BARBARA PRICE RUSHED INTO THE ROOM

“Able is compromised,” she said without preamble. “They’re going deep black to Charlie Mike but we need to get them a new safe house in a less populated area and arrange resupply.”

“When it rains, it pours,” Kurtzman said.

“What?”

“I got a message from James on the ground in Brazzaville, text based.”

“Why text?”

“He couldn’t get a signal out, so he put a communication in the system for the repeater relay. It’s twelve minutes old. They were compromised on initial insertion. They think their Congolese police counterpart might have set them up.”

Akira Tokaido leaned back in his chair and whistled. “Phoenix under fire, Able on the run—this mission is blown right out of the gate.”

Unconventional Warfare

Stony Man ®

Americas Ultra-Covert Intelligence Agency

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Beijing, People’s Republic of China

The Beijing Inn was a traditional structure nestled just beyond the more Westernized buildings of the international financial district. The architecture of the inn recalled China’s glorious past. Consisting of two stories under a peaked tile roof, the inn was divided into rooms of various sizes using internal support posts.

In a small room tucked away from the densely populated restaurant area sat Chao Bao, official of the clandestine Central Control of Information Division of the vast Ministry of State Security.

Bao sipped his tea, face inscrutable and emanating an air of timeless patience. While perhaps cliché to Caucasian sensibilities, his inner calm was authentic. At first glance he presented an unassuming figure. He looked younger than his forty-seven years, stood six inches over five feet and was built in a slight manner. His eyes were dark and unreflective, his hair thinning on top.

He could have been a tailor or perhaps an accountant.

On closer inspection a discerning eye would have noticed his build was not slight, but efficiently lean, supple as a leather whip. His knuckles were misshapen to chunks the size of dice by decades of martial-arts training.

He’d earned a reputation as a brutal interrogator of prisoners and as a virtual ghost on special-operations reconnaissance missions deep in enemy-controlled territory.

He was a practiced killer and as such, he was able to recognize that quality in others of his ilk. Even if he hadn’t already been intimately familiar with the personnel file of the man who now joined him in the quiet, shadowed alcove, he would have recognized a kindred spirit.

“Sifu,” Xi-Nan acknowledged.

“Valued friend.” Bao nodded. He gestured toward the empty padded bench across the low table from him in the private booth.

Despite being dressed in civilian clothes rather than a military uniform, General Xi-Nan was obviously a soldier. Tall for an ethnic Chinese at six feet, the commander of the Fifth Army was a fit man with a rigid posture ten years Chao Bao’s junior.

“Forgive my lagging manners,” Xi-Nan said. “But let us come to the point.”

His apology was perfunctory. He wasn’t sorry to drive straight to business without the culturally required period of idle talk. It was, in fact, the way he preferred to execute all his dealings, especially those involving the placid-faced man sitting across from him who seemed content sipping green tea from eggshell-porcelain cups.

Bao absolved him. “I understand your urgency. Please continue.”

“There is a complication with our African venture.”

“Somalia?”

“No, Congo,” Xi-Nan attested.

Bao lifted a single eyebrow and sipped his tea.

“Americans,” Xi-Nan further explained. “CIA or their NSA perhaps. They have compromised the periphery of our operation.”

“Then they must be stopped from gaining further insight.”

“Just so,” Xi-Nan agreed. “However I am afraid to use the Hayabusa on this. It would leave a paper trail.”

Hayabusa was the Mandarin word for “Falcon” and was used as the unofficial designation for the Chengdu Military Region Special Forces Unit.

Established in 1992, the unit specialized in target location and interdiction, airborne insertion, sabotage and rapid offensive strikes.

“A paper trail that could lead back to our personal Hong Kong bank accounts,” Bao finished the general’s thoughts.

“Exactly,” Xi-Nan agreed.

“You have a dossier for me?”

The corrupt general immediately slid a flash drive across the smooth teak table to the spymaster, who promptly pocketed the item.

“That is everything we know about the operations the Americans are calling the Niger Station,” he said.

Chao Bao smiled as he set down his empty teacup. The smile did not reach his eyes.

“Leave everything to me, old friend,” he said.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER Chao Bao arrived on the Beijing waterfront.

He lost himself among the twisting alleys and chaotic heavily populated fish markets until he found a dilapidated warehouse on an unassuming wharf. The building was nondescript and appeared abandoned with piles of rotting fishing nets and soggy old shipping pallets set on the oil-stained concrete loading dock.

Spray painted on the doors were the worn and peeling ideograms representing the Water Dragon Triad.

Bao entered the building and immediately three men armed with Type 64 Chinese submachine guns emerged from shadows. The street soldiers were flat-faced with black eyes that glittered with sinister light.

He countered their advance with a few simple words of identification and was allowed to pass unmolested into the inner sanctum of the triad gangster known only as Illustrious.

Bao stepped across the threshold and the door to the room was slammed shut behind him. The room was ornately furnished and uncomfortably warm, darkened to the point of gloominess.

Three brass braziers smoldered, providing a red-tinged light that served more to throw shadows than to illuminate. On a couch of red silk cushions, his face obscured by a demonic mask of black plaster, reclined Illustrious.

To his left, immobile as a statue, stood a massive bodyguard. Bao had once witnessed the giant execute a disobedient underling with a single well-placed punch to the back of the neck.

Bao stopped, brought his feet together and gave a respectful bow.

“Thank you for granting me an audience,” the intelligence officer said.

“How may Illustrious be of service?” the masked figure replied.

The mask was more than a petty affect designed to create an aura of mystery. The Communist Party ran the People’s Republic as a totalitarian police state and did not suffer organized crime lightly. There were many in Chao Bao’s own agency who would gladly see such a powerful underworld figure dead.

“It seems we have a situation,” Bao explained, “in Africa.”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to require the use of your Armenian connection.”

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

THE JUÁREZ CARTEL had turned the city into a free fire war zone.

In the year leading up to August of 2009 the border city had the highest murder rate in the world. Chaos was rampant in the streets, and the police department was utterly ineffective, or completely corrupted, in the face of drug money and paramilitary criminal violence.

Bodies littered the streets. People were executed, abducted and assaulted on an hourly basis. Sexual predators and serial killers so afflicted the city’s female population that Amnesty International had become involved with international relief efforts to save the women.

Federal police and Mexican army troops deployed in huge numbers to the area in an attempt to restore order. The drug cartels responded by fighting an insurgency campaign with weapons every bit as powerful as those wielded by the military.

The U.S. sent money and resources to help combat the problem, but the warfare spilled across the border, causing a dramatic increase in kidnappings and gang violence in El Paso and as far west as Arizona.

The drugs still flowed north. In return, money flowed south. Many analysts claimed American firearms flowed south, as well. While this might have been true to a degree, the cartels combated each other, as well as the police and Mexican army, with military-grade hardware unobtainable by the citizens of the United States.

The wealth to be accrued was so great that corruption was systemic. It filtered its way up from street cops to judges to army generals and national politicians.

Like a disease passing so quickly it was pandemic, the stain of drug money spread into the heart of the Mexican government’s establishment.

This included the officers and agents of the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, or National Security and Investigation Center, CISEN.

Forty-eight hours earlier a high-placed official in CISEN sold out the location of an undercover team of agents from the American Drug Enforcement Administration to members of the hyperviolent and brutally sadistic Juárez Cartel.

The bodies of the American law-enforcement officers turned up in a ditch near the border.

Their heads turned up hanging from light poles throughout the city.

Now the CISEN agent responsible for the betrayal was meeting with his cartel contacts to receive his payment.

Thanks to the digital intercept capabilities of the National Security Agency, Stony Man’s Able Team would also be attending the meet. Except the elite counterterrorist team would be gate-crashing.

THE ABANDONED FACTORY of the now defunct company Servicious Plasticos Ensambles stood alone in a massive dirt lot cluttered with garbage and rubble. Once the factory sweatshop had closed down, the city cut the power to that section of the grid.

Now the structural skeleton of the factory, along with the shantytown neighborhood surrounding it, lay covered in an utter darkness broken only by the occasional lantern in some black eye of a window. The lights of the better sections of Juárez glittered in the background.

Somewhere several blocks over, a woman began screaming in long, looping shrieks. A man’s voice broke in, shouting angrily.

Seconds later a staccato burst of automatic weapons fire broke out.

Then there was an abrupt silence broken a heartbeat later by the screech of tires.

Able Team emerged out of the darkness.

They moved fast, with a purpose and a lethal confidence hard earned. Like one of the U.S. Army’s small kill teams hunting the lonely stretches of highway outside of Baghdad, they emerged from the desert and disappeared again into shadow.

Night-vision goggles, DARPA-supplied next-generation AN/PVS-9 models, turned them into cyclopean silhouettes. Sound-suppressed M-4 carbines hung under jackets, silencer-equipped barrels pointed downward. Muscular torsos were sheathed in Kevlar-weave protective vests boasting ceramic inserts.

They wore backup silenced 9 mm pistols in shoulder rigs, and unmuffled .45-caliber Detonic Combat Master handguns were nestled in holdout holsters at the small of their backs. Fighting knives of surgical-grade steel were clipped to calves or forearms as weapons of last resort.

The stench of industrial pollution was a constant background miasma. Halfway across the dirt lot the smell was cut suddenly by the sharp putridness of rotting meat.

Alarmed, Carl Lyons, ex-LAPD homicide detective and Able Team leader, turned his head in the direction of the stink and saw a dead dog lying in a shallow depression. The NVG’s amplification of ambient light was so good he could see the squirming white mass of maggots covering the corpse.

Hermann Schwarz, former Army reconnaissance specialist and electronics genius, turned his head and spit the taste out of his mouth.

“This place has really gone to the dogs,” he muttered in a low voice.

Rosario Blancanales, former Special Forces soldier, opened his mouth to reply and suddenly froze. The unmistakable sound of a rattlesnake buzzed out of the bushes near his foot.

Lyons spun instantly, cursing softly. His head swiveled as he scanned with the NVGs, looking for the snake. Both he and Schwarz drew their Beretta 92-F pistols with 4-inch silencers screwed into the specially threaded barrels.

“Where is it?” Schwarz snapped.

“There.” Blancanales pointed to the ground at his feet.

Both of his teammates lifted their pistols but were too slow.

The Western Diamondback rattlesnake uncoiled like a trap going off, striking even as Blancanales tried dancing backward. It stretched out four feet and its blunt head rammed into the Puerto Rican’s leg with the force of a baseball bat.

“Jesus!” Blancanales grunted and staggered.

He felt the hot needle of a fang slide into his calf, and instantly agonized jolts of pain raced up and cut his breath off.

Schwarz and Lyons, using their NVGs, fired.

The snake blew into three separate chunks like a severed noodle. The squat, ugly head of the Diamondback hung for a moment from the top of Blancanales’s boot, then dropped off.

“Christing hell!” Blancanales swore.

“Sit down,” Schwarz said, moving to help his old friend.

“You have anything in the med kit to help?” Lyons demanded.

The ex-cop took a knee as he holstered his pistol. He swung his M-4 up and provided security. Blancanales sat heavily on the rubble-strewed ground and yanked his pant leg up out from where it was tucked into his boot.

