A RADIOACTIVE CLOUD WOULD SWEEP ACROSS THE GLOBE

Everybody would die. That wouldn’t happen unless the enemy was suicidal, or totally insane. Neither possibility was completely out of the question.

“Have there been demands from anybody?” Brognola inquired bluntly. “Hamas, Al Qaeda, Iraq, China?”

Frowning deeply, the President said, “Thankfully not yet, and we can’t make any inquiries. That would only demonstrate that we have no idea who is behind all of this. And as long as the enemy is not sure of exactly what we know, they’ll be cautious. Afraid of our direct military retaliation. Even without nuclear weapons, America has a tremendous military. But if the enemy discovers the truth…”

The President didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. The big Fed understood. Then the enemy would be free to do whatever it wanted. The only thing holding the terrorist states in check had always been the threat of nuclear strikes from the U.S. If the news of the covert disarmament was released, an incalculable wave of terrorist strikes would sweep the free world like a plague.

Other titles in this series:

#28 BLOOD STAR

#29 EYE OF THE RUBY

#30 VIRTUAL PERIL

#31 NIGHT OF THE JAGUAR

#32 LAW OF LAST RESORT

#33 PUNITIVE MEASURES

#34 REPRISAL

#35 MESSAGE TO AMERICA

#36 STRANGLEHOLD

#37 TRIPLE STRIKE

#38 ENEMY WITHIN

#39 BREACH OF TRUST

#40 BETRAYAL

#41 SILENT INVADER

#42 EDGE OF NIGHT

#43 ZERO HOUR

#44 THIRST FOR POWER

#45 STAR VENTURE

#46 HOSTILE INSTINCT

#47 COMMAND FORCE

#48 CONFLICT IMPERATIVE

#49 DRAGON FIRE

#50 JUDGMENT IN BLOOD

#51 DOOMSDAY DIRECTIVE

#52 TACTICAL RESPONSE

#53 COUNTDOWN TO TERROR

#54 VECTOR THREE

#55 EXTREME MEASURES

#56 STATE OF AGGRESSION

#57 SKY KILLERS

#58 CONDITION HOSTILE

#59 PRELUDE TO WAR

#60 DEFENSIVE ACTION

#61 ROGUE STATE

#62 DEEP RAMPAGE

#63 FREEDOM WATCH

#64 ROOTS OF TERROR

#65 THE THIRD PROTOCOL

#66 AXIS OF CONFLICT

#67 ECHOES OF WAR

#68 OUTBREAK

#69 DAY OF DECISION

#70 RAMROD INTERCEPT

#71 TERMS OF CONTROL

#72 ROLLING THUNDER

#73 COLD OBJECTIVE

#74 THE CHAMELEON FACTOR

#75 SILENT ARSENAL

#76 GATHERING STORM

#77 FULL BLAST

#78 MAELSTROM

#79 PROMISE TO DEFEND

#80 DOOMSDAY CONQUEST

#81 SKY HAMMER

#82 VANISHING POINT

#83 DOOM PROPHECY

#84 SENSOR SWEEP

#85 HELL DAWN

#86 OCEANS OF FIRE

#87 EXTREME ARSENAL

#88 STARFIRE

#89 NEUTRON FORCE

#90 RED FROST

#91 CHINA CRISIS

#92 CAPITAL OFFENSIVE

#93 DEADLY PAYLOAD

DON PENDLETON’S

STONY MAN®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Act of War

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment

to Nick Pollotta for his contribution to this work.

ACT OF WAR

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

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

White Sands, New Mexico

In a muted rumble, a massive 757 jumbo jetliner streaked across the night sky, the aircraft rendered invisible by the sheer distance. Only a few scattered clouds marred the peaceful heavens, along with a dusting of twinkling stars, a few of them crawling steadily along, the motion betraying the fact they were actually telecommunications satellites.

On the ground, a warm desert breeze moaned among the tall cactus and scraggly Joshua trees, the gentle wind kicking up tiny dust devils that twirled about madly. Scattered among the low rock formations, crickets softly chirped looking for a mate.

Sipping at a cup of hot coffee, a bare-chested man wearing khaki shorts and hiking boots listened to the music of the desert night. The reddish light of the dying campfire cast his craggy features into harsh relief, making him appear older and more heavily scarred than usual. Military tattoos were clearly visible on both arms. Numerous shiny patches on his chest were circular scars, mementos from shrapnel and assorted bullets caught in a dozen firefights around the world. A holstered U.S. Army Colt .45 automatic pistol rested on his left hip, and a fully loaded M-16/M-203 combination assault rifle leaned against a nearby boulder. A fat 40 mm antipersonnel shell was tucked into the stubby grenade launcher.

Just a few yards away from the U.S. Army sergeant a small canvas tent was perched on the crest of the small hillock, the flap tightly zippered closed to keep out the scorpions and desert spiders. The sergeant knew that for some unknown reason the creatures loved to hide inside boots, and if a man wasn’t careful pulling on his gear in the morning that would be a damn rude surprise.

Draining the cup, Sergeant Bruce Helford debated pouring another and decided it could do no harm. He was up for the night anyway. So far this tour of duty had been a cakewalk, and he had encountered nothing more dangerous than a couple of lost tourists looking for a gas station and some drunk college kids trying to sneak onto the military base for a thrill. Idiots.

Pretending to be a National Park ranger, Helford had forced a smile onto his face and helped the civilians on their way, then filed a report for taller fences. Whether anybody at the Pentagon ever read his reports about the incidents was unknown, but that was part of Army life. Besides, the sergeant knew that he was stationed here in the middle of nowhere purely as a precaution in the ancient military litany of being prepared for what an enemy could do, not for what they might do. There were a lot of heavy armament at the underground military base only a few dozen klicks away, and—

With a shock Helford realized that he could clearly see the cup of coffee in his hand. Then cold shock hit his guts as a bright light blossomed on the distant horizon.

Suddenly a low rumble steadily grew in volume and power until the ground began to shake. The campfire broke apart, startled birds took flight from the quivering Joshua trees and loose rocks tumbled free from the side of a low mesa.

Casting the steel cup aside, Helford reached for the Geiger counter sitting on the trembling ground, when a hot wind blew across the campsite carrying a strange metallic taste. Then the Geiger counter started to click wildly, the needle swinging up into the red zone and staying there.

Knowing he was already dead, the sergeant stood slowly, then broke into a sprint and charged to the tent. Diving inside, he snatched the military transponder hanging from the aluminum support pole, twisted the encoder to the proper setting and thumbed the transmit button.

“Watchdog Four to base,” he said, his words becoming a shout as the rumbling noise mounted with increasing fury until it seemed to fill the world. “Watchdog Four to base! Code nine! Repeat, we have a code nine!”

But if there was a reply, it could not be heard over the now deafening hurricane wind howling madly across the landscape. Sand and small stones peppered the flapping sides of the canvas tent, the hot wind stealing all sound from the air and increasing the bitter taste in the man’s mouth. Still shouting into the microphone, Helford flipped a safety cover and thumbed a red button to activate the emergency signal when the tent tore loose from the soil and flew away. Feeling stark naked, the sergeant raised a hand to protect his eyes from the terrible light searing the landscape. This was impossible! The hillock was much too far away from the armory. The distance had been checked, and rechecked, a dozen times by some of the best minds in America! There was no way that he should be able to actually see the glow, unless…

In stentorian majesty, a dozen fireballs grew on the horizon, the lambent columns rising upward to form the classic mushroom shape, each overlapping the other into a vista of hell.

Incredibly, the buffeting wind stopped, and the only sounds were the man’s ragged breathing and the nonstop clicking of the Geiger. He knew what that meant. The calm before the maelstrom. Just then, a ghastly prickly sensation began to stab needles into his body. The hard radiation had arrived.

“Code nine!” the sergeant grimly shouted into the transponder, even though the radio was probably dead from the electromagnetic pulse of the multiple nuclear explosions. “Code nine! Nine!”

Swelling rapidly, a tidal wave of debris rose from the burning ground, a roiling wall of destruction that swept across the tortured desert, shattering trees and tossing aside boulders.

Doggedly determined to die performing his duty, Helford continued shouting a warning into the transponder until the airborne shock wave arrived. He was instantly crushed into bloody paste and blew apart in a red mist. A microsecond later the hillock broke into pieces. Then the heat wave arrived, the brutal thermal onslaught searing the ruined landscape into a hellish vista.

Still expanding, the nuclear detonations continued growing in power and fury until the nightmarish conflagrations seemed like the end of the world….

CHAPTER ONE

“Take a seat, Hal,” the President of the United States said, gesturing. “We have a lot to cover and little time.” In the middle of the room, there was a battered old wooden desk, office furniture from some forgotten time, along with a few metal chairs. Set close by was an array of telephones and a cafeteria-style wheeled service cart carrying a steaming urn of what smelled like fresh coffee and a heaping pile of sandwiches and small pastries. None of the food had been touched. For security purposes, Hal Brognola, Justice Department liaison and director of the Sensitive Operations Group, based at Stony Man Farm, had agreed to meet the President in a remote, secure location.

“Yes, sir.” Sitting, the big Fed noticed that an Air Force colonel stood to one side of the President, holding a small leather briefcase. It was handcuffed to his wrist. Brognola promptly dismissed the man. That was the Football, the remote-control device containing the launch code for America’s arsenal of nuclear missiles.

As the President and Brognola got comfortable, the Secret Service agents who had accompanied the President remained standing, their hard eyes boring holes into the Justice Department man.

“All right, here it is. At 0214 hrs this morning the entire nuclear stockpile of tactical nuclear bombs exploded at White Sands, New Mexico,” the President said, passing over a manila file colored a deep crimson.

“Obviously not an accident,” Brognola stated, accepting the folder. On the front were stamped the words, Top Secret, but the color alone was enough identify the high-level security status of the file.

“No, it was not an accident, nor a traitor or an enemy spy that infiltrated the laboratory.”

“Are you sure, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting.” Carefully pressing his thumb to the sensor pad of the small explosive device locking the folder, Brognola impatiently waited until he heard a beep, then he slid off the explosive charge and opened the folder. There were a lot of documents carrying the Top Secret notice, along with a bevy of high-altitude surveillance photographs carrying the NSA emblem. There was a lot of technical jargon that the big Fed skimmed, along with a summary from the Pentagon noting the nuke signatures. Brognola knew that every type of nuclear explosive in the world had a unique chemical signature to its blast, sort of like fingerprints, the composite metal carried trace elements of their origins. An expert looking at the spectrograph of a nuclear explosion could tell with absolute certainty which country had made the bomb. Once again, this was old technology, tried and true, proved a hundred times over.

Scanning the summary, the big Fed slowly began to frown. He had expected to find one foreign nuke signature among the roll call of American bombs. But it wasn’t there. The White Sands base had not been hit with a nuke that set off a chain reaction among the arsenal of weapons in storage. The first blast had occurred deep underground. The side caverns built to absorb nuclear detonations had done their job and kept the explosions from reaching the surface. Unfortunately, there had been half a dozen tactical nukes being loaded onto some trucks to be shipped the Sixth carrier fleet in the Persian Gulf. Those blasts had to have been visible for miles. There was a small note on the side that a perimeter guard pretending to be a park ranger had called in the blast before going off the air. No remains had been found to date, but the search would continue. To everybody else in New Mexico the incident was being hushed up as an earthquake.

Poor bastard probably saw the actually blasts, Brognola thought. If so, there’s not going to be enough of him remaining to fill an eyedropper. But the military took care of their own, and whatever could be located would be given a proper funeral. How the living treat their fallen soldiers was the hallmark of any civilization.

“Every bomb in the place,” the big Fed said out loud, placing aside the folder. “How is that possible?”

“We have absolutely no idea,” the President said honestly, crossing his leg at the knee. “According to the security records recovered from the off-site bunker a hundred miles away, the status of the base was normal. There were no known intruders, no unusual incidents, nobody was acting oddly, no…nothing.” He shrugged. “The entire arsenal of nuclear weapons simply detonated at exactly the same moment.”

“All of them? Exactly?”

