Don Pendleton: Target Acquisition

Brognola nodded. “You wearing a wire, Brigadier?”

“What?” Kubrick seemed genuinely bewildered, but Brognola wasn’t at his first rodeo.

“A wire. You working with a special investigator?” Brognola slapped him in the chest, feeling for a hidden microphone.

“Jesus, Hal, no! I swear on my kids,” Kubrick protested.

In a second Brognola relied on decades of street experience and made his decision. He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a business card. He reached out and carefully placed it into the JSOC officer’s hand.

“That e-address is tight as a nun’s habit, Brigadier. You send me what you have and I’ll see what we can do.”

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

BROGNOLA LOOKED UP at Barbara Price.

“What do you think?”

The honey-blonde Stony Man mission controller sat on the edge of the War Room’s massive conference table, a cup of coffee in her hand. She cut her eyes away from Brognola toward Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, the head of her cyberteam. From his wheelchair Kurtzman deftly worked at the keyboard built into the unit.

“I think, Hal, that you handed me a complete operation tied up with a pretty pink bow.” The former NSA manager began ticking points off on her slender fingers. “Initial intelligence. Field reconnaissance. Logistical support to include transportation. Safehouse with arms, explosives, equipment and fresh changes of underwear.”

Brognola, seeing her starting to really warm up, gently interrupted. “Your point, Barb?”

“My point is that it’s one thing working with Agency, or Homeland or even Pentagon through SOG’s executive charter. It’s what, in part, we were designed to do from the beginning.”

“But?”

“But.” Kurtzman spoke up, “that’s not exactly what’s happening here.”

Price nodded. “This is a JSOC gig from scratch to burn. You’re just plugging the boys in as interchangeable with DEVGRU or CAG.” She paused and shrugged. “Or the Rangers, for all that goes.”

Barbara Price was listing off the premier units of the Joint Special Operations Command. The Combat Application Group, or CAG, was the elite Army counterterrorism and hostage rescue unit usually referred to as Delta Force, while DEVGRU, or the United States Naval Special Warfare DEVelopment GRoUp, was the successor to the more common reference of SEAL Team 6.

“You start doing this in this fashion,” Kurtzman added, “then where does it end? Remember Force Recon? The Marines tried for decades to keep that asset to themselves but now it’s out of Corps control and in JSOC’s.”

“The Marines got tired of seeing Green Berets and SEALs getting all the covert action and agreed to the move,” Brognola pointed out. “Look, this isn’t an attempt to poach our crews. It’s our specialty—last-minute, high degree of difficulty, direct action. This isn’t an attempt by the Pentagon to piss on our turf—it’s a professional favor. We’ve used and abused their personnel and equipment before, though they didn’t necessarily know it was us. What’s the problem?”

“I guess that is,” Kurtzman said. “JSOC initiated this…directly. It wasn’t a request or system of briefings channeled through Homeland or the Executive Office. They’ve thrown an end run, broken the cone of silence and come to us face-to-face. Something’s changed.”

“How do we know he’s not working with a Senate or Congressional special prosecutor? Times have changed, Hal. They’re trying to put covert-ops guys in prison these days.”

“Look, I ran Kubrick’s name past my Justice contacts. The FBI had nothing on him. Barb’s own check with NSA says Kubrick did some questionable things in El Salvador back in the day. He’s not a good candidate for setting us up. He checks out, guys. This is about killing bad guys with mass political protection. We’re all on the same side. The brigadier’s not working with the New York Times, people.”

Price pursed her lips then folded her arms. “I’ll alert the boys.”

THE WAR ROOM was crowded.

The five members of Phoenix Force and three of Able Team were arrayed around the conference table. The mood was upbeat and a current of emotional energy hummed in the room, just below everyone’s awareness. Clearly a mission was imminent, and the men of Stony Man were ready to take up the challenge.

“The KLPD is running a safehouse on the outskirts of Islamabad. It consists of six rooms, the entire seventh floor of a residential building, about half a block away from one of the largest mosques in the city and a local police precinct,” Barbara Price began.

From his wheelchair Kurtzman worked his keyboard. On the large screen recessed into the wall a digitized satellite map of the world appeared. Latitude and longitude readings scrolled down as the head of the cyberteam dialed up first Southwest Asia, then Pakistan, then Islamabad. On the screen, high-definition optics revealed buildings and streets.

Gary Manning, shoulders wide as barn doors, leaned over to Hermann Schwarz. “The resolution on that screen kicks ass.”

“That building is your target,” Price said.

On the screen the image split to accommodate a text scroll listing building materials, windowpane thickness, door construction, plumbing and electrical diagrams and a schematic drawing of the industrial blueprint.

Manning and Schwarz, the explosives specialist on each of their respective teams, began taking notes. Manning used a yellow legal pad while Schwarz employed a heavily modified CPDA, or Combat Personal Data Assistant.

Rosario Blancanales, a member of Able Team along with Schwarz, turned toward their unit commander, Carl Lyons, a blond and burly ex-LAPD detective. “We can put a sniper position on that building at the intersection across from the target. We’d have exposure on two sides to the building plus elevation on its roof. Also we can cover the major avenues of approach.”

“Not perfect,” Lyons agreed. “But just about all we can do.”

“We are going to ensure police response is down during the time frame,” Kurtzman said. “I have my team working on it now. We’ll simply crunch through their phone lines and shut everything down. We aren’t going there to leave Islamabad cops dead in the street.”

“What about any response from ISI assets?” Calvin James asked. The ex-SEAL reached up and stroked his close-cropped mustache with a hand the color of burnished onyx.

“The genesis of this operation is our problems with ISI boys getting U.S. boys dead. Most especially the KLPD branch,” Price said. “I’ve seen the information the ISA gave JSOC and it’s smoking-gun, slam-dunk stuff. The jackasses holed up in that apartment building are jihadists. They’re either just coming from some terror mission or they’re going to some terror mission. If KLPD wants to protect them, then they’re exactly the kind of targets within Pakistani intelligence we want to cull.”

“Bang bang,” T. J. Hawkins said.

“Numbers?” David McCarter asked. The ex-SAS commando was the leader of Phoenix Force.

“Anywhere from a squad to a platoon,” Price answered. “Armed with light weapons, grenades, standard stuff.”

“That’s a little ambiguous,” McCarter pointed out.

“As far as it goes all you’re really, really concerned with is this man,” Kurtzman said.

He tapped a key and a picture of a young Middle Eastern man filled the screen. He was handsome and well groomed in traditional dress. Each member of the Stony Man teams scrutinized the picture closely, committing each detail to memory as closely as they had the target building’s industrial specifications.

“Who’s this bastard?” Hawkins asked.

“Prince Ziad Jarrah bin Sultan al-Thani,” Price replied. “And for the next twelve hours he is your raison d’être.”