the only wound, a scratch really, on a young boy.

   Centurion de la Cruz was still there, having refused evacuation. The troops in black stripped off their body armor and set it against the wall, and he saw on their uniform jackets the jump wings of paratroopers, American, British, and German, along with the satisfied look of soldiers who'd gotten the job done.

   "Who are you?" he asked in Spanish.

   "I'm sorry, I can't say," Chavez replied. "But I saw what you did on the videotape. You did well, Sergeant."

   "So did you, ah?. . ."

   "Chavez. Domingo Chavez."

   "American?"

   "Si. "

   "The children, were any hurt?"

   "Just the one over there."

   "And the-criminals?"

   "They will break no more laws, amigo. None at all," Team2 Lead told him quietly.

   "Bueno. " De la Cruz reached up to take his hand. "It was hard?"

   "It is always hard, but we train for the hard things, and my men are-"

   "They have the look," de la Cruz agreed.

   "So do you." Chavez turned. "Hey, guys, here's the one who took 'em on with a sword."

   "Oh, yeah?" Mike Pierce came over. "I finished that one off for you. Balky move, man." Pierce took his hand and shook it. The rest of the troopers did the same.

   "I must-I must-" De la Cruz stood and hobbled out the door. He came back in five minutes later, following John Clark, and holding-

   "What the hell is that?" Chavez asked.

   "The eagle of the legion, VI Legio Victrix, " the centurion told them, holding it in one hand. "The victorious legion. Senor Dennis, con permiso?"

   "Yes, Francisco," the park manager said with a serious nod.

   "With the respect of my legion, Senor Chavez. Keep this in a place of honor."

   Ding took it. The damned thing must have weighed twenty pounds, plated as it was with gold. It would be a fit trophy for the club at Hereford. "We will do that, my friend," he promised the former sergeant, with a look at John Clark.

   The stress was bleeding off now, to be followed as usual by elation and fatigue. The troopers looked at the kids they'd saved, still quiet and cowed by the night, but soon to be reunited with their parents. They heard the sound of a bus outside. Steve Lincoln opened the door, and watched the grown-ups leap out of it. He waved them through the door, and the shouts of joy filled the room.

   "Time to leave," John said. He, too, walked over to shake hands with de la Cruz as the troops filed out.

   Out in the open, Eddie Price had his own drill to complete. His pipe now filled, he took a kitchen match from his pocket and struck it on the stone wall of the medical office, lighting the curved briar pipe for a long, victorious puff as parents pushed in, and others pushed out, holding their children, many weeping at their deliverance.

   Colonel Gamelin was standing by the bus and came over. "You are the Legion?" he asked.

   Louis Loiselle handled the answer. "In a way, monsieur," he said in French. He looked up to see a surveillance camera painted directly at the door, probably to record the event, the parents filing out with their kids, many pausing to shake hands with the Rainbow troopers. Then Clark led them off, back to the castle, and into the underground. On the way the Guardia Civil cops saluted, the gestures returned by the special-ops troopers.

CHAPTER 16
DISCOVERY

   The successful conclusion of the Worldpark operation turned out to be a problem for some, and one of them was Colonel Tomas Nuncio, the senior officer of the Guardia Civil on the scene. Assumed by the local media to be the officer in command of the operation, he was immediately besieged with requests for details of the operation, along with videotapes for the TV reporters. So successful had he been in isolating the theme park from press coverage that his superiors in Madrid themselves had little idea what had taken place, and this also weighed on his decision. So the colonel decided to release Worldpark's own video coverage, deeming this to be the most innocuous footage possible, as it showed very little. The most dramatic part had been the descent of the shooting team from the helicopter to the castle roof, and then from the roof of the castle to the control-room windows, and that, Nuncio decided, was pure vanilla, lasting a mere four minutes, the time required for Paddy Connolly to place his line charges on the window frames and move aside to detonate them. Nothing of the shooting inside the room had been taped, because the terrorists had themselves wrecked the surveillance camera inside the facility. The elimination of the castle-roof sentry had been taped, but was not released due to the gruesome nature of his head wound, and the same was true of the killing of the last of them, the one named Andre who had killed the little Dutch girl which scene had also been recorded, but was withheld for the same reason. The rest was all let go. The distance of the cameras from the actual scene of action prevented the recognition, or even the sight of the faces of the rescue team, merely their jaunty step, outside, many of them carrying the rescued children that, he decided, could harm or offend no one, least of all the special-operations team from England, who now hid one of the tricornio hats from his force to go along with the eagle of Worldpark's notional VI Legion as a souvenir of their successful mission.

   And so, the black-and-white video was released to CNN, Sky News, and other interested news agencies for broadcast around the world, to give substance to the commentary of various reporters who'd assembled at Worldpark's main gate, there to comment at great and erroneous length about the expertise of the Guardia Civil's special action team dispatched from Madrid to resolve this hateful episode at one of the world's great theme parks.

   It was eight o'clock in the evening when Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov saw it in his New York apartment, as he smoked a cigar and sipped a vodka neat while his VCR taped it for later detailed examination. The assault phase, he saw, was both expert and expected in all details. The flashes of light from the explosives used were dramatic and singularly useless for showing him anything, and the parade of the rescuers as predictable as the dawn, their springy steps, their slung weapons, and their arms full of small children. Well, such men would naturally feel elation at the successful conclusion of such a mission, and the trailing footage showed them walking off to a building, where there must have been a physician to take care of the one child who'd sustained a minor injury during the operation, as the reporters said. Then, later, the troops had come outside, and one of them had swiped an arm against the stone wall of the building, lighting a match, which he used . . .