“All of the live bombs, yes. Thankfully the hydrogen bombs are kept disassembled for safety concerns, and only the cores exploded, but there were no thermonuclear reactions.” The President recalled how surprised he had been to learn that a tactical nuke was basically the same type of weapon America had dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. In government slang, those were called atomic bombs by the old guard. But wrap a jack of heavy water around the core, add some tritium injectors and the atomic explosion became a thermonuclear reaction a thousand times more powerful. It was sort of like using a firecracker to set off a stick of TNT. The analogy didn’t quite hold, but was close enough to the truth to serve as a nontechnical explanation to most folks. Sure as hell worked for him.

“Son of a bitch,” Brognola muttered, loosening his necktie. “Sir, we’re in deep shit.”

“I concur, my old friend. The deepest shit imaginable.” Accepting a cup of coffee from an aide, the President took a sip and made a face. Reaching out, he added more milk and sugar. It wasn’t his first cup today, and far from the last.

“So there’s more,” Brognola said, reading the expression on the man’s face. “Okay, let me have it, sir.”

“At precisely the same time as our incident, the exact same time, I might add, the Russian Kornevko Nuclear Repository in northern Siberia, and an Israeli Tomcat jet fighter carrying a Class 2 tactical nuclear missile also exploded without known reason or cause.”

Sitting back in his chair, Brognola exhaled deeply. The military had a saying about such things. Once can be an accident, twice may be a coincidence, but three times is always enemy action.

“It seems that some group has found a way to remote detonate nuclear weapons,” the big Fed said, his stomach tightening into a knot from the words.

“Unfortunately, that is also our opinion on the matter.”

“Anything from the TDT?” Brognola asked pointedly, laying aside the report.

“Sadly, no. And the Joint Chiefs checked with the Theatrical Danger Team immediately. Normally the TDT has got a plan for damn well everything, but this time…”

“Nothing?”

“Exactly.”

“And the vice president must have checked with the AEC, CIA…” Brognola pursed his lips, mentally running through the entire catalog of alphabet agencies. Then he shifted mental gears. The facts were plain. Nobody in America must have any idea how the weapons were triggered, or else the President would not have summoned me, the Justice man thought. Fair enough.

“I’ll assume that we are quickly disassembling our stockpiles?” Brognola asked, reaching for a cup of coffee.

“Across the board. Oak Ridge, Paris Island, San Diego, Fort Bragg, Arctic Base One, aircraft carriers, submarines…” The President made a circular gesture to indicate the all-inclusive process.

“I’m surprised the bastards didn’t hit Oak Ridge first,” Brognola admitted. “Maybe the enemy is not as good as we fear.”

“Oh, they might have,” the President admitted honestly. “But where the Oak Ridge Nuclear Weapons and Storage facility is located on the map—and where it is actually located—are two entirely different things. The atomic lab is well hidden, as protection from the old Soviet Union from blowing it out of existence.”

Really? That was news to him.

“Certainly served us well enough today. If their stockpile of hydrogen bombs had detonated, half of the nation would be dying right about now from the radioactive fallout.” Then Brognola frowned. “Any reactions from the nuclear power stations?”

“Thankfully, there was not, especially since all of those are near major cities,” the President said, obviously pleased how fast the man thought.

“So this trigger effect only works on weapons, eh?” the big Fed mused, rubbing his chin. “That’s something, at least.”

“Unless the effect that set off the bombs does not work on power plants.”

“Because they don’t have a critical mass in the reactors?”

“That is the logical conclusion, but we may be wrong.” Draining the cup, the President placed it on the table. He stared at it for a minute, his thoughts private.

“Hal, we’re completely in the dark on this. An unknown enemy, with an unknown weapon and unknown goal. Did they try to destroy the Unites States and fail? Is this the opening round in a major conflict, or something else entirely?”

“What’s been done already, sir?”

“Every tactical nuke is being taken apart while it is being moved far away from civilian population centers,” the President declared. “Plus, until further notice, the nation will remain at DefCon Five, full war status. All military leaves have been cancelled, troops are arming, the Umbrella of fighter planes is out to maximum range and our entire stockpile of nonnuclear weapons is being prepared.”

“How long until every nuke is disarmed?” Brognola asked, leaning forward in his chair.

The President gave the man a hard look. “Using every available technician…sixteen days.”

“Sixteen!”

“Best we can do. On top of everything else, we’re also moving the bombs to secret locations, so the enemy can’t find them.”

“Unless they can sweep the entire continent with this triggering device.”

“Agreed. In that case, we’ve already lost, and the death toll will be in the millions, the hundreds of millions if they get even the slightest bit lucky and set off a couple of plutonium bombs.”

Brognola grunted at that. Too true. A radioactive death cloud would sweep across the globe, killing everybody. That wouldn’t happen unless the enemy was suicidal or totally insane. Neither possibility was completely out of the question.

“Have there been demands from anybody? Hamas, al Qaeda, Iraq, China?”

Frowning deeply, the President said, “Thankfully not yet, and we can’t make any inquires. That would only demonstrate that we have no idea who is behind all of this. And as long as the enemy is not sure of exactly what we know, they’ll be cautious. Afraid of our direct military retaliation. Even without nuclear weapons, America has a tremendous military. But if the enemy discovers the truth…”

The President didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. Brognola understood. Then the enemy would be free to do whatever it wanted. The only thing holding the terrorist states in check had always been the threat of nuclear strikes from the U.S. If the news of the covert disarmament was released, an incalculable wave of terrorist strikes would sweep the free world like a plague.

“Even worse,” the President continued. “If somebody, anybody, does make a demand, then we would have no choice but to comply. This isn’t a matter of making policy, or standing tall, but outright survival. We’re virtually helpless for sixteen days.”

“Even less if the enemy demands access to our Keyhole and Watchdog satellites,” Brognola added grimly, “then they could monitor our nukes, and stop them being moved or disarmed.”

“Sadly, yes.”

“Plus, any demands we receive may not even be the people behind the attacks,” the big Fed noted pragmatically. “It could simply be some opportunist group claiming the credit and trying to sneak one past us. Nuke Israel, or a million Americans die. Release every terrorist held in American prisons, hell’s bells, release everybody in all of our prisons. Or else.”

“Or else,” the President agreed solemnly.

“What do you want us to do, sir?” Brognola asked, standing.

“Find them,” the President said bluntly. “Find them and kill them and smash their damn machine, whatever it is.”

“You don’t want it recovered?”

“Hell no, it’s too damn dangerous. Smash it to pieces and burn any records, blueprints, schematics, whatever you find.”

“Done,” the Justice man stated, extending a hand. When the politician first took office, he had used euphemisms like “terminate with extreme prejudice,” or “permanently eradicate.” But that stopped. Troops had no confidence in a leader who couldn’t give a direct order. There were no euphemisms used in the middle of a firefight. A soldier killed the enemy. Period. End of discussion.

“Alert,” the communications officer announced, looking up from a laptop. “Message from PACOM for you, sir. Admiral Fallon at Camp Smith reports the nuclear destruction of the USS Persing missile frigate in the north Pacific Ocean. No survivors. The cause seems to be a tactical nuclear explosion. Navy Special Intelligence and the NSA are analyzing the Watchdog photographs for known radiation signatures.”

“Understood,” the President said. “Keep me informed of any further developments.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Better move fast, old friend,” the President said. “The numbers are falling and time is against us.”

Nodding in agreement, Brognola turned and headed for the door. America had the most powerful army in the world, along with a host of covert agencies, but to use any of them could reveal a fatal weakness and cause untold deaths.

Which left the deadly matter entirely in the hands of Stony Man Farm.

CHAPTER TWO

Yig-Ta Valley, China

Reaching the middle of the lake, the old man in the wooden boat back-rowed a little until the forward momentum was canceled and the boat was relatively still, rocking slightly in the gentle chop.

Whistling happily to himself, he opened a plastic box and carefully pulled out a large fishing net. It was discolored in several areas from numerous repairs done over the years with whatever was available, but the net was still strong and highly serviceable in his capable hands.

Shaking the net a few times to straighten out the folds and to warm up the muscles in his skinny arms, the fisherman then twisted sharply at the hip and the net flew out to land in the water with barely a splash to announce its arrival.

The small lead weights woven along the edge of the net dragged it down swiftly, and the man promptly began to haul the net up again, his fingers expertly testing for any additional weight that meant a catch.

But the net was empty, so he cast again. Fishing was more of an art than anything else, and a man needed patience almost as much as a net. This time, the net held a dozen yellow fin trout. Happily, he emptied the net into the empty plastic box and cast once more. It was a long time ago, but he vaguely remembered when the lake had been a peaceful fishing village. However, a few years ago the Communists had sent in armed troops to throw everybody out of their ancestral shacks, and then had an army of workers build the massive dam. Now he came here to fish and recall better times. Somehow, the trout he caught always brought back memories of his idyllic youth. Silly, but true.

From the woods surrounding the lake there came a snap of a breaking tree branch, and the old man froze motionless, nervously glancing around, his heart pounding. Thankfully there was nobody in sight. Fishing on the government lake was strictly forbidden for some reason. It had taken a thousand men five years to build the huge concrete dam that blocked off the Wei River, creating the huge artificial lake. Now Beijing controlled the water for the crops, and the electricity for the lights and distant factories. Good for the government, but only more taxes for the struggling farmers and workers. Nobody was allowed to be on the lake, not even to sail paper boats on festive days or to send out a floating candle for a dead loved one. Scandalous!

Unexpectedly the entire lake shook, and the old man almost dropped the net from surprise. A ripple expanded to the shores and came racing back, the water seeming to rise quickly as huge bubbles came up from below like a pot about to boil.

Suddenly the middle of the watery expanse started to bulge, the surface rising higher and higher until it burst apart and exploded into a vertical column of fiery steam that blasted high into the air.

Screaming in terror, the fisherman threw away the net and grabbed onto the gunwale of the boat as it was shoved aside by the strident explosion of steam. An instant later a deafening concussion vomited from the roiling depths, spreading the lake wide-open. A monstrous wave cast the old man and boat aside, sending them flying over the top of the concrete dam toward the distant mountains.

Horribly scalded, the terrified fisherman could only desperately hold on to the boat as it sailed through the air. Glancing down at the bubbling lake, he saw a wealth of writhing flames expand from the murky depths, then the boat hit the trees and blackness filled his universe.

Mounting in fury and volume, the nuclear fireball of the underwater Red Army weapons depot continued to expand, fully exposing the radioactive ruins of the illegal base hidden for years from the prying eyes of the annoying UN spy satellites. A split second later the physical shock wave crossed the churning expanse of the lake like an express train and the dam violently shattered, massive chunks of steel-reinforced concrete blowing out across the river valley below like the discharge of a shotgun. Ten thousand trees were mashed flat for half a mile, the destructive force of the fifteen DF-31 underwater missiles armed with tactical nuclear warheads was multiplied a hundredfold from being trapped under the lake. Tumbling wreckage from the destroyed dam plowed into the nearby hills like meteors throwing out geysers of earth and the boiling lake rushed through the yawning gap to thunderously churn along the river valley, destroying everything in its path. At a little vacation jetty, colorful boats were blown into splinters and rental cottages exploded, the startled families inside parboiled in a microsecond from the radioactive steam cloud, their death screams lost in the Dantian cacophony.

Disguised as an old barn, a military pillbox from the Glorious War for Freedom shuddered from the arrival of the searing torrent, the thick ferroconcrete walls withstanding the titanic pressure for almost a heartbeat before crumbling. Instantly dead, the soldiers tumbled away with all of the other debris propelled by the rampaging cascade.

T EN MILES DOWN THE Wei River valley in the small village of Tzang-Su, a teenage boy in a lookout tower dropped a pair of binoculars from his shaking hands. He was supposed to be looking for forest fires instead of trying to see into the bedroom of the girl that he was attracted to. But a flash from the north had caught his attention and his stomach lurched at the sight of the Wei River dam exploding like a house of cards.

A soft rumble could be heard, slowly increasing in volume, and the teen shook off the shock to spin around and rush for an old WWII radio sitting on a small table. A hurried glance informed him that the battery was fully charged, so he slapped the big red button on the side. He knew that would instantly send a signal to Beijing for emergency assistance. But could the soldiers in their helicopters arrive in time? The tidal wave from the dam could be seen moving above the treeline…no, it was moving through the forest, crushing aside the thick trees like blades of grass!

