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Sky Hammer
James Axler


Dedicated to fighting terror wherever it's found, the warriors of Stony Man do not consider failure to be an option. But the men and women of this top secret unit remain ever vigilant in the knowledge that some day a threat so enormous may arise that nothing can stop I t…not even the hardest commandos on the planet. That day may be now….It is brilliant technology from the space race days, shelved long ago in favour of more sophisticated weaponry. No nukes, no warheads, just simple rods of stainless steel corralled in space and sent jetting into Earth's atmosphere at Mach 2 to hit selected targets with white-hot balls of molten metal. Cheap to make, impossible to stop, and easy to deploy, it has fallen into hostile hands. Across the globe, a demonstration of the accuracy of Sky Hammer leaves little doubt that this could be the endgame for Stony Man…and the world.









“HEADS UP, PEOPLE. WE HAVE ACTIVITY!”


On the shots from the Hubbell, the Stony Man team could see the thrusters were firing on a dozen Thors, a lambent purple glow of ionized gas visible as the thick steel bars started accelerating toward the world below.

“Who are they attacking?” Tokaido asked anxiously. His hands itched to send out a warning to the target, maybe save some lives. But he knew it would be pointless. The Thors literally struck like lightning. There wasn’t time for a warning.

“Somebody in the North American continent,” Bear stated honestly. “Hell, maybe us.” Reaching out, the burly man slapped a button on the console.

“Barbara, you better sound the alarm,” Kurtzman said in a deceptively calm voice. “We may have incoming.”


Other titles in this series:

#15 BLOOD DEBT

#16 DEEP ALERT

#17 VORTEX

#18 STINGER

#19 NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE

#20 TERMS OF SURVIVAL

#21 SATAN’S THRUST

#22 SUNFLASH

#23 THE PERISHING GAME

#24 BIRD OF PREY

#25 SKYLANCE

#26 FLASHBACK

#27 ASIAN STORM

#28 BLOOD STAR

#29 EYE OF THE RUBY

#30 VIRTUAL PERIL

#31 NIGHT OF THE JAGUAR

#32 LAW OF LAST RESORT

#33 PUNITIVE MEASURES

#34 REPRISAL

#35 MESSAGE TO AMERICA

#36 STRANGLEHOLD

#37 TRIPLE STRIKE

#38 ENEMY WITHIN

#39 BREACH OF TRUST

#40 BETRAYAL

#41 SILENT INVADER

#42 EDGE OF NIGHT

#43 ZERO HOUR

#44 THIRST FOR POWER

#45 STAR VENTURE

#46 HOSTILE INSTINCT

#47 COMMAND FORCE

#48 CONFLICT IMPERATIVE

#49 DRAGON FIRE

#50 JUDGMENT IN BLOOD

#51 DOOMSDAY DIRECTIVE

#52 TACTICAL RESPONSE

#53 COUNTDOWN TO TERROR

#54 VECTOR THREE

#55 EXTREME MEASURES

#56 STATE OF AGGRESSION

#57 SKY KILLERS

#58 CONDITION HOSTILE

#59 PRELUDE TO WAR

#60 DEFENSIVE ACTION

#61 ROGUE STATE

#62 DEEP RAMPAGE

#63 FREEDOM WATCH

#64 ROOTS OF TERROR

#65 THE THIRD PROTOCOL

#66 AXIS OF CONFLICT

#67 ECHOES OF WAR

#68 OUTBREAK

#69 DAY OF DECISION

#70 RAMROD INTERCEPT

#71 TERMS OF CONTROL

#72 ROLLING THUNDER

#73 COLD OBJECTIVE

#74 THE CHAMELEON FACTOR

#75 SILENT ARSENAL

#76 GATHERING STORM

#77 FULL BLAST

#78 MAELSTROM

#79 PROMISE TO DEFEND

#80 DOOMSDAY CONQUEST


Sky Hammer

STONY MAN®

AMERICAN’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Don Pendleton









CONTENTS


PROLOGUE (#udef9e19b-aa08-5a31-b42b-3e6569426628)

CHAPTER ONE (#u769acae6-c3f2-5776-8204-b562f021ed12)

CHAPTER TWO (#u539aaa73-d313-5ca4-990e-156e490986a1)

CHAPTER THREE (#u2d0585dd-f0e6-5207-8ad9-96b3578c470d)

CHAPTER FOUR (#u1ce47648-9eef-5f0d-9fc7-a4e6492bca89)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)




PROLOGUE


Paris, France

Lightning flashed in the stormy sky as Alex Davis staggered through the filthy alley. Holding his right hand to his wound, he flinched at the burst of light and tightened his grip on the Beretta pistol in his left. But there was nobody in sight. The clouds opened and down came the rain. The NSA agent was drenched in seconds, the downpour of cool water slightly reviving him.

Coming out of the alley, the dying agent paused at the sidewalk, trying to focus his eyes through the torrential deluge. Only a few people were in sight, all of them racing through the puddles for the safety of a store or a cab. Nobody seemed to be looking his way.

Jerking his head, Davis forced himself awake. If he went to sleep now, he’d never wake up again. Leaving the alley, he lurched across the street and into another alley, a shortcut that kept him off the dangerous sidewalks.

When Davis had joined the NSA, he’d been told that field agents had a long life expectancy. But years of service had taught him the truth. Death stalked everybody in the intelligence game these days, and the only way to survive was to shoot first and ask questions later. He had paused, unwilling to take a human life without direct provocation, and now he was a walking dead man. Davis knew it in his bones.

That morning he’d arranged for a meet with one of his “groundhogs,” somebody who could feed the agency news from the street. Not the public streets, but the back-alley gossip, the hushed news from the French underworld. Blackmail, weapons smuggling, kidnappings, arson and murder. The NSA agent did nothing about the crimes unless they affected America. He simply took in the raw data and wrote a report for his superiors. Machines could tap into cell phone calls very easily these days, the electronic warriors were doing most of work nowadays. But it was spies, moles, turncoats and stool pigeons who kept America safe. People talking. Old-fashioned spy work. Human intelligence.

Everything had seemed aboveboard when Davis met the snitch at the train station. The woman was mature, sixty, maybe seventy, but still maintained her good looks. She was demure in a pink dress with black trim. Only the smile was cold and impersonal. You’d never guess that she ran dozens of brothels across the great metropolis, establishments that catered to the criminal hierarchy, clients who liked to talk afterward. Davis had slipped the madam a book with money stuffed between the pages and she’d given him a newspaper. He’d barely had time to glance at the message taped to the book review page when a train arrived, somebody shoved a shotgun through the window in a crash of glass and opened fire. The madam hit the tiled wall of the station in a red spray, her ruined body crumpling to the ground. Taking cover behind a vending machine, Davis had withdrawn his side arm, but was unable to return fire because of all the civilians.

However, that hadn’t stopped the dark-haired gunman, and Davis got hit twice before managing to escape by going through a plate-glass window. His agency vest had saved his life, but a block later he’d realized he was badly wounded. Dying. Somebody had tried to stop the madam from delivering the note he carried, so that made it a requisite that it be passed on. He pressed a hand to his jacket, but the cell phone was only bits and pieces, smashed during the brief gunfight.

Pausing to rest against a lamppost, Davis struggled to read the short note through the bad light and pouring rain. Could this be real? By God, that would mean…

Forcing himself into motion, the NSA agent continued his hopeless journey for the distant café. Come on, man, just one block more….

IMPATIENTLY, JOE SNYDER GLANCED at his watch. Half an hour late. Davis had to have been taking care of business. Ten more minutes and he’d start without the man. He had skipped breakfast this morning, and the CIA agent was starving. The two men lunched regularly and, more than once, one or the other was late.

Moments later a woman outside the café screamed, then a man sitting near the sidewalk jumped up, knocking back his chair. Coming out of the rain like something from a nightmare was a disheveled figure with a gun in his hand.

Snyder started to go for the Glock under his jacket when he recognized Davis.

“Good God, man, what happened to you!” Snyder cried, rising from his chair. Then he turned to a nearby waiter he knew. “Pierre, an ambulance! Fast!”

Pierre didn’t waste a second in discussion. He turned and charged through the café, maneuvering through the maze of people and tables to disappear into the steamy back room.

“Joe, gotta tell…” Davis mumbled, staggering against the table and knocking it sideways, the plates and silverware flying everywhere.

Reaching out, Snyder caught the man as he collapsed. “Easy there, buddy. Easy. What happened? Are you shot? Stabbed?” Snyder demanded in a soft voice. There were no obvious wounds, aside from a lot of bruises and accumulated filth. Looked as though Davis had been wrestling alligators in the Parisian sewers.

Davis tried to answer but went into a spasm of coughing, spraying red dots onto his wet hand.

Grabbing a cloth napkin from the floor, Snyder wiped the red off the trembling man. Blood was on his lips, giving his breath a coppery odor. That meant massive internal bleeding. Not good. Then he noticed a crimson stain under the man’s arm. Carefully peeling back the linen jacket, Snyder saw that the agent was wearing a nonregulation bulletproof vest. So that’s why no blood showed, it was concealed under his vest! Releasing the Velcro strips on the side to let the man breath easier, Snyder frowned at the sight of the blood-soaked shirt underneath. There was a small bullet wound under the arm. An armpit shot. That was either a freak shot or else somebody knew that was a major killzone. And in their line of business, it was almost always deliberate. Stab or shoot a man there and, nine times out of ten, he died even if you got him to the hospital within minutes.

“Doesn’t matter…” Davis whispered. “Couldn’t reach HQ…cell phone smashed…traitor!…we have a traitor…”

“Easy now, don’t talk.”

“Have to!” he whispered. “Joe…demo today…new weapon…for sale to everybody…anybody! Going to hit…hit…”

“Who? Talk, buddy! Who are they going to hit?”

“Abacus…” he said softly.

“Abacus? Okay, what’s that?”

Shuddering all over, Davis broke into a fit of coughing.

“Never mind the target, who’s the traitor?” the CIA agent urged gently. “Tell me, and I’ll personally squeeze all of the details out of their stinking hide.” He paused. “Was Abacus a code name? Is that the traitor?”

Grabbing the other man’s lapel with surprisingly strong fingers, Davis moved his lips, but no sound came out as the NSA agent slumped to the floor, his reserves of strength finally gone. Silently, Snyder lay his friend on the floor of the café where they had first met so very long ago.

“Goodbye,” he said softly, using a fingertip to close the other man’s eyelids.

The wailing siren grew steadily closer.

Suddenly an ambulance braked to a halt in front of the little café, and the side door slid back to reveal a group of people, all wearing black and carrying weapons. One of them a compact flamethrower, a hissing blue flame jutting out from the preburner angled underneath the ventilated main barrel. The heavy set of duel fuel tanks on her back gave the grim operator the appearance of a hunchback.

With a curse, Snyder dived to the ground as two of the men cut loose with shotguns. The café seemed to explode in blood as people near the entrance were literally cut in two by the discharges, then a machine gun racked the interior of the building as the flamethrower extended a fiery tongue of destruction that swept across the horrified crowd of civilians. Wine bottles exploded, people shrieked and a man dashed into the rain covered with jellied gasoline and dripping flames.

Rolling to his knees, Snyder pulled a Glock from under his jacket, racked the slide and fired a fast five times at the people in the vehicle. Two of the killers grunted from the impacts, but nothing more.

The attackers were wearing body armor, he realized, shoving over a table and taking refuge behind it. He had no idea who these people were, but they had professional hit squad written all over them. Probably the same group that iced Davis.

Now the strangers concentrated on Snyder, the barrage of incoming lead hammering the tabletop and punching through the ceramic tiles covering the wood. He tried to return fire, but screaming people were in the way.

Changing directions, the burning lance of the flamethrower went high and fire rained upon the patrons. Somebody threw a bottle at the ambulance and it smashed on the side of the vehicle with a shower of glass. This distracted the killers for a second and Davis emptied the Glock, trying to reach the pressurized tanks strapped to the back of the woman operating the flamethrower.

He missed and she aimed straight at the overturned table, the hellish column of flame hitting the flimsy barrier with audible force. The shaking table began to move backward, scraping across the floor, as the writhing fiery fingers reached through the bullet holes.

A second ambulance arrived with a flourish, parking in front of the first. As the French emergency medical team piled out, the rear doors of the ambulance opened and there came the dull thump of a grenade launcher. The windshield of the other vehicle shattered and the interior exploded, blowing off doors and sending out great plumes of thick black smoke.

Who were these guys? Snyder wondered as he quickly reloaded. The CIA agent knew he was outgunned here and decided it was time to leave. Davis was dead, and he was doing nothing to these people with the Glock. Might as well be throwing spit balls. That wasn’t an ambulance, it was a tank!

