Starfire

The Shadow Man lit his cigarette, flipped the match away and said, “You can get to all that on your own time, Mr. Brognola. I’m here at considerable risk to my own life, which puts you in the same position. Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you, no matter how tedious you may think me getting to the point.” Shadow Man puffed, dug a hand into his pants’ pocket. “These SADS and their monitoring of ELEs are kept fairly secret from John Q. Public, other than a passing knowledge they may be out there. In our Milky Way there are two-thousand-some NEOs alone. Most are no larger than your average pebble. Whoever controls space just above Earth, Mr. Brognola, controls the planet. Whoever controls the knowledge of these ELEs alone, why, they can monitor and track them and decide—depending on their trajectory and size—whether to blast or let them pass on by. No warning to us mere mortals here below. Knowledge then being the perfect weapon, or the perfect judgment.”

“What’s any of this have to do with what happened…”

“Extinction level event, Mr. Brognola. The future belongs to those who can control an ELE. Act of God or man-made.”

“So, we watch for the rock that wiped the dinosaurs off the face of the Earth. Hey, you’ll have to excuse me if maybe I’m translating for you here, but we—the good guys, I’ll assume—need to be the only ones in the neighborhood controlling orbiting satellites with nuclear platforms, whether to blast an ELE into quadrillion golf balls or threaten another nuclear power with a preemptive strike from the stars.”

“I wouldn’t go on sounding so glib and dismissive.”

Brognola pulled out a cigar, stuck it on his lip. “My mistake. I assumed you were in a hurry.”

“If most of the human race, say, is destined to go out like the dinosaur, as you put it, then the question facing us, who have the knowledge and foresight, is what kind of world will Man inherit.”

“Or who will inherit.”

The Shadow Man paused, as if Brognola had crossed some line in the sand, then went on. “Because of the coming threat of the cataclysmic impactor, there are nuclear-armed satellites in space, but I’m sure you already know this. Yes, we can safely assume the propaganda will keep pumping it out how such weapons are outlawed. And if they are, by chance, made public knowledge, then they will be deemed defensive measures against the killer asteroid. Lies by omission, we call it. What happened, thus, in Australia, is a result of someone getting the edge on this technology. Our educated suspicion is that a black ops renegade faction of the European Space Agency decided to field test a new toy. But, worse, our side in the space race—that would be NASA who is monitored and provided security by the NSA, which is contracted out on behalf of the Department of Defense—has, as you know, been working for some time with our supposed European space friends to launch any number of shuttles. Mutual-shared space stations for research and development, and so forth. Nobody asks what’s really going on up there. Ignorance in this instance is bliss for the majority of common man. Beyond myself, however, only a few in our cloistered intelligence circles are aware that all this rainbow coalition reach for the stars is merely a mask to hide the demon.”

Brognola waited for the final grim point, but the Shadow Man fell silent. The big Fed waited him out.

“Washington will keep scrambling to conceal the truth about what we think happened in Australia,” the Shadow Man finally said.

“Which is?” Brognola prompted.

“This is where you might come in.”

“How come I got the lucky draw? And what makes you think—”

“It is called Galileo. It’s a classified NASA complex north of Dallas. They are fronting as a SADS, but the Galileo program is only part of a more sordid truth. One such truth is that behind the scenes they’re building RLVs—reusable launch vehicles.”

“Space shuttles.”

“Not quite.” The Shadow Man seemed to vanish behind a dragon’s spray of smoke. “The single key difference between a space shuttle and an RLV is that our current shuttles lose their external tank shortly after liftoff. The single-stage-to-orbit RLV, on the other hand, is fully reusable. Winged-configuration will give it fuel tanks…the long and the short is that it has the capacity to become the prototype space plane, requiring little more than ground maintenance, refueling, then it’s wheels up once more.”

Brognola clenched his jaw at the infuriating silence. “And?”

