Unconventional Warfare

CHAPTER SIX

Suburbs, Washington, D.C.

The phone rang.

Hal Brognola came awake instantly. The director of the Special Operations Group and head of Stony Man Farm sat up in bed and snapped on the lamp at his bedside table. His wife of some thirty years moaned in protest and rolled away.

The phone rang again.

Getting oriented, the director of America’s most sensitive covert operation group looked at the table and tried to determine which of his two phones was ringing. The first phone was his home and it often rang when some matter from his position at the Justice Department needed urgent attention.

The second phone was a Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device, or SME PED. The combination of sat phone and PDA allowed the wireless transmission of classified information and conversations.

When that phone rang then Brognola knew without question that the call was in reference to the Stony Man program. It would mean that somewhere in the world something had gone very wrong and that a decision had been made at the very highest level that resolution was only to be found at the muzzle of a gun.

The Stony Man teams were the very best guns in the business.

Brognola blinked and phone chirped again. It was the SME PED.

Time to go to work, he thought, and picked up the secured device.

“Go for Hal,” he said.

Things started to roll.

Stony Man Farm

CARMEN DELAHUNT HAD CQ duty at the Farm.

CQ was a military acronym for “command of quarters” and it simply meant that she had drawn after-hours duty. Despite not having the field teams on any active assignment at that precise moment, Stony Man was still a 24/7 operation and as such the Farm was fully staffed around the clock.

Secure in the Communications Room of the Farm’s Annex, the fiery redhead and former FBI agent was monitoring updated intelligence situation reports, military communications traffic and twenty-four-hour cable news channels.

While monitoring all this sensory input, Delahunt casually whipped through page after page of challenging Sudoku puzzles. She was a multitasking machine driven by a sharp, type A personality engine.

On the top of the desk the duty phone blinked into life and then rang. Setting down her coffee cup, she snatched up the receiver.

“Farm,” she said. Then, after a pause she continued, “Good morning, Hal.”

She cocked a head as the big Fed began talking. Her fingers flew across the keyboard in front of her as she began pulling up the latest information on West Africa in general, the Congo in specific, focusing on the terrorist and criminal operatives in that area and a project known as Lazy Titan.

Satisfied she was up to speed, Brognola hung up in his suburban D.C. home and began getting dressed.

Once off the phone Delahunt made two priority calls, both to other locations on the Stony Man facility. The first was to inform Jack Grimaldi, chief pilot for the covert project, that he was needed ASAP to take a helicopter into Wonderland on the Potomac and ferry Brognola to the Farm.

The second call went to Barbara Price.

BARBARA PRICE, Stony Man’s mission controller, 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 over to her bedroom table and noted the glowing red numerals of her digital clock.

She had been asleep for a little over four hours. She 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 “Bear” Kurtzman’s coffee she knew she’d be ready to face another day.

She got out of bed and smoothed her clothes before picking up the copy of the Washington Post she had placed by her bed. The headline jumped out at her as she stepped out into the upstairs hallway of the Stony Man Farm main house.

Rebel Forces Invade Congo

Late yesterday afternoon the Congo was rocked by violence as insurgents under command of the infamous Gen. Nkunda took control of a region on the upper river. Human rights groups are worried as communication with the area has been cut off…

Disgusted, Price stopped reading. She had too much on her mind at the moment to worry about politics as usual in Africa.

She frowned. The name “General Nkunda” was unfamiliar. If there was a new player trampling through national playgrounds then she needed to be on top of it. She resolved to have her computer wizard Akira Tokaido see if Stony Man had any files on the man.

As she walked down the hall and took the stairs to the main floor of the farmhouse she began clicking through options and mentally categorizing her tasks. She had men on standby, preparing to go into danger, and like the maestro of a symphony it was her responsibility to coordinate all the disparate parts into a seamless whole.

She was in the basement and heading for the rail system that connected to the Annex when the cell phone on her belt began to vibrate. She plucked it free and used the red push-talk button to initiate the walkie-talkie mode on the encrypted device.

“This is Barb,” she said, voice cool.

“Barb,” Carmen Delahunt began, “Hal called. We have a situation.”

“Thanks, Carmen,” Price told the ex-FBI agent. “I’m in the tunnel and coming toward the Annex now.”

