Defense Breach

A quick glance at the dashboard clock’s LED told him he was on schedule to reach his destination before dark in spite of the fact that the winter sun, hurried by the season’s extended nights, had already passed its zenith and continued to march steadily toward the western horizon. As he maintained a course due north, the crouched shadow keeping pace on the snow beside him seemed to grow taller by the minute, serving as a steady reminder of the daylight’s unremitting flight.

Based on the intel provided to him, it was important that Bolan reach the cabin before nightfall. As it was, he knew he might already be too late to stop the transfer of a top secret computer code to a terrorist group in the Middle East. According to Hal Brognola, director of the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group, the code would enable them to successfully attack a United States aircraft carrier, killing thousands of Navy personnel. Determined to prevent that, Bolan pushed on.

When he was approximately one hour south of his objective, he again recalled the conversation with Hal Brognola two days earlier in the shade of the Washington Monument that had brought him three hundred miles into Canada for his reconnaissance mission.

At that meeting, Brognola’s breath had punctuated his words with little white clouds as he spoke. “As commander in chief, the President has a sacred obligation to protect the American soldiers and sailors under his authority,” Brognola said while they walked west along the National Mall with the Capitol Building at their backs. “His words, not mine.”

“What’s the worst-case scenario?” Bolan asked.

Brognola turned up his overcoat’s collar against the icy breeze that was blowing off the Potomac River and exhaled before answering, his breath appearing in a steady plume as thick as cigar smoke. “The Navy’s aircraft carriers are protected with a system called ADAS—Air Defense Alert System—designed and built by Nautech Corporation,” Brognola replied. “Worst-case scenario would be a terrorist group getting access to the computer code that gives ADAS its instructions. If an enemy was able to communicate with the program installed onboard a ship, hidden commands could be inserted into the operating system instructing ADAS to drop its electronic sensors. If that happened, our aircraft carriers would be like fish in a barrel.”

“How does the system work?” the Executioner asked.

The big Fed squinted into the distance for a moment before replying. He was wearing a charcoal gray topcoat that came to his knees, and a black felt fedora whose narrow brim cast the upper half of his face in shadow. A silk scarf printed with a rose-and-maroon paisley pattern filled the space between the topcoat’s wool collar and Brognola’s neck. In spite of the snow, his black wingtips were clean and shiny, his appearance as impeccable as if he had just come from a Fortune 500 boardroom.

Still looking toward a distant horizon, he said, “When the ADAS cabinets are deployed onboard aircraft carriers, twenty-seven monitors that resemble small television screens are also installed and connected to the system. The monitors are mounted in various places—some on the bridge, in the weapons center, one in the captain’s quarters, some in the mess hall. The point is to put them all over the ship to make sure that both the captain and the weapons officer will always be close to one. The system grabs real-time electronic information from the ship’s radar and weapons systems, and displays everything approaching the vessel within thirty nautical miles. ADAS also keeps track of available weapons and missile inventories, automatically matching incoming targets with the appropriate weapons to neutralize them.”

“Like a big video game,” Bolan commented.

“Except that life and death are at stake,” Brognola replied dryly. “Today’s weapons systems are able to assess the environment, make decisions and initiate action within seconds. You don’t have much time to figure out the best course of action when a few warheads are speeding toward your ship at Mach 2. ADAS does it all in split seconds. Recognizes the targets, assigns weapons, tracks, engages, mitigates. The USS Stark taught the Navy what happens when you don’t have an electronic umbrella monitoring your immediate area for incoming threats.”

Brognola adjusted his scarf with an efficient motion that suggested the gentle tugging and tucking might be a habit rather than a necessity. “If a terrorist group got their hands on Nautech’s top secret computer codes running ADAS,” he said, directing his gaze at Bolan, “they could blind our ships to incoming missiles. There are two or three aircraft carriers stationed in the Persian Gulf at any given time. Each one is a floating arsenal, transporting unbelievable weaponry to the modern-day battlefield. Fighter jets, bombers, guns, missiles—these nuclear-powered vessels are true death stars. They also cost close to a billion dollars to build and maintain. Losing even one in combat would be devastating. And not just because of the cost. Aircraft carriers represent the epitome of American military might. It would be a serious blow to both troop morale and our global prestige if we lost a carrier.”

