Hell Dawn

Kurtzman sipped his coffee and smiled at the memory. “That was when I got it,” he said. “Gabe just wanted attention. He was a genius, smarter than most of the adults he encountered, angry and bored with us all. The money he stole? He put most of it into accounts he’d set up at the banks. And it wasn’t because he had a moral problem with stealing. He just knew better than to go on a wild spending spree when you steal money.” Kurtzman tapped a thick forefinger against his temple. “Like I said, smart as hell. He was fourteen years old. How many fourteen-year-olds are that smart?”

“A handful, maybe.”

“Exactly.”

“So what did you do with him?”

He shrugged again. “What could I do? I couldn’t pretend like it didn’t happen or let him escape the consequences. But I also wasn’t going to let this kid rot in a detention center somewhere. I got him moved as close as I could to Virginia, a juvenile lockup in Alexandria. On my days off, I’d visit with him. I took him books and we’d talk computers for as long as they’d let us.”

“You were like a surrogate parent.”

“Maybe. The real articles weren’t exactly a national treasure. But I stayed in contact with him over the years, helped pay for his college, that sort of thing. He got married a year ago. In August.”

“I remember you took the time off.”

Kurtzman nodded. “Bastards took his wife,” he said. “Maria was a good woman, but whoever wanted to get the Cold Earth worm decided to kill her in the process. She was home when they broke in. Gabe wasn’t. So they killed her.”

Kurtzman’s throat ached and he swallowed hard to dispel the feeling. This was one of the rare times when he wished he were an operative rather than some wheelchair-bound geek locked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Fox needed muscle, firepower. These were the only things Kurtzman couldn’t provide and it pained him to admit it, even to himself.

“You’re doing all you can,” Price said, as though she could read his mind. “Trust me, Aaron, if I was in trouble, you’re one of the people I’d want in my corner.”

Kurtzman gave her a grateful smile and a wink.

“Frankly, if everything was going to hell, I’d rather have Mack the Bastard on my side,” Kurtzman said. He was referring to Mack Bolan, aka. the Executioner, the soldier who kept an arm’s-length relationship with Stony Man Farm, but often conducted missions on the ultrasecret organization’s behalf. Bolan, like most all of Stony Man’s paramilitary fighters, had been forged in the hellfire of combat.

The corner of Price’s mouth wrinkled in a perturbed expression that told Kurtzman she was having none of it. “Go get some rest, Aaron. Or go work on your project. What’s it called?”

“You mean, Predator?”

“Right. The offensive firewall stuff you developed. We could sure use that around here.”

He waved her off. “Sure. Yeah. I’ll be out of here in a few minutes. Besides, I finished that project a couple of days ago. I just have to test it.”

“Whatever. Go. Sleep. Now. Don’t make me order you off the floor.”

He threw a mock salute and a smile. “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” He gestured over his shoulder at his computer with his thumb. “Let me just make sure I’m at a stopping point, and I’ll disappear for a couple of hours.”

“Bear…” Price said, using his nickname.

“Promise.”

Price nodded and moved away. Wheeling back around, Kurtzman checked his encrypted e-mail account and saw a new message. His heart skipped a beat when he read the address: foxhound362. Gabe! He popped open the message and scanned through it.

AK,

Leadville.

You won’t see me, but I’ll see you.

GF

Pumping a fist into the air, Kurtzman yelled, “Yes! Sleep can wait. We have contact.”

AN HOUR LATER, Kurtzman was seated inside a Stony Man Farm’s Lear jet specifically designed to accommodate his wheelchair. Accompanying him were four of the finest warriors he knew. Pilot Jack Grimaldi was seated in front, finishing last-minute preparations for takeoff, and seated around the cabin was the trio known as Able Team—Carl “Ironman” Lyons, Rosario “Politician” Blancanales and Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz.

Whatever fatigue Kurtzman had felt previously had vanished with the arrival of Fox’s message. Though his eyes still ached from lack of sleep and his trademark bad coffee was causing his stomach to roil, his mind was more alert than it had been for at least twenty-four hours, and for that he was grateful.

It was heading into late evening and Blancanales let loose with a big yawn.

Kurtzman held up a stainless-steel thermos. “Coffee?” he offered.

Blancanales waved him off. “Save it, amigo,” he said. “Just in case the plane runs out of fuel.”

“I didn’t make it,” Kurtzman lied.

