Citadel Of Fear

McCarter surveyed his team. “Where’s Nick?”

James and Manning snapped up their K guns to watch their flanks.

Propenko limped out of the burning safe house, the enemy UAV’s fuselage halves clamped beneath his arm trailing scorched wires and guts. “I am figuring you are still wanting this.”

“You bet, bubba!” Hawkins said.

McCarter was duly impressed but stayed on mission. “Jack?”

“Lead chopper is gone. I wanted a piece of him but he has headed straight north into the Swedish hinterland. You want me to pursue or do you want extraction?”

There was very little way Phoenix Force could wander down the mountain after a gunfight, ghost helicopter crash and a flaming cabin. McCarter could already hear police and emergency vehicle sirens down in Kalmar proper.

“Jack? We need extraction now.”

“Where to? Swedish police channels are blowing up, much less Swedish air traffic control. My range is severely limited. Norway? Denmark? Pick a Baltic republic. They are all about incursions!”

“Poland,” McCarter decided.

Grimaldi was unusually flabbergasted. “You want me to fly you back across the Baltic into Poland?”

“Right back to Gdansk,” McCarter affirmed, and he felt good about it. “It’s the last thing any idiot we are dealing with will ever expect.”

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_3ef987b5-dd10-5937-b574-13e5f11a1808)

The Annex, Stony Man Farm

“Wow!” Akira Tokaido proclaimed. “Just…wow.”

The insides of the little UAV Phoenix Force had captured in Gdansk were even more impressive in person. Phoenix Force had managed to get the unmanned vehicle’s remains delivered to the United States Embassy in Stockholm and a private courier jet had gotten them to the United States in just under twenty-four hours. Tokaido, Kurtzman, Huntington Wethers and “Gadgets” Schwarz might as well have been in an operating theater.

The slightly scorched and smoke-stained patient had taken half a dozen steel fléchettes, but the damage had done nothing to mar the UAV’s majesty in the eyes of everyone assembled. Save one. Able Team happened to be in-house and Carl “Ironman” Lyons stood like a stone Buddha as the geek talk flew fast and thick. He finally began to lose patience with all the oohing and ahhing.

“So, can Phoenix trace any of it?” Lyons inquired. The Able Team leader was the one Stony Man member who had been a policeman rather than a soldier before he had been tapped by the Farm. He had risen to the rank of detective, and he was very good at it. “Can I?”

Wethers stood tall and stretched from all the hunching over the table. The distinguished, brilliant, black university professor was a key member of the Stony Man Farm cybernetics team. If you were one of the bad guys, Hunt Wethers turning his mind upon you and your operation as a problem that needed solving probably meant your ass. “Not exactly, Carl.”

“What do you mean, not exactly?”

“It means, technically, these components are untraceable.”

Lyons blinked. “What, it’s a People’s Republic knock-off and there are no serial numbers? We’ve dealt with that before. There’s a factory someplace that manufactured this stuff, and they will have left their stink all over it.”

Wethers shook his head. “Not this time.”

“You’re saying there’s no factory?”

“Not precisely, no.”

“It wasn’t manufactured?”

“No.”

Lyons shrugged. “You’re saying some closet-case, geek genius just built it in his garage out of pipe cleaners, bubble gum and baling wire? Hunt, even pipe cleaners, bubble gum and baling wire have a trail. I know, I’ve followed them.”

“You’re exactly right, Carl. Except that this exceptional little machine was not manufactured or cobbled together by some—” Wethers rolled his eyes “—geek genius in his garage.”

“You’re saying it was conjured out of thin air?”

“Exactly!” Wethers smiled happily as if Lyons were a student who was slowly but surely bringing his grades up and just might graduate on time. “Every last piece of that UAV, from stem to stern, motors to rotors, GPS, CPU—you name it—guidance, flight controls and the fuselage itself, were all conjured out of thin air.”

Lyons’s blond brows slowly bunched as he chewed all this over. “You’re saying it was printed.”

“Carl, you get an A.”

“Thanks, Prof.” The Able Team leader surveyed what he considered to be a shot-down toy helicopter. He was aware of the burgeoning world of 3-D printing, but mostly over the hysterics surrounding the idea of people being able to print their own guns. He hadn’t found the single-shot, .22-caliber zip guns the size of a small megaphone all that impressive, but he knew the technology involved was growing by leaps and bounds and revolutionizing a lot of industries. “The whole thing?”

“Every component save the wiring was put together one micron-thin layer at a time.”

“So we can trace the wires?”

“Oh, yeah.” Tokaido nodded absently as he tried to make the UAV’s CPU communicate with his laptop. The young hacker frowned. The CPU’s encryption was fighting him. To his chagrin it was holding its own. Whoever had designed the CPU, its programming and encryption was starting to disturbingly remind Tokaido of himself. “The wires came from China.”

“That’s a start?”

Schwarz looked at his Able teammate wryly. “Carl, do you have any idea how many meters of wire the PRC manufactures per year?”

“Millions?” Lyons ventured.

“Billions.”

“Oh.”

“This specific component wire could have been bought in any Radio Shack in America or, for that matter, any place that sells wire on planet earth. I myself happen to own reams of it. Trying to trace the wire is a nonstarter, buddy. Sorry.”

Lyons gazed down upon the remains of the immaculately conceived UAV. The detective part of his mind had already leapfrogged past the wire. “So this was an expensive proposition?”

Kurtzman shook his head at the wreckage in admiration. “Carl? You have no idea.”

“Give me an idea.”

“All right. The United States military has all sorts of unmanned vehicles, aerial, terrestrial and aquatic vehicles both surface combatant and submersibles. But this baby? Every last piece is custom designed and printed. You could not get Congress to pass a spending budget that included something like this. The Europeans? Forget it. The Chinese or the Russians? Maybe, just maybe, if they were really that motivated, but they would probably have to subcontract the work and why bother? They’ve got their own unmanned vehicles, not as good as ours—at least not yet. But again, why wouldn’t they just use commercial parts and if the UAV got captured just deny everything? It’s what they do. Someone cared enough to make this baby from scratch.”

Lyons leaned over the table. “Cal shot this bird down over Gdansk, and it was watching a bunch of Russian mafiya assholes that had been sent to wipe out Phoenix, except they didn’t know who Phoenix was or they wouldn’t have been so stupid.”

Kurtzman agreed. “Exactly.”

Lyons’s instincts spoke to him. “This is a private venture, a very well-funded private venture, and they’ve got an agenda we haven’t even begun to fathom.”