Starfire

“Armchair expert,” Noah chortled, holding up the peace sign. “‘Let me make this perfectly clear—I know who shot JFK and why.’”

Rosenberg washed a smoke wave in their faces. “Yuk, yuk. Okay, geniuses, so how are you going to go public if you’re all dead?”

That gave them pause.

“Now that I see I have your attention, do you guys have any idea what we’ve stumbled on to?” Rosenberg pressed. “Have you thought this through? Do you realize the impact of what we suspect we’ve learned these past three days—and I’m talking beyond the borders of our own country?”

“You’re talking about the fifty-kiloton impactor in Australia?” Job asked. “And who we think is behind it?”

“We’re just a bunch of geeks,” the Kid chimed in, then sucked another huge pull from his doobie, coughing as he choked down the pungent smoke, cheeks ballooning out like a puff adder. “We’re American citizens performing a public service.” He hacked the words out between toxic palls. “The Force of Truth. People knew about us, we’d be national heroes.”

“Yeah,” Cain said, “and I wouldn’t have to just daydream about my favorite pop star. She’d be banging down the front door to know me. And I’m definitely talking ‘know’ in the biblical sense.”

They started snickering, shaking their heads, the Kid and Cain back to their keyboards.

Comedians. Clueless.

Rosenberg then looked at the one table with its bank of monitors they always seemed to neglect. From across the room he could tell nothing was moving—or at least nothing he was aware of. Their laser webs, motion sensors and cameras were hidden as part of the wooded scenery in this neck of the Hampton Roads Peninsula. They were at the far edge of the trailer park, isolated, their closest neighbor about a quarter mile down the dirt track. But he knew the kind of gizmos ghost ops had at their disposal. Such as cutting edge EM scanners and laser burners a decade or more ahead of their time and which only a handful of people knew existed.

The spooks in question were the Mothership.

“Listen up,” Rosenberg snapped, then moved to the living-room window. There, as he felt their stares boring into the back of his head, he pulled the curtain two inches aside. As a last resort, they kept two Rottweilers in the chain-linked cage, hidden to the deep front end of their parked vehicles. From inside the trailer Rosenberg could release the gate by radio remote, and Ramses and Apollo would make a meal out of any—

He caught himself. They would chomp down on any “normal” intruder, that was.

“Chill out, old man,” Cain said. “Have a few brew-skis.”

“I want everything you have on hard drive burned to CD,” he told them, and ran a hard look down the line.

Abel looked aghast. “Everything? Does that include our SETI—”

“Everything means everything, pipsqueak. Now. I want three copies and however many originals. Shag your smart asses into high gear,” he barked.

As they grumbled and shrugged themselves out of neutral, Rosenberg knew it was time to start hedging his bets. He couldn’t expect any of them to understand the dire urgency of the situation. With the exception of Abel, violent death had never touched their lives, other than the usual horror stories about broken family life, divorce, alcoholism, child abuse and the ugly like. But he had stared down the barrel of a gun, seen men die for secrets he kept in his head. As good fortune had it, he was still alive to correct that mistake.

He heard them clacking away on their keyboards, but as he went to the steel cabinet, he could feel them going still, looking his way. The cabinet was off limits, and they knew it. The penalty for attempting to crack the code on the keypad was instant expulsion from the Force of Truth. They would be sent packing, shamed before their peers for not honoring the one ultimate request they had pledged a verbal solemn oath to. In their minds, to break their word on that was the military equivalent of death before dishonor.

Rosenberg keyed open the lockbox, switched on the battery-powered keypad and punched in the long series of numbers committed to steely memory. He felt the sudden burning curiosity of his hackers grow into a living force all by itself. None of them knew—and had been warned to not even ask—what was in the cabinet.

The stainless-steel Glock .45, already snugged in shoulder rigging, came out from the arsenal first. He checked the clip, slapped it home, chambered a live one, strapped in. The Uzi submachine gun was hauled out next. Rosenberg was in the process of cocking and locking when he read the stark fear etched on their faces, and said, “Oh…Now you get it.”

SINCE LANDING in Turkey to hammer out the present mission parameters, David McCarter believed all along his hunch would either pan out into a mother lode of intelligence and strike a massive blow against global terrorism, or get them all killed.

So, what was new?

A bloody damn lot, the leader of Phoenix Force decided. The relative warm comfort of the special ops base in Kurd country of east Turkey now seemed another lifetime as he scurried for the narrow fissure at the north edge of the rocky shelf, gathering a buzzard’s eye view of the hardsite on the fly. His gut instinct quickly amended end game suspicions, and locked him in with laser-guided precision to the grim immediate future.

They were knocking on Hell’s door.

