Doom Prophecy

The captain’s mind flashed back to the zombie movies he’d watched in his youth, remembering the horror of being torn from a place of safety and security, being hauled into the merciless grip of a horde of snarling, bloodthirsty things. He kicked frantically at the doorjamb, his team clawing at his back, trying to keep hold of him as he was being hauled through the dented doorway.

“No! Let me go!” The M-486 was empty. He’d burned off the whole magazine in a mad attempt to drive off the marauders, but with each corpse fallen away, another implacable man-thing lunged into place, fingers tearing at his battle uniform and flesh like talons. Icy fear filled his bowels as two of his men wrapped their arms around his legs, pulling with all their might as he was almost out of the helicopter now. His uniform blouse was torn out of its web belt. His backpack and load-bearing vest were peeled from his skin, and the chill of the night could be felt on his naked skin where the dozens of hands weren’t clutching him.

Kensington twisted his head. He bit into one marauder’s forearm and hot blood gushed over his lips, the skin bitter and tasting of clay and earth. He spit the foul concoction out of his mouth and felt his scalp yanked, his nonregulation-length hair knotted with clutching fingers. His lungs squeezed out a wail of horror. He was being dragged to his death.

A thumb gouged his eye. Fingers slipped into his mouth and yanked him by his upper teeth. He kicked and struggled, but his arms and legs were too firmly held. His spine creaked under the sheer pressure put on it by the tug of war. Gunfire exploded over the eerie silence.

That was the greatest of horrors. There were not even shouts of anger, no mocking taunts. Just quiet, voiceless violence. Like something out of the zombie movies, but there wasn’t even a soundtrack of moans or eerie music. Except for the rattle of M-4s, there was numbing silence, just the clutching of hands, the clawing of fingers, the tearing of skin and cloth and hair from its roots. And his own terrified screams for mercy and help.

To Kensington, that was the worst of all. As a commander, he led by example. That was why he struggled to his feet first, that was why he volunteered to be first through the door on countless terrorist-hunting missions. He didn’t want his men to face any dangers he wouldn’t. But now he was caught in his ultimate nightmare, out of control.

When darkness descended upon him, he almost welcomed what he knew to be his death.

THE HORROR WASN’T OVER. Captain Jacob Kensington opened his eyes. He was in front of a white drape, lit up by klieg lights. He squinted past the glare and could see men with video and still cameras. Flash elements flared and made him blink and wince. When he looked at the ground, he could see the forest floor. Trees were visible on the other side of the lights now that his eyes had adjusted. He was still in the jungle.

To his horror he found he was tied to a giant wooden X, his men around him. Six lay on the ground, their bodies ravaged and torn, their skin ripped out in chunks, eyeless sockets staring into the sky above them. He prayed that they were dead long before they were mutilated. He didn’t want to think of the possibility that the wounds on his dead boys were from bite marks, that they had been partially eaten alive.

Kensington saw a man wearing fragments of skull wired together into a mask on his face, two long animal fangs bolted into the cheeks, framing a wide, swarthy mouth. The man wasn’t African, though his skin was browned, heavily tanned. Clear blue eyes stared out of the eye sockets of the skull. They looked him over, making his skin crawl.

“I am Algul,” the man said. His cape fluttered on his shoulders. For a moment Kensington thought it was made of leather of various colors, patch worked together with coarse twine, but on closer examination, he saw tattoos on each of the bits of flesh. He recognized the unit insignias of dozens of military units from around Africa and the Middle East, each tattoo centered and perfectly visible.

Cold dread filled Kensington’s gut as he realized that the madman calling himself Algul was wearing the skin of dozens of soldiers, claiming their tattoos for his multicolored cloak.

The skull-masked killer smirked at Kensington’s fear and brandished a wicked, bone-handled knife. He stepped to the half-naked Special Forces captain and walked behind him. Kensington tried to turn his head, to follow the man, but instants later the skin over his shoulder blade burned.

“What a lovely skin tag you wear, Captain,” Algul whispered seductively into his ear. “It will look wonderful on me, do you think?”

“Get fuck—!” Kensington gasped, pain choking off his words. Blood poured down his back now. Algul stepped in front of him, licking the back of the patch of skin, and the Special Forces captain couldn’t restrain a shudder of cold fear and revulsion.

