He covered two-thirds of the distance in less than twenty minutes before he stopped again. This time he shut off the bike’s engine, took out his night-vision binoculars, and trained them on the hills rising to the east, beyond which lay the construction site. At first he saw nothing. He looked specifically for lights, any kind of lights, as well as for fences, movements such as patrols might make in jeeps, on horseback, or on foot, or any kind of a track in the sand.
A thin white light flashed in the sky just above a cut in the hills, probably an arroyo. For a second he thought it might have been a spotlight of some kind, but then the light bounced into the sky again, and he realized what he was seeing. The light had moved from right to left. A couple of seconds later he saw a much smaller red light wink on, then off, and then there was a pair of them. Taillights, he thought. A patrol vehicle was working its way along the ridge, which offered views down the one side into the valley where the missile base lay, and down the other across the open desert to where Nicols crouched beside his dirt bike.
They were obviously expecting intruders, or at the very least they were prepared for such a possibility. Let them be Russians, Nicols told himself mounting his bike and starting it. Not Mexicans. Let them be Russians, please God. After Afghanistan he had a few old scores to settle.
He cut straight across the desert now, directly for the northern edge of the arroyo, the last place he had seen the lights of the patrol vehicle. Whatever their schedule might be, he did not think they would be making a pass by any one spot more than once or twice each night. He would be relatively safe up to that point for the next few hours, he figured. From there he would descend into the valley on the other side, make his way onto the base, take his photographs, and then get the hell out. God help the man who got in his way. Especially if he was Russian. Here on this continent! Christ, it made his blood boil.
The desert dipped down toward the base of the first hills, then rose on an alluvial fan that spread out beneath the broad cut above. Leaning into the pitch of the hill, Nicols gunned the little bike, rocks and sand spitting out behind him and clattering down the hill as he spurted up. He was making too much noise, and he knew it. But he wanted to gain the first rise in the series of hills below the main crest. He figured he would find a spot to conceal the bike somewhere there and then make it the rest of the way on foot. If he was lucky the patrol vehicle he had seen earlier would be a long distance off by now. He did not think they would have installed any other kind of short-range surveillance equipment out here; heat sensors, motion detectors, pressure grids buried just beneath the surface. At least he hoped they hadn’t.
His luck ran out just at the top of the lower ridge. The headlights of at least half a dozen jeeps suddenly came on, catching him in a blinding glare. He tried to spin the bike around so that he could take off back down the hill the way he had come, but the rear wheel got away from him on the loose sand and gravel and he went down.
Moving purely on instinct, Nicols rolled left, away from the still sliding bike as he grabbed his MAC-10, yanked the bolt back, thumbed off the safety, and came around on his belly into a shooting position.
He fired one short burst at the nearest jeep to his left, and as the headlights suddenly were extinguished and a man cried out, he rolled left again.
A split instant before a withering rain of automatic weapons fire slammed into Nicols’s body, he heard someone shouting “Left! He has gone left!” at the top of his lungs. In Russian. They were the last words he ever heard.
It was two in the morning, a time that Donald Suthland Powers had always found the most enchanting, the most mysterious, a time when things always seemed to go bad. If you could somehow get past three A.M., the rest would naturally fall into place. Or at least anything that might happen afterward would be manageable. Like many of his predecessors, Powers had developed the habit of staying at his office during crucial operations when lives were on the line; lives of men and women he had personally sent out into the field. It was a part of the business that he had never become accustomed to. Here in his office on the seventh floor of the headquarters building at Langley, he felt more secure than he did at home, more in control, as if he were a direct part of whatever operation was in progress. As if his mere presence here would lend strength to the battles on distant fields. There was no one at his home in any event. Sissy was away at school, the housekeeper had taken the week off, and how many years had it been since Janet? More than he cared to count. It was at times like these he missed her the most. The nest was empty. This was home.
Danielle, his DDO, felt the same way although for different reasons. He sat across the desk from Powers, and they both looked up as they heard someone running up the corridor outside the open door. Stuart Flagler, Powers’s bodyguard, was sitting in the anteroom. He jumped up, his hand automatically reaching for his weapon.
Powers stiffened. He had had a premonition of disaster since this afternoon. Was this it, then? he wondered. “Stuart, see who that is,” he called.
“Yes, sir,” Flagler answered over his shoulder as he stepped to the outer door.
Danielle got to his feet as Tom Josten, one of his young staffers out of operations, appeared, out of breath.
“Mr. Danielle,” he called past Flagler.
“It’s all right, Stuart,” Powers said.
The big bodyguard stepped aside and the young man rushed in. He brought with him a half a dozen computer-enhanced and printed photographs from their surveillance satellite. They were infrared tracings. “There’s trouble with Banyan Tree, sir,” Josten said, spreading the photos on Powers’s desk. Banyan Tree was the code name of Warren Nicols’s operation.
“What have we got here, son?” Powers asked, bending over the stark photographs.
“These were sent down from Big Bird Four at 0517 Zulu — that would have been 1117 central time last night. I have the grid coordinates here ….”
“Banyan Base?” Danielle asked.
“Just outside it, sir. About four miles to the west. We overlaid it on the topo. It would have put the action at the first ridge just below the west wall.” Josten pointed to the first two prints, which showed a ragged red streak about three inches long. “This would be the exhaust-heat trace from Nicols’s bike. He was going up the hill at a pretty good clip.” Josten pointed to the next several prints, which showed a U-shaped ring of lights, and a fifth and sixth print showing pinpoints of light that bloomed into long red streaks. “They were waiting for him. Looks like headlights to Scotty downstairs. I’d have to agree. We’ll know once spectral analysis is done.”
“And these are gun bursts,” Danielle said.
“Yes, sir. A lot of them.”
Powers had picked up a magnifying glass, he bent low over one of the photos and looked at a series of pinpricks, and several streaks facing inward, toward the headlights. He looked up. “Nicols got off a few shots?”
Josten smiled unhappily. “Yes, sir. It would appear so. But we don’t think it did him much good. We counted at least twenty-three separate weapons locations, every one of them trained on and just to the left of where Nicols had fired. He didn’t have a chance in hell, sir. Not a chance.”
Powers put down his magnifying glass and exchanged glances with Danielle. “Nothing from him? No emergency signal?”