Читать книгу Ramrod Intercept - Don Pendleton - Страница 7

“You look like the messenger with bad news—and ‘very’ bad news.”

Hal Brognola was fondling an unlit cigar as he rolled into the War Room at Stony Man Farm. The director of the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group swept on, past Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, the chief cyber sorcerer who was confined for life to his wheelchair, thanks to a bullet, and grunted at Bear’s remark.

“Well?” Kurtzman pressed. “Did the Man give us the green light?”

The Man, of course, was the President of the United States, and half of Brognola’s twin-bill duty was playing a critical role as the Farm’s liaison to the chief executive. “We’re sitting in limbo—still.”

No thumbs-up from the Oval Office, and Barbara Price, the Farm’s mission controller, groaned. “Unbelievable. Does he have any clue how hard we pushed, maneuvering all the logistical chess pieces, to get it at the doorstep of…this eleventh hour?”

The Justice man knew all too well how many hours—belay that—days the Farm team had racked up, the number of strings tugged, contacts cajoled, markers raked in from the Pentagon to Langley. It galled him alone to think Stony Man’s elite commandos were poised on three separate thresholds, combat ready, chomping on prebattle nerves.

Waiting for the phone to ring.

The big Fed poured a large foam cup of Kurtzman’s infamous coffee, then dumped enough sugar in the black swill to make it go down a little easier. “Five days, as a matter of fact, since we put this one on the drawing board. I don’t mind saying I’m feeling the strain myself, people, and all the way to the hair on my toes,” Brognola told the key players, grabbing his seat, dumping himself down at the head of the table. “The Man’s as clued in like I was the burning bush to his Moses, all right, but he’s firmly stated his concerns about what could become a whopping and ugly international mess.”

“Welcome to the Oval Office,” Kurtzman groused.

“I damn near said that. At any rate, it’s why I’ve been at my office all day, waiting by the phone, lighting a few more fires around Wonderland.” He glowered at the red phone on the table within arm’s reach. “Looks like we’re all still going to have to wait—if and when—for the tough choice to get made.”

The chopper ride from his office at the Justice Department to the Farm in Virginia was roughly ninety minutes. But with only a catnap on the office couch, here and there during the past few days Brognola felt as if he’d just crossed three time zones, jet lag and ten years older. Tired as King Solomon perhaps over the folly and insanity of humans chasing the wind, on edge admittedly, and leaning a little to the mean side.

Brognola worked on the coffee, chomping his stogie, then said, “Okay, sitreps. I know we’ve run it down before, but maybe we missed something. A to Z. The basics and the particulars. Let’s start with Phoenix Force. Barbara?”

The honey-haired blonde, who could have just walked off the pages of a fashion magazine and into the War Room, took up a remote-control box and snapped on one of the large monitors built into the wall. An enlarged grid map of Madagascar and the Indian Ocean to the east flared to life. “The hunter-killer submarine Seawolf SSN 21 is submerged and still holding its position, forty kilometers and change from where Phoenix will be inserted on the eastern central shore of Madagascar. Sat imagery shows it’s a remote area, with only two villages and a scattering of rice terraces, a solitary Catholic church along the march. It will be your basic grunt march—move fast and silent and avoid contact with the locals. According to our and the Seawolf’s depth gauges and X-ray sat imagery of the water, the inlet’s bottom is smooth enough, slanting evenly up to shore, no crags, no snags, to receive the unarmed torpedo that will carry their gear and weapons onto the beach. Something like an underwater surfboard, special delivery riding right up on the sand. Ready and waiting for them to finish out their swim.”

Brognola grunted. “For some reason, I get damn nervous over the idea of inserting them by sea. I see twenty things going wrong all at once. Aren’t those shark-infested waters? As in great white?”

“Actually,” Kurtzman said, “the eastern coastline of Madagascar is called Whale Highway. Most of the marine life traffic is made up primarily of the larger animals, at least, namely migrating humpback whales.”

“I hear primarily and actually and namely, I don’t exactly get a warm fuzzy feeling, Bear. I’m not sure, but I don’t think they teach wanna-be SEALs in BUDs what the hell to do—other than pray—when they see a sixteen-foot torpedo-like shadow coming at them out of the murk with bared teeth the size of a butcher’s knife.”

“Your white shark population sticks farther to the south, off the coastline of South Africa where there’s an abundant seal menu.”

“Why couldn’t it have been an air drop instead of going out the hatch of a submersible?”

