Deadly Payload

DON PENDLETON’S

Stony Man® AMERICA'S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to

Douglas P. Wojtowicz for his contribution to this work.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Jason Kovak ran his fingertips across the smooth shell of the unmanned aircraft, a smile coming unbidden to his lips. It was a simple machine, with a standard propeller engine mounted under a housing that protected it from detection by thermal imagers. Even so, it ran much more coolly than a rocket thruster. The powerful computer in its bulbous nose would steer according to data flowing from its forward-looking radar, avoiding collision with terrain. That was only on autopilot, while utilizing an artificial intelligence program. Inside the sloped head there was also a tight beam transceiver, capable of picking up signals from a thousand miles away to be directed by remote control. Riding beneath wing mounts on two hard points were six high-powered missiles, their noses fitted with television cameras for precision fire.

“How many do we have?” the Israeli asked.

“Enough for what you wish,” Cortez answered. His handsome, tanned features and black, silken suit reminded Kovak of an unmasked Zorro.

Kovak nodded. “We’ll need quite a few. With some optional payloads. You’re sure you can get enough?”

“Generosity, promises whispered,” the Argentinian said, stroking his neatly trimmed pencil mustache. “I have my means.”

Kovak nodded. “I won’t dig too deeply, then.”

“This is a big step for your side,” Cortez said.

“My side?” Kovak asked. “I don’t have a side anymore. Not after we’ve been betrayed.”

“And so you’re turning to us,” the Argentinian concluded. “You can’t get much more anti-Israel than our consortium.”

“Israel and the Arab nations are partners now,” Kovak said. “Bedfellows, seeking out peace accords when for millennia they’ve assailed the land promised to our people. They forget the Holocaust. It was a blip in history, done by a German madman long dead.”

“So you’re going to destroy your country?” Cortez asked. “Not that we mind. After all, Mossad’s been hunting the Consortium’s family and membership for decades.”

Kovak chuckled. “There’s a little sting, I’ll admit. But the Mossad is a joke, knuckling to political correctness and cowardice. The Consortium isn’t on an anti-Jew kick now, because it has other problems. Both of us have other things to worry about. Betrayals, weakness and weakened, corrupted leadership that needs a slap in the face to wake up. We have the same goal. We are one, building a better future.”

Cortez nodded and held out his hand to the Israeli. “A world without our different headaches.”

“Engineering the new tomorrow,” Kovak said, referring to the name of the alliance. “If anyone wishes to stop us, they’ll run face-first into a united front.”

T HE FIRST STRIKE of the united front known only to a few as the Engineers of the New Tomorrow came at dawn at a terrorist camp just five miles north of Damascus, Syria, in the mountains that formed a natural border with Lebanon. The camp was used by Syria to train and arm members of the Popular Front for the Righteous Liberation of Lebanon, a splintered offshoot of the Palestinian forces in the Lebanese countryside.

The strike was preceded only instants before by the soft hum of propeller-driven unmanned aerial vehicles, which drew the attention of the sleepy camp guard. The guards were used to being buzzed and observed by the Americans with their Predator drones, but every so often the Pentagon wanted to look as if it was taking a more offensive stance, and dropped a couple Maverick missiles into their backyard. Nothing that would obliterate the widely dispersed camp. Still, the groggy guard called out a warning, but by the time the words left his mouth, it was too late.

The first three rounds were white phosphorous, which burst thirty yards above the ground. They had been perfectly spaced and timed, clawing trails of burning waxy smoke spreading wide and arcing down into the unprepared camp. Half-dressed men, hearing the cries of alarm from the sentries, had burst from their tents and run right into the searing rain. As the WP struck their flesh, whether or not it was exposed or protected by clothing, it melted through, destroying skin and muscle until it burrowed down to the bone.

The lucky ones passed out immediately, while dozens of others ran screaming in horror at a pain that could only be torn out on the point of a knife. Lebanese insurgents and Syrian advisers twisted and writhed, grinding into the muddy ground, trying to drown the burning fragments of white phosphorous, but once exposed to air, the deadly element was unquenchable. Flesh around the fragments cooked and peeled away from bone in a slow, murderous torture.

The second wave of missiles from the UAV drones came unheard, the screams of the wounded and dying filling the air until the shrill rattle of 77 mm artillery rockets was right on them. These landed amid the semipermanent prefabricated buildings where supplies were stored. Thermobaric warheads struck with earth-shattering force, ripping Quonset huts to pieces and destroying anything and anyone still inside. Assault rifles and rocket launchers meant to slay the enemies of Syria in Lebanon were turned to pulped and mangled piles of wreckage.

A lone round sizzled into the communications hut and scoured it from existence with a blast equal to six sticks of dynamite. A radioman inside was cut off in midrequest, begging for help and support from the Syrian military when he and the hut were blasted into oblivion. The largest piece remaining of the Syrian communications officer was the size of a pencil eraser.

As smoke roiled into the sky, the circling drones whirled into position to launch phase three. Like hightech vultures, the quartet of drones pumped out a sheet of staggered rockets. It would have seemed overkill had it been conventional explosives or white phosphorous, but instead, cakey yellow clouds erupted from each artillery rocket strike. The ugly ocher fog spread across the camp. The cries of the wounded suddenly fell silent as the cloud washed over them.

One rocket round had landed, unexploded, its fuse apparently having malfunctioned. While the manufacture was undeniably American, the writing on the side was Arabic. The unmanned drones themselves were identical to the machines given to Egypt by the United States government as part of a multibillion-dollar lend-lease agreement.

Syria, stung with betrayal over the loss of dozens of its troops to an Egyptian sneak attack, threw out accusations, crying out in hatred against politicians in Cairo and Washington, D.C., vowing revenge.

Shock waves rippled across the globe.

P HASE TWO OCCURRED within thirty minutes of the attack in Syria, but it occurred in Panama. Memories of the invasion that had deposed Manuel Noriega decades earlier had never really left the public’s mind. The full might of the United States armed forces had crushed down and taken out Noriega’s government and forces. The American liberal elite had accused the Reagan administration of using overkill against the Panamanians, to the point where AC-130 gunships were said to have slaughtered citizens and soldiers alike as they raked neighborhoods with dozens of machine guns and cannon in synchronized fire.

Those wounds were yet fresh and raw, despite the long years since 1989. The United States consulate still had its share of protesters out front, anger sharp and focused over lost loved ones. They were peaceful, and they carried candles for a midnight vigil commemorating the anniversary of the invasion. Mournful hymns in Spanish hung in the air as the protesters said goodbye to loved ones once more and called upon God for justice in an unjust world.

The Marines at the front gate had grown used to this, and relaxed only a little. Policy had been to keep their rifles cold at all times, but the warrior elite knew better. Cold weapons in Beirut had cost 249 brothers their lives, and even though the Panamanians were armed with nothing more dangerous than candles, there were enough of them that the guards had their M-16 A 4s hot and ready.

Somewhere behind them, a weapon opened up, and the armed Marines whirled at the sound. It took only a few moments for them to recognize the roar and chatter of an M-240 medium machine gun—standard Marine and Army issue, as well as being hugely popular throughout Europe. It could burn off 7.62 mm rounds at 850 rounds per minute, and was deadly out to a thousand yards. The Marines crouched, believing themselves to be under attack, but the haunting hymns had been turned to screeches, a horrifying wail, as if someone had dragged a needle off one track and let it go on a recording of hell itself.

The Marine guards whirled and saw unarmed civilians twist and thrash as 7.62 mm NATO rounds chopped brutally into them. Bodies collapsed and screams of panic filled the air. By the time the Marines realized what was going on, the unmanned drones swung over their heads, brass raining from their belly-mounted machine guns. The two, sleek UAV craft climbed to swing around for another strafing run. The embassy protectors took shots at the airborne marauders. However, the killer drones had climbed out of the effective range of their M-16s.

The aerial predators whirled and sliced down again, streams of high-powered lead erupting from their gun pods and ripping into the helpless crowd.

Marine Sergeant Zachary Admunsen pulled out his equalizer—an AT-4 antitank rocket. Hitting an aerial craft would be difficult, but Admunsen wouldn’t let civilians die without an effort. He triggered the rocket, giving one of the two drones some lead time. The warhead connected with the high-tech aircraft and blew it in two. The tail end whirled like a dervish and chopped off the right wing of the second Predator. It speared forward and crashed, relatively harmlessly, into the roof of the U.S. consulate, bursting apart into splinters. The semidisposable drones hadn’t been intended to survive heavy ground resistance, but being unmanned, their loss was only a small monetary setback, not the life of a skilled pilot.

Still, Admunsen was stunned to see that he’d taken out both attackers with a single shot.

By then, though, it was too late. The damage had been done and the throng of protesters had been dispersed. Corpses littered the ground, forty-seven dead and another dozen wounded. Most had been victims of gunfire, but others had been trampled in the mad flight to get out of the machine gun’s thunderous scythe of lead and fire.

Once more, accusations flew.

CHAPTER ONE

“So why are we investigating the destruction of a terrorist camp in Syria again?” T.J. Hawkins whispered to Calvin James as the Zodiac boat hummed toward the Lebanese coast. “If you ask me—”

“Well, I didn’t,” James retorted.

“Well, if you did, whoever took them out did us a favor,” Hawkins answered.

“Really, mate?” David McCarter asked as he scanned the shore with his field glasses. “A chemical weapons attack on an unfriendly country, using American materials. That’s a favor to the U.S.? I’d hate to see what you’d call a slap in the face.”

“The PFRLL were some of the sickest bastards in the Lebanese equation, though,” Hawkins stated. “They never cared about civilian casualties when they made their attacks. It’d have been our job, sooner or later, to take them out.”

“Sooner or later, sure,” Rafael Encizo answered as he worked the rudder’s till, keeping them on course despite a crosscurrent. “But then, we also need to figure out who has a small automated air force. The drones responsible for the attack could end up in the hands of someone who might turn them against a city.”

“Well then, that’d be a whole new mess o’ pig shit,” Hawkins admitted.

Encizo nodded, returning his attention to guiding the inflatable raft. The muscular little Cuban’s steady steering was born of years spent by the sea, either diving or working boats. Between him and Calvin James, Phoenix Force had the training to handle almost anything on the water. The inflatable raft would be collapsed on the shore and buried before they went inland. If necessary, the raft could be dug up and used to exfiltrate from the country, but McCarter had other avenues out of Lebanon, just in case the investigation took them on a new path.

“Welcoming party,” Gary Manning announced as he spied the beach through the scope of his Heckler & Koch PSG-1 rifle.

Hawkins’s hand tightened on the grip of his G-36, but his trigger finger rested on the receiver.

“Keep your booger hook off the bang switch,” he remembered his drill instructor bellowing in basic training. It was second nature for the Southerner, by now. Even as a Ranger, he practiced as a professional, not until he got it right once, but until he never got it wrong. That mentality was pushed even further as a veteran member of Phoenix Force, one of the most elite combat units in the world. The five handpicked Stony Man warriors had been chosen for their experience and ability. All of them were highly trained commandos.

“They spot us yet?” McCarter asked Manning.

“No. They seem to be waiting for someone else,” Manning said. “Their attention is more to the north.”

McCarter drew his finger across his throat and the Stony Man commandos fell silent. Only the muffled Mercury engine made any sound, and even then, it was a soft hum that was easily swallowed by the lap of waves. Phoenix Force lowered its profile, lying in the bottom of the raft, only Encizo and Manning breaching the tops of the inflated Kevlar pontoons to steer and to observe the mysterious group on the shore.

McCarter pointed to James and patted the grip of his knife. He nodded to Encizo. The stocky Cuban flicked a thumbs-up to the fox-faced Briton and adjusted their course a little farther to the south.

So much for the plan of burying the raft, Hawkins mused. With unknown forces on the shore, they would have to scuttle the inflatable raft, slashing through the rigid nylon pontoons. The weight of the motor would drag it down, and Phoenix Force would swim a hundred yards to shore.