“See you in a minute,” Delahunt said, and signed off.

Price put her phone away and got into the light electric railcar. The little engine began to hum and Price quickly picked up speed as she shot down the one-thousand-foot tunnel sunk fifteen feet below the ground of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

Things were starting to click, 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 was there 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.

It had been quite a promotion, she reflected as the railcar raced down the subterranean tunnel past conduit pipes and thick power cables toward the Farm’s Annex, which was camouflaged underneath a commercial wood-chipping facility.

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, Stony Man 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. Sometimes the big picture could provide a very cold and unforgiving snapshot.

This left Stony Man and its operators particularly vulnerable to certain types of exposure. One hint of their existence in a place like MSNBC or the New York Times could lead to horrific outcomes.

The electric engine beneath her seat began to power down and the railcar slowed to a halt. She pushed the morose reflections from her mind as she prepared to enter the Annex building.

Things were ready to roll hot; she could not afford to be distracted now. She stood and stepped out of the car. Fluorescent lights gleamed off linoleum floors and a sign on the whitewashed wall read Authorized Personnel Only. Price input the code on the keypad and reached over to open the door to the tunnel.

After passing through the door, she was met by the wheelchair-bound Aaron Kurtzman. The big man reached out a hand the size of a paw and gave her a steaming mug of coffee. She eyed the ink-colored liquid dubiously.

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

The pair of them had exchanged that same greeting so many times it came to feel like a Groundhog Day moment. Both took comfort from the repetition.

Kurtzman turned the wheelchair and began to keep pace with the female mission controller as they made for the Communications Room.

The former Big Ten college wrestler lifted a massive arm across a barrel chest and pushed his glasses up on his nose beneath a high forehead with a deep horizontal crease. Price had once teased him that the worry line was severe enough for him to be awarded a Purple Heart.

He’d earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He was a Stony Man veteran who had been with the Farm since the beginning, and his wheelchair was a constant testament to his dedication.

“McCarter just called for Phoenix,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “They’ve set up rendezvous with Encizo and James. Carl did the same for Able. They’re in place and ready to transport if we need them. They’ve been informed of the attack on NSA station Lazy Titan and the possibility of a survivor.”

“Good,” Price said. She took a drink of the strong coffee and pulled a face. “I’ll alert Hal, then. All we need is the go-ahead from the President.”

The pair entered the massive Communications Room and into a maelstrom of activity. Price paused at the door like a commander surveying her troops. She liked what she saw.

Kurtzman glided over to his work area, where it looked as if a bomb had gone off. His desk was covered in faxes, paperwork and the exposed wiring of half a dozen devices. Next to his desk, 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 earphone. 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 faculty of UCLA. 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 the Communications Room. The ex-FBI agent made a beeline for Barbara Price when she saw her boss. The only female on the Farm’s cyberteam, she served as a pivotal balance between Tokaido’s hotshot hacking magic and Wethers’s more restrained, academic style.

She 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.

“Since we’re on West Africa anyway you see the article about the new Congo player, General Nkunda?” she asked. “I started running an analytical of our files on that movement and him in particular.”

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 South American arraignments we made for the team’s extraction with the ‘package’—if it comes to that. It’s nice to be able to tap the resources of larger groups like the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, but coordination is a nightmare.”

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

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

Barbara 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 her desk, where a light flashing on her 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, Bear,” she answered.

She set her coffee down and picked up the handset as she sank into her chair. She put the phone to her ear and tapped a key on her computer, knocking the screen off standby mode.

“Hal, it’s Barb,” she said.

“I’m outside the Oval Office right now,” Brognola said. “Are the boys up and rolling?”

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

“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 get ready to roll.”

Nairobi, Kenya

PHOENIX FORCE MET UP in the capital and transferred to the Sikorsky MH-53 Pave Low helicopter. To them their mission was simple: go in and find a lone American survivor of a brutal attack. It didn’t matter that an entire army of heavily armed insurgents had taken him into a city turned into a hellish fortress.

They would proceed, always moving forward.

FOR ABLE TEAM THE MISSION evolved in a more circumspect manner.

In the back of the Lear jet taking them to the Farm the three-man team relaxed, unwinding from the mission. Thirty minutes into the flight, Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi opened the cockpit door.

