Starfire

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 following their seven-hundred-foot combat jump and subsequent two-mile hike. Not to mention that wandering around this neck of Hell was so dangerous to a foreigner’s health that any passports and visas—had they been issued—were as welcome a sight for inspection as a leper’s used tissue. By dawn’s early light, the Briton now found the lay of the land downright foreboding and desolate, and to the point where the five of them might as well be advancing for battle at an end of the world all but forgotten by man and God. That, he knew, wasn’t far from the truth as he considered just where they were.

Dagestan.

Land of the mountains, McCarter thought, which was the literal translation used by its indigenous mixed bag of ethnic descent.

The indigenous bulk were Sunni Muslims, most of whom were fanatical to the extreme as they bowed to the tenets of Wahhabism. The country was no less than a slice of Islamic fundamentalist Hell on Earth, a land that time and most of humankind ignored, if they even knew it existed. Even globe-trotting, battle-hardened commandos like the troops he led, he thought, would be hard-pressed to find this desolate backwater on any globe without some eye strain.

At their present position in the shadow of the towering, snow-capped, cloud-swathed Caucasus Mountains in the southwest corner of the country, what could have been transplanted moonscape fanned out in hills and steppe to the even more ominous empty east and north, until it all eventually dropped off into the vast Caspian Sea. Oil and gas were the country’s cash cows, and were the only reason Moscow still humped and bivouacked soldiers to what was loosely billed an autonomous Russian republic. It was no secret that Moscow, McCarter briefly pondered, maintained its iron grip on the spigots of major pipelines to keep pumping black gold and silver vapor north, but the Russians somehow managed to hide from the world that they were about as environmentally conscious as Godzilla stomping through Tokyo. Dagestan was an industrial dungheap, with major ecological contamination.

But tree-hugging was not on Phoenix Force’s to-do list, though chemical death, McCarter knew, was one reason they were plunging into an area of the world where its people would just as soon shoot them as look at them.

When he considered a tad more what this part of the world was all about, the Briton really wasn’t surprised in the least the fickle hand of black ops had steered them here. In some eerie way he figured it was about time for some scorched justice to find Dagestan’s local and imported beasts. Neighboring Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan were always spilling their own legions of rabid terror wolves across the borders. Guns, drugs, weapons of mass destruction, he weighed. Isolated training camps in this scarred mountain land were hidden from even the most stubborn of spy eyes in space. Money and matériel were shipped here en masse to be trained to carry out jihad.

Assess. McCarter raised the small high-powered field glasses to his eyes again. The farmhouse was backed up near a jumbled row of Stegosaurus-armor-like rock at the foot of broken hills that looked equally in part Jurassic. Nobody, including their own in-country Omon and SVR contacts, could swear one way or the other if the opposition could make fast tracks into a suspected latticework of caves and tunnels once the shelling and shooting started. There were three tractors east, parked near wilting apple orchards, pallets heaped with crates and burlap sacks he was reasonably sure didn’t require the presence of two heavy DShK machine guns in tow. The main compound, its roof dotted with satellite dishes, was a two-story wooden affair. An attached concrete bunker, an annex to the north where the motor pool drew his eye. There, an armada of vehicles, ranged from Mercedes and ZIL limos, Jeeps, SUVs, Volga minivans and GAZ-66 transports, strewed in a staggered line, west to east. According to the Omon source—and there was a good chance he was buried in the deep pockets of the Lezgi Don—the annex was where the crime boss mixed business with pleasure. Intel had it there were always twenty to thirty imported prostitutes on hand for any visiting VIPs, speaking of which no one could state for certain who or how many big shots would be on hand for this party. Surveillance, or so he was told, was pretty much maintained by roving sentries, with the exception of cameras mounted to roof edges.

Arrogant bastards.

McCarter panned a little farther north and took in ground zero.