“Well, in that case.”

Kurtzman poured the coffee into three foam cups and handed them out. “You girls are going to be needing this,” he said.

“Sounds ominous,” Blancanales said. Swigging down some of his coffee, he made a face. He looked at Kurtzman, flashing a knowing smile.

“It’s always ominous,” Lyons said, an edge in his voice. “Why you dragging me—us—out in the middle of the night like this?”

“Simple snatch-and-grab mission,” Kurtzman replied. Reaching into a pocket on the side of his wheelchair, he extracted three mission packets, handed them to Schwarz who was seated across from him, who, in turn, distributed them to the others. The plane had been configured for briefings, with four of the cabin seats facing one another.

“Before we leave the plane,” Kurtzman said, “I need to take back these dossiers and put them in a burn bag. None of this stuff is supposed to leave the airplane, so commit the photo to memory.”

Schwarz held out the photo so that it was visible to the others. “Kind of hard to forget a mug like this,” he said. “He’s a hard-looking kid. He the target?”

Kurtzman nodded. “In a manner of speaking, though he’s on our side, all appearances aside. Name’s Gabe Fox and he’s a computer genius.” Kurtzman brought the others up to date on the recent kidnapping attempts on Fox, the murder of his wife, how he’d gone underground and contacted Kurtzman less than two hours ago.

Blancanales was leafing through the file on his lap. “He’s what, twenty-three years old? What makes him so special that everyone and their brother’s trying to hunt him down?”

“It’s not Gabe, per se, they’re after,” Kurtzman said. “It’s what he’s created. A little bit of background. He works for the CIA’s counterterrorism unit. He’s not a field operative. He’s strictly a lab guy. Like I said, he’s a maestro at the computer, and we’re lucky to have him on our side. He’s created some downright scary computer viruses and worms. Stuff capable of shutting down electrical grids or air-traffic-control systems. Remember all the Y2K doomsday scenarios with airplanes falling from the sky and all that crap? Forget it. This kid can program that stuff in his sleep.”

“So someone wants him for his brain power?” Schwarz offered.

“Sort of,” Kurtzman replied. “He’s created a computer worm called Cold Earth. The thing’s capable of shutting down the cooling systems in nuclear reactors, then frying the computers so that they’ll do nothing but crash repeatedly. If you’re working at a nuclear power plant and the computers go blooey, what would you do?”

“Soil myself,” Schwarz said.

“After that,” Kurtzman said, smiling.

“Try to restart the system,” he replied. “See if I could get the cooling system to kick back on.”

“Right. Thing is, though, every time you do that, the worm changes the computer’s password. So you just sit there restarting the damn thing while the reactor core overheats.”

“Wow,” Schwarz said.

“Yeah, wow. Pretty soon, you have a meltdown like nothing the world’s ever seen. You multiply that by every nuclear reactor around the country, hell, around the world, and you’ve got Armageddon a hundred or so times over.”

“Okay, fine,” Lyons said, “so this little lab rat comes up with this thing. Surely he came up with a way to counteract it.”

“He’s working on it,” Kurtzman said.

Lyons’s face reddened, and Kurtzman knew the former Los Angeles cop was having a meltdown of his own. “Working on it? What the hell? If he’s ‘working on it,’ then he ought to be sitting on his rusty can in a basement at Langley. Not skulking around the damn Rocky Mountains.”

“That’s why we’re going after him, Carl,” Kurtzman said.

“That’s not what I meant. What I meant was, why wasn’t this guy under heavier lock and key? Shit, if it was me, I’d stick him in the Situation Room in the White House’s basement, cordon the place off with Delta Force troopers and not let him out until he came up with a way to counteract this thing.”

Kurtzman nodded. “Agreed. Unfortunately someone at Langley was more focused on playing ‘cover your ass,’ rather than doing his or her job. According to the background information Barb and I were able to piece together, someone in Virginia didn’t want the White House to know there was trouble.”

“So they handled it ‘in-house,’ so to speak,” Blancanales said.

“Yeah, they handled it, all right,” Lyons said. “Let the toilet overflow, and guess who has to handle the mop-up.”

“Eloquent,” Schwarz said.

“He’s right, though,” Kurtzman interjected. “Apparently someone, or several people within the Agency, for that matter, knew about Gabe’s problem. They also knew that someone was acting as a mole, handing out information about his latest creation. But they kept trying to handle it themselves, rather than go to the President or someone else for help.”

