“PRIORITIES?”

“The recovery of the enriched uranium,” Brognola said. “That’s the top threat. Next, we need to know just how far the connection between the WWUP and these domestic and international terror organizations goes.”

“On it,” Lyons said.

“Coordinate through Barb to have the Farm deliver anything additional you’ll need,” Brognola said. “I’ll arrange for a liaison with local law enforcement both in Chicago and wherever the trail ultimately takes you.”

“You sound like you have someplace in mind.”

“I might. Reginald Butler has long been a political activist. He’s one of the richest men in America, and if he’s mixed up in any of this, or even if he’s simply letting his company sell the Seever units to foreign nationals with ties to terror, I want him taken down.”

“Could get sticky,” Blancanales said dubiously. “Government operatives pressuring an American entrepreneur who’s already complaining about governmental harassment.”

“We don’t exist,” Brognola said. “We do, therefore, what we have to do.”

Drawpoint
Don Pendleton’s

Stony Man®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Phil Elmore for his contribution to this work.

DRAWPOINT

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

PROLOGUE

UVC Limited Milling and Processing Facility,

Meghalaya, India

Patrick Farrah paused to light a cigarette, groping for the pack and lighter that weren’t there, cursing as the realization hit him for the fifth time in as many hours. He swore under his breath as he overrode the impulses so deeply ingrained in his mind and muscle memory. He fished out a pack of gum and stuck one of the pieces in his mouth, muttering under his breath as he chewed the hard stick into pliancy. Quitting smoking was something he’d promised his girlfriend he’d do. He’d live longer, Jody had told him. Well, maybe he would. But that didn’t make it easier.

Twilight had brought little relief from the subtropical humidity. Meghalaya, as the wettest state in India, received an average rainfall that ranked it among the wettest places on Earth, not just in the nation. The idea still staggered Farrah, but the country, for all its moisture, was relatively moderate in terms of day-to-day climate. It was also lush and beautiful, exotic in a way the States would never be. He had easily fallen in love with the place.

The work was relatively easy, too. Sugar Rapids Security, the company for which he contracted, was among those backfilling private security details in Afghanistan and Iraq. Farrah’s girlfriend, safe back in Upstate New York, had been none too happy about his accepting the assignment in India, even if it was just for a year. But Farrah knew she’d have been a lot more unhappy if he’d agreed to the even riskier jobs available for triple pay in those war zones. No, the pay for the India posting was high enough to make it attractive, and safe enough that he didn’t have to keep Jody up nights worrying if he was going to make it back.

He really couldn’t complain about the work. A year spent in the beautiful West Khasi Hills area was almost like a vacation, as far as he was concerned. And how hard was it to guard a bunch of mining equipment overnight, make sure it wasn’t stolen or meddled with? The owner of the equipment, Uranium-Vanadium Consortium, Limited, gave the SRS subcontractors little grief and plenty of cash. Except for occasional checks by his Sugar Rapids supervisor, Farrah was on his own most of the time. It was peaceful and, if a little boring, steady and honest work.

He did worry, with a sort of superstitious dread, about being stationed near the milling plant. He supposed it was better than pulling duty closer to the laser enrichment facility, where things really glowed in the dark. He’d heard the whole thing was experimental, too, the latest in UVC technology subsidized by the Indian government. But apart from the technology itself, the idea of uranium dust just kind of scared the crap out of him. There were plenty of safety protocols in place, he’d been assured up and down. But all of the SRS contractors with whom he worked were a little nervous around stuff that could poison you and make you sterile if it didn’t kill you. He’d worked nuclear plant security in the States and was no stranger to the vague sense of unease radioactive material produced. He’d learned to live with it.

He understood just enough of the process to steer clear of the dangerous areas. The uranium ore was mined from the shafts recently sunk here in the Meghalaya hills. The discovery had been a shock to everyone involved except UVC, apparently, who had been counting on their new proprietary technology to open up new markets.

On a typical evening, Farrah made a long, slow circuit around the facility, giving the milling plant a wide berth. The enrichment plant was down the dirt road, beyond his specified territory; Ranjhit Bhatt patrolled that part of the complex. Bhatt was a good guy, a local who spoke fluent English and played a mean game of cards. The two sometimes met on their breaks to sneak in a few quick games.

Farrah tried to vary his routine slightly, but there were only so many ways to walk the perimeter and check on the various outbuildings in this part of the fenced compound. This night was no different. He shrugged mentally and started for the metal storage shed that was his mental landmark for the start of his circuit.

The shed exploded.

One moment it was there, the next it was a flaming cloud of debris. A wall of heat hit him, scorching his face and drying his eyes as the shock wave bowled him over. Farrah hit the ground hard, feeling the breath rush out of him in one great, wracking cough. He had the presence of mind to shield his head and roll over, painfully, as scraps of burning metal rained down. He had a moment to wonder what was happening before he heard it—a whistling noise increasing in pitch. When the heavy chunk of concrete struck him in the head, he didn’t have time to wonder what it was before his world went dark.

When he opened his eyes again to a throbbing pain in his skull, the night was aglow with flickering orange fire. He could hear the crackling flames and smell the smoke as he watched, his vision blurred from the blow to the head. Afraid to move from where he lay sprawled on the ground, he watched as trucks roared past. He coughed as their diesel exhaust plumes rolled over him, but tried otherwise to remain still. The trucks—he didn’t recognize them—were moving away from the enrichment plant. Men clung to the running boards on either side of the truck, men armed with what Farrah recognized as AK-47 rifles.

His brain fogged with pain and confusion, Farrah struggled first to one knee. Lurching to his feet, stumbling and getting up again, he fumbled at his belt for his pistol as the last of trucks roared past. There was only one man clinging to the side of the vehicle, a battered Toyota Land Cruiser. Farrah forced his blurred vision to cooperate just long enough to get his .45-caliber Springfield XD out of its holster. He fired once, then twice, then a third time, into the night.

He tripped and fell. The stumble saved his life, most likely, as return fire from a gunner in the rear of the Land Cruiser scored the air above him. Then the truck was gone, leaving only the burning wreckage of the UVC facility in its wake.

He groped for his radio but couldn’t find it. He wasn’t sure if he’d dropped it or if maybe it had been taken while he lay unconscious on the ground. With nowhere else to go, he staggered for the front entrance to the camp, where the chain-link gates had been knocked down. The trucks had probably driven through them.

He heard footsteps scraping through the dirt and brought up his gun, closing one eye in an attempt to fight back the double vision creeping into his sight. The bloody figure that emerged, backlighted by the flames, was Bhatt.

“Bhatt!” Farrah said in relief. “You’re alive!”

Bhatt tried to speak but fell to his knees, choking and coughing. Farrah reached for him but Bhatt waved him off, trying to catch his breath. Farrah turned and almost tripped over the body.

A dead man was sprawled on the dirt road.

The corpse wore olive-drab fatigues and a balaclava. An AK-47 had been dropped not far from the dead man. Also near the body was a square box the size of a large phone or personal data device. Farrah picked it up gingerly, fearing it might be a detonator of some kind. He turned it over in his hands, but couldn’t figure out what it might be. It looked like a complicated phone. Why would a guerrilla be carrying such a thing? And who were these people?

Bhatt coughed loudly and said something. Farrah turned to him and helped prop him up. Bhatt was flushed and choking, but he looked determined to choke out what he had to say.

“What is it?” Farrah asked him. “Bhatt, what it is?”

“Uranium!” Bhatt finally managed. “Enriched uranium!”

“What about it?” Farrah asked, his stomach sinking.

“They took it!” Bhatt said. “The trucks…full of drums of enriched uranium!”

“Full?” Farrah went pale. “Are you sure?”

Bhatt nodded.

Farrah looked down at the dead man, the man he’d killed, the first life he had ever taken. Then he looked back to Bhatt.

A single death was nothing compared to the potential mass murder that had just left through the main gate.

CHAPTER ONE

Aurora, Illinois

Carl “Ironman” Lyons sipped black coffee from a foam cup, surprised at how good it was. The former L.A. police officer had done more than his fair share of stakeouts, subsisting on gut-wrenching, greasy takeout leavened with bad coffee. He’d had coffee so bad, in fact, that it could make a person wince. But this was good coffee. The proliferation of designer coffees and trendy joints to drink it in had pushed the fast-food empires to keep pace. Lyons counted himself among those benefiting from this free market.

“I’ve never seen a man so thoughtful over a cup of Joe,” Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz commented. The electronics expert and veteran commando—whose nerdy demeanor concealed a hard core forged on many a battlefield—frowned and brushed a lock of brown hair out of his eyes. He shifted in the passenger seat of the black Suburban, glancing over at the bull-necked blond man who hulked behind the steering wheel sniffing at a coffee cup.

Lyons grunted at his teammate and turned back to watch the street. Encouraging Gadgets would only get him started, and it was too early in the morning to deal with his ribbing just yet.

The two members of the covert counterterrorist unit known as Able Team were parked down and across the street from the Illinois headquarters of the World Workers United Party. Even now, the third and final member of Able Team, Rosario “The Politician” Blancanales, was inside that building, patiently waiting to speak with the local director of the primary chapter of the WWUP. The gray-haired, dark-eyed, soft-spoken Hispanic was an expert in both the psychology of violence and in-role camouflage. He had needed no special disguise or even a particularly complicated cover story to get an appointment with the WWUP’s director. He had simply posed as an interested potential donor and made an appointment through the chapter’s secretary.

What had brought Able Team to the streets of this Chicago suburb was far more complicated. The brief had first been transmitted to him through the computer experts at Stony Man Farm, the covert organization under whose umbrella Able Team operated. A lot of it had caused Lyons’s eyes to glaze over in boredom, but he had of course been able to get the gist. The WWUP had a lot of money for a fringe political party, and the transfers of funds to and from the party had finally tripped whatever monitoring algorithms the supercomputers the Farm were using to monitor worldwide data transfers. More significantly, transfers of funds to the WWUP were being routed to the group from outside the country. The Byzantine web of laws governing political contributions was not something Lyons pretended to understand, but that didn’t matter. The key was that when the money tree was shaken hard enough, Stony Man had been able to link monies sent to the WWUP all the way back to offshore holding companies that were themselves linked to the Earth Action Front.

As Lyons had been so recently informed, the EAF was a notorious ecoterror group whose members were more than happy to use violence to achieve their aims. They had gone from total unknowns five years earlier, to the preeminent “green” terror group worldwide. While they’d started small-time—spray-painting EAF on “gas-guzzling” SUVs parked at American sales lots, or staging denial of service attacks on the networks of corporations overseas they deemed to be polluters—they’d long since graduated to acts of violence that bordered on mass murder. In the past month, in fact, the EAF had claimed responsibility for a housing development fire in California that had killed three—in the name of stopping “suburban sprawl”—and for the ill-planned bombing of a nuclear power plant in France that had killed a security guard. While international in scope, the EAF was known to have a significant presence domestically. And that presence was thought by many, including Stony Man Farm’s computer wizards, to include the WWUP.

Compare the World Workers United Party membership rolls to the EAF’s in the United States, Lyons imagined, and you’d most likely get more than a little overlap. That, by itself, was a matter for the FBI or other federal organizations, or so Lyons had thought. He had placed the call to the Farm to express this opinion, only to be gently persuaded otherwise by Hal Brognola, director of the Sensitive Operations Group’s and Lyons’s boss. Lyons had, of course, used the diplomacy for which he was well-known when discussing the issue with Brognola.

“This, Hal,” he’d said over the secure satellite phone, “is a steaming pile of horseshit.”

“Usually it’s David who gives me grief,” Brognola had said, referring to David McCarter, the leader of Stony Man Farm’s international counterterrorist unit, Phoenix Force. “What’s the problem?”

“Don’t we have bigger fish to shoot in a barrel?” Lyons had thrown back, deliberately mangling the metaphor. “Able Team is better used on just about anything other than rousting some play-acting Commies.”

