By Order of the President (Presidential Agent 1)

“Why don’t you ride up in front with Sergeant Schneider, Mr. Halloran?”

Halloran considered that.

“No,” he said. “I’ll get in the back with the major. That’ll really give my goddamned neighbors something to talk about. ‘You saw the cops hauling Halloran off?’ ”

“They won’t think that,” Castillo said.

“You don’t know my goddamned neighbors,” Halloran said and got in the backseat.

Castillo got in beside Sergeant Schneider.

“Lucky you,” she said, softly.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Castillo said.

She smiled at him and their eyes met momentarily again as she started the car.

Castillo wondered if Chief Inspector Kramer ha

d managed to make contact with one or more of his undercover cops.

And he wondered how long it was going to take for somebody—probably a spook using a CIA-controlled satellite —to find out whether the 727 was, or had been, in Abéché. All Secretary Hall had said was that they hoped to have confirmation, one way or the other, soon.

Castillo looked at his watch.

It was five minutes after eleven. He thought that made it five after five in the afternoon in Abéché. He wondered what time sunset was there. Not long after that, certainly. If the CIA had not managed to get satellites over Abéché by now—or, say, in the next hour—daylight would be gone and they’d have to rely on heat-sensing techniques, which were not nearly as good.

[THREE]

Aboard Royal Air Maroc 905 Altitude 35,000 feet (FL 350) 19.55 degrees North Latitude 22.47 degrees East Longitude 1705 9 June 2005

“About seven minutes, Colonel,” the pilot’s voice came over the cabin loudspeaker. “Starting to slow it down now. I’ll depressurize in about five minutes. I’ll give you a heads-up.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J. Davenport, Special Forces, U.S. Army, a tall, lithe thirty-nine-year-old, glanced at his team of paratroopers prepping for the High Altitude, Low Opening (Halo) jump and nodded. He touched a small microphone button on his chest. “Understand seven minutes, ” he said. “How do you read?”

“Loud and clear,” the pilot replied.

Colonel Davenport’s mouth and nose were hidden by a black rubber oxygen mask. The rest of his face and neck were just about covered with a brownish black grease. He was wearing what looked like black nylon tights.

Davenport looked at his watch. It told him that he—and everybody else in the rear cabin—had been taking oxygen for the past hour and eleven minutes. On one wall of the cabin was a rack of oxygen bottles and a distribution system to which everybody was connected by a rubber umbilical cord, which also carried current to the jump suits.

What looked like black tights were actually state-of-the-art cold weather gear. Several thin layers of insulating material were laced with wire—like a toaster—providing heat. The heating wire current would be activated just before depressurization of the rear cabin began. Timing here was critical. The heating system was very efficient. If the heating wire was turned on too soon—when the cabin temperature was not double digits below zero—the jumpers would be quickly sweat soaked and suffering the effects of too much heat.

In theory, the heat generated was thermostatically controlled. And that usually worked. Usually.

Presuming it did and the jumpers exited the aircraft neither sweat soaked nor frozen, when the umbilical severed, a battery strapped to the right leg would continue to power the heating wires. Similarly, at the cutoff of the umbilical, oxygen would be fed to the jumper’s mask from an oxygen flask strapped to him.

In theory, an hour of the oxygen—which everyone called “Oh-Two” because of its chemical symbol—was sufficient to drive the nitrogen from the blood of the jumpers, so they would not suffer the very-high-altitude version of the bends when the cabin was depressurized and then when they were falling through the sky. Flight level 350 is in the troposphere.

The theory presumed that every jumper had breathed nothing but pure oxygen for an hour and that he had not taken off his mask long enough to have taken even one breath of the “normal” air in the pressurized cabin. Taking even one breath of normal air set the one hour on Oh-Two timer back to zero.

The cabin was pressurized to protect the jumpers against the temperatures of the troposphere. The temperature outside an aircraft at 35,000 feet above the earth is about forty degrees below zero—on both the Fahrenheit and the Celsius scales, interestingly.

Colonel Davenport moved a lever that changed his microphone ’s function from PRESS-TO-TALK to VOICE ACTUATED.

“Okay. In six-fifteen, we will start to depressurize. Balaclavas and helmets now. Carefully. Carefully.”

The balaclava mask came from the ski slopes. It was knitted of wool and covered the entire head except for the eyes. The ones used by Gray Fox were black. They were protection against cold, of course, but they also effectively concealed facial features.