He counted twenty-one tankers, flipped an invisible salute that bit of intel hit the bull’s-eye on that score. Judging length and girth of those behemoths on wheels the Phoenix Force leader ballparked all that refined petro at…

Call it a quarter-million gallons. And however that number was given or taken, it still dumped the five of them on the potential wrong side of the coming big event.

The truck stop was penned in by basic steel-mesh fencing, for reasons no one was clear on. A spray can of liquid nitrogen would snap off fencing, he knew, and allow two of the team onto the grounds. But with seven—count nine now—assault-rifle-toting guards on the prowl it was touch and go just to light the torch. McCarter framed the sentry in the northwest tower, then saw the smoke cloud hammer the glass booth. The guard then lifted a bottle to his lips, McCarter wanting to scratch him off the worry list, but in his experience there was no such thing as a guarantee in combat. That left three shirkers on the backside, the trio, he’d been informed, apparently more interested in staying warm with a bottle of vodka and hovering near a fire barrel.

And what, pray tell, did all the big shots gathered in front of them need to fear anyway?

Nothing, apparently—or so it seemed.

Truth. A shadow group of Euro-Arab cutouts had finagled deals between Saddam and certain bureaucrats of the United Nations. And McCarter had learned during a CIA brief that a lot of cold, hard currency had been flown via Damascus to Jordan and shipped by diplomatic courier to Western Europe.

McCarter recalled the black op back in Turkey stating the facts of life as he knew them between rumbles of chuckling and obscenity-laden swipes at the French, Germans and Russians. Clear evidence, the op had claimed, had been obtained by electronic intercepts. Enemy agents bagged by the FBI in Manhattan had snitched so loud and fast they had nearly gone hoarse, painting a picture of corruption reeking from New York to Pyongyang. For reasons unknown some marquee names of the upper echelon of the United Nations had fattened Saddam’s terror chest way back when. And with not only food but weapons, intelligence and oversize vans stuffed with cash, using East European gangsters for contact. Yet more shadows, McCarter suspected, in a chain of middlemen that only God seemed to know stretched how far and stopped where. The UN jackals would apparently turn around and deliver Iraqi oil to cronies in their own political and business circles who fronted for petrochemical distribution networks. All this rolling flimflam while Saddam hoarded food meant for the starving masses, but to be distributed and sold to whomever he saw fit. Word was the deposed dictator’s soldiers—and later, the insurgent rabble—managed to feed themselves like princes.

On more than a few occasions—so the CIA word had it—a second deal was cut by the former regime with another rogue nation in exchange for still more cash and weapons. Yet more rumor connected to the sordid mess had it the Scotch-swilling despot of North Korea and mates were eating pretty good these days, and that alone was enough to have him seeing red what with the tyrannical buffoon in possession of…

McCarter fast-forwarded. Four Iraqis, smoked out by the CIA in Paris, Belgrade and Istanbul as recently as six months previous, were trailed to the Dagestan border before the operatives bailed for reasons undetermined. Here and now, the United Nations money-men believed on-site felt the heat building, so they had thrown themselves at the mercy of the Lezgi Mob chieftain who had more irons in the fire than the Devil himself it seemed. Finally, Dagestani Don who had free and easy access to move tanker trucks brimmed with gasoline at will told the ex-SAS commando that he was connected to Russian power shadows, and he had more suspicions beyond the UN moneymen on that front. Oh, but McCarter hoped all party animals in question had indulged one last night but good…

He stopped the train of angry thought.

Their mission was two-or-more-pronged, as he warned himself to not project into a future he and the others may never see.

Consequences. Blood was going to run, thick, swift and deep before the sun rose. As he felt the gas mask on his hip, it crossed his mind there was the not-so-little matter of what recently happened in Israel, and yet another savage twist of fate that had urged the five of them to trek to this godforsaken place. VX nerve gas wasn’t something any of them tended to gloss over as just a speed bump on the road to Hell. Assuming a cache of weapons of mass destruction was likewise under the roof…

McCarter heard the first voice patch through as T. J. Hawkins told him he was in position.