“Galileo has an RLV long since off the drawing board. We hear it’s about six months or so from its maiden voyage. And it’s platform is specced to house both a thermonuclear payload and particle laser weapons. But that’s not the real problem.”

WHEN LYONS FOUND he couldn’t clearly mark the shooter in thermal imaging, confusion threatened to freeze his hand. Every yard ever gained in enemy blood to battle the evil that men did, he thought, and he had never seen anything like this! A living ghost was bent on cutting him to ribbons!

Weapons fire strobed in his night vision as he bolted three or four feet, firing his subgun from the hip before he was chased to the broader span of the next available tree armor. The HK subgun it wielded was real enough, but since it was inanimate, meaning no heat generated beyond the muzzle-flash of igniting gases, the weapon was a fuzzy black object in Lyons’s night vision, and was considered a “cool area.” So if the thing appeared to move like a human being, darting now for its own shield behind the staggered row of trees, jumbled rock and thick scrub, why didn’t it give off a white-hot ghost hue that would betray it as living flesh? As far as Lyons could tell, there was little more than the haziest of white shimmer that wanted to frame it as human, like the thinnest chalk outlines of a body at a murder scene.

Lyons went low, flung his HK’s muzzle around the edge of a tree base and milked two 3-round bursts, hoping Blancanales was on the way, the thought tearing through his mind that his teammate hadn’t paged, but if he was…

The Able Team leader melted back for cover, bearing up under a fusillade of subgun fire as a tempest of bark sliced past his face. He was about to check his handheld thermal imager to determine how many warm bodies were within its thirty-yard proximity when another stuttering volley of weapons fire invaded the Invisible Man’s blistering salvo. The ex-L.A. detective was whipping around the opposite edge, HK up and tracking, when the specter came dancing and convulsing out from cover. Its subgun flaying wild bursts left to right, Lyons saw the white mists, the one or two long fingers jet like the slimmest of javelins into his thermal imaging.

Hot blood.

A little more hosing from 9 mm armor-piercing rounds eating it up, the Invisible Man toppled, crunching to a boneless heap. Lyons found ragged white holes up and down its torso, then fading to black as the corpse began to cool and the infrared radiation of its life force fled.

Lyons spotted the haze that was Blancanales, twelve yards north and closing, but checked his thermal imager. Nothing was on the small LCD monitor except his teammate’s read, but Lyons did a full 360 sweep to be on the safe side, moving out to link up with Blancanales. His teammate’s HK subgun parting the shadows as he advanced with all due caution, Blancanales checked the perimeter, the angry set to his features indicating he was a startled flinch away from unslinging the black-ferrite-painted Multi-Round Projectile Launcher off his shoulder. After what they’d both just seen, the Able Team leader wouldn’t fault Pol in the least if he started peppering the forest with 40 mm flesh-shredders.

Lyons toed the body. Close up now, the expression he found on his teammate’s face told him Blancanales had the exact same stunned reaction.

“It’s the pajama suit that turned him into a ghost,” Blancanales whispered, then backed away several yards to cover them both, weapon fanning the compass.

That was the only possible answer, as Lyons, one eye and ear on his surroundings, bent to touch the body. The material was some kind of soft fabric, silk maybe, or a silica fiber composite. It was woven in a pattern of scales, hard but flexible, overlapping but meshing together, if he was seeing right, and Lyons wasn’t sure what to believe after what he’d witnessed. The black-suit was molded skintight, from hood to customized boots, everything formfitting and blended into one piece except for the night-vision goggles. Had to be some kind of cutting-edge thermal insulation that trapped body heat, Lyons thought, freeing his Ka-Bar fighting knife. The possibilities, he knew, for gaining superior edge in night combat with such a suit were beyond frightening, the hairs on the back of his neck still bristling. There was webbing to Velcro spare clips and grenades, a sheath for a commando dagger—made of the same material—but as Lyons quickly patted down the body that was it. No radio, no ID. A vehicle, then. Where there was one invisible shooter…