“Delicious,” Algul said with a grin, his teeth stained with blood.

Kensington tried to swallow, but his throat was too tight, too dry. His heart hammered in his chest. “The U.S. government will not negotiate for our freedom. We will not give in to terrorist demands!”

Algul quirked an eyebrow and handed Kensington’s skin to one of his followers. “Terrorist demands? You silly, silly fool.”

The bone-handled knife rose to the captain’s throat. “First, I am not a terrorist. I am the spiritual leader of my people, the warriors of the night who seek freedom from the oppression of those who seek to shine their light upon us.”

The edge slit Kensington’s skin, a slow trickle of blood crawling down his chest.

“Second, I do not have demands. Indeed, I wish for more of your compatriots to throw their lives away in coming after me. I am Algul, the demon blood-drinking prince of darkness. And I thirst greedily.”

The knife bit deeper. One of Algul’s followers pressed a goblet into his master’s hand, and the madman brought the rim up to catch the sudden splash. The cut was wicked, bleeding profusely, but it hadn’t severed a major artery. Kensington knew he’d bleed to death from this wound, but unfortunately, it would be a slow, arduous process. He struggled against his bonds, spitting and cursing, but Algul held his cup steady as it filled.

Then the madman stepped back and raised the goblet to the cameramen. “This is the blood of the enemy, which I give to you, my followers!”

Kensington watched in horror as Algul decanted the blood into his mouth, streaks of crimson rolling down his chin, pouring onto his chest. The American’s heart hammered and he struggled, trying to rip free, but his strength poured out of him, down his own torso in the torrent of life that pumped from his wound.

Algul turned to Kensington, and smiled, his mouth a crimson mask. “You may feast now, my friends.”

Suddenly, red-clay-caked bodies blocked the glare of the klieg lights, bloodshot eyes staring at him, their mouths agape and slack.

Kensington swore he wouldn’t scream in horror, but when they lunged at him, his howls streaked through the darkness as if on the hooves of a nightmare.

AMANDA CASH CHUCKLED into the phone as she listened to Carmen Delahunt on the other end of the line.

“I’ll be there in a couple days for the Expo,” Delahunt said. “Maybe then we can get together and you can update me on your hunt for Ka55andra.”

Cash looked at the calendar. The San Francisco Law Enforcement Technology Exposition was scheduled for that Friday and “white-hat” hackers like her team would be attending. “White hats,” as they called themselves, were computer experts who used their skills for the sake of preventing cybercrime. Some, like her friend Carmen, worked for the government, even though Delahunt never really let on exactly where in the government she worked. Amanda herself, and her team, freelanced their work.

Delahunt had tapped Cash and her crew for assistance in tracking down a notorious cybercriminal who called herself Ka55andra. Identified only by her call sign, she proclaimed to be a prophetess of a new age, seeking to tear down the stone walls of the government and to destroy the Department of Homeland Security. So far, the cyberwitch had proved herself to be a formidable force, sending military units and agents into death traps for numerous terrorists and criminals. Ka55andra’s reign of terror had been responsible for the deaths of three hundred lawmen, soldiers and intelligence operatives around the globe, and she showed no signs of abatement.

That was why Delahunt had started using the resources of Cash’s crew, HedSpayce, for gathering information on Ka55andra. For Cash, it was no major problem. Her crew had enough ability, and what they couldn’t get on their own, they asked for around the bulletin boards across the Net, as discreetly as possible.

Having Ka55andra, someone who had ties to international terrorists and assassins, finding out they were on her trail would have been hazardous to HedSpayce’s health.

“I’ll look forward to seeing you, Carmen,” Cash said. “We haven’t gotten together in a couple years.”

“Yeah. Unfortunately, in the work I’m in, business is too good,” Delahunt answered, sounding sullen, defeated.

Cash figured that her friend worked for something akin to the CIA or the Department of Homeland Security, and she felt a pang of sympathy. If work was keeping her busy, that meant that she was keeping her finger on the pulse of tragedies and horrors across the globe. Trying to maintain a watch on that either turned you callous or slowly bled your spirit one atrocity at a time.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Carm.”

“It’s okay. Anything you have, just send it to my BBS. I’ll have my department look it over, too,” Delahunt answered. “I just wish we could budget you more money.”

