MEN DIED EVERY DAY IN BATTLE

But watching them die through the wonders of supertechnology was somewhat spooky, Brognola felt. Dead was dead, but this was something else entirely—real time, real flesh-and-blood dying as little more than a lit speck, an eerie video game.

There was still plenty of red-orange jumping all over the screens and lots of bad guys in play. Visual relay was shaky at best as the Phoenix Force warriors advanced, swung this way and that, ducked fire, blazed away in long raking bursts, left to right or vice versa.

Brognola watched as the tactical team relayed warnings and positions of bogeys. Encizo and Manning were monitored by Wethers, Kurtzman taking Hawkins and James, with Tokaido watching McCarter, the lone fighter out.

It was quite the grim and, yes, Brognola admitted to himself, ghoulish show.

Other titles in this series:

#9 STRIKEPOINT

#10 SECRET ARSENAL

#11 TARGET AMERICA

#12 BLIND EAGLE

#13 WARHEAD

#14 DEADLY AGENT

#15 BLOOD DEBT

#16 DEEP ALERT

#17 VORTEX

#18 STINGER

#19 NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE

#20 TERMS OF SURVIVAL

#21 SATAN’S THRUST

#22 SUNFLASH

#23 THE PERISHING GAME

#24 BIRD OF PREY

#25 SKYLANCE

#26 FLASHBACK

#27 ASIAN STORM

#28 BLOOD STAR

#29 EYE OF THE RUBY

#30 VIRTUAL PERIL

#31 NIGHT OF THE JAGUAR

#32 LAW OF LAST RESORT

#33 PUNITIVE MEASURES

#34 REPRISAL

#35 MESSAGE TO AMERICA

#36 STRANGLEHOLD

#37 TRIPLE STRIKE

#38 ENEMY WITHIN

#39 BREACH OF TRUST

#40 BETRAYAL

#41 SILENT INVADER

#42 EDGE OF NIGHT

#43 ZERO HOUR

#44 THIRST FOR POWER

#45 STAR VENTURE

#46 HOSTILE INSTINCT

#47 COMMAND FORCE

#48 CONFLICT IMPERATIVE

#49 DRAGON FIRE

#50 JUDGMENT IN BLOOD

#51 DOOMSDAY DIRECTIVE

#52 TACTICAL RESPONSE

#53 COUNTDOWN TO TERROR

#54 VECTOR THREE

#55 EXTREME MEASURES

#56 STATE OF AGGRESSION

#57 SKY KILLERS

#58 CONDITION HOSTILE

#59 PRELUDE TO WAR

#60 DEFENSIVE ACTION

#61 ROGUE STATE

#62 DEEP RAMPAGE

#63 FREEDOM WATCH

#64 ROOTS OF TERROR

#65 THE THIRD PROTOCOL

#66 AXIS OF CONFLICT

#67 ECHOES OF WAR

#68 OUTBREAK

#69 DAY OF DECISION

#70 RAMROD INTERCEPT

#71 TERMS OF CONTROL

#72 ROLLING THUNDER

#73 COLD OBJECTIVE

#74 THE CHAMELEON FACTOR

Silent Arsenal

STONY MAN®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Don Pendleton

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

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Myanmar

Colonel Ho Phan Lingpau feared the jungle, was borderline terrified of the dense pre-Jurassic rain forest encompassing the compound like a vined and walled fortress. These days there was plenty to fear, he thought, as he pondered murmured rumors he’d overheard among the rank and file. There was menace out there in the jungle. And beyond, ragtag bands of armed rebel savages.

He’d heard the terrible stories recently of man-eating crocodiles crawling up the banks of the Ayeyarwady River to chomp down on the leg of some unsuspecting villager, dragging him or her into the black waters, their bodies thrashing in the behemoth’s death roll the final sighting of the victim. Then there were rumors of tigers on the prowl, the beasts leaping from nowhere out of the brush, claiming human meals in a frenzy of disemboweling claws that left little to the imagination. And there were reported elephant stampedes throughout the Kachin and Shan states. Three days prior, he recalled as he shuddered over the images left dangling in his mind by the report, a herd of the beasts had gone berserk, crushing half of his thirty-pony caravan, trampling four of his soldiers to bloody pulp as they’d hauled refined product to the paddle wheeler on the river.

At first he had believed these wild tales to be mere fabricated excuses from the comrades of AWOL soldiers who held as much loathing and fear of the jungle as he did—only they had dredged up the nerve to defect his unit at the risk of a firing squad if caught traipsing back for the comfort and safety of Yangon. However, only after witnessing a rhino charging then knocking one of his transport trucks onto its side before the animal was shot down in a hail of bullets had he begun to allow silent credence to an ominous notion.

The jungle was alive with an animal evil. Wildlife had seemingly gone berserk, the creatures of the forest having evidently evolved to some vicious counterattack mode on humans, nature tired from fear of being the hunted. Mother Nature, he believed, was in revolt against man. No nature lover, no tree hugger—since he was the chief architect for the slash-and-burn of countless acres in the region to make room for more poppy fields—he entertained a fleeting wonder. How would he feel if he was destined for slaughter, his hide providing a coat or rug for some rich man’s mistress, perhaps his penis used, much like the tiger’s, as an aphrodisiac, maybe his head mounted on the wall for the hunter’s admiration? As if the grinding fear of animal attack wasn’t enough, there were the various and sundry rebel groups lurking the Kachin, all of them trigger-happy when it came to blowing away any uniform marched out there by Yangon. By day, the jungle frayed his nerves badly enough, rebel phantoms hidden in the lush vegetation, framing a uniform pasted to flesh drenched in sweat from steaming heat through the crosshairs of a high-powered scope. At night, with all the caws and chittering and howling in the dark, he found himself unable to sleep, unless his HQ was ringed by sentries and he drifted off with a brain floating on brandy.

As a top-ranking officer of the State Law and Order Restoration Council—SLORC—he knew there was no room, however, for any voicing of the slightest anxiety, much less complaint about one’s duty for the ruling military junta of Myanmar. Still, he was city-born and raised in Yangon, accustomed to the best food, clothing, housing that a man of his stature deserved. This stint, he thought, swatting at a mosquito the size of a mango, was little more than some supervisory outing better suited for a subordinate, some gung-ho underling eager to prove himself to the other twenty-one members of the SLORC. If he thought about his present assignment long enough, he knew protracted bitterness and resentment might distract him from meeting next week’s deadline.

Still, despite the encroaching deadline and possible reprimand from Yangon if the shipment fell short, he remained holed up for the most part in his bamboo-and-thatch-hut quarters, brooding in isolation instead of being out there in the refinery, barking orders or pacing among the peasants in the poppy fields, cracking the bullwhip over the backs of the workers if they didn’t meet the day’s quota: two burlap sacks of milky juice per head. And if he failed to ship out the requisite ten metric tons of heroin, divvied up between their wholesale distributors in Laos and Thailand, his gut warned him Yangon would make this foreboding stretch of impenetrable jungle in the Kachin State his indefinite HQ.

Or worse.

Lingpau eased back in his leopard-skin recliner, one of several creature comforts he had managed to smuggle out of the city in his personal French Aérospatiale helicopter. There was a fully stocked wet bar in one corner, with enough brandy and whiskey to get him through six months of this drudgery. He had three giant-screen TVs, and his attention was torn between the satellite piped-in news from al-Jazeera and CNN and the latest porn flick he’d just slipped into the VCR.

Perhaps life among the savages wasn’t that bad, after all. Naturally, with rank, certain perks and privileges were expected, even necessary since an unhappy commander could become apathetic, simply killing time, shirking duty if his own needs weren’t met. And he was in charge, no mistake, lord and master of this jungle domain, surrounded by tough, seasoned soldiers who could claim plenty of rebel blood on their hands. What was to fear?

Lingpau was pouring another brandy when he heard the sudden outburst of voices raised in panic outside his hut. He pivoted, heart lurching, brandy sloshing on his medallioned blouse. Then he froze, staring at the bright shimmer of light dancing over the bamboo shutters, certain they were under attack by rebels. The shouting of men, the pounding of feet beyond his quarters leaped in decibels, his mind swarming with fear-laden questions as he picked up his Chinese AK. How many attackers? Did he have enough soldiers, firepower to repulse even the largest army the Karens or Kachins could field?

As he burst into the living room, Lingpau found three of his soldiers piling onto the upraised porch beyond the front door, skidding to a halt as their stares fixed on their commander. The mere notion they could be under a full-scale assault by a guerrilla force sent another shiver down his spine. The Kachin State, he knew, was home to some of the most vicious and largest rebel armies in Myanmar. With a hundred-plus-strong army, with antiaircraft batteries, scads of rocket launchers, with tanks and helicopter gunships, he couldn’t imagine any rebel band, no matter how large or well-armed the force, would be brazen, or foolish enough, to attack a SLORC compound. But what rational mind could possibly fathom the desperate motives of a people on the verge of extinction? In his experience, the question of living or dying meant next to nothing to desperate men—and women—who knew they were just this side of the walking dead.

But there were stories, however, some of which he knew were based on truth. It boggled his mind, galled his ego, stung his soldier’s pride, just the same, that he might be under attack by the rebel leader the Karens called the Warrior Princess. If they were being attacked by guerrillas, though, where was the gunfire, the crunch of explosions that, he had been warned, signaled a rebel onslaught? What was this weird halo of light shining beyond the shadows of his men on the porch?

They were pointing skyward, their babble rife with fear and confusion.

“Stop yammering!” Lingpau shouted at the trio, searching the grounds for armed invaders but finding only his soldiers scurrying about the poppy fields with the night workforce, other gaggles of troops frozen near the transport trucks parked in front of the massive tent refinery.

“Rebels? Are we under attack?” Lingpau saw them shake their heads, mouths open, his sentries clearly left speechless over whatever they’d seen. “Then what? Answer me!”

“The sky, Colonel, it is falling!”

“The heavens are on fire!”

“It is going to crash right on top of us!”

Teeth gnashed, cursing the fool bleating something about a craft plunging in flames from outer space, Lingpau hit the ground, whirling, shouting orders, calling out the names of his captain and lieutenant. His voice sounding shrill in his ears, eyes darting everywhere, he ordered the perimeter sealed, the workforce detained in their tents, full alert and double the guard around the refinery. He was forced to repeat the orders, uncertain of his own voice, limbs hardening like drying concrete as he realized he was looking skyward.

“What…”

Lingpau’s first conclusion was that the descending fireball was the result of a rocket attack. Only the massive size of the unidentified object, the white sheen that seemed to spew tentacles of luminous blue fire for miles in all directions and, finally, the trajectory of its fall, told him it was something other than a missile. But what? he wondered, squinting against the harsh glare illuminating the heavens, hurtling night into day, the mushroom-capped jungle canopy rippling against the blinding light as if the inanimate threatened to come alive.

Yes, he had seen meteor showers, shooting stars, and what little he knew about comets no giant rock from outer space could slow its own descent, appear to hover, change directions. There were other stories he had heard, though, fantastic tales from the jungle he had dismissed without a second thought, told around campfires, no doubt, by bored peasants with too much time to waste and too much imagination perhaps inflamed by opium. Tales told of alien spacecraft that flew at impossible speeds over the countryside, blinding lights that fell over a man and saw him vanish into the sky. Was it possible? Could it be?