Placing the subgun on the ground, Lyons dug the blade into a pant leg, sheared off a strip of material and shoved it down into a slot on his vest. Assuming they all survived the next hour or so and made it back to Wonderland, Brognola had a crack forensics unit at the Justice Department who could give the fabric a thorough exam. He was pretty sure it was pointless to fingerprint the corpse. Most black ops were functioning living ghosts in everyday society, buried so deep and off the books they certainly couldn’t risk a social security number. But he took out the inkpad and a slip of paper for just such an occasion anyway, sliced the fabric off one hand. A quick roll and press of dead fingers, and Lyons signaled Blancanales to head out in a due north vector. It was time to abort, and Lyons knew he didn’t need to explain the reasons why to Blancanales. What remained to be seen—or not seen—may prove lethal beyond all their combined reason and experience.

And waiting in the night, at the bunker.

SABOTAGE, SUBVERSION and sale of nuclear-platform satellites to the enemies of the Free World were bottom-lined into the Shadow Man’s parlay. Whether crafted to finagle Brognola and whoever the op suspected were the big Fed’s superiors, the moment suddenly felt all wrong to the Justice Man.

He gnawed on his stogie, perusing the black file despite the nameless op’s wishes he hold off. What he saw were standard sat pics and blueprints of the Galileo complex, and what the man informed him were shots of a classified ESA compound in Germany. A CDROM was tucked in a corner pouch, and Shadow Man relayed the password. As usual, these sources from what struck Brognola as a bottomless abyss of intrigue and treachery always said a lot but told him little. This time was no different. It was as if a jigsaw puzzle was being dumped in his lap and he was supposed to strain himself into a stroke fitting the pieces together. Factor, though, what he knew about the nuke blast in Australia, the suspect a killer satellite of unknown origins that had self-detonated, the panic now rocketing through the White House…

There was a mission here, no question, or at least a starting point, so it seemed. Brognola hated the feeling that a noose was being dangled over his head. No matter how the intel shook out, he decided this would be the last time he ventured outside his own circle for a face-to-face with spookland, unless, that was, they were an old and trusted acquaintance. He was pondering how many things could go wrong when his pager vibrated.

Brognola gathered up the file, maintained his composure as he set the cigar on the edge of the ashtray. He bobbed his head in rhythm to the man’s ongoing spiel about the necessity to hunt down any traitors in place or circling the fort of Galileo. Rising, Brognola whipped out his Glock.

The cigarette fell from the Shadow Man’s lips. “What the hell are you—”

“Get on the floor.” When he hesitated, the big Fed aimed the Glock at his knee and ordered, “Now. Or I’ll give you some help.”

Brognola heard the commotion out front. No weapons fire, but he caught coughing and yelling beyond the door. Able Team, he hoped, gassing the shadow guns. The custom-designed Little Bulldozer that Blancanales toted, he knew, had a few armor-piercing impact rounds for the twelve tubes, packed with potent tranquilizer gas. No matter how thick the bulletproof glass on the spook ride, the driver should be down for the count if Pol slammed a 40 mm sleeper home in the GMC. Which left open the grim possibility of hidden shooters in the wooded slopes.

The op stretched out on his stomach. Brognola relieved the Shadow Man of his Beretta M-9. He slipped it inside his waistband, then heard Lyons patching through, the Able Team leader’s voice steely but urgent. Satisfied the man was disarmed, Brognola grabbed his handheld radio. “I’m here.”

“We’re bailing. Your two shadows out front are down, but we may have a problem, I’m not sure.”

That didn’t sound to Brognola like the take-charge Ironman he knew. “Explain.”

“I’ll explain when we evac. You’re covered. Mr. S will be waiting at the front door.”

“Roger.”

“I caught that. Brognola, listen to me. I didn’t come here to set you up. I’ve been straight with you. We’re on the same team. We want the same thing. There are people I need to flush out, ops I fear who are on the take and ready to pull the plug on Galileo. But I can’t do it myself. I’m too close to it, and they’ll know. I told you already, my life is in danger, so is yours. Especially after what I just gave you.”