“Like a snakebite kit? Antivenom?” Blancanales laughed. “Nope. Just the standard trauma stuff.” Ironically, the ex-Green Beret was the one most often charged with medical responsibilities on Able Team. “This is supposed to be an urban area, goddammit.”

Schwarz leaned over, turned on the IR penlight set on his night-vision goggles and illuminated the wound. Even in that uncertain light the leg was already obviously swollen. The puncture mark was a neat, red, raised hole leaking thinned-out blood.

“Looks like it only got you with one fang,” Schwarz observed. “The other one got caught on the leather of your boot top.”

“Let’s get him up and back to the vehicle,” Lyons said. “We’ll scrub the op.”

“Screw that, Ironman,” Blancanales said in a raspy voice. “Only one dose? It’s not that bad—I’ve got time. The poison isn’t that fast acting. I’ll be sick, sure. I’ll wish I could cut off my leg, but I’ve got hours before it’s really life-threatening. We are going to continue the mission.”

Lyons frowned, silently debating his responsibilities.

“You don’t have any antivenom,” he pointed out. “It’ll kill flesh.”

“The pendajos we’re here to hit put those DEA agents’ heads on poles, man. They put their heads on poles,” he repeated. “I’m not blowing this.”

“Is there anything we can do?” Schwarz interrupted before Lyons could object further.

“Sure,” Blancanales said. “Pressure dressing and an EpiPen. Shoot the Epi right into my leg above the bite.”

“What freaking good is that going to do?” Lyons demanded. “You going into shock?”

“No,” Blancanales denied. His body was covered with sweat. “But epi works as a vasoconstrictor. It’ll slow the spread of the venom.”

“I’m on it,” Schwarz said.

He saw Blancanales suddenly shiver despite the oppressive heat and he prayed the man was right.

“Fine,” Lyons agreed. “We’ll do it your way. But I want us back in our vehicle and we’ll swing around and come into the building on the other side. We’re not going to have you walking any more than necessary.”

Already sweating, Blancanales nodded. “Whatever you say, boss.”

CHAPTER TWO

Pan African Cross-Country Rally

Kenya

The dirt road cut a dusty brown seam through the rough terrain.

The Nissan 4x4 pickup tore along the road at break-neck speed, sheets of dust streaming behind it. The engine growled as the driver gunned it hard, putting it through its paces like a trainer working a racehorse.

The heavily modified off-road vehicle was painted black and yellow with heavy grilles placed over enhanced headlights. In the back, two extra wheels, jerricans filled with reserves of high-octane gasoline, motor oil and pioneer tools of ax, shovel and pick were strapped down in the bed.

David McCarter took his foot off the gas, slapped the clutch and shifted up out of third gear. He stutter-stepped back on the gas and the tricked-out pickup lunged forward, gaining speed.

The left front tire dropped into a pothole on the dirt track and the steering wheel jerked in his hands. He rode out the recoil and guided the truck out of the hole, his teeth clenched under his helmet against the jolt.

“Jesus Christ!” T. J. Hawkins protested from the passenger seat. “I think I just tasted my own balls!”

“If that were true you wouldn’t be complaining, mate!” McCarter shouted back.

The road turned in a brutal switchback, and the ex-SAS trooper casually used the emergency brake to slide around the turn. He released the brake and pushed the gas. The big knobby tires gripped the hard dirt, and the Nissan shot forward out of the fishtail.

“Screw you,” Hawkins replied.

The Texan was an ex-Army Ranger and ex-Delta Force commando. He held a Audiovox Jensen NVXM 1000 GPS system and was furiously working applications on the unit’s four-inch screen.

A Nexus Google phone set to speaker rested on his lap, providing communication uplinks to the support team. The device chirped and Gary Manning spoke up.

“How’s your engine temp, David?” the burly Canadian demanded. “My diagnostic uplink shows it climbing into the red.”

“Don’t be a bleeding wanker, you mother hen,” McCarter snapped. “I’m treating your baby fine.”

“You sure are different when you own the vehicle Dave’s driving instead of the U.S. government,” Hawkins pointed out, laughing.

“I’m a consultant, not an owner,” Manning argued. “But still, you blow an engine in the middle of the race and it’s over.”

“Mr. McCarter,” said a cool and utterly feminine voice, “this represents a significant investment on the part of my company.”

“Your company?” McCarter answered.

Up ahead a line of broken hills suddenly appeared in the windshield. To the west of the rocky ridgeline the terrain fell away into a deep, wide valley. A wall of dust cleared enough for the two Phoenix Force commandos to see the French racers of Team Gauloises in their Citroën Méhari running full-out ahead of them.

“Yes, Mr. McCarter,” Monica Fischer, CEO at North American, Inc., answered, “my company.”

“Maybe so,” McCarter snapped. “But I’m driving here!”

Just ahead of his pickup the French vehicle was a foot off his bumper. McCarter slammed the gas down and jerked his wheel to the side, running the Nissan up onto a wide shoulder. Rooster tails of sand spun out behind his grinding wheels as he gunned it past the Méhari.

He powered around the front of the French vehicle and snapped the pickup back onto the track, cutting off the Team Gauloises vehicle.

The Frenchmen shook their fists in anger but their shouted curses were lost to the roar of the big racing engines. Hawkins stuck his arm out the window and casually flipped them the bird as McCarter sped away.

“We’re coming up to the first branch here,” the Texan warned. “Have you got any better route intelligence to give us?”

There was a slight pause, then Manning, trailing behind the racing pickup in the team’s matinee vehicle, a stripped-down Suburban SUV, answered.

“Negative,” he replied. “I tried to get updated information about road conditions in the valley, but everybody around here is playing tight to the vest.”

McCarter snarled in frustration as the fork in the road appeared. To one side lay the road running through the hills while to the other was the track cutting across the valley.

The dirt road winding through the hills meant slower speeds and some climbing; it had, however, been thoroughly scouted before the race and was shorter. There would be little in the way of surprises.

The valley was flatter, allowing for faster driving that should also be easier on the vehicle. It would have been McCarter’s automatic choice in a race except that the racers hadn’t been informed of the option until an hour before the starting gun had gone off.

As such, the route was poorly marked, unscouted and about the only thing they knew for sure was that the road was cut several times by the 440-mile-long Tana River.

“Screw it,” McCarter mumbled and downshifted. “Let’s do the hills.”

“Ah, Christ,” Hawkins replied immediately. “You’re gonna shake my cherries right off their stem!”

“That’s what separates the rock stars from the groupies,” McCarter snapped.

He turned onto the hill road at the Y-intersection, going fast enough to fishtail sideways. Hawkins checked his passenger-side mirror.

“I guess you’re right,” he said, voice droll. “Because the French team just took the valley road.”

THE SUN SLID RAPIDLY toward the horizon, bringing on a rapidly gathering twilight.

Monica Fischer swore.

She fought with the power steering of the big Suburban chase vehicle as they drove flat out in an attempt to keep within striking distance of McCarter and Hawkins. Beside her in the passenger seat Manning was downloading a weather report from a commercial satellite service.

“Damn,” he muttered. “We’re getting a build up of nimbi in the highlands.”

“Nimbi?”

“Rain clouds. We have a pressure system stacking up against the mountains. There’s going to be rain before the night is out.”

“Great.” Fischer laughed. She glanced at her dashboard, then added, “We’re running low on fuel.”

Manning looked up from his screen. “Fine. Pull over and we’ll gas up while I tell David about the weather change.”

Monica pulled the heavy steering wheel to the side and guided the SUV off the road and under the slight protection offered by a grove of acacia trees. She shut off the engine and hopped out as Manning finished relaying the weather information to the racers.

Walking around back, he stepped up next to Monica as she pulled open the rear cargo doors. He hesitated as her arm brushed his. He could smell her very clearly next to him. It was a good smell. They both reached for the same jerrican of fuel.

“I got this, muscleman,” she teased. “You check the oil, we don’t want our engine temp to spike.”

“Sure,” Manning agreed, feeling slightly flustered. “Use the strainer,” he reminded her.

“This isn’t my first rodeo, cowboy.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

While Monica put the strainer in place over the nozzle as an extra protection against dirt clogging the fuel line and injectors, Manning popped the hood. Stuck behind the hood as he was he didn’t see the accident—just the results.

Monica lifted the end of the jerrican and the greasy metal slipped in her grip. The jerrican dropped to the ground hard, knocking the strainer cap free and splashing high-octane fuel up in a spray.

Some of the gas splashed onto the still hot exhaust pipe and instantly ignited. The spilled gas lit in a flash with a small explosion, and Monica screamed in agony as she was burned.

Manning came around the side of the SUV in a rush. He saw Monica stumbling backward as flames began racing up the spilled gas on her jumpsuit. He struck her with a shoulder and knocked her to the ground.

Instantly he was on top of her, using his own body to smother the flames. The industrial jumpsuit, not unlike the kind worn by military pilots, was made of flame-retardant material, helping his attempts to put her out.

“Monica, Monica!” Manning demanded, voice on the edge of frantic. “Are you okay?”

“My arms, my hands,” she said, teeth gritted against the pain.

She held her hands up for Manning to inspect and despite how red and puffy they looked, he was amazed the damage was so minimal. Despite this his practiced eye realized that soon, perhaps within minutes, the skin would first blister, then crack.

Such open wounds in the African bush were a guaranteed invitation to infection. On top of this, they had little in the way of pain medication in their medical kit. The chances of her slipping into shock were great, putting her life in danger.

“Hold on,” he said.

Hurriedly he got the med kit from behind the driver’s seat and began applying antiseptic cream to the wounds before wrapping them in loose, dry bandages.

“Gary, I’m so sorry.”

“Shut up.”

“But the race—”

“I said shut up,” Manning repeated. “To hell with the race. I’ll get you back to the checkpoint in the village we passed. We’ll have you airlifted out to Nairobi in no time.” He looked down the road and into the rough African terrain now cloaked in darkness. “Besides,” he continued, “if anyone can finish this race without a chase vehicle, it’s those two jokers.”

CHAPTER THREE

The Nissan pickup driven by David McCarter rattled like dice in a dryer as the Briton hammered the vehicle through the course. He and Hawkins were feeling the effects of so much vibrational trauma sapping their endurance.

Both men were silent for a moment after Manning had relayed his situation and intention to take Monica for medical help, leaving the racers without a chase vehicle. Hawkins looked up from his GPS device.

“Screw it, David,” he said. “We’re past the point of no return anyway. We might as well finish the race because it’s just as short a distance to Nairobi as to turn around.”

McCarter nodded. “Agreed. Tell Gary we’re pushing on.”

Hawkins relayed the information and for the next five minutes carefully calculated how far the fuel they carried with them would let them race.

“We don’t have a choice.” He looked up from his calculations. “We’re going to have to risk the shortcut. Our fuel reserve is just too tight.”

“Who Dares Wins,” McCarter replied, using the motto of his old unit, the British Special Air Service.

Up ahead a lone baobab tree appeared in the Nissan’s bouncing headlights and Hawkins immediately sat up.

