THE BIG FED’S THOUGHTS LOCKED ON THE INTERNATIONAL OUTRAGE

It was unthinkable that a rogue or supposed friendly nation was orbiting nuclear satellites, looking to butcher millions for an as yet unknown reason. Beyond the frightening facts, Hal Brognola knew ground zero in the Australian outback wouldn’t rate a footnote in history if a nuclear spear was plunged into a major city from above Earth’s atmosphere.

He drew a deep breath, let it out and said to the assembled team in the War Room, “The President green-lighted us to do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of what went down in Australia. The Man wants a rapid response, folks, no punches pulled, no mercy to the perpetrators. They go down hard and, if possible, their names and misdeeds are to be buried along with them. That’s the good news.

“Unfortunately, he also implied that because of the nature of the crisis, there’s a good chance our teams may well be locking horns with any number of operators. CIA. NSA. DOD. DIA. You name it.

“And on this one, it would be best if we kept our backs to the wall.”

Other titles in this series:

#22 SUNFLASH

#23 THE PERISHING GAME

#24 BIRD OF PREY

#25 SKYLANCE

#26 FLASHBACK

#27 ASIAN STORM

#28 BLOOD STAR

#29 EYE OF THE RUBY

#30 VIRTUAL PERIL

#31 NIGHT OF THE JAGUAR

#32 LAW OF LAST RESORT

#33 PUNITIVE MEASURES

#34 REPRISAL

#35 MESSAGE TO AMERICA

#36 STRANGLEHOLD

#37 TRIPLE STRIKE

#38 ENEMY WITHIN

#39 BREACH OF TRUST

#40 BETRAYAL

#41 SILENT INVADER

#42 EDGE OF NIGHT

#43 ZERO HOUR

#44 THIRST FOR POWER

#45 STAR VENTURE

#46 HOSTILE INSTINCT

#47 COMMAND FORCE

#48 CONFLICT IMPERATIVE

#49 DRAGON FIRE

#50 JUDGMENT IN BLOOD

#51 DOOMSDAY DIRECTIVE

#52 TACTICAL RESPONSE

#53 COUNTDOWN TO TERROR

#54 VECTOR THREE

#55 EXTREME MEASURES

#56 STATE OF AGGRESSION

#57 SKY KILLERS

#58 CONDITION HOSTILE

#59 PRELUDE TO WAR

#60 DEFENSIVE ACTION

#61 ROGUE STATE

#62 DEEP RAMPAGE

#63 FREEDOM WATCH

#64 ROOTS OF TERROR

#65 THE THIRD PROTOCOL

#66 AXIS OF CONFLICT

#67 ECHOES OF WAR

#68 OUTBREAK

#69 DAY OF DECISION

#70 RAMROD INTERCEPT

#71 TERMS OF CONTROL

#72 ROLLING THUNDER

#73 COLD OBJECTIVE

#74 THE CHAMELEON FACTOR

#75 SILENT ARSENAL

#76 GATHERING STORM

#77 FULL BLAST

#78 MAELSTROM

#79 PROMISE TO DEFEND

#80 DOOMSDAY CONQUEST

#81 SKY HAMMER

#82 VANISHING POINT

#83 DOOM PROPHECY

#84 SENSOR SWEEP

#85 HELL DAWN

#86 OCEANS OF FIRE

#87 EXTREME ARSENAL

Starfire

STONY MAN®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Don Pendleton

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

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Australia

Forty-three minutes and counting, and Chuck Boltmer knew they were cutting it close to the razor’s edge. He wasn’t even suited up and already he was sweating. If they stuck to training—both mock-up and virtual-reality dry runs—thirty-five minutes and a few more agonizing ticks alone would be devoured just getting set up, more, depending, of course, on the human factor. The low earth orbit satellite was already in position, and Boltmer knew if they were two shakes behind schedule Zenith One wasn’t about to hold up the show because the hired help was too slow on the draw from ground zero.

Man, oh, man, what kind of crazy life had he led, he wondered, that would lead him to the brink of suicide like this, and of his own free will?

He knew. A washed-out CIA special op once connected to the Cali Cartel, who loved money more than law and order and was hunted by his own people, broke and down on his luck didn’t get to choose which banquet table offered the choicest meat.

Not much more than a street beggar, as far as he was concerned, but those days were fast coming to an end, one way or another.

And in the face of a holocaust that would leave no doubt.

Boltmer killed the Jeep’s engine and lights, then stared through the dust- and bug-spattered windscreen. The pub and surrounding area had been chosen as a test site, he knew, and right from the beginning, when his handlers laid out mission parameters and particulars. Remoteness guaranteed limited immediate collateral damage. That, and the handlers figured nobody much cared about a bunch of ex-cons, ex-mercs and other assorted riffraff living off the radar screen, to be used as guinea pigs in what struck him as little more than a ghoul’s experiment.

The problem haunting Boltmer was grim knowledge acquired during training. Sure, this stretch of out-back fanning away in oceanic dimensions was humped with rocky hills and cut with gorges, all but deserted of human beings, and they were situated well beyond the immediate four- to five-mile incineration radius. Or so said the nameless European principals who had hired him out of obscurity and grinding poverty in Berlin, eighteen months back, but what now seemed another lifetime. What worried him at the moment was all the spinifex grassland, the eucalypt forest to the north and east, subtropical rain forest that would rise up when—if—they managed to extract for the decon site. In other words, the dry countryside was a living hot zone, with enough incendiary flashpoints…

“We will be fine. Show courage. Just remember, we are being paid five million dollars. Apiece.”

Boltmer looked over at the big, bullet-head buzz-cut man with black eyes cold and lifeless enough to sub-humanize him as part-reptile in human flesh.

He knew him only as Karlov. Boltmer was certain that wasn’t his real name, but judging the accent, sloping forehead and high cheekbones, he pegged him as East Euro-trash, maybe Serb or Bulgarian, likewise a gangster, since Karlov had all the greedy, malicious aura of a common street thug, more muscle and animal instinct than good sense. And what made him so confident anyway? he wondered. Did Karlov know something he didn’t?

As his partner marked their position on the GPS unit mounted to the dashboard, began punching in the series of cutout numbers on the secured sat phone, then fiddling with the scrambler, Boltmer wondered about his own seeming death wish. The madness he was about to participate in and come out the other side would find those hefty retirement funds plunked down into a numbered Swiss account—or all his hopes, dreams and fears—would be over.

Vaporized, in truth, in less time than it took to blink.

He tried to focus on the positive, such as living. The thermal-insulated, one-piece raid suit he wore was state-of-the-art, similar to the protection tiles that shielded space shuttles upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, only stronger. Same deal for the main protective suit, but with obvious and subtle variations. Compare 2900 degrees Fahrenheit those astronauts faced to an educated ballpark half-million hellish units he was maybe staring down, what with superheated pressure waves that would come roaring their way at supersonic speed, and both thermal pj’s and their black project robot shell better be next to as invincible as any divine armor of heavenly angels against evil.

“This is Vortex to Zenith One. We are at Blast Furnace and moving into position. Repeat…”

Bottom line, Boltmer figured it was all about the spacesuits and their advanced cutting-edge extras, as he heard Karlov confirm transmission. Forget the bush lab rats, the two of them were the real test subjects, once they suited up. He’d been blindfolded and driven from Berlin, he briefly recalled, to the underground complex for training when verbally signing on, he had never been told outright who he’d pledged allegiance to. But he knew enough about the European Space Agency to know it housed the European Space Operation Center in Darmstadt, Germany, and two and two still equaled four, even in the spook world’s black hole. Armed now with the latest in supertech armor for astronauts, he knew he was way past the point of hoping the spacesuit to be donned would hold up under heat about as extreme as the core of the sun. At the end of the day, he decided, the principals’ main objectives were none of his wonder.

Living to collect five million was his end game.

“Let’s do it, my friend,” Karlov said.

Boltmer malingered a moment before piling out the door behind his partner, another few seconds lagging before hauling the heavy corpse-size nylon bag out of the back of the Jeep. Hanging the full weight of what would either save or fry his war-grizzled bacon over his shoulder, he felt Karlov’s glacier eyes drilling into the side of his head, but ignored the man as he stared east. All the blood on his hands, all the insane schemes by his own machinations he’d lived through in his day than he actually had a right to keep on claiming air, and he was hardly lacking in the guts department. But this?

Pure Hell on Earth.

Oh, but the insanity of it all, no question.

And here he was, Boltmer glancing at the illuminated dial of his Breitling emergency transmitter watch, moving out to fall in behind Karlov. Forty minutes and ticking…

Then, willingly, they would become the first human beings to try to live in the face and fury of a nuclear explosion almost four times as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima.

CHAPTER ONE

New Mexico

“We have a problem.”

Radic Kytol didn’t want to hear about problems at this late stage, but he read the tight expression on Ludjac Muyol’s goateed face.

Natural paranoia constant, instinct tried and proved many times during his climb up the ranks in Belgrade to current post as top lieutenant in charge of the Balayko Family’s expansion goals, he felt compelled to give the broad vista of scrubland another search through the high-powered military field glasses. Scanning mesas and other outcrops ringing their temporary command post, he mouthed a curse. The sunbaked desert plain appeared one vast heat shimmer, thus creating the mirage that something was always moving, even when there was nothing there. Spooky, he decided, then considered where they were.

Roswell, New Mexico.

They were close to six hundred miles from their final destination east, and the advent of their own extraterrestrial encounter was moments away. It didn’t escape him for one second that their safehouse was within an area where wild rumors abounded for decades how alien spacecraft had crashed here, and that the United States Air Force had purportedly recovered the bodies of little gray men in 1947, engineering a subsequent secret cover-up about UFOs and extraterrestrial life that apparently wasn’t all that secret. That was, of course, if he chose to submit to the truth as the locals would have him believe when their two minivans passed through town, purchasing necessities there to continue their journey.

Briefly, he recalled the gift shop and diner, all the UFO paraphernalia, meant, he was sure, to further inflame and keep the fantastic alive. But, now that he thought about it, were they not aliens in their own right, invaders, no less? Ah, but considering the mission, they were poised to unleash an invasion of sorts, if not from another world, then just beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Spinning on his heel, he marched for Muyol, handing off the field glasses before plunging into the shadowy bowels of the three-man workstation. He found the computer brains hard at it, earning what was in his mind exorbitant fees, working laptop keyboards in a controlled frenzy. He sensed the tension, torqued up, higher than normal. The living room was barren except for the bank of five computers and the necessary modems that kept them online to their network of contacts, both overseas and in-country. Unfortunately, his knowledge of what they did was rudimentary at best, but he understood enough to know that Milo Serjac’s monitor shouldn’t be filled with pornography.

“What is that?” Kytol snapped, skidding to a halt behind the trio in their wheeled high-back leather thrones. He noted the constipated look flashing over Serjac’s face, as if he—a man who held the power of life and death in his hands—was little more than an irritating mosquito in the geek’s ear.

Fingers flying over his keyboard, Serjac declared over his shoulder, “It is a man and woman copulating.”

“You get sarcastic with me?” Kytol felt his face flush with hot anger. “I can see that! Why is it on your screen?” he demanded, but feared he knew the answer already.

“Three of our e-mail sites have been bombed,” Serjac said. “Melbourne, Tokyo and Barcelona, all compromised.”

“By whom?”

Serjac snorted, as if he’d been asked a stupid question. “It could be someone in Butte, Montana, for all I know. Or it could be NORAD or NASA.”

“And bombing our supposed secured e-mail with porn?”

“Perhaps a ruse while they attempt to trace us.”

“I thought that was impossible. To trace us, that is.”

“Nothing is impossible when it comes to computers and hacking into them. Especially when dealing with professionals.”

“I want answers, Serjac, not to stand here and suffer your infuriating condescension!”

Serjac moderated his tone. “There are something like twenty million skilled hackers around the world. There are over thirty thousand Web sites I know of that are set up for the express purpose of stealing information, especially classified information, since they are the most challenging, not to mention the most alluring and profitable. And those are just the amateurs. This would be a first in my experience. All transmissions were supposedly secured by a 128-bit encryption system—I will not burden you by telling you the near infinite number of quadrillion possibilities—but these were firewalls I personally built into our network. Suffice it to say this should not have happened.”

