Op Center 08 – Line Of Control – Clancy, Tom

PROLOGUE:

Siachin Base 3, Kashmir Wednesday, 5:42 A.M.

Major Dev Puri could not sleep. He had not yet gotten used to the flimsy cots the Indian army used in the field. Or the thin air in the mountains. Or the quiet. Outside his former barracks in Udhampur there were always the sounds of trucks and automobiles, of soldiers and activity. Here, the quiet reminded him of a hospital. Or a morgue.

Instead, he put on his olive green uniform and red turban. Puri left his tent and walked over to the front-line trenches. There, he looked out as the rich morning sun rose behind him. He watched as a brilliant orange glow crept through the valley and settled slowly across the flat, deserted demilitarized zone. It was the flimsiest of barriers in the most dangerous place on earth.

Here in the Himalayan foothills of Kashmir, human life was always in jeopardy. It was routinely threatened by the extreme weather conditions and rugged terrain. In the warmer, lower elevations it was at risk whenever one failed to spot a lethal king cobra or naja naja, the Indian cobra, hiding in the underbrush. It was endangered whenever one was an instant too late swatting a disease-carrying mosquito or venomous brown widow spider in time. Life was in even greater peril a few miles to the north, on the brutal Siachin Glacier. There was barely enough air to support life on the steep, blinding-white hills. Avalanches and subzero temperatures were a daily danger to foot patrols.

Yet the natural hazards were not what made this the most dangerous spot on the planet. All of those dangers were nothing compared to how humans threatened each other here. Those threats were not dependent on the time of day or the season of the year. They were constant, every minute of every hour of every day for nearly the past sixty years.

Puri stood on an aluminum ladder in a trench with corrugated tin walls. Directly in front of him were five-foot-high sandbags protected by razor wire strung tightly above them from iron posts. To the right, about thirty feet away, was a small sentry post, a wooden shelter erected behind the sandbags. There was hemp netting on top with camouflage greenery overhead. To the right, forty feet away, was another watch post.

One hundred and twenty yards in front of him, due west, was a nearly identical Pakistan trench.

With deliberate slowness, the officer removed a pouch of ghutka, chewable tobacco, from his pants pocket. Sudden moves were discouraged out here where they might be noticed and misinterpreted as reaching for a weapon. He unfolded the packet and pushed a small wad in his cheek. Soldiers were encouraged not to smoke, since a lighted cigarette could give away the position of a scout or patrol.

As Puri chewed the tobacco he watched squadrons of black flies begin their own morning patrol. They were searching for fecal matter left by red squirrels, goatlike markhors, and other herbivores that woke and fed before dawn. It was early winter now. Puri had heard that in the summer the insects were so thick they seemed like clouds of smoke drifting low over the rocks and scrub.

The major wondered if he would be alive to see them. During some weeks thousands of men on both sides were killed. That was inevitable with more than one million fanatic soldiers facing one another across an extremely narrow, two-hundred-mile-long “line of control.” Major Puri could see some of those soldiers now, across the sandy stretch between the trenches. Their mouths were covered with black muslin scarves to protect them against the westward-blowing winds. But the eyes in their wind-burned faces blazed with hatred that had been sparked back in the eighth century. That was when Hindus and Muslims first clashed in this region. The ancient farmers and merchants took up arms and fought about trade routes, land and water rights, and ideology. The struggle became even more fierce in 1947 when Great Britain abandoned its empire on the subcontinent. The British gave the rival Hindus and Muslims the nations of India and Pakistan to call their own. That partition also gave India control over the Muslim-dominated region of Kashmir. Since that time the Pakistans have regarded the Indians as an occupying force in Kashmir. Warfare has been almost constant as the two sides struggled over what became the symbolic heart of the conflict.

And I am in the heart of the heart, Puri thought.

Base 3 was a potential flashpoint, the fortified zone nearest both Pakistan and China. It was ironic, the career soldier told himself. This “heart” looked exactly like Dabhoi, the small town where he had grown up at the foot of the Satpura Range in central India. Dabhoi had no real value except to the natives, who were mostly tradesmen, and to those trying to get to the city of Broach on the Bay of Cambay. That was where they could buy fish cheap. It was disturbing how hate rather than cooperation made one place more valuable than another. Instead of trying to expand what they had in common they were trying to destroy what was uncommon.

The officer stared out at the cease-fire zone. Lining the sandbags were orange binoculars mounted on small iron poles. That was the only thing the Indians and Pakistans had ever agreed on: coloring the binoculars so they would not be mistaken for guns. But Puri did not need them here. The brilliant sun was rising behind him. He could clearly see the dark faces of the Pakistans behind their cinderblock barricades. The faces looked just like Indian faces except that they were on the wrong side of the line of control.

Puri made a point of breathing evenly. The line of control was a strip of land so narrow in places that cold breath was visible from sentries on both sides. And being visible, the puffs of breath could tell guards on either side if their counterparts were anxious and breathing rapidly or asleep and breathing slowly. There, a wrong word whispered to a fellow soldier and overheard by the other side could break the fragile truce. A hammer hitting a nail had to be muffled with cloth lest it be mistaken for a gunshot and trigger return rifle fire, then artillery, then nuclear weapons. That exchange could happen so fast that the heavily barricaded bases would be vaporized even before the echoes of the first guns had died in the towering mountain passageways.

Mentally and physically, it was such a trying and unforgiving environment that any officer who successfully completed a one-year tour of duty was automatically eligible for a desk job in a “safe zone” like Calcutta or New Delhi. That was what the forty-one-year-old Puri was working toward. Three months before, he had been transferred from the army’s HQ Northern Command where he trained border patrols. Nine more months of running this small base, of “kiting with tripwire,” as his predecessor had put it, and he could live comfortably for the rest of his life. Indulge his passion for going out on anthropological digs. He loved learning more about the history of his people. The Indus Valley civilization was over 4,500 years old. Back then the Pkitania and Indian people were one. There was a thousand years of peace. That was before religion came to the region.

Major Puri chewed his tobacco. He smelled the brewed tea coming from the mess tent. It was time for breakfast, after which he would join his men for the morning briefing. He took another moment to savor the morning. It was not that a new day brought new hope. All it meant was that the night had passed without a confrontation.

Puri turned and stepped down the stairs. He did not imagine that there would be very many mornings like this in the weeks ahead. If the rumors from his friends at HQ were true, the powder keg was about to get a new fuse.

A very short, very hot fuse.

Chapter One.

Washington, D.C. Wednesday, 5:56 A.M.

The air was unseasonably chilly. Thick, charcoal-gray clouds hung low over Andrews Air Force Base. But in spite of the dreary weather Mike Rodgers felt terrific.

The forty-seven-year-old two-star general left his black 1970 Mustang in the officers’ parking lot. Stepping briskly, he crossed the neatly manicured lawn to the Op-Center offices. Rodgers’s light brown eyes had a sparkle that almost made them appear golden. He was still humming the last tune he had been listening to on the portable CD player. It was Victoria Bundonis’s recording of the 1950s David Seville ditty “Witch Doctor.” The young singer’s low, torchy take on “Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah” was always an invigorating way to start the day. Usually, when he crossed the grass here, he was in a different frame of mind. This early, dew would dampen his polished shoes as they sank into the soft soil. His neatly pressed uniform and his short, graying black hair would ripple in the strong breeze. But Rodgers was usually oblivious to the earth, wind, and water–three of the four ancient elements. He was only aware of the fourth element, fire. That was because it was bottled and capped inside the man himself. He carried it carefully as though it were nitroglycerin. One sudden move and he would blow.

But not today.

There was a young guard standing in a bullet-proof glass booth just inside the door. He saluted smartly as Rodgers entered.

“Good morning, sir,” the sentry said.

“Good morning,” Rodgers replied. ” ‘Wolverine.’ “

That was Rodgers’s personal password for the day. It was left on his GovNet e-mail pager the night before by Op-Center’s internal security chief, Jenkin Wynne. If the password did not match what the guard had on his computer Rodgers would not have been allowed to enter.

“Thank you, sir,” the guard said and saluted again. He pressed a button and the door clicked open. Rodgers entered.

There was a single elevator directly ahead. As Rodgers walked toward it he wondered how old the airman first class was. Twenty-two? Twenty-three? A few months ago Rodgers would have given his rank, his experiences, everything he owned or knew to be back where this young sentry was. Healthy and sharp, with all his options spread before him. That was after Rodgers had disastrously field-tested the Regional Op-Center. The mobile, hi-tech facility had been seized in the Middle East. Rodgers and his personnel were imprisoned and tortured. Upon the team’s release, Senator Barbara Fox and the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee rethought the ROC program. The watchdog group felt that having a U.S. intelligence base working openly on foreign soil was provocative rather than a deterrent. Because the ROC had been Rodgers’s responsibility he felt as though he’d let Op-Center down. He also felt as though he had blown his last, best chance to get back into the field.

Rodgers was wrong. The United States needed intelligence on the nuclear situation in Kashmir. Specifically, whether Pakistan had deployed warheads deep in the mountains of the region. Indian operatives could not go into the field. If the Pakistanis found them it might trigger the war the United States was hoping to avoid. An American unit would have some wiggle room. Especially if they could prove that they were bringing intelligence about Indian nuclear capabilities to Pakistan, intelligence that a National Security Agency liaison would be giving Rodgers in the town of Srinagar. Of course, the Indian military would not know he had that. It was all a big, dangerous game of three-card monte. All the dealer had to do was remember where all the cards were and never get busted.

Rodgers entered the small, brightly lit elevator and rode it to the basement level.

Op-Center–officially the National Crisis Management Center–was housed in a two-story building located near the Naval Reserve flight line. During the Cold War the nondescript, ivory-colored building was a staging area for crack flight crews. In the event of a nuclear attack their job would have been to evacuate key officials from Washington, D.C. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the downsizing of the air force’s NuRRDs–nuclear rapid-response divisions–the building was given to the newly commissioned NCMC.

The upstairs offices were for nonclassified operations such as news monitoring, finance, and human resources. The basement was where Hood, Rodgers, Intelligence Chief Bob Herbert, and the rest of the intelligence-gathering and -processing personnel worked.

Rodgers reached the underground level. He walked through the cubicles in the center to his office. He retrieved his old leather briefcase from under the desk. He packed his laptop and began collecting the diskettes he would need for his journey. The files contained intelligence reports from India and Pakistan, maps of Kashmir, and the names of contacts as well as safe houses throughout the region. As he packed the tools of his trade Rodgers felt almost like he did as a kid growing up in Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford endured fierce winter storms. But they were damp storms that brought packing snow. Before putting on his snow suit Rodgers would get his bucket, rope, spade, and swimming goggles and toss them into his school gym bag. His mother insisted on the goggles. She knew she could not prevent her son from fighting but she did not want him getting hit by a snowball and losing an eye. Once outside, while all the other kids were building snow forts, Rodgers would climb a tree and build a snow tree house on a piece of plywood. No one ever expected that. A rain of snowballs from a thick branch.

After Rodgers had his briefcase packed he would head to the “Gulf cart” parked at the back door. That was what the military had christened the motorized carts that had shuttled officers from meeting to meeting during both Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The Pentagon bought thousands of them just before what turned out to be the last gasp of face-to-face strategy meetings before secure video-conferencing was created. After that, the obsolete carts had been distributed to bases around the country as Christmas presents to senior officers.

The Gulf cart would not have far to travel. A C-130 Hercules was parked just a quarter of a mile away, in the holding area of the airstrip that passed directly behind the NCMC building. In slightly under an hour the hundred-foot-long transport would begin a NATO supply trek that would secretly ferry Rodgers and his Striker unit from Andrews to the Royal Air Force Alconbury station in Great Britain to a NATO base outside Ankara, Turkey. There, the team would be met by an Indian Air Force AN-12 transport, part of the Himalayan Eagles squadron. They would be flown to the high-altitude base at Chushul near the Chinese border and then choppered to Srinagar to meet their contact. It would be a long and difficult journey lasting just over twenty-four hours. And there would be no time to rest when they reached India. The team had to be ready to go as soon as they touched down.

But that was fine with Mike Rodgers. He had been “ready to go” for years. He had never wanted to be second-in-command of anything. During the Spanish-American War, his great-great-grandfather Captain Malachai T. Rodgers went from leading a unit to serving under upstart Lt. Colonel Teddy Roosevelt. As Captain Rodgers wrote to Mrs. Rodgers at the time, “There is nothing better than running things. And there is nothing worse than being a runner-up, even if that happens to be under a gentleman you respect.”

Malachai Rodgers was right. The only reason Mike Rodgers had taken the deputy director’s position was because he never expected Paul Hood to stay at Op-Center. Rodgers assumed that the former Los Angeles mayor was a politician at heart who had eyes on the Senate or the White House. Rodgers was wrong. The general hit another big bump in the road when Hood resigned from Op-Center to spend more time with his family. Rodgers thought Op-Center would finally be his. But Paul and Sharon Kent Hood weren’t able to fix what was wrong with their marriage. They separated and Hood came back to Op-Center. Rodgers went back to being number two.

Rodgers needed to command. A few weeks before, he and Hood had ended a hostage siege at the United Nations. Rodgers had directed that operation. That reminded him of how much he enjoyed risking everything on his ability to outthink and outperform an adversary. Doing it safely from behind a desk just was not the same thing.

Rodgers turned to the open door a moment before Bob Herbert arrived. Op-Center’s number three man was always announced by the low purr of his motorized wheelchair.

“Good morning,” Herbert said as he swung into view.

“Good morning, Bob,” Rodgers replied.

“Mind if I come in?”

“Not at all,” Rodgers told him.

Herbert swung the wheelchair into the office. The balding, thirty-nine-year-old intelligence genius had lost the use of his legs in the Beirut embassy bombing in 1983. The terrorist attack had also taken the life of Herbert’s beloved wife. Op-Center’s computer wizard Matt Stoll had helped design this state-of-the-art wheelchair. It included a computer that folded into the armrest and a small satellite dish that opened from a box attached to the back of the chair.

“I just wanted to wish you good luck,” Herbert said.

“Thanks,” Rodgers replied.

“Also, Paul asked if you would pop in before you left,” Herbet said. “He’s on the phone with Senator Fox and didn’t want to miss you.”

Rodgers glanced at his watch. “The senator is up early. Any particular reason?”

“Not that I know of, though Paul didn’t look happy,” Herbert said. “Could be more fallout over the UN attack.”

If that were true then there was an advantage to being the number two man, Rodgers thought. He did not have to put up with that bullshit. They had absolutely done the right thing at the United Nations. They had saved the hostages and killed the bad guys.

“They’re probably going to beat us up until the secretary-general cries uncle,” Rodgers said.

“Senator Fox has gotten good at that,” Herbert said. “She slaps your back real hard and tells your enemies it’s a lashing. Tells your friends it’s a pat on the back. Only you know which it is. Anyway, Paul will deal with that,” Herbert went on. He extended his hand. “I just wanted to wish you well. That’s a remote, hostile region you’re heading into.”

Rodgers clasped Herbert’s hand and grinned. “I know. But I’m a remote, hostile guy. Kashmir and I will get along fine.”

Rodgers went to withdraw his hand. Herbert held it.

“There’s something else,” Herbert said.

“What?” Rodgers asked.

“I can’t find out who your contact man is over there,” Herbert said.

“We’re being met by an officer of the National Security Guard, Captain Prem Nazir,” Rodgers replied. “That’s not unusual.”

“It is for me,” Herbert insisted. “A few calls, some promises, a little intel exchange usually gets me what I want. It lets me check up on people, make sure there isn’t a double-cross on the other end. Not this time. I can’t even get anything on Captain Nazir.”

“To tell you the truth, I’m actually relieved that there’s tight security for once,” Rodgers laughed.

“Tight security is when the opposition doesn’t know what is going on,” Herbert said. “I get worried when our own people can’t tell me exactly what is going on.”

“Cannot or will not?” Rodgers asked.

“Cannot,” Herbert said.

“Why don’t you call Mala Chatterjee,” Rodgers suggested. “I bet she would be delighted to help.”

“That’s not funny,” Herbert said.

Chatterjee was the young Indian secretary-general of the United Nations. She was a career pacifist, the most vocal critic of Op-Center and the way they had taken over and resolved the crisis.

“I talked to my people at the CIA and at our embassies in Islamabad and New Delhi,” Herbert went on. “They don’t know anything about this operation. That’s unusual. And the National Security Agency does not exactly have things under control. The plan has not gone through the usual com-sim. Lewis is too busy housecleaning for that.”

“I know,” Rodgers said.

“The usual com-sim” was a computer simulation that was run on any plan that had been approved for the field. The sponsoring agency typically spent days running the simulations to find holes in the main blueprint and also to give backup options to the agents heading into the field. But the National Security Agency had recently been shaken up by the resignation of their director, Jack Fenwick. That occurred after Hood had identified Fenwick as one of the leaders of a conspiracy to help remove the president from office. His replacement, Hank Lewis, formerly assistant to the president, coordinator of strategic planning, was spending his time removing Fenwick loyalists.

“We’ll be okay,” Rodgers assured him. “Back in Vietnam my plans were always held together with spit.”

“Yeah, but there at least you knew who the enemy was,” Herbert pointed out. “All I want you to do is stay in touch. If something seems out of whack I want to be able to let you know.”

“I will,” Rodgers promised. They would be traveling with the TAC-SAT phone. The secure uplink would allow Striker to call Op-Center from virtually anywhere in the world.

Herbert left and General Rodgers picked up the files and diskettes he wanted to take. The hall outside the door was getting busier as Op-Center’s day crew arrived. It was nearly three times the size of the skeletal night crew. Yet Rodgers felt strangely cut off from the activity. It was not just the focused “mission mode” Rodgers went into before leaving the base. It was something else. A guardedness, as if he were already in the field. In and around Washington that was not far from the truth.

Despite Rodgers’s assurances, what Herbert said had resonated with him. Herbert was not an alarmist and his concerns did worry Rodgers a little. Not for himself or even his old friend Colonel Brett August. August would be commanding Op-Center’s elite Striker unit. Rodgers was worried about the young multiservice members of Striker who would be joining him in Kashmir. Especially the ones with families. That was never far from any commander’s mind. Herbert had helped to give it a little extra volume. But risk came with the uniform and the generous pension. Rodgers would do everything he could to safeguard the personnel and the mission. Because, in the end, there was one inescapable truth about actions taken by men like Mike Rodgers and Brett August.

The goal was worth the risk.

Chapter Two.

Srinagar, India Wednesday, 3:51 P.M.

Five hours after giving a false name to officials at the Foreigners’ Regional Registration Office at Srinagar Airport, Ron Friday was walking the streets of what he hoped would be his home for the next year or two. He had checked into a small, cheap inn off Shervani Road. He’d first heard about Binoo’s Palace the last time he was here. There was a gaming parlor in the back, which meant that the local police had been paid to keep the place secure. There, Friday would be both anonymous and safe.

The National Security Agency officer was happy to have gotten out of Baku, Azerbaijan. He was happy not only to get out of the former Soviet Republic but to be here, in Srinagar, less than twenty-five miles from the line of control. He had been to the capital of the northern state before and found it invigorating. Distant artillery fire was constant. So were the muted pops of land mines in the hills. During early morning there was the scream of jets and the distinctive whumping sound of their cluster bombs and the louder crashes of their guided missiles.

Fear was also in the air day and night. The ancient resort city was governed and patrolled by Indian Hindu soldiers while commerce was controlled by Kashmiri Muslims. Not a week went by without four or five deaths due to terrorist bombings, shoot-outs, or hostage situations.

Friday loved it. Nothing made each breath sweeter than when you were walking through a minefield.

The forty-seven-year-old Michigan native walked through the largest open-air market in the city. It was located on the eastern end of the town, near hills that had once been fertile grazing areas. That was before the military had appropriated the hills as a staging area for helicopter flights and convoys headed out toward the line of control. A short walk to the north was the Centanr Lake View Hotel, which was where most foreign tourists stayed. It was located near the well-kept waterfront region known collectively as the Mughal Gardens. These gardens, which grow naturally, helped give the region its name Kashmir, which meant “Paradise” in the language of the Mughal settlers.

A cool, light rain was falling, though it did not keep away the regular crowds and foreigners. The market smelled like nowhere else Friday had ever been. It was a combination of musk–from the sheep and damp rattan roofs on the stalls–lavender incense, and diesel fuel. The fuel came from the taxis, minibuses, and scooter-rickshaws that serviced the area. There were women in saris and young students in western clothing. All of them were jockeying for position at the small wooden stands, looking for the freshest fruits or vegetables or baked goods. Merchants whipped small switches at sheep who had been driven from adjacent fields by depleted pasturage or by soldiers practicing their marksmanship. The strays tried to steal carrots or cabbage. Other customers, mostly Arab and Asian businessmen, shopped at a leisurely pace for shawls, papier-mache trinket boxes, and leather purses. Because Srinagar and the rest of Kashmir were on the list of “no-go zones” at the State Department, British Foreign Office, and other European governments, very few Westerners were here.

