CHAPTER ONE

GEDULD

Pressing his fingers against the implant at the base of his skull, Specialist Felix Wenger listened intently for the whispered order he knew could not be long in coming. Like the others in his unit, Specialist Wenger had lain motionless for several hours now, hugging the hard sand while the day passed from a blazing afternoon into a chilled dusk. His legs were knotted and cramped, and he wanted desperately to move.— But he didn't dare.

The raw night air clung to the man's sweat-soaked body. The hair on his sinewy arms stiffened, and he shivered. The man, an elite soldier, was surprised how fleeting the desert's hold had been on the day's scorching heat. The sand which, only hours ago, had been searing the skin of his blackened face, now felt uncomfortably cold. Wenger was stiff and sore and impatient to get started.

The numbness in his leg worsened. Every instinct told him to lie still, but Wenger was fighting a losing battle. He had to move, if even just a little.

Raising his left leg ever so slightly now, Specialist Wenger issued a sigh of relief. Immediately, his head filled with sound.

"Lie still, man!" came Patterson's order through the comm-implant. "Geduld!"

Wenger didn't reply — he didn't need to. The wait was almost up. In a short while, Commander Patterson would order his squad to begin the attack against their quarry in the camp below. If Intelligence had it right this time, Rontana would be among the figures lurking about in the smoky shadows. If not, Patterson's raiding party was about to needlessly slaughter another company of inconsequential underlings. Or worse yet, a clan of innocent nomads. Mistakes had been made in the past, and no one was eager for a repeat, least of all Grundal Patterson.

In the air overhead, their rotors silently cutting the night, were the hover-drones. They were making a final sweep of the area. Commander Patterson would want to know, before moving in, the exact position of each and every one of the enemy. That, plus the weapons they were carrying, and any armor they might be wearing. The hover-drones made all this possible—and more. They were Patterson's eyes in the sky, relaying to him on a continuous basis everything he needed to know about each one of their opponents. Heartbeat. Body temperature. Direction of travel. What kind of ammo they were packing, and how much. Who they were aiming at. Whether or not there were any holo-soldiers in the strike zone, or any biologics. All relayed to him on a real-time basis, and then displayed on his corneal implant.

Specialist Wenger ran a final check now of his weapons. He was heavily armed. His personal arsenal included a pulse bola, a dozen or more nitro-projectiles, and a supply of megaflare globes, easily the most frightening of all battlefield weapons. But it didn't end there. Hanging from his canvas belt, just inches from the fingers of his twitching hand, was a manual firebomb. It was circular at the top like a conventional grenade, but its hull was covered with a sheet of heavy plastic. At the base was a handle five inches long, a handle which enabled the thrower to hurl the explosive farther and with greater accuracy than an ordinary grenade. The trick was in the accuracy and the timing, for once the plastic shield was removed and the casing of steel-like adhesive exposed to the air, the bomb itself would adhere instantly to any surface it contacted. The thrower had only fifteen seconds from the removal of the plastic covering until the explosion of the firebomb.

Still trying to shake off the nagging sensation of numbness which threatened to engulf him, Specialist Felix Wenger again shifted his weight in the sand. This time, there was no barked order to lie still, no demand for patience. This time, the comm remained silent. Patterson's attention was focused on the enemy camp now, and soon Wenger's would be too.

In the valley beneath them, he could see burnoose-cloaked figures huddled around the cooking fires, sharing a cup of hot tortan. The soldiers he saw there were laughing easily, and for a moment Wenger felt envy. He jealously licked his lips. The sand was cold, and he too longed for something warm to drink.

But then just as quickly as it had come, the feeling passed. These people were the enemy, and soon they would all be dead. He had been trained for nothing less.

Under normal circumstances, the President would never have sanctioned the use of force. This President believed in diplomatic solutions, not death squads. But then again, these were not normal circumstances. Rontana was a murderous fiend, and everyone agreed he had to be stopped. But at what cost?

