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“Silence!” Thawan hissed. He pressed the .45 more tightly against Agent Bonarski’s head. “American,” he said to McCray, “think carefully about the choice I give you.”
“Drop your weapons!” McCray ordered again. “I am an authorized representative of the federal government and I will not tell you again!”
“You poor, sad little man.” Thawan’s smile broadened. “Messy, then.”
The .45 went off, and Agent Bonarski’s suddenly lifeless body fell from the catwalk.
Hell erupted.
The agents on the warehouse floor began firing their weapons as the men above held back the triggers on their Kalashnikovs. Full-auto weapons fire echoed through the cavernous space, drowning out all other sound.
The wave of heat and light and pressure broke over Agent Carrol as the gunfire surrounded her. Time slowed. As she moved, raising her Glock and firing round after round, she felt as if she were trying to move through water, her every action encountering impossible resistance. Her eyes widened in horror as she watched blood blossom on Mike McCray’s chest. He staggered under the onslaught of dozens of rounds, dropping his weapon and falling to the floor.
Carrol acted on instinct. She emptied her Glock in the direction of the catwalk as she ran for the cover of the nearest benches, diving beneath one and colliding with the cardboard cartons of drugs and DVD cases. She grunted as her shoulder hit the stack of boxes, then rolled, bullets tearing up the table above. Several rounds struck the cartons, scattering fine white mist in every direction as the bags of heroin were punctured.
From her position, Carrol could see the exit, the very door whose lock the team had broken so casually just minutes before. It was so close and yet so impossibly far. With bullets striking the table, the floor, and burning through the air all around her, she pushed herself to her feet and ran for the door, her Glock useless and locked open, no thought of reloading or fighting back. Blind flight instinct kicked in as the chaos around her became total. She saw another of the armed agents die scant feet away as she ran.
If only she could make the car. If only she could get to the radio. If only she could call for backup. There was still a chance.
The hammer blow to her chest felt like a cinder block against her ribs. Her knees buckled. She felt herself falling, the floor taking a thousand years to come up, everything happening so slowly…
She saw stars in her vision as the floor hit her face. The pain was a distant sensation, hardly significant. Some part of her was able to process that she had been shot. How many times and how badly she didn’t know. She felt warm blood on her cheek; she tasted it in her mouth. She thought, as she floated, disconnected from her body, that she had broken her nose in the fall. She tried to push herself to her feet and could not. She couldn’t feel her legs.
The agent who had gone down in front of her stared back at her, eyes glassy in death. Carrol tried desperately to think, to act, as her mind clouded over with pain and then numbness. Her hand struggled to find the inner pocket of her suit jacket.
The gunfire died away. Thawan’s men filed down from the catwalk and began moving from body to body. A single shot rang out, and then another, from opposite sides of the warehouse. The shooters were killing the survivors. Those workers unharmed in the gunfight were being herded to one side of the workspace. The wounded workers were shot dead with the same casual disregard the gunmen had shown the FBI agents.
“Now, move, move,” Thawan was ordering the remaining workers, who looked at him with wide-eyed terror. “Collect the boxes. Collect the drugs. Everything must be packed and made ready for shipment. Gig!”
One of the gunmen, an even smaller, misshapen man with a scar across his face, hurried forward, cradling his Kalashnikov.
“Yes, boss.”
“Call for the trucks. We must move up the timetable.”
“That will take time, boss. The schedule is complicated. We will have to rearrange the drops.”
“Gig Tranh,” Thawan said with an exaggerated sigh, “did I ask for your opinion?”
“No, boss.”
“Then do as I tell you!” Thawan shouted, waving his .45 to punctuate the point.
“Yes, boss.” The small man scuttled off, pulling a wireless phone from his BDU jacket as he did so.
“You and you,” Thawan pointed to the nearest frightened workers. “Come here. You will help me search the bodies. We will take everything of value. Guns, ammunition. Their wallets. Their watches. Also, I want their badges. One never knows when such things will be of value.”
Agent Carrol, against the increasing, crushing weight of her limbs, managed to drag her own wireless phone from her jacket. Thawan was moving back and forth across the hazy field of her vision. She had one chance. She could feel her life slipping away; could feel her hold on consciousness ebbing. From what little she could see from the floor, it did not appear that any of the other FBI agents had survived. If they had, they would be killed. It was only luck that nobody had gotten to her yet.
She had to live long enough to let someone know, to get out word of what had happened. If only Thawan would move back into view…
Thawan stopped, turned and looked straight at her.
She snapped the picture with her phone’s camera option.
“Well, well,” Thawan said. He walked to her deliberately, not hurrying, seemingly not at all concerned. “What do you think you are doing?”
