Starfire

The only good news so far.

He soared, slammed to earth, then was sucked up, flying on. The raging sea of debris and dust jettisoned west was now being swept back in the furious clutches of the afterwinds. The world blurring along in the eye of this storm appeared little more than a streaking black whirlwind, all but blinding Boltmer to whatever else was being vacuumed beyond maybe a yard from his flight path.

Had he been inclined to pray…

The magnetic tug began losing steam, he sensed, as the violent slamming of limbs lessened by noticeable jarring degrees. Another fifty feet and he crash-landed, dragged like a tow line, another yard or so.

It was over.

He had survived. For the moment.

He breathed deep through the rubber mask over nose and mouth. Another intake of oxygen and he started to feel he might make it. Despite the Tempur lining in his suit—the special foam material, he knew, that was used to protect astronauts against G-force—Boltmer groaned as he felt the ache and throbbing nonetheless down his battered side, in his joints.

He clambered to his feet.

And found he was just in time to watch the final act. The mushroom cloud kept billowing out, angrier now, if that was possible. Glowing like the blazing maw of some gigantic incinerator—or the pit of Hell—it kept climbing, expanding yet more, rising on for what the principals told them would be its ceiling of five to six miles—or more—toward a sky that all but looked to burn.

Boltmer felt shaken to the core of his being.

He checked his temperature gauge, and froze, eyes bugged as he took a read.

Just over seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit, but dropping now. Then the numbers began falling hard, as they told him would happen, once the brute strength of blast furnace afterwinds sucked themselves back into the rising vortex. The temperature at their own gale-force impact and shortly thereafter was measured and recorded already on a minimodem.

Forget whatever the experiment’s goals, Boltmer’s grim concern became extraction. From there, they walked until their tanks redlined. If their contact was late, what with their ride out of the hot zone supposedly constructed with engine parts of classified alloys and which was also a self-contained oxygenated vehicle and decon chamber…

Boltmer was slowly turning when the hairs on his neck bristled. He caught the moaning as it filtered through his helmet, finally pivoted about-face, and gasped.

They came staggering out of the black pall. Boltmer choked down the bile squirting up his chest, cold fear and the unholy sight doing a tap dance on nerves taut as garrote wire.

They were nothing less than a vision of the damned.

What sounded like strangled cries or deep-throated moaning from the zombies grew louder, began pounding his helmet like invisible fists. Clear they were desperate to speak, probably shout, then Boltmer assumed their vocal cords, perhaps their tongues had been fried. They came twitching, convulsing, bridging the gap quick, and straight toward him, as if sensing another living presence.

He stared, paralyzed by horror. Their flesh had been microwaved in the searing winds, with black holes—but like glowing embers, it seemed—where the eyes were burned out, dark red streaks oozing down cheeks where skin was cooked off to the bone. Same for the scalp, hair and flesh gone to expose gleaming patches of skull. Boltmer couldn’t tell if they were clothed, if that was flesh or bone or both on down the black-and-red walking cadavers, then felt his senses boggled to another level of numbing repulsion. Nothing but mindless terror or the will to live should have kept them standing. Any oxygen—or most of it, he had to believe—had surely been incinerated out of the immediate vicinity, or turned into living fire, if nothing else.

They collapsed in a boneless heap.

He knew he needed to conserve oxygen, but Boltmer sucked deep from the main tank to calm his racing heart.

Granted, he was all about the money, but after what he had just witnessed, he had to wonder.

Up to ten miles they told him the flash could melt down retina, the initial blast shear away skin to the bone. How many more zombies were left wandering the countryside? he wondered, panning the firestorms, ten to two o’clock. Beyond this night, how many would die a slow, agonizing death from radiation sickness in the weeks, the years, to come? How many babies would be born with grotesque birth defects from mothers suffering from the invisible savaging of fallout?

He stared into the fire, which only seemed to grow more angry and intense in his frozen eternity. Was this but just a taste of Hell on Earth, a microcosm of Fate awaiting humankind? What kind of planet would survivors—the blind, burned and insane—inherit? All water contaminated, the air poisoned by fallout. The sun blotted out by a radioactive shield of dust that would reach around the globe. The only season, then, one winter of eternal subfreezing. No crops, since there would be no arable soil to grow food.

