Kitabı oku: «Ramrod Intercept», sayfa 2
“Go figure,” Brognola said. “I read smoke screen, hiding out in the open. And by classified, I’m hearing you mean to say they are a black project.”
“It certainly reads that way,” Kurtzman went on. “Since the files I hacked into over at the Department of Defense are full of blacked-out words and whole deleted sentences about the pasts of the head honchos. The top dogs are former Air Force air commandos, nothing, however, untoward that would indicate they would be part of some conspiracy. The workforce is primarily civilian, Harvard, UCLA, MIT grads, pretty-boy types. We did find out DYSAT’s production and research facility is located in Idaho.”
“I don’t mean to get sidetracked here, but can someone explain to me just what a chemical laser is?”
“Akira and Hunt,” Kurtzman said, referring to Akira Tokaido and Huntington Wethers, two more vital cogs in the cyber machinery at the Farm, “could probably explain better than I could.”
“Give it a shot.”
“Well, since the genesis of laser technology some three decades ago, it would appear the research is on the verge of crossing the Rubicon. The brass ring of future high-tech is within grasp, or so it would seem. Basically, a laser weapon works as the transfer of heat to a target. It’s a silent killer, supposedly, or so the scuttle-butt goes, which is capable of burning the eyes out of a soldier on the battlefield, and from as much as a hundred miles or more out. Meltdown, evaporation of anything the beam is focused on, no shots fired in anger. Only now the next quantum leap would be to use it on aircraft and missiles. Or even satellites. That’s where the microchips come in to help get the bugs out of high-energy X-ray lasers. Now, the ones DYSAT have produced—or so our informants told the FBI—can locate, identify, track and intercept satellite transmissions, anywhere, anytime.”
“And disrupt,” Brognola said. “There is nothing wrong with your television sets, NORAD. We are in complete control.”
“In a worst-case scenario,” Kurtzman went on. “What our three AWOL contacts told us is called Ramrod Intercept is currently on the drawing board and is designed to shut down early warning of ballistic missile launches or air attacks. Akira and Hunt get all worked up when they start talking about excimers, carbon dioxide molecular transfers and gas exits, but it’s essentially pulse radiation from what I can understand.”
“I get something of the picture,” Brognola said. “We’re talking about the next step in silent, invisible warfare. Warfare directed from space.”
“Or even from the ground,” Kurtzman said, “if you have the microchips, a computer, the component parts of what the missing informants called a roving command center.”
“We still have three more civilian brain suits who hacked into the Pandora’s box, right? These college playboys running scared?”
“Carl,” Price informed Brognola, referring to Carl “Ironman” Lyons, the leader of Able Team, “states he has them under constant surveillance. Alive and well, I might add.”
Kurtzman grunted. “Carl’s on a short leash, I have to tell you, Hal. Well, you know the guy’s bulldog style. He says if he has to go into one more gentlemen’s club and order soda water and watch everyone else having a grand old time while he’s playing a poor man’s Magnum with his thumb up his—”
“I get the drift,” Brognola said. “He’s about to go apeshit. And this is where, once again, I get the long hard pauses from the Man to the point where I nearly have to ask him if he’s still there. He tells me, item—DYSAT is a legitimate Air Force–run classified project, funded, of course, by Congress. Bottom line he wants absolute, one hundred percent concrete proof there’s a conspiracy before I send Lyons and Able Team crashing down the front door, kicking ass and taking no names.”
“They’re working on it,” Price said. “And we have enough suspicion, handed to you by way of the FBI, that there is a conspiracy to get these weapons and the Ramrod Intercept technology to both the Sudan and the Iranians.”
“Which brings me to Striker’s status. Well?”
Brognola read into the anvil of silence. Mack Bolan, also known as the Executioner, was Stony Man’s lone wolf operative. There would be no Phoenix Force or Able Team this time out watching his back. They all knew that, days ago and going in.
“Limbo, to quote you, and holding,” Kurtzman said, “at a U.S. air base in Saudi.”
“I haven’t quite gotten the particulars yet on what he’s supposed to do or how he’s prepared to get into Sudan, a country hostile, to understate it, folks, to the West.”
“Once we receive the green light,” Price volunteered, “Striker will be air-inserted inside the Sudanese border, a HALO jump from a Starlifter C-141.”
“I’m waiting for the good news.”
