Don Pendleton - High Assault

Before he slammed the door shut McCarter repeated his instructions to the Iraqi major. “Get to the RP. Link up with the chase vehicle and hold position as instructed. When I come across the radio we’ll be shaking ass out of the target zone so expect hot. Understood?”

Anjali nodded. His face was impassive as he replied, “I understand perfectly, Englishman.”

“Good,” McCarter answered, and slammed the Dzik-3’s door closed.

As soon as the man was gone Anjali had his cell phone out. He could feel his laughter forming in his belly and he bit it down. He’d save it for when he was looking at the bloody corpses of the western commandos.

Caracas, Venezuela

ABLE TEAM STEPPED OUT into the equatorial sunlight from the cramped depths of the customs station on the far side of the international airport. Hermann Schwarz’s eye was swollen slightly and he had a bemused look as he used a free hand to rub at his sore ribs.

He turned toward Lyons, who was squinting against the hard yellow light of the sun. “Next time you play the asshole,” he said.

Blancanales chuckled to himself. “It does come more natural to you,” he argued.

Lyons shrugged and slid on his shades. He stood in the doorway of the police center and smiled. “Quick, use your cell phone to take a video of me.”

Pretending to laugh along with the joke like ugly American tourists, Blancanales quickly opened his cell phone and thumbed on the video function. He started rolling, capturing the scene.

Immediately he saw a cadaverous man in a business suit watching them from beside their interrogator as he pointed the camera over Lyons’s bulky shoulder. The man frowned as he saw the Americans taking pictures and then turned and walked away.

“Something to remember Caracas by,” Schwarz said loudly.

“Oh, that was great acting,” Lyons muttered, walking forward.

“Thank you, thank you very much.”

“Did you get it?” Lyons asked.

“You mean, tall, skinny and corpse-looking?” Blancanales asked. “You betcha. I’ll see what Aaron’s crew can do with it.” He hit a button and fired off the short video clip to a secure server service that would eventually feed it into Stony Man.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

THE E-MAIL TRAVELED with digital speed through security links and into Carmen Delahunt’s computer. Seeing the priority message beeping an alert to her, she quickly lifted her hand, encased in a sensory glove, up to her left and pantomimed clicking on the link with a finger. Inside the screen of her VR uplink helmet the short cell phone video played out.

“Just got something from Pol,” she said. “They want an ID on what appears to be a civilian who’s buddy-buddy with Venezuelan law enforcement officials.”

From behind her in the Stony Man Annex’s computer room Aaron Kurtzman’s gruff voice instructed her, “Send it over to Hunt’s station. His link to the mainframe is more configured to that kind of search than your infiltration and investigation research algorithms. You stay on trying to get into VEVAK systems through their Interpol connection. I’m still convinced that’s our best route into Ansar-al-Mahdi computer files.”

Tapping the stem of a briarwood pipe against his teeth, Professor Huntington Wethers froze the video image on a single shot then transported it to a separate program designed to identify the anatomical features on the picture then translate them into a succinct binary code. He ran the program four times to include variables for age, angle and articulation, then ran a blending sum algorithm to predict changes for bad photography, low light and resolution obscurity. He grunted softly, then fired off double e-mails of the completed project, one back to Carmen Delahunt and the other to Akira Tokaido.

“There you go,” Wethers said. “I would suggest simultaneous phishing with a wide-base server like Interpol and something more aimed, like Venezuelan intelligence.”

“Dibs on Venezuelan intel,” Tokaido called out.

Speaker buds for an iPod were set in his ears, and the youngest member of the Stony Man cyberteam slouched in his chair using only his fingertips to control the mouse pads on two separate laptops.

“That’s just crap,” Delahunt replied. “I already have a trapdoor built into Interpol. Dad, Akira’s stealing all the fun stuff!”

“Children, behave,” Kurtzman growled. “Or I’ll make you do something really boring like checking CIA open agency sources like your uncle Hunt is doing.”

“Your coffeepot is empty, Bear,” Wethers replied, voice droll.

“What?” Kurtzman sat up in his wheelchair and twisted around to look at the coffeemaker set behind his workstation. To his relief he saw the pot was still half full of the jet-black liquid some claimed flowed through his veins instead of blood.

“Every time, Bear, I get you every time,” Wethers chided.

“That’s because some things aren’t funny,” Kurtzman said. “I expect such antics from a kid like Akira, but you’re an esteemed professor, for God’s sake. I expect you to comport yourself with decorum.”

“Brother Bear,” Wethers said, his fingers flying across his keyboard, “if you ever did run out of coffee you’d just grind the beans in your mouth.”

“Bear drinks so much coffee,” Delahunt added, her hands still wildly pantomiming through her VR screen, “that Juan Valdez named his donkey after him.”

“Bear drinks so much coffee he answers the door before people knock,” Tokaido added. He appeared to be hardly moving at his station, which meant he was working at his most precise.

Stony Man mission controller Barbara Price walked into the computer room just in time to catch Tokaido’s comment. Without missing a beat the honey-blond former NSA operations officer added a quip of her own.

“Bear drinks so much coffee he hasn’t blinked since the last lunar eclipse.”

Kurtzman coolly lifted a meaty hand and gave a thumbs-down gesture. Deadpan, he blew the assembled group a collective raspberry. “Get some new material—those jokes are stale, people.”

“Bear drinks so much coffee it never has a chance to get stale,” Delahunt said calmly. She tapped the air in front of her with a single finger and added, “Hugo Campos—”

“Hermida,” Tokaido simultaneously chorused with the red-headed ex-FBI agent.

“Of the General Counterintelligence Agency,” Wethers finished for them. All humor was gone from his voice now. “The Venezuelan military intelligence agency.”

Sensing the tension immediately, Price turned toward Kurtzman. “Venezuela? What does this mean for Able?”

Kurtzman pursed his lips and sighed. “Trouble.”

Basra, Iraq

Phoenix Force became as ghosts.

They crossed the broken rubble of the abandoned parking lot until they could squat in the lee of a burned-out warehouse. T. J. Hawkins, who had perfected his long-range shooting as a member of the U.S. Army’s premier hostage-rescue unit, scanned their back trail through his night scope. The other four members of the team clicked their AN/PVS-14 monocular night-vision devices over their nonshooting eyes.

McCarter waited patiently in the concealed position for his natural night vision to acclimate as much as possible before moving out. A stray dog, ribs prominent under a mangy hide, strayed close at one point but skittered off in fear after catching the scent of gun oil.

The group maintained strict noise discipline as they waited to see if they had been observed or compromised during the short scramble to their staging area. After a tense ten minutes McCarter signaled a generic all clear and rose into a crouch. He touched James on the shoulder and sent the former Navy SEAL across the parking lot toward a break in a battered old chain-link fence next to a pockmarked cinder-block wall.