“WHAT DO YOU HAVE THERE?” BROGNOLA ASKED

“A wild card out of left field,” Tokaido responded. “You aren’t going to believe it.”

“At this point, I’d believe just about anything,” Kurtzman said.

“It’s from Striker,” Tokaido stated. “He and the CIA ops he was working with just cracked that terrorist cell they were tracking in Jordan.”

“That’s good news,” Brognola said. “But how does that fit in with the situation in Spain?”

“They got a guy into interrogation,” Tokaido reported, “and get this—he says the Iraqis had an agent fly into northern Spain earlier this week to meet with the BLM. They’re trying to get their hands on some nukes and maybe even the supertank.”

“That’s out of left field, all right,” Kurtzman muttered.

“I don’t like the sounds of new players,” Brognola said. “It puts everything in a whole new light.”

Other titles in this series:

STONY MAN VI

STONY MAN VII

STONY MAN VIII

#9 STRIKEPOINT

#10 SECRET ARSENAL

#11 TARGET AMERICA

#12 BLIND EAGLE

#13 WARHEAD

#14 DEADLY AGENT

#15 BLOOD DEBT

#16 DEEP ALERT

#17 VORTEX

#18 STINGER

#19 NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE

#20 TERMS OF SURVIVAL

#21 SATAN’S THRUST

#22 SUNFLASH

#23 THE PERISHING GAME

#24 BIRD OF PREY

#25 SKYLANCE

#26 FLASHBACK

#27 ASIAN STORM

#28 BLOOD STAR

#29 EYE OF THE RUBY

#30 VIRTUAL PERIL

#31 NIGHT OF THE JAGUAR

#32 LAW OF LAST RESORT

#33 PUNITIVE MEASURES

#34 REPRISAL

#35 MESSAGE TO AMERICA

#36 STRANGLEHOLD

#37 TRIPLE STRIKE

#38 ENEMY WITHIN

#39 BREACH OF TRUST

#40 BETRAYAL

#41 SILENT INVADER

#42 EDGE OF NIGHT

#43 ZERO HOUR

#44 THIRST FOR POWER

#45 STAR VENTURE

#46 HOSTILE INSTINCT

#47 COMMAND FORCE

#48 CONFLICT IMPERATIVE

#49 DRAGON FIRE

#50 JUDGMENT IN BLOOD

#51 DOOMSDAY DIRECTIVE

#52 TACTICAL RESPONSE

#53 COUNTDOWN TO TERROR

#54 VECTOR THREE

#55 EXTREME MEASURES

#56 STATE OF AGGRESSION

#57 SKY KILLERS

#58 CONDITION HOSTILE

#59 PRELUDE TO WAR

#60 DEFENSIVE ACTION

#61 ROGUE STATE

#62 DEEP RAMPAGE

#63 FREEDOM WATCH

#64 ROOTS OF TERROR

#65 THE THIRD PROTOCOL

#66 AXIS OF CONFLICT

#67 ECHOES OF WAR

#68 OUTBREAK

#69 DAY OF DECISION

#70 RAMROD INTERCEPT

#71 TERMS OF CONTROL

Rolling Thunder

STONY MAN®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Don Pendleton

This book is dedicated to Feroze Mohammed, for patience, support and understanding far beyond the call of duty

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Nacional Parc Guell, outskirts of Barcelona, Spain

With a faint snap, the thick limb of a towering beech tree tumbled down from the forest canopy and crashed at Angelica Rigo’s feet. More than a dozen other branches, all festooned with dark green leaves, lay in a growing mound at the base of the tree. Rigo, a thirty-year-old, ruddy-skinned woman wearing khaki shorts and a matching sleeveless top, wiped the sweat from her brow and checked her watch, then looked up at the handful of men trimming the other branches in the tree above her. She barked at them in Euskara, native tongue of the Basques.

“Can’t you work any faster?”

One of the men glanced down from his perch and waved his small, curved handsaw. “Let us use chain saws instead of these toys, and we’ll have this tree down three times as fast.”

“And you’d be ten times as loud doing it,” Rigo countered, fighting back an urge to shout. “How many times do I have to tell you we need to do this quietly?”

“You keep telling us that,” the other man called down, “but what is the point? We’re miles from anywhere. Who’s going to hear us except the birds and squirrels?”

A few of the other men in the tree laughed lightly and murmured among themselves. Staring up at them, Rigo fumed. What had happened to the days when those who joined the movement could be counted on to work with dedication and without complaint? Why was it that she always found herself saddled with slackers and malcontents?

“Just keep working!” she told the men. She hesitated a moment, then grudgingly added, “Have this tree down by sunset and there will be wine with rations tonight!”

As expected, the promise of drink motivated the men, and they began to lay into their work with increased vigor. Rigo lit a cigarette as she watched them. They still needed to clear away another three beeches over the next two days to make the site ready. They would be cutting it close.

Another limb soon tumbled to the ground. Rigo sidestepped it and moved away from the tree, her boots treading softly on the wild grass and trailing vines that carpeted the forest floor. They were in a remote corner of Nacional Parc Guell, a densely treed nature preserve ten miles northeast of Barcelona. The nearest hiking trails were half a day’s walk away, so there was little chance that anyone would stumble upon the group illegally falling the beeches. And because the trees were being taken down with minimal disturbance of the overhead canopy, it was just as unlikely that anyone flying overhead would be able to spot the small clearing being carved out of the woods. That would be important come Friday, when the plan was to be carried out.

Rigo made her way through the trees, walking another twenty yards before coming to the edge of a steep-pitched slope that led to a broad, verdant valley. Blowing smoke from her cigarette, she stared out across the valley. Far off in the distance, barely visible through a faint afternoon haze, she could see the rising, honeycombed spires of La Sagrada Familia. The old church, designed more than a century before by infamous Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudi, was still unfinished, and Rigo saw a construction crane poised atop the highest spire like a gigantic metallic grasshopper. Provided the skies were clear on Friday, it would be easy to use the church as a frame of reference while drawing a bead on the intended target, the newly constructed Barcelona civic center, located a few miles southwest of the towers. The trajectory had already been calculated and would be assisted further by GPS readings from a surveillance drone; all that remained was to prepare the launch site and see to it that the FSAT-50 could be delivered on schedule without complications.

Once she’d finished her cigarette, Rigo unclipped her cell phone and, for the third time in the past half hour, checked to make sure it was turned on. It was, and there were still no messages. The woman slipped the phone back in its holder and retreated from the edge of the forest. The mound of trimmed branches at the base of the beech tree was growing higher. Rigo called up a few words of encouragement to her men, then went to check on the other preparations. To her right, a dozen or more smaller saplings had already been flattened, creating a corridor that soon led the woman to the banks of the Avignon River. The river, extending all the way from the uppermost reaches of the Pyrenees, formed the easternmost border of the national park and eventually drained into the Mediterranean near the Barcelona suburb of Sardana. For most of its course, the river ran deep—as much as ninety feet in places—but here there was a fork, with some of the water diverting into a shallow lagoon. The lagoon was also fed by a mountain stream carrying high levels of iron, which gave the water a faintly reddish hue. Another five men stood knee-deep in the water at the lagoon’s edge, scooping out spadefuls of mud and pitching them up onto the embankment. The mud, like the water, was rich with iron and the color of sienna.

“How goes it, Xavier?” Rigo called out to the man closest to her.

“Slow,” called back Xavier Golato, a tall, broad-shouldered man with massive arms and a shaved head glistening with perspiration. “But we are making good progress.”

“We’ll have one of the trees down by sunset,” Rigo told him. “I want to be able to cut the trunk into sections and use it for a ramp.”

“We will be ready,” Golato assured the woman. “You’ll be able to lay the trunks below the waterline like you wanted.”

“Excellent.”

Golato took in Angelica’s voluptuous figure with a faintly salacious gaze. “I have a trunk of my own waiting for you later tonight,” he whispered suggestively.

Angelica returned Golato’s gaze with one every bit as lecherous. “Just be careful not to cut it into sections first,” she taunted. “I’ll be wanting all of it.”

The lovers’ suggestive banter was interrupted when they saw several of the men stop their shoveling and glance upstream to a fork in the river. Rigo followed their gaze and saw a boat entering the lagoon. Instinctively she reached for the 9 mm Walther pistol holstered on her right hip. She relaxed her grip, however, when she recognized the craft, a small, weathered fishing boat propelled by a pair of outboard motors. There were several men on the deck. One of them waved a greeting as the boat drew closer.

“Looks like they brought company,” Golato murmured.

Rigo nodded, eyes on a man’s body sprawled out across the foredeck. A few feet from the body was a woman, gagged and bound at the wrists and ankles. Even from this distance, Rigo could see that the woman was terrified. She could also see that the woman, like the dead man, was white.

“Americans?” Angelica called out to the man who had waved to her from aboard the boat.

The other man nodded. “We came across them a quarter-mile upriver,” he replied, pointing to a small red kayak lying on the deck near the captive woman. “They were acting suspicious.”

Rigo told Golato to have the shovelers stop their work and help guide the boat to a suitable mooring spot ten yards from the section of embankment they had been excavating. After pausing to light another cigarette, she flipped open her cell phone and tried to get in touch with her brothers. Miguel and Jacque Rigo were a few hundred miles away in Bilbao, carrying out the other part of the mission. Neither of them responded. Rigo checked her watch again and frowned. She was supposed to have heard from Miguel ten minutes ago. Had something gone wrong?

Fighting back her concern, she put the phone away and strode along the bank to where the boat was being tethered. Once she’d leaped aboard, she took a closer look at the dead man and saw that he’d been shot once in the head at close range.

“He said they were just tourists, but they have sophisticated camera and radio equipment,” the captain of the boat told her, staring down at the corpse. “They were armed, too.”

Rigo looked from the body to the other woman. The prisoner eyed her beseechingly, tears streaming down her cheeks. She looked to be in her late twenties, blond haired with a sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks. She tried to say something, but her words were muffled by the gag.

“I’ll get to you in a moment,” Rigo told her in flawless English.

Then, shifting back to her native tongue, she asked the boat’s captain, “What did the sonar come up with, Enrique?”

“The readings were all good,” the captain responded. “The depth is acceptable all the way up to Catalia, and there are only a few areas where there are obstacles on the river bottom, but we should be able to maneuver around them.”

The woman smiled flatly. It was nice to have some good news for a change. Of course, Enrique had also brought back a problem with him. He knew it, too, and was quick to anticipate Rigo’s concerns. Gesturing at the woman prisoner, he said, “After I shot the other one, I told her that she would have one last chance to tell the truth once we got here. She knows she will be next if she doesn’t cooperate.”

Rigo nodded and unholstered her Walther. She stepped over the body and crouched before the other woman, eyeing her calmly as she reached for her gag.

“I’m going to take this off,” Rigo explained calmly, “then you will quietly tell us the truth, yes?”

The other woman nodded fearfully. Slowly the gag was unfastened. The prisoner gasped for air, then began to sob.

