Читать книгу Doomsday Conquest - Don Pendleton - Страница 8

Aaron Kurtzman wondered what it would be like to walk again. Maybe it was the ten cups and counting of coffee he’d consumed, all that tar floating in enough sugar to wire a small army, electrically hyper-charging the caffeine-soaked thoughts off on grim tangents best left alone. Maybe it was working through the night at his computer station, by himself, for the most part, locked up in his head, most of the world sleeping, including some of his comrades and co-workers at Stony Man Farm, though he couldn’t say for certain. Intensely private, he was not a man to dump emotional baggage on others, wear suffering on his sleeve or to cast blame like a human storm raging about until the misery was spread sufficiently to the four corners of the globe, but the thoughts and feelings were there, just the same, and he couldn’t deny them.

At that predawn hour, staring at the monitor of his computer, he suddenly imagined himself out of the bowels of the new-and-improved Computer Room, removed from this trapping of time and space, free, unconfined, able-bodied. And there he was, up top, strolling the grounds, sans wheelchair, the barrel-chested, powerfully built titan he recalled from the ghosts of years past, that Big Ten champion heavyweight wrestler of the University of Michigan, a young lion. Breathing in the cool, crisp air of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, he imagined, sun on his bearded face, drinking in the lush greenery of the Blue Ridge Mountains, unshackled from the shell that imprisoned him. He pictured himself on a leisurely jaunt, down a wooded trail, maybe a dog by his side for company, he’d always had a fondness for German shepherds….

Enough, he told himself. No, it never hurt to dream, he thought, or to pray even for a miracle, as long as he didn’t get mired in self-pity, one of the worst of human failings, in his mind. Rather, if it be the will of some Divine Force beyond his finite understanding… Maybe someday, some other time, space or dimension, beyond the physical constraints of Earth, there would be a new and improved Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman.

Leave it at that.

There was work to do.

Head of the cyberteam, the think tank of Stony Man Farm’s Computer Room—the nerve center for intelligence gathering that kept the warrior machine rolling in the trenches of the world’s flashpoints, overt or black ops—was his realm. As such, Kurtzman went back to tapping in the next series of access codes on his keyboard.

They were alphanumeric codes and bypass encryption, what he tagged “circumventors,” the sum total faster and far simpler than any software program he’d previously created, though this one was designed for more than hacking. The FORTRAN, or formula translation, was part of his Infinity program, the server software managing and sifting through data from interconnected systems at light speed, until only the critical information he sought was framed on his screen. The client-servers were never the wiser he or one of his team had just broken through about three firewalls, stolen whatever buried cybertreasures, then rebuilt those walls after a lightning and untraceable bolt back to Stony Man mainframes. Whether they changed their passwords on a frequent basis or not, on the client-servers’ end, Infinity was the cryptographer’s answers to all mysteries of the cyberuniverse. Those faceless, nameless clients almost always came from any alphabet-soup intelligence agency within the United States and the world over, likewise any military or law-enforcement agency mainframes Kurtzman needed to access.

He wasn’t sure what it was about the news report he’d been watching in a corner of his monitor since last evening, using the remote on his keyboard to snap through the local and national cable networks, but something disturbed him about the images of reporters being ushered away from what was clearly a large area quarantined by armed soldiers. Initial reports cited some natural disaster, or so the reporters were told by military spokesmen, belonging to what branch, though, no one knew or was allowed to say. Speculation had body counts mounting by the hour, but these nameless spokesmen were denying any such rumors. He heard about meteor showers, or something or other unexplained that had fallen from space. Each new report sounded flimsier than the last. He smelled cover-up, a brittle conspiracy ready to unravel with a good swift kick.

