“What’s that you say? You want details?”
They were in a large stone dwelling that Rushti passed off as his personal command center. Four grim and heavily armed Cossacks manned a bank of computers and other surveillance and tracking monitors, but otherwise McCarter found the C and C base as shabby and desolate as any other square foot of Dagestan. The ex-SAS commando scanned the sheafs of paper, then looked up and scowled at Rushti, who was again wearing his Rasputin grin.
“Tell me you didn’t bring us here only to show me some pictures of a space shuttle?”
Shistoi, McCarter spotted, had been dumped like a sack of potatoes in the far corner, sulking but holding up his malevolent front. Manning and James, he knew, were moving into an adjacent room McCarter had requested for privacy, noting that he didn’t need to explain the reasons to his Russian contact. Pros that they were, Manning and James would sweep the room thoroughly with their EM and other ECM equipment stowed in the gear bag before trying to reach the Farm.
“Not a space shuttle, but a reusable launch vehicle, my American friend.”
McCarter grunted. “From what little I know about them, I believe the single glaring difference is it loses its external tanks once it clears the atmosphere, about a hundred miles up. I thought an RLV was years down the road? Costs, for one thing, then a whole slew of technological headaches, the least of which is getting into space with some massive solid rocket boosters or versions of, then bringing the whole bloody package back down to Earth.”
“It is a little more involved than how you stated. But the future, my American friend, has arrived. Expendable launch vehicles discard engines, fuel tanks, their support structures after one flight. What you are looking at is the prototype space plane. One, my American friend, that is right now ready for launch—and is armed with a thermonuclear payload. Those are blueprints, computer schematics, if you will, stolen from a secret base in Siberia.”
McCarter stared into Rushti’s eyes. There was no smile now, no glint in those black orbs. The Stony Man warrior knew the Russian was getting warmed up to drop a bomb.
Rushti snapped his fingers, one of the Cossacks flying up to him and handing off another stack of papers. He gave them to McCarter. “You may or may not wish to spend a few minutes questioning the criminal. But I suspect you will not learn much more than I did.”
“Which would be?”
“He and Zhuktul were hatching some plot, among other criminal endeavors, that involves the prototype RLV, a Russian RLV, I will add, and one that has many technological advances owed to American and European ingenuity. Further, I fear there is some connection between various organized criminals and the European Space Agency. And, I suspect, the ESA is guilty of training and hiring Islamic extremists here in Dagestan and in Russia.”
McCarter felt the hackles rise on the back of his neck. He scanned the black-and-white pictures of three men. They were shot moving, separately or in pairs or as a threesome through what looked like an airport, getting out of ZIL limos, or standing in countryside that resembled the scarred terrain of Dagestan, though he knew he was in a part of the world where any number of the “Stan” republics were interchangeable as far as the looks department went.
McCarter’s gut warned him he and his troops were suddenly dumped onto some ticking doomsday clock. He clenched his jaw, waiting for Rushti to fill in the blanks.
“Those three men are here in Dagestan.”
“And they have answers to some ongoing conspiracy involving what? The hijacking of an RLV armed with nukes?”
“That they might.”
“So, why are we standing here?”
Rushti squared his shoulders. “There may be a few details we need to work out first.”
“Such as?”
“Such as how we divide the dirty work, the risk, that would be, of even capturing them, for starters.”
McCarter worked his jaw. “Let me guess. Assuming we capture them in one piece, we then roll dice for who gets to keep them?”
Rushti cleared his throat, squared his shoulders. “It is not the glory of the capture or necessarily any intelligence they have on any terrorist plot that may strike at my country. Rather…beyond their capture and what we may or may not learn, I have a personal request.”
McCarter felt a rising cobra of tension in his belly as he waited for the grim punchline.
“A request, my American comrade, that would involve ultimate sabotage, and that may pit you and your men against the entire military and intelligence wrath of Mother Russia.”
