It was Ahmed’s fault, he thought as he began to lose consciousness. The stupid son of a bitch had crawled over a landmine....

  He tried to roll over, but his body wouldn’t obey his commands. He lay there, facedown in the dirt, pain like a live animal crawling up his back toward his head.

  Claire Osterman was furious. She exited her command bunker in such a towering rage that no one dared try to stop her. She stalked over to Knoff, who was standing over the assassin’s body, smoke still trailing from his Uzi barrel.

  “What the hell is the meaning of this?” she shouted, causing Knoff to turn and look at her.

  “Madam President, you shouldn’t be out here until we make sure there are no others left,” he said, his voice muffled by his helmet and armor.

  “Screw that! I want to know how this bastard was able to get so close, and who sent him.”

  “He’s still alive. Would you like to ask him?” Knoff asked.

  Claire used the toe of her boot to turn Sadallah’s body over onto its back. She squatted next to him and slapped his face, back and forth, until his eyes flicked open.

  “Who are you?” she asked, her voice shrill in the night air.

  “I . . . I am Jackal,” Sied mumbled though lips covered with blood.

  “The Jackal!” Claire screamed. “Why you son of a bitch, I’ve hired you myself in the past. How dare you try to kill me?”

  Sied licked the blood from his lips and bared bloody teeth in a grin. “Nothing personal ... it was ... business.”

  She reared back and slapped his face so hard it made his eyes roll back in his head. “Who hired you? Who paid you to do this?”

  His eyes cleared momentarily. “Your old friend ... Ben Raines. He said ... he was sending you a message about . . . breaking the rules.”

  “Breaking the rules? Why you little shit! I’m the president. . . I make the rules.”

  Claire stood up and held out her hand to Knoff. “Give me your pistol, Herbert.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, handing her a Walther P-38 semi-automatic 9mm.

  She jacked the slide back and pointed it between Sied’s eyes.

  “One thing more,” the assassin mumbled, motioning her to come closer.

  She leaned over, and he spat a glob of bloody mucous in her face.

  Rearing back, she screamed, “You bastard!” and fired at point blank range, the pistol bucking and exploding in her hand.

  The bullet took Sied in the forehead, shattering his skull and showering Claire with blood and brains and tissue.

  She took a deep breath and calmly handed Knoff his pistol. “I’ll show that bastard Raines who makes the rules,” she growled as she walked back toward her bunker.

  “Herbert, get out of that suit and join me in my room. I have need of your services,” she said over her shoulder.

  Knoff glared at Sadallah, thinking that if he wasn’t already dead he’d kill him himself for causing Osterman to order him to her bedroom.

  He shook his head. It was a lousy way to make a living.

  Twenty-one

  The chumming of helicopter blades was a drone in Tom Harrison’s ears as he came in low, dangerously low, under USA’s radar in the south of Indiana, where so many SUSA missiles had knocked out the most strategic radar installations SUSA intelligence reports could give them.

  The night skies would help hide him and the noisy Huey with its twin turbines. And an all-out war was going on, with General Raines attacking the USA base from the north, after successful raids in the northeast, as far away as New York and Vermont, and parts of Ohio.

  This could be the death blow to Osterman’s government, he told himself, using the stick and the rudder pedals to keep the big Huey on a low trajectory, armed with four ATG missiles that would level everything in their pathway for a quarter of a mile in any direction.

  It was a bold plan, initiated by Lara Walden in a short but specific coded radio message, with the right wording to prove it had come from General Raines himself: Strike the main compound in Indianapolis at midnight, when there would be “other distractions.”

  Other distractions could mean only one thing.

  “They’ve sent someone to target Osterman in an assassination attempt,” he whispered, with his mike turned off so no one at base command could hear him.

  It was a bit unlike Raines, calling for a single chopper strike in the middle of the night without other air and ground support.

  “Someone knows something.” He sighed, guiding his powerful airship over the treetops in total darkness.

