Starfire

He clambered to his feet.

And found he was just in time to watch the final act. The mushroom cloud kept billowing out, angrier now, if that was possible. Glowing like the blazing maw of some gigantic incinerator—or the pit of Hell—it kept climbing, expanding yet more, rising on for what the principals told them would be its ceiling of five to six miles—or more—toward a sky that all but looked to burn.

Boltmer felt shaken to the core of his being.

He checked his temperature gauge, and froze, eyes bugged as he took a read.

Just over seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit, but dropping now. Then the numbers began falling hard, as they told him would happen, once the brute strength of blast furnace afterwinds sucked themselves back into the rising vortex. The temperature at their own gale-force impact and shortly thereafter was measured and recorded already on a minimodem.

Forget whatever the experiment’s goals, Boltmer’s grim concern became extraction. From there, they walked until their tanks redlined. If their contact was late, what with their ride out of the hot zone supposedly constructed with engine parts of classified alloys and which was also a self-contained oxygenated vehicle and decon chamber…

Boltmer was slowly turning when the hairs on his neck bristled. He caught the moaning as it filtered through his helmet, finally pivoted about-face, and gasped.

They came staggering out of the black pall. Boltmer choked down the bile squirting up his chest, cold fear and the unholy sight doing a tap dance on nerves taut as garrote wire.

They were nothing less than a vision of the damned.

What sounded like strangled cries or deep-throated moaning from the zombies grew louder, began pounding his helmet like invisible fists. Clear they were desperate to speak, probably shout, then Boltmer assumed their vocal cords, perhaps their tongues had been fried. They came twitching, convulsing, bridging the gap quick, and straight toward him, as if sensing another living presence.

He stared, paralyzed by horror. Their flesh had been microwaved in the searing winds, with black holes—but like glowing embers, it seemed—where the eyes were burned out, dark red streaks oozing down cheeks where skin was cooked off to the bone. Same for the scalp, hair and flesh gone to expose gleaming patches of skull. Boltmer couldn’t tell if they were clothed, if that was flesh or bone or both on down the black-and-red walking cadavers, then felt his senses boggled to another level of numbing repulsion. Nothing but mindless terror or the will to live should have kept them standing. Any oxygen—or most of it, he had to believe—had surely been incinerated out of the immediate vicinity, or turned into living fire, if nothing else.

They collapsed in a boneless heap.

He knew he needed to conserve oxygen, but Boltmer sucked deep from the main tank to calm his racing heart.

Granted, he was all about the money, but after what he had just witnessed, he had to wonder.

Up to ten miles they told him the flash could melt down retina, the initial blast shear away skin to the bone. How many more zombies were left wandering the countryside? he wondered, panning the firestorms, ten to two o’clock. Beyond this night, how many would die a slow, agonizing death from radiation sickness in the weeks, the years, to come? How many babies would be born with grotesque birth defects from mothers suffering from the invisible savaging of fallout?

He stared into the fire, which only seemed to grow more angry and intense in his frozen eternity. Was this but just a taste of Hell on Earth, a microcosm of Fate awaiting humankind? What kind of planet would survivors—the blind, burned and insane—inherit? All water contaminated, the air poisoned by fallout. The sun blotted out by a radioactive shield of dust that would reach around the globe. The only season, then, one winter of eternal subfreezing. No crops, since there would be no arable soil to grow food.

He jumped as Karlov passed by. His partner clambering on without so much as a glance at the dead, Boltmer followed, but moved as if he was in a trance. He wanted to focus on survival, five million bucks and his own dreams, but wondered if there was any future.

Or one that would be worth sticking around to see if the ultimate madness was unleashed.

CHAPTER THREE

Barbara Price didn’t need to read their faces. They knew the threat to their continued existence was grim. The sense of dread was so thick that it seemed to engulf her as she walked into the Computer Room.

But, to a man and woman, they were all seasoned professionals, she knew. They had a job to do, no matter what the odds, mystery or critical mass, and do it they would.

This time the attack was hitting them from cyberspace, which made it equally as lethal. Exposure of their ultracovert Sensitive Operations Group to the world at large would prove a legal catastrophe—possible imprisonment, fines and such—which, of course, would shut them down permanently. Tack on subsequent potential for toppling the White House, impeachment of the President all but guaranteed, and that by itself was no mere aftershock.

It was that bad.

Which meant they needed to go on the attack, and at all due light speed and martial and technical proficiency at their disposal. The problem right now, however, was in determining who was the enemy, where the enemy was hiding, and how to go on the offensive once the enemy was flushed out.

The slim honey-blond beauty stole a moment on the way to their cybercrews’ workstations to check the mounted digital wall clocks with major cities marked for each time zone. She noted the time differences on three current flashpoints, mentally juggling day and night disparities. As usual, Father Time was the invisible gathering storm for the cyberwizards here at the Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The same dire omen, she reflected, could be rolling dark thunderheads over both their field ops, and the entire planet when she considered the situation in Australia.

