Doomsday Conquest

“You ain’t. No deal. I’m walkin’ outta here and goin’ straight to the county sheriff.”

“Is that your final answer, Mr. Decker?”

“First and last.”

“Suit yourself.”

It was too easy, Decker’s instinct stirring, the old combat senses flaring to life, telling him something was wrong. He saw the glowing tip of the cigarette fall to the floor, eyes up, but the faceless Orion was gone, vanished, as if the light had swallowed him up. No sound of any door opening or closing to betray an exit, he was rising when he heard the electronic whir, looked up, thought he saw the ceiling part. A black hole yawning into view, barely perceptible as Decker squinted into the light, he heard machinery grinding to life, from some point beyond the white halo, deep in the dark void. If he didn’t know better, it sounded like a threshing machine was cranking to life. What the…

Warning bells clanged in a brain muddied by dope. He cursed whoever’d shot him up, limbs unwilling to respond to a rising sense of fear when the noise shrilled into what he was now certain was a wood chipper, and a damn big one, unless he missed his guess. He ventured a step forward, trying to get his sea legs, when the first gust of wind blasted around him like the gathering onslaught of a twister ready to rip across the prairie. Fear began edging toward terror, thoughts racing, as the wind strengthened, suctioned up and through the tunnel in the ceiling. What was happening became inconceivable, a nightmare he was sure, but here he was—all alone, no one knew he was even still alive, that he was dealing with the almighty hand of Big Brother who could do whatever he wanted and get away.

The cigarette was sucked up, flying past his eyes, the invisible force of a great vacuum swirling around him now, tugging arms and legs. The chair went next, shooting into the black hole, followed a split second later by a sort of screeching metallic grind.

And it dawned on him what was about to happen, horror setting in, the unholy racket of machinery torqued up to new decibels, spiking his ears, as he heard his cry being swept away into the white light. He tried to forge ahead, but the wind seemed to root him to the floor, the ground beneath like magnets daring him to walk, and far worse than any mud he’d ever slogged through more than half a century ago. The scream was on the tip of his tongue, but he knew the sound of terror would be lost to all but himself, if even that, as he was sheared naked by the cyclone, the flesh on his face feeling wrenched up, as though it was being blasted off bone, the twister sucking the air out of his lungs.

Oh, God, no! he heard his mind roar as he was lifted off his feet, levitating for a moment before the invisible strings began jerking with renewed violent force.

And he burst a silent scream into the wind, arms wrenched above his head, as he rose toward the black hole.

IT WAS A MOMENT, about as rare as a Nellie sighting in Loch Ness, Hal Brognola considered when he felt himself about to be scourged by depression. Or was it something else, he wondered, and far more insidious as he weighed the few facts as he knew them? Self-doubt? That what he did perhaps, at best, only pounded a small dent toward making the free world a better, safer place? That the only real solution, he morbidly thought, was kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out?

And dismissed that as soon as the first whisper of fatalistic pessimism filtered into his head. No way could he look himself in the mirror if he lived without principles, he knew, briefly angry with himself for even entertaining such notions. To doubt his duty, first of all, would be tantamount to death. And to undercut the fact there were good people everywhere—who only wished to live in peace and harmony, raise families, do whatever was right, whatever it took, no matter how tempting it was to turn their backs and go through the easy and wide-open gates of hell—was the first step toward becoming what he’d spent his life fighting.

Troubled, nonetheless, sifting through grim thoughts, the Man from Justice stole another few seconds, staring out the window as the Bell JetRanger swept over the Blue Ridge Mountains. When was the last time, he wondered, he had actually enjoyed the pristine view of those forested slopes, free to observe the rising sun spread the arrival of a new day, free to relax, not burdened by the weight of the nation’s security?

He couldn’t remember, and maybe it didn’t matter. By nature or destiny—and he wasn’t sure where the line blurred—he drove himself with the task at hand as hard as the day was long, grimly aware the wicked did not rest in his world. Beyond that, he was committed to the duty of defending America against its sworn enemies, from within and beyond its borders. On that score, it was an endless battlefront, he knew, forever expanding, as far as he was concerned, another roster of monsters always rising up to replace the evil dead, and often before the smoke cleared enough to see the next blood horizon. Or to pin down the next threat to God only knew how many innocents.