A dark truth, no less, was about to be revealed, unless, that was, he missed his guess and the combined wisdom of the CIA, the Justice Department on through to Mossad, Interpol, the Russian SVR and GRU proved nothing more than toxic smoke and shattered mirrors. The way it looked to be shaping up, as he took in the compound’s sprawl and number of wandering shooters, there were light-years to go before they bagged any human pythons bent on squeezing the life out of the innocent.

A long way, indeed, before they grabbed the prized trophies. And payback, though it would consume the savages here in fire the likes of which they’d never dared dream in their unholiest nightmare, was on temporary hold.

All indications from assorted spookwork, anywhere from fifty to a hundred or more obstacles stood as barriers to the gates of evil knowledge. The opposition here was heavily armed, well paid by the local Lezgi Mafia chieftain and his Chechen contacts. To a rabid brute they would in all likelihood prove loyal to a fierce fault, determined to win by bloody milestones or go down with their own Titanic when the hull had a massive hole punched through it by five black-suited commandos who had come loaded for wolf and bear in predatory human skin. Long odds, no matter how it was blasted, and there would be no winged death from above, which only served to add yet more tension to prebattle jitters over this huge roll of the dice. Beyond the soon-to-be crater in a time and place few sane men had ever heard about and fewer still dare to tread, he knew the daunting shadow of the Russian military and its vaunted special security forces known as Omon were lurking in the vicinity.

First strokes first.

Dropping into the tight little bowl and bringing the HK-33 assault rifle with custom-made 50 mm grenade launcher fixed to the barrel, the ex-SAS commando grabbed a few moments to scan, assess, review. The worst was on the way, make no mistake, he knew, but it felt good nonetheless to stop, breathe and suck down a mouthful of cold water from his canteen.

Review. It seemed to take forever and a day to get it in gear to go wheels-up in the C-130. Part of the problem was verifying intel, double- and triple-checking everything from terrain to enemy players to their own escape hatch, which was flimsy to the point of embracing suicide. But, upon further input from the Farm, McCarter made the call to go when he factored in what he knew, and considered what couldn’t be confirmed without the up-close and personal touch of eyeball kills. Cloud cover was the normal maddening order of the day for this unholy eyesore of the world, but there had been enough break in the ceiling twelve hours ago where the CIA ops at their disposal had managed a thorough sat read of the area and handed if off.

Scan. By night the countryside was bleak and gruesome enough to behold as Phoenix Force moved in on foot following their seven-hundred-foot combat jump and subsequent two-mile hike. Not to mention that wandering around this neck of Hell was so dangerous to a foreigner’s health that any passports and visas—had they been issued—were as welcome a sight for inspection as a leper’s used tissue. By dawn’s early light, the Briton now found the lay of the land downright foreboding and desolate, and to the point where the five of them might as well be advancing for battle at an end of the world all but forgotten by man and God. That, he knew, wasn’t far from the truth as he considered just where they were.

Dagestan.

Land of the mountains, McCarter thought, which was the literal translation used by its indigenous mixed bag of ethnic descent.

The indigenous bulk were Sunni Muslims, most of whom were fanatical to the extreme as they bowed to the tenets of Wahhabism. The country was no less than a slice of Islamic fundamentalist Hell on Earth, a land that time and most of humankind ignored, if they even knew it existed. Even globe-trotting, battle-hardened commandos like the troops he led, he thought, would be hard-pressed to find this desolate backwater on any globe without some eye strain.

At their present position in the shadow of the towering, snow-capped, cloud-swathed Caucasus Mountains in the southwest corner of the country, what could have been transplanted moonscape fanned out in hills and steppe to the even more ominous empty east and north, until it all eventually dropped off into the vast Caspian Sea. Oil and gas were the country’s cash cows, and were the only reason Moscow still humped and bivouacked soldiers to what was loosely billed an autonomous Russian republic. It was no secret that Moscow, McCarter briefly pondered, maintained its iron grip on the spigots of major pipelines to keep pumping black gold and silver vapor north, but the Russians somehow managed to hide from the world that they were about as environmentally conscious as Godzilla stomping through Tokyo. Dagestan was an industrial dungheap, with major ecological contamination.

But tree-hugging was not on Phoenix Force’s to-do list, though chemical death, McCarter knew, was one reason they were plunging into an area of the world where its people would just as soon shoot them as look at them.

When he considered a tad more what this part of the world was all about, the Briton really wasn’t surprised in the least the fickle hand of black ops had steered them here. In some eerie way he figured it was about time for some scorched justice to find Dagestan’s local and imported beasts. Neighboring Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan were always spilling their own legions of rabid terror wolves across the borders. Guns, drugs, weapons of mass destruction, he weighed. Isolated training camps in this scarred mountain land were hidden from even the most stubborn of spy eyes in space. Money and matériel were shipped here en masse to be trained to carry out jihad.