“We didn’t do anything!” she insisted. “I swear it! We’re working on a film, and we were just getting some second-unit footage of the river! That’s all we were doing! You have to believe me!”

Some of the other men on the boat brought over a crate filled with two handguns, as well as several high-priced film cameras, tape recorders and a slew of accessories. Rigo inspected the guns first. They were both small, standardized Ruger P-4 .22s. Neither had been fired. Rigo set the guns aside and picked up a telephoto lens, then looked back at the other woman.

“CIA?” she asked. “Or NATO maybe?”

“We aren’t spies!” the blonde pleaded. “I’m telling you, we’re just working on a film. A documentary about the Avignon River. We only had guns to warn off wild game whenever we came ashore. We weren’t doing anything wrong!”

Rigo ignored the outburst and looked through the crate, inspecting the woman’s passport, as well as the one taken off the corpse. Both documents seemed on the level, but Rigo knew that meant nothing. She had a dozen seemingly legitimate passports of her own back at the safehouse in Barcelona, and none of them listed her real name or the fact that she was a high-ranking member of the Basque Liberation Movement.

She turned back to the other woman. “One look at what you’ve filmed and we’ll know you’re lying.”

“Look all you want!” the prisoner said. “Go ahead! I’m telling you, it’s just nature footage! That’s all you’re going to see!”

“They tossed some film into the river when they saw us coming after them,” Enrique stated.

“That’s not true!” the blonde cried. “It wasn’t film!”

“No? What, then?”

The other woman hesitated, then said, “It was just some pot. Some marijuana and a pipe. We know about the laws here, and we didn’t want to be caught with it.”

Rigo was weighing the woman’s words when a young Basque with a wild mane of dark hair poked his head out of the boat’s cabin. “A call for you on the radio,” he told Rigo. “It’s your brother.”

“Which one?”

“Miguel.”

Rigo shared an expectant glance with Golato, then stood. It looked as if she were going to walk away from the prisoner, but suddenly she turned, casually took aim at the woman’s head and fired a round into her face, killing her instantly. As the woman slumped to the deck, Rigo holstered her gun and told Golato, “Once night falls, take them downriver to Sardana and get rid of them, along with the kayak. Make it look like they were robbed by river pirates.”

He nodded. “Done.”

Rigo excused herself and went to the cabin. The young man directed her to the transceiver, then stepped outside so that she could take the call alone.

“Miguel,” she said into the microphone, “I was beginning to worry.”

“It took longer than we’d planned, that’s all,” came the crackly response from the woman’s older brother.

“You got your hands on it, then.”

“Yes,” her brother assured her. “We have the tank.”

CHAPTER ONE

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Rosario Blancanales jogged higher up into the foothills surrounding Stony Man Farm. It was his favorite time of day, just past dawn with the sun yet to break through the early-morning clouds. There was a briskness in the air and the valley below him was quiet and tranquil. He’d passed a few small animals—rabbits and chipmunks—and the occasional bird flapped overhead, but otherwise he felt as if he had the winding dirt path to himself.

Soon Blancanales came upon a rocky escarpment affording a panoramic view of the Shenandoah Valley. From this perspective, Stony Man Farm looked much like any number of other isolated ranch estates scattered throughout pockets of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The main house and surrounding buildings were only faintly ostentatious, seemingly part of a modest farming enterprise that included the raising of seasonal crops and, off to the north, some harvesting of wood. Behind the unassuming facade, however, the sprawling valley enclave served as the command center for the covert Sensitive Operations Group, made up of not only Blancanales’s Able Team comrades, but also the warriors of Phoenix Force and a centralized support group that rarely left the Farm’s confines.

From his vantage point, Blancanales could see a few scattered farmhands laboring in the orchards. To his right, standing atop the crest of the nearest mountain, another two men busied themselves inspecting the high, barbwire-topped cyclone fence that encircled the Farm’s perimeter. The men, like those working down below, weren’t mere hired laborers, but rather highly trained, combat-ready members of the facility. The blacksuits.

Like the security force, Blancanales was a man of deceptive appearance. With his prematurely gray hair and well-tanned Hispanic features, he looked less like a battle-trained commando than a successful businessman out for a quick jog before heading into the office at some high-rise in Washington, D.C. In fact, Blancanales had resorted to such a role while on a recent assignment, using his white-suit savvy to infiltrate a shell company fronting for an Asian gun-running operation. One moment he’d been wheeling and dealing with the company’s CEOs at a business office; the next he was fighting alongside Able Team cohorts Carl Lyons and Gadgets Schwarz, trading gunfire with a goon squad at the warehouse where the black-market guns were stored. Before the dust had settled, the men had been forced to resort to hand-to-hand combat, and Blancanales had used his mastery of bo jitsu to neutralize a pair of thugs who together outweighed him by more than one hundred pounds. Blancanales had emerged from the skirmish with only a few aches and bruises, but Schwarz had been put out of commission for a few weeks with a stress fracture of the right leg, and while Lyons had quickly recovered from a flesh wound to the shoulder, he’d been subsequently laid low by a particularly virulent strain of the flu.

Now, for the first time in weeks, Blancanales had been presented with a reprieve from the field. Once he was finished with his jog, he planned to get a ride to Dulles International so that he could fly out to California for a long overdue visit with his family in East L.A. It’d been nearly a year since he’d been home, and he was looking forward to the trip and the inevitable backyard barbecues that were always thrown together at a moment’s notice once word spread that he was coming home.

As it turned out, however, Fate had other plans in store.

Blancanales was about to start back when he heard a rustling in the brush twenty yards downhill from where he was standing. Someone was heading up the path he’d just taken.

“Yo, Pol,” a familiar voice called out. Seconds later, Blancanales spotted Akira Tokaido on the trail. The young Japanese American was a key member of the Farm’s cybernetic team. He wore his black hair up in a topknot and, as usual, was chomping away at a few sticks of bubble gum. He popped the pink balloon he’d just blown, then called out, “¿Que pasa?”

“Since when did you speak Spanish?” Blancanales asked.

“That’s about all I know,” Tokaido confessed. “But you better brush up on yours.”

“Why’s that?”

“Barbara sent me to fetch you. Something’s going down in Spain, and she wants you and Jack Grimaldi to hook up with the guys over there to check it out. Or, as Yoda might put it, ‘May the Force be with you.’”

“I think that was Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“Whatever,” Tokaido said.

“Isn’t Phoenix on assignment in Korea?” he asked Tokaido.

“They wrapped things up there earlier this morning. They’re already on their way to Bilbao.”

Blancanales sighed. So much for downtime. “What are we up against?” he asked.

“Something about a stolen supertank. Briefing’s in ten minutes, or whenever the chief gets back from D.C. He’ll fill you in.”

As if on cue, the two men suddenly heard the faint droning of an approaching helicopter. Blancanales glanced back out over the valley and saw an unarmed OH-58D Kiowa Warrior drift over the mountaintops and begin its descent toward the Farm’s camouflaged airstrip.

“Speak of the devil,” Blancanales murmured.

“I won’t tell him you said that.” Tokaido blew another bubble, then turned and started back down the path, calling over his shoulder, “Last one down’s a rotten egg.”

Blancanales shrugged and began to lope behind Tokaido, muttering to himself, “I’ve been called worse.”

THE CHIEF WAS Hal Brognola. Also known as the head Fed, he was Stony Man’s liaison with the powers-that-be in Washington. Working under the guise of a functionary with the Justice Department, Brognola had been on a first-name basis with the past five presidents, and during that span he’d probably sat in on more meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff than any other person.

“I’ll try my best to keep this brief,” he began, pacing before those assembled in the basement War Room of the main house. Akira Tokaido wasn’t present; he’d gone off to join his colleagues at the computer facilities, located in the Farm’s Annex. Blancanales was there, however, seated alongside Brognola’s top aides, mission controller Barbara Price and Aaron Kurtzman, head of SOG’s cybernetic operations.

“I’m sure you’re all familiar with the FSAT-50,” Brognola said, launching into the briefing.

“Some kind of supertank, right?” Blancanales said.

The big Fed nodded. “We were building them in conjunction with Spain until last spring, when the Defense Department pulled the plug on any further U.S. financing.”

“But Spain’s kept up production,” Kurtzman recalled. “I believe they’re calling it the tank of the future. If I remember correctly, they’re rigging it to double not only as a war boat but also as a modified submarine.”

“Correct,” Brognola said. “FSAT stands for Fully Submersible Amphibious Tank. Last time it was tested underwater, it proved functional at a depth of more than a hundred feet. That’s six times deeper than you can go in a snorkel-equipped T-72. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as the advancements they’ve incorporated into the design. For starters, they’ve plated the tank with some kind of lightweight armor that’s every bit as strong as DU.”

“They’re keeping a tight lid on the armor specs,” Price interjected, “but we suspect they’re using a combination of titanium and plastic along with some variant of the depleted uranium used on the Abrams. Whatever the mix, they’ve brought the weight of the tank down to under thirty tons. That’s roughly half the weight of an Abrams, but it still has an RHA rating of over 1000. On top of that, apparently the frame has built-in pockets that act as ballast tanks when they’re filled with gas.”

“Let’s not get bogged down with too many specifics,” Brognola suggested. “That’s not the issue.”

“Thank God,” Kurtzman deadpanned. “You’re starting to lose me.”

“Amen,” Blancanales said. “Let’s cut to the chase. Akira says somebody’s snatched one of these tanks. My guess is that’s where we come in.”

“Right you are,” Brognola replied. He moved to one of the monitor screens built into the wall behind him. Kurtzman had already cued up a detailed map of northern Spain. Using one of his signature cigars as a pointing stick, the head Fed indicated a spot along the coast of the Bay of Biscay. “Gamuso Armorers were building the FSATs here in Zamudio, an industrial sector on the outskirts of Bilbao,” he went on. “They were field-testing one of the prototypes yesterday afternoon when there was a raid of some sort on the test grounds. We have conflicting reports, but somewhere between twenty and thirty people were killed, most of them members of Gamuso’s training crew. Bottom line—the prototype is now missing and assumed to be in the hands of the perpetrators.”

“Who’s that?” Blancanales asked.

“The Basque Liberation Movement,” Price interjected. “They’re a splinter group of Euskadi Ta Askatasuma. The ETA.”

“Can you shorthand that a little?” Blancanales asked.

“I’ll try,” Price said. “The ETA is Spain’s answer to the IRA. They’ve been clamoring for a separate Basque state for years, and they’ve racked up fair-sized death toll in the process, mostly through car-bombings and kidnappings. The Navarra cell is the most violent of the batch, and apparently they splintered off last year because they thought the ETA was going soft.”

“Specifically,” Brognola added, “there was a falling out after the head of the Navarra cell was gunned down by a Basque counterterrorism unit known as the Ertzainta. We don’t need to focus on the Ertzainta right now.”

Price nodded and resumed. “The head of Navarra’s cell was Carlos Rigo. He was a widower with two grown sons and a daughter. The children took over the cell and demanded that the ETA drop everything it was doing and go after the men who killed their father. When the ETA balked, they decided to go it alone and formed the BLM. They managed to get their revenge, then they dropped out of sight.”

