Don Pendleton - Starfire

Down the line they were Noah, Job, and Cain and Abel who were, in fact, the brothers Polansky. The skinny youth in the dark shades, working on a fat joint, with stringy hair down to his waist and all of eighteen was tagged the Kid. They were a motley crew, no doubt about it, but no one he knew of could match them when it came to computers and stealing information from cyberspace. He had personally tracked down three of them when they were hot, hauled their ragged bacon out of the frying pan, and maybe from worse than a stint in prison. The trio in question—Cain, Abel and Job—had hacked into classified government databases a few years back. They had stolen secrets they claimed to this day were irrefutable evidence of UFOs and extraterrestrials and a government cover-up, on through to who was behind both Kennedy assassinations to the coming extinction level event. Then thrown opposition networks into meltdown with the all-fearsome worm, a feat so incredible and embarrassing to two famous alphabet-soup agencies that not even a whisper of the crisis made the news. Both virus and worm writers, he knew, faced four years in the federal pen and up to half a million dollars in fines, which naturally no hacker ever caught with his fingers up the other’s guy mainframe ever seemed to have handy. Only in their cases Rosenberg suspected they would have been executed on the spot. That was, if he hadn’t descended on their doorsteps like manna from Heaven to offer them a job—of sorts—that matched their peculiar but undeniable genius. Saving their lives was an added bonus, his gift to them but one they had never once acknowledged. Genius could also be ungrateful to the extreme.

Cain, whose Aloha shirt was brighter than the sun at noon, took a sip from whiskey-spiked coffee. “What’s the beef, Grandpa? It’s just another day in Cyber Paradise, us ‘young sirs’ merely doing what we signed on for.”

The smart-ass route, then.

Methuselah had the sudden urge for a cold beer if only to clamp a lid on his rising anger. Instead, he torched a foot-long Havana cigar with a gold-plated lighter engraved with the Star of David. Blowing smoke, he stared at Johnny Polansky, bobbed his gray head. The twenty-six-year-old high school dropout had just come off seven years for manslaughter for stabbing a guy in a bar fight that left him half dead in the process and for which the jury had cut him some years. Going to court with wired-jaw, mashed nose and half of one ear sliced off had also helped pluck a few heartstrings, not to mention the dead man was a notorious three-time loser and suspected pedophile no one in all of Little Rock, Arkansas, would have missed anyway. Having sworn off cocaine, whiskey was the new magic potion the elder Polansky claimed helped him dig deeper into his black hole of creativity. The sad truth was, all of them had their demons. Even Job—what with his computer printout of God First, Fellow Man Second, Cyberspace Third in bold black letters around a crucifix and tacked over his laptop—was a heavy boozer. What could he do? It was most likely warped reasoning on his part, but Rosenberg reckoned he granted them indulgence in the Devil they knew best, if only to keep them steady and walking their highwire act on the tightrope between madness and genius.

With rare exceptions, human beings, he knew, created their own comfort zones, clung like infants to whatever the vice or ill behavior, and God forbid someone should attempt to invade the personal barrier. With this bunch, he figured talent and the extraordinary risks they took to uncover various truths of the ages—but splash them all over their AlphaDataSystems.com—had earned them some slack.

“Despite your best efforts,” Rosenberg began anew, “to ghost your trails, I have just learned we have more than piqued the curiosity of the No Such Agency.”

Noah swiveled in his leather wingback. The chair was splashed with colored artwork from predatory animals, UFOs, ETs, to tacked-in pics of his favorite film and song queens. “Then we were right. What did I say? If that’s a farm in the Shenandoah Valley, then I’m your grandson and I’ll go build you an ark right now.”

“First and foremost, ‘right’ has nothing to do with it. And second and last, an ark won’t cut it. If what I hear is true—and I have no reason to believe other-wise—then we’ll need that Mothership you whiz kids are always ranting about to drop down and take us all away—about a thousand light-years into deep space.”

Job piped up. “What are you talking about, oh gray-haired sir? No Such Agency is moving on us? We’re civilians, not some gun-packing black ops who are out to sell classified intelligence.”

“Besides,” Cain said, “you’ve seen the sat photos, all the thermal imaging from midnight passovers by Big Brother in space. You’ve read the e-mail that lays out whoever these people masquerading as apple pickers use as hot sites for emergency contacts. Interpol. FBI. Mossad is even in their black bag of vipers. Then we have CIA station chiefs in various embassies from London to Tokyo who are feeding them sitreps through about a dozen back channels we’ve discovered.”

“So bring on the spooks.” Abel—Jimmy Polansky—joined in, grinning like a fool as he lit an unfiltered Camel cigarette. “What we have on them, I say we can use as blackmail leverage to keep the wolves at bay.”

“Yeah,” Cain said. “We’ll threaten to go public. I always wanted to be on one of those talking-head shows.”

“Armchair expert,” Noah chortled, holding up the peace sign. “‘Let me make this perfectly clear—I know who shot JFK and why.’”

Rosenberg washed a smoke wave in their faces. “Yuk, yuk. Okay, geniuses, so how are you going to go public if you’re all dead?”

That gave them pause.

“Now that I see I have your attention, do you guys have any idea what we’ve stumbled on to?” Rosenberg pressed. “Have you thought this through? Do you realize the impact of what we suspect we’ve learned these past three days—and I’m talking beyond the borders of our own country?”

“You’re talking about the fifty-kiloton impactor in Australia?” Job asked. “And who we think is behind it?”

“We’re just a bunch of geeks,” the Kid chimed in, then sucked another huge pull from his doobie, coughing as he choked down the pungent smoke, cheeks ballooning out like a puff adder. “We’re American citizens performing a public service.” He hacked the words out between toxic palls. “The Force of Truth. People knew about us, we’d be national heroes.”

“Yeah,” Cain said, “and I wouldn’t have to just daydream about my favorite pop star. She’d be banging down the front door to know me. And I’m definitely talking ‘know’ in the biblical sense.”

They started snickering, shaking their heads, the Kid and Cain back to their keyboards.

Comedians. Clueless.

Rosenberg then looked at the one table with its bank of monitors they always seemed to neglect. From across the room he could tell nothing was moving—or at least nothing he was aware of. Their laser webs, motion sensors and cameras were hidden as part of the wooded scenery in this neck of the Hampton Roads Peninsula. They were at the far edge of the trailer park, isolated, their closest neighbor about a quarter mile down the dirt track. But he knew the kind of gizmos ghost ops had at their disposal. Such as cutting edge EM scanners and laser burners a decade or more ahead of their time and which only a handful of people knew existed.

The spooks in question were the Mothership.

“Listen up,” Rosenberg snapped, then moved to the living-room window. There, as he felt their stares boring into the back of his head, he pulled the curtain two inches aside. As a last resort, they kept two Rottweilers in the chain-linked cage, hidden to the deep front end of their parked vehicles. From inside the trailer Rosenberg could release the gate by radio remote, and Ramses and Apollo would make a meal out of any—