A Clear and Present Danger (12 page)

Two “security incidents” were boxed with red-ink borders in the young man’s notebook. In one case, an incident concerned the
matter of a religious fanatic in the Reverend Moon cult who was arrested for selling Moonie “gifts” art the Hanford Atomic
Reservation in Washington State and who eluded police and guards for several hours by hiding in a restricted laboratory. That
was in June of 1977.

In another case, two antinuclear activists in Virginia had sneaked into a power plant in their state, damaged the fuel rods,
and then announced how they had set the stage for dangerous waste leakage, to demonstrate the potential for catastrophic disaster
by sabotage. The young activists were convicted of trespassing and jailed.

Further jottings and notations included the words from a 1976 NRC press release:

“No plant has been determined to be out of compliance with existing regulations. All are operating under safeguard plans.
Based on our ongoing studies, we perceive no reasonable cause for taking actions beyond the prompt and thoroughgoing ones
that have already been initiated.”

The young man closed the covers of the two government documents from which he had taken copious notes. He picked up his briefcase
and slipped his notebook inside.

As he pulled on his trenchcoat, he thought to himself how overly easy it had been to plot his next course of action.

There had been no special skills involved. No midnight break-ins of the Department of Energy Building in Washington, as he
had thought he might have to accomplish when he first arrived in America; no stolen combinations for underground vaults; no
hurried snaps of a laser microfilm camera.

He had done these things before, having been trained in his craft since puberty. But nothing in his training had prepared
him psychologically for the baffling openness of the American culture, the almost complete lack of concern for the spies swarming
all over the country. He wrote it off to the overconfidence of a still young and continentalnation, a nation of secure borders
unmatched anywhere in the world.

Besides, what had America to fear from the likes of Canada and Mexico?

He shook his head, grinning conspiratorially. What a foolish country, he thought. All his training—training by a man the world
would soon bow to—and he had only to drop into a public library, flash a card, and spend all the time he needed with the shelves
containing America’s secrets.

The young man walked out of the library. It was raining. He stuffed his briefcase into the folds of his trench-coat to protect
it against the weather.

He headed to his car, a ten-year-old Chevrolet, and realized that he now had just about everything he needed to hold the world
hostage. Yet he had broken no law.

As he drove off the lot of the White Plains Public Library, he hummed the melody to an advertising air he remembered from
his indoctrination period, a full year of being steeped in films and television and books depicting the American popular culture.
The tune, he recalled, was sung at the beginning and end of a 1950s television variety show starring Dinah Shore.

“See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet—America’s the greatest land of all!”

And the most naive.

ANDORRA, the Pyrenees, 16 March 1981

They had made love twice before falling asleep. The first time quietly, almost unimaginatively. It was an exploration. The
second time was a noisy, sweating affair, wild and abandoned.

As he slept, his half-consciousness reflected on the ride in Sigrid’s Maserati up into the hills. Never had he seen such beautiful
country, such mysterious hills.

Exposed, heavily eroded granite arched in broken, odd-shaped peaks, moist clouds ringing each formation. Some mad giant, it
seemed in his dreams, had flung about great hunks of rock. Some of the rocks landed gracefully, others were heaped haphazardly
one atop the other. Inside these formations, soil blown by heavy winds found collection points. Trees rooted themselves precariously
from these hidden holes, curling up over the precipices to reach the life-giving rain and sunlight, their haggard limbs resembling
at times the legs and arms of human beings.

Mountain peaks clad in these forlorn ranges of trees, half-rooted in granite, disappeared into moonlit fog and heavy clouds.
As they drove up the face of the mountain, Ben saw the remains of shacks, once the homes of goat-herders and shepherds, later
outlaws who roamed the hills during the some seven hundred years Andorra was fought over by various invasions of French, Spanish,
and Moroccans.

Waterfalls, mostly small ones dropping ledge to ledge, connected swiftly moving rivers of ice-cold water. The terrain was
hauntingly like that of Dante’s inferno.

