It was simpler for the sergeant. He had an officer who told him what to do. Captain Ramirez knew what he was doing. He was an officer, and that was his job: to know what was going on and give the orders. That made it a little easier as he climbed back up the mountain to the RON site, but his bloodied shirt continued to cling to his back like the questions of a nagging conscience.

Tim Jackson arrived back at his office at 2230 hours after a short squad-training exercise right on the grounds of Fort Ord. Hed just sat down in his cheap swivel chair when the phone rang. The exercise hadnt gone well. Ozkanian was a little slow catching on in his leadership of second squad. This was the second time in a row that hed screwed up and made his lieutenant look bad. That offended Sergeant Mitchell, who had hopes for the young officer. Both knew that you didnt make a good squad sergeant in less than four years, and only then if you had a man as sharp as Chavez had been. But it was Ozkanians job to lead the squad, and Mitchell was now explaining a few things to him. He was doing so in the way of platoon sergeants, with vigor, enthusiasm, and a few speculative observations about Ozkanians ancestry. If any.

Lieutenant Jackson, Tim answered after the second ring.

Lieutenant, this is Colonel OMara at Special Ops Command.

Yes, sir!

I hear youve been making some noise about a staff sergeant named Chavez. Is that correct? Jackson looked up to see Mitchell walk in, his cabbage-patch helmet tucked under his sweaty arm and a whimsical smile on his lips. Ozkanian had gotten the message this time.

Yes, sir. He didnt show up where hes supposed to be. Hes one of mine, and Wrong, Lieutenant! Hes one of mine now. Hes doing something that you do not need to know about, and you will not, repeat not burn up any more phone lines fucking around into something that does not concern you. IS THAT CLEAR, LIEUTENANT?

But, sir, excuse me, but I You got bad ears or something, son? The voice was quieter now, and that was really frightening to a lieutenant whod already had a bad day.

No, sir. Its just that I got a call from I know about that. I took care of that. Sergeant Chavez is doing something that you do not need to know about. Period. End. Is that clear?

Yes, sir.

The line clicked off.

Shit, Lieutenant Jackson observed.

Sergeant Mitchell hadnt caught any words from the conversation, but the buzz from the phone line had made it to the doorway he was standing in.

Chavez?

Yeah. Some colonel at Special OpsFort MacDill, I guesssays that they have him and hes off doing something. And I dont need to know about that. Says he took care of Fort Benning for us.

Oh, horseshit, Mitchell observed, taking his place in the seat opposite the lieutenants desk, after which he asked: Mind if I sit down, sir?

What do you suppose is going on?

Beats the hell outa me, sir. But I know a guy at MacDill. Think Ill make a phone call tomorrow. I dont like one of my guys getting lost like that. Its not supposed to work like that. He didnt have no place chewing your ass either, sir. Youre just doin your job, looking after your people that way, and you dont come down on people for doing their job. In case nobody ever told you, sir, Mitchell explained, you dont chew some poor lieutenants ass over something like this. You make a quiet call to the battalion commander, or maybe the S-1, and have him settle things nice n quiet. Lieutenants get picked on enough by their own colonels without needin to get chewed on by strange ones. Thats why things go through channels, so you know whos chewing ya.

Thank you, Sergeant, Jackson said with a smile. I needed that.

I told Ozkanian that he ought to concentrate a little more on leadin his squad instead of trying to be Sergeant Rock. I think this time hell listen. Hes a pretty good kid, really. Just needs a little seasoning. Mitchell stood. See you at PT tomorrow, sir. Good night.

Right. Night, Sergeant. Tim Jackson decided that sleep made more sense than paperwork and headed off to his car. On the drive to the BOQ, he was still pondering the call hed gotten from Colonel OMara, whoever the hell he was. Lieutenants didnt interact with bird-colonels very muchhed made his (required) New Years Day appearance at the brigade commanders home, but that was it. New lieutenants were supposed to maintain a low profile. On the other hand, one of the many lessons remembered from West Point was that he was responsible for his men. The fact that Chavez hadnt arrived at Fort Benning, that his departure from Ord had been so . . . irregular, and that his natural and responsible inquiry into his mans situation had earned him nothing more than a chewing only made the young officer all the more curious. Hed let Mitchell make his calls, but hed stay out of it for the moment, not wanting to draw additional attention to himself until he knew what the hell he was doing. In this Tim Jackson was fortunate. He had a big brother on Pentagon duty who knew how things were supposed to work and was pushing hard for O-6captains or colonelsrank, even if he was a squid. Robby could give him some good advice, and advice was what he needed.

