Just at that moment, the a.s.sault team poised near the rear of the hovel made its move. One second there was a lot of yelling and screaming at the front; the next second there were flashbangs and a crack special operations squad going in the back. A second wave of policemen clad in protective gear came across the street from a pair of nearby vans as I rolled out of the way.

Taking down a bomb factory is not for the fainthearted; those things can go boom even under the best circ.u.mstances. I'd touched on the highlights of the tricky dance during my training visit years before. Jamal proved that he had not only retained what he learned but had taught it to his men. They swarmed inside so efficiently that even Mr. Murphy didn't have time to react. I dusted myself off, admiring the precision of the Egyptian team, feeling a little like a proud papa at his kid's graduation.

The feeling was a bit premature.

A crowd started to gather. This had been foreseen and though outnumbered, the half-dozen policemen a.s.signed to control onlookers had the initial advantage, wielding large plastic batons and very loud warnings to stay back. Two vans, lights and sirens blaring, were headed down the street with uniformed reinforcements, and a contingent of riot police was less than a half-mile away. A helicopter pulled overhead, the beams of its floodlights playing across the ramshackle buildings.

But Mr. Murphy was clearly p.o.'d that he had missed his chance inside. In revenge, he urged one of the members of the crowd near where I was standing to pick up a stick about the size of a baseball bat. The man waited until the policeman nearest him had turned his back, then grabbed the piece of wood and aimed it at the officer's unprotected head.

I jumped to intervene, catching the bat with my left hand mid-swing. He'd put so much weight into it that he flew to the pavement without me even getting a chance to pop him with my right hand. I took a half-step to balance myself, my eyes hunting the crowd in front of me for a second threat.

I should have looked behind me. A hard plastic baton smashed into the left side of my head and neck. I whirled, fought back, and fell, all in the same motion. My fist connected with someone's jaw, but the satisfaction was dulled by a second hard wallop of a baton, this one to the top of my head. Pepper spray exploded in my eyes. I snapped into bar-fight mode, determined to take as many jarheads down with me until my sailor buddies came to my aid.

Problem was, I wasn't in a bar fight. Knocked to the ground, I was dragged down the street even as I flailed. I started yelling that I was with the police, my curses alternating between English and Egyptian Arabic. My eyes felt like the inferno chicken wings at the local barbecue shack. I grabbed one of the sticks that was. .h.i.tting me and waved it against something that gave way. The next thing I knew, I was thrown into the back of a van. I rolled over and got to my knees. I had to grab my pants legs to keep myself from rubbing my eyes, which would only have irritated them more.

The van bolted forward, throwing me down to the floor. I rocked back onto my b.u.t.t, clawing for the side of the truck to get back up. Tears were streaming from eyes, washing the cayenne away. I blinked a few times, then managed to get my right eye open. The interior of the van was nearly pitch-black, the only light a thin filter of gray from the top of the door. I got out the small LED flashlight attached to my keychain. There was no one else in the truck. Still struggling to get my left eye open, I crawled to the back door. A large metal plate had been welded in front of the lock mechanism; the only way to remove it was with a blowtorch. I didn't have one handy, so I went to work with my never-fails door opener: my size extra-Rogue right boot.

The van careened around a corner as I aimed my first kick. Rather than hitting the door near the lock I put a good-sized welt in its bottom panel. Cursing, I propped myself against the corner and swirled to the left, combining martial arts with soccer as I pirouetted my foot toward the target. The door didn't budge.

I had one of my small Glock pistols strapped to my calf, but the metal guarding the door lock looked to be nearly an inch thick. The body of the truck was much more pliable, as my first kick had demonstrated, and that same thin metal separated me from the driver.

It took four shots before the van veered onto its side. I went with it, rolling and twisting as the truck tumbled out of control.

On my fifth rebound off the roof I thought to myself: time to reload. I pulled the magazine out, leaving a round chambered, and fed one of my spares in before the van stopped moving. Yea, verily, did my pistol overflow as the tumult ended. I pointed it at the back of the van a few seconds later when I heard pounding on the back.

Pounding followed by a most glorious sound-not of angels, but the next best thing: Doc's voice.

"Hey s.h.i.t for brains, are you in there?" he yelled.

"Where the f.u.c.k do you think I would be, a.s.shole?"

"Stand back. We're blowing the lock."

Had my brain not been jumbled, I would have told him not to blow the lock. Doc has a tendency to use just a tad too much C4 when he constructs an IED. Fortunately, he left the job to Big Foot, who is a stingy b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and he managed to pop the hinges off without wasting yours truly. Big Foot tossed me over his shoulder and double-timed back to the car.

