Shadow War

No matter what.

“I need a lead, Mack,” Calvin James stated. “Hal gave me the runaround. French security moved T.J., and we’re no longer trying to figure out where he is. The hit team that came after me was stripped clean. I’ve got no clues, no bread crumbs to follow.”

Bolan sighed. Every man who had signed up for Stony Man duty, including himself—especially himself—had understood that it could come to this.

Everyone had gone into the offered deal with his eyes wide open. Every man on Phoenix Force and Able Team had agreed, and now that the mission had gone south, that the worst-case scenario had finally occurred, Calvin James didn’t want to play by the rules anymore.

Bolan frowned. He wasn’t much on rules himself.

The Executioner picked up the phone.

Shadow War

Don Pendleton

Stony Man®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Special thanks and acknowledgment to

Nathan Meyer for his contribution to this work.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

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

PROLOGUE

Barbara Price opened her eyes.

She awoke clearheaded and alert, knowing exactly where she was and what she needed to do. There was a war being fought in the shadows and like the ringmaster of a circus, she was at its epicenter. Her eyes went to the window of her bedroom. It was dark outside. She looked at the clock on her bedside table and saw she had been asleep for exactly forty-five minutes.

Price sat up and pushed a slender hand through her honey-blond hair. She felt revitalized after her power nap, and with a single cup of Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman’s coffee she knew she’d be ready to roll.

She got up out of the bed, smoothed her clothes and picked up the copy of the Washington Post she had placed on her table before stepping into the upstairs hallway of Stony Man Farm’s main house. The headline screamed out at her.

Colombian Businessman Busy Senator

Marcos Sincanaros, renowned currency speculator, has been tied to campaign contributions exceeding five million dollars to Maryland Senator…

Disgusted, Price stopped reading. She had too much on her mind at the moment to worry about Washington politics. She frowned. The name “Sincanaros” was familiar, however. She resolved to ask Akira Tokaido, one of the Farm’s computer wizards, to see if Stony Man had a file on the man.

As Price walked down the hall, she began clicking through options and mentally categorizing her tasks. She had men in the field, preparing to step into harm’s way, and it was her responsibility to coordinate all the disparate parts into a seamless whole.

The Farm’s mission controller was headed to the basement when the cell phone on her belt began to vibrate. She plucked it free and used the red push-talk button.

“Price, here,” she said coolly.

“Barb,” Carmen Delahunt began, “the teams are in jump-off mode.”

“Thanks, Carm,” Price told the ex-FBI agent. “I’m almost in the tunnel now.”

“See you in a minute,” Delahunt said.

Price put her phone away, entered the tunnel that joined the main house to the Annex and got into the light electric rail car. The engine began to hum and the vehicle quickly picked up speed as it shot down the underground tunnel. Things were starting to click, to come together, and Price could feel the tingle she had first felt as a mission controller for long-range operations conducted by the National Security Agency. It had been there that she had made her bones in the intelligence business before being recruited by Hal Brognola to run logistics and support at the more covert Stony Man operation.

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

Stony Man had been given carte blanche to operate at peak efficiency, eliminating oversights and legalities in the name of pragmatic results. It also, perhaps most importantly, offered the U.S. government the ability to disavow any knowledge of operations that went badly. It was a brutal truth that if things turned wrong for the Stony Man action teams, Phoenix Force and Able Team, they would be left out in the cold.

It was one of Barbara Price’s most sincere prayers that she would never be called upon to make the decision that left compromised operators hanging in the wind.

She pushed aside the morose reflections as the electric car slowed and she exited the vehicle, then entered the Annex building after passing through security. Things were ready to go hot—she could not afford to be distracted now.

As she stepped into the Computer Room, she was met by Aaron Kurtzman, the wheelchair-bound head of cybernetics at Stony Man Farm. The big man reached out and handed her a steaming mug of coffee. She eyed the ink-colored liquid dubiously.

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

“David called for Phoenix Force in Marseilles,” he said, grinning. “They’re set up to go in the hotel. Carl did the same for Able Team in Louisiana. They’re in the air and heading toward the target.”

“Good,” Price said. She took a drink of the strong coffee and pulled a face. “Once we’re sure everything is unfolding, I’ll give Hal a call and he can pass the information on to the President.”

Kurtzman glided over to his work area, where it looked as if a bomb had exploded. His desk was covered in faxes, paperwork and the exposed wiring of half a dozen devices.

Across the room at his workstation, fingers flying across a laptop while monitoring a sat com link, Akira Tokaido bobbed his head in time to the music coming from a single earbud. The lean, compact hacker was the youngest member of Stony Man’s cybernetics team and the heir apparent to Kurtzman himself. The Japanese-American cyberpunk had at times worked virtual magic when Price had needed him to.

