rockets. They fired in salvos of four. At two kilometers he opened fire into the target area. The Syrian missileers somehow managed to launch another SAM. There should have been no escape, but the SA-6 had a radar-proximity fuse, and the passing Zunis triggered it, exploding the SAM harmlessly half a kilometer away. Motti grinned savagely beneath his mask, as he fired rockets and now twenty-millimeter cannon fire into the mass of men and vehicles.

The third salvo hit, then four more, as Zadin kicked rudder to drop his rockets all over the target area. The missile battery was transformed into an inferno of diesel fuel, missile propellant, and exploding warheads. A huge fireball loomed in his path, and Motti tore through it with a feral shout of glee, his enemies obliterated, his comrades avenged.

Zadin had but a moment of triumph. Great sheets of the aluminum which made up his aircraft's left wing were being ripped away by the four-hundred-knot slipstream. The A-4 began shuddering wildly. When Motti turned left for home, the wing collapsed entirely. The Skyhawk disintegrated in mid-air. It took only a few seconds before the teenaged warrior was smashed on the basaltic rocks of the Golan Heights, neither the first nor the last to die there. No other of his flight of four survived.

Of the SAM battery, almost nothing was left. All six vehicles had been blasted to fragments. Of the ninety men who had manned them, the largest piece recovered was the headless torso of the battery commander. Both he and Zadin had served their countries well, but as is too often the case, conduct which in another time or place might have inspired the heroic verse of a Virgil or a Tennyson went unseen and unknown. Three days later, Zadin's mother received the news by telegram, learning again that all Israel shared her grief, as if such a thing were possible for a woman who had lost two sons.

But the lingering footnote to this bit of unreported history was that the unarmed bomb broke loose from the disintegrating fighter and proceeded yet further eastward, falling far from the fighter-bomber's wreckage to bury itself meters from the home of a Druse farmer. It was not until three days later that the Israelis discovered that their bomb was missing, and not until the day after the October War ended that they were able to reconstruct the details of its loss. This left the Israelis with a problem insoluble even to their imaginations. The bomb was somewhere behind Syrian lines — but where? Which of the four aircraft had carried it? Where had it gone down? They could hardly ask the Syrians to search for it. And could they tell the Americans, from whom the “special nuclear material” had been adroitly and deniably obtained?

And so the bomb lay unknown, except to the Druse farmer who simply covered it over with two meters of dirt and continued to farm his rocky patch.

1 THE LONGEST JOURNEY…

Arnold van Damm sprawled back in his executive swivel chair with all the elegance of a rag doll tossed into a corner. Jack had never seen him wear a coat except in the presence of the President, and not always then. At formal affairs that required black tie, Ryan wondered if Arnie needed a Secret Service agent standing by with a gun. The tie was loose in the unbuttoned collar, and he wondered if it had ever been tightly knotted. The sleeves on Arnie's L. L. Bean blue-striped shirt were rolled up, and grimy at the elbows because he usually read documents with his forearms planted on the chronically cluttered desk. But not when speaking to someone. For important conversations, the man leaned back, resting his feet on a desk drawer. Barely fifty, van Damm had thinning gray hair and a face as lined and careworn as an old map, but his pale blue eyes were always alert, and his mind keenly aware of everything that went on within or beyond his sight. It was a quality that went along with being the President's Chief of Staff.

He poured his Diet Coke into an oversized coffee mug that featured an emblem of the White House on one side and “Arnie” engraved on the other, and regarded the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence with a mixture of wariness and affection. “Thirsty?”

“I can handle a real Coke if you have one down there,” Jack observed with a grin. Van Damm's left hand dropped below sight, and a red aluminum can appeared on a ballistic path that would have terminated in Ryan's lap had he not caught it. Opening the can under the circumstances was a tricky exercise, but Jack ostentatiously aimed the can at van Damm when he popped the top. Like the man or not, Ryan told himself, he had style. He was unaffected by his job, except when he had to be. This was not such a time. Arnold van Damm only acted important for outsiders. Insiders didn't need an act.

“The Boss wants to know what the hell is going on over there,” the Chief of Staff opened.

“So do I.” Charles Alden, the President's National Security Advisor, entered the room. “Sorry I'm late, Arnie.”

“So do we, gentlemen,” Jack replied. “That hasn't changed in a couple of years. You want the best stuff we've got?”

“Sure,” Alden said.

“Next time you fly to Moscow, look out for a large white rabbit with waistcoat and pocket watch. If he offers you a trip down a rabbit hole, take it and let me know what you find down there,” Ryan said with mock gravity. “Look, I'm not one of those right-wing idiots who moans for a return to the Cold War, but then, at least, the Russians were predictable. The poor bastards are starting to act like we do now. They're unpredictable as hell. The funny part is, now I can understand what a pain in the ass we always were to the KGB. The political dynamic over there is changing on a daily basis. Narmonov is the sharpest political in-fighter in the world, but every time he goes to work, it's another crisis.”

