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  It was the Hungarian.

  He just stood there on the deserted street and watched the Sukhoi disappear over the hills to the south, his eyes narrowing.

  FORTERESSE DE VALOIS

  BRITTANY, FRANCE

  26 OCTOBER, 0900 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  (1300 HOURS IN AFGHANISTAN—0300 HOURS

  E.S.T. USA)

  The two bounty hunters crossed the drawbridge that gave entry to the Forteresse de Valois, a mighty castle that thrust out into the Atlantic Ocean from the rugged north-western coast of France.

  Built in 1289 by the mad Compte de Valois, the Forteresse was not your typical French castle.

  Whereas most fortified buildings in France put an emphasis on beauty, the Forteresse de Valois was far more utilitarian. It was a rock, a grim fortress.

  Squat, fat and solid as hell, through a combination of sheer engineering audacity and the uniqueness of its location, in its time the Forteresse de Valois was ail-but impregnable.

  The reason: it was built on top of an enormous rock formation that jutted up from the ocean itself, about sixty yards out from the high coastal cliffs.

  As they stretched downward, the fortress's colossal stone walls blended seamlessly with the vertical sides of the rocky mount, so that the whole structure stood 400 feet above the crashing waves of the Atlantic.

  The castle's only connection with the mainland was a 60-metre-long spanning bridge of stone, the last twenty metres of which was a lowerable drawbridge.

  The two bounty hunters crossed the drawbridge, dwarfed by the dark castle looming above them, the relentless Atlantic wind blasting their bodies.

  They carried between them a large white box marked with a red cross and the words: 'human organs: DO NOT OPEN—express

  delivery'.

  Once across the bridge, the two men stepped underneath the fortress's 700-year-old portcullis, and entered the castle.

  They were met in the courtyard by a dapper gentleman dressed in perfectly-pressed tails and wearing a pair of wireframed pince-nez.

  'Bonjour, messieurs,' the man said. 'My name is Monsieur Delacroix. How may I help you?'

  The two bounty hunters—Americans, dressed in suede jackets, jeans and cowboy boots—looked at each other.

  The bigger one growled, 'We're here to collect the bounty on a

  couple of heads.'

  The dapper gentleman smiled politely. 'But of course you are.

  And your names?'

  The bigger one said, 'Drabyak. Joe Drabyak. Texas Ranger. This here is my partner, my brother, Jimbo.'

  Monsieur Delacroix bowed.

  'Ah, oui, the famous brothers Drabyak. Why don't you come

  inside.'

  Monsieur Delacroix led them through a garage that contained a collection of rare and expensive automobiles—a red Ferrari Modena; a silver Porsche GT-2; an Aston Martin Vanquish; some race-ready rally cars, and taking pride of place in the centre of the showroom, a glistening black Lamborghini Diablo.

  The two American bounty hunters eyed the array of supercars with delight. If their mission went according to plan, they'd be buying themselves some ail-American muscle cars very soon.

  'They yours?' Big Drabyak grunted as he walked behind Monsieur Delacroix.

  The dapper gentleman snuffed a laugh. 'Oh, no. I am but a humble banker from Switzerland supervising this distribution of funds for my client. The cars belong to the owner of this castle. Not me.'

  Monsieur Delacroix led them down some stone stairs at the end of the pristine garage, down to a lower level . . .

  . . . and suddenly they entered medieval times.

  They came to a round stone-walled ante-room. A long narrow tunnel branched off it to the left, disappearing into torch-lit subterranean gloom.

  Monsieur Delacroix stopped, turned to the smaller of the two Texans. 'Young monsieur James. You will stay here, while your brother and I verify the heads.'

  Big Drabyak gave his younger brother a reassuring nod.

  Monsieur Delacroix then led Big Drabyak down the long torch-lit tunnel.

  At the end of the passageway was a magnificent office. One entire wall of it was a picture window offering a stunning panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean, stretching away to the horizon.

  As they came to the end of the stone tunnel, Monsieur Delacroix stopped again.

  'If I may have your case, please . . .'

  The bounty hunter gave him the white medical transport box.

  Monsieur Delacroix said, 'Now, if you would wait here.'

