Doomsday Conquest
Doomsday Conquest
Don Pendleton
Accountable only to the Oval Office and fully committed to the security of the U.S. in an ever-morphing terrorist landscape, the warriors of Stony Man never relent, tire or fold.America's last line of defence understands that all it takes for evil to prevail is for a few good people to stand down. For Stony Man, that day will never come. Not now. Not ever.The covert world of black ops takes on a sinister new twist as high-ranking rogue operatives offer super-tech weapons for sale to enemies of the United States in an effort to "fix" the Middle East. With buyers from Russia to Iran lining up for the prize, America's national security is about to blow up in a mushroom cloud, plunging Stony Man into a killing game with no end or winner in sight.
TRAITORS
There were few villains Hal Brognola detested more than those who sold out their country, and he didn’t give a damn what the reason.
A man chooses a side, sticks with his choice no matter what the challenges, the temptations, the internal conflicts that might have him turn his back and seek what might be greener pastures.
Right then, as he slipped the rest of the sat photos and a copy of Orion’s disk into the manila envelope, the big Fed felt a little sick to his stomach. He gave the computer team a last look. They were hard at it, juggling the action—of the coming and certain firestorms—with professional resolve, skill and determination.
And with honor.
For the moment, there was nothing more he could do here, but he had someplace to go in search of possible answers to some dark and troubling realities.
Other titles in this series:
#14 DEADLY AGENT
#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
Doomsday Conquest
STONY MAN®
AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Don Pendleton
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u71ea7eb7-0be5-5ad9-bb1a-75c48695bffa)
CHAPTER TWO (#u8fa7f778-4877-5eb2-acf8-8777cedf571d)
CHAPTER THREE (#u8857e8a1-9fe5-5735-9da4-55e44d9fcaa4)
CHAPTER FOUR (#uf2afc7b4-c207-5f20-bda1-58304f1fe956)
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)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
Whatever the awful truth about the molten storm falling to earth under his command and control, Colonel Ytri Kolinko wasn’t all that sure he cared to know. A veteran of the Afghan war and a staunch believer in the Communist dictates of pre-Wall Russia, he trusted simplicity in all its forms, be it on the battlefield or in the high-tech laboratories of his current post. What the eye saw, in other words, the mind fathomed, whether his hand was dipped in the blood of slain mujahideen or held a test tube with microorganisms from outer space. Grinding his teeth as the warning siren blared, he slung the AK-74 assault rifle across his shoulder. Ignorance might truly prove bliss.
Or would it? he had to wonder as he torqued himself to a double-time march, propelled by a heady blend of fear, anxiety and excitement, heard his lieutenants of Command Red Lightning barking for the conscripts and the science detail beyond the steel door to move faster for the transport helicopters. This was his command, his protectorate in this remote and desolate abyss of Tajikistan, after all, the responsibility heaped square on his shoulders to get to the bottom of what had traveled from deep space to previously land in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgystan. And what was now breaching Earth’s atmosphere was neither comet, falling star, meteor shower nor any other space phenomenon identified by Man. If it played true to prior and—what, supernatural?—form, it would not only swamp roughly a dozen square acres, as it had in each of the former Soviet republics, thus forcing a military quarantine, but chances were the event would sear yet another terrifying memory at the sight of human beings…
He shuddered, shoved away the frightening images, cursing the young soldier who allowed the door to thud shut, near smashing his scowl to pulp. Forget the angry albeit sorry fact Moscow had dumped him in hostile country that made his former Chechen post look a Black Sea resort by comparison, the Minister of Defense wanted answers to mysteries that came from another galaxy, perhaps another world, even another dimension, if he believed what his astronomers told him about black holes, shrinking mass and evolving protostars.
Tajikistan, he knew, was marked off by the political and military barons of Moscow as a buffer zone between the Muslim extremists of Afghanistan and Russia, but another image easily leaped to mind when he thought about his woeful post. As Moscow’s man in-country, braving the cold, fighting drug traffickers, often engaged in pitched battles with both rebels and narcothugs—and often both were one and the same—he saw Tajikistan as a vast moat between Afghanistan and Russia, teeming with crocodiles—hungry and poised to devour those who would further erode the moral fiber of his country with the slow white death or outright attacking Mother Russia through terrorism and sabotage.
Prepared to tackle the night’s grim business, whatever the case, Kolinko used a bootheel to thunder open the door, barely breaking stride as he swept onto the sprawling helipads.
“Move, move, move!”
He took in the controlled frenzy of soldiers, urged on by his officers as they rushed to board three Mi-26 transports, then spotted the gaggle of spacesuits lumbering for the high-tech cocoon of the custom-built black Mi-14 search-and-rescue chopper at the deep north end. There, a squad of his black-clad Red Lightning commandos lugged the tubular lead containers with fastened vacuum hoses, muled various and sundry metal crates that housed detection and sampling verification ordnance.
As if, he thought, what was streaking for Earth could be understood by finite puny Man.
And Kolinko looked to the heavens, stood his ground, some two thousand feet high on the western edge of the Pamir Range. The scudding gray cloud banks seemed low enough to reach up and grab. Where the billows broke in roiling tendrils, he made out the faint sheen of moonlight, then stared at countless stars twinkling from galaxies both known and yet to be named.
After another few moments of stargazing, aware he was stalling, Kolinko looked back at the compound, briefly wondered if he would return to see its foreboding steel walls, see through to fruition the prototypes of future secret weapons being engineered in its labyrinth. Panning the mammoth complex, north to south, he almost envied the soldiers and science crews remaining behind, nestled as they were, safe from potential lethal doses of radiation or the terrifying clutches of antigravity, deep in the rock-hewn bowels.
Safe, yes, unless the celestial storm changed course and…
At least half the base was burrowed deep into the mountain range that rose from the plateau, the imposing peaks jutting higher, it seemed, forming a natural barrier the farther south they stretched to meet the northern edge of the Fedchenko Glacier, one of the world’s longest continental ice river. A final sweep, spying the concrete dome of the observatory looming dead center from the roof where its telescopes—Russian versions of the American Hubble, he knew—monitored the coming tempest, and Kolinko fastened the com link over his black beret.
His team of astrophysicists, he recalled, believed they had pinpointed the core source of the space ore. Give or take a thousand light-years, they claimed its origins in something called the Eagle Nebula, recent but evolving star formations about 6,500 light-years away in a stellar region called Serpens, near the Star Gamma Scuti. Whatever its genesis, for a moment Kolinko wished the observatory a silo, imagined the scope magically morphing into a nuclear warhead, a time-delay fuse that would erupt a thermonuclear blanket, all but vaporizing the extraterrestrial stew.
Kolinko swept back to reality as he felt the icy touch of rotor wash slashing his face. All set and ready, but for what? he wondered, grunting as he bent his head, forging toward the lead transport chopper.
Watching the first two transports lifting off, he suddenly found something both fearsome and absurd that a simple soldier should be forced to confront, much less explain the improbable and the preposterous. Boarding the Mi-26, he realized he was touching the emblem on the front of his beret and wishing what they were going to encounter was as simple to explain as lightning.
FAYSUD DOZMUJ WAS ashamed of his comrades.
As he cradled the AK-47, watching the caravan of mules and horses from the rearguard, he began to consider how much different he was than his fellow clansmen. One disturbing for instance, he wasn’t a terrorist, much less a cold-blooded killer, as many of them had proved themselves to be. The fact he didn’t carry a heart pumping with murderous wrath round-the-clock like his cousins for any human being other than Tajik—especially Russians and westerners—left him wondering if he was better than the others, or simply weak. Granted, circumstance dictated the road many of them had chosen, but the circumstance of the desperate poor or the oppressed—as they saw themselves—was a sad and sorry eternal plight the world over.
Always had been, always would be.
The blood of the innocent, he knew, was on many hands here in the Grbukt Pass. Be it Israel, Iraq or Kabul, and as family men themselves, did it not prey on their minds that they had shattered the lives of lambs who only wished to live in peace, perhaps slaughtering children and thus extinguishing future bloodlines? Did they not see that their violence and brutality made them an abomination in the eyes of God? Was there not one even half-righteous man among their lot?
And how did they see him? As a coward, always making himself scarce when an ambush was in the wings, having never fired a shot in anger against their hated Russian oppressors?
Shucking the heavy wool coat higher up his shoulders, he shivered against the icy wind that howled like a thousand banshees, or the giant hairy almasty, he thought, the man-thing rarely seen but often heard baying from the black depths of mountain forests. He sidestepped another pile of dung steaming in the snow, thinking this was the last time he would follow his cousins when they hired themselves out as drug mules for men, he knew, who clearly had no regard who suffered, directly or indirectly, from the evil they peddled, as long as they lived on, rich-fattened swine indulging their every vile transgression.
It wasn’t the long and dangerous drive by truck to the border, picking up something like two to three tons of heroin from Afghan warlords and their corrupt Russian counterparts each trip. The consignments were paid for in advance, their tribal leader, Ghazin, having won the trust of Russian gangsters long ago to deliver the cargo to designated rendezvous points in the Pamirs. Nor did the grueling three- or four-day march on foot when they were forced to abandon their vehicles in exchange for pack animals to trudge out the final leg of the journey bother him. Hardship was an accepted way of life for the Tajik.
Rather, it was his fear of God and the dreaded loss of eternal Paradise that disturbed him to no end, his heart and soul burdened by the weight of guilt, far exceeding, he imagined, the combined load of burlap sacks now being hauled out of the gorge. Way beyond the earthly consideration of a few paltry American dollars, by which he could feed a family of seven during the coming months, his conscience admonished him that what he did was wrong in the eyes of his Maker.
No more.
This was his last journey for the Devil, aware that what he did only enabled the spawning of evil, that was gain of illicit money to advance the slaughter of lambs.
He was trudging up the rise, searching the forested high ground, wondering if any of his cousins could forsake this wrong and find redemption before it was too late, when the animals began crying, shuffling and bucking against their burdens. The line lurched to a sudden halt, his cousins cursing the beasts as the braying and snorting rose in what he sensed was panic. He was wondering if the animals were spooked by the sudden arrival of the two giant black transport choppers as they appeared, hovering over the tree line of the high plateau, Ghazin on the field radio, confirming, he assumed, the helicopters ferried the Russian gangsters, when the sky erupted in a brilliant white light. Something inexplicable happened next to the helicopters, Dozmuj watching, shocked, as what appeared like a web of blue sparks began shooting, dancing around the hulls of the choppers. A heartbeat and one of the choppers was thrown into a whirling dervish, then propelled, it seemed, by the shroud of blue lightning, aimed on a course to smash into the heart of the caravan.
Whether it was instinct or some haunting premonition of doom he’d gnawed on since the border, Dozmuj knew something far out of the ordinary was blanketing the sky.
Terror then gripped him as the animals burst in a pellmell scatter off the trail, his cousins shouting, torn between chasing after the beasts of burden and staring, frozen in fear, at the heaven’s spread of dazzling—
Fire?
Dozmuj backpedaled, the assault rifle slipping off his shoulder, falling to ground as his mind tried to conceive that he bore witness to a vast sheet of white fire blossoming but rolling like ocean waves in a great storm across the width of the sky. And it powered the heavens above into instant day, as if the sun had burst through the celestial blackness, light so piercing he was forced to shut his eyes, afraid for a moment he was blind.
When he opened his eyes, he found the world on fire, the seeing all but beyond any belief.
Shouts of panic flaying the air and animals braying loud enough to further warp his senses, Dozmuj turned away and ran.
“PULL BACK!”
For all of their—what was to him—incoherent physics babble, it hardly explained the blue lightning shooting from the comm and tracking station amidships the transport chopper. More conjecture than anything else, the best his science people could come up with by way of explanation was that the storm of space lava created a supercharged electromagnetic field. Highly charged alpha particles, the most powerful of ionizing agents, the way he understood it, were in the process of fusing, splitting deuterium nuclei as they collided, but somehow creating antienergy in the process. One of the end fantastic results was that the ore emitted EMP—electromagnetic pulse—similar, but vastly more powerful in ways they couldn’t yet explain than those produced by a nuclear blast. Had he believed in God, angels or even an afterlife, he might have agreed with his scientists when they referred to the phenomenon as Heaven’s Vomit.
The pilot didn’t need to be told even once, Kolinko roaring the order again, though, through the cockpit hatchway just when the bird was thrown to a steep dip to port. He tumbled to the floorboard, his soldiers falling from their stations in a thrashing heap of limbs, Kolinko still fearing the fire in the sky would overtake them. As opposed to arriving on-site after the three previous showers, this was the first time he’d been eyewitness to the falling space matter. Cursing the horrifying unexplainable, he hoped it would be his last, but he wasn’t about to see his choppers bathed in celestial soup, sure to send them crashing to earth.
Jumping to his feet as his pilot straightened the chopper, Kolinko marched to the door, hollering for one of his men to pull the plug to their monitors from the battery-powered generator. He was just in time to find the two black Mi-14s—drug ships, he suspected, taking the high ground and waiting on the Tajiks to climb up the trail from the gorge—erupt into fireballs that defied any blast he’d ever seen on the battlefield. It was all lightning and blue flame along the plateau, two giant, sizzling orbs that appeared like electrical charges gone haywire, blinding-white explosions touching off, one after the other, inside the spheres, the jagged streaks seeming to gather renewed angry force, as if whatever energy they consumed from the doomed birds inside the blue furnace fed their unearthly power core.
It was the rolling molten tidal wave in the sky, though, that commanded his full and terrified attention. Patching through to his other flight crews, he confirmed them engaged in evasive maneuvers, all of them falling back in southerly vectors at top speed.
Kolinko watched, squinting against the brilliant sheen as the molten rain washed over the forested plateau, then pounded a path down the gorge. With nowhere to run or hide, he saw the sea of molten stew drench man and animal. The Tajiks and their Russian end purchasers were little more than criminal scum, but Kolinko wondered, just the same, if they died quick, or slow and in great pain as they drowned in the ore.
“IN TERMS OF PURE scientific theory, as defined by Isaac Newton and Einstein, the laws of gravity and inertial mass being proportional to gravitational mass—G-Force—this shouldn’t even exist. Alpha particles, if that’s what they even are, will yield their energy quickly, but whatever the particles, they are fusing, multiplying and growing in mass and strength, creating in the process what I can only describe as…antimatter?”
Kolinko bared his teeth, stepping toward the hastily erected work area. He found himself growing exasperated to the point of boiling anger, what with their lack of plausible scientific explanations, but realized, under the circumstances, he needed them more than they needed him.
The good news was that the laser field, a reverse electromagnetic barrier, as he understood it, held back the undefined particles that created this purported antigravity. With the extended poles rising forty feet high, laser beams interlocked at the speed of light, the abominable stench of sulfur was held in check, but the unreality of the moment was still there for his eyes to behold. Unable to look at the frightening spectacles farther down the gorge and just inside the laser wall, he watched his eight best and brightest, still donning hazmat suits, while striding closer to the banks of monitors, his science detail having informed him the lethal doses of radiation were cocooned behind the bars of blue laser light and presently dying off at an inexplicable rate. Only flaring back to life, fusing together again, they told him, at a speed faster than light, mounting in hyper-strength, though giving off no measurable radiation! Impossible, he decided, would be the most preposterous understatement he’d ever heard. Moscow would never buy it.
Geiger counters, he saw, were hooked into a radiation monitor, the clicks no longer audible, but Kolinko stole a read on the digital screen just the same, confirming he was in no danger of coming down with cancer in the near future. The last problem—no, the last nail—he needed was another Chernobyl in what was, essentially, a militarily occupied Russian protectorate. His own anger and mounting fear fusing like those particles they mentioned, Kolinko looked at their dark baffled faces inside the bubbled helmets as several of the geniuses filled test tubes with white crystals collected from the ground near the field station, then mixed them with a clear liquid. With syringes, they extracted the concoction, squirting drops on Petri dishes, sliding them under microscopes.
“It makes no sense at all how this could be happening.”
“But it is happening, Comrade Bukov!” Kolinko snapped, forcing himself to not even glance at the figure no more than twelve feet in front of him to confirm the terrible truth. Should this happen again, he dreaded, and in a heavily populated area…
Kolinko keyed his com link, scoured the skies with an anxious search. When informed by his flight crews that soldiers were now on the ground and securing a wide perimeter, erecting more laser walls, he turned back to his scientists. Two of them were hunched over the control panel of a solid aluminum cylinder they called a gravitational wave detector. When he saw them shaking their heads at each other, he nearly erupted, aware the mystery was only growing as they appeared to understand less with each passing second.
“I want answers, and within the hour, do you understand me, Comrade Bukov?”
“Then we’ll need to return to our laboratories for further and more accurate testing, Comrade Colonel. I am thinking this substance will first need a laser burst of at least a hundred picoseconds…”
“Picoseconds?”
“Measurements of trillionths of a second, done in a laser fusion chamber, therefore determining, if we are lucky, if these nuclei of atoms initiate fusion on their own, which, I already fear, they do.”
“You fear? What do you mean by that?”
Bukov went on as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Beyond that I am afraid that what, or part of what we are looking at, judging the previous samples and testing is an ongoing, unexplained fusion-fission reaction, but far more fusion than fission.”
The enormity of what he believed Bukov implied left Kolinko speechless for a long moment. “You are telling me that what is inside this force field is…that what came from deep space is…”
“Yes. We are perhaps looking at the possibility of a thermonuclear explosion. Developing critical mass as we speak, from, as you said, the far reaches of the galaxy.”
Kolinko swallowed his terror, wondering how long he could keep this from Moscow. The truth, of course, would get buried, but if Tajikistan was wiped off the map in a nuclear mushroom cloud with its unknown origins from deep space, there would be no way to hide it from the rest of the world. There would be international outrage. There would be sanctions. There would be much threatening noise, to say the very least, from the Americans. There would be fallout, and clear up the Ukraine, depending on the prevailing winds, with thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands dropping dead in their zombied tracks from radiation poisoning so high it would be off the charts of gigajoule and human-sievert measurements. There would be…
Numb, he was about to turn away, return to his chopper, when he found Dovkna pulling his visor away from his microscope. “What is it?” he barked.
Dovkna muttered something, shaking his head.
“Speak!”
Dovkna pointed a rubber-tipped finger at the crystallized rock formations on the ground, where the snow was still melting to puddles, a faint trace of sulfur still lingering in the air. “This white substance?” he said, and paused.
“Yes?”
“It’s sodium chloride.”
“Salt? You are telling me, comrade,” Kolinko said, throwing an arm at what was at the deep end of the pass, “that those men were—what? Turned into pillars of salt from outer space?”
Dovkna nodded inside his bubbled head. “That is precisely what I am saying.”
Kolinko staggered back a step, then froze, aware of the pleas and pitiful cries he’d up to then forced deaf ears to. Now, his mind tumbling with questions and fears holding no foreseeable answers or solutions, he stared up at the Tajik rebel, hovering some twenty feet in the air.
CHAPTER TWO
Nuclear power was a disaster begging to happen. Off the top of his head, he thought of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the most notable of grotesque nuclear reactor accidents, or the ones at least known to the world at large. Where they were concerned, he pictured—from an educated guess based on experience and access to classified intel—their reactor cores blew, most likely, due to incompetence, quasi-ignorance of the volatile nature of fission reaction under extreme stress, and the brazen zeal of self-proclaimed genius in search of the next quantum leap, that bold but proved foolish notion that Science Man adhered to the belief they could learn more about nuclear power through trial and error. Tell all that, he scoffed to himself, to those dying in protracted misery under radioactive clouds that were most likely still spreading to God only knew how far and wide.
Madness, he decided, and for what? All in the name of progress? The advancement of civilization or global annihilation? Either way, Man may prove someday to be his own worst enemy, but he hoped he wasn’t around to see it, though his three children might. No tree-hugger or global-warming doomsayer, he was an ace Stealth pilot of two Gulf wars, in fact, who’d churned up whole square miles of earth into smoking craters where not even a dandelion could sprout in the next foreseeable generation. But he still believed Man either took care of Mother Earth, or Mother Earth would take care of Man. That in mind, nuclear-powered submarines and battleships, he weighed, were nightmare scenario enough, but easily dispensed with as far as cover-ups went. Scuttle the works and the truth sank to the bottom of the ocean, where only a few in the loop were the wiser.
All those potential catastrophic voyages, but vessels chugging along over vast stretches of empty ocean?
No sweat.
Try flying, he thought, a supersonic fighter jet with a nuclear reactor’s guts cored with U-238, meant to torque up the yield of Pu-239 to keep on giving the gift of record-shattering speed and hang-time. Talk about flying Armageddon, but the doomsday potential for such a craft, he knew, hijacked and commandeered by the enemies of America, was less than zero.
At least for the immediate future.
Still, the more United States Air Force Major Michael Holloran pondered the facts as he knew them, considered what was housed, aft in their superbird, the more he believed he harbored some dark bent toward suicide. Or was it simply his nature, he wondered, a hyperachiever in his own right, pushing the limits of personal reality and talents to the edge, a middle-finger salute to fate to dare force him to stare into the abyss, face his own mortality? Certainly, he knew, whatever drove him to chase the next figurative or literal horizon had cost him two marriages, rendering him a man alone now among the gods of ultratech, transcended in some way beyond the norm he couldn’t quite define, but could surmise he wasn’t sure he liked all that much, given what he knew.
Get a grip, he told himself. He had a job to do.
They were sailing along at supersonic speed, Mach 5 to be exact, eighty thousand feet and change above the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, bearing down on the U.S. border; ETA a little over three minutes and counting. With what he knew lay ahead, those anxious thoughts began whispering louder over everything that could go wrong, near hissing, he imagined, like the highly flammable pure oxygen being pumped into his helmet. This was, after all, the maiden voyage of a classified prototype and ultrafighter jet that shouldn’t—and officially didn’t—exist.
Three years earlier a celestial mystery had fallen to the continental U.S., and it now powered the craft. And lent it properties far exceeding the narrow prism of Man’s understanding.
Thus, lack of knowledge about unknown properties and alloys—and he knew whatever the truth was being jealously guarded from those who now bore the task of flying the thing, as in himself and his copilot—should provide fear enough for him to reconsider the sanity of all involved.
For instance, the reinforced glass—if that’s what it even was—was as classified as the fuel that could propel them to Mach 10, more than three times faster than the now-retired SR-71 Blackbird, which had previously owned the world’s speed record of plus Mach 3. Officially—sort of—the fuel was classified as supergrade JP-7, the juice that kept the Blackbird aloft and a streaking black blur beneath the heavens. Why, then, was it pumped into the wings from a massive lead-encased tanker by hazmat suits in a hangar guarded by both armed sentries and batteries of surface-to-air missiles and M-1 Abrams tanks? Or was the answer so obvious…
The visor trapped the sound of his own grim chuckle.
In practical working theory, he knew they shouldn’t have even gotten off the ground, but the superjet and its power source defied all laws of aerodynamics, nuclear physics and gravity. Whether or not the reactor was a prototype, for instance, scaled down to near-dwarf stature in comparison to the mammoths that powered nuclear plants, it was still housed in a steel container, wrapped, in turn, by thick concrete walls. Therefore, the tremendous weight alone should have created drag enough to virtually snap off the tail.
Oh, but there were answers, he knew, as unbelievable as they might sound.
Yes, perhaps they believed him, in the dark and blissfully ignorant, those black-suited DOD superiors, their armed goons and aerospace engineers contracted out by Lockheed, but he’d caught on the sly the floating rumors. Since no secret was really ever such, he’d come to know that what they referred to as “the Divine Alloy” was a molten ore of some type from deep space. Whatever the unknown substance, he knew it was blended somehow with carbon-fiber laminates and aluminum and titanium, stem to stern on their ultratech ride. Likewise, cockpit and reactor housing were coated with the Divine Alloy. Which, believe it or not, made the superjet, code-named Lightning Bat, lighter than air, but able to withstand all the mass, thrust and gravity that Earth could pound mortal flesh with, once the shield was activated prior to takeoff. Moreover, their shield, sealed inside by the alloy, converted the cockpit into some vacuum of space, spared them G-force that should have crushed their insides to pulp. Rendered weightless by the Divine Alloy, they would have floated to the ceiling, pinned there, if not harnessed into their seats.
Holloran checked the instrument panel. All green, all systems go, he found. Comprised of intricate supercomputers, once the codes were punched in, he knew from two years of 24/7 training and virtual reality flight simulators that technology did roughly ninety percent of the work. From speed to navigation, down to calibrating the payload in the fuselage, Lightning Bat nearly had a mind all its own.
So why did that disturb him?
It was just about time, he knew, checking the digital readout to countdown, aware their audience was anxiously waiting back at Eagle Nebula, ready to monitor the test flight via camera link-up, once Lightning Bat descended and leveled out within a hundred miles of the area in question.
He was about to look over at Captain Thomas Sayers when he glimpsed something flash across the cockpit shield.
“Did you see that?”
