Hostile Dawn

“You have something?” Barbara Price asked.

Tokaido nodded. “Our paramilitary one-stop-shopping center migrated just a few miles from Barstow. They’re in Hesperia.”

Carl Lyons fielded the young hacker’s heads-up on the location of Army Gideon’s new quarters.

“Any word if they’ve been in contact with Ahmet or Nouhra?” Schwarz asked as he clipped frag grenades to an ammunition belt already loaded with magazines.

“No,” Lyons reported, “but they just got their mitts on a handful of Gustav rocket launchers. If that’s not special orders for our perps, I don’t know what is.”

“Hesperia’s less than a half hour away, tops,” Blancanales said. “Maybe we can beat the shoppers there and be waiting for them.”

“Not that it matters at this stage,” Schwarz said, “but I keep wondering who they plan to take out with these rocket launchers they keep trying to get their hands on.”

“Beats me,” Lyons said, “but I’m guessing innocent bystanders.”

Hostile Dawn

Don Pendleton

Stony Man ®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Ron Renauld for his contribution to this work.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Winter had come early to the Blue Ridge Mountains. The peaks were capped white, and the overnight snowfall had left three inches of fresh powder at the lower elevations. As Barbara Price waved to the security detail manning the front gate to Stony Man’s Shenandoah Valley compound, she saw one of the blacksuits maneuvering a trailer plow down the long driveway leading to the main house. The gabled structure looked, to the eye, much like any number of other isolated manors she’d passed on the drive from Baltimore, where she’d just spent a rare four-day weekend away from her duties as mission controller for the Farm’s Sensitive Operations Group. It had been good to get away, but Price was dedicated to her work and looked forward to padding her clipboard with the latest intel and logistics data needed to oversee covert operations being carried out by the men of Able Team and Phoenix Force.

A portion of the Farm’s private landing strip had been plowed clear, as well, and Price had just eased her Jeep Cherokee to a stop near the house when she saw a Bell 206 Long Ranger helicopter flutter down from the leaden skies overhead, raising up clouds of dry snow as it zeroed in on the clearing. After tucking her shoulder-length, honey-blond hair inside her parka, Price stepped out into the crisp, twenty-degree morning air. She strode past the dormant snow-covered produce gardens, reaching the chopper just as Hal Brognola was disembarking. Brognola, SOG’s director of operations, was a tall, middle-aged man with graying temples and well-earned furrows creasing his broad forehead.

“How was your vacation?” Brognola asked Price as they headed toward the house.

Price smiled. “Four days is a ‘breather,’ not a vacation. But we take what we can get.”

“Isn’t that the truth.”

“In any event, I’m recharged and ready to go.”

“Glad to hear it,” Brognola replied, “because we’ve got a full plate.”

The Sensitive Operations Group administrators passed through two checkpoints before reaching an underground tunnel that linked the main house with the Farm’s Annex, a newer facility housed within the facade of a wood-chipping mill set on the east end of the property. They traversed the thousand-foot-long passageway in an electric cart, its muted purr allowing Brognola to bring Price up to date without raising his voice.

“We’ve still got the men working two fronts,” Brognola explained. “Able Team’s out in California, just north of L.A., near Barstow.”

“The sleeper cell?” Price asked. “What would al Qaeda be doing up there?”

“We’ve got a lead that they’re trying to get their hands on some explosives,” Brognola said.

“From under whose counter?” Price wanted to know.

“Some paramilitary outfit,” Brognola explained. “We intercepted something off their message board that sounded like a deal in the making. Unfortunately there were no details on a time or location, so we’re going to have to sniff around and hope they tip their hand.”

“I take it there was nothing about what al Qaeda has in mind if they can load up.”

“Negative,” Brognola admitted. “We still think they’re targeting L.A., but since they’re roaming around up there it might be they’ve got their eyes on the aqueduct. It’s always been vulnerable, and there are tons of places up there where they’d have easy access to it.”

