The DMZ

  Julie grimaced. “And the public’s right to know?” But there was no real indignation in her query.

  “Hey, it won’t be my call. But I am sorry. You may just have saved the world and lost yourself that Pulitzer.”

  Julie smiled ruefully. “You know, somehow that just doesn’t seem like the end of the world anymore!”

  “Good!” Rick said absently. “I was hoping you’d feel that way.”

  Silence fell between them, but this time it wasn’t comfortable. Julie glanced up to find Rick’s eyes on her face, and something in them made her heart begin to race. She rushed to fill the vacuum. “What about Tim McAdams and Taqi Nouri? What’s going to happen to them?”

  “Julie!”

  Rick’s simple statement of her name cut through her babbling speech. She swung around to face him. “Yes?”

  “I was just wondering.” He was smiling, but Julie saw an uncertainty that was very un-Ricklike under the long lashes, along with that something else that was making her heart pound so hard, it seemed he had to see it. “If that Pulitzer isn’t on the immediate horizon, is there any chance you might settle instead for one slightly worn Special Forces officer who doesn’t always know where he’s going to be from one end of the week to the next?”

  Though his words had been lingering, unspoken, for an eternity, they caught Julie off guard. Speechless, she stared up at him. Then a slow smile rose to her eyes, lighting her thin, bruised face with a radiance that made Rick blink. “Just what are you trying to say, Captain Rick Martini?”

  What he read in that smile banished the uncertainty from his eyes. One step closed the gap between them, and the upward quirk of his mouth once again held its customary cool assurance as Rick took her hands in his.

  “What I’m trying to say, Julie Baker,” he said softly, “is that I love you, and I’d like to ask you to marry me, and I’m tired of waiting around for the world to stop falling apart before I let you know how I feel!”

  Julie had been wanting to do it for such a long time. Now, stepping within the circle of their clasped hands, she yielded to the impulse and stood on tiptoes to kiss the unshaven shadow of his chin. An impishness that Rick hadn’t seen in long weeks curved her lips as she answered just as softly, “So what are you waiting for?”

  Across the swamp, a burning circle raised its blazing rim over the jungle canopy, a reflection of the copper flames that leaped into Rick’s eyes. Out on the water, another fish leaped high. The watching heron shot down after it, but this time the bird came up empty-beaked. Dawn had at last arrived.

  * * *

  The pilot of the MH53J “Pave Low” helicopter was the first to spot open water ahead.

  “There it is—the swamp Captain Martini told us about,” he shouted above the powerful throp-throp of the six-bladed rotor.

  The Pave Low, used for combat search-and-rescue as well as transport for SouthCom’s Special Ops units, was the biggest helicopter the American forces had in Colombia, big enough to hold close to fifty crew and passengers. At the moment it was running almost empty, but that wouldn’t be for long.

  “Not Captain—Major,” Colonel Thornton corrected. “Or will be soon enough, though Martini doesn’t know it yet. That’s one exceptional job he’s done down there. Now to find that airstrip he mentioned. He said there would be two of them—he and the girl—standing at the entrance to wave us in.”

  The Pave Low flew down over the swamp, remaining just high enough to avoid the broken spars of the drowned hardwoods. The pilot checked his instrument panel. “Colonel, we’ve got something wrong here. By the coordinates that Captain—uh, Major Martini gave us, that should be it right over there off to the right between those two trees. But I’m not seeing anyone out in the open. I am picking up a heat signature on the infrared, but just one. Either we’ve got the wrong place—and a suspect life sign down there—or one of them’s gone missing.”

  Already, members of the Special Forces team were moving to the rotary mini-guns mounted in each doorway of the helicopter. Colonel Thornton spoke into the radio, addressing the two Black Hawks closing in behind them. “Proceed with caution. We may have a situation here.”

  As the Pave Low hovered down over the murky waters, the Joint Task Force commander peered through the windshield, his sharp eyes searching the tangle of jungle that bordered the swamp. Then, spotting the concrete airstrip under the overhanging camouflage of vegetation, he suddenly chuckled. “No, those are the right coordinates. I see them! And there may be only one heat signature, but there’s two people there, all right.”