They say the first casualty of war is truth, and no one knew this better than Ali Salaam Rontana. Although precise details as to Rontana's origins were clouded in obscurity, sometime around the turn of the century he swept out of the mountains of Persia leading an army of Moslem bandits. All the crazies of the world have had a manifesto, and Ali Salaam Rontana was no exception. His maniacal cry directing his followers to "kill their ideas by killing their genes" was merely the latest version of the age-old master race excuse for slaughtering one's neighbor.

Rontana's particular sickness was infanticide, and in a flawlessly logical, yet seemingly rational way, he laid it all out in his manifesto, Deicide, Infanticide, & Ecocide, or D.I.E. for short. His treatise was pure unadulterated lunacy, but it was required reading to earn a spot on Patterson's strike force. Commander Patterson believed that only by studying and understanding the diseased ideas of this deranged psychopath could a team member cultivate the necessary loathing to see this grisly business through to the end.

Now, as Felix Wenger lay there on the cold sand anxiously waiting for the "go" signal, he thought again of Rontana's handbook and how it recited in nauseating detail the madman's five reasons for committing infanticide in order to spare the environment.

First, there was the exploitation of infants as a food source, in other words, cannibalism. Even now, months after the fact, Felix remembered how sick he'd been when he first learned the truth, dry heaves and all.

Next, there was the competition for resources. By starving or murdering another man's infant—but not actually eating it—the killer could increase the nutriments available to himself and his own family.

Third, there was the competition between males for access to fertile females. By murdering another man's offspring, the killer gained an opportunity to put that man's female to work producing more of his progeny. Rontana clearly relished this "murder and rape" method as his personal favorite.

The fourth he labeled "compassionate infanticide." In the poverty-stricken areas where it was practiced, compassionate infanticide was typically rendered by the mother, just after birth. This she did with regret—and because she felt she had no choice. The problem was a lack of resources. If she already had a thriving four-year-old, the arrival of a newborn threatened the survival of the older child. To protect her investment in the healthy four-year-old, the newborn had to be put to death.

Reason number five was pure social pathology: slaughtering for sport. Beyond the sheer joy of killing, no tangible benefit of any kind accrued to the killer. It was ghastly behavior, and of the basest sort.

Like everything Rontana wrote or said, his manifesto was demented in the extreme. However, just simply reading it wasn't enough; Patterson wanted his men to commit every little sick nuance to memory. Then came the survival training — weeks of it. And after that, the military psychologist.

The men called her Dr. Death. She was tough as nails and every bit as evil as her subject. Her job was simple — to make sure the men in Wenger's unit understood what sort of man they were up against. And her qualifications? She still bore the scars of her imprisonment in one of Rontana's death camps. Dr. Death might have been pretty once, Felix thought. That is, before Rontana got ahold of her.

She told them that fanatics like Rontana depended on a personality cult to be successful. That, in order to usurp existing lines of authority, such a man had to debunk any and all conventionally held "truths." That no institution was exempt from the degradation — not God, not science, not even the rules of law which had governed western civilization for the past three thousand years. Everything was fair game, for it was only by debasing society's traditional heroes that a powerful lunatic could hope to substitute his own warped personality for the idols he wanted so desperately to topple.

To Rontana's followers, religion and mysticism were more convincing than science or fact. To Rontana himself, life meant nothing. Indeed, by the time the President decided to act, several hundred million people had already died at his hand.

The question was, how could otherwise normal people have lined up behind such a monster? And why, given the terrible suffering he'd unleashed upon the peoples he'd subjugated, had he not been overthrown? To Felix and the others, it didn't make any sense!

Dr. Death did her best to explain the apparent contradiction: A ruthless and cunning leader could remain in power, even when he brings untold anguish to his people, because of something she called the "paradox of collective action."