Showtime.

A hard sweeping scan and McCarter barely spotted the ex-Ranger. With a double take, he caught the top of Hawkins’s black-hooded head rising from his sniper’s roost, a few dozen meters or so above and due east of the tanker armada, his sound-suppressed Dragunov rifle poised to cover their two-man demo team. Down the line, Rafael Encizo, Gary Manning and Calvin James quickly informed him they were also in position.

Good to go.

Or so it seemed.

McCarter passed the order for James and Manning to get busy planting their ordnance.

A big bang, the ex-SAS commando knew, was in the wings, nothing short of scorched earth about to bring down the roof.

With any blessing whatsoever due them from the gods of black ops, and McCarter figured to live long enough to see the fall of the place of evil in this corner of Hell.

COMPLAINING ABOUT THE MOST adverse conditions of a mission never cut it. In the experience of his line of work, Calvin James knew that moaners and complainers weren’t only unreliable under fire, but they were often the first to get cut down in combat. The M and C crowd—of which there were none on his team, and none except for a couple officer types he could recall during his stint as a United States Navy SEAL who were mostly interested in bucking for promotion while the real deal did the fighting and killing for them—floated a mere notch above yellow.

His case in point was made when the two Dag sentries came whining his way.

The black ex-SEAL was through the hole at the base of the fence, liquid nitro spray gun dumped behind on the ground and replaced by the suppressed Beretta 92-F, when they shuffled into view. James didn’t know the language, but he could sure read faces and judge bitter tones for what they were. One of them forgot all about his AKM, the muzzle pointing at the ground, as he began jabbing a gloved mitt at the bottle of vodka his comrade didn’t seem inclined to share. The bickering decibels rose as the guard gestured angrily at the sky, waved at the line of tanker trucks with a dark scowl on his bearded face, his companion stamping his boot and fuming like a waiter stiffed on a big check. Whether the ongoing gripe was over the cold, boredom with sentry duty or who polished off the rest of the vodka, James didn’t know.

But he damn sure cared, since they were in the way of progress.

With a rock-steady, two-fisted grip on his weapon, he ended the argument with two quick taps, as hypersonic 9 mm Parabellum rounds cored their brains.

Two down, and James had a gut feeling it was set to go to Hell. He scanned, left to right, adrenaline practically carrying him to the bodies, despite fifty pounds of plastique added to his combat load. Quickly, he rolled the bodies under the silver beast’s tail, ears and eyes tuned to the no-man’s land between the fence line and the tankers.

He knew more sentries were in the area. In fact, combat senses shouted they were close. Manning was nowhere to be found, but James took that as a good sign the big Canadian was already making swift tracks.

The tankers were parked, nose-to-tail, in two rows with feet to spare, the odd rig out toward his teammate’s advance from the south. Maybe fifty meters needed to be covered before he met Manning in the middle, and both knew there was no set time to plant and prime the charges, but sooner the better.

James hauled the first shaped charge from his open nylon satchel, stuck it under the back wheel well, speared the priming rod in the middle of the package. It struck him next, checking his six before moving on, that McCarter was holding on to the extra radio remote unit. Backup hellbox, sure, just in case…

THE DRAWING BOARD and spit-balling of finer points for attack strategies always looked and sounded good, like it would all actually work according to plan. The reality, T. J. Hawkins knew, equaled the difference between life and death.

Sat images, HUMINT, EM scanners and thermal imaging handhelds and night vision to paint walking infrared radiation of the enemy on the way in was all well and good, and, in truth, solid planning was a must. Those Tomahawk salvos, the F-117 and Spectre strafes were a definite bonus package to soften up the target and shatter the enemy into a senseless slab of jelly, assuming anybody on the other team was still in one piece to cry the blues. All that and a bag of chips, he thought, but at the end of the smoke and the blood of battle, it all boiled down to the soldier. Skill and experience, a lion’s heart in the game all the way, and the capacity for improvising with the mayhem of combat counted far and away the most. All of the above was important, no question, but too often he’d seen that a little smile beamed on the good guys from Lady Luck won the day.

