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  “How 'bout that! Class of seventy, too. Well, here we go again, sports fans. I take it you don't much like airplane rides?”

  Before Carroll had a chance to answer, the copter jumped straight up from the parking lot. The ascent left Carroll's small intestines somewhere behind. The chopper pierced the smoky city afternoon, hugging the dusky walls of nearby buildings and cleverly avoiding swift winds sweeping off the river.

  As the copter swung out wide toward the East River, another Bell joined in from due south.

  “No, I'm not real crazy about helicopters. No offense, Luther.”

  Adrenaline flowed wildly through Carroll's body. Down below, he could see traffic streaming on the FDR.

  The police pilot shouted over the roaring rotors. “Beautiful day, man. You can see Long Island, Connecticut, almost see Paris, France.”

  “Beautiful day to get shot in the fucking heart.”

  Parrish snorted a laugh. “You been to 'Nam all right. Let's see, we've got two, maybe three, armed patrol helicopters on them right now. Pick up more help once we find out which borough they're goin' to. I think we'll be fine.”

  “I hope you're right.”

  “You see them down there? Little toy taxicabs. See? See right there?”

  “Yeah, with little toy M-Sixteens, toy rocket launchers,” Carroll said to the pilot.

  “You talk just like ex-infantry. Ironic-type shit. Makin' me all misty eyed.”

  “Still infantry from the look of things. Except I'm afraid we're fighting the Green Berets today.”

  The black pilot turned to Carroll with a knowing look. “They're bad dudes all right. Definitely Special Forces.” He nodded as if to a secret beat. He almost seemed proud of the Vets bravado. Their urban street-fighting style had hit a chord.

  A thousand feet below, the FDR Drive was a delicate ribbon of silver and shiny jet black. The Vets cabs looked intensely yellow down there. As the lineup of cabs crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, the two helicopters swung high and wide to avoid being seen. They actually disappeared briefly into low-flying clouds.

  Carroll's shirt was already soaked through. Everything seemed to be happening at a distance. The world was slightly fuzzed and unreal. They were going to solve Green Band, after all.

  On the Brooklyn side of the bridge, he could see that traffic was heavy but moving. The steady whoosh of cars, an occasional bleating horn, traveled all the way up to the cockpit.

  “They're getting off at the exit for the Navy Yard! This is Carroll to control. The Vets convoy is exiting at the Navy Yard! They're proceeding northeast into Brooklyn!” Carroll screeched into the microphone.

  Brooklyn

  At that same instant, a deafening explosion jarred the underbelly of the helicopter with a jolt that rattled right through Carroll's bones. His head cracked hard against the metal roof, and sharp bolts of pain stabbed behind his eyes.

  Then a second jarring blast struck the cockpit.

  Splinters of glass flew in all directions. Star fractures cob-webbed across the windshield. Everywhere, metal was ringing with gunshots. Glaring red flashes were angrily ribboning the sky.

  “Ohhh, goddamn, I'm hit. I'm hit,” Parrish moaned as he slumped forward.

  A machine gun chattered loudly off to Carroll's left. He caught a brief glimpse of floating, blinking red lamps on the right and the hulking shapes of two choppers he hadn't seen before.

  Christ! Two Cobras were attacking.

  The sky filled with bright, jarring yellow orbs of light, with roaring fire and billowing black smoke. The companion police helicopter had disintegrated before Carroll's eyes.

  Within seconds there was nothing left of the chopper but leaping gold-and-orange flames. Nothing but an eerie, fading afterimage in the sky.

  Carroll could see that Luther Parrish had been badly hit. Puddles of blood were collecting from a wound on the side of his head. The electric circuits in the cockpit seemed to be completely out.

  Heavy machine-gun fire suddenly welled up from below. The pilot moaned and grabbed his legs. The helicopter had begun to fall, to somersault and plummet.

  Carroll crazily fired his M-16 at one of the attacking Cobras. The red light winked derisively-then the copter calmly disappeared from sight.

  Carroll froze. The police helicopter suddenly flipped over. It was upside down. Blood was rushing, swirling through his head.

