THE LOCATION APPEARED TO BE NOTHING MORE THAN DENSE BRUSH WHERE THE ROAD ENDED

The crystal-clear picture on the screen changed to a swirling mesh of colors based on radiant heat. On the screen the figures beneath camouflage netting showed up immediately. Roughly two dozen individuals moved about, spread over an area the size of a soccer field.

Several bright spots indicated where industrial furnaces were active, and in one section of the field several large vehicles sat clustered in parallel rows. Cool rectangular blobs revealed Quonset huts and long, narrow buildings of concrete and wood.

The tension in the room grew as they waited for the field teams to strike. Barbara Price leaned forward and grabbed the backrest on an office chair. She squeezed it hard until her knuckles shone white from her grip.

Then, on the screen, all hell broke loose.

Critical Intelligence

Stony Man®

America’s Ultra-Covert Intelligence Agency

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Critical Intelligence

PROLOGUE

The CV-22B Osprey hung over the South American landscape like a nocturnal bird of prey.

The CV-22B was the Air Force version of the more famous Marine Corps Vertical Take Off Landing troop transport. Outfitted with extended-capacity fuel tanks, the CV was designed for long-range reconnaissance work or deep-penetration raids.

Jack Grimaldi and Charlie Mott worked the controls of the aircraft, navigating it across the jungle at the upper range of its flight ceiling. In the cargo area were the men of Phoenix Force and Able Team, elite commandos from Stony Man Farm, the ultrasecret extrax legal agency based in Virginia.

The Stony Man warriors were outfitted with military free-fall parachutes. They would be the advance force for phase one of the assault operation.

Grimaldi’s voice came over the intercom. “Boys, we’re rolling hot over the LZ. Commence final prejump checks.”

Both tactical teams rose from their sling seats and began, for the third time, to check the harness and fittings of their jump buddy’s parachute.

Once his check of Gary Manning was done, David McCarter looked to Carl Lyons, who gave him a thumbs-up. Around them the air was rich with the smell of engine heat and the noxious scent of aviation fuel.

“We’re up and ready, Jack,” McCarter said into his throat mike.

“Copy,” Grimaldi replied. “Line up. Charlie’s dropping the ramp now.”

Gary Manning finished off a chocolate bar in two bites and fell in behind McCarter as Calvin James and T. J. Hawkins lined up after him. Able Team took point position next to the exit, where a Stony Man jumpmaster stood ready.

Outside, the night sky, a cloudless color of indigo, stretched away into the horizon. Above the jumpers and to their right an indicator light blinked from amber to green.

The jumpmaster’s hand came down on Carl Lyons’s shoulder, slapping it hard enough to make a pop over the drone of the Osprey’s engines. Like a sprinter out of the blocks the ex-LAPD detective surged forward.

In a modified waddle against the bulk and weight of his parachute, rucksack and weaponry Lyons hit the ramp fast, rushed to the edge and plunged off without hesitation. Behind him in a line resembling lethal penguins the night fighters of Able Team and Phoenix Force followed.

The updraft struck Lyons hard enough to push his goggles against his face. He went into a spread-eagle position and carefully spun around so that he could get a visual on the circling Osprey. The Stony Man commandos shot out of the back, one after the other like Olympic cliff divers going for gold.

The jump was a down-and-dirty and within seconds the Cypress II electronic automatic activation devices began deploying the parachutes. Lyons grunted softly as his harness jerked up tight into his body under the brake of the opening chute. His feet swung out wide and he let his rucksack fall to the end of its tether.

Below him he quickly identified the lights of their initial target.

“Ironman to team,” Lyons said into his throat mike, using his nickname. “I have eyes on objective Alpha to southwest,” he finished.

“Copy,” each man answered in reply.

McCarter fell through the quiet with only the rush of wind and the rustle of silk to break the silence. On his wrist altimeter the meters dropped off at the speed of gravity. He felt like a meteorologist in the deceptively peaceful eye of a tornado.

At the one-thousand-foot mark the details of the objective resolved into sharper relief. The landing strip was suitable for small planes and had been carved with a powerful bulldozer out of the jungle.

Utilized by narcoterror cells operating out of the coca fields of South America, the runway had a prefabricated home at one end and a 4x4 Nissan pickup outfitted with a roll bar of lights at the other end.

All a pilot had to do to land an illicit load was to put his plane down between the two illuminated spots. The runway itself was guarded by narcoguerrillas affiliated with FARC commanders.

And, unbeknownst to themselves and Stony Man, the global network known simply as Seven.

McCarter eyed his altimeter. At the appropriate height he initiated the command. “Phoenix, we are at mike mark. Execute!”

“Copy.” The team reply sounded off simultaneously.

Instantly, the other four members of Phoenix Force pivoted hard and pulled their risers against the drag of their parachutes.

The four-man detachment split off from Able Team and turned toward the lights of the mobile home on the covert runway below.

They descended, death from above.

Carl Lyons craned his neck above and checked the position of Rosario Blancanales and Hermann Schwarz. Both men were strung out in a loose half circle from him, deftly maneuvering their canopies toward the landing zone.

Lyons looked back down after checking the GPS readout next to his altimeter. The ground beneath his dangling feet rushed up toward him. The landing zone was a table-flat stretch of dirt road behind a knife edge of hills half a mile to the east of the runway.

An NRO satellite image series from a month before showed a lightning-strike brush fire had ripped through the area, clearing the light foliage cover and further opening the spot up to an airborne insertion.

Lyons, Blancanales and Schwarz landed in sequence, rolling feet, thighs, shoulder and absorbing the impact in a smooth roll that brought them up to their feet. They functioned quickly, without words, going through a choreographed routine each man knew intimately.

“Ready?” Lyons asked.

“What did Mr. Spock find in the toilet?” Schwarz asked, clicking his safety off.

“Swear to God,” Lyons hissed. “Not another poop joke.”

“The captain’s log,” Schwarz finished. “And don’t trample on my First Amendment rights.”

Blancanales put a restraining hand on Lyons’s arm. “Don’t,” he said. “That crazy son of a bitch has all the explosives on him. If you punch him, he might explode.”

“Let’s just move out, please,” the ex-cop growled.

PHOENIX FORCE crouched in the ditch.

Across the dirt road, light blazed from the trailer’s windows. Occasional shadowed silhouettes passed before the windows. In the front yard two light pickups were parked in a loose L formation in front of the doorway.

A single sentry smoked a cigarette, AKM slung casually over one shoulder.

In the gully, Hawkins laid his crosshairs on the man.

Looking through a pair of light-enhancing binoculars, David McCarter, the Phoenix Force leader, scrutinized the far end of the field where Able Team was slated to remove the vehicle-based sentries. Targets moved in his optics but he caught no sign of Able Team, which was good.

“You good, Hawk?” McCarter whispered.

“Five by five,” the Texan drawled. “Give the word and this ass clown goes down.”

“Phoenix to Able,” McCarter said into his throat mike. “We are in position and prepared to execute.”

There was a moment of silence, then Able Team’s leader responded.

“Copy that, Phoenix. We’re in position. I count three bad guys out here about to go to sleep,” Lyons said.

“Common?”

“I have eyes on one sat phone. That appears to be all, unless they have more equipment inside the vehicles.”

“Roger,” McCarter acknowledged. “Target at will. Phoenix commencing.”

“Able out.” Lyons signed off.

“YOU GOT A CLEAN SHOT on all of them?” Lyons asked in double-check.

The three men lay belly-down on the ground sixty yards out from the terrorist sentry post. Ahead of them the unconcerned trio lounged with a casual sense of security that belied their deadly trade.

“Dead-on,” Blancanales confirmed.

“Ready when you are,” Schwarz said, voice cool as a kitten purring.

Lyons drew himself up to his hands and knees. “Let’s do it,” he grunted.

The deadly three-man squad leaped to their feet and began moving forward. Their M-4 carbines were up and tucked tightly into their shoulders as they stalked ahead, moving heel to toe.

Ahead of them one of the narcoterrorists leaped forward, waving his hand in the air and loudly braying like a donkey. The man thrust his hips forward in a piston action and brought his swinging hand down in a spanking motion.

The other three South Americans began laughing uproariously at the theatrical antics of their comrade in arms. One of them turned sideways, folding over at the waist, and began slapping the hood of his truck.

Lyons filled his sight with the wildly undulating comedian.

His finger took up the slack on his carbine and from thirty yards out the 5.56 mm round cracked as he fired. The back of the man’s head exploded, spraying bits of blood, brain and bone into the air.

The man crumpled forward like a rag doll into the dirt between the vehicles.

Beside Lyons, in a loose flying-wedge formation, both Blancanales and Schwarz triggered their weapons. The rifles cracked in unison and the flanking guerrilla sentries were thrown backward, 3-round bursts slinging loops of blood into the air.

The terrorist who’d been convulsing in laughter on the hood of his truck looked up in surprise at the weapons discharging.

The Able Team warriors sprinted forward, long strides eating up ground at a furious pace. The terrorist cast around him in bewilderment, his expression wavering between terrified and incredulous.

He fumbled for the AKM on a shoulder strap, the weapon shaking in his frightened grasp. Some sense of impending danger alerted the FARC death merchant and he looked up. His eyes grew wide as he saw the three blacked-out commandos charging toward him.

“Dios mio,” he whispered, rifle forgotten.

Three M-4 carbines fired as one from a distance of less than fifteen yards.

“TAKE HIM,” McCarter instructed.

Hawkins fired before the Briton finished his sentence. His silenced M-4 chuffed once. A single smoking 5.56 mm casing popped out of the weapon’s breech and arced through the air.

The sentry staggered backward as if he had just been punched in the chest. The man looked down, shock on his face, and his cigarette tumbled from his lips.

The man toppled over backward and disappeared from view behind one of the trucks. Hawkins’s spent shell casing hit the ground of the drainage ditch and came to rest.

“Go! Go! Go!” McCarter barked. The ex-SAS veteran jumped up, carbine at the ready, and charged toward the trailer. Behind him the remaining three members of Phoenix Force instantly followed.

Fifty yards back, Rafael Encizo covered their rear security.

As they sprinted forward the unit automatically split off into two teams of two. McCarter and Hawkins ran for the front door, while Calvin James and Gary Manning peeled off to target the rear door of the structure. As they ran closer they could make out the faded white paint and black lettering reading Doctors Without Borders.

In a bitter twist of irony the mobile home was the stolen remnant of some forgotten humanitarian mission.

McCarter hugged the front of the trailer as he ran, weapon up and sighted in on the front door. Behind him Hawkins jogged with his weapon at a higher angle, covering the windows.

From down the runway the sounds of Able Team firing could be clearly heard.

McCarter ran up to the metal steps suspended below the front door of the trailer and spun around them. He kept the light carbine up and ready with the muzzle covering the entrance as his left hand went to the suspender of his H-harness web gear and jerked an M-67 fragmentation grenade free.

Hawkins put his back against the trailer, muzzle of his own M-4 pointed upward as he reached out with his left hand and put it on the doorknob. He met McCarter’s eyes. The fox-faced Briton nodded once.

Hooking the ring of the safety clip to the thumb of his trigger hand, McCarter pulled hard and threw the pin into the dirt. He opened his fingers and let the spoon fly free, igniting the fuse.

Hawkins nodded back. His fingers twisted the handle all the way back and he yanked the flimsy door open. McCarter leaned forward and tossed the grenade through the opening at ankle level.

The OD-green metal sphere flew inside the door and bounced.

McCarter and Hawkins both turned away from the opening, throwing shoulders up against the coming blast.

Manning and James cut around the end of the trailer and ran up to the back door. Like the front, this rear entrance was serviced by three metal stairs inside runner struts welded to the bottom of the trailer frame.

Windows broke the surface of the mobile home, spilling bars of light out into the desert night. From this close to the structure it was easy to discern the hum of the generator placed next to the back door.

James cut wide around the generator housing and took a knee at an angle to the back door, weapon up as he provided security.

He and Manning saw the terrorist at the same time. The Hispanic man was adorned with a shapeless black beret and a full black beard that obscured most of his face in a tangle of knotted hair.

He stood over a kitchen sink and casually looked outside as he washed his hands. Manning drew a tight sight bead directly between the man’s eyes at the center of his beetled brow.

Both Phoenix Force commandos paused for a moment. Suddenly, the man’s eyes jerked wide in surprise and James tightened his finger on his trigger.

The grenade explosion filled the space behind the man. Suddenly a thin red syrup splashed the windowpane just as the glass burst outward from the concussive force, spraying shrapnel out in a deadly arc.

Manning and James automatically shifted the muzzles of their weapons and let loose with a long series of 3-round bursts, tearing the rear door to shreds and throwing a wall of lead into the trailer to cut off retreat for the terrorists trapped inside.

