Deadly Payload

Spare magazines were tucked into the pockets of their Safari vests, which concealed their handguns. The lightweight outer shell and multiple pockets also disguised the vests’ inner lining, a blend of lightweight chain mail and mesh-woven Kevlar capable of stopping a hunting rifle round cold. Coverage was incomplete, because the sleeveless designs were meant for hot weather, and nothing protected their heads, but the garments, dubbed by codesigners Schwarz and Kissinger as Hot LZ vests, provided enough of an edge to split the difference between attacking in full commando gear and blending in as civilians. Since the Panamanian public was leery of American troops, Able Team decided that low-profile “soft” civilian clothing was its best option.

Schwarz checked the screen on his PDA, live footage pouring in to inform him of the presence of two darts in the air. He pegged them as the Predator knockoffs. Only the sensitivity of the National Reconnaissance Office satellite feeding Stony Man its real time imagery made the patrolling drones visible against the jungle beneath. He pocketed the PDA and looked in the back of the SUV, making certain he left nothing behind.

“Shame, too. I liked this bucket,” Schwarz grumbled as he trotted to join the others away from the SUV.

“The road’s compromised somehow,” Lyons said. “But it sure didn’t look like any electronics could have survived in this environment.”

“No sensors,” Blancanales replied, “but there’s a possibility we might have been picked up by low-level radar. A tight beam wouldn’t show up on any detectors, not if it were scanning down into the hills instead of providing umbrella-style coverage.”

“More like a spotlight,” Lyons said. “It wouldn’t even be seen from space?”

“No. Not in a tight beam sweep,” Schwarz explained. “It was just blind luck that the drones I spotted on my map…”

They heard the thrum of motors fill the air. Softer and more subtle than conventional aircraft due to enclosed ducts, the Predators were designed to have a stealthy profile in their role as observation aircraft. Six shadows rocketed over a gap in the canopy overhead, speeding to the north.

“Six?” Schwarz wondered outloud, confused.

“How many did you see?” Lyons asked.

“Two…and they were a lot higher up,” the electronics genius answered.

Arquillo looked toward the Mercedes SUV, nestled in the shadows of the tall trees bracketing it. “Well, if they’ve passed already, it should be safe to get back in…”

The CIA agent’s musing was answered as a finger of smoke stabbed down through the treetops as quick as lightning. An explosion struck the SUV dead-center, splitting it into two burning halves that flopped away from each other like dying fish on dry land. The concussive blast rolled over Arquillo and pushed her to the ground.

Lyons grabbed her and hauled her to her feet. It took a few moments for her explosion-rattled senses to register that they were running, slicing through the rain forest as streams of machine-gun fire ripped down in their wake, lead, splintered branches and dislodged leaves falling in an unnatural storm behind them.

She shrugged loose from Lyons and kept up with Able Team’s frantic pace through the jungle, staying one step ahead of the sweeping scythes of automatic fire that lashed at their heels.

R OBERTO D A C OSTA DIDN’T BELIEVE in much. Though the majority of South America practiced Catholicism, or occasionally some other form of Christianity, DaCosta considered himself a fairly reasonable man, enlightened above the need for some invisible friend in the sky. Let the fools who worked under him throw their lot in with an imaginary father figure with magical powers, he thought. DaCosta made his own fortune and didn’t need any psychic crutches. Right now, overseeing the loading of an oil tanker with millions of gallons of petroleum, earmarked for the United States, the oil man realized what real power was. The Venezuelan had command over billions of dollars worth of product, and had the ability to deny substantial portions of another country the fuel they needed to warm their homes or to get to work in the morning.

DaCosta didn’t believe in much, but he believed in his godhood. At his whim, he could strangle the wheels of progress to a halt and cast nations into chaos. A smile crept across his sun-bronzed face, a corner of his mouth turning up. He wouldn’t really, but the thought shot him through with a jolt of adrenaline as powerful as any cocaine. In his role as supervisor at the Maracaibo petrochemical complex, he was paid handsomely, and had his share of mistresses for when he grew bored with his wife, or when the slowly aging slut was busy with some cabana boy or another. He’d even had occasion to enjoy a trip to Thailand, blowing a large bonus on some forbidden fruit.

