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  “What kind of car did they take?” asked the general.

  “Gray — old Dodge Colt.”

  “License?”

  “Canadian. Sutters are Canadian — stay all summer and fall. Thelma,” he called back to the woman in the cabin, “you got that license plate number Mick gave you?”

  “It’s RCV—” said the woman, timidly emerging from the cabin with a piece of paper, her hands shaking, pulling jerkily at her bath robe. “—RCV 625.”

  Choir backed the Explorer out quickly, throwing gravel. Freeman made contact with Sal and Aussie via their headsets. “You still have a beep?”

  “Affirmative. It’s coming from what’s indicated on the Tac Nav chart as a campground, a new one — Melson Campground — near the top of the lake. Possible they’re changing into civilian—” There was the crackle of static, and then Aussie and Sal could hear Freeman telling them that now that the rearguard action was over they should wait at the helo until further notice. The general had no sooner finished talking with Aussie and Sal than he heard Eddie Mervyn coming in on his MIR line informing him that, as suspected, all the rearguard terrorists — six of them — were dead. Freeman thanked Eddie and Gomez, telling them that he, Ruth, Choir, and Johnny Lee were only a quarter mile up the road, they had an SUV, and would pick them up within a few minutes.

  After Mervyn and Gomez were in the SUV, the team headed north on the lone road. The Ford Explorer was doing a maximum of thirty miles per hour, Ruth on the passenger-side running board, the general on the driver’s-side running board, both looking ahead for any sign of an improvised booby trap. The Explorer’s defroster was on the fritz, so Choir had to use his free hand to wipe the condensation from the windshield. Thirty miles per hour on the straightaway was Choir’s compromise between getting there quickly but still having time to jam on the brakes, should anything suspicious appear on the road that was now funneling into a dark tunnel of trees.

  Freeman figured Choir’s speed was a bit overcautious, but one anti-personnel mine on the road could rupture a tire and bring everything to a screeching halt.

  There was no mine, but an all-but-invisible cable strung tautly across the road.

  “Brake!” yelled Ruth, Choir shouting, “Heads down!” Choir’s controlled skid saved the Explorer from taking the impact full-on, its right side slamming against the cable. Ruth, caught by the cable, was lifted up by it, his helmet flying off, his severed head rolling along the road’s shoulder in a flurry of dead leaves, his torso gushing blood. The nose-clogging smell of burnt rubber wafted over the others as the SUV stopped, everyone in utter shock, their obscenities rending the air. Recovering first, Douglas Freeman said, “God watch him,” then “Put him in the back! MOVE!” As they did so, the pungent odor of burnt rubber hung about the vehicle like a funeral pall.

  Choir was as white as a sheet. It had been Ruth yelling, “Brake!” but it had been Choir who made the mistake of swinging the wheel instead of letting the vehicle hit the wire full-on, in which case it would likely have twanged over the roof without touching either Ruth or Freeman. Freeman ordered Choir to get back in and drive. Again Freeman took his position on the driver’s-side running board. “Go!” To prevent them from hearing the head rolling around, Johnny Lee, in the back, almost sick to his stomach, wrapped it up in a bunch of old clothing the owner had obviously dumped in the backseat, and stuffed it into a corner. No one spoke save Freeman, who, riding the driver’s-side running board, bellowed into the window against the slipstream, his eyes on the road all the time, “Stay focused! We can’t do anything to help Ruth now. But we can make those bastards pay for every—” Freeman’s body lurched forward, his left wrist jammed against the driver’s-side mirror as Choir braked hard, a swirl of leaves rising from the road’s shoulder under the impact of the skid temporarily blocking Freeman’s view.

  “Mines!” screamed Choir.

  “Six of them, right?” said Johnny Lee.

  “Yes!”

  Now Freeman saw them: six small, black objects, no more than a hand’s span wide, placed, staggered, across the road so that it would be impossible for a vehicle to pass without making contact with at least one of them.

  “Back up,” he ordered Choir, “till we’re at least fifty yards away.”

