“MY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN RUNNING THE PROBABILITIES,” BROGNOLA SAID.

“Indian Point and Calvert Cliffs are their biggest and best targets to cause hysteria, even if they fail in the attempt.”

“But they pushed up their timetable now that Phoenix Force stopped them in France,” the President countered. “And then there’s Syria. And when Damascus suffers from their own chemical weapons, the response will be worse than riots. They’ll hit everyone who knew about their facilities, which means our people in Iraq and Israel.”

The President thought about the pictures of the dead Kurds that had been used in the Fallen’s threat video. “Europe’s out of control, and America and the Middle East are under threat. If we ever needed a miracle, we need it now.”

Price took a deep breath. “Luckily, that’s Stony Man’s job description. The impossible missions.”

The President nodded in agreement. “Things don’t get more impossible than this.”

Extinction Crisis
Don Pendleton’s

Stony Man ®

America’s Ultra-Covert Intelligence Agency

www.mirabooks.co.uk

EXTINCTION CRISIS

CONTENTS

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 ONE

Carl Lyons stopped at the edge of the wide puddle of blood, attempting to control his rage at the murder of a Department of Energy investigative agent. Mare Hirtenberg had been a beautiful woman, closing in on forty, but nothing pretty remained in her blood-spattered features, hazel eyes bulging out as her mouth was stretched and distorted in agony. The Able Team leader had been assigned to work with Hirtenberg for the past few days, reviewing infiltration attempts at nuclear power plants around the nation.

Hirtenberg had been Lyons’s kind of Fed, a no-nonsense woman with a sense of irony and cynicism that appealed to him. But today, he had found her seated at her desk, her throat slashed.

The Able Team commander hit a button on his Smart phone, a speed dial command that would bring a Justice Department evidence team running. There was no hope for Hirtenberg, not with two gallons of blood painting the floor tiles and her desk. Paramedics would only be good for confirming the blatantly obvious fact that she was dead.

Something whirred softly on the other side of Hirtenberg’s desk and Lyons drew the Smith & Wesson Military and Police 357 from its shoulder holster. He sidestepped the puddle of blood and saw something move Hirtenberg’s lifeless leg along the side of the desk. He was able to notice two small darts embedded in her calf. Whoever had murdered her had utilized a Taser, directed just above ankle level. Theories of the Israeli Negev Nuclear Research Center break-in rushed to Lyons’s mind. He briefly considered the possibility of a small trained animal slipping unnoticed through defenses.

Lyons snapped his MP-357 to eye level, brow furrowing as he realized that animals didn’t have electro-motors. A dull gunmetal-black tendril writhed as it disappeared around the base of Hirtenberg’s chair. Not having a clear target, Lyons held his fire.

“Come on, show yourself,” Lyons growled, tracking the floor.

Air pistons hissed and Lyons felt an agonizing jolt in his shin. A twenty-thousand-volt current blasted along a pair of fine wires, and the Able Team commander’s entire body seized up. The paralyzing charge tightened every muscle in the former cop’s body, including the index finger curled around the tuned, 6-pound trigger of the sleek new Smith & Wesson. The high-pressure .357 SIG round cracked loudly, a bark that was nearly as intense a bellow as Lyons’s old favored .357 Magnum cartridge, and in a moment, the continuous Taser charge dissipated.

Lyons was physically as powerful as any two men, but in the wake of a Taser jolt, even his mighty musculature went limp. Only his incredible athletic conditioning kept him from falling unconscious or careening uncontrollably off the corner of Hirtenberg’s desk. He managed to catch himself on his hands and elbows, the Smith & Wesson MP clattering from numbed hands.

At floor level, he saw a bulbous, insectlike head staring at him. Two hexagon-patterned domes formed eyes reminiscent of a dragonfly, and the only flaw in the space between them was a smoking .357-inch hole. Beneath the bullet entry, a rectangular turret dangled, slender wires dangling from it like drool. The buglike object writhed, twisted, as if recovering its senses at the same rate that Lyons did.

“No, you don’t, you little bastard,” Lyons growled, pushing off the floor. The metallic worm turned almost completely over on itself, a nodule rising from a second bulbous segment just behind the head. The Able Team leader knew it was another weapon, and he reached out, fist closing on a wastebasket. It was only a few pounds, but to his Taser-hammered muscles, it felt more like a few tons. He swung the metal receptacle in front of his face before another air-piston hissed and an electric motor whined to angry life. The wastebasket’s aluminum skin screamed as a deadly cutting wire whipped at it. There was very little physical push behind the miniature lash, but a gash appeared in the bottom of the wastebasket from Lyons’s point of view.

Mystery solved—time to get primitive, the former LAPD cop thought. Lyons lunged, his wastebasket shield bashing against the side of the metallic caterpillar as its hydraulic whip continued to carve at the aluminum bucket. The impact jarred the yard-long automaton, disrupting the slicing cord. The hydraulic whine ended, and Lyons reached around to grab the lethal worm.

The robot’s blunt tail whipped around and struck the Taser-stunned warrior in the forearm with enough force to break a lesser man’s bones. Lyons grunted, stunned as his limb was jammed into the floor. A second whiplash of the heavy tail slapped aside the wastebasket and glanced off of Lyons’s head. The robot flipped to its upright position, silvery metallic rollers dragging it rapidly toward a battered ventilation duct.

Cursing his weakness and vulnerability, Lyons knew there would be no way to catch up to the escaping automaton.

Hirtenberg’s mechanized murderer had gotten away, but the Able Team leader vowed that whoever had built it would not live to celebrate his colleague’s demise. If he had to battle to the end of the planet, he would get vengeance.

E HAN F ARKAS WAS A TRUE son of Egypt, and as a soldier in the elite Unit 777 of the Egyptian Army, he would fight to the very end, attempting the impossible to protect his nation. In this instance, it was a slightly unusual case. He was stuck in the confines of a Peugeot station wagon with a young woman of obvious European descent and two Americans of different ethnic backgrounds. The woman was known only as Atalanta, and she was obviously an agent of the Israeli Mossad. Top-secret joint operations between the two countries’ agencies were fraught with intrigue and mistrust.

The two American men had been sent to engage in field training with Unit 777. The agent introduced as Farrow was a tall, lanky black man, and Rey was a compact, muscular Hispanic. The two U.S. operators were considered friends of the antiterrorism unit, but Farkas had heard rumors from Muslim Brotherhood prisoners about the pair. A few months back, al Aksari and two of his allies had struck a brutal blow against the radical terrorist group as they were operating in Alexandria, supporting a central African militia. The two mystery men working alongside the legendary soldier had similar descriptions to Farrow and Rey.

The timing of this sneak-and-peek operation cemented Farkas’s worries. A week ago, Israel had been thrown into a state of high alert by a security breech at the Negev Nuclear Research Center. Cairo had been informed of the “near event” in the reactor core. With a 150-megawatt reactor, reportedly capable of producing enough material for one hundred nuclear warheads, a near event generally meant that the world almost ended for several thousand people. Had the reactor gone critical, the effects would have been akin to the nightmare that was Chernobyl, except that the much smaller, more heavily populated nation of Israel would have had a much larger percentage of habitable land turned into an inhospitable radioactive deadland. Both Jews and Arabs would have been sickened or killed, not to mention an area stretching as far north as the West Bank and as far east as Safi would have been rendered unsafe for farming or livestock.

That kind of news left Egypt on edge, and Farkas was fully aware of the proximity of the particular Brotherhood cell they were watching to the Inshas Nuclear Research Center. The Inshas core was only twenty-two megawatts, and was part of a pilot program for Egypt to develop her own nuclear warheads. Still, a meltdown incident would produce carnage and weaken the country’s standing in the Mediterranean community. All in all, if Farrow and Rey were the same high caliber of warrior that al Aksari was, then Farkas felt a sense of relief with their presence.

“We have movement,” Rafael Encizo said. “They’re loading a van.” Encizo’s cover name for this mission was Rey. His Phoenix Force partner, Calvin James, was using the cover name Farrow.

Farkas rested his fingers on the keys in the ignition. “All right. I’ll give them thirty seconds’ lead driving time before firing our ride up.”

“Good plan,” Atalanta said without a hint of irony or condescension.

“That’s a strange stack of boxes that they loaded,” Calvin James mused. “They don’t resemble any weapons storage that I’ve ever seen.”

“That would be too obvious, wouldn’t it?” Farkas asked. “Police would know rifle crates if they saw them in the back of a van.”

James frowned, his black mustache deepening the gloom of his expression. “But why would they use any kind of boxes to hide rifles? Gymnasium bags or standard luggage would be far more innocuous and just as easily contain assault weapons or grenade launchers.”

“Well, what was the nature of the Negev break-in?” Farkas asked.

“This has nothing to do with that,” Atalanta lied. Irritation sprawled across the Israeli woman’s features.

Farkas rolled his eyes, deepening her annoyance.

“Grow up, Atalanta,” Encizo snapped. “Farkas isn’t stupid and he’s not our enemy.”

James nodded in agreement. “Don’t let national pride get in the way of an international crisis. Once this is over, Israel and Egypt can go back to their behind-the-scenes pissing contest.”

Tanya Kristopoulos, a.k.a. Atalanta, glared at the two American agents. She was a Greek-born Jew who had suffered the loss of family at the hands of jihad terrorists operating in her home country. She’d long ago put aside her anger at Arabs, but her allegiance to the Israeli Mossad had given her a perspective about operational security that bordered on paranoia. “Listen, just because the CIA can’t keep a damned secret doesn’t mean we have to accommodate your—”

Encizo put his hand up in front of her face to cut her off. “The Mossad doesn’t know how the controls to the coolant tanks were sabotaged, except that someone used a 9 mm handgun to shoot up vital components. There were no signs of entry except for minor damage to ventilation duct covers that were too small for even a child to crawl through.”

“God damn it, Rey!” Atalanta complained.

“Yell a little louder next time,” James sneered. “The pricks loading the van didn’t quite hear you.”

“So no human could have entered the Negev plant, but somehow a handgun punctured pipes and wrecked electronics-packed consoles?” Farkas asked.

Atalanta’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know about the pipes? You just asked about the nature of the security breech.”

“There were enough rumors flying about, but very little was substantive enough to quantify or qualify what really happened,” Farkas explained. “Rey filled in some holes in the theories that have been flying around Unit 777 and other national security agencies.”

“Well, whatever broke in either had a magical invisibility cloak or was shrunk to doll-size,” Encizo added.

“Invisibility cloaks are fantasy, not reality, Rey,” Atalanta chided dismissively.

“Actually, no, they are real,” James countered. “Tokyo University has preliminary technology in development that uses specially reflective beads and camera technology to render solid objects as see-through. That’s just technology in the public domain.”

Atalanta and Farkas both raised their eyebrows at that particular revelation.

“I doubt that the covert military optical stealth technology was utilized in the Negev break-in, though,” Encizo added. “Rear-projection morphic imagery only limits your visibility. It can’t phase you through bank vault doors or mask your scent and sound profile to highly trained attack dogs. No stealth fabric that we’ve encountered works against those particular measures.”

Encizo and James had encountered truly remarkable technologies in their journeys around the world. There were few things that they had seen or suspected that could ever surprise them anymore.

Farkas frowned. “’Tis a stranger world than I’ve ever imagined. Perhaps a trained simian with a gun? I know that bats and dolphins have been trained and used to deliver sabotaging explosives to hard-to-reach areas.”

“Any monkey small enough to operate in those particular ducts would have been roasted or frozen to death in various chambers,” Kristopoulos reluctantly admitted. “Plus, it wouldn’t have had the intellect to operate a firearm, nor the strength necessary to trigger or handle the recoil of a 9 mm pistol.”

