Читать книгу: «Capital Offensive»

Capital Offensive
Don Pendleton

STONY MAN ^®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to

Nick Pollotta for his contribution to this work.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Sonora, Texas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER ONE

Washington, D.C.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Greater than ninety-five percent.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man was always two steps ahead of any conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

“Not completely out of the question.”

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

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

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

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

“Artillery would be better.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER TWO

Tokyo, Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The members of Able Team looked at her disapprovingly.

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

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

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

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

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

“Roughly eighty miles.”

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

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

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

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

That sounded like a guard station. “Dead?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The corpse have a name?” Lyons inquired.

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

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

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

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

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

Just then, the intercom buzzed softly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Unfortunately, yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Agreed.”

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

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

“Yeah?” the man replied.

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

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

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

“Sounds fine,” Kurtzman replied.

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

“Why not helicopters?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Again?” Blancanales retorted.

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

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

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

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

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

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