“But it has, you insufferable jackass! Change passwords! Create another firewall! Add a more secure antivirus program!”

“That is what I am in the process of doing. That, and trying to discover if other hot sites have been breached. Dear Comrade Kytol, what I am telling you is that whoever is doing this is good, maybe as good as we are. What you are seeing now is comparable to a chess game between masters, but one done in cyberspace.”

Kytol ordered Muyol to secure the perimeter, but add another man to help Vishdal watch the cameras, then he barked at Serjac, “NSA? CIA? DOD? Give me your best guess.”

Serjac shrugged as a happy face on a stick body and flashing the middle finger jumped onto his screen. “There it is again. London is now compromised. The last access code to put us online with Zenith was being transmitted when this popped on.”

“So, you did get the codes?”

Serjac ignored him, his grim stare locked on his monitor, fingers banging away as the happy-faced stickman mooned him. “This swine—taunt me, will you?”

“Stop playing games and answer me, or I will have your castrated balls sitting on that keyboard!”

Kytol, feeling his blood boil like hot lava in his veins, and who had little patience when it came to finessing a situation, computer or otherwise, wanted nothing more than to whip the .45 Glock from the shoulder rigging beneath his windbreaker and blow the machine into countless pieces all over the room. But the slightly built wiry man, he knew, had been an informal member of the notorious Crna Ruka. The Black Hand was responsible for hacking into the Kosovo Information Center in 1998, and from there it was a short cyberjump to break into NATO databases. For all the good it did, valuable intelligence was stolen from NATO right before the bombs began raining on Yugoslavia. He may not like these men, their superior attitudes, because he didn’t understand what they did or how they did it, but they were—in their parlance—super-cyberwarriors. They were the best at what they did, and at the moment he needed them more than the other way around. The days were gone, Kytol knew, when wars were won solely on brute force and overwhelming violence.

Serjac finally deemed him worthy of an answer as he waved at the screen in front of the Russian. “You can see for yourself.”

Kytol looked at the digital readout in the top corner of Anatoly Dyvshol’s split screen. Forty-two seconds and scrolling down. The Russian worked his keys with a renewed burst of energy, and the solar-winged silver ball enlarged after a flashing series of zoom-ins, the real observation LEO satellite, he knew, now monitoring its orbit. The satellite hung against the endless backdrop of outer space, and Kytol watched as a slender arm on the portside extended from the platform and locked into place, conical nose aimed at the blue planet.

Thirty seconds.

As the Russian began the final countdown at five, Kytol lost the smile. His eyes widened as a cone of fire burst from the rocket’s thrusters, instantly swallowed, it seemed, by infinite blackness.

“Three, two…”

It looked to Kytol like a giant silver spear.

“One…”

Then it was hurtling toward Earth, vanishing rapidly for the sea of clouds, a streaking javelin, but packed, Kytol knew, with fifty kilotons of fissionable devastation.

THE SKY WAS FALLING.

And it was all Boltmer could do to pry his eyes off the tumbling numbers on the watch engineered into the wrist of his spacesuit.

Less than a minute to impact.

Boltmer had never felt such pure cold terror. Trajectory, rate of descent, distance and potency of each ring to their observation-monitoring post all calculated—with supposedly no margin for error—it would blow, dead ahead, in their face. Grimly aware he would, in fact, be living just outside a nuclear fission blast—Boltmer could barely concentrate on the final chore.

Lumbering in his robotic-like cocoon, he stepped up and snapped the supersuction cups mounted on the base of the black-tinted diamond shield to the floor with his boot. The list of a hundred-and-one things that could go wrong wanted to scream through his mind. They were on the outer limits of what the principals called the third ring. Instruments to measure wind and radiation levels likewise sewn into the arms of their suits—supposedly impervious to shock waves—with cameras to film the initial blast and its effects shielded inside a classified crystallized carbon composite and meant to bear up under flying debris and searing heat, the winds at this distance would still hammer them at over 200 mph.

Blast. Heat. Radiation.

The three big ones.

The sudden flash jolted Boltmer, a cry of alarm trapped and echoing inside the reinforced bubble of his helmet. It was dazzling, then flared beyond brilliant, like a thousand suns rushing together for one infinite supernova, the burst of light piercing even both sets of protective covering enough he had to squint.

Time seemed suspended, all but immeasurable in this frozen eternity, as Boltmer stood, awed and terrified by the expanding cloud.

The gauges on his arm, he found, were shooting numbers so fast they blurred.

It was coming.

CHAPTER TWO

“What the hell was that?”

They were gasping, all but turned to stone, squinting at the blinding orange-white ball as it roiled across the floor-to-ceiling plasma relay monitor. Swelling until the cloud ran off the twenty-by-twenty-foot screen, the image jumped, then flickered with static as titanic shock waves reached out for the observation satellite. They were too stunned, too late to readjust the ob-sat’s altitude and pull it back from the nuke’s asteroid-like hammerblows. Gyroscopes, radar, radio, John Ellison knew, the whole computerized nerve center, in short, that could monitor and transmit the situation from those space eyes wiped out.

All systems go, however, from where he stood.

While the twelve-man, three-woman workforce launched into scientific babble all over Control Room Omega, scrambling from bay to bay to check monitors and digital readouts and bark questions into throat mikes, Ellison kept a straight face. Hanging back, he listened as the director demanded to know what in God’s name had just happened.

God, the NSA man knew, had nothing to do with it.

What they knew was that the suspicious unidentified low earth orbit satellite their Keyhole and NASA-affiliated observation and military satellites were tracking had just detonated in a measured read of fifty-kiloton self-immolation. The same explosive yield, to their mounting horror and panic, that had just blown a chunk of Western Queensland outback into radioactive dust from a rocket fired from the killer satellite.

Ellison stole another moment to watch their frenzied search for quick answers they weren’t about to find anywhere in their computer systems. Director Turner looked torn between the wall monitor’s leaping fuzz, firing questions at his scientists and the red phone mounted on his personal command desk in the far corner. NORAD, the Pentagon, the CIA, down to NASA and every American military and law-enforcement agency in the continental United States and abroad with access to satellites would know by now the United States, its allies, and the world at large was just thrust to the edge of Armageddon. Ellison knew the combined authority of all that clout was scrambling right then to reach the Joint Chiefs, the President, anybody on his staff with a secured cell or sat phone. Only they would flood the White House with SOS to be flung back into this black hole of unfathomable mystery and international menace, the likes of which no power on Earth had yet to face.

Ellison left them to their terror and confusion, looked up at the observation deck. Behind the thick-glass bubble stood his one and only superior. The man in charge was casually working on a cigar, looking down on the workforce like some king on a throne about to pass judgment on his subjects.

In truth, he just had.

Ellison made eye contact with the man known only to the others as Sir. It was quick, but Sir lifted a hand to the blind side of their commotion, long enough to shoot him a thumbs-up.

THE SKY WAS ON FIRE.

Or so it looked to Boltmer in his flying vortex.

Unless he’d been nailed to the hull of a battleship, he knew there was nothing he could now do but let himself get dragged, lifted, dropped and bounced across the ground. Human tumbleweed. The shimmering radioactive halo that fanned across the heavens was the least of his concerns. Round one was punishing enough, as he and Karlov had hurtled in tandem, sailing west. How far they’d been tossed he couldn’t say, but he was still breathing.

The only good news so far.

He soared, slammed to earth, then was sucked up, flying on. The raging sea of debris and dust jettisoned west was now being swept back in the furious clutches of the afterwinds. The world blurring along in the eye of this storm appeared little more than a streaking black whirlwind, all but blinding Boltmer to whatever else was being vacuumed beyond maybe a yard from his flight path.

Had he been inclined to pray…

The magnetic tug began losing steam, he sensed, as the violent slamming of limbs lessened by noticeable jarring degrees. Another fifty feet and he crash-landed, dragged like a tow line, another yard or so.

It was over.

He had survived. For the moment.

He breathed deep through the rubber mask over nose and mouth. Another intake of oxygen and he started to feel he might make it. Despite the Tempur lining in his suit—the special foam material, he knew, that was used to protect astronauts against G-force—Boltmer groaned as he felt the ache and throbbing nonetheless down his battered side, in his joints.

He clambered to his feet.

And found he was just in time to watch the final act. The mushroom cloud kept billowing out, angrier now, if that was possible. Glowing like the blazing maw of some gigantic incinerator—or the pit of Hell—it kept climbing, expanding yet more, rising on for what the principals told them would be its ceiling of five to six miles—or more—toward a sky that all but looked to burn.

Boltmer felt shaken to the core of his being.

He checked his temperature gauge, and froze, eyes bugged as he took a read.

Just over seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit, but dropping now. Then the numbers began falling hard, as they told him would happen, once the brute strength of blast furnace afterwinds sucked themselves back into the rising vortex. The temperature at their own gale-force impact and shortly thereafter was measured and recorded already on a minimodem.

Forget whatever the experiment’s goals, Boltmer’s grim concern became extraction. From there, they walked until their tanks redlined. If their contact was late, what with their ride out of the hot zone supposedly constructed with engine parts of classified alloys and which was also a self-contained oxygenated vehicle and decon chamber…

Boltmer was slowly turning when the hairs on his neck bristled. He caught the moaning as it filtered through his helmet, finally pivoted about-face, and gasped.

They came staggering out of the black pall. Boltmer choked down the bile squirting up his chest, cold fear and the unholy sight doing a tap dance on nerves taut as garrote wire.

They were nothing less than a vision of the damned.

What sounded like strangled cries or deep-throated moaning from the zombies grew louder, began pounding his helmet like invisible fists. Clear they were desperate to speak, probably shout, then Boltmer assumed their vocal cords, perhaps their tongues had been fried. They came twitching, convulsing, bridging the gap quick, and straight toward him, as if sensing another living presence.

He stared, paralyzed by horror. Their flesh had been microwaved in the searing winds, with black holes—but like glowing embers, it seemed—where the eyes were burned out, dark red streaks oozing down cheeks where skin was cooked off to the bone. Same for the scalp, hair and flesh gone to expose gleaming patches of skull. Boltmer couldn’t tell if they were clothed, if that was flesh or bone or both on down the black-and-red walking cadavers, then felt his senses boggled to another level of numbing repulsion. Nothing but mindless terror or the will to live should have kept them standing. Any oxygen—or most of it, he had to believe—had surely been incinerated out of the immediate vicinity, or turned into living fire, if nothing else.

They collapsed in a boneless heap.

He knew he needed to conserve oxygen, but Boltmer sucked deep from the main tank to calm his racing heart.

Granted, he was all about the money, but after what he had just witnessed, he had to wonder.

Up to ten miles they told him the flash could melt down retina, the initial blast shear away skin to the bone. How many more zombies were left wandering the countryside? he wondered, panning the firestorms, ten to two o’clock. Beyond this night, how many would die a slow, agonizing death from radiation sickness in the weeks, the years, to come? How many babies would be born with grotesque birth defects from mothers suffering from the invisible savaging of fallout?

He stared into the fire, which only seemed to grow more angry and intense in his frozen eternity. Was this but just a taste of Hell on Earth, a microcosm of Fate awaiting humankind? What kind of planet would survivors—the blind, burned and insane—inherit? All water contaminated, the air poisoned by fallout. The sun blotted out by a radioactive shield of dust that would reach around the globe. The only season, then, one winter of eternal subfreezing. No crops, since there would be no arable soil to grow food.

He jumped as Karlov passed by. His partner clambering on without so much as a glance at the dead, Boltmer followed, but moved as if he was in a trance. He wanted to focus on survival, five million bucks and his own dreams, but wondered if there was any future.

Or one that would be worth sticking around to see if the ultimate madness was unleashed.

CHAPTER THREE

Barbara Price didn’t need to read their faces. They knew the threat to their continued existence was grim. The sense of dread was so thick that it seemed to engulf her as she walked into the Computer Room.

But, to a man and woman, they were all seasoned professionals, she knew. They had a job to do, no matter what the odds, mystery or critical mass, and do it they would.

