“How about a low-altitude drop?”
“Again, it might get us by the Israelis fortifying the mountain base, but unless we could come up with a way to disguise our parachutes, we would be exposed to Rasin’s troops the entire way down.”
“We need cover then.”
“Where cover plainly doesn’t exist.”
“Goddamn it!” Blaine roared. “We’ll climb the rock face if that’s what it takes to get up there. But we’re going to stop Rasin, do you hear me?”
“I hear you, Blainey, but your words fail to consider the realities of the limitations before us. We have looked to the obvious. Now the time has come to look deeper.”
“We’re deep now, Indian. Over our heads, as I make it.” Blaine stopped suddenly, obviously struck by something. “Okay, Indian, make believe you’ve got access to all the tech hardware in the world. Everything considered, could you find a way to get us on top of that rock?”
Wareagle turned his attention back to the map. At last he looked up and nodded emotionlessly.
“Yes, but it would take men as well as machines.”
“But there is a way?”
“A means without any guarantees. The spirits provide alternatives, not certainties.”
“That’s good enough for me, Indian.”
“Fudo-san,” Hiroshi said. “I can hardly hear you.”
“We’ve got a strange connection, Hiroshi. I’m talking to you from a Bedouin camp in the Judean Desert. Blame the bad reception on a radio signal traveling via land-line patch-through.”
“And that is where your trail has led you?”
“Among other places, yes.” McCracken paused. “Did you mean what you told me in Japan? Would you really do anything to right the wrong of your aiding Rasin?”
“I have violated my honor, Fudo-san. In days past that would be grounds for taking my own life.”
“There’s a way to regain your honor far more worthwhile than that.”
“Anything, Fudo-san. If it is within my power, it will be done. Just name it.”
“It’s a long list, Hiroshi. Better grab yourself a pad….”
When he was finished and the connection broken, Blaine acknowledged Johnny Wareagle’s slight smile and Isaac’s flabbergasted expression.
“Can this really be done?” the old man asked, incredulously.
“Hiroshi can pull it off. The only thing that might stop him — and us — is time.”
“A foe we will have difficulty staring down,” Wareagle reminded them.
McCracken checked his watch. “It’s one o’clock now. Hiroshi says he can be here with the equipment within ten hours. We’ll be cutting it close but we’ll have time. We can’t stop Rasin and the others from releasing their allotments of vaccine. But if we grab him on Masada, he won’t be able to unleash Gamma on the world on Independence Day.”
“And just how do you think he plans on doing that anyway?” Isaac wondered.
“If I’m right, the key is Tehran. Can you get a message to your people in the city?”
“I was about to contact our team leader. He can’t reach the individual cells directly, but there’s a signal he can employ meaning abort.”
“No! You can’t abort. Do you hear me? Firestorm is more important now than ever!”
Isaac looked totally confused. “Maybe you forget that the government was supplying the Apaches, and without them Firestorm has no chance of succeeding.”
“We’ll worry about them later. For now you’ve just got to trust me. Operation Firestorm must go on as planned.”
“Then why did you ask if I could get a message into the city?”
Blaine looked him in the eyes as he spoke. “You know where Evira is. I want her rescued. Send the word.”
“The risk! The danger!”
“It’s like this, Isaac. Without her, I might never be able to find my son. If she dies, he probably dies too. Sound simple? Let me put it another way. If I can’t save the kid, I might just help Rasin empty his cannisters filled with the Gamma virus.” And then he added to Wareagle, “I just can’t see the fucking point anymore.”
“But you see something the rest of us as of yet cannot, Blainey.”
“My eyes may be playing tricks on me, Indian. Let’s hope to hell they are.”
“Is there anything else?”
“No,” Yosef Rasin replied to the leather-clad Lace, “I believe you have everything covered.”
“Not quite,” returned the tall woman with the hard-muscled body. Her eyes turned toward the base of the mountain, where motion was visible amidst the floodlights the army had set up for itself. “But our friends down there are sure to cover anything we may have missed.”
“You still believe McCracken is alive?”
“I don’t believe he could have been killed as easily as your reports indicate.”
“So if he comes …”
Lace smiled and her neck muscles tensed. “Let him.”
And then she took her leave to rejoin Tilly in a sweep of the fortified positions she had arranged on Masada before night had fallen. Rasin had elected to concentrate his base on Masada’s northern front, just above the remains of Herod’s palace. Much of the large bathhouse, terraces, and labyrinth of storehouses had undergone extensive reconstruction and regained a measure of their original fortification. The remainder of structures on Masada were scattered across its rock-littered vastness. Rasin had expected the posting of their forces to begin at the guardhouse two hundred yards from the northern edge. But, fearing an attack, Lace had elected to disperse a number of guards along the entire perimeter so security could be maintained from all directions. If an attack came, they would know about it well in advance.
All the lights atop the mountain had been turned on, casting ancient Masada in an eerie, modern glow. Rasin was amazed by it. He could almost see to the ends of the mountaintop from his perch on the bathhouse roof. He had been wise to listen to Lace, wiser still to bring with him his personal commando force composed of outcasts like himself — a carefully chosen group of men tossed out of the military for brutality to Arabs. In short, a band of cutthroats. He did not fear an attack from McCracken as much as one from the government should it change its mind. His men were there as a deterrent against that. There was no way even the army’s most elite units could succeed in any assault on him. No way at all. Several of his commandos were armed with anti-aircraft weapons, for if an attack were to come, it would be from the sky.
Rasin breathed deeply and drank in the dry air. The power he had long sought, the power it had been his destiny to achieve, was now within his reach, thanks to Gamma. He checked his watch. Just five hours until he would fire his portion of the vaccine into the air. Around the same time a dozen others, placed strategically across Israel, would release their allotments to be swept by the wind across the small nation to render her safe from the imminent release of the Gamma virus. Since exposure to the ultraviolet rays of the sun would kill the vaccine organism instantly, the key was to time its release so it might spread as close to Israeli borders as possible by sunrise. It wasn’t an exact science, but it was close enough. Besides, fate was on his side.
He had outmaneuvered them brilliantly, of course; he had outmaneuvered everyone. If they ever suspected the lengths he had gone through to assure the success of his plan, if they ever realized the charade he had enacted for the world … Oh well, no sense in pondering over that. The charade was rapidly drawing to its conclusion.