“Turn off the faucet before it reaches L.A.?”

“That’s one theory,” Brognola said. “CIA thinks they could be targeting the freeways, and the Bureau’s hunch is there might still be something to all that talk about hitting a shopping mall.”

“Any one of those would be a nightmare,” Price said with a shudder that had only partly to do with the lack of heat in the illuminated passageway.

Reaching the far end of the tunnel, Brognola and Price left the cart and headed to the next security checkpoint.

“As for Phoenix Force,” the SOG director continued, “they’re in Damascus. A Hamas sect just kidnapped an American reporter for U.S. Global News. ”

“I read about that,” Price confessed. “He was looking into claims that Iran’s shuttling nuclear materials to Syria one step ahead of IAEC inspectors.”

“Not only that,” Brognola said. “He was running with the theory that they were using the same conduit Hussein used to smuggle WMAs out of Iraq back before we came sniffing around.”

“There’s a Pulitzer in there somewhere if he can prove it.”

“Provided he lives to write about it,” said Brognola. “We need to hope Hamas is trying to interrogate the guy and didn’t just whack him. Otherwise they’re going to be lying in wait for Phoenix.”

Damascus, Syria

T RAREQ C REEK N URSERY , located on hilly terrain two miles west of the Old City in Damascus, had been shut down for nearly a year. Most of its inventory had been transferred to a newer, larger facility closer to the Syrian capital’s suburban sprawl, but rainfall and a steady supply of water from mountain-fed streams that wound through the abandoned parcel had allowed those plants and large shrubs left behind to thrive. The overgrown, unpruned foliage had provided adequate cover for the men of Phoenix Force as they closed in on their target, a large greenhouse set back toward the rear of the nursery. Ivy and bougainvillea had overrun the greenhouse, covering most of its dust-caked glass panels. Parked next to the outbuilding was a late-model Subaru station wagon. It matched the description of the vehicle used by Hamas terrorists who, less than twelve hours ago, had kidnapped U.S. Global News reporter Walter Ferris in the parking lot outside the Damascus Venata Hotel.

Two of the terrorists were standing guard outside the greenhouse, one posted near the main doorway, the other up on a raised catwalk spanning the length of the glass enclosure’s arched roof. The nursery was located in the flight path of a small airfield less than a mile to the north, and while casing out the grounds in preparation for their attack, Phoenix Force had noticed that whenever a plane or tourist chopper ventured past, the ground sentry would duck inside the greenhouse while his counterpart on the catwalk retreated from view beneath the cover of a large acacia tree whose leafy branches extended over the glass structure. The U.S. covert op team had also determined that one of the sightseeing copters flew by the nursery at the same time every two hours. Locking in that time frame, the five-man crew had hastily sketched a battle plan.

Now, with the chopper due to make its next scheduled run past the terrorists’ hideout in less than a minute, it was time to put the plan into motion.

Gary Manning had already made it to a toolshed at the far end of the greenhouse. He knew that Calvin James and T. J. Hawkins were somewhere out on the grounds, closing in. Once they were in position, they would use their earbud transceivers to give the green light to Rafael Encizo, who lay prone on a raised knoll less than fifty yards away, his M-110, suppressor-equipped sniper rifle trained on a hazy pane of glass through which he could see Hamas agents pacing around their chair-bound hostage. As for Phoenix’s team leader, David McCarter had tracked down the Damascus Sky Tours office at the nearby airport and arranged for them to divert their next scheduled chopper tour from its usual course. Peering over the slanted roof of the toolshed, Manning could see one of the company’s Eurocopter EC-135 helicopters headed toward the nursery, but he knew McCarter was the only one aboard.