“WWUP is a remarkably powerful organization,” Brognola’d said, “whose professed ideology is admittedly socialist or Communist, depending on whom you ask. They are far from pretenders. There is serious talk of WWUP fielding a viable third-party candidate in the next presidential election.”

Lyons had hit back. “Since when does a third party have a chance? You expect me to take these people seriously?”

“You don’t have a choice,” Brognola had told him. “ We don’t have a choice. The WWUP didn’t exist before a few years ago. It’s rushed in to fill a perceived void in domestic politics, becoming a very real Communist movement.”

“And the WWUP is getting its funding from a global gang of environmentalist whackos. That’s still a job for the FBI.”

“This isn’t just about ‘environmentalist whackos,’” Brognola had insisted. “Ecoterror is on the rise, globally and domestically. Now, don’t get me wrong. We’re not talking about conservationists or legitimate environmental defense groups. We’re talking about extremists, those willing to commit violence to achieve their aims. And we’ve long gone past some animal rights activists releasing minks from cages, or vandals throwing bricks through the windows of fast-food restaurants. Our friends at the FBI, in fact, have a couple of thousand cases of arson, bombings, theft and vandalism on the books in recent years, all of them attributable to ‘green’ terrorist groups. My sources within the Bureau say they’re ranking it a greater emerging threat than the hot-button domestic terrorists of a decade or two ago—neo-Nazis, paramilitary groups, Klan splinter factions, and so on. And while the crimes are rising here in frequency and in violent intensity, they are rising simultaneously in developed nations across the globe.”

“So what’s the link?” Lyons had asked him.

“For whatever reason,” Brognola had said, sounding tired, “the radical, violent fringe of the environmentalist or ‘green’ movement has become the new home for collectivist politics domestically. The radical greens often tout a socialist agenda as part and parcel of the economic and environmental reforms they advocate. The more violent Communist and socialist groups are happy to embrace them. There’s a lot of cross-pollination between and among the various terrorist and fringe groups involved.”

“I’m not a politician, Hal. And I’m not a cop anymore.”

“I’m not asking you to be one,” Brognola had said, “and if this was about politics or could be taken care of by the local authorities, it would have nothing to do with the SOG. But Aaron’s team has identified an exponential trend in fund transfers to WWUP from accounts that can be linked, ultimately, to ecoterror groups, most notably the Earth Action Front. Most of the transactions are being routed through a single person at the top of the chain, the director of WWUP’s Chicago chapter.” Aaron was Aaron Kurtzman, head of Stony Man Farm’s cyber team.

“Why Chicago?”

“It’s the domestic headquarters for WWUP, the hub of their network of chapters throughout the country. Any decisions implemented by WWUP, including their potential presidential campaign, are ultimately made in Illinois.”

“So you want Able to…what?”

“There’s a timetable at work here,” Brognola’d confided. “The people behind WWUP, and especially their donors, have to know that their monetary transactions will look suspicious eventually. The Farm caught it a lot earlier than the usual domestic institutions would, but they’d have noticed it eventually, too. Campaign finance laws, IRS regulations, standard federal banking policies…any of these could have raised a few flags in a few hundred computers. For the WWUP and their backers to be acting so brazenly tells me that something is going to happen. Something big, considering the risks, and considering the scope of the WWUP in the United States.”

“What are you telling me, Hal?” Lyons had said, finally losing his hostile tone.

“I’ve got Aaron and his people looking into the wider implications, tracking both financial data and terrorist incidents at home and abroad,” Brognola had explained. “But our working theory is that a force or forces outside the United States is or are working very hard to exert political influence inside the country. Specifically, we theorize that one or more of these terror groups are funding a seemingly legitimate incursion into U.S. politics using, among other means, violence. Whatever they’re planning is coming to a head, or they wouldn’t be risking financial exposure. The top of the pyramid is in Chicago. I want you to take Able Team and poke your head in the dragon’s lair.”

“To see if we get roasted alive?”

“Something like that. If we’re wrong, we lose a little time and a little effort. If we’re not, we get in on whatever the WWUP is plotting, maybe make them nervous enough to expose themselves, tip their hand. The clock is ticking, Carl. Something big is ramping up, and my instincts tell me we have to move now, stop it before it can get out of control.”

The big Fed had been right about this kind of thing more than once, Lyons knew. “All right, Hal. We’ll take a look. We’ll see what we can shake loose. But I’m not promising anything resembling diplomacy.”

“Do what you do, Ironman,” Brognola had said. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

Now Able Team was on site, parked on Ogden Avenue in Aurora, Illinois. At least, two-thirds of the team was sitting in the SUV. The last member of the team, the man they called “the politician,” was on the inside, his every word monitored by the microtransceivers each member of the team wore in his ear.

The little earbud devices, nearly invisible when worn, had an effective range of half a city block. The one Blancanales wore would, if anyone noticed it, appear to be nothing more than a small hearing aid. Gadgets Schwarz had helped develop the minuscule units for the Farm’s use.

Schwarz’s banter notwithstanding, the two men kept their idle chatter to a minimum as they watched the front of the WWUP building, a converted storefront nestled between a pack-and-ship mailbox store and a sheet music shop. Blancanales could hear every word they said, so there was no point in annoying or distracting him with unnecessary chatter. As the two men waited and listened, they could hear the ringing of office telephones in the background. Now and again they could hear the WWUP receptionist’s voice, though her words were indistinct at Blancanale’s presumed distance from her. The wingnuts inside, Lyons reflected, had kept his teammate waiting for at least half an hour past his appointment time. Whether this was simply business on their part, or a calculated tactic, he couldn’t be sure. It didn’t seem likely that they’d antagonize a potential donor by making him cool his heels unnecessarily.

Even as he considered it, Lyons sat up. There was rustling on the other end of the connection as Blancanale put down whatever newspaper or magazine he’d most likely been pretending to read. A voice that Lyons recognized as the receptionist’s, closer now, told the man that the director would see him.

Schwarz, next to Lyons, press-checked his silenced Beretta 93-R, ready to go operational at Lyons’s command. As Schwarz holstered the weapon, Lyons ran through his mental checklist, idly patting himself down with one hand to verify that all of his gear was in place. His .357 Magnum Colt Python was secure in his shoulder holster. While the SUV held a concealed locker in which the team’s heavy weapons were locked, they’d opted to travel more lightly for this initial probe. Concealed under the gray business suit Blancanales wore, Lyons knew, was a Beretta 92-F in a shoulder holster, which should prove sufficient if he got into any trouble inside. Still, there was an element of risk in all such operations, especially since the man was placing himself at the mercy of potential enemies, cut off from the team by distance and a few doorways.

The Able Team leader listened as Blancanales and the director, who introduced himself as Timothy Albert, exchanged pleasantries. Lyons allowed himself a tight smile as Blancanales ran through a spiel on the injustices of “world capitalism” and “corporate rule,” intended to put Albert at ease, persuade him—momentarily, at least—that he was speaking to a fellow traveler ideologically. The two traded what, to Lyons, sounded like pompous slogans that would be lame coming from college radio jocks. Eventually, though, Blancanales moved in for the kill. Lyons tensed as he heard it coming, nodding to Schwarz. If he managed to shake anything loose, it would come now.

“Much as I would like to continue this conversation, my friend,” Blancanales was saying quietly, “there is the matter of the World Workers United and its status as a political party in the United States.”

“How do you mean?” Albert asked, sounding polite but puzzled.

“Illegal distributions of cash to your party,” Blancanales said, his tone equally polite. “Funds from overseas. Funds that violate campaign finance laws, just for starters, and that perhaps violate certain other laws intended to prevent the exchange of monies to and from terrorist groups.”

Albert was silent. Lyons pictured him gaping like a fish.

“You do not deny that your party receives significant funding from the Earth Action Front, do you?” Blancanales asked. Now his voice took on an edge.

“I…Well, I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about…” Albert stammered.

“Justice Department,” Lyons heard Blancanales say. He pictured the soft-spoken Hispanic flashing the Justice shield Brognola had issued to each of the member of Able for occasions such as this. “And you, sir, are under arrest. We have a warrant and we’ll be searching the premises. This search extends to seizures of your computer equipment. If you’ll step away from the desk, sir…”

Albert muttered something Lyons could not hear.

Schwarz and Lyons both winced involuntarily as the earpieces they wore cut out in bursts of white noise.

“Gunshot!” Lyons was already jumping out of the SUV, his Colt Python in his fist. Schwarz was close behind him with the 93-R. They ran full-tilt for the WWUP building, dodging cars as they dashed across the street. Lyons ignored the honking and the shouts from irate drivers—though one particularly loud commuter shut up fast when he noticed the mammoth revolver in Lyons’s big hand.

The twin glass doors at the front of the WWUP building slapped open, banging in their frames. Two men leveled pistols from the doorway. One of them was dressed in a blue security guard’s uniform, while the other wore a button-down shirt and tie. Lyons shoved Schwarz away from him bodily as the electronics expert came abreast. Gunshots burned through the air between them.

“Pol!” Lyons shouted. “Pol, come in!” He triggered a single round. The 170-grain jacketed hollowpoint round dropped the security guard in his tracks, booming like thunder in the crisp morning air. Simultaneously, Schwarz triggered a 3-round burst from his 93-R. The suppressed weapon chattered, stitching the other shooter across the chest. He fell in a crumpled heap with his necktie flapping across his face.

“Go, go, go!” Lyons ordered. “Blancanales! Come in, damn it!”

R OSARIO B LANCANALES flashed the Justice shield. “Justice Department,” he said. As he informed Albert that the man was under arrest, threatening search and seizure of the computers in the office, he watched the man carefully for his reaction. This was the moment of truth. If he was innocent of any wrongdoing, or perhaps simply a white-collar criminal looking to finance his party with extralegal funds, he would plead ignorance or try to cut a deal. If the World Workers United Party was dirty, however—

Faster than Blancanales would have thought possible, the slim, well-dressed, middle-aged Albert wrenched open a desk drawer and yanked out a Smith & Wesson .38 snub-nose revolver. Blancanales threw himself backward behind a chair without thinking. The first shot punched a hole in the wall of the office, directly behind the spot where he’d been standing.

As he fell, Blancanales ripped his Beretta 92-F from its leather shoulder holster. Without aiming, he hosed the front of the desk and the air above it with withering gunfire. He didn’t expect to hit Albert; he only needed to drive the man back to foul any follow-up shots that might be coming.

A door slammed. Blancanales surged to his feet, the Beretta in a two-handed grip. Albert had fled through a second door in the rear of his office. Before the Able Team commando could give chase, however, he heard gunshots from the outer office, where he’d been kept waiting. These were answered by the boom of what could only be Lyons’s Python, something he’d heard countless times before. Too experienced to freeze up with indecision, Blancanales rushed forward, trusting his teammates to take care of their part of the operation. He pushed through the rear door, going low and fast, waiting for more gunshots. They did not come. His earbud was producing noises, but he ignored it for a moment, focusing on the immediate threat that Albert presented.

A fire door slammed. Blancanales hustled down the narrow corridor in which he found himself, the Beretta leading the way. He hit the crash bar on the fire door and plunged through.

“Pol!” Lyons voice came in his ear again. “Come in, damn it!”

“Albert has gone out the back,” he responded. “I’m in pursuit.”

“Two down in at the front door,” Lyons barked. “The secretary’s screaming her head off, but she’s not hit and she’s not a hostile.”

“Understood,” Blancanales said. He rounded the corner at the rear of the building, taking it wide, “cutting the pie” to give him an angle for a return shot if Albert was waiting. A car door slammed and an engine churned to life. Blancanales stuck his head out of the alleyway and saw Albert starting a late-model Taurus.

“Ironman!” he said. “He’s coming your way, out the front! Maroon Taurus!”

“On it!” Lyons responded.