“No problem, Carm. Though, maybe a little tax break come April…”

Delahunt chuckled on the other side. “We’ll see what we can do, Mandy.”

“Thanks,” Cash answered, not quite certain whether Delahunt was joking or not.

The door of the warehouse loft offices was rapped, and Cash sighed. “I’ll have to talk to you later. Sounds like we’re getting a new delivery.”

“All right. Take care, okay?”

“Sure,” Cash replied, and she turned off the phone and tucked it into her pocket.

She opened the door and looked up to see one of the largest human beings she’d ever seen. He looked down on her but remained silent. A voice from below caught her attention, and she looked at a squat little man holding a clipboard.

“Is this HedSpayce?” the dwarf asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Cash answered. She looked past the dwarf and the giant, seeing a lanky, long-haired man with a handlebar mustache standing in the hall. He looked as if he were made out of toothpicks, he was so skinny. His eyes were black, and creepy. They had dollies, loaded with stacks of boxes of paper, diskettes and other office supplies. These weren’t their usual deliverymen, even though they wore the right uniforms and their boxes were stamped with the right return labels.

She just didn’t know. The mammoth delivery man looked too mean, too cruel, to be anything other than a professional wrestler, or worse, a serial killer. The giant somehow managed to squeeze his wide shoulders through the doorjamb and rolled his dolly toward the center of the office.

“Where do we drop this off?” the little one asked. Cash looked down at him as he pushed his cart in.

“Oh, the supply room is this way,” she said as he handed her the clipboard.

The clipboard was one of those digital delivery invoices, with a stylus to sign your name on a pressure-sensitive LED screen. HedSpayce’s office address was displayed on another little screen at the top of the brown unit. She signed her name and started to hand the clipboard back to the dwarf when something snaked around her throat.

It was an arm, the wiry thin limb of the creepy, long-haired delivery man. Suddenly, that toothpick-thin body was a lot stronger than she thought, corded muscles squeezing her throat and picking her up off the ground. Her feet kicked and she tried to let out a choked scream.

Nothing got past that strong, muscular forearm.

Henley, a handsome young black kid, rose, shouting at the man strangling her. The giant turned swiftly and wrapped his massive hands around Henley’s head and yanked him off his feet, snapping his body around and hurling him through a bank of cubicles. As the young hacker’s body crashed through the offices, screams of confusion filled the air.

Cash struggled, her fingers trying to dig into the forearm of the killer strangling her, but the cords of his muscles were too tight. It was like squeezing steel. His other arm snaked around and he aimed a long-barreled handgun at another of her friends, a pretty young woman named Claudia, and peppered her white blouse with bloody splotches. Claudia’s corpse dropped to the floor, and the HedSpayce executive forced a screech past her constricted larynx. She reached out to claw at his gun hand, but his arm was too long for her to grab the pistol.

The snakelike gunman twisted and put more shots into the head of Hideo, another of her co-workers, as he ran to her rescue. Tears burned in her eyes as she watched another of her friends collapse into a lifeless heap at her feet. Cash couldn’t speak, and her lungs strained for a fresh breath of air.

Everyone else was running now, but the giant ripped apart two boxes and pulled out two big, barrellike weapons. Thundering booms filled the room, and cubicle walls suddenly sprouted softball-size holes. More hackers and office workers tried to scramble for safety, but the giant’s weapons smashed the same massive channels through their chests and heads.

It was a massacre.

The dwarf had gotten another weapon out of a box. It looked like a water bottle with handles, a belt trailing from the side of it. However, it spit flames from the muzzle that sliced through the office. Computers burst apart in sprays of sparks and chips. Cash’s co-workers also burst open as the high-velocity slugs hammered into them.

The woman’s struggles weakened. She mouthed a desperate plea, then remembered the cell phone in her pocket. Maybe if she hit 9-1-1…

Jacob “The Snake” Cannon lowered his modified CZ-75 as he felt Amanda Cash slump in his arms. “She’s gone.”

“Took your time about it,” Linn “Gremlin” Keller snarled, slipping his personally designed belt-fed Ripper XM-1 back into its box. Keller was a brilliant weapons designer and had produced a full-powered machine gun that he could fire without being knocked off balance by the recoil. “You just love having the girls struggle, don’t you?”