“What the hell?” Holloran wasn’t sure what it was, but he would have sworn blue lightning had just streaked past Lightning Bat’s tapered nose. They weren’t low enough for any bolts of lightning, no storm systems to factor in, according to their Doppler radar. A shooting star, then? Meteor fragments?
Sayers repeated the question over the com link, Holloran staring up into the infinite black of the cosmos, when blue light jagged, but flashing this time, he believed, from inside the cockpit. Or did it shoot from the instrument panel? he wondered. After too many sorties in combat to count, having seen flying “things” he had more than once been warned by nameless spooks to never speak of, he wasn’t one to push panic buttons. But he felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck just the same, instinct warning him that something was either wrong or about to go south.
“Check all of our computer systems, Tom,” he told his copilot. “A to Z.”
“Roger, sir.”
“While you do that,” he said, wrapping one black-gloved hand around the side-arm controller, while tapping in the access code to the electro-optical navigational computer, “I’ll start dropping us down and prepping this puppy for its big audition.”
Holloran hoped he sounded confident, relatively gung-ho to the younger man, but he’d been dumped on the receiving end of too many SNAFUs to not trust his churning gut.
“PROTOSTAR EAGLE NEBULA Central Command to Lightning Bat Alpha. We are confirming your altitude and speed. Four thousand feet and holding steady, but you will have to decrease your speed to well below subsonic. Give us four hundred, Lightning Bat Alpha, and we can track you with visual confirmation.”
As the pneumatic doors hissed shut behind him, Gabriel Horn found he was just in time for the big show. The ground control station of Eagle Nebula wasn’t exactly the sprawling network of NASA’s command nerve center, he knew, but there was eyes-only supersophistication enough here to warrant all hands signing blood pacts for a black project so secret only a dozen men in Washington were aware of Lightning Bat’s existence. And, as head of Special Action Service, it was his duty to make damn certain all knowledge here either stayed under the compound’s roof or went to the grave with these people.
In that exclusive realm, however, there was critical mass, and building beyond the Eagle Nebula nest.
Easing up on their six, his rubber-soled combat boots padding silent as a ghost over sheer white concrete, Horn counted twelve aerospace brainiacs. The Chosen, he thought. Or the damned, depending on how well they held their tongues in check, though in his experience, considering at least three of the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, greed and envy—a couple of them, maybe more, would find a nasty and mysterious fatal accident in their futures. He could always count on the worst in human nature.
They appeared little more than shrouds at Horn’s first glance, white lab coats casting off a sort of glimmering hue as the fabric, woven out of nylon-silk, seemed to reflect light from the workstation with its running bank of monitors. Com links tying them all to Lightning Bat Alpha, their voices were a mixed babble to his ears as they relayed instructions to Major Holloran, confirming this and that.
Showtime.
Horn ignored the Air Force colonel boring daggers into the side of his head, focused instead on the cameras as they locked in on the arrowhead-shaped fighter jet. Briefed as thoroughly by Eagle Nebula’s commanding officer as he had expected, Horn knew the test flight was now monitored by four, long-range camera-fitted Black Hawks and two prototype Gulfstream SBJs. The supersonic executive jets, customized for military purposes, had the sleek Stealth hybrid covered, fore and aft, with the only variant being altitude at each end. To cover the fireworks, the Black Hawks were ranged around the compass, hovering now over the blast area.
All set for bombs away.
When the payloads were launched, gun cameras in the guidance systems of each nose, he knew, would track their flight paths, speeding bullets, near skimming U.S. government-owned prairie of North Dakota, until impact flashed obliteration then oblivion across the screens. Four payloads all told, he thought, what were technically cruise missiles, streaking at low altitude for the mock-ups, powered at subsonic speed to target by jet engines. Digital contour maps, born from radar and aerial and sat imagery, told the computer navigational systems in the warheads where to go.
Predestined supertech boogie-woogie.
Only these mothers of annihilation, code-named the Four Points, Horn knew, housed a series of thermal cluster bombs, eight to a package, two more inside each eight. As he did the math, recalling the computer graphics outlining the blast radius, he pictured smoking craters—or dozens of raging infernos—eating up something in the combined neighborhood of four to five square miles.
Sweet.
Welcome to the war of the future, he thought, aware that if this test run was successful, the empty wastelands of Nevada were next up, and in for a whole other galaxy of big bangs.
As Horn glimpsed Colonel Jeffreys moving his way, he pulled the pack of Camel unfiltered cigarettes from his pants pocket, stuck one on his lip. Clacking open his Zippo lighter and torching up, spitting tobacco flecks then dragging deep, he saw the head aerospace genius, Dr. Benjamin Keitel, glaring his way.
“Hey! Are you nuts? There’s no smoking in here!”
Horn washed a dragon’s spray of smoke toward Keitel, the man flapping his arms like a headless chicken, a couple more of his comrades jumping into the act. The geek was squawking out the virtues of nonsmoking to Jeffreys when Horn blew another cloud in his face and told the colonel, “Maybe you want to remind Dr. Frankenstein here who’s really in charge?” He ignored Keitel’s diatribe, adding, “Maybe you want to inform him I don’t exactly hand out pink slips at the end of the day for insubordination?”
“Get back to work,” Jeffreys told the aerospace engineer, who muttered something to himself then returned to his monitors.
Horn stared ahead, puffing, as the good colonel scowled him up and down. He could almost hear the man’s thoughts. Beyond the shoulder-holstered Beretta 92-F, if not for the white star emblem over his heart on his blacksuit, Jeffreys could pull rank.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t be so free in issuing implied threats like that, Mr. Orion,” the colonel said, layering disdain on his code name like a curse word.
“Well, you’re not me.”
“And I pray every night that blessing will continue.”
“Really?” Horn smoked, bobbed his head, got the message, hoping the day came when Jeffreys crossed into what he liked to call the Black Hole. “Fear not, Colonel. I’m not about to turn my quarters into a torture chamber,” he said, then, looking at the two female engineers, smiled and added, “or a rape room.”
“You son of a… Don’t you have some business to attend to, regarding an AWOL and, may I add, critical employee of this program?”
“We’re working on it. Something this sensitive, Colonel, it takes time,” Horn said as Jeffreys moved into his personal space.
“Time better served if you were, I would imagine, out there as point man in the hunt.”
Horn was searching for some threatening reply when he caught the change in tone from Keitel, questions hurled from his work bay, edged with concern as they were snapped into his com link. The SAS commander took a few steps forward, sensing a problem as he peered into the monitors where the executive jets mirrored Lightning Bat. The air became lanced, he felt, with rising panic as he saw what he believed were blue flames—or sparks?—leaping from the black ferrite-painted surface of the fighter jet, dancing next, nose to tail, there then gone. What the hell had just happened? he wondered, Kietel barking the same question to Major Holloran. Lightning Bat’s coating, he knew, was meant to absorb radar radiation, standard for any Stealth fighter to render it near invisible. Only he was privy there was more to the fighter jet’s body, from nose to swept-back Delta wings to tail, than earthly alloys.
Jeffreys banging out questions, Horn rolled up Keitel’s back. And clearly saw what looked like blue lightning shooting from the cockpit.
“Lightning Bat Alpha!” Keitel nearly shouted. “You are nowhere near the targets.”
“Why are the bomb bays opening?” Jeffreys demanded, checking his watch. “They’re way ahead of their scheduled launch!”
Horn heard Keitel gasp an oath as he saw the missiles lowered from their bay by the robotic arms. “Lightning Bat Alpha, respond!” he hollered, eyes darting from a digital readout to the play-by-play screens, snarling next as he pulled the com link from his ears, static crackling through the room like a string of firecrackers. “Colonel,” Keitel said, eyes bugged to white orbs, “all Four Points are recalibrating their targets!”
“What? How?” he demanded, flying up on Keitel’s rear. “Where?”
Horn was crowding Keitel and Jeffreys when he heard Holloran patch through, the panic in the major’s voice loud and clear through the static. “Ground Control, come in, dammit! We have a colossal and definite problem!”
Keitel looked about to vomit, sounding on the verge of hyperventilating as he tapped the keyboard on his computer. As a digital grid map of North Dakota flashed onto the monitor, Keitel paused, staring in horror at the blinking red dots. “Oh, God, no. This can’t be happening!”
“What?”
Keitel turned to Jeffreys, his face ashen, and told him, “All four missiles are recalibrated to strike civilian targets.”
“SWITCH TO MANUAL override!”
Targets Engaged flashing in red on the head up display from the holographic image illuminated by laser light on the inside of his visor, Holloran stifled the urge to smash his fist into the instrument panel.
“I can’t,” Sayers told him, his fingers flying over the keypad that would shut the targeting computer system down. “Dammit to hell, it’s locked up!”
Holloran swore under his breath. This was the next-to-ultimate nightmare scenario—four cruise missiles with cluster bombs set to launch and take out civilian targets—as he heard ground control telling him what he already knew.
The two of them were on their own.
Do something!
For all the four-digit Einstein IQ between them—there was nothing Eagle Nebula could do on its end. Short of blowing them out of the sky with a SAM—and he wouldn’t put it past them—there was one other option, he knew, waiting now for those three dreaded words.
Initiate Fatal Abort.
From the beginning, no ejector seats, no self-destruct button had been designed for Lightning Bat. There was good reason for that, he knew, fully accepting from the onset the twisted reasoning that IFA meant finding a vast and wide-open stretch of nothing and slamming Lightning Bat to Earth. A suicide ditching, a fireball spewing radiation, but hopefully nowhere close to a populated area. Or, at worst, only a few souls hopefully still wandering around outside Ground Zero, until Eagle Nebula could ferry in the hazmat platoons while soldiers quarantined God only knew how many square miles around the compass.
Holloran switched his HUD to the inside of the cockpit shield, wondering why some systems worked and others were—well, acting on their own, rebelling, as if they had willpower, defiantly commandeering the vessel. He grabbed the side-arm controller, hoping to God if he could throw the wings to a quick dip, forty-five degrees, port and starboard, the missiles might impact on what was empty prairie. Provided, of course, he got the timing right, but with everything else unraveling…
The stick was jammed!
And the blue lightning came back, leaping from the instrument panel, as Holloran found their own retractable cameras lower from each side of the hull’s underbelly amidships, zooming in on the two robotic arms lowering their payloads.
Targets Engaged freeze-framed on the shield.
Holloran cursed, rechecking the new calibrations, locked in still, he discovered, ground control screaming in his ear as the payloads fanned out into crossbars on their monitors.
Covering north, south, east and west, two on an arm, one frame hung a few meters lower than the other, and for the sake of what was now doomsday clearance. Just as they pulled the damn things up on their computers, he knew, they were held for the moment by titanium clamps, talons that would release them at any second as he watched the numbers fall to single digits on his readout.
Holloran stared at the vast prairie, looked to a long, sweeping horizon that seemed to run straight into the setting sun. They were still some fifty miles from the Badlands, Holloran certain, or rather praying, they were as empty as the lunar landscape he knew them to be.
“They’re going to fire, Major!”
And Holloran watched in helpless rage and disbelief as four cones of flame shot out beyond the stabilizing fins. The missiles released and went streaking away on four points of the compass.
GROUND CONTROL, Horn knew, was an obscene misnomer, and by galactic degrees in this case. There were no command guidance systems, at least for this initial outing, to depend on laser beams to pin down the targets to within a few meters, steer and keep the missiles locked in to impact. No passive system, either, meaning they homed in specifically on infrared radiation, as in heat-seeking the likes of auto or jet engines—or warm bodies. The Four Points were their own Alpha and Omega, relying solely on active systems, which was radar already engineered into the missiles, their guidance computers flying them on, unstoppable and untouchable, to vaporize the targets. Keitel was in the process of pointing this out to Colonel Jeffreys, they were little more than limp baggage on this end.
“Sweet Holy Virgin Mother of…”
“I’m afraid we are way past any hand of God, Colonel.”
“Don’t get smart on me, Keitel! Where are those missiles fixed to strike, mister?” the colonel rasped, clear to all now he realized he had become a master of the obvious by rattling off questions he already had the answers to from double-digit briefs.
The good Major Holloran seemingly all but forgotten for the moment, Horn watched as Keitel slammed in a series of numbers on one of his readouts, then hit his computer keyboard, informing the colonel he would bring up the targets on the wall. Looking past the workstation, Horn stared at the project’s emblem, thirty feet by twenty, painted on the stark white wall, dead ahead. The Eagle Nebula, he recalled, was a bright cluster of young evolving stars, but a massive gas formation, still condensing though not nearly thermonuclear enough to shine like Earth’s sun. Imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope only as recently as 1995, the dark nebulosity was more widely known among the deep space stargazers as “the Pillars of Creation.”
Keitel flashed the digital wall map of North Dakota over the emblem, framing four red circles, then enlarging the targets with a few taps on his keyboard.
With one ear, chain-smoking now that all the PC air was cleared, Horn listened to the colonel shout a litany of questions laced with orders, but he was more intent, fascinated, in fact, by the sight of the gun cameras framing in real-time the prairie sweeping below. Again, Jeffreys demanded to know the new targets, what might be the number of projected civilian casualties, railing next at Keitel to initiate some sort of abort action.
“It’s too late for that, Colonel! The damage is already done!”
“The hell you say. You people created it, do something to uncreate it! Or we are all in a world of hurt none of us can begin to even fathom!”
Horn smiled around his smoke, enjoying their sweat and panic, these pompous asses who often looked down their noses at him, a wolf among sheep who held the power of life and death. The snooty broads, too, often thinking they needed some R and R with a real man who could launch them into some deep space they couldn’t begin to get from their wonder toys. Maybe soon, figure the ladies might need a comforting shoulder to lay their distress on. Hope sprang eternal, and now on more fronts, he knew, than in his loins.
The gathered herd here didn’t know it, but he had his own plans.
He listened to Keitel’s ominous report. It looked like the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation was slated for one big bang, Jeffreys groaning as he heard the guesstimate for dead and maimed Native Americans. If there was any good news to be grabbed from this vision of hell, it appeared the westbound warhead would detonate on some rancher’s spread near the eastern leading edge of the Badlands. On that front, Jeffreys barked for numbers on family members, Horn now sensing the colonel was on the verge of fainting as the virtual reality of the body count kept on piling up in his churning desk-lifer mind, higher, he imagined with a puff and grin, than every piece of shredded document or deleted CDROM he was probably the first blast away from racing to. Another ranch on the Four Points’ feeding frenzy, but far larger in terms of cattle as imaged by a satellite parked over the state, was up for some more cluster dusting. Finally, there was a town, population twenty-six, but one of the geeks informed them at that hour the saloon was a big-ticket draw, Horn filing the man’s name away, wondering how he came by that information. When Horn caught the town’s name, another grin tugged at the corner of his lip.
Little Big Horn.
It was most definitely cover-the-assets time before some twenty-first-century scalping got in full swing, he knew, perfectly albeit horribly understandable, given that more than careers were at stake.
Talk about Black Holes.
Already, though, as he saw the watching eye on the Black Hawk closest to one of the civilian targets framing what was a row of small wooden buildings on a barren stretch of plain—assume Little Big Horn—the solution to the grim problems of the immediate future was shaping up, and in sweet accord with his own dreams. Funny, he thought, how a little patience and fortitude could find destiny smiling when a man decided to stand his ground.
As the Black Hawk closed to monitor the coming inferno, Jeffreys reached a level of near hysterics, ordering Keitel to fall to Plan IFA.
“You’re kidding, right? Unless you want to order Major Holloran to crash Lightning Bat out there, and with what’s going to happen if they do, do you really want to explain one more nightmare than we already have to deal with? You do know what’s on board that craft? You do know what fuels that jet?”
“I’m fully aware of the gravity of the situation, mister!” Jeffreys fumed, Horn again believing he could read the man’s tortured thoughts, what with all that gyrating body language and panic like neon signs in the eyes. Damage control, without question, time to place the SOS to DOD, the Pentagon, get the blame game cranked up, heating to thermonuclear critical mass, but in all directions other than his starched uniform.
Horn heard Holloran shouting from Keitel’s com link, the hooked-in intercom likewise now blaring the major’s voice. But he was locked on to the monitors, worked his spectating view between the gun camera and the Black Hawk relay.
And it happened, but far more spectacular than he could have imagined.
The gun camera winked out first as its cluster avalanche slammed into what Horn believed was the broadside of the first building in a Little Big Horn replay of that fateful and very gruesome day for the white man, but with total annihilation here for all present, indiscriminate of race, sex and age.
Complete and absolute obliteration, Horn saw, boiled like the smoke and fire of the Apocalypse, straight for the Black Hawk’s relay.
Just about all done, he knew, except for the cover-up.
Apparently, Horn found, Jeffreys had seen more than enough, the colonel wheeling, striding for the exit. A finger flick of his smoke, arcing it across the room, and he was marching hard for the intercept. Barking for Colonel No-Stones to halt, Horn grabbed him by the arm as the doors hissed open.
“Get your hands off me,” Jeffreys warned, wrenching his arm free.
“Listen to me, Colonel, and hear me but good. This fiasco, which, technically, falls under your responsibility, has a solution.”
“Solution?” He paused, the jaw going slack, the dark look betraying thoughts he knew what was about to be dumped in his lap. “No…”
“Yes. Now, you want to make some phone calls. I’ll give you a number you’re already aware of to someone who will, in no uncertain terms, inform you that what just happened lands square in my department.” It was Horn’s turn to breach personal space, as he put himself nose-to-nose with Jeffreys, and said, “The next words out of your mouth, Colonel, better be what I—what we all—know we need to hear, or, ‘sir,’ there could be more for you to dread than testifying before a bunch of fattened calves on the Hill. Oh. I see I have your full attention.”
“I’m listening.”
“Okay. Now, if it makes you happy, here’s what I propose to do….”
CHAPTER THREE
Aaron Kurtzman wondered what it would be like to walk again. Maybe it was the ten cups and counting of coffee he’d consumed, all that tar floating in enough sugar to wire a small army, electrically hyper-charging the caffeine-soaked thoughts off on grim tangents best left alone. Maybe it was working through the night at his computer station, by himself, for the most part, locked up in his head, most of the world sleeping, including some of his comrades and co-workers at Stony Man Farm, though he couldn’t say for certain. Intensely private, he was not a man to dump emotional baggage on others, wear suffering on his sleeve or to cast blame like a human storm raging about until the misery was spread sufficiently to the four corners of the globe, but the thoughts and feelings were there, just the same, and he couldn’t deny them.
At that predawn hour, staring at the monitor of his computer, he suddenly imagined himself out of the bowels of the new-and-improved Computer Room, removed from this trapping of time and space, free, unconfined, able-bodied. And there he was, up top, strolling the grounds, sans wheelchair, the barrel-chested, powerfully built titan he recalled from the ghosts of years past, that Big Ten champion heavyweight wrestler of the University of Michigan, a young lion. Breathing in the cool, crisp air of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, he imagined, sun on his bearded face, drinking in the lush greenery of the Blue Ridge Mountains, unshackled from the shell that imprisoned him. He pictured himself on a leisurely jaunt, down a wooded trail, maybe a dog by his side for company, he’d always had a fondness for German shepherds….
Enough, he told himself. No, it never hurt to dream, he thought, or to pray even for a miracle, as long as he didn’t get mired in self-pity, one of the worst of human failings, in his mind. Rather, if it be the will of some Divine Force beyond his finite understanding… Maybe someday, some other time, space or dimension, beyond the physical constraints of Earth, there would be a new and improved Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman.
Leave it at that.
There was work to do.
Head of the cyberteam, the think tank of Stony Man Farm’s Computer Room—the nerve center for intelligence gathering that kept the warrior machine rolling in the trenches of the world’s flashpoints, overt or black ops—was his realm. As such, Kurtzman went back to tapping in the next series of access codes on his keyboard.
They were alphanumeric codes and bypass encryption, what he tagged “circumventors,” the sum total faster and far simpler than any software program he’d previously created, though this one was designed for more than hacking. The FORTRAN, or formula translation, was part of his Infinity program, the server software managing and sifting through data from interconnected systems at light speed, until only the critical information he sought was framed on his screen. The client-servers were never the wiser he or one of his team had just broken through about three firewalls, stolen whatever buried cybertreasures, then rebuilt those walls after a lightning and untraceable bolt back to Stony Man mainframes. Whether they changed their passwords on a frequent basis or not, on the client-servers’ end, Infinity was the cryptographer’s answers to all mysteries of the cyberuniverse. Those faceless, nameless clients almost always came from any alphabet-soup intelligence agency within the United States and the world over, likewise any military or law-enforcement agency mainframes Kurtzman needed to access.
He wasn’t sure what it was about the news report he’d been watching in a corner of his monitor since last evening, using the remote on his keyboard to snap through the local and national cable networks, but something disturbed him about the images of reporters being ushered away from what was clearly a large area quarantined by armed soldiers. Initial reports cited some natural disaster, or so the reporters were told by military spokesmen, belonging to what branch, though, no one knew or was allowed to say. Speculation had body counts mounting by the hour, but these nameless spokesmen were denying any such rumors. He heard about meteor showers, or something or other unexplained that had fallen from space. Each new report sounded flimsier than the last. He smelled cover-up, a brittle conspiracy ready to unravel with a good swift kick.
And the Smoking Gun and Infinity programs were hard at work, he saw, alphanumeric codes tumbling in the top left-hand corner, as his labor of love raced out to those far reaches of the cyberuniverse to cross all pertinent I’s, dot the t’s of truth that not even the brightest award-winning journalist could uncover. Every shred of data from all U.S. intelligence agencies, black-inked or otherwise, was correlated with daily news reports, written or televised. Once any paper or station’s Web site dot.com was filed away into Infinity—Smoking Guns’s memory, the two programs became their own investigators. Between that and the sat imagery they burglarized from the satellite parked closest to the area in question—AIQ—in this instance North Dakota, and classified documents regarding military black ops and their installations within the state, Infinity did virtually all of the work for him. At the moment he was left with more questions than answers, but felt something far beyond space phenomenon had turned four separate areas in southwest North Dakota into what appeared to him on the imagery as smoking craters his trained eyed told him were the result of aerial strafing.
He was wondering how far and how to pursue it, when he became aware his partner at this early morning hour had cranked up his CD to that kind of fuzzy contortion blasting out of his headphones that should have rendered Akira Tokaido deaf.
Kurtzman wheeled sideways, Tokaido bebopping his head in rhythm to the tune. He held his arms out, caught his teammate’s eye, and said in a loud voice, “What the hell, huh?”
Akira, still bopping, looked at Kurtzman’s mouth and said, “I can hear you just fine. You said, ‘What the hell, huh?’”
“Okay, smart-ass. Do you think you can get to work while you’re getting all wet in the eyes over that blaring duet?”
Still bopping along, Tokaido’s fingers began flying over his keyboard. Kurtzman saw his monitor split into two screens. “What am I looking at, Akira?”
Two more images crowded the number on Kurtzman’s monitor to four.
Tokaido killed his CD. “Clockwise, top to bottom. A major Russian weapons factory in the Pamir Range of Tajikistan, the usual we know about it, they know we know, and the beat goes on. We check it with some of our own sources, I’m sure they’d verify there’s more going on under the roof than your basic WMD alchemy, the floating rumor out of spookdom’s black hole being they’re engineering superweapons of the future. Next, for your viewing pleasure, what I believe—and since the DOD, NSA and Pentagon files I accessed had so many black deletions regarding this base I discovered at great length tagged as Eagle Nebula, thus you can safely assume black project—is our version of the Pamir weapons factory. Is East meeting West, both sides dreaming up the future together regarding superweapons? Don’t know, but I think it’s worth looking into, in this humble whiz child’s often overlooked opinion.”
Kurtzman made a face. “Cut the crap or I’ll take away your CDs.”
Tokaido paused, considering something, then went on, “Whatever they’ve engineered inside the walls of Eagle Nebula, however, is what I think either crashed or burned up what Infinity calculates is roughly two square miles and then some of scorched earth that makes the Badlands look arable.”
“And you know this, how?”
Kurtzman watched as Tokaido further enhanced the imagery and he saw what his partner was referring to.
“Where there’s smoke, Bear… Now, the four areas the media is being pumped by the military to claim were hit by something from outer space are actually the results of cluster bombing. I compared those images through Infinity’s war-gaming, and they jibe. Blast radius, destruction pattern, spiral all the way down to the intensity of the fires, which indicate thermite payloads were used. These AIQs, I have confirmed, were civilian targets. From the body count, or what you can make out on your screen, gives you an idea of how nasty this could get if it’s going to involve a cover-up.”
Kurtzman weighed the enormity of what he heard then saw, tallied at least a dozen bodies, or what looked like the remains of such, on one of the AIQs. “A test run, you’re telling me, that went awry?”
“I would hope it wasn’t done on purpose.”
