Capital Offensive
Don Pendleton

STONY MAN ®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to

Nick Pollotta for his contribution to this work.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Sonora, Texas

Loose gravel crunched under the tanker truck’s tires as it slowly rolled out of the darkness.

“Hold it right there!” the guard called out, raising a palm. With a stern expression, the big man stood at the entrance to the brick kiosk. “Right there, I said!”

With hissing air brakes, the massive vehicle rocked slightly as it came to a complete stop directly in front of the locked gate of the electrified fence. Coiled lengths of razor-sharp concertina wire along its top glistened in the reflected glow of the headlights.

On the side of the tanker was the name and logo of a famous fuel company, but the guard knew that was probably false. Everything short of an ice-cream truck had delivered materials to the desert warehouse. After working there for a year, nothing surprised the man anymore. Although dressed in civilian clothing, the U.S. Marine corporal was wearing a canvas military gun belt with a .45 Desert Eagle pistol at his hip.

Keeping a hand near his weapon, the Marine could see there were two people inside the cab, a big man sitting behind the wheel and a woman resting her head against the passenger-side window. The raven-haired beauty appeared to be sound asleep; he could hear her softly snoring.

Cautiously loosening the Desert Eagle, the corporal cast a wary glance at the delivery schedule tacked to a corkboard inside the brick kiosk and saw there wasn’t a shipment due to the government warehouse for another couple of days. That wasn’t unprecedented. Set behind the electrified fence, the massive Quonset hut that served as a warehouse was little more than a junkyard for spare parts and obsolete equipment. Whenever anything got upgraded, or outright replaced, the old equipment was sent here, to be labeled, numbered, indexed, stacked, listed and forgotten. There wasn’t anything inside the warehouse worth stealing unless a person was looking for antiques. Everybody in his platoon considered standing guard here a punishment detail. Death by boredom. Although exactly who it was the soldier had annoyed he honestly had no idea.

“You folks lost?” the corporal asked, smiling politely. His relief had told him how a bunch of folks with cameras had stopped by once foolishly thinking this was the entrance to the famous Sonora Crystal Caves. It took him a full hour to convince the civilians that this was just a warehouse and not a tourist attraction. Civilians, he thought, were just about as useless as lips on a brick.

“Nope, not lost. Got a priority delivery,” the driver said, flipping down the visor and pulling loose a sheath of papers held in place by a rubber band.

The corporal tensed at the action. But the driver stayed inside the cab and held the papers outside the window.

“A delivery at this hour?” the corporal asked suspiciously, slightly easing his stance.

The driver shrugged. “Hey, I just work here, brother.”

A fellow Marine, eh? The corporal smiled. “I hear that.” Accepting the papers, he quickly checked the documents and everything seemed to be in order. Just another load of miscellaneous equipment for the junkyard.

Tucking the papers into the pocket of his shirt, the corporal grabbed the stanchions supporting the sideview mirror and pulled himself onto the corrugated steel step and looked inside the cab. He didn’t want to, but regulations were regulations, even out here in the middle of nowhere.

The driver raised both hands to show he was unarmed, and the corporal gasped at the sight of the sleeping female passenger. The buttons on her blouse were undone, the full breasts naked and exposed. One of the nipples was pierced, the steel ring glistening in the amber dashboard lights like gold.

“Okay, you’re going on report, asshole,” the corporal growled unhappily. “Bringing a goddamn hooker on a delivery run—” Suddenly he stopped talking and grabbed his throat with both hands, red blood gushing between his fingers.

Falling away from the truck, the Marine hit the ground hard, his head cracking against the pavement. Everything whirled for a moment, then he heard the door to the truck open. The corporal clawed for the Desert Eagle at his hip. As the gun cleared the holster, it was kicked from his grip and skittered away into the darkness. Then the driver knelt to stab him in the chest with what appeared to be a long sliver of glass wrapped in thick cloth.

The pain triggered adrenaline and the corporal savagely swung up an elbow to knock the makeshift knife aside, then he rolled over to frantically scramble for the kiosk. Gotta make it…only a few yards, he thought. There were more weapons inside a locked cabinet near the minifridge along with a full medical kit. But more importantly, there was the alarm button on the desk. The telephone was useless; talking would be impossible with his vocal cords cut. With that realization, a wave of cold flooded the corporal, and he knew this wasn’t some thrill-crazy lunatic, but a planned attack on a military site. Suddenly getting another pistol was replaced by the grim determination to hit the alarm button.

Stumbling into the kiosk, the corporal could see the alarm. But a heavy feeling was filling his body, and breathing was impossible, his chest aching from the need to pull in one more sip of air. Releasing the hand from his throat, the soldier saw crimson blood arch into the kiosk and instantly knew that a major artery had been cut with the first expert slash. Death was close. He had only a few seconds remaining. Summoning his last vestiges of strength, the corporal staggered toward the alarm button…but something pulled on his collar, hauling him back into the deadly night.

Tumbling to the hard ground, the dying soldier vaguely saw the grinning truck driver standing over him for a single moment, then the glass knife came down, stabbing into him again and again. Searing agony filled his universe, to be replaced with a soothing blackness that engulfed the Marine forever.

Standing erect, the frowning driver cast aside the glass knife and it shattered on the concrete steps to the small kiosk. “Sorry, brother,” the big man muttered in guttural Spanish.

“Was he alone?” Lieutenant Henrietta Caramico demanded, leaning out of the cab of the truck, a silenced 9 mm Bersa pistol held expertly in her hand. The woman’s shirt was still undone, her breasts swaying to the subtle vibrations of the big diesel engine.

“Yes, Lieutenant. There’s nobody else listed on the duty roster,” Sergeant Roberto Mendoza replied, squinting at the papers tacked to the corkboard above the desk.

“Good,” Caramico muttered, her weapon sweeping the darkness for any video cameras. But the area was clean. Once again, she thought, Snake Eater had been right. Security here had been a joke. But then, the Americans didn’t consider this isolated warehouse a chink in their national defense. Major mistake.

“Okay, let’s finish this,” the lieutenant snapped, swinging back into the cab. Holstering the gun, she began to hurriedly button her shirt closed.

Climbing behind the wheel, the sergeant revved the engine to build power and then shifted gears and charged for the wire gate. Sparks flew as the hinges were ripped away from the supporting steel posts and the gate crashed loudly to the pavement. Buckling the metal framework under its massive rubber tires, the heavy tanker rolled over the ruined gate and across the empty parking lot, steadily building speed.

“Zigzag a little,” Caramico ordered, tucking the shirt into her pants. “Remember, we’re supposed to be a runaway truck.”

Nodding, the big sergeant did as requested and began to move erratically. He sideswiped a battered old VW Beetle, probably the car of the dead guard, then stomped the gas pedal to the floor and shifted gears. The speedometer just managed to reach forty miles per hour when the truck violently slammed into the Quonset hut. A headlight shattered and the tanker severely dented the corrugated steel siding. Braced for the collision, the man and woman were still almost thrown from their seats.

Allowing the engine to sputter and stall, the sergeant clamored out of the cab and went around to the rear of the tanker. The lieutenant was already there, smiling widely. Gasoline was rushing out of a break in the main feeder pipe, exactly where they had weakened the metal with acid only a few minutes earlier.

“Take care of our guest,” Caramico said, walking briskly into the darkness.

Hunching his shoulder, Mendoza grunted. “Yes, ma’am.” Climbing into the sleeper compartment situated behind the cab, the sergeant dragged out a corpse and stuffed the owner of the tanker carefully behind the steering wheel. When the position looked natural, Mendoza liberally poured whiskey over the body and tossed the empty bottle to the floor mat. It had been easy enough for the pretty lieutenant to strike up a conversation with the driver at the truck stop on the main road, then convince him to have a couple of sips of whiskey to put a trace of alcohol into his bloodstream. Caramico was a cast-iron bitch, but even Mendoza had to admit that his lieutenant was a real looker. The two had had sex in the sleeper compartment, and when the man was snoring afterward, she’d used a hypodermic needle to inject a bubble of air into his bloodstream. Death was almost instantaneous, but would be totally untraceable to modern-day forensics.

“All clear,” Caramico reported, walking out of the gloom. “I dropped a few clues for the FBI to find tomorrow. Help them discover the identity of the terrorists, eh?”

“I dislike that word.” Mendoza stepped away from the expanding puddle of fuel on the cracked ground. The rising fumes were starting to blur the air, and the reek was becoming intolerable. “We’re soldiers, not criminals.”

“And this is war,” Caramico replied, retreating a few yards herself. “So shut the fuck up, and just do your job.”

Biting back a response, the big sergeant opened and closed his scarred hands, but said nothing.

Lighting a cigarette, the lieutenant drew in the smoke with obvious satisfaction. Then she slowly exhaled and tossed the cigarette onto a crack in the dry pavement. The glowing tip resembled the eye of a demon in the shadow of the crashed truck. Splashing from the broken pip, the dark pool of gasoline was rapidly spreading across the parking lot, following the sandy cracks to head directly for the burning cigarette.

“How long do we have?” Mendoza asked nervously, licking dry lips. The man preferred timing pencils and fuses. Solid, reliable military hardware, not this makeshift nonsense. But subterfuge was what the general wanted. And orders were orders.

“Less than a minute,” Caramico said slowly, estimating the expansion of the gasoline pool. The fuel seemed to be pouring out of the tanker faster than ever. Perhaps the minor crash had burst some of the internal seals.

In unison, the two soldiers broke into a run and were moving at a full sprint when they passed through the smashed gate and raced past the bloody corpse near the kiosk. A flickering light appeared from behind. Redoubling their speed, the man and woman frantically pelted into the desert and managed to dodge behind a large sand dune a split second before the ruptured gasoline tanker violently detonated.

Fiery light filled the night, and the very ground shook from the staggering force of the blast, the strident explosion rumbling across the flat Texas desert for countless miles. A heartbeat later, flaming debris sprayed across the desert, the sand dune shaking from the brutal impact on the other side.

Long moments passed before the force of the detonation dissipated. Brushing loose sand from their hair and clothing, the man and woman went around another sand dune and reclaimed the motorcycles they had parked there earlier that day.

Kicking their sleek bikes alive, Caramico and Mendoza paused for a moment to look to the north. Precisely on schedule, three bright pinpoints appeared above the mountains on the horizon.

“And so it begins,” Mendoza remarked, his face a blank mask of control.

“No, this is how it all ends,” Caramico corrected harshly, her eyes alive with pleasure.

Already moving at Mach Two, twice the speed of sound, a trio of experimental missiles streaked high in the evening sky, steadily moving away from one another as the war machines headed for scattered targets halfway around the world. Then, incredibly, they seemed to pause and rotate slightly to proceed in radical new directions.

CHAPTER ONE

Washington, D.C.

Dawn was just breaking over the capital city, and the White House, normally a beehive of activity at that early hour, was strangely quiet. Government aides rushed about without talking, telephone conversations were hushed and the Secret Service agents stationed at every door were grimly silent, their hard eyes constantly checking every identification badge. There were absolutely no tourists or news reporters anywhere in sight.

To the stoic people inside the Oval Office, the atmosphere was cool in both temperature and demeanor. The anxious members of the senior staff were perched on the two couches set in front of the fireplace, looking as if they were racehorses poised at the starting gate. Across the room, the President was sitting behind a massive hardwood desk, his fist clenched around a red telephone receiver. Ten years ago that would have been the hotline to Moscow. Now the secure line went directly to Beijing.

Openly cradling assault rifles, Secret Service agents stood in every corner, barely a ripple in their jackets from the body armor underneath. Outside the tall windows, armed helicopter gunships swept low around the capital building in a standard defensive pattern, then there came the low rumble of a full squadron of jet fighters streaking across the city. Through the glass panes of the door leading to the promenade, Marine One could be seen sitting on the manicured lawn between the Jefferson Mounds, the turbo props of the armored helicopter slowly turning as it stayed ready to fly the President to safety at a moment’s notice.

The members of the senior staff knew that the vice president was already in the underground bunker at Camp David, and the Joint Chiefs were en route to Cheyenne Mountain, the headquarters for NORAD.

“No, Mr. Premier, the United States of America is not, repeat, not at war with China, or with anybody else for that matter,” the President said in strained patience. The man’s hair was tousled and his necktie was askew, as if he hadn’t been to sleep in days. Yet he had only been awake for a few hours.

“Yes, I agree,” the President continued after a short pause. “We do have to keep the incident from the general public…. Yes, rioting in the streets is a distinct possibility, I agree.”

Frowning slightly, the President listened to the man on the other end of the receiver as he wearily poured himself a fresh cup of coffee from a steaming urn.

“No, that is not quite correct, Mr. Premier…. Look, Lu-Chan, I have absolutely no explanation about the missile misfiring.” The President leaned back in his chair with a white china cup balanced in his hand. “We did help you shoot them down, after all. A dozen of our new ICBMs went wild, but we were able to self-destruct nine. Only three got away from us, and all of them were destroyed in-flight. We suspect a computer malfunction…. Yes, I agree, Lu-Chan. Machines are useful servants, but very poor masters.”

The senior staff looked up sharply at the colossal lie, but said nothing. Nine missiles? Only three of the new ICBMs had been launched the previous night. But the careful distortion of the truth made the U.S. seem heroic and less like incompetent fools.

