pulled in familiar surroundings destroys the
delusion that we're invincible doing what we do
routinely every day-in this case, walking down a city
street. Liz had told the small group that in the
instant of shock, a person's body temperature,
blood pressure, and muscle tone all
crash and it takes a moment for the survival instinct
to kick in.
Attackers count on that instant of paralysis,
Liz had said.
But understanding what had happened didn't help. Not
at all. It didn't lessen the ache and the guilt that
Aideen felt. If she'd moved an instant
sooner or been a little more heads-up-by just a
heartbeat, that's all it would have taken-Martha might
have survived.
How do you live with that guilt?
Aideen asked herself as tears began to form.
She didn't know. She'd never been able to deal with
coming up short. She couldn't handle it when she found
her widower father crying at the kitchen table after losing
his job in the Boston shoe factory where
BALANCE OF POWER 19
he'd worked since he was a boy. For days thereafter she
tried to get him to talk, but he turned to scotch
instead. She went off to college not long afterward,
feeling as though she'd failed him. She couldn't
handle the sense of failure when her college
sweetheart, her greatest love, smiled warmly at
an old girlfriend in their senior year. He left
Aideen a week later and she joined the army
after graduation. She hadn't even attended the
graduation ceremony; it would have killed her to see
him.
Now she'd failed Martha. Her shoulders heaved out
the tears and the tears became sobs.
A young, mustachioed sergeant of the palace security
guard raised her gently by the shoulders. He helped
her stand.
"Are you all right?" he asked in English.
She nodded and tried to stop crying. "I think I'm
okay."
"Do you want a doctor?"
She shook her head.
"Are you sure,
sefioritaThat"
Aideen took a long, deep breath. This was not the
time and place to lose it. She would have to talk
to Op-Center's FBI liaison, Darrell
McCaskey. He had remained at the hotel
to await a disvisit from a colleague with Interpol.
And she still wanted to see Deputy Serrador. If
this shooting had been designed to prevent the meeting,
she'd be damned if she was going to let that happen.
"I'll be fine," Aideen said. "Do you-do you have the
person who did this? Do you have any idea who
it was?"
20 OP-CENTER
"No,
senorita,"
he replied. "We'll have to take a look and see
what the surveillance cameras may have recorded.
In the meantime, are you well enough to talk to us about this?"
"Yes, of course," she said uncertainly. There was
still the mission, the reason she'd come. She didn't
know how much she should tell the police about that. "
'But-
por favor?"'"
"Si?"
"We were to be met by someone inside. I would still like
to see him as soon as possible."
"I will make the necessary inquiries-was
"I also need to contact someone at the Princesa
Plaza," Aideen said.
"I will see to those things," he said. "But Comisario
Femandez will be arriving presently. He is the one
who will be conducting the investigation. The longer we
wait, the more difficult the pursuit."
"Of course," she said. "I understand. I'll talk
to him and meet with our guide after. Is there a
telephone I can use?"
"I will arrange for the telephone," the sergeant said.
"Then I will personally go and see who was to meet you."
Aideen thanked him and rose under her own power. She
faltered. The sergeant grabbed one of her arms.
"Are you sure you wouldn't like to see the doctor first?"
the man asked. "There is one in residence."
His
"Gracias, no,""
she said with a grateful smile. She wasn't going
to let the attacker claim a second victim.
She was going to get through this, even if it were one
second at a time.
BALANCE OF POWER 21
The sergeant smiled back warmly and walked with her
slowly toward the open gate.
As Aideen was being led away the palace doctor
rushed by. A few moments later she heard an
ambulance. The young woman half turned as the
ambulance stopped right where the getaway car had been.
As the medical technicians hurriedly unloaded
a gurney, Aideen saw the doctor rise from beside
Martha's body. He'd only been there a moment.
He said something to a guard then ran over to the
mailman. He began opening the buttons of the
man's uniform then yelled for the paramedics
to come over. As he did, the guard lay his jacket
over Martha's head.
Aideen looked ahead. That was it, then. It took just
a few seconds, and everything Martha Mackall had
known, planned, felt, and hoped was gone. Nothing
would ever bring that back.
The young woman continued to hold back tears as she was
led into a small office along the palace's
ornate main corridor. The room was
wood-paneled and comfortable and she lowered herself into a
leather couch beside the door. She felt achy where her
knees and elbows had hit the pavement and she was still in
an acute state of disbelief. But a countershock
reflex was going to work, replenishing the physical
resources that had shut down in the attack. And she
knew that Darrell and General Rodgers and
Director Paul Hood and the rest of the
Op-Center team were behind her. She might be by herself
at the moment, but she was not alone.