Brognola sighed heavily. “We need a soft probe, Striker. I can’t give you all the details here, but the objective is in Manitoba, about three hundred miles from the North Dakota border. We think a group of engineers from Nautech have hijacked the computer code and are planning to sell it on the black market.”

Bolan finished reading the four-page briefing Homeland Security had given the President earlier that morning and passed it back to Brognola. The edges of the papers ruffled in the breeze as the big Fed folded the report before slipping it into his overcoat’s internal breast pocket and buttoning the flap closed.

Bolan recalled missions he had accomplished in part aboard aircraft carriers, remembering the highly charged atmosphere where a crew of up to five thousand dedicated men and women worked in harmony to bring the enormous might of their vessel to bear. Brognola was right. It would be significant on a number of levels for the United States to lose a national asset like an aircraft carrier.

Soft probe, Bolan thought. How many times had he heard the words “soft,” “cold,” or “unoccupied” used to incorrectly describe one of his drop zones? For Brognola to be requesting his assistance, the situation had to have already progressed to a point where the President no longer trusted his official people to mitigate the threat before it affected policy.

“Okay,” Bolan said suddenly.

“Akira’s ready to brief you,” Brognola responded, referring to the talented hacker who served on Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman’s cybernetics team at Stony Man Farm.

The two men parted without another word, the man from the Justice Department setting off to inform the President that his request had been accepted; the man known to Brognola as “Striker” stepping away and turning up Twelfth Street. By the time the warrior had passed between the EPA and IRS buildings, he had merged with the few pedestrians braving the January cold, vanishing into the cityscape as effectively as a tiger disappeared into the jungle. The rules for survival were, if fact, the same everywhere.

An alarm sounded on the snowmobile’s dashboard. The electronic unit was alerting Bolan that he was entering an area being scanned by the type of radiation used to power long-distance surveillance radars. He brought his snowmobile to a halt and turned off the sensor.

In the stillness, he could hear snowmobiles. They were far away, at least three or four miles, the distance making it impossible to discern whether they were heading his way. Bolan’s experience on battlefields throughout the world had developed in him a phenomenal sense of space and distance. It was no coincidence that ancient cultures often portrayed their legendary warriors with ears resembling those of bats. In hand-to-hand combat, extraordinary fighters sometimes displayed an intimate feel for their surroundings so extreme they appeared to be operating with the assistance of a sixth sonarlike sense. Bolan listened hard for a few seconds before deciding the snowmobiles were moving away from his position.

He switched the sensor back on. The intermittent chirping pattern signified he was at the extreme edge of coverage. On the unit’s LED, the scanning frequency was identified as one residing at the long end of the L-band, verifying Tokaido’s assertion that the engineers from Nautech would probably use energy bands similar to those they worked with at the company. The radiation’s magnitude, however, was of more interest to Bolan than its actual frequency. By measuring the intensity of the beam sweeping across the open plain, Tokaido’s sensor was able to get a lock on the source’s location. According to the display, the cabin was roughly five miles away, which meant Bolan had probably not shown up yet on their screen. Before resuming his approach, he turned on his unit’s cloaking circuit.

“It’s only a snowmobile,” Akira Tokaido had replied to Barbara Price’s compliment after the hacker showed Stony Man Farm’s mission controller that there were methods other than physical design to shield items from radar detection. “It’s not like we’re hiding a battleship or anything.”

Well-known weapons such as the American Stealth bomber and South Korea’s KDX-II destroyer used angles and composite coatings to deflect or absorb radar transmissions. Tokaido, however, knew how to use electronic tweaking, what he referred to as “turning a mirror on the illuminator,” to shield almost anything from conventional radars.

With the unit’s LED emitting a steady green light indicating that an electronic cloak had been wrapped around him and his snowmobile, Bolan resumed his advance. It was growing colder, causing his exhaled breath to immediately form into ice crystals on the outside of his face mask. He pressed on, oblivious to the cold.

