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“No other references?” Brognola asked. “Because—”
“I’ve been quite thorough,” Wethers told him. “Option Omega has the computer skills and resources to launch attacks on any other group usurping their name. I’ve tried a couple of runs at their main website, and they are not only pro-La Palma takeover, but they are vehemently anti-G8.”
“Idaho is a long way from Norfolk,” Brognola said. “And it’s even farther to the Spanish Canaries.”
“Traffic to their site has risen exponentially,” cyberteam member Carmen Delahunt advised. “As has the mention of them on BBSs. They appear to have been recruiting heavily.”
“Appear?” Brognola asked, aware that Delahunt was referring to computerized Bulletin Board Systems.
Delahunt shook her head. “It doesn’t feel right. Especially since they ratcheted back their angry militia rhetoric and pumped up the antigovernment bile.”
“Like they switched horses midstream,” Price mused.
Brognola nodded. “Someone either usurped the leadership or is influencing them.”
“So Option Omega has become a sock puppet,” Wethers offered. “Maybe they were inspired by the supremacists who threatened the G8 before, utilizing orbital launched rods. I can’t see much in way of La Palma’s significance as a strategic target, outside of the Jeopardy Corporation’s white paper.”
“If they’ve got enough resources now to transform cruise ships and assemble a large enough army to control an island, they’re going to have some kind of money trail,” Price said to the distinguished African-American cybernetics professor. “Dig deep, Hunt. If anyone can find even an infinitesimal trace of outside influence, it’s you.”
Wethers took out his pipe, then clenched it between his teeth. “I shall be thorough.”
Wethers was an educated man who had been working with computers for decades. He had the appearance of a college professor, and many of the mannerisms of a highly intelligent, cultured man. One thing, however, that made the job worthwhile at Stony Man Farm was fighting against groups that victimized innocents. On those occasions when they went up against intolerant bigots, he took special satisfaction in being of assistance in slamming the lid on their plans and machinations. Especially against white supremacists, men who considered him no more than a talking ape, rather than a brilliant mathematician and programmer.
He turned his attention back to his workstation and dived in deeply.
At the same time, Carmen Delahunt took her cue to return to her work, checking for Option Omega’s links to prior white-power groups that Stony Man had recently encountered.
There had been a sudden surge in activity among the Christian Identity and White Power movements, where lots of money had been raised. The most violent of the groups’ splinter elements had been involved in multiple other crises, which meant that there was someone who wasn’t putting their eggs in one basket, or maybe some manipulators were seeing the near success of others as their chance.
With the right words, the right equipment and the right money, things could be attempted that could rock the world, to the benefit of one or another cabal.
Either way, the monsters behind the scenes were nearly as insidious as the general thugs who were manipulated into committing murder for the profit of their puppet masters. In some ways, even worse, as they rarely caught the full attention of law enforcement, or were well hidden behind the shields of treaties and diplomatic immunity.
Brognola grumbled this time, and knew that he was going to have to do something to bring down the headmasters of this particular escapade in terror.
He pulled Price aside and spoke with her in confidence.
This was going to be one instance where the plotters would bleed, as well.
* * *
“WE’VE GOTTEN WORD from the Farm. Your assumptions were pretty good,” T. J. Hawkins said after closing the satellite-linked field laptop that put them in uninterrupted contact with the Sensitive Operations Group headquarters back on Stony Man Farm.
“Tourists murdered so that the terrorists could take their place,” James murmured grimly. David McCarter’s
grimace was readily apparent.
“We were expecting this,” James whispered to him. “Don’t let this distract you from the lives we have to save.”
McCarter narrowed his eyes, glaring at James. “I’m in control. We rescue the hostages, and stop the detonation that will cause the La Palma landslide.”
The Briton grit his teeth, eyes alight. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy giving it to whoever we manage to catch hold of.”