“I understand that hundreds of Chinese civilians were killed when the missiles came crashing down on that factory complex,” the President stated, setting down the untouched cup. His voice was calm, but the tendons in his neck revealed the tension he was actually feeling. Red China was the last serious enemy to freedom in the world, but the gigantic nation was slowly becoming a valuable business partner with America. Soon enough, Communist China would crumble under the economic pressure to buy washing machines, DVD players and tractors, exactly as the Soviet Union had done several years ago. However, at the moment, the Chinese were still the only nation truly capable of nuking America off the map and their overly suspicious commander had to be treated with all due respect.

“This would have been much worse if the warheads hadn’t been dummies,” the President said, then abruptly stopped. There was an awkward pause. “Nonnuclear models,” he explained patiently.

The Premier of Red China boasted of his excellent English and considered it a mark of distinction that he didn’t need a translator like the American President. However, American slang sometimes confused the man terribly.

“I agree…we…yes, thank you, Lu-Chan.” The President sighed deeply, his muscles finally relaxing. “I only wish that if the situation were reversed, I could also show such wisdom and restraint as yourself, my old friend…. Yes, absolutely. We shall talk again on this soon. Goodbye.” Gently, the exhausted man hung up the red phone as if it were made of glass and a hurried gesture would shatter it into a million pieces.

“Well, sir?” Daniel Thursby nervously asked, wringing his hands. The senior domestic policy adviser had recently shaved and was neatly dressed. He looked almost too young to work in the government, yet in the halls of Congress, he was one of the most feared men in the nation.

“China has agreed to step down from Red Flag Five, their version of DefCon Five, and will no longer be preparing to launch missiles at us,” the President stated, taking a sip from the tepid cup of coffee.

With audible sighs, everybody in the room eased their stance at the good news.

“Even if they did, sir, we could have stopped their missiles,” Virgil McPherson stated confidently. Wearing a badly rumpled suit, the foreign policy adviser looked perpetually angry.

“All of them?” the President demanded pointedly, placing aside the empty cup.

“Greater than ninety-five percent.”

The President tried not to frown. Which would mean only twenty or thirty million dead civilians.

“What was the breakage, sir?” Brent Morgan, the head of Homeland Security asked, easing his grip on a black cell phone. The entire White House was shielded against radio signals, but cell phones could be used inside the structure for relaying commands to staff while on the move.

“The estimated death toll is five thousand men, women and children,” the President replied sternly, his displeasure at the cavalier euphemism patently obvious. “Although I’m sure that a lot of things—” he stressed the word “—were also smashed and destroyed. Our ambassador in Beijing will be receiving a bill within the day for the damages. Massively overinflated I’m sure, but we’ll have to pay without complaining to maintain international goodwill.”

“The one bright spot is that the Paris missile impacted on an empty apartment complex set to open next month,” George Calvert, the secretary of the interior added, throwing his arms wide across the back of the sofa. “Not a soul was hurt. But the blaze from the crash spread to a nearby park and started a damn forest fire. The blaze is out of control and heading for civilian areas and oil refineries.”

“Can we help?” Morgan asked. “Send some humanitarian assistance, try to earn some goodwill?”

Waving a dismissal, the other man snorted. “Hell, no! The Red Cross has already sent in disaster relief,” he replied. “NATO, as well. But all American assistance has been flatly refused. The French are beyond furious, and are squealing like stuck pigs.”

“Can we put any spin on this?” Thursby asked without much hope.

“Not a chance,” Amanda Freeman said, shaking her head. The press secretary was wearing a neatly tailored dress suit sans jewelry. She wore polish, but the nails were kept short from her constant work on computers. “We have to take this hit politically.” She frowned. “The Internet is burning with the tale, the bloggers are going nuts and the news cycle has already sunk its teeth into the story. The whole world thinks that we had a massive failure in our missile defense systems. We look like damn idiots, but at least nobody thinks we tried to start World War Three and failed miserably. Good thing the last missile hit the ocean.”

Which was a lot better than letting them know the truth, the President added mentally. The stealth capabilities of those missiles was being tested, not their accuracy. They should have been able to hit a phone booth on the other side of the globe! The very idea that three of them failed at the same time was beyond ludicrous.

“How are things at the United Nations?” Virgil McPherson asked pointedly. “I understand the Security Council has called a special meeting just to discuss limiting our—”

There was a knock at the door, then it opened and the President’s secretary appeared. “Sir, the sandwiches have arrived,” the elderly woman said quietly.

The dour expression on the President’s face eased somewhat at the news. “Excellent. Send them right in.”

“Yes, sir,” the secretary replied. She left the Oval Office at a brisk walk.

“Sandwiches?” asked the senior policy adviser, glancing at the sideboard along the wall. It was stacked with enough food to feed a platoon of Marines for a week.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you all for your diligent efforts,” the President said, sitting straighter in his chair. “But now I need a few minutes alone to consider the matter.”

“Leave? With so much on the table?” a junior speech writer asked in surprise, looking up from his laptop.

“Yes, thank you,” the President said with a touch of impatience in his voice. “I’ll confer with you again in an hour. Good day.”

“Of course, sir, absolutely,” Calvert said, rising from the couch. He shot the younger man a disapproving look. “We’ll be in the Blue Room with the Cabinet discussing the matter.”

Gathering their reports and files, the senior policy staff left the office, with the Secret Service agents following close behind. They also knew the difference between the President wanting to be alone and when he needed privacy.

When the office was empty, the President pressed a button on the intercom. Immediately the door opened and in walked Hal Brognola. Short, powerful, middle-aged, he looked like a Mafia capo or the CEO of a multinational corporation, instead of the director of the Sensitive Operations Group.

“By God, I have never wanted to see you less, but needed you more, old friend,” the President said, standing and offering a hand.

“Sorry I took so long, sir, but traffic is a mess around DuPont Circle,” Brognola replied, shaking hands, then taking a chair. “I heard about the missiles. What’s the real story?”

The man was always two steps ahead of any conversation.

“I’ll be brief.” The President grimaced unhappily, starting to pour himself another cup of coffee. But the urn proved to be empty. “Last night at around 2:00 a.m., there was a test firing of three of our new StarDagger ICBMs. Absolutely state-of-the-art missiles theoretically capable of penetrating the defense grid of any enemy nation without their even knowing it occurred. The targets were located far at sea, a long distance from any foreign powers, and a safe distance from the commercial shipping lines…just in case anything went wrong.”

“Which it obviously did,” Brognola stated, templing his fingers. He didn’t like where this conversation was going.

“Sadly, yes.” The President started to speak, paused, then took a deep breath. “Almost immediately after launching, the missiles went wildly off course and hit Paris and Beijing. One landed in the Pacific Ocean.”

“Where was that again?” Brognola asked, stunned. The news had talked about trouble overseas, but nothing like this. “Were the birds hot?”

“Thankfully, no.” The President sighed, rubbing his face. “The missiles were only equipped with marker warheads, just a half ton of M-2 plastique.”

Brognola knew that was enough high explosive to throw out a plume of water a hundred feet high, but not enough to do any significant damage to a major city. Maybe destroy a city block or two, but not much more than that. “How many people are dead?” he demanded gruffly.

“Hundreds. However, it could have been much worse.”

“Not by much,” Brognola replied curtly, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Racking his memory, the man recalled that modern-day ICBMs didn’t have a self-destruct and that their flight paths couldn’t change from the primary target. It was a failsafe procedure to prevent an enemy from seizing control and turning the missiles back against America. Once launched, the warbirds were totally autonomous. “How far off course did they go?”

“The original targets were the Fifth Fleet in the North Atlantic, the third Carrier Group in the Sea of Japan and the Second Submarine Assault Group in the South Pacific.”

The big Fed grunted in reply. Obviously the missiles hadn’t veered slightly off course, but had completely changed direction and flown halfway around the planet in new directions. That smacked of outside control, not a malfunction. “Any idea what went wrong, sir?” he demanded gruffly.

“To be honest I have no idea,” the President replied, spreading his hands. “Nor does anybody else. Only a wild guess. Every telltale was green, all telemetry was nominal, and yet…”

“Sabotage is the obvious answer, but how could anybody get to all three of them?” Brognola mused out loud, massaging his jaw. “Were they launched from the same base?”

“No.”

“Then we either have a network of traitors scattered through the launch silos…”

“Not completely out of the question.”

“Agreed. But if that’s not the case, then logically, somebody has found a way to manipulate our long-range weapons systems.”

“Sadly, that’s also my conclusion.” The President growled as if the notion put an unpleasant taste in his mouth. “Which means that until this matter is rectified, the nation is virtually defenseless. If we launch another ICBM, or even a long-range stealth bomb, it could go anywhere. Hit anybody from Manhattan to Melbourne. And the next time we may not be so lucky, and the civilian death tolls could be catastrophic.”

“And if these saboteurs can also alter the course of other nations’ missiles…” Brognola added grimly. The implications were staggering. “India fires at Pakistan, but hits London. The British launch at New Delhi and hit Moscow, and then they hit…” The man made an endlessly circular gesture. One wrong move by the U.S. could start a domino reaction that would bring about the long-feared apocalypse of the old cold war.

“I see that you’ve also come to the same conclusions as myself,” the President said. “At the moment, every antimissile we have has been taken offline. We can’t trust them anymore. Which leaves us with rail guns and lasers of questionable accuracy in the first place.”

“Artillery would be better.”

“Agreed. The Pentagon has all of our jet fighters on patrol around the continent watching for incoming missiles. But we can’t keep them up forever.”

“Especially if whatever is sending our missiles off course can also affect our jets, making them fly in the wrong directions to violate international airspace, crash into each other over populated cities…”

“…Or leave a wide-open breach for an incoming missile to fly through without hindrance,” the President finished grimly. “We have the best combat pilots in the world, but men get tired, and when they need to rely upon their navigational systems…” There was no need to finish the sentence.

“What can my people do to help, sir?” Brognola asked bluntly, leaning forward in the chair.

“Find out what happen to those ICBMs and stop whoever is responsible from doing it again,” the President stated, passing over a clear plastic jewel box containing a computer disk.

The shiny disk was marked with a brown stripe of high explosive. Open the jewel box incorrectly and the disk would violently be rendered useless. “This has the full technical readouts on the new missiles. Maybe your people at the Farm can find something useful. However, it is paramount that this remain top secret. If the public got wind of what was actually happening, there could be a national panic. Terrorists would attack U.S. bases overseas knowing that we can’t properly defend ourselves. The stock market might crash, financially crippling the nation for decades, hundreds of companies could go bankrupt, closing down factories and sending thousands of people out of work.” He grimaced. “It’s a nightmare waiting to happen.”

“Don’t worry, sir, we won’t let you down,” Brognola declared, rising from the chair.

“You never have before,” the President said, and started to add something more when telephone on the desk gave a soft buzz. The man glared at the device as if it were a live bomb, then lifted the receiver.

“Yes?” the President asked. He listened for a minute, then replaced the receiver in the cradle. “Well, it just happened,” he stated. “Two of our F-18 SuperHornets patrolling the oil fields of eastern Iraq got lost and accidentally crossed the boundary into western Iran. The mullahs are screaming violation of sovereign airspace and demanding punitive measures from the United Nations for our quote, ‘rampaging aggression,’ end quote.”

“The enemy is escalating their attacks already?” Brognola asked uneasily. “We can expect a lot more of this, and soon.”

The President opened a drawer and pulled out a folder marked with Top Secret seals and an explosive security tab. “Then stop wasting time talking to me and get moving,” he commanded, sliding on a pair of reading glasses and opening the file to start skimming the pages.

With a nod, Brognola turned and left the Oval Office, his mind already working on the complex matter. A lot of people hated America for various reasons. However, he knew there were few groups who had access to the sort of highly advanced technology needed to pull off this sort of cybernetic attack.

Departing from the building, Brognola headed for the parking lot behind the Old Executive Building. Heavily armed Park Rangers were on patrol everywhere inside enclosure, while D.C. police officers patrolled the sidewalks outside.

The key to the matter was how somebody had seized control of an ICBM in flight. And sent a military jet a hundred miles off course, the big Fed noted. There were a hundred safeguards and multiple backups on both guidance systems. Yet it had been done. There had to be some sort of common denominator; a computer chip or software program.

Stopping at his car, Brognola looked skyward at the dark storm clouds gathering high overhead. In the distance, thunder softly rumbled. Unfortunately there was only one thing he knew of that they both used as a navigational aid, and if that was compromised, the entire world was in more trouble than he could even contemplate.

CHAPTER TWO

Tokyo, Japan

A heavy rain fell over the sprawling metropolis, the sky dense with rumbling black clouds. Blurred by the downpour, heavy traffic flowed like rivers of stars through the city streets, a million neon signs blazing in every imaginable color.

In the nearby harbor, the dark shapes of cargo ships, oil tankers and American warships loomed like metal mountains rising from the choppy ocean. Impossibly tall, slender skyscrapers thrust into the storm, lightning illuminating them briefly in silhouette. Many of the office buildings were alive with bright lights, the diligent workforce of the mega-corporations working through the wee hours of the night to assure their nation’s future. The war for world domination had failed many decades ago, and the country paid a terrible price. Their attempt to financially control the West had also ended in total disaster, mostly through their own stupidity and greed, and now the Asian companies heroically struggled to try to repair the ghastly economic wounds.