  Choir had no sooner stopped the Explorer than the general, regretting that neither Sal nor Aussie’s longer-range weapons were at hand, ordered Gomez and Eddie Mervyn to concentrate on two targets apiece while he, Freeman, would deal with the remaining two. Choir turned the SUV’s engine off. The ensuing silence was eerie. They could smell the rain in the air. An ominous deep green color curdled the sky, promising heavy snow to the north along Idaho’s border with B.C. Leaves scuttled across the road with unnerving urgency. Although superbly trained, Gomez and Eddie Mervyn were showing signs of stress, Mervyn unusually jumpy, Eddie breathing rapidly. Still, their aim was true, and through the roar of the submachine guns Freeman could see the targets disintegrating. But something was wrong. There were no explosions.

  “What the—” began Johnny Lee.

  “All right,” said the general. “Let’s go.” He told Choir to stop momentarily by the targets then quickly stepped down from the driver’s-side running board and retrieved part of what they had thought were mines. “Son of a bitch!”

  “What is it, General?” pressed Choir as Prince, on high alert, cocked his head inquiringly, Gomez glancing anxiously at his watch, figuring that at the speed they were going they were less than six miles from the campground. Eddie Mervyn and Johnny Lee were watching the road intently through a shower of ice-cold rain.

  “China!” said the general. “Saucers. They put six damn saucers upside down across the road!”

  “Probably got ’em from the cabin they busted into,” Eddie Murphy suggested.

  Choir wasn’t interested. All right, so they were cunning. But right now, hunched tight over the wheel, eyes straining, the SpecFor veteran was preoccupied, watching the rain-slicked road, the calf of his right leg a tense bundle of nerves and muscle, ready to stab the brake at the first sign of another wire, the terrible, dull thud and thwack of Ruth’s decapitation burned into his memory forever.

  The general guesstimated that they were about five miles — around seven minutes — from Melson Campground, and he knew that the terrorist he was after, this “Ram,” if that was what he was called, was infuriatingly smart, almost, the general allowed, as smart as he was. Well, hell, the general told himself, one thing that he and the team weren’t going to do was drive pell-mell into the campground. It was early fall, and though he doubted there would be many campers, if any, after the Labor Day weekend, he’d have to be careful not to get any more civilians involved. They’d stop the Explorer a quarter mile before the objective and go in for the kill on foot.

  Approaching the campground on the run, Prince, on point, was panting so loudly, Freeman thought, that he could be heard a hundred feet away on the narrow, potholed road that led through a tunnel of trees to the campground. It was hoped that Prince still had the scent and that the eager spaniel could lead the general and his four-man team to exactly where the terrorists were, or to what hiking trail they’d selected to take them northward to the Canadian border fourteen miles due north.

  Freeman’s SpecFors halted fifty yards from the campground. They could see bodies strewn by the entrance where a bullet-ridden Winnebago stood facing them. Its driver, a woman, her door open, was slumped over the wheel. Two children, seven, possibly eight years old, were lying very still on the ground, the nearby grass so green it contrasted vividly with the pools of blood. The children’s faces were horribly disfigured, abdomens disemboweled. Prince became rigid and pointed. Several gray wolves, tails down, were slinking away on the off side of the camper, one of them baring its blood-smeared canines at the intrusion on what obviously, from the gruesome state of one of the children’s bodies, had been the predators’ meal.

  Freeman signaled Choir to put Prince back to work to find t
he enemy’s scent, which Prince did quickly despite the rain, leading them to a trailhead a hundred yards beyond the campground by one of the creeks. They followed Prince along the Dodge Colt’s tracks, which could be easily seen where the gravel ended and the grass began. Eddie Mervyn was mouthing obscenities. The car, Canadian plates RCV 625, had been nosed into heavy brush. There were a lot of pine needles around it; the needles had probably showered down when the doors, now shut, had been opened. None of the team thought there was an ambush set up; that would be an unwarranted loss of time for the terrorists. But none of the team expected to walk past the Dodge scot-free. The car was probably “rigged for red”—ready to blow via trip wire.