Manning winced, but let that flash of the old David McCarter pass. Even at his worst, the feisty ex-SAS man was hardly cruel, and was only ruthless to the point of ending a battle before it could harm bystanders. He might shoot a man in the back of the head, but only to keep a stray shot, or an intentional salvo of bullets from slaughtering innocents. When it came to handling murderers and other assorted thugs, if there was a personal bent toward McCarter’s duty, he was willing to go beyond the doctrine of using the minimum force necessary to end a conflict.
“All right, does everyone have their assignments?” Manning asked.
Officially, McCarter was the team leader. But Manning had a better bedside manner with teammates, and was generally the British warrior’s scientific adviser and the cooler head off which he could bounce ideas. Every member of Phoenix Force was a close friend to his teammates, but Manning and McCarter were especially close friends thanks to their cultural similarities—Canada and Britain sharing an allegiance and a loyalty to the Royal family, as well as both being original members of Phoenix Force. While Encizo, the other original veteran of the team, joked that the two bickered like an old married couple, it was their similarities and the sharp contrast of temperaments that made the two of them an effective team.
McCarter didn’t look particularly happy, but he nodded at Manning, thanking him for focusing on the present.
“We’ve got ’em,” Hawkins said.
“T.J., I’ll need you to delay in hooking up with Cal and me,” McCarter said. “Head to Tarajal and scope out the scene there. You can coordinate and reunite later.”
“Why not me?” Encizo asked.
“I want this done from land. Someone who could fit in,” McCarter said. “You’re a little too memorable. T.J., on the other hand, can be completely nondescript and act the role of someone new stumbling into town.”
Hawkins shrugged. “I’ll take care of things. Take my weapons bag with you. If it goes sideways, I don’t want to be tempted to risk overkill.”
“Pistols and knife, just in case,” McCarter admonished. “We’ll keep a hold of the bigger stuff. If you need something with more oomph...”
“Y’all are doing it wrong,” Hawkins concluded with his wry Texas grin.
McCarter nodded in assent. “We hold off on the shooting, at least until we get the lay of the land. That doesn’t mean we can’t kill any of these Option Omega bastards, but we do it quiet. Broken necks can be made to look more like accidents than bullet holes.”
Hawkins nodded.
“One last word of advice, though.” McCarter paused. “We’re planning to keep a low profile. But you know what military planning is...”
“It’s what you have in mind until you actually run into the enemy,” Hawkins answered.
“Stay sharp, lads. This is going to get bloody.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The men of Able Team had bound and separated their two prisoners, isolated from each other by nothing more than a strip of duct tape over eyes and mouths, preventing communication between them. Rather than immediately asking them questions, the three Stony Men preferred to work smart, letting them speculate on their own about their fate.
Thanks to fingerprinting and analysis of their equipment, the trio were able to gather some useful information on the two gunmen. They got names.
One was Stephen Baxter, drummed out of the U.S. Army Reserve for selling equipment out the back gate of his base. He then worked as hired muscle for Tonberth Security. There was little surprise to the fact that Tonberth was a contractor for the Jeopardy Corporation. However, the guns and communications were not linked to any purchases made by Tonberth, and Baxter was no longer employed by the company, having been let go for the same reason as his dismissal from the USAR.
The other gunman was Emmanuel Rosca, a Mexican national, although his fair skin and blue eyes painted a picture of him as someone from a family of pure European blood. Lyons knew this kind of man, especially if he were a violent, gun-toting thug. Able Team had once fought a conglomerate of Latin American racists, the Fascist International, who felt it their birthright, by dint of their European blood, to command those who were descended from the native Central and South American Indians or those who had “sullied” their whiteness by lying down and creating generations of “mud people.”
The group had considered itself the Reich of the Americas, and Able Team had waged a long, brutal war with this particular breed of bigot.
It was no surprise to Able Team, then, when Rosca’s background turned up a series of dropped charges of violence or convictions on lesser crimes in Mexico, always avoiding prosecution for hate crimes or terrorist acts. Rosca had been rumored to have been a lieutenant in Los Soldados Blancos, the White Soldiers, but it was nothing that the Mexican authorities could actually pin on him. He’d disappeared about a year ago.
