“Hal will make sure the President gets a full report. We also need a report on every single business endeavor we can connect to IESHEN Group.”
“Bear, we’ve already—”
“Do it again. Bring in NSA and the FBI. Deyn’s cut and run and no longer has access to his regular IESHEN Group assets. He’ll be relying on personal, undeclared fortunes and hidden cutouts in the corporate structure. Somewhere there has to be a clue about what he’s up to. Work it up. Make it happen.”
“All right. I’m on it.”
Kurtzman stared up at Laurentius Deyn and began bending the weapon of his mighty intellect against his enemy. Deyn was a cutting-edge industrialist, a patriot and a highly decorated Special Forces soldier. Kurtzman shoved his emotions aside. Deyn wasn’t his enemy. He was a problem to be solved, and Aaron Kurtzman was a man who had let his MENSA membership dues lapse because the membership bored him.
“Larry?” Kurtzman steepled his fingers, his eyes stared unblinkingly as he addressed the enigma on the giant flat screen in front of him. ‘What is motivating you?”
Berlin, Germany
AKIRA TOKAIDO SLOWLY and painfully clambered out of a very dark hole into consciousness. When consciousness turned to lucidity he wanted to crawl back into oblivion’s dark embrace. Every inch of his body ached. He flinched as he was spoken to.
“Ah, Herr Tokaido! You have returned to the living!”
The young hacker tried to look around but pain flared like white light whenever he tried to turn his head. He was in a reclined chair. His wrists and ankles were restrained. He looked at the curved roof and stared up into the recessed overhead lighting. His tongue slid across his split lip. Several very important things were screaming for his immediate attention but he couldn’t seem to focus.
“I…” Tokaido suddenly became aware. “I’m on a plane.”
“Very good!” Laurentius Deyn’s head eclipsed the overhead light. Tokaido pressed himself back down into his chair with instinctive fear as Clay Forbes’s face swam into view. Fear was a great focuser. His stomach sank in new sudden terror.
They knew his name.
Deyn smiled as he read the young man’s body language. “Ah, well, Herr Tokaido, you…babbled, a bit, during your sleep.” Deyn’s smile became sharklike. “We administered some sodium Pentothal, to help you rest.”
Tokaido couldn’t keep the fear off of his face. Clay Forbes laughed unpleasantly. “Man, you said all kinds of shit. Farms, bears, politicians?” Forbes poked the young hacker painfully in the forehead with his finger. “I swear it’s like the goddamn Wizard of Oz in your melon, kid.”
Tokaido glared back into Forbes’s grinning face and spoke with steel he didn’t know he had. “My boys are going to take you out, Forbes.”
Forbes kept smiling. “Oh, really.”
“We know your name, and we have assets you can’t even imagine.” Tokaido’s anger burned through eyes swimming in broken blood vessels as he slid his gaze to Deyn. “So why don’t you and Hitler here go find a cave in Afghanistan, get comfortable and kiss your asses goodbye. The boys will be coming along directly.”
Forbes threw back his head and roared with laughter. “You know something? I’ve been a SEAL and a black op for…what, fifteen years? And I’ve never been shot. I’ve been shot at, but shot, no way. But you? You shot me seven times last night. Then you goddamn knifed me, and no one, I mean no one, ever got the drop on me with a blade before. You’d think that would earn you some respect.”
Forbes’s hand shot out and clamped around Tokaido’s trachea. The young hacker’s eyes bugged as his breathing tube came just short of cracking. His tormentor’s voice dropped to a dangerous snarl. “But that’s where your punk ass would be wrong. All you did was piss me off and make me look bad in front of my boss. All your ass has earned is pain, blues and agony.”
Tokaido’s vision began to darken as Forbes’s fingers pressed down into his carotid arteries.
“You aren’t in Kansas anymore, punk. Me strangling you into unconsciousness? This is as good as it’s ever going to get in what little remains of your life. No one knows where you are. No one knows where you’re going. And where you wake up? That will be your final destination. When you get there? You’re going to have a nice, long talk with Mr. Deyn, and I’m going to be there to make sure you tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but truth, so help you God.” Forbes pressed his face into Akira’s. “I got three words for you before you pass out. Jumper cables, blowtorches and pliers.”
