Starfire. Don Pendleton

not exactly up for congressional funding, Bear. What’s your point?”

      “Oh, don’t get me wrong, I understand full well the ramifications here. My point is, say we do find them. Statistically most hackers are about fourteen to twenty-five years old. Kids for the most part. Geniuses, without a doubt, but still kids.”

      Price knew where Kurtzman was headed, but felt annoyed nonetheless that she had to spell it out. “I wasn’t planning on offering them a job here at the Farm, Bear.”

      “But?”

      “They’re a clear and present danger to our very existence. If information has been stolen from us, or if our location is pinned down and they think it’s cute and clever to announce to the world who we are, or they want to serve some mercenary agenda—blackmail for money—then we need to pay them a visit. Retrieve or destroy the information, and give them a stern and fair warning.”

      Kurtzman nodded. “Give us another hour, give or take, and I can let you know something definite.”

      “I’ll be in the War Room. I want a full package on each front in one hour.”

      “Will do.”

      Price left them to their individual tasks. As she headed toward the armored door, she felt her stomach roll over, her jaw tighten. There was no way to spin any positive angle on what they faced. Both the Farm and the world, she knew, had been shoved to the edge of the abyss by unknown enemies with equally unknown objectives. It was too often standard operating procedure to hurl themselves into the fire, armed with little more than questions and sordid hanging riddles, the sum total of which always put countless innocent lives on the scales of life and death. But stomping out flash-points before mass murder and anarchy could spread to consume entire countries and potentially send the entire world spiraling toward doomsday was what they did best. Only the present critical mass felt more sinister and threatening than at any previous time she could recall during her stint as mission controller. It appeared someone—or some nation—was sending a message they were armed with nukes and could drop them at will from space…

      If humankind went the way of the dinosaur, then her worries Stony Man could be exposed by hackers wouldn’t matter in the least. All horrible truth be told, if the world went up in a thermonuclear holocaust, then likewise it would be as if the Farm never even existed.

      End of game.

      End of life on Earth.

      Or so far as all of them now knew it.

      Maryland

      AS MUCH AS Carl Lyons hated ventures through spook snake pits, it struck him that, more often than not, he found himself doing just that. All the slick lies, intrigue and backstabbing, and those spooks who straddled the fence armed with personal agendas, could put any number of politicians on the grease to shame. Not to mention it seemed he was always creeping—or being led—to the doorstep of waiting Death.

      Well, it wasn’t his place to grumble why, he knew. Just dig in, do it. Nicknamed “Ironman,” he was no marshmallow melting in the flames of adversity. And Hal Brognola had handed Able Team its standing orders.

      A two-hour-plus jaunt from D.C., for starters, following a web of backcountry roads off the interstate as given to the big Fed by his Shadow Man, and they were guided in by the GPS in the Farm’s custom war van. They were here now in the wooded belly of Western Maryland, about thirty miles south of Gettysburg to be more exact. One of Lyons’s two teammates had disgorged alongside him into the dark unknown, right in front of the gate with its No Trespassing sign, two klicks and change out from the concrete bunker dug into the hillside where the shadow encounter would go down, and which Stony Man cyberburglars had been fortunate enough to steal a peek at from a passing satellite. Any threat, Brognola warned, wouldn’t be overt; it would come sudden and out of nowhere, if personal experience served him right. In other words, Lyons and company knew to trust no one, and to not, under any circumstances, allow the seeming absence of menace to lull them into dropping their guard. These particular wolves in sheep’s clothing, he knew—black ops who put themselves above the law and who would execute innocent civilians if it served their twisted ideal of protecting national security—often came bearing smiles and friendly assurances while waving a white flag.

      The former Los Angeles detective and current leader of Able Team dropped to a crouch behind a pine tree for quick situation assessment. Given that they knew next to nothing about Brognola’s rendezvous with the unknown spook source, they were ready to go tactical at the first double signal transmitted over vibrating pagers fixed to their respective hips. Like Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, he was togged in a blacksuit and weighted down with a combat harness and slotted vest stuffed to the gills with grenades, spare clips, on down to a sheathed Ka-Bar fighting knife on his shin. In lieu of his Colt Python .357 Magnum, the Able Team leader’s new sidearm of choice was a .50-caliber Desert Eagle, with mounted laser sight. Its clip was filled with fifteen rounds of special “black rhino” hollowpoint pulverizers. Stony Man’s resident armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, swore he could now nearly shred Kevlar like foam. Schwarz, he knew, was sitting with the war van, watching thermal screens and monitoring parabolic sensors for any traffic, human or vehicular, while Blancanales was on the move in a perimeter sweep to his deep right flank.

      All set, but for what?

      Lyons scanned the forested slopes through night-vision goggles, the Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun with attached sound suppressor and laser sight rolling in unison with his visual surveillance. Lyons listened to the dead silence. No matter how hard it tried, no matter the level of skill earned by tough experience, no living creature could advance in total silence through any such terrain. And that went for Blancanales, too, despite the fact the man was a Vietnam vet who had been baptized in the blood-soaked jungles of Southeast Asia where there was nothing but armed ghosts who moved silent as the wind. There was brush, twigs, stones to contend with, uneven but hard-packed earth to avoid, that would yield to encroaching weight. The body gave off distinct odors, often through expelled breath. Say a stalking opponent was inclined to smoke, booze, meat, or a splash of yesterday’s after-shave, or just so happened to be sweating out any number of toxins…

      And Lyons caught a whiff of cigarette residue as a sudden breeze rustled through the woods. As good fortune had it, he was downwind. The trouble under these circumstances was that he was up against professionals, bad habits or not. As such they would have night vision, EM scanners—

      What the hell was that? Lyons wondered. The figure—if he could call it such—was nearly invisible despite his infrared radiation-enhanced eye. It was a specter of human form, but in blurry white outline, almost perfectly blended with the outcrop beyond a stand of trees. Was it standing or moving, and where did it come from so suddenly? He wasn’t even sure he was looking at a living creature, since there was no discernible light-wave read, then he saw a subgun that appeared all but suspended in the air. Instinct screamed at Lyons he was marked, dead to rights, whatever the apparition, and if he wasn’t witness to the Invisible Man, then that was a mounted battery-operated weapon.

      And going for broke!

      Lyons was dropping for maximum shield behind the fat base of a pine just as the white beam of a laser speared the ghost-murk of night vision and bark flayed his exposed cheek and jaw to the burping retort of muffled subgun.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      “Extinction Level Event. ELE, if you like.”

      If he liked. Hell, Hal Brognola didn’t like any of it. Not the Shadow Man’s flare for the dramatic, nor his vague reasoning of shared interests in national security, certain these meets were also manufactured fishing expeditions. Brognola grew conscious of the Glock 17 stowed beneath his suit jacket, having already noted the hardware tucked at left bicep level under Shadow Man’s windbreaker.

      “What do you know about the space alerting and defense system?”

      He was no astronomy expert by any stretch, but he knew the basics enough to