And the Smoking Gun and Infinity programs were hard at work, he saw, alphanumeric codes tumbling in the top left-hand corner, as his labor of love raced out to those far reaches of the cyberuniverse to cross all pertinent I’s, dot the t’s of truth that not even the brightest award-winning journalist could uncover. Every shred of data from all U.S. intelligence agencies, black-inked or otherwise, was correlated with daily news reports, written or televised. Once any paper or station’s Web site dot.com was filed away into Infinity—Smoking Guns’s memory, the two programs became their own investigators. Between that and the sat imagery they burglarized from the satellite parked closest to the area in question—AIQ—in this instance North Dakota, and classified documents regarding military black ops and their installations within the state, Infinity did virtually all of the work for him. At the moment he was left with more questions than answers, but felt something far beyond space phenomenon had turned four separate areas in southwest North Dakota into what appeared to him on the imagery as smoking craters his trained eyed told him were the result of aerial strafing.

He was wondering how far and how to pursue it, when he became aware his partner at this early morning hour had cranked up his CD to that kind of fuzzy contortion blasting out of his headphones that should have rendered Akira Tokaido deaf.

Kurtzman wheeled sideways, Tokaido bebopping his head in rhythm to the tune. He held his arms out, caught his teammate’s eye, and said in a loud voice, “What the hell, huh?”

Akira, still bopping, looked at Kurtzman’s mouth and said, “I can hear you just fine. You said, ‘What the hell, huh?’”

“Okay, smart-ass. Do you think you can get to work while you’re getting all wet in the eyes over that blaring duet?”

Still bopping along, Tokaido’s fingers began flying over his keyboard. Kurtzman saw his monitor split into two screens. “What am I looking at, Akira?”

Two more images crowded the number on Kurtzman’s monitor to four.

Tokaido killed his CD. “Clockwise, top to bottom. A major Russian weapons factory in the Pamir Range of Tajikistan, the usual we know about it, they know we know, and the beat goes on. We check it with some of our own sources, I’m sure they’d verify there’s more going on under the roof than your basic WMD alchemy, the floating rumor out of spookdom’s black hole being they’re engineering superweapons of the future. Next, for your viewing pleasure, what I believe—and since the DOD, NSA and Pentagon files I accessed had so many black deletions regarding this base I discovered at great length tagged as Eagle Nebula, thus you can safely assume black project—is our version of the Pamir weapons factory. Is East meeting West, both sides dreaming up the future together regarding superweapons? Don’t know, but I think it’s worth looking into, in this humble whiz child’s often overlooked opinion.”

Kurtzman made a face. “Cut the crap or I’ll take away your CDs.”

Tokaido paused, considering something, then went on, “Whatever they’ve engineered inside the walls of Eagle Nebula, however, is what I think either crashed or burned up what Infinity calculates is roughly two square miles and then some of scorched earth that makes the Badlands look arable.”

“And you know this, how?”

Kurtzman watched as Tokaido further enhanced the imagery and he saw what his partner was referring to.

“Where there’s smoke, Bear… Now, the four areas the media is being pumped by the military to claim were hit by something from outer space are actually the results of cluster bombing. I compared those images through Infinity’s war-gaming, and they jibe. Blast radius, destruction pattern, spiral all the way down to the intensity of the fires, which indicate thermite payloads were used. These AIQs, I have confirmed, were civilian targets. From the body count, or what you can make out on your screen, gives you an idea of how nasty this could get if it’s going to involve a cover-up.”

Kurtzman weighed the enormity of what he heard then saw, tallied at least a dozen bodies, or what looked like the remains of such, on one of the AIQs. “A test run, you’re telling me, that went awry?”

“I would hope it wasn’t done on purpose.”

Kurtzman flashed Tokaido a scowl. He began chewing over the current mission of Phoenix Force, which was, more or less, still on the drawing board. At present, they were bivouacked at the American air base in Incirlik, Turkey, while the cyberteam at the Farm kept digging for clues about rumored supertech weapons being smuggled to Iranian extremists, somewhere along the Iraqi border, further in the process of attempting to put together pedigrees and place names to the faces of bad guys in question from their ultratech lair.