Suddenly from the nearby village the air-raid siren began to loudly wail, the noise rapidly increasing in volume until the windows on the homes and cars shook from the raw force of the clarion warning.

Everybody stopped whatever they were doing at the noise. The dam had broken? Surely this was only another government test. There hadn’t been a hard rain for many months….

Then the townspeople caught the muted vibration and saw the nearby river start to dramatically rise, climbing over the wooden docks and spreading across the streets, small vegetable gardens and freshly mowed lawns.

Shrieking hysterically, the people of Tzang-Su dropped whatever they had been doing and blindly raced for the public library. There was a large bomb shelter located in the basement, a holdover from the WWII. Long ago, the stout bunker had protected their grandparents from the aerial bombardments of the hated Japanese, and then had saved their parents from the brutal “political cleansing” of the Red Army. Now it would save them all from this onrushing disaster!

But upon reaching the library, it was painfully apparent that the bunker was too small to hold everybody in town. Instantly the people began to frantically struggle to be the first inside the imagined safety of the small bunker. But as more, and even more people attempted to jam into the zigzagging antiradiation corridor leading to the lead-lined door, fighting broke out among the mad press of bodies. Women began to shriek, men cursed, children wept. Knives flashed, guns fired. Soon, fresh blood flowed on the dirty concrete floor, and it became impossible to tell the living from the dead in the raw chaos.

The savage battle was still raging when the boiling wave of radioactive water thundered around a curve of the river valley, the churning wash a hideous slurry of steaming mud, broken trees and lifeless human bodies.

Looming high above the fishing village, the nuclear tsunami seemed to pause before slamming onto the village like the wrath of an angry god, flattening the wooden homes and smashing apart the few brick buildings. The sound of shattering glass overwhelmed the warning siren, and then it went silent, vanished in the maelstrom. A split second later the wave exploded through the side of the library, sending out a halo of stained glass to slice apart the people struggling to get into the ridiculously undersize bunker. Unexpectedly a flood of cars and tree trunks tore away the roof and punched more holes in the stone block walls. Still fighting among themselves, the cursing townsfolk screamed in terror as the water hit, the deadly waters rushing through every opening and crevice with trip-hammer force.

Less than a moment later, the flood swept past the ruined village, leaving behind a grotesque vista of smashed wreckage and a thousand steaming corpses….

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

D ESCENDING FROM THE darkening sky in a rush of warm air, the Black Hawk helicopter landed gently on the field of neatly trimmed grass. However the people inside did nothing for a moment, as the turboprops continued to spin overhead. Then a red light flashed green on the elaborate control console and the pilot turned around to give a thumbs-up to the passenger.

“All clear, sir!” he shouted over the rush of the engines. The Stony Man weapons array had been deactivated.

Hal Brognola slapped the release on his safety harness, exited the helicopter and hurried to the waiting SUV that would take him to the farmhouse.

A short ride took the big Fed to the main buildings. No one was there to greet him, so Brognola went through the security protocol, entered the farmhouse and walked briskly to the elevator, nodding to the staffers that he passed on the way. Stepping inside the car, he pressed the button for the basement.

The elevator started downward and soon stopped with a gentle jounce. As the doors slid open, the big Fed gave a half smile at the sight of Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, hurrying his way.

A stunningly beautiful woman with honey-blond hair, Price carried herself with the total assurance of a trained professional. As a former field agent for the NSA, Brognola expected no less.

“Hello, Hal,” she said.

“Wish I could drop by without bad news sometime, Barbara,” Brognola said. “Have you read the preliminary report?” They continued on toward the tunnel that would take them to the Annex.

“Yes, I already have Aaron and his team busy digging up intel on the matter.”

“Excellent.”

“Anything new to add?” she asked bluntly.

Without comment, Brognola removed a sheet of paper from his briefcase and passed it over. As she read the update, Price noted that the red striping along the edge of the document was still brightly colored. If the paper had been run through a scanner or copier, the red stripes would have faded to pink. This was an original document, direct from the Oval Office.

“So the Chinese did have a secret missile silo at the bottom of that lake,” she stated, handing it back. Where her fingers had touched the paper, brown spots began to appear from the warmth of her skin.

“More likely it was only a weapons cache to hide the nukes from our Watchdog and Keyhole satellites, but yes,” Brognola agreed, tucking the sheet away and closing the briefcase with a hard snap. “A lot of innocent civilians died in the flood, and more will perish from the poisoned drinking water. That whole section of the Wei mountain farmland is not going to be habitable until the rains come in the spring.”

Which would wash the contaminated soil down the river, and out into the sea, Price realized privately. Where it would be carried on the currents across the world. A nuclear explosion in Beijing would end up on the dinner table of America two years later. The world seemed huge, but in reality was a very small place, and with the advent of modern technology it was getting smaller every day.

Without speaking, the man and woman entered the tunnel, each lost in their own thoughts. They continued to walk, deciding not to take the electric rail car that would take them to the Annex.

Reaching the end of the tunnel, Brognola stayed back as Price placed a hand on a square of white plastic embedded into the smooth concrete wall. Sensors inside the pad checked her fingerprints, along with her palm print.

When the scanner was satisfied, there came a soft beep and the plate went dark, closely followed by the sound of working hydraulics. Ponderously, the security door began to swing away from the jamb.

Moving quickly, Brognola and Price stepped past the door and made their way to the Computer Room. The air was cool and clean, although tainted by the smell of burned coffee. Several people sat at a series of computer consoles. A small video display set alongside the main monitor showed a vector graphic map of the world, blinking lights indicating the state of military alert for every nation. Another side screen swirled with high-resolution photographs of the weather above the North American continent, the images broadcast live from a NASA satellite. The only sounds came from a softly burbling coffeepot at in a coffee station and the tapping of fingers on keyboards.

This was the Computer Room, the heart and quite literally the mind of Stony Man operations. Located on the next level down, just below the terrazzo flooring, was a unbelievably huge Cray IV Supercomputer, the titanic machine cooled by a steady stream of liquid nitrogen to keep the circuits working at their absolute optimum level.

This was the base of operations for the background soldiers of Stony Man Farm, the vaunted “electron-riders” of the covert organization. A cadre of unstoppable computer hackers, part data thieves and part cybernetic assassins, who patrolled the info net of the world and sometimes did more with the press of a single button than an army of soldiers could with missiles and tanks.

“Well, good morning!” John “Cowboy” Kissinger called, looking up from the monitor he studied.

A former DEA agent, Kissinger was a master gunsmith and in charge of all the firearms used at the Farm. He made sure that anything the field teams needed was instantly available, from conventional weaponry to experimental prototype. His workshop was stockpiled with everything from the P-11 underwater pistol used by the Navy SEALS, to the brand-new 25 mm Barrett rifle. He even created some of the specialty weapons used in the field by Able Team and Phoenix Force.

“What are you doing here?” Brognola asked brusquely. The man usually stayed in his workshop.

“Helping us,” Kurtzman said, grabbing the wheels of his chair in both hands and nimbly turning toward the new arrivals.

Resembling a grizzly bear in a badly rumpled suit, Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman was the head of the cybernetics team. A master code breaker and expert in cipher technology, Kurtzman had quit his lucrative job on the Rand Corporation’s world famous think tank to use his skills where they were most needed, bringing a measure of justice to the world, instead of just making more millions for fat businessmen already rolling in cash.

“Cowboy read the report on what happened in New Mexico, and had some suggestions to offer on where to look for more data,” Kurtzman added.

“Suggestions?” Price asked curiously, crossing her arms.

“Gunsmiths like to talk about weapons. It’s more than our job, you know, it’s a calling,” Kissinger said. “So I often lurk online, listening to the gossip about this and that, cut out articles from the trade journals and such, always keeping a watch for anything odd going on, anything that just doesn’t sound right.”

“He knew about the new 7.8 mm QBZ Chinese assault rifles before the Chinese army did,” Kurtzman stated. “Cowboy has sent us in the right direction numerous times.”

“Always considered that antinuke thing just a load of bull,” the armorer said. “But now…” He shrugged.

“Are you trying to tell me that somebody knows what triggered the nukes?” Brognola demanded, placing his briefcase on the polished floor.

“Of course not. But I do remember hearing something about an odd rumor from the cold war. The story was that some scientist in the Netherlands, Swedish maybe, or possibly Dutch, had invented some sort of device to stop a nuke from detonating, or something along those lines…different people told different versions, you know?”

“But the essence of the story,” Kurtzman added, “is that the KGB heard about the device, found it, killed the scientists involved and stole the blueprints.”

“Or so some of the rumors go,” Kissinger finished, resting a hand on the back of the wheelchair. “Other folks say the CIA stole it, but you know how that goes.”

Yes, Brognola did. Anything odd that happened in the world, some people immediately blamed the CIA.

“So, how old is this rumor?” Price asked, trying to see over the shoulders of the three people clustered around a console.

“About a decade or so.”

She started to scowl, then stopped. Just because something was old, didn’t mean it was harmless. There briefly flash in her mind the memory of how the French invention of the table fork had been introduced to England back in the Middle Ages. The French had been using forks for many years, but overnight the English discovered that the simple eating utensil fit perfectly through the eyeslots on a suit of armor. A fork that cost only pennies could easily kill a nobleman supposedly invulnerable inside a suit of highly expensive armor. The world of peasants versus knights was almost overturned until the helmets were quickly redesigned. Simple things could become very deadly in the right—or wrong—hands.

“Any truth behind the tale?” Brognola queried.

“Nothing yet, still checking,” Akira Tokaido said, rock music seeping from his earbuds.

“Let us know when you have anything,” Price added.

“No problem.” Unwrapping a fresh stick of chewing gum and popping it into his mouth, the handsome Japanese American was the youngest member of the cyberteam. It was joked that Akira had chips in his blood. The natural-born hacker could instinctively do things with computers that others took years to learn. Kissinger had taught the young genius how to shoot a gun on the Farm’s firing range, but in his official government profile, Tokaido’s weapon of choice was listed as a Cray Mark IV Supercomputer.

“Could this be another jump start?” Carmen Delahunt asked from behind a VR helmet. A wealth of glorious red hair cascaded from underneath the utilitarian device strapped around her head, and both hands were encased in VR gloves as she stroked open files and seized data from foreign computer banks.

“A jump start?” the big Fed prompted.

“Oh. During a past mission we cracked open a couple of NATO nukes to use the radioactive cores to kill the terrorists trying to steal them. Could something similar be happening now?”

“Possible, but unlikely,” Kurtzman said grimly, cracking his knuckles. “Besides, we had the access codes, these new folks do not.”

“True.”

“Perhaps only tactical nukes have been set off so far because of their compact electronics,” Brognola suggested, taking a chair and sitting. “Thermonuclear weapons have ten times the protective circuitry, right?”

“Absolutely true,” Professor Huntington Wethers stated, removing the cold pipe from his mouth only to place it back again. Since smoking was strictly forbidden on the premises, he was forced to merely chew the stem of his beloved briar while on duty. “However, all of the superpowers have different types of electromechanical protection for their nukes. Nobody knows how to set off every type of nuclear device. This must be a matter of preexciting a subcritical mass of U-235 to achieve threshold.”

Tall and lean with light touches of gray at his temples, the distinguished black man had formerly been a full professor at the University of California, Berkley, teaching advanced and theoretical cybernetics until the call came to help fight the criminals of the world.

“Threshold,” Kissinger stated, giving a sideways grin. “Why not just say explosion. It’s a perfectly good word.”

“But wildly inaccurate,” Wethers replied, then smiled. “Out of curiosity, does your automatic pistol use gunpowder, John?”

“Gunpowder?” The armorer arched an eyebrow. “What is this, 1920? Firearms haven’t used gunpowder since the invention of cordite! Well, we still call it gunpowder, but the technical name is propellant, that’s a form of stabilized fulminating guncotton…” He stopped, then grinned. “Point taken.”

“Would a neutrino bombardment work?” Delahunt asked.

“Not unless these people have a working neutron cannon,” Price declared. “And our Watchdog satellites are now keyed to detect the sort of induced magnetics needed to operate that weapon.”

“Plus, according to the videotapes I’ve seen, nobody near the nukes died before the explosions,” Brognola noted. “So this could not be caused by a beam of focused neutrinos.”