“I’ve arranged for a CIA contract agent to meet him, roughly twenty kilometers northwest of Port Sudan. One call on a secured satlink from the Company, and the contract agent will be there to pick Striker up, on-site and waiting. Striker will have a passport stating he’s an Iranian businessman who deals in Persian rugs and jewelry, if he finds himself facing down Sudanese soldiers while in-country.”
“That’s thin, Barbara. Especially if he’s confronted by the Sudanese authorities at a roadblock and they decide to lock him up until they can check him out. They tend to skin Western spies over there alive and feed them their own flesh.”
“It was the best we could do, Hal,” Kurtzman offered. “Since we have an ongoing situation in Port Sudan, and since we strongly suspect DYSAT is funneling the high-tech goodies through the country—”
“And with the Company contract agent as an escort,” Price quickly put in. “It’s dicey, I know, but Striker insisted he go. Shake some trees and see what falls. He said…he’d figure it out.”
Brognola had to smile at Bolan’s balls-to-the-wall philosophy. “Tell me why I’m not surprised he said that.”
He and the others dropped into silence as each of them hashed over the enormity of not one, but three separate missions. Just the same, three or five doors to bulldoze through, Brognola could see the dots beginning to connect all over the map.
The only thing left was to take decisive action, start putting the old boot through some doors and find out what waited on the other side.
The clean-and-simple approach.
“Is he dropping in with a full bag of necessities, Barbara?”
“One commando knife, his Beretta, just in case.”
“God knows…”
“Once he’s inside Port Sudan, the contract agent will land him the requisite hardware.”
Brognola rubbed his face. “Okay, so I guess we just work it out as we go along.”
“The usual,” Kurtzman said.
“Right. What’s new?”
Brognola found Kurtzman studying the world map on a monitor, suddenly as grim as hell. “What is it?”
Kurtzman cleared his throat. “Well, we have a window for about, well, another two hours, tops.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning if we don’t get the call, we’ll have to wait another full twenty-four hours—or rather Phoenix will have to wait. If we’re going for a dawn strike it has to get under way ASAP, according to the timetable we’ve laid out. And there’s another piece of bad news, Hal.”
Maybe it was nerves or just plain weariness, but Brognola sounded off a grim chuckle. “Oh, this is getting better by the minute. Do tell.”
“At roughly six o’clock, Madagascar time, the ONI-1 satellite is going to have to get moving on. Akira tells me there’s a Russian satellite moving in the same orbital path.”
“A collision course with a Russian satellite? How in the…? Never mind. I never understood how the Russian mind works anyway. You’re telling me no one on either side can move either satellite’s orbital path from down here?”
“Not can, but will they?” Price posed. “I’ve been stonewalled at Langley, and no one at the DOD has an answer.”
“So,” Brognola said, “Phoenix is on their own, and we’re blind to what they’re up against because the Russians…unbelievable. It’s outer space, folks. You mean to tell me…they can’t…or won’t…”
“We’ll still have the satlink,” Kurtzman said, but his grim expression told Brognola that was little comfort.
The silence was hanging for long moments, thick enough to reach out and grab it, when the red phone trilled. The big Fed nearly bit his cigar in two as he felt their eyes boring into him. A deep breath, expecting more bad news, and he lifted the receiver.
Brognola recognized the voice as the Man said, “A few items we need to go over first, and I want to make certain we are crystal…”
He wasn’t sure if high anxiety hit the air or relief was lighting up their faces, but he knew they were reading the gleam in his eyes, stone-cold frozen and watching. Brognola didn’t even hear the next few words, but he knew enough, reading into the Man’s tone. He gave them the thumbs-up.
CHAPTER TWO
“Every day’s just one big party for these guys. Cars, broads, blow, not a care in the world. One big tits-and-ass joyride. I tell you what—”
“Oh, shit.”
Rosario Blancanales knew that god-of-thunder voice for what it signaled. Trouble was on the way, mayhem imminent and aplenty and just around the corner, but so far Carl Lyons was keeping his temper reined in.
Barely.
Blancanales was edged out some himself, all the waiting and watching eating at nerves demanding action. Still he regretted the slip, not wishing to incite Lyons to blow before the time was right for a real showdown.
“What was that, Pol?” Lyons growled from the shotgun seat.
