TOKAIDO YANKED OUT HIS EARBUDS AND PUMPED HIS FIST IN THE AIR

“You have something?” Barbara Price asked.

Tokaido nodded. “Our paramilitary one-stop-shopping center migrated just a few miles from Barstow. They’re in Hesperia.”

Carl Lyons fielded the young hacker’s heads-up on the location of Army Gideon’s new quarters.

“Any word if they’ve been in contact with Ahmet or Nouhra?” Schwarz asked as he clipped frag grenades to an ammunition belt already loaded with magazines.

“No,” Lyons reported, “but they just got their mitts on a handful of Gustav rocket launchers. If that’s not special orders for our perps, I don’t know what is.”

“Hesperia’s less than a half hour away, tops,” Blancanales said. “Maybe we can beat the shoppers there and be waiting for them.”

“Not that it matters at this stage,” Schwarz said, “but I keep wondering who they plan to take out with these rocket launchers they keep trying to get their hands on.”

“Beats me,” Lyons said, “but I’m guessing innocent bystanders.”

Hostile Dawn
Don Pendleton
Stony Man ®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Ron Renauld for his contribution to this work.

HOSTILE DAWN

CONTENTS

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

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Winter had come early to the Blue Ridge Mountains. The peaks were capped white, and the overnight snowfall had left three inches of fresh powder at the lower elevations. As Barbara Price waved to the security detail manning the front gate to Stony Man’s Shenandoah Valley compound, she saw one of the blacksuits maneuvering a trailer plow down the long driveway leading to the main house. The gabled structure looked, to the eye, much like any number of other isolated manors she’d passed on the drive from Baltimore, where she’d just spent a rare four-day weekend away from her duties as mission controller for the Farm’s Sensitive Operations Group. It had been good to get away, but Price was dedicated to her work and looked forward to padding her clipboard with the latest intel and logistics data needed to oversee covert operations being carried out by the men of Able Team and Phoenix Force.

A portion of the Farm’s private landing strip had been plowed clear, as well, and Price had just eased her Jeep Cherokee to a stop near the house when she saw a Bell 206 Long Ranger helicopter flutter down from the leaden skies overhead, raising up clouds of dry snow as it zeroed in on the clearing. After tucking her shoulder-length, honey-blond hair inside her parka, Price stepped out into the crisp, twenty-degree morning air. She strode past the dormant snow-covered produce gardens, reaching the chopper just as Hal Brognola was disembarking. Brognola, SOG’s director of operations, was a tall, middle-aged man with graying temples and well-earned furrows creasing his broad forehead.

“How was your vacation?” Brognola asked Price as they headed toward the house.

Price smiled. “Four days is a ‘breather,’ not a vacation. But we take what we can get.”

“Isn’t that the truth.”

“In any event, I’m recharged and ready to go.”

“Glad to hear it,” Brognola replied, “because we’ve got a full plate.”

The Sensitive Operations Group administrators passed through two checkpoints before reaching an underground tunnel that linked the main house with the Farm’s Annex, a newer facility housed within the facade of a wood-chipping mill set on the east end of the property. They traversed the thousand-foot-long passageway in an electric cart, its muted purr allowing Brognola to bring Price up to date without raising his voice.

“We’ve still got the men working two fronts,” Brognola explained. “Able Team’s out in California, just north of L.A., near Barstow.”

“The sleeper cell?” Price asked. “What would al Qaeda be doing up there?”

“We’ve got a lead that they’re trying to get their hands on some explosives,” Brognola said.

“From under whose counter?” Price wanted to know.

“Some paramilitary outfit,” Brognola explained. “We intercepted something off their message board that sounded like a deal in the making. Unfortunately there were no details on a time or location, so we’re going to have to sniff around and hope they tip their hand.”

“I take it there was nothing about what al Qaeda has in mind if they can load up.”

“Negative,” Brognola admitted. “We still think they’re targeting L.A., but since they’re roaming around up there it might be they’ve got their eyes on the aqueduct. It’s always been vulnerable, and there are tons of places up there where they’d have easy access to it.”

“Turn off the faucet before it reaches L.A.?”

“That’s one theory,” Brognola said. “CIA thinks they could be targeting the freeways, and the Bureau’s hunch is there might still be something to all that talk about hitting a shopping mall.”

“Any one of those would be a nightmare,” Price said with a shudder that had only partly to do with the lack of heat in the illuminated passageway.

Reaching the far end of the tunnel, Brognola and Price left the cart and headed to the next security checkpoint.

“As for Phoenix Force,” the SOG director continued, “they’re in Damascus. A Hamas sect just kidnapped an American reporter for U.S. Global News. ”

“I read about that,” Price confessed. “He was looking into claims that Iran’s shuttling nuclear materials to Syria one step ahead of IAEC inspectors.”

“Not only that,” Brognola said. “He was running with the theory that they were using the same conduit Hussein used to smuggle WMAs out of Iraq back before we came sniffing around.”

“There’s a Pulitzer in there somewhere if he can prove it.”

“Provided he lives to write about it,” said Brognola. “We need to hope Hamas is trying to interrogate the guy and didn’t just whack him. Otherwise they’re going to be lying in wait for Phoenix.”

Damascus, Syria

T RAREQ C REEK N URSERY , located on hilly terrain two miles west of the Old City in Damascus, had been shut down for nearly a year. Most of its inventory had been transferred to a newer, larger facility closer to the Syrian capital’s suburban sprawl, but rainfall and a steady supply of water from mountain-fed streams that wound through the abandoned parcel had allowed those plants and large shrubs left behind to thrive. The overgrown, unpruned foliage had provided adequate cover for the men of Phoenix Force as they closed in on their target, a large greenhouse set back toward the rear of the nursery. Ivy and bougainvillea had overrun the greenhouse, covering most of its dust-caked glass panels. Parked next to the outbuilding was a late-model Subaru station wagon. It matched the description of the vehicle used by Hamas terrorists who, less than twelve hours ago, had kidnapped U.S. Global News reporter Walter Ferris in the parking lot outside the Damascus Venata Hotel.

Two of the terrorists were standing guard outside the greenhouse, one posted near the main doorway, the other up on a raised catwalk spanning the length of the glass enclosure’s arched roof. The nursery was located in the flight path of a small airfield less than a mile to the north, and while casing out the grounds in preparation for their attack, Phoenix Force had noticed that whenever a plane or tourist chopper ventured past, the ground sentry would duck inside the greenhouse while his counterpart on the catwalk retreated from view beneath the cover of a large acacia tree whose leafy branches extended over the glass structure. The U.S. covert op team had also determined that one of the sightseeing copters flew by the nursery at the same time every two hours. Locking in that time frame, the five-man crew had hastily sketched a battle plan.

Now, with the chopper due to make its next scheduled run past the terrorists’ hideout in less than a minute, it was time to put the plan into motion.

Gary Manning had already made it to a toolshed at the far end of the greenhouse. He knew that Calvin James and T. J. Hawkins were somewhere out on the grounds, closing in. Once they were in position, they would use their earbud transceivers to give the green light to Rafael Encizo, who lay prone on a raised knoll less than fifty yards away, his M-110, suppressor-equipped sniper rifle trained on a hazy pane of glass through which he could see Hamas agents pacing around their chair-bound hostage. As for Phoenix’s team leader, David McCarter had tracked down the Damascus Sky Tours office at the nearby airport and arranged for them to divert their next scheduled chopper tour from its usual course. Peering over the slanted roof of the toolshed, Manning could see one of the company’s Eurocopter EC-135 helicopters headed toward the nursery, but he knew McCarter was the only one aboard.

This is it, Manning thought to himself, unsheathing a Heckler & Koch USP Tactical gun from his web holster. The drone of the approaching chopper grew louder as he rigged the handgun with a suppressor. Once the weapon was ready, the Canadian operative crept from behind the toolshed. The rear of the greenhouse faced south, and its glass panels had been covered with an opaque layer of reflective insulation: no one inside could see him as he clasped an upper rung of the mounted ladder leading up to the catwalk. Overhead, McCarter had just guided the Eurocopter over the nursery and was hovering in place above the acacia, flying low enough that Manning could feel the greenhouse shudder from the noise as well as the chopper’s downdraft. The ladder vibrated, as well, masking Manning’s weight as he began to climb up. Already he could see the sentry, back turned to him, staring up through the wavering tree branches. Manning climbed another rung higher, then raised his pistol, taking aim at the gap between the other man’s shoulder blades. Once he heard the tinkling of glass to indicate that Encizo had fired the opening volley, he would pull the trigger.

H AMAS FIELD LEADER Riri Sahn had just clipped Walter Ferris in the jaw with the stock of his Kalashnikov AK-47.

“Lies!” Sahn roared at the hostage. “We want the truth!”

Dazed, Ferris spit blood as he sagged against the restraints binding him to the chair. He fought to remain conscious and glared at his abductors.

“I just told you!” he retorted, shouting to be heard above the helicopter that had just cast a shadow over the inside of the greenhouse. “I’m a travel reporter! I have no interest in terrorist issues!”

Two other Hamas agents stood near Sahn. A third had just come in from his post outside the main door.

“The helicopter didn’t just fly past like the other times,” he reported.

“You think I haven’t noticed!” Sahn yelled. He glanced up, trying to catch a glimpse of the chopper through the bougainvillea blanketing the glass-paneled roof. He was about to order the other men to investigate when one of the glass panes to his right shattered. A nanosecond later Sahn crumpled to the floor, his heart turned to chowder by a 7.62 mm NATO round.

The remaining three terrorists were still trying to process what had just happened when, over the drone of the Eurocopter, they heard a thud up on the catwalk transversing the greenhouse roof. As they glanced up, trying to pinpoint the sound, the greenhouse was suddenly rocked by the concussive force of two MK-3A-2 hand grenades landing on the north and south sides of the structure. Shock waves shattered the glass panels, leaving the surviving Hamas agents in clear view of their attackers.

The sentry who’d just entered the building reeled as he was strafed across the midsection by a fusillade from Hawkins’s M-16. The remaining two terrorists were grabbing for their AK-47s when Manning dropped through one of the shattered roof panels. He landed hard on the dirt ground near the chair Walter Ferris was bound to.

Manning sprang forward the moment he landed, tackling Ferris to the ground. In the process, the Stony Man commando rammed his shoulder into a nearby plant stand. Several large terra-cotta containers crashed down on the Canadian, one striking his hip while another clipped the back of his head, rendering him unconscious. Before the surviving Hamas agents could have a go at him, both Hawkins and James raked the nursery interior with bursts from their M-16s. The terrorists went down, landing on their unfired assault rifles.

In all, less than eight seconds had passed from the time Rafael Encizo had slain Riri Sahn. In those eight seconds, Walter Ferris’s fate had gone through a complete turnaround. Instead of facing certain torture and death, the reporter would now have a chance to complete the investigatory news story he’d spent the past four months working on.

Phoenix Force’s mission was accomplished.

CHAPTER TWO

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

“Phoenix pulled it off,” Barbara Price reported to her colleagues gathered inside the Annex Computer Room. She’d just finished speaking long-distance with David McCarter. “Ferris is safe and the Hamas squad was neutralized.”

“Chalk another one up for the good guys,” said Aaron Kurtzman, the wheelchair-bound head of SOG’s crack team of cyberanalysts. He was seated at a workstation situated on the west side of the large subterranean chamber. Poised in front of their computers at other stations were Akira Tokaido, Carmen Delahunt and Huntington Wethers. Price stood in their midst, while Hal Brognola was off to one side, clicking away at a laptop as he wrapped up a long-distance call of his own, this one to Able Team commander Carl Lyons.

“Are the guys okay?” asked Delahunt, a fiery-spirited redhead in her late forties who’d come to Stony Man by way of a long, heralded tenure with the FBI.

“All but Gary,” Price replied. “He’s being looked at for a possible concussion and shoulder separation.”

“By ‘neutralized,’ I take it there were no prisoners,” Huntington Wethers said. The somber-faced African American was the same age as Delahunt, but he looked years older, his close-cropped hair having turned silver at the temples within a few years of taking an extended leave from his professorial chair at UC Berkeley. To explore the cutting edge of cybernetic intel gathering on behalf of his country was, for Wethers, not only a challenge but an honor, and if it had cost him his once youthful good looks, he considered it a small price to pay.

“It would have been nice to have someone to interrogate, but no,” Price said. “David says their only option was to go in for the kill. He’s flown Gary and Ferris to the hospital, but the others stayed behind and are combing the nursery for intel. Hopefully we’ll have something to work with.”

