Critical Effect

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

EPILOGUE

Critical Effect

PROLOGUE

High above the fertile fields of northeastern France—altitude approximately 24, 223 feet—engines No. 1 and 2 suddenly quit and threatened to send the SOF C-141 Starlifter into a nosedive.

Only the quick thinking of the two British RAF pilots prevented the giant special-operations cargo plane from plunging to an unforgiving end. Warning alarms and Klaxons screamed through the cockpit. Every circuit board demanded attention. Lights flashed asynchronously as the shimmies nearly shook the crew to death. The pilot and copilot joined hands on the throttle in an effort to coax more power from the remaining pair of engines. The sheer weight of their cargo testified to the futility of the effort.

Welby Blythe, Group Captain, tuned his radio to the emergency band and issued a Mayday while his copilot, Flight Lieutenant Graham Little, made every effort to control their descent. The joint operations center at NATO’s Northern Command Office had accounted for the possibility of a single engine failure and taken precautions to ensure the plane could still make a “short” hop from Geneva, Switzerland, to Portsmouth. They had never even considered the disastrous consequences of a double-engine burnout.

Blythe received no response to his hails and gave up the radio for the moment. He tried to quell the shock and terror that rode through him with the same intensity and fearsomeness of his charge. Blythe had logged more successful missions than practically any other officer of his rank in the RAF, a record he’d remained quite proud of through his years as an airman. Now, however, it appeared the Devil had stacked the odds against him on this one. Blythe couldn’t recall having faced a grimmer situation in all his time behind the stick.

The captain clenched his teeth. “If we get her down in one piece, boys, it’ll only be a bloody damn miracle!”

A few alarms continued to chatter incessantly, although the first officer and two navigators had cleared most of them to reduce noise and confusion. After all, they knew they were losing altitude and didn’t really need the sensitive instruments to point out the fact.

Both the digital and mechanical altimeters continued to plummet in concert with their descent as the remaining pair of operable Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines groaned in protest. Blythe considered other options. He first thought about ordering the cargo haulers seated in back to dump as much of the payload as necessary to keep the craft airborne, but he knew the risk of such equipment falling into the hands of a potential enemy. Terrorists or other criminal elements might not realize the value of that cargo, but at minimum they could make use of the armament. He also recalled the accompanying detail of Special Air Service operatives assigned to protect that cargo at any cost. Their orders would include immediate termination of even a crazed, military pilot desperate to save his own ship.

With no other real options at their disposal, Blythe and Little continued to guide the C-141 toward its inevitable course.

That course eventually put the belly of the cargo plane just yards above a copse of trees. Blythe engaged the landing lights and then coordinated with his copilot to execute their landing. Above the strain of engines they could feel the vibrations of the nose landing gear as it rolled downward and locked into place. The basso thrumming of engines ceased in favor of the high-pitched whine when they opened the throttle to maximum to raise the nose, followed by immediate dissipation to stall speed. The belly just scraped the tree line but reached a point of long, open field beyond it.

The soft earth proved an almost demonic force, its spongy resilience pronouncing death on the landing gear supporting the heavy aircraft. The tail of the plane performed a violent sashay, uncontrollable from the cockpit with the nose gear still airborne. All four men leaned forward simultaneously in their seats, subconsciously hopeful the additional weight would bring the NLG in contact with the ground. When it finally touched earth, the vibrations became doubly vicious. Blythe felt as if his teeth might literally dislodge from his gums. A wash of mud, grass and weeds instantly coated the cockpit windows and all but eliminated visibility. The plane continued for about another 150 yards or so, then jolted the crew in their seats with a sickening crack to port that could only have been a tree taking out the wing. The sensation of centrifugal force took over as the plane began an almost lazy spin.

The torque nauseated Blythe, made him dizzy and threatened him with total blackout.

The landing ended suddenly with a bone-crushing stop as the aft section of the plane came into contact with something hard and unyielding. The impact slammed the flight crew against their harnesses and back into their seats. One of the navigators emitted a short yelp, and Blythe saw something sail past his shoulder and strike the main panel. The object performed a flip-flop dance down the front of the instrument panel with wet, smacking sounds, and in the half light of a gauge Blythe could see it was part of a human tongue.

For a minute or two Blythe didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to deal with the whimpers of a nearly tongue-less navigator, the hushed reassurances of the other men for his friend. Blythe looked slowly to his right and averted his eyes when he saw the gross dangle of Little’s head against a restraint. Blythe reached out slowly. Bile rose in his throat when he touched his fingers to the soft cleft of Little’s throat where it met with his jawline. No pulse.

Sanity took hold quickly then—almost as if Little’s demise had confirmed Blythe’s continued existence—and after a wiggle of fingers and toes to verify all his body parts were still attached, Blythe disengaged the restraint harness and squeezed out of his seat. He watched as the navigator held his injured comrade’s head against his shoulder. Blood ran freely from the other man’s mouth onto the sleeve of his friend, but the navigator didn’t seem to notice.

“Get the first-aid kit and see if you can stop that bleeding,” Blythe instructed. “I’m going to check on the hold.”

The navigator nodded. “Aye, sir. How is Little?”

“Dead,” Blythe reported plainly. He could see the pain in the navigator’s expression and softened the tone in his voice. “Friend?”

“School chum, sir.”

“I’m sorry.”

With that, Blythe continued to the rear hold before the navigator could see the tears well in his eyes. He had to use all his body weight to open the door enough that he could squeeze through it. Stacks of boxes, some of them containing survival gear, had dislodged from their bins and wedged open the door. Blythe managed to get to the hold.

