Domination Bid

Braden knelt and flicked his thumb twice at two of his team members. The demo guys went to work on the boxes, priming them with the charges. Braden risked a glance over his shoulder and saw Cyrus making his way through the fence in the same way Braden’s team had just a minute earlier.

Once the charges were set, Braden and his men broke from their positions and headed toward the rear door where they’d planned to make their entry. They were nearly there when the charges blew the power boxes apart. Every interior light in the building went out, as well as power to a small external building. One of the men blew the lock off the door with a small roll of self-detonating plastic explosive and within seconds Braden’s team had gained access.

“You have five minutes.” Cyrus’s voice resounded in Braden’s headset. “Mark T-minus five, starting now. Radio silence from this point.”

“Copy,” Braden replied.

The six men pushed up the darkened corridor, moving smoothly as one unit. They followed a standard fire-and-maneuver pattern, leap-frogging in pairs as they approached their objective.

They reached the data room unmolested and Braden gestured for four of his men to fan out while the other would provide cover while he made his entry. The door proved no match for the pencil detonator that shot the bolt lock inward as if it had been fired from a potato gun. Braden eased the door open and snatched the red-lens flashlight from his equipment harness.

He managed to get about three feet inside before bullets crashed into the chest of his comrade and drove the man into the door frame. Braden wondered how he managed to avoid a similar fate even as he threw himself the floor and a fresh volley burned the air where he’d stood a millisecond earlier.

Braden brought his Steyr Aug Para into play and triggered a burst in the direction of the muzzle-flashes. The rounds bounced off a solid object marked by the sparks from their impact. It took Braden a moment to realize that he’d been firing into bulletproof glass.

Braden rolled onto his back and yanked an HE grenade from his harness. He primed the hand bomb and tossed it overhead before jumping to his feet and rushing toward the door. He threw himself around the corner and landed on his belly just as the grenade blew. Red, yellow and orange flame whooshed through the open door.

“We’re blown!” he shouted at his men. “Retreat!”

None of them had to be told twice, two taking point and two more providing rear cover with Braden between them. The men dashed up the hallway at full sprint and exited the building in time to see a firefight had already ensued between Cyrus and his team.

Braden and his men spread out and engaged whatever targets presented. The air came alive with reports from dozens of automatic weapons on both sides. To the observer it would’ve seemed as if a small war had erupted in the USDA’s “research facility” and it would’ve been a bizarre sight, at best.

Braden managed to rendezvous with Cyrus, miraculously avoiding death in the process.

“What happened?” Cyrus demanded during a lull in the shooting.

“Ambush,” Braden replied as he sighted on an enemy gunner and squeezed the trigger. “They were waiting for us.”

“Blown immediately? From the start?”

“It would seem so,” Braden said through clenched teeth as he fired at another target, missing by a narrow margin.

“You’ve ordered a retreat?”

Braden nodded.

“We can’t stay here,” Cyrus said.

“You mean you want to leave them?”

“They have their orders.”‘

“Sir, we have to—”

“Do it, Major. Just do it!”

Braden didn’t hesitate, knowing orders were orders. He and Cyrus scrambled to their feet and fired a few extra short bursts to help cover their escape through the perimeter fence. They had a vehicle waiting in the woods, a late-model custom van. It was obvious they’d been expected, so the success of their getaway was by no means guaranteed. But one thing Cyrus and Braden agreed on as they made their way to the van, there would be a day of reckoning.

There would be payback and it would be a revenge of the sweetest kind.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_51cdcdcd-63bb-52c2-83e7-0a9547d51865)

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

The five battle-hardened warriors of Phoenix Force sat attentively as Harold Brognola, head of the most covert special operations agency in America, opened the briefing.

“We’re long on intelligence and short on time, so let’s get right to it,” Brognola said. He looked at Barbara Price and nodded.

Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, tapped the key on the table-top keyboard in front of her and the operations center conference room lights dimmed. A moment later the face of a young man with dirty-blond hair appeared on the 72-inch LED screen at one end of the room.

“Gentlemen, meet Dr. Oleg Dratshev. This picture was taken about ten years ago when he was age twenty-five. For more than a decade Dratshev has been Russia’s foremost military R and D scientist in the areas of electromagnetic pulse weapons. He holds several advanced degrees and his work has been financed directly by the Kremlin. Two days ago he disappeared.”

Price paused for effect and met the gaze of every Phoenix Force warrior before she continued. “Dr. Dratshev is highly respected by most members of the military scientific community. His security was handled by the FSB. He was taken by a party or parties unknown, and thus far no ransom demand has been made. The Russian government has attempted to keep his disappearance a secret, but it was hardly possible given that he disappeared shortly after arriving in Minsk and the grabbers left the bodies of four FSB agents behind.”

Phoenix Force’s team leader, David McCarter, cleared his throat and asked, “Do we know why he was in Minsk?”

Price shook her head. “We don’t have any positive proof but we believe he may have been there to oversee the test demonstration of some prototype weaponry he designed.”

Calvin James let out a low whistle. “Funny they’d think testing weapons of that size in a foreign territory would be something they could keep a lid on.”

“Well, the buzz running through the highest channels at both the CIA and NSA would indicate they weren’t testing high-energy weapons,” Price replied.

“Wait a minute,” Gary Manning interjected. “Are you saying Dratshev has come up with a design for EMP application using small arms?”

“It would seem so,” Price replied.

Each of the Phoenix Force members muttered curses under their breath and an icy tension settled on all present.

“That’s unthinkable,” Rafael Encizo said. A Cuban native and one of the original Phoenix Force veterans, Encizo was the team’s resident specialist in maritime operations and an expert knife fighter.

“As far as we know,” Price said, “the capabilities of EMP in small arms are still little more than an untested theory. But we do think that given how long Dratshev’s been working on the project, coupled with the Russian government’s continued financing of his research, those capabilities are a very real possibility.”

“Excuse me,” Thomas Jackson Hawkins said, raising a hand in automatic reflex.

“T.J.?” Price acknowledged with a nod.

“I was under the impression EMP was still somewhat poorly understood. At least from the perspective of safe weaponization.”

“I think Bear could give us a more expert opinion on that concept,” Brognola said. “Aaron?”

The other man in the room differed more than the rest in just the fact that he was confined to a wheelchair. By any standards Aaron Kurtzman had an IQ nearly off the charts and the uncanny ability to collect, sort and manipulate copious amounts of electronic data into logical chunks of intelligence. Those talents, coupled with his leadership of all of Stony Man’s computer-based operations, had saved the lives of every field team member on occasions almost too numerous to quantify.

Kurtzman grinned, happy as always to be in his element. “From the standpoint of physics, electromagnetics is a relatively simple principle to grasp. Think about the Earth. Surrounding our atmosphere is an electromagnetic field, which is generated by the Earth’s core of molten metal spinning at thousands of miles per hour. At least that’s the generally accepted scientific axiom.

“That field helps contain our air and moisture, but more importantly it protects us from the cosmic radiation generated by the sun. Now suppose that you could harness such a field on a microcosmic level and confine it into a narrow beam, a particle beam of sorts. By creating the initial energy and then liberating said energy, a pulse is formed that has all the magnetic force behind it with one distinct difference—it can be focused at a single point.”

“Sounds more like you’re talking about a laser,” McCarter remarked. The fox-faced Briton furrowed his brow. “Is there a difference?”