He jumped as Karlov passed by. His partner clambering on without so much as a glance at the dead, Boltmer followed, but moved as if he was in a trance. He wanted to focus on survival, five million bucks and his own dreams, but wondered if there was any future.

Or one that would be worth sticking around to see if the ultimate madness was unleashed.

CHAPTER THREE

Barbara Price didn’t need to read their faces. They knew the threat to their continued existence was grim. The sense of dread was so thick that it seemed to engulf her as she walked into the Computer Room.

But, to a man and woman, they were all seasoned professionals, she knew. They had a job to do, no matter what the odds, mystery or critical mass, and do it they would.

This time the attack was hitting them from cyberspace, which made it equally as lethal. Exposure of their ultracovert Sensitive Operations Group to the world at large would prove a legal catastrophe—possible imprisonment, fines and such—which, of course, would shut them down permanently. Tack on subsequent potential for toppling the White House, impeachment of the President all but guaranteed, and that by itself was no mere aftershock.

It was that bad.

Which meant they needed to go on the attack, and at all due light speed and martial and technical proficiency at their disposal. The problem right now, however, was in determining who was the enemy, where the enemy was hiding, and how to go on the offensive once the enemy was flushed out.

The slim honey-blond beauty stole a moment on the way to their cybercrews’ workstations to check the mounted digital wall clocks with major cities marked for each time zone. She noted the time differences on three current flashpoints, mentally juggling day and night disparities. As usual, Father Time was the invisible gathering storm for the cyberwizards here at the Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The same dire omen, she reflected, could be rolling dark thunderheads over both their field ops, and the entire planet when she considered the situation in Australia.

She was acutely aware that about ninety miles away in Washington, D.C., the best and the brightest of the most powerful country on the planet were scrambling for answers. Answering to only the President of the United States—who green-lighted each black ops for Stony Man and its warriors in the field—Price knew it was always best to let whatever political fallout land wherever it would, devour whoever it would.

Only this time the situation was so grave…

She stopped beside the head of the cyberteam. Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman acknowledged her presence with a dark glance over his shoulder. His spine had been shattered by a bullet during an attack on the Farm, and the big stocky computer genius was relegated to spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He lifted a hand to indicate he needed another few moments, then returned to tapping on his keyboard. A quick look down the line and Price found the main players were hard at it, working in grim silent frenzy. Carmen Delahunt, Huntington Wethers and Akira Tokaido looked like a troupe of master pianists as their fingers flew over keyboards. Satellite images, numerical data and grid maps of AIQs—areas in question—as well as shots with red laser lines around the globe marking satellite orbits, flashed over their monitors. The new crisis was being handled primarily by the team leader and Tokaido. That the Japanese cyberwarrior was without earbuds and MP3 player would have told Price by itself how fearsome the situation, how perilous the yawning black hole that was their immediate future.

What they knew was that an unknown killer satellite had dumped a nuclear missile on Australia from its low earth orbit, vaporizing a six-mile ring in a desolate tract of the Queensland outback, a fifty-kiloton wallop, as previously indicated by the Farm’s e-mail and database theft of NASA, DOD and CIA satellite reads of ground zero and contaminated vicinity beyond. The last she heard from her own intelligence sources was woefully limited, since no one knew anything of substance, but that was several hours ago.

That left Hal Brognola in her loop.

The high-ranking Justice Department official, who oversaw the Farm and was liaison to the Man, was off on his own intelligence-hunting expedition, and she silently urged a quick wrap on his end and an even quicker chopper ride back to the Farm. He had taken the three-man commando unit of Able Team along with him for a meet with an unnamed and unknown source he’d intimated to her would either prove highly informative or dangerous to his health.

Make that five crisis fronts, including their phantom attackers in cyberspace.

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, was off their radar screen at the moment as he pursued his own campaign in Sri Lanka. They could use all hands, but Phoenix Force had just hit Dagestan in a mission that required their one-hundred-percent iron-clad attention.