At first glance in the damp, red-orange glow of emergency lights, he assessed the special titanium-alloy containers that contained their ultrasecret cargo that appeared intact. Miraculously, they had somehow maintained their position in the center of the hold, held in place by thick canvas moorings, a testament to the skill of the loading crews. Blythe moved around them to the passenger bench on the starboard side of the craft and stopped abruptly.

Bodies were strewed everywhere. It appeared that a large part of the jump bench had completely dislodged from its moorings and been tossed every which way. Acting as a lever, it had obviously tossed around the SAS team members secured to it like so many rag dolls. The unforgiving metal edges had dismembered a couple of the men, the impact had been so great, and something that flew through the hold had even decapitated one man. Only two of the nine men who had been seated there even moved, and on closer inspection Blythe could tell one man was on his way out just by the way he breathed.

Blythe stepped past the grisly scene and moved rapidly toward the back, hopeful at least some of his loading crew survived. He found he could not squeeze past the last container in line. The entire rear of the Starlifter C-141 had folded into itself, crushed by some unseen force, the same force that had stopped the cargo ship cold. Blythe ducked to see if he could detect movement, cupped his hand to his mouth and called out, but only the echo of his voice in the cavernous hold returned—it seemed almost as if the echo answered of its own life to mock him.

Blythe turned and started toward the fore section when he heard the clang of metal followed a moment later by a hissing noise. Blythe turned his eyes for the ceiling, attempted to determine the source of the noise, but he couldn’t pinpoint it. It grew more pronounced and familiar, and Blythe stood still for several minutes as if bound in some sort of suspended animation. He felt tired, more tired than he ever had before in his life, and he couldn’t imagine how this whole situation could become worse.

Blythe shook off the weariness and marched toward the front of his plane with renewed purpose. As he reached the section beyond the foremost cargo container, he saw the remainder of sparks spitting through the wall of the fuselage just a moment before an entire section of wall fell inward. Men dressed in camouflage, weapons held at the ready, charged through the glowing rim of that gaping hole.

Blythe didn’t bother to try reaching for his sidearm. He knew how it would end if he attempted to resist the shadowy figures. They continued to pour through the hole, one upon the other, like locusts invading the harvest.

Somewhere in that outpouring a man stepped through the opening who possessed the regality of a monarch and wore a presence of exclamatory command authority. Blythe guessed the man’s height at about six and a half feet. Muscles rippled across his abdomen, for all intents appearing they might tear through his black T-shirt. Equally sculpted pectorals, biceps and triceps formed mountainous lines that reached to a bulging neck and strong, chiseled face. Shoulder-length brown hair and a trimmed beard framed that face. A patrician nose jutted from jade-colored eyes masked behind the yellowish tint of bifocals. The man rested his sledgehammer-size fists on a narrow waist that veed straight to hips and legs in camouflage fatigue pants. The man wore midcalf paratrooper boots with steel toes polished to a mirrorlike glisten. A military web belt encircled his hips, and he wore a sidearm in quick-draw fashion on his left thigh.

“You are now a prisoner of the Germanic Freedom Railroad,” the man announced. “Your life, as your cargo, is now forfeit at my discretion.”

Blythe could barely contain a squeal of outrage. “Now look here, I don’t give a goddamn who you are! You have seized an aircraft belonging to Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force under the command of NATO forces. And I can guarantee they’ll come quickly looking for us! You would be best to leave things be!”

The man stepped forward and leaned close to Blythe’s ear, his breath hot on the officer’s neck as he whispered, “I know exactly what I have seized, Group Captain. In fact, we’ve been expecting you.”

CHAPTER ONE

David McCarter sat on a large rock, a Player’s cigarette in one hand and a sweating can of Coca-Cola in the other.

The Phoenix Force leader chewed absently at his lower lip while he studied the lush foliage that ran along the base of Monti Sirino, about twenty miles from the Golfo di Policastro, Italy. A mission from Stony Man, the ultracovert operations unit of the United States government, had brought them here less than forty-eight hours earlier. With their mission complete in record time, McCarter and the other members of Phoenix Force could look forward to a long-needed week of R & R.

McCarter glanced over his shoulder as the turbofans on the twin Rolls-Royce engines of the C-20 Gulfstream whined into preflight action. The time had come for them to get the hell out of there. He took a last, long drag before he crushed the cherry against a rock, field stripped the remainder and dropped the butt in his pocket. It wouldn’t do to have someone find the thing and extract his DNA.

The fox-faced Briton’s boots crunched on the refined gravel of the makeshift airstrip. The running lights glowed faintly in the half light of dawn, most of the sunlight peeking over the horizon still obscured by trees and tall grasses at the base of the mountain. McCarter glanced at his watch before rushing up the narrow steps and into the plane. He looked toward the cockpit, wishing he would see the familiar figure of Jack Grimaldi there, although he knew he wouldn’t. Grimaldi, Stony Man’s top gun and usual pilot for Phoenix, was back in Washington recovering from a hell-raising mission in Afghanistan.

McCarter downed the last of his Coca-Cola in a few swallows, crushed the can and tossed it into a nearby waste receptacle.

“Oh, baby!” a voice called from the cabin. “You’re such a stud. Come over here and give us some love!”

McCarter turned toward the sound of the voice. The fresh and eager visage of T. J. Hawkins gazed at him in mock adoration. Thomas Jackson Hawkins was a straightforward guy with a heart of gold and a Texas accent so smooth it could melt the wills of even the strongest women.