   . . . to light a pipe . . .To light a pipe, Popov saw. He was surprised at his own reaction to that. He blinked hard, leaning forward in his seat. The camera didn't zoom in, but the soldier/policeman in question was clearly smoking a curved pipe, puffing the smoke out every few seconds as he spoke with his comrades , . . doing nothing dramatic, just talking unrecorded words calmly, as such men did after a successful mission, doubtless discussing who had done what, what had gone according to plan and what had not. It might as easily lave been in a club or bar, for trained men always spoke the same way in those circumstances, whether they were soldiers or doctors or football players, after the stress of the job was concluded, and the lessons-learned phase began. It was the usual mark of professionals, Popov knew. Then the picture changed, back to the face of some American reporter who blathered on until the break for the next commercial, to be followed, the anchorman said, by some political development or other in Washington. With that, Popov rewound the tape, ejected it, and then reached for a different tape. He inserted it into the VCR, then fast forwarded to the end of the incident in Bern, through the takedown phase and into the aftermath where . . . yes, a man had lit a pipe. He'd remembered that from watching from across the street, hadn't he?

   Then he got the tape of the press coverage from the Vienna incident, and . . . yes, at the end a man had lit a pipe. In every case it was a man of about one hundred eighty centimeters in height, making much the same gesture with the match, holding the pipe in exactly the same way, gesturing to another with it in exactly the same manner, the way men did with pipes . . .

   ". . . ahh, nichevo, " the intelligence officer said to himself in the expensive high-rise apartment. He spent another half an hour, cueing and rerunning the tapes. The clothing was the same in every case. The man the same size, the same gestures and body language, the same weapons slung the same way, the same everything, the former KGB officer saw. And that meant the same man . . . in three separate countries.

   But this man was not Swiss, not Austrian, and not Spanish. Next Popov backed off his deductive thoughts, searching for other facts he could discern from the visual information he had there. There were other people visible in all the tapes. The pipe smoker was often attended by another man, shorter than he, to whom the pipe smoker appeared to speak with some degree of friendly deference. There was another around, a large, muscular one who in two of the tapes carried a heavy machine gun, but in the third, carrying a child, did not. So, he had two and maybe a third man on the tapes who had appeared in Bern, Vienna, and Spain. In every case, the reporters had credited the rescue to local police, but no, that wasn't the truth, was it? So. who were these people who arrived with the speed and decisiveness of a thunderbolt-in three different countries.. . twice to conclude operations that he had initiated, and once to settle one begun by others-and who they had been, he didn't know nor especially care. The reporters said that they'd demanded the release of his old friend, the Jackal. What fools. The French would as soon toss Napoleon's corpse from Les Invalides as give up that murderer, ll'ych Ramirez Sanchez, named with Lenin's own patronymic by his communist father. Popov shook that thought off. He'd just discovered something of great importance. Somewhere in Europe was a special-operations team that crossed international borders as easily as a businessman flying in an airliner, that had freedom to operate in different countries, that displaced and did the work of local police . . . and did it well, expertly . . . and this operation would not hurt them, would it? Their prestige and international acceptability would only grow from the rescue of the children at Worldpark . . .

   "Nichevo, " he whispered to himself again. He'd learned something of great importance this night, and to celebrate he poured himself another vodka. Now he had to follow it up. How? He'd think that one over, sleeping on the thought, trusting his trained brain to come up with something.

   They were nearly home already. The MC– 130 had picked them up and flown the now relaxed team back to Fereford, their weapons re-packed in the plastic carrying cases, their demeanor not the least bit tense. Some of the men were cutting up. Others were explaining what they'd done to team members who'd not had the chance to participate directly. Mike Pierce, Clark saw, was especially animated in his conversation with his neighbor. He was now the Rainbow kill-leader. Homer Johnston was chatting with Weber-they'd come to some sort of deal, something agreed between them. Weber had taken a beautiful but out-of policy shot to disable the terrorist's Uzi, allowing Johnston to-of course, John told himself, he didn't just want to kill the bastard who'd murdered the little girl. He'd wanted to hurt the little prick, to send him off to hell with a special, personal message. He'd have to talk to Sergeant Johnston about that. It was outside of Rainbow policy. It was unprofessional. Just killing the bastards was enough. You could always trust God to handle the special treatment. But well, John told himself he could understand that, couldn't he? There had once been that little bastard called Billy to whom he'd given a very special interrogation in a recompression chamber, and though he remembered it with a measure of pain and shame, at the time he'd felt it justified. . . and he'd gotten the information he'd needed at the time, hadn't he? Even so, he'd have to talk with Homer, advise him never to do such a thing again. And Homer would listen, John knew. He'd exorcised the demons once, and once, usually, was enough. It must have been hard for him to sit at his rifle, watching the murder of a child, the power to avenge her instantly right there in his skilled hands, and yet do nothing. Could you have done that, John? Clark asked himself, not really knowing what the answer was in his current, exhausted state. He felt the wheels thump down on the Hereford runway, and the props roar into reverse pitch to slow the aircraft.

