The satellite photograph filled the screen of the briefing room of the U.S. carrier cruising routinely somewhere in the Mediterranean.
Cody, Caine, and Murphy sat across the table from the Admiral and a CIA operative named Roberts.
It was early afternoon of the same day of the “soft probe” that had gone decidedly hard at Yuri Vronski’s KGB base outside of Padomir, Bulgaria.
Admiral Williams looked back at the ensign running the projection machine.
“Sharpen it up some, please.”
The ensign made adjustments, and the photograph of a compound in the middle of the Libyan desert honed in on a collection of trailers and some tents within a barbed-wire perimeter, sand dunes along three sides adding natural-terrain camouflage.
But the camp at Edri had not been able to hide from one of the U.S. spy satellites circling the planet hundreds of miles out in space.
The effect of refocusing the picture was like plummeting toward Earth. The shot froze with enough clarity to show people walking around between the trailers.
“We’ve known about the compound for some time,” Roberts told them, “but there are oil company camps all across that desert. It’s impossible to tell everything from space no matter what kind of technological miracles we can work.”
“The government knows there are at least thirty-four terrorist training bases in the Libyan desert,” Williams put in. “The only problem is, we’re talking about the largest desert on Earth.”
“Three million square miles,” Cody said with a nod, “but I think we have solid proof on this one. There is a terrorist training camp at Edri. It’s the only way this mission we’re on fits together.”
“The question now is,” Murphy grunted, “what are we going to do about it?”
Hawkeye Hawkins, much to that Texan’s chagrin, was, against his will, a guest of a U.S. Army medical facility in Athens.
After leaving Padomir and hot-wiring a car, which could only have been afforded by a Party member, on the outskirts of Sofia, Cody had made contact with the CIA station at the U.S. embassy.
The embassy was naturally wired for sight and sound by the KDS and the KGB, but the CIA station in Sofia constantly upgraded their scrambler communications systems to keep ahead of Soviet and Bulgarian taps while allowing nonclassified embassy business and misinformation to continue across standard lines and channels so as not to arouse suspicion.
Cody’s team, with Hawkins never emitting a squeak of discomfort, were motored by a CIA contact to the rail yards where they had been secreted in a falsely labeled refrigeration boxcar that was not refrigerated and, thanks to CIA connections at Bulgarian customs, not checked on its way back across the border into Greece hours later.
“I’ve been in contact with Lund,” said Cody. “There are possibilities.” He looked at Roberts. “You have some papers for us.”
Roberts nodded, lifting a briefcase from the floor between his feet.
“British Intelligence waylaid an Irish terrorist named Liam O’Devlin. IRA. MI5 has its share of contacts inside every one of those cells and their man in Londonderry got the word out on O’Devlin just before they got him. It was the last message he sent. O’Devlin was on his way to a little place in the Libyan desert called”—here he nodded to the blown-up satellite picture on the screen—“Edri.”
“Smart bunch, MIS.” Caine nodded. “And what did my British brethren do with Mr. O’Devlin?”
“Why, they terminated him, of course, with extreme prejudice,” said Roberts. “Sort of an evening up of the score for the Irish Republican Army taking out one of their men.”
“That’s cricket,” Caine said approvingly, “but dare I ask where this fits in with—” Then he got it. “Aha. And is Mrs. Caine’s little boy, Richard, going to become Liam O’Devlin by any chance?”
“British Intelligence knew where O’Devlin was heading, but they didn’t know what was at Edri,” said Cody, “that is, until they pooled their information with the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“What sort of time frame are we talking about?” Murphy asked.
“MI5 waylaid O’Devlin at Heathrow last night,” said Roberts.
“About the same time we were busy in Rome,” Caine noted. “This old cinder of dirt we live on is getting smaller, isn’t it?”
“With the stepped-up activities aimed at curtailing terrorism from the different governments, terrorist groups have had to close ranks and go very low-profile,” Admiral Williams interjected, “especially on flights between countries and most especially on flights to Libya. That’s what we’re working with.”
“I think I’m getting the picture too,” said Murphy. “Are you saying that the gang at Edri doesn’t know what O’Devlin looks like?”
“They couldn’t,” said Cody. “The last photograph of O’Devlin is six years old.”
“A new course of instruction is going to begin in the next day or so at Edri,” Roberts added. “The IRA decided that O’Devlin would attend at the last minute so, no, the camp in the desert doesn’t even have that six-year-old picture. Of course, that camp won’t take just anyone; fingerprints and the like will be used to double-check identities once everyone is there, but that could take a couple of days.”
Roberts reached into his briefcase. He handed across passports with doctored photographs of Caine, a.k.a. Liam O’Devlin, a.k.a. (according to the passport) Charles Mackey, and a passport with John Cody’s photograph identifying him as Jack Wade, American.
“Do, uh, many IRA terrorists travel with Americans?” Caine asked.
“It’s not as unusual as you might think,” said Roberts, “especially if the American is an international arms runner who is functioning as O’Devlin’s bodyguard.”
