Rolling Thunder

“Hot damn!” Encizo said. “It’s about time we got some help!”

Once he reached the trail, Encizo quickly realized the ATV’s front wheels were so misaligned he was in danger of crashing into the rocks flanking either side of the path. After a few yards he gave up trying and brought the vehicle to a stop.

“Stay put,” he told Manning. “David and I’ll go help mop up, then we’ll come back to get you.”

Manning nodded.

Encizo was halfway out of the ATV when he noticed that McCarter was still in his seat.

“David?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

McCarter stared at Encizo. He looked confused. “David,” he said. “Is that my name?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

“Amnesia?” Carmen Delahunt was floored by the news Akira Tokaido had just delivered after a briefing with Aaron Kurtzman. “David has amnesia?”

Tokaido nodded. “All these times we’ve accused him of being out of his mind, who’d have thought we’d wind up being right?”

“Not funny,” Delahunt snapped. Anger flushed her cheeks just a shade lighter than her fiery red hair.

“Hey, just a little gallows humor, all right?” Tokaido countered.

“I repeat,” Delahunt said. “It’s not funny. What’s next? Are you going to start making wisecracks about Calvin being a holey man because he took three bullets?”

“Okay, I got it.”

Tokaido shrugged and pitched his bubble gum into a trash receptacle as he made his way to the far corner of the Annex Computer Room, where steam rose from Kurtzman’s legendary coffeepot.

Along with Tokaido and Huntington Wethers, who was due to arrive any moment, Delahunt rounded out Kurtzman’s cybernetics team. The members of the group had never joined Able Team or Phoenix Force on the battlefield, yet within the confines of the Computer Room they played an equally important role in helping to stem the tide of global terrorism and high crime both at home and abroad.

Both Tokaido and Delahunt had been on duty for the past ten hours. Carmen had planned to go on break as soon as Wethers arrived, but in light of recent developments, she figured her usual midday catnap would have to wait. Stifling a yawn, she cursored across her screen, calling up a messaging program that would allow her to stay on top of any communications coming in from the field teams. There was one new message, from Rafael Encizo, under the heading “Med Update.” Delahunt was opening up the message when a cup of coffee suddenly materialized at the edge of her desk.

“Peace offering,” Tokaido said when she glanced up. “You were right. I shouldn’t have been smarting off like that.”

Delahunt picked up the cup and offered a tentative smile. “If this stuff’s fresh, you’re forgiven.”

“The spoon didn’t get stuck when I was stirring the cream,” Tokaido said.

“Close enough.”

Delahunt was taking a sip when the doors behind them opened and in walked a tall, crisply dressed black man with traces of gray in his short-cropped hair.

Huntington Wethers, a former cybernetics professor at Berkeley, had the most analytic mind of anyone working at the Farm, and when it came to sorting through the constant stream of information filtering into the Computer Room, Wethers was more often than not the first to glean the patterns and connections that transformed raw data into useable intelligence.

“I just heard Phoenix Force ran into some difficulties in Spain,” Wethers said to Tokaido and Delahunt as he made his way to his workstation.

“There’s an understatement,” Tokaido said.

Delahunt shot him a warning glance, then quickly told Wethers about the ill-fated mission outside Bilbao.

“Terrible,” Wethers said once Carmen had finished. “What’s everybody’s medical status?”

“I was just working on that,” Delahunt said. “Give me a second.”

Wethers and Tokaido stood by watching as Carmen read through Encizo’s e-mail. “Actually, David’s in the best shape of them all, at least physically,” she reported. “He’s got a mild concussion and needed some scalp stitches where he struck his head. They’ll be giving him a CAT scan soon so they can come up with some kind of prognosis on his amnesia.”

“Hopefully it’ll be only short-term,” Wethers said. “That’s usually the case in situations like this.”

“That’s what we’re banking on,” Delahunt said. “As for Calvin, he’s still in surgery. A field medic managed to stop the bleeding from his gunshot wounds, but they’re going back in for one of the bullets because it’s positioned too close to one of his arteries.”

“But he’s going to pull through, yes?” Wethers asked.

Delahunt skimmed through the rest of Encizo’s note, then said, “Rafe says it’s touch and go. The surgeons told him it was a miracle they were able to bring Cal in alive, given all the blood he’d lost. He got a couple units from two of the guys in that commando outfit that flew in with David and Gary.”

“And Gary? How’s he?”

Delahunt shook her head. “Partial tear in his right hamstring, and a strain in the left. That plus he pulled the muscles in his lower back. He can barely move.

“And with Rafe, the knife nicked a tendon and sliced into his right deltoid. He’ll be in a sling and full-arm cast for at least a few weeks.”

“Bottom line,” Tokaido interjected, “is that they’re all out of commission except for T.J.”

“This is quite a blow,” Wethers said. “First we lose two guys from Able Team, and now this.”

“I know,” Delahunt concurred. “And what’s really upsetting is that it looks like this was just a wild-goose chase.”

“Not entirely,” Tokaido reminded her. “I mean, we did manage to take out an BLM cell that was trying to set up a base in the mountains there.”

“Maybe so,” Delahunt conceded, “but if you ask me, I think the Basques deliberately tried to make it look like they were carting those stolen missiles.”

“Diversionary ploy?” Wethers queried.

“Exactly,” Delahunt replied. “Look at all the manpower that went into that mission. Not just on our part, but Spain, too. With everybody focused on those mountains, it gave the BLM a better chance to smuggle the missiles out of the area. Not to mention this supertank.”

“The needles have left the haystack, you’re saying,” Wethers replied.

“That would be my guess,” Delahunt said. “And the more time that passes without us finding them, the wider the search area’s going to get.”

“And on our part, we’re down to Pol and T.J.,” Tokaido said. “And Pol’s not even expected to reach Spain for another few hours. The trail’s just going to get colder.”

“Fortunately, it’s not up to just us,” Delahunt reminded Tokaido. “The Spanish are pouring as many resources into this whole thing as they can, and they’re getting help from the French and NATO, too.”

“Yeah, but they’re not as good as us,” Tokaido said. “You’re talking boys going out to do a man’s job.”

Delahunt managed a smile. “Do I detect a little home-team prejudice?”