“The big questions are, who sold him out and who’s trying to kidnap him?” Blancanales said. “We have anyone covering that angle?”

Kurtzman nodded. “Hal’s working on it. As soon as word went out about the whole situation, he hopped a plane to Wonderland. I guess the National Security Council’s still getting up to speed and debating whether to yank this from the Agency.”

Blancanales scowled. “Doesn’t seem like there ought to be a hell of a lot to debate here.”

“More politics,” Kurtzman said, sighing. “In the meantime, we’re heading to Leadville, Colorado, to hunt for Gabe. Or more precisely, we’re going there so he can find us. There’s a municipal airport in Dillon. From there, it’s about an hour or so’s drive to find him. He knows me and will be looking for me. That’s the reason I’m going along on this mission. Plus, Barb and Hal figured my computer expertise might help. I may draft Gadgets, too, before it’s all over.”

Schwarz nodded. “What then?” he asked.

“Carl, you and Pol need to form a human cordon around him. Gadgets and I will work with him on trying to counteract this thing.”

“If we’re that worried about losing him,” Blancanales countered, “why not haul him back to Stony Man Farm? No one would find him here.”

Kurtzman shook his head. “Unfortunately, the word from upper management was pretty clear. Someone already has traced Gabe to one safehouse. It’s pretty safe bet that someone inside the government’s selling him out. Hal and the Man agree that they don’t want to risk Stony Man’s security by making it a target. That’s also why he’s not cooling his heels at Langley, or any other facility at the moment.”

“Fasten your seat belts, ladies,” Grimaldi called over his shoulder. “We’re about to go airborne.”

The assembled warriors strapped themselves in, and the engine’s whine intensified, audible through the craft’s hull. Kurtzman felt his bulky torso press against his harness as the force pushed him forward. He shuffled through some papers, looking for a copy of the two-page memo Price had supplied for the briefing. While the Lear taxied down the runway, he handed copies of the memo to the members of Able Team, each man scanning his copy when he received it.

“So they don’t want to put Stony Man Farm on the bull’s-eye,” Blancanales said without looking up from his briefing packet. “What do we know about the kidnapping attempt?”

“We found one of the agents in Gabe’s room. She’d been shot dead. According to the forensics report, she’d taken one in the stomach at close range. The bullet punched through her spine and—” Kurtzman snapped his fingers “—the lights went out instantly for her. We think Gabe’s the one who shot her. And we think he did it with her weapon.”

“Why?” Blancanales asked.

“She had scratch marks on her face and hands, bruising on her midsection, all consistent with a struggle, like she’d been tackled. Now her gun’s missing. We recovered the bullet, but it was so mangled from tearing through bone and colliding with the floor that a good ballistics match is damn near impossible.”

“Okay,” Blancanales persisted, “but why kill her?”

A cold sensation settled into Kurtzman’s gut as he spoke. “We have a couple of theories at this point. One, Gabe actually went rogue himself and used the chaos created by the raid to kill her and escape. The more likely scenario, though, is that she was actually working in concert with the kidnappers.”

“Explain,” Blancanales said.

“These guys were pros. They did what they could to haul their dead away. But they missed a couple. One of the raiders got knocked into a crevice and the bad guys had to leave him. We ran his prints and came up with some interesting results. Name was Ricardo Montoya. Apparently he worked for the Mexican government, along with about two dozen other men and women, forming an elite counter-terrorism team called Project Justice.

“Project Justice?” Blancanales said.

“Yeah. Unfortunately, Montoya and his group disappeared about six months ago, along with enough guns, ammo and explosives to supply a small army.”

“Which is precisely what they are,” Schwarz said.

“According to Mexican intelligence sources, there have been rumors that the group decided to sell its collective skills on the open market,” Kurtzman said.

“Mercs?” Lyons asked.

Kurtzman shook his head. “A couple of the group’s foot soldiers have been spotted in the Tri-Border in South America, meeting with a multitude of bad actors, everyone from Chinese triads to al Qaeda. Some of our best people—Delta Force, Navy SEALs—trained these folks in counterterrorism tactics.”

“And now they’re sharing what they know with terrorists and criminals,” Lyons said. “Beautiful. And this fits with your buddy Gabe how exactly?”

