Starfire. Don Pendleton

It wasn’t.

      Two men, Brognola thought, that’s what the spook said, as he stepped outside, Glock fanning the Stygian gloom, right and left. Say he told the truth, then who was forcing Lyons to make the call to abort?

      The war van, lights out, was already waiting, the side door open, Schwarz at the wheel and confirming a message over his com link. A quick march past the outstretched shadow by the front door, the air still tainted with the after-bite of chemicals, and Brognola was up and in the high-tech belly. A second later, Lyons was bounding in on his heels.

      “Go!” Lyons barked at Schwarz.

      Brognola landed in one of the seats bolted to the floor. He held on as Schwarz threw the wheel hard left, then whipped the van around, engine snarling as the Stony Man warrior straightened. Lyons looked strange, frightened, if Brognola didn’t know better. The white-hot tension thickened yet more as Lyons, crouched in the door, watched the passing wooded hills, HK roving and ready. The Able Team leader growled for Schwarz to slow down as Lyons reached out and helped haul Blancanales aboard.

      “What the hell is going on?” Brognola demanded as Lyons slammed the door shut and Blancanales plopped down in front of a console. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say something or someone put the fear of God in the both of you.”

      Blancanales began working the GPS monitor with its grid map of the area, feeding Schwarz new directions other than the front gate they’d come through originally.

      Lyons slumped into a chair beside Blancanales. Brognola could almost smell the adrenaline oozing from the Able Team leader’s sweat as he tugged a swatch of shredded material from his combat vest, held it out and said, “Something did.”

      CHAPTER FIVE

      “Listen up like you have never listened to anyone in your short miserable lives. Because of this compulsion of yours to prove yourselves divine in comparison to the cybermight of the United States military intelligence industrial complex, we are now officially, young sirs, hot-wired. More to the point, I hope you know what, precisely, that means.”

      His name was David Rosenberg, but in the cyber-world and to his superhacker comrades in the Force of Truth he was known as Methuselah, and if they were listening, he believed only the Almighty would be able to tell.

      He took a few moments in hopes the coming Wrath of God intonations would sink in, as he stood, arms akimbo, in the narrow alcove to the living room of their double-wide mobile home. A former encryption master for the Department of Defense, Rosenberg understood the dilemma staring them all down, as he began to sense they knew they had crossed a line in the sand. Experience, he believed, counted light-years more than raw genius at the moment, a point he needed to hammer home, but subtly, through their thick craniums and Einstein IQs. He scowled and held the command look, nothing less than a father about to sound off with a barrage of much-deserved angry admonishment at rebellious sons. One by one, they finally decided to look away from their laptops, their network of modems and multiple processors. They looked uncertain whether to act sufficiently rebuked or turn smart-ass. He bet on the latter.

      Down the line they were Noah, Job, and Cain and Abel who were, in fact, the brothers Polansky. The skinny youth in the dark shades, working on a fat joint, with stringy hair down to his waist and all of eighteen was tagged the Kid. They were a motley crew, no doubt about it, but no one he knew of could match them when it came to computers and stealing information from cyberspace. He had personally tracked down three of them when they were hot, hauled their ragged bacon out of the frying pan, and maybe from worse than a stint in prison. The trio in question—Cain, Abel and Job—had hacked into classified government databases a few years back. They had stolen secrets they claimed to this day were irrefutable evidence of UFOs and extraterrestrials and a government cover-up, on through to who was behind both Kennedy assassinations to the coming extinction level event. Then thrown opposition networks into meltdown with the all-fearsome worm, a feat so incredible and embarrassing to two famous alphabet-soup agencies that not even a whisper of the crisis made the news. Both virus and worm writers, he knew, faced four years in the federal pen and up to half a million dollars in fines, which naturally no hacker ever caught with his fingers up the other’s guy mainframe ever seemed to have handy. Only in their cases Rosenberg suspected they would have been executed on the spot. That was, if he hadn’t descended on their doorsteps like manna from Heaven to offer them a job—of sorts—that matched their peculiar but undeniable genius. Saving their lives was an added bonus, his gift to them but one they had never once acknowledged. Genius could also be ungrateful to the extreme.

      Cain, whose Aloha shirt was brighter than the sun at noon, took a sip from whiskey-spiked coffee. “What’s the beef, Grandpa? It’s just another day in Cyber Paradise, us ‘young sirs’ merely doing what we signed on for.”

      The smart-ass route, then.

      Methuselah had the sudden urge for a cold beer if only to clamp a lid on his rising anger. Instead, he torched a foot-long Havana cigar with a gold-plated lighter engraved with the Star of David. Blowing smoke, he stared at Johnny Polansky, bobbed his gray head. The twenty-six-year-old high school dropout had just come off seven years for manslaughter for stabbing a guy in a bar fight that left him half dead in the process and for which the jury had cut him some years. Going to court with wired-jaw, mashed nose and half of one ear sliced off had also helped pluck a few heartstrings, not to mention the dead man was a notorious three-time loser and suspected pedophile no one in all of Little Rock, Arkansas, would have missed anyway. Having sworn off cocaine, whiskey was the new magic potion the elder Polansky claimed helped him dig deeper into his black hole of creativity. The sad truth was, all of them had their demons. Even Job—what with his computer printout of God First, Fellow Man Second, Cyberspace Third in bold black letters around a crucifix and tacked over his laptop—was a heavy boozer. What could he do? It was most likely warped reasoning on his part, but Rosenberg reckoned he granted them indulgence in the Devil they knew best, if only to keep them steady and walking their highwire act on the tightrope between madness and genius.

      With rare exceptions, human beings, he knew, created their own comfort zones, clung like infants to whatever the vice or ill behavior, and God forbid someone should attempt to invade the personal barrier. With this bunch, he figured talent and the extraordinary risks they took to uncover various truths of the ages—but splash them all over their AlphaDataSystems.com—had earned them some slack.

      “Despite your best efforts,” Rosenberg began anew, “to ghost your trails, I have just learned we have more than piqued the curiosity of the No Such Agency.”

      Noah swiveled in his leather wingback. The chair was splashed with colored artwork from predatory animals, UFOs, ETs, to tacked-in pics of his favorite film and song queens. “Then we were right. What did I say? If that’s a farm in the Shenandoah Valley, then I’m your grandson and I’ll go build you an ark right now.”

      “First and foremost, ‘right’ has nothing to do with it. And second and last, an ark won’t cut it. If what I hear is true—and I have no reason to believe other-wise—then we’ll need that Mothership you whiz kids are always ranting about to drop down and take us all away—about a thousand light-years into deep space.”

      Job piped up. “What are you talking about, oh gray-haired sir? No Such Agency is moving on us? We’re civilians, not some gun-packing black ops who are out to sell classified intelligence.”

      “Besides,” Cain said, “you’ve seen the sat photos, all the thermal imaging from midnight passovers by Big Brother in space. You’ve read the e-mail that lays out whoever these people masquerading as apple pickers use as hot sites for emergency contacts. Interpol. FBI. Mossad is even in their black bag of vipers. Then we have CIA station chiefs in various embassies from London to Tokyo who are feeding them sitreps through about a dozen back channels we’ve discovered.”

      “So bring on the spooks.” Abel—Jimmy Polansky—joined in, grinning like a fool as he lit an unfiltered Camel cigarette. “What we have on them, I say we can use as blackmail leverage to keep the wolves at bay.”

      “Yeah,”