"You may use that telephone," the sergeant said,
22 OP-CENTER
pointing to an antique rotary phone on a glass
end table. "Dial zero for an outside line."
"Thank you."
"I will have a guard posted at the door so you
will be safe and undisturbed. Then I will go and see
about your guide."
Aideen thanked him again. He left and shut the
door behind him. The room was quiet save for the
hissing of a radiator in the back and the muted sounds
of traffic. Of life going on.
Taking another deep breath, Aideen removed a
hotel notepad from her backpack and looked down
at the telephone number printed on the bottom.
She found it impossible to believe that Martha was
dead. She could still feel her annoyance, see her
eyes, smell her perfume. She could still hear
Martha saying.
You know what's at stake here.
Aideen swallowed hard and entered the number. She
asked to be connected with Darrell McCaskey's
room. She slipped a simple scrambler over the
mouthpiece, one that would send an ultrasonic
screech over the line, deafening any taps. A
filter on McCaskey's end would eliminate the
sound from his line.
Aideen did know what was at stake here. The fate
of Spain, of Europe, and possibly the world. And
whatever it took, she did not intend to come up short
again.
.
ATX-UL1024 TWO
ATX-UL0 Monday, 12:12 p.m. Washington,
D.c.
When they were at Op-Center headquarters at
Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland or at
Striker's Base in the FBI Academy in
Quantico, Virginia, the two
forty-five-year-old men were Op-Center's
Deputy Director, General Michael Bernard
Rodgers, and Colonel Brett Van Buren
August, commander of Op-Center's
rapid-deployment force.
But here in Ma Ma Buddha, a small, divey
Szechuan restaurant in Washington's Chinatown,
the two men were not superior and subordinate. They were
close friends who had both been born at St.
Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut;
who had met in kindergarten and shared a passion for
building model airplanes; who had played on the
same Thurston's Apparel Store Little League
team for five years-and chased home run queen
Laurette DelGuercio on the field and off; and
who had blown trumpet in the Housatonic
served in different branches of the military in
Vietnam-Rodgers in the U.s. Army
Special Forces, August in Air Force
Intelligence-and saw each other infrequently over
the next twenty years. Rodgers did
24 OP-CENTER
two tours of Southeast Asia, after which he was sent
to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to help
Colonel "Chargin" Charlie" Beckwith oversee
the training of the U.s. Army's 1/ Special
Forces Operational Detachment-the Delta Force.
Rodgers remained there until the Persian Gulf
War, where he commanded a mechanized brigade with such
Pattonesque fervor that he was well on his way
to Baghdad while his backup was still in Southern
Iraq. His zeal earned him a promotion-and a desk
job at Op-Center.
August had flown eighty-seven F-4 spy
missions over North Vietnam during a two-year
period before being shot down near Hue. He spent a
year as a prisoner of war before escaping and making his
way to the south. After recovering in Germany from
exhaustion and exposure, August returned
to Vietnam. He organized a spy network
to search for other U.s. POW'S and then
remained undercover for a year after the United States
withdrawal. At the request of the Pentagon,
August spent the next three years in the
Philippines helping President Ferdinand
Marcos battle Moro secessionists. He
disliked Marcos and his repressionist policies, but
the U.s. government supported him and so August
stayed. Looking for a little desk-bound downtime after the
fall of the Marcos regime, August went to work as
an Air Force liaison with NASA, helping
to organize security for spy satellite
missions, after which he joined the SOC as a
specialist in counter-terrorist activities. When
Striker commander X. Colonel W. Charles
Squires was killed on a mission in Russia,
Rodgers immediately contacted Colonel August and
offered him the commission.
BALANCE OF POWER 25
August accepted, and the two easily resumed their
close friendship.