Or, in this instance, the dawn.

The simple fact they were in position and moving in for the kill at that hour was a case in point to tip the hat to Lady Luck, when he considered the agonizing delays on the ground back in Turkey, how bad weather simply wouldn’t allow decent satellite pictures. As it stood, sentries had already endured the long, cold night, bored out of their gourds, he knew, on the verge of nodding off as they were anxious to be relieved of duty. Better, whoever the yet-to-be-determined VIP playboys inside the main compound would be sleeping off a tough night of booze and broads. There would be security goons on hand, some of which would either be tasting the goodies on the sly, or sulking in envy and resentment they had to seethe, idle on the sidelines.

Life was tough like that.

The question now moving into the ex-Ranger’s scope was who exactly life would get tough for.

Hawkins had sensed the guard in the fur hat with pointed crown and knee-length black-leather coat already knew something was amiss, and before he started barking their names.

“Dhzari! Ghombalj!”

Moments ago, Hawkins caught Calvin James skirting the periphery of his vision, the ex-SEAL a blurring ghost with two kills in his wake. The dead men’s comrade was now in search of his buddies, as he stepped out from behind the rear of a tanker, three rigs down from where James had stashed the stiffs. Unless he missed his guess, reading the guard’s tight body language, Hawkins was a few moments away from sending him to join his comrades.

The Klieg lights provided ample illumination, so Hawkins didn’t need to switch the scope to infrared. He hefted 4.4 kilos of killing power, rose up on a knee, extended the sound-suppressed Dragunov, and tracked his mark with the naked eye for another moment. The Russian piece was a gift from the special ops in Kurd-land, and it came complete with a state-of-the-art scope with digital read off the laser sight. The extended detachable box magazine held fifteen 7.62 mm armor-piercing rounds. This time around McCarter had handed him the sniper designation. Hawkins would have preferred a tried-and-proved American high-powered rifle, but he understood McCarter’s reasoning that they carry a mixed assortment of weapons into battle. Russian grenades, German assault rifles, U.S. sidearms, and if they went down to a man no one would be the wiser about their origin of allegiance.

As if it would matter.

A quick search of the tankers provided no sighting of his teammates; all was quiet and holding.

But…

The guard spotted the boots under the rig’s tail.

Hawkins bit down the curse, hit one of three buttons on the side of his scope. In less than one eye blink the fiber optic scan threw up the virtual reality numbers in the upper left corner where they hung like some ghost script scrawled on a UFO above his field of vision. Distance to target, elevation, down to factoring in wind speed—2.5 knots, and at his back—he read the trajectory data as the guard’s expression of shocked anger framed with instant crystal clarity in the crosshairs. The man was reaching for his handheld radio, mouth already opening when Hawkins painted the red laser eye just above his right ear and squeezed the trigger. Muzzling at 830 meters a second, the armor-piercing projectile streaked the eighty-two yard bridge to target in a microsecond, so fast Hawkins had to peer hard before he registered there was, in fact, nothing in his scope but a faint dark mist raining over empty space.

He lowered the rifle, confirmed the decapitated heap of twitching carcass at a glimpse, then began scouring the field. Somewhere to the south—Manning’s way—he heard a voice calling out. Another comrade search.

Silently he urged his teammates to hustle.

The clock was ticking, and there was nothing he could do about his kill left out in the open.

Something jumped into the corner of the ex-Ranger’s vision. Before he looked, Hawkins already knew what he’d find. Adrenaline kicking his senses into overdrive, the Stony Man warrior confirmed two more hardmen on the move and staring right at the mess he’d just dumped on the ground.