Starfire

CHAPTER SIX

Azmit Zhuktul always found himself amazed and disgusted by the arrogance of men who willingly sold their souls for money then sought reassurances they had made the correct choice. Yes, he understood how greed knew no limits, how it was never satisfied, how there was never “enough.” The men standing in front of him, who had purchased the world they desired, needed to accept the fact they had already charted a one-way course, and that perdition wasn’t far off. There were no safety nets, no guarantees. Certainly no going back. There was only the fight to stave off the inevitable—death—and consume and conquer while there was still time. Or be consumed.

One of the three Iraqis, Faisal al-Harqazhdi, began the squawking yet again. “You have been delivered more than a fair price to make arrangements for our safe passage to the Far East. And yet, here we all stand, while you send one of your soldiers to tell us there have been certain sudden changes in plans. Granted, we may well be safe in your country and free of the American CIA, my good Lezgi friend, but there are still many Russians in your country, as I am sure you are aware. Russians who may well be in the wrong places at the wrong time, and beyond the reach of even those who are paid to protect you. Granted, we understand how you have the director general and key staff of the Dagneft oil company at your disposal and that it appears the shipments to our Western European friends will continue as arranged. However, it is our experience that when it all looks too easy, well, quite the opposite could not be far from becoming a most frightening reality.” A pause, then, “Are you listening to me?”

Zhuktul made them wait for his reply. They were tiresome creatures. Impatient, weak men who were too unwilling to endure a few days’ inconvenience.

Cowards.

He lit a hand-rolled cigarette, then swept aside the bearskin blanket to expose stark nakedness. The VIPs began clearing throats, shuffling from one Italian-loafered foot to the other, frowning away from what he knew they perceived an insult to Islamic tenets regarding modesty. Hypocrites. They paid lip service in public and to unsuspecting peers about the virtues of holiness, yet they were the first in line to get drunk, bed his whores, even snort his heroin. How could a man dare regard himself as a man, Zhuktul wondered, if he didn’t live what was truly in his heart? At least he knew he was the very definition of evil, and could willingly accept as much. If there was such a thing as Paradise, then why wait? If God, he believed, wanted man to live as a pillar of virtue, then he would have been created without lust, greed, anger and so forth in the first place. Zhuktul would concern himself with God whenever he met Him in the future. This day, there were many worlds to conquer, too much pleasure to be indulged.

Exhaling the harsh smoke toward the mirrored ceiling, glimpsing ten-thousand-dollar suits and gold jewelry that could have rebuilt any number of cities in their war-torn country, he fished around in the rolling pool of silk pillows and furs until he found a full bottle of vodka. A quick check of the label to make sure it wasn’t the brand of paint thinner he served the troops, he uncapped the bottle and took a deep swig. One of the Ukrainian women, sleeping off the night’s orgy, suddenly reached out an arm. She was purring for something, most likely heroin to powder her nose with so she could go back to sleep, when Zhuktul slapped her arm away and stood. It was all he could manage to restrain laughter at the sight of their swarthy faces turning red. Where they were soft and flabby from their embassy parties and glad-handing various corrupt UN officials and their aides in midnight meetings, nothing short of war had chiseled his flesh into taut muscle that looked more armor than human skin. He saw them fidget and nervously glance at the sight of old bullet scars, the patches of badly healed and mottled flesh from the razor’s end of flying shrapnel. Souvenirs of the lion in the face of jackals.

Slowly, Zhuktul tugged on his trousers, puffing away. “If you profess so much confidence in me,” he finally said, slipping into his BDU shirt then strapping himself into the shoulder-holstered 9 mm Tokarev pistol, “then why do you insist on speaking to me out of both sides of your mouth?”

“Excuse me?”

Zhuktul scanned their aghast expressions. He watched their shoulders tighten, one of them glancing back at the soldiers posted around the living room. Evidence of the night’s festivities was strewed, he found, end to end. Black and blond hair spilled from beneath wolf or sheepskin blankets, their women stretched out. Ashtrays overflowed with cigarette and cigar butts, empty bottles and trays of powder scattered across massive coffee tables.

