'He'll make it, John.' Chavez rubbed his hand over the night's growth of beard. The three of them plus quite a few others had spent the night reviewing everything CIA had on terrorist groups. 'We have to do something about this, guys. This is an act of war.' His voice was devoid of accent now, as it tended to be when he got serious enough to call on his education instead of his L.A. origins.
'We don't know much. Hell,' the DDO said, 'we don't know anything yet.'
'Shame he couldn't have taken one alive.' This observation, to the surprise of the two others, came from Clark.
'He probably didn't have much of a chance to snap the cuffs on the guy,' Ding replied.
'True.' Clark lifted the set of crime-scene photos that had been couriered over from the FBI just after midnight. He'd worked the Middle East, and it had been hoped that he might have recognized a face, but he hadn't. Mainly he'd learned that whichever FBI puke had been inside, the gent could shoot as well as he ever had. Lucky man, to have been there, to have had that chance, and to take it.
'Somebody's taking one hell of a big chance,' John said.
'That's a fact,' Mary Pat agreed automatically, but then they all wondered about it.
The question was not how big the chance was, but rather how big the chance was perceived to be by whoever had tossed the dice. The nine terrorists had all been throwaways, as surely marked for death as the Hezbol-lah fanatics who'd gone strolling down Israeli streets in clothing made by DuPont—that was the CIA joke about it, though in fact the plastic explosives had probably come from the Skoda Works in the former Czechoslovakia. 'Not-so-smart bombs' was the other in-house sobriquet. Had they really believed that they could pull it off? The problem with some of the fanatics was that they didn't weigh things very well… maybe they hadn't even cared.
That was also the problem of those who sent them. This mission had been different, after all. Ordinarily, terrorists boasted widely of what they did, however odious the act, and at CIA and elsewhere they'd waited for fifteen hours for the press release. But it never came, and if it hadn't by now, then it never would. If they didn't make the release, then they didn't want anyone to know. But that was an illusion. Terrorists always proclaimed their acts, but they didn't always appreciate that police agencies could figure things out anyway.
Nation-states knew better, or were supposed to. Okay, fine, the dealers hadn't had anything that could identify their point of origin—or so some might think. But Mary Pat was under no such illusions. The FBI was better than good, good enough that the Secret Service was letting the Bureau handle all of the forensics. And so it was likely that whoever had initiated the mission might actually expect that the story would eventually unravel. Knowing that— probably—they'd gone ahead with it anyway. If this line of speculation were true, then—
'Part of something else?' Clark asked. 'Not a standalone. Something else, too.'
'Maybe,' Mary Pat observed.
'If it is, it's big,' Chavez went on for them. 'Maybe that's why the Russians called in to us.'
'So big… so big that even if we figure it out, it won't matter when we do.'
'That's pretty big, Mary Pat,' Clark said quietly. 'What could it be…?'
'Something permanent, something we can't change after it's done,' Domingo offered. His time at George Mason University hadn't been wasted.
Mrs. Foley wished her husband were in on this, but Ed was meeting with Murray right now.
SATURDAYS IN THE spring are often days of dull but hopeful routine, but in just over two hundred homes little was done. Gardens were not planted. Cars were not washed. Garage sales were not attended. Paint cans went unopened. That wasn't counting government employees or news personnel working the big story of the week. Mainly the people suffering from the flu were men. Thirty of them were in hotel rooms. Several even tried to work, attending their trade shows in the new cities. Wiping their faces, blowing their noses, and wishing the aspirin or Tylenol would kick in. Of the last group, most went back to the hotel rooms to relax—no sense in getting the customers sick, was there? In not a single case did anyone seek medical attention. There was the usual winter/spring flu bug circulating around, and everybody got it sooner or later. They weren't that sick, after all, were they?
NEWS COVERAGE OF the incident at Giant Steps was entirely predictable, starting with camera shots taken from about fifty yards away, and the same words repeated by all of the correspondents, followed by the same words delivered by «experts» in terrorism and/or other fields. One of the networks took the viewer all the way back to Abraham Lincoln for no other reason than that it was otherwise a very slow news day. All of the coverage pointed to the Middle East, though the investigating agencies had declined any comment at all on the event so far, except to cite an FBI agent's heroic interference and the spirited battle put up by the Secret Service bodyguards of little Katie Ryan. Words like 'heroic,' 'dedicated,' and «determined» were bandied about with great frequency, leading to the 'dramatic conclusion.'
Something very simple had gone wrong, Badrayn was certain, though he wouldn't know for sure until his colleague got back to Tehran from London, via Brussels and Vienna, on several different sets of travel documents.
'The President and his family are at the Presidential Retreat at Camp David,' the reporter concluded, 'to recover from the shock of this dreadful event just north of peaceful Annapolis, Maryland. This is…'
'Retreat?' Daryaei asked.
'It means many things in English, first among them is to run away,' Badrayn answered, mainly because he was sure that's what his employer would like to hear.
'If he thinks he can run away from me, he is mistaken,' the cleric observed in dark amusement, the spirit of the moment getting the better of his discretion.
Badrayn didn't react to the revelation. It was easy at the instant of his realization, since he was looking at the TV and not at his host, but things then became more clear. There was not all that much risk at all, was there? Mah-moud Ilaji had a way to kill this man, perhaps whenever he wished to do so, and it was all being orchestrated. Could he really do it? But, of course, he already had.
IVIS MADE LIFE hard on the OpFor. Not all that hard! Colonel Hamm and the Blackhorse had won this one, but what only a year before would have been a wipeout of cosmic proportions—Fort Irwin was in California, and some linguistic peculiarities were inevitable—had been a narrow victory. War was about information. It was always the lesson of the National Training Center: Find the enemy. Don't let the enemy find you. Reconnaissance. Reconnaissance. Reconnaissance. The IVIS system, operated by halfway competent people, shot the information out to everyone so fast that the soldiers were leaning in the right direction even before the orders came down. That had nearly negated a maneuver on the OpFor's part, which would have been worthy of Erwin Rommel on his best day, and as he watched the fast-play of the exercise on the big screen in the Star Wars Room, Hamm saw just how close it had been. If one of those Blue Force tank companies had moved just five minutes faster, he would have lost this one, too. The NTC would surely lose its effectiveness if the Good Guys won regularly.
'That was a beautiful move, Hamm,' the colonel of the Carolina Guard admitted, reaching in his pocket for a cigar and handing it over. 'But we'll whip your ass tomorrow.'
Ordinarily, he would have smiled and said, Sure you will. But the cracker son of a bitch just might pull it off, and that would take a lot of the fun out of Hamm's life. The colonel of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment would now have to come up with ways of spoofing IVIS. It was something he'd thought about, and had been the subject of a few discussions over beers with his operations officer, but so far they had only agreed that it was no small feat, probably involving dummy vehicles… like Rommel had used. He'd have to get funding for those. He walked outside to smoke his cigar. It had been honorably won. He found the Guard colonel there, too.
'For Guardsmen, you're pretty damned good,' Hamm had to admit. He'd never said such a thing to a Guard formation before. He rarely said it to anyone at all. Except for one deployment error, the Blue Force plan had been a thing of beauty.
'Thank you for saying that, Colonel. IVIS came as a rude surprise, didn't it?'
'You might say that.'
'My people love it. A lot come in on their own time to play on the simulators. Hell, I'm surprised you took us on this one.'
'Your reserve was too close in,' Hamm told him. 'You thought you knew what to exploit. Instead, I caught you out of position to meet my counterattack.' It wasn't a revelation. The senior observer/controller had made that lesson clear to the momentarily contrite tank commander.
'I'll try to remember that. Catch the news?'
