Shadow War

Price 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 “the Bear” Kurtzman’s coffee she knew she’d be ready to roll.

She got up out of the bed, smoothed her clothes and picked up the copy of the Washington Post she had placed on her table before stepping into the upstairs hallway of Stony Man Farm’s main house. The headline screamed out at her.

Colombian Businessman Busy Senator

Marcos Sincanaros, renowned currency speculator, has been tied to campaign contributions exceeding five million dollars to Maryland Senator…

Disgusted, Price stopped reading. She had too much on her mind at the moment to worry about Washington politics. She frowned. The name “Sincanaros” was familiar, however. She resolved to ask Akira Tokaido, one of the Farm’s computer wizards, to see if Stony Man had a file on the man.

As Price walked down the hall, she began clicking through options and mentally categorizing her tasks. She had men in the field, preparing to step into harm’s way, and it was her responsibility to coordinate all the disparate parts into a seamless whole.

The Farm’s mission controller was headed to the basement when the cell phone on her belt began to vibrate. She plucked it free and used the red push-talk button.

“Price, here,” she said coolly.

“Barb,” Carmen Delahunt began, “the teams are in jump-off mode.”

“Thanks, Carm,” Price told the ex-FBI agent. “I’m almost in the tunnel now.”

“See you in a minute,” Delahunt said.

Price put her phone away, entered the tunnel that joined the main house to the Annex and got into the light electric rail car. The engine began to hum and the vehicle quickly picked up speed as it shot down the underground tunnel. Things were starting to click, to come together, and Price could feel the tingle she had first felt as a mission controller for long-range operations conducted by the National Security Agency. It had been there that she had made her bones in the intelligence business before being recruited by Hal Brognola to run logistics and support at the more covert Stony Man operation.

Stony Man had operated as a clandestine antiterrorist operation since long before the infamous attacks of September 11 had put all of America’s military, intelligence and law-enforcement efforts on the same page. As such, it operated as it always had—under the direct control of the White House and separate from both the Joint Special Operations Command and the Directorate of National Intelligence.

Stony Man had been given carte blanche to operate at peak efficiency, eliminating oversights and legalities in the name of pragmatic results. It also, perhaps most importantly, offered the U.S. government the ability to disavow any knowledge of operations that went badly. It was a brutal truth that if things turned wrong for the Stony Man action teams, Phoenix Force and Able Team, they would be left out in the cold.

It was one of Barbara Price’s most sincere prayers that she would never be called upon to make the decision that left compromised operators hanging in the wind.

She pushed aside the morose reflections as the electric car slowed and she exited the vehicle, then entered the Annex building after passing through security. Things were ready to go hot—she could not afford to be distracted now.

As she stepped into the Computer Room, she was met by Aaron Kurtzman, the wheelchair-bound head of cybernetics at Stony Man Farm. The big man reached out and handed her a steaming mug of coffee. She eyed the ink-colored liquid dubiously.

“Thanks, Aaron. That’s just what I’ve been missing. Something that can put hair on my chest.”

“David called for Phoenix Force in Marseilles,” he said, grinning. “They’re set up to go in the hotel. Carl did the same for Able Team in Louisiana. They’re in the air and heading toward the target.”

“Good,” Price said. She took a drink of the strong coffee and pulled a face. “Once we’re sure everything is unfolding, I’ll give Hal a call and he can pass the information on to the President.”

Kurtzman glided over to his work area, where it looked as if a bomb had exploded. His desk was covered in faxes, paperwork and the exposed wiring of half a dozen devices.

Across the room at his workstation, fingers flying across a laptop while monitoring a sat com link, Akira Tokaido bobbed his head in time to the music coming from a single earbud. The lean, compact hacker was the youngest member of Stony Man’s cybernetics team and the heir apparent to Kurtzman himself. The Japanese-American cyberpunk had at times worked virtual magic when Price had needed him to.

Across the room from Tokaido sat his polar opposite. Professor Huntington Wethers had come to the Stony Man operations from his position on the teaching faculty of UC Berkeley. The tall, distinguished black man sported gray hair at his temples and an unflappable manner. He currently worked two laptop screens as a translation program fed him information from monitored radio traffic coming out of France.

Carmen Delahunt walked through the door of Computer Room and made a beeline for Barbara Price. The only female on the Farm’s cyberteam, Delahunt served as a pivotal balance between Tokaido’s hotshot hacking magic and Wethers’s more restrained, academic style.

Delahunt finished her conversation and snapped her cell phone shut as she walked up to Price. She pointed toward the newspaper in the mission controller’s hand.

“You see that about Sincanaros?” she asked. “As soon as I saw that name, it rang a bell. I ran a profile—not pretty.”

Price smiled. “You read my mind, Carmen,” she said. “Once we have Phoenix and Able taken care of, why don’t you send me a summary in case anything comes of it.”

“Will do.” Delahunt nodded. “I have to double-check the Mediterranean arrangements we made for Phoenix’s extraction with the ‘package.’ It’s nice to be able to tap the resources of larger groups like the Agency, but coordination is a nightmare.”

“Let me know if anything goes wrong,” Price said.

Delahunt nodded, then turned and began to walk back across the floor toward the connecting door to the Annex’s Communications center, her fingers punching out a number on her encrypted cell phone.

Price smiled.

She could feel the energy, the sense of purpose that permeated the room, flow into her. Out there in the cold, eight men on two teams were about to enter into danger for the sake of their country. If they got into trouble, if they needed anything, they would turn to her and her people.

She did not intend to let them down.

She made her way to a nearby desk where a light flashing on the desktop phone let her know a call was holding. She looked over at Kurtzman and saw the man returning a telephone handset to its cradle. He pointed toward her.

“It’s Hal on line one,” he said.

“Thanks, Aaron,” she answered.

She set her coffee and paper down and picked up the handset. She put the phone to her ear.

“Hal, it’s Barb,” she said.

“I’m holding for the President on the other line,” Brognola said from his Justice Department office. “Are the men up and rolling?”

“As we speak,” Price answered. “Tell him both operations are prepped to launch.”

“All right. Let’s hope this one goes by the numbers,” the gruff federal agent said.

“As always,” she agreed, and hung up.

“All right, people,” she announced to the room. “Let’s roll.”

CHAPTER ONE

Lost Parish, New Orleans, Louisiana

The men hung from chains.

Gabriel Gonzales turned his blindfolded head and spit blood from his mouth. His lips were swollen and his teeth loose from where the Zetas gunmen had smashed a rifle butt into his face. His nose had been broken, so the act of spitting left him breathless. He quickly sucked in air, trying not to choke on blood. The air was stale and tinged with the harsh chemical smell of spilled oil.

His arms screamed in their sockets, and Gonzales pushed his toes against the concrete floor beneath his feet to give them some relief. Around him he heard the moans and shuffling of the two other men hanging next to him. He didn’t know who they were, as they had already been bound and blindfolded in the back of the Lincoln Navigator SUV when he’d been picked up.

Let them have gotten my call, he prayed silently.

The sound of vibrating corrugated metal reached him as a door slammed. The noise echoed in hollow tones and Gonzales realized he had to be inside a large structure, such as an abandoned factory or, more probably, an empty warehouse. He heard the sounds of boot soles striking the floor as a group of men muttering low in Spanish moved closer.