Farkas turned his attention back to the suspects. They had just finished loading their van and gotten into the front. “We could just pull over their vehicle…”

“But what would keep them from blowing up their van to eliminate any evidence we’d capture?” Kristopoulos asked. “Remember, the Negev meltdown would have irradiated hundreds of miles, making it impossible to reach minimum safe distance without suffering debilitating, if not lethal, effects.”

“Besides, we want to keep an eye on how these guys are doing this,” James added. “Those men are only delivery boys, pawns.”

“You’ve got that correct,” Farkas agreed. “I know those two from our files. They’re errand boys who get handed all manner of shit duty, as you Americans so colorfully put it.”

“That’s believable,” Encizo said. “A lot more than some of the ideas we’ve been tossing around for the past minute. Okay, start her up.”

Farkas fired up their Peugeot and the station wagon pulled out to track the Brotherhood’s van as it drove toward the Inshas Nuclear Research Center. He couldn’t shake the feeling of dread that filled his gut. Tonight, a twenty-two-megawatt nuclear reactor was going to be assailed by terrorists armed with a form of technology that sliced through high-tech and low-tech defenses like a knife through butter.

Tonight, a radioactive nightmare could conceivably come true.

D AVID M C C ARTER LIT another cigarette to give his hands something to do. The Phoenix Force leader hated to cut short his vacation with Gary Manning and T. J. Hawkins, even if it was just a working holiday. The remaining members of Phoenix Force were in England to engage in a little cross training alongside elements of the SAS, so for McCarter it felt like a homecoming, despite the bruises and aches he sported from martial arts sparring with a crew of hardheaded Cockney recruits who reminded the Eastender of himself as a man in his twenties.

Still, the news of the French Department of Nuclear Energy headquarters break-in was a sobering splash on McCarter’s reminiscences. Right now, in the regiment’s guest barracks at Hereford, they were awaiting news from Barbara Price back at Stony Man Farm for permission to launch their Paris investigation without interference from DCRI, the French version of the FBI or Homeland Security. As a British citizen, McCarter had every right to hop on the Channel ferry or to board the Chunnel train to shoot on over to Paris without much paperwork, but he would have to undertake such a trip unarmed and ill-equipped to deal with what had been reported as a mysterious commando team raiding the DNE offices with surgical precision.

The European Union’s views on firearms ownership by private citizens, no matter how sterling their prior military service, was at best intolerant of people with the determination to defend their lives. Of course, this meant that McCarter’s text message to a friend in Paris would be what their operation hinged on if they couldn’t get official clearance. McCarter knew people around the globe, and was able to acquire supplies of reliable weapons from them.

His cell phone burbled with a text message answer to his initial inquiry. What he read soured his mood.

“Can scrounge gear for you and your two friends. No Grand Puissants in inventory, alas.”

The Grand Puissant was the French term for a Browning Hi-Power, one of David McCarter’s preferred designs and his trusted companion across the globe for his entire professional warrior career. His comfort with the reliable, accurate 9 mm autoloader enabled him to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the classic design. Naturally, his disappointment sparked interest from his younger partner.

Hawkins read McCarter’s screen, then checked the look on his commander’s face. “Y’all make that sound like we’ll be landing in the middle of a nest of ninjas the moment we were within sight of the Eiffel Tower. So what if you have to pack a Glock for a while?”

Gary Manning regarded the youngest member of Phoenix Force with a wry grin. “Once you’ve acclimated yourself to true perfection, attempting to cope with an egotistical Austrian’s proclaimed flawless design is a troubling disappointment.”

McCarter chortled. “Besides, I’d be happy to have a row with a troupe of Japanese in black pajamas leaping about with swords and what have you. They’re so much fun when you head butt them and get their gobs all messy under those scarves.”

The laptop with the teleconference software burbled to life. Stony Man’s mission controller, Barbara Price, appeared on the screen, and she wasn’t very happy.

“I wonder if she’s grumpy over your lack of a Hi-Power, too,” Hawkins murmured.

“Don’t make me murder you in your sleep, lad,” McCarter quipped. “What’s wrong, Barb?”

“The big new French interior intelligence agency has been comparing notes with itself, and they decided they don’t want to play with American-sponsored Interpol investigators anymore,” Price replied. “Especially in matters of French nuclear-energy security breaches.”

“We’ve been on good terms with both French Intelligence in the past,” Manning said. “What is the problem now?”

“I’ll tell you what the problem is,” McCarter growled. “The head of the new amalgamated agency has his head up his arse. Though it’s not as if the bloody wankers sitting behind the desk realize that they’re telling us to sit this one out and leaving it to the second or third best in the world.”

“Pride is unbecoming of you, David,” Price admonished.

“Bollocks,” McCarter continued to snarl. “It’s the same ‘I know what’s best’ shit that happens every time we have to work with some department. We go somewhere and some half-wit thinks he’s the cock of the walk when he’s just a flounder in a bucket.”

“Well, Hal doesn’t want you to get caught. And if DCRI sends someone after you, try not to maim them,” Price ordered.

McCarter sneered. “Just a dent on their chin and a slap on the ass to run home to mother.”

Manning pulled out his Smart phone and began the process of ordering Chunnel train tickets. “Looks like you’re going to have to grin and bear it with whatever your mate supplies you.”

“I don’t care if it’s a wooden shoe that I have to break off in someone’s bum,” McCarter returned. “It’s time to show the DCRI how professionals deal with infiltrators.”

Manning grinned. It was good to see a flash of the cocky McCarter. It was also an indication of how much the enemy was going to regret pulling an operation that showed up on the Phoenix Force commander’s radar.

CHAPTER TWO

Lyons stood in the hallway, battered forearm wrapped in an athletic bandage to secure it in case the blow it had taken had resulted in a hairline fracture. The bandage would serve as a temporary splint until the forearm could be x-rayed. The Able Team leader didn’t intend to remove himself from the crime scene until the technicians had all of the data they needed to track down the escaped robot’s murderous masters. He had seen the killer, but he didn’t know its origins and who had sent it. The evidence linking Mare Hirtenberg’s murder to the rash of security breeches at international nuclear power plants was purely circumstantial, but Lyons couldn’t dismiss the possibility that someone had used a compact mechanical assassin to penetrate the Department of Energy’s Washington, D.C., offices with the same ghostlike ability of the saboteurs at the other plants.

Lyons’s leg was still raw from where the Taser darts had penetrated his skin and pumped twenty thousand volts through his body. The Justice Department crime scene techs had collected the contents of two Taser cartridges that had been loaded into the robot’s head section. There might have been more in the mechanism, in case the mechanism had encountered multiple opponents. A security officer, assigned to protect the DoE offices, approached Lyons, his step cautious as he caught the grim darkening of the big ex-cop’s face.

“No sighting of the robot?” Lyons asked, putting aside his rage to speak with a fellow lawman.

“No,” the security officer said. “It’ll take us a while to get our own camera-mount robot here, and even then, it might not fit into the air vents.”

Lyons’s brow furrowed. “I’d get a bomb-sniffing dog team here, just to be safe. If the device did have a self-destruct mechanism, it wouldn’t do much damage to the infrastructure of this building, but it could harm a mainframe or more personnel.”

“We’ve thought of that possibility already,” the officer replied. “But thanks for confirming that we’re not completely paranoid.”

“My teammates think otherwise, but I appreciate the sentiment,” Lyons returned.

The office door opened and a covered body on a gurney rolled into the hallway. The coroner walked beside the body of Hirtenberg, having claimed the corpse for release. The Justice Department medical examiner met Lyons’s gaze for a moment before the brooding Stony Man warrior looked down at the remains of a woman whom he’d befriended over the past few days.

“Cause of death was fairly obvious,” Alicia Khan said softly. Her dark, elfin face was serene and sympathetic, large and soulful brown eyes steady in the path of Lyons’s disquiet and angry grief. “Exsanguination due to laceration of the throat by an unknown weapon.”

“I saw it in action. It was a metal wire spun on an electric-motor-powered spool,” Lyons said. “The crime techs picked up trimmings of it with blood transfer from her.”

Lyons didn’t want to give in to the queasiness in his gut at the description of a friend’s agonizing murder, especially in front of someone as sympathetic and empathic as Khan. He swallowed his disgust at how clinically he spoke of her end. “You might find traces of the wire on her vertebrae, since the wire cuts flesh and thin aluminum easily, but might have been stopped by heavy bone.”

Khan nodded. “I’ll run an X-ray in that area. Metal from garrote wires or knife wounds often transfers to heavy bone. You going to be all right?”

Lyons took a deep breath. Khan, a gorgeous woman in her mid-forties, was no stranger to Lyons. She was one of a team whom Hal Brognola, director of Stony Man Farm, kept on hand to deal with the aftereffects of a domestic operation undertaken by Able Team, Phoenix Force or even the Executioner. The Justice crew kept traces of Stony Man’s covert operations well out of the public eye, but kept data on hand in case there was a prosecutable case left in the wreckage of Stony Man’s cleansing flames.

For a woman who interacted with the dead, her empathy was outstanding. She could endure even the worst of Lyons’s legendary rages, never steering away from providing him with a bridge back to humanity. Lyons managed a smile for her. “Thanks, Alicia, I can deal with the grief.”

Khan nodded. “Catharsis is one thing, baby. Just don’t hang on to the pain for too long.”

Lyons nodded. “Then get to testing, Alicia. I have murderers to track down.”

Khan stroked his cheek, a brief touch of tenderness from tigress to lion. They were both hunters, different predators in the same ecosystem, tracking criminals. While the medical examiner took to her chase with microscopes and spectrometers, Lyons’s tools of the hunt were measured in twelve gauge and .357.

“Good hunting,” she told him and returned to escorting Hirtenberg’s body to the coroner’s wagon.

The Able Team leader glanced one last time at the receding gurney, then left the hallway to meet up with his partners, Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, also fondly referred to as Pol. Able Team had gone from investigation and paper-pushing mode to full-on pursuit.

T HE DOOR PANEL on the side of the van rolled open and Hermann Schwarz felt the mass of Lyons’s muscular form tilt the vehicle. He opened his eyes after receiving a slap on the shoulder from his best friend, Rosario Blancanales.

“Look busy, the boss is here,” Blancanales said.

“Carl knows that I’m a slacker,” Schwarz replied.

“A slacker who calculates quantum physics equations the same way most people do Sudoko,” Lyons mentioned. “Actually, no. You don’t even need pen or paper. Do you need a description of the murder-bot one more time, Gadgets, or have you already cobbled one together out of soda cans and twist ties?”

Schwarz looked over his shoulder and looked back at his commander, attempting to imitate Lyons’s moments of annoyance. “Oh, fecal discharge, Rosario, my good man. The honorable Mr. Lyons just paid me a compliment and we haven’t even blown anyone up yet.”

“Gadgets, I’m being sweetness and love right now because I am under the delusion that you will put my hands around the throat of the scumbag who took out a fellow cop,” Lyons explained. “Do you want me to return that anger back toward you and your snarky attitude?”

Schwarz pivoted in his seat and handed over a clipboard. “No. I did not build my own copy of the robot. Seems we were out of guitar picks necessary for the stegasaur-style ridge plates. But I do have technical drawings that hypothetically reconstruct the device based on your description of its movements and external dimensions.”

Lyons rewarded Schwarz with a tight-lipped smile as he accepted the stack of papers with twenty pages of sketches of motors and circuits. He leafed through until he came to a page depicting himself, clad in a bearskin, wielding a massive thigh bone, ready to smash the robot that had escaped him. Scrawled in a cartoon word balloon were the words, “Carl smash shiny worm!”

“Can I keep this for my fridge?” Lyons asked Schwarz.

The Able Team electronics whiz raised an eyebrow. “Sure.”

Lyons carefully ripped out the page, removed the sketch of the robot, then crumpled the rest of the page and hurled it out the sliding panel door, where it landed in the gutter. Lyons stuck it under the front clip as an impromptu cover for the robot design notes. “Do you know who built it?”

