There was a short pause.
“Bronson here,” the man replied, his voice blurry from pain medication.
“Listen to this,” Potvin commanded, and thrust the cell phone at the young woman.
Still sniffling in her hands, the teenager started screaming as Sakeda pulled out a knife and ran the blade along her arm, slightly breaking the skin.
“Recognize the voice?” Potvin asked. “That’s your daughter, Victoria.”
Over the tiny speaker, Bronson gave a strained laugh. “Have you seen the way I dress? I’m gay! I’ve never been with a woman in my life!”
“Yeah? Then you won’t mind if we play with her a little, will ya?” Potvin snapped back. “Okay, nail her hands to the table!”
A lot of people in the crowd jerked at the pronouncement, and Smith fired another burst, setting them put into place.
Chuckling, Sakeda grabbed the young woman and dragged her to the heavy buffet table. A sweep of his arm cleared away the pheasant and caviar, antique china and sterling silver pieces flying madly. Then, bending her over the table, Sakeda slung the MP-5 over a shoulder and pulled a hammer and some steel nails from inside his clothing.
“Daddy, help me!” Victoria cried. Then she shrieked hysterically as the first spike was driven through her flesh.
“Stop! Stop hurting her!” Bronson cried out, tears in his voice. “Yes, okay, she’s my daughter! I act like a homosexual to stop anybody from even looking for her. How the hell—”
“Every whore in this state answers to me, and you talk in your sleep, moron,” Potvin declared, walking over to hold the cell phone closer to the weeping teenager. “Besides, I don’t do business with anybody unless I know how to hurt them. Really and truly make them wish for death.”
“You bastard,” Bronson whispered hoarsely.
“Nail her other hand!”
“No! Please, dear God, whatever I have is yours,” Bronson gushed. “Money, drugs, weapons…Just ask!”
“Better,” Potvin said, narrowing his eyes. “Now unless you want to hear us rape this bitch, and then set her on fire—” he paused to let the threat seep into the other man’s mind “—then put us in contact with the man called Snake Eater, and I mean right now.”
There was no response from Bronson.
“You hear me, Bronson?” Potvin snarled, tightening his grip on the SMG. “Give me Snake Eater, or she dies right here and now!”
“Betray a client? B-but that would put me out of business forever!”
Whimpering softly, Victoria squirmed as Sakeda drew a knife blade along her jawline.
“Last chance,” Potvin declared in a no-nonsense tone.
“A-a-agreed.” There came a series of clicks and a pleasant voice came on the phone, the words heavily accented.
“Good evening, Mr. Potvin, and what can I do for you this lovely evening?” Mongoose asked politely.
“Somebody just kidnapped your last client by pretending to be us,” Potvin retorted, barely in control of his monumental rage. “I want the impostors dead, and you want the client protected. If you know where they can be found, let’s cut a deal. Interested?”
There was a short pause.
“Absolutely,” Mongoose whispered. “I think that we can do quite a bit of business together, my friend.”
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
MASSAGING HER STIFF NECK, Carmen Delahunt was studying a blacksuit field report on her VR helmet when a tiny icon for NATO appeared on the bottom of the visor overlapping the factory schematics and railroad graphics. It took her a full second to react to the sight, and as she quickly reached for the symbol with her cybernetic gloves it suddenly began to flash a bright red. Cold adrenaline flooded her body as the woman tapped the icon to access the encoded message.
“Red alert!” Delahunt yelled from her console, dropping her stocking feet to the floor to lean forward. “We have intruders at NATO Depot 75. That’s 75!”
“The nuclear weapons cache in Turkey?” Kurtzman asked, quickly slaving his console to hers.
As the machines dovetailed, he saw the main screen begin to scroll with the NATO data flow, a submonitor flicking into pictures of the interior of the subterranean warehouse, relayed via fiber-optics of pinhead cameras hidden in the vaunted ceiling.