“That’s it!” He pointed through the dust-smeared windshield. “That’s the marker for the shortcut.”

“All right, mate,” McCarter replied. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

He slowed, downshifted, took the fork and gunned the vehicle back up to speed. Inside the cab the two Phoenix Force drivers were bounced against their safety harnesses like pinballs.

“Holy crap,” Hawkins swore in his Texas drawl. “I didn’t think a road could get worse than the one we’re on, but this son of a bitch is tearing us up.”

“It’ll save us twenty minutes,” McCarter reminded him.

“If it doesn’t rip apart our axle,” Hawkins shot back.

“You want to go back?”

“Just drive!”

For the next fifteen minutes the Nissan bounced across the open country course, leading them out of the foothills. Once a lone elephant standing calmly in the middle of the road appeared in their headlights.

McCarter swerved up out of the tire ruts and bounced across a rocky berm to avoid the multiton animal, then snapped the pickup back on the road before a pile of rocks almost tore off his front end.

Finally their first river crossing appeared in front of them.

Mexico

“THE AZTECS USED TO sacrifice about two hundred and fifty thousand of their own people every year,” Schwarz said. “They would cut out their hearts while they were still alive.”

“Okay, that provides us with a template on how to deal with this guy Chavez,” Lyons pointed out.

Blancanales nodded from behind the wheel of the black Dodge SUV. Around them a rambling shantytown sprawled outward from the edges of Juárez. The Stony Man crew kept the blacked-out windows on their SUV buttoned up tight against the smell.

The road they rolled along was made of dirt and heavily rutted, dotted with puddles of dubious origins. Bored, apathetic faces stared out at the expensive vehicle from the safety of clapboard and aluminum-siding shacks.

The poverty was appalling and left Carl Lyons uneasy. He was no stranger to Central and South American conditions. Able Team had made the lower half the Western Hemisphere a primary area of operations since the unit’s inception.

Blancanales, already recovering, guided the big vehicle through narrow alleys while hungry dogs barked and chased them. Up ahead a line of railroad tracks divided the sprawling shantytown and massive warehouses began to line its length. Beyond these the silent mausoleum of factories built by American companies that had exported jobs to exploit cheap labor reared up like austere, prefabricated mountains.

Blancanales cut the SUV onto a single-lane dirt road that paralleled the train track. The Dodge’s suspension rattled and hummed but inside the climate-controlled cab the ride was smooth and virtually silent. Up ahead a chipped and cracked asphalt lot opened up just past a broken gate in a dilapidated chain-link fence. A battered and rusted sign warning away trespassers in Spanish hung off to one side like a forgotten letter.

The building across the old parking lot was abandoned, dotted with broken windows and gaping emptiness where doors had stood. A line of crows had taken roost across the top, and Blancanales slowed the vehicle as he pulled into the old parking lot.

“How are we sitting for time?” he asked.

Lyons looked at his watch. “We’re a good hour before the meet, according to the CIA stringer,” he said. “We couldn’t have got here any sooner with flight time anyway.”

Blancanales guided the SUV around the side of the building. A pair of filthy alley cats hissed in surprise at the sudden appearance of the monstrous vehicle and scrambled for the safety of some overflowing garbage bins. Lyons eyed the building with a wary gaze as Blancanales drove around it. He reached under the seat and pulled an M-4 clear.

“Politics give me a rash,” Lyons muttered. He snapped the bolt back on the compact carbine and seated a 5.56 mm round.

“I just wish we had more time to check out this set up,” Schwarz said from the backseat. He pulled an identical M-4 from a briefcase on the seat next to him and chambered a round. “We don’t know this guy from Adam.”

Blancanales reached over and pulled his own prepped and ready M-4 from the inside compartment of his door. Each man on the team wore a windbreaker over a backup shoulder holster. They had no intention of hiding their firepower when they went into the meet.

As the team stepped out of the vehicle there was a thunderous roaring as a freight train began its approach of the rail yard off to the side of the building. Lyons looked around. This was the location of the meet with the man who was supposed to take them to where their target was hiding.

“This strike you as overly isolated for a simple meet-and-greet?” Schwarz asked.

“Why, whatever do you mean, Grandma?” Lyons asked.

The freight train began to slow even further. The engineer popped its brakes with a deafening hissing noise accompanied by the screaming of steel on steel as wheels locked up on rails. Blancanales eyeballed the upper reaches of the building as they approached. The windows looked back at him, silent and dark.

Closer to the ground the building was taken up by a concrete loading dock and roll-up bay doors for almost two-thirds of its length. The other section was broken by a single metal door set at the top of a short flight of concrete steps. Spiky lines of graffiti covered the wall and doors. Displaced air from the sliding train pushed scraps of paper across the broken asphalt like stringless kites.

Juárez was one of the most polluted cities on the face of the earth and here, in its underbelly, the stench was sharp and chemical, coating the tongues of the three men as they approached the building.

The train pulled up next to the yard, arriving in a deafening din as boxcar after boxcar slowly rumbled by. Though they stood right next to each other the men couldn’t have heard one another speak. Lyons frowned and made a gesture with his hand.

The other two immediately spread out, forming into a loose triangle as they finished their approach to the front of the building. Schwarz looked to one side and saw a line of gouts suddenly erupt in the earth. He reached over and shoved Lyons to one side, then flung himself in the other direction. The line of bullets stitched its way up the middle of them while off to the side Blancanales had lifted his carbine and began spraying it at the top line of windows on the building.

The compact M-4 carbine was designed for close-in range and ease of concealment, but the 5.56 mm rounds were more than powerful enough to cross the space between the ambush sniper and the men caught in the path of his murderous fire.

Blancanales’s burst peppered the building.

Lyons rolled with the hard shove his teammate had given him and somersaulted over one shoulder. He came up and quickly scanned the building for the attackers. He saw nothing other than the single sniper trading shots with Blancanales and quickly crossed his stream of 5.56 mm rounds with those of the ex-Green Beret.

Bullets rebounded off the wall and shattered what slivers of glass still remained in their frames. He saw brilliant bursts of muzzle-flash and tried to bring his own fire to bear accurately as he continued racing toward the building. The freight train had formed a blanket of painful white nose on the entire area, and Lyons felt acutely strange, able to register the feel of his recoil and the heat of escaping gases but still almost entirely unable to hear the report of his own weapon in his hands.

Off to one side Schwarz bounced up off the parking lot and raced for the single pedestrian door set to one side of the building. Behind him Blancanales continued spraying successive bursts into the area of the sniper in an attempt to suppress his gunfire. The freight train continued to roll on past their position in an endless line of flatbed trailers and boxcars.

Snarling with the effort, Schwarz raced toward the building, his M-4 carbine up and at the ready. Closing with the short staircase, he let go of the carbine with his left hand and leaped up like a sprinter running hurdles. He caught hold of a metal safety rail running the length of the stair and vaulted over to the top of the steps.

He tucked his elbow in tight against his ribs and drew the M-4 in close to his body. With his free hand he grabbed the doorknob and twisted, jerking the heavy door open on protesting hinges. The sound of the train rolled into the building and echoed off it so that the racket was actually worse the closer the Stony Man crew got to the massive warehouse structure.

As the door swung open in his hands, he darted inside. Immediately, Schwarz found himself in a cavernous space some three stories high. He scanned the gloomy interior and let the door swing closed behind him. He had expected the structure to contain floors but he quickly shifted his tactics to compensate for the open space.

He pivoted and dropped into a crouch facing an erector-set formation of ladders and scaffolding set against one wall. Through a forest of metal bars and steel mesh he caught an impression of movement. He triggered a burst and heard the sniper do the same. Lead slugs ricocheted wildly inside the building and muzzles-blasts flared, casting crazy shadows.

Realizing he had to cut an angle on the sniper, Schwarz dived forward across oil-stained concrete and came up before triggering a second burst with his M-4. He saw a black-clad figure lean over a railing with a scope-mounted M-16, its black buttstock jammed tight into his shoulder.

The man fired down at Schwarz, and the Able Team electronics whiz threw himself toward the uncertain cover of a line of fifty-five-gallon barrels. One of the rolling bay doors directly beneath the sniper suddenly slid open to a height of about three feet and Schwarz had a brief glimpse of Rosario Blancanales lying flat on his stomach, M-4 held out in front of him.

Realizing Lyons was about to enter the abandoned factory, Schwarz raked the scaffolding with automatic fire, still desperately seeking an angle to catch on the sniper. He couldn’t force a clear trajectory out of the mess and his rounds scattered in a wild pattern around the hunched and ducking man.

The sniper rose, straightened his weapon and returned fire, his assault rifle set to 3-round bursts. A flurry of rounds began to hammer into the barrels Schwarz crouched behind. Below the man Carl Lyons pinpointed his position and turned his own M-4 skyward. The chatterbox rattled in his hands and a stream of dull gold casings arced out like water from a hose and bounced and rolled across the concrete floor.

The 5.56 mm slugs began slamming into the mesh and metal framework at the sniper’s feet and the man suddenly began sprinting toward one side of the platform above them while still trying to turn and return Lyons’s fire.

Schwarz used the opportunity to merge his own stream of gunfire with Lyons’s, only to have his magazine run dry.

He dropped the magazine from the well in the pistol butt, and curling gray smoke followed the empty box. He pulled a secondary magazine from his coat pocket and slid it home before chambering a round. In the brief time it took for the Able Team commando to switch out magazines, the faceless sniper had managed to reach the temporary safety of a double-girder overhead-bridge crane control panel and engine housing.

Schwarz cursed. The control area was like a fortress of metal squares and thick welded beams. He tried an exploratory burst but the M-4 was less than precise. He would have to settle for burst cover fire unless he could work his way in closer for a more accurate shot.

Off to one side Schwarz saw Blancanales enter the building, and three steady lines of 5.56 mm slugs now began converging on the sniper’s position. The man disappeared behind cover only to reemerge and return fire.

The situation was fast approaching a stalemate, Schwarz realized. Without drawing closer, the M-4s were too inaccurate to pose a threat at the current range. But to get closer the Stony Man operatives would have to cross open space easily within the range of the man’s assault rifle.

Carl Lyons sprinted out across the space between his position and the barrels Schwarz was using for cover. He rolled over and came up next to his teammate as Blancanales continued to fire from the edge of one of the bay doors. The train outside just continued rolling past, and the clatter rolled into the open space of the old factory through the open door and bounced around.

“This is insane!” Lyons yelled. “The asshole can’t possibly think the CIA will let him get away with setting up a meet and then ambushing American agents!”

Schwarz lifted his M-4 and sprayed another quick burst. “He must think he can run.”

The sniper poked the barrel of his M-16 around the edge of the panel and squeezed off an answering burst. Blancanales returned fire.

“The only way to find out is to take him alive,” Schwarz said.

“You want to cross that open space and charge up a ladder?” Lyons demanded.

“No, but I was hoping you would, though,” Schwarz retorted. “You are known for your temper.”

“Kiss my ass, Schwarz!” Lyons muttered, the carbine bucking in his hands.

Schwarz scanned the wide-open floor space of the factory. He realized that with his elevated position and superior range the sniper still had every advantage—even though he’d blown his initial attack.