Schwarz looked out the door of the van, even though the wadded sketch was long gone. “Attempting to narrow down the original designer of a robot is next to impossible. There are entire schools of kids who build these things, not to mention countless amateurs who enter them into battle-bot competitions.”

Lyons nodded. “I’m growing disappointed.”

“Ah, but Mr. Lyons, you asked for a designer, while I applied my mental powers to a more productive course of action. I thought outside of the box,” Schwarz said. “There is room in the robot for a 5.8-gigahertz transmitter that can maintain a remote link.”

Lyons smirked. “You’ve been monitoring that signal?”

Schwarz rolled his eyes. “But of course. Unfortunately, I’ve only narrowed down the broadcast to a nearby relay module.”

Lyons looked through the windshield as Schwarz turned wordlessly in his swivel seat. Halfway down the block sat a brown delivery van with a popular company’s yellow logo painted on the back door. Lyons looked at the license plates. “They forgot to forge plates with the proper business coding on them. That vehicle’s only got stickers for nonperishable food delivery, not air freight.”

Blancanales shook his head. “You with the electronics, and him with the memorizing every possible type of license plate. Are you two attempting to make me feel like a fifth wheel here?”

Lyons winked. “Nothing could match your seven hundred years of experience, Methuselah.”

“We hadn’t run the plates yet,” Blancanales said, steering the conversation away from the fact that he was the oldest man in the van and on the team. “We simply tracked down the signal and I realized that there was no one on this street that had received a delivery, and no one had left that truck.”

Lyons looked along the sidewalks. “I might just make detectives out of you two jungle fighters yet.”

Schwarz sighed. “Detectives. That’s why God and Al Gore invented the Internets, Ironman. To make actual gumshoe work obsolete.”

Blancanales regarded Lyons. “Not going to tear the doors off of their van?”

“I want to see if they make a pickup instead of a delivery,” Lyons replied. “Gadgets, you have a camera focused on the undercarriage of that truck, right?”

Schwarz looked back at Lyons, sincerely offended this time by the implication that he wouldn’t have done what his leader had suggested. “You trust me to plant a bomb in a microcomputer in the space of fifteen seconds before thieves can run off with it, but when I’m sitting right behind a suspicious enemy vehicle, you doubt that I’ve already been recording it for the time it took for the CSI team to run all their fingerprints and blood-spray patterns?”

Schwarz flicked on a monitor attached to the dashboard before Lyons could answer. A high-quality view of the underside of the van was visible. “The monitor would have turned on because I have a sensor in the camera set up to activate at the first motion.”

Lyons patted Schwarz on the shoulder. “You just earned the weekends of the Consumer Electronics Show and the Electronic Entertainment Expo free. Barring end-of-the world crises.”

“Yay,” Schwarz droned, trying to seem unexcited, but Lyons knew exactly the kind of electronic geekery that went on for those two weekends. The monitor flickered, indicating a change in the ground-level camera view. “Okay, something just moved a storm grating in the shadow of the curb.”

Lyons squinted at the ten-inch monitor. “Come on, you son of a bitch, show yourself.”

The metal grille tottered, then flopped over. A bulbous, silvery head emerged from under the sidewalk. As Schwarz muttered about a downgrade of hydraulic efficiency from Lyons’s gunshot, movement on the sidewalk drew the Able Team leader’s attention. A man was pushing a stroller down the street.

“It should have been able to push the grating over a little more easily,” Schwarz commented.

“I’d hit it with my .357 Smith,” Lyons said distractedly, watching the man and the toddler walk closer to the delivery van.

That brought a grin to Schwarz’s face. “Able Team. Travel the world. Meet technological wonders. Shoot them to pieces.”

“’Kin A,” Lyons agreed softly.

The robotic inchworm crawled toward the center of the truck’s undercarriage. A panel opened above it, and two hands reached down to grasp it.

“We’ve got the bas—” Lyons began.

“It’s a segment too long,” Schwarz cut him off.

Lyons’s attention flitted from the monitor to the father and child on the street. He exploded out of his seat, jumping to the sidewalk and charging toward the delivery truck. He didn’t need an explanation about the nature of Schwarz’s grim, sudden warning. He took off from the Able Team van as if launched from the barrel of a gun as fast as his powerful leg muscles could propel him.

“Carl! Wait!” he heard Blancanales call out.

It was too late to stop Lyons as he drew upon his high school and college football conditioning to rocket him down the sidewalk with explosive speed. Each thrust of his powerful leg muscles carried him closer to the delivery van and the two bystanders who were now even with the stopped vehicle. The young father looked up from his child in the stroller, seeing the human freight train barrelling toward them both. Lyons unfurled his massive arms and scooped up father and infant. The Able Team commander twisted himself so that his broad back would absorb the shock wave that he expected to erupt. It came an instant later, the brown metal skin billowing out. Thankfully the hull of the truck was not pre-scored metal so that when it split due to the rupturing overpressure of the exploding robot, no shrapnel flew from the delivery van, though Lyons had his Kevlar on under his shirt and jacket. Lyons’s forward momentum had carried all three of them past the torn vent in the side of the truck, sparing the trio exposure to a gout of flame that vomited through the wound in the vehicle.

Outside, in open air, the pressure wave had space to roll and disperse, sparing the Able Team leader and the two bystanders. The men inside of the truck would have had no such dispersal as the atmosphere inside of the vehicle could only compress so much before it crushed the bodies it was trapped with. Any living leads had been pulverized by the self-destruct mechanism in the robot.

“Y-you saved us,” the man stammered.

Lyons set down the stroller, unhooking the crying toddler within. He handed the girl off to dad after a quick examination for shrapnel injuries or possible burns. The father had suffered a scraped elbow, but the baby had been shielded from sidewalk rash by Lyons’s body and her crumpled stroller. “Just calm your little girl down and go home.”

“What…is this, a terrorist attack?” the man inquired.

“No. It’s just a couple of crooks being silenced by their boss,” Lyons explained. “You didn’t see anything, but don’t stick around, all right? Just make sure the kid’s fine.”

The girl’s wails subsided as her father cradled her. “Thank you.”

Lyons nodded and waved him off.

Schwarz and Blancanales had run up to the gutted van, but the heat of the fire inside kept them at bay. Lyons jogged back around toward his partners, phone already in hand.

“Barb, we have an explosion four blocks north of the Department of Energy offices. Get on the press and the Justice Department and start spinning that it’s organized crime related, and totally independent of the murder of Mare. Keep this from being released as a terrorist attack,” Lyons said to Stony Man.

“You found the robot?” Price asked.

“Yes, and it had a self-destruct mechanism inside,” Lyons told her. “We won’t get anything from the punks who delivered it.”

“I’ll put word forward to Calvin and Rafael,” Price replied. “They’re following another van with a mystery load in the vicinity of Inshas.”

“Relay to them that the robot I encuntered had built-in Tasers and a wire whip that cuts through aluminum and flesh like butter,” Lyons added.

“Given the Israeli situation at Negev, the robot they might encounter could have a firearm built in, as well,” Price said. “You lucked out.”

“Didn’t seem so lucky for Hirtenberg,” Lyons growled. “Send Alicia to pick up our crispy critters here. And give her my apologies for two call-outs in one day.”

“You sound like you’re not coming back to the Farm,” Price mused.

“No. I know the van builders who might have crafted the fake delivery truck,” Lyons said.

“We haven’t even run the plates off of Gadgets’s video footage,” Price replied.

“I know the D.C. area chop shops and kinky garages like the back of my hand, Barb,” Lyons countered. “We beat cops don’t like waiting for slow shit like Web searches.”

Price laughed. “All right. Khan’s team is on the way to the blast site. D.C. Metropolitan Police has been advised to control the area and allow you egress from the crime scene.”

Lyons looked up at the police helicopter that was already watching the area. “Good. Just to be safe, tell Alicia we may have a third corpse pickup for her.”

“I’ll convey your apologies,” Price said. “Flowers and candy, too?”

“And reservations for dinner,” Lyons added. He turned to Schwarz and Blancanales. “Mount up, soldiers. It’s time to kill people and break things.”

“Enough investigation?” Blancanales asked.

Lyons nodded. “Now it’s time for prosecution.”

Schwarz grinned. “Prosecution to the max, baby.”

Able Team drove off, ready for war in the streets.

C ALVIN J AMES, RIDING IN the backseat of the Peugeot station wagon with “Atalanta” Kristopoulos, answered his satellite phone’s chirp on the first ring.

“Farrow here,” James said, using his cover name.

“We have news from across the pond.” Barbara Price opened the conversation. “Ironman and his boys encountered some delivery men just like yours. Their special present was a two-fold surprise.”

“Whatever it is, it had a self-destruct mechanism,” James deduced. That brought sharp stares from the others in the station wagon.

“All right. Only one surprise,” Price corrected herself.

“It was a robot?” James inquired.

“Here’s the surprise. It’s been rigged with antipersonnel defenses, and was utilized for the assassination of an investigator that Ironman was liaising with,” Price explained. “It gave Ironman a pounding with Tasers, a wire saw and its tail boom.”

“Tail?” James asked.

“It’s a worm- or snake-shaped robot, which probably allows for greater flexibility through vents and drainage pipes,” Price said.

“Okay. That makes sense. I was imagining one of those modified radio-controlled cars or a rebuilt lawn mower device like the battle bots that show up on British television,” James said. “So the delivery men don’t control the robots themselves?”

“No, but they do sit on a remote signal relay,” Price told him. “Gadgets and Bear agree that the command frequency is beamed through a tight focus point, which allows the signal to penetrate concrete and steel over short distances.”

“The usual structures of a nuclear power plant would interfere with the robot’s reception,” James agreed, following Price’s logic.

“Precisely,” she said. “A narrow-band, high-energy transmission allows for real time control in a power-plant campus or even your average office building.”

“And these things are rigged for fighting?” James continued.

“Ironman was tased, and when the saw got snarled on a wastebasket he used for a shield, it nearly shattered his arm with its shield,” Price recounted. “But that was the extent of its offensive weaponry.”

“So it’s agile and tough to escape our favorite caveman,” James said.

“Carl put a .357 SIG round into it and was only able to take out the robot’s Taser battery,” Price described. “I’d hate to see what would happen if the Taser were replaced with a Glock.”

“Chances are, that’s what we’ll have to deal with,” James muttered. “Thanks for the heads-up on the destruct mechanism, as well.”

“It’s enough to kill everyone inside of a Grumman Kurbmaster,” Price added. “But Carl was only fifteen feet from the van when it exploded, and came through unharmed. That’s not to say the destruct mechanism can’t produce its own shrapnel.”

“Add in constant monitoring, presumably through built-in cameras,” James said.

“Just built-in cameras?” Encizo asked from the Peugeot’s shotgun seat. “Ask mother hen if she happens to have an eye in the sky over our position.”

“Just satellites.” James relayed her answer. “And they don’t see anything in the air.”

Farkas spoke up. “That’s the point of remote observation drones. If they showed up on radar and aerial cameras.”

“Figures,” Kristopoulos grumbled. “Robots belly-crawling on the ground and flying in the air over our heads.”

“It’s only observing us so far,” Encizo said. “But if they warn the Brotherhood members in the van or if it has weapons of its own, we’re screwed.”

“We are hanging back far enough that the drone operator may not think we’re following their people,” Farkas offered.

“If they are paranoid enough to put a set of eyes in the air, then they’re too smart to leave our continued trailing of their deliverymen to chance,” Encizo countered. “We were made long before I ever noticed their bird.”

“Well, that’s the end of a perfectly good surveillance operation,” Kristopoulos said. “What would be their response?”

