Stony Man # 35
Message to America

CHAPTER ONE

Riga, Latvia
Maritime Fishing Docks
3:30 a.m. Local Time

David McCarter stamped his rubber-booted feet on
the pier's wet planking, trying to drive the chill from
his toes. Through the wide gaps between the boards,
he could see the Daugava River, black and swirling
below. The stink of rotting fish that rose from the
water obliterated the salt tang of the Baltic Sea, which
was less than a mile downstream; it made McCafret
remember the old joke about sausage, that anyone
who'd seen it made would never eat it. He dragged
on the loosely packed, harsh Belomor cigarette he
was smoking and wondered to bloody hell if he was
ever going to be able to face another plate of fish and
chips.
    The barrel-chested man at McCarter's side nudged
him with a half-full Kuban vodka bottle. Gary Man-
ning was dressed like McCarter, in a baggy khaki pea
coat with the collar turned up, worn wool pants, blue
watch cap, rubber boots and crusty knit gloves with
the fingertips hacked off. Under the glare of the pier's
lamppost, dew glistened on the naps of their caps and




coats; it dripped from the lines and cables of the
trawlers and tugboats tied up along the quay.
    The lateness of the hour meant nothing to the Riga
trawl fleet, which worked around the clock during
fishing season. A nearly constant stream of small, die-
sel-powered trucks rumbled back and forth in front of
the two men, towing fish carts between trawlers and
the processing plants, moving pieces of heavy equip-
ment and supplies to and from the boats. Marine en-
gines idled, rivet guns whacked, hoists and chains
clanked and creaked, providing a background din that
would hide both automatic-weapons fire and screams.
McCarter and Manning blended into the general
chaos like barnacles on a piling. They might have
been a pair of trawler crewmen returning to their ship
after a night on the town, or boat refitters on a mid-
shift booze break.
  Might have been.
    Beneath their loose-fitting coats, they wore combat
harnesses loaded with fragmentation, CS gas and stun
grenades, and high-capacity 9 mm semiautomatic
handguns and extra magazines rode in shoulder
leather. The canvas tool bags at their feet held gas
masks and silencer-equipped, German-made machine
pistols. In addition, Manning's gear bag contained
blocks of Semtex plastic explosive and a complete
demolition man's tool kit. McCarter and Manning
were two-fifths of Phoenix Force, a supersecret U.S.
covert-action team, operating under direct but un-
traceable order of the President. If they were caught
this night, the Latvian police would regard them as
international terrorists. The U.S. State Department
would provide no explanation for their presence in-
country; the executive branch would not intervene,

 publicly or privately, on their behalfi If they were
 captured alive, the warriors of Phoenix Force would
 be left to twist in the wind.
    McCarter and Manning's immediate concern
wasn't the police, but a lanky, bearded man in black
oilskins pushing a two-wheeled metal cart toward
them. The guy's eyes !it up when he saw the Kuban
bottle. McCarter lowered the bottle and flicked away
his cigarette as the man approached them.
    "Yey," the sailor said, licking his lips, "da-vai gla-
tok.t "
    McCarter recognized the language as Russian, not
Latvian. Either the man was an expatriate sailor, one
of the many who had settled here prior to the Soviet
breakup, or he was posing as one. If he was with the
opposition, he could have been a military black mar-
keteer or a thug from one of the many ruthless subsets
of Russian mafia. While McCarter watched the man's
eyes and hands, Manning scanned the dock in both
directions, looking for signs of trouble. Even if the
sailor was just thirsty, there was always the chance
he would make a fuss when he discovered the liquor
was actually water and they were only pretending to
be boozing.
  A fuss was something they didn't need just now.
    The earpiece hidden under McCarter's watch cap
crackled. "Hawk here. I have him."
    Hidden atop the superstructure of the rusting
trawler moored across the pier from them, Thomas
Jackson "Hawk" Hawkins, had an easy seventy-yard
head shot with a suppressor-equipped, Leupold-
scoped Remington Model 700 sniper rifle. McCarter
knew Hawkins wouldn't risk giving away his own
position and the team's presence unless everything




came unglued. Despite the silencer, a close-range, cat-
astrophic brain shot with a .308 Winchester bullet
would be hard to conceal, what with the partial va-
porization of the skull and its contents and the cut-
string drop of the corpse.
    McCarter shrugged his left arm, as if shaking out
a mild cramp. Cold steel slid down the inside of the
former SAS man's sleeve. The tips of his fingers
stopped the fall of the unsheathed Devil Dart. A fur-
ther twitch would drop the knurled handle of the
bead-blasted killing spike into his fist. Scuffles and
fights on the docks were not uncommon, but they in-
variably drew spectators. McCarter's attack, if that
proved necessary, would be quick and final, a single
thrust under the bearded chin to skewer the tongue
against the soft palate and drive the triangular point
deep into the man's brain.
    Manning heard Hawkins's words through his own
earpiece and moved accordingly, shifting his burly,
six-foot frame to shield the action from view as much
as possible. Knowing Hawkins's fire lane to the target
and McCarter's striking range, he gave them both
plenty of room to work. No matter how the Russian
met his death, Manning was ready to lunge forward
and catch the falling body. In the blink of an eye, he
could tumble it over the pier's railing.
    The Russian repeated his request, holding out his
hand. He didn't know how close he was to having
already enjoyed his last drink.
    "P-yei svo-evo," McCarter said. "Drink your
own." He chugged the last of the contents and tossed
the bottle over his shoulder into the river. Then he
added, "Ee-de... v Rossiyu." "Go back to Russia."

 "Svoloch! Basran!" the sailor cursed as he turned
 away.
     Manning leaned close and whispered, "What did
 he say?"
    "You don't want to know, mate," McCarter as-
sured him. Resting his elbows against the pier's rail-
ing, the Phoenix Force team leader resheathed the
Devil Dart, then checked his watch. The real-time sat-
ellite window was closing; in another twenty minutes
they would lose the scrambled uplink to the Stony
Man Farm command center. It was time to get the
show on the road. He spoke a few words into the
minimicrophone hidden by the raised collar of his
jacket, giving the green light to the other two mem-
bers of the Phoenix team, Rafael Encizo and Calvin
James. Then he lit up another of the toxic Russian
cigarettes.
    Behind him, eighty yards farther down the dock,
the 155-foot trawler, Varuskya Liset, rested at her
moorings. A trio of short, burly men armed with So-
viet assault rifles stood atop her gangway. They held
their shoulder-slung AKS-74s down low but not com-
pletely out of sight.
    They weren't protecting a cargo of Arctic cod with
5.45 mm automatic weapons.
    They guarded something more precious than gold,
something every jumped-up, pot-metal, Third World
president-for-life wanted. The power to inflict mega-
death.
    When the Belomor was half-smoked, McCarter
nodded to Manning and they picked up their satchels
and started down the dock like a pair of well-
lubricated sailors in no particular hurry to get back to




work. Their zigzag route took them closer and closer
to the Varuskya Liset--absolute ground zero.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia
8:34 p.m. EDT

AT THE SOUND OF THE BEEP, Aaron "the Bear"
Kurtzman removed his mug from the computer lab's
microwave oven. Steam snaked up from the cup, car-
rying with it the bitter smell of feboiled coffee. He
took a sip and made a face. He couldn't remember
how many times he'd reheated it, but five dark brown
rings around the inside of the cup's rim indicated re-
cent lowerings of the waterline.
    Kurtzman dumped the undrinkable brew down the
sink. There wasn't time to build a fresh pot of the
black-as-tar, supercaffeinated java that he preferred,
and that everyone else on the Stony Man Farm elec-
tronic-Intel squad either doctored with milk and
sugar--or avoided like the plague. He snatched a pair
of blueberry danishes from the covered tray beside
the microwave, figuring a sugar lift, though brief, was
better than no lift at all.
    He pivoted his wheelchair and propelled himself
back up the shallow ramp to his workstation. Like the
rest of the crew, he had been working at his computer
terminal virtually nonstop for eighteen hours. The
strain was beginning to show in annoying little ways.
His fingers cramped as they gripped the wheels' rims,
and when he blinked his eyes, they burned against the
insides of his lids like they'd been sandblasted. From
the elevated dais supporting his massive, horseshoe-
shaped desk, he surveyed the bank of wall screens
that displayed what his people had on their worksta-

 tion monitors, then he checked each team member in
 turn.
    Dr. Huntington Wethers sat hunched over his com-
puter console, grinding the stem of his unlit pipe be-
tween his teeth. He was eavesdropping on Latvian
police, emergency and military radio transmissions in
and around Riga. The audio signals were being si-
multaneously translated into English text at a CIA
intercept station inside the city. The African Ameri-
can former cybernetics professor scanned the scroll-
ing lines of type for aid calls from the commercial
fishing pier, reports of shots fired, explosions, re-
quests for ambulances--anything that indicated Phoe-
nix Force's primary line of retreat might be in jeop-
ardy, or that they might soon be under assault from
local authorities. In either case, Wethers would re-
route and supervise the covert-action squad's with-
drawal.
    At her computer station, red-haired, compactly
built Carmen Delahunt was taking her third turn with
the voluminous Justice Department and Interpol files
on the international arms merchant, Sergio Ishmael
Eshamani. Despite weeks of effort, the Stony Man
team had come up empty in a critical area of the
investigation. In such a situation, lab procedure called
for each team member to review all the basic material,
the rationale being that if five keenly trained minds
tackled the same problem, one of them would be
bound to find the end of the ball of string--in this
case, the buyer and/or final destination of the Riga
nuclear contraband. The Eshamani records went back
almost twenty years, to when he had been a lackey
for the Middle Eastern sales force of an Italian small-
arms manufacturer. As Delahunt's fingers rattled the




computer keys, her lips moved silently. Kurtzman
didn't have to be much of lip-reader to realize she
was swearing under her breath.
    At the center workstation, Akira Tokaido kept track
of Phoenix Force's on-site radio transmissions and
monitored the city of Riga from a weather satellite
camera. His CD player and headset lay abandoned at
the far end of the desk, along with a litter of classic
punk and grunge-rock CDs. He was in constant, ner-
vous motion, adjusting the gain and filter array to get
the clearest audio and video signals, drumming his
fingers impatiently on the edge of the keyboard, oc-
casionally brushing his palm across his hair. There
had been no transmissions from McCarter and the
others for several minutes, not since he had given the
go signal.
    From the back of the room, Barbara Price stared
up at the wall screen display of broken cloud cover
over Riga. The honey blonde was the only member
of the team who looked cool and collected. The calm
she projected was a function of one of her previous
incarnations: model and cover girl. Price had learned
to control her facial expression no matter what she
was feeling. Kurtzman knew that inside the beautiful,
serene shell, Stony Man Farm's mission controller
was wound as tight as a ten-dollar watch.
    Kurtzman folded a danish once and took half of it
in a huge bite. It tasted like sugar-iced cardboard. His
stomach growled ominously as he swallowed. Indi-
gestion came with the territory at this stage of a mis-
sion. The Bear and his crew had done everything hu-
manly possible to ensure the success of the job at
hand. There had been weeks of preplanning, of triple
fail-sating the escape routes, of identifying and either

eliminating or compensating for the operation's weak
points. But in every mission, there was a point when
the Farm's planners and thinkers had to wait, reduced
to mere spectators while the odds played out and the
Phoenix warriors took their turn at bat.
    A brief, terrible vision filled Kurtzman's mind: the
weather satellite wall monitor flaring suddenly from
a central bright pinpoint of red to full-screen crimson,
the Riga radio signals lost in a howl of static.
  Detonation.
    He forced the image from his mind. Everyone in
the room was fighting the same dread. As lab-section
chief, he felt compelled to break the heavy silence, to
focus on something constructive while they sat on
their hands.
    "Carmen, are you making any progress over
there?" he asked.
    "You tell me," she said. "I've been going through
Eshamani's known client list again. Running over
ground we've already covered, trying to see if we've
missed anything. Do you want the high points?"
  "Go ahead," Kurtzman said.
    "We've agreed that only a small segment of his
market is going to be interested in a chunk of high-
grade nuclear material or a functional nuclear
weapon. We've ruled out the U.S. and South Amer-
ican drug gangs who've been buying Soviet-
manufactured autoweapons and conventional explo-
sives from him. For small-scale, purely economic
warfare, even the light artillery, and the ground-to-air
and ground-to-ground, wire-guided missiles in his
east European inventory are overkill. The client in
this case has got to have big-time political motives."
  "Assuming that whoever's buying the goods isn't




interested in a quick resale to another party," Tokaido
added without taking his eyes from his monitor's
screen.
    "Eshamani's too sharp a dealer for that," Kurtz-
man countered. "You can be sure his price off this
stuff is so high that a second middleman couldn't
make a decent profit."
    Dr. Wethers swiveled his chair and glanced up at
the dais. "So that still leaves us chasing every two-
bit terrorist group and Third World dictator on the
planet," he said.
    "Not quite," Delahunt said. "To make a big bang
from scratch, you need highly skilled people and a
well-equipped research facility. Which means major,
long-term capital investment. Which means a govern-
mental or quasigovernmental entity."
    "But that assumes," Barbara Price said as she
walked up the wheelchair ramp, "as in the previous
Eshamani operation, we're simply dealing with the
sale of weapons-grade nuclear material. Or even sys-
tem subcomponents, like a target assembly scavenged
from a Soviet weapon scheduled for destruction.
Given the situation in the former republics, the num-
ber of functional nukes still in the field and the de-
teriorating security, we can't rely on Eshamani stay-
ing at the bits-and-pieces level of nuclear tech. The
market for an operational device is too huge and too
profitable. It includes all the groups or governments
who lack the expertise to construct their own nukes,
or who don't want to pay for the R and D, or who
want something they know will work the first time."
    "Your basic, off-the-rack, ready to wear nuclear
holocaust," Delahunt said.

"And the worst of all possibilities," Dr. Wethers
added grimly, "a buyer who intends to let it rip."
    Delahunt typed in a command, and the rows of
names, dates and numbers vanished from her wall
screen, replaced by moving images. The recent sur-
veillance video showed an impeccably dressed Sergio
Ishmael Eshamani strolling on the Champs-Elys6es.
The short, stoutly built man was dwarfed by leggy
Parisian high-fashion models clinging to either elbow,
while stone-faced bodyguards brought up the front
and rear of the formation.
    As the video loop recycled, Delahunt zoomed in
tight on the arms dealer from the shoulders up.
Eshamani's most startling feature was his head, which
he shaved to minimize the effect of an extreme case
of pattern baldness. What hair he had grew black and
thick in oddly shaped and widely spaced islands--the
pair of blotches atop his high forehead reminded
Kurtzman of the horn buds of a young goat. If the
top of Eshamani's head was thin in the hair depart-
ment, his cheeks, chin and neck more than made up
for it: they were shadowed by a dark beard so heavy
that he had it scraped off three times a day.
    Though Eshamani and his various enterprises had
been under CIA and Justice Department surveillance
for nearly two decades, it wasn't until recently, when
he began moving large quantities of liberated Soviet
war mat6riel, that his operation had become a priority
concern of the U.S. government. Even though the
level of scrutiny had increased, there had been no
direct proof, only strong suspicions of his entry into
the illicit nuclear trade. Then, six weeks earlier, Jus-
tice had received a tip from an unnamed overseas
source that linked a Panamanian-registry cargo ship




to the in-progress transfer of Soviet-manufactured ce-
sium to Libya.
    Operating on secret orders from the President, re-
layed through Hal Brognola, the White House liaison
to Stony Man, Phoenix Force had intercepted the sus-
pect vessel in international waters off the Canary Is-
lands. During an intense close-quarters firefight, the
Phoenix team had killed eighteen of the twenty-man
crew; only the captain and first mate survived the as-
sault. A search of the hold turned up four pounds of
high-grade fissionable material, still in its Russian-
marked, lead-lined safety container. Before Gary
Manning set off the explosive charges that blew the
bottom out of the ship, scuttling it in two hundred
fathoms of water, Rafael Encizo sent out a garbled
distress call in Spanish. When rescuers arrived at the
scene three hours later, other than debris that had
drifted over a wide area, there was no sign of the
cargo ship or its crew. All were presumed lost in an
unexplained accident at sea.
    For the first five days of around-the-clock interro-
gation by Phoenix Force, the captain and his first mate
had refused to confirm what the Stony Man cyber
squad had already uncovered from its review of sat-
ellite and radio intelligence: there had been contact
between the Panamanian cargo ship and an uniden-
tified small fishing trawler in the North Atlantic. On
the sixth day, the mate gave up the nationality, port
and name of the trawler. A further check showed that
the Varuskya Liset was owned by a relative of a high-
ranking Russian military officer. The officer had
known connections to the Chechen mafia and to Ser-
gio Ishmael Eshamani, as well as access to nuclear
stockpiles.

    The Panamanian cargo ship, on the other hand, had
no link, direct or indirect, to the arms merchant. It
turned out to be the leased property of the Libyan
government. Which led Kurtzman and the others to
conclude that the Soviet cesium had already been
bought and paid for. Because the ship had gone down,
Libya had lost its entire investment, on the order of
tens of millions of dollars--something that had to
have strained the relationship between buyer and mid-
dleman. Accordingly Stony Man considered it un-
likely that Libya was the customer for the Riga ma-
terial. As the ship had sunk without witnesses,
apparently by accident, Eshamani could not know the
jeopardy his operation was in.
    Phoenix Force's recovery of the cesium had fanned
the White House's fear that Eshamani planned to es-
tablish a global pipeline for Soviet nuclear contra-
band. That was something the President wanted
stopped at all costs, the buyers and sellers neutralized,
any nukes or material seized or destroyed. Surveil-
lance in and around Riga in the past twenty-four
hours had confirmed the presence of the Russian brig-
adier general, of Eshamani and of two teams of
heavily armed thugs guarding the vessel in question.
One of the security squads belonged to the interna-
tional arms dealer. Because of weather conditions, an-
other high-seas boarding had been ruled too risky.
Instead, a surgical strike, performed dockside by a
small team of experts, offered the best odds of suc-
cess.
    There was, of course, an enormous potential down-
side. If the ship held an operational device and things
went sour, a city of a million souls could be ran-
somed. Or destroyed.




    That the President had fully commiued to the plan
was a measure of his supreme confidence in Phoenix
Force and the Stony Man personnel. Kurtzman
glanced at the wall clock set to Riga time. Any second
now the Phoenix warriors would be breaching the
trawler's perimeter.
    Very soon they would know which end of the tiger
they had hold of.

Riga Fishing Docks
3:41 a.m. Local Time

TEN FEET BELOW the surface of the water, Rafael
Encizo swam against an onrushing wall of darkness
and cold. He maintained his bearing in the current by
skimming the heel of his gloved right hand against
the steel skin of the Varuskya Liset. When he reached
the end of the hull, he turned, following the curve of
the stem into a pool of bright light.
    The aft superstructure of the trawler carded a huge
gantry and reel; directly below it, the deck was cut
by a broad ramp that sloped down into the water. The
ramp allowed the trawl net's load to be dragged up
on deck. Hovering over Encizo's head, backlit by the
bank of floodlights illuminating the boat's net bay,
was the underside of a twelve-foot Zodiac that was
tethered to the foot of the ramp.
    Encizo unslung his Barnett RC-150 crossbow. With
the armed, cocked weapon in firing position, he
dropped half of the lead weights belted to his waist
and slowly rose to the surface.
    When the Chechen mafia soldier guarding the ramp
saw Encizo's black neoprene-hooded head, black-
smeared face and the short black bow of the Barnett

 break the surface, he half turned, the pistol grip of his
 AKS-74 in his fist. For an instant, he squinted against
 the floodlights' glare. Was he looking at a tangled
 mass of oily debris? Or was it a threat? The shock of
 realization sent adrenaline coursing through his veins,
 but it was too late.
    Before the hardman could bring his shoulder-slung
assault rifle to bear, the crossbow thwanged, salt mist
spraying from its bowstring. The sixteen-inch metal
bolt covered the distance in a tenth of a second. Its
modified broad-head point sliced into the middle of
the Chechen's throat an inch above the top edge of
his body armor. Because of the relative positions of
the bowman and target, the bolt's entry angle was
steeply upward. Four razor-sharp blades transected
the Chechen's windpipe and larynx, and the point of
the broad-head buried itself into the front of the ver-
tebra that supported the base of his skull.
    The soldier staggered back a step, hunching his
shoulders and gagging. He released the autorifle, let-
ting it drop on its sling, and clawed for the fletched
end of the bolt shaft protruding from his throat. A
second passed, then the shaft came away in his fist as
the explosive-tipped broad-head detonated with a
muffled cough. A tiny pop that turned a maybe into
a sure kill.
    For the briefest instant, hot explosive gases bal-
looned the flesh of the Chechen's neck and face, mak-
ing his eyes bulge enormously. The small, shaped
charge neatly separated his skull from the knobby col-
umn of his spine. The quartet of surgical steel razors
fractured away from the broad-head's core, blowing
ragged rents in the sides of his neck. The soidier's
knees buckled, and his eyes became twin blood-laced




zeros. As he rolled down the grade to the edge of the
water, his semidetached head flopped through nearly
360 degrees of are.
    Encizo rose from the water and quickly recocked
and rebolted his weapon with another of the minifrag
broad-heads designed by Gary Manning and Stony
Man Farm's armorer, John "Cowboy" Kissinger, for
perimeter penetration.
    Calvin James surfaced on the other side of Zodiac.
The tall African American unplugged the barrel of his
silenced Heckler & Koch MP-5 KA, cleared its action
and covered Encizo while he kicked off his fins and
pulled off his face mask and snorkel. As James re-
moved his own headgear, the comer of his mouth and
the pencil-thin mustache above it twisted in an ex-
pression of disgust. The sulphurous, carrion stink of
fish guts and spilled diesel in the net bay was awe-
some. He stepped out of his fins and moved to
Encizo's side.
    They advanced uphill with Encizo facing front,
covering the lip of the ramp with the Barnett, and
James walking backward behind him, sweeping the
H&K over the gantry area that looked down on them.
As they neared the top of the ramp, they dropped to
their stomachs and peered over the edge. The main
deck of the Varuskya Liset was bathed in hard white
light. Beyond the base of the crane, which stood about
thirty feet across the deck from the start of the ramp,
was a low metal structure that sheltered the fish-
sorting and processing area. The shelter had two doors
on each side and no door on the end that faced them.
Each of the entrances was guarded by an armed and
armored Chechen soldier. Beyond the processing
shed, a four-story-tall radar mast dominated the deck.

 In front of the mast, one story above the deck, was
 the captain's cabin, and stacked on top of that was
 the ship's bridge.
    Encizo and James ducked back below the lip of the
ramp when a fifth man moved into view atop the pro-
cessing shed.
    "Counting the guys on the gangway, I make it
eight," James whispered. "But there could be more,
out of sight up in the bridge."
    Encizo nodded, checking the dial of a small instru-
ment strapped to his wrist. He showed the radiation
reading to James, then enabled the communications
device at his belt. He folded down the microphone of
the headset hidden under his diving hood and spoke
softly into it. "Bud, this is Bud Light. We are home
and have a signature. Repeat, heat is confirmed."
    McCarter's terse reply crackled into both of their
headsets. "Bud Light proceed."
    Encizo stripped off the tight-fitting neoprene hood;
now that he was out of the frigid water, it was slow-
cooking his head. The communications headset came
off with it. He slicked back his grizzled black hair
with a hand, and replaced the earpiece and mike.
    An untrained observer viewing his face under the
black camouflage war paint might have thought it
calm, the eyes relaxed to the point of almost appear-
ing sleepy. It was a dangerous illusion, based on
faulty but lingering stereotypes of race and intellect.
The Cuban's square, Indian features and the smooth-
ness and economy of his movements belied a brain
that routinely planned its attacks five moves ahead
and a body that was capable of blinding speed and
power. Beneath the seemingly calm exterior, Rafael




Encizo was revving at seven grand, his brain and
body redlined.
  "The roof guy first?" James asked.
    "Take him," Encizo said as he unplugged the bar-
tel of his silenced Beretta 93-R autopistol. He
checked the weapon's action, then reholstered it in
shoulder leather. In the imminent close-quarters battle
belowdecks, the high-capacity 93-R would be his
mainstay; it was his weapon of last resort if more
firepower was needed above deck.
    Encizo didn't have to warn his partner about rico-
chets in an all-steel environment. James knew that,
silenced guns and subsonic ammo notwithstanding, a
slug whining off the superstructure would alert the
enemy, and probably get some if not all of them
killed. As he peeked over the lip of the ramp, the man
atop the shelter turned away and walked toward the
bow, continuing his tour of the shelter's roof perim-
eter. James thumbed the tire-selector switch to single
shot and settled into a prone shooting position on the
metal ramp. Through the steel against his belly, he
could feel a pulse, not his own, but the slow, throb-
bing beat of a pile driver at work farther down the
pier. It rattled his guts.
    James braced his elbows on the edge of the ramp,
lined up the H&K's open sights with the roofline and
flipped off the safety. His breathing fell into the pile
driver's slow and solid rhythm.
    The roof guard strolled back to the aft end of the
shelter. He paused and surveyed the stern of the ship.
He was looking right at James, apparently without
seeing him, when the former SEAL squeezed off a
round. The H&K phutted, ejecting a single spent case.
The 9 mm hollowpoint slug caught the soldier under

the nose, and the impact snapped back his head. For
a moment, his chin pointed at the sky, then he fell
over in slow motion, dropping to his side. He hit the
roof on the pile driver's down beat.
    No one rushed away from the sides of the shelter
to check on him.
    Encizo touched James's arm, and they rose and
crossed to the crane on the run, pausing at the door-
less end of the processing shed. James immediately
bellled down on the deck and crept forward to take a
low peek around the right-hand corner of the building.
He quickly pulled back. With hand signals, he told
Encizo that the closest of the two guards was standing
away from structure, over by the gunwale.
    Standing upright, Encizo edged around the corner
with the butt of the crossbow's skeleton stock firmly
planted against his shoulder. The Chechen had his
back to the shelter. He was relieving himself over the
side through the hawsehole, a man-size opening in the
gunwale that allowed access to a mooring cleat. As
the soldier zipped himself up and turned back to face
the shed, Encizo fired the bow.
    The bolt zipped across the deck, striking two inches
above the man's chin. Its razor tip shattered his bot-
tom front teeth and speared into his mouth. The stun-
ning force of the hit sent him stumbling backward,
legs tangling over the cleat. As he toppled through
the hawsehole, the broad-head detonated. It made a
sound like a soggy, air-filled paper bag slammed
against an open palm. Blood mist twinkled in the light
for an instant, then it was gone.
    Before the soles of the man's shoes dropped out of
sight, James was up, dashing along the side of the
shelter. When the second man stuck his head out of




the doorway, the muzzle of James's H&K was less
than a yard away. The soldier caught the rush of
movement out of the corner of his eye; it was the last
thing he saw before the hollowpoint slug slammed his
temple. James snatched hold of the falling corpse by
the vest and eased it down on the deck.
    The inside of the shelter was all business: grim gray
steel walls, well-worn stainless-steel-clad cleaning
tables and open hatches that led to the refrigeration
holds. Encizo looked over the edge of a hatch as he
knelt behind one of the tables. There were no fish
down there, only a big-time stink and three feet of
the concentrated salt brine used to lower the freezing
temperature of the catch. The men guarding the dock
side of the shelter were out on the deck, in plain view
of the three thugs covering the gangway. None of
them could be safely taken out until the bow of the
boat had been swept. Everything had to be done in
order, by the numbers. The battle plan depended on
Phoenix Force clearing and controlling the top deck
without alerting the men on the decks below--it was
the only way a force of five could dissect a force of
twenty or more and survive. Encizo hand-signaled for
James to stay put and exited by the door he had en-
tered.
    The Cuban moved along the superstructure to the
captain's cabin, where a set of steep stairs led up to
the bridge. As he climbed the steps, he leaned out and
looked into the dark cabin, noting the empty bunk.
He padded silently across the cabin's roof, which was
also the rear deck of the bridge. The inside of the
pilothouse was lit up like Christmas. Through the
window set in the back door, he could see a short
corridor that opened onto the bridge proper, and two

 men inside. One was seated on an upholstered bench
 behind the ship's wheel; the other stood facing his
 shipmate with his back to the front windows and his
 arms folded across his chest. Neither had body armor,
 but both were wearing automatic pistols in ballistic
 nylon hip holsters.
    Encizo took out the Beretta with his left hand and
thumbed off the safety. With the crossbow in his right
fist, he slipped through the door, low and cat quick.
Before either sailor realized what was happening, he
was in their midst. As he fired the 9 mm pistol point-
blank into the seated man's forehead, the other man
had the presence of mind to reach, not for the pistol
on his hi[y---which he could never have gotten out of
its holster--but for the wooden handle hanging from
a chain above his head. The ship's horn.
    The Barnett's bowstring twanged as Encizo sent a
bolt into the center of the sailoffs unprotected chest.
In this case, the explosive feature of the broad-head
was pure overkill: its stainless-steel razors had already
cut an X through the middle of the man's heart, stop-
ping it cold. The dead sailor's fingers brushed the
hom's knob but didn't get a grip as he crumpled to
the floor. Encizo stopped the swinging handle with
the Barnett's cocking stirrup. Close, he thought.
    Encizo checked the other rooms in the bridge and,
finding no one, moved back onto the rear deck. He
slipped into a prone position with the rearmed cross-
bow and looked down onto the deck. The men guard-
ing the top of the gangway stood clumped in front of
the gate; the other two soldiers leaned against the
shelter's outside wall. They were all chatting back and
forth, occasionally laughing.
 The Cuban gritted his teeth. The shot angles were




much steeper and tighter than he liked. The closest
targets, the men by the gangway, stood almost di-
rectly under him; that, coupled with the body armor
they were wearing, meant he had to hit a softbail-
sized bull's-eye on top of their heads. If the broad-
head didn't strike square, it could glance off the thick
bone of a skull. He considered using the Beretta be-
cause it had better penetration power, but decided
against it. If the target moved and he missed with a
9 mm slug, it would clang on the deck like a dinner
bell. At least with the Barnett, a shot outside the ten-
ring might not alert the men inside the ship.
    He pulled back from the edge of the roof and spoke
into his headset mike. "The summit is clear," he said.
"I have position."