  Delacroix entered the office, leaving the Texan bounty hunter standing just beyond the doorway, still inside the stone passageway.

  Delacroix crossed to his desk, pulling a handheld remote from his coat as he did so, and pressed a button on it—

  Wham! Wham! Wham!

  Three steel doors came thundering down into the medieval passageway from slits concealed in its roof.

  The first two doors sealed off the ante-room, imprisoning Little Drabyak in the circular stone room, cutting him off from both the upstairs garage and the narrow tunnel containing his older brother.

  The third steel door sealed off the office from the passageway— separating Monsieur Delacroix from Big Drabyak.

  Small perspex windows set into each steel door allowed the two bounty hunters to look out from their new prisons.

  Monsieur Delacroix's voice came to them via speakers in the

  ceiling.

  'Gentlemen. As you both would no doubt appreciate, a bounty hunt of this value attracts—how shall I put it—some rather unscrupulous individuals. You will stay where you are while I verify the identity of the heads that you have brought me.'

  Monsieur Delacroix placed the medical delivery box on his desk, opened it with expert hands.

  Two severed heads gazed up at him.

  One was speckled in blood, its eyes wide with horror.

  The other was in poorer condition. It had been badly burned.

  Monsieur Delacroix was unperturbed.

  Donning a pair of surgical gloves, he calmly extracted the blood-speckled head from the box and placed it on a scanning device beside his computer.

  'And who do you claim this is?' Monsieur Delacroix asked Big

  Drabyak over the intercom.

  'The Israeli, Rosenthal,' Drabyak said.

  'Rosenthal,' Delacroix punched the name into his computer. 'Hmmm . . . Mossad agent ... no DNA records. Typical of the Israelis, really. It is no matter. I have instructions on this. We shall have to use other means.'

  Delacroix initiated the scanning device on which the severed

  head sat.

  Like a CAT scan, the device ran a series of laser beams over the

  exterior of the severed head.

  Once the device had finished scanning the head, Delacroix calmly opened the mouth of the blood-speckled face and exposed the head's teeth to the laser scanner.

  Delacroix then pressed another button on his keyboard and compared the analysed head to a collection of records on his computer screen.

  The computer beeped, and Monsieur Delacroix smiled.

  'The cross-reference score is 89.337%. According to my instructions, a verification score of 75% or higher is enough to warrant payment of the bounty. Gentlemen, your first head has been successfully verified by cranial shape and known dental records as that of Major Benjamin Y. Rosenthal of the Israeli Mossad. You are now 18.6 million dollars richer.'

  The two bounty hunters smiled in their respective stone cages.

  Delacroix then pulled out the second head.

  'And this one?' he asked.

  Big Drabyak said, 'It's Nazzar, the HAMAS guy. Found him in Mexico. Buying M-16s from a drug lord.'

  'How utterly fascinating,' Delacroix said.

  The second head was blackened with burn-damage, and it appeared as if half its teeth had been blasted out with a gunshot wound ... or a hammer.

  Monsieur Delacroix performed the cranial and dental laser tests.
>
  The two bounty hunters held their breath. They seemed to get increasingly apprehensive with Delacroix's examination of the two heads.

  The skull and dental records returned a verification score of 77.326%.

  Monsieur Delacroix said, 'The percentage is 77%, no doubt due to the extensive fire and bullet damage to this head. Now, as you know, according to my instructions, a verification score of 75% or higher is enough to warrant payment of the bounty . . .'

  The bounty hunters grinned.

  '. . . unless there is a DNA record of the individual at issue, in which case I am to consult it,' Delacroix said. 'And it appears from my records here that there is a DNA sample for this individual.'

  The two bounty hunters whirled to face each other, shocked.

  Big Drabyak said, 'But there can't be . . .'

  'Oh, yes,' Delacroix said, 'according to my records here, Mister Yousef Nazzar was imprisoned in the United Kingdom in 1999 on minor weapons importation charges. A sample of his blood was taken in accordance with the UK's prisoner-intake

  DNA policy.'

  As Big Drabyak shouted for him to stop, Monsieur Delacroix injected a hypodermic needle into the left cheek of the blackened head in front of him and extracted some blood.