From the other side of the trailer came the distinctive sounds of M-4 carbines firing as McCarter and Hawkins moved in to mop up.

Smoke rolled out of shattered windows as the firing stopped.

“Clear!” McCarter barked.

“Clear!” James shouted.

“Phoenix has seized objective,” McCarter announced.

“Able is clear,” Lyons confirmed through the com link.

“I copy.” Jack Grimaldi’s voice broke in from where he circled the Osprey CV-22B overhead. “Airfield secured. We’re coming in.”

CHAPTER ONE

Barbara Price opened her eyes.

She awoke clearheaded and alert, knowing exactly where she was and what she needed to do.

There was a war being fought in the shadows and as the Stony Man mission controller, she was at its epicenter. Her eyes went to the window of her bedroom. It was dark outside. She looked over to her bedside table and read the time on the glowing red numerals of her digital clock.

She had been asleep for a little over four hours. She sat up and pushed a slender hand through her honey-blond hair. She felt revitalized after her power nap, and with a single cup of Aaron “Bear” Kurtzman’s coffee, she knew she’d be ready to face another day.

She got up and smoothed her clothes before picking up the copy of the Washington Post she had placed by the bed. Before stepping out into the upstairs hallway of the Stony Man Farm main house, she reread the headline that had jumped out at her.

Government Accounting Office Finds Fraud

A GAO investigation led by Deputy Director Hammond Carter has led to a senate investigation of funding for several “black op” Pentagon units…

Disgusted, Price stopped reading. The mission controller had too much on her mind at the moment to worry about politics as usual in Washington, D.C.

She frowned. The name “Hammond Carter” was unfamiliar. If there was a new player trampling through intelligence and special operations playgrounds, then she needed to be on top of it. She resolved to have her computer wizard Akira Tokaido see if Stony Man had any files on the man.

As she walked down the hall and then the stairs to the main floor of the farmhouse she began mentally clicking through options and categorizing her tasks. She had men in the field, preparing to go into danger and, like the conductor of a symphony, it was her responsibility to coordinate all the disparate parts into a seamless whole.

She was in the basement and headed for the rail system to the Annex when the cell phone on her belt began to vibrate. She plucked it free and used the red push-talk button to initiate the walkie-talkie mode on the encrypted device.

“This is Price,” she said, voice cool.

“Barb,” Carmen Delahunt began, “the teams are in jump-off mode.”

“Thanks, Carmen,” Price told the ex-FBI agent. “I’m in the tunnel and coming toward the Annex now.”

“See you in a minute.” Delahunt signed off.

Price put her phone away and got into the light electric rail car. The little engine began to hum and she quickly picked up speed as she shot down the one thousand-foot tunnel sunk fifteen feet below the ground of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

Things were starting to come together, and Price could sense the tingle she had first felt as a mission controller for long-range operations conducted by the National Security Agency. It was there she had made her bones in the intelligence business before being recruited by Hal Brognola to run logistics and support at the top secret Stony Man Farm.

It had been quite a promotion, she reflected as the rail car raced down the subterranean tunnel past conduit pipes and thick power cables toward the Farm’s Annex, camouflaged underneath a commercial wood-chipping facility.

Stony Man had operated as a clandestine antiterrorist operation since long before the infamous attacks of September 11 had put all of America’s military, intelligence and law-enforcement efforts on the same page. Stony Man operated as it always had—under the direct control of the White House and separate from both the Joint Special Operations Command and the Directorate of National Intelligence.

Stony Man had been given carte blanche to operate at peak efficiency, eliminating oversights and legalities in the name of pragmatic results. It also, perhaps most importantly, offered the U.S. government the ability to disavow any knowledge of operations that went badly. Sometimes the big picture could be a very cold and unforgiving snapshot.

This left Stony Man and its operators particularly vulnerable to certain types of exposure. One hint of their existence in a place like MSNBC or the New York Times could lead to horrific outcomes.

The electric engine beneath her seat began to power down, and the rail car slowed to a halt. She pushed the morose reflections from her mind as it entered the Annex building.

Things were ready to roll hot; she could not afford to be distracted now. She stood and stepped out of the car. Fluorescent lights gleamed off linoleum floors and a sign on the whitewashed wall read Authorized Personnel Only. Beside the sign a member of the Farm’s security staff nodded to her and reached over to the keypad that controlled the door to the tunnel. The fit, broad-shouldered man wore a black uniform and carried a 9 mm H&K MP-5 submachine gun.

Coming through the door, she was met by the wheelchair-bound Aaron Kurtzman. The big man reached out a hand the size of a paw and gave her a steaming mug of coffee. She eyed the ink-colored liquid dubiously.

“Thanks, Bear. That’s just what I’ve been missing—something that can put hair on my chest.”

The pair of them had exchanged that exact same greeting so many times it was like a Groundhog Day moment. Both took comfort in the repetition.

Kurtzman turned the wheelchair and began to keep pace with the female mission controller as they made for the Communications Center.

The former Big Ten college wrestler lifted a massive arm across a barrel chest and pushed his glasses up on his nose beneath a high forehead with a deep horizontal crease. Price had once teased him that the worry line was severe enough for him to be awarded a Purple Heart.

After he’d earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Kurtzman had been a computer programmer in one form or another. He was a Stony Man veteran who had been with the Farm since the beginning, and his wheelchair was a constant testament to his dedication.

“McCarter just called for Phoenix,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “They’re set up with Grimaldi at the secure helipad. Lyons did the same for Able Team. They’re in place and ready to execute.”

“Good,” Barb said. She took a drink of the extrastrong coffee and pulled a face. “I’ll alert Hal, then. All we need is the go-ahead from the President.”

The pair entered the massive Communications Center and into a maelstrom of activity. Price paused at the door like a commander surveying her troops. She liked what she saw.

Kurtzman glided over to his work area, where it looked as if a bomb had gone off. His desk was covered in faxes, paperwork and the exposed wiring of a half dozen devices. Behind his desk a coffeepot, stained as black as the mud that filled it, bubbled like a tar pit.

Next to Kurtzman’s desk, fingers flying across a laptop while monitoring a sat link, Akira Tokaido bobbed his head in time to the music coming from a single earbud. The lean, compact hacker was the youngest member of Stony Man’s cybernetics team and the heir apparent to Kurtzman himself. The Japanese American cyber wizard had at times worked virtual magic when Price had needed him to.

Across the room from Tokaido sat his polar opposite.

Professor Huntington Wethers had come to the Stony Man operation from his position on the faculty of UCLA. The tall, distinguished black man sported gray hair at his temples and an unflappable manner. He currently worked two laptop screens as a translation program fed him information from monitored radio traffic coming out of France.

Carmen Delahunt walked through the door between the Computer Room and the Communications Center. The redheaded ex-FBI agent made a beeline for Barbara Price when she saw her boss. The only female on the Farm’s cyberteam, she served as a pivotal balance between Tokaido’s hotshot hacking magic and Wethers’s more restrained, academic style.

She finished her conversation and snapped her cell phone shut as she walked up to Barb. She pointed toward the newspaper in the mission controller’s hand.

“You see that about GAO investigations?” she asked. “I started running an analytical of our financial allotments and expenditures, just to double-check none of our money originated in accounts tainted by the investigations.”

Price smiled. “You read my mind, Carmen,” she said. “Once we have Phoenix and Able taken care of, why don’t you send me a summary in case anything comes of it.”

“Will do.” Delahunt nodded. “I have to double-check the South American arrangements we made for the team’s extraction with the ‘package’—if it comes to that. It’s nice to be able to tap the resources of larger groups like the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, but coordination is a nightmare.”

“Let me know if anything goes wrong,” Price said.

Delahunt nodded, then turned and began walking back across the floor toward the connecting door to the Annex’s Computer Room, her fingers punching out a number on her encrypted cell phone.

Barbara Price smiled.

She could feel the energy, the sense of purpose that permeated the room flow into her. Out there in the cold eight men on two teams were about to enter into danger for the sake of their country. If they got into trouble, if they needed anything, they would turn to her and her people.

She did not intend to let them down.

She made her way to her desk, where a light flashing on her desktop phone let her know a call was holding. She looked over at Kurtzman and saw the man returning a telephone handset to its cradle. He pointed toward her.

“It’s Hal on line one,” he said.

“Thanks, Bear,” she answered.

She set her coffee down and picked up the handset as she sank into her chair. She put the phone to her ear and tapped a key on her computer, knocking the screen off standby mode.

“Hal, it’s Barb,” she said.

“I’m outside the Oval Office right now,” Brognola said. “Are the boys up and rolling?”

“As we speak,” Price answered. “Tell him operations are prepped to launch at his word.”

“All right. Let’s hope this one goes by the numbers,” the gruff federal agent said.

“As always,” she agreed, and hung up.

“All right, people,” she announced to the room. “Let’s get ready to roll.”

CHAPTER TWO

Bogotá, Colombia

Lieutenant Colonel Sim Sin-Bok lit his cigar.

The North Korean intelligence officer narrowed his eyes in pleasure as he inhaled the thick, strong smoke of the Corona Grande. The rich nicotine entered his bloodstream and he immediately felt the euphoric rush. He relaxed into the plush leather seats of the BMW X3 and released the tobacco smoke through his nose in a sigh.

“Nothing but the best, eh, my friend?” Jimenez Naranjo purred.

The FARC commander was seated directly across from the covert representative of North Korea. The two men rode in comfort as the sleek, black BMW SUV flew down a jungle road leading deeper into mountains.

“I must admit,” Sin-Bok said in accented Spanish, “I have come to enjoy our little liaisons.”

“Your boss, he enjoys our money, too. No?” Naranjo winked, flashing white teeth.

“As much as yours enjoys our armaments,” Sin-Bok countered.

The intelligence officer had been all over the Pacific Rim and Middle East in his years of service with the most glorious leaders. He had come to have a grudging respect for the FARC commander Naranjo in the course of their dealings, but weapons sales to violent groups always left him feeling nonplussed at best.

The SUV raced along the jungle road, cutting deeper into the mountain stronghold of the last nebulous Communist insurgency left on the planet. More than any ideological revelations, it had been the extortion of Colombian drug barons by the FARC guerrillas that had propelled them down a road toward the sort of capitalism they claimed to despise so much. They claimed their actions were about the rights of the peasant farmers to grow a crop that turned them profits and improved their lives.

For all Sin-Bok knew, the FARC leaders believed that. But he also knew that the influx of cocaine money had made things like up-armored diplomat-model BMW SUVs available to what had once been a rabble force dressed in rags. They were also able to purchase guidance systems such as the ones he carried on a flash drive in his briefcase. Guidance systems that could turn shoot-and-forget munitions such as old Soviet S-7 grail rocket launchers into weapons of pinpoint accuracy, capable of disabling a tank or knocking even American combat helicopters out of the sky.

Naranjo moved his hand down and hit a lever button on his seat rest. Behind him the vehicle’s glass partition powered smoothly up, the engine making a subdued whine as it closed.

Sin-Bok kept his face inscrutable. He had dealt with Chinese Tongs based in Hong Kong, with representatives of Hamas and the Syrian government. He had sold or bought illicit goods from them all. He did not rattle easily and best of all, his ability to eat outside of the famine pit that was North Korea had left him with a bit of a pot belly. Such a belly was an indication of power in his nation. Men noticed and feared those grown so powerful they could be fat. Women took note and were appropriately impressed.

Sin-Bok cocked an eyebrow toward Naranjo.

When the FARC leader spoke he carefully enunciated each word so that there could be no misunderstanding. And he spoke in English.

“Two plus five equals seven,” he said.

Sin-Bok felt a cold squirt of adrenaline hit his stomach. He felt his throat swell up from the reaction and he forced himself not to swallow and thus reveal his surprise and nervousness.

By the dragon’s luck, he thought wildly, this cannot be. Then he thought, Their servants truly are everywhere.

On his lap his hands tightened momentarily around his attaché case. Then relaxed. He met Naranjo’s eye and nodded once, sharply.

“Three plus four equals seven,” Sin-Bok replied, also in English, completing the code parole and establishing his rank as one higher than his contact.

The two agents of the shadowy organization stared at each other for a long moment. Naranjo opened a lid set between his rear-facing seats and pulled out two cut-crystal tumblers and a bottle of expensive rum.

He poured Sin-Bok a glass and handed it over. The North Korean espionage agent took it without a word. The enhanced suspension on the BMW made their vehicle ride like it was on rails. He sipped the sugar-cane liquor, enjoying the sharp alcohol.

He carefully set his tumbler on top of his leather attaché case and picked up his cigar from the ashtray. He drew in a lungful of smoke as the FARC narcoterrorist and field agent poured himself a drink.