Kurtzman began to suspect he saw a pattern emerge, some connection, or so he believed Tokaido alluded to, between the death factory in Tajikistan and weapons-hungry jihadists. Was there more? Such as connecting the dots somehow to this Eagle Nebula black project? It wouldn’t be the first time, he knew, someone on the home team had sold out to the other side. Able Team was standing down, Kurtzman checking the digital clock at the bottom of his monitor, aware Hal Brognola, the man who headed the Sensitive Operations Group, would be arriving at his office at the Justice Department shortly. He needed to run his suspicions past the big Fed.

“There’s more, Bear, only I’m not sure how this fits, if it does…only…well, it’s just a feeling,” Tokaido said, and Kurtzman watched as four more sat images flashed onto his monitor, blurring the previous pics. He heard Tokaido mention the three names of former Soviet republics, then told him the last image was shot by NASA. “Remember that story CNN ran a few years back about a purported NORAD quarantine of an area in the Colorado Rockies that was supposedly hit by some type of…well, what was described by an eyewitness as ‘alien space matter.’”

Kurtzman knew he was looking at a full-blown military quarantine in each of the AIQs, complete with soldiers, choppers, makeshift work areas of equipment he couldn’t define, but manned by spacesuits. All told, he knew it spelled disaster area, civilians Keep Out, perhaps at the risk of jail time or worse.

“I do,” he told Tokaido. “It ran one time, as I recall.”

“NASA officially reported the Colorado incident as the result of a meteor shower. But ask yourself when was the last time you saw a hazmat detail gathered around a meteor, or stone fragments thereof, and with what appear to be radiation detectors?”

“And something tells me you got hold of classified documents that state otherwise.”

“Off the public radar screen as ‘unexplained extraterrestrial ore of unknown origin and substance.’ And that eyewitness?”

“I bet you’re about to tell me he vanished off the face of the earth.”

“There was one brief follow-up story, but the star witness was nowhere to be found.”

“Next you’re going to tell me NORAD, or whoever this Eagle Nebula, has iced down the bodies of little gray men with grasshopper-shaped heads and huge black eyes.”

“They’re actually a sort of off-white, but with a grayish hue. Hey, stranger things have happened, Bear, when it comes to the military wanting to keep unexplained phenomenon, whatever the truth and the mystery, all to themselves.”

No truer words, Kurtzman thought, could his cyber buddy have spoken. He reached for the intercom to start sounding off his suspicions.

CAMERON DECKER was sure he was dead, about to meet his Maker as he believed he opened his eyes, but was forced to clamp them shut when the blinding white light stabbed him clear through the brain, a lancing fire. No, this wasn’t heaven, he was in way too much pain for any eternal bliss, his body throbbing with knifing twists, scalp to feet. Gingerly he touched the side of his head, just to be sure he was, indeed, still on earth, probed the bandages wound around his skull. Why did he feel as if he was floating on air, though, his head like a balloon set to burst, both sensations bringing on the nausea? The last moment he remembered was…

A vision of hell on Earth, to say the least.

He saw himself being hurled through the air, far away from his ranch house, fractured pictures of recall slowly groping their way together. One minute, he had been dragged from the kitchen where he was preparing dinner for his bed-ridden wife, alarmed by the shrill barking of Custer. Even in the twenty-first century cattle rustlers were still alive and on the prowl for prime heads of choice beef, and it wouldn’t have been the first time some thieves had come through his spread and loaded up a trailer. The Winchester 30.06 in hand as he’d shucked on the sheepskin coat, grumbling his way out the back door, his normally stoic German shepherd dog going berserk, straining to break free of his chain. Spooked by what, he couldn’t tell, but his cattle were agitated as hell, his horses snorting from the barn, all in a lather. He’d heard that animals had some sixth sense, though, a built-in radar that warned them of mass atmospheric disturbances, and it wouldn’t be the first time that beastly extrasensory perception had foretold him of a sudden thunderstorm. It all looked like another red sundown over the prairie from where he stood, but there was “something” in the air. He could feel it. Something he thought he heard like a whistle, or those incoming rounds he remembered from Korea, the cattle stomping around the pen in a fury next as he walked…