This time the attack was hitting them from cyberspace, which made it equally as lethal. Exposure of their ultracovert Sensitive Operations Group to the world at large would prove a legal catastrophe—possible imprisonment, fines and such—which, of course, would shut them down permanently. Tack on subsequent potential for toppling the White House, impeachment of the President all but guaranteed, and that by itself was no mere aftershock.

It was that bad.

Which meant they needed to go on the attack, and at all due light speed and martial and technical proficiency at their disposal. The problem right now, however, was in determining who was the enemy, where the enemy was hiding, and how to go on the offensive once the enemy was flushed out.

The slim honey-blond beauty stole a moment on the way to their cybercrews’ workstations to check the mounted digital wall clocks with major cities marked for each time zone. She noted the time differences on three current flashpoints, mentally juggling day and night disparities. As usual, Father Time was the invisible gathering storm for the cyberwizards here at the Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The same dire omen, she reflected, could be rolling dark thunderheads over both their field ops, and the entire planet when she considered the situation in Australia.

She was acutely aware that about ninety miles away in Washington, D.C., the best and the brightest of the most powerful country on the planet were scrambling for answers. Answering to only the President of the United States—who green-lighted each black ops for Stony Man and its warriors in the field—Price knew it was always best to let whatever political fallout land wherever it would, devour whoever it would.

Only this time the situation was so grave…

She stopped beside the head of the cyberteam. Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman acknowledged her presence with a dark glance over his shoulder. His spine had been shattered by a bullet during an attack on the Farm, and the big stocky computer genius was relegated to spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He lifted a hand to indicate he needed another few moments, then returned to tapping on his keyboard. A quick look down the line and Price found the main players were hard at it, working in grim silent frenzy. Carmen Delahunt, Huntington Wethers and Akira Tokaido looked like a troupe of master pianists as their fingers flew over keyboards. Satellite images, numerical data and grid maps of AIQs—areas in question—as well as shots with red laser lines around the globe marking satellite orbits, flashed over their monitors. The new crisis was being handled primarily by the team leader and Tokaido. That the Japanese cyberwarrior was without earbuds and MP3 player would have told Price by itself how fearsome the situation, how perilous the yawning black hole that was their immediate future.

What they knew was that an unknown killer satellite had dumped a nuclear missile on Australia from its low earth orbit, vaporizing a six-mile ring in a desolate tract of the Queensland outback, a fifty-kiloton wallop, as previously indicated by the Farm’s e-mail and database theft of NASA, DOD and CIA satellite reads of ground zero and contaminated vicinity beyond. The last she heard from her own intelligence sources was woefully limited, since no one knew anything of substance, but that was several hours ago.

That left Hal Brognola in her loop.

The high-ranking Justice Department official, who oversaw the Farm and was liaison to the Man, was off on his own intelligence-hunting expedition, and she silently urged a quick wrap on his end and an even quicker chopper ride back to the Farm. He had taken the three-man commando unit of Able Team along with him for a meet with an unnamed and unknown source he’d intimated to her would either prove highly informative or dangerous to his health.

Make that five crisis fronts, including their phantom attackers in cyberspace.

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, was off their radar screen at the moment as he pursued his own campaign in Sri Lanka. They could use all hands, but Phoenix Force had just hit Dagestan in a mission that required their one-hundred-percent iron-clad attention.

“Good news and bad news,” Kurtzman suddenly told the mission controller. “The good news is that I’ve scrubbed our hot e-mail dumps, installed another antivirus and antiworm program in our network. The bad news is that our servers were bombed—a brute force attack that means whoever was trying to track us has put together their own network over the Internet. My best guess is they’ve created their own supercomputer, with firewall encryption every bit as sophisticated as ours. For all I know, it could be one to a dozen or more hackers.”

“And you determined they had broken through our firewalls how?”

“They were either cocky,” Tokaido interjected, “or taunting us. They bombed servers we use in emergencies with porn that would make even the dirtiest scumbag blush.”

Kurtzman cleared his throat, frowning as he shot Tokaido an admonishing eye for embellished interruption. “Apparently, they’ve also been busy bombing e-mail from NASA to the CIA and God only knows whoever else.”

Tokaido flashed Price a tight grin. “But believe us, the triple-X shenanigans aside, they’re good.”

They had to be, Price thought. the Farm used encryption software programs that combined elaborate mathematics, symbols and letters that would have sent Einstein screaming into the night. Their crypto texts of substitution, transposition and fractionalization were well beyond the commonly used 56-bit encryption that had seventy-two quadrillion possibilities alone. Only the U.S. government, its military intelligence complex and banks were allowed to use anything above 56-bit encryption. Attempted sale of such encryption programs, home or abroad, was a federal crime.

“We’re attempting to backtrack,” Kurtzman told her. “But—”

“They can scrub and change handles and create new servers as you run them down.”

“I believe I can trace them, however. They’re using Old Testament figures as handles—Noah, Cain and Abel and so forth,” Tokaido said. “And sticking to the same names. It’s almost as if they’re daring us to find them.”

“So, find them,” Price said, and wondered why, if that was true, they seemed so willing to be tracked down and cornered, this invisible enemy being such crack cybercommandos.

Kurtzman’s frown was back. “Thing is, Barb, these are most likely civilians. We all know the Pentagon, the DOD, the Air Force and even the CIA have seen their e-mail busted into recently and with frightening ease and regularity. Very few people outside the elite intelligence loop know about that.”

“Yeah, embarrassment,” Tokaido added, “fear of admitting their own vulnerability. Job security, I imagine, since they don’t want public perception of our intelligence and military hierarchy as inept when it comes to guarding national security and its secrets.”

“And we hack into their databases all the time,” Kurtzman said.

“We’re not exactly up for congressional funding, Bear. What’s your point?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I understand full well the ramifications here. My point is, say we do find them. Statistically most hackers are about fourteen to twenty-five years old. Kids for the most part. Geniuses, without a doubt, but still kids.”

Price knew where Kurtzman was headed, but felt annoyed nonetheless that she had to spell it out. “I wasn’t planning on offering them a job here at the Farm, Bear.”

“But?”

“They’re a clear and present danger to our very existence. If information has been stolen from us, or if our location is pinned down and they think it’s cute and clever to announce to the world who we are, or they want to serve some mercenary agenda—blackmail for money—then we need to pay them a visit. Retrieve or destroy the information, and give them a stern and fair warning.”

Kurtzman nodded. “Give us another hour, give or take, and I can let you know something definite.”

“I’ll be in the War Room. I want a full package on each front in one hour.”

“Will do.”

Price left them to their individual tasks. As she headed toward the armored door, she felt her stomach roll over, her jaw tighten. There was no way to spin any positive angle on what they faced. Both the Farm and the world, she knew, had been shoved to the edge of the abyss by unknown enemies with equally unknown objectives. It was too often standard operating procedure to hurl themselves into the fire, armed with little more than questions and sordid hanging riddles, the sum total of which always put countless innocent lives on the scales of life and death. But stomping out flash-points before mass murder and anarchy could spread to consume entire countries and potentially send the entire world spiraling toward doomsday was what they did best. Only the present critical mass felt more sinister and threatening than at any previous time she could recall during her stint as mission controller. It appeared someone—or some nation—was sending a message they were armed with nukes and could drop them at will from space…

If humankind went the way of the dinosaur, then her worries Stony Man could be exposed by hackers wouldn’t matter in the least. All horrible truth be told, if the world went up in a thermonuclear holocaust, then likewise it would be as if the Farm never even existed.

End of game.

End of life on Earth.

Or so far as all of them now knew it.

Maryland

AS MUCH AS Carl Lyons hated ventures through spook snake pits, it struck him that, more often than not, he found himself doing just that. All the slick lies, intrigue and backstabbing, and those spooks who straddled the fence armed with personal agendas, could put any number of politicians on the grease to shame. Not to mention it seemed he was always creeping—or being led—to the doorstep of waiting Death.

Well, it wasn’t his place to grumble why, he knew. Just dig in, do it. Nicknamed “Ironman,” he was no marshmallow melting in the flames of adversity. And Hal Brognola had handed Able Team its standing orders.

A two-hour-plus jaunt from D.C., for starters, following a web of backcountry roads off the interstate as given to the big Fed by his Shadow Man, and they were guided in by the GPS in the Farm’s custom war van. They were here now in the wooded belly of Western Maryland, about thirty miles south of Gettysburg to be more exact. One of Lyons’s two teammates had disgorged alongside him into the dark unknown, right in front of the gate with its No Trespassing sign, two klicks and change out from the concrete bunker dug into the hillside where the shadow encounter would go down, and which Stony Man cyberburglars had been fortunate enough to steal a peek at from a passing satellite. Any threat, Brognola warned, wouldn’t be overt; it would come sudden and out of nowhere, if personal experience served him right. In other words, Lyons and company knew to trust no one, and to not, under any circumstances, allow the seeming absence of menace to lull them into dropping their guard. These particular wolves in sheep’s clothing, he knew—black ops who put themselves above the law and who would execute innocent civilians if it served their twisted ideal of protecting national security—often came bearing smiles and friendly assurances while waving a white flag.

The former Los Angeles detective and current leader of Able Team dropped to a crouch behind a pine tree for quick situation assessment. Given that they knew next to nothing about Brognola’s rendezvous with the unknown spook source, they were ready to go tactical at the first double signal transmitted over vibrating pagers fixed to their respective hips. Like Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, he was togged in a blacksuit and weighted down with a combat harness and slotted vest stuffed to the gills with grenades, spare clips, on down to a sheathed Ka-Bar fighting knife on his shin. In lieu of his Colt Python .357 Magnum, the Able Team leader’s new sidearm of choice was a .50-caliber Desert Eagle, with mounted laser sight. Its clip was filled with fifteen rounds of special “black rhino” hollowpoint pulverizers. Stony Man’s resident armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, swore he could now nearly shred Kevlar like foam. Schwarz, he knew, was sitting with the war van, watching thermal screens and monitoring parabolic sensors for any traffic, human or vehicular, while Blancanales was on the move in a perimeter sweep to his deep right flank.

All set, but for what?

Lyons scanned the forested slopes through night-vision goggles, the Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun with attached sound suppressor and laser sight rolling in unison with his visual surveillance. Lyons listened to the dead silence. No matter how hard it tried, no matter the level of skill earned by tough experience, no living creature could advance in total silence through any such terrain. And that went for Blancanales, too, despite the fact the man was a Vietnam vet who had been baptized in the blood-soaked jungles of Southeast Asia where there was nothing but armed ghosts who moved silent as the wind. There was brush, twigs, stones to contend with, uneven but hard-packed earth to avoid, that would yield to encroaching weight. The body gave off distinct odors, often through expelled breath. Say a stalking opponent was inclined to smoke, booze, meat, or a splash of yesterday’s after-shave, or just so happened to be sweating out any number of toxins…

And Lyons caught a whiff of cigarette residue as a sudden breeze rustled through the woods. As good fortune had it, he was downwind. The trouble under these circumstances was that he was up against professionals, bad habits or not. As such they would have night vision, EM scanners—

What the hell was that? Lyons wondered. The figure—if he could call it such—was nearly invisible despite his infrared radiation-enhanced eye. It was a specter of human form, but in blurry white outline, almost perfectly blended with the outcrop beyond a stand of trees. Was it standing or moving, and where did it come from so suddenly? He wasn’t even sure he was looking at a living creature, since there was no discernible light-wave read, then he saw a subgun that appeared all but suspended in the air. Instinct screamed at Lyons he was marked, dead to rights, whatever the apparition, and if he wasn’t witness to the Invisible Man, then that was a mounted battery-operated weapon.

And going for broke!

Lyons was dropping for maximum shield behind the fat base of a pine just as the white beam of a laser speared the ghost-murk of night vision and bark flayed his exposed cheek and jaw to the burping retort of muffled subgun.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Extinction Level Event. ELE, if you like.”

If he liked. Hell, Hal Brognola didn’t like any of it. Not the Shadow Man’s flare for the dramatic, nor his vague reasoning of shared interests in national security, certain these meets were also manufactured fishing expeditions. Brognola grew conscious of the Glock 17 stowed beneath his suit jacket, having already noted the hardware tucked at left bicep level under Shadow Man’s windbreaker.

