"Listen to me," I said. "I can't save Joel Hand, but I can make them think he's not dead."

Everyone just stared at me.

Then Marino said, "What?"

I was getting frantic. "He could die any minute," I said. "I've got to get in there now and buy you enough time to get in, too."

"We can't get in," Wesley said.

"Once I'm in there, maybe you can," I said. "We can use the robot to find a way. We'll get him in, and then he can stun and blind them long enough for your guys to get in. I know you have the equipment to do that."

Wesley was grim and Marino looked miserable, I understood the way they felt, but I knew what must be done.

I went out to the nearest ambulance and got what I needed from paramedics while other people found ice. Then Toto and I made our approach with Lucy at the controls. The robot carried fifty pounds of ice while I was in charge of a large medical chest. We walked toward the front door of Old Point's main building as if this were any other day and our visit was normal. I did not think of the men who had me in their scopes. I refused to imagine explosives or the barge loading up material that could help Libya build an atom bomb.

When we reached the door, it was immediately opened by what looked like the same bearded man who had appeared to get the hostage phone not long ago.

"Get in," he gruffly said, and he was carrying an assault rifle on a strap.

"Help me with the ice," I said.

He stared at the robot with its five bags held fast in grippers. He was reticent, as if Toto were a pit bull that might suddenly hurt him in some way. Then he reached for the ice and Lucy programmed her friend through fiber optics to release it. Next, this man and I were inside the building with the door shut, and the security area had been destroyed, X-ray and other scanning devices ripped out of place and riddled with bullets. There were blood drips and drag marks, and when I followed him around a corner, I smelled the bodies before I saw the slain guards who had been gathered into a ghastly, gory pile down the hall.

Fear rose in my throat like bile as we passed through a red door, and the rumble of combines shook my bones and made it impossible to hear anything said by this man who was a New Zionist. As I noticed the large black pistol on his belt, I thought about Danny and the.45 that had so coldly killed him. We climbed grated stairs painted red, and I did not look down because I would get dizzy. He led me along a catwalk to a door that was very heavy and painted with warnings, and he punched in a code as ice began to drip on the floor.

"Just do as you're told," I vaguely heard him say as we walked into the control room. "You understand me?" He nudged my back with his rifle.

"Yes," I said.

There were maybe a dozen men inside, all dressed in slacks and sweaters or jackets, and carrying semiautomatic rifles and machine guns. They were very excited and angry, and seemed indifferent to the ten hostages sitting on the floor against a wall. Hands were tied in front of them, and pillowcases had been pulled over their heads. Through holes cut out for eyes, I could see their terror. The openings for their mouths were stained with saliva and they sucked in and out with rapid, shallow breaths. I noted bloody drag marks on the floor here, too, only these were fresh and led behind a console where the latest victim had been dumped.

I wondered how many bodies I would later find should mine not be among them.

"Over there," my escort ordered.

Joel Hand was on his back on the floor, covered by a curtain someone had ripped from a window. He was very pale and still wet from the pool where he had swallowed water that would kill him, no matter what I tried to do. I recognized his fair, full-lipped face from when I had seen him in court, only he looked puffier and older.

"How long has he been like this?" I spoke to the man who had brought me in.

"Maybe an hour and a half."

He was smoking and pacing. He would not meet my eyes, one hand nervously resting on the barrel of his gun, which was aimed at my head as I set down the medical chest. I turned around and stared at him.

"Don't point that at me," I said.

"You shut up." He stopped pacing and looked as if he would crack my skull.

"I'm here because you invited me, and I'm trying to help." I met his glassy gaze and my voice meant business, too. "If you don't want me to help, then go ahead and shoot me or let me leave. Neither one is going to help him. I'm trying to save his life and don't need to be distracted by your goddamn gun."

He did not know what to say as he leaned against a console with enough controls to fly us to the moon. Video displays on walls showed that both reactors were shut down, and areas in a grid lighted up red warned of problems I could not comprehend.

"Hey, Wooten, take it easy." One of his peers lit a cigarette.

"Let's open the bags of ice now," I said. "I wish we had a tub, but we don't. I see some books on those countertops, and it looks like there's a lot of stacks of paper over there by that fax machine. Bring anything like that you can for a border."

Men brought to me all sorts of thick manuals, reams of papers and briefcases that I assumed belonged to the employees they had captured. I formed a rectangular border around Hand as if I were in my backyard making a flower bed. Then I covered him with fifty pounds of ice, leaving only his face and an arm exposed.

"What will that do?" The man called Wooten had moved closer, and he sounded as if he were from out west somewhere. d to radiation," I said. "His "He's been acutely expose system is being destroyed and the only way to put a stop to it is to slow everything down."

I opened the medical chest and got out a needle, which I inserted into their dying leader's arm and secured with tape. I connected an IV line leading to a bag on a stand that contained nothing but saline, a harmless salty solution that would do nothing one way or another. It dripped as he got cooler beneath inches of ice.

Hand was barely alive, and my heart was thudding as I looked around at these sweating men who believed that this man I pretended to save was God. One had taken his sweater off, and his undershirt was almost gray, the sleeves drawn up from years of washing. Several of them had beards, while others had not shaved in days. I wondered where their women and children were, and I thought of the barge in the river and what must be going on in other parts of the plant. voice barely said, and at least

"Excuse me," a quavering one of the hostages was a woman. "I need to go to the bathroom." obody shitting

"Mullen, you take her. We don't want n in here."

"Excuse me, but I have to go, too," said another hostage, who was a man.

"So do I." he was young

"All right, one at a time," said Mullen, w and huge.

I knew at least one thing the FBI did not. The New Zionists had never intended to let anyone else go. Terrorists place hoods over their hostages because it is easier to kill people who have no faces. I got out a vial of saline and injected fifty milliliters into Hand's IV line, as if I were giving him some other magic dose.

"How's he doing?" one of the men loudly asked as another hostage was led off to the bathroom.

"I've got him stabilized at the moment," I lied.

"When's he going to come around?" asked another.

I took their leader's pulse again, and it was so faint I almost could not find it. Suddenly, the man dropped down beside me and felt Hand's neck. Digging his fingers in the ice, he pressed them over the heart, and when he looked up at me, he was frightened and furious.

"I don't feel nothing!" he yelled, his face red.

"You're not supposed to feel anything. It's critical to keep him in a hypothermic state so we can arrest the rate of irradiation damage to blood vessels and organs," I told him. "He's on massive doses of diethylene triamine pentaacetic acid, and he is quite alive."