Going to the coffee station, Price poured herself a cup of coffee, adding a lot of cream and sugar. She took a sip and made a face. Good God Almighty, Kurtzman liked his brew strong enough to melt teeth. He seemed to have come pretty close with this batch, too.

“Maybe we’re looking in the wrong direction,” Price suggested. “Perhaps somebody has simply found a way to ignite the C-4 used inside a nuclear weapon. That would slam the uranium together and cause a nuclear blast.” Then she scowled. “No, we’ve seen videos of the guards near the attack sites. Several of them were carrying M-203 grenade launchers, and those 40 mm shells are armed with C-4. Damn!”

“Okay, do all nukes have anything in common, aside from C-4 and uranium?” Brognola asked, furrowing his brow.

“Tell you in a minute.” Kurtzman turned back to his console. Rolling the wheelchair into place, the big man locked the wheels and started quickly typing on the keyboard. Within moments the screen was scrolling with mathematical equations and complex molecular diagrams.

“And the answer is…Well, I’ll be damned. Thulium,” Kurtzman growled, poking a stiff finger at the rotating graphic of a molecule on the screen. “It seems that every nation uses some sort of thulium shield to protect—” the man grinned as he looked up at Price “—to protect the C-4 plastic explosives inside their nukes.”

“Do they now,” Price muttered, narrowing her gaze in concentration. Okay, the cyberteam had gotten hold of a very slender thread. The enemy was somehow exciting the thulium, which in turn triggered the C-4, causing an early explosion. They now knew what was happening, but not how, why or the much more important who.

“Akira, see if anybody has ever done theoretical work on the possible long-range stimulation of thulium,” Brognola ordered, leaning forward in his chair.

“No,” Kurtzman countered. “Pull up all of the files on thulium. Everything there is available, mining operations, common and military uses, research projects…everything!”

“Already have,” Tokaido said calmly, tapping a button.

Pulsating into life, the main wall monitor divided into four sections, each slowly scrolling with text and mathematics.

Biting a lip, the big Fed struggled to read all of the screens at the same time, when Price gave a hard grunt. “Wait a second!” she barked. “There on screen three! Go back a bit.”

Stroking a fingerpad, Tokaido did as requested, and everybody perused the text. It was a Pentagon document on foreign-weapons research. The file was ten years old and marked as abandoned.

Reaching for his ceramic mug, Kurtzman took a sip of the black coffee. “Code name Icarus,” he muttered. “That’s it, just the project name? No details?”

“Very little,” Tokaido admitted, accessing the file. “Less than a page. The Pentagon wasn’t interested in obtaining more since the project was a failure. Why, does the name mean something to you?”

Removing his pipe, Wethers answered. “In Greek mythology, Icarus was given wings of feathers and wax. He flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he plummeted into the sea.”

Tokaido shrugged. It was as good as any place to start.

More data came onto the screen. “Okay, Project Icarus was a top-secret research project by the Finnish government conducted around 1989,” Kurtzman announced. “Believed to be some sort of electromagnetic shield designed to stop a nuclear blast. The project was abandoned a year after it started.”

“During the cold war,” Kissinger said in a low voice. “And Finland is sure as hell part of the Netherlands.”

The people in the room became galvanized at the simple pronouncement.

“So the rumors were correct. Sort of. But a nuclear shield?” Delahunt said. “That’s ridiculous! Scientifically impossible.”

“That could have simply been the cover story,” Brognola explained. “Lord knows I’ve had to spin some whoppers in my career to cover the work that goes on here.”

A dimple appeared on her cheeks. “Fair enough.”

“No way the Finns are behind this,” Price declared resolutely. “They are some of the staunchest supporters of world peace.”

“The Chinese invented gunpowder, but they still got shot by the Japanese in both of the Sino-Japanese wars,” Kurtzman retorted. “Somebody may have just have run across this research and finished the project, or simply stolen it outright. Are any of the Finnish scientists or politicians involved in the project still alive today? Anybody we can question for details?”

“Checking,” Tokaido said, typing on his keyboard.

“Negative,” Wethers announced, hitting a button to slave his monitor to the wall screen. Old photographs of men and women in laboratory coats appeared on the screen, short profiles scrolling alongside each face. “They have all passed away from natural causes.”

“But they only look to be about forty years old,” Price said carefully, as if weighing each word. “If this picture was taken in 1989, that would only put them in their sixties now.”

“All of them are dead?” Brognola demanded suspiciously. “All?”

“I have the death certificates,” Wethers said, checking the screen. Then he frowned. “What in the world…These are fake. Look at those dates! It is statistically impossible for fifty people working on a project to all die on the exact same day.” He tapped the scroll button to flip pages. “Car crashes, heart attacks, fell off a bridge, drowned…this is a wipe-out!”

“Has to be,” Kurtzman growled. “Somebody must have hit the lab and killed everybody there, and the Finnish government disguised the deaths as accidents.”

“The natural choice is the Soviet Union, which means the KGB,” Brognola said. “But the KGB was disbanded when Russia became a democracy.”

“The KGB also sold off a lot of their stockpiles of tanks, planes, submarines and even some nukes,” Delahunt noted. “They might have sold the Icarus blueprints to anybody.”

“Excuse me, this man is not dead,” Tokaido said casually.

“Eh? I have the files right here,” Wethers stated, shifting his pipe to the other side of his mouth. “Fifty people, fifty death certificates.”

“True, but I cross-checked with their families to see who got the estates of the deceased scientists, settled their bills and so on.” He moved a mouse and a single picture appeared on the wall monitor. The man was pudgy with thick wavy hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a small mustache. “Only the family of Dr. Elias Gallen did not apply to his insurance company, and he carried term life.”

“He’s not dead,” Price said with a hard smile. “The son of a bitch survived the attack, and the Finns pretended that he was to try to save his life from further assaults.”

“Got a location?” Brognola demanded urgently. “If he can tell us exactly what we’re dealing with here…”

“Checking…” Tokaido said, frowning slightly. A minute passed, then two. Five minutes.

“Need any help?” Kurtzman growled impatiently, fingers poised over his keyboard.

“Not really,” the young man answered slowly, both hands working furiously. “These records are still on magnetic tape in some Finnish archive, and they load slower than a Bolivian firewall…Yes, got it!” He swung away from the console. “All right, there is no record of them changing their mailing address, driver’s license or anything similar.”

“Be the mistake of a rank amateur if they did,” Kurtzman interjected rudely.

“However,” Tokaido continued unabated, “when the Treasury Bureau of Finland closed the personal accounts of Dr. and Mrs. Gallen, that exact same amount was sent to a numbered Swiss bank account in Geneva.” The man smiled. “Then shifted to a Chase Bank in Mousehole, Wales, United Kingdom.”

“Always follow the money,” Price said with a nod. “Good job, Akira.”

“Got an address?” Brognola asked. In spite of all the years working with these people, he was still amazed at how fast they could unearth information and track down people.

“It’s 14-14 Danvers Road,” Kurtzman answered, studying a small window display. “That’s a house, not an apartment complex, so there should be a name on the land file. Good thing David McCarter got us those MI-5 access codes…The land belongs to a Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Cartwright. I’ll cross-reference that with the Royal Motor Division—she does not have a driver’s license, but he does—give me a sec, downloading the JPEG now.” On the wall monitor was a the slightly blurry photograph of a pudgy man with thick wavy hair, the temples winged with silver streaks, horn-rimmed glasses, a large mustache and an old scar along the right cheek. It was clearly an old bullet scar. Everybody in the room had seen enough of them to know those on sight.

“Any fingerprints?” Brognola asked hopefully.

“No need, that’s him,” Tokaido stated confidently. “Same blood type listed on his organ-donor card, and still on the same medication.”

“What for?”

“Some sort of cancer. Checking…”

“Working with high-voltage electronics for many years often causes leukemia, cancer of the blood,” Wethers said unexpectedly.

Dutifully, Tokaido bent into the screen. “Confirmed, he has leukemia,” he announced after a few moments. “The medical records also show his wife was admitted to St. Frances Hospital in Wales last year, also with leukemia…she died six months ago and was laid to rest in Heather Grove cemetery in Sussex.”

“Exhume the body,” Brognola ordered. “I want to make sure it is her and not him.”

Pausing in his blowing of a bubble, Tokaido looked pained at the request, but nodded. “We’ll know for sure by noon tomorrow,” he said, and went to work contacting Scotland Yard, routing the request through Brognola’s Justice department e-mail account. The British police regularly did the Farm small favors, assuming the requests came from Justice.

“All right, I hacked the bank and got his credit card,” Delahunt announced smoothly. “The account for his wife was closed last year, and the dates match her supposed demise.”

“What about him?” Price asked.

“He spent a lot of time drinking at the local bars, months actually, then went to Amsterdam for a—” Delahunt coughed delicately. “Shall we say he had a lonely man’s weekend adventure?”

“Everybody grieves in their own way. All I want to know is, where the frag is he now?” Kurtzman asked. “Exploring the forbidden delights of Hong Kong? Going down under in Australia?”

“Australia?”

“Prostitution is legal there.”

“Is it? Well, the card shows he took British Airlines Flight 255 to Nashville, Tennessee, and he is staying at the Tuncisa Casino and Hotel in Memphis. Room 957, the Heartbreak Hotel suite.”

In spite of the situation, Brognola almost smiled at that. “He’s an Elvis fan?”

“And who isn’t?” Kissinger said languidly.

“Has Jack gotten in touch with Able Team yet?” Price asked, standing from her chair. Jack Grimaldi was the chief pilot for Stony Man and often carried the field teams to and from battlegrounds. There wasn’t a machine with wings or rotors that Grimaldi couldn’t fly, including space shuttles.

“Just a few minutes ago,” Kurtzman replied. “They were getting some R and R visiting Toni in Los Angeles, and not answering their cell phones, so I sent some blacksuits after them as you suggested. Thankfully, Ironman heard about New Mexico on the radio and the team is already on the way.”

“Excellent. When they arrive, send the team to Memphis and bring in Professor Gallen,” she ordered. “We need him alive.”

“Consider it done.”

“What about Phoenix Force?” Brognola asked.

“They’re going to Finland, to check the former location of the lab,” Price answered curtly. “Or rather, they will be soon. Unfortunately right now they’re incommunicado on that search-and-rescue mission to Sardinia. No way out of that.”

Although irritated, the man accepted the information. Soldiers couldn’t very well answer a cell phone in the middle of a firefight. One small distraction could cost a hundred lives. There was nothing to do until McCarter called the Farm, either announcing a successful mission or asking for an immediate air strike.

The big Fed took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “How soon until they call in?”

Price checked the clock on the wall above the room’s entrance.

“Just about any time now…” she answered as the hands moved forward with a mechanical click.

CHAPTER THREE

The Isle of Sardinia

It was a moonless night and the stars were bright in the heavens. Sitting on a rock, the man in loose clothing was cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife when he went stiff, his eyes going wide in shock. His hands twitched from the effort to grab the AK-47 assault rifle laying across his lap, but they refused to obey even the most simple command.

There was pain, searing pain, at the back of his head, and the guard realized that he had been stabbed in Death’s Doorway, the tiny fissure located near the right ear. Slide in a thin blade right there and your victim was paralyzed, twist the blade and they died instantly, like turning off a light switch. Click, dead. The guard had done it many times over the years to policemen, judges, even a few women who had refused to cooperate, but he never knew how much it hurt. The pain filled his body like electric fire. It was beyond agony! But he couldn’t make a sound. Not a sound.

Then there was pressure from the blade, a flash of light and eternal blackness.

With a soft exhalation, the dead man slid off the rock onto the white sandy beach, the assault rifle splashing into the blue sea.

“One down, fifty to go,” T. J. Hawkins whispered, wiping the blade clean before sheathing it. A decorated member of the elite Delta Force before joining Stony Man, Thomas Jackson Hawkins, T.J. to his family and friends, was a big man, lightning-fast in his movements and a stone-cold killer on the battlefield.

“Firebird One, this is Texas. The clubhouse is open,” Hawkins said, touching his throat mike.

