He settled down to wait. Several yards to his left a light shone in the guard booth's broken window. The single wall he could see from his position was spattered with blood. A limp, upflung arm rested against it above the spot where one of the lifeless guards had fallen.

Manuel looked away from the booth, moving his gaze out along the perimeter fence to where the others were at their tasks, dark blurs against the deeper darkness. Blowing a gap in the fence hadn't been his own idea. The watchmen on duty would have known the gate's electronic access codes, and he'd proposed they be captured and made to unlock it at gunpoint. But Kuhl had formulated a minute-by-minute plan and wanted them killed before the jump team's arrival. With the robot and guards in the compound's western sector eliminated, he had reasoned there would be a surveillance lapse until backup security units could arrive. This would give Manuel's group an opening to set their explosives while Teams Orange and Yellow carried out their end of the plan.

Manuel hadn't argued. It was Kuhl's role to make the final calls, and his to carry them out.

Now Manuel saw one of the other jumpers come scurrying up toward the gate, a length of 'det cord winding out behind him. Not a moment too soon, he thought. His wound was large and ugly, the torn flesh imbedded with sharp fragments of metal. He would need to take care of it soon.

He inhaled to clear his head, then took the cord from his teammate and inserted it into the charge he'd just primed.

"Bueno, Juan," he said. "Where is Marco?"

"Coming," Juan said. He gestured toward Manuel's arm. "You all right?"

Manuel looked at him.

"Yes, all right," he said. He willed himself not to stumble as he rose to his feet. "Radio Tomas and the others. Let them know we're through here. Then I pull the pin."

In the center of the compound, three levels underground, Thibodeau rushed through the monitor room's entrance to find Jezoirski, Cody, and Delure agitatedly studying their displays.

"What the hell's goin' on?" he said, noting their flustered expressions.

Delure swiveled his chair around to look at him.

"Sir, it's Ned ... the 'hog's detected a group of intruders in its sector. Could be the same ones we saw at the western perimeter, there's no way to tell."

Thibodeau eyed the screen and made a low, apprehensive sound in his throat. He cared less about whether these were the same trespassers Wally had encountered than how they had gotten into the compound without initiating any perimeter alarms, and what the purpose of their intrusion might be. A man who relied heavily on instinct, he saw a pattern and tempo to their movements that took him back to his days as a Long Range Recon Patrolman with the 101st Air Cav in Southeast Asia, awakening suspicions that were almost too crazy to share.

But he could not ignore the guideposts of his own experience, and commanding a LRRP unit out of Camp Eagle had taught him plenty. Outrageous as it seemed at first blush, what was happening had all the earmarks of an airborne insertion. That would account for the intruders' seeming ability to materialize out of nowhere, and also explain their otherwise mystifying cat-and-mouse game with Wally. They hadn't taken on the 'hog because they needed to, but because they'd wanted to, as if their aim was to put the goddamned contraption through its paces.