“What do you know about the space alerting and defense system?”

He was no astronomy expert by any stretch, but he knew the basics enough to thwart Shadow Man if he was attempting to paint him an ignoramus. Even a small portion of knowledge wielded some power, Brognola thought. He took a few moments to consider his answer, measure the man.

They were nameless sources of intelligence he had used over the years. Sometimes the big Fed went to them, but usually they sought him out through a series of encrypted e-mails they had arranged. Whether to pick his brains or to attempt to confirm suspicions and rumors of the existence of Stony Man Farm, he met them at a mutually agreed-upon time and place. He always seemed to walk away, taking everything, giving nothing, but only insofar as he knew.

They came as the usual clone of buzz cut, dark clothing, chiseled but nondescript faces, a security force of normally two shooters on hand, as was the case now. One mountain of granite with earpiece, throat mike and HK-33 was posted outside the door, the other wraith, Brognola had likewise last seen, was waiting behind the wheel of the black GMC with government plates. There could be more hardmen, likewise snipers buried in the woods for all he knew. But he had come armed with more than foresight and a bad gut feeling. Since nearly being murdered in the past during one such encounter, Brognola had Able Team in tow, more than confident that they had him covered. If the Stony Man commando sensed the slightest threat, the pager on his hip would vibrate to abort, go tactical. Barring that, there was the handheld radio unit clipped to his belt, and Carl Lyons wasn’t one to speak softly when it hit the fan.

“SADS,” Brognola finally said, deciding he could play the Shadow Man’s acronym game. “They are Earth’s last insurance policy against NEOs, or near earth objects.” He cleared his throat into a long moment of stony silence. “If this is a history on the threat of comets and asteroids, I know about the mile-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona, about Tunguska in Siberia where something like fifteen to twenty miles of forest was leveled by a twenty-megaton blast. I know a one kilometer space rock is considered a ‘large impactor.’ I know about twenty or thirty billion tons of said space rock hurtling toward Earth and impacting at about ten kilometers a second is what science considers the threshold for an extinction level event, which, I think, would yield something in the area of one million million megatons of TNT. Oh yeah, and a two or three mile rock would create global catastrophe. Earthquakes, firestorms, tidal waves of hundred-foot or more walls if it hit water. Hurricane winds off any chart we now measure them by would ensue and hurl tens of billions of tons of dust and debris into the air. The sun would vanish. A new Ice Age would start.”

The Shadow Man snorted.

Brognola felt the guy’s penetrating stare, then, annoyed at whatever his act, glanced around the room. The only furniture was four chairs and the steel table at which Brognola sat, all of them bolted to the concrete floor. He suspected there was a cellar, as evidenced by a short, arrow-straight fissure midway across the room. It was barely noticeable to the naked eye, and he would have missed it altogether had it not been for the white light burning from the single bulb hanging over his head. The no-name op remained standing in the outer limits of light in the deep corner, as if deciding what and how much to say. Brognola was reaching for the black folder when a match flared.

The Shadow Man lit his cigarette, flipped the match away and said, “You can get to all that on your own time, Mr. Brognola. I’m here at considerable risk to my own life, which puts you in the same position. Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you, no matter how tedious you may think me getting to the point.” Shadow Man puffed, dug a hand into his pants’ pocket. “These SADS and their monitoring of ELEs are kept fairly secret from John Q. Public, other than a passing knowledge they may be out there. In our Milky Way there are two-thousand-some NEOs alone. Most are no larger than your average pebble. Whoever controls space just above Earth, Mr. Brognola, controls the planet. Whoever controls the knowledge of these ELEs alone, why, they can monitor and track them and decide—depending on their trajectory and size—whether to blast or let them pass on by. No warning to us mere mortals here below. Knowledge then being the perfect weapon, or the perfect judgment.”

“What’s any of this have to do with what happened…”

“Extinction level event, Mr. Brognola. The future belongs to those who can control an ELE. Act of God or man-made.”

“So, we watch for the rock that wiped the dinosaurs off the face of the Earth. Hey, you’ll have to excuse me if maybe I’m translating for you here, but we—the good guys, I’ll assume—need to be the only ones in the neighborhood controlling orbiting satellites with nuclear platforms, whether to blast an ELE into quadrillion golf balls or threaten another nuclear power with a preemptive strike from the stars.”

“I wouldn’t go on sounding so glib and dismissive.”

Brognola pulled out a cigar, stuck it on his lip. “My mistake. I assumed you were in a hurry.”

“If most of the human race, say, is destined to go out like the dinosaur, as you put it, then the question facing us, who have the knowledge and foresight, is what kind of world will Man inherit.”

“Or who will inherit.”

The Shadow Man paused, as if Brognola had crossed some line in the sand, then went on. “Because of the coming threat of the cataclysmic impactor, there are nuclear-armed satellites in space, but I’m sure you already know this. Yes, we can safely assume the propaganda will keep pumping it out how such weapons are outlawed. And if they are, by chance, made public knowledge, then they will be deemed defensive measures against the killer asteroid. Lies by omission, we call it. What happened, thus, in Australia, is a result of someone getting the edge on this technology. Our educated suspicion is that a black ops renegade faction of the European Space Agency decided to field test a new toy. But, worse, our side in the space race—that would be NASA who is monitored and provided security by the NSA, which is contracted out on behalf of the Department of Defense—has, as you know, been working for some time with our supposed European space friends to launch any number of shuttles. Mutual-shared space stations for research and development, and so forth. Nobody asks what’s really going on up there. Ignorance in this instance is bliss for the majority of common man. Beyond myself, however, only a few in our cloistered intelligence circles are aware that all this rainbow coalition reach for the stars is merely a mask to hide the demon.”

Brognola waited for the final grim point, but the Shadow Man fell silent. The big Fed waited him out.

“Washington will keep scrambling to conceal the truth about what we think happened in Australia,” the Shadow Man finally said.

“Which is?” Brognola prompted.

“This is where you might come in.”

“How come I got the lucky draw? And what makes you think—”

“It is called Galileo. It’s a classified NASA complex north of Dallas. They are fronting as a SADS, but the Galileo program is only part of a more sordid truth. One such truth is that behind the scenes they’re building RLVs—reusable launch vehicles.”

“Space shuttles.”

“Not quite.” The Shadow Man seemed to vanish behind a dragon’s spray of smoke. “The single key difference between a space shuttle and an RLV is that our current shuttles lose their external tank shortly after liftoff. The single-stage-to-orbit RLV, on the other hand, is fully reusable. Winged-configuration will give it fuel tanks…the long and the short is that it has the capacity to become the prototype space plane, requiring little more than ground maintenance, refueling, then it’s wheels up once more.”

Brognola clenched his jaw at the infuriating silence. “And?”

“Galileo has an RLV long since off the drawing board. We hear it’s about six months or so from its maiden voyage. And it’s platform is specced to house both a thermonuclear payload and particle laser weapons. But that’s not the real problem.”

WHEN LYONS FOUND he couldn’t clearly mark the shooter in thermal imaging, confusion threatened to freeze his hand. Every yard ever gained in enemy blood to battle the evil that men did, he thought, and he had never seen anything like this! A living ghost was bent on cutting him to ribbons!

Weapons fire strobed in his night vision as he bolted three or four feet, firing his subgun from the hip before he was chased to the broader span of the next available tree armor. The HK subgun it wielded was real enough, but since it was inanimate, meaning no heat generated beyond the muzzle-flash of igniting gases, the weapon was a fuzzy black object in Lyons’s night vision, and was considered a “cool area.” So if the thing appeared to move like a human being, darting now for its own shield behind the staggered row of trees, jumbled rock and thick scrub, why didn’t it give off a white-hot ghost hue that would betray it as living flesh? As far as Lyons could tell, there was little more than the haziest of white shimmer that wanted to frame it as human, like the thinnest chalk outlines of a body at a murder scene.

Lyons went low, flung his HK’s muzzle around the edge of a tree base and milked two 3-round bursts, hoping Blancanales was on the way, the thought tearing through his mind that his teammate hadn’t paged, but if he was…

The Able Team leader melted back for cover, bearing up under a fusillade of subgun fire as a tempest of bark sliced past his face. He was about to check his handheld thermal imager to determine how many warm bodies were within its thirty-yard proximity when another stuttering volley of weapons fire invaded the Invisible Man’s blistering salvo. The ex-L.A. detective was whipping around the opposite edge, HK up and tracking, when the specter came dancing and convulsing out from cover. Its subgun flaying wild bursts left to right, Lyons saw the white mists, the one or two long fingers jet like the slimmest of javelins into his thermal imaging.

Hot blood.

A little more hosing from 9 mm armor-piercing rounds eating it up, the Invisible Man toppled, crunching to a boneless heap. Lyons found ragged white holes up and down its torso, then fading to black as the corpse began to cool and the infrared radiation of its life force fled.

Lyons spotted the haze that was Blancanales, twelve yards north and closing, but checked his thermal imager. Nothing was on the small LCD monitor except his teammate’s read, but Lyons did a full 360 sweep to be on the safe side, moving out to link up with Blancanales. His teammate’s HK subgun parting the shadows as he advanced with all due caution, Blancanales checked the perimeter, the angry set to his features indicating he was a startled flinch away from unslinging the black-ferrite-painted Multi-Round Projectile Launcher off his shoulder. After what they’d both just seen, the Able Team leader wouldn’t fault Pol in the least if he started peppering the forest with 40 mm flesh-shredders.

Lyons toed the body. Close up now, the expression he found on his teammate’s face told him Blancanales had the exact same stunned reaction.

“It’s the pajama suit that turned him into a ghost,” Blancanales whispered, then backed away several yards to cover them both, weapon fanning the compass.

That was the only possible answer, as Lyons, one eye and ear on his surroundings, bent to touch the body. The material was some kind of soft fabric, silk maybe, or a silica fiber composite. It was woven in a pattern of scales, hard but flexible, overlapping but meshing together, if he was seeing right, and Lyons wasn’t sure what to believe after what he’d witnessed. The black-suit was molded skintight, from hood to customized boots, everything formfitting and blended into one piece except for the night-vision goggles. Had to be some kind of cutting-edge thermal insulation that trapped body heat, Lyons thought, freeing his Ka-Bar fighting knife. The possibilities, he knew, for gaining superior edge in night combat with such a suit were beyond frightening, the hairs on the back of his neck still bristling. There was webbing to Velcro spare clips and grenades, a sheath for a commando dagger—made of the same material—but as Lyons quickly patted down the body that was it. No radio, no ID. A vehicle, then. Where there was one invisible shooter…

Placing the subgun on the ground, Lyons dug the blade into a pant leg, sheared off a strip of material and shoved it down into a slot on his vest. Assuming they all survived the next hour or so and made it back to Wonderland, Brognola had a crack forensics unit at the Justice Department who could give the fabric a thorough exam. He was pretty sure it was pointless to fingerprint the corpse. Most black ops were functioning living ghosts in everyday society, buried so deep and off the books they certainly couldn’t risk a social security number. But he took out the inkpad and a slip of paper for just such an occasion anyway, sliced the fabric off one hand. A quick roll and press of dead fingers, and Lyons signaled Blancanales to head out in a due north vector. It was time to abort, and Lyons knew he didn’t need to explain the reasons why to Blancanales. What remained to be seen—or not seen—may prove lethal beyond all their combined reason and experience.

And waiting in the night, at the bunker.

SABOTAGE, SUBVERSION and sale of nuclear-platform satellites to the enemies of the Free World were bottom-lined into the Shadow Man’s parlay. Whether crafted to finagle Brognola and whoever the op suspected were the big Fed’s superiors, the moment suddenly felt all wrong to the Justice Man.