“What sort of cat is he?” van Damm asked. “You've met the man.” Alden had met Narmonov, but van Damm had not.

“Only once,” Ryan cautioned.

Alden settled down in an armchair. “Look, Jack, we've seen your file. So has the Boss. Hell, I've almost got him to respect you. Two Intelligence Stars, the submarine business, and, Jesus, the thing with Gerasimov. I've heard of still waters running deep, fella, but never this deep. No wonder Al Trent thinks you're so damned smart.” The Intelligence Star was CIA's highest decoration for performance in the field. Jack actually had three. But the citation for the third was locked away in a very safe place, and was something so secret that even the new President didn't and would never know. “So prove it. Talk to us.”

“He's one of those rare ones. He thrives on chaos. I've met docs like that. There are some, a rare few, who keep working in emergency rooms, doing trauma and stuff like that, after everybody else burns out. Some people just groove to pressure and stress, Arnie. He's one of them. I don't think he really likes it, but he's good at it. He must have the physical constitution of a horse—”

“Most politicians do,” van Damm observed.

“Lucky them. Anyway, does Narmonov really know where he's going? I think the answer is both yes and no. He has some sort of idea where he's moving his country to, but how he gets there, and exactly where he's going to be when he arrives, that he doesn't know. That's the kind of balls the man has.”

“So, you like the guy.” It was not a question.

“He could have snuffed my life out as easy as popping open this can of Coke, and he didn't. Yeah,” Ryan admitted with a smile, “that does compel me to like him a little. You'd have to be a fool not to admire the man. Even if we were still enemies, he'd still command respect.”

“So we're not enemies?” Alden asked with a wry grin.

“How can we be?” Jack asked in feigned surprise. “The President says that's a thing of the past.”

The Chief of Staff grunted. “Politicians talk a lot. That's what they're paid for. Will Narmonov make it?”

Ryan looked out the window in disgust, mainly at his own ability to answer the question. “Look at it this way: Andrey Il'ych has got to be the most adroit political operator they've ever had. But he's doing a high-wire act. Sure, he's the best around, but remember when Karl Wallenda was the best high-wire guy around? He ended up as a red smear on the sidewalk because he had one bad day in a business where you only get one goof. Andrey Il'ych is in the same kind of racket. Will he make it? People have been asking that for eight years! We think so — I think so — but… but, hell this is virgin ground, Arnie. We've never been here before. Neither has he. Even a god-damned weather forecaster has a data base to help him out. The two best Russian historians we have are Jake Kantrowitz at Princeton and Derek Andrews at Berkley, and they're a hundred-eighty degrees apart at the moment. We just had them both into Langley two weeks ago. Personally I lean towards Jake's assessment, but our senior Russian analyst thinks Andrews is right. You guys pays your money and you takes your choice. That's the best we got. You want pontification, check the newspapers.”

Van Damm grunted and went on. “Next hot spot?”

“The nationalities question is the big killer,” Jack said. “You don't need me to tell you that. How will the Soviet Union break up — what republics will leave — when and how, peacefully or violently? Narmonov is dealing with that on a daily basis. That problem is here to stay.”

“That's what I've been saying for about a year. How long to let things shake out?” Alden wanted to know.

“Hey, I'm the guy who said East Germany would take at least a year to change over— I was the most optimistic guy in town at the time, and I was wrong by eleven months. Anything I or anyone else tells you is a wild-ass guess.”

“Other trouble spots?” van Damm asked next.

“There's always the Middle East —” Ryan saw the man's eyes light up.

“We want to move on that soon.”

“Then I wish you luck. We've been working on that since Nixon and Kissinger back during the '73 semifinals. It's chilled out quite a bit, but the fundamental problems are still there, and sooner or later it's going to be thawed. I suppose the good news is that Narmonov doesn't want any part of it. He may have to support his old friends, and selling them weapons is a big money-maker for him, but if things blow up, he won't push like they did in the old days. We learned that with Iraq. He might continue to pump weapons in — I think he won't, but it's a close call — but he will do nothing more than that to support an Arab attack on Israel. He won't move his ships, and he won't alert troops. I doubt he's willing even to back them if they rattle their sabers a little. Andrey Il'ych says those weapons are for defense, and I think he means it, despite the word we're getting from the Israelis.”

“That's solid?” Alden asked. “State says different.”

“State's wrong,” Ryan replied flatly.

“So does your boss,” van Damm pointed out.

“In that case, sir, I must respectfully disagree with the DCI's assessment.”

Alden nodded. “Now I know why Trent likes you. You don't talk like a bureaucrat. How have you lasted so long, saying what you really think?”

“Maybe I'm the token.” Ryan laughed, then turned serious. “Think about it. With all the ethnic crap he's dealing with, taking an active role bears as many dangers as advantages. No, he sells weapons for hard currency and only when the coast is clear. That's business, and that's as far as it goes.”

“So, if we can find a way to settle things