Caine looked at Cody.
“Americans are about as popular in Libya these days as Israelis in Lebanon, especially after we hit them with that air strike. Maybe I should run this play solo.”
“Actually, Kaddafi still has plenty of dealings with Americans,” Williams said, “as long as they’re interested in selling out their country”
“And that’s just what I aim to do, old buddy.” Cody lapsed into a pure Down South American twang. “Them fuckers made a big mistake when they bounced me out of their goddamn army and tried to indict me for running arms to Libya. Ain’t had no use for “em since. Guess that’s how I linked up with Liam, here. Had to hire out my gun to somebody, and bodyguard work is better than no work at all. Maybe I’ll line up some connections of my own at that camp.”
“O’Devlin wasn’t traveling with an American,” Roberts explained, “but Libya won’t know that.”
Murphy wore a deep-creased frown across his broad black face.
“So, damn good communication between intelligence agencies gives us a handle on the training camp, and that’s where Vronski and Kamal are. But that base, if I read the maps right, is something like four hundred miles inside Libyan airspace. Kaddafi’s pilots and radar are far from the best, but their equipment isn’t. They’ve got MIGs up the butt. Say you and Richard do get inside the camp as O’Devlin and Wade. Will you terminate Kamal and the Russian?”
“And make damn good work of it,” Caine grunted, pocketing the O’Devlin passport with casual ease, suggesting that he was already becoming the IRA terrorist in his own mind, his voice taking a surly curtness.
“But how will you get out after that?” Murphy wanted to know.
“I’m afraid that’s a good point,” Williams conceded. “About seventy percent of Kaddafi’s radar is concentrated on the Med. He’s got nothing to fear from Egypt—despite how much they hate him—nor Chad, and his other neighbors aren’t a threat, either. And for that same reason we can’t fly over their airspace to get you out of that camp. Hell, if we could get in, we’d level the damn place ourselves now that we know what it is, or we’d advise the Israeli Air Force and let them take it from there.”
“We could get the Israelis, maybe,” Murphy suggested. “Those gutsy cats will fly anywhere and bomb anything if they think there’s a terrorist in sight. A camp full of terrorists would be like a red flag in front of a bull.”
“Taking out a PLO base in Lebanon or Tunisia is one thing,” Cody said. “Flying into Libyan airspace for a bomb run is something else. I know they blasted that lraqui reactor back in “8I, but this would be a suicide mission.”
“It sounds like a suicide mission for you and Richard,” Murphy countered.
“It would,” Cody said with a nod, “except for an ace in the hole.”
“The CIA happens to have a secret air base located in the desert north of Bardail in Chad,” Roberts continued. “We use it to keep an eye on the flaky colonel and the civil war in Chad that Kaddafi keeps trying to meddle in.”
“The Libyans do have radar stations along that border—” Williams began.
“The spy plane in use at that base is an F-82,” Cody told them. “It flies at sixty-three thousand feet.”
Murphy, the pilot, nodded, a grin starting to spread over his frown.
“Too humping high for the Libyan MIGs. An F-82, huh? I’ve heard about those babies.”
“You’re going to do a lot more than hear about them,” said Cody. “You’re copiloting one in on the run to pick us up.”
Murphy’s grin got so big, it practically went around his head.
“Now we’re cooking.” He nodded. “Man, I’ve been waiting to climb back into a jet cockpit since Nam.”
Admiral Williams looked like a man not used to being surprised or impressed, but at the moment his face wore a combination of both expressions.
“A hard strike into Libya? Good God Almighty, you guys have got to be the bravest or the craziest men I have ever encountered.”
“Maybe a little of both.” Cody chuckled, but his voice stayed serious. “Okay, that’s the plan, and time is running out like it has been since Rome. There’s only one reason Vronski would accompany Kamal to a training camp for terrorists.”
“Kamal is recruiting a new team,” Murphy said, adding it up. “Vronski is keeping an eye on his interests.”
“And maybe looking for a replacement for Kamal while he’s at it,” Caine grunted in his O’Devlin voice, the scantest shading of a brogue flavoring his accent.
Cody pounded a fist onto the tabletop, and everyone whipped their eyes at him to see a man staring evenly at that satellite photo of the base at Edri like a man who wanted to already be there more than anything else in the world.
“We’re going to take out those two hairbags before that happens,” he growled. “They’re going to pay for what they did in Rome and God knows where else, and we can’t waste any more time talking things out. We’ve got traveling ahead if we want this chase to end with Vronski and Kamal dead and not us. Here’s what Lund, Roberts and I have come up with; it’s not going to be easy and I don’t know if we’re going to make it out alive, but it’s the only option we’ve got….”
The president of the United States could not sleep.
He had never been a sound sleeper—who in his job could be? he had often thought, trying to console himself— but he could not recall the last time he’d had as much trouble falling asleep as tonight, and he knew the reason.
