Starfire

“They’re a clear and present danger to our very existence. If information has been stolen from us, or if our location is pinned down and they think it’s cute and clever to announce to the world who we are, or they want to serve some mercenary agenda—blackmail for money—then we need to pay them a visit. Retrieve or destroy the information, and give them a stern and fair warning.”

Kurtzman nodded. “Give us another hour, give or take, and I can let you know something definite.”

“I’ll be in the War Room. I want a full package on each front in one hour.”

“Will do.”

Price left them to their individual tasks. As she headed toward the armored door, she felt her stomach roll over, her jaw tighten. There was no way to spin any positive angle on what they faced. Both the Farm and the world, she knew, had been shoved to the edge of the abyss by unknown enemies with equally unknown objectives. It was too often standard operating procedure to hurl themselves into the fire, armed with little more than questions and sordid hanging riddles, the sum total of which always put countless innocent lives on the scales of life and death. But stomping out flash-points before mass murder and anarchy could spread to consume entire countries and potentially send the entire world spiraling toward doomsday was what they did best. Only the present critical mass felt more sinister and threatening than at any previous time she could recall during her stint as mission controller. It appeared someone—or some nation—was sending a message they were armed with nukes and could drop them at will from space…

If humankind went the way of the dinosaur, then her worries Stony Man could be exposed by hackers wouldn’t matter in the least. All horrible truth be told, if the world went up in a thermonuclear holocaust, then likewise it would be as if the Farm never even existed.

End of game.

End of life on Earth.

Or so far as all of them now knew it.

Maryland

AS MUCH AS Carl Lyons hated ventures through spook snake pits, it struck him that, more often than not, he found himself doing just that. All the slick lies, intrigue and backstabbing, and those spooks who straddled the fence armed with personal agendas, could put any number of politicians on the grease to shame. Not to mention it seemed he was always creeping—or being led—to the doorstep of waiting Death.

Well, it wasn’t his place to grumble why, he knew. Just dig in, do it. Nicknamed “Ironman,” he was no marshmallow melting in the flames of adversity. And Hal Brognola had handed Able Team its standing orders.

A two-hour-plus jaunt from D.C., for starters, following a web of backcountry roads off the interstate as given to the big Fed by his Shadow Man, and they were guided in by the GPS in the Farm’s custom war van. They were here now in the wooded belly of Western Maryland, about thirty miles south of Gettysburg to be more exact. One of Lyons’s two teammates had disgorged alongside him into the dark unknown, right in front of the gate with its No Trespassing sign, two klicks and change out from the concrete bunker dug into the hillside where the shadow encounter would go down, and which Stony Man cyberburglars had been fortunate enough to steal a peek at from a passing satellite. Any threat, Brognola warned, wouldn’t be overt; it would come sudden and out of nowhere, if personal experience served him right. In other words, Lyons and company knew to trust no one, and to not, under any circumstances, allow the seeming absence of menace to lull them into dropping their guard. These particular wolves in sheep’s clothing, he knew—black ops who put themselves above the law and who would execute innocent civilians if it served their twisted ideal of protecting national security—often came bearing smiles and friendly assurances while waving a white flag.

The former Los Angeles detective and current leader of Able Team dropped to a crouch behind a pine tree for quick situation assessment. Given that they knew next to nothing about Brognola’s rendezvous with the unknown spook source, they were ready to go tactical at the first double signal transmitted over vibrating pagers fixed to their respective hips. Like Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, he was togged in a blacksuit and weighted down with a combat harness and slotted vest stuffed to the gills with grenades, spare clips, on down to a sheathed Ka-Bar fighting knife on his shin. In lieu of his Colt Python .357 Magnum, the Able Team leader’s new sidearm of choice was a .50-caliber Desert Eagle, with mounted laser sight. Its clip was filled with fifteen rounds of special “black rhino” hollowpoint pulverizers. Stony Man’s resident armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, swore he could now nearly shred Kevlar like foam. Schwarz, he knew, was sitting with the war van, watching thermal screens and monitoring parabolic sensors for any traffic, human or vehicular, while Blancanales was on the move in a perimeter sweep to his deep right flank.

All set, but for what?