She was acutely aware that about ninety miles away in Washington, D.C., the best and the brightest of the most powerful country on the planet were scrambling for answers. Answering to only the President of the United States—who green-lighted each black ops for Stony Man and its warriors in the field—Price knew it was always best to let whatever political fallout land wherever it would, devour whoever it would.

Only this time the situation was so grave…

She stopped beside the head of the cyberteam. Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman acknowledged her presence with a dark glance over his shoulder. His spine had been shattered by a bullet during an attack on the Farm, and the big stocky computer genius was relegated to spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He lifted a hand to indicate he needed another few moments, then returned to tapping on his keyboard. A quick look down the line and Price found the main players were hard at it, working in grim silent frenzy. Carmen Delahunt, Huntington Wethers and Akira Tokaido looked like a troupe of master pianists as their fingers flew over keyboards. Satellite images, numerical data and grid maps of AIQs—areas in question—as well as shots with red laser lines around the globe marking satellite orbits, flashed over their monitors. The new crisis was being handled primarily by the team leader and Tokaido. That the Japanese cyberwarrior was without earbuds and MP3 player would have told Price by itself how fearsome the situation, how perilous the yawning black hole that was their immediate future.

What they knew was that an unknown killer satellite had dumped a nuclear missile on Australia from its low earth orbit, vaporizing a six-mile ring in a desolate tract of the Queensland outback, a fifty-kiloton wallop, as previously indicated by the Farm’s e-mail and database theft of NASA, DOD and CIA satellite reads of ground zero and contaminated vicinity beyond. The last she heard from her own intelligence sources was woefully limited, since no one knew anything of substance, but that was several hours ago.

That left Hal Brognola in her loop.

The high-ranking Justice Department official, who oversaw the Farm and was liaison to the Man, was off on his own intelligence-hunting expedition, and she silently urged a quick wrap on his end and an even quicker chopper ride back to the Farm. He had taken the three-man commando unit of Able Team along with him for a meet with an unnamed and unknown source he’d intimated to her would either prove highly informative or dangerous to his health.

Make that five crisis fronts, including their phantom attackers in cyberspace.

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, was off their radar screen at the moment as he pursued his own campaign in Sri Lanka. They could use all hands, but Phoenix Force had just hit Dagestan in a mission that required their one-hundred-percent iron-clad attention.

“Good news and bad news,” Kurtzman suddenly told the mission controller. “The good news is that I’ve scrubbed our hot e-mail dumps, installed another antivirus and antiworm program in our network. The bad news is that our servers were bombed—a brute force attack that means whoever was trying to track us has put together their own network over the Internet. My best guess is they’ve created their own supercomputer, with firewall encryption every bit as sophisticated as ours. For all I know, it could be one to a dozen or more hackers.”

“And you determined they had broken through our firewalls how?”

“They were either cocky,” Tokaido interjected, “or taunting us. They bombed servers we use in emergencies with porn that would make even the dirtiest scumbag blush.”

Kurtzman cleared his throat, frowning as he shot Tokaido an admonishing eye for embellished interruption. “Apparently, they’ve also been busy bombing e-mail from NASA to the CIA and God only knows whoever else.”

Tokaido flashed Price a tight grin. “But believe us, the triple-X shenanigans aside, they’re good.”

They had to be, Price thought. the Farm used encryption software programs that combined elaborate mathematics, symbols and letters that would have sent Einstein screaming into the night. Their crypto texts of substitution, transposition and fractionalization were well beyond the commonly used 56-bit encryption that had seventy-two quadrillion possibilities alone. Only the U.S. government, its military intelligence complex and banks were allowed to use anything above 56-bit encryption. Attempted sale of such encryption programs, home or abroad, was a federal crime.

“We’re attempting to backtrack,” Kurtzman told her. “But—”

“They can scrub and change handles and create new servers as you run them down.”

“I believe I can trace them, however. They’re using Old Testament figures as handles—Noah, Cain and Abel and so forth,” Tokaido said. “And sticking to the same names. It’s almost as if they’re daring us to find them.”

“So, find them,” Price said, and wondered why, if that was true, they seemed so willing to be tracked down and cornered, this invisible enemy being such crack cybercommandos.

Kurtzman’s frown was back. “Thing is, Barb, these are most likely civilians. We all know the Pentagon, the DOD, the Air Force and even the CIA have seen their e-mail busted into recently and with frightening ease and regularity. Very few people outside the elite intelligence loop know about that.”

“Yeah, embarrassment,” Tokaido added, “fear of admitting their own vulnerability. Job security, I imagine, since they don’t want public perception of our intelligence and military hierarchy as inept when it comes to guarding national security and its secrets.”

“And we hack into their databases all the time,” Kurtzman said.

“We’re not exactly up for congressional funding, Bear. What’s your point?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I understand full well the ramifications here. My point is, say we do find them. Statistically most hackers are about fourteen to twenty-five years old. Kids for the most part. Geniuses, without a doubt, but still kids.”

Price knew where Kurtzman was headed, but felt annoyed nonetheless that she had to spell it out. “I wasn’t planning on offering them a job here at the Farm, Bear.”

“But?”