Shadow War

“Um, you into pop princesses?” he asked.

“Shut up. She’s been all over the news, that’s all,” Lyons snapped.

Schwarz turned his head toward Blancanales. He could see the stocky Latino preparing a sarcastic riposte and felt his own laughter bubbling up in his throat.

Then the screaming began.

G ONZALES BEGAN to shiver in fear.

Lagos moved between the men hanging from the ceiling like slabs of meat at a slaughterhouse. He lit a cigarette. Beyond the lights the hulking figures of his men were reduced to nondescript shadows.

The man hanging on Gonzales’s left started to mumble a prayer to the Virgin Mary in rapid Spanish. There was the sudden sharp, acrid smell of urine as one of the men let his bladder go. Lagos chuckled and blew out a blue cloud of cigarette smoke.

“The people,” Lagos said, “they don’t understand that what we do is hard work. They think moving product is like being a rock star. You bang models and party all the time. Sometime you have to be like, uh, the Tony Soprano and use your gun. Right?”

Lagos moved around to stand in front of Gonzales. He regarded the hanging prisoner like some insect he’d found crushed on the sole of his shoe. He blew smoke into Gonzales’s face, then reached up with one hand and snatched the informant by the chin. Lagos locked eyes with his prey.

“But we know the truth, don’t we?” Lagos gritted. “We know it is hard goddamn work making our money. And the ladies aren’t the only things we bang, eh?”

From behind Lagos his men chuckled. To the terrified Gonzales it sounded like hyenas regarding a wounded gazelle. He was close enough to Lagos to see the black clogged pores of the man’s nose. There was a tiny residue of white powder around the edge of one of his cavernous nostrils. The man’s eyes blazed as bloodshot as a rabid dog’s. Gonzales squeezed his own eyes shut and tried to turn away. Lagos’s fingers were like steel bands on his face, and they burned his flesh with his intense body heat.

“One of you bitches knows about Bellicose Dawn.” Lagos released Gonzales’s face and stepped back. “None of you should know about my Bellicose Dawn. Before I am finished, the one who knows will tell me what he knows. But since I will kill that person, I don’t expect anyone to volunteer the information. So we were talking about hard work again, right? Getting the one of you to confess will be hard work. Just as keeping my woman happy can be hard work.”

Lagos turned his back on the hanging men and walked past the halogen lamp setup. With his back to the men, his voice rolled across the warehouse away from them, echoed off the thin metal walls then bounced back, ringing evilly in their ears.

“So I…What do the gringos say? Yes. I can kill…I can kill two birds with one bush. Or get two stones in my palm. Something. Fuck it. My woman, she likes to hurt people who’ve disappointed me. For her it is not such hard work.”

Lagos turned and faced the men, now a faceless shadow behind the lights that blinded them.

“It gets her very worked up, if you understand what I mean.” On cue, his thugs laughed. “So I win. I don’t have to do the work. I get my information. My lady is happy. Then she makes me happy. See? Everybody wins, yes?” Lagos paused and his dry chuckle trailed off. “Well, I am guessing not everyone. Not you, eh, bitches?”

From behind Gonzales one of the other two men began to scream.

“L ET’S MOVE IN ,” Lyons said.

He rose off his knee and swept up the 12-gauge shotgun. Behind him Blancanales and Schwarz stood in smooth unison, their weapons sweeping up and tracking toward the danger zone.

In well-practiced motions the team approached its objective. Lyons raced forward several yards, then took cover behind some debris. He brought his drum-fed shotgun up, providing cover as his teammates jogged quickly past him. Twenty yards up, they dropped to their knees behind solid piles of junk and covered Lyon’s bunny-hop motion. Able Team repeated the maneuver three more times before coming to the last bit of cover—an overturned and waterlogged Ford Taurus.

Lyons scanned the area around the building and saw no sentries. He made a V out of his index and middle fingers and gestured toward his eyes, then pointed toward a window on the side of the building.

Immediately, Schwarz rose, Steyr AUG up, and ghosted across the muddy gravel toward the four-pane window. He crouched beneath the opening, then slowly straightened until he was peeking inside. He remained motionless for nearly a minute, soaking in every detail.

From inside, there was the sound of a little gas-powered engine and the screams had turned to shrieks.

“Jesus,” Blancanales muttered. He lifted a finger to the cell attachment in his ear. “Stony Base, Able is about to make entry.”

“Copy,” Price answered, her voice still cool. “Jack, go ahead and bring the Little Bird in over site.”

“Roger,” Grimaldi answered.

From out over the swamp Able Team could suddenly pick up the whir and hum of the Little Bird helicopter. It formed a rhythmic droning punctuated by the shrieks of the torture victims.