He watched for what felt like an hour, waiting, dreading the moment when the giant flaming orb would squash the entire compound, nothing but a smoking crater choked with pulped corpses, crushed poppy and strewed product testament to the calamity here. Then it seemed to float away, or suspend itself in midair, or retreat—he wasn’t sure. The halo above its slow-motion free fall appeared to spread mist next, rolling it out like a carpet. He saw it was destined to crash far to the north, figured five or seven miles away, and felt a moment’s relief. The shouting of men was muted by the rolling thunder of the distant explosion as the white fireball plunged from sight. There were numerous Karen and Kachin villages in that direction. Whatever had plummeted to the jungle, whatever it was, he knew it required an investigation, a follow-up report to his superiors in Yangon. If this was some new weapon being tested by the rebels, perhaps some high-tech rocket the American CIA or DEA supporters had given the insurgents, and he failed to inform Yangon of its existence…

He shuddered at the thought of the grim consequences he could suffer for any dereliction of duty.

Lingpau was barking out the next round of orders, rounding up his lieutenant and ordering three full squads to board the Russian HIP-E helicopters and the Aérospatiale when he spotted a pair of eyes shining back at him from the edge of the jungle. Lifting his assault rifle, barrel sweeping up before his eyes, he was prepared to empty the entire clip into the brush. But the big cat was gone.

Lingpau scoured the impenetrable blackness, willing his legs to carry him to his helicopter. It was a fleeting albeit dangerous thought, yearning to return to Yangon, even if that meant abandoning his duty. Whatever had just dropped from the sky, he was certain yet one more evil was about to claim the jungle.

KHISA AN-KHASUNG neither wanted nor felt she deserved the Nobel peace prize. It was true, though, she had become something of a legend throughout Burma—Myanmar—if not most of Southeast Asia, viewed as heroine by the poor and the oppressed, denounced by SLORC and Laotian and Thai warlords and narcotics traffickers as a radical and criminal to be shot on sight. She took honor that she was seen by friend and foe alike as something of a stalking lioness, prowling the jungle, even hunting down the hyenas in human skin who would devour her pride. Defending the weak and the innocent had called on her to do more than just remain a rabble-rousing activist in Yangon or Mandalay, or to chase whatever accolades bestowed her as a lauded poet and writer of short stories, all of which, naturally, were published in the West. Had she chosen this path in life, she wondered, or had the path chosen her?

Whichever, there was the blood of many slain enemies on her hands, and a trip to Stockholm to be honored for a virtue she had never contributed to was hypocrisy in her eyes. It was pretty much the grandiose chatter of foreign journalists, anyway, Europeans, even Americans, all of them as transparent as glass to her. They came to her country—often specifically seeking her out in search of a story or a hero—men of questionable principles and motives, leaving with no more understanding of the horrors and the cruelty of life under military rule than when they’d arrived. The only honor she sought was for her land to be free of terror and tyranny.

And these days there was more avenging than defending.

Ever since the Barking Dogs of the SLORC had expanded their heroin operation north from the Shan State, she had seen the rain forest nearly burned and chopped down to perhaps a few thousand remaining acres of hardwood and mangrove. But there was no comparison, she knew, between their slash-and-burn of the jungle to the toll in human suffering the Barking Dogs had inflicted on the peoples of the Kachin. Where they weren’t brutalized or outright murdered by the Barking Dogs, they were seized by soldiers for slave labor in the poppy fields.

When villages were raided, where they were not razed by fire and the inhabitants weren’t all executed on the spot, she knew young daughters were taken from their families to be used as sex slaves by the Barking Dogs. When deemed soiled goods, they were then sold by the SLORC to rich cronies in neighboring countries, their families—murdered, worked to death in the poppy fields or dispersed to die in the jungle—never to see them again.

It was another form of genocide, she supposed, killing the men, abducting young women, extinguishing all hope the bloodline of the minority groups would continue. She knew all about the indignities, the humiliation the SLORC could inflict on a captive female. And she bore the scars of torture and rape on her own soul, her thoughts right then threatening to wander back to the four years she’d languished in a Yangon prison…

No. Her enemies were in the present, and perhaps the salvation of the Kachin State rested square on her shoulders.

Swathed in thick vines and brush, her fighting force of sixty-two spread evenly to either side along the jungle edge, she scanned the compound through infrared field glasses. With the help and support of both DEA and CIA contract agents in the Kachin, the Karen National Liberation Army of the Karen National Union was better armed and equipped than their predecessors—including her father and three brothers—who had been captured and executed during a SLORC raid when she was—about eight years old. So long ago—another lifetime, it seemed—it often took strenuous thinking to even recall her own age of twenty-four.

Too young, she thought, to feel so old.

There was, she knew, no turning back.

Even though they wielded rocket launchers, the hard truth, she knew, was that they were still outnumbered and outgunned by the Barking Dogs. They could attack this compound, her strategy already laid out to her freedom fighters. They could encircle the refinery, toss around a few white-phosphorous grenades, burn up the poison, cut down a few dozen or so Barking Dogs with their assault rifles and machine guns, but there was another hard truth beyond what would amount to little more than a suicide strike. No matter how many SLORC thugs they killed, Yangon would swarm the jungle with two, even three times the numbers she found before her. The painful thought that perhaps death was just another word for freedom and peace flickered through her mind, but she quickly cast aside any pessimistic notions that would render her less than a leader.

She knew they needed outside help if they were to drive the Barking Dogs from the Kachin. With her contacts to the CIA and DEA, a plan as to how she could achieve such a victory had nearly solidified the next path.

She was lowering the night glasses, wondering how or if they should launch an attack on the soldiers and the refinery, when the sky flashed above the jungle. She winced at the brightness, her fighters edging closer to open ground where the jungle gave way to the closest poppy field to gain a better view of the sky. They were muttering, pointing, searching for the source of light in the heavens. She ordered silence, told them to fall back. She believed another rebel group in the area had preempted her own strike, then she saw the utter stillness of soldiers and workers alike as they gazed at whatever the source of light in the sky.

Assault rifle in hand, she waited for an attack that never came, then surveyed the entire compound for the next few minutes, taking in the commotion, the air of panic mounting among the workers and soldiers. Arms were flapping now, soldiers darting around the compound, shoving the field hands into tents, doubling the sentries around the refinery. She couldn’t see the source of light, but the soldiers were aiming fingers and weapons to the north. She heard the rumble of a distant explosion, then found a contingent of thirty or so soldiers boarding the gunships. Despite her order, she caught the whispering among her fighters, sensed the mounting fear around her in the dark. Gauging the impact point of the blast, the vector of the gunships, she knew the explosion had erupted to the north. That, she also knew, was where a large population of her own people had yet to be molested by the Barking Dogs.

Khisa An-Khasung rose, AKS sweeping, her thoughts locked on to the mystery of the light and the explosion. She melted into the dark and told her fighters to follow.

GENERAL MAW NUYAUNG had stalled the task as long as he dared. He had his own superiors to contend with, and they had become impatient over the past two and a half days for answers, even while he debated with his comrades how the catastrophe should be most efficiently handled. He had handed off a number of excuses why he shouldn’t personally undertake such a grisly chore best relegated to lower-ranking officers and medical experts already on the scene. But the supreme hierarchy of the SLORC had seen through his flimsy sales pitch, sent him packing with veiled threats on his way out the door about failure to fulfill his duty. Since the Kachin refinery had been built at his insistence—despite reservations about growing rebel armies and the distance to both Laotian and Thai borders from his colleagues in the SLORC—the generals with more stars, fatter bank accounts and political muscle had singled him out to investigate the mysterious explosion over the Kachin.

It was directive number two that found his bowels rumbling, heart racing, the sweat beads popping up on his bald dome and trickling down his craggy face from under the cap.

Determined but anxious to get this ghastly business over, he stared out the cabin window as the paddies swept several hundred feet below the custom-built VIP helicopter. The flight plan had already been mapped out before leaving Yangon, his pilots sticking to the arranged course, sailing east for the sluggish brown waters of the Ayeyarwady. They had just cut a wide berth around the quarantined area surrounding the refinery, en route now to the Buddhist temple, then a quick flyby of the Kachin and Karen villages being sanitized by arriving fresh battalions. A final search of the paddies and he felt relief stir at the sight of farmers and water buffalo still standing, man and animal toiling under the sun. Perhaps, he thought, the horror had been contained. If not he—all of the SLORC—was threatened with a crisis of proportions not even known in the worst of nightmares.

In fact, the calamity was already threatening to reach nationwide critical mass.

According to the weather report, a modest breeze of six to eight miles per hour had been blowing northeast since the explosion. But whatever the biological agent—presumably released before and during the blast—the wind had shifted due south, toward Yangon, and was gathering strength. If common citizens began dropping in the streets in a city teeming with four million…

General Nuyaung decided he was in no rush to hit the ground.

Exactly what had happened almost three nights ago remained a puzzle, but a mystery rife with horrifying implications for the entire country, he knew. Beyond the outbreak of plague, there was the matter of internal security, now threatened by foreign intelligence agents looking to capitalize on the supposed good will of a concerned global community.

Already there had been leaks about the disaster to the western media, CIA or DEA in-country operatives, most likely, pushing panic buttons around the globe, seeking only to infiltrate agents into what they branded a closed society, wishing to subvert and overthrow the ruling powers, disrupt or eradicate the production and flow of eighty percent of the world’s heroin. The hue and cry from the shadows was working.

Already the United Nations, Red Cross and even the American Centers for Disease Control were offering aid and assistance. He wasn’t fooled by the charade of proposed charity. Nuyaung—as did the other members of the SLORC—feared their troubles had only just begun.

Nuyaung wondered what nightmare he would find when he landed at the refinery, even though the intelligence report, complete with photos of victims and initial medical analysis, was perched on his lap. The unidentified object had been painted on their radar screens in Yangon, he remembered, as he had been called in to the Supreme Command and Control Center as soon as it had been picked up, forty-something thousand feet directly above the Kachin State. It had dropped like a streaking comet out of the sky, plunging to earth at more than seven hundred miles per hour before any fighter jets could be scrambled to destroy it. Then, incredibly, the object had slowed its own descent and cut to a mere impossible hover before sailing north.

At first they’d believed they were under attack, frantic speculation even that perhaps the DEA was striking the poppy fields with some supertech thermite bomb meant to incinerate the countryside of what had become the lifeblood of the SLORC. Their technical experts had measured the object at two hundred feet across, sixty feet top to bottom. Beyond the dimensions of the object there was little more than roundtable guessing over what it was. Initial reports stated a white cloud had been observed erupting from the unidentified object, spreading over one square mile before dispersing. That much, he knew, had been verified, the first dead and afflicted struck down in the immediate area of what Yangon tagged Ground Zero. It was the living, dying in other quarantined areas, contaminated by a plague yet to be identified, that concerned Nuyaung the most.

