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and billions of dollars of infrastructure that would be damaged. Either way the blow delivered would be catastrophic.
The Man couldn’t choose to let either the hostages or the nation come to harm, so he had turned to the Sensitive Operations Group based at the Stony Man Farm. Led by Brognola, the counterterrorism teams could strike around the globe, neutralizing threats to the entire Free World.
* * *
PHOENIX FORCE RODE their SDV beneath the waves, heading into the jaws of death. Their counterparts, Able Team, were back in the United States checking the damage wrought upon the Jeopardy Corporation by an unknown force, most likely the same one that was at work at La Palma.
As the SDV powered toward the hostage island, James kept it low, close to the ocean floor to avoid being seen on sonar. They were at a depth so that even the noon sun was dimmed to the point where it was like dusk. They needed headlights, but were able to use them unseen from the surface due to the massive water above them. The Phoenix Force warriors were watching for signs of other undersea craft or magnetic antiship mines when they saw the grisly collection of figures on the seabed.
James and Encizo knew that the corpses hadn’t been down here very long as there was still tissue on their bodies. Meat, especially carrion, on the ocean floor often ended up in the bellies of crustaceans or fish. Indeed, the lifeless bodies were identifiable as men or women.
The estimation of the time that the bodies had been down here was undermined by the stilled forms of crabs and small fish scattered around the bodies. The corpses had nibbles, small bites in them, but once it was learned that others who ate from the carrion died instantly, the rest of the undersea scavengers avoided the deadly meals.
This was an ominous indication of how the poor souls had died. Somewhere, likely while they had been moored on tranquil waters just above their current position, the collection of dead had been afflicted by nerve gas, most likely a type that was absorbed through skin. The deadly toxins would make the corpses a lethal last meal for the carrion eaters who normally seized upon fresh flesh drifting to the bottom.
McCarter tapped James on the shoulder, then pushed himself from his seat. James grimaced, teeth clenched around his mouth gauge. The rules of extravehicular activity on the SDV had been decided beforehand, and first among them was that no more than one diver would be apart from the sled at a time. This was a just-in-case policy, something that would reduce the risks to the Phoenix Force swimmers. McCarter’s lone probe into the strewed corpses and poisoned sea life could only be supported by the swivel lamp mounted next to Encizo.
The only consolation that James had was that the SDV could linger, thanks to the oxygen recycling in the bubble-less systems.
McCarter was able to make out more detail as he swam closer to the dead. He could tell that they were all relatively young, in their twenties and thirties, and to a body, none of them wore a stitch of clothing above their waists. In life, they must have been fit, beautiful, though the cold waters had lent a bloated complexion to each of them as he took images with his underwater digital camera. He was also able to peg their nationalities as predominantly American, mostly thanks to the fact that the men wore “board shorts,” surfing wear that was loose, airy and comfortable, as opposed to the European preference for tighter, more revealing swimwear.
The dead had also come from a private cruise, since the women were all topless, yet with American males. It had been a party among friends, where the girls had felt confident enough and comfortable in baring their breasts to one and all. That hadn’t kept them from showing some modesty as several had gossamer-thin wraps tied around their waists.
McCarter grunted, feeling a dark consolation that these poor kids had passed quickly, thanks to the nerve gas. They undoubtedly died in agony, but they hadn’t been molested before or after their demise. The bodies of the women were free of bruising indicative of rape or post-mortem activity, further evidence of the dangerous toxins absorbed through their bare skin.
He swam to the bodies of the men and began searching through pockets after he took digital photos of their slack, cold faces. One of them might have had the presence of mind to pack a wallet or some other form of identification, but instead he found seawater-corroded cell phones and unopened foil packets of condoms. It had taken five tries to get a good, old-fashioned wallet, and he also found a more modern design, a stainless-steel model that sealed money and cards inside, safe from sweat or immersion while surfing or swimming.
Having found some ID, McCarter returned to the sled, not quite happy, but nor was he despondent. The Navy would be directed to these GPS coordinates to recover the lost and perhaps bring them home for proper burial. Right now, however, he had the means of giving closure to the families of the dead.