It was a nice, smooth flight in the COD. Even so, Robby Jackson didnt like it much. He didnt like sitting in an aft-facing seat, but mainly he didnt like being in an airplane unless he had the stick. A fighter pilot, test pilot, and most recently commander of one of the Navys elite Tomcat squadrons, he knew that he was about the best flyer in the world, and didnt like trusting his life to the lesser skills of another aviator. Besides, on Navy aircraft the stewardesses werent worth a damn. In this case it was a pimply-faced kid from New York, judging by his accent, whod managed to spill coffee on the guy next to him.

I hate these things, the man said.

Yeah, well, it aint Delta, is it? Jackson noted as he tucked the folder back in his bag. He had the new tactical scheme committed to memory. As well he might. It was mainly his idea.

The man wore khaki uniform clothing, with a U.S. insignia on his collar. That made him a tech-rep, a civilian who was doing something or other for the Navy. There were always some aboard a carrierelectronics specialists or various sorts of engineers who either provided special service to a new piece of gear or helped train the Navy personnel who did. They were given the simulated rank of warrant officer, but treated more or less as commissioned officers, eating in the officers mess and quartered in relative luxurya very relative term on a U.S. Navy ship unless you were a captain or an admiral, and tech-reps did not rate that sort of treatment.

What are you going out for? Robby asked.

Checking out performance on a new piece of ordnance. Im afraid I cant say any more than that.

One of them, eh?

Fraid so, the man said, examining the coffee stain on his knee.

Do this a lot?

First time, the man said. You?

I fly off boats for a living, but Im serving time in the Pentagon now. OP-05s office, fighter-tactics desk.

Never made a carrier landing, the man added nervously.

Not so bad, Robby assured him. Except at night.

Oh? The man wasnt too scared to know that it was dark outside.

Yeah, well, carrier landings arent all that bad in daylight. Flying into a regular airfield, you look ahead and pick the spot youre gonna touch on. Same thing on a carrier, just the runways smaller. But at night you cant really see where youre gonna touch. So that makes it a little twitchy. Dont sweat it. The gal we got driving A girl?

Yeah, a lot of the COD drivers are girls. The one up front is pretty good, instructor pilot, they tell me. It always made people safer to think that the pilot was an instructor, except: Shes breaking in a new ensign tonight, Jackson added maliciously. He loved to needle people who didnt like flying. It was always something he bothered his friend Jack Ryan about.

New ensign?

You know, a kid out of P-cola. Guess he wasnt good enough for fighters or attack bombers, so he flies the delivery truck. They gotta learn, right? Everybody makes a first night carrier landing. I did. No big deal, Jackson said comfortably. Then he checked to make sure his safety belts were nice and tight. Over the years hed found that one sure way of alleviating fear was to hand it over to someone else.

Thanks.

You part of the Shoot-Ex?

Huh?

The exercise were running. We get to shoot some real missiles at target drones. Shoot-Ex. Missile-Firing Exercise.

I dont think so.

Oh, I was hoping you were a guy from Hughes. We want to see if the fix on the Phoenix guidance package really works or not.

Oh, sorryno. I work with something else.

Okay. Robby pulled a paperback from his pocket and started reading. Now that he was sure there was somebody on the COD more uncomfortable than he was, he could concentrate on the book. He wasnt really frightened, of course. He just hoped that the new nugget sitting in the copilots right seat wouldnt splatter the COD and its passengers all over the ramp. But there wasnt much that he could do about that.

The squad was tired when they got back to the RON site. They took their positions while the captain made his radio call. One of each pair immediately stripped his weapon down for cleaning, even those few who hadnt gotten a shot off.

Well, Oso and his SAW got on the scoreboard tonight, Vega observed as he pulled a patch through the twenty-one-inch barrel. Nice work, Ding, he added.

They werent very good.

Hey, mano, we do our thing right, they dont have the chance to be very good.

Its been awful easy so far, man. Might change.

Vega looked up for a moment. Yeah. Thats right.