Carrol could feel her vision turning gray at the edges. The sound of Thawan’s voice was hollow in her ears, as if he spoke through a metal pipe.
She hit Send, transmitting the MMS message to the first contact in her phone’s address book.
Thawan reached down and snatched the phone from her. He took notice of the empty Glock still clutched in her other hand. Contemptuously, he kicked her pistol aside. Then he examined the phone.
“Well,” he said, shaking his head, “it appears you will not be calling for help. Even if you had, pretty lady—” he smiled, showing rotted, uneven teeth “—it would do no good. We will be gone before anyone arrives. You have died for nothing.” He dropped the phone to the floor and stomped it with one booted foot. It took several tries, but he was finally able to crush the phone, snapping it into several pieces.
“You…” Carrol managed to say, her breath coming in short rasps now. “You…won’t…”
“Won’t what, pretty lady?” Thawan smiled. “Won’t get away with it? Won’t escape? Won’t walk over the bodies of your dead fascist pig brothers and escape? I will, and more.” He squatted and took her face in his left hand. His right still held the .45. Holding her chin and jaw, he moved her head from side to side. “Such a shame. Such a waste. You are really not so bad-looking, you know? We could have had some fun, my boys and I. But no,” he said and let her go. She collapsed, now staring directly at the ceiling. “No, you are too far gone. But not so far gone that I will not help you there.”
The last thing Agent Carrol saw was Thawan standing over her, the barrel of the .45 impossibly large as he aimed it between her eyes.
The muzzle-blast was very bright.
CHAPTER TWO
Stony Man Farm
In the War Room at Stony Man Farm, the stern-looking and apparently disembodied face of Hal Brognola stared from one of the plasma wall screens, twice as big as life. Across from the screen, seated near one end of the long conference table, Barbara Price tapped keys on a slim notebook computer.
“How about now, Hal?” she asked.
“Yes, I can hear you.” Brognola nodded, his disembodied voice amplified by the wall speakers positioned around the room. Price tapped a key to lower the volume slightly, bringing the big Fed’s virtual presence to something closer to normal. The microphone on Brognola’s end of the scrambled connection was producing some feedback, which Price eliminated with the stroke of a key.
“You forgot,” Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman said, rolling into the room in his wheelchair, “to ask him to say, ‘Testing, one, two, three.’ Hardly a dignified state in which to find the director of the Sensitive Operations Group.”
“What can I say?” Brognola said, his voice dry. “I’m a man of the people.”
Price nodded. The big Fed was broadcasting from his office on the Potomac, roughly eighty miles away in Washington, D.C. Even through the scrambled link, she could tell that Brognola was forcing the humor. The strain was visible around his eyes. It would not be the first time she had seen his image on the screen and worried for his health. Brognola drove his people hard, but he drove himself much harder.
Kurtzman rolled into position next to Price’s chair and put his heavy stainless, industrial-size coffee mug on the conference table. “It’s a mystery to me,” he said, “how the settings on that connection change from conference to conference.”
“Goes with the territory, Bear,” Price said. “The first rule of technology is that anything that can malfunction will do so just before the meeting.”
“Sounds familiar, at that,” Kurtzman grunted. The head of the Farm’s cybernetics team—not to mention a computer genius in his own right—took a long swallow from his mug of coffee.
The rest of the computer support team filed in, heralded by the dull roar from the MP3 player whose headphones were jammed into Akira Tokaido’s ears. The young Japanese computer expert was, as always, listening to heavy metal at eardrum-bursting decibel. He wore a leather jacket and an eager expression.
After Tokaido was Carmen Delahunt, who looked unusually somber this morning. Price knew why; the normally vivacious redhead was formerly with the FBI. She was speaking in hushed tones with fellow cybernetics team member Huntington “Hunt” Wethers. The refined, graying black man said something to which Delahunt only nodded. The pair took seats on either side of Akira, making way for the personnel crowding the corridor behind them.
Phoenix Force was first into the room, led by David McCarter. The lean, hot-headed Briton was sipping from a can of soda and muttering something under his breath. It was, Price thought, probably a complaint of some kind that he would be more than happy to air during the briefing.
The former SAS operator was followed by quiet, solid demolitions expert Gary Manning. The big Canadian and former member of an antiterrorist squad with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was in turn chatting with Cuban-born guerilla expert Rafael Encizo. The deadly Encizo moved with a quiet grace that was an interesting counterpart to Manning’s comfortable, solid gait.