Kurtzman flashed Tokaido a scowl. He began chewing over the current mission of Phoenix Force, which was, more or less, still on the drawing board. At present, they were bivouacked at the American air base in Incirlik, Turkey, while the cyberteam at the Farm kept digging for clues about rumored supertech weapons being smuggled to Iranian extremists, somewhere along the Iraqi border, further in the process of attempting to put together pedigrees and place names to the faces of bad guys in question from their ultratech lair.
Kurtzman began to suspect he saw a pattern emerge, some connection, or so he believed Tokaido alluded to, between the death factory in Tajikistan and weapons-hungry jihadists. Was there more? Such as connecting the dots somehow to this Eagle Nebula black project? It wouldn’t be the first time, he knew, someone on the home team had sold out to the other side. Able Team was standing down, Kurtzman checking the digital clock at the bottom of his monitor, aware Hal Brognola, the man who headed the Sensitive Operations Group, would be arriving at his office at the Justice Department shortly. He needed to run his suspicions past the big Fed.
“There’s more, Bear, only I’m not sure how this fits, if it does…only…well, it’s just a feeling,” Tokaido said, and Kurtzman watched as four more sat images flashed onto his monitor, blurring the previous pics. He heard Tokaido mention the three names of former Soviet republics, then told him the last image was shot by NASA. “Remember that story CNN ran a few years back about a purported NORAD quarantine of an area in the Colorado Rockies that was supposedly hit by some type of…well, what was described by an eyewitness as ‘alien space matter.’”
Kurtzman knew he was looking at a full-blown military quarantine in each of the AIQs, complete with soldiers, choppers, makeshift work areas of equipment he couldn’t define, but manned by spacesuits. All told, he knew it spelled disaster area, civilians Keep Out, perhaps at the risk of jail time or worse.
“I do,” he told Tokaido. “It ran one time, as I recall.”
“NASA officially reported the Colorado incident as the result of a meteor shower. But ask yourself when was the last time you saw a hazmat detail gathered around a meteor, or stone fragments thereof, and with what appear to be radiation detectors?”
“And something tells me you got hold of classified documents that state otherwise.”
“Off the public radar screen as ‘unexplained extraterrestrial ore of unknown origin and substance.’ And that eyewitness?”
“I bet you’re about to tell me he vanished off the face of the earth.”
“There was one brief follow-up story, but the star witness was nowhere to be found.”
“Next you’re going to tell me NORAD, or whoever this Eagle Nebula, has iced down the bodies of little gray men with grasshopper-shaped heads and huge black eyes.”
“They’re actually a sort of off-white, but with a grayish hue. Hey, stranger things have happened, Bear, when it comes to the military wanting to keep unexplained phenomenon, whatever the truth and the mystery, all to themselves.”
No truer words, Kurtzman thought, could his cyber buddy have spoken. He reached for the intercom to start sounding off his suspicions.
CAMERON DECKER was sure he was dead, about to meet his Maker as he believed he opened his eyes, but was forced to clamp them shut when the blinding white light stabbed him clear through the brain, a lancing fire. No, this wasn’t heaven, he was in way too much pain for any eternal bliss, his body throbbing with knifing twists, scalp to feet. Gingerly he touched the side of his head, just to be sure he was, indeed, still on earth, probed the bandages wound around his skull. Why did he feel as if he was floating on air, though, his head like a balloon set to burst, both sensations bringing on the nausea? The last moment he remembered was…
A vision of hell on Earth, to say the least.
He saw himself being hurled through the air, far away from his ranch house, fractured pictures of recall slowly groping their way together. One minute, he had been dragged from the kitchen where he was preparing dinner for his bed-ridden wife, alarmed by the shrill barking of Custer. Even in the twenty-first century cattle rustlers were still alive and on the prowl for prime heads of choice beef, and it wouldn’t have been the first time some thieves had come through his spread and loaded up a trailer. The Winchester 30.06 in hand as he’d shucked on the sheepskin coat, grumbling his way out the back door, his normally stoic German shepherd dog going berserk, straining to break free of his chain. Spooked by what, he couldn’t tell, but his cattle were agitated as hell, his horses snorting from the barn, all in a lather. He’d heard that animals had some sixth sense, though, a built-in radar that warned them of mass atmospheric disturbances, and it wouldn’t be the first time that beastly extrasensory perception had foretold him of a sudden thunderstorm. It all looked like another red sundown over the prairie from where he stood, but there was “something” in the air. He could feel it. Something he thought he heard like a whistle, or those incoming rounds he remembered from Korea, the cattle stomping around the pen in a fury next as he walked…
There was an explosion, out of nowhere, or rather, a series of blasts that sounded as one, but with each earsplitting trumpet of thunder there was no telling as his senses were shattered. Before he could fully assess the moment, glimpsing in horror his home and his parents’ home of eighty-five years being uprooted and blown away like so much fertilizer in a twister, he was sailing, dumped, last he remembered, facedown inside the cattle pen.
Now…
He thought he was going to puke, groaning, as he dared to open his eyes. He was getting his bearings, found himself dressed in a white smock like a hospital gown, squinting into the shroud of white light that seemed supernatural in a way he could only describe as some waiting room—Purgatory perhaps?—between Heaven and Hell, when a voice called from the glow, “Mr. Decker? Can you hear me?”
A hard search, adjusting his vision, and he spotted a lean shape in black, straight ahead. The figure was blowing smoke through the light, sunglasses so black and fat they looked more like a visor. Between the combat boots and the pistol in shoulder holster, any hopeful notion the man was a doctor evaporated. Had he landed, though, in a hospital? The light alone was spooky enough, but there seemed to be no walls surrounding him, as if he were in some vast empty space, with the white shroud, bright as the sun, going on forever. Calling him? he wondered, wishing he didn’t feel so sick to his stomach, that feeling of being disembodied chilling him to the bone, warping his senses.
“Who are you? Where am I?”
“You can call me Mr. Orion. And you are in protective custody for the time being.”
“Protective…what the hell is going on? What happened to my ranch?” He tried to stand, but rubber legs folded, collapsing him back into his seat. Groaning, the room spinning, he said, “What’s wrong with me? What have you done to me…”
“Minor burns from the incident, a few cuts and contusions, Mr. Decker. We gave you a shot of morphine for the pain, patched you all up… You’ll be good as new in a few days. As for your ranch and all your cattle and horses—they are no longer standing.”
He felt his stomach roll over. “And my wife?”
“Your wife, Allison, Mr. Decker, was dying of breast cancer and emphysema. We’ll, uh, just call the incident where she is concerned a blessing in disguise. No, belay that. You being a devout church-goer and all, think of her passing as simply an act of God, that she now rests in eternal peace.”
Anger cleared some of the sludge away, this Orion character slamming his nose with one smoke bomb after another, speaking of his wife’s death as if it was nothing more than some near-miss highway crash he ought to be making the sign of the cross over. “Why, you rotten… I want to know what happened and exactly who you are, mister, or I swear…”
“Relax, Mr. Decker. Do you really need to bring on number three heart attack?”
Decker froze, the man reciting more of his medical history, with doctors’ names, dates of operations, down to length of each recuperation. Was that a smile? he wondered, this Orion talking next about his two sons, matter-of-fact, how they had turned their backs on what they called Nowhere, U.S.A., riding off to chase the wind of whatever their dreams in the big cities of Chicago and New York. Putting him in his place, playing mind games. But how did he know so much?
“I’m here to help, Mr. Decker, but only if you wish to help yourself. First of all, let us be clear, what happened to your ranch was the result of a meteor shower.”
“That wasn’t no rock falling from the sky that leveled my ranch and killed my wife. Those were explosions. I’m guessin’ some sort of missile or rocket.”
“As you might well believe that’s what you think you saw, being as you were a decorated veteran of the Korean War, having seen more than your rightful share of combat. And I salute you for your service to the country, sir.”
“Stick all that noise, and I don’t need to think about nothin’. I know what I saw. I’m bettin’ you’re military, work for the government. Something screwed up with you people, and now you want me to shut my mouth about what I saw. Let me tell you, friend, out here, we may be just dumb cowboys to you people, but I got no love for your Big Brother.”
And the faceless smoker knew all about that, too, the threats of bank foreclosures on his property, the audits and subsequent liens that drove him into bankruptcy, the suits from Washington offering to buy up his land, claiming they could cut him a break on what he owed if he grabbed the brass ring of his last stand.
“You seem to know an awful lot about me,” Decker snapped. “Whether or not much of this is a matter of public record, you don’t understand me at all.”
Another wave of smoke and Orion said, “No, it’s you who don’t understand, sir. Here it is, and this is a onetime, nonnegotiable offer. Between property value, including livestock, what would be your projected future earnings for the next five years and your wife’s insurance policy, we are prepared to write you a check in the amount of three million dollars, nontraceable, nontaxable funds. Death certificates have already been made out for both your wife and yourself, only you, sir, get to relocate, all expenses paid, until you get set up in someplace far away from North Dakota. Washington, all your medical bills and those banks you so detest? Your debt is erased, officially you become the man who was never born. Think about it. New name. New identity. You could be sitting on a beach in Hawaii, sipping mai tais and playing with the local hula-hoop talent by tomorrow. If I were you…”
“You ain’t. No deal. I’m walkin’ outta here and goin’ straight to the county sheriff.”
“Is that your final answer, Mr. Decker?”
“First and last.”
“Suit yourself.”
It was too easy, Decker’s instinct stirring, the old combat senses flaring to life, telling him something was wrong. He saw the glowing tip of the cigarette fall to the floor, eyes up, but the faceless Orion was gone, vanished, as if the light had swallowed him up. No sound of any door opening or closing to betray an exit, he was rising when he heard the electronic whir, looked up, thought he saw the ceiling part. A black hole yawning into view, barely perceptible as Decker squinted into the light, he heard machinery grinding to life, from some point beyond the white halo, deep in the dark void. If he didn’t know better, it sounded like a threshing machine was cranking to life. What the…
Warning bells clanged in a brain muddied by dope. He cursed whoever’d shot him up, limbs unwilling to respond to a rising sense of fear when the noise shrilled into what he was now certain was a wood chipper, and a damn big one, unless he missed his guess. He ventured a step forward, trying to get his sea legs, when the first gust of wind blasted around him like the gathering onslaught of a twister ready to rip across the prairie. Fear began edging toward terror, thoughts racing, as the wind strengthened, suctioned up and through the tunnel in the ceiling. What was happening became inconceivable, a nightmare he was sure, but here he was—all alone, no one knew he was even still alive, that he was dealing with the almighty hand of Big Brother who could do whatever he wanted and get away.
The cigarette was sucked up, flying past his eyes, the invisible force of a great vacuum swirling around him now, tugging arms and legs. The chair went next, shooting into the black hole, followed a split second later by a sort of screeching metallic grind.
And it dawned on him what was about to happen, horror setting in, the unholy racket of machinery torqued up to new decibels, spiking his ears, as he heard his cry being swept away into the white light. He tried to forge ahead, but the wind seemed to root him to the floor, the ground beneath like magnets daring him to walk, and far worse than any mud he’d ever slogged through more than half a century ago. The scream was on the tip of his tongue, but he knew the sound of terror would be lost to all but himself, if even that, as he was sheared naked by the cyclone, the flesh on his face feeling wrenched up, as though it was being blasted off bone, the twister sucking the air out of his lungs.
Oh, God, no! he heard his mind roar as he was lifted off his feet, levitating for a moment before the invisible strings began jerking with renewed violent force.
And he burst a silent scream into the wind, arms wrenched above his head, as he rose toward the black hole.
IT WAS A MOMENT, about as rare as a Nellie sighting in Loch Ness, Hal Brognola considered when he felt himself about to be scourged by depression. Or was it something else, he wondered, and far more insidious as he weighed the few facts as he knew them? Self-doubt? That what he did perhaps, at best, only pounded a small dent toward making the free world a better, safer place? That the only real solution, he morbidly thought, was kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out?
And dismissed that as soon as the first whisper of fatalistic pessimism filtered into his head. No way could he look himself in the mirror if he lived without principles, he knew, briefly angry with himself for even entertaining such notions. To doubt his duty, first of all, would be tantamount to death. And to undercut the fact there were good people everywhere—who only wished to live in peace and harmony, raise families, do whatever was right, whatever it took, no matter how tempting it was to turn their backs and go through the easy and wide-open gates of hell—was the first step toward becoming what he’d spent his life fighting.
Troubled, nonetheless, sifting through grim thoughts, the Man from Justice stole another few seconds, staring out the window as the Bell JetRanger swept over the Blue Ridge Mountains. When was the last time, he wondered, he had actually enjoyed the pristine view of those forested slopes, free to observe the rising sun spread the arrival of a new day, free to relax, not burdened by the weight of the nation’s security?
He couldn’t remember, and maybe it didn’t matter. By nature or destiny—and he wasn’t sure where the line blurred—he drove himself with the task at hand as hard as the day was long, grimly aware the wicked did not rest in his world. Beyond that, he was committed to the duty of defending America against its sworn enemies, from within and beyond its borders. On that score, it was an endless battlefront, he knew, forever expanding, as far as he was concerned, another roster of monsters always rising up to replace the evil dead, and often before the smoke cleared enough to see the next blood horizon. Or to pin down the next threat to God only knew how many innocents.
And it was a changing world out there, he reflected, evolving darker and more sinister by the day. Weapons of mass destruction. Suicide bombers. Suitcase nukes. Whole nations harboring, training and financing the murder of innocents. Supposed NATO allies, France and Germany, for example, doing business in the billions of dollars in the shadows with a former tyrant who used murder and torture and rape as an entertaining pastime. Forget any goodwill toward all men, there were mornings, like now, he wondered if the whole world was just going straight to hell.
He stood and went to the scanning console set on the small teakwood table. It was roughly the size of a notebook computer, but with attached fax and what looked like a microscope, Brognola finding his access code had been relayed to the Farm’s Computer Room, confirmed and framed in white on the monitor. Initiate Phase Two flashed, and he took a seat. IPT, he knew, was part of a trial run to upgrade security, establish identity one hundred percent, thus save time and keep the blacksuits from rolling out of the main building, or find the antiaircraft battery painting incoming aircraft.
The retinal scan was first, Brognola placing his right socket against the scope’s eye, depressing the send button, grateful high-tech refinements didn’t produce any flash that would leave him squinting. Right thumb rolled over the ink pad, then placed on standard-size, white bond paper, he punched in the numbers for the secure line, faxed it to Kurtzman. Tapping in a series of numbers to activate the system’s scrambler—Go illuminated in green on the monitor’s readout—he spoke into the miniature voice box.
“This is Alpha One to Omega Base Home. Confirm Voice Test Analysis. All tests initiated, awaiting your confirmation. Out.”
While he waited, Brognola eased back in the bolted-down leather swivel chair. There was a gathering tempest out there, and only direct actionable response, he knew, would hold back the barbarians before they tore down the walls of civilization.
FORMER DELTA FORCE Colonel Joshua Langdon took the smaller of black ferrite-painted aluminum steamer trunks by the nylon strap handle as soon as the ninety-foot-long inflatable boat scraped sand. Known to his men and the attached three-commando unit calling itself Tiger Ops as Commander X, he allowed the others to jump over the side first, splash down in ankle-deep, blue-green water. Five altogether, two commandos each to a steamer trunk the size of a body bag, the odd man out he knew as Capricorn Alpha Galaxy Leader, hands empty except for an HK MP-5 subgun, and they were on the beach, seconds flat, hauling the high-tech loads—one of his troops likewise burdened with a hundred-pounds-plus of folded camo netting on his back—deeper into the lush tropical greenery. A GPS module in the hands of his one of his commandos, steering them down a path to erect their base predetermined by satellite shoots, he followed Capricorn Alpha Galaxy Leader to shore.
Home sweet home, at least for the immediate future.
A quick search of the beach, black wraparound sunglasses shielding eyes from sunlight that beat off the emerald-green waters and white sand like imagined glowing radiation, and the ex-Delta colonel found himself alone with the Tiger Ops leader. Setting the trunk down, shucking the slung HK subgun higher up his shoulder, Commander X checked the screen on his handheld heat-seeker. Sweeping the perimeter, he found six ghosts in human shape, with much smaller thermal images flashing across the screen. He took a moment, listening to the gentle lap of waves on the beachhead, the caws of wild birds from some point inside the ringing walls of greenery on the coral island roughly the size of a city block.
“Almost paradise, huh? Nothing personal, you understand, but it kind of makes me wish I’d brought along my own little Eve.”
Commander X glanced at the lean figure in tiger-striped camous, the Tiger Ops leader working on a smoke, clearly not all that inclined to do much more than profile, opting to leave the grunt work to others, while drinking in this Eden and maybe picture romping naked through the lagoon with his own vision of the mother of mankind. Something about the leader troubled Langdon, but he couldn’t pin it down. The guy had shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair and a nappy beard as opposed to his own buzz cut, clean mug. Langdon noted the military bearing, decided there was more mercenary—or buccaneer, in this instance—than a current or ex-serviceman or intelligence operative performing his duty for country and God. Likewise, it was unclear who the Tiger Ops leader pledged allegiance to, even why he’d been assigned to assist him on what was a satellite relay station somewhere in the Maldive Islands.
Langdon saw his two men hustling down the beach to retrieve the rest of the steamer trunks. As they splashed down, he turned, looked at the anchored Interceptor Gunboat. The skipper, he knew, was one of his people, and the inshore patrol craft, on loan, presumably from the CIA station chief in India, would stay put until he green-lighted the man to pull away for surveillance duty. Langdon ran an approving look, stem to stern of their gunboat ride. Two Deutz MWM diesel engines, top speed of 25 knots, a range of 600 nautical miles, with a forward 12.7 mm machine gun, and he had no doubt about the ability of his troops manning the ship to fend off trouble, alert them to any incoming surprises. They worked for the same people, he knew, his men having been culled from various special forces for both their proved martial skills and high-tech talent, signing the standard “training” contracts that swore them to a lifetime of secrecy. Halfway around the world from Omega Base, they would be able to reach the Farm as if they were but a few yards away, once the fiberoptic comm station was set up. As for his Tiger Ops comrades…
Well, in this age of the media and politically stamped “new war on terrorism,” every intelligence, law-enforcement agency and military arm wanted to muscle itself in for a piece of the action. Langdon, like the people he represented, wasn’t in it for money or the glory. Truth was, he—like anyone who worked in the shadows for the Farm—was nowhere to be found on any official record.
He stole another moment, staring off into the vast Indian Ocean, getting his bearings. They had departed from Cape Comoros on the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent, pushing out, south by southwest, where the Lakshadweep Sea flowed into the Indian Ocean. The Maldives were comprised of a chain of twenty-six atolls of 1190 islands, only 200 of which were inhabited, and none of which rose more than ten feet off the water. Most of the islands sat, more or less, on the equator, and for this stint plenty of bottled water was required to get them through the long, hot days. Call their position somewhere in the vicinity of 400 miles due west of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
“Shall we get to work, Commander?”
Langdon heard the soft whine of battery-powered drills working on tent pegs. Hoping the man was inclined to do more than catch a tan and daydream about some island girl, Langdon skipped the remark as the Tiger Ops leader turned and strolled away, slinging his HK around his shoulder to free his hands for another cigarette.
ROBERT FIRE CLOUD was angry and scared.
For what he guessed was ten hours or more now, he had been watching them from a safe distance. Hidden in a gully in the hills north of what used to be his home, and the white eyes government-built-and-paid-for houses of his neighbors, each time one of the black helicopters—three in all for the moment—lifted off and swept the prairie near his roost, he took cover deeper in his hole. Who they were, he didn’t know, but assumed they were white eyes soldiers, between the choppers, the submachine guns, black uniforms and matching helmets.
What he knew was that four homes had been blown off the face of the earth. Only now were the fires of brilliant white beginning to lose their anger and intense glow. When the wind blew his way, he caught the sickly sweet whiff of charred flesh, the memory of neighbors and friends burning deep his anger each time his nose filled with the stink. His home, little more than a two-room shack, may be just a glowing cinder, but he was thankful he lived alone.
His neighbors hadn’t been so blessed.
Granted, the edge of hot anger had dulled some during the course of the past few hours, after the few first bodies had been dug out of the smoldering piles by men in spacesuits, dumped in black rubber bags. Now that it was clear some horrific accident had befallen Crazy Horse Lane, he wasn’t sure how to proceed, where to run, who to go to for help. The county sheriff, John Mad Bull, would be passed out, too hung over to do anything even if he woke him at that hour.
So he watched the spacesuits use long metal poles to dig through more rubble, extracting bodies or what was left of men, women and children who shared this lonely stretch of the Berthold Reservation. His closest neighbors were six to eight miles in any direction, but surely, he thought, they had heard the tremendous series of explosions? Or had the same fate befallen them?
Again, he considered his own good fortune, felt a flush of shame on his cheeks, thinking himself lucky as opposed to the dead. If not for his nightly ritual at the Crazy Horse saloon…
He was stone-cold sober now, but began thinking about the bottle of Wild Turkey under the seat of his pickup, a few down the hatch to get his nerves and the shakes under control. The longer he watched them, he wondered if the white eyes soldiers spotted him, would he use the G-3 assault rifle, bought at a gun show and converted to fully automatic, stand his ground, go down in some blaze of glory. After all, he thought, he was believed to be direct blood to Crazy Horse. Only the white eyes had him outnumbered fifty or more to one. A 40-round detachable box magazine would hardly take down more than a few, considering he saw gunships armed with machine guns in their doorways.
He had to do something, even if it was wrong.
One of the gunships made the decision for him, as it lifted off, veering in his direction. As if it knew he had been there all along.
He stood, hunched, and worked his way down the gully, as fast as limbs swollen with the sludge of liquor would allow. Beyond his heart thundering in his ears, the assault rifle growing heavy in hands filling with the running sweat of the night’s drinking, he heard the insect bleat of chopper blades bearing down from behind. After what he’d seen, what was to stop these men from taking him prisoner, or killing him? Or was he being paranoid? He didn’t know, wasn’t about to freeze where he stood. They were still white eyes with guns.
Stumbling out of the gully, he hit level ground, running for his Chevy pickup. Out of nowhere, the light flared, fear seizing him as he was framed in the white umbrella, heard a voice boom from a loudspeaker, “You there! Halt now and throw down your weapon!”
The command was delivered, not only with anger, he thought, but with menace. He was turning, snarling as the light stabbed him in the eyes, to split a brain throbbing from exertion, when he became aware he was lifting his assault rifle.
Then the machine gun roared through the light. He felt numb flesh absorb the first few rounds, the impact jerking him halfway around before hot emotion and the desire to die standing on his feet seized him. Rage that these white eyes soldiers would slaughter him without further warning erupted what he hoped was his best war cry. He held back on the G-3’s trigger as the big gun thundered, chopping up his flesh, spraying hot blood on his face. He was dead on his feet, he knew, seconds from floating away to the next world, but Robert Fire Cloud only hoped his death and whatever had happened to his neighbors would be avenged.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hal Brognola watched the War Room’s wall monitor as Aaron Kurtzman took the remote and clicked on the bearded, turbaned face of what he suspected was the bad guy of the month.
“The Sign of God, Rafiq Namak…” Kurtzman began.
“The what?” Brognola exhorted.
“That’s what Ayatollah means, sign of God. Only this cleric has anointed himself Grand Ayatollah, and it appears he’s looking to muscle out all the competition, from drug and arms traffickers to rival mullahs, all the way to the president of Iran, who, as far as moderates go in that part of the world, is about as rational as they come.”
“Meaning, can we say, ‘he wants to be chummy with Uncle Sam,’” Brognola interjected.
“Up to a point, but only as long as he can keep the country from being overrun by Pizza Huts, rap music, satellite television that pipes in western entertainment while kissing up to the hardliners behind the scenes. The president of Iran, as we all know, isn’t the real power that keeps either the oil pumping or the radicals frothing at the mouth and chanting ‘Death to America.’ He’s a puppet, in truth, toeing the line between bringing his country into the twenty-first century and appeasing the radical clerics.
“According to our CIA intelligence skims, there’s been another in a long line of internal power struggles between rival clerics for the choice seat at the head of the extremist table. Right now, it looks like Namak has fairly fitted himself to wear that crown. He has his own and not-so-small army of radicals, including some of the most dangerous and vicious intelligence officers, ex-SAVAK thugs, a mass following of politically indoctrinated Revolutionary Guards who do his bidding, which is pretty much offing the competition or who are so cruel and barbaric they could have given Saddam’s sons a few lessons in torture. He’s done pretty good for himself, if you factor in his last known five or so years of opium and heroin proceeds coming across the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, cutting himself in a for a nice chunk of change for safe passage and warehousing. Then there’s his version of madrassas, about twenty schools, our intel cites, only far more radical than anything in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Egypt, and which he runs across Iran in every corner, with hand-picked mullahs who give new meaning to the word extreme. Pretty much the usual brainwashing of angry impoverished youth being groomed for future martyrdom, only these students, some as young as seven or eight, are being shipped out to blow themselves up wherever Namak aims his ‘kill all Americans’ automatons.