Hawkins fed Encizo’s rifle into a water-tight bag, since he was steering. He did the same for Manning’s PSG-1, while the powerfully built Canadian switched to McCarter’s field glasses to maintain surveillance of the unknown enemy.

“There,” Encizo stated softly. He turned off the engine and James slashed the inflated tubes to starboard while McCarter took out the port side. The raft collapsed almost instantly, Mediterranean seawater rushing in and engulfing Hawkins. Within a few kicks, Phoenix Force had swum free of the sinking raft, and Hawkins handed Encizo and Manning their waterproof packs.

So far, their plans had been preempted, but then, an average day of work for Phoenix Force rarely went as they hoped. However, the team had been formed to take care of things when nothing had gone right. Adapt and overcome was their forte.

H ERMANN “G ADGETS ” S CHWARZ was no stranger to Central America, and he was no stranger to the morass of its constant threats and violence. Going over the files that described the evidence of the Panama assault, he tried to gain the measure of who they were up against this time out. In the past, the warriors of Stony Man Farm had battled all manner of threats in the canal nation, from renegade secret policemen who killed for their fascist beliefs to Chinese espionage agents trying to gain control of the canal to drug dealers who had flourished under the former dictator. Often, multiple parties entwined, and even forces theoretically on the same side, like Communist rebels and the Red Chinese government, were at odds against each other. Then again, whenever Able Team went south of the border, it was never simple and easy.

“Never a lack of targets on these operations,” Carl Lyons said. “Shoot in any direction and you’ll hit a bad guy.”

“Just the way you like it,” Schwarz replied sardonically, putting the file away. “Simple and bloody.”

Lyons grunted. “If I wanted to fuss over geopolitics, I’d have joined Phoenix Force.”

Rosario Blancanales, fondly known as Pol, looked back at the pair from the balcony and sighed. “As if a caveman like you could run with that bunch.”

“I am a pretty good detective, you know,” Lyons responded. He looked at the list of murdered civilians, his heavy brow furrowed. “It could have been an assassination attempt.”

“But making it look like the U.S. did it?” Schwarz asked.

“Well, the Venezuelan government has no love for our leadership in Washington,” Lyons replied.

“Leadership in Wonderland?” Schwarz asked.

“Well, you know what I mean,” Lyons returned. “But no one on the list of the dead fits in with people who’d have pissed off the head Communists in Caracas.”

“Just women and children,” Schwarz said. “Killed to smear America’s name across the headlines in innocent blood.”

Lyons shrugged. “The papers are already full of the U.S. being bloodthirsty brutes for Iraq. Like we needed any more vilification?”

Blancanales cocked an eyebrow.

“Sorry,” Lyons said. “That last caveman comment got me breaking out my five-dollar words.”

Blancanales grinned, but the smile didn’t last long. “But why UAVs?”

“It has to be linked to the mess Phoenix is investigating over in Lebanon,” Schwarz said. “And don’t forget, we’ve had our own encounters with rogue drones in the past.”

“The Farm never did figure out who supplied that Egyptian general with so many Predators,” Blancanales answered. “This might be more of the same.”

Lyons frowned, “Then we can find out who’s behind it and shut it all down.”

“Before they start a global war,” Schwarz mentioned. He looked at the files on the attack. “We just need to figure out where the drones launched from. Maybe then we could learn who made them and work our way up the food chain.”

He pored over detailed photographs of the wrecked unmanned drones that had hit the crowd at the consulate. Nothing identifiable had survived the crash of the second, and the AT-4 rocket had blasted everything to garbage.

“Nothing on the technology front?” Blancanales asked.

“Bulk, cheap Chinese electronics, rewired to handle the demands of duplicating Predator UAV technology. Some brilliant improvisation, but no evidence of who put it together,” Schwarz said. He shook his head. “Untraceable.”

“Nothing is untraceable,” Lyons retorted. “We’ll find a handle. And when we do, we’ll twist until we get some answers.”

There was a knock at the door and all three Able warriors’ hands fell to the grips of their holstered handguns. Lyons answered the door and admitted their contact, Susana Arquillo. She was a CIA field agent assigned to Panama. Her skin was darkened and bronzed by the near equatorial sun. Her hair had been long and dark in her file photograph, but in person, it was trimmed short and pulled back into a tight bun. A few strands of white feathered through it to make it seem lighter. Arquillo’s full, lush lips parted in a smile.

“Carl Ryder?” she asked.

“That’s me,” Lyons said.

“And you can confirm who I am?” Arquillo asked.

“Gadgets, run her prints,” Lyons told Schwarz. “If you’re not who you’re supposed to be…”

Arquillo’s eyes dropped to the rubber Pachmayer grips poking out of Lyons’s waistband. “I won’t be walking out of here. But what if I’m packing explosives?”

Lyons looked her over, hard blue eyes scanning the way her jeans hugged her curvaceous hips. Her blouse hung, unbuttoned and tied together at the bottom, a dark red tank top constraining her full breasts. His hand patted around her waist and found her compact 9 mm Glock on one side and a tiny .38 Special tucked away on the other. “I don’t think you could be hiding too much under there.”

Arquillo was relatively tall, five foot nine, and athletically built. She cocked an eyebrow as she pressed her fingertips to the flat scan plate Schwarz held out for her. “Ever hear of a charger?”

“You don’t strike me as the kind of woman who’d want to go out with an eighth of a stick of C-4 detonating in her ass,” Lyons said.

“Besides,” Blancanales added, holding up a portable “sniffer.” “This thing would have smelled explosive residue on you.”

“Thorough,” Arquillo noted.

“She’s clean,” Schwarz declared.

CHAPTER TWO

Gary Manning observed the unknown group on the beach, ignoring the salt drying and congealing with sand in his soaked BDUs. There would be time to change into fresh clothing later, and it was a minor discomfort. The group’s activity was clearer now from their position on the beach. It was a work crew, unloading containers from transport trucks onto a beached barge. His lips drew into a tight line.

“Unmarked containers,” he said. “But the shape is unmistakable.”

“UAV transport crating,” David McCarter answered as he lowered his binoculars. “We lucked out here.”

“Except, if we were lucky, we would have a Zodiac raft to shadow the barge to its destination,” Manning said.

“I’ll contact the Farm,” McCarter suggested. “It’ll be a breach of radio discipline, but they can keep an eye on the craft while we continue our inland push.”

“We’re still going into Lebanon?” Hawkins asked.

“These things were delivered somewhere. And we still have to touch base with Unit 777 and the Mossad. They’ve been noticing some unusual activity in Lebanon.”

“UFO sightings,” Calvin James muttered. “If they weren’t one of the crack units in the region, I’d have thought they’d gone nuts.”

“Unidentified aircraft aren’t always spawned by little green men, hermano ,” Rafael Encizo chided his partner. “And some of those UFOs might have dropped chemical weapons into Syria. I’d still like to keep a tail on them.”

McCarter lowered the satellite radio. “Barb has a Keyhole watching the barge. The Farm isn’t going to lose track of it.”

James nodded. “Which means we can concentrate on keeping up with the trucks.”

“Not necessarily,” Manning interjected. McCarter and James regarded their partner quizzically as the brawny Canadian observed the convoy through his sniper scope. “The trucks aren’t moving.”

McCarter ran a mental tally of the enemy vehicles. There were three tractor-trailer combinations and half a dozen pickup trucks. The pickups had six men a piece, and who knew how many crewed the eighteen-wheelers, but the Phoenix Force commander figured between forty and fifty men for this operation. The rules of engagement for this mission had nominally been to avoid enemy contact, and any unavoidable conflict had to be undertaken with a maximum of stealth. Five against fifty was not going to be a silent struggle, no matter if all of their weapons had been suppressed. The element of surprise only went so far.

“Even more bad news,” Encizo noted as he lowered his scope-equipped MP-5. “That barge didn’t go more than five hundred yards out into the water.”

McCarter glanced back, then watched the trailers. He swept them with his binoculars, eschewing optics for his machine pistol. He lowered them. “They set up a transmission antenna.”

James looked out toward the barge. “We only saw them unload one of the trailers onto the barge, with workers who had come out of the back of a second.”

“The third is a control center,” Hawkins said. He took a deep breath and lifted his binoculars to watch the barge along with James and Encizo. “It’s parked?”

“Looks like they’re setting up to launch the UAVs,” James noted.

“Get on the horn to the Farm,” McCarter said. “We’ve got a major emergency. Rafe, Cal. Time to hit the water.”

Encizo grimaced. “Both of us?”

“I appreciate the offer, but that barge has to be put down before they can launch,” McCarter ordered.

Hawkins looked up from his satellite phone. “Got the Farm.”

“Barb?” McCarter asked.

“What is it, David?” Barbara Price asked.

“Have the Israeli air force go on alert. We’ve stumbled on another bit of provocation,” he told her. “That barge is a floating launch pad.”

“Should we get someone scrambled out to you?” Price asked.

“Syria is on full alert as it is. Any friendly aircraft who’d hit this place would only provoke them and their allies in Lebanon,” the Briton explained.

“What kind of enemy forces are you looking at?” Price continued.

“Thirty to forty ground troops. Lord know how many in the trucks, but a group went out on the barge,” McCarter explained.

Price covered the mouthpiece on her end for a moment, then spoke to McCarter again. “An air strike might make Damascus squirrelly, but we have a way around that.”

“What’ve you got?” McCarter inquired.

“An artillery unit in northern Israel. They lob some explosives across the border into Lebanon every so often,” Price mentioned.

McCarter frowned. “We’re danger close, and I’d like to take one of the trailers intact. If we can get hold of the hardware and servers used to operate their drones, we could slip you chaps into the back door for some deep-down digging.”

“Ten to one’s tough odds, David,” Price said.

“Worse than that,” McCarter admitted. “I sent Cal and Rafe to the barge to sink it.”

“We drop one shell in the vicinity. It’ll cut the odds, and less likely to blow everything to hell.”

The Briton handed the phone to Hawkins and contacted James and Encizo on his Los Angeles SWAT Headset—LASH. “How soon to the barge?”

“Another two minutes,” Encizo said.

McCarter took the phone back from Hawkins. “How far is the artillery site from here?”

Price gave the coordinates.

“A minute and a half flight,” McCarter figured.

“That’s what we figured. Coordinates?” Price asked.

McCarter handed the phone to Manning, who had been observing the operation. The Canadian read off coordinates he figured through his map skills. Manning’s mathematical skills and navigational abilities were second to none, and if anyone had a chance to spot for an artillery shell fired from dozens of miles away without benefits of laser targeting, it was him. Manning gave the Briton the phone.

“Your artillery is on its way,” Price promised. “It’ll be there by the time the others make their move on the barge.”

“What can we expect?” McCarter asked.

“We have a reserve unit dropping some payback on a Palestinian group. You’ll get a 155 mm Copperhead from a Doher,” Price said.

“Cover your heads, lads. It’s going to get loud,” McCarter promised.

Manning slung his sniper rifle and drew his Glock 34. He’d eschewed a machine pistol for the precision rifle, but compromised by carrying two of the chosen sidearm for this mission. The second Glock was set up for close-quarters combat, equipped with a blunt four-inch suppressor, a 20-round extended magazine and, on a rail under the barrel, a mounted gun light. The suppressor provided a semblance of stealth without sacrificing stopping power for the hollowpoint rounds within, and the light, even if it wasn’t activated, served as a means of steadying the already mild recoil of the G-34 in rapid fire. The Glock was also one of the most accurate and easy-to-shoot handguns on the planet, second only to McCarter’s own beloved Browning Hi-Power.

McCarter relegated his MP-5 to a backup role, drawing his Browning in anticipation of a fast, nasty mop-up. And it would be quick and nasty. While an artillery shell would take out a good number of the enemy force, no barrage would ever completely obliterate opposition. But it would soften them up. Hawkins stuck with his MP-5, not trusting his skill with a handgun to be as high as Phoenix veterans Manning and McCarter.

The Briton looked out over the water.