Blancanales took aim and pumped the remainder of his Beretta’s clip into the rear of the Taurus. The car was already putting distance between them; his 9 mm rounds having no noticeable effect. Then the black Suburban bearing Lyons and Schwarz was roaring up to him, barely stopping. Blancanales threw himself into the back of the vehicle, narrowly avoiding catching his leg in the door as momentum slammed it shut.

Schwarz was already on his wireless phone, calling the Farm to arrange for a clean-up team to run interference with local authorities—and see to the bodies. Lyons drove with a white-knuckled grip, pursuing the Taurus through heavy traffic. The reinforced truck howled on its extra-heavy-duty tires. Blancanales imagined he could hear the overpowered engine sucking in gasoline as the armored SUV roared in response to Lyons’s foot on the accelerator. Schwarz was forced to hang on to the overhead handle to keep from sliding back and forth in his seat as the Suburban weaved and dodged. Blancanales smiled grimly and held on to the back seat.

“What happened in there?” Lyons asked, his eyes never leaving the traffic in front of them.

“You heard him,” Blancanales said. “I played the Justice card and he froze. When I talked about seizing and searching his computers, he went for the hardware. Who were the other two?”

“Security, I guess,” Lyons grunted. “Moved on us the second your boy opened fire. Must have made our stakeout. They were too quick to come at us, otherwise.”

“So they were already waiting for trouble,” Schwarz mused.

“But why would they just open fire? What’s to be gained?” Lyons asked. “The second we show up they start popping caps. Why?”

“Whatever the reason, this means Hal’s suspicions were well-grounded,” Blancanales replied.

“And a big, black Suburban parked on the street isn’t as subtle as we thought it was,” Schwarz said wryly.

“Gadgets, the clean-up team,” Lyons said, whipping the steering wheel hard left, then right. “They know to secure the computers?”

“Yes,” Schwarz said. “They’ll search the network and pull the drives for us. That’s if nobody activated some sort of sweep-and-clear doomsday program. We might come back to find their drives have eaten themselves.”

“Let’s hope not,” Lyons said. He came to a clear stretch of road and tromped the pedal to the floor. The Suburban growled and shot forward with renewed speed. “Got him now,” Lyons said.

Blancanales craned his neck, looking forward out the windshield from where he sat. The Suburban slowed for a moment and the distance between the two vehicles increased.

“Carl—” Schwarz said.

“Ironman, wait—” Blancanales protested.

Lyons slammed the pedal to the floor again. The Suburban rocketed forward like a battering ram. The bull bars mounted in front of the grille smashed into the rear of the Taurus, crumpling the trunk as the smaller vehicle shuddered beneath the impact. Lyons never let up, maneuvering the nose of the Suburban until it was scraping the rear quarter of the Taurus. Then he pitted the Taurus, slamming the sedan into the curb with tire-popping force. Maroon paint streaked the front fender of the Suburban. Lyons was out of the driver’s seat almost before the two vehicles stopped moving.

“Out of the car, out of the car!” Lyons shouted. “Hands where I can see them! Hands!” A dazed Timothy Albert staggered out of the Taurus. His airbag had not deployed, and his forehead was bloody. He had something in his left hand. His other arm was behind his back.

“Drop it!” Lyons yelled. The barrel of the Python never wavered. “Drop it, now! Get your right hand where I can see it!”

Albert glanced at the device in his hand as if seeing it for the first time. Something like recognition flashed across his face. Then his right hand came up. The Smith & Wesson’s short barrel lined up on Lyons’s chest.

The gunshot rang out. Crimson blossomed, soaking Albert’s chest. The .357 Magnum bullet from Lyons’s Python did its deadly work, dropping the politico-turned-gunman in a tangled heap. The body slumped against the creased rear fender of the Taurus and the .38 clattered to the pavement.

Lyons advanced, checking side to side and glancing to his rear as he kept the Python trained on Albert. When he was certain Timothy Albert wouldn’t be shooting at anyone ever again, he spared a look at Schwarz and then at Blancanales. “We clear?” he asked.

“Clear,” Schwarz replied said. He and Blancanales had taken up positions to form a triangle with Lyons around the damaged Taurus.

“Clear,” Blancanales stated.

“All right,” Lyons nodded. “Gadgets, grab a flare from the truck and direct traffic around us. We don’t need any more rubbernecking than we’re already getting.”

“On it.”

“Pol,” Lyons said. “Give me a hand here.” He knelt over the body. Blancanales, watchful for other threats and mindful of the traffic still streaming past, came to join him. The big former L.A. cop had picked up the device Blancanales had at first thought to be a phone. “Check it out,” he said. “That’s no phone. It’s not a PDA, either.”

“Strange,” Blancanales said, taking the device and turning it over in his hand. “It almost looks like a miniature satellite link.” The roughly square device had a tubular antenna running the length of its slim body, with a full miniature keyboard, a mike pickup and a tiny camera. It was much heavier than he would have thought to look at it. The device’s heft made Blancanales wonder just how much microelectronic black magic was hidden inside it.

“What do you suppose it does?” he asked.

“That’s Gadgets’s department,” Lyons said. “But I wanted you to get a look at it before he takes it.”

“True.” Blancanales laughed. “Once he’s got his mitts on it, we’ll never see it again.”

“Why do you think I sent him to direct traffic?” Lyons cracked a rare grin.

“I heard that,” Schwarz said over the earbud transceiver.

CHAPTER TWO

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

A bleary-eyed Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman wheeled himself into the War Room at Stony Man Farm, cradling an oversize stainless-steel insulated travel mug in the crook of one hairy arm. He positioned his wheelchair next to where Barbara Price already sat, checking files on her laptop as she glanced up at the large plasma wall screens to which the slim notebook computer was connected. Stony Man’s honey-blond mission controller looked up and raised an eyebrow at Kurtzman.

“Security blanket, Aaron?” she asked, nodding to the mug.

“Life support,” Kurtzman said evenly. He took a long drink from the mug, the smell of his extra-strong coffee reaching Price from where the bearded, barrel-chested cybernetics expert sat. “Want some?”

“No, thanks,” Price said, smiling. Kurtzman’s personal blend was legendary for its power. “I don’t want to burn a hole through my stomach.”

“I haven’t had any,” a disembodied voice said over the War Room’s speakers, “and I’m still working on an ulcer.”

Price tapped a key on the laptop. The harassed face of Hal Brognola appeared on one of the plasma wall screens. He was chewing an unlighted cigar and glanced repeatedly off camera to something that had to have been on his desk. The microphone on his end of the scrambled link picked up the sound of shuffling papers and then the tapping of computer keys. Brognola, as leader of the SOG, was one of only a handful of living human beings—apart from those operators working within Stony Man’s ranks—who knew that the ultracovert antiterrorist operation existed. When it came to the Farm, Brognola answered to the Man himself, the President of the United States. But while Stony Man was the President’s secret antiterror and security arm, it was Brognola’s baby first. The stress, the constant worry, the basic wear and tear of heading SOG and the Farm were evident in Brognola’s face, and had been for as long as Barbara Price had known him.

Price knew at a glance that Brognola was seated in his office on the Potomac, the gray-skies-and-white-marble Wonderland backdrop a stark contrast to the beauty of the Shenandoah National Park. The park ran along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Stony Man Farm—a real, working farm—was named for Stony Man Mountain, one of the highest peaks in the region and roughly eighty miles by helicopter from Washington. The natural beauty in which the base was located belied the brutal ugliness of the situations with which the Farm’s staff so often coped. From the look in Brognola’s eyes it was clear that this day would be no different.

“Good morning, Hal,” Price said. On the other end of the scrambled connection, Brognola managed a smile.

“Barb, Aaron,” Brognola said, nodding. Kurtzman grunted in reply. “Did you get what there was, Bear?”

Kurtzman swallowed and put the mug down on the conference table. “I’ve got Hunt and Carmen data-mining,” he said, “but that’s just to dot the eyes and cross the tees. I spent the night going through what they’ve pulled, organizing it and getting it uploaded to Barb for the brief.”

Price nodded. “Hunt” was Huntington Wethers, the eminently refined black man who was one-third of Kurtzman’s computer support team. Wethers had been a professor of cybernetics at Berkeley before Kurtzman recruited him. Carmen Delahunt, by contrast, was an old-line FBI agent until Brognola had gotten his hands on her. The vivacious redhead’s personality made her an interesting counterpoint to Wether’s quiet dignity. While Kurtzman hadn’t mentioned him, Price knew that Akira Tokaido, the youngest member of Stony Man’s team, was busy working on some hardware with one of the Stony Man team members. Of Japanese descent, Tokaido was never without an MP-3 player blasting heavy metal music into his much-abused eardrums. Price had no idea how he concentrated with that noise ringing in his brain, but he seemed to thrive on it.

“We almost ready?” Brognola asked.

“Bringing up Able now,” Price said. She tapped a few more keys. A second plasma screen came alive with the out-of-focus image of a beefy palm. Price raised an eyebrow again, then shook her head with a smile as the hand was withdrawn. The image resolved itself into that of a very irritated Carl Lyons, obviously staring down into a Web cam of some kind. Schwarz and Blancanales crowded in next to him, their heads almost touching as they verified they were present for the meeting. Lyons shrugged them off, leaving only parts of their shoulders and torsos in view as he glared down at the camera.

“This,” he said tersely, “is really annoying.”

“You’ll live,” Price said evenly. “Can you hear us and see us okay?”

Lyons grunted. “Yes.”

“Wideband scattering-noise projectors in place,” Schwarz said, his face not visible. Price nodded; this would thwart electronic eavesdropping on their location, including directional microphones.

The door to the War Room opened again. Several men entered. Price watched them take seats around the conference table and nod to the images of Brognola and Able Team in turn. The new arrivals were Phoenix Force, the second counterterrorist team run by the Farm, responsible primarily for international operations. The greater scope of their turf was reflected in the larger size of the team—five for Able’s three.

Slouching into his seat, nursing a can of Coke and appearing deceptively casual, was David McCarter, Phoenix Force’s leader. The lean, fox-faced Briton had always been something of a hothead, which had brought him into conflict with Brognola more than once. He had proved a capable leader, however, through countless missions with Phoenix. The former SAS operative smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. Price assumed he’d just finished one before the briefing.

Next to McCarter, making a show of waving away the fumes, was the stockier, more heavily muscled Rafael Encizo. The Cuban-born guerrilla expert was a much squatter, blockier man, but his appearance, Price knew, concealed catlike reflexes.

Demolitions expert Gary Manning, sat on the other side of McCarter, sipping what Price assumed was coffee.

Tall and graceful, Calvin James slipped into a chair next to Manning. The lanky black man, who’d grown up on Chicago’s South Side, was the team’s medic and former Navy SEAL who was also very talented with a knife.

Bringing up the rear was T. J. Hawkins. The youngest member of the team, Hawkins was a former Army Ranger. The Georgia-born southerner’s easy manner and lilting drawl concealed a keen mind and viciously fast fighting abilities.

“All accounted for, Hal,” Price said finally.

“All right,” Brognola said. “Let’s get started.” Price took this as her cue and pressed a button on her laptop, bringing up a map of India.

“Bloody hell,” McCarter muttered.

“Just under forty-eight hours ago,” Brognola said, ignoring McCarter, “an armed raid was staged on a mining facility in the Meghalaya hills, north of Bangladesh, not far from the West Khasi Hills district headquarters, Nongstoin. The facility is jointly owned by UVC Limited and the Indian government.”

“UVC?” Schwarz asked, his head still cut off on screen.

“Uranium-Vanadium Consortium, Limited,” Brognola said.

“I thought India was relatively uranium-poor,” Manning put in.

“Not anymore,” Brognola said. “I don’t yet have all the details, nor are they necessarily relevant, but UVC is using a new sonic-based technology to find and exploit previously untapped reserves of ore, including uranium. The deal they cut with the Indian government apparently stems to long before the ore was actually found in Meghalaya. Their surveyors gambled and construction began on an experimental laser enrichment plant well in advance of the actual mining operation.”

