Doomsday Conquest. Don Pendleton

Maybe someday, some other time, space or dimension, beyond the physical constraints of Earth, there would be a new and improved Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman.

      Leave it at that.

      There was work to do.

      Head of the cyberteam, the think tank of Stony Man Farm’s Computer Room—the nerve center for intelligence gathering that kept the warrior machine rolling in the trenches of the world’s flashpoints, overt or black ops—was his realm. As such, Kurtzman went back to tapping in the next series of access codes on his keyboard.

      They were alphanumeric codes and bypass encryption, what he tagged “circumventors,” the sum total faster and far simpler than any software program he’d previously created, though this one was designed for more than hacking. The FORTRAN, or formula translation, was part of his Infinity program, the server software managing and sifting through data from interconnected systems at light speed, until only the critical information he sought was framed on his screen. The client-servers were never the wiser he or one of his team had just broken through about three firewalls, stolen whatever buried cybertreasures, then rebuilt those walls after a lightning and untraceable bolt back to Stony Man mainframes. Whether they changed their passwords on a frequent basis or not, on the client-servers’ end, Infinity was the cryptographer’s answers to all mysteries of the cyberuniverse. Those faceless, nameless clients almost always came from any alphabet-soup intelligence agency within the United States and the world over, likewise any military or law-enforcement agency mainframes Kurtzman needed to access.

      He wasn’t sure what it was about the news report he’d been watching in a corner of his monitor since last evening, using the remote on his keyboard to snap through the local and national cable networks, but something disturbed him about the images of reporters being ushered away from what was clearly a large area quarantined by armed soldiers. Initial reports cited some natural disaster, or so the reporters were told by military spokesmen, belonging to what branch, though, no one knew or was allowed to say. Speculation had body counts mounting by the hour, but these nameless spokesmen were denying any such rumors. He heard about meteor showers, or something or other unexplained that had fallen from space. Each new report sounded flimsier than the last. He smelled cover-up, a brittle conspiracy ready to unravel with a good swift kick.

      And the Smoking Gun and Infinity programs were hard at work, he saw, alphanumeric codes tumbling in the top left-hand corner, as his labor of love raced out to those far reaches of the cyberuniverse to cross all pertinent I’s, dot the t’s of truth that not even the brightest award-winning journalist could uncover. Every shred of data from all U.S. intelligence agencies, black-inked or otherwise, was correlated with daily news reports, written or televised. Once any paper or station’s Web site dot.com was filed away into Infinity—Smoking Guns’s memory, the two programs became their own investigators. Between that and the sat imagery they burglarized from the satellite parked closest to the area in question—AIQ—in this instance North Dakota, and classified documents regarding military black ops and their installations within the state, Infinity did virtually all of the work for him. At the moment he was left with more questions than answers, but felt something far beyond space phenomenon had turned four separate areas in southwest North Dakota into what appeared to him on the imagery as smoking craters his trained eyed told him were the result of aerial strafing.

      He was wondering how far and how to pursue it, when he became aware his partner at this early morning hour had cranked up his CD to that kind of fuzzy contortion blasting out of his headphones that should have rendered Akira Tokaido deaf.

      Kurtzman wheeled sideways, Tokaido bebopping his head in rhythm to the tune. He held his arms out, caught his teammate’s eye, and said in a loud voice, “What the hell, huh?”

      Akira, still bopping, looked at Kurtzman’s mouth and said, “I can hear you just fine. You said, ‘What the hell, huh?’”

      “Okay, smart-ass. Do you think you can get to work while you’re getting all wet in the eyes over that blaring duet?”

      Still bopping along, Tokaido’s fingers began flying over his keyboard. Kurtzman saw his monitor split into two screens. “What am I looking at, Akira?”

      Two more images crowded the number on Kurtzman’s monitor to four.

      Tokaido killed his CD. “Clockwise, top to bottom. A major Russian weapons factory in the Pamir Range of Tajikistan, the usual we know about it, they know we know, and the beat goes on. We check it with some of our own sources, I’m sure they’d verify there’s more going on under the roof than your basic WMD alchemy, the floating rumor out of spookdom’s black hole being they’re engineering superweapons of the future. Next, for your viewing pleasure, what I believe—and since the DOD, NSA and Pentagon files I accessed had so many black deletions regarding this base I discovered at great length tagged as Eagle Nebula, thus you can safely assume black project—is our version of the Pamir weapons factory. Is East meeting West, both sides dreaming up the future together regarding superweapons? Don’t know, but I think it’s worth looking into, in this humble whiz child’s often overlooked opinion.”

      Kurtzman made a face. “Cut the crap or I’ll take away your CDs.”

      Tokaido paused, considering something, then went on, “Whatever they’ve engineered inside the walls of Eagle Nebula, however, is what I think either crashed or burned up what Infinity calculates is roughly two square miles and then some of scorched earth that makes the Badlands look arable.”

      “And you know this, how?”

      Kurtzman watched as Tokaido further enhanced the imagery and he saw what his partner was referring to.

      “Where there’s smoke, Bear… Now, the four areas the media is being pumped by the military to claim were hit by something from outer space are actually the results of cluster bombing. I compared those images through Infinity’s war-gaming, and they jibe. Blast radius, destruction pattern, spiral all the way down to the intensity of the fires, which indicate thermite payloads were used. These AIQs, I have confirmed, were civilian targets. From the body count, or what you can make out on your screen, gives you an idea of how nasty this could get if it’s going to involve a cover-up.”

      Kurtzman weighed the enormity of what he heard then saw, tallied at least a dozen bodies, or what looked like the remains of such, on one of the AIQs. “A test run, you’re telling me, that went awry?”

      “I would hope it wasn’t done on purpose.”

      Kurtzman flashed Tokaido a scowl. He began chewing over the current mission of Phoenix Force, which was, more or less, still on the drawing board. At present, they were bivouacked at the American air base in Incirlik, Turkey, while the cyberteam at the Farm kept digging for clues about rumored supertech weapons being smuggled to Iranian extremists, somewhere along the Iraqi border, further in the process of attempting to put together pedigrees and place names to the faces of bad guys in question from their ultratech lair.

      Kurtzman began to suspect he saw a pattern emerge, some connection, or so he believed Tokaido alluded to, between the death factory in Tajikistan and weapons-hungry jihadists. Was there more? Such as connecting the dots somehow to this Eagle Nebula black project? It wouldn’t be the first time, he knew, someone on the home team had sold out to the other side. Able Team was standing down, Kurtzman checking the digital clock at the bottom of his monitor, aware Hal Brognola, the man who headed the Sensitive Operations Group, would be arriving at his office at the Justice Department shortly. He needed to run his suspicions past the big Fed.

      “There’s more, Bear, only I’m not sure how this fits, if it does…only…well, it’s just a feeling,” Tokaido said, and Kurtzman watched as four more sat images flashed onto his monitor, blurring the previous pics. He heard Tokaido mention the three names of former Soviet republics, then told him the last image was shot by NASA. “Remember that story CNN ran a few years back about a purported NORAD quarantine of an area in the Colorado Rockies that was supposedly hit by some type of…well, what was described by an eyewitness as ‘alien space matter.’”

      Kurtzman knew he was looking at a full-blown military quarantine in each of the AIQs, complete