She summarized the paradox this way: The gains from removing an evil leader accrue to the population as a whole — including those who have done nothing whatsoever to get rid of him. Yet, the risks of opposing such a dictator — prison, disenfranchisement, loss of life — are borne entirely by those who take action against him. Although everyone would undoubtedly gain if the totalitarian leader were overthrown, the gain to any one single individual — or even to a small group acting in concert — is usually too small to make the risk worthwhile. She herself had been caught trying — and severely punished. Raped repeatedly; cut up like a piece of meat; burnt, whipped, and left for dead. It was a miracle she survived.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, and Dr. Death meant to have hers. Training Grundal Patterson's team was part of it — therapy, if you will. But it was only a start. The doctors that patched her up could have given her back her pretty face, they could have reconstructed the breasts Rontana's people hacked away, they could have blotted from her mind the terrible memories. But she wanted no part of it. Rehabilitation was for pansies. She wanted nothing less than to join the team — Patterson's team — and have her revenge.

That's why now, on this moonlit night in 2282, seventy-five men — plus one woman — lay hidden in the cold Saudi sand. Their purpose was clear. The order had been given. The President wanted this monster eliminated. It was up to them to kill the sick son of a bitch.

In this enterprise, surprise and stealth were their allies. But if they met with stiff resistance, there would be no second chances. No squadron of airchops sitting waiting behind the next dune, ready to swoop in and save their skins if they got into trouble. No columns of infantry standing nearby, eager to rush in and whisk them all to safety if anything went wrong. They were totally on their own. The last team had failed miserably, and now it was up to them — Skinny, Tex, Oiler, Matthews, and all the rest. Get in, get out, and get back to the jeeps alive.

Suddenly Wenger's head filled with sound. The long wait was finally over.

"This is it, boys. Move! Move! Move!"

Along the entire length of the dune now there was a concerted movement forward. Not movement as in a desperate charge up an enemy hill, but stealthy movement, quiet movement, as in a cat silently stalking his prey.

The men of Lead Corps would advance up the center, Alpha Unit along the right, Beta to the left. Wenger himself would never get in that close — and for good reason. He was one of just two pyrotech specialists assigned to the team. The other was Nate "Tiger" Matthews on the opposite ridge. Each was a munitions expert, the best in their field. No one knew manual firebombs or dynamite megaflares better than those two. Without them, the team stood almost no chance of success.

Crawling on his belly now, Felix "Flix" Wenger began edging cautiously forward over the ridge of the wind-sculpted dune. He was in his element here, doing what he knew best. His nickname said it all. Flix. The sound a lighter makes when the cylinder is spun to fetch a spark. Flint against metal. Flix had earned the handle because he much preferred the old-style manual lighters to the newer electronic ones. The newer ones were much too finnicky for his taste. Left no room for error when lighting one of those ill-tempered three-second fuses.

Flix moved into position. The spot had been chosen for him ahead of time, by Patterson, after carefully studying the satellite-generated topo-maps of the strike zone. The spot he'd chosen for Flix was just below the lip of the dune, and off to one side where Flix would have a perfect view of the proceedings. From this perch he could see everything.

The men of Lead Corps were sliding silently down into the depression now, keeping to the shadows wherever possible. Their pulse guns were at the ready.

Overhead, the hover-drones scanned the area for any sign that they'd been spotted. Some of the drones were aloft; others had dropped to the ground, burying themselves in the sand. All were in nonstop communication with Patterson and the other men.

In the eyes of the hover-drones the enemy camp was transparent, its defenders naked and vulnerable to remarkably precise attack. The fist-sized drones were capable of dispatching real or burst-timed data, all triangulated in three dimensions and further accuratized by the web of global positioning satellites which blanketed the planet 150 kilometers up. The drones — hundreds of them — could collect virtually all forms of data, everything a battlefield commander could possibly want — optical, infrared, acoustic, seismic, chemical, radar, signal — thus painting for him an extraordinarily-rich target map, not to mention providing constant status reports and precise geographic coordinates, all within a fraction of a second. About the only things they couldn't do was look through solid rock or predict when bad luck would strike. Otherwise, there would be no explaining what happened next.

Flix saw it first from his angle atop the ridge, a glint of moonlight reflecting off a pair of nightvision goggles. He swore under his breath. This early in the game people shouldn't be making stupid mistakes! The goggles they'd been given were supposed to be totally black to light in the visual range, but this particular pair was anything but.