Tokaido slipped back down the long black hole and kept on falling. Forbes released him as he went limp.
“Sweet dreams.”
CARL LYONS GLARED at the cast on his right forearm. The ulna was cracked, and a steel pin had been required to hang his thumb back onto his hand. He popped a pair of painkillers and took a long pull on his bottle of beer. He had been dreading the ass-chewing he was going to receive at Kurtzman’s hands. Now it would almost be a benediction. There had been no ass reaming. The computer expert wasn’t blaming Lyons for what happened. He was blaming himself.
Blancanales entered the safehouse’s living room and flopped into a chair wearily. On the TV Argentina was playing Germany in soccer, but Lyons was glaring sightlessly into middle distance unheeding. Soccer fanatic that Blancanales was, he couldn’t bring himself to care.
Lyons’s voice was little more than a distracted grunt. “How’s Gadgets?”
“Bad. Broken ribs, separated shoulder, he’s peeing blood and the doctor thinks it’s his kidney.” Blancanales sighed heavily. “But for a guy who fell three stories and was run over by a van, he’s doing okay. He’s awake and lucid. I brought him a laptop and when I left him he was in communication with the Farm.”
“And Hal?”
“Well, they beat the hell out of him, and then he fell out of a moving vehicle. That big German asshole really teed off on him. Nearly took his jaw off his head. They suspect a concussion. He had a CAT scan about forty-five minutes ago, and they’re going to keep him overnight for observation. So much for his appealing to Deyno Boy, did we back the wrong horse.”
Lyons grunted and resumed glaring at nothing.
Blancanales ran his eye over Lyons’s cast and the stitches over his eyebrow. Wounds were nothing to brag about, and scars were simply proof that you had zigged when you should have zagged rather than medals of honor, but Able Team had been decimated, and Blancanales still felt twinges of shame that he had come through it unscathed.
Lyons red eyes focused on the armchair in the corner. Tenari’s Jungle Gun lay propped up against it. Empty beer cans and a half-eaten bratwurst lay on the table next to it. “Damn Samoan slob.”
Blancanales sighed. He had already grieved for Tenari. Lyons was living up to his nickname and internalizing everything, including the blame. Any feelings he was willing to show would be expressed through anger or brooding silence.
“There’s a shitstorm brewing in D.C. I think we’re going to be recalled.”
Lyons rose and walked over to Tenari’s chair. He scooped up the shotgun and awkwardly snapped out the folding stock. He held the shotgun like a giant pistol in his left hand with the stock against his inner elbow. “Cowboy needs to send me a folding stock with an arm brace. He can probably steal one off a SPAS-12 and jury rig it.”
“Carl…”
Lyons refolded the stock and threw the shotgun into his gear bag along with his .357 Python revolver. “Give me a call if you hear anything.”
“Where’re you going?”
“The shooting range.” Lyons stalked out the door. “I need to put in some practice shooting left-handed.”
Tel Aviv, CIA Station
“IS IT TRUE?” Gary Manning and the rest of Phoenix Force looked up as David McCarter came into the conference room. He’d been gone for an hour. The Briton didn’t come back smiling.
“Able got ambushed in Berlin. They were set up, straight from the get-go. Gadgets and Hal are in hospital, Carl’s got
a broken gun hand. The mission failed. We don’t know where the nukes are, and our suspects made a clean extraction.”
Calvin James shook his head. “Damn it.”
“It gets worse. Akira was in the field. He’s a prisoner.”
Every man at the table sat up.
McCarter nodded ruefully. “We must assume that within the next twenty-four hours or less all of our identities and our current mission profile will be compromised. We have to get out of Israel ASAP before the enemy can launch a strike against us. Aaron suggested we head to CIA Cairo Station. He’ll have full war loads and a jet waiting for us. From there we’ll deploy as the situation develops. I want to be out of here within the hour.”