“Good news and bad news,” Kurtzman suddenly told the mission controller. “The good news is that I’ve scrubbed our hot e-mail dumps, installed another antivirus and antiworm program in our network. The bad news is that our servers were bombed—a brute force attack that means whoever was trying to track us has put together their own network over the Internet. My best guess is they’ve created their own supercomputer, with firewall encryption every bit as sophisticated as ours. For all I know, it could be one to a dozen or more hackers.”

“And you determined they had broken through our firewalls how?”

“They were either cocky,” Tokaido interjected, “or taunting us. They bombed servers we use in emergencies with porn that would make even the dirtiest scumbag blush.”

Kurtzman cleared his throat, frowning as he shot Tokaido an admonishing eye for embellished interruption. “Apparently, they’ve also been busy bombing e-mail from NASA to the CIA and God only knows whoever else.”

Tokaido flashed Price a tight grin. “But believe us, the triple-X shenanigans aside, they’re good.”

They had to be, Price thought. the Farm used encryption software programs that combined elaborate mathematics, symbols and letters that would have sent Einstein screaming into the night. Their crypto texts of substitution, transposition and fractionalization were well beyond the commonly used 56-bit encryption that had seventy-two quadrillion possibilities alone. Only the U.S. government, its military intelligence complex and banks were allowed to use anything above 56-bit encryption. Attempted sale of such encryption programs, home or abroad, was a federal crime.

“We’re attempting to backtrack,” Kurtzman told her. “But—”

“They can scrub and change handles and create new servers as you run them down.”

“I believe I can trace them, however. They’re using Old Testament figures as handles—Noah, Cain and Abel and so forth,” Tokaido said. “And sticking to the same names. It’s almost as if they’re daring us to find them.”

“So, find them,” Price said, and wondered why, if that was true, they seemed so willing to be tracked down and cornered, this invisible enemy being such crack cybercommandos.

Kurtzman’s frown was back. “Thing is, Barb, these are most likely civilians. We all know the Pentagon, the DOD, the Air Force and even the CIA have seen their e-mail busted into recently and with frightening ease and regularity. Very few people outside the elite intelligence loop know about that.”

“Yeah, embarrassment,” Tokaido added, “fear of admitting their own vulnerability. Job security, I imagine, since they don’t want public perception of our intelligence and military hierarchy as inept when it comes to guarding national security and its secrets.”

“And we hack into their databases all the time,” Kurtzman said.

“We’re not exactly up for congressional funding, Bear. What’s your point?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I understand full well the ramifications here. My point is, say we do find them. Statistically most hackers are about fourteen to twenty-five years old. Kids for the most part. Geniuses, without a doubt, but still kids.”

Price knew where Kurtzman was headed, but felt annoyed nonetheless that she had to spell it out. “I wasn’t planning on offering them a job here at the Farm, Bear.”

“But?”

“They’re a clear and present danger to our very existence. If information has been stolen from us, or if our location is pinned down and they think it’s cute and clever to announce to the world who we are, or they want to serve some mercenary agenda—blackmail for money—then we need to pay them a visit. Retrieve or destroy the information, and give them a stern and fair warning.”

Kurtzman nodded. “Give us another hour, give or take, and I can let you know something definite.”

“I’ll be in the War Room. I want a full package on each front in one hour.”

“Will do.”

Price left them to their individual tasks. As she headed toward the armored door, she felt her stomach roll over, her jaw tighten. There was no way to spin any positive angle on what they faced. Both the Farm and the world, she knew, had been shoved to the edge of the abyss by unknown enemies with equally unknown objectives. It was too often standard operating procedure to hurl themselves into the fire, armed with little more than questions and sordid hanging riddles, the sum total of which always put countless innocent lives on the scales of life and death. But stomping out flash-points before mass murder and anarchy could spread to consume entire countries and potentially send the entire world spiraling toward doomsday was what they did best. Only the present critical mass felt more sinister and threatening than at any previous time she could recall during her stint as mission controller. It appeared someone—or some nation—was sending a message they were armed with nukes and could drop them at will from space…

If humankind went the way of the dinosaur, then her worries Stony Man could be exposed by hackers wouldn’t matter in the least. All horrible truth be told, if the world went up in a thermonuclear holocaust, then likewise it would be as if the Farm never even existed.