Behind the two men, Calvin James, the dark-skinned, wisecracking product of Chicago’s South Side, said something Price couldn’t hear that made Manning smile and caused Encizo to laugh out loud. The former SEAL and expert knife fighter had a cutting sense of humor, as he was fond of saying. It was an old but dependable joke. James was followed by former Ranger and born-and-bred Southern boy T. J. Hawkins, whose easygoing manner and comfortable drawl masked a dynamic and keen-minded soldier.
Together, the five men of Phoenix Force were the Farm’s international warriors, taking the fight for justice from America’s shores to the rest of the world. The three men of Able Team, Stony Man’s domestic counterterrorist operators, were close on their heels. The trio took the remaining seats around the now-crowded conference table.
Blond, crew-cut, bull-necked and ever gruff, Able’s leader, Carl “Ironman” Lyons, looked to be in a typically cross mood. Lyons had little patience for these briefings, which Price knew usually reminded the former L.A. police officer of the bureaucracy he’d left behind so many years before. Next to him, trying and failing to banter with him, was Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz. Schwarz was an electronics expert whose devices and designs had supplemented the Stony Man teams’ gear on more than one occasion. Schwarz was more than an electronics whiz, though; he was also an experienced counterterror operative and veteran of countless battles.
Quietly considering all assembled was Rosario “Politician” Blancanales. The normally soft-spoken Hispanic was a former Black Beret and an expert in the psychology of violence and role camouflage. As such, Price had noted many times before, he tended to hang back, observe and gather data before saying anything. When he finally spoke, it was normally worth listening to him.
“All right,” Price said. “Hal, you’re ready?”
“Yes, go ahead.” Brognola nodded on the plasma screen.
Price touched a key on her notebook computer. The plasma screen opposite Brognola, visible to all at the table, came to life. The image it displayed was that of a small, dark-skinned man wearing an open BDU blouse over a novelty T-shirt. He carried a .45 in one hand. The image was somewhat grainy and had clearly been enhanced, but the face of the man—and the cruelty evident on it—was clearly visible.
“This,” Price said, “is Mok Thawan. This photo was taken seconds before Thawan executed a gravely wounded FBI agent.”
Delahunt swore under her breath. The rest of the Stony Man personnel nodded or simply took in the image, saying nothing.
Price pressed another key. The image changed to that of a large interior space littered with empty tables—and dead bodies. “Camden, New Jersey,” she said. “This warehouse was the target of an FBI task force pursuing what is believed to be one of the largest retail piracy rings operating in the United States. According to the data assembled by the task force members beforehand, this site was a clearinghouse for the smuggling of illegally manufactured and copied DVDs.”
The image changed again as Price touched the key once more. She scrolled through several photos of the dead FBI agents, whose bodies had been marked with evidence tags. Empty shell casings littered the floor.
“What is that dust everywhere?” McCarter asked, sipping his Coke.
“That,” Price said, tapping a couple of keys and bringing up some close-up shots, “is heroin.”
“Bloody hell,” McCarter said.
“Not long after the shoot-out,” Price explained, “local police responded. They found what you see here. Dead FBI agents, stripped of their weapons. An empty warehouse. And heroin residue everywhere.” She entered something on the notebook computer and scanned the file on her screen. “The police reports indicate that all of the agents were shot except one, who had his throat cut. There was nothing else in the warehouse except a few empty boxes and several shattered plastic DVD cases. Whoever was operating there, whatever the extent of their activities, they pulled up stakes and got out of there fast and completely.”
“So the Bureau raided what they thought was a fairly tame retail piracy operation,” Blancanales said, “and instead got heroin smugglers?”
“That’s just the beginning of it,” Price said. She switched the image on the plasma screen back to that of Mok Thawan. “Thawan is a known quantity, with an Interpol dossier a mile long. Specifically, he figures prominently in organized crime centered in southern Asia. He’s an enforcer for a group that calls itself the Triangle.”
“The Triangle runs heroin from Thailand and Burma to the United States,” Brognola said. “Just about every major law-enforcement agency, foreign and domestic, is aware of its activities, but precious little has been done about it up to now.”
“Why is that, Hal?” Schwarz asked.
“A combination of factors,” Brognola said, sounding weary. “Corruption in the local governments, especially in Thailand. There is some evidence that the Burmese government is directly involved, too, but it’s less overt, which might mean it’s even worse.”
“If they bother hiding it, there’s something to hide,” Encizo said.
“Exactly.” Brognola nodded. “The Triangle is also incredibly violent. They respond with ruthless, overwhelming force whenever threatened. This bloodbath in New Jersey is nothing compared to the slaughter of government troops in Thailand last year, when a joint DEA-Interpol task force got close to the Triangle’s operations there.”
“If they’re so big a problem,” McCarter interrupted, “why haven’t we targeted them before now?”