A flashing blue light amid the fire caught his attention and Snyder eagerly snatched the cell phone out of the still hand of a dead businessman. Crouching, the agent tapped in a number. There was a short pause followed by a series of clicks as the scrambled signal was relayed to the Agency headquarters only a few blocks away.

“Hello,” a voice said over the phone. It was flat, metallic, just a robot used to relay incoming messages.

“Snyder, Paris,” he said, coughing, and then gave his identification number. “Under enemy fire. Alex Davis of the NSA is dead! Claims there is a traitor in the NSA or possibly the CIA, I’m not sure which. Some sort of new weapon is going to hit Abacus. Repeat, Abacus is in danger!” He coughed again, longer this time. It was getting difficult to talk. The agent couldn’t really hear the outside world anymore. He pulled into himself, trying to shy away from the incredible heat. He only had a few seconds more of life. He had to make them count.

“Repeat…” The cell phone crackled over the mounting inferno. It was a human voice. Somebody had been listening!

Trying to comply, Snyder broke into savage coughing and dropped the phone. It hit the ground and shattered, the pieces flying into the crackling flames. Bitterly cursing, Snyder decided to take a desperate gamble and insanely charged through the fire firing his gun at the dimly seen figures in the ambulance. There was a pay phone on the corner if he could just reach it…

The machine guns spoke in unison, then the flamethrower. Terrible pain filled Snyder’s universe and everything went black.




CHAPTER ONE


An unmarked black helicopter moved across the Virginia sky. The single passenger onboard was a well-dressed woman with a top fashion model’s flawless beauty.

Gazing out the small window, Barbara Price, mission controller of Stony Man Farm, could see nothing out of order on the grounds of the nation’s premier ultrasecret antiterrorist installation. Yet something was going on that was serious enough to drag her back here from a three-day conference that she had been looking forward to for six months.

“Here we are, Ms. Price,” the pilot announced over a shoulder as the helicopter landed on a wide patch of grass. “Right on time.”

“Thanks.”

Releasing the latch, Price slid back the side door and noted with satisfaction the assortment of men in work clothes lounging near the buildings. All of them had a hand out of sight, presumably resting on the butt of a loaded gun. She was expected, but they were trained to prepare for the unexpected. As Price stepped to the ground, the men all smiled and relaxed their stances, returning to their cover work of painting and weeding.

When Price was a few yards away from the aircraft, the rush of air from above it increased dramatically and the helicopter lifted off again to head back to D.C. She decided to walk to the farmhouse. It was a beautiful day.

“Sorry to ruin your conference,” Aaron Kurtzman said as she reached the porch.

“So what’s the problem?” Price asked.

“There’s trouble in Paris,” Kurtzman replied.

Knowing he wouldn’t divulge details within open air, Price hurried through the security process and made her way with him to the War Room, rather than heading to her office in the Annex.

“Talk,” she directed him as she slipped into a chair. “What happened in Paris?”

Closing the door, Kurtzman took a seat and passed her a report on the café killings. “More importantly,” he said gruffly, “do you know of any secret project or black ops named Abacus?”

Price took the page and read its contents. Her expression darkened with every passing second.

“Akira intercepted this message while on its way to Langley,” Kurtzman said, referring to superhacker Akira Tokaido. “It wasn’t earmarked for a ‘please copy’ to the NSA.”

“So they’re not sharing data, in spite of a presidential order to that effect,” Price murmured.

“Exactly.”

“Anybody crazy enough to hit both the CIA and the NSA is a major threat,” she said bluntly, placing the paper aside. “But it’s this cryptic reference to Abacus that bothers me the most.”

“That’s why I called you back a day early,” Kurtzman stated. “I really need your input. Do you know of anything with that code name? A satellite maybe, or a computer complex?” He paused. “Of course I know an abacus is an ancient Chinese device for making fast and accurate mathematical additions and subtractions. It’s just a wooden frame with beads that move along taut wires. Sort of like a primitive slapstick. Yet the damn thing is so efficient and easy to use that three thousand years later Chinese shopkeepers around the world are still using it instead of mechanical cash registers.”

“Something to do with money, then. Or perhaps the Chinese.”

“Seems likely, given the name.”

Placing an elbow on the desk, Price rested her jaw in her palm. “Well, there’s nothing that I know about. Hal might have a better idea.”

“I don’t think we need the big boss for this. If there was known and confirmed trouble coming, sure. But not for a fishing expedition.”

Price lifted the paper again. “Hmm, it says here the NSA agent was badly wounded at the time, dying in fact.”

“Yes, he was. And…?” Kurtzman prompted, not sure where the woman was going with this. A dying report from a field agent was nothing new in their line of work. Terrible and tragic, yes, the death of a good man always was, but sadly, nothing new. Although it did make responding to his information a top priority. Officially they weren’t in the revenge business.

“He might have been mumbling his words,” she said, thoughtfully. “Ab-ba-cus.” Price tried it again, slurring the word, testing the syllables. Then she went pale.

Spinning in the chair, she checked a calendar. “Son of a bitch, that’s today. Hell, it’s going on right now!”

“What is? What’s happening?” Kurtzman demanded.

Snatching the phone off the receiver, Price tapped in a string of numbers. It was answered before the third ring.

“Hello, Hal?” The mission controller spoke into the receiver. “You better warn the President. I think all hell is about to break loose in the Middle East!”

Abu Dis, Israel/Palestine Border

THE CLOUDS WERE THICK over the West Bank and everybody was thankful for the brief respite from the endless blazing heat of summer in the Middle East. Major Kushner approved. The rains weren’t due for another month and the cooling shade added a festive touch to the milling throng filling the divided city.

Adjusting the compact, green, TAV assault rifle slung at her side, Major Adina Kushner of the Israeli Defense Forces inspected the decorative brick topping of the concrete barrier separating the city of Abu Dis. A single brick was missing from the array,

Walking along the edge of the scaffolding, the major breathed deeply, the smell of oranges from the nearby orchards almost overwhelming the traditional reek of gasoline fumes and camel dung.

On both sides of the concrete barrier, Abu Dis was filled with people, all of them singing, talking, praying, cursing, milling around and taking endless pictures. In spite of the concertina wire frothy on the ground, the Palestinian side of the wall was covered with graffiti and the Israeli side dotted with posters. The major sighed. Civilians! What could you do?

Situated on top of nearby buildings, television crews from around the world were already in place, their cameras sweeping the crowds on both sides of the concrete wall, doing background shots to be included into the news reports later. It seemed as if the entire world wanted to see the dedication ceremony of the wall. The famous wall. The hated wall. The “failing wall,” as one BBC anchor had cleverly dubbed the barrier, the wordplay based upon the famous Wailing Wall of Jerusalem.

Started by another president of Israel right after the 9/11 al Qaeda attack on New York City in America, the wall was a desperate attempt to keep out the terrorist bombers that had plagued the West Bank, physically separating the nation of Israel from the Palestine territory. Although more and more people were simply calling it Palestine. These days, the hardcore Zion fundamentalists were grudgingly admitting that everybody deserved their own homeland.

Eight yards high, ten yards deep in places and 720 miles long, the imposing barrier had been built along the exact 1967 borders agreed upon by Israel and Palestine at the time. Of course, once Israel started building the wall, the Palestinians decried the construction in spite of the earlier accord. They took the matter to the World Court, which decided the construction should stop until the delicate political matter of whether the Palestinians should be forced to keep the treaties they signed was decided. Israel ignored the court order and continued building, although, they did change the borders ever so slightly so that the wall was a bit more on their property. The concession brought fury from the horde of Jewish settlers now trapped on the other side of the wall and from the few Palestinians still inside the barrier.

As a flight of Israel F-16-I jet fighters streaked by overhead, Major Kushner checked her wrist for the time, then looked at the position of the sun for confirmation. Only a few minutes to go. The wall had been finished for weeks, but this day was the ceremony of its completion. The last brick was to be officially laid today amid great fanfare, international press coverage and massive security. Why Abu Dis had been chosen for the ceremony, the major had no idea. Maybe because it was almost in the exact middle. Maybe not. Politics wasn’t her forte.

Dressed in short pants and bulletproof vests, heavily armed Israeli soldiers moved through the crowd, smiling and polite, their sharp eyes checking everybody and everything.

A small child was delayed as the soldiers checked his shopping bag, but it proved to contain only foodstuffs and assorted sundries. A stumbling drunk was quietly escorted to a private room where the soldiers ascertained that the man really was intoxicated and that his bottle held whiskey, not nitroglycerin or some other form of dangerous liquid. A known terrorist was found photographing the scaffolding near the wall, and hit with a tranquilizer dart from a disguised camera held by a Mossad agent dressed as a taxicab driver. The unconscious man was caught by two pretty Mossad agents, who scolded their friend for being drunk in public, and the criminal was hauled away to a private interrogation room.

An elderly pickpocket tried working the crowd and, despite the massive security, actually got a couple of wallets from tourists before being apprehended. He willingly turned over the wallets, which were then surreptitiously returned to the owners, and the thief was thrown into a concrete cell for later trial.

Always in pairs, F-16-I jet fighters moved across the sky, while Yas’ur-class helicopter gunships hovered above the crowds, staying carefully out of range of the news cameras. Several of the huge helicopters were equipped for surveillance, while a few were armed to the teeth, their wings bristling with armament.

At strategic locations were brand-new Merkava-4 battle tanks; old Sho’t army tanks stood guard at street corners. A dozen Zelda-class APCs full of troops patrolled both sides of the border. Radar swept the sky and chemical sniffers checked every bag for contraband. Video cameras swept through the crowd, relaying the scene to a massive bank of police computers in Tel Aviv where sophisticated software cross-referenced every face to a list of known terrorists. When one was spotted, he or she was deftly removed from the crowd for questioning. One man tried to escape and make a break for the hole in the wall, but was tackled by the soldiers guarding the entrance. Another pulled a grenade and was torn to pieces by concentrated gunfire from the silenced pistols of security forces.

Walking along the wall, Major Kushner reviewed everything. Flag poles adorned with the blue-and-white Israel flag flanked the platform on the north side of the wall, a precisely equal amount carrying the Palestinian flag on the south. There was a podium with a speech prompter in place, and near the gap on top of the wall was a single brick lying on a white pillow like some ancient virgin sacrifice. Nearby was a battered bucket full of wet cement and a shiny golden trowel. All of which had been checked for bombs, poisons and anything else that could mar the ceremony or kill the PM.

At the base of the scaffolding was a full company of soldiers; six more in formal dress uniforms stood guard on the top of the platform. Only Kushner had no assigned post. She was the roving soldier ordered to walk everywhere, looking for trouble. But so far, so good. The military officer nodded in satisfaction. The area seemed secure. The Israeli Defense Force had done this sort of thing before, and there was nobody better. Everything that could be accomplished to secure the area had been already done in triplicate. This was an important occasion, and nobody was taking a chance of it turning into an international incident for some terrorist group out to grab some fast headlines.

Suddenly the radio receiver in her ear crackled with an announcement and a few seconds later, a civilian band, all in matching uniforms, swelled into the national anthem of the State of Israel. Just then, a motorcade of six armored limousines stopped in front of the scaffolding and the prime minister got out waving to the crowd, which roared in approval. Only a few people jeered the man’s arrival, but their cries were lost in the overwhelming positive response. Cameras flashed continuously. Proceeding to the carpeted steps to the top of the platform, the PM moved to the podium and made the grand gesture of turning off the speech prompters. The people cheered in approval.

“On this historic day,” the prime minister said softly into the microphone, the speakers amplifying his words until they boomed with biblical force across the entire city, “we lay the final brick in this modern day wall of Jericho. But unlike that ancient structure, this wall will be a symbol of peace and…”

The politician stopped as Major Kushner touched her earphone and frowned. On the ground, dozens of soldiers were charging around, the Zelda APCs began to disgorge armed soldiers as police vans started rolling toward the scaffolding, armed troops guiding civilians out of its way.

Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, the prime minister mopped his face and whispered to the officer, “Is there trouble?”

“Unknown, sir,” Kushner replied. “But radar has picked up something odd.”

“A missile?”

Scowling in concern, Kushner shook her head as lightning flashed in the cloudy sky.

Squinting into the clouds, the prime minster saw the flash again, but it seemed to come from the other side of the clouds and go right through to impact somewhere in the city only blocks away. But there was no explosion from a detonating warhead. He frowned at the sight. That didn’t resemble a missile, rocket or a bomb. It didn’t look like anything he knew.

Below the scaffolding, the crowd was growing nervous, its murmurs increasing in volume.

“Status report,” Kushner snapped into her throat mike.

“Situation unknown,” an IDF operative reported crisply. “Radar has something, or rather, they had something on the screens, but don’t know what that was yet.”

The flash came once more and something brighter than the sun smashed into the Palestinian side of the wall only a few yards from the platform. The concrete and bricks exploded in a geyser of destruction, the rubble flying for hundreds of yards into the air before raining upon the horrified crowds. A split second later a rolling thunder of a sonic boom arrived from the sky.