“And hopefully we can convince Ferris to cough up anything he knows instead of saving it for some damn scoop,” said Akira Tokaido, the youngest member of the cybercrew. “The guy owes us.”

“Apparently, Ferris had his jaw fractured by Hamas,” Price said. “He’s going under the knife and probably won’t be up for questioning right away. Once he is, I’m sure McCarter will debrief him.”

Across the room, Brognola removed a flash drive from his laptop and handed it to Kurtzman.

“Load this, Bear, would you? And call up the photo file. Monitor three.”

“Sure thing.”

While Kurtzman transferred the files to his computer, Brognola addressed the others.

“We’ve got a sidebar of sorts regarding Able Team’s assignment on the West Coast,” he said. “It came up toward the end of the White House briefing, but there wasn’t a lot of hard data available to back it up. Now we’ve got a little more to sink our teeth into.”

“This is about the al Qaeda cell?” Wethers asked.

“Possibly,” Brognola said. “I’ll get into it. Bear?”

“Coming right up.”

Once Kurtzman had pulled up the photo file, he ran his cursor over the necessary commands to transfer an image to one of the large, flat-screen monitors lining the east wall. The collective Stony Man braintrust soon found itself staring at a booking mugshot of a man in his midthirties, head shaved, his thin, tight lips framed by a goatee the same dark color as his piercing, defiant eyes.

“He uses a handful of aliases, but his name is Kouri Ahmet,” Brognola explained. “He’s Lebanese by birth and has loose ties with both Hamas and Hezbollah, but all intel points to him being a freelancer. Over the years he’s also dabbled with al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad and a handful of other terrorist outfits in the Far East. He specializes in assassinations but will tackle any job that suits his purposes.”

“He doesn’t look like the happy sort,” Carmen Delahunt commented.

“This was taken after his arrest three days ago in Mexico,” Brognola said, passing along what he’d just learned from Lyons, who, in turn, had come upon the info through an L.A. contact with the FBI. “He was trying to broker a deal for a cache of Blinidicide-81 LAWs stolen from a military depot in La Paz. Apparently an informant turned on him and the Mexican authorities had him in custody when the Justice Department here flagged him on a conspiracy charge involving the secretary of state.”

“I remember that,” Tokaido said as he absently fingered the ink-black topknot rising from his scalp like an exclamation point. “Some sniper plot that was supposed to be carried out during the secretary’s last trip to the Middle East, right?”

“Good memory,” Brognola said. “We’re not sure at this point what Ahmet planned to do with the LAWs, but the idea of him loading up on that kind of firepower just south of the border obviously has us concerned.”

“Not to mention the secretary,” Delahunt interjected. “If he thought it was bad having someone come after him with a rifle, imagine what he must think about being the crosshairs of an antitank rocket.”

“Again, we’re not certain who Ahmet was targeting,” Brognola said. “He’s being extradited and is already on a plane bound for the States. The Bureau wants to run him through interrogation and dangle leniency as bait in hopes he’ll cop to what he was planning and finger some higher-ups.”

“I assume one theory is that he was looking to bring those rocket launchers to the sleeper cell Able Team is looking for,” Price ventured.

“It would make sense,” Brognola said. “Like I said, Ahmet’s a freelancer, so it’s not a reach to think he’d throw in with al Qaeda. And the Mexican border is still porous enough to figure those LAWs were earmarked for L.A.”

“Hopefully the Bureau will get to the bottom of it,” Price said. “But I take it we’re in the on-deck circle.”

“Affirmative,” Brognola said. “I pulled strings and arranged to have Ahmet flown up to Edwards Air Force Base near Barstow instead of L.A.”

“Where Able Team just so happens to be in the neighborhood,” Delahunt interjected.

Brognola nodded. “The Bureau will go by the book with Ahmet, but if that doesn’t work, we’ve got the green light to let Ironman have a go at him.”

Price smiled dourly. “If it comes to that, I like our chances.”

CHAPTER THREE

Airspace over San Diego County, California

It was only after he’d put the Gulfstream back on autopilot that Kouri Ahmet began to come down off the adrenaline rush that had powered his desperate ploy to thwart his extradition to Los Angeles. As he sat back in the jet’s cockpit, waiting for his pulse to return to normal, the Lebanese expatriate thought back on the past several minutes, savoring details that, at the time, had flashed by in a blur.

The small government transport jet had hit a pocket of turbulence shortly after crossing the Mexican border and when the Gulfstream had begun to rock, Ahmet had taken note of the U.S. Air Marshal’s distraction and made his move. Bolting from his seat, the terrorist had lunged across the aisle and burrowed his shoulder into the other man’s solar plexis, knocking the wind from his lungs. That had bought Ahmet the time necessary to draw his shackled hands beneath his waist and wriggle them forward until his arms were no longer pinned behind his back. The marshal was still disoriented when Ahmet had rendered him unconscious, using the handcuffs as a makeshift garrote. It had all happened in a matter of seconds, and by the time the plane had cleared the turbulence, Ahmet was on his feet, the officer’s 9 mm Colt pistol clenched in his fist. The door to the cockpit had been locked, but two well-placed rounds had given him access to the pilot. The pilot had been armed, but Ahmet had put a bullet through his skull before he’d had a chance to reach his gun. Though hindered by his ankle cuffs, the prisoner had managed to drag the other man from his seat and take over the controls long enough to bring the plane to a lower altitude. Once he’d set the Gulfstream on autopilot, he’d hauled the pilot back into the main cabin. By then, the marshal had regained consciousness, but Ahmet had quickly finished him off with a gunshot to the heart. After opening the outer door, he’d disposed of the bodies—first the marshal, then the pilot. Suddenly, in a matter of moments, the terrorist’s doomed future had taken a dramatic turn.

Ahmet had boarded the plane back in La Paz with no set escape plan, but now, with the plane back up to twenty thousand feet on a diverted course toward Riverside County, Ahmet reflected that it was unlikely that any orchestrated attempt could have succeeded any better than the gambit he’d just executed. Some would have attributed such good fortune to serendipity, but for Ahmet it was the guiding hand of God that had intervened on his behalf. He offered up a quick prayer of thanks, then ceased his ruminations. There was, after all, work to be done. Ahmet was still in shackles, dressed in a telltale prison-orange jumpsuit at the controls of a plane that soon, no doubt, would be the object of an intense aerial manhunt. Yes, he’d overpowered his captors and placed himself more in control of his fate, but the renegade knew that he was still a long way from being free.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

H AL B ROGNOLA AND Barbara Price were halfway through the tunnel leading back to the main house when the Stony Man director received the news on his earbud transceiver.

On Brognola’s signal, Price turned the electric cart around and headed back toward the Annex. Brognola, meanwhile, wrapped up his long-distance call with Able Team’s interim pilot, Jack Grimaldi, who was on the other side of the continent, manning the controls of a loaner F-16 fighter jet he’d just lifted off the runway at Edwards Air Force Base.

“Yes, by all means intercept him if you can,” Brognola said, reaching into his trench coat for a plastic-wrapped cigar. “With any luck, he’s still airborne.”

“He doesn’t have much of a jump on us,” Grimaldi replied. “Hell, we were already out on the runway waiting for him when we got the word.”

“Still, there’s a lot of airspace between Barstow and San Diego,” Brognola said. “I’ll get Camp Pendleton to send somebody up to help out.”

“Fine by me,” Grimaldi said. “But what if we get to him first?”

“We’d obviously like him alive for questioning, but do what you have to. We can’t let him get away.”

“Got it.”

When he heard Grimaldi click off, Brognola silenced his earbud transceiver and peeled the wrapper from the cigar. There’d been a time, years ago, when he smoked expensive, hand-rolled Havanas, but now cigars were nothing more to him than a prop, something to keep his hands busy at times, like this, when the going got tough and his nerves were rattled.

“Something went wrong with Ahmet’s transfer,” Price said. It was more a statement than a question. She’d already deduced what had happened from listening to Brognola’s side of the conversation.

“Afraid so,” the big Fed replied, rolling the cigar between his fingers. “Some college kids near San Diego just came across two bodies that dropped out of the sky at a park near there. One’s the pilot of the transfer plane and the other’s the federal Air Marshal who was guarding Ahmet. They’d both been shot with the marshal’s pistol. We have to assume Ahmet’s behind it, which means he’s on the loose in a Gulfstream 100.”

“It shouldn’t have happened.” Price parked the cart and both she and Brognola retraced their steps to the Computer Room. “You’d think they would have had the guy chained to his seat with more than one guard watching him.”

“You’d think so,” Brognola conceded. “But apparently the idea was to go easy on the restraints in hopes of buttering him up. Not a great idea in my book, and I’m sure somebody’s being called on the carpet about it as we speak.”

“As well they should,” Price said. “Now, instead of having Ahmet dropped in their lap, Able Team has to go out and find him.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Airspace over San Bernardino and

Riverside counties, California

“This is more like it,” Jack Grimaldi said, speaking through his headset microphone with Able Team commander Carl Lyons, seated behind him in the gunner seat of the F-16 fighter jet.

“Yeah, I’ll take a weapons pylon over those damn recliner seats any day,” Lyons said, staring out the gunner window at the rugged desert terrain below. “Now let’s just hope we can track this scumbag down. The longer he stays off our radar, the better his chances of getting away.”

“Pedal’s to the metal,” Grimaldi said, opening the jet’s throttles. “If he’s still in the air when we spot him, he won’t be able to outrun us.”

“The Marines are closer,” Lyons said, “but at this point I don’t care who gets him, as long as he’s taken out of the mix. Finding the rock al Qaeda’s hiding under is hard enough without splitting our focus.”

Able Team’s search for the sleeper cell in Barstow had produced only limited results. They’d managed to secure an address linked to Army Gideon, the paramilitary group rumored to be offering explosives to the al Qaeda team, but when they’d raided the site, located a few miles to the south in Oro Grande, they’d found the place deserted. There’d been traces of gunpowder on the property, and a day-old newspaper had been found stashed in a trash barrel along with scraps of fast food that had yet to spoil, convincing Lyons and the others that the compound had been only recently evacuated.

A visit to the burger franchise matching the food wrappers had determined that the meals had been purchased by Gideon members rather than the al Qaeda team, but Able Team had chanced upon a lead soon after when they’d stopped for gas at the only service station in the area. They learned the cashier had sold a handful of maps to a man who roughly matched the description of Mousif Nouhra, the purported field leader for the al Qaeda team. The maps had been for the L.A. freeway system, lending credence to the theory that the terrorists were hoping to somehow cripple the city’s transportation network. Nouhra had also apparently asked for directions to southbound I-15, suggesting that the terrorists were headed back to Los Angeles.

Lyons’s colleagues, Rosario “Politician” Blancanales and Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz, had already headed back to L.A., armed with a description of Nouhra’s Dodge Caravan. After receiving word of Kouri Ahmet’s aerial escape, Lyons had called both men, advising them to switch gears and provide ground support in the search for the Lebanese fugitive. The plan now was for Blancanales and Schwarz to check out private airfields south of L.A. on the chance Ahmet would decide to quickly land the hijacked Gulfstream and seek out another avenue of escape.

As Grimaldi gunned the F-16 across the desert between Barstow and L.A., Lyons changed frequencies on his headset transceiver and touched base with Blancanales.

“What’s your position, Pol?”

“I’m on the 405, just passing through Westwood,” Blancanales reported. “Once I hit the ‘10’ split, I’m going to dog it east toward San Bernardino. Gadgets is a few miles ahead of me. He’ll keep heading south. We’ll update you once we reach the airfields.”

“Good enough,” Lyons responded. “If we spot our guy from up here, I’ll let you know so you can change course.”

“Got it.”

“But, if you happen to spot that Caravan out on the road, by all means forget about Ahmet and run an intercept.”

“Not gonna happen, but I’ll keep my eyes open,” Blancanales promised.

Lyons clicked off and passed along word to Grimaldi, then lapsed into silence.

We’ve got our hands full on this one, he mused darkly.

Grimaldi had powered the fighter jet over the freeway and toward a relatively uninhabited mountain region when a call came in from a MAG-39 pilot from Camp Pendleton who’d taken another F-16 to the sky in search of Kouri Ahmet.

“I have visual contact with the Gulfstream,” the Marine pilot reported. When he gave his position, Grimaldi was quick to respond.

“We’re in the neighborhood. Stay on him and wait for us to catch up.”

Grimaldi banked the fighter jet and veered eastward toward the wilderness stretching between Hemet and Palm Springs. A few minutes later, both the Marine jet and the hijacked Gulfstream appeared on the horizon.