The two men had come to Ma Ma Buddha after spending
the morning discussing a proposed new International
Strike Force Division for Op-Center. The idea
for the group had been conceived by Rodgers and Paul
Hood. Unlike the elite, covert
Striker, the ISFD unit would be a small
black-ops unit comprised of U.s. commanders and
foreign operatives. Personnel such as Falah
Shibli of the Sayeret Ha'Druzim, Israel's
Druze' Reconnaissance unit, who had helped
Striker rescue the Regional OpCenter and its
crew in the Bekaa Valley. The ISFD would be
designed to undertake covert missions in potential
international trouble spots. General Rodgers had
been quiet but attentive for most of the meeting, which was
also attended by Intelligence Chief Bob Herbert,
his colleagues Naval Intelligence Chief
Donald Breen and Army Intelligence head
Phil Prince, and August's friend Air Force
Intelligence legend Pete Robinson.
Now Rodgers was simply quiet. He was poking his
chopsticks at a plate of salt-fried string
beans. His rugged face was drawn beneath the
close-cropped saltand-pepper hair and his eyes were
downtumed. Both men had recently returned from
Lebanon. Rodgers and a small party of soldiers
and civilians had been field testing the new
Regional Op-Center when they were captured and
tortured by Kurdish extremists. With the help of
an Israeli operative, August and
Striker were able to go into the Bekaa Valley and get
them out. When their ordeal was over and an attempt
to start a war between Turkey and Syria had been
averted, Gen-
26 OP-CENTER
eral Rodgers had drawn his pistol and executed
the Kurdish leader out of hand. On the flight back
to the United States, August had prevented a
distraught General Rodgers from turning the handgun
on himself.
August was using a fork to twirl up his pork lo
mein. After watching the prison guards eat while
he starved in Vietnam, if he never saw a
chopstick again it would be too soon. As he ate, his
the effects of combat and captivity, and he knew
only too well what torture could do to the mind,
let alone the body. He didn't expect
Rodgers to recover quickly. Some people never recovered
at all. When the depth of their dehumanization
became apparent-both in terms of what had been done
to them and what they may have been forced to do-many former
hostages took their own lives. Liz Gordon
had put it very well in a paper she'd published in
International Amnesty Journal: A hostage is
someone who has gone from walking to crawling. To walk
again, to face even simple risks or routine
authority figures, is often more difficult than
lying down and giving up.
August picked up the metal teapot. " 'Want
some?"'"
"Yes, please."
August kept an eye on his friend as he turned the
two cups rightside up. He filled them and then
set the pot down. Then he stirred a half
packet of sugar into his own cup, raised it, and
sipped. He continued to stare at Rodgers through the
steam. The general didn't look up.
"Mike?"
"Yeah."
BALANCE OF POWER 27
"This is no good."
Rodgers raised his eyes. "What? The lo mein?"
August was caught off guard. He grinned.
"Well, that's a start. First joke you've made
since-when? The twelfth grade?"
"Something like that," Rodgers said sullenly. He
idly picked up his cup and took a sip of tea.
He held the cup by his lips and stared down
into it. "What's there been to laugh about since then?"
"Plenty, I'd say."
"Like what?"
"How about weekend passes with the few friends you've
managed to hold on to. A couple of jazz
clubs you told me about in New Orleans, New
York, Chicago. Some damn fine movies. More
than a few nice ladies. You've had some real
nice things in your life."
Rodgers put the cup down and shifted his body
painfully. The burns he'd suffered during
torture at the hands of the Kurds in the Bekaa were
a long way from healing, though not so long as the
emotional wounds. But he refused to lie on his sofa
and rust.
"Those things are all diversions, Brett. I love
'em, but they're solace. Recreation."
"Since when are solace and recreation bad things?"
"Since they've become a
reason
for living instead of the reward for a job well done,"
Rodgers said.
"Uh oh," August said.
"Uh oh is right," Rodgers replied.
August had sunk a hose into a cesspool
and Rodgers had obviously decided to let some of the
raw sewage out.
"You want to know why I can't relax?" Rodgers
28 OP-CENTER
said. "Because we've become a society that lives
for the weekend, for vacations, for running away from
responsibility. We're proud of how much
liquor we can hold, of how many women we can charm
our way into bed with, of how well our sports teams
are doing."
"You used to like a lot of those things," August pointed
out. "Especially the women."
"Well, maybe I'm tired of it," Rodgers
said. "I don't want to live like that any more. I
want to
do
things."
"You always have done things," August said. "And you still
found time to enjoy life."
"I guess I didn't realize what a mess the
country was becoming," Rodgers said. "You face an
enemy like world Communism. You put everything into that
fight. Then suddenly you don't have them anymore and
you finally take a good look around. You see that
everything else has gone to hell while you
fought your battle. Values, initiative,
compassion, everything. Now I've decided I want