The two minutes that James and Encizo had estimated were almost up.

K NIFING THROUGH THE WATER like they were born to it, Rafael Encizo and Calvin James closed on the barge. The Phoenix Force pair drew their fighting knives in anticipation of first contact with the crew of the barge, but their observations showed that the men on board were busy preparing unmanned aerial vehicles for launch. Just before they reached the hull, they noted canisters labeled with the universal symbol for biohazard.

Encizo and James shared a nervous, knowing glance as they realized the implications of their failure. Whoever these men were, they were planning to launch an attack, utilizing a similar lethal contamination that devastated the Syrian camp. Four UAVs sat on the deck of the barge, laden with four canisters each on underwing mounts normally meant for Maverick antitank missiles. The size of the containers promised a potential of death for thousands if they struck in a metropolitan center.

Both Phoenix force commandos realized that Israel had many port cities that would provide tempting targets for the airborne death-bringers.

On the shore, a thunderclap split the air, which served as the starting gun for their assault.

Encizo gripped the rail of the barge with one hand and hauled himself onto its deck, staying low. In his off hand, the Cold Steel Tanto Combat knife was held in an icepick grip, the chisel-pointed, razor-sharp blade shielded against his forearm so it wouldn’t reflect the work lights on the deck, even though he had the concealment of a crate. James surfaced and crawled onto the barge fifteen feet away, also behind a transport container. The barge itself was twenty yards long, but much narrower by a factor of four to one, five yards wide. It was a garbage scow that had been pressed into service as an aircraft carrier to launch the drones. Since the UAVs were designed for short takeoff and landing, even with underwing payloads, the length would be enough for the launching task.

The engines on the first one strummed to life and Encizo realized that if it started moving, tragedy would fall on an Israeli city. The stocky Cuban sheathed his combat blade and shouldered his machine pistol, quickly detaching the suppressor on the MP-5, knowing that he’d need every ounce of power to damage even the relatively flimsy and disposable aircraft.

He focused on the engine cowling, situated two feet above and away from the biohazard canisters mounted underwing, and opened fire as soon as he had a clear sight picture. The German-made machine pistol chattered out its popping death song. Men on deck dived for cover at the sound of Encizo’s attack, shocked at his sudden appearance. The engine cowling perforated in a dozen places as full-metal-jacketed bullets smashed through the pistons running its propeller.

The Predator knockoff lurched forward a few feet, smoke pouring from the damaged engine, but it rolled to a halt as the propeller caught and froze on broken pistons.

James moved from behind cover as soon as Encizo opened fire and concentrated on two of the enemy who were reaching for their weapons. All the men on the barge were armed with at least handguns, and the two who were reacting had AKM folding-stock assault rifles. James ripped a burst of suppressed fire into one of them, stitching him through the face and shoulders. The other man had gotten to his knees and fired a quick salvo from the hip that missed the black Phoenix Force pro by inches. James tucked down deeper and sliced the rifleman from crotch to throat with a half dozen Parabellum slugs. The enemy gunner flopped over the side of the barge, disappearing into the Mediterranean.

Encizo scurried behind the cover of his crates, keeping one step ahead of the handgun fire that chased him. The Cuban took a few potshots, but was hampered by the fact that four drones were parked on the deck laden with poison-packed containers. He didn’t want to risk dumping contagion into the Mediterranean to have it wash ashore in a populated area.

Saving one city would have been a waste if other civilians were sacrificed because of sloppy work. He still fired a few shots, high and wide, to keep their attention on him and give James, who had a better angle on the defenders, a chance to take them out.

James didn’t envy Encizo’s position as human target, and he ripped off more bursts from his machine pistol, tagging every enemy target he could find. Unfortunately the enemy had realized that as long as they cowered behind the biohazard containers, they were relatively safe.

James disabused them of that concept by dropping prone and targeting legs and feet with his machine pistol. Bullets smashed violently through tarsal bones and kneecaps with equally devastating and crippling results. The conspirators crashed helplessly to the deck, falling away from the lethal cylinders of contagion that they sought to use as shields. Flat on their backs and bellies, they were easy targets for James and Encizo to finish off.

The Cuban crouched behind a crate and swept fallen survivors with submachine-gun fire. It was a cruel and callous effort, gunning down the injured, but these men still held handguns that they could use in a last-ditch effort to breach one of the bioweapon containers as a final act of revenge.

“All clear?” James asked, moving swiftly around the bodies of the dead and the inert drones.

“No movement,” Encizo answered.

“We can’t leave these things,” James stated, looking toward the shore.

“No,” Encizo agreed, “but we can take them with us.”

James looked at the deckhouse. “I’ve got it.”

“Maybe we won’t be too late to help out,” Encizo concluded as the barge turned toward the shore.

I T WAS NO DIFFICULT TRICK to misdirect a laser-guided 155 mm artillery shell utilizing a broadcast pulse from a satellite slaved to Stony Man Farm’s control. The M-712 Copperhead was one of the first and most successful of laser-guided, cannon-launched munitions, with a range of ten miles, and carrying nearly fifteen pounds of Composition B as its warhead. With a velocity of detonation at 8050 meters per second, 1100 meters per second faster than TNT, the Copperhead shell possessed awesome destructive ability. Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman distracted the single Copperhead round from a flight of twenty aimed across the northern border between Israel and Lebanon against a Syrian-backed militia. Well within the ten-mile range of the laser-guided shell, the M-712 altered its guide path and split off from the main flight.

Kurtzman continued to track their hijacked shell in flight, painting Manning’s target via a satellite-mounted laser. The computer genius took into account atmospheric refraction, but he held his breath as the warhead, loaded with the equivalent of fifteen pounds of TNT, was dropped, as McCarter had noted, “danger close” to the men of Phoenix Force. One variation in humidity or air temperature and there was a strong possibility that there wouldn’t be enough left of McCarter, Manning and Hawkins to scoop up inside a matchbox.

The satellite registered the detonation of the Copperhead, and Kurtzman looked at his screen for the IFF codes on Phoenix Force’s LASH communicators.

They were still in operation, unmoved by the concussive eruption of the deadly warhead. However, even as the dust cloud rose and thickened over the battle scene, obscuring the reconnaissance satellite’s visual coverage of the battle scene, McCarter’s, Manning’s and Hawkins’s signals burst into motion toward the convoy of conspirators.

“Good luck,” Kurtzman whispered.

W HEN 138 POUNDS OF LASER-GUIDED missile landed, even if only fifteen pounds of it was made of high explosives, it made an impression.

The impact and detonation kicked up a wind that blew harshly over the heads of McCarter and his partners. The convoy itself was rocked as riflemen standing guard in the open and their pickups were lifted and hurled by a concussion wave that traveled at 26,000 feet per second. The tractor-trailer rigs shook mightily, but their enormous bulk had protected them from being flung around like children’s toys. A column of dust and smoke rose from the impact crater, and bodies were strewed about. A pickup that had been two yards from the Copperhead’s landing point was compressed as if it were an empty beer can, and rolled toward the beach. Other trucks were simply flipped to varying degrees.

While some of the drivers inside might have survived, McCarter felt confident that those inside the crushed pickup kicked toward the Mediterranean like a gigantic metal beach ball were instantly dead. Rushing from behind cover with his sound-suppressed Browning in fist, McCarter was first into action. Manning and Hawkins were only heartbeats behind him, their own weapons at the ready.

The Phoenix Force commander charged toward the remnants of the convoy. A stunned rifleman jerked to his hands and knees, wagging his head to shake out the cobwebs. McCarter, not needing to have an armed soldier at his back, cleared those cobwebs away with a fast double-tap of Para bellum rounds, coring the gunner’s skull. Hawkins and Manning sighted other potential enemies, ripping suppressed fire into them before they could return to their senses and form a defense of their Predator ground-control operation. It was fast and brutal butcher’s work, but considering that the odds against them could still be twenty against three, there was no doubts slowing the three professional warriors.

The closer to the blast crater they got, the less movement they encountered, though McCarter paused for a half step at the sight of one survivor. A soldier guarding the convoy gasped, holding the almost skeletal remains of his right arm out to the Briton. The Arab’s face was a sticky red mess and his jaw worked up and down, unintelligible sounds waiting through shredded lips. McCarter hammered three shots into the ghastly figure, ending the man’s suffering as he continued in his hard charge toward the trailer that Manning had identified as the main control center.

Here, the guards had managed to recover much more quickly, even if they did sway uneasily on their feet, senses reeling from the hammer blow dropped by an angry god into their laps. McCarter dropped to one knee and pivoted like a human turret, his Browning sweeping enemy heads, trigger breaking like a glass rod every time his front sight crossed a body. At six shots a second, he wasn’t going to approximate the rate of fire of a submachine gun, but each round went exactly where McCarter needed it to go, faces exploding as 9 mm bullets smashed into them with blinding speed.

With eight shots dead on target in a shade over a second, McCarter rose from his kneeling position and continued his rush. In the heartbeat between kneeling and accelerating to a full run, he automatically replenished the partially emptied Browning with a new 13-round magazine.

Manning and Hawkins raked the flanking survivors among the guard force with their own weapons, giving McCarter the freedom to continue toward the operations control trailer. He was three feet from the top of the steps at the back of it when the door slammed open, a dazed, bloodied technician staggering into view. The Briton lashed out with his left hand, grabbing a fistful of the man’s shirt and shoving him back into the control center, the Browning in his right chugging two shots through the technician’s heart. The flap holster on the man’s hip might only have been for show, but he was armed and was going to send a weapon-laden flight of drones to attack an Israeli city. Cored through the heart, the technician was now a lifeless shield of flesh and bone as the Briton heaved him through the doorway.

Someone inside had some presence of mind and cut loose with a Makarov pistol, but the low-powered 9 mm bullets couldn’t penetrate the dead man McCarter held in front of him. Most of the lights inside the trailer had been knocked out, only one bulb illuminating the far end, though liquid crystal display screens threw a soft but dim blue glow over the interior. Shaken technicians struggled to get out of the way of the Phoenix Force commander’s stampede through their quarters. The Briton tapped off three shots at the gunman who’d drilled his own dead comrade. One shot was a miss, but the second and third shots were as straight as a line of rivets, cutting two gory holes in the shooter’s throat. Head nearly severed, the armed technician flopped across his computer table, keyboard and liquid crystal monitor crashing to the floor of the trailer.

A drone operator lunged at McCarter from behind, his arms spread wide to grab the wily fox-faced Briton. Instead of catching him in a bear hug, the technician caught the point of McCarter’s elbow in his solar plexus with bone-breaking force. Suddenly unable to breathe, the man collapsed to his knees, giving McCarter a moment of freedom to shove his corpse shield into a second feisty drone operator who tried to swing his chair as a club. Both men’s bodies collapsed to the floor, McCarter pinning the chair-wielding technician down forever with two rounds from his Browning.

The choking operator reached out, trying to grab McCarter again, and this time the Stony Man commando whirled and snapped his heel into the conspirator’s nose, crushing it flat and driving the bone into his brain. Four down, he thought, looking around the shadowy trailer, scanning for more opponents. He’d almost completed a full circle of his search when two Makarov bullets stung his armored load-bearing vest. The enemy gunman had some training, and that saved the former SAS commando, since most people concentrate on the center of mass when shooting. McCarter’s center was protected by Kevlar and polymer mesh chain link calibrated to stop a .44 Magnum or AK-47 bullet. Lightning reflexes spurred the Phoenix Force leader to return fire, zipping five shots into the gunman from crotch to sternum.

Opened up like a gutted calf, the last drone operator fell to his knees, folding over his spilling entrails and dying.

“Report in,” McCarter called over his com-link.

The others reported “all clear.”

“T.J., bring the sat phone in here and hook these control computers up to the Farm,” the Briton ordered.

He looked around the trailer, at the five bodies. The death toll for this mission was sure to climb. And given that even the technicians were willing to fight to the death, this conflict was going to be brutal.

McCarter took a deep breath and reloaded his partially spent Browning.

