the rails, foundering on power struggles within the faction. Only the timely intervention of a third party - the Liberty Foundation, as it later emerged - caused them to alter their plans. After twelve days of captivity, Janson walked free. "For all we know, Novak wasn't even involved, didn't have any knowledge of the situation," Katsaris went on. "But it's his foundation. Ergo, you owe the man your life. So this lady comes up to you and says, Baaqlina has come due. You've got to say yes."
"I always feel like an open book around you," Janson said, his smile crinkling the lines around his eyes.
"Yeah, written with one time pad encryption. Tell me something. How often do you think about Helene?" The warrior's brown eyes were surprisingly gentle.
"Every day."
"She was magical, wasn't she? She always seemed so free."
"A free spirit," Janson said. "My opposite in every way."
Katsaris slid a nylon-mesh brush through the bore hole of another automatic weapon, checking for any cracks, carbon deposits, or other irregularities, and then he looked straight into Janson's eyes. "You once told me something, Paul. Years ago. Now I'm going to tell it to you." He reached over, placed a hand on Janson's shoulder. "There is no revenge. Not on this earth. That's storybook stuff. In our world, there are strikes and reprisals and more reprisals. But that neat, slate-cleaning fantasy of revenge - it doesn't exist."
"I know."
"Helene's dead, Paul."
"Oh. That must be why she hasn't been answering my phone calls." His deadpan was masking a world of pain, and not very well.
Katsaris's gaze did not waver, but he squeezed Janson's shoulder harder. "There is nothing - nothing - that can ever bring her back. Do what you want to the Kagama fanatics, but know this."
"It was five years ago," Janson said quietly.
"Does it feel like five years ago?"
The words came out in a whisper. "Like yesterday." It was not how an officer spoke to those he commanded. It was how a man spoke to the person with whom he was closest in the world, a person to whom he could never lie. He exhaled heavily. "You're afraid I'm going to go berserk and visit the wrath of God upon the terrorists who killed my wife."
"No," Katsaris said. "I'm afraid that on some gut level, you think that the way to wipe the slate clean, the way to honor Helene, is to get yourself killed by them, too."
Janson shook his head violently, though he wondered whether there could be any truth to what Katsaris said. "Nobody's going to die tonight," he said. It was a ritual of self-assurance, they both knew, rather than a statement of probabilities.
"What's ironic is that Helene always had real sympathy for the Kagama," Janson said after a while. "Not the terrorists, not the KLF, of course, but the ordinary Kagama caught in the middle of it all. Had she lived, she probably would have been right by Novak's side, trying to work out a peace agreement. The Caliph is an archmanipulator, but he exists because there are genuine grievances for him to manipulate."
"If we're here to do social engineering, we've been given the wrong equipment." Theo ran a thumbnail against a combat knife, testing its keenness. "Besides, Peter Novak tried that, and look where it got him. This is a strict in-out. Insertion and extraction."
Janson nodded. "If everything goes right, we'll be spending a total of a hundred minutes on Anura. Then again, if you've got to deal with these people, maybe it'll help if you know where they're coming from."
"If we've reached that stage," Katsaris replied grimly, "everything will have gone wrong that can go wrong."
"I won't mind taking this baby out for a spin," Honwana said admiringly. He, Janson, and Hennessy were standing in the gloomy hangar, their eyes still adjusting from the bright sun outside to the shadows within.
The BA609 was a sea-landing-equipped tiltrotor aircraft; like the discontinued Ospreys, it had propellers that enabled vertical takeoffs and landings but that, when tilted to the horizontal position, would enable the craft to function like a fixed-wing airplane. Bell/Agusta had crafted the fuselage of this particular specimen not from steel but from a tough molded resin. The result was an exceptionally lightweight craft that could travel much farther on a liter of fuel than any conventional design - up to four times as far. Its versatility would be important to the success of the mission.
Now Honwana ran his fingertips over the nonreflective surface. "A thing of beauty."