A few merchants hawked rugs. There were farmers who had parked their trucks and carts at one end and were carrying baskets with fresh produce or bread to various stands. And there were soldiers. Except in Israel, Friday had never seen a public place where there were nearly as many soldiers as there were civilians. And those were only the obvious ones, the men in uniform. He was sure that there were members of the Special Frontier Force, which was a cocreation of the CIA and India’s Research and Analysis Wing, their foreign espionage service. The job of the SFF was to disrupt the flow of materiel and intelligence to and from enemy positions. Friday was equally sure the crowd included members of Pakistan’s Special Services Group. A division of the army’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the group monitored actions behind enemy lines. They also worked with freelance operatives to commit acts of terrorism against the Indian people.

There was nothing like this in Baku, where the markets were quiet and organized and the local population was small and relatively well behaved. Friday liked this better. One had to watch for enemies while trying to feed one’s family.

Having a desk at the embassy in Baku had been interesting but not because of the work he was doing for Deputy Ambassador Dorothy Williamson. Friday had spent years working as an attorney for Mara Oil, which was why Williamson had welcomed him to her staff. Officially, he was there to help her draft position papers designed to moderate Azerbaijani claims on Caspian oil. What had really made Friday’s tenure exciting was the undercover work he had been doing for Jack Fenwick, the president’s former national security advisor.

The broad-shouldered man had been recruited by the NSA while he was still in law school. One of his professors, Vincent Van Heusen, had been an OSS operative during World War II. Professor Van Heusen saw in Friday some of the same qualities he himself had possessed as a young man. Among those was independence. Friday had learned that growing up in the Michigan woods where he went hunting with his father for food–not only with a rifle but with a longbow. After graduating from NYU Friday spent time at the NSA as a trainee. When he went to work for the oil industry a year later he was also working as a spy. In addition to making contacts in Europe, the Middle East, and the Caspian, Friday was given the names of CIA operatives working in those countries. From time to time he was asked to watch them. To spy on the spies, making certain that they were working only for the United States.

Friday finally left the private sector five years ago. He grew bored with working for the oil industry full-time and the NSA part-time. He had also grown frustrated, watching as intelligence operations went to hell overseas. Many of the field agents he met were inexperienced, fearful, or soft. This was especially true in the Third World and throughout Asia. They wanted creature comforts. Not Friday. He wanted to be uncomfortable, hot, cold, hurting, off balance.

Challenged. Alive.

The other problem was that increasingly electronic espionage had replaced hands-on human surveillance. The result was much less efficient mass-intelligence gathering. To Friday that was like getting meat from a slaughterhouse instead of hunting it down. The food didn’t taste as good when it was mass-produced. The experience was less satisfying. And over time the hunter grew soft.

Friday had no intention of ever growing soft. When Jack Fenwick had said he wanted to talk to him, Friday was eager to meet. Friday went to see him at the Off the Record bar at the Hay-Adams hotel. It was during the week of the president’s inauguration so the bar was jammed and the men were barely noticed. Fenwick recruited Friday to the “Undertaking,” as he had called it. An operation to overthrow the president and put a new, more proactive figure in the Oval Office. One of the gravest problems facing America was security from terrorists. Vice President Cotten would have dealt with the problem decisively. He would have informed terrorist nations that if they sponsored attacks on American interests their capital cities would be bombed flat. Removing fear from Americans abroad would have encouraged competitive trade and tourism, which would have helped covert agencies infiltrate nationalist organizations, religious groups, and other extremist bands.

But the plotters had been stopped. The world was once again safe for warlords, anarchists, and international muggers.

Fortunately, the resignations of the vice president, Fenwick, and the other high-profile conspirators were like cauterizing a wound. The administration had its main perpetrators. They stopped the bloodletting and for the time being seemed to turn attention away from others who may have assisted in the plan. Friday’s role in setting up the terrorist Harpooner and actually assassinating a CIA spoiler had not been uncovered. In fact, Hank Lewis was trying to get as much intel as possible as fast as possible so he could look ahead, not back. NSA operatives outside Washington were being called upon to visit high-intensity trouble spots and both assist in intelligence operations and report back first-hand. That was why Friday left Baker. Originally he tried to get transferred to Pakistan, but was moved to India by special request of the Indian government. He had spent time here for Mara Oil, helping them evaluate future productivity in this region as well as on the border between the Great Indian Desert in India’s Rajasthan Province and the Thar Desert in Pakistan. He knew the land, the Kashmiri language, and the people.

The irony, of course, was that his first assignment was to help a unit from Op-Center execute a mission of vital importance to peace in the region. Op-Center, the group that had stopped the Undertaking from succeeding.

If politics made strange bedfellows then covert actions made even stranger ones. There was one difference between the two groups, however. Diplomacy demanded that politicians bury their differences when they had to. Field agents did not. They nursed their grudges.

Forever.

Chapter Three.

Washington, D.C. Wednesday, 6:32 A.M.

Mike Rodgers strode down the corridor to the office of Paul Hood. His briefcase was packed and he was still humming “Witch Doctor.” He felt energized by the impending challenge, by the change of routine, and just by getting out of the windowless office.

Hood’s assistant, Stephen “Bugs” Benet, had not yet arrived. Rodgers walked through the small reception area to Hood’s office. He knocked on the door and opened it. Op-Center’s director was pacing and wearing headphones. He was just finishing up his phone conversation with Senator Fox. Hood motioned the general in. Rodgers made his way to a couch on the far end of the room. He set his briefcase down but did not sit. He would be sitting enough over the next day.

Though Hood was forty-five, nearly the same age as Rodgers, there was something much younger-looking about the man. Maybe it only seemed that way because he smiled a lot and was an optimist. Rodgers was a realist, a term he preferred to pessimist. And realists always seemed older, more mature. As an old friend of Rodgers’s, South Carolina Representative Layne Maly, once put it, “No one’s blowin’ sunshine up my ass so it ain’t showin’ up between my lips.” As far as Rodgers was concerned that pretty much said it all.

Not that Hood himself had a lot to smile about. His marriage had fallen apart and his daughter, Harleigh, was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a result of having been taken hostage at the United Nations. Hood had also taken a bashing in the world press and in the liberal American media for his guns-blazing solution to the UN crisis. It would not surprise Rodgers to learn that Senator Fox was giving Hood an earful for that. The goddamn thing of it was nothing helped our rivals more than when we fought among ourselves. Rodgers could almost hear the cheering from the Japanese, from the Islamic Fundamentalists, and from the Germans, the French, and the rest of the Eurocentric bloc. And we were arguing after saving the lives of their ambassadors.

It was a twisted world. Which was probably why we needed a man like Paul Hood running Op-Center. If it were up to Rodgers he would have taken down a few of the ambassadors on his way out of the UN.

Hood slipped off the headphones and looked at Rodgers. There was a flat look of frustration in his dark hazel eyes. His wavy black hair was uncharacteristically unkempt. He was not smiling.

“How are you doing?” Hood asked Rodgers. “Everything set?”

Rodgers nodded.

“Good,” Hood said.

“How are things here?” Rodgers asked.

“Not so good,” Hood said. “Senator Fox thinks we’ve gotten too visible. She wants to do something about that.”

“What?” Rodgers asked.

“She wants to scale us back,” Hood said. “She’s going to propose to the other members of the COIC that they recharter Op-Center as a smaller, more covert organization.”

“I smell Kirk Pike’s hand in this,” Rodgers said.

Pike was the newly appointed head of the Central Intelligence Agency. The ambitious former chief of navy intelligence was extremely well liked on the Hill and had accepted the position with a self-prescribed goal: to consolidate as many of the nation’s intelligence needs as possible under one roof.

“I agree that Pike is probably involved, but I think it’s more than just him,” Hood said. “Fox said that Secretary-General Chatterjee is still grumbling about bringing us before the International Court of Justice. Have us tried for murder and trespassing.”

“Smart,” Rodgers said. “She’ll never get the one but the jurists may give her the other.”

“Exactly,” Hood said. “That makes her look strong and reaffirms the sovereign status of the United Nations. It also scores points with pacifists and with anti-American governments. Fox apparently thinks this will go away if our charter is revoked and quietly rewritten.”

“I see,” Rodgers said. “The CIOC acts preemptively to make Chatterjee’s action seem bullying and unnecessary.”

“Bingo,” Hood said.

“Is it going to happen?” Rodgers asked.

“I don’t know,” Hood admitted. “Fox hasn’t discussed this with the other members yet.”

“But she wants it to happen,” Rodgers said.

Hood nodded.

“Then it will,” Rodgers said.

“I’m not ready to concede that,” Hood said. “Look, I don’t want you to worry about the political stuff. I need you to get this job done in Kashmir. Chatterjee may be secretary-general but she’s still Indian. If you score one for her side she’ll have a tough time going after us.”

“Not if she passes the baton to Pike,” Rodgers said.

“Why would she?” Hood asked.

“Back-scratching and access,” Rodgers said. “A lot of the intel I have on Kashmir came from the CIA. The Company works very closely with the Indian Intelligence Bureau.”

“The domestic surveillance group,” Hood said.

“Right,” Rodgers said.

Under the Indian Telegraph Act, the Indian Intelligence Bureau has the legal authority to intercept all forms of electronic communication. That includes a lot of faxes and e-mail from Afghanistan and other Islamic states. It was IIB that blew the whistle on Iraq’s pharmaceutical drug scam back in 2000. Humanitarian medicines were excluded from the United Nations sanctions. Instead of going to Iraqi hospitals and clinics, however, the medicines were hoarded by the health minister. When shortages pushed up demand the drugs were sold to the black market for hard foreign currency that could be used to buy luxury goods for government officials, bypassing the sanctions.

“The IIB shares the information they collect with the CIA for analysis,” Rodgers went on. “If Director Pike helps Chatterjee, the Indians will continue to work exclusively with him.”

“Pike can have the trophy if he wants,” Hood said. “We still get the intelligence.”

“But that isn’t all Pike wants,” Rodgers said. “People aren’t satisfied just winning in Washington. They have to destroy the competition. And if that doesn’t work they go after his friends and family.”

“Yeah–well, he’ll have to get a task force for that one,” Hood said quietly. “We Hoods are kind of spread out now.”

Rodgers felt like an ass. Paul Hood was not living with his family anymore and his daughter, Harleigh, spent a lot of time in therapy. It was careless to have suggested that they might be at risk.

“Sorry, Paul. I didn’t mean that literally,” Rodgers said.

“It’s all right,” Hood replied. “I know what you meant. I don’t think Pike will cross that line, though. We’ve got pretty good muckrakers and a great press liaison. He won’t want to take any rivalry public.”

Rodgers was not convinced of that. Hood’s press liaison was Ann Farris. For the last few days the office was quietly buzzing with the rumor that the divorcee and Paul Hood were having an affair. Ann had been staying late and the two had been spotted leaving Hood’s hotel together one morning. Rodgers did not care one way or the other as long as their relationship did not impact the smooth operation of the NCMC.

“Speaking of family, how is Harleigh doing?” Rodgers asked. The general was eager to get off the subject of Pike before leaving for India. The idea of fighting his own people was loathsome to him. Though the men did not socialize very much, Rodgers was close enough to Hood to ask about his family.

“She’s struggling with what happened in New York and with me moving out,” Hood said. “But she’s got a good support system and her brother’s being a real trouper.”

“Alexander’s a good kid. Glad to hear he’s stepping up to the plate. What about Sharon?” Rodgers asked.

“She’s angry,” Hood said. “She has a right to be.”

“It will pass,” Rodgers said.

“Liz says it may not,” Hood replied.

Liz was Liz Gordon, Op-Center’s psychologist. Though she was not counseling Harleigh, she was advising Hood.

“Hopefully, the intensity of Sharon’s anger will diminish,” Hood went on. “I don’t think she and I will ever be friends again. But with any luck we’ll have a civil relationship.”

“You’ll get there,” Rodgers said. “Hell, that’s more than I’ve ever had with a woman.”

Hood thought for a moment then grinned. “That’s true, isn’t it? Goes all the way back to your friend Biscuit in the fifth grade.”

“Yeah,” Rodgers replied. “Look, you’re a diplomat. I’m a soldier. I’m a prisoner to my scorched earth nature.”

Hood’s grin became a smile. “I may need to borrow some of that fire for my dealings with Senator Fox.”

“Stall her till I get back,” Rodgers said. “And just keep an eye on Pike. I’ll work on him when I get back.”

“It’s a deal,” Hood said. “Stay safe, okay?”

Rodgers nodded and the men shook hands.

The general felt uneasy as he headed toward the elevator. Rodgers did not like leaving things unresolved–especially when the target was as vulnerable as Hood was. Rodgers could see it in his manner. He had seen it before, in combat. It was a strange calm, almost as if Hood were in denial that pressures were starting to build. But they were. Hood was already distracted by his impending divorce, by Harleigh’s condition, and by the day-to-day demands of his position. Rodgers had a feeling that the pressure from Senator Fox would become much more intense after the CIOC met. He would give Bob Herbert a call from the C-130 and ask him to keep an eye on Op-Center’s director.

A watcher watching the watcher, Rodgers thought. Op-Center’s intelligence chief looking after Op-Center’s director, who was tracking Kirk Pike. With all the human drama gusting around him the general almost felt as if it were routine to go into the field to search for nuclear missiles.

But Rodgers got his perspective back quickly. As he walked onto the tarmac he saw the Striker team beginning to assemble beside the Hercules transport. They were in uniform, at ease, their grips and weapons at their feet. Colonel August was reviewing a checklist with Lieutenant Orjuela, his new second-in-command.

Behind him, in the basement of the NCMC, there were careers at risk. Out here men and women were about to buy their way into India using their lives as collateral.

The day that became routine was the day Rodgers vowed to hang up his uniform.

Stepping briskly, proudly, Rodgers made his way toward the shadow of the plane and the sharp, bright salutes of his waiting team.

Chapter Four.

Kargil, Kashmir Wednesday, 4:11 P.M.

Apu Kumar sat on the old, puffy featherbed that had once been used by his grandmother. He looked out at the four bare walls of his small bedroom. They had not always been bare. There used to be framed pictures of his late wife and his daughter and son-in-law, and a mirror. But their houseguests had removed them. Glass could be used as a weapon.

The bed was tucked in a corner of the room he shared with his twenty-two-year-old granddaughter Nanda. At the moment the young woman was outside cleaning the chicken coop. When she was finished she would shower in the small stall behind the house and then return to the room. She would unfold a small card table, set it beside her grandfather’s bed, and pull over a wooden chair. The bedroom door would be kept ajar and their vegetarian meals would be served to them in small wooden bowls. Then Apu and Nanda would listen to the radio, play chess, read, meditate, and pray. They would pray for enlightenment and also for Nanda’s mother and father, both of whom died in the roaring hell that was unleashed on Kargil just four years ago. Sometime around ten or eleven they would go to sleep. With any luck Apu would make it through the night. Sudden noises tended to wake him instantly and bring back the planes and the weeks of endless bombing raids.

In the morning, the Kargil-born farmer was permitted to go out and look after his chickens. One of his houseguests always went with him to make sure he did not try to leave. Apu’s truck was still parked beside the coop. Even though the Pakistanis had taken the keys Apu could easily splice the ignition wires and drive off. Of course, he would only do that if his granddaughter Nanda were with him. Which was why they were never allowed outside together.

The slender, silver-haired man would feed the chickens, talk to them, and look after any eggs they had left. Then he was taken back to the room. In the late afternoon it was Nanda’s turn to go out to do the more difficult work of cleaning the coop. Though Apu could do it, their guests insisted that Nanda go. It helped keep the headstrong young woman tired. When they had enough eggs to bring to market one of their houseguests always went to Srinagar for them. And they always gave the money to Apu. The Pakistanis were not here for financial profit. Though Apu tried hard to eavesdrop, he was still not sure why they were here. They did not do much except talk.

For five months, ever since the five Pakistanis arrived in the middle of the night, the physical life of the sixty-three-year-old farmer had been defined by this routine. Though daily visits to the coop had been the extent of the Kumars’ physical life, Apu had retained his wits, his spirit, and most importantly his dignity. He had done that by devoting himself to reading and meditating on his deep Hindu beliefs. He did that for himself and also to show his Islamic captors that his faith and resolve were as powerful as theirs.

Apu reached behind him. He raised his pillow a little higher. It was lumpy with age, having been through three generations of Kumars. A smile played on his grizzled, leathery face. The down had suffered enough. Perhaps the duck would find contentment in another incarnation.

The smile faded quickly. That was sacrilegious. It was something his granddaughter might have said. He should know better. Maybe the months of incarceration were affecting his reason. He looked around.

Nanda slept in a sleeping bag on the other side of the room. There were times when Apu would wake in the small hours of the night and hear her breathing. He enjoyed that. If nothing else their captivity had allowed them to get to know each other better. Even though her nontraditional religious views bothered him, he was glad to know what they were. One could not fight the enemy without knowing his face.

There were two other rooms in the small stone house. The door to the living room was open. The Pakistanis stayed there during the day. At night they moved to the room that used to be his. All save the one who took the watch. One of them was always awake. They had to be. Not just to make sure Apu and Nanda stayed inside the house but to watch for anyone who might approach the farm. Though no one lived close by, Indian army patrols occasionally came through these low-lying hills. When this group of Pakistanis first arrived they had promised their unwilling hosts that they would stay no more than six months. And if Apu and Nanda did what they were told they would not be harmed after that time. Apu was not sure he believed the four men and one woman but he was willing to give them the time they asked for. After all, what choice did he have?

Though he would not mind if the authorities came and shot them dead. As long as he did not cause harm to befall them it would not affect his future in this life or the next. The shame of it was that as people they would all get along fine. But politics and religion had stirred things up. That was the story of this entire region from the time Apu had been a young man. Neighbors were neighbors until outsiders turned them into enemies.

There was one small window in the room but the shutters had been nailed closed. The only light came from a small lamp on the nightstand. The glow illuminated a small, old, leatherbound copy of the Upanishads. Those were the mystical writings of Apu’s faith. The Upanishads comprised the final section of the Veda, the Hindu holy scriptures.

Apu turned his mind back to the text. He was reading the earliest of the Upanishads, the sections of verse that addressed the doctrine of Brahman, the universal self or soul. The goal of Hinduism, like other Eastern religions, was nirvana, the eventual freedom from the cycle of rebirth and the pain brought about by one’s own actions or karma. This could only be accomplished by following spiritual yoga, which led to a union with God. Apu was determined to pursue that goal, though actually achieving it was a dream. He was also devoted to the study of the post-Vedic Puranas, which address the structure of life in an individual and social sense and also take the reader through the repeating cycle of creation and end of the universe as represented by the divine trinity of Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the preserver; and Shiva, the destroyer. He had had a hard life, as befitted his farmer caste. But he had to believe that it was just a blink in the cosmic cycle. Otherwise, there would be nothing to work toward, no ultimate end.

Nanda was different. She put more trust in the poet-saints who wrote religious songs and epics. The literature was essential to Hinduism but she responded to the outpourings of men more than the doctrines they were describing. Nanda had always liked heroes who spoke their minds. That had been her mother’s nature as well. To say what she believed. To fight. To resist.

That was what had helped cost Apu his daughter and son-in-law. When the Pakistani invaders first arrived, the two sheep farmers made Molotov cocktails for the hastily organized resistance fighters. After two weeks both Savitri and her husband, Manjay, were caught transporting them inside bags of wool. The bags were ignited with the couple bound in the cab of their truck. The next day Apu and Nanda found their bodies in the blackened ruins. To Nanda they were martyrs. To Apu they had been reckless. To Apu’s ailing wife, Pad, they were the final blow to a frail body. She died eight days later.

“All human errors are impatience,” it was written. If only Savitri and Manjay had asked, Apu would have told them to wait. Time brings balance.

The Indian military eventually pushed most of the Pakistanis out. There was no reason for his children to have acted violently. They hurt others and added that burden to their spiritual inventory.

Tears began to fill his eyes. It was all such a waste. Though, strangely, it made him cherish Nanda all the more. She was the only part of his wife and daughter that he had left.

There was a sudden commotion in the other room. Apu shut his book and set it on the rickety night table. He slid into his slippers and quietly crossed the wooden floor. He peeked out the door. Four of the Pakistanis were all there. The houseguests were working on something, arms and heads moving over something between them. The backs of three of the men were toward him so he could not see what they were doing. Only the woman was facing him. She was a slender, very swarthy woman with short black hair and a frowning, intense look. The others called her Sharab but Apu did not know if that was her real name.

Sharab waved a gun at him. “Go back!” she ordered.

Apu lingered a moment longer. His houseguests had never done anything like this before that he was aware of. They came and went and they talked. Occasionally they looked at maps. Something was happening. He edged forward a little more. There appeared to be a burlap sack on the floor between the men. One of the men was crouching beside it. He appeared to be working on something inside the bag.

“Get back!” the woman yelled again.

There was a tension in her voice that Apu had never heard before. He did as he was told.

Apu kicked off his slippers and lay back on the bed. As he did he heard the front door open. It was Nanda and presumably the fifth Pakistani. He could tell by how loud the door creaked. The young woman always opened it boldly, as if she wanted to hit whoever might be standing behind it.

Apu smiled. He always looked forward to seeing his granddaughter. Even if she had only been gone an hour or two.

This time, however, things were different. He did not hear her footsteps. Instead he heard quiet talking. Apu held his breath and tried to hear what was being said. But his heart was beating louder than usual and he could not hear. Quietly, he raised himself from the bed and eased toward the door. He leaned closer, careful not to show himself. He listened.

He heard nothing.

