Ramrod Intercept

Feeling good.

He saw she was already cutting a beeline his way, all smiles, ready to rock, waving off the come-ons from the wanna-be lady-killers. He was one of the privileged elite clientele who had access to the back rooms. And why not, he figured, the kind of money he threw away in the place, a fringe benefit or two should always be on the menu. He was in a stressful line of work, after all, needed relief, and things weren’t getting any less tense around the office.

Los Angeles was a party town, around the clock, and Collins was looking for some way to keep the good times rolling. He believed he had found the answer, only he was concerned where he might go with his information and who should get it.

And for what price.

Still, he was disturbed about recent events he couldn’t explain, but his ticket to paradise was stashed away in the aluminum briefcase by his side.

And there were shadows following him. He couldn’t see them, but three of his colleagues had gone AWOL. The past month or so had seen a few grim-faced robots—Terminators, he thought—lumbering around the DYSAT office in Century City. These days, he felt he was always being watched, since he was a top-ranking executive with access to sensitive information to classified high-tech weapons, microchip processors….

Well, he had stumbled across the order manifests and they didn’t jibe with production output. Not only that, but the end users—purchasers—were logged as…

He shuddered to even consider whom DYSAT had fallen into bed with. Okay, he figured he could talk to the president of the company, a former Air Force colonel, and put the screws to him. It might cost him his job, but if he made some noise about going to the Feds unless there was ample cash compensation…

“Hey, cutie. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Was it his imagination, or did Cyndy look especially pleased to see him?

“Likewise.”

“You want a drink first?”

“After.”

She took his hand, leading the way. Paradise.

“You sound real horny tonight.”

“Tough day at the office.”

She seemed too eager to please, not even bothering to relieve him of two hundred bucks first, but he figured she was just hot to get it on. He trailed her through the rear door, into a narrow, murky hall. He was grateful the back rooms were nearly soundproof, blotting out the thunder of heavy metal and the roar of hyenas in heat. The only kind of noise he wanted to hear was her mewing for more. Down the hall to the last room, and she opened the door. He was moving inside, looking from the soft light burning on the nightstand, adjusting his eyes to the deeper gloom, when he spotted the shadow.

“What the…?”

“Mr. Collins. Nice of you to show up.”

Collins felt his blood pressure rise like a war drum in his ears, heart pulsing with fear and anger. “What is this? I’ve seen you before.”

“I left your envelope with the bartender.”

Collins nearly bellowed with outrage as the whore simply nodded, not even looking at him as she left the room, the door snicking shut.

The Terminator rose, and Collins heard the dialogue leaping to mind, aware he had been set up, screwed. He was about to say, “I can explain,” when the behemoth in a buzz cut pulled out a pistol and attached a sound suppressor.

“Your services are no longer required by DYSAT.”

“Listen! No, I can—”

A chug, then the lights were punched out.

CHAPTER ONE

“You look like the messenger with bad news—and ‘very’ bad news.”

Hal Brognola was fondling an unlit cigar as he rolled into the War Room at Stony Man Farm. The director of the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group swept on, past Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, the chief cyber sorcerer who was confined for life to his wheelchair, thanks to a bullet, and grunted at Bear’s remark.

“Well?” Kurtzman pressed. “Did the Man give us the green light?”

The Man, of course, was the President of the United States, and half of Brognola’s twin-bill duty was playing a critical role as the Farm’s liaison to the chief executive. “We’re sitting in limbo—still.”

No thumbs-up from the Oval Office, and Barbara Price, the Farm’s mission controller, groaned. “Unbelievable. Does he have any clue how hard we pushed, maneuvering all the logistical chess pieces, to get it at the doorstep of…this eleventh hour?”

The Justice man knew all too well how many hours—belay that—days the Farm team had racked up, the number of strings tugged, contacts cajoled, markers raked in from the Pentagon to Langley. It galled him alone to think Stony Man’s elite commandos were poised on three separate thresholds, combat ready, chomping on prebattle nerves.

Waiting for the phone to ring.