Suddenly a low roar cut through the noise of the city and the storm. Then on top of an apartment building, a billboard advertising Green Apple cigarettes violently blasted into a million pieces of plastic and splintering wood as the prow of an American 767 jetliner punched through the flimsy obstruction.

Snarling curses, the frantic cockpit crew struggled to raise the lumbering aircraft, to change their course, regain the sky, their shock over not being at the airport dwarfed at their horror at the wall of mirrors looming directly ahead of them. What the hell were they doing downtown? How did they get this far off their flight plan?

Adorned with the name of the famous car manufacturer, the colossal skyscraper of chrome and steel swelled in front of the lost jetliner as it streaked across the broad city street, the pilot and copilot straining every muscle in their bodies as they fought the shuddering controls. Height! They needed more height! Before—

Lightning flashed as the jetliner and office building collided. The entire ninety stories of the majestic structure shook from the strident impact, then the rippling windows shattered as the crumpling 767 exploded into a deafening fireball. For a single horrible moment, the entire city of Tokyo was briefly illuminated in the hellish light. Then the building began to tilt to the side, cracks yawning wide in the exposed infrastructure.

Buffeted by the brutal shock wave, tens of thousands of people on the streets below looked upward in surprise, shouting at the nightmarish sight, then the rain of broken glass arrived and their cries became agonized shrieks. Hundreds of cars crashed into one another, spreading the destruction in every direction and plowing into countless horrified pedestrians.

More glass windows fell away as the trembling building began to collapse, crumbling into pieces like a sand castle. Chunks of smashed masonry mixed with debris, dead bodies, splintery furniture and burning pieces from the fuselage of the annihilated jetliner tumbled away into the rainy night. Crushing death filled the streets of Tokyo. An acrid cloud of concrete dust and roiling black smoke flowed outward from the building, the screams of the wounded and dying seeming to challenge the stentorian thunder of the raging maelstrom in the black sky above.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

I N A RUSH OF WARM AIR , the Black Hawk helicopter landed in the middle of the freshly mowed field. The side hatch opened and out stepped a tall blond man carrying a nylon equipment bag. He was dressed in dirty denim pants, a flannel work shirt and hiking boots.

Keeping his head low, Carl “Ironman” Lyons tried to ignore the spinning turboprops only inches above his head, the breeze ruffling his short hair. Closing the armored hatch, the former L.A.P.D. detective waved through the bulletproof Lexan plastic window at the pilot of the craft. His hand still on the joystick, the pilot nodded curtly in return and promptly revved the massive Detroit engines back to full power.

As the Black Hawk lifted into the air, Lyons moved quickly across the smooth grass. Heading toward a rustic-looking farmhouse, the ex-L.A.P.D. detective noted the dozen men scattered about the grounds. Wearing denim overalls, the guards were trimming bushes, painting wooden shutters or taking soil moisture readings with handheld probes. Even though Lyons knew everybody in sight was heavily armed, he couldn’t spot any of their weapons. That was both impressive, and a little annoying. The former cop had spent a lot of years on the mean streets of Los Angeles and usually could tag an armed man from fifty feet just from the way he stood and moved. Three pounds of steel strapped under your clothing altered a person’s stance significantly to the trained eye. But not these men. Which was one of the many reasons they had been chosen from the top professionals in the nation to become a blacksuit, the elite soldiers who guarded the country’s top antiterrorist headquarters, Stony Man Farm.

Stepping onto the wooden porch, Lyons pressed a hand to a sensor plate that resembled a smooth patch of wood. A moment later a small section of the wall cycled aside to reveal a keypad. He tapped in the entry code. There came a soft answering beep, then the armored front door swung aside with the soft hiss of working hydraulics. As he stepped into the building, the door closed behind him with a muffled boom.

Inside the farmhouse, the blacksuits were openly armed with pistols at their sides or carried in shoulder holsters. A softly beeping radar screen showed the departing Black Hawk heading for the horizon.

Hurrying on assorted errands, the men and women nodded to Lyons in passing as he strode for the elevator. Then he changed his mind and headed for the stairs. After six long hours in the Black Hawk he could use a good stretch of the legs.

Reaching the subbasement level, Lyons proceeded along a corridor. More blacksuits were down here, one standing on a ladder and fixing a light fixture, another dutifully running a waxing machine along the clean terrazzo floor. Both were wearing earphones and throat mikes, the constant chatter of the other guards a muted buzz from the miniature radios.

Passing the firing range, Lyons could dimly hear some sort of a machine gun yammering and took a guess that Kissinger was testing the new M-249 SAW. John “Cowboy” Kissinger was the armorer for the covert base, and there wasn’t a weapon in existence that the lanky Texan couldn’t fix, repair or modify for the field teams. Whatever was needed to get the job done, Kissinger had in stock.

The SAW was the latest addition to the Stony Man arsenal. Nicknamed “the Minimi” by NATO forces, the squad assault weapon had replaced the old M-60 machine gun as the standard support for a platoon needing suppressive firepower. An attached ammo box held the belt of ammunition, thus removing the possibility of tangling the feed, and also hiding from the enemy just how many rounds the gunner had remaining. Firing a much smaller 5.56 mm round, the M-249 was lighter, fired faster, farther and quieter. A lot of Marines were using them in Iraq, and nobody had complained about the weapons yet.

Turning a corner, Lyons saw Chief Buck Greene talking to a couple of unknown blacksuits.

Wearing sunglasses, with a massive Colt .45 revolver holstered at his hip, Greene resembled a drill instructor. Lyons almost smiled. Which was probably the whole idea. Veteran soldiers who would charge a chattering machine-gun nest flinched in horror at the memory of their miserable weeks at boot camp. Chief Greene was the man in charge of base security for the Farm, and he took his job very seriously. There was nobody better to have protecting your six.

Slinging his bag, Lyons grunted in passing, and Greene jerked his chin in reply. The men were friends and hadn’t seen each other for a while, but when Barbara Price announced an emergency recall, that meant the blood had already hit the fan and there was no time for pleasantries.

Reaching the Conference Room, Lyons pushed open the armored door. Four people were hunched over a conference table reading security reports. On the wall was a video monitor showing maps of the world, the war status of the superpowers scrolling along the bottom. Additional screens displayed weather conditions around the planet and a vector graphic of orbiting satellites.

“About time you showed up,” Rosario Blancanales said in greeting, laying aside a top-secret report.

Dressed is a three-piece suit of gray worsted material, Blancanales looked like a kindly banker rather than a professional soldier, and middle age had done nothing to soften his appearance of sheer physical strength. Called “The Politician” for his knack for fast-talking himself out of any trouble, Blancanales had salt-and-pepper hair and a million-dollar smile.

“Well, I was fishing in the Yukon,” Lyons stated, dropping his bag on the floor.

“Yeah, yeah, always the same old excuse,” Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz said with a chuckle.

Wearing casual business attire, Schwarz looked more like the manager of a video store than the best combat technician in the world. General Electric had a standing offer for Schwarz to join the corporation at a staggering salary, but long ago the technical wizard had decided to use his talents for defending the nation instead of acquiring wealth. Nobody in his family truly understood the choice, but the call to duty was something only another soldier could ever really understand.

“Sweet Jesus, you smell like Baltimore Harbor at low tide!” Price scowled, wrinkling her nose. “Would somebody please pour a cup of Aaron’s coffee over the man to kill the smell?” She was, of course, referring to Aaron Kurtzman, Stony Man’s computer whiz.

“Can’t. It might dissolve the concrete floor.” Lyons grinned, taking a chair at the table. Then the smile dutifully vanished. “All right, I read the initial report on the flight over here. What’s our current status?”

“Still at DefCon Five,” stated Barbara Price, the Mission Controller for Stony Man Farm.

Crossing his arms, Lyons frowned. “Damn. Has there been another attack?”

“Tokyo, less than an hour ago,” she replied, turning to gesture at a wall monitor.

“Son of a bitch,” Lyons said softly, reading the scroll from CNN and the BBC. As civilian news agencies went, those were among the best. When the estimated death toll came into view, the man tightened his hands into hard fists, suppressing his rage. Lowering his head, the leader of Able Team paused in silent contemplation, then looked up again, his eyes diamond points of glacial fury.

“Any suspects yet?” he asked coolly, forcing his hands to unclench.

“Everybody and anybody,” Blancanales replied with a dour expression. “This sort of thing seems out of the league for al Qaeda, the PLO or Hamas. Something like this must have required years of careful planning.”

“However the hell they did it,” Schwarz muttered angrily, studying a sheet of paper covered with technical information. There was a handwritten note for him from Brognola offering a possibility. But it was ridiculous. Utterly impossible, he thought. Thank God, because if it was correct, then America already had a gun to its head and the hammer was being pulled back to deliver the deathblow.

“We’ll figure out the details after we shovel them into the dirt and read their operation files,” Lyons declared. “By the way, where’s McCarter? I’m surprised that Phoenix Force isn’t also here.” He paused. “Or have they already come and gone?”

Price nodded. “Hours ago. David McCarter and Phoenix Force are already at the Texas missile base checking into the possibility of sabotage,” she said. “But it’s just a feint to throw off the enemy. I’m also sending a couple of blacksuits to check the factory where the missiles were assembled, along with the U.S. Army train that delivered the warheads.”

The members of Able Team looked at her disapprovingly.

“Agreed.” Price sighed. “It’s a long shot, but then, gambles have paid off before.”

“So what is our assignment, another diversion?” Lyons asked, but then he saw her expression. “You found something.” He stated the observation as a fact.

“Hopefully. Aaron found something odd a few minutes ago, just before you arrived.” Price typed briefly on a small keyboard built into the wooden top of the conference table. The main wall screen changed from a view of the world to a satellite photo of southwestern America, then it jumped to a tight shot of Texas. Then again to a small town.

“The city of Sonora,” Price declared just before the name appeared to scroll along the bottom of the screen. “Aaron and his cyber team were surfing the Internet, looking for anything odd around the time of the launch, when they discovered this.” She tapped a button and a side monitor came alive with a newspaper headline from the Sonora Gazette. There was a picture of a smoking hole in the ground and several sheet-draped bodies. “Apparently an empty warehouse outside of town was blown up by a runaway gasoline truck at almost the exact same moment the missiles were launched.”

“How far away from the launch site did this happen?” Lyons asked, studying the article for details. From the struts among the charred wreckage, he would guess the structure had been some sort of a Quonset hut.

“Roughly eighty miles.”

“Interesting. Could the launch have been seen by anybody at the warehouse?” Schwarz asked, tapping a pencil on the table.

Price leaned back in her chair. “Bet your ass. An ICBM launch lights up the night brighter than a NASA space shuttle taking off. And there were three of them this time. Would have looked like the Fourth of July at Christmas.”

“How sure are we that the warehouse was empty?” Blancanales asked pointedly. “Could the records have been faked?”

“At the moment, we don’t know anything about the warehouse,” Price replied honestly. “Aaron ran an inventory search, checked the deed, traced the utilities bills, everything we could think of, and his team has hit a stone wall. Nobody seems to have built the Quonset hut, nobody owns it and there were no customers. Yet the warehouse had an armed man out front in a brick kiosk.”

That sounded like a guard station. “Dead?”

“Absolutely. Same as the truck driver. The preliminary autopsy indicates he was drunk, and that the guard was killed by flying glass.”

“Which could be true,” Blancanales said hesitantly. “However…”

“However, the driver was a Mormon, and they don’t drink,” she stated, sliding a sheet of paper into a slot on the desk. A wall monitor displayed the membership records from Salt Lake City, Utah. “That was a bad slip on the part of our saboteurs. And the guard…well, he seems to have died twice.”

“Twice?” Schwarz asked with a frown. He knew what that meant, and it wasn’t good.

“A spook,” Lyons stated, rubbing his unshaven jaw to the sound of sandpaper on rock. “Interesting.”

“We ran his footprints through the DOD.” Price didn’t have to tell the other people why. They all knew that fingers often got blown off in combat, or too badly mangled to read. However, footprints were just as reliable and inside an Army boot, they had a much higher rate of survival. “Apparently the guard was killed by a sniper near the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan four years ago, and then again yesterday.”

“The corpse have a name?” Lyons inquired.

She snorted. “Aaron found fifteen and they have all proved to be fakes. This guy was so deep undercover that he could have been one of us.”

There was a chilling observation. “That sounds like a CIA black bag operative,” Blancanales mused. Able Team had encountered such men before. The Agency would have an operative pretend to be a civilian and get recruited into the military. Then they would arrange for them to be sent into the heart of the fiercest fighting happening at the time. When the operative arrived, there would be a switch and a corpse would take his place on the battlefield, followed closely by a nice mangling explosion, and the CIA op would faded away, his identify safely removed.

“Anything is possible,” Price agreed, turning away from the screen. “Homeland Security, DOD, he’s obviously a government agent.”

“Yeah,” Schwarz muttered, stroking his mustache. “The question is, which government?” The defunct KGB had been particularly fond of this trick, along with MI-5 in the United Kingdom and the Mossad.