Kurtzman cursed at the sight. There were a dozen men in antigas gear working with laptops on a door to the large cage. The thieves were surrounded by megatons of military ordnance, but ignored it all to just concentrate on the cage. The men were surrounded by unlimited explosives, and there was an oxygen/acetylene torch nearby just begging to be used. But they weren’t falling for the trap. Any attempt to force open the cage would cause the immediate and automatic release of VX nerve gas. But more importantly, thermite charges would ignite, reducing the plastic boxes and their precious contents to slag in only seconds.
“Damn, they must know what’s inside,” Tokaido said, spitting out his gum. He hit a macros file and a submonitor became illuminated with the contents of the long-term storage facility.
Trying to stay one step ahead of their nameless enemy, Tokaido had a host of sensitive files already accessed and ready. With all of the recent disasters, it had only made sense to check on the status of certain NBC weapons systems, nuclear, bacteriological and chemical. At the top of the NATO inventory for Depot 75 was a list of tactical nuclear weapons: two artillery shells, two bombs and two CIA-style suicide backpacks.
“How soon until NATO can get some troops there?” Wethers growled, moving his pipe to the other side of his mouth.
“Hours,” Kurtzman replied gruffly, his hands flashing across the silent keyboard. “They’re already busy handling all of the other mysterious crashes and explosions across Europe.”
“But these are nukes being stolen!”
“Yeah, but they don’t know that yet,” Kurtzman stated angrily, sending a priority-one alert to NATO headquarters in Brussels. “And by the time they get some people there it will be too late. The sons of bitches have already cracked the second door lock!”
“Which leaves four to go,” Delahunt said, then she flinched. “No, only three! They just got another!”
“I’m attempting to hack the system,” Tokaido said in forced calm. “Damn these firewalls. They’re good.”
“Should be,” Wethers said gruffly. “I helped make them.”
“Did you leave a back door?” Kurtzman demanded hopefully.
“No, too risky,” Wethers replied curtly, banging a fist impotently on the console. “Besides…Damn, these people are good. They just ripped out the auxiliary communication lines buried under the floor. There’s no way we can activate the self-destruct charges now.”
“Are you positive?” Delahunt snapped, struggling to cut the power to the depot or release the VX gas. But nothing was working. The depot had a lot of defenses, most of them automatic, but the primary defense of a nuclear arsenal had always been total secrecy. A thief couldn’t steal something if nobody knew where it was.
“Positive,” Wethers replied, the single word spoken like a death sentence. The Farm had fought for decades to keep nuclear weapons off the black market, but with this theft six of the latest and most powerful models would be unleashed upon civilization. It really didn’t matter if this was al Qaeda, PLO, Unity or even Hamas. The death toll would be staggering, and with the planet already teetering on the edge of world war, this was just the sort of push that could send them over the brink into Armageddon.
Already the invaders were starting up forklifts and beginning to move crates of supplies out of the way to clear a path to the exit.
Think, man, think! Wethers raged internally. I could set off the fire sprinklers. Those released inert argon gas that would eventually suffocate men wearing gas masks, but on the monitor he could see that these versions had small air tanks attached to the masks. Self-breathers. The argon gas would do nothing but let the thieves know somebody was trying to stop them. Totally useless.
Then the pr
ofessor narrowed his eyes into hard slits. He had a wild idea that just might work if he had enough time….
“Come on, we’ve got to find a way to seal those bastards inside,” Kurtzman declared, savagely hitting keys. He tried again to cause a massive short-circuit in the electrical system and ignite the munitions, but failed once more.
“I’m trying to activate the failsafe by radio control from a NATO satellite. It’s long shot but…” Delahunt paused, her gloved hands fondling the air as if kneading bread dough. “It worked! I’m in. Shit, they used the debris from the main door to block the tracks of the secondary doors.”
“How the hell did they even know about those?” Kurtzman raged, then something clicked in his mind. “Akira, run a probe! These assholes must have some serious computer support. If they’ve hacked the security system through the telephones or through the power lines…”
“Then the enemy might be watching what is happening by using a piggyback signal,” Tokaido finished. “On it! Just give me a minute…”
“Don’t lose him!” Kurtzman commanded.