He glimpsed the rolling green hills, their peaks swaddled in white mist, then perused the report once again as the chopper began to vector over the jungle canopy. Including villagers, his workforce and soldiers, the body count, as of six hours ago, now exceeded three hundred. Within several hours of the explosion the first symptoms marked the onslaught of the mystery illness. He recalled the dying words from his last radio contact with Colonel Lingpau.

“General…help us. We are all dying…fever. I am burning up…it feels…as if even my eyes…are on fire. Even my sweat…it is like blood. I am told it is blood…”

Fever. Convulsions. Black urine. Sweat filled with blood infected by plague. Was it an airborne contagion? he wondered. Could he be infected if some blundering fool accidentally brushed up against him? Could it spread through water, food? Was his merchandise contaminated?

The more he thought about it, General Nuyaung suspected someone had launched germ warfare against his country. But who? Why? Relations with neighboring China, Laos, Thailand, India and Bangladesh were anything but strained. The surrounding countries, naturally, guarded their borders, and those in charge of any nation always frowned and attempted to turn back or eliminate refugee hordes. There were, he knew, the occasional border skirmishes, usually involving contraband, but nothing so volatile as to warrant their neighbors unleashing a plague that could wipe out the entire population of Myanmar. And if the attacker was a neighboring country, they risked cross-border contamination. Then who?

It was an hour of madness, he knew, either way, but extreme measures were being initiated to, hopefully, contain the outbreak. There was still hope—if the situation was at least under control in the quarantined sectors, or all potential human contaminants eliminated, infected corpses removed then burned in some inaccessible stretch of jungle—he could save the product and meet his self-imposed deadline. Peasant workers and soldiers alike were easy enough to replace. His greatest fear, beyond personal risk of infection, was that perhaps the vast acreage of poppy and the refinery itself were contaminated.

Nuyaung flipped the file on the seat beside him. He tried to will away the images of the contorted death masks of victims and their faces riddled with red sores and bumps oozing pus, but they were branded in his mind. Perhaps, he considered, it was a grave mistake, after all, to expand heroin production outside the Shan State. But worldwide demand was up, particularly now that various Islamic organizations were gobbling up massive quantities of product, using the funds to finance the future of jihad, no doubt in clamoring search for weapons of mass destruction.

Having lost himself racking his thoughts for solutions to a variety of problems, he suddenly found his chopper hovering over the courtyard. The latest arrivals, some five hundred soldiers, were divided as evenly as possible throughout the stricken zones. Nuyaung stared into the inferno below, then saw a squad of SLORC soldiers dragging two robed monks past the three statues of the warrior guardians set near the three lions and three-headed elephant in front of the temple. The monks were still alive, one of them attempting to break free of the latex-gloved hands clamped around his shoulders. Nuyaung knew the filter masks the troops wore would be no protection against the plague if it was an airborne contagion, assumed the stench of burning flesh down there would bring his men to their knees if their faces weren’t covered. HAZMAT suits—the few that could be scrounged from various military and medical facilities—were reserved for the team of doctors. Depending on what he heard, he would pull rank, claim a HAZMAT suit for himself.

Nuyaung turned away as the monks were tossed into the fire. He glimpsed the towering plumes of black smoke, north and east, decided he could wait on reports about the sanitizing of contaminated peasant villages. He punched the intercom button, told his pilot, “Take me to the refinery. I will tell you where to land when we arrive.”

“THIS IS NOT the right time, Khisa. They are too many.”

She felt the fire burn behind her eyes, willed herself to hold back the tears, holding on to rage and hatred.

Ashre Nwa was right, she knew, but wondered, just the same, how much longer she could bear to watch the slaughter of innocent people she had sworn to protect, or avenge, before raw emotion compelled her to strike. If an attack was potential suicide before, the odds against even a pyrrhic victory were now clearly insurmountable.

Whatever happened as a result of the explosion had seen the quick arrival of more Barking Dogs, more helicopter gunships than she could count. A shock attack, unless she was committed to suicide and the senseless massacre of her fighters, was beyond hope. Five tanks had been airlifted into the surrounding area just after dawn, followed by still more soldiers, armored personnel carriers, antiaircraft batteries—an impregnable barrier.

Then there were men in space suits and the plastic tents hastily erected outside the perimeters of the villages, cylinders and steel tubes and vats, computers and other equipment she couldn’t possibly identify….

They were makeshift laboratories, she knew, the men in space suits drawing blood from both villagers and soldiers alike who had fallen ill. What had happened here? If this was some testing ground for a biological weapon engineered in Yangon, surely the SLORC wouldn’t use their own soldiers as guinea pigs. And if she and her fighters remained in the area, would they, too, become stricken by whatever sickness appeared to claim the lives of victims within a matter of hours?

For more than two days now she had remained with her fighters, high up in the hills, hidden in the forest, an umbrella of mist of suspended clouds shielding them from the flock of helicopter gunships patrolling the skies. With mounting rage, she had watched the Barking Dogs gun down every man, woman and child of the three largest villages in the vicinity of where, she assumed, the blast had detonated. They dragged them out of their bamboo huts. They dumped bodies—some of which, she observed, were still moving—into pits dug out by heavy machinery flown in by still more giant transport helicopters. They poured gasoline over both the living and the dead, ignited mass graves with flamethrowers before soldiers moved on, torching every last hut, every living thing. The screams of victims burning alive still echoed in her head. The call of the murdered, she told herself, crying out for justice from the grave.

Demanding vengeance.

She looked away from the burning pit, the meandering space suits, the soldiers with flamethrowers burning down what few huts still stood, and searched the faces of her fighters. Beyond anger, she saw they were frightened, wondering, most likely, what horror had been unleashed on the Kachin.

“We will return to camp. We are going to need outside help,” she told them. “I know what has to be done.”

She turned away, shaking with fury, leading her fighters down the hill toward the river. Whatever was happening, they all knew there was far more to fear now than just the Barking Dogs.

“REPORT. AND DO NOT tell me you have no answers.”

General Nuyaung was still waving back Dr. Angkhu, working nervous surveillance around the space suit, taking in the commotion of soldiers hard at it, disposing of corpses. The filter mask staved off the fumes of burning flesh, but now that he was on the ground, smack in the middle of a contaminated zone, Nuyaung felt the fear rising. Bodies were still being hauled by soldiers from tents, dumped into a mass grave, men in space suits wandering in and out of the plastic tents, heavy machinery unearthing more mass graves. He spotted the bloody carcass of a tiger, a figure with leaking guts stretched out near the large bamboo hut. He saw Angkhu follow his stare, the doctor’s voice muffled by his helmet.

“Colonel Lingpau.”

“Speak up!”

“He was attacked,” Angkhu said, “this morning. It is most unusual, distressing to inform you this, but I would urge caution, especially at night. Three other tigers have been seen—”

“I do not care about that. A tiger can be shot! And why hasn’t Colonel Lingpau’s body been burned?”

“Major Kyin. He was uncertain whether you would desire…such a disposal of a fellow officer.”

Nuyaung bellowed at the closest group of soldiers to throw the colonel’s body and the tiger carcass into the fire.

“What are we faced with?” he shouted at Angkhu.

“I…we… Initial tests are inconclusive.”

“Inconclusive!”

“It is a filo or a thread virus. But it is unlike any virus we have ever seen. Its DNA appears a combination of smallpox, malaria, perhaps another genetically mutated virus—we are not certain. But whatever it is, it multiplies at an extreme rapid rate in a host. First symptoms of outbreak occur within two hours.”

“Is it airborne? Can you become infected by mere contact with a carrier?”

“For our purposes, I believe we would be better served if we could study this back in Yangon—”

“No one leaves here until I have answers. What about the refinery?”

“If you are asking if the refinery is contaminated, the answer is no. Viruses do not simply go away, they merely hide. A virus needs a live host.”

“Watch your tongue! I am not completely ignorant of the situation, Doctor. I sense you are holding something back. What is your expert opinion? How bad is it?”

“The virus, in my expert opinion, is a hybrid cross, created in a laboratory. It—”

Nuyaung gritted his teeth, waiting, the look in Angku’s eyes warning him he would not like the answer. “Speak!”

“I am afraid this particular virus, General, is one hundred percent fatal.”

NAHIRA MUHDU no longer prayed for deliverance from evil. God, she believed, knew the horror she was leaving behind, aware, too, of her needs. If she—and her only surviving family—were to survive the journey, reach safety inside the border of Kenya, then it was God’s will. She was too tired, so parched from thirst the tears had ceased flowing, too weak from hunger, even, to pray.

It had been…what? she wondered, feeling the blood squish in sandals worn down to ragged strands of leather, each yard earned over rock-stubbled broken ground shooting pain through every nerve ending. Three weeks? A month since she had set out on foot with the other villagers from Bhion and the vast surrounding southern plain?

They had been driven out by marauding rebel troops at war with the government of Addis Ababa, and the entire country appeared under assault by rebels and soldiers alike, men who were more like wild beasts than anything human. Killing. Burning. Looting. Raping. The horrors of a new war with Eritrea had spread from the north where Eritrean soldiers were invading the Tigray region. She had heard her country was losing the latest war with Eritrea, mauled Ethiopian troops falling back to the plains of the south, renegade soldiers taking what they wanted from defenseless villages so they could live to fight—or murder—another day.

Famine, drought and civil war were nothing new to Ethiopia, she knew, but the past six months had become a living hell, her country gone mad with violence and brutality, villages in flames from the Tigray to the Darod, reports of mass graves littering the countryside. Drought, then starvation and, finally, the invasion by Eritrea had unleashed anarchy, an evil, it seemed to her, that was much like an avalanche gathering momentum the longer it kept rolling.

And the evil of other men had found her. Remaining in her homeland was certain death. Small comfort, but she wasn’t alone in misery.

Her anger and grief had withered some the first week out of the village, exhaustion and hunger dampening raw emotion, but the memory of her husband, shot dead by the killers of the Free Ethiopian Order of Islam, was still fresh, as if it happened only minutes ago. What they hadn’t burned, they plundered, seizing every last grain of wheat, every handful of sorghum they could find. The horror of the past, the dreaded uncertainty of tomorrow, and she wondered if peace would simply come with her own death.

And they had been falling dead in greater numbers the past week.

Only yesterday had she buried in a shallow grave, dug by rock with the help of fellow refugees, two of her three sons, ages four and six. The weeping was over, only the ghosts from a life taken haunting her every step. So weary now, her fingers aching, the flesh raw and crusted with dried blood where she had clawed out the hard earth, there was nothing to do anymore but to keep moving, to keep hoping. There was a life to consider beyond her own, the tiny, emaciated frame of Izwhal, swathed in filthy rags, she determined, her final reason to live. She couldn’t recall the last time either of them had eaten.

Which was why the refugee camp of Barehda lit a flicker of hope inside her punished body, rubbery legs finding energy at the sight of the food lines near the massive transport plane. Her only thought that food might sustain life until God opened another door.