CALVIN JAMES ACKNOWLEDGED Encizo's transmis-
sion, then took a deep breath and slowly let it out. It
was up to him now. He rechecked the action of the
H&K, making sure its fire-selector switch was set on
single shot. As much as he would've liked to, he
couldn't come charging out of the shelter firing on
full auto. James was a gifted marksman and athlete,
but he knew the limits of what was physically pos-
sible. Shooting full auto on the mn against multiple
moving targets, although safer for him, would almost
guarantee a miss--and a ricochet. Single shot, target
by target, was the only route under the circumstances.
Like a shadow, he glided across the shelter's work
area, pausing near the stemmost door, which was se-
cured open with a nylon cord and metal hook.
    He put his back against the cold steel wall. He shut
his eyes and relaxed, letting the tension drain from
his shoulders, arms, hands, fingertips. He rotated his

head, stretching the tightness from his neck. He had
to be loose in order to be smooth; he had to be smooth
in order to be quick; he had to be quick in order to
survive. Once he took that first step out of the shelter,
secrecy went bye-bye and the level of risk skyrock-
eted, not just for Phoenix Force, but for the still sleep-
ing population of Riga.
  All hits, he told himself. No misses.
    He reached down to his belt and activated his com-
munications device. In a whisper he said, "Bud, this
is Bud Light. I am go. Repeat, go. Counting down
from fifteen... fourteen... thirteen..."

AT JAMES'S SIGNAL, McCarter gave Manning a nudge
and they started weaving toward the entrance to the
ship's gangway. As they set foot on the ramp, the
three Chechen guards leaned out and shouted down
at them to clear off.
    McCarter took the lead up the gangway, keeping
James's count in his head as he climbed. Six...five...
    A guard yelled through a cupped hand for them to
turn back, that they were boarding the wrong ship. He
punctuated the warning by showing them his Soviet-
made autorifle.
    McCarter didn't stop climbing, with Manning on
his heels. Four...three...
    The Chechens braced themselves and took aim.
Thirty feet of steeply angled gangway separated
McCarter and Manning from the muzzles of the trio
of AKMs.
 Two... one.

JAMES DUCKED OUT of the shelter with the H&K in
his left hand. Barely clear of the doorway, he already




had the back of the first Chechen's head in the ring-
and-post front sight. He punched a round into the base
of the man's neck. As the corpse crumpled to the
deck, it exposed the other shelter guard to point-blank
fire. The side of his face bathed in his comrade's
blood, the second hardman managed to turu toward
his attacker, but his autorifle remained frozen in his
hands, aimed uselessly at the deck. James looked right
into the man's eyes as he tightened down on the ma-
chine pisto!'s trigger. With the ultimate defeat bearing
down on him, there was no remorse in the Chechen
soldier's face, only glaring hate.
    The second zip-thwack of the H&K attracted the
gangway crew's full attention. With a grunt of sur-
prise, the man nearest James spun away from the
ramp, swinging his AKM sights around as he pivoted.
The soldiers behind him swiveled, as well, both of
them stepping away from the gunwale to get a clear
firing lane.
    From the moment he popped out of the shelter
doorway, time for James had dropped into crawl
mode. Things appeared to be happening at quarter
speed, allowing his brain to vacuum up the tiniest
details. From experience, he knew the sensation
wasn't real; time was moving along at its normal,
brisk clip. The only difference between Calvin James
the instant before he made his exit and Calvin James

now was that he had
action and reaction,
years of training and
As the gangway
dropped to a knee to

surrendered control of his body,
to his subconscious mind, to
instinct.
crew drew down on him, he
present them with a smaller tar-

get, and he had the machine pistoi's folding stock
snug against his shoulder. A split second before he

cut loose on the closest man's forehead, the rearmost
of the soldiers twisted suddenly out of line, sprawling
sideways. James glimpsed a feathered shaft protrud-
ing from one side of the man's neck, and peeking out
the other, the front half of a wetly gleaming broad-
head. The short fuse of the C-4 charge ignited on
impact. James touched off the H&K, instinctively
averting his eyes as the mined arrow tip exploded,
sending tiny bits of tempered steel shrapnel flying in
all directions. Even as he protected himseli', he swung
the H&K's muzzle on the third hardman.
    He only looked away for an instant. But an instant
was too long.
    When James looked back, the dead men were fall-
ing. The head-shot Chechen slumped, loose !imbed,
to the deck. His crossbow-shot comrade toppled so
hard against the middle guy's back that it pushed him
out of James's sights.
    The surviving Chechen grinned at James over the
muzzle of his AKM.
    Even as James tucked and rolled, he knew it was
all over.




CHAPTER TWO

The two opposing sets of security teams eyed each
other like packs of junkyard dogs separated by a hur-
ricane fence. The threat of instantaneous, limitless vi-
olence hung heavy in the air, along with the smell of
boiled fish and cabbage.
    Sergio Eshamani stood with his back against the
galley's steel-clad service counter, his hands thrust
into the pockets of his belted, black kid leather trench
coat. He was bracketed by eight male members of the
Salvatore Lovecchio clan. The sober faces of the Si-
cilians bore the scars of what--and whty--they had
done. Their hands were not in their pockets, nor were
they on pistol grips of the compact, 9 mm Beretta
12S submachine guns and Smith & Wesson 12-gauge
pump-action room brooms that hung from their shoul-
ders on leather slings.
    The stare-down game with the Chechens on the
other side of the room reflected the Sicilians' pride in
their work, their unflinching loyalty, their absolute
fearlessness. Nobody, but nobody, was going to back
down the Lovecchio family.
    Across the galley's scarred gray linoleum floor,
seven AKM-packing Chechens maintained eye con-
tact with Eshamani's troops while their boss, Briga-

dier General Avril Krukillov, two-handed a black ny-
lon gym bag onto the scale in the middle of the long
dining table. The contents of the bag clinked when he
set it down on the scale plate. The diai's red needle
swung up and stopped, quivering just below eighteen
kilos. Both of the gym bags on the tabletop weighed
the same, and their combined weight was about eighty
pounds.
  Eighty pounds of Krugerrands.
    A faint smile lit the Russian's broad, ruddy face as
he pulled a pocket calculator from inside his brown
wool overcoat.
    Because of his own inherited affliction, Eshamani
tended to divide people into the haves and the have-
nots, hairwise--and Krukillov had it in spades. The
general's hairline tapered to a sharp V three inches
above the bridge of his nose. The hair itself was iron
gray, glossy, incredibly thick and straight, and styled
in an inch-long brush cut.
    Krukillov tapped the current price of gold into his
calculator and came up with the value of the table's
load: close to half a million dollars.
    The gold was meant to wow the Chechen thugs
who did all of the general's wet work. It had definitely
impressed them. They positively twitched, fighting
the urge to tear open the bags and sieve the bright
coins through their fingers. Krukillov was obviously
pleased, as well, but in a much more relaxed way.
    Eshamani knew the general was thinking on a big-
ger canvas. His delight had less to do with those par-
ticular bags of pirate treasure than with the apparently
limitless horizon that stretched out before him. The
free market was indeed a glory and a marvel to be-
hold. As one of the officers entrusted with the coilec-





tion of the former Soviet republics' scattered nuclear
stockpiles, Krukillov supervised the transportation of
said weapons to centrally located sites for dismantling
and destruction. Arranging for a few weapons here
and there to be misplaced was child's play for a sol-
dier of his rank and experience. On paper the diverted
nukes would never be categorized as missing; they
would be in perpetual transit somewhere in the vast
and complex bureaucratic system. The general didn't
need a calculator to figure out how many similar deals
it would take to make him unassailably rich--he
could count far enough for that on the fingers of one
hand.
  "When do I get the rest?" Krukillov asked.
    The "rest" was three million dollars, payment in
full for delivery of three operational nuclear devices.
    "It will be moved electronically to your Swiss ac-
count," Eshamani told him, "as soon as I verify the
PAL codes."
    The PAL, or Permissive Action Link, was the mul-
tiple-digit, maximum-security access code that al-
lowed the weapons to be armed and fired. Without
the correct PAL codes, the Soviet nukes were nothing
but very expensive, shiny boxes for holding pluto-
nium.
    The general nodded to his security team. "Bring
out the starookhas," he said. As four of his Chechens
left the galley, he took a silver hip flask from his
overcoat pocket. Unscrewing the cap, he offered the
flask to Eshamani. "Pepper vodka?" The arms merchant declined.
    Krukillov raised the flask in the air and said, "To
a long and profitable association." He tipped back his
head as he took a long pull of the spiced liquor.

    Their association had already been profitable for
Eshamani; as to its being long-term, that had never
been in the cards. Even when they had been dealing
in components destined for ongoing, secret R-and-D
programs, the end had always been in sight--and it
was mushroom shaped. Now that they had moved up
into functional weapons, the half-life of the operation
was even shorter. At some point in the very near fu-
ture, after one of the buyers exploded a device, the
heat would come down heavy on them from all di-
rections. Eshamani had no doubt that Krukiliov was
already setting up a patsy to take the blame on his
end. But the final result would be the same: the pipe-
line would be closed. While the route was open,
Eshamani's marketing challenge was to move as
much product as quickly as he could, even if that
meant selling the stuff at bargain-basement prices.
    The four Chechens returned to the galley. They
pushed two dollies, each bearing a heavy wooden
crate the size of a refrigerator. The Chechens shifted
the olive drab crates onto the floor and, on the gen-
eral's command, began unscrewing the front panels.
Inside each of the heavily braced and padded crates
was a gleaming silver artillery shell with a warhead
a shade under eight inches in diameter. The noses of
the warheads bore the symbol of the three-bladed fan,
the universal radiation-hazard warning. A special se-
curity container encased two-thirds of the chest-high
shells, from the bottom to a couple of inches below
the join of the warhead and casing. The container
made it impossible for the packaged round to be
chambered into a cannon straight out of the box. Each
of the security jackets had a massive lock with a nu-
meric keypad and two heavy-duty lifting handles.




 Stenciled in Russian along the locked seam were the
 words Do Not Open Except To Fire.
     The general produced a slim folder and pushed it
 over to Eshamani. "This is a synopsis of the opera-
 tions manual and ballistic data for the weapons sys-
 tem," he said. "The notations on the last pages refer
 to the PAL access codes--they are grouped by
 weapon serial number."
    As he rounded the galley table, Eshamani flipped
through the pamphlet. One look told him it wasn't
good enough. "I need to run through a complete arm-
 ing sequence right now," he told the Russian.
   "You don't trust me?"
    "Trust has nothing to do with it," Eshamani as-
sured him. "At some point, I'm going to have to ex-
plain the operation of this weapon to the buyers.
When that time comes, you're not going to be around
to help me answer questions."
  "Very well," the general conceded.
    As Eshamani flattened the folder on the table, Kru-
killov leaned over his shoulder, gusting him with stale
vodka breath. The general's stubby fingers brushed
across the first set of numbers. "These digits are the
code that unlocks the container." He entered the
numbers into the keypad on the front of the container,
and the lock sprang open with a metallic click.
    The Chechen assistants lifted away the halves of
the security jacket, exposing the warhead and shell
casing of the 152 mm howitzer round. It was known
in the arms trade as an AFAP, an Artillery Fired
Atomic Projectile.
    "Beautiful, isn't it?" Kruki!!ov said, patting the
warhead's nose.
 From the crate, the Chechens took out a small key-

pad with an LCD madout. Using a short cable, they
plugged the keypad into a socket that was machined
flush with the warhead's steel skin.
    "Do you know why we call it starookha?" Kru-
killov asked.
    "'Dirty old woman'?" Eshamani said, taking his
best shot at a translation.
    The general's eyes glittered. "That's fight. Like
waking up after a night of too much vodka to find a
starookha in your bed, this is the nastiest of sur-
prises."
    Eshamani smiled, but only barely. A two-tenths-of-
a-kiloton nuke was the equivalent of four hundred
thousand pounds of TNT. Equating that to drunken
sex with a bag lady was a typically bleak--and un-
funny--Russian joke.
    "Let's go through the command sequence," the
arms merchant said. He took the keypad from the
Chechens.
    "The first set of numbers is the handshake-
engage," Krukillov said. "It allows you to proceed
with the fusing and arming protocols."
    As the general read off the numbers, Eshamani
tapped them into the keypad and they appeared in red
on the unit's LCD panel. When he hit the final key,
the six numbers blinked twice, then vanished, re-
placed by six red asterisks. "What's happened?" Es-
hamani said, showing the readout to the general.
    "The stars mean the handshake code has been ac-
cepted. The next set of digits encode the targeting
information." The general turned back through the
ops folder until he found pages of conversion tables.
He showed them to Eshamani. "Refer to these tables




 when you set the electronic fuse timer and the altitude
 of the nuclear burst."
  "Give me some numbers."
    "We'll set the fuse for one minute, target range of
ten thousand meters with no radar-homing beacon,
ground-burst detonation." Krukillov showed Esha-
mani where each of the codes appeared on the tables.
Then he said, "Obviously, while the targeting infor-
mation is variable, the input order is not. The data
input sequence is clearly explained in the operations
manual."
      Again, after Eshamani had poked in the values,
stars appeared on the readout panel.  "Now what?" he asked.
    "The arming code," Krukiilov said. "You should
note that the handshake-engage code for all starookha
AFAPs is the same. The final, six-digit arming codes
are different for each weapon."
    Eshamani punched in the numbers as the general
read them off. The digits blinked twice and kept on
blinking. "Something's wrong," he said. "There
aren't any stars."
    "That's because I switched a number on you, on
purpose. I wanted you to see what happens if you
make a mistake. Hit the zero button six times to clear
the keypad, then I'll give you the correct code."
    "How many tries before the PAL locks out?" the
arms merchant asked. The lockout was a security fea-
ture that kept unauthorized users from inputting ran-
dom number sets until they hit the jackpot.
    "You have three tries at the handshake and arming
steps," the general said. "After that, the system will
no longer respond to the keypad."
  "Is there a way to recover from a lockout?"

    "Not without dismantling the AFAP," Kruki!!ov
said. "You'd better tell your buyers to be careful.
They're not going to be able to send these weapons
back to the factory for retooling." The general gave
Eshamani the correct arming code.
    The numbers again disappeared, replaced this time
not by asterisks but by six little red hammer-and-
sickle symbols.
 The starookha was combat ready.
    "As I understand it," Eshamani said, "these things
have to be fired from a cannon in order to detonate'?"
    "For all practical purposes, that's true," Krukiilov
said. "The electronic fuse will not operate unless the
shell is spinning at about 17,000 rpm. To get that
result, the round's propellant charge has to ignite and
the shell has to pass through a howitzer barrel."
  "How do I abort?" Eshamani said.
    "Replacing the security case automatically shuts
down the LCD unit and clears the arming system's
input memory. There's no limit on the number of
times you can abort, but if the system has already
experienced lockout, putting on the security jacket
will not reset the cycle."
    "I'd like to test-run the second weapon, to make
sure I can operate it," Eshamani said.
    "No problem," Krukillov agreed, stepping out of
the arms merchant's way.
    Eshamani plugged the LCD unit into the other sta-
rookha and, referring to the ops manual, began feed-
ing the nuclear warhead six-digit codes.

WHEN THOMAS JACKSON Hawkins heard Calvin
James start the countdown through his headset, he
abandoned his 7x35 mm Steiner binoculars and




 moved behind the sandbagged Remington 700. From
 his hide atop the bridge roof of the derelict trawler,
 Hawkins peered through the Leupoid M-3A tele-
 scopic sight.
    The Leupold's field of view was much narrower
than the Steiner's, less than ten feet from side to side
at the designated target distance. It was also slower
and more awkward to shift back and forth, not just
because of the weight and length of the rifle, but be-
cause of the sandbagged shooting rest he had built.
Which meant Hawkins couldn't take in the whole bat-
tlefield at a glance, but was reduced to tunnel vision.
Without a spotter, he had to perform all his own bul-
let-impact observations through the Leupold, not an
easy thing to do with a heavy-caliber rifle mule-
kicking your shoulder.
    On the upside, Hawkins knew the plan, knew
where his teammates were supposed to be and what
their individual objectives were. And his position was
elevated enough to control the dock side of the top
deck of the Varuskya Liset from bow to stern.
    Squeezing the sandbag under the Remington's butt,
Hawkins adjusted his sight picture, framing the target
zone in the lens. The zone was the gate that led from
the ship to the gangway, the gate where three body-
armor-clad Chechens stood guard. Hawkins had al-
ready cranked the scope's internal Bullet Drop Com-
pensator--BDC----cam down as low as it would go.
Because the shot was under one hundred yards and
at a downward angle, it required an additional low
hold to compensate for the bullefts natural rise once
it left the barrel.
    Hawkins pulled back from the scope. With his na-
ked eye, he could see McCarter and Manning climb-

ing the gangway, ignoring the challenge from the
guards, calmly walking into the Chechens' fire lane
and three 30-round mags of 5.45 mm bullets. Though
it was a cold night, beads of sweat oozed down the
sides of Hawkins's face. He already knew he only had
time for one shot. The question was where should he
take it? There was no room for error; in fact, there
was very little room, period. A clean miss would send
a 168-grain slug crashing into the side of the captain's
cabin. A through-and-through shot to the head or neck
would also mean a ricochet.
    Hawkins found the stock weld with his cheek and
set the cross hairs in the middle of the gangway open-
ing. With a slight shift of his weight against the butt-
stock, he could move the aim point to any of the three
men. He let his breathing fall into the slow, even
shoot-cycle rhythm.
    Because of the limited field of view through the
scope, Hawkins couldn't see James come bursting out
of the shelter, shooting the nearest guards at point-
blank range. He did see the Chechens spin away from
the gangway, turning their guns in James's direction.
Hawkins bore down, his fingertip easing back the trig-
ger, holding it just before the break point. As he hung
there, short of snapping the .308's cap by a quarter-
ounce of finger pressure, the guard on the left and the
one on the right fell away under James's and Encizo's
fire, leaving the middle man crouched in the gangway
opening, still armed and dangerous.
    With Encizo momentarily out of ammo and James
caught flat-looted, Hawkins had no choice. He
touched off the shot. The rifle butt slammed back into
his shoulder. Thanks to the J. A. Ciener suppressor,
the noise exiting the business end of the sniper rifle




was around 138 decibels, less than the noise of a .22
pistol or a rivet gun.

 THE BRIGHT LIGHTS that washed the top decks of the
 Varuskya Liset made for an excellent killing ground.
 Captain Andrei Sarnov had a clean shot on the figure
 in black neoprene kneeling on the bridge's rear deck.
 He held the PSO-! scope's reticle arrow point in the
 middle of the man's back and watched as he quickly
 cocked and reloaded a nasty looking skeleton-stock
 crossbow. Sarnov's hide and command post was in
 the radar mast crow's nest of a trawler moored one
 dock over from the Varuskya Liset. The four-power
 scope's built-in range finder made the distance across
 the water to the target a bit under two hundred yards.
 With a practiced flick of the wrist, Sarnov adjusted
 the BDC so he could shoot dead on.
    Samov was furious, and wanted very much to drill
the nameless bastard who was jeopardizing a year of
very delicate and very dangerous work. But because
he was angry and knew it, he resisted the temptation.
He eased off slightly on the SVD's trigger, holding
the Soviet-made semiautomatic sniper rifle on target.
Due to the location of his hide and its angle of view,
he couldn't see the action going down on the other
side of the ship.
    He was hearing about it through his headset,
though.
    Uri Turgenev's excited voice made the earpiece
crackle. "They've taken the gangway! Two more
men on board!" he said.
    Turgenev was in position on the dock near the bow
of the suspect trawler. In the metal cart he pushed,
concealed under a tarp, was an assortment of weapons

of war: a pair of AKM assault rifles, an RPG launcher
and grenades.
    Another man spoke to Sarnov through the earpiece.
V!ad Ferdishenko, who watched over the stern of the
ship and the net bay from a small truck parked on the
dock, was as upset as Turgenev. "Who the hell are
they.'?" he exclaimed.
    The question had come up several times in the past
few minutes, first when an astonished Sarnov had wit-
nessed the assault along the side of the processing
shelter. The simple answer was that they were pro-
fessionals. Sarnov knew slick work when he saw it,
and those men were good. Not only physically skilled,
but disciplined, seasoned warriors.
    The follow-up question was much more compli-
cated. Who were they working for?
    Sarnov ran through the list of possibilities. They
could have been part of a double cross by the arms
merchant Eshamani, a scheme to get a few weapons
for nothing. Or they could have been hirelings in the
pay of Kruki!lov, who intended to take Eshamani's
money and give him nothing. That possibility seemed
unlikely because the unidentified hit men were killing
the general's own Chechen thugs left and right. When
he thought about it, Sarnov couldn't see the reward
being great enough for either man to take the risk.
The really big money was in doing business, moving
product. That narrowed down the list considerably.
Sarnov was left with Western military intelligence, or
freelancers from the Russian mafia, or mutinous ele-
ments of Eshamani's security force.
    A woman's voice broke his train of thought. It
came from beside him in the crow's nest, not through
the headset.




  "Shall I kill the sniper now?"
    Samov looked over at Natasha Beioc, the lone fe-
male assigned to the Spetsnaz recovery team. Like
him, she wore a one-piece, nonreflective black jump-
suit. Except for a few stray wisps, her curly blond
hair was hidden under a black watch cap, her cheeks
were flushed with the cold and her fight eye was
pressed snug into the PSO-I's robber eyecup. The
twenty-six-year-old Beloc had twice qualified for the
Russian army's biathion team. Inside of six hundred
yards with the Dragunov, she was a superb, almost
uncanny shot. When she said "kill," she meant just
that. Her target was seventy-five yards farther away
than his, across the dock from where the Varuskya
Liset was moored. Their vantage point in the crow's
nest gave her enough of a down angle on the enemy
sniper's hide to score multiple torso hits.
    Should she kill the sniper? Again the impulse to
mark and control Samov's own tuff was there, nag-
ging him like a tiny splinter of wood caught under
his tingemail. He needed a second to think, to weigh
the actual nature of the threat and his response op-
tions.
  "No," he told her. "Wait..."
    The original plan had been to trap the conspirators
and their nuclear contraband on board the ship. To
achieve that end, Samov had positioned his four-
person unit to control all escape attempts from the
vessel. He had no intention of boarding the trawler
with such a small attacking force. As top-notch as his
people were, such an idea bordered on the suicidal.
There were just too many guns on the other side. That
the unidentified hit crew might be taking them all on,
apparently confident that they could do the job,

amazed Samov. Either they were crazy, he decided,
or they were counting on some part of the ship's de-
fensive force to back them up.
    According to the plan, once the trap closed, Samov
would alert the Riga authorities, military and civilian,
who would do all the mopping up. He wasn't con-
cemed about the danger the nukes presented to the
city of Riga. Samov and his team had been pursuing
the born-again entrepreneur Krukillov for a year.
They knew exactly what type of nuclear weapons
were on the ship. Their surveillance operation had
documented the paperwork "errors" that had jumbled
the transfer of a cargo of AFAPs from Latvia to a
Russian disposal site. From the start, the Spetsnaz
team's mission had been a clean sweep of criminals
and stolen goods; simple containment and over-
whelming force had been the means to that end.
    And nothing had changed, except that the uniden-
tified attacking force was lowering the odds against
them, essentially doing their work for them. Samov
could have dropped his aimpoint and stitched a line
of rifle fire across the steel hull, warning the trawler's
passengers of the impending attack, but there was
nothing in it for him. Better to let the four crazy bas-
tards slip unnoticed belowdecks and reduce the odds
even more.
    Samov spoke into his headset microphone. "The
plan stands," he said. "Don't shoot until someone
actually tries to leave the ship. Try to turn them back
with autotire. If that doesn't work, or if they return
fire, shoot to kill. If you see anyone moving one of
the weapons on deck, terminate them at once." He
covered his mike with his hand. "At the first shot




from their side or ours," he told Tasha, "kill the
sniper."
    The Spetsnaz captain found it hard not to root a
little for the suicide-assault team. He was curious how
far they'd get before the odds kicked in. Of course,
the outcome couldn't possibly change, no matter how
well they did. Sarnov checked his wristwatch. He
would give them three or four minutes to work before
he called the Riga equivalent of 911.

As MCCARTER CHARGED up the ramp, clearing his
silenced autopistol out from under the pea coat, a
heavy slug freight-trained six feet above his head,
slapping something soft but solid on board the
trawler. In two leaping strides, he reached the gang-
way and found the surviving Chechen flat on the
deck, blowing bloody bubbles down his chin. Haw-
kins had played the odds, slamming the guard in the
side with a .308 bullet. Without steel inserts, body
armor reduced gunshot trauma by sixty percent. In
this case, body armor had saved the man's life, but it
couldn't stop the slug's impact from splintering his
ribs and punching them into his lung. McCarter
thumbed off the Beretta's safety and inflicted one
hundred percent gunshot trauma to the Chechen's
brain.
    Stepping clear of the tangle of corpses, the former
SAS man dropped into a kneeling position, his
weapon out front, then waved Manning on. Manning
put his back to the superstructure and took a silenced
subgun from his satchel. He passed the weapon over
to McCarter, then withdrew a second H&K for him-
self. With the demolition kit bag in his left hand, he

followed Calvin James to the bridge tower's aft en-
trance and the stairs that led belowdecks.
    After reholstering his handgun, McCarter turned
and trotted for the bow. When he arrived at the door-
way set in the front of the bridge tower, Encizo was
waiting there for him. The Cuban had abandoned the
crossbow and was holding his Beretta 93-R in a two-
handed grip. The fire-control switch was set on tri-
burst, which meant every trigger pull sent a trio of
9 mm hollowpoints flying out the barrel.
      McCarter cracked open the tower door and stole a
look down the steep metal stairway.  No one was in sight.
    Quickly and quietly, the two warriors descended to
the landing of the second deck. The stairway contin-
ued down to the third deck, which held the trawler's
refrigeration unit, the repair shop, the engine room
and, at the stern of the ship, the fish holds.
    The second-deck landing ended in an undogged
bulkhead door.
    McCarter reached for the handle with his left hand,
holding the H&K ready to rip in his right. He had a
fatalistic, professional soldier's view of nuclear pro-
liferation. He knew that eventually some of it was
bound to get out and get exploded, that innocent peo-
ple would die by the tens of thousands, sacrificed in
the name of some political cause, but he was damned
to bloody hell if it was going to be on his watch. He
was willing to die to prevent it from happening.
    McCarter eased the door inward an inch or two. It
opened onto the crew quarters. There were three
banks of gray steel bunks and the walls were lined
with steel lockers. The place smelled like a pit.
McCarter and Encizo checked the bunks for sleeping




sailors. They were all empty. At the other end of the
room was another door. McCarter knew it led to the
galley.
    As they moved to either side of the bulkhead,
McCafret and Encizo could hear voices and laughter
through the wall.
    McCarter folded down his headset mike. He spoke
softly but distinctly. "We're in position."