Turning to demand an answer this time, the prime minister was tackled by Kushner and she drove him to the floor, covering the politician with her body.

“Stay down!” she commanded, drawing a 9mm Jericho pistol. “Control, I want air cover now! Do you read me, right now!”

“What’s happening?” the prime minister gasped, his heart pounding in his chest.

The military officer didn’t reply, but tilted her head as if listening to voices through her earphone. Clustered around the fallen politician, the honor guards had their assault rifles in hand, two of the soldiers thumbing 40 mm rounds into the grenade launcher attached beneath the barrels.

Everybody on the ground was screaming by now and running in panic on both sides of the barrier. Another flash of light and a second section of the wall exploded directly above the gate. The archway collapsed and dozens of civilians were crushed under the tons of falling masonry.

“Alert! We have civilians down at the Abu Dis gate!” Kushner reported, adjusting the transponder on her belt. “Convoy, I want a Merkava at the platform immediately! Get the PM out of here!”

“Confirm, battle tanks are on the way.”

“What about the medics?”

“ETA, five minutes.”

“Good. Where’s our air cover?”

At that, a flight of F-16-I fighters streaked by and there came the dull heavy throb of a Yas’ur gunship. The tan-and-beige helicopter rose above the wall, then seemed to burst apart as another flash filled the air. The blades of the demolished craft spun free, skimming through the air in a blur, flying directly into a CNN camera crew. Bloody limbs sprayed everywhere.

Chaos reigned as sirens began to howl and more flashes rent the sky. A section of the wall exploded in a fast series of explosions. Rubble blew out like shrapnel and concrete dust clouded the atmosphere. Here and there machine guns chattered and another wing of jets streaked along the wall searching for the location of the enemy rockets or artillery emplacement. There was a burst of light and one of the jet fighters became a fireball above the city.

“Rockets, my ass, it’s a goddamn meteor shower!” Kushner shouted into the throat mike, her ears ringing from the strident detonations. There was a tickling sensation on a cheek and she instinctively knew it was blood. “Repeat, this is not a terrorist attack! Not an attack! Meteors!”

“A what?” the voice in her ear demanded, confused.

Kushner started to reply when the clouds parted and a hail of brilliant flashes slammed into the wall. The noise was deafening. Debris shot out, smashing windows and peppering nearby buildings for blocks. Peals of thunder boomed, shrieks rent the air, weapons fired, a car exploded, a weakened building tilted and collapsed, sending up huge clouds of acrid dust. Now the major felt the ground shake with every triphammer blow. It felt like heavy bombing, but there was no report from distant cannons, only the sonic booms from the sky, then the savage hammering of the wall and helpless city. Dozens had to be dead, maybe hundreds. Where was the air cover?

Fiery darts rose suddenly from the horizon as the antiaircraft batteries and antimissiles answered the attack in a protective barrage. But it had no effect. The bright light bursts continued, the concussions growing to deafening proportions. Then they abruptly stopped. For a moment a thick silence covered the city. A cool breeze blew from the Palestinian side of the barrier, pushing the smoke and dust away to reveal a path of flattened destruction. Then the sirens, cries and gunfire returned with a vengeance.

“Move!” Kushner shouted, dragging the prime minster to his feet and shoving him toward the stairs.

As they hurried down the torn carpeting, avoiding the broken steps, Kushner could see that the entire section of the wall that went through the center of town was gone, reduced to smoking rubble.

“Incredible,” a guard whispered.

Reaching the ground, Kushner shoved the prime minster toward the tank, and a Mossad agent helped the man inside. There were a dozen more of the agents nearby, their weapons drawn and hammers back. Kushner started to leave, but one of the men waved her inside and she obediently followed.

“Go!” a Mossad agent called down the hatch.

At the front of the armored vehicle, a driver started the massive diesels and the tank rumbled into motion.

“Are you all right, sir?” a Mossad agent asked, helping the politician to sit on a hard plastic seat. Her hands moved across the man, searching for wounds, but thankfully found nothing important.

“Hell, no. The Arabs are somehow going to blame us for this meteor strike,” the prime minister proclaimed, brushing off his tattered clothing. “I don’t know how, but they will.”

“I always thought meteors burned up in the atmosphere,” Kushner said with a frown, hanging on to a ceiling strap.

“Most disintegrate plummeting through the atmosphere, but not all,” the tank commander stated. “The Gulf of Mexico was made by a meteor strike. As were all of the holes that make up the man on the moon.”

Cradling a sore arm, the prime minister frowned. The officer was correct, yet this the strike had occurred just as the dedication ceremony began. No way that was a coincidence, which left one unnerving conclusion.

“I want a geologist,” the prime minister announced, wiping dirt off his face.

“Sir?” Kushner asked, puzzled. Then she nodded. “Of course. Yes, sir.” She touched her throat mike. “Control, we need a geologist with maximum security clearance at the grandstand immediately.”

“A geologist?” a voice replied. “Did I hear that correctly?”

Kushner gave the prime minister a questioning look and he nodded.

“Confirm, control. A geologist. ASAP.”

“Roger, we’ll contact the university. Over.”

Leaning to peer out a gunport, the prime minister scowled at the path of destruction cutting a swath through the borders of the two rival nations. Precisely, and exactly along the border, hammering the wall down to the ground for several city blocks. Buildings were riddled with shrapnel, streets smashed, cars burning, wounded people everywhere. A lot more laying motionless in the wrecked streets. The wreckage of a F-16-I jet fighter lay smoldering on the ground on the Israeli side of the crevice and a tank sat dead on the Palestinian side, an orange-hot hole in the roof armor clearly showing a direct hit from…whatever had done this.

“When the scientist arrives, have him check the residue at the bottom of each crater,” the prime minister ordered brusquely. “Each and every single one.”

“Why?” the Mossad agent asked bluntly.

“I don’t think those were meteors,” the politician stated.




CHAPTER TWO


Los Angeles, California

“Look, gentlemen, we can do this all night,” the President of the United States said, lifting a carafe and pouring himself a cup of lukewarm coffee, “but I really don’t think that—”

He stopped talking abruptly as the vice-president walked into the boardroom flanked by a cadre of grim-faced Secret Service agents.

“Sir, there is an important call for you from NORAD, sir,” the VP said.

The President went still at the coded phrase. Any sentence that started and ended with the same word meant all hell had just broken loose somewhere.

“Sorry, gentlemen,” the President said, wearily standing. “This is a matter of national security.”

The gruff men in expensive suits murmured their understanding as the President left the room.

Moving along the corridor, a dozen Secret Service agents closed around the President and more joined him from every doorway they passed. Soon, he was surrounded, and could no longer see where they were going. The leader of the United States had to simply follow wherever his bodyguards were leading.

Upon reaching the driveway, the Secret Service agents parted to reveal a line of identical black limousines, all of them with the exact same license plates. There were five of the vehicles, and the President was directed to the fourth in line. As he approached, the rear door opened and his personal assistant, Kevin Molendy, stepped out.

“This way, sir,” he said, moving out of the way.

The man was wearing a bulletproof vest under his suit jacket, which was odd, but the President said nothing as he stepped into the limo and took a seat. Several people were waiting for him, four of them Secret Service agents. The rest were members of his Executive Council: Oswaldo “Oz” Fontecchio, his national policy adviser, as well as Hillary Hertzoff, his national security adviser, and Matthew Mingle, the current head of the CIA.

Thank goodness, Hal Brognola wasn’t here, the President observed with a sigh. That would have meant real trouble.

As Molendy climbed inside, a Secret Service agent closed the door and the limo started to roll. The President knew that the vehicles wouldn’t maintain formation, but rotate positions randomly, making it impossible for a sniper to know in which vehicle he was riding. An assassin would have to strike all of the limousines to even have a chance of success, and the plain black limos were all million-dollar cars, containing more armor than most light tanks, including the tires. Even if hit with a grenade, the rubber would blow off, but the limo would continue moving smoothly on the wide steel plates hidden inside.

“Okay, what happened?” the President asked as the limo took a corner.

“Sir, there has been an attack on the wall in Israel,” Hertzoff said in clipped tones. It was as if every word was precious and she didn’t want to waste any. “Hundreds are dead, perhaps more, with collateral damage in the millions.”

“Missiles or car bombs?” the President queried.

Leaving his seat, Molendy opened a small wall panel and started making fresh coffee.

“Neither, sir. It was a meteor shower,” Hertzoff replied.

“A what?” the President demanded as the smell of Jamaican Blue Mountain filled the air of the limousine. “A meteor shower?”

“Yes, sir. About a mile of the wall has been completely flattened in the border town of Abu Dis.”

“A meteor shower,” the President repeated slowly, leaning back in the seat. “How sure are you about that?”

“No confirmation as of yet, sir.”

“And what does this have to do with the CIA?” he asked, accepting a steaming cup from the aide.

“We got a tip about the attack from an agent in Paris about ten minutes before it happened,” Mingle answered with a frown. “The report said something about an attack on Abacus, or so we thought. It seemed like garbled data. Until Israel.”

“And?” the President prompted. Then he frowned. “Wait a minute, wasn’t the dedication ceremony supposed to be held today?”

“Yes, sir. Exactly.”

No way in hell that was a coincidence. “Get the agent on the phone,” the President commanded. “I want to talk to him direct.”

Mingle shook his head. “Impossible, sir. He appears to have been terminated in what might have been enemy action.”

“Appears? Might have been?” Fontecchio said, leaning forward in his seat. “Sir, the café was hit with flamethrowers and grenades! Twenty civilians are dead and the French government is furious!”

“We’re checking further into the matter,” Mingle replied smoothly.

“Did this meteor shower hit during the brick-laying ceremony, by any chance?” the President ventured as a guess.

Hertzoff nodded. “Yes, sir. Just as it began.”

“Is the prime minister dead?”

“No, sir,” Fontecchio answered. “Not a scratch. But the town is in shambles. The people are rioting and running back and forth across the border.”

“The Israelis will stop that nonsense soon enough with some concertina wire,” Fontecchio stated resolutely. “Not a problem.”

“Good. I want a full report on the matter within the hour,” the President snapped. “And contact the Joint Chiefs, I want our status raised to DefCon Three.”

Fontecchio balked at that, but said nothing. DefCon One was peacetime, DefCon Five was war. After 9/11, the United States hadn’t dropped below DefCon Two. Peace seemed to be a thing of the past, merely a notation on the war board, but nothing to do with the real world.

“Yes, sir,” Fontecchio replied uncomfortably.

The passengers in the limo swayed slightly as the vehicle took a corner, the rear limo moving ahead of them as they dropped to a new position in the convoy.

Turning to his aide, the president asked, “Isn’t there a ship christening tomorrow?”

“Yes, sir,” Molendy answered without glancing at the personal computer sticking out of his pocket. “A new aircraft carrier will be launched from the San Diego naval shipyard.”

“Don’t cancel the ceremony,” the President ordered. “Have the Secretary of Defense christen the ship.”

“Yes, sir. And what should I tell the secretary?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, sir. And the press?”

“Same thing.”

“No problem, sir.”

“Then contact Space Defense, I want to know what’s happening up there.”

“NASA reports no unusual activity in space,” Hertzoff reported. “If there was a meteor shower, it’s over by now.”

There came a soft buzzing and Molendy pulled out a cell phone. The device was huge, almost the size of a paperback book; it cost more than most small airplanes and contained some of the most sophisticated electronics in existence.

“White House,” the aide said. Then he hit the mute button. “Sir, you have a call from a General Stone.”

“Who?” Mingle muttered, his annoyance clearly discernable.

Placing down his empty coffee mug, the President took the phone. “Hello, General…yes, I…well, no…damn.” Then the President was silent for a long time. “Okay, see you on the plane.” As the line went dead, the President closed the lid on the cell phone, automatically scrambling the memory and sending a false signal to the White House library. There was no redial function on this cell phone. Especially not to Hal Brognola, head of the Sensitive Operations Group based at Stony Man Farm.

Molendy accepted the phone and tucked it away opposite his bulky journal.

“Is there a problem, sir?” Hertzoff asked in concern.

Trying to be casual, the President dismissed that with a wave. “Nothing of importance.”

The others took that as a notice that the conference was over for the moment, and got on their own cell phones to check for any missed messages over the past ten minutes.

Outside the limo, police motorcycles rode along with the executive convoy, keeping people away from the line of limousines. Wherever the President went, traffic snarled and a major city ground to a halt for the duration of his visit. But his mind wasn’t on maintaining good public relations right now. If Hal Brognola wanted a private meeting, then all hell had broken loose somewhere. Could be Paris or Israel. Maybe both.

