Rolling Thunder

Rigo nodded and unholstered her Walther. She stepped over the body and crouched before the other woman, eyeing her calmly as she reached for her gag.

“I’m going to take this off,” Rigo explained calmly, “then you will quietly tell us the truth, yes?”

The other woman nodded fearfully. Slowly the gag was unfastened. The prisoner gasped for air, then began to sob.

“We didn’t do anything!” she insisted. “I swear it! We’re working on a film, and we were just getting some second-unit footage of the river! That’s all we were doing! You have to believe me!”

Some of the other men on the boat brought over a crate filled with two handguns, as well as several high-priced film cameras, tape recorders and a slew of accessories. Rigo inspected the guns first. They were both small, standardized Ruger P-4 .22s. Neither had been fired. Rigo set the guns aside and picked up a telephoto lens, then looked back at the other woman.

“CIA?” she asked. “Or NATO maybe?”

“We aren’t spies!” the blonde pleaded. “I’m telling you, we’re just working on a film. A documentary about the Avignon River. We only had guns to warn off wild game whenever we came ashore. We weren’t doing anything wrong!”

Rigo ignored the outburst and looked through the crate, inspecting the woman’s passport, as well as the one taken off the corpse. Both documents seemed on the level, but Rigo knew that meant nothing. She had a dozen seemingly legitimate passports of her own back at the safehouse in Barcelona, and none of them listed her real name or the fact that she was a high-ranking member of the Basque Liberation Movement.

She turned back to the other woman. “One look at what you’ve filmed and we’ll know you’re lying.”

“Look all you want!” the prisoner said. “Go ahead! I’m telling you, it’s just nature footage! That’s all you’re going to see!”

“They tossed some film into the river when they saw us coming after them,” Enrique stated.

“That’s not true!” the blonde cried. “It wasn’t film!”

“No? What, then?”

The other woman hesitated, then said, “It was just some pot. Some marijuana and a pipe. We know about the laws here, and we didn’t want to be caught with it.”

Rigo was weighing the woman’s words when a young Basque with a wild mane of dark hair poked his head out of the boat’s cabin. “A call for you on the radio,” he told Rigo. “It’s your brother.”

“Which one?”

“Miguel.”

Rigo shared an expectant glance with Golato, then stood. It looked as if she were going to walk away from the prisoner, but suddenly she turned, casually took aim at the woman’s head and fired a round into her face, killing her instantly. As the woman slumped to the deck, Rigo holstered her gun and told Golato, “Once night falls, take them downriver to Sardana and get rid of them, along with the kayak. Make it look like they were robbed by river pirates.”

He nodded. “Done.”

Rigo excused herself and went to the cabin. The young man directed her to the transceiver, then stepped outside so that she could take the call alone.

“Miguel,” she said into the microphone, “I was beginning to worry.”

“It took longer than we’d planned, that’s all,” came the crackly response from the woman’s older brother.

“You got your hands on it, then.”

“Yes,” her brother assured her. “We have the tank.”

CHAPTER ONE

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Rosario Blancanales jogged higher up into the foothills surrounding Stony Man Farm. It was his favorite time of day, just past dawn with the sun yet to break through the early-morning clouds. There was a briskness in the air and the valley below him was quiet and tranquil. He’d passed a few small animals—rabbits and chipmunks—and the occasional bird flapped overhead, but otherwise he felt as if he had the winding dirt path to himself.

Soon Blancanales came upon a rocky escarpment affording a panoramic view of the Shenandoah Valley. From this perspective, Stony Man Farm looked much like any number of other isolated ranch estates scattered throughout pockets of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The main house and surrounding buildings were only faintly ostentatious, seemingly part of a modest farming enterprise that included the raising of seasonal crops and, off to the north, some harvesting of wood. Behind the unassuming facade, however, the sprawling valley enclave served as the command center for the covert Sensitive Operations Group, made up of not only Blancanales’s Able Team comrades, but also the warriors of Phoenix Force and a centralized support group that rarely left the Farm’s confines.

From his vantage point, Blancanales could see a few scattered farmhands laboring in the orchards. To his right, standing atop the crest of the nearest mountain, another two men busied themselves inspecting the high, barbwire-topped cyclone fence that encircled the Farm’s perimeter. The men, like those working down below, weren’t mere hired laborers, but rather highly trained, combat-ready members of the facility. The blacksuits.

