Thomas Hoover - Project Cyclops

“Take a look." He pointed toward the cluster of tiny dots slowly diminishing in the dim sky. "Looks like somebody showed up just long enough to screw us, then aborted. And now Mike is back in the Belly of the Beast." He turned and peered at the fog-swathed floodlights, now growing pale as dawn began arriving in earnest. Around them the dull outlines of trees and rocks were lightening into greens and granite-grays. "With the damned rocket still sitting up there ready to blast off.

"All right," he continued after a thoughtful pause, "we know where Ramirez is, but after all the shooting around here, the idea of a nice clean insertion will have to go by the boards." He returned his gaze to Launch Control. "No way in hell could we take Launch by surprise now. Ramirez has got to know something is brewing. Which means we're going to have to do things the old-fashioned way. Bad news for the hostages if they don't know how to get out of the way, but we've got to deal with the bomb, no matter what."

There was muttering and grumbling. ARM men did not fancy excessive gunfire. They had all long passed that age of youthful denial when men thought they were invulnerable. They had seen too much.

"By the way," Armont abruptly interrupted everybody's chain of thought, "what happened to the woman who was here, Dr. Andros? Was she hit?"

Nobody had noticed, up until that point, that she was absent. They quickly checked the rocks around the area, but she was nowhere to be found.

"Forget about her," he finally decreed. "If she doesn't want to stay with us, then she's not our problem." He thought a minute. "Maybe we should break radio silence and see if we can raise Vance. He took a unit with him."

"I'm against it," Willem Voorst declared. "As a matter of fact, I'm against doing anything. If the U.S. is planning to come in here and take down this place, then why should we risk our own ass. Let's just get in a secure position and let them do our work for us. We've never had that kind of help before. It might be refreshing. I think Michael can take care of himself. Why-"

"No, we can't wait for them, whoever it was." Armont cut him off. "I don't know what the hell they were really up to. And besides, if that little demonstration we just had was any indication, their mode is going to be to shoot first and ask questions later. So we have to finish our job, just get it over with. And I'll tell you what I think. Since Launch is a muck-up now, our best bet is to keep Ramirez off guard for a while and go ahead and take down Command. Immediately, before they realize what's going on. With any luck, maybe they won't be expecting it." He looked around. "Make a three-point entry, flash-bangs and tear gas. Just blow out the place." He paused to let the words sink. "Well," he continued finally, "does anybody disagree?"

There were nervous frowns, but nobody did. Instead, they began silently collecting their gear.

Hansen had returned to the basement Situation Room, where maps and operation plans cluttered the teakwood table and littered meal trays, grease encrusting on the white china, were piled up in the corner. No stewards were allowed in the room, and nobody else was going to clean up. He had not slept for a day and a half, and he was now showing a ragged shadow of beard. Ted Brock had heard some of his aides upstairs commenting to each other sotto voce that he had never seemed older.

"All right," he said. "I've called off the assault and given the bastard six hours to clear out. I've also released the money, had it wired to the account he wanted. So maybe now he'll leave quietly. Our deal is that he frees the hostages unharmed, disarms the bombs, and gets the hell out of there. But I'll tell you something else: he's not going to live to spend a dime. The minute he's airborne, his ass is ours. I want him shot out of the sky, and the hell with the consequences."

"He'll probably take some civilians along with him," Briggs said. "Hostages. We could be looking at some dicey press."

"All right, then, so we won't shoot him down; we'll just force him down, the way we handled that Libyan passenger jet with terrorists aboard. There was official flack for a week or so from the usual quarters, but off the record everybody was applauding. When you do the right thing, the world makes allowances for how you manage it."

Briggs remained skeptical, but he kept his thoughts to himself. He wanted to have as little to do with the operation as possible. Sooner or later there would be loss of life, he was sure of it, and the chances were the losses would be massive. He had no interest in making the history books as the author of a civilian massacre, terrorists or no terrorists.

"All right, Mr. President, I'll tell the Deltas to keep their powder dry until we play this one out." He had already heard from General Max Austin, who said Nichols was fit to be tied, eating his cigars instead of smoking them. Who could blame him? To have a Commander-in-Chief micromanaging an anti-terrorist op violated every known canon of military strategy. There might be a more surefire recipe for disaster, but it was hard to conjure one offhand.

Hansen, for his own part, recognized the pitfalls of giving the terrorists more time. However, he hoped it would end up being the rope-make that false confidence-that would hang them.

He had wired the "ransom" money to the numbered account at Banco Ambrosiano, as requested. There, his intelligence on the ground was reporting, the eight hundred million had been split and transferred to several other accounts. Then portions of it had been immediately wired out-to a destination not yet known, though it damned well would be. What, he wondered, was that all about? Were the terrorists in the process of screwing each other? It was a possibility. Everything was a possibility. But it also was smart, because it made recovering the funds that much more difficult. They were, in effect, laundering it even before they had made their getaway. These characters, whoever they were, were taking no chances.

"Load it on now," Ramirez was saying. "We're taking it with us." He flashed a smile from behind his aviator shades. "You never know when you'll need a nuke."

Abdoullah couldn't believe his luck. He had been sure that Number One intended to try and kill him. But now it turned out to be the others, the ones he'd sent over to Command, that he planned to leave in the lurch.

Dawn was breaking, but there still was enough early fog to mask their movements partially. It was definitely time to get the show on the road. One of the bombs had been installed on the VX-1 vehicle and a countdown was under way. When that bomb devastated Souda Bay, nobody was going to be worrying about a lone chopper somewhere over the Med. And with the other weapon still in their hands, the whole operation was going like clockwork. The money was in place -he was now rich-and they were packing to leave.

The bomb they were now loading actually made him think. Maybe, he mused fleetingly, he could just kill Number One and return it. It would be the final revenge for what the bastard did to Rais.

No, that was stupid. Better to just take the money and run. Lose the heroics. In fact, given how things had gone so far, the whole thing was almost too good to be true. In fact, that bothered him a little. More than a little. He had seen too much double-dealing already to believe anything Number One said or did.

He trusted Dore Peretz even less. The Israeli, he was sure, had a private agenda of his own. He always seemed to. Maybe he was planning to divert the bomb and take out Tel Aviv. He was crazy enough.

But who cared? They were getting out. Better still, Number One had indicated he intended to take the old professor, the Jew, with them. With him on board, Number One had declared, there was no danger that the U.S. President would order the chopper shot down. The old guy made a perfect passport.