Don Pendleton - Starfire

He caught himself. They would chomp down on any “normal” intruder, that was.

“Chill out, old man,” Cain said. “Have a few brew-skis.”

“I want everything you have on hard drive burned to CD,” he told them, and ran a hard look down the line.

Abel looked aghast. “Everything? Does that include our SETI—”

“Everything means everything, pipsqueak. Now. I want three copies and however many originals. Shag your smart asses into high gear,” he barked.

As they grumbled and shrugged themselves out of neutral, Rosenberg knew it was time to start hedging his bets. He couldn’t expect any of them to understand the dire urgency of the situation. With the exception of Abel, violent death had never touched their lives, other than the usual horror stories about broken family life, divorce, alcoholism, child abuse and the ugly like. But he had stared down the barrel of a gun, seen men die for secrets he kept in his head. As good fortune had it, he was still alive to correct that mistake.

He heard them clacking away on their keyboards, but as he went to the steel cabinet, he could feel them going still, looking his way. The cabinet was off limits, and they knew it. The penalty for attempting to crack the code on the keypad was instant expulsion from the Force of Truth. They would be sent packing, shamed before their peers for not honoring the one ultimate request they had pledged a verbal solemn oath to. In their minds, to break their word on that was the military equivalent of death before dishonor.

Rosenberg keyed open the lockbox, switched on the battery-powered keypad and punched in the long series of numbers committed to steely memory. He felt the sudden burning curiosity of his hackers grow into a living force all by itself. None of them knew—and had been warned to not even ask—what was in the cabinet.

The stainless-steel Glock .45, already snugged in shoulder rigging, came out from the arsenal first. He checked the clip, slapped it home, chambered a live one, strapped in. The Uzi submachine gun was hauled out next. Rosenberg was in the process of cocking and locking when he read the stark fear etched on their faces, and said, “Oh…Now you get it.”

SINCE LANDING in Turkey to hammer out the present mission parameters, David McCarter believed all along his hunch would either pan out into a mother lode of intelligence and strike a massive blow against global terrorism, or get them all killed.

So, what was new?

A bloody damn lot, the leader of Phoenix Force decided. The relative warm comfort of the special ops base in Kurd country of east Turkey now seemed another lifetime as he scurried for the narrow fissure at the north edge of the rocky shelf, gathering a buzzard’s eye view of the hardsite on the fly. His gut instinct quickly amended end game suspicions, and locked him in with laser-guided precision to the grim immediate future.

They were knocking on Hell’s door.

A dark truth, no less, was about to be revealed, unless, that was, he missed his guess and the combined wisdom of the CIA, the Justice Department on through to Mossad, Interpol, the Russian SVR and GRU proved nothing more than toxic smoke and shattered mirrors. The way it looked to be shaping up, as he took in the compound’s sprawl and number of wandering shooters, there were light-years to go before they bagged any human pythons bent on squeezing the life out of the innocent.

A long way, indeed, before they grabbed the prized trophies. And payback, though it would consume the savages here in fire the likes of which they’d never dared dream in their unholiest nightmare, was on temporary hold.

All indications from assorted spookwork, anywhere from fifty to a hundred or more obstacles stood as barriers to the gates of evil knowledge. The opposition here was heavily armed, well paid by the local Lezgi Mafia chieftain and his Chechen contacts. To a rabid brute they would in all likelihood prove loyal to a fierce fault, determined to win by bloody milestones or go down with their own Titanic when the hull had a massive hole punched through it by five black-suited commandos who had come loaded for wolf and bear in predatory human skin. Long odds, no matter how it was blasted, and there would be no winged death from above, which only served to add yet more tension to prebattle jitters over this huge roll of the dice. Beyond the soon-to-be crater in a time and place few sane men had ever heard about and fewer still dare to tread, he knew the daunting shadow of the Russian military and its vaunted special security forces known as Omon were lurking in the vicinity.

First strokes first.

Dropping into the tight little bowl and bringing the HK-33 assault rifle with custom-made 50 mm grenade launcher fixed to the barrel, the ex-SAS commando grabbed a few moments to scan, assess, review. The worst was on the way, make no mistake, he knew, but it felt good nonetheless to stop, breathe and suck down a mouthful of cold water from his canteen.

Review. It seemed to take forever and a day to get it in gear to go wheels-up in the C-130. Part of the problem was verifying intel, double- and triple-checking everything from terrain to enemy players to their own escape hatch, which was flimsy to the point of embracing suicide. But, upon further input from the Farm, McCarter made the call to go when he factored in what he knew, and considered what couldn’t be confirmed without the up-close and personal touch of eyeball kills. Cloud cover was the normal maddening order of the day for this unholy eyesore of the world, but there had been enough break in the ceiling twelve hours ago where the CIA ops at their disposal had managed a thorough sat read of the area and handed if off.

Scan. By night the countryside was bleak and gruesome enough to behold as Phoenix Force moved in on foot following their seven-hundred-foot combat jump and subsequent two-mile hike. Not to mention that wandering around this neck of Hell was so dangerous to a foreigner’s health that any passports and visas—had they been issued—were as welcome a sight for inspection as a leper’s used tissue. By dawn’s early light, the Briton now found the lay of the land downright foreboding and desolate, and to the point where the five of them might as well be advancing for battle at an end of the world all but forgotten by man and God. That, he knew, wasn’t far from the truth as he considered just where they were.

Dagestan.

Land of the mountains, McCarter thought, which was the literal translation used by its indigenous mixed bag of ethnic descent.

The indigenous bulk were Sunni Muslims, most of whom were fanatical to the extreme as they bowed to the tenets of Wahhabism. The country was no less than a slice of Islamic fundamentalist Hell on Earth, a land that time and most of humankind ignored, if they even knew it existed. Even globe-trotting, battle-hardened commandos like the troops he led, he thought, would be hard-pressed to find this desolate backwater on any globe without some eye strain.

At their present position in the shadow of the towering, snow-capped, cloud-swathed Caucasus Mountains in the southwest corner of the country, what could have been transplanted moonscape fanned out in hills and steppe to the even more ominous empty east and north, until it all eventually dropped off into the vast Caspian Sea. Oil and gas were the country’s cash cows, and were the only reason Moscow still humped and bivouacked soldiers to what was loosely billed an autonomous Russian republic. It was no secret that Moscow, McCarter briefly pondered, maintained its iron grip on the spigots of major pipelines to keep pumping black gold and silver vapor north, but the Russians somehow managed to hide from the world that they were about as environmentally conscious as Godzilla stomping through Tokyo. Dagestan was an industrial dungheap, with major ecological contamination.