Extinction Crisis

Cursing his weakness and vulnerability, Lyons knew there would be no way to catch up to the escaping automaton.

Hirtenberg’s mechanized murderer had gotten away, but the Able Team leader vowed that whoever had built it would not live to celebrate his colleague’s demise. If he had to battle to the end of the planet, he would get vengeance.

E HAN F ARKAS WAS A TRUE son of Egypt, and as a soldier in the elite Unit 777 of the Egyptian Army, he would fight to the very end, attempting the impossible to protect his nation. In this instance, it was a slightly unusual case. He was stuck in the confines of a Peugeot station wagon with a young woman of obvious European descent and two Americans of different ethnic backgrounds. The woman was known only as Atalanta, and she was obviously an agent of the Israeli Mossad. Top-secret joint operations between the two countries’ agencies were fraught with intrigue and mistrust.

The two American men had been sent to engage in field training with Unit 777. The agent introduced as Farrow was a tall, lanky black man, and Rey was a compact, muscular Hispanic. The two U.S. operators were considered friends of the antiterrorism unit, but Farkas had heard rumors from Muslim Brotherhood prisoners about the pair. A few months back, al Aksari and two of his allies had struck a brutal blow against the radical terrorist group as they were operating in Alexandria, supporting a central African militia. The two mystery men working alongside the legendary soldier had similar descriptions to Farrow and Rey.

The timing of this sneak-and-peek operation cemented Farkas’s worries. A week ago, Israel had been thrown into a state of high alert by a security breech at the Negev Nuclear Research Center. Cairo had been informed of the “near event” in the reactor core. With a 150-megawatt reactor, reportedly capable of producing enough material for one hundred nuclear warheads, a near event generally meant that the world almost ended for several thousand people. Had the reactor gone critical, the effects would have been akin to the nightmare that was Chernobyl, except that the much smaller, more heavily populated nation of Israel would have had a much larger percentage of habitable land turned into an inhospitable radioactive deadland. Both Jews and Arabs would have been sickened or killed, not to mention an area stretching as far north as the West Bank and as far east as Safi would have been rendered unsafe for farming or livestock.

That kind of news left Egypt on edge, and Farkas was fully aware of the proximity of the particular Brotherhood cell they were watching to the Inshas Nuclear Research Center. The Inshas core was only twenty-two megawatts, and was part of a pilot program for Egypt to develop her own nuclear warheads. Still, a meltdown incident would produce carnage and weaken the country’s standing in the Mediterranean community. All in all, if Farrow and Rey were the same high caliber of warrior that al Aksari was, then Farkas felt a sense of relief with their presence.

“We have movement,” Rafael Encizo said. “They’re loading a van.” Encizo’s cover name for this mission was Rey. His Phoenix Force partner, Calvin James, was using the cover name Farrow.

Farkas rested his fingers on the keys in the ignition. “All right. I’ll give them thirty seconds’ lead driving time before firing our ride up.”

“Good plan,” Atalanta said without a hint of irony or condescension.

“That’s a strange stack of boxes that they loaded,” Calvin James mused. “They don’t resemble any weapons storage that I’ve ever seen.”

“That would be too obvious, wouldn’t it?” Farkas asked. “Police would know rifle crates if they saw them in the back of a van.”

James frowned, his black mustache deepening the gloom of his expression. “But why would they use any kind of boxes to hide rifles? Gymnasium bags or standard luggage would be far more innocuous and just as easily contain assault weapons or grenade launchers.”

“Well, what was the nature of the Negev break-in?” Farkas asked.

“This has nothing to do with that,” Atalanta lied. Irritation sprawled across the Israeli woman’s features.

Farkas rolled his eyes, deepening her annoyance.

“Grow up, Atalanta,” Encizo snapped. “Farkas isn’t stupid and he’s not our enemy.”

James nodded in agreement. “Don’t let national pride get in the way of an international crisis. Once this is over, Israel and Egypt can go back to their behind-the-scenes pissing contest.”

Tanya Kristopoulos, a.k.a. Atalanta, glared at the two American agents. She was a Greek-born Jew who had suffered the loss of family at the hands of jihad terrorists operating in her home country. She’d long ago put aside her anger at Arabs, but her allegiance to the Israeli Mossad had given her a perspective about operational security that bordered on paranoia. “Listen, just because the CIA can’t keep a damned secret doesn’t mean we have to accommodate your—”

Encizo put his hand up in front of her face to cut her off. “The Mossad doesn’t know how the controls to the coolant tanks were sabotaged, except that someone used a 9 mm handgun to shoot up vital components. There were no signs of entry except for minor damage to ventilation duct covers that were too small for even a child to crawl through.”

“God damn it, Rey!” Atalanta complained.

“Yell a little louder next time,” James sneered. “The pricks loading the van didn’t quite hear you.”

“So no human could have entered the Negev plant, but somehow a handgun punctured pipes and wrecked electronics-packed consoles?” Farkas asked.

Atalanta’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know about the pipes? You just asked about the nature of the security breech.”

“There were enough rumors flying about, but very little was substantive enough to quantify or qualify what really happened,” Farkas explained. “Rey filled in some holes in the theories that have been flying around Unit 777 and other national security agencies.”

“Well, whatever broke in either had a magical invisibility cloak or was shrunk to doll-size,” Encizo added.