DAVID ROSENBERG FOUND using pornography—to both lure followers with visits to Force of Truth sites and attack their enemies—distasteful, to say the least. Filling the human mind with sewage was the lowest common denominator, he thought, no less than a form of pimping, but there they’d been for some time now, feeding a sickness so rampant and widespread throughout Western society that they were actually helping to keep smut seated on its unholy throne as an acceptable form of entertainment. He hated to admit it, but morality and decency were losing, fast and hard, in the media-dubbed Culture Wars. On the other hand, he figured that to win certain battles for the Force of Truth sometimes he had to walk, albeit head bowed in shame, in an uneasy truce with the most undesirable of enemies in his war for the future of humankind. Sad to say, the bottom line was that without the creation of their own porn Webs, the message of the Force of Truth would not be as widespread or accessible as it was, though he hesitated to dismiss the lurid aspects of their work as just another sign of the times when he considered some of the team was barely out of puberty, prone to indulge overactive imaginations anyway, and with God only knew what kind of warped fantasies. The other angle—the key to whatever their success—was that porn had deflected the truth away from their real identity, as irate intelligence operators wondered if the cyberthieves were merely sick and twisted pranksters, or maybe fingers of blame were aimed at some coworker who clearly had too much time on idle hands. In the end, though, the prurient freak show had merely bought them a little more time before the hammer fell.
And the hammer was now falling, as Noah pointed out the obvious.
“That looks like a definite problem, old man.”
They were in the back office of the porn mecca, Rosenberg straining to make out the alarm in Noah’s voice as the infernal rock music seemed to pound on the door and walls with invisible sledgehammers. Minutes ago, their renegade blogger, the proprietor of Dreamland, had just finished transferring their files to a Web site he had created for them in Del Ray Beach, Florida. Rosenberg was finished shoving the CDs along with the rest of the hundred-dollar bills from his fifty grand rainy day stash at Dreamland inside a small satchel when he shot a look toward the bank of security cameras. Sure enough, it looked as if they were about to be dumped into the frying pan.
They were standard-issue black ops, buzz cuts, as grim as the Devil’s hellhounds, but the telltale signs of bulky weapons beneath their trenchcoats was more than evidence enough to Rosenberg they weren’t late-night customers here to peruse the rows of XXX videos, DVDs or hunker down in the slime pits of peep booths.
The war, though, had already begun. Since he couldn’t contact the rest of the team, he assumed they had fulfilled their roles as sacrificial lambs. A part of him detested himself for leaving them behind on the gallows in his place, stealing them time, but the older Polansky had volunteered, along with his brother and Job. There was a chance they could have been captured, but Rosenberg doubted just such a scenario that had hung by the flimsiest of threads to begin with. All along the six of them were clear on what could happen if they were found out and tracked down.
It was gut-check time.
“There’s a back way out to the lot.”
Rosenberg grabbed his Uzi off the desk. He looked at James Flincher, an old DOD friend who still didn’t look a day over thirty since their time together in spookland, and said, “Thanks. I apologize for any trouble you might have over us.”
“You did that coming in. And I knew what I was getting into from day one.”
Rosenberg could well believe that. Flincher had taken no small risk in feeding them access codes to various classified DOD files when Rosenberg had originally come to him with his Force of Truth vision.
“Oh, and which way were you implying was our escape hatch?”
Rosenberg spotted three more men in black rolling up on the back door, one of them working the lock with a slender shiny object. Flincher’s curse answered the Kid’s question.
Rosenberg was turning to ask his old friend if he had a Plan C when Flincher hauled a stainless-steel .45 ACP from out of the top desk drawer. The Dreamland owner chambered a round, snugged the cannon inside his waistband, left side, along with three spare clips, then draped the tails of his Aloha shirt over the weapon.
“I’ll take it this means you assume the worst?”
Moving for the door and thundering wrath of rock and roll, Flincher said, “David, I did that way back when I first starting working for the government.”
DREAMLAND.
For one frozen second, Carl Lyons felt as if he’d been transported to the gaudy glitz of Las Vegas. Reminding himself this was no R & R stint, the Able Team leader marched for the winking neon lights, the sign big and bright enough to be seen by the naked eye and clear to outer space, he imagined, a leggy blond nude the size of the Hindenburg perched over the billboard, blinking in places that left no doubt what went on inside the four walls.