  Two heads very close together shot up as the Pave Low swooped in through the opening in the trees. Colonel Thornton raised the radio to his mouth. “Belay that last! We’ve got Martini and the girl. And they’re doing just fine … really fine, I’d say!”

  * * *

  James Whitfield switched to mute the flat-screen TV that occupied one wall of the conference room at Southern Command headquarters in Miami. The NBC news channel played on in silence, its beautiful brunette anchorwoman, Sondra Kharrazi, gracefully gesturing against a background of Amazonic jungle that was only a projected image behind her. She had already informed her audience that the kidnapped journalist, whose recent rescue by Colombian counter-narcotics troops had exposed a terrorist plot to smuggle bio-weapons into the United States, was a personal friend. The NBC anchorwoman believed what she was saying to be the unadulterated truth. The four men in the conference room knew otherwise.

  “So that’s what we have to take to the president?” the National Security Advisor demanded incredulously. “No great technology involved. One of our own planes. Out-of-date bio-weapons. Nothing we wouldn’t consider war surplus. And yet they came that close to taking out the most powerful nation on earth?”

  “The whole thing was fiendishly clever,” CIA Director Martin Sawatsky said quickly. “The Iranian minister of intelligence, Taqi Nouri, has been less than forthcoming—unfortunately, our oversight laws won’t allow us to use the kind of persuasion on him that he would use if roles were reversed. But Tim McAdams, their sleeper agent, is made of weaker stuff. He’s spilling everything he knows—in return for a plea bargain and the chance he might get to use those overseas bank accounts of his again someday. They had every detail worked out, including fuel stops in Mexico and the Bahamas—thanks to their FARC buddies, they have access to every narco airstrip in the hemisphere. We’ve already picked up the personnel they had manning those sites.

  “The spray unit doesn’t weigh much compared to the F-117’s usual bomb load, and the difference in weight allowed them to rig up an additional fuel tank as well. There were three Iranians and a dozen Iraqis at the Colombia base, and forty or fifty more between the fueling sites and operations in Iran and Iraq—and only a handful knew what was really going down. And every one of them was a handpicked Islamic fundamentalist—the reason we never got so much as a whiff of this.”

  “What we never got a whiff of is how they managed to come up with one of our own stealth fighters!” James Whitfield retorted. “I understood the Iraqis had never so much as come close to tracking our F-117s during the Persian Gulf War.”

  The SouthCom commander Brad Johnson stirred uncomfortably. “Well, that wasn’t exactly the case.”

  “Not exactly the case—or just flat out a lie?” Whitfield demanded bluntly.

  “Okay, the truth is we did have a stealth fighter go down, though we’d assumed it was destroyed. It was toward the end of the Gulf conflict. We’d sent in two F-117s after a suspected bio-warfare plant north of Baghdad. It was a fluke thing as far as we know, just some stray anti-aircraft fire. The one Nighthawk got clean away, but he saw the other take a hit before he cleared out. When the pilot never showed up as a prisoner of war, we assumed he didn’t make it out of the plane … at least alive.

  “Frankly, it never entered our thinking that the pilot might have tried to land the plane. I guess we’ll never know all the circumstances, but from what this Tim McAdams
admitted, the plane was still flight-worthy, though its instruments were knocked out—including radio and locator beam—or he would have signaled his location. The pilot hoped he could coax the plane back into allied territory, but somehow he got turned around, because instead of flying back into Saudi territory, he ended up over northern Iraq. He managed to set it down in the desert before he ran out of fuel and ran up a rescue flare. Only it was the Iraqis who showed up in response. We can assume they didn’t parade the pilot as they did our other prisoners of war because they wanted to keep their possession of the plane a secret.”

  The SouthCom commander didn’t elaborate. Every man in that room had been involved in the Persian Gulf War, and they had no desire to dwell on the kind of long, drawn-out death that young pilot must have undergone.