At geosynchronous height over Brazil, a weather satellite of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had its low-resolution camera pointed forever downward at the planet it had left eleven months before and to which it would never return. It seemed to hover almost in a fixed position, twenty-two thousand six hundred miles over the emerald-green jungles of the Amazon valley, but in fact it was moving at a speed of about seven thousand miles per hour, its easterly orbital path exactly matching the rotation speed of the earth below. The satellite had other instruments, of course, but this particular color-TV camera had the simplest of jobs. It watched clouds that floated in the air like distant balls of cotton. That so prosaic a function could be important was so obvious as to be hard to recognize. This satellite and its antecedents had saved thousands of lives and were arguably the most useful and efficient segment of Americas space program. The lives saved were those of sailors for the most part, sailors whose ships might otherwise stray into the path of an undetected storm. From its perch, the satellite could see from the great Southern Ocean girdling Antarctica to beyond the North Cape of Norway, and no storm escaped its notice.

Almost directly below the satellite, conditions still not fully understood gave birth to cyclonic storms in the broad, warm Atlantic waters off the West Coast of Africa, from which they were carried westward toward the New World, where they were known by the West Indian name, hurricane. Data from the satellite was downlinked to NOAAs National Hurricane Center at Coral Gables, Florida, where meteorologists and computer scientists were working as part of a multiyear project to determine how the storms began and why they moved as they did. The busy season for these scientists was just beginning. Fully a hundred people, some with their doctors degrees years behind them, others summer interns from a score of universities, examined the photographs for the first storm of the season. Some hoped for many, that they might study and learn from them. The more experienced scientists knew that feeling, but also knew that those massive oceanic storms were the most destructive and deadly force of nature, and regularly killed thousands who lived too close to the sea. They also knew that the storms would come in their own good time, for no one had a provable model for explaining exactly why they formed. All man could do was see them, track them, measure their intensity, and warn those in their path. The scientists also named them. The names were chosen years in advance, always starting at the top of the alphabet and proceeding downward. The first name on the list for the current year was Adele.

As the camera watched, clouds grew skyward five hundred miles from the Cape Verde islands, cradle of hurricanes. Whether it would become an organized tropical cyclone or simply be just another large rainstorm, no one could say. It was still early in the season. But it had all the makings of a big season. The West African desert was unusually hot for the spring, and heat there had a demonstrable connection with birth of hurricanes.

The truck driver appeared at the proper time to collect the men and the paste processed from the coca leaves, but they werent there as expected. He waited an hour, and still they werent there. There were two men with him, of course, and these he sent up to the processing site. The driver was the senior man of the group and didnt want to be bothered climbing those cursed mountains anymore. So while he smoked his cigarettes, they climbed. He waited another hour. There was quite a bit of traffic on the highway, especially big diesel trucks whose mufflers and pollution controls were less well attended to than was the case in other, more prosperous regionsbesides, their removal made for improved fuel economy in addition to the greater noise and smoke. Many of the big tractor-trailer combinations roared past, vibrating the roadbed and rocking his own truck in the rush of air. That was why he missed the sound. After waiting a total of ninety minutes, it was clear that hed have to go up himself. He locked the truck, lit yet another cigarette, and began his way up the path.

The driver found it hard going. Though hed grown up in these hills, and could remember a boyhood in which a thousand-foot climb was just another footrace with his playmates, hed been driving the truck for some time, and his leg muscles were more accustomed to pushing down pedals than this sort of thing. What would once have taken forty minutes now took over an hour, and with the place almost in sight he was venomously angry, too angry and too tired to pay attention to things that ought to have been obvious by now. He could still hear the traffic sounds on the road below, could hear the birds twittering in the trees around him, but nothing else when he should have been hearing something. He paused, bending over to catch his breath when he got his first warning. It was a dark spot on the trail. Something had turned the brown earth to black, but that could have been anything, and he was in a hurry to see what the problem was up the hill and didnt ponder it. After all, there hadnt been any problem lately with the army or the police, and he wondered why the refining work was done so far up the mountainside in any case. It was no longer necessary.

Five minutes more and he could see the little clearing, and only now he noticed that there were no sounds coming from it, though there was an odd, acrid smell. Doubtless the acid used in the prerefining process, he was sure. Then he made the last turn and saw.

