Splintered Sky

Blananales returned to looking for the mystery shadow, launching another parachute flare, but the uneven ground had too many shadows, nooks and crannies for a determined fleeing opponent. The fact that he hadn’t returned fire was indicative that their foe was not interested in a fight.

“We’ll find him,” Schwarz promised. “Whoever set this up has something planned.”

Blancanales nodded as the parachute flare sputtered and burned out. In moments, it was as cold as the trail looked.

CHAPTER THREE

Yuma, Arizona

The aftermath of the border battle wasn’t the end of Able Team’s business. First, they had to stash Paczesny away in their safehouse. Since Grimaldi had the use of a small airfield that saw only moderate use, Lyons decided to keep him in a broom closet in the hangar that Stony Man Farm had reserved for them. Paczesny glared daggers, his mouth stuffed with a rag that was duct-taped in place. Anchoring the rag partially inside and outside of his mouth would keep him from aspirating the cloth and choking to death on it.

“We’ll talk to you when we’re rested,” Lyons said. He slapped pieces of duct tape across the prisoner’s eyes and set a pair of headphones on the man’s ears. The other end of the phones was plugged into an MP3 player that ran a twenty-minute loop of a digitally produced, low-pitched squeal. Completely blinded and deafened, the prisoner would be softened up by the time Able Team was ready to interrogate him.

The trio reported in to the Farm, giving what they knew and learning of a full-court Homeland Security press on investigating the brutal raid.

“We’ll put you on the roster to join in with the task force,” Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, told them. “You’ll be Justice Department agents.”

“Good,” Lyons said. “I’d like to get a quick look at the crime scene.”

“You’ll get as much as you want once daylight hits,” Price responded. “We’ll see what we’ve got on file about Leon Paczesny and do some forensic financial documentation on him. Whoever paid him to be the inside man at Burgundy Lake will have left a trail.”

“While Aaron and the gang play CSI Grand Cayman, don’t forget to have them let us in on parallel rocketry developments in the works,” Lyons added.

“You think this was a ploy to interrupt our ability to develop maneuvering thrusters that could compete with an enemy power?” Price asked.

“Wouldn’t be the first time we were in on something like this,” Lyons replied. “Does HS have an investigation team going to the border?”

“To pore over what’s left of the raider team that hit, yeah,” Price answered. “Fortunately, we do have the fingerprints and facials you sent us via digital camera.”

“Keep working on that. I don’t mind interagency cooperation, but HS tends to trip over its own dick when it comes to actually putting clues together,” Lyons grumbled. “We can toss them a few hints when we’re on the way home from wrecking the perps.”

“Trust me,” Price said. “You’ll be the first ones to know anything about this.”

“Good,” Lyons replied. “I’m going to get cleaned up and get some food in me. By the time I’m done, Paczesny will feel like he’s been in sensory deprivation for a whole day.”

“Don’t forget to break out your Fed suits,” Price reminded him.

Lyons wrinkled his nose. “Yeah.”

Watching him over the Web cam link, he saw Price’s face brighten with gentle but mocking humor. “Just when you thought you’d gotten away from the suit and tie look…”

“Yeah,” Lyons said, rolling his eyes. “It’s the price I have to pay to get a look at Burgundy Lake.”

“We’ll be able to reconstruct the raiders’ hit when we’re on-site,” Blancanales added. “The tactics they used might give us a clue as to who trained this group.”

Lyons nodded. “I hope they’re local. I’d hate to lose a shot at them because they’re overseas.”

“Phoenix Force is prepped and ready to move out,” Price told him. “Your job this time around is to work inside our borders.”

Lyons sighed. “Used to have the whole world as our beat map.”

“You’ve been getting more chances to step out and play, Ironman. Don’t worry. This doesn’t seem close to finished,” Price promised.

Lyons glanced toward the broom closet where Paczesny was being softened by Schwarz’s home-brewed sonic assault. “Not with Paczesny. Right now, I’m melting his brain. In a few minutes, he’s going to wish he didn’t have one.”

The Able Team leader broke contact and freshened up.

C HRONOLOGICALLY , L EON P ACZESNY was left in the sensory deprivation for only forty minutes total. However, due to the white noise and utter lack of sensation except for the tearing agony in his ruined elbow, it felt as if he were penned up in the broom closet for forty hours.

The first hint he had of the real world was when the duct tape was ripped off his mouth and eyes. Gag free, he let out a yell that was cut off when Lyons punched him just under the sternum. The blow interrupted the shout and cut off his breathing for a few seconds.

Just long enough for the Able Team commander to slide the headphones off Paczesny’s ears. Then the turncoat felt the back of his head crack against the broom closet wall, ironhard fingers squeezing his jaw until it felt as if the mandible would snap.

“Welcome back to the land of the walking dead,” Lyons snarled. “I’m the Ironman, and I’ll be your host on the scenic tour of hell.”

“You can’t do this. I’m an American citiz—”

“You, Mr. Paczesny, are nothing anymore,” Lyons growled. “You are listed among the corpses stacked like cord wood back at Burgundy Lake. As such, you are a non-entity, only useful for as long as you are giving up information. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

“I have no rights?” Paczesny asked, already knowing the answer.

“You’re acting as if I’m some kind of cop. I’m the Grim Reaper, pal. It’s just been a busy night, thanks to you, and I want to play a little before packing you off to hell.”

“Damn it, you can’t do this. You have to have some kind of authority, some rulebook…” Paczesny said. “This isn’t Camp X-Ray.”

Lyons slammed his forearm down on Paczesny’s. “Camp X-Ray? That’s amateur hour, dip shit. It’s kindergarten, while this is the graduate class. Get it?”

“Yes. Yes, sir,” Paczesny whimpered. “I got it!”

Lyons started the digital recorder, and began asking questions. Paczesny spilled his guts.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

H UNTINGTON W ETHERS LISTENED to the download of the MP3 file that Able Team uploaded to him. Paczesny’s confession made the process of forensic accounting easier, enabling Wethers to locate the trail of funds.

Naturally, the identities of the mysterious donors remained vague. Paczesny didn’t have faces or voices, only e-mail contacts and a few shadowy meetings with men who hid their features and utilized vocal distortion technology. The trail of cash in Paczesny’s Cayman Island account also followed a tangled snarl of jumps from front company to front company, all of which were new and lacked any ties to previously known espionage or organized crime groups.

Wethers squeezed his brow as he went over the financial autopsy on the screen before him, scanning line by line for the name of a front company owner who would register on any of a thousand law-enforcement watch lists. Though the plodding, meticulous cyberdetective was utilizing his search engines to look for a familiar name, his own vast reserves of memorized information churned in his mind, working as fast as the powerful processors of the Cray supercomputers in the Annex.

For all of the technological power in the Stony Man cyber-center, the computers were still only pale duplicates of the human brain, lacking intuition or the ability to correlate something that didn’t quite match what came before.

Wethers blinked his eyes, realizing he hadn’t done so in several minutes. Tears washed over his parched orbs, flooding down the side of his cheek.

“Doing okay, Hunt?” Akira Tokaido asked from his workstation.

Wethers picked up his pipe and chewed on the stem, sitting back to allow his subconscious to digest the images burned into his retinas. “Just slow, steady work. I need to rest my eyes a little.”

Tokaido nodded.