A wry smile worked its way over Blancanales’s lips. “Nothing, Carl. I was just having a heart palpitation. Might just be heartburn from lunch.”
Lyons was the leader of Able Team, which was comprised of the former L.A. detectives, Blancanales and Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz. They were all friends, tried and tested commandos who would make the ultimate sacrifice if need be, and for one another if it came down to that. It wasn’t that a wrathful Lyons made Blancanales especially nervous or even intimidated—no, berserker outbursts were simply wasted energy as far as he was concerned. Try telling that, he thought, to Ironman. Best just to let him vent some steam, clean the pipes out, then get himself refocused. Men, he knew, who fought and killed the enemy side by side, who knew what it was to face down death and walk out the other side of combat had a way of coming to read and gauge each other’s mind-sets and moods better than most couples married for a lifetime.
“I’m getting sick and tired of all this sneaking and peeking around,” Lyons growled, his gaze fixed on the strip joint across Sunset Boulevard. “Watching a bunch of goddamn playboys acting out their own Hollywood Babylon. They take two hour cocktail lunches in Brentwood, sashay out the office lobby before four, then go piss the night away gaping at ass and getting hummers in back rooms ‘reserved’ for their candy.”
Blancanales groaned against his will. “Oh, man…”
Lyons fixed him with an eye that was glinting between mocking and irritation. “Another heart palpitation? Maybe you should go a little easier on all that hot sauce I watch you drown your tacos in. We’re not getting any younger, my friend. We can’t assault our systems the way we used to, you know.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.”
Lyons went back to glowering at the front doors where two of their DYSAT exec targets had just entered to begin a long night of trolling for fun and games. “These thousand-dollar-suited pricks are starting to annoy the hell out of me. These guys, every time I see them get a lap dance they throw at least a twenty-spot away, go skipping up to the stage, same deal. A bunch of twinkle toes with shit-eating grins. Their cash is trash. Big shots.”
Blancanales looked into the rearview glass, caught Schwarz grinning from his control console in the back of the van. He put a glare into his eyes, softly shook his head, but, damn it if Schwarz didn’t barge ahead with it anyway.
“If I didn’t know better, Carl, I’d say you were sounding a smidge jealous.”
“You’re right—you don’t know any better. And jealous of what? I just got a full head of steam, three days and nights out here, doing grunt dick work while we wait on Hal to tell us the Man finally made the hard call. We know these guys at DYSAT are dirty. I mean, two pigeons vanished off the face of the earth just as Hal’s Justice suits were marching to scoop them up. Two and two still add up to four where I come from, guys.”
“We still have three to watch,” Pol said.
“Baby-sit, you mean,” Lyons said. “And, you know, I somehow don’t get the whole scam. If this DYSAT is run by spooks and former air commandos, why hire a bunch of kids damn near fresh out of business school? Still wet behind the ears, but given the keys to the kingdom.”
“I think I have a pretty good hunch why,” Schwarz volunteered.
“That right? Well, Pol and I are all ears.”
“They were handpicked, chosen.”
“You’re telling us,” Blancanales said, “they’re sacrificial lambs.”
“Something like that. I’m thinking they were sought out on purpose, with the specific intent of becoming scapegoats if the arms and high-tech wheeling and dealing was found out by the Feds. Your basic fall guys. The former air commandos, with their service records, would simply shrug it off, lie their way out of it, go to ground until the smoke cleared and the college boys were safely on their way to the big house.”
Blancanales saw Lyons bobbing his head, hashing it over.
“Makes sense, in some twisted way,” Lyons said. “And the marginal lifestyles they lead, it wouldn’t be a stretch for the top brass to point out these guys had serious vice problems.”
“It’s the only thing that fits,” Schwarz said. “We know they are simply numbers crunchers for the most part, moving the parts of the goodies around, writing up the manifests, using the contacts of the real powers to create safe transport lanes for delivery. They figured the civilian workforce they hired would be too naive to figure it out.”
“How wrong they were,” Blancanales said. Then he saw two big men in dark suit jackets and buzz cuts going for the doors to the gentlemen’s club, rolling out of the night shadows, flashing lights jumping about like winking halos around them from this lit-up neon stretch of clubs and bars. “Hey, heads up. Our playboys are about to get paid a visit by your friendly neighborhood DYSAT goons.”
“Yeah,” Lyons said. “They were at the last club, too, where Collins disappeared. Only I counted up three the last stop.”