He didn’t need to sweat under the sun, among the white buttons of oil storage containers spread out in rows along the Gulf of Venezuela, or get his hands greasy in operating pipes. Hundreds toiled under DaCosta’s leadership. Still, his bronzed flesh glinted in the noonday sun as he stood on a catwalk overlooking the oil transferral. His secretary could handle the paperwork, and any important phone calls would be routed through the cell phone hanging on his belt. DaCosta preferred to be outside, watching, paying attention to the domain that he ruled with unequaled power. He’d been, secretly, part of the two-month oil strike that had hit at the end of 2002, cajoled by an offer of several million dollars to hurt the government. That was when he realized his true godhood.

His cell warbled on his belt.

“What is it?” he asked, annoyed at the interruption of his dreams of grandeur.

“Sir, the coastal patrol spotted something a few minutes ago, passing Los Monjes,” his secretary told him.

DaCosta was about to dismiss it, but knew that Los Monjes islands were a point of contention between Venezuela and Colombia. “Smugglers? So? Colombia sends smugglers all the time around the Gulf.”

“Well, with the trouble in Panama with unmanned attack aircraft…” his secretary began.

“The coastal patrol can handle a few enemy airplanes, right?” DaCosta asked.

“They lost track of the unidentified aircraft.”

DaCosta felt a moment of weakness. From his position atop the catwalk, he could see north, along the bottleneck between Lago de Maracaibo and the Gulf of Venezuela for miles and miles. Needlepoints of white, five or six of them, were visible in the faint distance across the glassy waters of the now placid gulf.

The Venezuelan oil man swallowed hard as they wove around the stern of an oil tanker, moving with synchronized precision like a school of deadly fish.

Suddenly he realized that his godly power was a stack of cards that could be knocked down, and he watched the personification of the ill wind that was going to collapse it.

N ORMALLY, THE P REDATOR UAV drone was a low-powered, propeller-driven unmanned drone. It had been developed from early cruise missiles, the space normally reserved for a warhead payload replaced with advanced optics, transmitters and cameras. Unfortunately the cruise missiles, with their supersonic engines, were grossly inefficient at gathering intelligence, passing too quickly through an enemy territory. It was good for a first-glance of forces in a region, but commanders knew the benefits of real-time transmissions. Something slower, with longer staying power, was necessary. As such, the winglets were increased in width and area to allow more surface to catch air and glide, and the jet engine was replaced with a more fuel-efficient prop-driven motor. Now, crossing the sky at under two hundred miles an hour, the Predator was an ideal eye in the sky, able to hang around and orbit throughout an entire battle, or maintain a long-term watch on enemy movements across distances. The slow-moving Predators could also be equipped with weaponry that made them ideal assassination platforms, as proved in Afghanistan against al Qaeda forces.

The Engineers of the New Tomorrow, however, had brilliant designers on their side. Not only were the UAVs modified for multiple weapon platforms, such as machine guns, artillery rockets or even biochemical weapon payloads, but the ENT had developed a lightweight rocket engine that fit into the housing of the prop unit on their modified Predators. The additional wingspan helped stabilize the drones at near sonic speeds, and all that high-tech electronics were replaced.

In the case of the Maracaibo assault, the payload was a medium-size thermobaric warhead. While larger thermobarics were a step below a nuclear warhead, the modified Predators, reverse engineered back to being cruise missiles, were still devastating weapons. Originally, these particular warheads were meant for clearing underground installations such as those encountered in Afghanistan. Producing a cloud of airborne fuel, which was ignited to the same temperature as the surface of the sun, the fuel-air explosion had enormous power, capable of incinerating even the most persistent biological or chemical weapon.

Used against the armored white tanks dotting the shoreline, it was like a sledgehammer brought down on a row of candy buttons. The Predators spread out evenly, their blast radius a mere 500 meters, but more than enough to cover a large portion of the petrochemical complex. All six detonated simultaneously.

Roberto DaCosta, standing on his catwalk, was spared the raw fury of being caught in the cloud of vaporized fuel igniting across three kilometers of shoreline. The flash, however, was blindingly hot and his exposed skin was scourged with first-degree burns. A concussion wave of superheated air thrown off by the explosion slammed him against the railing of the catwalk hard enough to leave a hairline fracture along his pelvis and lower back, as well as deep tissue bruising. The combined pain made him collapse, his arms flailing for the support of the rail.