Lyons scanned the forested slopes through night-vision goggles, the Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun with attached sound suppressor and laser sight rolling in unison with his visual surveillance. Lyons listened to the dead silence. No matter how hard it tried, no matter the level of skill earned by tough experience, no living creature could advance in total silence through any such terrain. And that went for Blancanales, too, despite the fact the man was a Vietnam vet who had been baptized in the blood-soaked jungles of Southeast Asia where there was nothing but armed ghosts who moved silent as the wind. There was brush, twigs, stones to contend with, uneven but hard-packed earth to avoid, that would yield to encroaching weight. The body gave off distinct odors, often through expelled breath. Say a stalking opponent was inclined to smoke, booze, meat, or a splash of yesterday’s after-shave, or just so happened to be sweating out any number of toxins…

And Lyons caught a whiff of cigarette residue as a sudden breeze rustled through the woods. As good fortune had it, he was downwind. The trouble under these circumstances was that he was up against professionals, bad habits or not. As such they would have night vision, EM scanners—

What the hell was that? Lyons wondered. The figure—if he could call it such—was nearly invisible despite his infrared radiation-enhanced eye. It was a specter of human form, but in blurry white outline, almost perfectly blended with the outcrop beyond a stand of trees. Was it standing or moving, and where did it come from so suddenly? He wasn’t even sure he was looking at a living creature, since there was no discernible light-wave read, then he saw a subgun that appeared all but suspended in the air. Instinct screamed at Lyons he was marked, dead to rights, whatever the apparition, and if he wasn’t witness to the Invisible Man, then that was a mounted battery-operated weapon.

And going for broke!

Lyons was dropping for maximum shield behind the fat base of a pine just as the white beam of a laser speared the ghost-murk of night vision and bark flayed his exposed cheek and jaw to the burping retort of muffled subgun.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Extinction Level Event. ELE, if you like.”

If he liked. Hell, Hal Brognola didn’t like any of it. Not the Shadow Man’s flare for the dramatic, nor his vague reasoning of shared interests in national security, certain these meets were also manufactured fishing expeditions. Brognola grew conscious of the Glock 17 stowed beneath his suit jacket, having already noted the hardware tucked at left bicep level under Shadow Man’s windbreaker.

“What do you know about the space alerting and defense system?”

He was no astronomy expert by any stretch, but he knew the basics enough to thwart Shadow Man if he was attempting to paint him an ignoramus. Even a small portion of knowledge wielded some power, Brognola thought. He took a few moments to consider his answer, measure the man.

They were nameless sources of intelligence he had used over the years. Sometimes the big Fed went to them, but usually they sought him out through a series of encrypted e-mails they had arranged. Whether to pick his brains or to attempt to confirm suspicions and rumors of the existence of Stony Man Farm, he met them at a mutually agreed-upon time and place. He always seemed to walk away, taking everything, giving nothing, but only insofar as he knew.

They came as the usual clone of buzz cut, dark clothing, chiseled but nondescript faces, a security force of normally two shooters on hand, as was the case now. One mountain of granite with earpiece, throat mike and HK-33 was posted outside the door, the other wraith, Brognola had likewise last seen, was waiting behind the wheel of the black GMC with government plates. There could be more hardmen, likewise snipers buried in the woods for all he knew. But he had come armed with more than foresight and a bad gut feeling. Since nearly being murdered in the past during one such encounter, Brognola had Able Team in tow, more than confident that they had him covered. If the Stony Man commando sensed the slightest threat, the pager on his hip would vibrate to abort, go tactical. Barring that, there was the handheld radio unit clipped to his belt, and Carl Lyons wasn’t one to speak softly when it hit the fan.

“SADS,” Brognola finally said, deciding he could play the Shadow Man’s acronym game. “They are Earth’s last insurance policy against NEOs, or near earth objects.” He cleared his throat into a long moment of stony silence. “If this is a history on the threat of comets and asteroids, I know about the mile-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona, about Tunguska in Siberia where something like fifteen to twenty miles of forest was leveled by a twenty-megaton blast. I know a one kilometer space rock is considered a ‘large impactor.’ I know about twenty or thirty billion tons of said space rock hurtling toward Earth and impacting at about ten kilometers a second is what science considers the threshold for an extinction level event, which, I think, would yield something in the area of one million million megatons of TNT. Oh yeah, and a two or three mile rock would create global catastrophe. Earthquakes, firestorms, tidal waves of hundred-foot or more walls if it hit water. Hurricane winds off any chart we now measure them by would ensue and hurl tens of billions of tons of dust and debris into the air. The sun would vanish. A new Ice Age would start.”

The Shadow Man snorted.

Brognola felt the guy’s penetrating stare, then, annoyed at whatever his act, glanced around the room. The only furniture was four chairs and the steel table at which Brognola sat, all of them bolted to the concrete floor. He suspected there was a cellar, as evidenced by a short, arrow-straight fissure midway across the room. It was barely noticeable to the naked eye, and he would have missed it altogether had it not been for the white light burning from the single bulb hanging over his head. The no-name op remained standing in the outer limits of light in the deep corner, as if deciding what and how much to say. Brognola was reaching for the black folder when a match flared.