Cannon smirked. “I’m part snake, Gremlin. You know we like to feel the last wiggles of our prey.”

He licked Cash’s earlobe, then let her slip to the floor in a puddle of long red hair and tangled limbs. “Haggar!”

The gigantic David Lee “Mammoth” Haggar stopped clomping through the wreckage of the cubicles and looked back to his partners.

“You know, while you two are talking,” Haggar answered in a deep baritone, “there might be survivors dialing for the cops.”

The giant stopped and triggered one of his custom-designed Striker 12 shotgun pistols into the body of a downed office worker. Keller had shortened the barrels on the 12-shot, rotary drum shotguns specifically to give the titanic assassin a weapon that he felt comfortable with. An oversize trigger guard and grips for his big hands completed the fitting of tool to user.

“Right. Spread out,” Keller said. “We won’t have much time to make sure of a clean sweep, not after the racket we raised.”

“If the cops come, we’ll take care of them,” Cannon responded, his cruel mouth twisting into a hideous smile.

Keller sighed, threw Haggar a bandolier of shotgun shells, then began reloading his Ripper. Cannon chuckled. Even though Keller hated to kill more people than they were hired to, there was a glint of joy as the malevolent, miniature weapons designer fed a new belt into his crowd-killing device.

Sure enough, the San Francisco Police Department showed up as they reached the entrance of the office building.

Of course, Cannon thought later. He slipped into the back of their delivery van and looked at the burning police cars and slaughtered officers slumped in the street—they never stood a chance.

CHAPTER TWO

David McCarter had a strong stomach, but when the horde of bloodred monstrosities fell upon the captive Special Forces soldiers, the Briton had to look away and shake his head. In the SAS, he’d seen countless atrocities committed against captured soldiers and policemen, and as a member and leader of Phoenix Force, he’d been at ground zero to several more. Every time he saw them, revulsion steeled him to fight harder against the madmen who sought to turn the world into their charnel house.

At the other end of the War Room table, a massive fist smashed down hard. Carl “Ironman” Lyons, Able Team’s commander, had given in to his anger.

“That’s what you’ll be going up against, David,” Hal Brognola affirmed, ignoring Lyons’s outburst.

“Africa,” McCarter said. He looked at his mission plan. “Well, I’d like to at least have Calvin with me on this.”

Brognola glanced over to Calvin James. He was a tall, lanky black man, one of the first replacement members of Phoenix Force and their first American teammate. “I wish I could keep Phoenix Force together, but we don’t have enough manpower to keep the teams intact and handle what we think are the three hot spots in the AJAX hunt.”

McCarter sighed. “We can’t call Mack in on this?”

Brognola shook his head. “He’s gone hunting. He’ll be back when he can, but I want AJAX stopped immediately.”

McCarter sighed. “All right. Phoenix has split up before to take on missions. But once you find the gobs who’ve been snuffing those State Department boys…”

“We’ll be right on the first flight to the Sudan,” James answered.

McCarter winked at his longtime teammate. “Don’t make me have to bail you out, Cal.”

Rafael Encizo spoke up. “We’ve got Japan nailed down.” The stocky Cuban’s swarthy face split with a wide smile. He glanced over to James, who looked troubled. “You okay, amigo?”

“I just wish I could be in three places at once,” James said. “I hate leaving David in Africa without a brother to back him up. And Able Team’s going to San Francisco where a lot of cops were killed by the creeps who wiped out HedSpayce.”

McCarter frowned. When he first met Calvin James, he was a member of the San Francisco SWAT team. The ex-Navy SEAL had left behind the streets of Chicago where too many of his family had been lost to heroin and its abusers. Still, even after leaving the military, James wanted to do something to see that no one else suffered like his sister and mother. Putting on a badge was James’s first step in that crusade, but soon the ex-SEAL was called to join another war, taking the place of the fallen Keio Ohara. James still kept ties with the San Francisco police department, and helped vet blacksuits for Buck Greene from that department. McCarter had lost enough friends and partners to know how much James wanted to be part of the team that got even for the slaughter of his fellow lawmen.

“Cal, look at that ugly brute that just dented the table,” McCarter said. Rosario Blancanales and Hermann Schwarz, Lyons’s partners on Able Team, chuckled at the Briton’s description of their friend.