“Anything from scorched earth to the Brotherhood engaging in evasive maneuvers,” James said. “But the deliverymen don’t seem to have deviated from their normal course.”

“Maybe they want us to know,” Farkas said. “After all, how do you defend against armed, murderous robots?”

Encizo brought his field glasses to bear on the back of the Muslim Brotherhood van. “The back door just moved.”

The Cuban drew his Glock 34 from its spot in a cross-draw holster under his photographer’s vest. He heard Kristopoulos and James do likewise in the backseat.

“We might not know how to prevent robots from infiltrating a nuclear power plant, but a pissed-off terrorist with an assault rifle is practically a Friday-night get-together for us,” James said.

A hundred yards ahead, the muzzle-flash of an AK-47 burned. Even as the windshield cracked and deformed under the first impact, Farkas swerved hard to avoid the rain of shattered glass and steel-cored bullets tearing into their vehicle.

CHAPTER THREE

Rafael Encizo crouched tightly in the passenger’s seat of the Peugeot as Farkas swerved. Bullets cut through the windshield and metal frame holding up the roof of the automobile before slicing the air over his head. Centifugal force and the anxiety of 7.62 mm rounds snapping past so close that his black hair flew with their passage made him grip the Glock 34 Tactical pistol tightly in his fist. Only his index finger resting on the dust cover kept the point-and-pull weapon from discharging from muscle tension. The idea of a handgun versus a Kalashnikov didn’t appeal to the Cuban Phoenix Force veteran, even though the G-34’s five-plus-inch barrel milked every ounce of range, power and accuracy out of the 9 mm round it fired. The polymer pistol still lacked the punch and reach of a .30-caliber rifle.

“Damn!” he heard Calvin James bellow from the backseat.

“Are you hit?” Encizo called back.

“Got cut by flying glass!” James snarled. “Farkas, pull over. We’ll get our big guns from the trunk.”

“No can do!” Farkas returned. “The Brotherhood is coming back around!”

The station wagon squealed its tires as Farkas spun the vehicle away from the enemy van. Its roof and all of its windows were blasted into a sieve of shattered glass and perforated metal. The hostile truck went into full reverse, backing toward them. The Peugeot ground to a halt, and Encizo realized that he was facing the stern of the Brotherhood’s van head-on. If this was an old naval battle, Encizo would have been in position for an unopposed salvo on the vehicle, but in a modern assault-rifle battle where he’d only brought a side arm, he was a sitting duck, even behind the door of the station wagon. The gunman in the back poured on more fire. Encizo winced as a round, slowed by the car door, plunked into the Kevlar he wore. The body armor barely protected his stomach from the awesome punch of the Kalashnikov bullet. In response, Encizo thrust the Glock out of the passenger’s window and blazed away. A half-dozen rounds jetted out of the extra-length barrel and speared through the night at the enemy gunner, each shot going off as fast as Encizo could pull the trigger.

From the back, James and Kristopoulos added their firepower to the fusillade of 9 mm clatter against the Muslim Brotherhood vehicle. The handgun rounds just didn’t have the same oomph. Rather than punch through the door that the enemy gunman was using for cover, they merely dented the metal, and they weren’t even able to smash the window through which they could see the silhouette of his head. The rounds only smacked starred impact craters in the glass. Sure, the fifty-yard distance lessened the penetrative punch of their bullets, but as the Brotherhood van drew closer, a second rifleman poked his weapon out of the passenger’s window.

“Hit the gas!” the Cuban shouted. The Peugeot station wagon shot forward, avoiding the twin streams of full automatic thunder. The rifles clattered as their owners swung the muzzles of their weapons in an effort to keep up with Phoenix Force and company.

Encizo levelled his Glock now that he had an angle on the open, passenger’s-side window of the enemy vehicle. He ripped off four fast shots, and while he couldn’t hit the head or the torso of the Egyptian gunman inside, he was able to break the killer’s arm with three lucky hits. His last bullet clanged off of the AKM’s receiver. Forearm bones splintered and muscles chopped into a bloody mess of shredded mead and the Egyptian terrorist let his weapon clatter into the dirt road.

The Brotherhood van swerved hard as the Peugeot swung for a brief moment, parallel to the enemy vehicle. Phoenix Force and their allies were the only ones able to open up, this time taking full advantage of the broadside they had been presented. At the space of ten feet, the Glocks had more than enough punch to tear through the van’s thin metal skin. James, Encizo and Kristopoulos unleashed a torrent of rapid-fire handgun rounds into the hostile van, the Peugeot’s interior filling with smoke and thunder. Though no handgun could be fired with the speed of a submachine gun or assault rifle, the three warriors were more than able to pour on a storm of copper-jacketed lead that slashed across the van’s passenger side. The wounded rifleman’s head snapped violently as it caught a 9 mm slug cored through his temple. The enemy vehicle jerked violently as blood and brain matter flew into the driver’s eyes, shocking and blinding him.

“That got him,” James growled as the Egyptian radicals ground noisily against a roadside barrier in a spray of sparks from metal-on-stone violence.

The rear of the van vomited a tongue of flame and the roar of an AK-47 that blew the rear window out of their station wagon.

Kristopoulos glared at James. “They didn’t stay screwed.”

“Less bitching, more shooting!” Encizo snapped at the bickering pair in the back.

“I concur!” Farkas agreed as he cranked the steering wheel, pulling the group out of the line of fire of the enemy assault rifle. “Kill him!”

Once again, Encizo, James and Kristopoulos opened up with their side arms, but Farkas, in his instinctive effort to avoid the withering bite of the enemy gunman’s full-auto assault rifle, had pulled their station wagon out of direct view of their target. Their 9 mm bullets clanged against the side of the Brotherhood van, but there was no way to tell if they had struck the gunman in the van’s cargo compartment.

“We don’t have a shot, Farkas,” the Cuban complained.

“If we get a shot, we’ll be taking fire, too, and this car’s already more collander than transportation,” Farkas countered.

Encizo glanced back up the road. “Then drive back to where we jousted with the Brotherhood. One of them dropped their rifle.”

Farkas looked doubtful for the space of a heartbeat, but threw the Peugeot into gear and spun to where Encizo had pointed. Clouds of road dust and loose sand kicked up as the wagon fought for traction, providing the Egyptian-Israeli-Phoenix Force alliance with a smoke screen.

The Cuban commando opened the door and hung his hand down to almost road level to scoop up the Kalashnikov, but Farkas drove too quickly for Encizo to snag the AK on the first pass. The Brotherhood radical in the van took that moment to step out onto the street and open fire. The Peugeot’s back tires exploded as rifle slugs smashed into them. Farkas found himself battling against a wild spinout that hurled Encizo into the road through the open car door.

“Rafe!” James’s voice cut through Encizo’s awareness. The stocky Cuban tucked his chin down to his chest and hit the dirt on his shoulders, rather than his neck or head, sparing him a spine-crushing impact. The powerful muscles of his well-toned swimmer’s body cushioned his landing as he rolled in a somersault that bled off the momentum of his launch. Though he was not nearly as powerful as his Phoenix Force partner Gary Manning or the leader of Able Team, Carl Lyons, he was still possessed of a phenomenal musculature that shielded his body from crippling injury, and the added agility of his smaller size enabled him to recover from the rough landing. He saw that he was close to the fallen Kalashnikov carbine. Encizo’s powerful legs kicked hard and threw him the ten feet to the equalizing weapon he’d sought. A deft scoop and Encizo swung the AK onto the Egyptian Brotherhood gunman. Kalashnikov steel-cored slugs tore into the violent radical, ripping him from crotch to throat, and the horrendous gash of autofire spilled out ropey intestines that looped down around his thighs. The gunman staggered for a moment, looking down at entrails pouring out of his torn-open torso. It took a few moments, but finally his strength gave out and he collapsed in a puddle of guts and gore.

James, Kristopoulos and Farkas scrambled to Encizo’s side, finally armed with their rifles, recovered from the station wagon’s hidden compartment.

“You all right, Rafe?” James asked.

“I’ll be good, Farrow,” Encizo answered, accepting the SIG 551 carbine from his partner. He didn’t have to check to see that a magazine was in place and a round chambered. Phoenix Force operatives rarely went anywhere without a weapon ready for instant action. A sanitized rifle was as useful as a blunt-edged sword.

“Their driver isn’t moving,” Farkas reported. “We made a clean sweep of the scumbags, but that leaves us with nothing in terms of intelligence.”

“There’s always the crates inside the can,” Kristopoulos said. “If you’re willing to deal with a self-destruct mechanism that’s killed at least two members of this robot conspiracy.”

James sighed. “Stay here. I’ll check the van out.”

“Alone?” Kristopoulos asked.

“Alone,” James emphasized. He glanced over to Encizo. “Rey took a nasty tumble, and I seriously do not want to piss off the Israeli or Egyptian governments by losing either of you two to a booby trap. That just leaves me.”

Encizo patted his SIG carbine. “We’ll provide cover fire for you if the robots wake up, or if our eyes in the sky takes more than a passive role in this bit.”

James smirked. “Well, I was hoping you’d say that. I’m risking my life, not throwing it away.”

“I’ve got your back,” the Cuban said.

Farkas gave his rifle a pat in silent agreement with the Phoenix Force veteran.

James looked at Kristopoulos, who fumed but eventually nodded her assent that his plan held merit.

James kept his SIG 551 carbine at low ready, and made the approach to the wrecked enemy van. The driver looked as if he was out of the fight, but he could have been playing possum in the wake of his comrades’ deaths. There was also Lyons’s warning of the lethal antipersonnel capabilities of the infiltrator robots. At least one American was dead because of the weaponry bristling within the deadly little automaton’s form. James glanced skyward and saw a dim flicker of movement in the night overhead.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle stalking in the dark, starless velvet of night cover was another risk that James added to the dangers on this quiet Egyptian road. The unmanned drone in the sky was visible, but only barely. James knew from experience that the converse was vastly different, thanks to built-in infrared and light-amplification optics that transmitted even in the darkest pitch of night. James had seen UAV camera footage and he knew that to the machine’s operator, he was a glowing, bright target, easily followed and destroyed, especially if the drone was armed. The warriors of Stony Man had gone against too many UAVs with weapons ranging from machine guns and antitank missiles to payloads of nerve gas and even nuclear warheads. The drone, nearly invisible and totally silent, maintained its ghostly watch on James and his companions, not drawing closer to the grounded prey.

A clatter resounded from the cargo compartment of the van, and James snapped his rifle to his shoulder, his eyes and muzzle covering the same space. He checked the driver’s seat first, but the Brotherhood wheelman was only just stirring, dazed and confused. He was in no position to do anything that would have precipitated the metallic sound James had heard. James crab-walked sideways to get a better angle on the open rear doors. He paused and stepped back to avoid tripping over the gory mass of twisted flesh and bone that used to be a hostile enemy rifleman. The man who had caused them so much trouble was nothing more than a messy puddle now. As James moved past the corpse, something slithered out of the back of the van.

James searched for the source of the burst of movement, but the robot had disappeared beneath the undercarriage of the van. He checked his hands-free radio to reach the others left behind, but had to endure the screech of static that blasted out of his earphone. The former SEAL was alone against a hostile mechanism with the power to kill, thanks to the enemy’s ability to jam electronic signals.

A gunshot rang out and James felt the impact of a 9 mm slug against his upper chest. He collapsed to the dirt, but rolled to avoid further fire from the hostile robot. He was glad that he wore his Kevlar body armor under his shirt, despite the oppressive Egyptian heat. The armored material had stopped a bullet meant for his heart, fired with deadly accuracy by the stealthy infiltration automaton. James triggered his SIG from where he had landed on his back, 5.56 mm rounds kicking up dirt where the muzzle-flash had originated.