“I know their vehicles,” Gadgets said, watching his monitor, the image being relayed from a minicam mounted on top of the van, the rolling command center handed off to Able Team courtesy of Hal Brognola’s Justice contacts in L.A. “I photoed them and the plates yesterday when they came out of the garage of the office complex.”
“So, go find them,” Lyons said, “and stick another of your famous tracking boxes so we can stay glued on their tails. I see a parking lot down the street, the direction they came from. Let’s rock and roll, Gadgets. I’m going in. Pol, keep the engine hot. The looks I just read on the goons’ faces…let’s just say I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Blancanales cleared his throat as he watched Lyons secure the mini-Uzi in a special rigging beneath his loose-fitting windbreaker, the Ironman’s .357 Magnum Colt Python snug in a shoulder holster on the opposite side with a clear bulge. Subtle wasn’t found in Lyons’s vocabulary. “Easy, big guy. We still haven’t been flashed the green light.”
Lyons shot Blancanales a cold grin, checked the load on his Colt Python, then slid the big piece back into shoulder leather. “Relax. I’ve got a few extra bucks on me to throw around. Maybe I’m just rolling in there to have a couple laughs, check out the girls. Let ’em know big daddy’s in town.”
Lyons was out the door, into the night. Schwarz rolled back the side door, gone to play his role as bug planter.
Now Blancanales felt a real heart palpitation, and it wasn’t the aftereffect of hot sauce and too many tacos. This wasn’t good, he thought. Hell’s bells, he could almost feel the angry energy, trailing Lyons as he crossed the street.
A human time bomb, looking for a place to blow.
No mistake, he could feel it all about to hit the fan, and maybe go straight to hell before the mission even got official status.
JACK ROSWELL DESPISED his current task, or, more to the point, the kind of flunkies he was hunting. The former air commando and black operative for the NSA had his orders from up top, and he would carry them out even if he couldn’t fathom the logic in the whole scheme from the very beginning. This whole mess, he thought, could have been avoided long ago. Now he had been cut loose, a stone-cold killer, on the march to silence wagging tongues.
As he weaved his way through the gaggle of suits and howling throngs of half-drunken lechers, Morton on his left flank, he wondered where it was all headed. It was the colonel’s show, just the same, from day one, and he had often considered broaching the subject. Such as why hire on a pack of twentysomething guys to do the dirty work of moving the prototype high-tech goodies around the globe? Such as why allow them access to classified files? Such as why let them run all around Los Angeles, having the Sodom and Gomorrah time of their lives, a couple of them coked up half the time, six figure salaries to a man? Flash, showing off, now flapping loose lips.
Worse still, the backbone, the real movers and shakers behind DYSAT, had the boot heel of the Justice Department stomping down on it, putting on the weight, ready to snap it in two. At last count, three of the pretty-boy executives were dead and accounted for, with three more that he knew of still running around, making little whispered noise about blowing the lid on the whole plan to one another. Well, the Feds had come running, and Roswell knew they were even right then in the neighborhood. No, it wasn’t all that difficult to spot the black van bristling with antennae, parked across the street for what it was.
Official G-men were on the prowl.
He hoped they came running, trying to close the net. With some cunning and a little brazenness, he could lead them outside, a dark alley maybe, where he could send a message to the Feds. When they came and picked up what was left of the bodies, he didn’t figure they’d just pack up their surveillance and leave town, tails tucked between their legs. No, they’d turn up the heat, but that was just fine with him. Things were reaching a critical mass anyway, and only a swift and decisive counterattack could save the DYSAT kingdom.
After dogging the marks around for days, where they wiled away their nights in gentlemen’s clubs, paid cash for quickies and huffed up blow in back rooms, he was starting to feel mean, and dirty. Midforties, he was somewhat surprised to find a craving for younger girls boiling in his loins, an urge he hadn’t known existed until now. But this was business, and he had no time to indulge any amount of seething lust.
He needed relief, though, and he was content enough to find it through the barrel of his sound-suppressed Beretta 92-F.
Maybe when this whole dirty business was cleaned up he could return to one of these clubs, peace of mind intact, and spend some of his hard-earned cash indulging the fire.