The Shadow Man lit his cigarette, flipped the match away and said, “You can get to all that on your own time, Mr. Brognola. I’m here at considerable risk to my own life, which puts you in the same position. Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you, no matter how tedious you may think me getting to the point.” Shadow Man puffed, dug a hand into his pants’ pocket. “These SADS and their monitoring of ELEs are kept fairly secret from John Q. Public, other than a passing knowledge they may be out there. In our Milky Way there are two-thousand-some NEOs alone. Most are no larger than your average pebble. Whoever controls space just above Earth, Mr. Brognola, controls the planet. Whoever controls the knowledge of these ELEs alone, why, they can monitor and track them and decide—depending on their trajectory and size—whether to blast or let them pass on by. No warning to us mere mortals here below. Knowledge then being the perfect weapon, or the perfect judgment.”

“What’s any of this have to do with what happened…”

“Extinction level event, Mr. Brognola. The future belongs to those who can control an ELE. Act of God or man-made.”

“So, we watch for the rock that wiped the dinosaurs off the face of the Earth. Hey, you’ll have to excuse me if maybe I’m translating for you here, but we—the good guys, I’ll assume—need to be the only ones in the neighborhood controlling orbiting satellites with nuclear platforms, whether to blast an ELE into quadrillion golf balls or threaten another nuclear power with a preemptive strike from the stars.”

“I wouldn’t go on sounding so glib and dismissive.”

Brognola pulled out a cigar, stuck it on his lip. “My mistake. I assumed you were in a hurry.”

“If most of the human race, say, is destined to go out like the dinosaur, as you put it, then the question facing us, who have the knowledge and foresight, is what kind of world will Man inherit.”

“Or who will inherit.”

The Shadow Man paused, as if Brognola had crossed some line in the sand, then went on. “Because of the coming threat of the cataclysmic impactor, there are nuclear-armed satellites in space, but I’m sure you already know this. Yes, we can safely assume the propaganda will keep pumping it out how such weapons are outlawed. And if they are, by chance, made public knowledge, then they will be deemed defensive measures against the killer asteroid. Lies by omission, we call it. What happened, thus, in Australia, is a result of someone getting the edge on this technology. Our educated suspicion is that a black ops renegade faction of the European Space Agency decided to field test a new toy. But, worse, our side in the space race—that would be NASA who is monitored and provided security by the NSA, which is contracted out on behalf of the Department of Defense—has, as you know, been working for some time with our supposed European space friends to launch any number of shuttles. Mutual-shared space stations for research and development, and so forth. Nobody asks what’s really going on up there. Ignorance in this instance is bliss for the majority of common man. Beyond myself, however, only a few in our cloistered intelligence circles are aware that all this rainbow coalition reach for the stars is merely a mask to hide the demon.”

Brognola waited for the final grim point, but the Shadow Man fell silent. The big Fed waited him out.

“Washington will keep scrambling to conceal the truth about what we think happened in Australia,” the Shadow Man finally said.

“Which is?” Brognola prompted.

“This is where you might come in.”

“How come I got the lucky draw? And what makes you think—”

“It is called Galileo. It’s a classified NASA complex north of Dallas. They are fronting as a SADS, but the Galileo program is only part of a more sordid truth. One such truth is that behind the scenes they’re building RLVs—reusable launch vehicles.”

“Space shuttles.”

“Not quite.” The Shadow Man seemed to vanish behind a dragon’s spray of smoke. “The single key difference between a space shuttle and an RLV is that our current shuttles lose their external tank shortly after liftoff. The single-stage-to-orbit RLV, on the other hand, is fully reusable. Winged-configuration will give it fuel tanks…the long and the short is that it has the capacity to become the prototype space plane, requiring little more than ground maintenance, refueling, then it’s wheels up once more.”

Brognola clenched his jaw at the infuriating silence. “And?”

“Galileo has an RLV long since off the drawing board. We hear it’s about six months or so from its maiden voyage. And it’s platform is specced to house both a thermonuclear payload and particle laser weapons. But that’s not the real problem.”

WHEN LYONS FOUND he couldn’t clearly mark the shooter in thermal imaging, confusion threatened to freeze his hand. Every yard ever gained in enemy blood to battle the evil that men did, he thought, and he had never seen anything like this! A living ghost was bent on cutting him to ribbons!