"ROGER THAT," Manning said into his mike, drag-
ging back the sleeve of his pea coat so he could read
the face of his watch.
    He and James were in the "wet room," which
stood between the aft door of the galley and the
tower's rear staircase. The wet room held the crew's
foul-weather gear and fish-cleaning slickers. Every-
thing hung neat and name tagged from hooks set high
in the steel walls. Along the base of the wall, under
the oilskin coats and hats, were sets of rubber boots,
also name tagged. Before it ended at the galley door,
the room turned a dogleg right to a set of open show-
ers. Manning and James knelt beside the closed galley
door.
    "In ten, on my mark," McCarter said through his
mike. There was a pause, then he said, "Mark."
    "Gotcha," Manning replied. As his watch's sweep
hand turned, he plucked a pair of thunder-flash con-
cussion grenades from his combat harness and pulled
the pins. He nodded to James, who took hold of the
door's handle, then he released the safety clips, letting
them flip off onto the floor.

THOUGH LUIGI LOVECCHIO, nephew of the head of
the Sicilian clan, continued to stare stilettos across the

galley, he was bored. He had already won the no-
blink contest. The Chechen he had targeted was so
cowed that he was willing to look anywhere but back
into Lovecchio's eyes. To pass the time, the Sicilian
tried listening to the discussion between his employer
and the Russian. He couldn't make any sense out of
it. Mostly they were just rattling off bunches of num-
bers. Even when they used actual words--his English
wasn't all that great--it still sounded like so much
double-talk to him.
    When Eshamani and Krukillov moved over to the
service counter, both apparently happy with the way
things were going down, Lovecchio's mind began to
wander a bit. He started thinking about his sixteen-
year-old girlfriend in Palermo.
    Because his back was turned to the aft door, he
didn't see the concussion grenades fly into the middle
of the room, which meant his eyes missed the direct
blast of blinding light. Like everyone else in the gal-
ley, he had no protection from the thunderclap. The
powerful shock wave shattered the room's light bulbs,
plunging it into darkness.
    The Sicilian didn't notice. It was already dark in-
side his skull. The head-splitting pressure of the blast
in the enclosed steel room blacked him out for a sec-
ond. He didn't feel his knees buckling, but he awoke
with a sickening jolt as they hit the deck.
    Before he could shake off the numbness in his
limbs, the galley's forward door swung open. A !it
flare skittered across the floor, bathing the room in
hard white light.
 Lovecchio knew what was coming.
    He grabbed for the pistol grip of his shoulder-slung
12-gauge.


 MCCARTER BURST through the doorway, on the heels
 of the flare he had tossed. In the flickering light, most
 of the enemy gunners were still down, but none of
 them were out. As he crossed the threshold, McCarter
 opened fire, scything back the men nearest to him
 with 9 mm lead. Encizo stepped to McCarter's side,
 triple-thumping the scattering human forms with his
 Beretta 93-R.
     The hardmen, still stunned by the concussion and
 half-blinded by the flash, tried to crawl or run away.
 Some realized that escape was impossible and stood
 their ground, raising their weapons to fight to the
 death. The thugs fanned away from the source of
 bone-shattering pain and sudden death, moving in all
 directions at once. Like predator fish attacking a pan-
 icked school of anchovies, McCafret and Encizo had
 to keep focused on individual targets if they wanted
 to hit anything.
    They swung from head shot to head shot, wasting
no bullets on the body armor. Blood and skull con-
tents sprayed high onto the steel walls. Clouds of gun
smoke rolled in the strobe light of full-auto muzzle-
flashes. Ricochets whined around the room, and
through-and-through slugs clanged against the metal,
leaving bright silver pieces of flattened lead. The men
caught in the Phoenix Force meat grinder screamed
and cursed. Return fire from a stubby 12-gauge pump
gun rocked the room, but it was aimed by a dying
hand and crashed harmlessly into the ceiling.
    McCarter dumped his empty magazine. As he
slammed home a fresh one, a pair of panicked gun-
men tried to overturn the galley's dining table. They
soon discovered that it was securely bolted to the
deck, which left them flat-looted and in the line of

fire. The Phoenix warriors blew them apart with si-
multaneous 3-round bursts.
    In the middle of the room, a pair of refrigerator-
sized wooden crates drew hardmen like moths to a
flame. It wasn't much cover, but it was the only op-
tion they had. Four thugs clawed over each other to
reach it.
    McCarter and Encizo stepped wide of the boxes
and chopped the men down from either side, peeling
them away from the cover. While they were so oc-
cupied, three of Eshamani's security men managed to
slip through the door at the far end of the galley.

GARY MANNING DIDN'T hesitate when he saw the blur
of movement through the galley door. He knew it
wasn't a friendly blur, which would've shouted a
warning before charging into a prearranged, close-
quarters cross fire. From his position just inside the
entrance to the wet room's showers, Manning cut
loose with a full-auto burst at knee height, shooting
the legs out from under the first two men.
    Calvin James fired his H&K from a kneeling stance
near the door to the stairway, hitting the third man
full in the face with a 3-round burst. The Chechen
went down on top of his screaming buddies, pinning
them to the deck with his deadweight and twitching
limbs.
    A pair of single-shot whispers from James's
weapon ended the shrill cries of pain in the wet room,
while the sounds of the gun battle and death throes
from the galley likewise lessened, then ceased.
    "We're clear in here," James shouted toward the
half-open doorway.




SERGIO ISHMAEL Eshamani, blood seeping from his
ears, fully regained consciousness as he was dumped
face-first down an emergency hatch set in the kitchen
floor. He tumbled, arms flailing wildly, into the bright
lights of the engine room below. The broad curve of
a generator housing broke his fall after a six-foot
drop. He slid belly-first over the housing's broad,
green-enameled back and landed in a heap at its foot.
    Behind him, Krukillov hit the housing with both
feet and jumped to the deck. He immediately jerked
Eshamani up by an armpit.
    "Hey!" he said, giving the arms merchant a vig-
orous shake.
    Moments before, thunder-flash grenades had landed
on the galley deck less than ten feet from where Es-
hamani and Krukillov had been standing. When the
grenades had exploded, they had knocked the arms
merchant and the general sideways, blowing them off
their feet, slamming them against the edge of the gal-
ley's service counter and spinning them around its
corner. When they had fallen, they had toppled behind
the counter, out of view.
    Because of the thickness of Kmkillov's skull and
the layers of muscle guarding his bull neck, the blast's
concussion hadn't made him black out. He had had
the strength to grab the unconscious Eshamani by the
back of his jacket collar and drag him along the rear
of the counter into the long, narrow kitchen area,
thereby saving his life.
    "The Zodiac," Krukillov said, pinning the smaller
man upright against the side of the humming gener-
ator. "It's our only chance."
    Eshamani nodded in agreement. It was then he re-
alized he had the AFAP ops folder crumpled up in

his fist. When the grenades had gone off, slamming
him senseless, he had clutched it out of reflex. He
shoved the document into an inside coat pocket.
  "Can you run?" the general asked.
  Eshamani tested his knees. "1 think so."
    Only when the arms merchant started chasing the
Russian through the clutter and grease of the engine
room did his head clear enough for the shock to sink
in. He had had close calls many times before, but they
had always been of a different variety. He had nearly
been arrested, nearly convicted, but he had never
been nearly killed before. He had no doubt that the
attackers intended to leave no one on board alive. And
that whoever the intruders were, they had come
within a gnat's eyelash of getting the job done.
    Krukillov looked up from the base of the aft stair-
way to the landing that stood between them and the
top deck. It was clear, for the moment. "There're got
to be more enemy outside," the general said. "Once
we reach the top deck, we've got to move fast and
low. If we don't reach the net bay in short order,
we're dead. When you clear the door, head for the
gunwale and keep tight to it all the way down to the
trawl ramp--it'll block any small-arms fire from the
dock."
  "Understood."
  "Can you drive the boat?"
 Eshamani nodded.
    "When we hit the ramp, you start up the engine
and get the Zodiac moving. I'!1 provide the covering
fire."
    Eshamani looked at the general's empty hands. He
started to ask the obvious question, but Krukillov
whirled away and began mounting the stairs two at a




time. Eshamani had to strain to keep up with him.
The Russian didn't hesitate at the tower door, but
shoved it back and dashed out. Eshamani followed,
running in a half crouch.
    Out of the corner of his eye, Eshamani saw the
forward gangway was blocked by a pile of dead bod-
ies. Their mingled blood ran in a gummy, blackening
river down the deck, draining toward the stern. Ahead
of him, the general was sprinting toward the stern. As
Krukillov reached the hawsehole that allowed access
to the ship's middle mooring cleat, he lost his footing
on the wide patch of gore and skidded oreo his back-
side. As he slipped, a single, heavy-caliber rifle shot
sailed through the hawse opening and banged the su-
perstructure where his chest should have been.
    Before Eshamani could reach him, the Russian had
already scrambled past the hole and regained his feet.
Eshamani didn't slip on the blood, but when he
neared the opening he threw himself into a shallow
dive that cleared the hole and slammed him belly-first
on the deck. As he pushed up, he saw Kruki!lov bend
over the two dead Chechens sprawled alongside the
processing shed. He snatched up their dropped AKMs
by the shoulder straps and retreated to the cover of
the gunwale.
    As Eshamani ran up to Kmkillov, something
whined high overhead, followed instantly by what had
to be a gun crack. The bullet came from the water
side of the trawler. Another shot rang out, then an-
other. All of them sailed well above the Varuskya
Liset's superstructure, apparently aimed somewhere
across the dock. "That's a Dragunov sniper rifle,"
Krukiilov said. "We could be in a cross fire once we
hit the crane deck. Don't stop for anything."

    It was only thirty yards to the edge of the ramp,
but it was across unprotected deck. At every stride,
Eshamani expected a bullet to cut him down, but they
made the protection of the net bay's ramp without
drawing more fire.
    The situation changed abruptly as soon as they
closed on the Zodiac and came into view of the dock.
    Eshamani glimpsed a small truck on the pier, a fig-
ure half-concealed behind it and the winking starburst
of a muzzle-flash. Bullets spanged into the ramp be-
side them.
    "Hurry!" Krukillov growled. He held the AKMs
straight-armed out in front of him like a pair of duel-
ing pistols and opened fire, full auto, spraying the
dock and the side of the truck with 5.45 mm slugs,
forcing the shooter to take cover.
    Meanwhile, Eshamani jumped into the inflatable.
The electric start, fifty-horsepower outboard turned
over for him on the first try. As he gunned the motor
in neutral, the RussJan's AKMs came up empty and,
discarding the guns, he hurled himself into the Zo-
diac's bow.
  "Go! Go!" Krukillov shouted.
    The arms merchant jammed the engine in gear and
twisted the throttle wide-open. Only the load in the
bow kept the boat from flipping as he cut the tiller
arm over hard, slashing a sweeping 180-degree turn
through the net bay. As they cleared the hull, some-
thing screamed past them.
    The RPG slammed into the side of the trawler's net
bay, blowing a huge dent in the steel. The shock of
the explosion made Eshamani flinch at the tiller. The
Zodiac swerved wildly, and for a moment he lost con-
trol of the boat. When he recovered, they were tray-




cling at fifty miles per hour and headed right into the
bow of another moored trawler. He veered off at the
last second, barely scraping the Zodiac's rubber skin
against the hull. As they roared into the darkness, rifle
slugs from across the water sailed inches over Esha-
mani's head, sparking as they thunked against the
trawler's side.

MCCAR'mR ROLLED the limp corpse to one side and
examined the body beneath. A wash of dark blood
coated the man's face and matted his hair to his skull,
masking the extent of the head wound he had re-
ceived. McCarter checked for signs of breathing and,
finding none, applied thumb pressure to the center of
the eyeball.
  No response.
  He moved on to the next body.
    It was an unpleasant job, but it had to be done, and
quickly.
    The four Phoenix warriors worked their way
through the galley's heaped corpses, separating and
turning them, making sure there were no survivors.
Although it ate up seconds of precious time, they
couldn't afford to have one of the bad guys "wake
up" on them while their attention was fixed else-
where. They had to secure the room before tackling
the gleaming silver shells in the wooden crates.
    McCarter and the others had just completed the
grim task when an urgent voice boomed through their
headsets. It was Stony Man Farm, via satellite, with
a traffic update.
  "Bud, this is Hardcase," Hunt Wethers said.
  "Roger, Hardcase," McCarter replied.
    "Company is on the way. Repeat, company is on
the way."

CHAPTER THREE

Thomas Hawkins scanned the dock side Of the Va-
ruskya Liset from his hide on the roof of the derelict
trawler's bridge. The bridge's roofiine made it look
like the turret 'of a medieval castle. A two-foot-high,
rust-spotted metal wall ringed the roof perimeter, and
the wal!'s top edge was cut by evenly spaced, foot-
square notches. It was in one of these perfect little
firing ports that he had set up his sandbags and the
.308 Remington bolt-action rifle. Hawkins's primary
assignment on the mission was traffic control on the
pier during and after the assault. The shooting posi-
tion he had picked filled that bill to a T: no one could
come or go in either direction without coming under
his sights.
    The hide didn't do quite as good a job covering the
decks of the suspect ship. Over the top of the l.~poid
scope, he could see the full length of the trawler, but
because of his angle of view, the decks were partially
hidden by the gunwale. He did have a clear sight of
the top-deck access door set in the back of the bridge
tower; the only other way onto the deck was through
the door in the front of the tower. Anyone attempting
to flee the scene would have to come from the bow




of the boat and pass near the bodies heaped up in the
gangway entrance.
    Hawkins figured those corpses would deter anyone
from trying to escape that way. The ramp down to
the dock was too long and too open. The safest way
off the ship, and the most likely route, would be in-
side the protection of the gunwale, toward the stem
and the trawl ramp.
    That gunwale presented a shooting problem for
Hawkins because it screened practically the entire es-
cape route. Though the top of a running man's head
might be visible above the edge of the solid wall, that
small target would also be moving up and down, and
therefore in and out of Hawkins's view field. The only
places the gunwale failed to provide complete cover
were at the hawseholes. The four openings along the
side of the hull were each as tall as a standing man
and six feet across. Their lower thirds were partially
blocked by massive metal cleats.
    Hawkins had his shot lined up, his weapon securely
sandbagged, when the tower door banged open. A
gray-haired man in a brown overcoat crossed the deck
in a full-out sprint and disappeared behind the gun-
wale. Hawkins recognized General Kruki!lov from
surveillance and briefing photos. Then a second,
shorter man burst out of the doorway and beelined for
the same cover.
    So Eshamani had slipped the noose, too, Hawkins
thought. The head rats were deserting the ship. As he
settled in behind his weapon, he could see the top of
the general's head bobbing up and down, first vanish-
ing then reappearing above the gunwale. The silvery
brush cut rapidly closed the distance to the midship
hawsehole.

    Hawkins found the stock weld and peered through
the Leupold's optics. He touched the tip of his finger
to the trigger and applied steadily increasing pressure
until he felt the resistance of the break point.
    Six feet of deck wasn't much room to work a trap
shot on a running man, especially with that big cleat
in the way, but a tracking lead was out of the ques-
tion. Hawkins only had a partial view of the moving
target; if the general slowed down when he was mo-
mentarily out of sight, it would completely throw off
the shot timing. Hawkins centered the cross hairs at
the right edge of the hawse opening, between the
point of the cleat and the gunwale--an estimated
eighteen-inch span. His hold was for the chest height
of a standing man or the head height of a kneeling
man.
 A hit was all he wanted.
 And any hit would do.
    Hell, even a close miss might keep the buzzards
aboard long enough for McCarter and the others to
mop them up.
    The instant the shadowy blur appeared in the left
of the hawsehole, Hawkins broke the trigger. The
Remington coughed softly--and kicked like a mule.
Hawkins rode the recoil wave, fighting to teacquire
the target in the scope's field of view. He got the
briefest glimpse of the man's legs flying up as he slid
past the hawsehole.
    For an instant, he thought he had scored in the ten-
ring.
    Then he saw the chipped paint on the metal wall
where the slug had hit.
 There was no blood spray.
 A clean miss.




    Hawkins worked the Remington's butter-smooth
bolt, chambering a second round. He bore down
again, but before he could lock in on the narrow bullet
window, the smaller man dived headfirst past the
opening.
    With a curse, Hawkins grabbed the sniper rifle from
its chocks and rolled to his feet. He knew his sec-
ondary position at the rear of the roof would give him
a better tire lane to work the stern of the trawler.
  He never got there.
    As he rose, something big and bad whooshed over
his head. The heavy-caliber bullet snatched off his
knit hat, sending it and the communications headset
flying off the bridge. Hawkins threw himself down
beside the rooffs decorative wall. For a second, he
thought he'd been head shot. His scalp tingled all the
way to the base of his neck, then it went numb. When
he tested his head for blood, though, his fingertips
came away dry.
    Then, with an ear-ringing whap, a second slug
smacked the outside of the wall. A little peak ap-
peared in the metal on his side of the barter, six
inches beyond the end of his nose. Another sniper, he
thought. Serious opposition. Whoever was shooting
at him had the range and a steady hand.
    He started to crawl along the wall toward the rear
edge of the roofi He got about two feet when another
bullet slammed the rusting metal in front of him, this
time blowing tight through it. The impact sprayed rust
flakes in his face.
  He was pinned, but good.

THERE WERE DISASTERS and then there were bloody
huge disasters.

    McCarter had to know which kind was beating
down on his crew. "Who's coming?" he said into his
headset mike.
    "Who isn't," Wethers replied. "I'm tracking top-
priority emergency responses from police, fire and
military units all over the city. It amounts to near total
mobilization. They're en route as we speak, and frorrt
the chatter they know what to expect. They've started
civil-defense procedures."
  "What's the ETA?" McCarter said.
    "You've got four or five minutes, tops, before they
seal off the land exits to the pier."
    "Roger that, Hardcase," McCarter said. He was
looking at the radiation symbols on the noses of the
artillery shells inside the wooden crates. "The trouble
is, we've got a couple of rather large items sitting
here that we can't move ashore and we can't leave as
is."
    "Item" was the Riga mission's code for an oper-
ational nuclear weapon. Had Phoenix Force found ra-
dioactive material or bomb components, the code des-
ignation would have been "product."
    A different voice, but a very familiar one, spoke
through their headsets. "Bud, can you disable the two
items?" Kurtzman asked.
  "Roger," Gary Manning said without hesitation.
    "Then proceed and we'll update traffic and alter-
nate routes as you work."
"We're on it, Hardcase," McCarter stated.
Gripping a lifting handle, Encizo tried to shift one
of the shells in its crate. "Whew!" he said. "These
babies must weight a couple of hundred pounds."
    "Two and a half, actually," Manning said, taking
a claw hammer from his demolition kit bag and hand-




 ing it to Encizo. "Knock the crates apart as quickly
 as you can."
    "What are we going to do with these things?"
James asked as he helped Encizo clear away the hard-
wood bracing.
    "Like McCarter said, we can't move them off the
ship," Manning replied, pulling a cordless power drill
from his bag. "Even if they didn't weigh so much,
they're big and they're obvious. They look like what
they are, 152 mm artillery shells, and they've got
those radiation stickers plastered all over them. We
could get them off the boat, but we'd never get them
off the pier. So we've got to deal with them here."
    Manning chucked a gleaming five-inch bit into the
drill.
"What are you going to do with that?" James said.
"Make nuclear Swiss cheese," Manning told him.
"This diamond-tipped bit cuts through stainless steel
like it was butter. If anyone fires these shells after I'm
through holing them, the warheads'II whistle through
the air like a goddamned calliope. And they will
never, ever detonate." With that, he revved the drill
and started punching holes in the warhead.
    "Oh, man," James said, watching bright curls of
metal flying as he and Encizo attacked the other crate.
    "You guys better stand back," Manning warned as
he cored the first warhead with random boreholes.
"I'm flying blind here. I might hit the radioactive
target by accident and aerosolize some plutonium
dust. You don't want to breathe that stuff it can be
bad for your health. If I had the time, I'd put on a
dust mask myself."
  "If you don't hurry up," McCarter told him,

"none of us is going to live long enough to get can-
cer."
    "Don't rush him too much," James cautioned.
"We don't want any mistakes."
    "Hey, they aren't going to go off," Manning said
as he bored a four-inch-deep hole in the second
weapon's nose.
  "I know, but--"
    A rocking boom from the stem area of the ship cut
James off in midsentence and knocked pots and pans
off the ga!ley's stove.
    "Damn!" Encizo said, gripping the edge of the
table to steady himself. "I thought Hardcase said we
had four or five minutes."
    McCarter was already on the horn to his outside
man. "Hawk, this is Bud. We have someone knock-
ing at the back door. Who the hell is it? Hawk, are
you on it? Hawk, come in."  There was no reply.
    "Bloody hell!" McCarter exclaimed. "Hardcase,
this is Bud. We just took an incoming HE round and
Hawk is off-line. Who's shooting at us?"
      Dr. Wethers' reply was immediate, his voice grave.
"Bud, for sure it isn't anybody wearing a white hat."
  "Now what?" Encizo asked.
    "Gary," McCarter said, "what else do we need to
do here?"
    "Chuck these babies in the drink," the Canadian
replied. "The brackish water pouring into the war-
heads will ruin their circuitry."
    "Jesus, Gary," James said incredulously, "that
would contaminate the bay and the tidewater for a
thousand years. It'd be a mini-Chemoby!."
  "Have you got a better idea?"




     "If you want to sink 'em in salt water," James
 said, "why not toss 'em into the fish hold?"
     "He's fight," Encizo cut in. "We saw lots of brine
 clown there."
  "Let's roll," McCarter urged.
     Each of the warriors grabbed a lifting handle, and
 they lugged the awkward, heavy weapons out of the
 galley and up the stairs. They were all sweating by
 the time they reached the door to the top deck.
     "Once we get out on deck," Manning said, "let's
 not carry these frigging ball-breakers. If we can skid
 them along the deck, we can move much faster and
 lower."
    "Yeah," McCarter agreed. "If we meet resistance,
return fire but keep moving to the shed. We have to
destroy these weapons before we leave the ship."
    McCarter and James went first, submachine guns
in one hand, the lifting handle of the nuke-tipped ar-
tillery shell in the other. The underside of the shell
made a loud scraping noise as they dragged it along
the deck. The fiver of spilled blood acted as a lubri-
cant and made the job easier. They reached the pro-
cessing-shed door without drawing fire, and hauled
the shell up to the edge of the fish hold.
    Encizo and Manning entered the shed a moment
later, both puffing from the effort. As they skidded
their artillery shell over to the hold, McCarter and
James tipped their weapon into the brine. It hit with
a monstrous splash that sent milky water slopping up
onto the floor.
    The four of them quickly dumped the second
weapon in after it.
    Streams of air bubbles rose from the holes in the
warheads as they filled up with concentrated salt so-

lution. The sight brought a grin of satisfaction to
Manning's lips. "They're only fit for the scrap heap
now," he said.
    A chorus of sirens punctuated the end of his sen-
tence. Their singsong wails appeared to be coming
from all directions at once.
    McCarter took a look out of the doorway that faced
the dock. At the entrance to the pier, scores of blue-
and-white lights flashed, reflecting against the walls
of the fish-packing plants.
    They had waited too long to make their escape by
land.
    McCarter dropped his weapons on the fish-cleaning
table and dumped his combat harness on the floor.
"Come on," he said, "it's time to go."
    "What about Hawk?" Manning said. He spoke to
McCarter's back as the Phoenix Force leader exited
the processing shed's water-side door.
  His question hung in the air, unanswered.

HER RIGHT EYE PRESSED tight to the Dragunov
scope's eyepiece, Tasha Beloc held her fire, trying to
outthink her target. She knew the man had to bail off
the back of the roof. With two well-placed shots, she
had proved to him it was either jump for it or die
where he lay. It was only a drop of three yards to the
rear bridge deck. From there, a quick tuck and roll
would put him in the tower or off the far side of it.
    To safety and escape. But diving off the back of
the roof meant that for a few seconds he would be
vulnerable.
    It would make a challenging shot, but it was well
within her ability, and thanks to glasnost, within the
ability of the SVD. Prior to the fall of the Soviet




 Union, even a biathlete like herself had been unable
 to get such fine, Match-grade cartridges for the Dra-
 gunov. Now that the 180-grain, soft-nose Norma bul-
 lets were available, they extended the capabilities of
 the weapon, which had built-in limitations. Its semi-
 automatic action could not seat cartridges with the
 same precision as a bolt gun. A thin barrel made ac-
 curizing difficult, if not impossible. The standard
 scope was only four power, which all added up to a
 relatively short killing range for a sniper gun of less
 than six hundred yards.
     Still, at under ten pounds, it was a light gun and
 easy for her to carry. And because she had worked
 with it for so many years in competition, she had
 supreme confidence in it, within specific limits.
    A less highly skilled shooter might have used up
most of the 10-round magazine, punching holes in the
turret top in order to flush the target into view. Beloc
knew that her best accuracy came from a cold barrel.
She also knew her firing window was going to be so
narrow that she'd never be able to recover from the
recoil of a preliminary shot and still get her gun on
target.
    She relaxed and slipped into no-blink mode, the
only tension in her body in the tip of her trigger fin-
ger. As she slowed her breathing, sirens howled, very
near. Reinforcements from the Latvian police and
military had arrived and closed off the end of the pier.
He was going to jump now; she could feel it.
    "Hold it," Sarnov said, putting a gentle hand on
her shoulder.
    Beloc immediately let up on the trigger, and as she
did so, her target made his move. Through the tele-
scopic sight, she saw the figure in black vault the

turret. He was backlit for an instant, before he rolled
off the far side of the tower, out of sight to the main
deck below.
 Beloc knew she could have killed him.
    "You just saved that lucky bastard's life," she
said.
    "Look," the captain said, pointing at the Varuskya
Liset's processing shed. Four men in black had exited
one of the side doors and were crossing the deck,
single file. They weren't carrying nuclear artillery
shells, they didn't even have side arms. The men dis-
appeared under the cover of the gunwale, only to
reappear at the hawsehole.
    Beloc snugged the SVD's fiberglass stock to her
cheek as she sighted in on the forehead of the man
standing in the gunwale's opening.

ENCIZO, MANN1NG and James caught up with Mc-
Carter as he climbed over the mooring cleat. They
were all fit to be tied.
    "Goddammit, man," James said, "we can't just
leave the kid behind."
    "Even if he's dead," Manning said, "we can't go
without him. We've got to find him and take him
home.' '
    McCarter half turned toward them, a sardonic smile
on his face.
    "What the hell are we going to do about Hawk?"
Encizo demanded.
    "Join him," McCarter replied. He pointed down at
the man calmly treading water beside the trawler's
hull, then stepped off into space.

