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Katz followed a few steps behind Sadek, watching the well-groomed and modishly dressed officer step over blood and gore to avoid staining his English wing tips.

Sadek spoke with a soldier, then turned to Katz. "There was fighting on the roof. We should go there."

Following the bloody stairs into the smoke-hazed midnight, they coughed as the slight wind blew drifts of soot and smoke past them.

"Where is Mr. Parks?" Sadek asked.

Katz glanced back down the stairs. "I don't know."

"Perhaps his stomach..."

They smiled at their friend's discomfort. Katz never took his attention from the Egyptian. He stayed at Sadek's side, watching him, noting the small details the man noted. He saw Sadek wave a flashlight over dead dogs, then several corpses. The flashlight's beam held on wounds. A few steps farther, Sadek found brass casings.

Taking an envelope from his jacket pocket, he scooped up two 9mm casings. He found a .45-caliber casing, picked it up with the point of a pen, studied it for a moment. Then that shell went into the envelope.

"Steiner! Steiner!" A voice called out. Returning to the stairs, Katz saw Parks waving him down.

As Katz limped down to the landing, Parks blurted out, "We're in motion at the airport, sir! We got an investigation. It's a whole new ball game."

Nodding, Katz glanced around them, saw three Egyptians within earshot. At the head of the stairs, he heard Sadek speaking in Arabic with a plainclothes officer. Katz heard Sadek instruct the officer to "take the shell casings to the laboratory."

Katz pointed to the silver rod of an antenna that stuck out of the coat pocket of Parks's suit.

"Your driver radioed the message?"

"Yes, just this minute. My men are following a suspect"

"Is that radio scrambler-equipped?"

"This?" Parks held up the radio. He looked at the switches, turned the radio in his hand as if looking for printed specifications. "I don't know"

11

Breaking down the modified Colt Government Model, Lyons examined it for damage or unusual wear. He released the magazine and thumbed out the cartridges. He checked for grit or lint on the ramp or feed lips and laid the magazines on the clean canvas of his folding cot. A tiny wrench removed the set screw from the suppressor, allowing the oval cylinder to unscrew from the threaded barrel. He put the suppressor in one of the empty coffee containers, filled the container with solvent and left the suppressor to soak.

He depressed the disassembly latch that replaced the Colt's slide stop. The pistol's slide and barrel assembly slipped forward and apart like a Beretta. The short high-tension recoil spring shot into his palm.

Lyons noted that Gadgets was watching. "Seen my new Colt?"

"Konzaki made that? How can you put a silencer on the barrel of a 1911? The barrel flops up and down during the cycle"

"Look." Lyons held up the slide assembly. He moved the barrel. "See? It's different. And the ejector. And the interlink between the barrel and the slide. Andrzej says the barrel doesn't unlock as Browning designed it. It's like a Beretta now. When you fire, the barrel and slide travel back, the barrel unlocks for an instant but stays straight, the slide continues back and the brass ejects. That's why the ejection port is cut all the way across. The brass flies straight up. The barrel stays straight on line the whole cycle. And there are big changes in the sear mechanism."

Studying the modified components, the internal parts still bearing machining marks, here and there the heat marks of micro-welds, Gadgets joked, "Colt Frankenstein!"

"Decent accuracy, fires silent bursts of full-velocity hollowpoints. You saw what I did with it. I got no complaints about how it looks."

Gadgets squatted down, balanced on the balls of his feet. He glanced to their taxi drivers, spoke too quietly for the others to hear. "Yeah, I saw what you did tonight. I got to talk to you"

"This a criticism session?"

"Nan, man. You were beautiful tonight. For a guy who ain't even a vet, you do real well. Wish you'd been with me in Nam."

"When we got the surprise on that roof, you yelled for us to get out of there. You wanted to retreat."

"Well yeah. That would've been the intelligent thing to do." Gadgets called out, "Politician! Over here. Help me with some wording Dig it, Carl. Don't get defensive. I'm trying to talk philosophy with you."

"I wanted those rockets. I didn't know they weren't the right kind of rockets. That old man steered us wrong."

"No problem with that. It's cool. They could've had a million SAM-7s. Like you said, we could have gone home tonight. Rosario, our pal thinks I'm criticizing him when I say it would have been intelligent to have retreated tonight"

Blancanales nodded. He pulled up another cot, sat down. "Could have gone wrong."

"It did go wrong," Lyons told them. He dipped a bore brush in the coffee container of solvent and began to swab out the Colt's short barrel. "We didn't get the missiles."

"See? He thinks I'm criticizing him," said Gadgets. "Hey, I want to introduce the concept of an 'Honorable Withdrawal.' To retreat from an unfavorable turn of circumstances is not a crime. Dig who's telling you this. Old Gadgets Schwarz, Special Forces, retired. Now active in Very Special Forces."

"That's why I'm glad I'm with you," Blancanales said. "I figure I learn something once in a while."

"I think you're trying to prove something, you know that?" smiled Gadgets.

"I amtrying to prove something," Lyons insisted. His voice had risen. He caught himself, lowered his tone to an urgent whisper. "I'm trying to prove I can make a difference. And for the last year or so, I have. I've helped my country, I've helped my people. I've helped people I didn't know existed"

"Okay, okay," Gadgets grinned. "But just understand next time we're outnumbered, outgunned, ambushed and naked in the kill zone, retreat isan option."

The buzz of Gadgets's relay radio unit sounded.

Blancanales went to the hood of a taxi, brought the radio to where Gadgets knelt with Lyons.

Gadgets put the handset to his ear and listened. He looked to Lyons and Blancanales.

"The rockets"

As his taxi cruised through streets lurid with neon Arabic signs, Gadgets received a call from Katz via scrambler-encoded radio. "I separated from the embassy group. This will be my only opportunity to brief you. Please take notes so that you may brief your compatriots."

"How about a four-way?" Gadgets suggested. "A conference call. If you don't mind the drivers hearing"

"Where are the others?"

"In the cabs."

"Very well."

Keying his hand radio, Gadgets buzzed the others. "Politician. Ironman. Conference with the diplomat."

"Waiting," Blancanales answered.

"So what's going on?" Lyons asked.

"Gentlemen. I do not have much time to speak. Soon I must rejoin our Agency associates. First, I inspected the site of your action. That group is now inoperative. Second, I received a report from friends who questioned your prisoners. You neutralized a group of Muslim Brotherhood and PLO assassins. That group planned a series of strikes against American and Western European diplomats. The attack on the limousines leaving the embassy was the first of the series. Our friends determined that the group did not participate in the attack on the jet."

"Yeah," Lyons interrupted. "We found out. They had rockets but not SAMs. All that for nothing."

"Your time was not wasted," Katz told him. "And simultaneous with your action, the Agency scored something of a success of its own. An hour ago, another secret flight left the airport."

"Was it hit?" Blancanales asked.

"No. This time, it was an F-16 with electronic counter-measures and the speed to escape the missiles..."