The correlation of the White Soldiers to Option Omega, a connection established by Stony Man Farm, was only cause for more concern.
“What’s the approach?” Lyons asked Blancanales.
Rosario Blancanales had been called the Politician, or Pol for short, because of his way with words and ability to convince people to follow his suggestions, not because he was a liar who slung mud. Blancanales was one of Stony Man’s best interrogators, showing an uncanny skill at delving into someone’s wants and fears and utilizing diplomacy to open doors that even Carl “Ironman” Lyons couldn’t kick down. “I’m going to start with Rosca.”
Lyons glared at the Mexican bigot as he squirmed, wrists and ankles bound, eyes and mouth sealed off with duct tape, ears rendered numb by headphones pumping white noise.
“I know,” Blancanales added, reading the enmity that Lyons held for Rosca’s predecessors. Lyons had been captured, tortured and brainwashed by the Fascist International, a month-long ordeal that occurred in the wake of one of his best friends being murdered by those self-same “liberators.” “Carl, I know that this is one group that you wouldn’t mind resorting to killing with a thousand cuts. But we need answers.”
Lyons nodded. “Don’t worry about me. I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t even feel like executing the bound-up little bitch. Killing helpless prisoners isn’t my way.”
“I know that,” Blancanales said. He glanced at Rosca. “Though, mind if I let you build up a head of steam before I begin chatting him up?”
Lyons smirked. “Oh, I don’t need to build up a foul mood. I installed a tap for that years ago.”
Blancanales chuckled. “I figured as much. Gadgets and I’ve been getting pints off of you for years.”
“The fear of a psychopath, ready to rock,” Lyons growled. His good humor only added a frenzied mania to his angry appearance.
It was time for Blancanales to begin his work at dismantling the White Soldier’s defenses.
* * *
HERMANN SCHWARZ WASN’T called Gadgets as an ironic statement of his technical ineptitude. The man was an electronics engineer and innovator, having done much of the development of some of the surveillance and communications systems that kept the teams in constant communication with their headquarters in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
Having gotten hold of the communications carried by the mercenary team that had attacked them, Schwarz was on the job. This wasn’t a toil for him, either. His was the kind of inquisitive mind that had dismantled and reassembled everything from the smallest robot toy to the most complex, top-of-the-line personal computer ever since he’d developed the coordination to operate a screwdriver.
The one SUV that Able Team had captured was fitted with electronics that Schwarz could tap into. The GPS unit from the SUV was one of the best bits of intelligence that he could have collected. He was able to backtrack the path that the hired guns had taken from their starting point to the Norfolk shipyard. Schwarz downloaded everything from the unit’s hard drive, gathering every destination that the vehicle had gone to and from.
While he was plotting out thousands of miles of road travel for the vehicle—he made special note of the fact that it wasn’t a rental—he went to work on the communications systems that the men carried.
They were fairly standard electronics, mass-produced in Southeast Asia—Vietnam to be exact. It didn’t quite jibe with the SIG 556 rifles, but Schwarz took a closer look at the assault weapons that had been utilized against them.
They were Brazilian IMBEL Model LCs, not SIGs, though there were considerable similarities between the two weapons that could cause confusion at a distance. The fineries of weapon identification hadn’t mattered in the heat of combat, just that they could tell the unique sound of a high-velocity .22-caliber round and how easily it could penetrate body armor but not solid cover. The Brazilian firearms were going to be difficult to track, but that was the point, Schwarz assumed. The electronics were similar, and he would have to rely on the skills of the Stony Man Farm cyberteam to look for elements inside of the programming for these GPS units, just in case they were utilizing proprietary software. He noticed that there were downloaded updates of coordinates that had been recently entered into the electronics, new paths updated on the fly.