“Two weeks ago, the lady Gabe killed apparently traveled to Mexico. Puerto Vallarta to be exact. She used her own passport, so she wasn’t necessarily trying to hide her travels. A day or so later, a Mexican intelligence agent shoots a picture of a man named Pedro Vasquez meeting with an American woman in a small beachfront café. Vasquez is sort of their bagman, or business manager, depending on how you want to look at it. Mexican intelligence has been shadowing him for a couple of months, hoping to catch up with the group, but to no avail. He rarely makes direct contact, but instead relies on cloned cell phones that they constantly churn through and hand-delivered messages left at drop-off points.”

“Old school tradecraft,” Schwarz said. “Smart group.”

“No e-mails, no single home base. Frankly, they’ve stolen a page from guys like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, using primitive communications whenever possible and constantly staying on the run.”

“What happened to Vasquez?” Schwarz asked.

Kurtzman shrugged. “Not sure. He’s an attorney in Puerto Vallarta, but he recently came up missing.”

“Dead?”

“Possibly. More likely, though, he found a hole to crawl into until things settle down a little bit. The Mexicans had a stroke of luck and found the guy supplying the disposable phones, and he had a list of phone numbers for the phones. They passed this stuff along to the National Security Agency, which is hoping to catch a stray phone call, one they can trace back to the group. Once they do, the Mexican authorities have promised to drop the hammer on these bastards.”

“What are we?” Lyons said, his face flushing. “Chopped liver? I’d like to be there for that, not babysitting some damn egghead and cleaning up the Agency’s messes.”

Kurtzman nodded. “Understood, Carl. But we need to look at the bigger picture here. Someone wants to get hold of Gabe for a reason. And, if they do, they’d have something horrible in their grasp. They don’t call this worm Cold Earth for nothing. Imagine multiple meltdowns occurring at once.”

Lyons held up his hands defensively. “I get it. I get it. I just don’t like sitting on my rump when something needs done, is all.” He displayed one of his snakeskin cowboy boots. “These boots were made for kicking tail, baby.”

“Nancy Sinatra you’re not, amigo,” Blancanales said, grinning. “Aaron, do we have any of our own people following up on the Mexican lead, just in case things start happening?”

“We’ve got Phoenix Force on standby. Until we get a little more hard intel, Hal’s decided to leave them in Virginia. We have no idea where these guys might surface, or whether a second crisis might pop up. So he’s trying to conserve resources, as they say in the business world.”

“That’s a euphemism for cooling your heels,” Lyons said with a smirk. “Good. No sense in us having all the fun. Let’s just hope your boy’s got an eye out for us.”

CHAPTER TWO

Where the hell were they?

Fox peered through the coffee-shop window again for the fourth time in twenty minutes, eyes scouring the streets for some sign of Kurtzman. This was his third day on the run, and he found himself jumping at shadows. He’d arrived in Leadville two days earlier, after hitching a ride from a trucker. He’d been able to get some clothes from a church, and public rest rooms had given him a place to wash, making him look like just another hiker stopping in town for a shave and warm meal. A dull ache in his back and neck reminded him that he’d spent the last couple of nights sleeping on the ground in a meadow behind the local elementary school.

Setting down his coffee, he reached for the nylon satchel he normally used for carrying his laptop. Unzipping it, he stared at the weapon inside, an Uzi submachine gun. Computer nerds weren’t supposed to know how to use such weapons. But he did, thanks largely to a couple of gang bangers he’d known in his hometown who were given to driving to the country, dropping hits of acid and shredding rabbits and squirrels with well-placed bursts from the Israeli-made subgun. He’d never had the stomach to shoot an animal, but he’d wasted more than one discarded beer can during those trips. So he could shoot straight, if necessary.

Besides, you didn’t need to be Annie Oakley to shoot yourself in the head. Just the proper motivation. He figured losing a wife, being betrayed by his own government and having every creep in the world chasing him gave a guy all the motivation he needed. A crashing realization of what he was about to do struck him, causing his hands and knees to tremor. He shoved the bag aside, leaving it closed, but not zipped, and lit up a cigarette.

“Might as well smoke ’em,” he muttered. “You’ll likely be dead in an hour.”

“Sir?”

The voice caused him to start. Yanking the cigarette from his mouth, he whipped his head around and found the waitress standing next to his table. Brushing aside her kinky brown hair, she gave him a confused smile.

“Sir, did you say something?”

He waved dismissively. “Just yapping to myself,” he said.