He spotted them beyond the next stage where three girls were gyrating the creamy goods to heavy metal thunder, in their faces. The swirling light show lit up their baby-smooth features, eyes glittering, and it angered Roswell to find the executives ready to laugh and lust the night away while prepared to stick it to DYSAT. They had secured a booth, nothing but Heineken and top-shelf booze for those guys.
Roswell gave Morton the nod. They knew the drill.
And they had their marks squeezed into the booth before they could wonder what the hell was happening.
Grogan had his bottle poised near his lips, eyes darting all around. “You guys…”
“Yeah, us guys,” Roswell said. “There’s good news and there’s bad news, ladies. Bad news—Collins, Hurley and Samuels found new employment…in hell. Good news—you guys have a chance to stay breathing, but only if you talk to us and give us everything you even think you think you know.”
Caldwell was the first to want to spill it. “Not a problem, guys, just let us explain…”
“Not here,” Roswell said. “Nice and quiet, we’ll all get up, one big happy family, out the back door.”
“We’ve got a problem. Twelve o’clock.”
Roswell followed Morton’s stare out to the party sea of lights and noise and AWOL husbands. In Roswell’s experienced estimation of human nature, separating what was what from who was who in the interest of self-preservation, the big guy was falling way short of trying to blend into the crowd as another rooster on the loose away from the wife and kids. For one thing, there were the twin bulges under the windbreaker, the first tipoff a hunter had walked in, trying to close the gap, quick and quiet. He didn’t quite have the look of a Fed, Roswell decided. There was something too cold and menacing to conclude he and Morton would simply hear the guy reading off their Miranda rights.
The big guy with icy eyes stuck to the Mr. Cool routine, just the same, ordering a beer at the bar, grinning around at the female amusement park. Once the bottle was settled in front of him, he picked up his march, shouldering his way through the suits.
Moving with purpose.
Roswell grabbed Caldwell by the arm. “Let’s go.”
LYONS WAS twelve to fifteen steps away from the hardmen when he was spotted. They were hauling the playboys out of the booth, the two buzz-cut thugs seeing him without seeing him. Tweedledee and Tweedledum had the eyes, too.
Which meant they would just as soon kill him as look at him.
He could have radioed Pol for backup, as he saw the foursome weaving through the crowd, angling for a gigantic bouncer guarding what Lyons supposed was the doorway to whore paradise. The Able Team leader decided to go solo, do it his way.
The hard way.
He deposited the beer on the edge of the bar, brushed past a scantily clad waitress who scowled and bleated an oath at his backside. They made the door, and Lyons saw Tweedledee slip a crisp bill into Godzilla’s hand, mouthing something in his direction.
Rolling on, as the foursome was swallowed up by the gloom beyond the door, Lyons already knew where this was headed. Godzilla was all evil eyes, watching as Lyons marched up to him. Getting tensed up to go on the muscle, Godzilla sizing the opposition.
“It’s a private party. Take a hike, Pops.”
Lyons gave Godzilla a quick measure. Late-twenty-something, all muscles, the kind of arrogance in his eyes that told Lyons he had never done much more most likely than toss a few drunks out the front door.
“You’re telling me this is members only, son?”
Godzilla was about to lose it, his eyes turning mean. “What part of ‘take a hike’ didn’t you understand, Pops?”
“How about none of it?”
It came from the heart to begin with, the tried-and-true warrior backed by experience, all the pain and disappointment a man could know, choke down and file away along the course of his life coming together in a critical instant to do the deed. It boiled down, essentially, to a man versus a punk. Physically it came from the legs, a coiled spring that cut loose up his lower back, up the spine, an explosion down the arm until his forearm shot up with all the force of an erupting land mine. Lyons saw the light nearly winking out as Godzilla was lifted an inch or so off his patent leathers, head snapping back on wilting rubber from the forearm pile driver to the jaw. Figure he’d spent a few more hours in the gym lately, pumping more iron than Lyons had his entire life, and he saw the need to follow up with a sweeping left hook. It damn near scared Lyons to hit the guy that hard, his fist driving through jawbone, head snapping sideways, out and back. For a second, Lyons wondered if he had decapitated Godzilla. When the man went thundering off the floor, down for the count, Lyons checked his pulse, found a weak beat. A scan of the party crowd and he found his luck was holding up for a change. They were too busy playing grab ass to notice the incident.
“Pops” Ironman Lyons freed his Colt Python, then hit the door.