  Ten minutes later they knew there were no trip wires, and that they had wasted ten minutes. And they no longer had the “beep.” It wasn’t their modern infantry radios that had been jammed. Rather, the thunderous collision of two big storm fronts, whose electric-blue strikes were dancing neurotically amid the Selkirk Mountains that bordered Idaho and the Canadian province of British Columbia, had temporarily scrambled all radio communication. Prince, having led them to the Dodge, was now sneezing so hard and frequently that the team wondered if the terrorists had used black pepper or some other equally confusing compound to throw the dog off.

  Don’t panic, Freeman told himself, as if addressing the other members of his team. Stay calm. Go back to the campground’s entrance, look for boot marks, get your sense of sight working, and working hard.

  But it was no use. The heavy rain had obliterated any footprints or enemy smell for Prince to work with. The spaniel looked up and the general could have sworn the dog’s eyes were saying “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Bud,” said Freeman, kneeling, catching his breath. “You’ve worked hard.” As the general patted Prince, he glanced back at the murdered woman in the Winnebago and the bodies of her children, which neither Johnny Lee nor Choir wanted to deal with.

  Freeman called in on the sheriff’s Sandpoint police frequency. A message machine answered. He gave the team’s location and told them, “We’re in trouble. Send in whoever you can. We’ll try to pick up the scumbags’ trail and we’ll secure the campground perimeter just in case.”

  It was a mark of his leadership — to know that he was beaten and not let pride prevent him from calling in the bigger, albeit slower moving, search and rescue elements. With no scent, no beep, and heavy rain, tracking the bad guys was virtually hopeless. But just because he’d failed on his quick dash by helo to Priest Lake, there was no reason now to prevent the bigger battalions from coming in. Until it occurred to him — the most unexpected scenario of all — that because each tent and trailer-home site was so secluded in this heavily forested area, the terrorists could be hiding in the campsite itself. Freeman could not give himself or his team a reason why the terrorists should do this, but he did know that a good leader examines all the possibilities.

  Freeman, Choir, Gomez, Lee, and Eddie Mervyn began doing a search, moving swiftly yet cautiously from one site to another. It was bad enough to have lost a man already, and Freeman didn’t want any more casualties in this — so far, at least — futile mission. Prince was doing his all, between bouts of sneezing that jangled their nerves. It took all of Choir’s concentration not to say, “Bless you,” to the dog each time, so close was his bond with Prince. He could see that Prince was becoming increasingly uncomfortable under the weight of the protective vest. Now and then the spaniel would stop and paw at it, to no avail.

  Johnny Lee saw the strand and screamed, “Down!” Everyone did so, including Prince, but he’d already tripped the wire that had been strung a few inches above the apron of soggy ground. The bang of the claymore mine and the whistling of its seven hundred steel balls temporarily blocked out the sound of the rain. They were all hit with ricochets coming off the surrounding trees, but their hagvar helmets, vests, and high-collared battle dress uniforms had saved them from any incapacitating injury, though Choir’s right thigh would be badly bruised from one ricochet. Prince, however, had not been so lucky. Having caught part of the blast on the part of his hindquarters not covered by his hagvar coat, he now lay yelping in a tangle of wire dangling from the exploded mine’s carcass. Choir limped to his spaniel’s side, Freeman already calling in search and rescue in Coeur d’Alene via Sandpoint for an evac helo. Eddie Mervyn, Gomez, and Johnny Lee went into T.D.P. — triangular defensive position — to cover the general. The delay, they all knew, meant more gained ground for the terrorists, who the team now believed must be escaping on one of the many trails that wove their way farther from the campground into the wilderness of the Idaho — British Columbia border.

  “Hang on, old boy,” Choir whispered to Prince, unbuckling the bloodied rear strap of Prince’s armored vest. “Hang on.”

  A half an hour later, as they waited for the SAR helo that they could hear beating the air somewhere above them in the torrential downpour, their fatigue, the loss of Tony, and now, possibly, of Prince, sat upon them like a heavy, gray sheet of metal. Freeman knew that they had lost too much time to catch the terrorists before they crossed the border into Canada. By now, the regular army forces had had time to assemble and, under presidential orders, were taking over the search. The general, Gomez, Mervyn, Choir, and Johnny Lee all tried to hide their bitter disappointment as they regrouped, waiting for a lift back to Sandpoint, but the plain fact was that the terrorists, despite having lost half their number in the fiercely fought rearguard action at the lake, had soundly defeated Freeman’s team.