James was rewarded for his efforts by a bullet glancing off of his carbine. The impact rammed the receiver into his cheek, dazing him for a moment, but Encizo, Farkas and Kristopoulos opened up to give the stunned Stony Man medic a chance to recover his senses. The only problem was that a robot operating via remote control was not intimidated by incoming rifle fire. It had no need to flinch, even if it was operated by someone on the other side of its camera feed. The undercarriage lit up as the automaton turned its attention to the trio of human operatives who dared to attack it.

James dumped the magazine on his SIG, working the action by hand. There seemed to be no interference, but considering that this was a life-or-death battle, the Phoenix pro wasn’t about to take any half measures with his survival. He fed in a new load, chambered a round effortlessly and cut loose on the gap beneath the van. Sparks flew as 5.56 mm rounds impacted on the segmented robot. The curved steel compartments of the machine’s body readily deflected the 5.56 mm rounds that struck it.

James saw a flare light and he knew that a ricochet had punctured the gas tank. Dripping gas was ignited, and the robot was now lost in a roaring cauldron of fire. If this had been a movie, the van would have rocketed skyward on a column of blossoming fire, but that usually occurred with the assistance of several pounds of plastic explosives and hydraulic rams. The reality was that there weren’t enough fumes inside the van’s gas tank to cause an explosive situation as the liquid fuel poured and kept the enflamed gasoline from detonating. As the gas burned in open air, it had room to expand without increased pressure.

James had hoped that the blazing heat would have hindered the enemy robot, but another gunshot hammered into the dirt close to him. The rebounding slug clipped him across the collarbone, only striking the Kevlar vest’s shoulder strap. It was a stunning blow regardless, and his rifle dropped into the dirt. He rolled away from the fallen weapon, another round only missing by inches, plucking the cloth of his pant leg.

Cut off from communications with his partner and under fire from an enemy robot obscured by a wreath of flame, James rolled, scurrying out of the path of the hostile mounted weapon. Somewhere in the crackling blaze beneath the van, the robot swiveled and turned to keep its aim directed at the prone Phoenix Force fighter.

It wasn’t much better than the rifle at this range, but the former Navy SEAL pulled his Glock and cut loose with it. The wide-mouthed hollowpoints, however, would have a better chance to snag on the smooth, curved skin of the enemy mechanism and cut into its electronic guts. James grimaced as he realized that he was no better than shooting blind into the harsh glow of the burning gasoline, but he emptied a half-dozen shots, cranking the trigger as fast as it reset against his finger.

A burning figure scurried out from under the van. James swung his point of aim to pursue the fiery mechanism when a second round of gunfire burst out of the van. Two robots were applying pressure on the Phoenix commando now, and this one had been shielded from the flames by the interior of the van. He pushed himself to his feet and charged out of view of the back of the vehicle. Bullets kicked up sand at his heels as the second infiltration mechanism cranked off rounds at him. Encizo, in the distance, opened up with his SIG carbine, 5.56 mm rounds able to pass through the skin of the van as if it was made of paper. James skidded to a halt to avoid crossing his partner’s line of fire. The full magazine tore a precision burst through the vehicle, and a limping, floppy mechanism crashed out of the rear doors into the dirt.

James swung his Glock toward it when a bullet hit him just above the solar plexus. Fortunately, the Kevlar prevented a catastrophic injury again, but the impact knocked the wind out of James’s lungs. Farkas and Kristopoulos turned their rifles against the muzzle-flash, which originated from a flaming copse of grass where the first robot had escaped. The two robots swung and cut loose with their weapons. Kristopoulos jerked as she took a round in the thigh, outside of the protection of her body armor. The bullet only struck muscle, not bone or artery, and she somehow managed to find the strength to continue to stand and fire. Farkas slipped his arm around her waist and triggered his AK from the hip. James whirled back to the machine that Encizo had damaged. It writhed in an effort to target the closer Phoenix Force commando. Together James and Encizo concentrated their fire on the machine as its operator struggled to choose between the two Phoenix targets.

A storm of 9 mm and 5.56 mm slugs tore into the silvery form and chewed it into confetti, knocking segments apart. James had reloaded his 17-round magazine twice in rapid succession and Encizo had fed a new magazine into his carbine.

“The other one’s still moving!” Encizo relayed across from the pair of Farkas and Kristopoulos. “How much punishment can these things take?”

“Not that much when you can concentrate fire on them,” James said. “But it’s not like shooting an animal or a human. These things probably have redundant motors and electronic systems that make them harder to incapacitate. Throw in their metal covering and the fact that they don’t have the breath—”

“Enough lecture! Get your rifle!” Encizo snapped. He reloaded his spent SIG’s magazine and ripped off a full automatic fusillade against the burning shrubbery. James scooped up his weapon and added his firepower to the final knockout. Four people with automatic weapons had expended almost 500 rounds in unison against a pair of these mechanisms, and had unhindered fields of fire against them.

James knew that any attempt to hunt these down in the confines of a nuclear facility would be a nightmarish struggle, even if they could manage to spot such robots in ventilation ducts and access pipes. The Chicago Phoenix Force warrior continued to pound out the contents of a second magazine into the writhing mass of machinery until it stopped twitching. He held his distance, not wanting to be caught in a self-destruct mechanism blast radius, but since the robot had been torn to shredded metal, he wondered if any detonator would have been still in operation after such a hammering.

“Farkas, are you and Atalanta all right?” James called.

“We’ll be fine,” the Egyptian said. “I’m applying first aid to her leg. She only took it in the meat, nothing structural or circulatory harmed.”

James nodded. “Let me handle that. We need a bomb team here, just to be certain.”

Encizo walked closer to the robot that he and James had poured nearly a hundred bullets into. “How many times did we have to hit the other one, after you’d lit it on fire?”

James looked up from Kristopoulos, medical kit in one hand. He looked at the Greek Israeli woman. “How many magazines from you?”

“Only one from my rifle before that bastard smacked me in the leg,” Kristopoulos growled. “Then I transitioned to my SIG-Sauer.”

“Farkas?” James asked.

“Two magazines from my AK. Then what you two threw at it,” the Egyptian said.

Encizo held up his hand to cut off James’s estimation. None was needed. “We’re looking at devices that possess a remarkable amount of durability. If it takes at least ninety rounds of 5.56 mm, not counting the stuff that managed to hit with Farkas firing his AK from the hip, these things require the same kind of firepower that’s reserved for anti-aircraft or anti-matériel purposes.”

James frowned. “Then again, Carl did disable some of its mechanism with a .357 SIG round.”

“He disabled the Taser,” Encizo countered. “One component in an arsenal. And that was a high-pressure, near-Magnum round at a range of less than five feet.”

“So we utilize more appropriate weaponry,” James said.

“Like what?” Farkas asked.

“Shotgun saboted slugs?” Kristopoulos suggested.

“You read my mind,” James returned. “Then I’ve also seen bomb disposal robots which utilized a .44 Magnum Redhawk.”

“That’s old school,” Kristopoulos said. “How old are you again?”

James looked at the Greek woman, then smiled. “I’d tell you, but it’d depress me.”

“Give me some credit, Mr. Farrow,” Kristopoulos replied.

Farkas was on the phone to his allies in Unit 777. Encizo scanned the air overhead, frowning.

“Is the UAV still up there?” James asked.

“It’s moved on,” Encizo replied. “Just the same, I wouldn’t go close to the robots until the bomb squad has dealt with them.”

“At least it wasn’t armed,” James returned.

“No, but now whoever is in control of these machines knows what we look like,” Encizo said.

James frowned. “General appearance.”

“So how many tall African-Americans and stocky Hispanics have you seen running around with weaponry in Egypt?” Encizo asked.

James sighed. “I’ll get back on the horn to Barb to see if we can get some sanitization of our identities.”

“Paranoid much?” Kristopoulos asked.

“Says the woman using a code name plucked from mythology,” James said. “I thought Mossad and Unit 777 trusted each other and didn’t have to hide behind fake identities.”

Kristopoulos wrinkled her nose. “Point taken.”

“A demolitions team will be by to deal with the carcasses,” Farkas announced. “And an ambulance if our Israeli visitor is inclined to go to the doctor.”

“It was far from my heart,” Kristopoulos answered. “I’ll deal with the pain.”

“Stubborn as one of us,” Farkas sighed.

“Help me up, Farrow,” Kristopoulos said. “I don’t want to look hurt in front of our hosts.”

James nodded and assisted her to her feet.

Encizo continued to watch the night skies, as if he could penetrate the gloom and his sense of dread to find the mysterious foes who had caused so much mayhem on this quiet Egyptian street.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Paris bakery was run by a friend of one of David McCarter’s friends. A network of people around the globe could give the Briton access to weaponry when he needed it. Sure, there was a long streak where Phoenix Force had military flights or passes through customs with huge suitcases of rifles and grenade launchers, but the truth was, such free rides weren’t always reliable. More than once across the long and storied career of the team, they’d had to rely on utensils found on-site.

Daniel Mittner was one such supplier of wares in McCarter’s network of European contacts. In Europe, it was becoming more difficult to find reliable, decent arms dealers with access to the kind of gear Phoenix Force required in the field due simply to harsher regulations. Not that the less scrupulous dealers had such qualms, but when it came to gun runners that McCarter could trust with quality equipment and privacy, Mittner was a rare deal for the team.

Mittner glanced up from his counter in the nearly empty bakery, his bleary eyes recognizing McCarter instantly. “Oy. Three unsavory chaps like you blowing through my door? It’s a bloody good wager someone would think you’d come looking for guns. Lord knows you’d draw a touch of interest from John Law.”

McCarter looked around the bakery and saw a lone man, disheveled with a jaw covered in stubble, take a sip of coffee. The reaction on his face told the Briton that whatever he had just drank ranked with Aaron Kurtzman’s worst pots of brew. The coffee drinker was a local Frenchman, and from his state, McCarter could tell that he was an armed, undercover police officer. McCarter glared at Mittner, making his look as dirty as he possibly could.

The Frenchman took a bite of a scone that crunched as if it were made of plaster.

“What? Just because we came in here with a dumb American Southerner…” McCarter began.

Manning tapped McCarter on the arm. “You’re being redundant.”

Hawkins nodded. “And wrong. I might have been born in the dirty South, but I was raised in Texas. There’s the South, and then there’s Texas. Never the twain shall meet, got it, hoss?”

McCarter rolled his eyes at the interruptions. “Sorry. Just because we have a redneck idiot—”

“Redundancy,” Manning interrupted again.

McCarter gave Manning a scowl. He looked at Hawkins, who merely nodded in approval over the latest appelation the Briton had given him. Presumably after the faux pas with stereotyping the French, he was accepting pennance for his Texas cliché.

“Just because we have a Texan with us does not mean we’re gun-obsessed morons with no sense of awe and wonder,” McCarter finished. “Can’t a bloke walk into a bakery for biscuits and tea?”

Mittner nodded at the lone patron, who nodded in return as he stood. “If you will excuse me, I must retire to the men’s room. This coffee runs through a man as if it were a flood tide.”

“You know where to go, Bertrand,” Mittner stated.

Bertrand nodded to the counter man and walked down a hallway.

“We don’t have much time,” Mittner said. “He’s paid well to ignore certain things, and he doesn’t agree with the current administration of intelligence services in this country.”

“So he knows, but he can’t say what we’re doing here if he’s in the loo for the bulk of our conversation,” McCarter concluded.

“Makes things a little simpler,” Hawkins said, standing in the hallway leading to the washroom. “You know him, David?”

“No real names, Texan,” McCarter cut him off.

Mittner nodded in agreement. “He knows the type. A no-bullshit officer. You’ll want locker FP5.”

Mittner slid a key onto the counter that McCarter took, exchanging it for euro notes with numbers written into the margins. Mittner looked them over. “You’ll inform me of the replacement code when you’re satisfied?”

