"And the German end of the operation?"

"That is more easily accomplished."

"Will it work?" Qati asked, staring off at the dusty hills of Lebanon.

"It should. I give it a sixty percent chance."

At the very least, we will punish the Americans and the Russians, the Commander told himself. The question came next: Is that enough? Qati's face became hard as he considered the answer to that.

But there was more than one question. Qati thought himself a dying man. The disease process had its ebbs and flows, like an inexorable tide, but a tide that never quite restored itself to where it had been a year or a month before. Though today he felt well, he knew that this was a relative thing. There was as much chance that his life would end in the next year as there was that Bock's plan would succeed. Could he allow himself to die and not do everything he could to see his mission accomplished?

No, and if his own death was likely, what importance should he give to the lives of others? Were they not all unbelievers?

Gunther is an unbeliever, a true infidel. Marvin Russell is another, a pagan. The people you propose to kill they are not unbelievers. They are People of the Book, misguided followers of Jesus the Prophet, but also people who believe in the one God.

Yet Jews were also people of the Book. The Koran proclaimed it. They were the spiritual ancestors of Islam, as much the children of Abraham as the Arabs. So much in their religion was the same as his. His war against Israel was not about religion. It was about his people, cast out of their own land, displaced by another people who also claimed to be motivated by a religious imperative when it was really something else.

Qati faced his own beliefs in all their contradictions. Israel was his enemy. The Americans were his enemy. The Russians were his enemy. That was his personal theology, and though he might claim to be a Muslim, what ruled his life had precious little to do with God, however much he might proclaim the opposite to his followers.

"Proceed with your planning, Gunther."

CHAPTER 20

Competition

At the halfway point of the NFL season, the Vikings and Chargers were still the class of the league. Shrugging off their overtime loss to Minnesota, San Diego took their revenge the next week at home against doormat Indianapolis, whom they buried 45-3, while the Vikings had to struggle against the Giants in a Monday Night game, emerging on the sweet side of a 21-17 score. Tony Wills passed a thousand rushing yards in the third quarter of the season's eighth game, and was already consensus rookie of the year, plus becoming the official NFL spokesman for the President's Campaign Against Substance Abuse (CASA). The Vikings stumbled against the Forty-Niners, losing 24-16, which evened their record with San Diego's 7-1, but their nearest competition in the NFL Central - 'Black and Blue' - division was the Bears at 4-3. Parity in the National Football League had come and gone. The only serious challenge in the American Conference came, as always, from the Dolphins and Raiders, both of which were on the Chargers' dance card for the tail end of the season.