July 8, 1530 hours, Smyrna, Georgia

The attack on Elwood Industries went off like the well-planned military campaign that it was. The only thing that separated it from actual war was the fact that heavily armed, well-trained thugs were going up against unarmed civilians.

At precisely 1530, three trucks stopped on the three access roads to Elwood Industries and set up roadblocks. Men in coveralls halted traffic and told drivers there would be a half-hour delay while a crew located a large gas leak.

At 1532, a man and a woman in a stolen telephone-company truck went down an access hatch and cut the lines to Elwood Industries and all the neighboring plants. When an off-duty security guard stopped to pass the time of day, the man and woman took turns practicing their karate blows. Then they stuffed the body into the access space and replaced the hatch cover.

The Elwood building was surrounded precisely on schedule, at 1540. Two minutes later, three teams of four men each went into the building by its three different entrances.

At the front entrance, the receptionist's smile died when she saw the two M-16s and the double-barreled shotgun carried by the three terrorists who followed Aya Jishin. Jishin's hands were empty, but that did not make her look any less menacing than the others.

"Where do I find Lao?" Jishin demanded.

The receptionist turned white.

Jishin grabbed her arm, held it over the edge of the desk and broke it with a single blow.

"Where?" Jishin asked.

"The end of corridor three on the right," the receptionist screamed.

"That's better," Jishin said and strode out of the reception area, leaving her henchmen to kill the receptionist.

The one with the shotgun blasted her face into gory bits.

Jishin found corridor three and marched grimly to the end. Gunshots sounded elsewhere in the building. Doors in corridor three began to open and heads poked out of doorways.