A high-pitched whine made him turn, again, toward where he had hidden the bomb.
Three metal spheres, propelled by charges of compressed gas, burst upward into the air, one after the other.
“No—” Pyragy had time to say.
And then there was no more time, ever.
CHAPTER ONE
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
Barbara Price, Stony Man Farm’s mission controller, seated herself at the large conference table in the War Room, smoothing the slitted thigh-length skirt of the business suit that did nothing to hide her contours. The honey-blonde, model-beautiful Price did not look as if she had been awake since the earliest hours of the morning, but then neither did Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman. As the Farm’s cybernetics expert propelled himself into the room, turning smartly with a practiced motion of his wheelchair, he looked bright-eyed and alert. Clutched in one massive hand was an oversize insulated aluminum travel mug that was, no doubt, freshly filled with his stomach-roiling house blend of overpowering coffee. Kurtzman busied himself with the uplink controls set in the wall next to the giant plasma screen that dominated that end of the briefing room.
The men of Phoenix Force and Able Team filed in moments later, talking quietly among themselves or, in the case of Able Team leader Carl Lyons, sitting stone-faced and watching the room with cold blue eyes while silently sipping coffee from a disposable cup. The big, blond ex-cop, who had more than earned the nickname “Ironman” from his teammates, was flanked by Able Team members Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario Blancanales.
Schwarz, who pushed his wire-framed glasses up on his nose while reaching for a coffee cup of his own, was a computer expert in his own right. He was also a veteran field operative. Many enemies had underestimated the slim, unassuming Schwarz…and had died because of it. Blancanales, for his part, looked calm and confident. He always did. The gray-haired, dark-eyed, soft-spoken Hispanic, a former Black Beret, was known among the men as “the Politician” for his ease with blending in with others, making them believe what he needed them to believe.
David McCarter, team leader of Phoenix Force, seated himself next to Blancanales and gave him a neighborly jab with one elbow, uncharacteristically cheerful by his usual standards. He emptied the aluminum can of Coca-Cola from which he was drinking and set it on the table with a loud, metallic ring. The lean, fox-faced Briton, a former SAS commando, had changed considerably in his time as leader of Phoenix, Price thought. While still something of a hothead, he took his job seriously and had led his fellow counterterrorist operatives to victory in mission after dangerous mission.
The other Phoenix Force veterans filled the opposite side of the conference table. There was Rafael Encizo, the stocky, well-built Cuban-born guerilla expert. Next to him hulked Gary Manning, the burly, square-jawed Canadian who served as Phoenix Force’s demolitions expert. A former antiterrorist operative with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Manning was the sort of solid, dependable soldier Price was always glad to have on hand. He was quiet, stable and more than willing to speak his mind if it was necessary.
To Manning’s left sat Calvin James, the lanky knife fighter and former SEAL who would always be the son of Chicago’s mean streets. Price mentally chided herself for indulging in such poetic phrasing, even privately. Still, looking at James and watching the muscles play under his dark skin, it was hard not to see him as some kind of predatory animal. Easygoing as he was, he was one of the most dangerous men she had ever met, and that was saying something, considering the company he kept. It occurred to Price that she sat in a room with some of the most experienced warriors on the face of the Earth. There was just one exception, and she would see him soon enough, when he returned from whatever mission had called him away most recently.
Beyond James, just pulling out a chair for himself, was T. J. Hawkins, formerly of the Army Rangers and the youngest member of Phoenix Force. Hawkins’s Southern drawl and easy manner belied his abilities as a fighter. He could hold his own with any of the men of Able Team or Phoenix Force, which was why he had been added to the latter’s ranks.
Also on hand was Akira Tokaido, the brilliant computer hacker who, with Carmen Delahunt and Huntington Wethers, formed the rest of Kurtzman’s cybernetics contingent. Tokaido took the chair next to where Kurtzman was stationed and placed an item on the table in front of them both. The device was about the size of a large universal remote control and bore several LEDs, buttons and knobs, all labeled in neatly printed black permanent marker.
Price unfolded her slim notebook computer, waiting as it connected wirelessly to the secured network that controlled the flat plasma screens on the wall of the briefing room. As she did so, the careworn face of Hal Brognola suddenly appeared on the screen at the end of the room. Larger than life-size, the face of the director of the Sensitive Operations Group stared out at them with hound-dog sincerity from behind his desk, the scrambled transmission emanating from his office on the Potomac. The big Fed was chewing something, which Price knew was probably an antacid. Dark circles under his eyes betrayed the sleepless night he had no doubt just had.
Not for the first time, Price wondered if Brognola’s job was slowly killing him. The man from Justice answered directly to the President, but the covert antiterrorist organization that was Stony Man Farm—from the hidden base in Shenandoah National Park, where they now sat, to the network of resources and assets that included the black-operations soldiers sitting in front of her now—was Brognola’s baby before it was anyone’s. The troubles of the world rested squarely on Brognola’s shoulders before they weighed down anyone else.
“Good morning, Hal,” Price said.
Brognola huffed something that might have been a “good morning” of his own. He was looking away from the camera and thus from the microphone when he did it. He found the papers he was looking for and then looked into the lens of his own camera again. “Let’s get started,” he said.
Price nodded and then looked to Kurtzman, who lowered the lights in the War Room by fifty percent. Price tapped several keys on her notebook computer. The plasma screens on the walls that did not bear Brognola’s image came to life with the pictures of three men.
“Now there’s a respectable-looking lot,” McCarter muttered.
“You’re looking at Nargoly Pyragy, Kanzi Nihemedow and Gandosi Burdimedezov,” Brognola said. “Turkmen nationals who, according to our intelligence networks, were part of a terror network run by the recently ‘elected’ leader of Turkmenistan, officially known as ‘President for Life Nikolo Ovan.’”
“‘Were’?” Hawkins drawled.
“Were.” Brognola nodded. “Because just over eight hours ago, they blew themselves up rather spectacularly in a shopping mall in upstate New York.”
Price tapped more buttons and the images shifted to show video footage of a sea of police cars, fire engines, emergency vehicles and SWAT vans parked in front of the blackened entrance to what could have been a shopping center in any part of the United States. A sharp-eyed Calvin James sat forward in his seat.
“Why am I seeing hazmat response teams in that shot, Hal?” he asked.
“Good catch,” Brognola said. “This was no ordinary terrorist bombing,” he explained. “Aaron?”
Kurtzman nodded and addressed the assembled operatives. “From the point of view of a terrorist,” he said, “the hardest part about perpetrating a successful bombing is not finding the materials to make a device. It is not even planting the device, in most cases. It is detonating the device at a time when the explosion will do more than just property damage. In other words, the hard part is figuring out how to kill the most people.”
“Timers,” Tokaido chimed in as if on cue, “are imprecise. If the bombers are going to be long gone before the bomb explodes, they can’t control the conditions at detonation. In Iraq especially, our military have become adept at dealing with one of the ways terrorists circumvent