Ramrod Intercept. Don Pendleton

and get it launched as part of the Pentagon’s Special Access Programs. It was designed to go down in flames on purpose, make certain an avalanche of badges and subpoenas came crashing down on DYSAT, all the sound and fury of the Justice Department, trumpeting out the intimidation, offering guys immunity in the Witness Protection Program and the like. But also in mind from the start would be the final conflagration, stoked and brewed to critical mass, while he skipped out the door, all the way to the bank.

      The genius of it all was it had been worked out by his own cunning and the toil of spilled blood on his hand.

      Everything in life ended. Everyone died. Survival was not necessarily for the fittest.

      Survival was simply survival. They said that after the big one dropped, only the cockroach would inherit the earth. Mindful of that disgraceful tidbit, just how special could man be?

      Not very, he thought.

      If there was no hope for humankind, there was also no redemption, and certainly no salvation. Armageddon was inevitable; it just needed a decent shove in the right direction to ignite the fuse.

      He sat in his large, deep-cushioned swivel chair, scanning the massive office suite, an amused smile tugging at his mouth. Beyond his teakwood desk, the size of three grand pianos, Grandahl and Preuter were busy on their secured cellulars, trying like hell but failing to dial up their hitters. He wanted to believe no news was good news, but the whole deal was unraveling fast. He could feel it, a noose dangling over his head, ready to drop and put the squeeze on.

      It was time to clean up the garbage and bail.

      Yes, he had wanted this whole venture to fail from the start. Failure, he once heard said, was often the measure of a man’s success, but he never bought into that loser’s philosophy. Granted, he had failed in three marriages, with seven children he never saw spread all over the country, but what could he say? Women were women, and a man needed far more in life than the comfort and stability of some suburban purgatory.

      A man needed conquest, honor and respect. It was either the bliss of heaven or the agony of hell; nothing in between was acceptable. And, no mistake, never again would he fail at anything. DYSAT was his baby, and if he had given it life, he could most certainly take it away. He had always believed the real power in the world came from the left hand of darkness anyway, the true father of light. Even the devil, he believed, had real feelings and needs. It was simply a question of having those wishes honored by the legions of faithful subjects. Meaning they had to be prepared to not only sacrifice their lives for him, but also sell him their very souls.

      Still, he often thought life would have been much simpler, easier if he had been, say, a biker. Riding in the wind. A big middle finger jammed in the eye of society at large. Wheeling and dealing guns and dope… Well, he could at least claim he was something of an arms dealer, an outlaw, to be sure.

      And outlaws only had to care about and look out for number one, which was why his stint as an Air Force air commando had been brief to the point of ridiculous. Search-and-rescue missions didn’t mean much more than a gob of flying phlegm when a man didn’t care if human beings lived or died. On then to a number of years working as a special black operative, guarding classified Air Force installations where they were building the future of super high-tech. Grooming contacts and, of course, quietly removing any thorns in his side on his climb to the top.

      Well, Jim Lake had finally arrived. His big deal was on the table, in the wings, ready to fly. The college kids had been nothing more than pawns, mere toilet paper, he thought. Bring them on board, unleash a few secrets, here and there, fat salaries so they could indulge their every whim and petty earthly desire. He always knew a couple of them would have cracked under the strain of uncovering knowledge of high-tech espionage, state-of-the-art goodies being delivered to so-called enemies of the United States. Truth was, he had counted on them to go running, pants wet, to the Feds. By the time the real law figured it out, he would be long gone, a whopping numbered account overseas, engineering grand schemes to bring on some doomsday from a remote tropical paradise. It would be a sort of in-their-face gesture, proving to every American man, woman and child, from the hallowed classified halls of the Pentagon all the way to Silicon Valley, that Jim Lake was just a little smarter, tougher and, yes, better looking than they were.

      That Jim Lake wasn’t only his own man, but a god among mere mortals to be worshiped.

      He was scanning the bank of security cameras hung from the ceiling over his desk when he spotted the two men in the lobby. The bigger one was haggling with the security guard, flashing a wallet packet, looking as if he were poised to fly over the desk and start slapping the man. A Fed, on the muscle, only if that guy was a Fed he was Gandhi.

      “Gentlemen, I believe we’re about to have company.”

      “I don’t like the looks of those two,” Grandahl said, craning his neck some to stare up at the camera bank. He was fingering his goatee, running a nervous hand over his shiny dome. “I can’t raise Morton or Roswell. We should have heard from them by now. We know the Justice Department was set to bag—”

      Lake sounded a long deep chuckle, a hollow knell that seemed to swell up the suite with the sound. “Relax. We’ll deal with them. It’s time we wrapped this up anyway. We have one more pigeon out there on the run to take care of. We have a backup security force in town, which you just put out the call to, on standby.” He leaned up, smoothed out the arms of his silk jacket, punched a button on his phone. “Giddell, I’ve got company on the way. They look rather unpleasant.”

      “Yes, sir, I saw them, too.”

      “Stand by but make yourself available next door. There’s going to be some noise, then we’re bailing.”

      “Understood, sir.”

      Lake wheeled back a few inches, reached under his desk and slid the Uzi submachine gun from out of its special mounting. He checked the load, cocked the bolt, then took a peek at the Beretta 92-F in shoulder rigging. If it wasn’t enough, there was an arms cache in a hidden wall panel, twelve paces to his right.

      “When we’re finished here,” Lake told his hitters, “we go pay this little snip Godwin a visit. I’m hearing he got his filthy paws on the Ramrod Intercept microchips and data manual. Without those, gentlemen, my deal may fall through. If I can’t retrieve them, our whole timetable will be altered.”

      “Meaning?” Grandahl asked.

      “Meaning we’ll have to go the lab in Idaho and pick up another batch. I had planned to do that anyway. One last shipment has already been arranged through a CMF.”

      “A classified military flight,” Grandahl said, nodding. “Sweet.”

      “Standard procedure. Look alive, they just hit the elevator.”

      Of course, he took the obligatory alerting phone call from the security guard.

      “They had badges, Mr. Lake, looked official, meaning they looked real enough to me. Special Agents from the Justice Department, they’re telling me. Carl Lemmon and Rosario Bocales. I—”

      “Not a problem, there was nothing you could do. I’ll handle it. Thank you.”

      Jim Lake leaned back and sounded off another death knell chuckle. Life, he thought, was just about to get real interesting.

      And what was real gain, true triumph on the way to glory without risk?

      WHEN LYONS AND BLANCANALES stepped off the elevator to the DYSAT floor, they found yet more cameras monitoring their every step.

      Lyons led the march toward the mammoth teak doors with the gold-plated Jim Lake, President hung as large as a Vegas neon sign. He could feel Pol’s nerves mounting as they closed on the doors, the mirrored walls reflecting their grim looks, the cameras catching them on the roll. Lyons felt his own personal time bomb ticking away in his gut.

      It was time to start spreading the misery around, kick a few of the top dogs in the teeth.

      “How come I feel like raising a middle finger salute to one of those?” Lyons