“So just how large-scale is this?”

“Large enough to make India a much bigger player in the nuclear club,” Brognola said. “The Indian government has long maintained a high level of secrecy regarding its nuclear power and weapons programs, but we all know they have nuclear weapons and have had them since the 1970s. A steady source of uranium ore and a steady production of enriched fuel will simply advance their program or programs, and significantly.”

“So the issue is the standoff with Pakistan?” James asked.

“No,” Brognola said. “That would almost be preferable. The issue is that the UVC facility in Meghalaya was relieved of several insulated drums of enriched, weapons-grade fuel. That itself is enough to get us involved. But that’s just the beginning of the problem.”

Price tapped a key on her notebook again. The image of a dark-skinned man appeared, a mugshot from an international criminal database. It was juxtaposed with a second image—that of the same man, eyes closed in death, lying on a slab in a morgue.

“This is Nilambar Chakraborty,” Brognola said.

“It was, you mean,” McCarter muttered.

Brognola spared McCarter a baleful gaze through his camera before continuing. “Chakraborty is a known member of the Purba Banglar Sarbahara Party, a terrorist group operating in Bangladesh. They’ve broadened their territory lately, moving farther and farther north into India and surrounding areas. The PBSP is a vicious, well-financed, anti-capitalist revolutionary group whose ideological origins stem from sympathy for the Chinese Communist movement. Their ultimate aims are vague, but coherent enough. They seek to bring about worldwide socialism, starting with their part of the world, through force of arms.”

“These blokes have been around for years,” McCarter put in. “Starting with opposition to the new Bangladeshi state. And last I knew, they spent most of their time and energy splintering off from one another to form different opposed sub-groups.”

“That was true until perhaps two years ago,” Brognola nodded. “The PBSP has since experienced a surge in growth, tied to global resurgence of various Communist and socialist groups.”

“The political pendulum is swinging around the world,” Encizo said sourly. “As it does, as people foolishly throw in with totalitarian ideologies, the fortunes of terrorist and agitator groups like these go up.”

Price watched Encizo thoughtfully. As a native Cuban he was naturally sensitive to the evil that communist governments could wreak.

The door of the War Room opened. Akira Tokaido entered quietly, carrying what appeared to be a personal data device, and took a seat.

“But wait,” Blancanales said off-camera, imitating a game-show host, “there’s more.”

“Indeed there is,” Brognola said. “Akira?”

“This,” Tokaido said, holding up the electronic device, “was recovered by a security guard who survived the attack on the UVC plant. The device was given to executives at Sugar Rapids Security, who forwarded it through channels to the U.S. Government almost immediately. We got word of and intercepted it before it could disappear into a Washington warehouse somewhere, crated up next to the Ark of the Covenant.”

“Chakraborty was carrying that device,” Brognola explained.

“And this,” Schwarz chimed in, holding up a PDA-size device of his own, “is an identical unit, recovered from the now deceased director of the Illinois chapter of the World Workers United Party.”

McCarter looked from the screen to the device in Tokaido’s hands, then back. “Bloody hell,” he said again.

Tokaido removed the earbud headphones attached to his MP-3 player. Heavy metal noise could be heard through the speakers, even from across the table. The young Asian blushed slightly and switched off the player. He pointed at the device recovered in India.

“This,” he said, “is a sanitized communicator. It has been manufactured with parts that are supposed to be untraceable. It carries no identifying markings, but all I had to do was play with it and look at its internals to understand what it is. It’s a Worldcom Transat Seever.”

“A knockoff, you mean?” Hawkins asked.

“No,” Tokaido said. “It is not a knockoff. It is a genuine WTS and uses the same satellite network and communications protocols. The only difference between this and a commercial WTS is the origins of the parts and the lack of serial numbers on them.”

“Does somebody want to tell me what a WTS is?” Lyons asked, sounding irritated.

“The WTS is the flagship product of Butler Telecommunications,” Barbara Price explained. “It’s the next generation of secure, scrambled satellite phone.”

“Like the units we carry?” James gestured with the secure phone he and all the Stony Man team members carried.

“Much more advanced,” Kurtzman said, “in terms of the bandwidth it can handle and the way the units interface with one another. Your phones connect with us at the Farm for security reasons, and we can transfer data, photos and so forth. The transmissions are coded and secure, yes, but most of that security stems from the fact that you’re communicating with the Farm and not other points of transfer. The Seevers produced by Butler Telecomm are bulky and awkward compared to your duty phones, but they give an agent in the field a means of communicating with any other similarly equipped agent, completely securely, anywhere in the world.”

“Not much need for such a thing among teams that are centrally controlled, such as ours directed by the Farm,” James stated, “but perfect for terrorist cells to communicate and coordinate.”

“Exactly,” Brognola said. “The technology has been the subject of heated debate for that reason. Washington has pressured Butler Telecomm to provide access to the encryption used, for national security reasons. Reginald Butler, president and chairman of the company, has stonewalled the government at every step. He’s become the poster boy for civil liberties in certain political circles.”

“Why do I feel like something is tying all this together?” McCarter said ruefully.

“Able Team was sent to check World Workers United Party because of financial transaction warnings flagged here at the Farm,” Price explained. “The party has received substantial funding from the Earth Action Front, an ecoterrorist group.”

“What Able got, when they looked,” Brognola said, “was three very trigger-happy ‘workers’ who were obviously expecting trouble. The director of WWUP in Illinois had one of these Seevers. We can’t crack its encryption, but we do know that it is operating on the same subnetwork as the unit found in India.”

“So uranium stolen by Bangladeshi Communist terrorists is somehow connected to environmental terrorists and also to an American Communist party,” McCarter said.

“Yes,” Brognola nodded. “Aaron and his team have been up all night sifting through the recovered drives from the WWUP office. Bear?”

“I’m uploading the files to all of your phones now,” Kurtzman said, leaning past Price to tap a few of the keys on her notebook. “Following the money trail, and cross-referencing known associates with current records of terrorist actions that can or could be labeled ‘green’ in nature, not to mention cross-referencing these with NSA, FBI, and CIA files on various World Workers United Party members of interest, we have produced a series of potential domestic targets, ranked in order of priority.”

“Able remains on-site in Chicago to begin local follow-up,” Brognola said.

“Meanwhile,” Kurtzman continued, “I have produced a similar list relevant to Purba Banglar activity worldwide, cross-indexing that with known coalitions of both international Communist and socialist terror groups, and ‘green’ agitator organizations. The trail starts in Nongstoin.”

“And that,” Brognola said, “is where I am sending you, Phoenix.”

“Priorities?” McCarter asked.

“First, the recovery of the enriched uranium,” Brognola said. “That is by far the most significant threat. Second, and this applies especially to you, Able, we need to know just how far and how deep the connection between the WWUP in the United States and these domestic and international terror organizations goes. American politics has long been ripe for infiltration by foreign elements. It looks like it’s happening, and in a big way. I want to know the details—how, who, and why, in that order.”

“On it,” Lyons said.

“Coordinate through Barb to have the Farm deliver anything additional you’ll need,” Brognola said. “I’ll arrange for a liaison with local law enforcement, both in Chicago and wherever the trail ultimately takes you.”

“You sound like you have someplace in mind.”

“I might,” Brognola said. “Reginald Butler has long been a political activist. He’s one of the richest men in America and he’s got a lot to lose. If he’s mixed up in any of this, or even if he’s simply letting his company sell the Seever units to foreign nationals with ties to terror, I want him taken down. That means sooner or later you’ll be paying him a visit at Butler Telecomm headquarters in Atlanta.”

“And me, a local boy, stuck overseas,” Hawkins drawled. “Let me know if you boys want a list of the local hotspots.”

“Could get sticky,” Blancanales said dubiously, leaning in so his face was visible. “Government operatives pressuring an American entrepreneur who’s already complaining about governmental harassment.”

“We don’t exist,” Brognola said. “We do, therefore, what we have to do.”

“Understood, Hal.” Lyons nodded.

“Every second that uranium is out there is a tick on the doomsday clock,” Brognola said gravely. “If it’s not recovered, we’re looking at nuclear Armageddon in the hands of terrorists. On the next threat level, we have to look seriously at the idea our domestic political infrastructure is being compromised by violent terrorists with an international agenda. In either direction, the outlook is bleak, and the threat to the United States potentially terminal.”

“Understood,” Lyons said again. McCarter and the members of Phoenix Force nodded grimly.

“All right,” Brognola said. “Phoenix, we’re in touch with the Indian government and will have some of the red tape untangled before your boots hit the ground there. More information will be made available to you through secure data transfers as and if it becomes available. Get out there, people. Get it done. Hundreds of thousands of lives could ultimately ride on this.”

“Bloody hell,” McCarter repeated.

CHAPTER THREE

Nongstoin, West Khasi Hills, India

The old Range Rover was scarred and even boasted a small-caliber bullet hole in one rear side window, but the engine had turned over smoothly and the tank had been full when they boarded. For small favors like those, David McCarter thanked whatever higher power likely wasn’t listening—fate, hope, karma, whatever—and brought the vehicle to a halt in front of the Deputy commissioner’s office. The humidity hit him as soon as he exited the truck’s air-conditioned cab. Across from the parking area, a low, round fountain—which was not running—sat full of stagnant green water. The fountain was surrounded by purple-red flowers that appeared almost to be growing wild.

The district headquarters squatted above them, a square, multistory, grayish-green building. An Indian flag fluttered on a flagpole jutting from the roof. In the distance, under gray skies and misty clouds, the hills for which the region was named loomed round and dark. McCarter paused to light a Player’s cigarette. Inhaling deeply, he surveyed the area around the squat building. The rest of Phoenix Force climbed out of the Range Rover behind him.

“Bloody wonderful,” McCarter muttered to himself, taking in the scene.

Jack Grimaldi, Stony Man Farm’s ace pilot, waited with their plane at the airstrip, where Stony Man’s logistics wizards had also arranged for a helicopter, Hughes OH-6A Loach which was in superb condition and came with a single Hydra 70 mm seven-tube rocket pod. McCarter had no idea how Brognola or Price had managed to wrangle that on Indian soil, nor was he going to look this particular gift horse in the mouth.

“Easy, David,” Encizo offered, coming up to stand next to him. “It’s a necessary evil.”

“Don’t I know it, mate,” McCarter since, taking a deep drag from his cigarette. “It doesn’t mean I like it any more. We should be moving directly on the first target.”

“Proper form, my friend,” Encizo said quietly. “Proper form must be followed.” The target to which McCarter referred was a cement factory outside Nongstoin. It had been identified by the Farm’s computer experts as belonging to an investor suspected of having ties to the Purba Banglars. It was too great a coincidence to ignore. Such a plant would be a great place to stage stolen uranium, it seemed to McCarter. He could not understand why they were wasting time appeasing bureaucrats, but Brognola had cautioned them against ignoring the district’s deputy commissioner. They would need the cooperation of the locals if they were to operate without interference from the Indian government. While relations between India and the United States were not particularly strained, the presence of armed American operatives on foreign soil was always a touchy issue. Phoenix Force had been issued false credentials identifying them, officially, as U.S. Military advisers operating as security consultants. Each man had retained his first name, as this was not exactly deep cover, but any check on their fake last names would yield a Farm-produced piece of biographical fiction that would lead nowhere.

In the truck, in specially loaded gear bags, were the team’s assault rifles. The Farm’s armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, had supplied them with his latest prizes—Israeli Military Industries TAR-21 Tavor assault rifles, space-age bullpup rifles chambered in 5.56 mm NATO and accepting STANAG M-16 30-round magazines. The incredibly ergonomic, compact weapons were modular firearms comprised of composite materials, each specially tuned to Kissinger’s exacting standards. Each rifle had a cyclic rate of 800 rounds and was fitted with red-dot optics for fast target acquisition. James and Manning had been issued Tavors with the M-203 40 mm grenade launcher attachment, and their gear contained high-explosive, flechette and flare rounds for the weapons.

