Hansen had returned to the basement Situation Room, where maps and operation plans cluttered the teakwood table and littered meal trays, grease encrusting on the white china, were piled up in the corner. No stewards were allowed in the room, and nobody else was going to clean up. He had not slept for a day and a half, and he was now showing a ragged shadow of beard. Ted Brock had heard some of his aides upstairs commenting to each other sotto voce that he had never seemed older.
"All right," he said. "I've called off the assault and given the bastard six hours to clear out. I've also released the money, had it wired to the account he wanted. So maybe now he'll leave quietly. Our deal is that he frees the hostages unharmed, disarms the bombs, and gets the hell out of there. But I'll tell you something else: he's not going to live to spend a dime. The minute he's airborne, his ass is ours. I want him shot out of the sky, and the hell with the consequences."
"He'll probably take some civilians along with him," Briggs said. "Hostages. We could be looking at some dicey press."
"All right, then, so we won't shoot him down; we'll just force him down, the way we handled that Libyan passenger jet with terrorists aboard. There was official flack for a week or so from the usual quarters, but off the record everybody was applauding. When you do the right thing, the world makes allowances for how you manage it."
Briggs remained skeptical, but he kept his thoughts to himself. He wanted to have as little to do with the operation as possible. Sooner or later there would be loss of life, he was sure of it, and the chances were the losses would be massive. He had no interest in making the history books as the author of a civilian massacre, terrorists or no terrorists.
"All right, Mr. President, I'll tell the Deltas to keep their powder dry until we play this one out." He had already heard from General Max Austin, who said Nichols was fit to be tied, eating his cigars instead of smoking them. Who could blame him? To have a Commander-in-Chief micromanaging an anti-terrorist op violated every known canon of military strategy. There might be a more surefire recipe for disaster, but it was hard to conjure one offhand.
Hansen, for his own part, recognized the pitfalls of giving the terrorists more time. However, he hoped it would end up being the rope-make that false confidence-that would hang them.
He had wired the "ransom" money to the numbered account at Banco Ambrosiano, as requested. There, his intelligence on the ground was reporting, the eight hundred million had been split and transferred to several other accounts. Then portions of it had been immediately wired out-to a destination not yet known, though it damned well would be. What, he wondered, was that all about? Were the terrorists in the process of screwing each other? It was a possibility. Everything was a possibility. But it also was smart, because it made recovering the funds that much more difficult. They were, in effect, laundering it even before they had made their getaway. These characters, whoever they were, were taking no chances.