“So what else is bloody new?” he asked tiredly, holstering his pistol.

CHAPTER THREE

The Mercedes SUV bounced raggedly over the muddy trail through the Darien. A mountainous rain forest that formed an almost impenetrable border between Panama and Colombia, the Darien was a formidable force. Even though northern Colombia received constant radar scanning from various drug-enforcement agencies, the inland jungles and rugged mountains of the land bridge formed between the two nations provided innumerable hiding places for people not wishing to be found. Uninhabited, hot and rainy the area also could befuddle an army of people searching for fugitives. While building a base within these territories would be extremely difficult, a curtain of inhospitable jungle and choppy, hill-broken terrain provided a hard-to-penetrate barrier.

“But that barrier is useless against flying machines like an unmanned aerial vehicle,” Schwarz said.

The SUV’s front right tire dipped into another pothole that hurled the members of Able Team and Susana Arquillo around like rag dolls. Carl Lyons held on tightly, fighting to maintain control of the 4WD vehicle as the terrain threatened to hammer them insensate with the passenger compartment of the SUV.

Lyons glanced over at Arquillo. She clutched the sides of her seat to absorb most of the frantic thrashing, but even so, her pert, sleek little bosom jostled with each rut slam.

“Are you aiming for these potholes, Mr. Ryder?” Arquillo snapped. “Because if you are, just pull over and I’ll do five minutes of jumping jacks for you and then you can drive sanely.”

Lyons’s attention had already returned to the road.

“You’ve driven in this mess before,” he growled. “You know these roads suck.”

“Besides, you’re not Ironman’s type,” Blancanales said. “You can count to ten without using your fingers.”

Lyons grunted in annoyance, weaving between two huge puddles. They were already soaked to the skin, as the humidity in the jungle was a stifling blanket, even without raining. They’d also hit one inescapable puddle that was three feet deep and stretched along ten feet of road. The interior of the vehicle was soaked with brown, brackish water as there was no way that they would drive the SUV with its doors attached. The roof, however, had a canvas canopy that prevented them from being brained by low-hanging branches. The fabric covering, however, breathed enough to keep the three men and their female companion from suffocating in the vehicle.

“How’re we doing on the navigation?” Lyons asked as they neared the coordinates where Arquillo’s informants had sighted UFOs.

Schwarz looked at his heavy-duty PDA. A GPS map on its screen was laid over a real-time photographic image of the countryside, satellite imagery transmitted from Stony Man Farm to give Able Team every bit of information they needed on the go. The PDA itself was made with solid-state electronics and encased in a tough metallic shell. The screen was made from quarter-inch thick Lexan over a liquid crystal display. The keypad was a touch-sensitive pad under a fireproof Nomex screen with numbers and letters installed. The clear Lexan screen didn’t interfere with the “touch screen” controls, which could be operated with any pointed object, from a dagger point to a pencil or stick scrounged from the environment. Schwarz knew that a stylus was easy to lose, having been a tech geek who’d lost several dozen expensive and inexpensive models for far less durable pocket data assistants.

“Another five minutes on…Hit the brakes!” Schwarz snapped. The Mercedes SUV screeched to a halt, its front end plowing into another pond-size puddle that sprawled across the road. Schwarz wiped muddy water off his screen and squinted. He tapped the screen with a pencil, increasing magnification. “We’ve got company.”

Lyons pushed the SUV into a lower gear and powered out of the puddle, crushing through thick foliage at the roadside. He kept going, weaving between tree trunks until the canopy of the forest gave them concealment.

Able Team and Arquillo left the vehicle, grabbing their combat packs and weapons as they did so. All four of them carried SIG 551 assault rifles. Chosen for a durable, mud-and grit-proof AK-47-style action, but with the ability to utilize American 5.56 mm ammunition and M-16 magazines, the SIGs had fourteen-inch barrels, light and compact enough for jungle or close quarters fighting, but still with enough power and reach for long-range engagements. Lyons’s version had a cut-down Remington 870 shotgun “Masterkey” modification attached under his barrel. A small 5-shot 12-gauge allowed the Able Team leader some versatility in breaking the back of an enemy ambush with buckshot, or punching holes through stubborn locks as a breeching weapon. Normally, the Masterkey system was limited to rifles that could mount the M-203 grenade launcher, and the SIG rifles were designed to carry Heckler & Koch grenade launchers, a completely different form of bracket. However, since Blancanales didn’t want to give up the M-203 grenade launcher he favored, and demanded for his SIG 551, Stony Man’s master gunsmith John “Cowboy” Kissinger redesigned the M-203 mounting sleeve for the short-barreled SIG’s forearm. The shotgun and the grenade launcher modifications to the assault carbines gave the team a force multiplier and the ability to destroy enemy vehicles or defensive positions with several ounces of high-explosive power. All four carried heavyweight 77-grain match-grade hollowpoint ammunition to make up for the 5.56 mm round’s loss of velocity out of the 14-inch barrel of the SIGs.

Spare magazines were tucked into the pockets of their Safari vests, which concealed their handguns. The lightweight outer shell and multiple pockets also disguised the vests’ inner lining, a blend of lightweight chain mail and mesh-woven Kevlar capable of stopping a hunting rifle round cold. Coverage was incomplete, because the sleeveless designs were meant for hot weather, and nothing protected their heads, but the garments, dubbed by codesigners Schwarz and Kissinger as Hot LZ vests, provided enough of an edge to split the difference between attacking in full commando gear and blending in as civilians. Since the Panamanian public was leery of American troops, Able Team decided that low-profile “soft” civilian clothing was its best option.

Schwarz checked the screen on his PDA, live footage pouring in to inform him of the presence of two darts in the air. He pegged them as the Predator knockoffs. Only the sensitivity of the National Reconnaissance Office satellite feeding Stony Man its real time imagery made the patrolling drones visible against the jungle beneath. He pocketed the PDA and looked in the back of the SUV, making certain he left nothing behind.

“Shame, too. I liked this bucket,” Schwarz grumbled as he trotted to join the others away from the SUV.

“The road’s compromised somehow,” Lyons said. “But it sure didn’t look like any electronics could have survived in this environment.”

“No sensors,” Blancanales replied, “but there’s a possibility we might have been picked up by low-level radar. A tight beam wouldn’t show up on any detectors, not if it were scanning down into the hills instead of providing umbrella-style coverage.”

“More like a spotlight,” Lyons said. “It wouldn’t even be seen from space?”

“No. Not in a tight beam sweep,” Schwarz explained. “It was just blind luck that the drones I spotted on my map…”

They heard the thrum of motors fill the air. Softer and more subtle than conventional aircraft due to enclosed ducts, the Predators were designed to have a stealthy profile in their role as observation aircraft. Six shadows rocketed over a gap in the canopy overhead, speeding to the north.

“Six?” Schwarz wondered outloud, confused.

“How many did you see?” Lyons asked.

“Two…and they were a lot higher up,” the electronics genius answered.

Arquillo looked toward the Mercedes SUV, nestled in the shadows of the tall trees bracketing it. “Well, if they’ve passed already, it should be safe to get back in…”

The CIA agent’s musing was answered as a finger of smoke stabbed down through the treetops as quick as lightning. An explosion struck the SUV dead-center, splitting it into two burning halves that flopped away from each other like dying fish on dry land. The concussive blast rolled over Arquillo and pushed her to the ground.

Lyons grabbed her and hauled her to her feet. It took a few moments for her explosion-rattled senses to register that they were running, slicing through the rain forest as streams of machine-gun fire ripped down in their wake, lead, splintered branches and dislodged leaves falling in an unnatural storm behind them.

She shrugged loose from Lyons and kept up with Able Team’s frantic pace through the jungle, staying one step ahead of the sweeping scythes of automatic fire that lashed at their heels.

R OBERTO D A C OSTA DIDN’T BELIEVE in much. Though the majority of South America practiced Catholicism, or occasionally some other form of Christianity, DaCosta considered himself a fairly reasonable man, enlightened above the need for some invisible friend in the sky. Let the fools who worked under him throw their lot in with an imaginary father figure with magical powers, he thought. DaCosta made his own fortune and didn’t need any psychic crutches. Right now, overseeing the loading of an oil tanker with millions of gallons of petroleum, earmarked for the United States, the oil man realized what real power was. The Venezuelan had command over billions of dollars worth of product, and had the ability to deny substantial portions of another country the fuel they needed to warm their homes or to get to work in the morning.

DaCosta didn’t believe in much, but he believed in his godhood. At his whim, he could strangle the wheels of progress to a halt and cast nations into chaos. A smile crept across his sun-bronzed face, a corner of his mouth turning up. He wouldn’t really, but the thought shot him through with a jolt of adrenaline as powerful as any cocaine. In his role as supervisor at the Maracaibo petrochemical complex, he was paid handsomely, and had his share of mistresses for when he grew bored with his wife, or when the slowly aging slut was busy with some cabana boy or another. He’d even had occasion to enjoy a trip to Thailand, blowing a large bonus on some forbidden fruit.

He didn’t need to sweat under the sun, among the white buttons of oil storage containers spread out in rows along the Gulf of Venezuela, or get his hands greasy in operating pipes. Hundreds toiled under DaCosta’s leadership. Still, his bronzed flesh glinted in the noonday sun as he stood on a catwalk overlooking the oil transferral. His secretary could handle the paperwork, and any important phone calls would be routed through the cell phone hanging on his belt. DaCosta preferred to be outside, watching, paying attention to the domain that he ruled with unequaled power. He’d been, secretly, part of the two-month oil strike that had hit at the end of 2002, cajoled by an offer of several million dollars to hurt the government. That was when he realized his true godhood.

His cell warbled on his belt.

“What is it?” he asked, annoyed at the interruption of his dreams of grandeur.

“Sir, the coastal patrol spotted something a few minutes ago, passing Los Monjes,” his secretary told him.

DaCosta was about to dismiss it, but knew that Los Monjes islands were a point of contention between Venezuela and Colombia. “Smugglers? So? Colombia sends smugglers all the time around the Gulf.”

“Well, with the trouble in Panama with unmanned attack aircraft…” his secretary began.

“The coastal patrol can handle a few enemy airplanes, right?” DaCosta asked.

“They lost track of the unidentified aircraft.”

DaCosta felt a moment of weakness. From his position atop the catwalk, he could see north, along the bottleneck between Lago de Maracaibo and the Gulf of Venezuela for miles and miles. Needlepoints of white, five or six of them, were visible in the faint distance across the glassy waters of the now placid gulf.

The Venezuelan oil man swallowed hard as they wove around the stern of an oil tanker, moving with synchronized precision like a school of deadly fish.

Suddenly he realized that his godly power was a stack of cards that could be knocked down, and he watched the personification of the ill wind that was going to collapse it.

N ORMALLY, THE P REDATOR UAV drone was a low-powered, propeller-driven unmanned drone. It had been developed from early cruise missiles, the space normally reserved for a warhead payload replaced with advanced optics, transmitters and cameras. Unfortunately the cruise missiles, with their supersonic engines, were grossly inefficient at gathering intelligence, passing too quickly through an enemy territory. It was good for a first-glance of forces in a region, but commanders knew the benefits of real-time transmissions. Something slower, with longer staying power, was necessary. As such, the winglets were increased in width and area to allow more surface to catch air and glide, and the jet engine was replaced with a more fuel-efficient prop-driven motor. Now, crossing the sky at under two hundred miles an hour, the Predator was an ideal eye in the sky, able to hang around and orbit throughout an entire battle, or maintain a long-term watch on enemy movements across distances. The slow-moving Predators could also be equipped with weaponry that made them ideal assassination platforms, as proved in Afghanistan against al Qaeda forces.

The Engineers of the New Tomorrow, however, had brilliant designers on their side. Not only were the UAVs modified for multiple weapon platforms, such as machine guns, artillery rockets or even biochemical weapon payloads, but the ENT had developed a lightweight rocket engine that fit into the housing of the prop unit on their modified Predators. The additional wingspan helped stabilize the drones at near sonic speeds, and all that high-tech electronics were replaced.