“Let’s just go,” Schwarz said.

“What!” Lyons shouted, voice incredulous.

“Lets just boogey out of here. I mean it. Let him think we ran.”

“We need to know what that guy knows!” Lyons argued. “Our bad guy is a ghost—he’s our only lead.”

“To find out,” Schwarz said, “we need him to come down.”

Lyons opened his mouth to reply. He paused, then closed his mouth and cocked an eyebrow. He turned toward Schwarz and nodded once. “Okay, let’s do it,” he said.

“Blancanales!” Schwarz shouted.

“What?” Blancanales shouted back.

“Get the car!” Schwarz yelled. “Trust me!”

Blancanales looked at him, then nodded. In a second he was out the door. Lyons dropped a magazine from the pistol grip of his M-4 and inserted a fresh one while Schwarz provided covering fire.

CHAPTER FOUR

The fleeing sniper cranked the throttle on his street bike and raced out of the building. He was pretty close to panicked. He had gone too far, pissed off the Americans. There was nothing left but to run for it.

What had started out as easy money from influence peddling against the arrogant Yankees had quite suddenly backfired. The Juárez organization on the border was wrecked. Their commandant butchered. It was time to take the money and run. Too bad, so sad. Now it was time to go.

He gunned the powerful motorcycle across the abandoned asphalt parking lot of the old factory and out the front gate. The American investigating team had made their escape and it was time for him to do the same. He used the toe of his boot to push the bike into a higher gear and he cranked his wrist, holding the throttle wide open.

He shot through the gate and out onto the access road lined with shacks of aluminum siding and cardboard. Suddenly up ahead, next to the rusting derelict of a train engine parked and forgotten on the old tracks, the sniper saw one of the American agents, the big blond bastard, standing out in the open with his carbine. The man flipped him the middle finger and the sniper locked up his bike, sending it into a slide and changing direction before the fool opened fire.

His rear tire caught on the hard-packed earth and he felt the motorcycle start to respond. Suddenly he saw movement and looked up. Too late he saw the American’s vehicle, a massive SUV, rush out of a narrow alley and head directly at him. Behind the blacked-out visor of his helmet the sniper screamed.

Blancanales’s face was a smooth, flat affect, as expressionless as a mask as he rammed the big vehicle into the man. The heavy bumper struck the Japanese bike and sent it skipping end-over-end down the road, tossing the rider like a rag doll in a spinning pinwheel of limbs.

The corrupt Mexican law-enforcement agent struck the ground and bounced, his limbs almost instantly folding into unnatural angles. Blancanales hit the brakes on the SUV to allow the motorcycle to bounce away and avoid becoming entangled with it. He watched the figure of the ambush assassin rebound off the ground like a rubber ball and sprawl in an ungainly slide onto the weed-choked railroad tracks.

“Oh, that’s going to leave a mark,” Schwarz muttered, and winced.

Blancanales twisted the wheel and threw the SUV into a slide as he brought the vehicle to a stop. He opened his door and bailed while across from him the Able Team electronics expert did the same. Both men brought their compact carbines up to provide cover.

From his decoy position Carl Lyons raced toward the fallen man, his own carbine covering the motionless figure. Blancanales sized up the situation and immediately turned to provide cover outward as his two teammates converged on the broken body.

Lyons knelt and put two fingers against the motorcycle rider’s throat while Schwarz covered him. Lyons pulled some clothing to one side and felt again. He looked up at Schwarz and shook his head.

“No pulse,” he said.

“Yank the helmet,” Schwarz said.

Setting the M-4 down, Lyons quickly undid the chin-strap and pulled the helmet free. The man’s head bounced oddly and came to rest at an almost obscene angle. The neck of the assassin was clearly broken.

“Well, I guess we’re done in Juárez,” Lyons muttered.

“Shake him down for a cell phone or something, it might pay off,” Schwarz suggested. “I’m sorry, guys. I know we needed him alive. I didn’t realize he’d be riding a bike instead of driving a car when I set up the plan.”

“Shit happens,” Lyons said.

“Find anything?” Blancanales called.

Lyons looked up. “No, he was running clean.”

“Let’s get out of here, then,” Schwarz said, looking around. “The natives are starting to get curious.”

Lyons stood and nodded.

“Let’s roll.”

Kenya

“DOESN’T THAT JUST BEAT everything?”

McCarter’s voice was so dull with disappointment it barely held a trace of his accent. Beside him in the SUV, Hawkins just slowly shook his head.

“It’s the French,” he said. His disbelief only served to thicken his Texas drawl. “Why did it have to be the goddamn French?”

McCarter didn’t have an answer.

Their vehicle was parked on a bluff overlooking the river. Halfway across the dark brown waters they could clearly see the commercial ferry taking cars across to the other side.

Based on its current speed, the two Phoenix Force members estimated it’d be another half hour before the ferry unloaded its cargo on the far side and made its way back to pick them up.

To make matters worse the ferry was loaded with the French racing team. The laughter of the other racers was clearly audible as they powered away across the water. One of the Frenchmen lifted up his arm and flipped off the two men.

“I guess I had that coming,” Hawkins said.

“They started before us,” McCarter pointed out. “So the fact that we’ve caught up to them again, means our times are good.”

“Sure,” Hawkins conceded. “But I’d feel a hell of a lot better with them at our six than running flat out ahead of us.”

“What do you want to do?”

“According to the map there’s another crossing down the river,” Hawkins answered. “We get there and across, we could gain even more time.”

“Better damned if we do than if we don’t?”

“I sure as hell don’t want to burn daylight just sitting here if we have another option.”

McCarter released the parking brake and put the idling SUV into gear. “Let’s hit it,” he agreed.

The SUV powered across the open terrain.

McCarter navigated the riverbank for almost a mile until it twisted in a great bend. Reading the map beside him, Hawkins instructed him to cut straight cross-country to meet the waterway where it looped back.

Still battered by the lack of a road, the two men found the going relatively easy across a flat stretch of grassland. McCarter kept one eye on his watch while Hawkins used the dashboard compass, his much abused race map and the GPS unit to coordinate their position exactly. Soon he was plagued by a constant, low-grade headache. As they pressed on without an update on Monica Fischer’s condition, their worry mounted.

Copses of trees proved the most difficult obstacle to navigate but the route called for them to ford several small streams along the way. McCarter gunned the vehicle through one such obstacle and clawed his way up the other side and the men found themselves on an immense plain.

“That’s it,” Hawkins said. “That’s the last stream for a while and we’re on the veldt before the river crossing.”

According to their plan McCarter slowed and stopped the vehicle. Hawkins quickly got out, retrieved a grease gun from the cargo space and crawled under the vehicle to do his preventive maintenance.

As Hawkins worked, McCarter slipped out from behind the wheel to stretch. On a whim he crawled up onto the roof of the SUV and scanned his surroundings. The wild distance seemed vast as he scanned the terrain.

To the west he saw a small group of water buffalo wallowing in the mud beside the small stream they had just crossed. Beyond them a herd of giraffes moved easily across the grassland.

He felt at peace despite his exhaustion. The cares and worries of his singular occupation seemed far away. He felt the burden of his responsibilities lift off his shoulders like a bird taking flight.

He looked at his watch and noted how much time had passed. He was pleased. He calculated that their alternate route would put them in front of the Frenchmen in another hour.

“We might just win this thing, after all,” he called down to Hawkins.

Hawkins answered from beneath the rear axle but his reply was drowned out by the ringing of the satellite phone on McCarter’s belt. The Briton pulled it free and answered, figuring it was Manning with an update on Fischer’s condition.

He listened for a moment, then sighed.

“Hello, Barb. What can I do for you?”

Brazzaville; Capital, Republic of the Congo

THE NIGHT WAS HOT.

The heat was cloying, so humid it clung to the body in a blanket of damp. It made showering a superfluous activity. Despite this Rafik Bagdasarian had taken two in the past hour.

The first had been to wash the smell of the woman off him.

He’d been infatuated with her ebony skin and rich accent, but once he’d paid her, he’d come to the conclusion that whores were whores the world over. It didn’t matter if it was Moscow, New York, Paris or Brazzaville.

He took the second shower to calm his nerves. This one the Armenian mafioso lieutenant took with an iced tumbler full of Ouzo. In his years as arms merchant, contract killer, drug smuggler and human trafficker he’d come to love the anise-flavored liquor.

Walking through the suite of the Olympic Palace Hotel, he toweled off his pale, lanky body then poured himself a second drink. His body was covered with swirling green ink tattoos that announced his résumé and biography to those who knew how to read them.

Skulls, daggers, horned monsters, Catholic iconography all twisted across his lean, muscular frame. He was a problem solver, which was why his captain had sent him to the Congo.

Taking his drink, he stepped out onto his balcony and looked across the dirty water of the Congo River at Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The twin cities of Kinshasa and Brazzaville were the only national capitals sharing a river border or situated so closely together.

The unique circumstance had done nothing to help the two countries, however, Bagdasarian thought.

He stepped off the balcony, tossed back his drink and began to think. The civil war of Congo-Brazzaville in 1997 and the larger war in Congo-Kinshasa in 1998 had left the poverty-stricken nations and their capitals in ruins with political systems decimated.

From the power vacuum strongmen with guns had emerged.

It was a situation and environment Bagdasarian understood well. His own criminal clique had risen to prominence during and after the chaos of his own country’s bitter, bloody and protracted war with neighboring Azerbaijan.

He lit a French cigarette and buttoned his shirt. His area of operations for the Armenian syndicate was Africa, but he wasn’t just here for them. This time it was bigger; this time the Chinese principal had set him into motion.

Failure was not an option.

In the valise on the bed in front of him was a large amount of francs and a Walther PPK.

The woman he’d bought had served for something else beside sexual gratification.

Prostitutes were the elements of the criminal underground most readily available to foreigners in any country. They haunted the hotels and nightclubs promising sweaty miracles in exchange for cash.

But they were also conduits to the black market.

Prostitution went hand in hand with drugs and where you found a drug dealer you found someone who could, if the wheels were greased, get you a gun or introduce you to all manner of nefarious operators.

Bagdasarian had the number of his own contact in Brazzaville but he wasn’t about to go anywhere in the dangerous African city unarmed. Unwilling to risk his mission by attempting to smuggle a weapon onto a French airline, he’d used the hooker to secure a pistol.

Dressed, armed, and carrying twenty-five thousand dollars in francs, Bagdasarian went out of his room to find the police.

He needed some Americans killed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Rafik Bagdasarian shoved a fistful of local currency over the battered seat to the cabdriver and got out. He leaned in the open window of the passenger door and instructed the driver to wait for him around the block.

The taxi sped away, leaving him standing on the edge of an unpaved street. There was an open sewer off to his right and the stench was ripe in his nose.

Bagdasarian looked around.

He was on the opposite side of Brazzaville from the international airport. The dirt street was lined with shanties and what light there was escaped from boarded-up windows or from beneath shut-up doors.

A pair of mongrels fought over some scraps in a refuse pile several dozen yards up the road. Other than those dogs fighting, the stretch of grimy road was strangely deserted.

