“Tell them the situation is Broken Arrow. Russian origin. Target unknown. Sheikh Jaspari is involved. Tell them we need all data extracted within the hour.”
Hawkins stared down sadly at the sheikh. “You are so fucked.”
McCarter stared unblinkingly at Jaspari. “Tell them to use whatever means necessary.”
The sheikh was a big man, but his voice ripped out of him in a near squeak. “No!”
McCarter shoved his face into the sheikh’s. “Sunshine? You are going to talk to me.”
Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia
KURTZMAN SIPPED COFFEE that would strip paint and read Carl Lyon’s after-action report. Akira had been in a gunfight, and according to the report he’d given a good account of himself. After Able Team had hit the bank someone figured out it wasn’t a local affair, and they had the wherewithal to find the most likely foreigners on the island and sent a squad of hitters to take them out. Lyons’s group would undoubtedly stand out.
Part of Kurtzman was angry as hell that his protégé had been exposed. Another part of him was secretly proud of the boy. Akira had broken Infinite Financial Antilles’s defenses like a matchstick, and when the shit had hit the fan, he’d stood and fought. Regardless, Kurtzman decided he was going to chew Lyons out for getting Akira shot at when he got back. He grunted as he read the last part of the report. “So what can you tell me about Nine Toes?”
Barbara Price flipped through a dossier. “Able dropped him off at Guantanamo and the CIA was able to work up his info pretty quick. His name is Hugo Carlinho. Brazilian national. He was in the First Special Forces Battalion and reached the rank of sergeant. Honorably discharged in 1998 and went into private security.”
“Who does he work for now?”
“That’s where things start to get shady. Last the CIA can establish he worked for the Circulado Corp. It’s a Brazilian textile and mining concern. Carlinho was on the Circulado security section payroll. His official job was VIP protection. Unofficially the rumor is he was one of the goto guys when Circulado was having problems with local indigenous populations.”
Kurtzman scowled. He’d read this kind of résumé before. Circulado used Carlinho’s jungle warfare skills to terrorize Indians into signing away their land. Given the nature of the attack on Able Team, he was also most likely one of the guys they sent to assassinate tribal union leaders. “Circulado didn’t order Carlinho to the Antilles. Someone else did. Have Carmen dig up everything she can on Circulado. Pol says here he believes another one of the shooters was Argentine. My bet is they have larger, trans-South American ties.”
“She’s already on it.” Price took a file that had been faxed from the Farm armory. “Meantime, the Cowboy sent us this on the weapon Able sent back.”
Kurtzman looked at a spec sheet for the silenced submachine gun the hitters had used. It was a folding stock weapon with a large, disk-shaped clear plastic drum mounted on top. “MGV-176?”
“It’s .22-caliber, the drum on top holds 176 rounds of ammo.”
“Good heavens.”
“Yeah, according to Cowboy, it’s a remake of the old American 180 carbine. It caused a stir in the 1970s because it was the first weapon to have a laser designating sight.”
Kurtzman looked at the sheet beneath it. The file had the specs for the 180. The seventies’ era weapon had a full wooden stock and steel furniture. The new weapon had a folding wire stock and made extensive use of plastics. “So who’s remaking it?”
“The Slovenes were.”
“Really.”
“Cowboy says Slovene Special Forces used them as assassination weapons during their war of independence from Yugoslavia. He says we can try to run a trace on them, but he’s betting Slovenian military inventory will show them as lost or destroyed during the war.”
It was interesting, but Kurtzman had to agree it seemed like a dead lead. “The question is what are exotic Slovenian submachine guns doing in the Antilles?”
Price shrugged. “As for Slovenian connection, we just don’t have much, except that it’s the most prosperous of the former Yugoslavian republics. Highest standard of living in post-Communist central and eastern Europe.”
“Lots of foreign investment,” Kurtzman concluded. He looked at the huge world map on the giant flat screen with red dots marking the recent action sights. “Casinos in Tajikistan. Dutch offshore banks in the Caribbean. Saudi royal family members. Slovenian submachine guns in the hands of South American corporate hitters.”