   Well, John thought, his idea, his concept for Rainbow was working out rather well, wasn't it? Three deployments, three clean missions. Two hostages killed, one before his team deployed to Bern, the other just barely after their arrival in the park, neither one the result of negligence or mistake on the part of his men. Their mission performance had been as nearly perfect as anything he'd ever seen. Even his fellow animals of 3rd SOG in Vietnam hadn't been this good, and that was something he'd never expected to say or even think. The thought came suddenly, and just as unexpectedly came the near-need for tears, that he might have the honor to command such warriors as these, to send them out and bring them back as they were now, smiling as they stood, hoisting their gear on their shoulders and walking to the open rear cargo door on the Herky Bird, behind which waited their trucks. His men.

   "The bar is open!" Clark called to them, when he stood.

   "A little late, John." Alistair observed." If the door's locked, we'll have Paddy blow it," Clark insisted, with a vicious grin.

   Stanley considered that and nodded. "Quite so, the lads have earned a pint or two each." Besides which, he knew how to pick locks.

   They walked into the club still wearing their ninja suits, and found the barman waiting. There were a few others in the club as well, mainly SAS troopers sipping at their last-call pints. Several of them applauded when the Rainbow team came in, which warmed the room. John walked to the bar, leading his men and ordering beer for all.

   "I do love this stuff," Mike Pierce said a minute later, taking his Guinness and sipping through the thin layer of foam.

   "Two, Mike?" Clark asked.

   "Yeah." He nodded. "The one at the desk, he was on the phone. Tap-tap," Pierce said, touching two fingers to the side of his head. "Then another one, shooting from behind a desk. I jumped over and gave him three on the fly. Landed, rolled, and three more in the back of the head. So long, Charlie. Then one more, got a piece of him, along with Ding and Eddie. Ain't supposed to like this part of the job. I know that-but, Jesus, it felt good to take those fuckers down. Killin' kids, man. Not good. Well, they ain't gonna be doing any more of that, sir. Not with the new sheriff in town."

   "Well, nice going, Mr. Marshal," John replied, with a raised glass salute. There'd be no nightmares about this one, Clark thought, sipping his own dark beer. He looked around. In the corner, Weber and Johnston were talking, the latter with his hand on the former's shoulder, doubtless thanking him for the fine shot to disable the murderer's Uzi. Clark walked over and stood next to the two sergeants.

   "I know, boss," Homer said, without being told anything. "Never again, but goddamn, it felt good."

   "Like you said, never again, Homer."

   "Yes, sir. Slapped the trigger a little hard," Johnston said, to cover his ass in an official sense.

   "Bullshit," Rainbow Six observed. "I'll accept it -just this once. And you. Dieter nice shot. but . . ."

   "Nie wieder. Herr General. I know, sir." The German nodded his submission to the moment. "Homer, Junge, the look on his face when you hit him. Ach, that was something to see, my friend. Good for the one on the castle roof, too."

   "Easy shot," Johnston said dismissively. "He was standing still. Zap. Easier 'n throwing darts, pal."

   Clark patted both on the shoulder and wandered over to Chavez and Price.

   "Did you have to land on my arm?" Ding complained lightly.

   "So, next time, come through the window straight, not at an angle."

   "Right." Chavez took a long sip of the Guinness.

   "How'd it go?" John asked them.

   "Aside from being hit twice, not bad," Chavez replied. "I have to get a new vest, though." Once hit, the vests were considered to be ruined for further use. This one would go back to the manufacturer for study to see how it had performed. "Which one was that, you think, Eddie?"

   "The last one, I think, the one who just stood and sprayed at the children."

   "Well, that was the plan, for us to stop those rounds, and that one went down hard. You, me, Mike, and Oso, I think, took him apart." Whatever cop had recovered that body would need a blotter and a freezer bag to collect the spilled brains. "That we did," Price agreed as Julio came over.

   "Hey, that was okay, guys!" First Sergeant Vega told them, pleased to have finally participated in a field operation.

   "Since when do we punch our targets?" Chavez asked.

   Vega looked a little embarrassed. "Instinct, he was so close. You know, probably could have taken him alive, but-well, nobody ever told me to do that, y'know?"

   "That's cool, Oso. That wasn't part of the mission, not with a room full of kids."

   Vega nodded. "What I figured, and the shot was pretty automatic, too, just playin' like we practice, man. Anyway, that one went down real good, jefe. "

   "Any problem on the window?" Price wanted to know.

   Vega shook his head. "Nah, gave it a good kick, end it moved just fine. Bumped a shoulder coming through the frame, but no problems there. I was pretty pumped. But you know, you shoulda had me cover the kids. Fin bigger, I woulda stopped more bullets."

   Chavez didn't say that he'd worried about d'ega's agility wrongly, as it had turned out. An important lesson learned. Bulky as Osowas, he moved lightly on his feet, far more so than Ding had expected. The bear could dance pretty well, though at 225 pounds, he was G little large for a tutu.

   "Fine operation," Bill Tawney said, joining the group.

   "Anything develop?"

   "We have a possible identification on one of them, the chap who killed the child. The French ran the photo through some police informants, and they think it night be an Andre Herr, Parisian by birth, thought to be a stringer for Action Directe once upon a time, but nothing definite. More information is on the way, they say. The whole set of photos and fingerprints from Spain is on its way to Paris now for follow-up investigation. Not all of the photos will be very useful, I am told."

   "Yeah, well, a burst of hollowpoints will rearrange a guy's face, man," Chavez observed with a chuckle. "Not a hell of a lot we can do about that."

   "So, who initiated the operation?" Clark asked.

   Tawney shrugged. "Not a clue at this point. That's for the French police to investigate."

   "Would be nice to know. We've had three incidents since we got here. Isn't that a lot?" Chavez asked, suddenly very serious.