“The guard could have been working for anybody,” Lyons said, typing at another miniature keyboard set in the table and accessing a duplicate of the reports. He quickly flipped through the electronic documents. Nothing, nothing and even more nothing.

Just then, the intercom buzzed softly.

“Price,” the mission controller answered brusquely, touching a switch.

“Bear, here,” a gruff voice replied over the speaker. “My team just pulled in something hot.”

“Excellent,” Price said. “Send it over.”

A moment later there came a soft hum from the table and a document extruded from the printer under the table. When it dropped free, she picked it up and briefly scanned the message. Then she paused and read it again, slowly and more thoroughly.

“It seems that the real owner of the warehouse is the DOD,” she announced, sailing the sheet across the table. “And according to these top-secret inventory records, the Quonset hut was packed to the rafters with defunct electronics from the cold war. Mostly obsolete inertial guidance systems for ICBMs.”

“Son of a bitch,” Blancanales said, snatching up the sheet to read the report. “That’s what used to steer our long-range missiles before we switched to GPS navigation, right?”

“Before we switched to using GPS,” Schwarz said in a monotone, “an intercontinental ballistic missile was a hideously complex and staggeringly sophisticated piece of military ordnance. But not the warheads, of course. Atomic bombs were relatively easy to make. Slap two semicritical pieces of enriched uranium together and they exploded.”

No, the difficult part was delivering the warhead on target, and on time, through the enemy defenses, halfway around the world, without having it veer off and explode in friendly territory. The trick was guidance.

The Pentagon had tried a lot of solutions to the problem, some of them quite bizarre, but in the end, the inertial guidance system proved to be the only viable solution to steering an ICBM at the time. Anchored by gyroscopes, and with fantastically detailed relays, an INS device could precisely deliver a two-story-tall ICBM anywhere with deadly accuracy. However, an inertial guidance system was hideously expensive to manufacture, almost a million dollars a piece, and each unit took nearly six months to construct. Even with computer automation. It was simply that complex a piece of equipment.

During the Reagan administration, the Pentagon had decided to scrap the INS and use the much cheaper GPS. A collection of telecommunication satellites had been launched around the world and placed in stable orbits in specific points above the spinning Earth. The satellites transmitted a complex code and could be read on a receiver to give your precise location on the ground. A civilian model of a receiver would give your location within ten yards, a commercial model within two yards. A military model was dead-on, bull’s-eye accurate. Twenty years ago, the very existence of the GPS network had been beyond top secret. Nowadays, a person could buy a GPS device from the local electronics store to take on the family camping trip, and most of the better luxury cars came with the devices installed at the factory. It was commonplace. Ordinary. Mundane. There wasn’t a plane, train, ship, submarine, missile or long-range weapon system in the world that didn’t use the Global Positioning System as an aid to navigation.

“I thought the GPS network was untouchable,” Price said suspiciously, “the access codes mathematically impossible to break.”

“So did I.” Schwarz sighed deeply. “But I guess these folks found a way. Some new approach, or technique, that we never thought of.”

“Barb, you’d better call Hal and have him inform the President,” Lyons stated brusquely. “The military is down to laser-guided weapons, dead-head rockets and heat-seekers for defense until further notice.”

“All of them short-range weapons and pretty damn useless at stopping an incoming ICBM.”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

Without further comment, Price went to a phone on the wall and started punching buttons.

“Okay, if the saboteurs—or rather, the hackers—hit the warehouse before they stole the missiles,” Blancanales said slowly, narrowing his gaze, “that means they’re afraid we might fix this before a real war starts.”

“Which certainly seems to be their goal,” Lyons noted.

“Agreed. This seems to say that time is critical to them.”

“Then we just have to move faster,” Schwarz added somberly.

Deep in thought, Blancanales pulled in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Gadgets, any idea how long it might take for Jet Propulsion Laboratory to make replacement units?”

“I’m sure the templates are still in storage somewhere,” the man said hesitantly. “Unless they were also in the warehouse. But even if they have to work from scratch, I’d estimate three months, maybe only two.”

“No better than that?” Price demanded unhappily, hanging up the receiver.

Schwarz shrugged. “Hey, it used to take six months to build the things, and the very first model took years to perfect.”

“All right, inertial guidance systems are expensive, rare and delicate,” Lyons said, looking upward to stare at the featureless ceiling. “So let’s use that to our advantage.”

“What do you mean?” Price asked, reclaiming her chair.

“If we had more inertial guidance units, our ICBMs would be safe and the terrorists would be out of business.”

Slowly, her face lit up. “So we make more of them. Hundreds more. On paper.”

“Exactly. Then when the terrorists attack the fake warehouse,” Lyons said, “we grab a few alive and twist the location of their base out of them.”

“And how they’re doing it,” Schwarz added, gesturing with a finger. “That’s paramount.”

“Agreed.”

Price said nothing. She could image what would be involved in the process. Able Team wouldn’t torture a prisoner for information, no matter how badly it was needed, but there were a lot of ways a man could be forced to talk. Including letting him escape and following him back to his base of operations. However, that was used only when the situation was truly desperate. Sometimes, the “rabbit” would simply run, staying far away from his comrades. But then, nothing was certain in life except death.

Tapping on the intercom, Price said, “Bear?”

“Yeah?” the man replied.

“We need you to create a virtual warehouse full of INS devices,” Price told him.

“What for?” Kurtzman growled over the speaker. “Oh, I get it. A trap. Sure. Where do you want it located? I know of a DOD warehouse in Columbus, Ohio, where we store nonsensitive documents. Easy enough to switch the inventory to guidance systems…no, that would be much too close. The warehouse has to be as far away as possible, but still on American soil.”

“Good point. How about Puerto Rico?” Blancanales suggested, leaning forward in his chair. “I know for a fact that the U.S. government already has several long-term storage facilities on the island.”

“Sounds fine,” Kurtzman replied.

“As soon as you have the fake warehouse filed, I’ll pull Phoenix Force off their inspection and have them order the technicians at the silo to prepare the other missiles for an emergency retrofit,” Price said. “Then they’ll take a standard military transport to Puerto Rico, requisition a cargo truck and drive off into the jungle, with a return flight scheduled for an hour.”

“Why not helicopters?”

“The winds are too strong in some of the more remote valleys,” she answered. “Besides, trucks are slower. Which gives the terrorists time to stage an ambush. So choose someplace appropriate, Aaron. Far from civilians.”

“With plenty of combat room. I understand. No problem,” the man replied, and the intercom clicked silent.

“How can we be sure the terrorists find out in time?” Blancanales asked, furrowing his brow.

“How did they learn about the first warehouse?” Price countered, typing on the keyboard. “Now, I want you three in Sonora, ASAP. These people would be fools not to have somebody watching the ruined warehouse to see who we send to investigate.” She smiled coldly. “That’s why I didn’t send Phoenix Force there first. Make them sweat a little. Nervous people make mistakes.”

“If I was any more nervous I’d need a change of underwear,” Schwarz quipped.

“Again?” Blancanales retorted.

Ignoring the banter, Lyons pulled a .357 Magnum Colt Python from behind his back and swung out the cylinder to check the load. He closed the gun with a firm click. “How soon can Jack be ready to fly us down to Texas?”

“He’s warming up a C-130 Hercules at Dulles right now,” Price replied, looking up from the keyboard. “Your equipment van is already being loaded. And a blacksuit has a helicopter on the front lawn waiting for you. Find me somebody, and burn the rope.”

Stoically, the three members of Able Team rose from the table, gathered their personal belongings and headed for the door.

“Move fast on this,” Price ordered in dismissal. “The numbers are already falling. You have no idea how close we came to the end of everything last night.”

But the men were already gone, the armored door swinging closed behind them.

“Good luck,” the mission controller added softly, returning to her typing. For a long while, the only sounds in the War Room were the soft patting of her strong fingers and the steady ticking of the mechanical clock mounted on the concrete wall.

CHAPTER THREE

Panama Canal, Panama

As the thick steel gates of the lock began to swing aside, the colossal Pennsylvania loomed in the opening, dominating everything with its sheer size.

“Back off!” the harbor master screamed into a radio microphone. The man was bent over a twinkling console in the control room of Lock Command. “Veer starboard! I said starboard, not port, you fool!”

But the American oil tanker continued irrevocably onward, the ship’s computer totally confused by the conflicting information it was receiving from the channel markers and the GPS network. On the bridge of the Pennsylvania, the frantic captain was attempting to seize manual control of the huge vessel, but before he could, it was too late.

In a horrible groan of crushing steel, the prow of the ship crumpled against the open lock of the canal. The seams split, internal pipes burst and a tidal wave of thick, black crude oil gushed from the ship to spread across the surface of the water. The captain finally achieved control of his misguided vessel and applied full reverse, but driven by inertia, the million-ton tanker kept moving, sparks flying from metal grinding against metal. The bright spray touched the black torrent and the oil whoofed into flames. Rapidly, the fire spread across the water to lap against the walls of the open lock and spill into the next compartment of the waterway.

Still moving in the wrong direction, the wounded hull of the shuddering American tanker continued to yawn, the rush of oil dramatically increasing. Caught in the black deluge, a tugboat was capsized and several other ships became engulfed by the pool of fire—a Mexican fishing trawler, an Australian yacht and a gunboat of the Brazilian navy. The sails of the yacht instantly burst into flames, as did the nets of the trawler. With nowhere else to run, the crews took refuge from the conflagration belowdecks, but only minutes later their wooden hulls caught fire and men began to shriek.

Lurching into action, the Brazilian gunboat rushed to offer assistance. Sailors helped sailors; that was the rule of the sea. But, blinded by the dense smoke, the warcraft rammed directly into the trawler. The weakened hull splintered apart, exposing the vulnerable fuel tanks. As the oil fire reached inside, the gasoline lines caught like fuses, drawing the deadly blaze to the main fuel tanks.

Trapped between two of the locks, the Pennsylvania completely blocked the passageway as the crude oil continued to pour out, the internal safeties overwhelmed by the sheer amount of damage done to the crippled hull.

Standing along the side of the canal, behind an iron pipe safety railing, was a huge crowd of horrified civilians. The majestic passing of the international ships through the locks was always a big tourist attraction. Cameras flashed and cell phones took endless pictures of the mounting disaster.

In a thundering blast, the trawler exploded, the flying engine parts hammering holes in the gunboat, the oil flames seeping inside, spreading along the metal decks toward the ammunition lockers. Retardant foam gushed from the ceiling, and men dived forward to shut water-tight hatches, but it wasn’t enough and the writhing flames reached the stores of munitions, washing across the missiles, shells and depth charges. For a single heartbeat it seemed that nothing would happen, then the Brazilian gunboat vanished inside a massive fireball, the deadly halo of shrapnel tearing the yacht into splinters, and riddling the hull of the Pennsylvania to actually increase the flow of crude oil into the beleaguered lock.

Behind the railing, a hundred tourists fell as bloody lumps, their shattered bodies torn to pieces, the arms and legs gone. The few wounded survivors began to scream for their lives. But the flashing of their cameras and cell phones never seemed to stop.

Bitter smoke was everywhere, Klaxons rang like gongs, sirens howled and the primary pumps for all of the other locks automatically shut down, closing the vital canal to all traffic until further notice.

Lujan, Argentina

W ITH HEAVY TIRES HUMMING on the smooth roadway beneath the APC, a group of armed soldiers sat along the metal walls in cushioned jump seats, smoking and laughing. Suddenly there was a soft chime and a soldier opened a laptop to read the incoming e-mail. It took a few moments for the software to decode the garbled message.

“Good news, sir,” the soldier announced in grim satisfaction. “We just took out the Panama Canal.”

“Excellent,” General Rolf Calvano replied without any warmth or feeling about the matter.

Staring out a viewport, the grizzled veteran watched the seemingly endless mob of fat civilians pass by the armored personnel carrier. The sheet of bulletproof Lexan plastic didn’t distort the view in any way. More’s the pity, he thought. It wasn’t even market day and the noisy crowd completely choked the wide thoroughfare, spilling off the sidewalks and filling the streets.

As the APC stopped at a crosswalk, a dozen eager hands tried the handles, attempting to get inside to the passengers. But the driver of the military vehicle simply moved onward, the feeble attempts yielding nothing but frustration and the occasional bruised foot. In spite of its tremendous bulk, the APC was sporting slippers, rubber cushions, on the treads to prevent damage to the paved city streets, and also to any idiotic civilians.

Shouting loudly, everybody in the stores and along the sidewalks was offering items for sale. Scowling darkly, General Calvano felt distaste rise within him like the rank, sour bile that heralded vomiting.

“Too many people,” he muttered. Food prices were becoming ridiculous, gasoline outrageous. There were housing shortages, and away from Buenos Aires, at least once a week the electricity went down. Not enough generators, not enough power lines, not enough cars, trucks, farms….

Like rats trapped in a cage, humanity was breeding itself to death. The truth was in every newspaper, every broadcast, on the Web, floating in the air. Overpopulation threatened the stability of the entire world, and when the end came it wouldn’t be pretty. Natural resources were running short. The Americans were already embroiled in a war for oil. Soon, it would be for cropland. Worldwide rationing would follow, then food riots, civilians fighting one another like ants over scraps, and finally would come the ultimate horror of cannibalism.