Slowly, he nudged the door open. One of the men was there, looking out the window. He was holding his silver handgun and smoking a cigarette. The Pakistani glanced back at Apu.

“Go back in the room,” the man said quietly.

“Where is my granddaughter?” Apu asked. He did not like this. Something felt wrong.

“She left with the others,” he said.

“Left? Where did they go?” Apu asked.

The man looked back out the window. He drew on his cigarette. “They went to market,” he replied.

Chapter Five.

Washington, D.C. Wednesday, 7:00 A.M.

Colonel Brett August had lost track of the number of times he had ridden in the shaking, cavernous bellies of C-130 transports. But he remembered this much. He had hated each and every one of those damn flights.

This particular Hercules was one of the newer variants, a long-range SAR HC-130H designed for fuel economy. Colonel August had ridden in a number of customized C-130s: the C-130D with ski landing gear during an Arctic training mission, a KC-130R tanker, a C-130F assault transport, and many others. The amazing thing was that not one of those versions offered a comfortable ride. The fuselages were stripped down to lighten the aircraft and give it as much range as possible. That meant there was very little insulation against cold and noise. And the four powerful turboprops were deafening as they fought to lift the massive plane skyward. The vibrations were so strong that the chain around Colonel August’s dog tags actually did a dance around his neck.

Comfort was also not in the original design-lexicon. The seats in this particular aircraft were cushioned plastic buckets arranged side by side along the fuselage walls. They had high, thick padded backrests and headrests that were supposed to keep the passenger warm. Theoretically that would work if the air itself did not become so cold. There were no armrests and very little space between the chairs. Duffel bags were stowed under the seats. The guys who designed these were probably like the guys who drew up battle plans. It all looked great on paper.

Not that Colonel August was complaining. He remembered a story his father once told him about his own military days. Sid August was part of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division, which was trapped by the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division shortly before the Battle of the Bulge. The men had only K rations to eat. Invented by an apparently sadistic physiologist named Ancel Benjamin Keys, K rations were flat-tasting compressed biscuits, a sliver of dry meat, sugar cubes, bouillon powder, chewing gum, and compressed chocolate. The chocolate was code-named D ration. Why chocolate needed a code name no one knew but the men suspected the starving Germans would fight harder knowing there was more than just dry meat and cardboardlike biscuits in the enemy foxholes.

The airmen ate the K rations sparingly while lying low. After a few days the air force managed to night-drop several cases of C rations and extra munitions to the soldiers. The C rations contained dinner portions of meat and potatoes. But introducing real food to their systems made the men so sick and flatulent that the noise and smell actually gave their position away to a German patrol. The airmen were forced to fight their way out. The story always made Brett August uneasy with the idea of having too much comfort available to him.

Mike Rodgers was sitting to August’s right. August smiled to himself. Rodgers had a big, high-arched nose that had been broken four times playing college basketball. Mike Rodgers did not know any way but forward. They had just taken off and that nose was already hunkered into a briefcase thick with folders. August had flown with Rodgers long enough to know the drill. As soon as the pilot gave the okay to use electronic devices, Rodgers would pull some of those folders out. He would put them on his left knee and place his laptop on the right knee. Then, as Rodgers finished with material, he would pass it to August. About halfway over the Atlantic they would begin to talk openly and candidly about what they had read. That was how they had discussed everything for the forty-plus years they had known each other. More often than not it was unnecessary to say anything. Rodgers and August each knew what the other man was thinking.

Brett August and Mike Rodgers were childhood friends. The boys met in Hartford, Connecticut, when they were six. In addition to sharing a love of baseball they shared a passion for airplanes. On weekends, the two young boys used to bicycle five miles along Route 22 out to Bradley Field. They would just sit on an empty field and watch the planes take off and land. They were old enough to remember when prop planes gave way to the jet planes. Both of them used to go wild whenever one of the new 707s roared overhead. Prop planes had a familiar, reassuring hum. But those new babies–they made a boy’s insides rattle. August and Rodgers loved it.

After school each day the boys would do their homework together, each taking alternate math problems or science questions so they could finish faster. Then they would build plastic model airplanes, boats, tanks, and jeeps, taking care that the paint jobs were accurate and that the decals were put in exactly the right place.

When it came time to enlist–kids like the two of them didn’t wait to be drafted–Rodgers joined the army and August went into the air force. Both men ended up in Vietnam. While Rodgers did his tours of duty on the ground, August flew reconnaissance missions over North Vietnam. On one flight northwest of Hue, August’s plane was shot down. He mourned the loss of his aircraft, which had almost become a part of him. The flier was taken prisoner and spent over a year in a POW camp, finally escaping with another prisoner in 1970. August spent three months making his way to the south before finally being discovered by a patrol of U.S. Marines.

Except for the loss of his aircraft, August was not embittered by his experiences. To the contrary. He was heartened by the courage he had witnessed among American POWs. He returned to the United States, regained his strength, and went back to Vietnam to organize a spy network searching for other American POWs. August remained undercover for a year after the U.S. withdrawal. After he had exhausted his contacts trying to find MIAs, August was shifted to the Philippines. He spent three years training pilots to help President Ferdinand Marcos battle Moro secessionists. After that August worked briefly as an air force liaison with NASA, helping to organize security for spy satellite missions. But there was no flying involved and being with the astronauts now was different from being with the monkey Ham when he was a kid. It was frustrating working with men and women who were actually getting to travel in space. So August moved over to the air force’s Special Operations Command, where he stayed ten years before joining Striker.

Rodgers and August had seen one another only intermittently in the post-Vietnam years. But each time they talked or got together it was as if no time had passed. When Rodgers first signed on at Op-Center he had asked August to come aboard as the leader of the Striker force. August turned him down twice. He did not want to spend most of his time on a base, working with young specialists. Lt. Colonel Charlie Squires got the post. After Squires was killed on a mission in Russia, Rodgers came to his old friend again. Two years had passed since Rodgers had first made the offer. But things were different now. The team was shaken by the loss and he needed a commander who could get them back up to speed as fast as possible. This time August could not refuse. It was not only friendship. There were national security issues at stake.

The NCMC had become a vital force in crisis management and Op-Center needed Striker.

The colonel looked toward the back of the plane. He watched the group as they sat silently through the slow, thunderous ascent. The quick-response unit turned out to be more than August had expected. Individually, they were extraordinary. Before joining Striker, Sergeant Chick Grey had specialized in two things. One was HALO operations–high-altitude, low-opening parachute jumps. As his commander at Bragg had put it when recommending Grey for the post, “the man can fly.” Grey had the ability to pull his ripcord lower and land more accurately than any soldier in Delta history. He attributed this to having a rare sensitivity to air currents. Grey believed that also helped with his second skill–marksmanship. Not only could the sergeant hit whatever he said he could, he had trained himself to go without blinking for as long as necessary. He’d developed that ability when he realized that all it took was the blink of an eye to miss the “keyhole,” as he called it. The instant when the target was in perfect position for a takedown.

August felt a special kinship with Grey because the sergeant was at home in the air. But August was close to all his personnel. Privates David George, Jason Scott, Terrence Newmeyer, Walter Pupshaw, Matt Bud, and Sondra DeVonne. Medic William Musicant, Corporal Pat Prementine, and Lieutenant Orjuela. They were more than specialists. They were a team. And they had more courage, more heart than any unit August had ever worked with.

Newly promoted Corporal Ishi Honda was another marvel. The son of a Hawaiian mother and Japanese father, Honda was an electronics prodigy and the unit’s communications expert. He was never far from the TAC-SAT phone, which Colonel August and Rodgers used to stay in touch with Op-Center. The backpack containing the unit was lined with bullet-proof Kevlar so it would not be damaged in a firefight. Because it was so loud in the cabin Honda sat with the TAC-SAT in his lap. He did not want to miss hearing any calls. When he was in the field, Honda wore a Velcro collar and headphones of his own creation. They plugged directly into the pack. When the collar was jacked in, the “beep” was automatically disengaged; the collar simply vibrated when there was an incoming call. If Striker were on a surveillance mission there was no sound to give them away. Moreover, the collar was wired with small condensor microphones that allowed Honda to communicate subvocally. He could whisper and his voice would be transferred clearly to whoever was on the other end.

But Striker was more than just a group of military elite drawn from different services. Lt. Colonel Squires had done an extraordinary job turning them into a smart, disciplined fighting unit. They were certainly the most impressive team August had ever served with.

The plane banked to the south and August’s old leather portfolio slid from under his seat. He kicked it back with his heel. The bag contained maps and white papers about Kashmir. The colonel had already reviewed them with his team. He would look at them again in a few minutes. Right now August wanted to do what he did before beginning every mission. He wanted to try and figure out why he was here, why he was going. That was something he had done every day since he was first a prisoner of war: take stock of his motivations for doing what he was doing. That was true whether August was in a Vietcong stockade, getting up in the morning to go to the Striker base, or leaving on a mission. It was not enough to say he was serving his country or pursuing his chosen career. He needed something that would allow him to push himself to do better than he did the day before. Otherwise the quality of his work and his life would suffer.

What he had discovered was that he could not find another reason. When he was optimistic, pride and patriotism had been his biggest motivators. On darker days he decided that humans were all territorial carnivores and prisoners of their nature. Combat and survival were a genetic imperative. Yet these could not be the only things that drove us. There had to be something unique to everyone, something that transcended political or professional boundaries.

So what he searched for in these quiet times was the other missing motivation. The key that would make him a better soldier, a better leader, a stronger and better man.

Along the way, of course, he discovered many things, thought many interesting thoughts. And he began to wonder if the journey itself might be the answer. Given that he was heading to one of the birthplaces of Eastern religion, that would be a fitting revelation. Maybe that was all he would find. Unlike the mission, there were no maps to show him the terrain, no aircraft to take him there.

But for now he would keep looking.

Chapter Six.

Srinagar, India Wednesday, 4:22 P.M.

There was a two-and-one-half-hour time difference between Baku and Kashmir. Still on Azerbaijan time, Ron Friday bought several lamb skewers from one of the food merchants. Then he went to a crowded outdoor cafe and ordered tea to go with his dinner. He would have to eat quickly. There was a dusk-to-dawn curfew for foreigners. It was strictly enforced by soldiers who patrolled the streets wearing body armor and carrying automatic rifles.

Though the rain had stopped, the large umbrellas were still open over the tables. Friday had to duck to make his way through. He shared his table with a pair of Hindu pilgrims who were reading while they drank their tea. The two men were dressed in very long white cotton robes that were tied at the center with a brown belt. It was the wardrobe of holy men from the United Provinces near Nepal, at the foot of the Himalayas. There were heavy-looking satchels at their sides. The men were probably on their way to a religious shrine at Pahalgam, which was located fifty-five miles south of Srinagar. The presence of the satchels suggested that they were planning to spend some time at the shrine. The men did not acknowledge Friday as he sat, though they were not being rude. They did not want to interrupt his tranquillity. One of the men was looking over a copy of the International Herald Tribune. That struck Friday as odd, though he did not know why it should. Even holy men needed to keep up with world events. The other man, who was sitting right beside Friday, was reading a volume of poems in both Sanskrit and English. Friday glanced over the man’s forearm.

“Vishayairindriyagraamo na thrupthamadhigachathi ajasram pooryamaanoopi samudraha salilairiva,” it said in Sanskrit. The English translation read, “The senses can never be satisfied even after the continuous supply of sensory objects, as the ocean can never be filled with a continuous supply of water.”

Friday did not dispute that. People who were alive had to drink in everything around them. They consumed experiences and things and turned that fuel into something else. Into something that had their fingerprints on it. If you weren’t doing that you were living, but not alive.

While the pilgrims sat at the table they were approached by a Muslim. The man offered low-price shelter at his home if they wished to stay the night. Often, pilgrims had neither the time nor the money to stay at an inn. The men graciously declined, saying they were going to try and catch the next bus and would rest when they reached the shrine. The Muslim said that if they missed this bus or one of the later ones he could arrange for his brother-in-law to drive them to the shrine the next day. He gave them a card with his address handwritten on it. They thanked him for his offer. The man bowed and excused himself. It was all very civil. Contact between the Muslims and Hindus usually was cordial. It was the generals and the politicians who provoked the wars.

Behind Friday two men had stopped for tea. From their conversation he gathered that they were heading to the night shift at a nearby brick factory. To Friday’s left three men in the khaki uniforms of the Kashmir police force were standing and watching the crowd. Unlike in the Middle East, bazaars were not typically the scene of terrorist attacks in Kashmir. That was because as many Muslims as Hindus frequently mingled in marketplaces. Hindu-specific sites were usually targeted. Places such as homes of local officials, businesses, police stations, financial institutions, and military bases. Even militaristic, aggressive groups like the Hezb-ul Mujahedeen guerrillas did not typically attack civilian locales, especially during business hours. They did not want to turn the people against them. Their war was with the Hindu leaders and those who supported them.

The two pilgrims quickly finished their tea. Their bus was pulling up three hundred yards to the right. It braked noisily at a small, one-room bus stop at the far western side of the market. The bus was an old green vehicle, but clean. There were iron racks on the roof for luggage. The uniformed driver came out and helped passengers off while a luggage clerk brought a stepladder from inside the bus stop. While he began to unload the bags of riders who were disembarking, ticket-holders began queuing up beside him to board. For the most part the line was extremely orderly. When the two men were finished they both entered the small wooden structure.

The two pilgrims at Ron Friday’s table had put away their reading material and picked up their big lumpy bags. With effort, the men threw the satchels over their shoulders and made their way onto the crowded street. Watching them go, Friday wondered what the punishment was for stealing. With customers packed so closely together and focused on getting what they needed, the market would be a pickpocket’s heaven. Especially if they were going to get on a bus and leave the area quickly.

Friday continued to sip his tea as he ate the lamb from the wooden skewers. He watched as other pilgrims rushed by. Some of them were dressed in white or black robes, others were wearing Western street clothes. The men and women who were not wearing traditional robes would be permitted to worship at the shrine but not to enter the cave itself. A few people were pulling children behind them. Friday wondered if their hungry expressions were anxiety about getting onto the bus or a physical manifestation of the religious fervor they felt. Probably a little of both.

One of the police officers walked toward the bus stop to make sure the boarding process was orderly. He walked past the police station, which was to his left. It was a two-story wooden structure with white walls and green eaves. The two front windows were barred. Beyond the police station, practically abutting it, was a decades-old Hindu temple. Friday wondered if the local government had built the police station next to a temple in an effort to protect it from terrorists. Friday had been to the temple once before. It was a dvibheda–a bidivisional house of worship that honored both Shiva, the god of destruction, and Vishnu, the preserver. The main portal was fronted by the five-story-tall Rajagopuram, the Royal Tower. To the sides were smaller towers over the auxiliary entrances. These white-brick structures were trimmed with green and gold tile and honored the two different gods. The walls were decorated with canopies, roaring lions, humanlike gatekeepers in what appeared to be dancing poses, and other figures. Friday did not know a great deal about the iconography. However, he did recall that the interior of the temple was designed to symbolize a deity at rest. The first room was the crest, followed by the face, the abdomen, the knee, the leg, and the foot. The entire body was important to the Hindus, not just the soul or the heart. Any part of a human being without the other part was incomplete. And an incomplete individual could not manifest the ultimate perfection required by the faith.

However fast they were going, each pilgrim took a moment to turn to it and bow slightly before continuing on. As important as their individual goals were, the Hindus understood that there was something much greater than they were. Other pilgrims were exiting the temple to catch the bus. Still other Hindus, probably local citizens, as well as tourists were moving in and out of the arched portal.

A block past the temple was a movie theater with an old-style marquee. India made more motion pictures than any nation in the world. Friday had seen several of them on videotape, including Fit to Be a King and Flowers and Vermilion. Friday believed that the dreams of a people–hence, their weaknesses–could be found in the stories, themes, and characters of their most popular films. The Indians were especially drawn to the three-hour-long contemporary action-musicals. These films always starred attractive leads who had no names other than “Hero” and “Heroine.” They were Everyman and Everywoman in epic struggles yet there was always music in their hearts. That was how the Indians viewed themselves. Reality was a disturbing inconvenience they did not choose to acknowledge. Like an oftentimes cruel caste system. Friday had a theory about that. He had always believed that castes were an embodiment of the Indians’ faith. In society as in the individual there was a head, feet, and all parts in between. All parts were necessary to create a whole.

Friday glanced back at the market proper. Movement continued unabated. If anything it was busier than before as people stopped by before dinner or on their way home from work. Customers on foot and on bicycles made their way to different stalls. Baskets, wheelbarrows, and occasionally truckloads of goods continued to arrive. The markets usually remained open until just after sunset. In Srinagar and its environs, workers tended to be very early risers. They were expected to arrive at the local factories, fields, and shops around seven in the morning.

Friday finished eating and looked over at the bus. The driver had returned and was helping people board. The bus stop employee was back on his stepladder loading bags onto the roof. What was amazing to Friday was that amid all the seeming chaos there was an internal order. Every individual system was functioning perfectly, from the booths to the shoppers, from the police to the bus. Even the supposedly antagonistic religious factions were doing just fine.

A fine drizzle started up again. Friday decided to head over to the bus station. It looked as if there were new construction there and he was curious to see what lay beyond. As Friday followed the last of the pilgrims he watched the bus driver take tickets and help people onboard.

Something was not the same.

It was the driver. He was not a heavyset man but a rather slender one. Maybe he was a new driver. It was possible; they all wore the same jackets. Then he noticed something else. The clerk who was loading bags into the rack was being very careful with them. Friday had not gotten a very good look at the clerk. The exiting passengers had blocked his view. He could not tell if this were the same man.

The bus was still two hundred yards away. The American quickened his pace.

Suddenly the world to Friday’s left vanished, swallowed in a flash of bright white light, infernal white heat, and deafening white noise.

Chapter Seven.

Washington, D.C. Wednesday, 7:10 A.M.

Paul Hood sat alone in his office. Mike Rodgers and Striker were on their way and nothing else was pressing. Hood’s door was shut and a file labeled “Working OCIS” was open on his computer. The “working” part of the heading indicated that this was not the original draft but a copy. The OCIS was a clickable chart of Op-Center’s internal structure. Under each division was a list of the departments and personnel. Attached to each name was a subfile. These were logs that were filed each day by every employee. They outlined the activities of the individual. Only Hood, Rodgers, and Herbert had access to the files. They were maintained to allow the Op-Center directors to track and cross-reference personnel activities with phone records, e-mail lists, and other logs. If anyone were working at cross-purposes with the rest of the team–cooperating with another agency or even another government–this was the first line of security. The computer automatically flagged any activity that did not have a log entry ordering or corroborating it.

Right now Paul Hood was not looking for moles. He was looking for lambs. The sacrificial kind. If Senator Fox and the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee wanted cutbacks he had to be prepared to make them. The question was where?

Hood clicked on Bob Herbert’s intelligence department. He scrolled through the names. Could Herbert get by with just daytime surveillance of e-mail communications in Europe? Not likely. Spies worked around the clock. What about a single liaison with the CIA and the FBI instead of one for each? Probably. He would ask Herbert which one he wanted to lose. Hood moved the cursor to the tech division. What about Matt Stoll? Could he survive without a satellite interface officer or a computer resources upgrade manager? Matt could outsource the work he needed whenever they had to eavesdrop on foreign communications satellites or change hardware or software. It would be inconvenient but it would not be debilitating. He double-clicked on the upgrade manager and the position disappeared.

Hood’s heart sped up as he checked the next department. It was the office of the press liaison. Did Op-Center really need someone to issue news releases and organize press conferences? If Senator Fox were afraid that the National Crisis Management Center was too visible, then the press officer and her one assistant should be the first to go.

Hood stared at the computer. Never mind what Senator Fox thought. What did he think?

Hood did not see the list. He saw the face of Ann Farris. After years of flirting the two had finally spent a night together. It was at once the most wonderful and devastating encounter of Hood’s life. Wonderful because he and Ann cared about each other, deeply. Devastating because Hood had to acknowledge that a bond existed. It was even stronger than the one he had felt when he encountered his old lover Nancy Jo Bosworth in Germany. Yet he was still married to Sharon. He had his children’s well-being to consider, not to mention his own. And he would have to deal with Sharon’s feelings if she ever found out. Though Hood loved being close to Ann this was not the time for another relationship.

And what would Ann think? After a rough divorce of her own, Ann Farris was not a very secure woman. She was poised when meeting the press and she was a terrific single mother. But those were what psychologist Liz Gordon had once described at an employee “Job vs. Parenting” seminar as “reactionary qualities.” Ann responded to external stimuli with good, natural instincts. Inside, where she had allowed Paul to go, she was a scared little girl. If Hood let her go she would think he was doing it to keep her away. If he kept her she would think he was playing favorites, protecting her.

Personally and professionally it was a no-win situation. And Hood was not even considering how the rest of Op-Center would react. They had to know what was going on between him and Ann. They were a tight-knit office and an intelligence group. This had to be the worst-kept secret on the base.

Hood continued to stare at the screen. He no longer saw Ann Farris’s face. He saw only her name. The bottom line was that Hood had to do his job, whatever the consequences. He could not do that if he let personal feelings interfere.

Hood double-clicked the mouse. Not on a name but on an entire two-person department.

A moment later the press division was gone.

Chapter Eight.