   "It is," the intelligence officer agreed. "It would not have been ten or fifteen years ago, but things had quieted down recently." Another shrug. "Could be mere coincidence, or perhaps copycatting, but-"

   "Copycat? I shouldn't think so, sir," Eddie Prise observed. "We've given bloody little encouragement to any terr' who has ambitions, and today's operation ought to have a further calming effect on those people."

   "That makes sense to me," Ding agreed. "Like Mike Pierce said, there's a new sheriff in town, and the word on the street ought to be `don't fuck with him' even if people think we're just local cops with an attitude. Take it a step further, Mr. C."

   "Go public?" Clark shook his head. "That's never been part of the plan, Domingo."

   "Well, if the mission's to take the bastards down in the field, that's one thing. If the mission is to make these bastards think twice about raising hell-to stop terrorist incidents from happening at all-then it's another thing entirely. The idea of a new sheriff in town might just take the starch out of their backs and put them back to washing cars, or whatever the hell they do when they're not being bad. Deterrence, we call it, when nation-states do it. Will it work on a terrorist mentality? Something to talk with Doc Bellow about, John," Chavez concluded.

   And again Chavez had surprised him, Clark realized. Three straight successes, all of them covered on the TV news, might well have an effect on the surviving terrorists in Europe or elsewhere with lingering ambitions, mightn't it? And that was something to talk to Paul Bellow about. But it was much too soon for anyone on the team to be that optimistic . . . probably, John told himself with a thoughtful sip. The party was just beginning to break up. It had been a very long day for the Rainbow troopers, and one by one they set their glasses down on the bar, which ought to have closed some time before, and headed for the door for the walk to their homes. Another day and another mission had ended. Yet another day had already b.-gun, and in only a few hours, they'd be awakened to run and exercise and begin another day of routine training. "Were you planning to leave us?" the jailer asked Inmate Sanchez in a voice dripping with irony.

   "What do you mean?" Carlos responded.

   "Some colleagues of yours misbehaved yesterday," the prison guard responded, tossing a copy of Le Figaro through the door. "They will not do so again."

   The photo on the front page was taken off the Worldpark video, the quality miserably poor, but clear enough to show a soldier dressed in black carrying a child, and the first paragraph of the story told the tale. Carlos scanned it, sitting on his prison bed to read the piece in detail, then felt a depth of black despair that he'd not thought possible. Someone had heard his plea, he realized, and it had come to nothing. Life in this stone cage beckoned as he looked up to the sun coming in the single window. Life. It would be a long one, probably a healthy one, and certainly a bleak one. His hands crumpled the paper when he'd finished the article. Damn the Spanish police. Damn the world.

   "Yes, I saw it on the news last night," he said into the phone as he shaved.

   "I need to see you. I have something to show you, sir," Popov's voice said, just after seven in the morning.

   The man thought about that. Popov was a clever bastard who'd done his jobs without much in the way of questions . . . and there was little in the way of a paper :rail, certainly nothing his lawyers couldn't handle if it cane to that, and it wouldn't. There were ways of dealing with Popov, too, if it came to that.

   "Okay, be there at eight-fifteen."

   "Yes, sir," the Russian said, hanging up.

   Pete was in real agony now, Killgore saw. It was tine to move him. This he ordered at once, and two orderlies came in dressed in upgraded protective gear to goal the wino onto a gurney for transport to the clinical side. Killgore followed them and his patient. The clinical side was essentially a duplication of the room in which the street bums had lounged and drunk their booze, waiting unknowingly for the onset of symptoms. He now had hem all, to the point that booze and moderate doses of morphine no longer handled the pain. The orderlies loaded Pete onto a bed, next to which was an electronically operated "Christmas tree" medication dispenser. Kilgore handled the stick, and got the IV plugged into Pete's major vein. Then he keyed the electronic box, and seconds later, the patient relaxed with a large bolus of medication The eyes went sleepy and the body relaxed while the Shiva continued to eat him alive from the inside out. Another IV would be set up to feed him with nutrients to keep his body going, along with various drugs to see if any of them had an unexpectedly beneficial effect on the Shiva. They had a whole roomful of such drugs, ranging from antibiotics-which were expected to be useless against this viral infection-to Interleukin-2 and a newly developed -3a, which, some thought, might help, plus tailored Shiva antibodies taken from experimental animals. None were expected to work, but all had to be tested to make sure they didn't, lest there be a surprise out there when the epidemic spread. Vaccine-B was expected to work, and that was being tested now with the new control group of people kidnapped from Manhattan bars, along with the notional Vaccine A, whose purpose was rather different from -B. The nanocapsules developed on the other side of the house would come in very handy indeed. As was being demonstrated even as he had the thought, looking down at Pete's dying body. Subject F4, Mary Bannister, felt sick to her stomach, just a mild queasiness at this point, but didn't think much of it. That sort of thing happened, and she didn't feel all that bad, some antacids would probably help, and those she got from her medicine cabinet, which was pretty well stocked with over the-counter medications. Other than that, she felt pretty mellow, as she smiled at herself in the mirror and liked what she saw, a youngish, attractive woman wearing pink silk jammies. With that thought, she walked out of her room, her hair glossy and a spring in her step. Chip was in the sitting room, reading a magazine slowly on the couch, and she made straight for him and sat down beside him

   "Hi, Chip." She smiled.

   "Hi, Mary." He smiled back, reaching to touch her hand.