James was the first to say what each man was thinking. “What’s the situation on a rescue mission?”
“None. We don’t know where Akira is. Like I said, as soon as we’re out of Israel we’re on standby for rapid deployment to anywhere, but finding the nukes is still our number-one priority.”
Manning scowled. “There’s got to be something we can do.”
“With any luck, finding Akira and the weapons will end up being the same mission. Rescue is definitely part of the mission profile.”
“And if it isn’t?”
Anger crept into the Briton’s voice. “Then it’s bloody search and destroy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Berlin, Germany
Thunder rolled across the indoor range. German border patrol officers lowered their 9 mm pistols and stared in awe as Lyons shot. It was the third time he’d been to the range in twenty-four hours. The Germans on the range had all admired his stainless-steel Colt Python revolver. They gazed on in awe as the Able Team leader cut loose with his shotgun. He held out the brutally shortened 12-gauge semiautomatic like a huge handgun. An hour earlier an overnight package had arrived for Lyons from the Farm, and within was a replacement for the Jungle Gun’s standard folding stock. It was an ugly, phosphate-finished, abbreviated piece of skeletonized sheet steel. Beneath the stock was a blunt, U-shaped, swing-out padded hook. The principle was simple. The steel stock braced along the forearm, the hook swung up and under to cradle the firer’s triceps, allowing the operator to fire the shotgun one-handed. The concept had been tried on several combat shotguns. Most knowledgeable gun experts eschewed the technique as impractical. It wasn’t that it didn’t work.
It just required a shooting animal of a higher order.
The Jungle Gun roared like the biggest beast on the range it was as Carl Lyons bent the weapon to his will. He was on his tenth silhouette target at ten meters. The first nine were a carpet of confetti on the range floor. Bruises were already blossoming unnoticed on the Ironman’s left arm where the steel had slammed him.
Blancanales walked onto the range. Lyons lowered the smoking shotgun. “Don’t even tell me we’re being recalled.”
“From everything Gadgets and I could pick up, that’s the way it looked like it was headed.”
Lyons set down his weapon. “Was?”
“Well, probably still is, but I pulled a fast one.”
Hearts and minds were Blancanales’s specialty and he could manipulate allies as easily as enemies. He wasn’t nicknamed “The Politician” for nothing. “What did you do?”
“I made a phone call.”
“Who’d you call?”
He shrugged. “The cavalry.”
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
AARON KURTZMAN had barely moved in twenty-four hours. Hacking German top secret military records was proving harder than expected. With the firefight in Berlin, the German military and police were on a terror attack footing, and they were angry as hell at the rumor of American operations gone awry to the point of firefights in the streets of Berlin and helicopters falling out of the sky. The President himself had authorized the hack but had told Kurtzman in no uncertain terms that being detected would prove disastrous. Kurtzman was certain Akira could have done it with his eyes closed. Hunt and Carmen were good, but the young man was a genius in his field. Kurtzman himself wasn’t bad, but his true genius lay in extrapolating data and coming up with answers rather than breaking systems.
Laurentius Deyn was eluding him.
There had to be something. Some key that was—Kurtzman lurched up in his chair and realized to his chagrin that Mack Bolan could have been standing behind him for an hour for all he knew. “You shouldn’t sneak up on a guy like that, Mack.”
Bolan smiled. “Sorry, but you looked so intent I didn’t want to disturb your train of thought.”
Kurtzman sighed. It was quite possible Bolan had been standing there for an hour. He had the patience of a saint. The computer whiz grinned back. No, he had the patience of a trained sniper. He could outwait a rock and then blur into a killing whirlwind with the speed of a buzz saw. There was hardly a place on Earth he hadn’t been and hardly anything he hadn’t done.
“I came as soon as I got word, Bear.”
“Barbara called you.”
“No, Pol did. Then I called Barb and told her I was coming in,” Bolan said. “So what do you have on this end?”
“Actually, I’d appreciate your input. I just can’t figure this guy out.”
“I read the dossier Carmen worked up him on the chopper. I think I have him figured out.”