Something had gone terribly wrong, but what? Had the soldier picked up the wrong set of goggles back at base camp? Had he gotten them wet, thus destroying their zero-reflect polymer skin? Or — God forbid — was the man a Rontana sympathizer, here to sabotage the mission? Whatever it was, it couldn't be good. If an enemy soldier had spotted the flash of light as Flix had, all bets were off. No amount of fancy hover-drone technology could rebalance the books once the element of surprise was lost.

Justifying his own worst fears, Flix next heard the sound of an auto-tripod-gun coming online and then being fired.

Pfft, pfft.

Twice, in rapid succession, the well-oiled machine popped out of the sand and sent one of its deadly messengers on its way. Their arrival on target a moment later sent an agonizing gasp of pain coursing through Flix's headcomm. Sentry robots didn't miss. Ever. And what was worse, they alerted their human masters to the presence of intruders. It would only be a matter of moments now before the hostile lair came alive. These would be soldiers — real soldiers — the kind that could think and move and shoot. The kind that Petterson's team had been sent here to kill.

The pair of tracers that brought an end to the owner of the nightvision goggles also put the implementation of Patterson's battle plan on a fast track. Within seconds, the commandos of Lead Corps began to answer in kind the death of their teammate. Beginning with a stacatto round of bursts from their pulse guns, they pounded the enemy encampment with everything they had. Any pretense of quiet or stealth was lost now as both Alpha and Beta Units joined in on the fight. As Flix watched, the attack exploded in full force along the entire perimeter of the camp.

Stray bullets blew burning logs from the cooking fires, filling the air with sparks. Concussion grenades rocked the camp throwing up dust and sand by the truckload, making it impossible to see. What air there was was choked with fumes as the pulse guns ionized the oxygen and superheated the nitrogen. Then, under cover of the duststorm they themselves had created, Lead Corps opened up with their flame-throwers, scorching everything in sight as they advanced.

With the situation rapidly turning chaotic, Flix vaulted into action, executing the steps he'd rehearsed so many times before. Moving quickly now, he reached into his rucksack, pulled out a megaflare launcher, and firmly anchored it in the sand. Across the valley he knew Lieutenant Matthews would be doing the same.

Supported atop a slender tripod no more than half a meter tall, the size of this nasty little device did scant justice to its awesome destructive capabilities. Cinched into place and linked to the gps computer, this lethal delivery-system had but one purpose — to hurl baseball-sized globes of lyddite-gel high into the air over the contact area. Once they reached their apogee, the megaflare globes would shatter into a thousand pieces, each a glowing red-hot cinder.

At first, the seemingly innocuous bits would do little more than illuminate the battlefield. But then, as the shower of glowing shards fell from the sky like a sprinkling of fireflies, the burning and maiming would begin. It would be a scorching rain and no soldier — enemy or otherwise — could long withstand its flesh-searing fury. Indeed, any man struck by one of these fiery cinders would be so badly incapacitated by the pain, he would be unable to take aim or return fire. Retaliation became an impossibility.

For the fourth time in under two minutes, Flix checked the latest databurst from the hover-drones for the current windspeed and direction. After the terrible accident last summer, no one knew better than Flix how a red-hot cinder could burn a friendly just as easily as it could an enemy. That incident was still fresh in his mind now as he made a final visual sweep of the area. Though not directly responsible for the calamity himself, it nearly cost him his commission. He wasn't going to risk making the same mistake twice.

Satisfied after one further adjustment that he wasn't about to unleash a cascade of hellfire-rain on his own men, Flix lit the fuse and catapulted the first of his megaflare globes skyward. He watched it go — higher and higher — a tight smile erupting on his face. It was a beautiful sight, and the adrenalin surge made him feel lightheaded.

As the globe reached the top of its flight path — and before the burning shards began to descend — the night sky was briefly as bright as the dawn. For a moment, the light-readings from the hover-drones went off the scale.

The illumination made the camp appear surreal. In the intense chemical light, all colors went flat, as if the sudden flood of luminescence had robbed them of any reflection. The enemy soldiers were scurrying about, looking for cover. Patterson's men, their eyes shielded, began picking them off, one by one.

