Thomas Hoover - Project Cyclops

That didn't make any sense. Bill's project was commercial; it had no military value. Or at least none he could imagine.

But now he had only one thing on his mind. He secured his life vest tighter and held on to the mast, the salty Aegean in his face. The current was taking him due south, the same direction the chopper had headed.

"Damn it!" Ramirez looked down at the weapons' readouts. "Did you have the Swatter armed? The system should have been off. If it was on, he could have detonated it by impact."

Peretz stared a second longer at the wreckage of the vessel below, then glanced back at his instruments and paled. "I thought it was… it must have malfunctioned. No fucking way-"

"Carelessness. Stupid carelessness." Ramirez bent his head and examined the wing, then checked the status readouts on the weapons system. "We lost the starboard rocket pod, too."

Peretz took one look and realized it was true. The rocket pod had been shorn away, leaving the tangled metal of the wing completely bare. But the Hind did not need its wings for stability; they were merely for armaments.

"Well, so what? I wasted the fucker, whoever he was." He tried a smile, sending a web of lines through his tan as the lights of the weapons panel played across his face. It was the way he always disguised nervousness.

Damn you, Ramirez was thinking. An Israeli cowboy. I would kill you on the spot except that I need you. It was an arrogant mistake, and I can't let it happen again. It won't happen again.

He turned and moved back up to the cockpit. "What's our status?"

"Sideslip is nominal," Salim reported grimly, his dark eyes glancing down at the churning sea only a couple of hundred meters below them. "I think we're going to be all right."

"We have just had an example of how an oversight can destroy an operation," Ramirez declared, turning back to the main cabin. "We will not succeed if we get careless, lose discipline. I have planned this operation down to the last small detail. You have all been briefed, over and over." He paused and examined the men. Sometimes he felt as if he were lecturing children, but these were no children. "Each of you knows what his job is. I expect you to do it with exactness and precision. The next oversight anyone here makes will be his last. Am I understood?"

There was silence, then finally a voice came from the litters in the darkened cabin aft, barely audible above the roar of the twin engines. It was Jean-Paul Moreau, the Frenchman. He hated flying, and he particularly hated flying with an Iranian at the controls.

"What the hell happened?"

"Someone on… presumably a raft of some kind. We took a couple of rounds of small-arms fire." He glanced back, making sure his voice reached Peretz in the weapons station. "The last Swatter was left turned on, armed, and it must have been hit. Probably the detonator. A stupid oversight."

"Looks like the mistake was mine," came the voice of Peretz, trying, unsuccessfully, to sound contrite. "Can't win them all, baby."

Back to his smart-ass self, Ramirez thought, still gritting his teeth in anger. But he pushed it aside. "Forget it. In this business you only look back if you can profit from your mistakes. We just learned what happens when we forget our mission. The matter is closed."

"Now"-he returned his attention to the main cabin- "when we set down at the facility, I expect total discipline. Nothing less will be tolerated. Is that understood?" He motioned Peretz out of the weapons station and took his place there.

Would these men hold together the way he required? As he looked them over, he felt confident. He had had enough experience to smell success.

Sabri Ramirez had definitely been around the track. Born in Venezuela almost half a century earlier, the son of a prominent Marxist lawyer, he had become an ardent revolutionary by age twenty. At twenty-five he went off to Cuba, but it was only later, while attending Patrice Lumumba University in the Soviet Union, that he discovered his true ideological core -it turned out he actually despised "the oppressed of the earth," along with curfews, books, and lectures. No, what he really wanted to join was not the Party, but the party-good living, women, fame. And he wanted the last most of all. After nine months his lack of ideological fervor got him summarily expelled. He actually felt relief.

With an eye to where the action was, he immigrated to Beirut… and prudently became a Muslim by conversion. Then he started making contacts-Beirut had always been a good place to make contacts. The payoff was quick. He was young, obviously brilliant, and he would do anything. In the early 1970s he was recruited by the terrorist group known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and assigned leadership of its European unit. Off he went to Paris, the posting of his dreams.

He had long fantasized about making himself a legend as one of the world's leading terrorists, and he was soon succeeding beyond his fondest imaginings. In 1974 he graduated from the PFLP and formed his own group. A Middle Eastern gun-for-hire, it was known as the Organization of the Armed Arab Struggle. The designation, he thought, had a nice revolutionary ring, which he had long since learned mattered. His new enterprise-terrorism-to-go-soon attracted such major clients as Libya and Iraq. Among his more celebrated achievements were the bombing of a French Cultural Center in West Berlin, exploding a suitcase bomb at a Marseilles railroad station, and placing an incendiary device aboard the French "bullet train."

Although he never had cared about ideology, he appreciated the importance of a correct political stance in the Islamic world, and therefore he frequently posed as the leader of an "armed struggle" against the "Zionist Enemy." But always, however, at a profit. He had, in fact, perfected the fine art of extortion, pressing the "reactionary" regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf sheikdoms into paying protection money disguised as "revolutionary donations." After he engineered the 1975 OPEC incident in Vienna in which eleven oil ministers were taken hostage, and then blew up a seaside resort, killing a Kuwaiti official, he began receiving regular payoffs from all the Gulf states.

Finally, in 1984, he closed out operations under the OAAS name, moved to Damascus, and began training Syrian intelligence agents. By that time, he had become a chimera, a legend whose nickname, the Hyena, was linked to every car bomb in Europe. And by that time also, the Hyena (a name he despised) had become the stuff of popular fiction, as well as of dossiers on three continents.

Having reduced terrorism to a science-a boring science -he then temporarily retired. But now, after the American invasion of the Middle East, he had decided to come back for one last score, to do what he had been dreaming about for years. The Americans had unwittingly provided the perfect opportunity. Why not seize it? This time, however, he wanted to do it himself, not with an army of half-crazed radical Muslims…

He stepped up to the cockpit and examined the rows of gauges. "Hold the airspeed under a hundred knots. And make sure you keep her on the deck."

Then he checked down below. "Peretz, this time make sure all the weapons stations are switched off. That's off."

The Israeli nodded, this time without his usual grin.

Now the Hind had begun its final approach. The low-light TV showed a small landing pad approximately thirty meters on each side with a private helicopter parked in the middle of a black and white bull's-eye in the center. He knew that ARM-a group he had long hated-had ringed the island with a first-class industrial security system. Five years ago, he recalled, they had killed three of his operatives in Beirut, in a futile attempt to kill him. What's more, it never made the papers. Typical. The security system they had developed for the island was good, but it made no provision for this kind of penetration. It pleased him to at last make fools of them.