The truck driver was not a man unaccustomed to violence. Hed been involved in the pre-Cartel fighting and had also killed a few M-19 sympathizers in the wars because of which the Cartel had actually been formed. Hed seen blood, therefore, and had spilled some himself.

But not like this. All fourteen of the men hed driven in the previous night were lined up shoulder to shoulder in a neat little row on the ground. The bodies were already bloated, and animals had been picking at several of the open wounds. The two men hed dispatched up the mountainside were more freshly dead. Though the driver didnt fathom it, theyd been killed by a claymore mine triggered when theyd examined the bodies, and their bodies were newly shredded, with major sections missing where the ball-bearing-sized fragments had struck, and with the blood still trickling out. Ones face showed the surprise and shock. The other man was facedown, with a section about the size of a shoe box messily removed from his back.

The driver stood still for a minute or so, afraid to move in any direction, his quivering hands reaching for another cigarette, then dropping two which he was too terrified to reach for. Before he could get a third, he turned and moved carefully down the path. A hundred meters after that, he was running for his life as every bird call and every breeze through the trees sounded to him like an approaching soldier. They had to be soldiers. He was sure of that. Only soldiers killed with that sort of precision.

That was a splendid paper you delivered this afternoon. We hadnt considered the Soviet nationalities question as thoroughly as you have. Your analytical skills are as sharp as ever. Sir Basil Charleston raised his glass in salute. Your promotion was well earned. Congratulations, Sir John.

Thanks, Bas. I just wish it could have happened another way, Ryan said.

That bad?

Jack nodded. Im afraid so.

And Emil Jacobs, too. Bloody bad time for your chaps.

Ryan smiled rather grimly. You might say that.

So, what are you going to do about it?

Im afraid theres not much I can say about that, Jack replied carefully. I dont know, but I cant exactly say that, can I?

Quite so. The head of Her Majestys Secret Intelligence Service nodded sagely. Whatever your response is, Im sure it will be appropriate.

At that moment he knew that Greer had been right. He had to know such things or risk being taken for a fool by his counterparts here and everywhere else in the world. Hed get home in a few more days and talk things over with Judge Moore. Ryan was supposed to have some bureaucratic muscle now. Might as well flex it a little to see if it worked.

Commander Jackson woke after six hours sleep. He, too, enjoyed that greatest of luxuries aboard a warship, privacy. His rank and former station as a squadron commander put him high on the list of VIPs, and there happened to be a spare one-man stateroom in this floating city. His was just under the flight deck forward. Close to the bow catapults by the sound of things, which explained why one of Rangers own squadron commanders didnt want it. On arrival, hed made the necessary courtesy calls, and he didnt have any official duties to attend to for another . . . three hours. After washing and shaving and morning coffee, he decided to do a few things on his own. Robby headed below for the carriers magazine.

This was a large compartment with a relatively low ceiling where the bombs and missiles were kept. Several rooms, really, with nearby shops so that the smart weapons could be tested and repaired by ordnance technicians. Jacksons personal concern was with the AIM-54C Phoenix air-to-air missiles. There had been problems with the guidance systems, and one purpose of the battle-group exercise was to see if the contractors fix really worked or not.

Entry into the space was restricted, for obvious reasons. Robby identified himself to a senior chief petty officer, and it turned out that theyd both served on the Kennedy a few years before. Together they entered a work space where some ordies were playing with the missiles, with an odd-looking box hanging on the pointed nose of one.

What dya think? one asked.

Reads out okay to me, Duke, the one on the oscilloscope replied. Let me try some simulated jamming.

Thats the bunch were prepping for the Shoot-Ex, sir, the senior chief explained. So far they seem to be working all right, but . . .

But wasnt it you who found the problem in the first place? Robby asked.

Me and my old boss, Lieutenant Frederickson. The chief nodded. The discovery had resulted in several million dollars in penalties to the contractor. And all the AIM-54C missiles in the fleet had been decertified for several months, taking away what should have been the most capable air-to-air missile in the Navy. He led Jackson to the rack of test equipment. How many we supposed to shoot?

Enough to tell whether the fix works or not, Robby replied. The chief grunted.

That could be quite a Shoot-Ex, sir.