A padded, nondescript case in the truck also contained an M-24 Sniper Weapon System. The United States Army’s version of the Remington 700 rifle, chambered in 7.62 mm NATO and boasting a Leupold Mark IV 10 x 40 mm telescopic sight, was nominally for Gary Manning’s use, though any of the Phoenix Force commandos could deploy the rifle if need be.

Each of the men carried their pistols, nominally concealed in Kydex or leather holsters under the desert-tan BDUs each man wore. James, Encizo and Hawkins had opted for the standard Beretta M-9s. Manning carried an old favorite, his .357 Magnum Desert Eagle. For his part, McCarter could not forsake his Browning Hi-Power, which was as much a part of his identity as the pack of Player’s cigarettes he carried.

Each member of Phoenix Force carried a few other nasty surprises. Before they’d left, Kissinger had passed around a pile of long, black cardboard boxes, doling them out like candy. Each was marked with the slogan For Those Who Serve. McCarter couldn’t care less for marketing, but he knew serviceable steel when he saw it. Each man in his command was armed with something sharp and deadly as a result. All of them had opted for fixed blades. McCarter carried a Triumph neck knife under his BDUs, slung under his shoulder on a paracord harness, that acted like a makeshift shoulder harness and allowed the knife to hang handle-down under his arm.

The team entered the building, leaving Hawkins with the truck. At the front desk, McCarter introduced the team only as the “U.S. delegation.” They were ushered into the office of the deputy commissioner, Kamal Jignesh.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Jignesh said pleasantly in accented English, inviting them in from behind his desk. There were only two chairs. McCarter and Manning took seats, while the rest of the team stood behind them. “We of the West Khasi Hills district deeply regret the difficulty that the Consortium experienced. We will do whatever we can to cooperate in your investigation.”

McCarter nodded, studying Jignesh. He was a short, somewhat plump man, wearing a lightweight suit that looked a size too big. His hair was receding over a wrinkled forehead and plump, deeply set features. While his face smiled, his eyes held something else. Fear? Suspicion? McCarter couldn’t place it. He flashed his papers.

“Deputy Commissioner,” McCarter said, doing his best not to sit on the edge of the chair out of impatience, “my men and I have urgent business. We were informed by our government that you would be assigning us a liaison.”

“Yes, of course, of course.” Jignesh nodded eagerly, waving the identification away. “I shall call him in. I know you must hurry. We are very concerned, of course, and wish for a quick resolution to this as much as you do. Our own forces have been alerted to the danger and are even now searching the countryside.”

McCarter had no idea whether to take that seriously, but it didn’t matter. He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. Jignesh used the intercom on his desk and spoke a few words—if it was Hindi, McCarter didn’t know one way or another—before completing the call and looking at his office door expectantly. A second Indian man entered. He was tall and lean, with a beak of a nose and sharp, dark, darting eyes.

“Gentlemen,” Jignesh said, “this is Sankara Gopalan, my aide. He will accompany you. If you must interact with any of our armed personnel, he will make sure your…autonomy…is respected.”

The Briton noted that with interest. The Indians were either aware of just how potentially destructive the loss of the uranium fuel was, or they were getting heavy pressure from the State Department. Perhaps both. Brognola had definitely pulled some strings.

Gopalan nodded. “A pleasure to meet you.” His English was more thickly accented than Jignesh’s, but still quite good.

“This is potentially dangerous work.” The former SAS operative eyed Gopalan hard. “Are you armed?”

“I am not,” Gopalan replied, shaking his head. “Do not worry, sir. I am aware of the risks. But my government insists your activities be monitored.”

“Meaning no offense, of course,” Jignesh put in. “I’m sure—”

“Right, then,” McCarter said, cutting off whatever other blustering Jignesh might have been preparing to interject. “Let’s get a move on, ladies.” He waited as his teammates hustled Gopalan out of the room, following on their heels. Jignesh rushed from behind his desk and grabbed McCarter by the shoulder when the other men were through the door.

“He is not to be trusted!” Jignesh whispered. Gone was the mask of obsequious welcome. He was clearly terrified. “Your people were anticipated!”

McCarter nodded once, curtly, winking at Jignesh. Then he continued on so that none of the others, particularly Gopalan, could suspect that any words had been exchanged.

“Ears on, people,” McCarter said as the team, with Gopalan tagging along, reached the Range Rover. With a tap, each man activated the earbuds that would provide them with a secure, local, and hands-free short-range communications link with one another.

The Briton waited for Gopalan to climb into the back seat of the truck between James and Encizo. Hawkins managed to squeeze in, too, while the larger Manning took the passenger seat. As he walked around the rear of the Range Rover, he spoke quietly, knowing his words were being transmitted over the earbuds.

“Right then, listen up. Jignesh has gone squirrelly and says we’re headed for a trap. Keep a close eye on Gopalan. We’ve other targets to try, but I’m betting the most likely is also the deadfall. We’ll trip their trap and take the battle straight down their throats.”

He threw open his door and climbed into the vehicle. Manning was glaring at him, expressing what McCarter imagined was concern regarding knowingly charging a trap. He would get over it. He had before. He couldn’t argue, either, not with Gopalan there to hear. That was almost amusing. McCarter glanced at the others. James looked cool and collected, as usual. Encizo was unreadable, while Hawkins looked like he might be waiting to take a nap. Nodding to himself and knowing that his team was more than ready, McCarter fired up the Range Rover. The engine caught easily and the British-made four-wheel-drive—surely that was a good sign—lurched from its parking spot.

McCarter drove, following Gopalan’s directions to the outskirts of town, where the cement factory was located.

“There is parking near the supervisory shed,” Gopalan said.

“Familiar with the plant, are you?” McCarter looked up at the Indian in the rearview mirror.

“Oh, yes, it is my job to meet with the local businesses,” Gopalan said smoothly. “Encouraging trade and industry is the deputy commissioner’s highest priority.”

“I imagine it would be,” McCarter said insincerely. He stopped the truck well short of the main cluster of buildings, stopping to turn it around so it was nose-outward in the middle of the access road.

“What are you doing?” Gopalan asked mildly.

“Parking,” McCarter said. He motioned for Phoenix Force to exit the Range Rover. As they climbed out, Gopalan pointed up the road.

“You are blocking access to the factory,” he said. McCarter couldn’t be sure, but he thought the Indian was starting to look worried.

“Only for a moment,” McCarter said, smiling.

His grin suddenly vanished and his tone turned hard. “Gary,” he said. “Do it.”

Manning, his face stern, produced his .357 Magnum Desert Eagle. He cocked the hammer and shoved the massive triangular snout of the hand cannon under Gopalan’s chin, grabbing the Indian by the back of the head to hold him in place.

“What are you doing?” Gopalan squealed. “I am a representative of—”

“Terrorists and murderers,” McCarter finished for him. “Now, mate, you’ve got what I see as two choices. You can tell us what the ambush is all about, who put you wise to it, and who you’re working for, or you can stand there quietly and my friend here will splash your brains all over this beautiful countryside. How about it?”

“You cannot…I…This cannot…” Gopalan sputtered. Finally he started cursing in his native language.

“Gary,” McCarter said, “shoot him.”

“No!” Gopalan shrieked. “I will tell you! I will tell you!”

McCarter smirked. “That’s more like it.” He shook a cigarette from his pack and lit it, feigning boredom as he took a long drag.

“Now—” he deliberately blew smoke into Gopalan’s face as he turned to the man, “—get with it. He nodded to the other members of Phoenix Force. “Gear up.” Encizo threw open the rear door of the Range Rover and began tossing gear bags to James and Encizo.

“I was told to watch for any searching for the uranium,” Gopalan admitted. His words came out in a rush. “I monitored conversations with the deputy commissioner. I listened in when our government gave him his instructions to cooperate with the American advisers who were coming.” He gave the Briton a meaningful look. Obviously he was smart enough to grasp that Phoenix Force was something other than what the Indian government had been told to expect.

“How did you know we would come here?”

“We didn’t,” Gopalan said. “But it was a likely spot. I was given a list of locations the authorities or the military might choose to investigate. I was to give warning as soon as I knew the destination, so that we could prepare.”

“Who is ‘we’?” McCarter asked. When Gopalan did not immediately answer, the Briton nodded to Manning, who pressed the Desert Eagle more tightly under Gopalan’s chin.

“The Proletarian Party of East Bengal,” Gopalan said.

“The bloody Purba Banglars.” McCarter snarled. “What’s their involvement?”

“We have the uranium,” Gopalan said. “More I cannot tell you. I do not know where it is. I do not know what is to be done with it.”

“How’d you know to hit the plant in the first place?” Calvin James said, walking up next to McCarter with his Tavor assault rifle in hand.

“I do not know,” Gopalan shook his head, mindful of the Desert Eagle pressing against his throat.

“And the deputy commissioner?” McCarter demanded. “He in on this?”

“We have his family,” Gopalan said.

“Bloody hell,” McCarter whispered. “All right, then. He—” the Briton nodded to Gopalan “—has talked, and I want to see what shakes loose. We take the cement plant.”

“What about him?” Manning nodded to the Indian.

“Oh, him,” McCarter said. “Calvin, let me see your rifle a moment.” He took the Tavor, unloaded it, and ejected the chambered round, handing both round and magazine to James. “One second, mate.” Then he walked around behind Gopalan. “Let go, Gary.” When Manning did so, McCarter buttstroked Gopalan in the back of the head with the Tavor. The Indian fell, unconscious.

“A bit light,” McCarter said, handing the rifle back to James. “But at least it did the trick.” James winked coolly and reloaded the weapon.

“Now what?” Encizo asked evenly.

“That hill,” McCarter nodded to a facing hill that overlooked the road leading to the cement plant. “A decent vantage. Gary, take the M-24 and get up there. Rafe and Calvin, you take the flanks. Skirt the plant and come at it from the rear quarters. T.J., you’re with me.”

“Y’all aren’t going to do what I think you’re going to do, are you?”

“Bloody well right,” McCarter grinned, smoking his cigarette down to the filter and letting it fall to the dirt road. He ground it under the heel of his combat boot, picked it up and pocketed it. “We’re going in the front.”

The Phoenix Force leader helped Manning drag Gopalan into the Range Rover, where Manning secured his wrists and ankles with plastic riot cuffs. The burly Canadian took the M-24 and sprinted away. Meanwhile, McCarter saw to his own gear bag and prepared his rifle. It felt good to have the political games out of the way, however temporarily. Now it was time to see to business.

At a nod from McCarter, James and Encizo made their way left and right, moving quietly but quickly. Hawkins watched them go and then nodded up the dirt road, where the main cluster of buildings waited in the distance. “We walkin’?” he asked.

“We’re walking,” McCarter nodded. “Can you keep up?”

“I reckon I’ll manage, hoss.” Hawkins exaggerated his Southern drawl.

“Commo check,” McCarter said, testing the earbud link.

“In position,” Manning said. He wasn’t even breathing heavily despite his fast climb.

“Moving,” James reported.

“Also moving,” Encizo called in.

“As are we, gents,” McCarter said. He jerked his chin in the direction of the plant. He and Hawkins readied their rifles and started to march, keeping well apart from each other, using the road to maintain the distance between them.

“We’re going to get shot at,” Hawkins said.

“I’m counting on it,” McCarter grinned. “Gary, be ready.”

“On it,” Manning called back.

The two Phoenix Force commandos, slightly crouched, moved from one piece of equipment to the next, closing in on the large main building that was the central point in the cement plant. McCarter was playing a dangerous game, he knew, but tripping a deadfall was never easy. They would have to strike a delicate balance, staying out of the enemy’s direct lines of fire while nonetheless making themselves tempting targets. He paused near some kind of grinder, the mammoth machine showing spots of rust under peeling paint as it hulked in the humid climate.