CAPTAIN ANDRE! SARNOV watched, expressionless,
as the Riga police and military forensic personnel tied




 handkerchiefs over their faces to protect themselves
 from the stench in the galley. For two hours, while
 the land and water access to the pier was cordoned
 off, the blood and voided bowel contents of twenty-
 odd corpses had lingered in the airless, windowless
 steel room. The effect of so much death in so small
 a space was gut-turning.
    Although Sarnov had a clean handkerchief in his
hip pocket, he didn't take it out. As a Spetsnaz officer,
he was expected to be tougher than tough. He wanted
the queasy Latvians to see that his face wasn't turning
green around the gills. Also, from experience, Sarnov
knew that wearing a hankie over one's nose was a
pointless exercise, unless it had been soaked in per-
fume first.
    Despite the breakup of the Soviet Union and de-
cades of ill will between the former satellites and Rus-
sia, the local civilian and military authorities treated
Sarnov and the rest of the Spetsnaz unit with the ut-
most courtesy and respect. They knew they were an
elite military force, a force whose lives were now
dedicated to protecting the interests of both Latvia
and Russia. The physical presence of Captain Sarnov
had something to do with it, too. He commanded sim-
ply by his bearing and by the icy, all-business ex-
pression in his eyes. Eyes that had seen much in al-
most twenty years of service. With a glance, he had
deflected questions and protests, and sent the police
and army scurrying to search every inch of the ship
with radiation-detection devices.
    Looking at the piled bodies, Sarnov still had no
clue who the hit team was or who had sent them, but
he knew for sure who they weren't. There had been

no backup, no double cross from any part of the
trawler's security squads. All of them were dead.
Only a few weapons had retumed fire, and apparently
unsuccessfully. The men who had executed this mis-
sion were not crazy or suicidal as he had first thought.
    And they hadn't lucked out. Four men didn't luck
out against a we!l-armed, professional opposing force
of nearly thirty.
    Even though the bodies had been moved from
where they'd originally fallen, Samov could replay
recent events from the direction of the blood splatters.
All the gunfire had come from one end of the room,
the bow end. Scorch marks on the galley floor indi-
cated that a pair of concussion grenades had gone off
prior to the attack. Those explosions had shattered the
light bulbs wire-caged in the ceiling. In the confusion
and darkness, a pair of men had entered by the bow
door and opened fire, using a flare to light their tar-
gets. Nine-millimeter shell casings still littered the
floor, making the forensic people mind where they
stepped. All but three of the security men had been
killed in the galley; those three lived long enough to
reach the wet room, next door. Apparently Sergio Es-
hamani and Brigadier General Krukillov were the sole
survivors of the assault.
    There was no joy in Samov's heart as he stared at
the fractured crates that had housed the weapons; in-
stead, a sinking sensation racked his guts. He was
afraid that, as the old saying went, he had won the
battle but lost the war.
    Then he noticed that mixed among the splinters of
wood on the floor were a few tight spirals of steel.
He knelt down and waved his Geiger counter over the




 shavings, and the machine chattered a harsh warning.
 The weapons' warheads had definitely been breached.
     As he straightened up, a Latvian soldier rushed
 over to him and announced, "The ship is clean be-
 lowdecks, sir."
  ' 'You' re sure?' '
      "We've gone over everything three times with the
 Geiger counters and recovered nothing more."
   Sarnov muttered a curse under his breath.
     "But your people have apparently found something
 on the top deck," the soldier continued. "They
 passed the word that they want you to come up and
 have a look."
    "That's better news," the captain said. "But be-
fore we go, this room must be cleared." He put his
arms in the air and started waving the body baggets
toward the aft door. "Everyone must leave at once,"
he told them.
    "Our work isn't finished in here," the head of the
civilian forensics unit protested.
    "For the moment it is," the Spetsnaz captain cor-
rected him. "The galley is highly radioactive. There
are plutonium fragments scattered all over the floor.
Get some people in here who can clean them up, and
leave your shoes in the wet room for decontamina-
tion."
    Samov replaced his own shoes with a pair of rubber
boots from the wet room, then followed the soldier
up to the top deck. They passed by a police photog-
rapher who was taking flash shots of the bodies by
the gangway. Beyond the corpses, Samov saw the
twin tracks, ragged lines drawn in blood, heading to-
ward the stem. They led through the processing
shed's first doorway.

    When he entered the shed, he found Turgenev, Fer-
dishenko and Tasha Beloc standing around an open
hatch set in the floor. Turgenev had a Geiger counter
in his hand, and was passing it back and forth over
the opening. The counter sang like a thousand lunatic
crickets.
    "It shouldn't be reading this high," Turgenev said,
shaking his head. "We've got a major radiation leak
on our hands."
    "They've breached the warheads somehow," Sat-
nov explained.
    "How about with this?" Beioc said. She removed
the cordless drill from the kit bag left behind on the
table and let Turgenev scan it with his Geiger counter.
The little machine screamed.
    "Those guys really did a job here," Ferdishenko
said. "It took some guts to put a hand drill to a nu-
clear warhead."
    Samov nodded. Whoever they were, they had guts
to spare, and brains, too. Clearly they had never in-
tended stealing the weapons for resale. Destruction
had been the only thing on their minds. And they had
managed to compromise the weapons and contain
most of the leaking radiation in the fish hold.
    Down in the milky water, Samov could barely
make out the casings of the artillery shells. He
couldn't tell how many shells had been dumped in
the hold. He still had a tiny flicker of hope.
    "Vlad, find some long-handled gaff hooks," he
said.
    Using four gaffs, the Spetsnaz team snagged one
of the warheads by its drill holes and lifted it halfway
out of the brine.
  Samov stared at it. It was, he thought, rain heaped




upon min. The treasure of his nation had been squan-
dered on such devices; for the safety they promised,
four generations of Soviet citizens had gone without
food, without comfort or hope of same. The only sat-
isfaction to be had, and it was slight at best, was that
the West had likewise crippled itself to pay for weap-
ons it would never use.
    They lowered the shell back into the hold and
fished out the second one. Salt water poured out of
the randomly drilled holes as they raised the warhead
into view.
    Sarnov unhooked his gaff from the warhead and
used it to poke around in the murky water, searching
the rest of the hold from wall to wall and finding
nothing. Hope died for the Spetsnaz captain.
    There were only two starookhas on board the ship,
and Kmkillov had stolen three.

PART TWO

THE SAWTOOTH CONSPIRACY




CHAPTER FOUR

Los Pavos, California
3:!! a.m. PDT

    Edward Kelso eased the Mustang coupe down
Main Street. On both sides of the road, businesses
catering to Interstate 5 traffic--fast food, gas and
booze--were dark. Ahead, in the flat distance, a half-
dozen stop signals blinked at him, yellow and out of
sync. The town's seven-thousand-odd residents dozed
peacefully amid the musty sweet stink of corporate
poultry farms upwind, secure in their beds because
they believed there was nothing in Los Pavos to steal.
    At the mouth of an alley on Kelso's right, partially
hidden beneath a crudely lettered billboard proclaim-
ing God's Eternal Love, was a county sheriff's cruiser
with its headlights and engine off. As Kelso drove
past, by the harsh glare of a streetlamp he could see
a head behind the wheel of the green-and-white car.
It was a speed trap, manned by the town's lone night-
duty policeman, a deputy sheriff.
    There was no way the Mustang Kelso had stolen
from the San Fernando Valley two hours earlier could
have been on the deputy's hot sheet. Still, Kelso
watched his rearview mirror intently, aware of the




surgical gloves he wore drawing skintight across his
knuckles as he squeezed the steering wheel.
    No lights came on behind him. The cruiser stayed
put.
    He continued at a sedate pace for two more blocks,
then turned right at City Hall, a thirty-foot-long, alu-
minum-sided trailer, and onto a wide residential street
without sidewalks. After going one block, he turned
right again and began paralleling, backtracking his
route down Main. As he neared the end of the speed-
trap alley, he cut lights and engine, coasting past the
driveway and coming to a quiet stop.
    This early rooming was typical of the central valley
in summer: sweltering, airless, pulsing with cricket
song. The day to come wasn't going to get any bet-
ter-just hotter. Kelso reached under the front of his
bucket seat and found the grip of the .22-caliber pis-
tol. He lifted the Walther automatic into his lap. The
weapon's stubby barrel was extended by six inches
of silencer. Inside the surgical gloves, Kelso's hands
were slippery with sweat, not from fear, but from the
sauna effect of the latex.
    He took the flat tin of camouflage makeup from the
passenger's seat and liberally smeared antiglare green
over his wide forehead, meaty cheeks and chin. He
did his bare arms, then picked up the gun. Before he
opened the car door, he shut off the dome light. He
rounded the rear of the Mustang on the run, his crepe-
soled shoes padding soundlessly on the pavement.
    The sheriff's cruiser sat in a pool of lamplight 150
feet away. Kelso zigzagged down the alley, darting
from Dumpster to trash cans to parked pickup track,
the black of his T-shirt and slacks merging with the
shadows. He advanced rapidly on the driver's side of

the car. The window was rolled all the way down,
and an elbow in a short-sleeved khaki uniform shirt
stuck out over the ledge.
    Kelso moved into the car's blind spot, alongside
the left rear fender. He could see the deputy through
the back window and the mesh screen that separated
the front seat from the rear. The deputy had propped
up a newspaper on the steering wheel and was reading
it by the light of the streetlamp.
    Kelso took three more quick steps, then poked the
pistol's silenced muzzle around the doorjamb,
through the open window. At the last second, out of
the comer of his eye, the deputy caught the blur of
movement. Startled, he glanced into the side mirror.
    The firing pin snapped once, dry and crisp. The
muffled shot thwacked, like a nail gun punching steel
into a two-by-four. Powder grains from the muzzle
blast dusted the deputy's earlobe black. As the man
slumped over on the seat, Kelso leaned through the
window and methodically put seven more insurance
rounds into the base of his skull.
    With a .22, one never knew. Even at point-blank
range, the lightweight, standard-velocity slugs could
glance off bone and fail to penetrate the cranial cav-
ity. A hit gun was never used twice, either, so it was
always used to the maximum. Kelso tossed the empty
Walther onto the car's floorboards, grabbed the dep-
uty by the arm and jerked him back up into a sitting
position. Then he tipped the dead man's hat down
over his face.
    Kelso trotted back to the Mustang, heart pounding,
nerve ends tingling. When it came to murder, Kelso
was like a skilled plumber or carpenter. He could ad-
mire a piece of work--his own or someone else's--




 for its neatness or style, but the act of killing didn't
 excite him anymore. His thrill came from the mission
 itself, the careful planning, the teamwork, the absolute
 commitment and, most of all, the element of personal
 risk.
     He got back in the Mustang and started it up. The
 cop-killing, never a wise move, was necessary in this
 case; the only direct radio link between the town and
 the California Highway Patrol was now broken. Kelso
 knew a million things could still go sour this morning,
 things he had never even considered. The thought
 raised the hair on the back of his neck.
    He drove the car half a block before turning on his
lights. He continued until he saw his objective on the
right. The 432nd National Guard Armory was a two-
story brick building with barred windows. It sat in the
middle of a block-long rectangle of asphalt. The street
he was on ran along the back of the armory com-
pound, beside the floodlit vehicle-storage yard that,
like the entire perimeter, was bounded by a fifteen-
foot-high hurricane fence topped with spirals of razor
wire.
    He blinked his headlights on and off as he crossed
the intersection, then pulled over to the curb. On the
other side of the street, a parked semitruck and trailer
immediately started up and, lights off, swung into re-
verse. The big rig cut a wide are, partially blocking
the road as it brought its tailgate to within a few feet
of the fence.
    As Kelso got out of the Mustang, the trailer's rear
door rolled up and three men in black clothes, their
faces also covered with green camouflage makeup,
jumped down and began attacking the fence wire with
long-handled bolt cutters. A fourth man, the driver,

hopped down from the truck's cab and took a kneel-
ing position beside the left front fender. He shoul-
dered an M-16 automatic rifle equipped with a si-
lencer.
    Nothing stirred in the row of squat prefab houses
across the street. In Los Paros, they were used to big
tracks coming and going at all hours.
    By the time Kelso jogged over to the trio working
on the fence, they had created a man-size slit in the
heavy wire.
  No words passed between them.
  None were necessary.
    The powers that be had allowed Kelso to handpick
his team. He had been under fire and worse, with
every one of them, in Vietnam. Recently the quintet
had been involved in organization "fund-raisers": the
Security National Bank of Des Moines; the armored-
truck job in Kansas City; the Fargo City Savings and
Loan. Kelso's guys were not shy about using their
weapons to get what they wanted. They knew the
morning's itinerary cold; Kelso had made sure of that.
He was a fanatic for detail. That was how he had
earned and kept these men's respect over the years.
The little things often made the difference between
success and failure, living and dying.
    None of them, Kelso included, had ever been con-
victed of a crime in the United States. Their military-
service records were clean, as well. They didn't have
easily traceable connections to the organization,
which didn't hand out membership cards and had no
mailing list. The Sawtooth Patriots didn't believe in
that kind of regimentation. Ultimately that's what the
battle was all about. Personal freedom. As far as
Kelso was concerned, it felt great to fight for a cause




again, to know that you were doing something with
right on your side, something that would make a dif-
ference.
    Kelso accepted a satchel from the tallest of the
three men, former U.S. Army Sergeant Rudy Speck.
While Tim Ringman and Nell Mallone held open the
cut in the fence, he and Speck slipped through into
the storage yard.
    There were two rows of equipment between them
and the armory building. In the first were six-by-six
trucks, jeeps and howitzers. In the back was a quartet
of small tanks painted desert camouflage and an equal
number of armored personnel carriers.
    The armory building's alarm system was external
and primitive. In less than two minutes, Kelso and his
tall shadow were inside, their shoe soles softly
squeaking on the well-waxed linoleum of the hallway.
Twin flashlight beams locked on to a small rectan-
gular sign sticking out at right angles to the wall
above a door on the left. The battalion commander's
office was locked.
    They kicked the door in unison, splintering it off
its hinges, and headed straight for the room's side
wall that was lined with tightly packed metal book-
shelves. A quick search of books and notebook spines
did not turn up what they were looking for. Kelso
aimed his light at the unconcealed wall safe. It had
to be in there. With Speck illuminating things over
his shoulder, Kelso took a small wad of plastic ex-
plosive from the satchel, shaped it and stuck it along
the safe's door seam. He inserted the detonator and
set the timer.
    The two of them knelt down in front of the com-
mander's desk, awaiting the explosion. For an instant,

Kelso's flashlight beam swept over Speck's sweaty,
green-daubed face. The man's eyes were full of glee.
It was a look Kelso knew and one he understood. It
brought back a sudden torrent of memories. Of 1968
and the Cambodian border. Tiger cages, heat, thirst
and pain. Of a lone NVA prison-camp guard who had
been obsessed with trying to crush their testicles with
his rifle butt.
    For hours the bastard had jabbed that metal-shod
club through the bamboo bars, bashing their tailbones,
knees and shins, whiling away the time until the rest
of his unit returned from a foraging expedition. The
cages were so narrow they could not escape the
blows; they could only cover with arms and legs and
take them.
    Finally Kelso had had enough. It didn't matter to
him that resistance meant death. The guard was no
longer jerking the gun back quickly after every jab,
but left it propped on the cage cross brace while he
grinned in at them, considering his next lunge.
    Kelso had waited for the inevitable next blow and
when it came, he absorbed it. Then he struck. From
a fetal position on the floor of the cage, he kicked the
extended buttstock with both feet, driving it back and
up over the cross brace, driving its crude, fixed-spike
bayonet three inches into the middle of the guard's
forehead. The guard had grimaced horribly, clutching
at the gun muzzle. His knees buckled and he slumped
back, dragging the rifle out of the cage. He dropped
to his side, thrashing and kicking in the red dirt.
    Kelso quickly reached through the bars and jerked
the man's knife free. As he began to saw off the !ac-
ing that held the bars together, he looked over at
Speck, naked in a separate cage. Amid a face caked




with blood and filth and oozing sweat, his eyes twin-
kled with delight. Sergeant Rudy Speck knew he was
about to be turned loose on the world. For how long,
it didn't matter.
    "Kill him!" Speck bellowed as Kelso stepped from
the tiger cage. "Blow the mother's head off!"
    That was how the other American POWs had felt,
too. From their bamboo pens they cheered as Kelso
grabbed the butt and pistol grip of the guard's
AK-47 and used the rifle as a lever to turn the little
man onto his back.
    How long they were free mattered to Kelso. He
knew a single rifle shot could alert the returning squad
of NVA.
    He threw his full body weight against the buttstock,
driving the steel spike completely through the guard's
head and into the ground. The little man stopped
thrashing. Kelso gave the weapon a savage twist,
snapping the bayonet off at the muzzle, leaving the
guard pinned to the earth.
    Once the other POWs were free, they didn't scatter
and flee into the bush. Kelso hadn't allowed it, and
he had the guard's AK. Under his direction, they took
weapons from the camp cache and hidden along the
main trail. When the rest of the NVA unit entered the
camp, their former captives ambushed them. After-
ward, also under Kelso's direction, the Americans did
horrible things to the enemy survivors.
    At the hollow whump of the explosion, Kelso
flinched and covered, forcibly brought back to the
present. Acoustic tiles blown free of the ceiling
bounced off the desktop and slapped the wall behind
him. Then he was up, hurrying to the safe through
clouds of smoke. The safe's door hung by a single

IVlLd~.)/-Jk.TL.I ~ /'~/?1L/~,Ik,,.H

twisted hinge. Speck stepped up behind him, holding
the light. Kelso elbowed the door out of the way and
reached inside, removing account ledgers and sheaves
of loose paper, dumping everything on the floor until
he found what they had come for. The gun book, the
history of every cannon on the premises, on computer
diskette and in hard copy.
    He quickly leafed through the pages of the note-
book, checking the number of effective full charges,
or EFCs, each gun had fired. EFCs were a measure
of a gun's probable life span; a field howitzer was
worn out after about fifteen thousand. From this in-
formation, Kelso picked the best gun of the lot. He
tore out the pages of the firing tables that documented
the cannon's firing history, tabulating the range to be
reached from any elevation of the gun firing a specific
charge and shell. The table also included the specifics
of time of flight, standard fuse timing and corrections
for wind and air temperature for various charge-and-
shell combinations. Kelso pocketed the pages and the
diskette, and dumped the notebook on the floor with
the rest of the debris.
    He and Speck ran side by side back down the hal!-
way. Outside, Ringman and Mallone had completed
their job. They had cut an entire section of fence free
of its supporting posts and rolled it to one side. They
had also lowered a pair of steel tracks from the rear
of the trailer to the ground. A dozen packaged
155 mm howitzer rounds were already secured inside
the trailer.
    Kelso matched the serial number on the pages in
his hand with one of the howitzers. Even as he was
pointing out the gun, Mallone was running from the
trailer with a winch cable slung over his shoulder.




They hooked the cable to the gun's trails, released the
wheel brakes and winched the howitzer back through
the gap in the fence, up the tracks and into the trailer.
    While Ringman and Mallone battened down the
gun, Kelso and Speck slid the tracks into the trailer
and pulled down the trailer door. Kelso locked the
two men and the howitzer inside, then ran for the
front of the truck with Speck on his heels. He climbed
into the passenger's side of the cab, relieved Wiley,
the driver, of the silenced M-16, and passed the
weapon to Speck, who took the window seat. As they
rumbled down the street, Speck held the automatic
rifle out the window, watching the dark line of houses
for signs of life.
    Kelso checked his wristwatch. The elapsed time
was eight minutes. In another four minutes they
would be at a dead-end side road, changing trucks,
transferring their cargo. Only Kelso knew exactly
what they were going to do with it. It wasn't a matter
of security that kept him from telling Speck and the
others, but rather a matter of need-to-know.
    Of course, there was no way he could stop them
from trying to guess among themselves. There were
clues, all right. No one in his right mind stole some-
thing as big as an artillery field piece and then took
it to another country to use it.
    As Wiley steered the truck up the freeway on-ramp,
Speck put the butt of his M-16 on the floor and
trapped its muzzle between his knees, keeping the
weapon out of sight but accessible. He turned to
Kelso and gave him a wide, knowing grin.
    Kelso smiled back. It came easily. Speck could
strain his brain and still he would never guess. He
just didn't think big enough.

CHAPTER RVE

Cody, Wyoming
10:23 a.m. MDT

Although E. Paul Rutherford had the full use of his
legs, he sat behind the K-CHAT on-air console in a
wheelchair. As radio talk-show host, he had to move
quickly along the control panel and back and forth to
the storage cases stationed around the glassed-in
room, where shelves held cassettes of commercial an-
nouncements, taped music and news programs and
sound-effect selections. Standard office chairs with
little swivel wheels weren't up to the task. The wheels
lasted only a couple of shows before blowing out and
scattering their tiny steel bearings over the floor.
    The reason that E. Paul Rutherford was so hard on
furniture was that, dripping wet, he weighed 450
pounds.
The console's call lights were flashing.
"Rutherford here," he said into station's boom
mike, cupping one ear closed so he could properly
modulate his syrupy baritone. "Welcome to K-
CHAT. You're on Truth Watch."
    "This is Chuck from Billings," a man's gruff voice
said.




    "Hey, Chuck, what's on your mind today?" As he
spoke, Rutherford's massive pink jowls trembled. He
was mostly bald; what hair he had, he combed over
from a part just above his fight ear. The top of his
head was the normal size for a man of five foot ten,
but from the cheekbones down, he grew larger and
larger, spreading out in all directions like the flanks
of a mountain.
A mountain in a Brooks Brothers pinstriped suit.
"The same thing that's on my mind every day,"
Chuck answered. "This country is being invaded.
I've seen it myself, with my own two eyes."
    Rutherford checked his computer prompter, on
which Polly, his producer and call screener, logged
each of the incoming calls and the subjects the callers
wanted to discuss. He was looking for another call to
pull up, in case this one turned suddenly boring or
profane. "Are we talking UFOs, green men from
Mars or what, Chuck? You've got to be more specific.
And get on with it, I've got a lot of people waiting
to speak this morning."
    "We're being infiltrated by the armies of the New
World Order," Chuck said.
    "Before you explain that, why don't you tell us
what you do for a living?"
    "What I did for a living, Mr. R. I'm out of work
since the goddamned environmentalists and federal
government conspired to shut down the copper
smelter over by Big Hat."
    "Sorry to hear that, Chuck. Now, tell us about this
army."
    "It's part of an international conspiracy to enslave
the American working man. They're starting the cam-
paign here in the West, where they have lots of room

to maneuver and where the population is spread out
and especially vulnerable to attack. I'm not just some
nut. I've got evidence on this. I've seen the trains."
  "Okay, Chuck, I'll bite. What trains?"
    "A week ago Thursday, at seven in the morning, I
was hunting over in the Clark River basin and I saw
a hundred-car train coming from Johnsonville. Two
engines pulling a string of flatcars covered with tarps.
But not all the tarps were tied down--some had come
completely off. What do you think was under them,
Mr. R.?"
  "I haven't a clue, Chuck."
      "Russian and East German trucks. Personnel car-
hers. Must have been two hundred of them lined up."
  "You're sure about this?"
  "I know a Commie red star when I see one."
    "Did you follow the train, Chuck? Did you see
where it took all those trucks?"
    "No, I didn't. Believe me, I'm sorry now that I
didn't, but I was about a mile from my pickup at the
time."
  "Thanks for the report, Chuck."
    "Thank you for being on the radio, Mr. R. You're
our guiding light. You're helping to save America."
    "You bet." Rutherford glared at his wall clock;
some days seemed endless. "All I can say is, signs
and portents, Americans. Signs and portents. If there's
anybody out there who can confirm Chuck's story, or
knows where those Evil Empire trucks ended up, give
us a call here at K-CHAT. Next caller, you're on
Truth Watch."
  "This is Denver from Butte. Howdy, Mr. R."
  "Not John Denver, I hope."
  "Hardly. Denver's my first name. I didn't see that




train, but I've heard about other suspicious activity
around here."
  "What kind of activity?"
    "Drug gangs from Los Angeles and Miami and
New York City being flown into deserted air bases. I
know, 'cause friends of mine have seen 'em. These
drug punks are being trained as shock troops for the
New World Order. The plan is to give 'em dope and
guns, and once they're all doped up, they're going to
do house-to-house searches all through Montana, Wy-
oming and Idaho. They'll seize all valuables, guns,
ammo and Bibles. They'll be robbin', rapin' and kil-
lin' anyone who resists. These drug gangsters are go-
ing to be sent into combat first, like a human wave,
against property owners--that way they'll soak up all
the ammo the honest citizens have stored away. Then
the Pakistanis'11 come in and finish everyone off."
"What have the Pakistanis got to do with this?"
"Goddamned UN troops," Denver replied.
"They're already here. Training up in the mountains.
They're going to enforce the martial law of the New
World Order."
  "But why the Pakistanis?"
    "Because they're not white," Denver said. "It's
one of the rules of these New Order bastards. To do
their dirty work, they always send in occupying
troops of a different color than the general population.
Whites'11 go to Pakistan or Hong Kong. Africans will
go to West Yellowstone. They've done psychiatric
research that shows black troops have less mercy on
people they're enslaving if those people are white,
and vice-a-versa."
    "Well, Denver, you've given us a lot to think about
this morning," Rutherford said.

    "I just want to say one more thing, quick, before
I hang up."
  "Sure, Denver."
    "You aren't corrupted by money and power, like
the rest of the American media. I pray you have the
strength to stay that way. God bless you."  "Bless you, too," Rutherford said.
    At 10:59:27, the fat man punched up his last auto-
glass commercial and rolled back from the console.
He locked the chair's wheels and, with a grunt,
pushed up to his feet.
    Rutherford's producer met him at the controlsroom
door, clipboard in hand. It appeared she had a list of
things for him to do. The slim, thirty-year-old redhead
started to speak, but he cut her off before she could
get out a word. "Sorry, Polly, I don't have a second
to spare. I've got an early lunch over at the Irma
starting in ten minutes," he told her. As he lumbered
past her down the corridor, he said, 'T !1 be there until
3:00 p.m."
    The Irma Hotel, a Cody landmark, was only a few
blocks from the radio station's offices, but Rutherford
hated to hurry. Hurrying made him perspire, made
him short of breath and made his face even pinker
than usual. He drove to the hotel restaurant in his full-
size Cadillac sedan.
    From the outside, the Irma wasn't much to look at,
a long, boxy building. Inside, it had its own peculiar
charm. It was built by Buffalo Bill Cody, the cowboy
master showman of the !ate nineteenth century and
town's namesake. Its elaborately carved cherry-wood
bar had been a present to Buffalo Bill by Queen Vic-
toria, a token of her appreciation after seeing one of
his performances. There were the standard Wild West




decorative touches, stuffed buffalo and moose heads.
Over the cash register hung a bullet-hole silhouette
portrait of Buffalo Bill, artistically rendered in several
different calibers on a thin sheet of steel. The restau-
rant's walls were lined with dark wood-paneled
booths; the high ceilings were also dark. Combined
with the weak lighting, it made for a brooding, serious
drinking atmosphere.
    Rutherford ruffed over to his usual booth, off in a
particularly dimly lit corner. He moved the table over
to give himself room, then slid in, his buttocks filling
the booth's bench seat from one end to the other.
    When the perky young waitress arrived, he waved
off the menu she offered him and announced, "I'd
like a large bowl of the soup of the day, followed by
the Lite Eater's Cobb salad with bread sticks, and a
glass of low-calorie beer."
    As his appointment walked up, Rutherford was just
tidying up what had once been a platter of salad
greens and mixed dell meats and cheeses. He mopped
up the last of the Italian dressing with the stub of a
bread stick. Wiping his mouth with his napkin, he
extended a hand to the FBI man.
  "Always good to see you, Parker."
    The agent shook hands, then, with difficulty, took
a seat opposite the radio personality. He had trouble
sliding in because the table was shoved so far over
on his side.
    When the waitress saw Rutherford's guest appear,
she returned at once with her order pad.
    "What are the specials today?" Rutherford asked
her.
    She rattled off three selections, none of which
suited him.