She nodded. “Can I get you something else?”

He looked at her face, oval-shaped with pale blue eyes, and felt that heavy sensation settle into his chest again. His wife also had had blue eyes. “Just the check.” The uncertainty still in her eyes, she nodded and headed back toward the counter to tally the bill.

With his left hand, he rubbed his cheeks, now bare because he’d shaved his goatee in an attempt to alter his appearance. Good luck. A man mountain covered in tattoos trying to hide himself by removing a little facial hair, it seemed a vain effort. Like trying to dress up hell with a flower garden.

Kurtzman’s reply to his e-mail had been brief, but comforting. We’re coming, he’d written. Stay cool. So he’d been doing just that for the last several hours, but he’d yet to see any sign of his old friend.

Fox had been operating as a computer nomad of sorts over the past few days, using the machines at the local libraries to check his e-mail account and to scan media Web sites for any word of his appearance or of the shootings at the safehouse. As expected, he’d found nothing. He’d checked his e-mail account about an hour ago, looking for any further communications from Kurtzman, but had found nothing.

The sound of car doors slamming outside pulled him from his thoughts. Maybe it was Aaron, he thought. Glancing through the window, he spotted three men climbing from a black Cadillac Escalade. A fourth already stood by the driver’s-side door, scanning his surroundings. A matching SUV had parked a few spots back and three more men were disgorging. Blood thundered in Fox’s ears and sweat immediately broke out on his forehead. How the hell? When the realization struck, his stomach plummeted. The credit card. He’d used a credit card to pay for the Internet access, and apparently someone had been waiting for him to do just that.

He rocketed to his feet, grabbing his satchel. Turning on a heel to bolt, he nearly collided with the waitress. Her eyes wide, she crossed her arms over her chest protectively and inhaled sharply as she came to a halt. Reaching into his pocket, Gabe grabbed a crumpled ten-dollar bill and held it out to her.

She took it. “It’s going to be a minute on the change.”

“Keep it,” he said, his voice sharp and loud. “A back door. You got one?”

The volume of his voice, his size and his erratic behavior seemed to take her aback. Eyes wide, her lips parted but no sound came out.

“A door!” Without taking her eyes from him, she turned and gestured toward a pair of swing doors at the other end of the counter.

“There. Through there.”

“Thanks,” he said, his voice dropping in volume. He darted for the back of the restaurant. Pushing through the swing doors, he wound his way between a series of tables covered with chopped food and kitchen appliances. A twenty-something man, his hair dyed green and three earrings on his left ear, his skinny torso covered in a stained apron, stepped into Fox’s path, a butcher’s knife clutched in his right hand, but not upraised to strike.

“What’s the—” he said.

Fox’s stiff-armed the cook, planting the open palm of his left hand into the man’s sternum, sending him spinning backward into a wall. The cook yelled, but it only vaguely registered with Fox. He pushed through a wood-framed screen door, which emptied into an alley that ran the length of a row of commercial buildings, most of them stout and more than a century old. Cutting right, he began to move along the alley, his lungs already feeling the exertion from years of smoking combined with the thin mountain air.

Even as he moved, he heard the screen door slam behind him, prompting him to glance over his shoulder. He spotted the cook from the restaurant, knife still in his hand, yelling and cursing at him.

A corridor, little more than the space between two buildings, opened up to his right and Fox darted into it. Footsteps pounded the pavement and he heard a faint thumping in the distance. Flattening himself against the wall, he reached inside the satchel and fisted the Uzi, but kept the bag over it for the moment. Chances were the irate cook or the waitress was already calling 911, summoning the local police. If they showed up, he’d lose the weapon, give himself up and hope to stay alive in custody until Kurtzman arrived. Fox wasn’t in love with the police, and the memory of his betrayal by the CIA was fresh in his mind, but he wasn’t about to draw down on some local cop trying to do his or her job. He’d die before doing that.

The whupping of chopper blades rent the air and the craft passed overhead, the whine of the engine reverberating from the alley walls. Biting off a curse, Fox headed for the mouth of the alley, which led back onto the main street. Chancing a look around the corner, he spotted two of the guys from the SUV moving up the street toward him. Jerking back, he spun on a heel, retraced his steps toward the other end of the alley. The helicopter’s engine grew louder as it returned for another pass. Had they spotted him during their previous pass? He had no reason to think otherwise.