Five minutes later, all four men were strapped in, and engines were turning.

"How are you this morning, Shredder?" Jackson asked over his intercom.

"Ready to waste some Marines, skipper. Lookin' good back here. Is this thing gonna fly today?"

"Guess it's time to find out." Jackson switched to radio. "Bud, this is Spade, ready here."

"Roger, Spade, you have the lead." Both pilots looked around, got an all-clear from their plane captains, and looked around again.

"Spade has the lead." Jackson tripped his brakes. "Rolling now."

"Hello, mein Schatz." Manfred Fromm said to his wife.

Traudl rushed forward to embrace him. "Where have you been?"

"That I cannot say." Fromm replied, with a knowing twinkle in his eye. He hummed a few bars from Lloyd Webber's 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina.'

"I knew you would see." Traudl beamed at him.

"You must not talk of this." To confirm her suspicion, he handed her a wad of banknotes, five packets of ten thousand D-Marks each. That should keep the mercenary bitch quiet and happy, Manfred Fromm told himself. "And I will only be here overnight. I had some business to do, and of course -"

"Of course, Manfred." She hugged him again, the money in her hands. "If only you had called!"

Arrangements had been absurdly easy to make. A ship outbound for Latakia, Syria, was sailing from Rotterdam in seventy hours. He and Bock had arranged for a commercial trucking company to load the machine tools into a small cargo container which would be loaded on the ship and unloaded onto a Syrian dock in six more days. It would have been faster to send the tools by air, or even by rail to a Greek or Italian port for faster transshipment by sea, but Rotterdam was the world's busiest port, with overworked customs officials whose main task was searching for drug shipments. Sniffer dogs could go over that particular container to their hearts' content.

Fromm let his wife go into the kitchen to make coffee.

It would take a few minutes, and that was all he needed. He walked down into his basement. In the corner, as far from the water-heater as was possible was an orderly pile of lumber, on top of which were four black metal boxes. Each weighed about twelve kilograms, about twenty-five pounds. Fromm carried one at a time - on the second trip, he got a pair of gloves from his bureau drawer to protect his hands - and placed them in the trunk of his rented BMW. By the time the coffee was ready, his task was complete.

"You have a fine tan," Traudl observed, carrying the tray out from the kitchen. In her mind, she'd already spent about a quarter of the money her husband had given her. So, Manfred had seen the light. She'd known he would, sooner or later. Better that it should be sooner. She'd be especially nice to him tonight.

"Gunther?"

Bock didn't like leaving Fromm to his own devices, but he also had a task to perform. This was a far greater risk. It was, he told himself, a high-risk operational concept, even if the real dangers were in the planning stage, which was both an oddity and a relief.