The Briton caught movement in the corner of his eye and knew that the moment had come. The muzzle-flash, when it appeared in a window on the second story of the main building, was brief but plainly visible. Dirt churned near Hawkins’s feet as a trio of bullets dug into the ground. The answering thunder from Manning’s M-24 came half a beat later. One down.

McCarter and Hawkins ran for it, opening up with their Tavors. The chatter of the lightweight Israeli guns was met by the characteristic hollow racket of Kalashnikovs. The Phoenix Force leader, even as he moved, noted the positions of the enemy fire—and smiled with grim satisfaction. Almost lost in the chaotic din was the slow, deadly drumbeat of Manning and his sniper-tuned Remington 700, but wherever his answering call went, the muzzle-flashes marking the enemy suddenly ceased. By the time McCarter and Hawkins made the entrance of the big building, the Briton was confident most of the shooters were down.

Hawkins took the left and McCarter the right as they cleared the doorway. A pair of dark-skinned men wearing mismatched jungle camouflage and black bandanna face masks opened fire on them. The Tavors barked and the first man, then the next fell. Two more Kalashnikovs fell silent.

“Take the ground floor, T.J.,” McCarter directed, confident his earbud would carry the words to Hawkins. “I’ll take the high road.” The structure was basically a corrugated metal warehouse boasting a single large, open factory floor. Heavy equipment, for grinding and mixing, was clustered in the middle at ground level. A metal catwalk ran the perimeter of the building’s interior, and it was from there that the gunmen had been firing. McCarter scaled the nearest ladder and hoisted himself up onto the rickety, rusting framework, scanning for targets among the fallen bodies of the shooters.

“Anything, T.J.?” McCarter asked.

“No one left on this level at the front,” Hawkins reported.

“No one at the rear,” James said, unseen somewhere on the other side of the building. “We took out one gunner. All’s quiet.”

“All right,” McCarter said. “Search the bodies. See if you can find anything useful. I’ll make the rounds up here and then join you on the ground. Gary?”

“On my way back to the truck to check Gopalan,” the big Canadian’s voice came back.

“Good,” McCarter said. “Not such a bad plan, now, was it?”

Manning grumbled something over the link. McCarter resisted the urge to laugh.

He checked each man in turn. The shooters carried guns and some ammunition, but nothing else—no identification, no clues, and no other personal effects. McCarter took a picture of each corpse with the camera built into his secure wireless phone. The other Phoenix Force members would be doing the same, he knew. The pictures would be sent to the Farm to see if an identification, and hence any records, could be pulled from across the vast computer networks to which Stony Man had access.

He was toeing over the last of the bodies when the man lying on the rusty catwalk opened his eyes.

The man screamed something and surged to his feet, a Kalashnikov bayonet flashing in his hand. McCarter leaned back in time to avoid the small bowie-shaped blade slashing at his gut, but the man lunged after him, and McCarter stumbled. The Tavor fell from his hands as the man tackled him. They rolled, coming up again, and the man charged with the blade before McCarter could take the initiative. The Briton had just enough to time to slap his hands down, knocking the knife aside, as he stepped in to slam the palm of his off hand up and under the man’s chin.

The blow rocked the knifer onto his back. He rolled and came up again, shaking his head, his whole body trembling. McCarter saw the look of a true believer in his eyes, an expression he’d seen on many a fanatic and terrorist. The man came in again, close behind his knife, seeking McCarter’s flesh with the needle-sharp clip point.

The Browning Hi-Power filled the Briton’s hand.

“Drop the blade,” McCarter ordered.

The knifer remained steady and focused.

“Look, mate,” he said, trying to sound calm. “it’s over. We don’t want to kill you. We want to question you. Play it right and you could walk away from this.” While that last was, strictly speaking, a lie, McCarter needed the guy alive. There were too many questions to be answered, and they had about all they were likely to get from Gopalan. Something was afoot, something big, and if the Stony Man teams were to get to the bottom of it, they needed to start producing more answers than questions.

The man lunged.

McCarter swore and fired, putting a single round between the man’s eyes. There was no other choice; if he tried to play fancy trick-shooting games with a charging blade, it could mean his life. The would-be killer was dead before his body completed its fall to the catwalk, the knife clanging on the rusty metal.

“Bloody hell,” McCarter said once more.

CHAPTER FOUR

The apartment building was as decrepit a structure as any the members of Able Team were likely to find in the area. Looking around, Carl Lyons shook his head. The buildings here had a sense of history. It was obvious this had once been a much better neighborhood. Now it was dying, rotting from the inside out, a victim of the animals who lived there and preyed on one another. Able Team had visited many such places in their battle against terror and crime. Still, even a hardened former cop and veteran counterterrorist like Lyons felt a pang of regret whenever he saw a place like this one, so badly gone to seed.

They were dressed casually. Lyons wore a bomber jacket over denims, while Blancanales and Gadgets wore slacks, polo shirts and windbreakers. Their nondescript attire did nothing to conceal the weapons in their hands. Lyons would normally have moved much more discreetly, but they had received a scrambled call from the Farm only minutes before reaching their destination that morning. Phoenix Force had taken down an ambush in India, and no one knew precisely how the enemy was a step ahead of what the Stony Man teams were doing. Given that, the former L.A. detective didn’t intend to get blindsided. They were going in, yes, and they were going in hot.

The target was an apartment building, and specifically a unit on its top floor. The site was part of the list produced by the Farm’s computer wizards. Each target on the priority-ordered list was linked to a person or persons of interest relevant to the WWUP or the ecoterror groups funding them, as Kurtzman had explained it. The fundamental mission had not changed. Both Able Team and Phoenix Force were shaking trees to see what fell out of them.

These trees, of course, often bore lethal fruit.

The shotgun Carl Lyons held in his calloused fists was a Daewoo USAS-12, a massive selective fire 12-gauge shotgun styled something like an M-16 and fitted with a 20-round polymer drum magazine. Lyons carried extra drums in the green canvas war bag slung across his chest. Schwarz and Blancanales carried similar bags. The rest of Lyons’s armament consisted of his personal handgun, the Colt Python, as well as a Columbia River Knife and Tool “M-16” tactical folding knife. The blades carried by the other team members were of the same brand but in different styles. Blancanales had opted for a fixed blade CRKT Ultima, while Schwarz carried an “M-18” folder model.

Schwarz was armed with a Kissinger-tuned specialty, the silenced Beretta 93-R machine pistol, and several 20-round magazines were in the pouches of his web belt, under his windbreaker. Blancanales had opted for something a little less exotic, but no less effective—a short-barreled CAR-15 with a collapsible stock and vertical foregrip complete with flashlight unit.

The three men took the stairs leading up to the target apartment with practiced precision, covering one another with Lyons in the lead.

They had discussed the fastest way to breach the door to the apartment. Lyons’s first thought had been to use a portable battering ram of the type used by SWAT teams, but the warning from the Farm had nixed that plan. He did not want any member of Able Team to be vulnerable, even temporarily, if armed hostiles were waiting on the other side of the door. In the end he had simply loaded the Daewoo’s chamber with a fléchette breaching round. The first shot from the awesomely powerful weapon would be to take down the lock, after which Lyons and his teammates would blitz the door and overwhelm whoever was waiting on the other side.

The hallways through which they walked were padded with stained, threadbare carpet, which softened the impacts of their combat boots. The hallways smelled of cooking food. Lyons could hear a baby crying through one of the doors on a lower floor; he signaled to Schwarz and Blancanales and frowned. His warning was clear. There were innocents nearby and they could risk no collateral casualties.

Their earbud transceivers were active, but Lyons didn’t want to risk even a whisper as they neared the target doorway just past the top-floor landing. He signaled to his teammates, who took up positions on either side of the door to back him up. Lyons aimed the USAS-12 and braced himself. He looked to his teammates both of whom nodded.

Lyons pulled the trigger.

The shotgun blast disintegrated the lock. The big ex-cop immediately slammed the sole of his combat boot into the spot immediately left of the hole, slamming the flimsy hollow-core door open. He led Able Team into the apartment, his weapon sweeping the room for targets. Blancanales and Schwarz flanked him, taking opposite sides of the room as he advanced. They would sweep and clear in both directions, each man covering the other to prevent any nasty surprises.

“Clear!” Lyons shouted. The living room was empty save for a broken and half-collapsed flea market sofa and an ancient console television boasting a bent pair of rabbit ears. Pizza boxes were piled in a corner of the room, next to two blue plastic bins into which empty beer and soda cans had been piled. While the apartment itself was typical of the hovels third-rate scumbags occupied, Lyons thought to himself, it was surprisingly clean.

“Bedroom’s clear!” Schwarz called from the next room.

“Bathroom!” Blancanales sang out. “Got a live one!”

His shotgun at a low ready, Lyons found Blancanales standing over a twenty-something male who was doing his best to look nonchalant—while sitting on the toilet. He had been reading a magazine when the team had busted down his door, apparently. It was crumpled on the floor at his feet, on top of the fuzzy blue bathmat that covered most of the floor in the tiny bathroom. The title Earth Action was emblazoned across it.

“Is there anyone else here?” Blancanales asked calmly, the stubby barrel of his rifle trained on the young man’s face.

“No,” the man shook his head.

“Your name?” the Hispanic commando asked in the same even, almost friendly tone.

“Ryan,” the young man answered. “Ryan Pinter.”

“Well, Mr. Pinter—” Blancanales lowered the CAR-15 “—I suggest you cooperate fully. You’re in a lot of trouble.”

“But…but…I didn’t do anything!”

“We’ll be the judge of that,” Lyons said, easily playing bad cop to Blancanales’s good.

“First things first,” the Hispanic commando said. “Why don’t you, well, pull your pants up. You’ll be joining us in the living room.”

“Is anyone else expected here?” Lyons snarled.

“No, no, not for hours,” Pinter admitted readily. “Look, please, I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t know what this is about, but—”

“Oh, you know,” Lyons said, planting a beefy palm between Pinter’s shoulder blades and propelling him into the living room as the young man left the bathroom, still hitching at his pants. Pinter almost collided with the couch and tried to crawl up into a ball on it, looking up at each of the armed men who had suddenly invaded his world.

“Look, you can’t just break in here and…Do you have a warrant?”

Lyons, playing his part now, raised the USAS-12 menacingly. “This is my warrant,” he said.

“You’re a member of the World Workers United Party,” Blancanales informed him.

“So that’s what this is?” Pinter became indignant. “You’re rousting me because of my political beliefs? Oh, man, I knew this Patriot Act thing was going to turn into oppression! You can’t suppress my political beliefs at gunpoint! I’ll sue, I’ll sue and you’ll be—”

“We’ll be what?” Lyons asked. “You are aware, aren’t you, that the director of the WWUP here in Illinois was killed while attempting to murder federal law-enforcement officers?”

Pinter looked down, the wind taken out of his sails for a moment. “I heard he was maybe in an embezzlement scandal.” The young man shook his head. “That he tried to shoot his way out rather than get caught. That isn’t right, man, but it shows you that capitalist greed can infect even those who—”

“Shove a sock in it,” Lyons growled. “I’m not interested in your speeches.”

“But look, man, you can’t hold every member of the party responsible for what one guy does.”

“Three guys, actually,” Lyons said. “Or don’t you read the news?” An officially scrubbed version of the events at the WWUP facility had been released to the media, complete with rumors of corruption as the official reason behind the shootings. The rumor mill had already started to manufacture plausible backstories, with the assistance of a twenty-four-hour cable news media desperate for unfounded speculation with which to fill its schedule. All of this put the public off the trail, as was intended. There was no point in starting a panic—though at this point, even the Farm didn’t know enough to guess as to why the WWUP director had been so fast on the trigger—with the real story behind the events, and of course Stony Man’s covert operatives had to be shielded. Lyons knew that Brognola’s heartburn only intensified every time Able was involved in so public a shooting, but it went with the territory. The big former L.A. cop had been as surprised as anyone when the probe had turned to gunplay so fast. The fact that it had was just proof for Brognola’s theory that big things were happening, or about to happen. The worm in front of Able Team now could well prove the key to unlocking some part of the puzzle. If not that, he might lead them to those who could.