Brognola didn’t answer as he backpedaled for the armored door.

“Brognola! If you just took out my two men—”

“Not the way you think. The only pain they’ll feel is when they wake up with a hangover that will have them screaming for a detox bed. And don’t call me, I’ll call you.” The man was still pleading his case as Brognola tried the steel handle, afraid it was locked. It wasn’t.

Two men, Brognola thought, that’s what the spook said, as he stepped outside, Glock fanning the Stygian gloom, right and left. Say he told the truth, then who was forcing Lyons to make the call to abort?

The war van, lights out, was already waiting, the side door open, Schwarz at the wheel and confirming a message over his com link. A quick march past the outstretched shadow by the front door, the air still tainted with the after-bite of chemicals, and Brognola was up and in the high-tech belly. A second later, Lyons was bounding in on his heels.

“Go!” Lyons barked at Schwarz.

Brognola landed in one of the seats bolted to the floor. He held on as Schwarz threw the wheel hard left, then whipped the van around, engine snarling as the Stony Man warrior straightened. Lyons looked strange, frightened, if Brognola didn’t know better. The white-hot tension thickened yet more as Lyons, crouched in the door, watched the passing wooded hills, HK roving and ready. The Able Team leader growled for Schwarz to slow down as Lyons reached out and helped haul Blancanales aboard.

“What the hell is going on?” Brognola demanded as Lyons slammed the door shut and Blancanales plopped down in front of a console. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say something or someone put the fear of God in the both of you.”

Blancanales began working the GPS monitor with its grid map of the area, feeding Schwarz new directions other than the front gate they’d come through originally.

Lyons slumped into a chair beside Blancanales. Brognola could almost smell the adrenaline oozing from the Able Team leader’s sweat as he tugged a swatch of shredded material from his combat vest, held it out and said, “Something did.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“Listen up like you have never listened to anyone in your short miserable lives. Because of this compulsion of yours to prove yourselves divine in comparison to the cybermight of the United States military intelligence industrial complex, we are now officially, young sirs, hot-wired. More to the point, I hope you know what, precisely, that means.”

His name was David Rosenberg, but in the cyber-world and to his superhacker comrades in the Force of Truth he was known as Methuselah, and if they were listening, he believed only the Almighty would be able to tell.

He took a few moments in hopes the coming Wrath of God intonations would sink in, as he stood, arms akimbo, in the narrow alcove to the living room of their double-wide mobile home. A former encryption master for the Department of Defense, Rosenberg understood the dilemma staring them all down, as he began to sense they knew they had crossed a line in the sand. Experience, he believed, counted light-years more than raw genius at the moment, a point he needed to hammer home, but subtly, through their thick craniums and Einstein IQs. He scowled and held the command look, nothing less than a father about to sound off with a barrage of much-deserved angry admonishment at rebellious sons. One by one, they finally decided to look away from their laptops, their network of modems and multiple processors. They looked uncertain whether to act sufficiently rebuked or turn smart-ass. He bet on the latter.

Down the line they were Noah, Job, and Cain and Abel who were, in fact, the brothers Polansky. The skinny youth in the dark shades, working on a fat joint, with stringy hair down to his waist and all of eighteen was tagged the Kid. They were a motley crew, no doubt about it, but no one he knew of could match them when it came to computers and stealing information from cyberspace. He had personally tracked down three of them when they were hot, hauled their ragged bacon out of the frying pan, and maybe from worse than a stint in prison. The trio in question—Cain, Abel and Job—had hacked into classified government databases a few years back. They had stolen secrets they claimed to this day were irrefutable evidence of UFOs and extraterrestrials and a government cover-up, on through to who was behind both Kennedy assassinations to the coming extinction level event. Then thrown opposition networks into meltdown with the all-fearsome worm, a feat so incredible and embarrassing to two famous alphabet-soup agencies that not even a whisper of the crisis made the news. Both virus and worm writers, he knew, faced four years in the federal pen and up to half a million dollars in fines, which naturally no hacker ever caught with his fingers up the other’s guy mainframe ever seemed to have handy. Only in their cases Rosenberg suspected they would have been executed on the spot. That was, if he hadn’t descended on their doorsteps like manna from Heaven to offer them a job—of sorts—that matched their peculiar but undeniable genius. Saving their lives was an added bonus, his gift to them but one they had never once acknowledged. Genius could also be ungrateful to the extreme.