Price saw where the Bear was going. “We’re looking at a multinational with something very ugly in mind.”
“We’re looking at missing nuclear devices, the Russian mafiya, ties to Middle Eastern terrorists, and Phoenix Force was on its way to Germany before it got rerouted south to Saudi.” He zoomed the screen in on Germany. “We’re looking at Berlin, and we were looking at four German satellites over Moscow during the warehouse fight. We have to tie one of them into all of this, and I don’t care how.”
Carmen Delahunt burst into the room, her cheeks flushed from running. She was the prototypical vivacious redhead. She was emotional and liked to live large. Panic, however, wasn’t part of her emotional acumen. She was old-line FBI.
But there was genuine fear in her eyes.
Kurtzman saw it and felt a twinge himself. It took a lot to rattle Delahunt. “Carm? What have you got?”
“I pulled some CIA contacts in the Russian navy. Akira had it right. Admiral Sergei Beniaminov had oversight over special Soviet riverine naval forces whose missions included infiltrating the major European river and canal networks.”
“Let me guess.” Kurtzman felt his stomach sinking. “Nuclear demolition was part of their purview.”
Delahunt nodded. “It gets worse. MI-6’s contact reported they believed six weapons were stolen.”
Price felt her own stomach start to sink. “Phoenix got back five. One is still loose. Right?”
Delahunt swallowed with difficulty. “We can’t get anything more out of the Russians, but NSA has caught unconfirmed chatter at the highest levels of the Russian military and government. NSA can’t confirm, but they recommend the missing nuclear demolition charge number be revised.”
Kurtzman blinked. “Just how many devices does NSA think the Russians have missing?”
Delahunt took a long breath. “Thirty.”
There was a moment of appalled silence in the War Room.
Price reined in her horror. “That’s not counting what Phoenix recovered?”
“That’s correct. Revised estimate is twenty-five devices unaccounted for.”
Kurtzman put his head in his hands. “So what’s the good news?”
“NSA came through on the German satellite survey.”
“Who owns it?” Kurtzman asked.
“A multinational called the IESHEN Group.”
“Carm, get me everything on the IESHEN Group. Top priority, cross-reference them with Infinite Financial Antilles and Circulado Corp. For that matter, find out what kind of business dealings they have in Slovenia.”
“All U.S. Middle East assets are ready to assist them depending on where they need to deploy.”
“The IESHEN Group is headquartered in Berlin, correct?” Price asked.
Delahunt glanced at one of her files. “That’s correct.”
“I’ll have Able Team in Berlin within twenty-four hours, with full warloads and support in place when they get there.”
Kurtzman frowned.
Price caught the look. “What is it?”
“Tell Akira his mission has been extended.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Bonaire, Dutch Antilles
“Berlin?” Tokaido looked out the window onto the aching blue of the Caribbean Sea.
“Yeah.” Carl Lyons stood with his arms folded across his chest. “That’s where we’re headed. I want you to come along.”
“What’s Bear going to say?”
“He already approved it before w
e got our marching orders. Question is, do you want to go?”
Tokaido let out a heavy sigh. “Honestly?”
“Yeah. Honestly.”
“Carl, I don’t know. I mean…” He struggled to put his feelings into words. “I mean, back at the Farm I’m always thinking about going out into the field. I guess almost every data specialist daydreams about it. But yesterday. I shot that guy.”
“You’ve shot people before. We’re proud of what you can do.”
The young hacker flushed slightly. Lyons handed out praise neither often nor lightly. “Yeah, but yesterday, I leaned out a window. I looked down into a guy’s eyes.” Tokaido shook his head. “I looked in his eyes and shot him three times in the face.”
“And how do you feel?”
Tokaido searched for words and failed. “I don’t feel anything.”
“Good.”
“Good? I killed a guy. Aren’t I supposed to feel something?”
Lyons frowned. “Why would you?”
“Jeez…”
“Listen, kid, contrary to popular belief, I’m not made of iron. I have feelings.”