Srinagar, India Wednesday, 4:41 P.M.

Ron Friday felt as though someone had jabbed tuning forks in his ears. His ears and the inside of his skull seemed to be vibrating. There was a high-pitched ringing and he could not hear anything except for the ringing. His eyes were open but he could not tell what he was looking at. The world was a cottony haze, as though a still fog had moved in.

Friday blinked. White powder dropped into his eyes, causing them to burn. He blinked harder then pushed a palm into one eye, then the other. He opened them wide and looked out again. He still was not sure what he was looking at but he realized one thing. He was lying on his belly with his face turned to the side. He put his hands under him and pushed up. White powder fell from his arms, his hair, his sides. He blinked it away. He tasted something chalky and spit. His saliva was like paste. The chalky taste was still there. He spit again.

Friday got his knees under him. His body ached from the fall but his hearing was beginning to return. Or at least the ringing was going away; he did not hear anything else. He looked to his left. For a moment he felt as if he were inside a cloud that was inside a cloud. Then the dust that had been shaken from his body began to settle. He could see what he had been looking at a moment ago, what had made no sense to him.

It was wreckage. Where the temple and the police station had stood there was now a hodgepodge of rubble between jagged walls. Through the mist of the powder he could see the sky.

The ringing continued to subside. As it did, Friday heard moans. He put a hand on his knee, pushed down, and began to rise. His back ached and he was trembling. Then his head grew light and his vision darkened. He settled back down on his knees for a moment. He looked ahead and saw the bus through the hanging dust. He also saw people coming toward him.

Suddenly, behind the people, the area around the bus turned yellow-red. Time seemed to slow as the colors exploded in all directions. It was followed by another loud crack that quickly became a rumble. The bus seemed to jump apart. It looked like a balloon that someone had stepped on–stretched out at both ends and then gone. Most of the pieces flew out, away, or down. Some shards skidded along the ground, moving fast and straight like vermin. Larger chunks such as the seats and tires tumbled away, end over end. The people standing nearest the bus were swallowed whole by the fire. Those who were farther away were thrown left, right, and back like the bigger pieces of the bus.

He continued to watch as a charcoal-gray cloud surged forward. Like lightning, flashes of blood and flame punctuated the rolling darkness.

Friday removed his hands from his ears. He rose slowly. He looked down, checking his legs and torso to make sure he had not been hurt. The body had a way of shutting off pain in cases of extreme trauma. His side and right arm ached where he had hit the asphalt. His eyes were gummy from the dust and he had to keep blinking to clear them. Except for the coating of dust from the blasted temple he appeared to be intact.

Papers from books and offices had been lofted high by the blast. They were just now beginning to return to earth. Many of them were just fragments, most were singed, some were ash. A few of the more delicate pages looked like they had belonged to prayer books. Perhaps they had been part of the Sanskrit text the pilgrim had been studying just minutes before.

The gray cloud reached Friday and engulfed him. Nine or ten feet high, it carried the distinctive, noxious smell of burning rubber. Beneath that smell was a sweeter, less choking odor. The stench of charred human flesh and bone. Friday drew a handkerchief from his pocket and held it over his nose and mouth. Then he turned away from the stinging cloud. Behind him the bazaar was still. People had flung themselves to the ground not knowing what might explode next. They were lying under stalls or behind wheelbarrows and carts. As his ears began to clear Friday could hear sobbing, prayer, and moans.

Friday turned back toward the remains of the temple and the police station. The drizzle was helping to thin the cloud of smoke and douse the few fires that had been ignited. No longer light-headed, he began walking toward the rubble. He just now noticed that the police officers who had been standing outside were dead. The backs of their uniforms were bloodied, peppered with shrapnel. Whatever did this had been a concussive device rather than incendiary.

It was strange. Besides the bus, there appeared to be two blastways, the fanlike spray debris followed from the epicenter of an explosion. One line led from the front of the police station. The other led from deep inside the temple. Friday could not understand why there had been two separate explosions on this site. It was unusual enough for two religious targets to be bombed, a temple and a busload of pilgrims. Why was the police station attacked as well?

Sirens cut through the cottony quiet as police who had been on patrol began to arrive. Other officers, who had been out on foot, began to run toward the toppled buildings. People began to get up and leave the bazaar proper. They did not want to be here if there were more explosions. Only a few people headed toward the rubble to see if they might be able to help pull out any survivors.

Ron Friday was not one of those people.

He started walking back toward the inn where he was staying. He wanted to get in touch with his contacts in India and Washington. Learn if they had any intel on what had just happened.

There was a sound like bowling pins falling. Friday looked back just as one of the surviving back walls of the temple crashed onto the rubble. Thick balls of dust swirled from the new wreckage, causing people to step back. After the blocks stopped tumbling, people started moving forward again. Many of them had dustings of white on their faces and hands, like ghosts.

Friday continued walking. His mind was in overdrive.

A police station. A Hindu temple. A busload of pilgrims. Two religious targets and one secular site. Friday could imagine the temple being brought down by accident, collateral damage from an attack on the police station. A lot of terrorist bomb makers were not skilled enough to measure precise charges. A lot of terrorist bomb makers did not care if they took down half a city. But there were those two blast lines suggesting concurrent explosions. And the bus proved that this was a planned assault against Hindus, not just against Indians. Friday could not remember a time when that had happened. Certainly not on this scale.

Yet if Hindus were the target, why did the terrorists attack the police station as well? By striking two religious sites they were obviously not looking to disguise their intent.

Friday stopped walking.

Or were they? he thought suddenly. What if the attack on the temple and bus were distractions? Maybe something else was happening here.

Explosions drew crowds. What if that were the point? To get people to a place or away from one.

Friday wiped his eyes and continued ahead. He looked around as he walked. People were either hurrying toward the disaster site or away from it. Unlike before there were no eddies within eddies. That was because the choices were simple now. Help or flee. He peered down side streets, into windows. He was looking for people who did not appear to be panicked. Perhaps he would see someone, perhaps he would not. The bag on the bus could have been planted at a previous stop. Explosives could have been set to go off with a timer in a suitcase or backpack well padded to take the bumps of the road. Maybe the passenger who was carrying the luggage got off here, deposited additional explosives in the temple and police station, and walked on. Perhaps the bomber was someone who had been masquerading as a pilgrim or a police officer. Perhaps one of the men Friday had been sitting with or looked at had been involved. Perhaps one or more terrorists had been killed in the blast. Anything was possible.

Friday continued to look around. He was not going to see anyone. In terrorist terms, years had passed. Whoever did this was dead or long gone. And he could not see anyone watching from the street, a room, or a rooftop.

The best way to deal with this now was with intel. Collect data from outside the targets and use it to pinpoint possible perpetrators. Then move in on them. Because this much was clear: Now that Hindu targets had been attacked, unless the guilty parties were found and punished, the situation in Kashmir was going to deteriorate very, very quickly. With nuclear war not just an option but a real possibility.

Chapter Nine.

Srinagar, India Wednesday, 4:55 P.M.

Sharab was sitting forward in the passenger’s seat of the old flatbed truck. To her left the driver sat with his hands tightly clutching the steering wheel. He was perspiring as he guided them north along Route 1A, the same road that had brought the bus to the bazaar. Between them sat Nanda, her right ankle cuffed to an iron spring under the seat. Two other men were seated in the open deck of the truck, leaning against the bulkhead amid bags of wool. They were huddled under a tarp to protect them from the increasingly heavy rain.

The windshield wipers were batting furiously in front of Sharab’s dark eyes and the air vent howled. The young woman was also howling. First she had been screaming orders at her team. Get the truck away from the market and stick to the plan, at least until they had additional information. Now she was screaming questions into her cell phone. The young woman was not screaming to be heard over the noise. She was screaming from frustration.

“Ishaq, did you already place the call?” Sharab demanded.

“Of course I placed the call, just as we always do,” the man on the other end informed her.

Sharab punched the padded dashboard with the heel of her left hand. The suddenness of the strike caused Nanda to jump. Sharab struck it again but she did not say a word, did not swear. Blaspheming was a sin.

“Is there a problem?” Ishaq asked.

Sharab did not answer.

“You were very specific about it,” Ishaq went on. “You wanted me to call at exactly forty minutes past four. I always do what you say.”

“I know,” the woman said in a low monotone.

“Something is wrong,” the man on the telephone said. “I know that tone of voice. What is it?”

“We’ll talk later,” the woman replied. “I need to think.”

Sharab sat back.

“Should I turn on the radio?” the driver asked sheepishly. “Maybe there is news, an explanation.”

“No,” Sharab told him. “I don’t need the radio. I know what the explanation is.”

The driver fell silent. Sharab shut her eyes. She was wheezing slightly. The truck’s vents had pulled in slightly acrid, smoky air from the bazaar blast. The woman could not tell whether it was the air or the screaming that had made her throat raw. Probably both. She shook her head. The urge to scream was still there, at the top of her throat. She wanted to vent her frustration.

Failure was not the worst of this. What bothered Sharab most was the idea that she and her team had been used. She had been warned about this five years ago when she was still in Pakistan, at the combat school in Sargodha. The Special Services Group agents who trained her said she had to be wary of success. When a cell succeeded over and over it might not be because they were good. It might be because the host was allowing them to succeed so they could be watched and used at some later date.

For years Sharab’s group, the Pakistan-financed Free Kashmir Militia, had been striking at select targets throughout the region. The modus operandi for each attack was always the same. They would take over a house, plan their assault, then strike the target. At the moment of each attack whichever cell member had remained behind would telephone a regional police or military headquarters. He would claim credit for the attack on behalf of the Free Kashmir Militia. After that the FKM would move to another home. In the end, the isolated farmers whose homes and lives they briefly borrowed cared more about survival than about politics. Many of them were Muslim anyway. Though they did not want to cooperate and risk arrest, they did not resist the FKM.

Sharab and her people only struck military, police, and government offices, never civilian or religious targets. They did not want to push or alienate the Hindu population of Kashmir or India, turn them into hawkish adversaries. They only wanted to deconstruct the resources and the resolve of the Indian leaders. Force them to go home and leave Kashmir.

That was what they were trying to do in the bazaar. Cripple the police but not harm the merchants. Scare people away and impact the local economy just enough so that farmers and shoppers would fight the inflammatory presence of Indian authorities.

They had been so careful to do just that. Over the past few nights one member of the party would go to the bazaar in Srinagar. He would enter the temple dressed in clerical robes, exit in back, and climb to the roof of the police station. There, he would systematically lift tiles and place plastique beneath them. Because it was in the middle of a night shift, when this section of the city was usually quiet, the police were not as alert as during the day. Besides, terrorist attacks did not typically occur at night. The idea of terrorism was to disrupt routine, to make ordinary people afraid to go out.

This morning, well before dawn, the last explosives were placed on the roof along with a timer. The timer had been set to detonate at exactly twenty minutes to five that afternoon. Sharab and the others returned at four thirty to watch from the side of the road to make sure the explosion went off.

It did. And it punched right through her.

When the first blast occurred Sharab knew something was wrong. The plastique they had put down was not strong enough to do the damage this explosion had done. When the second blast went off she knew they had been set up. Muslims had seemingly attacked a Hindu temple and a busload of pilgrims. The sentiments of nearly one billion people would turn against them and the Pakistan people.

But Muslims had not attacked Hindu targets, Sharab thought bitterly. The FKM had attacked a police station. Some other group had attacked the religious targets and timed it to coincide with the FKM attack.

She did not believe that a member of the cell had betrayed them. The men in the truck had been with her for years. She knew their families, their friends, their backgrounds. They were people of unshakable faith who would never have done anything to hurt the cause.

What about Apu and Nanda? Back at the house they had never been out of their sight except when they were asleep. Even then the door was always ajar and a guard was always awake. The man and his granddaughter did not own a transmitter or cell phone. The house had been searched. There were no neighbors who could have seen or heard them.

Sharab took a long breath and opened her eyes. For the moment, it did not matter. The question was what to do right now.

The truck sped past black-bearded pilgrims in white tunics and mountain men leading ponies from the marketplace. Distant rice paddies were visible at the misty foot of the Himalayas. Trucks bearing more soldiers sped past them, headed toward the bazaar. Maybe they did not know who was responsible for the attack. Or maybe they did not want to catch them right away. Perhaps whoever had framed them was waiting to see if they linked up with other terrorists in Kashmir before closing in.

If that was the case they were going to be disappointed.

Sharab opened the glove compartment and removed a map of the region. There were seventeen grids on the map, each one numbered and lettered. For the purposes of security the numbers and letters were reversed.

“All right, Ishaq,” she said into the phone, “I want you to leave the house now and go to position 5B.”

What Sharab really meant was that Ishaq should go to area 2E. The E came from the 5 and the 2 from the B. Anyone who might be listening to the conversation and who might have obtained a copy of their map would go to the wrong spot. “Can you meet us there at seven o’clock?”

“Yes,” he said. “What about the old man?”

“Leave him,” she said. She glanced at Nanda. The younger girl’s expression was defiant. “Remind him that we have his granddaughter. If the authorities ask him about us he is to say nothing. Tell him if we reach the border safely she will be set free.”

Ishaq said he would do that and meet the others later.

Sharab hung up. She folded the cell phone and slipped it in the pocket of her blue windbreaker.

There would be time enough for analysis and regrouping. Only one thing mattered right now.

Getting out of the country before the Indians had live scapegoats to parade before the world.

Chapter Ten.

Siachin Base 3, Kashmir Wednesday, 5:42 P.M.

Major Dev Puri hung up the phone. A chill shook him from the shoulders to the small of his back.

Puri was sitting behind the small gunmetal desk in his underground command center. On the wall before him was a detailed map of the region. It was spotted with red flags showing Pakistan emplacements and green flags showing Indian bases. Behind him was a map of India and Pakistan. To his left was a bulletin board with orders, rosters, schedules, and reports tacked to it. To his right was a blank wall with a door.

Affectionately known as “the Pit,” the shelter was a twelve-by-fourteen-foot hole cut from hard earth and granite. Warping wood-panel walls backed with thick plastic sheets kept the moisture and dirt out but not the cold. How could it? the major wondered. The earth was always cool, like a grave, and the surrounding mountains prevented direct sunlight from ever hitting the Pit. There were no windows or skylights. The only ventilation came from the open door and a rapidly spinning ceiling fan.

Or at least the semblance of ventilation, Puri thought. It was fakery. Just like everything else about this day.

But the cool command center was not what gave Major Puri a chill. It was what the Special Frontier Force liaison had said over the phone. The man, who was stationed in Kargil, had spoken just one word. However, the significance of that word was profound.

“Proceed,” he had said.

Operation Earthworm was a go.

On the one hand, the major had to admire the nerve of the SFF. Puri did not know how high up in the government this plan had traveled or where it had originated. Probably with the SFF. Possibly in the Ministry of External Affairs or the Parliamentary Committee on Defence. Both had oversight powers regarding the activities of nonmilitary intelligence groups. Certainly the SFF would have needed their approval for something this big. But Puri did know that if the truth of this action were ever revealed, the SFF would be scapegoated and the overseers of the plot would be executed.

On the other hand, part of him felt that maybe the people behind this deserved to be punished.

A “vaccination.” That was how the SFF liaison officer had characterized Operation Earthworm when he first described it just three days before. They were giving the body of India a small taste of sickness to prevent a larger disease from ever taking hold. When the major was a child, smallpox and polio had been fearful diseases. His sister had survived smallpox and it left her scarred. Back then, vaccination was a wonderful word.

This was a corruption. However necessary and justifiable it might be, destroying the bus and temple had been vile, unholy acts.

Major Puri reached for the Marlboros on his desk. He shook a cigarette from the pack and lit it. He inhaled slowly and sat back. This was better than chewing the tobacco. It helped him to think clearly, less emotionally.

Less judgmentally.

Everything was relative, the officer told himself.

Back in the 1940s his parents were pacifists. They had not approved of him becoming a soldier. They would have been happy if he had joined them and other citizens of Haryana in the government’s fledgling caste advancement program. The Backward Classes list guaranteed a gift of low-paying government jobs for underprivileged natives of seventeen states. Dev Puri had not wanted that. He had wanted to make it on his own.

And he had.

Puri drew harder on the cigarette. He was suddenly disgusted with his own value judgments. The SFF had obviously viewed this action as a necessary extension of business as usual. Trained jointly by the American CIA and the Indian military’s RAW–Research and Analysis Wing–the SFF were masters of finding and spying on foreign agents and terrorists. For the most part, enemy operatives and suspected collaborators were eliminated without fanfare or heavy fire-power. Occasionally, through a specially recruited unit, Civilian Network Operatives, the SFF also used foreign agents to send disinformation back to Pakistan. In the case of Sharab and her group, the SFF had spent months planning a more elaborate scheme. They felt it was necessary to frame Pakistan terrorists for the murder of dozens of innocent Hindus. Then, when the Pakistani cell members were captured–as they would be, thanks to the CNO operative who was traveling with them–documents and tools would be “found” on the terrorists. These would show that Sharab and her party had traveled the country planting targeting beacons for nuclear strikes against Indian cities. That would give the Indian military a moral imperative to make a preemptive strike against Pakistan’s missile silos.

Major Puri drew on the cigarette again. He looked at his watch. It was nearly time to go.

Over the past ten years more than a quarter of a million Hindus had left the Kashmir Valley to go to other parts of India. With a growing Muslim majority it was increasingly difficult for Indian authorities to secure this region from terrorism. Moreover, Pakistan had recently deployed nuclear weapons and was working to increase its nuclear arsenal as quickly as possible. Puri knew they had to be stopped. Not just to retain Kashmir but to keep hundreds of thousands more refugees from flooding the neighboring Indian provinces.

Maybe the SFF was right. Maybe this was the time and place to stop the Pakistani aggression. Major Puri only wished there had been some other way to trigger the event.

He drew long and hard on the cigarette and then crushed it in the ashtray beside the phone. The tin receptacle was filled with partly smoked cigarettes. They were the residue of three afternoons filled with anxiety, doubt, and the looming pressure of his role in the operation. His aide would have emptied it if a Pakistani artillery shell had not blown his right arm off during a Sunday night game of checkers.

The major rose. It was time for the late afternoon intelligence report from the other outposts on the base. Those were always held in the officers’ bunker further along the trench. This meeting would be different in just one respect. Puri would ask the other officers to be prepared to initiate a code yellow nighttime evacuation drill. If the Indian air force planned to “light up” the mountains with nuclear missiles, the front lines would have to be cleared of personnel well in advance of the attack. It would have to be done at night when there was less chance of the Pakistanis noticing. The enemy would also be given a warning, though a much shorter one. There would be no point in striking the sites if the missiles were mobile and Pakistan had time to move them.

Around seven o’clock, after the meeting was finished, the major would eat his dinner, go to sleep, and get up early to start the next phase of the top-secret operation. He was one of the few officers who knew about an American team that was coming to Kashmir to help the Indian military find the missile silos. The Directorate of Air Intelligence, which would be responsible for the strikes, knew generally where the silos were located. But they needed more specific information. Scatter-bombing the Himalaya Mountains was not an efficient use of military resources. And given the depth at which the silos were probably buried, it might be necessary to strike with more than conventional weapons. India needed to know that as well.

Of course, they had not shared this plan with their unwitting partners in this operation.

The United States wanted intelligence on Pakistan’s nuclear capacity as much as India did. The Americans needed to know who was helping to arm Islamabad and whether the missiles they had deployed could reach other non-Muslim nations. Both Washington and New Delhi knew that if an American unit were discovered in Kashmir it would cause a diplomatic row but not start a war. Thus, the U.S. government had offered to send over a team that was off the normal military radar. Anonymity was important since Russia, China, and other nations had moles at U.S. military installations. These spies kept an eye on the comings and goings of the U.S. Navy SEALs, the U.S. Army Delta Force 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment, and other elite forces. The information they gathered was used internally and also sold to other nations.

The team that was en route from Washington, the National Crisis Management Center’s Striker unit, had experience in mountain silo surveillance going back to a successful operation in the Diamond Mountains of North Korea years before. They were linking up with a NSA operative who had worked with the the Indian government and knew the area they would be searching.

Major Puri had to make certain that as soon as the American squad arrived the search-and-identify mission went smoothly and quickly. The Americans would not be told of the capture of the Pakistani cell. They would not know that a strike was actually in the offing. That information would only be revealed when it was necessary to blunt international condemnation of India’s actions. If necessary, the participation of the Striker unit would also be exposed. The United States would have no choice then but to back the Indian strike.

Puri tugged on the hem of his jacket to straighten it. He picked up his turban, placed it squarely on his head, and headed for the door. He was glad of one thing, at least. His name was not attached to the SFF action in any way. As far as any official communiques were concerned, he had simply been told to help the Americans find the silos.

He was just doing his job.

He was just carrying out orders.

Chapter Eleven.

Washington, D.C. Wednesday, 8:21 A.M.

“This is not good,” Bob Herbert said as he stared at the computer monitor. “This is not good at all.”

The intelligence chief had been reviewing the latest satellite images from the mountains bordering Kashmir. Suddenly, a State Department news update flashed across the screen. Herbert clicked on the headline and had just started reading when the desk phone beeped. He glanced with annoyance at the small black console. It was an outside line. Herbert jabbed the button and picked up the receiver. He continued reading.

“Herbert here,” he said.