Bolan heard the generator a good ten minutes before the cabin came into sight. The sun was slightly less than an hour from setting when he halted his snowmobile and dismounted in one of the waist-deep gullies that pocked the plain. The snow formations in this area resembled shallow riverbeds, the shapes blown into the prairie in much the same way water sculpted a stream’s dirt banks. After performing a quick touch-check on the weapons he wore, Bolan crawled to the edge of the snow brim where he could see the outline of the cabin tucked into the edge of a small stand of spruce bordering a sparse coppice of hardwood and pine.

A bone-chilling wind from the north fueled to life more than a dozen miniature tornadoes of fine dry snow, setting them swirling wildly in front of Bolan’s position. The whirlwinds danced for minutes at a time across his field of vision before each fell abruptly back to earth, only to be instantly replaced by others leaping skyward from the white powder.

Distances were deceiving on a flat terrain where the sun, while low on the horizon, was nevertheless still brilliant. Even coming in at an extreme angle, rays shining onto a pristine white countryside devoid of color often played tricks. Bolan scanned the area before him in long overlapping sweeps, estimating the cabin to be slightly more than a half mile away. The building was cast in late-afternoon shadow by half a dozen spruce trees whose gnarled and misshapen boughs were testimony to the number of years they had stood like sentries, their crooked growth influenced by decade after decade of the wind’s unrelenting push.

Bolan reached into one of the pouches on his white combat belt and withdrew a pair of binoculars whose lenses were composed of the same material he wore in his goggles. The compact binoculars were ruggedized, which meant they could withstand harsh environments, including shock and vibration, without a resultant performance loss. Bolan peered through the eyecups while fingering the focus wheel.

Despite the generator’s noise, the cabin appeared to be deserted, but three snowmobiles pulled into a tight huddle against the building’s east wall belied the initial impression. Bolan switched the binoculars into infrared mode, causing the landscape to shimmer for a few seconds while the internal photocathode sensors adjusted to the IR data stream. Processed from a half mile away, an infrared view’s validity was suspect, but the image coming through the lenses clearly showed that the cabin walls were considerably warmer than its surroundings. The snowmobiles emitted a color profile that indicated none of the engines had been fired up recently. Notwithstanding the apparent inactivity, Bolan would approach the cabin as if the people inside were armed and awaiting his arrival.

He lowered the binoculars and put them back into their pouch. As he pushed himself away from the berm’s shallow lip, he took mental inventory of his weapons.

In a white leather holster riding low on his hip, the soldier wore a .44-caliber Desert Eagle. If called into service, the oversize handgun’s appetite would be fed with the two hundred rounds of Cor-Bon 249-grain ammo he carried in one of the pouches on his white combat belt.

Bolan’s Beretta 93-R, loaded with a 20-round clip of 9 mm Parabellum ammunition, was housed in a shoulder holster with Velcro flap. In one of the pouches on his combat belt, Bolan carried two hundred additional 9 mm rounds and the pistol’s sound suppressor. This mission did not overtly call for a suppressor, but after spending a good portion of his life in conditions that wavered to the whims of battle uncertainty, Bolan knew there was no such thing as being too prepared or too well-equipped for a job.

A foot-long Sykes-Fairbairn tempered steel knife, honed to a razor’s edge, rested in a white leather sheath strapped to the outside of his right calf. Four MK3A2 concussion grenades hooked to the combat belt’s webbing ensured the availability of additional firepower in the event his planned soft probe took an unexpectedly intense turn.

Bolan climbed back onto his snowmobile, started the motor and circled around to the cabin’s far side. Numerous tracks in the snow close to the building alerted him that there had been recent visitors. Although not as unique as tire tracks, the traces on the ground displayed sufficient variation for Bolan to determine that four separate snowmobiles had arrived from the west, departing in the same direction. He eased his vehicle into the cover of the thin woods behind the cabin, cruising twenty yards among the trees until he found a spot affording acceptable concealment. Once there, he switched off the motor. As he dismounted and drew his Beretta, a crow cried out from its perch in a nearby tree, and the warrior paused to listen to nature’s voice. The very distant drone of the snowmobiles he had registered earlier was the only man-made sound reaching his ears.