“I’ll be satisfied with combat Tupperware?” McCarter challenged.

“I told you, finding a Hi-Power in France at this time is like trying to find a public official who takes a shower,” Mittner returned.

Hawkins stifled a snort of laughter at Mittner’s comment.

“Which package did you provide?” McCarter asked.

“Your first option,” Mittner told the Phoenix Force commander.

“Well, can’t be too bad, then,” Manning said. “If it’s your first choice—”

“It’s not locked and cocked and made of steel, but it’ll do,” McCarter cut him off. “Thanks, Mittner.”

“Whatever you do, don’t get caught. It’s all well and good being an outlaw to do the right thing, but the French government doesn’t have much patience for outlaws,” Mittner warned.

“I promise not to kick their asses too badly,” McCarter replied.

Mittner handed the trio a small plate of almond croissants and three lattes. “On the house.”

“Thanks,” McCarter replied.

Hawkins took a bite of his pastry reluctantly, after remembering the condemnation Bertrand had given to Mittner’s cooking. He was surprised at the flavor and freshness of the croissant. “Where does Bertrand get off insulting his cooking?”

“Bertrand is on a budget, and he can’t justify spending money on Mittner’s good cooking, so he’s forced to eat the day-old baked goods,” Manning said. “Besides, if Mittner were to start making good stuff for the French agent hanging out at his shop, watching for arms deals, his supervisors would think that there was some form of collusion between them.”

McCarter took a sip of his latte. “Which there is, but the appearance of propriety makes up for a lot in terms of French collaboration.”

“Collaboration sounds pretty negative,” Hawkins noted.

“Not in this case,” McCarter said. “Mittner informed us directly that Bertrand was on our side. If we do happen to get nicked by the gendarmerie, we can call on him for a voucher. Though, if that does happen, we’re shit out of luck.”

“In other words, since we’re cheating, we better not get caught,” Hawkins mused.

“Precisely,” McCarter said. “We scored pretty well. I had Mittner pull a set of Steyr AUG A-3 rifles with Aimpoint scopes and a selection of alternate barrels. For side arms, we have SIG-Sauer SP-2022 pistols.”

“Ah. Plastic pistols with hammers.” Hawkins spoke up. “Why not a Heckler & Koch USP?”

“The French don’t like German guns,” McCarter said.

“But SIG-Sauer is…” Hawkins began.

“Once more, the image of propriety,” McCarter returned. “Plus, the SP-2022 is the new side arm of choice of French law enforcement. We can score ammunition and magazines easily if we have to.”

“Point taken,” Hawins affirmed.

“Now, we’ve got leads to check out,” McCarter continued.

“You’ve been getting updates from Barb?” Hawkins asked.

McCarter tapped his phone. “Of course. Plus, Gary used to do business with some chaps in France’s nuclear power security back when he owned his own company. We’ll tap them, as well.”

Hawkins looked at Manning. “Man, I wish they’d picked someone with more real world contacts than a silk jumper and ground pounder like me.”

“Don’t worry, son,” Manning replied. “Stick with us, and you’ll get a real education.”

Phoenix Force hit the streets to pick up their weapons.

A ARON K URTZMAN PINCHED THE flesh between his eyebrows, tired of looking into the depths of the Department of Energy database for signs of electronic penetration by hackers. Lyons had been adamant that there was the possibility that the infiltrator robot had also been capable of introducing either a tap on the DoE’s files or planted some form of logic bomb that would cause problems with the emergency protocols intended to prevent a hacker from endangering a nuclear power plant by remote control.

The threat of a hostile computer takeover was something that the Department of Energy was aware of since the old DARPA days of the Internet. Not only did the agency have on-call Nuclear Emergency Special Teams capable of countering terrorists like a national SWAT team, but they had electronic warfare and cybernetic infiltration experts on hand to keep the control apparatus of the nation’s nuclear power secure. Even then, Stony Man had to work with the DoE on multiple occasions against threats too great even for the NEST squads to deal with, such as the ninja-skilled Tigers of Justice or KGB-backed forces out to force meltdowns of reactors.

Kurtzman shot a glance to Huntington Wethers, who was at his workstation, his unblinking eyes focused on his monitor. “Hunt, did you notice any errant lines of code in the system?”

“None so far. I’m barely halfway through my search, however, Aaron,” Wethers replied. He gnawed on the stem of his pipe, not looking away from his monitor as he scanned the DoE operating system for any recent changes.

Kurtzman rubbed his forehead and rolled his wheelchair over to the coffeepot where Carmen Delahunt was mixing cold water with the freshly brewed chai tea she’d brought to the computer center. “Anything on the crispy critters that Lyons and the boys left behind in D.C.?”

“Not a thing. The explosion removed everything that could have identified them quickly. We’re stuck with DNA coding, and CODIS is nowhere near as fast as it appears to be on TV crime procedurals,” Delahunt answered. She took a sip of her tea and licked her lips.

“So, we’ve got at least three days before we can figure out if the dead perps are somehow in the DNA database,” Kurtzman murmured. He sighed. “By then, we could have a China syndrome incident four times over.”

“Which is why Carl and the boys are pounding the street and going through the likely goons who would have made a fake UPS truck,” Delahunt told him. “Sometimes, all we can do is pore over computer programs looking for kinky programming and viruses left behind. All the satellites and computerized search engines in the world aren’t going to replace shoe leather on a sidewalk and a shotgun in your fists doing the real work.”

“Nope,” Kurtzman said. “But don’t tell Barb that. She thinks we can do anything.” He paused to pour himself a mug of his high-octane sludge, then took a sip and sighed. “I’m going to see what Akira has on the French situation.”

“The new Directorates talk a big game about operational security, but Akira’s been tap-dancing through their systems pretty easily,” Delahunt said.

Kurtzman nodded. “It’s all that twitchiness in his reflexes. He’s too fast for their system to adapt to. Quick and low profile is the way things work best, at least when you’re in a hostile land.”

“The same applies to David, Gary and T.J.,” Delahunt noted. “They slipped into France, and now they’re gearing up with a nonstandard supplier. Akira’s doing his best to give them targets to look at, but mostly, it’s up to those three.”

“Once again, we’re batting cleanup and doing the boring work,” Kurtzman complained. “Any word from Cal and Rafe?”

“Nothing after they took out the probe team,” Delahunt explained. “Right now, they’re with Unit 777 looking over the infiltration robots, but considering how badly they damaged them, we’re not going to have too much success figuring out the origins of their components or who built them.”

“How badly damaged?” Kurtzman asked.

“Each took about 120 to 150 hits from rifle and handgun rounds,” Delahunt replied.

“That much?” Kurtzman exclaimed.

“That’s how long the robots kept shooting back,” Delahunt explained.

Kurtzman frowned. He remembered the faxed scans of the designs whipped up by Schwarz based on Lyons’s description of the robots. “Okay, that makes sense. It also makes them scarier. You’d need a heavy machine gun to take out one of those things.”

“Wouldn’t that be the point? You don’t want a soap bubble sent in. It takes a knock in a vent, and you’ve wasted the effort. Force four people to pour bullets into one robot, maybe even more, and you’ve tied up half a SWAT team,” Delahunt replied. “They probably have redundant communications, as well, making it harder to jam whatever signals are being directed toward them.”

“Encizo also noticed a UAV over the truck, correct?” Kurtzman asked.

“Extra complication,” Delahunt admitted. “Akira’s got a search running for missing UAVs in the area, but this might be some leftovers from the last missing bits from a U.S. military shipment to Egypt that Striker encountered.”

“I thought we tied up all of those loose ends,” Kurtzman groaned.

“You put a lot of military tech on the black market, you have to deal with trickles of it for years,” Delahunt grumbled.

“Well, at least we have records. I’ll see if we can find back-door commands to get into the UAV CPUs,” Kurtzman said. “There’s a possibility that they haven’t gone completely over to a new operating system to run the stolen birds.”

“Though if they’re good, they’ll have gone through and closed those loopholes,” Delahunt noted. “And they might well be the best. They found the DoE agent on their case.”

Kurtzman grimaced. “I’ll see what I can scrounge up. Maybe they’ve left a hole as bait for us. They’ll know that someone would be on their case in cyberspace. It’s a good bet they’ll want a shot at their competition.”

“So there’s a chance we might have to go on viral lockdown again?” Delahunt asked.

“Better us than someone who can’t handle a worm or logic bomb,” Kurtzman explained. “We can cordon off any infection. The FBI or CIA get hit, and there’s a chance we lose half the intel that Homeland Security somehow managed to gather.”

“Half of nothing, you mean?” Delahunt asked. “I fail to see how bloating the intelligence-gathering process does anything for securing our national security.”

“Don’t say that too loud,” Kurtzman replied. “There are still types who’d rather trade their freedom for security up the road.”

Delahunt made a face. “You’d have thought after eight years of that kind of ineptitude, we’d be done with it by now.”

“Promises made are just pillow talk. Politics is still the Greek term for many blood-sucking insects, not many truth speakers,” Kurtzman growled.

“Back to work?” Delahunt asked.

Kurtzman sighed. “The bad guys aren’t going to find themselves for us, are they?”

“Nope,” Delahunt answered.

The two computer experts returned to their workstations, toiling on in the search for any link to the robot masters.

D ARRIN H OMM LOOKED OVER the UAV footage from Egypt. Though the images were grainy due to the lack of finesse inherent to night vision, he still had height and weight estimations thanks to computerized parallax analysis relating the images to known objects on the ground around them. He entered the data into a search program that contained dossiers for known current and past agents of a half-dozen governments.

With that particular information, the computer mastermind turned to his partner, Mischa Shenck, putting the pictures down in front of the engineer. Shenck looked at the printed photos, then raised an eyebrow.

“An African in Africa?” the Russian-born cyberneticist asked.

“African-American,” Homm replied. “But black Americans are usually tourists, and Egypt doesn’t let tourists run around with state-of-the-art assault rifles.”

Shenck looked at the picture. “So, he’d be an American CIA agent? Special Forces?”

“Special Forces is straight Army. Get the facts straight,” Homm growled.

Shenck sighed, knowing the computer expert’s obsessive-compulsive disdain for improper terminology. “Sorry. Special operations.”

“Likely special operations. I put that face through recognition software, but it’s come back as a null return,” Homm said. “That marks him as a sanitized operative since he doesn’t even register on recognition patterns.”

“So, you want me to help you figure out who he is?” Shenck asked. “He’s been sanitized by professionals if he’s a nonentity in your recognition program. Whoever wiped him out of the database would have been thorough.”

Homm nodded. “If anything, they are working closely with the Egyptian authorities. Their driver is a member of Unit 777.”

“It’s not much to go on,” Shenck said.

“Bullshit it’s not. Somehow, two Americans brought their own personal weapons, because SIG-Sauer is not standard Egyptian gear, even for their high-speed, low-drag units,” Homm said. “And they were on watch for our robots.”

“Which means we’re not talking about a large agency here,” Shenck said. “The Americans at the Department of Energy had only encountered the other robot a few hours ago. Intelligence agencies take days to get word to units in other cities, let alone other countries.”

“Hence the logic of a small agency or a tightly knit department,” Homm suggested.

“Something around twenty people,” Shenck mused. “Half in the field, half working cyber support. They undoubtedly have an efficient and secure communications network, as well, so tapping them will be nearly impossible.”

“They might be hard to trace, but they have their own contacts and allies abroad,” Homm stated. “So we should be able to tap whomever they’re working with.”

“Breaking the DoE and Egyptian military intelligence networks to figure out who they’re interfacing with will be your job, but this group does sound sort of familiar,” Shenck said. “Did you only get a picture of the black man?”

“There was an Israeli woman. I managed to pry her identity from Mossad’s computers,” Homm said. “And she was with another man.”

“Did you run him through?” Shenck asked.

