As if on cue, from the eastern reaches of the canyon there came the thumping of helicopter rotors. The fighters, having learned as their Afghan brothers had learned during the Soviet occupation to fear this, began shouting and pushing, hoping to find either cover or firing positions for RPGs.

"Calm yourselves, brothers, there is nothing to fear," Samet called over the PA speaker. "This is expected. Stand fast."

The crowd slowly calmed and went quiet as all eyes turned eastward. For a full minute the beat of the rotors increased until a pair of flashing wingtip navigation lights emerged from the darkness of the neighboring canyon. The helicopter--an old Soviet Mi-8 HIP complete with 12.7mm nose cannon and 80mm rocket outrider pods--roared overhead, passing thirty feet over the crowd before wheeling right and stopping in a hover over the clearing beside the motor pool. In a blast of rotor wash the HIP touched down on its tripod wheels. After a few seconds, the engine turned off, and the rotors spooled down, first to a dull whine and then to complete silence. For nearly a full minute, nothing moved. The crowd stood in rapt silence, watching the helicopter for signs of movement. Some of the men, their martial instincts so finely tuned, shifted nervously, weapons clutched tightly across chests. The HIP's navigation strobes, still active, flashed blue and white against the canyon walls.

Finally the door slid open, revealing a rectangle of darkness. From above the speaker's platform, a scaffold-mounted spotlight glowed to life and bathed the side of the helicopter in a circle of stark white light. Still nothing moved.

And then a lone figure emerged from the darkness of the helicopter's doorway. Clearly a man, the figure stood well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and squat, powerful legs. A hood covered his head.

Murmured voices rose from the crowd.

The man raised his hands to shoulder height, palms out, and the crowd settled.

The man reached up and drew back the hood.

The crowd gave a collective gasp. The face they saw was familiar: strong chin, hawkish nose, thick, black mustache . . .

"Greetings, brothers. I have returned, and in that I offer you your country back," said Bolot Omurbai. "I ask you: Who will fight at my side?"

3

SAN FRANCISCO

THOUGHJackie had introduced her team--first names only--as soon as they'd regrouped at the safe house, Fisher was still in countersurveillance mode, so it took him a few minutes to stop thinking of them as dots on his mental clock face. Tail 6.1--the man who had for the final hour of the exercise stayed so doggedly on Fisher's six--was named Frederick, and Tail 6.2.2--the arm-in-arm couple that had passed him right before his dash into the alley--were named Reginald and Judy. Most of the other eight faces were familiar, but a few were not, and Fisher absently wondered if he'd somehow missed them. As much as he hoped not, he knew the reality. For every rat you see, there's . . .

"Okay, people, I think it's safe to say Sam taught us a few tricks tonight. So, despite the sting to our egos, let's raise a toast to our rabbit . . ."

As one, the group raised glasses of wine, beer, or hard liquor in a silent salute to Fisher. Fisher smiled, nodded, and raised his own bottle of Coors. The toast was heartfelt and the atmosphere easy, but for most of Fisher's career he had worked alone, and so, like dozens of other surprises this turn in his career had given him, the camaraderie took some getting used to.

After Jackie had pulled up in the Johnson & Sons van and admitted defeat, she, Fisher, and the team had regrouped at a CIA safe house in Sausalito, across the bay from Angel Island State Park, for a postmortem of the exercise. Of those assembled, only Fisher and Jackie knew tonight's exercise had been Fisher's final exam before graduation.

Much of his training over the past three months had been familiar stuff--weapons, unarmed combat, covert communications, surveillance--so Fisher had had little trouble adapting his own background to the material. What had taken some time to get used to was that many of the tradecraft tricks were often done in broad daylight and under close surveillance. Passing someone a message in a darkened alley was one thing; doing so on a busy city street during noon rush hour with dozens of watchers studying your every move was an altogether different matter.

Still, Fisher was unsurprised to find that he was enjoying himself. The challenge of playing and winning the espionage chess game with only your wits and guile was intoxicating.

Tonight's tour through San Francisco's foggy streets had been the culmination of a weeklong "live fire" exercise designed to test his ability to slip into an unfamiliar city, establish and run a network of agents, and then cleanly ex-filtrate himself after securing "the key," a crucial piece of information from a notional enemy ministry of defense. The final test had been straightforward if not easy: service a dead drop where one of his agents had placed "the key" and then transport it to his handler on the other side of town, all under the watchful eyes of Jackie's secret police team.

Now friends again, the group sat at a round poker table under a cluster of pendant lights that cast soft halogen pools on the baize surface.

"So tell me this, Sam," said Reginald. "That thing with the ladder on the roof . . . Did you bang it on the edge that last time just to make sure we heard it?" Fisher nodded, and Reginald grinned and shook his head. "Nice touch."

"How about the apartment?" Judy asked, sipping a glass of Chardonnay. "Did you just spot it empty, or what?"

"Checked the newspaper ads two days ago."

"Where?"

"During breakfast. The coffee shop on Sloan. The ad was brand-new, so it was a safe bet it hadn't been rented yet."

"But you didn't circle anything, did you, you crafty bastard," Jackie said. "We picked up that paper, checked it."

"Hell, I don't even carry a pen anymore."

There were chuckles around the table. Fisher knew nothing about these people beyond their first names, but he assumed each of them worked as case officers in the CIA's Directorate of Operations--the real-ife, boots-on-the-ground, secret-stealing, shadow-skulking operatives of film and book.

Each one, like Fisher, would know the rules of working and living as a professional paranoid. In this case, pens were often considered instruments of betrayal, something that can leave a trace of your presence or intentions or even passing interest. The CIA's informal history, passed down from generation to generation of operatives, is full of stories of otherwise smart men and women who'd died from a case of ink poisoning. In this business, memorization and recall was not a luxury but rather a requisite for a long life.

Fisher said, "That homeless guy I paid off . . . Did you--"

"Rough him up?" said Jackie. "No. But Frederick did tug on his beard to see if it was a fake."

More laughter.

"What I meant was, did you let him keep the hundred bucks?"

This brought more gales of laughter. When they subsided, Jackie said, "Yeah, yeah, we let him keep it. We're not barbarians, Sam. The poor guy had peed his pants. I wasn't going to rob him on top of it."

The dissection of the exercise continued for another half hour until finally Jackie asked, "Any feedback from your side of things, Sam? How'd we do?"

Fisher shrugged, took a sip of his beer.

"Come on, man," said Reginald. "Let's hear it."

Fisher glanced at Jackie, who gave him a nod.