Ramrod Intercept

“I stand corrected. If I sounded like a grumpy old man, Barbara…”

“I understand perfectly. Okay, Aaron and I ran down the logistics, worked out the timetable from start to finish. Jack Grimaldi and a blacksuit crew are parked on a military base, courtesy of our own State Department’s clout with a few government officials in Tanzania. Once Phoenix hits the beach, Jack will be contacted by us, hooked up on a three-way sat uplink with the ground troops. The AC-130 Spectre gunship will take off from Dar es Salaam, fly east by southeast, then due south, move in, westward, once it hits their insertion point. Sat imagery lines up the old French garrison, due west, approximately ten kilometers west of where they will come ashore.”

“And if Jack gets there first?”

“He’ll fly a holding pattern, and hope. However, we have this timed down to the minute, Hal.”

“There was never any doubt.”

“To answer your question,” Price said, “about an air insertion, we know the garrison has state-of-the-art radar, sold to the government in Antananarivo—or Tana for short—by France. We’ve picked up machine-gun nests, but no antiaircraft batteries and no fighter jets. However, if one of the terrorists is running around with a Stinger when this goes down, the Spectre would be history if it’s wielded by even semicapable hands. Besides,” she added, a trace of sarcasm in her tone, “the former French colony has been attempting to go democratic for about ten years.”

“How? By giving safe haven to a small army of international murderers?”

Price shrugged. “What can I say? All of us know graft and corruption don’t care about the difference between communism, iron-handed dictatorship or fledgling democracy.”

“I hear you.”

Brognola heaved a breath, told himself to drop it down a notch, aware his jacked-up mood was affecting and stretching taut nerves all around.

Price rode out a moment of silence, then said, “The way I figured it, since Madagascar is an island four hundred kilometers from the east coast of Africa by the Mozambique Channel, and with what we have planned, an air drop sounded too risky. Too much open sea, to get them from point A to B. And the Seawolf was available. Going in by cover of the vast Indian Ocean, and at night, was the lesser of two evils. Once the dust settles and the smoke clears, an airfield about two hundred meters west of the garrison can accommodate Jack and company for a landing. Evacuation for our troops. And we assume, there will be some of the more notable terrorists left standing to be brought back to the States to stand trial for what we know is their involvement in just about every major terrorist attack around the world in the past ten years or more.”

“We’re assuming an awful lot, all of us,” Kurtzman said. “We all know the President’s position on this. He wants a few live ones to hold up to the cameras. Whipping boys or trophies, I have to wonder.”

“I told him up front and in no uncertain terms I wasn’t about to make that promise,” Brognola said. “Could be why I’m getting the silent treatment. No way in hell am I putting Phoenix into the fire, working under the assumption these fanatics are just going to throw their hands up and let our guys read them their Miranda rights, recite Geneva Convention nonsense, chapter and verse and all that crazy shit. Besides, I have to agree with the Man to some extent on one point. A few songbird fanatics could have the mother lode of intelligence. Give me a numbers crunch on bad guys.”

“Bear?” Price said.

“Two full squads of Madagascan soldiers. Thirty-four, now thirty-one Iranian fanatics.”

Brognola raised a curious eyebrow over the smoke at the grim tone in Kurtzman’s voice. “I get the feeling you want to tell me something?”

“I’ll do better. I’ll show you, live and in color.” Kurtzman palmed his own remote and flashed on a sat image that made Brognola freeze as the steaming brew was being raised to his lips. “We have an ONI-1 satellite, courtesy of the DIA, parked in space over Madagascar.”

Kurtzman muttered a curse. “There’s our Butcher of Southern Sudan, hard at work, showing off the kind of talent he used on black Christians and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army for some five years. Bloody animal. The UN puts his slaughter of mostly innocent women and children in the tens of thousands.”

“A real charming piece of work,” Price added. “Mr. Sunshine.”

“So, who got to know Vlad the Impaler’s loving feeling?”

“One of them was Reza Nahru,” Kurtzman informed.

“That name sounds familiar.”

“It should. He was tried and convicted by the Israelis in absentia for three separate terrorist attacks that claimed forty-three lives,” Kurtzman said. “One was a busload of little else but women and children in Tel Aviv. We have also picked up from ONI-1 four other faces belonging to Iranians linked to bin Laden who were likewise convicted in absentia but by the Jordanians. Death warrants issued for these butchers.”