Kurtzman simply stared. “Really.”
“He’s a hero, Bear. A soldier and a patriot.”
“Well, that we know. But we can’t find any sympathetic terrorist leanings in his past. We’ve tried working the closet Nazi angle but it just doesn’t figure. Neither do any residual East German Communist leanings. The money or power angles don’t work, either. He could assassinate his fellow board members at IESHEN Group, take over the whole multinational corporation and probably get away with it. But why? The man is a millionaire. We’re talking hundreds of millions, and that’s just what you can see on paper. What does a man like him want with twenty-five nuclear demolition devices?”
Bolan raised his eyes to the man on the monitor. “He wants revenge.”
Kurtzman blinked. “How do you figure that?”
“I told you. I read his résumé.” Bolan’s cobalt-blue eyes bore into the computer expert’s. “Then I looked in the mirror.”
Bolan’s disarming smile suddenly flashed across his face. “The question is, revenge for what? You figure that out, Bear, and you’ve got this guy pegged.”
Kurtzman sat up, intrigued with the new logic thread. “And here I was trying to work the megalomaniac angle.”
“He’s that, too,” Bolan agreed. “That’s why in his mind he’s going to call it justice. No matter what the collateral damage is.”
“Well, hell, I’m glad you stopped by.” Kurtzman suddenly cocked his head. “So what are you going to do?”
“Hal and Gadgets are in the hospital, Akira’s been captured and rumor is Able may get pulled.”
Kurtzman shook his head. “That’s the way the wind seems to be blowing.”
“You pull Carl at this juncture and he’s liable to go rogue.”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“So I’m on a plane.”
Kurtzman raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to take over Able and keep Carl on a leash?”
“No, Able is Carl’s team.” Bolan grinned again. “I’m going to back his play, to the hilt.”
“I knew you were going to say that.”
“I’ve got a flight to Berlin in two hours. Tell the President.” Bolan strode out of the Computer Room and stopped in the doorway. “Revenge, Bear. That’s the key to taking this guy down.”
AKIRA TOKAIDO WOKE UP in the hurt locker. He was hanging by his hands in a room with a steel floor and corrugated iron walls. Clay Forbes had administered what he described as a “leisurely, introductory beating” and then left him to hang awhile to think about his misdeeds and his short, unpleasant future.
He was startled when the door to his cell opened and the cyberhottie walked in. Tw
o large men with automatic weapons flanked the door. One of them closed the door behind her and locked it from the outside. The woman stared, appalled as she took in Akira’s bloody, bound form. “Mr.…Tokaido.”
It took the young hacker several moments to work up enough saliva so that he could croak out an answer. “Yeah.”
She held up his laptop. “This is a remarkable piece of engineering.”
Able Team’s and Phoenix Force’s after-action reports made for spine-tingling reading. Tokaido had read every single one he could get his hands on. Members of Able and Phoenix had been on both sides of interrogations. Akira was surprised to find that in his beaten and probably drugged condition he was able to recognize the good cop/bad cop routine. Again, he found himself speaking with mettle he didn’t know he had.
“Fuck you, Franka.”
Marx stared. “How do you know my—”
“We had passive listening in the van. That, and you had your name in your video conferencing window.”
“Ah.” Marx flushed slightly. “I had not factored in direct communication with your entry team.”
“The communication was a closed loop. It’s a small error when you look at it that way. Besides, you were planning on betraying us anyway.”
The redhead flinched at the word betrayal. “I betrayed no one, you are Americans trying to—”
“Save the world.” Tokaido couldn’t believe he was talking like this, but it kept rolling out of his mouth. “But what do you care?”
“Save the world?” Marx shook her head in disgust. “Corporate espionage is not—”
“Corporate espionage? You ca—” Tokaido suddenly bit back his retort. Several things occurred to the young man at once. One, it occurred to him that the conversation was very likely being monitored. Two, he couldn’t be sure whether the woman knew what was really going on or not, but if she didn’t, then there might be one very slim card he could play. He turned his head and glared at the wall. “You can go to hell.”
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