There was an explosion, out of nowhere, or rather, a series of blasts that sounded as one, but with each earsplitting trumpet of thunder there was no telling as his senses were shattered. Before he could fully assess the moment, glimpsing in horror his home and his parents’ home of eighty-five years being uprooted and blown away like so much fertilizer in a twister, he was sailing, dumped, last he remembered, facedown inside the cattle pen.

Now…

He thought he was going to puke, groaning, as he dared to open his eyes. He was getting his bearings, found himself dressed in a white smock like a hospital gown, squinting into the shroud of white light that seemed supernatural in a way he could only describe as some waiting room—Purgatory perhaps?—between Heaven and Hell, when a voice called from the glow, “Mr. Decker? Can you hear me?”

A hard search, adjusting his vision, and he spotted a lean shape in black, straight ahead. The figure was blowing smoke through the light, sunglasses so black and fat they looked more like a visor. Between the combat boots and the pistol in shoulder holster, any hopeful notion the man was a doctor evaporated. Had he landed, though, in a hospital? The light alone was spooky enough, but there seemed to be no walls surrounding him, as if he were in some vast empty space, with the white shroud, bright as the sun, going on forever. Calling him? he wondered, wishing he didn’t feel so sick to his stomach, that feeling of being disembodied chilling him to the bone, warping his senses.

“Who are you? Where am I?”

“You can call me Mr. Orion. And you are in protective custody for the time being.”

“Protective…what the hell is going on? What happened to my ranch?” He tried to stand, but rubber legs folded, collapsing him back into his seat. Groaning, the room spinning, he said, “What’s wrong with me? What have you done to me…”

“Minor burns from the incident, a few cuts and contusions, Mr. Decker. We gave you a shot of morphine for the pain, patched you all up… You’ll be good as new in a few days. As for your ranch and all your cattle and horses—they are no longer standing.”

He felt his stomach roll over. “And my wife?”

“Your wife, Allison, Mr. Decker, was dying of breast cancer and emphysema. We’ll, uh, just call the incident where she is concerned a blessing in disguise. No, belay that. You being a devout church-goer and all, think of her passing as simply an act of God, that she now rests in eternal peace.”

Anger cleared some of the sludge away, this Orion character slamming his nose with one smoke bomb after another, speaking of his wife’s death as if it was nothing more than some near-miss highway crash he ought to be making the sign of the cross over. “Why, you rotten… I want to know what happened and exactly who you are, mister, or I swear…”

“Relax, Mr. Decker. Do you really need to bring on number three heart attack?”

Decker froze, the man reciting more of his medical history, with doctors’ names, dates of operations, down to length of each recuperation. Was that a smile? he wondered, this Orion talking next about his two sons, matter-of-fact, how they had turned their backs on what they called Nowhere, U.S.A., riding off to chase the wind of whatever their dreams in the big cities of Chicago and New York. Putting him in his place, playing mind games. But how did he know so much?

“I’m here to help, Mr. Decker, but only if you wish to help yourself. First of all, let us be clear, what happened to your ranch was the result of a meteor shower.”

“That wasn’t no rock falling from the sky that leveled my ranch and killed my wife. Those were explosions. I’m guessin’ some sort of missile or rocket.”

“As you might well believe that’s what you think you saw, being as you were a decorated veteran of the Korean War, having seen more than your rightful share of combat. And I salute you for your service to the country, sir.”

“Stick all that noise, and I don’t need to think about nothin’. I know what I saw. I’m bettin’ you’re military, work for the government. Something screwed up with you people, and now you want me to shut my mouth about what I saw. Let me tell you, friend, out here, we may be just dumb cowboys to you people, but I got no love for your Big Brother.”