“Which leads us to the task at hand, as far as the Madagascar and Sudan situations are concerned,” Brognola said. “This General Arakkhan is no small fish. He still carries heavy weight among a loyal military faction in Khartoum who want to see his return to…well, the Vlad the Impaler glory days. The problem is the CIA contract agents who got us this far are disappearing all over Sudan.”

“They were working on getting the Company a leadin,” Price said, “to where the shipment of high-tech weapons is located, or being shipped, which is rumored to be an Iranian-occupied island in the Strait of Hormuz. Now, the rumbling I caught from Langley was that Nahru had jumped to the other side of the tracks, looking to deal or double deal. Who can say now? Obviously word got back to Arakkhan the impaler. Three less fanatics on the loose now, if nothing else. And with what we know about the situation in Los Angeles we can at least surmise the smuggling operation has its origins there.”

“DYSAT,” Brognola growled. “What do we know about them, other than three of their executives who went to the FBI have been abducted by the DYSAT mother ship?”

Kurtzman filled in the blanks. “Apparently they do classified work, chemical lasers, microchip processors for high-energy X-ray lasers. It took some digging and a few phone calls over to the Pentagon, but that’s about as far as we got. Their only office is in Century City, Tinsel Town, which I find sort of strange, planting classified military think tanks in the heart of where all the movie execs and agents do their trolling and scamming.”

“Go figure,” Brognola said. “I read smoke screen, hiding out in the open. And by classified, I’m hearing you mean to say they are a black project.”

“It certainly reads that way,” Kurtzman went on. “Since the files I hacked into over at the Department of Defense are full of blacked-out words and whole deleted sentences about the pasts of the head honchos. The top dogs are former Air Force air commandos, nothing, however, untoward that would indicate they would be part of some conspiracy. The workforce is primarily civilian, Harvard, UCLA, MIT grads, pretty-boy types. We did find out DYSAT’s production and research facility is located in Idaho.”

“I don’t mean to get sidetracked here, but can someone explain to me just what a chemical laser is?”

“Akira and Hunt,” Kurtzman said, referring to Akira Tokaido and Huntington Wethers, two more vital cogs in the cyber machinery at the Farm, “could probably explain better than I could.”

“Give it a shot.”

“Well, since the genesis of laser technology some three decades ago, it would appear the research is on the verge of crossing the Rubicon. The brass ring of future high-tech is within grasp, or so it would seem. Basically, a laser weapon works as the transfer of heat to a target. It’s a silent killer, supposedly, or so the scuttle-butt goes, which is capable of burning the eyes out of a soldier on the battlefield, and from as much as a hundred miles or more out. Meltdown, evaporation of anything the beam is focused on, no shots fired in anger. Only now the next quantum leap would be to use it on aircraft and missiles. Or even satellites. That’s where the microchips come in to help get the bugs out of high-energy X-ray lasers. Now, the ones DYSAT have produced—or so our informants told the FBI—can locate, identify, track and intercept satellite transmissions, anywhere, anytime.”

“And disrupt,” Brognola said. “There is nothing wrong with your television sets, NORAD. We are in complete control.”

“In a worst-case scenario,” Kurtzman went on. “What our three AWOL contacts told us is called Ramrod Intercept is currently on the drawing board and is designed to shut down early warning of ballistic missile launches or air attacks. Akira and Hunt get all worked up when they start talking about excimers, carbon dioxide molecular transfers and gas exits, but it’s essentially pulse radiation from what I can understand.”

“I get something of the picture,” Brognola said. “We’re talking about the next step in silent, invisible warfare. Warfare directed from space.”

“Or even from the ground,” Kurtzman said, “if you have the microchips, a computer, the component parts of what the missing informants called a roving command center.”

“We still have three more civilian brain suits who hacked into the Pandora’s box, right? These college playboys running scared?”

“Carl,” Price informed Brognola, referring to Carl “Ironman” Lyons, the leader of Able Team, “states he has them under constant surveillance. Alive and well, I might add.”