He gnawed on his stogie, perusing the black file despite the nameless op’s wishes he hold off. What he saw were standard sat pics and blueprints of the Galileo complex, and what the man informed him were shots of a classified ESA compound in Germany. A CDROM was tucked in a corner pouch, and Shadow Man relayed the password. As usual, these sources from what struck Brognola as a bottomless abyss of intrigue and treachery always said a lot but told him little. This time was no different. It was as if a jigsaw puzzle was being dumped in his lap and he was supposed to strain himself into a stroke fitting the pieces together. Factor, though, what he knew about the nuke blast in Australia, the suspect a killer satellite of unknown origins that had self-detonated, the panic now rocketing through the White House…

There was a mission here, no question, or at least a starting point, so it seemed. Brognola hated the feeling that a noose was being dangled over his head. No matter how the intel shook out, he decided this would be the last time he ventured outside his own circle for a face-to-face with spookland, unless, that was, they were an old and trusted acquaintance. He was pondering how many things could go wrong when his pager vibrated.

Brognola gathered up the file, maintained his composure as he set the cigar on the edge of the ashtray. He bobbed his head in rhythm to the man’s ongoing spiel about the necessity to hunt down any traitors in place or circling the fort of Galileo. Rising, Brognola whipped out his Glock.

The cigarette fell from the Shadow Man’s lips. “What the hell are you—”

“Get on the floor.” When he hesitated, the big Fed aimed the Glock at his knee and ordered, “Now. Or I’ll give you some help.”

Brognola heard the commotion out front. No weapons fire, but he caught coughing and yelling beyond the door. Able Team, he hoped, gassing the shadow guns. The custom-designed Little Bulldozer that Blancanales toted, he knew, had a few armor-piercing impact rounds for the twelve tubes, packed with potent tranquilizer gas. No matter how thick the bulletproof glass on the spook ride, the driver should be down for the count if Pol slammed a 40 mm sleeper home in the GMC. Which left open the grim possibility of hidden shooters in the wooded slopes.

The op stretched out on his stomach. Brognola relieved the Shadow Man of his Beretta M-9. He slipped it inside his waistband, then heard Lyons patching through, the Able Team leader’s voice steely but urgent. Satisfied the man was disarmed, Brognola grabbed his handheld radio. “I’m here.”

“We’re bailing. Your two shadows out front are down, but we may have a problem, I’m not sure.”

That didn’t sound to Brognola like the take-charge Ironman he knew. “Explain.”

“I’ll explain when we evac. You’re covered. Mr. S will be waiting at the front door.”

“Roger.”

“I caught that. Brognola, listen to me. I didn’t come here to set you up. I’ve been straight with you. We’re on the same team. We want the same thing. There are people I need to flush out, ops I fear who are on the take and ready to pull the plug on Galileo. But I can’t do it myself. I’m too close to it, and they’ll know. I told you already, my life is in danger, so is yours. Especially after what I just gave you.”

Brognola didn’t answer as he backpedaled for the armored door.

“Brognola! If you just took out my two men—”

“Not the way you think. The only pain they’ll feel is when they wake up with a hangover that will have them screaming for a detox bed. And don’t call me, I’ll call you.” The man was still pleading his case as Brognola tried the steel handle, afraid it was locked. It wasn’t.

Two men, Brognola thought, that’s what the spook said, as he stepped outside, Glock fanning the Stygian gloom, right and left. Say he told the truth, then who was forcing Lyons to make the call to abort?

The war van, lights out, was already waiting, the side door open, Schwarz at the wheel and confirming a message over his com link. A quick march past the outstretched shadow by the front door, the air still tainted with the after-bite of chemicals, and Brognola was up and in the high-tech belly. A second later, Lyons was bounding in on his heels.

“Go!” Lyons barked at Schwarz.

Brognola landed in one of the seats bolted to the floor. He held on as Schwarz threw the wheel hard left, then whipped the van around, engine snarling as the Stony Man warrior straightened. Lyons looked strange, frightened, if Brognola didn’t know better. The white-hot tension thickened yet more as Lyons, crouched in the door, watched the passing wooded hills, HK roving and ready. The Able Team leader growled for Schwarz to slow down as Lyons reached out and helped haul Blancanales aboard.

“What the hell is going on?” Brognola demanded as Lyons slammed the door shut and Blancanales plopped down in front of a console. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say something or someone put the fear of God in the both of you.”

Blancanales began working the GPS monitor with its grid map of the area, feeding Schwarz new directions other than the front gate they’d come through originally.

Lyons slumped into a chair beside Blancanales. Brognola could almost smell the adrenaline oozing from the Able Team leader’s sweat as he tugged a swatch of shredded material from his combat vest, held it out and said, “Something did.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“Listen up like you have never listened to anyone in your short miserable lives. Because of this compulsion of yours to prove yourselves divine in comparison to the cybermight of the United States military intelligence industrial complex, we are now officially, young sirs, hot-wired. More to the point, I hope you know what, precisely, that means.”

His name was David Rosenberg, but in the cyber-world and to his superhacker comrades in the Force of Truth he was known as Methuselah, and if they were listening, he believed only the Almighty would be able to tell.

He took a few moments in hopes the coming Wrath of God intonations would sink in, as he stood, arms akimbo, in the narrow alcove to the living room of their double-wide mobile home. A former encryption master for the Department of Defense, Rosenberg understood the dilemma staring them all down, as he began to sense they knew they had crossed a line in the sand. Experience, he believed, counted light-years more than raw genius at the moment, a point he needed to hammer home, but subtly, through their thick craniums and Einstein IQs. He scowled and held the command look, nothing less than a father about to sound off with a barrage of much-deserved angry admonishment at rebellious sons. One by one, they finally decided to look away from their laptops, their network of modems and multiple processors. They looked uncertain whether to act sufficiently rebuked or turn smart-ass. He bet on the latter.

Down the line they were Noah, Job, and Cain and Abel who were, in fact, the brothers Polansky. The skinny youth in the dark shades, working on a fat joint, with stringy hair down to his waist and all of eighteen was tagged the Kid. They were a motley crew, no doubt about it, but no one he knew of could match them when it came to computers and stealing information from cyberspace. He had personally tracked down three of them when they were hot, hauled their ragged bacon out of the frying pan, and maybe from worse than a stint in prison. The trio in question—Cain, Abel and Job—had hacked into classified government databases a few years back. They had stolen secrets they claimed to this day were irrefutable evidence of UFOs and extraterrestrials and a government cover-up, on through to who was behind both Kennedy assassinations to the coming extinction level event. Then thrown opposition networks into meltdown with the all-fearsome worm, a feat so incredible and embarrassing to two famous alphabet-soup agencies that not even a whisper of the crisis made the news. Both virus and worm writers, he knew, faced four years in the federal pen and up to half a million dollars in fines, which naturally no hacker ever caught with his fingers up the other’s guy mainframe ever seemed to have handy. Only in their cases Rosenberg suspected they would have been executed on the spot. That was, if he hadn’t descended on their doorsteps like manna from Heaven to offer them a job—of sorts—that matched their peculiar but undeniable genius. Saving their lives was an added bonus, his gift to them but one they had never once acknowledged. Genius could also be ungrateful to the extreme.

Cain, whose Aloha shirt was brighter than the sun at noon, took a sip from whiskey-spiked coffee. “What’s the beef, Grandpa? It’s just another day in Cyber Paradise, us ‘young sirs’ merely doing what we signed on for.”

The smart-ass route, then.

Methuselah had the sudden urge for a cold beer if only to clamp a lid on his rising anger. Instead, he torched a foot-long Havana cigar with a gold-plated lighter engraved with the Star of David. Blowing smoke, he stared at Johnny Polansky, bobbed his gray head. The twenty-six-year-old high school dropout had just come off seven years for manslaughter for stabbing a guy in a bar fight that left him half dead in the process and for which the jury had cut him some years. Going to court with wired-jaw, mashed nose and half of one ear sliced off had also helped pluck a few heartstrings, not to mention the dead man was a notorious three-time loser and suspected pedophile no one in all of Little Rock, Arkansas, would have missed anyway. Having sworn off cocaine, whiskey was the new magic potion the elder Polansky claimed helped him dig deeper into his black hole of creativity. The sad truth was, all of them had their demons. Even Job—what with his computer printout of God First, Fellow Man Second, Cyberspace Third in bold black letters around a crucifix and tacked over his laptop—was a heavy boozer. What could he do? It was most likely warped reasoning on his part, but Rosenberg reckoned he granted them indulgence in the Devil they knew best, if only to keep them steady and walking their highwire act on the tightrope between madness and genius.

With rare exceptions, human beings, he knew, created their own comfort zones, clung like infants to whatever the vice or ill behavior, and God forbid someone should attempt to invade the personal barrier. With this bunch, he figured talent and the extraordinary risks they took to uncover various truths of the ages—but splash them all over their AlphaDataSystems.com—had earned them some slack.

“Despite your best efforts,” Rosenberg began anew, “to ghost your trails, I have just learned we have more than piqued the curiosity of the No Such Agency.”

Noah swiveled in his leather wingback. The chair was splashed with colored artwork from predatory animals, UFOs, ETs, to tacked-in pics of his favorite film and song queens. “Then we were right. What did I say? If that’s a farm in the Shenandoah Valley, then I’m your grandson and I’ll go build you an ark right now.”

“First and foremost, ‘right’ has nothing to do with it. And second and last, an ark won’t cut it. If what I hear is true—and I have no reason to believe other-wise—then we’ll need that Mothership you whiz kids are always ranting about to drop down and take us all away—about a thousand light-years into deep space.”

Job piped up. “What are you talking about, oh gray-haired sir? No Such Agency is moving on us? We’re civilians, not some gun-packing black ops who are out to sell classified intelligence.”

“Besides,” Cain said, “you’ve seen the sat photos, all the thermal imaging from midnight passovers by Big Brother in space. You’ve read the e-mail that lays out whoever these people masquerading as apple pickers use as hot sites for emergency contacts. Interpol. FBI. Mossad is even in their black bag of vipers. Then we have CIA station chiefs in various embassies from London to Tokyo who are feeding them sitreps through about a dozen back channels we’ve discovered.”

“So bring on the spooks.” Abel—Jimmy Polansky—joined in, grinning like a fool as he lit an unfiltered Camel cigarette. “What we have on them, I say we can use as blackmail leverage to keep the wolves at bay.”

“Yeah,” Cain said. “We’ll threaten to go public. I always wanted to be on one of those talking-head shows.”

“Armchair expert,” Noah chortled, holding up the peace sign. “‘Let me make this perfectly clear—I know who shot JFK and why.’”

Rosenberg washed a smoke wave in their faces. “Yuk, yuk. Okay, geniuses, so how are you going to go public if you’re all dead?”

That gave them pause.

“Now that I see I have your attention, do you guys have any idea what we’ve stumbled on to?” Rosenberg pressed. “Have you thought this through? Do you realize the impact of what we suspect we’ve learned these past three days—and I’m talking beyond the borders of our own country?”

“You’re talking about the fifty-kiloton impactor in Australia?” Job asked. “And who we think is behind it?”

“We’re just a bunch of geeks,” the Kid chimed in, then sucked another huge pull from his doobie, coughing as he choked down the pungent smoke, cheeks ballooning out like a puff adder. “We’re American citizens performing a public service.” He hacked the words out between toxic palls. “The Force of Truth. People knew about us, we’d be national heroes.”

“Yeah,” Cain said, “and I wouldn’t have to just daydream about my favorite pop star. She’d be banging down the front door to know me. And I’m definitely talking ‘know’ in the biblical sense.”

They started snickering, shaking their heads, the Kid and Cain back to their keyboards.

Comedians. Clueless.

Rosenberg then looked at the one table with its bank of monitors they always seemed to neglect. From across the room he could tell nothing was moving—or at least nothing he was aware of. Their laser webs, motion sensors and cameras were hidden as part of the wooded scenery in this neck of the Hampton Roads Peninsula. They were at the far edge of the trailer park, isolated, their closest neighbor about a quarter mile down the dirt track. But he knew the kind of gizmos ghost ops had at their disposal. Such as cutting edge EM scanners and laser burners a decade or more ahead of their time and which only a handful of people knew existed.

The spooks in question were the Mothership.