“Looks like showtime,” Grimaldi told Lyons through his headset. He patched through to the other pilot and asked, “Any word from Ahmet?”

“Negative,” the pilot answered. “I’ve put through calls telling the guy to bring the plane down and surrender, but he’s incommunicado.”

“No surprise there.”

Grimaldi nosed the Fighting Falcon and dropped another thousand feet before leveling off on a course parallel to that of the Gulfstream. Behind him, at the gunner controls, Lyons lined up the other plane in his sights.

“Sucker’s got its fly open,” Grimaldi said.

Lyons looked and saw that the side door of the Gulfstream was ajar.

“He might’ve just left it open after tossing the bodies,” Lyons said.

“Try again,” Grimaldi said, inching still closer to the other craft. “There’s nobody in the cockpit. Bastard has the thing on autopilot!”

“He jumped?” Lyons said.

“That’s gotta be it,” Grimaldi replied. “And unlike the guys he tossed, I’m guessing he bailed with a parachute.”

San Jacinto Wilderness Preserve,

Riverside County, California

K OURI A HMET HAD JUST FINISHED stuffing his wadded parachute into a narrow crevasse deep in the heart of the San Jacinto Wilderness Preserve when he’d spotted the first of his aerial pursuers. He’d crawled beneath a jutting outcrop as one of the fighter jets had passed overhead and now, moments later, he heard a distant explosion in the air. His feet still tethered close together by ankle cuffs, Ahmet shuffled from cover and stared over the treetops, just in time to catch a glimpse of the disintegrated remains of the Gulfstream he’d hijacked earlier. The shards were raining from the sky, leaving behind a dark cloud of smoke. There was a second fighter jet in the sky, headed south, away from the falling debris.

Ahmet cursed. He’d figured the Gulfstream would wind up being shot down, but he’d hoped it would have taken longer for the enemy to realize he’d abandoned the aircraft. Any moment now, he knew both jets would likely double back, on the lookout for him. The jets’ surveillance capacities would be hindered by their speed and the need to fly at a high altitude, but it would be only a matter of time before helicopters were called in to assist in the search. Ahmet knew he would have to act fast to avoid being captured.

As he’d parachuted to the ground, the fugitive had spotted a campground to the north, and it was in that direction that he now headed, taking a circuitous route dictated by the rambling oak trees he took cover beneath, hoping their thick canopy would conceal him from view by those looking down from overhead. He was still wearing his prison-orange jumpsuit, and his hands, like his ankles, were still bound by cuffs. It would be impossible for anyone to see him and not realize he was an escaped prisoner.

Armed with the two Colt pistols he’d taken from the men he’d killed when taking over the Gulfstream, Ahmet made his way cautiously across the unruly terrain, stopping briefly when he heard the two jets pass by in quick succession. Once the drone of their turbos faded, he broke from cover and continued toward the campground. As with his escape, he had no set plan. All he knew was that he needed to gain access to some kind of vehicle. If he could get behind the wheel and out on an open road, it would then be only a matter of making his way to a main thoroughfare. There he could get lost in traffic and buy the time he needed to contact the allies he knew were hiding out only a short drive from where he’d chosen to bail from the jet.

The opportunity Ahmet had been seeking presented itself a few minutes later. Following the treeline, the fugitive had straggled up a slight incline overlooking a narrow, well-trodden path. When he heard the steady pounding of a hammer, Ahmet dropped to his knees and inched toward the edge of the incline. Downhill, thirty yards to his right, a park ranger was using a sledgehammer to drive fence posts into holes he’d augered in the hard-packed soil. A roll of wire fencing lay on the ground next to him. From the looks of it, the ranger was preparing to close off a section of the trail. He was working alone, his back turned to Ahmet, wearing a noise-reduction headset to mute the sound of his pounding. As if that weren’t enough reason to rally the renegade’s spirits, a set of bolt cutters lay atop the fence roll and, another ten yards away, a Ford F-150 pickup bearing the stenciled logo of the State Forestry Service was parked under the shade of a eucalyptus tree.

Perfect.

Ahmet rose to a crouch and, still hindered by his ankle restraints, awkwardly advanced along the incline. Once he was standing directly above the ranger, he coiled his legs, waiting for the right moment to strike. As the ranger began to bring the sledge bearing down on the post, Ahmet made his move. He leaped forward, arms outstretched, one knee extended in front of the other.

The ranger had just struck the post when Ahmet collided with him, driving his knee into the other man’s spine. He brought his hands down hard, making sure that the exposed butt of each handgun avoided the man’s headset and connected squarely with his skull. The sledgehammer fell from the ranger’s grasp as he collapsed under Ahmet’s weight. The two men tumbled to the ground, and only one of them got back up.

Ahmet wasn’t sure if he’d killed the ranger, but he wasn’t about to take any chances. Setting down his two guns, he grabbed the sledgehammer and lofted it into the air, then brought it crashing down on the other man’s head with a sickening thud.

By now Ahmet was bathed in sweat and breathing heavily, but there was no time to rest. He cast aside the sledgehammer and quickly snatched up the bolt cutters. Snipping the ankle restraints was easy enough, and with considerable more effort he was able to prop the cutters in such a way that they could chew their way through the links of his handcuffs. Liberated, he shook his legs and then waved his freed arms back and forth, loosening the stiffened muscles. Now able to move more freely, he dragged the ranger’s body to the truck and maneuvered it up into the rear bed. Once he’d stripped the man of his uniform, Ahmet set the clothing aside and draped the body with a tarpaulin. He would worry about where to dispose of it later.

The fugitive backtracked to the fence posts for his stolen guns, then returned to the truck and quickly peeled off his sweat-drenched jumpsuit, stuffing it under the tarp next to the ranger’s body.

The ranger had been slightly taller than Ahmet, and when he put on the dead man’s clothes they fit loosely. It served the fugitive’s purposes, as the long sleeves and pant legs enabled him to conceal the severed cuffs still clenched around his wrists and ankles.

The pickup’s keys were in the ranger’s pockets. Ahmet took them, climbed into the truck and set his two weapons on the bench seat beside him. He grinned with satisfaction as he started the engine and put the truck in reverse. So far, so good.

Backing away from the work area, Ahmet came to a dirt service road. He shifted gears and followed it northward, winding past the campground and mountain foothills, a cloud of dust trailing behind him. He made his way without incident, encountering no one until he reached the park entrance. There, another ranger was standing outside a small wooden shack stocked with parking stickers, brochures and maps of hiking trails. Normally, the man would have been posted inside, dealing with visitors as they entered the site. Due to fire conditions, however, the park was closed, as Ahmet realized when he saw a drawn gate barricading his way to the main road. The other ranger, it turned out, was taking advantage of the closure to paint the shack’s clapboard exterior.

Ahmet cursed under his breath as he approached the shack. Reducing his speed, he took one hand from the wheel and grabbed a wide-brimmed hat resting on the seat beside the two pistols. He propped the hat on his head, brim pulled down low. He doubted the ruse would work, but if it bought him a few seconds, that would be all he’d need.

The pickup had come to within twenty yards of the shack when the other ranger turned from his painting and glanced Ahmet’s way. Head bowed slightly, the fugitive offered a slight wave, taking care not to expose the handcuff tucked beneath his shirtsleeve. The ranger glanced fleetingly at Ahmet and waved back nonchalantly. He was about to return to his painting when he did an apparent double-take and looked back. Confirming that an impostor was driving the truck, the ranger dropped his paintbrush and grabbed for the walkie-talkie clipped to his waist.

Before the ranger could send out a distress call, Ahmet fired twice, pumping two 9 mm rounds into the man’s chest. The ranger staggered backward, bounding off the shack and then falling to the ground, fresh paint imprinted on the back of his uniform.

Ahmet shifted into neutral and jammed the parking brake, then bounded out, quickly dragging the ranger to the back of the truck. He dropped the tailgate and strained again as he hoisted his latest victim up onto the truck bed. He shoved the corpse next to that of the ranger he’d killed earlier, then raided the man’s pockets for his keys and wallet. Once he’d covered the bodies and raised the tailgate, he went to the gate, trying seven different keys before he found the one that worked the lock. He swung the gates open, then drove through to the other side and brought the truck to another stop, getting out long enough to close the gates behind him.

Moments later, he was on the main road, heading for the two-lane highway that, in time, would take him to the major arterial freeways. Once there, he would head west and meet up with Mousif Nouhra and the members of his al Qaeda sleeper cell. Yes, they would be disappointed that he’d failed in his attempt to smuggle in rocket launchers from Mexico, but once they learned of his daring escape, he was sure that they would be impressed enough to abide by his supervision. There was, after all, a mission still to be carried out.

CHAPTER FIVE

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

“Bastard slipped through the cracks,” Aaron Kurtzman groused as he filled his coffee grinder.

“For the moment, perhaps,” Hal Brognola conceded.

A high-pitched whine sounded throughout the Computer Room as Kurtzman ground the beans. Carmen Delahunt glanced up from her keyboard and grinned at the burly strategist.

“Sounds like my brain about now,” she said. “Whirrrrrrr…”

“Your brain would probably make for a better cup of coffee than whatever Bear’s whipping up,” Akira Tokaido quipped without taking his eyes off his computer screen.

“I’m feeling the love,” Kurtzman said, taking the wisecracks in stride. His addiction to superstrong coffee was a running joke among the cybercrew, and he was more than willing to let himself be the butt their humor. It was, after all, a more benign way of managing the inevitable stress of their jobs than throwing things or hitting walls.

“Okay, people,” Brognola interjected. “Can we stay on task here?”

The “task” was deciding how best to proceed in dealing with Kouri Ahmet’s ground escape after the Lebanese renegade had bailed from the hijacked Gulfstream that had been transporting him back to the States to stand trial on conspiracy charges. Able Team’s Pol Blancanales and Gadgets Schwarz had arrived at the San Jacinto Wilderness Preserve within an hour after Ahmet’s getaway plane had been shot down, and, working in tandem with a search party made up of county sheriff officers, FBI agents and helicopters from the Camp Pendleton Marine base, they’d undertaken an intensive dragnet of the rugged terrain where it had been determined that Ahmet had most likely touched down. With aerial help from the search copters, the runaway’s parachute had been tracked down in an isolated ravine and footprints had led to a spot where blood on the ground hinted at the likelihood that Ahmet had overpowered a forest ranger as a means of continuing his escape. Two rangers were reported missing along with a Forest Service pickup. An APB was out for the truck as well as for Ahmet, but so far there had been no sightings. It was dark now on the West Coast, and with each passing minute the trail was getting colder.

“Carl and Jack just caught up with Rosario and Gadgets,” Huntington Wethers, the third member of the Farm’s cyberteam, reported. He was on the phone with Lyons, linked to Able Team’s field leader by way of a scrambled signal. “They want to leave Ahmet to the Bureau for now and focus on tracking down that al Qaeda cell.”

“Tell them to go ahead,” Brognola advised. “But if Ahmet comes back on radar, I’ll want them to be ready to shift gears again.”

“If you ask me, if they’re looking for al Qaeda there’s a good chance they’ll bump into Ahmet anyway,” Kurtzman stated. “I still think there’s got to be a link there somewhere.”

“You could be right,” Brognola said.

“I’ll have Carl keep that in mind,” Wethers suggested.

“Good idea.”

As Wethers tapped his headset to pass along instructions, Brognola unwrapped another of his cigars. He began working it between his fingers as he turned to Delahunt.

“Anything on that arms deal Ahmet was involved in when he was arrested? Was he buying or selling?”

“Buying,” Delahunt responded.

“You’re following the money?”

Delahunt nodded. “It took some doing but we’ve traced the currency back to an offshore account in the Caymans. The bank there is stonewalling, but we’ve got records on them brokering a lot of action with heavyweights in the Middle East, including a Lebanese financier who’s been funding Hezbollah training camps in the Bekaa Valley.”

Brognola frowned. “That reporter Phoenix just freed from Hamas…Wasn’t he looking into an angle about Lebanon being in the loop on those nuclear materials Iran is shuttling out of the country?”

“Now that you mention it, yeah,” Delahunt replied. “You think these training camps might figure in?”

“Worth looking into,” Brognola said.

“Hold on,” Kurtzman interjected. “Let me make sure I’m following this. We’re saying Iran’s moving nuclear materials to Lebanon by way of Iraq and Syria?”

“That’s what Ferris claims,” Brognola said. “I haven’t had a look at his sources or what kind of intel he’s working with, but that’s the corridor he’s talking about.”