“This is not about politics. At least, it’s not about your public politics. You’re also member of the Earth Action Front,” Blancanales said calmly. “A highly ranked member, in fact.”

“Look, man, you got it all wrong,” Pinter said desperately. “I’m an environmentalist, sure. Green Party, a few other groups. I care about my planet, is that a crime? But I’m not in the Earth Action Front.”

Lyons snorted and lowered the shotgun. He stepped away long enough to duck into the bathroom, grab the magazine Pinter had been reading and throw it at him. Ryan flinched as the dog-eared, glossy pages hit him.

“So what’s that?” Lyons demanded. “A little light reading?”

“ Earth Action is a reputable publication,” Ryan almost whined. “Just because the Earth Action Front names themselves after a green magazine, you can’t—”

Lyons snarled, set the shotgun on the carpeted floor and drew the Colt Python from his shoulder holster. He leveled the heavy barrel at Pinter’s face. “Let’s just stop dicking around, shall we?”

“Ironman,” Blancanales said, sounding concerned. He, too, was playing a role for Pinter’s benefit.

“Shut up.” Lyons turned away from Pinter, to Blancanales, and winked. Then he turned back to the terrified young man. “You’re a radical activist who uses saving mother Earth as an excuse for supporting violent causes, and you hang out with people who do the same, or worse. We’re here because your activities aren’t secret. You’re on a list, kid. You’re on a bunch of lists, in fact. When we cross-index those lists we get the profile of somebody we think is just screwy enough to firebomb a fast-food restaurant, or maybe, just maybe, take a shot at a federal officer.”

“No way, man!” Pinter said vehemently. “Sure, I vote green. Sure, I want the EAF to succeed in bringing their voice to the people, man. But I’m, like, a pacifist! I wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

“You just support those who do,” Blancanales said, sounding disappointed.

Pinter said nothing.

“You have one chance, kid.” Lyons let Ryan Pinter contemplate the gaping maw of the Python pointed at his face. “If you know something that will help us, something that will take us to the EAF or the WWUP, something they’re doing that’s not on the up and up, you’d better spill it. Or so help me God, I will spill you.”

Pinter seemed to deflate in front of their eyes. He looked down, shaking his head. “I told them…I told them this wasn’t the way. I told them—”

“Told who what?” Blancanales prodded.

“My roommates, man.”

“Roommates?” Lyons looked around skeptically. “In this one-bedroom dump?”

“They don’t live here, exactly,” Pinter said. “But they crash here a lot. Hang out, sleep on the couch, plan stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“Direct action, man.” Pinter shook his head. “Stuff we can do to save the environment and the country from the capitalists and from depoliation.”

“Uh-huh,” Lyons snorted. “And you’re completely innocent in all this.”

“I wanted to help the planet and change the country, sure,” Pinter said. “But when they started talking about…well, I couldn’t do it. Maybe I’m a wuss. They said I talk a big game. That if I’m going to be a facilitator in the WWUP or a field operative in the EAF, I gotta do more than talk big. I don’t know, maybe they’re right.”

“Facilitator?” Blancanales asked.

“A recruiter, somebody who helps further the cause, volunteers in the offices.”

“And your ‘field operative’ status?”

“Direct action,” Pinter said again. “You know, go out and…do stuff.”

“Terrorism,” Lyons said flatly.

“It’s not like that!” Pinter insisted. “We’re not terrorists! We’re just trying to…trying to get people’s attention. Make them see that all this conspicuous consumption, all this crass commercialism, it’s killing the planet!”

“Shut up,” Lyons said. He lowered the Python, since Pinter seemed more than happy to talk. “What was it your friends wanted you to do?”

Pinter looked from man to man, turning pale.

“Don’t make me change my mind about punching your ticket,” Lyons snarled.

“Okay, okay,” Pinter said, defeated. “Mogray Estates. It’s a housing development. Full of bourgeois fat cats raping the land, pumping out too many kids. You know. In the suburbs, man. My roommates, they went to Mogray Estates.”

“To do what?” Lyons asked, a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“What they always do in the suburbs, man. Fight the sprawl.”

“Fight it how?” Blancanales asked.

“They’re going to burn it down.”

T HE BLACK S UBURBAN’S engine roared as Gadgets Schwarz directed the big vehicle through the traffic of suburban Chicago. In the passenger seat, Carl Lyons was on his secure satellite phone, connected to Stony Man Farm.

“That’s right, Barb,” Lyons was saying. “Mogray Estates, a housing development in suburban Chicago.” He rattled off the address Schwarz had pulled from the phone book in Pinter’s apartment. “We need you to scramble fire and local police out there. Not sure how many we may be dealing with. Could be two or three kids, could be something else. But this Pinter character says it’s happening today, now. Seems he chickened out of the party.” He paused again. “All right, Barb. We’re in transit now. ETA in…Gadgets?”

“Five minutes,” Schwarz said.

“Five minutes,” Lyons repeated. “Will do.”

“What did she say?” Blancanales asked from the rear seat. Behind him, in the cargo area, Pinter was trussed up in plastic riot cuffs, blindfolded and gagged, with ear plugs in his ears. The plugs were held in place by a long strip of silver duct tape that was wound around his head and secured his blindfold. For his part, Pinter had not resisted and seemed resigned to his fate. No doubt he feared he was headed to someplace like Guantanamo. There had been no time to transfer him into appropriate custody for further questioning, so Able Team had simply bundled him up and taken him with them.

“She said to be careful,” Lyons said as he closed the phone.

“We going to be careful?” Blancanales asked.

“Of course not.” Lyons shook his head.

The entrance to the housing development reminded the big ex-cop of a gated community, except that there was no gate. It was an elaborate arch bearing the name of the development and boasting twin lion statues, their finishes painted to simulate verdigris. Why anyone would believe the statues and the development had been here long enough for the lions to look weathered was a mystery to the Able Team leader, given that the place was so new the lawns were still just dirt. He supposed those types of touches meant something to someone.

“Pulling up a satellite map of the complex now,” Blancanales said, reading the scrambled feed from Stony Man Farm. “It should be transmitting to your phones, as well.”

“What’s the play, Ironman?” Gadgets asked.

“Take us in deeper, toward the center of the complex,” Lyons said, watching the houses and parked minivans speed by. “We’ll split up, head for three points roughly equidistant, then start sweeping clockwise from the perimeter. Sooner or later we’ll find Pinter’s little buddies.”

“Let’s hope for sooner,” Blancanales said.

“That’s right.” Lyons nodded. “Otherwise it may be too late. Let’s move.”

Leaving Pinter trussed up in the SUV, the three Able Team commandos moved out. It was Schwarz who first called in over the earbud transceiver link.

“Ironman, Pol, I’ve got something,” he said. He relayed the street address, which his teammates could check on the browsers on their secure phones. “Looks like one man, in an attached garage. I can smell gasoline from here.”

“Move,” Lyons instructed him.

“Moving,” Schwarz responded. Lyons continued on it. He vaulted a low picket fence and rounded the corner of one of the many very similar houses. Parked out front was a panel van and emerging from it was a scruffy-looking, college-age youth with a gas can in one hand and some kind of electronic device in the other.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

“Drop it!” Lyons ordered. The Daewoo USAS-12 came up, its stubby barrel no doubt looking like the mouth of Hell from where the youth stood.

“Oh, God, man, don’t shoot, don’t shoot—”

Something, perhaps combat instinct, told Lyons to duck. As he did so, he could almost hear the bullet that burned through the air where his head had been.

The guy with the gas can never had a chance. His body rebounded against the panel van, leaving a red streak as he slid to the manicured lawn. Lyons was already turning, the Daewoo churning double-aught buck on full auto. The barrage stuck a man dressed in black BDUs and wearing a red bandanna over his face. His knees were chopped out from under him and he dropped his pistol.

“Don’t move! Don’t move!” Lyons shouted. Over the earbud transceiver, he could hear other gunshots, muffled through the automatic volume cutout the little units incorporated. There was no time to wonder what Schwarz and Pol had gotten into now.

The gunner was trembling, trying to remove something from inside the pocket of his BDUs. Lyons, ready to shoot again if the man’s hand came out with a weapon, checked his fire when he saw the Seever unit. The man on the ground, broken from the buckshot and clearly in shock as he bled out, did not even seem to notice him. He brought the Seever device to his bandanna-covered face, coughed once, and died. The Seever slipped from his fingers onto the grass.

Lyons checked the man’s pulse to make sure he was dead, then he went to the kid, finding no sign of life. The gas can was, well, a gas can. The other item was an electronic detonator with a stubby, rubberized wireless antenna. Lyons frowned. He and the rest of the commandos from the Farm were all too familiar with this kind of technology. Such a detonator could be used to set off a bomb by wireless phone, a tactic that had been used extensively with roadside bombs during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. He looked back at the dead, masked gunner, clearly much older than the young man he’d shot—accidentally or intentionally. A few kids with gas cans looking to burn down a housing development was one thing. It was ecoterror, yes, but it did not speak to some greater design. But high-tech wireless detonators, and additional personnel…now that was something else again. Lyons didn’t like it, not one bit, and it was looking more and more like there was no fooling Brognola’s gut.

“Pol! Gadgets!” Lyons said. “Report!”

“Two down,” Schwarz reported. “I have firebombs and detonator gear here. If these guys are friends of Pinter’s, there’s an age gap.”

“Meaning?” Lyons said.

“Meaning I’m willing to bet the Farm has dossiers on these two,” Schwarz said. “They’re way too old to be idealistic greens out for a night of arson.”

“I’ve got another youngster here,” Blancanales said. “DOA. I heard the shot, followed it in. Looks like his partner, another of our youth-challenged ecoterrorists, removed him from the equation. I engaged and he’s out of the picture. I have a firebomb here wired to go, and another of those Seever units.”

“Ditto here,” Lyons said.

“What do you think, Ironman?” Schwarz asked.

“I think this is a synchronized terrorist attack with external coordination,” Lyons said. “Get pictures and transmit them to the Farm, right away. I’ll do the same. Then I’ll talk to Barb.”

“Then what?” Blancanales asked.

“We roll on the next target by priority, unless we hear otherwise. And we might. Guys, I don’t like where this is heading.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“Hal, I don’t like where this is heading,” McCarter said. “You don’t mean to say you’d leave those people?”

“I’m saying,” Brognola said patiently over the scrambled, secure satellite phone connection, “that we have mission priorities here. Will saving the deputy commissioner’s family further the mission, or will it stop us from getting to the heart of this?”

“Bloody hell, Hal!” McCarter spit. He paced back and forth outside the Range Rover, which was still parked to block the dirt road to the cement plant. The rest of Phoenix Force looked on, weapons at the ready. Gopalan remained a prisoner inside the Range Rover.

“David, I’m not insensitive to the issues at play,” Brognola told him. “But the reports coming in from Able only confirm that this goes as deep as we feared. We’ve cross-checked the IDs of the arsonists Able took down outside Chicago. Some are locals, young people with ties to environmentalist groups. The other dead are Russian-born mercenaries, one of whom is former military.”

“What the hell are Russian mercs doing working with green firebombers in the United States?”

“We don’t know the full extent of it yet,” Brognola said, “but it’s clear that the operation in India to hit the uranium plant, the political activities of World Workers United Party, and the terrorist activities of the Earth Action Front and the Purba Banglars are all likely linked. It’s the how and the why we don’t yet have. What we do know is that somehow the Earth Action Front is alerted to our interdiction efforts.”

“The Farm is compromised?” McCarter asked.