As they rounded a bend on a heavily rutted, narrow road, near the top of a middle peak, Sigrid had pointed to a massive block
of piled stones, huge and black, silhouetted against the backlight of the moon.

“That is where I live,” she said. “It is the remains of a castle. The bare remains, I should say.”

And so it was.

The castle was little more than a huge round tower, with entrances into underground corridors—or what Slayton assumed were
corridors dug into the mountain face—closed by ancient rock slides, probably the result of fierce battle and cannon fire.

There were several floors. Slayton would explore the place in the daylight. His need for the beautiful German woman was sufficiently
urgent to keep him in on this clear night. He had followed her across a rotting board that spanned the remains of a moat,
then up the narrow steps from the ground floor to Sigrid’s loft.

Slits of windows overlooked a wide plain, dropping off more than a thousand feet, Sigrid had told him, to a field of boulders.
In the pale yellow illumination of the moon, she had slipped off her clothing, revealing her perfect form.

As he slept now, his mind a jumble of impressions, he shifted in her bed. Momentarily he was confused by the feel of a woman
next to him, by the feel of the thin mountain air.

But Slayton’s head cleared and he woke fully to her touch. A dull red light was forming in the sky. Soon it would be dawn.
Sigrid had already risen and now she was kneeling over his body, her high, soft breasts moving gently to the rhythm of her
hands as they massaged his naked chest and stomach.

His eyes were half open as he watched her take hold of his penis. She stroked it softly, a deep gutteral sound cooing in her
throat. She leaned downward and covered the head of his penis with her lips.

Slayton heard himself rumble, felt himself pulse with desire as he swelled inside her warm mouth. He listened to her sibilant
sounds. He felt her long hair, held her to him, thrust into her. He could hold back no longer.

When she had finished, she lay back in the bed. He moved to her, covering her chest with his own. As he kissed her, he could
taste himself on her lips and tongue.

The two of them twisted into each other, their bodies warm and wet. He was on his back. She slid on top of him, covering the
length of his body with her own, her long arms and legs draped over him.

She spread her thighs and sat upright in one quick, smooth motion. Her narrow, taut hips were poised over his erection. She
plunged down onto him, filling herself, shouting as she did so.

He watched, transfixed by the sight of his own hard member disappearing into her soft darkness over and over as she moved
up and down on him. The sounds of her German words were muffled by the wet sounds of their sex.

Slayton closed his eyes again, weary from the long night and from Sigrid’s insatiable passions. He drifted off. He couldn’t
remember it ending… .

… When he awakened, it was to the sharp sound of gunfire.

TOKYO, Japan

The apartment house on Ginza Street was quiet. A bell from the nearby square at Tokyo Station signaled the midnight hour.
Tomorrow was a work day. The Meijiza and Kabuki Theatres, to the north and south of the apartment house, had long ago dispensed
their early evening audiences.

Tokyo is a city of early risers, even in the Ginza, the most fashionable and the most colorful street. Residents of the apartment
house were highly paid professionals, for the most part, with a smattering of foreign businessmen and assorted diplomats who
found it especially convenient because of its proximity to the Imperial Palace and the Diet Building.

Outside, the only sound was that of strolling police officers, dressed in navy blue tunics and red sashes, armed only with
nightsticks and whistles. Two blocks away, a mechanized street sweeper could be heard wetting down the pavement, its giant
circular brushes rubbing the surface of the street.

The newest tenant in the apartment house glanced out her window to the street. The Ginza was empty, save for the reassuring
sight of the police foot patrols. She walked from the window and stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray full of butts.

Her guests lay quietly sleeping, their bodies strewn about the studio in sleeping bags and beneath blankets spread out on
two small sofas and a chair.

She was Italian—of medium size, but much larger than the Japanese women asleep with their men in her apartment. Her companion,
a small but powerfully built Japanese man, was still awake. He was making them a small pot of tea.