Only two of the men had smartphones with them, at least as far as Schwarz could recover. He took the SIM cards from those phones to shield them from any long-range, remote nullification of the information in them. The phones themselves were just housings; the SIM cards held the most vital information for each of the mercenaries’ normal use. These were business phones, though, and had very little personal information as far as he could tell.
It didn’t matter, thanks to the Location Area Identity entries into those cards. Now, in conjunction with the GPS, Schwarz could track their movements for several days.
Right now, he was uploading the data from the devices to Stony Man Farm after gathering some preliminary notes. If anyone could discern what patterns the opposition were keeping to, it would be the techno-wizards at the Farm.
In the meantime, he was going through the memory on the two smartphones that had been recovered. Memos and notes had been erased, but Schwarz had them plugged into his laptop, and he brought up a drive “unwiper” that could recover lost data easily.
Blancanales rapped on the door to the room that Schwarz had set up as his tech lab. “Gadgets?”
He looked up to his oldest, dearest friend. “What’s going on?”
“Carl’s hit a brick wall.”
“Poor wall. Or do you mean figuratively?” Schwarz asked.
“Figuratively,” Blancanales replied. “You’d have felt the safe house shake if he’d actually punched a wall.”
Schwarz nodded. “I’ve collected a lot of data already, on movements, on people called. Is he going to try to force admission?”
Blancanales grinned. “It helps to be able to say we’ve got someone where they’ve been. We need to know as much about them as possible.”
“Here’s the background and records pulled up from the Farm, too,” Schwarz replied. “Lots more dirt on our prisoners.”
Blancanales accepted the small file folder, looking it over. His lips were drawn tightly, and Schwarz could see the glint in his eyes as he was filling his brain, memorizing everything he could about the two men in their custody. It was a typical tactic, not only of police detectives, but of carnival mentalists who gave “cold” readings of their subjects.
The foreknowledge of answers to questions was a means of breaking down bricks in whatever wall the subject erected to deflect a questioner. If the questioner could provide answers to his own questions, it made any effort at keeping secrets seem more and more futile. Such a regimen was generally successful, even with the grimmest and toughest of subjects.
Interrogation—the most successful and adept interrogation—didn’t come from torture or from terror. It came from shattered spirits, from the truth that nothing could be hidden from those interrogating them.
“Carl and I have gotten about half of this,” Blancanales admitted. He looked up. “But we can still use this.”
“Good. I’m still working with the Farm to dig deeper,” Schwarz said. “Aaron’s already on top of the forensic accounting for these two thanks to the smartphone work.”
“That’ll prove interesting,” Blancanales mused. “Not enough for me to sit and watch it, but the results would be pretty damning, and useful for breaking our shooters.”
“Right now I’ve done all that I can. I’m going to be sitting on my thumbs for a good bit,” Schwarz said.
“Can’t grab a catnap?” Blancanales inquired.
Schwarz spread out all of the information he’d accumulated. “Data overstimulation. I’m running things through the back of my mind subconsciously, so I’m not going to get much toward sleep.”
“Multilevel intellect.” Blancanales sighed. “You’ve usually got at least three or four things working in that brain of yours. I’m surprised you can ever get to sleep.”
“Meditation which duplicates REM sleep generally gets me through,” Schwarz answered. “That or caffeine crash. Coffee actually makes me sleepy.”
Blancanales chuckled. “So what’s your plan? Hit up a coffee shop?”
“Unless...”
Schwarz looked down at one of the smartphones, then powered it back up.
“We nullified all of the GPS-locating soft- and hardware, didn’t we?” Blancanales asked.
“I triple-checked all of that,” Schwarz replied. “But you know...”
“Hang out as bait? That usually works best if you’re in a team,” Blancanales countered.
“You and Carl are busy. And Mack Bolan does the solo stuff all the time,” Schwarz answered.
Blancanales shook his head. “We’re not that guy. He’s too experienced, too skilled. He’s on a whole different level than we are.”
“He plans ahead, he lays traps,” Schwarz returned. “He thinks on damn near as many levels as I do. And he doesn’t have a trunk full of nasty technology like I do.”
