Starfire. Don Pendleton
shall we say, he is in the process of scrambling to save his own world.”
“What you mean to say, and perhaps have neglected to inform us, is that he is either dead, captured by the Russians or hiding in the mountains,” Jabayt intoned.
“None of the above. What I am telling you is that the colonel put me in charge of your situation, and my word on that should be more than enough.” Zhuktul felt a sudden fierce hatred toward these men who grew rich and fat while placing all the risk in the hands of others. “Let us examine your situation, shall we? Was it not the four of you who fled on your own volition all the creature comforts of Paris and Germany for sanctuary in my humble country? Was it not you who left others to possibly be hanged in your places? Yes, yes, I know all about how the CIA ‘stumbled,’ as you put it, on to your dealings with the UN. I am aware how you were but a mere few hours away from being arrested like some of your comrades who did business with Saddam and who are now cutting deals with the American authorities in secret to spare their lives.”
Scowling, he hit them with a cannonball of smoke, sickened to the point of some murderous rage by their whining as he felt the storm building like hot lava behind his eyes. “But you four…you made it somehow. And that you are still free men by itself should make you grateful to the point of weeping. Yet you question the very security I have arranged for you, and now when I am in the process of seeing that you can live out your lives and spend all the millions you pilfered from both your own countries and the deal your comrades made with Colonel Shistoi. And that I deal with you at all, considering that it is you who are the ones who could be bringing trouble to my own backyard, should have you on your knees and kissing my feet.”
As Osman gasped in outrage, Zhuktul drank, watching them begin to wilt under his icy stare. They knew he was right. He smoked, let them steam in silence. They were breaking eye contact, lips fluttering in impotent rage and frustration, when shouting and shots fired struck the curtained window directly behind the Iraqis. Their panic was instant and infuriating.
“Relax!” Zhuktul barked at the Iraqis, then shouldered through them, ignoring the battery of questions fired at his back. His men were already flying through beaded archways on both ends to investigate. The weapons fire abruptly stopped, then Zhuktul turned on his VIPs and told them, “This happens.”
“What happens?” Jabayt nearly shouted.
Raising the bottle to his lips, Zhuktul drank, hard and deep, then grew yet more angry at what he smelled wafting past their perfumed flab—fear, which, he knew, could be contagious. He had a good mind to shoot them all where they stood, but in some as yet undefined way that picked at the back of his thoughts, he decided they could prove more useful to him alive.
Zhuktul listened as they babbled among themselves, then treated his guests to a scornful eye. “One of my men is simply drunk. Perhaps he mistook a wolf for an intruder. If that is the case, he will be punished. Now. Were there any other complaints?”
THE GUARD WAS LAUNCHED through glass as if shot from a howitzer. The sight of the body sailing from the tower gave McCarter brief pause. Advancing for the line of dreary apple trees, about a hundred meters out and closing on the deep southeast edge of the main building, the ex-SAS commando stole a moment or two to watch the swan dive, his assault rifle extended and ready for live ones. Shattered glass, a dispersing cloud of blood and gore from an obvious head shot and a spinning object he pegged as a handheld radio trailed convulsing acrobatics sixty feet to bone-crunching impact.
They were made.
To the credit of surviving sentries there were no further shouts of alarm, no long bursts of autofire, which meant they were pros, caught napping or not, and were most likely in the process of fanning out to seal a net of lead doom on James and Manning. Somehow McCarter doubted the nine to thirteen or more hardmen were all down and twitching out. As seasoned pros themselves, McCarter knew they would all adapt to the sudden disruption, full bore ahead. Each of them had their own firepoints, tasks to carry out, to be improvised as the need arose.
Aware it all looked and felt too easy on his end, McCarter was scanning the rock-stubbled ground when he spied the tripwire at the last possible second. He stepped over it, scouring all the rotten apples strewed like some slimy morass in front of him, and for improvised explosive devices maybe disguised as produce. Autofire rattled the cold dawn air. A shout, followed by more silence.
How long he could hold off hitting the doomsday button…
Belay that. He would give James and Manning all the time they deemed necessary to clear ground zero, deciding to wait another minute or so before keying his com link.
So the battle had jumped the gun before they were hunkered and blew a hole through the sky.
Sooner was always better than later.
The thought he was eager to turn on the killing heat of hellfire began cranking up his own adrenaline levels, limbs oiled, senses electrified. A few swift but careful meters forward, and McCarter grabbed cover behind the gnarled base of a rotting apple tree.
Hunkered, hidden from more than a passing eye, he was ready to rock.
The HK-33 came up to draw a bead on the large steel door to dead twelve o’clock where he made out muffled bellows beyond. Seconds later, the enemy barged outside, assault rifles swinging in all directions. Four, then six hardmen were trying to get it together as they spilled farther from the building. They were flapping arms and raising a general ruckus on handheld units when the Phoenix Force leader took up slack on the HK’s trigger and cut loose.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
As he claimed his chair at the head of the table in the War Room, Hal Brognola found Barbara Price and Aaron Kurtzman watching him closely. Settling in and leaning back, he took a few moments, conscious suddenly of what seemed to be the ten years he’d just aged in the past twelve hours or so. They had to have read the haggard look and smoldering burn in his eyes for something other than the usual weariness, anger and anxiety when he found the combined power of Stony Man holding up the weight of the world. Since he was in charge of the Sensitive Operations Group, the crushing weight of the ultimate success or failure of any mission was sometimes daunting. But this time he and the Farm weren’t alone in shouldering the burden of Atlas. With any number of intelligence and military spooks throwing their weight around, Brognola knew the waters were murkier than he could recall in long memory, chummed fat and wide, with man eaters circling for what may well prove a global feeding frenzy.
Against his will, the big Fed’s thoughts remained locked on the cracking ice of international outrage, the possibility that a rogue or supposed friendly nation was orbiting nuclear satellites around the planet and looking for blood. Beyond the stark and frightening facts as Stony Man knew them, Brognola realized ground zero in the Australian outback wouldn’t rate a footnote in history if a nuclear spear was plunged into a major city from above Earth’s atmosphere.
Sensing the mission controller and the head of the cyberteam were anxious but giving him some time to gather his thoughts, breathe air free of human rot and all its treachery and malice, the big Fed sipped some of the battery acid Kurtzman passed off as coffee. He unwrapped a fresh cigar, stuck it in a corner of his mouth, rolled his shoulders. He took a deep breath, let it out and told them, “In the few brief moments the President could spare me, he green-lighted us to do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of what happened in Australia. Nail it down. The Man wants a rapid response, folks, no punches pulled, no mercy whatsoever to whoever the perpetrators. They go down hard, and, if possible, their names and misdeeds are to be buried along with them. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, he also implied that, because of the nature of the crisis, there’s a good chance our teams may well be locking horns with any number of operators—CIA, NSA, DOD, DIA. You name it.”
“In other words,” Kurtzman said, “beware of those bearing free gifts.”
Brognola nodded, aware that Kurtzman and Price were apprised of the encounter in upstate Maryland. “The hacker problem is, of course, our situation to deal