Don Pendleton: High Assault

“Terrorist organizations,” Najafi scoffed, shaking his head with irritation. “You heard that?” he asked Ayub, who nodded. “Those cowboys will soon learn to regret their arrogant presumption.”

Najafi walked over to Suleiman and yanked the cordless drill from the man’s leg. Suleiman screamed. The drill whined to life, spinning at its fearsome 1,900 RPM. Suleiman’s eyes sprang wide in terror and he threw his head back against the chair.

Najafi lifted the drill in an almost offhand manner and plunged it into his captive’s left eye. Michael Suleiman jerked like a man in an electric chair, coming up out of his seat against his restraints, then sagging back down limply and falling irrevocably still.

Najafi yanked the drill free. Behind him Colonel Ayub bent double and vomited on his own shoes as the Hezbollah commandos snickered behind their masks. The Ansar-al-Mahdi commander regarded his subordinate with a look of cool distain until he had finished purging.

“Something you ate?”

“Yes, General,” Ayub said, wiping his mouth.

“Good.” Najafi shoved the gore-drenched power tool into the colonel’s shaking hands. “Clean that so that my briefcase is not stained.” He turned toward his Hezbollah surrogates and pointed at the corpse. “Take this piece of shit down to the cargo bay. I’m going to the cockpit. We’re on our way back to Tehran. When we’re over north Beirut I’ll signal the load master and you dump the body out so it can be found.”

“Yes, General,” the team leader replied.

Najafi turned back toward Colonel Ayub in his vomit-splattered dress shoes. “When you have finished with your valet duties, come up to the cockpit,” he told the man. He paused at the door of the TOC after removing his bloody apron. “We are going to figure out how exactly to show these Americans exactly what terror really is.”

Colonel Ayub nodded and Najafi went out the door. The politically connected military officer felt the eyes of the Hezbollah gunmen on him. He forced himself to stand straight. He looked at the bloody and mutilated body of Michael Suleiman and he forced his features into a mask of indifference despite the taste of his own vomit on his tongue.

“You heard the commander!” he snapped. “Get the body downstairs and wait for your orders.”

But the Hezbollah team was already in motion and they simply ignored the bureaucrat.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia—Present Day

Barbara Price pushed hard against the pedals of the elliptical machine, her honey-blond hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and her body shiny with sweat. A beautiful woman with a model’s looks, she tried to maintain a high level of fitness though her workaholic nature had kept her at the Shenandoah Valley covert operations site almost continuously over the recent months. The War on Terror had left the clandestine Stony Man personnel—both Phoenix Force and Able Team—like paramilitary firefighters, rushing from one global hot spot to the next with little downtime between assignments.

The former NSA mission controller didn’t see an end in sight, either.

The cardio trainer machine beeped at her and the readout display informed her that her forty-five-minute workout was almost over. She refocused her attention and began to swing her legs even faster. She was off her normal pace and fought hard to regain the distance before her time ran out.

Her body was fluid in motion. She was trim and muscular, with an assertive but feminine sexuality that caused men’s heads to turn when she passed. She took pride in her appearance, but her dedication to fitness was no longer about cosmetic sensibilities. When she was fit, her endurance improved, and when she went days without sleep while exercising a grueling schedule of life-and-death multitaskings, her improved stamina made her a better leader and support system for the men in her command.

Suddenly the cell phone resting on her elliptical machine’s console began to ring. Frowning at the interruption, she picked it up and looked to see who was calling the encrypted device before she answered.

“Barb, I need to see you in the War Room of the main house,” Hal Brognola announced.

“I thought you were supposed to be in D.C. today,” Price replied. “Briefing the Man on our last op in Kenya.”

“I was,” the big Fed said. “Now I’m in a chopper about thirty seconds from the Farm.”

“What have you got?”

There was a pause, and when Brognola spoke again Barbara Price could easily hear the grim note of satisfaction in his voice. “We’ve finally got a breakthrough on Stage One.”

Instantly the Stony Man mission controller stopped running, the machine slowing beneath her. “Really?” she said, her own voice eager. “We have a lead?”

“One for sure and one likely,” Brognola answered. “I’ll tell you more when I touch down.”

“Understood. I’ll see you in ten,” Price said, and clicked off.

She stepped off the exercise machine and grabbed up a handy towel to mop her forehead and blot the sweat on her arms. She threw it around her neck and then clicked over to the walkie-talkie function on her cell phone. Her thumb pressed the push-to-talk button and she spoke into the phone.

“Bear, you on?”

There was a pause and then Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman’s gruff voice growled out a response. “Go ahead, Barb. What’s up?” The brilliant technician served as leader of the Farm’s cyber team and was Barbara Price’s right-hand man.

“Meet me in the War Room,” Price told him. “Hal’s coming in now and he has something for us.”

“Something big?”

When she spoke Price could hear the same satisfied tone in her own voice as she had just identified in Hal Brognola’s. It made the corners of her mouth tug upward in an involuntary grin.

“Hal says we just broke something on our Stage One project.”

Kurtzman made no attempt to keep his enthusiasm in check. “Hot damn!” he barked into the phone, making Price wince. “It’s about time we caught a break on that one.”

“Copy that, Bear,” Price agreed. “Is Carmen or Akira near you?” she asked, referring to two members of Kurtzman’s team. Carmen Delahunt was an ex-FBI agent recruited into the Stony Man program by Hal Brognola, and Akira Tokaido was a network systems interfacing genius and all around cybercowboy who had conducted digital wizardry for Price many times in the past.

“Carmen’s right here,” Kurtzman replied.

“Good. Have her alert Able Team and Phoenix Force,” Price said. “I want the teams on standby and ready to go the minute we get the rundown from Hal.”

“Copy that.”

“All right, I’m out. See you in the War Room.” The mission controller cut communications and hurried out of the workout center.

The well-oiled machinery of Stony Man had begun ticking with precision timing and practiced competence. Soon men would be out on the sharp end and the blood of killers would begin to spill.

STONY MAN FARM was located in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Despite housing an extensive command-and-control logistics network, an airfield and outdoor training areas, the remote clandestine site maintained a facade as a tree farm, orchard and pulp mill. Security was a fully integrated package of electronic, computer-monitored and human surveillance. The farm workers and general laborers spread around the Farm were actually highly trained soldiers from America’s elite military and law enforcement units.

In the past rotational assignments to the Farm had given members of those units access to advanced training tactics and an opportunity to engage in cross-organizational networking. As the wars in southwest Asia and the Middle East had ground on, the short-term assignments to the top secret site had started to provide physically and emotionally exhausted multitour combat veterans with a low-key break from near-constant combat operations.