On feet as silent as those of a stalking tiger, he swiftly covered the distance between the cabin and woods. Reaching the structure, he pressed himself against the weathered siding close to where a propane gas tank was mounted on a steel frame. There was no sound from within. Before entering, he removed his protective goggles and put them away, exposing blue eyes that darted from one point to another, continuously processing information relative to his surroundings.

Bolan inched closer to the door, raising his Beretta to the ready position. When he reached the doorknob, he halted for a second, steeling himself for whatever he might find inside. Knowing he might come under gunfire as soon as his presence was discovered, he took hold of the doorknob and turned, finding it unlocked. Without further delay, he stepped into the cabin where the nauseating stench of death immediately accosted his nostrils.

With dusk settling over the region, the light inside was dim, coming from a single overhead bulb hanging from an extension cord stapled to the ceiling. The cabin was built with three rooms, the austerity of furnishings bearing testament to its short-term use. An open area contained a beat-up table and half a dozen chairs arranged in the vicinity of a propane stove. A tiny bathroom with a stall shower visible through an open door was situated against the rear wall and a bedroom with an open curtain in place of a door was next to the bathroom. On the floor in the center of the main room, two bullet-ridden bodies lay in grotesque death poses, their blood mingling on the floorboards in an irregular dark stain occupying the space between them. One of the corpses had been shot numerous times—some bullets obviously postmortem, as if the purpose of the additional slugs was to eradicate the victim’s identity. Indeed, identifying the disfigured corpse based on facial evidence alone would be impossible. Why, Bolan wondered, weren’t they both mutilated?

With pistol drawn, he made his way silently to the back bedroom, taking care to avoid stepping in the bloodstains splattered randomly across the floor. There should have been electronic equipment here—at the very least, a radiation source and monitoring device. If the radar Tokaido’s module had detected was not coming from this cabin, where was its origin? There were no other possibilities.

The bedroom was considerably darker than the outer room. Bolan pulled a powerful pen flashlight from one of his pouches and swept the interior with its beam, his eyes scanning the space before him while he listened for signs of life. In the seam where the floorboards met the distant wall, the flashlight’s beam played across a line of bright yellow sawdust, the color alerting him to the fact that the dust had not been there for a full winter during which time the elements would have turned it an oxidized gray.

Recalling the three snowmobiles outside, Bolan stepped into the center of the room and pushed the bed against a wall. The outline of a trapdoor was visible in the floorboards, a rectangle approximately three feet by two. Whoever constructed the door had done a good job placing the hinges on the underside; with only a casual glance under the bed to make sure no one was hiding there, the door would have gone unnoticed.

“Police!” he shouted to alert whomever might be under the floorboards. He had told lies much worse than impersonating an officer of the law. “Come out with your hands up.”

There was no response.

Bolan placed the penlight between his teeth and drew his knife, sliding the blade into the crack forming one of the short sides. Using the weapon as a lever, he discovered there was no locking mechanism on the door. With minimal effort he was able to pry it open a few inches, which then grew wider as he pushed down on the knife’s leather grip. When there was sufficient space between the door and the floor, he grabbed the hatch’s edge with the hand holding his Beretta and threw it back all the way. The door banged open onto the floorboards, sounding unnaturally loud in the still of the bedroom.

“Please! Please don’t kill me,” came from the darkness below. The words were spoken in a voice laced with terror.

Bolan had been exposed to people on the brink of hysteria innumerable times throughout his career, and it was never a situation he preferred. Survival in his line of work was often dependent on controlling more variables than his opponent, and people scared out of their wits were not easy to control. He turned sideways to reduce his profile and held the penlight away from his body as he shone the beam into the void.

A woman was huddled in the far corner, her eyes blinking in rapid response to the light.

“Please,” she said in a vacant voice.

“I won’t hurt you,” Bolan replied, holstering his Beretta upon seeing she was alone and unarmed.

“I thought you were one of them. They’re coming back,” she stated.