After Naranjo had put the bottle away, Sin-Bok spoke again.

“I take it these guidance systems aren’t just headed for your jungle camps,” he observed.

“Ah, no,” Naranjo admitted, switching back to Spanish. “I, like you, am a link.”

With a rueful look Sin-Bok held up his glass. “Here’s to Seven,” he said, voice rueful.

White House, Washington, D.C.

HAL BROGNOLA LOOKED OUT the east door of the Oval Office and into the Rose Garden. Beside him in a comfortable chair sat the special envoy to North Korea. They faced the President of the United States in his traditional seat behind the desk made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute.

Behind them in the northeast corner a grandfather clock built by John and Thomas Seymour ticked out the passing of time. Waiting for the President to finish reading the report, Brognola looked down at the carpet on the floor, noting the presidential seal. He’d been in this office a good many times over the years, seen more than one man pass through the job, seen the job age them all.

The President sighed. He tossed the national intelligence estimate addendum down on the desk and leaned back. He folded his hands in a pensive motion and cocked an eyebrow at Brognola.

“You’re sure, then?” The question was perfunctory.

Brognola nodded once. “Yes, sir.”

The President frowned and twisted slightly in his seat. “Let’s get ’em on the line,” he told the envoy.

The special envoy leaned forward and tapped a few numbers out on the handset located on the desktop. He activated the speakerphone function and leaned back while the number dialed. After two digital ring tones a smooth feminine voice answered, Korean.

The envoy answered in Korean, then stated, “With your permission, Mr. Ambassador, I would like to switch to English.”

There was a brief pause, then a sharp, almost shrill man’s voice spoke in quick, truncated syllables. The North Korean regime did not maintain a diplomatic presence in the United States, and the men in the Oval Office were speaking to the leader of the U.N. delegation in New York.

“Yes, English is fine,” the ambassador said. “But whatever language we choose to continue wasting our time in, the fact still remains constant. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has no knowledge of the activities of which you speak. We consider such activities as a personal insult on the character of our most beloved leader, the eternal president, Kim Jong-il. Frankly a continuation of this so-called investigation will be construed as a hostile act.”

Brognola shifted his gaze away from the conference call toward the President’s face. It remained impassive except for the slight tightening of muscles along the jaw, indicating that he was grinding his teeth.

“Mr. Ambassador,” the envoy began, “we consider the arming and training of known terrorist groups such as FARC to be hostile acts.”

“Fortunately for the United States, Korea has not undertaken any of these activities.”

“Why is that ‘fortunate’ for us?” Brognola interjected.

“Because,” the voice continued, “if such an error in perception was to occur, the United States might be tempted to do something rash in response.”

“I trust you’ve read the dossier I sent you earlier,” the envoy prompted.

At his desk the President made a steeple of his long, slender fingers and leaned slightly forward in his chair. He was due to a staff meeting to discuss implementation of public health care options in twelve minutes. Brognola could see the President growing more annoyed with the futile game they were now playing with the North Koreans.

“I have seen the dossier,” the ambassador admitted. “I saw nothing compelling in those documents. The idea that a member of our security services would be working as a trainer and liaison for a FARC cell in Colombia is obviously impossible. That leaves only two explanations for your report that I can see.”

The envoy let out a sigh and leaned back in his chair. “And those explanations would be…?”

“Either your much vaunted intelligence services are mistaken or, second and more likely, you are attempt to fabricate this evidence to justify a preemptive strike on our homeland.” The ambassador paused, then began speaking in a much louder, much shriller voice. “This is inexcusable! We will not be the victim of your imperialist plots! We will defend our home by any means necessary from your Western aggression!”

The President looked over at Brognola. He silently mouthed the word imperialist to the big federal agent. Brognola shrugged, then murmured under his breath, “They’re a little like Cuba,” he explained. “Forty or fifty years behind. They probably just got a copy of Dr. Strangelove in Pyongyang last month.”

The President made a sour face as the ambassador continued to bark his outrage over the conference link. He made a chopping motion with one hand toward the phone, then nodded at the envoy.

“Mr. Ambassador,” the envoy interrupted, “your protests have been noted. We will not be speaking of this matter again. Good day.” He cut the connection.

“Okay,” the President said. “I gave it one last try. We don’t know what kind of brinksmanship they’re trying to pull off this time, but they can go to hell.” He spun around in his chair and looked out at the Rose Garden. “Your boys in position to execute our contingency plan?”

“It seems our contingency just upgraded to primary,” Brognola said. “And yes, my crews are in place and ready to roll.”

“Then proceed,” the President said.

Once they left the office Brognola and the special envoy went in separate directions, each man pulling out a NSA-encrypted cell phone. The director of the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group hit the number 1 on his speed dial option. Two rings later Barbara Price answered.

“I just got out of my meeting with the Man,” he informed her. “We are ready to execute.”

Stony Man Farm

BARBARA PRICE STOOD in the hallway in front of the door leading to the Communications Room. She said goodbye to Brognola and cut the connection on her phone before opening the door.

Price entered the room like a gust of wind. The attractive mission controller wore a headset communications link and carried a matte-black cell phone PDA with NSA security upgrades.

She walked across the room, nodding to where Akira Tokaido and Carmen Delahunt sat at workstations. A giant flat screen was fixed to the wall above their heads. The monitor was silent and still, for the moment showing only the screen saver: an image of the movie poster for The Magnificent Seven with the quote from the script, “We deal in lead, friend.”

“Time?” Price asked.

“M-Minute minus twenty seconds,” Kurtzman replied.

From the other side of the room he used a blunt, square-tipped finger to toggle his wheelchair away from his workstation. The electric engine of the power chair ramped up as the leader of the Stony Man cybernetics team pulled even with Stony Man’s mission controller.

“Okay,” Price said. “Bring central synchronistic communications online.”

At her station, Carmen Delahunt typed a command on her keyboard. Inside Price’s headset earjack, the receiver popped and the ex-NSA operational manager nodded once to Delahunt.

“Stony Base to Stony Eagle,” she said. “Radio check, over.”

Instantly the voice of Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi answered, coming over the digital link with crystal clarity. “Base, this is Bird,” he replied. “I have good copy.”

Price gave a curt nod to herself and turned toward the communal HD screen and pointed a finger.

Kurtzman tapped a command on an interface board built into his power chair and the screen switched to a satellite image of the Earth. The observation platform was a Keyhole satellite in near-Earth geosynchronous orbit completely dedicated to the needs of Stony Man operational taskings.

“Stony Base to Stony Hawk,” she continued.

“Stony Hawk, good copy,” Able Team leader Carl Lyons answered in clipped syllables.

On the screen the sat image rotated until the HD monitor showed the Western Hemisphere. Kurtzman tapped out a few clicks on his keypad, centering the screen over Central America, and then began to tighten its resolution as it slid down toward the southern continent. Kurtzman hit another command key and a political map was overlaid on the topographical features.

“Do you have eyes on target?” Price asked.

“Affirmative,” Lyons responded.

“Eagle, give us your position,” Price told Grimaldi.

“I’m in a holding pattern behind Hill 372, about three klicks out,” Grimaldi said.

On the overhead monitor the political map showed Colombia. The spy camera tightened its resolution even further and suddenly the POV began descending at a rapid rate.

To the onlookers it seemed as if they were in the nose of a plane as it dive-bombed through wispy patches of clouds toward the earth below.

“Hawk and Eagle, we are green light go,” Price said. “I repeat, we are green light go.”

“Copy,” Grimaldi answered.

“Copy,” Lyons said.

Price looked to the wall. On one side of the image, scrolling vertically were GPS coordinates blinking rapidly next to numerical sets of longitude and latitude readings.

Patches of green and brown, at first unidentifiable, formed into a jungle canopy over a series of rolling hills. On the southeast side of the screen a broad, fast-moving river cut through the trees. Up the sheer plateau from the water, a brown dirt road cut out of the rugged geography.

From his position at his workstation Akira Tokaido manipulated the sat image. The camera view settled on a flat area of the map. At first the location appeared to be nothing more than dense brush where the road ended.

“Toggling to IR,” Tokaido informed the room.

His thumb struck the appropriate key and instantly the crystal-clear picture on the screen changed to a swirling mesh of colors based on radiant heat that made the monitor appear like a watercolor canvas.

On the screen the figures beneath camouflage netting showed up immediately. Roughly two dozen individuals moved around, spread over an area the size of a soccer field.

Several bright spots indicated where industrial furnaces were active and in one section of the field several large vehicles sat clustered in parallel rows. Cool rectangular blobs revealed Quonset huts and long, narrow buildings of concrete and wood.

The tension in the room grew as they waited for the field teams to strike. Barbara Price leaned forward and grabbed the backrest on an office chair. She squeezed it hard until her knuckles shone white from her grip.

Then, on the screen, all hell broke loose.

CHAPTER THREE

Colombia

Carl Lyons lifted his Bushnell binoculars and scanned the FARC camp below. Able Team’s position was located right above the only road leading into the terrorist outpost. This was a hammer-and-anvil operation, with Able Team serving as the anvil.

The readout on the range finder built into the optics showed 204 meters. Sweat trickled down Lyons’s body, sliding over his feverish skin to collect at his armpits, navel and groin. He was a big man and heavily muscled, which made the heat a burden to him. He was growing crankier by the second.

Behind him in the brush Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz slapped a mosquito. The Able Team electronics genius was crouched next to a 80 mm mortar. Lined up in front of the squat weapon’s base plate were six rounds: two high explosive, two antipersonnel, two white phosphorous. He lowered a compass and quickly adjusted the angle of the tube based on his reading.

On the ground a tripod-mounted electronic device hummed softly. The size of a Power-Book it had an antenna dish set in the top that slowly rotated. On loan from the Pentagon through the DARPA—Defense Advance Research and Projects Agency—program, the XM-12 was a field-portable scrambler unit capable of disrupting digital signals in addition to radio waves.

Out in front of Schwarz and Lyons the third member of Able Team lay belly-down on the soggy ground. Ex-Special Forces sergeant Rosario Blancanales had his right eye suctioned up close against the rubber cup of his sniper scope.

“You heard the lady,” he growled. “Let’s do this thing.”

“Phoenix inbound,” Grimaldi informed them over the com link. “Adios, assholes,” Blancanales muttered to the narcoterrorists. Behind him Schwarz picked up the first HE round.

In the reticule of his scope the Puerto Rican’s crosshairs were settled on a bearded FARC soldier manning the machine gun position at the entrance to the camp.

The man wore dark khaki fatigues stained with sweat. His tangle of long, greasy black hair was kept back by a shapeless black beret, and he wore a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power in a belt holster opposite the sheath for a wicked-looking machete.

He laughed, and blunt, very white teeth stood out like neon against his walnut-brown complexion. On his web gear he carried a sat phone, which had first alerted Blancanales that this was a leader. Two other soldiers, much younger and beardless, stood around listening to the older man talk, M-16 A-2 assault rifles in their hands.

Blancanales slowly released his breath and felt his world narrow to the crosshairs of his scope. The FARC leader’s fatigue shirt was open to the belly, revealing an expanse of curly black hair across his lean chest. A gold chain hung down between the man’s pectoral muscles. Blancanales’s crosshairs centered there.

From the valley there was the sudden sound of an approaching helicopter. The man snapped his head around at the noise. The M-21 sniper rifle with folding paratrooper stock coughed once as Blancanales squeezed the trigger in a slow, controlled movement.

Across two hundred yards he saw the FARC leader jerk as the 7.62 mm NATO round struck him. In the sniper optic Blancanales saw blood halo out behind the man in a fine mist. The target half spun, crumpled to his knees, then fell forward on his face.

The two sentries standing next to the dead man swept up their weapons. They turned toward the sound of the helicopter, spun back toward the road from where Blancanales’s round had come. They brought their M-16s to their shoulders and started shouting in Spanish.

Lyons opened up with his cut-down M-60E.

He had the machine gun supported on a fallen log and fed from a green plastic, 200-round drum magazine. The weapon roared to life with a stuttering thunder as hot shell casings arced out of the receiver and spun to the forest floor.

The earth in front of the FARC sentries erupted in a series of geyser spouts as he walked his fire in on them. Behind him Schwarz released his hold on the mortar round, dropping it smoothly into the tube. It went off with a throaty bloop. Lyons’s rounds struck the two men.

The heavy-caliber bullets buzzed into the FARC sentries, hacking them up like spinning axes. They spun and jiggled like marionettes dancing for a puppeteer. They staggered, dropping their weapons, then flopped to the ground still quivering.

