Hostile Dawn

The sentry who’d just entered the building reeled as he was strafed across the midsection by a fusillade from Hawkins’s M-16. The remaining two terrorists were grabbing for their AK-47s when Manning dropped through one of the shattered roof panels. He landed hard on the dirt ground near the chair Walter Ferris was bound to.

Manning sprang forward the moment he landed, tackling Ferris to the ground. In the process, the Stony Man commando rammed his shoulder into a nearby plant stand. Several large terra-cotta containers crashed down on the Canadian, one striking his hip while another clipped the back of his head, rendering him unconscious. Before the surviving Hamas agents could have a go at him, both Hawkins and James raked the nursery interior with bursts from their M-16s. The terrorists went down, landing on their unfired assault rifles.

In all, less than eight seconds had passed from the time Rafael Encizo had slain Riri Sahn. In those eight seconds, Walter Ferris’s fate had gone through a complete turnaround. Instead of facing certain torture and death, the reporter would now have a chance to complete the investigatory news story he’d spent the past four months working on.

Phoenix Force’s mission was accomplished.

CHAPTER TWO

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

“Phoenix pulled it off,” Barbara Price reported to her colleagues gathered inside the Annex Computer Room. She’d just finished speaking long-distance with David McCarter. “Ferris is safe and the Hamas squad was neutralized.”

“Chalk another one up for the good guys,” said Aaron Kurtzman, the wheelchair-bound head of SOG’s crack team of cyberanalysts. He was seated at a workstation situated on the west side of the large subterranean chamber. Poised in front of their computers at other stations were Akira Tokaido, Carmen Delahunt and Huntington Wethers. Price stood in their midst, while Hal Brognola was off to one side, clicking away at a laptop as he wrapped up a long-distance call of his own, this one to Able Team commander Carl Lyons.

“Are the guys okay?” asked Delahunt, a fiery-spirited redhead in her late forties who’d come to Stony Man by way of a long, heralded tenure with the FBI.

“All but Gary,” Price replied. “He’s being looked at for a possible concussion and shoulder separation.”

“By ‘neutralized,’ I take it there were no prisoners,” Huntington Wethers said. The somber-faced African American was the same age as Delahunt, but he looked years older, his close-cropped hair having turned silver at the temples within a few years of taking an extended leave from his professorial chair at UC Berkeley. To explore the cutting edge of cybernetic intel gathering on behalf of his country was, for Wethers, not only a challenge but an honor, and if it had cost him his once youthful good looks, he considered it a small price to pay.

“It would have been nice to have someone to interrogate, but no,” Price said. “David says their only option was to go in for the kill. He’s flown Gary and Ferris to the hospital, but the others stayed behind and are combing the nursery for intel. Hopefully we’ll have something to work with.”

“And hopefully we can convince Ferris to cough up anything he knows instead of saving it for some damn scoop,” said Akira Tokaido, the youngest member of the cybercrew. “The guy owes us.”

“Apparently, Ferris had his jaw fractured by Hamas,” Price said. “He’s going under the knife and probably won’t be up for questioning right away. Once he is, I’m sure McCarter will debrief him.”

Across the room, Brognola removed a flash drive from his laptop and handed it to Kurtzman.

“Load this, Bear, would you? And call up the photo file. Monitor three.”

“Sure thing.”

While Kurtzman transferred the files to his computer, Brognola addressed the others.

“We’ve got a sidebar of sorts regarding Able Team’s assignment on the West Coast,” he said. “It came up toward the end of the White House briefing, but there wasn’t a lot of hard data available to back it up. Now we’ve got a little more to sink our teeth into.”

“This is about the al Qaeda cell?” Wethers asked.

“Possibly,” Brognola said. “I’ll get into it. Bear?”

“Coming right up.”

Once Kurtzman had pulled up the photo file, he ran his cursor over the necessary commands to transfer an image to one of the large, flat-screen monitors lining the east wall. The collective Stony Man braintrust soon found itself staring at a booking mugshot of a man in his midthirties, head shaved, his thin, tight lips framed by a goatee the same dark color as his piercing, defiant eyes.

“He uses a handful of aliases, but his name is Kouri Ahmet,” Brognola explained. “He’s Lebanese by birth and has loose ties with both Hamas and Hezbollah, but all intel points to him being a freelancer. Over the years he’s also dabbled with al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad and a handful of other terrorist outfits in the Far East. He specializes in assassinations but will tackle any job that suits his purposes.”

“He doesn’t look like the happy sort,” Carmen Delahunt commented.

“This was taken after his arrest three days ago in Mexico,” Brognola said, passing along what he’d just learned from Lyons, who, in turn, had come upon the info through an L.A. contact with the FBI. “He was trying to broker a deal for a cache of Blinidicide-81 LAWs stolen from a military depot in La Paz. Apparently an informant turned on him and the Mexican authorities had him in custody when the Justice Department here flagged him on a conspiracy charge involving the secretary of state.”

“I remember that,” Tokaido said as he absently fingered the ink-black topknot rising from his scalp like an exclamation point. “Some sniper plot that was supposed to be carried out during the secretary’s last trip to the Middle East, right?”