“Considering he was born with a silver spoon shoved down his vitriolic anti-West yap—the son of a father whose father brokered himself a sweet deal during the early Anglo-Iranian Oil Company days—Rafiq was educated in Europe where he apparently forgot all about the strict tenets of Shi’a Islam, his reputation being one of a free-spending, drug-using playboy, who, so the rumor goes, had some peculiar tastes in sexual games. Word from spook city is he spent a few years in the late eighties and early nineties ingratiating himself to the CIA, the NSA, DIA and whoever else might help him climb the ladder of success while he lies, backstabs, generally plays both ends against the middle in a high-wire act that apparently left a whole lot of wreckage—spell dead American intelligence operatives.”
“Meaning,” Brognola said, “his former friends are now his enemies.”
“Or may still be his pals, if what is rumored churning out of the spook mill pans out and he’s handing out the ready cash to the buzzards of the day. What he wants, publicly stated, is one united Middle East under Shiite control, and he’s starting with Iraq, lighting the powder keg of resistance. Beyond that, engineering mass killing sprees, who knows what his end game really is? He’s made plenty of enemies, no question, there have been several assassination attempts, but he seems blessed by that weird dark light that always sees his ilk live to savage another day. He uses body doubles to keep trigger-happy rivals guessing, never known to be in the same place for very long. Sometimes you see him in robe and turban when he makes an appearance before the adoring mobs. Other times a three-piece suit, or he sports tiger-striped camous when he ventures into the desert to check out one of his three known training camps for the youngbloods. There are claims by his followers that he can see the future.”
“Do tell.”
Kurtzman grunted. “Apparently he’s not bashful when it comes to touting himself an oracle of Mohammed.”
“I’ll venture a wild guess here, but his psychic powers predict terrorist attacks.”
“He’s been right on the money, at least the where and how of it,” Kurtzman said, cocking a grin in Brognola’s direction. “The body counts are a little off, but with each attack, whether in Israel or his favorite killing ground, Iraq, the crowds go wild in Tehran. Lately he’s been hitting the airwaves over there with predictions of total annihilation for the Great Satan, a ‘conflagration from God that will wipe America off the face of the earth in a storm of fire the world will never forget.’”
“Blowing smoke?”
Kurtzman shrugged. “Hard to tell. How far along Iran’s reprocessing plants are to make weapons-grade plutonium and uranium, we don’t know, but we know of at least two factories of WMD that are well on their way, and believed to be loosely controlled by an influx of Namak cash. We do know that he calls his organization of fighters the Army of Armageddon, and with radical ties all the way to Lebanon where, it’s believed, he wants to establish a power base. And, yes, in order to jumpstart his war of annihilation, presumably starting with Israel while he torches what he can in Iraq.”
Brognola gnawed on his cigar, perused the intel packet Barbara Price had handed him earlier. During the brief pause, Brognola noticed that the Stony Man Mission Controller seemed unusually quiet, but the lady was a pro, no problem listening with one ear to the brief while she scanned the monitor of her battery-powered laptop, combing through the grim facts as he’d received them late last night from his nameless source in Shadowland. Likewise, Kurtzman had his own notebook computer, having already downloaded the CDROM to his hard drive, hooking the modem that would allow him to frame pertinent data direct from both computers to the wall monitor.
“This,” Kurtzman said, clicking the screen to frame what looked like a typical artillery shell, “is SPLAT. Special Purpose Laser Anti-Tank.”
Brognola waited as Kurtzman broke the screen into four quads. He saw a tracked vehicle, a UAV that looked suspiciously like a CIA Predator, and some sort of delivery system, complete with radar screen, the background appearing to be a stone hovel.
“During a U.S. special ops raid on a stronghold believed used by Namak along the Iranian-Iraqi border, these were seized, along with blueprints and instructions strongly suspected of having their origins somewhere far outside the Mideast realm.”
“Any ideas on who’s looking to help pile up the body count with SPLAT?”
Kurtzman sipped from his mug, frowning. “There was some talk, the French were mentioned, but we think it’s a smoke screen to deflect blame. Since France was dumped in the crapper on oil contracts in Iraq, however, they have been schmoozing the Iranians. I’m not one to jump on the PC bandwagon, so I don’t mind saying they’re a sneaky, backstabbing lot, with a whole lot to hide in some shady dealings with Saddam, but I don’t think they have the balls to start dumping off ordnance that could be used against Coalition Forces in Iraq, though they most likely have this technology. That aside, there are no markings, serial numbers and such that we know of on the ordnance, which leaves suspicion enough to go around it could be Germans, North Koreans or Russians…”
“Or someone on our team.”
“It’s happened before, as we all sadly know. Now, as for SPLAT, it’s the next step in laser-guided artillery and its sister version for short and intermediate range missiles. Laser guidance has been tried in the past where field artillery is concerned, but there’s a few refinements on SPLAT. Thermal, or heat-seeking guidance systems have been upgraded, for one, the use of sophisticated super microchips installed in computer systems, developed, in part, from the U.S. Navy’s SidewinderAIM-9D. You can see the tracked vehicle with eight launch rails, I’m told twelve to twenty more shells, or short-range missiles, can be stored in ready-access pallets. As for the shells, they range anywhere from 85 mm to 155 mm. On the short-range or intermediate missile range…”
“I bet you’re going to tell me they can be fitted with chemical or biological warheads. Or tactical nukes.”
“Not only that, but they can, ostensibly, hit their target down to within a few meters. Gunner in turret mount, he aims the projectile using GPS. The tracking signal processor feeds into the computer optic link using Global Positioning Satellite. Point and fire.”
“And the package can be guided in by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.”
“Yes. All things considered, Hal,” Kurtzman said, “it’s a quantum leap in laser-guided field artillery, vastly improved for bad weather and night operations.”
“Range?”
“Unknown. But, say for the sake of argument, you go with intermediate-range missiles, using this delivery system and rocket fuel…”
“You could hit Tel Aviv.”
“With your eyes closed.”
Brognola grunted around his cigar. “And we’re thinking Namak is beefing up his Army of Armageddon with SPLAT?”
“And/or arming foreign fighters across the border in Iraq,” Kurtzman said. “And if he has UAVs at his disposal to guide the projectiles to target.”
“Which bring us to Phoenix Force,” Brognola said. “What’s its status?”
“They’re ready to move when you give the green light,” Kurtzman said.
“To link up with our Tiger Ops allies,” Brognola muttered. “And I use that word ‘ally’ with great reservation.”
“I know you tried to get the Man,” Kurtzman said, referring to the President of the United States, “to cut Phoenix loose on its own, but with the instability of the area in question near and along the Iranian border, and with no telling how many enemy combatants they may be facing, a few extra guns may not hurt.”
“The jury’s still out on that, Bear. For one thing, you can’t dig up any background on who these Tiger Ops are, which agency cuts them blank checks from whoever’s slush fund. I hate having our people working with and inside lurking shadows who may have dubious agendas. Especially since we don’t know who is funneling SPLAT and whatever other high-tech ordnance to Namak and thugs.”
“I concur, which is another reason I thought we’d run with the satellite relay station. In the event Phoenix needs backup on the ground, Barb worked it out with the CIA station chief in India to have them a Gulfstream fueled and ready to fly to the battlefront on a moment’s notice. Not only that, but with the weather predicted to be nothing but tropical paradise, clear skies for the next two weeks, any satellite imagery relayed to us from them will be in crystal clarity. With the fiber-optic camera mounts Phoenix will have on their person, our guys can monitor the battlefront for them, live and in color, cyberspace directors, if you will, on the bloody stage. Likewise we will get relayed images, but they will be time-delayed by about three seconds.”
Brognola watched as Kurtzman snapped on the vast Indian Ocean, enlarging an area southwest of the subcontinent’s tip in the Maldive Islands in red.
“Emerald Base Zero,” Kurtzman said, “confirmed they are set up and ready to begin sweeping the Iran-Iraq border with the first available satellite they can park over the AIQ. What I did was provide Commander X and his team with a software program—Ghost Dreams—which will create a ghost satellite of the one they park in space. That way, whoever’s on the ground monitoring that eye in the sky will think it’s still orbiting, will even have ‘artificial imagery’ relayed to the station.”
“And, once again, our blacksuits are running the relay station in a joint effort with Tiger Ops, who will be watching the backs of their own guys,” Brognola said, then paused, watching Price. “You know what I’m thinking? It looks like these Tiger Ops have been running around in Iraq and maybe Iran for some time now, that they have in all likelihood established contacts on both sides of the fence.”
“And you suspect some or all of them may be sleeping with the enemy?”
“If they are—and like you said, Bear, it’s happened before—Phoenix will get the thumbs-down from me to take them out, and I don’t care how highly touted they came to me from the President. I may be liaison between the Farm and the Oval Office, but I won’t play anybody’s fool when it comes to putting our people in harm’s way. Barb? I gather you’ve found something I received from my Shadow Man that’s grabbed your eye?”
“Perhaps, but I’ll need to make a phone call or two to some old contacts of mine at the NSA. Before you arrived, Bear, Akira and I were kicking around some ideas about this ‘incident’ in North Dakota. It smacks of a military test gone wrong. In this instance, terribly wrong. Our sat pics show civilian casualties, full military quarantine, denials being issued to whatever press can get close enough before they’re driven back. From the facts given to you by your source, I’m thinking there’s a strong possibility…well, your source states this Eagle Nebula is creating superweapons of the future, including, as unbelievable as it may sound, flying war vans that can be fitted with state-of-the-art hardware. Moreover, he hints that maybe a few loose cannons are selling whatever the supertechnology to our enemies.” She tapped her keyboard, framing a fighter jet on the wall monitor. “That is Lightning Bat, allegedly the prototype super fighter jet of tomorrow. With its swept-back Delta wings and arrowhead configuration, it appears just like an F-117 Stealth, only with quantum leap variants. According to your source, it has a top speed of Mach 10. To go ten times the speed of sound, your intel alludes to some type of super combustion ramjet, using air for fuel.”
“Only, Lightning Bat is powered by a nuclear reactor,” Kurtzman added.
“Which I find damn hard to believe. You have the problem of the tremendous weight of a reactor alone, for one thing, all that steel and concrete housing,” Brognola said. “You’re releasing huge sustained amounts of energy, which is basically heat, I believe, producing what is steam to keep a turbogenerator going strong. You’ve got to keep the reactor cooled by water…”
“We believe it’s done at high altitudes,” Kurtzman said, “by air pumped through vents to cool the reactor. Somehow, we don’t know how, but they’ve purportedly done it at Eagle Nebula, weight problem and all. Problem is, the single greatest fear and why no aircraft before now has been propelled by nuclear energy should be the obvious crash landing in a heavily populated area. Depending on how much uranium or plutonium is used, you would most definitely have a Chernobyl to deal with.”
“And we’re thinking Lightning Bat’s test run,” Brognola said, “was a belly flop, and that they’ve got radioactive clouds spreading over half of North Dakota?”
“No,” Price said. “We’re thinking its payload was launched by some sort of computer malfunction. Or by direct sabotage.”
“And these payloads are suspected to be?”
“Conventional cluster bombs,” Kurtzman said.
“And your man in the know,” Price added, “claims the bomb bay can hold nukes, and that a nuke test run is on the drawing board for Nevada. Cluster nukes, he calls them, one designed to go off after the other in varying outreaching circles of obliteration around the compass. The payloads are lowered on something like a crossbar, which allows for a simultaneous launch of four warheads, north, south, east and west. Whatever happened out there I think warrants investigation. And if weapons or technology is being hijacked to be sold on the international black market…”
Brognola nodded. There were a lot of blanks that needed filling in, and if there was one type of savage he detested it was a traitor wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, selling out for money or twisted ideology, it didn’t matter. Treason, he believed, deserved the ultimate rough justice.
“Okay, what’s the status on Able Team?” Brognola inquired.
Price cleared her throat. “Carl and Gadgets,” she said, referring to Carl Lyons and Hermann Schwarz, two of the three commandos of Able, “are in Chicago.”
“Let me guess. R and R,” he offered, “tearing up the town. Gentlemen’s clubs, all-night drinking binges and the possibility I may get a phone call they need bail money.”
“How well you know our prodigal sons,” Kurtzman quipped.
“Yeah, well, there may come a day they’ll rue when Daddy hangs up the phone. So, what’s the story on Rosario?” Brognola asked, meaning the third leg of the team, Rosario Blancanales, sometimes referred to as the Politician.
“I arranged to have him sent to Vegas,” Price said.
“I didn’t know he was a gambler.”
“He’s not,” Price said, and tapped her keyboard. “He is.”
Brognola looked at the wizened face on the wall monitor. The eyes were hidden by dark sunglasses, a mane of snow-white hair flowing to the shoulders of his aloha shirt.
“That,” Price said, “is Ezekiel Jacobs, the creator of Lightning Bat and its purported nuclear-powered capabilities, among other superweapons systems, as confirmed by your source’s intelligence. An Israeli national, he was educated in the States, then disappeared for a number of years after a brief stint with NASA. The NSA says he worked for the Russians during that missing time on a space program to someday see man travel deep space. Apparently a number of his theories, travel at light speed using controlled bursts of fission reactions, was a little too radical for the NASA crowd. He begged for funding to create what he called the Dynamo Matrix Program—again deep space travel at light speed—raised a stink, was fired by NASA and, it appears, sold his services to the Russians. He’s considered a genius, however, in the field of aerospace engineering and physics.”
“And he spends his free time at the slot machines?” Brognola said.
“Blackjack. He can count cards so well he’s been banned from several casinos. Now, apparently, he’s switched to dice just so he can get through the front door, or not end up in an unmarked grave in the desert.”
“So what’s Pol doing out there?”
“Helping an old friend from his Vietnam tour,” Price answered.
“Come again?”
“He was reluctant at first to go into much detail, then I pushed him when he asked about me arranging a classified flight out of your office, so he could take whatever hardware he needed, thus, as you know, bypassing the usual boarding inspections. If I overstepped my authority, Hal…”
“No need to apologize, it isn’t like I have to go to Congress for a blank check or have to explain myself to a bunch of senators. And I’m sure you had good reason, and that you’re about to drop a bomb on me about Mr. Jacobs here.”
“Pol’s buddy is a private investigator,” Price said. “For whatever reason, and I gather the reason is that there is some degree of danger involved, the friend enlisted Pol’s help.”
“Called out of the blue?”
Price shrugged. “I gather they’ve stayed in touch over the years, as a lot of vets of that war probably have. Anyway, the PI, he lives in South Dakota, near the ranch where Jacobs lived with his wife, and one day recently up and vanished. Being as he’s been known to hole up in Vegas before, she contacted this investigator who, in turn, called Pol.”
“And the danger is?”
“Russian intelligence operatives,” Price said. “Pol confirmed his PI buddy believes Jacobs is being courted by the Russians. Not only that, but Pol told me Jacobs had a classified job at a remote North Dakota installation that required he work there, four days on, four off.”
“The Eagle Nebula,” Brognola said, watching Price nod. “So, we think we’ve fallen into some snake’s nest and by accident or by way of the accident or sabotage by our own military? And we have more riddles than answers, and we’re thinking there could be homegrown traitors clear from North Dakota to Iraq?”
“Pretty much the usual,” Kurtzman said.
Brognola worked on his cigar. “Okay. Barb call Carl and get those two to North Dakota, but have Pol stay put in Vegas for the time being, see what he digs up or what may fall into his lap.”
“You’ll want Carl and Gadgets looking into Eagle Nebula? As what, part of some special task force from the Justice Department?”
“Complete, if I can get it, with a presidential directive that gives them free and ready access to the base and to question whoever’s in charge there,” Brognola said. The grim note in Price’s voice and the wry glint in her eyes not escaping him. “Oh, yeah, I know. Lyons isn’t big when it comes to smearing on the gentle diplomacy. But, if they’re hiding something out there, covering up a disaster that involves civilian casualties, I’m counting on his crocodile style to flush out and chomp down on some raw meat. The perfect pit bull for the job,” Brognola added with a grim smile.
EZEKIEL JACOBS HELD his Russian benefactors in contempt. Assuming they were either current or former Spetsnaz commandos or ex-KGB, perhaps even tied to some criminal organization, this ignorant rabble who lived by the sword and were enslaved by all the animal inclinations of such didn’t have a clue how to handle themselves when in the presence of genius—or women—much less understand the fine point that living well was the best revenge.
“This is what we are throwing away good and very large sums, may I add, Comrade Jacobs, of money on? A computer graphic of an American Stealth fighter? Charts of chemical equations and numbers and physics babble?”
And there it was, he thought, pulling back his flowing mane of snow with one hand, staring at Boris Rustov on the other side of the coffee table as the Russian glowered at the specs on Lightning Bat, his black ferret eyes nearly bugged out with profound confusion and anger over mathematical equations that only a few in his elite stratosphere could even begin to comprehend. Clearly this barbarian was blind to the creativity of pure genius that was as close, he thought, to the Divine as Earthbound Man could get.
Ah, but why must he suffer fools gladly? Then again, why not? A few more days and playtime was over. For the moment he figured he was as close to heaven on earth as he could possibly ascend. One look out the massive window, and the constellation of neon out there on the Strip beckoned him the world could be his, but for one more roll of the dice, another few hours at the blackjack table. From his six-hundred-dollar-a-day suite on the north corner of the Bellagio hotel-casino—all the trimmings of two giant screen TVs, whirlpool, fully stocked wet bar and room service with all the frills, complete with ladies of the evening—he could drink in the glittering diadems of Caesar’s Palace, the Barbary Coast, the Flamingo Las Vegas, Imperial Palace.
The 3000-room ultraresort was a marvel of flamboyance, he thought, grabbing up a fat chunk of real estate where the old Dunes was perched on the southwest corner of Flamingo and the Strip. Considered one of the most expensive hotel-casinos on the planet, it featured Italian gardens, a twelve-acre lake, showroom, water shows, with a few hundred million in art displayed and spread around all the heavenly opulence. The best news of all was that families with children were strongly urged to seek accommodations farther up the Strip, high rollers only to walk through these pearly gates. Granted, he was still mid-Strip, in the thick of the hustle and bustle, traffic and noise a near 24/7 nuisance, but there was no reason to venture farther north where the common folk—low-rollers—wasted their paltry sums in grind joints.
From behind his dark Blues Brothers sunglasses, Jacobs watched the Russian scowl, looking him up and down as if he were some sideshow freak. Jacobs crossed one pajama-wrapped leg in white silk over the other, smoothed out the robe in matching color and fabric, brushing a fleck of tobacco off the Playboy bunny monogram on his left breast. Believing he could feel the steam building in the Russian’s primitive brain, sure Rustov’s blood pressure was ready to shoot off the monitor, he turned to Cleopatra, his companion. He watched her with an approving eye, as the striking Asian beauty slinked up to the couch to deliver him another brandy.
“Thank you, my dear,” Jacobs said, twirling the drink in his snifter, then patting the seat beside him. And he thought Rustov would erupt as she dropped her luscious flesh, barely concealed in the leopard-skin one-piece, bottom thrust his way, snuggling close to genius, all purrs and caresses. Breathing in her exquisite fragrance, he felt the stirring of heat in his loins, then the guttural bark of his Russian visitor soured the rising mood.
“There is a limit to our generosity and a bottom to our money pit. Explain yourself now, Comrade Jacobs.”
Jacobs took his smoking pipe, tamped down a fresh snootful of tobacco. “Six million million miles,” he said, smiling. “Three hundred thousand kilometers or 186,000 miles per second. Mass, force, space and time.”
“You find this amusing, comrade?”
“The first was the measure of a light-year. The second was the speed of light. The third is part of an equation whereby I explain how to shrink mass, while heating a hydrogen core for controlled bursts of a thermonuclear explosion that would allow for travel at and beyond light speed.”
“You are trying my patience to its limits.”
“So I see.” Jacobs puffed, sipped his drink. He took the remote box, snapped on a James Bond movie behind the Russian thug, wondering if he could replicate or refine one of Q’s high-tech toys, but saw the scene and already knew that he had. If he hadn’t, he knew the Russians wouldn’t be here now, waiting on him, hand and foot, frothing at the mouth, impatient to get on with business, surely entertaining violent fantasies of what they’d like to do to him if he weren’t regarded as the Holy Grail to their superiors.
“What you see, Comrade Rustov,” he said, speaking now in fluent Russian, “as a typical Stealth fighter jet is, in fact, the war bird of the future, created by my own hand, and for which your country came to me and agreed to my demands in order to—one—not only engineer a version of Lightning Bat, but—two—deliver to you my considerable expertise in likewise building weapons and weapons systems that far surpass your incomprehension of me and my creation. What you failed to understand and thus give me a chance to become immortalized beyond the likes of Albert Einstein is that Lightning Bat was one, perhaps two, steps away from being able to send man into deep space at the speed of light through my sweat and labor. Which requires nuclear propulsion, of which I installed in Lightning Bat and was in the process of designing for a prototype spacecraft.”
“You are talking much but telling me nothing of what I wish to know.”
“Ah, I see. You think I throw you a crumb with those computer printouts on the table. You want to know where the good stuff is kept.” Jacobs tapped the side of his head. “Nearly all of the treasures of the mysteries of the universe, comrade, are locked safely away in here. Regarding my continued health and happiness, I will lead you to all pertinent documents and data in due course. After, of course, I have enjoyed what was agreed upon as one week of R and R in Las Vegas. That leaves me at present with three days to suffer your scowling and barbs and demands.”
Rustov leaned forward, an edge to his voice. “You may feel genius should be granted all the perks and privileges it demands, while we, the common peasants should bow and scrape before you, but I would be very careful how you speak to me, Comrade Jacobs. Your continued happiness is really of no great concern to me.”
Jacobs blew smoke across the table. “It damn well better be, Comrade Rustov. Your life depends on just how happy I am.” Jacobs watched the gunsel, thinking he could almost read his mind as his thug’s brain churned over at the rate of drying concrete, searching for some response that would save face.
“Three more days, then it is I who will dictate the agenda.”
“Until then…if you would be so kind as to order up some breakfast for myself and Cleopatra. Eggs over easy, I like my bacon juicy with fat, not irradiated to shoe leather as it was yesterday. Make sure they understand that. If I discover you are cutting budget costs by stiffing room service on the tip, I will be most unhappy.”
Rustov chuckled as he stood. “Perhaps you are unaware, believing myself and my men only your ignorant lackeys. While you sleep with your whores, we cracked the mainframe on your laptop.”
Jacobs felt his heart flutter. “That was most unwise, since you should treat my privacy like you would my happiness.”
“We know about the Web sites, your e-mails to your former colleagues in my country. Should you not deliver as promised, we believe they have sufficient expertise to assist us.”
“Sufficient, in this case, will not cut it, Comrade Rustov. Further, you seem to forget I worked at Compound Zero-159-A, and that these former colleagues of mine could not complete work I left unfinished when the money dried up. Now. Are you going to respect my privacy and see to my continued happiness, likewise see to it that my pockets are deep when I leave for the casinos or do I contact your superiors and tell them the deal is off? And inform them it is because you are uncooperative cheapskate with a considerable chip on his shoulder?”
Rustov smiled, bobbed his head. “We will continue the arrangement, Comrade Jacobs, as you wish. Only bear this in mind as a gambler. When your marker is called in, you had best pony up.”
“The threat implying it’s a big desert out there?”
Jacobs watched Rustov, the baboon wearing his stupid grin, as he turned and walked for the foyer, barking at his four gunslingers to fall in. Grateful when he was alone, he draped an arm over Cleopatra, pulled her closer, and said, “I certainly hope that little bit of unpleasantness didn’t ruin your mood, my dear.”
“YOU THINK YOU CAN TAKE IT easy on the liquor, Slim, while we’re sailing along at a hundred miles an hour and five hundred feet off the ground?”
“The name’s Rupert, son. And I don’t care what that tin badge you flashed me sayin’ you’re with the Justice Department, this is my plane, and I been flying since you were but a mere itch in your daddy’s sac. And unless you wanna arrest me for FWI and land this bird yourself, you might want to lose that nasty attitude of yours—Mr. G-Man—sir.”
Carl “Ironman” Lyons was in a foul mood as it was. It was never a happy day when he was snatched off R and R, duty calling or not. No, it wasn’t so much he was being bosom-nuzzled by a beautiful dancer way more than half his age when he got the call from the Farm to put his pants on, as it was the hangover now pulsing wardrums through a swollen brain that was sorely tempting his sand-papered tongue to mollify the old prairie buzzard for a shot of whiskey if only to help pull shot nerves together. At the moment, fear of flying took on a whole new meaning for the leader of Able Team.