Deep in thought, the President studied the city passing by outside, trying to recall the details of a scientific report he had read as a junior senator very long ago. Israel may have been hit by vaporware, something that was not supposed to exist. But very obviously did. Project Sky Hammer. If so, then nobody was safe, absolutely nobody, and there were going to be a lot more deaths real soon.

Pressing a button on the armrest, the President said, “Driver, maximum speed to the airport, please.”

Instantly a siren started blaring from under the hood, and the convoy of limos surged with speed.

Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia

THE LARGE ROOM was very quiet, the air vents steadily exhaled a cool breeze and the silent keyboards made tiny patting noises from the hurried impact of fingers. A coffeemaker burbled at the kitchenette and muffled rock music could be heard coming from somewhere.

“What’s this about a Thor?” Carmen Delahunt asked, lowering her glasses. “Okay, Aaron. Tell me we aren’t looking at a Thor here. I remember reading about the project in a journal.”

A virtual reality visor plugged into her console, ready to access the Internet anytime. But the million-dollar VR helmet was deactivated at the moment. After the Paris attack, the team had been looking for a possible traitor in the NSA or CIA. But then the attack on Israel occurred, and it had top priority.

Privately, Delahunt hoped the two incidences weren’t directly linked.

Slim and well-built, the red-haired woman was a classic Irish beauty, but she was also one of the elite, the four Cyberwizards who composed the cybernetic division of Stony Man Farm. Her desk console was directly attached to the bank of Cray supercomputers under Stony Man’s direct control.

“The display is coming up now,” Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman called from the small kitchenette along the wall, where he was filling his coffee mug.

Sipping and wheeling at the same time, he rolled back to his console, the chair fitting snugly underneath.

The console had several monitors. A few of them were dark, but the rest were busy scrolling with news reports from every agency in the world.

Impatient, Kurtzman tapped one monitor with a screen saver. Why was the file taking so long? Instantly the wooden glen disappeared to show the status of the top-secret download. Ah, here we go, almost downloaded from archives now.

“Okay, heads up,” Kurtzman announced, tapping his keyboard.

Everybody else stopped whatever he or she was doing and paid attention.

“I’m afraid you’re right, Carmen. The name of the thing is Project Sky Hammer,” Kurtzman said as the big monitor at the front of the room came to life.

The plasma screen pulsed with light a few times, then cleared into a view of starry space, the blue-white globe of Earth low in the corner. The technical data flowed past the screen, showing power curves, field strengths and striking power. That end of the data nearly went off the chart. The Stony Man cyber team read the flowing data carefully.

Back in 1977, a research scientist named Dr. Gerald Mahone started thinking about weapons and what part of a bomb actually caused death and destruction. It wasn’t the metal casing or even the shrapnel inside. As an example, he suggested taking a bullet and throwing it at somebody. A steel-jacketed, hollow point, .357 Magnum round would simply bounce off his or her chest and fall to the floor. The bullet, the casing, the metal, wasn’t deadly, per se. It was the amount of force behind the projectile that made it deadly.

Anything was lethal if it moved fast enough. There were hundreds of recorded cases where a tornado had driven a piece of straw into a telephone pole, or done the same thing with a bottle cap and a brick wall. Speed, raw velocity, made objects dangerous.

The space race was still strong back in the seventies, and America had been locked in a deadly struggle for supremacy with the Soviet Union. New weapons were needed all the time. So Mahone did some basic calculations and invented the Thor.

The idea was simple, as good ones usually were. Take a plain steel rod, eight feet long and twelve inches in diameter. Add a couple of inexpensive steering rockets, cheap wings and a limited-capability computer. The whole thing wouldn’t have cost more than a couple hundred dollars.

Now place hundreds of these “spears” into orbit. A floating cloud of destruction waiting to be unleashed. When enemy forces were spotted, targeting information was sent to as many of the Thors as you needed to commit to the attack, and they would obediently jet out of space and into the atmosphere, constantly accelerating down the gravity hit, growing hotter and hotter from the friction with the atmosphere, until finally a white-hot, molten ball of steel moving at Mach Two arrived. There were few tanks, ships or gunnery emplacements of the time period that could have withstood the thundering impact of even a single Thor.

Even better, because of its speed and steep trajectory, a Thor should be impossible for missiles to track and blow out of the sky. The Thor was a cheap, deadly, unstoppable super-weapon.

With a few flaws. Space travel was still expensive back in the seventies, and there was no way to accurately give a Thor the precise location of a target. It was quite possible that a swarm of Thors might drift off course and slam into your own tanks, annihilating your own troops instead of the enemy’s.

The project was given the code name, Sky Hammer, and shelved in the deep top secret archives of the Pentagon. It was brilliant, but not feasible using technology of the time.

“So that’s what we’re facing,” Kurtzman said, turning off the screen. “Sky Hammer, a plain piece of molten steel falling from high orbit. The only things holding back the project before were the cost of space travel and the inability to accurately pinpoint a target. But a dozen nations have relatively cheap access to space these days, dirt cheap if they use an illegal version of the new Spaceship One rocket plane, and with a Global Positioning Device—GPD—bought off the shelf of any electronics store…” The man shrugged. “You’ve seen the results.”

“Everything old is new again,” Huntington “Hunt” Wethers muttered, scowling.

“Son of a bitch,” Delahunt whispered, reviewing the material again on her console. “And this is what hit Israel, a Thor.”

“More likely it was several of them,” Akira Tokaido stated grimly.

“Please bring up the TV news coverage of the wall,” Kurtzman requested, taking a sip of coffee. “I want to check something.”

Delahunt hit a macro and the CNN report appeared in a window within the view of space and started to play again.

“Hold,” Kurtzman said after a minute, and the scene froze. “There, look at that.”

Frowning, Wethers removed his pipe from his mouth. “The wall wasn’t blown up, it was smashed down.”

“Hit from above,” Kurtzman growled.

Wethers turned to Tokaido. “Better check to see if anybody is looking for a geologist at one of Israel’s universities.”

“To analyze the residue at the bottom of the crater?” Tokaido asked. “Yeah, makes sense. And that is the only way to know for sure, isn’t it?”

“Sadly, yes,” Wethers replied. “If there is a lot of pure steel down there…”

“But why did they wait until the ceremony started?” Delahunt wondered out loud. “Just to kill the prime minister? But they missed him.” Her head snapped up. “Paris!”

Biting back a curse, Kurtzman remembered the dying words of the NSA agent. He had said something about a new weapon for sale on the black market. Whoever was behind this had hit the wall as an advertisement. They probably announced in advance what was going to happen on the international arms market, and now that it had occurred right on schedule, they could start taking orders. With enough of them, anything could be smashed down by a Thor. Anything. The White House, Cheyenne Mountain, Hoover Dam… The targets were limitless and completely vulnerable. There wasn’t a defensive system in existence that could stop a Thor. Nothing. Only solid bedrock—and a lot of it.

“A Thor could crush the Farm, and we couldn’t do a damn thing except die,” Tokaido said softly, glancing at the ceiling. There were only white foam tiles in sight, but in his mind the sky was falling at exactly thirty-two feet per second….

“Okay, how do we stop it?” Delahunt asked.

Kurtzman sighed. “We can’t. The old figures were correct. Not a missile or antimissile, or antimissile laser can track and lock on to a Thor fast enough to do any significant damage.”

“Then we have to go after the people controlling it. That’s the vulnerable point, the operators.”

“Yes,” Kurtzman said, glancing at the world map. “Where they are.”

“If this news hits the airwaves and Internet, there’s going to be a worldwide panic,” Wethers stated bluntly. “A Sky Hammer alert would make the Cuban missile crisis look like an ice-cream social! Thousands of people will die in the riots when they try to reach subway tunnels, bomb shelters, anything underground.”

“And none of those would protect them.”

“Exactly.”

“It’s possible that we might have to shut down the Net,” Kurtzman stated. “Akira, prepare to arm the nexus point C-4 charges.”

The young man stopped what he was doing and got busy. The entire Internet was relayed though sixteen junction points. If those were blown up, the Internet was gone, possibly for months. That would cause a loss of billions of dollars to corporations, and nobody had the authorization to do that but the Secretary General of the UN. And very illegally, Stony Man Farm. It had taken them months to get the firing commands for the remote charges, and even then, they’d had to have a field team infiltrate each nexus to add their own control elements. This was something they had talked about for years in dread. Blowing the Internet was a doomsday option, a last-ditch effort to hold back the news that could cause the death of countless people. Nobody sane wanted to undertake this action, but the cyberteam had to be ready. Just in case. On the other hand, if the news got on the cable news shows, then the cat was out of the bag and all hell would break loose anyway, and there really wasn’t anything they could do about that event.

“Could Sky Hammer smash down the junction points?” Wethers asked suddenly.

Kurtzman nodded. “If the people controlling it know the locations, yes.”

“I’ll start a disinformation campaign about this,” Delahunt said, slipping on her VR helmet. The best way to hide the truth was to bury it under half-truths and lies. With enough misleading rumors circulating, nobody would ever believe that Sky Hammer existed.

Kurtzman grabbed a telephone on his console. “Barbara? It’s worse than we feared…yes, a Thor. It’s got to be. We better recall the teams immediately. This is going to get real bad, real fast.”

“I have them located,” Wethers said, working a mouse.

The main screen switched to a map of the world, two glowing blue stars marking the precise location of the Stony Man field teams. They were on opposite sides of the globe.

Kurtzman hung up the phone. “Okay, Barbara is calling Hal, and we have recall authorization. Bring ’em back.”

“We can’t,” Wethers stated. “See? They are both under radio silence.”

“Why?”

“They found their targets much sooner than expected and have engaged the enemy.”

Kurtzman narrowed his gaze. Damn! The teams were wasting valuable time taking out these minor dangers to America when the sky was literally about to fall down on everybody. Hours wasted. Time gone. Time they didn’t have to spare.

Kurtzman clamped his mouth shut. He knew the current enemy action was merely “cleanup,” but if the teams were in the middle of a firefight, any distraction at exactly the wrong moment could get all of them killed. There was nothing to do but wait, wait for them to finish the missions they were on.

“Come on, guys, shake a leg,” Kurtzman whispered. “Move it.”




CHAPTER THREE


Chicago, Illinois

The classic rock music of Peter Frampton was blaring over the wall speakers of the control booth. Lost in thought, the blurry DJ was staring out the window of the Sears Tower, and it took quite a while before he finally noticed the jingling instrument.

“Yellow!” he drawled, removing the handrolled cigarette from his mouth. The smoke was sweet and pungent, and highly illegal. “This is WQQQ, all radio, all the time. What can I do for you?”

“Pay close attention, Jew, or everybody dies,” a garbled voice spoke.

The DJ went very still at that and dropped the joint into a nearly empty beer bottle on the sound board. It hissed out of existence.

“What did you just say?” he asked, flipping a switch to record the conversation. Having worked his way up through the ranks, the DJ had started in the news department and knew the sound of a scrambled voice when he heard it. Lots of kooks and nuts called up stations proclaiming everything imaginable, from women sighting Elvis on a UFO, to men claiming to be an alien’s baby. But nobody ever had the coin to get a voice scrambler. That alone meant big bucks, and money plus crazy always spelled trouble.

“I said shut the fuck up, Moses, or we’ll bomb your little shithole of a station just to make the other kike radio stations pay attention. Understand?”

In the control booth, a union technician perked up in his chair at the sound of the voice, and quickly started punching numbers into a red phone dedicated for outside calls only. The DJ tried to wave the man from calling the police, but the engineer paid him no attention.

“My apologies, sir,” the DJ muttered. They thought the radio station was Jewish? The owner of the radio station was a Norwegian, Dave Linderholm, and he had no idea who owned the Sears Tower.

A crackle of static and the voice returned.

“Mind your betters, pig. Now, the wall in Palestine was destroyed by the American Liberation Strike Force,” the distorted voice continued. “And we…”

“Do you mean, the wall in Israel?” the DJ asked, confused.

“Shut up! There is no such country!” The phone crackled. “All of that land belongs to Palestine!”

“Even the parcels they sold to the Jews?” the DJ asked quickly, pointedly trying to egg the caller into saying something that would be banned on the air. That always helped the ratings, and sweeps week was coming up.

“Zion propaganda! Now, unless American ZOG pulls all of its troops back to U.S. soil, our next target will be the UN building!” There was a click and the line went dead.

Quickly shoving another recorded cassette of early heavy metal into the board, the DJ rushed into the engineering booth.

“What a freaking loon,” the DJ exhaled, running nervous fingers through his wavy crop of hair. “Did we get everything?”

“Loud and clear.” The engineer smiled, patting a digital CD recorder on the board. “By the way, what’s a ZOG?”

“Zionist Occupation Government.”

“What’s Zionist?”

“Tell ya later. Did we get a trace on the call?” the DJ asked hopefully, looking at the bewildering display of readouts, gauges, lights and meters. He was the talent, not a freaking atomic brain.