With grim resolve, McCarter buckled into his seat. He no longer saw the victims of La Palma as an abstract. There were faces, and those faces could be turned to names. The victims of the hostage takers, no matter what their incentive for violence, had been slain in the prime of their lives. He’d seen them, touched them and knew that they were gone forever, even if their remains were pulled from the cold, dark depths at the bottom of the Atlantic.
They had come here in life, looking for joy and camaraderie and romance. Instead, they had been murdered.
It wouldn’t be up to him to piece together names and faces caught on his digital camera, but he could only imagine what horrors had befallen them in the last moments of their lives.
McCarter grit his teeth tighter around the mouthpiece of his rebreather. The murderous bastards were going to pay. He may not have been the raging berserker Carl Lyons of Able Team, but he sure as hell had come close in his days before assuming the responsibility of leading Phoenix Force. Even though he was calmer now, he still held a spot in his heart for anger, loathing, soul-crushing rage against those who slaughtered helpless innocents. And he’d squeeze all of that out in bloody retribution against these killers.
CHAPTER THREE
The three men of Phoenix Force surfaced along the western coast of the island of La Palma in darkness. They paused to give the shore a good scan with binoculars and laser range finders that were carried on the SDV. Over their satellite link to Stony Man Farm, they double-checked their position and sought a real-time infrared photograph of the rocky shore ahead of them. The shore was in a province of the island called Tazacorte, which was fairly sparsely populated. There was only one post office and one school for the whole area, as well as a port, which they had surfaced near. Most of the province was unreachable thanks to a sixty-meter elevation where the cliff fell off rapidly into the ocean, but that wouldn’t be a hindrance to Phoenix Force.
They were still going to land a mile to the south of Tarajal, which was a popular marina for tourists and locals alike. They wanted to stay out of sight of the native population and the mercenaries, if they were active in this part of the island. That meant that they would climb a rocky cliff and cut across the sparsely populated banana plantations that topped the oceanfront cliffs.
There were tourist-oriented beaches, such as the Playa del Puerto. A seaside promenade with restaurants and beach facilities was present. Farther south, there was Los Guirres o El Volcán, which was wild in nature, isolated, but a favorite spot for surfers who wanted to get off the beaten path. All along, they could make out the black volcanic sands that made the island so well known and striking.
McCarter joined in on the scan of the Spanish marina. “Looks like a lot of the locals got in their boats and took off.”
“I don’t see much in way of an armed presence either way,” Encizo said.
“That means bugger all. We’ve got a submarine loaded with guns and explosives, and we look like bumps on the waves,” McCarter countered. “And don’t forget that a cruise ship turned out to be a missile-launching Q-ship that took over Santa Cruz harbor.”
“That’s over the spine of the island,” Encizo said. “But they might have some kind of presence here, especially since we’re that much closer to Cumbre Vieja.”
None of the team had to double-check the map that they had memorized. Cumbre Vieja volcano was the subject of the Jeopardy white paper about how a catastrophic volcanic landslide could result in a mega-tsunami. La Palma, seen from orbit, looked something like a yolk-up egg, except that the dome was actually the depressed caldera of an ancient but recently geologically active volcano. Most of the tourism was concentrated along the lower level, southern coasts of the island.
James’s frown was ever present as he checked the forearm-strapped com link that kept him in touch with Stony Man Farm. Still nothing about the identities of the bodies seen below the waves.
McCarter noticed the grim look on James’s face. “You put a few clues together to get something disturbing.”
“Those were tourists dropped off shore,” James returned. “We haven’t gotten anything solid back from the Farm, but who else would they be?”
“And that marina is a good place for a yacht full of terrorists disguised as vacation-goers to pull in,” Encizo added.
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” McCarter said. He had been right there, looking the corpses in their lifeless faces, getting digital photographs to upload to the Farm. “So they could have parked, leaving behind spotters.”
“And they could have women terrorists on hand,” James threw in. “So we can’t be sure of who we’re looking at, if we run across some tourists.”
