Don Pendleton - Triplecross

“I’m telling you,” Schwarz said to Blancanales, “every adventure movie where the hero gets caught and then has to fight his way out is automatically cliché. A bad guy catches a good guy, what’s he going to do? He’s going to kill him or he’s going to torture him, but either way our hero isn’t going to get free.”

“But real people have escaped terrorist captors and home invaders in real life,” Blancanales countered. “People who didn’t even have any training. In your movie the hero is always a tough guy or someone who’s ex-military. Or both.”

“Exactly my point,” Schwarz said.

“Gadgets, do you realize you say, ‘Exactly my point,’ every time you start to lose an argument?”

“Exactly my point,” Schwarz repeated.

“So a trained, albeit fictional military or law-enforcement hero can’t do what a real-life civilian can do.”

“Exactly my—”

“Here,” Blancanales said. From his pocket he took a red-dot sight. “I can’t get this to illuminate. I changed the battery and everything. I think it’s broken. Why don’t you uphold that science-whiz reputation you have and see if you can’t fix it?”

“Isn’t this Cowboy’s department?”

“Cowboy and the armory are backed up,” Blancanales said. “I know you can help.”

“Did this come off Aaron’s coffee cup?” Schwarz said, grinning.

“Don’t start,” Kurtzman grumbled. “My revenge will be swift and terrible.”

“Why’s the hero getting caught in the first place?” Lyons put in. That surprised Price, who usually thought of him as the straight man for Schwarz’s banter. Obviously, Lyons and Blancanales were a bit taken aback, as well; they both turned and eyed Lyons curiously before Schwarz managed a response.

“Well, we’ve all been...” Schwarz looked sheepish.

“What?” Lyons demanded. “Caught by the enemy?”

“You’ve got to admit that the sheer number of times that—” Blancanales began.

“If we’re all ready to start?” interrupted Hal Brognola.

The assembled Stony Man operatives turned to regard the larger-than-life satellite image of Hal Brognola. The head of the Sensitive Operations Group was chewing an unlighted cigar and looked as harried as he always did.

Not for the first time or the hundredth time, Price worried about the amount of stress the man was under. A lot of world power plays fell under Brognola’s watch. Still more of those turned into fires that the SOG was tasked to put out.

Such as the one they were about to talk about.

“You are go, Hal,” said Price. “Phoenix is live and connected.”

“Ready and waiting,” McCarter acknowledged. “We can’t sit here for too much longer, though. Our hind ends are hanging in the wind.”

“Understood,” Brognola noted. He cleared his throat. “To put it bluntly, a series of military skirmishes between what seems to be Pakistani and Indian forces are driving our intelligence assets batty. Neither government admits to deploying military assets in the region.”

“And that region is?” Lyons asked.

“In an around the disputed territory of Kashmir,” Brognola explained. “As you know, due to a rather complicated series of political maneuvers more than half a century ago, the two nations have, arguably, been in a state of low-grade war ever since. They simply do not like each other. Over the years the conflict has flared up and then died down. It’s gone on like that, hot and cold, for decades. Recently, a ceasefire was brokered by the Man and several high-profile diplomats with plenty of political capital in the United Nations. It was a big deal.”

“I remember seeing that on the news,” Schwarz said.

“What makes any lessening of tensions between Pakistan and India so important,” Brognola continued, “is the fact that the two nations are among the eight nations of the world who have, or who are believed to have, viable nuclear weapons. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China you know. Israel has long been suspected by the rest of the world to possess defensive nukes of its own, and while they won’t admit it, we wouldn’t be SOG if we didn’t know that, yes, they do. North Korea, for all its problems, has been a nuclear power since 2006.”

“If their tests aren’t hoaxes,” McCarter said. “This is a nation that builds ghost cities on its borders to make the South believe it’s not mired in poverty.”

“Nonetheless,” Brognola said, “the relatively short list underscores just how dangerous it is to have India and Pakistan rattling sabers at each other. The conflict destabilizes the entire region, but if it goes too far...”

“One of the two is going to start thinking they don’t want to wait any longer to see what their nukes can do,” Lyons finished.

“India tested their Pokhran-1, code-named ‘Smiling Buddha,’ back in ’74,” Price said. “Pakistan went nuclear later, but they’re not new to the game. They conducted a string of underground nuclear tests in ’98, as retaliation for India’s Pokhran-2, or Operation Shakti. The message on the part of both nations was clear—we’ve got the means to wipe you out. Either because of that threat or despite it, the two have skirmished with each other but never gone all the way. The President is concerned that if things keep going as they are, all-out war is assured...and we think we know why.”

“Neither India nor Pakistan will take credit for voluntarily committing forces to the border conflict,” Brognola said. “Both countries claim their own patrols have come under unprovoked attack. As you can imagine, any one of these attacks can be construed as an act of war. Our thermal imaging has mapped out a series of border conflicts between what we at first believed were elements of the Pakistani and Indian armies. We were right...and we were wrong.”

“Okay, I’m officially confused,” Blancanales protested.

“During the mop-up of a clash with what we took to be both Indian and Pakistani uniformed soldiers,” Brognola explained, “Phoenix Force took digital photographs of as many of the dead soldiers as they could. Those photographs have been analyzed at the Farm.”

“We’ve run the identities of the soldiers through our databases,” Kurtzman put in. “Many of them have no file on record. The ones that do, however, have something very specific in common.” He tapped a few buttons on the keyboard built into the conference table. A pair of images came up on the wall screen next to Brognola’s image. The two men depicted were both dark of skin and wearing military uniforms.

“The heavyset man is Ibrahim Jamali of Pakistan. His thinner, hawk-nosed counterpart is India’s Siraj Gera. Both men were or are generals in their respective armies. But there’s more.”

Kurtzman took the cue and tapped several more keys. Now a grid of images appeared. The faces were much alike and too small to be particularly memorable, but the text below each image indicated that the file photo belonged to a man found dead by Phoenix Force.

“The men you see here were all found dead at the scene of a battle in the Kashmir area. During the conflict, both sides targeted Phoenix Force. What all of the men listed here have in common is that they’re dead.”

“Naturally,” said Lyons.

“No, not after the battle,” Kurtzman said. “They were already dead.”

“Those that weren’t officially listed as dead are criminals or mercenaries,” Brognola clarified. “A few have been declared deserters. None are officially traceable to their governments.”

“Shadow companies,” Lyons concluded. “Private armies.”

“That’s right,” Brognola said. “We believe that Pakistan and India have lost control of Generals Jamali and Gera, and that both men have crafted military forces loyal to them. Most likely they’ve simply misappropriated the units over which they initially held control, and then bolstered those forces with expatriates and other mercenaries. In other words, gentlemen, they’ve gone rogue.”