Drones are cheap! Robby pointed out in a most outrageous lie. But the chief knew what he meant. It was cheaper than going to the Indian Ocean and maybe having a shoot-out with Iranian F-14A Tomcats (they had them, too) and then finding out that the goddamned missiles didnt work properly. That was a most efficient way of killing off pilots whose training went for a million dollars a pop. The good news was that the fix was working, at least as far as the test equipment could tell. To make sure, Robby told the chief, between ten and twenty of the Phoenix-Cs would be shot off, plus a larger number of Sparrows and Sidewinders. Jackson started to leave. Hed seen what he needed to see, and the ordies all had work to do.

Looks like were really going to be emptying this here locker out, sir. You know about the new bombs were checking out?

No. I met with a tech-rep on the COD flight in. He didnt talk a hell of a lot. So what the hell is new? Just a bomb, right?

The senior chief laughed. Come on, Ill show you the Hush-A-Bomb.

What?

Didnt you ever watch Rocky and Bullwinkle, sir?

Chief, you have really lost me.

Well, when I was a kid I used to watch Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose, and one of the stories was about how Boris and Natashathey were the bad guys, Commanderwere trying to steal something called Hush-A-Boom. That was an explosive that blew stuff up without making any noise. Looks like the guys at China Lake came up with the next-best thing!

The chief opened a door to the bomb-storage area. The streamlined shapesthey didnt have any fins or fuses attached until they were taken topsidesat on storage pallets securely chained down to the steel deck. On a pallet close to the rectangular elevator that delivered them topside was a group of bluepainted bombs. The blue color made them exercise units, but from the tag on the pallet it was clear that they were also loaded with the customary explosive filler. Robby Jackson was a fighter pilot, and hadnt dropped very many bombs, but that was just another side of his profession. The weapons he looked at appeared to be standard two-thousand-pound low-drag cases, which translated to nine hundred eighty-five pounds of high explosives, and just over a thousand pounds of steel bombcase. The only difference between a dumb or iron bomb and a guided smart bomb was the attachment of a couple of hardware items: a seeker head on the nose, and movable fins on the tail. Both units attached to the normal fusing points, and in fact the fuses were part of the guidance-package attachments. For obvious reasons these were kept in a different compartment. On the whole, however, the blue bombcases appeared grossly ordinary.

So? he asked.

The chief tapped the nearest bombcase with his knuckle. There was an odd sound. Odd enough that Robby did the same.

Thats not steel.

Cellulose, sir. They made the friggin things outa paper! How you like that?

Oh. Robby understood. Stealth.

These babies gotta be guided, though. They aint gonna make fragments worth a damn. The purpose of the steel bombcase, of course, is to transform itself into thousands of high-speed razors, ripping into whatever lay within their ballistic range after detonation. It wasnt the explosion that killed peoplewhich was, after all, the reason to build bombsbut rather the fragments they generated. Thats why we call it the Hush-A-Bomb. Fuckers gonna be right loud, sir, but after the smoke clears youre gonna wonder what the hell it was.

New wonders from China Lake, Robby observed. What the hell good was a bomb thatbut then, it was probably something for the new Stealth tactical bomber. He didnt know all that much about Stealth yet. It wasnt part of his brief in the Pentagon. Fighter tactics were, and Robby went off to go over his notes with the air-group commander. The first part of the battle-group exercise would begin in just over twenty-four hours.

The word got to Medellin fairly quickly, of course. By noon it was known that two refining operations had been eliminated and a total of thirty-one people killed. The loss of manpower was incidental. In each case more than half had been local peasants who did the coolie work, and the rest had been scarcely more important permanent employees whose guns kept the curious away, generally by example rather than persuasion. What was troubling was the fact that if word of these events got out, there might be some difficulties in recruiting new people to do the refining.

But most troubling of all was the simple fact that nobody knew what was going on. Was the Colombian Army going back into the hills? Was it M-19, breaking its word, or FARC, doing the same thing? Or something else? No one knew. That was most annoying, since they paid a good deal of money to get information. But the Cartel was a group of people, and action was taken only after consensus was reached. It was agreed that there must be a meeting. But then people began to worry if that might be dangerous. After all, clearly there were armed people about, people with little regard for human life, and that was also troubling for the senior Cartel officials. Most of all, these people had heavy weapons and the skill to use them. It was decided, therefore, that the meeting should be held at the most secure location possible.