"Tell the guards to stop making a spectacle of it!" Carpathia raged. "They are playing right into these people's hands. Let the crowd see that no matter what they do or say or sing, still their heady belong to us!"

The guillotine was readied as the woman continued to force out the lyrics, though she had long since lost the tune. As she was grabbed by guards on each side and wrestled into place, she cried out, ". . . demands my soul, my life, my all!"

The blade dropped and the crowd erupted.

"Aah! " Carpathia sighed. "Can we not see from the other side? "

"The other side, sir?" the South American potentate repeated.

"Of the blade! Of the blade! Get a camera around there! The body does not drop! It merely collapses. I want to see the head drop!" The next several in line approached the killing machine with their palms raised. The guards kept grabbing their elbows and pulling down their arms, but the condemned kept raising them. The guards slashed at their hands with bayonets, but the people instinctively moved and mostly avoided being cut.

The guards moved in behind them and prodded them with bayonet points in the lower back. Now the camera moved around behind a man who held a safety lever with one hand and used the other to grab the hair of the victim and pull the head into place. He lowered the restraining bar onto the neck, let go of the lever, and nodded to a matronly woman. She yanked at the release cord.

The blade squealed against the guides as it dropped in a flash, and the head fell out of sight, blood erupting from the neck.

"That is more like it!" Carpathia whispered. "We're home free, aren't we?" Hannah said.

Mac turned to look at her. "My plane has about enough fuel to get us to Dome. There's a small airstrip south of there manned by Co- op people who stockpile fuel. I'm not going to feel safe until we take off from there."

"But these people, I mean," she said. "They'll never reach this airport before we do, will they?"

"Not in cars."

"What're you saying?" George said. "It won't take 'em long to guess where we're going. They won't think we're trying to beat 'em to the border by car."

"Your plane hidden?"

"From auto traffic, sure. From the air? No."

"How long would it take them to fly here?"

"Out of Kozani, in a fighter? They could beat us there."

"Could they destroy your plane?"

"Only if they get there first."

"How much personnel could they bring?"

"Not many if they use a small, quick plane."

George sounded irritated. "This has been too much work to see it fail now, Mac. Let's get it all on the table. You hoping we just show up, climb aboard, and take off?"

"That's the only plan I've got," Mac said.

"We've got to figure they'll beat us there," George said, "and decide what to do about that."

"You want to a.s.sume the worst?"

"Of course! We have to. You think I got away from those idiots by hoping they'd let me go? Tell me about this airstrip."

"Runs east and west. I'm at the east end, facing west."

"If they can get a plane in there before we take off, all they have to do is get in our way."

"Let's get in their way first," Mac said. "I'll dump you guys at the plane; you get the engines warm while I drive out onto the runway and sit directly in our path. They're going to have to be pretty crafty and flexible to avoid hitting me on landing. When we take off, we angle enough to miss the car and them, and we're gone." George shook his head. "And when do you board? You're leaving a lot to chance."

"Leaving it to G.o.d, George. I don't know what else to do."

Mac's phone buzzed. "Go, Chang."

"They're in a jet ten minutes from touchdown. Stefanich, the three philosophers, and a pilot. Plane does not appear to be offensively equipped, but they are heavily armed."

"We're closer than that," Mac said. "We just have to beat 'em, that's all."

He asked Chloe if she could get any more out of the little car, but it was whining as it was, speeding along on a bad road. "When we get there, get off the road and come in on the east end."

Mac was giving Sebastian instructions about the plane when he thought he heard the scream of jet engines in the distance. He and George rolled down their windows to listen. "That's our clearing, Chloe! Easy!"

She whipped off the road, down into a ravine, and up the other side. The car bounced and jerked, and Mac's head hit the ceiling.

"Use your brights ! I have no idea what's out here."

"Am I going to be able to get through those trees?" she said.

"a.s.sume you will. Just get us there."

Chloe hit a rocky patch that threw the car into the air. When it landed, the left rear tire blew. "Great!" she said. "At least it is in the back," George said. Stand on it!" With the brights on, Chloe saw only uneven, rocky terrain up to a thick grave of trees. She couldn't imagine a way through, but there was no turning back now. The left rear side was dragging from the flat as if someone had dropped an anchor. It didn't help that Sebastian, the biggest person in the car, sat back there.

With the let looming, Chloe wished she could kill the lights and just plow on through. But it had all come down to timing. And determination. These were the people who had killed her comrades and who would now snuff out this little surviving band of Trib Forcers without a thought.

Chloe had wanted action, to be in the thick of it. And though she would do whatever it took to get back to Buck and Kenny, she was already long past any option but recklessness. Caution, diplomacy, trickery that was all out the window now. She had to get to that plane and they had to take off, or none of them would see the sun rise again.

She picked her way through the trees, only occasionally lifting her foot from the accelerator. The little car had front wheel drive, a small blessing in a bad situation. Making her own path, she smacked the car against a tree first on one side, then the other, and kept going.

Now she could see Mac's plane, but a three wire fence was in the way. Slowing even a bit could make the car get tangled in it. She glanced at Mac, who braced himself with a palm on the ceiling. He merely nodded at the fence as if she had no choice. Chloe kept the accelerator down, and the car caught the lower wire, made the top two slip over the hood, pulled a wood post from the ground, and snapped its way through to the edge of the runway, forty feet from the plane.

Banking at the other end came the GC jet, landing lights illuminating the strip all the way to the car.

Chapter.

FOR THE first time since he had been running the point for the Tribulation Force at the palace complex, Chang wondered if he had been found out. His computer screen was suddenly ringed with a red border, meaning an outside source was testing his firewall.

He immediately switched to a screen saver that scrolled the date and time and temperature, cut all the lights in his apartment, disrobed, and jumped into bed prepared to look as if he had been sleeping, should Figueroa or one of his minions come knocking.

There was really no way of knowing what the warning meant, but David Ha.s.sid had told him he had built the security in just to alert the operator that someone was nosing around.

Maybe someone was checking to see every computer that was turned on. Who knew whether the search was capable of hacking in and finding out who the mole was? The latter didn't seem possible, if David could be believed. He had rigged the system so elaborately that it seemed there wouldn't be enough years left before the Glorious Appearing before someone could decode it. Chang's mind began playing games. Perhaps Akbar had instructed Figueroa to sense every computer running, eliminate the mainframe that ran the whole place, isolate the laptops and personal computers, and do a fast doorto door search to see what people were up to.

Chang's computer would show no record of what he had been doing during the hours since he got back from his office. For that reason, he hoped someone would show up and check.