And it was a changing world out there, he reflected, evolving darker and more sinister by the day. Weapons of mass destruction. Suicide bombers. Suitcase nukes. Whole nations harboring, training and financing the murder of innocents. Supposed NATO allies, France and Germany, for example, doing business in the billions of dollars in the shadows with a former tyrant who used murder and torture and rape as an entertaining pastime. Forget any goodwill toward all men, there were mornings, like now, he wondered if the whole world was just going straight to hell.

He stood and went to the scanning console set on the small teakwood table. It was roughly the size of a notebook computer, but with attached fax and what looked like a microscope, Brognola finding his access code had been relayed to the Farm’s Computer Room, confirmed and framed in white on the monitor. Initiate Phase Two flashed, and he took a seat. IPT, he knew, was part of a trial run to upgrade security, establish identity one hundred percent, thus save time and keep the blacksuits from rolling out of the main building, or find the antiaircraft battery painting incoming aircraft.

The retinal scan was first, Brognola placing his right socket against the scope’s eye, depressing the send button, grateful high-tech refinements didn’t produce any flash that would leave him squinting. Right thumb rolled over the ink pad, then placed on standard-size, white bond paper, he punched in the numbers for the secure line, faxed it to Kurtzman. Tapping in a series of numbers to activate the system’s scrambler—Go illuminated in green on the monitor’s readout—he spoke into the miniature voice box.

“This is Alpha One to Omega Base Home. Confirm Voice Test Analysis. All tests initiated, awaiting your confirmation. Out.”

While he waited, Brognola eased back in the bolted-down leather swivel chair. There was a gathering tempest out there, and only direct actionable response, he knew, would hold back the barbarians before they tore down the walls of civilization.

FORMER DELTA FORCE Colonel Joshua Langdon took the smaller of black ferrite-painted aluminum steamer trunks by the nylon strap handle as soon as the ninety-foot-long inflatable boat scraped sand. Known to his men and the attached three-commando unit calling itself Tiger Ops as Commander X, he allowed the others to jump over the side first, splash down in ankle-deep, blue-green water. Five altogether, two commandos each to a steamer trunk the size of a body bag, the odd man out he knew as Capricorn Alpha Galaxy Leader, hands empty except for an HK MP-5 subgun, and they were on the beach, seconds flat, hauling the high-tech loads—one of his troops likewise burdened with a hundred-pounds-plus of folded camo netting on his back—deeper into the lush tropical greenery. A GPS module in the hands of his one of his commandos, steering them down a path to erect their base predetermined by satellite shoots, he followed Capricorn Alpha Galaxy Leader to shore.

Home sweet home, at least for the immediate future.

A quick search of the beach, black wraparound sunglasses shielding eyes from sunlight that beat off the emerald-green waters and white sand like imagined glowing radiation, and the ex-Delta colonel found himself alone with the Tiger Ops leader. Setting the trunk down, shucking the slung HK subgun higher up his shoulder, Commander X checked the screen on his handheld heat-seeker. Sweeping the perimeter, he found six ghosts in human shape, with much smaller thermal images flashing across the screen. He took a moment, listening to the gentle lap of waves on the beachhead, the caws of wild birds from some point inside the ringing walls of greenery on the coral island roughly the size of a city block.

“Almost paradise, huh? Nothing personal, you understand, but it kind of makes me wish I’d brought along my own little Eve.”

Commander X glanced at the lean figure in tiger-striped camous, the Tiger Ops leader working on a smoke, clearly not all that inclined to do much more than profile, opting to leave the grunt work to others, while drinking in this Eden and maybe picture romping naked through the lagoon with his own vision of the mother of mankind. Something about the leader troubled Langdon, but he couldn’t pin it down. The guy had shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair and a nappy beard as opposed to his own buzz cut, clean mug. Langdon noted the military bearing, decided there was more mercenary—or buccaneer, in this instance—than a current or ex-serviceman or intelligence operative performing his duty for country and God. Likewise, it was unclear who the Tiger Ops leader pledged allegiance to, even why he’d been assigned to assist him on what was a satellite relay station somewhere in the Maldive Islands.