   "I upped the Valium in her breakfast," Barbara Archer said in the control room, zooming the camera in. "Along with the other one." The other one was an inhibition reducer. "You look nice today," Chip told her, his words imperfectly captured by the hidden shotgun microphone.

   "Thank you." Another smile.

   "She looks pretty dreamy."

   "She ought to be," Barbara observed coldly. "There's enough in her to make a nun shuck her habit and get it on."

   "What about him?"

   "Oh, yeah, didn't give him any steroids." Dr. Archer had a little chuckle at that.

   In proof of which, Chip leaned over to kiss Mary on the lips. They were alone in the sitting room.

   "How's her blood work look, Barb?"

   "Loaded with antibodies, and starting to get some small bricks. She ought to be symptomatic in another few days."

   "Eat, drink, and be merry, people, for next week, you die," the other physician told the TV screen.

   "Too bad," Dr. Archer agreed. She showed the emotion one might display on seeing a dead dog at the side of the road.

   "Nice figure," the man said, as the pajama tops came off. "I haven't seen an X-rated movie in a longtime, Barb." A videotape was running, of course. The experimental protocol was set in stone. Everything had to be recorded so that the staff could monitor the entire test program. Nice tits, he thought, about the same time Chip did, right before he caressed them on the screen.

   "She was fairly inhibited when she got here. The tranquilizers really work, depressing them that way." Another clinical observation. Things progressed rapidly frond that point on. Both doctors sipped their coffee as they watched. Tranquilizers or not, the baser human instincts charged forward, and within five minutes Chip and Mary were humping madly away, with the usual sound elects, though the picture, blessedly, wasn't all that clear. A few minutes later, they were lying side by side on the thick shag rug, kissing tiredly and contentedly, his hand stroking her breasts, his eyes closed, his breathing deep and regular as he rolled onto his back.

   "Well, Barb, if nothing else, we have a pretty good weekend getaway for couples here," the man observed with a sly grin. "How long do you figure on his blood work?"

   "Three or four days until he starts showing antibodies, probably." Chip hadn't been exposed in the shower as Mary had.

   "What about the vaccine testers?"

   "Five with -A. We have three left as uncontaminated controls for -B testing."

   "Oh? Who are we letting live?"

   "M2, M3, and F9," Dr. Archer replied. "They seem to have proper attitudes. One's a member of the Sierra Club, would you believe? The others like it outdoors, and they should be okay with what we're doing."

   "Political criteria for scientific tests-what are we coming to?" the man asked with another chuckle.

   "Well, if they're going to live, they might as well be people we can get along with," Archer observed.

   "True." A nod. "How confident are you with -B?"

   "Very. I expect it to be about ninety-seven percent effective, perhaps a little better," she added conservatively.

   "But not a hundred?"

   "No, Shiva's a little too nasty for that," Archer told him. "The animal testing is a little crude, I admit, but the results follow the computer model almost exactly, well within the testing-error criteria. Steve's been pretty good on that side."

   "Berg's pretty smart," the other doctor agreed. Then he shifted in his chair. "You know, Barb, what we're doing here isn't exactly-"

   "I know that," she assured him. "But we all knew that coming in."

   "True." He nodded submission, annoyed at himself for the second thoughts. Well, his family would survive, and they all shared his love of the world and its many sorts of inhabitants. Still, these two people on the TV, they were humans, just like himself, and he'd just peeped in on them like some sort of pervert. Oh, yeah, they'd only done it because both were loaded with drugs fed to them through their food or in pill form, but they were both sentenced to death and

   "Relax, will you?" Archer said, looking at his face and reading his mind. "At least they're getting a little love, aren't they? That's a hell of a lot more than the rest of the world'll get-"

   "I won't have to watch them. " Being a voyeur wasn't his idea of fun, and he'd told himself often enough that he wouldn't have to watch what he'd be helping to start.

   "No, but we'll know about it. It'll be on the TV news, won't it? But then it will be too late, and if they find out, their last conscious act will be to come after us. That's -he part that has me worried."

   "The Project enclave in Kansas is pretty damned insecure, Barb," the man assured her. The one in Brazil's even more so." Which was where he'd be going eventually. The rain forest had always fascinated him.

   "Could be better," Barbara Archer thought.

   "The world isn't a laboratory, doctor, remember?" Wasn't that what the whole Shiva project was about, or Christ's sake? Christ? he wondered. Well, another ice a that had to be set aside. He wasn't cynical enough to invoke the name of God into what they were doing. Nature, perhaps, which wasn't quite the same thing, he thought.

   "Good morning, Dmitriy," he said, coming into his office early.

   "Good morning, sir," the intelligence officer said, rising to his feet as his employer entered the anteroom. It was a European custom, harkening back to royalty, and one that had somehow conveyed itself to the Marxist sate that had nurtured and trained the Russian now living in New York.

   "What do you have for me?" the boss asked, unlocking his office door and going in.

   "Something very interesting," Popov said. "How important it is I am not certain. You can better judge that than I can."

   "Okay, let's see it." He sat down and turned in his swivel chair to flip on his office coffee machine.

   Popov went to the far wall, and slid back the panel that covered the electronics equipment in the woodwork. He retrieved the remote control and keyed up the large-screen TV and VCR. Then he inserted a videocassette.

   "This is the news coverage of Bern," he told his employer. The tape only ran for thirty seconds before he stopped it, ejected the cassette, and inserted another. "Vienna," he said then, hitting the PLAY button. Another segment, which ran less than a minute. This he also ejected. "Last night at the park in Spain." This one he also played. This segment lasted just over a minute before he stopped it.