In the case of the Maracaibo assault, the payload was a medium-size thermobaric warhead. While larger thermobarics were a step below a nuclear warhead, the modified Predators, reverse engineered back to being cruise missiles, were still devastating weapons. Originally, these particular warheads were meant for clearing underground installations such as those encountered in Afghanistan. Producing a cloud of airborne fuel, which was ignited to the same temperature as the surface of the sun, the fuel-air explosion had enormous power, capable of incinerating even the most persistent biological or chemical weapon.

Used against the armored white tanks dotting the shoreline, it was like a sledgehammer brought down on a row of candy buttons. The Predators spread out evenly, their blast radius a mere 500 meters, but more than enough to cover a large portion of the petrochemical complex. All six detonated simultaneously.

Roberto DaCosta, standing on his catwalk, was spared the raw fury of being caught in the cloud of vaporized fuel igniting across three kilometers of shoreline. The flash, however, was blindingly hot and his exposed skin was scourged with first-degree burns. A concussion wave of superheated air thrown off by the explosion slammed him against the railing of the catwalk hard enough to leave a hairline fracture along his pelvis and lower back, as well as deep tissue bruising. The combined pain made him collapse, his arms flailing for the support of the rail.

Instants later the wind returned, but in the opposite direction, pulling with the force of a tornado as the atmosphere fought to fill the momentary vacuum caused by six thermobaric warheads detonating in unison.

DaCosta howled in fear and terror, clinging to the railing for dear life. Below, he could see the complex’s workers being thrown around like rag dolls by concussion and implosion waves.

The winds finally stopped, but the heat grew worse. DaCosta looked back and realized that 1500 square kilometers of oil storage field was a blazing inferno, millions of gallons of petroleum fueling a fire that convinced him that hell truly did exist. The sky turned deep black as thick, choking smoke spread out, a smothering blanket that spread across the city of Maracaibo.

T HE DRONES WERE RELENTLESS in their pursuit of Able Team and Arquillo. While their brethren were en route to unleash relentless hell and fury on a defenseless city, moving at high subsonic velocities, the patrol Predators hung at a relatively lazy ninety miles an hour, long wings picking up the wind to provide lift beyond what their forward velocity supplied. Even so, their initial strafing runs had proved fruitless, simply because the only means that they had for picking up the fleeing humans was thermal imaging. In the hot and humid atmosphere of the rain forest, however, it was impossible to get a clean lock on the Stony Man warriors and their CIA ally. The SUV had proved to be an easy target, simply because its mass of metal and hot engine proved a much easier target for even tropic-hazed sensors.

Unfortunately the metal in their weaponry and equipment provided the tight-beam radar spotlight with a small means of tracking them. It was a tiny, low-profile signature, but still enough to give the operators of the drones something to lock on to.

Blancanales, his senses tuned by years of experience in jungles across the globe, found a cave and ushered the others into it. It was small, and a tight fit, but once inside, they were shielded not only from streams of light machine-gun fire, but also the probing radar beams that hunted them through the rain forest

Arquillo was crouched, hands on her khaki-clad knees, reddish hair damp and soaked, covering her face as she gulped down air to replenish herself from the frantic run. Lyons rested a hand on her shoulder and she glanced up at him. He offered her a canteen of water.

“Damn near got us killed suggesting we go back to the SUV,” she panted before taking a swig of tepid water. She swallowed, knowing that she needed the moisture.

“We’re alive,” Lyons told her. “No harm, no foul.”

Arquillo straightened and leaned her head against the cave wall. She dragged a curtain of sweat-dampened hair from in front of her eyes and looked over Able Team. “I still let my guard down too soon.”

“Well, it’s not like we can drive you back to a day-care center for CIA agents, can we?” Blancanales asked, winking. “Someone blew up our ride.”

Schwarz breathed slowly and deeply, willing his body’s autonomic reactions to subside so that he could concentrate on his PDA. Inside the cave, under a sheet of heavy rock in the side of a hill, he’d lost satellite contact. He switched the device over to transmission scanning and moved closer to the mouth of the cave.

“Isn’t he going to give our position away? One good shot with a rocket like before, and this cave becomes a tomb,” Arquillo said.

“Nah. I’m on passive scan, this unit has radar-absorbent paint over its metal, and I left my rifle with Pol,” Schwarz mentioned as he studied the screen.

“Checking to see if the spotlight is near us,” Arquillo concluded as she watched.

The electronics expert nodded. “See, they can sweep the hillside with relative impunity because it’s a tight beam. No radiation spills over to be noticed, even by sensors checking the area, unless they’re right in the arc of the beam.”

“Which the PDA is,” Lyons said. “You don’t pick them up, they can’t pick us up.”

Blancanales looked at Schwarz. “They’re still sweeping the area?”

“Yeah. And even if the spotlight is off us, those drones still have thermal sensors. It won’t be efficient, but after wasting so much ammo, they might just see what they could do with more rockets.”

The ground shook violently and Arquillo ducked. Dust rained from the roof of the cave, making her cough.

“See what I mean?” Schwarz asked, crouched near the mouth of the cave.

“We could just shoot them down,” Lyons growled.

Blancanales shrugged. “So then they’d send forces on foot after us.”

“I’d rather go one on one with enemy soldiers than cower from rocket strikes,” Lyons countered.

“Got a point there,” Arquillo agreed. The rumbling thunder of artillery rockets slamming into the hillside around them was unnerving and left her feeling impotent and helpless. At least in a gunfight, she knew she had an even chance to survive and win.

Schwarz looked at the roof of the cave. “Don’t worry. The tunnel’s holding up. We’re under enough rock that it’ll take a direct hit to bring it down.”

A loud thunderclap split the air in the cave, and Arquillo and the Stony Man warriors curled up in reaction to the nearby explosion.

“Say something else to tempt fate, smart-ass,” Lyons grumbled.

Schwarz held a finger up to his lips, then pointed to the roof of the cave. The rolling thunder of the air strikes had stopped, the drones’ rocket pods spent and empty. Schwarz grinned. “I was counting their shots. That was it.”

“Good,” Lyons answered. “With any luck, they’ll send out a patrol. It’ll be a relief to have a human opponent.”

CHAPTER FOUR

It didn’t take long for Phoenix Force to grab the hard drives out of the controllers’ computers. They just ripped open the casings and sliced the IDE cables. The hard drives were durable and fit into Manning’s backpack.

While Manning and McCarter were tearing apart CPUs, James, Encizo and Hawkins were repairing the tires of one of the pickups. The Toyota pickup was a bit old and weathered, but an inspection showed that the vehicle was in good running condition. All it took was a tire change, and it would be back in action. The pickup would be less conspicuous than the covered trailers, as well as having the benefit of maneuverability.

Hawkins scrounged the other vehicles and found spare gasoline canisters.

“All set?” Manning asked James as he topped off the pickup’s tank.

“Yeah,” James replied. “Time to go?”

Manning looked at his watch. “We’ve got a minute.”

“Okay,” James said, screwing the cap on the jerri can.

“No, we’ve got a minute to reach minimum safe distance,” Manning explained.

“Aw heck. We were supposed to be coming in quietly,” James muttered.

McCarter slid behind the wheel and started the engine. Hawkins and Manning squeezed into the front with the Briton, while Encizo and James clambered into the truck bed. Encizo’s and James’s darker coloring would be less conspicuous in the Lebanese countryside than the other members of the team, who looked distinctly European.

Manning’s estimate of a minute to reach minimum safe distance was spot-on. Utilizing distract mechanisms already in the trailers, as well as some “Eight-balls”—one-eighth of a stick of C-4 plastic explosives—Manning had wired the drone operations centers well. The trailers ripped violently apart, but there was little flash. Electronics and corpses were ground to bits by the detonations.

While Manning had done his demolitions work, McCarter took fingerprints from the dead, utilizing a fingerprint scanner. Now, as he drove, Hawkins plugged the scanner into the sat-phone-linked laptop and uploaded information to Stony Man Farm.

“Barb, see if these are current Syrian operatives,” McCarter had text-messaged along with the data file.

Hawkins looked up from the laptop. “Bear says that it’ll take a few hours for them to check the records for certain.”

“To narrow it down, tell them the unit we saw on the sentries. They might have been veterans of the same group,” McCarter suggested.

Hawkins typed that message back to the Farm’s Computer Room. It took only a few moments to get a reply.

“Bear says thanks. He’ll see what he can get on the sentries,” Hawkins said.

“How’s our schedule, Gary?” McCarter asked.

“At this rate, we should be five minutes early to our meet with the Egyptians,” Manning answered.

“Of course, that doesn’t take into account running into local factions.”

“Just a little more drama for the evening in that case,” McCarter said. “We won’t stay and fight.”

Manning was about to say something when McCarter sailed the pickup three feet into the air after plowing through a rut in the road. The truck plopped down and shook Phoenix Force around.

“Not that we’ll be running into anyone with antiaircraft weapons.”

McCarter grinned. It was a long-standing joke between the two that the British pilot drove as if he expected vehicles could fly. Manning had grown used to his driving, but he still held on to his seat with white-knuckled strength. From the bed, Encizo and James grumbled and complained through the cab’s rear window.

“Hey, David, we don’t have seat belts back here!” James growled.

McCarter kept up the breakneck pace. Drivers weren’t known for cautious pace in the Lebanese countryside, and the Briton was following suit. “When in Rome” was a savvy strategy for blending in. It wasn’t as if there were highway patrolmen on these dirt roads. No headlights were visible on the horizon in any direction. Manning scanned out the windows for operating lights on any aircraft, but the sky was merely sprinkled with immobile stars.

“Anything back there?” McCarter asked.

“Just two rattled people,” Encizo complained. “No lights on the horizon.”

“Give a shout if you see something,” McCarter said.

“Who the hell’s gonna catch up to us?” James asked.

“You know our luck,” Manning quipped.

Hawkins shook his head. “Probably a rocket-assisted APC.”

“Don’t tempt fate,” Manning cautioned.

Something sparked in the distance, a star of light on the ground. It wasn’t a single headlight, and moments later, the snap-crack of bullets lashing past the truck filled the air. Machine-gun rounds hurtled by so quickly, Phoenix Force could hear the breaking of the sound barrier.

McCarter killed the headlights and swerved hard, breaking off their previous course. The Toyota pickup jerked and jostled as it rolled over rough ground and clumps of vegetation. Encizo and James were silent in the back, holding on for dear life so they wouldn’t be ejected when the truck hit the next bump.

The star of gunfire turned into a sidelong flare, tracer rounds scratching streaks of red in the black night. Whoever the gunner was, he was searching for Phoenix Force’s pickup. The teardrop-shaped muzzle-flash fattened and turned into a circle, bullets raking the ground around the pickup. McCarter hit the brakes and drove toward the machine gun. The arc of fire swung past and sliced into the night. Bullets had drilled into the pickup’s bodywork, and the windshield sported three new white spiderwebs where bullets ricocheted off.

The weapon was a light machine gun, the rifle rounds at the extreme limit of their normal range, lacking the power to smash the safety glass.

“Everyone okay?” McCarter asked, skidding the pickup to a halt.

“Yeah,” James said, crawling out of the bed.

Manning and Hawkins piled out of the cab, the Canadian went prone behind a bush and locked his sniper rifle’s scope on the distant gunner.

“What is it?” Hawkins asked, sliding beside him.

“An armored personnel carrier,” Manning grumbled. “Not the one you ordered, though. Just the good old-fashioned roll-along. No rocket boosters.”

Hawkins grimaced. “Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.”

“Too much information there, T.J.,” James joked. “Whatever happened to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’?”

Hawkins winced, remembering Aaron Kurtzman’s nickname.

McCarter threw the American members of Phoenix Force a harsh glare, then leaned to Manning.

“Is it alone?”

The big Canadian swept the terrain around the APC. “It’s an old Soviet-style APC, so it could either be Syrian or Syrian allied. The ground is uneven around it, and I can’t see anything else. Range out is 750 meters, give or take.”