    "Why don't you have the chef chicken-fry me a
nice sixteen-ounce buffalo steak, medium rare. Mush-
rooms and onions. Baked potato and trimmings.
Steamed vegetables. Sourdough rolls."  "To drink?'~
  "Another low-calorie beer for me."
"And you, sir?" the waitress asked Parker.
"Too early for lunch. Just coffee, black, please."
After the waitress left with the empty dishes, the
FBI agent leaned over the table and said, "You're
dicking the wrong guy, Rutherford."  "A very unpleasant expression."
    "You want unpleasant?" Parker said, finding the
table's pedestal with the soles of both shoes. He put
his hands on the table edge. "This is unpleasant .... "
His back braced against the booth, he shoved with
hands and feet, scooting the table across the rug,
burying its edge deep in Rutherford's massive gut,
creasing him all the way to his rib cage.
    "Do you think I'm stupid, Mr. R.?" the agent
hissed.
    Rutherford couldn't reply; he was too busy fighting
for breath.
    "You've been taking the Bureau's money for a
year now. You've been playing footsy with some real
bad apples. But you've given me diddly-squat."
    The fat man struggled against the pressure, trying
in vain to push the table back.
    "Do you know how mad it makes me every time
I see you smiling down from one of your Truth Watch
billboards?" Parker said. "You' ve got your talk-show
syndication scam in high gear, but you should never,
ever forget who brought you to the party. I set you
up as God's gift to the airwaves and I can take you




down, pronto." He shoved harder with his feet, until
he could lock his knees. The booth back behind the
radio host made an ominous cracking sound.
    "Okay, Okay, enough," Rutherford gasped, his
face turning dark red. He waved his hands in surren-
der.
    Parker let the table slide back a little. "I hate get-
ting physical with you, but you don't seem to get the
point. My patience, and that of the Bureau, is gone.
It's time to take these scum-buckets down. You're
going to get me what I need to do the job. Evidence
of serious criminal activity, felonies, something I can
take to a grand jury."
  "Or you'll stop paying me?"
    "Of course I'll stop paying you," Parker said, "but
that isn't what should be keeping you up at night.
What you should worry about is how your superpa-
triotic pals are going to take the news that their golden
boy is a federal snitch."
    The waitress rolled over a small trolley cart bearing
Rutherford's meal. As she set out the plates, he picked
up the fresh glass of beer and drained it.
"Can I get you another beer?" she asked.
"Please." He looked down at the food, then up at
Parker. "Do you mind?" he asked, gesturing at the
plate with his knife and fork. "It would be a shame
to let it get cold."
    Parker watched Rutherford attack the food, sawing
off great bloody hunks of breaded, pan-fried buffalo
steak, jamming them into a mouth already crammed
with half-chewed vegetables, baked potato and sour-
dough roll.
    "I'm glad I didn't put you off your feed," the FBI
man said, sipping at his black coffee.

      Rutherford made short work of the platter, finishing
it before the waitress could return with his beverage.
  "Did you save room for dessert?" she asked.
    "Apple pie, I think," Rutherford said. "With dou-
ble h la mode."
  She wrote it down on her pad as she turned away.
    "So, what's it going to be?" Parker said. "Are you
going to do your duty, or are you going down?"
    Rutherford drank the beer before he answered.
"You seem to think I haven't been trying all these
months, but I have. I've been working hard to get you
what you need to make your case. I'm onto something
big that's about to break--it'll blow the lid off. I can't
talk about it yet, but I think you're going to be sur-
prised at just how big it is. I think you're going to be
very pleasantly surprised."
    "I'll look forward to that," Parker said. "But make
it sooner than later. You're not going to like later."
    As Rutherford watched the FBI man leave, he au-
tomatically picked up the beer glass and tried to drink
out of it.
  It was empty.
  And his hand was shaking.
    Just when everything seemed to be going right for
him, the bottom started falling out. He was caught in
a bad place--between the gears of the Department of
Justice and the shadowy, actively violent militia
group known as the Sawtooth Patriots. His radio ca-
reef needed another month, two months at most, to
really take off, but even then he wouldn't be free to
tell the Feds to go to hell. He was on their hook, but
good.
    From Parker's new, get-tough attitude, Rutherford
figured more stalling was out of the question, which




meant he had to produce something to keep the agent
at bay. The trouble was, the people Justice wanted
him to inform on weren't stupid. They didn't make
mistakes, and they knew all about FBI spies, how to
uncover them and how to deal with them. Parker
knew damned well how good they were. He knew
that Sawtooth had in its ranks alumni of earlier ultra-
right-wing groups that had been targeted by Justice,
including the antitax vigilantes, Posse Comitatus, and
neo-Nazis from the Order--not to ever be confused
with Truth Watch's favorite subject, "the New World
Order," which was a liberal, humanist, anti-Christian,
antifamily, race-mixing, individual-crushing, abor-
tion-and-homosexual-loving, one-world dictatorship.
    The upper echelon of the Sawtooth organization
trusted Rutherford, but only to a point. They encour-
aged him to spread their paranoid message of im-
pending Armageddon and armed resistance over the
airwaves. They had given him fifty thousand in cash
that Agent Parker didn't know about, but they hadn't
shared any real secrets with him yet. He had nothing
to show the Feds for a year of under-the-table fund-
ing, for a year of their help in building up his career,
which was intended to make him more attractive to
the militia and other, similar groups.
    Of course, he had heard the rumors that elements
of Sawtooth had robbed banks and armored cars, that
members had killed civilians who opposed the
group's beliefs. Those civilians included judges, sher-
iffs and county prosecuting attorneys. But he had
never met any of the people who had supposedly
committed these crimes; he had never heard their
names mentioned or a word spoken about the deeds
in question by Sawtooth's leaders.

    Maybe the bank jobs and the murders were as real
as the supposed Pakistani troops jackbooting through
downtown Jackson Hole? Rutherford shook his head,
feeling suddenly weepy and sorry for himself.
  How did he ever get into this crazy position?
  He'd never had any choice in the matter.
    He'd been doomed from the start by his genes,
cursed from the moment of~is conception by God.
As a morbidly fat person with no education past high
school, no skills except the ability to jabber convinc-
ingly in a comforting tone of voice, the FBI's offer
to hook him up with a nationally known PR firm that
would not only construct him a new image, but make
him a household name throughout the west, was
something he didn't have the willpower---or the in-
telligence--to pass up.
  If something looked too good to be true, it probably
was.
    Before Special Agent Parker intervened, E. Paul
Rutherford was nobody, so if Parker walked away,
he'd be worse than a nobody, he'd be dead. The ques-
tion was, could he get what he needed to pacify the
Justice Department without tipping his hand to Saw-
tooth and blowing his cover?
He didn't know the answer, and that terrified him.
As the waitress cleaned up the table, she said,
"Will there be anything else this afternoon?" Then
she saw the expression on his face. "Are you all right,
Mr. Rutherford?"
    "Yes, I'm fine," he said, forcing a smile. "Bring
me another Iow-cal beer. I've got to stick around for
a while. I've got another couple of people coming by
in a few minutes."
 Two beers later, a pair of tall, lean men entered the




Irma and headed for Rutherford's booth. They re-
minded the talk-show host of those Marlborough
Country ads. Both of them wore long canvas dusters,
well-worn Stetson hats, jeans and cowboy boots. In
the Irma, where it was like a Wild West costume party
seven days a week, nobody paid them any mind.
    As the man in front stepped up, he removed his
aviator's sunglasses. Oswald Carmody, the com-
mander in chief of the Sawtooth Patriots, had flint-
hard gray eyes and a !ongish, hollow-cheeked face.
He grabbed a chair from a nearby table and spun it
around in front of Rutherford's booth. With the chair
turned backfirst, he sat down.
    The other guy Rutherford knew as Matt Cook, a
member of the Sawtooth executive council. His
brown beard and handlebar mustache were tinged
with highlights of gray. Cook also took a chair and
set it next to the booth. There was no way either of
the men could have squeezed his legs under the table
with Rutherford sitting on the other side. True to cow-
boy etiquette, they both kept their hats and coats on.
    "Good show this morning," Carmody said. "Peo-
ple love hearing about those trainloads of Commie
trucks."
    "Thanks," Rutherford said. "I'm getting a little
worried about Chuck's calls, though. He's been on
the air a little too much lately."
    "Chuck is a very committed soldier of the armed
resistance."
    "I know that, but we don't want anyone to think
he's a plant. Can't you get somebody else to make
the call in his place? Or at least have him change his
voice and give another name?"
 Carmody turned to Cook. "Make a note of that,"

he directed. "We'll give Chuck a vacation for a cou-
ple of weeks."
    "Yes, sir," Cook said, pulling a spiral pad out of
his duster's slash pocket. As he did so, his coat
opened up wide.
    Rutherford could see the automatic pistol hanging
in a leather shoulder holster. Its walnut grip and wide
blue-steel backstrap stuck straight out from under
Cook's armpit. The pistol's hammer was cocked all
the way back. Rutherford knew it was just the tip of
the iceberg; Matt Cook was a walking arsenal. All
Sawtooth members that Rutherford had met made it
a practice to carry multiple handguns, three, four,
even five concealed around their persons. Sometimes
they packed machine pistols and stubby riot shotguns,
as well.
    "We want you to come out to the ranch for the
weekend," Carmody said. "Bring your tape re-
corder."
    Rutherford tried not to act stunned. The ranch was
Carmody's private spread, a thousand acres of high-
plains desert backed by the Sawtooth Mountain range.
It was also the militia group's training center and re-
treat. As far as he knew, there had never been any
media allowed on the ranch before, not even a tame
representative like him. He suddenly saw a way out
of his current predicament. Maybe a sketch of the
ranch's grounds or the interiors of the buildings
would satisfy Parker. Or it was always possible that
he'd glimpse something incriminating on the tour.
Don't act too delighted or too anxious, he told him-
self, just flattered that you've been asked.  "I'd enjoy that," he said.
  "We'll send a car around to pick you up."




    Rutherford wanted to ask Carmody why the policy
about nonmembers on the ranch had been changed
and what he was supposed to do with his tape re-
corder, but kept his mouth shut. Maybe they figured
a little publicity would boost their recruitment num-
bers, maybe even get some spin-off groups started in
other states. They would tell him in their own good
time if they intended to, and if they didn't, his asking
about it would be a mistake. He didn't want Carmody
to think he was pumping them for information.
    Cook leaned forward and said, "Say, how's that
ghostwriter of yours working out? We saw him walk-
ing up the street as we drove in. Hope he's not mak-
ing you bigger than life." There was unconcealed
amusement in Cook's eyes as he looked over at Car-
mody.
    Sticks and stones, Rutherford thought, sticks and
stones. As for the ghostwriter thing, that was a bit of
desperate inspiration. When Carmody had gotten cu-
rious about the occasional presence of Parker, Ruth-
erford had explained that he had hired an out-of-work
English literature professor to help him write his au-
tobiography, tentatively entitled Truth Watch. The
book's scheduled publication date coincided with the
projected signing of an eight-state radio-show syndi-
cation deal that was currently in the works.
"He's slow, but he's good," Rutherford said.
"Can't wait to read it," Carmody commented.
Rutherford automatically searched the man's face
for sarcasm and found none. Carmody never made
fun of him; he was always respectful. Dead serious
and deadpan. A straight-arrow guy, he said what he
believed and believed what he said. The mind-set he
projected was infectious. It really wasn't surprising

that he could get other men to buy into the byzantine
conspiracies of the New World Order, or to follow
him into a gunfight or to commit a bank robbery. Had
Rutherford been younger, leaner and meaner, had
Carmody asked him nicely, he, too, might well have
picked up a gun to defend individual freedom and
property rights.
    "You'll get one of the first copies that comes off
the press, I promise," Rutherford said.
  "Autographed, of course," Carmody countered.
    "Of course." Things were most definitely looking
up.
    Rutherford caught the waitress's attention, then
turned back to his companions. "Now that business
is out of the way, gentlemen," he said, "what are we
going to have for lunch?"




CHAP~RS~

Thermopolis, Wyoming
4:32 p.m. MDT

The Beechcraft Kingair flew under a dress parade of
broken high clouds. Carmody's view from the copiI
lot's seat was of a jumble of deeply eroded yellow
mountains, sun shafted and shadowed, that stretched
from horizon to horizon. He had read somewhere that
seventy or so million years ago, the awesome desert
below had been a tropical paradise populated by di-
nosaurs.
    Carmody had thought a lot about the nature of total
change, and had come up with three basic require-
ments: it had to be the right precipitating event, it had
to occur in the fight place and at the right time. Since
his service in Desert Shield and Storm and his dis-
charge from the U.S. Army Reserve National Guard,
he had been trying to stage-manage such a change in
his own country. It was a complex and dangerous
business that he privately liked to think of as "hur-
rying the hand of God," and its climax, Operation
Firestorm, was close at hand.
    The twin-engined plane banked a turn. Below, he
could see the town of Thermopolis, an oasis of green

trees and red, rounded knobs of rock. Afternoon
winds made the air rough on the landing approach.
The charter pilot compensated for the twenty-mile-
per-hour cross breeze and set the Kingair down
smoothly on the airstrip.
    Les Johnson cracked back the headset from his
right ear. "Where do you want me to park it?" he
asked Carmody.
"Over by the Learjet on the service apron."
Carmody watched the pilot as he taxied the aircraft
off the runway. Like most of the participants in Op-
eration Firestorm, Johnson was a veteran. He had
served three tours in Vietnam as a recon pilot, spot-
ting targets for jet fighters and artillery from a single-
engine, usually unarmed Cessna. Though his hair and
the stubble of beard were grizzled, he was still as hard
as nails. Unlike the rest of the personnel, Johnson was
not a volunteer; he was being paid handsomely for
his services.
    He had been hired to provide twenty-four-hour, on-
call transportation of men and matdriei for a two-
week period. No one had asked him how he had come
up with the Beechcraft on such short notice, but it
was obvious that the tail section had been recently
repainted. Under close inspection, the edges of the old
FAA identification numbers could been seen peeking
out in places under the new ones.
    It was certainly more cost-efficient to steal a plane
than to buy a stolen one from someone else, espe-
cially when you were going to bum it when the job
was done. By heisting the Kingair himself, Johnson
had saved roughly 160 grand, and he'd had a much
wider selection of aircraft to choose from.
 Sawtooth had invested a considerable sum in the




background check on the ex-recon pilot, but it had
been necessary. Because of what he had to know in
order to do his job, he was in a position to sink the
mission and get them all killed. Johnson's track rec-
ord since Nam was most impressive. For many years,
he had flown support missions for CIA ops in South-
east Asia and Central America. When the plug was
finally pulled on the Nicaraguan Contras, he went to
work for the Medellin cartel. He had logged hundreds
of hours night-flying raw coca paste from Peru to pro-
cessing centers in Colombia before he was busted. To
make amends and stay out of prison, he had agreed
to switch sides and fly guns and men into Peru for
DAS, the Colombian FBI. A misunderstanding about
payment had escalated into a three-day torture session
in the subbasement of the Bogotfi central police sta-
tion.
    Like the other former soldiers under Carmody's
command, Johnson had plenty of reason to hate big
government and its instrument of social control, big
law enforcement. Unlike the rest, he had struck back.
Four months earlier, he had taken out an entire Justice
Department tactical unit, killing eighteen of its finest
fighting men in a single, devastating, air-to-ground
rocket attack. A complete professional, he had wasted
no women or children, just the hotshot bastards be-
hind the black ski masks. In that one act, he had taken
cleaner, more appropriate revenge for Waco, Ruby
Ridge and a host of other big-government atrocities
committed against American citizens than the
Oklahoma City bombers.
    Again, it was the right event at the right time and
place.
Carmody had nothing but contempt for the

Oklahoma bunglers. He felt the same way about the
Muslim fanatics who had blown up the World Trade
Center. Both groups were made up of stupid, lazy
cowards. The Muslim terrorists thought they were go-
ing to kick off a planet-wide jihad with a cow-dung
bomb in a rentat truck. The fertilizer bomb was easy
to make and plant, but it was the wrong weapon. The
target was safe to hit because it was unguarded, but
it was the wrong target. Predictably the explosion,
when it came, brought the wrong result. Instead of
sparking a world uprising, all it did was produce mi-
nor damage to a building and kill a few people. Be-
cause postexplosion there was no ripple effect, no
wider consequences, the bombing was categorized as
a limited act of revenge and, as such, quickly faded
from the news.
    The Oklahoma City dilwads had made exactly the
same mistakes. They'd had big plans for what was
going to happen after the bang, which was supposed
to be a call to arms that would unify the American
militia movement. They used cow dung explosive,
also in a rental truck, and they had compounded the
goof with their choice of a target. The Alfred Murrah
Building was easy because it was undefended. It was
also largely worthless, actually and symbolically,
which was why it was such a sitting duck. Who really
gave a damn about what happened in Oklahoma City?
Obviously nobody. The bombing had dropped out of
the national headlines even faster than the Trade Cen-
ter hit.
    Neither attack had changed anything in the long
term. Self-limited and therefore self-defeating, both
were quickly swallowed up by larger events.
 Carmody had learned a couple of things from his




analysis of the prior bombings. First, pick a target that
can't fall out of the news. Second, use the right
weapon for the job. He had no qualms about taking
out innocent civilians; indeed, their deaths by the hun-
dreds of thousands were absolutely necessary if the
desired result was to be achieved. Unlike the Trade
Center or the Oklahoma City operation, Carmody's
plan extended beyond zero hour of the cataclysmic
event, to a chain of predictable actions and reactions.
    That chain of action and response, not a smoking
bomb crater, was the real goal. In carefully measured
steps, it led to the horrors of Armageddon, and past
them to a new and better America.
    Not all these ideas were his own. He owed much
to someone older, with wider experience and educa-
tion. And infinitely deeper pockets.
    "Stay here," Carmody told Johnson and Cook as
the props stopped turning. He had to raise his voice
and repeat himself to be heard over the roar of the
single-engine, red-and-white plane just coming in for
a landing. "I'll be back in a few minutes."
    He climbed out of the Beechcraft and crossed the
tarmac to the lowered steps of the Learjet. On the hull
beside the open door was a black-and-silver corporate
logo. That was a bitter joke. The five-million-dollar
aircraft no longer belonged to Monstrel Mining and
Chemical, Inc.; it was the property of the U.S. gov-
ernment. It had already been scheduled for confisca-
tion by the IRS.
    As Carmody mounted the stairs, a huge figure ap-
peared above him in the doorway. Bald on top, the
man wore his side and back fringe of pale blond hair
down to his shoulders. He had an ugly little blue-steel
machine pistol in his right fist. The bodyguard rec-

ognized Carmody and reholstered the miniUzi be-
neath his sports coat. He stepped aside so Carmody
could enter the cabin.
    Every organization has levels of responsibility and
commitment. The Sawtooth Patriots was divided into
four unequal parts, stacked like a pyramid. The lowest
and largest level was made up of believers who
bought into the end-times-are-here party line, who
had guns and stored supplies, but who hadn't taken
the pledge to kill for the organization. The next level
up consisted of fifty foot soldiers committed to de-
fending the group from outside attack. The third level
was made up of a dozen men willing to take offensive
action against an identified enemy, if so ordered. The
top level, where all the command decisions were
made, only had two chairs in it.
    "Take a walk, Paolo," said the man sitting at the
rear of the cabin. Charles Krick smiled at Carmody
and waved him to a seat. Krick's designer Western
wardrobe was a little too much for Carmody's taste,
the hand-tooling and silver toe caps on his boots too
ornate, the watchband of gold nuggets a little too
flashy. The CEO of Monstrel was sharp faced, with a
straight, thin nose, and he wore his white hair
trimmed very short.
  "What's the news?" Carmody asked.
      "The tools have arrived," Krick said. "I just had
confirmation from our Persian friend."
  "That's a relief to hear."
  "It was a near thing, too."
  "How so?"
    "There was a problem on the other end. Some very
expensive articles were lost--not ours, though. A
bloodbath, I gather. The Persian said he almost


bought the farm. Apparently our goods were shipped
by separate container weeks ahead in order to make
the scheduled delivery date. He assured me that ev-
erything would be ready for us in two days, as prom-
ised. He'll be meeting us at the storage site to facil-
itate."
  "What about the PAL code?"
    "He's going to handle all of that in person. He
insisted on it."
  "As long as we get the code..."
    "How's the 12-7 team doing with the trainer?"
Krick asked.
    "No problems there. We've been running the op-
eration on a scale-model range."
    "Too bad we couldn't have corraled a secondD-20
howitzer for you to use," Krick said.
    "Yeah, it would've been nice," Carmody replied,
"but the logistical problems were just too big. The
risk of discovery during transport would've doubled,
and firing it for practice would've alerted everybody
within a hundred miles what we were up to. We'd all
be dead or in federal prison by now."
    "Still, I'd feel a lot more confident if I knew you
had worked on a !ire-size howitzer."
    "Don't worry about it. I know the 12-7 guys from
the Gulf War. We've all gone from trainer to live fire
before. We know how to make the jump. We'll hit
the target."
  "And the B team?" Krick asked.
      "They acquired their matfiriel this morning. They'll
be testing it, nice and loud, early tomorrow."
  "Poor B team," Krick said.
  "War is about sacrifice," Carmody countered.

     "I hope the ranch is ready to take what's coming,"
 the white-haired man said.
     "We started installing the final grid of the defen-
 sive perimeter today. It should be completed by to-
 night."
  "No clue as to our infiltrator?"
    For months they had known they had to have a Fed,
or Feds, in their midst. They hadn't discovered a se-
curity breach, nor had they received a tip from a sus-
picious Patriot. It was a question of inevitability; they
had to have been infiltrated. Every antigovernment
organization could, and would, be penetrated by Jus-
tice if it was large enough. Krick and Carmody had
taken the spies as a given and worked around it.
    "No," Carmody replied, "but he'll show himself
soon. He has to, and when he does, I have something
special planned for him."
    The commander in chief of the Sawtooth Patriots
rose from his seat. "I'd better get back in the air,"
he said. "I want to check the minefield work while
it's still light." He extended his hand to Krick.
"Don't worry about the mission. We're going to nail
it."
    "See you on the East Coast in two days," Krick
said, pumping his hand.
    Carmody hurried down the Lear's steps and headed
for the Beechcraft, gripping the brim of his tall Stet-
son to keep it from blowing off in the wind. He didn't
look across the runway where the field's most recent
arrival sat, so he didn't see the man photographing
him through a telephoto lens that poked out the co-
pilot's window of the red-and-white Cessna.
    The shutterbug was Special Agent William Parker
of the FBI.




Old Glory Ranch
Highway 26, Western Wyoming
5:35 p.m. MDT

JACK HUTTON LEANED on his shovel and wiped the
sweat from his face with the tail of his shirt. He had
just finished digging the last spadefui of dirt from the
last trench in the last grid. At the other end of the
shallow ditch, the mine-laying team was working
back toward the bunkhouse, placing antipersonnel and
antitank mines inside the perimeter of the ranch com-
pound's ten-foot-high hurricane fence. On either side
of the crew were open trenches, each dotted with
mines of various sizes and connected by bright
lengths of electrical wire.
    The idea for the defensive strategy had come from
Oswald CarroDdy himself. He had sworn that the Old
Glory Ranch wouldn't be another one-sided Waco. If
armored personnel carriers and tanks entered the pe-
rimeter, they would pay for the trespass.
    The mined grids of open ground extended from the
ranch's buildings like the spokes of a wheel. They
were armed by a master panel in the main house's
fortified bunker-basement. Each separate minefield
could be rigged to explode either by contact or by
electric impulse, simply by throwing a switch. They
could also be as easily deactivated. The grid system
allowed the defenders to control all the approaches to
their stronghold. By arming one of the minefields and
disarming the bordering grids, the Patriots could
move men across the mined ground and concentrate
flanking fire on crippled opposition forces.
    The flexibility of the system was the stone bitch,
Hutton thought. On the other hand, there was no de-

nying that it did simplify his job. Because there was
no "safe way" in, no clear path over the minefields,
there was nothing for him to commit to memory and
then map. How the Justice Department tactical units
were going to handle the assault, he didn't have a
clue. That wasn't his problem, and he was glad of it.
He had his hands full just getting the site-analysis
information off the ranch and into the hands of the
FBI.
    When the mine-laying team reached the end of the
trench, the Sawtooth Patriot officer in charge of the
detail ordered everyone to move to cover behind the
bunkhouse. The officer, former National Guard Mas-
ter Sergeant Vernon Drake, spoke into his walkie-
talkie. Drake was a certified pain in the ass in his
neatly pressed desert-camou fatigues and matching
boonie hat. "Grid N is hardwired, and we are clear,"
he said. "Repeat, we are all clear. Proceed with the
firing check."
    Hutton sat on the ground, his back up against the
bunkhouse wall. Looking down the narrow walkway
that separated the enlisted men's quarters from the
main house, he could see the ragged, snowcapped
peaks of the Sawtooth Mountains about two miles
away. Out of sight, eight miles in the opposite direc-
tion, was the two-lane highway that marked the south-
ern edge of Old Glory Ranch. He couldn't hear what
was happening inside the house, but he knew what
was going on because he had seen it many times be-
fore. In the bunker, the fire-control officer was work-
ing the control panel, tripping the arming switches on
all the mines in the grid. A sensor attached to the last
mine in each string would confirm that they were
ready to rip if someone or something stepped on




them. The sensor also confirmed that current was trav-
eling through the entire grid circuit, so all the mines
could be fired at once.
    After about five minutes, the word came up from
the bunker via Drake's walkie-talkie. "Grid N is off-
line," the fire control officer said. "Repeat, Grid N
is off-line. Everything checks out. Nice job, boys."
    "Okay, let's get that trench filled in," Drake said.
' 'Pronto.' '
    "Easy for him to say," Hutton muttered as he
walked along the side of the ditch.
    His digging partner heard the remark. "We're al-
most done with this shit, so you got nothing to com-
plain about," Bill Boggs said. "You're through work-
ing for today. You can take a shower, eat dinner, hit
the rack early. Not old Boggsie--I pulled all-night
guard duty at OP-3."
    OP-3 was the hilltop observation post closest to the
highway and farthest from the compound. The sand-
bagged cleft in a rock outcrop was cold and uncom-
fortable, and boring. Between 10:00 p.m. and dawn,
you could count the traffic passing by on your fingers
and toes, if you could feel them.
    "Tell you what, Boggs. I'll take your watch to-
night."
  "You're bullshitting me."
    "No, I'll do it. I don't mind. I haven't been sleep-
ing good. Anxious about what's coming, I guess. You
can pay me back some other time, or not. It doesn't
matter.' '
  "You're a pal, Hutton."
  "Yeah, I know."
    As Hutton and Boggs filled in the ditch, they were
followed by a man with a rake, who was followed by

another man with a push broom to smooth out the
yellow dirt to match the rest of the compound. They
had the job half-completed when the Beechcraft
landed on the ranch's foot airstrip, which was on the
mountain side of the property, outside the perimeter
fence. Hutton leaned on his shovel and watched Car-
mody and Cook jump into a jeep and drive around to
the front gate. The commander in chief took a quick
look at the minefield, approved what he saw, then
went into the main house to clean up for supper.
    After the evening meal, Hutton drove down the
ranch's curving dirt road and relieved the sentry at
OP-3. It was around midnight when a car appeared
on the highway from the south. It blinked its head-
lights once without slowing. Hutton blinked his flash-
light twice. The car vanished over a rise in the road.
    Taking his M-16 with him, Hutton deserted the ob-
servation post, skidding and sliding on the slope of
loose rock. In darkness, he crossed the flat ground and
its scrub-brush obstacle course, heading for the fence
line. When he got close, he saw the car parked there
on the shoulder of the road. When he got closer still,
he could make out the shape of a man leaning against
the driver's door.
    "I was starting to get a little worried about you,
Hutton," Agent Parker said.
    "Me, too," Hutton replied. "Things are getting
scary up there." He handed Parker a couple of sheets
of lined notebook paper, folded into a tiny square.
"I've mapped out all the defenses and given you the
building floor plans, including the secret connecting
passages. Also the names of some of the new person-
nel. It's everything I could get."




