Thomas Hoover - Project Cyclops

"You've got it. I want you to get in there fast, take down the hostiles, and get this situation the hell over with. That's the best way to put this problem behind us and fast. The last thing this man's army needs is a month's worth of gory headlines. Some quick casualties can look unavoidable and be over with in a day. A long-drawn-out situation can make us all look like jerks."

"I can't believe I'm hearing this."

"You didn't hear a damned thing, at least not from me. But if you know what's good for the Army, and for the country, you'll get in there and take down the place in a morning, neutralize the hostiles with extreme prejudice, and let the Army write the headlines with a press release."

Nichols knew what he was hearing: the groundwork for "deniability." And he despised it. This kind of "cover your ass" bullshit was one of the things that gave him such contempt for desk jockeys.

"All right," he said smoothly, covering his disgust, "if you want to play it that way, then we can sure as hell do it. I don't suppose my opinion in the matter is of a hell of a lot of interest to the Pentagon."

"Truthfully, no."

"Okay." He leaned back. "Doing it the Pentagon's way, there would be two points we need to assault. There's the computer control center, and then there's the launch facility. There're probably terrorists at both, so we've got to take down both locations simultaneously. And both, unfortunately, are underground, which also means we've got to figure out how to get in, get down there, and do it fast."

"What would be your insertion strategy, given what we've just discussed?"

"Well, I've already got the alternatives rehearsed. Right now I think we should stage a diversionary landing on the coast by a SEAL team, then use the confusion to let the main assault team insert from choppers. My main worry is not the hostages, but getting my own boys shot up going in. It's going to be a cluster-fuck if some of those bastards can get a bead on the task force that's arriving by chopper. Could mean a lot of casualties. Let something go wrong and I don't even want to think about how many of my men could get chewed up. But we've been rehearsing that assault option and I think we can get twenty men on the ground in about ninety seconds."

The difference, he was thinking, was that he had been planning to do it under cover of darkness. To suddenly have to revise the entire strategy and try and take down the place in broad daylight was calling every assumption into question. But there was no time to try and devise yet another assault. Shit. All because Washington kept changing its signals, and when it did get them straight, somebody came up with this bullshit about minimizing property damage. It was a goddamn outrage. But that's what you had to expect when REMFs got mixed up in planning an op. Shit.

"Well, twenty men should do it," Austin said. "And there'll always be backup from the SEAL team that's providing the coastal diversion. They'll be there, in-theater so to speak."

"Right." You don't know fuck-all about how an op like this goes down, Nichols was thinking, and you have the balls to sit there and tell me how to deploy my resources.

On the other hand, it sounds easy. Too easy. That's what's wrong with it. The place would appear to be a crackerbox. But these bastards are pros, so they must already have thought through everything we have. Time to plan ahead of them.

"All right," Nichols concluded, rising. "I'll have everybody airborne in fifteen minutes."

Vance twisted around and tried to see his watch. He couldn't make out the hands, but they both seemed to be pointing in the general direction of down. Whatever that meant exactly, the time had to be getting on toward dawn. The six hours that Cally had talked about, the six hours left before the liftoff: how much of that time was left? It had to be half gone.

What now? Maybe his cock-and-bull story had impressed the French hood enough to get him out of the room for a while, but it wasn't going to cut any ice with anybody who knew anything about lasers. Sooner or later, he was going to come back. Not something to let the mind dwell on.

One thing was sure: he felt like he had been run over by a truck. The blood from the beating was slowly starting to coagulate, crusting on his face. It had begun to itch, and something where his liver used to be was emitting stabbing bursts of pain. It would come, then subside, then come again. He tried to focus his eyes on the room, the piles of empty crates, wondering if maybe a sharp object was protruding somewhere, maybe something he could use to cut away at the cord that held his hands.

Nothing, and it was a stupid idea anyway, left over from too many B movies. But now his mind was beginning to attempt to function with a little more rationality, and along with that came the glimmerings of an idea. The bomb was aboard one of the vehicles and a countdown was under way, now being handled by Bill's supercomputer. There was no obvious way to stop it. Maybe, however, there was a not-so-obvious way. A last-minute reprieve. Assuming he ever got the chance.

He groaned and leaned back, wondering…

What happened next came so fast he couldn't really comprehend it at the time. Only later could he roughly reconstruct the dizzying confluence of events. But that was as it should have been. The door was suddenly slammed wide, and two smoke grenades plummeted into the room, followed by a flash grenade. Next, through the smoke and confusion three men dressed in black pullovers plunged through the opening and dropped to their knees, MP5s at the ready.

Jesus! He gasped for breath, blinded by the flash grenade but still trying to see through the billowing CS that was engulfing everything. In what seemed like less than a second, one of the men appeared by his side, and he saw a knife blade flash. A hand was slapped over his mouth as another rough set of hands yanked him from the chair. His legs were numb from the bindings, but they came alive as his weight went back onto them. Terra firma had never felt better.

The men's faces were all covered in balaclavas, but one of them gave two sharp clicks and, on that signal, they began to drag him out the door.

He knew better than to say a word. The whole operation had been carried out with clockwork precision and in perfect silence-except for the destruction of the door. Had there been any terrorists in the room, they would have been dead, scarcely knowing what had happened.

As they entered the hallway, one of the men pulled back his antismoke hood. "You look like hell," Willem Voorst said. "Can you walk?"

"In a manner of speaking." He felt pain shooting up through his wobbly legs. "I suppose I should ask what took you so long, only it hurts to talk. You weren't scheduled in for another day. What happened?"

"We moved up the timetable, though you'd be amazed how many people didn't want us to show up," Marcel remarked, his Belgian calm returning. “The entire U.S. Navy, to be exact. We were made to feel very unwanted."

“That's going to seem like a Welcome Wagon compared to what's coming up." He paused and tried to inhale the comparatively smokeless air of the hallway. "What's the plan? Do you want to try and take out Launch Control, or do you want to move on Command?…" That was when he saw Cally. "How did you get down here?"

"Somebody had to lead these guys in," she said matter-of- factly. Her face was scratched and her shirt torn. "No thanks to you. All we have to thank you for is blowing up the gantry"

He just groaned. "Things got complicated."

"But you waited until it moved over the explosive before you blew it. I saw the whole thing. How could you be so crazy!" Her anger was boiling. "That wasn't what we agreed to."

"Like I said, things-"