“Until last night,” said Brognola. “Now they’re back in business, and if they’ve got their hands on this tank like we think, they’ve just turned themselves into a force to be reckoned with.”

“Assuming they know how to use it,” Blancanales said.

“I think that’s a safe assumption,” Brognola countered. “They were off the radar more than six months, and my guess is they spent most of that time planning this heist. Why would they go to all that trouble unless they were sure they’d know what to do with the tank once they got their hands on it?”

“Fair enough,” Blancanales conceded, “but still, it’s only one tank, right? I don’t care how high-tech it is, it’s not like they’re suddenly armed to the teeth.”

Brognola shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong, Pol. You see, one of the upgrades Gamuso made when they took over the development program was a retractable missile launcher. A modified Scud system to be exact. Only it’s not restricted to your usual HEAT or AA rounds.”

Blancanales sat upright in his seat, already dreading the worse. “Nukes?” he murmured aloud. “It can fire nukes?”

Brognola nodded gravely. “I’m afraid so.”

“But it wasn’t armed with warheads when they stole it, was it?” Kurtzman asked.

“No,” Brognola said, “but there’s a small item that’s been kept classified since the raid. At roughly the same time the raid was carried out, there was a power brownout inside the Gamuso facility. During all the commotion, somebody managed to gain access to the arms depot. They only had a three minute window of opportunity, but they made the most of it. Once the power was back on and security checked the premises, they came up two missiles short.”

“Both of them nukes,” Blancanales guessed.

“Yes,” Brognola confirmed. “Both missiles had nuclear warheads compatible with the tank’s launch system.”

“Inside job,” Kurtzman speculated.

“That seems a lock,” Brognola concurred. “Spain’s AMI already has the place barricaded and is interrogating all personnel. They also have the militia laying a dragnet within a hundred-mile radius of the test grounds. And their counterterrorist forces are honing in on all known BLM strongholds throughout Navarra.”

“Sounds like they’re covering all the bases,” Blancanales said. “And I hate to say it, but, bad as this all sounds, it seems like an internal problem. Why are we being brought in?”

“Good question.” Brognola turned his attention back to the monitor, this time pointing his cigar at the northeast coastline of Spain. “This Friday there’s a NATO conference being held in Barcelona. Dealing with the ETA and BLM is near the top of the agenda, and both Spain and France have already gone on record asking the other member nations for help. The President has already promised our support.”

“So the Basques want to retaliate by heaving a nuke at the conference?” Blancanales said, his voice tinged with skepticism. “Sounds like overkill, don’t you think?”

“We can’t rule it out,” Brognola insisted. “Put yourselves in their shoes a minute. Say you’ve got some global heavyweights about to gang up on you. Are you going to sit back and wait for them to make the first move? Or are you going to strike first, figuring it’s now or never?”

Blancanales nodded. “I’d go with Plan B.”

“There you have it, then,” Brognola said. “The President was on the phone all night trying to have the conference canceled or at least moved out of Spain, but he’s been overruled. Apparently the other countries feel they can’t run from these separatists and then expect to sound credible when they talk about standing up to them.”

“True,” Blancanales said, “but what’s the population of Barcelona? A million? Two million? Three? That’s putting a hell of a lot of people at risk for the sake of posturing.”

“Like it or not, that’s the hand we’ve been dealt,” Brognola said. “Phoenix Force will probably be landing in Bilbao within the hour. They’re going to scope out the best plan of attack there and await orders. Pol, I want you and Jack to fly to Barcelona and see what you can come up with there. If we turn up any leads on the tank’s whereabouts, we’ll change focus and move inland in hopes we can head it off.”

“And if we aren’t able to head it off?” Blancanales asked.

“I think you’ve already touched on the consequences,” Brognola said. “If they get that tank close enough to lob a nuke at Barcelona, we could have casualties in the millions….”

CHAPTER TWO

Cordillera Cantabriea Mountains,

Vizcaya Province, Spain

“Looks like we’re gonna hit the ground running, big time,” T. J. Hawkins said as he double-checked his parachute gear.

“Fine by me,” replied Rafael Encizo, who was preparing to roll open the side door of the MC-130H Combat Talon that had transported Phoenix Force from North Korea. They were flying at less than twenty-five hundred feet over the easternmost fringe of the Cordillera Cantabriea Mountain Range, some eighty-five miles south of Bilbao. Standing alongside Hawkins and Encizo was former SEAL Calvin James, the group’s medic. He, too, was suited up and ready to jump once the Talon reached their hastily determined insertion point. The other two members of the commando force, Gary Manning and David McCarter, were up front in the plane’s cockpit. It was Manning, the big Canadian, who several minutes before had fielded the call from Spain’s Agency of Military Intelligence about the sighting of a twenty-man BLM force moving through the mountains. Ground troops were reportedly on the way to the area, but Providence had given Phoenix Force an opportunity to have the first crack at the purported masterminds behind the recent theft of the top-secret FSAT-50 battle tank. According to AMI, this particular group didn’t have the tank with them, but there was a chance they were in possession of the twin nuclear warheads stolen at the time of the tank heist.

“All set?” James called out to Hawkins and Encizo.

Hawkins nodded as he slung an M-60 machine gun over his shoulder. James and Encizo were both armed with M-4 carbines, the latter’s rifle supplemented with a submounted 40 mm grenade launcher. For backup, all three men had M-9 Berettas tucked in shoulder-strap web holsters.

“Let’s do it,” Encizo said.

James yanked the door along its rollers and staggered slightly as wind howled its way past the opening. He leaned forward and stared down through a smattering of thin-rib-boned clouds at the rolling green mountains below. Their insertion point was a broad meadow flanked on three sides by mountain peaks. The BLM was reportedly three miles away, trekking a path downhill from the northernmost mountain range; the peaks would likely block their view of the parachutists as they made their drop. James hoped their luck would hold out. If they could land undetected, it would give them an opportunity to position themselves before the enemy reached the meadow. In a situation like this, it was crucial to make the best of any advantage.

Manning’s voice suddenly crackled through the small speaker mounted over one of the cargo holds. “We’re there, guys. Give yourselves a ten-count, then go give ’em hell. We’ll hook up with you as soon as we set this bird down.”

The three paratroopers lined up before the open doorway. James counted down, then lunged out of the plane. He immediately paralleled his body with the ground below and extended his arms and legs outward, slowing his fall. It felt for a moment as if he were flying. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Encizo and Hawkins were airborne as well, framed against the sky above him, similarly spread-eagled. The Talon had flown on and was already banking to the right, ready to dip behind the nearest mountain peak and begin its descent toward a remote, long-abandoned airstrip dating back to days when there had been plans to develop one of the neighboring valleys into a resort community. There, according to plan, McCarter and Manning would rendezvous with the arriving Spanish militia. There were supposedly a few mountain-worthy Jeeps in the convoy, and Manning had been told that a pair of AH-1Q Cobras were additionally being diverted to the site from a military air base in Bilbao. Using Jeeps and choppers, it would hopefully be possible to move quickly and have the ETA forces surrounded by the time they reached the meadow. The trick, obviously, would be to capture or neutralize the enemy without detonating its lethal cargo.

As he drew closer to the meadow, James spotted a few dozen sheep grazing in the tall grass fifty yards to his right, watched over by a young boy and a large black sheepdog. He tugged at his shroud lines, trying to veer as far away from them as possible. The boy had already spotted him, however, and soon the dog had turned and begun charging through the grass toward him, barking loudly.

“Beat it, Lassie,” James muttered under his breath as he prepared to touch down. “You’re blowing our cover.”

The dog continued to yelp, but the moment James hit the ground, it stopped in its tracks, apparently intimidated by the size of James’s quickly collapsing chute. James tumbled expertly and was already unhitching the chute harness when he rose to his feet. He jerked at the lines and hissed at the dog, sending it chasing after Hawkins and Encizo.

Once he’d gathered up the chute and bunched it into a ball, James stuffed it beneath a nearby bush, then strode quickly toward the young shepherd, putting a finger to his lips. The boy, no more than eleven years old, took a tentative step back. A black beret was cocked at an angle on his head, and his hands were clenched around an old Steyr SBS Forester rifle. The weapon was nearly as big as he was, but James had the sense that the boy knew how to fire it.

James had learned to speak Spanish while growing up in a Chicano neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, but he knew that the boy most likely spoke Basque, a language as dissimilar from Spanish as it was from English. Still, he needed to say something to calm the boy. The last thing he wanted to do was to have to draw on him.

“¡Hola!” he called out softly, holding his hands out at his sides. Continuing in Spanish, he said, “Don’t be afraid. We come as friends.”

The boy’s expression remained unchanged and he continued to aim the rifle at James. Finally he spoke, not in Spanish or Euskara, but in English.

“Why should I believe you?”

James was momentarily taken aback. By now Hawkins and Encizo had landed and were headed toward him, the sheepdog barking at their heels. The boy took another step back, fanning his rifle back and forth to keep all three men covered.

“He doesn’t trust us,” James told the others out of the side of his mouth.

“I gathered that much.” Encizo stopped alongside James and sized the boy up, then offered a disarming smile. “Your papa taught you well,” he said. “Atzerri otserri, eh?”

It was the boy’s turn to be surprised. He kept his rifle aimed at the men but slowly lowered the barrel as he called out to his dog. The dog fell silent and scampered to the boy’s side, then sat on its haunches, tongue trailing from its mouth as it caught its breath.

“Where the hell did you learn how to speak Basque?” Hawkins asked Encizo.

“There was a Basque janitor at my high school,” Encizo said. “We got to know each other with all the time I spent in detention. I picked up a few phrases.”

“What was the one you just ran by him?”

“‘The alien’s land is a land of wolves,’” Encizo said.

“Well, tell him the wolves he ought to be worried about are gonna be here any second.”

Encizo turned his attention back to the boy, who’d clearly been listening to the conversation.

“What other wolves?” he asked. “BLM?”

Encizo nodded. “Yes,” he explained. “There are perhaps two dozen of them, and they’re armed. You need to get out of the way and take cover while we—”

Encizo’s voice was drowned out by the thundering echo of a single gunshot. A split second later, the sheepdog howled and toppled onto its side briefly. As it tried to get back on its feet, blood began to glisten on its fur where it’d been shot. The boy stared down at the dog and was crying out its name when another shot ripped its way through the nearby grass a few feet to his right.

James instinctively lunged forward and pulled the boy to the ground as he cried out to the others, “Ready or not, here they come….”

PEERING OVER the boy’s shoulder, James stared past the scattering flock of frightened sheep. More than a dozen BLM gunmen, all wearing trademark red berets, had appeared at the edge of the meadow. Four of them walked carefully alongside a slow-moving ATV, each holding a rifle in one hand while they used the other to steady the vehicle’s cargo, a large, rectangular wooden crate loosely tethered in place by shock cords. Given the crate’s dimensions, James could understand why AMI suspected it might well contain the missing warheads.

