Project Cyclops Part 45

"Guilty." He nodded. "Now for round three. That gla.s.s of wine you have with the book is probably something tame. Say, Chablis."

"You drink . . . mmmm, let me see. Scotch is too mundane. I'll bet it's tequila. Straight."

"You're psychic. But you missed the lime."

"Oh, I almost forgot the most important thing." She grew somber. "You like a good battle. So taking on these thugs is going to be the most fun you've had all week."

"That's where you just went off the track." His eyes narrowed, the corners crinkling. "We're definitely on the wrong end of the odds here.

These b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are dug in, they've probably got A-bombs, and we know for sure they've got a lot of helpless people in their grasp. That's not a recipe for heroics. It's more like one for pending tragedy." He paused, deciding it was definitely time to change the subject.

"Speaking of tragedies, it would be a major one if we didn't have a Greek salad to go with those steaks."

He walked over and checked the fridge. Sure enough, there was a ma.s.sive bowl of ripe, red tomatoes sitting next to a pile of crisp cuc.u.mbers.

Most important of all, there was a huge chunk of white feta cheese.

Yep, the chef had to be Greek. And up there, on a high kitchen shelf, were rows and rows of olives, curing in brine. Throw them all together with a little oregano, lemon juice, and olive oil, and the traditional side dish of Greece was theirs.

"Just the stuff." He pulled down a jar of olive oil and one of dark Greek olives. Then he selected some tomatoes and a cuc.u.mber and went to work.

"You know, you're not a half-bad Greek chef. My mother would have loved you. You're making that salad exactly the way she used to." She made a face. "Every day. G.o.d, did I get sick of them. All I wanted to eat was french fries. So when I finally got away, off at college, I practically lived on cheeseburgers and pizza for years after that."

"Shame on you. This is very wholesome. Very good for your state of mind." He finished slicing the tomatoes, then opened the fridge and fished out a couple of brown bottles of the local beer. "Retsina would be the thing, but this will have to do." He looked over. "By the way, how're the steaks coming?"

"Looks like our feast is ready." She pulled them off the grill and onto plates. "How long has it been since you ate?"

"Think it's about two days now." He finished tossing the salad and served them each a hearty helping. "Didn't realize how famished I was till I smelled those T-bones broiling." He popped the caps on the beers and handed her one. "Bon appet.i.t. Better eat hearty, because this may be the last food we're going to see for a while."

She took a bite, then looked up, chewing. "It's delicious. And I want to say one more thing about our game a while ago." She stopped to swallow. "And I mean this. It's always a little sad when I see a person who can do a lot of things but doesn't really find total satisfaction in any of them. Nothing they ever do really makes them happy. And I think that's you, really. I'll bet that whenever you're doing one thing, you're always thinking about some other things you could be doing. Which means you're never really content. You always want more."

"That's pretty deep stuff." He had launched hungrily into his steak.

"Maybe you're right, but I'm not going to come out and admit it. It's too d.a.m.ning. So let me put it like this. Maybe I happen to think it's possible to care about a lot of things at once. That's--"

"Such as?"

"Well, okay, I'll give you a 'for instance.' I like sailing around these islands, but all the time I'm doing it, I'm thinking about what it must have been like two, three thousand years ago. The archaeology.

It's intrigued me as long as I can remember. My dad was the same; he spent his life digging around in Crete. I thought that was the most marvelous thing in the world, so I did it, too. For years. Even wrote a book about that island once. I loved the place. Still do."

"That's funny. I was born practically in the shadow of

Crete, and yet I've only been there a couple of times." She sighed.

"Well, what happened? I mean to your love affair with Crete. Sounds like that's what it was."

"Maybe I loved the place too much. I don't know." He paused to take a drink of the beer, cold and refreshing. "Well, when you love somebody, or something, you want to find out everything there is to know about them. But when I did that, and told what I'd concluded was the real story, or what I pa.s.sionately believed was the real story, n.o.body wanted to hear it. I had some ideas about the island's ancient age of glory that didn't jibe with the standard theories. Made me very unpopular in the world of academia. Scholars don't like their boats to be rocked."