  “What did you say?” asked his co-pilot, Les Minor. “You didn’t have your mike on.”

  Tom thought about his reply before he gave it out loud, for a man could never be too careful about where a bug had been planted. “Someone knows our target will be easy to hit tonight,” he answered.

  “It does seem strange,” said Les. “We have no support in the air of any kind.”

  “I think it was designed this way, Les. We’re supposed to go in with these ATGs and fire them off with as little fanfare as possible.”

  “This Huey makes a hell of a lot of noise, Captain. It will be hard as hell to go in without being noticed on the ground.”

  Tom’s jaw clamped. While he agreed with his copilot, it was dangerous to question orders from the top levels of command. “We’re doing what we were told to do, Les. We should be sighting our target in less than five minutes, give or take. I can’t read our ground-speed indicator with all the instrument lights turned off. This is like flying blind in a really bad dream.”

  “Our radar is working. Nothing I can see in our way for the next quarter mile.”

  “It’s what we can’t see that worries me,” Tom replied, using a bit more thrust to increase the Huey’s speed and forward tilt to the north. “A heat sensor on a SAM will pick us up right away, and we’ll be ducking and dodging for our lives up here. This is not my idea of a good assignment.”

  “We don’t get to pick ’em, unfortunately,” Les said. “What worries me most is that this one came so quickly, and it came from Lara.”

  Tom nodded. “I know, but I verified the source of the radio signal, and it came from SUSA. We didn’t really have a choice.”

  “Seems odd that they’d send us to the USA headquarters without a backup, Cap’n. General Raines is usually very careful about sending us out. We’ve had plenty of air support.”

  Tom was growing tired of the banter. “Why don’t you contact him by radio and ask him if he was serious about this mission, Les?”

  Les gazed down at the inky forests below them. “I think I’ll just keep my mouth shut about it, Cap’n. If this is what they want us to do, I’d be the last one in this Rebel army to question it.”

  “You’ll remain an officer a helluva lot longer with that attitude,” Tom told him. “I’m real sure they’ve got plenty of potatoes needing to be peeled at the mess hall, if you’d rather have that job.”

  “It’d be safer,” Les observed.

  Tom gave the Huey’s radar screens a glance. “Could be trouble,” he said after a moment’s contemplation. “See that little blip coming up from the north? Could be a SAM being fired at us.”

  “We’re still way out of range, Cap’n. I don’t think that’s a missile. It’s too small.”

  Tom wasn’t so sure. “I hope like hell you’re right about it, Les. This big metal bird will go down like a damn rock if they hit us.”

  “My belly ain’t feelin’ so good, Cap’n. Wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”

  “I’m a realist, Les. If they’ve fired a heat-seeking SAM at our radar image, we don’t stand a chance in this big son of a bitch.”

  Tom watched the screen again. “Looks like it’s coming right at us.”

  “It’s too damn small. Hardly more’n a speck on that screen right now.”

  The blip on their radar screen was aimed in a straight trajectory toward the Huey. Tom watched it a moment longer, and there was no mistaking its course. Whatever it was, it was coming for them.

  “You don’t suppose we’ve been double-crossed?” Les asked in a small voice.

  Tom swallowed, for now his mouth was dry His hands were wet, and his feet trembled slightly on the rudder and rear rotor pedals. “Tricked might be a better word for it,” he said. “I know that was Lara’s voice. She gave me the code word, and when I answered back, she gave me the correct reply. It had to be her, unless—”

  “Unless what, Cap’n?”

  “Unless they somehow picked up an earlier transmission and broke the code.”

  “But you said it sounded just like her.”

  “It did. I swear I would know her voice anywhere. It was Lara, all right.”

  Les was staring out the front of the chopper. “I can see a vapor trail now, Cap’n. That’s a damn SAM missile, and it’s headed straight for us.”

  Tom had only one choice . . . to take the Huey down as fast as he could. The big helicopter was awkward, hard to maneuver in the air.