This is it, Manning thought to himself, unsheathing a Heckler & Koch USP Tactical gun from his web holster. The drone of the approaching chopper grew louder as he rigged the handgun with a suppressor. Once the weapon was ready, the Canadian operative crept from behind the toolshed. The rear of the greenhouse faced south, and its glass panels had been covered with an opaque layer of reflective insulation: no one inside could see him as he clasped an upper rung of the mounted ladder leading up to the catwalk. Overhead, McCarter had just guided the Eurocopter over the nursery and was hovering in place above the acacia, flying low enough that Manning could feel the greenhouse shudder from the noise as well as the chopper’s downdraft. The ladder vibrated, as well, masking Manning’s weight as he began to climb up. Already he could see the sentry, back turned to him, staring up through the wavering tree branches. Manning climbed another rung higher, then raised his pistol, taking aim at the gap between the other man’s shoulder blades. Once he heard the tinkling of glass to indicate that Encizo had fired the opening volley, he would pull the trigger.

H AMAS FIELD LEADER Riri Sahn had just clipped Walter Ferris in the jaw with the stock of his Kalashnikov AK-47.

“Lies!” Sahn roared at the hostage. “We want the truth!”

Dazed, Ferris spit blood as he sagged against the restraints binding him to the chair. He fought to remain conscious and glared at his abductors.

“I just told you!” he retorted, shouting to be heard above the helicopter that had just cast a shadow over the inside of the greenhouse. “I’m a travel reporter! I have no interest in terrorist issues!”

Two other Hamas agents stood near Sahn. A third had just come in from his post outside the main door.

“The helicopter didn’t just fly past like the other times,” he reported.

“You think I haven’t noticed!” Sahn yelled. He glanced up, trying to catch a glimpse of the chopper through the bougainvillea blanketing the glass-paneled roof. He was about to order the other men to investigate when one of the glass panes to his right shattered. A nanosecond later Sahn crumpled to the floor, his heart turned to chowder by a 7.62 mm NATO round.

The remaining three terrorists were still trying to process what had just happened when, over the drone of the Eurocopter, they heard a thud up on the catwalk transversing the greenhouse roof. As they glanced up, trying to pinpoint the sound, the greenhouse was suddenly rocked by the concussive force of two MK-3A-2 hand grenades landing on the north and south sides of the structure. Shock waves shattered the glass panels, leaving the surviving Hamas agents in clear view of their attackers.

The sentry who’d just entered the building reeled as he was strafed across the midsection by a fusillade from Hawkins’s M-16. The remaining two terrorists were grabbing for their AK-47s when Manning dropped through one of the shattered roof panels. He landed hard on the dirt ground near the chair Walter Ferris was bound to.

Manning sprang forward the moment he landed, tackling Ferris to the ground. In the process, the Stony Man commando rammed his shoulder into a nearby plant stand. Several large terra-cotta containers crashed down on the Canadian, one striking his hip while another clipped the back of his head, rendering him unconscious. Before the surviving Hamas agents could have a go at him, both Hawkins and James raked the nursery interior with bursts from their M-16s. The terrorists went down, landing on their unfired assault rifles.

In all, less than eight seconds had passed from the time Rafael Encizo had slain Riri Sahn. In those eight seconds, Walter Ferris’s fate had gone through a complete turnaround. Instead of facing certain torture and death, the reporter would now have a chance to complete the investigatory news story he’d spent the past four months working on.

Phoenix Force’s mission was accomplished.

CHAPTER TWO

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

“Phoenix pulled it off,” Barbara Price reported to her colleagues gathered inside the Annex Computer Room. She’d just finished speaking long-distance with David McCarter. “Ferris is safe and the Hamas squad was neutralized.”

“Chalk another one up for the good guys,” said Aaron Kurtzman, the wheelchair-bound head of SOG’s crack team of cyberanalysts. He was seated at a workstation situated on the west side of the large subterranean chamber. Poised in front of their computers at other stations were Akira Tokaido, Carmen Delahunt and Huntington Wethers. Price stood in their midst, while Hal Brognola was off to one side, clicking away at a laptop as he wrapped up a long-distance call of his own, this one to Able Team commander Carl Lyons.