“Which is why we’re avoiding any contact until we’re sure who we’re dealing with,” McCarter said.
James nodded.
“You’re not going to get cold feet about shooting a woman, are you?” McCarter asked.
“If they have a gun and they’re trying to kill me, not a chance,” James answered. “We’ve encountered enough murderous ladies, and I’ve never flinched from that.”
“This is also Spain, where gun laws aren’t like America. It’s not bloody likely that we’ll run into a lady with a concealed carry pistol,” McCarter added.
“And that was what I’d worry most about,” Encizo said, nodding to James in agreement with his unspoken doubts.
“Just keep your eyes peeled,” McCarter warned.
The three men swam back to the submerged vehicle, turned it to the south and continued on toward the rocky shore.
* * *
HAROLD BROGNOLA LURCHED from the couch in his office, grimacing as he felt the pinch in his neck caused by sleeping with his head on the armrest. While he was aware of the Farm’s accommodations for guests—soft, comfortable beds—Brognola was more of a mind to avoid sleeping there. The couch was its own quiet alarm, its lumps and painful armrest rousing him from slumber after only an hour. If he were on a schedule that would allow a full night’s sleep, he’d drag himself to a guest room and snore happily.
Awake, he made his way to the Stony Man Farm War Room, looking at the gigantic map on the wall. The display was made of several interlocked plasma screen televisions, enabling different panels to be pulled up for individual windows containing pertinent information. Right now, the screens showed a blockade around the island of La Palma in the Atlantic Ocean. Forty-eight hours earlier, the western port of the island, Santa Cruz, became ground zero for a wild, unprecedented explosion of violence, literally.
A cruise ship, what appeared to be a cruise ship more precisely, suddenly fired anti-shipping missiles from its deck and shattered the hulls of two ocean liners so that they were left malingering in the path of any other large craft attempting to get away. With the sudden blasts, smaller craft were suddenly set to flight, two speed boats with vacationers accelerating out of the harbor as quickly as humanly possible.
As they fled, smaller missiles were launched. They easily caught up with the civilian crafts and blasted them out of the water.
All of this was caught on video camera and transmitted to the rest of the world with its grim, ominous warning.
“Send forces ashore, and we shall kill thousands.”
The group called itself Option Omega, and they were railing against the G8 and its interference with the natural economy of the world. Governments mismanaging taxes and regulations, they had said, were leading the world to the brink of financial collapse.
Option Omega wanted to show the world’s governments how weak they truly were. La Palma was a tourist mecca, a wide-open maw for tourist revenues that kept Spain solvent.
Option Omega intended to show Spain and the other European members of the G8 simply how weak they were when it came to pushing the people under the wheels of their insane economic policies.
Brognola knew that this group was borrowing the vague, half-assed rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street and the even older Tea Party movement—two groups of American
citizens who had legitimate gripes about American financial and fiscal woes—and was regurgitating it with elements of both groups’ ideals. It was a hodgepodge jumble that had garnered them a modicum of “I admire your sentiments, but not your actions” lip service on left- and right-wing squawk boxes.
He proceeded to where Barbara Price, the Farm’s mission controller, was working at her station, collating information as quickly as it came in.
“Anything new?” Brognola asked.
“Gunfight in Norfolk,” Price told him matter-of-factly, not hiding the annoyance in her voice. “Small consolation is that it was far from bystanders, though the whole waterfront heard machine guns and grenades for miles.”
“How’s the Virginia news handling it all?” Brognola asked.
“They’re reporting that it might be gang violence. They brought up the fire that gutted the boatyard a month ago,” Price said. “And then they skimmed away when there was a fresh tweet from that actress trapped on La Palma.”
Brognola grimaced. “She’s still posting to the internet?”
“Nobody can get out of the hotels, but they have some pretty good internet connections,” Price told him. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were letting hostages have access to social media in order to keep the world watching.”
“Social media, but they’re pretty good at only putting their video out,” Brognola mused.
“Even smartphone video has a pretty large footprint to be intercepted,” Price suggested. “Aaron told me that it would be easy for someone to monitor and purge video footage or digital photos from the stream.”