Like the security force, Blancanales was a man of deceptive appearance. With his prematurely gray hair and well-tanned Hispanic features, he looked less like a battle-trained commando than a successful businessman out for a quick jog before heading into the office at some high-rise in Washington, D.C. In fact, Blancanales had resorted to such a role while on a recent assignment, using his white-suit savvy to infiltrate a shell company fronting for an Asian gun-running operation. One moment he’d been wheeling and dealing with the company’s CEOs at a business office; the next he was fighting alongside Able Team cohorts Carl Lyons and Gadgets Schwarz, trading gunfire with a goon squad at the warehouse where the black-market guns were stored. Before the dust had settled, the men had been forced to resort to hand-to-hand combat, and Blancanales had used his mastery of bo jitsu to neutralize a pair of thugs who together outweighed him by more than one hundred pounds. Blancanales had emerged from the skirmish with only a few aches and bruises, but Schwarz had been put out of commission for a few weeks with a stress fracture of the right leg, and while Lyons had quickly recovered from a flesh wound to the shoulder, he’d been subsequently laid low by a particularly virulent strain of the flu.

Now, for the first time in weeks, Blancanales had been presented with a reprieve from the field. Once he was finished with his jog, he planned to get a ride to Dulles International so that he could fly out to California for a long overdue visit with his family in East L.A. It’d been nearly a year since he’d been home, and he was looking forward to the trip and the inevitable backyard barbecues that were always thrown together at a moment’s notice once word spread that he was coming home.

As it turned out, however, Fate had other plans in store.

Blancanales was about to start back when he heard a rustling in the brush twenty yards downhill from where he was standing. Someone was heading up the path he’d just taken.

“Yo, Pol,” a familiar voice called out. Seconds later, Blancanales spotted Akira Tokaido on the trail. The young Japanese American was a key member of the Farm’s cybernetic team. He wore his black hair up in a topknot and, as usual, was chomping away at a few sticks of bubble gum. He popped the pink balloon he’d just blown, then called out, “¿Que pasa?”

“Since when did you speak Spanish?” Blancanales asked.

“That’s about all I know,” Tokaido confessed. “But you better brush up on yours.”

“Why’s that?”

“Barbara sent me to fetch you. Something’s going down in Spain, and she wants you and Jack Grimaldi to hook up with the guys over there to check it out. Or, as Yoda might put it, ‘May the Force be with you.’”

“I think that was Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“Whatever,” Tokaido said.

“Isn’t Phoenix on assignment in Korea?” he asked Tokaido.

“They wrapped things up there earlier this morning. They’re already on their way to Bilbao.”

Blancanales sighed. So much for downtime. “What are we up against?” he asked.

“Something about a stolen supertank. Briefing’s in ten minutes, or whenever the chief gets back from D.C. He’ll fill you in.”

As if on cue, the two men suddenly heard the faint droning of an approaching helicopter. Blancanales glanced back out over the valley and saw an unarmed OH-58D Kiowa Warrior drift over the mountaintops and begin its descent toward the Farm’s camouflaged airstrip.

“Speak of the devil,” Blancanales murmured.

“I won’t tell him you said that.” Tokaido blew another bubble, then turned and started back down the path, calling over his shoulder, “Last one down’s a rotten egg.”

Blancanales shrugged and began to lope behind Tokaido, muttering to himself, “I’ve been called worse.”

THE CHIEF WAS Hal Brognola. Also known as the head Fed, he was Stony Man’s liaison with the powers-that-be in Washington. Working under the guise of a functionary with the Justice Department, Brognola had been on a first-name basis with the past five presidents, and during that span he’d probably sat in on more meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff than any other person.

“I’ll try my best to keep this brief,” he began, pacing before those assembled in the basement War Room of the main house. Akira Tokaido wasn’t present; he’d gone off to join his colleagues at the computer facilities, located in the Farm’s Annex. Blancanales was there, however, seated alongside Brognola’s top aides, mission controller Barbara Price and Aaron Kurtzman, head of SOG’s cybernetic operations.