And the faceless smoker knew all about that, too, the threats of bank foreclosures on his property, the audits and subsequent liens that drove him into bankruptcy, the suits from Washington offering to buy up his land, claiming they could cut him a break on what he owed if he grabbed the brass ring of his last stand.

“You seem to know an awful lot about me,” Decker snapped. “Whether or not much of this is a matter of public record, you don’t understand me at all.”

Another wave of smoke and Orion said, “No, it’s you who don’t understand, sir. Here it is, and this is a onetime, nonnegotiable offer. Between property value, including livestock, what would be your projected future earnings for the next five years and your wife’s insurance policy, we are prepared to write you a check in the amount of three million dollars, nontraceable, nontaxable funds. Death certificates have already been made out for both your wife and yourself, only you, sir, get to relocate, all expenses paid, until you get set up in someplace far away from North Dakota. Washington, all your medical bills and those banks you so detest? Your debt is erased, officially you become the man who was never born. Think about it. New name. New identity. You could be sitting on a beach in Hawaii, sipping mai tais and playing with the local hula-hoop talent by tomorrow. If I were you…”

“You ain’t. No deal. I’m walkin’ outta here and goin’ straight to the county sheriff.”

“Is that your final answer, Mr. Decker?”

“First and last.”

“Suit yourself.”

It was too easy, Decker’s instinct stirring, the old combat senses flaring to life, telling him something was wrong. He saw the glowing tip of the cigarette fall to the floor, eyes up, but the faceless Orion was gone, vanished, as if the light had swallowed him up. No sound of any door opening or closing to betray an exit, he was rising when he heard the electronic whir, looked up, thought he saw the ceiling part. A black hole yawning into view, barely perceptible as Decker squinted into the light, he heard machinery grinding to life, from some point beyond the white halo, deep in the dark void. If he didn’t know better, it sounded like a threshing machine was cranking to life. What the…

Warning bells clanged in a brain muddied by dope. He cursed whoever’d shot him up, limbs unwilling to respond to a rising sense of fear when the noise shrilled into what he was now certain was a wood chipper, and a damn big one, unless he missed his guess. He ventured a step forward, trying to get his sea legs, when the first gust of wind blasted around him like the gathering onslaught of a twister ready to rip across the prairie. Fear began edging toward terror, thoughts racing, as the wind strengthened, suctioned up and through the tunnel in the ceiling. What was happening became inconceivable, a nightmare he was sure, but here he was—all alone, no one knew he was even still alive, that he was dealing with the almighty hand of Big Brother who could do whatever he wanted and get away.

The cigarette was sucked up, flying past his eyes, the invisible force of a great vacuum swirling around him now, tugging arms and legs. The chair went next, shooting into the black hole, followed a split second later by a sort of screeching metallic grind.

And it dawned on him what was about to happen, horror setting in, the unholy racket of machinery torqued up to new decibels, spiking his ears, as he heard his cry being swept away into the white light. He tried to forge ahead, but the wind seemed to root him to the floor, the ground beneath like magnets daring him to walk, and far worse than any mud he’d ever slogged through more than half a century ago. The scream was on the tip of his tongue, but he knew the sound of terror would be lost to all but himself, if even that, as he was sheared naked by the cyclone, the flesh on his face feeling wrenched up, as though it was being blasted off bone, the twister sucking the air out of his lungs.

Oh, God, no! he heard his mind roar as he was lifted off his feet, levitating for a moment before the invisible strings began jerking with renewed violent force.

And he burst a silent scream into the wind, arms wrenched above his head, as he rose toward the black hole.

IT WAS A MOMENT, about as rare as a Nellie sighting in Loch Ness, Hal Brognola considered when he felt himself about to be scourged by depression. Or was it something else, he wondered, and far more insidious as he weighed the few facts as he knew them? Self-doubt? That what he did perhaps, at best, only pounded a small dent toward making the free world a better, safer place? That the only real solution, he morbidly thought, was kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out?

