Unconventional Warfare

His rounds sprayed wildly in a loose pattern, most of them burning off harmlessly into the ceiling.

A second burst caught him in the chest and shoulder, smashing him back against the filing cabinet. The kinetic force jerked his arm, and the muzzle of the blazing SMG dropped.

Two rounds struck one of the attackers in his right arm, slicing through the biceps and cracking the humerus bone beneath, while the other sliced a gouge of meat an inch wide off the man’s rib cage. The Nigerian killer grunted with the impact and staggered.

The second gunman hosed the ex-Marine down, stitching a line of slugs in a diagonal pattern from hip to neck and unzipping the American’s stomach in the process.

Ensign rebounded off the filing cabinet and dropped to his knees, the H&K falling silent. A final burst from the unwounded killer sliced his face off his skull, leaving only a bloody cavity in its place.

The corpse fell forward and struck the ground with a wet slap.

Colonel Kabila stepped into the hut, a bloody panga knife in hand, cigar burning in his mouth.

He looked at his wounded police officer and jerked his head to the side, indicating the man should go.

“Dress your wounds,” he ordered, and the man hurried to obey.

Kabila took a deep drag and blew smoke out of his wide nostrils like a dragon. He looked at the other police officer and lifted his panga. The blade of the heavy bush tool was smeared black with blood.

“Get to work,” he said.

Twenty yards away Dexter huddled in the bush, hidden from sight.

CHAPTER SIX

Suburbs, Washington, D.C.

The phone rang.

Hal Brognola came awake instantly. The director of the Special Operations Group and head of Stony Man Farm sat up in bed and snapped on the lamp at his bedside table. His wife of some thirty years moaned in protest and rolled away.

The phone rang again.

Getting oriented, the director of America’s most sensitive covert operation group looked at the table and tried to determine which of his two phones was ringing. The first phone was his home and it often rang when some matter from his position at the Justice Department needed urgent attention.

The second phone was a Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device, or SME PED. The combination of sat phone and PDA allowed the wireless transmission of classified information and conversations.

When that phone rang then Brognola knew without question that the call was in reference to the Stony Man program. It would mean that somewhere in the world something had gone very wrong and that a decision had been made at the very highest level that resolution was only to be found at the muzzle of a gun.

The Stony Man teams were the very best guns in the business.

Brognola blinked and phone chirped again. It was the SME PED.

Time to go to work, he thought, and picked up the secured device.

“Go for Hal,” he said.

Things started to roll.

Stony Man Farm

CARMEN DELAHUNT HAD CQ duty at the Farm.

CQ was a military acronym for “command of quarters” and it simply meant that she had drawn after-hours duty. Despite not having the field teams on any active assignment at that precise moment, Stony Man was still a 24/7 operation and as such the Farm was fully staffed around the clock.

Secure in the Communications Room of the Farm’s Annex, the fiery redhead and former FBI agent was monitoring updated intelligence situation reports, military communications traffic and twenty-four-hour cable news channels.

While monitoring all this sensory input, Delahunt casually whipped through page after page of challenging Sudoku puzzles. She was a multitasking machine driven by a sharp, type A personality engine.

On the top of the desk the duty phone blinked into life and then rang. Setting down her coffee cup, she snatched up the receiver.

“Farm,” she said. Then, after a pause she continued, “Good morning, Hal.”

She cocked a head as the big Fed began talking. Her fingers flew across the keyboard in front of her as she began pulling up the latest information on West Africa in general, the Congo in specific, focusing on the terrorist and criminal operatives in that area and a project known as Lazy Titan.

Satisfied she was up to speed, Brognola hung up in his suburban D.C. home and began getting dressed.

Once off the phone Delahunt made two priority calls, both to other locations on the Stony Man facility. The first was to inform Jack Grimaldi, chief pilot for the covert project, that he was needed ASAP to take a helicopter into Wonderland on the Potomac and ferry Brognola to the Farm.

The second call went to Barbara Price.

BARBARA PRICE, Stony Man’s mission controller, opened her eyes.

She awoke clearheaded and alert, knowing exactly where she was and what she needed to do.

There was a war being fought in the shadows and like the ringmaster of a circus, she was at its epicenter. Her eyes went to the window of her bedroom. It was dark outside. She looked over to her bedroom table and noted the glowing red numerals of her digital clock.

She had been asleep for a little over four hours. She sat up and pushed a slender hand through her honey-blond hair. She felt revitalized after her power nap and with a single cup of Aaron “Bear” Kurtzman’s coffee she knew she’d be ready to face another day.

She got out of bed and smoothed her clothes before picking up the copy of the Washington Post she had placed by her bed. The headline jumped out at her as she stepped out into the upstairs hallway of the Stony Man Farm main house.

Rebel Forces Invade Congo

Late yesterday afternoon the Congo was rocked by violence as insurgents under command of the infamous Gen. Nkunda took control of a region on the upper river. Human rights groups are worried as communication with the area has been cut off…

Disgusted, Price stopped reading. She had too much on her mind at the moment to worry about politics as usual in Africa.

She frowned. The name “General Nkunda” was unfamiliar. If there was a new player trampling through national playgrounds then she needed to be on top of it. She resolved to have her computer wizard Akira Tokaido see if Stony Man had any files on the man.

As she walked down the hall and took the stairs to the main floor of the farmhouse she began clicking through options and mentally categorizing her tasks. She had men on standby, preparing to go into danger, and like the maestro of a symphony it was her responsibility to coordinate all the disparate parts into a seamless whole.

She was in the basement and heading for the rail system that connected to the Annex when the cell phone on her belt began to vibrate. She plucked it free and used the red push-talk button to initiate the walkie-talkie mode on the encrypted device.

“This is Barb,” she said, voice cool.

“Barb,” Carmen Delahunt began, “Hal called. We have a situation.”

“Thanks, Carmen,” Price told the ex-FBI agent. “I’m in the tunnel and coming toward the Annex now.”