Unified Action

Slowly, McCarter felt his adrenaline begin to bleed off as they weren’t hit. After a minute he tapped James. When the ex-SEAL turned toward him he gave the man the hand-and-arm signal for a perimeter sweep. Instantly, James stepped backward into the tree at the bottom of the defilade and began a 360-degree search of the rendezvous zone.

McCarter rose into a crouch and jogged over to where Encizo waited by the corpse. The bulk of the ancient five-ton truck loomed above them. As he drew closer he saw the bloody hole that filled the left side of their contact’s face.

If a bullet had entered through the driver’s window it would have struck the truck occupant in just such a fashion, he realized.

“Is this our guy?” Encizo asked him.

“Don’t know,” McCarter whispered back. “We had location, time and code exchanges.”

Both men turned at the same time, weapons ready. Calvin James appeared in front of them, then squatted. “It’s clear out to seventy-five yards in these woods. Beyond that anyone watching us would either be down the road or up in elevation.”

Encizo got up and investigated the vehicle cab as McCarter shook the corpse down for any useful information. James, a trained medic and forensic investigator, performed a cursory inspection of the major head wound.

“Low velocity, larger caliber.”

“Pistol?”

“Almost certainly. Maybe one of your favorites—a Browning Hi-Power or even a .45 with a silencer.”

“How can you tell a silencer?” McCarter asked as he pulled several items out of the dead man’s clothes.

“Can’t be one hundred percent sure,” James admitted. “But the entrance wound was pretty damn traumatic for there to be no exit wound. That suggests a soft-nosed slug with a subsonic load.”

“High-end electronic jammers and silencer kills?” McCarter grumbled. “We stepping on someone else’s toes?”

“Chinese?” James offered.

“Chinese gear beating Bear’s electronics?” McCarter shook his head. “Not a chance.”

“Curioser and curioser,” James replied.

“Hey, guys,” Encizo said from the cab. “Get a load of this.”

Dominican Republic

THE WOMAN SPUN in the chair, obviously surprised by Schwarz’s revelation.

The Stony Man operative smirked back at her. “Let’s keep it simple,” the Able Team electronics genius said. “Skip your transient codes and go right to your mother parole.” He paused, then said, “India Delta Six.”

The woman, tension draining from her limbs, frowned and sighed. “Delta India Nine,” she replied.

“I was almost shot by one of our own stringers?” Lyons demanded. “Christ, that happens too often. Fine. Where the hell’s Smith?”

The woman turned back and looked at him. “I don’t know. He never showed up to our meet. I went to the secondary rendezvous and he didn’t show for that, either. I began to suspect the security service for the government had realized he was more than a law-enforcement liaison and did away with him.”

“So you broke into this place?” Schwarz asked.

“I’ve been here before,” she replied. “It seemed the most obvious place he would have kept information about me. I wanted to erase my trail before internal security followed up on me.”

“What was the last thing he was working on?” Lyons demanded.

“A meet for tonight with a middleman for some third party. Maybe about drugs, maybe weapons. Either way he thought it would get him a lead into which elements within this regime were working both sides of the street.”

Lyons frowned, locked eyes with Schwarz over the top of the woman’s head. “I guess we know where we go next,” he said. Schwarz nodded.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

INSIDE THE computer center, Professor Huntington Wethers let out a long, low whistle and set his cold pipe down on the desktop next to his keyboard. A tall, laconic black man with almost gaunt features and salt-and-pepper hair, he was the ultimate academic.

He preformed his tasks of research, logistics and information networking with methodical, almost mechanical efficiency. He was not an artist making wild leaps of intuition like his younger counterpart on the cyberteam, Akira Tokaido. Rather he crossed his t’s and dotted his i’s like a probate lawyer until every fact or isolated bit of information was accounted for and placed neatly into its appropriate box before being checked off.

Wethers made connections, he found links, he built bridges one binary bit at a time between data streams until scrambled mosaics became crystal-clear pictures. In his usual understated way, he had made another connection.

“Bear?” Wethers asked over one bony shoulder.

From beside the bubbling coffeepot where he was assembling a table of organizational equipment for the field teams Kurtzman looked up. “Go ahead, Hunt,” he growled. “You got something?”

“I have a rather odd connection between what our teams are doing,” Wethers answered.

Curiosity piqued, Kurtzman maneuvered his wheelchair out from behind his desk and toward the former college professor. “Between the Caribbean and central Asia? A connection? Do tell.”

“Could be a fluke,” Wethers warned. “One of those odd coincidences people use to justify a belief in fate.”

Kurtzman rolled up next to him and grunted. “No such thing as coincidences in our world. What do you have?”

“Our missing FBI agent in Santo Domingo and our missing contractor in Kyrgyzstan?”

“Okay?”

“They’re brothers.”

Carmen Delahunt burst into the room through the door leading to the communications center. “We’ve got a problem,” she said without preamble. “We just lost our uplink with Phoenix.”

“Weather?” Kurtzman asked.

“Weather shouldn’t have been a problem. I ran a forensic diagnostic on the signal and I got shadow chatter in the low-end megahertz range.”

“Crap,” Kurtzman swore.

“High-end jammers,” Wethers agreed.

Kyrgyzstan

MCCARTER MOVED IN a crouch through the graveyard. Behind him three other members of Phoenix Force were spread out in a loose wedge formation, weapons up. Above them, hidden on the ridge, Hawkins tracked their progress from a sniper overwatch position.

McCarter dodged in and out of headstones, skirting graves torn open by artillery rounds. He averted his gaze from mummified husks of old corpses and tried not step on any of the skeletal remains that lay scattered like children’s toys. Rafael Encizo muttered something low and in Spanish under his breath as his foot came down in a spot of a decomposing corpse.

In five minutes everything had gone to shit.