Unified Action

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

INSIDE THE communications center of the underground Annex, Barbara Price clicked off the screen to the communications relay station and slowly turned in her chair. She saw Aaron “Bear” Kurtzman, leader of the Stony Man cyberteam, waiting for her. The burly man was sitting comfortably in a motorized wheelchair outfitted with an array of computer uplinks and interfaces.

There were two steaming mugs of coffee in his huge paws. He leaned forward and handed one to Price, who took it gratefully. She sipped at the coffee and looked up in surprise.

“This is great!” she sputtered. “You made this?”

Kurtzman grinned from behind his mug, suddenly self-conscious. “Yeah…I really don’t know what happened.”

“Is Phoenix in the conference room?”

“McCarter and James are,” Kurtzman replied. Price rose and began walking. “The rest of them are at the equipment cages getting gear ready for the airlift.”

“Good,” Price said, exiting the communications center.

Kurtzman followed the woman as she strode quickly down the hallway, pulling an iPhone free. Carmen Delahunt, the red-haired ex–FBI agent, came up and offered Price a form.

“Requisitions needs your signature for the AT-4s,” the woman explained.

Price shifted her phone to the crook of her shoulder and scrawled her name across the form. On the phone the connection clicked into place.

“Go for Brognola,” Hal Brognola said in his usual gruff voice.

“What are you doing?” Price asked.

She began walking again and the motor of Kurtzman’s chair whined as he followed her down the hall.

“Trying to ram our budget past the cabinet,” he replied. “You realize we use more ammunition than the entire United States Marine Corps in a year?”

“Even now?”

“Even now,” the big Fed said drolly. “What can I do for you? Able en route?”

“Able’s scrambling for the Dominican,” she confirmed.

She spun on her heel and shoved open the door to the Annex conference room, barging in to see Phoenix Force leader David McCarter and team medic Calvin James waiting for her.

“Phoenix?” Brognola demanded.

“That’s why I’m calling,” Price replied.

She pointed a finger at Kurtzman, then at the wall and the tech administrator worked a sequence on his chair-mounted keyboard. Instantly the plasma wall monitor sparked into life and went to its default setting of a global atlas.

“What do you need?”

On the screen the geographical image was overlaid with two thin red lines, one for latitude and one for longitude. Wherever the two lines intersected, a box formed, capturing the terrain and political information of any spot on the planet. Kurtzman worked a mouseball on his keyboard.

“Before I scramble Phoenix,” Price continued, “I need to know if I’m going to get overflight permission from Uzbekistan or if we have to get a plane capable of maintaining enough altitude to avoid detection during the insertion.”

“Just a second,” Brognola said. “Let me call a general at Stratcom to sense the general impression before I try to get it authorized.”

“I’ll hold,” Price said.

Calvin James, former Navy SEAL, turned toward the Phoenix Force leader, David McCarter. “We’re going to Kyrgyzstan.”

McCarter, a former British Special Air Service commando, shook his head. “Nah, Tajikistan. They’ve been having problems north of Kabul lately.”

“Kyrgyzstan,” James replied stubbornly.

“Twenty spot on it?”

“Done.” James shook the fox-faced Briton’s hand.

On the screen the lat and long lines settled over central Asia. The political lines showing the border of Kyrgyzstan with China on the right and Tajikistan on the south and Kazakhstan to the north and west showed up. Then the mountain range in the southeast of Kyrgyzstan was pulled up in vivid relief reading.

“Pay up, limey.” James smirked.

McCarter scowled good-naturedly. “I’ll get you in a bit.”

“You’re worse than Hawkins about paying up.”

“All right,” Price interrupted. “While I’m waiting for Hal to check this angle, we’ll move forward. This operation is a supplementation to an operational focus initiated by Joint Special Operations Command. We’re going to be performing direct-action missions based on information fed us by the Intelligence Support Activity,” Price explained, referencing the Pentagon unit tasked specifically with providing tactical information to special operations forces independent of civilian intelligence agencies. “What do you know about Kyrgyzstan?”

James shrugged. “There are clashes going on between progovernment and opposition forces. The government is threatening to balkanize, making the whole area highly unstable. There’ve been increased activity of extremist groups in the area. Most especially the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU, a terror group with direct links to al Qaeda.”

“Those are our boys,” Price said. “We have good intel they’re planning attacks on U.S. government facilities in the region. JSOC has had to shift too many assets south into Pakistan because of increased Taliban activity in the northwest border region there. They asked if we could send you boys to war.”

McCarter sat up. “Straight fights?”

“Is anything you do straight?” Kurtzman asked.

McCarter looked at him. “I’m not quite sure how to take that, mate.” He paused, then lifted an eyebrow. “Are you flirting with me, Bear?”

“Yes. Yes, I am,” Kurtzman said and nodded.

“If we’re done playing eHarmony.com do you think we could get back to the briefing?” Price asked.

“We’re going after bad guys?” James asked.

“Hunter-killer operation, search and destroy,” Price confirmed.

“I’m so happy,” McCarter replied.

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

THE SABERLINER BANKED hard as it made its approach.

Out their windows the members of Able Team could see several columns of thick, black smoke roiling up as the city burned. Dominican politics started at the street level and worked its way up. Public housing units and neighborhoods were carved into voting districts, and political workers utilized street gangs and corrupt police to intimidate voters and manipulate precincts.