  The blood was then placed in an analyser attached to Delacroix's computer.

  Another beep.

  A bad one.

  Delacroix frowned—and suddenly his face took on a far more dangerous complexion.

  'Gentlemen . . .' he said slowly.

  The bounty hunters froze.

  The Swiss banker paused, as if he was offended by the indiscretion. 'Gentlemen, this head is a forgery. This is not the head of Yousef Nazzar.'

  'Now wait a minute—' Big Drabyak began.

  'Please be quiet, Mister Drabyak,' Delacroix said. 'The cosmetic surgery was quite convincing; you employed a good plastic surgeon, that much is certain. The burning of the head to remove visual identification, well, that is clever but old. And the restructured teeth were very well faked. But you didn't know there was a DNA record, did you?'

  'No,' Big Drabyak growled. 'The Rosenthal head was also a fake, then?' 'It was obtained by an associate of ours,' Big Drabyak lied, 'and he assured us that it was—'

  'But you have presented it to me, Monsieur Drabyak, therefore it is your responsibility. Let me be clear. Honesty, in this moment, may help you. Is the Rosenthal head also a fake?'

  'Yes,' Drabyak grimaced.

  'This is a grave offence against the rules of the hunt, Mister Drabyak. My clients will not tolerate attempts to deceive them, you do understand that?'

  Big Drabyak said nothing.

  'Fortunately, I have instructions on this,' Delacroix said. 'Monsieur Drabyak the Elder. The passageway in which you are standing, do you know what it is?'

  'No.'

  'Oh, yes. How silly of me to forget, you are American. You know nothing of world history except the name of every US President and the capital of every US state. A knowledge of medieval European warfare would be somewhat beyond you, no?'

  Big Drabyak's face was blank.

  Delacroix sighed. 'Monsieur Drabyak, the tunnel in which you now stand was once used as a trap to ensnare those who would attack this castle. When enemy soldiers came through that passageway, boiling oil would be flushed into it through the gutters in its walls, killing the intruders in a most painful way.'

  Big Drabyak snapped to look at the walls of the stone passageway around him. They were indeed pockmarked with a series of basketball-sized holes high up near the ceiling.

  'This castle, however, has been modified slightly,' Delacroix said, 'in keeping with modern technology. If you would observe your brother.'

  Big Drabyak spun, and stared wide-eyed through the perspex window in the steel door that separated him from his younger brother.

  'Now. Say goodbye to your brother,' Monsieur Delacroix's voice said over the speakers.

  In the office, Delacroix lifted his handheld remote again and pressed another button on it.

  Immediately, an ominous mechanical humming noise emanated from the stone walls of Little Drabyak's circular ante-room.

  The humming noise gathered intensity, getting faster and faster and faster.

  At first Little Drabyak seemed unaffected.

  Then with frightening suddenness, he convulsed violently, snapping a hand to his chest, to his heart. Then he clutched his ears—a moment before they spurted hideously with blood.

  He screamed.

  Then, as Big Drabyak watched, the most horrifying thing of all happened.

  As the humming noise hit fever-pitch, his little brother's chest just burst open, his whole rib cage blurting outward in a disgusting spray of blood and gore.

  Little Drabyak dropped to the floor of the ante-room, his eyes vacant, his rib cage blasted apart. Dead.

  Delacroix's voice: 'A microwave defence system, Monsieur Drabyak. Tres effective, no?'

  Big Drabyak was thunderstruck.

  He spun where he stood, powerless to escape.

  'You little fuck! I thought you said honesty would help!' he yelled.

  Delacroix laughed. 'Americans. You think you can plea-bargain your way out of anything. I said it might help. But on this occasion, I have decided that it will not.'

  Drabyak glanced at his brother's grisly remains. 'Is that what you're going to do to me?'

  Monsieur Delacroix smiled. 'Oh, no. Unlike you, I am an admirer of history. Sometimes, the old ways are the most satisfying.'

  And with that the Swiss banker hit a third and final button on his remote . . .

  . . . and 1,000 litres of boiling oil sprayed out from the wall-holes in the tunnel containing Joe Drabyak.