“Okay, the signal isn’t coming from anyplace in Europe,” Tokaido said, the slow words counterpointing his flashing hands. “That was a fake. Clever fellow, he’s using the Atlantic long-lines instead of a satellite relay….”
Unexpectedly, the intercom buzzed. “Kurtzman, what the hell is going on down there?” Barbara Price demanded.
“Tell you later!” Kurtzman yelled, clicking off the device so that his team wouldn’t be disturbed again.
His mind a whirlwind, the chief hacker struggled to come up with something, anything, to stop the would-be thieves. On his screen, an indicator blinked as the fourth lock disengaged and the fifth fell right behind it. Only one more to go and the cage would be open. “Carmen, can we access the nukes?”
“Not to set them off, no,” the redhead answered curtly. “Way ahead of you there, Chief.”
“He’s not in North America,” Tokaido continued, sweat dripping off his face in spite of the coolness of the room. “The signal is being bounced off a couple of telecommunications satellites…and a weather satellite…” The man snarled as he detected a bounced signal. “The bastard knows we’re trying a trace, and now is attempting to find us!” This was now a race. The hacker who was the fastest would win; the loser would be bombed out of existence.
“Are the sensors live?” Kurtzman demanded. His heart pounding, the man dredged up everything he could remember about NATO procedure for the handling of nuclear weaponry.
“Absolutely,” she replied. “But what good are they?”
“The inspection program!” Wethers announced, swiveling in his chair. “Use the inspection program!”
At the cry, Kurtzman’s eyes went wide. By God, that just might work!
“Carmen, access the UN override and blow open the seals for an on-site inspection!”
“The seals? But that would…” Delahunt gave a hard smile under the VR helmet. “God, that’s clever.”
Staring anxiously at the screen, Kurtzman watched as plastic carrying cases snapped open displaying the six nuclear charges.
Still working on the door, the men jerked at the noise, and one of them moved quickly away. But it was already too late. Set in a wall niche, a Geiger counter started to click wildly as the outer casing of the six nuclear bombs opened wide for a visual inspection, closely followed by the internal armor plating and then the primary shields. A soft glow began to infuse the air as the subcritical charges of radioactive U-235 were fully exposed.
Instantly, the thieves sagged their shoulders and dropped several of the laptops. The machines crashed on the concrete floor, the screens going blank. One of the thieves reeled drunkenly and clutched the bars for support, while another turned to loudly retch behind a forklift.
In grim satisfaction, the Stony Man hackers watched as the dozen would-be thieves began to slump, two of them shuffling for the exit. All of them soiled their clothing, and most tore off the gas masks and bulletproof vests. Their faces were deathly pale, their slack mouths flapping for air like fish on a sidewalk. But the intruders got only halfway there before limply collapsing, thin red blood dribbling from their blind eyes and deaf ears.
With a muttered curse, Tokaido slapped the keyboard. “Lost them!” he cried. “I was getting close so the other hacker cut and run. The source was in South America, but that’s as far as I got.”
With every living cell in their bodies rapidly breaking down from the waves of hard radiation, the twelve men began wetly coughing out their dissolving lungs in a shockingly similar manner to the innocent civilians they had ruthlessly murdered with mustard gas only a few minutes ago outside.
“More than enough,” Kurtzman said. “South America means Calvano.”
“Most likely.”
“I’ll inform Phoenix Force,” Wethers said, turning back to his console. “If the general has a computer expert that good, he must be the person who hacked into the GPS network. We really could use him alive!”
“If possible,” Delahunt agreed grimly, closely watching the monitor for any signs of treachery from the dying thieves. On the wall, the Geiger counter was clicking so fast it almost sounded like a single continuous tone, the rads nearly off the scale.
It took a full hour before the men stopped moving completely. Ruthlessly, Kurtzman then released the argon gas, flooding the depot way past the safety level to where nothing could breathe. One of the figures on the floor stopped twitching, and he let more argon flow into the depot until he was well and truly satisfied that every one of the invaders was dead.