“Listen up,” Rosenberg snapped, then moved to the living-room window. There, as he felt their stares boring into the back of his head, he pulled the curtain two inches aside. As a last resort, they kept two Rottweilers in the chain-linked cage, hidden to the deep front end of their parked vehicles. From inside the trailer Rosenberg could release the gate by radio remote, and Ramses and Apollo would make a meal out of any—

He caught himself. They would chomp down on any “normal” intruder, that was.

“Chill out, old man,” Cain said. “Have a few brew-skis.”

“I want everything you have on hard drive burned to CD,” he told them, and ran a hard look down the line.

Abel looked aghast. “Everything? Does that include our SETI—”

“Everything means everything, pipsqueak. Now. I want three copies and however many originals. Shag your smart asses into high gear,” he barked.

As they grumbled and shrugged themselves out of neutral, Rosenberg knew it was time to start hedging his bets. He couldn’t expect any of them to understand the dire urgency of the situation. With the exception of Abel, violent death had never touched their lives, other than the usual horror stories about broken family life, divorce, alcoholism, child abuse and the ugly like. But he had stared down the barrel of a gun, seen men die for secrets he kept in his head. As good fortune had it, he was still alive to correct that mistake.

He heard them clacking away on their keyboards, but as he went to the steel cabinet, he could feel them going still, looking his way. The cabinet was off limits, and they knew it. The penalty for attempting to crack the code on the keypad was instant expulsion from the Force of Truth. They would be sent packing, shamed before their peers for not honoring the one ultimate request they had pledged a verbal solemn oath to. In their minds, to break their word on that was the military equivalent of death before dishonor.

Rosenberg keyed open the lockbox, switched on the battery-powered keypad and punched in the long series of numbers committed to steely memory. He felt the sudden burning curiosity of his hackers grow into a living force all by itself. None of them knew—and had been warned to not even ask—what was in the cabinet.

The stainless-steel Glock .45, already snugged in shoulder rigging, came out from the arsenal first. He checked the clip, slapped it home, chambered a live one, strapped in. The Uzi submachine gun was hauled out next. Rosenberg was in the process of cocking and locking when he read the stark fear etched on their faces, and said, “Oh…Now you get it.”

SINCE LANDING in Turkey to hammer out the present mission parameters, David McCarter believed all along his hunch would either pan out into a mother lode of intelligence and strike a massive blow against global terrorism, or get them all killed.

So, what was new?

A bloody damn lot, the leader of Phoenix Force decided. The relative warm comfort of the special ops base in Kurd country of east Turkey now seemed another lifetime as he scurried for the narrow fissure at the north edge of the rocky shelf, gathering a buzzard’s eye view of the hardsite on the fly. His gut instinct quickly amended end game suspicions, and locked him in with laser-guided precision to the grim immediate future.

They were knocking on Hell’s door.

A dark truth, no less, was about to be revealed, unless, that was, he missed his guess and the combined wisdom of the CIA, the Justice Department on through to Mossad, Interpol, the Russian SVR and GRU proved nothing more than toxic smoke and shattered mirrors. The way it looked to be shaping up, as he took in the compound’s sprawl and number of wandering shooters, there were light-years to go before they bagged any human pythons bent on squeezing the life out of the innocent.

A long way, indeed, before they grabbed the prized trophies. And payback, though it would consume the savages here in fire the likes of which they’d never dared dream in their unholiest nightmare, was on temporary hold.

All indications from assorted spookwork, anywhere from fifty to a hundred or more obstacles stood as barriers to the gates of evil knowledge. The opposition here was heavily armed, well paid by the local Lezgi Mafia chieftain and his Chechen contacts. To a rabid brute they would in all likelihood prove loyal to a fierce fault, determined to win by bloody milestones or go down with their own Titanic when the hull had a massive hole punched through it by five black-suited commandos who had come loaded for wolf and bear in predatory human skin. Long odds, no matter how it was blasted, and there would be no winged death from above, which only served to add yet more tension to prebattle jitters over this huge roll of the dice. Beyond the soon-to-be crater in a time and place few sane men had ever heard about and fewer still dare to tread, he knew the daunting shadow of the Russian military and its vaunted special security forces known as Omon were lurking in the vicinity.

First strokes first.

Dropping into the tight little bowl and bringing the HK-33 assault rifle with custom-made 50 mm grenade launcher fixed to the barrel, the ex-SAS commando grabbed a few moments to scan, assess, review. The worst was on the way, make no mistake, he knew, but it felt good nonetheless to stop, breathe and suck down a mouthful of cold water from his canteen.

Review. It seemed to take forever and a day to get it in gear to go wheels-up in the C-130. Part of the problem was verifying intel, double- and triple-checking everything from terrain to enemy players to their own escape hatch, which was flimsy to the point of embracing suicide. But, upon further input from the Farm, McCarter made the call to go when he factored in what he knew, and considered what couldn’t be confirmed without the up-close and personal touch of eyeball kills. Cloud cover was the normal maddening order of the day for this unholy eyesore of the world, but there had been enough break in the ceiling twelve hours ago where the CIA ops at their disposal had managed a thorough sat read of the area and handed if off.

Scan. By night the countryside was bleak and gruesome enough to behold as Phoenix Force moved in on foot following their seven-hundred-foot combat jump and subsequent two-mile hike. Not to mention that wandering around this neck of Hell was so dangerous to a foreigner’s health that any passports and visas—had they been issued—were as welcome a sight for inspection as a leper’s used tissue. By dawn’s early light, the Briton now found the lay of the land downright foreboding and desolate, and to the point where the five of them might as well be advancing for battle at an end of the world all but forgotten by man and God. That, he knew, wasn’t far from the truth as he considered just where they were.

Dagestan.

Land of the mountains, McCarter thought, which was the literal translation used by its indigenous mixed bag of ethnic descent.

The indigenous bulk were Sunni Muslims, most of whom were fanatical to the extreme as they bowed to the tenets of Wahhabism. The country was no less than a slice of Islamic fundamentalist Hell on Earth, a land that time and most of humankind ignored, if they even knew it existed. Even globe-trotting, battle-hardened commandos like the troops he led, he thought, would be hard-pressed to find this desolate backwater on any globe without some eye strain.

At their present position in the shadow of the towering, snow-capped, cloud-swathed Caucasus Mountains in the southwest corner of the country, what could have been transplanted moonscape fanned out in hills and steppe to the even more ominous empty east and north, until it all eventually dropped off into the vast Caspian Sea. Oil and gas were the country’s cash cows, and were the only reason Moscow still humped and bivouacked soldiers to what was loosely billed an autonomous Russian republic. It was no secret that Moscow, McCarter briefly pondered, maintained its iron grip on the spigots of major pipelines to keep pumping black gold and silver vapor north, but the Russians somehow managed to hide from the world that they were about as environmentally conscious as Godzilla stomping through Tokyo. Dagestan was an industrial dungheap, with major ecological contamination.

But tree-hugging was not on Phoenix Force’s to-do list, though chemical death, McCarter knew, was one reason they were plunging into an area of the world where its people would just as soon shoot them as look at them.

When he considered a tad more what this part of the world was all about, the Briton really wasn’t surprised in the least the fickle hand of black ops had steered them here. In some eerie way he figured it was about time for some scorched justice to find Dagestan’s local and imported beasts. Neighboring Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan were always spilling their own legions of rabid terror wolves across the borders. Guns, drugs, weapons of mass destruction, he weighed. Isolated training camps in this scarred mountain land were hidden from even the most stubborn of spy eyes in space. Money and matériel were shipped here en masse to be trained to carry out jihad.

Assess. McCarter raised the small high-powered field glasses to his eyes again. The farmhouse was backed up near a jumbled row of Stegosaurus-armor-like rock at the foot of broken hills that looked equally in part Jurassic. Nobody, including their own in-country Omon and SVR contacts, could swear one way or the other if the opposition could make fast tracks into a suspected latticework of caves and tunnels once the shelling and shooting started. There were three tractors east, parked near wilting apple orchards, pallets heaped with crates and burlap sacks he was reasonably sure didn’t require the presence of two heavy DShK machine guns in tow. The main compound, its roof dotted with satellite dishes, was a two-story wooden affair. An attached concrete bunker, an annex to the north where the motor pool drew his eye. There, an armada of vehicles, ranged from Mercedes and ZIL limos, Jeeps, SUVs, Volga minivans and GAZ-66 transports, strewed in a staggered line, west to east. According to the Omon source—and there was a good chance he was buried in the deep pockets of the Lezgi Don—the annex was where the crime boss mixed business with pleasure. Intel had it there were always twenty to thirty imported prostitutes on hand for any visiting VIPs, speaking of which no one could state for certain who or how many big shots would be on hand for this party. Surveillance, or so he was told, was pretty much maintained by roving sentries, with the exception of cameras mounted to roof edges.

Arrogant bastards.

McCarter panned a little farther north and took in ground zero.

He counted twenty-one tankers, flipped an invisible salute that bit of intel hit the bull’s-eye on that score. Judging length and girth of those behemoths on wheels the Phoenix Force leader ballparked all that refined petro at…

Call it a quarter-million gallons. And however that number was given or taken, it still dumped the five of them on the potential wrong side of the coming big event.

The truck stop was penned in by basic steel-mesh fencing, for reasons no one was clear on. A spray can of liquid nitrogen would snap off fencing, he knew, and allow two of the team onto the grounds. But with seven—count nine now—assault-rifle-toting guards on the prowl it was touch and go just to light the torch. McCarter framed the sentry in the northwest tower, then saw the smoke cloud hammer the glass booth. The guard then lifted a bottle to his lips, McCarter wanting to scratch him off the worry list, but in his experience there was no such thing as a guarantee in combat. That left three shirkers on the backside, the trio, he’d been informed, apparently more interested in staying warm with a bottle of vodka and hovering near a fire barrel.

And what, pray tell, did all the big shots gathered in front of them need to fear anyway?

Nothing, apparently—or so it seemed.

Truth. A shadow group of Euro-Arab cutouts had finagled deals between Saddam and certain bureaucrats of the United Nations. And McCarter had learned during a CIA brief that a lot of cold, hard currency had been flown via Damascus to Jordan and shipped by diplomatic courier to Western Europe.

McCarter recalled the black op back in Turkey stating the facts of life as he knew them between rumbles of chuckling and obscenity-laden swipes at the French, Germans and Russians. Clear evidence, the op had claimed, had been obtained by electronic intercepts. Enemy agents bagged by the FBI in Manhattan had snitched so loud and fast they had nearly gone hoarse, painting a picture of corruption reeking from New York to Pyongyang. For reasons unknown some marquee names of the upper echelon of the United Nations had fattened Saddam’s terror chest way back when. And with not only food but weapons, intelligence and oversize vans stuffed with cash, using East European gangsters for contact. Yet more shadows, McCarter suspected, in a chain of middlemen that only God seemed to know stretched how far and stopped where. The UN jackals would apparently turn around and deliver Iraqi oil to cronies in their own political and business circles who fronted for petrochemical distribution networks. All this rolling flimflam while Saddam hoarded food meant for the starving masses, but to be distributed and sold to whomever he saw fit. Word was the deposed dictator’s soldiers—and later, the insurgent rabble—managed to feed themselves like princes.

On more than a few occasions—so the CIA word had it—a second deal was cut by the former regime with another rogue nation in exchange for still more cash and weapons. Yet more rumor connected to the sordid mess had it the Scotch-swilling despot of North Korea and mates were eating pretty good these days, and that alone was enough to have him seeing red what with the tyrannical buffoon in possession of…

McCarter fast-forwarded. Four Iraqis, smoked out by the CIA in Paris, Belgrade and Istanbul as recently as six months previous, were trailed to the Dagestan border before the operatives bailed for reasons undetermined. Here and now, the United Nations money-men believed on-site felt the heat building, so they had thrown themselves at the mercy of the Lezgi Mob chieftain who had more irons in the fire than the Devil himself it seemed. Finally, Dagestani Don who had free and easy access to move tanker trucks brimmed with gasoline at will told the ex-SAS commando that he was connected to Russian power shadows, and he had more suspicions beyond the UN moneymen on that front. Oh, but McCarter hoped all party animals in question had indulged one last night but good…

He stopped the train of angry thought.