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Don Pendleton
Accountable only to the Oval Office and fully committed to the security of the U.S. in an ever-morphing terrorist landscape, the warriors of Stony Man never relent, tire or fold.America's last line of defence understands that all it takes for evil to prevail is for a few good people to stand down. For Stony Man, that day will never come. Not now. Not ever.The covert world of black ops takes on a sinister new twist as high-ranking rogue operatives offer super-tech weapons for sale to enemies of the United States in an effort to "fix" the Middle East. With buyers from Russia to Iran lining up for the prize, America's national security is about to blow up in a mushroom cloud, plunging Stony Man into a killing game with no end or winner in sight.
TRAITORS
There were few villains Hal Brognola detested more than those who sold out their country, and he didn’t give a damn what the reason.
A man chooses a side, sticks with his choice no matter what the challenges, the temptations, the internal conflicts that might have him turn his back and seek what might be greener pastures.
Right then, as he slipped the rest of the sat photos and a copy of Orion’s disk into the manila envelope, the big Fed felt a little sick to his stomach. He gave the computer team a last look. They were hard at it, juggling the action—of the coming and certain firestorms—with professional resolve, skill and determination.
And with honor.
For the moment, there was nothing more he could do here, but he had someplace to go in search of possible answers to some dark and troubling realities.
Other titles in this series:
#14 DEADLY AGENT
#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
Doomsday Conquest
STONY MAN®
AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Don Pendleton
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u71ea7eb7-0be5-5ad9-bb1a-75c48695bffa)
CHAPTER TWO (#u8fa7f778-4877-5eb2-acf8-8777cedf571d)
CHAPTER THREE (#u8857e8a1-9fe5-5735-9da4-55e44d9fcaa4)
CHAPTER FOUR (#uf2afc7b4-c207-5f20-bda1-58304f1fe956)
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)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
Whatever the awful truth about the molten storm falling to earth under his command and control, Colonel Ytri Kolinko wasn’t all that sure he cared to know. A veteran of the Afghan war and a staunch believer in the Communist dictates of pre-Wall Russia, he trusted simplicity in all its forms, be it on the battlefield or in the high-tech laboratories of his current post. What the eye saw, in other words, the mind fathomed, whether his hand was dipped in the blood of slain mujahideen or held a test tube with microorganisms from outer space. Grinding his teeth as the warning siren blared, he slung the AK-74 assault rifle across his shoulder. Ignorance might truly prove bliss.
Or would it? he had to wonder as he torqued himself to a double-time march, propelled by a heady blend of fear, anxiety and excitement, heard his lieutenants of Command Red Lightning barking for the conscripts and the science detail beyond the steel door to move faster for the transport helicopters. This was his command, his protectorate in this remote and desolate abyss of Tajikistan, after all, the responsibility heaped square on his shoulders to get to the bottom of what had traveled from deep space to previously land in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgystan. And what was now breaching Earth’s atmosphere was neither comet, falling star, meteor shower nor any other space phenomenon identified by Man. If it played true to prior and—what, supernatural?—form, it would not only swamp roughly a dozen square acres, as it had in each of the former Soviet republics, thus forcing a military quarantine, but chances were the event would sear yet another terrifying memory at the sight of human beings…
He shuddered, shoved away the frightening images, cursing the young soldier who allowed the door to thud shut, near smashing his scowl to pulp. Forget the angry albeit sorry fact Moscow had dumped him in hostile country that made his former Chechen post look a Black Sea resort by comparison, the Minister of Defense wanted answers to mysteries that came from another galaxy, perhaps another world, even another dimension, if he believed what his astronomers told him about black holes, shrinking mass and evolving protostars.
Tajikistan, he knew, was marked off by the political and military barons of Moscow as a buffer zone between the Muslim extremists of Afghanistan and Russia, but another image easily leaped to mind when he thought about his woeful post. As Moscow’s man in-country, braving the cold, fighting drug traffickers, often engaged in pitched battles with both rebels and narcothugs—and often both were one and the same—he saw Tajikistan as a vast moat between Afghanistan and Russia, teeming with crocodiles—hungry and poised to devour those who would further erode the moral fiber of his country with the slow white death or outright attacking Mother Russia through terrorism and sabotage.
Prepared to tackle the night’s grim business, whatever the case, Kolinko used a bootheel to thunder open the door, barely breaking stride as he swept onto the sprawling helipads.
“Move, move, move!”
He took in the controlled frenzy of soldiers, urged on by his officers as they rushed to board three Mi-26 transports, then spotted the gaggle of spacesuits lumbering for the high-tech cocoon of the custom-built black Mi-14 search-and-rescue chopper at the deep north end. There, a squad of his black-clad Red Lightning commandos lugged the tubular lead containers with fastened vacuum hoses, muled various and sundry metal crates that housed detection and sampling verification ordnance.
As if, he thought, what was streaking for Earth could be understood by finite puny Man.
And Kolinko looked to the heavens, stood his ground, some two thousand feet high on the western edge of the Pamir Range. The scudding gray cloud banks seemed low enough to reach up and grab. Where the billows broke in roiling tendrils, he made out the faint sheen of moonlight, then stared at countless stars twinkling from galaxies both known and yet to be named.
After another few moments of stargazing, aware he was stalling, Kolinko looked back at the compound, briefly wondered if he would return to see its foreboding steel walls, see through to fruition the prototypes of future secret weapons being engineered in its labyrinth. Panning the mammoth complex, north to south, he almost envied the soldiers and science crews remaining behind, nestled as they were, safe from potential lethal doses of radiation or the terrifying clutches of antigravity, deep in the rock-hewn bowels.
Safe, yes, unless the celestial storm changed course and…
At least half the base was burrowed deep into the mountain range that rose from the plateau, the imposing peaks jutting higher, it seemed, forming a natural barrier the farther south they stretched to meet the northern edge of the Fedchenko Glacier, one of the world’s longest continental ice river. A final sweep, spying the concrete dome of the observatory looming dead center from the roof where its telescopes—Russian versions of the American Hubble, he knew—monitored the coming tempest, and Kolinko fastened the com link over his black beret.
His team of astrophysicists, he recalled, believed they had pinpointed the core source of the space ore. Give or take a thousand light-years, they claimed its origins in something called the Eagle Nebula, recent but evolving star formations about 6,500 light-years away in a stellar region called Serpens, near the Star Gamma Scuti. Whatever its genesis, for a moment Kolinko wished the observatory a silo, imagined the scope magically morphing into a nuclear warhead, a time-delay fuse that would erupt a thermonuclear blanket, all but vaporizing the extraterrestrial stew.
Kolinko swept back to reality as he felt the icy touch of rotor wash slashing his face. All set and ready, but for what? he wondered, grunting as he bent his head, forging toward the lead transport chopper.
Watching the first two transports lifting off, he suddenly found something both fearsome and absurd that a simple soldier should be forced to confront, much less explain the improbable and the preposterous. Boarding the Mi-26, he realized he was touching the emblem on the front of his beret and wishing what they were going to encounter was as simple to explain as lightning.
FAYSUD DOZMUJ WAS ashamed of his comrades.
As he cradled the AK-47, watching the caravan of mules and horses from the rearguard, he began to consider how much different he was than his fellow clansmen. One disturbing for instance, he wasn’t a terrorist, much less a cold-blooded killer, as many of them had proved themselves to be. The fact he didn’t carry a heart pumping with murderous wrath round-the-clock like his cousins for any human being other than Tajik—especially Russians and westerners—left him wondering if he was better than the others, or simply weak. Granted, circumstance dictated the road many of them had chosen, but the circumstance of the desperate poor or the oppressed—as they saw themselves—was a sad and sorry eternal plight the world over.
Always had been, always would be.
The blood of the innocent, he knew, was on many hands here in the Grbukt Pass. Be it Israel, Iraq or Kabul, and as family men themselves, did it not prey on their minds that they had shattered the lives of lambs who only wished to live in peace, perhaps slaughtering children and thus extinguishing future bloodlines? Did they not see that their violence and brutality made them an abomination in the eyes of God? Was there not one even half-righteous man among their lot?
And how did they see him? As a coward, always making himself scarce when an ambush was in the wings, having never fired a shot in anger against their hated Russian oppressors?
Shucking the heavy wool coat higher up his shoulders, he shivered against the icy wind that howled like a thousand banshees, or the giant hairy almasty, he thought, the man-thing rarely seen but often heard baying from the black depths of mountain forests. He sidestepped another pile of dung steaming in the snow, thinking this was the last time he would follow his cousins when they hired themselves out as drug mules for men, he knew, who clearly had no regard who suffered, directly or indirectly, from the evil they peddled, as long as they lived on, rich-fattened swine indulging their every vile transgression.
It wasn’t the long and dangerous drive by truck to the border, picking up something like two to three tons of heroin from Afghan warlords and their corrupt Russian counterparts each trip. The consignments were paid for in advance, their tribal leader, Ghazin, having won the trust of Russian gangsters long ago to deliver the cargo to designated rendezvous points in the Pamirs. Nor did the grueling three- or four-day march on foot when they were forced to abandon their vehicles in exchange for pack animals to trudge out the final leg of the journey bother him. Hardship was an accepted way of life for the Tajik.
Rather, it was his fear of God and the dreaded loss of eternal Paradise that disturbed him to no end, his heart and soul burdened by the weight of guilt, far exceeding, he imagined, the combined load of burlap sacks now being hauled out of the gorge. Way beyond the earthly consideration of a few paltry American dollars, by which he could feed a family of seven during the coming months, his conscience admonished him that what he did was wrong in the eyes of his Maker.
No more.
This was his last journey for the Devil, aware that what he did only enabled the spawning of evil, that was gain of illicit money to advance the slaughter of lambs.
He was trudging up the rise, searching the forested high ground, wondering if any of his cousins could forsake this wrong and find redemption before it was too late, when the animals began crying, shuffling and bucking against their burdens. The line lurched to a sudden halt, his cousins cursing the beasts as the braying and snorting rose in what he sensed was panic. He was wondering if the animals were spooked by the sudden arrival of the two giant black transport choppers as they appeared, hovering over the tree line of the high plateau, Ghazin on the field radio, confirming, he assumed, the helicopters ferried the Russian gangsters, when the sky erupted in a brilliant white light. Something inexplicable happened next to the helicopters, Dozmuj watching, shocked, as what appeared like a web of blue sparks began shooting, dancing around the hulls of the choppers. A heartbeat and one of the choppers was thrown into a whirling dervish, then propelled, it seemed, by the shroud of blue lightning, aimed on a course to smash into the heart of the caravan.
Whether it was instinct or some haunting premonition of doom he’d gnawed on since the border, Dozmuj knew something far out of the ordinary was blanketing the sky.
Terror then gripped him as the animals burst in a pellmell scatter off the trail, his cousins shouting, torn between chasing after the beasts of burden and staring, frozen in fear, at the heaven’s spread of dazzling—
Fire?
Dozmuj backpedaled, the assault rifle slipping off his shoulder, falling to ground as his mind tried to conceive that he bore witness to a vast sheet of white fire blossoming but rolling like ocean waves in a great storm across the width of the sky. And it powered the heavens above into instant day, as if the sun had burst through the celestial blackness, light so piercing he was forced to shut his eyes, afraid for a moment he was blind.
When he opened his eyes, he found the world on fire, the seeing all but beyond any belief.
Shouts of panic flaying the air and animals braying loud enough to further warp his senses, Dozmuj turned away and ran.
“PULL BACK!”
For all of their—what was to him—incoherent physics babble, it hardly explained the blue lightning shooting from the comm and tracking station amidships the transport chopper. More conjecture than anything else, the best his science people could come up with by way of explanation was that the storm of space lava created a supercharged electromagnetic field. Highly charged alpha particles, the most powerful of ionizing agents, the way he understood it, were in the process of fusing, splitting deuterium nuclei as they collided, but somehow creating antienergy in the process. One of the end fantastic results was that the ore emitted EMP—electromagnetic pulse—similar, but vastly more powerful in ways they couldn’t yet explain than those produced by a nuclear blast. Had he believed in God, angels or even an afterlife, he might have agreed with his scientists when they referred to the phenomenon as Heaven’s Vomit.
The pilot didn’t need to be told even once, Kolinko roaring the order again, though, through the cockpit hatchway just when the bird was thrown to a steep dip to port. He tumbled to the floorboard, his soldiers falling from their stations in a thrashing heap of limbs, Kolinko still fearing the fire in the sky would overtake them. As opposed to arriving on-site after the three previous showers, this was the first time he’d been eyewitness to the falling space matter. Cursing the horrifying unexplainable, he hoped it would be his last, but he wasn’t about to see his choppers bathed in celestial soup, sure to send them crashing to earth.
Jumping to his feet as his pilot straightened the chopper, Kolinko marched to the door, hollering for one of his men to pull the plug to their monitors from the battery-powered generator. He was just in time to find the two black Mi-14s—drug ships, he suspected, taking the high ground and waiting on the Tajiks to climb up the trail from the gorge—erupt into fireballs that defied any blast he’d ever seen on the battlefield. It was all lightning and blue flame along the plateau, two giant, sizzling orbs that appeared like electrical charges gone haywire, blinding-white explosions touching off, one after the other, inside the spheres, the jagged streaks seeming to gather renewed angry force, as if whatever energy they consumed from the doomed birds inside the blue furnace fed their unearthly power core.
It was the rolling molten tidal wave in the sky, though, that commanded his full and terrified attention. Patching through to his other flight crews, he confirmed them engaged in evasive maneuvers, all of them falling back in southerly vectors at top speed.
Kolinko watched, squinting against the brilliant sheen as the molten rain washed over the forested plateau, then pounded a path down the gorge. With nowhere to run or hide, he saw the sea of molten stew drench man and animal. The Tajiks and their Russian end purchasers were little more than criminal scum, but Kolinko wondered, just the same, if they died quick, or slow and in great pain as they drowned in the ore.
“IN TERMS OF PURE scientific theory, as defined by Isaac Newton and Einstein, the laws of gravity and inertial mass being proportional to gravitational mass—G-Force—this shouldn’t even exist. Alpha particles, if that’s what they even are, will yield their energy quickly, but whatever the particles, they are fusing, multiplying and growing in mass and strength, creating in the process what I can only describe as…antimatter?”
Kolinko bared his teeth, stepping toward the hastily erected work area. He found himself growing exasperated to the point of boiling anger, what with their lack of plausible scientific explanations, but realized, under the circumstances, he needed them more than they needed him.
The good news was that the laser field, a reverse electromagnetic barrier, as he understood it, held back the undefined particles that created this purported antigravity. With the extended poles rising forty feet high, laser beams interlocked at the speed of light, the abominable stench of sulfur was held in check, but the unreality of the moment was still there for his eyes to behold. Unable to look at the frightening spectacles farther down the gorge and just inside the laser wall, he watched his eight best and brightest, still donning hazmat suits, while striding closer to the banks of monitors, his science detail having informed him the lethal doses of radiation were cocooned behind the bars of blue laser light and presently dying off at an inexplicable rate. Only flaring back to life, fusing together again, they told him, at a speed faster than light, mounting in hyper-strength, though giving off no measurable radiation! Impossible, he decided, would be the most preposterous understatement he’d ever heard. Moscow would never buy it.
Geiger counters, he saw, were hooked into a radiation monitor, the clicks no longer audible, but Kolinko stole a read on the digital screen just the same, confirming he was in no danger of coming down with cancer in the near future. The last problem—no, the last nail—he needed was another Chernobyl in what was, essentially, a militarily occupied Russian protectorate. His own anger and mounting fear fusing like those particles they mentioned, Kolinko looked at their dark baffled faces inside the bubbled helmets as several of the geniuses filled test tubes with white crystals collected from the ground near the field station, then mixed them with a clear liquid. With syringes, they extracted the concoction, squirting drops on Petri dishes, sliding them under microscopes.
“It makes no sense at all how this could be happening.”
“But it is happening, Comrade Bukov!” Kolinko snapped, forcing himself to not even glance at the figure no more than twelve feet in front of him to confirm the terrible truth. Should this happen again, he dreaded, and in a heavily populated area…
Kolinko keyed his com link, scoured the skies with an anxious search. When informed by his flight crews that soldiers were now on the ground and securing a wide perimeter, erecting more laser walls, he turned back to his scientists. Two of them were hunched over the control panel of a solid aluminum cylinder they called a gravitational wave detector. When he saw them shaking their heads at each other, he nearly erupted, aware the mystery was only growing as they appeared to understand less with each passing second.
“I want answers, and within the hour, do you understand me, Comrade Bukov?”
“Then we’ll need to return to our laboratories for further and more accurate testing, Comrade Colonel. I am thinking this substance will first need a laser burst of at least a hundred picoseconds…”
“Picoseconds?”
“Measurements of trillionths of a second, done in a laser fusion chamber, therefore determining, if we are lucky, if these nuclei of atoms initiate fusion on their own, which, I already fear, they do.”
“You fear? What do you mean by that?”
Bukov went on as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Beyond that I am afraid that what, or part of what we are looking at, judging the previous samples and testing is an ongoing, unexplained fusion-fission reaction, but far more fusion than fission.”
The enormity of what he believed Bukov implied left Kolinko speechless for a long moment. “You are telling me that what is inside this force field is…that what came from deep space is…”
“Yes. We are perhaps looking at the possibility of a thermonuclear explosion. Developing critical mass as we speak, from, as you said, the far reaches of the galaxy.”
Kolinko swallowed his terror, wondering how long he could keep this from Moscow. The truth, of course, would get buried, but if Tajikistan was wiped off the map in a nuclear mushroom cloud with its unknown origins from deep space, there would be no way to hide it from the rest of the world. There would be international outrage. There would be sanctions. There would be much threatening noise, to say the very least, from the Americans. There would be fallout, and clear up the Ukraine, depending on the prevailing winds, with thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands dropping dead in their zombied tracks from radiation poisoning so high it would be off the charts of gigajoule and human-sievert measurements. There would be…
Numb, he was about to turn away, return to his chopper, when he found Dovkna pulling his visor away from his microscope. “What is it?” he barked.
Dovkna muttered something, shaking his head.
“Speak!”
Dovkna pointed a rubber-tipped finger at the crystallized rock formations on the ground, where the snow was still melting to puddles, a faint trace of sulfur still lingering in the air. “This white substance?” he said, and paused.
“Yes?”
“It’s sodium chloride.”
“Salt? You are telling me, comrade,” Kolinko said, throwing an arm at what was at the deep end of the pass, “that those men were—what? Turned into pillars of salt from outer space?”
Dovkna nodded inside his bubbled head. “That is precisely what I am saying.”
Kolinko staggered back a step, then froze, aware of the pleas and pitiful cries he’d up to then forced deaf ears to. Now, his mind tumbling with questions and fears holding no foreseeable answers or solutions, he stared up at the Tajik rebel, hovering some twenty feet in the air.
CHAPTER TWO
Nuclear power was a disaster begging to happen. Off the top of his head, he thought of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the most notable of grotesque nuclear reactor accidents, or the ones at least known to the world at large. Where they were concerned, he pictured—from an educated guess based on experience and access to classified intel—their reactor cores blew, most likely, due to incompetence, quasi-ignorance of the volatile nature of fission reaction under extreme stress, and the brazen zeal of self-proclaimed genius in search of the next quantum leap, that bold but proved foolish notion that Science Man adhered to the belief they could learn more about nuclear power through trial and error. Tell all that, he scoffed to himself, to those dying in protracted misery under radioactive clouds that were most likely still spreading to God only knew how far and wide.
Madness, he decided, and for what? All in the name of progress? The advancement of civilization or global annihilation? Either way, Man may prove someday to be his own worst enemy, but he hoped he wasn’t around to see it, though his three children might. No tree-hugger or global-warming doomsayer, he was an ace Stealth pilot of two Gulf wars, in fact, who’d churned up whole square miles of earth into smoking craters where not even a dandelion could sprout in the next foreseeable generation. But he still believed Man either took care of Mother Earth, or Mother Earth would take care of Man. That in mind, nuclear-powered submarines and battleships, he weighed, were nightmare scenario enough, but easily dispensed with as far as cover-ups went. Scuttle the works and the truth sank to the bottom of the ocean, where only a few in the loop were the wiser.
All those potential catastrophic voyages, but vessels chugging along over vast stretches of empty ocean?
No sweat.
Try flying, he thought, a supersonic fighter jet with a nuclear reactor’s guts cored with U-238, meant to torque up the yield of Pu-239 to keep on giving the gift of record-shattering speed and hang-time. Talk about flying Armageddon, but the doomsday potential for such a craft, he knew, hijacked and commandeered by the enemies of America, was less than zero.
At least for the immediate future.
Still, the more United States Air Force Major Michael Holloran pondered the facts as he knew them, considered what was housed, aft in their superbird, the more he believed he harbored some dark bent toward suicide. Or was it simply his nature, he wondered, a hyperachiever in his own right, pushing the limits of personal reality and talents to the edge, a middle-finger salute to fate to dare force him to stare into the abyss, face his own mortality? Certainly, he knew, whatever drove him to chase the next figurative or literal horizon had cost him two marriages, rendering him a man alone now among the gods of ultratech, transcended in some way beyond the norm he couldn’t quite define, but could surmise he wasn’t sure he liked all that much, given what he knew.
Get a grip, he told himself. He had a job to do.
They were sailing along at supersonic speed, Mach 5 to be exact, eighty thousand feet and change above the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, bearing down on the U.S. border; ETA a little over three minutes and counting. With what he knew lay ahead, those anxious thoughts began whispering louder over everything that could go wrong, near hissing, he imagined, like the highly flammable pure oxygen being pumped into his helmet. This was, after all, the maiden voyage of a classified prototype and ultrafighter jet that shouldn’t—and officially didn’t—exist.
Three years earlier a celestial mystery had fallen to the continental U.S., and it now powered the craft. And lent it properties far exceeding the narrow prism of Man’s understanding.
Thus, lack of knowledge about unknown properties and alloys—and he knew whatever the truth was being jealously guarded from those who now bore the task of flying the thing, as in himself and his copilot—should provide fear enough for him to reconsider the sanity of all involved.
For instance, the reinforced glass—if that’s what it even was—was as classified as the fuel that could propel them to Mach 10, more than three times faster than the now-retired SR-71 Blackbird, which had previously owned the world’s speed record of plus Mach 3. Officially—sort of—the fuel was classified as supergrade JP-7, the juice that kept the Blackbird aloft and a streaking black blur beneath the heavens. Why, then, was it pumped into the wings from a massive lead-encased tanker by hazmat suits in a hangar guarded by both armed sentries and batteries of surface-to-air missiles and M-1 Abrams tanks? Or was the answer so obvious…
The visor trapped the sound of his own grim chuckle.
In practical working theory, he knew they shouldn’t have even gotten off the ground, but the superjet and its power source defied all laws of aerodynamics, nuclear physics and gravity. Whether or not the reactor was a prototype, for instance, scaled down to near-dwarf stature in comparison to the mammoths that powered nuclear plants, it was still housed in a steel container, wrapped, in turn, by thick concrete walls. Therefore, the tremendous weight alone should have created drag enough to virtually snap off the tail.
Oh, but there were answers, he knew, as unbelievable as they might sound.
Yes, perhaps they believed him, in the dark and blissfully ignorant, those black-suited DOD superiors, their armed goons and aerospace engineers contracted out by Lockheed, but he’d caught on the sly the floating rumors. Since no secret was really ever such, he’d come to know that what they referred to as “the Divine Alloy” was a molten ore of some type from deep space. Whatever the unknown substance, he knew it was blended somehow with carbon-fiber laminates and aluminum and titanium, stem to stern on their ultratech ride. Likewise, cockpit and reactor housing were coated with the Divine Alloy. Which, believe it or not, made the superjet, code-named Lightning Bat, lighter than air, but able to withstand all the mass, thrust and gravity that Earth could pound mortal flesh with, once the shield was activated prior to takeoff. Moreover, their shield, sealed inside by the alloy, converted the cockpit into some vacuum of space, spared them G-force that should have crushed their insides to pulp. Rendered weightless by the Divine Alloy, they would have floated to the ceiling, pinned there, if not harnessed into their seats.
Holloran checked the instrument panel. All green, all systems go, he found. Comprised of intricate supercomputers, once the codes were punched in, he knew from two years of 24/7 training and virtual reality flight simulators that technology did roughly ninety percent of the work. From speed to navigation, down to calibrating the payload in the fuselage, Lightning Bat nearly had a mind all its own.
So why did that disturb him?
It was just about time, he knew, checking the digital readout to countdown, aware their audience was anxiously waiting back at Eagle Nebula, ready to monitor the test flight via camera link-up, once Lightning Bat descended and leveled out within a hundred miles of the area in question.
He was about to look over at Captain Thomas Sayers when he glimpsed something flash across the cockpit shield.
“Did you see that?”
“What the hell?” Holloran wasn’t sure what it was, but he would have sworn blue lightning had just streaked past Lightning Bat’s tapered nose. They weren’t low enough for any bolts of lightning, no storm systems to factor in, according to their Doppler radar. A shooting star, then? Meteor fragments?