Then, as abruptly as it had begun, everything changed again. Now, as the glare from the exhausted megaflare dimmed, the colors returned. But in the fading light, something new occurred — there was screaming.

Carried aloft by the wind, the seared screams reached Flix's ears. The stench of scorched flesh brushed past his nose.

To keep from gagging, Flix put his hand over his mouth. It was a reflex action and it lasted only a fraction of a second. By then the sky had gone white again. Flix's counterpart on the opposite ridge had launched one of his own megaflares into the night. Again the adrenalin rush.

"Switch to nitro!" Commander Patterson ordered sharply, his worried voice booming through the headcomm.

Recognizing that Lead Corps had probably moved in too close now for him to safely use another megaflare, Specialist "Flix" Wenger again reached into his rucksack. This time his hand closed around an aluminum canister marked EXTREMELY VOLATILE in bold red letters on the outside. The metal was cold to the touch.

A nitro-projectile was a most unpleasant incendiary device. In the first stage a pressurized mist composed of pure oxygen and a highly-flammable fuel is released over the target area, a circle of death perhaps 500 meters in circumference. The explosive fumes spread rapidly through the air until, in the second stage, the fog is brought to the ignition point by a powerful thermal-fuse. A huge blast and ferocious firestorm follow.

Within the circle of death, temperatures can reach upwards of 700 degrees Fahrenheit. The shock wave from the blast can level buildings, explode minefields, blow out eardrums, collapse eyeballs, even suffocate unsuspecting troops as the air is literally sucked out of their lungs by the fire's prodigious burn-rate. Anyone who manages to survive the blast and the firestorm would be so badly burned they might wish afterwards that they had died instead.

"Thirty seconds to nitro from my mark," Flix announced through the comm as he set the timer.

"Do not enter central strike zone!" Commander Patterson warned his troops. "I repeat: clear central!"

The light-burst from Matthews' second megaflare had already crested when Flix's nitro-projectile went incendiary. There was a flash of white light, then a roar like a freight train.

The nitro burned so furiously and consumed so much oxygen so quickly, the detonation produced a curious effect. Instead of blowing things outward, away from the point of detonation like a grenade or a bomb might, the inferno gave rise to a violent inrushing of air, something akin to a small tornado. The only benefit was, the torrent of inrushing air also drowned out the blood-curdling screams of the victims it claimed.

Now, when the nitro storm receded, Flix was astounded to see a handful of Rontana's men still standing. At first, he thought they were nothing more than a company of holo-soldiers painted by some hidden camera, but then he realized they were real. To have survived the attack unharmed, they must have been standing guard just outside the blast zone. And yet, it was apparent from the way they moved that they weren't unharmed. Their gait was jerky and irregular, their movements uncoordinated. The soldiers, though still very much alive, had been so badly stunned by the blast, they were incapable now of putting up much of a fight. This opened the door for Alpha Unit to take advantage of the situation.

Moving quickly now, and before the floundering soldiers had a chance to recover, the sharpshooters of Alpha Unit began picking off what few remained of Rontana's men. They were supported in this effort by the men of Delta and Epsilon.

Illuminated from behind by the blaze of burning debris, Rontana's men made easy targets.

One by one they went down, and in under half a minute the dirty deed was done. No one was spared. Everyone was killed. Now, except for the whimpering of some wounded mongrel dog, all was quiet, like before.

Minutes passed. The burning nitro cooled. Flix didn't move. He remained on high alert, waiting for orders. From where he sat, high up on the bluff, his legs pressed against the sand, he could see the entire enemy camp. There was no sign of movement. Anywhere.

At long last the silence was broken. The comm at the base of his skull crackled with life. Patterson's voice was strong. And confident.

"Perimeter secure. Lead Corps, move in. Beta, cover their flank. Exercise extreme vigilance. No mistakes."

Holding his position, Flix observed the guarded movements of his teammates from Lead Corps. Keeping to the shadows, they were cautiously advancing towards the center of the decimated camp. They wore desert fatigues to conceal their bodies, plus black balaclavas with eyeholes to cover their head, neck, and shoulders.