And dismissed that as soon as the first whisper of fatalistic pessimism filtered into his head. No way could he look himself in the mirror if he lived without principles, he knew, briefly angry with himself for even entertaining such notions. To doubt his duty, first of all, would be tantamount to death. And to undercut the fact there were good people everywhere—who only wished to live in peace and harmony, raise families, do whatever was right, whatever it took, no matter how tempting it was to turn their backs and go through the easy and wide-open gates of hell—was the first step toward becoming what he’d spent his life fighting.

Troubled, nonetheless, sifting through grim thoughts, the Man from Justice stole another few seconds, staring out the window as the Bell JetRanger swept over the Blue Ridge Mountains. When was the last time, he wondered, he had actually enjoyed the pristine view of those forested slopes, free to observe the rising sun spread the arrival of a new day, free to relax, not burdened by the weight of the nation’s security?

He couldn’t remember, and maybe it didn’t matter. By nature or destiny—and he wasn’t sure where the line blurred—he drove himself with the task at hand as hard as the day was long, grimly aware the wicked did not rest in his world. Beyond that, he was committed to the duty of defending America against its sworn enemies, from within and beyond its borders. On that score, it was an endless battlefront, he knew, forever expanding, as far as he was concerned, another roster of monsters always rising up to replace the evil dead, and often before the smoke cleared enough to see the next blood horizon. Or to pin down the next threat to God only knew how many innocents.

And it was a changing world out there, he reflected, evolving darker and more sinister by the day. Weapons of mass destruction. Suicide bombers. Suitcase nukes. Whole nations harboring, training and financing the murder of innocents. Supposed NATO allies, France and Germany, for example, doing business in the billions of dollars in the shadows with a former tyrant who used murder and torture and rape as an entertaining pastime. Forget any goodwill toward all men, there were mornings, like now, he wondered if the whole world was just going straight to hell.

He stood and went to the scanning console set on the small teakwood table. It was roughly the size of a notebook computer, but with attached fax and what looked like a microscope, Brognola finding his access code had been relayed to the Farm’s Computer Room, confirmed and framed in white on the monitor. Initiate Phase Two flashed, and he took a seat. IPT, he knew, was part of a trial run to upgrade security, establish identity one hundred percent, thus save time and keep the blacksuits from rolling out of the main building, or find the antiaircraft battery painting incoming aircraft.

The retinal scan was first, Brognola placing his right socket against the scope’s eye, depressing the send button, grateful high-tech refinements didn’t produce any flash that would leave him squinting. Right thumb rolled over the ink pad, then placed on standard-size, white bond paper, he punched in the numbers for the secure line, faxed it to Kurtzman. Tapping in a series of numbers to activate the system’s scrambler—Go illuminated in green on the monitor’s readout—he spoke into the miniature voice box.

“This is Alpha One to Omega Base Home. Confirm Voice Test Analysis. All tests initiated, awaiting your confirmation. Out.”

While he waited, Brognola eased back in the bolted-down leather swivel chair. There was a gathering tempest out there, and only direct actionable response, he knew, would hold back the barbarians before they tore down the walls of civilization.

FORMER DELTA FORCE Colonel Joshua Langdon took the smaller of black ferrite-painted aluminum steamer trunks by the nylon strap handle as soon as the ninety-foot-long inflatable boat scraped sand. Known to his men and the attached three-commando unit calling itself Tiger Ops as Commander X, he allowed the others to jump over the side first, splash down in ankle-deep, blue-green water. Five altogether, two commandos each to a steamer trunk the size of a body bag, the odd man out he knew as Capricorn Alpha Galaxy Leader, hands empty except for an HK MP-5 subgun, and they were on the beach, seconds flat, hauling the high-tech loads—one of his troops likewise burdened with a hundred-pounds-plus of folded camo netting on his back—deeper into the lush tropical greenery. A GPS module in the hands of his one of his commandos, steering them down a path to erect their base predetermined by satellite shoots, he followed Capricorn Alpha Galaxy Leader to shore.