Instants later the wind returned, but in the opposite direction, pulling with the force of a tornado as the atmosphere fought to fill the momentary vacuum caused by six thermobaric warheads detonating in unison.

DaCosta howled in fear and terror, clinging to the railing for dear life. Below, he could see the complex’s workers being thrown around like rag dolls by concussion and implosion waves.

The winds finally stopped, but the heat grew worse. DaCosta looked back and realized that 1500 square kilometers of oil storage field was a blazing inferno, millions of gallons of petroleum fueling a fire that convinced him that hell truly did exist. The sky turned deep black as thick, choking smoke spread out, a smothering blanket that spread across the city of Maracaibo.

T HE DRONES WERE RELENTLESS in their pursuit of Able Team and Arquillo. While their brethren were en route to unleash relentless hell and fury on a defenseless city, moving at high subsonic velocities, the patrol Predators hung at a relatively lazy ninety miles an hour, long wings picking up the wind to provide lift beyond what their forward velocity supplied. Even so, their initial strafing runs had proved fruitless, simply because the only means that they had for picking up the fleeing humans was thermal imaging. In the hot and humid atmosphere of the rain forest, however, it was impossible to get a clean lock on the Stony Man warriors and their CIA ally. The SUV had proved to be an easy target, simply because its mass of metal and hot engine proved a much easier target for even tropic-hazed sensors.

Unfortunately the metal in their weaponry and equipment provided the tight-beam radar spotlight with a small means of tracking them. It was a tiny, low-profile signature, but still enough to give the operators of the drones something to lock on to.

Blancanales, his senses tuned by years of experience in jungles across the globe, found a cave and ushered the others into it. It was small, and a tight fit, but once inside, they were shielded not only from streams of light machine-gun fire, but also the probing radar beams that hunted them through the rain forest

Arquillo was crouched, hands on her khaki-clad knees, reddish hair damp and soaked, covering her face as she gulped down air to replenish herself from the frantic run. Lyons rested a hand on her shoulder and she glanced up at him. He offered her a canteen of water.

“Damn near got us killed suggesting we go back to the SUV,” she panted before taking a swig of tepid water. She swallowed, knowing that she needed the moisture.

“We’re alive,” Lyons told her. “No harm, no foul.”

Arquillo straightened and leaned her head against the cave wall. She dragged a curtain of sweat-dampened hair from in front of her eyes and looked over Able Team. “I still let my guard down too soon.”

“Well, it’s not like we can drive you back to a day-care center for CIA agents, can we?” Blancanales asked, winking. “Someone blew up our ride.”

Schwarz breathed slowly and deeply, willing his body’s autonomic reactions to subside so that he could concentrate on his PDA. Inside the cave, under a sheet of heavy rock in the side of a hill, he’d lost satellite contact. He switched the device over to transmission scanning and moved closer to the mouth of the cave.

“Isn’t he going to give our position away? One good shot with a rocket like before, and this cave becomes a tomb,” Arquillo said.

“Nah. I’m on passive scan, this unit has radar-absorbent paint over its metal, and I left my rifle with Pol,” Schwarz mentioned as he studied the screen.

“Checking to see if the spotlight is near us,” Arquillo concluded as she watched.

The electronics expert nodded. “See, they can sweep the hillside with relative impunity because it’s a tight beam. No radiation spills over to be noticed, even by sensors checking the area, unless they’re right in the arc of the beam.”

“Which the PDA is,” Lyons said. “You don’t pick them up, they can’t pick us up.”

Blancanales looked at Schwarz. “They’re still sweeping the area?”

“Yeah. And even if the spotlight is off us, those drones still have thermal sensors. It won’t be efficient, but after wasting so much ammo, they might just see what they could do with more rockets.”

The ground shook violently and Arquillo ducked. Dust rained from the roof of the cave, making her cough.

“See what I mean?” Schwarz asked, crouched near the mouth of the cave.

“We could just shoot them down,” Lyons growled.

Blancanales shrugged. “So then they’d send forces on foot after us.”

“I’d rather go one on one with enemy soldiers than cower from rocket strikes,” Lyons countered.