Langdon saw his two men hustling down the beach to retrieve the rest of the steamer trunks. As they splashed down, he turned, looked at the anchored Interceptor Gunboat. The skipper, he knew, was one of his people, and the inshore patrol craft, on loan, presumably from the CIA station chief in India, would stay put until he green-lighted the man to pull away for surveillance duty. Langdon ran an approving look, stem to stern of their gunboat ride. Two Deutz MWM diesel engines, top speed of 25 knots, a range of 600 nautical miles, with a forward 12.7 mm machine gun, and he had no doubt about the ability of his troops manning the ship to fend off trouble, alert them to any incoming surprises. They worked for the same people, he knew, his men having been culled from various special forces for both their proved martial skills and high-tech talent, signing the standard “training” contracts that swore them to a lifetime of secrecy. Halfway around the world from Omega Base, they would be able to reach the Farm as if they were but a few yards away, once the fiberoptic comm station was set up. As for his Tiger Ops comrades…

Well, in this age of the media and politically stamped “new war on terrorism,” every intelligence, law-enforcement agency and military arm wanted to muscle itself in for a piece of the action. Langdon, like the people he represented, wasn’t in it for money or the glory. Truth was, he—like anyone who worked in the shadows for the Farm—was nowhere to be found on any official record.

He stole another moment, staring off into the vast Indian Ocean, getting his bearings. They had departed from Cape Comoros on the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent, pushing out, south by southwest, where the Lakshadweep Sea flowed into the Indian Ocean. The Maldives were comprised of a chain of twenty-six atolls of 1190 islands, only 200 of which were inhabited, and none of which rose more than ten feet off the water. Most of the islands sat, more or less, on the equator, and for this stint plenty of bottled water was required to get them through the long, hot days. Call their position somewhere in the vicinity of 400 miles due west of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

“Shall we get to work, Commander?”

Langdon heard the soft whine of battery-powered drills working on tent pegs. Hoping the man was inclined to do more than catch a tan and daydream about some island girl, Langdon skipped the remark as the Tiger Ops leader turned and strolled away, slinging his HK around his shoulder to free his hands for another cigarette.

ROBERT FIRE CLOUD was angry and scared.

For what he guessed was ten hours or more now, he had been watching them from a safe distance. Hidden in a gully in the hills north of what used to be his home, and the white eyes government-built-and-paid-for houses of his neighbors, each time one of the black helicopters—three in all for the moment—lifted off and swept the prairie near his roost, he took cover deeper in his hole. Who they were, he didn’t know, but assumed they were white eyes soldiers, between the choppers, the submachine guns, black uniforms and matching helmets.

What he knew was that four homes had been blown off the face of the earth. Only now were the fires of brilliant white beginning to lose their anger and intense glow. When the wind blew his way, he caught the sickly sweet whiff of charred flesh, the memory of neighbors and friends burning deep his anger each time his nose filled with the stink. His home, little more than a two-room shack, may be just a glowing cinder, but he was thankful he lived alone.

His neighbors hadn’t been so blessed.

Granted, the edge of hot anger had dulled some during the course of the past few hours, after the few first bodies had been dug out of the smoldering piles by men in spacesuits, dumped in black rubber bags. Now that it was clear some horrific accident had befallen Crazy Horse Lane, he wasn’t sure how to proceed, where to run, who to go to for help. The county sheriff, John Mad Bull, would be passed out, too hung over to do anything even if he woke him at that hour.

So he watched the spacesuits use long metal poles to dig through more rubble, extracting bodies or what was left of men, women and children who shared this lonely stretch of the Berthold Reservation. His closest neighbors were six to eight miles in any direction, but surely, he thought, they had heard the tremendous series of explosions? Or had the same fate befallen them?

Again, he considered his own good fortune, felt a flush of shame on his cheeks, thinking himself lucky as opposed to the dead. If not for his nightly ritual at the Crazy Horse saloon…

He was stone-cold sober now, but began thinking about the bottle of Wild Turkey under the seat of his pickup, a few down the hatch to get his nerves and the shakes under control. The longer he watched them, he wondered if the white eyes soldiers spotted him, would he use the G-3 assault rifle, bought at a gun show and converted to fully automatic, stand his ground, go down in some blaze of glory. After all, he thought, he was believed to be direct blood to Crazy Horse. Only the white eyes had him outnumbered fifty or more to one. A 40-round detachable box magazine would hardly take down more than a few, considering he saw gunships armed with machine guns in their doorways.