Schwarz’s 80 mm HE mortar round struck the camp dead center of the FARC motor pool. A black Ford Excursion with its roof cut off and massively oversize tires exploded. A ball of black smoke and orange flame mushroomed out. The vehicle was picked up off the ground and spun end-over-end, crumpling an old school bus repainted OD-green. Two five-ton Oso-12 trucks had their windows blown out, and a FARC soldier walking past was picked up and thrown like a rag doll.

Blancanales drew down on a running soldier and pulled his trigger. The man fell in a tangled heap.

Lyons eased up on his machine gun and activated his throat mike.

“Eagle, this is Hawk,” he said. “The front door is sealed. Deploy.”

“Copy,” the British-accented voice of David McCarter replied.

“Drop the WP right on the road in case anyone tries to drive out,” Lyons told Schwarz.

Schwarz nodded, then twisted the elevation knob on the mortar down several clicks. He lifted a white phosphorous round and dropped it in. The mortar went off and the round lobbed outward in a tight arc. The WP bomb struck the earth at the sentry post and detonated. Instantly the corpses at the impact site burst into flame.

Satisfied, Schwarz dropped his second round on the same angle and turned the entrance to the FARC camp into a raging conflagration.

“Keep an eye out for our Korean guest,” Lyons told Blancanales.

The ex-Green Beret nodded and continued sweeping his scope across the camp below them, hunting for targets of opportunity. Lyons opened up with his M-60E and directed suppressive fire on the FARC compound.

JACK GRIMALDI lifted the Blackhawk straight up out of the shallow jungle valley and bunny-hopped the bird over the hilltop. He put the nose of the helicopter down and raced forward, flying at treetop level. Two hundred yards out, his thumb flicked up the red safety cover to his rocket pod.

The FARC compound had two 20 mm antiaircraft emplacements providing security and they were Grimaldi’s first priority. He banked the bird hard, brought it on line with the narrow, fast-moving creek below and gunned the Blackhawk hard toward the camp.

His thumb depressed the button.

Instantly twin seven-inch rockets from pods under his weapons platform launched toward the camp. The projectiles whistled out, leaving contrails of white smoke behind them as they flew.

They both hit the sandbag walls encircling one of the 20 mm AA cannons and exploded. Gunny sacks, body parts and pieces of the guns went flying. Grimaldi worked his foot pedals and maneuvered the yoke. The Blackhawk banked hard, then spun around on its axis until the nose was orientated 120-degrees on a separate plane.

Through the windshield Grimaldi could see the antiaircraft crew scrambling to bring the 20 mm cannon to bear. Men’s faces twisted in fear and anger as they swarmed like ants around the gun placement. The helicopter remained level under Grimaldi’s hand. Again his thumb found the activation toggle.

Two more rockets leaped from their pods and swept forward, spiraling inward on synchronous flight paths. FARC gunners threw themselves out of the artillery pit in a desperate attempt to avoid the blast, but the twin explosions caught them in a concussive wave of lethal force.

“Here we go!” Grimaldi yelled into his throat mike.

The Blackhawk yawed hard, then settled into a hover fifty yards off the broken, uneven ground. Camouflage netting across the compound was ripped off and tossed into twisted heaps around the aluminum pole frame work, revealing men, sheds and tin-roofed buildings. A cloud of dust sprang up like fog as the topsoil was ripped from the ground by the force of rotor wash.

A thick hemp rope was kicked out of the cargo bay door. An instant later T. J. Hawkins, ex-Delta Force operator, appeared in the doorway. He wore a black sporting helmet and clear visors over his eyes. His hands were covered by thick welder’s gloves.

“Go! Go! Go!” David McCarter shouted.

Instantly, Hawkins stepped off the helicopter and onto the rope, sliding down the hemp weave like a firefighter on a pole. He was halfway down when the second man appeared in the door, then grasped the rope. Rafael Encizo, veteran anti-Castro guerrilla commando and combat diver, stepped off and dropped like a stone.

On the ground Hawkins shuffled forward a few places and took a knee, weapon coming up. Encizo dismounted the rope and took up a position to Hawkins’s left, his own weapon up as Calvin James, former Navy SEAL and trained medic, hit the rope.

Hawkins saw two men in Russian military fatigues run out of an outbuilding, weapons up. He drew down on them and used his M-4 carbine to cut them down.

Beside him Encizo unleashed his own firepower, an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon, in stuttering bursts.

James hit the ground, bending at the knees to absorb the force of the impact, and a second later Gary Manning, former Canadian Special Forces soldier and explosives expert, also landed. The Canadian put his own M-60E in the pocket of his shoulder and fired over the heads of his teammates as he shuffled forward.

James peeled off to Encizo’s left, forming the anchor point on one end of their wedge formation as Manning shuffled into position on the opposite side. Behind them McCarter was on the ground, his M-4/M-203 combination carbine grenade launcher up and tracking for targets.

“Clear!” McCarter shouted.

The ex-SAS trooper walked smoothly forward, weapon up and finger on the trigger. Behind him the assault rope was disengaged by the helicopter loadmaster and door gunner, a sergeant from the 75th Ranger Division on loan to Stony Man’s blacksuit security detail.

“Copy!” Grimaldi responded.

The helicopter’s turbine engines screamed as the pilot climbed the bird up to a better altitude. The loadmaster/door gunner slid over behind an M-134 Gatling gun and rotated the barrel cluster around to bear on the compound.

“Advance,” McCarter directed.

Instantly the unit began shuffling forward, firing their weapons as they moved. Above them the Blackhawk drifted along, the 7.62 mm minigun firing ahead of them. The weapon’s massive rate of fire had twinkling, smoking hot shell casings dropping down on them like metal raindrops.

In front of them FARC soldiers tried desperately to mount a defense, but the triple impact of speed of attack, aggression of action and firepower coupled with surprise was proving more than they could deal with. FARC guerrillas soaked up bullets like sponges, were scythed in two or battered into submission.

Hawkins walked his muzzle in measured angles from left to right, dropping running, screaming targets with each squeeze of his trigger. Encizo used his SAW from the hip, triggering one short burst after the other. He saw a door to a long, low barracks-style building swing open and he took it under fire immediately. Red tracer fire arced through the opening and dropped a knot of FARC guerrillas.

“Able, do we have eyes on?” McCarter demanded through his com set. Beside him Manning used his M-60E to blast into an armored sedan being used as cover by a handful of enemy combatants.

“Negative,” Lyons replied. “To your five o’clock I have the command bunker.”

McCarter looked in the direction Lyons had indicated and, as if to punctuate the ex-cop’s directions, Schwarz put an 80 mm mortar round down on top of a jet-black armored BMW SUV parked near a concrete structure. The luxury sport vehicle went up like a Roman candle. A moment later another mortar went off.

“I have eyes on bunker,” McCarter answered. Beside him Gary Manning mowed down three FARC soldiers attempting to set up an RPK machine gun.

“Good,” Lyons replied. “Blancanales said he scoped our target entering the bunker twenty minutes ago.”

“En route,” McCarter confirmed.

Machine-gun fire erupted from just ahead and to the left of them. Bullets cut toward the assault force in a lethal wave. The concussive force of the heavy-caliber rounds cutting through the air next to their bodies buffeted Phoenix Force and they all went down in defensive sprawls.

“Machine gun, left!” Encizo called out.

The team looked toward the position and saw a reinforced foxhole with a sandbag roof. A .30-caliber machine gun burped out another burst as the gunner tried to find his range.

Manning, armed with his own machine gun, cut loose, trying to suppress the other gunner’s fire. His bullets gouged up furrows of earth just in front of the position and slapped into the dirt-filled sandbags, causing the FARC machine gunner to flinch.

Encizo lifted the barrel of his SAW and added to the maelstrom of fire.

McCarter used the barrage as cover enough to risk popping up to one knee. He tucked the butt of his M-4 into his shoulder and triggered his M-203 attachment. A 40 mm fléchette round shot from the barrel and arched like football into the enemy position.

A heavy bang sounded and smoke began roiling. Razor-sharp fléchette darts scissored into the machine gunner and his assistant, cutting the men to bloody ribbons.

Phoenix rose as one unit, weapons up. Manning stepped forward and unleashed the M-60E in a wide arc in front of them, spraying the camp in a crescent-moon pattern designed to keep other defenders from gaining momentum.

“Bunker!” McCarter yelled. “Gary and Rafe, cover!”

The two machine gunners ran forward and threw themselves down to give themselves overlapping fields of fire. Behind them the other three members of Phoenix Force prepared to storm the bunker.

CHAPTER FOUR

Inside the FARC command bunker Lieutenant Colonel Sin-Bok could hear the men outside screaming as they died. He was out of the way, in a corner, holding tightly to his attaché case and a .45-caliber M-1911 pistol Naranjo had provided him once the attack started.

Outside, bullets struck the bunker and everyone heard them bounce off the concrete. All eyes kept glancing toward the barred and reinforced door at the front of the structure. It was the only way out or in.

If the North Korean was going to make an escape, his only option was out through that door. When the raiders outside came, it would be in through that same door. Sin-Bok’s entire world had shrunk to a four-foot-by-three-foot piece of steel hung on reinforced storm hinges.

Across the room Naranjo cursed loudly and threw his sat phone to the ground. It burst apart on the hard-packed floor, plastic pieces spraying out like shrapnel. The other group of people trapped in the bunker cringed at his outburst.

“I can’t get a signal out!” Naranjo shouted. “They’re fucking blocking communications.”

“Who?” Sin-Bok demanded. It made a very real difference who they were. “Is it your government?”

Realizing immediately what Sin-Bok feared, Naranjo scowled and shook his head. “No,” he said. “All we’ve seen are norteamericanos, maybe Europeans. I do not think these are Colombian Jaguars,” he finished, referencing the Colombian military’s elite unit.

“Then the flash drive has to make it out,” Sin-Bok said.

Naranjo opened his hands and looked around in question.

Salvation didn’t appear to be within reach. Sin-Bok quickly looked around the bunker again. He saw a fourteen-year-old girl in oversize fatigues and holding a ridiculously outsize M-16. Her brown eyes were almost comically big.

FARC, like most Third World insurgencies, recruited heavily from younger members of their impoverished society. Sin-Bok, who had been raised and conditioned since birth to put nation before self, understood this. He also understood how abhorrent the concept of child soldiers were to the Western powers.

“You,” he barked. “Come here!”

The girl started when she realized he was pointing toward her. She cut her gaze to Naranjo, who, confused, nodded. As the girl began crossing the room, a burst of gunfire slammed into the bunker door.

“They’re coming!” Sin-Bok snapped. “Hurry! Now, someone give me a condom.”

Naranjo looked as if he’d been slapped. “This is hardly the time for—”

“Shut up, you fool,” Sin-Bok snarled. “The flash drive must get out. I need a condom.”

Despite being born to a heavily Catholic country, many of the FARC soldiers, heavily influenced by secular Marxist ideals, had a prophylactic on their person. Rubbers were as ubiquitous as cigarettes among soldiers.

Working quickly, Sin-Bok tore open the wrapping and pulled the lubricated sleeve free.

He dropped the flash drive inside the condom and quickly tied a knot in the end. He handed it back to the girl. She held it out in her hand as if it was a snake. She looked back at the North Korean.

Sin-Bok waved his hand at her. “Hurry, hurry.”

Shrugging, the girl leaned her M-16 against a table and began pulling at her belt buckle to loosen her pants.

“No, no, no!” Sin-Bok yelled. “Swallow it, you idiot!”

The girl made a face but quickly slid the material into her mouth and swallowed hard. She gagged once and coughed, then was done. Satisfied, Sin-Bok stepped up close and grabbed her by her thin arms.

Pulling her close, the North Korean locked eyes with the frightened girl. “Listen close,” he instructed. He spoke an address in Bogotá to the girl, made her repeat it. “Now get naked. Go to the corner and do not fight. If the Americans make it through and we lose, pretend you were kidnapped. Then, later, you get that flash drive to the address I just gave you.”

“Seven must prevail,” Naranjo muttered from over the Korean’s shoulder.

“Seven must prevail,” Sin-Bok agreed.

OUTSIDE THE BUNKER DOOR the Phoenix Force entry team prepared for the final assault.

Manning and Encizo formed anchor points on opposite sides of their skirmish line. Up on the hill Able Team provide a second level of security overwatch. The battlefield was spread out below them like a chessboard. Jack Grimaldi, from a standoff position, continued to use his missiles and machine gun to devastating effect along the periphery of the compound.

Calvin James let his main weapon hang loose from its strap as he manipulated an industrial caulking gun. Beside him Hawkins presented timing pencils with preset timers.

McCarter surveyed the iron door as James and Hawkins prepped the demolition charges, a grenade in one hand. “Quarter-inch internal hinges, likely with reinforcement points at the latch and corners,” he said.