Faintly, Bagdasarian could hear the sound of a lousy stereo playing and then voices raised in argument. A baby started crying somewhere and farther away more dogs began barking in response.

Bagdasarian looked up at the sky, noting the low cloud cover. The road was thick with muck from the seasonal rains and it clung heavy to the soles of his hiking boots.

He set the attaché case he was holding down and reached around behind his back and pulled his pistol clear. He jacked the slide and chambered a 9 mm round before sliding the pistol into his jeans behind his belt buckle, leaving it in plain sight. He leaned down and picked up the case. He shifted his grip on the attaché handle so that his gun hand remained free.

He took a quick look around before crossing the road and stepping up to the front door of one of the innumerable shacks lining the road. He lifted his big hand and pounded three times on the door. He heard a hushed conversation break out momentarily before the voices fell quiet.

“Kabila?” Bagdasarian asked, speaking French. “Rafik.”

Bagdasarian felt a sudden damp and realized it had started to rain while he was standing there. Despite the wet he was still uncomfortably warm in his short-sleeved, button-down khaki shirt and battered blue jeans.

The short-sleeved shirt left his elbows and forearms exposed, revealing their thick covering of tattoos, his calling card.

The door opened slowly and a bar of soft, nicotine-colored light spilled out and illuminated Bagdasarian.

A silhouette stood in the doorway and the Armenian narrowed his eyes to take in the figure’s features. It was a male, wearing an unbuttoned and disheveled gendarme uniform. His eyes and teeth were sharply yellow against the deep burnished purple-black of his skin.

He held a bottle of grain alcohol in one hand, and the other rested on the pistol grip of a French MAT-49 submachine gun hanging from a strap slung across his neck like a guitar. He leaned forward, crowding Bagdasarian’s space.

Bagdasarian made no move to back up.

“You, Rafik?” the man demanded, also speaking French.

His breath reeked with alcohol fumes, and the light around him reflected wildly off the glaze in his eyes. His words were softly slurred but his gaze was steady as he eyed Bagdasarian up and down.

The finger on the trigger of the MAT-49 submachine gun seemed firm enough.

“Yes,” Bagdasarian answered. “Is Kabila here?”

“Colonel Kabila,” the man corrected.

“Is Colonel Kabila here?”

“You have the money?”

Bagdasarian lifted the attaché case, though he knew the man had already seen it when he’d opened the door.

The gendarme ignored the displayed satchel, his eyes never leaving Bagdasarian’s face. His hair was tightly cropped and Bagdasarian could see bullets of sweat beading on the man’s forehead. The smell of body odor was acrid.

“Give me the pistol.”

“Go to hell.”

The drunken gendarme’s eyes lifted in shock and his face twisted in sudden, instant outrage. He snapped straight and twisted the MAT-49 around on its sling, trying to bring the muzzle up in the cramped quarters.

Bagdasarian’s free hand shot out and grabbed the submachine gun behind its front sight. The big man locked his arm and pushed down, preventing the gendarme from raising the weapon. The gendarme’s eyeballs bulged in anger and the cords of his neck stood out as he strained to bring the submachine gun to bear.

“Leave him!” a deep bass voice barked from somewhere behind the struggling gendarme.

The man cursed and tried to step back and swing his weapon up and away from Bagdasarian’s grip. The Armenian stepped forward as the man stepped back, preventing the smaller man from bringing any leverage to bear.

An ability to call up instant explosive anger and balls like brass fixtures was the way Bagdasarian had risen to the top in the hyperviolent world of Armenian organized crime. He didn’t take shit. Even if it cost him his life.

They moved into the room through the door and Bagdasarian heard chair legs scrape against floorboards as men jumped to their feet. He ignored them, making no move for the butt of the 9 mm PPK plainly sticking out of his jeans.

The man grunted his exertion and tried to step to the outside.

Rafik Bagdasarian danced with him, keeping the gendarme’s body between him and the others in the smoky room. His grip on the front sling swivel remained unbroken. Finally the gendarme dropped his bottle and grabbed the submachine gun with both hands. The bottle thumped loudly as it struck the floor but did not break.

Liquid began to gurgle out and stain the floorboards.

“I said enough!” the voice roared.

The gendarme was already using both his hands to snatch the submachine gun free as the order came.

The Armenian released the front sling swivel and stepped to the side. The gendarme found his center of balance around the struggle abruptly gone and overextended himself. Already drunk, he toppled over backward and struck the floor in the pool of reeking alcohol spilling from his dropped bottle.

Cursing and sputtering, the man tried to rise.

Bagdasarian surveyed the room. He saw four other men in the same soiled and rumpled police uniforms, each one armed either with a pistol or a submachine gun. All of them were gaunt and lanky with short hair except for the bear of a man bearing the gold braid epaulets of an officer.

The man rose from behind a table and hurled a heavy glass tumbler at the gendarme Bagdasarian had spilled onto the floor. The glass struck the man in the face and opened a gash under his eye, high on a prominent cheekbone where Bantu tribal scars had been etched at puberty and rubbed with charcoal.

“I said leave him!”

The shock of being struck snapped the embarrassed man out of his rage. He touched a hand to the cut under his eye and held up his bloody fingers. He looked away from his hand and nodded once toward the man looming up behind the table before rising.

The officer turned toward Bagdasarian. “My apologizes,” he said. “My men worry about my safety.”

“Understandable, Colonel Kabila.” Bagdasarian nodded. “I worry about my own safety.”

“Come now, you are in the company of police officers.”

“Yes, I am,” Bagdasarian agreed.

“Foreigners are not usually permitted to carry weapons in our land.”

Bagdasarian threw the attaché case down on the table. “That should more than cover any administrative fees.”

“Is it in euros?”

“Francs,” Bagdasarian corrected.

Kabila nodded and one of the gendarmes at the table reached over and picked up the attaché case. He had a sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve.

Bagdasarian saw there were two very young girls pressed up against the back wall of the shack. Their eyes were hard as diamonds and glittered as they took him in.

The gendarme sergeant pulled the case over and opened it. The sudden light of avarice flared in his eyes, impossible to disguise. Bagdasarian shrugged it off.

While the sergeant counted the stacks of French currency, Colonel Kabila reseated himself.

He snapped his fingers at one of the girls and she jumped to pick a fresh glass off a shelf beside her. She brought it over to the table and poured the colonel a fresh drink from an already open bottle. Bagdasarian could feel the intensity of her gaze.

Kabila regarded the Armenian through squinty, bloodshot eyes. He picked up a smoldering cigar off the table and dragged heavily from it. His men made no move to return to their seats. Kabila pulled his cigar out of his mouth and gestured with it.

“Sit down.”

Bagdasarian pulled out the chair from the end of the table opposite Kabila and eased himself into it. The two men regarded each other with coolly assessing gazes while the sergeant beside Kabila continued counting the money. Kabila lifted his new glass and splashed its contents back without changing expression.

“Shouldn’t a man like you be out selling drugs in the nightclubs?” Kabila asked.

“Shouldn’t you be out in the delta or back east, fighting?”

Kabila shrugged. “That’s what the army is for. I fight crime.”

“How’s it pay?”

“Not as well as you do, I hope.” Kabila smiled. He wasn’t smiling when he added, “For your sake.”

The gendarme sergeant looked up from counting the money secured inside the attaché case. Kabila’s eyes never left Bagdasarian. “Is it all there?” he asked.

“More.”

“More?” Kabila asked Bagdasarian.

“There’s a bonus in there. You’re going to have to travel outside the city.”

“Up river?” The colonel sounded incredulous.

“Yes.”

“I am a policeman.” Colonel Kabila smirked.

Bagdasarian followed the line of Kabila’s sight across the room to where the gendarme he had scuffled with stood glowering.

“Any way you want it, Colonel.”

“Yes. Yes, it usually is.”

Kabila leaned back from the table and stretched out his arm.

The girl who had poured his drink slid into his lap. She regarded Bagdasarian from beneath hooded lids. Bagdasarian guessed she could have been no older than fourteen. She was beautiful, her eyes so darkly brown they were almost black, but still nearly luminescent. The effect was disquieting. In America she would be a freshman in high school. In Congo-Brazzaville she was the paramour of a corrupt warlord four times her age.

Bagdasarian forced himself to look away.

The sergeant on Kabila’s right shut the briefcase and placed it on the floor of the shack underneath the table and at his colonel’s feet. Bagdasarian looked around the room. An expensive-looking portable stereo played hip-hop music featuring a French rapper. A bar stood against one wall and a motley collection of bottles sat on it, devoid of import tax stamps. Cigar smoke was thick in the room, and Bagdasarian was surprised to see several of the gendarme officers chewing khat, a narcotic root he had always associated with the Horn of Africa, as well as the more common draggar.

The Armenian placed his hands palm down on the table and pushed himself up. He rose slowly and nodded to the colonel, who didn’t bother to return the favor. Bagdasarian looked over at the gendarme who had opened the door. The man’s eyes were slits of hate.

Rafik Bagdasarian crossed the room, keenly aware of how many guns were at his back. He placed his hand on the door handle and slowly turned the knob. Coolly he swung it open and stepped out into the falling rain.

Nigeria

THE QUONSET HUTS HAD BEEN dropped into the clearing by a Sikorsky helicopter. The cover story had to do with oil exploration for Chevron, which was a prolific presence in the Niger Delta region.

The electronic intelligence for the program hadn’t been so lucky.

The four-man team had traveled upriver through snake-, crocodile-and pirate-infested waterways first by motor launch and then for four miles of bush breaking overland.

The satellite relay station was jointly funded through the NSA and the DEA for counterterror and antinarcotics trafficking operations throughout western sub-Saharan Africa. For the most part the marriage between law enforcement and raw intelligence gathering had proved successful.

The most glaring hole in the plan was the lack of a security element. The NSA, unlike its intelligence-gathering counterparts in the Central Intelligence Agency or the Pentagon, preferred a “below the radar” profile to one more centered on firepower.

Calvin Sloke, a six-year electronic-intelligence specialist, swatted a mosquito.

The flying bug was particularly big and had got that way, Sloke suspected, by helping its vampric self to liberal portions of the American’s blood.

“Got you, you son of a bitch!” Sloke shouted in triumph.

The bug was smeared like fruit pulp along his forearm just above his Timex Ironman wristwatch.

“Congratulations,” Selene Hoffman replied from behind him.

Her voice was thick with sarcasm. She didn’t much like Sloke after six weeks in the cramped quarters and had pretty much given up pretending otherwise.

“Screw you,” Sloke replied, voice artificially pleasant.

“In your dreams, dork.”

“Quitting smoking sure has done a lot for your personality.”

“Sorry my not dying is inconveniencing you.”

“Boy, has it.”

“Stow the bullshit,” Mark Ensign said as he entered the tech center.

The ex-Marine was the only one of the crew who’d been to Africa before, having served time in both Liberia and Somalia as a counterintelligence officer. He still kept in shape with daily routines of calisthenics that made the other techs nauseous just watching him.

“We get our signal today?” he continued.

“Coming up now,” Sloke said.

