Project Cyclops

"Is there anything we need to go over again?" Pierre Armont inquired, looking around the dusty, aging Athens hangar with a feeling of wary confidence. The weather-beaten benches...

"Isaac, wake up." She shook him, trying to be as quiet as possible. Outside a new storm was building, but the large barracks room in Level Three of the Bates Motel was dark and...

Sitting at Main Control, the central desk facing the large display screen, Cally Andros had just reached a conclusion. She was getting old. Two more weeks to her thirty-fifth bi...

Michael Vance was exhilarated, and scared. The salty taste of the Aegean was in his mouth as he reached for the black mike of his radio, still gripping the starboard tiller. His...

The conduit was roughly a meter and a half in diameter and pitch dark. He had expected that and had extracted a waterproof flashlight from an emergency kit in the wreckage of th...

They had used the same insertion procedure off Beirut three years earlier, so there was nothing about this that was new. Standard procedure. As had been planned all along, they...

Fayette-Nam--as they called Fayetteville, North Carolina, in the 1960s-- hosts the largest army base in the world: Fort Bragg, home of the XVIII Airborne Corps. Breaking the mon...

Vance cocked the Pakistani's Uzi and trained it on the door, not sure what to do. The fear was that he might inadvertently kill a friendly. Hostage situations always presented t...

Pierre Armont was forty-six, with gray temples and a body appropriate to an Olympic wrestler. He had full cheeks, a heavy mustache, and suspicious dark eyes that constantly sear...

Hugo Voorst was lying propped against a rock, his shoulder bandaged with white strips of gauze from the first-aid kit. Now that the flow of blood had been staunched, Marcel was...

Cally, who had been listening to the radio exchange, already had other things to think about. She was engaged by the computer terminal, checking out the status of the facility.

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. T...

"My God," the President muttered, settling the red phone into its cradle. "They did it. The bastards detonated one of them. NSA says their SIGINT capabilities in the Med just we...

Dawn had arrived, though the mantle of light fog was still adding a hazy texture to the air. The sun-up had a freshness that reminded Vance of the previous morning, the first gl...

"It's very simple," Ramirez said to Jean-Paul Moreau. After the phone call, he had sent Mannheim to the Bates Motel and returned to Launch. Let Washington stew awhile. They were...

"Just a minute." He clicked off the intercom and returned to his other call. "Caroline, I don't know. Just play it by ear and do the best you can. Press Secretaries get paid for...

"Hansen lied," Ramirez was saying as he took one last glance at the snowy TV monitor, which moments earlier had shown the chaos in Command. "The son of a bitch lied. He didn't c...

When Vance caught his first clear sight of Andikythera's sheltered inlet, the storm had passed over in the night and Homer's "rosy- fingered dawn" was displaying all her splendo...

Cally Andros felt disgusted, physically nauseated. And partly it was with herself. Blame the victim. She wondered if all hostages felt this way: powerless, angry, and scared. Wh...

"Damn it!" Ramirez looked down at the weapons' readouts. "Did you have the Swatter armed? The system should have been off. If it was on, he could have detonated it by impact."