Silent Arsenal. Don Pendleton

Now.”

      “Listen to me,” she said, her voice lowering to a whisper, Lyons straining to make out her voice as it was drowned by the thunder of rock and roll. She pulled back, Lyons swearing he saw her eyes misting. “I—I made a mistake…you don’t want to know…”

      “Wrong. I want to know now more than I did when I came in.”

      “I can’t.”

      Lyons could almost reach out and touch the wall of fear, her hand shaking as she ground out the smoke, uncrossed her legs. It was a bad move, as Lyons envisioned the cavalry en route, but he reached over, grabbed her arm.

      “I’m not leaving until you answer my question.”

      “You’re already gone, sport.”

      She was breaking away as Lyons heard the voice he’d already put the face to tell her, “Get dressed, and take off. Your VIPs are here.”

      “I wasn’t finished.”

      “You’re finished, sport, but first me and you are going to have a conversation. Now,” he said, Lyons watching as the Perm settled into the booth, “we can handle this one of two ways…”

      CHAPTER TWO

      “I see I have your undivided attention.”

      Brognola was glancing up from the first series of high-resolution satellite imagery when the cocky grin vanished off sunglasses. The remark, he supposed, was in reference to how intently the big Fed studied photos. Whoever the shadow emissary—CIA, NSA, DIA—Brognola found himself impatient to get on with the brief. He sensed, though, some undercurrent of resentment building the more Sunglasses dawdled, sitting here, inscrutably silent, the watchful Sphinx likewise desiring for a mere civil servant of the Justice Department to know how important he was, a spook holding the key to some divine riddle. A crisis was being dumped in his lap, requiring the immediate resources of the Farm, and Brognola didn’t have time or patience for spook nonsense, nor was he about to explain why he was the man of the hour and Sunglasses was designated the White House gofer. If that’s what he even was, and Brognola didn’t much care.

      “I see HAZMAT suits,” Brognola said. “A jungle compound, Asian soldiers. I’ve got what I’m thinking look like poppy fields, fires all over the place, high-resolution photos of corpses, and which, I presume, are being incinerated, presumably killed by some biological or chemical agent. Clearly a contaminated, quarantined area.”

      “Clearly. And you presume correct.”

      “Do you think you can tell me what I’m looking at in ten words or less and skip the X-Files routine?”

      “You are looking at the Kachin State in Burma.”

      “Myanmar.”

      “Burma, Thailand and Laos, of Golden Triangle infamy, produce over eighty percent of the world’s opium.”

      “I’m aware of that. You’re here to talk about the scourge of dope?”

      “Production of heroin in Burma alone has quadrupled the past five years, demand—so both the DEA and our intelligence community reports—rising exponentially as various terror organizations use funds from narcotics trafficking to expand their global jihad. Part of the dilemma from our standpoint is the State Law and Order Restoration Council—SLORC—has taken over heroin production from the rebels, making Burma an even more closed society than it previously was. Makes it tough to get operatives on the ground, infiltrate rebel groups sympathetic to the cause of freedom and justice.”

      Whose freedom, whose justice? Brognola wondered, feeling his cynical meter shooting up the longer he sat in the presence of Sunglasses. If this was headed where he suspected—dumping his Stony Man warriors inside Myanmar for some protracted jungle war against SLORC-sponsored drug armies—he would send Sunglasses back to the Man, tail tucked between the crack of his silk slacks.

      The spook had to have read his look, said, “I say something wrong?”

      “I’m assuming you’re not here to enlist my services in the war against drugs?”

      The spook cleared his throat, carried on in a voice that bordered condescending. “There are roughly thirty-five known major rebel groups, most of them fighting for independent chunks of real estate or to take back control of the poppy fields. The SLORC isn’t about to let that happen. It appears some form of high-tech genocide is being unleashed on the indigenous Burmese, but we know it wasn’t perpetrated by the SLORC.

      “All drug roads may lead to Thailand and Laos, but the real gold at the end of the rainbow may lead to China, the lion that no longer needs to sleep. You have a major gas pipeline under construction in Burma, which may stretch all the way through Thailand to Vietnam, plans for an overseas pipeline reaching clear to Indonesia, the Chinese might even want to get into the act. The SLORC needs money for this task. They need more and bigger guns. Drug money is a fast and easy way to spread the corruption of their military junta around Southeast Asia. If certain situations can be corrected in Burma, the west has a great interest in helping to engineer this international pipeline.

      “The SLORC and its drugs and this latest incident are the hurdles. Now, the Chinese have the weapons and the technology for delivering mass death, if the SLORC chooses to lie down with them. The fear is Yangon has either gone high-tech and is seeking, or has acquired weapons of mass destruction. There is a major principal, already known to our intelligence community, who has been looking to trade the technology for WMD but who are also interested in more money generated by narcotics trafficking. Shadows inside shadows, wolves coming to the table in sheep’s clothing, so to speak.”

      So much for ten words or less, Brognola thought, perusing the horror show in his hands.

      “What crashed in the Kachin was robotic spacecraft,” Sunglasses went on.

      “A satellite?”

      “The robotic spacecraft was in low earth orbit and was picked up and tracked by the NRO as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Deliberate deorbiting, the Kachin, it appears, was chosen as a laboratory, victims the test subjects. The flight path was controlled by computers on Earth, we greatly suspect, but sufficient heat was picked up to tell us it was also using boosters but in reverse thrust. It actually slowed to a near hover, unleashed its payload, by aerosol first then remote-controlled detonation, spreading the whole mess over several square miles. Depending on the weather, contamination could have reached as far as Yangon. From there, cross-border contamination, we don’t know.”

      “Who?”

      “I’m getting to that.”

      Brognola scowled. “What’s the agent?”

      “That is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Some sort of bioengineered virus is the educated guess, and which appears nearly one hundred percent fatal. It would appear to make a Level Four virus—the worst—like catching the flu in comparison to this Bio-Agent X. We have CIA, DEA in the Golden Triangle, contract agents—mostly rebels—but Yangon is keeping a tight lid on this particular boiling pot. We can’t get any of our operatives close enough to the hot zone. Word of this disaster has leaked out to the UN, Red Cross, and so on, all manner of aid and assistance being offered to the SLORC from the world community.”

      “I take it that’s not going to happen, not if Yangon thinks there’s a coming foreign invasion to burn down their poppy fields.”

      “Channels of communication are open, but it will be a tough sale. It gets worse.” Another pause for dramatic effect, then Sunglasses continued. “We parked a spy spacecraft over the area in question. It was attacked at 1000 EST by a roving military spacecraft trailing in the same high-altitude geosynchronous—east to west—orbit. An anti- or hunter-killer robotic spacecraft completely destroyed it. The measured blast radius picked up by our command and control data handling systems at the NRO, NSA and CIA was big enough to vaporize several city blocks. Whether its platform is also loaded with nuclear capability…we