  In the next twenty-four hours, as a few grim locals put it, “the hills were alive with the sound of curses,” as battalions of army reservists and army rangers, guided by forest rangers, scoured the high wilderness areas west, north, and east of Priest Lake, pressing ever farther into the mountainous fastness of Idaho’s panhandle. Only one thing of any relevance was found, and that by a ranger corporal. It was a manila envelope with “General D. Freeman—Personal” written on it. The envelope had been placed inside a large, transparent plastic Ziploc bag together with what looked like black marble-sized pieces of bubble plastic. The bag itself had been attached to a tree at the side of one of the many hiking trails that crisscrossed the border. The area was inaccessible by vehicle and, for this reason, was frequently used by drug mules carrying prized “B.C. Bud”—marijuana — across into the United States.

  There was very little conversation as Douglas Freeman and his reunited team were heloed back to Sandpoint, where, as Freeman was tersely issuing instructions for the transfer of Tony Ruth’s remains back to Arlington, a major delivered the Ziploc bag. The general held it up against the gunmetal sky, examining it carefully for any sign of booby traps, though the fact that it had been forwarded to him by army rangers without anything untoward happening was reasonably good assurance that it hadn’t been rigged. Still, this was the post-9/11 world, and there could be anthrax or some other equally lethal powder in the manila envelope inside the Ziploc. It didn’t take much to kill you. The general walked downwind, away from his team, the black melted plastic bits sliding back and forth in the bag like popcorn. He carefully removed the envelope from the bag, slipped out his twelve-inch Cold Steel blade from its scabbard and, holding the envelope downwind at arm’s length, slit it and waited. No powder. Next, he carefully opened the yellow, folded, letter-sized sheet of paper: “AMERICANS SUCK.”

  The general, the sole passenger aboard the DOD’s West Coast Learjet en route back to Monterey, was handed an encoded e-mail by the copilot. It was from DARPA’s General Charles at the Pentagon, and confirmed what Freeman had feared most, that the black blobs of plastic in the Ziploc bag had once been a computer disk. The sickening implication was that the terrorists must have downloaded and transmitted the super-cavitation data via hilltop line-of-sight modem — and that with apparently no copies at DARPA ALPHA, America now had no record of the data, shifting the balance of power dramatically, and terrifyingly, from the West to the terrorists.

&n
bsp; The general’s concomitant fear was that already the precious data was being fed into the brains of computer-controlled lathes that could turn the requisite hard carbon and steel composites into weaponry and ammunition with hitherto undreamed-of accuracy and destructive power.

  Eleanor Prenty handled the news networks with typical aplomb. She allowed Marte Price to interview her on this evening’s Prime Time to state that classified material had indeed been stolen from a DOD installation at Lake Pend Oreille.

  “What kind of material?” asked Marte Price.

  “Personnel files.”

  The look of incredulity from Marte Price was seen by millions of viewers. “Secretary Prenty, are you telling me that—” She glanced down at her notes. “—ten, no, eleven, Americans have been murdered by terrorists because they wanted personnel files?”

  Prenty’s Washington-honed expression gave away nothing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “So!” the President growled at Eleanor Prenty, who was standing respectfully behind him on the Oval Office’s carpet as the chief executive of the United States, hands clasped behind him, gazed out through the bulletproof glass into the Rose Garden. “The hard drive’s been destroyed and the backup disk stolen. And now we have the possibility — indeed the probability — that some terrorist cell, who knows where, will throw it back at us in the form of a prototype bullet, torpedo, or missile, a technology which we don’t know how to counter because we’ve had the damn technological data stolen.”

  “Mr. President,” said Eleanor, in what was almost certainly the understatement of her career, “I know it looks bad.” She paused. “It is bad, but Chief Scientist Moffat has e-mailed me that it’s only the very latest C.P.L. equipment—”

  “For God’s sake, Eleanor, speak English!”