“A minisub,” Price said. “Riding piggyback on the escape hatch of the Seawolf. A submersible requires a surface support vehicle at all times, often needs to be hooked by cable to the mother ship. The state-of-the-art Titan was designed by aerodynamic engineers for the specific intent of inserting soldiers by sea. It’s not a deep research vessel by any stretch. It’s built for speed and deployment of combat troops.”

“I stand corrected. If I sounded like a grumpy old man, Barbara…”

“I understand perfectly. Okay, Aaron and I ran down the logistics, worked out the timetable from start to finish. Jack Grimaldi and a blacksuit crew are parked on a military base, courtesy of our own State Department’s clout with a few government officials in Tanzania. Once Phoenix hits the beach, Jack will be contacted by us, hooked up on a three-way sat uplink with the ground troops. The AC-130 Spectre gunship will take off from Dar es Salaam, fly east by southeast, then due south, move in, westward, once it hits their insertion point. Sat imagery lines up the old French garrison, due west, approximately ten kilometers west of where they will come ashore.”

“And if Jack gets there first?”

“He’ll fly a holding pattern, and hope. However, we have this timed down to the minute, Hal.”

“There was never any doubt.”

“To answer your question,” Price said, “about an air insertion, we know the garrison has state-of-the-art radar, sold to the government in Antananarivo—or Tana for short—by France. We’ve picked up machine-gun nests, but no antiaircraft batteries and no fighter jets. However, if one of the terrorists is running around with a Stinger when this goes down, the Spectre would be history if it’s wielded by even semicapable hands. Besides,” she added, a trace of sarcasm in her tone, “the former French colony has been attempting to go democratic for about ten years.”

“How? By giving safe haven to a small army of international murderers?”

Price shrugged. “What can I say? All of us know graft and corruption don’t care about the difference between communism, iron-handed dictatorship or fledgling democracy.”

“I hear you.”

Brognola heaved a breath, told himself to drop it down a notch, aware his jacked-up mood was affecting and stretching taut nerves all around.

Price rode out a moment of silence, then said, “The way I figured it, since Madagascar is an island four hundred kilometers from the east coast of Africa by the Mozambique Channel, and with what we have planned, an air drop sounded too risky. Too much open sea, to get them from point A to B. And the Seawolf was available. Going in by cover of the vast Indian Ocean, and at night, was the lesser of two evils. Once the dust settles and the smoke clears, an airfield about two hundred meters west of the garrison can accommodate Jack and company for a landing. Evacuation for our troops. And we assume, there will be some of the more notable terrorists left standing to be brought back to the States to stand trial for what we know is their involvement in just about every major terrorist attack around the world in the past ten years or more.”

“We’re assuming an awful lot, all of us,” Kurtzman said. “We all know the President’s position on this. He wants a few live ones to hold up to the cameras. Whipping boys or trophies, I have to wonder.”

“I told him up front and in no uncertain terms I wasn’t about to make that promise,” Brognola said. “Could be why I’m getting the silent treatment. No way in hell am I putting Phoenix into the fire, working under the assumption these fanatics are just going to throw their hands up and let our guys read them their Miranda rights, recite Geneva Convention nonsense, chapter and verse and all that crazy shit. Besides, I have to agree with the Man to some extent on one point. A few songbird fanatics could have the mother lode of intelligence. Give me a numbers crunch on bad guys.”

“Bear?” Price said.

“Two full squads of Madagascan soldiers. Thirty-four, now thirty-one Iranian fanatics.”

Brognola raised a curious eyebrow over the smoke at the grim tone in Kurtzman’s voice. “I get the feeling you want to tell me something?”

“I’ll do better. I’ll show you, live and in color.” Kurtzman palmed his own remote and flashed on a sat image that made Brognola freeze as the steaming brew was being raised to his lips. “We have an ONI-1 satellite, courtesy of the DIA, parked in space over Madagascar.”

Kurtzman muttered a curse. “There’s our Butcher of Southern Sudan, hard at work, showing off the kind of talent he used on black Christians and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army for some five years. Bloody animal. The UN puts his slaughter of mostly innocent women and children in the tens of thousands.”

“A real charming piece of work,” Price added. “Mr. Sunshine.”

“So, who got to know Vlad the Impaler’s loving feeling?”

“One of them was Reza Nahru,” Kurtzman informed.

“That name sounds familiar.”

“It should. He was tried and convicted by the Israelis in absentia for three separate terrorist attacks that claimed forty-three lives,” Kurtzman said. “One was a busload of little else but women and children in Tel Aviv. We have also picked up from ONI-1 four other faces belonging to Iranians linked to bin Laden who were likewise convicted in absentia but by the Jordanians. Death warrants issued for these butchers.”