Home sweet home, at least for the immediate future.

A quick search of the beach, black wraparound sunglasses shielding eyes from sunlight that beat off the emerald-green waters and white sand like imagined glowing radiation, and the ex-Delta colonel found himself alone with the Tiger Ops leader. Setting the trunk down, shucking the slung HK subgun higher up his shoulder, Commander X checked the screen on his handheld heat-seeker. Sweeping the perimeter, he found six ghosts in human shape, with much smaller thermal images flashing across the screen. He took a moment, listening to the gentle lap of waves on the beachhead, the caws of wild birds from some point inside the ringing walls of greenery on the coral island roughly the size of a city block.

“Almost paradise, huh? Nothing personal, you understand, but it kind of makes me wish I’d brought along my own little Eve.”

Commander X glanced at the lean figure in tiger-striped camous, the Tiger Ops leader working on a smoke, clearly not all that inclined to do much more than profile, opting to leave the grunt work to others, while drinking in this Eden and maybe picture romping naked through the lagoon with his own vision of the mother of mankind. Something about the leader troubled Langdon, but he couldn’t pin it down. The guy had shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair and a nappy beard as opposed to his own buzz cut, clean mug. Langdon noted the military bearing, decided there was more mercenary—or buccaneer, in this instance—than a current or ex-serviceman or intelligence operative performing his duty for country and God. Likewise, it was unclear who the Tiger Ops leader pledged allegiance to, even why he’d been assigned to assist him on what was a satellite relay station somewhere in the Maldive Islands.

Langdon saw his two men hustling down the beach to retrieve the rest of the steamer trunks. As they splashed down, he turned, looked at the anchored Interceptor Gunboat. The skipper, he knew, was one of his people, and the inshore patrol craft, on loan, presumably from the CIA station chief in India, would stay put until he green-lighted the man to pull away for surveillance duty. Langdon ran an approving look, stem to stern of their gunboat ride. Two Deutz MWM diesel engines, top speed of 25 knots, a range of 600 nautical miles, with a forward 12.7 mm machine gun, and he had no doubt about the ability of his troops manning the ship to fend off trouble, alert them to any incoming surprises. They worked for the same people, he knew, his men having been culled from various special forces for both their proved martial skills and high-tech talent, signing the standard “training” contracts that swore them to a lifetime of secrecy. Halfway around the world from Omega Base, they would be able to reach the Farm as if they were but a few yards away, once the fiberoptic comm station was set up. As for his Tiger Ops comrades…

Well, in this age of the media and politically stamped “new war on terrorism,” every intelligence, law-enforcement agency and military arm wanted to muscle itself in for a piece of the action. Langdon, like the people he represented, wasn’t in it for money or the glory. Truth was, he—like anyone who worked in the shadows for the Farm—was nowhere to be found on any official record.

He stole another moment, staring off into the vast Indian Ocean, getting his bearings. They had departed from Cape Comoros on the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent, pushing out, south by southwest, where the Lakshadweep Sea flowed into the Indian Ocean. The Maldives were comprised of a chain of twenty-six atolls of 1190 islands, only 200 of which were inhabited, and none of which rose more than ten feet off the water. Most of the islands sat, more or less, on the equator, and for this stint plenty of bottled water was required to get them through the long, hot days. Call their position somewhere in the vicinity of 400 miles due west of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

“Shall we get to work, Commander?”

Langdon heard the soft whine of battery-powered drills working on tent pegs. Hoping the man was inclined to do more than catch a tan and daydream about some island girl, Langdon skipped the remark as the Tiger Ops leader turned and strolled away, slinging his HK around his shoulder to free his hands for another cigarette.