   "Yes?" the man said, when it was all over.

   "What did you see, sir?"

   "Some guys smoking – the same guy, you're saying"

   "Correct. In all three incidents, the same man, or so it would appear."

   "Go on," his employer told Popov.

   "The same special-operations group responded to and terminated all three incidents. That is very interesting."

   "Why?"

   Popov took a patient breath. This man may have been a genius in some areas, but in others he was a babe in the woods. "Sir, the same team responded to incidents in three separate countries, with three separate national police forces, and in all three cases, this special team took over from those three separate national police agencies and dealt with the situation. In other words, there is now some special internationally credited team of special-operations troops-I would expect them to be military rather than policemen currently operating in Europe. Such a group has never been admitted to in the open press. It is, therefore, a `black' group, highly secret. I can speculate that it is a NATO team of some sort, but that is only speculation. Now," Popov went on, "I have some questions for you."

   "Okay." The boss nodded.

   "Did you know of this team? Did you know they existed?"

   A shake of the head. "No." Then he turned to pour a cup of coffee.

   "Is it possible for you to find out some things about them?"

   A shrug. "Maybe. Why is it important?"

   "That depends on another question-why are you paying me to incite terrorists to do things?" Popov asked.

   "You do not have a need to know that, Dmitriy."

   "Yes, sir, I do have such a need. One cannot stage operations against sophisticated opposition without having some idea of the overall objective. It simply cannot be done, sir. Moreover, you have applied significant assets to these operations. There must be a point. I need to know what it is." The unspoken part, which got through the words, was that he wanted to know, and in due course, he might well figure it out, whether he was told or not.

   It also occurred to his employer that his existence was somewhat in pawn to this Russian ex-spook. He could deny everything the man might say in an open public forum, and he even had the ability to make the man disappear, an option less attractive than it appeared outside of a movie script, since Popov might well have told others, or even left a written record.

   The bank accounts from which Popov had drawn the funds he'd distributed were thoroughly laundered, of course, but there was a trail of sorts that a very clever and thorough investigator might be able to trace back closely enough to him to cause some minor concern. The problem with electronic banking was that there was always a trail of electrons, and bank records were both time stamped and amount-specific, enough to make some connection appear to exist. That could be an embarrassment of large or small order. Worse, it wasn't something he could easily afford, but a hindrance to the larger mission now under way in places as diverse as New York, Kansas, and Brazil. And Australia, of course, which was the whole point of what he was doing.

   "Dmitriy, will you let me think about that?"

   "Yes, sir. Of course. I merely say that if you want me to do my job effectively, I need to know more. Surely you have other people in your confidence. Show these tapes to those people and see if they think the information is significant." Popov stood. "Call me when you need me, sir."

   "Thanks for the information." He waited for the door to close, then dialed a number from memory. The phone rang four times before it was answered:

   "Hi," a voice said in the earpiece. "You've reached the home of Bill Henriksen.Sorry, I can't make it to the phone right now. Why don't you try my office."

   "Damn," the executive said. Then he had an idea, and picked up the remote for his TV. CBS, no, NBC, no.. .

   "But to kill a sick child," the host said on ABC's Good Morning, America.

   "Charlie, a long time ago, a guy named Lenin said that the purpose of terrorism was to terrorize. That's who they are, and that's what they do. It's still a dangerous world out there, maybe even more so today that there are no nation-states who, though they used to support terrorists, actually imposed some restraints on their behavior. Those restraints are gone now," Henriksen said. "This group reportedly wanted their old friend Carlos the Jackal released from prison. Well, it didn't work, but it's worth noting that they cared enough to try a classic terrorist mission, to secure the release of one of their own. Fortunately, the mission failed, thanks to the Spanish police."

   "How would you evaluate the police performance?"

   "Pretty good. They all train out of the same playbook, of course, and the best of them cross-train at Fort Bragg or at Herefordin England, and other places, Germany and Israel, for example."

   "But one hostage was murdered."

   "Charlie, you can't stop them all," the expert said sadly. "You can be ten feet away with a loaded weapon in your hands, and sometimes you can't take action, because to do so would only get more hostages killed. I'm as sickened by that murder as you are, my friend, but these people won't be doing any more of that."

   "Well, thanks for coming in. Bill Henriksen, president of Global Security and a consultant to ABC on terrorism. It's forty-six minutes after the hour." Cut to commercial.

   In his desk he had Bill's beeper number. This he called, keying in his private line. Four minutes later, the phone rang.

   "Yeah, John, what is it?" There was street noise on the cellular phone. Henriksen must have been outside the ABC studio, just off Central Park West, probably walking to his car.

   "Bill, I need to see you in my office ASAP. Can you come right down?"

   "Sure. Give me twenty minutes."

   Henriksen had a clicker to get into the building's garage, and access to one of the reserved spaces. He walked into the office eighteen minutes after the call.

   "What gives?"

   "Caught you on TV this morning."

   "They always call me in on this stuff," Henriksen said. "Great job taking the bastards down, least from what the TV footage showed. I'll get the rest of it."

   "Oh?"

   "Yeah, I have the right contacts. The video they released was edited down quite a bit. My people'll get all the tapes from the Spanish-it isn't classified in any way-for analysis."

   "Watch this," John told him, flipping his office TV to the VCR and running the released tape of Worldpark. Then he had to rise and switch to the cassette of Vienna. Thirty seconds of that and then Bern. "So, what do you think?"

   "The same team on all three?" Henriksen wondered aloud. "Sure does look like it-but who the hell are they?"

