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Kurtzman flashed Tokaido a scowl. He began chewing over the current mission of Phoenix Force, which was, more or less, still on the drawing board. At present, they were bivouacked at the American air base in Incirlik, Turkey, while the cyberteam at the Farm kept digging for clues about rumored supertech weapons being smuggled to Iranian extremists, somewhere along the Iraqi border, further in the process of attempting to put together pedigrees and place names to the faces of bad guys in question from their ultratech lair.
Kurtzman began to suspect he saw a pattern emerge, some connection, or so he believed Tokaido alluded to, between the death factory in Tajikistan and weapons-hungry jihadists. Was there more? Such as connecting the dots somehow to this Eagle Nebula black project? It wouldn’t be the first time, he knew, someone on the home team had sold out to the other side. Able Team was standing down, Kurtzman checking the digital clock at the bottom of his monitor, aware Hal Brognola, the man who headed the Sensitive Operations Group, would be arriving at his office at the Justice Department shortly. He needed to run his suspicions past the big Fed.
“There’s more, Bear, only I’m not sure how this fits, if it does…only…well, it’s just a feeling,” Tokaido said, and Kurtzman watched as four more sat images flashed onto his monitor, blurring the previous pics. He heard Tokaido mention the three names of former Soviet republics, then told him the last image was shot by NASA. “Remember that story CNN ran a few years back about a purported NORAD quarantine of an area in the Colorado Rockies that was supposedly hit by some type of…well, what was described by an eyewitness as ‘alien space matter.’”
Kurtzman knew he was looking at a full-blown military quarantine in each of the AIQs, complete with soldiers, choppers, makeshift work areas of equipment he couldn’t define, but manned by spacesuits. All told, he knew it spelled disaster area, civilians Keep Out, perhaps at the risk of jail time or worse.
“I do,” he told Tokaido. “It ran one time, as I recall.”
“NASA officially reported the Colorado incident as the result of a meteor shower. But ask yourself when was the last time you saw a hazmat detail gathered around a meteor, or stone fragments thereof, and with what appear to be radiation detectors?”
“And something tells me you got hold of classified documents that state otherwise.”
“Off the public radar screen as ‘unexplained extraterrestrial ore of unknown origin and substance.’ And that eyewitness?”
“I bet you’re about to tell me he vanished off the face of the earth.”
“There was one brief follow-up story, but the star witness was nowhere to be found.”
“Next you’re going to tell me NORAD, or whoever this Eagle Nebula, has iced down the bodies of little gray men with grasshopper-shaped heads and huge black eyes.”
“They’re actually a sort of off-white, but with a grayish hue. Hey, stranger things have happened, Bear, when it comes to the military wanting to keep unexplained phenomenon, whatever the truth and the mystery, all to themselves.”
No truer words, Kurtzman thought, could his cyber buddy have spoken. He reached for the intercom to start sounding off his suspicions.
CAMERON DECKER was sure he was dead, about to meet his Maker as he believed he opened his eyes, but was forced to clamp them shut when the blinding white light stabbed him clear through the brain, a lancing fire. No, this wasn’t heaven, he was in way too much pain for any eternal bliss, his body throbbing with knifing twists, scalp to feet. Gingerly he touched the side of his head, just to be sure he was, indeed, still on earth, probed the bandages wound around his skull. Why did he feel as if he was floating on air, though, his head like a balloon set to burst, both sensations bringing on the nausea? The last moment he remembered was…
A vision of hell on Earth, to say the least.
He saw himself being hurled through the air, far away from his ranch house, fractured pictures of recall slowly groping their way together. One minute, he had been dragged from the kitchen where he was preparing dinner for his bed-ridden wife, alarmed by the shrill barking of Custer. Even in the twenty-first century cattle rustlers were still alive and on the prowl for prime heads of choice beef, and it wouldn’t have been the first time some thieves had come through his spread and loaded up a trailer. The Winchester 30.06 in hand as he’d shucked on the sheepskin coat, grumbling his way out the back door, his normally stoic German shepherd dog going berserk, straining to break free of his chain. Spooked by what, he couldn’t tell, but his cattle were agitated as hell, his horses snorting from the barn, all in a lather. He’d heard that animals had some sixth sense, though, a built-in radar that warned them of mass atmospheric disturbances, and it wouldn’t be the first time that beastly extrasensory perception had foretold him of a sudden thunderstorm. It all looked like another red sundown over the prairie from where he stood, but there was “something” in the air. He could feel it. Something he thought he heard like a whistle, or those incoming rounds he remembered from Korea, the cattle stomping around the pen in a fury next as he walked…
There was an explosion, out of nowhere, or rather, a series of blasts that sounded as one, but with each earsplitting trumpet of thunder there was no telling as his senses were shattered. Before he could fully assess the moment, glimpsing in horror his home and his parents’ home of eighty-five years being uprooted and blown away like so much fertilizer in a twister, he was sailing, dumped, last he remembered, facedown inside the cattle pen.