“Got a point there,” Arquillo agreed. The rumbling thunder of artillery rockets slamming into the hillside around them was unnerving and left her feeling impotent and helpless. At least in a gunfight, she knew she had an even chance to survive and win.

Schwarz looked at the roof of the cave. “Don’t worry. The tunnel’s holding up. We’re under enough rock that it’ll take a direct hit to bring it down.”

A loud thunderclap split the air in the cave, and Arquillo and the Stony Man warriors curled up in reaction to the nearby explosion.

“Say something else to tempt fate, smart-ass,” Lyons grumbled.

Schwarz held a finger up to his lips, then pointed to the roof of the cave. The rolling thunder of the air strikes had stopped, the drones’ rocket pods spent and empty. Schwarz grinned. “I was counting their shots. That was it.”

“Good,” Lyons answered. “With any luck, they’ll send out a patrol. It’ll be a relief to have a human opponent.”

CHAPTER FOUR

It didn’t take long for Phoenix Force to grab the hard drives out of the controllers’ computers. They just ripped open the casings and sliced the IDE cables. The hard drives were durable and fit into Manning’s backpack.

While Manning and McCarter were tearing apart CPUs, James, Encizo and Hawkins were repairing the tires of one of the pickups. The Toyota pickup was a bit old and weathered, but an inspection showed that the vehicle was in good running condition. All it took was a tire change, and it would be back in action. The pickup would be less conspicuous than the covered trailers, as well as having the benefit of maneuverability.

Hawkins scrounged the other vehicles and found spare gasoline canisters.

“All set?” Manning asked James as he topped off the pickup’s tank.

“Yeah,” James replied. “Time to go?”

Manning looked at his watch. “We’ve got a minute.”

“Okay,” James said, screwing the cap on the jerri can.

“No, we’ve got a minute to reach minimum safe distance,” Manning explained.

“Aw heck. We were supposed to be coming in quietly,” James muttered.

McCarter slid behind the wheel and started the engine. Hawkins and Manning squeezed into the front with the Briton, while Encizo and James clambered into the truck bed. Encizo’s and James’s darker coloring would be less conspicuous in the Lebanese countryside than the other members of the team, who looked distinctly European.

Manning’s estimate of a minute to reach minimum safe distance was spot-on. Utilizing distract mechanisms already in the trailers, as well as some “Eight-balls”—one-eighth of a stick of C-4 plastic explosives—Manning had wired the drone operations centers well. The trailers ripped violently apart, but there was little flash. Electronics and corpses were ground to bits by the detonations.

While Manning had done his demolitions work, McCarter took fingerprints from the dead, utilizing a fingerprint scanner. Now, as he drove, Hawkins plugged the scanner into the sat-phone-linked laptop and uploaded information to Stony Man Farm.

“Barb, see if these are current Syrian operatives,” McCarter had text-messaged along with the data file.

Hawkins looked up from the laptop. “Bear says that it’ll take a few hours for them to check the records for certain.”

“To narrow it down, tell them the unit we saw on the sentries. They might have been veterans of the same group,” McCarter suggested.

Hawkins typed that message back to the Farm’s Computer Room. It took only a few moments to get a reply.

“Bear says thanks. He’ll see what he can get on the sentries,” Hawkins said.

“How’s our schedule, Gary?” McCarter asked.

“At this rate, we should be five minutes early to our meet with the Egyptians,” Manning answered.

“Of course, that doesn’t take into account running into local factions.”

“Just a little more drama for the evening in that case,” McCarter said. “We won’t stay and fight.”

Manning was about to say something when McCarter sailed the pickup three feet into the air after plowing through a rut in the road. The truck plopped down and shook Phoenix Force around.

“Not that we’ll be running into anyone with antiaircraft weapons.”

McCarter grinned. It was a long-standing joke between the two that the British pilot drove as if he expected vehicles could fly. Manning had grown used to his driving, but he still held on to his seat with white-knuckled strength. From the bed, Encizo and James grumbled and complained through the cab’s rear window.

“Hey, David, we don’t have seat belts back here!” James growled.