“Sure. It’s useless.” The engineer sighed. “The call came from a rest stop on Route 95, outside of Camden, right over the river in New Jersey.”

Clever. Stop your car, make the call, drive away before anybody can get there.

“Could it have been a fake phone location?”

“For people with a voice scrambler? Sure.” The engineer leaned back in his chair, the springs squeaking in protest. “So what now? Call the news director, or do we sell this directly to CNN?”

“We?” the DJ asked, stressing the word.

“I have the only tape, dude,” the engineer said, patting the recording machine.

The DJ glared at the machine, then shrugged. “Fifty-fifty?”

“Done.” The engineer grinned, extended a hand, and the two men shook.

“So who would you call?” the DJ smiled.

“The FBI, man,” the engineer stated with a wave. “These crank yankers might be the real thing.”

The DJ laughed, then he heard the reverberating drum roll of a Metallica song fading away and rushed back to his board to shove in a commercial for acne cream. When it was over, he shoved in the longest running song he could find, which bought him thirty minutes. Time to contact CNN and get a big check!

Heading back to the engineering booth, the DJ paused at the sight of the 9/11 wall poster of the Twin Towers. Vaguely he seemed to remember that everybody had lots of hint and clues about the forthcoming attack, but nobody had told the FBI.

“Aw, shit.” the DJ sighed and picked up a phone. “Hello, Operator? Please give me the phone number for the Philadelphia division of Homeland Security.” He paused. “Yes, ma’am, this is an emergency.”

“What are you doing?” the engineer demanded, horrified, rushing out of the booth.

“Doing the right thing. We’re ratting these assholes out, and I hope Homeland puts ’em in a cell down in Gitmo. With extra rolls of film.”

The engineer rolled his eyes heavenward. “That guy on the phone was right. You’re an idiot.”

“That may be,” the DJ said, feeling oddly patriotic. “But if you have any porn on the computer, better start purging. Homeland might check it out, and this dump needs you.”

“Sure, who else would work for these wages?” The engineer snorted rudely. Then he returned to the booth and started hastily accessing files on the station’s PC to delete them like crazy.

Trevose, Pennsylvania

“WHAT IS A ZOG?” Zdenka Salvai asked as her commander got behind the steering wheel.

“Something Nazis talk about,” Bella Tokay replied, tucking away the voice scrambler, then starting the stolen car.

The vehicle had been obtained outside of a strip club on Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Camden, located just over the bridge from Philadelphia. Few people told friends that they were going to a strip club, thus they were safe to kill. The owner of the vehicle wouldn’t be missed for a long time. Perhaps days. Eventually his body would be found; a corpse inside a plastic garbage bag soon filled it with fumes, and the bags often popped like balloons. It wasn’t the optimum way of disposing of a body, but it was sufficient for today. They needed only a few hours.

The redhead lit a fresh cigarette. “I hate Nazis,” she stated, puffing out every word. Her long fingers were stained yellow from the constant cigarettes and her teeth were the same. But few men ever noticed that, their vision rarely rising above her ample cleavage. Between her knees was a large object covered with a blanket. Some sort of metallic hose could be seen sticking out from underneath, and there was the faint smell of jellied gasoline.

Tokay laughed. “As do we all,” he agreed, releasing the brake and heading north on Route 1. Bethlehem was far away, but they had plenty of time. On the seat next to the man was a newspaper, the checkered grip of a compact machine gun barely visible beneath it.

“Think they will take the bait?” Petrov Delellis asked from the rear seat. Cradling a bulky X-18 grenade launcher, the giant Hungarian seemed to fill the back of the sedan. There was a clean new bandage on the side of his neck, a gift from the stubborn CIA agent in Paris. A goodbye gift.

“Of course they’ll take the bait,” Tokay replied smugly, steering around a flatbed truck hauling steel beams. “And they’ll waste precious time chasing us around, until the Castle is obtained, and then the boss lets us kill them.”

“We can’t kill them now?” Salvai said with a scowl.

Tokay smiled, cold and mercilessly. “Well, maybe one or two,” he answered.

Sandy Hook, New Jersey

AS GRIM AS EXECUTIONERS, Able Team strode out of the rolling smoke screen, firing their weapons at every step. Ricochets zinged and threw sparks along the concrete wall separating the parking lot from the little museum, and people with guns ducked behind the stout barrier.

Still bodies sprawled everywhere on the asphalt between the rows of cars, including a state trooper without a face, a 9 mm HK pistol still in his hand, unfired. A former Los Angeles cop himself, Carl “Ironman” Lyons felt a visceral surge of rage at the sight, but controlled his temper for the moment and kept going. The dead and the dying didn’t matter right now. Only killing the terrorist bastards who had invaded the beachfront park.

Unfortunately, Able Team had no counterattack plan, no clever tactics or fancy maneuvering. The numbers had fallen, and the three counterterrorists had arrived too late to stop the deadly assault on the vacation spot. Now all they could do was a full-frontal charge with guns blazing.

Moving from vehicle to vehicle, the three Stony Man operatives maintained a steady cover fire with their assault rifles and shotguns. Circling a bread truck, they caught one of the Red Star agents in the process of reloading his AK-47 rifle. The arming bolt had jammed, probably from overheating. The Chinese agent cursed at their sudden appearance and dropped the Kalashnikov to claw for a Norinco pistol at his side.

“Don’t do it, bub,” Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz warned, leveling his M-16 assault rifle.

But if the Chinese agent understood the words, he made no sign, and the deadly Norinco .45 barely cleared leather when Gadgets sent a wreath of tumblers across the man’s chest. The Red Star agent was thrown backward against a car, shattering the side windows with his splayed arms. Gurgling into death, the agent slid to the asphalt, leaving a trail of red across the car. But Able Team was already on the move, constantly trying to stay ahead of the terrorists. A split second later, a Chinese-made RPG streaked out from behind the souvenir kiosk and the Buick erupted into a fireball from the white phosphorus rounds.

Popping up from behind a concrete wall near the public restrooms, a Chinese operative fired a long burst from his machine gun, riding the chattering weapon in a tight figure-eight pattern for maximum killpower. The cars in the parking lot were torn apart by the hellstorm of incoming lead, windshields exploding, hoods buckling, tires bursting, and finally a stray ricochet got a gas tank and a compact car violently detonated into a fireball, spraying shrapnel across a dozen other vehicles.

Taking a stance, Schwarz pumped a shell from the M-203 mounted under the barrel of his M-16. The bomb tracked perfectly, arching high to land on the other side of the concrete seawall. The Red Star agents scattered as thick volumes of smoke rose from the hissing charge. But a salty warm breeze was blowing in from nearby coast, already thinning the protective cover.

“On three,” Lyons said, readying the Atchisson autoshotgun in his arms. He had only a single 40 round drum with him, so every shot had to count. He hadn’t been expecting a firefight! “Okay…three!”

The men broke around another SUV, got onto the dented hood of a station wagon and jumped to the top of the seawall. Two Red Star agents were crouching behind the barrier, their weapons aimed for the open section ten feet away, obviously waiting in ambush.

“Hey,” Rosario “The Politician” Blancanales said softly.

The Communists started to turn and Able Team cut them down. Hopping to the terrazzo flooring, Lyon found a few more civilian bodies, mostly guards. Older out of shape men in clean uniforms, holstered revolvers at their side. This had been a part-time job for them, just something to help stretch their meager retirement pay.

On the nearby beach the corpses of several joggers dotted the shoreline, their blood still staining the waves as they washed over the still forms, giving them a horrible mockery of life.

“Look over there,” Lyons told his teammates.

Through the thinning smoke, the men could see the long barrels of the old WWII cannons rising above the small museum and fast-food stand.

Originally, Sandy Hook had been a large brick tower resembling a lighthouse, a stony keep equipped with muzzle-loading cannons to attack any Imperial British frigates harrowing the guerrilla fighters in the Revolutionary War. During World War II, it became a concrete fortress armed with banks of sixteen-inch cannons that could blow open the hull of any German warship. During the cold war underground installation had been added and Sandy Hook became a Minute Man missile base, designed to knock down Soviet ICBMs. Sandy Hook had long been a bastion of defense for the east coast of the nation, and had seen a lot of fighting, including an invasion of German frogmen near the middle of World War II, saboteurs sent to blow phone lines, collapse bridges, burn down hospitals and movie theaters, and generally inflict as much harm and terror as possible upon the American people. Softening tactics for Hitler. A prelude to invasion. Paving the way. The big guns of Sandy Hook had fired upon the midnight invaders just as they got out of the rubber rafts, and not a Nazi agent reached American soil alive. Or even in one piece.

But that was sixty years ago. These days, the Minute Man missile base had been moved inland, away from the vulnerable beach, and the gigantic cannons had been disarmed, the barrels blocked with a concrete plug, the hydraulic lines removed, the firing pins gone. Once the guardians of the United States, the cannons were reduced to slightly rusty exhibits on public display, relics of the past standing alongside a small outside museum that told of the glory days, with a small gift shop. But the Pentagon Theoretical Danger Team had postulated there was a potential terrorist danger to New York at Sandy Hook. Long ago, when the cannons worked, they had a range of twelve miles, and Manhattan was just over the horizon, nine miles away. But the titanic weapons had been neutralized, disarmed, virtually disassembled. It would take a major undertaking to get them live again. So the Pentagon had placed the museum on the Watch Alert list and then promptly forgot about the place entirely. It was too nebulous a threat to be taken seriously.

Suddenly two men in greasy mechanic’s coveralls appeared on the roof of the restrooms building and started firing assault rifles. Able Team dived for cover behind a painted wooden bench and came up returning fire. The chattering M-16 assault rifles held by Blancanales and Schwarz peppered the structure, driving the enemy under cover. When the firing stopped, they popped back and Lyon’s Atchisson sprang into action. In a bull roar, the weapon discharged 12-gauge shotgun shells in a long burst. The Chinese agents were literally blown apart, their bodies shattered from the hellstorm of steel buckshot.

Even before the corpses tumbled to the ground, Able Team was on the move again.

Early that morning, the first indication that something was amiss had been a radiation sensor hidden in a tollbooth plaza on the Garden State Parkway. Considered the finest road in the world, the GSP actually received visitors from foreign countries to study its construction so that the builders could return to their homelands and try to duplicate the modern marvel. Tourists from New Jersey visiting Portugal, Argentina or Australia often found themselves experiencing déjâ vu as they encountered an exact duplicate of the New Jersey road cutting through the rolling hills of a foreign landscape.

When the cars stopped to pay the toll, one of many along the rather expensive GSP, every vehicle was probed for contraband. Chemical sniffers found a lot of drugs and sometimes a corpse in the trunk. But this day the hidden sensors spiked as weapons-grade plutonium was detected coming off Exit 9.

Quickly, computer records were checked, but since there was no record of such a radioactive source coming onto the superhighway, the state police tagged the report as a possible glitch. The police filed a copy of the report with Homeland Security and a minute later Stony Man knew about it. Since Exit 9 was dangerously close to Sandy Hook, Barbara Price had sent Able Team to do a recon. When the men arrived, they’d expected to find an ore truck full of pitchblende, or maybe a mobile health clinic. Portable X-ray machines used radioactive thulium and often set off detectors by mistake.

Instead, Able Team had discovered a parking lot full of dead tourists and an empty truck that had been full of greasy machinery. But not anymore. Grabbing weapons out of the back of their van, the team got hard and moved in fast. They didn’t like the combination of murder, Sandy Hook and radiation. There was such a thing as nuclear artillery shell….

“Any heat?” Lyons demanded, checking the Atchisson on the run. He wished there were reloads for the hungry weapon, half of the shells were already gone, and this battle was barely ten minutes old.

“Bet your ass, there is,” Schwarz said, firing a burst into some bushes. Leaves flew, but nobody tumbled out dead. Stealth wasn’t a concern, the Red Star agents knew they were here. Schwarz was the electronics expert for the team, and his wristwatch was also a short-range Geiger counter. However, loud clicks during a battle could get a soldier killed, so instead the device vibrated as a warning. At the moment, it was going wild.

“They must be arming the shell,” Blancanales repeated, pausing to roll a dummy grenade into the gift shop.

Inside the building, men cursed in Chinese and came bursting out, firing their weapons. Already in position, Able Team caught the Red Star agents in a withering cross fire and they died to a man.

Then a man and woman stumbled into view from around a corner. The man was carrying a wicker basket and the woman was holding a baby swaddled in blankets in her arms. Neither one was Chinese, they looked more Italian than anything else.

“Don’t shoot!” the man yelled, stepping in front of his wife. “Please! I’ll pay you whatever you want!”

“It’s a trick!” Blancanales cried, raising his M-16.

