Don Pendleton - Act Of War

Less than a moment later, the flood swept past the ruined village, leaving behind a grotesque vista of smashed wreckage and a thousand steaming corpses….

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

D ESCENDING FROM THE darkening sky in a rush of warm air, the Black Hawk helicopter landed gently on the field of neatly trimmed grass. However the people inside did nothing for a moment, as the turboprops continued to spin overhead. Then a red light flashed green on the elaborate control console and the pilot turned around to give a thumbs-up to the passenger.

“All clear, sir!” he shouted over the rush of the engines. The Stony Man weapons array had been deactivated.

Hal Brognola slapped the release on his safety harness, exited the helicopter and hurried to the waiting SUV that would take him to the farmhouse.

A short ride took the big Fed to the main buildings. No one was there to greet him, so Brognola went through the security protocol, entered the farmhouse and walked briskly to the elevator, nodding to the staffers that he passed on the way. Stepping inside the car, he pressed the button for the basement.

The elevator started downward and soon stopped with a gentle jounce. As the doors slid open, the big Fed gave a half smile at the sight of Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, hurrying his way.

A stunningly beautiful woman with honey-blond hair, Price carried herself with the total assurance of a trained professional. As a former field agent for the NSA, Brognola expected no less.

“Hello, Hal,” she said.

“Wish I could drop by without bad news sometime, Barbara,” Brognola said. “Have you read the preliminary report?” They continued on toward the tunnel that would take them to the Annex.

“Yes, I already have Aaron and his team busy digging up intel on the matter.”

“Excellent.”

“Anything new to add?” she asked bluntly.

Without comment, Brognola removed a sheet of paper from his briefcase and passed it over. As she read the update, Price noted that the red striping along the edge of the document was still brightly colored. If the paper had been run through a scanner or copier, the red stripes would have faded to pink. This was an original document, direct from the Oval Office.

“So the Chinese did have a secret missile silo at the bottom of that lake,” she stated, handing it back. Where her fingers had touched the paper, brown spots began to appear from the warmth of her skin.

“More likely it was only a weapons cache to hide the nukes from our Watchdog and Keyhole satellites, but yes,” Brognola agreed, tucking the sheet away and closing the briefcase with a hard snap. “A lot of innocent civilians died in the flood, and more will perish from the poisoned drinking water. That whole section of the Wei mountain farmland is not going to be habitable until the rains come in the spring.”

Which would wash the contaminated soil down the river, and out into the sea, Price realized privately. Where it would be carried on the currents across the world. A nuclear explosion in Beijing would end up on the dinner table of America two years later. The world seemed huge, but in reality was a very small place, and with the advent of modern technology it was getting smaller every day.

Without speaking, the man and woman entered the tunnel, each lost in their own thoughts. They continued to walk, deciding not to take the electric rail car that would take them to the Annex.

Reaching the end of the tunnel, Brognola stayed back as Price placed a hand on a square of white plastic embedded into the smooth concrete wall. Sensors inside the pad checked her fingerprints, along with her palm print.

When the scanner was satisfied, there came a soft beep and the plate went dark, closely followed by the sound of working hydraulics. Ponderously, the security door began to swing away from the jamb.

Moving quickly, Brognola and Price stepped past the door and made their way to the Computer Room. The air was cool and clean, although tainted by the smell of burned coffee. Several people sat at a series of computer consoles. A small video display set alongside the main monitor showed a vector graphic map of the world, blinking lights indicating the state of military alert for every nation. Another side screen swirled with high-resolution photographs of the weather above the North American continent, the images broadcast live from a NASA satellite. The only sounds came from a softly burbling coffeepot at in a coffee station and the tapping of fingers on keyboards.

This was the Computer Room, the heart and quite literally the mind of Stony Man operations. Located on the next level down, just below the terrazzo flooring, was a unbelievably huge Cray IV Supercomputer, the titanic machine cooled by a steady stream of liquid nitrogen to keep the circuits working at their absolute optimum level.

This was the base of operations for the background soldiers of Stony Man Farm, the vaunted “electron-riders” of the covert organization. A cadre of unstoppable computer hackers, part data thieves and part cybernetic assassins, who patrolled the info net of the world and sometimes did more with the press of a single button than an army of soldiers could with missiles and tanks.

“Well, good morning!” John “Cowboy” Kissinger called, looking up from the monitor he studied.

A former DEA agent, Kissinger was a master gunsmith and in charge of all the firearms used at the Farm. He made sure that anything the field teams needed was instantly available, from conventional weaponry to experimental prototype. His workshop was stockpiled with everything from the P-11 underwater pistol used by the Navy SEALS, to the brand-new 25 mm Barrett rifle. He even created some of the specialty weapons used in the field by Able Team and Phoenix Force.

“What are you doing here?” Brognola asked brusquely. The man usually stayed in his workshop.

“Helping us,” Kurtzman said, grabbing the wheels of his chair in both hands and nimbly turning toward the new arrivals.

Resembling a grizzly bear in a badly rumpled suit, Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman was the head of the cybernetics team. A master code breaker and expert in cipher technology, Kurtzman had quit his lucrative job on the Rand Corporation’s world famous think tank to use his skills where they were most needed, bringing a measure of justice to the world, instead of just making more millions for fat businessmen already rolling in cash.

“Cowboy read the report on what happened in New Mexico, and had some suggestions to offer on where to look for more data,” Kurtzman added.

“Suggestions?” Price asked curiously, crossing her arms.

“Gunsmiths like to talk about weapons. It’s more than our job, you know, it’s a calling,” Kissinger said. “So I often lurk online, listening to the gossip about this and that, cut out articles from the trade journals and such, always keeping a watch for anything odd going on, anything that just doesn’t sound right.”

“He knew about the new 7.8 mm QBZ Chinese assault rifles before the Chinese army did,” Kurtzman stated. “Cowboy has sent us in the right direction numerous times.”

“Always considered that antinuke thing just a load of bull,” the armorer said. “But now…” He shrugged.

“Are you trying to tell me that somebody knows what triggered the nukes?” Brognola demanded, placing his briefcase on the polished floor.

“Of course not. But I do remember hearing something about an odd rumor from the cold war. The story was that some scientist in the Netherlands, Swedish maybe, or possibly Dutch, had invented some sort of device to stop a nuke from detonating, or something along those lines…different people told different versions, you know?”

“But the essence of the story,” Kurtzman added, “is that the KGB heard about the device, found it, killed the scientists involved and stole the blueprints.”