"One of our jets as it left the airport," Hershey told him.

"The bastards! Will it never stop? Does your embassy have a statement for the newspapers?"

"That's the ambassador's worry." Hershey slipped on his suit jacket, tucked Uzi mags in the coat's wallet pockets. "What we're going to do is stop those fanatics. Tonight."

Wind banged a Coca-Cola sign. Dust swirled on the street's stones, the wind from the desert carrying litter and the stink of the slums. Three Fiats followed an alley-narrow street through a district of shops and tenements. Yellow light spilled from the windows. One neon sign, Arabic symbols in electric blue, marked a shop.

In the lead car, Hershey spoke into his hand radio. "Park here."

Holding his Uzi under his suit coat, he left the car. He gingerly stepped through the piles of garbage and broken glass in the gutter, stopped at the end of the street. Parks and Sadek left their cars to join him. Hershey looked around the corner, pointed. "There."

Only stones and twisted metal remained of the first structure on the street. The second building, a shop with a second floor of rooms, leaned visibly, ready to fall. Beams scavenged from the wreckage of the collapsed building braced the leaning wall. Light showed in a corrugated sheet-metal hut on the roof of the tenement. Hershey pointed to a battered truck parked on a sidewalk.

"There's our surveillance. Hopper and McGraw are down on the other end. Those crazies with the rocket launcher are still in there."

"What about the people around here?" Parks indicated the dark shops and windows of the streets. "We go in and someone opens up shooting, and we're in an international incident."

Hershey sneered at his aide. "Maybe you want to call the police? They killed an American pilot tonight. We're going in there hard and fast. Sadek, any of the city police show up, show them your identification, keep them back. I want to take prisoners. Maybe we can break this group tonight."