She joined him at the kitchen end of her apartment, draping an arm around his muscular shoulders as he removed a kettle from
the range and poured it over green tea leaves in a ceramic pot. They sat down together at a little table. She lit a cigarette
and smoked as they waited for the tea to steep.

“When will he come?” she asked. They spoke in English.

“Not for three more days.”

“You are sure?”

“It is what the Wolf has said.”

The woman raised her hand to silence him from speaking further.

“What was that?” she whispered.

He had heard nothing, and told her so.

She walked to the window again, nonetheless. All was still quiet in the Ginza. The policemen had passed the building. They
would return a few more times this way before the night was over.

She decided that she had heard nothing.

A man on the roof of her building watched as she left the window. He signaled to another man, who in turn signaled to two
more.

Four men, two of them Americans, two Japanese, stepped through the darkness to the front of the roof edge. Silently, they
let drop their rappelling ropes to a few feet above the ledge line of the new tenant’s floor. They secured the top ends by
hooking them into the steel railings.

Silently, the four made their way down the face of the apartment house, small steps at a time. Strapped to their backs were
lightweight Uzi submachine guns.

Inside the apartment building, a platoon of Americans made their way to an upper floor where the Italian woman lived. The
elevator shaft was adjacent to her apartment and they did not wish to arouse the slightest suspicion of their coming. Like
the men on the roof, the men in the stairwells also carried Uzis.

“You saw nothing?” the Japanese man said to her when she returned to her tea at the table.

“No. I was mistaken.”

She took another sip of tea. She thought she heard something once again.

When she looked up, she saw that he had heard it, too. He pulled a small pistol from his belt and advanced on the window,
through the shadows.

She picked up an AK-47, one of three lying on a butcherblock counter, and followed him.

He waved to her, ordering her to wake the others. As she did so, the slumbering guests clutched at their weapons involuntarily.
Their eyes fluttered open and cleared only after their hands were wrapped around AK-47s or Lugers, fingers set at the triggers.
It was a discipline born of many dread nights, nights when a whimper or a cough could mean a life lost. They were guerrillas,
and they were ready to make war on a second’s silent notice.

One by one, the bodies in the room came to, stood up, guns clutched in hands.

Outside, on the ledge, the four commandos could hear the rustling; they knew they had lost their only real weapon, the surprise
element. There would be death now on each side. Eyes widened and the sweat began to pour.

Commandos in the stairwells had reached their floor and were forming into flying wedge position at the door of the apartment,
ready to charge through the barrier at the first crack of machine-gun fire. One of their number listened closely at the door.
Something was different. The sounds of sleep had stopped.

A glint of light flashed on the barrel of a commando’s Uzi—light refracted from a fog lamp in the Ginza.

The scream of attack from inside the apartment came from first one and then a dozen or more young throats.

Then the bullets sprayed.

The commandos rushed through the two windows at the ledge, their Uzis sweeping the room in a horizontal, side-to-side shower
of bullets. Only the sound of dropping bodies told the commandos they had hit their targets in the pitch black of the apartment.

One of the American commandos felt fire at his throat and chin. A half-dozen bullets had made their mark. He made a futile
attempt to stop the gush of blood flowing from his neck. He was thrown back by the force of the bullets, back toward the window.
One more bullet crashed into his body, smashing his breast bone. He was thrown back wildly into the window, into the shards
of glass and beyond. His balance and his breath and his strength at an end, the commando fell to the street, losing his life
somewhere in the time it took for his broken body to hit the pavement.

The door to the apartment had burst open in that instant and the room filled with more commandos; the men with the Uzis poured
into the darkened studio, filling it with the dull popping repeater rhythm of their weapons. One of them fell immediately,
hit by the fire of the Italian woman. Her shouted revolutionary slogan betrayed her position. The burp of a Uzi sliced through
her abdomen and she pitched forward, then down to the floor.