Every monitor in the room turned into hash.
“What the…We’ve lost the satellite feed,” Tokaido stated, working his console to no result. “Damn, I was afraid this might happen! Calvano didn’t know exactly where we were located.”
“So he used the GPS network to slightly shift every satellite above the East Coast,” Delahunt finished. “We can’t talk to our teams anymore!”
“And the nation is stone blind against an enemy attack,” Wethers said.
“Telecommunications, NASA weather satellites, NSA spy sats, Watchdogs, Keyholes, cell phones—everything is gone!”
“Carmen, find that sat!” Kurtzman commanded, sliding back a panel on his console and grabbing a joystick. “Akira, get the feed back! Wethers, steal us a landline and then another satellite!”
Moving frantically, the team went to work, and for a very long time there was only the soft sound of tapping fingers and the loud crackle of static from the dead monitors.
IN THE NATO DEPOT, misty with argon gas, the shipping containers for the nuclear weapons still lay open, even though the shielding for the devices was closed once again. In the heated rush of the aborted theft, nobody on the Stony Man team seemed to have noticed that all six nuclear weapons had opened wide for a core inspection. But only five of them had softly glowed with live uranium.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Omaha, Nebraska
Moving steadily along Route 29, the dark blue SUV holding the Forge soldiers carefully maintained the speed limit. A dozen yards behind the vehicle, a large black Cadillac stayed precisely in position, the armed men inside watching for treachery from every direction.
“Well?” Lyons snapped from behind the steering wheel.
“We’ve lost the Farm,” Schwarz declared, placing aside the compact radio transceiver on the backseat near a box of ammunition. “I caught a squeal about Trinity busting out of jail, and General Calvano running Forge with Phoenix Force invading his Argentine base, then nothing.”
“Trouble with the equipment?” Blancanales said hopefully, running a finger along the scar on his face. The spirit gum holding the prosthetic in place itched like crazy; he had to force himself to keep from scratching it off.
“No way. Even the cell phone is dead,” Schwarz answered, chewing a lip. “I would venture a guess that Forge must have shifted every telecommunication satellite above eastern America,
if not the whole continent, to try to knock Kurtzman and his people off the air. Everything seems to be down in this whole area.”
“Except for the GPS network,” Lyons said, glancing at the glowing computer screen set into the ornate dashboard. The icon for the Caddy was moving northward along Route 29 through northern Nebraska. “That seems to be fine.”
“For the moment.” Shifting his position on the backseat, Schwarz frowned darkly. “But Forge will need that up and running to keep making things veer off course at the last second.”
“So we’re on our own,” Blancanales said, working the arming bolt on the M-16 assault rifle cradled in his arms. Luckily, Trinity was known for using a wide variety of weapons, so the team didn’t have to leave their preferred weapons behind with Grimaldi.
Outside the tinted windows, Able Team saw only the endless Nebraska farmlands on both sides of the highway, the lush fields of corn extending for miles in every direction. Aside from the few cars on the black highway, the only objects visible were a billboard advertising a local restaurant that specialized in honey-fried chicken, a sprawling farmhouse with an unpainted grain silo rising high and shiny like a SCUD missile and a hulking combine harvester, the colossal farm machine resembling a mobile factory with its array of rotating thrasher blades, serrated cornheads, conveyor belts, swing arms, chains, hydraulic lifters and pneumatic augers. A glass-lined booth was perched high on top, the driver nestled inside like some sort preserved specimen on display in a museum, instead of the highly trained operator of a quarter-million-dollar piece of farm equipment.
“Anything on the CB?” Lyons asked, adjusting the cloth cap covering his shaved head.
“Clear,” Schwarz said, touching the earplug worn under his bushy wig. “But it only has a range of about a hundred miles.”
“Any way to boost that?”
“Not with what we have onboard,” the man said, spreading his arms wide. “I stuffed everything possible into the trunk, but this civilian boat doesn’t have half the storage capability of our modified Chevy van.”
Capital Offensive (Stony Man) Page 19