“But do you see what I’m getting at?” Kurtzman said. “The northern provinces in Iraq are al Qaeda strongholds these days. Syria’s underworld is run by Hamas. And in Lebanon we’ve got Hezbollah calling the shots. Granted, those folks all would like nothing better than to see us flushed down the toilet, but it’s not like they’re working hand-in-hand.”

“Or are they?” Barbara Price spoke up. “It’s not like Ferris is some crackpot. He’s got a track record for solid reporting, so if he’s putting this out as some cooperative effort, we need to start rethinking a few things.”

“None of them good,” Brognola added. “Factionalism between those groups has always been one thing holding them in check. The last thing we need is them rallying behind the same game plan.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Kurtzman piped in over the gurgling of his coffeemaker. “And the idea of those groups breaking bread together is bad enough. Throw nukes into the mix and…I don’t even want to go there.”

Brognola nodded gravely. The implications of Walter Ferris’s news story had a bearing not only on the situation in the Middle East but the one in California, as well.

“Kouri Ahmet is Lebanese,” he recalled, thinking out loud. “If you’re going to lump him in with some terrorist outfit, it’s Hezbollah or Hamas. But if it turns out he’s in cahoots with that al Qaeda cell in L.A., that already proves half of Ferris’s theory.”

“Hang on, everyone,” Akira Tokaido interrupted. While the others had been brainstorming, he’d been clicking away at his keyboard, culling through the Farm’s databases for cross-links between Ahmet and a possible transport conduit between Iran and Lebanon. He’d found something.

“Get this,” the young hacker told his counterparts. “Ahmet trained in Bekaa Valley at a Hezbollah camp near Baalbek. I’ve got the place linked to funding from a Lebanese financier named Nasrallah Kassem. That ring a bell with anyone?”

“Here,” Delahunt said. “That’s the money guy behind those accounts in the Caymans I was just talking about.”

“I’ve heard of him, too,” Brognola said. “Yes, he’s a Hezbollah sympathizer, but he’s made his fortune off the Tokyo Stock Exchange and deals in the Far East.”

“Meaning he gets around, same as Ahmet,” Delahunt said.

“See what you can find on Kassem’s Pac-Rim dealings and run them through the Caymans mix,” Brognola suggested.

“Will do,” Delahunt responded.

Tokaido interrupted again. “Before we go there, can we stay focused on Lebanon for a minute?”

“You have something else?” Brognola asked.

“I’ve got nothing on Ahmet’s movements for a week prior to his arrest,” Tokaido responded, referring to one of the tracking files he’d just called up. “But I’ve got a blip from CIA putting him in Lebanon last Tuesday. Baalbek to be exact.”

“His old training ground,” Delahunt murmured.

“Right,” Tokaido said. “And I’m guessing Kassem has a home in the city there. Or at least some kind of office.”

“Easy enough to find out,” Delahunt said.

“Let’s do that,” Brognola suggested.

“I don’t know what the game plan is for Phoenix now that they’ve wrapped up in Damascus,” Tokaido said, “but Baalbek’s just on the other side of the mountains.”

“I hear you,” Brognola said. As the big Fed wandered over to the far wall, Price glanced at Tokaido and offered a taunting smile.

“What, you’re after my job, Akira?” she teased.

“No way,” Tokaido said, grinning back. “I’m just after some brownie points and a little something extra in my Christmas stocking.”

By the time Brognola had reached the monitor depicting a world map, Kurtzman had already read the SOG director’s mind and zoomed the graphic to focus on a large, detailed view of the border linking Lebanon with Syria. Brognola studied the map a moment, then turned back to the others.

“Okay,” he began, “we’ve got Ahmet in Baalbek a week ago and in La Paz a few days later. It stands to reason he flew out of Lebanon and stopped off in the Caymans to pick up the cash for the arms deal. Carmen, go ahead and run with that. Factor in Kassem but try to find who Ahmet’s contact there was. Airline checks, hotels, cab logs…the whole nine yards.”

“Got it,” Delahunt said.

Brognola turned to Tokaido. “I heard you and, yes, you’ll get your brownie points and stocking stuffers. Sending Phoenix into Lebanon is definitely the way to go.”

Tokaido grinned and pumped a fist. “Yo! The kid rocks!”

“Have McCarter packet any hard copy intel over to Fisk at the CIA branch in Damascus,” Brognola told Price. “Apprise them on what we’ve come up with, then put them on the move, ASAP. If word’s gotten out about us taking out that Hamas team, there are going to be a lot of shredders working overtime trying to destroy evidence. Hopefully, Phoenix can get there quick enough to find us something.”

“Where do you want them to focus first?” Price asked. “Kassem or the training camp?”

“The camp,” Brognola said. “It’s probably a reach, but with any luck, Kassem will be there and we can kill two birds with one stone.”

“It’ll give them a chance to try out Cowboy’s Gopher Snake, too,” Kurtzman suggested. “They didn’t use it in Damascus, right?”

“Now that you mention it, no, they didn’t,” Brognola said.

“The camp’s definitely the way to go,” Tokaido called, staring at his monitor. “Kassem will have to wait for another day. According to what I’ve got here, he’s out of the country on business.”

“Any idea where?” Brognola asked.

Tokaido nodded. “He’s in the Orient.”

CHAPTER SIX

Hong Kong

Nasrallah Kassem was in his midsixties but felt twenty years younger and had doled out a fortune on plastic surgery in hopes of proving it. The results were dubious. Yes, he’d rid himself of a few worry lines as well as some flab below his chin, but one too many facelifts had drawn his olive skin so taut that it looked almost as if the next time he shaved he’d find himself scraping raw bone. Skull-faced beneath a crop of thick, well-coiffed hair dyed the color of charcoal, the vain financier cradled a snifter of cognac in his manicured hand as he held court with the two men seated across from him on the terrace of his high-rise penthouse overlooking the maritime bustle of Victoria Harbour. The lavish quarters was just one of eight furnished residences Kassem maintained around the globe. All but two were in the Middle East or along the Pacific Rim; another was in Libya and the last, a twenty-two-million dollar ocean-view estate overseen by his daughter, Sana, was in the Cayman Islands.

The two men with Kassem were Gohn Len, a tall, lanky Intelligence Bureau chief for the People’s Liberation Army, and Pasha Yarad, Iran’s balding, stoop-shouldered Deputy Minister of Defense. The three men had all been in proximity to Hong Kong when they’d received the news regarding Ahmet’s escape during his extradition to California and had agreed to meet on short notice to discuss the ramifications. They were speaking in French, the one language with which they all had at least a passing familiarity.

“While it’s fortunate that Ahmet eluded the Americans, the fact that he’s in the States empty-handed is a setback, without question,” Kassem said. “I’m confident, however, that we can secure alternative firepower for the mission in Los Angeles. We have other sources, after all.”

“I have no doubt that we have the connections to get other weapons,” Yarad told the Lebanese businessman as he helped himself to another few grapes from a sumptuous fruit platter set on the table along with a basket of fresh-baked pastries and croissants. The fifty-year-old Iranian was in his element on the topic of munitions and glad for the chance to speak from a position of authority. “And while the Blindicides were convenient enough, any number of LAWs would serve our purposes just as well. AT-4s, RPGs—”

“Agreed,” Kassem said, tactfully cutting off Yarad. “But the thought was that it would be more expedient than other options to smuggle LAWs into the States from Mexico.”

“Somebody obviously thought wrong,” Len retorted, his sallow face contorted into a look that lay somewhere between contempt and annoyance.

“Yes,” Kassem conceded, “obviously Ahmet’s connections in La Paz should have been better scrutinized. He relied on the wrong people. But you know his track record. Dozens of missions, all carried out like clockwork.”

“Perhaps,” Len said, “but apparently this time he did a poor job of setting his clock.”

Kassem knew Len was baiting him. Of the nineteen leaders comprising the New Dawn Rising coalition, the Chinese officer was, hands-down, the most contentious and uncompromising, and Kassem wasn’t the only member concerned that Len’s positions were dictated by Beijing’s conceit that, given time, they would be able to achieve most of their objectives without the help of others. Kassem was determined not to allow Len’s recalcitrance govern the impromptu meeting. Rather than rise to the PLA officer’s bait, the elderly businessman paused and quietly sipped his cognac, savoring its cloying warmth on his tongue before swallowing. Then, reaching into the pocket of a tailored silk suit he’d purchased just days before in Hong Kong’s garment district, Kassem casually withdrew a filigreed silver cigarette case and helped himself to an unfiltered Pall Mall. When he held out the case to his colleagues, both Len and Yarad shook their heads. Kassem shrugged and lit his cigarette. When he spoke, it was with a nonchalance as calculated as the way in which he’d convinced the others to meet on his home turf.

“What’s done is done,” he told Len simply.

“Placing Ahmet in charge of this operation was your idea,” the intelligence chief persisted.

“I accept responsibility,” Kassem countered evenly. “Does that satisfy you?”

The intelligence officer’s face flushed. He was about to respond but thought better of it. Jaw clenched, Len instead clamped his long, coarse fingers around a ceramic teacup filled with green tea and brought it to his lips. It was all he could do to keep his hand from trembling with anger.

The youngest of three men, Len looked uncomfortable, not only with the situation, but also with being trapped inside his ill-fitting brown suit. Kassem was sure the Asian would have preferred to show up in his medal-encrusted PLA uniform so as to give an appearance of greater cache, but such attire would have drawn unwanted attention in this, an apartment building leased out primarily to business executives. Holding the meeting here had been Kassem’s suggestion, and seeing to it that Len came dressed in civilian attire had been but another of the many small ploys the Lebanese entrepreneur had relied upon to place himself at a tactical advantage over his colleagues.

Just as he’d compromised Len by putting him in a suit, Kassem’s insistence that they speak in French came at the expense of Yarad, easily the least fluent of the three and therefore forced to ask the others to repeat themselves and speak in rudimentary sentences. And, when they’d first come out to sit on the terrace, Kassem had been shrewd enough to take a seat placing his back to the harbor, forcing the other two men to contend with the glare of the late-afternoon sun whenever they looked his way.

It was Pasha Yarad who finally broke the uneasy silence.

“This is not the time for second-guessing,” he said, siding with Kassem for the moment. “We came here to settle on a course of action and pass it along to the others. I suggest we focus our efforts there and leave the hindsight for another day.”

The ball was in Len’s court. He set down his cup and crossed his arms across his chest. “Very well,” he said gruffly. “I’m listening.”

Kassem was more amused than put off by Len’s petulance. Rather than fuel it, he left the floor to Yarad.

“Our main concern should be verifying that our teams are in place and still ready to carry out the operation,” the Iranian said.

Kassem assured Yarad, “Ahmet was in constant contact with the teams up to the time of his arrest. Things were proceeding on schedule. I also made a few calls to the States before you arrived. There have been no other problems aside from those involving Ahmet.”

“But Ahmet masterminded this whole plot,” Len countered, quick to resume the role of devil’s advocate. “He’s the go-between for all the groups we have in place in California. Can we really be sure all these different teams will be able to carry things out without his supervision?”

“Your point is well taken,” Kassem conceded, feeling it best to throw Len this one small bone. “And yes, it would be for the best if Ahmet were available to oversee things. God willing, he’ll elude capture and meet up with one of the teams shortly. But at the moment, that is something beyond our control. Which is why we need to come back to the matter of securing other weapons. It will take more than conventional firearms or explosives for the plan to be carried out the way it was drawn up.”

“Understood,” Yarad responded. “Then let’s concentrate on supplying the teams with what they’ll need. You were just saying you had access to other suppliers.”

Kassem nodded. “I’ve already made a few calls. I should have word back shortly. If none of those options seem viable, I can tap into the arsenals of one of my training camps back in Lebanon. The concern there, as before, is the time frame and transport logistics. We need to carry out the attack in a few days.”

“Do what you can,” Yarad said. “I’m sure we can work out something.”

“Not so fast.” Gohn Len stood and moved to one side, taking shelter from the sun beneath an awning that reached out over the terrace. Kassem smiled indulgently, as if to acknowledge his awareness that Len was trying to gain leverage by putting his six-foot frame on display.

“Is there a problem?” Kassem queried innocently.

Len took a moment, choosing his words carefully. Finally he said, “Given what’s happened, I think we should reconsider the whole operation. Why attempt it now when there is too wide a margin for failure?”

“Because this is an ideal opportunity,” Yarad reminded the Chinese officer. “How many chances will we get to have all our enemies rounded up under one roof?”

“The Frazier Group meets annually,” Len countered impatiently. “We can wait and try again next year!”