  He shut down the engines and headed for the dark ground underneath them with the blades in autogyro, hoping the crash wouldn’t kill them, knowing for certain a SAM missile would.

  The Huey crashed into the tops of a copse of maple trees, slowing its fall as a SAM missile streaked by overhead, fooled by the absence of the heat signature from the big Whitney-Pratt engines that the pilot had shut down in the nick of time.

  The bird stopped momentarily, held in place by tree limbs. Tom slapped at the buckle on his seatbelt and rolled to the door as the chopper tilted at a crazy angle. He lay on his back and kicked out the plexiglass window and dove through it just before the Huey turned turtle and crashed to the ground, thirty feet below.

  Tom landed on his left shoulder and back, his stomach doing flip-flops at the sound of his bones breaking. Then pain rushed at him like a red fog and he was swallowed up by blackness.

  Hours later, he awoke. His shoulder felt as if someone was holding a branding iron to it, and any movement brought him dangerously close to passing out again.

  He crawled on hands and knees, using only his right arm, his left hanging useless at his side. “Got to warn HQ, he mumbled. There’s a traitor somewhere. Got to let General Raines know.

  It took Tom thirty minutes to crawl the fifteen yards to the wreckage of the Huey. Pulling himself up, he glanced in the window and saw Les, bent and crumpled in the copilot’s seat, his neck canted at an angle, his open eyes staring at eternity.

  Son of a bitch, Tom thought. If only I’d checked with headquarters, this wouldn’t have happened.

  Another half hour was spent prying open the door and crawling into the chopper. There was the smell of burnt insulation everywhere, along with the heady aroma of avgas. The tanks must’ve ruptured on impact, he figured, so he didn’t have much time left to warn the others.

  With a Herculean effort, he pried back the pilot’s seat and fumbled at the radio controls. Thank God, it’s still active.

  “Eagle Two, come in. This is Whirlybird Three calling. Come in.”

  “Eagle Two HQ here,” a voice answered. “Eagle Two is not here. Shall I send for him?”

  “No. We’re down ten klicks from enemy headquarters. Tell Eagle Two we got fake . . . repeat bogus . . . message from Lara Walden to attack without air support.”

  “Say again, Whirlybird Three.”

  “There is someone out there using our codes and the name Lara Walden. Warn Eagle Two . . . you’ve got to warn—”

  A loud whoosh sound was followed by an intense wave of heat as the aviation gasoline in the tanks went up in flames.

  Tom had time for one quick intake of breath, and he was consumed by the inferno.

  “Whirlybird Three, come in . . .” The radio began to melt from the incredible heat and the transmission was not completed.

  There was no one left alive to hear it.

  Twenty-two

  Ben and his team and Lara Walden’s Freedom Fighters were just finishing breakfast, with Cooper giving those members who hadn’t been along on the raid on the hydroelectric plant a highly colored version of the firefight when the radio buzzed.

  Corrie stepped to the transceiver and keyed in the frequency, switching on the scrambler at the same time.

  “Eagle One, come in. This is Eagle Two calling Eagle One.”

  Corrie picked up the mic. “This is Eagle One. Come back, Eagle Two,” she said, glancing at Ben with raised eyebrows. It was highly unusual for Mike Post to call during the day unless he had important news to convey.

  Ben got up from the table and walked over to the radio set.

  “Eagle One,” Mike’s voice said. “This transmission is ears only. Are you secure?”

  Ben leaned over and plugged in the earphones, so only he could hear what Mike had to say. His face showed worry. Mike had never before called with an “ears only” message. Something big was up, and Ben wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it.

  “This is Eagle One. Transmission is secure. Go ahead, Eagle Two.”

  “Ben, I’ve got some disturbing news. The boys in Security have been putting some things together, and have come to the conclusion we have a spy among us.”

  “I’ve had similar thoughts, as you know, Mike. Any idea who, or where, the operative is?”

