Starfire. Don Pendleton
expert,” Noah chortled, holding up the peace sign. “‘Let me make this perfectly clear—I know who shot JFK and why.’”
Rosenberg washed a smoke wave in their faces. “Yuk, yuk. Okay, geniuses, so how are you going to go public if you’re all dead?”
That gave them pause.
“Now that I see I have your attention, do you guys have any idea what we’ve stumbled on to?” Rosenberg pressed. “Have you thought this through? Do you realize the impact of what we suspect we’ve learned these past three days—and I’m talking beyond the borders of our own country?”
“You’re talking about the fifty-kiloton impactor in Australia?” Job asked. “And who we think is behind it?”
“We’re just a bunch of geeks,” the Kid chimed in, then sucked another huge pull from his doobie, coughing as he choked down the pungent smoke, cheeks ballooning out like a puff adder. “We’re American citizens performing a public service.” He hacked the words out between toxic palls. “The Force of Truth. People knew about us, we’d be national heroes.”
“Yeah,” Cain said, “and I wouldn’t have to just daydream about my favorite pop star. She’d be banging down the front door to know me. And I’m definitely talking ‘know’ in the biblical sense.”
They started snickering, shaking their heads, the Kid and Cain back to their keyboards.
Comedians. Clueless.
Rosenberg then looked at the one table with its bank of monitors they always seemed to neglect. From across the room he could tell nothing was moving—or at least nothing he was aware of. Their laser webs, motion sensors and cameras were hidden as part of the wooded scenery in this neck of the Hampton Roads Peninsula. They were at the far edge of the trailer park, isolated, their closest neighbor about a quarter mile down the dirt track. But he knew the kind of gizmos ghost ops had at their disposal. Such as cutting edge EM scanners and laser burners a decade or more ahead of their time and which only a handful of people knew existed.
The spooks in question were the Mothership.
“Listen up,” Rosenberg snapped, then moved to the living-room window. There, as he felt their stares boring into the back of his head, he pulled the curtain two inches aside. As a last resort, they kept two Rottweilers in the chain-linked cage, hidden to the deep front end of their parked vehicles. From inside the trailer Rosenberg could release the gate by radio remote, and Ramses and Apollo would make a meal out of any—
He caught himself. They would chomp down on any “normal” intruder, that was.
“Chill out, old man,” Cain said. “Have a few brew-skis.”
“I want everything you have on hard drive burned to CD,” he told them, and ran a hard look down the line.
Abel looked aghast. “Everything? Does that include our SETI—”
“Everything means everything, pipsqueak. Now. I want three copies and however many originals. Shag your smart asses into high gear,” he barked.
As they grumbled and shrugged themselves out of neutral, Rosenberg knew it was time to start hedging his bets. He couldn’t expect any of them to understand the dire urgency of the situation. With the exception of Abel, violent death had never touched their lives, other than the usual horror stories about broken family life, divorce, alcoholism, child abuse and the ugly like. But he had stared down the barrel of a gun, seen men die for secrets he kept in his head. As good fortune had it, he was still alive to correct that mistake.
He heard them clacking away on their keyboards, but as he went to the steel cabinet, he could feel them going still, looking his way. The cabinet was off limits, and they knew it. The penalty for attempting to crack the code on the keypad was instant expulsion from the Force of Truth. They would be sent packing, shamed before their peers for not honoring the one ultimate request they had pledged a verbal solemn oath to. In their minds, to break their word on that was the military equivalent of death before dishonor.
Rosenberg keyed open the lockbox, switched on the battery-powered keypad and punched in the long series of numbers committed to steely memory. He felt the sudden burning curiosity of his hackers grow into a living force all by itself. None of them knew—and had been warned to not even ask—what was in the cabinet.
The stainless-steel Glock .45, already snugged in shoulder rigging, came out from the arsenal first. He checked the clip, slapped it home, chambered a live one, strapped in. The Uzi submachine gun was hauled out next. Rosenberg was in the process of cocking and locking when he read the stark fear etched on their faces, and said, “Oh…Now you get it.”
SINCE LANDING in Turkey to hammer out the present mission parameters, David McCarter believed all along his hunch would either pan out into a mother lode of intelligence and strike a massive blow against global terrorism, or get them all killed.
So, what was new?
A bloody damn lot, the leader of Phoenix Force decided. The relative warm comfort of the special ops base in Kurd country of east Turkey now seemed another lifetime as he scurried for the narrow fissure at the north edge of the rocky shelf, gathering a buzzard’s eye view of the hardsite on the fly. His gut instinct quickly amended end game suspicions, and locked him in with laser-guided precision to the grim immediate future.
They were knocking on Hell’s door.
A dark truth, no less, was about to be revealed, unless, that was, he missed his guess and the combined wisdom of the CIA, the Justice Department on through to Mossad, Interpol, the Russian SVR and GRU proved nothing more than toxic smoke and shattered mirrors. The way it looked to be shaping up, as he took in the compound’s sprawl and number of wandering shooters, there were light-years to go before they bagged any human pythons bent on squeezing the life out of the innocent.
A long way, indeed, before they grabbed the prized trophies. And payback, though it would consume the savages here in fire the likes of which they’d never dared dream in their unholiest nightmare, was on temporary hold.
All indications from assorted spookwork, anywhere from fifty to a hundred or more obstacles stood as barriers to the gates of evil knowledge. The opposition here was heavily armed, well paid by the local Lezgi Mafia chieftain and his Chechen contacts. To a rabid brute they would in all likelihood prove loyal to a fierce fault, determined to win by bloody milestones or go down with their own Titanic when the hull had a massive hole punched through it by five black-suited commandos who had come loaded for wolf and bear in predatory human skin. Long odds, no matter how it was blasted, and there would be no winged death from above, which only served to add yet more tension to prebattle jitters over this huge roll of the dice. Beyond the soon-to-be crater in a time and place few sane men had ever heard about and fewer still dare to tread, he knew the daunting shadow of the Russian military and its vaunted special security forces known as Omon were lurking in the vicinity.
First strokes first.
Dropping into the tight little bowl and bringing the HK-33 assault rifle with custom-made 50 mm grenade launcher fixed to the barrel, the ex-SAS commando grabbed a few moments to scan, assess, review. The worst was on the way, make no mistake, he knew, but it felt good nonetheless to stop, breathe and suck down a mouthful of cold water from his canteen.
Review. It seemed to take forever and a day to get it in gear to go wheels-up in the C-130. Part of the problem was verifying intel, double- and triple-checking everything from terrain to enemy players to their own escape hatch, which was flimsy to the point of embracing suicide. But, upon further input from the Farm, McCarter made the call to go when he factored in what he knew, and considered what couldn’t be confirmed without the up-close and personal touch of eyeball kills. Cloud cover was the normal maddening order of the day for this unholy eyesore of the world, but there had been enough break in the ceiling twelve hours ago where the CIA ops at their disposal had managed a thorough sat read of the area and handed if off.
Scan. By night the countryside was bleak and gruesome enough to behold as Phoenix Force moved in on foot