“You may be fine with waiting that long,” the deputy minister said, “but I, for one, want to see this taken care of now rather than later. Too much can happen in a year. With every day that passes, there is a greater risk that our coalition will be found out. If that happens, all our work—everything we’ve done to put ourselves in this position—will have been in vain.”

Kassem narrowed his eyes and stared through a wreath of smoke at his colleagues, doing his best to restrain himself. Did it always have to be like this? Squabbling and bickering, everyone at cross-purposes? How were they ever to achieve the kind of change they wanted if they couldn’t get past their own differences?

“I’ll confer with the others,” he finally told Len and Yarad, stubbing out his cigarette in a gesture of finality. “We’ll take their input into consideration and hopefully have some sort of consensus. In the meantime, though, I think the smart course is to proceed as planned. A plot of this magnitude can always be called off at the last minute, but if we’re going to carry it out, the pieces need to be in place.”

“I agree,” Yarad said.

Both Kassem and the Iranian stared at their Chinese counterpart. Len hesitated, picking up his ceramic cup and taking one last, long sip. The tea had gone cold and left a bitter taste in his mouth. He swallowed it nonetheless, unnerved by the sense that he was swallowing his pride, as well.

“If need be, I might be able to divert some rocket launchers from one of our covert installations in South America,” he said, offering up an olive branch to his cohorts. “They could be cargoed in a way that it would be possible to have them delivered to one of the ports near Los Angeles.”

Yarad stared at Len, incredulous. “This is the first mention of this as an option. Why didn’t you bring it up before?”

“It involves certain complications,” Len said. “Of a personal nature.”

Kassem saw an opportunity to ease the ill will between him and Len, and seized it.

“Whatever the case, thank you for the offer,” he told the Asian. “We’ll only take you up on it as a last resort, though. Fair enough?”

Len nodded tersely and grabbed the valise he’d brought with him to the meeting. “If we choose to go that way, I’ll need to have laid some groundwork. I’d best get started. If you’ll excuse me, I can show myself out.”

“Of course,” Kassem said. Both he and Yarad stood, offering Len a polite nod. Once the Asian had left, the Iranian turned to Kassem.

“I don’t trust him,” he said. “This offer of his. It came out of nowhere.”

Kassem shrugged. “I don’t trust him, either.”

“What should we do about it?”

“Leave that to me,” the elderly financier told Yarad. “And since we now have an opportunity to speak alone, this would be a good time to address another matter.”

“Our nuclear situation,” the Iranian guessed.

Kassem nodded. “I take it you’ve heard about the Hamas incident in Damascus.”

“Yes, I’ve been briefed,” Yarad replied. “Those idiots failed to get any information from that reporter before they were killed off.”

“At least none of them survived for questioning,” Kassem said.

“Small consolation,” Yarad groused. “We still have more components to smuggle out of Iran before the inspectors can catch scent of them. We need to know for sure whether we can still move everything through Iraq and Syria without detection.”

Kassem shrugged. “If there are problems with the existing conduit, we’ll improvise and find another way. It’s the same as with securing rocket launchers for our teams in California. We have many options. It’s one advantage of our having a coalition.”

Yarad finished off the last of the grapes, then squinted against the glare of the sun, eyeing Kassem.

“You agree with me that it’s imperative to follow through on our plan, yes?” he asked. “You weren’t just siding with me to vex Gohn Len.”

“I’m behind the plan,” Kassem reassured the Iranian. “For the same reason as you. The timing is important. But we need to keep in mind that taking the Frazier Group off the playing field is only a first step. To bring the West completely to its knees, we’ll need to be able to follow up and speak in a language they understand.”

The Iranian smiled. “Trust me, when we have the bomb, the West will hear us loud and clear.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Washington, D.C.

Secretary of State Roland Carruthers frowned with annoyance as he read over the NSA briefing he’d just received regarding the escape of Kouri Ahmet. He wasn’t sure which infuriated him more, the fact that Ahmet was back on the loose or the circumstances that had allowed him to take control of the government jet bringing him to Los Angeles. He decided the latter was something he could more readily deal with, and within thirty seconds he was on the phone with FBI Director Eric Thompson, a longtime acquaintance and frequent golfing partner. Carruthers, a decorated Gulf War vet who’d parlayed his combat honors into a long-running political career, was never one to beat around the bush, and after a quick hello he got straight to the point.

“I don’t want to hear anything about rationales,” he told Thompson brusquely. “Whoever arranged Ahmet’s transfer needs to get the ax.”

“That’s not your call, Roland,” Thompson responded calmly. “You know that.”

“You got that right!” Carruthers snapped. “If it’d been my call, that two-bit son of a bitch would have had an unfortunate accident back in La Paz and never made it to the jet.”

“That might’ve made you sleep better at night, but it would have been a shortsighted solution,” Thompson countered. “We were looking at the big picture.”

“There are protocols, damn it!” Carruthers said. “Not to mention common sense. No backup security on the plane? One marshal and that was it? Hell, I’m surprised you didn’t offer the guy caviar and throw him a prostitute so he could join the Mile High Club!”

“I know you’re upset, Roland—”

“I’m at the top of that nut job’s hit list!” Carruthers said. “Upset doesn’t even come close!”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, we’ve already reassigned Cook,” Thompson said, referring to the FBI’s Regional Director for West Coast Operations. “If you want, I’ll take under consideration anyone you’d want as his replacement.”

“That’s it? Throw me a crumb and I’m all happy?”

“What else would you suggest?”

“How about Ahmet’s head on a platter?” Carruthers suggested. “That would work for me.”

“A silver platter, I suppose.”

“It can be a paper plate for all I care! Just drop-kick that bastard from here to kingdom come and be quick about it!”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Thompson offered. “Anything else?”

“What about that al Qaeda cell supposedly looking to raise hell in L.A.?” Carruthers said. “Anything new on that?”

“It looks like they got their hands on some explosives over the past couple days,” Thompson said. “We’re not sure of the quantity or what they plan to do with them, but we’re running a full court press. The president says he’s got some other input factored in, as well.”

“What kind of input?”

“He wouldn’t volunteer that,” Thompson said. “I didn’t press. You know how he likes to keep his tricks up his sleeve.”

“Don’t remind me,” Carruthers said, glancing up as one of his aides brought in the next round of paperwork requiring his attention. The secretary stared sourly at the piled documents, then waved the aide away and resumed tongue-lashing his longtime friend.

“Ahmet’s had dealings with al Qaeda,” Carruthers said. “Anybody put two and two together?”

“Yes, we’re considering that he’ll try to make contact with them,” said Thompson. “The Bureau’s part of the search effort, and if we’re finished here, maybe I can actually do my job and look into it a little further.”

“Good idea,” Carruthers said, easing back in his chair. His bluster spent, the secretary cracked his knuckles and detoured the conversation. “Just make sure you don’t miss our tee time at the club.”

Thompson laughed on the other end of the line. “I knew you had your priorities straight, Roland. I’ll see you then.”

Carruthers hung up and stroked his chin as he stared out the window of his top-floor office at the State Department. The Washington Monument was visible in the distance, pointing upward at the pewter sky blanketing the nation’s capital. There was rain in the forecast and Carruthers knew there was a good chance he and Thompson might not make it out to the links. He figured it was just as well. Carruthers was already having second thoughts about having vented on the FBI director. Maybe it hadn’t been wise to draw so much attention to his concern over Ahmet and the state of security in Los Angeles. The last thing he needed was to arouse any suspicion that he planned to be heading there at the end of the week.

The secretary was replaying the conversation with Thompson in his head when one of his cell phones rang. He had two cells; the one ringing was a prepaid disposable with no link to him or the State Department. There were only two people who had the number. Even before he flipped the phone open, he knew which one of them was calling.

“Yes, I already heard about Ahmet,” he barked, not bothering with salutations.

“I was just wondering how this would impact on your plans to attend the conference,” the caller responded.

“No change,” Carruthers asserted. “I’ll be there.”

Paris, France

M ICHELLE R ENAIS SIGHED with bemusement as Carruthers hung up on her, leaving the dial tone to bleat in her ear. The secretary of state’s terse bluster hadn’t taken her by surprise; she’d been expecting it. The man was so predictable.

Once she’d checked Carruthers’s name off her list, Renais rose from her desk overlooking the River Seine and went to the kitchen, breaking off a piece of a half-eaten baguette and slathering it with raspberry jam. She wasn’t really hungry, but her stomach had begun to rumble and she didn’t want to be distracted by the noise as she made the rest of her calls.

Renais was an alabaster-skinned, doe-eyed brunette in her late forties, thin to the point of appearing frail, though in fact she was known by colleagues and competitors as someone filled with vitality to go with her strong will and fierce determination. Her penthouse flat on Avenue George Cinq was one of the more coveted—and expensive—pieces of real estate in all of Paris, and she owned the place outright, having bought it three years ago with her share of the profits from the hostile financial takeover of Ars Gratia Communications, France’s second-largest media conglomerate. She figured by year’s end she would have the necessary pieces in place to make a run at forcing her rival into a merger, making her easily one of the most powerful and influential women in all of Europe, if not the world.

Given her stature, it seemed incongruent for Renais to saddle herself with a chore as mundane and secretarial as going down a phone list to confirm attendance at a forthcoming conference. But the import of the gathering she would be presiding over was such that the woman felt it was better to handle the calls herself than to entrust them to some hireling. And, too, there was the need for absolute discretion. The Frazier Group’s very existence was a zealously guarded secret, and the organization’s success and effectiveness over the years was as much a tribute to its clandestine nature as the collective sway its membership exerted over world events.

Renais slowly nibbled the baguette as she returned to her desk. There was a portable wet bar next to the desk, and she used tongs to place cubes from an ice bucket into a small cocktail glass before half filling it with anisette from a hand-blown glass decanter. The milky liqueur would further help to settle her stomach.

Sitting back down, the Frenchwoman glanced over her list to determine who she would call next. There were five more individuals left to contact: World Bank President Anthony Robin; Scotland Yard’s Inspector Bip Hartson; NATO Armed Forces Commander Helmut Marschan; Australian real-estate baroness Veronica Court-Lyle; and Jude Cartier, France’s minister of finance. It was a disparate group, to be sure, representative of the Frazier Group’s diverse overall membership. The diversity was by design. Kotch Wellmeyer, the outspoken major league baseball owner who was among the organization’s founders, had perhaps best summed up the organization’s philosophy—and recruitment philosophy—when he’d declared, “If we want to keep Western Civilization from being taken down by the upstarts of the world, we better damn well make sure we cover all the bases.”

After some reflection, Renais decided it didn’t much matter which order she made the calls in, as long as she saved Cartier for last. The finance minister had just flown back to Paris from an economic summit in Madrid. Renais already knew Cartier would be attending the conference. Contacting the politician would serve another purpose. Renais would give Cartier a chance to reach his flat and unwind, then call him to suggest they get together for drinks. Most likely he would invite her to his place, located across the river three blocks from the Eiffel Tower. She would take him up on the invitation, offer token resistance to his romantic advances, then finally “give in” to his supposedly irresistible charm. They would share a few hours of passion and Renais would make a point to extend the afterglow throughout the week. At the conference, she would do what she could to discreetly help Cartier bend the universe to his will, taking care not to ask for any immediate favors in return. There would be no need to call in markers until the end of the year, when she was ready to make her move on Media François. By then, Renais was sure she’d have Cartier wrapped around her little finger and ready to help her finesse the transaction through a gauntlet of antitrust regulations.

Neither Anthony Robin nor Bip Hartson answered their cell phones when Renais tried to reach them, but Helmut Marschan picked up on the second ring. The German officer confirmed that he would be attending the conference, then pressed Renais regarding the meeting’s agenda.

“I want to be sure that I have the floor early on to discuss this whole nuclear situation in Iran,” Marschan said.

“I thought Iran was only firing up centrifuges as an alternative power source,” Renais replied.

“You know that’s a lie,” the general retorted, clearly unaware that Renais was being facetious. “They’re ramping up a covert nuclear program and if the IAEC doesn’t find proof, it’ll only be because Iran’s trundled their weapons-related equipment out of the country.”

“The ‘pipeline’ to Lebanon,” Renais said. “Yes, I’ve heard about that whole rumor.”

“I think we’re past rumors,” Marschan insisted. “If there wasn’t concern about that pipeline coming to light, Hamas wouldn’t have tried to kidnap that reporter.”

“Do you hear yourself?” Renais asked. “Lebanon, Iran and Hamas mentioned all in the same sentence? That’s a reach, don’t you think?”

“I might’ve thought that a few months ago,” Marschan countered. “Hell, maybe even a few weeks ago. But from what I’ve been able to find out about this article that Ferris reporter is working on, there’s collusion going on. It needs to be addressed.”