Cain, whose Aloha shirt was brighter than the sun at noon, took a sip from whiskey-spiked coffee. “What’s the beef, Grandpa? It’s just another day in Cyber Paradise, us ‘young sirs’ merely doing what we signed on for.”

The smart-ass route, then.

Methuselah had the sudden urge for a cold beer if only to clamp a lid on his rising anger. Instead, he torched a foot-long Havana cigar with a gold-plated lighter engraved with the Star of David. Blowing smoke, he stared at Johnny Polansky, bobbed his gray head. The twenty-six-year-old high school dropout had just come off seven years for manslaughter for stabbing a guy in a bar fight that left him half dead in the process and for which the jury had cut him some years. Going to court with wired-jaw, mashed nose and half of one ear sliced off had also helped pluck a few heartstrings, not to mention the dead man was a notorious three-time loser and suspected pedophile no one in all of Little Rock, Arkansas, would have missed anyway. Having sworn off cocaine, whiskey was the new magic potion the elder Polansky claimed helped him dig deeper into his black hole of creativity. The sad truth was, all of them had their demons. Even Job—what with his computer printout of God First, Fellow Man Second, Cyberspace Third in bold black letters around a crucifix and tacked over his laptop—was a heavy boozer. What could he do? It was most likely warped reasoning on his part, but Rosenberg reckoned he granted them indulgence in the Devil they knew best, if only to keep them steady and walking their highwire act on the tightrope between madness and genius.

With rare exceptions, human beings, he knew, created their own comfort zones, clung like infants to whatever the vice or ill behavior, and God forbid someone should attempt to invade the personal barrier. With this bunch, he figured talent and the extraordinary risks they took to uncover various truths of the ages—but splash them all over their AlphaDataSystems.com—had earned them some slack.

“Despite your best efforts,” Rosenberg began anew, “to ghost your trails, I have just learned we have more than piqued the curiosity of the No Such Agency.”

Noah swiveled in his leather wingback. The chair was splashed with colored artwork from predatory animals, UFOs, ETs, to tacked-in pics of his favorite film and song queens. “Then we were right. What did I say? If that’s a farm in the Shenandoah Valley, then I’m your grandson and I’ll go build you an ark right now.”

“First and foremost, ‘right’ has nothing to do with it. And second and last, an ark won’t cut it. If what I hear is true—and I have no reason to believe other-wise—then we’ll need that Mothership you whiz kids are always ranting about to drop down and take us all away—about a thousand light-years into deep space.”

Job piped up. “What are you talking about, oh gray-haired sir? No Such Agency is moving on us? We’re civilians, not some gun-packing black ops who are out to sell classified intelligence.”

“Besides,” Cain said, “you’ve seen the sat photos, all the thermal imaging from midnight passovers by Big Brother in space. You’ve read the e-mail that lays out whoever these people masquerading as apple pickers use as hot sites for emergency contacts. Interpol. FBI. Mossad is even in their black bag of vipers. Then we have CIA station chiefs in various embassies from London to Tokyo who are feeding them sitreps through about a dozen back channels we’ve discovered.”

“So bring on the spooks.” Abel—Jimmy Polansky—joined in, grinning like a fool as he lit an unfiltered Camel cigarette. “What we have on them, I say we can use as blackmail leverage to keep the wolves at bay.”

“Yeah,” Cain said. “We’ll threaten to go public. I always wanted to be on one of those talking-head shows.”

“Armchair 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.