Abed Osman cleared his throat, lost his scowl first. “We did not mean to sound…disrespectful. I think at this time we would also wish to thank you for your generous hospitality these past several days.”

Zhuktul took another pull from his bottle, dragged on his cigarette, then blew smoke over their heads. “I will accept that as your best effort for an apology.”

“Then,” Abu Jabayt inquired quietly, “when can we expect to be on our way?”

“Soon.”

Zhuktul watched them look at one another, wondering who would be the first to gather enough courage to pose the question.

Al-Harqazhdi spoke up, his voice tight with controlled anger. “My good friend, as has been pointed out when we first arrived, everything you have requested from us has been placed into your capable hands. Money, information, new and numbered and safe accounts that will funnel funds to the appropriate financiers. Any of whom will prove most helpful in advancing your cause here in the Caucasus, as well as the cause of jihad in the name of all our oppressed Islamic brothers.”

“Bah! You who have never denied yourselves anything, you who have never fired the first shot in anger, do not insult me with such nonsense how you would care about holy war.”

They stiffened visibly, as Jabayt pressed, “Be that as it may, we had an arrangement. Without us you would not have been able to move both your gasoline and what was smuggled out of Iraq. We groomed the contacts. We arranged safe routes for the delivery of men and matériel on both sides.”

“I gather this is where I am to tell you four how indebted I am to you?”

Osman stepped in to save their collective face. “We only hope that respect is mutual. However, it was our original understanding that the colonel was to be here to personally greet us, and with a jet fueled and ready to fly out at a moment’s notice.”

Zhuktul chuckled. There was much that they didn’t know.

Al-Harqazhdi trembled, eyes smoldering with fury. “You find our monstrous inconvenience and the potential for a threat to our safety amusing? Now, who is being insulted?”

Zhuktul waved his cigarette, shaking his head. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, please. I need a moment.” He shut his eyes, lowering his head. “Ah! The sun has not yet risen and already I fear this day giving me great pause, with a burden, I may add, that threatens to leave me feeling less than charitable.” He felt the warm glow spread, but his anger only seemed to build. He opened his eyes, ran a scathing look over their faces. “First of all, let us be clear that it was the four of you who sought out my services.”

“No. It was originally the colonel we sent our own people to,” Osman said.

Zhuktul felt the blood pressure drum in his ears. Their arrogance and sniveling was more than he could bear to tolerate, but he kept his composure. “So it would seem, I will grant you that. But, the good Colonel Shistoi is indisposed. Like yourselves, shall we say, he is in the process of scrambling to save his own world.”

“What you mean to say, and perhaps have neglected to inform us, is that he is either dead, captured by the Russians or hiding in the mountains,” Jabayt intoned.

“None of the above. What I am telling you is that the colonel put me in charge of your situation, and my word on that should be more than enough.” Zhuktul felt a sudden fierce hatred toward these men who grew rich and fat while placing all the risk in the hands of others. “Let us examine your situation, shall we? Was it not the four of you who fled on your own volition all the creature comforts of Paris and Germany for sanctuary in my humble country? Was it not you who left others to possibly be hanged in your places? Yes, yes, I know all about how the CIA ‘stumbled,’ as you put it, on to your dealings with the UN. I am aware how you were but a mere few hours away from being arrested like some of your comrades who did business with Saddam and who are now cutting deals with the American authorities in secret to spare their lives.”

Scowling, he hit them with a cannonball of smoke, sickened to the point of some murderous rage by their whining as he felt the storm building like hot lava behind his eyes. “But you four…you made it somehow. And that you are still free men by itself should make you grateful to the point of weeping. Yet you question the very security I have arranged for you, and now when I am in the process of seeing that you can live out your lives and spend all the millions you pilfered from both your own countries and the deal your comrades made with Colonel Shistoi. And that I deal with you at all, considering that it is you who are the ones who could be bringing trouble to my own backyard, should have you on your knees and kissing my feet.”

As Osman gasped in outrage, Zhuktul drank, watching them begin to wilt under his icy stare. They knew he was right. He smoked, let them steam in silence. They were breaking eye contact, lips fluttering in impotent rage and frustration, when shouting and shots fired struck the curtained window directly behind the Iraqis. Their panic was instant and infuriating.