“Bob, this is Hank Lewis,” said the caller.

The name was familiar but for some reason Herbert could not place it. Then again, he was not trying very hard. He was concentrating on the news brief. According to the update there had been two powerful explosions in Srinagar. Both of them were directed at Hindu targets. That was going to ratchet up tensions along the line of control. Herbert needed to get more information and brief Paul Hood and General Rodgers as soon as possible.

“I’ve been meaning to call since I took over at NSA,” Lewis said, “but it’s been brutal getting up to speed.”

Jesus, Herbert thought. That’s who Hank Lewis was. Jack Fenwick’s replacement at the National Security Agency. Lewis had just signed off on the NSA’s participation in the Striker mission. Herbert should have known the name right away. But he forgave himself. He had a mission headed into a hot zone that had just become hotter. His brain was on autopilot.

“You don’t have to explain. I know what the workload is like over there,” Herbert assured him. “I assume you’re calling about the State Department update on Kashmir?”

“I haven’t seen that report yet,” Lewis admitted. “But I did receive a call from Ron Friday, the man who’s supposed to meet your Striker team. He told me what you probably read. That an hour ago there were three powerful bomb blasts in a bazaar in Srinagar.”

“Three?” Herbert replied. “The State Department says there were two explosions.”

“Mr. Friday was within visual range of ground zero,” Lewis informed him. “He said there were simultaneous explosions in both the police station and in the Hindu temple. They were followed by a third blast onboard a bus full of Hindu pilgrims.”

Hearing the event described, Herbert flashed back to the embassy bombing in Beirut. The moment of the explosion was not what stayed with him. That was like running a car into a wall, a full-body hit. What he remembered, vividly, was the sickness of coming to beneath the rubble and realizing in a sickening instant exactly what had happened.

“Was your man hurt?” Herbert asked.

“Incredibly, no,” Lewis said. “Mr. Friday said the explosions would have been worse except that high-impact concussive devices were employed. That minimized the damage radius.”

“He was lucky,” Herbert said. HiCon explosives tended to produce a big percussive center, nominal shock waves, and very little collateral damage. “So why is Friday so sure the first two hits were separate blasts? The second one could have been an oil or propane tank exploding. There are often secondary pops in attacks of this kind.”

“Mr. Friday was very specific about the explosions being simultaneous, not successive,” Lewis replied. “After the attack he also found two very similar but separate debris trails leading from the buildings. That suggests identical devices in different locations.”

“Possibly,” Herbert said.

An expression from Herbert’s childhood came floating back: He who smelt it dealt it. Op-Center’s intelligence chief briefly wondered if Friday might have been responsible for the blasts. However, Herbert could not think of a reason for Friday to have done that. And he had not become cynical enough to look for a reason. Not yet, anyway.

“Let’s say there were three blasts,” Herbert said. “What do your nerve endings tell you about all this?”

“My immediate thought, of course, is that the Pakistans are turning up the heat by attacking religious targets,” Lewis replied. “But we don’t have enough intel to back that up.”

“And if the idea was to hit at the Hindus directly, why would they strike the police station as well?” Herbert asked.

“To cripple their pursuit capabilities, I would imagine,” Lewis suggested.

“Maybe,” Herbert replied.

Everything Lewis said made sense. Which meant one of two things. Either he was right or the obvious answer was what the perpetrators wanted investigators to believe.

“Your Strikers won’t be arriving for another twenty-two hours and change,” Lewis said. “I’m going to have Mr. Friday go back to the target area and see what he can learn. Are there any resources you can call on?”

“Yes,” Herbert said. “India’s Intelligence Bureau and the Defense Ministry helped us to organize the Striker mission. I’ll see what they know and get back to you.”

“Thanks,” Lewis said. “By the way, I’m looking forward to working with you. I’ve followed your career ever since you went over to Germany to take on those neo-Nazis. I trust men who get out from behind their desk. It means they put job and country before personal security.”

“Either that or it means they’re crazy,” Herbert said. “But thanks. Stay in touch.”

Lewis said he would. Herbert hung up.

It was refreshing to talk to someone in the covert community who was actually willing to share information. Intelligence chiefs were notoriously secretive. If they controlled information they could control people and institutions. Herbert refused to play that game. While it was good for job security it was bad for national security. And as Jack Fenwick had demonstrated, a secretive intelligence chief could also control a president.

But though Ron Friday was a seasoned field operative, Herbert was not quite as willing to bet the ranch on his report. Herbert only believed in people he had worked with himself.

Herbert phoned Paul Hood to brief him on the new development. Hood asked to be conferenced on the call to Mike Rodgers whenever that took place. Then Herbert put in a call to the Indian Intelligence Bureau. Sujit Rani, the deputy director of internal activities, told Herbert pretty much what he expected to hear: that the IIB was investigating the explosions but did not have any additional information. The notion that there had been three explosions, not two, was something the IIB had heard and was looking into. That information vindicated Ron Friday somewhat in Herbert’s eyes. Herbert’s contact at the Defense Ministry told him basically the same thing. Fortunately, there was time before Striker reached India. They would be able to abort the mission if necessary.

Herbert went into the Kashmir files. He wanted to check on other recent terrorist strikes in the region. Maybe he could find clues, a pattern, something that would help to explain this new attack. Something about it did not sit right. If Pakistan were really looking to turn up the heat in Kashmir they probably would have struck at a place that had intense religious meaning, like the shrine at Pahalgam. Not only was that the most revered site in the region but the terrorists would not have had to worry about security. The Hindus trusted completely in their sacred trinity. If it was the will of Vishnu the preserver then they would not be harmed. If they died violently then Shiva the destroyer would avenge them. And if they were worthy, Brahma the creator would reincarnate them.

No. Bob Herbert’s gut was telling him that the Hindu temple, the bus, and the police station were struck for some other reason. He just did not know what that reason was.

But he would.

Chapter Twelve.

C-130 Cabin Wednesday, 10:13 A.M.

When he first joined Striker, Corporal Ishi Honda discovered that there was not a lot of downtime on the ground. There was a great deal of drilling, especially for him. Honda had joined the team late, replacing Private Johnny Puckett who had been wounded on the mission to North Korea. It was necessary for Honda, then a twenty-two-year-old private, to get up to speed.

Once he got there Honda never let up. His mother used to tell him he was fated never to rest. She ascribed it to the different halves of his soul. Ishi’s maternal grandfather had been a civilian cook at Wheeler Field. He died trying to get home to his family during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Ishi’s paternal grandfather had been a high-ranking officer on the staff of Rear Admiral Takajiro Onishi, chief of staff of the Eleventh Air Fleet. Onishi was the architect of the Japanese attack. Ishi’s parents were actors who met and fell in love on a show tour without knowing anything about the other’s background. They often debated whether knowing that would have made a difference. His father said it absolutely would not have. With a little shake of her head, her eyes downturned, his mother said it might have made a difference.

Ishi had no answers and maybe that was why he could not stop pushing himself. Part of him believed that if he ever stopped moving he would inevitably look at that question, whether or not a piece of information would have kept him from being born. And he did not want to do that because the question had no answer. Honda did not like problems without solutions.

What he did like was living the life of a Striker. It not only taxed him mentally, it challenged him physically.

From the time he was recruited to join the elite unit there were long daily runs, obstacle courses, hand-to-hand combat, arms practice, survival training, and maneuvers. The field work was always tougher for Honda than for the others. In addition to his survival gear he had to carry the TAC-SAT equipment. There were also tactical and political sessions and language classes. Colonel August had insisted that the Strikers learn at least two languages each in the likely event that those skills would one day be required. At least Honda had an advantage there. Because his father was Japanese, Honda already had a leg up on one of the languages he had been assigned. He selected Mandarin Chinese as the other. Sondra DeVonne had chosen Cantonese as one of her languages. It was fascinating to Honda that the languages shared identical written characters. Yet the spoken languages were entirely different. While he and DeVonne could read the same texts they could not communicate verbally.

Though the time the Strikers spent on the ground was rewarding, Honda had learned that their time in the air was anything but. They rarely took short trips and the long journeys could be extremely dull. That was why he had come up with constructive ways of filling his time.

Wherever they were going, Honda arranged to patch his personal computer into the data files of both Stephen Viens at the National Reconnaissance Office and those of Op-Center’s computer chief, Matt Stoll. The NRO was the group that managed most of America’s spy satellites. Because Viens was an old college chum of Stoll’s, he had been extremely helpful in getting information for Op-Center when more established groups like military intelligence, the CIA, and the NSA were fighting for satellite time. Viens was later accused of forward-funding two billion dollars of NRO money into a variety of black ops projects. He was vindicated with Op-Center’s help and recently returned to duty.

Before Striker headed to any territory, Viens set aside satellite time to do all the photographic recon that Colonel August needed. That imaging was considered of primary importance and was sent on the mission in Colonel August’s files. Meanwhile, Stoll spent as much time as possible collecting electronic intelligence from the region. Police departments and the military did not share everything they knew, even with allies. In many foreign countries, especially Russia, China, and Israel, American operatives were often watched without their knowledge by foreign operatives. It was up to Op-Center to pick up whatever information they could and protect themselves accordingly. They did this by diverging from the agreed-upon routes and time schedules, using “dispensable” team members to mislead tails, or occasionally subduing whoever was following them. A host nation could not complain if the person they had sent to spy on an ally was later found bound and gagged in a hotel closet.

The ELINT Stoll had gathered was composed of everything from fax messages and e-mail to phone numbers and radio frequencies. Everything that came to or went from official sources or known resistance and opposition forces. These numbers, frequencies, and encryption codes were then run through programs. They were compared with those of known terrorists or foreign agents. If there were any possible “watchdogs or impediments” in the region, as mission planners referred to them, these scans helped to find and identify them. The last thing American intelligence chiefs wanted was to have undercover operatives photographed or their methods observed by foreign governments. Not only could that information be sold to a third party, but the United States never knew which friendly governments might one day be intelligence targets.

“Think Iran,” Colonel August reminded them whenever they went on a joint mission with allies.

Honda had brought along a Striker laptop. The computer was equipped with a wireless, high-speed modem to download data Stoll was still collecting. Honda would memorize any relevant data. When Striker reached India, the computer would be left on the transport and returned to the base. Colonel August would keep his laptop to download data. Where they were going, the less Corporal Honda had to carry the happier he would be.

As the new intelligence was dumped into Honda’s computer, an audio prompt pinged. It was alerting him to an anomaly that Stoll’s program had picked up at Op-Center. Honda accessed the flagged data.

The Bellhop program on the air force’s “Sanctity” satellite continually scanned the cell phones and radios that used police bands. Op-Center and the other U.S. intelligence agencies had these numbers for their own communications with foreign offices. It was a simple matter to hack the computers and look for other incoming calls.

The Bellhop had picked up a series of point-to-point calls made on a police-registered cell phone. It was coded “field phone” in the Bellhop lexicon. Most of the calls were placed over a five-month period from Kargil to the district police headquarters in Jammu, coded “home phone.” During that time there was only one call to that field phone from the home phone. Stoll’s program, which integrated Op-Center intel with NRO data, indicated that the call was placed less than one second before the Kashmir-focused ClusterStar3 satellite recorded an explosion in a bazaar in Srinagar.

“Damn,” Honda muttered.

Honda wondered if Colonel August or General Rodgers had been informed about a possible terrorist attack. The fact that a police cell phone made a call to the site an instant before the explosion could be a coincidence. Perhaps someone was phoning a security guard. On the other hand there might be a connection between the two. Honda unbuckled himself from the uncomfortable seat and went forward to inform his commanding officers. He had to walk slowly, carefully, to keep from being bucked against his teammates by the aircraft’s movements in the turbulent air.

August and Rodgers were huddled together over the general’s laptop when he arrived.

“Excuse me, sirs,” Honda said. He had to shout to be heard over the screaming engines.

August looked up. “What have you got, Corporal?”

Honda told the two officers about the explosion. August informed Honda that they were just reading an e-mail from Bob Herbert about the blast. It provided what few details anyone had about the attack. Then Honda informed his superiors about the phone calls. That seemed to grab General Rodgers’s interest.

“There were two calls a day for five months, always at the same time,” Honda said.

“Like a routine check-in,” Rodgers said.

“Exactly, sir,” Honda replied. “Except for today. There was just one call and it was made to the field phone. It was placed a moment before the explosion that took out the temple.”

Rodgers sat back. “Corporal, would you go through the data file and see if this calling pattern is repeated, probably from field phones with different code numbers? Outgoing calls to one home phone and one or none coming back?”

“Yes, sir,” Honda replied.

Honda crouched on the cold, rumbling floor and raised one knee. He put the laptop upon it. He was not sure what the officers were looking for exactly and it was not his place to ask. He input the code number of the home phone and asked for a Bellhop search. Colonel August’s hunch was correct. He told them that in addition to this series there were seven weeks of calls from another field phone in Kargil. They were made twice a day at the same times. Before that there were six weeks of calls from another field phone, also two times daily. Thirteen weeks was as far back as these Bellhop records went.

“New Delhi must have had civilian agents tracking a terrorist cell,” Rodgers said.

“How do you know that?” August asked. “The calls may just have been field ops reporting in.”

“I don’t think so,” Rodgers told him. “First of all, only one of the calls on Corporal Honda’s list was made from the home phone to the field phone.”

“That was the one made at the time of the explosion,” August said.

“Correct,” Rodgers replied. “That would suggest the officers in charge of the recon did not want field phones ringing at inopportune moments.”

“I’ll buy that,” August said.

“There’s more than that, though,” Rodgers said. “When Pakistan was knocked out of Kargil in 1999, the Indian Special Frontier Force knew that enemy cells would be left behind. They couldn’t hunt them down with soldiers. The locals would have known if strangers were moving through a village. And if the locals knew it members of the cell would have known it. So the SFF recruited a shitload of locals to serve in their Civilian Network Operatives unit.” The general tapped his laptop. “It’s all here in the intelligence overview. But they couldn’t give the recruits normal militia radios because, that close to Pakistan, those channels are routinely monitored by ELINT personnel. So the SFF gave their recruits cell phones. The agents call the regional office and complain about break-ins, missing children, stolen livestock, that sort of thing. What they’re really doing is using coded messages to keep the SFF informed about suspected terrorist movements and activities.”

“All right,” August said. “But what makes you think the calls on this list aren’t just routine field reports?”

“Because CNO personnel don’t make routine field reports,” Rodgers said. “They only report when they have something to say. There’s less chance of them being overheard that way. I’m willing to bet that there are terrorist strikes to coincide with the termination of each of those series of calls. A target was hit, the cell moved on, the calls stopped being placed.”

“Perhaps,” August said. “But that doesn’t explain the call to the temple right before the blast.”

“Actually, it might,” Rodgers told him.

“I don’t follow,” August said.

Rodgers looked up at Honda. “Corporal, would you please get the TAC-SAT?”

“Yes, sir.”

Rodgers turned back to August. “I’m going to ask Bob Herbert to check on the dates of terrorist strikes in the region,” he said. “I want to see if reports from field phones stopped coming in after terrorist strikes. I also want Bob to look into something else.”

“What’s that?” August asked.

Honda closed his laptop and stood. He lingered long enough to hear Rodgers’s reply.

“I want to know what kind of detonator caps the SFF uses for counterterrorist strikes,” the general replied.

“Why?” August asked.

“Because the Mossad, the Iraqi Al Amn al-Khas, Abu Nidal’s group, and the Spanish Grapo have all used PDEs on occasion,” Rodgers said. “Phone-detonated explosives.”

Chapter Thirteen.

Srinagar, Kashmir Wednesday, 6:59 P.M.

It was nearly dark when Ron Friday returned to the bazaar. Though he was curious to see how the authorities here were handling the investigation he was more interested in what he might be able to find out about the attack. His life might depend on that information.

The rain had stopped and there was a cold wind rolling off the mountains. Friday was glad he had worn a baseball cap and a windbreaker, though the drop in temperature was not the reason he had put them on. Even from his room he could hear helicopters circling the area. When Friday arrived he found that the two police choppers were hovering low, less than two hundred feet up. In addition to looking for survivors, the noise echoing loudly through the square helped to keep onlookers from staying too long. But that was not the only reason the choppers were there. Friday guessed that they were also maintaining a low altitude to photograph the crowd in case the terrorist was still in the area. The cockpits were probably equipped with GRRs–geometric reconstructive recorders. These were digital cameras that could take photographs shot at an angle and reconfigure the geometry so they became accurate frontal images. Interpol and most national security agencies had a “face-print” file consisting of mug shots and police sketches of known and suspected terrorists. Like fingerprints, face-print photographs could be run through a computer and compared to images on file. The computer superimposed the likenesses. If the features were at least a 70 percent match, that was considered sufficient to go after the individual for interrogation.

Friday had worn the baseball cap because he did not want to be face-printed by the chopper. He did not know which governments might have his likeness on file or for what reason. He certainly did not want to give them a picture with which to start a file.

The blast sights had been roped off with red tape. Spotlights on ten-foot-tall tripods had been erected around the perimeters. Physically, the main market area reminded Friday of a gymnasium after a dance. The event was over, the place eerily lifeless, and the residue of activity was everywhere. Only here, instead of punch there were bloodstains. Instead of crepe there were shredded awnings. And instead of empty seats there were abandoned carts. Some of the vendors had taken their carts away, leaving dust-free spots on the ground in the shape of the stall. In the sharp light they resembled the black shadows of trees and people that had been burned on the walls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by nuclear fire. Other carts had been simply abandoned. Perhaps the owners had not been there when the blast occurred and the hired help did not want to stick around. Maybe some of the sellers had been injured or killed.

Militiamen from the regular army were stationed around the perimeters. They were carrying MP5K submachine guns, very visible in the bright lights. Police were patrolling the square carrying their distinctive .455 Webley revolvers. Apart from discouraging looters–which did not really require exposed firearms–there was only one reason to haul out artillery after a strike. It was a means of restoring wounded pride and reassuring the public that the people in charge were still a potent force. It was all so sadly predictable.

Reporters were allowed to make their news broadcasts or take their pictures and then were asked to leave. An officer explained to a crew from CNN that it would be more difficult to watch for looters if a crowd gathered.

Or maybe they just did not want cameras recording their own thefts, Friday thought. He was willing to bet that many of the goods that had been left behind would be gone by morning.

A few people had come to the marketplace just to stare. Whatever they expected to see–broken bodies, the spectacle of destruction, news being made–it did not appear to fulfill them. Most left looking deflated. Bomb sites, combat zones, and car wrecks often did that to people. They were drawn to it and then repulsed. Maybe they were disappointed by a sudden awareness of their own bloodthirstiness. Some people came with flowers, which they laid on the ground beneath the tape. Others just left behind prayers for dead friends, relatives, or strangers.

At the destroyed police station and temple, building inspectors were moving through surrounding structures to determine whether they had been weakened or damaged in the blasts. Friday recognized them by their white hard hats and palm-sized echometers. These devices emitted either single-or multidirectional sound waves that could be adjusted to the composition of an object, from stone to concrete to wood. If the sound waves encountered anything that was inconsistent with the makeup of the material–which typically meant a breach–an alarm would sound and the officials would examine the site further.

Apart from the engineers there were the usual police recovery units and medical personnel working at all three sites. But Friday was surprised by one thing. Typically, terrorist attacks in India were investigated by the district police and the National Security Guard. The NSG was established in 1986 to act as a counterterrorist force. The so-called Black Cat Commandos handled situations ranging from in-progress hijackings and kidnappings to forensic activities at bomb sites. However, there was not a single black-uniformed NSG operative here. These sites were under the control of the brown-uniformed Special Frontier Force. Friday had never been to any bomb sites in Srinagar. Maybe this was the way responsibility for antiterrorist investigations had been parceled out, with the SFF getting the region nearest the line of control.

Friday was motioned along by one of the police officers. He would not be able to get into the rubble himself. But he could still come up with some sound ideas about how the attack was made. As he walked toward the place where the bus had exploded, Friday used his cell phone to call Samantha Mandor at the NSA’s photo archives. He asked her to search the AP, UPI, Reuters, and other digital photograph files for pictures of sites struck by terrorists in Kashmir. He also wanted her to pull together any analysis files that were attached to the photographs. He probably had some of those in his own computer files back in his room. But he wanted information that was incident-specific. Friday told her to phone back the minute she had the photo and text archives.

The American operative neared the roped-off bus site. Unlike the two buildings, where the walls had kept people and objects from the street, the bus debris had been strewn everywhere by the powerful explosion. The bodies had been cleared away but the street was covered with metal, leather, and glass from the bus itself. There were books and cameras that the passengers had been carrying and travel accessories, clothing, and religious icons that had been packed in luggage. Unlike the buildings, this scene was a snapshot of the moment of impact.

Friday’s cell phone beeped as he neared the red tape. He stopped walking and took the call.

“Yes?” he said.

“Mr. Friday? It’s Samantha Mandor. I have the photographs and information you asked for. Do you want me to send the images somewhere? There are about four dozen color pictures.”

“No,” Friday said. “When was the last attack in Srinagar?”

“Five months ago,” Samantha told him. “It was against a shipment of artillery shells that were en route to the line of control. The attack caused one hell of an explosion.”

“Was it a suicide bombing?” he asked.