“I got Barb on secure communications,” he told them. “I don’t think you guys are going home yet.”

“Perfect,” Blancanales said, laughing.

Nicaragua

ABLE TEAM’S PLAN WAS simple.

They would come in on a commercial flight and make it through customs clean. Following that, they would pick up a vehicle and make their way to a safehouse used by a joint CIA and Army Special Operations Intelligence Support Activity operation to establish a base before starting surveillance of the target.

Things began to go wrong immediately.

Carl Lyons pulled his carry-on bag down from the overhead compartment just after the Unfasten Seat Belts sign popped up on the TWA commercial flight. They were flying first-class as part of their administrative cover, and the team leader had watched, bemused, as Blancanales had seduced the Hispanic flight attendant with his gregarious charm.

Team funnyman Hermann Schwarz had cracked one stale joke after another as the silver-haired smooth-talker had reaffirmed his membership in the mile-high club thirty thousand feet over the Caribbean with a dark-eyed Nicaraguan beauty half his age.

In a more regulation-orientated unit such behavior as stand-up sex in an airplane restroom would have been a scandalous breach of operational security, one that a team leader like Lyons would have had to treat severely as a discipline issue.

Not so in the shadowy world in which Able Team operated. Now there wasn’t a person on the plane among the crew or passengers who didn’t think the three men were anything but what they claimed; middle-aged divorced tourists on a Central American vacation. Blancanales’s audacity was role-playing brilliance.

If there was anything bothering Lyons as he exited the plane after the flight attendant had slipped her cell number to Blancanales, it was that circumstances dictated they roll into the opening moves of the operation unarmed. Carl Lyons didn’t like taking a shower unarmed, let alone enter a potentially volatile nation without a weapon.

“Okay,” Schwarz murmured as they came into the big, air-conditioned terminal, “we can add a certain TWA flight attendant named Bonita to our roster of Stony Man local assets.”

“Oh, yeah,” Lyons replied. “I’m sure she’ll be a big help. We can just send David and his boys down here sometime and they can all crash at her hacienda. It’ll be like the Farm South.”

“You see how it is, Gadgets?” Blancanales said, voice weary. “You try to take one for the team and management doesn’t appreciate it. I try to show loyalty through service and all I get is cynical pessimism.”

“Oh, buddy,” Schwarz replied, voice dry as south Texas wind, “you just got a lot more on you than cynical pessimism.”

“Yes,” Blancanales replied seriously. “Yes, I did.”

“Can you gentlemen come this way?”

The voice interrupted their banter with the certainty of undisputed authority. Able Team turned their heads as one to take in the speaker. He was a tall Latino with jet-black hair, mustache and eyes and was wearing the crisp uniform of a Nicaraguan customs officer. There was a 9 mm automatic pistol in a polished holster on his hip but the flap was closed and secured.

However, a few paces behind him the assault rifles of the military security guards were right out and open as the soldiers stood with hands on pistol grips and fingers resting near triggers.

Lyons scowled. Schwarz gave the officer his best grin in reply to the summons. Then he turned his head slightly and whispered to Blancanales out of the side of his mouth, “Any chance you want to take one for the team now?”

Blancanales fixed an insincere grin of his own on his face. “Nope. This time we move right to cynical pessimism,” he replied. He turned to face the stern uniformed officer, face suddenly serious. “This isn’t about that flight attendant, is it?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Nicaraguan customs separated the three men quickly, hustling them into separate rooms. There they sat, isolated, for two hours. Carl Lyons found himself sitting in front of a plain metal table on an uncomfortable folding chair while the customs officer pretended to read official-looking papers he’d taken from a blue folder with a government seal at the top.

Fluent in Spanish, Lyons easily read the pages he set on the tabletop and saw that they were merely quarterly flight maintenance reports being used as props. Warily, Lyons decided to relax a bit; this seemed a more random occurrence than he had first feared. The Farm had considerable resources, but the operation was minuscule compared to other government agencies and Stony Man operatives were often forced to rely on logistical support from larger bureaucratic entities. Whenever that happened, security became a prime concern, but for now this seemed a more typical customs roust than anything more threatening.