Across the room from Tokaido sat his polar opposite. Professor Huntington Wethers had come to the Stony Man operations from his position on the teaching faculty of UC Berkeley. The tall, distinguished black man sported gray hair at his temples and an unflappable manner. He currently worked two laptop screens as a translation program fed him information from monitored radio traffic coming out of France.

Carmen Delahunt walked through the door of Computer Room and made a beeline for Barbara Price. The only female on the Farm’s cyberteam, Delahunt served as a pivotal balance between Tokaido’s hotshot hacking magic and Wethers’s more restrained, academic style.

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

“You see that about Sincanaros?” she asked. “As soon as I saw that name, it rang a bell. I ran a profile—not pretty.”

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

“Will do.” Delahunt nodded. “I have to double-check the Mediterranean arrangements we made for Phoenix’s extraction with the ‘package.’ It’s nice to be able to tap the resources of larger groups like the Agency, but coordination is a nightmare.”

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

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

Price smiled.

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

She did not intend to let them down.

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

“It’s Hal on line one,” he said.

“Thanks, Aaron,” she answered.

She set her coffee and paper down and picked up the handset. She put the phone to her ear.

“Hal, it’s Barb,” she said.

“I’m holding for the President on the other line,” Brognola said from his Justice Department office. “Are the men up and rolling?”

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

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

“As always,” she agreed, and hung up.

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

CHAPTER ONE

Lost Parish, New Orleans, Louisiana

The men hung from chains.

Gabriel Gonzales turned his blindfolded head and spit blood from his mouth. His lips were swollen and his teeth loose from where the Zetas gunmen had smashed a rifle butt into his face. His nose had been broken, so the act of spitting left him breathless. He quickly sucked in air, trying not to choke on blood. The air was stale and tinged with the harsh chemical smell of spilled oil.

His arms screamed in their sockets, and Gonzales pushed his toes against the concrete floor beneath his feet to give them some relief. Around him he heard the moans and shuffling of the two other men hanging next to him. He didn’t know who they were, as they had already been bound and blindfolded in the back of the Lincoln Navigator SUV when he’d been picked up.

Let them have gotten my call, he prayed silently.

The sound of vibrating corrugated metal reached him as a door slammed. The noise echoed in hollow tones and Gonzales realized he had to be inside a large structure, such as an abandoned factory or, more probably, an empty warehouse. He heard the sounds of boot soles striking the floor as a group of men muttering low in Spanish moved closer.

He heard Lagos and his heart sank. The man was speaking rapidly, and after a moment Gonzales realized he had to be on his cell phone because he was talking to his mysterious patron, the Frenchman “Henri.”

This is going to hurt, he realized, and felt hopeless tears well up in his eyes behind the filthy cloth that covered them. When Lagos got off the phone with Henri, violent things always followed. There was a snap of hard plastic as a cell phone was shut. A snarling baritone growled an order and suddenly the blindfold was ripped from his eyes.

Powerful headlights snapped on, burning into his eyes and keeping him blinded. Gonzales tried to turn his head away from the painful, high-intensity beams. He didn’t need his eyes to recognize the voice in command: Lagos was here and Gabriel Gonzales realized he was going to die. There was no doubt anymore, he was a dead man. All that remained was the suffering.

J ACK G RIMALDI BANKED the Hughes 500MD Scout Defender hard in the darkness. The helicopter settled down into a hover some ten feet above the dark ground. All around the veteran pilot the devastation of Hurricane Katrina spread in a broken tableau of ruin and debris years after the storm had struck.

Behind him acres of swamp stretched toward the tide tables nestled against the sea, while in front of him mud-caked rubble in geometrically spaced piles marked where houses and stores had once stood along roads. It looked like a war zone, even in the yellow moonlight, a ghostly boneyard of destruction and destroyed lives.

Reconstruction had passed this Parish by. The residents had been too poor, the neighborhood too peripheral to the campaign aspirations of politicians. This was an area the hurricane could keep as New Orleans fought its way back from the devastation.

But power abhorred a vacuum. The Zetas—former members of the army who had gone over to the dark side—had come to claim the forgotten place for themselves. The hard-core drug smugglers had found little in the way of opposition when they had first arrived. All of that was about to change.

The three men of Able Team leaped from the hovering helicopter and entered the stifling heat of the Louisiana night.

L AGOS SNATCHED G ONZALES by the hair and twisted his face around. Ignoring the pain, Gonzales stared dully into the eyes of the former Mexican army special-operations soldier. The eyes stared back at him, black and empty like the dull, lifeless eyes of a shark. Devoid of emotion. What was happening was just business.