If you've ever been in the back of a van that's had its doors blown off, you know one thing: that is a LOUD explosion. My ears were ringing. But around the time we reached our car, I started to pick out a few familiar sounds from the background: Big Foot's grunts, Doc's curses, and a rat-tat-rata-bam-

bam I'd heard a little too much of lately-the sound of two or three Minimis running through their ammunition boxes.

Grape and Doc were right behind us, returning fire with their MP5Ns. I tried to stop Big Foot, but once he gets up momentum not even a bulldozer can change his direction, and it wasn't until he tried wedging me into the car that I got his attention.

"We have to get those guys," I said, pulling myself upright.

"No s.h.i.t, Sir," said Big Foot. "Get in the f.u.c.kin' car."

"In the car! In the car!" Doc yelled, adding a few of his choicest terms of endearment. He was about a yard behind us, and had just slapped a new set of bullets into his MP5N. "Drive, Big Foot, drive! Get the h.e.l.l out of here!"

Had I stopped to think about it, I would have known that Doc and Big Foot were right-we should have gotten the h.e.l.l out of Dodge. But I wasn't in any mood to stop and think. As Big Foot dove behind the wheel, I ran back up the road, just about colliding with Grape as he leveled his 12-gauge Pancor Jackhammer in the direction of the gunmen.

Someday I'll quote Grape on the beauty of a bullpup automatic shotgun. For now, I'll just say he covered the road with a spray of lead, four rounds spitting from the angled nozzle of the gun in the s.p.a.ce of a second. The shotgun was his preferred weapon; his backup, an MP5, hung off his shoulder.

"This way!" I yelled at him. "Give me your other gun. Come on-we attack, we don't retreat."

Grape blinked at me for a second, and then something lit in his brain. And I swear to G.o.d, the next words out of his mouth were, "Rangers lead the way!"

Somewhere up in heaven, William O. Darby * smiled. Me, I nearly busted a gut trying to keep up with Grape as he burst down the road toward the ragheads, who made the mistake of trying to fire at us. Grape ran through the rest of the rounds in his Jackhammer; by the time he dumped the round cylinder at the back of the gun to reload, the three men had more metal in them than a new car. I kept running, scooping up one of the guns that had fallen. Meanwhile, tires were squealing and people were yelling. All of a sudden, everything went quiet. Then Doc's voice boomed out behind me.

"d.i.c.k, have you lost your f.u.c.king mind?"

You can't lose what you don't have. I led an orderly retreat back to the car, which Big Foot had already pointed back in the other direction.

"On some kind of economy kick?" asked Doc as we sped away. "I thought you liked to buy new."

"Minimis are very popular with tangos these days. Some of the terrorists at the Vatican and the people in Sicily had them."

"Saladin?"

"Maybe."

"AK-47s not good enough for him, huh?" Doc's a bit of a traditionalist.

Grape explained how they had seen me being hauled into the van and managed to follow, though the truck was moving so fast that they had trouble keeping up through the streets. Two other vehicles were with them and it looked like another two were approaching.

"I thought we were going to lose you," he said. "Then, it was like a miracle-the van just flew off the road."

I enlightened them as to the cause of the miracle.

"Question is," said Doc, "were the cops in on it or not?"

"How did it look?"

"I don't know," said Grape. "People were flooding in from the buildings nearby. I couldn't tell."

"There's only one way to find out, that's to ask."

"When?"

"Now's as good a time as any."

Doc grunted. "I'm getting too old for this. Too d.a.m.n old."

I laughed. He's been singing that tune for years.

Jamal lived in one of the nicer suburbs of Cairo. Though small for the States, the house was a good-sized place for Egypt, complete with a wall to keep the riffraff out.

The better-behaved riffraff, obviously, because we had no trouble with it or with the dogs, who unfortunately for them had not been trained to never take food from strangers. We left them snoozing on several pounds of sedated horsemeat and located Jamal in his bed where he had collapsed barely an hour before, exhausted from the long night. I clamped my hand over his mouth-Big Foot was holding his arms-and put my finger up, pointing to his wife. It would have been a shame to wake her.

Out in his den, Jamal wondered why I had come.

"I thought we oughta talk."

"It couldn't wait for morning?"

"I don't think so."

"Where did you go after the operation?" said Jamal. "I was looking for you."

I picked him up by the collar and put him against the wall. Generally I don't like to treat friends this way, but it was late and I was starting to feel a little tired. And bruised.

"You really don't know what happened to me?"

Jamal shook his head. I studied his face. Some people are very convincing liars-I've worked for a pack of them-but the Egyptian security service captain didn't fall into that category. Still, it was hard to believe him at that moment, because it sure looked like I had been set up.

"Tell me what you found in the bomb factory."