Overhead, in geosynchronous near-earth orbit, a Dong Fang Hong satellite of the People’s Republic of China made its daily pass. Like clockwork the Nigeria station would begin signals intercepts, or SIGINT, operations.

This operation, along with digital wiretaps of the satellite and cellular communications networks used by the criminal pipeline that moved cocaine and heroin from Mexico and South America through Africa, up to Armenia and into the European Union, was the primary responsibility of the Nigeria station.

“Where’s Dex?” Hoffman asked.

“Getting some rack time,” Ensign replied.

Jason Dexter was the hardware and systems engineer assigned to keep all the various highly classified components at the site working and working with each other. After six years with the U.S. Navy and then two more doing the same job with the Department of Defense’s Defense Intelligence Agency, he’d been quietly recruited into the Puzzle Palace.

High-strung, type A and nearly anorexic, the specialist was a mission-first workaholic who’d run one marriage into the ground and didn’t speak to his children. Despite this, or maybe because of it, he had a reputation as the premier field-operations guy in the Agency.

At that moment the door to the communications station opened and a figure appeared in the doorway, submachine gun held in his hands.

Ensign reached for the metal filing cabinet where he’d placed his holdout, an H&K MP-5. His fingers curled around the smooth metal handle of the drawer.

The figure in the doorway stepped to one side and a second form appeared in the entrance. Hoffman had time to look toward Ensign as he yanked open the drawer and reached inside. Sloke covered his head with his arms.

Ensign lifted the submachine gun, tried to turn as his thumb snapped the fire-selector off safety and onto full auto.

The men in the doorway opened fire.

Bullets streamed through the claustrophobic space in a hailstorm of lead. Rounds chewed through computer screens and electronics equipment, shattering cases and housing like sledgehammers.

Sparks flew in wild rooster tails and miniature columns of smoke spewed upward as shards of plastic and stamped metal ricocheted around.

The cowering Sloke caught a long burst that slammed into him with relentless force, gouging out the flesh of his side and back, shattering his ribs and scrambling his internal organs like eggs in a skillet. He screamed and flopped under the impact until a triple burst of soft-nosed slugs shattered his jaw, cracked his temple and punched two holes through the temporal bone of his skull.

He slumped instantly, banging his head on the tabletop before flopping onto the diamond-plate flooring panels. His blood spilled out like flood waters.

Hoffman rose to her feet in a half crouch, a hapless, helpless, terrified look freezing her face into a mask of fear. Her hands came up as if she could ward off the bullets with such a feeble attempt.

Her left hand lost the pinkie and index finger as the rounds sliced through her. Her right palm blossomed with blood as a round slammed through the muscle under her thumb and lodged in the bones of her wrist.

She opened her mouth to scream and a single round slid into her torso, slicing apart her diaphragm and venting the air in her lungs. She gasped weakly and folded like a lawn chair in time to catch six more bullets across her chest and throat.

The intelligence agent fell backward, her blood splashing her computer screen, and tripped over her chair. She struck the ground like a kid falling out of a tree and gasped, fighting for breath through ruined lungs and larynx.

Her eyes filmed gray in an instant and she fell slack. The oxygen-starved muscles of her abdomen spasmed once and a cascade of dark blood bubbled out of her mouth and streaked her face.

Ensign leveled the H&K, his finger tight on the trigger.

He felt two bullets strike him like the impacts of a baseball bat, one in his thigh and a second low in his gut. He squeezed the MP-5’s trigger and the submachine gun roared to life in his hands.

His rounds sprayed wildly in a loose pattern, most of them burning off harmlessly into the ceiling.

A second burst caught him in the chest and shoulder, smashing him back against the filing cabinet. The kinetic force jerked his arm, and the muzzle of the blazing SMG dropped.

Two rounds struck one of the attackers in his right arm, slicing through the biceps and cracking the humerus bone beneath, while the other sliced a gouge of meat an inch wide off the man’s rib cage. The Nigerian killer grunted with the impact and staggered.

The second gunman hosed the ex-Marine down, stitching a line of slugs in a diagonal pattern from hip to neck and unzipping the American’s stomach in the process.

Ensign rebounded off the filing cabinet and dropped to his knees, the H&K falling silent. A final burst from the unwounded killer sliced his face off his skull, leaving only a bloody cavity in its place.

The corpse fell forward and struck the ground with a wet slap.

Colonel Kabila stepped into the hut, a bloody panga knife in hand, cigar burning in his mouth.

He looked at his wounded police officer and jerked his head to the side, indicating the man should go.

“Dress your wounds,” he ordered, and the man hurried to obey.

Kabila took a deep drag and blew smoke out of his wide nostrils like a dragon. He looked at the other police officer and lifted his panga. The blade of the heavy bush tool was smeared black with blood.

“Get to work,” he said.

Twenty yards away Dexter huddled in the bush, hidden from sight.

CHAPTER SIX

Suburbs, Washington, D.C.

The phone rang.

Hal Brognola came awake instantly. The director of the Special Operations Group and head of Stony Man Farm sat up in bed and snapped on the lamp at his bedside table. His wife of some thirty years moaned in protest and rolled away.

The phone rang again.

Getting oriented, the director of America’s most sensitive covert operation group looked at the table and tried to determine which of his two phones was ringing. The first phone was his home and it often rang when some matter from his position at the Justice Department needed urgent attention.

The second phone was a Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device, or SME PED. The combination of sat phone and PDA allowed the wireless transmission of classified information and conversations.

When that phone rang then Brognola knew without question that the call was in reference to the Stony Man program. It would mean that somewhere in the world something had gone very wrong and that a decision had been made at the very highest level that resolution was only to be found at the muzzle of a gun.

The Stony Man teams were the very best guns in the business.

Brognola blinked and phone chirped again. It was the SME PED.

Time to go to work, he thought, and picked up the secured device.

“Go for Hal,” he said.

Things started to roll.

Stony Man Farm

CARMEN DELAHUNT HAD CQ duty at the Farm.

CQ was a military acronym for “command of quarters” and it simply meant that she had drawn after-hours duty. Despite not having the field teams on any active assignment at that precise moment, Stony Man was still a 24/7 operation and as such the Farm was fully staffed around the clock.

Secure in the Communications Room of the Farm’s Annex, the fiery redhead and former FBI agent was monitoring updated intelligence situation reports, military communications traffic and twenty-four-hour cable news channels.

While monitoring all this sensory input, Delahunt casually whipped through page after page of challenging Sudoku puzzles. She was a multitasking machine driven by a sharp, type A personality engine.

On the top of the desk the duty phone blinked into life and then rang. Setting down her coffee cup, she snatched up the receiver.

“Farm,” she said. Then, after a pause she continued, “Good morning, Hal.”

She cocked a head as the big Fed began talking. Her fingers flew across the keyboard in front of her as she began pulling up the latest information on West Africa in general, the Congo in specific, focusing on the terrorist and criminal operatives in that area and a project known as Lazy Titan.

Satisfied she was up to speed, Brognola hung up in his suburban D.C. home and began getting dressed.

Once off the phone Delahunt made two priority calls, both to other locations on the Stony Man facility. The first was to inform Jack Grimaldi, chief pilot for the covert project, that he was needed ASAP to take a helicopter into Wonderland on the Potomac and ferry Brognola to the Farm.

The second call went to Barbara Price.

BARBARA PRICE, Stony Man’s mission controller, opened her eyes.

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

There was a war being fought in the shadows and like the ringmaster of a circus, she was at its epicenter. Her eyes went to the window of her bedroom. It was dark outside. She looked over to her bedroom table and noted the glowing red numerals of her digital clock.

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

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

Rebel Forces Invade Congo

Late yesterday afternoon the Congo was rocked by violence as insurgents under command of the infamous Gen. Nkunda took control of a region on the upper river. Human rights groups are worried as communication with the area has been cut off…

Disgusted, Price stopped reading. She had too much on her mind at the moment to worry about politics as usual in Africa.

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

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

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

“This is Barb,” she said, voice cool.

“Barb,” Carmen Delahunt began, “Hal called. We have a situation.”

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

“See you in a minute,” Delahunt said, and signed off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The electric engine beneath her seat began to power down and the railcar slowed to a halt. She pushed the morose reflections from her mind as she prepared to enter the Annex building.

Things were ready to roll hot; she could not afford to be distracted now. She stood and stepped out of the car. Fluorescent lights gleamed off linoleum floors and a sign on the whitewashed wall read Authorized Personnel Only. Price input the code on the keypad and reached over to open the door to the tunnel.

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

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

The pair of them had exchanged that same greeting so many times it came to feel like a Groundhog Day moment. Both took comfort from the repetition.

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

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

He’d earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He was a Stony Man veteran who had been with the Farm since the beginning, and his wheelchair was a constant testament to his dedication.

“McCarter just called for Phoenix,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “They’ve set up rendezvous with Encizo and James. Carl did the same for Able. They’re in place and ready to transport if we need them. They’ve been informed of the attack on NSA station Lazy Titan and the possibility of a survivor.”

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

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

Kurtzman glided over to his work area, where it looked as if a bomb had gone off. His desk was covered in faxes, paperwork and the exposed wiring of half a dozen devices. Next to his desk, fingers flying across a laptop while monitoring a sat com link, Akira Tokaido bobbed his head in time to the music coming from a single earphone. The lean, compact hacker was the youngest member of Stony Man’s cybernetics team and the heir apparent to Kurtzman himself. The Japanese-American cyberpunk had at times worked virtual magic when Price had needed him to.

Across the room from Tokaido sat his polar opposite.

Professor Huntington Wethers had come to the Stony Man operations from his position on the faculty of UCLA. The tall, distinguished black man sported gray hair at his temples and an unflappable manner.

He currently worked two laptop screens as a translation program fed him information from monitored radio traffic coming out of France.

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

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

“Since we’re on West Africa anyway you see the article about the new Congo player, General Nkunda?” she asked. “I started running an analytical of our files on that movement and him in particular.”

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

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

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

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

Barbara Price smiled.

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

She did not intend to let them down.

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

“It’s Hal on line one,” he said.

“Thanks, Bear,” she answered.

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

“Hal, it’s Barb,” she said.

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

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

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

“As always,” she agreed, and hung up.

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

Nairobi, Kenya

PHOENIX FORCE MET UP in the capital and transferred to the Sikorsky MH-53 Pave Low helicopter. To them their mission was simple: go in and find a lone American survivor of a brutal attack. It didn’t matter that an entire army of heavily armed insurgents had taken him into a city turned into a hellish fortress.

They would proceed, always moving forward.

FOR ABLE TEAM THE MISSION evolved in a more circumspect manner.

In the back of the Lear jet taking them to the Farm the three-man team relaxed, unwinding from the mission. Thirty minutes into the flight, Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi opened the cockpit door.

“I got Barb on secure communications,” he told them. “I don’t think you guys are going home yet.”

“Perfect,” Blancanales said, laughing.

Nicaragua

ABLE TEAM’S PLAN WAS simple.

They would come in on a commercial flight and make it through customs clean. Following that, they would pick up a vehicle and make their way to a safehouse used by a joint CIA and Army Special Operations Intelligence Support Activity operation to establish a base before starting surveillance of the target.

