JOHN J. CORMACK President of the United States

MICHAEL ODELL Vice President of the United States

JAMES DONALDSON Secretary of State

MORTON STANNARD Secretary of Defense

WILLIAM WALTERS Attorney General

HUBERT REED Secretary of the Treasury

BRAD JOHNSON National Security Adviser

DONALD EDMONDS Director, FBI

PHILIP KELLY Assistant Director, Criminal Investigations Division, FBI

KEVIN BROWN Deputy Assistant Director, CID, FBI

LEE ALEXANDER Director, CIA

DAVID WEINTRAUB Deputy Director (Operations), CIA

QUINN The negotiator

DUNCAN MCCREA Junior field agent, CIA

IRVING MOSS Discharged CIA agent

SAM SOMERVILLE Field agent, FBI

CYRUS V. MILLER Oil tycoon

MELVILLE SCANLON Shipping tycoon

PETER COBB Armaments industrialist

BEN SALKIND Armaments industrialist

LIONEL MOIR Armaments industrialist

CREIGHTON BURBANK Director, Secret Service

ROBERT EASTERHOUSE Free-lance security consultant and Saudi expert

ANDREW LAING Bank official, Saudi Arabian Investment Bank

SIMON American student at Balliol College, Oxford

PATRICK SEYMOUR Legal counselor and FBI agent, American embassy, London

LOU COLLINS Liaison officer, CIA, London

MARGARET THATCHERPrime Minister

SIR HARRY MARRIOTT Home Secretary

SIR PETER IMBERT Commissioner, Metropolitan Police

NIGEL CRAMER Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Specialist Operations Department, Metropolitan Police

JULIAN HAYMAN Free-lance security company chairman

COMMANDER PETER WILLIAMS Investigation officer, Specialist Operations Department, Metropolitan Police

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV General Secretary, Communist Party of the Soviet Union

GENERAL VLADIMIR KRYUCHKOV Chairman, KGB MAJOR

PAVEL KERKORIAN KGB rezident in Belgrade

GENERAL VADIM KIRPICHENKO Deputy Head, First Chief Directorate, KGB

IVAN KOZLOV Marshal of the U.S.S.R. MAJOR GENERAL

ZEMSKOV Chief planner, Soviet General Staff

ANDREI Field agent, KGB

KUYPER Belgian thug

BERTIE VAN EYCK Director, Walibi Theme Park, Belgium

DIETER LUTZ Hamburg journalist

HANS MORITZ Dortmund brewer

HORST LENZLINGER Oldenburg arms dealer

WERNER BERNHARDT Former Congo mercenary

PAPA DE GROOT Dutch provincial police chief

CHIEF INSPECTOR DYKSTRA Dutch provincial detective

The dream came again, just before the rain. He did not hear the rain. In his sleep the dream possessed him.

There was the clearing again, in the forest in Sicily, high above Taormina. He emerged from the forest and walked slowly toward the center of the space, as agreed. The attaché case was in his right hand. In the middle of the clearing he stopped, placed the case on the ground, went back six paces, and dropped to his knees. As agreed. The case contained a billion lire.

It had taken six weeks to negotiate the child’s release, quick by most precedents. Sometimes these cases went on for months. For six weeks he had sat beside the expert from the carabinieri’s Rome office-another Sicilian but on the side of the angels-and had advised on tactics. The carabinieri officer did all the talking. Finally the release of the daughter of the Milan jeweler, snatched from the family’s summer home near Cefalù beach, had been arranged. A ransom of close to a million U.S. dollars, after a start-off demand for five times that sum, but finally the Mafia had agreed.

From the other side of the clearing a man emerged, unshaven, rough-looking, masked, with a Lupara shotgun slung over his shoulder. He held the ten-year-old girl by one hand. She was barefoot, frightened, pale, but she looked unharmed. Physically, at least. The pair walked toward him; he could see the bandit’s eyes staring at him through the mask, then flickering across the forest behind him.

The Mafioso stopped at the case, growled at the girl to stand still. She obeyed. But she stared across at her rescuer with huge dark eyes. Not long now, kid. Hang in there, baby.

The bandit flicked through the rolls of bills in the case until satisfied he had not been cheated. The tall man and the girl looked at each other. He winked; she gave a small flicker of a smile. The bandit closed the case and began to retreat, facing forward, to his side of the clearing. He had reached the trees when it happened.

It was not the carabinieri man from Rome; it was the local fool. There was a clatter of rifle fire; the bandit with the case stumbled and fell. Of course his friends were strung out through the pine trees behind him, in cover. They fired back. In a second the clearing was torn by chains of flying bullets. He screamed, “Down!” in Italian but she did not hear, or panicked and tried to run toward him. He came off his knees and hurled himself across the twenty feet between them.

He almost made it. He could see her there, just beyond his fingertips, inches beyond the hard right hand that would drag her down to safety in the long grass. He could see the fright in her huge eyes, the little white teeth in her screaming mouth… and then the bright crimson rose that bloomed on the front of her thin cotton dress. She went down then as if punched in the back and he recalled lying over her, covering her with his body until the firing stopped and the Mafiosi escaped through the forest. He remembered sitting there holding her, cradling the tiny limp body in his arms, weeping and shouting at the uncomprehending and too-late-apologetic local police: “No, no, sweet Jesus, not again…”

Winter had come early that year. Already by the end of the month the first forward scouts, borne on a bitter wind out of the northeastern steppes, were racing across the rooftops to probe Moscow ’s defenses.

The Soviet General Staff headquarters building stands at 19, Frunze Street, a gray stone edifice from the 1930s facing its much more modern eight-story high-rise annex across the street. At his window on the top floor of the old block the Soviet Chief of Staff stood, staring out at the icy flurries, and his mood was as bleak as the coming winter.

Marshal Ivan K. Kozlov was sixty-seven, two years older than the statutory retirement age, but in the Soviet Union, as everywhere else, those who made the rules never deemed they should apply to them. At the beginning of the year he had succeeded the veteran Marshal Akhromeyev, to the surprise of most in the military hierarchy. The two men were as unlike as chalk and cheese. Where Akhromeyev had been a small, stick-thin intellectual, Kozlov was a big, bluff, white-haired giant, a soldier’s soldier, son, grandson, and nephew of soldiers. Although only the third-ranking First Deputy Chief before his promotion, he had jumped the two men ahead of him, who had slipped quietly into retirement. No one had any doubts as to why he had gone to the top; from 1987 to 1989 he had quietly and expertly supervised the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, an exercise that had been achieved without any scandals, major defeats, or (most important of all) publicized loss of national face, even though the wolves of Allah had been snapping at the Russian heels all the way to the Salang Pass. The operation had brought him great credit in Moscow, bringing him to the personal attention of the General Secretary himself.