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"But you can dig one,", Stoll interrupted excitedly. "You've got to dig one."

"Right!" Herbert said. "And to dig, you need dirt."

"From the descriptions on those pictures," Stoll said, "most of these caves were cut into the rock shelf by subterranean streams."

"Most," Herbert said as the data came up, "but maybe not all."

Stoll stored the Bekaa photographs and brought up the geological records which Katzen had organized before leaving for the region. Stoll and Herbert both leaned toward the monitor as Stoll ran a word-search for "soil." He came up with thirty-seven references to soil composition. The men began reading through each reference, looking for anything which suggested a recent excavation. They crawled through a mass of figures, percentages, and geological terms until something caught Herbert's eye.

"Hold it," Herbert said. He slapped his hand on the mouse and scrolled back a page. "Look at this, Matt. A Syrian agronomical study from January of this year." Herbert began scanning down. "The team reported an anomaly in the Thicket of Oaks region of the Chouf Mountains."

Stoll glanced at notes he'd been taking. "Ohmigod. That's the area where the ROC is."

Herbert continued reading. "It says here the A horizon or topsoil there is characterized by unusually high biotic activity as well as an abundance of organic matter which is typically found in the B horizon substratum. Movement typically occurs from A horizon to B, carrying fine-grained clay downward. This concentration of substratum material suggests one of two things. First, that an effort was made to enrich the soil with more active earth, and then abandoned. Or second, it could be the result of a nearby archaeological dig. The level of biological activity suggests the deposits were placed here within the last four to six weeks."

Stoll looked at Herbert. "An archaeological dig," he said, "or else a bit of bunker-building."

"Absolutely possible," Herbert replied. "And the time frame fits. They found the soil four months ago. That means the digging was done five to six months ago. That would have been enough time to put together a base and train a team."

Stoll began typing commands.

"What are you doing?" Herbert asked.

"The NRO routinely photographs the Bekaa," Stoll said. "I'm bringing up the recon files of the region for the last six months. If there was any digging, they may not have done it all by hand."

"Yeah, those caves might just be wide and tall enough," Herbert said. "And if they brought in a backhoe or bulldozer, even at night--"

"There would be deep tire tracks," Stoll said. "If not from the equipment itself, then from the truck or flatbed which carted it in."

When the files were loaded, Stoll accessed a graphics program. He pulled up a file and typed Tire Treads. When the menu appeared, he typed, No Automobiles. The computer went to work. Just over a minute later, it offered a selection of three photographs. Stoll asked to see them. All three showed distinct tread-bar marks in front of the same cave. It was the cave from which the soil had been excavated.

"Where's the cave?" Herbert asked.

Stoll asked the computer to find the cave in its geography file. It took just a few seconds for the coordinates to come up.

Stoll held up his can of Tab. "Here's dirt in your eye," he said as he triumphantly slugged the rest of it down.

Herbert nodded quickly as he snapped up his cellular phone, put in a call to Major General Bar-Levi in Haifa, and told him about the map which was about to be modemed over.

* * *

THIRTY-SIX

Tuesday, 1:00 p.m.,

Damascus, Syria

Over the past twenty years, Paul Hood had been to dozens of crowded airports in many cities. Tokyo had been big but orderly, packed with businesspeople and tourists on a scale he'd never imagined. Vera Cruz, Mexico, had been small, jammed, outdated, and humid beyond imagining. The locals were too hot to fan themselves as they waited for departures and arrivals to be written on the blackboard.

But Hood had never seen anything