“I agree with you that it bears looking into,” Renais told the German. “And at the conference I’ll do what I can to give you some priority in putting it on the table.”

“It should be our first order of business!” Marschan insisted. “If that rabble in the Middle East is teaming up against us, we’ll have a crisis on our hands.”

“If you throw wild dogs together they don’t instantly become a pack,” Renais countered skeptically. “They’ll go after each other’s throats before they turn on anyone else.”

“Maybe,” the German replied. “Then again, maybe this has been going on for a while behind everyone’s backs. Maybe they’ve worked out their differences enough to act in unison.”

“If that’s the case, we’ll handle them,” Renais assured the NATO strategist. “Trust me, if the Frazier Group puts its mind to it, we can squash anyone who stands in our way, and we won’t need help doing it.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Bekaa Valley, Lebanon

David McCarter tightened his parachute harness as he stared out at the thick clouds that obscured his view of the tall mountains flanking the Bekaa Valley. The sun had gone down several hours earlier and the Phoenix Force commander knew that the blackened, overcast skies would aid with their insertion into enemy territory. He and the others were in the cargo bay of a converted DC-10 bearing the emblem of a prominent international delivery carrier. In fact, the plane was one of several owned and operated by the CIA throughout the Middle East. Phoenix Force had secured use of the jet care of Albert Fisk, the operations officer they’d delivered hardcopy intel to following their wrap-up of the Hamas kidnapping incident in Damascus.

Fisk’s offer had come with the small price of allowing two Company agents to accompany McCarter’s men on their assignment. With Gary Manning temporarily out of action, McCarter had decided there was little to lose in taking on the extra manpower. After all, according to the most recent satellite camera images reviewed by Stony Man’s cyberteam back in Virginia, there were an estimated two dozen recruits holed up at the Hezbollah training camp Phoenix Force would be targeting.

“Ready, mates?” the London-born warrior called out to his colleagues.

Rafael Encizo and Calvin James both nodded. T. J. Hawkins, who’d just pried open the lid of a tuba-size leather carrying case, glanced up at McCarter and said, “Give me just another minute.”

One of the CIA agents was up in the cockpit. The other, a gaunt, horse-faced Bostonian named Roger Combs, was crouched next to Hawkins. He checked over his thumb-size digital spy camera, then slipped it into the shirt pocket of his camo fatigues as he glanced inside Hawkins’s carrying case, puzzled by the sight of something that looked like a high-tech tool case sandwiched between a garbage can lid and a wide-wheeled skateboard.

“What the hell is that?” Combs wondered.

Hawkins lifted out the contraption, which was far lighter than it appeared. “TCD-100,” he said.

“That doesn’t help me.”

“Tunnel Combat Device,” the youngest Phoenix Force member explained. “It’s a prototype cooked up by our weaponsmith back in the States.”

Combs frowned. “What does it do?”

“Word is a lot of this training camp is underground. With any luck, we’ll be able to give you a demonstration.”

“In other words, you’re not telling me.”

Hawkins shrugged. “Sorry, man. Classified, y’know?”

“Sort of like who you guys really are, right?” Combs countered. “I don’t buy that line about you being just some JD special task force.”

McCarter interjected, telling the CIA agent, “You want to come along for the ride, fine and dandy. Just save the nosing around for the enemy, all right?”

Combs held up his hands. “No problem. Just curious, that’s all.”

Before McCarter could respond further, the door to the cockpit opened and the other CIA agent made his way to the main cabin. Junior Hale was shorter than his colleague, thickset but in a way that suggested the bulk was more muscle than fat.

“Two minutes to Geronimo,” he announced, moving toward the doorway through which the men would be jumping. “After the insert, Paulie’s gonna fly back and refuel, then wait on our word to swoop in for a pickup.”

“Works for me,” McCarter said.

Hale was about to open the door when he spied the TCD. “What the hell is that?” he echoed.

Combs and McCarter exchanged a look. Both men grinned, then Combs told his colleague, “You don’t wanna know.”

T HE TRAINING CAMP’S southernmost sentry tower rose on a sturdy wooden framework just inside a greenbelt of thick, thorn-tipped bramble that infested the otherwise infertile, red-soiled hillside and helped to create a natural, if incomplete, barrier around the facility. Yusra Wahin, a rail-thin twenty-year-old Hezbollah recruit who’d just completed his third week of training, was posted on the upper platform, armed with a Kalashnikov AK-47 manufactured two years before he was born. High-powered field binoculars were slung around his neck, and clipped to the belt holding up his baggy camo pants was a black-market Motorola HT1000 two-way radio. Wahin was halfway through his shift, battling monotony and an urge to drop to the planks and catch some much-needed sleep. Sentry duty, after all, had come on the heels of a day already filled with calisthenics, training exercises and indoctrination seminars.

From his vantage point, Wahin could also see two other observation posts rising up from the bramble’s edge on the far side of the camp. Sentries were posted there, as well, and the guard suspected they were combating the same ennui that weighed on him. He could see smoke trailing upward from one of the silhouetted figures and immediately felt a craving for a cigarette. He fought off the urge, however. Smoking was supposedly forbidden by sentries, and Wahin lacked the impunity of his older counterpart. He would have to wait until dawn, when he was relieved from his post, to indulge himself.

Wahin had completed his twelfth tiresome lap around the railed confines of the platform when he detected movement up in the mountains to his left. He first suspected it was one of the countless wild goats that periodically roamed up from the valley, but a closer look revealed that the figure was moving on two legs, clutching something difficult to mistake for anything but a long-barreled firearm. Wahin immediately stopped his pacing and grabbed his binoculars, the better to confirm his growing fear.

It was an armed intruder, and he wasn’t alone. As Wahin panned with the binoculars, he spotted several more men clearing the ridgeline and fanning out as they began to charge downhill toward the camp.

The sentry anxiously lowered the binoculars and grabbed his two-way radio. He’d raised the device to his lips and was about to relay the alarm when he was struck in the chest by what felt like a white-hot firebrand. The blow threw him off balance and he dropped the walkie-talkie as he veered backward, an intense pain radiating from where he’d been hit. By the time it occurred to him that he’d just been shot, Wahin had careened against the railing behind him. The thin wood splintered under his weight and the recruit instinctively flung his arms outward, clawing at the air as he toppled from the tower. When he struck the half-empty water tank below him, Yusra Wahin’s neck snapped, sending him to his Maker.

W HEN THE GUARD LANDED on the water tank, a dull, gonglike peal echoed across the mountainside. Rafael Encizo scowled as he lowered the high-powered M-110 he’d used to bring the man down.

“So much for the element of surprise,” he muttered to Calvin James. “If this peashooter didn’t get anyone’s attention, that sure as hell did!”

“Not much we can do about it but get a move on,” James said, shifting his grip on three of the hastily gathered parachutes with which Phoenix Force and their CIA counterparts had touched down on the ridgeline. McCarter had already hauled the other three chutes halfway down the mountainside and, with the help of CIA Agent Hale, was pitching them over the nearest row of bramble standing between them and the camp. Hawkins was off to the left, moving at a slower pace, the TCD-100 tucked close to his chest. With him was Roger Combs, the other Company operative.

Encizo nodded tersely and followed close behind as James loped downhill to the right of McCarter and Hale. By the time they’d reached another long-running patch of bramble, sentries posted atop the far towers had spotted them. Volleys of rounds thumped into the dirt around them as they ducked low behind the thorn bush.

“Here, give me a quick hand,” James said, unraveling the parachutes in the dirt. The nylon fabric was thin, but when the canopies were folded and placed on top of one another, sandwiching the suspension lines, they would provide a layer thick enough to partially blunt the stabbing force of the bramble thorns. The two Stony Man commandos, following McCarter and Hale’s lead, draped the parachutes over the coarse shrubbery, then quickly steeled themselves and bounded over. James grunted as he felt several thorns poke through the makeshift barrier as well as his pant legs, drawing blood along his right thigh. Encizo cursed as he took a few barbs of his own. Within seconds they’d cleared the obstacle and were forced to dive in separate directions to avoid the next volley of rifle fire from the sentry towers.

“One down, two to go,” James confirmed, ignoring the blood that had begun to seep through his pants. He waited out another few rounds from the enemy, then crawled back to the parachutes and quickly gathered them up. Encizo, meanwhile, brought his semiautomatic back into play, taking sight through the M-110’s 30 mm KAC scope and triggering a return shot. Far off across the camp, the sentry in the northeast tower slumped to his platform.

“I was talking about the bramble, but that’s okay,” James drawled, stuffing the parachutes under his arm. He glanced down at a thin rivulet of blood trailing from his combat boots into the rust-colored dirt.

“Look on the bright side,” Encizo told him, grinning savagely. “Leave a trail like that and we won’t have any trouble finding our way back.”

M C C ARTER AND H ALE HAD MADE it over their first hurdle, but when they tried to retrieve the parachutes that had shielded them from the briar, the canopies wouldn’t give.

“They must be stuck on a branch,” the CIA agent said after giving the chutes another sharp tug.

McCarter, who was trading shots with the lone remaining sentry, called out to Hale without taking his eyes off his target. “Leave ’em, then,” he said. “We’ll have to try to make an end run around the bushes.”

Hale let go of the parachutes and grabbed his M-16/M-203 combo rifle. He fingered the carbine’s trigger and was unleashing a volley at the distant guard tower when a return round from the sentry clipped him in the ribs.

“Son of a bitch!” he swore, grimacing as he dropped to one knee.

McCarter looked around and spotted a boulder heap twenty yards to his left. He fired a quick autoburst at the sentry, then rushed to Hale’s side, pulling him up to his feet.

“C’mon, mate.”

McCarter helped the wounded agent straggle along the briar line to the rock formation. Once they reached it, the Briton eased Hale to the ground. Bullets sang off the boulders above their heads as McCarter tore open the other man’s shirt to get a better look at the wound.

“Went clean through. How’s your breathing?”

Hale winced as he dragged in air and let it out slowly, then spit into his hand, checking for blood. “Missed the lung, at any rate.”

“You’ll need to hang back and staunch the blood flow.” McCarter set down his M-16 long enough to pull off his shirt and tear off one of the sleeves. “These won’t be exactly sterilized, but they’ll have to do.”

Once he’d torn the sleeve in two, the Phoenix Force Leader handed the makeshift compresses to Hale, who was now reclining against one of the larger boulders. The CIA agent needed both hands to press the cloth against the entry and exit wounds. Blood quickly seeped through, reddening his fingers.

“Go on,” he told McCarter. “If I’m still kicking when the dust settles, I’m Type O and’ll probably be down a few pints.”

McCarter nodded, putting on his now-sleeveless camo shirt. “We’ll take care of you,” he assured Hale, “and when it’s over I’ll buy you a couple pints of Guinness, too.”

“Deal.”

“Mind if we swap popguns?” McCarter asked, reaching for the CIA agent’s combo. “The grenade launcher might come in handy.”

“Be my guest.”

McCarter handed the other man his M-16, then cast his shirt aside and clutched Hale’s over-under. He scrambled halfway up the boulder heap and was forced to duck when sniper fire glanced off the rocks. From the higher vantage point, he was able to see past the briar line. If he could get to the other side and dogleg to his left, there was a dirt access road that he figured would take him to the camp without having to contend with the thorn bushes.

Inching upward, McCarter propped his borrowed carbine in a niche between two rocks and sighted up on the far guard tower through the M-16’s scope. From his position he wasn’t able to get a clear bead on the sentry, but the enemy gunner had shifted his attention to James and Encizo, who were using their parachutes to clear yet another of the bramble clots. Taking advantage of his foe’s distraction, McCarter sprang forward, bounding up over the top of the rock heap and down to the other side. He hit the ground running and dodged left, crouching low as he made his way to the road. By the time he reached it, the remaining sentry had been taken out, courtesy of Encizo’s M-110.

As McCarter jogged down the road leading toward the camp, he saw the first sign of Hezbollah reinforcements rising up from their underground lair. Like ants, they began to emerge from several different openings and fan out in all directions.

“Not good,” McCarter murmured to himself. “C’mon, T.J., get busy with that bloody Gopher Snake already!”

CHAPTER NINE

The TCD-100 had essentially been the creation of Stony Man armorer John Kissinger, but Hawkins had spent time at the Farm’s weapons lab helping Cowboy construct the device and configure its computerized operating system. He’d also worked side by side with Kissinger during the Gopher Snake’s field trials, so it was no surprise that when the weapon was given the green light for the battlefield, Hawkins had been placed in charge of its operation.