   "You know who Popov is, right?"

   Bill nodded. "Yeah, the KGB guy you found. Is he the guy who twigged to this?"

   "Yep." A nod. "Less than an hour ago, he was in here to show me these tapes. It worries him. Does it worry you?"

   The former FBI agent grimaced. "Not sure. I'd want to know more about them first."

   "Can you find out?"

   This time he shrugged. "I can talk to some contacts, rattle a few bushes. Thing is, if there is a really black special-ops team out there, I should have known about it already. I mean, I've got the contacts throughout the business. What about you?"

   "I can probably try a few things, quietly. Probably mask it as plain curiosity."

   "Okay, I can check around. What else did Popov say to you?"

   "He wants to know why I'm having him do the things."

   "That's the problem with spooks. They like to know things. I mean, he's thinking, what if he starts a mission and one of the subjects gets taken alive. Very often they sing like fucking canaries once they're in custody, John. If one fingers him, he could be in the shitter. Unlikely, I admit, but possible, and spooks are trained to be cautious."

   "What if we have to take him out?"

   Another grimace. "You want to be careful doing that, in case he's left a package with a friend somewhere. No telling if he has, but I'd have to assume he's done it. Like I said, they're trained to be cautious. This operation is not without its dangers, John. We knew that going in. How close are we to having the technical-"

   "Very close. The test program is moving along nicely Another month or so and we'll know all we need to know."

   "Well, all I have to do is get the contract for Sydney I'm flying down tomorrow. These incidents won't hurt."

   "Who will you be working with?"

   "The Aussies have their own SAS. It's supposed to be small-pretty well-trained, but short on the newest hardware. That's the hook I plan to use. I got what they need, at cost," Henriksen emphasized. "Run that tape again, the one of the Spanish job," he said.

   John rose from his desk, inserted the tape, and rewound it back to the beginning of the released TV coverage. It showed the assault team zip-lining down from the helicopter.

   "Shit, I missed that!" the expert admitted.

   "What?"

   "We need to have the tape enhanced, but that doesn't look like a police chopper. It's a Sikorsky H-G0."

   "So, the -60 has never been certified for civilian use. See how it's got POLICE painted on the side? That's a civilian application. It isn't a police chopper, John. It's military . . . and if this is a refueling probe," he said, pointing, "then it's a special-ops bird. That means U.S. Air Force, man. That also tells us where these people are based-"

   "Where?"

   "England. The Air Force has a special-ops wing based in Europe, part in Germany, part in England . . . MH-60K, I think the designation of the chopper is, made for combat search-and-rescue and getting people into special places to do special things. Hey, your friend Popov is right. There is a special bunch of people handling these things, and they've got American support at least, maybe a lot more. Thing is, who the hell are they?"

   "It's important?"

   "Potentially, yes. What if the Aussies call them in to help out on the job I'm trying to get, John" That could screw up the whole thing."

   "You rattle your bushes. I'll rattle mine."

   "Right."

CHAPTER 17
BUSHES

   Pete now had six friends in the treatment center. Only two of the subjects felt well enough now to remain in the open bay with the TV cartoons and the whiskey, and Killgore figured they'd be in here by the end of the week, so full was their blood with Shiva antibodies. It was odd how the disease attacked different people in such different ways, but everyone had a different immune system. That was why some people got cancer, and others did not despite smoking and other methods of self-abuse.

   Aside from that, it was going easier than he'd expected. He supposed it was due to the high doses of morphine that had all of them pretty well zonked out. It was a relatively new discovery in medicine that there really wasn't a maximum safe dosage of painkillers. If the patient still felt pain, you could give more until it went away. Dose levels that would cause respiratory arrest in healthy people were perfectly safe for those in great pain, and that made his job far easier. Every drug-dispensing machine had a button the subjects could hit if they needed it, and so they were medicating themselves into peaceful oblivion, which also made things safer for the staffs, who didn't have to do all that many sticks. They hung nutrients on the trees, checked to make sure the IVs were secure, and avoided touching the subjects as much as possible. Later today, they'd all get injected with Vaccine-B, which was supposed to safeguard them against Shiva with a high degree of reliability-Steve Berg said 98 to 99 percent. They all knew that wasn't the same as 100 percent, though, and so the protective measures would be continued.

   Agreeably, there was little sympathy for the subjects. Picking winos off the street had been a good call. The next set of test subjects would appear more sympathetic, but everyone in this side of the building had been fully briefed Much of what they did might be distasteful, but it would still be done.

   "You know, sometimes I think the Earth First people are right," Kevin Mayflower said in the Palm restaurant.

   "Oh? How so?" Carol Brightling asked.

   The president of the Sierra Club looked into his wine. "We destroy everything we touch. The shores, the tidal wetlands, the forests-look at what `civilization' has done to them all. Oh, sure, we preserve some areas-and that's what? A hot three percent, maybe? Big fucking deal. We're poisoning everything, including ourselves. The ozone problem is really getting worse, according to the new NASA study."

   "Yeah, but did you hear about the proposed fix?" the President's science advisor asked.

   "Fix? How?"

   She grimaced. "Well, you get a bunch of jumbo jets, fill them up with ozone, fly them out of Australia, and release ozone at high altitude to patch it up. I have that proposal on my desk right now."

   "And?"

   "And it's like doing abortions at half-time in a football game, with instant replay and color commentary. No way it can possibly work. We have to let the planet heal herself – but we won't, of course."

   "Any more good news?"