The house had explosives-about a hundred pounds of Semtex. A set of fuses engineered from radio-controlled toys were lined up on a table in one of the two rooms when they entered. Jamal believed the house was the final a.s.sembly point, but they had found no completely a.s.sembled bombs in the raid. It was possible that the devices were only put together at the last minute, or that the factory was new and they had hit its first production line.

"The cousin of this man is against the government," Jamal said. "I believe they are part of a cell seeking to overthrow the regime."

Was there a self-respecting terrorist cell in Cairo that wasn't? For that matter, was there a self-respecting Egyptian who wouldn't have silently cheered if the corrupt, autocratic, and paranoid leaders were disposed of?

"How did you know to go there?" I asked.

"A tip, as I told you during the day."

"Where did it come from?"

"The phone, d.i.c.k. I swear on my son's head-"

"Leave your kids out of this. This is between you and me."

Jamal's eyes opened a little wider. I think he finally understood exactly how much trouble he was in.

"We tried, we tried to trace it of course, but came away with nothing."

"Have you talked to the bomb maker?" I asked.

"He died when we went in. He was wearing a bomb vest and as soon as the men saw that they shot him. If he had detonated it they would have been killed. It was self-defense."

Or maybe a setup from the word go.

"Did the caller who tipped you off mention me at all?"

"No."

"Why did you think of using me?"

"The caller mentioned that tourists were often on the block and suggested that as a diversion."

That sounded bogus to me-but maybe just bogus enough to be real. Still, if it had been a setup, whoever had arranged it had taken a h.e.l.l of a chance that I'd be involved.

Or else they knew me very well, and knew I couldn't resist going to a dance.

Jamal looked like he was telling the truth that night, and eventually I left without expressing my displeasure in a physical way. He promised to do what he could to find my would-be abductors, and to look carefully at his own organization, to see if he had a traitor in his ranks. I don't suppose I could have asked for more, but I had a few too many bruises to completely trust him-or anyone else in Cairo.

As a precaution on an overseas mission, we often reserve several rooms in different hotels as backups; we made use of one that night. When we were sure we were secure, I called Rogue Manor, and found that Shunt had been waiting several hours to talk to me. He'd given the disks from the rug warehouse a preliminary scan and found literally hundreds of possible contacts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran to check into. There was a complication, however-if the emails on the system were to be believed, the owner of the rug business had been in jail in India for the past three months. Apparently, he had forgotten to bribe the right official there when trying to take rugs out of the country. His fifteen-year-old son had taken over the business temporarily.

"He's been writing a lot of letters to try and get him out and gathering money for a trip there," said Shunt. "Doesn't look like a good candidate to be Saladin."

"What did you find from Bakr's computer?"

"The disks got here a few hours ago, so I still have to work on them. But from what I see so far, he's broke. Real broke," Shunt told me. "And he can't balance a checkbook to save his life. He has a program like Quicken to do his finances. Bad."

"Maybe it's a ruse or a cover in case someone like me breaks in."

"It's pretty convincing. Disk drive is littered with old files, half-written over. A lot of red ink. He likes women with big chests, too."

That's not a crime-thank G.o.d!-but it doesn't help make you top raghead either, and anyone who was setting up his computer to throw off an intruder wouldn't leave the sort of soft p.o.r.n files Shunt described to be found.

"He might still be involved," suggested Doc. "Helping in some way we don't understand yet."

It couldn't be ruled out, but it looked more and more like a dead end. A backgrounder on the submarine captain provided by one of Doc's gabbing buddies also made him seem less likely; the captain had disowned several close relatives for belonging to a radical mosque two years before.

We weren't officially at a dead end. I wanted to check the submarine out and make sure no one was missing. And there was always a chance the key loggers or bugs I'd planted might give us something useful. But for the moment the winds propelling us forward had stalled.

So when I got the message that afternoon that the BetaGo people wanted to push up the timing on my consulting gig, I told them I'd be there as soon as I could. It made more sense for me to hop over there and get that out of the way than hang around in Alexandria, or continue poking my nose under tents in Cairo. Doc and his shadows could do that as easily as I could. Trace had Sicily under control, and Danny was effectively mopping up in Pakistan. Better for me to earn some more beer money than look over their shoulder. The Rogue Warrior's Strategy for Success dictates that you hire the best people you can and then get the h.e.l.l out of their way. It was time for me to follow that advice.

Besides, after all the b.u.mps and bruises I'd taken over the past few days, I figured my body could use a bit of a change of pace. The a.s.signment seemed routine. With luck, I might get a chance to take a day off, see some exotic sights, and maybe even have a new experience or two.

As things turned out, I should have remembered another piece of advice from The Rogue Warrior's Strategy for Success: Be careful what you wish for.

*For more details, see Green Team.

*Darby was one of the fathers of the modern Army Rangers, tasked with training and leading the first unit into combat during World War II.

9.