Qati had chosen well. Until a few months earlier, it had been a command center for Hezbollah. Dug into the side of a steep hillside, the corrugated-iron roof was covered with earth and planted with the sparse local shrubbery. Only a skilled man who knew exactly what he was looking for could ever have spotted it, and that was unlikely. Hezbollah was particularly adept at routing out informers in its midst. A dirt track ran right past it to an abandoned farm whose land was too played-out even for opium and hashish production, which was the major cash crop in the area. Inside the structure was about a hundred square meters of concrete-floored shade, even with room to park a few vehicles. The only bad news was that this place would be a deathtrap in case of an earthquake, Ghosn told himself, not an unknown occurrence in the region. He pulled the car in between two posts, out of sight. On leaving the car, he dropped camouflage netting behind it. Yes, Qati had chosen well.

The hardest balance, as always, was choosing between the two aspects of security. On the one hand, the more people who knew that anything was happening, the worse it was. On the other, some people were necessary just to provide a guard force. Qati had brought most of his personal guard, ten men of known loyalty and skill. They knew Ghosn and Bock by sight, and their leader came forward to meet Manfred.

"This is our new friend," Ghosn told the man, who looked closely at the German's face and walked away.

"Was gibt's hier?" Fromm asked in tense German.

"What we have here," Ghosn answered in English, "is very interesting."

Manfred took his lesson from that.

"Kommen Sie mil, bitte." Ghosn led them to a wall with a door in it. A man with a rifle stood outside of it, which made much better sense than a lock. The engineer nodded to the guard, who nodded curtly back. Ghosn led them into the room and pulled a cord to turn on the fluorescent lighting. There was a large metal work table covered with a tarp. Ghosn removed the tarp without further comment. He was tiring of the drama in any case. It was time for real work.

"Gott im Himmel!"

"I've never seen it myself," Bock admitted. "So that is what it looks like?"

Fromm put on some glasses and peered over the mechanism for perhaps a minute before looking up. "American design, but not American manufacture." He pointed. "Wrong sort of wiring. Crude device, thirty years - no, older than that in design, but not in fabrication. These circuit boards are 1960s, perhaps early 70s. Soviet? From the cache in Azerbaijan, perhaps?"

Ghosn merely shook his head.

"Israeli? Ist das moglichf." That question got a nod.

"More than possible, my friend. It is here."

"Gravity bomb. Tritium injection into the pit to boost yield - 50 to 70 kilotons, I'd guess - radar and impact fusing. It has actually been dropped, but did not go off. Why?"