Rodgers invariably favored greater numbers, and there were strong arguments for both points of view. Herbert pointed out that Samson beat back the Philistines using only the jawbone of an ass. In the thirteenth century, Alexander Nevsky and his poorly armed Russian peasants repulsed the heavily armored Teutonic knights. In the fifteenth century, the small band of Englishmen who fought beside Henry V at Agincourt defeated vastly superior numbers of Frenchmen.
But Rodgers had his examples as well. The brave band of Spartans were defeated by the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 B.C.; the Alamo fell to Santa Anna; and then there was the British 27th Lancers cavalry, the "Light Brigade" which was cut down in its self-defeating charge during the Crimean War.
Add to the list of the doomed Robert West Herbert, he thought as he listened to the footfalls and cracking twigs.
The guy who didn't have the goddamn brains enough to write down the name that could have saved them. At least he would die in good company. King Leonidas. Jim Bowie.
Errol Flynn.
Thinking about Flynn helped him stay loose as he psyched himself up to make a stand against all these enemies. He only hoped that Jody would run. The thought of fighting to save her gave him extra adrenaline.
And then, because he wasn't thinking about it, the name he'd been trying to remember came back to him.
"Jody, push me," he said.
She had been walking beside him. She stopped and got behind him.
"C'mon, push," he said. "We're going to get out of this.
But we'll need time." Jody put her tired back and wounded shoulder into the effort. Herbert reached for his weapon.
Unlike Flynn's doomed Major Vickers, Herbert was going to hold the enemy off. Though unlike Samson, he wasn't going to use the jawbone of an ass to do it.
He was going to use a cellular phone.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
The call was put through to Rodgers as he was waiting for an update from Colonel August.
Bob Herbert was on a cellular phone. Rodgers switched on the speaker phone so Darrell, Martha, and Press Officer Ann Farris could hear.
"I'm in the middle of a dark forest somewhere between Wunstorf and a lake," Herbert said. "The good news is, I've got Jody Thompson." Rodgers sat up straight and triumphantly drove a fist into the air. Ann jumped from her chair and clapped.
"That's fabulous!" Rodgers said. He shot McCaskey a look. "You've done it while Interpol and the FBI are still asking questions and pissing off the German authorities.
How can we help you, Bob?" "Well, the bad news is we've got a bunch of Nazi wannabes on our butts. You've got to find me a phone number." Rodgers leaned toward the keyboard. He alerted John Benn with an F6/Enter/17. "Whose number, Bob?" Herbert told him. Rodgers asked him to hold on as he typed Hauptmann Rosenlocher, Hamburg Landespolizei.
McCaskey had swung over to take a look. While Rodgers sent the number over to Benn, McCaskey jumped to another phone and called Interpol.
"This Rosenlocher is a burr in the fur of the head Nazi," Herbert said, "and he may be the only man you can trust.
From what I overheard he's in Hanover, I think." "We'll find him and get him over to you," Rodgers said.
"Sooner would be better than later," Herbert said.
"We're pushing on, but we're losing ground to these guys. I can hear the cars. And if they find the bodies we left in our wake—" "I read you," Rodgers said. "Can you stay on the line?" "As long as Jody holds out I can," he said. "She's dead on her feet." "Tell her to hang on," Rodgers said as he switched to the Geologue program. "You too." He brought up Wunstorf and looked over the terrain between the town and the lake.
It was just as Herbert had described it. Trees and hills. "Bob, do you have any idea where you are? Can you give me any landmarks?" "It's black here, Mike. Far as I know, we may even have done a W.W. Corrigan." Wrong Way Corrigan, Rodgers thought. Herbert didn't want Jody to know they might be headed in the wrong direction.
"Okay, Bob," Rodgers said. "We'll get you a fix on everyone's positions." McCaskey was still on the line with Interpol, so Rodgers called Stephen Viens himself. Even with light-intensification capabilities for night surveillance, Viens told him that the NRO satellites would require up to a half hour to pinpoint Herbert exactly. Rodgers pointed out that their lives might be at stake. Viens said, not dispassionately, that it would still take up to a half hour. Rodgers thanked him.
The General studied the map. They were really out in the boondocks. And if Herbert could hear the pursuers, it was unlikely a car or even chopper could get to them in time.
Rodgers looked over at McCaskey. "Have we got anything on that police officer yet?" "Working." Working. Rodgers always had a visceral reaction to that word: he hated it. He liked things to be done.
He also hated giving bad news to people in the field.
But bad news was better than ignorance, so he got back on the line.
"Bob, NRO is trying to spot you. Maybe we can keep you moving away from the enemy. Meanwhile, we're still looking for the officer. Thing is, even if we find him it doesn't look like you're any place easy to get to." "Tell me about it," Herbert said. "Goddamn trees and hills everywhere." "Would it be better if you tried to flank the enemy?" "Negative," Herbert said. "The terrain is rough here, but it looks rockier on either side. We'd literally be crawling." He was silent for a moment. "But General? If you can at least find Rosenlocher, there is one thing you can try." Rodgers listened while Herbert extemporized. What the intelligence chief proposed was creative, ghoulish, and unlikely to succeed. But in the absence of anything else, it became their marching orders.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
There were ten closed-circuit surveillance cameras tucked two-atop-two in a closet in Dominique's office. Before the building had begun to rumble, he was sitting in his leather chair, calmly watching the activity in the corridor and in the computer room.
The stupidity of these people, he'd been thinking as he watched them break into his system and find themselves cornered. Dominique would have been content to let them go if they hadn't gotten pushy and broken into his secret files. Ms. Bosworth didn't have that degree of skill, so it had to have been the other man who did it. Dominique hoped that man lived. He wanted to hire him.
Even when the French commandos closed in on the New Jacobins in the corridor, Dominique wasn't concerned.
He had sent word for other men to surround them. He had made certain that fully half of his hundred New Jacobins would be on the premises tonight. Nothing must go wrong with the downloading of his games.
Dominique wasn't concerned about anything until the building began to shake. Then his high forehead wrinkled and his dark eyes blinked, batting away the reflection of the TV screens. Using the control panel built into his top desk drawer, he switched to external views of the compound. On the river side the black-and-white screen was awash with white light. Dominique turned down the contrast and watched as an aircraft settled down, its navigation lights burning brightly. It was an airplane whose engines had tilted into the vertical so it could descend like a helicopter. The parking lot had cars scattered here and there so the aircraft was unable to land. As it hovered fifteen feet up the hatch opened. A pair of rope ladders were unwound and troops climbed down. NATO troops.
Dominique's mouth tensed. What is NATO doing here?
he roared inside, though he knew the answer. It was a newly defined mission designed to get him.