He swung the bed covers back, trying not to make too much of a stir, and sat there, his feet on the floor, his elbows on his knees, running his fingers through his hair, knowing that the American people would probably not recognize the man they had elected.
His wife, alongside him in the bed, extended to his shoulder that featherlike touch of hers that had always communicated everything he had ever loved about her during their thirty years of marriage: her strength, her tenderness, her caring.
“What is it, hon?” she prodded gently. “Something you can’t talk about is my guess.”
He reached back and squeezed her fingers resting on his shoulder, then he stood and crossed to part the curtains as if to gaze out upon the lights of the nation’s capital.
But he thought about nothing but John Cody and his men. “Right, as usual,” he told her. “I’m sorry. Try to get back to sleep, will you? I think I’ll take a visit downstairs.”
She had been the first lady long enough to know that being president was a twenty-six-hour-a-day job.
“I’ll be here,” she promised, a little private cliche between them full of warmth, love, and understanding, allowing him to be alone with his thoughts.
He thought then, as he had increasingly, about Kaddafi.
A Libyan warlord who would not rest, it seemed, until the Mediterranean, as he had prophesied, ran red with blood.
The strong-arm ruler of Libya had been thought by some to be a madman, but this president knew that such was far from the case. Kaddafi was hardly rational, according to secondhand psychiatric profiles commissioned by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, but was, more accurately, a religious zealot who considered his ultimate mission in life to be to force a confrontation with former Western colonial powers in the name of all Arab peoples and Islam, which was why Libya supported the Palestinian cause and other terrorist organizations and why Libya’s raving, threatening dictator was so dangerous.
The wrinkle was that in dealing with Kaddafi the U.S. was really fighting a much larger battle… with the Soviet Union.
The president understood more than most that World War III was already under way. A global conflict between the United States and the USSR for world control, the war being fought for the time being through Third World surrogates. Libya was the only significant military ally the Soviets had in the Med, and Kaddafi had threatened more than once to allow the Russians to install a military presence in the region. The Soviets would never have tolerated a kill-crazy religious fanatic like Kaddafi unless they hoped someday to establish missile and air bases in Libya.
This was not the first time the president had considered the irony that the birth place of Christianity, the Middle East, could quite possibly become the deathbed of civilization.
It could come to that with enough escalations, enough push and pushing back. A nuclear confrontation over the world’s oil supply provoked by religious disputes in a region where those disputes had raged since long before the time of Christ. Such a thing must never happen, and he hoped it never would.
That was how men like Cody, Hawkins, Murphy, and the Englishman, Caine, fit into the scheme of things, for when diplomacy failed, as it unquestionably had in the Mideast, and direct outright conflict between the major world powers was to be averted, stabilization could often be achieved only through covert actions carried out by the likes of Cody’s Army. Some thought the American bombing run on Tripoli was the answer, but it didn’t do much damage to the intended targets and lost ground in the international propaganda war.
So it had come to this.
An assault into Libya, a direct hit at the first actual terrorist training camp verified there.
He recalled all too clearly the hostage rescue mission attempt during the Iranian crisis. That debacle had contributed not a little to the downfall of one of his predecessors, but he told himself that this would be different. That had been a full-scale military operation that had run into the worst of luck. This was an operation being carried out by a small team that intended actually to go inside that camp.
It was the damnedest thing this president had ever heard of, but he admitted to himself that Pete Lund was right.
“There’s simply no other way, Mr. President,” Lund had said an hour ago when the two of them and some advisers had kept the midnight oil burning, kicking this thing around before Lund got back on the satellite hookup to line the thing up with Cody. “Not if we want to take out that base, and especially not if we want to catch Vronski and Kamal while they’re there. They won’t go back to the base at Padomir in Bulgaria. They could go anywhere after Edri. It’s essential that we stop them there, and quickly. We may not get another chance.”
That had been the capper, as far as the president was concerned. His own daughter was grown now, but he thought of her as a little girl and how he would have felt if his child had been viciously butchered overseas, tar from home, the way Laura Parker had been.
He had given the go-ahead.
He did not wish to contemplate a world where an Abdul Kamal would continue to plot and slaughter, and Lund was right.
This was the only way.
Except now he could not sleep.
He began slipping into casual clothes. He would go down and visit Pete. He thought the world of that guy, and in a way he knew that Lund’s job was even more difficult than his own because Lund personally knew the men he was called on to send oft’ to face the enemy, to put their lives up for grabs the way Cody and his men were at this minute, on the other side of the world.
He completed dressing and let himself out of the bedroom, seeing that his wife had drifted back to sleep. He wished he could confide in her, but of course he could not, and yet his concern for a bunch of good men led by Cody was too much to sit on, for that concern was at this moment tearing his presidential guts to shreds.
He would go downstairs and visit Pete. They would share a cup of coffee, maybe talk about nothing, but at least they could wait together for some word, any word, on an assault by Cody’s Army into a desert kill zone from which there would very likely be no return.