Dropping the blanket, the snarling woman pulled a compact SDMG machine pistol from inside the plastic doll and started firing. Blancanales blew her away just as the man swung a Skorpion machine gun from behind his back. Schwarz shot the man in the chest to no effect, then Lyons triggered the Atchisson, the maelstrom of double-aught stainless-steel buckshot removing his face and opening the throat and lower belly like a can of spaghetti. Already dead, the Chinese operative spun, his hands instinctively tightening on the weapon, the deadly Skorpion spraying lead randomly as he toppled to the ground. Ricochets went everywhere and Schwarz grunted as a slug hit him in the stomach.

“Goddamn mercs,” he muttered, rubbing his stomach. “The guy must have been wearing body armor.”

“Still hurts like a bitch,” Lyons stated, hefting the Atchisson. Only a few cartridges remained. After that, he was down to grenades and his pistol.

“Bet your ass it does,” Blancanales agreed, checking their flank. Even the titanium and Teflon NATO body armor that the team wore under their shirts still occasionally broke bones when hit by large-caliber weaponry. But a week in hospital was preferable to eternity in the grave.

“Better bed than dead,” Schwarz quipped. “Hey, how’d you know it was a trap?”

“She was holding the baby wrong. The kid would have been dead from strangulation the way she was doing it.”

“Cover me,” Lyons said, knotting a handkerchief around his face. Going to the museum, he checked the door for boobytraps, then swept inside, the Atchisson at the ready.

The place was a shambles, with two whimpering women bound and gagged in the corner. Hostages for the enemy agents to use as bargaining chips if necessary. He had expected something like that. Able Team had fought Red Star before.

Pulling out a knife, Lyon advanced upon them. The older woman fainted while the pretty teenager tried to wiggle away. With a slash, the ex-cop cut ropes from their wrists. Stunned, the teen looked at her freed wrists and then at Lyons, comprehension dawning in her face.

“Don’t y’all worry none, ma’am, “he drawled, affecting a thick Texas accent. “We’re Delta Force.” Sheathing the blade, he snapped an ammonia capsule under the nose of the unconscious woman. She fluttered immediately and then awoke, recoiling in horror.

“It’s okay, Mom!” the teenager said, pulling down her gag. “They’re the U.S. Marines.”

“Really?” the older woman squeaked, having trouble breathing.

“United States’ Special Forces,” Lyons corrected with a brief grin. “Now, y’all follow me outside. Quick, now.”

With joyful tears on her cheeks, the teenager nodded agreement and slipped an arm under the other woman to leverage her off the floor.

“My husband…” the mother started.

Not having found anybody else alive, Lyons looked at the woman and said nothing for a long moment that seemed to last forever. The middle-aged lady went a little pale, then nodded in understanding.

“What about my daddy?” the teen asked, a quaver in her voice.

The mother touched her daughter on the shoulder. “Let’s go,” she said in a calm tone. “Now, dear, no time to waste.”

Going to the door, Lyons whistled sharply. There came an answering whistle and he led the way outside. Schwarz and Blancanales were standing guard near the stairs to the beach, both of them with handkerchiefs tied around their faces.

“Thank you, all,” the mature woman gasped, the cloth strip that had been used as a gag hanging around her throat.

“You’re welcome,” Blancanales said. “Now get!” Turning, he fired a burst at the open sea.

Livid, the two women jerked at the noise, turned and took off at a run. Soon they lost their high heels and continued barefoot much faster.

“Alone?” Schwarz asked, glancing sideways.

Lyons pulled down his mask. “Husband.”

“Damn.”

“Let’s finish this,” Blancanales stated, starting toward the stairs that led to the outside exhibit.

But then he paused. The cannons were no longer visible rising from behind the museum, and just then the floor shook as heavy machinery buried below the ground came to life.

Without a word, Able Team charged. They still had a hundred feet of open ground to cover to reach the guns.

“WHAT IS HAPPENING, comrade?” the mechanic asked, both hands busy in the guts of the hydraulic pump. New lines were attached to the feed and snaked out the door to the middle cannon. More Red Star agents were installing the new firing pin into the weapon, and off by himself, the Beijing technician was unpacking a single artillery shell from a lead-lined picnic cooler.

“Nothing that concerns you,” the colonel snapped, sweeping the sand dunes with a pair of powerful binoculars. “Get back to work.”

“Yes, Commander.”

The colonel knew that everything was going well, but was still unhappy. The parking lot had been cleared of civilians and the museum taken without losing a single man of his cell. The telephones were all disconnected in case they had missed somebody hiding somewhere, and the repairs on the guns were nearly completely. All well and good. But the colonel didn’t like the fact that there was smoke rising from several locations. However, that might have been done to hide the police taking defensive positions, rather than to offer cover for advancing troops. It was highly unlikely that any of the American Special Forces could have arrived yet. This whole mission had been accelerated to lightning speed. Never pause, never rest, go fast, and the lazy Americans would trip over the red tape of their own government.

“Done,” the mechanic said, laying down his wrench and throwing a freshly greased lever.

A light flashed, there was a snap of electricity, and the motor room concrete bunker shook slightly as a pair of ancient motors rumbled into life. The meters on the housing flickered alive, and the guns began to move as the hydraulic pressure reached functional status.

“Excellent.” The colonel smiled. “Well done, Comrade.” Then, drawing a pistol, he shot the startled man in the heart. The body limply collapsed onto the hydraulic hoses, the red blood pumping to spread along the lines between the tiles of the floor.

The colonel gave the corpse a salute, then holstered the pistol. At least the mechanic died well, from an honest Chinese bullet, rather than vomiting his intestines like the fools at the United Nations would soon be doing. The death of that many hundreds of diplomats would throw the world into chaos, and China had carefully laid out plans to take every advantage of the political turmoil. Every member of his cell knew this was to be a suicide assignment. There was no hope of returning home. Glory would be only earned if they accomplished the mission, so they would succeed or die trying.

By now, a man at the cannon was frantically turning guiding wheels to alter the elevation, while a second checked a compass in his hand.

“Left twelve degrees!” he commanded. “Hold! Now, up ten degrees! Hold!” He turned. “We’re on target, Comrade.”

Smiling, the colonel stuck his thumbs in his belt. “Load the shell!” he ordered.

Slowly the technician from Beijing stood, holding the artillery shell as if it were a priceless artifact.

A burly Red Star agent worked the latch and swung aside the breech to make ready. But there came an odd rattling noise from the cannon, as if something had broken loose and was moving freely.

Furious, the colonel advanced closer as three grenades rolled out of the open end of the cannon and landed on the sandy ground.

“Run!” a man screamed, turning to flee when the grenades exploded.

Thundering flame and hot shrapnel filled the area, teeth and broken limbs flying into the air as the hydraulic lines ruptured and pressurized red oil rose like blood from a cut artery. Not yet locked into position, the cannon impotently lowered its muzzle until pointing at the empty beach.

The colonel barely had time to react when the men of Able Team arrived, firing as they climbed over the seawall at different points. The last few Red Star agents collapsed, trying to fire their AK-47 assault rifles in response, but only getting off a few short bursts before falling on top of their weapons.

Pulling his pistol, the colonel shot the Beijing technician before he was torn apart by the incoming American lead, the hardball ammo going through the man to ricochet off the wall behind. As the technician dropped, he let go of the shell and it rolled across the sandy platform to bounce down a sand dune and come to a stop on the beach near some driftwood.

DROPPING A SPENT CLIP, Schwarz reloaded while the others stood guard. Then Blancanales replaced his exhausted clip as Lyons shouldered the empty autoshotgun and drew a .357 Colt Python from his belt. Moving to the edge of the gunnery bastion, Schwarz hopped down to the beach and walked over to the Chinese artillery shell lying near the water line.

“Clear?” Blancanales asked, looking around.

“Clear,” Lyons confirmed.

“Oh, shit,” Schwarz cursed, sitting on the piece of driftwood. “We’re in trouble.”

Weapons out, Blancanales and Lyons rushed over. By the time they arrived, Schwarz had already ripped open a Velcro pouch at his side and was placing electrical tools on the damp sand.

“What’s wrong?” Lyons asked. “That thing can’t possibly be live.”

“Oh yeah, the shell is live,” Schwarz said in a flat monotone. “The damn thing is designed to arm itself after a set number of revolutions after it spirals out a cannon.”

“Rolling down the sand dune did the same thing?”

“Apparently so.”

“Shit!”

“My word exactly.”

“What can we do?” Blancanales said, leveling his M-16 at the shell. It was standard U.S. Army procedure that in case of a nuclear emergency, shoot the bomb. Once the uranium sphere was distorted, even slightly, the device could no longer detonate. One shot and the artillery shell would be dead. The same as Able Team after about ten days of slow dying by radiation poisoning.

“Your call, Hermann,” Lyons said, aiming the .357 Colt Python at the red-and-green-striped shell.

“Make me a hole,” Schwarz ordered, sorting through the tools.

Blancanales fired a burst from the M-16 at the beach, chewing a depression into the sand. Schwarz gently placed the shell into the hole and packed the loose sand around it.

Sitting on the damp ground, the electronics wizard wrapped his legs around the bomb to hold it tight and started working in the recessed side bolts.

“Thought you were supposed to go in through the top,” Lyons said, watching his friend work on the nuclear charge. An explosion on the beach would boil the ocean for a hundred feet, the radioactive steam contaminating a hundred miles of New Jersey, killing thousands of people. There couldn’t be a worse place to set off a nuke than the sea! His hand tightened on the checkered grip of his revolver. Three die, or three thousand. Hell, that was an easy choice. Another ounce of pressure on the trigger was all it would take to get the job done.

“The top? Not this model,” Schwarz said, both hands busy. A sharp snap of breaking metal and Lyons and Blancanales both jumped slightly. The men held their breath as their teammate slid the casing off the nose of the bomb, exposing the complex internal mechanism.

“All the wires are the same color,” Blancanales said with a scowl. “How the hell will you know which one to cut?”

Jamming his knife deep into the device, Schwarz stopped a tiny flywheel from spinning, then ripped out a handful of wires.

“Just got to know what you’re doing,” he said, casting away the circuits. “Whew, that was close!”

“Too close, brother.” Blancanales sighed, raising the assault rifle. “You sure it’s dead?”

“Oh, yeah. Deader than disco.”

“Good.”

“I happen to like disco.” Lyons chuckled in relief. Touching his throat, the big man activated the radio link. “Stony Bird to Nest, all clear. We found a hot egg, but it will not hatch. Repeat, the egg is dead. What was that?” He frowned. “Roger, on the way.”

“Take the bomb, we’ll store it in our lead safe on the van,” Lyons directed, startling briskly for the parking lot.

“We’ve been recalled to the Farm,” Schwarz stated, lifting the core of the bomb out of the shell. It wasn’t a question.

“Yep.” Softly in the background, police sirens could be heard coming this way. The covert team paid no attention. Then the noise abruptly stopped.

“Sounds like they were also recalled,” Blancanales said, glancing at the exposed workings on the mechanism swinging in his friend’s bare hand. But Blancanales wasn’t worried. If Hermann thought it was okay for them to travel with the nuke this way, that was good enough. He trusted the electronics expert with his life in battle, so why not now?

“Just a little diversion by Bear.” Lyons grinned, hoisting the Atchisson to a more comfortable position. “As soon as we’re gone, they’ll be directed right back here, along with the FBI and Homeland.”

“More Red Star?” Schwarz asked.

“Not this time,” Lyons said, avoiding the civilian bodies. “We’ll be briefed on the way to Bethlehem.”

Schwarz balked. “We’re going to Israel?”

“No, Phoenix Force is. We’re going to see some Nazis in Pennsylvania.”

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Steel Town U.S.A. Check. “Who’s in trouble?” Blancanales asked, going around one of his own blast craters, misty smoke still moving along the ground.

Pausing at the entrance to the historic site, Lyons glanced at the clear blue sky. “Who’s in trouble?” he repeated with a growl. “Hell, everybody is, this time.”




CHAPTER FOUR


Edwards Air Force Base

The red Corvette hummed along the empty highway of the California desert. Dark clouds blanketed the early morning sky and heat lightning sizzled now and then. But no rain. Not yet, anyway.

Yawning behind the wheel, Mike Toddel was alternating sips of hot chocolate from a travel mug and bites of a cheese sandwich.

Taking a turnoff, he continued for a couple more miles until reaching the outer perimeter of Edwards. Glowing like a pearl against the rosy dawn, the air base was brightly illuminated by halogen lamps just inside the electrified fence.

Add a couple of Falcons and this would make a great postcard, Toddel thought with a chuckle.

Shifting gears, he slowed at the front gate and drove up to the guard kiosk. This separate section of the AFB was under maximum security, with armed men on station, guard towers, dogs patrolling the fence, gunship helicopters moving in the dim air and more SAM batteries hidden under concrete bunkers than even Toddel knew about. And he repaired their radar!

