London 230 GMT

William Stuart lay in the warm darkness of his flat on Cadogan Square in the Knightsbridge section of London. Alison reached across his chest and hugged him, and he turned and kissed her fine, slightly perfumed hair. Alison made small mewing sounds into his chest, as she always did after they made love. Little Aliba is becoming a bit of a fixture, thought William absently. He stretched a bit and dozed. Pretty, sweet, boring Alison.

He was awakened suddenly by the harsh ring of the bedside telephone. Alison pushed herself away from his chest with a grunt of annoyance and rolled away as he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“William, it’s John. Sorry to wake you so early.”

William recognized the voice instantly. John was Capt. John Harris, United States Navy, the Defense Intelligence Officer at the U.S. Embassy. John was a good friend, but not someone you wanted to hear from in the middle of the night. Stuart swung his legs out of bed and stood, then picked the phone up and carried it into the living room, trailing the long cord. He sat in his easy chair and placed the phone on the low table in front of him, found his cigarettes, and lit one. “John, it’s 2:30 a.m., I just dragged in from Annabelle’s, and I’m slightly drunk and very sleepy. I suppose it’s too much to hope for that you’re waxing melancholy in some club and need a friend to talk to.”

“Sorry, old man. I need a friend, all right, but at the office.” The office meant the quiet room at the embassy though no one ever said that on the phone. “There is a fire.”

Oh, shit, thought Stuart, stubbing out the cigarette and rubbing his temples. That awful, melodramatic phrase every officer long away from active service hoped he would never hear. “There is a fire” meant something dreadful had happened, and somehow the government was going to drag him into whatever operation was necessary to clean up the mess. “Can’t you tell me any more than that, John?” Stuart knew the answer and wondered why he had asked, except perhaps to delay the inevitable.

“At the office, William. We’re starting to brief in fifteen minutes.”

“OK. I’ll throw some clothes on and call a cab.”

“You won’t need a cab. Sergeant Hudson is waiting downstairs.”

“Now?” This was beginning to sound important, and Stuart felt a kernel of excitement growing within his feeling of dread.

“Now,” said Harris, and hung up.

Stuart sat in the left front seat of the small car as Sergeant Hudson, impeccable even at three in the morning in marine dress blues, drove the short distance to the embassy in Grosvenor Square. Alison hadn’t stirred as Stuart slipped through the bedroom into the bath and took a brief, very cold shower. No soap, just icy water over his face, neck, chest, and crotch. He toweled himself vigorously, shivering, then dressed rapidly in an old crew-neck sweater and jeans and struggled into socks and loafers. He grabbed his old leather flight jacket from the end of the closet and shrugged into it. He kissed the back of Alison’s perfumed head, but she slept on. Stuart’s business was oil; he ran the engineering services department of the London office of Western Petroleum, and middle-of-the-night calls were frequent, with Stuart being roused to deal with a rig that had gone down or a key part that had to be found to repair one.

Hudson pulled into the alley behind the main embassy building and stopped. Stuart got out, pulling together his light leather jacket against the early morning chill, and followed the tall marine into the building. Stuart presented his red inactive-reserve identity card to an armed corporal, who checked it against a list and handed Stuart a clip-on badge, red again, with the words “Code 1 Access” on it. Hudson led him to the quiet room and left him at the door. Stuart entered and saw John Harris, two other men in uniform, and two apparent civilians seated around a table littered with coffee cups and full ashtrays. Stuart closed the door behind him.

The quiet room was in the central core of the embassy building. It had no windows. Outside the room, on all sides and over the ceiling and under the floor, there were baffles, both physical and electronic, designed to make sure that words spoken within stayed within. Even if somehow a transmitter could be smuggled in, its signal would be contained, lost in the lead and the concrete, or turned to muted static by the electronic traps.

Stuart was offered coffee and introduced to the others. He had met Harris’s assistant, Navy Lieutenant Bill Forrest, at embassy parties. The others were a marine captain, Joe Panos, head of embassy security, a Doctor Masad, from American University in Washington but currently doing unspecified research in London, and Fred Maniero, the deputy cultural attaché. Stuart smiled and sat. He pegged Maniero for CIA and thought anybody would. Harris stood and turned to a large map of the Mediterranean pinned to the cork wall. There was a blue line made of string on the map from Torrejon in Spain to a point just west of Sicily, which then bent sharply south and ended slightly to the east of Tripoli. At the end of the string was a tiny toy airplane.

“Hijacking,” said William to himself but loud enough to be heard.

“Right, William, a bad one,” said Captain Harris. “It’s one of ours.”

“TWA again?” said William. Poor TWA had the routes in southern Europe, Spain, Italy, and Greece that seemed to attract the most attention of terrorists.

“Worse, William, much worse. The aircraft is a World Airways DC-8, under charter to the Navy.”

William sat bolt upright in his chair and stared at the toy airplane stuck to the map. Fred Maniero got up and ran down the facts that were known, and then Bill Forrest described the available U.S. forces in the immediate area. The major force was the carrier America with her battle group, which had sailed from Sicily at 0200. Dr. Masad identified himself as a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs, then talked at some length about the Abu Salaam faction, its aims, and its demands, and about the Libyan Revolution and its charismatic and some said crazy leader, Col. Hassan al-Baruni. When the doctor sat down, everybody looked at Stuart.

Stuart took a sip of cold coffee. “So, it’s a bad one, but why am I here, John?”

“Because, my friend, in 1971 and 1972, in your third tour in Vietnam, you went into Laos once, to a place called Lak Sao, and into North Vietnam once, to a place called Vu Liet, and both times you cracked enemy prison camps and brought out American aviators, alive.”

Stuart felt his eyes narrow as the image rose in his brain of wet, sharp-edged leaves cutting his cheeks, and the strong, rotting odor of the jungle floor as his search team had crawled into those camps, and the stronger smells of human feces and of death they had found. More than ten years ago, he thought, but fresh and foul as yesterday. “I’m surprised you know that, John. The records of those operations are sealed, top secret.”

“I received a précis of your closed record when you first came to London, William.” Harris reached back and tapped the map just under the toy airplane. “We need to crack that camp and bring those men and women out alive, William, and we need you to help us do it.”

“Jesus, man, that was fifteen years ago, and in the jungle!”

“You got people out then. Few others ever found anyone alive.”

William frowned, remembering why the records remained sealed, and the indifference received in place of honors. The men who had fought in Nam at the end of the American involvement had it the worst, and no one had wanted to know. “Well, maybe I can help a little with method.”

Harris stood, as did the others, except Forrest. “That’s all we have now, except Maniero’s pictures. Start thinking about the problem, William, while I organize some breakfast.”

William nodded, Maniero handed him a thick folder and departed. Inside the folder were aerial and satellite photos of the Uqba ben Nafi Air Base, once Wheelus Air Force Base. Stuart spread them out and began to look for he knew not what.