As silent as ghosts, more men rose from the scraggly juniper bushes of the low hillock and approached the rocky rill, moving from shadow to shadow. Past the hillock rose huge sand dunes that extended for miles. This section of Sardinia was often called the Sarah of Italy. Others called it purgatory, the gateway to hell.

Carefully studying the coastline, David McCarter kept the Barnett crossbow steady in his grip, the blackened tip of the arrow as reflectionless as the sky above. A quiver of arrows for the crossbow was strapped across his back and a MP-5 machine gun was slung at his side, the barrel tipped with a sound suppressor.

There was a tunnel straight ahead of the Stony Man team, a dark recess going straight into the bowels of the earth. Sardinia was famous for its gold mines, the island honeycombed with a warren of passages. But McCarter knew this abandoned mine was a dead end. The slavers were a lot smarter than that. They had been plying their trade for decades, and nobody had ever gotten closer than the length of a knife blade before.

Until this night, McCarter thought grimly. A former member of the SAS, David McCarter was the leader of Phoenix Force, a former SAS commando and an Olympic-class pistol shot. Every man on the team owed his life to McCarter a dozen times over, and had repaid the debt in equal numbers. Their bonds of friendship had been forged in fields of blood.

On the surface, the island of Sardinia was a tourist’s paradise, the fjords filled with more yachts and pleasure craft than all of the fishing boats of the entire chain of twenty-three islands combined. The beaches were made of the purest white sand, as pristine as newly fallen snow, and the sea was almost supernaturally clear. During the daylight, it was possible to look all the way to the bottom of the shoals and see the wrecked stone columns from the time of the Roman Empire.

However, the criminal elements of Sardinia began to kidnap young women from Italy, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Spain and Sicily, hauling them away to a secret location. There they were brutalized until their spirits finally broke and they learned to accept their new position as sex slaves. Branded like cattle, the girls, mostly teenagers, were sold on the world sex market to high-priced whorehouses in Bangkok, harems in Arabia and South America or to millionaire sadists seeking fresh victims for their private torture rooms. If the girls refused to obey, or tried to escape, they were brutally killed.

Italy lost an estimated thousand teenage girls a year to the monstrous slavers. Numerous ships had been caught at sea, and occasionally some girls were rescued alive. But the slavers disliked witnesses, and often tossed them overboard still locked in their heavy steel chains.

If the flesh merchants were arrested by NATO forces, they went to stand trail in the world court. If taken by the Italian military, the slavers were executed at sea with a bullet to the back of the head. Nobody had ever accused the Italians of being soft on crime. But the lure of huge profits was too strong an incentive, and in spite of everything the UN, Interpol, Italy, Greece and Turkey could do, the foul practice continued.

There were few villages along Costa Verde that afforded privacy to anybody who did not wish to be observed. Far out to sea, Arlentu Mountain was a basalt fortress rising on the horizon from the last volcanic eruption hundreds of years ago. It was a landmark for passing ships to find the safe deep-water harbors. The mountain was also an excellent way for the slavers to navigate without using radar or radio beacons, which might give away their position.

Pulling a palm-size computer from a pocket of his combat suit, McCarter checked the position on the blinking red dot. The slavers were smart, he’d give the bastards that, but not smart enough. A raiding party had captured a water-skiing party that morning, and one of the guests was the daughter of a American senator, with a low-jack chip embedded into her earlobe. It was a precaution that some politicians and the members of their families, took against kidnapping. The chip had been steadily emitting a pulse, giving her exact location. Unfortunately, her father had been in conference until noon and only learned of her disappearance then. The senator immediately called the President, who then called Stony Man. Hours later Phoenix Force was moving through the night, tracking a tiny blip that hopefully still was attached to a living woman.

“There are no proximity sensors in the area,” Rafael Encizo said, checking the EM scanner in his hand. “We’re clear to proceed.”

Encizo was a short stocky man, with catlike reflexes. Slung across his chest was an MP-5 machine gun, and stun grenades festooned his web harness. A compact .38 Walther PPK rode in a high belly holster, a Tanto combat knife was sheathed upside down near his shoulder for fast access and plastic garrotes dangled from a breakaway catch on his belt.

“Are we heading for that?” Calvin James asked suspiciously, his accent pure southside Chicago. “Jails make a good cover for covert ops. Nobody wants to go near them, and any trouble can be attributed to an attempted escape.”

Rising far to the south, the black outline of a Sardinia penitentiary stood against the starry sky, a stoic reminder that not everybody on the island was involved in the black market of selling human beings. Like everywhere else, most of the people were just trying to make a living and protect their families. But not all.

“Trail goes this way,” McCarter said, checking the locator.

“Just hope we’re tracking a girl and not merely an ear,” Gary Manning stated, working the slide on a KGB Special pistol.

Satchel charges hung from both sides of his combat suit, while a standard-issue MP-5 submachine gun was slung across his chest. Usually, he carried a .50-caliber sniper Barrett rifle, whose titanic cigar-size bullets could shoot through a brick wall. But that was for open terrain, and the work tonight was going to be close quarters, probably hand to hand. Which is why he was also carrying disposable plastic garrotes, stun grenades and the KG-B Special.

Actually, the automatic pistol was simply a Beretta 9 mm with an oversize ejector port to prevent jamming. But the bullets were truly unique. Invented long ago by the KGB, the shells carried half-charges that propelled a miniature piston forward inside the casing to slap the soft-lead bullet forward. However, the 9 mm piston then jammed into the narrow 7 mm mouth of the casing virtually welding into place from the heat and friction. That stopped all of the propellant gases from escaping, along with any noise. The KGB Special wasn’t a silenced gun, but carried silenced bullets. The only sounds made were the click of the falling hammer and the click of the piston. The subsonic rounds had a pitiful range and poor penetration. But for this kind of a soft probe, where silence was vital, it was pure death, especially in the talented hands of Gary Manning.

Suddenly soft bells began to tinkle, and the Stony Man commandos dropped into combat posture, snicking off the safeties of their weapons. A moment later a deer strolled into view from around a boulder, its leather collar studded with tiny bells.

“A pet?” Encizo asked, easing his finger off the trigger of his submachine gun.

“No, the island is full of them,” James replied, checking behind them in case this was a diversion. “They roam free by the thousands, like reindeer in Iceland.”

As the deer began to walk along the sandy beach, Hawkins gave a hard grin. “Which is why there are no remote sensors. They’d be going off every five minutes with these things wandering around.”

“All the better for us,” McCarter said, comparing the vector graphic on the device to the terrain around them. “Okay, this way. I’m on point, T.J. and Gary cover the flanks. One meter spread, silenced weapons only.” First and foremost, this was a rescue mission. Get the girls out alive. Afterward, there could be a reckoning with the slavers, but not before. The image of the criminals throwing their “goods” overboard flashed into his mind, and a rage filled the former British soldier. He checked the arming bolt on his MP-5 submachine gun.

Easing through the jumbled array of boulders dotting the landscape, Phoenix Force slipped through the moonless night, watching for sentries and trip wires. There were sure to be additional safeguards aside from the one sleepy guard.

The salty smell of the sea became sweetened by the perfume of the maccia shrubs and myrtle. The team jerked their weapons upward at an odd noise, then relaxed when it was only a vulture winging by overhead. They only hoped it wasn’t an omen.

Following a dried riverbed of smooth stones, the Stony Man team soon reached a big granite tower set alongside a low hill, partially hiding it from the beach. All around them rose granite cliffs, impossible to climb. It was a box canyon, with the stony riverbed the only entrance.

“Mine,” Hawkins whispered into his throat mike.

Everybody froze.

Dropping to one knee, Hawkins moved aside the loose stones to reveal a squat land mine. Only the burnished pressure plate had been exposed, a small coin set among the loose stones. Pulling a garrote from his belt, Hawkins cinched it tight through the locking safety and heard the mine disarm. The weight trigger had been set to maximum, probably so that one of the wandering deer wouldn’t set the charge, but an escaping girl would have her legs blown off. Nasty.

A few yards away McCarter whistled softly, and bent to neutralize another. Then Encizo did a third, followed by James. Proceeding with extreme care, the team cleared a wide path down the middle of the riverbed until finally reaching an ancient Roman pavilion. Marble stairs rose from the riverbed and led directly to a large stone tower, which dominated the box canyon.

Spreading out, the Stony Man commandos checked for traps, but reached the crumbling fortress without incident.

Apparently, the granite tower had once been a tourist attraction, as there was a sign announcing the prices for a guided tour. But now the entrance was blocked. A weathered sign printed in Italian, Sardinian, French and Japanese listed the structure as dangerously unstable, about to collapse at any moment. The message was clear: keep out or die.

“Bullshit,” James muttered, holstering his pistol and running a scan of the door. He found no electronic sensors and went to work on the lock. A moment later they heard a subdued click and the door swung aside, revealing only darkness.

Donning their night-vision goggles, the team switched from starlite to UV and slipped into the ruin. The night vanished, replaced with a black-and-white view of the world in sharp detail.

The inside of the granite tower had been reinforced with concrete plastered on the walls. Rubber mats lined the ancient stones, and winding stairs led to the tower and down to the basement. Checking their weapons, Phoenix Force descended into the bowels of history.

The center of the stone steps was worn from two thousand years of bare feet, sandals, boots and sneakers. Small recessed niches dotted the wall. Most of them were empty, but a few contained modern Coleman lanterns. Reaching a landing, McCarter saw a short, plump statue of a naked woman sitting in a niche, the smiling figure holding a spear and a sheath of wheat. That was the mother goddess, protector of women and children. The Briton felt repulsed at the thought of the crying prisoners dragged past the ancient idol as some sort of horrible joke. Or was it more than that?

Going to the statue, McCarter switched from UV to infrared. Sure enough, the navel of the plump little goddess glowed faintly. Still warm from the touch of a human hand. Gently, the Stony Man commando inserted a finger into the navel and felt the stone give slightly.

Across the landing, there was a click and a section of the smooth concrete wall separated. Also switching to infrared, Hawkins inspected the door and pressed a palm to the only glowing area. There was a second click and the door swung aside, revealing a long narrow tunnel cut through the rock of the hill.

His weapon at the ready, Hawkins took the point position again and moved swiftly into the passageway, holding his pistol in a two-handed grip.

The last to enter, James pulled out a small block of C-4 from the satchel charge, shoved in a radio detonator and hid the explosive wad alongside the secret door. Just in case.

Exiting the tunnel, Hawkins found a huge room carved into the rock. Wooden pallets were placed in orderly lines along opposite walls and large cisterns stood in the corners.

“This was the barracks for the soldiers,” McCarter stated, glancing around. The place was enormous, suitable for a small army. He spotted small brass placards on the walls showing where racks for spears and swords used to be located. Now there were only rough outlines left by the smoke of primitive candles.

“Some sort of a museum exhibit,” Manning observed warily. There was no concrete down here. The walls were raw stone, covered with a ripple pattern of chisel marks from the artisans who had hammered the room into existence two thousand years ago.

“I don’t like this,” Encizo muttered, looking around quickly. There didn’t seem to be any other way out of the barracks. “Which means that either we missed something or else…”

A ghostly whimper interrupted the thought, closely followed by a man’s cruel laugh.

This was it! McCarter realized, the knowledge sending adrenaline pumping through his veins. The slavers were right on the other side of the stone walls. But where was the bleeding entrance?

Switching his goggles from UV to IR, Hawkins saw nothing unusual. He knew the team was missing something obvious, but what? They could start tossing grenades, but the moment they started, the jig was up for the girls.

Removing his goggles, McCarter pulled out a flashlight and clicked on the bright halogen light. Sweeping the beam around the barracks, he saw the hidden door immediately. Every one of the brass plaques on the wall was above a sleeping pallet, except one located on a black wall, the brass tarnished and dirty.

Clicking off the light, McCarter pressed the plaque and the nearby pallet slid aside silently on greased tracks. Worn stone steps led down again. The sound of laughter was louder.

“Just like Afghanistan,” Hawkins whispered, readying a stun grenade. When the Soviet Union had invaded the ancient country, their battle tanks had been meet by booby traps designed centuries ago for Roman war chariots. Hinged sections of road opened wide and a tank dropped fifty feet onto solid granite. What killed horses two thousand years ago, only stunned the crew of the tank. But before they could recover, the Afghans poured gasoline through the air vents of the armored transport and burned the Soviets alive. Grisly, but effective.