Stopping at the wooden bar blocking the entrance, he flashed the guard his access badge. “Hey, Harold.” He smiled. “Looks like a hell of a storm coming, eh?”

“Sir, would you please show me you pass again,” Sergeant Harold Adler demanded crisply, one hand resting on the holstered 9 mm pistol at his side.

He called me “sir”? That was when Toddel noticed another guard inside the kiosk wearing body armor and holding a massive M-60 machine gun, pointed his way. As the corporal in the kiosk worked the arming bolt, the linked brass dangling from the deadly weapon tinkled like distant wind chimes.

“Ah, sure thing, Sarge,” Toddel muttered, doing as requested. “Something wrong? President here or something?”

Checking the pass against a list on a clipboard, the sergeant returned it and gave a salute. “Thank you, sir. Proceed to Hangar 19. They’re waiting for you, sir.”

Without comment, Toddel worked the clutch to shift gears and drove away, wary of the speed bump just inside the fence. What was going on here?

The base was full of airman, technicians and officers rushing around. A light burned in every window and there was a circle of black cars parked around the flight tower on the airfield.

Turning past a dark PX, Toddel headed toward Hangar 19 when lightning flashed, very bright and without thunder.

Suddenly a violent explosion obscured the hangar. Stunned, Toddel watched as a column of black smoke rose to form a spreading mushroom cloud. He panicked for a moment, then remembered that any large explosion would create that formation.

What the hell had happened? It looked as though lightning had struck the fuel storage tanks or maybe the munitions depot. He hoped everybody in the hangar was all right. The windows were bulletproof glass and the thick walls were solid concrete with brick on both sides. A bazooka couldn’t dent that hangar.

Braking to a halt so hard it stalled the engine, Toddel could only stare agape as the desert wind moved the smoke to show the fiery hole in the ground. The hangar was gone. Completely gone! Along with all of the experimental F-22 Raptor antisatellite fighters stored there.

Yellow Sea, North Korea

GREASY WATER SLAPPED listlessly against the hull of the Sargasso Queen. Anchored five miles offshore, the vessel was large, a monster of its kind. Old, but still serviceable. She rested low in the ocean, clearly loaded down with goods to be delivered. However, the vessel was anchored into position with four chains, any one of which would have been sufficient for an oil tanker twice its size. The registry listed the Sargasso Queen as a cargo ship, but it was going nowhere. Ever.

Watching from the shore, David McCarter nodded with satisfaction that while the vessel was covered with rust spots, there wasn’t a barnacle on the hull. Why remove one, but not the other? Maybe so that the ship was in good shape, but didn’t look that way? Seemed likely.

While his team got the equipment in order, McCarter counted six machine-gun nests along the deck, the weapon emplacements disguised with canvas sheeting to try to resemble lashed-down packing crates. The radar was brand-new, and there were depth-charge launchers, rocket batteries and a lot of searchlights. The ship was a fortress. During the day, McCarter had counted more than a hundred men on board, three times what a craft of that size needed, and all of them armed with AK-47 assault rifles. Not exactly standard issue for the merchant traders, even in Communist North Korea.

Just then a passing cloud blocked the moonlight and the Stony Man commandos quickly came out of hiding to slide into the waves. Adjusting their rebreathers, the team started swimming with the currents, slowly approaching the vessel. Visibility was only a few feet, but they knew from orbital photographs taken by NSA spy satellites that the underwater defenses were impressive. The sea floor around the ship was studded with sonar sensors, along with hundreds of chained mines. A submarine might be able to blow a path through those with torpedoes, but no enemy warship could possibly approach without being detected and destroyed. Only men could do that job.

Checking a GPD, McCarter stopped the team a safe distance from the mines, and Calvin James activated a box on his chest harness. The device vibrated against his ribs as it generated the sounds of a large school of tuna. That should fool the sonar, but now came the hard part. Switching on scooters, the Stony Man team started into the minefield, the small military waterjets in their hands pulling them along as silent as ghosts.

Slowly the murky depths resolved into a forest of mines, the huge metallic balls chained at different heights to form an imposing barrier. Up close, the spheres were festooned with seaweed that hung off them like Spanish moss on a tree. The dull surfaces of the mines were covered with trigger studs, and they swayed slightly to the motion of the ocean currents. Two of them clanged together, the noise unnaturally loud in the water. The men tensed, but then relaxed when there was no detonation. Obviously the mines were safe from contact with each other.

Something large flashed by them and McCarter bit back a curse at the sight of a pair of dolphins. The damn things had come hunting for tuna! Pickings had to be very slim in the sea for them to come this close to land. McCarter started to turn off the sound generator, but stayed his hand. If he did, that would expose them to the sonar. Damned if they did, and damned if they didn’t. Only one chance, go faster!

Playfully swimming all around the team, the dolphins kept searching for the elusive tuna and bumped into the humans several times. Thankfully there was no explosion. Pulled along by the whispering waterjets, the men of Phoenix Force tried not to think about what would happen it they did that to a mine.

A last array of mines formed a dotted wall in front of the team, the spheres packed almost too close together for the scooters to traverse. Turning sideways, the Stony Man team shot through at full speed and reached clear water. A moment later the dolphins arrived, happily chattering to each other in their incomprehensible language.

James killed the generator and the dolphins paused in confusion, then rose to the surface for a breath of air and came back down to disappear into the minefield.

Ahead of the team loomed the cargo ship, the thick anchor chains extending into the dark depths.

Turning off their waterjets, the men let the scooters float in place as they climbed aboard and proceeded to the belly of the ship. Stopping there for only a moment, the men moved on to the rear of the ship. No video cameras were discernable; the zone was clear.

Reaching the propellers, Phoenix Force removed its swim fins and attached them to their belts. Swimming slowly upward, they moved among the huge propellers. If the blades started turning, the five would be chopped to pieces, chum for the sharks. But the propellers stayed motionless, and soon the team reached the hull of the vessel.

Opening bags at their sides, the men donned sophisticated climbing gloves. Slow and silent, the five shapes moved along the thickest part of the hull where the soft pats of the gloves wouldn’t be heard by anybody in the engine room. Soon the surface shimmered above, the waves dancing with moonlight, and they rose like ghosts from the bay, moving hand-over-hand up the flat stern of the enormous vessel. Their wet suits were camouflage-colored orange, red and brown in irregular patterns. From a distance they should appear as just more rust spots. The effect was heightened by irregularly shaped backpacks and satchels that each man had strapped to his body.

The five men reached the gunwale, then paused as a sailor walked by smoking a cigarette. Pulling on night-vision goggles, McCarter turned on the Starlite function and clearly saw that the man was dressed in civilian clothing. But his boots were regular North Korean army, and an AK-47 was strapped to his back. As the disguised soldier threw the butt of the cigarette overboard, T. J. Hawkins gave a low whistle, the kind men use to get the attention a pretty girl.

Curious, the North Korean soldier glanced over the railing and looked down. Instantly Rafael Encizo rammed a Tanto combat knife directly into the man’s jaw, pinning his mouth shut so that no possible cry of warning could be given. Drowning in his own blood, the North Korean flailed, clawing at his throat, then went limp. Carefully, he was dragged over the railing and tied with ropes to be lowered into the water without a splash. As the corpse reached the sea, the rope was released and the body sank from the weight of his boots and assault rifle.

Easing over the railing, Phoenix Force reached the deck and crouched, listening for any potential source of trouble. But the great vessel was silent; there was only the sound of the waves below. Everything else was still.

Staying in a bunch to keep a low profile, the team donned dry sneakers from their packs and opened watertight bags to remove Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine guns, each barrel tipped with an acoustical sound suppressor. The weapons carried a flip clip, bound together with the service man’s best friend, duct tape. Warily, the men made sure that the clip carrying the half-load rounds was inserted into the machine guns. The reduced charge seriously lowered the firepower, but helped the suppressors do their job. The other side of the flip clip was standard ammo, armor-piercing, full charges. Just in case the suppressors failed.

The sound of soft footsteps came from around the housing and Phoenix Force dropped behind the canvas sheet covering a machine-gun nest.

Lightly resting a finger on the trigger of his MP-5, McCarter tracked the sailor strolling along the deck, an AK-47 on his back, both hands shoved into the pockets of his peacoat for warmth. It was obvious to the former SAS commando that the North Koreans weren’t expecting any trouble this night. Too bad for them.

It had been known for some time that Kim Jong-il, the dictator of North Korea, had been trying to manufacture biological weapons to use against the democratic people of South Korea and the hated United States. Several labs had been found by the CIA and blown out of existence by NATO. But Kim kept trying to duplicate his success with a nuclear weapons program. Half of the trapped population of impoverished nation subsisted on starvation rations, but their “glorious leader” spent billions on creating weapons that might never be used, for a war that only he wanted.

“Which way?” McCarter whispered, staying low.

Pulling a personal computer from a pocket on his thigh, Encizo checked the glowing map of the boat. It was a compilation made from the structural blueprints of the dockyard where it had been constructed and a lot of guesswork based upon orbital photos and passive thermographic readings from shore.

“Left,” the little Cuban said, starting forward.

Proceeding along the deck, the five-man team kept close to the painted metal walls, pausing every now and then as somebody walked along the gunwale. The guards expected that any trouble would come from outside, and kept watching the sea, the sky and the distant shoreline, the small fishing villages and military slave camps twinkling patterns in the night.

Soft light came from a series of portholes and the Stony Man operatives ducked low beneath them. Faintly, they could hear soldiers laughing and a television set blaring with a translated American sitcom.

Maneuvering past the cargo hold, Phoenix Force passed a couple of guards on patrol and a pair of soldiers out on errands, one of them carrying a silver tray covered with spotless white linen. The delicious aroma of roasted duck wafted behind the steward, lingering in his wake. Weapons poised, Phoenix Force watched the fellow cross the deck and disappear into the main salon a hundred feet away.

“That wasn’t spam on a shingle like they feed the troops,” Calvin James observed, easing his gun hand. “Guess it’s good be to the king.”

“Pity the general in charge is awake,” Hawking quipped, checking the rigging on the cargo hoist for any suspicious motions. “But at least we now know that Le-Wan isn’t belowdecks. That had to be for him.”

James nodded in reply. Good point. Where ever Le-Wan was located, that’s where Kim Jong-il would have the bulk of the troops to protect his nephew.

“Be nice if Yi was belowdecks.”

“Amen to that, brother.”

“Gary, over here,” McCarter said, tapping an access panel in the wall.

Sliding the panel back, Manning found a fuse box, well protected from the corrosive salty air. Jimmying the lock, he swung the door aside. A bank of circuit breakers was inside, all of them clearly marked as to function. Opening the electrical panel, Manning exposed a complex nest of wiring. Checking the breakers, Manning clipped thin gauge wires to their backs, then snipped the bypassed circuits. The master console in the control room would still read the lines as live, but they would die the first time they were turned on and resetting the circuit breaker would do nothing to help. Manning pressed a gray-colored wad of C-4 to the back of the breakers and slid in a radio detonator. The whole ship might be protected by the Faraday Cage effect running through the hull, but this was located out in the open. Closing the board, he swung the door shut and pushed the access panel back into place.

Phoenix Force proceeded to the lower deck. Down here the air was much warmer, the smell of the sea was gone and there was the continuous sound of some sort of machine. Large steel gates were folded back against the walls, and arms lockers were everywhere. James and Manning hid more C-4 charges behind the weapons dumps as Encizo rigged a couple of the gates. Just a little insurance for the future. Hopefully, getting off the vessel was going to be just as quiet as it was getting on. But a wise soldier always planned for what an enemy could do, not for what he might do.

Loosening the light bulbs in the ceiling as they went along the hallway, Phoenix Force left darkness in its wake. That would be suspicious to a passing soldier, but far less revealing than actually spotting the team.

Hawkins took point while James read off the signs on each door. He was fairly proficient in Vietnamese, but only knew a few halting phrases in idiomatic Korean. However, it was enough. Sterile Room. Animals. Contaminate. Storage. Supplies. Laboratory.

Bingo!

Bending, McCarter softly scratched at the bottom of the lab door. After a few minutes, a grumbling person stomped over and threw it wide. The angry soldier was armed with a broom, clearly prepared to do battle with a rat. His face registered shock at the sight of the five intruders, and McCarter rose to hit him in the throat with an open-handed blow. The soldier dropped the broom and back away, hacking for air.

Moving fast, Phoenix Force stepped into the room and Manning closed the door while Encizo fired a single round from his MP-5. The weapon gave a chuff sound and the choking man crumpled into the corner.

Spreading out, the team secured the room, then did a fast search. The room was an office of some kind, containing desks, papers, computers, printers and tall green file cabinets. Double doors marked with warning signs in Korean filled the left wall and the air carried the antiseptic smell of a hospital.