Now…
He thought he was going to puke, groaning, as he dared to open his eyes. He was getting his bearings, found himself dressed in a white smock like a hospital gown, squinting into the shroud of white light that seemed supernatural in a way he could only describe as some waiting room—Purgatory perhaps?—between Heaven and Hell, when a voice called from the glow, “Mr. Decker? Can you hear me?”
A hard search, adjusting his vision, and he spotted a lean shape in black, straight ahead. The figure was blowing smoke through the light, sunglasses so black and fat they looked more like a visor. Between the combat boots and the pistol in shoulder holster, any hopeful notion the man was a doctor evaporated. Had he landed, though, in a hospital? The light alone was spooky enough, but there seemed to be no walls surrounding him, as if he were in some vast empty space, with the white shroud, bright as the sun, going on forever. Calling him? he wondered, wishing he didn’t feel so sick to his stomach, that feeling of being disembodied chilling him to the bone, warping his senses.
“Who are you? Where am I?”
“You can call me Mr. Orion. And you are in protective custody for the time being.”
“Protective…what the hell is going on? What happened to my ranch?” He tried to stand, but rubber legs folded, collapsing him back into his seat. Groaning, the room spinning, he said, “What’s wrong with me? What have you done to me…”
“Minor burns from the incident, a few cuts and contusions, Mr. Decker. We gave you a shot of morphine for the pain, patched you all up… You’ll be good as new in a few days. As for your ranch and all your cattle and horses—they are no longer standing.”
He felt his stomach roll over. “And my wife?”
“Your wife, Allison, Mr. Decker, was dying of breast cancer and emphysema. We’ll, uh, just call the incident where she is concerned a blessing in disguise. No, belay that. You being a devout church-goer and all, think of her passing as simply an act of God, that she now rests in eternal peace.”
Anger cleared some of the sludge away, this Orion character slamming his nose with one smoke bomb after another, speaking of his wife’s death as if it was nothing more than some near-miss highway crash he ought to be making the sign of the cross over. “Why, you rotten… I want to know what happened and exactly who you are, mister, or I swear…”
“Relax, Mr. Decker. Do you really need to bring on number three heart attack?”
Decker froze, the man reciting more of his medical history, with doctors’ names, dates of operations, down to length of each recuperation. Was that a smile? he wondered, this Orion talking next about his two sons, matter-of-fact, how they had turned their backs on what they called Nowhere, U.S.A., riding off to chase the wind of whatever their dreams in the big cities of Chicago and New York. Putting him in his place, playing mind games. But how did he know so much?
“I’m here to help, Mr. Decker, but only if you wish to help yourself. First of all, let us be clear, what happened to your ranch was the result of a meteor shower.”
“That wasn’t no rock falling from the sky that leveled my ranch and killed my wife. Those were explosions. I’m guessin’ some sort of missile or rocket.”
“As you might well believe that’s what you think you saw, being as you were a decorated veteran of the Korean War, having seen more than your rightful share of combat. And I salute you for your service to the country, sir.”
“Stick all that noise, and I don’t need to think about nothin’. I know what I saw. I’m bettin’ you’re military, work for the government. Something screwed up with you people, and now you want me to shut my mouth about what I saw. Let me tell you, friend, out here, we may be just dumb cowboys to you people, but I got no love for your Big Brother.”
And the faceless smoker knew all about that, too, the threats of bank foreclosures on his property, the audits and subsequent liens that drove him into bankruptcy, the suits from Washington offering to buy up his land, claiming they could cut him a break on what he owed if he grabbed the brass ring of his last stand.
“You seem to know an awful lot about me,” Decker snapped. “Whether or not much of this is a matter of public record, you don’t understand me at all.”
Another wave of smoke and Orion said, “No, it’s you who don’t understand, sir. Here it is, and this is a onetime, nonnegotiable offer. Between property value, including livestock, what would be your projected future earnings for the next five years and your wife’s insurance policy, we are prepared to write you a check in the amount of three million dollars, nontraceable, nontaxable funds. Death certificates have already been made out for both your wife and yourself, only you, sir, get to relocate, all expenses paid, until you get set up in someplace far away from North Dakota. Washington, all your medical bills and those banks you so detest? Your debt is erased, officially you become the man who was never born. Think about it. New name. New identity. You could be sitting on a beach in Hawaii, sipping mai tais and playing with the local hula-hoop talent by tomorrow. If I were you…”
“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.”