“Good memory,” Brognola said. “We’re not sure at this point what Ahmet planned to do with the LAWs, but the idea of him loading up on that kind of firepower just south of the border obviously has us concerned.”

“Not to mention the secretary,” Delahunt interjected. “If he thought it was bad having someone come after him with a rifle, imagine what he must think about being the crosshairs of an antitank rocket.”

“Again, we’re not certain who Ahmet was targeting,” Brognola said. “He’s being extradited and is already on a plane bound for the States. The Bureau wants to run him through interrogation and dangle leniency as bait in hopes he’ll cop to what he was planning and finger some higher-ups.”

“I assume one theory is that he was looking to bring those rocket launchers to the sleeper cell Able Team is looking for,” Price ventured.

“It would make sense,” Brognola said. “Like I said, Ahmet’s a freelancer, so it’s not a reach to think he’d throw in with al Qaeda. And the Mexican border is still porous enough to figure those LAWs were earmarked for L.A.”

“Hopefully the Bureau will get to the bottom of it,” Price said. “But I take it we’re in the on-deck circle.”

“Affirmative,” Brognola said. “I pulled strings and arranged to have Ahmet flown up to Edwards Air Force Base near Barstow instead of L.A.”

“Where Able Team just so happens to be in the neighborhood,” Delahunt interjected.

Brognola nodded. “The Bureau will go by the book with Ahmet, but if that doesn’t work, we’ve got the green light to let Ironman have a go at him.”

Price smiled dourly. “If it comes to that, I like our chances.”

CHAPTER THREE

Airspace over San Diego County, California

It was only after he’d put the Gulfstream back on autopilot that Kouri Ahmet began to come down off the adrenaline rush that had powered his desperate ploy to thwart his extradition to Los Angeles. As he sat back in the jet’s cockpit, waiting for his pulse to return to normal, the Lebanese expatriate thought back on the past several minutes, savoring details that, at the time, had flashed by in a blur.

The small government transport jet had hit a pocket of turbulence shortly after crossing the Mexican border and when the Gulfstream had begun to rock, Ahmet had taken note of the U.S. Air Marshal’s distraction and made his move. Bolting from his seat, the terrorist had lunged across the aisle and burrowed his shoulder into the other man’s solar plexis, knocking the wind from his lungs. That had bought Ahmet the time necessary to draw his shackled hands beneath his waist and wriggle them forward until his arms were no longer pinned behind his back. The marshal was still disoriented when Ahmet had rendered him unconscious, using the handcuffs as a makeshift garrote. It had all happened in a matter of seconds, and by the time the plane had cleared the turbulence, Ahmet was on his feet, the officer’s 9 mm Colt pistol clenched in his fist. The door to the cockpit had been locked, but two well-placed rounds had given him access to the pilot. The pilot had been armed, but Ahmet had put a bullet through his skull before he’d had a chance to reach his gun. Though hindered by his ankle cuffs, the prisoner had managed to drag the other man from his seat and take over the controls long enough to bring the plane to a lower altitude. Once he’d set the Gulfstream on autopilot, he’d hauled the pilot back into the main cabin. By then, the marshal had regained consciousness, but Ahmet had quickly finished him off with a gunshot to the heart. After opening the outer door, he’d disposed of the bodies—first the marshal, then the pilot. Suddenly, in a matter of moments, the terrorist’s doomed future had taken a dramatic turn.

Ahmet had boarded the plane back in La Paz with no set escape plan, but now, with the plane back up to twenty thousand feet on a diverted course toward Riverside County, Ahmet reflected that it was unlikely that any orchestrated attempt could have succeeded any better than the gambit he’d just executed. Some would have attributed such good fortune to serendipity, but for Ahmet it was the guiding hand of God that had intervened on his behalf. He offered up a quick prayer of thanks, then ceased his ruminations. There was, after all, work to be done. Ahmet was still in shackles, dressed in a telltale prison-orange jumpsuit at the controls of a plane that soon, no doubt, would be the object of an intense aerial manhunt. Yes, he’d overpowered his captors and placed himself more in control of his fate, but the renegade knew that he was still a long way from being free.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

H AL B ROGNOLA AND Barbara Price were halfway through the tunnel leading back to the main house when the Stony Man director received the news on his earbud transceiver.

On Brognola’s signal, Price turned the electric cart around and headed back toward the Annex. Brognola, meanwhile, wrapped up his long-distance call with Able Team’s interim pilot, Jack Grimaldi, who was on the other side of the continent, manning the controls of a loaner F-16 fighter jet he’d just lifted off the runway at Edwards Air Force Base.

“Yes, by all means intercept him if you can,” Brognola said, reaching into his trench coat for a plastic-wrapped cigar. “With any luck, he’s still airborne.”

“He doesn’t have much of a jump on us,” Grimaldi replied. “Hell, we were already out on the runway waiting for him when we got the word.”

“Still, there’s a lot of airspace between Barstow and San Diego,” Brognola said. “I’ll get Camp Pendleton to send somebody up to help out.”

“Fine by me,” Grimaldi said. “But what if we get to him first?”

“We’d obviously like him alive for questioning, but do what you have to. We can’t let him get away.”