    "Thanks," Parker said, pocketing the papers.
"What about the artillery trainer?"
    "They practiced with it for five hours today. I in-
cluded a sketch of their target range, but you can't
tell much from it. It looks like a high-angle-of-fire
shot, though. I haven't seen anything that resembles
an artillery piece. I don't think they have one yet."
  "That's good news."
    Hutton took a breath, then said, "When are you
going to shut these bastards down?"
    "Soon," Parker said. "Very soon. Stay ready and
out of the line of fire."
      "Right. For sure I'm keeping my head down. I'd
better get back. They shoot deserters."  "Good luck."
    Hutton hurried over the flat ground and scrambled
up the slope to the observation post. His heart froze
in his chest when he looked over the top of the sand-
bags and saw the post was occupied by two men. He
couldn't make out their faces. He grabbed the auto-
rifle's pistol grip and swung the weapon around on
its shoulder sling.
  "Don't do that, soldier," Carmody warned him.
    "Oh, it's you, sir," Hutton said, anything but re-
lieved.
    The other figure cloaked in darkness moved for-
ward. When Matt Cook took his weapon from him,
Hutton knew it was bad.
  "Where were you just now?" Carmody asked.
    "Taking a whiz, sir. I didn't want to do it too close
to the OP. The smell, sir."
    "That's real considerate of you, Hutton." Carmody
reached out and put something heavy into his hand.
"Do you know what that is?"

    By feel, Hutton recognized the sight tube and head
strap of a cyclops night-vision device. He said noth-
ing. He couldn't speak; his mouth was too dry.
    "Who do you think you're kidding, you rat?" Car-
mody snarled.




CHAPTER SEVEN

Chocolate Canyon
Millard County, Utah
5:05 a.m. MDT

The tractor-trailer lumbered down the rutted dirt road.
On the horizon to Edward Kelso's right, the sun was
peeking up, but the air was still cold and the morning
light tinged with purple. The dew that lingered on the
road helped to keep the dust down. For a hundred
miles in all directions, the land was open range. High-
way 6, which they'd followed through most of Ne-
vada, was fifteen miles behind them.
    Kelso took a reading from his laser range finder,
then pulled his head back inside the truck cab. The
distance was right. Just ahead, a rise in the high-plains
desert coincided with the irregularly shaped contour
mark on his topo map.
    Oswald Carmody had delegated all responsibility
for the test firing to Kelso, a measure of the com-
mander in chief's confidence in him, and his lack of
confidence in nearly everyone else. Kelso regarded
the vast majority of Sawtooth Patriots as ridiculous
posers. They loved the militia movement because of
its phony martial trappings: the camou uniforms, the

brigade and division designations, the cute unit nick-
names, the pretense of military command structure
and discipline. They were believers, though. They did
think the New World Order was going to eat them
for lunch, and they had committed their limited abil-
ities to the struggle against an impending, oppressive
world government. But when push came to shove, the
rank and file were sponges for bullets, mere cannon
fodder.
    Kelso, on the other hand, was a bona fide cannon
shooter. He took very seriously the responsibility he'd
been given. Well in advance, he had worked out all
the necessary alterations to the semitrailer, making it
a secure mobile firing platform for the stolen 155 mm
field gun. He had picked the general area for the firing
test, siting it close enough to an existing military
range so the sound of repeated cannon shots wouldn't
raise punic alarm, but far enough away so the Lake
Desert Test Center folks wouldn't run out and inves-
tigate the unscheduled bombardment.
    He had also decided on the test range. The lay of
the land on the surrounding plain closely matched the
contours and elevations of the real target and firing
position. Kelso flipped the clear plastic overlay sheet
down over his topo map. The plastic overlay had
many widely separated marks on it. Most of them
were ringers; only three had anything to do with the
actual target. At the top of the overlay, a rectangle
with a dot in it indicated the howitzer's firing posi-
tion, and just below that, a triangle indicated an ob-
servation post. At the bottom of the overlay was a
black cross with a simple "TGT" notation, and no
other grid or target references. With the plastic sheet




folded down, it sat in the middle of the low rise on
the topo map.
  "Stop here," he told Wiley.
    The driver braked the truck to a halt in the middle
of the road.
    "Leave it running," Kelso said. "You stay behind
the wheel, everybody else out. Let's shake it."
    Kelso and Speck jumped down first, followed by
Mallone and Ringman, who rode in the truck cab's
sleeper. While Speck passed out flags of different col-
ors to the others, Kelso hustled out onto the rise. In
the center of the flat-topped hill, he planted a red flag.
At his direction, the others quickly staked out a large
rectangular area with their pennants. Then they all
climbed back into the truck.
    Kelso slammed the passenger's side door shut.
"Move," he ordered.
    Wiley slipped the Kenworth into gear, and they
headed away from the flagged area, up a long, straight
stretch of road and a very gradual incline, toward a
line of dark brown hills about five miles away.
    Kelso knew he was going to make history real
soon. Nuclear devices had only been detonated in an-
ger twice before. Now one was about to go off in
anger again, and it would make a similar kind of
statement: don't mess with us. He was bound to be-
come famous for being the man who pulled the lan-
yard. Kelso liked the idea of having his name
associated with the biggest antigovernment bang ever
set off in the U.S. It would be a bang heard around
the world. Chunks of existing textbooks were going
to have to be thrown out in order to make room for
him.
  Many targets had been suggested for the nuclear

strike, but in the end it had been decided that shooting
the beast in the purse would hurt it the most. It was
a target that wouldn't draw much sympathy from the
everyday Joe. Outwardly there might be tears for the
victims and their families, but inwardly, all the "shee-
pie," or sheep people, would be laughing with relief,
maybe even glee. Only the slaves of the beast would
really mourn the death and destruction. They'd be
cowering under their beds because they'd know their
day of judgment was at hand.
    When the Kenworth closed on the dark brown hills,
the entrance to the box canyon became visible among
the folds of smooth rock. It was wide enough for four
semis to park side by side.
    Wiley leathered the brakes, slowing to a crawl.
"Looks kind of soft to me," he said, referring to the
dry streambed that led into Chocolate Canyon.
    "No, it's fine," Kelso assured him. "I already
checked it out. Pull in a hundred feet and stop."
    Wiley crept the Kenworth between the canyon's
two-hundred-foot-high walls, then hit the brakes.
    "Okay," Kelso directed, "let's get this thing lined
up."
    Everyone but Wiley climbed out of the cab. Mal-
lone and Ringman opened the rear doors of the trailer
and bolted them back as Kelso scrambled up beside
the gun. Speck relayed Kelso's signals to the driver
as they adjusted the position of the trailer to bring the
M-198 to bear on the distant target.
    "That's good. Right there," Kelso said, pounding
the sheet-steel wall of the trailer with his balled fist.
He hit the start button on his stopwatch. "We're on
the clock, boys."
 They all knew their jobs inside out. Wiley left the




truck engine running and securely chocked the fig's
wheels, front and back. Then he grabbed a pair of
binoculars and a walkie-talkie and headed up the side
of the canyon on a dead run. Mallone and Ringman
climbed into the trailer and up the ladders bolted to
either side of the box. Under Kelso's watchful eye,
they had customized the trailer during a short stop the
day before, cutting out a big section of the box's rear
roof and hinging it so it could be winched open and
dropped onto the roof of the truck cab. This allowed
the cannon barrel to be raised to the maximum; it
could also be fired through the open rear doors. To-
ward the center of the box, the howitzer, its tow
wheels cranked up and its split-rail carriage spread as
far as possible, was bolted to the trailer frame. There
was room in the front of the trailer for shells and gun
crew.
    Kelso checked the elapsed time, then got behind
the M-198's electronic sight and began laying the gun
on target. The sight compensated for the lack of level
in the weapon platform and for shell drift. Because
they knew the distance to the stationary target and
had the firing tables for the cannon, they had already
calculated the charge and shell fusing.
    The Sawtooth leader called out sight adjustments
to Speck, who raised the eight-inch bore with a hand
wheel. There was no horizontal-control officer and no
vertical-control officer on this mission. It was seat-of-
your-pants work. When Kelso was satisfied, Ringman
and Mallone set the packaged shell in the shot guide
and rammed it into the breech.
    Kelso spoke into his walkie-talkie. "Wiley, are you
in position?"
  "Affirmative," came the reply.

  "All clear!" Kelso shouted.
    They bailed out of the trailer by its side door. As
Kelso hopped down, he held the uncoiled lanyard in
his hand.
    He gave the cord a hard jerk. The cannon's lock
snapped, and a 155 mm HE round boomed out of the
gun. The trailer rocked from the blast, and its side
walls flared with the concussion, searing clouds of
propellant smoke pouring out of the open top and the
doors.
    There was no way they could have remained in the
box for the shot.
    Having to abandon ship before every shot was an
annoyance that ate up time, but they wouldn't have
to deal with it at H-hour. Because they still needed
the trailer to transport the weapon to the real target,
they couldn't cut away the walls yet. At H-hour,
they'd be shooting from an open platform.
    From on top of the canyon rim, Wiley reported
what he saw downrange through his binoculars. From
the aiming stakes, he could calculate the distance of
the miss and call the observation and correction down
to the trailer.
"Short, fifty fight," he said. "Left four hundred."
Kelso and the others climbed back into the trailer.
Ringman and Mallone cleared the breech of the shell
case, while Kelso adjusted the cannon himself this
time. In fifteen seconds, they had reloaded and were
again bailing out of the trailer.
    The rocking boom torqued the trailer on its sus-
pension as a second HE shell screamed downrange.
    Wiley was silent for a moment before offering cor-
rections. "Short, ten right," he said. "Left eighty,
add four hundred."




    The gun crew scurried to relay the howitzer and
reload. By the time they jumped down again, they
were all sweating from the effort and the heat trapped
inside the trailer.
    Kelso yanked the lanyard; his men covered their
ears.
    The truck and trailer jolted hard against the chocks,
but they held. The trailer's rivets did not. By the doz-
ens, they popped out of the trailer skin as its weak-
ened walls ballooned from the blast.
    The third round arced just over the target, but along
the imaginary observer-target line that ran through the
middle of the flagged rectangle. It gave Wiley enough
data to make the final correction. "Over line," he
said. "Drop fifty, fire for effect."
    The howitzer boomed again, sending echoes rolling
over the high desert plain.
    The fourth time was a charm. The HE shell landed
in the dead center of the rectangle, hurling smoke,
chunks of dirt and the colored pennants high into the
air.
"Nailed it," Wiley announced. "End of mission."
Kelso checked his watch. Elapsed time was six
minutes, well within the mission parameters. With the
box cut off the trailer, they could reduce the time
another minute and a half. He wanted as much time
as he could get, in case it took him more than four
rounds to get on the real target. On the whole, though,
he was quite satisfied.
  "Let's bag it," Kelso said.
    They worked with speed and precision, swinging
the roof section into place and battening down the
gun. They had just finished unchocking the truck and

trailer wheels when Wiley raced up, out of breath. He
climbed into the cab and goosed the engine.
    Kelso had him reverse the truck out of the wash,
then cut a K-turn to head back down the road the way
they had come.
    Wiley slowed the Kenworth as they approached the
shell craters. At Kelso's command, he stopped the
truck once more. The gun crew hopped out of the cab
and spent a couple of frantic minutes picking up what
was left of the aiming stakes. Kelso figured why leave
anything behind that would help the Feds with their
investigation?
    They returned to Highway 6 without drawing pur-
suit, aerial or ground. If anybody anywhere was ask-
ing questions about the cannon fire, they were too far
away to make a difference. Kelso directed Wiley to
head east, toward Salt Lake City.
    "So when are you going to tell us what we're re-
ally going to shoot at?" Speck asked.
    "Yeah," Wiley agreed. "It'd be nice to know who
and what we're going to ice with our cannon."
    "It'd be something to look forward to on the ride,"
Ringman added with a grin.
    Kelso thought about it for a second. They were en
route to the target, but they had a stop along the way
to pick up the nuke. They would be spending the
night at a roadside rest stop and making the hit at ten
the following morning. Lots of things could go wrong
with that much time left. If one of the crew turned
out to be a federal plant, everything could go wrong.
He didn't think for a minute that any of his men were
double-crossers, but there was no point in taking the
risk. Plus, he took no small pleasure in withholding
the information, and teasing them with it.




  "Come on," Mallone said, "let us in on it."
  "No can do."
  "Christ, Kelso..."
    "Trust me," he said. "You won't be disap-
pointed."

CHAPTER EIGHT

Kensington, London
3:05 p. rm GMT

Sergio Eshamani had spent a rough day and a half in
the company of the Russian brigadier general. In that
time, he had learned more than he cared to about the
man. Across the living room of his Kensington town
house, Avril Krukillov sat on the white leather couch
with his shoes propped up on the art deco coffee ta-
ble. He was drinking straight, nearly frozen Absolut
vodka from a sixteen-ounce tumbler and talking a
mile a minute.
    No matter how much vodka the general drank, it
seemed to have no effect on him. He had been drink-
ing ever since they had made their escape from Riga.
He drank on the commercial flight to London. He
drank on the drive down from Heathrow. And he had
been drinking steadily since they had arrived in Ken-
sington.
  His speech wasn't slurred.
  His eyes weren't the least bit bloodshot.
    Chalk it up to a marvelous constitution and decades
of training.
 The only change Eshamani had noticed over the




past several hours was that the general was repeating
himself even more frequently than usual.
    "How will you ever repay me for saving the glo-
rious, fun-filled life you enjoy?" he asked yet again.
"Think of all the young models you would have
missed if I had left you on the galley floor pissing
your pants."
  "I didn't wet myself."
    Kmkillov leered at him over the vodka glass. "But
you know you surely would have." He chuckled and
took a long swallow of Absolut.
    Eshamani knew by now that there wasn't any point
in arguing. Even if the Russian had been sober, he
was too hardheaded to listen to anyone who didn't
outrank him, who couldn't stand him up against a
wall and shoot him. His usefulness to the arms mer-
chant was at an end. It was clear to Eshamani that the
Varuskya Liset had been targeted by an official gov-
ernment agency, probably Russian or Latvian. If the
brains behind the raiding party knew the weapons
were on the ship, then they also knew who was in-
volved in the operation. That meant the Krukillov nu-
clear-weapons pipeline had been permanently shut
down after a single transaction.
    "I assume that must've been your first time under
fire," Krukillov said. "Under the circumstances,
soaking your shorts is nothing to be ashamed of. I am
a veteran of many pitched battles. They don't raze me
anymore."
"Interesting," Eshamani said without meaning it.
"From now on, every time you mount one of your
young models," the general said, "you will think of
Krukillov." His eyes narrowed and his forehead wrin-
kled, bringing his hairline even closer to the bridge

of his nose. "Under the circumstances, you should
pay me what you owe me for the two starookhas in
Riga."
    The general was a fugitive from his own land. A
rich fugitive, but not as rich as he might have been.
    "I paid you for the one weapon that was delivered
into my hands," the arms merchant said coldly.
    "It was not all my fault that the other two were
lost," Krukillov argued. "Security was partly your
responsibility, as well. I think we can both agree that
your Italian mariosos weren't up to the task, either. A
fair man would split the difference--pay me for one
of the two. That way we would both assume part of
the loss."
    "I never took possession of the articles in question,
so no more monies will be transferred. End of story."
    Eshamani could see from the expression on the
general's face that nothing he had said had sunk in.
    "Where are all the bosomy young women of your
swinging life-style?" Krukiilov demanded. "I have
yet to meet a single gorgeous model. I thought you
would share a few of them with the man who risked
his own life to save yours. I would like to start with
a pair of blondes with very long legs and pillowy soft
behinds."
    Not in your dreams, Eshamani thought. He shared
his women with no one, not even his discards. He
folded his arms across his chest and ignored the re-
quest.
    Although the arms merchant lamented the loss of
the two nuclear artillery shells, he had covered him-
self against almost every eventuality. He had paid out
about one and one-half million dollars to the general,
and there was another quarter of a million in trans-




portation costs for the surviving weapon and its ac-
cessories. Even so, Eshamani wasn't out of pocket,
since the nukes had been ordered well in advance,
and each of the three interested parties had given him
two-million-dollar cash deposits pending delivery.
Because one of the clients had requested delivery in-
side the U.S., Eshamani had had to make special ar-
rangements to reduce the danger of discovery and
confiscation. The weapon had to travel by a round-
about sea route. To make the scheduled delivery date,
he'd advance-shipped the third weapon two weeks
earlier. Happily that meant that, despite the loss of
two-thirds of the Soviet nuclear contraband, he would
still make a handsome profit from the shell's ten-
million-dollar price tag.
    The question gnawing at the back of his mind
wasn't about money; it was whether crossing the Bal-
tic and North Seas had done him any good. Had he
thrown off the pursuit, or was he still under surveil-
lance? The incident in Riga also made him wonder
about the previous attempt to transfer Soviet nuclear
material to Libya. Perhaps the Panamanian-registry
freighter hadn't sunk by accident. Perhaps the same
team of killers had sent it to the bottom of the Atlan-
tic. For all Eshamani knew, he had been hunted for
months. The idea was very unsettling. He walked past
Krukiilov to the foyer that led to the front door. A
dining-room chair had been moved to the short hall-
way and on it sat a stocky, dark-complected Sicilian
holding an AR-18S Sterling-Armalite carbine. The Si-
cilian rose quickly to his feet as his boss approached.
  "Anything to report, Claudio?" Eshamani asked.
  "The street and park are clear, boss."
  Eshamani had a few men roaming outside, and

there were more hired guns stationed upstairs and at
the back of the ground floor. He didn't think the as-
sault on the Varuskya Liset could have been a joint
East-West action. Things weren't that cozy between
the intelligence services of the former sworn enemies.
It was either one or the other, East or West, and most
likely East. He certainly couldn't imagine Britain's
MI-6 cooperating with their Russian counterparts to
take him out on English soil. The Brits were way too
fussy about their jurisdiction, and too much bad water
had passed under the Cold War bridge. If it had been
an Eastern hit team in Riga and they had followed
him to London, they would be operating solo, without
backup and resupply. As a naturalized British citizen,
Eshamani enjoyed the full protection of British law.
All he had to do was keep the bears off his back long
enough for the bobbles to arrive. That's what all the
Sicilians were for.
    Not that he planned on sticking around Kensington
much longer. He had a plane to catch and business to
conclude on the other side of the Atlantic. In little
more than twenty-four hours, a happy American
buyer would walk away with his very own nuclear
weapon and the equally happy Iranian-Italian middle-
man would collect an enormous paycheck.
    "Claudio, have the limo brought around to the
front," the arms merchant said. "It's time for us to
leave. We don't want to get stuck in the afternoon
traffic."
    Eshamani knew that by dealing in nukes, he was
asking for big trouble, and trouble in the long term.
But that's what made it challenging and so exciting
for him. It was the Super Bowl of arms sales. For
years Eshamani had been prepared to pull a vanishing




act at a moment's notice. He had false passports and
cash stashed in airports and banks around the world.
He could arrive in Paris as one person, and leave for
Stockholm as another. A couple of jumps like that
would put the hounds off his trail, and he could
choose a new, more permanent identity and nation-
ality at his leisure. Lately he was leaning toward turn-
ing Argentinian.
    "You're leaving now?" Krukillov asked, lumber-
ing to his feet.
    Eshamani slipped into his Armani suit jacket.
"That's correct."
  "Will we meet again?"
"I wouldn't count on it. Our business is through."
"Then I must say goodbye." With that, the Rus-
sian grabbed Eshamani by the shoulders and held him
in an ironlike grip while he planted a wet kiss on
either cheek.
    It was hard to say which Eshamani hated the most,
the RussJan's meaty hands crumpling his silk suit
jacket or the sloppy wetness drying on his cheeks.
Had he been armed at that moment, Eshamani would
have put a bullet in the general's gut.
    Claudio cleared his throat to get Eshamani's atten-
tion, then said, "The car's ready, boss."
    "I'm ready, too." Eshamani wasn't taking any lug-
gage with him. His apartment overlooking New York
City's Central Park had a complete selection of
clothes and personal effects. He patted the side of his
Armani jacket and felt the crinkle of folded sheets of
paper in the inside pocket.  The PAL codes.
  Recipes for someone else's disaster.
  He wouldn't leave home without them.

FROM THE THIRD-STORY window of the Georgian res-
idence directly across from Eshamani's town house,
Spetsnaz Captain Andrei Sarnov kept careful watch.
The fronts of the stately, whitewashed blocks of
homes were separated by a pair of narrow one-way
streets. Between the two streets was a pocket park
tinged by a wrought-iron fence, with grass, flower
beds, tall trees, benches and a children's play area.
Sarnov counted the visible opposition. A man in a tan
overcoat leaned against the town-house doorway,
while two others in sweat suits were doing circuits of
the little park. A light blue four-door sedan kept cir-
cling the streets. The car also had two men inside.
  A noise made Sarnov half-turn.
    Behind him, nose to nose on top of the queen-size
bed, the occupants of the home lay trussed up with
rope and duct tape. The securely gagged man and
woman were in their early sixties.
    "Stay quiet," Sarnov warned them. Then he added
in a much softer tone, "I assure you, you have noth-
ing to be afraid of. No one is going to hurt you or
rob you. Try to sleep, if you can. It will help make
the time pass more quickly."
    The Spetsnaz officer turned back to the window,
picking up a pair of binoculars. He had correctly
guessed that after fleeing Riga, Eshamani would head
for his closest hidey-hote, London, where many of his
visible assets were held. So far, things had gone
smoothly. They had moved into position without in-
cident. But Sarnov knew that could all change in an
instant. He hadn't bothered to ask Her Majesty's gov-
ernment for permission to operate on its sovereign
soil because he knew permission wouldn't have been
forthcoming. He didn't need a pass to do his job. His




team had a responsibility that superseded national
boundaries, and they had the authority to take human
lives, if necessary, in order to regain possession of the
third artillery shell.
    Peering through the binoculars, Samov saw move-
ment on the roof of the building to the right of
Eshamani's home. All the residences on the street
were connected, sharing exterior walls and rooflines.
Vlad Ferdishenko crossed over to the target building
and quickly stepped to a tiny dormer window set in
the copper-plate roof. It took him only seconds to cut
the glass from the frame and drop out of sight inside.
    Sarnov scanned the park. The men in sweat suits
hadn't seen anything. They continued their sentry
duty, walking the path in opposite directions. On a
bench just off the path, Tasha Beloc sat eating some
chips and reading a book. She had what looked like
a CD player headset on. It wasn't. In the short dress
and black tights, she looked like a schoolgirl. She
wasn't.
  A limousine pulled up in front of the town house.
    "Tasha," Sarnov said into his headset's micro-
phone.
  "I see it," came the immediate reply.
    The front door opened, and Eshamani descended
the stairs to the street in a crowd of security men. If
anyone had wanted to put a hole in him, there was
no clear shot. A gunman opened the limo's rear door.
  "Tasha," the captain said again.
    "I'm on it," she said, closing her book and getting
up from the bench. She moved briskly away from the
Eshamani residence to a car parked on the street in
front of Sarnov's station.
  "Trail him, Tasha," Sarnov said. "No matter

where he goes. Use the usual reporting procedure, and
we'll catch up when we can."
    She pulled out of the parking space and acceler-
ated, making a quick tour around the park in order to
catch up with the departing limousine. "Krukiilov is
still inside," she said as she turned right and disap-
peared.
    "Understood," Sarnov said. "We'll take care of
him."
    There was a lesson to be taught this afternoon. If
you deal in nukes, you can't run and you can't hide.
If you deal in nukes, you will die.
    Sarnov set down the binoculars and checked his
gun. Like all the mission's weapons, it had been sup-
plied by the GRU officer at the Russian embassy. It
was a British product, a 5.56 mm XL 70 E-3 Enfield.
The bullpup-style autorifle held a 30-round mag that
it could unload at 650 to 800 rounds per minute. A
thick silencer tube extended by nearly a foot the stub
of a barrel that protruded from the front stock. Still,
the extremely short gun fit inside the wooden tool tray
that was part of Sarnov's cover. He pulled an oily rag
over the weapon and zipped up his light blue cover-
alls.
    "Vlad? Uri?" he said into his microphone. When
they each responded, he gave them the attack order.
Then he removed the headset and put it down on the
windowsill.
    "I'm leaving now," he told the gagged and bound
Londoners. "Don't worry. The police will be here
soon to release you."
    With his tool tray in hand, he descended the stairs
to the ground floor, exited the building and started to
cross the park. He had gained entrance into the sur-




vei!iance house by posing as a building inspector.
That was how he hoped to reach Eshamani's front
door.

 "Do YOU LIKE the Englishwomen?" Krukillov asked
 the guard seated in the foyer.  The Sicilian shrugged.
     "I've heard they respond with great enthusiasm to
 Latin men."
  The bodyguard squinted at him.
    "Their own men are cold and don't know how to
please them."
  Still the man said nothing.
    "Maybe you know some Englishwomen? Maybe
they would like to come over for a visit?" the Russian
persisted.
    The Sicilian rummaged in the handkerchief pocket
of his suit jacket and produced a toothpick that he
proceeded to use with great care between his top front
teeth.
    It was hard for Krukiliov to maintain his upbeat
mood. With Eshamani gone, there was no one to tor-
ment. The bodyguards had a poor command of En-
glish and no Russian at all. Teasing one of them was
like teasing a very stupid dog.
    Kruki!lov looked at his empty glass. At least there
was still plenty of vodka in the house. He went into
the kitchen and opened the refrigerator's freezer com-
partment. He took out the frozen bottle of Absolut
and filled his tumbler with the syrupy liquor. After a
good sip, he checked the bottom part of the fridge.
The leftovers of the Indian take-out meal his host had
ordered sat under a tinfoil wrapper. Krukillov helped

himself to some of the tandoori chicken, washing
down each bite with a slug of neat vodka.
    The general had a little time to kill before he could
set his own escape plans in motion. The false passport
and identity cards Eshamani had arranged wouldn't
be complete until the following afternoon. Then it
was off to the Caribbean, where he would open bank
accounts in his new name and transfer some of the
Swiss funds to them. It irked him that he had been
forced to leave the bags of gold in Riga. They would
have made traveling much easier. Although he had
things to complain about, the situation could have
been worse. He could have been dead or penniless.
    Something heavy thudded on the other side of the
kitchen ceiling just above his head.
    Something heavy enough to make the light fixture
rattle.
    Kmkillov lowered the chicken leg from his mouth
and stepped out of the kitchen. As he approached the
foyer, he saw the Sicilian watchdog mounting the
stairs with his AR-18S at the ready. The general
peered around the comer, looking up at the bodyguard
as he turned the first landing.
    A flurry of silenced gunshots slammed into the Si-
cilian, bouncing him off the wall. He slid down the
stairs on his face, ending up in a twitching heap at
Kruki!lov's feet. Above, the !anding's wallpaper was
splotched with gore and pocked with 5.56 mm bullet
holes.
    Behind the Russian, at the other end of the foyer,
someone was at the front door, turning the handle.
    The guard sitting outside knew it was locked, knew
he had to use his key to get in.
Krukillov snatched up the AR-18S, whirled, and




sent a 5-round burst into the door at chest height.
Spent cartridge casings were still clattering across the
hardwood floor as the general rushed back into the
kitchen. The outline of a head appeared at the back
door, but before he could fire, it was gone.  That line of retreat was no good.
  He had to find a secure position quickly and defend
it.
    Krukillov tried a door at the far end of the kitchen
and discovered that led to the daylight basement. It
was a closed box, with no door to the street. He didn't
like it, but he knew it would have to do. At least he
could control the only way in.
    He closed the door behind him and quietly de-
scended the wooden steps. The room was so dim it
took his eyes a second to adjust. The available light
was filtered through a pair of draped windows set high
in the walls. Krukillov unscrewed the light bulb from
the ceiling fixture and picked his comer, beside the
rows of Eshamani's wine racks. As the general knelt,
he steeled himself for a fight to the death.