“I said we wouldn’t stand and fight, but driving in the dark without headlights is starkers, even by my standards,” McCarter said. He consulted his map, illuminating it with his refilter flashlight. The low frequency of light put out by the ruby-colored lens wouldn’t travel far to betray their position, especially at that range. He did a quick bit of reckoning. “We can leave the pickup and continue on foot.”

“Double time,” Hawkins said, looking over McCarter’s shoulder.

“Get on the link to the Farm and tell Aaron that we ran into some interference,” McCarter ordered.

“Shit, “Hawkins muttered. “David…”

McCarter looked at the laptop screen and clucked his tongue. “The paratroopers were dishonorably discharged. Syrians were dealing drugs to their fellow soldiers. They were assigned to operations here in Lebanon. And we’ve dealt with enough heroin coming out of the Bekaa Valley to know who they could have hooked up with.”

“Drug dealers attacking Israel?” James asked.

“Muslim drug dealers,” Encizo corrected. “The Jihad has used narcotics money to supply terrorist groups with almost bottomless funding.”

“The kind of funding that can afford ten heavily armed UAV drones and two eighteen-wheelers loaded with computer software,” Manning added.

“There’s no solid confirmation that those paratroopers went into the Lebanese heroin trade, yet,” McCarter said. “We’ll have to check on that once we make our rendezvous.”

“The APC is moving,” Manning announced.

“Headed our way?” James asked.

“A straight beeline,” Manning said. “Give me a few moments. Move on ahead, I’ll catch up.”

Phoenix Force took off while Manning took another stick of C-4 from his pack and divided it up, setting it on the fuel-filled jerri cans and replacing the gas cap to the tank. He wired them to one central detonator. There was a chance that the APC would hose down the truck with its machine gun at a distance, but either way, the explosion would erase any evidence of Phoenix Force presence in Lebanon.

If militia men did inspect the truck, there was a better likelihood that they would disturb the cans in the back and set off one of Manning’s tripwires, removing another squad of gun-toting militiamen from the Lebanese conflict. Shouldering his sniper rifle, Manning took off after his friends. His long legs fell into a loping pace that ate up distance effortlessly. He slowed to accommodate the others once he caught up with them.

Five minutes after leaving the truck, a fireball flashed, lighting the night behind them. The outline of the APC and two military-style jeeps appeared, backlit by the flowering blossom of their pickup. One of the jeeps flipped and bounced off the APC.

“Seventy gallons of petrol will do that,” McCarter quipped.

Manning knelt and surveyed the blast site with his rifle.

“They tracking us?” Encizo inquired.

“They’re dealing with wounded, “Manning informed them. “We’ll have plenty of time to get out of sight by sunup.”

“Ground cover will obscure us after another two hundred yards, and it’s two hours until sunrise anyhow,” James mentioned.

“That’s no reason to sit around discussing the weather,” McCarter said. “Let’s roll.”

“A LL MANEUVERS GO according to plan,” Javier Cortez said. “At least until contact with the enemy. We’ve got activity in our Middle Eastern and Central American arenas.”

“Someone’s noticed us,” Kovak said. “I see that Tel Aviv is still quiet.”

“The fight was diverted.” Ling Jon spoke up. “An outside group of hackers broke into the network and commandeered the drones. We shut down on first notification, initiated defensive—”

“Their system will have taken a beating from your defenses,” Kovak noted. “What about the other scheduled attacks?”

Ling smiled. “The fuse is lit in the China Sea, and Kashmir is about to rock.”

Kovak took a deep breath and glanced at Cortez. “You’re looking to start every war you can imagine.”

“So many juicy-looking powder kegs,” Cortez answered with a grin. “We’re making a whole new world, Jason.”

“There’s going to be enough of a planet left after China gets set off?” Kovak asked.

“I’m fully aware of what plans Beijing has, and the West’s projected response,” Ling explained.

“Beijing will take the attack as an excuse to make a move on Taiwan. The British and Australian navies will move to protect Taiwan, and of course the United States will throw in. One or two more Chinese ships sunk—”

“And China will take a potshot at the Western navies,” Kovak concluded. “World War Three.”

“Just like the chest-beating in South America,” Cortez said. “Colombia and Venezuela responded exactly as we wanted.”

Kovak looked at the world map. The Engineers’ software was monitoring international tensions. Earlier that day, the Republic of Georgia suffered an attack from Azerbaijan The Azerbaijani government claimed innocence, but the city of Gardabani was hammered by HVAR artillery rockets and antitank missiles launched by unmanned drones. Muslim separatists took the opportunity to start riots across the city, killing police officers and soldiers.

The Russian-controlled Commonwealth of Independent States, already on the edge because of infighting between ethnic groups in the region, was on full alert. The Russian president offered to send a few divisions of troops into Georgia to help enforce the peace, but the leadership in Tsiblisi remembered that Russian troops had swallowed the independent government in 1921. Leery eyes remained locked on Moscow, wondering if this was a ploy by hard-liners who wanted to rebuild the old Soviet empire. And now Beijing was being poked, the sleeping dragon baited with the jewel that was Taiwan. It was no secret that the People’s Republic of China lusted after the independent island nation, and had all forms of contingency plans to take the little country. Taiwan was ready to fight, but it knew that if its Western allies faltered, it would lose the battle and China would be reunited.

With tensions in South America, the Middle East and the Commonwealth of Independent States, Britain and America would be stretched thin, making the road to Taiwan wide and ready. The projected spark of violence between India and Pakistan over Kashmir would leave the globe with a hair trigger.

“This should confuse matters,” Cortez said. “Our previous two hot spots were major oil conflicts.”

“Lebanon?” Kovak asked.

“Syria and Israel border on major oil-producing nations who are members of OPEC. The start of an all-out war between those two would affect Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not to mention the potential of other OPEC states that dislike Israel to step in and join the party,” Cortez said.

“Those countries tried that. Israel beat them down. And we have nukes now, remember?” Kovak reminded the man.

Cortez smirked. “That’s part of what we’re counting on. We’re lighting the match on as many fuses as we can.”

Kovak nodded, looking at the map. “And when the bombs go off, the topography of the world alters. Radically.”

“The Old World, the New World, the Third World, everything breaks down into anarchy,” Cortez explained. “Barbarism and chaos run rampant. Riots infect the streets, governments crumble and, eventually, everyone will look to who has enough power to bring them peace and stability.”

Kovak’s eyes narrowed. “The tank attacks on Israel, a while back. Utilizing Marshall Plan hardware…”

“A test run. Now, we can see how the world responds to our operations, and we can anticipate them,” Cortez said.

“This has been a long time coming,” Kovak noted.

“We needed to build up supplies. The drones for bringing hostilities to the edge and pushing them over,” Cortez continued. “But we have other facilities. Storage areas, set up around the globe, stocked with the kind of firepower we’d need to emerge from the ashes of civilization as the new tomorrow’s government.”

“And forcing nuclear, biological and chemical attacks across the globe thins down the herd you want to run,” Kovak concluded. “After all, you might have a fairly strong organization, but even you can’t rein in six billion humans.”

“No,” Cortez admitted. He smiled. “I don’t blame you for feeling overwhelmed.”

“It’s not every day someone sets the wheels of Armageddon in motion,” Kovak stated.

Cortez chuckled. “Yes. The backup plan.”

Kovak looked at Israel, specifically the Northern District. To many Christians around the world, this was to be the location for the battle of Armageddon, specifically in the Jezreel Valley, not far from the Golan Heights. Several historical battles of Meggido had been fought across the history of humankind.

Jammed in the armpit between Lebanon and Syria, and containing the contested Golan Heights, the Northern District was a lightning rod for tension and violence. Between angry and hostile enemies, this region had seen countless acts of terrorism and posturing, from rocket artillery attacks from Lebanon to massed troops on the border with Syria. On the Israeli side of the equation, angry settlers engaged in brutal vigilante violence against native Arabs, murdering and intimidating countless people.

Kovak had engaged in copious amounts of such intimidating violence until the cowardly government gave in to “peaceful concessions” and gave the land back to the Arabs. Settlers were wrestled and hijacked from their homes. Kovak then realized that the Promised Land had fallen to the forces of evil. He wasn’t the only one, and together, they had formed an unofficial wing of the Mossad called Abraham’s Dagger. Made up of current and former Mossad agents, they took the actions that the government was too weak to commit. Now, hunted by their former comrades, Kovak and his allies were out in the cold.

Their future involved either jail or a shallow, unmarked grave.

Kovak’s loyalty to Israel burned away like gasoline under a blowtorch.

It was time to start over.

That meant forming an alliance with South American Nazis and anti-communist Chinese rebels, among dozens of other splintered cells, disillusioned and rejected. Alone, none of them could have made much of a difference, just a few minutes of carnage-bloodied footage on the evening news.

Together, they were the Engineers of the New Tomorrow.

The world would bathe in blood, and be washed clean by the tide of war.

Kovak looked at Cortez and nodded grimly. The future would involve strange bedmates, but in the end, it wouldn’t matter. The past was up for execution, and after the chaos, he could see the Dagger and the Nazis as allies. Old hatreds had no place when there was a world to rebuild.

They would be too busy trying to fight off mutual enemies.

T HERE WERE TWO GROUPS meeting in the cave when Phoenix Force arrived at their rendezvous. But that was to be expected. Though Israel and Egypt were locked in a “cold peace,” each side watching the other in response to enemy actions, they were at peace, not war. There was a healthy measure of distrust, but there was also a camaraderie between the two nations when it came to fighting terrorism. The same ultraradical Islamic groups that swore to destroy Israel also sought to overthrow the government in Cairo because it was not vehemently Muslim enough, nor willing to crush the tiny nation of Jews to its northeast. Peace talks and diplomacy was a wide-open avenue between the two, and such openness was an anathema to terrorists who wanted nothing less than extermination of a foreign presence in the Arab world.

In the minds of the Mossad and Egypt’s General Intelligence Directorate, the ancient history that tied Cairo and Jerusalem together was just that—ancient history. A new era called for new responses and allegiances. While the GID had been formed to respond to the Mossad’s attempts to undermine Egypt’s fighting ability against Israel, the threat of terrorists often threw them together as allies.

“Is this a private party, or can anyone join in?” David McCarter said in greeting at the mouth of the cave. The muzzles of automatic weapons swung in his direction, but the black-and-white checkered keffiyeh dangling in his left hand was the indicator he was an ally. While the keffiyeh was traditional head garb of violent terrorists, holding it like a limp flag in his left hand showed disdain for the cloth in Arab cultural mores. The left was the unclean hand, and primarily holding such a sacred item in a left hand while the right was free was an insult to the PLO and the Fatah movements.

The muzzles pointed to the dirt.

“Bring your people in, King,” the Egyptian leader said. “You can call me Mahmoud.”

McCarter nodded to the Egyptian.

“I’m Reiser,” the Israeli offered.

McCarter made a hand gesture to the rest of Phoenix Force. Encizo and James remained just outside the cave entrance, along with pairs of Egyptians and Israelis who served as perimeter guards, and to keep the others inside polite.

There was tension, but the real concern was an outsider stumbling onto this situation. Considering that most outsiders in the Lebanese countryside were armed members of one of several militia groups, the noise and violence would be considerable, drawing unwanted attention if the alliance didn’t take them down swiftly and silently.

“Have you heard about the latest situations?” Mahmoud asked.

“Pakistan and India?” McCarter inquired.

“Border crossing with troops and air support from these damned drones,” Reiser explained.

“Troops,” McCarter noted with some surprise. “Any positive identification?”

“Most likely insurgents who found Iraq too hot to handle,” Mahmoud stated. “Not much was left for identification. They grabbed their wounded when the Indian fire base they assaulted hit back hard. Drones packed with napalm crashed into the Indian compound, killed the troops and destroyed most of the remains of the fallen assault force.”