Their mission was two-or-more-pronged, as he warned himself to not project into a future he and the others may never see.

Consequences. Blood was going to run, thick, swift and deep before the sun rose. As he felt the gas mask on his hip, it crossed his mind there was the not-so-little matter of what recently happened in Israel, and yet another savage twist of fate that had urged the five of them to trek to this godforsaken place. VX nerve gas wasn’t something any of them tended to gloss over as just a speed bump on the road to Hell. Assuming a cache of weapons of mass destruction was likewise under the roof…

McCarter heard the first voice patch through as T. J. Hawkins told him he was in position.

Showtime.

A hard sweeping scan and McCarter barely spotted the ex-Ranger. With a double take, he caught the top of Hawkins’s black-hooded head rising from his sniper’s roost, a few dozen meters or so above and due east of the tanker armada, his sound-suppressed Dragunov rifle poised to cover their two-man demo team. Down the line, Rafael Encizo, Gary Manning and Calvin James quickly informed him they were also in position.

Good to go.

Or so it seemed.

McCarter passed the order for James and Manning to get busy planting their ordnance.

A big bang, the ex-SAS commando knew, was in the wings, nothing short of scorched earth about to bring down the roof.

With any blessing whatsoever due them from the gods of black ops, and McCarter figured to live long enough to see the fall of the place of evil in this corner of Hell.

COMPLAINING ABOUT THE MOST adverse conditions of a mission never cut it. In the experience of his line of work, Calvin James knew that moaners and complainers weren’t only unreliable under fire, but they were often the first to get cut down in combat. The M and C crowd—of which there were none on his team, and none except for a couple officer types he could recall during his stint as a United States Navy SEAL who were mostly interested in bucking for promotion while the real deal did the fighting and killing for them—floated a mere notch above yellow.

His case in point was made when the two Dag sentries came whining his way.

The black ex-SEAL was through the hole at the base of the fence, liquid nitro spray gun dumped behind on the ground and replaced by the suppressed Beretta 92-F, when they shuffled into view. James didn’t know the language, but he could sure read faces and judge bitter tones for what they were. One of them forgot all about his AKM, the muzzle pointing at the ground, as he began jabbing a gloved mitt at the bottle of vodka his comrade didn’t seem inclined to share. The bickering decibels rose as the guard gestured angrily at the sky, waved at the line of tanker trucks with a dark scowl on his bearded face, his companion stamping his boot and fuming like a waiter stiffed on a big check. Whether the ongoing gripe was over the cold, boredom with sentry duty or who polished off the rest of the vodka, James didn’t know.

But he damn sure cared, since they were in the way of progress.

With a rock-steady, two-fisted grip on his weapon, he ended the argument with two quick taps, as hypersonic 9 mm Parabellum rounds cored their brains.

Two down, and James had a gut feeling it was set to go to Hell. He scanned, left to right, adrenaline practically carrying him to the bodies, despite fifty pounds of plastique added to his combat load. Quickly, he rolled the bodies under the silver beast’s tail, ears and eyes tuned to the no-man’s land between the fence line and the tankers.

He knew more sentries were in the area. In fact, combat senses shouted they were close. Manning was nowhere to be found, but James took that as a good sign the big Canadian was already making swift tracks.

The tankers were parked, nose-to-tail, in two rows with feet to spare, the odd rig out toward his teammate’s advance from the south. Maybe fifty meters needed to be covered before he met Manning in the middle, and both knew there was no set time to plant and prime the charges, but sooner the better.

James hauled the first shaped charge from his open nylon satchel, stuck it under the back wheel well, speared the priming rod in the middle of the package. It struck him next, checking his six before moving on, that McCarter was holding on to the extra radio remote unit. Backup hellbox, sure, just in case…

THE DRAWING BOARD and spit-balling of finer points for attack strategies always looked and sounded good, like it would all actually work according to plan. The reality, T. J. Hawkins knew, equaled the difference between life and death.

Sat images, HUMINT, EM scanners and thermal imaging handhelds and night vision to paint walking infrared radiation of the enemy on the way in was all well and good, and, in truth, solid planning was a must. Those Tomahawk salvos, the F-117 and Spectre strafes were a definite bonus package to soften up the target and shatter the enemy into a senseless slab of jelly, assuming anybody on the other team was still in one piece to cry the blues. All that and a bag of chips, he thought, but at the end of the smoke and the blood of battle, it all boiled down to the soldier. Skill and experience, a lion’s heart in the game all the way, and the capacity for improvising with the mayhem of combat counted far and away the most. All of the above was important, no question, but too often he’d seen that a little smile beamed on the good guys from Lady Luck won the day.

Or, in this instance, the dawn.

The simple fact they were in position and moving in for the kill at that hour was a case in point to tip the hat to Lady Luck, when he considered the agonizing delays on the ground back in Turkey, how bad weather simply wouldn’t allow decent satellite pictures. As it stood, sentries had already endured the long, cold night, bored out of their gourds, he knew, on the verge of nodding off as they were anxious to be relieved of duty. Better, whoever the yet-to-be-determined VIP playboys inside the main compound would be sleeping off a tough night of booze and broads. There would be security goons on hand, some of which would either be tasting the goodies on the sly, or sulking in envy and resentment they had to seethe, idle on the sidelines.

Life was tough like that.

The question now moving into the ex-Ranger’s scope was who exactly life would get tough for.

Hawkins had sensed the guard in the fur hat with pointed crown and knee-length black-leather coat already knew something was amiss, and before he started barking their names.

“Dhzari! Ghombalj!”

Moments ago, Hawkins caught Calvin James skirting the periphery of his vision, the ex-SEAL a blurring ghost with two kills in his wake. The dead men’s comrade was now in search of his buddies, as he stepped out from behind the rear of a tanker, three rigs down from where James had stashed the stiffs. Unless he missed his guess, reading the guard’s tight body language, Hawkins was a few moments away from sending him to join his comrades.

The Klieg lights provided ample illumination, so Hawkins didn’t need to switch the scope to infrared. He hefted 4.4 kilos of killing power, rose up on a knee, extended the sound-suppressed Dragunov, and tracked his mark with the naked eye for another moment. The Russian piece was a gift from the special ops in Kurd-land, and it came complete with a state-of-the-art scope with digital read off the laser sight. The extended detachable box magazine held fifteen 7.62 mm armor-piercing rounds. This time around McCarter had handed him the sniper designation. Hawkins would have preferred a tried-and-proved American high-powered rifle, but he understood McCarter’s reasoning that they carry a mixed assortment of weapons into battle. Russian grenades, German assault rifles, U.S. sidearms, and if they went down to a man no one would be the wiser about their origin of allegiance.

As if it would matter.

A quick search of the tankers provided no sighting of his teammates; all was quiet and holding.

But…

The guard spotted the boots under the rig’s tail.

Hawkins bit down the curse, hit one of three buttons on the side of his scope. In less than one eye blink the fiber optic scan threw up the virtual reality numbers in the upper left corner where they hung like some ghost script scrawled on a UFO above his field of vision. Distance to target, elevation, down to factoring in wind speed—2.5 knots, and at his back—he read the trajectory data as the guard’s expression of shocked anger framed with instant crystal clarity in the crosshairs. The man was reaching for his handheld radio, mouth already opening when Hawkins painted the red laser eye just above his right ear and squeezed the trigger. Muzzling at 830 meters a second, the armor-piercing projectile streaked the eighty-two yard bridge to target in a microsecond, so fast Hawkins had to peer hard before he registered there was, in fact, nothing in his scope but a faint dark mist raining over empty space.

He lowered the rifle, confirmed the decapitated heap of twitching carcass at a glimpse, then began scouring the field. Somewhere to the south—Manning’s way—he heard a voice calling out. Another comrade search.

Silently he urged his teammates to hustle.

The clock was ticking, and there was nothing he could do about his kill left out in the open.

Something jumped into the corner of the ex-Ranger’s vision. Before he looked, Hawkins already knew what he’d find. Adrenaline kicking his senses into overdrive, the Stony Man warrior confirmed two more hardmen on the move and staring right at the mess he’d just dumped on the ground.

CHAPTER SIX

Azmit Zhuktul always found himself amazed and disgusted by the arrogance of men who willingly sold their souls for money then sought reassurances they had made the correct choice. Yes, he understood how greed knew no limits, how it was never satisfied, how there was never “enough.” The men standing in front of him, who had purchased the world they desired, needed to accept the fact they had already charted a one-way course, and that perdition wasn’t far off. There were no safety nets, no guarantees. Certainly no going back. There was only the fight to stave off the inevitable—death—and consume and conquer while there was still time. Or be consumed.

One of the three Iraqis, Faisal al-Harqazhdi, began the squawking yet again. “You have been delivered more than a fair price to make arrangements for our safe passage to the Far East. And yet, here we all stand, while you send one of your soldiers to tell us there have been certain sudden changes in plans. Granted, we may well be safe in your country and free of the American CIA, my good Lezgi friend, but there are still many Russians in your country, as I am sure you are aware. Russians who may well be in the wrong places at the wrong time, and beyond the reach of even those who are paid to protect you. Granted, we understand how you have the director general and key staff of the Dagneft oil company at your disposal and that it appears the shipments to our Western European friends will continue as arranged. However, it is our experience that when it all looks too easy, well, quite the opposite could not be far from becoming a most frightening reality.” A pause, then, “Are you listening to me?”

Zhuktul made them wait for his reply. They were tiresome creatures. Impatient, weak men who were too unwilling to endure a few days’ inconvenience.

Cowards.

He lit a hand-rolled cigarette, then swept aside the bearskin blanket to expose stark nakedness. The VIPs began clearing throats, shuffling from one Italian-loafered foot to the other, frowning away from what he knew they perceived an insult to Islamic tenets regarding modesty. Hypocrites. They paid lip service in public and to unsuspecting peers about the virtues of holiness, yet they were the first in line to get drunk, bed his whores, even snort his heroin. How could a man dare regard himself as a man, Zhuktul wondered, if he didn’t live what was truly in his heart? At least he knew he was the very definition of evil, and could willingly accept as much. If there was such a thing as Paradise, then why wait? If God, he believed, wanted man to live as a pillar of virtue, then he would have been created without lust, greed, anger and so forth in the first place. Zhuktul would concern himself with God whenever he met Him in the future. This day, there were many worlds to conquer, too much pleasure to be indulged.

Exhaling the harsh smoke toward the mirrored ceiling, glimpsing ten-thousand-dollar suits and gold jewelry that could have rebuilt any number of cities in their war-torn country, he fished around in the rolling pool of silk pillows and furs until he found a full bottle of vodka. A quick check of the label to make sure it wasn’t the brand of paint thinner he served the troops, he uncapped the bottle and took a deep swig. One of the Ukrainian women, sleeping off the night’s orgy, suddenly reached out an arm. She was purring for something, most likely heroin to powder her nose with so she could go back to sleep, when Zhuktul slapped her arm away and stood. It was all he could manage to restrain laughter at the sight of their swarthy faces turning red. Where they were soft and flabby from their embassy parties and glad-handing various corrupt UN officials and their aides in midnight meetings, nothing short of war had chiseled his flesh into taut muscle that looked more armor than human skin. He saw them fidget and nervously glance at the sight of old bullet scars, the patches of badly healed and mottled flesh from the razor’s end of flying shrapnel. Souvenirs of the lion in the face of jackals.

Slowly, Zhuktul tugged on his trousers, puffing away. “If you profess so much confidence in me,” he finally said, slipping into his BDU shirt then strapping himself into the shoulder-holstered 9 mm Tokarev pistol, “then why do you insist on speaking to me out of both sides of your mouth?”

“Excuse me?”

Zhuktul scanned their aghast expressions. He watched their shoulders tighten, one of them glancing back at the soldiers posted around the living room. Evidence of the night’s festivities was strewed, he found, end to end. Black and blond hair spilled from beneath wolf or sheepskin blankets, their women stretched out. Ashtrays overflowed with cigarette and cigar butts, empty bottles and trays of powder scattered across massive coffee tables.