James nodded. “I brought a big hammer just in case,” he said.

The foam shape charge squirted out of the caulking gun like icing from a chef’s pastry applicator. With expert dabs and straight lines the ex-SEAL wasted no time in positioning his charge at the most precise locations. Finished, he stepped back and tossed the caulker aside.

“‘That’ll do, Pig. That’ll do,’” he quoted.

Hawkins snorted as he quickly placed the timers and started the countdown. “Fire in the hole, people,” he warned.

The entrance into the bunker was a short set of steps leading four feet down into the ground with sandbag walls built up on the side. Moving quickly and under covering fire from the support units, they peeled back from the doorway.

The charges went off with a loud, flat bang, and black smoke rolled out. Immediately automatic weapons fire burned out of the opening from inside the bunker.

“Hawk!” McCarter ordered.

The lanky Texan rushed down the steps, slid into a corner of the doorway and produced an awkward-looking assault rifle from a sling carry on his torso.

The CornerShot Assault Pistol Rifle boasted a steel hinge that allowed the weapon to be folded into an L-shape and fired around corners. The version used by Hawkins now had a digital folding heads-up-display screen and handgun at the end of the weapon capable of firing 5.56 mm ammunition.

Coolly, Hawkins swung the weapon around the corner into the teeming confusion inside the bunker. A shape loomed up, filling the screen. Hawkins pulled his trigger three times and the shape went down.

“Do you have eyes on?” McCarter demanded.

“Negative,” Hawkins replied. He snapped the weapon back around in the other direction. “Hold on!” he said. “There! I have eyes on Target Pusan Kim chi. He’s at position fourteen-thirty.”

“Fourteen-thirty,” the team repeated out loud, using the twenty-four-hour indicator for two-thirty on a clock.

McCarter, grenade primed, chucked the little hand bomb in a slap-shot maneuver around the corner as Hawkins folded back out and switched out weapons.

There were curses in Spanish and a cry of terror, then the stun device went off with a brilliant flash and a deafening bang.

“Go! Go! Go!” McCarter barked.

Hawkins charged down the steps into the smoke, weapon up, visor in place. He stepped across the threshold and button-hooked to the left. Two steps behind him Calvin James rushed into the room, twisting to the right. McCarter tapped Rafael Encizo on the shoulder, then charged in after Hawkins and James.

Encizo rushed down the steps into the hellbox.

Behind them Manning held their direct six while the guns of Able Team provided overwatch support fire.

Already pockets of resistance on the compound had begun to fade. Vehicles burned, FARC corpses lay like trash on the ground and Grimaldi’s Blackhawk hovered over the scene, miniguns blazing in sporadic bursts.

Inside the bunker Hawkins rushed forward.

Disorganized and wounded FARC guerrillas stumbled past him. He shot two, skipped over their falling bodies and reached the huddled form of Sin-Bok. The North Korean operative looked up and Hawkins dropped a haymaker on his face two inches up from the point of the man’s chin.

The target dropped, and James rushed forward, spinning around to cover the rest of the room as Hawkins slapped plastic riot cuffs and a dark hood on the Korean. Out of the smoke and dark a screaming FARC officer appeared, a .45 ACP filling his hand.

The pistol roared, the muzzle-flash illuminating the gloomy bunker like lightning. Two heavy slugs slapped into the concrete above the Korean’s head, and James realized the man had been trying to silence the foreign agent. He shot the FARC officer twice, once low in the stomach and once through the face as he folded.

“Let’s go!” Hawkins grunted.

Across the room Encizo and McCarter were clearing the rest of the bunker with ruthless, mechanically murderous proficiency.

James helped haul the groggy Korean to his feet. He turned away from the man, hand on the pistol grip of his weapon. His eyes scanned the room as they began moving forward, looking for any last-second piece of intelligence or overlooked threat.

“Damn, hold on!” he shouted.

Hawkins turned, pushing the Korean down and bringing up his weapon. He jerked around, looking for the threat, but didn’t see anything moving. He looked down and saw what James was looking at.

The girl was in her underwear and huddled against the wall. A dead FARC soldier lay bleeding in front of her. She looked up at the masked and heavily armed commandos with stark fear.

“Hey, boss,” Hawkins called to McCarter.

“Who are you? How did you get here?” James asked the girl in Spanish.

“What?” McCarter demanded. He looked over. “Shit,” he said simply.

“My name is Maria,” the girl said. “I’m from the village of San Sebastian. I want to go home, please.”

“This is mission creep.” McCarter spit.

“We put her on the Blackhawk,” James said, “turn her over to our South American liaison. They contact a relief agency. No fuss, no muss. Just a chopper ride.”

McCarter hesitated, even though everyone there knew there was no way they were leaving a helpless teenage girl behind them.

“Fine,” the ex-SAS trooper said. “But she’s your baby till we hand her over to our Agency contact.”

“No problem,” James answered.

McCarter spoke into his throat mike. “Phoenix, we are leaving.”

THE COMPOUND WAS DOTTED with fires. Corpses, broken weapons, body parts and the cinder hulks of destroyed vehicles specked the ground.

Keeping their security level high, Phoenix Force approached a flat stretch of ground as Jack Grimaldi brought the Blackhawk in for a landing. From the opposite side of the clearing Able Team broke cover and began their approach to the helicopter.

As the teams crammed into the troop transport bay under the watchful minigun, Carl Lyons looked over to where the girl sat quietly. James’s black fatigue shirt was hanging off her.

“What the fuck?” Lyons demanded. “You can’t go anywhere without finding strays?”

James laughed from behind his balaclava. “That’s why I signed up, man, to meet new people and make friends.”

Lyons turned and looked at the carnage the Stony Man teams were leaving behind as the helicopter lifted off.

“Oh, man.” The ex-cop chuckled. “We made plenty of friends today.”

“Yeah,” McCarter agreed. “But we just don’t seem to play well with others.”

Kiev, Ukraine

KLEGG SIPPED HIS DRINK and watched the clubgoers through slitted eyes.

The vodka was expensive and ice-cold so it went down with little more bite than frigid water. The dance beat, a hypno-industrial blend of tribal-styled rhythms, was two years past hip in New York and three in Europe. Despite this the meat-packing plant turned trendy nightclub was crowded with young, inebriated and apparently sexually frenzied young people fueled with chemical cocktails and copious amounts of hard alcohol.

Next to him Svetlana scanned the crowd with the bored indifference of the nouveau riche. She was fashionably anorexic with thighs thinner than her knees and bare buds for breasts. She was draped in a Pierre Cardin silk number with all the ridiculously expensive space-age, unisex, avant-garde styling that implied. She let a hand drift to the flat plane of her stomach, her eyes as large as a character’s in a Japanese manga above the drawn, stark lines of her cheekbones.

Klegg had known her for three days and in that time he’d never seen her eat anything but the olive from her vodka martini. Her energy, both in bed and out, seem entirely fueled by Stolichnaya Gold vodka and cocaine. She performed the most depraved of sexual acrobatics with the same robotic expression and untouchable eyes she used now to survey the club.

Glassy-eyed women in heavy makeup and tight, revealing clothing made their way past them to the concrete dance floor. Stalking them like wolves, strung-out male Russian urbanites, or the occasional steroid monster, followed in close pursuit.

Svetlana nodded to innumerable numbers of the club crowd. Her true value lay not in her penchant for kinky sex but in her vast, tangled social connections.

The youngest daughter of an extremely powerful and corrupt Moscow oligarch, she was more courtesan than prostitute. Klegg had flown halfway around the world and paid her in Colombian emeralds to secure an important introduction.

Upon accepting his request and payment for her services as social purveyor, she seemed to have slept with him out of habitual reflex rather than any sense of obligation.

Klegg himself had gone along with it because while vapid, she was still beautiful and because he had promised himself, upon passing the New York bar exam, that he would sleep with a woman from every continent.

After that challenge he had further redefined his goal to include economic regions and geographical features. It had only cost him one marriage and a stubborn case of herpes to meet his goal.

Klegg always achieved his goals, no matter what the price.

Kiev, he decided, really wanted to be Moscow and Moscow, he knew, really wanted to be Los Angeles.

His eyes scanned the crowd in a slow sweep like a radar dish. The images came back to him in jumbles: two girls in a booth making out while a crowd of onlookers gathered around. Stoned women on the dance floor slinging chem-lights around on strings while their dresses crept up their anorexic thighs. A long, greasy-haired kid in a thousand-dollar jacket dealing Ecstasy in front of the restrooms under the watchful eye of two hired thugs with bodies by Dianabol and eyes like polished steel mirrors.

The place smelled like sweat and cigarettes and liquor and sex. The din of the DJ’s stereo system was enough to qualify as a sonic weapon. Klegg could literally feel the 2-4 backbeat of the bass shake him with tactile force as it pumped out of the massive speakers.

He wasn’t here to have a good time.

He spoke Russian, among four other languages, and he was young enough not to stand out too terribly in the club during the initial surveillance. His cover was simple and straightforward because it was, in fact, his profession. He was a procurement specialist for a private contractor specializing in large-corporation inventory.

He made deals for engines in Peru, he acquired stockpiles of diamonds in South Africa, he secured binary processors in India, he obtained cooling systems for French Mirage jets and sold them to African dictators.

All the while he built his networks of shady lawyers, street contacts, intelligence agents, criminal syndicates, ship captains and bush pilots. Today he was going to expand that network into the field of soldiers for hire, and Svetlana was going to help him.

“There,” the woman said.

Across the dance floor near where a phalanx of bouncers guarded the club’s entrance he saw Milosevic. The Russian lawyer came in like a visiting emperor, his entourage part Praetorian guard, part sycophantic toadies and part pleasure slaves.

Klegg reached down to where his attaché case rested against his leg. He took the not unsubstantial weight of the thing in his hand and stepped away from the bar. Across the room Milosevic was shown to a private area at the top of a short flight of stairs leading to a balcony over the dance floor.

A massive, impassive-faced thug with the body of a professional wrestler and an Armani suit stood sentry before the red-velvet rope dividing the stair and viewing lounge from the common dancers and general population.

As they approached, the man’s head turned on a bull neck like a 20 mm cannon on an APC gun turret. His eyes were cold chips of blue. Klegg felt an instant rising of his own hackles as he drew closer. It was an instinctual reaction to so much rival testosterone. The potential for conflict was intense. It wouldn’t pay to lose his head, and this was what Svetlana was earning her percentage for.

He let a small smile play across his face as the bodyguard’s eyes were drawn away from him, a man with a briefcase in a Ukrainian nightclub, to the slinky form of the icy blonde. The guy might be tough, Klegg mused, but he wasn’t a pro.

Behind the guard up the stairs Milosevic was opening a bottle of champagne. He said something and everyone in the group laughed like marionettes. A flamboyantly gay man with purple spiky hair and tight leather pants shrieked his giggles like a siren and dumped a copious amount of white powder down directly on the glass top of the low table set between the party’s couches.

“Dmitri,” Svetlana pouted. Her hand went to the mile-wide expanse of his chest. “You act like you don’t remember me.” Her chin came down, and her eyes looked up as she made coy into a seduction power play.

She was like a big-league power hitter, Klegg realized. Her technique wasn’t subtle; she’d either strike out completely or knock the ball out of the park. And like a high-paid baseball home-run specialist she’d knock more out of the park than she’d lose…until age and the drugs caught up with her.

Dmitri broke into an easy grin, his eyes trailing down her body like the laser guidance system of a jet fighter locking on to target. He replied in guttural, bass Russian, his chest rumbling like the engine of a Harley Davidson motorcycle.

“I remember you, Svetlana. That time in Moscow—” he began.

“We stayed up all night,” she answered, and they laughed together.

Dmitri caught sight of Klegg standing behind her and his smile hardened. Catching the shift in him Svetlana put her hand on his chest again, drawing his attention back to her the way a tiger’s eyes will follow a piece of raw meat in the hands of a circus trainer.

“How is he?” she asked. “Does he ever talk about me?” She sounded so sincere Klegg, who had planned the ruse with her, was almost fooled despite himself. Dmitri grinned knowingly and Klegg could see he had bought into the act completely.

“Of course, baby,” the bodyguard purred. “Like anyone could ever forget you.” He shrugged his shoulders and the effect was like seeing tectonic plates shift. “But you know how he is. Everything, all the time—it’s hard to look back. Hard to keep track.”

“Let me talk to him,” she purred.

He started to shake his head no and she slid two crisp folded American hundred-dollar bills into his hand before he could speak. He made the money disappear and reached for the hook to the red rope strung between the stanchions in front of the short flight of stairs.

