At the bottom, he pulled the caribinari sergeant’s hat from his pocket and jammed it onto his head, completing the look. It was not perfect, but it would do. He took a few deep breaths, clearing his thoughts. When he took the next step and opened the door, he had to be in character. Mustaf was now a harried Lisbon police sergeant suddenly on the front line of a terrorist attack in his peaceful city.
A door on the floor below smashed open. Two figures in black combat garb dove through.
Bulky armored vests and heavy helmets hid their features from Mustaf, but he could easily see that these were the first members of the SWAT team, making their way up the stairs to cut off his escape. Their M-16 rifles danced like deadly cobras as the pair darted forward. Two more team members dove through the door immediately behind them.
Mustaf smiled. These men would be easy prey. One well-placed grenade would take them all out. Either they didn’t listen or they were trained by amateurs. Professionals didn’t bunch up so they could all die with a single stroke.
Mustaf leaned down the stairwell just enough so the lead gunner could see the uniform and yelled, “Hurry, before they get away. Apartments on the third floor. Hurry!” He waved vaguely upward.
Mustaf barely dared to breathe. He had just about exhausted his command of Portuguese. If the SWAT team stopped to interrogate him, they would easily detect the imposter. His hand dropped involuntarily to caress the butt of the 9mm Beretta in its shiny patent leather holster. He consciously pulled his hand away from the pitiful little weapon. These four would turn him into chopped meat before he fired the first round.
The SWAT team dashed past him with barely a glance as they headed to the ambush.
Mustaf walked slowly down the stairs and out the door. Bright morning sun greeted him as he exited the building that was meant to be his tomb. He slowly strolled down the alley, past the line of police vehicles and out onto the boulevard. American armored cars blocked off both ends. Combat garbed Marines stood behind the vehicles and crouched behind the tall palm trees in the center of the boulevard, their eyes fixed on the smoking apartment. No one even glanced at the caribinari sergeant as he slowly trudged down the sidewalk and rounded the corner.
Mustaf’s mind was seething. Everything was changed. There was no going back to the PLO now. It was time for a larger game. The Palestinians could worry about the trivialities of their homeland. It was time for him to free the Moslem world from the tyranny of the American Empire. If he could just make it out of Lisbon and slip across to Libya, Mustaf knew how he would do it. It was all so easy when Allah revealed his plan.
2
01 Jun 1998, 0930LT (31 May, 2330Z)
General Liu Pen sat back and listened. The briefing was excruciatingly boring, as usual. Every minor diplomat or small time spymaster laboring in the employ of the Peoples Republic of China seemed to find it vital to report every useless tidbit of information they stumbled across. They didn’t seem to realize that the director of Peoples Army Intelligence Corp had important duties to attend to.
Located deep under Tiannamen Square, The Central Command of the Peoples Intelligence Service was not listed on the tourist guide for Beijing. The concrete bunkers, secretly constructed during the sixties, could withstand a full blown nuclear assault from either the Americans or the Russians. Chairman Mao could never quite decide which was the greater threat. Their function to protect China’s leaders against nuclear annihilation was largely obsolete, but the bunkers had a new purpose. The massive concrete walls and tons of earth above shielded his command center from any prying eyes. No electronic sensor, no matter how sophisticated and sensitive, could reach here.
From this hidden location, his tendrils reached out to all of Asia and beyond; sifting each tiny bit of intelligence; sorting, evaluating, filing every morsel. And General Liu Pen sat at the center of the spider web.
Liu Pen’s eyes drifted away from the briefer and toward the map of Asia, nearly filling the wall to his left. China, of course, dominated the central part of the map, but Liu Pen focused further to the South, to the broad underbelly of Asia.
For untold centuries China’s threat had been to the North and West. First from hordes of Mongol barbarians swarming across the empty plains, then from the Russians with their tanks and missiles. In today’s world, those threats were gone. The danger was from the South. It was from an odd mixture of Western capitalist economic power and fundamentalist Islamic poverty mixed in the stewing cauldron of the tropics. But, in that boiling mix of greed, hunger, and hate, Liu Pen saw an irresistible opportunity. It was not without risk, but a prize so valuable was worth some risk.
The General sat back and gazed at the map, lost in thought. The giant fans, barely whispering, drew the outside air in, and after filtering it through several levels of defense, delivered a gentle zephyr of jasmine scented air across Liu Pen’s cheeks.
“Our friend in Libya has reported in.” The briefer finished one subject and moved on to the next.
Liu Pen shifted slightly and turned his stare back toward the briefer. This was a subject that he was interested in. The briefer hesitated before he continued the briefing, almost as if he was tantalizing the General with a