“He also had a zero response,” Homm answered. “He was of average height and build, though.”

Shenck looked at the second American’s photo. He smiled. “Just what I expected.”

“Who did you think you would find?” Homm asked.

“The Latino member of the team,” Shenck answered.

“One black. One Latino. And three sort of average white men as partners?” Homm suggested.

“Exactly,” Shenck replied. “We’ve come up against the urban legend known as Phoenix Force.”

Homm punched the desk between them. “Damn! That means the big blond guy who didn’t even stop when we hit him with the Taser must have been from their so-called sister team, Able.”

“Presumably the same Mr. Stone who my former friends in the KGB despised so deeply,” Shenck said. “Stone or iron or some such invulnerable material fits the description of a man who shrugged off twenty thousand volts through a Taser.”

“So those two groups are allied?” Homm asked.

“Considering that they are aspects of the same myth, it is a likelihood,” Shenck said.

“These groups aren’t myths. We have photographs of them,” Homm growled.

“We’ve seen the basis for the mythology,” Shenck countered. “But the facts are not so clear in regard to what the nature of their organization is.”

“Their agency is large enough to operate in Washington, D.C., and outside of Inshas, Egypt, but they are still small enough to quickly communicate across the Atlantic Ocean. They also have their pulse on things, because Hirtenberg was investigating our touches on the DoE’s security system and they hooked up with the Mossad after the Negev near-incident,” Homm speculated.

“So they know all about our infiltration, the nature of the attack robots and our deal with local terror groups,” Shenck mused.

“They also know that we have Global Hawk UAV drones,” Homm said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have excellent face shots if they weren’t looking directly at the drone.”

“How screwed are we?” Shenck asked.

“It all depends on operations in France,” Homm replied. “And if they have their teams granulated enough to have a presence in Europe, as well.”

“You believe the teams have split?” Shenck asked.

“There’s only two visible in Egypt. We can’t discount the remainder of Phoenix Force being elsewhere, especially in the wake of the violence committed in Paris,” Homm sighed.

“What do we do?” Shenck asked.

“Adapt. Which means I call in some extra help on my side, and you utilize some of those upgrades which I thought would be too flashy,” Homm replied.

“What about Inshas?” Shenck asked.

“It gets hit with upgraded robots, but only once we’ve made certain that everyone is locked into Washington, D.C., and France,” Homm told him.

“So the Middle East will start suffering meltdowns, while our efforts in the U.S. and France are blunted?” Shenck asked.

“The U.S. operation is too widespread to be easily stopped, and France right now is on high alert. They’re not accepting help from the U.S.,” Homm said. “France might just be pulled off, and we have the flexibility in the States to do whatever we want.”

“Just have to know what we’re dealing with,” Shenck said. “All right. I’ve got some quick module ideas that we can send out.”

Homm smiled. After this, the panic against nuclear power would paralyze alternative power technology around the world.

The nightmare would only make them the most influential men in future technologies. If they somehow managed to survive the effort.

CHAPTER FIVE

David McCarter watched T. J. Hawkins finish scrubbing down and lubricating every bit of mechanism of the high-tech, polymer-composite Steyr AUG A-3 rifle in his possession. When the Southern Phoenix Force pro was concentrating on his weapons maintenance, there were few things that could distract the young man from his task.

Gary Manning turned off his cell phone and removed the wireless headset from his ear. “The Security Directorate isn’t aware of any outside investigation occuring within Paris at this moment. We’re pretty much in the clear.”

“Wouldn’t asking about their awareness put them on alert?” Hawkins asked as he reassembled his rifle.

“There is that worry, but don’t forget, not every organization is Stony Man,” Manning returned. “By the time they send through memos and requests for recognition, it will have been two or three days before we encounter any official interference.”

“That’s from the authorities themselves,” McCarter mused. “The DoE is the same kind of bloated, fragmented beauracracy as the new French internal security agency, but our opponents discovered the agent looking into their backtrail fast enough to send a killer robot snake after her.”

Manning nodded. “Which is why I routed the phone call through my cabin outside of Toronto. Whoever the opposition is, they might be genuinely misdirected for a few hours.”

McCarter watched the mechanical precision with which Hawkins worked on the AUG A-3 carbine. “I wouldn’t underestimate them. If Stony Man could catch a whiff of their interest in Europe’s nuclear reactor programs, then there’s a strong possibility that we’re going to have some drama on our end here.”

“So why are you looking at Hawkins’s rifle like it were some long-lost lover?” Manning asked.

“’Cause I cleaned it so well that it shines like a diamond,” Hawkins answered.

“No. I’m worried that according to Rafe and Cal, a 5.56 mm doesn’t have enough immediate punch to slow down one of those robots. The round’s fine for antipersonnel use at close range, but we’re dealing with small, tough-skinned mechanisms which contain redundant systems,” McCarter corrected.

Manning nodded. “Which is why you’re not the only one here who has friends in France with access to powerful guns.”

McCarter raised an eyebrow. “What are you thinking of?”

“We want a big, metal-crunching punch, so I arranged for a friend of mine to drop off something,” Manning said.

There was a knock at the back door and McCarter glanced toward it. Manning rose and went to answer. Over the big Canadian’s shoulder, the Briton could see a pretty woman with long, sable dark hair and glimmering blue eyes hand him a rectangular, gift-wrapped box.

Manning greeted her in French, and McCarter could hear enough to know that the brawny Canadian was telling her sweet nothings. Whatever compliments that Manning had for the woman could hardly be classified as lies, judging from the brief glimpses he caught of her. Manning gave the woman a kiss on her cheek, and closed the door.

“How do I arrange a delivery like that?” Hawkins asked.

“You know a beautiful, intelligent woman? Shame that you can’t find those with your looks and manners,” Manning responded.

“Southern charm mean anything to y’all?” Hawkins asked.

“You’ve never shown it,” Manning said with a wink.

McCarter grinned at the jab as Hawkins waved off the Canadian’s verbal barb. “We going to give the robots flowers and hope they contract hay fever?”

Manning sighed. “You know, that’s a good idea. Too bad my plan was more pedestrian.”

He opened the box and McCarter looked at the pistol-grip, folding-stock pump shotgun within and nodded. The Briton picked up a box of ammunition that was sitting next to the weapon in the gift-wrapped container. “Twelve-gauge slugs. Innocuous for deer hunting, but it’s also strong enough to smash what passes for engines in European automobiles.”

“Or smashing the self-destruct charge out of a killer snake robot,” Hawkins noted.

“Really?” Manning asked. “I never would have thought of that.”

Hawkins rolled his eyes. “Did you ever do this to James when he was still the youngest member of the team?”

“No. But then, Cal’s laid-back, experienced and worldly,” McCarter replied.

“Plus, we’re jealous of Gadgets and Pol and all the piss they take out of Carl,” Manning added.

“That, too,” McCarter agreed. “Can’t let the Yanks have all the fun.”

Hawkins rolled his eyes and went back to fieldstripping his SIG. “Pistol-grip pump?”

“With a Knoxx Comp-stock and a folding shoulder stock,” Manning said. “It can be fired like a handgun if need be. Lyons thinks the world of his Remington with the Comp.”

“Lyons also has been known to break coconuts in two with his bare hands,” Hawkins grumbled.

“Can’t everyone?” Manning asked.

“I forgot. You’ve got more muscles than Paul Bunyan. You just dress to hide ’em,” Hawkins said.

“All right. Enough chin wag.” McCarter cut his friends off. “We’ve got leads to run down and people to beat up.”

C ARL L YONS LET THE BEAST out, and right now the rage he felt against the conspiracy that murdered a fellow investigator came down in concentrated agony on the shoulder and elbow of Darius Morrison. The chicken-wing armlock applied to him bent the two joints at angles they could barely support, tendons stretched to the snapping point.

“I know you have something to say to me, Darius,” Lyons growled, his gas mask distorting his voice to make it even more animalistic. “The only question is whether you’ll ever be able to use your arm again after your rotator cuff is permanently torn.”

“You didn’t even ask a question!” Morrison howled in pain. Tears and mucus ran from his eyes and nose as capsaicin burned the tender tissues of his face. He coughed and sputtered, suffering from the effects of riot control gas and feeling the ache from where a neoprene baton had battered several ribs.

Lyons looked toward Schwarz and Blancanales, also disguised and concealed behind their own gas masks protecting them from the remaining wisps of burning chemical smoke. “I didn’t ask him anything?”

“Nope,” Schwarz answered.

“Well, you did say hit the floor when we poured tear gas, flash-bangs and riot batons into this bunch,” Blancanales pointed out. “But you haven’t asked a question since you crippled Mickey Giardelli.”

“Giardelli?” Morrison asked. “But he has an army—”

“Had an army,” Lyons snarled, the gas mask turning the response into a gutteral reply from a ferocious beast. “They’re being hosed off the concrete, along with Giardelli’s arms and legs. Pol, you have the rubber tubing?”

Blancanales held up the pale yellow tourniquets. Morrison saw Schwarz stroke the blade of a blood-crusted saw.

“The fuck you going to do?” Morrison whined.

“Keep you from bleeding to death,” Lyons told him. “That way, we can tell our boss that we didn’t kill anyone this week.”

“Not personally,” Schwarz added. “How was I to know that someone switched the first batch of tear gas for high-explosive fragmentation?”

“Don’t tell me that it’s your fault we have a half-dozen bodies jammed into the back of our van to dump in the river,” Lyons snapped at Schwarz.

Morrison twisted and struggled in the ex-cop’s grasp. “Wait! Wait! What vehicle are you looking for?”

“A brown delivery van,” Blancanales said.

“Don’t tell him before we take his legs off at least!” Lyons bellowed. The hollow echo of the gas mask amplified the yell to a roar against the side of Morrison’s head.

“No, the brown van? Man, they picked that up two days ago! Look in the office!” Morrison said. “You want the password? Ecclesiastic!”

Schwarz tilted his head. “What?”

“From that movie. Where they wanted the safe word…but had to go with snakebite ’cause the snitch was too stupid?” Morrison asked.

“Spell it,” Schwarz said.

Morrison did so. He didn’t even realize that Lyons had let up the pressure on his arm.

“Aw hell, you’re going to shoot me in the head,” Morrison muttered.

Lyons shrugged. “Why would I do that?”

“And, for our edification, Mickey Giardelli coughed you up, and we didn’t even have to pretend to be a SWAT team,” Blancanales said.

Morrison’s eyes widened. “Aw shit…”

“You’ve got a choice, son,” Lyons told him, slapping him on the shoulder to focus his attention. “Stay free, and maybe have the pricks who you delivered the truck to think you gave them up—which you did—or do some prison time for running a chop shop. One ends with you sitting safe in a box for six months. The other has guys willing to murder federal agents wanting to shut you up so you don’t testify.”

“I’ll take the safe option, thank you very much,” Morrison stated.

Lyons smiled. “Beautiful.”

Morrison mopped his brow as Schwarz broke into his computer.

K URTZMAN PICKED UP THE secure, direct connection from the field. Schwarz had activated an encryption protocol that turned the line his computer was on into a shielded transmission conduit. Hackers attempting to penetrate the electronic security locks and creating interference with the direct connection would alert Stony Man Farm to the intrusion and render themselves open to a salvo of countersurveillance programs guaranteed to crash even the most powerful processors set to the task.

“Gadgets,” Kurtzman greeted over the tight-band video chat. “Nice design extrapolation on the robot snake.”

“Thanks,” Schwarz replied. “You should have seen the picture of Carl as Captain Caveman that he destroyed.”

“I bet it would have been a hoot,” Kurtzman admitted.

Schwarz grinned. “Since I drew it on a tablet computer, I’ll upload it to you for a screen saver.”

Kurtzman chuckled. “Lyons would take my head off if he found that.”