“No,” Samantha said. “There’s a microscopic image of liquid crystal display fragments that were found near ground zero. The lab analysis says it was part of a timer. They also said a remote sensor was found in the debris but that it was apparently not detonated.”

That was probably part of a backup plan, Friday thought. Professionals often included a line-of-sight device to trigger the explosives in case the timer did not work or if the device were discovered before the timer could activate them. The presence of an LOS receiver meant that at least one of the terrorists was almost certainly in the area when the device exploded.

“What about the personnel at the bomb site?” Friday asked. “What kind of uniforms were they wearing?”

“There were National Security Guard officers as well as local police on the scene,” the woman informed him.

“Any members of the Special Frontier Force?” Friday asked.

“None,” she said. “There were additional assaults against military targets in Srinagar. They occurred six and seven weeks prior to that attack. National Security Guard officers were present there as well.”

“Did anyone claim responsibility for those attacks?” Friday asked.

“According to the data file those two and this one were claimed by the same group,” Samantha told him. “The Free Kashmir Militia.”

“Thank you,” Friday said. He had heard of them. Reportedly, they had the backing of the Pakistan government.

“Will you need anything else?” Samantha asked.

“Not right now,” he replied and clicked off.

Friday hooked the cell phone to his belt. He would call his new boss later, when he had something solid to report. He looked around. There were no Black Cat Commandos here. Maybe that was significant, maybe it was not. Their absence might have been a territorial issue. Or maybe the NSG had been unable to stop the terrorists and the problem had been turned over to the SFF. Perhaps a former SFF officer had been named to a high government post. Appointments like that routinely led to reorganizations.

Of course, there was always the possibility that this was not routine. What kind of exceptional circumstances would lead to a department being shut out of an investigation? That would certainly happen if security were an issue. Friday wondered if the NSG might have been compromised by Pakistani operatives. Or maybe the SFF had made it look as though the Black Cats had been penetrated. Because budgets were tighter there was even more interagency rivalry here than there was in the United States.

Friday turned around slowly. There were several two- and three-story-high buildings around the market. However, those would not have been good vantage points for the terrorists. If they had needed to use the remote detonators, the carts with their high banners, awnings, and umbrellas might have blocked the line of sight. If there had been any cooked-food stands in the way smoke might also have obscured their vision. Besides, the terrorists would also have had the problem of renting rooms. There was a danger in leaving a paper trail, like the terrorists who charged the van they used to attack the World Trade Center in New York. And only amateur terrorists paid cash for a room. That was a red flag that usually sent landlords right to the police. Not even the greediest landlord wanted someone who might be a bomb maker living in their building.

Besides, there was no need to hide here. It would have been easy for a terrorist to remain anonymous in this busy marketplace day after day to case the targets, plant the explosives, and watch the site today. But Friday did wonder one thing. Why did the police station and the temple blow up at the same time while the bus did not explode until several seconds later? It was extremely likely that they were related attacks. It could have been that the timers were slightly out-of-synch. Or maybe there was another reason.

Friday continued walking to where the bus had been parked. Traffic had been diverted from Route 1A to other streets. He was able to stand in the broad avenue and look back at the site. This road was the most direct way out of here. It fed any number of roads. Pursuit would have been extremely difficult even if the police knew the individual or kind of vehicle they were looking for. He found the line-of-sight spot that would have been the ideal place to stand in case the timer failed. It was on the curb, near where the bus was parked. It was about four hundred yards from the target, which was near the maximum range for most remote detonators. Obviously, if a terrorist were waiting there for the blast, he would not have wanted the bus to blow up yet. He would have waited until after the temple explosion then moved a safe distance away. The bus explosion would have been scheduled to give him time to get away. Or else he had triggered the blast himself using the same remote he would have used on the temple.

But that still did not tell him why there were two separate explosions for the police station and temple. One large explosion would have brought both structures down.

Friday started back toward the other end of the market. When he got back to his room he would call the NSA. The market attack itself did not bother him. He did not really give a damn who ended up being in charge here. What concerned him were the Black Cats. These people would have access to intelligence about him and Striker once they went into the mountains. If there was even a possibility that the NSG was leaking, he wanted to make sure they were kept out of the circuit.

Chapter Fourteen.

Kargil, Kashmir Wednesday, 7:00 P.M.

As his motorcycle sped through the foothills of the Himalayas, Ishaq Fazeli wished he had one thing above all. He had left Apu’s farm without eating dinner and he was hungry. But he did not want food. He had been driving with his mouth open–a bad habit–and his tongue was dry. But he did not want water. What he wanted most was a helmet.

As the lightweight Royal Endfield Bullet sped through the mountain pass, small, flat rocks spit from under the slender wheels. Whenever the roadway narrowed, as it did now, and Ishaq passed too close to the mountainside, the sharp-edged pebbles came back at him like bullets. He would even settle for a turban if he had the material to make one and the time to stop. Instead, Ishaq adjusted to driving with his face turned slightly to the left. As long as the pebbles did not hit his eyes he would be all right. And if they did he would be philosophical about it. He would still have his left eye. Growing up in the west, near the Khyber Pass, he had learned long ago that the mountains of the subcontinent were not for the weak.

For one thing, even during a short two-hour ride like this, the weather changes quickly. Brutal sunshine can give way to a snow squall within minutes. Sleet can turn to thick fog even quicker. Travelers who are unprepared can freeze or dehydrate or lose their way before reaching safety. Sunshine, wind, precipitation, heat and cold from fissures, caverns, and lofty tors–all rush madly around the immutable peaks, clashing and warring in unpredictable ways. In that respect the mountains reminded Ishaq of the ancient caliphs. They too were towering and imperious, answering only to Allah.

For another thing, the foothills of the Himalayas are extremely difficult to negotiate on foot, let alone on a motorcycle. The mountain range is relatively young and the slopes are still sharp and steep. Here, in Kashmir, the few paths one finds were originally made by the British in 1845 at the onset of the Anglo-Sikh Wars. Queen Victoria’s elite mountain forces used the routes, known as “cuts,” to flank enemy troops that were encamped in lower elevations. Too narrow for trucks, cars, and artillery, and too precarious for horses and other pack animals, the cuts fell into disuse at the time of the First World War and remained largely untraveled until the Pakistanis rediscovered them in 1947. While the Indians used helicopters to move men and materiel through the region, the Pakistanis preferred these slower, more secretive paths. The cuts peaked at around eight thousand feet, where the temperatures were too low at night and the air too cold to support simple bedroll camps or sustained marches.

Not that the hazards or the discomfort mattered to Ishaq right now. He had a mission to accomplish and a leader to serve. Nothing would get in the way of that. Not precipitous falls, or the hornetlike pebbles that wanted to send him there, or the sudden drop in the temperature.

Fortunately, the motorcycle performed as heroically as its reputation. More than a year before, Ishaq had taken the Royal Endfield Bullet from behind an army barracks. It was a beautiful machine. It was not one of the prized vintage bikes from the 1950s, made when the British company first set up its factory in India. But the machine was standard equipment of local military and police units. As such, it did not attract undue attention. And there were tactical advantages as well. Like all the Royal Endfield Bullets, the distinctive red-and-black motorcycle got exceptional mileage and had a maximum speed of nearly eighty miles an hour. The bike was durable and the 22 bhp engine was relatively quiet. At just under four hundred pounds the bike also caused very little stress on the cliffside portions of the road. And the low noise output was important as he made his way up into the foothills, where loud sounds could cause rock slides.

Ishaq saw small numbers carved in the side of the mountain. They indicated that the elevation was four thousand feet. The Free Kashmir Militiaman was behind schedule. He pushed the bike a little faster. The wind rushed at him, causing his cheeks to flutter. The noise they made sounded almost like the motorcycle engine. By the grace of the Prophet he and the machine had become one. He smiled at the ways of Allah.

Section 2E was near the high midpoint of the cuts. Pakistani troops had spent years mapping this region. When they retreated from Kargil, the troops left a large cache of weapons, explosives, clothes, passports, and medical supplies in a cave at the high point of the sector. Sharab and her team frequently retreated to the spot to replenish their stores.

Ishaq had kept an eye on his watch as he pushed higher into the hills. He did not want to keep Sharab waiting. That was not because their leader was intolerant or impatient but because he wanted to be there for her–whenever, wherever, and for whatever reason she needed him. A political professor with no prior field experience, Sharab’s dedication and tactical ingenuity had quickly earned the respect and complete devotion of every member of the team. Ishaq was also a little bit in love with her, although he was careful not to let that show. He did not want her thinking that was the only reason he was with her. She liked to work with patriots, not admirers. Yet Ishaq often wondered if the leaders of the Free Kashmir Militia had asked her to lead this group because she was a woman. When ancient physicians used to cauterize the wounds of warriors it took five or more men to restrain the injured man–or one woman. For love of Sharab or fear of shaming their manhood, there was nothing the men in her cell would refuse to do.

A .38 Smith & Wesson was snug in a holster under his wool sweater. The handgun came to the FKM via the Karachi Airport security police, which had bought nearly one thousand of the weapons from the United States almost thirty years before. The weight of the loaded gun felt good against his ribs. Ishaq’s faith taught him that it was only through the Prophet and Allah that a man became strong. Ishaq believed that, passionately. Prayer and the Koran gave him strength. But there was also something empowering about having a weapon at your side. Religion was a satisfying meal that carried a man through the day. The Smith & Wesson was a snack that got him through the moment.

The road became bumpier due to recent rockfall from a cliff. The outside corners were also more precarious. To make things worse, a cool drizzle began. It nicked his face like windblown sand. But despite all this he pushed the motorcycle even harder. If the rain kept up and had a chance to freeze, the cut would become brutally slick. He also had to watch out for hares and other animals. Hitting one could cause him to skid. Still, he could not slow down. Not if he were going to reach the zone in time. They always met up here after a mission but never with such urgency. First, Sharab usually liked to go back to whatever house or hut or barn they had occupied in order to have a final talk with their host. She wanted to make sure that whoever she left behind understood that they would remain alive only as long as they remained silent. Some of the team members did not agree with her charity, especially when they were Hindus like Apu and his granddaughter. But Sharab did not want to turn the people against her. To her, whether they were Muslim or not, most of these farmers, shepherds, and factory workers were already Pakistani. She did not want to kill innocent countrymen, present or future.

The skies were dark and Ishaq flipped on his headlights. A powerful lamp illuminated the road almost two hundred yards ahead. That was barely enough visibility to allow him to keep moving at his current pace. Curves came up so suddenly that he nearly went off the cut twice. Every now and then he slowed for just a moment to keep from feeling like he could fly. That was a very real delusion at this height and these speeds. He also took that time to glance back. He wanted to make sure he was not being followed. With the hum of the engine echoing off the crags and valleys, the sputtering of his cheeks, and the knocking of the thrown pebbles, Ishaq would not necessarily hear the roar of a pursuing vehicle or helicopter. He had warned Apu to stay in the house and he had cut the telephone line. But still–one never knew how a man would react when a family member was in captivity.

Ishaq saw another roadside marker. He was at forty-five hundred feet now. He did not know exactly how far Sharab and the team would be able to go in the van. They were coming up another cut. Maybe they could get to five thousand feet before the road became too narrow to accommodate the truck. The roads joined a few hundred feet ahead. When he arrived, he would either see their tire treads or else wait for them at the cave. He hoped they were already there. He was anxious to know what had happened, what had gone wrong.

He prayed it was nothing that might keep them from him. If for some reason the others did not show up within twenty-four hours, Ishaq’s standing orders were to get to the cave and set up the radio he carried in his small equipment case. Then he was to call the FKM base in Abbottabad, across the border in Pakistan. They would tell him what to do. That meant either he would be advised to wait for replacements or attempt to return home for a debriefing.

If it came to that, Ishaq hoped they would tell him to wait. Going home would mean climbing the mountains to the Siachin Glacier. Or else he would have to attempt to make his way across the line of control. His chances of surviving the trip were not good. FKM command might just as well order him to shoot himself at the cave.

As Ishaq neared the point where the two cuts converged he saw the truck. It was parked in the middle of the road. The flatbed was covered with an earth-tone tarp they carried and the cab was hidden beneath scrub. A smile fought a losing battle against the wind. He was glad they had made it. But that changed when his headlights found the team about two hundred yards ahead. As one they turned and crouched, ready to fire.

“No, it’s Ishaq!” he cried. “It’s Ishaq!”

They lowered their weapons and continued ahead without waiting for their teammate. Sharab was in front with the girl. Nanda was being urged forward at gunpoint.

That was not like Sharab.

This was bad. This was very, very bad.

Chapter Fifteen.

Washington, D.C. Wednesday, 10:51 A.M.

Bob Herbert was usually a pretty happy man.

To begin with, Herbert loved his work. He had a good team working beside him. He was able to give Op-Center personnel the kind of heads-up intelligence he and his wife never had in Lebanon. He was also happy with himself. He was not a Washington bureaucrat. He put truthfulness above diplomacy and the well-being of the NCMC above the advancement of Bob Herbert. That meant he could sleep at night. He had the respect of the people who mattered, like Paul Hood and Mike Rodgers.

But Bob Herbert was not happy right now.

Hank Lewis had phoned from the NSA to say that the latest information e-mailed from Ron Friday was being processed by decryption personnel. It would be forwarded to Herbert within minutes. While Herbert waited for the intel he did something he had been meaning to do since the Striker recon mission was okayed by the CIOC. He pulled up Ron Friday’s NSA file on his computer. Until now, Herbert and his team had been too busy helping Mike Rodgers and Striker prepare for the mission to do anything else.

Herbert did not like what he saw in Ron Friday’s dossier. Or rather, what he did not see there.

As a crisis management center, Op-Center did not keep a full range of military maps and intelligence in what they called their “hot box.” The only files that were reviewed and updated on a four-times-daily basis were situations and places where American personnel or interests were directly involved or affected. Kashmir was certainly a crisis zone. But if it exploded, it was not a spot with which Op-Center would automatically be involved. In fact, that was the reason Striker had been asked to go into the region and look for Pakistani nuclear weapons. Pakistani intelligence would not be expecting them.

Ron Friday was a very late addition to the mission. His participation had been requested over the weekend by Satya Shankar, minister of state, Department of Atomic Energy. Officially, one of Shankar’s duties was the sale of nuclear technology to developing nations. Unofficially, he was responsible for helping the military keep track of nuclear technology within enemy states. Shankar and Friday had worked together once before, when Shankar was joint secretary, Exploration, of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Friday had been called in by a European oil concern to assess legal issues involving drilling in disputed territory between Great Indian Desert in the Rajasthan Province of India and the Thar Desert in Pakistan. Shankar had obviously been impressed by the attorney.

Since Op-Center was stuck with Friday, reading his file had not been a high priority for Herbert. Especially since the CIOC had already okayed Friday based on his Blue Shield rating. That meant Ron Friday was cleared to take part in the most sensitive fieldwork in foreign countries. Red Shield meant that an agent was trusted by the foreign government. White Shield meant that he was trusted by his own government, that there was no evidence of double-agent activity. Yellow Shield meant that he had been revealed to be a double agent and was being used by his government to put out disinformation, often without his knowledge or occasionally with his cooperation in exchange for clemency. Blue Shield meant he was trusted by both nations.

What the Red, White, and Blue rankings really meant was that no data had ever come up to suggest the agent was corrupt. That was usually good enough for a project overseer to rubber-stamp an individual for a mission. Especially an overseer who was new on the job and overworked, like Hank Lewis at the National Security Agency. But the Shield system was not infallible. It could simply mean that the agent had been too careful to be caught. Or that he had someone on the inside who kept his file clean.

Friday’s file was extremely skimpy. It contained very few field reports from Azerbaijan, where he had most recently been stationed at the United States embassy in Baku as an aide to Deputy Ambassador Dorothy Williamson. There were zero communications at all from him during the recent crisis in the former Soviet Republic. That was unusual. Herbert had a look at the files of the two CIA operatives who had been stationed at the embassy. They were full of daily reports. Coincidentally, perhaps, both of those men were killed.

Friday’s thin file and his apparent silence during the crisis was troubling. One of his superiors at the NSA, Jack Fenwick, was the man who had hired the terrorist known as the Harpooner to precipitate the Caspian Sea confrontation between Azerbaijan, Iran, and Russia. Herbert had not read all the postmortems about the situation. There had not been time. But Friday’s silence before and during the showdown led Herbert to wonder: was he really inactive or were his reports made directly to someone who destroyed them?

Jack Fenwick, for example.

If that were true it could mean that Ron Friday had been working with Jack Fenwick and the Harpooner to start a war. Of course, there was always the possibility that Friday had been helping Fenwick without knowing what the NSA chief was up to. But that seemed unlikely. Ron Friday had been an attorney, a top-level oil rights negotiator, and a diplomatic advisor. He did not seem naive. And that scared the hell out of Herbert.

The decrypted NSA e-file arrived and Herbert opened it. The folder contained Friday’s observations as well as relevant data about the previous antiterrorist functions of both the National Security Guard and the Special Frontier Force. It did not seem strange to Herbert that SFF had replaced the Black Cats after this latest attack. Maybe the SFF had jurisdiction over strikes against religious sites. Or maybe the government had grown impatient with the ineffectiveness of the Black Cats. There was obviously a terrorist cell roaming Kashmir. Any security agency that failed to maintain security was not going to have that job for very long.

Either he or Paul Hood could call their partners in Indian intelligence and get an explanation for the change. Herbert’s concerns about Ron Friday would not be so easy to dispel.

Herbert entered the numbers 008 on his wheelchair phone. That was Paul Hood’s extension. Shortly before Op-Center opened its doors Matt Stoll had hacked the computer system to make sure he got the 007 extension. Herbert had not been happy about Stoll’s hacking but Hood had appreciated the man’s initiative. As long as Stoll limited his internal sabotage to a one-time hack of the phone directory Hood had decided to overlook it.

The phone beeped once. “Hood here.”

“Chief, it’s Bob. Got a minute?”

“Sure,” Hood said.

“I’ll be right there,” Herbert said. He typed an address in his computer and hit “enter.” “Meanwhile, I’d like you to have a quick look at the e-files I’m sending over. One’s a report from the NSA about this morning’s attack in Srinagar. Another is Ron Friday’s very thin dossier.”

“All right,” Hood said.

Herbert hung up and wheeled himself down the corridor to Hood’s office. As Herbert was en route he got a call from Matt Stoll.

“Make it quick,” Herbert said.

“I was just reviewing the latest number grabs from the Bellhop,” Stoll told him. “That telephone number we’ve been watching, the field phone in Srinagar? It’s making very strange calls.”

“What do you mean?” Herbert said.

“The field phone keeps calling the home phone in Jammu, the police station,” Stoll said. “But the calls last for only one second.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Stoll told him. “We read a connect, a one-second gap, then a disconnect.”

“Is it happening regularly?” Herbert asked.

“There’s been a blip every minute since four P.M. local time, six thirty A.M. our time,” Stoll told him.

“That’s over four hours,” Herbert said. “Short, regular pulses over a long period. Sounds like a tracking beacon.”

“It could be that,” Stoll agreed, “or it could mean that someone hit the autoredial button by accident. Voice mail answers nonemergency calls at the police station. The field phone may have been programmed to read that as a disconnect so it hangs up and rings the number again.”

“That doesn’t sound likely,” Herbert said. “Is there any way to tell if the field phone is moving?”

“Not directly,” Stoll said.

“What about indirectly?” Herbert asked as he reached Paul Hood’s office. The door was open and he knocked on the jamb. Hood was studying his computer monitor. He motioned Herbert in.

“If the phone calls are a beacon, then the police in Kashmir are almost certainly following them, probably by ground-based triangulation,” Stoll told Herbert. “All of that would be run through their computers. It will take some time but we can try breaking into the system.”

“Do it,” Herbert said.

“Sure,” Stoll said. “But why don’t we just call over and ask them what’s going on? Aren’t they our allies? Aren’t we supposed to be running this operation with them?”

“Yes,” Herbert replied. “But if there’s some way we can accomplish this without them knowing I’d be happier. The police are going to want to know why we’re asking. The Black Cats and selected government officials are the only ones who are supposed to know that Striker is coming over.”

“I see,” Stoll said. “Okay. We’ll try hacking them.”

“Thanks,” Herbert said and hung up as he wheeled into Hood’s office. He locked his brakes and shut the door behind him.

“Busy morning?” Hood asked.

“Not until some lunatic decided to set off fireworks in Srinagar,” Herbert replied.

Hood nodded. “I haven’t finished these files,” he said, “but Ron Friday is obviously concerned about us having anything to do with the Black Cats. And you’re apparently worried about having anything to do with Ron Friday.”

Paul Hood had not spent a lot of time working in the intelligence community and he had a number of weaknesses. However, one of Hood’s greatest strengths was that his years in politics and finance had taught him to intuit the concerns of his associates, whatever the topic.

“That’s about the size of it,” Herbert admitted.

“Tell me about this police line blip,” Hood said, still reading.

“The last home phone-to-field phone communication came a moment before the explosion,” Herbert said. “But Matt just told me that the regular pulses from field to home started immediately after that. In ELINT we want three things to happen before we posit a possible connection to a terrorist attack: timing, proximity, and probable source. We’ve got those.”

“The probable source being a cell that’s apparently been working in Srinagar,” Hood said.

“Correct,” Herbert said. “I just asked Matt to try and get more intel on the continuing blips.”