“Which leads us to the task at hand, as far as the Madagascar and Sudan situations are concerned,” Brognola said. “This General Arakkhan is no small fish. He still carries heavy weight among a loyal military faction in Khartoum who want to see his return to…well, the Vlad the Impaler glory days. The problem is the CIA contract agents who got us this far are disappearing all over Sudan.”

“They were working on getting the Company a leadin,” Price said, “to where the shipment of high-tech weapons is located, or being shipped, which is rumored to be an Iranian-occupied island in the Strait of Hormuz. Now, the rumbling I caught from Langley was that Nahru had jumped to the other side of the tracks, looking to deal or double deal. Who can say now? Obviously word got back to Arakkhan the impaler. Three less fanatics on the loose now, if nothing else. And with what we know about the situation in Los Angeles we can at least surmise the smuggling operation has its origins there.”

“DYSAT,” Brognola growled. “What do we know about them, other than three of their executives who went to the FBI have been abducted by the DYSAT mother ship?”

Kurtzman filled in the blanks. “Apparently they do classified work, chemical lasers, microchip processors for high-energy X-ray lasers. It took some digging and a few phone calls over to the Pentagon, but that’s about as far as we got. Their only office is in Century City, Tinsel Town, which I find sort of strange, planting classified military think tanks in the heart of where all the movie execs and agents do their trolling and scamming.”

“Go figure,” Brognola said. “I read smoke screen, hiding out in the open. And by classified, I’m hearing you mean to say they are a black project.”

“It certainly reads that way,” Kurtzman went on. “Since the files I hacked into over at the Department of Defense are full of blacked-out words and whole deleted sentences about the pasts of the head honchos. The top dogs are former Air Force air commandos, nothing, however, untoward that would indicate they would be part of some conspiracy. The workforce is primarily civilian, Harvard, UCLA, MIT grads, pretty-boy types. We did find out DYSAT’s production and research facility is located in Idaho.”

“I don’t mean to get sidetracked here, but can someone explain to me just what a chemical laser is?”

“Akira and Hunt,” Kurtzman said, referring to Akira Tokaido and Huntington Wethers, two more vital cogs in the cyber machinery at the Farm, “could probably explain better than I could.”

“Give it a shot.”

“Well, since the genesis of laser technology some three decades ago, it would appear the research is on the verge of crossing the Rubicon. The brass ring of future high-tech is within grasp, or so it would seem. Basically, a laser weapon works as the transfer of heat to a target. It’s a silent killer, supposedly, or so the scuttle-butt goes, which is capable of burning the eyes out of a soldier on the battlefield, and from as much as a hundred miles or more out. Meltdown, evaporation of anything the beam is focused on, no shots fired in anger. Only now the next quantum leap would be to use it on aircraft and missiles. Or even satellites. That’s where the microchips come in to help get the bugs out of high-energy X-ray lasers. Now, the ones DYSAT have produced—or so our informants told the FBI—can locate, identify, track and intercept satellite transmissions, anywhere, anytime.”

“And disrupt,” Brognola said. “There is nothing wrong with your television sets, NORAD. We are in complete control.”

“In a worst-case scenario,” Kurtzman went on. “What our three AWOL contacts told us is called Ramrod Intercept is currently on the drawing board and is designed to shut down early warning of ballistic missile launches or air attacks. Akira and Hunt get all worked up when they start talking about excimers, carbon dioxide molecular transfers and gas exits, but it’s essentially pulse radiation from what I can understand.”

“I get something of the picture,” Brognola said. “We’re talking about the next step in silent, invisible warfare. Warfare directed from space.”

“Or even from the ground,” Kurtzman said, “if you have the microchips, a computer, the component parts of what the missing informants called a roving command center.”

“We still have three more civilian brain suits who hacked into the Pandora’s box, right? These college playboys running scared?”

“Carl,” Price informed Brognola, referring to Carl “Ironman” Lyons, the leader of Able Team, “states he has them under constant surveillance. Alive and well, I might add.”

Kurtzman grunted. “Carl’s on a short leash, I have to tell you, Hal. Well, you know the guy’s bulldog style. He says if he has to go into one more gentlemen’s club and order soda water and watch everyone else having a grand old time while he’s playing a poor man’s Magnum with his thumb up his—”

“I get the drift,” Brognola said. “He’s about to go apeshit. And this is where, once again, I get the long hard pauses from the Man to the point where I nearly have to ask him if he’s still there. He tells me, item—DYSAT is a legitimate Air Force–run classified project, funded, of course, by Congress. Bottom line he wants absolute, one hundred percent concrete proof there’s a conspiracy before I send Lyons and Able Team crashing down the front door, kicking ass and taking no names.”