He had to do something, even if it was wrong.

One of the gunships made the decision for him, as it lifted off, veering in his direction. As if it knew he had been there all along.

He stood, hunched, and worked his way down the gully, as fast as limbs swollen with the sludge of liquor would allow. Beyond his heart thundering in his ears, the assault rifle growing heavy in hands filling with the running sweat of the night’s drinking, he heard the insect bleat of chopper blades bearing down from behind. After what he’d seen, what was to stop these men from taking him prisoner, or killing him? Or was he being paranoid? He didn’t know, wasn’t about to freeze where he stood. They were still white eyes with guns.

Stumbling out of the gully, he hit level ground, running for his Chevy pickup. Out of nowhere, the light flared, fear seizing him as he was framed in the white umbrella, heard a voice boom from a loudspeaker, “You there! Halt now and throw down your weapon!”

The command was delivered, not only with anger, he thought, but with menace. He was turning, snarling as the light stabbed him in the eyes, to split a brain throbbing from exertion, when he became aware he was lifting his assault rifle.

Then the machine gun roared through the light. He felt numb flesh absorb the first few rounds, the impact jerking him halfway around before hot emotion and the desire to die standing on his feet seized him. Rage that these white eyes soldiers would slaughter him without further warning erupted what he hoped was his best war cry. He held back on the G-3’s trigger as the big gun thundered, chopping up his flesh, spraying hot blood on his face. He was dead on his feet, he knew, seconds from floating away to the next world, but Robert Fire Cloud only hoped his death and whatever had happened to his neighbors would be avenged.

CHAPTER FOUR

Hal Brognola watched the War Room’s wall monitor as Aaron Kurtzman took the remote and clicked on the bearded, turbaned face of what he suspected was the bad guy of the month.

“The Sign of God, Rafiq Namak…” Kurtzman began.

“The what?” Brognola exhorted.

“That’s what Ayatollah means, sign of God. Only this cleric has anointed himself Grand Ayatollah, and it appears he’s looking to muscle out all the competition, from drug and arms traffickers to rival mullahs, all the way to the president of Iran, who, as far as moderates go in that part of the world, is about as rational as they come.”

“Meaning, can we say, ‘he wants to be chummy with Uncle Sam,’” Brognola interjected.

“Up to a point, but only as long as he can keep the country from being overrun by Pizza Huts, rap music, satellite television that pipes in western entertainment while kissing up to the hardliners behind the scenes. The president of Iran, as we all know, isn’t the real power that keeps either the oil pumping or the radicals frothing at the mouth and chanting ‘Death to America.’ He’s a puppet, in truth, toeing the line between bringing his country into the twenty-first century and appeasing the radical clerics.

“According to our CIA intelligence skims, there’s been another in a long line of internal power struggles between rival clerics for the choice seat at the head of the extremist table. Right now, it looks like Namak has fairly fitted himself to wear that crown. He has his own and not-so-small army of radicals, including some of the most dangerous and vicious intelligence officers, ex-SAVAK thugs, a mass following of politically indoctrinated Revolutionary Guards who do his bidding, which is pretty much offing the competition or who are so cruel and barbaric they could have given Saddam’s sons a few lessons in torture. He’s done pretty good for himself, if you factor in his last known five or so years of opium and heroin proceeds coming across the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, cutting himself in a for a nice chunk of change for safe passage and warehousing. Then there’s his version of madrassas, about twenty schools, our intel cites, only far more radical than anything in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Egypt, and which he runs across Iran in every corner, with hand-picked mullahs who give new meaning to the word extreme. Pretty much the usual brainwashing of angry impoverished youth being groomed for future martyrdom, only these students, some as young as seven or eight, are being shipped out to blow themselves up wherever Namak aims his ‘kill all Americans’ automatons.

“Considering he was born with a silver spoon shoved down his vitriolic anti-West yap—the son of a father whose father brokered himself a sweet deal during the early Anglo-Iranian Oil Company days—Rafiq was educated in Europe where he apparently forgot all about the strict tenets of Shi’a Islam, his reputation being one of a free-spending, drug-using playboy, who, so the rumor goes, had some peculiar tastes in sexual games. Word from spook city is he spent a few years in the late eighties and early nineties ingratiating himself to the CIA, the NSA, DIA and whoever else might help him climb the ladder of success while he lies, backstabs, generally plays both ends against the middle in a high-wire act that apparently left a whole lot of wreckage—spell dead American intelligence operatives.”