Moving swiftly along the flight of stairs, the commandos found themselves descending into a huge natural cave. The floor below was lined with rows upon rows of steel cages, young woman lying inside on piles of dirty straw.

Like animals in a zoo, James noted, feeling a furious coldness swell deep inside.

Several of the prisoners were weeping, the sound echoing slightly off the hard walls of the cave. Reaching the floor, McCarter switched to IR again, searching for any hot spots. Immediately he saw the rectangle of a door set into the far wall, the outline glowing with warmth. Jackpot.

The Stony Man team headed that way, moving past the rows of cages in the dark. The smell from the dirty straw was foul. There were no bathroom facilities for the prisoners. Obviously another part of the process designed to break their spirit. The soldiers hardened their hearts and concentrated on the mission. If the team started freeing the girls, some would began to shout, alerting the slavers. The only way to release them all was to take out the Sardinians first.

A soldier’s burden, Hawkins thought grimly, trying to ignore the sobbing teenagers.

A guard armed with a cattle prod was sleeping in a chair beside the door. Manning and James grabbed his arms as McCarter clapped a hand across the man’s mouth and slit his throat with a fast slash of a Gerber combat knife. The guard awoke drowning in his own blood and thrashed wildly for a few moments before going still.

With the sound of the dead man’s life dripping onto the floor, Encizo went to the door and ran a check with the EM scanner. It was clean, no traps this time.

Hawkins took point again and tried the latch. It moved easily and the door swung aside on loud creaking hinges. Damn! The big Southerner brought up his MP-5 fast, but the next room was empty.

As their goggles adjusted to the bright electric lights, the Stony Many commandos saw rubber mats on the rock floor making paths through the torture chamber. There was no other word for the place. Gleaming steel tolls hung from hooks on the walls, and heavy wooden stocks, looking like something from the Middle Ages, were situated over rusty drains. Ripped clothing was piled to the side, mostly T-shirts and swimming suits. A stainless steel surgical table was filled with personal items, rings, eyeglasses, hair clips and such. Video cameras were mounted on tripods to record the humiliating strip, and the air was redolent with the smell of pine disinfectant. A hose lay coiled in a corner, the nozzle trickling water down a drain.

This must be where the girls were first taken to be stripped of everything from the outside world. A wooden butcher’s block was surrounded by the remains of cell phones that had been smashed into useless rubbish, and the hopper of a nearby shredder was filled with the remains of wallets and credit cards. The last hope of escape was destroyed right before the helpless captives.

Across the room was a door made of burnished steel.

Moving in that direction, the team tightened their grips on the weapons as the metal door opened and out walked a whistling man with a coiled whip in his hand. The slaver paused, registering shock at the unexpected sight of a group of armed soldiers inside the underground base, then McCarter shot him in the face with the crossbow.

The barbed quarrel came out the back of his head, and the dying man wheezed in pain as he eased to the rubber mats on the floor. Already at the door, Hawkins kept it from closing completely with a knife blade, while Encizo and James pulled the rings from grenades.

A guttural voice laughed harshly and several men responded in Sardinian. The words almost made sense, the language was so close to Italian, but there were just enough differences to render it incomprehensible.

“Please,” a young woman cried out in English. “My father is a senator! He’ll pay anything you want for me! Anything!”

“We make more, you go Sudan,” the first voice said in halting English. “Big show, daughter American senator.”

There came the sound of ripping cloth, and the young woman screamed.

Instantly, Hawkins pulled open the door, Encizo and James tossed in their grenades, and the rest of Phoenix Force moved in with their weapons firing. A group of men was clustered around a young woman dressed only in bra and panties. They turned at the noise, cursed and shoved her aside to claw for the handguns in their belts.

Aiming carefully, McCarter put an arrow through the throat of a bald man holding a fistful of blouse, then dropped the weapon and pulled around his MP-5. Hawkins shot a Sardinian in the forehead, then rocked back as an incoming round hit him in the belly.

On the count of eight, the stun grenades detonated while still rolling along the floor, the bright flashes filling the room. Blinded by the light, the Sardinians began to shoot wildly, one of them blowing the face off the slaver standing right alongside. The glowing streaks of tracer rounds filled the air.

Over near a video-mixing board, two men worked the bolts on their Kalashnikov assault rifles, chambering rounds. Encizo took out one, Hawkins the other. The Sardinians died with their life blown out the backs of their chests.

Shooting as carefully as if he was at a gun range, Manning placed four rapid head shots in a row, taking out the men clustered around the console.

Diving forward, James tackled the terrified girl to the floor to get her out of the line of fire, trying to keep her covered with his body. He grunted as a bullet hit his back, the NATO body armor under his fatigues deflecting the slug with a sharp whine. Screaming hysterically, the girl began pummeling the Stony Man operative with her soft fists.

“Delta Force, ma’am,” James grunted as he took another bullet in the back. “You want to shut the fuck up and let us rescue you?”

Instantly she stopped struggling and looked into his face, tears of hope welling in her eyes. He could see that she had been badly beaten, her nose broken, and there were teeth missing, fresh blood smeared on her cheek and shoulder.

“Kill them,” she begged with a sob in her voice. “Please kill them all.”

“That’s the plan,” James replied, pulling out his Beretta and firing directly into the groin of a man coming their way loading a shotgun. Dropping the weapon, the slaver shrieked and tried to get away. James shot the man in the back, then again in the spine as the bleeding gunner started to slide limply down the wall.

A few moments later it was over and Phoenix Force quickly reloaded their weapons before going into the next room. Rising stiffly, James hauled the girl back to the entrance, hustling her away to safety. The first part of the mission was done. Now came the hard part—burning out this nest of vipers.

Kicking open the door, McCarter found a short corridor lined with curtained alcoves. It reminded him of a brothel he had raided once in Hong Kong. The implications were horribly clear, and he shoved the stubby barrel of the machine gun into the first sex room, seeking a target. A naked girl was strapped to small bed, a naked man trying to get a handgun free from the tangle of his clothing draped over a chair. McCarter stitched the slaver from groin to face, then departed while reloading. They’d come back later for the prisoners. This wasn’t over yet by a long shot. The element of surprise was gone, and the Sardinians would start fighting back for real at any second. Every tick of the clock was a mark against the Stony Man commandos. This had to be a blitz.

Standing in a doorway, Hawkins was holding back a curtain and firing his MP-5 in short bursts, the spent brass arching away to bounce off the wooden jamb. Men screamed from within the alcove, followed by silence.

Going to the next curtain, Encizo paused and the fabric started to jump from the outgoing lead. He waited until the firing stopped, then swept in low, catching the bare-chested slaver as he dropped a spent clip from his Skorpion machine pistol. The little Cuban stroked the trigger and sent a wreath of 180-grain, steel-jacketed vengeance into the slaver.

Cringing behind a chair, a middle-aged woman stared at the act with a growing expression of delight. As the Sardinian fell, she leaped forward to pull a knife from his belt and attacked the riddled corpse in mindless fury.

Finishing another alcove, McCarter paused at the sight of his reflection moving in a wall mirror. Acting on a hunch, he fired into the glass, and a man fell out holding an AP grenade. As it rolled into sight, McCarter saw the ring was still attached. That had been too close! The NATO body armor they wore was good, but it didn’t make a man invulnerable to head shots or concussion damage. Warily, the Briton checked inside the closet for any more hardmen and found a flight of stairs leading deeper into the earth. Patting his chest, the Stony Man commando found that he was out of stun grenades. Returning to the room, he grabbed the AP grenade from the floor and tossed it down the stairs. As the lethal sphere bounced men shouted in fear and there came the sound of running boots.

Jumping down the short flight, McCarter landed in a crouch and saw a rough-hewn tunnel filled with men holding guns. Dodging to the left, the Phoenix Force leader opened fire with the MP-5, mowing them down. A few of the slavers fired back, the rounds ricocheting off the rock walls. When the clip was empty, McCarter pulled his 9 mm Browning Hi-Power and waded into the dying bodies, finishing off anybody who wasn’t obviously dead.

Clearing out the last alcove, Manning reloaded his MP-5 just as a fat man rushed around a corner blasting away with an M-16. Coolly, Manning took out the fellow with a burst in the chest, then moved past the falling body to sneak a peek around the corner.

About a dozen men were opening plastic crates. A couple Sardinians were donning NBC suits, and the rest buckling on harnesses for XM-214 electric miniguns. Just one of those weapons could chew the Stony Man team into hamburger, and if the hardmen released VX gas into the prehistoric warren, everybody would die, including the girls still trapped in the cages.

“They’ve got VX and miniguns,” Manning subvocalized into his throat mike, arming his last stun grenade. He couldn’t risk rupturing the nerve-gas canisters.

Staying low, Encizo joined Manning just as a roaring hellstorm of lead blasted out of the room as the miniguns chewed a deep gap into the corner and wall, throwing off an explosion of splinters. In unison, the two Stony Man commandos tossed their stun grenades around the corner, then quickly retreated.

As the grenades flashed into a triple flare, the slavers walked through the blinding light, firing their weapons everywhere, the spinning barrels of the miniguns vomiting high-velocity lead.

Crossing the streams, the Sardinian criminals chewed twin paths of destruction along the hallway and into the alcoves. Most of the curtains had been torn down, and they could see inside with no trouble. Still hacking at the corpse, the middle-aged woman was torn to bits.

Marching over the bodies of their fallen comrades, the two gunners proceeded into the studio, searching for the enemy, assuming it to be the Italian army again. But they could hardly believe the fools ever found their base, much less got this far inside. But the studio was also empty. Easing his grip on the firing handle, one of the Sardinians asked a muttered question. But the other man merely shrugged, uncertain of what to do next.

In the destroyed hallway, two of the bodies lying under the torn curtains raised into kneeling positions, and the Stony Man commandos cut loose with their MP-5 machine guns at point-blank range. The Sardinians flew backward from the concentrated barrage, their miniguns briefly firing to hammer at the stone ceiling before going as silent as the dead slavers.

Walking forward, Hawkins administrated a shot directly into the face of each Sardinian, just to make sure. Then Encizo pulled the power cords from the miniguns, rendering them inoperable.

“Okay, let’s finish this,” Manning said, slinging his machine gun. Pulling a Desert Eagle from a holster on his hip, the man clicked off the safety. His KGB Special didn’t have anywhere near enough stopping power for this next part.

Slinging their machine guns, Hawkins and Encizo prepared their own handguns as they walked down the hallway, past the alcoves. There was a fast flurry of gunfire, then three slow deliberate shots.

Appearing in the smashed mirror, David McCarter carefully studied the war zone outside the alcove before emerging with his MP-5 in one hand and a thick book tucked under the other arm.

As he moved followed, the members of his team came around the corner.

“All clear?” McCarter asked.

The soldiers nodded.

“Well, I found the sales ledger,” McCarter announced, tapping the fat volume with the hot barrel of the machine gun.

“Great,” Hawkins muttered, working out a jam from his MP-5. “Then let’s get out of this shithole.” Saving the girls had been the mission priority, but this was the prize. The names and address in the book would send dozens of men and women to the gas chamber. Or whatever method of execution their assorted countries used to execute criminals in these so-called enlightened days. Hawkins had seen enough death in his career to understand that making somebody wait ten years on death row was a cruel and unusual punishment. A bullet to the back of the head was swift and painless, carrying much more mercy and compassion than the cannibals of society ever showed to their victims.

“I’ll call in the rescue planes. Find some blankets, spare clothing, anything like that, and go help Calvin open the cages,” McCarter directed. “And be gentle. The girls have been through double hell. If anybody doesn’t want to leave her cage, then just unlock the door and let her be. To them, we’re just another bunch of ugly guys with guns.”

“Ugly?” Manning almost smiled at that, then he turned to Hawkins. “Must be talking about you.”

Finally clearing the jam, Hawkins gave a snort. “Ugly in Texas is beautiful everywhere else in the world.”

“I’ve been to Dallas, brother, and that dog won’t hunt.”

“Yeah, right.”

“How about we bring along a peace offering?” Encizo suggested, reaching down to grab a dead Sardinian by the collar. He lifted the bloody corpse off the floor. “To show our goodwill.”