“They’re working on it,” Price said. “And we have enough suspicion, handed to you by way of the FBI, that there is a conspiracy to get these weapons and the Ramrod Intercept technology to both the Sudan and the Iranians.”

“Which brings me to Striker’s status. Well?”

Brognola read into the anvil of silence. Mack Bolan, also known as the Executioner, was Stony Man’s lone wolf operative. There would be no Phoenix Force or Able Team this time out watching his back. They all knew that, days ago and going in.

“Limbo, to quote you, and holding,” Kurtzman said, “at a U.S. air base in Saudi.”

“I haven’t quite gotten the particulars yet on what he’s supposed to do or how he’s prepared to get into Sudan, a country hostile, to understate it, folks, to the West.”

“Once we receive the green light,” Price volunteered, “Striker will be air-inserted inside the Sudanese border, a HALO jump from a Starlifter C-141.”

“I’m waiting for the good news.”

“I’ve arranged for a CIA contract agent to meet him, roughly twenty kilometers northwest of Port Sudan. One call on a secured satlink from the Company, and the contract agent will be there to pick Striker up, on-site and waiting. Striker will have a passport stating he’s an Iranian businessman who deals in Persian rugs and jewelry, if he finds himself facing down Sudanese soldiers while in-country.”

“That’s thin, Barbara. Especially if he’s confronted by the Sudanese authorities at a roadblock and they decide to lock him up until they can check him out. They tend to skin Western spies over there alive and feed them their own flesh.”

“It was the best we could do, Hal,” Kurtzman offered. “Since we have an ongoing situation in Port Sudan, and since we strongly suspect DYSAT is funneling the high-tech goodies through the country—”

“And with the Company contract agent as an escort,” Price quickly put in. “It’s dicey, I know, but Striker insisted he go. Shake some trees and see what falls. He said…he’d figure it out.”

Brognola had to smile at Bolan’s balls-to-the-wall philosophy. “Tell me why I’m not surprised he said that.”

He and the others dropped into silence as each of them hashed over the enormity of not one, but three separate missions. Just the same, three or five doors to bulldoze through, Brognola could see the dots beginning to connect all over the map.

The only thing left was to take decisive action, start putting the old boot through some doors and find out what waited on the other side.

The clean-and-simple approach.

“Is he dropping in with a full bag of necessities, Barbara?”

“One commando knife, his Beretta, just in case.”

“God knows…”

“Once he’s inside Port Sudan, the contract agent will land him the requisite hardware.”

Brognola rubbed his face. “Okay, so I guess we just work it out as we go along.”

“The usual,” Kurtzman said.

“Right. What’s new?”

Brognola found Kurtzman studying the world map on a monitor, suddenly as grim as hell. “What is it?”

Kurtzman cleared his throat. “Well, we have a window for about, well, another two hours, tops.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning if we don’t get the call, we’ll have to wait another full twenty-four hours—or rather Phoenix will have to wait. If we’re going for a dawn strike it has to get under way ASAP, according to the timetable we’ve laid out. And there’s another piece of bad news, Hal.”

Maybe it was nerves or just plain weariness, but Brognola sounded off a grim chuckle. “Oh, this is getting better by the minute. Do tell.”

“At roughly six o’clock, Madagascar time, the ONI-1 satellite is going to have to get moving on. Akira tells me there’s a Russian satellite moving in the same orbital path.”

“A collision course with a Russian satellite? How in the…? Never mind. I never understood how the Russian mind works anyway. You’re telling me no one on either side can move either satellite’s orbital path from down here?”

“Not can, but will they?” Price posed. “I’ve been stonewalled at Langley, and no one at the DOD has an answer.”

“So,” Brognola said, “Phoenix is on their own, and we’re blind to what they’re up against because the Russians…unbelievable. It’s outer space, folks. You mean to tell me…they can’t…or won’t…”

“We’ll still have the satlink,” Kurtzman said, but his grim expression told Brognola that was little comfort.

The silence was hanging for long moments, thick enough to reach out and grab it, when the red phone trilled. The big Fed nearly bit his cigar in two as he felt their eyes boring into him. A deep breath, expecting more bad news, and he lifted the receiver.

Brognola recognized the voice as the Man said, “A few items we need to go over first, and I want to make certain we are crystal…”

He wasn’t sure if high anxiety hit the air or relief was lighting up their faces, but he knew they were reading the gleam in his eyes, stone-cold frozen and watching. Brognola didn’t even hear the next few words, but he knew enough, reading into the Man’s tone. He gave them the thumbs-up.