The net veil was some protection against the buzzing hordes of flies, but she gagged as the fumes from the initial wave of rotting and diseased flesh and bodily waste clawed her senses. She followed the others toward the plane, appalled and pained at the sight of their stick figures, bodies sheared of muscle by malnutrition, dark, sagging flesh like leather, aware she looked every bit a walking corpse herself.

They skirted the outer northern perimeter of the camp, weaving past camels, goats and mules, their hides likewise worn to the bone. She heard the faint sobs of children, saw mothers cradling tiny bodies in spindly arms, skeletal fingers pushing some sort of grainy oatmeal into their mouths. But the infants, and even the older children, appeared almost too weak to chew. God, she had heard, might create drought, but man made the famine. What had been created here as the result of man’s inhumanity, she thought, had to be an abomination in the eyes of God.

She looked at the smattering of plastic tents, spotted shells of dark figures stretched out inside the flimsy covering, but most of the refugees were forced to bake under the sun, the suffocating heat, she knew, only compounding their suffering. She fell farther behind the others, shrouded in dust, her heart sick at the sight of so much misery, aware she and her son would most likely die here.

The refugees were eating all around her, a hopeful sign, she thought, the older males—teenagers mostly—shoveling the gruel into their mouths, slurping some white liquid from small plastic containers. There were a number of men, even small children, with missing arms and legs, cruel and sudden amputations as the result of countless land mines buried across both Ethiopia and Somalia.

She scoured the sea of displaced and starving, head spinning from the stink and the sight of so many living dead. She felt the cry of anguish burn in her chest, the thought that this would soon be the open burial ground for so many too much to bear when she saw tin containers suddenly falling to the ground. Refugees began clutching their stomachs, men, women and children convulsing, vomit spewing from mouths like burst faucets, bodies slumping over. Paralyzed by horror, she watched, listened to the cries fade, infants spilling from the arms of mothers who tumbled, thrashing on the ground. It was no mystery, she knew, disease was a major killer throughout Somalia, but something else was happening across the camp. The ravages of whatever the affliction were too sudden, too violent, to be any illness she had ever seen.

She found herself alone, the others now falling into the food line far ahead, unaware of what was happening, caring only about whatever food was being dispensed. She watched those she had made the trek with, fear mounting, something warning her to flee this place. There were armed men, wearing filter masks and white gloves, she saw, some of them barking orders to the refugees to hurry, other gunmen handing out the tin containers from the ramp of the silver transport plane. Why were they protecting themselves from breathing the air? No Red Cross or United Nations relief workers she’d ever seen came to the camps, heavily armed, donning protection as if they feared close contact with the local populations. That was no UN plane, either. She strained to make out the emblem on the fuselage: a white star inside a black ring, a fist that looked armored inside the star. They were westerners, that much she could tell. Another group of white men, she could see, stood on a ridge where the plain gave way to a jagged escarpment, far to the east, well beyond the camp. There were the dreaded technicals, she noted; Toyota pickups with mounted machine guns, too many armed Somalis to count, their eyes watching the camp over scarves or from behind black hoods. Why were they laughing among themselves?

It struck her as a bad dream, food being distributed by armed men laughing at the sight of so much suffering and death. It all felt so hideously wrong…it was evil, she decided

She flinched, gasped when she felt a hand tug at her shoulder.

“You just arrived?”

He spoke Amharic, the language of her country. There was fear in his stare. She answered, “Yes… I…”

“Did you eat the food?”

She shook her head.

“Come,” he said. “They have all been poisoned.”

“But what of the others?” she said, nodding toward the refugees around the plane. “I must warn—”

“No. If you do that, the Somalis and the white men will most likely kill you and your child. We must make our way to the farthest edge of the camp. Night will fall soon, then we will make our way out of here and run to the Kenyan border. I have family there. You will be safe. But we must make our way now.”

Could she trust this stranger? she wondered. Why, if what he said was true, poison all of them? It made no sense. But in a lawless land like Somalia, where only violence and mayhem ruled, why wouldn’t mass murder of refugees, viewed as a blight and a burden, be acceptable?

She watched in growing horror, knew she couldn’t stay here, counted perhaps another ten refugees toppling to the ground, then let the stranger take her arm and lead her and her son deeper into the camp. She avoided looking anyone in the eye, felt like a coward for fleeing, leaving them to die without warning. But perhaps, she decided, it was God’s will she and her son survive. Afraid more than ever, Nahira Muhdu found the strength to silently implore God to deliver them from this evil.

YASSIF ABADAL WAS thinking God did, indeed, work in mysterious ways, bestowed wondrous gifts to those who remained faithful and loyal and patient. Sometimes God even used the Devil, he thought, to do his work.

As chieftain of his Nurwadah clan, controlling the deep southwest edge of Somalia, he had his sights set on far loftier goals than simply dominating an area populated mostly by nomads and bandits. Mogadishu was the ultimate prize. But he needed a mighty sword’s clear edge, some overwhelming power that would see him crush rivals, bring the entire country under his rule.

The white men, he believed, had brought him, it appeared, all the power of the sword he could have ever hoped or prayed for.

The refugees were spilling all over the camp in droves, their feeble cries flung from his ears as his warriors chuckled and made jokes among themselves. Snugging the bandanna higher up his nose, he watched as the white men quickly handed out the tin containers and the milky-looking drink to the newest Ethiopian horde. They were so concerned with only filling their bellies, they seemed unaware their fellow countrymen were right then dying in their midst.

Toting one of the new G-3 assault rifles, he looked at the white men fanned down the ridge beside him. It was, indeed, the strangest of alliances, he thought, looking at their blond heads, blue eyes that were as cold as chips of ice, catching the arrogance and contempt in their voices for these refugees as they barked in their native guttural tongue.

He had never seen a German in the flesh, but his predecessor had somehow gotten his hands on an old black-and-white film of World War II. It had galled him, back then, how their late leader had so admired white racist barbarians who would have enslaved the indigenous peoples of North Africa if they hadn’t been driven off the continent by the British and Americans. But when the role as leader was passed on to him, Abadal came to see the stunning power of their blitzkrieg and other military tactics, understood the brutal discipline and the steely professional commitment to war that even he now preached to his clan.

If these Germans could propel him into the future glory of complete victory over every rival clan, and if he was destined to sit in the presidential palace in Mogadishu with their help, he had no problem walking into tomorrow with the devil by his side. Nor did it matter how many rivals, refugees or common Somalians died in the bloody path to the crown.

They had flown in a group of emissaries for the first round of negotiation a month prior. It was an unauthorized landing in a country so hostile to the west, Abadal had been, at first, anxious, even unnerved by their brazenness, their lack of fear, but perhaps whatever intimidation they felt was only masked with contempt. The ice was broken, however, when the Germans came bearing gifts of cash and weapons, including heavy machine guns, handheld multibarreled rocket launchers, flamethrowers. The high-tech gear—cell phones with scrambled lines, the ground and air radar, night-vision goggles and other state-of-the-art wonders only dreamed of in Somalia—had required some lengthy instruction. But Abadal and his top lieutenants had gotten the gist, enduring gruff explanations by the Germans until they felt proficient enough to at least get the high-tech goods up and running.

For their generosity, these Germans had a proposal, and they had chosen him to be ruler of all Somalia. Why him? he’d asked. They had grunted, shrugged and answered, “Why not?” Did he wish to remain a nomad in the desert with a few old AKs, some rusty technicals and indulging wishful thinking about greatness? Of course not, he’d countered. What did they want in return? They had claimed nothing more than a possible base of operations when the other clans were wiped out and he controlled the destiny of his country. They had a weapon, the first group had claimed, one that was as potentially devastating as any weapon of mass destruction.

Now that he had seen the almost instant and clear catastrophic effects of this invisible killer, Abadal had questions, most of which were based on concern for his own safety. He found their leader; the tall, muscled one named Heinz with the bullet head and black leather jacket, and walked up to him.

“Ah, my Somali friend. What do you think?” he said, admiring the view as shriveled figures in rags thrashed throughout the camp. “As good as promised, I hope?”

“Tell me something. This virus in the food, can it be spread to others who have not eaten it? Can it be caught through the air? By touch?”

“First of all, this was an experiment. Our way of showing you the future that, uh,” he said, voice thick with his native tongue, “we are prepared to place solely in your hands. Second, it is a biologically engineered parasite, not a virus, taken from the female Anopheles mosquito.”

“I am seeing an outbreak of malaria?”

Heinz shook his head, chuckled. “Yes and no. The details are very complex, scientific jargon you would neither understand, nor do you need to concern yourself with. And if you are worried about contamination, you will only become infected two ways. If you eat what is basically pig slop made from simple microyeast or you come into direct contact with bodily fluids.”

“Blood?”

“That would be a bodily fluid.”

The German was talking to him like a child now. Abadal scowled. “But you said you can deliver an airborne plague, that you have the vaccine.”

“That is true.”

“When?”

“Shortly. I will consult with my superiors. But, I must tell you, there may be a few more conditions before we are prepared to hand this country over to you. A plague that is spread deliberately…well, it is something that requires serious planning, contingencies to be thought out, and so forth. There is also the question of loyalty, compensation, reward and the like.”

And there it was, Abadal thought, suspecting all along it was too good to be true. “So there is more in it for you than using my country as simply a base for whatever your intentions.”

Abadal heard the quiet laugh again as Heinz told him, “A man of vision such as yourself surely must understand personal greatness and glory comes with a price.”

“And what will mine be?”

“We will be in contact with you. In the meantime, I suggest you thoroughly sanitize the area as we discussed.”

Abadal clenched his teeth, angry that the German, this arrogant foreigner who had come to his land as if he owned it, would just walk away, dismissing him, a flunky. “You realize I could either decline your offer…or take what I want from you.”

Abadal watched as the German kept walking, smiled at the death being spread below, then laughed out loud. “Yes, perhaps you could do just that, my Somali friend, but there would yet be another price to pay.”

THE HORROR BEGAN just after nightfall.

She was struggling to keep up with the man who told her his name was Mawhli. Beyond his name, she knew nothing about him, but if promised flight to Kenya…

At the moment safe passage into the unknown future was her only option.

Nahira Muhdu stumbled, Mawhli turning at the sound of her cry. He caught her before she was flung into a headlong tumble down the steep incline for the wadi, a fall that might have ended any hope of escape with broken bones or her son crushed in her arms.

There was screaming behind her, brief hideous wails that chilled her to the bone. She gasped when she saw the tongues of fire, glowing waves shooting from hoses extended in the hands of shadows moving away from the technicals, a ring of death that encircled the camp.

“There is nothing you can do for them, Nahira.”

“Why?”

“Only God knows that.”

“Then he knows he cannot allow such evil men to go unpunished.”

“I believe that, also. Come, we must hurry!”

She hesitated, sick to her stomach, the stench of burning flesh carried to her nose on the wind, the heat from the fires touching her face. The breath of Satan. She turned, began following Mawhli into the wadi, melting into the darkness. She prayed for the life of her son, for safe passage into Kenya, then asked God for something she would have never believed herself capable of doing.

Nahira Muhdu asked God to deliver retribution against the warlord and his murdering beasts.