Lagos leaned in close to the sweating Gonzales and behind him the bound man could see the hulking forms of Lagos’s men, all of them wearing balaclava hoods and holding weapons. Gonzales rolled his eyes around to try to get a better look at the men hanging with him, but Lagos held him firmly. His breath smelled like cigarette smoke.

“Was it you?” Lagos whispered. “Did you betray us?”

“No, I swear—” Gonzales began lying.

Lagos released his hold on the hanging man’s hair and stepped back. He lifted his arm and backhanded Gonzales across the face, cutting off his protests. Lagos was a powerful man fuelled by a daily cocaine habit. The blow hurt.

Gonzales’s head rocked back and he winced at the sudden, stinging pain. He stumbled backward, toes barely in contact with the ground, to the end of his chain and then was unceremoniously swung back toward his abuser.

Lagos stepped in close as Gonzales stumbled forward, planting his fist in the hanging man’s midriff. Gonzales gasped and the muscles of his diaphragm spasmed painfully. He sucked in a breath, and Lagos snapped the top of his hand, extended in a flat blade, into Gonzales’s vulnerable groin.

Agony stole Gonzales’s sight. He moaned low as the sharp pain was almost instantaneously replaced by a dull, spreading ache.

God help me, he thought. It’s just beginning.

C ARL L YONS HELD UP an arm and then sank down on one leg, resting on his ballistic armor knee pad. Behind him the other two members of Able Team, Rosario “Politician” Blancanales and Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz, copied his stance.

Lyons let his automatic shotgun hang from the strap over his shoulder and pointed out toward the team’s twelve-o’clock position. Through a break in an acre-size lot of soggy timber, busted concrete and twisted rebar sat the low squat shape of an undamaged warehouse. Parked in front of the building, which spilled brilliant white halogen light through its cracks, were a dark, 1970s Dodge van and an H3 Hummer with a shiny black carapace.

“There they are,” Lyons said quietly. The six foot two, two-hundred-pound man turned his attention back to his target.

Clutching a Steyr AUG bullpup-designed assault rifle, Schwarz moved into position closer to team leader Carl Lyons. Behind them Blancanales leaned in to hear their conversation as he covered the periphery with his H&K MP-5 SD-3 submachine gun.

Blancanales put a finger to the communication piece in his ear. “We’re on-site and doing initial recon.”

“Copy,” Barbara Price answered. “Our coverage of local police channels put friendlies way outside your area of operation. Over.”

“Roger. Able out,” Blancanales murmured.

“Two vehicles,” Schwarz muttered, scanning the structure. “But big vehicles. Anywhere from five to ten guys. All former Zetas.”

“Sounds about right,” Lyons said, nodding.

Their briefing on the last-minute search-and-rescue operation had given them little to go on other than a target—Gabriel Gonzales, CIA confidential informant—and a location gathered by triangulating the man’s cell-phone signal. As part of his payment, the CIA had provided Gonzales, a former Mexican border patrol agent turned narcotic trafficker, with a state-of-the-art cell phone. The CIA had also added the location tracer buried in the body of the lightweight device.

As valuable as Gonzales might have been to drug-enforcement agencies, the CIA had turned a blind eye to his narcotics profiteering to concentrate on his anti-terrorism capabilities. It was a Faustian arrangement made common by the necessities of a post-9/11 world.

Gonzales granted the U.S. intelligence community a much-needed window into the realities of the growing, solidifying world of narco-terror. Organizations such as the former Mexican special-forces group turned drug runners, the Zetas and the violent international MS13 gang had begun to overlap with the intelligence agencies of Venezuela and the heroin syndicates of Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

Wherever there was illicit money to be made, there was an opportunity for black funds to flow into the operational coffers of terrorist organizations. It was a situation that Able Team had faced more than once.

“Let’s move in closer,” Lyons said. “But first scan with your optics. If there are sentries outside, they may well have night-vision gear. We’ll exploit the range of your sniper scope.”

“I see all,” Schwarz whispered as he shuffled forward.

Schwarz raised the Steyr AUG A3 to his shoulder. The A3 was the carbine configuration of the classic bullpup assault rifle with a shortened 16-inch barrel. The standard factory-mounted sighting optics had been replaced by Stony Man armorer John “Cowboy” Kissinger with a Picatinny mounting rail upon which he placed a 1.5X-telescope containing a circle aiming reticle.

A low, full moon hung over the scene, providing enough ambient light for the three-man special-operations team to operate without night-vision equipment.

Schwarz flinched once as the 1.5X magnification qualities of his sniper scope suddenly presented him with vision of a huge rat running lightly along an exposed section of plumbing until it disappeared into the open mouth of an overturned toilet.

