Then he searched through the underbrush, looking for a branch. The first was too long, the second too wet, but then he found a broken branch of the right thickness and length. It was knobbed like a medieval mace. Bourne hefted it, then swung it over his head several times. He thought it would do. Stripping off his jacket and shirt, he tied the sleeves of his shirt to two knobs on either side of the broken branch, then placed the TNT and the rocket fuel gingerly in the fabric. The sling he had made from his shirt held them both securely.

Separating the items, he launched himself up into the thickest pine, moving nimbly, but mindful of the payload he carried, extremely cautiously from branch to branch, rising higher and higher. As he climbed, he could hear the helicopter’s engine more clearly. It was hovering, waiting him out. Every once in a while the pilot sent a volley of machine-gun fire into the copse, perhaps hoping for a blind hit or to flush Bourne from his sanctuary.

Bourne needed a place where he would become a visible target and also give himself sufficient room. It took him some time to find the right spot, but at last he did, a delicate crotch just beneath the tip of the pine. There he balanced himself, then raised his head, waiting to be spotted. The pilot, possibly emboldened by the fact that Bourne no longer carried the Strela-2 launcher, moved the copter in for the kill.

With the TNT and the rocket fuel loaded into his shirt-sling, Bourne cocked his arm and waited. The few seconds as the copter maneuvered to get the kill shot were nerve racking. Bourne judged the distance; he needed the copter in closer. Just a few feet now. Three, two, one.

The machine-gun fire started up just as Bourne swung his payload up and out of the jerry-rigged slingshot. The combined payload struck the helicopter’s shiny metal skin, where the TNT ignited, setting off the rocket fuel.

Bourne ducked as the explosion ripped through the body of the aircraft, tearing it into pieces. He began to climb down, but the stricken copter came out of the sky with appalling speed. Its still-spinning rotors snapped off the tops of the pines and continued to saw into the trees, following the body as it crashed into the copse.

Bourne, shaken out of his perch, felt the intense heat, the violent spray of wood chips, and heard the rotors’ rhythmic drumbeat of death as they came crashing and flailing directly for him.

13

INDIGO RIDGE. Peter had worked until the wee hours of the morning reading up on the California mine, how it had been started, then abruptly abandoned in the 1970s when China flooded the international market with rare earths, driving down prices and rendering Indigo Ridge too expensive a proposition. Mining rare earths was a long and complex process and was further complicated by the refining processes, which were different for each element. Flash-forward to the present, when China abruptly reversed course, cutting rare earth exports by 85 percent, stunning everyone including the supposedly bright lights at the Pentagon, the DoD, and DARPA. Now the Pentagon was screaming bloody murder. The unthinkable had occurred: The manufacture of its next-gen weaponry was being either delayed or canceled altogether because of the scarcity of rare earths essential for the components. While everyone else in the world was slumbering in ignorance, China had been buying up virtually all the rare earth mines outside the United States and Canada.

Dismayed, Peter continued downloading everything he could find on NeoDyme, the new public company charged to mine Indigo Ridge, and its head Roy FitzWilliams. He began to read. Then he pulled the chart on the IPO. NeoDyme had gone public yesterday at 18. In its first day of trading, it had plummeted all the way to 12 before flattening out for what looked to be less than an hour. Late in the trading day, a number of huge trades brought the stock all the way back to 163⁄8, where it closed. A high-volatility stock, that was for sure, Peter thought. Reading the accompanying commentary he pulled off the CNBC and Bloomberg sites, he could readily see why. The investing gurus didn’t know what to make of NeoDyme. Some felt that since it would take years to get the rare earths out of the ground and refine them, the stock would be dead money until then. Others, who seemed to have more knowledge of the strategic importance of rare earths, gave the opposite opinion: It was time to get in now.

Completely hooked, he continued to read, switching to a bio of Fitz-Williams. A BA in earth and mineral sciences from Penn State, an advanced degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia, then jobs in the uranium mines of Australia and Canada, a stint in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. Then he disappeared off the map for just over two years.

Peter spent the next hour running down leads for 1967–1969 on the Internet, always finding a dead end. Just as he was about to give up, he discovered a clue. An obscure organization called the Mineralization and Rare Metals Conference Board had held a regional meeting in Qatar in the spring of 1968 at which Fitz was the guest speaker. Another frustrating forty-five minutes yielded one more interesting nugget: Fitz was listed as a consultant for El-Gabal Mining.

Peter immediately looked up El-Gabal, a Syrian company, only to discover it was now defunct. There was precious little known about it or, indeed, any business in Syria. The country was not a member of the World Trade Organization and every large business like El-Gabal was controlled by the government, so accurate assessments of Syria’s export profits, let alone a single company’s, were impossible to find or even guess at.

A dead end, Peter thought, returning to FitzWilliams’s CV. He returned from the Middle East to run Indigo Ridge, keeping his job even when the mine went more or less dormant in the 1970s. He’d been there ever since and now, riding the stratospheric resurgence of rare earth metals, had returned to an almost princely prominence as a major player in the rapidly emerging strategic field.

Peter sat back and pressed his thumbs into his bloodshot eyes. He was exhausted and would have dearly loved a cup of coffee, but at this hour the machine was out and, anyway, he didn’t want to get up for fear of breaking his train of thought.

He considered for a moment more, then called one of Soraya’s assets in Syria, gave him the rundown on Fitz and El-Gabal, and asked for as much intel as he could unearth. Then he accessed Hendricks’s hard drive and posted what he had discovered to the pertinent file there.

Peter wanted to go on, but the figures, facts, and opinions had begun to whirl inside his head like a school of reef fish. He needed sleep. Picking up his coat, he dragged himself out of the office. The corridors were silent; only the soft whir of the elevator rising disturbed the peacefulness.

The elevator doors opened and Peter stepped in. He pressed the button for the garage level and leaned his head against the wall, already half asleep. The bell sounded as the elevator came to a halt, and as the doors opened he saw a hulking figure in the shadows of the fifth-floor corridor. The figure approached him with definite intent, and Peter’s head came away from the wall. Light spilled onto the figure as it entered the elevator. The door closed, sealing them in together. Peter saw the service revolver at one hip.

“Evening, Director Marks.”

“Hey, Sal.”

Sal’s blunt finger stabbed out and pressed the button for the lobby, and the elevator resumed its quiet descent. “Burning the midnight oil, huh?”

“As always.”

Sal grunted. “I hear ya, but you look like you could use some sleep.”

“That’s an understatement.”

“Well, you can rest easy. Everything’s clear upstairs.”

The doors opened at the lobby and Sal stepped out.