“Are the guys okay?” asked Delahunt, a fiery-spirited redhead in her late forties who’d come to Stony Man by way of a long, heralded tenure with the FBI.

“All but Gary,” Price replied. “He’s being looked at for a possible concussion and shoulder separation.”

“By ‘neutralized,’ I take it there were no prisoners,” Huntington Wethers said. The somber-faced African American was the same age as Delahunt, but he looked years older, his close-cropped hair having turned silver at the temples within a few years of taking an extended leave from his professorial chair at UC Berkeley. To explore the cutting edge of cybernetic intel gathering on behalf of his country was, for Wethers, not only a challenge but an honor, and if it had cost him his once youthful good looks, he considered it a small price to pay.

“It would have been nice to have someone to interrogate, but no,” Price said. “David says their only option was to go in for the kill. He’s flown Gary and Ferris to the hospital, but the others stayed behind and are combing the nursery for intel. Hopefully we’ll have something to work with.”

“And hopefully we can convince Ferris to cough up anything he knows instead of saving it for some damn scoop,” said Akira Tokaido, the youngest member of the cybercrew. “The guy owes us.”

“Apparently, Ferris had his jaw fractured by Hamas,” Price said. “He’s going under the knife and probably won’t be up for questioning right away. Once he is, I’m sure McCarter will debrief him.”

Across the room, Brognola removed a flash drive from his laptop and handed it to Kurtzman.

“Load this, Bear, would you? And call up the photo file. Monitor three.”

“Sure thing.”

While Kurtzman transferred the files to his computer, Brognola addressed the others.

“We’ve got a sidebar of sorts regarding Able Team’s assignment on the West Coast,” he said. “It came up toward the end of the White House briefing, but there wasn’t a lot of hard data available to back it up. Now we’ve got a little more to sink our teeth into.”

“This is about the al Qaeda cell?” Wethers asked.

“Possibly,” Brognola said. “I’ll get into it. Bear?”

“Coming right up.”

Once Kurtzman had pulled up the photo file, he ran his cursor over the necessary commands to transfer an image to one of the large, flat-screen monitors lining the east wall. The collective Stony Man braintrust soon found itself staring at a booking mugshot of a man in his midthirties, head shaved, his thin, tight lips framed by a goatee the same dark color as his piercing, defiant eyes.

“He uses a handful of aliases, but his name is Kouri Ahmet,” Brognola explained. “He’s Lebanese by birth and has loose ties with both Hamas and Hezbollah, but all intel points to him being a freelancer. Over the years he’s also dabbled with al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad and a handful of other terrorist outfits in the Far East. He specializes in assassinations but will tackle any job that suits his purposes.”

“He doesn’t look like the happy sort,” Carmen Delahunt commented.

“This was taken after his arrest three days ago in Mexico,” Brognola said, passing along what he’d just learned from Lyons, who, in turn, had come upon the info through an L.A. contact with the FBI. “He was trying to broker a deal for a cache of Blinidicide-81 LAWs stolen from a military depot in La Paz. Apparently an informant turned on him and the Mexican authorities had him in custody when the Justice Department here flagged him on a conspiracy charge involving the secretary of state.”

“I remember that,” Tokaido said as he absently fingered the ink-black topknot rising from his scalp like an exclamation point. “Some sniper plot that was supposed to be carried out during the secretary’s last trip to the Middle East, right?”

“Good memory,” Brognola said. “We’re not sure at this point what Ahmet planned to do with the LAWs, but the idea of him loading up on that kind of firepower just south of the border obviously has us concerned.”

“Not to mention the secretary,” Delahunt interjected. “If he thought it was bad having someone come after him with a rifle, imagine what he must think about being the crosshairs of an antitank rocket.”

“Again, we’re not certain who Ahmet was targeting,” Brognola said. “He’s being extradited and is already on a plane bound for the States. The Bureau wants to run him through interrogation and dangle leniency as bait in hopes he’ll cop to what he was planning and finger some higher-ups.”