THE OTHER SEPARATIST fighters had fanned out and were scrambling up into the nearby foothills, which were strewed with rocks and boulders. The terrain provided ideal cover; in fact, it was the same area where Phoenix Force had planned to take up position in hopes of pinning down the BLM forces once they reached the meadow. Now, unfortunately, the Basques had beat them to the higher ground, and it was Phoenix Force that had been placed at the disadvantage.

The gunner who’d fired the first shot was crouched on a low promontory thirty yards up the mountainside. He was lining up James in his sights, but before he could get off another shot, James hurriedly brought his M-14 into play and fired an autoburst across the meadow, driving the man to cover.

As he scanned the foothills for another target, James noticed, for the first time, a small stone hut concealed in the shade of two large chestnut trees less than fifty yards from where the BLM was swarming. A split-rail fence encircled the hut, and a rusting metal water trough sat near the pen’s open gate. Just beyond the corral’s perimeter, a crude knee-high wall of stacked boulders had been erected behind the house to act as a barrier against rockslides from the mountain.

“Is that where you’re staying?” James whispered to the boy.

The boy nodded fearfully. James ducked as another shot whistled past, then asked the boy, “Is anyone inside?”

“My papa,” the boy replied. Tears began to well in his eyes. “He’s sick. I was tending the sheep so that he could sleep.”

James looked over his shoulder and quickly passed the information along to Encizo and Hawkins, who’d both taken cover behind a cluster of boulders rising up through the grass a few yards behind him.

“I’ll try to get to him,” Hawkins replied. He fired his carbine into the foothills, then split away from Encizo, rolling down into a shallow ditch. Once he’d crawled back up to where he could see the enemy, he called back to James.

“I don’t know, Cal. They’re a hell of a lot closer to the hut than we are. Getting there ahead of them’s gonna be tough.”

“We need to try.” James turned to Encizo. “Give them a grenade or two but stay clear of that crate they’re hauling.”

“Sure thing.”

Encizo leaned back as a spray of gunfire chipped the boulders he was crouched behind, then countered with a round from his M-14 before turning his attention to the carbine’s submounted grenade launcher. James, meanwhile, huddled close to the boy, whose gaze was still fixed on the sheepdog, which now lay still in the grass.

“I’m sorry,” he told the boy, “but there’s nothing we can do for him now. You need to get down in the gully with my friend, okay? Crawl all the way and keep your head down. I’m going to check on your father.”

The boy sobbed faintly and wiped back a tear, then grabbed his rifle and followed James’s instructions. As small as he was, he still presented a target for the enemy, and bullets began to slant down toward him from the foothills.

“Hurry!” Hawkins called out to the boy as he rose and fired back at the enemy. One of his rounds found its mark and a would-be sniper sprawled forward, dropping his rifle. His beret snagged on the lower branches of a nearby shrub and came off as the man hit the ground and rolled a few yards before coming to a rest. Hawkins didn’t waste any time admiring his handiwork. He reached out and grabbed the boy’s right arm, helping him into the ditch.

“Stay low, amigo,” Hawkins told him.

The youth was still crying, but his expression had turned from fear to anger. He crawled lower into the ditch, but stayed put only for a moment. Once Hawkins had turned his attention back to the gunmen in the hills, the boy rose to crouch and raised his rifle into firing position. He quickly took aim and fired off a single shot.

“Hey!” Hawkins cried out. “I told you to stay down!”

The boy ignored Hawkins and fired off another shot. Hawkins look toward the foothills and saw, to his amazement, that the boy had connected with both shots, dropping two men who’d been making their way toward the stone hut.

“I’ll be damned,” Hawkins murmured under his breath.

He turned to grudgingly compliment the boy’s shooting, but the youth had broken into a run, bent over as he followed the ditch’s meandering course toward the distant hut. Enemy gunfire slammed into the earth around him, but he refused to stop, much less turn back.

“That kid’s trying to get himself killed!” Hawkins called out to James. But James didn’t hear him; he was already on the move himself, zigzagging through the grass, sidestepping several of the startled sheep.

Behind him, as promised, Encizo covered James’s advance by firing the first of his 40 mm grenades. He’d followed James’s warning and aimed away from the ATV, targeting instead a group of gunmen firing from positions among the heaviest concentration of boulders in the foothills. The strategy paid off. The grenade’s initial blast quickly took out one gunman, and two others were brought down soon after by a combination of shrapnel and flying rock.

“Way to go, Rafe,” Hawkins called out to him.

“We’ve still got our work cut out for us,” James shouted back. As he readied another grenade, he glanced back at the trailhead by which the terrorists had entered the meadow. The driver of the ATV shut off the engine and joined the men who’d been escorting the wooden crate. All five of them huddled on the far side of the vehicle, using it for cover. A stand of chestnut trees blocked their view of James and the young shepherd, so they directed their fire at Hawkins and Encizo.

James put on a burst of speed and was about to catch up with the boy when spotted two guerrillas scaling the retaining wall behind the stone hut. They boy saw them, too, and he cried out in horror as they circled the hut and disappeared behind the structure.

“Papa!”

“Get down!” James yelled as he caught up with the boy. “Let us handle this!”

The boy, however, shook his head determinedly without breaking his stride. “Papa!” he screamed again. “Wake up!”

They were rushing together through the open gateway of the pen surrounding the hut when gunfire erupted inside the enclosure.

“Papa!” the boy wailed yet again.

James lengthened his stride and outraced the boy to the hut. The building was less half the size of a one-car garage, and it looked to James as if the front doorway was the only way in. Figuring the gunfire had likely been directed through a rear window, he bypassed the doorway and approached the far side of the hut, carbine at the ready. As he turned the corner, James froze. Less than ten yards away, one of the Basques stood facing him with a 9 mm Uzi subgun held out before him, finger on the trigger.

Both men fired simultaneously.

James winced as three rounds slammed into his side like jabs from a red-hot poker. He staggered to his right, crashing into the side of the hut. The other man had taken a volley to the chest. Dropping his gun, he pitched forward, landing face-first in the dirt.

Grimacing, James stepped over the body and inched toward the rear of the hut. His side felt as if it were on fire, and he could feel blood seeping from his wounds, but he tried to put the pain out of his mind. He’d taken a few steps when he heard scuffling out near the retaining wall. Whirling, he spotted yet another gunman crawling over the barrier. He emptied the rest of his magazine, bringing the man down, then tossed his carbine aside and backtracked to the man he’d killed moments before, snatching up his Uzi. He was beginning to feel light-headed from the loss of blood, but he forced himself to move on. Rounding the back of the hut, he was about to let loose with the Uzi when he saw another Basque lying in a pool of blood just below a small rear window. James approached cautiously. Once he was sure the man was dead, he peered in through the window.

The shepherd boy had entered the hut and was embracing his father, who held in his right hand the old Smith & Wesson revolver with which he’d apparently shot the man lying at James’s feet. The old shepherd was clearly weak on his feet, but it didn’t look as if he’d been shot. He spoke to his son reassuringly, but James couldn’t make out what the man was saying. There was a odd thundering in his ears, and soon a field of stars began to cloud his vision. When he felt his knees buckling beneath him, James grabbed at the windowsill for support, but his fingers wouldn’t cooperate. As he began to fall, his world faded to black.

CHAPTER THREE

Encizo was concerned by all the gunfire that had taken place after James had disappeared behind the stone hut, but he was in no position to investigate. The gunmen stationed behind the parked ATV had him pinned down in the middle of the pasture. He fed another grenade into his M-14’s launcher as bullets caromed off the boulders he crouched behind. Encizo figured a well-placed shot could take out the gunmen, but he couldn’t run the risk of blowing up the crate still tethered to the vehicle. He had to try another way.

He waited for a lull in the shooting, then took aim at the stand of chestnut trees to the left of the ATV.

“Get ready to wrap this up!” he shouted out to Hawkins, who was still lying prone at the edge of the nearby ditch.

“Go for it!” Hawkins shouted back, rising to a crouch.

Encizo triggered the launcher. The M-14’s stock bucked sharply against his shoulder as it sent a 40 mm grenade hurtling toward the trees. Encizo’s aim couldn’t have been better. The grenade detonated as it struck the base of one of the trees, obliterating most of the trunk.

With a wrenching snap nearly as loud as the explosion itself, the tall chestnut teetered to one side, then came crashing down, its upper branches slapping across the top of the ATV. By then, Encizo and Hawkins were both on their feet and charging through the meadow.

The ploy worked, flushing the enemy from the ATV. Once Encizo reached another crop of boulders, he dropped to one knee and blasted away with his carbine. Two men dropped from view into the tall grass. Judging from the way they’d gone down, Enzico doubted they’d be getting back up. Hawkins had similar luck, firing through the branches of the fallen tree and nailing a gunman seeking out cover behind the shattered trunk.

As Hawkins continued to race toward the chestnuts, however, he was nearly broadsided by a stream of gunfire coming down from the mountains to his right. He dived to the ground and rolled to one side until he reached one of the sheep, which had been caught up in the cross fire and lay dead in the grass. Peering over the carcass, Hawkins spotted two snipers up in the foothills near the rocks where Encizo had fired earlier. He trained his sights on the man who presented the best target. It took three shots, but he finally managed to send a killshot through the man’s skull. The other gunman returned fire, missing Hawkins by inches with one shot and stirring the dead sheep with another.

“Got a stray to take care of!” Hawkins called over his shoulder to Encizo. “I’ll take him out, then circle around!”

Encizo nodded. He stayed put a moment, eyes on the fallen tree, waiting for another separatist to show himself. None appeared. He stole a quick glance at the stone hut but could still see no sign of James or the shepherd boy. He was about to go have a closer look when he heard the sound of the ATV’s engine revving to life. Shifting his gaze, he saw that one of the Basques had climbed into the driver’s seat and was brushing away the branches draped across the steering wheel. Once he’d shifted gears, the man began to back the ATV up, pulling away from the fallen tree.

“Not so fast,” Encizo muttered.

He quickly fired off a few rounds, managing to hit the vehicle’s framework but not the driver. The ATV separated itself from the tree and began to turn. Encizo realized the driver was hoping to retreat the way he’d come. Cursing, he broke from cover and began to sprint after the vehicle. His carbine was slowing him, so he cast it aside. Without breaking stride, he yanked the 9 mm pistol from his web holster. There was no point in firing, however; the crate blocked his view of the driver.

By the time Encizo reached the fallen tree, the ATV had left the meadow and begun to head down a narrow dirt path that threaded its way between outcroppings and a scattering of tall mountain pines. After a couple turns the vehicle had disappeared from view.

Rather than take the trail, Encizo bounded onto the closest outcropping and followed it, leaping from rock to rock, hoping he wouldn’t lose his footing. He could still hear the ATV and tried his best to head in the same direction. Behind him, he could hear intermittent gunfire back in the meadow and figured Hawkins still had his hands full.

After sixty yards, Encizo was forced to come to a stop. The outcropping had not only narrowed to a point, but it had also come to an abrupt end, leaving him poised at the edge of a sheer, forty-foot precipice.