Kurtzman grunted. “Carl’s on a short leash, I have to tell you, Hal. Well, you know the guy’s bulldog style. He says if he has to go into one more gentlemen’s club and order soda water and watch everyone else having a grand old time while he’s playing a poor man’s Magnum with his thumb up his—”

“I get the drift,” Brognola said. “He’s about to go apeshit. And this is where, once again, I get the long hard pauses from the Man to the point where I nearly have to ask him if he’s still there. He tells me, item—DYSAT is a legitimate Air Force–run classified project, funded, of course, by Congress. Bottom line he wants absolute, one hundred percent concrete proof there’s a conspiracy before I send Lyons and Able Team crashing down the front door, kicking ass and taking no names.”

“They’re working on it,” Price said. “And we have enough suspicion, handed to you by way of the FBI, that there is a conspiracy to get these weapons and the Ramrod Intercept technology to both the Sudan and the Iranians.”

“Which brings me to Striker’s status. Well?”

Brognola read into the anvil of silence. Mack Bolan, also known as the Executioner, was Stony Man’s lone wolf operative. There would be no Phoenix Force or Able Team this time out watching his back. They all knew that, days ago and going in.

“Limbo, to quote you, and holding,” Kurtzman said, “at a U.S. air base in Saudi.”

“I haven’t quite gotten the particulars yet on what he’s supposed to do or how he’s prepared to get into Sudan, a country hostile, to understate it, folks, to the West.”

“Once we receive the green light,” Price volunteered, “Striker will be air-inserted inside the Sudanese border, a HALO jump from a Starlifter C-141.”

“I’m waiting for the good news.”

“I’ve arranged for a CIA contract agent to meet him, roughly twenty kilometers northwest of Port Sudan. One call on a secured satlink from the Company, and the contract agent will be there to pick Striker up, on-site and waiting. Striker will have a passport stating he’s an Iranian businessman who deals in Persian rugs and jewelry, if he finds himself facing down Sudanese soldiers while in-country.”

“That’s thin, Barbara. Especially if he’s confronted by the Sudanese authorities at a roadblock and they decide to lock him up until they can check him out. They tend to skin Western spies over there alive and feed them their own flesh.”

“It was the best we could do, Hal,” Kurtzman offered. “Since we have an ongoing situation in Port Sudan, and since we strongly suspect DYSAT is funneling the high-tech goodies through the country—”

“And with the Company contract agent as an escort,” Price quickly put in. “It’s dicey, I know, but Striker insisted he go. Shake some trees and see what falls. He said…he’d figure it out.”

Brognola had to smile at Bolan’s balls-to-the-wall philosophy. “Tell me why I’m not surprised he said that.”

He and the others dropped into silence as each of them hashed over the enormity of not one, but three separate missions. Just the same, three or five doors to bulldoze through, Brognola could see the dots beginning to connect all over the map.

The only thing left was to take decisive action, start putting the old boot through some doors and find out what waited on the other side.

The clean-and-simple approach.

“Is he dropping in with a full bag of necessities, Barbara?”

“One commando knife, his Beretta, just in case.”

“God knows…”

“Once he’s inside Port Sudan, the contract agent will land him the requisite hardware.”

Brognola rubbed his face. “Okay, so I guess we just work it out as we go along.”

“The usual,” Kurtzman said.

“Right. What’s new?”

Brognola found Kurtzman studying the world map on a monitor, suddenly as grim as hell. “What is it?”

Kurtzman cleared his throat. “Well, we have a window for about, well, another two hours, tops.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning if we don’t get the call, we’ll have to wait another full twenty-four hours—or rather Phoenix will have to wait. If we’re going for a dawn strike it has to get under way ASAP, according to the timetable we’ve laid out. And there’s another piece of bad news, Hal.”

Maybe it was nerves or just plain weariness, but Brognola sounded off a grim chuckle. “Oh, this is getting better by the minute. Do tell.”

“At roughly six o’clock, Madagascar time, the ONI-1 satellite is going to have to get moving on. Akira tells me there’s a Russian satellite moving in the same orbital path.”

“A collision course with a Russian satellite? How in the…? Never mind. I never understood how the Russian mind works anyway. You’re telling me no one on either side can move either satellite’s orbital path from down here?”

“Not can, but will they?” Price posed. “I’ve been stonewalled at Langley, and no one at the DOD has an answer.”