“Now you’re talking sense,” Hawkins said, slinging the machine gun.

As the Stony Man operatives walked away, dragging the dead slavers along behind, McCarter worked the transceiver on his belt. The civilian cell phones would never have worked this deep underground, but the team had left a repeater unit hidden in the bushes on the surface. “Rock House, this is Firebird One,” he said, touching his throat mike. “The clubhouse is clear, and the goods have been recovered.”

“Excellent. Any breakage?” Barbara Price said, her voice wavering slightly from the interference of the surrounding rock.

Resting the hot barrel of the MP-5 machine gun on his shoulder, McCarter looked sideways at the woman in the alcove. “Yes,” he said in a flat voice. “Send body bags along with the medics.”

“Confirm. Sorry to hear that.” Price sighed. “I’ll contact the NATO frigate waiting offshore and have the prisoners picked up ASAP. As soon as the rescue helicopters arrive, proceed to your former staging area and wait for further instructions.”

“Something local?” McCarter asked, pulling a cigarette from the packet of Player’s in his shirt and lighting up. He pulled in the dark smoke with little satisfaction. Maybe they hadn’t gotten all of the slavers, and another nest of the vipers had been found. That’s fine by me. Let’s end this filthy practice, once and forever, he thought.

“Nothing local. We’ve got hot soup with breakage,” Price said tersely. “Coffeemaker will relay details over a more secure line.”

Coffeemaker had to be Kurtzman. “What kind of breakage?” McCarter asked, getting a bad feeling.

“Not over an open transmission.”

That made McCarter raise an eyebrow. Open? These radios were protected by 254-byte encoding! The situation had to be really bad.

“Confirm,” he stated, exhaling a long stream of smoke. “You sending Sky King?”

There was a crackle of background static. “Negative. Look for a man in dark clothing.”

A blacksuit from the Farm would be bring them a plane, the leader of Phoenix Force translated. “Understood. We’ll be ready. Over.”

“Over and out,” Price repeated, and the radio went silent.

Dropping the cigarette to the floor, McCarter crushed it under a boot, then went to inform the rest of the team. Their long night was over, but it sounded like an even longer day was just beginning.

CHAPTER FOUR

North Atlantic Ocean

The waves were low and sluggish, the thick waters of the Atlantic shimmering with the glassine effect of the nearly frozen brine. Peeking out from behind a few scattered clouds, the sun was high in the sky, but the light gave little warmth to the chilly world.

Standing on the bow of the HMS Harlow, the young boson swept the horizon with a large digital camera, his finger pressed lightly on the start button as if it were the trigger of an assault rifle. Standing closeby were the captain and the first officer, looking through computer-augmented binoculars.

“Anything?” the captain asked, an unlit cigarette jutting from a corner of his mouth.

“Nothing yet, sir,” the first officer replied. “Boson?”

“Same here, Skipper,” the man replied, swaying slightly to the motion of the deck as the missile frigate cut through the cold waters.

“Well, stay sharp!” the captain shouted above the wind. “It’ll be any second now, and we won’t get a second chance!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

The salty wind was brisk, the sailors’ uniforms slowly becoming damp as the material snapped against their arms and legs. High above them on the bridge were the gray half domes of the radar pods, and behind the bulletproof Lexan plastic windows could be seen more officers and crewmen with field glasses, monoculars, digital cameras and old-fashioned 16 mm chemical cameras, the boxy Nikons equipped with telephoto lens. This was going to be a historic day for Her Majesty’s navy, hopefully, and every detail needed to be recorded.

“Look there, sir!” the first officer called excitedly, pointing starboard. “North by northwest!”

The captain replied with a grunt, but swung around to face the new direction, his hands tight on the binoculars.

Obediently, the boson followed their example. Through the electronic viewfinder, the sailor looked closely for any signs of submarine activity. The British navy was holding a live-fire test today of their new weapon, some thing called the Firelance. Unofficially, the rocket-powered torpedo had already been nicknamed by the sailors of the Harlow as the Thunder-fish.

Which was pretty accurate considering what the bloody thing could do, the boson thought, leaning harder against the safety railing to stop from swaying.

Removed from its regular duties, the Harlow was now on patrol outside the coastal wars of the Isle of Man, thought by some to be the most lonely spot in the North Atlantic that the UK still deemed to recognize as a royal possession. Just a lot of bare rock islands, hardly bigger than cricket field, and a million seagulls.

However, the royal missile frigate was not here to participate in the test, but assigned merely to be an observer. This was to be a battle of the titans, so to speak, and a vital stage in developing an adequate defense for the crown against this Russian aquatic killer. The British-made Firelance was going up against a Russian Squall purchased illegally on the black market by MI-5. Good lads all, the boson thought. Hopefully, the new British weapon could take out the Russian monster. Back during the cold war, the Soviet Union had invented the Squall, and the Iranians had their own version of the Russian superweapon. Sadly, the British navy was lagging behind in third place with the Yanks breathing hot on their necks. The boson smirked in pleasure. At least the French didn’t have them yet, thank Jesus. That was some comfort, anyway.

The Firelance was incredible, with a maximum speed of 350 kilometers per hour. The captain had been forced to play the instructional video several times for the startled crew before they got over the shock of seeing anything move that fast under water. The torpedoes had a powerful rocket engine instead of propellers at the end, and a flat, armored crown, which seemed to be the secret to its success. The torpedo looked about as streamlined as a truck, and needed to be hard-fired into the water, not merely released like a regular torpedo. But when the Firelance hit the ocean, the impact caused a momentary shock wave effect that created yawning cavitation on the armored crown. In effect the concussion pushed aside the seawater for a split second, leaving behind a small empty space that was almost a vacuum. The Firelance flew through the shock wave, in a vacuum of its own creation. A Squall could blow any surface ship out of the water before the crew even knew it was under attack.

An abrupt disturbance in the pattern of the waves caught the attention of everybody. Excited voices rose from the bridge. This was it! Then a humpback whale broke the surface for a moment to grab a breath and dived out of sight again.

Lowering the camera to clean the lens of spray, the boson hoped the big creature got the hell out of the engagement zone. Somewhere out there were two Royal Navy Vanguard submarines, and when the war games commenced, this was not going to be a safe place for innocent bystanders. Any minute now, the whale was going to find itself in more danger than a tourist in Liverpool.

There was subtle movement below the surface, the waves canting in different directions for only a heartbeat. Just long enough for the boson to catch sight of a periscope descending below the waves. Gotcha!

“Sub at four o’clock, sir!” the boson called out, tightening his grip on the video camera. Softly, the machine began to hum. “Range, one thousand meters!”

As the officers spun around, something flashed past the Harlow just below the surface. The blur was visible for a split second, then was gone.

“Mother of God,” whispered the first officer, lowering his glasses. “Was…that our fish, or the Russian?”

“Who can tell?” the captain retorted, sounding excited and angry at the same time. “Look, there’s the second fish!”

Another submerged object streaked past the bow of the frigate on a divergent course as the two aquatic hunters tried to find each other. Now it was machine vs. machine.

“Bridge, I want a sonar reading,” the first officer said into a hand radio lashed by a cord to his belt.

“Negative, sir,” came the prompt reply. “We’ve got a lot of hissing, but we can’t track where it’s coming from. They’re just too damn fast, sir!”

“Both of them?”

“Aye, sir!”

“Excellent,” the captain said, looking like a kid on Christmas morning.

Moving incredibly fast, the Firelance and the Squall zigzagged around the Atlantic, one of them trying to hit the submerged submarine, the other trying to prevent that very action. Then they were both gone and there was only the choppy waves.

Suddenly there was a tremendous flash of light from deep below, and the cold waters churned as the bubbling explosion rose to the surface. Every sailor on the Harlow cheered in victory at the sight. An explosion meant the Firelance had taken out the Squall! The Russian superkiller had just been defeated!

Maintaining a tight zoom on the churning patch of ocean, the boson frowned as he heard an odd ticking sound from behind, or rather, a sort of clicking. Suspiciously the sailor attempted to keep the video camera still as he glanced over a shoulder at the closed hatches of the missile launcher set into the main deck. The ferruled steel lids on the honeycomb were all tightly closed, but there was the oddest smell and then incredibly he saw fat sparks crackle on the outside of the WE-177 nuclear depth charges sitting in their launch rack. Stunned beyond words, the boson dropped the camera. Impossible! Those weren’t even armed!

A split second later the Harlow was vaporized, the concussion traveling through the water to crush both of the British submarines in the area, the airborne blast also taking out the RAF Harrier jumpjet carrying the Minister of Defence who had wanted to see the live-fire test, but from a supposedly safe distance. Only seconds later, the British spy satellite relayed wire-sharp photos of the destruction to the headquarters for the Ministry of Defence, and the prime minister was immediately alerted. The United Kingdom had just joined the list of nations attacked by the unknown terrorists.

Memphis Airport, Tennessee

W ITH THE WHINE OF controlled hydraulics, the aft ramp of the colossal C-130 Hercules transport slowly lowered to the tarmac with a muffled crash, and a civilian van drove out of the huge airplane, jouncing hard as it make the transition from the sloped ramp to the smooth asphalt.

“Good luck,” the voice of Jack Grimaldi said in the earphones of the men of Able Team.

“Same to you,” Carl “Ironman” Lyons replied, shifting gears and moving away from the secluded landing strip.

As the man drove the van toward an access road running alongside the landing strip, the loading ramp of the Hercules rose upward and closed with a clang.

When the members of Able Team had arrived at Reagan National Airport outside Washington, D.C., they had found Grimaldi waiting for them in the Hercules, with their equipment van already loaded and strapped down for an immediate takeoff. En route, the men changed their clothing and reviewed the information of the nuclear detonations while checking over their stores of weaponry. They had to move fast. If the enemy discovered that Professor Gallen was still alive, they would send an army of mercenaries to kill the man. Or worse, some other group would learn about the scientist and kidnap him, bringing a third party into the matter. It was possible that the Stony Man operatives would simply drive into Memphis, find the man, hustle him back to the Hercules and fly off without any trouble. But every second that passed put the odds against them.

“Hit the hotel first?” Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz asked, draping a camera around his neck. Then he adjusted the silenced 9 mm Beretta pistol clipped to a breakaway holster on his belt. Taking on the role of a tourists for this assignment, the Stony Man team was casually dressed in loose slacks and loud Hawaiian shirts that perfectly covered the NATO body-armor underneath.

“Nobody stays in their hotel room on a vacation unless they’re sick,” Rosario “The Politician” Blancanales replied from the passenger seat, tucking a .380 Colt pistol snug in a similar holster at the small of his back. “We should hit Graceland. That’s the Mecca for all Elvis fans.”

“Mecca?” Schwarz asked with a wry smile, checking the batteries in a stun gun.

“Metaphorically speaking.”

“We’ll hit the hotel first,” Lyons stated, slowing the van as it headed for a tall wire fence that closed off that end of the Memphis airport. “Best to make sure he’s actually here, before we hit Graceland. If we find the room in disarray with blood on the carpeting, then there’s no sense looking for a corpse already floating in the Mississippi River.”

“Plus, we can leave a bug behind, and lowjack his suitcase,” Schwarz added, tapping the pocket of his shirt. “Just in case we miss him and he tries to run.” Several ordinary-looking pens were clipped there, each of the intricate electronic devices worth more than most cars on the road.

“Readiness is all,” Blancanales agreed, reaching up to slide aside a fake panel in the ceiling to take down a M-16/M-203 combination assault rifle. With expert hands, the former Black Beret made sure the 40 mm grenade launcher was loaded with a gel-pack stun bag. Just in case the professor didn’t want to come along peacefully.

The so-called stun bags were nylon bags filled with soft gelatin pellets. The cartridges held only half-charges, but the nonlethal rounds still hit with enough force to break bones.

“Having a few guns doesn’t hurt, either,” Schwarz agreed, doing the same for his own assault rifle and then preparing the Atchisson autoshotgun for Lyons. The first couple of 12-gauge cartridges in the ammunition drum for the Atchisson were stun bags, the other twenty-four were stainless steel fléchettes. Perfect for blowing down locked doors or cutting a man in two.