Another stream of expletives spilled from Encizo’s lips as he sized up his situation. He had two options: he could either backtrack the way he’d come or try to make his way down the sheer face of the cliff. In terms of catching up with the ATV, either way seemed futile. He could no longer even hear the vehicle, much less see it. Like it or not, it looked as if the enemy had gotten away.

“Way to go, Rafe,” he chastised himself.

Encizo was still deliberating his next move when he heard a rustling behind him. He whirled and saw that a mountain goat had appeared atop the outcropping twenty yards behind him. He wasn’t sure how it’d gotten there, but Encizo had a feeling the animal wasn’t about to let him pass. The goat, a full-grown male weighing more than two hundred pounds, stared intently at Encizo, then lowered its head slightly, tipping its horns forward.

“I don’t think that’s a good sign,” Encizo whispered to himself. He was inching closer to the edge of the precipice when the goat suddenly lunged forward, lowering its head still further.

Just as quickly, Encizo lowered himself over the side, seeking out the first available niches and protuberances for support. He’d make it a few yards down when the goat appeared at the edge of the precipice and stared down at him. Encizo stared back momentarily, then glanced over his shoulder, watching a handful of loose stones clatter down the side of the cliff before crashing against the hardpan below.

“Not good,” Encizo muttered. “Not good…”

“HELL, I FEEL like I’m trying to fly that damn supertank,” David McCarter groused.

“It’s no Cobra, that’s for sure,” Gary Manning conceded.

When the two men had landed at the airstrip two miles from where they’d jettisoned their teammates, they’d discovered that the two promised Cobra gunships had been deployed elsewhere. In their place, McCarter had found himself at the controls of a Sikorsky CH-54S Tarhe. Better known as the S-64 Skycrane, the Sikorsky was a forty-year-old hand-me-down that had first seen service in the early years of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. In fact, beneath its sun-faded layers of paint, the Skycrane still bore the insignia of the U.S. 478th Aviation Company. One of the largest helicopters ever built, the S-64 was an unarmed workhorse, designed primarily for lifting of up to ten tons of cargo: anything from 155 mm howitzers to the 4536 kg long-fuse bombs used create instant LZs in the Vietcong heartland. In this case, the chopper’s tailboom was rigged with a service pod containing a surgical operations facility. Also riding in the pod were six well-armed members, not of the militia—which was on its way up into mountains by foot and Jeep—but rather Spain’s special forces. Weighed down with such a heavy load, the chopper lumbered slowly through the air.

Manning had his M-14 at the ready as he scouted the ridge-line of the mountain range they were flying over. In their haste to drop to their insertion point, none of the other Phoenix Force commandos had brought along communications gear, so McCarter and Manning had no idea what kind of situation they would find once they reached the meadow.

“I’m glad we’ve got some backup in the belly of this sucker,” McCarter said, “but I’d trade them in a second for some bloody rocket pods and a nose gun.”

“Maybe next time,” Manning said.

Soon they cleared the peak and were within view of the meadow. At first, the only signs of disturbance they could see were the slain dog and a couple bullet-riddled sheep lying in the tall grass. Then Manning noticed several bodies lying amid the rocks on the south side of the mountain they’d just flown over.

“Over there,” he told McCarter, pointing at the bodies.

The Briton nodded, banking the chopper and coming in from a closer look. “Looks like our guys have been busy.”

“Yeah,” Manning said, “but where are they?”

The Skycrane’s shadow drifted across the meadow as Manning continued to scout for other signs of activity. He was about to point out a few more bodies near the fallen chestnut when the young shepherd boy raced out into view from beneath the canopy of the other trees. He waved wildly as he stared up at the chopper.

“What the hell?” Manning murmured.

“Let’s check it out,” McCarter said, slowly easing the Sikorsky downward.

The boy backpedaled as the chopper’s rotor wash swept over him, flattening the grass around him. Even before the Skycrane had set down completely, the pod doors swung open and the Spanish troops crowded the opening. Once the landing wheels had touched ground, the men piled out, crouching over as they made their way clear of the rotors. Two of them beelined to the boy and began to question him; the others, most of them armed with MP-5 subguns, quickly fanned out in all directions, seeking out the enemy.

“Those lads don’t waste any time, do they?” McCarter deadpanned as he killed the engines and unstrapped himself from the pilot’s chair.

“Reminds me of us,” Manning observed, still scanning the surrounding meadow. “I still don’t see the guys.”

“I don’t like it,” McCarter said, worry creeping into his voice. He reached for his holster, drawing a 7-round, .380 ACP EA-SA Compact.

Once they’d deplaned, McCarter and Manning made their way to the two soldiers interrogating the shepherd boy. One of the men was the unit’s leader, Captain Raul Cordero, a tall, ruggedly handsome officer with dark eyes, thick brows and an equally thick mustache that only partially obscured his pronounced harelip. He was fluent in seven languages, including Basque and English.

“He says they fought off the BLM, but one of your men was shot a few times in the side,” he reported to McCarter. “He says his father is ill, as well.”

“Where are they?” McCarter wanted to know.

“There,” the boy interjected, pointing in the direction of the shaded stone hut.

“The wounded man,” McCarter asked the boy. “What does he look like?”

“He is African,” the boy responded. “He was shot in the side. We can’t stop the bleeding.”

“Go ahead and check it out,” Manning told McCarter. “I’ll get a couple stretchers.”

Cordero told his subordinate to lend Manning a hand, then followed McCarter and the boy toward the hut. On the way, McCarter had the boy once again describe what had happened. He found out that Hawkins was with James, but that Encizo had last been seen chasing after an ATV carrying some kind of large wooden crate.

“I’ll take the bird back up once we check on things here,” McCarter told Cordero.

Once they reached the hut, the boy led the two men around back. There, Calvin James lay at the base of the rear window, several yards from the man the boy’s father had shot. Hawkins was crouched behind James, pressing a blood-soaked towel against the black man’s rib cage. Nearby, the old shepherd sat with his back to the stone wall, hunched over slightly, his ashen-faced glistening with perspiration. He fanned himself with his beret, barely able to muster the strength to look up at his son.

“I’ll check the old man,” Cordero told McCarter.

McCarter nodded, then crouched alongside Hawkins. James was unconscious, lying on his side, arms and legs stretched out at odd angles.

“How does it look?” he asked Hawkins.

Hawkins shook his head. “He got nailed twice, maybe three times. Must’ve hit something, because he’s bleeding out on me. We need to get him looked at, quick.”

“Maybe being stuck with that Skycrane was a good thing after all,” McCarter muttered.

“What’s that?”

“I flew in in a Sikorsky,” McCarter told him. “It’s outfitted with one of those OR pods.”

“Decent,” Hawkins said. “Did a medic come with you?”

McCarter called over to Cordero. “Is there a medic in your unit? My guy needs surgery. Probably a transfusion, too.”

Cordero nodded, removing his palm from the old shepherd’s forehead. “Yes, we have two medics. One is the best field surgeon you could ask for.”

“Good,” McCarter said. “I have a feeling he’s going to get a chance to prove it.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Rafael Encizo slowly extended his right foot toward the base of a scrub brush growing out of the side of the cliff. Once he made contact, he eased his weight onto the limb. It felt capable of supporting him, so he lowered himself a few more inches, transferring his right hand to a narrow crevice.

He was moving at a snail’s pace and had only been able to climb ten yards down the sheer incline. The mountain goat had long since retreated from the cliff’s edge, but Encizo was committed to his downward course. Several times he’d heard the ATV, and though it was hard to judge its whereabouts given the acoustics of his gorgelike surroundings, he held on to the hope that he’d managed to outdistance it earlier and would be able to intercept the driver should he come his way.

As he continued his gruelling descent, sweat stung Encizo’s eyes and blood began to trickle from a score of places where he scraped himself against the rock. His hands and wrists were beginning to ache, and he could feel blisters forming along his fingertips. But he kept on, maintaining his focus, taking care not to rush and risk falling.

Finally he’d made it halfway down the precipice. Pausing to catch his breath, he listened intently. Suddenly his spirits rallied. The ATV now sounded as if it were headed his way. Reinvigorated, Encizo moved sideways along the cliff face, seeking out the concealment of shadows cast by a stand of tall pines lining the mountain ridge behind him. Once he reached the shade, the Cuban stayed put and waited.

Moments later, he spotted the vehicle, raising a cloud of dust as it slowly navigated its way downhill toward him. The driver’s attention was on the trail, which was barely visible beneath a layer of loose rock and wild grass.

Encizo remained still, clinging to the rock with both hands and feet. Reaching for his gun was out of the question; it would only blow his cover and make him an easy target. He was faced with another dilemma, as well. The ATV was coming to a fork in the trail. If the driver kept to his right, he’d pass directly under Encizo. If he went left, however, he’d disappear behind another outcropping and likely make his getaway before the Phoenix Force commando could reach the ground.

“Come on, baby,” Encizo whispered as the driver slowed to a stop at the fork. “Come to papa…”

Encizo’s plea, however, went unanswered.

After a moment’s hesitation, the driver of the ATV turned left and soon passed from Encizo’s view. The sound of its laboring engine began to fade, as well.

“Dammit,” Encizo cursed.

Disheartened, he once again resumed the arduous task of making his way down the cliff. Once he reached the bottom, he figured he’d have no choice but to retrace the Jeep’s course back to the meadow. Provided James and Hawkins had managed to neutralize the enemy, they’d have to wait and hope McCarter and Manning would swing by in time to try to intercept the ATV before it came down out of the mountains.

Encizo hadn’t gone far when he stopped again. He glanced over his shoulder and stared incredulously at the split in the trail. For whatever reason, the ATV had backed up and reappeared at the fork. After shifting gears, the driver slowly turned right and headed Encizo’s way.

The Cuban was no longer in the shade. He froze in place, woefully exposed, as the vehicle approached. Thankfully, the driver was too busy trying to steer his way around fallen rocks to look up. The man was in his late twenties, with shoulder-length hair spilling out from beneath his red beret. He cursed loudly as one of the front wheels rolled over a large rock, jostling the crate behind him. The container had already shifted more than a foot to one side, and the driver had to put the ATV in Neutral momentarily, then rise up in his seat and shift the load so that it was more evenly balanced. He tightened the shock cords slightly, then got back behind the wheel and drove on, eyes once again focused on the trail.

Encizo tensed and readied himself as the ATV passed directly below him.

It was now or never.

He drew a quick breath, then pushed away from the cliff and plunged.

The driver spotted him, but by then it was too late. Encizo dropped onto the crate feet first, bending at the knees to absorb the force of his landing. In the same motion, he shifted his weight forward, flattening himself against the crate’s lid. Reaching past the container, he grabbed at the driver’s neck.

The driver cried out and reached up one hand to claw at Encizo’s fingers. He drew blood, but Encizo refused to release his grip. Encizo shouted in Spanish for the man to stop the vehicle, but the man either didn’t understand him or wasn’t about to comply. Instead, he eased off on the gas and jerked hard to the right. The crate shifted, and Encizo felt himself sliding sharply to one side. His left leg dropped over the side of the crate. As he tried to reposition himself, the driver suddenly slammed on the brakes, taking Encizo by surprise. He was forced to let go of the driver’s neck and grab at the crate to keep from falling off.