The cyberwizard cocked his head warily. “Really?”
“Yeah. Really. Listen, I’ve killed more people than I can count. It comes down to perspective. I feel bad when people die because of my mistakes. I feel bad when innocents get caught in the crossfire, and I’ve dropped the hammer on people and wished to God it hadn’t come to it.”
“You’re saying those guys had it coming.”
“The one we got an ID on was a corporate thug who made big coin brutalizing indiginies for a South American strip-mining outfit. We’re here trying to track down loose nuclear weapons and keep them out of some very bad hands. He came to stop us, Akira. He came to kill us. I’m not saying he deserved to die, but he made his choice. I’m not sweating him. Neither should you.”
“I hear you. It’s just pretty…sobering.”
“That’s exactly what it should be.” Lyons cracked a rare smile. “There might be hope for you yet.
“So, you want to go to Berlin? The Bear says if we’re going to rip off the IESHEN Group’s most sensitive data, we’re going to have to do it on site.”
“Same as the bank?”
“Nah, Gadgets gets us in past security quietly, then you hack the mainframe. In and out, undetected on both fronts, with luck. Our next move after that will probably depend on what kind of data you extract.”
“Is Tino coming?” Tokaido had always been a little intimidated by the huge blacksuit, but the man’s massive strength and good humor were very comforting in a “situation.”
“Oh, yeah, as an Air Policeman he was stationed in Germany for a few years. He speaks the lingo, and he’s got your back the whole way.” Lyons nodded. “And if the shit actually does come down? I’ll be standing in front of you. That, I promise.”
Tokaido took in the ocean breeze. It occurred to him that he spent a little too much time beneath the earth in the Computer Room. “Berlin, huh?”
“Yeah, Berlin.”
He thought a moment about the firefight and shot Lyons a sly look. “Can I have a bigger gun?”
One corner of Lyon’s mouth quirked against his will. “Anything you say, Tex.”
Berlin, Germany
LAURENTIUS DEYN CONSIDERED the impossible. Franka’s instincts had been correct. The incident at Infinite Financial Antilles had been much more than a mere robbery attempt. The subsequent slaughter at the hotel had proved that the enemy was using Special Forces operatives against them. Strangely, however, they didn’t behave like any Special Forces men Deyn had ever known. Neither the U.S. Navy SEALs nor the British SAS behaved in such loose, almost cavalier fashion. His opponents appeared to be running the operation by the seat of their pants, almost making it up as they went along. This was something Laurentius Deyn didn’t care for. The fact was, if the British or U.S. intelligence communities were on to his activities and acting against him, he would know about it.
The whole situation smacked of black operations.
Independent operatives, deniable assets. Deyn shook his head. It was all the sort of James Bond bullshit that he had very little use for. The situation did have advantages. For one, it narrowed things down. Only three countries had the wherewithal and the resources to engage in these Mickey Mouse kinds of games. Deyn appraised them in reverse order of possibility. French intelligence was famous for its rogue activities. They engaged in Byzantine international operations, often getting in over their head and resolving the situation by killing everyone involved. Deyn doubted he had attracted French attention. Another very real threat was the Israelis. They, too, engaged in fast and loose intelligence operations, but almost always against their Arab opponents. Anyone else they considered a threat they usually just assassinated.
That left the Americans, and, oh, how they loved their cowboy games.
U.S. intelligence was arguably the best and most capable in the world. The fact that Navy SEALs hadn’t come knocking on his door in the middle of the night told Deyn that while U.S. intelligence might somehow suspect some aspect of the IESHEN Group was involved in some missing nukes, they had little else to go on.
Thus the cowboys probed, looking for clues.
The nice thing about black operations was that the operatives were generally considered expendable in the name of national security. Their actions were almost always illegal, and a team that was slaughtered would be denied. Then whatever dark corner of the U.S. government that was controlling the operation would have to face internal review, and only then, slowly and painfully try to rebuild their operation.
Long before that could happen, investigating Laurentius Deyn would be the least of the United States’ problems.