“Relax!” Zhuktul barked at the Iraqis, then shouldered through them, ignoring the battery of questions fired at his back. His men were already flying through beaded archways on both ends to investigate. The weapons fire abruptly stopped, then Zhuktul turned on his VIPs and told them, “This happens.”

“What happens?” Jabayt nearly shouted.

Raising the bottle to his lips, Zhuktul drank, hard and deep, then grew yet more angry at what he smelled wafting past their perfumed flab—fear, which, he knew, could be contagious. He had a good mind to shoot them all where they stood, but in some as yet undefined way that picked at the back of his thoughts, he decided they could prove more useful to him alive.

Zhuktul listened as they babbled among themselves, then treated his guests to a scornful eye. “One of my men is simply drunk. Perhaps he mistook a wolf for an intruder. If that is the case, he will be punished. Now. Were there any other complaints?”

THE GUARD WAS LAUNCHED through glass as if shot from a howitzer. The sight of the body sailing from the tower gave McCarter brief pause. Advancing for the line of dreary apple trees, about a hundred meters out and closing on the deep southeast edge of the main building, the ex-SAS commando stole a moment or two to watch the swan dive, his assault rifle extended and ready for live ones. Shattered glass, a dispersing cloud of blood and gore from an obvious head shot and a spinning object he pegged as a handheld radio trailed convulsing acrobatics sixty feet to bone-crunching impact.

They were made.

To the credit of surviving sentries there were no further shouts of alarm, no long bursts of autofire, which meant they were pros, caught napping or not, and were most likely in the process of fanning out to seal a net of lead doom on James and Manning. Somehow McCarter doubted the nine to thirteen or more hardmen were all down and twitching out. As seasoned pros themselves, McCarter knew they would all adapt to the sudden disruption, full bore ahead. Each of them had their own firepoints, tasks to carry out, to be improvised as the need arose.

Aware it all looked and felt too easy on his end, McCarter was scanning the rock-stubbled ground when he spied the tripwire at the last possible second. He stepped over it, scouring all the rotten apples strewed like some slimy morass in front of him, and for improvised explosive devices maybe disguised as produce. Autofire rattled the cold dawn air. A shout, followed by more silence.

How long he could hold off hitting the doomsday button…

Belay that. He would give James and Manning all the time they deemed necessary to clear ground zero, deciding to wait another minute or so before keying his com link.

So the battle had jumped the gun before they were hunkered and blew a hole through the sky.

Sooner was always better than later.

The thought he was eager to turn on the killing heat of hellfire began cranking up his own adrenaline levels, limbs oiled, senses electrified. A few swift but careful meters forward, and McCarter grabbed cover behind the gnarled base of a rotting apple tree.

Hunkered, hidden from more than a passing eye, he was ready to rock.

The HK-33 came up to draw a bead on the large steel door to dead twelve o’clock where he made out muffled bellows beyond. Seconds later, the enemy barged outside, assault rifles swinging in all directions. Four, then six hardmen were trying to get it together as they spilled farther from the building. They were flapping arms and raising a general ruckus on handheld units when the Phoenix Force leader took up slack on the HK’s trigger and cut loose.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

As he claimed his chair at the head of the table in the War Room, Hal Brognola found Barbara Price and Aaron Kurtzman watching him closely. Settling in and leaning back, he took a few moments, conscious suddenly of what seemed to be the ten years he’d just aged in the past twelve hours or so. They had to have read the haggard look and smoldering burn in his eyes for something other than the usual weariness, anger and anxiety when he found the combined power of Stony Man holding up the weight of the world. Since he was in charge of the Sensitive Operations Group, the crushing weight of the ultimate success or failure of any mission was sometimes daunting. But this time he and the Farm weren’t alone in shouldering the burden of Atlas. With any number of intelligence and military spooks throwing their weight around, Brognola knew the waters were murkier than he could recall in long memory, chummed fat and wide, with man eaters circling for what may well prove a global feeding frenzy.