As the battle raged around them, Hawkins and Roger Combs had detoured into an earthen culvert that ran along the training camp’s eastern perimeter. Sat cam footage had pinpointed several tunnel openings along the length of the ditch, and while the Stony Man cybercrew considered them to be escape routes, Hawkins figured they could also be used to access the Hezbollah’s underground lair.

There was water in the culvert, ankle-deep and filled with sediment that clawed at the men’s boots, forcing them to move slowly. Hawkins had the Gopher Snake tucked under one arm, leaving the other free to defend himself with a KRISS Super V submachine gun. Combs, who was carrying a pair of full-face gas masks, was similarly armed. The five-pound, .45-caliber firearms were light enough to wield with one hand, and the two warriors had a chance to prove it moments later when three Hezbollah soldiers emerged from the nearest tunnel armed with AK-47s. Combs and Hawkins had the drop on them and burped a quick half dozen rounds their way. The Super V’s muted recoil and muzzle rise allowed for deadly accuracy, especially at such close range, and all three men crumpled into the brackish water without having had a chance to return fire.

The intruders forged ahead, ready to empty their magazines should others appear. Nearing the tunnel, they sidestepped the bodies. When no one else came forward, Hawkins crouched near the raised entrance and unclipped the TCD-100’s remote transceiver from its underhousing.

“Cover me,” he whispered to Combs.

Combs nodded, his eyes on the tunnel. Hawkins adjusted the remote’s settings, then carefully set the Gopher Snake into the mouth of the tunnel. He flicked on the transceiver and stared at the small, embedded screen providing him with an image taken from the wheeled device’s front-mounted camera.

“Okay, little guy,” Hawkins whispered, activating the TCD. “Go do your stuff.”

“G ET UP AND MOVE OUT !” the Hezbollah commandant shouted from the doorway leading to the subterranean barracks. “We’re under attack!”

Half dressed and barely half awake, a dozen recruits staggered from their cots and grabbed assault rifles, then warily followed their burly leader into a leg of the networked tunnels carved out beneath the training camp. The nearest staircase leading up to the surface was to their left. As they approached it, the men came upon a faint haze wafting through the tunnel. Immediately they began to hack and cough, their eyes tearing with a burning sensation.

“Tear gas!” the commandant shouted, blinking furiously as he veered to one side, crashing against the tunnel wall. Glancing down the passageway, he spotted the TCD-100 rolling toward him like some oversize toy. The tear gas spewed from a spray nozzle just below the Gopher Snake’s angled Kevlar shield. His eyes stinging, a wave of nausea sweeping over him, the commandant nonetheless willed himself to raise his AK-47. He was about to unleash a round when strobe lights mounted on the TCD’s shield began to blink with staccato frenzy. The intense, flickering illumination temporarily blinded the man as well as the fighters huddled close to him, and though he managed to fire his weapon, only a few rounds glanced off the TCD-100’s bulletproof shield; the rest pummeled the ground.

Others fired as well with the same futility. Moments later they were brought to their knees when a partition in the Gopher Snake’s shield briefly parted, allowing it to launch a pair of modified XM-84 stun grenades. The flash-enhanced explosions echoed loudly through the enclosed space, further immobilizing the combatants. They fell upon one another, trying to flee the small, wheeled contraption that had effectively neutralized them. As the tear gas thickened around them, the men doubled over and retched violently, too caught up in their misery to notice Hawkins and Combs advancing toward them, their hastily donned gas masks equipped with built-in night-vision goggles that minimized the effect of the tear gas.

Combs gunned down several of the men and Hawkins knocked a few others unconscious with the butt of his KRISS subgun, then cleared the way so that he could use his transceiver to guide the Gopher Snake past them and around the next bend in the tunnel.

“Okay, I’m impressed,” Combs murmured through his gas mask.

“Gotta say, I am, too,” Hawkins confessed. The device had worked even better than he’d expected, and the TCD-100 had spent only half its arsenal. Hawkins figured the device was still capable of dealing with any other enemy forces still lurking in the tunnels.

“C’mon, boy,” he called down to the Snake as if taking a pet dog out for a leisurely stroll. “Let’s keep up the good work.”

R AFAEL E NCIZO AND Calvin James had cleared their way past the last briar hurdle. Both men were bleeding thanks to the barbed thorns, but the wounds seemed less threatening than the throng of dispersing Hezbollah warriors they now found themselves faced with. Veering past the sentry’s body at the base of the nearest tower, the Stony Man commandos took up positions on either side of the water tank and began firing. They were answered by AK-47s, a steady barrage of NATO rounds forcing them to press close to the tank, which took enough hits to begin draining water out onto the reddish hardpan.

“What do you think?” James called to Encizo as he reloaded his carbine. “We’re outnumbered, what, maybe five to one?”

“A least that,” Encizo shouted over the noise of his assault rifle. He saw two men go down near the tents, weapons falling from their lifeless hands. “That’s usually par for the course, though, right?” he added.

“Yeah, I guess they can’t all be picnics like in Damascus.”

Once James reloaded, he held back firing for a moment, instead grabbing at the ammunition belt slung around his hips. He unclipped a baseball-size M-67 frag grenade and quickly enabled it, then cocked his arm and flung it in the direction of a tunnel opening where still more terrorist recruits were surfacing. The explosive detonated shy of the hole, but its casualty radius was wide enough to kill half the emerging soldiers outright and pound the others with frag shards, voiding any chance they might help ramp the odds still further against Phoenix Force.

The grenade blast was still resonating through the valley when it was joined by another, this one care of a 40-mm high-explosive round launched from McCarter’s M-203 into a supply truck several Hezbollah gunmen had taken cover behind. The initial blast ruptured the gas tank, further disintegrating the vehicle. There were screams of agony as shrapnel sprayed the surrounding enemy. As the maimed terrorists fell to the smoke-shrouded earth, James and Encizo ventured clear of the water tank and advanced, raking the camp with their carbines. Behind them, Junior Hale had apparently stopped his bleeding enough to crawl up the rocks and add to the onslaught with bursts from McCarter’s M-16.

The tide of the battle quickly shifted in Phoenix Force’s favor. The covert ops fanned out, whittling down the enemy as they sought to encircle the camp and block off escape routes. When no further combatants emerged from the tunnels, McCarter and the others assumed that Hawkins had made good use of the Gopher Snake and kept Hezbollah from replenishing its forces aboveground.

As the surviving terrorists saw their ranks dwindle, the fight began to go out of them. Several men threw down their weapons and dropped to their knees, placing their hands on their heads in a gesture of surrender. A few others fired wildly in midflight, racing away from the smoldering carcass of the bombed truck, only to be cut down. Two recruits scrambled into one of the parked Jeeps in hopes of escaping out onto the main road, but another frag grenade, this one heaved by Encizo, rolled beneath the chassis and its concussive blast flipped the vehicle into the air, throwing the men clear before landing upside down in the dirt. Stunned, the recruits cried out for mercy and straggled to their knees, joining those who’d already given up the fight.

Three others made a valiant last stand near one of the far sentry towers, forcing James and Encizo to flatten themselves on the turf to avoid rounds from their AK-47s. McCarter and Hale responded by shifting aim and targeting the gunners. Within seconds the men were down, having fired the last shots that would be heard from the enemy.

Once he sensed the skirmish was over, McCarter warily stepped clear of the rocks he’d taken cover behind, his eyes on the carnage.

“Canvass the area for flare-ups,” he shouted to James and Encizo.

McCarter’s colleagues rose to their feet and began to cautiously make their way through the camp, motioning for the surviving Hezbollah warriors to group together near the veiled helicopter. The beleaguered recruits complied, some of them sobbing, others crying out in pain. McCarter, meanwhile, backtracked to the boulders where he’d left Hale. The CIA agent was slumped across the rocks, M-16 at his side. The Phoenix Force leader climbed up to him. Hale had lost his makeshift compresses and his initial wounds bled heavily onto the rocks. He’d taken two more slugs, as well, one to the shoulder, the other a clear killshot to the head. McCarter fingered the man’s wrist for a pulse, already knowing he wouldn’t find one.

“Damn it,” McCarter murmured.

There was nothing to be done for Hale. McCarter grimly braced himself, then hoisted the dead man off the rocks and slung him over his shoulder. He could feel Hale’s blood drenching him as he slowly hauled the body back to the camp. James and Encizo had finished rounding up the prisoners. There were ten of them. As McCarter went to join them near the helicopter, he detected movement through the smoke near where James’s grenade had earlier cratered the hardpan. A half-clad Hezbollah soldier was rising up from the tunnels, hands clasped to his head. Even as the man was stepping out onto the level ground, another recruit followed behind him, then yet another. Soon a total of seven young men had appeared, all unarmed, all hacking and blinking away tears from the gas that had left them defenseless. Finally Hawkins brought up the rear, still wearing his gas mask, still clutching his KRISS Super V subgun.

“Nice work, Teej,” McCarter told him, dropping to one knee so that he could ease Hale’s body to the ground.

“Thank the Gopher Snake,” Hawkins replied. “Little sucker worked like a charm.”

McCarter was bathed in sweat and blood. He rose slowly, his legs aching from the exertion of toting the corpse.

“What’s the situation down there?” he asked.

“There’s still a few men in the tunnels,” Hawkins reported. “Five dead, probably that many out cold, at least for now. Combs has ’em covered, but I’d best get back before they come to.”

McCarter nodded. “Did you spot anything besides barracks?”

“About what you’d expect,” Hawkins reported. “Command post, weapons cache, storage area. Plenty to search through.”

“Combs has his camera, so go ahead and let him take a few shots, but don’t spend any more time down there than you have to.”

“You want him to call for our chopper?”

“Hold off for now,” McCarter said, glancing at the net-shrouded Huey. “If we can get this sucker going, we won’t have to wait around.”

Hawkins nodded, leaving his prisoners in Encizo’s care and venturing back underground. McCarter turned to James as he approached the helicopter. “Help me get the net off.”

“Gonna hotwire it?” James asked as he grabbed one edge of the thick netting slung over the Huey’s rotors. He worked with one hand, keeping his M-16 trained on the prisoners with the other. McCarter was doing the same.

“If that’s what it takes,” the Briton said. “We’ll have room for Hale and a couple prisoners. Hopefully some of them speak English and will horsetrade info for some leniency.”

“What about the rest of them?” James asked.

“If it were us, they’d probably just gun us down and be done with it,” McCarter guessed. “Can’t see doing it, though. We’ll just leave ’em.”

James stared at the prisoners. They were all young, some in their teens. They looked back at him, some still fearful while others had turned sullen, their eyes filled with hate. It sickened James to think that these men would no doubt quickly regroup with others and resume their training, possibly even more determined than ever to turn themselves into killing machines for the Hezbollah cause. But he knew McCarter was right; they couldn’t in good conscience just massacre the whole lot of them. To do so would be to drag Phoenix Force down to the enemy’s level. It was bad enough that the Stony Man commandos had to regularly navigate their way through moral gray areas to carry out their assignments; if they were to succumb completely to the dark side, they would have betrayed not only their country, but also themselves. Still, the matter didn’t sit well with James.

“Gotta say,” he finally murmured, “giving them a free pass sucks, big time.”

“Tell me about it,” McCarter said. “Sometimes war is more than just hell.”

CHAPTER TEN

Leystra Hot Springs, California

Leystra Hot Springs was a once prominent New Age retreat located eighty miles east of Los Angeles in the heart of a heavily wooded forest blackened by the 2007 fires that had turned Southern California into hell on Earth. The twenty-one-acre retreat had fallen on hard times even before the fire, and when flames had ravaged most of the outbuildings and neighboring establishments, the facility’s owners had filed for bankruptcy and closed its doors. The grounds had been fenced off haphazardly with posted caveats against trespassing, but the low-bidding rent-a-cops hired to back up the warnings rarely so much as drove past the isolated property, much less searched it for intruders.

As such, the haven had become a retreat, not for the pampered and well-to-do, but rather a succession of downtrodden squatters, some hardbound transients, others former area residents left homeless in the wake of the fires. However, judging from the aerial surveillance that had prompted Able Team’s early morning arrival, it appeared that the hot springs’ latest uninvited guests were of a far more sinister nature.

Grimaldi and his Stony Man confederates weren’t the only ones targeting the isolated facility. The California Highway Patrol was in the process of barricading the access road in both directions, and SWAT teams had already spilled out of two armored Humvees and begun to venture into the dense brush surrounding the hot springs. To the north, another pair of helicopters—one a CHP H-20, the other a refurbished SWAT Huey—hovered low over the mountainous terrain that stretched behind the retreat. The heavy show of force was in response to word that more than one person had been seen on the grounds. Kouri Ahmet apparently wasn’t alone.