“India would love for Pakistan to have made an offensive move,” McCarter commented. “Kashmir has been a sore point between those two for years. It would be the perfect excuse to close it down once and for all.”

“Trouble is, both sides have nuclear missiles,” Reiser reminded him. “With a billion noncombatants in the subcontinent, that solution might be all too final.”

“There’s trouble between Georgia and Azerbaijan,” Mahmoud noted. “Venezuela was also attacked. Maracaibo is in flames, literally.”

“This is much bigger than we thought,” McCarter said. He filled in the Egyptians and the Israelis about the aborted drone attack on Israel.

“Ex-Syrian paratroopers turned mercenary,” Reiser mused. “Deniable, but that wouldn’t matter much to our government if it had succeeded. Every insult must be answered in kind, which would involve firing a nuclear warhead into a Syrian city.”

“Even if they were not guilty of this particular offense,” McCarter added. “Because the world has seen that Syria is anything but innocent of malice toward the Israelis.”

“Just like Colombia and Venezuela are hardly the sweetest of friends, or Pakistan and India, or Georgia and Azerbaijan,” Mahmoud rattled off. “Someone’s taking advantage of deep-seated hostility to start a war or five.”

“Who and why?” Manning asked.

“Someone with ambition.” One of the Israelis spoke up. “Couldn’t help with the other option.”

“Doesn’t narrow the field down much, does it?” T.J. Hawkins quipped.

“That’s why we’re here,” Mahmoud said. “If we figure this out, perhaps we can head off the main insanity.”

“Which means China might be next,” another Egyptian said. “It doesn’t seem like there’s a situation that might lead to a nuclear exchange than something involving Taiwan. The Taiwanese don’t have the bond, but the U.S. and Britain do, and they’d need to have that kind of power to take on Communist China.”

“We’ll keep our eyes peeled in that direction,” McCarter replied. “Good thinking.”

The Briton’s brow furrowed as he remembered a report from Able Team’s Hermann Schwarz, about cheap knock off electronics from China. He hoped the cyberteam at the Farm would figure out that possible connection in the near future. Otherwise, he’d bring it up at their next scheduled teleconference.

That was, if this odd alliance survived long enough to report in.

CHAPTER FIVE

Barbara Price stared at the screen, not believing what she saw—a submarine from the People’s Republic of China floating, belly-up, like a slaughtered whale, flame and smoke bleeding into the sky.

“For too long, we have dealt with the hostile ring that the Communists have wrapped around our tiny island nation. Now the so-called mightiest military in the world will see what power unrestrained truly is!” the announcement said.

The video and voice were coming through a live feed, broadcast over multiple frequencies. It was a slap in the face to Beijing, their navy now one ship smaller, split apart. Considering the number of drones that had been utilized in attacks recently, it was no surprise that they were getting broadcast quality video sent around the world.

“How’s the trace on the signal?” Price asked Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman.

“Uplinks are bouncing all over the place,” Kurtzman said. “We’ve got some trails leading back to Taiwan, but more are scattered all across the Pacific. We’ve even got relay pulses coming from San Francisco and…”

“What?” Price asked.

“Panama,” Kurtzman stated.

“China could take the path of least resistance and use the relays going through Taiwan as evidence for a retaliatory strike,” Price mentioned.

“Which means we have to work fast,” Kurtzman explained.

Price frowned. “Surely with all these attacks going on, utilizing similar MOs, the world would see that it’s being yanked on a chain.”

“Rational leaders would realize that,” Kurtzman said. “But you’ve got these people working on the raw nerves of leaders who have grudges. I mean, how many times have our teams put down agents provocateurs in dozens of other conflicts?”

“Too many to count,” Price answered. She pinched her brow between her eyes and sighed. “You’d think they’d learn by now.”

“The bad guys go with what works,” Kurtzman said. “And we keep stopping them cold, so the world’s leaders don’t get a chance to learn any better.”

“Check on that transmission from Panama. Home in on it,” Price ordered. “I’ve got to make sure that we can keep our government from misbehaving.”

“My eyes are wide open,” Kurtzman said, returning to his keyboard.

Price left the Computer Room and headed to her office. She picked up her phone and began conferring with her contacts in the CIA and NSA, making certain that the word got out about the uncertain origins of the Chinese submarine video. Both agencies confirmed Kurtzman’s findings, though it took some cajoling to get their admissions. Intelligence agencies were notoriously tight-lipped about their information, even among their own departments. Price’s contacts, however, were people she knew when she worked for NSA, and they shared a mutual respect. While the Department of Homeland Defense had been devised to eliminate jurisdictional disputes and information smoke stacking, the reality was that petty rivalries often strangled the flow of intelligence between those who needed to know.

Price’s hot line rang and she picked up. It was Hal Brognola.

“What’s happening, Hal?” she asked.

“The president is working on building a case for Beijing not to take action against Taiwan. Information from the CIA, NSA and the U.S. Navy has given him enough counterindication to work on, but it’s not going to be too easy,” Brognola said. There was a short pause. “Good work.”

“Sometimes intelligence and logic can prevail,” Price replied. The past few hours of wheeling and dealing over the phone had left her with a throbbing headache, but relief flooded her after hearing Brognola’s news. “What about the other fires on?”

“FARC has stepped up action, making it difficult for Colombia and Venezuela to step down. Both sides are on full alert, and it’s hard to tell the difference between terrorist activity and legitimate military action,” Brognola explained. “The National Reconnaissance Office’s notes are that northern and central America are pretty heavily masked. Electronic surveillance is difficult, and orbital cameras are being obscured by all the smoke from Maracaibo.”

“I got the same from Aaron,” Price answered. “We’re doing our best, though, and Able is on the ground.”

“If anyone can shake answers loose, it’s Carl,” Brognola admitted. “Keep in touch with him.”

“I suppose we don’t have to worry about any more international incidents with all this going on,” she said with a sigh. Price checked her screen and received McCarter’s report on the meet in Lebanon. She saw the postscript, and as usual, the men of Phoenix Force demonstrated knowledge and political awareness. The report came in just minutes before the video on the Chinese submarine, and McCarter had voiced concerns about the conspiracy they were in conflict with attempting to spur tensions over Taiwan.

“David can be scary sometimes,” Price murmured.

“Don’t tell me that. I’ve driven with him,” Brognola quipped.

“I mean, he and the others were concerned about China being the next hot spot the drones hit,” Price corrected him.

Brognola clucked his tongue. “Oh, that. Last time I checked, the average IQ of the members of Phoenix was around genius level.”

“Dummies don’t last long in field operations,” Price replied. “I’ll see if there’s anything new on the Chinese front, and see if there’s any breakthrough in Panama.”

“I’ll brief the President on what you’re sending me,” Brognola replied. “He’s headed to New York to speak with the United Nations.”

“Talk about tap dancing on thin ice,” Price remarked. “After the world accused the U.S. of overreacting to Iraq, the President calling for cool heads…”

“There’s no other choice, Barb. Either we get the world to put its sabers down and look for the real cause, or World War Three hits,” Brognola told her. “It’s world-saving time again. And we can’t screw up.”

“I know, Hal,” Price answered. “We’re on it.”

“Never doubted that,” Brognola replied. He hung up.

C ARL L YONS CROUCHED , the SIG 551 Masterkey cradled across his knees as he peered through the foliage at a pickup wending its way across a dirt road. The back was covered with a tarp, and two dirt bikes with submachine-gun-armed riders rolled parallel to it. Two more dirt bikes snarled into view, coming from the direction that Able Team had marched from.

“They’ll know we got out of the SUV,” Susana Arquillo whispered to the Able Team leader.

Lyons nodded toward the riders. “They have radios, so they’ll have reported the lack of corpses back at the drop-off.”

Arquillo looked up. The thick tree canopy overhead blocked the sky, but with some forms of imaging, they might as well have been hiding under clear plastic wrap. Her lips were drawn tight.

“Nothing in the air.” Schwarz consoled her. “We’re okay for now.”

“They won’t have to send aerial scouts for us,” Blancanales countered. “They know they’re our targets. If we’re not charred skeletons in a burned-out vehicle, then we’re on our way to check them out.”

“We’ll be answered by some serious security, in that case,” Arquillo said.

“Good,” Lyons answered.

“That’s good?” Arquillo quizzed.

“The more protection we run into, the more important the base, and the more answers we’ll get after we crack it open,” Lyons explained.

“That’s Ironman,” Schwarz quipped. “He’s a Pollyanna, looking for a silver lining in every cloud.”

“More like a Silvertip hollowpoint in every .45,” Lyons corrected him. “We’ll stick with the road, but keep to the forest. Pol?”

“I’ll take point,” Blancanales answered, accepting the role. The eldest Able Team member was at home in tropical jungles and could lead the group through the densest of rain forests with nimble ease. Schwarz was a jungle warfare expert, as well, but he was busy monitoring a frequency meter to determine enemy activity and watching for drones being directed toward them. With Schwarz glued to his PDA monitor, it was up to Blancanales to watch for more terrestrial challenges.

The Stony Man warriors and their comrade continued parallel to the road the motorbikes and pickup took for a few minutes when Schwarz gave the hand signal for them to stop cold.

Arquillo and Lyons crouched deeply. The leaves of the canopy were thick overhead, but to some forms of detection, they might as well have been standing on barren tundra.

“Tree trunks, break up our pattern,” Schwarz whispered, crawling into the crooked fingers of a tree’s roots for cover. The others did the same, sweeping leaves and mud over themselves. The ambient temperature of the forest floor would allow the leaves and mud to mask their humanoid heat patterns, however, all the metallic gear they carried would provide enough to lock on with focused radar sweeps. Even the pound of metal in Arquillo’s polymer-framed Glock would register.

Schwarz inwardly hoped that because of the low-cost Chinese electronics in the unmanned drones, that they wouldn’t have the technical capacity to operate a focused beam radar sweep. He doubted it, though. The drones were supposed to be untraceable, but the enemy would undoubtedly want prime-quality gear for the UAVs protecting their home base. He braced his SIG and aimed toward where the PDA’s sensors picked up the drones’ approach, ready to empty a magazine of 5.56 mm NATO rounds into the Predator.

The thrum of engines sounded overhead as the UAVs took up an orbit. There were two of them, Schwarz’s monitor picked them out as they described a lazy circular arc overhead, setting Able Team and their ally perfectly in the middle. The electronics genius scowled.

“Found us,” Schwarz said. He still stayed close to the tree trunk, but the mulch of the forest floor was no longer needed. “But these aren’t armed.”

“The last time they hosed us down from the air, they got bupkis,” Lyons growled. “This time, they want confirmed kills. That means…”

The buzzing snarl of dirt bikes rose to a crescendo in the distance, but then stopped. Blancanales gestured toward where he placed the enemy’s last position. His SIG, equipped with an M-203 grenade launcher, swept the forest.

Lyons squirmed out of most of his gear and laid the SIG Masterkey beside it. The only metal he had left on his person was his combat knife and his Kissinger-tuned 1911 pocket revolver and spare ammunition. It was still a significant amount, but the Able Team leader had been briefed well by Schwarz about the radar capability of the Predator drones. His sheathed magazines, pocketed revolver and battle knife, under radar-absorbent ballistic nylon, would provide a negligible signal for the drone to pick up. He threaded a suppressor onto the barrel of the .45 auto and nodded for the others to do the same.

The implication was clear.

His teammates dumped their gear except for their handguns and knives.

Arquillo was about to do the same, but Lyons shook his head.

“You’re our anchor,” he told her in a low whisper. “I know you’re okay with fighting, but this isn’t going to be self-defense. This is going to be slaughter.”

Arquillo frowned as she gripped her .45. “I can handle myself.”

Lyons shook his head. “If things go tits up, I need someone with a real weapon, not a handgun, giving us cover fire.”

The CIA agent’s eyes narrowed. “Because I’m a woman?”

“Because you’re not a member of our team, and you haven’t done what we have,” Lyons said. He stalked off into the forest, his modified-for-silence .45 a dark, grim bit of high-tech in his fist.