CHAPTER ONE

“Sixteen years old, and Boise is the closest she’s been to a big city. Hops a Greyhound and I find out about this two months ago—no clue, no threats, no kiss-my-ass. Not even Mrs. Evans number three—Ilsa of the SS I tell ya—with all her keen female intuition, saw this bomb dropping. And here I was, thinking I was father of the year. The cop the press maggots used to call Dirty Harry on Steroids, lower than the lowest now. I can’t even hold my family together. Three-time loser, huh. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking?”

“That’s not what I was thinking, Jim. And I’m not the enemy.”

“Right, yeah, you’re a buddy, ex-cop, once my partner.”

The man he knew from the old L.A.P.D. days was on an angry roll, fueled by whiskey and the torment of the day, steaming more mad at the world with every snarl and speck of flying froth. Carl “Ironman” Lyons figured the best thing to do was to let him vent, expend all the fury before he started firing off his own questions.

“Fuck me raw. I keep asking myself why? It’s like some sick tape I keep running through my head, all these horrible images of everything that could happen to her. Wandering the street, maybe on drugs, some pimp… Goddammit, Carl. All I wanted was for her to have a decent life—you know, clean air, big sky, small town. No drugs, no crime, no gangs, a little slice of peace and sanity to grow up in, not drowning with all the other human turds in that toilet we knew, Los Angeles. We know the city can eat up someone her age. And with her looks… You see a picture of her, you’re looking at an angel, a goddamn princess. Now I track her here, one of my worst fears comes true. I find out she’s been dancing in a strip joint, for God’s sake.”

Lyons didn’t believe in coincidence or fate, didn’t cater to psychic babble or all those crystal-ball hotlines that mapped out someone’s destiny, cradle to grave, fame and fortune and bliss on earth written in the palm of the hand. A former detective of the Los Angeles Police Department and currently a commando working out of Stony Man Farm—an ultra-covert intelligence agency nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains—he believed in action, truth and just the facts. But, he had to admit, bumping into another cop he had partnered with for more than a year in a police department clear on the other side of the country—a man he hadn’t seen, heard from nor thought about in well over a decade—was on the hinky side of coincidence.

But there Jim Evans had been, seconds away from either getting bounced on his ear out of the bar or breaking the joint up with collateral damage to doormen and patrons, a guest stint in a D.C. jail with the kind of unsavory characters he loathed, had busted up and feared his daughter falling into league—or bed—with. Bizarre fluke or some guiding cosmic hand, Lyons couldn’t help but wonder, just the same, about the events leading up to the chance encounter.

After three days decompressing from the latest mission, Lyons had rounded up the other two-thirds of Able Team for a quick getaway until duty called again. Restless, feeling confined at Stony Man Farm in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, Lyons, the leader of Able Team, had piled the three of them into the oversize War Wagon—which wasn’t supposed to leave the Farm’s premises for a mere joyride—then driven them to the Key Bridge Marriott where he’d paid for a penthouse suite for a week. Still restless, tired of watching Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario Blancanales enthralling themselves with the same movies on cable or playing computer games until he was sure they were bug-eyed, he had set out by himself for a few belts and beers, a tour of downtown D.C. strip joints on the play-card, fantasies of getting lucky urging him on. Cheap thrills had a way of bringing trouble to Lyons, and this time out had proved no different. It had been touch-and-go back at the titty bar, wrestling Evans free of the bouncers, packing the ex-L.A. detective, drunk and belligerent, into his Lexus rental, trying to get both the story and the facts straight.

Lyons, sensing Evans about to launch himself on the verbal rampage again, was not sure he was willing to sit through another diatribe. Judging from whiskey fumes strong enough to gag a buzzard, one cloud of cigarette smoke after another blown out in long, angry exhales, he didn’t see the man calming down anytime soon. Add the snail’s pace the Stony Man warrior was forced to keep the rental creeping through Georgetown and Lyons found his own aggravation level rising.

He looked over at Evans, found a wrinkled, leather-faced, heavier version of the cop he’d once known. With his black Stetson, sheepskin coat and cowboy boots, Evans in his Wild West garb was damn near a circus act in a coat-and-tie Beemer and Evian town that looked down its nose at anyone who didn’t fit the yuppie and PC parameters. Then again, Lyons, with his knee-length black leather trench coat, aloha shirt alive and flaming with palm trees, flamingos and scantily clad island girls, with white slacks and alligator shoes… Well, he knew he didn’t have much room to judge the fashion show. In fact, he recalled one of the musclebound punks with an earpiece back at the bar tagging him “Don Ho” and ordering him to get his buddy, Wyatt, back home to the ranch.

Kids these days, he groused to himself, no respect for their elders.

Evans, he recalled, hadn’t been a particularly good cop, nor a bad one, at least not the renegade he was purported by the press to be when Lyons had worked with him. There were rumors of brutality, charges of racism, L.A. media making a big stink over a couple of questionable shootings before the man had transferred to Lyons’s division. They had gone through some doors together, solved some tough cases, but Lyons had never found himself ready to cozy up to the man, on or off the job.

He had never been able to put a finger on his feelings toward the man, supposed he was just plain mean-spirited, with or without a badge, the whole world crap, not a decent human being anywhere, a borderline bully out to control, dominate or punish. He wasn’t the kind of man Lyons would sit down with and drink a few beers, but Evans had jumped in front of a bullet for him, getting seriously wounded in the process, commendations eventually pinned on both of them.

What was this moment supposed to mean? he wondered. Was Fate, after all, calling in a marker? Was some cosmic force urging him to extend a helping hand, if not for Evans, but for the innocent life of a young girl? Whatever the emotional quandary, it was a rare day on the planet, he figured, when just about any man’s intentions and motives were altruistic.

So far, Lyons had the gist of why Evans had come to town. Up to a point he supposed he could understand the man’s pain and anger over a runaway child. Hadn’t he once been married? It was true, he had a son, Tommy, but he hadn’t spoken to either the ex or his boy—now fully grown—in quite a while. What was he feeling now? What was he thinking? Did he regret the path in life he’d chosen, sloughing off whatever responsibilities as a father he should have seen through? If so, why? Because it was a big bad savage world out there, after all, and his skills as a warrior were more needed for the greater good of humankind, instead of raising a family? Was he on the verge right then of doing some voyeuristic dance through another man’s broken family life? Was he thinking he could and should help Evans find his daughter, despite his true feelings for the guy?

Lyons jostled through a bottleneck of vehicles playing bumper cars, lurched ahead as a light turned red and a few horns blared their ire at him.

“Did you report her missing?” Lyons asked when Evans fell silent.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Hell, I was embarrassed. I didn’t want anyone to know, or think I’d failed as a father. Judy, even though she’s not Deirdre’s real mother, somehow found plenty of ways to want to blame me, but that’s another stinger to pull out of my hide at some point. Didn’t come right out and say it, but she had her way of telling me she’s my problem, I deal with it. How do you like that?”

Another marriage made in hell, Lyons thought. “Seems you picked up the trail pretty quick.”

“She left with an older girl, a Susan Barker. I heard she’d been hanging around with her. Susie’s something of the town good-time girl, nice way of saying she’s just a whore. I own a bar—maybe I told you that—and I hear things. One rumor led to another. I had a talk with this girl’s sometime boyfriend.”

“And a little chat with the boyfriend pointed you east to this fair city?”

“Let’s just say I got a few answers the old-fashioned way. And, my daughter absconded with a couple of my credit cards. Easy enough to track them both to a motel here—the bills started coming in—but Susie’s sometime squeeze filled in a few blanks about their little jaunt to D.C. Seemed Susie filled Deirdre’s head with a lot of nonsense about how they could make it big here, she had friends in the area, some kind of big shots in the entertainment business. I already had my head crammed with visions of pure assholes she’d come here and get scammed by, or worse. Only I get the impression it was something more than just…stripping for a bunch of assholes who oughta be home with their wives and kids. Just today I found Susie holed up in some crack motel up New York Avenue, staked it out, followed Susie to work, where you found me. She goes by the name of Candy. Get this. Walk in, like a regular asshole, I see my daughter’s picture on the wall in this dump, goes by Dee-Dee. The bastards—no better than pimps—had her all dolled up in some cowgirl outfit.”

“Did you, uh, run into your daughter back there?”

Evans scowled. “No. I was told she was off tonight.”

“I got the impression you were making a hard pitch.”

“Yeah, like telling the manager he’s got a sixteen-year-old girl taking her clothes off in his place, and if he didn’t want the cops shutting him down or my fist doing a rectal probe, he’d better tell me where my daughter was. That’s where you entered the picture.”

Lyons cleared his throat, already knew the reaction he’d get when he dropped the bomb. “I have to ask, Jim. Are you leaving anything out?”

“Such as?” Evans growled.

“Kids run away from home for a reason.”

“Why don’t you just come out and ask it, Carl, instead of tap-dancing on my nuts.”

“Okay. Was there any abuse?”

Lyons found his former partner staring at him, steady, no sign of anger or resentment.

“No. None whatsoever of any kind. But I understand you asking. I may be a mean SOB on the streets, but I take care of my kids, never raised a hand to them or touched them in any way. End of story.”

Lyons fell silent, wondering how far he should go with this. Then Evans asked, “If you don’t mind me asking, what are those two cannons you’re packing? Couldn’t help but notice. I figure you’re into something needs punch like that.”

The question didn’t catch Lyons off guard, but he felt uncomfortable with the sudden glint in Evans’s eyes—the Stony Man warrior sure his former partner was entertaining ideas about going vigilante if he discovered any more dark secrets about his darling DeeDee. They were twin .45s, butts-out, stainless-steel, the double bulging package obvious beneath his coat, Lyons knew. But he had the bogus Justice Department ID just in case the issue of concealed weapons was pushed by any law on the prowl. The twins had been made by John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Farm’s resident weaponsmith. With fifteen Rhino or body-armor-piercing rounds in each clip, Lyons had let Kissinger talk him into trying out hardware other than the .357 Magnum Colt Python he usually carried. Lyons told Evans what they were, but left out the details.

Evans chuckled. “We might have lost touch over the years, but I figured you put in your twenty, retired, maybe got yourself a boat, move up north like a lot of L.A. cops do when they leave the job, maybe write crime novels.”

“I did. Retire, that is. But sitting still on a sailboat or in front of a keyboard isn’t my speed.”

“So what are you doing to keep busy these days?”

“I do freelance security work.”

Evans nodded, looked at his cigarette, savvy enough to know not to push the subject. He paused, working on his smoke, then said, “Know what I’m thinking right now, Carl? I’m thinking I played a bad hand back at that toilet bowl, blew any chance maybe getting Susie to talk, find my daughter. My gut tells me she’s into something way over her head, and you could see I was in no mood or shape for any subtle approach.”

“So I saw.”

“I don’t mean to sound like some judgmental prick, but you actually enjoy going to those kinds of places? What is it? Some kind of Peeping Tom jolt, look but don’t touch, the lonely guy’s masturbatory fantasy in living color?”

“I guess it beats sitting around watching sitcoms every night.”