WHEN CAPTAIN SARNOV opened the waist-high iron
gate on Eshamani's side of the little park, someone
shouted at him.
  "Hey! Hey, you!"
    Samov turned to see one of the sweat-suit boys
bearing down on him. He had his right hand behind
his back, no doubt reaching for a gun. Instead of wait-
ing for the man to come to him, the Spetsnaz captain
walked back and met him halfway, in front of a
bench.
    "What are you doing around here?" the Sicilian
demanded.

    Samov lifted the tool tray by the handle, sliding his
other hand under the oily rag. The silenced bullpup
stuttered, blowing splinters and smoke out the end of
the tray. The Sicilian's knees buckled, and he sat
down abruptly on the bench, his head lolling over
onto his shoulder.
    It looked as though he was taking a nap, except for
the ragged ring of holes in his chest and all the blood.
    As Sarnov turned up the walk to Eshamani's front
steps, the guard on the porch rose from his chair.
    "Building inspector," Samov announced, then he
opened fire, stitching a line of slugs up the Sicilian's
chest to the point of his chin. The man was slumping
down the wall when Samov reached the top step. He
sat the dead guard back on the chair.
    The captain had his hand on the doorknob when he
smelled smoke. The heat from the second full-auto
burst had set the oily rag on fire. As he ducked down
to smother it, gunshots ripped through the door where
his chest had just been.
    Unable to kick in the door without putting himself
in the line of fire, Sarnov had to kneel there and wait
a few eternal seconds until Uri Turgenev and Vlad
Ferdishenko could open it for him from the inside.
    The first thing Sarnov saw was the lifeless body of
one of the guards draped down the stairs. It was
steadily leaking fluids into the Persian rugs.
  "Did you get the general?" Samov asked.
  "He wasn't upstairs," Ferdishenko said.
    "And he didn't come out the back," Turgenev
added.
    They quickly fanned out and did a fruitless search
of the ground floor. The search terminated in the
kitchen.




    It was Sarnov who noticed the closed door. He
pointed at it with his bullpup Enfield. "Where does
that go?"
"Probably down to the basement," Turgenev said.
"Shut off the light," the captain said.
Ferdishenko killed the kitchen light and Sarnov
inched the door open. It was dark down there, but not
pitch-black. He inched the door closed.
    "There are windows looking into the basement?"
he asked.
    "Yes," Ferdishenko replied. "Two in front, two in
back, none on the sides. They're very narrow. I don't
think he could fit through them."
  "Can you see into them well enough to shoot?"
    "They've got curtains over them, but if we have a
target..."
    "Get outside and get into position," Sarnov said.
"V!ad in front. Uri take the back. Fire when you see
him fire."
    Sarnov accompanied Ferdishenko to the front of
the house. As the younger man went out the door, the
captain bent over the dead guard on the stairs. He
grabbed the corpse by the back of the shirt collar and
dragged it into the kitchen. After pulling over a
kitchen chair close to the basement door, he hoisted
the dead man onto the seat.
    Holding the corpse in place with a hand, he paused
to give his men time to get into position.
    After two minutes, he opened the basement door a
crack, pursed his lips and made a "shhing" sound.
Soft though it was, it was loud enough to get the
general's attention. Then Samov drew the door back
all the way, stepped behind the chair and tipped it

forward, dumping the body headfirst down the dark
stairs.
    The thudding racket was met by a burst of autofire
from the left side of the cellar. As Sarnov ducked
back, he caught a glimpse of muzzle-flashes lighting
up the stairwell.
    Then, in stereo, came the tinkle of broken glass and
the muffled, canvas-ripping sound of full-auto return
fire. More glass shattered, and the general's gun rat-
tled back briefly, then stopped.
    Ferdishenko and Turgenev emptied their weapons,
reioaded and emptied them again.
    When they were done, it was very quiet in the base-
ment.
    Samov flipped the light switch on and off a couple
of times before he realized the bulb was missing. He
descended the stairs. There was enough light from the
broken windows to see what he needed to see, any-
way.
    The general lay crumpled against the wall of the
cellar, sprawled in a pool of mingled red wine and
blood. The right half of his head had been shot away
by the first salvo. The second barrage had impacted
above the corpse, chewing great hunks out of the
stone wall and savaging the arms merchant's exten-
sive wine collection.
    Sarnov stepped away from the spreading sheet of
red.
    "Captain!" Turgenev shouted from the kitchen.
"Sirens!"
    Sarnov heard them. They were close and getting
closer. He dropped his weapon on the floor and took
the cellar steps two at a time.




TASHA BELOC FIGUREo the limousine was headed for
Gatwick International Airport as soon as it got on the
A23. When it stuck to that route, she was sure of it.
Eshamani was making his break. It didn't matter
whether he led them straight to the third weapon or
not. If he didn't take them to it, they would kill his
bodyguards, kidnap him and make him give up the
name of the buyer and the intended target. Actually
that way seemed preferable to her, a bit more just.
Why should the thief Eshamani die quickly? What
mercy did he offer the future innocent victims of the
stolen nukes?
    She pushed the question of justice from her mind.
It didn't really matter how Eshamani died, only that
it was soon.
    The limousine turned off for the airport and, once
there, pulled in at the British Airways passenger-
loading area. Beloc double-parked six car lengths be-
hind the limo and waited until the arms merchant and
three of his henchmen got out and started for the ter-
minal. The limo signaled a turn, squeezed into the
flow of traffic and began to drive away.
    Beloc couldn't afford to wait to make sure the limo
was really leaving. She left her own car running and
hurried into the terminal after Eshamani. She knew
she was taking a big risk; an unoccupied car at Gat-
wick drew a lot of attention, fast. It was certain to be
searched and towed away in a matter of minutes. If
the airport stop was a ruse by Eshamani and he re-
turned to the limo farther down the loading zone, she
could be left without transportation.
    She had no choice. She had to stay on Eshamani's
tail.
Ahead the arms merchant and his three bodyguards

got into the British Airways ticket line. Beloc let a
few people move in front of her before she lined up
herself.
    Above the service counter, a television monitor dis-
played a list of flights departing for all comers of the
world. Beloc's stomach tightened; Eshamani could
have been going anywhere. The line advanced, and
the arms merchant stepped up to the counter, sur-
rounded by his Sicilians. Beloc leaned over the velvet
rope as the man bought tickets for himself and his
companions. The clerk handed Eshamani his fat batch
of tickets, then gave him instructions for the gate
number and departure time. Half lip-reading, half
eavesdropping, Beloc managed to pick up the details.
From them, it was easy for her to figure out the flight
number and destination.
 Eshamani was going to New York, first-class.
 On behalf of the Russian government, so was she.




CHAPTER NINE

Chocolate Canyon
11:15 a.m. MDT

U.S. Army Corporal Sean Smithers was not easily
twitched when confronted by scary male human be-
ings. He'd been working around guys like that for
years. It wasn't so bad at his current station, but dur-
ing his Ranger training at Fort Bragg, and later, on
his first tour of duty in Honduras, he had been in the
company of guys so tightly wound, so beyond the
pale, that just turning his back on them gave him an
awful sinking feeling.
    In the Humvee's rearview mirror, Smithers could
see the blond guy in the garish red-and-green Ha-
waiian shirt sitting directly behind him. The man was
staring right back at him.
    Smithers returned his gaze to the road ahead. As
he did so, he got that same sinking feeling, as if he
was turning his back on a mountain lion.
    He knew he should never have tried to make con-
versation with the blond guy while they were loading
up the Hummer. In an attempt to be funny, he had
said something dumb about the gigantic black ballis-
tic nylon backpack the guy was toting. For his trouble

he'd gotten back a look that said How do you want
to die?
    The guy wasn't any bigger than Smithers--about
six feet tail--so he couldn't intimidate the corporal
with sheer size. It was the man's intensity that was
so spooky. Smithers had never seen anybody so fo-
cused, not even at Fort Bragg. In comparison, the
other three passengers seemed almost normal. None
of them had introduced themselves yet, and Smithers
had a feeling they would never quite get around to it.
Like the blond guy, they were also in civvies; none
of them wore top-security-clearance ID tags around
their necks.
    After his failure at making small talk, the corporal
had kept his mouth shut and driven the Humvee down
the long, straight, gravel road, which was what he had
been ordered to do.
    Two miles ahead on the desert plain, Smithers
could see the first roadblock. The one-lane gravel
track on either side of the "incident" had been sealed
off by armed U.S. marshals and federal agents in
black helmets and body armor. Between the pair of
wooden barricades, it was a circus of parked official
vehicles, conflicting badges and uniforms and hun-
dreds of yards of yellow plastic hazard tape. He
stopped at the barrier, and an FBI man armed with an
M-16 looked in the vehicle, nodded to the white-
haired guy sitting beside Smithers in the shotgun seat,
then waved them on.
    His passengers were definitely "somebodies,"
Smithers decided. At least to the Justice Department.
    When they rolled up beside a broad area of desert
that had been taped off, the big guy with black hair
and cool blue eyes reached over from the back seat




 and put a hand on Corporal Smithers's shoulder.
 "Stop right here," he said. "This is fine."
    As the white-haired passenger got out of the ve-
hicle, a pair of men with ATF written on their chests
in big white block letters walked over from the side
of the road. The big black-haired guy climbed out,
followed by the shortest member of the quartet, a man
with brown hair worn slightly long, covering the tops
of his ears. The blond guy scrambled out after them.
    "We've kept everybody off the site, as requested,"
the stocky ATF man said to all of them. There was a
look of intense displeasure on his face. It fried his
cookies that his own hotshot crime-scene units hadn't
been allowed first peek at the evidence.
Who were these guys? Smithers asked himself.
Three of them comprised Able Team, the domestic-
action arm of Stony Man Farm, which targeted home-
grown terrorism and violence. The blonde was Carl
"Ironman" Lyons, a former LAPD detective. Like a
tightrope walker, Lyons balanced a keenly honed stra-
tegic mind with the fighting style of a berserker. The
guy with brown hair was Hermann "Gadgets"
Schwarz, a master of all things electronic and me-
chanical. Gadgets had graduated from Vietnam with
experience in demolition and booby traps, and in
counterintelligence and guerrilla warfare. The guy
with the white hair slicked straight back was Rosario
"Politician" Biancahales. "Pol" had matriculated
with honors from the same school as Schwarz; his
major was psy-ops.
    The fourth, the black-haired man, was a free-
roving, often solo performer for the same Sensitive
Operations Group. Although he had many identities,
his given name was Mack Bolan. The name he had

earned from his sworn enemies was "the Execu-
tioner." All four had, during long and distinguished
careers, put the fear of God into hundreds of mob-
smrs, terrorists and assassins before sending them,
disassembled and screaming, into the bowels of Hell.
    Although all of Smithers's passengers got out, only
two of them seemed to give a damn about the shell
craters on the other side of the hazard tape. Mack
Bolan and Gadgets Schwarz climbed over the bright
barrier and got to work at once.
    As it was hot in the Humvee, Corporal Smithers
climbed out, as well. He leaned against the side of
the Hummer and watched the pair move across the
cordoned-off desert. They stepped cautiously from
crater to crater, then the Executioner selected one to
dissect. He handed one of the wooden stakes he was
carrying to Schwarz.
    "Is that the one you'd have picked, Corporal?"
Rosario Blancanales asked.
    Smithers flinched. The white-haired Latin had
come up beside him so quietly that the sudden ques-
tion had startled him. "Uh, yes sir."  "Why's that?"
    "It's a clearly defined shell crater with a shallow
angle of entry, sir," Smithers said in a rush. "The
big guy's already found the entrance groove where
the shell penetrated the ground prior to detonation.
The other guy's looking on the other edge of the cra-
ter for the mark the fuse left when it blew free of the
warhead."
    As the corporal finished speaking, across the desert
the brown-haired guy straightened up. He had a smile
on his face.
  "Got it," Schwarz said to Bolan.




    The Executioner didn't look up from his work. He
was using a flat rock to tap in an aiming stake a foot
or so back from the edge of the entrance groove.
Gadgets Schwarz followed his example and used a
chunk of rock to pound in a marker where the fuse
had impacted. Then he placed a compass on top of
his stake and lined it up with the post on the other
side of the crater.
    "What they've got there," Corporal Smithers said,
"is a straight line leading back..." Half-turning, he
saw the white-haired man was already facing the way
the shell had come. Under his high-altitude suntan,
Smithers's cheeks flushed with embarrassment. "But
I'm not telling you anything you don't already know,
am I, sir?"
    Blancanales squinted up the rise in the road to the
line of dark brown hills. "No, Corporal," he said.
"I'm afraid not."
    Bolan and Schwarz double-checked their work by
locating the side spray--the chunks of rock that the
explosion had thrown out of the opposite sides of the
crater. After they had found and staked the middle of
each fan of rubble, Schwarz stepped into the crater
and likewise marked its center. With his compass in
the middle of the shell pit, he measured the angle
formed by the opposing stakes. When he divided that
angle in half, it lined up almost exactly with the pre-
vious estimate, confirming the direction to the can-
non.
    A soft grunting noise from the other side of the
road made Smithers turn and look over the roof of
the Humvee. Ignoring the activity in the taped-off
area, the big blond was doing a series of nonstop Sho-

tokan karate katas at high speed and with almost
manic intensity.
    "What's with that guy, anyway?" the corporal
asked.
    "He's the eighth wonder of the world," Blancan-
ales said. "That's how he relaxes."
    "Why is he here? He's not even looking at the
crime scene."
    "He doesn't do investigative work anymore,"
Blancanales replied. "That's not his specialty."
    Smithers could guess what his specialty was from
the flurry of linked power strikes. The guy moved like
a propeller that had broken free of its engine mount
at maximum rpm, in wild, Iooping spirals. It wasn't
pretty, but it wasn't meant to be. Every blow was a
death strike.
    Bolan and Schwarz stepped back over the tape bar-
rier and returned to the Hummer.
    "Hey, Ironman," Biancahales shouted across the
road to the blond guy. "Wrap it up."
    "Ironman" Lyons drew himself up and then
bowed to his imaginary foe. When he stepped back
to the vehicle, Smithers saw that, despite all the vi-
olent kicks and punches in the heat of the day, he was
barely perspiring.
    "Corporal," Bolan said, "we need to take this
Hummer off-road."
  "No problem, sir."
    After they had all piled in the vehicle, Bolan di-
rected him off the gravel and onto the desert scrub
beside the fence of yellow tape. When they were close
to the crater that had been staked out, the big guy got
out and in short order had the vehicle lined up with
the pair of aiming posts. He hopped back in the shot-




gun seat and pointed at the compass on the dash.
"Keep us on that course. You can do that, can't you,
soldier?"
  "Yes, sir."
  "I'll tell you when to stop."
    As the corporal drove, his passengers spoke very
little, but what they said seemed important.
    "I make it at least four from the boot tracks,"
Schwarz said. "They staked out the target with
these." He showed his partners a shred of fluorescent
green pennant.
    "From the shell craters," Bolan said, "it looks like
they were firing HE out of a 155."
    "Our boys from California have headed noah and
east," Blancanales said.
    Smithers stole a glance into his rearview mirror.
The blond guy did look a little more relaxed now. He
was staring out the window with unfocused eyes. He
didn't utter a word during the bumpy overland trip,
but Smithers could tell he was listening to what his
partners were saying.
    Following the compass course, they crossed back
onto the road a short distance from the brown hills.
As they did, the Hummer was pointed right at the
entrance to Chocolate Canyon.
    "Hold it here," Bolan said, opening his door.
"Let's do the rest of this on foot."
    Smithers, Blancanales and Lyons watched through
the dusty windshield as Bolan and Schwarz walked
up the dry streambed between the cliffs.
    After a few minutes of stony quiet inside the hot
vehicle, Bolan and Schwarz returned.
    "The tracks of a semitruck lead into the canyon
about two hundred feet, then stop," Bolan said. "It

looks like they've got the howitzer inside a truck
trailer. That's the shooting platform they're using."
    "That fits with the crime scene in California,"
Blancanales said.
    "Except for bootprints and tire tracks, the firing
position looks clean," Bolan stated.
    "Counting the driver, there were five of them,"
Schwarz went on. "Four men crewed the gun and the
fifth acted as observer, probably up on the cliff
there."
  "We need to talk to the Farm," Bolan concluded.

Stony Man Farm
3:05 p.m. EDT

SOMETIMES WHEN THINGS fell into place, you wished
they hadn't.
    Hal Brognola was on the secure, scrambled phone
link to the White House. His neck and shoulders
ached as if they were being drilled at very slow speed
by a very dull drill bit. He'd already spent a tense
half hour explaining the situation and response op-
tions to the President. In the shifting sea of related
evidence, two facts stood out.
    The Soviet nuclear artillery shells had been discov-
ered in Riga, and halfway around the world, a how-
itzer had been stolen that could fire them.
    Brognola saw it as much more than mere coinci-
dence.
    When the President asked about the discrepancy
between the calibers of the Soviet and American how-
itzers, Brognola explained, as it had been explained
to him by John "Cowboy" Kissinger, Stony Man




Farm's armorer, that 152 mm Soviet artillery shells
could be fired out of 155 mm U.S. cannons.
    "The Russian nukes would rattle a bit on the way
out of the barrel, but otherwise they'd work just fine,"
Kissinger had said.
    The President said that he understood, but that he
was still having trouble with the direct connection
between stolen nukes, stolen howitzer and the Old
Glory Ranch. Brognola knew that he was being asked
to sell the Chief Executive on the threat before he
signed on to the plan that was intended to resolve it.
    Brognola ran down the list of known facts, tying
them together with means, motive and opportunity. A
reliable FBI informant at the Wyoming ranch had
passed on the news that the militia was running drills
with an artillery trainer, a small-caliber, single-shot
gun that was used to prepare soldiers to operate a real
cannon's sighting and aiming systems. They already
knew that the commander in chief of the Patriots and
many of its recruits had recent combat experience in
the field artillery units of the National Guard. Oswald
Carmody and the others had participated in the one-
sided artillery duels of Desert Storm that knocked out
seventy enemy guns in the space of an hour. Stony
Man and the Justice Department were well aware of
the psy-ops campaign the group was waging in the
rural West. The Sawtooth Patriots, directly and indi-
rectly, were planting seeds of fear through radio and
print media and on the Internet.
    Fear of repression by armed agents of a shadowy
world government.
    At that point, the President brought the big Fed up
short. "I don't see the motive in all this. How does

the scare campaign fit in with the whole nuclear-
attack scenario?" he asked.
    "The false rumors they've spread about blacked-
out helicopters and United Nations troop movements
on country highways are a way of controlling peo-
ple's perceptions of real events that are about to take
place," Brognola said. "In order to precipitate the all-
out government repression they've described, to fulfill
their own prophecy of tanks in the barnyards and
house-to-house searches of simple ranch folk, they're
about to initiate the most horrible, unthinkable terror-
ist attack in the history of humankind. Their motive,
simply put, is to use the manufactured 'truth' of their
oppressive-world-government story in order to build
a guerrilla army of resistance that would do battle for
control of American soil."
    "You paint a very ugly picture, Hal, of some very
dangerous men."
    Brognola explained the final link in the chain of
circumstantial evidence that pointed to the Sawtooth
Patriots: the test firing of a 155 mm howitzer in Utah
earlier in the day. "1 have no doubt, sir," Brognola
told the President, "that this weapon will be used
against U.S. citizens."
    "Do you have any proof that these militia people
are connected to the stolen Soviet nuclear weapons?"
"No direct proof."
    "I think you said your people destroyed two of
these weapons in Latvia. Are you confident that the
pipeline is sealed and that no other weapons have left
the former republics?"
    "The pipeline is sealed at that end," Brognola said.
"A communiqu6 from British Intelligence in the last
hour has confirmed the death of one of the men in-




volved, a Russian brigadier general. He was shot by
persons unknown in the basement of a London resi-
dence. The other alleged conspirator, Sergio Ishmael
Eshamani, has since disappeared. We assume that by
now he's switched identities. According to MI-6, the
London hit looks like a professional job. There were
bodies all over the place. The bottom line is, without
the Russian to sneak weapons out of the system, the
pipeline no longer exists. Unfortunately we have no
way of knowing whether we got all the weapons he
diverted. We could ask the Russians, but I doubt
they'd tell us the truth, even if they untangled it from
their paperwork. It would be too embarrassing for
them to have to admit publicly that they can't keep
track of their own goddamned nukes."  "What do you suggest we do?"
    Brognola didn't hesitate; he plunged right in. "We
have to hit the militia stronghold before dawn and
deactivate it. We might get lucky and find the stolen
howitzer on the premises. Even if we don't, we might
find a clue as to the intended target for a conventional
or nuclear artillery strike:"
  "That's a lot of 'mights,' Hal."
    "I know it is, sir. That's why it's a job for us and
not FBI or ATF. If we take the ranch and find nothing,
it'll look like an internal conflict, a turf war among
militiamen. However, and I want to stress this, I'm
confident that we'll find what we're looking for."

"So?" AARON KURTZMAN said when Brognola re-
turned to the farm's computer center. "What did he
say?"
    The head of the Justice Department's Sensitive Op-
erations Group took a seat beside Kurtzman, Barbara

Price and Yakov Katzenelenbogen, Stony Man's tac-
tical adviser and the former Phoenix Force team
leader. "The President said he's already informed the
attorney general that no Justice or ATF tactical units
would be committed in an assault on the Sawtooth
stronghold. Because the Old Glory Ranch is heavily
fortified and its occupants well-armed and deter-
mined, the President is convinced it'll turn out to be
another Waco or worse. And he doesn't want the
heat.' '
  "Who would?" Price said.
    "He asked if elements of the Stony Man covert
force could actually take the ranch," Brognola said.
"I gave him your analysis, Yakov, that it's possible
because we have the layout of the grounds and the
building interiors from our informant, but that it
would require the combined Able and Phoenix
teahis."
    "I also said the chances of success were only fifty-
fifty," the craggy-faced man added. Under heavy salt-
and-pepper eyebrows, his light blue eyes flashed. "I
hope you told him that, as well."  "Of course."
  "And what did he say?"
    "He asked me if I thought the risk should be taken.
I told him that the unanimous opinion of every'one at
Stony Man was that we should commit both action
teams and Striker, and that we should proceed with
all due haste. His reply was, 'Do it.'"
    "I've got photographs from Wyoming scrolling up
on the wall screen," Carmen Delahunt announced
from her computer station.
  The grainy color pictures showed Oswald Carmody




exiting the steps of a Learjet. The plane's corporate
logo was clearly visible.
    "That's the Sawtooth head guy," Kurtzman said.
"Who shot the photos?"
    "SAC William Parker," Brognola said. "He's
been working the case on the ground. He's developed
the informant inside the Old Glory Ranch."
    "Monstrel?" Barbara Price said. reading the
plane's black-and-silver decal. "How does that fit
in?"
    "Krick is the CEO of Monstrel Mining and Chem-
ical," Hunt Wethers replied. "He's Harvard edu-
cated, we!l-traveled and was until recently a very rich
man. For the past few years, he's been dabbling at
the fringes of extreme right-wing politics on the state
level. He became politically active after the federal
government forced the closure of some of his most
toxic mining sites. EPA investigators found they were
polluting the public groundwater supplies of three
states with known carcinogens."
"So Krick is Sawtooth's banker?" Delahunt asked.
"Was," Dr. Wethers said. "Monstrel is history.
Krick has lost every civil lawsuit so far, and there are
criminal cases pending. He's broke, but as you can
see from the Lear jet, he's still keeping up a good
front."
     Tokaido interrupted the discussion. "We've got an
incoming scramble from Utah. It's Striker."
  "Put it on the speakers," Kurtzman said.
  "What've you got, Striker?" Brognola asked.
  The big man's voice boomed in the windowless
  room. "I think we found the California Guard's miss-
  ing howitzer," he said. "A 155 was fired four times
  from a box canyon off Highway 6, then the shooters

beat it. They took the cannon with them. It looks like
a test run to me. They had a rectangular area staked
out on the desert as a target. From that, I'd say they're
after a very big building."
  "What about the range?" Katz said.
    "The target was five miles away and it was hit with
HE direct fire. They've got the gun inside a semi-
trailer--that's how they're moving it around. There
were five men involved in the operation. Earwitnesses
report all four shots were fired in under two minutes.
From the speed these guys worked and their accuracy,
there's no doubt they're a well-trained gunnery team.
Unfortunately no one saw them fire and no one re-
members a truck turning onto the highway after the
barrage. We've got tire tracks, but they're only going
to help if we find the truck. The trail here is ice cold.
These people could be anywhere within a five-
hundred-mile radius by now."
  "Anything else, Striker?" Brognola said.
    "Yeah, Gadgets has something he wants to say. It's
important."
  "Go ahead, put him on."
    "I've been thinking about the target they drew in
the dirt," Schwarz said. "If they really mean to hit a
building and it's as big as what they'd staked out, a
few rounds of direct fire HE aren't going to do it
much structural damage. Individual floors would be
wrecked, but even that would be limited because of
all the interior supporting walls and baffles. Heck,
even a few dozen rounds of HE wouldn't do that
much damage to a really solid structure. We have to
assume that a building with this big a footprint is
going to be solid. Our stolen M-198 howitzer can
shoot four rounds per minute, max. So, to fire twenty-


four rounds, not counting the time for the registration
shots, would take six or seven minutes. These guys
have to got to know they're not going to have that
long to work."
    Brognola already knew where this was going. He
dipped into his shirt pocket for his antacid tablets.
    "What I think the target should be telling us,"
Gadgets went on, "is that the shooters don't intend
to use conventional artillery rounds. They're just
practicing with them to get comfortable with the can-
non. They're planning on firing a nuke."
    Katz nodded in agreement. "He's fight, unfortu-
nately."
    "We have no choice but to proceed with the mis-
sion as outlined," Barbara Price declared.
    "And hope to hell we beat them to the punch,"
Tokaido added.
    "Striker," Brognola said, "the Phoenix team is
leaving within the half hour to join you. Move to the
rendezvous point and wait for their arrival."

CHAPTER TEN

Old Glory Ranch
3:50 p.m. MDT

From his observation post on the flank of the moun-
tain, Oswald Carmody saw the muzzle-flash from the
plain a half mile away, then a split second later, heard
the faint gun crack. A two-hundred-loot-tall cirque of
rock framed the downhill side of the lake below him.
With a sizzling hiss, the D-20 trainer round cleared
the rim of the mountain bowl and dropped with a
sploosh into the middle of the wind-riffled, quarter-
acre lake.
    "Fire for effect," Carmody said into his walkie-
talkie. He hit the start button on his stopwatch.
    In fifteen seconds, the trainer boomed again, and
again a sploosh.
 Again, almost dead center in the lake.
    Instead of a two-foot-high plume of water, Car-
mody visualized air hot enough to melt granite into
thin soup and a concentric shock wave that would
reduce blocks of skyscrapers to a single towering col-
umn of dust.
    "End of mission," he said into the communica-
tions device. "Nice work, 12-7."