Abed Osman cleared his throat, lost his scowl first. “We did not mean to sound…disrespectful. I think at this time we would also wish to thank you for your generous hospitality these past several days.”

Zhuktul took another pull from his bottle, dragged on his cigarette, then blew smoke over their heads. “I will accept that as your best effort for an apology.”

“Then,” Abu Jabayt inquired quietly, “when can we expect to be on our way?”

“Soon.”

Zhuktul watched them look at one another, wondering who would be the first to gather enough courage to pose the question.

Al-Harqazhdi spoke up, his voice tight with controlled anger. “My good friend, as has been pointed out when we first arrived, everything you have requested from us has been placed into your capable hands. Money, information, new and numbered and safe accounts that will funnel funds to the appropriate financiers. Any of whom will prove most helpful in advancing your cause here in the Caucasus, as well as the cause of jihad in the name of all our oppressed Islamic brothers.”

“Bah! You who have never denied yourselves anything, you who have never fired the first shot in anger, do not insult me with such nonsense how you would care about holy war.”

They stiffened visibly, as Jabayt pressed, “Be that as it may, we had an arrangement. Without us you would not have been able to move both your gasoline and what was smuggled out of Iraq. We groomed the contacts. We arranged safe routes for the delivery of men and matériel on both sides.”

“I gather this is where I am to tell you four how indebted I am to you?”

Osman stepped in to save their collective face. “We only hope that respect is mutual. However, it was our original understanding that the colonel was to be here to personally greet us, and with a jet fueled and ready to fly out at a moment’s notice.”

Zhuktul chuckled. There was much that they didn’t know.

Al-Harqazhdi trembled, eyes smoldering with fury. “You find our monstrous inconvenience and the potential for a threat to our safety amusing? Now, who is being insulted?”

Zhuktul waved his cigarette, shaking his head. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, please. I need a moment.” He shut his eyes, lowering his head. “Ah! The sun has not yet risen and already I fear this day giving me great pause, with a burden, I may add, that threatens to leave me feeling less than charitable.” He felt the warm glow spread, but his anger only seemed to build. He opened his eyes, ran a scathing look over their faces. “First of all, let us be clear that it was the four of you who sought out my services.”

“No. It was originally the colonel we sent our own people to,” Osman said.

Zhuktul felt the blood pressure drum in his ears. Their arrogance and sniveling was more than he could bear to tolerate, but he kept his composure. “So it would seem, I will grant you that. But, the good Colonel Shistoi is indisposed. Like yourselves, shall we say, he is in the process of scrambling to save his own world.”

“What you mean to say, and perhaps have neglected to inform us, is that he is either dead, captured by the Russians or hiding in the mountains,” Jabayt intoned.

“None of the above. What I am telling you is that the colonel put me in charge of your situation, and my word on that should be more than enough.” Zhuktul felt a sudden fierce hatred toward these men who grew rich and fat while placing all the risk in the hands of others. “Let us examine your situation, shall we? Was it not the four of you who fled on your own volition all the creature comforts of Paris and Germany for sanctuary in my humble country? Was it not you who left others to possibly be hanged in your places? Yes, yes, I know all about how the CIA ‘stumbled,’ as you put it, on to your dealings with the UN. I am aware how you were but a mere few hours away from being arrested like some of your comrades who did business with Saddam and who are now cutting deals with the American authorities in secret to spare their lives.”

Scowling, he hit them with a cannonball of smoke, sickened to the point of some murderous rage by their whining as he felt the storm building like hot lava behind his eyes. “But you four…you made it somehow. And that you are still free men by itself should make you grateful to the point of weeping. Yet you question the very security I have arranged for you, and now when I am in the process of seeing that you can live out your lives and spend all the millions you pilfered from both your own countries and the deal your comrades made with Colonel Shistoi. And that I deal with you at all, considering that it is you who are the ones who could be bringing trouble to my own backyard, should have you on your knees and kissing my feet.”

As Osman gasped in outrage, Zhuktul drank, watching them begin to wilt under his icy stare. They knew he was right. He smoked, let them steam in silence. They were breaking eye contact, lips fluttering in impotent rage and frustration, when shouting and shots fired struck the curtained window directly behind the Iraqis. Their panic was instant and infuriating.

“Relax!” Zhuktul barked at the Iraqis, then shouldered through them, ignoring the battery of questions fired at his back. His men were already flying through beaded archways on both ends to investigate. The weapons fire abruptly stopped, then Zhuktul turned on his VIPs and told them, “This happens.”

“What happens?” Jabayt nearly shouted.

Raising the bottle to his lips, Zhuktul drank, hard and deep, then grew yet more angry at what he smelled wafting past their perfumed flab—fear, which, he knew, could be contagious. He had a good mind to shoot them all where they stood, but in some as yet undefined way that picked at the back of his thoughts, he decided they could prove more useful to him alive.

Zhuktul listened as they babbled among themselves, then treated his guests to a scornful eye. “One of my men is simply drunk. Perhaps he mistook a wolf for an intruder. If that is the case, he will be punished. Now. Were there any other complaints?”

THE GUARD WAS LAUNCHED through glass as if shot from a howitzer. The sight of the body sailing from the tower gave McCarter brief pause. Advancing for the line of dreary apple trees, about a hundred meters out and closing on the deep southeast edge of the main building, the ex-SAS commando stole a moment or two to watch the swan dive, his assault rifle extended and ready for live ones. Shattered glass, a dispersing cloud of blood and gore from an obvious head shot and a spinning object he pegged as a handheld radio trailed convulsing acrobatics sixty feet to bone-crunching impact.

They were made.

To the credit of surviving sentries there were no further shouts of alarm, no long bursts of autofire, which meant they were pros, caught napping or not, and were most likely in the process of fanning out to seal a net of lead doom on James and Manning. Somehow McCarter doubted the nine to thirteen or more hardmen were all down and twitching out. As seasoned pros themselves, McCarter knew they would all adapt to the sudden disruption, full bore ahead. Each of them had their own firepoints, tasks to carry out, to be improvised as the need arose.

Aware it all looked and felt too easy on his end, McCarter was scanning the rock-stubbled ground when he spied the tripwire at the last possible second. He stepped over it, scouring all the rotten apples strewed like some slimy morass in front of him, and for improvised explosive devices maybe disguised as produce. Autofire rattled the cold dawn air. A shout, followed by more silence.

How long he could hold off hitting the doomsday button…

Belay that. He would give James and Manning all the time they deemed necessary to clear ground zero, deciding to wait another minute or so before keying his com link.

So the battle had jumped the gun before they were hunkered and blew a hole through the sky.

Sooner was always better than later.

The thought he was eager to turn on the killing heat of hellfire began cranking up his own adrenaline levels, limbs oiled, senses electrified. A few swift but careful meters forward, and McCarter grabbed cover behind the gnarled base of a rotting apple tree.

Hunkered, hidden from more than a passing eye, he was ready to rock.

The HK-33 came up to draw a bead on the large steel door to dead twelve o’clock where he made out muffled bellows beyond. Seconds later, the enemy barged outside, assault rifles swinging in all directions. Four, then six hardmen were trying to get it together as they spilled farther from the building. They were flapping arms and raising a general ruckus on handheld units when the Phoenix Force leader took up slack on the HK’s trigger and cut loose.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

As he claimed his chair at the head of the table in the War Room, Hal Brognola found Barbara Price and Aaron Kurtzman watching him closely. Settling in and leaning back, he took a few moments, conscious suddenly of what seemed to be the ten years he’d just aged in the past twelve hours or so. They had to have read the haggard look and smoldering burn in his eyes for something other than the usual weariness, anger and anxiety when he found the combined power of Stony Man holding up the weight of the world. Since he was in charge of the Sensitive Operations Group, the crushing weight of the ultimate success or failure of any mission was sometimes daunting. But this time he and the Farm weren’t alone in shouldering the burden of Atlas. With any number of intelligence and military spooks throwing their weight around, Brognola knew the waters were murkier than he could recall in long memory, chummed fat and wide, with man eaters circling for what may well prove a global feeding frenzy.

Against his will, the big Fed’s thoughts remained locked on the cracking ice of international outrage, the possibility that a rogue or supposed friendly nation was orbiting nuclear satellites around the planet and looking for blood. Beyond the stark and frightening facts as Stony Man knew them, Brognola realized ground zero in the Australian outback wouldn’t rate a footnote in history if a nuclear spear was plunged into a major city from above Earth’s atmosphere.

Sensing the mission controller and the head of the cyberteam were anxious but giving him some time to gather his thoughts, breathe air free of human rot and all its treachery and malice, the big Fed sipped some of the battery acid Kurtzman passed off as coffee. He unwrapped a fresh cigar, stuck it in a corner of his mouth, rolled his shoulders. He took a deep breath, let it out and told them, “In the few brief moments the President could spare me, he green-lighted us to do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of what happened in Australia. Nail it down. The Man wants a rapid response, folks, no punches pulled, no mercy whatsoever to whoever the perpetrators. They go down hard, and, if possible, their names and misdeeds are to be buried along with them. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, he also implied that, because of the nature of the crisis, there’s a good chance our teams may well be locking horns with any number of operators—CIA, NSA, DOD, DIA. You name it.”

“In other words,” Kurtzman said, “beware of those bearing free gifts.”

Brognola nodded, aware that Kurtzman and Price were apprised of the encounter in upstate Maryland. “The hacker problem is, of course, our situation to deal with, which, needless to say, we’re out of business if it hits the Washington Post. Now, from what I gather, you two think there are pieces of this whole sordid puzzle that want to fit and that want to tie together the hackers and a nuke slamming into the Australian out-back from space?”

Price cleared her throat. “Unfortunately we’re not sure of anything at this stage.”

“Okay, so we’re early in the game, but we’re in. Go ahead and give me what you do have. Good news–bad news, what we know and what we don’t.”

Kurtzman clicked on the wall monitor. “What you’re looking at, Hal, is about fifteen to twenty square miles of irradiated earth.”

Brognola peered at the image. The screen showed nothing other than an unusual white glow. He frowned at Kurtzman. “Aaron…”

“You see nothing, Hal, because that’s what our satellites see as the result of a fission blast more than twice the twenty-two-kilotons that was dropped on Nagasaki. In other words, until some of the heat dissipates our space probes are useless over this tract of Queensland. The good news—if it can be called that—is that there are maybe two human beings per square mile up to fifty to seventy or more square miles in the immediate affected area. My point—I’m thinking there was some method behind the madness of whoever did this, as far, that is, as containing immediate collateral damage.”

Brognola chomped on his cigar, trying like hell not to glower. He already knew that electromagnetic pulse had affected Australia as far as Sydney and other east coast cities. He knew that eighty-five percent of the country’s population lived along the coasts, which was the only other piece of questionable good news as far as the blast went. He knew prevailing winds would carry fallout and that radiation dosages could reach well beyond the lethal eight hundred. He knew Great Britain’s former penal colony was one riot away from declaring martial law, but that a cover story was already being handed to the press by the parliament, everything from a secret nuclear reactor meltdown to an asteroid, though it sounded to him nobody knew which direction to start dancing. He hoped Kurtzman was getting somewhere fast other than a show-and-tell of what he already knew.

“What I’m saying, Hal, and I’m not trying to be a wiseass, is that blank picture is about where we are, at least in regard to whoever is actually behind the incident. The list of countries we know of that have satellites is lengthy. Many of which have covert space programs.”

“Black ops.”

“Black ops. For some time, the NSA and CIA have believed that China and Russia are dabbling in everything from antigravity devices to reverse engineering of alien spacecraft. The ESA has fifteen members alone, and that doesn’t include our friends north of the border.”

“So, pick one—that’s what you’re trying to tell me?”

Price stepped in. “When you transcribed the CD to us from the chopper, it gave us a few nibbles to run with, but…”

Brognola stared at the dark look in Price’s eyes as she fell silent.

And there it was.

From the White House, around the world and back to Stony Man, it seemed everyone was at a loss to explain, or begin to find answers. What he knew for certain was the smoke screen to be thrown up between Washington, Great Britain and the prime minister of Australia may or may not hold back the world from collapsing into a tailspin of panic and anarchy.

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