Critical Intelligence. Don Pendleton

walked across the room, nodding to where Akira Tokaido and Carmen Delahunt sat at workstations. A giant flat screen was fixed to the wall above their heads. The monitor was silent and still, for the moment showing only the screen saver: an image of the movie poster for The Magnificent Seven with the quote from the script, “We deal in lead, friend.”

      “Time?” Price asked.

      “M-Minute minus twenty seconds,” Kurtzman replied.

      From the other side of the room he used a blunt, square-tipped finger to toggle his wheelchair away from his workstation. The electric engine of the power chair ramped up as the leader of the Stony Man cybernetics team pulled even with Stony Man’s mission controller.

      “Okay,” Price said. “Bring central synchronistic communications online.”

      At her station, Carmen Delahunt typed a command on her keyboard. Inside Price’s headset earjack, the receiver popped and the ex-NSA operational manager nodded once to Delahunt.

      “Stony Base to Stony Eagle,” she said. “Radio check, over.”

      Instantly the voice of Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi answered, coming over the digital link with crystal clarity. “Base, this is Bird,” he replied. “I have good copy.”

      Price gave a curt nod to herself and turned toward the communal HD screen and pointed a finger.

      Kurtzman tapped a command on an interface board built into his power chair and the screen switched to a satellite image of the Earth. The observation platform was a Keyhole satellite in near-Earth geosynchronous orbit completely dedicated to the needs of Stony Man operational taskings.

      “Stony Base to Stony Hawk,” she continued.

      “Stony Hawk, good copy,” Able Team leader Carl Lyons answered in clipped syllables.

      On the screen the sat image rotated until the HD monitor showed the Western Hemisphere. Kurtzman tapped out a few clicks on his keypad, centering the screen over Central America, and then began to tighten its resolution as it slid down toward the southern continent. Kurtzman hit another command key and a political map was overlaid on the topographical features.

      “Do you have eyes on target?” Price asked.

      “Affirmative,” Lyons responded.

      “Eagle, give us your position,” Price told Grimaldi.

      “I’m in a holding pattern behind Hill 372, about three klicks out,” Grimaldi said.

      On the overhead monitor the political map showed Colombia. The spy camera tightened its resolution even further and suddenly the POV began descending at a rapid rate.

      To the onlookers it seemed as if they were in the nose of a plane as it dive-bombed through wispy patches of clouds toward the earth below.

      “Hawk and Eagle, we are green light go,” Price said. “I repeat, we are green light go.”

      “Copy,” Grimaldi answered.

      “Copy,” Lyons said.

      Price looked to the wall. On one side of the image, scrolling vertically were GPS coordinates blinking rapidly next to numerical sets of longitude and latitude readings.

      Patches of green and brown, at first unidentifiable, formed into a jungle canopy over a series of rolling hills. On the southeast side of the screen a broad, fast-moving river cut through the trees. Up the sheer plateau from the water, a brown dirt road cut out of the rugged geography.

      From his position at his workstation Akira Tokaido manipulated the sat image. The camera view settled on a flat area of the map. At first the location appeared to be nothing more than dense brush where the road ended.

      “Toggling to IR,” Tokaido informed the room.

      His thumb struck the appropriate key and instantly the crystal-clear picture on the screen changed to a swirling mesh of colors based on radiant heat that made the monitor appear like a watercolor canvas.

      On the screen the figures beneath camouflage netting showed up immediately. Roughly two dozen individuals moved around, spread over an area the size of a soccer field.

      Several bright spots indicated where industrial furnaces were active and in one section of the field several large vehicles sat clustered in parallel rows. Cool rectangular blobs revealed Quonset huts and long, narrow buildings of concrete and wood.

      The tension in the room grew as they waited for the field teams to strike. Barbara Price leaned forward and grabbed the backrest on an office chair. She squeezed it hard until her knuckles shone white from her grip.

      Then, on the screen, all hell broke loose.

      CHAPTER THREE

      Colombia

      Carl Lyons lifted his Bushnell binoculars and scanned the FARC camp below. Able Team’s position was located right above the only road leading into the terrorist outpost. This was a hammer-and-anvil operation, with Able Team serving as the anvil.

      The readout on the range finder built into the optics showed 204 meters. Sweat trickled down Lyons’s body, sliding over his feverish skin to collect at his armpits, navel and groin. He was a big man and heavily muscled, which made the heat a burden to him. He was growing crankier by the second.

      Behind him in the brush Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz slapped a mosquito. The Able Team electronics genius was crouched next to a 80 mm mortar. Lined up in front of the squat weapon’s base plate were six rounds: two high explosive, two antipersonnel, two white phosphorous. He lowered a compass and quickly adjusted the angle of the tube based on his reading.

      On the ground a tripod-mounted electronic device hummed softly. The size of a Power-Book it had an antenna dish set in the top that slowly rotated. On loan from the Pentagon through the DARPA—Defense Advance Research and Projects Agency—program, the XM-12 was a field-portable scrambler unit capable of disrupting digital signals in addition to radio waves.

      Out in front of Schwarz and Lyons the third member of Able Team lay belly-down on the soggy ground. Ex-Special Forces sergeant Rosario Blancanales had his right eye suctioned up close against the rubber cup of his sniper scope.

      “You heard the lady,” he growled. “Let’s do this thing.”

      “Phoenix inbound,” Grimaldi informed them over the com link. “Adios, assholes,” Blancanales muttered to the narcoterrorists. Behind him Schwarz picked up the first HE round.

      In the reticule of his scope the Puerto Rican’s crosshairs were settled on a bearded FARC soldier manning the machine gun position at the entrance to the camp.

      The man wore dark khaki fatigues stained with sweat. His tangle of long, greasy black hair was kept back by a shapeless black beret, and he wore a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power in a belt holster opposite the sheath for a wicked-looking machete.

      He laughed, and blunt, very white teeth stood out like neon against his walnut-brown complexion. On his web gear he carried a sat phone, which had first alerted Blancanales that this was a leader. Two other soldiers, much younger and beardless, stood around listening to the older man talk, M-16 A-2 assault rifles in their hands.

      Blancanales slowly released his breath and felt his world narrow to the crosshairs of his scope. The FARC leader’s fatigue shirt was open to the belly, revealing an expanse of curly black hair across his lean chest. A gold chain hung down between the man’s pectoral muscles. Blancanales’s crosshairs centered there.

      From the valley there was the sudden sound of an approaching helicopter. The man snapped his head around at the noise. The M-21 sniper rifle with folding paratrooper stock coughed once as Blancanales squeezed the trigger in a slow, controlled movement.

      Across two hundred yards he saw the FARC leader jerk as the 7.62 mm NATO round struck him. In the sniper optic Blancanales saw blood halo out behind the man in a fine mist. The target half spun, crumpled to his knees, then