“Invisibility cloaks are fantasy, not reality, Rey,” Atalanta chided dismissively.

“Actually, no, they are real,” James countered. “Tokyo University has preliminary technology in development that uses specially reflective beads and camera technology to render solid objects as see-through. That’s just technology in the public domain.”

Atalanta and Farkas both raised their eyebrows at that particular revelation.

“I doubt that the covert military optical stealth technology was utilized in the Negev break-in, though,” Encizo added. “Rear-projection morphic imagery only limits your visibility. It can’t phase you through bank vault doors or mask your scent and sound profile to highly trained attack dogs. No stealth fabric that we’ve encountered works against those particular measures.”

Encizo and James had encountered truly remarkable technologies in their journeys around the world. There were few things that they had seen or suspected that could ever surprise them anymore.

Farkas frowned. “’Tis a stranger world than I’ve ever imagined. Perhaps a trained simian with a gun? I know that bats and dolphins have been trained and used to deliver sabotaging explosives to hard-to-reach areas.”

“Any monkey small enough to operate in those particular ducts would have been roasted or frozen to death in various chambers,” Kristopoulos reluctantly admitted. “Plus, it wouldn’t have had the intellect to operate a firearm, nor the strength necessary to trigger or handle the recoil of a 9 mm pistol.”

Farkas turned his attention back to the suspects. They had just finished loading their van and gotten into the front. “We could just pull over their vehicle…”

“But what would keep them from blowing up their van to eliminate any evidence we’d capture?” Kristopoulos asked. “Remember, the Negev meltdown would have irradiated hundreds of miles, making it impossible to reach minimum safe distance without suffering debilitating, if not lethal, effects.”

“Besides, we want to keep an eye on how these guys are doing this,” James added. “Those men are only delivery boys, pawns.”

“You’ve got that correct,” Farkas agreed. “I know those two from our files. They’re errand boys who get handed all manner of shit duty, as you Americans so colorfully put it.”

“That’s believable,” Encizo said. “A lot more than some of the ideas we’ve been tossing around for the past minute. Okay, start her up.”

Farkas fired up their Peugeot and the station wagon pulled out to track the Brotherhood’s van as it drove toward the Inshas Nuclear Research Center. He couldn’t shake the feeling of dread that filled his gut. Tonight, a twenty-two-megawatt nuclear reactor was going to be assailed by terrorists armed with a form of technology that sliced through high-tech and low-tech defenses like a knife through butter.

Tonight, a radioactive nightmare could conceivably come true.

D AVID M C C ARTER LIT another cigarette to give his hands something to do. The Phoenix Force leader hated to cut short his vacation with Gary Manning and T. J. Hawkins, even if it was just a working holiday. The remaining members of Phoenix Force were in England to engage in a little cross training alongside elements of the SAS, so for McCarter it felt like a homecoming, despite the bruises and aches he sported from martial arts sparring with a crew of hardheaded Cockney recruits who reminded the Eastender of himself as a man in his twenties.

Still, the news of the French Department of Nuclear Energy headquarters break-in was a sobering splash on McCarter’s reminiscences. Right now, in the regiment’s guest barracks at Hereford, they were awaiting news from Barbara Price back at Stony Man Farm for permission to launch their Paris investigation without interference from DCRI, the French version of the FBI or Homeland Security. As a British citizen, McCarter had every right to hop on the Channel ferry or to board the Chunnel train to shoot on over to Paris without much paperwork, but he would have to undertake such a trip unarmed and ill-equipped to deal with what had been reported as a mysterious commando team raiding the DNE offices with surgical precision.

The European Union’s views on firearms ownership by private citizens, no matter how sterling their prior military service, was at best intolerant of people with the determination to defend their lives. Of course, this meant that McCarter’s text message to a friend in Paris would be what their operation hinged on if they couldn’t get official clearance. McCarter knew people around the globe, and was able to acquire supplies of reliable weapons from them.

His cell phone burbled with a text message answer to his initial inquiry. What he read soured his mood.

“Can scrounge gear for you and your two friends. No Grand Puissants in inventory, alas.”

The Grand Puissant was the French term for a Browning Hi-Power, one of David McCarter’s preferred designs and his trusted companion across the globe for his entire professional warrior career. His comfort with the reliable, accurate 9 mm autoloader enabled him to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the classic design. Naturally, his disappointment sparked interest from his younger partner.

Hawkins read McCarter’s screen, then checked the look on his commander’s face. “Y’all make that sound like we’ll be landing in the middle of a nest of ninjas the moment we were within sight of the Eiffel Tower. So what if you have to pack a Glock for a while?”

Gary Manning regarded the youngest member of Phoenix Force with a wry grin. “Once you’ve acclimated yourself to true perfection, attempting to cope with an egotistical Austrian’s proclaimed flawless design is a troubling disappointment.”

McCarter chortled. “Besides, I’d be happy to have a row with a troupe of Japanese in black pajamas leaping about with swords and what have you. They’re so much fun when you head butt them and get their gobs all messy under those scarves.”

The laptop with the teleconference software burbled to life. Stony Man’s mission controller, Barbara Price, appeared on the screen, and she wasn’t very happy.

“I wonder if she’s grumpy over your lack of a Hi-Power, too,” Hawkins murmured.