Blancanales found cover in the deep shadows of an evergreen near parked cars, some distance away from the steps. Here he would wait. He sent a two-click signal to Gadgets and felt the tap on his shoulder that marked the departure of Lyons.

As the Ironman moved off, Pol sent a silent prayer into the night. When the two men first met, Carl was an L.A. cop, a good one. Then Lyons became a true soldier — one of the hardest soldiers that Pol had ever known. Lyons was now a legend. But the current situation presented a special challenge. Able Team knew something bad was about to happen and they would move to stop it, but they could not expect back-up of any sort because acknowledgement of their existence might tip a traitor. At best it would tip off British intelligence that there indeed was a traitor among them. Either way the lid would blow too soon.

They had to do it their way, Able Team's way, and that meant Lyons, true to character, would have to go up the wall.

Lyons worked his way along the shadows of tree-lined Thames Street toward the east end of the castle. He knew that an encounter would prove disastrous. These were friendly forces, and he could not fire back.

Soon Thames Street followed the curve between the castle wall and a small section of woodland. Lyons found a hiding place between bushes growing beneath a stand of linden trees.

He looked at the stone wall. It was not immense. It protected only the outer limits of this part of the castle, which held parkland and a forest as small but as dense as the woodland on the outside. He could see the tops of elm trees swaying within the grounds.

From the top of the wall jutted metal spikes to deter trespassers.

Lyons crouched deep in the shadows. He unwound the rope and tied a small loop at one end. He peered out from his position.

He jerked back as two British sentries approached in the night. He watched them pass, holding himself rigid and unbreathing. Their uniforms told him they were Welsh Guardsmen.

They chatted amiably on their patrol, ignorant of what lurked to one side. Lyons watched them. Terrorist atrocities occurred with mounting regularity in Britain, but nothing had yet shaken the islanders' native sangfroid and resigned tolerance. Naked fear was not known in Britain to the degree it was elsewhere.

As the sentries' sauntered paces faded into the night, Lyons waited for minutes more, then made his move.

The rope caught on the first toss. Silently he scrambled up. Exposed at the top for perilous seconds against the night sky, Lyons unhitched the rope from the spike and carried it with him as he jumped down into the bushes on the other side. He absorbed the impact of his drop on bended knees, ending in the right-shoulder roll that Bolan taught him. He came up short behind the sheltering trunk of an elm.

His M-16/M-203 swung automatically into position as he sighted the glowing end of a cigarette at head-height in the shadow of a tree fifty yards away. "Beejaysus, dat's good stuff," the shadow said to itself. Lyons's motor revved on recognition of the accent. Contact confirmed.

The ember continued to glow, periodically burning brighter as the Irishman toked noisily on his prebattle spliff. Battle hash was a common custom in Nam, but Lyons was surprised to see an Irishman smoking up before combat. Welcome to the eighties.

Lyons stripped himself of his combat gear and pulled a Bowie knife from its sheath on his thigh. Silence was imperative, and the Bowie fit that criterion. He moved out on his belly. The orange ember glowed brighter in the otherwise black night. The smoker sucked a hearty lungful. "Christmas, dat's good," the voice said to no one.

Lyons crawled in a semicircle toward his target. When the ember glowed brightly again, he raised himself into a crouch, ran noiselessly toward the target. He staggered the pot smoker with an openhanded blow to the forehead. Then he dragged the knife blade backhand across the man's carotid and jugular. It was an effortless kill.

The joint burned in the grass beside the corpse. Lyons ground it out with the toe of his Israeli combat boot. He heard more Irish voices calling hoarsely into the velvet night.

"Micky, ya'dere?"

"Micky lad, where is ya'?"

Lyons's heart skipped a beat. His grenade launcher and other fighting gear were fifty yards behind him. He would have to dispose of both terrorists, using his wits and the knife.

The pointman passed within inches of his position. Lyons could not see him but he felt the air move as he passed, and he smelled the odor of tobacco on the guy's clothes. With patience and professionalism learned from Blancanales, Lyons waited for the second man. The moon broke briefly through a cloud.

He saw a heavily armed figure walking through the trees. "He'll be spliffin' da' weed," the man said. "See if it ain't true." Lyons came on him in the dark. He reached around the man's head with his left hand and clapped the mouth shut. With his right hand, he drove the Bowie knife deep under the breastbone. Both men fell together to the forest floor.

"Ya' may be right, Stevie," the first man answered, "but we still need the bastard. Right?"

"Uh-huh," said Lyons in the dark. The terrorist's talk had given him a good fix on the guy.

With a smooth, practiced motion, he flung the bloody blade into the middle of the voice.

"I'm kill't!" gurgled the terrorist.

"Good t'ing, too," muttered Lyons.

Whatever else he thought of that Kathleen McGowan bitch, Michael O'Shea had to admit she was one hell of an organizer. During the past two months, thirty-five people involved in the night's operation had undergone training in both Northern Ireland and England, and their leaders had visited the castle as tourists and had studied its interior plans under McGowan's careful eye.

O'Shea knew the information and training would serve him well.

His group was to secure the west end of the North Terrace. O'Shea and his four men had scaled the wall some distance west of the One Hundred Steps, using the trees as cover. The killers with O'Shea carried AK-47s and two HE grenades each. O'Shea held a silenced Uzi; the advantage of silence for the night's work outweighed the loss of accuracy incurred by the silencer.

O'Shea checked his watch, shielding the digital timepiece with his hand so its glow would not give them away. Timing was essential; if he moved earlier than 8:30, his group's actions would not be coordinated with those of the other two assault teams and the attack would fail.

Moments before 8:30, a five-man British patrol slowly made its way down the One Hundred Steps, looking for anything out of place in the forest on both sides of the worn steps. O'Shea heard the thud of the combat boots on the stone. He waited patiently for the first casualties of the night.

The patrol leader had no time to warn his companions. The 9mm parabellums from O'Shea's Uzi tore into his throat. The remainder of the patrol died quickly as the silent onslaught continued. The clatter of their weapons on stone was the only signal that something was amiss.

Two sentries in the street below heard the clatter. Quickly they opened the gate at the bottom of the steps and headed up them toward the noise. So intent were they on their objective that neither noticed the black-clad man slip out of the shadows and follow them. Once through the gate, Blancanales vaulted the left bannister of the steps and followed the two men as they climbed. While moving, Pol transmitted a pair of double clicks, advising his partners that the battle was on.

O'Shea's finger stroked the trigger of the Uzi again as the two British sentries came up the steps. One of the troopers slipped in the rivulets of blood that washed down the center of the worn stone. Before he could recover, his own life ran out to join with the crimson stream. A heartbeat later, his companion fell. Stillness returned to the night as the stream flowed on.