  The helicopter was now in a deadfall, sailing and spinning into the Brooklyn Navy Yard below. A flat black rooftop, with a water tower mounted on it, suddenly loomed at the copter's windshield. Carroll could see them skimming over an expanse of shadowy factory buildings a block long, at least. They missed a smoking industrial chimney by inches. Then the copter's tail was clipped off by a high brick retaining wall.

  A deserted grid of avenues and streets appeared through the windshield as the chopper cleared the last building. Cars were parked in long, uneven lines up both sides.

  Carroll was familiar with helicopters from his many trips in Vietnam, though not how to fly. Reflexively he grabbed at the controls.

  He was beyond all fear now, beyond anything he'd even felt in combat or police action. He was in a new realm-a place where he was acutely conscious of everything around him.

  This was it, he thought. He was going to die.

  The helicopter's belly cleanly sheared the rooftops off half a dozen parked cars. Carroll covered his face and shielded Parrish as best he could.

  The helicopter struck the street on a side angle. It skidded, bounded violently, then issued a grinding shriek. Sparks, plumes of intense red flames, flew in every direction. Whole sides of parked automobiles, headlights, and bumpers were effortlessly cut away. A fire hydrant popped out of the sidewalk.

  The helicopter plowed to a tearing, screaming, crunching halt against two crushed cars.

  A man in a factory security uniform came running down the deserted street, zigzagging crazily toward the unbelievable accident. “Hey, hey! That's my car! That's my car!”

  Carroll cradled the badly wounded pilot. “Grab hold. You just hold me,” he whispered, hoping the man wasn't already dead. “Just hold me, Luther. Don't let go.”

  He began to half carry the hulking NYPD pilot away from the burning helicopter wreckage. His eyes nervously searched the skies for the attacking Cobras, but he could see nothing.

  The choppers might as well have been a nightmare. The nightmare of Vietnam all over again. But it was happening right here on the streets of Brooklyn.

  And now Archer Carroll was out of the grand chase. He had lost Green Band. They had eluded him again.

  40

  The Vets cabs proceeded northeast, then almost due east across Brooklyn. They were moving inexorably toward François Monserrat and the appointed end of Green Band. Everything was precisely on schedule.

  Erect and alert behind the wheel, David Hudson was experiencing a moment of unusual anxiety. It all had to do with being this close to the end. They were less than seven minutes from the rendezvous with Monserrat.

  Nothing could distract David Hudson from Green Band now. He would concentrate as if he were entering a combat zone. Nothing must look even mildly suspicious…

  François Monserrat's soldiers could be watching the streets from neighborhood rooftops and darkened apartment windows. If they spotted the unexpected attack force, the final massive exchange of Wall Street securities would fail. Green Band would fail.

  Like an advance scout in 'Nam, Hudson noted everything. A knot of black youths was easing out of Turner's Grill. Their voices carried-low, guttural sounds in syncopated street rhythms. He checked and rechecked the squat, cheerless brick buildings as he drove closer to the agreed-upon meeting place.

  Hudson drove slowly on until he found a parking spot farther down the slope-shouldered Bedford-Stuyvesant side street. Very nonchalantly he climbed out of the car. He continued to look around the quiet neighborhood, searching for any sign of danger. He finally popped open the cab's dented and scarred trunk.
The Wall Street securities were there in ordinary-looking gray vinyl suitcases.

  Hudson hoisted up the bags and began to walk as rapidly as he could toward a red brick factory at the next corner. He was certain he was being watched. François Monserrat was somewhere nearby. All of his senses and instincts corroborated that warning signal. This was to be the moment of reckoning. Hudson's Special Forces training to be matched against Monserrat's years of experience, his years of meticulous deceit.

  Hudson shouldered open the heavy wood front door of a building that housed shabby apartments and a small Italian-American shoe factory, the Gino Company of Milano.

  He pushed into a dark hallway, where trapped cooking smells immediately assaulted him. The musty scent of old winter clothes hung in the air. The meeting place seemed appropriately isolated, but almost too mundane.