Hood nodded and continued reading. “The problem you have with Friday is a little dicier.”

“Why?” Herbert asked.

“Because he’s there at the request of the Indian government,” Hood said.

“So is Striker,” Herbert pointed out.

“Yes, but they’ve worked with Friday,” Hood said. “They’ll give Striker more freedom because they trust Friday.”

“There’s an irony in there somewhere,” Herbert said.

“Look, I see where you’re coming from,” Hood acknowledged. “Friday worked for Fenwick. Fenwick betrayed his country. But we have to be careful about pushing guilt by association.”

“How about guilt by criminal activity?” Herbert said. “Whatever Friday was doing in Baku was removed from his file.”

“That’s assuming he was working for the NSA,” Hood said. “I just put in a call to Deputy Ambassador Williamson in Baku. Her personal file says that Friday worked as her aide. He was on loan from the NSA to collect intelligence on the oil situation. There’s no reason to assume the CIA involved him in the hunt for the Harpooner. And Jack Fenwick was playing with fire. He may not have told Friday what the NSA was really doing in the Caspian.”

“Or Fenwick may have sent him there,” Herbert pointed out. “Friday’s oil credentials made him the perfect inside man.”

“You’ll need to prove that one,” Hood said.

Herbert didn’t like that answer. When his gut told him something he listened to it. To him, Hood’s habit of being a devil’s advocate was one of his big weaknesses. Still, from the perspective of accountability Hood was doing the right thing. That was why Hood was in charge of Op-Center and Herbert was not. They could not go back to the CIOC and tell them they called off the mission or were concerned about Friday’s role in it because of Herbert’s intuition.

The phone beeped. It was Dorothy Williamson. Hood put the phone on speaker. He was busy typing something on his keyboard as he introduced himself and Herbert. Then he explained that they were involved in a joint operation with Ron Friday. Hood asked if she would mind sharing her impressions of the agent.

“He was very efficient, a good attorney and negotiator, and I was sorry to lose him,” she said.

“Did he interact much with the two Company men, the ones who were killed by the Harpooner’s man?” Hood asked.

“Mr. Friday spent a great deal of time with Mr. Moore and Mr. Thomas,” Williamson replied.

“I see,” Hood said.

Herbert felt vindicated. Friday’s interaction with the men should have shown up in his reports to the NSA. Now he knew the file had been sanitized.

“For the record, Mr. Hood, I do want to point out one thing,” Williamson said. “The Company agents were not killed by one assassin but by two.”

That caught Herbert by surprise.

“There were two assassins at the hospital,” the deputy ambassador went on. “One of them was killed. The other one got away. The Baku police department is still looking for him.”

“I did not know that,” Hood said. “Thank you.”

Herbert’s gut growled a little. The two CIA operatives were killed getting medical attention for a visiting agent who had been poisoned by the Harpooner. Fenwick’s plan to start a Caspian war had depended upon killing all three men at the hospital. Fenwick certainly would have asked Friday for information regarding the movements of the CIA operatives. And just as certainly that information would have been deleted from Friday’s files. But after the two men were killed, Friday had to have suspected that something was wrong. He should have confided in Williamson or made sure he had a better alibi.

Unless he was a willing part of Fenwick’s team.

“Bob Herbert here, Madam Deputy Ambassador,” Herbert said. “Can you tell me where Mr. Friday was on the night of the murders?”

“In his apartment, as I recall,” Williamson informed him.

“Did Mr. Friday have anything to say after he learned about the killings?” Herbert pressed.

“Not really,” she said.

“Was he concerned for his own safety?” Herbert asked.

“He never expressed any worries,” she said. “But there was not a lot of time for chat. We were working hard to put down a war.”

Hood shot Herbert a glance. The intelligence chief sat back, exasperated, as Hood complimented her on her efforts during the crisis.

That was Paul Hood. Whatever the situation he always had the presence of mind to play the diplomat. Not Herbert. If the Harpooner was killing U.S. agents, he wanted to know why it did not occur to Ms. Williamson to find out why Friday had not been hit.

The deputy ambassador had a few more things to say about Friday, especially praising his quick learning curve on the issues they had to deal with between Azerbaijan and its neighbors. Williamson asked Hood to give him her regards if he spoke with Friday.

Hood said he would and clicked off. He regarded Herbert. “You wouldn’t have gotten anywhere hammering her,” Hood said.

“How do you know?” Herbert asked.

“While we were talking I looked at her c.v.,” Hood said. “Williamson’s a political appointee. She ran the spin-doctoring for Senator Thompson during his last Senate campaign.”

“Dirty tricks?” Herbert asked disgustedly. “That’s the whole of her intelligence experience?”

“Pretty much,” Hood said. “With two CIA agents on staff in Baku I guess the president thought he was safe scoring points with the majority whip. More to the point, I’m guessing this whole thing sounds too clean to you.”

“Like brass buttons on inspection day.”

“I don’t know, Bob,” Hood said. “It’s not just Williamson. Hank Lewis trusted Friday enough to send him to India.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Herbert said. “I spoke with Hank Lewis earlier this morning. He’s making decisions like a monkey in a space capsule.”

Hood made a face. “He’s a good man–“

“Maybe, Chief, but that’s the way it is,” Herbert insisted. “Lewis gets a jolt of electricity and pushes a button. He hasn’t had time to think about Ron Friday or anyone else. Look, Hank Lewis and Dorothy Williamson shouldn’t be the issues right now–“

“Agreed,” Hood said. “All right. Let’s assume Ron Friday may not be someone we want on our team. How do we vet him? Jack Fenwick’s not going to say anything to anyone.”

“Why not?” Herbert asked. “Maybe the rat-bastard will talk in exchange for immunity–“

“The president got what he wanted, the resignations of Fenwick and his coconspirators,” Hood said. “He doesn’t want a national trial that will question whether he was actually on the edge of a mental breakdown during the crisis, even if it means letting a few underlings remain in the system. Fenwick got off lucky. He’s not going to say anything that might change the president’s mind.”

“That’s great,” Herbert said. “The guilty go free and the president’s psyche doesn’t get the examination it may damn well need.”

“And the stock market doesn’t collapse and the military doesn’t lose faith in its commander-in-chief and a rash of Third World despots don’t start pushing their own agendas while the nation is distracted,” Hood said. “The systems are all too damn interconnected, Bob. Right and wrong don’t matter anymore. It’s all about equilibrium.”

“Is that so?” Herbert said. “Well, mine’s a little shaky right now. I don’t like risking my team, my friends, to keep some Indian nabob happy.”

“We aren’t going to,” Hood said. “We’re going to protect the part of the system we’ve been given.” He looked at his watch. “I don’t know if Ron Friday betrayed his country in Baku. Even if he did it doesn’t mean he’s got a side bet going in India. But we still have about eighteen hours before Striker reaches India. What can we do to get more intel on Friday?”

“I can have my team look into his cell phone records and e-mail,” Herbert said, “maybe get security videos from the embassy and see if anything suspicious turns up.”

“Do it,” Hood said.

“That may not tell us everything,” Herbert said.

“We don’t need everything,” Hood said. “We need probable cause, something other than the possibility that Friday may have helped Fenwick. If we get that then we can go to Senator Fox and the CIOC, tell them we don’t want Striker working with someone who was willing to start a war for personal gain.”

“All very polite,” Herbert grumped. “But we’re using kid gloves on a guy who may have been a goddamned traitor.”

“No,” Hood said. “We’re presuming he’s innocent until we’re sure he’s not. You get me the information. I’ll take care of delivering the message.”

Herbert agreed, reluctantly.

As he wheeled back to his office, the intelligence chief reflected on the fact that the only thing diplomacy ever accomplished was to postpone the inevitable. But Hood was the boss and Herbert would do what he wanted.

For now.

Because, more than loyalty to Paul Hood and Op-Center, more than watching out for his own future, Herbert felt responsible for the security of Striker and the lives of his friends. The day things became so interconnected that Herbert could not do that was the day he became a pretty unhappy man. And then he would have just one more thing to do.

Hang up his spurs.

Chapter Sixteen.

Siachin Base 2E, Kashmir Wednesday, 9:02 P.M.

Sharab and her group left the camouflaged truck and spent the next two hours making their way to the cliff where the cave was located. Ishaq had raced ahead on his motorcycle. He went as far as he could go and then walked the rest of the way. Upon reaching the cave he collected the small, hooded lanterns they kept there and set them out for the others. The small, yellow lights helped Sharab, Samouel, Ali, and Hassan get Nanda up to the ledge below the site. The Kashmiri hostage did not try to get away but she was obviously not comfortable with the climb. The path leading to this point had been narrow with long, sheer drops. This last leg, though less than fifty feet, was almost vertical.

A fine mist drifted across the rock, hampering visibility as they made their way up. The men proceeded with Nanda between them. Sharab brought up the rear. Her right palm was badly bruised and it ached from when she had struck the dashboard earlier. Sharab rarely lost her temper but it was occasionally necessary. Like the War Steeds of the Koran, who struck fire with their hooves, she had to let her anger out in measured doses. Otherwise it would explode in its own time.

Nanda had to feel her way to the handholds that Sharab and the others had cut in the rock face over a year before. The men helped her as best they could.

Sharab had insisted on bringing the Kashmiri along, though not so they would have a hostage. Men who would blow up their own citizens would not hesitate to shoot one more if it suited them. Sharab had taken Nanda for one reason only. She had questions to ask her.

The other two blasts in the Srinagar marketplace had not been a coincidence. Someone had to have known what Sharab and her group were planning. Maybe it was a pro-Indian extremist group. More likely it was someone in the government, since it would have taken careful planning to coordinate the different explosions. Whoever it was, they had caused the additional explosions so that the Free Kashmir Militia would unwittingly take the blame for attacking Hindus.

It did not surprise Sharab that the Indians would kill their own people to turn the population against the FKM. Some governments build germ-war factories in schools and put military headquarters under hospitals. Others arrest dissidents by the wagonload or test toxins in the air and water of an unsuspecting public. Security of the many typically came before the well-being of the few. What upset Sharab was that the Indians had so effectively counterplotted against her group. The Indians had known where and when the FKM was attacking. They knew that the group always took credit for their attack within moments of the blast. The Indians made it impossible for the cell to continue. Even if the authorities did not know who the cell members were or where they lived, they had undermined the group’s credibility. They would no longer be perceived as an anti-New Delhi force. They would be seen as anti-Indian, anti-Hindu.

There was nothing Sharab could do about that now. For the moment she felt safe. If the authorities had known about the cave they would have been waiting here. Once the team was armed and had collected their cold weather gear she would decide whether to stay for the night or push on. Moving through the cold, dark mountains would be dangerous. But giving the Indians a chance to track them down would be just as risky. She could not allow her group to be taken alive or dead. Even possessing their bodies would give the Indian radicals a target with which to rally the mostly moderate population.

Sharab wanted to survive for another reason, also. For the sake of future cells Sharab had to try to figure out how the Indian authorities knew what she and her team had been doing. Someone could have seen them working on the roof of the police station. But that would have led to their arrest and interrogation, not this elaborate plot. She suspected that someone had been watching them for some time. Since virtually none of the FKM’s communications were by phone or computer, and no one in Pakistan knew their exact whereabouts, that someone had to have been spying from nearby.

She knew and trusted everyone on her team. Only two other people had been close to the cell: Nanda and her grandfather. Apu would have been too afraid to move against them and Sharab did not see how Nanda could have spoken with anyone else. They were watched virtually all day, every day. Still, somehow, one of them must have betrayed the group.

Ishaq was leaning from the cave about ten feet above. He reached down and helped everyone up in turn. Sharab waited while Ishaq and Ali literally hoisted Nanda inside. The rock was cool and she placed her cheek against it. She shut her eyes. Though the rock felt good, it was not home.

When she was a young girl, Sharab’s favorite tale in the Koran involved the seven Sleepers of the Cave. One line in particular came to her each time she visited this place: “We made them sleep in the cave for many years, and then awakened them to find out who could best tell the length of their stay.”

Sharab knew that feeling of disorientation. Cut off from all that she loved, separated from all that was familiar, time had lost its meaning. But the woman knew what the Sleepers of the Cave had learned. That the Lord God knew how long they had been at rest. If they trusted in Him they would never be lost.

Sharab had her god and she also had her country. Yet this was not how she had wanted to return to Pakistan. She had always imagined going home victorious rather than running from the enemy.

“Come on!” Samouel called down to her.

Sharab opened her eyes. She continued her climb toward the cave. The moment of peace had passed. She began getting angry again. She pulled herself inside the small cave and stood. The wind wailed around her going into the shallow cave, then whooshed past her as it circled back out. Two lanterns rocked on hooks in the low ceiling. Beneath them were stacked crates of guns, explosives, canned food, clothing, and other gear.

Except for Ishaq, the men were standing along the sides of the cave. Ishaq was reattaching a large tarp to the front of the cave. The outside was painted to resemble the rest of the mountainside. Not only did it help to camouflage the natural cave but it helped keep them warm whenever they were here.

Nanda was near the back of the cave. She was facing Sharab. The ceiling sloped severely and the Kashmiri woman’s back was bent slightly so she could remain standing. There was a band of blood staining the ankle of her pants. The cuff must have worn the flesh raw yet Nanda had not complained. The corners of her mouth trembled, her breath came in anxious little puffs, and her arms were folded across her chest. Sharab decided that was probably an attempt to keep warm and not a show of defiance. They were all perspiring from the climb and the cold air had turned their sweat-drenched clothes frigid.

Sharab walked slowly toward her prisoner.

“Innocent people died today,” Sharab said. “There will be no retribution, no more killing, but I must know. Did you or your grandfather tell anyone about our activities?”

Nanda said nothing.

“We did not destroy the temple and the bus, you know that,” Sharab added. “You’ve lived with us, you must have heard us making plans. You know we only attack government targets. Whoever attacked the Hindus is your enemy. They must be exposed and brought to justice.”

Nanda continued to stand where she was, her arms bundled around her. But there was a change in her posture, in her expression. She had drawn her shoulders back slightly and her eyes and mouth had hardened.

Now she was defiant.

Why? Sharab wondered. Because a Pakistani had dared to suggest that Indians could be enemies to Indians? Nanda could not be so naive. And if she did not agree, she did not want to defend her countrymen either.

“Samouel?” Sharab said.

The young bearded man stood. “Yes?”

“Please take care of dinner, including our guest,” Sharab said. “She’ll need her strength.”

Samouel opened a frost-covered cardboard box that contained military rations. He began passing out the pop-top tins. Each of the shallow, red, six-by-four-inch containers was packed with basmati rice, strips of precooked goat meat, and two cinnamon sticks. A second cardboard box contained cartons of powdered milk. While Samouel handed those to the men Ali got a jug of water from the back of the cave. He added it to the powdered milk, pouring in skillful little bursts that kept the ice that had formed in the jugs from clogging the neck.

Sharab continued to regard Nanda. “You’re coming with us to Pakistan,” Sharab informed her. “Once you’re there you will tell my colleagues what you refuse to tell me.”

Nanda still did not respond. That seemed strange to Sharab. The dark-eyed woman had been talkative enough during the months at the farm. She had complained about the intrusion, the restrictions that had been placed on her, the militaristic leaders of Pakistan, and the terrorist activities of the FKM. It seemed odd that she would not say anything now.

Perhaps the woman was just tired from the climb. Yet she had not said anything in the truck either. It could be that she was afraid for her life. But she had not tried to get away on the mountain path or to reach any of the weapons that were plainly in view.

And then it hit her. The reason Nanda did not want to talk to them. Sharab stopped a few feet in front of the Kashmiri woman.

“You’re working with them,” Sharab said suddenly. “Either you want us to take you to Pakistan or–” She stopped and called Hassan over. Standing nearly six-foot-five, the thirty-six-year-old former quarry worker was the largest man on her team. He had to duck just to stand in the cave.

“Hold her,” Sharab ordered.

Now Nanda moved. She tried to get around Sharab. She was apparently trying to reach one of the guns in the box. But Hassan moved behind Nanda. He grabbed her arms right below the shoulders and pinned them together with his massive hands. The Kashmiri woman moaned and tried to wriggle away. But the big man pushed harder. She arched her back and then stopped moving.

Hassan wrestled Nanda over to Sharab. The Pakistani woman felt the pockets of Nanda’s jeans and then reached under Nanda’s bulky wool sweater. She patted Nanda’s sides and back.

She found what she was looking for at once. It was on Nanda’s left side, just above her hip. As Nanda renewed her struggles, Sharab pulled up the sweater and exposed the woman’s waist.

There was a small leather pouch attached to a narrow elastic band. Inside the pouch was a cellular phone. Sharab removed it and walked closer to one of the hanging lanterns. She examined the palm-sized black phone closely. The liquid crystal display was blank. Though that function had been disengaged the phone itself was working. It vibrated faintly, pulsing for a second and then shutting down for a second. It did that repeatedly. There was also a dark, concave plastic bubble on the top edge. It looked like the eye of a television remote control.

“Ali, Samouel, gather up weapons and supplies,” Sharab ordered. “Do it quickly.”

The men put down their meals and did as they were told. Hassan continued to hold Nanda. Ishaq watched from the side of the cave. He was waiting for Sharab to tell him what to do.

Sharab regarded Nanda. “This is more than just a cell phone, isn’t it? It’s a tracking device.”

Nanda said nothing. Sharab nodded at Hassan and he squeezed her arms together. She gasped but did not answer. After a moment Sharab motioned for him to relax his grip.

“You could not have spoken to your collaborators without us hearing,” Sharab went on. “You must have used the keypad to type information. Now they’re probably tracking you to our base. Who are they?”

Nanda did not answer.

Sharab strode toward the woman and slapped her with a hard backhand across the ear. “Who is behind this?” the woman screamed. “The SFF? The military? The world needs to know that we did not do this!”

Nanda refused to say anything.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Sharab said, stepping back.

“I do,” the Kashmiri woman said at last. “I stopped your people from committing genocide.”

“Genocide?”

“Against the Hindu population in Kashmir and the rest of India,” Nanda said. “For years we’ve listened to the promise of extermination on television, shouted outside the mosques.”

“You’ve been listening to the radicals, to Fundamentalist clerics who shout extremist views,” Sharab insisted. “All we wanted was freedom for the Muslims in Kashmir.”

“By killing–“

“We are at war!” Sharab declared. “But we only strike military or police targets.” She held up the cell phone and tapped the top with a finger. “Do you want to talk about extermination? This is a remote sensor, isn’t it? We put you close to the site and you used it to trigger explosives left by your partners.”

“What I did was an act of love to protect the rest of my people,” Nanda replied.

“It was an act of betrayal,” Sharab replied. “They moved freely because they knew we would not hurt them. You abused that trust.”

Sharab’s people took part in these acts primarily in the Middle East where they used their bodies as living bombs. The difference was that Nanda’s people had not chosen to make this sacrifice. Nanda and her partners had decided that for them.

But morality and blame did not matter to Sharab right now. Nanda did not have the experience to have originated this plan. Whoever was behind this was coming and undoubtedly they would be well armed. Sharab did not want to be here when they arrived.

She turned to Ishaq. The youngest member of the team was standing beside the cartons eating his goat meat and rice. His lips were pale from the cold and his face was leathery from the pounding the wind had given it during his motorcycle journey. But his soulful eyes were alert, expectant. Sharab tried not to think about what she was about to tell him. But it had to be done.

She handed Ishaq the cell phone. “I need you to stay here with this,” she told him.

The young man stopped chewing.

“You heard what is happening,” Sharab went on. “We’re leaving but her accomplices must think we’re still here.”

Ishaq put down the tin and took the phone. The other men stopped moving behind them.

“It’s very heavy,” Ishaq said softly. “You’re right. I think they’ve added things.” He regarded Sharab. “You don’t want the Indians to leave here, is that correct?”

“That is correct,” Sharab replied quietly. Her voice caught. She continued to look into Ishaq’s eyes.

“Then they won’t leave,” he promised her. “But you had better.”

“Thank you,” Sharab replied.

The woman turned to help the other men, not because they needed help but because she did not want Ishaq to see her weep. She wanted him to hold on to the image of her being strong. He would need that in order to get through this. Yet the tears came. They had been together every day for two years, both in Pakistan and in Kashmir. He was devoted to her and to the cause. But he did not have the climbing or survival skills the other men had. Without them they would not get across the mountains and the line of control and back to Pakistan.

The remaining members of the team pulled on the heavy coats they kept for extended stays in the cave. They threw automatic weapons over their right shoulders and ropes over their left. They put flashlights and matches in their pockets. Ali took the backpack he had loaded with food. Hassan grabbed Nanda after Samouel gave him the backpack with pitons, a hammer, extra flashlights, and maps.

Then, in turn, each member of the party hugged Ishaq. He smiled at them with tears in his eyes. Sharab was the last to embrace him.

“I pray that Allah will send to your aid five thousand angels,” Sharab whispered to him.

“I would sooner He send them to help you reach home,” Ishaq replied. “Then I would be sure that this has not been in vain.”

She hugged him even tighter then patted his back, turned, and stepped through the tarp.

Chapter Seventeen.

Srinagar, Kashmir Wednesday, 10:00 P.M.

Ron Friday was in his small room when the phone on the rickety night table rang. He opened his eyes and looked at his watch.