The general grimaced at the very word. Cannibalism, the single, filthiest sin that it was possible to commit. To eat the flesh of your own kind was blasphemy beyond any salvation.

In spite of iron self-control, General Calvano shivered in remembrance of the bitter cold of that horrible month spent in the Andes, a young recruit trapped with his platoon in a cave by the unexpected avalanche. When the supplies ran out, the soldiers were forced to eat their boots, paperback books, anything possible. But as the slow days passed in an interminable march toward starvation, at last, straws had been drawn, and the killing commenced. At first a man voluntarily took his life, dying so that the others might live. But then it became a contest of the strongest, the meanest, and the true nature of Man had been brutally revealed to the young private in hellish clarity. Men were beasts, merely another form of animal, and would always revert to their base feral nature when it became a matter of survival.

As the foul memory welled, the general tried to block the taste, vaguely of pork, more like chicken. Acid flooded his gut at the horrid recollection, and he forced away the dark thoughts, denying their very existence. He alone had walked from the cave when a warm rain had finally melted away the blockage of deadly snow. He survived to walk a hundred miles through the barren hills until finding an isolated village and taking refuge near the blazing forge of the local blacksmith. As the teenager lay shivering on the dirty floor, his plan to save the world had been born. It had been crude, simplistic, but over the long years, the youth had become a man, and the plan had also grown in complexity and sophistication until it blossomed into fruition. Those American ICBMs had only been the first step toward salvation.

“Just too many people,” Calvano whispered, the words thick with hatred.

The corporal driving the APC paid no attention to the mutterings of his commanding officer. As did the other soldiers riding in the rear. Brand-new FN-2000 assault rifles lay across their laps, the 40 mm grenade launchers slung beneath the barrels loaded with AP rounds and ready to be released at a moment’s notice. They were the chosen elite, the personal guards for the leader of Forge.

Normally, officers in the Argentine army didn’t have bodyguards, but then the 67th Battalion wasn’t a normal unit, nor was Firebase Alpha. Once the soldiers had been told the truth, they eagerly joined Forge, and now worked for the general, the man who would become the unwanted savior of humanity.

Turning a corner, the APC nearly clipped a parked taxicab. The snoozing driver came to with a jerk and started to curse and wave a fist. The general knew that there was little chance of his losing a fare from the profanity. There were so many people, but everybody was walking. Cabs were expensive, while God had made feet for free.

If there really was a God, Calvano noted sourly, which he highly doubted. Enough prayers had been said over the centuries, and there had never been a reply.

Among the people thronging the sidewalks, Calvano noted drug deals happening, and instinctively reached for the 9 mm Bersa pistol holstered at his side. Then stayed his hand.

Not yet. But soon, the general noted. However, he marked the face of the traitor for later extermination along with the rest of the vermin and filth.

In a passing alleyway, Calvano saw a fat prostitute on her knees, servicing a grinning customer in the reeking shadows, garbage strewed on the ground around them. Disgusting. A professional soldier, the general wasn’t a prude, and very much in favor of recreational sex. He had a wife in Rosario and a mistress in Chivilcoy. But only the wife had been allowed to have children. After that, the general had gotten himself a vasectomy. The very minor surgery was virtually unheard of by the macho men of his backward country, and Calvano had been forced to fly to Canada.

Both of the children had been girls, which was fine with the general. Calvano wasn’t a sexist like so many of his brethren. Argentine culture was an odd mixture of Spanish pride and German rigidity, along with a certain fine madness mixed into the gene pool from the tropical paradise they lived in, and were slowly paving under with concrete and asphalt. But his little girls were fine, safe with their mother in his farm to the north, far, oh so very far away from the coming apocalypse.

As the limo stopped at an intersection, a starving man in rags appeared and started to wash the prow of the APC with a squeegee dipped into a bucket of soapy water. Normally it would have been done to the glass windshield of a car, but the man diligently washed the armor while smiling with a gap-toothed grin.

Not just an old cloth, the general noted sourly. This poor man’s job was to clean the dust from passing vehicles. He had found a way to survive. For that he applauded the man’s ingenuity, even though he hated his very existence.

“Sir, should I…” the driver asked hesitantly, pulling a wad of brightly colored pesos from his shirt pocket.

“Drive on,” the general commanded brusquely. “Give him nothing.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver replied, tucking the money away.

As the light changed, the APC surged forward, leaving the frustrated old man behind shouting obscenities and waving the squeegee in a threatening manner.

The sight made the general deeply sad. Calvano remembered when Argentina had been a beautiful land. The air and water had been clean, and crimes were few because justice had been swift. But the nation had started crumbling when the fat fool Peron and his wife took control, and was nearly bankrupt when they left. And the Americans had written a musical about the stupid bitch! he thought derisively.

Now there were homeless people living in cardboard boxes and under bridges. Crime was out of control, and food was becoming almost too expensive to buy. Only gasoline, made right there, was plentiful and cheap. A mixed blessing, as the smog was getting worse every year, even out on the ranch-lands of the wide pampas. And smog brought lung disease, which meant more sick people, more hospitals, more taxes….

As the APC left the town, the roadway became clear of traffic and the driver dutifully increased speed until the lush green countryside was flashing past the military vehicle. Fresh, clean air came in through the louvered vents, and the soldiers joked about the lack of taste as they breathed in deeply.

Lost in his own thoughts, the somber general didn’t join in the casual banter. Air pollution, water pollution…humanity was a cancer, eating itself alive, choking on the waste products and wondering what had gone wrong. Numbers didn’t lie. World population was over six billion! India and China each had a billion, and soon so would other nations. In a high-secret report, the general had read about the S2 in Brazil acually rounding up their homeless people and machine-gunning them to death in warehouses late at night to try to curb the runaway poverty. Too many people and not enough jobs.

But population control wasn’t the answer. New food technologies weren’t the answer. Oh, no. Only the general seemed to understand the gravity of the situation. One man could live in a telephone booth, but not two, and certainly not five, ten…twenty…There were just too many people in the world. Unfettered and out of control. There was only one solution. Radical surgery. Amputation of the surplus population. There were six billion people in the world, so kill five to save one billion. The numbers were harsh and unforgiving, but acceptable. A soldier’s burden.

Once, long ago, when fighting Communists from Chile trying to invade Argentina, Calvano had stationed a troop of men to hold a bridge at any cost while the rest of his battalion retreated to safety. A hundred men assigned to die so that a thousand could live. On paper it sounds like nothing. But he had looked directly into the faces of those brave men, those soldiers, when he told them to stay and die. And they had done as ordered. They stood the line and did their job, which saved the battalion. How could he do any less?

In sharp detail, Calvano still remembered the looks in their eyes as comprehension came. The flash of shock, the rage, the fear, and then the grim understanding of what had to be done. They died, or everybody died. It was that simple. There was no third option. The soldiers accepted the responsibility and stood their ground in a small foundry overlooking some nameless bridge. Long afterward, when the stripped bodies of his men had been recovered, Calvano found the last two soldiers lying behind a cold forge where they had made their final stand. There wasn’t a bullet in their guns, and three of the rebels lying dead on the floor had been taken out by hammers. Hammers! Those heroic bastards had fought to the very end, beyond hope, beyond sanity, delaying the enemy at any cost. And it had happened at a forge again. The young major took it as a sign from the Lord God, and that very night Forge was born. Soldiers determined to fight to the end at any cost, to give one last chance for a world gone mad.

Slowing to a halt to let a herd of cows cross the highway, the driver floored the APC and headed into the suburbs. Long stretches of track homes appeared, only to be replaced with green, rolling countryside that quickly became dense misty forest.

“Sir, we’d better take the back way in,” the driver said, touching the radio receiver on his head. “There’s a traffic jam on the continental highway.”

“What’s the problem?” the general demanded, frowning. His constant growing fear was that the Americans might send one of the covert assassination squads to kill him before the great task could be finished. He slept with a guard dog in his room, bars on the windows and a loaded assault rifle resting against the headboard.

“Some sort of crash on the Pergamino Bridge, sir. A truck hit a bus, and the cars behind plowed into them and…” He waved a hand in an expressive circle.

And everybody panicked, smashing into each other until cars were falling off the bridge like rats fleeing a burning ship, Calvano noted in repulsion. There was no room anymore, not even on the big roadways. Too many people.

“Do as you think best, Corporal,” Calvano commanded, sitting back and pulling out a cigar from inside his uniform jacket.

“Yes, sir.”

Lighting a match, the general let the sulfur burn off completely before applying the flame to the end. Drawing in the dark smoke with true satisfaction, Calvano pulled the fumes in his lungs until they threatened to burst, then exhaled twin streams through his nose. Tobacco was the only drug of which he approved. Nicotine kept a soldier’s mind sharp, not befogged and stupid, like alcohol or marijuana. Hard drugs were strictly forbidden in the Argentine army, and in Forge their use was punishable by a public whipping for the first offense and a bullet to the head for the second time. Discipline was the key. The whole world simply needed more discipline! Calvano knew.

Veering off the main highway, the APC began a serpentine journey into the wild hills, leaving every trace of civilization behind. Located deep in the mountainous terrain, Firebase Alpha had once been a secret base of operations for the Communist rebels. But after clearing them out with VX nerve gas, General Calvano had then simply moved into the stronghold and taken over the place for himself, and Forge.

The deadly VX nerve gas purchased from a Russian arms dealer had proved to be most efficient, odorless and fast, but extremely painful. The rebels died screaming, ripping off their own melting flesh. Most of the Communists had used handguns on themselves to end the horrible agony. When Calvano rode unopposed into the camp the next day, only a handful of the rebels were still alive, grotesque twitching lumps on the ground. By his command, the troops encircled the dying rebels with wooden sawhorses and left them untouched to slowly die in the hot sun. Naked under the very eyes of God.

The base had proved to be a godsend. It was amazingly well stocked with weapons, fuel, food and communications equipment. The isolated valley was far from the annoying TV cameras of the news media, along with the watchful eyes of Argentine Military High Command. Hidden in the deep woods, the general had the privacy needed to build his private army. Out here in the wild forests of western Argentina, Calvano was king, free to do whatever he wished. There was no law, except his commands.

Surprisingly, the rebels had an underground bunker holding a staggering amount of hard currency, in very short supply in Argentina at the time, along with a tremendous supply of raw heroin they had been planning on selling cheaply to the decadent politicians and lawmakers to help corrode the fledgling democracy from within. Merely another good reason to kill every rebel without mercy, Calvano thought. He was only sorry that so many of them had perished so quickly from the VX gas. Criminals should pay for their crimes.

Debating the matter for only a few minutes, Calvano had taken all of the cash for Forge, and acquired an huge additional profit when he sold the narcotics to the gangsters of the Chilean underworld. In fact, the transaction had proved so profitable, the general regularly sent his private forces into Peru to raid the drug factories there and to seize more drugs to sell to Chile.

Let those fat fool idiots on the coast see to their own problems, Calvano noted callously. My only concern is Argentina.

Millions poured into the coffers of Forge, and a good thing, too. Constructing the other firebases had proved incredibly expensive, but vitally necessary. According to Professor Reinhold, there had to be a minimum of two uplinks to maintain their delicate control of the worldwide GPS network. The scientist tried to explain the technical details once, but the general soon became lost in the mathematical equations, and just took the matter on faith. Reinhold was one of them, a valued member of Forge, and fiercely dedicated to saving the human race from its own stupidity. Although unknown to the professor, there was also a hidden cache of VX hidden in the Black Fortress that the general could release by remote control. Just in case it was ever necessary to purge the mesa of rebellious personnel. Failure came from sloppy work, not a clever enemy, he believed.

“Here we are, sir,” the driver announced, slowing at a gravel road.

Grunting in acknowledgment, Calvano dropped the cigar to crush it under his boot, then reached into his jacket to withdraw a small remote control. He pressed a few buttons and waited. After a moment, there came an answering beep and a tiny LED flashed green.

“You may proceed, Corporal,” he said, tucking away the box once more.

“Yes, sir!”

Now the APC advanced onto the minefield, the loose gravel crunching under the weight of the heavy tires. Swinging around a copse of tall trees, Calvano looked closely, but only caught a brief glimpse of the large satellite dish antenna hidden among the dense greenery.

Passing a brick kiosk surrounded by a low sandbag nest, the general noted the Forge guards stood alert and wary, with hands on their assault rifles. Then he saw the woman.

“Hold!” the general bellowed, already rising from his jump seat.

Quickly, the driver braked the APC to a halt, but Calvano was out the sliding hatch before the vehicle had ceased rocking back and forth.

Walking across the blacktop, General Calvano scowled at the strange woman tied securely to a base of a metal flag pole. High above, the flag of Argentina fluttered in the soft breeze. Her clothes were in disarray, ripped and torn, the exposed skin underneath badly bruised. The nipple of one breast was showing, and it appeared to have been bitten. Gray duct tape covered her mouth. Weakly, she looked up from the ground with an expression of terror.

“And who is this?” Calvano demanded, pointing a finger at the cringing prisoner.

“Shelly Scoville, a news reporter from the capital,” a burly sergeant said, snapping off a brisk salute. “We found her ID in her purse, along with a digital camera and a lot of memory sticks.”

“We caught her trying to sneak into the base,” another man added proudly.