  “And the fact that we’d lost a plane?” Whitfield asked dryly.

  “Well, when the Iraqis didn’t announce it, neither did we. For all we knew, it could have crashed into the mountains and never been found. In fact we were banking on something like that, as we figured the Iraqis would have been bragging all over the place if they’d managed to down one of our stealth planes. They’d been trying long enough. It didn’t seem”—the general paused, searching for words—“politically expedient to announce that we’d spoiled our perfect record.”

  “Our perfect record?” Whitfield echoed. “When maybe if we’d gone after that plane instead of hushing it up, we just might have had some warning here? Instead, Khalkhali and our friend in Iraq have had more than ten years in which to put together a plan to wipe out the United States of America.”

  “Do you really think these attacks would have been enough to take our entire country down?” Unlike the others, the country’s drug czar, Charles Wilson, no longer had any official standing here now that the terrorist operation had proved unrelated to either drugs or the Colombian guerrillas’ running of them. “Surely we could have stopped them before they got that far.”

  “Don’t kid yourself!” the CIA director answered bluntly. “Running at night without lights—sure, we might have picked him up eventually—almost certainly, in fact. There are ways of detecting even a stealth plane.”

  The drug czar didn’t ask for details. He knew he wouldn’t get any.

  “But odds are,” Sawatsky continued, “we’d think it was one of our friendlies. After all, this was clearly one of our own planes. The reality is, they could have hit an indefinite number of targets by the time we got around to checking our own training patterns.”

  Martin Sawatsky shook his head, and his narrow features were uncharacteristically pale even for his desk-bound complexion. “Deaths would be in the tens of millions—certainly most of our center of government. The panic and dissolving of any public security could take out millions more. If they’d had two weeks, up to ninety percent of our population could have gone. A lot of the military would have survived, but not all, as we haven’t yet finished our vaccination program. But the rest of the country would have been gone.

  “What never entered their minds is the domino effect it would have had on the rest of the world. Total crash of the stock market. Collapse of a world economy that’s based on ours. Even greater collapse of governments as the deterrent of our forces is removed from the picture. China invading Iran. Certainly the Arab countries invading Israel. India full tilt against Pakistan and Sri Lanka. You’re talking World War III!”

  “Well, it didn’t happen,” Charles Wilson said after a moment. “Though when I think that all our technology, all our safeguards, didn’t do a thing to stop this, that if it wasn’t for a bunch of Stone Age natives and a rookie reporter and one measly intelligence asset—”

  He broke off, and a collective restless stirring that might have been a shudder went over the group. Running a massive hand over his face, James Whitfield shook his head ponderously. “I’m not sure I can take this anymore. Every time we foil one plot aimed at bringing this country to its knees, it seems another one comes along. And what happens when one slips through? It’s bound to happen—by the laws of probability, if nothing else!”

  “What I can’t believe is that it hasn’t yet,” Martin Sawatsky said quickly. “We always seem to slide though—if only by the skin of our teeth. If half the crises we’ve stopped in this country came to light, people would swear it was a Hollywood scenario—and a pretty improbable one at that. Or be so terrified they wouldn’t be able to function.”

  “It is rather astonishing with the kind of enemies we have that no one has succeeded until now,” Whitfield said thoughtfully. “You know, if my mother were still on this earth, she’d say there had to be a bigger hand than ours guiding events in this country.”

  “So would mine,” Brad Johnson put in. “But then, she was quite a God-fearing woman.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s just hope,” James Whitfield added somberly, “that the God they feared doesn’t choose some day to lift His hand of protection off our nation.”

  There was a silence for all of five seconds before the next item on the agenda was picked up.

  * * *

  The Ayatollah Khalkhali paced angrily across the mosaic floor, his long robes flopping with furious lack of grace around his legs. Where was Taqi Nouri? Why had he not yet received a report of their mission’s success? Why had he heard nothing at all in almost twenty-four hours? His minister of intelligence had assured him that the new Western communication equipment was infallible, even in those jungle regions.