Things began to go wrong immediately.

Carl Lyons pulled his carry-on bag down from the overhead compartment just after the Unfasten Seat Belts sign popped up on the TWA commercial flight. They were flying first-class as part of their administrative cover, and the team leader had watched, bemused, as Blancanales had seduced the Hispanic flight attendant with his gregarious charm.

Team funnyman Hermann Schwarz had cracked one stale joke after another as the silver-haired smooth-talker had reaffirmed his membership in the mile-high club thirty thousand feet over the Caribbean with a dark-eyed Nicaraguan beauty half his age.

In a more regulation-orientated unit such behavior as stand-up sex in an airplane restroom would have been a scandalous breach of operational security, one that a team leader like Lyons would have had to treat severely as a discipline issue.

Not so in the shadowy world in which Able Team operated. Now there wasn’t a person on the plane among the crew or passengers who didn’t think the three men were anything but what they claimed; middle-aged divorced tourists on a Central American vacation. Blancanales’s audacity was role-playing brilliance.

If there was anything bothering Lyons as he exited the plane after the flight attendant had slipped her cell number to Blancanales, it was that circumstances dictated they roll into the opening moves of the operation unarmed. Carl Lyons didn’t like taking a shower unarmed, let alone enter a potentially volatile nation without a weapon.

“Okay,” Schwarz murmured as they came into the big, air-conditioned terminal, “we can add a certain TWA flight attendant named Bonita to our roster of Stony Man local assets.”

“Oh, yeah,” Lyons replied. “I’m sure she’ll be a big help. We can just send David and his boys down here sometime and they can all crash at her hacienda. It’ll be like the Farm South.”

“You see how it is, Gadgets?” Blancanales said, voice weary. “You try to take one for the team and management doesn’t appreciate it. I try to show loyalty through service and all I get is cynical pessimism.”

“Oh, buddy,” Schwarz replied, voice dry as south Texas wind, “you just got a lot more on you than cynical pessimism.”

“Yes,” Blancanales replied seriously. “Yes, I did.”

“Can you gentlemen come this way?”

The voice interrupted their banter with the certainty of undisputed authority. Able Team turned their heads as one to take in the speaker. He was a tall Latino with jet-black hair, mustache and eyes and was wearing the crisp uniform of a Nicaraguan customs officer. There was a 9 mm automatic pistol in a polished holster on his hip but the flap was closed and secured.

However, a few paces behind him the assault rifles of the military security guards were right out and open as the soldiers stood with hands on pistol grips and fingers resting near triggers.

Lyons scowled. Schwarz gave the officer his best grin in reply to the summons. Then he turned his head slightly and whispered to Blancanales out of the side of his mouth, “Any chance you want to take one for the team now?”

Blancanales fixed an insincere grin of his own on his face. “Nope. This time we move right to cynical pessimism,” he replied. He turned to face the stern uniformed officer, face suddenly serious. “This isn’t about that flight attendant, is it?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Nicaraguan customs separated the three men quickly, hustling them into separate rooms. There they sat, isolated, for two hours. Carl Lyons found himself sitting in front of a plain metal table on an uncomfortable folding chair while the customs officer pretended to read official-looking papers he’d taken from a blue folder with a government seal at the top.

Fluent in Spanish, Lyons easily read the pages he set on the tabletop and saw that they were merely quarterly flight maintenance reports being used as props. Warily, Lyons decided to relax a bit; this seemed a more random occurrence than he had first feared. The Farm had considerable resources, but the operation was minuscule compared to other government agencies and Stony Man operatives were often forced to rely on logistical support from larger bureaucratic entities. Whenever that happened, security became a prime concern, but for now this seemed a more typical customs roust than anything more threatening.

The officer, whose name tag read Garcia, picked up Lyons’s passport with his free hand and opened it. “Mr. Johnson?” His English was accented but clipped and neat.

Lyons nodded. “That’s me.”

Garcia regarded him over the top of the little blue folder. “What brings you to Nicaragua?”

“Sunny weather, beautiful women, the beaches. All the usual. Is there a problem with my passport?”

The customs agent carefully put the blue folder down. He ignored the question and tapped the passport with one long, blunt-tipped finger. “There are many countries in Central America with beautiful beaches and women.”

“But only one San Hector Del Sur—it’s world famous,” Lyons replied in flawless Spanish, referencing Nicaragua’s most popular tourist destination.

Garcia’s eyes flicked upward sharply at the linguistic display. His eyes looked past Lyons and toward the large reflective glass Lyons knew from his own experience as a police officer was where the customs officer’s superiors were watching the interrogation. Garcia let his gaze settle back on Lyons. He offered a wan smile.

“I’m sure this is just an administrative error,” the officer said. “My people will have it sorted out in no time.” Garcia rose to his feet. “Please be patient.”

“Okay.” Lyons nodded agreeably. “But, man, am I getting thirsty.”

GARCIA LEFT LYONS and walked toward the interrogation room containing Hermann Schwarz. As he moved down the hallway he saw the tall, cadaverous figure in a dark suit standing off behind his commanding officer. The man met Garcia’s gaze with cold, dead eyes, and the Nicaraguan customs officer felt a chill at the base of his spine. What was he doing here? Garcia wondered. He stifled the thought quickly—it didn’t pay to ask too many questions about the internal security organization, even to yourself.

As he entered the room he saw a burly sergeant had Schwarz pinned up against the wall, one beefy forearm across the American’s throat. The officer was scowling in fury as Schwarz, going by the name Miller, smirked.

Schwarz looked over at Garcia as the man entered and grinned. “Hey, Pedro,” he called. “You know why this guy’s wife never farted as a little girl? ’Cause she didn’t have an asshole till she got married!”

The sergeant rotated and dipped the shoulder of his free hand. His fist came up from the hip and buried itself in Schwarz’s stomach. The Stony Man operative absorbed the blow passively and let himself crumple at the man’s feet. He looked up from the floor, gasping for breath.

Schwarz looked at Garcia. “You know what this pendejo’s most confusing day is? Yep—Father’s Day.”

His cackling was cut off as the sergeant kicked him in the ribs. Garcia snapped an order and reluctantly the man backed off. “Leave us!” he repeated, and the officer left the room scowling.

Garcia moved forward and dropped Schwarz’s passport on the table. He looked down as the American fought his way back up to his feet. Garcia watched dispassionately as the man climbed into his chair.

“This is a hell of a country you got here, pal,” Schwarz said. “Tell a few jokes and get the shit kicked out of you. I should get a lawyer and sue your ass.”

“You’ll find Nicaraguan courts unsympathetic to ugly Americans, Mr. Miller.”

“Yeah, well, your momma’s so fat when she walks her butt claps.”

“Why have you come to Nicaragua, Mr. Miller?”

“I heard a guy could get a drink. I think it was a lie. Seriously, I’m here with some buddies to check out the sites, maybe see the senoritas on San Hector Del Sur, but instead I get this?”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t insult my officers?”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t lock an innocent turista up for two hours in a room with a trained monkey like that asshole.”

Garcia sighed heavily, a weary man with an odious task. “I’m sure this is just an administrative error. We’ll have it sorted out shortly.”

“You’re damn well right you will,” Schwarz snapped, playing his role to the hilt.

“In the meantime perhaps you could refrain from antagonizing my officers? Yes?”

“Hey, Pedro—is that your stomach or did you just swallow a beach ball?”

Officer Garcia turned and walked out of the room, studiously ignoring the thin man standing outside in the hall next to the doorway.

“Hey, who do ya have to screw to get a drink around here?” Schwarz demanded as the door swung closed.

From behind the two-way mirror the thin man watched him with inscrutable curiosity.

AS CUSTOMS OFFICER Garcia entered the final interrogation room, Blancanales, whose own passport was made out under the name of Rosario, rose from his seat, manner eager and face twisted into a mask of hopeful supplication.

“Listen,” he began babbling, “I’m really, really, really sorry about what happened on the plane. I know I should have waited till I got to San Hector Del Sur but this is my first vacation in years and I guess I got carried—”

“Shut up and sit down!” Garcia snapped. “Yes, I know, I know. You are all here innocently. You are all planning to go to San Hector Del Sur, you are all thirsty and need a drink because you are just typical ugly American’s here to screw our women and drink tequila!”

Face frozen in a look of sheepish innocence, Blancanales settled back in his chair. He blinked his eyes several times. “Well, er, I guess…yeah.”

Face red, Garcia spun on a heel and tossed the blue passport on the table in disgust. He left the room and slammed the door behind him so hard it rattled in its frame. Blancanales called after him, “Actually, I am kind of thirsty, amigo.”

OUT IN THE HALLWAY Garcia marched up to his superior, who stood waiting next to the thin man in civilian clothes. “Sir, their paperwork checks out. Everything checks out perfectly. They’ve obviously rehearsed their story—or it’s the truth. Should I toss them in a holding cell?”

“That won’t be necessary,” the thin man said. “Let them go. Apologize for the mistake, wish them well.”

Garcia slid his gaze over to his commanding officer, who glanced over at the man next to him, then nodded. “Yes, we have enough. Let them go.”

Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo

THE ROTORS OF THE Blackhawk helicopter were still turning slowly as the side door to the cargo bay opened and the men Colonel Kabila had been sent to greet emerged. He surveyed them with a critical eye, noting the athletic physiques, flat affects and nonregulation weaponry hanging off their ballistic armor and black fatigues.

Kabila had seen enough special operations soldiers in his life to recognize the type, French, American, British. As much as they might have liked to think otherwise, nationality mattered little—the elite always had more in common with each other than even with others of their own country or military. Kabila was wise and realistic enough to know he himself did not belong among their ranks. It was no matter of ego for him; his interests lay in other directions.

At the moment it remained focused on gaining these mysterious commandos’ trust, leading them into hostile terrain beyond the reach of help, and then betraying them—making himself a little wealthier in the process.

The first man to reach Kabila was tall and broad with fox-faced features and brown eyes and hair. Having spent the past five years operating alongside British forces in Brazzaville the rebel police officer recognized an Englishman even before he spoke and revealed his accent.

“You Kabila?” David McCarter asked.

Kabila nodded, noting the man did not identify either himself or his unit. Behind the Briton his team paused: a tall black man with cold eyes, a stocky Hispanic with a fireplug build and scarred forearms standing next to a truly massive individual with shoulders like barn doors and an M-60E cut-down machine gun.

Behind the tight little group another individual, as tall and muscular as the rest, turned and surveyed the windows and rooftops of the buildings overlooking the secured helipad. There was a sniper-scoped Mk-11 with a paratrooper skeletal folding stock in his hands. The eyepieces on the telescopic sight popped up to reveal an oval peep sight glowing a dim green.

“We were briefed on the flight in,” McCarter continued. “You get us past the Congolese security checkpoints and militia crossings until we’re within striking distance, then fall back with the reserve force should we need backup.”

“Just so.” Kabila nodded. “I’m surprised you agreed to having only Congolese forces as overwatch. Did you work with us in Brazzaville before?” The question was casually voiced but still constituted a breach of etiquette in such situations.

“Has there been a change in the situation since our initial briefing?” the black man asked, cutting in.