"And you let that get you down?" She snorted. Being a woman, she'd had an uphill battle all her life. Men could be such babies sometimes.

"See, when the world's against you, that's when you're supposed to fight hardest. That's always been my rule. I'm not a quitter. Ever."

He winced and stopped eating. "Hey, I'm back, aren't I? In Greece." He looked at her, impulsively wanting to touch her again. "But it's nice to have somebody like you to pitch in and help. Maybe we'll manage something together."

"Maybe you should have had somebody around the first time." G.o.d, he was really reminding her of Alan. The same b.u.t.tons. "Maybe you're not as tough as you think."

"Adversity depresses me. Like bad weather. I prefer life without too many psychodramas." And this Greek fireball, he told himself, had psychodrama written large all over her. Still . . .

"Then the question now is what I should do." She looked at him, taking a last bite. "Go back, or stay with you."

"We need to learn from _Ulysses'_ experience with the Cyclops," Vance said, clicking back into the real world. "The one-eyed giant had trapped him and his crew and was devouring them one by one. So how did they overcome him? They got him plastered on some good Greek wine, then put out his eye with a burning post. That done, they proceeded to exploit his disability."

"What are you saying?" She frowned.

"This guy is killing off your people, right? Pierre is coming in with his crew to try and take this place down, but in the meantime it would be good if we took a shot at putting out their eyes."

"Put out their eyes?" She was still puzzled.

"It's a metaphor. It would be extremely helpful if we could blind them enough that they didn't know ARM was coming in. Couldn't 'see' the team. Maybe shut down the radars, something."

"Michael"--it was the first time she had used his name, and she liked it--"that's why we're in this mess in the first place. There are no radars that could spot an insertion. That's how these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds got in here in the first place. Bill gets the Saddam Hussein Military Preparedness Award. There is no radar to monitor the sh.o.r.e."

He laughed. "Okay, but now that oversight has turned into a plus.

What's good for the goose is good for the you- know-what. If there are no peripheral radars, then they're not going to know where Pierre and the boys make their insertion."

"Right. The bad guys are already blind. It's got to make a difference."

'Then what we need to do"--he was thinking aloud--"is to get them all together in one place."

'They're not going to let it happen." She was questing, too. "Unless .

. . unless we can make it happen. Something . . ."

"Keep thinking," he said. "I don't have any ideas either, but somebody better come up with one."

"Well, let's go back up on the mountain before they find us here," she said finally, clearly itching to get going and do something. "We're going to screw these guys, wait and see."

Vance nodded, wishing he could believe it as confidently as she did.

10:49 P.M.

Sabri Ramirez stood watching as the last of the krytron detonators was secured in the ganglia of wiring that surrounded the explosive Octol sphere. Now one of the bombs was armed. He liked the looks of it. The next--

"They haven't come back yet," Wolf h.e.l.ling said, interrupting his thoughts. "Do you think there was a problem?" He was warily watching the bomb and its timer being a.s.sembled, trying to calm his nerves. This was not like playing with a yellow lump of Sematach. One false move and you would be vaporized. Any man who pretended it didn't scare him was a liar, or worse, a fool. Maybe both.

The bomb did not frighten Ramirez; his mind did not dwell on risk. He a.s.sumed the Pakis knew their job--they d.a.m.ned well better. No, his current concern also was what had happened to Moreau. He had expected his unit to return before now. So far they had taken over an hour on what should have been a simple operation. With hostages dispersed in three locations, Ramirez feared that things were getting spread thin.

Gamal had been keeping watch over the guards and the off-duty shifts on Level Three of the accommodations facility, while Peretz was holding things together in Command, but still it would be better if four of the team were not out chasing over the island trying to find some rogue guard. He had tried to reach them on his walkie-talkie, but so far he had not been able to raise anybody. That was particularly troubling.

Why should all the radios suddenly go dead?

"If there was some difficulty up the hill, surely they're handling it."

Ramirez tried to push aside his misgivings. He actually felt it was true, or should be true. He had checked out Moreau's credentials carefully, investigating beyond the popular myth, and what he had found did nothing to diminish the legend of the blond demon, Jean-Paul. . . .