Sverenssen had recoiled from the window, and Lyn could see him clawing at his eyes in the middle of the room as he tried to get his bearings. Whatever happened, he couldn’t be allowed to get to the communications room now. She began picking her way cautiously around the wall to get between him and the passageway leading to the office wing. He saw the movement through the smoke and came nearer. "You! " His face twisted into a mask of fury as he recognized her, made even more grotesque by the watery streaks cutting through the smoke grime on his cheeks. Lyn’s heart did a backflip in her chest. She backed away, but kept moving toward the passageway. Sverenssen’s shape came looming through the smoke, straight at her.

Then barked military commands sounded inside the house, seemingly from not far away in the direction of the guest annex. Sverenssen threw a glance back over his shoulder and hesitated. Shadowy figures were struggling in the corridor outside the kitchen, and there was more movement on the side of the house facing the pool. He changed direction and made a bolt toward the office wing. Without realizing what she was doing, Lyn scooped up a wicker chair and hurled it across the floor at his legs. Sverenssen went down heavily and struck his head on the wall as he sprawled full-length on the floor.

But through the smoke Lyn could see he was still moving. She looked around desperately, picked up a large vase from a side table, swallowed hard and tried to stop her hands from shaking, and forced herself to move nearer. Sverenssen was half sitting up, one hand clutching at his head, a small trickle of blood oozing through his fingers. He braced a foot beneath himself, stretched out an arm to steady himself against the wall, and started to haul himself up. Lyn raised the vase high with both hands. But Sverenssen’s legs had turned to jelly. He swayed for a second, groaned aloud, and then collapsed back against the baseboard. Lyn was still standing paralyzed in the same position when the first figures wearing respirators and Army combat uniforms and carrying assault rifles materialized out of the fumes around her. One of them took the vase lightly from her hands. "We’ll take care of him," a gruff voice told her. "Are you okay?" She nodded mutely while in front of her two Special Forces troopers lifted Sverenssen roughly to his feet.

"Bloody good show that," an English voice commented from somewhere behind her. "You know, if you worked at it, you might even get a job with the S.A.S." She turned and found Hunt looking at her approvingly. Shearer stood next to him. Hunt moved beside her, slipped an arm around her waist, and squeezed reassuringly. She pressed the side of her head against his shoulder and clung tightly as the tension released itself in a spasm of trembling. Talking could wait until later.

Around them the noise had subsided, and the smoke was clearing to reveal Sverenssen’s domestic staff being brought into the corner room to be searched and relieved of their weapons before they were herded away into the guest annex. As the assault troops and the others already inside the house removed their respirators, a knot of American and Soviet officers came in through the wreckage. They were accompanied by men wearing civilian clothes beneath combat jackets. Sverenssen’s eyes bulged in disbelief as they refocused. "Hi," Norman Pacey said, with a trace of deep satisfaction. "Remember us?"

"For you the war is over, my friend," Sobroskin informed him. "In fact, everything is over. It’s a shame that you did not find Bruno up to your standards. It’s quite luxurious compared to where you will be going." Sverenssen’s face writhed with anger, but he still seemed too dazed to make any reply.

A sergeant crossed the room, saluted, and reported to Shearer. "No casualties, sir. Just some cuts and bruises, mainly on the other side. None of them got away. The whole house is secured."

Shearer nodded. "Start getting them out right away. Let’s get those landers away before they’re spotted by the surveillance. Where are Verikoff and the CIA people?" Even as he spoke, another group of figures pushed into the room. Sverenssen’s head jerked around, and his jaw dropped as he heard the name. Verikoff halted a few feet away from him and stood eying him defiantly.

"So, it’s you . . ." Sverenssen hissed. "You . . . traitor! " He lunged forward instinctively and was promptly doubled over by a sharp blow delivered to the solar plexus by a rifle butt. As he sagged two of the troopers caught him and held him.

"He carries the key to the facility on him at all times," Verikoff said. "It should be on a chain around his neck." Shearer ripped open the front of Sverenssen’s shirt, found the key, removed it, and passed it to Verikoff.

"You’ll pay for these atrocities, Colonel," Sverenssen wheezed weakly. "Mark my words. I’ve ruined bigger men than you."

"Atrocities?" Shearer turned his head aside quizzically. "Do you know what he’s talking about, Sergeant?"

"I’ve no idea, sir."

"Did you see anything?"

"Didn’t see a thing, sir."

"Why do you think this man is holding his stomach?"

"Probably indigestion, sir."

As Sverenssen was hustled away to join his staff, Shearer turned to Clifford Benson. "I’m pulling my men out right away, apart from ten that I’ll leave as guards for the house. I guess it’s ready for you to take over."

"You did a fine job, Colonel," Benson acknowledged. He turned to the others. "Well, time’s precious. Let’s get on with it."

They stood aside while Verikoff led the way into the passage toward the office wing, and followed a few paces behind. At the end of the passage he came to a large, solid-looking, wooden door. "I am not sure how far JEVEX’s visual field extends," he called to them. "It would be better if you kept well back." The others fell back into a small dense huddle with Hunt, Sobroskin, Lyn, Benson, and Pacey together at the front. "I need a minute to compose myself," Verikoff told them. They waited while he brushed a few specks of soot from his clothes, smoothed his hair, and wiped his face with a handkerchief. "Do I look as if all is normal?" he asked them.

"Fine," Hunt called back.

Verikoff nodded, turned to face the door, and unlocked it. Then he drew a deep breath, grasped the handle, and pushed the door open. The others caught a glimpse of elaborate instrumentation panels and banks of gleaming equipment, and then Verikoff stepped inside.

Chapter Thirty-Four

The strain on the Command Deck of the Shapieron had been hovering around breaking point for days. Eesyan was standing in the center of the floor gazing up at the main display screen, where an enormous web of interconnected shapes and boxes annotated with symbols showed the road map into JEVEX that ZORAC had laboriously pieced together from statistical analyses and pattern correlations of the responses it had obtained to its probe signals. But ZORAC was not getting through to the nucleus of the system, which it would have to penetrate if it was going to disrupt JEVEX’s h-jamming capability. Its attempts had been repeatedly detected by JEVEX’s constantly running self-checking routines and thwarted by automatically initiated correction procedures. The big problem now was trying to decide how much longer they could allow ZORAC to try before the tables of fault-diagnostic data accumulating inside JEVEX alerted its supervisory functions that something very abnormal was happening. Opinions were more or less evenly divided between Eesyan’s scientists from Thurien, who already wanted to call the whole thing off, and Garuth and his crew, who seemed willing to risk almost anything to pursue what was beginning to look, the more Eesyan saw of it, like some kind of death wish.

"Probe Three’s function directive has been queried for the third time," one of the scientists announced from a nearby station. "Header response analysis indicates we’ve triggered a veto override again." He looked across at Eesyan and shook his head. "It’s too dangerous. We’ll have to suspend probing on this channel and resume regular traffic only."