   "Oh, yeah, the CO, issue. There's a guy up at Harvard who says if we dump iron filings into the Indian Ocean, we can encourage the growth of phytoplankton, and that will fix the CID, problem almost overnight. The math looks pretty good. All these geniuses who say they can fix the planet, like she needs fixing instead of leaving her the hell alone."

   "And the President says what?" Mayflower asked.

   "He says for me to tell him if it'll work or not, and if it looks like it's going to work, then test it to make sure, then try it for real. He hasn't got a clue, and he doesn't listen." She didn't add that she had to follow his orders whether she liked them or not.

   "Well, maybe our friends at Earth First are right, Carol. Maybe we are a parasitic species on the face of the earth, and maybe we're going to destroy the whole damned planet before we're done."

   "Rachel Carson come to life, eh?" she asked.

   "Look, you know the science as well as I do – maybe better. We're doing things like-like the Alvarez Event that took the dinosaurs out, except we're doing it willfully. It took how long for the planet to recover from that?"

   "Alvarez? The planet didn't recover, Kevin," Carol Brightling pointed out. "It jump-started mammals-us, remember? The preexisting ecological order never returned. Something new happened, and that took a couple of million years just to stabilize." Must have been something to see, she told herself. To watch something like that in progress, what a scientific and personal blessing it must have been, but there'd probably been nobody back then to appreciate it. Unlike today.

   "Well, in a few more years we'll get to see the first part of it, won't we? How many more species will we kill of this year, and if the ozone situation keeps getting worse – my God, Carol, why don't people get it? Don't they see what's happening? Don't they care?"

   "Kevin, no, they don't see, and, no, they don't care. Look around." The restaurant was filled with important people wearing important-looking clothes, doubtless discussing important things over their important dinners, none of which had a thing to do with the planetary crisis that hung quite literally over all their heads. If the ozone layer really evaporated, as it might, well, they'd start using sunblock just to walk the streets, and maybe that would protect them enough . . . but what of the natural species. the birds, the lizards, all the creatures on the planet who had no such option? The studies suggested that their eyes would be seared by the unblocked ultraviolet radiation, which would kill them off, and so the entire global ecosystem would rapidly come apart. "Do you think any of these people know about it-or give a damn if they do?"

   "I suppose not." He sipped down some more of his white wine. "Well, we keep plugging away, don't we?"

   "It's funny," she went on. "Not too long ago we fought wars, which kept the population down enough that we couldn't damage the planet all that much-– but now peace is breaking out all over, and we're advancing our industrial capacity, and so, peace is destroying us a lot more efficiently than war ever did. Ironic, isn't it?"

   "And modern medicine. The anopheles mosquito was pretty good at keeping the numbers down-you know that Washington was once a malarial swamp, diplomats deemed it a hazardous-duty post! So then we invented DDT. Good for controlling mosquitoes, but tough on the peregrine falcon. We never get it right. Never," Mayflower concluded.

   "What if? . . ." she asked wistfully.

   "What if what, Carol?"

   "What if nature came up with something to knock the human population back?°"

   "The Gaea Hypothesis?" That made him smile. The idea was that the earth was itself a thinking, self-correcting organism that found ways to regulate the numerous living species that populated the planet. "Even if that's valid-and I hope it is, really – I'm afraid that we humans move too fast for Gaea to deal with us and our work. No, Carol, we've created a suicide pact, and we're going to take down everything else with us, and a hundred years from now, when the human population worldwide is down to a million or so people, they'll know what went wrong and read the books and look at the videotapes of the paradise we once had, and they'll curse our names-and maybe, if they're lucky, they'll learn from it when they crawl back up from the slime. Maybe. I doubt it. Even if they try to learn, they'll worry more about building nuclear power reactors so they can use their electric toothbrushes. Rachel was right. There will be a Silent Spring someday, but then it'll be too late." He picked at his salad, wondering what chemicals were in the lettuce and tomatoes. Some, he was sure. This time of year, the lettuce came up from Mexico, where farmers did all sorts of things to their crops, and maybe the kitchen help had washed it off, but maybe not, and so here he was, eating an expensive lunch and poisoning himself as surely as he was watching the whole planet being poisoned. His quietly despairing look told the tale. He was ready to be recruited, Carol Brightling thought.

   It was time. And he'd bring some good people with him, and they'd have room for them in Kansas and Brazil. Half an hour later, she took her leave, and headed back to the White House for the weekly cabinet meeting.

   "Hey, Bill," Gus said from his office in the Hoover Building. "What's happening?"

   "Catch the TV this morning" Henriksen asked.

   "You mean the thing in Spain?" Werner asked.

   "Yep."

   "Sure did. I saw you on the tube, too."

   "My genius act." He chuckled. "Well, it's good for business, you know?"

   "Yeah, I suppose it is. Anyway, what about it?"

   "That wasn't the Spanish cops, Gus. I know how they train. Not their style, man. So, who was it, Delta, SAS, HRT?"

   Gus Werner's eyes narrowed. Now Assistant Director of the FBI, he'd once been the special agent in charge of the FBI's elite Hostage Rescue Team. Promoted out, he'd been Special Agent in Charge of the Atlanta field division, and now was the AD in charge of the new Terrorism Division. Bill Henriksen had once worked for him, then left the Bureau to start his own consulting company, but once FBI always FBI, and so now, Bill was fishing for information.

   "I really can't talk much about that one, buddy."

   "Oh?"

   "Oh? Yes. Can't discuss," Werner said tersely.

   "Classification issues?"