7:48 a.m.
Vance stared up the mountain, puzzled. The silence baffled him, and then he realized why. He was not hearing the usual high-tension hum of transformers; nothing was operating. They had shut down the power.
He heaved a sigh, then dropped down beside a tree trunk and clicked out the magazine of the black Uzi. It had about fifteen rounds left, so the time had come to start making them count. Here, amid the brush, he had a chance to lie low for a while and figure out what to do next. Besides feeling thirst and fatigue, he had a throbbing sprain in his shoulder, incurred somehow during the crash of the chopper. But the pain was helping to clear his mind.
Maybe, he thought, he could find some provisions stowed in the Hind, left or overlooked. A stray canteen or some MREs. But did he want to risk going back down?
The answer was yes because—even more important—the radio might still be operating. It was definitely time to activate the warranty on this job.
But first things first. Who are these creeps?
Hoping to find out something, he pulled out the leather packet he had retrieved from the terrorist's torn shirt and cracked it open. Crumpled inside was a wad of Yemeni dinars, and a crinkled ID card in German. On the back was a phrase scrawled in English ... it looked like The Resistance Front for a Free—it was smudged, but yes—Europe.
Back when he and Bates had first talked about the security question, Bill had insisted ARM focus on industrial security. Truthfully, there hadn't been any real thought given to antiterrorist measures. It had just seemed unimaginable. Looked at another way, though, Bates had been trying to be cost-effective, had gambled on an assumption. Now it was beginning to look as though that had been a bad bet.
Although for a ground-based setup Dimitri's handiwork— contracted out of Athens—was top-notch, it had made no provisions against aerial penetration. From land or sea. That haunting phrase kept coming back. But Bill had laughed it off, and the client was always supposed to be right.