“Suppose there was a time I did, too.” Evans grunted, Lyons thinking he could almost read the man’s thoughts regarding another chance encounter if he hadn’t been there ready to tear the place apart. Whatever he was chewing over, the anger faded from his eyes. “You, uh, you doing anything special the next couple of days?”

“You’re thinking you’d like me to pick up where you left off tonight.”

“That’s what I’m asking. Maybe you can make some inroads, talk to Susie, at least steer me in the right direction if you learn something. Right now, with a load on, and being too close to it, I’m no good to anybody.”

“I agree, but when I start something, I like to finish it my way, my terms.”

Lyons wished the night had turned out the way he’d originally envisioned, Evans’s world, safe and tucked in back in Idaho, but here he was, boxed in the spotlight. He debated the matter, wanted to tell the man he was on his own, but a combo of chivalry, guilt and a vague sense of being a good guy got the better of him.

“If I do,” he told Evans. “I can’t make any promises you’ll get whatever the end result you want. And, if I do, I have a couple of conditions, no questions, no tirades, no strings. You don’t like what I find, go off half cocked, you’re on your own. Don’t even call me for bail money.”

“Whatever they are, I’ll live with the terms. And I’ll pay you whatever you think is right for your time and trouble.”

“This isn’t the ‘Rockford Files.’ I don’t need your money. Consider this returning a favor for when you took a bullet for me.”

“Fair enough. So, you’ll help?”

“Give me a second,” Lyons said, juggling cell phone and the wheel as he turned them onto Key Bridge, a Volvo cutting him off with horn blasting and the middle-finger salute shot his way.

Seven, eight trills, Lyons gnashing his teeth over the delay. Then he heard Schwarz come on, his teammate forced to nearly shout over a background score for a shoot-’em-up he knew they’d been watching every time it came on Cinemax and HBO.

“This better be good, Carl.”

“I knew it! I can hear your five Elvis impersonators shooting up the Riviera Casino clear across goddamn Key Bridge. How many times you two clowns need to watch 3000 Miles to Graceland? Figure by now you must know every word of dialogue by heart. It’s becoming kind of obsessive-compulsive, don’t you think?”

“I’m partial to the Kurt Russell part. I see you as that psychopath, Murphy, especially when you go down in a hail of SWAT bullets at the end, bleeding out to ‘I Did It My Way.’”

“You’re going to see my foot up your ass if you don’t turn off the TV and look alive! I’m bringing up company.”

“I bet you’ve been out trolling the nudie bars. I sure hope you don’t come through the door with just one chippy, me and Pol—”

“It’s a cop I know from the L.A.P.D. We’re going to work—tonight—and I’ll buy you clowns the DVD for Christmas. You can watch 3000 Miles to Graceland all you want but only on your time.”

“You promise?”

Lyons punched off, found Evans treating him to a curious look. “Despite what you just heard, they are professionals.”

HAL BROGNOLA WAS no fan of spook games, intrigue or mystery. Just the same, he was moving in a shadow world this night, prepared to meet a faceless, nameless emissary shipped out by the President of the United States to get the particulars on a brewing but unnamed crisis.

Beyond his public role as a high-ranking federal agent in the United States Department of Justice, he did, however, lead a double life as director of the Sensitive Operations Group, based at Stony Man Farm. Brognola was also the liaison to the President of the United States, the chief executive’s go-to man in the Farm’s world of high-stakes covert operations.

The Man sanctioned nearly all of the Farm’s missions, the dirtiest of wet work against enemies to national security, either of the foreign or homegrown variety. There was direct contact, usually by phone, between Brognola and the President before the starting flag was waved, the utmost protocol of secrecy maintained where it regarded Stony Man Farm and the Justice man’s netherworld role behind the public face.

So he had some reservations about the rendezvous, the normal channels bucked, unknown entities operating as cutouts. The Man had sounded terse, even abrupt, earlier when he’d called him at his Justice Department office on the secured line to begin casting shadows over what Brognola suspected would become a long night melding into even longer and tense days ahead. But if the President—who had everything to lose if the Farm was exposed—trusted the setup, who was he, Brognola figured, to question his judgment? The crisis was either so serious and the President too busy…

Brognola shut down his reservations, got a grip on what was actually normal professional anxiety and paranoia. In his business, reality was rarely as it appeared.

He proceeded across the Mall, vectoring for the Red Castle of the Smithsonian, flanked and dwarfed by the distant dome of the Capitol and the Washington Monument. It was a short walk from the Justice Department building in the Federal Triangle, and a check of his watch showed he was on time. At this late hour, the museums along Jefferson Drive were shut down to the public. No traffic, vehicular or human, in the area, but there had been a series of armed robberies around the Mall lately, which had thinned the herd of after-work walkers and joggers to virtual extinction. Briefcase in hand, Brognola was mindful of the weight of the Glock .45 shouldered beneath his suitcoat, figured there were enough rounds to split the difference between muggers or spooks with malice of heart.

He was unwrapping a cigar when he spotted the trio of black vehicles rolling his way. They parked curbside in front of the Smithsonian. Government plates, black-tinted windows all around, two unmarked sedans sandwiched a limousine. Doors opened and four suits with earpieces got out, scanned the street, the Mall, before one of them beckoned for Brognola to climb into the limo. The sunglasses were a little much, he supposed, figured the shades for intimidating intent.

The big Fed crossed Jefferson, squeezed through the doorway, claimed an empty section of cushy seat beside a minibar. The door closed and Brognola found another pair of sunglasses across the well. He had a full head of coiffed black hair, cashmere coat, but beyond that the guy was nondescript. Another civil servant. Yet there was something in his silence, the way Brognola found himself measured, wishing he could see the emissary’s eyes…

Sunglasses to wingtips, the guy was spook, Brognola concluded.

“Time is short on this one, Mr. Brognola,” Sunglasses said, producing a thick letter-size envelope stamped with Classified-Eyes only and the presidential seal, handing it to the big Fed. “The fate of the free world and a not-so-inconsequential matter of the possible extinction of the human race may have just fallen into your hands.”

“LOVE THE ‘Miami Vice’ look, but don’t you think the sunglasses are overdoing it?”

Lyons pushed the Blues Brothers shades snug up his nose. “What can I say? Your presence is blinding.”

Cop instincts flaring up, he could see her gears mesh, Susie-Candy wondering how to handle him, but already knowing what problem had walked into her life. All of three seconds looking at her, Lyons heard the bullshit radar in his head blipping off the screen, blond bogey at twelve o’clock.

She finally took a seat in the booth across from Lyons, blowing smoke his way, glancing around, then crossing a leg, the strap-on pump going back and forth like a piston. The damsel-in-distress look wasn’t about to aid his cause, but Lyons didn’t plan on staying any longer than it took to get the answers he wanted.

She sipped from a glass of watered-down champagne that Lyons had promised and paid twenty bucks for after slipping a fifty into her garter when she was on stage, shaking it for her coat-and-tie hyenas. A friendly chat, he’d told her, was all he wanted, nursing a beer while she took her sweet time getting over to him, working her platoon of admirers for a few dollars more. Now that she was his for the moment, Lyons felt the resentment and hostility from wannabes—more than likely on the lam from husband and father duties—boring into the side of his head. He wondered how much of her time he could commandeer before she either turned snippy during Q and A or the security kid with the mouth came over to tell Don Ho his money was no good here. He knew he was being watched, every fiber of instinct screaming the softer, kinder approach was probably just a dream.

Lyons gave it a few seconds before he cut to the chase, treated Candy to a smile that would have come from the heart under other circumstances. The frilly one-piece Roaring Twenties get-up did little to hide a package Lyons surmised lightened many a fat wallet, but the painted face was already showing wear and tear around the eyes from all-night shenanigans. He figured a few more years of life in the fast lane and she’d look every bit the jaded, used-up whore she was acting. Well, he was no one to judge character flaws, and so far he was unmolested by the security quartet. Still, something felt wrong, a lurking menace in the air, and he wondered who was about to do the fishing. A check of his six, and the guy he figured for either the manager or the owner still had the evil eye aimed his way, ready to march out the troops.

“Who’s the guy over there with the bad perm, looking all mean and surly?”

“The owner.”

The way she answered, sure she was in control, Lyons knew he was on the clock. He produced the photo Evans had given him, laid it on the table. It was a shot of the daughter in the saddle of her horse back at the ranch. She appeared relaxed, content enough in the photo, a beauty like Evans claimed, but there was something forced in the expression that told Lyons she wasn’t the happiest camper in Idaho. Chalk it up to youthful disillusionment maybe, but Lyons had seen something more than suppressed rebellion. The truth was, he knew if he discovered Evans had lied about any abuse, he was prepared to walk away. These days, he thought, there was an epidemic of children being savaged, scarred for life by adults, if they weren’t outright murdered. In all good conscience he knew he wouldn’t be a party to returning Evans’s daughter to a torture chamber of psychological and physical abuse if that happened to be the case.

“Tell me where I can find Dee-Dee.”

She laughed, nervous eyes darting around, body language a stone wall of defiance.

“You think this is funny, Susie? She’s sixteen, that by itself means I could get this place shut down, then you’d be out of a job, on the street, probably hooking, unless you’re working the johnson on someone’s husband, or pimping for some scumbag takes your money for crack.”

“Kiss my ass.”

“I’ll take a rain check.”

Lyons read the sudden fear in her eyes, but sensed it wasn’t about being unemployed as she made another roving search of the crowd.

“Look at me, Susie.”

She did, the cigarette trembling in her hand. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”

“Maybe. If that’s true, why?”

She blew smoke in his face. “You’re a cop, like her old man. I can tell, all cops have this look…”

“Was a cop. I’m not interested in your psychoanalysis of a job I’m sure you’ve ever only been on the wrong side of.”

“Touché. So, you a friend of his? A private detective? What?”

“I’m just some guy he used to know and he asked a favor.”

She grunted, choosing her words. “Loneliness.”

“What?”

Lyons watched as she paused, thought about something, the tough-street act almost fading away. “Look, she’s a sweet kid, I like her, I’m her only real friend. All she needed was a friend, you know.”

“Who doesn’t.”

“You want some answers, Miami, listen.” Another look past Lyons, then she went on. “Dee-Dee was always kind of sad. She spent most of her time alone, but it was more than me feeling sorry for her. She has what I call a special heart, an innocence she deserves to keep, something I lost a long time ago.”

“Oh, I’m sure she’ll stay special working here.”

“It’s all an act, Miami. It isn’t some free-for-all whoring you might think, like hand jobs under the table.”

“Girl has to make a living, that it?”

“Dee-Dee deserves a lot more out of life than small-town Nowhere, U.S.A., and she knew it. How’s that for psychoanalysis?”

“And so you come along and offer her the Promised Land.”

She ignored the remark, went on, “She wrote poems, pretty good ones, and told me how her father didn’t like that. He actually tore them up one day in front of her, told her he wasn’t going to stand by and watch her dream her life away. Might as well called her a nobody. I’d say that’s reason to want to leave home—wouldn’t you?—someone reaches in and rips your soul out. She never wanted to leave Los Angeles in the first place.”

Lyons resisted the tug at his heartstrings, but knew he failed.