  A loud pounding on the heavy wooden doors at the end of the reception salon intruded on his angry reflections. He swung impatiently around as the doors burst open. How dare anyone interrupt him in such a manner!

  He stood stiff with outrage as a squad of soldiers marched into the large salon, not the Revolutionary Council forces of his own judiciary branch, but regular military. Khalkhali recognized the general heading up the party, one of the main proponents of the new Iranian president’s weak-kneed reforms and one of the main reasons the ayatollah had not been able to trust the military with this mission. Where were his own guards who should be taking care of this intrusion?

  “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded coldly.

  The general waved his soldiers to a halt in front of Khalkhali, and there was in his bearing none of the deference and even fear to which the spiritual leader of Iran was accustomed from his inferiors. “You are under arrest for crimes of high treason committed against the state.”

  “I?” The ayatollah drew himself up to the full height of his formidable presence. “You forget who I am! I will have you executed for this. And what have you done with my own men?”

  The general showed no signs of wilting under his glare. “Taqi Nouri and his capitalistic lackey spy have been arrested by the Americans.”

  So—somehow they had failed! And now, it would seem, their enemies had communicated with the Iranian leadership, and the reform-minded weaklings who believed they were running this country had chosen to capitulate to the infidels’ pressure. The ayatollah did not allow his fury to touch the impassive mask of his face. “You will not get away with this!”

  “Perhaps not,” the general shrugged. “But at least this time the people of Iran will know what manner of man their spiritual leader has proven himself to be!”

  With a snap of his fingers, he ordered his men to surround Khalkhali. “Take him!”

  * * *

  The U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber droned over the endless green sea of the Amazon basin. Tomorrow there would be guerrilla leaders, and certain local politicians as well, making representations to Bogotá over the Americans’ invasion of national territory, but for once those complaints would fall on unsympathetic ears. A restricted circle of Colombian officials had also been horrified to learn the scale of death they had been harboring within their borders.

  A glimmer of water opened up under the bomber’s wings—the swamp included in their mission briefing. At this elevation there was no way to distinguish their target from the
rest of the jungle canopy. But that was what GPS coordinates were for. The bombs dropped away cleanly from the belly of the aircraft, steered by their electronic guidance systems. The explosion could be felt even at the distance at which the bomber was cruising.

  The pilot banked so the crew could see the results of their handiwork. All that remained of the terrorist base and its horrifying stockpile of death was a smoking crater and scattered toothpick remnants of the tall hardwoods tossed across the jungle canopy. Above the devastation hovered a mushroom cloud that would be picked up by every surveillance satellite that crossed the equator.

  “Too bad!” commented the navigator. “That was a pretty place down there. Though I suppose it was the safest way to deal with the mess.”

  “Nature will fill it in soon enough,” the aircraft commander answered. “The place will be green again in a year. Besides, no one except a few wandering natives will ever see it.”

  The electronics officer was watching with awe the results of his few maneuverings on his console. “Sir, do you think any of this is going to put a dent in the war these people are waging down here?”

  The aircraft commander shook his head, his own attention held by the smoking hole in the jungle canopy. “I wish I could say. But at least by getting rid of these foreign elements who have done their best to keep this conflict stirred up and supplied with arms, maybe we can give all parties a breathing space to think seriously about peace. Bottom line—it’s going to be up to them, not us.”

  * * *

  The Arabic language TV station al-Jazeera, based in the neighbor state of Qatar, carried the news of the ayatollah’s arrest. The bottle-brush mustache of the Supreme Leader of Iraq quivered with anger as he watched. He’d wondered when he had heard nothing from Khalkhali, wondered even if his Iranian ally had double-crossed him. But this—this was complete failure!

  For a moment anger gave way to trepidation. Had he been careful enough? Yes, the Americans might be certain, but they couldn’t prove that the plot went beyond the Iranians and a few rogue Iraqi fundamentalists whom his own secular government had an established track record of trying to suppress. If the Americans made public accusations, he would resort to the usual bluster and wounded innocence.