He was bending to recover it when the soles of his boots lost their traction and his legs went skating out from under him.

The ground came up hard against his back, knocking the wind from his lungs. He attempted to scramble upright, and only flopped onto his side. Tried again and slid back down. The grass beneath him was stiff and slippery. His clothes were as unbending as molded plastic. His skin was brittle and much too tight. Out of the comer of his eye he saw Tomas skidding about on his stomach in the same helpless, flailing manner that he was, looking weirdly like a man trying to swim across solid ice.

He screamed then, his mind hurtling over the edge of fear to full-blown panic, screamed at the top of his lungs, and was still crying out when the security cars dispatched by Thibodeau came racing up the access road behind them.

The same road where, moments ago, the two invaders had planted their mines.

The three dark-blue quick-response cars beat their air support out of the gate by several minutes--partly because their drivers had been closer to the motor pool than the chopper pilots were to the helipad, and partly because the Skyhawk copters had longer crank times than the armored Mercedes 300 SE sedans, which sprang to life with the turn of an ignition key.

The drivers knew going into their pursuit that the lag would be a problem. Their chopper-automobile teams were equipped with integrated thermal tracking systems that allowed them to accurately pinpoint the location of their quarry, accomplishing this by means of a microwave video link between the Skyhawks' pod-mounted surveillance equipment and receivers on the chase cars' dashboards. But without the aerial transmissions from the helicopters, the men in the cars were relying on nothing more sophisticated than their headlights to spot the intruders.

Tragically, they also lost any chance of being forewarned about the concealed mines awaiting them on the access road.

There were two men in the first car besides the driver, one seated next to him, another in the rear. Neither passenger ever knew what hit him. The driver did see an almost unnoticeable dark patch on the roadway about three yards before the mine came up on him, and thinking it was a bump or pothole, tried to swing around it. But the high speed at which he was traveling made that almost impossible.

The mine went off with a booming explosion as the edge of his left tire rolled over it. The Mercedes shot up into air, its front end bucking higher than the rear. While its armor-plated chassis had been designed to withstand a direct and sustained small-arms assault, its undercarriage was vulnerable to the blast of orange flame that went tearing into it, instantly killing all three of its occupants. A second later the vehicle came down on its right side and rolled crazily forward on two wheels before tumbling onto its roof, fire jetting from its shattered windshield.