“Yeah, there’s a lot you don’t know.”

“Telling me she ran away with you, her mentor, because she missed the big-city lights?”

“If you’re asking did her old man sleep with her, the answer is no. But he’s a drunk, and he can be mean, and he’s a control freak. As far as I know, he never hit her, either.”

“I still have cop’s eyes, Susie. And I’m looking at someone holding back. Keep blowing smoke in my face, but everything about you tells me she’s in trouble. So cut the concerned-mother-hen act and tell me what you know. Now.”

“Listen to me,” she said, her voice lowering to a whisper, Lyons straining to make out her voice as it was drowned by the thunder of rock and roll. She pulled back, Lyons swearing he saw her eyes misting. “I—I made a mistake…you don’t want to know…”

“Wrong. I want to know now more than I did when I came in.”

“I can’t.”

Lyons could almost reach out and touch the wall of fear, her hand shaking as she ground out the smoke, uncrossed her legs. It was a bad move, as Lyons envisioned the cavalry en route, but he reached over, grabbed her arm.

“I’m not leaving until you answer my question.”

“You’re already gone, sport.”

She was breaking away as Lyons heard the voice he’d already put the face to tell her, “Get dressed, and take off. Your VIPs are here.”

“I wasn’t finished.”

“You’re finished, sport, but first me and you are going to have a conversation. Now,” he said, Lyons watching as the Perm settled into the booth, “we can handle this one of two ways…”

CHAPTER TWO

“I see I have your undivided attention.”

Brognola was glancing up from the first series of high-resolution satellite imagery when the cocky grin vanished off sunglasses. The remark, he supposed, was in reference to how intently the big Fed studied photos. Whoever the shadow emissary—CIA, NSA, DIA—Brognola found himself impatient to get on with the brief. He sensed, though, some undercurrent of resentment building the more Sunglasses dawdled, sitting here, inscrutably silent, the watchful Sphinx likewise desiring for a mere civil servant of the Justice Department to know how important he was, a spook holding the key to some divine riddle. A crisis was being dumped in his lap, requiring the immediate resources of the Farm, and Brognola didn’t have time or patience for spook nonsense, nor was he about to explain why he was the man of the hour and Sunglasses was designated the White House gofer. If that’s what he even was, and Brognola didn’t much care.

“I see HAZMAT suits,” Brognola said. “A jungle compound, Asian soldiers. I’ve got what I’m thinking look like poppy fields, fires all over the place, high-resolution photos of corpses, and which, I presume, are being incinerated, presumably killed by some biological or chemical agent. Clearly a contaminated, quarantined area.”

“Clearly. And you presume correct.”

“Do you think you can tell me what I’m looking at in ten words or less and skip the X-Files routine?”

“You are looking at the Kachin State in Burma.”

“Myanmar.”

“Burma, Thailand and Laos, of Golden Triangle infamy, produce over eighty percent of the world’s opium.”

“I’m aware of that. You’re here to talk about the scourge of dope?”

“Production of heroin in Burma alone has quadrupled the past five years, demand—so both the DEA and our intelligence community reports—rising exponentially as various terror organizations use funds from narcotics trafficking to expand their global jihad. Part of the dilemma from our standpoint is the State Law and Order Restoration Council—SLORC—has taken over heroin production from the rebels, making Burma an even more closed society than it previously was. Makes it tough to get operatives on the ground, infiltrate rebel groups sympathetic to the cause of freedom and justice.”

Whose freedom, whose justice? Brognola wondered, feeling his cynical meter shooting up the longer he sat in the presence of Sunglasses. If this was headed where he suspected—dumping his Stony Man warriors inside Myanmar for some protracted jungle war against SLORC-sponsored drug armies—he would send Sunglasses back to the Man, tail tucked between the crack of his silk slacks.

The spook had to have read his look, said, “I say something wrong?”

“I’m assuming you’re not here to enlist my services in the war against drugs?”

The spook cleared his throat, carried on in a voice that bordered condescending. “There are roughly thirty-five known major rebel groups, most of them fighting for independent chunks of real estate or to take back control of the poppy fields. The SLORC isn’t about to let that happen. It appears some form of high-tech genocide is being unleashed on the indigenous Burmese, but we know it wasn’t perpetrated by the SLORC.

“All drug roads may lead to Thailand and Laos, but the real gold at the end of the rainbow may lead to China, the lion that no longer needs to sleep. You have a major gas pipeline under construction in Burma, which may stretch all the way through Thailand to Vietnam, plans for an overseas pipeline reaching clear to Indonesia, the Chinese might even want to get into the act. The SLORC needs money for this task. They need more and bigger guns. Drug money is a fast and easy way to spread the corruption of their military junta around Southeast Asia. If certain situations can be corrected in Burma, the west has a great interest in helping to engineer this international pipeline.

“The SLORC and its drugs and this latest incident are the hurdles. Now, the Chinese have the weapons and the technology for delivering mass death, if the SLORC chooses to lie down with them. The fear is Yangon has either gone high-tech and is seeking, or has acquired weapons of mass destruction. There is a major principal, already known to our intelligence community, who has been looking to trade the technology for WMD but who are also interested in more money generated by narcotics trafficking. Shadows inside shadows, wolves coming to the table in sheep’s clothing, so to speak.”

So much for ten words or less, Brognola thought, perusing the horror show in his hands.

“What crashed in the Kachin was robotic spacecraft,” Sunglasses went on.

“A satellite?”

“The robotic spacecraft was in low earth orbit and was picked up and tracked by the NRO as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Deliberate deorbiting, the Kachin, it appears, was chosen as a laboratory, victims the test subjects. The flight path was controlled by computers on Earth, we greatly suspect, but sufficient heat was picked up to tell us it was also using boosters but in reverse thrust. It actually slowed to a near hover, unleashed its payload, by aerosol first then remote-controlled detonation, spreading the whole mess over several square miles. Depending on the weather, contamination could have reached as far as Yangon. From there, cross-border contamination, we don’t know.”

“Who?”

“I’m getting to that.”

Brognola scowled. “What’s the agent?”

“That is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Some sort of bioengineered virus is the educated guess, and which appears nearly one hundred percent fatal. It would appear to make a Level Four virus—the worst—like catching the flu in comparison to this Bio-Agent X. We have CIA, DEA in the Golden Triangle, contract agents—mostly rebels—but Yangon is keeping a tight lid on this particular boiling pot. We can’t get any of our operatives close enough to the hot zone. Word of this disaster has leaked out to the UN, Red Cross, and so on, all manner of aid and assistance being offered to the SLORC from the world community.”

“I take it that’s not going to happen, not if Yangon thinks there’s a coming foreign invasion to burn down their poppy fields.”

“Channels of communication are open, but it will be a tough sale. It gets worse.” Another pause for dramatic effect, then Sunglasses continued. “We parked a spy spacecraft over the area in question. It was attacked at 1000 EST by a roving military spacecraft trailing in the same high-altitude geosynchronous—east to west—orbit. An anti- or hunter-killer robotic spacecraft completely destroyed it. The measured blast radius picked up by our command and control data handling systems at the NRO, NSA and CIA was big enough to vaporize several city blocks. Whether its platform is also loaded with nuclear capability…we don’t know.

“The political powers here in town are anxious to keep this from going public, since a number of key players were allowed to walk around with their agenda right under our noses. These, uh, key players, have been ‘marked,’ shall we say, in keeping with the new conventional wisdom that enemies to national security are fair game for hunting.

“Keep flipping. There’s another situation—one, it is believed, that is related to the Kachin incident and the shoot-down of our spy spacecraft.”

Brognola thumbed through the pile until he came to the high-resolution imagery of more corpses being tossed into fires. There was a shot of a silver transport plane with an emblem of what looked like a mailed fist on the fuselage, shots of men, white and black, and all of them armed, standing on a ridge overlooking a large camp on a barren plain. It was another scene of mass death and corpse incineration.

“You’re looking at a Somali warlord and his cutthroats,” Sunglasses said. “The corpses being burned are Ethiopian refugees fleeing a major civil war in their own country. We received initial reports with some degree of skepticism, but the CIA confirmed this incident with the flyover of a Predator drone. They were following up after an Ethiopian man and woman—the only survivors—managed to cross into Kenya to tell the story. This Somali warlord received a shipment, it is believed, of biotech food from the westerners you see. Only this food was deliberately poisoned. The symptoms of the outbreak are nearly identical to the Burmese guinea pigs.”

“A killer virus spawned in…what, microyeast?”

“You have many of the pertinent details, the access codes for the CD-ROMs written down, some good leads. No one has all the answers, but I gathered from my briefing by the President you might know how to proceed.”

“You never answered my original question of who?”

“Germans.”

Brognola blinked. “Yes, our good friends and allies. It is a cabal called EuroDef, run by German businessmen and military contractors who have contacts here in the United States. The workforce, technicians and scientists come from a number of different countries, including Russian and American microbiologists, virologists, scientists and so on, looking to sell their wisdom to the highest bidder.”

“Am I hearing conspiracy?”

“One so dark and potentially embarrassing…well, I get the impression this will be handled in an unofficial capacity.”

It was a lot to digest, but Brognola knew what the President was asking. The green light was flashed for Stony Man to cut loose its dogs of covert war.

The big Fed judged the spook’s long silence for dismissal. “If that’s all…”

“For now. Good luck, Mr. Brognola.”

Without another word or look back, Brognola was out the door.

THE ONLY IMMEDIATE questions in his mind were how much pain he would be forced to inflict by way of multiple contusions, abrasions and broken bones, and how much collateral damage he would wreak before he walked out with the answer he wanted. Lyons mulled the possibilities, racked his brain for a peaceful solution.

As covert operatives, the Farm had a way of frowning on extracurricular melees that tended to bring police attention to Brognola’s doorstep. Sure, the big Fed could always cut through red tape, and he could be on his merry black ops way, any charges vanishing into cyber limbo, even as he was aware he would be forced to endure sufficient and justified rebuke from Brognola. Okay, then consider the predicament with mature judgment and acute detail to responsibility.

Schwarz and Blancanales were in the War Wagon, staking out the door and the street. A quick call on his tac radio and Lyons could marshal up a little help from his friends, maybe they would play some conciliatory role as negotiators, usher him quiet and nice into the night, with all forgiven. He could have bobbed his head to the threatening noise the Perm was making, meek as a lamb, shuffled off, sorry if he’d caused any disturbance, bowing and scraping all the way out the door. He wondered if he was growing soft or getting too old to go on the muscle to thrash a guy who clearly deserved a can of whup-ass rammed into his throat or some other orifice.

Nah. Only in a perfect world, he decided, where there was peace and love and goodwill toward all men, and the young and the innocent weren’t preyed upon by adult savages. The mature, responsible Carl Lyons, then, would have to wait for another day.

“You listening to me, sport?”

