A shape was huddled at the front of a helicopter-at the front of the Huey, Harry noticed with a sudden jolt of alarm. The man had a penlight and was bent over, working on something.
Harry took another step forward. There was no sense in announcing himself. Not yet. Just a few more feet.
All at once, his foot caught a metal can and sent it rattling loudly across the concrete floor. That did it.
A muffled curse broke from the intruder’s lips and he jumped up, startled.
“Get your hands up!” Harry screamed, his voice echoing like thunder in the narrow confines of the hangar. “ Now!”
The figure hesitated for a moment, then he turned and darted towards the back of the hangar, toward the door there.
Harry darted forward, ducking around the Huey, afraid to fire for fear of damaging the helicopter. He couldn’t get a clear shot.
The man reached the back door and darted out into the night as Harry chased after him, feet pounding against the hard concrete.
Harry paused at the door, listening, uncertain which way to go. He couldn’t see anyone now. Everything was still, so silent he could feel it. He took a careful step forward, the Colt extended in front of him. Somewhere…
A wrench smashed into his arm, sending the Colt spinning out of reach. Harry whirled, gasping in pain, throwing his other arm up to deflect the attacker’s second blow.
His right hand slipped to his ankle, searching for the combat knife strapped there, but the man bowled him over before he could reach it. The wrench descended toward his head.
Harry rolled right, grabbing a fistful of sand and dirt, heaving it up and out, into the face of his attacker. Rubbing his eyes, the man reeled backward, barely keeping his feet.
And he ran.
Pulling the combat knife from its ankle sheath, Harry regained his footing. There was no sense in trying to locate the Colt. The man would be long gone before he could hope to find it.
Harry dashed forward. The intruder was just disappearing around the side of one of the other hangars. There was still time to catch him, but Harry wasn’t going to let himself be fooled as easily this time.
By the time Harry reached the edge of the hangar, the man was gone. Disappeared. Vanished into the inky blackness of the night.
Inwardly, Harry prayed for a moon he would have cursed only ten minutes earlier. He had no idea which way to go.
He moved toward the hangar door, pushed it open. It squeaked noisily on its hinges and he paused. There was no way he would have missed that sound. The man hadn’t gone inside. He must have gone around.
He went around as well, moving slowly, listening, watching, the long knife still in his hand.
Listening for something, anything. He could call the airfield’s security patrols to help with the search, but that would take too long, and from what he had seen of their efficiency that night, he didn’t know that they would be much help.
A faint noise arrested his progress. He stopped stock-still, listening, his eyes trying to pierce the night. Without success.
There it was again. A shuffling noise, as though someone were running through the sand. Around the edge of the hangar…
Harry dropped into a crouch by the building as the noise came closer. A shape loomed above him and he rose, smashing the hilt of the knife into the man’s breastbone, knocking him off-balance.
The man grunted and toppled backward, Harry going down on top of him. He pressed the tip of the knife firmly against the intruder’s throat. “Surrender,” he hissed in Arabic. “ Now.”
“Nichols,” the man gasped weakly, forcing his words out past the knife. “Is that you?”
Harry pulled the blade away quickly. “ Davood! What are you doing out here?”
“I was coming from the latrines,” the Iranian-American agent whispered, rubbing his sore throat with his hand. “Saw somebody over by one of the hangars-let me up, will you!”
“Of course,” Harry responded, rolling to one side. “But what did you see?”
The agent pulled himself into a sitting position, still trying to regain his breath. “A man was sneaking around the hangars. I tried to follow him.”
“Which way did he go?”
Davood shook his head. “I don’t know. Lost him in the darkness. I was looking for him when I ran into you.”
“Same here,” Harry nodded. “Got your automatic?”
“I don’t need it to take a leak. I left it back in quarters.”
Harry rose to his feet, looking around him, trying to get his bearings. Once again, everything was silent. Too silent. He glanced down at the agent. “Run and get Colonel Tancretti,” he ordered tersely. “I’m going back to the hangar where the Huey is housed. Do you know where that is?”
“No,” Davood replied, rising to stand beside him.
“Tancretti’ll know. Tell him I want a squad of men around that Huey from now on. Scratch that,” Harry corrected, anger in his voice, “I want a whole platoon around the hangar. Get going.”
“Roger.”
11:57 P.M.
Q-West Airfield
Northern Iraq
“So, what did he do?” Harry demanded as Tancretti rose from his crouch by the Huey. The colonel’s face was unusually grim.
“He trashed one of the external stabilizers.”
“Can you fix it?” Thomas asked, holstering his automatic.
“Yes,” Tancretti replied. “But I would need parts from Mosul.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “We have an hour till go-mission.”
Harry nodded silently, weighing his options. None of them were good. Tancretti was speaking again.
“We could take the Pave Low.”
“No,” Harry retorted sharply, looking over at the colonel. “I believe I told you this afternoon. Washington wants plausible deniability on the operation. Using the Pave Low compromises that.” He shook his head. “I have my orders.”
His eyes locked with Tancretti’s. “How do you suppose he got inside?”
“I don’t know,” Tancretti replied, shrugging his shoulders. “We have twenty kilometers of perimeter fencing to patrol. My men are spread thin.”
“And those you’ve got aren’t doing their job well enough!” Harry snapped. “One of those kids let me get within five feet of him tonight before he issued a challenge. I could have put a knife between his shoulderblades and he would have been dead before he knew the difference.”
“They’re learning. But we’ve had saboteurs slip inside before. It’s part of the country, Colonel.”
Harry took another step toward him, his face dark as the night. “I couldn’t care less what is a part of this country, Tancretti. What I want to know is why one of these ordinary run-of-the-mill, routine saboteurs would choose the oldest aircraft on base to sabotage it! It doesn’t make sense. You’ve got millions of dollars of hardware on this airfield and this man penetrates all the way to the middle to disable the one aircraft that is of no use to anyone-except us. This mission. The mission that was supposed to go down one hour from now.”
He glanced around, searching the faces of his fellow team members, of the Air Force personnel clustered behind Tancretti. “Someone knew…”
4:08 P.M. Eastern Time
NCS Operations Center
Langley, Virginia
One hour. Actually, less than an hour. Fifty-one minutes, twenty-five seconds to be precise, Bernard Kranemeyer thought as he carefully synchronized his watch to Baghdad Time. And then Operation TALON would begin.
A computer had randomly picked the code name for the operation, but the selection had brought a grin to the faces of both Kranemeyer and the DCIA. Eagle Claw had been the codename of the last US hostage rescue mission into Iran. And an eagle’s claw was a talon.