“No,” Brognola said. “But by your own account, you were anticipated in Nongstoin. If they weren’t waiting for you, they were waiting for someone, and they knew to mobilize fast. The question is, how? How deep does this go, and how far?”

“What are you saying, Hal?”

“I’m saying exactly what I said before. I’m saying that there is a conspiracy afoot here, David,” Brognola said. “As we know, it is one that links international ecoterrorism to politics in the United States, generally. Specifically, the group or groups responsible for the uranium seizure, starting with the Purba Banglars and continuing with the EAF, are the same groups, or somehow working for the same groups, that are funding the WWUP in the U.S. They’re using hardware in common. They’re armed and they’re obviously ready to use lethal force, which says they’re no longer biding their time or trying to blend in quietly. We’d have to be blind not to see the potential.”

“So you definitely think the uranium is coming to the States,” McCarter said.

“I do,” Brognola said. “We don’t yet know who’s orchestrating this. But the identifications of those you took down in Nongstoin have come back. With two exceptions, they’re locals, all of them known Purba Banglars or mercenaries known to work for terrorist groups regardless of affiliation. Two of them, however, came back as Earth Action Front operatives. Both of your EAF specimens were last reported active in Europe, in fact.”

“So the two terrorist groups aren’t just fellow travelers. They’re working in common.”

“Yes,” Brognola said. “And let’s not forget that one is a green group, while the other is Communist. For them to be working together tells me there’s some umbrella objective, something uniting them. And if they’re importing assistance all the way from Europe, and the groups are sharing advanced technology here and in the States, that speaks to heavy financing. All of it means this operation runs deep and wide. Just as we feared.”

“Not good,” McCarter said.

“Not good,” Brognola echoed. “And that is why we can’t afford to assign priorities incorrectly. You’re the field commander; it’s your call. Will rescuing the deputy commissioner’s family get us closer to the uranium? Will it help us stop it from coming to the U.S.?”

McCarter stopped and considered that. He trashed the cigarette he’d been sucking on, exhaling a plume of blue-white smoke as he retrieved the butt. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, it will, Hal, and I believe that. I’ll be straight with you. I don’t want to leave them hanging. But we’re dry here, and this was the most likely prospect. If we can take one or more of these blokes alive, we might be able to get ahead of the rest of this lot. They might be able to tell us where to look next, give us a better shot than an educated guess. I admit, I’m following my nose, Hal. But you know how it can be in the field. I want to see how deep this rabbit hole goes.”

“Okay. Do you know where the family is being held?”

McCarter looked to the Range Rover, where Gopalan stared out from the side window fearfully. “Not yet,” he said. “But I will in a moment.”

T HE SLUM TO WHICH an only too eager Gopalan directed Phoenix Force was as miserable as any the team members had seen in their extensive counterterrorist operations abroad. It had taken relatively little persuading to make the man talk. McCarter had simply leveled his Hi-Power at the Indian’s head and thumbed the hammer back, then asked the question. Whatever loyalty Gopalan had for the Purba Banglars, it hadn’t gone very far when his own neck was on the line. Whatever the man had been paid—McCarter would dearly have loved to know where the money was coming from, ultimately—hadn’t bought much loyalty, either.

They’d dropped Gopalan with the local Indian military police. Whether that would do any good was anybody’s guess. For all the Phoenix Force leader knew, Gopalan would be on the streets again in minutes, depending on how loudly money talked and how badly infiltrated with Purba operatives, or sympathizers, the local authorities were. Certainly the Purba Banglars had no difficulty placing an operative in the deputy commissioner’s office, where their interests could be monitored district-wide. Silently, McCarter cursed the bureaucracy that worked to the advantage of terrorists like these. If Phoenix Force had just come in and made their hit on the targets identified for them, rather than tipping their hand by following through with all the governmental and diplomatic rigmarole, things might have gone differently. But there was nothing to be done about that now. As for Gopalan, he would unlikely amount to much and had given them everything he was likely to know. He probably deserved a bullet in the brain, but the members of Phoenix Force were not cold-blooded murderers. No, giving him to the local authorities was the best route. Whatever happened to him thereafter was irrelevant to the mission at hand.

What they found inside the hovel at the street address Gopalan had given up might change the Briton’s mind. But he hoped not. There was actually a very good chance that Jignesh’s family was alive and well, at least for now. They’d hardly be much use as leverage against the deputy commissioner if they were dead. Jignesh had a lot of stones, McCarter had to admit, cluing in the team despite the danger. McCarter hadn’t told Brognola, of course, but he did feel a certain obligation to Jignesh for that. The man had put his own family on the line to stop Phoenix Force from walking blindly into a trap, knowing it was the right thing to do for his country. There was real courage there, and the way he’d done it had been fairly smart, too. A man like that was not likely simply to take the Purba Banglars’ word for what had been done with the hostages. No, he’d more than likely insist on regular proof they were alive and well. So that meant there was a good chance they still were—though perhaps not for much longer now that their activities had been exposed.

They parked the Range Rover in a fetid alley a block from the target, after taking a route around the area to survey the neighborhood. James’s sharp eyes picked out two different snipers on the rooftops. There were bound to be other guards, at ground level, but these were better hidden or simply not in evidence as the team made its recon of the area.

“Remember, mates,” McCarter said, his voice low but carrying over the team’s earbud transceivers, “this lot could get word at any time that things have gone bad for them. Maybe they already have. Keep a sharp eye out for the hostages and do not hesitate.”

A chorus of quiet acknowledgment greeted him, as each Phoenix Force member in turn spoke discreetly for his transceiver’s benefit.

“Cal, T.J.,” McCarter directed, “cut around the back of this building and retrace our route. Find those snipers and take them. See if you can spot any other guards. Remember, they may know somebody’s coming.”

“Right,” James said.

“Understood,” Hawkins said.

“Gary, you take the back,” McCarter said jerking his chin toward the ramshackle house, little better than a shanty, that leaned precariously at the opposite end of the block. It was composed of equal parts scrap wood, corrugated metal and tarps. The entire neighborhood, a claustrophobic maze of narrow alleyways and stained, crumbling structures that looked to be falling down where they stood, stank like an open sewer. Rotting garbage was piled in some of the shadowed lees of the buildings. A man was lying against one of the closer hovels, and McCarter gave him a very careful look to make sure it wasn’t a terrorist guard shamming as a drunk or a beggar. On closer inspection, however, he realized it was a body. The decay was unmistakable, even if the smell was lost among the other odors in the alley.

“Lovely,” McCarter muttered.

Manning was already on his way. McCarter motioned to Encizo. “You’re with me, mate. We’ll take the front. Let’s go.”

“Right.” Encizo nodded.

They kept their Tavor rifles low against their bodies as they went, but they made no real effort to hide the weapons. Any attempt to operate within the auspices of the Indian government had been fouled by Gopalan’s interference and Phoenix Force’s interception of him. McCarter was not about to accept another “liaison” he did not know and could not trust, so they were going to do things his way, and damn the consequences. If the Purba Banglars were sitting on the uranium and someone holding the Jignesh family knew where it was, there was no reason to delay and no point in playing bureaucratic games. McCarter preferred it that way. They passed plenty of locals, some of them dead-eyed, others alert enough to take note and hurry in the opposite direction. Places like this the world over shared a universal, overriding law. Don’t get involved. The only resistance McCarter anticipated would come from the hostage-takers themselves. He was itching to bring the fight to them.

C ALVIN J AMES WORKED his way along the alley, then forward, cutting around the sniper positions while keeping the miserable shacks between him and the enemy shooters. At the same time, Hawkins cut around the opposite side, staying low. The teammates did not have to exchange words to work effectively. They had been through scenarios like this time and again.

James had time to consider the sprawling debris around him. Slums were slums the world over. Grinding poverty like this made human life cheap and human beings desperate. It meant they were that much easier to turn, to buy off and to push around. Those they faced, be they Purba Banglar terrorists or just hired muscle off the streets of Nongstoin, would be capable of anything if the price was right.

When he had flanked the first sniper’s position, he found a stack of crates spilling over with refuse. He used these to climb up onto the rooftop of the shanty facing them. On top of the rusted, corrugated metal roof, he found a maze of clutter. Everything from wooden crates to metal and plywood additions to the huts below dotted the artificial landscape. He took full advantage of the cover to carefully cross the ramshackle roof.

As he crept closer to the first of the sentries, he watched to verify that the target was still there. The man obligingly shifted in place, exposing his shoulder and head, as he looked through the scope of a Dragunov-type rifle. He was partially hidden in the lee of a precariously listing stack of rusting chicken-wire cages. These might once have housed some sort of livestock, maybe even birds of some kind. They were empty now and looked to have been for some time.

James got as close as he dared. When he judged that he, too, was partially obscured by the debris around him, from the perspective of the target house, he placed his Tavor rifle gently on the roof next to him. His hand went to the butt of the Desert Tan Columbia River M-60 fixed blade on his belt. The six-inch blade slid free quietly as James tightened his grip on the textured handle.

The sentry sensed death coming for him at the last minute. He turned, his eyes widening as James landed on him, his free hand clamping in a vise-like grip over the man’s mouth as the M-60’s blade slid between his ribs. James grimaced and worked the knife in and out to finish the job, making sure the sentry’s cries went unheard under his palm. The man’s death rattle was barely audible as his eyes lost focus and the light left them.

James rolled the sentry aside. He picked up the Dragunov knockoff, looked it over briefly and pulled the bolt back just far enough to verify that a round was chambered. Then he settled into the spot just vacated by the dead sniper. The front window of the target house was bright and clear through the scope, which was a surprisingly expensive German model. The scope and the rifle itself were covered in scratches that showed little regard for the weapon, but it felt solid and appeared to be functional. His Tavor was within reach if he needed it, which he might. Using an unknown weapon, which might or might be sighted in properly, which might not even fire when the trigger was pulled, was hardly something he was eager to do. But just in case others among the Purba Banglars were watching the sniper positions, it was important that there be a body up there behind the rifle. Unless they were using binoculars, James thought what little of him was visible would be sufficient to fool the enemy. If, however, they were keeping a close—and magnified—view of their rooftop shooters, he was made already, and there was nothing to do about it. The rest of Phoenix Force would deal with that, if those in the house grew suspicious and started shooting.

“This is Cal,” he said quietly, knowing his earbud transceiver would pick up his words. “One down.” There was no response from Hawkins, nor did he expect one until T.J. had his sniper neutralized. He could only assume the man had matters well enough in hand.

T.J. H AWKINS HAD MATTERS well in hand. While he never underestimated an enemy—he’d seen too many battles go south too quickly for that—so far he wasn’t very impressed with the opposition. He’d located and skirted around his sniper well enough, where the man knelt hunched against a two-story shanty made of plywood and tarps. He was smoking, his cigarette smoke forming a plume that marked him as an amateur and served as a beacon to his location.

Hawkins found a foothold on one side, where several large holes had been punched, kicked, or otherwise pushed into the wood. A dirty blue tarp positioned inside the hovel protected the interior from wind and rain. As quietly as he could, mindful that there could be and likely were occupants of the slums in this building or in the nearby structures, Hawkins lifted himself up to the roof of the first story.

“This is Cal,” came the voice in Hawkins’s ear. “One down.” That was the younger man’s cue. He started to move forward, his hand going to the ergonomic grip of the Columbia River Ultima fixed blade on his belt.

His foot dragged against a piece of loose wood anchoring the tarp-covered rooftop.

The sniper spun in place, his head ducking out from behind cover, dark eyes wide and locking with the Phoenix Force commando. Hawkins did not hesitate. Crawling, crablike, on the roof, his Tavor was gripped in his left hand by the plastic stock. Instead of trying for it, he went for the Beretta M-9 in the inside-the-waistband Kydex holster behind his right hip. He whipped up the weapon, wiping the safety off with his thumb, and double-actioned the first 9mm round. The bullet snapped the sniper’s head back.

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