End of game.

End of life on Earth.

Or so far as all of them now knew it.

Maryland

AS MUCH AS Carl Lyons hated ventures through spook snake pits, it struck him that, more often than not, he found himself doing just that. All the slick lies, intrigue and backstabbing, and those spooks who straddled the fence armed with personal agendas, could put any number of politicians on the grease to shame. Not to mention it seemed he was always creeping—or being led—to the doorstep of waiting Death.

Well, it wasn’t his place to grumble why, he knew. Just dig in, do it. Nicknamed “Ironman,” he was no marshmallow melting in the flames of adversity. And Hal Brognola had handed Able Team its standing orders.

A two-hour-plus jaunt from D.C., for starters, following a web of backcountry roads off the interstate as given to the big Fed by his Shadow Man, and they were guided in by the GPS in the Farm’s custom war van. They were here now in the wooded belly of Western Maryland, about thirty miles south of Gettysburg to be more exact. One of Lyons’s two teammates had disgorged alongside him into the dark unknown, right in front of the gate with its No Trespassing sign, two klicks and change out from the concrete bunker dug into the hillside where the shadow encounter would go down, and which Stony Man cyberburglars had been fortunate enough to steal a peek at from a passing satellite. Any threat, Brognola warned, wouldn’t be overt; it would come sudden and out of nowhere, if personal experience served him right. In other words, Lyons and company knew to trust no one, and to not, under any circumstances, allow the seeming absence of menace to lull them into dropping their guard. These particular wolves in sheep’s clothing, he knew—black ops who put themselves above the law and who would execute innocent civilians if it served their twisted ideal of protecting national security—often came bearing smiles and friendly assurances while waving a white flag.

The former Los Angeles detective and current leader of Able Team dropped to a crouch behind a pine tree for quick situation assessment. Given that they knew next to nothing about Brognola’s rendezvous with the unknown spook source, they were ready to go tactical at the first double signal transmitted over vibrating pagers fixed to their respective hips. Like Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, he was togged in a blacksuit and weighted down with a combat harness and slotted vest stuffed to the gills with grenades, spare clips, on down to a sheathed Ka-Bar fighting knife on his shin. In lieu of his Colt Python .357 Magnum, the Able Team leader’s new sidearm of choice was a .50-caliber Desert Eagle, with mounted laser sight. Its clip was filled with fifteen rounds of special “black rhino” hollowpoint pulverizers. Stony Man’s resident armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, swore he could now nearly shred Kevlar like foam. Schwarz, he knew, was sitting with the war van, watching thermal screens and monitoring parabolic sensors for any traffic, human or vehicular, while Blancanales was on the move in a perimeter sweep to his deep right flank.

All set, but for what?

Lyons scanned the forested slopes through night-vision goggles, the Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun with attached sound suppressor and laser sight rolling in unison with his visual surveillance. Lyons listened to the dead silence. No matter how hard it tried, no matter the level of skill earned by tough experience, no living creature could advance in total silence through any such terrain. And that went for Blancanales, too, despite the fact the man was a Vietnam vet who had been baptized in the blood-soaked jungles of Southeast Asia where there was nothing but armed ghosts who moved silent as the wind. There was brush, twigs, stones to contend with, uneven but hard-packed earth to avoid, that would yield to encroaching weight. The body gave off distinct odors, often through expelled breath. Say a stalking opponent was inclined to smoke, booze, meat, or a splash of yesterday’s after-shave, or just so happened to be sweating out any number of toxins…

And Lyons caught a whiff of cigarette residue as a sudden breeze rustled through the woods. As good fortune had it, he was downwind. The trouble under these circumstances was that he was up against professionals, bad habits or not. As such they would have night vision, EM scanners—

What the hell was that? Lyons wondered. The figure—if he could call it such—was nearly invisible despite his infrared radiation-enhanced eye. It was a specter of human form, but in blurry white outline, almost perfectly blended with the outcrop beyond a stand of trees. Was it standing or moving, and where did it come from so suddenly? He wasn’t even sure he was looking at a living creature, since there was no discernible light-wave read, then he saw a subgun that appeared all but suspended in the air. Instinct screamed at Lyons he was marked, dead to rights, whatever the apparition, and if he wasn’t witness to the Invisible Man, then that was a mounted battery-operated weapon.