The big Fed poured a large foam cup of Kurtzman’s infamous coffee, then dumped enough sugar in the black swill to make it go down a little easier. “Five days, as a matter of fact, since we put this one on the drawing board. I don’t mind saying I’m feeling the strain myself, people, and all the way to the hair on my toes,” Brognola told the key players, grabbing his seat, dumping himself down at the head of the table. “The Man’s as clued in like I was the burning bush to his Moses, all right, but he’s firmly stated his concerns about what could become a whopping and ugly international mess.”

“Welcome to the Oval Office,” Kurtzman groused.

“I damn near said that. At any rate, it’s why I’ve been at my office all day, waiting by the phone, lighting a few more fires around Wonderland.” He glowered at the red phone on the table within arm’s reach. “Looks like we’re all still going to have to wait—if and when—for the tough choice to get made.”

The chopper ride from his office at the Justice Department to the Farm in Virginia was roughly ninety minutes. But with only a catnap on the office couch, here and there during the past few days Brognola felt as if he’d just crossed three time zones, jet lag and ten years older. Tired as King Solomon perhaps over the folly and insanity of humans chasing the wind, on edge admittedly, and leaning a little to the mean side.

Brognola worked on the coffee, chomping his stogie, then said, “Okay, sitreps. I know we’ve run it down before, but maybe we missed something. A to Z. The basics and the particulars. Let’s start with Phoenix Force. Barbara?”

The honey-haired blonde, who could have just walked off the pages of a fashion magazine and into the War Room, took up a remote-control box and snapped on one of the large monitors built into the wall. An enlarged grid map of Madagascar and the Indian Ocean to the east flared to life. “The hunter-killer submarine Seawolf SSN 21 is submerged and still holding its position, forty kilometers and change from where Phoenix will be inserted on the eastern central shore of Madagascar. Sat imagery shows it’s a remote area, with only two villages and a scattering of rice terraces, a solitary Catholic church along the march. It will be your basic grunt march—move fast and silent and avoid contact with the locals. According to our and the Seawolf’s depth gauges and X-ray sat imagery of the water, the inlet’s bottom is smooth enough, slanting evenly up to shore, no crags, no snags, to receive the unarmed torpedo that will carry their gear and weapons onto the beach. Something like an underwater surfboard, special delivery riding right up on the sand. Ready and waiting for them to finish out their swim.”

Brognola grunted. “For some reason, I get damn nervous over the idea of inserting them by sea. I see twenty things going wrong all at once. Aren’t those shark-infested waters? As in great white?”

“Actually,” Kurtzman said, “the eastern coastline of Madagascar is called Whale Highway. Most of the marine life traffic is made up primarily of the larger animals, at least, namely migrating humpback whales.”

“I hear primarily and actually and namely, I don’t exactly get a warm fuzzy feeling, Bear. I’m not sure, but I don’t think they teach wanna-be SEALs in BUDs what the hell to do—other than pray—when they see a sixteen-foot torpedo-like shadow coming at them out of the murk with bared teeth the size of a butcher’s knife.”

“Your white shark population sticks farther to the south, off the coastline of South Africa where there’s an abundant seal menu.”

“Why couldn’t it have been an air drop instead of going out the hatch of a submersible?”

“A minisub,” Price said. “Riding piggyback on the escape hatch of the Seawolf. A submersible requires a surface support vehicle at all times, often needs to be hooked by cable to the mother ship. The state-of-the-art Titan was designed by aerodynamic engineers for the specific intent of inserting soldiers by sea. It’s not a deep research vessel by any stretch. It’s built for speed and deployment of combat troops.”

“I stand corrected. If I sounded like a grumpy old man, Barbara…”

“I understand perfectly. Okay, Aaron and I ran down the logistics, worked out the timetable from start to finish. Jack Grimaldi and a blacksuit crew are parked on a military base, courtesy of our own State Department’s clout with a few government officials in Tanzania. Once Phoenix hits the beach, Jack will be contacted by us, hooked up on a three-way sat uplink with the ground troops. The AC-130 Spectre gunship will take off from Dar es Salaam, fly east by southeast, then due south, move in, westward, once it hits their insertion point. Sat imagery lines up the old French garrison, due west, approximately ten kilometers west of where they will come ashore.”

“And if Jack gets there first?”

“He’ll fly a holding pattern, and hope. However, we have this timed down to the minute, Hal.”