Assess. McCarter raised the small high-powered field glasses to his eyes again. The farmhouse was backed up near a jumbled row of Stegosaurus-armor-like rock at the foot of broken hills that looked equally in part Jurassic. Nobody, including their own in-country Omon and SVR contacts, could swear one way or the other if the opposition could make fast tracks into a suspected latticework of caves and tunnels once the shelling and shooting started. There were three tractors east, parked near wilting apple orchards, pallets heaped with crates and burlap sacks he was reasonably sure didn’t require the presence of two heavy DShK machine guns in tow. The main compound, its roof dotted with satellite dishes, was a two-story wooden affair. An attached concrete bunker, an annex to the north where the motor pool drew his eye. There, an armada of vehicles, ranged from Mercedes and ZIL limos, Jeeps, SUVs, Volga minivans and GAZ-66 transports, strewed in a staggered line, west to east. According to the Omon source—and there was a good chance he was buried in the deep pockets of the Lezgi Don—the annex was where the crime boss mixed business with pleasure. Intel had it there were always twenty to thirty imported prostitutes on hand for any visiting VIPs, speaking of which no one could state for certain who or how many big shots would be on hand for this party. Surveillance, or so he was told, was pretty much maintained by roving sentries, with the exception of cameras mounted to roof edges.

Arrogant bastards.

McCarter panned a little farther north and took in ground zero.

He counted twenty-one tankers, flipped an invisible salute that bit of intel hit the bull’s-eye on that score. Judging length and girth of those behemoths on wheels the Phoenix Force leader ballparked all that refined petro at…

Call it a quarter-million gallons. And however that number was given or taken, it still dumped the five of them on the potential wrong side of the coming big event.

The truck stop was penned in by basic steel-mesh fencing, for reasons no one was clear on. A spray can of liquid nitrogen would snap off fencing, he knew, and allow two of the team onto the grounds. But with seven—count nine now—assault-rifle-toting guards on the prowl it was touch and go just to light the torch. McCarter framed the sentry in the northwest tower, then saw the smoke cloud hammer the glass booth. The guard then lifted a bottle to his lips, McCarter wanting to scratch him off the worry list, but in his experience there was no such thing as a guarantee in combat. That left three shirkers on the backside, the trio, he’d been informed, apparently more interested in staying warm with a bottle of vodka and hovering near a fire barrel.

And what, pray tell, did all the big shots gathered in front of them need to fear anyway?

Nothing, apparently—or so it seemed.

Truth. A shadow group of Euro-Arab cutouts had finagled deals between Saddam and certain bureaucrats of the United Nations. And McCarter had learned during a CIA brief that a lot of cold, hard currency had been flown via Damascus to Jordan and shipped by diplomatic courier to Western Europe.

McCarter recalled the black op back in Turkey stating the facts of life as he knew them between rumbles of chuckling and obscenity-laden swipes at the French, Germans and Russians. Clear evidence, the op had claimed, had been obtained by electronic intercepts. Enemy agents bagged by the FBI in Manhattan had snitched so loud and fast they had nearly gone hoarse, painting a picture of corruption reeking from New York to Pyongyang. For reasons unknown some marquee names of the upper echelon of the United Nations had fattened Saddam’s terror chest way back when. And with not only food but weapons, intelligence and oversize vans stuffed with cash, using East European gangsters for contact. Yet more shadows, McCarter suspected, in a chain of middlemen that only God seemed to know stretched how far and stopped where. The UN jackals would apparently turn around and deliver Iraqi oil to cronies in their own political and business circles who fronted for petrochemical distribution networks. All this rolling flimflam while Saddam hoarded food meant for the starving masses, but to be distributed and sold to whomever he saw fit. Word was the deposed dictator’s soldiers—and later, the insurgent rabble—managed to feed themselves like princes.

On more than a few occasions—so the CIA word had it—a second deal was cut by the former regime with another rogue nation in exchange for still more cash and weapons. Yet more rumor connected to the sordid mess had it the Scotch-swilling despot of North Korea and mates were eating pretty good these days, and that alone was enough to have him seeing red what with the tyrannical buffoon in possession of…

McCarter fast-forwarded. Four Iraqis, smoked out by the CIA in Paris, Belgrade and Istanbul as recently as six months previous, were trailed to the Dagestan border before the operatives bailed for reasons undetermined. Here and now, the United Nations money-men believed on-site felt the heat building, so they had thrown themselves at the mercy of the Lezgi Mob chieftain who had more irons in the fire than the Devil himself it seemed. Finally, Dagestani Don who had free and easy access to move tanker trucks brimmed with gasoline at will told the ex-SAS commando that he was connected to Russian power shadows, and he had more suspicions beyond the UN moneymen on that front. Oh, but McCarter hoped all party animals in question had indulged one last night but good…