From the window Schwarz turned back toward his unit. He held up his hand and spread the fingers. Five. He closed his hand into a fist, then opened it again. Five more. He closed his hand once more then held up three fingers. Thirteen total.

Lyons nodded once, his head moving sharply.

“Let’s roll,” he said.

CHAPTER TWO

France

T HOMAS J ACKSON H AWKINS sat in the lobby of the Marseilles hotel. His com-link earpiece as inconspicuous as the newspaper he pretended to study in the crowd of EU powerbrokers. He read the story about a Venezuelan named Sincanaros connected to the improper campaign finances of a Maryland senator with genuine disgust. Underneath the rest of his paper, thrown casually to the lobby side of his little café table, was a parabolic mike designed to look like a cell phone.

The electronic device pointed toward the front desk and the pickup fed directly into the modified microphone Hawkins wore in his ear.

The Phoenix Force commando sipped his espresso and idly scanned the page of newsprint in his hands, searching for good news and killing time until the mark showed herself. He was the point man on this snatch operation.

A Joint Special Operations Command task force had pulled a prepaid cell phone off the corpse of a Chechen master bombmaker during a black op in Karachi, Pakistan. The redial option had revealed a Luxembourg prefix and number. Intrigued, JSOC had passed the information on to their CIA counterparts.

Electronic and computer analysts had managed to track the number to a satellite phone purchased by a Saudi Arabian construction company specializing in the sale of heavy equipment and suppression of oil-well fires in Africa and Southwest Asia.

The only representative of the company in Luxembourg during the appropriate time frame had been one Nayef al-Shalaan, who had turned out to be a very interesting person. He drew a generous salary from a construction company that was owned by one of the currently eight hundred Saudi princes. A prince who also happened to be al-Shalaan’s father.

Al-Shalaan had a degree in communications from Jordon College in Oxford and a master’s degree in finance from Princeton University. He enjoyed diplomatic immunity as House of Saud royalty, and he was an expert at brokering deals around UN mandates. Though a great deal of animosity had existed between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Saudi Arabia, al-Shalaan hadn’t allowed that to get in the way of profit, and he had managed to wed up several companies connected to French politicians with the Jordanian representatives of the Iraqi oil ministry during what would come to be known as the UN Oil-for-Food scandal, taking considerable amounts in money and favors in broker fees from both sides.

His connections with Sunni intelligence agents of the Special Republican Guard had continued after the U.S. invasion, and he’d grown rich channeling the finances of the Ramadi and Fallujah insurgents through Damascus and out to global points. Al-Shalaan was the very definition of a high-value target. The black bag surveillance specialists rolling out of Langley had gone right to work.

In short time the frequency for al-Shalaan’s personal cell phone had been ascertained, triangulated and captured. Once his personal communications were cracked, a whole world of intelligence had opened up to U.S. agencies.

Then al-Shalaan had started transferring funds for men believed to be the bodyguards of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s number two. Al-Zawahiri was an Egyptian doctor and important figure in the radical Islamic Jihad group founded there, and was tied to many acts of terror designed to weaken and overthrow the secular North African state.

Suddenly the CIA had a problem. The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency had put in a daily intelligence estimate that al-Shalaan, a prince of an important ally in the war on terror with diplomatic immunity, had suddenly come to the attention of another important ally: the brutal Egyptian GDSSI, or General Directorate for State Security Investigations. If al-Shalaan was going down, then the U.S. wanted him all to themselves.

Coordinating the intelligence cross-pollination, the DNI had gone to the Oval Office with his take on the situation. Al-Shalaan had to disappear. Taking the matter out of CIA hands, the President had gone to Stony Man.

Al-Shalaan was going to be pulled out of his Marseilles penthouse suite one step ahead of a black-ops squad of GDSSI agents. The resources available were scant. The time frame was ridiculously tight, the potential operational blowback a PR nightmare. Kidnapping a Saudi prince was unthinkable, even one that was a known facilitator of terror.

Phoenix Force got the job.

One number on al-Shalaan’s phone had unfailingly come up in connection to his stay at the five-star Marseilles resort—the number to a very high-priced, very exclusive dominatrix for hire.

The Langley profilers had been nonplussed by the revelation that al-Shalaan liked to be spanked and humiliated. And submissives like the Saudi were willing to pay large sums of money to secure a professional dominant.

Monica Bellucci was such a woman.

Hawkins sat up in his seat, then studiously turned his attention to his paper. Bellucci had walked into the lobby. The Phoenix Force commando nonchalantly reached under his folded newspaper and turned up the volume on the parabolic microphone. The smooth technology fed the passive signals into his earpiece so well he might have been standing at the woman’s shoulder.