  “Don't turn around, Colonel.”

  Three men with long-nosed Magnums and Berettas drawn, stepped into the dim corridor.

  “Move right up against the wall… That's good. Right there. That will be fine, Colonel Hudson.”

  The leader had a cultivated Spanish accent, more than likely Cuban. François Monserrat ran the Caribbean and most of the terrorist activities in South America, Hudson remembered. At the rate he was going, one day Monserrat was going to run the entire Third World.

  “I'm not armed,” Hudson said quietly.

  “We have to search you anyway.”

  One of the men positioned himself about three feet away from Colonel David Hudson. He pointed his gun between Hudson's eyes. It was a popular gunman's trick, one Hudson himself had been taught at Fort Bragg. At close range, shoot out the eyes.

  The second man patted him down, quickly and professionally. The third man searched the suitcases, slashing them carefully with a knife, looking for false siding, a false bottom.

  “Upstairs!” the terrorist who held the gun finally commanded Hudson. He spoke like a military officer, Hudson noted.

  They began to climb a steep and creaking flight of stairs, then another flight. Were they leading him to Monserrat? Finally, the enigmatic Monserrat himself? Or would there be more deception?

  “This is your floor, Colonel. That blue door straight ahead. You can just walk inside. You're most definitely expected.”

  “Point of information? I have a question for you, for all of you. Curiosity on my part.” David Hudson spoke without turning to face them.

  An impatient grunt came from behind…

  The Lizard Man. Past interrogations. Special Forces training. Hudson's mind continued to churn at a furious rate.

  All to prepare him for this very moment? For this and no other?

  “Do they ever tell you what's really happening? Has anyone bothered to tell you the truth about this operation? Do you know what this meeting really is? Do you know why?”

  David Hudson was introducing some element of doubt into all of their minds, petty doubts and confusion, paranoid unease he could use later, if he needed to.

  Deception.

  “Don't bother to knock, Colonel.” The man in charge calmly spoke once again. “Just go right in; you're expected. Everything you try to do is expected, Colonel.”

  A slice of dull yellow light emanated from the fourth-floor tenement room as David Hudson peered inside. He paused at the doorway's edge.

  He was about to confront the mysterious and dangerous Monserrat. He was about to end Green Band's long mission.

  The Vietcong's Lizard Man had taught Hudson an essential lesson in Vietnam: Play games in which your opponent wasn't given the rules. This was the principle behind all successful guerrilla warfare, Hudson believed.

  Colonel David Hudson versus Monserrat.

  Now it would begin, and end.

  “All blue-and-white units! We've picked them up again… We've got our friends Green Band!”

  NYPD cruiser radios echoed brassily above the noise of whining police and hospital emergency sirens at the helicopter crash site near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

  “They're moving into a residential neighborhood. Bed-ford-Stuyvesant. It's right in the heart of the fucking ghetto. They're traveling on Halsey Street in Bed-Stuy. Over.”

  Arch Carroll sagged heavily against the open front door of one of the half-dozen police cruisers that had arrived after the accident. Crime scene technicians were already swarming onto the fire-lit street.

  He wasn't sure if he'd heard the radio report right… Green Band appeared; Green Band disappeared. Which was it now?

  Carroll tried to clear his head as he listened to the minute-by-minute updates squawking over nearby police-cruiser radios.

  He felt numb. He was beyond pain.

  Parrish was carried on a litter into a waiting EMS ambulance. KIA, Carroll was almost certain.

  “Carroll? You're Arch Carroll, aren't you? Do you want to go with me? I'm heading to Halsey Street. It's about ten minutes from here.” A police captain, a plump, white-haired man Carroll knew from a saner niche in his life, came up to him.

  Carroll knew he appeared badly dazed. He felt far worse than that, but he nodded. Yes, he definitely wanted to witness the end. He had to be there. Colonel David Hudson-Monserrat-Archer Carroll-they all had to be there. Everything had led to this point.