Kabila turned to face Calvin James, noting the H&K MP-7 submachine gun dangling from a sling off his shoulders down the front of his black fatigue shirt. In his big, scarred hands the man casually cradled a SPAS-15 dual-mode combat shotgun. Its stock was folded down so that he held it by the pistol grip and forestock just beyond the detachable drum-style magazine.

Just as with the rest of them, Kabila saw the man’s black fatigues bore no unit insignia, name tag or rank designation. His voice was flatly American, however, the accent bearing just a trace, perhaps of the Midwest, but he couldn’t be sure.

The Congolese pretended not to notice the pointed disregarding of his own indelicate question. Behind the team the Blackhawk’s engines suddenly changed pitch and began to whine as the helicopter lifted off.

Kabila shook his head to indicate no to the black man’s questions, then waved his hand toward the APC parked on the edge of the helipad’s concrete apron. The Dzik-3 was a multipurpose armored car made in Poland and used by Congolese army and police units throughout the country.

The 4.5-ton wheeled vehicle boasted bulletproof windows, body armor able to withstand 7.62 mm rounds, puncture-proof tires and smoke launchers. T. J. Hawkins, covering the unit’s six as they made for the APC, thought it looked like a dun-colored Brink’s truck and doubted it could withstand the new special penetration charges currently being used as roadside improvised explosive devices. He would have felt a lot safer in an American Stryker or the Cougar Armored Fighting Vehicle.

He was used to stark pragmatism, however, and made no comment as he scrambled inside the vehicle, carefully protecting his sniper scope. Despite the rotation of special operations soldiers through Stony Man, the exact nature of the Farm and its teams remained clandestine in the covert community. There were enough special-access programs floating around the intelligence and military establishments performing overlapping and complementary missions that the true carte blanche under which Hal Brognola’s Sensitive Operations Group conducted business was greatly obfuscated.

It had been easier to coordinate a blacked-out operation through local Congolese forces than to bring international authorities operating in the Brazzaville theater in on the loop because the deployment had been so frenzied. Hawkins accepted the situation without complaint.

Inside the armored vehicle the team sat crammed together, muzzles up toward the ceiling. Rafael Encizo sat behind the driver’s seat holding a Hawk MM-1 multiround 40 mm grenade launcher. As Kabila settled in the front passenger seat beside his driver, he looked back at the heavily armed crew with a frown.

“I am in charge of my vehicle during transport and thus am commanding officer for this phase of the operation,” he said, voice grave. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that you put your weapon safeties on.”

McCarter leaned forward, shifting his M-4/M-203 combo to one side as he did, the barrel passing inches from Kabila’s face. He held up his trigger finger in front of the Congolese colonel’s face and smiled coldly.

“Sorry, mate,” he said. “I know you’ve heard this before but—” he wiggled his trigger finger back in forth in front of Kabila’s eyes “—this is my safety.” He settled back into his seat. “End of story.”

Kabila turned around, face gray with fury. He slapped the dash of the vehicle and curtly ordered his driver to pull away from the tarmac of the helipad. As the vehicle rolled out into traffic he forced himself to calm. It was as the old African proverb, claimed by the English as their own, said: who laughs last laughs best, and Colonel Kabila planned to be laughing very hard indeed at the end of the next few hours.

PHOENIX FORCE REMAINED alert as the Dzik-3 left the main traffic thoroughfares surrounding the airport and pushed deeper into the city. They rolled through Congolese national army and police checkpoints without a problem, but as the buildings grew more congested and run-down and the signs of the recent civil conflicts became more prolific—in the form of bullet-riddled walls, the charred hulks of burned-out vehicles, gaping window frames and missing doors—so did flags and graffiti proclaiming rebel slogans and allegiance.

Now the checkpoints were manned by local force police officers who all wore subtle indicators of tribal allegiance in conjunction with their official uniforms. Phoenix Force was entering a section of the city where centralized authority had lost its influence and clan leaders and tribal warlords were the de facto power structures.

The checkpoint stops became longer and the night grew deeper. In the backseat Gary Manning used a GPS-program-enhanced PDA to plot their course as they moved through the city. After a moment he froze the screen and leaned forward to tap McCarter on the shoulder. “We’re here,” he said.

McCarter nodded and looked out a side window. They had entered an era of urban blight forming a squalid industrial bridge between two more heavily populated sections of the city. The dull brown waters of the Niger River cut through concrete banks lined with empty and burned-out factories, manufacturing plants and abandoned electrical substations. A rusting crane sat in a weed-choked parking lot like a forgotten Jurassic beast of steel and iron.

“Pull over,” McCarter told Kabila.

The man looked back in confusion. “What—we still have two more checkpoints to go before the rendezvous point,” he protested.

“Pull over. We have our own ops plan.” McCarter repeated. “When we give the signal, you and the chase vehicle can meet us at the RP. We’ll insert on foot from here.”

“This isn’t what I was told—” Kabila sputtered.

“Pull over.”

Kabila scowled, then barked an order to his driver, who immediately guided the big 4.5-ton vehicle over to the side of the road. They rolled to a stop and Phoenix Force wasted little time scurrying out of the vehicle, weapons up.

Before he slammed the door shut, McCarter repeated his instructions to the Congolese police officer. “Get to the RP. Link up with the chase vehicle and hold position as instructed. When I come across the radio we’ll be shaking ass out of the AO so expect hot. Understood?”

Kabila nodded. His face was impassive as he replied, “I understand perfectly, Englishman.”

“Good,” McCarter answered, and slammed the Dzik-3’s door closed.

As soon as the man was gone Kabila had his cell phone out. He could feel his laughter forming in his belly and he bit it down. He’d save it for when he was looking at the bloody corpses of the Western commandos.

Managua, Nicaragua

ABLE TEAM STEPPED OUT into the equatorial sunlight from the cramped depths of the customs station on the far side of the international airport. Hermann Schwarz’s eye was swollen slightly and he had a bemused look as he used a free hand to rub at his sore ribs.

He turned toward Lyons, who was squinting momentarily against the hard yellow light of the sun. “Next time you play the asshole,” he said.

Blancanales chuckled to himself. “It does come more natural to you,” he pointed out.

Lyons shrugged and slid on his shades. He stood in the doorway of the customs station and smiled. “Quick, use your cell phone to take a picture of me.”

Pretending to laugh along with the joke like ugly American tourists, Blancanales quickly opened his Samsung cell phone and thumbed on the video function. He started rolling, capturing the scene.

Immediately he saw a cadaverous man in a business suit watching them from beside their interrogator as he pointed the camera over Lyons’s bulky shoulder. The man frowned as he saw the Americans taking pictures, and then he turned and walked away.

“Something to remember Managua by,” Schwarz said loudly.

“Oh, that was great acting,” Lyons muttered, walking forward.

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“Did you get it?” Lyons asked.

“You mean, tall, skinny and corpse-looking?” Blancanales asked. “You betcha. I’ll see what Aaron’s crew can do with it.” He hit a button and fired off the short video clip to a secure server service that would eventually feed it into Stony Man.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

THE EMAIL TRAVELED with digital speed through security links and into Carmen Delahunt’s computer. Seeing the priority message beeping an alert, she quickly raised her sensory-glove-encased hand to her left and pantomimed clicking on the link with a finger. Inside the screen of her VR uplink helmet the short cell phone video played out.

“Just got something from Pol,” she said. “They want an ID on what appears to be a civilian who’s buddy-buddy with Nicaraguan law-enforcement officials.”

From behind her in the Annex’s Computer Room Aaron Kurtzman’s gruff voice instructed, “Send it over to Hunt’s station. His link to the Roadrunner is more configured to that kind of search than your infiltration and investigation research algorithms.”

The head of the Stony Man cyberteam referred to the blade farm IBM Roadrunner supercomputer used as the primary workhorse of the Farm. The IBM Roadrunner was considered the fastest supercomputer in the world, though Kurtzman, much like the NSA, preferred using a Blue Gene/L archetype for defensive counterhacking operations. The Stony Man Roadrunner model was every bit as efficient as the one in Las Alamos Laboratories, provided them digital espionage options equal to any agency in the American government or overseas.

Tapping the stem of a briarwood pipe against his teeth, Professor Huntington Wethers froze the video image on a single shot, then transported it to a separate program designed to identify the anatomical features on the picture then translate them into a succinct binary code. He ran the program four times to include variables for age, angle and articulation, then ran a blending-sum algorithm to predict changes for bad photography, low light and resolution obscurity. He grunted softly before firing off double emails of the completed project, one back to Carmen Delahunt and the other to Akira Tokaido.

“There you go,” Wethers said. “I would suggest simultaneous phishing with a wide-base server like Interpol and something more aimed, like Nicaraguan intelligence.”

“Dibs on Nicaraguan intel,” Tokaido called out.

The youngest member of the Stony Man cyberteam slouched in his chair using only his fingertips to control the mouse pads on two separate laptops.

“That’s just crap,” Delahunt replied. “I already have a trapdoor built into Interpol. Dad, Akira’s stealing all the fun stuff!”

“Children, behave,” Kurtzman growled. “Or I’ll make you do something really boring like checking CIA open agency sources like your uncle Hunt is doing.”

“Your coffeepot is empty, Bear,” Wethers replied, voice droll.

“What?” Kurtzman sat up in his wheelchair and twisted around to look at the coffeemaker set behind his workstation. To his relief he saw the pot was still half full of the jet-black liquid some claimed flowed through his veins instead of blood.

“Every time, Bear. I get you every time,” Wethers chided.

“That’s because some things aren’t funny,” Kurtzman said. “I expect such antics from a kid like Akira, but you’re an esteemed professor, for God’s sake. I expect you to comport yourself with decorum.”

“Brother Bear,” Wethers said, his fingers flying across his keyboard, “if you ever did run out of coffee you’d just grind the beans in your mouth.”

“Bear drinks so much coffee,” Delahunt added, her hands still wildly pantomiming through her VR screen, “that Hector Valdez named his donkey after him.”

“Bear drinks so much coffee he answers the door before people knock,” Tokaido added. He appeared to be hardly moving at his station, which meant he was working at his most precise.

Stony Man mission controller Barbara Price walked into the Computer Room just in time to catch Tokaido’s comment. Without missing a beat the honey-blonde former NSA operations officer added a quip of her own.

“Bear drinks so much coffee he hasn’t blinked since the last lunar eclipse.”

Kurtzman coolly lifted a meaty hand and gave a thumbs-down gesture. Deadpan, he blew the assembled group a collective raspberry. “Get some new material—those jokes are stale, people.”

“Bear drinks so much coffee it never has a chance to get stale,” Delahunt said calmly. She tapped the air in front of her with a single finger and added; “Ortega, Dan—”

“Daniel,” Tokaido simultaneously chorused with the redheaded ex-FBI agent.

“Of the General Counterintelligence Agency,” Wethers finished for them. All humor was gone from his voice now. “The Nicaraguan military intelligence agency.”

Sensing the tension immediately, Price turned toward Kurtzman. “What does this mean for Able?”

Kurtzman pursed his lips and sighed. “Trouble.”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.