“Okay, ’Lana,” he growled. “But just you. I don’t know your boyfriend, and Milosevic doesn’t want to make any new buddies.”

He stared at Klegg as if daring him to argue.

Klegg said nothing. Everything was going according to plan. Svetlana reached up and kissed Dmitri quickly, leaving a lipstick mark so red on his pale skin it looked like a wound. Then she was up the stairs and being greeted like an old friend.

Klegg waited patiently, ignoring Dmitri’s hard stare. He waited while Svetlana passed kisses of greetings all around and hugged Milosevic. She laughed at something he said, then helped herself to a line of the coke and a glass of the expensive champagne. Milosevic seemed generally happy to see her and, having spent time with the lady himself, Klegg could understand why.

After a few moments, once she was comfortably ensconced next to the Russian syndicate lawyer, he saw her lean in close, hand on Milosevic’s thigh, and begin whispering in his ear.

Klegg, long attuned to these things, watched Milosevic’s body language change. The smile, a social mask, stayed in place, but when his eyes cut away from Svetlana and down the stairs to Klegg they glittered like a snake’s, sizing him up.

Klegg smiled slightly back in acknowledgment.

It was time to make his play. He was a six plus one.

CHAPTER FIVE

Stony Man Farm

The Bronco pulled out of the dirt road emerging from the orchard and came to a stop at the foot of the hill. Doors were kicked open and the five members of Phoenix Force emerged from the vehicle. Gary Manning unwrapped a protein bar and began eating it.

“Good God, Manning,” Calvin James said. “Are you always eating?”

Still chewing, the massively muscled Manning looked at him and shrugged. “I’m in a bulking phase. I want to see how much weight I can put on and still keep my two-mile-run time under eleven and a half minutes.”

“Christ,” Rafael Encizo groused. “If you get any goddamn bigger we’ll never get the helicopter off the ground.”

“Then I’ll just leap to the target in a single bound,” Manning shot back.

Moments later a second SUV pulled up, this one containing Able Team and driven by John “Cowboy” Kissinger.

Kissinger had done time as a DEA agent before coming to work as armorer for the Stony Man operation. When it came to tactical equipment, firearms and explosives, he combined the creative insight of Akira Tokaido and the intense analytical skills of Professor Wethers.

McCarter took a sip of his coffee out of a cardboard cup and looked over at the armorer. Kissinger was laughing in response to something Hermann Schwarz was saying.

“Oh, Christ,” the Briton muttered as Manning strolled up beside him. “Schwarz is telling jokes again.”

The Canadian moaned in response as the two field teams converged. Schwarz kept right on talking, his eyes fairly dancing with delight as Carl Lyons, his favorite target for off-color humor, studiously ignored him.

“You think that’s bad, Cowboy?” Schwarz asked Kissinger. “One time after we got our operational bonuses we went in on a cattle ranch.”

“Oh, man,” Calvin James muttered to T. J. Hawkins, “this is going to be awful.”

“Usually,” Hawkins agreed. Then, momentarily taken back by the outlandishness, he turned toward James. “Wait, did they invest in property?”

“The only property Lyons ever invested in was the stripper pole he put up in his condo,” James replied.

“So we decide to buy this bull,” Schwarz continued. “You know, to increase our stock.”

“Please shut up,” Lyons said, his voice dull with hopelessness. “Can’t we just train?”

Schwarz continued as if he hadn’t heard. “So I go over there and Carl is all down, really bummed, says the bull just eats grass all day and won’t even look at the cows.” Schwarz stopped talking long enough to cut his eyes over to the burly ex-LAPD detective. The man looked resigned and Schwarz’s grin grew. “So I tell him to get a vet out quick to fix the problem. Two weeks later we get scrambled by Barb for a deployment.”

“Where I wished you’d suffered a horrific wound to your mouth,” Lyons added.

“And I ask Carl how things are going and he’s happy as hell! ‘The bull has taken care of all my cows, broke through the fence and has even serviced all the neighbor’s cows!’ I’m all like wow!” Schwarz laughed. “What the hell did the vet do to that bull? ‘Just gave him some pills,’ said Carl. So I’m like, what kind of pills? And Carl looks me straight in the eye—this is no bullshit—and says ‘I don’t know, but they sort of taste like peppermint.’”

Schwarz immediately began laughing at his own joke, folding almost in two with mirth as he guffawed. He looked up and saw the rest of the men from Stony looking at him with flat affects. “What?” he demanded. “He said ‘they taste like peppermint!’ See, he was eating the horny pills.” Out in the long grass, crickets chirped. Schwarz frowned. “These are the jokes, people.”

Rafael Encizo shook his head in pain. “You’ve got a real gift, man.”

“Yeah, he’s got a gift,” Blancanales replied. “He’s got such a gift Hal had to go to the freakin Oval Office to keep the CIA from stealing his jokes to use on the prisoners in Gitmo.”

“Oh, man.” McCarter shook his head. “If the ACLU thought sleep deprivation was torture they would have lost their minds if they’d ever heard Schwarz telling detainees jokes.”

Schwarz stood, his face holding a shocked expression. “You know Jesus said a prophet is never revered in his own land. Now I know what he meant.”

Kissinger burst out laughing in incredulous mirth. “Yeah, Hermann, whenever I think of Jesus I think of you, man.” The armorer stepped forward, shaking his head. “How ’bout I show you guys why I brought you out here before Carl picks up Blancanales and beats you to death with him?”

“Sure.” Schwarz shrugged. “I like new toys as much as the next electronics genius.”

“You can see,” Lyons observed, “he’s as modest as he is funny.”

“Please tell us what you brought,” Manning begged Kissinger.

“Let me introduce you boys to a little bit of gear I appropriated from DARPA by way of our good friends at Lockheed Martin.”

“Jet pack?” McCarter, a pilot, asked, only half joking.

“Close.” Kissinger nodded and led the teams around to the rear of his SUV where he lowered the back hatch. “Exoskeletons.”

“Exoskeletons?” Encizo asked.

Kissinger nodded. “Yep. Called HULC.” He began handing out surprisingly compact packages. “We do the first trial out here on a few hill runs, then I had Hal go through Justice and get us some time at the Marine Corps obstacle course down in Quantico. We’re going to put these mothers through a workout, then see if they’d be any use to you shooters out in the field.”

Hawkins looked at his package. “They call it the Hulk?” he asked.

“No,” Kissinger replied. “Not the Hulk, but HULC, or Human Universal Load Carrier. Just stretch out the legs, then step into the open foot pads. Secure the straps at thighs, waist and shoulders. Supposedly they’ve got it spec’ed out for two hundred pounds at a top speed of ten miles per hour. But you’re supposed to be able to crawl, jump, kneel, squat in it.”

“How does it work?” Schwarz asked, all humor gone as the prospect of new tech was put in front of him.

“Four lithium-ion batteries go into that pouch at the small of your back. They power sensors in the footpads, the microprocessors that read them and move the hydraulic system.”

Lyons frowned while the others began putting on their units. “How quick can we unass ’em if we need to?”

“Once you get the hang of it, the contractor told me under thirty seconds,” Kissinger replied.

“Oh, that’s good,” Schwarz said. He began doing deep knee bends in his combat apparatus. “You see, since he took that medicine I told you about, Ironman’s been real, real concerned with getting his clothes off in a hurry.”

“You got one of these things with a dog muzzle?” Lyons asked. “That could help me out.”

“I’ll see what the boys at DARPA have to say.” Kissinger nodded.

The Stony Man tactical teams secured themselves into the exoskeletons and began warming up the gear. First they paired up and ran a series of sprints up the hill. There was no improved performance, but the HULC tactical system provided surprisingly little hindrance to their speeds.

“What’s DARPA tell you so far, Cowboy?” Manning asked. “It look like Lockheed is going to get the contract?”

Kissinger nodded. “Yep, the boys at JSOC loved ’em. They’re talking that if the test results hold up, they’ll go beyond Rangers and maybe deploy them to general infantry units in the Marines and Army.”

Kissinger lowered the rear gate of the SUV where he had loaded a pallet with training weapons and prepacked rucksacks filled with sandbags. “Let’s start loading you supermen up and see what these bad boys can really do.”

Farmhouse

BARBARA PRICE SAT in the kitchen of the old farmhouse and slowly drank a cup of coffee. In front of her she had a stack of satellite images, an encrypted Kindle DX and a PowerBook logged into A-Space.

A-Space, or Analytic Space, was a social networking and common collaborative workspace for all the members of the USIC, or United States Intelligence Community.

The Stony Man mission controller was using the site to search through the Library of National Intelligence for seemingly unrelated links that formed a pattern.

As a dedicated part of her counterintelligence security measures, Kurtzman’s cybernetic team had been tasked with searching the browser on a rotating basis, making sure no evidence, concrete or oblique, about Stony Man Farm made it onto the site.

Once upon a time in America, great firewalls of competition and compartmentalization mindsets had kept the disparate fiefdoms of the USIC separate from each other. In those days Stony Man Farm had been the main off-the-books weapon of choice by the Executive Branch looking to battle terrorism.

Post 9/11 many things had changed in America. Compartmentalization had gone out of vogue with a vengeance. Other “tip of the spear” organizations like the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA’s Special Activities Division had seen themselves refocused into areas traditionally deemed off the books and thus the province of Stony Man.

Also intelligence activity oversight committees in the House and Senate had started looking into corners and under rocks that before had remained unmolested. Several high-profile scandals had already rocked the espionage and military communities.

All of those would seem like the high jinks of a naughty PTA president in comparison if the full scope of Stony Man’s operation ever came to light.

The list was endless: extrajudicial killings of foreign nationals and American citizens; violations of federal, state and local laws and statues by the truckload; operations conceived, designed and executed in full and complete violation of the Posse Commitatus Act; war crimes as defined by the Geneva Convention and Uniformed Code of Military Justice. The list stretched out and led up the chain of command all the way to the Oval Office.

Theoretically at least, in several ways the Stony Man operation was many a U.S. lawmaker’s and citizen’s ultimate big brother nightmare. In practicality it was the best defense the nation had ever instituted.

In theory, Price thought wryly of the old axiom, theory and practice were the same. In practice they never are.

She dialed down the Kindle DX screen, scrolling through the digital display of the after-action report CIA interrogators at a black site camp on the island of Diego Garcia had sent back. It continued the results of the interrogation of the North Korean, Sin-Bok.

Most of the information was unspectacular. The agent hadn’t been taken as an investigation tool but rather as a behind-the-scenes warning to Kim Jong-il to not play his brand of lunatic hardball in the Western Hemisphere.

However, something odd had caught Price’s eye. While under a modest dose of sodium thiopenal and slight measures of the euphoric agent lysergic acid diethylamide, the North Korean had babbled merrily on but his answers had been incoherent, often shifting from language to language and even into the random, including rattling off simple mathematical problems.

“‘Three plus four. I’m three plus four,’” Price quoted to herself.

It was abnormal even for a person tripping on LSD. She leaned back in her chair and smelled the fresh air of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She picked up her Montblanc pen, a gift from Hal Brognola, and tapped her chin in a reflexive motion.

On a whim she typed “three plus four” into the search option on A-Space. Found nothing. She shrugged. It had been a wild shot anyway. Perhaps Hunt or Akira could…

“Stupid!” She laughed suddenly.

Leaning forward, she put her pen down with a click next to her ceramic mug of coffee. The keys on the PowerBook tapped rapidly as she typed in the word and hit Enter: “Seven.”

CHAPTER SIX

Kiev, Ukraine

Klegg sat. He didn’t offer to shake hands. Milosevic regarded him with a reptile stare, eyes bloodshot. He watched as the American set the attaché case carefully between them.

Milosevic cocked an eyebrow in question. Klegg smiled slightly and held his hands out in a welcoming gesture. Beside him on the couch Svetlana was completely ignoring him now that her job was done.

She giggled madly as another girl in a brilliant couture dress pulled out a water bong of thin-cut crystal and splashed vodka from a bottle out of an ice bucket into the main chamber. The entourage around them chattered in Russian under the watchful eyes of Milosevic’s bodyguards.

Kiev made Klegg think of what Dodge City had been like during the cattle days or San Francisco during the gold rush; a wide-open frontier town where the law didn’t apply to anyone with money.

Beside him another loose pile of cocaine was casually split across the table as a laughing twentysomething with dragon tattoos on his scrawny arms and a diamond stud in his nose opened a velvet drawstring pouch and dropped buds of deep green colored marijuana into the mix.

“I’m supposed to ask what you want, I know,” Milosevic said in English. “But I don’t like playing twenty questions.”

“Twenty-two pounds,” Klegg supplied for him.

“Twenty-two pounds?”

“Twenty-two pounds,” Klegg confirmed.

