Don Pendleton - Critical Intelligence

“You think that’s bad, Cowboy?” Schwarz asked Kissinger. “One time after we got our operational bonuses we went in on a cattle ranch.”

“Oh, man,” Calvin James muttered to T. J. Hawkins, “this is going to be awful.”

“Usually,” Hawkins agreed. Then, momentarily taken back by the outlandishness, he turned toward James. “Wait, did they invest in property?”

“The only property Lyons ever invested in was the stripper pole he put up in his condo,” James replied.

“So we decide to buy this bull,” Schwarz continued. “You know, to increase our stock.”

“Please shut up,” Lyons said, his voice dull with hopelessness. “Can’t we just train?”

Schwarz continued as if he hadn’t heard. “So I go over there and Carl is all down, really bummed, says the bull just eats grass all day and won’t even look at the cows.” Schwarz stopped talking long enough to cut his eyes over to the burly ex-LAPD detective. The man looked resigned and Schwarz’s grin grew. “So I tell him to get a vet out quick to fix the problem. Two weeks later we get scrambled by Barb for a deployment.”

“Where I wished you’d suffered a horrific wound to your mouth,” Lyons added.

“And I ask Carl how things are going and he’s happy as hell! ‘The bull has taken care of all my cows, broke through the fence and has even serviced all the neighbor’s cows!’ I’m all like wow!” Schwarz laughed. “What the hell did the vet do to that bull? ‘Just gave him some pills,’ said Carl. So I’m like, what kind of pills? And Carl looks me straight in the eye—this is no bullshit—and says ‘I don’t know, but they sort of taste like peppermint.’”

Schwarz immediately began laughing at his own joke, folding almost in two with mirth as he guffawed. He looked up and saw the rest of the men from Stony looking at him with flat affects. “What?” he demanded. “He said ‘they taste like peppermint!’ See, he was eating the horny pills.” Out in the long grass, crickets chirped. Schwarz frowned. “These are the jokes, people.”

Rafael Encizo shook his head in pain. “You’ve got a real gift, man.”

“Yeah, he’s got a gift,” Blancanales replied. “He’s got such a gift Hal had to go to the freakin Oval Office to keep the CIA from stealing his jokes to use on the prisoners in Gitmo.”

“Oh, man.” McCarter shook his head. “If the ACLU thought sleep deprivation was torture they would have lost their minds if they’d ever heard Schwarz telling detainees jokes.”

Schwarz stood, his face holding a shocked expression. “You know Jesus said a prophet is never revered in his own land. Now I know what he meant.”

Kissinger burst out laughing in incredulous mirth. “Yeah, Hermann, whenever I think of Jesus I think of you, man.” The armorer stepped forward, shaking his head. “How ’bout I show you guys why I brought you out here before Carl picks up Blancanales and beats you to death with him?”

“Sure.” Schwarz shrugged. “I like new toys as much as the next electronics genius.”

“You can see,” Lyons observed, “he’s as modest as he is funny.”

“Please tell us what you brought,” Manning begged Kissinger.

“Let me introduce you boys to a little bit of gear I appropriated from DARPA by way of our good friends at Lockheed Martin.”

“Jet pack?” McCarter, a pilot, asked, only half joking.

“Close.” Kissinger nodded and led the teams around to the rear of his SUV where he lowered the back hatch. “Exoskeletons.”

“Exoskeletons?” Encizo asked.

Kissinger nodded. “Yep. Called HULC.” He began handing out surprisingly compact packages. “We do the first trial out here on a few hill runs, then I had Hal go through Justice and get us some time at the Marine Corps obstacle course down in Quantico. We’re going to put these mothers through a workout, then see if they’d be any use to you shooters out in the field.”

Hawkins looked at his package. “They call it the Hulk?” he asked.

“No,” Kissinger replied. “Not the Hulk, but HULC, or Human Universal Load Carrier. Just stretch out the legs, then step into the open foot pads. Secure the straps at thighs, waist and shoulders. Supposedly they’ve got it spec’ed out for two hundred pounds at a top speed of ten miles per hour. But you’re supposed to be able to crawl, jump, kneel, squat in it.”

“How does it work?” Schwarz asked, all humor gone as the prospect of new tech was put in front of him.

“Four lithium-ion batteries go into that pouch at the small of your back. They power sensors in the footpads, the microprocessors that read them and move the hydraulic system.”

Lyons frowned while the others began putting on their units. “How quick can we unass ’em if we need to?”

“Once you get the hang of it, the contractor told me under thirty seconds,” Kissinger replied.

“Oh, that’s good,” Schwarz said. He began doing deep knee bends in his combat apparatus. “You see, since he took that medicine I told you about, Ironman’s been real, real concerned with getting his clothes off in a hurry.”

“You got one of these things with a dog muzzle?” Lyons asked. “That could help me out.”

“I’ll see what the boys at DARPA have to say.” Kissinger nodded.

The Stony Man tactical teams secured themselves into the exoskeletons and began warming up the gear. First they paired up and ran a series of sprints up the hill. There was no improved performance, but the HULC tactical system provided surprisingly little hindrance to their speeds.

“What’s DARPA tell you so far, Cowboy?” Manning asked. “It look like Lockheed is going to get the contract?”

Kissinger nodded. “Yep, the boys at JSOC loved ’em. They’re talking that if the test results hold up, they’ll go beyond Rangers and maybe deploy them to general infantry units in the Marines and Army.”

Kissinger lowered the rear gate of the SUV where he had loaded a pallet with training weapons and prepacked rucksacks filled with sandbags. “Let’s start loading you supermen up and see what these bad boys can really do.”

Farmhouse

BARBARA PRICE SAT in the kitchen of the old farmhouse and slowly drank a cup of coffee. In front of her she had a stack of satellite images, an encrypted Kindle DX and a PowerBook logged into A-Space.

A-Space, or Analytic Space, was a social networking and common collaborative workspace for all the members of the USIC, or United States Intelligence Community.

The Stony Man mission controller was using the site to search through the Library of National Intelligence for seemingly unrelated links that formed a pattern.

As a dedicated part of her counterintelligence security measures, Kurtzman’s cybernetic team had been tasked with searching the browser on a rotating basis, making sure no evidence, concrete or oblique, about Stony Man Farm made it onto the site.

Once upon a time in America, great firewalls of competition and compartmentalization mindsets had kept the disparate fiefdoms of the USIC separate from each other. In those days Stony Man Farm had been the main off-the-books weapon of choice by the Executive Branch looking to battle terrorism.

Post 9/11 many things had changed in America. Compartmentalization had gone out of vogue with a vengeance. Other “tip of the spear” organizations like the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA’s Special Activities Division had seen themselves refocused into areas traditionally deemed off the books and thus the province of Stony Man.

Also intelligence activity oversight committees in the House and Senate had started looking into corners and under rocks that before had remained unmolested. Several high-profile scandals had already rocked the espionage and military communities.