For the love of…
Lyons wasn’t above a little examination of his own conscience, galled for a moment to think that under different circumstances he might cast his lot among this rabble. He had problems himself in certain areas, he knew, but any man willing to be more than a swine in slop found a way to rise above his base passions.
After their drive around the porn palace, and it looked to the ex-L.A. detective the compound gobbled up a tract of land half of a city block at least, as it squatted in the wooded foothills of the Blue Ridge and Sauratown mountains. No way the three of them could cover it, inside and out. Top that nasty truth with the fact they didn’t know the layout…
Good news. Rosenberg’s Caddie was parked out back, but the classic with shark’s fins and white walls was hardly inconspicuous among all the SUVs, 4WD Jeeps and a smattering of beaten-up older model cars. The first piece of bad news was the two black GMCs with government plates. The next round of dire omens came when they found all four tires on the Caddie shot to flattened tread. But, since Rosenberg was made by whoever and how many the opposition, then Lyons decided the black ops—should they escape—would likewise find themselves stranded and searching for a ride, unless they had eight spare tires on hand. Of course, Lyons knew there was the possibility they had roving backup, and considering they went into Virginia Beach, guns and laser blazing…
Lyons, sandwiched between Schwarz and Blancanales, gave his teammates a scathing look that left no doubt. There had been no concrete plan from the start, so why bother with finesse now?
Just the way Ironman Lyons liked it.
Bulldoze and blast.
He homed in on rock and roll that he figured might just lift the roof off by itself. He marched up the short flight of steps, crossed the porch, grimly aware of the weight he carried beneath the black leather trenchcoat. Schwarz and Blancanales likewise donned the custom-made “urban war coats.” They were slotted with deep pouches, both sides, plenty of room to hold spare clips and grenades. Both of them had mini-Uzis in special webbed rigging, Beretta 93-Rs stowed on the opposite sides.
Lyons’s hand slipped through the tailor-made cut in his coat, fisted the LAR, muzzle aimed at the ground, weapon hugged tight to his leg. At a passing glance, they could pass as just a few more lonely pervs, that was, until someone noted the com links snugged over their heads.
Schwarz shot ahead, opened the door to a blast of strobing light and heavy-metal hell.
Lyons strode in, all steel and malice of heart, ears so assaulted by the jumbo-jet decibels of drums and screeching guitar rifts he clung to hope no amount of shooting would be heard beyond these walls. A few long strides over the foyer, he stopped at the edge of the landing, gave the place a long sweeping scan, Schwarz and Blancanales rolling up on his wings and parking.
Row after row of videos and magazines were stacked six feet or more high. To the deep north end he saw the maze of curtained booths, the doors festooned with whatever the aberrant desire of choice. Off to his one o’clock there was a glass and chained-off area that housed every instrument of degradation and then some that would have left the Marquis de Sade wondering at the infernal sickness of it all. That such an abyss could thrive in this Bible belt neck of the woods told Lyons two things. One—the local law and politicians were involved, and with more than just getting their hands greased with cash. Two—there was a whole lot of hypocrisy throughout the land here. Case in point, Lyons spotted fifteen, maybe twenty guys lurking around, perusing titles, shuffling in and out of the peep chambers. More than a few of them were shame-faced, indulging in guilty pleasures when he was fairly certain they should be home with the wife and kids or the girlfriend.
And then Lyons saw them.
Three black-suited clones were rolling past the toy store, and walking with purpose. The dark sunglasses were a bizarre touch, but Lyons figured they didn’t care if they were noticed, since they most likely didn’t figure on leaving behind any witnesses.
Good enough.
As Lyons followed their hidden stares, he spotted four men to the deep northwest, and moving swift for the first line of peep booths. Beyond the black duffel and Uzi subgun in Rosenberg’s hands, their body language told Lyons everything he needed to know.
The surviving Force of Truth was running scared, but ready to shoot their way out of Dreamland.
Lyons gave the nod. Schwarz peeled off to grab the far left flank, Blancanales descending the short flight of steps to seize the middle row.
Then Lyons moved down and out, gathering steam as his ears pulsed with the clamoring noise from Hell and his heart pounded to the beat of his own dark intentions.