“So,” Brognola said, “Phoenix is on their own, and we’re blind to what they’re up against because the Russians…unbelievable. It’s outer space, folks. You mean to tell me…they can’t…or won’t…”

“We’ll still have the satlink,” Kurtzman said, but his grim expression told Brognola that was little comfort.

The silence was hanging for long moments, thick enough to reach out and grab it, when the red phone trilled. The big Fed nearly bit his cigar in two as he felt their eyes boring into him. A deep breath, expecting more bad news, and he lifted the receiver.

Brognola recognized the voice as the Man said, “A few items we need to go over first, and I want to make certain we are crystal…”

He wasn’t sure if high anxiety hit the air or relief was lighting up their faces, but he knew they were reading the gleam in his eyes, stone-cold frozen and watching. Brognola didn’t even hear the next few words, but he knew enough, reading into the Man’s tone. He gave them the thumbs-up.

CHAPTER TWO

“Every day’s just one big party for these guys. Cars, broads, blow, not a care in the world. One big tits-and-ass joyride. I tell you what—”

“Oh, shit.”

Rosario Blancanales knew that god-of-thunder voice for what it signaled. Trouble was on the way, mayhem imminent and aplenty and just around the corner, but so far Carl Lyons was keeping his temper reined in.

Barely.

Blancanales was edged out some himself, all the waiting and watching eating at nerves demanding action. Still he regretted the slip, not wishing to incite Lyons to blow before the time was right for a real showdown.

“What was that, Pol?” Lyons growled from the shotgun seat.

A wry smile worked its way over Blancanales’s lips. “Nothing, Carl. I was just having a heart palpitation. Might just be heartburn from lunch.”

Lyons was the leader of Able Team, which was comprised of the former L.A. detectives, Blancanales and Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz. They were all friends, tried and tested commandos who would make the ultimate sacrifice if need be, and for one another if it came down to that. It wasn’t that a wrathful Lyons made Blancanales especially nervous or even intimidated—no, berserker outbursts were simply wasted energy as far as he was concerned. Try telling that, he thought, to Ironman. Best just to let him vent some steam, clean the pipes out, then get himself refocused. Men, he knew, who fought and killed the enemy side by side, who knew what it was to face down death and walk out the other side of combat had a way of coming to read and gauge each other’s mind-sets and moods better than most couples married for a lifetime.

“I’m getting sick and tired of all this sneaking and peeking around,” Lyons growled, his gaze fixed on the strip joint across Sunset Boulevard. “Watching a bunch of goddamn playboys acting out their own Hollywood Babylon. They take two hour cocktail lunches in Brentwood, sashay out the office lobby before four, then go piss the night away gaping at ass and getting hummers in back rooms ‘reserved’ for their candy.”

Blancanales groaned against his will. “Oh, man…”

Lyons fixed him with an eye that was glinting between mocking and irritation. “Another heart palpitation? Maybe you should go a little easier on all that hot sauce I watch you drown your tacos in. We’re not getting any younger, my friend. We can’t assault our systems the way we used to, you know.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

Lyons went back to glowering at the front doors where two of their DYSAT exec targets had just entered to begin a long night of trolling for fun and games. “These thousand-dollar-suited pricks are starting to annoy the hell out of me. These guys, every time I see them get a lap dance they throw at least a twenty-spot away, go skipping up to the stage, same deal. A bunch of twinkle toes with shit-eating grins. Their cash is trash. Big shots.”

Blancanales looked into the rearview glass, caught Schwarz grinning from his control console in the back of the van. He put a glare into his eyes, softly shook his head, but, damn it if Schwarz didn’t barge ahead with it anyway.

“If I didn’t know better, Carl, I’d say you were sounding a smidge jealous.”

“You’re right—you don’t know any better. And jealous of what? I just got a full head of steam, three days and nights out here, doing grunt dick work while we wait on Hal to tell us the Man finally made the hard call. We know these guys at DYSAT are dirty. I mean, two pigeons vanished off the face of the earth just as Hal’s Justice suits were marching to scoop them up. Two and two still add up to four where I come from, guys.”

“We still have three to watch,” Pol said.

“Baby-sit, you mean,” Lyons said. “And, you know, I somehow don’t get the whole scam. If this DYSAT is run by spooks and former air commandos, why hire a bunch of kids damn near fresh out of business school? Still wet behind the ears, but given the keys to the kingdom.”

