Prologue

       April 6, 1994

      Zulu wore sunglasses and camo fatigues, and he had a star on each collar point that winked in the sunlight. These were not the first things you noticed, at least not as soon as you got close. What you noticed first was that somebody had tried to cut his nose off with a hard downward stroke from above, perhaps as if the blade had struck a helmet first and been deflected a little and gone into the hard bone of his nose almost at the bridge and taken out a chunk of it. Now he had a nose that looked in profile like a child’s idea of a witch’s nose, a nose that started too far down his face and came straight out before plunging downward. Some people winced when they first saw that nose.

      His real name was not Zulu. Nor was it the name on his passport. The men with him simply called him Z.

      He had four men with him, also in camo, men like him who were too pale to have been in the sun for long. He spoke to them in French, but, because one of the four had to translate for the others into another language, it seemed that