He settled back, ignoring the pungent stench of the flood area. The humidity was stifling and the Able Team commando sweated freely under the black smears of his camouflage grease paint. He scanned the target building in vectors, his brain reducing the activity to simplified angles and precise geometric patterns.

“Nothing outside,” he said. “At least not from this angle…Wow, hold on.” A bright set of headlights suddenly appeared out of the ruins on the far side of the building.

Schwarz turned his weapon toward the new threat stimulus and dampened the passive feed on his scope even further.

“Holy crap,” he whispered. “It’s a McLaren F1!”

“I know I’m going to be sorry I asked, but what’s a McLaren F1?” Lyons asked.

Without preamble, and in the hushed tones of a small boy describing a cherished toy, Schwarz rattled off the car’s specks. “The F1 was the fastest production car ever made, and they only made one hundred of them. It’s got a 6.1-liter BMW S70 V12 engine, and it’ll go over 230 mph easy, without turbo or supercharges. Price tag? Well north of a cool million, my man.”

“Who the hell would drop that kind of money on such a classic supercar and then drive it into this mess?” Blancanales asked.

Schwarz shook his head as the metallic-silver supercar pulled in next to the SUVs and the bat-wing doors rose like something out of a science-fiction movie. “Anyone who’d do this is a bad, bad person. I think we’ll have to kill them all.”

“Suits me,” Lyons answered. “I freakin’ hate Zetas.”

Schwarz let out a low whistle. “Does she look like any Zetas you’ve ever seen?”

A tiny, delicate foot in a wraparound stiletto heel emerged from the darkness of the McLaren F1 and came to rest on the damp gravel. The leg attached to the thousand-dollar shoe seemed to go on for miles. Even in the poor light and across the distance, Able Team could see it was a million-dollar leg.

The young woman emerged from the McLaren F1. A sheer white blouse was knotted below her full breasts just above her red plaid miniskirt. Her hair was raven-wing black and hung in long, loose curls over a heart-shaped face.

“Oh. That’s very Britney Spears,” Schwarz breathed. “Very ‘I’m Not So Innocent.’”

“Please,” Lyons said. “It’s ‘Oops…I Did It Again’ and it’s so 2001 it makes me laugh.”

Blancanales’s head snapped around to stare at the Able Team leader. Schwarz removed his eye from the sniper scope, his mouth hanging open in shock.

“Um, you into pop princesses?” he asked.

“Shut up. She’s been all over the news, that’s all,” Lyons snapped.

Schwarz turned his head toward Blancanales. He could see the stocky Latino preparing a sarcastic riposte and felt his own laughter bubbling up in his throat.

Then the screaming began.

G ONZALES BEGAN to shiver in fear.

Lagos moved between the men hanging from the ceiling like slabs of meat at a slaughterhouse. He lit a cigarette. Beyond the lights the hulking figures of his men were reduced to nondescript shadows.

The man hanging on Gonzales’s left started to mumble a prayer to the Virgin Mary in rapid Spanish. There was the sudden sharp, acrid smell of urine as one of the men let his bladder go. Lagos chuckled and blew out a blue cloud of cigarette smoke.

“The people,” Lagos said, “they don’t understand that what we do is hard work. They think moving product is like being a rock star. You bang models and party all the time. Sometime you have to be like, uh, the Tony Soprano and use your gun. Right?”

Lagos moved around to stand in front of Gonzales. He regarded the hanging prisoner like some insect he’d found crushed on the sole of his shoe. He blew smoke into Gonzales’s face, then reached up with one hand and snatched the informant by the chin. Lagos locked eyes with his prey.

“But we know the truth, don’t we?” Lagos gritted. “We know it is hard goddamn work making our money. And the ladies aren’t the only things we bang, eh?”

From behind Lagos his men chuckled. To the terrified Gonzales it sounded like hyenas regarding a wounded gazelle. He was close enough to Lagos to see the black clogged pores of the man’s nose. There was a tiny residue of white powder around the edge of one of his cavernous nostrils. The man’s eyes blazed as bloodshot as a rabid dog’s. Gonzales squeezed his own eyes shut and tried to turn away. Lagos’s fingers were like steel bands on his face, and they burned his flesh with his intense body heat.

“One of you bitches knows about Bellicose Dawn.” Lagos released Gonzales’s face and stepped back. “None of you should know about my Bellicose Dawn. Before I am finished, the one who knows will tell me what he knows. But since I will kill that person, I don’t expect anyone to volunteer the information. So we were talking about hard work again, right? Getting the one of you to confess will be hard work. Just as keeping my woman happy can be hard work.”