  “Yeah. From the times of the leaks and culling out people who had access to all of the information we know has been sent to the USA, Security is about fifty percent sure it’s someone up there with you. Their best guess is ... Lara Walden.”

  Ben’s face paled. “I was afraid you were going to say that. Anything more certain than a guess?”

  “Well, one of our helicopter pilots received a secure transmission from someone calling herself Lara Walden. She had all the right code words, and he said he was sure it was her voice.”

  “What happened?”

  “She sent him and his crew on a mission against Osterman’s compound without any air cover. The pilot said they were waiting for him.”

  “Did they make it?”

  There was a moment of white noise, then Mike came back on. “No. The ship and the crew were a total loss.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, preliminary word is our hit on Sugar Babe was a bust. The Jackal radioed they were expecting him, but he was going to go ahead, anyway. That’s the last we’ve heard, so I guess that’s another couple of lives we can chalk up to our informer.”

  Ben was stunned. He thought he knew Lara, and he would never have taken her for a traitor. There must be more to it than he knew. “Thanks, Mike. I’ll take care of it on my end. Eagle One out.”

  When Ben looked up from the radio, everyone in the room was busy trying to look as if they hadn’t been listening, but he knew they’d heard his every word.

  When he turned off the radio and walked back to the table, everyone looked at him with questioning eyes, especially his team, who knew how unusual it was for Mike to ask to talk to him in private.

  He assumed a casual expression on his face. “Just some intel info from Mike concerning a joint operation I’d planned. Nothing important.”

  Corrie started to speak, but a look from Ben silenced her.

  Ben poured himself another cup of coffee and took out his makings. He built himself a cigarette and struck a match on his pants to light it.

  He took the smoke deep into his lungs, enjoying the bite of it and chased it with a long drink of coffee. Two of the most underated pleasures in life, he thought, not looking forward to what he had to do next.

  He picked up an old fly rod lying in a corner and looked at Lara. “Any fish in that lake out back?” he asked.

  She grinned. “Sure, if you know how to catch ’em.”

  “Why don’t you give me a quick lesson? Fish for lunch sounds mighty tasty.”

  “OK,” she replied, refilling her coffee cup and following him out the door.

  Cooper turned to Jersey and raised his eyebrows. She shook her head, not knowing what was going on, but having faith that Ben knew what he was doing.

  At the lake, Lara dug in the moist soil for a moment, shoving pine needles and humus aside until she uncovered a couple of white grubs. “The bass around here love these. Put one on your hook and see what happens.”

  Ben fixed the bait to his hook and cast over next to a half-submerged log in some shadows near the edge of the lake.

  He sat on a fallen tree and smoked and drank his coffee, his eyes on the small cork.

  After a moment, Lara sat next to him. She stared into her coffee and said in a low voice, “Ben, what was that transmission about?”

  Without looking at her, he answered, “It was about you, Lara. It seems someone has been divulging sensitive information about our strategy to the enemy.”

  She nodded, also without looking up. “And you think it’s me?”

  He glanced at her, his eyes dead. “We know it’s you, Lara. Security has determined it can’t be anyone else.”

  When she continued to stare into her cup, he said, “You want to tell me why?”

  She took a deep breath, her face flushed a deep crimson. “It’s Carl. You remember I told you he disappeared?”

  Ben nodded.

  “Well, when I was captured, they told me he was still alive. Then ... then ...”—she began to sob as she spoke—“... they showed me a finger that still had the ring on it I’d given him as an engagement present.”

  Ben remained silent, his eyes on the cork.

  “They told me if I’d help them, give them occasional bits of information, he’d be kept alive and treated well. If I refused, they’d keep sending me pieces of him until there wasn’t anything left to send.”

  Ben took a deep breath. It was worse than he’d imagined. The trouble was, he could see where she’d had little choice but to comply. God only knew what he would do if they had Anna, or Buddy, in a similar situation. He turned to look at her.

  “Then the escape was planned?”