Feeling hot anger building inside his mind, the general said, “And it seems she put up quite a struggle. How many of you did it require to capture the news reporter? Ten, perhaps twelve?”

The sergeant seemed confused, and looked around at his fellow guards. They were staying near the kiosk, as if distancing themselves from the man.

“I…we caught her easily, sir,” the man said warily. “But I…we roughed her up some to make sure she was working alone, and didn’t have any friends lurking in the woods.”

“The woods around the firebase filled with proximity sensors and land mines?” Calvano asked pointedly.

“Yes, sir. I…That is…” The sergeant faltered, unsure of what should be the correct reply. “I was just doing my job, sir.”

“We’ll see about that,” the general replied coldly, turning to the woman. On closer inspection, several of her fingers were broken, the nails bent back. “I assume she talked?”

“Yes, sir!” the sergeant answered smartly. “She’s alone, working on a magazine article about forest fires and—”

The gunshot shattered the stillness of the forest, and birds took flight from the nearby trees as the dead woman slumped to the ground.

“We are not rebels, you stinking piece of filth! We’re soldiers! And soldiers do not torture prisoners!” Calvano bellowed, then stopped. As she splayed on the freshly mowed grass, he could see there were fresh scratches along her inner thighs. The stockings were torn to shreds, and there was no sign of her underwear.

“Who did that? ” Calvano demanded in a whisper, pivoting on a heel. The smoking Bersa pistol was still in his clenched fist, the ejected brass shiny near his boot like a fallen star. Then his voice came back in a strident roar. “Who raped a helpless prisoner on my base?”

The other Forge guards moved away from the sergeant, who suddenly started to sweat profusely in spite of the coolness of the day. “Sir, I…that is…” the man stuttered, then took hold of himself. “Sir, we haven’t been to town in months, and since she was going to die anyway, I didn’t see the harm in a little taste….”

With a flick of the wrist, Calvano raised the gun again and fired. A neat black hole appeared in the forehead of the sergeant and he stumbled backward, blood and a sort of thin, watery fluid beginning to pour from the hole in his brain. As the sergeant’s fingers twitched, the FN 2000 assault rifle stuttered, the 5.56 mm rounds stitching a line of destruction directly in front of the general and heading his way. As if he was carved from winter ice, Calvano didn’t move, but instead fired twice more directly into the chest of the dying man.

Crumpling with a sigh, the soldier collapsed and went still.

“We are not killing four billion people only to put animals in charge!” the general stated furiously. His eyes held an insane look, and his gun swept the assembled men, pointing to each one in turn. Nobody moved. Then the 9 mm pistol was smoothly holstered.

“We are not terrorists, criminals or the American CIA!” the general continued. “We are soldiers! The saviors of the human race! And we do not torture prisoners, we kill the enemy! Period. Is that clear?”

The soldiers nodded quickly, saying nothing.

“Now bury her in the trees,” Calvano said, turning his back on the guards. “And throw him into the ravine for the ants to eat.”

As the guards rushed to obey, the general glanced at the waiting APC. His bodyguards were standing near the machine, their weapons at the ready, the driver at the gun turret, only his eyes showing behind the 7.62 mm electric minigun.

Feeling a rush of pride, General Calvano gave them a nod of approval, which was returned. Now those were soldiers, men of honor. There might have to be a thinning of his battalion after the nuclear war. There were just too many unreliables among the troopers.

Turning away from the APC, Calvano strode across the access bridge, his boots ringing against the corrugated aluminum. There was no safety railing for an invading force to hide behind, and a score of land mines were bolted to the underside of the prefabricated bridge in case an invading force needed to be stopped.

With a sputtering roar, the APC came alive and followed after the general, the bridge trembling slightly from the tremendous weight of the military vehicle.

Once past the sighing trees, Calvano smiled as Firebase Alpha came into view. A civilian might find the military installation rather drab and plain-looking, but to any combat soldier it was beautiful. The base was a sprawling expanse of squat concrete buildings surrounded by an electrified fence topped with razor-sharp concertina wire. An insulated fence formed a path of safety for the dogs padding around the firebase on patrol. Dimly seen soldiers watched with binoculars from behind the bulletproof glass of the tall guard towers, and there were subtle movements inside the dark concrete pillboxes at the corner of the electric fence. Canvas sheets covered the gunports, and there was no way to tell there was a 40 mm Vulcan minigun inside each squat redoubt.

More guards walked the flat roofs of interior buildings, and white whisps of mist rose from the ventilation fans of the command center, exhaust from the liquid nitrogen used to cool down the massive Cray SVG Supercomputer in the reinforced basement. The chief hacker for Forge had insisted on the installation of the SOTA hardware, and had proved its usefulness many times over. Nobody could properly pronounce his real name, so the soldiers liked to call the little man Snake Eater. Apparently he had been involved in some trouble in Calcutta a while back, and fled to Argentina. The computer expert had found refuge in the ranks of Forge.

Approaching the armored gate, Calvano snapped his fingers impatiently and the soldiers in the brick kiosk rushed to the control panel. As the APC lumbered to a halt behind the general, the solid slab of steel used as an anticrash stanchion descended from sight with the sound of working hydraulic machinery. Now, woven steel nets were raised, closing off the dog tunnel, and the gate loudly unlocked, then began to ponderously swing aside. The driver of the APC shifted the vehicle into gear, but Calvano didn’t move.

Major Domingo San-Martin rushed toward the front gate from the command center. The short, heavyset officer held a sheet of crumpled paper in his hand. The general grimaced at the sight. That couldn’t be good news.

“Sir…” Major San-Martin gasped, coming to a halt only a few feet away. “I saw you on the bridge—”

“What has happened?” Calvano demanded, snatching away the fax. The paper was covered in complex double lines of alphanumeric code, but the translation was written underneath each in red pencil.

“There is another…warehouse…sir,” the man gasped.

The general went still. “Impossible.”

“The Americans…are preparing all of their remaining missiles for a retrofit,” he said, stumbling slightly over the odd term. “The inspection team in Texas is racing to Puerto Rico, and has a scheduled stay of only an hour.” Color was returning to his face, and his chest no longer heaved.

So they did have more, Calvano thought. Or was it a trap? The Americans often acted stupidly but were rarely fools. If there were more warehouses with replacement INS units, Forge would have to shut down operations. Perhaps permanently.

“We could crash their place on the return flight,” San-Martin suggested. “It would be easy enough to send a few commercial flights into their path.”

“Which would send all evidence to the bottom of the sea,” the general growled, crumpling the fax in his hand. “If there are replacement units in Puerto Rico, I need to know. Have Snake Eater assign a local team to handle the matter. They’re to kill everybody on sight and destroy any INS units discovered. But I want a confirmation either way.”

“Understood, sir.” The major turned to go.

“And send Lieutenant Caramico back to Sonora,” Calvano added.

The officer stopped and turned slowly. “But, sir, we specifically sent her away from the town in case the Americans tried to capture some of our people for questioning.”

“Now we wish to do the same,” the general stated. “The natural place to capture us would be at the warehouse, so have her avoid it completely. Watch the airport…no, the local law enforcement, police, sheriff, whatever they have. The CIA will certainly touch base with the people who were first at the scene of the fire. That will be the place to get prisoners for questioning.”

“Questioning?” the major repeated slowly. He awaited clarification. It was a strange order coming from the general.

Feeling a mounting dread, General Calvano glanced backward at the guard post, the team of men burying the dead news reporter. Something trembled inside his soul, then died. This was a war for survival of the species. Sacrifices would have to be made. So he would perform the first. “Torture the Americans in any way necessary, but get me some answers.”

The major smiled in relief. At least the kid gloves were coming off and the troops were free to do whatever was needed to save their beloved homeland. The rest of the world could die in flames, but Argentina would survive the coming holocaust no matter what.

“No problem, sir,” Major San-Martin replied eagerly. “The lieutenant has Sergeant Mendoza with her. He’s the perfect man for this sort of thing.”

“Yes, I know,” Calvano said. “And have the professor prepare for phase two.”

“It will be my pleasure, sir.” The major saluted, then sprinted toward the communications bunker.

There, it is done, Calvano noted, staring after the officer. I’ve crossed the line between soldier and terrorist. I am no longer an honorable man. Oddly though, a great weight was lifted from his shoulders at the decision, and the general felt exhilarated, almost intoxicated at the rush of total freedom. There were no more rules anymore, only results.

With a low rumble, the APC came alive and started after the general, the great machine advancing until it loomed over the man, casting him into a dark shadow.

CHAPTER FOUR

Makran Coast, Pakistan

“Red alert!” a voice boomed over the PA system of the U.S. Navy frigate as Klaxons blared. “Red alert!”

Erupting into action, the crew of the USS Canton scrambled for their posts even as the Phalanx guns at the bow and stern swung about automatically and started roaring at full blast. Guided by radar, the Vulcan miniguns vomited a fiery barrage of 40 mm shells at the incoming missile, the rapid-fire cannons spraying a wall of soft lead and steel pellets into the air.

With a violent concussion, the two LAW rockets fired from the hills along the rocky shore exploded in midair, peppering the sea with hot shrapnel until the water appeared to be boiling.

The crew cheered and quickly reloaded their weapons. Riding low in the choppy water, the USS Canton was anchored just off the desolate Makran Coast of Pakistan. There were no fishing villages along most of the coastline, the sea being far too heavily polluted from the oil refineries of Iran to the west and the steel industries of India to the east. But this section was possibly the worst. The coast resembled the lunar surface with bare jagged mountain covered by stiletto-like spires. There was only sparse vegetation, raggedy plants and leafy weeds struggling to stay alive in a hostile land, only a few randomly scattered acacia trees. Nearby was a gurgling mud volcano, the geological phenomenon endlessly pumping out waves of bubbling mud, the sluggish river of muck flowing along the cracked ridges and dissolving the sandstone formations on its way to the murky sea. Visibility was almost nil in the thick waters, and if there were any fish in the area, the sonar operator of the Canton couldn’t find them. The crew knew they were still on the planet Earth, but had to keep reminding themselves of the fact.

On the bridge of the Canton, Captain David Henderson lowered his binoculars and grudgingly admired the strategy of the Afghanistan rebels. If they could get America embroiled in a shooting war with Pakistan, then the U.S. Navy would be hard-pressed to aid the NATO troops inside Afghanistan hunting down terrorist training camps.

“Ready a Tomahawk,” Henderson said calmly as the bow Phalanx fired again. Then it swung to a new position and fired twice more.

Barely visible in the swirling steam of the mud volcano, another missile exploded, only doing damage to the ragged plants along the crumbling cliffs.

“And let HQ know we are under fire from the hills,” the captain added over a shoulder. “These appear to be LAW rockets from the look of the contrail.”

“Sir!” a man replied from the communications board inside the bridge. Swiftly, the man started to relay the information to the Pentagon via satellite.

Stoically, Henderson went back to watching the shore. LAW rockets against a frigate? The Afghans had to be desperate to try that. Even if they hit the ship, which was highly unlikely, the rockets simply didn’t have enough power to punch through the armored hull. It’d be like throwing grenades at the Empire State Building.

“Tomahawks ready, sir!” a lieutenant reported crisply, with a salute. “On your command.”

“Double check the coordinates,” Henderson ordered, sweeping the coastline once more with the binoculars. “We want to hit that training camp outside of Safar, not the American troops encircling the damn place.” Three hundred miles wasn’t a long distance for a Tomahawk, but the old fortress the warlord ruled was small, and the troops in close quarters. The tiniest slip in the coordinates could spell a disaster.

On the stern deck of the Canton, sailors were returning fire at the snipers in the hills with an Armbrust. There was a snowy backblast of nitrogen flakes from the aft end of the launcher, and the rocket streaked away. But unlike the incoming LAW rockets, there was no smoke from the projectile to reveal its trajectory.

A few moments later there was a bright flash among the scraggly trees on a small cliff, and a fireball of white phosphorous spread across the ledge. Covered with flames, screaming men rose from behind the boulders to dash about madly. The sailors at the port-side gun emplacement opened fire with a .50-caliber machine gun and another Armbrust. In a muted crack, the ledge broke into pieces, slowly coming away from the sandstone cliff, bodies and boulders plummeting straight down into the gelatinous brown sea.

“Well done, men,” the captain said, trying unsuccessfully to keep a tone of satisfaction from his voice. “Lieutenant, fire the Tomahawks!”

In a double explosion of smoke, two metal lids blew open on the honeycomb on the main deck and a pair of sleek missiles lifted into the sky, then streaked away to disappear inland.

“Heading?” the captain asked, squinting after the Tomahawks. Funny, he actually thought that he could see the airborne missiles. But that was impossible. They were both much too far away by now to be spotted by the naked eye.

“Aye, sir,” a lieutenant replied, hunched over the radar screen. “Missiles are at…” He paused to work the controls, the beeps strangely coming faster and faster. Then the men looked up in confusion and horror. “Sir! One of them is coming right back at us!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the captain demanded, turning away from the coastline. “Double check your instruments! It must be just another LAW coming in, that’s all.”

“No, sir, this is a Hawk!” the man replied, the beeps almost a single tone now, they were happening so fast. His hand hovered over the self-destruct switch. “Should I abort?”