“Whatever happened to the good old days when we took care of these things ourselves?” Carl Lyons muttered as he eyeballed the backup forces. The Able Team commander was sitting beside Grimaldi up front in the Bell’s cockpit; Blancanales and Schwarz were in back, feeding ammo cartridges into their M-16s.

“Everybody’s gotta feel important, I guess,” Blancanales said.

Grimaldi eased the chopper over the leafy oak trees surrounding the retreat, then hovered in place above one of the hot springs. The pool had once been enclosed, but fire had claimed the surrounding structure, reducing it to charred ruins. Half submerged in the murky, steaming water was the missing Forest Service pickup. Floating facedown nearby amid scattered leaves and debris were two bodies, one stripped to its shorts, the other still uniformed.

“That’s gotta be the rangers,” Lyons said, peering down at the corpses. “Let’s see if we can’t give those poor bastards some justice.”

“Closest I can get is the parking lot,” Grimaldi said.

“Close enough.”

Grimaldi pulled away from the spring, then backtracked to a large, cracked patch of asphalt thirty yards downhill. As the pilot lowered the chopper, Lyons turned to his colleagues.

“You and I’ll handle the ground search,” he told Blancanales. “Gadgets, stay aboard and keep the fly open in case we need air support.”

“Got it,” Schwarz said, throwing open the side door of the passenger compartment. Blancanales eased past him. Once Grimaldi had brought the chopper to within a few feet of the tarmac, he bounded out. Lyons followed. Both men crouched low, fanned by the copter’s rotor wash as it pulled back up into the air.

Of the retreat’s eight buildings, only three remained standing. The nearest was a graffiti-festooned, garage-size bungalow set off a flagstone pathway linking the parking lot to the hot spring where the pickup had been spotted.

“I got this one,” Lyons told Blancanales. “You take the one over there. We’ll hit the main building last.”

Blancanales nodded and cautiously advanced toward a half-scorched two-story outbuilding with two large bay openings. A late-model Dodge Caravan had been backed into one bay; the other contained the rusted-out remains of a tractor and large riding lawn mower. The van had a layer of road dust but Blancanales could see that the windshield wipers had been used recently, likely by the al Qaeda sleeper cell Able Team had been trying to track down in Barstow. It now seemed certain that Kouri Ahmet’s aborted attempt to secure portable rocket launchers had been on behalf of the Iraqi terrorist squad. Obviously the fugitive’s parachute jump from the highjacked Gulfstream had been orchestrated to bring him within range of the Iraqis. The enemy had last been spotted in Barstow, but Blancanales’s gut told him that this was their primary hideout, the one from which they were planning whatever violence they hoped to unleash on Los Angeles. If Blancanales and his fellow commandos had anything to say about it, that plan would never be carried out.

Both large-framed picture windows on the second floor of the outbuilding had been vandalized, and Blancanales was startled when several pigeons suddenly fluttered out through a break in the glass. He doubted that it was his approach that had spooked the birds, and when he glanced up he detected further movement behind the broken glass. Acting on instinct, the East L.A. native veered sharply to his right, avoiding the stream of gunfire that rained down from one of the windows, tearing up the asphalt where he’d been standing a moment before.

“Got a live one over here!” Blancanales shouted to Lyons as he rolled behind an overturned litter barrel. Bringing his M-16 into play, he returned fire, shattering what little glass remained in the window frame and perforating the wooden slats below it. He’d missed his target, however, and more rounds blitzed his way, chewing the tarmac and glancing off the trash bin. When Lyons doubled back and fired at his assailant, Blancanales welcomed the diversion and rolled clear. Once back on his feet, he zigzagged toward the building. Nearing the bay where the Dodge was parked, he peered in and spotted a gunman bounding down a back stairway leading from the second story.

Blancanales drew up and strafed the staircase, taking the gunman out at the knees. The Iraqi pitched forward, dropping his rifle and somersaulting down the steps before landing in a sprawl near the Caravan. He was still alive and crawled toward his weapon, managing to close his fingers around the stock before Blancanales finished him off with another burst from his M-16.

There was at least one other al Qaeda operative still up on the second floor, however, and after forcing Lyons to cover with an autoburst, the gunner moved to the top of the stairs and shifted his aim toward Blancanales. By then the Able Team commando had reached the building and dived forward, eluding the blasts sent his way. Scrambling past the parked van, he helped himself to the slain attacker’s carbine, a Chinese-made QBZ-95. He took aim at the ceiling and quickly emptied the weapon. Above the loud din of gunfire, he heard the unmistakable sound of a body dropping to the floor above him.

Blancanales looked out through the bay opening and saw Grimaldi drifting toward him in the OH-58C. Schwarz was leaning out of the chopper, pouring more rounds into the second story. Blancanales waited out the assault, then waved to his colleague and gestured that he was heading up the steps. Schwarz nodded and pulled himself back inside the chopper. As Grimaldi flew over the building, Blancanales cast aside the QBZ and charged the steps, taking them two at a time, M-16 in firing position.

Clearing the last step, Blancanales saw the second assailant stretched out dead on the floor. He started toward the body, then flinched, hearing a noise behind him. A beam of sunlight glanced off the knife blade streaking toward him, and the next thing he knew, Blancanales felt the sharp edge rip through his shirt and glance off his ribs. The man holding the weapon had lunged at him, and when the two men collided, Blancanales was sent reeling backward. He grabbed his attacker and both men went tumbling down the staircase.

Blancanales took the brunt of the fall, cushioning the knifeman from the steps. By the time he reached the ground, the Stony Man commando’s wind had been knocked from his lungs. He lay, stunned, as the Iraqi rose to his knees, still clutching the now-bloodied knife. He was about to plunge the blade into Blancanales’s chest when a volley of 7.62 mm NATO rounds streaked into the service bay, eviscerating the terrorist’s midsection. The knife fell from the Iraqi’s hands as he pitched forward on top of his would-be victim.

Groaning, Blancanales shoved the man aside and gasped for breath, blinking away the stars that flashed across his field of vision. Lyons caught up with him a moment later.

“You okay?” he asked, helping his colleague to his feet.

Blancanales ripped his shirt open and inspected the bleeding gash along his rib cage. “Could’ve been worse,” he said. “Thanks for the backup.”

“No problem,” Lyons said, eyeing his teammate’s wound. “You’re going to need stitches on that sucker, though.”

“Later,” Blancanales said. He turned his attention to the two men lying dead next to them. Both looked to be in their late twenties, dark-haired and olive-skinned. Neither was Kouri Ahmet.

“Our sleeper cell guys?” Lyons said.

“Gotta be,” Blancanales said. He gestured at the Dodge Caravan. “The van matches the one that grease monkey saw up in Barstow.”

“I kinda like the irony of them driving around on American wheels.”

“They probably swiped it, same as Ahmet did that ranger’s truck.”

“Speaking of that scumbag,” Lyons said. “If we didn’t get him here, odds are he’s still out—”

The Able Team leader’s voice was drowned out by a fresh outbreak of gunfire. He and Blancanales glanced toward the bungalow Lyons had been headed for before the assault at the outbuilding. They could see another gunman standing in the open doorway of the smaller building, directing fire up at the OH-58C.

“The fun never stops,” Lyons said, slamming a fresh cartridge into his M-16.

“S WING AROUND !” Schwarz shouted at Grimaldi, bracing himself in the chopper’s open doorway.

“Gladly!” Grimaldi answered. The Stony Man pilot had just missed being hit by the slug that had punched through his side window. He dipped the chopper sharply, then brought it about-face so that Schwarz could see the gunman, who’d ducked for cover behind a flagstone wall extending out from the bungalow. Schwarz tattooed the wall, keeping the enemy pinned behind it. From the corner of his eye, he saw Lyons and Blancanales spread out so they could advance on the gunner from separate directions.

“Up a little higher,” Schwarz told Grimaldi. “Then ease in a little closer.”

Grimaldi urged the OH-58C up and forward, trying to bring the shooter back into view. As he did so, rounds from yet another gunman began to pepper the chopper’s underside. Grimaldi turned to his right and saw the enemy leaning out from a large, wisteria-choked pergola behind the bungalow.

“Three o’clock!” he shouted.

“Got him!”

Schwarz shifted position and leveled his M-16, firing before the assailant could retreat behind one of the pergola’s wooden colonnades. The rounds found flesh and the gunner keeled to the ground, his upper torso freshly embroidered.

The first shooter, emboldened by Schwarz’s distraction, rose from behind the flagstone wall and sent a fusillade whizzing through the chopper doorway before Gadgets whirled back around and nailed him.

By now Lyons and Blancanales had reached the bungalow. Grimaldi left them to raid the interior and pulled away, guiding the chopper above a meandering walkway that led back to the remaining building, a larger, one-story cinder-block orientation center with a sun-faded sign out front that still beckoned visitors with an inviting come-on: Our Spring’s Just the Thing!

The first of the SWAT ground units had begun to materialize from out of the vegetation surrounding the orientation center. Wearing flak jackets over their camo fatigues, they spread out, encircling the building. From Grimaldi’s aerial perspective, he could see that the main entrance was still boarded up, but a side door was ajar. As he watched, two of the SWAT officers approached the entryway, one brandishing a MAC-10, the other a semiautomatic Benelli M-1 shotgun. They were within ten yards of the door when it suddenly flew open. A short, wiry man dived out headfirst, rolling on impact with the ground and scrambling quickly to his feet, a 9 mm Heckler & Koch MP-5 cradled close to his chest. He managed to fire a killshot into the face of the SWAT shotgunner before being brought down by the other commando’s MAC-10.

As the rest of the SWAT team converged on every available opening to the O-building, Grimaldi brought the chopper up higher in the hope of gaining a vantage point from which Schwarz could effectively lend fire from the air. The maneuver was a fortuitous one.

Seconds later, with a deafening roar, a series of explosive charges detonated inside the building, blowing its cinder-block walls outward and turning the roof into a frag shower that hailed upwards, pelting the OC-58’s skids and underbelly. Had Grimaldi not just changed his position, the flying shrapnel would have likely sheared his rotors, bringing the bird down. As it was, the flyboy was hard-pressed to keep the chopper aloft when the blast’s shock wave tossed the craft about.

The jolt caught Schwarz off guard and threw him out the Bell’s open doorway, M-16 flying from his grasp. If not for his martial arts training, the Stony Man warrior would likely have plummeted sixty feet to certain death on the flagstone walkway below. Instead, with nimble instincts, Schwarz was able to throw out his right arm and break his fall by grabbing the chopper’s right skid. His fingers clamped tightly around the cold metal, buying him the time needed to raise his other arm and secure a firmer grip.

“Still here!” he shouted through clenched teeth.

Grimaldi couldn’t hear Schwarz over the rotors and the din of the explosion, but when the displaced weight pitched the chopper to one side he realized Schwarz was still aboard and quickly compensated, righting the aircraft and then slowly bringing it down.

Lyons and Blancanales had been knocked to the ground by the blast, but by the time the OH-58C had dipped to within ten yards of the pathway, both men were on their feet. They scrambled over and grabbed Schwarz’s dangling legs, allowing him to let go of the chopper’s skid. As they eased him down to solid ground, the helicopter floated off, bound for the parking lot where the whole ordeal had begun.

“Nice stunt,” Lyons told Schwarz. “You had us going there for a minute.”

“Tell me about it,” Schwarz said, flexing the life back into his numbed fingers. “Don’t try this at home, kids.”

The team’s levity was short-lived, giving way to a grim silence as they made their way to the debris-filled crater that had once been the orientation center. The blackened, smoldering hellhole was nearly twenty feet deep, flames consuming any trace of the explosives that had created it. Lying on the perimeter like tossed dolls were the members of the SWAT team, most of them dismembered by shrapnel, none of them breathing.

“What the hell did they have stored in there, World War III?” Lyons wondered, gazing past the bodies into the crater.

The blast had caught the attention of the rest of the backup teams, and by the time Grimaldi joined his colleagues, the other two choppers were headed toward them. Sirens wailed to life out on the road as a pair of CHP Crown Victorias pulled out of their barricade positions and raced toward the parking lot along with one of the SWAT Hummers.

“They’re a little late,” Schwarz said.

Blancanales had ventured over to the enemy gunman who’d dived from the building shortly before the explosion. He turned the body over, then looked at his partners.

“It’s not Ahmet,” he reported.

Lyons glanced at the crater and shook his head. “If he’s in there, it’s gonna take more than dental charts to ID him.”

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