“For what?”

“Call it earnest money, for a conversation.”

“Which conversation?”

“The one we’re about to have.”

“Why would you bring me twenty-two pounds to have a conversation? This conversation—” Milosevic leaned forward “—which is starting to become ludicrous.”

Twenty-two pounds was the exact weight of one million dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills.

Beside Klegg, Svetlana had taken a fat, sticky bud and coated it liberally with powdered cocaine and then thumbed it into the bowl of the vodka-filled bong. The giggling mad man with the nose diamond provided a pocket lighter that seemed closer to a butane torch, and the coven huddled around the implement.

“There’s nothing ludicrous here,” Klegg assured him, not without a sense of irony. “I’m giving you that money to listen to my proposal. To consider it seriously. If you say no to what I’m suggesting, fine—you take the money and we part on good terms. But I’m not here to talk real estate or banking or oil futures out of Chechnya.”

Milosevic snapped his fingers and settled back in his lounge chair. The music in the club was deafening but the ballistic plastic surrounding the deck landing muted the sound to a tolerable level.

A muscle-heavy thug with a crew cut and fifty-five-inch chest bent down and picked up Klegg’s briefcase. Beside him Svetlana coughed and a cloud of cocaine-laced marijuana smoke rolled out like smog from a chimney. Immediately, Klegg felt light-headed and he instantly wondered if that wasn’t part of Milosevic’s plan.

“Talk,” the ex-KGB operative said. “You have purchased five minutes in which to interest me.” He lit a cigar. “Frankly, I don’t expect you to succeed.”

“I came here on certain assumptions.”

“Dangerous.”

“It can be,” Klegg conceded. “But risk preempts reward. For example…six plus one equals seven.”

The Russian made a face. If he was surprised he didn’t show it. “Just as five plus two equals seven,” he replied.

“Even my assumptions are grounded in certain…continuities,” Klegg smiled.

Milosevic waved his free hand in a “come on” gesture. Svetlana passed the bong to the girl in the red couture dress.

“The first assumption,” Klegg continued, “is that you retained your contacts from your time in a KGB station house in eastern Africa. That you could, if properly motivated, reach out and reactivate stringers, cells and networks across the region.”

“You must have these kinds of contacts among your own community,” Milosevic countered. “Why come to Ukraine to get what you could get in London or New York?”

On the couches the entourage exploded into laughter and applause as Svetlana and the girl in the red dress began making out.

“Because,” Klegg said slowly, “I need contractors and operatives who don’t mind pulling down on Westerners. I want businessmen, not ideology. For that, it was come here or go to Palermo.”

“Rio, Caracas,” the Russian offered. “Even Uruguay.”

“I go to the cartels, I might as well go to the fucking monkey house at the zoo.” Klegg paused. “Though for what I have in mind, an outer circle of cannon fodder might be appropriate, given an inner cadre capable of dealing with them afterward.”

“A fixer who exercises total unit closure on his field talent tends to have an abbreviated career,” Milosevic countered.

“You’ll land on your feet, I’m sure.”

Milosevic released cigar smoke in a huge plume and settled back comfortably in his chair. His eyes cut over to where Svetlana was making out with the girl from his entourage. The Russian oligarch looked back at Klegg.

“You start tying up loose ends, it can sometimes be hard to know when to stop.”

Now it was Klegg’s turn to shrug. “Tie up the knots that can’t tie you back. Call it acceptable.”

Like a scene out of Faust, Milosevic leaned forward and extended his hand.

IT WAS COLD in the alley outside the Kiev nightclub.

Klegg’s and Svetlana’s breath plumed up between them as they kissed furiously. The American plunged his hands inside the woman’s ankle-length fur coat. Her eyes were glassy marbles as they kissed. He ran his hands over her body underneath her coat, stroking her up to a fever pitch of excitement.

She moaned as his fingers worked at her.

The back door to the nightclub was just a few yards away and the muted sound of the dance beat music rattled the blacked-out windows in their frames. The alley smelled strongly of the urine of drunk and stoned patrons. Garbage overflowed out of battered old cans and three giant green bins.

Rats, braving the frigid chill to get the remnants of greasy food, swarmed across the refuse and watched the humans with glittering eyes.

Though thousands of citizens of Kiev went about their lives within little distance of couple, it was as if they were alone in a vast, urban wasteland of empty windows, rubbish and deep shadows. It called to Klegg’s mind the poem The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.

“I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust,” the lawyer thought idly. It made no sense but his mind was starting to click with adrenaline.

“Now,” Svetlana whispered in his ears. “I want it now.”

“Now?” Klegg asked, his heart starting to beat even faster.

“Yes, yes,” she breathed.

“Okay.” He laughed. “But remember, you asked for it.”

The American psychopath stepped back from the Russian woman, leaving her gasping. Her glassy, red-veined eyes opened in confusion.

Klegg grinned like a maniacal clown.

His hands went to the small of his back underneath his coat. He emerged with a pair of nunchaku.

The martial-arts weapon was designed from the width of a single, slightly thicker than average handle cut smoothly down the middle, allowing for more compact and thus easier surreptitious carrying. The handles on the thicker edges were octagonal, presenting a variety of sharp edges for contact when swung.

“My favorite movie when I was growing up was Enter the Dragon,” Klegg explained, speaking fast as his breath continued coming harder and faster. “Nylon cord and teak wood. I walked right through airport security with this.”

He assumed the rear defense stance. Dramatic, almost cinematic in nature, with most of his weight resting on his outstretched forward leg while his torso was held back, arms up, nunchaku held along the outside of his right arm.

“W-what?” Confusion. The beginnings of fear.

“I’m not going to lie,” Klegg snorted. “I like this weapon ’cause it’s so fancy. Does a lot for my self-esteem.”

He exploded into motion, whipping the segmented clubs around through an intricate pattern of moves: reverse shoulder swing into a figure-eight swing, down into an underarm grip.

He was grinning so wildly now his smile threatened to split his face. He forcefully exhaled and performed a cross-back swing too fast for the eye to follow, and Svetlana, at last understanding what was about to happen, opened her mouth to scream.

The end of the nunchaku whipped around and slapped the woman across the jaw. Her head snapped to the side and her scream was cut short by the impact. Blood painted the dirty snow in stripes of scarlet. She stumbled back, long heels sliding on the icy ground, only the alley wall keeping her up.

Klegg, eyes burning, moved in, the nunchaku cycloning through its figure-eight pattern. He struck her again, then caught the stick under his arm on the rebound. Her head snapped back and this time teeth flew like tumbling dice.

She sagged to her knees and her ruined face poured blood out in a hot, sticky puddle beneath her.

Klegg lashed out again and again. His skill was not simply that of a choreographed dancer; he could swing the arcane weapon with deadly force. The teakwood handle made sickening crunching sounds like cracking ice as it slapped into Svetlana’s skull and jaws over and over.

Blood splatter painted the walls, painted the ground, soaked the woman until her face was a mask of it. She couldn’t find the strength to scream, couldn’t drag in enough air to cry out before she was struck again.

She could only whimper.

Klegg’s smile was a horrible rictus on his gleaming face. His breath came in short, hard pants like a man having sex. The concussive shock of each blow traveled back up his arm with each strike.

Finally one of the octagonal edges of the striking club caught the ravaged woman a glancing blow along her temple and she was knocked unconscious. She sagged face-first to the ground, still as a slaughtered carcass. Klegg struck the back of her head two hard snaps and more blood matted her once silky hair.

Gasping for breath, he moved around behind her and took each side of the nunchaku in an underhand grip. He bent and looped the nylon cord under her chin then twisted. He twisted until he felt her larynx crumple like an empty soda can under his heel and he rose, dropping the weapon to lie beside Svetlana’s rapidly cooling corpse.

He took off his gloves and ran a hand through his hair. He straightened and smoothed his overcoat. He reached down and adjusted his still prominent erection in his slacks.

Without hurry he lit a cigarette and blew smoke out in twin streams from his nostrils. Slowly his heart slowed and his breathing calmed. His erection began to fade.

He smoked half the cigarette down, then dropped it to the ground. It landed in a sludgy pool of snow and blood, instantly extinguished.

He turned and walked calmly from the alley to hail a taxicab. He had no fear of the police. Kiev was a wide-open, dirty city and he was under the protection of Milosevic, the biggest villain of them all.

Things were working out just right, he decided.

Stony Man Farm

BARBARA PRICE sat at her desk in the Annex.

She had three computer screens open in front of her, each with a spreadsheet showing expenditures for separate areas of the Stony Man operation. She had itemized ledgers for the armory, for Transportation and for Buck Greene’s security projects. Requisition forms for jet fuel alone were enough to make clerks from the Governmental Accountability Office gray with shock.

Price looked at the tally and shook her head as she typed in her authorization code.

The public was always in some outcry about thousand-dollar hammers or eight-hundred-dollar toilet seats. The truth was the number crunchers at the GAO would never have made such oversights. Those inflated purchase orders were designed to hide covert-action expenditures for clandestine units and projects just like Stony Man.

There was a knock on the office door and she looked up. Carmen Delahunt stood in the entrance, a tired look on her face and a manila file folder in her hand.

“Got a second?” the redhead asked.

Price pushed herself back from her desk. “Sure,” she said. “What’ve you got?”

“Multiples of Seven.”

“Really?” Price arced an eyebrow.

Delahunt entered the room and took a seat across from Price at the desk. She laid out her folder showing several computer printings and a couple of glossy jpg enlargements.

Delahunt began leafing through them, talking fast, the way she always did when she was onto something.

“I started cross indexing intelligence estimates and after-action reports like you’d asked,” she explained. “Looking to see if anything relating to Seven came up.”

“You found something?”

“I found a motherlode, Barb. I’ve got Seven cross-indexing things going back decades. Some of it can’t be related—the search is too broad, but you’ve tapped into some kind of thread here. Pieces from a thousand different puzzles that nobody realized they were even supposed to be looking at.”

Price leaned forward, caught up in her enthusiasm. She reached across the desk and pulled a codex Delahunt had printed up. Her vision swam as she saw some of the events and people highlighted.

Kabul urban police. Princess Diana. Baghdad Green Zone. Kiev. Israel, 1968. CERN. The Vatican. Charles Lindberg. Hangar 21. White Sands, New Mexico. Ho Chi Minh City. Aldrich Ames. There was such a collage of information it was impossible to make sense of.

The list went on.

“As interesting as these initial surveys are, they’re basically cold cases,” Delahunt continued. “Some much less cold than others, but for now, cold cases.” She paused. “Except for this.”

Price looked up from the codex. “What?”

“Canada.” Delahunt slid a paper-clipped report to Price. “Toronto.”

“Give me the through line.”

“Our Department of Energy runs a contract research facility there. Ostensibly to study alternative fuels. Green tech, stuff like that. From what I’ve gathered, though, much of the science is a little more experimental. A little more theoretical.”

“And?”

“And the DOE put in a request to the FBI last week to conduct a counterintelligence operation on the facility as internal security had started reporting recruitment approaches being made on their employees by unknown operatives looking to do pay-for-play deals. Also, electronic countermeasures had been tripped in the last forty-eight hours indicating someone was doing a hostile analysis of their hard site security.”

“Standard Bureau stuff.” Price nodded. “Could be anyone looking to see what goodies are being cooked up. Hell, it could be industrial even, not political.”

Delahunt nodded. “Still could be. Nothing’s been proven. However the FBI team they sent to Toronto managed to catch a glimpse of someone seen surveying the employee entrance.”

“Custody?”

“No.” Delahunt shook her head. “This wasn’t a joint op with the Canadians. They took his photo and requested RCMP help with digital analog forensics.”

“They ID the guy?”

“Sure. Man named Jen Duh sh Tyen Tsai.”

“If Schwarz were here you’d know he’d say—”

“Gesundheit,” Delahunt agreed. “He’s a funny man that Hermann.”

“Yeah, but looks aren’t everything.”

“You got that from him, didn’t you?”

Price took a sip of coffee and shrugged. “Sometimes he’s funny. Mostly he’s just funny ’cause he’s trying to be funny and fails.” She set the mug of coffee down. “But surely Mr. What’s-his-name doesn’t go by that handle.”

“Mostly just Jen.”

“What do we know about him?”

“We know he’s in Toronto. We know he’s a sort of free agent between Chinese Tong running underworld activities there. Part courier, part outside hit man, part information broker.”

“So a criminal mercenary with connections to Chinese syndicates is running a surveillance operation on a DOE private contractor facility. And you tied him in to Seven how?”

“Look at his sleeve.” Delahunt gestured toward a RCMP file photo. “His left arm, inside, above the elbow.”