When done, Schwarz tucked away the excess ammunition and closed all of the hatches until there was no sign of the arsenal within the ceiling and walls of the Ford Econoline 450. The van was a rolling arsenal of military weapons, and the rear was a compact electronic lab for Schwarz. Hidden compartments were filled with munitions, weapons, cash, clothing, medical supplies and anything else needed for the team out in the field. There were also three large blocks of thermite hidden inside the chassis in case it was necessary for them to destroy the vehicle. Burning at 2,000 Kelvin, the thermite would reduce the armored vehicle to a puddle of molten steel in a matter of seconds. It would be impossible for any police forensic expert to track who, and where, the van had originally come from.

Easing on the brakes, Lyons stopped the vehicle just past the wire fence and Blancanales climbed out to lock the gate behind them. Then the team proceeded toward Interstate 240. The traffic was light, the sky overcast, but not raining yet, and soon the sprawling city of Memphis loomed on the horizon.

Soaring skyscrapers marked the downtown area, bright steel and sparkling glass reflecting the streetlights. Neat rows of apartment blocks lined the bank of the mighty Mississippi, with small parks scattered around in artful disarray.

The water in the mile-wide river was dark and slow, with only a few pleasure craft darting across the murky surface. A fishing trawler moved slowly against the sluggish current, and a brightly lit paddle-wheel casino lolled majestically along, looking like something from another century.

“Behold, the Paris of the South,” Schwarz quipped.

Dominating the entire southside of the bustling city was a colossal pyramid, the sloping sides tinted purple from neon lights. Lyons knew that was the Memphis Sports Arena, named not for the place of its birth, but for the ancient city the modern day metropolis was itself named after, Memphis, Egypt, on the Nile River. The gigantic arena was twenty-three stories high, taller than the Statue of Liberty, and easily held a crowd of twenty thousand people. Illuminated by searchlights at night, the Pyramid Arena could be seen for miles, and airline pilots had it listed on their visual reference chart as a landmark in case of any trouble with their GPS units.

“Huge place. We’ll be shit out of luck if we have to hunt for Gallen in the Pyramid,” Blancanales noted pragmatically, tucking a Homeland Security commission booklet into a pocket.

Few police actually knew what the ID looked like for HSA agents, and virtually no civilians did. So the booklets would open a lot of closed doors for the Stony Man commandos, and even if somebody called Washington, the official HSA records properly listed the three men as duly authorized operatives, thanks to a little creative hacking from Kurtzman and his team. As soon as this mission was over, the HSA files would be deleted, only to be recreated when needed. But there was much less of a chance of somebody in Homeland Security spotting any irregularities in the government files if the records didn’t exist between missions.

“Caruthers,” Lyons corrected. “The name is Caruthers now.”

“But calling him Gallen let’s the professor know that we are aware of who he really is.”

“Fair enough.”

“Sure hope he hasn’t donned a disguise,” Schwarz agreed somberly, pulling up a pdf on his U.S. Army laptop to check the picture of the scientist. “We can’t exactly call out something in Finnish. That might give him a heart attack.”

“Agreed. We may have to split up to hit more places,” Lyons said, swerving to get out from behind a Mack truck hauling live hogs. On their way to the slaughterhouse, the fat animals peeked out from the dark interior, squealing unhappily as if somehow sensing their imposing doom. Lyons felt a brief impulse of sympathy for the animals, and only hoped it wasn’t prophetic for the team. “If there’s any trouble, we rendezvous at the Hercules.”

“Check,” Blancanales answered.

“No problem,” Schwarz added, slinging the laptop over a shoulder. The portable computer had a thousand and one uses in the field, from opening electronic locks to deactivating low-jacks on civilian cars. It was also sheathed in galvanized titanium and was bulletproof to any caliber up to a .357 round at point-blank range. There were several small dents in the tough casing, testifying to the truth of the manufacturer’s claim.

As they neared the downtown area, the traffic grew thicker, and Lyons tried to look confused as they drove past a Memphis Police Department patrol car, the officers casually watching the assorted cars and trucks flow past. To add some credence to the air of confusion, Blancanales pulled out a crumpled map, and started scowling unhappily until the police were left behind and out of sight, blocked by a Main Street trolley.

“And there she blows,” Schwarz said, pointing a finger to the right. A few blocks ahead of them was the hotel-casino. It was definitely from the old school, the sort of thing that would have been seen in Las Vegas twenty years earlier, before the corporations took over and cleaned up the infamous Sin City.

But here, the Tunica Hotel was festooned with neon lights that blazed brightly even in the direct sunlight, announcing the hottest slots in town and a famous comic for an two additional weeks. The night’s performance was marked as sold out.

Sparkles, garish paint, mirrors and plastic tinsel adorned everything else, and set among some neatly rimmed bushes were two colossal searchlights patiently waiting for the arrival of night. Cheery music played from speakers hidden in the bushes, a nearby water fountain spiriting up columns to match the beat of the country-western tune, even though it was performed only by violins and pianos. Rolling into the parking lot, the members of Able Team exchanged dour glances, but said nothing. Compared to the rest of the stately Southern metropolis, the hotel looked like a stripper in a nunnery.

The first couple of lots were full of cars, excited people pouring into the casino and weary ones stumbling into the hotel. Smiling politely, large men, probably guards, flanked the glass front doors, receivers in their ears to keep them in constant communications with Security. Video cameras were nowhere in sight, but Schwarz swept the front of the garish building with an EM scanner and found them all over the place.

“Smile, we’re on Candid Camera. ” He tucked the scanner away. “Better try the back, Carl.”

“That was the plan,” Lyons replied, maneuvering past a group of drunks stumbling past a bedraggled fellow staring forlornly at a single dollar clenched in his fist. Obviously he was not a big winner today.

Bypassing the front parking lot, Lyons drove around the hotel and parked behind an enclosed area, the pungent smell in the air telling them this was where the restaurant dumped its garbage.

The men waited for a few minutes to see if anybody would respond to their presence, then gathered their equipment into black nylon gym bags and left the van, locking it. Some low hedges masked the emergency fire exit, and while Lyons and Blancanales stood guard, Schwarz used a locksmith’s keywire gun to shoot the dead bolt full of stiff wire. A sharp turn of the wrist and the lock disengaged without the alarm sounding.

“Easy as pie,” Schwarz said, sliding the tool into the cushioned bag holding his laptop as the others slipped inside.

“Thus speaks a man who has never made a pie,” Blancanales responded, his sharp eyes checking for trouble in the corridor. But there was nobody in sight, just rows of doors leading to rooms on either side. The sounds of laughter came from several rooms, and a couple was having a screaming match about something undetectable.

Closing the fire exit behind them, Schwarz reactivated the alarm, and they proceeded at a casual pace into the hotel. At an intersection filled with plants and overstuffed easy chairs, the team boarded the elevator and rode to the fifteenth floor. A family with two happy children and an unhappy teenager got on the elevator after them.

Chatting casually about the comic concert that night, Able Team strolled along the hallway, passing several more tourists and one drunk grimly determined to feed a fifty-dollar bill into a soda machine that was clearly marked Exact Change Only.

Going through a set of double doors, the team reached room 1544. They listened for a moment for any odd sounds, then Lyons lightly rapped his knuckles on the door. There was no response. After a minute, he tried again to the same result.

Nodding at Schwarz, the Able Team leader went to a corner, while Blancanales stood guard, trying to stand in a way that would block any casual sight of his friend. Kneeling at the door, Schwarz looked it over carefully and smiled. He had been afraid that the lock on a luxury suite might be different from the standard hotel rooms, but the mechanisms were all the same. It was a standard electronic swipe, with a red and green light to tell the guest if they had inserted the keycard correctly.

Snorting in contempt, Schwarz got out the laptop, attached a small probe to the electronic lock and hit a few buttons. There was a short pause, then the door unlocked.

Pulling a stun gun into view, Lyons slipped into the room, the other two men close behind.

“Okay, this place is empty. Is there anything hot?” the Able Team leader asked, tucking away the stun gun and lowering the gym bag to the carpeting. There were no obvious signs of violence. Everything was neat and tidy, with some clothing hanging in the closet and the towels neatly folded over the chrome rods in the bathroom.

“Clean. No bugs or digital recorders,” Blancanales announced, tucking away the device. He tried to keep disdain out of his voice, and failed miserably. The suite was hideously decorated with Elvis memorabilia; old posters from his movies, facsimiles of his gold records, newspaper clippings, a plaster bust of the King, a mirror with his silhouette etched into the glass and lots of photographs.

“Yeah, I think this is where kitch goes to die,” Schwarz muttered, clicking on a UV flashlight and playing the eerie blue light around, checking the curtains, carpeting, blankets and bathroom for any organic residue. Blood, sweat, urine, semen, any bodily fluid would give off a ghostly glow under the ultraviolet beam no matter how well the area was cleaned. Unless they use steam. But the room registered clean, merely in questionable taste. In Schwarz’s opinion, while Elvis may have worn outrageous costumes on stage, in his private life, Mr. Presley would probably have run screaming out of a room like this.

“How clean?” Lyons demanded, his blue eyes narrowing suspiciously. “Has it been steamed?”

“No, there’s soap scum on the bathroom towel and fingerprints on the TV set,” Schwarz stated, turning off the flashlight. “Nobody has been killed here, and the room washed down to hide the fact.”

“You sure?” the Able Team leader asked, lifting up the covers to check under the bed.

“Positive.”

“Good,” Blancanales said, inspecting the telephone.

Under his UV flashlight there were clear fingerprints on the buttons and a palm print on the handset, so Gallen had made a call to somebody. He could have just been asking housekeeping for more mints on his pillow, but maybe not. There was a pad and pencil near the telephone. Blancanales gently rubbed the pencil across the top sheet, but no words appeared, and there were no crumpled papers in the wastebasket. Damn, the man was tidy. It had to be his scientific training where a single misplaced item could ruin months of hard work. Too bad. Slovenly people were always easy to track, the Puerto Rican thought.

Going to the dresser, Lyons opened the bottom drawer and began riffling through the contents for maps or brochures. If the professor wasn’t here, then he was somewhere in the city, and nobody wandered around a strange town with no idea where they were going. With luck, he’d left a clue to his whereabouts. If not, they’d have to hit the streets of Memphis and trust on luck. None of the Stony Man team put much faith in blind luck.

“Better do the mirror,” Lyons directed, inspecting a drawer full of socks and underwear. “That’ll give us some warning if he comes back.”

“Done, and done.” Taking the Elvis silhouette mirror off the wall, Schwarz laid it on the bed facedown. Pulling out a combat knife, he eased off the pressboard backing and used the tip of the blade to slice off a small amount of the silver backing. Next, he carefully positioned a metallic disk to the clear area and reattached the back before hanging the mirror on the wall once more. Pulling out his laptop, Schwarz touched a few keys and the plasma screen lit up with a sideways view of the hotel room. Adjusting the controls, the view rotated until it was right-side up.

“We’re in business,” he announced, closing the lid. “Any maps?”

“Not a damn thing,” Lyons stated gruffly, closing the top drawer of the dresser. “Guess we’re going to—” There was a knock on the door and everybody froze.

“Mr. Caruthers?” a man called from the hallway. “Hotel management, sir. There’s a leak in the tub above your room. May I come in to inspect the bathroom, please?”

Instantly the team was alert. That had been a mistake. If there was a leak, the management would simply use a pass key to get maintenance into the room as fast as possible. Asking for permission meant the person on the other side of the door wasn’t on the hotel staff.

Pulling out his .357 Colt Python revolver, Lyons mumbled something into his palm to disguise the words as the other men took position on either side of the door. Shuffling over, Lyons paused, then threw open the door. Blancanales hit the startled man outside with his stun gun. The man grimaced, his arms and legs going stiff as the electric charge shot though his body. As Blancanales released the button, the stranger toppled over, breathing heavily. Catching the limp man under the arms, Schwarz dragged him into the suite and deposited him on the bed.

The newcomer was freshly shaved and dressed in a hotel uniform. His shoes looked hotel issue, and his fingernails were short and clean. All well and good. However, there was no wallet or car keys in his pants, or any other items—aside from a photograph of Professor Gallen tucked in his jacket pocket, along with a hypodermic syringe full of a dark blue liquid and a pair of steel handcuffs.

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