The officer, whose name tag read Garcia, picked up Lyons’s passport with his free hand and opened it. “Mr. Johnson?” His English was accented but clipped and neat.

Lyons nodded. “That’s me.”

Garcia regarded him over the top of the little blue folder. “What brings you to Nicaragua?”

“Sunny weather, beautiful women, the beaches. All the usual. Is there a problem with my passport?”

The customs agent carefully put the blue folder down. He ignored the question and tapped the passport with one long, blunt-tipped finger. “There are many countries in Central America with beautiful beaches and women.”

“But only one San Hector Del Sur—it’s world famous,” Lyons replied in flawless Spanish, referencing Nicaragua’s most popular tourist destination.

Garcia’s eyes flicked upward sharply at the linguistic display. His eyes looked past Lyons and toward the large reflective glass Lyons knew from his own experience as a police officer was where the customs officer’s superiors were watching the interrogation. Garcia let his gaze settle back on Lyons. He offered a wan smile.

“I’m sure this is just an administrative error,” the officer said. “My people will have it sorted out in no time.” Garcia rose to his feet. “Please be patient.”

“Okay.” Lyons nodded agreeably. “But, man, am I getting thirsty.”

GARCIA LEFT LYONS and walked toward the interrogation room containing Hermann Schwarz. As he moved down the hallway he saw the tall, cadaverous figure in a dark suit standing off behind his commanding officer. The man met Garcia’s gaze with cold, dead eyes, and the Nicaraguan customs officer felt a chill at the base of his spine. What was he doing here? Garcia wondered. He stifled the thought quickly—it didn’t pay to ask too many questions about the internal security organization, even to yourself.

As he entered the room he saw a burly sergeant had Schwarz pinned up against the wall, one beefy forearm across the American’s throat. The officer was scowling in fury as Schwarz, going by the name Miller, smirked.

Schwarz looked over at Garcia as the man entered and grinned. “Hey, Pedro,” he called. “You know why this guy’s wife never farted as a little girl? ’Cause she didn’t have an asshole till she got married!”

The sergeant rotated and dipped the shoulder of his free hand. His fist came up from the hip and buried itself in Schwarz’s stomach. The Stony Man operative absorbed the blow passively and let himself crumple at the man’s feet. He looked up from the floor, gasping for breath.

Schwarz looked at Garcia. “You know what this pendejo’s most confusing day is? Yep—Father’s Day.”

His cackling was cut off as the sergeant kicked him in the ribs. Garcia snapped an order and reluctantly the man backed off. “Leave us!” he repeated, and the officer left the room scowling.

Garcia moved forward and dropped Schwarz’s passport on the table. He looked down as the American fought his way back up to his feet. Garcia watched dispassionately as the man climbed into his chair.

“This is a hell of a country you got here, pal,” Schwarz said. “Tell a few jokes and get the shit kicked out of you. I should get a lawyer and sue your ass.”

“You’ll find Nicaraguan courts unsympathetic to ugly Americans, Mr. Miller.”

“Yeah, well, your momma’s so fat when she walks her butt claps.”

“Why have you come to Nicaragua, Mr. Miller?”

“I heard a guy could get a drink. I think it was a lie. Seriously, I’m here with some buddies to check out the sites, maybe see the senoritas on San Hector Del Sur, but instead I get this?”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t insult my officers?”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t lock an innocent turista up for two hours in a room with a trained monkey like that asshole.”

Garcia sighed heavily, a weary man with an odious task. “I’m sure this is just an administrative error. We’ll have it sorted out shortly.”

“You’re damn well right you will,” Schwarz snapped, playing his role to the hilt.

“In the meantime perhaps you could refrain from antagonizing my officers? Yes?”

“Hey, Pedro—is that your stomach or did you just swallow a beach ball?”

Officer Garcia turned and walked out of the room, studiously ignoring the thin man standing outside in the hall next to the doorway.

“Hey, who do ya have to screw to get a drink around here?” Schwarz demanded as the door swung closed.

From behind the two-way mirror the thin man watched him with inscrutable curiosity.

AS CUSTOMS OFFICER Garcia entered the final interrogation room, Blancanales, whose own passport was made out under the name of Rosario, rose from his seat, manner eager and face twisted into a mask of hopeful supplication.