Don Pendleton: Silent Arsenal

But watching them die through the wonders of supertechnology was somewhat spooky, Brognola felt. Dead was dead, but this was something else entirely—real time, real flesh-and-blood dying as little more than a lit speck, an eerie video game.

There was still plenty of red-orange jumping all over the screens and lots of bad guys in play. Visual relay was shaky at best as the Phoenix Force warriors advanced, swung this way and that, ducked fire, blazed away in long raking bursts, left to right or vice versa.

Brognola watched as the tactical team relayed warnings and positions of bogeys. Encizo and Manning were monitored by Wethers, Kurtzman taking Hawkins and James, with Tokaido watching McCarter, the lone fighter out.

It was quite the grim and, yes, Brognola admitted to himself, ghoulish show.

#9 STRIKEPOINT

#10 SECRET ARSENAL

#11 TARGET AMERICA

#12 BLIND EAGLE

#13 WARHEAD

#14 DEADLY AGENT

#15 BLOOD DEBT

#16 DEEP ALERT

#17 VORTEX

#18 STINGER

#19 NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE

#20 TERMS OF SURVIVAL

#21 SATAN’S THRUST

#22 SUNFLASH

#23 THE PERISHING GAME

#24 BIRD OF PREY

#25 SKYLANCE

#26 FLASHBACK

#27 ASIAN STORM

#28 BLOOD STAR

#29 EYE OF THE RUBY

#30 VIRTUAL PERIL

#31 NIGHT OF THE JAGUAR

#32 LAW OF LAST RESORT

#33 PUNITIVE MEASURES

#34 REPRISAL

#35 MESSAGE TO AMERICA

#36 STRANGLEHOLD

#37 TRIPLE STRIKE

#38 ENEMY WITHIN

#39 BREACH OF TRUST

#40 BETRAYAL

#41 SILENT INVADER

#42 EDGE OF NIGHT

#43 ZERO HOUR

#44 THIRST FOR POWER

#45 STAR VENTURE

#46 HOSTILE INSTINCT

#47 COMMAND FORCE

#48 CONFLICT IMPERATIVE

#49 DRAGON FIRE

#50 JUDGMENT IN BLOOD

#51 DOOMSDAY DIRECTIVE

#52 TACTICAL RESPONSE

#53 COUNTDOWN TO TERROR

#54 VECTOR THREE

#55 EXTREME MEASURES

#56 STATE OF AGGRESSION

#57 SKY KILLERS

#58 CONDITION HOSTILE

#59 PRELUDE TO WAR

#60 DEFENSIVE ACTION

#61 ROGUE STATE

#62 DEEP RAMPAGE

#63 FREEDOM WATCH

#64 ROOTS OF TERROR

#65 THE THIRD PROTOCOL

#66 AXIS OF CONFLICT

#67 ECHOES OF WAR

#68 OUTBREAK

#69 DAY OF DECISION

#70 RAMROD INTERCEPT

#71 TERMS OF CONTROL

#72 ROLLING THUNDER

#73 COLD OBJECTIVE

#74 THE CHAMELEON FACTOR

Silent Arsenal

STONY MAN®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Don Pendleton

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EPILOGUE

Myanmar

Colonel Ho Phan Lingpau feared the jungle, was borderline terrified of the dense pre-Jurassic rain forest encompassing the compound like a vined and walled fortress. These days there was plenty to fear, he thought, as he pondered murmured rumors he’d overheard among the rank and file. There was menace out there in the jungle. And beyond, ragtag bands of armed rebel savages.

He’d heard the terrible stories recently of man-eating crocodiles crawling up the banks of the Ayeyarwady River to chomp down on the leg of some unsuspecting villager, dragging him or her into the black waters, their bodies thrashing in the behemoth’s death roll the final sighting of the victim. Then there were rumors of tigers on the prowl, the beasts leaping from nowhere out of the brush, claiming human meals in a frenzy of disemboweling claws that left little to the imagination. And there were reported elephant stampedes throughout the Kachin and Shan states. Three days prior, he recalled as he shuddered over the images left dangling in his mind by the report, a herd of the beasts had gone berserk, crushing half of his thirty-pony caravan, trampling four of his soldiers to bloody pulp as they’d hauled refined product to the paddle wheeler on the river.

At first he had believed these wild tales to be mere fabricated excuses from the comrades of AWOL soldiers who held as much loathing and fear of the jungle as he did—only they had dredged up the nerve to defect his unit at the risk of a firing squad if caught traipsing back for the comfort and safety of Yangon. However, only after witnessing a rhino charging then knocking one of his transport trucks onto its side before the animal was shot down in a hail of bullets had he begun to allow silent credence to an ominous notion.

The jungle was alive with an animal evil. Wildlife had seemingly gone berserk, the creatures of the forest having evidently evolved to some vicious counterattack mode on humans, nature tired from fear of being the hunted. Mother Nature, he believed, was in revolt against man. No nature lover, no tree hugger—since he was the chief architect for the slash-and-burn of countless acres in the region to make room for more poppy fields—he entertained a fleeting wonder. How would he feel if he was destined for slaughter, his hide providing a coat or rug for some rich man’s mistress, perhaps his penis used, much like the tiger’s, as an aphrodisiac, maybe his head mounted on the wall for the hunter’s admiration? As if the grinding fear of animal attack wasn’t enough, there were the various and sundry rebel groups lurking the Kachin, all of them trigger-happy when it came to blowing away any uniform marched out there by Yangon. By day, the jungle frayed his nerves badly enough, rebel phantoms hidden in the lush vegetation, framing a uniform pasted to flesh drenched in sweat from steaming heat through the crosshairs of a high-powered scope. At night, with all the caws and chittering and howling in the dark, he found himself unable to sleep, unless his HQ was ringed by sentries and he drifted off with a brain floating on brandy.

As a top-ranking officer of the State Law and Order Restoration Council—SLORC—he knew there was no room, however, for any voicing of the slightest anxiety, much less complaint about one’s duty for the ruling military junta of Myanmar. Still, he was city-born and raised in Yangon, accustomed to the best food, clothing, housing that a man of his stature deserved. This stint, he thought, swatting at a mosquito the size of a mango, was little more than some supervisory outing better suited for a subordinate, some gung-ho underling eager to prove himself to the other twenty-one members of the SLORC. If he thought about his present assignment long enough, he knew protracted bitterness and resentment might distract him from meeting next week’s deadline.

Still, despite the encroaching deadline and possible reprimand from Yangon if the shipment fell short, he remained holed up for the most part in his bamboo-and-thatch-hut quarters, brooding in isolation instead of being out there in the refinery, barking orders or pacing among the peasants in the poppy fields, cracking the bullwhip over the backs of the workers if they didn’t meet the day’s quota: two burlap sacks of milky juice per head. And if he failed to ship out the requisite ten metric tons of heroin, divvied up between their wholesale distributors in Laos and Thailand, his gut warned him Yangon would make this foreboding stretch of impenetrable jungle in the Kachin State his indefinite HQ.