Sayers repeated the question over the com link, Holloran staring up into the infinite black of the cosmos, when blue light jagged, but flashing this time, he believed, from inside the cockpit. Or did it shoot from the instrument panel? he wondered. After too many sorties in combat to count, having seen flying “things” he had more than once been warned by nameless spooks to never speak of, he wasn’t one to push panic buttons. But he felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck just the same, instinct warning him that something was either wrong or about to go south.
“Check all of our computer systems, Tom,” he told his copilot. “A to Z.”
“Roger, sir.”
“While you do that,” he said, wrapping one black-gloved hand around the side-arm controller, while tapping in the access code to the electro-optical navigational computer, “I’ll start dropping us down and prepping this puppy for its big audition.”
Holloran hoped he sounded confident, relatively gung-ho to the younger man, but he’d been dumped on the receiving end of too many SNAFUs to not trust his churning gut.
“PROTOSTAR EAGLE NEBULA Central Command to Lightning Bat Alpha. We are confirming your altitude and speed. Four thousand feet and holding steady, but you will have to decrease your speed to well below subsonic. Give us four hundred, Lightning Bat Alpha, and we can track you with visual confirmation.”
As the pneumatic doors hissed shut behind him, Gabriel Horn found he was just in time for the big show. The ground control station of Eagle Nebula wasn’t exactly the sprawling network of NASA’s command nerve center, he knew, but there was eyes-only supersophistication enough here to warrant all hands signing blood pacts for a black project so secret only a dozen men in Washington were aware of Lightning Bat’s existence. And, as head of Special Action Service, it was his duty to make damn certain all knowledge here either stayed under the compound’s roof or went to the grave with these people.
In that exclusive realm, however, there was critical mass, and building beyond the Eagle Nebula nest.
Easing up on their six, his rubber-soled combat boots padding silent as a ghost over sheer white concrete, Horn counted twelve aerospace brainiacs. The Chosen, he thought. Or the damned, depending on how well they held their tongues in check, though in his experience, considering at least three of the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, greed and envy—a couple of them, maybe more, would find a nasty and mysterious fatal accident in their futures. He could always count on the worst in human nature.
They appeared little more than shrouds at Horn’s first glance, white lab coats casting off a sort of glimmering hue as the fabric, woven out of nylon-silk, seemed to reflect light from the workstation with its running bank of monitors. Com links tying them all to Lightning Bat Alpha, their voices were a mixed babble to his ears as they relayed instructions to Major Holloran, confirming this and that.
Showtime.
Horn ignored the Air Force colonel boring daggers into the side of his head, focused instead on the cameras as they locked in on the arrowhead-shaped fighter jet. Briefed as thoroughly by Eagle Nebula’s commanding officer as he had expected, Horn knew the test flight was now monitored by four, long-range camera-fitted Black Hawks and two prototype Gulfstream SBJs. The supersonic executive jets, customized for military purposes, had the sleek Stealth hybrid covered, fore and aft, with the only variant being altitude at each end. To cover the fireworks, the Black Hawks were ranged around the compass, hovering now over the blast area.
All set for bombs away.
When the payloads were launched, gun cameras in the guidance systems of each nose, he knew, would track their flight paths, speeding bullets, near skimming U.S. government-owned prairie of North Dakota, until impact flashed obliteration then oblivion across the screens. Four payloads all told, he thought, what were technically cruise missiles, streaking at low altitude for the mock-ups, powered at subsonic speed to target by jet engines. Digital contour maps, born from radar and aerial and sat imagery, told the computer navigational systems in the warheads where to go.
Predestined supertech boogie-woogie.
Only these mothers of annihilation, code-named the Four Points, Horn knew, housed a series of thermal cluster bombs, eight to a package, two more inside each eight. As he did the math, recalling the computer graphics outlining the blast radius, he pictured smoking craters—or dozens of raging infernos—eating up something in the combined neighborhood of four to five square miles.
Sweet.
Welcome to the war of the future, he thought, aware that if this test run was successful, the empty wastelands of Nevada were next up, and in for a whole other galaxy of big bangs.
As Horn glimpsed Colonel Jeffreys moving his way, he pulled the pack of Camel unfiltered cigarettes from his pants pocket, stuck one on his lip. Clacking open his Zippo lighter and torching up, spitting tobacco flecks then dragging deep, he saw the head aerospace genius, Dr. Benjamin Keitel, glaring his way.
“Hey! Are you nuts? There’s no smoking in here!”
Horn washed a dragon’s spray of smoke toward Keitel, the man flapping his arms like a headless chicken, a couple more of his comrades jumping into the act. The geek was squawking out the virtues of nonsmoking to Jeffreys when Horn blew another cloud in his face and told the colonel, “Maybe you want to remind Dr. Frankenstein here who’s really in charge?” He ignored Keitel’s diatribe, adding, “Maybe you want to inform him I don’t exactly hand out pink slips at the end of the day for insubordination?”
“Get back to work,” Jeffreys told the aerospace engineer, who muttered something to himself then returned to his monitors.
Horn stared ahead, puffing, as the good colonel scowled him up and down. He could almost hear the man’s thoughts. Beyond the shoulder-holstered Beretta 92-F, if not for the white star emblem over his heart on his blacksuit, Jeffreys could pull rank.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t be so free in issuing implied threats like that, Mr. Orion,” the colonel said, layering disdain on his code name like a curse word.
“Well, you’re not me.”
“And I pray every night that blessing will continue.”
“Really?” Horn smoked, bobbed his head, got the message, hoping the day came when Jeffreys crossed into what he liked to call the Black Hole. “Fear not, Colonel. I’m not about to turn my quarters into a torture chamber,” he said, then, looking at the two female engineers, smiled and added, “or a rape room.”
“You son of a… Don’t you have some business to attend to, regarding an AWOL and, may I add, critical employee of this program?”
“We’re working on it. Something this sensitive, Colonel, it takes time,” Horn said as Jeffreys moved into his personal space.
“Time better served if you were, I would imagine, out there as point man in the hunt.”
Horn was searching for some threatening reply when he caught the change in tone from Keitel, questions hurled from his work bay, edged with concern as they were snapped into his com link. The SAS commander took a few steps forward, sensing a problem as he peered into the monitors where the executive jets mirrored Lightning Bat. The air became lanced, he felt, with rising panic as he saw what he believed were blue flames—or sparks?—leaping from the black ferrite-painted surface of the fighter jet, dancing next, nose to tail, there then gone. What the hell had just happened? he wondered, Kietel barking the same question to Major Holloran. Lightning Bat’s coating, he knew, was meant to absorb radar radiation, standard for any Stealth fighter to render it near invisible. Only he was privy there was more to the fighter jet’s body, from nose to swept-back Delta wings to tail, than earthly alloys.
Jeffreys banging out questions, Horn rolled up Keitel’s back. And clearly saw what looked like blue lightning shooting from the cockpit.
“Lightning Bat Alpha!” Keitel nearly shouted. “You are nowhere near the targets.”
“Why are the bomb bays opening?” Jeffreys demanded, checking his watch. “They’re way ahead of their scheduled launch!”
Horn heard Keitel gasp an oath as he saw the missiles lowered from their bay by the robotic arms. “Lightning Bat Alpha, respond!” he hollered, eyes darting from a digital readout to the play-by-play screens, snarling next as he pulled the com link from his ears, static crackling through the room like a string of firecrackers. “Colonel,” Keitel said, eyes bugged to white orbs, “all Four Points are recalibrating their targets!”
“What? How?” he demanded, flying up on Keitel’s rear. “Where?”
Horn was crowding Keitel and Jeffreys when he heard Holloran patch through, the panic in the major’s voice loud and clear through the static. “Ground Control, come in, dammit! We have a colossal and definite problem!”
Keitel looked about to vomit, sounding on the verge of hyperventilating as he tapped the keyboard on his computer. As a digital grid map of North Dakota flashed onto the monitor, Keitel paused, staring in horror at the blinking red dots. “Oh, God, no. This can’t be happening!”
“What?”
Keitel turned to Jeffreys, his face ashen, and told him, “All four missiles are recalibrated to strike civilian targets.”
“SWITCH TO MANUAL override!”
Targets Engaged flashing in red on the head up display from the holographic image illuminated by laser light on the inside of his visor, Holloran stifled the urge to smash his fist into the instrument panel.
“I can’t,” Sayers told him, his fingers flying over the keypad that would shut the targeting computer system down. “Dammit to hell, it’s locked up!”
Holloran swore under his breath. This was the next-to-ultimate nightmare scenario—four cruise missiles with cluster bombs set to launch and take out civilian targets—as he heard ground control telling him what he already knew.
The two of them were on their own.
Do something!
For all the four-digit Einstein IQ between them—there was nothing Eagle Nebula could do on its end. Short of blowing them out of the sky with a SAM—and he wouldn’t put it past them—there was one other option, he knew, waiting now for those three dreaded words.
Initiate Fatal Abort.
From the beginning, no ejector seats, no self-destruct button had been designed for Lightning Bat. There was good reason for that, he knew, fully accepting from the onset the twisted reasoning that IFA meant finding a vast and wide-open stretch of nothing and slamming Lightning Bat to Earth. A suicide ditching, a fireball spewing radiation, but hopefully nowhere close to a populated area. Or, at worst, only a few souls hopefully still wandering around outside Ground Zero, until Eagle Nebula could ferry in the hazmat platoons while soldiers quarantined God only knew how many square miles around the compass.
Holloran switched his HUD to the inside of the cockpit shield, wondering why some systems worked and others were—well, acting on their own, rebelling, as if they had willpower, defiantly commandeering the vessel. He grabbed the side-arm controller, hoping to God if he could throw the wings to a quick dip, forty-five degrees, port and starboard, the missiles might impact on what was empty prairie. Provided, of course, he got the timing right, but with everything else unraveling…
The stick was jammed!
And the blue lightning came back, leaping from the instrument panel, as Holloran found their own retractable cameras lower from each side of the hull’s underbelly amidships, zooming in on the two robotic arms lowering their payloads.
Targets Engaged freeze-framed on the shield.
Holloran cursed, rechecking the new calibrations, locked in still, he discovered, ground control screaming in his ear as the payloads fanned out into crossbars on their monitors.
Covering north, south, east and west, two on an arm, one frame hung a few meters lower than the other, and for the sake of what was now doomsday clearance. Just as they pulled the damn things up on their computers, he knew, they were held for the moment by titanium clamps, talons that would release them at any second as he watched the numbers fall to single digits on his readout.
Holloran stared at the vast prairie, looked to a long, sweeping horizon that seemed to run straight into the setting sun. They were still some fifty miles from the Badlands, Holloran certain, or rather praying, they were as empty as the lunar landscape he knew them to be.
“They’re going to fire, Major!”
And Holloran watched in helpless rage and disbelief as four cones of flame shot out beyond the stabilizing fins. The missiles released and went streaking away on four points of the compass.
GROUND CONTROL, Horn knew, was an obscene misnomer, and by galactic degrees in this case. There were no command guidance systems, at least for this initial outing, to depend on laser beams to pin down the targets to within a few meters, steer and keep the missiles locked in to impact. No passive system, either, meaning they homed in specifically on infrared radiation, as in heat-seeking the likes of auto or jet engines—or warm bodies. The Four Points were their own Alpha and Omega, relying solely on active systems, which was radar already engineered into the missiles, their guidance computers flying them on, unstoppable and untouchable, to vaporize the targets. Keitel was in the process of pointing this out to Colonel Jeffreys, they were little more than limp baggage on this end.
“Sweet Holy Virgin Mother of…”
“I’m afraid we are way past any hand of God, Colonel.”
“Don’t get smart on me, Keitel! Where are those missiles fixed to strike, mister?” the colonel rasped, clear to all now he realized he had become a master of the obvious by rattling off questions he already had the answers to from double-digit briefs.
The good Major Holloran seemingly all but forgotten for the moment, Horn watched as Keitel slammed in a series of numbers on one of his readouts, then hit his computer keyboard, informing the colonel he would bring up the targets on the wall. Looking past the workstation, Horn stared at the project’s emblem, thirty feet by twenty, painted on the stark white wall, dead ahead. The Eagle Nebula, he recalled, was a bright cluster of young evolving stars, but a massive gas formation, still condensing though not nearly thermonuclear enough to shine like Earth’s sun. Imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope only as recently as 1995, the dark nebulosity was more widely known among the deep space stargazers as “the Pillars of Creation.”
Keitel flashed the digital wall map of North Dakota over the emblem, framing four red circles, then enlarging the targets with a few taps on his keyboard.
With one ear, chain-smoking now that all the PC air was cleared, Horn listened to the colonel shout a litany of questions laced with orders, but he was more intent, fascinated, in fact, by the sight of the gun cameras framing in real-time the prairie sweeping below. Again, Jeffreys demanded to know the new targets, what might be the number of projected civilian casualties, railing next at Keitel to initiate some sort of abort action.
“It’s too late for that, Colonel! The damage is already done!”
“The hell you say. You people created it, do something to uncreate it! Or we are all in a world of hurt none of us can begin to even fathom!”
Horn smiled around his smoke, enjoying their sweat and panic, these pompous asses who often looked down their noses at him, a wolf among sheep who held the power of life and death. The snooty broads, too, often thinking they needed some R and R with a real man who could launch them into some deep space they couldn’t begin to get from their wonder toys. Maybe soon, figure the ladies might need a comforting shoulder to lay their distress on. Hope sprang eternal, and now on more fronts, he knew, than in his loins.
The gathered herd here didn’t know it, but he had his own plans.
He listened to Keitel’s ominous report. It looked like the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation was slated for one big bang, Jeffreys groaning as he heard the guesstimate for dead and maimed Native Americans. If there was any good news to be grabbed from this vision of hell, it appeared the westbound warhead would detonate on some rancher’s spread near the eastern leading edge of the Badlands. On that front, Jeffreys barked for numbers on family members, Horn now sensing the colonel was on the verge of fainting as the virtual reality of the body count kept on piling up in his churning desk-lifer mind, higher, he imagined with a puff and grin, than every piece of shredded document or deleted CDROM he was probably the first blast away from racing to. Another ranch on the Four Points’ feeding frenzy, but far larger in terms of cattle as imaged by a satellite parked over the state, was up for some more cluster dusting. Finally, there was a town, population twenty-six, but one of the geeks informed them at that hour the saloon was a big-ticket draw, Horn filing the man’s name away, wondering how he came by that information. When Horn caught the town’s name, another grin tugged at the corner of his lip.
Little Big Horn.
It was most definitely cover-the-assets time before some twenty-first-century scalping got in full swing, he knew, perfectly albeit horribly understandable, given that more than careers were at stake.
Talk about Black Holes.
Already, though, as he saw the watching eye on the Black Hawk closest to one of the civilian targets framing what was a row of small wooden buildings on a barren stretch of plain—assume Little Big Horn—the solution to the grim problems of the immediate future was shaping up, and in sweet accord with his own dreams. Funny, he thought, how a little patience and fortitude could find destiny smiling when a man decided to stand his ground.
As the Black Hawk closed to monitor the coming inferno, Jeffreys reached a level of near hysterics, ordering Keitel to fall to Plan IFA.
“You’re kidding, right? Unless you want to order Major Holloran to crash Lightning Bat out there, and with what’s going to happen if they do, do you really want to explain one more nightmare than we already have to deal with? You do know what’s on board that craft? You do know what fuels that jet?”
“I’m fully aware of the gravity of the situation, mister!” Jeffreys fumed, Horn again believing he could read the man’s tortured thoughts, what with all that gyrating body language and panic like neon signs in the eyes. Damage control, without question, time to place the SOS to DOD, the Pentagon, get the blame game cranked up, heating to thermonuclear critical mass, but in all directions other than his starched uniform.
Horn heard Holloran shouting from Keitel’s com link, the hooked-in intercom likewise now blaring the major’s voice. But he was locked on to the monitors, worked his spectating view between the gun camera and the Black Hawk relay.
And it happened, but far more spectacular than he could have imagined.
The gun camera winked out first as its cluster avalanche slammed into what Horn believed was the broadside of the first building in a Little Big Horn replay of that fateful and very gruesome day for the white man, but with total annihilation here for all present, indiscriminate of race, sex and age.
Complete and absolute obliteration, Horn saw, boiled like the smoke and fire of the Apocalypse, straight for the Black Hawk’s relay.
Just about all done, he knew, except for the cover-up.
Apparently, Horn found, Jeffreys had seen more than enough, the colonel wheeling, striding for the exit. A finger flick of his smoke, arcing it across the room, and he was marching hard for the intercept. Barking for Colonel No-Stones to halt, Horn grabbed him by the arm as the doors hissed open.
“Get your hands off me,” Jeffreys warned, wrenching his arm free.
“Listen to me, Colonel, and hear me but good. This fiasco, which, technically, falls under your responsibility, has a solution.”
“Solution?” He paused, the jaw going slack, the dark look betraying thoughts he knew what was about to be dumped in his lap. “No…”
“Yes. Now, you want to make some phone calls. I’ll give you a number you’re already aware of to someone who will, in no uncertain terms, inform you that what just happened lands square in my department.” It was Horn’s turn to breach personal space, as he put himself nose-to-nose with Jeffreys, and said, “The next words out of your mouth, Colonel, better be what I—what we all—know we need to hear, or, ‘sir,’ there could be more for you to dread than testifying before a bunch of fattened calves on the Hill. Oh. I see I have your full attention.”
“I’m listening.”
“Okay. Now, if it makes you happy, here’s what I propose to do….”
CHAPTER THREE
Aaron Kurtzman wondered what it would be like to walk again. Maybe it was the ten cups and counting of coffee he’d consumed, all that tar floating in enough sugar to wire a small army, electrically hyper-charging the caffeine-soaked thoughts off on grim tangents best left alone. Maybe it was working through the night at his computer station, by himself, for the most part, locked up in his head, most of the world sleeping, including some of his comrades and co-workers at Stony Man Farm, though he couldn’t say for certain. Intensely private, he was not a man to dump emotional baggage on others, wear suffering on his sleeve or to cast blame like a human storm raging about until the misery was spread sufficiently to the four corners of the globe, but the thoughts and feelings were there, just the same, and he couldn’t deny them.
At that predawn hour, staring at the monitor of his computer, he suddenly imagined himself out of the bowels of the new-and-improved Computer Room, removed from this trapping of time and space, free, unconfined, able-bodied. And there he was, up top, strolling the grounds, sans wheelchair, the barrel-chested, powerfully built titan he recalled from the ghosts of years past, that Big Ten champion heavyweight wrestler of the University of Michigan, a young lion. Breathing in the cool, crisp air of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, he imagined, sun on his bearded face, drinking in the lush greenery of the Blue Ridge Mountains, unshackled from the shell that imprisoned him. He pictured himself on a leisurely jaunt, down a wooded trail, maybe a dog by his side for company, he’d always had a fondness for German shepherds….
Enough, he told himself. No, it never hurt to dream, he thought, or to pray even for a miracle, as long as he didn’t get mired in self-pity, one of the worst of human failings, in his mind. Rather, if it be the will of some Divine Force beyond his finite understanding… Maybe someday, some other time, space or dimension, beyond the physical constraints of Earth, there would be a new and improved Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman.
Leave it at that.
There was work to do.
Head of the cyberteam, the think tank of Stony Man Farm’s Computer Room—the nerve center for intelligence gathering that kept the warrior machine rolling in the trenches of the world’s flashpoints, overt or black ops—was his realm. As such, Kurtzman went back to tapping in the next series of access codes on his keyboard.
They were alphanumeric codes and bypass encryption, what he tagged “circumventors,” the sum total faster and far simpler than any software program he’d previously created, though this one was designed for more than hacking. The FORTRAN, or formula translation, was part of his Infinity program, the server software managing and sifting through data from interconnected systems at light speed, until only the critical information he sought was framed on his screen. The client-servers were never the wiser he or one of his team had just broken through about three firewalls, stolen whatever buried cybertreasures, then rebuilt those walls after a lightning and untraceable bolt back to Stony Man mainframes. Whether they changed their passwords on a frequent basis or not, on the client-servers’ end, Infinity was the cryptographer’s answers to all mysteries of the cyberuniverse. Those faceless, nameless clients almost always came from any alphabet-soup intelligence agency within the United States and the world over, likewise any military or law-enforcement agency mainframes Kurtzman needed to access.
He wasn’t sure what it was about the news report he’d been watching in a corner of his monitor since last evening, using the remote on his keyboard to snap through the local and national cable networks, but something disturbed him about the images of reporters being ushered away from what was clearly a large area quarantined by armed soldiers. Initial reports cited some natural disaster, or so the reporters were told by military spokesmen, belonging to what branch, though, no one knew or was allowed to say. Speculation had body counts mounting by the hour, but these nameless spokesmen were denying any such rumors. He heard about meteor showers, or something or other unexplained that had fallen from space. Each new report sounded flimsier than the last. He smelled cover-up, a brittle conspiracy ready to unravel with a good swift kick.
And the Smoking Gun and Infinity programs were hard at work, he saw, alphanumeric codes tumbling in the top left-hand corner, as his labor of love raced out to those far reaches of the cyberuniverse to cross all pertinent I’s, dot the t’s of truth that not even the brightest award-winning journalist could uncover. Every shred of data from all U.S. intelligence agencies, black-inked or otherwise, was correlated with daily news reports, written or televised. Once any paper or station’s Web site dot.com was filed away into Infinity—Smoking Guns’s memory, the two programs became their own investigators. Between that and the sat imagery they burglarized from the satellite parked closest to the area in question—AIQ—in this instance North Dakota, and classified documents regarding military black ops and their installations within the state, Infinity did virtually all of the work for him. At the moment he was left with more questions than answers, but felt something far beyond space phenomenon had turned four separate areas in southwest North Dakota into what appeared to him on the imagery as smoking craters his trained eyed told him were the result of aerial strafing.
He was wondering how far and how to pursue it, when he became aware his partner at this early morning hour had cranked up his CD to that kind of fuzzy contortion blasting out of his headphones that should have rendered Akira Tokaido deaf.
Kurtzman wheeled sideways, Tokaido bebopping his head in rhythm to the tune. He held his arms out, caught his teammate’s eye, and said in a loud voice, “What the hell, huh?”
Akira, still bopping, looked at Kurtzman’s mouth and said, “I can hear you just fine. You said, ‘What the hell, huh?’”
“Okay, smart-ass. Do you think you can get to work while you’re getting all wet in the eyes over that blaring duet?”
Still bopping along, Tokaido’s fingers began flying over his keyboard. Kurtzman saw his monitor split into two screens. “What am I looking at, Akira?”
Two more images crowded the number on Kurtzman’s monitor to four.
Tokaido killed his CD. “Clockwise, top to bottom. A major Russian weapons factory in the Pamir Range of Tajikistan, the usual we know about it, they know we know, and the beat goes on. We check it with some of our own sources, I’m sure they’d verify there’s more going on under the roof than your basic WMD alchemy, the floating rumor out of spookdom’s black hole being they’re engineering superweapons of the future. Next, for your viewing pleasure, what I believe—and since the DOD, NSA and Pentagon files I accessed had so many black deletions regarding this base I discovered at great length tagged as Eagle Nebula, thus you can safely assume black project—is our version of the Pamir weapons factory. Is East meeting West, both sides dreaming up the future together regarding superweapons? Don’t know, but I think it’s worth looking into, in this humble whiz child’s often overlooked opinion.”
Kurtzman made a face. “Cut the crap or I’ll take away your CDs.”
Tokaido paused, considering something, then went on, “Whatever they’ve engineered inside the walls of Eagle Nebula, however, is what I think either crashed or burned up what Infinity calculates is roughly two square miles and then some of scorched earth that makes the Badlands look arable.”
“And you know this, how?”
Kurtzman watched as Tokaido further enhanced the imagery and he saw what his partner was referring to.
“Where there’s smoke, Bear… Now, the four areas the media is being pumped by the military to claim were hit by something from outer space are actually the results of cluster bombing. I compared those images through Infinity’s war-gaming, and they jibe. Blast radius, destruction pattern, spiral all the way down to the intensity of the fires, which indicate thermite payloads were used. These AIQs, I have confirmed, were civilian targets. From the body count, or what you can make out on your screen, gives you an idea of how nasty this could get if it’s going to involve a cover-up.”
Kurtzman weighed the enormity of what he heard then saw, tallied at least a dozen bodies, or what looked like the remains of such, on one of the AIQs. “A test run, you’re telling me, that went awry?”
“I would hope it wasn’t done on purpose.”
Kurtzman flashed Tokaido a scowl. He began chewing over the current mission of Phoenix Force, which was, more or less, still on the drawing board. At present, they were bivouacked at the American air base in Incirlik, Turkey, while the cyberteam at the Farm kept digging for clues about rumored supertech weapons being smuggled to Iranian extremists, somewhere along the Iraqi border, further in the process of attempting to put together pedigrees and place names to the faces of bad guys in question from their ultratech lair.