Right on time.

The phone was from the 1950s, a heavy black anvil of a thing with a thick brown cord. And it really rang rather than beeped. Friday was sitting on the bed; after sending the encoded message to Hank Lewis he had turned on the black-and-white TV. An old movie was on. Even with English subtitles Friday had trouble following the plot. The fact that he kept dozing off did not help.

Friday did not answer the phone on the first ring. Or the second. He did not pick up until the tenth ring. That was how he knew the caller was his Black Cat contact. Tenth ring at the tenth hour.

The caller, Captain Prem Nazir, said he would meet Friday outside in fifteen minutes.

Friday pulled on his shoes, grabbed his windbreaker, and headed down the single flight of stairs. There were only twelve rooms at Binoo’s Palace, most of them occupied by market workers, women of questionable provenance, and men who rarely emerged from their rooms. Obviously, the police turned a blind eye to more than just the gaming parlor.

The inn did not have much of a lobby. A reception desk was located to the left of the stairs. It was run by Binoo during the day and his sister at night. There was a Persian rug on a hardwood floor with battered sofas on either side. The windows looked out on the dark, narrow street. The smell of the potent, native-grown Juari cigarettes was thick here. The gaming parlor was located in a room behind the counter. A veil of smoke actually hung like a stage scrim behind Binoo’s oblivious sister.

The heavyset woman was leaning on the counter. She did not look up from her movie magazine as Friday came down. That was what he loved about this place. No one gave a damn.

The lobby was empty. So was the street. Friday leaned against the wall and waited.

Friday had never met the fifty-three-year-old Captain Nazir. Atomic Energy Minister Shankar knew him and put a lot of trust in him. Friday did not trust anyone, including Shankar. But Captain Nazir’s extensive background in espionage, first behind the lines in Pakistan in the 1960s, then with the Indian army, and now with the National Security Guard, suggested that the two men might enjoy a good working relationship.

Unless, that is, there were a problem between the NSG and the Special Frontier Force. That was the first order of business Friday intended to discuss with Nazir, even before they talked about the Striker mission to search for Pakistani nuclear missiles. Friday did not mind going on a sensitive mission for the Black Cats if they did not have the full trust and support of the government. Part of intelligence work was doing things without government approval. But he did mind going out if the Black Cats and the SFF were at war, if one group were looking to embarrass the other. A freeze-out of the NSG at the bomb site did not mean that was the case. But Friday wanted to be sure.

Captain Nazir arrived exactly on schedule. He was strolling in no particular hurry with no apparent destination, and he was smoking a Juari. That was smart. The officer was up from New Delhi but he was not smoking one of the milder brands that was popular in the capital. The local cigarette would help him blend in with the surroundings.

The officer was dressed in a plain gray sweatshirt, khaki slacks, and Nikes. He was about five-foot-seven with short black hair and a scar across his forehead. His skin was smooth and dark. He looked exactly like the photographs Friday had seen.

Ron Friday obviously looked like his photographs as well. Captain Nazir did not bother to introduce himself. They would not say one another’s names at all. There were still SFF personnel working in the bazaar. They might have set up electronic surveillance of the area to try to catch the bombers. If so, someone might overhear them.

The officer simply offered Friday his hand and said in a low, rough voice, “Walk with me.”

The two men continued in the direction Captain Nazir had been headed, away from the main street, Shervani Road. The narrow side street where the inn was located was little more than an alley. There were dark shops on either side of the road. They sold items that did not usually turn up in the bazaar, like bicycles, men’s suits, and small appliances. The street ended in a high brick wall about three hundred yards away.

Nazir drew on the nub of his cigarette. “The minister thinks very highly of you.”

“Thanks,” Friday said. He looked down and spoke very softly. “Tell me something. What happened today in the marketplace?”

“I’m not sure,” Nazir replied.

“Would you tell me if you did?” Friday asked.

“I’m not sure,” Nazir admitted.

“Why was the SFF handling the investigation instead of your people?” Friday asked.

Nazir stopped walking. He retrieved a pack of cigarettes from under his sweatshirt and used one to light another. He looked at Friday in the glow of the newly lit cigarette.

“I do not know the answer to that,” the officer replied as he continued walking.

“Let me point you in a direction,” Friday said. “Does the SFF have special jurisdiction over Srinagar or religious targets?”

“No,” Nazir replied.

“But their personnel were on the scene and your people were not,” Friday repeated.

“Yes,” Nazir said.

This was becoming frustrating. Friday stopped walking. He grabbed Nazir by the arm. The officer did not react.

“Before I head north and risk my life, I need to know if there’s a leak in your organization,” Friday said.

“Why would you think there is?” Nazir asked.

“Because there was not a single Black Cat Commando at the scene,” Friday told him. “Why else would you be shut out of the investigation except for security issues?”

“Humiliation,” Nazir suggested. “You have conflicts between your intelligence services. They go to great lengths to undermine one another even though you work toward the same goal.”

There was no disputing that, Friday thought. He had killed a CIA agent not long ago.

“The truth is, the SFF has been extremely quiet about their activities of late and we have been quiet about our operations, including this one,” Nazir went on. “Both groups have their allies in New Delhi and, eventually, all the intelligence we gather gets shuffled into the system and used.”

“Like a slaughterhouse,” Friday observed.

“A slaughterhouse,” Nazir said. He nodded appreciatively. “I like that. I like it very much.”

“I’m glad,” Friday replied. “Now tell me something I’m going to like. For example, why we should put ourselves into the hands of an intelligence agency that may be risking our lives to boost their own standing in New Delhi?”

“Is that what you think?” Nazir asked.

“I don’t know,” Friday replied. “Convince me otherwise.”

“Do you know anything about Hinduism?” Nazir asked Friday.

“I’m familiar with the basics,” Friday replied. He had no idea what that had to do with anything.

“Do you know that Hinduism is not the name we use for our faith. It’s something the West invented.”

“I didn’t know that,” Friday admitted.

“We are countless sects and castes, all of which have their own names and very different views of the Veda, the holy text,” Nazir said. “The greatest problem we have as a nation is that we carry our factionalism into government. Everyone defends his own unit or department or consulate as if it were his personal faith. We do this without considering how our actions affect the whole. I am guilty of that too. My ‘god,’ if you will, is the one who can help me get things done. Not necessarily the one who can do the best job for India.” He drew on his cigarette. “The tragedy is that the whole is now threatened with destruction and we are still not pulling together. We need more intelligence on Pakistan’s nuclear threat. We cannot go and get that information ourselves for fear of triggering the very thing we are trying to avoid–a nuclear exchange. You and your group are the only ones who can help us.” Nazir regarded Friday through the twisting smoke of his cigarette. “If you are still willing to undertake this mission I will be the point man for you. I will go as far into the field as I can with maps, clearances, and geographical reconnaissance. The minister and I will make certain that no one interferes with your activities. He does not know the men who are coming from Washington but he has enormous respect for you. He considers you a member of ‘his’ sect. That is more than simply an honor. It means that in future undertakings of your own you will be able to call on him. To him the members of his team come before anything. But we must secure the intelligence we need to ensure that the team continues. The American force is going in anyway. I am here to make sure that you are still willing to go with them. I hope to be able to report that back to the minister.”

Friday did not believe any man who claimed to put the good of the team before his own good. A minister who was running a secret operation with the Black Cats was looking to strengthen his ties to the intelligence community and build his power base. If he could spy on Pakistan today he might spy on the SFF or the prime minister tomorrow.

The fact that a politician might have personal ambition did not bother Friday. He had heard what Captain Nazir was really saying. Minister Shankar wanted Friday to go with Striker to make sure that the Americans were working for India and not just for Washington. And if Friday did undertake this mission he would have a highly placed ally in the Indian government.

The men reached the brick wall at the end of the street and Nazir lit another cigarette. Then they turned around and started walking back to the inn. Nazir was looking down. He had obviously said what he had come to say. Now it was up to Friday.

“You still haven’t convinced me that there isn’t a leak in your organization,” Friday said. “How do I know we won’t go out there and find ourselves ass-deep in Pakistanis?”

“You may,” Nazir granted. “That is why we cannot go ourselves. As for leaks, I know everyone in the Black Cats. We have not been betrayed in the past. Beyond that, I cannot give the assurances you ask for.” Nazir smiled for the first time. “It is even possible that someone in Washington has leaked this to the Pakistanis. There is always danger in our profession. The only question is whether the rewards are worth the risks. We believe they are, for us–and for you.”

That sounded very much like an introductory lecture from a guru at an ashram. But then, Friday should have expected that.

“All right,” Friday said. “I’m in–with one condition.”

“And that is?”

“I want to know more about today’s attack,” Friday said. “Something about it is not sitting right.”

“Can you tell me exactly what is bothering you?” Nazir asked.

“The fact that the attacker detonated two separate charges to bring down the police station and the temple,” Friday said. “There was no reason for that. One large explosion would have accomplished the same thing. And it would have been easier to set.”

Nazir nodded. “I’ve been wondering about that myself. All right. I’ll see what I can find out and I will let you know when we are together again–which will be tomorrow around noon. We can meet here and then go to lunch. I will bring the materials I’ll be turning over to your team.”

“Fair enough,” Friday said.

The men reached the inn. Friday regarded the captain.

“One more question,” Friday said.

“Of course.”

“Why didn’t you offer me a cigarette?” Friday asked.

“Because you don’t smoke,” Nazir replied.

“Did the minister tell you that?”

“No,” Nazir told him.

“You checked up on me, then,” Friday said. “Asked people I’ve worked with about my habits and potential weaknesses.”

“That’s right,” Nazir told him.

“So you didn’t entirely trust the minister’s judgment about bringing me onboard,” Friday pointed out.

Nazir smiled again. “I said I knew everyone in the Black Cats. The minister is not one of my commandoes.”

“I see,” Friday replied. “That was still sloppy. You told me something about yourself, your methods, who you trust. That’s something a professional shouldn’t do.”

“You’re right,” Nazir replied evenly. “But how do you know I wasn’t testing you to see if you’d notice what I did?” The captain offered his hand. “Good night.”

“Good night,” Friday said. He felt the flush of embarrassment and a trace of doubt as he shook Nazir’s hand.

The Black Cat Commando turned then and walked into the night, trailing a thick cloud of smoke behind him.

Chapter Eighteen.

Alconbury, Great Britain Wednesday, 7:10 P.M.

Mike Rodgers was looking at files Bob Herbert had e-mailed from Op-Center when the giant C-130 touched down at the Royal Air Force station in Alconbury. Though the slow takeoff had seemed like a strain for the aircraft, the landing was barely noticeable. Maybe that was because the plane shook so much during the trans-Atlantic flight that Rodgers did not realize it had finally touched down. He was very much aware when the engines shut down, however. The plane stopped vibrating but he did not. After over six hours he felt as if there were a small electric current running through his body from sole to scalp. He knew from experience that it would take about thirty to forty minutes for that sensation to stop. Then, of course, Striker would be airbound again and it would start once more. Somewhere in that process was a microcosm of the ups and downs and sensations of life but he was too distracted to look for it right now.

The team left the aircraft but only to stand on the field. They would only be on the ground for an hour or so, long enough for a waiting pair of hydraulic forklifts to off-load several crates of spare parts.

The officers of the RAF referred to Alconbury as the Really American Field. Since the end of World War II it had effectively been a hub of operations for the United States Air Force in Europe. It was a large, modern field with state-of-the-art communications, repair, and munitions facilities. Since every base, every field, every barracks needed a nickname, the Americans here had nicknamed the field “Al.” Many of the American servicemen went around humming the Paul Simon song, “You Can Call Me Al.” The Brits did not really get the eternal American fascination with sobriquets for everything from presidents to spacecraft to their weapons–Honest Abe, Friendship 7, Old Betsy. But Mike Rodgers understood. It made formidable tools and institutions seem a little less intimidating. And it implied a familiarity, a kinship with the thing or place, a sense that man, object, and organization were somehow equal.

It was very American.

The members of Striker walked down the cargo bay ramp and onto the tarmac. Two of the Strikers lit cigarettes and stood together near an eyewash stand. Other soldiers stretched, did jumping jacks, or just lay back on the field and looked up at the blue-black sky. Brett August used one of the field phones standing off by the warehouse. He was probably calling one of the girls he had in this port. Perhaps he would bail on the team and visit her on the way back. The colonel certainly had the personal time coming to him. They all did.

Mike Rodgers wandered off by himself. He headed toward the nose of the aircraft. The wind rushed across the wide-open field, carrying with it the familiar air base smells of diesel fuel, oil lubricant, and rubber from the friction-heated tires of aircraft. As the sun went down and the tarmac cooled and shrunk, the smells seemed to be squeezed out of them. Whatever airfield in the world Rodgers visited, those three smells were always present. They made him feel at home. The cool air and very solid ground felt great.

Rodgers had his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the oil-stained field. He was thinking about the data Friday had sent to the NSA and the files Herbert had forwarded to him. He was also thinking about Ron Friday himself. And the many Ron Fridays he had worked with over the decades.

Rodgers always had a problem with missions that involved other governments and other agencies within his own government. Information given to a field operative was not always informative. Sometimes it was wrong, by either accident, inefficiency, or design. The only way to find out for sure was to be on the mission. By then, bad information or wrong conclusions drawn from incomplete data could kill you.

The other problem Rodgers had with multigroup missions was authority and accountability. Operatives were like kids in more ways than one. They enjoyed playing outside and they resented having to listen to someone else’s “parent.” Ron Friday might be a good and responsible man. But first and foremost, Friday had to answer to the head of the NSA and probably to his sponsor in the Indian government. Satisfying their needs, achieving their targets, took priority over helping Rodgers, the mission leader. Ideally, their goals would be exactly the same and there would be no conflict. But that rarely happened. And sometimes it was worse than that. Sometimes operatives or officers were attached to a mission to make sure that it failed, to embarrass a group that might be fighting for the attention of the president or the favor of a world leader or even the same limited funding.

In a situation where a team was already surrounded by adversaries Mike Rodgers did not want to feel as if he could not count on his own personnel. Especially when the lives of the Strikers were at risk.

Of course, Rodgers had never met Ron Friday or the Black Cat officer they were linking up with, Captain Nazir. He would do what he always did: size them up when he met them. He could usually tell right away whether he could or could not trust people.

Right now, though, the thing that troubled Rodgers most had nothing to do with Friday. It had to do with the explosion in Srinagar. In particular, with that last call from the home phone to the field phone.

Other nations routinely used cell phones as part of their intelligence-gathering and espionage efforts. Not just surveillance of the calls but the hardware itself. The electronics did not raise alarms at airport security; most government officials, military personnel, and businesspeople had them; and they already had some of the wiring and microchips that were necessary for saboteurs. Cell phones were also extremely well positioned to kill. It did not take more than a wedge of C-4, packed inside the workings of a cell phone, to blow the side of a target’s head off when he answered a call.

But Rodgers recalled one incident in particular, in the former Portuguese colony of Timor, that had parallels to this. He had read about it in an Australian military white paper while he was on Melville Island observing naval maneuvers in the Timor Sea in 1999. The invading Indonesian military had given cell phones to poor East Timorese civilians in what appeared to be a gesture of good will. The civilians were permitted to use the Indonesian military mobile communications service to make calls. The phones were not just phones but two-way radios. Civilians who had access to groups that were intensely loyal to imprisoned leader Xanana Gusmao were inadvertently used as spies to eavesdrop on nationalistic activities. Out of curiosity, Rodgers had asked a colleague in Australia’s Department of Defense Strategy and Intelligence if the Indonesians had developed that themselves. He said they had not. The technology had come from Moscow. The Russians were also big suppliers of Indian technology.

What was significant to Rodgers was that the radio function was activated by signals sent from the Indonesian military outpost in Baukau. The signals were sent after calls had indicated that one individual or another was going to be in a strategic location.

Rodgers could not help but wonder if the home phone had somehow signaled the field phone to detonate the secondary blasts. The timing was too uncomfortably close to be coincidence. And the continuation of the signal at such regular intervals suggested that the terrorists were being tracked.

Hell, it did more than suggest that, Rodgers told himself. And the more he thought about it, the more he began to realize that they might have a very nasty developing situation on their hands. The Pentagon’s elite think tank, with the innocuous name of the Department of Theoretical Effects, called this process “computing with vaporware.” Rodgers had always been good at that, back when the Pentagon still called it “domino thinking.”

He had to talk to Herbert about this.

Rodgers called over to Ishi Honda. The communications man was lying on the tarmac with the TAC-SAT beside him. He came running over with the secure phone. Rodgers thanked him then squatted on the field beside the oblong unit and phoned Bob Herbert. He used the earphones so he could hear over the roar of landing and departing jets.

Herbert picked up at once.

“Bob, it’s Mike Rodgers,” the general said.

“Glad to hear from you. Are you at Al?” Herbert asked.

“Just landed,” Rodgers said. “Listen, Bob. I’ve been thinking about this latest data you sent me. I’ve got a feeling that the Srinagar bombers have been tagged, maybe by someone on the inside.”

“I’ve got that same feeling,” Herbert admitted. “Especially since we’ve been able to place the calls from field to home before that. They originated at a farm in Kargil. We notified the SFF. They sent over a local constable to check the place out. The farmer refused to say anything and they could not find his granddaughter. Ron and the SFF guy are going over first thing in the morning, see if they can’t get more out of him.”

“None of this smells right,” Rodgers said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Herbert said. “And there’s something else. The farmer’s daughter and son-in-law were resistance fighters who died fighting the Pakistani invasion.”

“So the farmer certainly had a reason to be part of a conspiracy against the Free Kashmir Militia,” Rodgers said.

“In theory, yes,” Herbert said. “What we’re looking at now is whether there is a conspiracy and whether it could have involved the district police station that was home for the cell phone. Matt Stoll’s gotten into their personnel files and my team is looking at the backgrounds of each officer. We want to see if any of them have connections with antiterrorist groups.”

“You realize, Bob, that if you find a link between the police and the Pakistani cell, we may have an unprecedented international incident on our hands,” Rodgers said.

“I don’t follow,” Herbert replied. “Just because they might have known about the attack and decided not to prevent it–“

“I think it may have been more than that,” Rodgers said. “There were three separate attacks. Only one of them conformed to the established m.o. of the Free Kashmir Militia, the bombing of the police station.”

“Wait a minute,” Herbert said. “That’s a big leap. You’re saying the police could have planned this action themselves? That the Indians attacked their own temples–“

“To coincide with the FKM attack, yes,” Rodgers said.

“But an operation like that would have to involve more than just the police in Kashmir,” Herbert pointed out. “Especially if they’re tracking and going to attempt to capture the cell, which is apparently the case.”

“I know,” Rodgers replied. “Isn’t it possible they do have help? From a group that is a little more involved than usual?”

“The SFF,” Herbert said.

“Why not? That could be the reason they wanted the bazaar sealed and the Black Cats kept out,” Rodgers said.

Herbert thought for a moment. “It’s possible,” he agreed. “But it’s also possible we’re getting ahead of ourselves.”

“Better than being behind,” Rodgers pointed out.

“Touche,” Herbert said. “Look. Let’s see what Ron Friday and his partner turn up in the morning. I’ll bring Paul up to date and let you know when we have anything else.”

“Sure,” Rodgers said. “But while we’re getting ahead of ourselves let’s go one step further.”

“All right,” Herbert said tentatively.

“Striker is going in to Pakistan to look for nukes,” Rodgers said. “What if we don’t find very many or even none at all? Suppose the Indian government authorized the Srinagar attack just to rouse their population and pick a fight. A fight Pakistan cannot possibly win.”

“You think they’ll respond with a nuclear strike?” Herbert said.

“Why not?” Rodgers asked.

“The world wouldn’t stand for it!” Herbert replied.

“What would the world do?” Rodgers asked. “Go to war against India? Fire missiles on New Delhi? Would they impose sanctions? What kind? To what end? And what would happen when hundreds of thousands of Indians started to starve and die? Bob, we’re not talking about Iraq or North Korea. We’re talking about one billion people with the fourth largest military in the world. Nearly a billion Hindus who are afraid of becoming the victims of a Muslim holy war.”

“Mike, no nation on earth is going to condone a nuclear strike against Pakistan,” Herbert said. “Period.”

“The question is not condoning,” Rodgers said. “The question is how do you respond if it happens. What would we do alone?”

“Alone?”

“More or less,” Rodgers said. “I’m betting Moscow and Beijing wouldn’t complain too loud, for starters. India nuking Pakistan leaves Moscow free to slam whichever republics they want with a limited nuclear strike. No more long wars in Afghanistan or Chechnya. And China probably wouldn’t bitch too loud because it gives them a precedent to move on Taiwan.”

“They wouldn’t,” Herbert said. “It’s insane.”

“No, it’s survival,” Rodgers said. “Israel’s got a nuclear strike plan ready in case of a united Arab attack. And they’d use it, you know that. What if India has the same kind of plan? And with the same very powerful justification, I might add. Religious persecution.”

Herbert said nothing.

“Bob, all I’m saying is that it’s like the house that Jack built,” Rodgers said. “One little thing leads to another and then another. Maybe it’s not those things, but it’s nothing good.”

“No, it is nothing good,” Herbert agreed. “I still think we’re overreacting but I’ll get back to you as soon as we know anything. Meantime, I have just one suggestion.”