“Meanwhile, social media posts adding only 140 characters at a time can get through because there’s no way that a strike team could use a status update to plan an assault,” Brognola grumbled.
Price nodded. “Aaron also said that our satellite coverage of the Spanish Canaries is being assailed. We keep getting spikes of interference, which means they are intent on keeping the outside world blind but not deaf.”
Brognola sneered. “It’s like poking a wounded hostage so that their screams weigh on rescuers, but they keep the drapes drawn so we can’t take a shot in.”
“But we did take a shot,” Price said. “We sent in Phoenix.”
Brognola nodded. “You don’t sound happy.”
“We got an upload of a few dozen photos over satellite laser link. They’re of preserved corpses in the waters off of Tazacorte,” Price said. “That was a few minutes ago, but they’re of young people. We’re trying facial IDs, as well as tapping some SIM cards that survived being at the bottom of the ocean.”
“Tourists?” Brognola asked.
“McCarter and James both suggested that in texts to us,” Price answered. “Mode of dress was summer casual, very casual. Everyone was topless.”
Brognola grumbled at this suggestion. “Meaning that if they were on a boat, they left the majority of their clothing and personal identification in their state rooms.”
Price nodded. “James sent that as a follow-up after they came up. There were some yachts still docked at the marina in Tarajal.”
“What have we got on those faces and cards?” Brognola asked.
“Still checking on it,” Price told him. “But we’ve got the fastest fingers on the East Coast working on this.”
Brognola looked immediately over to Akira Tokaido, who was running through multiple images on his computer screen. They were flashing through too fast for Brognola to follow, but Tokaido had been born with a nervous system that seemed to have a quad-core processor. Brognola was still in abacus world when it came to technology, and he barely knew what quad-core meant, but it was fast, and Tokaido was that quick. He could look at those faces and run through code at lightning speed.
There was a quick whoop as Tokaido made a connection. “Barb! I have IDs.”
“That was fast,” Price said. Brognola accompanied her over to his station.
“We’ve been looking for signs of trouble since the first explosions,” Tokaido said. “That meant going back months.”
“So missing persons reports?” Brognola asked.
Tokaido nodded. “A bunch of twenty-somethings gone missing, but they said that they were staying on some extra time.”
“Email contact?”
“And new photos and videos up on social media,” Tokaido added. “So that’s allaying most of the suspicion.”
“Who isn’t buying this?” Brognola asked.
“Young lady, Cathryn Lopez. She was due to ship out after her vacation,” Tokaido said.
“Where?” Brognola asked.
“Marines. When a female Marine doesn’t report in for duty, it raises some flags. Especially if she’s still posting online,” Tokaido said. “As her last port of call...”
“The USMC is doing part of our intel for us,” Brognola mumbled. “There was a face in that batch?”
Tokaido shook his head. “But Lopez was on the same boat with Bryce Jennings. And his SIM card was recovered by McCarter.”
“Bryce Jennings?” Price asked. She shook her head. “Was he a porn star or something?”
“No, it was his real name,” Tokaido said.
“They slipped ashore disguised as tourists,” Brognola murmured. “Does our satellite coverage have identification on any of the boats?”
“We’re getting interference,” Tokaido returned. “And any IFF we have on the ships show nothing on the yacht that these kids were supposedly on.”
“So they’re anticipating us,” Price mused. “They’re anticipating something.”
“Are we getting anything at other marinas on that side? Or just Tarajal?” Brognola asked.
“No fine details in Tarajal, so that means that particular marina has some craft inside that’s jamming us,” Tokaido mused.
“And keeping watch on that coast,” Price added.
“You can fit a bit of surveillance equipment on a yacht,” Brognola said. “Radar, telescopes, satellite communications...”
“And Option Omega scouts,” Price noted.
“Option Omega has very little history except as an Idaho-based splinter of a white-supremacist militia,” Huntington Wethers, another member of Kurtzman’s cyberteam, interjected. “As to being a splinter, we’re talking a top membership of a dozen.”