ROBERT FIRE CLOUD was angry and scared.

For what he guessed was ten hours or more now, he had been watching them from a safe distance. Hidden in a gully in the hills north of what used to be his home, and the white eyes government-built-and-paid-for houses of his neighbors, each time one of the black helicopters—three in all for the moment—lifted off and swept the prairie near his roost, he took cover deeper in his hole. Who they were, he didn’t know, but assumed they were white eyes soldiers, between the choppers, the submachine guns, black uniforms and matching helmets.

What he knew was that four homes had been blown off the face of the earth. Only now were the fires of brilliant white beginning to lose their anger and intense glow. When the wind blew his way, he caught the sickly sweet whiff of charred flesh, the memory of neighbors and friends burning deep his anger each time his nose filled with the stink. His home, little more than a two-room shack, may be just a glowing cinder, but he was thankful he lived alone.

His neighbors hadn’t been so blessed.

Granted, the edge of hot anger had dulled some during the course of the past few hours, after the few first bodies had been dug out of the smoldering piles by men in spacesuits, dumped in black rubber bags. Now that it was clear some horrific accident had befallen Crazy Horse Lane, he wasn’t sure how to proceed, where to run, who to go to for help. The county sheriff, John Mad Bull, would be passed out, too hung over to do anything even if he woke him at that hour.

So he watched the spacesuits use long metal poles to dig through more rubble, extracting bodies or what was left of men, women and children who shared this lonely stretch of the Berthold Reservation. His closest neighbors were six to eight miles in any direction, but surely, he thought, they had heard the tremendous series of explosions? Or had the same fate befallen them?

Again, he considered his own good fortune, felt a flush of shame on his cheeks, thinking himself lucky as opposed to the dead. If not for his nightly ritual at the Crazy Horse saloon…

He was stone-cold sober now, but began thinking about the bottle of Wild Turkey under the seat of his pickup, a few down the hatch to get his nerves and the shakes under control. The longer he watched them, he wondered if the white eyes soldiers spotted him, would he use the G-3 assault rifle, bought at a gun show and converted to fully automatic, stand his ground, go down in some blaze of glory. After all, he thought, he was believed to be direct blood to Crazy Horse. Only the white eyes had him outnumbered fifty or more to one. A 40-round detachable box magazine would hardly take down more than a few, considering he saw gunships armed with machine guns in their doorways.

He had to do something, even if it was wrong.

One of the gunships made the decision for him, as it lifted off, veering in his direction. As if it knew he had been there all along.

He stood, hunched, and worked his way down the gully, as fast as limbs swollen with the sludge of liquor would allow. Beyond his heart thundering in his ears, the assault rifle growing heavy in hands filling with the running sweat of the night’s drinking, he heard the insect bleat of chopper blades bearing down from behind. After what he’d seen, what was to stop these men from taking him prisoner, or killing him? Or was he being paranoid? He didn’t know, wasn’t about to freeze where he stood. They were still white eyes with guns.

Stumbling out of the gully, he hit level ground, running for his Chevy pickup. Out of nowhere, the light flared, fear seizing him as he was framed in the white umbrella, heard a voice boom from a loudspeaker, “You there! Halt now and throw down your weapon!”

The command was delivered, not only with anger, he thought, but with menace. He was turning, snarling as the light stabbed him in the eyes, to split a brain throbbing from exertion, when he became aware he was lifting his assault rifle.

Then the machine gun roared through the light. He felt numb flesh absorb the first few rounds, the impact jerking him halfway around before hot emotion and the desire to die standing on his feet seized him. Rage that these white eyes soldiers would slaughter him without further warning erupted what he hoped was his best war cry. He held back on the G-3’s trigger as the big gun thundered, chopping up his flesh, spraying hot blood on his face. He was dead on his feet, he knew, seconds from floating away to the next world, but Robert Fire Cloud only hoped his death and whatever had happened to his neighbors would be avenged.