  Any exposed flesh was burned on contact—all the skin on his face was scalded in a second. Wherever the boiling oil touched his clothes, it simply melted them to his body.

  And as the oil felled him, Drabyak screamed. He would

  shriek and cry and wail until he was dead, but no-one would hear him.

  Because the Forteresse de Valois, mounted on its high rocky pinnacle overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, hanging off the edge of the Brittany coast, lay 20 miles from the nearest town.

  DEEP IN THE HINDU KUSH MOUNTAINS AFGHANISTAN-TAJIKISTAN BORDER 26 OCTOBER, 1300 HOURS LOCAL TIME (0300 HOURS E.S.T USA)

  It was like storming the gates of hell.

  Lieutenant Elizabeth Gant's eight-wheeled Light Armoured Vehicle kicked up a tornado of dust and dirt as it sped across the 200 yards of open ground that protected the entrance to the terrorist cave system.

  An absolute storm of bullets hammered the ground all around the speeding LAV as it wended its way toward the cave entrance, covered by an overhead artillery barrage of its own.

  This was the Allies' fifth attempt to get troops into the cave system—a converted Soviet mine known to be harbouring Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, Hassan Zawahiri, and about two hundred heavily-armed Al-Qaeda terrorists.

  More than a year after the Taliban regime had been ousted from Kabul—and even though a far more public war had since been waged and won against Saddam Hussein in Iraq—Operation Enduring Freedom still raged in the darkest places of Afghanistan: the caves.

  For the final annihilation of Al-Qaeda could not be achieved until all the terrorist caves had been cleared, and that involved a kind of warfare not suitable for viewing on CNN or Fox. A down-and-dirty variety of fighting. Hand-to-hand, man-on-man cave-hunting.

  And then just this week, US and UK forces had found this cave

  system far in the north of the country, straddling the Afghan-Tajikistan border—the most important terrorist cave base in Afghanistan.

  It was the core of the Al-Qaeda network.

  An abandoned Soviet coalmine once known as the Karpalov Mine, it had been converted by Osama bin Laden's construction company into a labyrinthine network of hiding caves: caverns in which terrorists lived and worked and in which they'd stored a veritable arsenal of weap
ons.

  It also came with an extra defence mechanism.

  It was a methane trap.

  Coal gives off methane—a highly flammable gas—and methane levels of 5% are explosive. One spark and it all goes up. And while the inner sections of the abandoned mine were supplied with fresh air from chimney-like vents, its outer extremities were filled with methane.

  In other words: invading soldiers couldn't use guns until they arrived at the core of the mine.

  One thing was certain: the terrorists who had withdrawn to this cave system were not going to give up without a fight. Like Kunduz the previous year and the bloodbath at Mazar-e-Sharif, this was going to be a fight to the death.

  It was Al-Qaeda's last stand.

  The mine's entrance was a reinforced concrete archway wide enough for large trucks to pass through.

  The sharply-sloping mountainside above it was pockmarked with dozens of tiny snipers' nests, from which the terrorists covered the wide expanse of open ground in front of the entrance.

  And somewhere up in the tangle of mountain peaks covering the mine were the openings to two air vents—twin 10-metre-wide shafts that rose like chimneys from the bottom of the mine, allowing fresh air into it. The terrorists had long ago covered the tops of these vents with camouflaged lids, so that they were invisible to spy planes.

  Those vents were Gant's objective.

  Capture a vent from inside the mine, blow its lid from below, and then send up a targeting laser that would be picked up by an overflying C-130 bomber, giving it a bull's-eye that it wouldn't miss.

  The only thing left to do then was to get the hell out of the mine before a devastating 21,000-pound Massive Ordnance Air Burst (more commonly known as MOAB, the Mother Of All Bombs) was dropped down the chimney.

  The first three attempts that morning to storm the tunnel system had been successful.

  In each attempt, a pair of LAV-25s—eight-wheeled Light Armoured Vehicles—filled with Marines and SAS troopers had survived the hail of bullets and entered the cave.

  The fourth attempt, however, had been a disaster. It had ended with a terrible cross-fire of Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades—known to many as 'LAV-Killers'—slamming into the two inrushing vehicles, killing all the men inside them.