Kurtzman began to suspect he saw a pattern emerge, some connection, or so he believed Tokaido alluded to, between the death factory in Tajikistan and weapons-hungry jihadists. Was there more? Such as connecting the dots somehow to this Eagle Nebula black project? It wouldn’t be the first time, he knew, someone on the home team had sold out to the other side. Able Team was standing down, Kurtzman checking the digital clock at the bottom of his monitor, aware Hal Brognola, the man who headed the Sensitive Operations Group, would be arriving at his office at the Justice Department shortly. He needed to run his suspicions past the big Fed.
“There’s more, Bear, only I’m not sure how this fits, if it does…only…well, it’s just a feeling,” Tokaido said, and Kurtzman watched as four more sat images flashed onto his monitor, blurring the previous pics. He heard Tokaido mention the three names of former Soviet republics, then told him the last image was shot by NASA. “Remember that story CNN ran a few years back about a purported NORAD quarantine of an area in the Colorado Rockies that was supposedly hit by some type of…well, what was described by an eyewitness as ‘alien space matter.’”
Kurtzman knew he was looking at a full-blown military quarantine in each of the AIQs, complete with soldiers, choppers, makeshift work areas of equipment he couldn’t define, but manned by spacesuits. All told, he knew it spelled disaster area, civilians Keep Out, perhaps at the risk of jail time or worse.
“I do,” he told Tokaido. “It ran one time, as I recall.”
“NASA officially reported the Colorado incident as the result of a meteor shower. But ask yourself when was the last time you saw a hazmat detail gathered around a meteor, or stone fragments thereof, and with what appear to be radiation detectors?”
“And something tells me you got hold of classified documents that state otherwise.”
“Off the public radar screen as ‘unexplained extraterrestrial ore of unknown origin and substance.’ And that eyewitness?”
“I bet you’re about to tell me he vanished off the face of the earth.”
“There was one brief follow-up story, but the star witness was nowhere to be found.”
“Next you’re going to tell me NORAD, or whoever this Eagle Nebula, has iced down the bodies of little gray men with grasshopper-shaped heads and huge black eyes.”
“They’re actually a sort of off-white, but with a grayish hue. Hey, stranger things have happened, Bear, when it comes to the military wanting to keep unexplained phenomenon, whatever the truth and the mystery, all to themselves.”
No truer words, Kurtzman thought, could his cyber buddy have spoken. He reached for the intercom to start sounding off his suspicions.
CAMERON DECKER was sure he was dead, about to meet his Maker as he believed he opened his eyes, but was forced to clamp them shut when the blinding white light stabbed him clear through the brain, a lancing fire. No, this wasn’t heaven, he was in way too much pain for any eternal bliss, his body throbbing with knifing twists, scalp to feet. Gingerly he touched the side of his head, just to be sure he was, indeed, still on earth, probed the bandages wound around his skull. Why did he feel as if he was floating on air, though, his head like a balloon set to burst, both sensations bringing on the nausea? The last moment he remembered was…
A vision of hell on Earth, to say the least.
He saw himself being hurled through the air, far away from his ranch house, fractured pictures of recall slowly groping their way together. One minute, he had been dragged from the kitchen where he was preparing dinner for his bed-ridden wife, alarmed by the shrill barking of Custer. Even in the twenty-first century cattle rustlers were still alive and on the prowl for prime heads of choice beef, and it wouldn’t have been the first time some thieves had come through his spread and loaded up a trailer. The Winchester 30.06 in hand as he’d shucked on the sheepskin coat, grumbling his way out the back door, his normally stoic German shepherd dog going berserk, straining to break free of his chain. Spooked by what, he couldn’t tell, but his cattle were agitated as hell, his horses snorting from the barn, all in a lather. He’d heard that animals had some sixth sense, though, a built-in radar that warned them of mass atmospheric disturbances, and it wouldn’t be the first time that beastly extrasensory perception had foretold him of a sudden thunderstorm. It all looked like another red sundown over the prairie from where he stood, but there was “something” in the air. He could feel it. Something he thought he heard like a whistle, or those incoming rounds he remembered from Korea, the cattle stomping around the pen in a fury next as he walked…
There was an explosion, out of nowhere, or rather, a series of blasts that sounded as one, but with each earsplitting trumpet of thunder there was no telling as his senses were shattered. Before he could fully assess the moment, glimpsing in horror his home and his parents’ home of eighty-five years being uprooted and blown away like so much fertilizer in a twister, he was sailing, dumped, last he remembered, facedown inside the cattle pen.
Now…
He thought he was going to puke, groaning, as he dared to open his eyes. He was getting his bearings, found himself dressed in a white smock like a hospital gown, squinting into the shroud of white light that seemed supernatural in a way he could only describe as some waiting room—Purgatory perhaps?—between Heaven and Hell, when a voice called from the glow, “Mr. Decker? Can you hear me?”
A hard search, adjusting his vision, and he spotted a lean shape in black, straight ahead. The figure was blowing smoke through the light, sunglasses so black and fat they looked more like a visor. Between the combat boots and the pistol in shoulder holster, any hopeful notion the man was a doctor evaporated. Had he landed, though, in a hospital? The light alone was spooky enough, but there seemed to be no walls surrounding him, as if he were in some vast empty space, with the white shroud, bright as the sun, going on forever. Calling him? he wondered, wishing he didn’t feel so sick to his stomach, that feeling of being disembodied chilling him to the bone, warping his senses.
“Who are you? Where am I?”
“You can call me Mr. Orion. And you are in protective custody for the time being.”
“Protective…what the hell is going on? What happened to my ranch?” He tried to stand, but rubber legs folded, collapsing him back into his seat. Groaning, the room spinning, he said, “What’s wrong with me? What have you done to me…”
“Minor burns from the incident, a few cuts and contusions, Mr. Decker. We gave you a shot of morphine for the pain, patched you all up… You’ll be good as new in a few days. As for your ranch and all your cattle and horses—they are no longer standing.”
He felt his stomach roll over. “And my wife?”
“Your wife, Allison, Mr. Decker, was dying of breast cancer and emphysema. We’ll, uh, just call the incident where she is concerned a blessing in disguise. No, belay that. You being a devout church-goer and all, think of her passing as simply an act of God, that she now rests in eternal peace.”
Anger cleared some of the sludge away, this Orion character slamming his nose with one smoke bomb after another, speaking of his wife’s death as if it was nothing more than some near-miss highway crash he ought to be making the sign of the cross over. “Why, you rotten… I want to know what happened and exactly who you are, mister, or I swear…”
“Relax, Mr. Decker. Do you really need to bring on number three heart attack?”
Decker froze, the man reciting more of his medical history, with doctors’ names, dates of operations, down to length of each recuperation. Was that a smile? he wondered, this Orion talking next about his two sons, matter-of-fact, how they had turned their backs on what they called Nowhere, U.S.A., riding off to chase the wind of whatever their dreams in the big cities of Chicago and New York. Putting him in his place, playing mind games. But how did he know so much?
“I’m here to help, Mr. Decker, but only if you wish to help yourself. First of all, let us be clear, what happened to your ranch was the result of a meteor shower.”
“That wasn’t no rock falling from the sky that leveled my ranch and killed my wife. Those were explosions. I’m guessin’ some sort of missile or rocket.”
“As you might well believe that’s what you think you saw, being as you were a decorated veteran of the Korean War, having seen more than your rightful share of combat. And I salute you for your service to the country, sir.”
“Stick all that noise, and I don’t need to think about nothin’. I know what I saw. I’m bettin’ you’re military, work for the government. Something screwed up with you people, and now you want me to shut my mouth about what I saw. Let me tell you, friend, out here, we may be just dumb cowboys to you people, but I got no love for your Big Brother.”
And the faceless smoker knew all about that, too, the threats of bank foreclosures on his property, the audits and subsequent liens that drove him into bankruptcy, the suits from Washington offering to buy up his land, claiming they could cut him a break on what he owed if he grabbed the brass ring of his last stand.
“You seem to know an awful lot about me,” Decker snapped. “Whether or not much of this is a matter of public record, you don’t understand me at all.”
Another wave of smoke and Orion said, “No, it’s you who don’t understand, sir. Here it is, and this is a onetime, nonnegotiable offer. Between property value, including livestock, what would be your projected future earnings for the next five years and your wife’s insurance policy, we are prepared to write you a check in the amount of three million dollars, nontraceable, nontaxable funds. Death certificates have already been made out for both your wife and yourself, only you, sir, get to relocate, all expenses paid, until you get set up in someplace far away from North Dakota. Washington, all your medical bills and those banks you so detest? Your debt is erased, officially you become the man who was never born. Think about it. New name. New identity. You could be sitting on a beach in Hawaii, sipping mai tais and playing with the local hula-hoop talent by tomorrow. If I were you…”
“You ain’t. No deal. I’m walkin’ outta here and goin’ straight to the county sheriff.”
“Is that your final answer, Mr. Decker?”
“First and last.”
“Suit yourself.”
It was too easy, Decker’s instinct stirring, the old combat senses flaring to life, telling him something was wrong. He saw the glowing tip of the cigarette fall to the floor, eyes up, but the faceless Orion was gone, vanished, as if the light had swallowed him up. No sound of any door opening or closing to betray an exit, he was rising when he heard the electronic whir, looked up, thought he saw the ceiling part. A black hole yawning into view, barely perceptible as Decker squinted into the light, he heard machinery grinding to life, from some point beyond the white halo, deep in the dark void. If he didn’t know better, it sounded like a threshing machine was cranking to life. What the…
Warning bells clanged in a brain muddied by dope. He cursed whoever’d shot him up, limbs unwilling to respond to a rising sense of fear when the noise shrilled into what he was now certain was a wood chipper, and a damn big one, unless he missed his guess. He ventured a step forward, trying to get his sea legs, when the first gust of wind blasted around him like the gathering onslaught of a twister ready to rip across the prairie. Fear began edging toward terror, thoughts racing, as the wind strengthened, suctioned up and through the tunnel in the ceiling. What was happening became inconceivable, a nightmare he was sure, but here he was—all alone, no one knew he was even still alive, that he was dealing with the almighty hand of Big Brother who could do whatever he wanted and get away.
The cigarette was sucked up, flying past his eyes, the invisible force of a great vacuum swirling around him now, tugging arms and legs. The chair went next, shooting into the black hole, followed a split second later by a sort of screeching metallic grind.
And it dawned on him what was about to happen, horror setting in, the unholy racket of machinery torqued up to new decibels, spiking his ears, as he heard his cry being swept away into the white light. He tried to forge ahead, but the wind seemed to root him to the floor, the ground beneath like magnets daring him to walk, and far worse than any mud he’d ever slogged through more than half a century ago. The scream was on the tip of his tongue, but he knew the sound of terror would be lost to all but himself, if even that, as he was sheared naked by the cyclone, the flesh on his face feeling wrenched up, as though it was being blasted off bone, the twister sucking the air out of his lungs.
Oh, God, no! he heard his mind roar as he was lifted off his feet, levitating for a moment before the invisible strings began jerking with renewed violent force.
And he burst a silent scream into the wind, arms wrenched above his head, as he rose toward the black hole.
IT WAS A MOMENT, about as rare as a Nellie sighting in Loch Ness, Hal Brognola considered when he felt himself about to be scourged by depression. Or was it something else, he wondered, and far more insidious as he weighed the few facts as he knew them? Self-doubt? That what he did perhaps, at best, only pounded a small dent toward making the free world a better, safer place? That the only real solution, he morbidly thought, was kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out?
And dismissed that as soon as the first whisper of fatalistic pessimism filtered into his head. No way could he look himself in the mirror if he lived without principles, he knew, briefly angry with himself for even entertaining such notions. To doubt his duty, first of all, would be tantamount to death. And to undercut the fact there were good people everywhere—who only wished to live in peace and harmony, raise families, do whatever was right, whatever it took, no matter how tempting it was to turn their backs and go through the easy and wide-open gates of hell—was the first step toward becoming what he’d spent his life fighting.
Troubled, nonetheless, sifting through grim thoughts, the Man from Justice stole another few seconds, staring out the window as the Bell JetRanger swept over the Blue Ridge Mountains. When was the last time, he wondered, he had actually enjoyed the pristine view of those forested slopes, free to observe the rising sun spread the arrival of a new day, free to relax, not burdened by the weight of the nation’s security?
He couldn’t remember, and maybe it didn’t matter. By nature or destiny—and he wasn’t sure where the line blurred—he drove himself with the task at hand as hard as the day was long, grimly aware the wicked did not rest in his world. Beyond that, he was committed to the duty of defending America against its sworn enemies, from within and beyond its borders. On that score, it was an endless battlefront, he knew, forever expanding, as far as he was concerned, another roster of monsters always rising up to replace the evil dead, and often before the smoke cleared enough to see the next blood horizon. Or to pin down the next threat to God only knew how many innocents.
And it was a changing world out there, he reflected, evolving darker and more sinister by the day. Weapons of mass destruction. Suicide bombers. Suitcase nukes. Whole nations harboring, training and financing the murder of innocents. Supposed NATO allies, France and Germany, for example, doing business in the billions of dollars in the shadows with a former tyrant who used murder and torture and rape as an entertaining pastime. Forget any goodwill toward all men, there were mornings, like now, he wondered if the whole world was just going straight to hell.
He stood and went to the scanning console set on the small teakwood table. It was roughly the size of a notebook computer, but with attached fax and what looked like a microscope, Brognola finding his access code had been relayed to the Farm’s Computer Room, confirmed and framed in white on the monitor. Initiate Phase Two flashed, and he took a seat. IPT, he knew, was part of a trial run to upgrade security, establish identity one hundred percent, thus save time and keep the blacksuits from rolling out of the main building, or find the antiaircraft battery painting incoming aircraft.
The retinal scan was first, Brognola placing his right socket against the scope’s eye, depressing the send button, grateful high-tech refinements didn’t produce any flash that would leave him squinting. Right thumb rolled over the ink pad, then placed on standard-size, white bond paper, he punched in the numbers for the secure line, faxed it to Kurtzman. Tapping in a series of numbers to activate the system’s scrambler—Go illuminated in green on the monitor’s readout—he spoke into the miniature voice box.
“This is Alpha One to Omega Base Home. Confirm Voice Test Analysis. All tests initiated, awaiting your confirmation. Out.”
While he waited, Brognola eased back in the bolted-down leather swivel chair. There was a gathering tempest out there, and only direct actionable response, he knew, would hold back the barbarians before they tore down the walls of civilization.
FORMER DELTA FORCE Colonel Joshua Langdon took the smaller of black ferrite-painted aluminum steamer trunks by the nylon strap handle as soon as the ninety-foot-long inflatable boat scraped sand. Known to his men and the attached three-commando unit calling itself Tiger Ops as Commander X, he allowed the others to jump over the side first, splash down in ankle-deep, blue-green water. Five altogether, two commandos each to a steamer trunk the size of a body bag, the odd man out he knew as Capricorn Alpha Galaxy Leader, hands empty except for an HK MP-5 subgun, and they were on the beach, seconds flat, hauling the high-tech loads—one of his troops likewise burdened with a hundred-pounds-plus of folded camo netting on his back—deeper into the lush tropical greenery. A GPS module in the hands of his one of his commandos, steering them down a path to erect their base predetermined by satellite shoots, he followed Capricorn Alpha Galaxy Leader to shore.
Home sweet home, at least for the immediate future.
A quick search of the beach, black wraparound sunglasses shielding eyes from sunlight that beat off the emerald-green waters and white sand like imagined glowing radiation, and the ex-Delta colonel found himself alone with the Tiger Ops leader. Setting the trunk down, shucking the slung HK subgun higher up his shoulder, Commander X checked the screen on his handheld heat-seeker. Sweeping the perimeter, he found six ghosts in human shape, with much smaller thermal images flashing across the screen. He took a moment, listening to the gentle lap of waves on the beachhead, the caws of wild birds from some point inside the ringing walls of greenery on the coral island roughly the size of a city block.
“Almost paradise, huh? Nothing personal, you understand, but it kind of makes me wish I’d brought along my own little Eve.”
Commander X glanced at the lean figure in tiger-striped camous, the Tiger Ops leader working on a smoke, clearly not all that inclined to do much more than profile, opting to leave the grunt work to others, while drinking in this Eden and maybe picture romping naked through the lagoon with his own vision of the mother of mankind. Something about the leader troubled Langdon, but he couldn’t pin it down. The guy had shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair and a nappy beard as opposed to his own buzz cut, clean mug. Langdon noted the military bearing, decided there was more mercenary—or buccaneer, in this instance—than a current or ex-serviceman or intelligence operative performing his duty for country and God. Likewise, it was unclear who the Tiger Ops leader pledged allegiance to, even why he’d been assigned to assist him on what was a satellite relay station somewhere in the Maldive Islands.
Langdon saw his two men hustling down the beach to retrieve the rest of the steamer trunks. As they splashed down, he turned, looked at the anchored Interceptor Gunboat. The skipper, he knew, was one of his people, and the inshore patrol craft, on loan, presumably from the CIA station chief in India, would stay put until he green-lighted the man to pull away for surveillance duty. Langdon ran an approving look, stem to stern of their gunboat ride. Two Deutz MWM diesel engines, top speed of 25 knots, a range of 600 nautical miles, with a forward 12.7 mm machine gun, and he had no doubt about the ability of his troops manning the ship to fend off trouble, alert them to any incoming surprises. They worked for the same people, he knew, his men having been culled from various special forces for both their proved martial skills and high-tech talent, signing the standard “training” contracts that swore them to a lifetime of secrecy. Halfway around the world from Omega Base, they would be able to reach the Farm as if they were but a few yards away, once the fiberoptic comm station was set up. As for his Tiger Ops comrades…
Well, in this age of the media and politically stamped “new war on terrorism,” every intelligence, law-enforcement agency and military arm wanted to muscle itself in for a piece of the action. Langdon, like the people he represented, wasn’t in it for money or the glory. Truth was, he—like anyone who worked in the shadows for the Farm—was nowhere to be found on any official record.
He stole another moment, staring off into the vast Indian Ocean, getting his bearings. They had departed from Cape Comoros on the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent, pushing out, south by southwest, where the Lakshadweep Sea flowed into the Indian Ocean. The Maldives were comprised of a chain of twenty-six atolls of 1190 islands, only 200 of which were inhabited, and none of which rose more than ten feet off the water. Most of the islands sat, more or less, on the equator, and for this stint plenty of bottled water was required to get them through the long, hot days. Call their position somewhere in the vicinity of 400 miles due west of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
“Shall we get to work, Commander?”
Langdon heard the soft whine of battery-powered drills working on tent pegs. Hoping the man was inclined to do more than catch a tan and daydream about some island girl, Langdon skipped the remark as the Tiger Ops leader turned and strolled away, slinging his HK around his shoulder to free his hands for another cigarette.
ROBERT FIRE CLOUD was angry and scared.
For what he guessed was ten hours or more now, he had been watching them from a safe distance. Hidden in a gully in the hills north of what used to be his home, and the white eyes government-built-and-paid-for houses of his neighbors, each time one of the black helicopters—three in all for the moment—lifted off and swept the prairie near his roost, he took cover deeper in his hole. Who they were, he didn’t know, but assumed they were white eyes soldiers, between the choppers, the submachine guns, black uniforms and matching helmets.
What he knew was that four homes had been blown off the face of the earth. Only now were the fires of brilliant white beginning to lose their anger and intense glow. When the wind blew his way, he caught the sickly sweet whiff of charred flesh, the memory of neighbors and friends burning deep his anger each time his nose filled with the stink. His home, little more than a two-room shack, may be just a glowing cinder, but he was thankful he lived alone.
His neighbors hadn’t been so blessed.
Granted, the edge of hot anger had dulled some during the course of the past few hours, after the few first bodies had been dug out of the smoldering piles by men in spacesuits, dumped in black rubber bags. Now that it was clear some horrific accident had befallen Crazy Horse Lane, he wasn’t sure how to proceed, where to run, who to go to for help. The county sheriff, John Mad Bull, would be passed out, too hung over to do anything even if he woke him at that hour.
So he watched the spacesuits use long metal poles to dig through more rubble, extracting bodies or what was left of men, women and children who shared this lonely stretch of the Berthold Reservation. His closest neighbors were six to eight miles in any direction, but surely, he thought, they had heard the tremendous series of explosions? Or had the same fate befallen them?
Again, he considered his own good fortune, felt a flush of shame on his cheeks, thinking himself lucky as opposed to the dead. If not for his nightly ritual at the Crazy Horse saloon…
He was stone-cold sober now, but began thinking about the bottle of Wild Turkey under the seat of his pickup, a few down the hatch to get his nerves and the shakes under control. The longer he watched them, he wondered if the white eyes soldiers spotted him, would he use the G-3 assault rifle, bought at a gun show and converted to fully automatic, stand his ground, go down in some blaze of glory. After all, he thought, he was believed to be direct blood to Crazy Horse. Only the white eyes had him outnumbered fifty or more to one. A 40-round detachable box magazine would hardly take down more than a few, considering he saw gunships armed with machine guns in their doorways.
He had to do something, even if it was wrong.
One of the gunships made the decision for him, as it lifted off, veering in his direction. As if it knew he had been there all along.
He stood, hunched, and worked his way down the gully, as fast as limbs swollen with the sludge of liquor would allow. Beyond his heart thundering in his ears, the assault rifle growing heavy in hands filling with the running sweat of the night’s drinking, he heard the insect bleat of chopper blades bearing down from behind. After what he’d seen, what was to stop these men from taking him prisoner, or killing him? Or was he being paranoid? He didn’t know, wasn’t about to freeze where he stood. They were still white eyes with guns.
Stumbling out of the gully, he hit level ground, running for his Chevy pickup. Out of nowhere, the light flared, fear seizing him as he was framed in the white umbrella, heard a voice boom from a loudspeaker, “You there! Halt now and throw down your weapon!”
The command was delivered, not only with anger, he thought, but with menace. He was turning, snarling as the light stabbed him in the eyes, to split a brain throbbing from exertion, when he became aware he was lifting his assault rifle.
Then the machine gun roared through the light. He felt numb flesh absorb the first few rounds, the impact jerking him halfway around before hot emotion and the desire to die standing on his feet seized him. Rage that these white eyes soldiers would slaughter him without further warning erupted what he hoped was his best war cry. He held back on the G-3’s trigger as the big gun thundered, chopping up his flesh, spraying hot blood on his face. He was dead on his feet, he knew, seconds from floating away to the next world, but Robert Fire Cloud only hoped his death and whatever had happened to his neighbors would be avenged.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hal Brognola watched the War Room’s wall monitor as Aaron Kurtzman took the remote and clicked on the bearded, turbaned face of what he suspected was the bad guy of the month.
“The Sign of God, Rafiq Namak…” Kurtzman began.
“The what?” Brognola exhorted.
“That’s what Ayatollah means, sign of God. Only this cleric has anointed himself Grand Ayatollah, and it appears he’s looking to muscle out all the competition, from drug and arms traffickers to rival mullahs, all the way to the president of Iran, who, as far as moderates go in that part of the world, is about as rational as they come.”
“Meaning, can we say, ‘he wants to be chummy with Uncle Sam,’” Brognola interjected.
“Up to a point, but only as long as he can keep the country from being overrun by Pizza Huts, rap music, satellite television that pipes in western entertainment while kissing up to the hardliners behind the scenes. The president of Iran, as we all know, isn’t the real power that keeps either the oil pumping or the radicals frothing at the mouth and chanting ‘Death to America.’ He’s a puppet, in truth, toeing the line between bringing his country into the twenty-first century and appeasing the radical clerics.
“According to our CIA intelligence skims, there’s been another in a long line of internal power struggles between rival clerics for the choice seat at the head of the extremist table. Right now, it looks like Namak has fairly fitted himself to wear that crown. He has his own and not-so-small army of radicals, including some of the most dangerous and vicious intelligence officers, ex-SAVAK thugs, a mass following of politically indoctrinated Revolutionary Guards who do his bidding, which is pretty much offing the competition or who are so cruel and barbaric they could have given Saddam’s sons a few lessons in torture. He’s done pretty good for himself, if you factor in his last known five or so years of opium and heroin proceeds coming across the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, cutting himself in a for a nice chunk of change for safe passage and warehousing. Then there’s his version of madrassas, about twenty schools, our intel cites, only far more radical than anything in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Egypt, and which he runs across Iran in every corner, with hand-picked mullahs who give new meaning to the word extreme. Pretty much the usual brainwashing of angry impoverished youth being groomed for future martyrdom, only these students, some as young as seven or eight, are being shipped out to blow themselves up wherever Namak aims his ‘kill all Americans’ automatons.
