The Chameleon Factor. Don Pendleton

are the various agencies doing so far?”

      “Nothing. This is a White Project. Level Ten personnel only. As far as the FBI and the media are concerned, there was a gas explosion at a military warehouse in Alaska.”

      “Orders, sir?” Brognola asked grimly.

      “Search the wreckage, find out who stole the Chameleon, or if nobody did and this is all a gigantic coincidence. They do happen sometimes.”

      Yeah, right. “If it isn’t a coincidence, sir?”

      The President leaned closer to the screen. “Then get the Chameleon back at any cost. Get it back, Hal. And if that proves impossible, then destroy the prototype.”

      “Sir?”

      “You heard me. I’ll eat that billion dollars, and another billion on top, if that is what it takes to keep the U.S. safe. The Chameleon is dangerous enough in our hands. But at least we have checks and balances in our government. However, under the control of a terrorist group, or rogue nation, we’d never even know what was happening until Manhattan, L.A. or even D.C. was blown off the face of the map with millions dead.”

      “Understood, sir,” Hal said in a strained voice, and then bluntly added, “What a shitstorm!”

      The President gave a strained smile. “You took the words right out of my mouth, my friend.”

      A light flashed on the briefcase computer.

      “You should have the full files and aerial reconnaissance photos by now,” the President announced, doing something off-screen.

      “Just arrived, sir. Standard decoding?”

      “Yes. Move fast on this one, Hal. We’re completely in the dark so far, and that light at the end of the tunnel isn’t daylight, but a goddamn express train coming down our throats.”

      With a swirl of colors, the link was broken and the screen returned to its neutral silver sheen.

      Closing the briefcase, Brognola cupped a hand to his mouth and loudly shouted, “Hey, pilot!”

      In the wide cockpit, the blacksuit glanced over a shoulder. “Yes, sir!”

      “Turn around. We’re going back.”

      The man arched an eyebrow in surprise, but said nothing and tilted the stick in his grip. The pitch of the blades overhead changed, and the Black Hawk started to swing around in the sky.

      As the sun reappeared on the other side of the gunship, Brognola opened his briefcase once more and started to access a secret satellite.

      Within a few minutes, the screen cleared to show a blond-haired woman leaning forward on a desk. She was dressed in a simple blue workshirt, with no jewelry.

      “Forget your wallet, Hal?” asked Barbara Price, mission controller at Stony Man Farm.

      “Wish I had. Call them back,” Brognola ordered. “Both teams. Call everybody back. We’ve got trouble.”

      CHAPTER TWO

      Cassatt Federal Penitentiary, South Carolina

      Soft and low, the mournful call of a freight train moved through the night as armed guards in the high watchtowers closely scrutinized the arrival of an armored bus at the front gate of the Cassatt Federal Penitentiary.

      The first line of guards checked the driver’s ID and did an EM scan of the vehicle, then finally passed it through the outer, thirty-foot-tall fence. Once the bus was trapped between the first and second fences, more guards arrived with dogs to sniff for explosives or narcotics before the transport rolled through the inner, electric fence and finally onto a featureless parking lot. There were no concrete bumpers or ornamental bushes for anyone to take cover behind. Just a flat expanse of bare asphalt studded with tiny reflecting squares set into the tar and gravel, range finders to assist the sharpshooters in the watchtowers.

      In an ocean of bright lights, there came the sound of pumping hydraulic, and the huge ferruled doors on the Cassatt Federal Penitentiary began to ponderously cycle open.

      With the close of Alcatraz so many years ago, there had been an urgent need for new prisons to hold the worst of the worst, the mad-dog killers and terrorists that the courts had condemned to death. With nothing to lose, the prisoners would use any opportunity to escape, and since a person could be executed only once, taking another human life meant less than nothing to the cold-blooded psychopaths. Hence the creation of the Bureau of Prisons’ supermax facilities.

      Cassatt had been the first supermaximum prison created in the country, level six, absolute security. Yet there had proved to be men that even this ultralockdown couldn’t contain, and so there was forged the prison within a prison, the violent-control ward. Boxcar-style doors permitted no communication to other prisoners, video surveillance was twenty-four hours and there were no windows. Each prisoner had his own private cell. There was no mixing with other prisoners for his entire stay. Guards in the lotus-style control room could electronically open the cell door, and the unescorted prisoner would walk down empty corridors for his shower three times a week. There was no human contact with these violent repeat offenders. Ever.

      Yet the ingenuity of the criminals was incredible. Staples were attached to the tips of Q-Tips and blown through tubes made of rolled paper to strike passing guards. Dozens of makeshift weapons were created out of seemingly innocuous items, and more than one guard lost an eye, or worse, to the ingenious prisoners until full-coverage body armor and goggles became standard dress uniform.

      Cassatt supermax, and its fellow penitentiaries, weren’t ICCs, correctional institutes trying to correct the career of the professional criminal. The supermax was the end of the line, the edge of the world, and damn few who ever went in ever came out again, except in a black body bag.

      Security was tighter here to keep the prisoners in than it was at Cheyenne Mountain, where the purpose was to keep invading enemy armies out. The land beyond the perimeter of the second fence was barren and dead, a former uranium milling dumpsite that the EPA was still trying to clean after forty years. There was no grass to hide in, no weeds in the muddy creek, no trees whose branches could be used as a club. Additional sentry posts stood between the deadlands around the penitentiary and the city of Cassatt, forcing any escapee into the slag heaps of the toxic waste dump. A hundred men had tried to escape from Cassatt supermax over the years. Ten made it to the gate alive.

      Six got over the first fence, and two got over the second fence only to be blown apart by the radio-controlled land mines.

      The infamous Ossing of New York and Leavenworth of Kansas were considered luxurious country clubs compared to Cassatt supermax. But there were even more secure facilities now: Pelican, Logan and the infamous Florence in Colorado. Many of the inmates were insane, but no asylum ever built could hold the killers, and the violent-control ward of a supermax was the only chance of containing these enemies of civilization.

      Many people believed it would be much more humane to simply kill the prisoners than send them to the steel-caged hell of Cassatt. Every prisoner and guard of the supermax penitentiary agreed, except for four special inmates.

      As the final lock on the armored front gate was released with a hydraulic hiss, additional lights glowed into blinding brilliance, illuminating the parking lot and the grounds beyond for more than a mile. On the stone walls, searchlights swept the sky looking for small planes or helicopters. It was unknown who would want these four men free, but the list of people who wanted them dead at any cost was a mile long. Although they would be executed some day by the state, that wasn’t the right of any individual, and as much as they hated the idea the Cassatt guards were ready to die in order to protect the criminals from any vigilante justice, no more how much it was deserved.

      Ten guards in full combat gear stepped from the armored bus and waited while twenty men in full riot gear walked four prisoners through the doorway of the penitentiary. The inmates were dressed in bright orange prison jumpsuits, heavy shackles on their legs, handcuffs on their wrists,