“Until recently,” Brognola said, “they’ve been ghosts. International law enforcement has been a step behind the Triangle for the past three years. Several attempts to penetrate the organization with undercover agents have also failed.”
“Every one of the agents has turned up dead or gone missing entirely,” Price explained. “Interpol claims to have at least one agent unaccounted for, but nobody’s heard from him or her for at least six months.”
“Likely swimming with the fishes,” McCarter concluded.
“The massacre in New Jersey has the Man agitated,” Brognola said, “and for good reason. The sad but direct fact of the matter is that we cannot allow government agents to be killed en masse on U.S. soil, not without mounting a response.”
“You don’t mean to tell me this is about making a statement?” McCarter demanded. “Bloody Christ, Hal! Is that what we’ve come to now?”
“You know better than that, David,” Brognola said sternly. “There are certain political realities, yes,” he explained, “but what’s changed is that we finally have a way to track the Triangle and get out in front of their operation.”
“Bear and his team—” Price nodded to Kurtzman, Tokaido, Delahunt and Wethers “—have conducted an extensive investigation into financial accounts and networks known to be linked to the Triangle.”
“By ‘extensive,’ she means ‘illegal,’” Wethers said with a faint smile.
“Very.” Price glanced at Brognola, whose expression had gone sour. “Using Interpol and U.S. federal agency records as the jumping-off point, we’ve gotten to know the Triangle intimately, exposing portions of its operation, identifying links in the poppy production and heroin trafficking, and discovering certain key facts.” She looked to Delahunt.
“First,” Delahunt said, “the Triangle operates a conventional bootlegging ring that appears to smuggle several different consumer products. Counterfeit designer clothing, the DVDs found in New Jersey, consumer electronics…it’s very extensive, perhaps the biggest ever to operate internationally.”
“The Triangle is piggybacking the distribution of the heroin on the smuggling of their retail goods,” Price said. “They’re using the same network, but sheltering the more serious criminal activity with the bootlegging.”
“It’s brilliant,” Blancanales put in. “Vice is always easier to understand than legitimate commercial activity. It offers a unique shield, for if the smuggling is discovered, those exposing it will be tempted to stop at the piracy, thinking they’ve found what there is to find.”
“Bloody right,” McCarter said. “Nobody trusts a guy who says he’s got nothing to hide. But if you think you’ve found him out—”
“You stop looking for whatever else he might be doing,” Blancanales finished. “Multiply that across an entire organization and you have a very clever strategy for covering the true depths of a criminal enterprise.”
“Trickery of that type goes only so far, of course,” Brognola said. “That’s why the Triangle is so ready and willing to do violence to shield its activities. When discovered, they immediately hit, and hit hard, then fade from view. The method has served them well until now.”
“What’s changed, Hal?” Schwarz asked.
“I’ll answer that,” Price said. She tapped a couple of keys and an exploded-view mechanical drawing of a satellite appeared on the plasma screen opposite Brognola. “This,” she said, “is NetScythe. It’s an experimental military spy satellite developed by DoD in conjunction with some of the more brilliant boys and girls at NASA.”
“What does it do?” Schwarz asked.
Price nodded to Tokaido.
“It is really very amazing,” Tokaido said, pointing to the plasma screen. “NetScythe uses a combination of fuzzy-logic algorithmic processing, digital satellite imaging and an advanced telescopic array very much influenced by the Hubble Space Telescope. This allows it to track targets on the ground, very specific targets that correspond to complicated threat or interest profiles developed by analysts on the ground.” He pointed to himself, to Wethers and to Delahunt. “By inputting our target criteria and our warning flags, we can have NetScythe track Triangle assets on the ground, from space. When those assets move, be they people, vehicles or people and vehicles moving to and from specified target profile locations, NetScythe’s heuristic meta-analysis can predict where those assets may move to next.”
“Bloody hell,” McCarter said. “The thing predicts the future?”
“In a way, perhaps,” Hunt Wethers said. “It’s a bit more complicated and not quite as definitive as that, but essentially, it will tell us how to get ahead of the Triangle’s operatives in order to target components of its organization. Much more important, analysis of the target assets may tell us where the links in the Triangle’s chain are located. We can use what we know to learn what we don’t know. With several Triangle assets designated, we can find others of which we were previously unaware.”
“It’s the break we’ve needed to dig into the Triangle and root it out,” Brognola said. “But there are other considerations at play.”
“Which brings us to the second very important piece of information we uncovered.” Price nodded once more to Delahunt.
“The Triangle is funneling money, and large quantities of it, through several holding companies and multiple banks,” Delahunt said. “The money is finding its way to Aleksis Katzev.”