T SO K U KILLED THE ENGINE on his Kawasaki and slid off its seat. The heat was stifling, but it was a familiar cloak. While the rain forest here smelled different, strange plants and animals compared to the jungles of Thailand where he served as chief of security for heroin plantations, it was familiar territory. The rules were the same as back in Thailand, even if their aerial cover was far more sophisticated. Somewhere above the treetops, rotating around their target site, the Raptors, Predators updated and renamed by the Engineers of the New Tomorrow, kept high-tech eyes on their prey.

He clutched his Heckler & Koch G-36 K, a fine, sturdy piece of hardware that was as well suited to the jungle as his old AK-47. While his shirt stuck to him with damp sweat and sticky humidity, his vest didn’t add an unwanted burden of extra heat while providing a layer of protection against even full-powered rifle slugs. ENT had gone to great lengths to give Tso all he needed to be successful in this new environment.

Tso pulled his out GPS monitor. The Raptors had picked up his team on its radar, the steel in their weapons and gear giving them away to invisible high-frequency beams. There was some scattering of the signal, tiny blips away from their main targets, four people who had wandered into the jungle.

No, they hadn’t wandered. They’d survived one of ENT’s distracting traps and a strafing run. The Mercedes SUV left burning at the cliff was mute testimony that the strangers weren’t wayward tourists. It was a quality, expensive piece of equipment, and charred gear in the back indicated that the four of them were well-armed and looking for trouble.

Tso sneered as he silently answered that the fools had found trouble.

Using hand signals, Tso had his men spread out. They were a mix of Filipino, Thai, Mexican and Colombian, all experienced in jungle operations, and ENT had trained them together to form a cohesive team to the point where they could communicate entire thoughts with gestures and glances. FARC had made the mistake of trying to enter their territory, and the ragtag terrorists, forty strong, had fallen to the well-honed ENT security force under Tso, despite two-to-one odds. Tso hadn’t lost a single member of his team.

Tso had seven men with him, leaving the others to protect the base. If anything happened to this group, Aceveda would lock down the facility. The Thai commander didn’t think that this group could handle two-to-one odds, but they had managed to survive a Raptor attack involving machine guns and an antitank missile. Firepower wasn’t everything, and Tso was under no illusion that even his team’s level of training made them invincible.

There was a soft cough off to his right and Tso hit the ground hard. A Filipino ENT sentry also fell, but not out of survival reflex. The ENT gunman’s face had been obliterated by a suppressed pair of bullets, smashing his cheekbone and ejecting his brains out the other side of his skull. One glassy eye stared at Tso, unblinking in its accusation.

There was no room for silent communication now. Not with hostile marauders in their midst.

“Ambush!” Tso bellowed, slithering into the foliage as slugs dug up mud near him. He triggered his G-36 K, slicing a wide arc in the forest before reaching the cover of a tree trunk. Other assault rifles chattered, and Tso could see their muzzle-flashes in the dimness of the canopy’s shadow. “Check fire! Check fire!”

The ENT commander slung his rifle. The weapon would give his position away. The rifles they selected for this operation were chosen for their compactness, but that same short barrel also produced a flare that would point right at him. Even with the muzzle brake taming the explosive gases to a mere spark, it was still bright enough to give away his position. Tso pulled his pistol and looked for movement in the trees. His team was smart enough to set their assault rifles aside, going to handguns in the darkness. A pistol wasn’t a preferred weapon, but with stealthy ambushers, their long-arms would prove to be a hindrance, giving aid to the enemy.

Thumbing back the hammer on his pistol, Tso took to the shadows, hunting the demons of the forest.

C ARL L YONS DELIBERATELY MISSED the apparent leader of the enemy strike force, throwing away ammunition in the course of forcing Tso to reach cover. He rammed a fresh magazine into the butt of his .45 and snicked on the safety. He wanted the Asian alive, or at least in good enough condition to survive a couple of questions. From his position in the middle of a patch of shadowy, moss-encrusted roots, he was invisible, the 1911’s suppressor rendering his low-flash ammunition invisible to view from Tso. The direction of the bullet impacts in the ground might have drawn the commander’s attention, but his assault rifle spit wide of the mark.

“Loudmouth’s mine,” Lyons whispered over his LASH radio.

“Roger,” Schwarz answered. “Remaining three fair game.”

Lyons slid a phosphate-coated Ka-Bar fighting knife from its sheath. A dull black, even to its razor-thin, flesh-slicing edge, it was a shard of night hidden among the shadows. Tso and his crew would obviously be alert for the sound of a suppressed handgun. Even though the muzzle-flash was swallowed by the steel tube, and the roar of the bullet was reduced to a cough, there was still enough sound for a nearby opponent to lock on to a target. Wiping out half of the investigating force had been easy with the initial shots, and even from cover, Able Team had been relatively secure against return fire.

The ex-cop saw Blancanales glide from behind a tree and wrap a muscle-knotted arm around the throat of a Hispanic gunman. The Colombian’s eyes went wide as the former Black Beret’s forearm closed over his throat, cutting off his air. Blancanales didn’t give the ENT sentry a chance to strangle to death, even though his grasp had been tight enough to crush the man’s windpipe. Another black-bladed combat knife punched through the bone and cartilage of the Colombian’s breastbone, spearing through the thick trunk of the aorta beneath it. The point had missed the guard’s heart by an inch, but with a wicked twist and a hard rip, the knife had rendered the blood pump useless by severing the major artery. Blood pressure dropped like a rock and the Puerto Rican’s victim didn’t even have the strength for one final thrash, his arms and legs dropping limply like wet noodles to the forest floor. Dark, cold eyes stared lifelessly at Lyons as he circled behind a second of Tso’s commandos.

Lyons lurched from the shadows, his hand wrapping around the Asian’s face, palm clamping over the gunman’s mouth while he slammed his Ka-Bar into his reedy, brown neck. The thick Bowie-style blade carved through arteries and windpipe in one savage intrusion. Lyons cranked on his knife handle as if it were a cantankerous stick shift, pulling the knife forward.

The wiry little Asian tried to scream, his arms flailing into the big ex-cop’s face, and the guard’s windpipe resisted the Ka-Bar, hanging on with rubbery tenacity. Unable to pull the knife forward, Lyons twisted the blade around and shoved back. His adversary’s eyes rolled crazily as the phosphate-coated edge crunched and ricocheted between vertebrae, parting cartilage. Nearly decapitated, the ENT soldier’s corpse fell instantly still. Lyons wiped the blood off his blade and looked for the team’s commander.

The Thai security commander’s handgun revealed him, bullets cracking loudly. Lyons whirled and spotted Schwarz, diving for cover, pulling the body of his last ENT victim along with him as a shield. Tso howled in rage and reloaded his handgun.

Lyons let his knife fall and lifted his silenced .45. He aimed low, striking the ENT guard in the rear.

Contrary to comedy, anything more than a load of bird shot in the gluteous maximus was guaranteed to cause major injury. One of Lyons’s 230-grain hollowpoints rounds, stopped cold, deforming as Tso’s pelvic girdle absorbed its forward momentum. Unable to deal with 350 pounds of force, the hip bone shattered. The second round tore through fatty tissue and muscle to burst Tso’s bladder, ripping out a half-inch chunk of groin muscle. Either wound would have made it impossible for the Thai to stand upright. Together at once, they dropped the ENT commander to the forest floor in blinding agony.

Blancanales rushed to the wounded man, kicking the gun out of his hand before checking his wounds.

“He’ll live?” Lyons asked.

“Missed the femoral artery, but he’s bleeding badly,” Blancanales said. He pulled a small tube from his medical pack and poured a black silt into Tso’s groin wound. It was gunpowder, and the Able Team medic ignited it with an electric lighter.

The Thai gunman thrashed in agony as his bloody wound was cauterized shut, damaged blood vessels sealed off as they cooked instantly.

Lyons leaned onto Tso’s throat, his hands clamped on either side of his neck.

“Speak English?” Lyons asked.

“Go to hell,” Tso answered.

“Good enough for me,” Lyons replied. “We’re going to have a little talk.”

Tso coughed violently. “Or what? You’ll torture me? Didn’t you hear that torture was illegal?”

“How long do you think it’ll take for you to die in this jungle?” Lyons asked.

Tso’s eyes narrowed.

“You’re a cripple. There’s no way you can walk out. And even if you could crawl one hundred miles to the nearest city, I’m pretty sure you’ll succumb to a few dozen infections. You’ll never go anywhere on your two feet regardless,” Lyons stated.

“You cauterized my gunshots,” Tso said, his voice a nervous warble.

Lyons rolled his eyes and pulled his Ka-Bar. The blade sliced into Tso’s upper arm, opening the skin. “How many cuts do you think we’ll need, Pol?”

“Just that one,” Blancanales replied. “Any more, and we’d run the risk of jaguars finding and finishing him off too soon.”

Tso’s features paled instantly.

“You know,” Schwarz said, “the cats aren’t the real threat. I’d be more concerned about ants or maggots.”

“Actually, the maggots would be helpful,” Lyons told Schwarz. “Maggots only eat necrotic flesh and leave healthy, uninfected tissue alone.”

Schwarz nodded. “There’s that. But you’re talking about garden-variety maggots. There are flesh-eating larvae in these jungles that burrow down and even gnaw into living bone.”

Tso grimaced. “You wouldn’t do that…”

Lyons frowned. “You just said, we Americans can’t torture you. And you’ve done nothing for us to give you a quick, clean death.”

The Thai looked at the hard-faced members of Able Team.

“Nice try,” Tso said. “I’d find a way to make it quick for—”

The sound of his shoulder dislocating and separating exploded across Tso’s consciousness like an atomic blast. A red curtain of blood replaced his vision, his ears resonating with the rumbling echoes of his cracking bones and popping cartilage. He returned to reality, the taste of his sour bile in his mouth, the stench of vomit next to his head. He didn’t remember throwing up, but it had to have been while his consciousness disconnected. His arm was a limp, useless mass of twisted muscle and bone.

There was no one to be seen around him.

“Hey…” he croaked. His throat was raw from yelling, or maybe the acid in his bile searing unprotected esophagus.

There was no answer and he twisted, looking around.

“Hey! Hey! I’ll talk!” Tso shouted.

The forest was empty, except for the corpses of some of his men. He tried to roll and crawl, but with only one arm and a shattered pelvis, he was helpless, motionless. All he could do was clutch at leaves and roots, unable to pull his lifeless limbs along. He saw the handle of his pistol poking out of some leaves and reached for it. Fingers sank into mud and he pulled. It seemed to take an eternity to shift only an inch, and two of his nails had been pried out by the roots due to his efforts. Bloody tips stung as they sank into the dirt for more leverage and haul himself closer to the pistol.

He was drenched with sweat, and his cut was burning from the effort. Tso looked at the puckered brown skin, seething with infection. With another tug, he felt the rubber grips of his pistol and he pulled it closer. It felt lighter, and he looked at the magazine well.

Empty.

Maybe there was a round in the chamber. He thumbed back the hammer and pressed the muzzle to his temple. The trigger tripped and the hammer fell with a loud clack.

Tears cut through the sweat and grime on his cheeks.

They’d left him with an empty gun, to taunt him with the faint hope of a swift end.

“There are twelve more men at the base,” Tso called as loud as he could, feeling something pop in his throat. “Twelve men, with machine guns, and motion detectors as well as UAV drones!”

Tso took another deep breath and repeated his cry.

He shouted his report five more times, for a total of seven, when he heard the crunch of wet leaves under boots. His throat tightened as he looked up to see Carl Lyons standing over him. He held a 9 mm pistol by the barrel, handle presented for the Thai.

Tso reached up, swallowing. His fingers wrapped around the grip. He turned it over, and there was no magazine in place.

“You’ve got one shot,” Lyons told him. “Use it wisely. We won’t give you another.”

Tso nodded. “My people will tear you apart.”

The ENT commander tilted the barrel of the pistol between his lips and pulled the trigger, getting the hell out of Panama.

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