Going to the desk, Manning checked, but every drawer was locked. Accepting that, he fixed a couple more blocks of C-4 from his dwindling supply onto the file cabinets and set the timers for twenty minutes.

“Make it fifteen,” McCarter directed, stuffing some papers from the Out basket into a watertight pouch strapped to his chest.

Manning did as requested, as Encizo and James kept watch on the corridor and Hawkins checked out the double door at the far end. Through the round glass windows, he could see another set of doors. Past those he could vaguely discern some sort of a laboratory, but the angle was wrong for any details. Could be empty, could have a hundred armed troops inside. There was only one way to know for sure.

“Okay, it’s showtime,” McCarter declared, closing the pouch. “Let’s find the professor.”

Walking through the double set of doors, Phoenix Force found the inner room was indeed a full biological weapons laboratory. Two large tables were covered with bubbling experiments, the complex array of gurgling glassware reaching several feet high. Locked cabinets covered the walls, aside from the life-size portrait of Kim Jong-il. There was an autoclave, centrifuge, lots of cages for the test subjects and an Oriental man eating a sandwich. But no guards. The old man was tall and slim, with white hair and glasses. He wore a gold wedding ring. It looked like their target from behind, but could be a trick.

“Yi,” McCarter said, announcing their presence.

The professor looked up from his meager repast and went pale. “No. No! I am loyal to our glorious leader!” he cried, dropping the sandwich and raising both hands. “Don’t kill me! I love North Korean! Death to the Americans!”

“We are Americans,” McCarter said, removing the night-vision goggles to expose his face.

The terror vanished to be replaced with joy. “Then get me the hell out of here, cobber,” Yi stated, switching to English as he slid off the lab stool. “These people are bloody insane.” He started their way, beaming a smile.

“Lift your shirt, please, Professor,” Hawkins urged politely, aiming his MP-5 at the man.

Stopping in his tracks, Yi sighed and did as requested. The man’s chest was marred by a large area of puckered scars, a gift from an early experiment in chemistry gone bad back at Perth University in Australia.

“Sorry, had to be sure,” Hawins apologized.

Professor David Allen Yi lowered his shirt. “You thought I might be a fake? A stand-in or something?”

“Been known to happen,” McCarter said, picking up a glass pipette used for drawing blood. Suddenly he threw the pipette to Yi and the professor caught the glassware with his left hand. Confused, he stared at the pipette, then frowned at McCarter.

“A good test,” Yi noted with strained patience. “Autonomic responses are difficult to fake. Yes, I’m left-handed. Now, is that enough proof, or do you also want some blood and a stool sample?”

“Maybe later.” McCarter grinned in spite of the situation. The old Aussie scientist was as tough as Barbara Price had said. It had to have taken a lot of men to kidnap him from the Woomera Military Hospital last year. Canberra was going to be delighted have the cranky genius back safe and sound.

James went over to an autoclave full of sealed bottles. Each was filled with a greenish fluid. “That it?” he asked.

“Sadly, yes,” Yi said grimly. “Moonfire. The worst nerve gas I ever made, or even heard about. It kills, fast and horrible. Moonfire is not so much a war gas as it is a terror weapon. No solider who ever saw it work would ever risk going anywhere near again. Dear God, I must have killed dozens of people with the clinical test alone! But I…they…”

“Torture?” McCarter asked softly.

Yi turned away, unable to speak.

“Any man can be broken, Professor,” James said gently. “It’s nothing to be ashamed about.”

The professor could only shake his head, obviously reliving the deaths of his unwilling test subjects. Kim Jong-il and his cruel nephew enjoyed finding new ways to dispose of their political enemies. His tests had thus served two purposes for the dictator: revenge and entertainment.

Opening a satchel, Manning started placing explosive charges around the room. Joining him at the task, James directed the placement of the C-4.

Keeping the inner door open with a foot, Encizo watched the outer set of doors while Hawkins stayed close to Yi. Pushing back the tight sleeve of his wet suit, McCarter checked his watch. Five minutes to go.

“Please hurry,” Yi pleaded. “If they catch me with you, it’ll mean the work camps at Pyongyang. Nobody lasts there very long.” He frowned. “Although, I’m sure it seems like a bloody eternity to them.”

“You’re too valuable for that,” McCarter stated bluntly.

“The hell I am. To be honest, I’m surprised at the rescue,” Yi said, rubbing his face. “It would have been much easier to kill me.”

“The incredible we do immediately,” Hawkins said, “the impossible takes a few days.”

“Besides,” McCarter added, “you’re the best man to make a counteragent to Moonfire.”

A short whistle from Encizo caught everyone’s attention. “Company,” he said, working the bolt on his weapon.

The Stony Man operatives instantly moved into defensive positions behind the lab tables, dragging the reluctant professor along with them. McCarter slung his MP-5 and swung a Barnett crossbow from behind his back to load an arrow. It clicked into place just as the double doors to the sterile lab burst open and in walked a short, fat man surrounded by a dozen guards armed with AK-47s.

“Doctor, your work has been so excellent this past week, I prepared a special treat for you,” Kim Le-Wan declared loudly, carrying the silver tray covered with a white linen cloth. But then his smile vanished at the sight of the armed strangers in the lab.

“Kill them!” Kim screamed, tossing aside the tray and diving behind a soldier.

The North Koreans and Phoenix Force all brought up their weapons and Yi moved between them. “Stop!” he screamed in Korean. “Fire those in here and we all die!”

The military guards paused, unsure of what to do, and McCarter fired. Across the lab, Kim rocked backward as the barbed arrow slammed deep into his face. For a moment he weaved drunkenly, only a tiny trickle of blood inching down his features. Then the miniature explosive charge detonated and the man’s head exploded into a million pieces, bones and pink brains spraying outward in a ghastly cascade. Screaming obscenities, the guards raised their Kalasnikovs like clubs and charged.

Releasing their MP-5 machine guns, four members of Phoenix Force threw the knives they had been hiding. Three of the North Korean soldiers dropped to the deck, clutching their throats, while the fourth clasped a hand to the side of his head, teeth clenched in pain as blood poured from the horrible gash where his ear used to be located. The grisly object was pinned to the wall like some sort of demonic butterfly, still shaking from the impact. Then the two groups mixed, the green military uniforms of the North Koreans mingled with the slick rust-colored wet suits of the Stony Man commandos.

Assault rifle slammed against machine gun, the owners wresting for supremacy for a moment, then the men dropped the useless weapons and went hand-to-hand. Pulling out a curved knife, a guard threw the blade, but James deflected the incoming missile with his Randall fighting knife. The blade hit the floor and skittered away, and James advanced, slashing with the military knife, the spine of the blade tight against his palm.

McCarter fired again, feathering a guard’s temple. The man went down with a sigh as if he were going to sleep. Hawkins kicked a guard in the groin, then opened the fellow’s throat with a backhand slash. A muscular guard launched a Tiger Claw at Encizo, but he swayed backward out of the reach of the blinding martial-arts strike, then turned sideways and buried the heel of his sneaker into the man’s solar plexus. As the air woofed out, the guard doubled over, and the Cuban brought down the edge of his hand in a Little Leaf strike, adding the full force of his entire body to the blow. The North Korean’s neck snapped and he dropped to the deck dead, his twitching body only slowly accepting the irrefutable fact.

Loading and firing, McCarter killed a third, a fourth, then the Koreans were upon him, and he joined the battle. His hands dripping blood, Manning moved on to a new opponent, leaving a corpse behind, the empty eye sockets of the man staring at eternity.

Dropping to the deck with his face smashed apart, a dying guard fumbled for the pistol at his belt. Accidentally, he fired the weapon while it was still inside the holster. The round missed his boot and ricocheted off the steel deck to musically zing off a wall. Then there came a shattering of glass and a sizzling green mixture spewed onto a stainless-steel table, instantly discoloring the resilient metal.

“Masks!” James barked, slapping the emergency filter over his nose and mouth. Every member of the Stony Man team followed suit.

A second later the North Koreans started writhing in agony. Holding a spare mask, McCarter raced for Professor Yi, but it was too late. The old scientist began to violently shake. Turning, Yi grabbed a beaker and smashed the glass to slice open his own throat before the real pain began.

“There is no…counteragent…” He gurgled and fell to the floor.

Helplessly, Phoenix Force watched the scientist die, and in only a few moments they were the only people still standing in the misty green laboratory. Ever so slowly, the toxic fumes started thinning, moving with the air currents into the humming wall vent of the ventilation system.

“Okay, burn the place,” McCarter barked, pulling out a fat canister. “Leave nothing behind for them to work with.”

Moving to the double doors, the team pulled out grenades, yanked pins, released arming levers, threw and turn to run. They were in the office when the lab exploded into flames, the searing wash building into a roaring inferno as the thermite cooked. The metal tables sagged, the walls began to buckle. Sprinklers in the ceiling gushed to life, but the water only served to increase the fury of the chemical blaze, the thermite feeding off the oxygen in the water to fuel its rampaging endothermic reaction.

“That should do it,” Hawkins said, wiping his face with a sleeve.

Somewhere onboard the ship, a siren started to howl, then abruptly stopped, the surge of power feeding the device causing the rigged wiring of the circuit breaker panel to blow.

“Okay, let’s go,” McCarter barked, slinging away the crossbow, and bringing up his MP-5. The team made the deck unchallenged.

A series of muffled explosions sounded from belowdecks and new sirens took up the Klaxon call of warning.

“Do it,” McCarter ordered, sealing his wet suit closed and sliding the mouthpiece of his rebreather into place.

With a ripping noise, Encizo opened a Velcro-sealed pocket, pulled out a small cylinder. He flipped the top aside with a thumb, squeezed the body until a red light glowed, and pressed down hard on a small button.

A faint shiver went through the entire vessel as the two armor-piercing demolition charges that had been placed on the keel detonated. Hot gases bubbled up from below the ship on both sides. The ship gave a groan of tortured metal.

Heading starboard, Phoenix Force fired at anything in its way. Guards were torn apart by the assault, flinging their rifles skyward in death. As the team leaped over the dead and the dying, the Sargasso Queen shook again, harder this time, and a gout of roiling flame rose from the main smokestack, brightening the mist for a full second.

Heading for the gunwale, McCarter felt the ship start to tilt to port. Yi was dead, the lab ruined, the Moonfire destroyed, files burned. The rescue mission was a failure, but they had destroyed the Moonfire lab. Now all they had to do was get out of here alive.

“Hello, Smoky. This is Bandit. Over,” James said into his throat mike, one hand firing his MP-5, the other changing the frequencies on the box on his belt. “Smoky, this is Bandit, 10-45! Repeat, 10-45!”

“Roger, Bandit, copy. This is Uncle Smoky,” Jack Grimaldi replied over their earphones. “My eggbeater is on the way to Check Point Charlie.”

“Negative,” McCarter snapped. “The Berlin Wall is coming down, hard and fast. See you at Bikini Zuma. Repeat, Bikini Zuma! Do you copy?” Check Point Charlie was the bow of the ship, where they were hoping to escape with Professor Yi. Zuma Beach was their hidden camp on the rocky shoreline.

“Check. Out,” the pilot replied crisply, and the earphones went silent.

With a loud snap, one of the anchor chains broke, the length of links whipping out of the water to come crashing down across the forecastle, crushing men and machines alike. High-pitched screaming told of somebody still alive in the wreckage.

Grabbing the railing to hop over, Rafe grunted and fell to the deck as a North Korean shot him in the back. The rest of Phoenix Force retaliated with concentrated gunfire from their 9 mm machine guns and the enemy soldier went to his maker in several pieces.

“Shit, my rebreather is gone,” Encizo cursed, releasing the chest harness. The device dropped off his frame and hit the deck to move away with a scraping noise.

“We can share,” James offered, hefting his bulky rebreather.

“Got your six, brother,” Hawkins confirmed, his MP-5 firing along the railing to take out soldiers coming their way. The men fell like bowling pins, several of them going overboard.

“Dump everything!” McCarter ordered. “Move it, people!”

As the deck continued to rise, the men removed their excess equipment. By now, every loose item on board was starting to sliding to port, and the shouting of the North Koreans was taking on a hysterical note. Another anchor chain broke, the whipping metal crashing down upon the rocket battery with thundering results. The Sargasso Queen shuddered.

Scrambling over the angled gunwale, the Stony Man commandos dropped into the water and started swimming across the surface. Speed was important now, not stealth. Everybody on board the sinking vessel was too busy to bother shooting at them now.

Minutes later, the five reached a pebble beach. Rising from the waves, McCarter turned just in time to see the burning ship do a death roll, water and flames blowing out of the gaping hole in its belly like a whale surfacing for air. Something in the engine room exploded, probably the boilers from all the steam mixing with the smoke, and the ship loudly groaned as it cracked in two to begin a short voyage to the bottom of the cold Yellow Sea.




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