Gasping for breath, the driver reached for an Uzi lying in the seat next to him.

“Not a chance,” Encizo growled.

Scrambling forward, he tackled the driver and forced him to release the brakes. The ATV began to drift off the trail, but the men were too busy grappling for the subgun to do anything about it.

As they scuffled, the driver lashed out with his elbow and caught Encizo squarely across the bridge of his nose, almost knocking him out. Blood began to flow through his nostrils and wave of nausea passed over him, but Encizo persevered and countered with a blow of his own, kneeing the driver sharply in the ribs. The man let out a howl. He’d managed to get his hands on the Uzi, however, and rammed the barrel in Encizo’s right thigh.

The moment he felt the gun against his leg, Encizo kicked outward, slamming his ankle against the underside of the dashboard. The Uzi fired harmlessly to the side. Encizo wasn’t about to let the driver get off another shot. Twisting to one side, he freed one arm and lashed out with a karate chop. He caught the other man squarely just below the temple with enough force to knock him out.

By now the ATV had left the trail completely and begun to bound wildly down a steep incline, crashing through several small pines. It glanced off the trunk of a larger tree and swerved sharply to one side. The next thing Encizo knew, he was headed straight for the lip of a deep ravine. The ATV lurched forward, bounding over a sprawl of rocks as large as bowling balls. Behind him, the crate slid forward, as well, striking him between the shoulderblades. Encizo let out a cry of pain. Finally he managed to find the brakes. The ATV brodied sideways and went into a slide before coming to a stop.

One of the front wheels had slipped over the edge of the precipice, however, and as he shut off the engine, Encizo felt the vehicle begin to teeter precariously. He hazarded a glance and saw that the ravine dropped off as sharply as the cliff he’d encountered earlier. The drop-off here, however, was more than twice the distance; it was a good hundred yards straight down to the rock floor.

When Encizo tried to move, the ATV slowly pitched forward. He quickly leaned the other way, stabilizing the vehicle. The driver lay limply beside him, one leg dangling over side. The crate now extended halfway across the driver’s seat, forcing Encizo to lean forward. He was wary of trying to push the container back. One false move and he knew he’d find himself plummeting to certain death.

He was trapped.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Let’s move it!” McCarter shouted irritably at Manning and Hawkins, who were working to detach the OR pod from the Sikorsky. McCarter stood a few yards from the chopper, holding a flag-sized strip of heavy canvas out before him to block the sun from falling on James and the shepherd boy’s father, who both lay on stretchers on the ground. Sergeant Tatis, the medic Captain Cordero had referred to earlier, was crouched over James, tending to his gunshot wounds. The boy, meanwhile, knelt at his father’s side, wiping his brow with a damp cloth.

“Hold your horses,” Manning told McCarter, “we’re almost there.”

A power generator grumbled to life inside the pod and moments later Cordero emerged. He lent Manning and Hawkins a hand with the last few couplers, then moved back and reached out to take the tarp from McCarter.

“You should be able to take off now,” he said. “Once you’re clear, we’ll get your man into surgery and do what we can for him.”

“Good.” McCarter turned to Manning and Hawkins. “Come with me,” he told the big Canadian. “T.J., stay here and keep an eye on things.”

“Got it,” Hawkins said.

McCarter and Manning quickly boarded the Sikorsky. Cordero tossed aside the canvas, then grabbed hold of one end of James’s stretcher. Hawkins took the other.

“Move him very slowly,” Tatis told him, stepping back to give them room.

The Skycrane’s engines soon drowned out the generator and buffeted the meadow with its rotor wash. The detached OR pod rattled in place slightly as the chopper lifted off. Cordero and Hawkins waited until McCarter had guided the Sikorsky away from the pod before lifting James and hauling him into the portable chamber. The medic was right behind him. Inside, there was an OR table already set up in one corner. Even as Cordero and Hawkins were transferring James from the stretcher, Tatis was probing the wounded man’s arm for a vein to tap into with an IV line.

“What is his blood type?” he asked Hawkins.

Hawkins told him. “Are there any units here?”

Tatis shook his head. “No. And he is going to need at least a couple units.”

“Can’t help,” Hawkins said. “He’s not my type.”

“I’m a match,” Cordero said, rolling up his left sleeve. “You can start with me.”

The unit’s other medic arrived moments later; he and the boy were carrying the stretcher bearing the older shepherd.

“It’s too crowded in here.” Tatis turned to Hawkins. “Take the boy out with you. Try to find one of our men, tall with a scar down his right cheek. His name is Umiel. Tell him we need him.”

“He’s got the right blood?” Hawkins said.

“Yes,” Tatis confirmed. “Now, go…”

“What about my papa?” the boy asked.

“He will be fine,” the medic assured him. “We will give him antibiotics and fluids and he will be fine.”

The boy seem unconvinced, but when Hawkins put a hand on his shoulder, he grudgingly kissed his father on the forehead and then followed T.J. out of the pod.

“He’ll be okay,” Hawkins assured the boy. “Keep the faith.”

The boy frowned and looked up at Hawkins. “What does that mean?”

“It means you have to believe things are going to work out.” Hawkins glanced northward, looking for the Sikorsky. The chopper had cleared the mountains, however, and dropped out of sight. He turned his gaze back at the OR pod a moment, then told the boy, “Sometimes keeping the faith is all you can do.”

After searching the meadow and the area around the chestnut trees, Hawkins spotted Umiel halfway up the mountain-side behind the rock hut. He and another soldier had dragged four bodies from the rocks and lined them face-up, side by side, on a level patch of ground. As Hawkins and the shepherd boy approached, the two soldiers finished photographing the dead men’s faces, then set the camera aside and drew Kolvan fighting knives from sheaths strapped to their thighs. With studied nonchalance, the men began slicing off the ears of the fallen ETA warriors.

“Hey!” Hawkins shouted, rushing forward. Once he caught up with the soldiers, he grabbed Umiel by the collar and jerked him away from the bodies. Umiel staggered, off balance, then fell to the ground, dropping his knife. Hawkins grabbed it, then glared at Umiel and the other soldier, who’d momentarily stopped his grisly handiwork. When the boy caught up with Hawkins, he took one look at the butchered corpses and turned away.

“What the hell’s going on here?” Hawkins demanded.

Umiel didn’t understand what Hawkins was saying, but the other man knew a little English and replied, “It is something we learned from the Ertzainta. We take pictures, then check files and find their families. We send ears along with pictures to show what happens if you join BLM.”

“I don’t know who the Ertzainta is,” Hawkins said, “but this is bullshit!”

“The Ertzainta are rogue police,” the other man said. “A death squad that puts more fear into these separatists than we’re allowed to. We will give them credit for this.”

Hawkins stared at the severed ears with disgust, then turned back to the soldiers. “And you don’t think that makes them just more determined to keep fighting you?”

The officer smiled menacingly. “If they fight back, we let the Ertzainta come in and kill someone in their family. Soon they will understand we mean business.”

This wasn’t the first time Hawkins had heard of such tactics used in counterterrorism circles, and there was a part of him that understood the gruesome logic. Still, he couldn’t condone the butchery. It was one thing to gun a man down because he was the enemy. Carving him up for souvenirs, regardless of one’s rationale, went against everything he’d been taught growing up in a military family with a tradition for valor in the battlefield. This was wrong, and he wasn’t about to stand by and watch it happen.

“Sergeant Tatis wants you back at the OR,” he told Umiel. Stretching the truth, he turned to the other soldier, as well. “Both of you.”

“When we finish,” the other soldier said. He was about to slit the ear off another of the dead men when Hawkins yanked out his pistol and thumbed off the safety. The soldier hesitated with his knife and glanced up, finding Hawkins’s gun aimed at his head.

“Now,” Hawkins said.

The soldier hesitated, glaring at Hawkins.

“Americans,” he snapped, spitting at the ground. “Always big shots.”

Before Hawkins could respond, he detected a blur of motion to his right. Umiel was lunging toward him, scooping up a handful of gravel. Hawkins reflexively threw his forearm before his face, deflecting the stones as they came hailing toward him. Umiel reached him before he could fire his gun, however, and the two men tumbled to the ground.

The other soldier was about to join the fray when a rock suddenly glanced off his forehead. He dropped to his knees, stunned. Before he could recover his senses, the shepherd boy rushed forward and shoved him in the shoulder, knocking him to the ground. The boy then rushed over to the bodies of the slain Basques and grabbed one of their subguns. He turned it on the Spaniard and fired a blast into the dirt a few feet in front of him, then raised the barrel, pointing it at the man’s chest.

By then, Hawkins had managed to overpower Umiel, pinning his arm behind him in a full Nelson. As he wrestled the man to his feet, he grinned at the shepherd boy and told him, “Something tells me your father taught you a few things besides how to tend sheep.”

The boy grinned back. “He taught me to always be prepared,” he said, adding, “That way, it is easy to keep the faith.”

CHAPTER SIX

“There he is!” Manning shouted, pointing at the gorge he and McCarter were flying over in the Sikorsky Skycrane.

McCarter glanced down and spotted the terrorists’ ATV, still tilting precariously at the edge of the drop-off where it had come to a stop earlier. Encizo remained trapped in the front seat, shouldering the large wooden crate to keep it from sliding forward any farther. The driver hadn’t yet regained consciousness and continued to lie sprawled next to the Cuban, who glanced up and waved faintly with one hand once he spotted the chopper.

“This could get tricky,” McCarter said, holding the Sikorsky stable in midair. “If we go down to try to help, the rotor wash is liable to push him over the edge.”

“I think you’re right,” Manning said. “We’ve got to do something, though.”

McCarter shifted his gaze to the route the ATV had taken once it had left the trail. When he spotted a half-fallen, lightning-charred pine tree twenty yards uphill from Encizo’s position, he thought he might have stumbled on the solution.

“Check and see if there’s any rope around here,” he told Manning.

“What for?”

“Just do it!” McCarter snapped.

“Since you asked so nicely,” Manning said with a grin.

The big Canadian swiveled his seat around and snapped open a large footlocker mounted over the rear windshield. The locker was filled mostly with tools and emergency gear, but there was also a large spool of heavy link chain. Manning grunted as he hoisted the spool free.

“Will this do?” he asked McCarter.

“That might work even better. How much do you think is there?”

Manning tried to gauge the length of the chain without unwinding it from the spool. “I don’t know, ten yards. Maybe twenty.”

“Let’s give it a shot,” McCarter said. He jockeyed the controls, pulling the Sikorsky away from Encizo’s position. As he dropped toward the far side of the charred pine, he spelled out his plan. “I’ll get you as close to the ground as I can so you can hop down and hook the chain up to the crane hook. Then run a line under that pine and find a way to secure it to the ATV.”

“So you can winch it,” Manning guessed. “Good idea.”

“That’s why they put me in charge instead of you.”

Manning let out a snort. “And here I thought it was your charm.”