Lyons had his head cocked toward a booth where a quartet of new arrivals were in a serious discussion with two of the Perm’s SS. Three looked like muscle, big and broad, clearly packing cannons beneath their sport jackets, while number four, decked out in a cashmere coat, wearing sunglasses, the goatee and ax face…

Wait a second, Lyons thought. He was sure he’d seen van Gogh somewhere before. Where? Take off the facial hair, the shades…

He would have sworn he’d seen him on TV, one of those cable talking-head shows where everyone was such an expert they could have told all the little people the mysteries of the universe. No doubt in his mind they were the VIPs, as Lyons saw Susie materialize in a mink coat, before she was led away, van Gogh wrapping a hand around the furry arm.

The Perm, snapping his fingers now, snippy. “Hey, sport. I’m the one you need to be worried about. I asked you a question.”

Lyons faced the Perm. “I heard you. All this ‘you know people,’ telling me you’ve got clout in this town. Outfit muscle, I’m guessing.”

“I’m telling you, sport, you can leave here standing or I can have you wheeled out, dump your body in the Potomac and nobody would ever know. One look at you, I don’t think you’d rate much attention.”

“What if I told you I was a special agent with the Justice Department?”

“The kind of people I know own Feds, have half the politicians in their pocket, whistling to their tune. If I don’t squash you like the insect you are, I know people who can get your badge yanked and pinned to your ass.”

“You’re a big man, is that it?”

“Bigger than you really want to find out, sport.” Lyons chuckled, nodded and grinned. “I’ve got it now. I know who you remind me of.” The Perm froze, Lyons glancing over his shoulder, found the bulldogs still on their leash. “‘The Gong Show,’ that’s it. You look like that guy, the host, the one with the frizzy hairdo, shirt always unbuttoned to his navel, you know, showing off a chest I’ve seen with more muscle and meat on a starving Kurd refugee. Loved that show. I especially got a kick out of Gene-Gene the Dancing Machine. Remember that guy? Hey, maybe it’s really you, that silly guy, you know, career change… What the hell was his name? Can you still mimic those Gene-Gene moves?”

The moment was sealed now and Lyons knew what had to be done. It was way beyond hope, mature or responsible.

“That’s it…”

The Perm was rising when Lyons grabbed him by the earlobe, squeezing, twisting, lifting him to his feet. Funny what pain did to get the other guy’s attention. The Perm’s squeal was cutting through the rock music when Lyons clamped a hand over his throat.

And the SS was coming.

There was a general paralysis among the patrons, Lyons saw, catching a couple of scantily clad females mirrored in the wall glass as they scurried for cover. Lyons had the pair of goons marked in the mirror, as he spun the “Gong Show” clone around, gauging range to target number one. The foot shot out. Lyons rewarded by a whoof and eyeballs rolling back in the head as he scored a home run to testicles. Number two faltered, watching as his comrade folded at his feet. The .45 was out next, whipping sideways, slamming off number two’s scalp. So much 250 pounds of bulging pecs and biceps, but Lyons liked the way he hit the floor, out cold, the odds cut by half. The dancer on stage screamed and grabbed up her clothes. Lyons adjusted his aim as goons three and four bulled their way through the crowd.

“Freeze!” Lyons shouted, the sight of the .45 thrust at their faces freezing SS Three and Four in their tracks. “Eat the deck, facedown!”

“Mr. Greer, do you want us to call the cops?”

“I am the cops, asshole. Last chance!”

“Do what he says…no cops,” Greer sputtered.

When they stretched out, Lyons flung the Perm to the edge of the stage, the .45’s muzzle pressed between his eyes. “One time. Where is Dee-Dee?” Lyons saw the Perm had trouble finding a tongue he was on the verge of swallowing, released some pressure. “What was that?”

“You don’t know…who you’re fucking with, Miami.”

Lyons cocked the hammer to another shrill cry from somewhere near the stage.

“Room…”

Lyons bent closer, caught the number of the hotel suite. Time to exit stage left, but Lyons spotted a few wannabe heroes in the crowd, eyes angry, jaws working, shadows shuffling in the mirrors. He pulled the Perm to his feet, sweeping around the .45, barking at a suit to sit. He was halfway to the front door when he came to a table of three guys who looked set to throw up a barricade of muscle, twitching around in their seats, mouthing words Lyons couldn’t make out.

“Here,” Lyons told them, flinging the Perm over the table. A tumble through bottles and ashtrays, and the Perm flopped down, pinning them to their seats. “You three look like you could use a lap dance.”

HERMANN SCHWARZ was getting antsy. He was sitting at the bank of monitors in the War Wagon, surveying M Street and the door to the bar, the picture piped in through a minicam, no larger than a pinhead, fixed to an antenna. A twist of the dial and he could monitor the entire street for several blocks, the high-tech eye doubling as an instant camera, able to take night snapshots, infrared lens capable of coming on with the flick of a switch.

“I don’t like it, Pol. Our fearless leader’s been in there too long. You know Carl, some places tend to bring out the beast in him, and that’s saying something.”

Blancanales had the wheel, his head rolling side to side as he surveyed the street. “He can give new meaning to bull in a china shop, I’ll grant you that.”

The whole setup was screwy, but they had already killed enough time hashing it over until they both knew it began to sound like a bunch of bellyaching. Still, that didn’t mean they had to like it.

A former cop partner of Ironman’s, Schwarz thought, dropping out of the sky, smelling and looking like he needed detox more than walking around in public, hunting down his runaway daughter. This Evans guy back in their suite, drinking their booze, watching 3000 Miles to Graceland, when that should have been them. They were on R and R, sure enough, but Schwarz was waiting for the phone with secured line to start ringing off the hook any second, Brognola or the Farm’s mission controller, Barbara Price, wondering why they had absconded with the supertech War Wagon to go tooling around downtown D.C. What would he tell them, provided, of course, he could even bleat out a word during the ass-chewing?

“Gadgets, I think there might be a problem. Start shooting pics.”

After all of two seconds, watching as bodies began streaming out the door, suits harried and hustling off into the night, Schwarz read the body language, loud and clear. They were fleeing from a human wrecking ball.

“Pol, how come I get the weird feeling Carl made contact and the words ‘please and thank you’ weren’t part of his vocabulary?”

“Gadgets, Pol!”

Tac radio in hand, Schwarz punched on, in sync with Pol’s, “Yeah!”

“Get your fingers out of your asses and your heads out of Graceland. Four assholes and a chippy in a mink coat should be out front by now!”

Schwarz spied the party in question as they swung away from the front door, began marching down the sidewalk toward a waiting limo. Schwarz began snapping pictures even as Lyons barked for him to do just that. “I’m on it!”

“I’m especially interested in the guy who looks like van Gogh. You see him?”

“I’ve got him,” Schwarz answered.

“What’s the situation?” Blancanales needed to know.

Schwarz heard the name of the hotel and the suite number.

“You know where it is?”

“It’s in Crystal City,” Blancanales answered.

“I’ll follow in my car, but you get there first, you wait,” Lyons growled. “We just went tactical, so get yourselves strapped in to some serious hardware. On the ride, Gadgets, you can stay busy giving me a computer sketch of van Gogh sans the goatee and shades. You copy?”

“Roger.”

Schwarz took one final shot of the limo’s plates as the vehicle lurched ahead, gathered speed and shot past them. Blancanales was cranking on the engine, dropping it into gear when Schwarz spotted Lyons bulling his way out onto the sidewalk. “Hey, Carl. You want me to take a shot of you for our scrapbook?” Schwarz cut off their leader’s voice just as he launched into a tirade.

Blancanales was throwing the rig into a hard turn to give pursuit when Schwarz said, “Hey, Pol, I just thought of something.”

“What?”

“When we write our memoirs I think I’ll call it, 3000 Miles to the Farm. What do you think?”

“We’re both going to be 3000 miles to nowhere if we don’t do what Carl wants.”

Just then the red line beeped. Schwarz stared at it as though it were a viper coiled to bite, said, “I think no truer words were ever spoken.”

“Are you going to answer that?”

Schwarz slowly punched on, attempted his best winning, innocent voice. “Yes?”

“You three want to explain yourselves?”

It wasn’t real hard to read the tone. Schwarz knew Barbara Price wasn’t asking how they were feeling.

“THEY WHAT? They’re doing what?”

After so many years in the same office at the Justice Department and climbing the ranks, certain perks now came with the job. Brognola’s spacious office was soundproof, bugproof, with recently installed bullet-and-bomb-reinforced windows. There was a small conference table, a couch for sleeping, a personal workstation, a giant TV built into the wall. All things considered, they were the creature comforts necessary for a man who spent most of his professional hours on his feet and on the edge.

With perks, however, came more responsibility and worries. Translate added worry to the human factor.

He wasn’t thirty seconds on the satellite link to the Farm, catching the sitrep from Price, when he was chomping on half a pack of Rolaids. He heard how Gadgets, with his infinite knowledge of high-tech, had most likely accessed the code panel in the barn where the War Wagon was housed. He heard about the task for a friend Lyons had undertaken, how the leader of Able Team needed a few more hours, they might be on to something big. Working at light speed to relay the data handed off by Sunglasses, Brognola feared a long night ahead for all of them.

“This isn’t the first time they’ve pulled some bull-headed nonsense like this,” Brognola noted. “Goddammit! Those three could test the patience of the Virgin Mary. I tell you what. If I end up having to bail them out of some police problem, they can bet their black bank accounts their next vacation will be in North Korea.”

“That might be worth some serious consideration.”

“I need them front and center in the War Room when I land at the Farm—no more than three hours from now. If that vehicle doesn’t return in the same condition they took it, they will rue the day they pulled this stunt. I mean, there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, and it won’t be from either of us.”

“I’ll pass that on.”

“Are you getting this?”

“It’s coming through. We’ll get right on it. Can you give me a quick rundown on what we’re looking at, Hal?”

“The way it was told to me, we might be looking at the beginning of Armageddon.”

“That’s quick enough.”

CHAPTER THREE

Their tail of the limo to Crystal City was a jagged blur of white light and angry noise for Rosario Blancanales. Even with radar jammer and GPS monitor guiding the way, it was a miracle of sorts, he thought, no cops had roared up their bumper. The limo’s driver set the pace, however, flying along, whipping past other vehicles, oblivious or indifferent to potential speed traps. It left Blancanales to wonder if they’d been made, where they were really going, what, if anything, they had to hide. Somehow the Stony Man warrior maintained a quarter-mile distance to their target.

It was a juggling act, no mistake, manning the wheel, shooting through town on I-395, rocketing next down Route 1, needle pushing eighty, slipping on the custom-webbed rigging to carry the mini-Uzi, wondering which asp would bite first. There was Lyons on the tac radio, snarling out the game plan, which was about as simple and crazy as it came; crash the suite’s door, bull-rush inside, no fix on numbers, but if it was armed, it went down.

Then there was Barbara Price, the Farm’s mission controller, someone they didn’t want on their ass if this night went to hell. Her calm but cold voice still chimed its potential death knell in his head as she laid down the law in no uncertain terms—back to the Farm in three hours sharp, not even bug splatter on the windshield, do not get nabbed by police. She left the threat of consequences—regarding their AWOL status and return of the War Wagon in mint condition—open to the imagination. This, as bizarre coincidence had it, as he shot them past Arlington National Cemetery.

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