“I assume one theory is that he was looking to bring those rocket launchers to the sleeper cell Able Team is looking for,” Price ventured.

“It would make sense,” Brognola said. “Like I said, Ahmet’s a freelancer, so it’s not a reach to think he’d throw in with al Qaeda. And the Mexican border is still porous enough to figure those LAWs were earmarked for L.A.”

“Hopefully the Bureau will get to the bottom of it,” Price said. “But I take it we’re in the on-deck circle.”

“Affirmative,” Brognola said. “I pulled strings and arranged to have Ahmet flown up to Edwards Air Force Base near Barstow instead of L.A.”

“Where Able Team just so happens to be in the neighborhood,” Delahunt interjected.

Brognola nodded. “The Bureau will go by the book with Ahmet, but if that doesn’t work, we’ve got the green light to let Ironman have a go at him.”

Price smiled dourly. “If it comes to that, I like our chances.”

CHAPTER THREE

Airspace over San Diego County, California

It was only after he’d put the Gulfstream back on autopilot that Kouri Ahmet began to come down off the adrenaline rush that had powered his desperate ploy to thwart his extradition to Los Angeles. As he sat back in the jet’s cockpit, waiting for his pulse to return to normal, the Lebanese expatriate thought back on the past several minutes, savoring details that, at the time, had flashed by in a blur.

The small government transport jet had hit a pocket of turbulence shortly after crossing the Mexican border and when the Gulfstream had begun to rock, Ahmet had taken note of the U.S. Air Marshal’s distraction and made his move. Bolting from his seat, the terrorist had lunged across the aisle and burrowed his shoulder into the other man’s solar plexis, knocking the wind from his lungs. That had bought Ahmet the time necessary to draw his shackled hands beneath his waist and wriggle them forward until his arms were no longer pinned behind his back. The marshal was still disoriented when Ahmet had rendered him unconscious, using the handcuffs as a makeshift garrote. It had all happened in a matter of seconds, and by the time the plane had cleared the turbulence, Ahmet was on his feet, the officer’s 9 mm Colt pistol clenched in his fist. The door to the cockpit had been locked, but two well-placed rounds had given him access to the pilot. The pilot had been armed, but Ahmet had put a bullet through his skull before he’d had a chance to reach his gun. Though hindered by his ankle cuffs, the prisoner had managed to drag the other man from his seat and take over the controls long enough to bring the plane to a lower altitude. Once he’d set the Gulfstream on autopilot, he’d hauled the pilot back into the main cabin. By then, the marshal had regained consciousness, but Ahmet had quickly finished him off with a gunshot to the heart. After opening the outer door, he’d disposed of the bodies—first the marshal, then the pilot. Suddenly, in a matter of moments, the terrorist’s doomed future had taken a dramatic turn.

Ahmet had boarded the plane back in La Paz with no set escape plan, but now, with the plane back up to twenty thousand feet on a diverted course toward Riverside County, Ahmet reflected that it was unlikely that any orchestrated attempt could have succeeded any better than the gambit he’d just executed. Some would have attributed such good fortune to serendipity, but for Ahmet it was the guiding hand of God that had intervened on his behalf. He offered up a quick prayer of thanks, then ceased his ruminations. There was, after all, work to be done. Ahmet was still in shackles, dressed in a telltale prison-orange jumpsuit at the controls of a plane that soon, no doubt, would be the object of an intense aerial manhunt. Yes, he’d overpowered his captors and placed himself more in control of his fate, but the renegade knew that he was still a long way from being free.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

H AL B ROGNOLA AND Barbara Price were halfway through the tunnel leading back to the main house when the Stony Man director received the news on his earbud transceiver.

On Brognola’s signal, Price turned the electric cart around and headed back toward the Annex. Brognola, meanwhile, wrapped up his long-distance call with Able Team’s interim pilot, Jack Grimaldi, who was on the other side of the continent, manning the controls of a loaner F-16 fighter jet he’d just lifted off the runway at Edwards Air Force Base.