“That, too,” the Briton replied. “Now hop to it.”

“Yes, sir!”

McCarter brought the Sikorsky to within ten feet of a reasonably flat escarpment. The rotor wash raised a cloud of leaves and pine needles, revealing the bare rock Manning would have to land on. The big Canadian manipulated the boom’s remote controls, releasing the winch hook mounted under the fuselage. Once he’d unwound six yards of cable, he locked the winch in place and swung his door open.

“Wait for a thumbs-up,” he told McCarter.

McCarter nodded. “Good luck.”

Manning stepped out onto the cockpit ladder and lowered himself to the last rung, then reached out and let the chain spool drop with a loud clatter onto the escarpment. Once McCarter had lowered the Sikorsky another couple feet, Manning pushed free and dropped to the ground a few feet from the spool. He grimaced as a flash of pain raced up both legs, but there was no time to dwell on his discomfort. He quickly affixed one end of the chain to the winch hook, then limped faintly as he made his way to the toppled pine, feeding out the length of chain behind him. He was rolling the spool under the pine when Encizo called out to him.

“That you, Gary?”

“Stay put,” Manning called back. From where he was standing, the tethered crate blocked his view of Encizo.

“Don’t have much choice.”

“We’re going to tug you back to solid ground.” Manning quickly relayed the plan as he continued to unroll the spool. He was halfway to the ATV when he ran out of chain. Staring up at the Sikorsky, which was still hovering in position above the charred pine, he signaled for McCarter to feed out more cable.

As he was waiting, Manning detected a glint of refracted light to his right. He looked over his shoulder and traced the glint to a mountain ridge a hundred yards away. As quickly as it had appeared, the flash disappeared.

“Anyone else in these hills that you know about?” he called out to Encizo.

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Encizo called back. “Why?”

“I think I caught some light bouncing off a pair of binocs,” Manning said.

“Maybe it’s reinforcements,” Encizo replied. “Wasn’t the militia supposed to be on its way up here?”

“Yeah,” Manning said, “but they were coming the other way.”

“We better get the show on the road, then,” Encizo said. “Last thing we need is another warm BLM welcome.”

By now McCarter had let out another twenty yards of cable. Manning tugged at the spool, pulling the chain until he’d reached the ATV. There was no trailer jack and he doubted the rear bumper would hold up, so he dropped flat against the ground and reached under the vehicle, knotting the chain to the chassis. Doing so, he nudged the ATV slightly and it groaned, inching farther over the edge of the precipice. One of the rear tires began to rise off the ground.

“Shit!”

Manning quickly scrambled out from under the vehicle and grabbed at the bumper, pressing down with his full weight.

“Push the crate back!” he shouted to Encizo.

“I don’t know about—”

“Push it back!” Manning repeated.

Manning shifted his weight and began pulling at the bumper. He was in no position to signal for McCarter to start reeling the ATV in, but the Sikorsky nonetheless began to move upward, taking in the chain’s slack. It was going to be close; Manning could feel the ATV slipping forward, pulling him toward the precipice.

“Faster, David!” he muttered, gritting his teeth as he pulled harder on the bumper. He felt his hamstrings and lower back straining from the effort but he refused to let up.

Encizo, meanwhile, had thrown caution to the wind and crawled up out of the driver’s seat and begun to scramble across the top of the crate, trying to rebalance the ATV’s load so it wouldn’t go over the side. Manning stared up at him, his face red, the veins in his neck bulging from his exertion.

“I think we’re gonna make it,” Encizo said. Now that he’d moved from the front to the rear of the ATV, both the vehicle’s rear wheels were back on the ground and it had stopped its forward slide. Moments later, the ATV jerked back a few inches from the precipice. McCarter had taken up all the chain’s slack and was now starting to pull the vehicle from the brink of the abyss.

“Almost there,” Encizo murmured, preparing to jump to the ground once all four wheels were back on firm ground.

Suddenly a muffled blast echoed from up in the hills, followed seconds later by a larger explosion, this one in the air just above the toppled pine. Manning and Encizo looked up simultaneously.

“David!” Encizo cried out.

A mortar shot had just struck the Skycrane’s tail rotor. Destabilized, the chopper had begun to spin around eerily as it dropped toward the ground, taking McCarter down with it.

MCCARTER HAD NO TIME to react. Not that he could have done anything to prevent the Skycrane from crashing. One second he was lurching to one side from the force of the explosion; the next he found the ground rushing up to greet him. All that saved him from being killed on impact was the Sikorsky’s manic air dance; just before striking the pines, it had pirouetted and tilted upward so that the damaged tail section touched down first. When the front end followed suit, the branches of the charred pine helped cushion the landing. Still, the impact was jarring enough to throw McCarter against the front windshield. The glass cracked but held in place as he bounded back into his seat, dazed, blood streaming down his face from a scalp gash.

The Sikorsky had come to rest at an odd angle, tilting slightly upward and sideways just enough to throw off McCarter’s equilibrium. When he tried to stand, his head began to spin. He grabbed for the copilot’s seat to steady himself, but his legs gave out underneath him and he keeled forward, dropping the carbine and toppling to the cockpit’s floor. He struck his head again, this time against the instrument panel. The blow was forceful enough to render him unconscious. The last thing he recalled was the smell of leaking engine fuel.

MANNING STARTED to rush toward the fallen chopper, but his strained hamstrings refused to cooperate, slowing him to a quick hobble. Compounding matters, the ground around him came to life as a stream of gunfire chewed at the dirt and the now-slack length of chain reaching from the ATV to the charred pine. Driven back, he took shelter behind the ATV, kneeling beside Encizo, who’d already retrieved the driver’s Uzi subgun.

“Bastards,” Encizo growled. “Some of them must’ve veered off before they reached the meadow.”

“That or they’ve got a camp around here somewhere,” Manning speculated. He ignored the fiery sensation in his legs and drew his 15-round M-9 Beretta from its shoulder holster. He could no longer see the downed Skycrane, but he could smell smoke and the rank odor of fuel.

“We need to get David out of that chopper before it blows,” he told Encizo, speaking above the gunfire.

“I know,” Encizo said, “but how? They’ve got us pinned down.”

“What about the jalopy?”

“After what it’s been through, I doubt it’s running,” Encizo said, “but let’s give it a—”

Encizo pitched forward, suddenly attacked from behind. The vehicle’s driver had regained consciousness and sprang forward from the front seat armed with a combat knife. The blade bit sharply into Encizo’s shoulder as the Basque knocked him to the ground.

The Basque quickly pulled the knife free and was about to stab Encizo a second time when Manning intervened, instinctively lashing out with the butt of his pistol. He caught the other man just below the right cheekbone, breaking a few teeth. Stunned, the man dropped his knife and his eyes began to roll up inside his head. Before he could collapse on top of Encizo, Manning grabbed hold of him and jerked him back to his feet with so much force the driver reeled backward. He was still trying to catch his balance when he ran out of ground and vanished as quickly as if a trapdoor had just opened under his feet.

Leaning against the ATV for support, Manning slowly limped forward to the edge of the precipice. With both hamstrings out it felt as if his legs had turned to jelly, and each step was an agony. By the time he reached the edge and peered downward, the driver had landed in a contorted, bloody heap at the base of the cliff.

“That’s one down,” Manning murmured.

He turned and headed back toward Encizo. The Cuban had pulled himself to his feet. His shirt was soaked with blood where he’d been stabbed. He ripped the fabric aside and inspected the wound. “He took a nice chunk out of me.”

“Let me take a look,” Manning said.

“Later.” Encizo moved past his teammate and slid into the front seat of the ATV. “Come on, let’s go get David.”

“Easier said than done,” Manning replied, struggling to pull himself into the passenger’s seat. Encizo reached out with his good arm and helped him up.

“Hammies?”

“Yeah,” Manning groaned. “Messed them up playing tug-of-war with the truck here.”

“That sucks,” Encizo told him. “What happened to the good old days when we came through these firefights without a scratch?”

“Times change, I guess,” Manning said. He started to tell Encizo about the gunshot wounds Calvin James had sustained in the meadow when the next stream of gunfire rained on them from the mountains. The crate blocked most of the shots, but a few bullets found their way to the front hood, leaving navel-sized holes. The men knew if they didn’t move they would end up sitting ducks.

Encizo quickly keyed the ignition. The engine turned over several times but wouldn’t catch.

“Come on, you freaking piece of garbage!”

He tried again; this time the engine turned over.

Encizo was shifting into Reverse when their attackers fired another mortar round their way. Manning caught a fleeting glimpse as it whizzed by, missing the ATV by a few yards. It wound up exploding in the gorge behind them, and the sound of the blast echoed through the mountains like a death knell.

“I guess the good news is we must not be carting those nukes after all,” Encizo speculated. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be trying to blow us up.”

“In other words, they don’t have to pull any punches going after us,” Manning replied.

“That’s the bad news,” Encizo said. “Hang on. Here goes…”

The ATV’s front end had been knocked out of alignment during its downhill plunge, and as Encizo guided the vehicle backward, it crabbed sharply to one side. He worked the steering to compensate, and with each turn his wounded shoulder felt as if it were about to fall off.

Encizo backed up the ATV a few more yards, then put on the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a stop several yards short of the pine tree Manning had used to winch the ATV from the edge of the precipice. One of the Sikorsky’s main rotor blades extended out over them, and smoke drifted past the front of the vehicle.

“Okay,” Encizo said, shifting the ATV into neutral. “Let’s try to get to David before he gets fried.”

Manning tried to climb out of his seat. He couldn’t. “No good,” he told Encizo.

“Take the wheel, then,” Encizo said. “I’ll go.”

“I can manage that,” Manning stated.

Encizo climbed out of the driver’s seat, leaving it drenched with blood, then disappeared from view. Manning drew in a deep breath, then braced himself and struggled to duck under the front end of the crate. The effort drained him.

Beretta in hand, Manning scanned his surroundings, looking for signs of the enemy. The gunfire, which had stopped, at least for the moment, had all come from behind him, and all he could see to his right were rock formations, trees and the occasional shrub. As he was turning to his left, he rammed his cheekbone into the crate’s front end.

Muttering an epithet, Manning grabbed the top of the box and pulled himself up until he was sitting on the seat’s headrest. He could see Encizo now. The little Cuban had grabbed hold of the downed chopper’s rotor blade and was swinging his way, hand over hand, toward the cockpit, feet dangling just above the limbs of the charred pine. The tree had been set aflame by burning debris and the flames were crawling along the trunk, racing Encizo toward the aircraft. Manning could see fuel leaking from a rupture in the boom tank. It would take a miracle for Encizo to get to the cockpit and rescue McCarter before the flames reached the fuel and turned the chopper into a fireball.

Manning knew he had to do something. He prepared to fling himself to the ground, hoping he could crawl to the flames and hopefully smother them. Before he could dive forward, however, another volley of gunfire ripped through the pines and pinged along the side of the ATV, forcing him to crawl back behind the cover of the crate. In the process he wrenched his back and a fresh wave of pain shot through his lower torso.