  Seconds later he was uncomfortably hunched up in a patrol car. He felt sure he was going to be sick. Hammers of fear were tripping off in his head.

  The cruiser lurched into motion. The flashing cherry-red light began to revolve. The siren of the speeding car warbled above the Brooklyn rooftops.

  This was the master terrorist Monserrat.

  This was François Monserrat.

  David Hudson could not believe that what his eyes told him was true.

  Monserrat?… Or was this more incredible deception? The highest manifestation of deception? He felt the familiar electric tingling in his fingertips, his arm, his legs.

  He watched the mysterious dark-suited figure come toward him. He noted the two gunmen in the shadows against the far wall.

  “Colonel Hudson.” The handshake was quick, firm. “I'm François Monserrat. The real one this time.” A thin smile played at the corners of his mouth. It was the most confident and assured look that David Hudson had ever witnessed.

  Monserrat's smile dimmed immediately. “Let's get down to business. I believe we can complete our transaction quickly. Look at what he's brought, Marcel. Rapidement!”

  A man in a dark suit stepped inside the room at Monserrat's command. He was perhaps sixty and had the pallid complexion, the weak eyesight, of someone who spent much of his life looking through microscopes and magnifying glasses. He bent low to examine the securities Colonel David Hudson had brought with him.

  Hudson watched closely as he rubbed the individual trading bonds carefully, testing their texture between his thumb and forefinger. He smelled selected bonds, testing for fresh ink, for any unusually pungent odors, anything that would suggest recent printing. He worked extremely fast.

  Nevertheless, each minute passed with excruciating slowness.

  “For the most part, the bonds are authentic,” he finally said to Monserrat, looking up.

  “Any problems at all?”

  “I have a slight question about the Morgan Guaranty, perhaps about the smaller Lehman Brothers lot. I think there are possibly some counterfeit papers in those stacks. As you know, there are always some counterfeits,” he added. “Everything else is quite in order.”

  François Monserrat nodded curtly. He seemed uneasy now. The terrorist picked up the plain black telephone on the table. He dialed a telephone company business office, gave a four-digit number, then spoke to someone who was clearly an overseas operator. Seconds later the terrorist was speaking directly to someone obviously known at a bank in Geneva.

  “My account is Number four-eleven/FA. Make the agreed-upon deposit into the account…” A few minutes later Monserrat hung up.

  Then the phone rang, and Colonel Hudson received a confirmation that the
money had indeed been successfully transferred in Europe. More than two hundred million dollars had gone out of the Soviet accounts into special accounts opened by the Vets in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Madrid. Vets 28, Thomas O'Neil, the Customs chief of Dublin International Airport, had come through once again. The Green Band plan was perfect.

  “Colonel, I believe our business is concluded. You seem to have won each round. This time, anyway.” Monserrat executed a cold deferential bow.

  As Colonel David Hudson stood up from the table, he felt that a terrible weight had finally been lifted. He was free of an obsession he'd carried with him for almost fifteen years.

  At that precise moment, he was silently counting down to zero.

  Green Band was almost at an end.

  Almost, but not quite. Just one more twist, one final element of surprise.

  Deception, at its best.

  A game in which Hudson alone knew the rules. An amazing game called Green Band.

  Less than forty seconds remained… Two pistols were drawn in the room…

  Concentrate. David Hudson eased himself toward a controlled calmness.

  Talk to them. Keep talking to Monserrat.

  “I have one question before I leave. May I? May I ask one troubling question?”

  Monserrat nodded. “What harm? You may ask anything. Then perhaps I have a question.”

  Colonel Hudson watched Monserrat's eyes as he spoke. He saw nothing, no emotion there. No affect. The two of them were close in so many ways. Killing machines.

  “How long have you been with the Russians? How long have you been one of their moles?”

  “I was always with the Russians, Colonel. I am Russian. My parents were stationed in middle America. They were among the hundreds of agents who came here in the late 1940s. I was taught to assimilate myself-to be American. There are many others like me. Many others. They're all over the United States right now. Waiting, Colonel. We want to destroy this country financially, and in every other way.”