Against his will, the big Fed’s thoughts remained locked on the cracking ice of international outrage, the possibility that a rogue or supposed friendly nation was orbiting nuclear satellites around the planet and looking for blood. Beyond the stark and frightening facts as Stony Man knew them, Brognola realized ground zero in the Australian outback wouldn’t rate a footnote in history if a nuclear spear was plunged into a major city from above Earth’s atmosphere.

Sensing the mission controller and the head of the cyberteam were anxious but giving him some time to gather his thoughts, breathe air free of human rot and all its treachery and malice, the big Fed sipped some of the battery acid Kurtzman passed off as coffee. He unwrapped a fresh cigar, stuck it in a corner of his mouth, rolled his shoulders. He took a deep breath, let it out and told them, “In the few brief moments the President could spare me, he green-lighted us to do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of what happened in Australia. Nail it down. The Man wants a rapid response, folks, no punches pulled, no mercy whatsoever to whoever the perpetrators. They go down hard, and, if possible, their names and misdeeds are to be buried along with them. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, he also implied that, because of the nature of the crisis, there’s a good chance our teams may well be locking horns with any number of operators—CIA, NSA, DOD, DIA. You name it.”

“In other words,” Kurtzman said, “beware of those bearing free gifts.”

Brognola nodded, aware that Kurtzman and Price were apprised of the encounter in upstate Maryland. “The hacker problem is, of course, our situation to deal with, which, needless to say, we’re out of business if it hits the Washington Post. Now, from what I gather, you two think there are pieces of this whole sordid puzzle that want to fit and that want to tie together the hackers and a nuke slamming into the Australian out-back from space?”

Price cleared her throat. “Unfortunately we’re not sure of anything at this stage.”

“Okay, so we’re early in the game, but we’re in. Go ahead and give me what you do have. Good news–bad news, what we know and what we don’t.”

Kurtzman clicked on the wall monitor. “What you’re looking at, Hal, is about fifteen to twenty square miles of irradiated earth.”

Brognola peered at the image. The screen showed nothing other than an unusual white glow. He frowned at Kurtzman. “Aaron…”

“You see nothing, Hal, because that’s what our satellites see as the result of a fission blast more than twice the twenty-two-kilotons that was dropped on Nagasaki. In other words, until some of the heat dissipates our space probes are useless over this tract of Queensland. The good news—if it can be called that—is that there are maybe two human beings per square mile up to fifty to seventy or more square miles in the immediate affected area. My point—I’m thinking there was some method behind the madness of whoever did this, as far, that is, as containing immediate collateral damage.”

Brognola chomped on his cigar, trying like hell not to glower. He already knew that electromagnetic pulse had affected Australia as far as Sydney and other east coast cities. He knew that eighty-five percent of the country’s population lived along the coasts, which was the only other piece of questionable good news as far as the blast went. He knew prevailing winds would carry fallout and that radiation dosages could reach well beyond the lethal eight hundred. He knew Great Britain’s former penal colony was one riot away from declaring martial law, but that a cover story was already being handed to the press by the parliament, everything from a secret nuclear reactor meltdown to an asteroid, though it sounded to him nobody knew which direction to start dancing. He hoped Kurtzman was getting somewhere fast other than a show-and-tell of what he already knew.

“What I’m saying, Hal, and I’m not trying to be a wiseass, is that blank picture is about where we are, at least in regard to whoever is actually behind the incident. The list of countries we know of that have satellites is lengthy. Many of which have covert space programs.”

“Black ops.”

“Black ops. For some time, the NSA and CIA have believed that China and Russia are dabbling in everything from antigravity devices to reverse engineering of alien spacecraft. The ESA has fifteen members alone, and that doesn’t include our friends north of the border.”

“So, pick one—that’s what you’re trying to tell me?”

Price stepped in. “When you transcribed the CD to us from the chopper, it gave us a few nibbles to run with, but…”

Brognola stared at the dark look in Price’s eyes as she fell silent.

And there it was.

From the White House, around the world and back to Stony Man, it seemed everyone was at a loss to explain, or begin to find answers. What he knew for certain was the smoke screen to be thrown up between Washington, Great Britain and the prime minister of Australia may or may not hold back the world from collapsing into a tailspin of panic and anarchy.

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