Was the man serious? Henderson thought. Snapping his head back toward the craggy coastline, the captain briefly saw something moving in the air, coming straight for the frigate. He waited for the Phalanx system to engage, but the guns did nothing, the military software of the computer-guided radar strictly forbidding the guns to fire upon any Navy missile, even one coming straight for the ship.

“Abort!” the captain bellowed.

The lieutenant slapped the switch, but it was too late. Moving almost too fast to visually track, the Tomahawk slammed directly into the open hatch it had just launched from less than a minute ago.

A strident explosion shook the entire vessel from stem to stern, the fiery blast blowing out the portholes and causeways, throwing burning bodies into the sea. For a single heartbeat, Henderson thought the internal firewalls might just hold.

In a thundering staccato, the rest of the complement of Tomahawks detonated belowdecks, and the Canton lifted from the water and burst from within, the armored hull rent apart from the multiple trip-hammer detonations.

For several long minutes debris and corpses rained from the sky, hissing as they plummeted into the dirty water. But when the hellish rain eventually ceased, the USS Canton was gone, completely obliterated.

T HREE HUNDRED MILES away from the coastline, the second Tomahawk cruise missile checked the GPS network and sharply veered around a tall mountain peak to flash down into a valley below, and then around another outcropping.

Running across the barren landscape, U.S. Army troops and tanks were steadily surrounding an ancient fortress carved into the rock of a hill. The resilient walls had withstood attacks by Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon and the Soviet Union. But now the rocks were cracked and weakening from the nonstop barrage of shells unleashed by the American tanks. A thousand Afghani fighters along the walls of the fortress were firing at the American soldiers with old AK-47 assault rifles, and doing very little to stop the steady advance.

The row of Abrams tanks fired again and a huge section of the sandstone palisade burst apart, the explosion and halo of rock splinters killing dozens inside the ancient fortress. Smoke and flame and blood was everywhere, and the screams of the dying men seeming to last forever.

Standing defiantly on the parapet, the Afghan warlord grimly watched the enemy come ever closer, knowing this was his last day alive, and that there was nothing he could do but try to die with dignity.

The Yanks will not pull me from some hidey-hole to parade on TV for the amusement of their fat children, the warlord raged internally, working the arming bolt of his Kalashnikov. I will die on my feet with a weapon in my hand like a man!

“Shar, incoming missile!” the bearded man cried from the old WWII radar console. A luminous green arm swept around the graduate screen, beeping softly.

The warlord raised an eyebrow at the pronouncement. Vaguely in the distance, he could see a streaking firebird, weaving a patch along the convoluted contours of the hilly land, avoiding the boulders and outcroppings as if it could see. Another Tomahawk so soon? So be it. Time to die. Damn the Americans and their technology!

Working the arming bolt of his assault rifle, the warlord started firing his weapon at the incoming missile. It wouldn’t work, of course, but there was nothing else to even try. Only a few more seconds now….

Incredibly, the American missile flashed by overhead, streaking past the old fortress and rolling over to dive down and impact directly upon an Abrams tank rolling up the sloped hillside. The titanic explosion covered the landscape in fire and thunder.

But even before the mountain breeze cleared away the smoke, the warlord heard the terrible grinding noise of an avalanche. Still shaking from the concussion, endless tons of rocks and dirt came pouring down the side of the mountain to cover the startled American troops like a roiling blanket of death. The invaders disappeared from sight, then there came a series of dull explosions from under the rocks as the assorted munitions and ordnance of the Yankees detonated from the crushing weight of the devastating landslide. In a few minutes there was only a handful of American soldiers scattered about the valley.

“Ready the Jeeps!” the warlord bellowed, feeling his heart quicken with the taste of victory. “Charge the remaining troops and kill them all. Kill everybody you find! No prisoners! I want heads laid at my feet within the hour!”

“By your command!” A bearded man saluted and rushed off shouting orders to the troops.

“I rule Safar!” the warlord shouted at the sky, brandishing a gnarled fist. “Death to America! Death to all infidels!”

As the mob of screaming Afghan fighters came charging out of the old fortress, the few remaining American soldiers quickly made a defense circle and fought bravely, but it was all over in a few minutes. Without any support from the buried tanks, they were outgunned and outmanned. Soon, there were only still bodies strewed about the dusty ground. Then rusty axes began to rise and fall, gathering grisly trophies.

Utaudo, Puerto Rico

F LOCKS OF RAUCOUS PARROTS sitting in the tall banyon trees squawked loudly in protest as a VW truck rumbled past them on Route 111.

Smoking a cigarette, the armed driver ignored the noisy birds and shifted gears to take the steep hill coming ahead. The modified V-12 engine responded smoothly with a low growl of controlled power.

Although battered and dented, the truck was clean, and the smooth asphalt of the highway hummed beneath the six new tires, the outer rubber washed with diluted acid to make them appear old and worn. The ripped canvas sheet covering the sides of the vehicle had been expertly patched. The rear section was closed with a pair of hinged wooden doors instead of the usual loose flap, and several of the knotholes artfully were enlarged to now serve as crude gunports.

A passing police car paid the truck no attention, the uniformed officers completely unaware that twenty Kalashnikov assault rifles remained pointed in their direction until the natural rise of the landscape carried them out of view.

“Stupido.” The driver sneered, casting the lit cigarette out the window and expertly starting another using only one hand.

“Did you really want them to pull us over for littering?” the man sitting in the passenger seat asked incredulously. A sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun lay in his lap. It was the perfect weapon to use inside the tight confines of the cab. Even at only a yard of distance, a man could miss with a pistol, but not with a twin load of buckshot. There were a series of small notches on the wooden stock, one for every fool who had shoved his unwanted face into the crew wagon of the Miguel brothers, and was promptly blown straight to hell.

“I am not afraid of the police,” Esteban Miguel boasted hotly. But the driver checked the sideview mirror to make sure the officers were indeed long gone.

Shrugging in reply, Julio Miguel went back to watching for the exit. The sloped fields on both sides of the highway were heavy with tobacco plants, the broad leaves spreading wide to absorb the bright tropical sunshine. On the rubber floor mat between his shoes was an Uzi machine pistol, along with a canvas bag of spare clips and a plastic box filled with grenades.

When the call had come in through their agent in San Juan, the Miguel brothers had been uneasy about accepting the job. Nameless men asking for other nameless men to be killed on sight sounded like a sting operation by the U.S. authorities. Or worse, the military police. But then the bank confirmed the wire transfer of funds to their Swiss account, and the brothers dutifully gathered their full crew to head into the deep jungle mountains. It seemed like overkill, twenty guns to take out five tourists and blow up a building, but the client had insisted and paid the asked-for price, so who were they to complain? Besides, a job was a job.

We’d kill the pope, Julio thought, if the price was right, that is.

The cultivated farmlands fell behind and soon the truck was driving past a shimmering expanse of blue water. Hundreds of families were strolling along the public beach of Lake Coanillas, dozens of sailboats skimmed the low waves, and there seemed to be a endless supply of teenage girls in skimpy bikinis sunning themselves on the shore. The open display of young flesh was delightful.

“Perhaps afterward we can stop by for a snack, eh?” Esteban chuckled suggestively.

“Afterward,” Julio promised, placing the shotgun down to check the load in the 9 mm Uzi machine pistol.

Cresting the top of a hill, the truck slowed and Julio pointed to the left with the shotgun. Esteban nodded and turned onto Highway 607. The new asphalt turned into old concrete, and the noise from the tires changed to a higher tone. The landscaping along the major highway changed into wildwoods of kapok, mahogany and tall palm trees. A few miles later the truck reached a gravel road. A wooden barrier marked it as closed from mudslides, but the brothers knew that was a lie. The rainy season was long over.

Slowing to a crawl, Esteban nosed the VW truck forward and knocked the wooden planks aside. They fell with a clatter and then he shifted into low gear and proceeded. From there on, things got tricky and conversation between the men ceased as Esteban concentrated on driving. There were no guardrails along this steep section of hilly road, and the ground dropped away sharply to a rampaging river. Composed entirely of rain water, the river had no name because it would be gone in a few weeks. But at the moment, the white-water rapids rose and fell in crashing waves against jagged boulders that dotted the rushing torrent like broken islands. A slip at this point, and even if the men survived the fall—highly unlikely—they wouldn’t last a minute in the raging cascade.

Countless little creeks trickled along the steep hillsides like silver veins feeding life into the body of the tropical island, and the air became redolent with the rich smells of wild orchids and rotting fruit. Thankfully, the parrots could no longer be seen or heard. Then both men jerked as a monkey dropped from the trees overhead to land on the hood of the truck. The little animal screeched at them angrily, then scampered away, leaving a foul mess on the polished metal.

“I hate those fucking things,” Julio snarled, lowering the barrel of his weapon.

“Then go live in Miami,” Esteban suggested, curling a lip around the cigarette. “Get a skinny blond girl, pierce your ear and pretend you’re from Cuba.”

His brother’s reply consisted entirely of four-letter words.

Chuckling in amusement, Esteban slowed the truck as he found the next turnoff, and thankfully put the dangerous river behind them. Now they only had to worry about the men they had been hired to kill. Probably DEA agents. Everybody hated those.

As they moved deeper into the mountains, the road became dirt, a path of crushed plants with a few rusting metal poles here and there to mark the trail. Eventually, the brothers had to consult a map, and finally use a GPS receiver to get their exact location and to locate the isolated valley they wanted.

The foolish American DEA agents had actually asked for directions to this valley from the local police. Idiots! The brothers didn’t have any of the law officers in their pocket, but their sister was the radio dispatcher, and cops liked to chat among themselves. Everything the police knew, the Miguel brothers soon learned. The arrangement was expensive—their sister charged a fortune for her services—but her flow of information had saved their lives and kept them out of prison many times in the past. A short burst of hot lead given to an eyewitness was much more economical than paying a million pesos to some San Juan law firm.

“This is as close as we can go,” Esteban said, easing the truck to a halt below a poinciana bush. The plant rose thirty feet tall, its twisted branches spreading outward to form a fiery umbrella of impossibly bright red flowers. As he turned off the engine, the eternal sound of the jungle could be heard, rustling leaves, the tiny coqui frogs singing their mating song, and dripping moisture. Endless dripping.

“We’re here, amigos!” Julio called, thumping a fist twice on the wooden wall separating the cab from the cargo area.

There came the clank of a bolt disengaging, and the rear doors swung open wide, exposing a group of armed men. While two stood guard, the rest jumped out, stretching their limbs and yawning after the long confinement. Then the guards closed the doors from inside and worked the bolts once more.

“How much are we getting paid for this?” one of the men asked, squinting at the dense greenery all around. His boots sank a good inch into the carpet of soft moss that covered the land.

The leaves of a banyon tree moved and a huge spider crawled into view with a wiggling lizard in its mandibles. The colossal insect crouched as it prepared to jump at the men, then scuttled away into the gloom.

“Not enough,” another man replied curtly, easing his grip on the AK-47 assault rifle. “I hate the fucking jungle!”

Several other men agreed with the sentiment, and one of them spit in disgust.

“Shut up,” Julio snapped, climbing down from the cab. “No more chatter until the job is done. And no smoking! That’s an order.”

The group of men grumbled softly, but complied. The bosses knew their stuff. The mercs had been in business for a long time and put a lot of people into the ground while the Miguel brothers were still alive and making steady money. It was hard to argue with that kind of success. Alive and rich was a winning combination.

“All right, let’s spread out and find these fools and their secret warehouse,” Esteban directed, loudly yanking back the bolt on an ungainly M-60 machine gun. The M-60 had been phased out of service by the U.S. military, replaced with the much lighter and faster M-249. But Esteban liked the big gun. The ventilated barrel and dangling ammo belt made it look as impressive as hell, and it threw down a thundering storm of .308 long AP rounds. The body armor of DEA agents stopped 9 mm rounds, and even .357-caliber bullets, but the oversize .306 armor-piercing rounds blew through the armor as if it were a banana leaf.

“Should be a couple of hundred yards to the north of here,” Julio added, slinging an M-2 satchel charge across his back. “If we find the mainlanders, do nothing. Let them go inside the warehouse, then we’ll blow it and do both jobs at the same time.”

“What’s the place look like?” a short man asked, thumbing a 40 mm round into the grenade launcher of the Russian assault rifle.

Tucking the sawed-off shotgun into a holster along his leg, Julio snorted. “What is this, downtown New York?” he snapped, picking up the Uzi machine gun. “We find a building, that’s the one we want. Let’s move out!”

Nodding agreement, the mercs checked their weapons and started along the crude path, their Kalashnikovs sweeping the lush greenery for targets.

Time passed slowly and the two hundred yards gradually became three, then four hundred. Suddenly the jungle broke and the group of men found themselves on a mossy escarpment overlooking a wide, swampy valley. Mist moved along the watery surface and bats hung from the banyon like grotesque fruit. There was no sign of any building, only dank muck and boiling swarms of buzzing insects.

“You sure we went in the right direction?” Julio demanded softly, scowling at the primordial morass in annoyance.

Resting the M-60 on a shoulder, Esteban pulled out the GPS receiver and checked the indicator again. “Yeah, this is it,” he said slowly. “But there’s nothing here, and never has been. So what the…oh shit.” He dropped the receiver and used both hands to swivel the M-60 at the dense jungle.