McCarter kept up the breakneck pace. Drivers weren’t known for cautious pace in the Lebanese countryside, and the Briton was following suit. “When in Rome” was a savvy strategy for blending in. It wasn’t as if there were highway patrolmen on these dirt roads. No headlights were visible on the horizon in any direction. Manning scanned out the windows for operating lights on any aircraft, but the sky was merely sprinkled with immobile stars.

“Anything back there?” McCarter asked.

“Just two rattled people,” Encizo complained. “No lights on the horizon.”

“Give a shout if you see something,” McCarter said.

“Who the hell’s gonna catch up to us?” James asked.

“You know our luck,” Manning quipped.

Hawkins shook his head. “Probably a rocket-assisted APC.”

“Don’t tempt fate,” Manning cautioned.

Something sparked in the distance, a star of light on the ground. It wasn’t a single headlight, and moments later, the snap-crack of bullets lashing past the truck filled the air. Machine-gun rounds hurtled by so quickly, Phoenix Force could hear the breaking of the sound barrier.

McCarter killed the headlights and swerved hard, breaking off their previous course. The Toyota pickup jerked and jostled as it rolled over rough ground and clumps of vegetation. Encizo and James were silent in the back, holding on for dear life so they wouldn’t be ejected when the truck hit the next bump.

The star of gunfire turned into a sidelong flare, tracer rounds scratching streaks of red in the black night. Whoever the gunner was, he was searching for Phoenix Force’s pickup. The teardrop-shaped muzzle-flash fattened and turned into a circle, bullets raking the ground around the pickup. McCarter hit the brakes and drove toward the machine gun. The arc of fire swung past and sliced into the night. Bullets had drilled into the pickup’s bodywork, and the windshield sported three new white spiderwebs where bullets ricocheted off.

The weapon was a light machine gun, the rifle rounds at the extreme limit of their normal range, lacking the power to smash the safety glass.

“Everyone okay?” McCarter asked, skidding the pickup to a halt.

“Yeah,” James said, crawling out of the bed.

Manning and Hawkins piled out of the cab, the Canadian went prone behind a bush and locked his sniper rifle’s scope on the distant gunner.

“What is it?” Hawkins asked, sliding beside him.

“An armored personnel carrier,” Manning grumbled. “Not the one you ordered, though. Just the good old-fashioned roll-along. No rocket boosters.”

Hawkins grimaced. “Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.”

“Too much information there, T.J.,” James joked. “Whatever happened to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’?”

Hawkins winced, remembering Aaron Kurtzman’s nickname.

McCarter threw the American members of Phoenix Force a harsh glare, then leaned to Manning.

“Is it alone?”

The big Canadian swept the terrain around the APC. “It’s an old Soviet-style APC, so it could either be Syrian or Syrian allied. The ground is uneven around it, and I can’t see anything else. Range out is 750 meters, give or take.”

“I said we wouldn’t stand and fight, but driving in the dark without headlights is starkers, even by my standards,” McCarter said. He consulted his map, illuminating it with his refilter flashlight. The low frequency of light put out by the ruby-colored lens wouldn’t travel far to betray their position, especially at that range. He did a quick bit of reckoning. “We can leave the pickup and continue on foot.”

“Double time,” Hawkins said, looking over McCarter’s shoulder.

“Get on the link to the Farm and tell Aaron that we ran into some interference,” McCarter ordered.

“Shit, “Hawkins muttered. “David…”

McCarter looked at the laptop screen and clucked his tongue. “The paratroopers were dishonorably discharged. Syrians were dealing drugs to their fellow soldiers. They were assigned to operations here in Lebanon. And we’ve dealt with enough heroin coming out of the Bekaa Valley to know who they could have hooked up with.”

“Drug dealers attacking Israel?” James asked.

“Muslim drug dealers,” Encizo corrected. “The Jihad has used narcotics money to supply terrorist groups with almost bottomless funding.”

“The kind of funding that can afford ten heavily armed UAV drones and two eighteen-wheelers loaded with computer software,” Manning added.

“There’s no solid confirmation that those paratroopers went into the Lebanese heroin trade, yet,” McCarter said. “We’ll have to check on that once we make our rendezvous.”

“The APC is moving,” Manning announced.

“Headed our way?” James asked.

“A straight beeline,” Manning said. “Give me a few moments. Move on ahead, I’ll catch up.”