James looked at Lyons out of the corner of his eye. He made a face. “Do I have to?”

“Kin-A you have to.” Lyons grunted, slipping into caveman mode.

James looked over, and McCarter continued. “I know you want to do mean, nasty things to those cop killers and freaks who murdered twenty unarmed office workers. I know you’re dying to unleash every horror under the sun upon them. But, Calvin, you’re only human.”

Lyons snorted ferociously.

“That ugly bugger, he’s a bloody nightmare come to life. Do you honestly think there is a worse punishment on Earth than sending him after them?” McCarter asked.

“Well, since you put it that way,” James answered. “I know I sure wouldn’t want to see him as the last thing before I went to hell.”

McCarter gave his friend a clap on the shoulder. James would have gone to Japan and done his duty anyways. Still, it was good to relieve some of his tension and doubts.

“You done with the Mac and Lyons show?” Brognola asked, feeling a little impatient.

McCarter looked at Lyons and raised his eyebrows. The blond ex-cop nodded. “Thanks, Carl.”

“Anytime,” Lyons responded.

“Now that we’re done with that,” Brognola said, “any questions?”

Gary Manning, a broad, barrel-chested Canadian, raised his hand. “The Predator that knocked down the Pave Hawk that Kensington and his team were on. Has anyone been able to check to find out how it was tampered with?”

Brognola took a deep breath, chewing his cigar. “Unfortunately, the central processor unit was destroyed on impact with the Pave Hawk.”

“So we’re up a creek without a paddle on that,” T. J. Hawkins drawled. McCarter rubbed his chin as he looked at photographs of the wreckage.

“Why?” Hermann Schwarz asked, and looked across the table to Manning, Phoenix Force’s demolitions expert.

“Not only did the Pave Hawk veer off course after losing radio contact with their base, but the Predator that was assigned to watch their target followed them. You’d think that the drone’s crew would have picked up on any interference,” Manning responded.

Schwarz ran his index finger through his mustache and thought about it for a moment. “Well, Ka55andra, the leader of AJAX, appears to be a hacker. She could have overridden the Predator’s command codes.”

“From where?” Manning asked.

“With the right satellite hookups, anywhere on the planet,” Schwarz answered. “But she’d have to be a wizard to override its control systems.”

“She does claim to be a prophet,” Blancanales answered.

“A prophet of doom, just like the original Cassandra,” Hawkins stated.

“The original Cassandra?” Brognola asked.

“It’s in Homer’s Iliad, and various other myths,” Encizo cut in. “Cassandra was given the power of prophecy by Apollo because he had fallen in love with her. Unfortunately, she didn’t love him, so he cursed her so that no one would ever believe her prophecies. Since then, Cassandra’s name has come to take on the meaning of a prophet of doom.”

Blancanales shrugged. “Didn’t you read the Classics in school, Hal?”

Brognola’s nose wrinkled. “All right. I’ll have the cybercrew look up more about her. There might be something more to her background that might suggest a motive for our cyberwitch.”

Lyons shrugged. “Well, the warrior Ajax, during the sacking of Troy, attacked and raped Cassandra in the temple of Athena. Later, the goddess Athena smashed his ship with a thunderbolt to sink him. When that didn’t work and Ajax clung to a rock, Poseidon split the stone with his trident and drowned him.”

Brognola glared at Lyons out of one eye.

“Oh, come on. It was a movie just a couple of years ago,” Lyons answered.

Brognola grumbled and shook his head.

“So we might have a rape victim as the mastermind coordinating the assault on Homeland Security?” Blancanales asked. He looked like he’d taken a bitter bite at the thought.

“Not just a rape victim,” Schwarz answered. “She had her home destroyed by Ajax. Burned to the ground, the survivors scattered to the winds, her family slaughtered.”

“And she’s blaming the Department of Homeland Security?” Manning cut in.

“Someone high up, at least,” James said. “A director, a deputy director…”

“All of whom are powerful politicians who have enough power to sweep any scandal under the rug,” McCarter mused.

Hawkins scratched his chin with his thumb, his eyes focusing on the table. He glanced over to Encizo for a helpful suggestion.

“Well, Ajax was a warrior. We could narrow it down,” Encizo suggested. “Ex-soldiers who had been present at the destruction of a city or town.”