“Son of a bitch!” he growled, pounding the crate with so much force the lid jarred open slightly.

Manning eyed the lid, then glanced back at the fire. It was a long shot, but he figured if he could pry to lid off and heave it far enough, it might be able to snuff out the fire, or at least divert it away from the chopper.

The lid was nailed shut, but Manning had opened a wide enough gap for his fingers, and he tugged upward, ignoring the pain in his back, as well as the bullets slamming into the far side of the ATV. After a few agonizing seconds, the lid finally came free.

Manning glanced into the container, then whistled low and muttered, “I’ll be damned.”

ENCIZO WAS as mindful of the creeping flames as Manning, and when bullets began zipping past his head, he finally let go of the rotor blade and dropped down onto the burning tree. He tore at his blood-soaked shirt, ripping it from his back and then using it to slap at the flames. It worked at first, putting out the part of the fire closest to the fuel spill. He couldn’t get any other of the burning branches without putting himself back into the line of fire, however, and soon it became clear that he was fighting a losing battle.

Pressing the shirt against the gash in his shoulder, Encizo made his way back toward the chopper, half climbing, half stepping over the brittle branches of the pine. Finally he reached the Sikorsky’s ladder and climbed up to the cockpit. Peering in, he saw McCarter struggling to get to his feet, still bleeding from his scalp wound.

“Over here!” Encizo called out.

McCarter glanced up, a quizzical expression on his face.

“Come on!” Encizo jerked the door open and reached out to McCarter. “We’ve got to get out of this firetrap, quick!”

McCarter hesitated, then took Encizo’s hand. The Cuban pulled hard, helping the Briton to the doorway.

“They really pulled the rug out from under you that time, didn’t they?” he wisecracked.

“Rug?” McCarter said dully.

“Let’s go,” Encizo told him. “Gary’s waiting in the ATV.”

“Gary,” McCarter repeated.

Encizo climbed back down the ladder, then dropped to the ground. He was waiting for McCarter to catch up when he heard a loud crash behind him. Turning, he saw the wooden crate tumble over the side of the ATV, spilling its contents onto the ground. Instead of the missiles and warheads the men had been concerned about, the crate had been filled with weapons: LAW rocket launchers, assault rifles, submachine guns and boxes filled with ammo clips. As for Manning, he was beside the vehicle’s rear cargo bay, in the process of setting up a Barrett .50-caliber machine gun on its tripod stand.

“Thought I’d lighten our load,” he called out as Encizo and McCarter made their way to the ATV. “Let’s get the hell out of here before we get toasted!”

“I’ll drive,” Manning told McCarter, pausing to snatch up one of the assault rifles. He handed the gun to McCarter. “You can ride shotgun.”

McCarter stared at the rifle, entranced, as Encizo bounded into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

“Come on, David, dammit!”

McCarter looked up, then moved around the ATV and took a seat next to Encizo.

“Glad to see you in one piece, David,” Manning called out from the rear of the vehicle.

As soon as McCarter climbed in, Encizo geared the ATV and popped the clutch. The vehicle lunged forward, still listing to one side as it raced clear of the downed Sikorsky. Moments later, there was a resounding explosion and shards of flaming shrapnel erupted in all directions. Manning ducked low in the vehicle, aiming the Barrett into the hills. Triggering the gun, he sent an autoburst streaming at their attackers. He couldn’t see if he’d hit anyone, but there was yet another lull in the gunfire coming their way.

Encizo veered the ATV sharply to the right, heading up a slope that led back to the trail it had strayed from earlier. Just as they reached the path, a pair of fleeting shadows passed over the ATV. Glancing up, Encizo and Manning spotted a pair of Cobra gunships heading toward the enemy positions in the hills.

“Hot damn!” Encizo said. “It’s about time we got some help!”

Once he reached the trail, Encizo quickly realized the ATV’s front wheels were so misaligned he was in danger of crashing into the rocks flanking either side of the path. After a few yards he gave up trying and brought the vehicle to a stop.

“Stay put,” he told Manning. “David and I’ll go help mop up, then we’ll come back to get you.”

Manning nodded.

Encizo was halfway out of the ATV when he noticed that McCarter was still in his seat.

“David?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

McCarter stared at Encizo. He looked confused. “David,” he said. “Is that my name?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

“Amnesia?” Carmen Delahunt was floored by the news Akira Tokaido had just delivered after a briefing with Aaron Kurtzman. “David has amnesia?”

Tokaido nodded. “All these times we’ve accused him of being out of his mind, who’d have thought we’d wind up being right?”

“Not funny,” Delahunt snapped. Anger flushed her cheeks just a shade lighter than her fiery red hair.

“Hey, just a little gallows humor, all right?” Tokaido countered.

“I repeat,” Delahunt said. “It’s not funny. What’s next? Are you going to start making wisecracks about Calvin being a holey man because he took three bullets?”

“Okay, I got it.”

Tokaido shrugged and pitched his bubble gum into a trash receptacle as he made his way to the far corner of the Annex Computer Room, where steam rose from Kurtzman’s legendary coffeepot.

Along with Tokaido and Huntington Wethers, who was due to arrive any moment, Delahunt rounded out Kurtzman’s cybernetics team. The members of the group had never joined Able Team or Phoenix Force on the battlefield, yet within the confines of the Computer Room they played an equally important role in helping to stem the tide of global terrorism and high crime both at home and abroad.

Both Tokaido and Delahunt had been on duty for the past ten hours. Carmen had planned to go on break as soon as Wethers arrived, but in light of recent developments, she figured her usual midday catnap would have to wait. Stifling a yawn, she cursored across her screen, calling up a messaging program that would allow her to stay on top of any communications coming in from the field teams. There was one new message, from Rafael Encizo, under the heading “Med Update.” Delahunt was opening up the message when a cup of coffee suddenly materialized at the edge of her desk.

“Peace offering,” Tokaido said when she glanced up. “You were right. I shouldn’t have been smarting off like that.”

Delahunt picked up the cup and offered a tentative smile. “If this stuff’s fresh, you’re forgiven.”

“The spoon didn’t get stuck when I was stirring the cream,” Tokaido said.

“Close enough.”

Delahunt was taking a sip when the doors behind them opened and in walked a tall, crisply dressed black man with traces of gray in his short-cropped hair.

Huntington Wethers, a former cybernetics professor at Berkeley, had the most analytic mind of anyone working at the Farm, and when it came to sorting through the constant stream of information filtering into the Computer Room, Wethers was more often than not the first to glean the patterns and connections that transformed raw data into useable intelligence.

“I just heard Phoenix Force ran into some difficulties in Spain,” Wethers said to Tokaido and Delahunt as he made his way to his workstation.

“There’s an understatement,” Tokaido said.

Delahunt shot him a warning glance, then quickly told Wethers about the ill-fated mission outside Bilbao.

“Terrible,” Wethers said once Carmen had finished. “What’s everybody’s medical status?”

“I was just working on that,” Delahunt said. “Give me a second.”

Wethers and Tokaido stood by watching as Carmen read through Encizo’s e-mail. “Actually, David’s in the best shape of them all, at least physically,” she reported. “He’s got a mild concussion and needed some scalp stitches where he struck his head. They’ll be giving him a CAT scan soon so they can come up with some kind of prognosis on his amnesia.”

“Hopefully it’ll be only short-term,” Wethers said. “That’s usually the case in situations like this.”

“That’s what we’re banking on,” Delahunt said. “As for Calvin, he’s still in surgery. A field medic managed to stop the bleeding from his gunshot wounds, but they’re going back in for one of the bullets because it’s positioned too close to one of his arteries.”

“But he’s going to pull through, yes?” Wethers asked.

Delahunt skimmed through the rest of Encizo’s note, then said, “Rafe says it’s touch and go. The surgeons told him it was a miracle they were able to bring Cal in alive, given all the blood he’d lost. He got a couple units from two of the guys in that commando outfit that flew in with David and Gary.”

“And Gary? How’s he?”

Delahunt shook her head. “Partial tear in his right hamstring, and a strain in the left. That plus he pulled the muscles in his lower back. He can barely move.

“And with Rafe, the knife nicked a tendon and sliced into his right deltoid. He’ll be in a sling and full-arm cast for at least a few weeks.”

“Bottom line,” Tokaido interjected, “is that they’re all out of commission except for T.J.”

“This is quite a blow,” Wethers said. “First we lose two guys from Able Team, and now this.”

“I know,” Delahunt concurred. “And what’s really upsetting is that it looks like this was just a wild-goose chase.”

“Not entirely,” Tokaido reminded her. “I mean, we did manage to take out an BLM cell that was trying to set up a base in the mountains there.”

“Maybe so,” Delahunt conceded, “but if you ask me, I think the Basques deliberately tried to make it look like they were carting those stolen missiles.”

“Diversionary ploy?” Wethers queried.

“Exactly,” Delahunt replied. “Look at all the manpower that went into that mission. Not just on our part, but Spain, too. With everybody focused on those mountains, it gave the BLM a better chance to smuggle the missiles out of the area. Not to mention this supertank.”

“The needles have left the haystack, you’re saying,” Wethers replied.

“That would be my guess,” Delahunt said. “And the more time that passes without us finding them, the wider the search area’s going to get.”

“And on our part, we’re down to Pol and T.J.,” Tokaido said. “And Pol’s not even expected to reach Spain for another few hours. The trail’s just going to get colder.”

“Fortunately, it’s not up to just us,” Delahunt reminded Tokaido. “The Spanish are pouring as many resources into this whole thing as they can, and they’re getting help from the French and NATO, too.”

“Yeah, but they’re not as good as us,” Tokaido said. “You’re talking boys going out to do a man’s job.”

Delahunt managed a smile. “Do I detect a little home-team prejudice?”

Tokaido grinned back. “Hey, if you can’t root for the home team, what good are you?”

Wethers was in no mood for comic relief. He glanced across the room at one of the monitors depicting a sat-link photo of the mountainous terrain that stretched between Bilbao and Barcelona. He asked the others, “What have Hal and Barbara had to say about all this?”

“The chief’s back in Washington conferring with the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Delahunt responded. “Barbara’s back at the main house. She said she was going to go over the backgrounds on some of the blacksuits and see if we can patch together a backup team to send over.”

“Won’t be the same,” Tokaido said. “There’s no replacing the guys in Phoenix Force or Able Team.”

The cybercrew was interrupted as the door behind them opened a second time. This time, it was a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed man who strode purposefully into the room. His face was pale and his forehead glistened with sweat.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he told Tokaido.

“Carl?” Delahunt called out, startled to see the Able Team leader up and on his feet. “What are you doing here?”

Carl Lyons snapped a salute and flashed a menacing grin. “Reporting for duty, what else?”

“You’ve got the flu, for God’s sake,” Delahunt protested. “Look at you, you’re sweating like you just came out of a steam bath.”

“Flu schmoo,” Lyons snarled. “I just got done talking with Barbara. We’ve got work to do, so quit gawking and track me down a jet so I can get my ass to Spain, pronto.”

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