“I think I have a pretty good hunch why,” Schwarz volunteered.

“That right? Well, Pol and I are all ears.”

“They were handpicked, chosen.”

“You’re telling us,” Blancanales said, “they’re sacrificial lambs.”

“Something like that. I’m thinking they were sought out on purpose, with the specific intent of becoming scapegoats if the arms and high-tech wheeling and dealing was found out by the Feds. Your basic fall guys. The former air commandos, with their service records, would simply shrug it off, lie their way out of it, go to ground until the smoke cleared and the college boys were safely on their way to the big house.”

Blancanales saw Lyons bobbing his head, hashing it over.

“Makes sense, in some twisted way,” Lyons said. “And the marginal lifestyles they lead, it wouldn’t be a stretch for the top brass to point out these guys had serious vice problems.”

“It’s the only thing that fits,” Schwarz said. “We know they are simply numbers crunchers for the most part, moving the parts of the goodies around, writing up the manifests, using the contacts of the real powers to create safe transport lanes for delivery. They figured the civilian workforce they hired would be too naive to figure it out.”

“How wrong they were,” Blancanales said. Then he saw two big men in dark suit jackets and buzz cuts going for the doors to the gentlemen’s club, rolling out of the night shadows, flashing lights jumping about like winking halos around them from this lit-up neon stretch of clubs and bars. “Hey, heads up. Our playboys are about to get paid a visit by your friendly neighborhood DYSAT goons.”

“Yeah,” Lyons said. “They were at the last club, too, where Collins disappeared. Only I counted up three the last stop.”

“I know their vehicles,” Gadgets said, watching his monitor, the image being relayed from a minicam mounted on top of the van, the rolling command center handed off to Able Team courtesy of Hal Brognola’s Justice contacts in L.A. “I photoed them and the plates yesterday when they came out of the garage of the office complex.”

“So, go find them,” Lyons said, “and stick another of your famous tracking boxes so we can stay glued on their tails. I see a parking lot down the street, the direction they came from. Let’s rock and roll, Gadgets. I’m going in. Pol, keep the engine hot. The looks I just read on the goons’ faces…let’s just say I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Blancanales cleared his throat as he watched Lyons secure the mini-Uzi in a special rigging beneath his loose-fitting windbreaker, the Ironman’s .357 Magnum Colt Python snug in a shoulder holster on the opposite side with a clear bulge. Subtle wasn’t found in Lyons’s vocabulary. “Easy, big guy. We still haven’t been flashed the green light.”

Lyons shot Blancanales a cold grin, checked the load on his Colt Python, then slid the big piece back into shoulder leather. “Relax. I’ve got a few extra bucks on me to throw around. Maybe I’m just rolling in there to have a couple laughs, check out the girls. Let ’em know big daddy’s in town.”

Lyons was out the door, into the night. Schwarz rolled back the side door, gone to play his role as bug planter.

Now Blancanales felt a real heart palpitation, and it wasn’t the aftereffect of hot sauce and too many tacos. This wasn’t good, he thought. Hell’s bells, he could almost feel the angry energy, trailing Lyons as he crossed the street.

A human time bomb, looking for a place to blow.

No mistake, he could feel it all about to hit the fan, and maybe go straight to hell before the mission even got official status.

JACK ROSWELL DESPISED his current task, or, more to the point, the kind of flunkies he was hunting. The former air commando and black operative for the NSA had his orders from up top, and he would carry them out even if he couldn’t fathom the logic in the whole scheme from the very beginning. This whole mess, he thought, could have been avoided long ago. Now he had been cut loose, a stone-cold killer, on the march to silence wagging tongues.

As he weaved his way through the gaggle of suits and howling throngs of half-drunken lechers, Morton on his left flank, he wondered where it was all headed. It was the colonel’s show, just the same, from day one, and he had often considered broaching the subject. Such as why hire on a pack of twentysomething guys to do the dirty work of moving the prototype high-tech goodies around the globe? Such as why allow them access to classified files? Such as why let them run all around Los Angeles, having the Sodom and Gomorrah time of their lives, a couple of them coked up half the time, six figure salaries to a man? Flash, showing off, now flapping loose lips.