"Alpha Unit, fan out and execute sweep," Patterson continued.

Mobilized by his instructions, eight men broke cover and began a systematic search of the area.

"Delta Unit, swing left and shut down those sentry robots. Epsilon, swing right," Patterson ordered, alarmed by the faint thermal blip showing up on the latest hover-drone readout. "And watch out for booby traps. Lead Corps, hold your . . . "

Lead Corps never heard Grundal Patterson's order to hold their position because they were suddenly overwhelmed by forty or fifty of Rontana's finest.

At first, it was impossible to say where they all came from, but then Flix saw the light streaming from the desert floor. Like an angry hive of bees, they were swarming out of a hidden, underground bunker.

Rontana's men struck fast, and they struck hard. Their attack was vicious, and in a matter of moments they had cut down most of Lead Corps and all of Delta Unit.

The men of Alpha Unit immediately retaliated, but not before a second wave of enemy troops had exploded from their subterranean hiding place and begun spraying the desert with hot lead.

Flix gasped. Patterson's men were dropping like flies!

How could this have happened? he wondered, staring at the tragedy unfolding before him. What could have gone wrong?

For the hover-drones not to have seen this coming, the bunker these men must have been hiding in had to have been sunk deep and lined with stealth materials. For the nitro storm not to have incinerated them along with everything else, the bunker must have been sealed shut at just the critical moment. But what were the chances?

Everything pointed now to an inside job, an apple gone rotten. First the goggles and now this. Had something similar happened to the previous team?

Intelligence on this was low. The list — if there was one — would have to be short, darn short. Who among them could have managed it? Who knew Rontana's movements well enough? Who was so far above suspicion that . . . ?

Flix's jaw dropped as the truth hit him like a ton of bricks. Dr. Death. That sweet, sweet girl who had been maimed, raped, and tortured. She had double-crossed every last one of them. Paradox of collective action indeed!

The first screams reached his ears. His buddies were dying now, and in great number. The bitch had killed them all, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it.

For Flix and for Tiger Matthews this was the worst of all possible scenarios. While they were in little personal danger themselves, they were powerless to stop the carnage. Patterson had ordered them to remain in the rear, away from the fighting, and unless they wanted to unleash the fury of their hellfire weapons on their own men, there was no way now for either of them to dip into their pyrotechnic bag of tricks. With the battle already at close quarters, their hands were tied.

The savage duel raged for nearly a quarter of an hour. Once the pulse guns were drained of their ammo, the combatants turned to pistols. And when the flame-throwers ran out of fuel, they turned to knives.

Eventually the fighting degenerated into a brutal hand-to-hand contest. Only, the two sides were not evenly matched. Rontana's people possessed superior cover — and greater numbers — and with each passing minute they were steadily gaining the upper hand. It wasn't long before the battle had clearly become a desperate, one-sided affair. One after another of Flix's buddies dropped off the hover-drone report as still being "active."

Then it happened: Commander Patterson's stern voice thundered over the comm, drowning out everything else.

"Flix, we're in trouble down here. You and Matthews have to finish it. I want a nitro-projectile from each of you. Now!"

"But Commander," Flix protested, "you'll be killed for sure!"

"We're dead already," Patterson stoically replied.

"But, sir, there must be another way."

"Damn it, man! I order you to finish it. There is no other way. Do it. Now!"

Drawing a deep breath to flush the adrenalin from his system, Flix reluctantly did as he was told. Stoney-faced, like a robot, he snapped a canister of nitro into place and catapulted it high into the night sky. On the opposite ridge, Matthews did the same. Then, touching the sub-cutaneous switch beneath his ear, Flix shut off his comm. He would follow orders if he had to, but no one could make him listen to the anguished cries of his comrades while they died.

As the circle of death engulfed friend and foe alike, Flix cringed at the thought of what he'd just done. Someone had to walk the wall, but why did it have to be him?

Bitterly cursing what he had become, Flix sobbed quietly, his tears falling to the cold, cold sand.