“You told him how to understand the magic box?” Schwarz asked.

There was a grunt on the other end, and Lyons appeared on camera as Schwarz winced and rubbed his shoulder.

“There’ll be time for jokes later,” Lyons grunted. “You have access to Morrison’s hard drives?”

“Yeah,” Kurtzman said. “We’ve located the account which paid for the delivery truck, but we’re looking at an offshore bank with some paranoid security.”

“Paranoid is a walk in the park for you guys, isn’t it?” Lyons asked.

“Not these banks,” Kurtzman replied. “They’ve been upgrading their black ice, and I’m not afraid to say that they’re making us work for our paycheck, even if it is just a false front.”

“So, the conspirators dumped cash into an account for their dead buddies to pull out,” Lyons said. “How’ll you be able to track the money trail?”

“By diligent, meticulous observation once Akira breaks a hole for us into the bank’s security,” Kurtzman stated.

“What about the robots?” Lyons asked. “I hear that Cal and Rafe transmitted digital photographs of what was left of their encounter with two of them.”

“Same design. Two sets of parallel bow-coiled legs off of a central, flexible spine. The legs are fat little plates, and the body ends in a large head that fits an interesting firearm design,” Kurtzman told them.

“How so?” Lyons asked.

Kurtzman looked at the picture. “You know how the FN P-90 has that pivoting magazine that turns bullets at 90 degrees to keep the gun flat?”

Lyons nodded. “It’s been used on other designs, as well.”

“This one was hooked up to a Glock 26 barrel. The end result is that the head of the snake is about six inches long, and only four inches in diameter, but holds 17 shots,” Kurtzman said. “It has no means to reload itself, but stuck in there, parallel to the Glock barrel are two small cameras, and two Taser modules, whose capacitor batteries are further down the spine, tucked between the legs.”

Lyons blinked. “I saw the picture that Gadgets made. The batteries look like oversize watch batteries, right?”

“Yes. More than capable of producing enough voltage to paralyze a grown man,” Kurtzman said. “You’re lucky that you’re as strong and prepared for Taser shocks as you are.”

“I’m also lucky I was too stupid to keep my finger off the trigger. If my muscles hadn’t seized up and applied enough pressure to drop the striker, I’d have been carved up by that weed-whacker in its tail,” Lyons snarled.

“The cutting monofilament,” Kurtzman noted.

Akira Tokaido waved at Kurtzman to get his attention. “Hunt’s inside running the finances on the account,” Tokaido said.

“Good news,” Kurtzman answered. “You heard?” he said to Lyons.

“Yeah,” Lyons replied. “Is anyone watching Hunt and Akira’s six inside the bank?”

“Carmen’s way ahead of you on that,” Kurtzman told him. “After the DoE was penetrated, we’re on extra-high alert about any impropriety.”

“Good,” Lyons said. “You done with Morrison’s records?”

“Yes. You can shut down the computer,” Kurtzman answered. “He tries anything in the future, we’ve got a tap on his records.”

“I think he could be used as a local resource,” Lyons said. “I’ll stop by and rap my knuckles on his dome for a few answers every so often.”

Kurtzman nodded. “I was thinking the same thing, except I’m talking about aiding anyone on the terrorist watch lists.”

“Those things work?” Lyons asked.

“Not for Homeland Security, but those of us here with brains can determine the corn from the shit,” Kurtzman replied.

Lyons smiled. “Spoken like a true cop.”

Kurtzman winked. “Farm out.”

O NE OF THE ADVANTAGES that Phoenix Force had over the Directorate of Security and their investigation was that they didn’t have to worry about coordinating multiple raids after assembling a half-dozen teams in and around Paris. The Directorate needed to pull off each raid at the same time, in case the conspirators were in communication with each other, and more than one enemy site was actually part of the guilty party. The agency also needed to assemble warrants, scope out approaches and gather much more intelligence before they could make the first move. That all also depended on putting aside the bureaucratic differences that put the brakes on their moves.

McCarter looked at the latest data gathered from the French by the computer hackers at Stony Man Farm, and applied his years of counterterrorism investigation and operation to narrowing down Phoenix Force’s target as Manning drove them through the streets of Paris.

“I think that we’re looking at the neo-Nazi cell just off of the Seine,” McCarter said.

“What makes you think that?” Manning asked.

“The warrants are moving especially slow on them,” McCarter said. “Considering that we’re dealing with expert computer hackers, as well as the robots, I’m betting that the conspirators are looking to keep their asses covered until their patsies can get out of the way.”

“Or be gotten out of the way,” Hawkins mentioned. “The bad guys in Inshas and Washington were both sacrificial lambs, and they didn’t seem to care about the robots, either.”

“So even if we hit the little Hitler lovers, they might already be corpses,” Manning grumbled.

McCarter’s brow furrowed. “I like our chances.”

“What?” Manning asked.

“The conspiracy seems to be cleaning up its backtrail with almost paranoid efficiency,” McCarter replied. “But they left the lead to the neo-Nazis hanging out there.”

Manning nodded. “I see.”

“I don’t,” Hawkins replied.

“The conspirators want to take the piss out of us. In two places, they’ve had Stony Man teams on their asses,” McCarter said. “They noticed Able shadowing their deliverymen in Washington, D.C. They caught Rafe and Cal in Egypt. They’re dangling bait for us here in Paris to see if they can catch a nibble.”

Hawkins grimaced. “So they’re aware of Stony Man.”

“They’re aware of a particularly efficient agency on their tails. They don’t know the details, but the specifics of who we are doesn’t matter to them,” McCarter told him. “What matters is that someone has managed to cut through the red tape and bureaucratic bullshit to know that there is a conspiracy out there messing with nuclear power plants across three continents.”

“And we’re looking at a trap for us,” Hawkins sighed.

“The neo-Nazis are in all likelihood dead,” McCarter said. “But there will be an elimination team on hand, waiting for us to make our move. Once we do, they drop the hammer.”

“An ambush won’t work too well if we’re aware of it,” Manning said.

“The enemy might be anticipating that, as well,” McCarter said. “Depending on who they hired to hit us, it could be a feint, or it could be a hard-kill force.”

“A test for us,” Manning said. “Or a distraction.”

Hawkins took a deep breath. “Either way, we’re going to have our work cut out for us, or is this mental chess game hinging on making us look less capable than we are?”

“Screw that,” McCarter snapped. “If we’re going to encounter some drama, we’re going to bring our A game every time. Whoever they send after us, we treat them as professionals and we don’t let up on them. Taking it easy on any asshole we meet is a fast ticket to an unmarked grave.”

Hawkins nodded. “For a moment, I was wondering if you were a Cockney brawler or Sherlock Holmes.”

“There’s times for being smart, and there’s times for being the deadliest bastard on the sidewalk,” McCarter said. “The time for being smart is done now. Let’s be bloody and deadly.”

C ALVIN J AMES POKED A pencil at the burned shell segment remaining from the snake-shaped robot that had been such a menace to him and his allies earlier. He glanced at his Phoenix Force partner and friend Rafael Encizo, who merely shrugged as he sat at the table. James was a scientist, but his fields of expertise were anatomy and pharmacology, not electronics or robotics. Encizo had more experience with robots, but only through his work with them during oceanic salvage expeditions. The fields of underwater archaeology and marine biology were rife with the use of subaquatic remote devices that could transmit images of the ocean floor or sea life, or had manipulator claws that enabled the recovery of living specimens or lost artifacts.

Still, there was a difference between the camera bots and recovery drones that Encizo worked with and manipulated on his salvage expeditions, and the compact, nearly organic device that lay before him.

Colonel Assid gave James a clap on the shoulder. “Nothing?”

“Just a pile of shot-up and charred metal that doesn’t leave much in the way of forensics,” James said. “The only things we know for sure is that they have enough redundant systems to survive a hundred rounds of rifle fire and still continue shooting and moving for the bulk of that barrage.”

“Farrow had better luck going over the dead men,” Encizo admitted. “Thanks for letting him stand in on their autopsy.”

Assid nodded. “It’s always good to have an extra set of eyes present. What about the digital images you transmitted back to your agency?”

“They’re still running checks on the few markings we discovered on the wreckage,” James said sullenly. “But the components are common devices with preformed metallic shells. Trying to pinpoint their source of manufacture is like trying to find a particular grain of sand in the desert.”

Assid nodded. “We’re assembling a squad to pay a visit to the rest of the corpses’ cell members. I thought you two might want to stretch your legs and give your eyes a rest.”

Encizo smirked. “I’m all for that. Anything’s better than being kept out of my element.”

“Where did the cell originate?” James asked.

“They’re operating off of a fishing trawler,” Assid said. “Part of the reason why I’m hoping the two of you would help out. Normally, the unit would look for assistance from the Egyptian marines or navy, but right now, we’re trying to keep everything in-house.”

“Because of the drone we spotted?” Encizo asked.

“I remember the troubles we had with Egyptian military tanks and Predator UAVs falling into the hands of radical Palestinian and Syrian forces a while back,” Assid mentioned. “I don’t want to risk a leak of our raid getting back to whoever is running this show.”

James nodded. “According to what the home team told us, the conspirators seem to be on the ball. Any investigation pointing in their direction gets flagged and bogged down with paperwork.”

“So they do have monitors internationally, as well as moles?” Assid asked. “How big is this conspiracy?”

“Probably small,” Encizo said. “Whoever the leaks are, they’re probably just garden-variety bureaucrats with open palms and the willingness to look the other way or misplace paperwork.”

“A couple of smart people with a good bank account can do as much as a worldwide organization,” James said. “We work on brains and connections ourselves, so we can see where holes can be exploited in any security system.”

“A bribe or two in the Egyptian government, and they have the drop on us if we go outside the family,” Assid mused. “That explains why they’re working with the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“The local muscle they’ve hired don’t know what’s really going on, likely,” Encizo offered. “But the conspirators have given them the promise of their goals of confusion and government disarray.”

“That’s worked well enough,” Assid said. “Despite the fact that the Brotherhood didn’t get the robots anywhere near Inshas, the press caught word of an attempted attack. People are nervous, and they’re calling for an end to Egypt’s development of nuclear energy.”

James nodded. “The same news leaks have shown up across Europe and the United States. Israel was smart enough to clamp down a hard moratorium on printing the news about the Negev incident, so your neighbors aren’t getting frightened and antsy yet.”

Encizo frowned. “Israel isn’t nervous over Israeli nuclear energy. But you just have to know that the Inshas attempt is all over their headlines. Just imagine that your neighbors had a gas leak, Cal.”

“I’d be worried about fires or monoxide poisoning in my own house, just because of our proximity,” James muttered.

Assid’s brow furrowed in concern. “So even though we’ve been incident free, at least as far as a reactor being threatened with a critical incident, just the very act of stopping their infiltration accomplished whatever goal our enemy wanted? That’s insidious.”

“That’s the type of Machiavellian manipulation that we encounter on a regular basis,” Encizo sighed. “I miss the good old days when if it wasn’t simply a local group of psychotics, then the ones responsible were the KGB holdouts.”

“Or Nazi revivalists,” James mentioned.

Encizo rubbed his forehead, tracing the faint scar he’d received on a mission years ago. “Thing is, with the world in such flux today, there are dozens of groups with the money and motive to pull this kind of panic mongering.”

Assid nodded. “This could easily be a ploy of the Saudis to dissuade their customers from abandoning oil for nuclear power.”

“Not necessarily the whole Saudi government,” James said.

Assid sneered. “I wouldn’t put it past those fanatics. They’ve given their nephews millions in order to fulfill their religious fantasies of Islamic dictatorships.”

“You’re Muslim, aren’t you?” Encizo asked.

“And you’re Christian. Does that mean you endorse homophobic freaks who claim that tidals waves are messages from God that Christians aren’t murdering enough gays?” Assid asked.

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