It came down to one thing.
A group of cowboys needed killing.
Deyn pushed a button on his desk and a moment later three men walked into the room. One was the size and build of a sumo wrestler. Everything about him was rough-hewn and blunt. From his brow and jaw to his catcher’s-mitt-size hands. Johan Mahke was Deyn’s personal director of security in Germany. Beside Mahke stood the ex-Navy SEAL Clay Forbes and the Russian Spetsnaz officer Alexsandr Zabyshny.
“Gentlemen, you are aware of the situation in the Antilles?”
Three very dangerous men nodded.
“And you have received the report from our Saudi Arabian assets?”
All three men had read it. The snatch of Sheikh Jaspari was an absolute worst-case scenario.
“Gentlemen, we have a Yankee problem.” Deyn tilted his head at Forbes. “No offense, Clay.”
“None taken.” Forbes grinned. “I’m a citizen of the world.”
“Then let me be plain. The Americans are coming and I want them dead.”
Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia
“GIVE ME EVERYTHING you’ve got.” Hal Brognola slouched back into his chair.
Kurtzman handed him a file. “Suspect number one, IESHEN Group International.”
“IESHEN Group? Jesus, Bear, you told me to invest in them!”
“I know.” Kurtzman grinned. “How’d you do last week?”
“The stock split.” Brognola shot a rare smile. “And I bought more. So I want you to give me some goddamn good reasons why I want to screw up my stock portfolio.”
“IESHEN Group is a German-based multinational. They started off as a merger between the IES Technology Company in Bonn and HEN Light Industries in the late 1980s and they have steadily grown. They also diversified and have become the umbrella corporation for some very wide ranging endeavors.
Brognola peered at the file. “Like Infinite Financial Antilles?”
“They’ve put money there before, and while we can’t prove it, we believe IESHEN Group has controlling interest. Hunt is on it.”
“Uh-huh.” The big Fed grunted. “And Circulado Corp?”
“Hunt already nailed that one down. There are two cutout corporations in between. Legally, IES
HEN Group could deny all knowledge of Circulado’s activities but at the end of the day we’re saying IESHEN Group owns them outright.”
“Okay.” Brognola flipped through file pages. “So give me Sheikh Jaspari.”
“That’s where we lucked out. He just happens to warm a chair on the board of directors of Treibstoff-Chemikalie von Bonn.”
Brognola flexed his rusty German. “Bonn Petrol-Chemical.”
“Right. HEN Light Industries was getting into oil exploration in the late 1980s. When they merged with IES they bought into Bonn Petro-Chemical. IES was working on specialized technology for finding oil with new kinds of ground penetrating radar and satellite geothermal imaging. Some of their undersea geothermal exploration was nothing short of spectacular. They also put a lot of work into going to known oil reserves that were considered too difficult and expensive to exploit, buying the drilling rights cheap and turning a profit. The money they made on that in the 1990s gave them the financial base to expand into all sorts of new areas. Jaspari has been a significant investor and sits on the board. We believe he was the money conduit to Admiral Beniaminov.”
“Straight answer, can you put Sheikh Jaspari in bed with IESHEN Group.”
“Not at the moment. Remember, IESHEN Group is a multinational. They can always claim that one of their subsidiaries has gone rogue, and for that matter, they could be telling the truth.”
“But they own our most likely satellite?”
“That one they can’t squirm away from. That satellite has IESHEN Group stamped on the side in bold letters. There’s a picture of it on their Web site. On a minor note, Bonn Petro-Chemical has been heavily involved in developing Slovenia’s natural gas deposits. So I think we have a good guess on where those submachine guns came from in the Antilles.”
Brognola stared hard at the file. They had a lot of intriguing data, but nothing conclusive. Snatching a sheikh out of his oasis and faking a bank heist was one thing. Going to war with one of the world’s leading corporations based in one of the United States’ closest allies was another. “I gather you have a strategy?”
Barbara Price spoke for the first time. “Able Team is in Berlin. All CIA and NSA German assets have been diverted. We suggest sending them in.”
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