“It’s a trap!” Julio yelled, dropping to one knee and spraying the nearest greenery with a burst from the Uzi.

Snarling a curse, Esteban cut loose with the M-60, the big rounds chewing a path of destruction through the moist foliage. Instantly the rest of their crew hosed streams of copper-jacketed rounds in random directions, the spent brass from the chattering Kalashnikovs flying everywhere. The leaves violently shook in the dripping trees and birds erupted into the sky even as bloody monkeys tumbled dead to the mossy ground. Hot lead was poured into every bush and flowering tree, even the stagnant pools of water far below. But nobody fired back or shouted out in pain.

After a moment Julio called a halt and listened intently. The gunfire echoed along the swampy valley, but other than that, there was only silence. The jungle was momentarily still from the thundering barrage of military ordinance.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Esteban whispered nervously, digging into the nylon bag at his side to extract a spare belt of fresh rounds. With fumbling hands, he flipped open the breech and tossed away the last few remaining inches of linked cartridges, then laid in the new belt of fifty rounds.

Watching the greenery for anything suspicious, Julio licked dry lips. “Don’t know, don’t care,” he stated forcibly. “Everybody back to the truck!”

Dropping spent clips, the mercenaries reloaded on the run, charging through the strangely quiet jungle. As the VW truck came into view, one of them tripped and went sprawling, his Kalashnikov sliding away into the damp bushes.

“Go get it, stupid!” Esteban snarled, then stopped as he saw a human eye blink in the carpet of leaves alongside the fallen man.

Faster than ghosts escaping from the grave, five large men in military-camouflaged ghillie suits erupted from the ground, the MP-5 submachine guns in their hands blowing flame and death. Five of the mercenaries died on the spot, the rest of the group diving for cover in the ferns and poinciana bushes.

“They’re underground!” Julio bellowed unnecessarily, the Uzi spraying lead. One of the subterranean warriors dodged out of the way. But another took a full burst in the chest. Yes! However, the 9 mm rounds only tore off patches of wet fabric from the ghillie suits, exposing some sort of molded body armor underneath.

Snarling, Esteban added the yammering fury of the M-60 with the same results. The sight sent icy-cold adrenaline into his stomach. Body armor that could stop a .308 round? These weren’t DEA agents, but U.S. Special Forces! What was going on here?

Spreading out, the five camouflaged strangers moved into the greenery, their weapons firing in short, controlled bursts. Screams of pain and bitter cursing came from everywhere. A grenade exploded, the fireball pushing back the jungle dampness for a searing heartbeat.

Bracketing the blast with suppressive rounds from the hammering M-60, Esteban knew that wasn’t one of their grenades. It was something the Army called Willie Peter—white phosphorous—and it could roast the flesh from a person in under a heartbeat.

Constantly on the move, Kalashnikovs yammered in the gloom, the fiery flowers from the muzzles strobing in the thick foliage. The MP-5 submachine guns answered briefly in return, and more mercenaries shrieked into agonizing death.

Firing steadily, Julio backed toward the truck. When the Uzi clicked empty, he dropped the weapon to draw the shotgun. Crouching, the merc leader waited for a target. A shadowy figure lurched from the dripping vines and Julio gave it both barrels. In the bright muzzle flash, he was horrified to see that it was one of his own men. Fuck! Spinning, the mercenary tumbled back into the bushes, leaving a ghastly crimson trail.

Then a big man rose from the bushes, dropping a spent clip into his MP-5. Cracking the sawed-off shotgun, Julio frantically ejected the spent 12-gauge shells and shoved in fresh ones. Raising the shotgun, he saw that the other man was holding a crossbow, of all things. They fired in unison. The shotgun blast obliterated the plants alongside the big soldier, and Julio staggered backward, the long black quarrel from the crossbow sticking out of his shoulder.

Blood gushing from the wound, Julio tried to stanch the flow with his bare hands when he violently collided with a tree, the blow almost knocking him unconscious. He lost his vision for a time period, and silence filled the world.

Sight and sound returned with a vengeance, the jar shocking him painfully alert. Machine guns and assault rifles blazed away constantly all around him, then a grenade exploded nearby and Julio weakly looked up just in time to see his brother flying limply into the air, his arms and legs traveling in different directions. Fury filled his mind, but his body refused to obey and Julio slumped weakly against the tree, tears of rage coursing down his dirty cheeks.

A few moments later it was over. Only the five strangers were still standing, the bloody ground of the crude jungle path dotted with shiny spent brass and twitching corpses.

“T.J., give me a BDH,” David McCarter ordered brusquely, reloading his MP-5 machine gun. “Calvin, see to that man! Everybody else, watch the perimeter.”

The members of Phoenix Force moved without comment.

Gingerly checking his neck, McCarter found that he was bleeding slightly from a graze along the side where one of the mercs had come too close with a thrown knife. A former member of the vaunted British SAS, and now the leader of Phoenix Force, David McCarter was surprised a mercenary had gotten that close. Most professional soldiers held mercs in the same low esteem they did body lice, just something to crush when they got annoying.

Going to the panting leader of the Puerto Rican mercenaries, Calvin James looked down at the man and said nothing for a moment, watching how the blood came from the arrow wound. It was flowing, but not pumping. No arteries had been nicked, then. Good. This guy might just live if he cooperated. The tallest member of the team, Calvin James was a Navy SEAL, the field medic for the team and one of the best underwater demolitionists his teammates had ever seen.

“Drop the knife,” James ordered, his accent a growl of pure southside Chicago. He was still holding the MP-5, but his finger wasn’t on the trigger.

Looking down, Julio was surprised to see that he was holding a switchblade knife. He had no recollection of pulling the weapon. Forcing his fingers apart, he let the blade drop into the moss.

“Better,” James said, slinging the weapon and swinging around a medical kit. “Now, I can stop the bleeding, but it’s going to hurt. And I mean a lot.”

“B-bah. I—I am not…not afraid,” Julio wheezed, sweat running down his pale face.

“You should be,” James replied stoically and, without another comment, he yanked the arrow free.

White-hot pain lanced through Julio, and he barely had a chance to scream before completely losing consciousness.

As the merc went limp, James pulled out a knife to start cutting away the crimson-soaked fabric so he could clean the wound.

With a Beretta in one hand and the MP-5 in the other, T. J. Hawkins warily approached McCarter, his expression grim.

“We’ve got a problem,” Hawkins stated. “I count seventeen dead bodies.”

Every member of Phoenix Force heard that over their earplugs and went instantly alert.

Standing with his back to a kapok tree, Rafael Encizo tightened his grip on the MP-5 just as drop of moisture fell from the leaves above to hit the hot barrel. The water sizzled into steam. A heavy, stocky man with catlike reflexes, Encizo was less than handsome, his face carrying the scars of too many battles. But the rough looks beguiled a razor-sharp mind.

“You sure about that?” Encizo whispered, studying the area.

Trying to appear casual, Hawkins scratched his nose. “Definite.”

“Shit.” Gary Manning grunted at the pronouncement. The big Canadian shrugged the massive bolt-action rifle strapped across his back to a more comfortable position. Manning was the sniper for Phoenix Force, and his weapon of choice was the infamous .50-caliber Barrett rifle. The colossal weapon fired a bullet that could penetrate most light-tank armor and blow holes through brick walls from a mile away. The colossal Barrett was a deadly machine of distant termination, but only in the hands of an expert marksman.

“Seventeen,” Manning whispered, squinting at the still forms scattered in the gory mud. “But I thought that Aaron said the Miguel brothers always rode with a crew of twenty.”

Down the jungle path, the headlights of the truck suddenly came on, bathing Phoenix Force in a harsh illumination.

“They do!” McCarter yelled, moving and firing at the same time.

As the team separated fast, the V-12 engine loudly came to life and the truck started rolling forward, rapidly increasing speed. From behind the vehicle, something even brighter flashed and smoke puffed.

“Rocket!” James cursed, dragging the unconscious Julio behind the massive tree for some protection.

The fiery dart of a LAW rocket streaked down the leafy pathway and plowed into a stand of sugarcane. A split second later, a thunderous explosion tore the sweet plants apart, spraying debris into the misty sky.

Lumbering along faster, the truck kept coming, and now Kalashnikov assault rifles cut loose from behind the vehicle, the three ducking mercs only partially in view.

Bobbing and weaving among the dripping ferns, Phoenix Force arced through the jungle on both sides of the crude road, only to reappear and close upon the truck from opposite sides.

“T.J. and Gary, go!” McCarter commanded over the radio.

Rising into view, the two members of Phoenix Force hosed the truck with 9 mm rounds from their MP-5 submachine guns.

Forced to quickly take cover behind the moving vehicle, the three mercs pulled grenades from their pockets, clawing to get off the strip of safety tape holding down the arming levers. As the tape came loose, the mercs yanked out the arming pins.

That was when McCarter and Encizo stepped out of the ferns and stitched the three with prolonged bursts. Crying out in shock, the mercs threw their arms high as the copper-jacketed rounds tore them apart, the safety handles falling away free.

As the dying men collapsed, Phoenix Force rapidly took cover, and a split second later the grenades detonated, the entire jungle seeming to shake from the triple blast.

Crouching in the bushes, Hawkins grunted as something slammed hard into his belly. Slapping a hand to the spot, he quickly checked for blood, but his NATO body armor had stopped the shrapnel from penetrating. It had hurt, a lot, but he would live.

Continuing through the smoky trees, the truck jounced over the still corpses of the mercs lying in the bloody mud, until it wandered into the plants and rumbled away out of sight, the dripping leaves and flowery vines closing behind the vehicle.

“Anybody hurt?” McCarter demanded over the radio, slapping a fresh clip into his weapon. These three made twenty mercs total, but he was staying sharp in case the Miguel brothers had brought along some friends.

“No breakage,” James replied, still kneeling alongside the unconscious leader of the mercenaries. He was in front of the man, protecting him from incoming rounds.

“And the area looks clear,” Hawkins reported, scanning the jungle with IR goggles. The optical device registered heat sources, and aside from the Stony Man commandos and the sugarcane conflagration raging out of control, there was nothing within sixty yards that was bigger than an iguana.

“Stay sharp,” McCarter directed, walking over to James and his patient. The Stony Man commando had the mercenary propped up against a banyon tree, and was just finishing off a temporary bandage around the ragged wound.

“What’s his condition?” McCarter asked.

“He’ll live,” James said, adjusting the knot. Satisfied, he moved away from the man and reclaimed his weapons. Only a fool tried to heal an enemy with a gun at his side. “Just not sure how useful that arm will ever be.”

“Can you wake him?”

James gave a curt nod. “No problem.”

“Do it,” McCarter ordered.

Pulling a preloaded syringe from the compact med kit, James gave the unconscious merc a combo shot of morphine, digitalis and amphetamine, a battlefield cocktail guaranteed to rouse the dead if the bodies were still fresh.

He’ll have a splitting headache tomorrow, James thought, injecting the devil brew directly into a vein. But then again, the stupid son of a bitch is lucky to still have a head. Mercenaries he could tolerate. Drug dealers he could execute in cold vengeance. His kid sister had died of an over dose of smack, and there weren’t enough bullets in existence ever to balance the score.

With a low moan, Julio sluggishly came awake. “You…” the man mumbled in blurry recognition. “What did you give me?”

“Something for the pain,” James said, putting away the empty syringe.

Along with other things to try to make me talk, Julio rationalized, waves of soothing warmth spreading through his arm and then his chest. The pain vanished, leaving him feeling slightly disconnected from reality. Then the memory of the fight, along with the death of his brother, came rushing back and he snarled in raw hatred.

“What do you want with me, gringo?” Julio demanded, his tongue feeling thick and awkward. “I tell you nothing. Nothing! Go ahead and haul my ass to jail. I will call my lawyers and be free in a day. A day!”

“That might be true, if we were the DEA or the police,” McCarter said, glancing sideways at Hawkins.

Giving a wink, Hawkins recoiled from a corpse on the ground. “Hey, this guy is still alive!” he cried loudly.

“Too bad. We already have their leader,” McCarter said. “So we don’t need him.”

“No problem, sir.” Pulling his Beretta, Hawkins worked the slide and fired a couple of 9 mm Parabellum rounds directly into the chest of the dead man. The body jerked at each impact, almost seeming to die all over again.

The brutally callous execution caught Julio completely by surprise. These mainlanders were insane! Most definitely not U.S. Army, or even the CIA.

Crouching on his heels, McCarter lit a cigarette and offered it to the prisoner.

As if suspecting another trap, Julio hesitantly accepted and sucked in a ragged breath. He held the smoke for a long time, then let it out slowly. “Okay, okay, you win, I’ll talk,” Julio muttered grudgingly. “What do you want to know?”

“Don’t want to know anything,” McCarter said incredibly. “What you will do is send a message that this job was a total success. We’re dead, and the warehouse was burned to the ground.”

Smoking away steadily, Julio said nothing but his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why?” he asked, puzzled.

“Our business. And don’t try to lie that it has to go through your sister,” McCarter warned. “She is already in custody, and we’ve raided her files.” Or rather Kurtzman and his cybernetic team had, the Briton thought, which was pretty much the same thing. “We know that she only relays information. Your brother runs the crew, but you make the deals.”

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