“Considering he was born with a silver spoon shoved down his vitriolic anti-West yap—the son of a father whose father brokered himself a sweet deal during the early Anglo-Iranian Oil Company days—Rafiq was educated in Europe where he apparently forgot all about the strict tenets of Shi’a Islam, his reputation being one of a free-spending, drug-using playboy, who, so the rumor goes, had some peculiar tastes in sexual games. Word from spook city is he spent a few years in the late eighties and early nineties ingratiating himself to the CIA, the NSA, DIA and whoever else might help him climb the ladder of success while he lies, backstabs, generally plays both ends against the middle in a high-wire act that apparently left a whole lot of wreckage—spell dead American intelligence operatives.”
“Meaning,” Brognola said, “his former friends are now his enemies.”
“Or may still be his pals, if what is rumored churning out of the spook mill pans out and he’s handing out the ready cash to the buzzards of the day. What he wants, publicly stated, is one united Middle East under Shiite control, and he’s starting with Iraq, lighting the powder keg of resistance. Beyond that, engineering mass killing sprees, who knows what his end game really is? He’s made plenty of enemies, no question, there have been several assassination attempts, but he seems blessed by that weird dark light that always sees his ilk live to savage another day. He uses body doubles to keep trigger-happy rivals guessing, never known to be in the same place for very long. Sometimes you see him in robe and turban when he makes an appearance before the adoring mobs. Other times a three-piece suit, or he sports tiger-striped camous when he ventures into the desert to check out one of his three known training camps for the youngbloods. There are claims by his followers that he can see the future.”
“Do tell.”
Kurtzman grunted. “Apparently he’s not bashful when it comes to touting himself an oracle of Mohammed.”
“I’ll venture a wild guess here, but his psychic powers predict terrorist attacks.”
“He’s been right on the money, at least the where and how of it,” Kurtzman said, cocking a grin in Brognola’s direction. “The body counts are a little off, but with each attack, whether in Israel or his favorite killing ground, Iraq, the crowds go wild in Tehran. Lately he’s been hitting the airwaves over there with predictions of total annihilation for the Great Satan, a ‘conflagration from God that will wipe America off the face of the earth in a storm of fire the world will never forget.’”
“Blowing smoke?”
Kurtzman shrugged. “Hard to tell. How far along Iran’s reprocessing plants are to make weapons-grade plutonium and uranium, we don’t know, but we know of at least two factories of WMD that are well on their way, and believed to be loosely controlled by an influx of Namak cash. We do know that he calls his organization of fighters the Army of Armageddon, and with radical ties all the way to Lebanon where, it’s believed, he wants to establish a power base. And, yes, in order to jumpstart his war of annihilation, presumably starting with Israel while he torches what he can in Iraq.”
Brognola gnawed on his cigar, perused the intel packet Barbara Price had handed him earlier. During the brief pause, Brognola noticed that the Stony Man Mission Controller seemed unusually quiet, but the lady was a pro, no problem listening with one ear to the brief while she scanned the monitor of her battery-powered laptop, combing through the grim facts as he’d received them late last night from his nameless source in Shadowland. Likewise, Kurtzman had his own notebook computer, having already downloaded the CDROM to his hard drive, hooking the modem that would allow him to frame pertinent data direct from both computers to the wall monitor.
“This,” Kurtzman said, clicking the screen to frame what looked like a typical artillery shell, “is SPLAT. Special Purpose Laser Anti-Tank.”
Brognola waited as Kurtzman broke the screen into four quads. He saw a tracked vehicle, a UAV that looked suspiciously like a CIA Predator, and some sort of delivery system, complete with radar screen, the background appearing to be a stone hovel.
“During a U.S. special ops raid on a stronghold believed used by Namak along the Iranian-Iraqi border, these were seized, along with blueprints and instructions strongly suspected of having their origins somewhere far outside the Mideast realm.”
“Any ideas on who’s looking to help pile up the body count with SPLAT?”
Kurtzman sipped from his mug, frowning. “There was some talk, the French were mentioned, but we think it’s a smoke screen to deflect blame. Since France was dumped in the crapper on oil contracts in Iraq, however, they have been schmoozing the Iranians. I’m not one to jump on the PC bandwagon, so I don’t mind saying they’re a sneaky, backstabbing lot, with a whole lot to hide in some shady dealings with Saddam, but I don’t think they have the balls to start dumping off ordnance that could be used against Coalition Forces in Iraq, though they most likely have this technology. That aside, there are no markings, serial numbers and such that we know of on the ordnance, which leaves suspicion enough to go around it could be Germans, North Koreans or Russians…”
“Or someone on our team.”
“It’s happened before, as we all sadly know. Now, as for SPLAT, it’s the next step in laser-guided artillery and its sister version for short and intermediate range missiles. Laser guidance has been tried in the past where field artillery is concerned, but there’s a few refinements on SPLAT. Thermal, or heat-seeking guidance systems have been upgraded, for one, the use of sophisticated super microchips installed in computer systems, developed, in part, from the U.S. Navy’s SidewinderAIM-9D. You can see the tracked vehicle with eight launch rails, I’m told twelve to twenty more shells, or short-range missiles, can be stored in ready-access pallets. As for the shells, they range anywhere from 85 mm to 155 mm. On the short-range or intermediate missile range…”
“I bet you’re going to tell me they can be fitted with chemical or biological warheads. Or tactical nukes.”
“Not only that, but they can, ostensibly, hit their target down to within a few meters. Gunner in turret mount, he aims the projectile using GPS. The tracking signal processor feeds into the computer optic link using Global Positioning Satellite. Point and fire.”
“And the package can be guided in by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.”
“Yes. All things considered, Hal,” Kurtzman said, “it’s a quantum leap in laser-guided field artillery, vastly improved for bad weather and night operations.”
“Range?”
“Unknown. But, say for the sake of argument, you go with intermediate-range missiles, using this delivery system and rocket fuel…”
“You could hit Tel Aviv.”
“With your eyes closed.”
Brognola grunted around his cigar. “And we’re thinking Namak is beefing up his Army of Armageddon with SPLAT?”
“And/or arming foreign fighters across the border in Iraq,” Kurtzman said. “And if he has UAVs at his disposal to guide the projectiles to target.”
“Which bring us to Phoenix Force,” Brognola said. “What’s its status?”
“They’re ready to move when you give the green light,” Kurtzman said.
“To link up with our Tiger Ops allies,” Brognola muttered. “And I use that word ‘ally’ with great reservation.”
“I know you tried to get the Man,” Kurtzman said, referring to the President of the United States, “to cut Phoenix loose on its own, but with the instability of the area in question near and along the Iranian border, and with no telling how many enemy combatants they may be facing, a few extra guns may not hurt.”
“The jury’s still out on that, Bear. For one thing, you can’t dig up any background on who these Tiger Ops are, which agency cuts them blank checks from whoever’s slush fund. I hate having our people working with and inside lurking shadows who may have dubious agendas. Especially since we don’t know who is funneling SPLAT and whatever other high-tech ordnance to Namak and thugs.”
“I concur, which is another reason I thought we’d run with the satellite relay station. In the event Phoenix needs backup on the ground, Barb worked it out with the CIA station chief in India to have them a Gulfstream fueled and ready to fly to the battlefront on a moment’s notice. Not only that, but with the weather predicted to be nothing but tropical paradise, clear skies for the next two weeks, any satellite imagery relayed to us from them will be in crystal clarity. With the fiber-optic camera mounts Phoenix will have on their person, our guys can monitor the battlefront for them, live and in color, cyberspace directors, if you will, on the bloody stage. Likewise we will get relayed images, but they will be time-delayed by about three seconds.”
Brognola watched as Kurtzman snapped on the vast Indian Ocean, enlarging an area southwest of the subcontinent’s tip in the Maldive Islands in red.
“Emerald Base Zero,” Kurtzman said, “confirmed they are set up and ready to begin sweeping the Iran-Iraq border with the first available satellite they can park over the AIQ. What I did was provide Commander X and his team with a software program—Ghost Dreams—which will create a ghost satellite of the one they park in space. That way, whoever’s on the ground monitoring that eye in the sky will think it’s still orbiting, will even have ‘artificial imagery’ relayed to the station.”
“And, once again, our blacksuits are running the relay station in a joint effort with Tiger Ops, who will be watching the backs of their own guys,” Brognola said, then paused, watching Price. “You know what I’m thinking? It looks like these Tiger Ops have been running around in Iraq and maybe Iran for some time now, that they have in all likelihood established contacts on both sides of the fence.”
“And you suspect some or all of them may be sleeping with the enemy?”
“If they are—and like you said, Bear, it’s happened before—Phoenix will get the thumbs-down from me to take them out, and I don’t care how highly touted they came to me from the President. I may be liaison between the Farm and the Oval Office, but I won’t play anybody’s fool when it comes to putting our people in harm’s way. Barb? I gather you’ve found something I received from my Shadow Man that’s grabbed your eye?”
“Perhaps, but I’ll need to make a phone call or two to some old contacts of mine at the NSA. Before you arrived, Bear, Akira and I were kicking around some ideas about this ‘incident’ in North Dakota. It smacks of a military test gone wrong. In this instance, terribly wrong. Our sat pics show civilian casualties, full military quarantine, denials being issued to whatever press can get close enough before they’re driven back. From the facts given to you by your source, I’m thinking there’s a strong possibility…well, your source states this Eagle Nebula is creating superweapons of the future, including, as unbelievable as it may sound, flying war vans that can be fitted with state-of-the-art hardware. Moreover, he hints that maybe a few loose cannons are selling whatever the supertechnology to our enemies.” She tapped her keyboard, framing a fighter jet on the wall monitor. “That is Lightning Bat, allegedly the prototype super fighter jet of tomorrow. With its swept-back Delta wings and arrowhead configuration, it appears just like an F-117 Stealth, only with quantum leap variants. According to your source, it has a top speed of Mach 10. To go ten times the speed of sound, your intel alludes to some type of super combustion ramjet, using air for fuel.”
“Only, Lightning Bat is powered by a nuclear reactor,” Kurtzman added.
“Which I find damn hard to believe. You have the problem of the tremendous weight of a reactor alone, for one thing, all that steel and concrete housing,” Brognola said. “You’re releasing huge sustained amounts of energy, which is basically heat, I believe, producing what is steam to keep a turbogenerator going strong. You’ve got to keep the reactor cooled by water…”
“We believe it’s done at high altitudes,” Kurtzman said, “by air pumped through vents to cool the reactor. Somehow, we don’t know how, but they’ve purportedly done it at Eagle Nebula, weight problem and all. Problem is, the single greatest fear and why no aircraft before now has been propelled by nuclear energy should be the obvious crash landing in a heavily populated area. Depending on how much uranium or plutonium is used, you would most definitely have a Chernobyl to deal with.”
“And we’re thinking Lightning Bat’s test run,” Brognola said, “was a belly flop, and that they’ve got radioactive clouds spreading over half of North Dakota?”
“No,” Price said. “We’re thinking its payload was launched by some sort of computer malfunction. Or by direct sabotage.”
“And these payloads are suspected to be?”
“Conventional cluster bombs,” Kurtzman said.
“And your man in the know,” Price added, “claims the bomb bay can hold nukes, and that a nuke test run is on the drawing board for Nevada. Cluster nukes, he calls them, one designed to go off after the other in varying outreaching circles of obliteration around the compass. The payloads are lowered on something like a crossbar, which allows for a simultaneous launch of four warheads, north, south, east and west. Whatever happened out there I think warrants investigation. And if weapons or technology is being hijacked to be sold on the international black market…”
Brognola nodded. There were a lot of blanks that needed filling in, and if there was one type of savage he detested it was a traitor wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, selling out for money or twisted ideology, it didn’t matter. Treason, he believed, deserved the ultimate rough justice.
“Okay, what’s the status on Able Team?” Brognola inquired.
Price cleared her throat. “Carl and Gadgets,” she said, referring to Carl Lyons and Hermann Schwarz, two of the three commandos of Able, “are in Chicago.”
“Let me guess. R and R,” he offered, “tearing up the town. Gentlemen’s clubs, all-night drinking binges and the possibility I may get a phone call they need bail money.”
“How well you know our prodigal sons,” Kurtzman quipped.
“Yeah, well, there may come a day they’ll rue when Daddy hangs up the phone. So, what’s the story on Rosario?” Brognola asked, meaning the third leg of the team, Rosario Blancanales, sometimes referred to as the Politician.
“I arranged to have him sent to Vegas,” Price said.
“I didn’t know he was a gambler.”
“He’s not,” Price said, and tapped her keyboard. “He is.”
Brognola looked at the wizened face on the wall monitor. The eyes were hidden by dark sunglasses, a mane of snow-white hair flowing to the shoulders of his aloha shirt.
“That,” Price said, “is Ezekiel Jacobs, the creator of Lightning Bat and its purported nuclear-powered capabilities, among other superweapons systems, as confirmed by your source’s intelligence. An Israeli national, he was educated in the States, then disappeared for a number of years after a brief stint with NASA. The NSA says he worked for the Russians during that missing time on a space program to someday see man travel deep space. Apparently a number of his theories, travel at light speed using controlled bursts of fission reactions, was a little too radical for the NASA crowd. He begged for funding to create what he called the Dynamo Matrix Program—again deep space travel at light speed—raised a stink, was fired by NASA and, it appears, sold his services to the Russians. He’s considered a genius, however, in the field of aerospace engineering and physics.”
“And he spends his free time at the slot machines?” Brognola said.
“Blackjack. He can count cards so well he’s been banned from several casinos. Now, apparently, he’s switched to dice just so he can get through the front door, or not end up in an unmarked grave in the desert.”
“So what’s Pol doing out there?”
“Helping an old friend from his Vietnam tour,” Price answered.
“Come again?”
“He was reluctant at first to go into much detail, then I pushed him when he asked about me arranging a classified flight out of your office, so he could take whatever hardware he needed, thus, as you know, bypassing the usual boarding inspections. If I overstepped my authority, Hal…”
“No need to apologize, it isn’t like I have to go to Congress for a blank check or have to explain myself to a bunch of senators. And I’m sure you had good reason, and that you’re about to drop a bomb on me about Mr. Jacobs here.”
“Pol’s buddy is a private investigator,” Price said. “For whatever reason, and I gather the reason is that there is some degree of danger involved, the friend enlisted Pol’s help.”
“Called out of the blue?”
Price shrugged. “I gather they’ve stayed in touch over the years, as a lot of vets of that war probably have. Anyway, the PI, he lives in South Dakota, near the ranch where Jacobs lived with his wife, and one day recently up and vanished. Being as he’s been known to hole up in Vegas before, she contacted this investigator who, in turn, called Pol.”
“And the danger is?”
“Russian intelligence operatives,” Price said. “Pol confirmed his PI buddy believes Jacobs is being courted by the Russians. Not only that, but Pol told me Jacobs had a classified job at a remote North Dakota installation that required he work there, four days on, four off.”
“The Eagle Nebula,” Brognola said, watching Price nod. “So, we think we’ve fallen into some snake’s nest and by accident or by way of the accident or sabotage by our own military? And we have more riddles than answers, and we’re thinking there could be homegrown traitors clear from North Dakota to Iraq?”
“Pretty much the usual,” Kurtzman said.
Brognola worked on his cigar. “Okay. Barb call Carl and get those two to North Dakota, but have Pol stay put in Vegas for the time being, see what he digs up or what may fall into his lap.”
“You’ll want Carl and Gadgets looking into Eagle Nebula? As what, part of some special task force from the Justice Department?”
“Complete, if I can get it, with a presidential directive that gives them free and ready access to the base and to question whoever’s in charge there,” Brognola said. The grim note in Price’s voice and the wry glint in her eyes not escaping him. “Oh, yeah, I know. Lyons isn’t big when it comes to smearing on the gentle diplomacy. But, if they’re hiding something out there, covering up a disaster that involves civilian casualties, I’m counting on his crocodile style to flush out and chomp down on some raw meat. The perfect pit bull for the job,” Brognola added with a grim smile.
EZEKIEL JACOBS HELD his Russian benefactors in contempt. Assuming they were either current or former Spetsnaz commandos or ex-KGB, perhaps even tied to some criminal organization, this ignorant rabble who lived by the sword and were enslaved by all the animal inclinations of such didn’t have a clue how to handle themselves when in the presence of genius—or women—much less understand the fine point that living well was the best revenge.
“This is what we are throwing away good and very large sums, may I add, Comrade Jacobs, of money on? A computer graphic of an American Stealth fighter? Charts of chemical equations and numbers and physics babble?”
And there it was, he thought, pulling back his flowing mane of snow with one hand, staring at Boris Rustov on the other side of the coffee table as the Russian glowered at the specs on Lightning Bat, his black ferret eyes nearly bugged out with profound confusion and anger over mathematical equations that only a few in his elite stratosphere could even begin to comprehend. Clearly this barbarian was blind to the creativity of pure genius that was as close, he thought, to the Divine as Earthbound Man could get.
Ah, but why must he suffer fools gladly? Then again, why not? A few more days and playtime was over. For the moment he figured he was as close to heaven on earth as he could possibly ascend. One look out the massive window, and the constellation of neon out there on the Strip beckoned him the world could be his, but for one more roll of the dice, another few hours at the blackjack table. From his six-hundred-dollar-a-day suite on the north corner of the Bellagio hotel-casino—all the trimmings of two giant screen TVs, whirlpool, fully stocked wet bar and room service with all the frills, complete with ladies of the evening—he could drink in the glittering diadems of Caesar’s Palace, the Barbary Coast, the Flamingo Las Vegas, Imperial Palace.
The 3000-room ultraresort was a marvel of flamboyance, he thought, grabbing up a fat chunk of real estate where the old Dunes was perched on the southwest corner of Flamingo and the Strip. Considered one of the most expensive hotel-casinos on the planet, it featured Italian gardens, a twelve-acre lake, showroom, water shows, with a few hundred million in art displayed and spread around all the heavenly opulence. The best news of all was that families with children were strongly urged to seek accommodations farther up the Strip, high rollers only to walk through these pearly gates. Granted, he was still mid-Strip, in the thick of the hustle and bustle, traffic and noise a near 24/7 nuisance, but there was no reason to venture farther north where the common folk—low-rollers—wasted their paltry sums in grind joints.
From behind his dark Blues Brothers sunglasses, Jacobs watched the Russian scowl, looking him up and down as if he were some sideshow freak. Jacobs crossed one pajama-wrapped leg in white silk over the other, smoothed out the robe in matching color and fabric, brushing a fleck of tobacco off the Playboy bunny monogram on his left breast. Believing he could feel the steam building in the Russian’s primitive brain, sure Rustov’s blood pressure was ready to shoot off the monitor, he turned to Cleopatra, his companion. He watched her with an approving eye, as the striking Asian beauty slinked up to the couch to deliver him another brandy.
“Thank you, my dear,” Jacobs said, twirling the drink in his snifter, then patting the seat beside him. And he thought Rustov would erupt as she dropped her luscious flesh, barely concealed in the leopard-skin one-piece, bottom thrust his way, snuggling close to genius, all purrs and caresses. Breathing in her exquisite fragrance, he felt the stirring of heat in his loins, then the guttural bark of his Russian visitor soured the rising mood.
“There is a limit to our generosity and a bottom to our money pit. Explain yourself now, Comrade Jacobs.”
Jacobs took his smoking pipe, tamped down a fresh snootful of tobacco. “Six million million miles,” he said, smiling. “Three hundred thousand kilometers or 186,000 miles per second. Mass, force, space and time.”
“You find this amusing, comrade?”
“The first was the measure of a light-year. The second was the speed of light. The third is part of an equation whereby I explain how to shrink mass, while heating a hydrogen core for controlled bursts of a thermonuclear explosion that would allow for travel at and beyond light speed.”
“You are trying my patience to its limits.”
“So I see.” Jacobs puffed, sipped his drink. He took the remote box, snapped on a James Bond movie behind the Russian thug, wondering if he could replicate or refine one of Q’s high-tech toys, but saw the scene and already knew that he had. If he hadn’t, he knew the Russians wouldn’t be here now, waiting on him, hand and foot, frothing at the mouth, impatient to get on with business, surely entertaining violent fantasies of what they’d like to do to him if he weren’t regarded as the Holy Grail to their superiors.
“What you see, Comrade Rustov,” he said, speaking now in fluent Russian, “as a typical Stealth fighter jet is, in fact, the war bird of the future, created by my own hand, and for which your country came to me and agreed to my demands in order to—one—not only engineer a version of Lightning Bat, but—two—deliver to you my considerable expertise in likewise building weapons and weapons systems that far surpass your incomprehension of me and my creation. What you failed to understand and thus give me a chance to become immortalized beyond the likes of Albert Einstein is that Lightning Bat was one, perhaps two, steps away from being able to send man into deep space at the speed of light through my sweat and labor. Which requires nuclear propulsion, of which I installed in Lightning Bat and was in the process of designing for a prototype spacecraft.”
“You are talking much but telling me nothing of what I wish to know.”
“Ah, I see. You think I throw you a crumb with those computer printouts on the table. You want to know where the good stuff is kept.” Jacobs tapped the side of his head. “Nearly all of the treasures of the mysteries of the universe, comrade, are locked safely away in here. Regarding my continued health and happiness, I will lead you to all pertinent documents and data in due course. After, of course, I have enjoyed what was agreed upon as one week of R and R in Las Vegas. That leaves me at present with three days to suffer your scowling and barbs and demands.”
Rustov leaned forward, an edge to his voice. “You may feel genius should be granted all the perks and privileges it demands, while we, the common peasants should bow and scrape before you, but I would be very careful how you speak to me, Comrade Jacobs. Your continued happiness is really of no great concern to me.”
Jacobs blew smoke across the table. “It damn well better be, Comrade Rustov. Your life depends on just how happy I am.” Jacobs watched the gunsel, thinking he could almost read his mind as his thug’s brain churned over at the rate of drying concrete, searching for some response that would save face.
“Three more days, then it is I who will dictate the agenda.”
“Until then…if you would be so kind as to order up some breakfast for myself and Cleopatra. Eggs over easy, I like my bacon juicy with fat, not irradiated to shoe leather as it was yesterday. Make sure they understand that. If I discover you are cutting budget costs by stiffing room service on the tip, I will be most unhappy.”
Rustov chuckled as he stood. “Perhaps you are unaware, believing myself and my men only your ignorant lackeys. While you sleep with your whores, we cracked the mainframe on your laptop.”
Jacobs felt his heart flutter. “That was most unwise, since you should treat my privacy like you would my happiness.”
“We know about the Web sites, your e-mails to your former colleagues in my country. Should you not deliver as promised, we believe they have sufficient expertise to assist us.”
“Sufficient, in this case, will not cut it, Comrade Rustov. Further, you seem to forget I worked at Compound Zero-159-A, and that these former colleagues of mine could not complete work I left unfinished when the money dried up. Now. Are you going to respect my privacy and see to my continued happiness, likewise see to it that my pockets are deep when I leave for the casinos or do I contact your superiors and tell them the deal is off? And inform them it is because you are uncooperative cheapskate with a considerable chip on his shoulder?”
Rustov smiled, bobbed his head. “We will continue the arrangement, Comrade Jacobs, as you wish. Only bear this in mind as a gambler. When your marker is called in, you had best pony up.”
“The threat implying it’s a big desert out there?”
Jacobs watched Rustov, the baboon wearing his stupid grin, as he turned and walked for the foyer, barking at his four gunslingers to fall in. Grateful when he was alone, he draped an arm over Cleopatra, pulled her closer, and said, “I certainly hope that little bit of unpleasantness didn’t ruin your mood, my dear.”
“YOU THINK YOU CAN TAKE IT easy on the liquor, Slim, while we’re sailing along at a hundred miles an hour and five hundred feet off the ground?”
“The name’s Rupert, son. And I don’t care what that tin badge you flashed me sayin’ you’re with the Justice Department, this is my plane, and I been flying since you were but a mere itch in your daddy’s sac. And unless you wanna arrest me for FWI and land this bird yourself, you might want to lose that nasty attitude of yours—Mr. G-Man—sir.”
Carl “Ironman” Lyons was in a foul mood as it was. It was never a happy day when he was snatched off R and R, duty calling or not. No, it wasn’t so much he was being bosom-nuzzled by a beautiful dancer way more than half his age when he got the call from the Farm to put his pants on, as it was the hangover now pulsing wardrums through a swollen brain that was sorely tempting his sand-papered tongue to mollify the old prairie buzzard for a shot of whiskey if only to help pull shot nerves together. At the moment, fear of flying took on a whole new meaning for the leader of Able Team.
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Don Pendleton
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Шпионские детективы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Accountable only to the Oval Office and fully committed to the security of the U.S. in an ever-morphing terrorist landscape, the warriors of Stony Man never relent, tire or fold.America′s last line of defence understands that all it takes for evil to prevail is for a few good people to stand down. For Stony Man, that day will never come. Not now. Not ever.The covert world of black ops takes on a sinister new twist as high-ranking rogue operatives offer super-tech weapons for sale to enemies of the United States in an effort to «fix» the Middle East. With buyers from Russia to Iran lining up for the prize, America′s national security is about to blow up in a mushroom cloud, plunging Stony Man into a killing game with no end or winner in sight.