And going for broke!

Lyons was dropping for maximum shield behind the fat base of a pine just as the white beam of a laser speared the ghost-murk of night vision and bark flayed his exposed cheek and jaw to the burping retort of muffled subgun.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Extinction Level Event. ELE, if you like.”

If he liked. Hell, Hal Brognola didn’t like any of it. Not the Shadow Man’s flare for the dramatic, nor his vague reasoning of shared interests in national security, certain these meets were also manufactured fishing expeditions. Brognola grew conscious of the Glock 17 stowed beneath his suit jacket, having already noted the hardware tucked at left bicep level under Shadow Man’s windbreaker.

“What do you know about the space alerting and defense system?”

He was no astronomy expert by any stretch, but he knew the basics enough to thwart Shadow Man if he was attempting to paint him an ignoramus. Even a small portion of knowledge wielded some power, Brognola thought. He took a few moments to consider his answer, measure the man.

They were nameless sources of intelligence he had used over the years. Sometimes the big Fed went to them, but usually they sought him out through a series of encrypted e-mails they had arranged. Whether to pick his brains or to attempt to confirm suspicions and rumors of the existence of Stony Man Farm, he met them at a mutually agreed-upon time and place. He always seemed to walk away, taking everything, giving nothing, but only insofar as he knew.

They came as the usual clone of buzz cut, dark clothing, chiseled but nondescript faces, a security force of normally two shooters on hand, as was the case now. One mountain of granite with earpiece, throat mike and HK-33 was posted outside the door, the other wraith, Brognola had likewise last seen, was waiting behind the wheel of the black GMC with government plates. There could be more hardmen, likewise snipers buried in the woods for all he knew. But he had come armed with more than foresight and a bad gut feeling. Since nearly being murdered in the past during one such encounter, Brognola had Able Team in tow, more than confident that they had him covered. If the Stony Man commando sensed the slightest threat, the pager on his hip would vibrate to abort, go tactical. Barring that, there was the handheld radio unit clipped to his belt, and Carl Lyons wasn’t one to speak softly when it hit the fan.

“SADS,” Brognola finally said, deciding he could play the Shadow Man’s acronym game. “They are Earth’s last insurance policy against NEOs, or near earth objects.” He cleared his throat into a long moment of stony silence. “If this is a history on the threat of comets and asteroids, I know about the mile-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona, about Tunguska in Siberia where something like fifteen to twenty miles of forest was leveled by a twenty-megaton blast. I know a one kilometer space rock is considered a ‘large impactor.’ I know about twenty or thirty billion tons of said space rock hurtling toward Earth and impacting at about ten kilometers a second is what science considers the threshold for an extinction level event, which, I think, would yield something in the area of one million million megatons of TNT. Oh yeah, and a two or three mile rock would create global catastrophe. Earthquakes, firestorms, tidal waves of hundred-foot or more walls if it hit water. Hurricane winds off any chart we now measure them by would ensue and hurl tens of billions of tons of dust and debris into the air. The sun would vanish. A new Ice Age would start.”

The Shadow Man snorted.

Brognola felt the guy’s penetrating stare, then, annoyed at whatever his act, glanced around the room. The only furniture was four chairs and the steel table at which Brognola sat, all of them bolted to the concrete floor. He suspected there was a cellar, as evidenced by a short, arrow-straight fissure midway across the room. It was barely noticeable to the naked eye, and he would have missed it altogether had it not been for the white light burning from the single bulb hanging over his head. The no-name op remained standing in the outer limits of light in the deep corner, as if deciding what and how much to say. Brognola was reaching for the black folder when a match flared.