A “sleeve” was a slang term used by tattoo enthusiasts to indicate an arm that was entirely covered by ink designs from deltoid to wrist. Jen Tsai’s was covered in swirling images of Chinese characters, mythological demons and iconography in bold reds, blues, yellows and black.

“Where? I don’t see…” Price trailed off as she scrutinized the photo. “Ah.”

Just above Jen Tsai’s elbow was a horned demon skull, screaming mouth lined with fangs. Flames swirled inside the gaping jaws, and in the center of the flames were the numerals 1+6=7.

“Yeah,” Delahunt agreed. “Little odd for a hardcore Chinese gangster to be sporting primary arithmetic in his colors, no?”

“Oh, yes,” Price answered.

“We have his probable twenty?”

“We most certainly do.”

Price picked up her coffee mug. “Good. I’ll call Hal have him pull the Bureau boys off surveillance. Then I’ll send Able Team around to knock on some doors.”

“Knowing Ironman, it’ll be heads that get knocked more than doors.”

Price shrugged. “Whatever…”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Toronto, Canada

Regent Park, 3:00 a.m., the streets were quiet.

From behind the wheel of the black Excursion SUV, Carl Lyons surveyed the neighborhood. The vehicle had been waiting for them at the airport.

Lyons watched the streets with the cynical, jaundiced eye of a veteran cop.

Regent Park’s reputation preceded it. Fifty percent of the people living in the urban area were teenagers and sixty-eight percent of all the people there were settled in well below the national poverty rate for the rest of Canada.

With poverty, the lack of aspiration, and the loss of hope came crime and most often violent crime. Regent Park was a tough neighborhood not unlike any other bad neighborhood in any other First World country. It wasn’t Islamabad or Caracas, but it could still kill you.

“Keep an eye out for gangbangers working as sentries for drug dealers,” Lyons muttered.

“This isn’t my first rodeo, Hefei,” Blancanales reminded him.

Lyons grunted and turned down Queen Street East. In the back Schwarz was using his CPDA to run a more sophisticated GPS unit than the one that had come with the big Excursion. The CPDA he had begun using was a SME PED, or Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device.

Barbara Price had managed to secure a crate of the high-end encrypted devices from her old bosses in the Puzzle Palace, the National Security Agency.

“You notice some bastards have torn down all the street markers?” Schwarz observed.

“So police have a hard time responding to incidents or giving their location for backup,” Lyons said.

“Hey,” Schwarz replied in his best faux-Hispanic accent, “this ain’t my first rodeo, Hefei.”

“You guys are assholes.”

Schwarz leaned forward and nudged Blancanales on his shoulder. When the ex-Green Beret turned he saw Schwarz grinning madly, hand up to his ear as he mimicked holding a phone.

“Bring-bring.” Schwarz giggled, then made his voice deep. “Kettle? Yes, this is Pot, um, you’re black.”

“I’m an asshole?” Lyons snapped. “I’m an asshole? On what grounds?”

“On the account of your warm and overly gregarious people skills.” Blancanales laughed.

“Hey,” Lyons snarled. “Some people are like Slinkies, not really good for anything…but they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down a flight of stairs.”

Outside the vehicle rows of dingy brick buildings from the Toronto Community Housing Corporation slid by in uniform ranks.

The city planners had originally visualized Regent Park as a transitional community, and it was Canada’s largest experiment with a social housing project where people on social assistance could find affordable housing until their circumstances improved.

That had turned out to be very few and the population had stagnated, then grown. Eventually it had also become an immigrant community neighborhood. Into this melting pot of urban squalor Jen Tsai had moved, establishing links with local street gangs and building a safe haven for himself.

Lyons turned onto Parliament Street and began driving north in the general direction of the more upscale, historical Cabbagetown.

“There,” he said. “On the right is Regent Park—that’s our primary landmark. See what the GPS is saying.”

“Already on it,” Schwarz acknowledged.

“Circle the tenement when we get there,” Blancanales said. “We’ll finish the three-sixty survey then I, not being so muy blanco, can hop out and cover the back door.”

“Hey,” Lyons said, “this isn’t my first rodeo.”

“Everyone’s a comedian in this crew.” Schwarz spoke up. Then he said, “There. On the right, facing the park, that’s our building.”

“Let me swing around back,” Lyons said. “You got anything on the police scanner?”

“Negative,” Schwarz replied. “I got one domestic-disturbance call as we rolled in but after that nothing.”

“There we go,” Blancanales said.

The Able Team warrior looked out their windows and into Regent Park.

A group of African-Canadian youths stood beside a children’s playground. They were dressed in typical hip-hop regalia and with openly hostile looks watched the SUV as it cruised slowly past.

The clique that ran Regent Park, and the one with whom Jen Tsai now made his deals, according to RCMP records, was the PBS, or the Point Blank Souljahs, the remnants of a much more powerful organization called the Regent Park Crew that had controlled cocaine traffic in the 1980s and ’90s and was now defunct.

“Good thing our windows are blacked out,” Schwarz said. “Or those Souljahs would think we were cops.”

“As it is now,” Blancanales pointed out drily, “they might decide we’re an enemy crew on a drive-by mission.”

“Then they wouldn’t be far wrong, would they?” Lyons grunted.

“Not really,” Blancanales agreed. “You want me to contact Wethers now?”

“Yeah, bring him up.” Lyons nodded. “Schwarz, you got the shotgun mike ready?”

“I’m on it like Blue Bonnet.”

Lyons nodded to Blancanales, who spoke into his own SME PED. “Able to Stony Bird,” he said, initiating contact.

“Copy,” Wethers answered immediately. “I have you up on my video display. I see your twenty.”

The camera feed to the video display Professor Wethers referred to was mounted into the nose of an RQ-7 Shadow, a light, compact tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. Only thirty-six feet long and boasting a fourteen-foot wingspan with a weight of 375 pounds, the UAV was much smaller than its larger cousins, the MQ-9 and MQ-1 Reapers.

Able Team had launched the vehicle from a portable launcher they’d mounted on the roof of their SUV from the top of a deserted commercial parking garage. With a flight endurance of six hours, a sixty-eight-mile range and service ceiling of fifteen thousand feet, it was exactly the kind of tool they needed for the low-profile urban operation.

“Go ahead and give our boy Jen a call,” Schwarz said. “I’m up.”

Lyons and Schwarz cued up their headsets while Blancanales used his SME PED to dial Stony Man Farm. Waiting at a com station just outside the remote pilot setup Wethers ran the RQ-7 from, Kurtzman took the incoming call and shuffled it through his system to make it anonymous before routing it back to Toronto.

After three rings Jen Tsai answered. “Hello?” he said in English.

Blancanales lifted his arm and gave Schwarz a thumbs-up.

Lyons subvocalized into his throat mike to Wethers. “We’re on. Start triangulation.” Behind them Schwarz powered down the back window and pointed a compact directional mike at the building housing the Chinese gangster.

“Hello?” Tsai repeated, this time sounding pissed off.

“You fucked up the job on the lab,” Blancanales said. At Stony Man, Kurtzman was feeding his voice through a distorter so that it came out deep and gravelly. “You got made by Mounties.” He paused then added, “Seven is not pleased.”

“It’s not over yet!” Tsai shouted into the phone. “I can handle the cops here. I’m still going to get an in.”

“No denial, right to defensive begging, nice,” Lyons murmured into his throat mike.

“We’re getting everything,” Kurtzman assured him.

“Excuses don’t cut it,” Blancanales said.

Behind him Schwarz looked down at the scrolling screen of his SME PED.

The signal from Jen Tsai’s phone was shown against a 3-D structural blueprint of the public housing building as it was triangulated between Schwarz’s parabolic mike and the sensory instruments in the nose of the RQ-7 Shadow controlled by Wethers.

There was a pause after Blancanales’s admonishment.

For several tense seconds the conversation was still. Lyons looked in his side mirror and immediately sat up. Approaching the idling SUV were four of the gang members they’d passed earlier. The gangsters’ hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of their hooded pullover sweatshirts.

Lyons swore softly; he knew what was happening immediately. The Point Blank Souljahs crew had noticed an unidentified SUV with blacked-out windows rolling slowly through disputed drug territory then parking in front of their housing unit.

They were coming to kill trespassers and once they got a good look at Able Team the lead would start flying all the sooner.

On the phone Tsai suddenly spoke again, voice rich with suspicion. “One plus six.”

Blancanales turned and looked at Lyons, then back over his shoulder at Schwarz, hand up and face questioning. “What do I say?” he mouthed silently.

Lyons cut his eyes back to the approaching gangsters. He saw the leader produce a TEC-9 machine pistol. He turned back toward Blancanales and pulled out his silenced Beretta 92 with extended magazine.

“One plus six!” Tsai barked into the phone.

“Fuck it!” Lyons snarled. “Hang up, we’ll roll hot. I’m tired of all this goddamn sneaking around anyway.”

“We just got here!” Schwarz protested.

“Hurry up,” Blancanales answered him. He caught sight of the approaching gangsters in the rearview mirror and snapped his cell phone shut, cutting off the angry Tsai. “If you don’t move fast, Schwarz, then Ironman is going to kill all the good ones.”

Stony Man Farm

BARBARA PRICE, hair still damp from her shower, finished dressing.

She was in the bedroom of the farmhouse where she kept toiletries and clothing for the times she spent overnight at Stony Man. Most weeks she spent more time sleeping here than she did at her D.C. town house.

The shower in the room’s bathroom was running as Mack Bolan rinsed off. He’d just returned from somewhere, doing something—Price had no idea what.

He’d smelled like gunpowder and had blood under his nails. The past half hour had been stolen moments, but stolen moments were the only moments the casual couple got.

She thought idly about perhaps stripping down again and joining him in the shower. What was another fifteen minutes if she was in a stealing mood?

The push-talk application on her SME PED broke squelch and she heard Kurtzman’s gruff voice call out to her from across the Farm in the Annex.

“You on, Barb?” the leader of the cyberteam asked.

Price sighed and rose off the rumpled bed. She felt a pang at the missed opportunity but by the time she reached the phone the feeling was gone. With practiced self-discipline she slammed her shields down, brought her discipline up and become once again mission controller.

“Go ahead, Bear.”

“Barb, Carmen has pulled something out possibly relating to Seven. I think you should take a look.”

“Copy. I’m en route to your twenty now.”

“I’ll have the coffee ready.”

“Don’t threaten me, Bear.”

Price turned to look in the mirror over the dresser and pushed a stray strand of her blond hair behind an ear. Pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together. Whoever this Seven was, Price could tell she was starting to get their scent in her nose now.

It’s only a matter of time, she thought. She left the room, mind completely absorbed in the problem now.

Bolan would figure out something had come up easily enough.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“What did you find?” Price asked.

The Annex was a flurry of activity. Akira Tokaido’s desk area looked as if a bomb had gone off. Red Bull cans and Snickers candy bar wrappers lay cast around like spillover from a landfill. His fingers hammered his keyboards while the Smiths cranked out of the earbuds of his iPod.

“I found more cases of Seven,” Delahunt said. “Bear is setting up the display right now.”

Across the room Kurtzman was plugging a flash drive into a media presentation station connected to a large flat-screen monitor set on the wall. The screen saver showed the actor Mel Gibson in his costume from the Road Warrior.

“How recent?” Price asked.

“I found some interesting links to both our old MERGE and TRIO operations, but that’s old, though it does raise all sorts of questions.”

MERGE had been a criminal network consisting of elements from the Mexican mafia, Corsican crime families and Colombian cartels. TRIO had proved to be an Asian counterpart to MERGE, formed by Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian organizations.

“Seven was behind both those unifications?” Price sounded incredulous. “That kind of global influence is insane.”

“It’s not definitive,” Delahunt admitted. “But now that I know what to look for, I’m linking things together that have no business being connected. It’s like a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream.”

“Ready,” Kurtzman announced.

The women turned toward the display screen.

A line of bodies lay in sequence on a green tarp. The corpses were bullet riddled and all black male adults. Standing around them were five Caucasian men in desert camouflage stripped of rank and identification, all holding American weapons.

Price didn’t recognize the men but she saw one was holding a Stoner M-63 light machine gun. “SEALs?” she asked.

“Yep, DevGru,” Kurtzman replied, using the shorthand for the unit that had replaced the legendary SEAL Team 6. “In Somalia, last year. Tag-and-bag mission of al Qaeda in Africa. Major communication node and his team of bodyguards.”

“What am I looking for?”

“There,” Delahunt said. “On the one with gray hair, the leader. Bear, blow up his left clavicle.”

Kurtzman grunted and worked the control pad on his automated wheelchair. A mouse drew a box around the indicated area, then blew up the resolution. A series of stars about the size of a dime were tattooed in blue ink.

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