Don Pendleton - Hell Dawn

“A handful, maybe.”

“Exactly.”

“So what did you do with him?”

He shrugged again. “What could I do? I couldn’t pretend like it didn’t happen or let him escape the consequences. But I also wasn’t going to let this kid rot in a detention center somewhere. I got him moved as close as I could to Virginia, a juvenile lockup in Alexandria. On my days off, I’d visit with him. I took him books and we’d talk computers for as long as they’d let us.”

“You were like a surrogate parent.”

“Maybe. The real articles weren’t exactly a national treasure. But I stayed in contact with him over the years, helped pay for his college, that sort of thing. He got married a year ago. In August.”

“I remember you took the time off.”

Kurtzman nodded. “Bastards took his wife,” he said. “Maria was a good woman, but whoever wanted to get the Cold Earth worm decided to kill her in the process. She was home when they broke in. Gabe wasn’t. So they killed her.”

Kurtzman’s throat ached and he swallowed hard to dispel the feeling. This was one of the rare times when he wished he were an operative rather than some wheelchair-bound geek locked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Fox needed muscle, firepower. These were the only things Kurtzman couldn’t provide and it pained him to admit it, even to himself.

“You’re doing all you can,” Price said, as though she could read his mind. “Trust me, Aaron, if I was in trouble, you’re one of the people I’d want in my corner.”

Kurtzman gave her a grateful smile and a wink.

“Frankly, if everything was going to hell, I’d rather have Mack the Bastard on my side,” Kurtzman said. He was referring to Mack Bolan, aka. the Executioner, the soldier who kept an arm’s-length relationship with Stony Man Farm, but often conducted missions on the ultrasecret organization’s behalf. Bolan, like most all of Stony Man’s paramilitary fighters, had been forged in the hellfire of combat.

The corner of Price’s mouth wrinkled in a perturbed expression that told Kurtzman she was having none of it. “Go get some rest, Aaron. Or go work on your project. What’s it called?”

“You mean, Predator?”

“Right. The offensive firewall stuff you developed. We could sure use that around here.”

He waved her off. “Sure. Yeah. I’ll be out of here in a few minutes. Besides, I finished that project a couple of days ago. I just have to test it.”

“Whatever. Go. Sleep. Now. Don’t make me order you off the floor.”

He threw a mock salute and a smile. “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” He gestured over his shoulder at his computer with his thumb. “Let me just make sure I’m at a stopping point, and I’ll disappear for a couple of hours.”

“Bear…” Price said, using his nickname.

“Promise.”

Price nodded and moved away. Wheeling back around, Kurtzman checked his encrypted e-mail account and saw a new message. His heart skipped a beat when he read the address: foxhound362. Gabe! He popped open the message and scanned through it.

AK,

Leadville.

You won’t see me, but I’ll see you.

GF

Pumping a fist into the air, Kurtzman yelled, “Yes! Sleep can wait. We have contact.”

AN HOUR LATER, Kurtzman was seated inside a Stony Man Farm’s Lear jet specifically designed to accommodate his wheelchair. Accompanying him were four of the finest warriors he knew. Pilot Jack Grimaldi was seated in front, finishing last-minute preparations for takeoff, and seated around the cabin was the trio known as Able Team—Carl “Ironman” Lyons, Rosario “Politician” Blancanales and Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz.

Whatever fatigue Kurtzman had felt previously had vanished with the arrival of Fox’s message. Though his eyes still ached from lack of sleep and his trademark bad coffee was causing his stomach to roil, his mind was more alert than it had been for at least twenty-four hours, and for that he was grateful.

It was heading into late evening and Blancanales let loose with a big yawn.

Kurtzman held up a stainless-steel thermos. “Coffee?” he offered.

Blancanales waved him off. “Save it, amigo,” he said. “Just in case the plane runs out of fuel.”

“I didn’t make it,” Kurtzman lied.

“Well, in that case.”

Kurtzman poured the coffee into three foam cups and handed them out. “You girls are going to be needing this,” he said.

“Sounds ominous,” Blancanales said. Swigging down some of his coffee, he made a face. He looked at Kurtzman, flashing a knowing smile.

“It’s always ominous,” Lyons said, an edge in his voice. “Why you dragging me—us—out in the middle of the night like this?”

“Simple snatch-and-grab mission,” Kurtzman replied. Reaching into a pocket on the side of his wheelchair, he extracted three mission packets, handed them to Schwarz who was seated across from him, who, in turn, distributed them to the others. The plane had been configured for briefings, with four of the cabin seats facing one another.

“Before we leave the plane,” Kurtzman said, “I need to take back these dossiers and put them in a burn bag. None of this stuff is supposed to leave the airplane, so commit the photo to memory.”

Schwarz held out the photo so that it was visible to the others. “Kind of hard to forget a mug like this,” he said. “He’s a hard-looking kid. He the target?”

Kurtzman nodded. “In a manner of speaking, though he’s on our side, all appearances aside. Name’s Gabe Fox and he’s a computer genius.” Kurtzman brought the others up to date on the recent kidnapping attempts on Fox, the murder of his wife, how he’d gone underground and contacted Kurtzman less than two hours ago.

Blancanales was leafing through the file on his lap. “He’s what, twenty-three years old? What makes him so special that everyone and their brother’s trying to hunt him down?”

“It’s not Gabe, per se, they’re after,” Kurtzman said. “It’s what he’s created. A little bit of background. He works for the CIA’s counterterrorism unit. He’s not a field operative. He’s strictly a lab guy. Like I said, he’s a maestro at the computer, and we’re lucky to have him on our side. He’s created some downright scary computer viruses and worms. Stuff capable of shutting down electrical grids or air-traffic-control systems. Remember all the Y2K doomsday scenarios with airplanes falling from the sky and all that crap? Forget it. This kid can program that stuff in his sleep.”

“So someone wants him for his brain power?” Schwarz offered.

“Sort of,” Kurtzman replied. “He’s created a computer worm called Cold Earth. The thing’s capable of shutting down the cooling systems in nuclear reactors, then frying the computers so that they’ll do nothing but crash repeatedly. If you’re working at a nuclear power plant and the computers go blooey, what would you do?”

“Soil myself,” Schwarz said.

“After that,” Kurtzman said, smiling.

“Try to restart the system,” he replied. “See if I could get the cooling system to kick back on.”

“Right. Thing is, though, every time you do that, the worm changes the computer’s password. So you just sit there restarting the damn thing while the reactor core overheats.”

“Wow,” Schwarz said.

“Yeah, wow. Pretty soon, you have a meltdown like nothing the world’s ever seen. You multiply that by every nuclear reactor around the country, hell, around the world, and you’ve got Armageddon a hundred or so times over.”

“Okay, fine,” Lyons said, “so this little lab rat comes up with this thing. Surely he came up with a way to counteract it.”

“He’s working on it,” Kurtzman said.

Lyons’s face reddened, and Kurtzman knew the former Los Angeles cop was having a meltdown of his own. “Working on it? What the hell? If he’s ‘working on it,’ then he ought to be sitting on his rusty can in a basement at Langley. Not skulking around the damn Rocky Mountains.”