"Drive!" Zhgenti shouted, beating on the driver's back.

The van rolled sideways, the shock of a blast shattering the windows, spraying the interior with thousands of cubes of tempered glass. Continuing through the sideways roll, they saw a ball of flame rising from what had been a truck.

Desmarais screamed as the van rolled. Then the van stopped on its roof and she crawled from the window, her overnight bag clutched in her hand. Standing in the swirling snow and the sudden day, she saw burning hulks and maneuvering vehicles. The wounded were dying under tires and tank treads. Leaking gasoline became streams of fire.

A long, wailing scream drowned out the engines and explosions and shouts. Desmarais realized the scream came from her own throat, as she stood upright in the flames and chaos and death.

Her legs responded to her panic with blind and unreasoning animal flight. Headlights and fire illuminated her path through the rocks and debris. Then came the body-numbing shock of another high-explosive blast, and she hit the asphalt. She ran again, her flight bag banging against her legs with every step.

A troop transport passed her. Brakes squealed, tires smoked as the truck slowed. Headlights behind her — the lights seemed to come from the sky — revealed the empty back of the transport. She threw herself over the boards. Behind her were the searing headlights of a huge truck. Its roaring diesel engine drowned out her whimpering and the screams of the dying along the roadside.

Two soldiers looked across at her. In the back of the transport, the Syrians lay flat, exposing as little as possible of their bodies to the blast and shrapnel of the artillery barrage.

"Journalist!" she screamed, her voice cracking with panic. "Journalist! Journalist!" She repeated the word in French and Arabic. The soldiers ignored her.

The truck accelerated. Scenes of flames and darkness flashed past. A shock rocked the truck, splintered wood, showering her. She looked up to see that a shell fragment had slashed through a thick plank on one side. Tangled in the other slats, the plank shifted and bumped with the lurching of the truck. A soldier who sat against the truck's cab scrambled across the deck and shoved the splintered plank out.

Pausing for an instant, the soldier looked at her. A fur hat and a scarf covered his face, but she saw Caucasian skin and blue eyes. A Russian? He returned to his position near a heavy machine gun and wrapped a blanket around himself as the truck hurtled through the night.

Desmarais called in her basic Arabic to the two Syrian soldiers. "I am a journalist. I go to Damascus. You take me to Damascus?"

"Yes, we go there," one of the Shias replied, nodding.

"Thank you, thank you," she sobbed.

They left the carnage behind. Desmarais put her face to the dirty boards and gasped down breath after breath.

She had survived.

And she had left Zhgenti behind.

An arm's reach away from Desmarais, Carl Lyons whispered into his hand-radio. "We just picked up a hitchhiker. Guess who it is?"

The others heard him laughing.

Shouting, cursing, Zhgenti led his men through the wreckage. The Palestinians and Soviets of his kill squad had abandoned any pretense of representing a news network. They had taken their weapons and equipment and left the empty cases to burn in the wrecked vans. Now they moved through the flames and swirling snow, hurrying to the safety of the open highway.

Trucks and cars burned around them. Shells continued to fall hundreds of meters to the east as the distant artillery unit walked the 130mm shells along the highway, blasting the blazing trucks and screaming wounded again and again. Secondary explosions sent the twisted wreckage of transports spinning through the night.

Others also tried to put the slaughter behind them. Vehicles somehow untouched wove through the hulks scattered along the highway. Crowded with soldiers, a troop transport low-geared around the tangle of metal that had been a private car before a high-explosive shell reduced it to scattered fenders and burning upholstery. Syrian soldiers left the roadside ditches and sprinted after the transport. Three soldiers managed to clutch the side slats and ride away holding on to the outside of the truck.

"We want a truck!" Zhgenti called out to his squad. "One of these, any one that isn't ruined."

But high explosive and shrapnel had destroyed the vehicles they found. Ignoring the flaming trucks, they checked the vans and trucks that had run off the road in the first chaotic minute of the artillery barrage.

One of the Soviets ran to a small Japanese truck with four-wheel drive. The vehicle showed no damage other than shattered windows. But the interior was filled with torn corpses. A blast of shrapnel had turned the opposite side of the truck into a lattice of perforated fenders and doors, the steel cut to shreds by the high-velocity fragments of a bursting shell. Ignoring the gore inside, the Soviet checked the engine and tires and found that the fragments had totaled the truck.

The squad continued checking trucks until they came to what remained of the Syrian unit that had established the checkpoint.

One of the BMP combat vehicles had taken a direct hit. Nothing remained except the track threads and the slab of armor plating that had formed the undercarriage. The wreckage of the armored vehicle — and the blood-clotted shreds of the crew — lay everywhere.

A second BMP nearby had taken the blast of a shell without apparent damage. However, the soldiers inside had not closed the rear hatches. The high-velocity fragments, like supersonic axes, had ricochetted throughout the interior of the vehicle. Blood flowed from the armored troop carrier.

Zhgenti looked down at a Syrian officer gasping on the asphalt. The dying officer clutched at his open gut, his hands lost in a tangle of intestines.

"Fool!" Zhgenti spat into the Syrian's agony-racked face. "You had to delay me. Don't you understand that some people do not have time for your petty politics?"

Leaving the roadblock commander to die, Zhgenti directed his men to spread out. He raised his Uzi above his head and shouted, "The next one that comes through is ours! Take it!"

11

Only a flashlight lit the interior of the sandbag bunker inside the trailer. Desmarais sat on the floor as Blancanales questioned her.

For the first time since the Canadian journalist-cum-Soviet agent had sought out Powell and become involved with the American pursuit of the terrorists, Desmarais spoke truthfully. She no longer pretended to be a journalist. She no longer preached her anti-American politics. She no longer taunted the American antiterrorist fighters.

Chaos and luck had defeated her. The game of deceit had ended. Now she hoped only for survival.

"The assignment to the rocket group came like all the others. My director called and briefed me, and then all the materials and tickets and names of contacts came in the mail. I was surprised when I saw that I would be investigating Soviets, but I did not question the assignment..."

"All the other times," Blancanales interrupted to clarify the point. "The director — the voice on the telephone — sent you against Americans?"

"Yes. Stories about American activities for the Canadian and European newspapers, sometimes for Soviet newspapers. But this time I used my job only for cover. I knew my director would not want a story published about these Iranians and Syrians. But I followed it..."

"Why were you certain?" Blancanales asked.

"Because the Syrians are allies of the Soviet Union. And I saw that they were working together with the Iranian fundamentalists. I did not learn what the project would be, but it involved only terrorist groups. It had to be terrorism. When the Iranians killed the CIA men in Beirut, that could be a story. I investigated that as if I were writing a story. That took me to Powell. I knew Shabakkar — he is the fighter for the creation of the Black Nation of Islam in North America — and Shabakkar said he would speak with Powell, but it was a trap and the Iranians took me..."