“Meaning,” Brognola said, “his former friends are now his enemies.”

“Or may still be his pals, if what is rumored churning out of the spook mill pans out and he’s handing out the ready cash to the buzzards of the day. What he wants, publicly stated, is one united Middle East under Shiite control, and he’s starting with Iraq, lighting the powder keg of resistance. Beyond that, engineering mass killing sprees, who knows what his end game really is? He’s made plenty of enemies, no question, there have been several assassination attempts, but he seems blessed by that weird dark light that always sees his ilk live to savage another day. He uses body doubles to keep trigger-happy rivals guessing, never known to be in the same place for very long. Sometimes you see him in robe and turban when he makes an appearance before the adoring mobs. Other times a three-piece suit, or he sports tiger-striped camous when he ventures into the desert to check out one of his three known training camps for the youngbloods. There are claims by his followers that he can see the future.”

“Do tell.”

Kurtzman grunted. “Apparently he’s not bashful when it comes to touting himself an oracle of Mohammed.”

“I’ll venture a wild guess here, but his psychic powers predict terrorist attacks.”

“He’s been right on the money, at least the where and how of it,” Kurtzman said, cocking a grin in Brognola’s direction. “The body counts are a little off, but with each attack, whether in Israel or his favorite killing ground, Iraq, the crowds go wild in Tehran. Lately he’s been hitting the airwaves over there with predictions of total annihilation for the Great Satan, a ‘conflagration from God that will wipe America off the face of the earth in a storm of fire the world will never forget.’”

“Blowing smoke?”

Kurtzman shrugged. “Hard to tell. How far along Iran’s reprocessing plants are to make weapons-grade plutonium and uranium, we don’t know, but we know of at least two factories of WMD that are well on their way, and believed to be loosely controlled by an influx of Namak cash. We do know that he calls his organization of fighters the Army of Armageddon, and with radical ties all the way to Lebanon where, it’s believed, he wants to establish a power base. And, yes, in order to jumpstart his war of annihilation, presumably starting with Israel while he torches what he can in Iraq.”

Brognola gnawed on his cigar, perused the intel packet Barbara Price had handed him earlier. During the brief pause, Brognola noticed that the Stony Man Mission Controller seemed unusually quiet, but the lady was a pro, no problem listening with one ear to the brief while she scanned the monitor of her battery-powered laptop, combing through the grim facts as he’d received them late last night from his nameless source in Shadowland. Likewise, Kurtzman had his own notebook computer, having already downloaded the CDROM to his hard drive, hooking the modem that would allow him to frame pertinent data direct from both computers to the wall monitor.

“This,” Kurtzman said, clicking the screen to frame what looked like a typical artillery shell, “is SPLAT. Special Purpose Laser Anti-Tank.”

Brognola waited as Kurtzman broke the screen into four quads. He saw a tracked vehicle, a UAV that looked suspiciously like a CIA Predator, and some sort of delivery system, complete with radar screen, the background appearing to be a stone hovel.

“During a U.S. special ops raid on a stronghold believed used by Namak along the Iranian-Iraqi border, these were seized, along with blueprints and instructions strongly suspected of having their origins somewhere far outside the Mideast realm.”

“Any ideas on who’s looking to help pile up the body count with SPLAT?”

Kurtzman sipped from his mug, frowning. “There was some talk, the French were mentioned, but we think it’s a smoke screen to deflect blame. Since France was dumped in the crapper on oil contracts in Iraq, however, they have been schmoozing the Iranians. I’m not one to jump on the PC bandwagon, so I don’t mind saying they’re a sneaky, backstabbing lot, with a whole lot to hide in some shady dealings with Saddam, but I don’t think they have the balls to start dumping off ordnance that could be used against Coalition Forces in Iraq, though they most likely have this technology. That aside, there are no markings, serial numbers and such that we know of on the ordnance, which leaves suspicion enough to go around it could be Germans, North Koreans or Russians…”