The steward left.

"What now, Mr. President?" Hall asked.

"Natalie said I should go back to Washington about now. Maybe with your resignation in my pocket. So what I'm going to do is wait until we hear from General Naylor that the 727 is not in Chad and never has been."

"Mr. President, I serve at your pleasure," Hall said. "Would you like me to prepare my resignation?"

"No. I may have to ask for it eventually, but I don't like throwing people to the wolves because of my mistakes, especially when they've done nothing but their very best to do what I told them to do."

[FOUR]

Abeche, Chad

2305 9 June 2005

Two men dressed in the loose cotton robes worn by inhabitants of the Chadian desert sat in a small, light tan-colored tent three hundred yards off the end of the runway of the Abeche airfield.

One was Sergeant First Class Frederick Douglass Lewis, a very tall, very thin twenty-six-year-old from Baltimore, in whose home was hung a framed photograph of himself in full uniform. He was shown with his arm around an African-a very tall, very thin Watusi-in a sort of a robe, standing on one leg, sort of supporting himself on a long spear. Both men were smiling broadly at the camera. On closer examination, one might notice both men had the same face. Lewis, who was pretty good at screwing around with digital photographs, had superimposed his face on that of the African tribesman.

He had also superimposed the face of his wife on a photograph of Janet Jackson in a very revealing costume. Mrs. Lewis, whose father was pastor of Baltimore's Second African Methodist Episcopal Church and still carried a lot of that around with her, had not been amused.

Sergeant Lewis was the Gray Fox team communicator. He sat down with a communications device between his legs, making minor adjustments trying, as he thought of it, to make all the lights go green.

It was taking a little longer than it usually did, but finally all the LEDs were green.

"We're up, Colonel," Sergeant Lewis said.

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J. Davenport, who commanded Gray Fox and who was unusually in personal command of this team operation, gave Sergeant Lewis a thumbs-up signal but did not raise his eyes from the communications device on the ground between his legs. It looked, more than anything else, like a small laptop computer.

He read what he had typed:

3. RECON PRODUCED:

(PROB-FIVE) FUEL BLADDERS.

B. FOLLOWING SUPPORTING DETAILS:

4. SUMMARY:

The first paragraph-"All well"-covered a lot of ground: Six men, and all their equipment, had successfully made a Halo parachute descent from a jet transport at 35,000 feet and landed with all their equipment (and themselves) intact and functioning precisely where they had intended to land. They had carried out their reconnaissance mission without being detected, which of course also meant that no one had been killed, injured, or lost.

The second paragraph reported-with a probability factor of nine on a one-to-ten scale-what Colonel Davenport believed to be the facts. The rest of the message gave his reasons and his best guesses.

There was no address and no signature. The way the system was set up at the moment, the message was going to Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab only and he knew that only one person could have sent it.

When Colonel Davenport pushed the send key, the message would be first encrypted and then sent to a satellite circling the earth at an altitude of 27,000 miles. The satellite-having been programmed to do so-then would relay the message to a device which another Gray Fox communicator had set for General McNab in the VIP Guest Quarters assigned to him at the Royal Air Force Base at Medina, Morocco. There, when General McNab typed in the seven-digit access code, the message would be decrypted and displayed on the screen of what without the secret communications technology would be an ordinary laptop computer.

The entire process would take from three to ten seconds, depending mostly on how quickly General McNab typed in the access code.

Colonel Davenport looked at Sergeant Lewis, who checked to make sure all the LEDs were still green and then gave Colonel Davenport a thumbs-up.

Colonel Davenport pushed the SEND key and then straightened up and flexed his shoulders.

For some reason, whenever he was involved in something like this Colonel Davenport always thought of the signaling device that had fascinated him when-then a young lieutenant-he had first seen it in the museum at the Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

Like the signaling device he was using now, the purpose was to communicate between a scouting unit and a headquarters.

The device at Huachuca-which Davenport guessed had lain in a warehouse at the old Indian fighting post in the desert for maybe a century before someone had stumbled across it and decided it belonged in the museum-had never been issued. It had looked as if had come from the factory in Waltham, Massachusetts, last week.

It was mounted on a varnished wooden tripod, the legs of which were adjustable both for height and for uneven terrain. On top-where a camera would go-was a collection of simple mirrors, a lever, and a sighting device.

Cavalry patrols scouting for hostile Indians carried the signaling device with them, and, while looking for the Indians, also kept an eye open for high ground from which they could see their command post and on which the device could quickly be set up.