    "Roger," came the reply. "Are we done for to-
day?"
  "Yeah, that's it. I'm coming down."
    Carmody started packing his gear into a knapsack.
He knew the crew was sick of practicing with the
D-20 trainer, but the intensive work they'd put in had
really paid off. Despite the gusting afternoon winds
this day, they had laid round after round on the target.
As a weapon, the trainer itself was about as deadly
as a 12-gauge shotgun. Mounted on a tripod, it fired
a single heavy-caliber rifle bullet from a scaled-down
barrel, but it used the same sighting and elevation
systems as the real D-20 cannon. The Soviet pan-
oramic sight and clinometer systems took some get-
ting used to, even for an experienced gun team like
12-7.
  The "12-7" code name was Krick's idea.
    It referred to December 7, 1941, the "day of in-
famy" sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
    The commander in chief of the Sawtooth Patriots
shrugged on his pack and picked his way down the
mountainside, skirting the larger boulders and clumps
of sagebrush. The name of the gun team had been
Krick's brainstorm, but the firing range was all Car-
mody. He had worked it out to an almost perfect one-
tenth scale.
    As would be the case in the real attack, the range's
lake target was invisible to the howitzer crew, blocked
by a tall barrier jutting up from the plain. In order to
score a hit, they had to use a high angie of fire and
lob the shot over the barrier. Because of air resistance
and gravity, the target end of an artillery shell's tra-
jectory was always steeper; in this case, to clear the
intervening obstacles, the nuclear warhead had to fall
almost straight down on the target. An attack using
indirect fire required an observer to monitor the reg-

istration of the preliminary shell impacts and call in
range and elevation adjustments to bring the follow-
ing rounds on target. At H-hour, as in all the practice
sessions, Carmody would man the observation post
himselfi
 Calling in megadeath from a safe distance.
    By the time Carmody reached the plain, the gun
crew was waiting there in the jeep to pick him up.
    "What do you think, Oz?" the driver asked as Car-
mody piled into the front passenger's seat. His name
was "Skel" Peterson; he got the nickname from his
extremely thin and angular face. Peterson had a quick,
analytical mind and physical reflexes to match. He
was also one hell of a gunner.
    "Remember what we did to those Iraqi gun em-
placements during Storm?" Carmody said.
    "Kicked their mooshy brown butts," assistant gun-
ner Rick Link answered from the back seat. He wore
the brim of his desert-camou boonie hat tied up on
one side with the chin thong, Australian style.
    "Ninety percent casualties in the first hour," Bob
Gabhart, the number-one cannoneer, chimed in.
    "An honest-to-God sixty-minute war," said Billy
Ray Ransom, the second cannoneer.
    Both of the team's cannoneers had the same build:
stocky, with powerful legs, arms and shoulders. They
needed all those muscles to keep the heavy shells
moving steadily onto the shot guide. Unlike Ransom,
who had a full head of short, spiky brown hair, Gab-
hart was practically bald over the crest of his block-
shaped skull.
    "We're going to do the same thing here," Car-
mody said. "You guys are on the money. We can't
miss."




    "I'll bet we can bracket the target, and get the nuke
off in three shots," Gabhart said.
    "That'd be sweet," Peterson said. "Then they re-
ally wouldn't know what hit 'em."
    Billy Ray Ransom laughed from the back seat.
"They'd probably think the Russians MIRVed 'em
until they checked the missile-defense radar. Hey,
Joint Chiefs, guess what? No incoming blips from
Kamchatka on this deal. Ooh-wee, they are gonna be
fit to be tied."
    "The Beech is coming in," Peterson said. He
pointed toward the ranch compound. The twin-
engined plane was making its final approach.
  "That'll be the fat man," Carmody said.
  "What's he here for?" Rick Link asked.
    "A little psy-ops," Carmody said. "Don't worry
about it, he's completely under control."
    "All you got to do is feed him," Gabhart said,
"and he'll follow you anywhere."
    At Carmody's order, Skel Peterson headed the jeep
for the airstrip. They arrived just as the lone passenger
was getting out.
    With great effort and painful slowness, E. Paul
Rutherford descended the Beechcraft's steps. Over
one shoulder was a normal-sized carry-on flight bag.
Next to his tremendous bulk, it looked like a woman's
purse.
    "Get in," Carmody said to the talk-show host.
Without being told, the gun crew bailed out to make
room for Rutherford. Carmody moved over behind
the wheel.
      Puffing from the exertion, the fat man obeyed,
planting himself in the front passenger's seat.
  "How was the flight?" Carmody asked.
  "Fine."

  "You brought your equipment, I trust?"
    "Yes, it's all packed in my case. But you didn't
say what I supposed to do with it while I'm here. I
don't know what you have in mind."
    "Nothing too difficult," he assured the radio per-
sonality as he turned the jeep around. "Very soon
people are going to want to know all about the Saw-
tooth Patriots. I want you to be in a position to tell
them. It'll be good for you, and it'll be good for us."
  "Am I going to interview you?"
    "Me and the other men at the ranch. I want you to
get a feel for the place, and a feel for the Patriots.
You know, who they really are and what they stand
for."
    "Uh-huh, I can do that. And I think you're right--
I think it would make an interesting series of broad-
casts."
    "First thing," Carmody said, "I'll take you
through the main house. It's built on the site of the
original ranch house, which burned down in 1968.
The original house was built in 1881 by my great-
grandfather."
    Carmody drove through the main gate and parked
by the house's massive, iron-bound front doors.
    As they got out of the jeep, a strange sound echoed
across the compound yard. Ghostly and shrill, it
seemed to come from the general direction of the
ranch's we!l--a cylindrical flagstone structure shaded
by a steeply sloping tin roof. Under the shade of the
little roof, attached to its support posts, was a wooden
crank handle with a rope affixed. The rope extended
straight and guitar-string taut down into the well's
opening.
    "What the hell was that?" Rutherford asked his
host.




  "Nothing," Carmody replied.
  Another moan drifted across the courtyard.
  "There it is again," the fat man said.
    "I'll fix it," Carmody told him. On the way to the
we!!, Carmody stopped to pick up a chunk of rock
the size of a football. He dropped the stone down the
well. A second passed, and then the stone made a
thunk instead of a splash. The groaning noise abruptly
ceased.
    Carmody slipped free the loop of cord that held the
crank locked in position and adjusted the rope, drop-
ping it down about an inch. Then he looped the han-
dle securely back into place.
    "Come on, let's go inside," he said, walking past
the fat man.

JACK HUTTON, FBI informant, saw the rock coming
down at him, but there wasn't anything he could do
to avoid it.
    His wrists were duct-taped together in front of him;
his ankles were also bound. The wad of rag that
gagged his mouth was held in place by more tums of
the gray plastic tape that encircled his head. Looped
under his armpits was the end of the well rope. The
rope kept him dangling in place and mostly sub-
merged. It was all he could do to keep his mouth and
nose above the water.
    The stone hit him on the point of the fight shoulder
and bounced softly into the water.
    Hutton bit into his gag as the pain speared through
him. If he'd had any brains, he told himself, he
would've moved directly under the falling rock and
let it bash his head in. But he couldn't do it, he
couldn't kill himself. He wanted to live, to survive

long enough to see the Sawtooth Patriots go down in
flames.
    As the pain in his shoulder faded, the horrible sen-
sation of all-over cold returned. Life-sucking cold. He
started shaking against his bonds as if he was about
to fly apart.
    Then the rope dropped a little, and it was suddenly
much harder for him to keep his face above the sur-
face. For a second, he panicked, swallowing the water
that seeped into his mouth. He tried to lever himself
up with the toes of his shoes, but he couldn't keep
his balance on the slippery stone lining of the well.
He slid down again, and the rope creaked as his
weight stretched it tight.
    He knew this torture wasn't meant to extract infor-
mation from him. Prior to his being tied up and low-
ered into the freezing pit, Carmody hadn't asked him
one question. Evidently the commander in chief of
the Patriots didn't care what he knew or what he had
told the FBI.
 This was torture as punishment.
  Punishment for betraying the movement.
    As he'd been lowered into the well, Carmody had
promised to make him sorry that he'd ever been born.
    In his mind, Hutton stayed strong. He was scared
because he was getting so weak, the cold water sap-
ping away all his strength, but he still had a couple
of things to hold on to. He had turned informant on
the Patriots because he'd learned that under the ve-
neer of valid complaints, under their bugle-and-drum
rhetoric and their paranoid claims, they were purely
evil, and that what they wanted to do to America was
purely evil. At least he had the satisfaction of know-
ing he'd given the Feds the floor plan of the ranch
buildings and the details of the mining of the com-




pound. He hoped that the Feds would use his infor-
mation to storm the place and kill every one of the
mothers' sons. He remembered that Parker had said
the Justice Department was going to send in the
troops real soon. That gave him reason to hope that
maybe the cavalry would even arrive in time to rescue
him.
    The tightly stretched rope gave another quarter
inch, and cold water came pouring through the gag
and into his mouth.
    He swallowed the water, choking on it, coughing
and making it shoot out his nose. He had to concen-
trate, to focus his entire mind on maintaining his po-
sition, or he would drown like an unwanted kitten in
a gunnysack.

Arlemont Shopping Plaza
Salt Lake City 4:50 p.m. MDT

"THAT'S THE PLACE," Edward Kelso said, pointing at
the huge sign on steel posts that marked the entrance
to the shopping center. "Pull into the drive and go
around to the back."
    Wiley steered the semi into the parking lot, and
they rolled over a series of speed bumps until they
reached the end of the line of connected, single-story
retail shops. Around the comer to the left, set at the
far end of the lot, was the Western Super Discount
Appliance store. Wiley headed for the concrete-block
structure and, when he reached it, he turned, making
for the loading bays in the back.
    When they pulled up, a man in a short-sleeved
white shirt with a pen protector in the pocket stepped
out from behind one of the warehouse's overhead

sliding doors. Suspenders held up his gray slacks. He
mopped his forehead with a handkerchief as the men
in the truck piled out.
      "You picking up the special order for Old Glory
Ranch?" the appliance salesman asked.  "That's right," Kelso replied.
      "I thought you weren't going to show up today,"
the salesman said. "It was getting to be so late."
  "Not a chance of that," Kelso told him.
    "Got the item right here." He pointed to a wood-
braced cardboard carton about five feet high. It was
already strapped to a refrigerator dolly. On the side
of the carton, in big red letters, it said The Thunder-
bolt. Industrial Grade, Super Heavy Duty Washing
Machine.
    Kelso smiled when he saw that. Some joke--it
would clean out the dirt, all right.
    "You have to sign for it," the salesman said, hand-
ing him down a clipboard and pen.
    When Kelso had done that, the salesman asked,
"Can we roll it right into the back of your truck? The
reason I ask, that's one heavy washing machine. I've
never seen the like around here. We sell home appli-
ances, and we don't usually handle industrial units."
  "We'll take it from here," Kelso assured him.
  Ringman and Mallone hopped up on the dock and
  rolled the box to the loading-dock steps. Speck joined
  them there, and the three men lowered the dolly to
  the ground. Wiley had already opened the trailer's
  side door. Once they lifted the carton inside, they se-
  curely battened it down.
    "Boy, that trailer looks like it's been through a
war," the salesman said to Kelso. He was staring at
the black smoke and scorch marks on the edges of




the roof and across the closed rear doors, and at all
the popped rivets in the side wails.
  "Yeah, we're kind of hard on equipment, I guess."
    "I guess that's why you guys need an industrial
washer."
    Kelso climbed into the cab and pulled the door
shut. He waved at the salesman as they pulled away
from the dock.
      "A two-tenths-kiloton washing machine," Speck
said, slapping his thigh. "Can you beat that?"
  "Hell of a spin cycle," Wiley added.
    They were all still laughing as they exited the park-
ing lot.

Old Glory Ranch
5:05 p.m. MDT

SHORTLY BEFORE the evening meal was served in the
main house's dining room, Rutherford excused him-
self to wash up. As hungry as he was, and as good
as the smells from the kitchen were--pot roast, he
thought--he was always reluctant to show his true
colors when dining in someone else's domain. It was
one thing to look like you ate like a pig; it was an-
other to demonstrate that vast appetite before strang-
ers.
  Especially trim and fit strangers.
    When placed in an unfamiliar dining situation, in-
stead of setting-to with his usual boundless enthusi-
asm, Rutherford invariably made a great show of
picking at his food, pushing it around the plate while
he engaged those sitting around the table in spirited
conversation. He did this while seething with yearn-

ing inside, forced by his own twisted pride to watch
as others gorged themselves without remorse.
    He knew it was idiotic for him to pretend that he
hadn't reached such monumental proportions by eat-
ing to excess. What did he expect people to believe,
that one night he had gone to sleep skinny and, to his
horror, awakened the next morning tipping the scales
at 450 pounds? Still, he couldn't make himself act
naturally.
    With difficulty, Rutherford put thoughts of food
and associated shame from of his mind. If he wanted
to continue feeding in the fashion to which he had
become accustomed, he had to pass on something of
value to Agent Parker of the FBI. He had already seen
much inside the ranch house that was disturbing to
him.
    The Sawtooth Patriots had at least two heavy-
caliber machine guns that guarded the front and back
of the main house. They were set in fortified eraplace-
ments behind what had once been large picture win-
dows. The glass had been removed from the frames
and replaced on the outside with two pieces of ply-
wood that left a gap of about a foot in the middle of
the frame. On the inside of the house, crudely welded
panels of steel plate reduced the view to a slit just big
enough for the gunner to sight through and for the
machine guns to fan back and forth, covering their
field of fire. The areas around the machine guns
weren't just sandbagged, but were shielded with more
of the half-inch steel plate. Beside the sandbags were
stacked boxes of belted 7.62 mm cartridges.
    At one time the main house must have had a
homey, cabinlike atmosphere with its peeled-log
walls, bare ceiling beams and rustic wood stove. Now




the Western decorations--saddles, blankets, antique
guns and animal heads--were overpowered by
stacked sandbags. The place looked like a bunker.
Sandbags cut the width of the hallways in half. They
were piled waist high in every corridor. The floors
were probably hardwood, but they could no longer be
seen. The Patriots had covered them with plates of
steel. At the end of the brief home tour, Carmody had
told him there was more to see under the house. Ruth-
erford guessed that the steel plate was intended to
protect whatever was down there from direct attack.
    Because he'd never seen the militia in its own en-
vironment before, the talk-show host had never had
reason to take their threats and posturing with any-
thing but a grain of salt. Talk was talk, and it was
cheap. Before this, he had pigeonholed the Patriots as
country dimwits, harmless nutcases and the means to
a multistate syndication for his program. As he
walked through the house, unesconed, the prepara-
tions for all-out war told him how far in over his head
he really was. If there was a dimwit at Old Glory
Ranch, it was surely him.
    Instead of heading for the sink and towel in his
assigned room, and the hand-washing he claimed he
needed, Rutherford made a beeline for Carmody's of-
rice. He had been allowed to take a quick look into
it on the tour, and what he had glimpsed made him
want to see more. From the doorway, he moved di-
rectly to the big worktable set up in the middle of the
room.
    At first he didn't know what he was looking at.
There didn't seem to be any order to it. Layers of
printed material covered the entire table. There were
what looked like So-Viet and U.S. military manuals

and a couple of Russian dictionaries, ballistic texts
and complex tables of numbers and map references,
all stacked amid a clutter of maps. Topographic pro-
jections, detailed street maps and highway maps.
    When Rutherford looked more closely at the map
titles, he saw they all covered the same geographical
area.
  Ogden, Utah.
    The Sawtooth Patriots were planning something for
Ogden, the fat man thought. That news was bound to
please Parker. It looked like solid, incriminating evi-
dence. Coupled with possession of the illegal machine
guns, it was grounds for a search warrant. Even if it
turned out to be nothing more than a Fourth of July
parade, it would still get him off the hook with the
FBI for a while.
    Leaning over the table, Rutherford shifted the top-
most map aside. Under it was a detailed street map
with a straight line drawn across it in red felt marker.
The line didn't coincide with any of the streets, but
cut across them at a steep angle. At one end of the
line was a big circle, and beside the circle, a symbol.
  A crudely drawn death's-head.
    When Rutherford saw the name of the building
complex that was inside the red circle, it made his
head spin and his palms begin to sweat. He steadied
himself with a hand on the edge of the table. If the
Sawtooth Patriots were serious, they intended to make
big trouble for America. If they were serious, they
were even more dangerous than the defensive forti-
fications of the ranch suggested.
    He took a tiny point-and-shoot camera from his
pocket, and with slippery, sweaty fingers, shot a series




of close-up flash photos of the material on the table-
top.
    He was so intent on the job that he didn't see Car-
mody standing in the open doorway behind him.

THE COMMANDER IN CH1EF of the militia wasn't an-
gry; in fact, he appeared quite pleased. He had reason
to be, everything was falling into place. Not all of it
was his doing, of course; some of it was just luck.
But the most important parts were his.
    Carmody knew he had a knack for twisting reality,
for making people see exactly what he wanted them
to see, and to see it in exactly the way he wanted
them to. It was a skill that he enjoyed using and re-
fining, if for no other reason than to find out how far
he could go.
    A case in point--Carmody had personally put re-
flective stickers on highway signs and then identified
them to his rank and file as secret troop-movement
markers that would direct the invading New World
Order forces into America's heartland. The radio
waves and the Internet throbbed for weeks with the
story. Troop-transport sightings were reported. High-
powered-ammunition sales skyrocketed in a three-
state area.
    Another case in point--he knew his enemies and
their lackeys would be looking for a certain kind of
information at Old Glory Ranch, based on what they
surmised about the militia's aggressive intent. Like
the reflective stickers he had planted along the Wy-
oming roadside, the information he'd left out on his
worktable led nowhere.
    Without making a sound, Carmody backed away
from the doorway and turned clown the hall.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

JFK Airport, New York
8:15 p.m. EDT

The British Airways 747 touched down on the tarmac
with a jolt. As the big engines reversed, slowing the
plane, Sergio Eshamani watched the runway lights
whip past his window. He'd had a good rest on the
flight, thanks to a sleeping pill and two shots of vin-
tage cognac. He felt totally relaxed as the aircraft
taxied to the arrival gate.
    The passport he handed the immigration clerk at
the checkpoint said he was Dominic Taddei, citizen
of Italy. His purpose in the United States, as he ex-
plained to the man in uniform, was tourism, a well-
earned vacation. The clerk accepted this story without
question; he didn't bother running the passport num-
ber against the computer database, although a termi-
nal sat right in front of him on the counter. As the
clerk handed back the stamped documents, he wished
Eshamani a nice vacation.
    Eshamani had brought no changes of socks, but he
had several changes of ID with him. He tossed the
Taddei ID into the nearest trash can and left the air-
port terminal as Walter Bertrand Combs of High-




tower, Texas. The trio of bodyguards that dogged his
heels to the passenger-loading zone also had double
[Ds.
    At the curb, a stretch limo was waiting for him.
The extralong vehicle was necessary because of the
number of hired gunmen who had come along for the
ride. In addition to the three shooters he had brought
from London, Eshamani had five more Sicilian sol-
diers stationed inside the limo. As the trio from Lon-
don took their seats, they were handed the tools of
their trade by their countrymen. The new arrivals im-
mediately checked the silenced miniUzi machine pis-
tols, then set the weapons down on the carpet at their
feet.
    There was enough 9 mm firepower in the limo to
start--and win--a small war.
    As the limo pulled away from the curb and into the
flow of traffic, the Sicilian capo cleared his throat. He
didn't look happy. "We had some bad news, boss. A
phone call a couple of hours ago from London. The
Kensington house was hit hard."
  Eshamani straightened up in his seat.
    "We lost all of our guys. The Russian bought it,
too. All of them slaughtered like hogs."
    In an instant, the sense of confidence and relaxation
that had marked the arms merchant's arrival in the
U.S. evaporated. Someone had tracked him from Riga
to London, someone skilled and ruthless. Perhaps
even more ruthless than he was. One thing was cer-
tain: his enemy would not be put off by a mere trans-
atlantic hop.
    As the limo pulled onto the expressway, Eshamani
pressed the switch that lowered the smoked-glass win-
dow between the passenger and driver compartments.

"Lupo," he said to the driver, "it's important that
we aren't being tailed."
    "Gotcha, boss." The uniformed man scanned his
side mirrors as he changed lanes, identifying the col-
ors and shapes of the vehicles behind them. He ac-
celerated to eighty miles per hour, then cut back to
his original lane. Again he searched his mirrors.
  "Well," Eshamani said, "are we being tailed?"
  "I don't think so, boss."
  "Make sure."
    The limo driver nodded. Without a signal, and at
the last possible second, he swerved onto an off-ramp
that descended in a tight circle to the right. The pas-
sengers either grabbed hold of the straps hanging
from the ceiling or held on to the edges of their seats
as the heavy car skidded around the turn. Lupo braked
hard at the stop sign at the bottom of the ramp and,
seeing a gap in the oncoming street traffic, squealed
a right turn.
    He scanned his mirrors again. They rolled past two
blocks of brick factories before he said, "I think we
might have a shadow, boss."
    Eshamani had no intention of dragging a tail to the
nuclear merchandise, especially if it was connected to
the people who arranged the Riga and London hits.
The last thing he wanted at the secret storage site was
a prolonged firefight. Even though there was consid-
erable risk in getting rid of the pursuit on a city street,
he had to take it.
    "Lupo, turn off the main street," he said, "and put
some. distance between us and the tail. We'll need
thirty seconds or so to get set up."
    The driver accelerated, scanning the street ahead
for a likely turnoff.




    "Get your guns ready," Eshamani told the Sicili-
ans. "When Lupo stops, pile out fast and get busy.
We're going to leave the tail in no condition to fol-
low, except maybe as a ghost."
    Lupo saw his opportunity ahead and seized it. He
slashed a hard right turn that sent the iimo's rear
wheels skidding. Then the tires bit, and they shot
down the narrow alley between empty factories. They
were doing one hundred miles per hour, and the
alley's mouth loomed ahead when Lupo smashed on
the brakes. The limo's nose dipped, and they hit the
cross street with locked wheels and smoking tires.
Lupo's skilled footwork had dropped their speed to
forty. He stomped on the gas and cut the wheel over,
screeching a wide left turn.
    Tires spinning, they surged forward. Before they
reached the next corner, Lupo again stepped on the
brakes. The limo slewed around the left turn. The
slew became a gut-wrenching, four-wheel drift that
ended with the right-side wheels slammed up hard
against the curb.
    The !irao's doors popped open, and all eight gun-
men hopped out. They moved into position behind
the protection of the car body, their miniUzis up and
ready to rip.
    They could hear the car coming, its engine racing
as it approached the ambush. A gray compact sedan
squealed around the corner. In the glare of the street-
light, one person was visible behind the wheel.
    The Sicilians opened fire the instant the car
rounded the turn, the momentum of the skidding se-
dan carrying it into closer range. The windshield was
hit by fifty bullets in the blink of an eye; it collapsed
inward over the steering wheel. The hood sprang

open. Even though all the miniUzis were silenced,
because there were so many of them, they still made
a racket in the canyon of dark and deserted factories.
Clouds of cordite smoke bi!!owed up from behind the
limo.
    The sedarn kept sliding toward them, and as it did,
its front end turned away from the attack. The front
passenger's door was pounded by such concentrated
autofire that the metal buckled and the door sprang
open. The front and rear tires blew out on the right
side, and sparks flew as steel wheels grated over
bone-dry asphalt.
    The sedan ground to a stop ten feet from the side
of the limo and ten feet ahead of it. Three of the
Sicilians hurried out from behind cover, and sighting
down their weapons, looked into the ruined front seat.
One of them reached in through the blown-out pas-
senger's window and filched something from the seat.
He took it over to the limo and held it up for Esha-
mani to see.
  It was an almost empty fifth of gin.
    "Lupo needs a new pair of glasses," the gunman
said, "It was a drunk driver, not a tail."
      Better safe than sorry, Eshamani thought. "That
was his tough luck," the arms merchant said.
  "Hers, boss. It was a woman."
  "Whatever. Let's get out of here."
    When they were rolling again, Eshamani told Lupo,
"We're going to Jersey. Get us back on the express-
way. Keep your eyes open for anything else that looks
suspicious."
    "Just make sure it isn't a school bus full of kids,"
one of the Sicilians said.




"Yeah, that could take more ammo than we
brought along," said the guy sitting next to him.
    The laughter of the Sicilians faded quickly when
they saw that their boss was not amused.
    Eshamani picked a fleck of lint from the knee of
the trousers of his Armani suit. He decided that
maybe he was being a little bit paranoid, but after
what had happened in Riga and London, he had a
perfect right to be cautious. As far as he knew, he
wasn't a wanted man in the U.S. yet. There was no
direct connection between him and the weapon stored
near Union City. The way he had it planned, there
never would be. Long before the starookha was ever
used, he'd be out of reach.
    Following Eshamani's directions, Lupo drove them
down to the docks along the Hudson River. They
turned onto a dark, pothole-fiddled street. Looming
on the left, and taking up an entire block, was a
boarded-up manufacturing plant, circa 1910--four
stories of greasy redbrick and vandalized window-
panes. Lupo parked opposite the plant, in front of one
of several metal warehouses built on pilings over the
river. The warehouse was shaped like a cylinder cut
in half lengthwise; it looked like an aircraft hangar
on stilts. The windows in the front and high along the
sides of the building were painted out with white-
wash. Inside the warehouse was dark; outside, a series
of bright floodlights provided a theft deterrent around
the entire perimeter.
    As Eshamani exited the limo, he got a whiff of a
garbage barge upwind, an aroma that mingled with
the stink from the nearby oil refineries. He crossed
quickly to the warehouse's front door, which had a
sign that read International Scrap Metal, Inc. He

opened the door with a key. The warehouse had been
leased through one of Eshamani's assumed and dis-
carded identities. The arms merchant stepped back
and let four of his bodyguards enter first. They turned
on the lights, then checked to make sure the office
area was clear. Only when they gave the okay did
Eshamani and the rest of his troops step inside.
    The place had a thoroughly hammered look to it.
The office furniture was scarred, gray military sur-
plus; the chair backs were all split, and yellowed foam
bulged from the gaping wounds. The concrete floor
was stained with a miscellany of drips and blotches.
An ancient adding machine under a dusty cover stood
abandoned in a comer.
    Eshamani pulled a clipboard from a hook by the
office's rear door and hit the warehouse light switch.
Again his Sicilians took the lead. Once the place was
secure, they waved for their boss to enter. The ware-
house proper was three stories high, from the wooden
plank floor to the metal ceiling. At the river end of
the building, there were enormous double sliding
doors. The side of the building also had big double
doors. Both sides of the warehouse were stacked with
metal shipboard cargo containers. In the center of the
roof, running the entire length of the building, was a
crane for moving the containers onto truck trailers.
    Eshamani walked down the line of stacked con-
tainers, checking their serial numbers against his list.
When he found one he wanted, he examined the seals
on the container's doors. They were unbroken. He put
a yellow chalk mark on the door beside them. He
repeated this procedure on three more of the huge
metal boxes. Customs declarations had identified the
contents of all four containers as "metal scrap" ac-




quired in the former Soviet bloc. Indeed, that was
what was inside of them.  Mostly.
    Mixed in with the different job lots of steel scrap
were the dismantled barrel, carriage and wheels of an
otherwise fully operational 152 mm Soviet D-20 how-
itzer.
    The fourth cargo container held a dozen rounds of
Russian-made, 152 mm HE, and one starookha.
    The following morning, Eshamani would have the
warehouse crew pull the ~entified containers out of
the stacks and move them to one side. According to
their arrangement, the buyer was going to bring in his
own trucks to move the contraband material. Esha-
mani wanted to make sure the transfer went smoothly
and quickly, with emphasis on the latter.
    The sooner the nuke was off his hands, the sooner
he could get on with his wonderful life.

WHEN TASHA BELOC exited U.S. Customs at JFK,
she was confronted with a sea of waving cardboard
signs, each bearing the name of an arriving passenger.
The sign with her name on it was being held by a tall
man with buzz-cut, fire-engine red hair.
    "Good evening, Lieutenant Beloc," he said. "I'm
Leonid Sokolov, your escort from the embassy."
    "Eshamani'll be coming out in a minute," she told
the Russian intelligence officer. "He was behind me
in the line for customs."
    "We have his limousine under surveillance out-
side. We can wait for him there,"
    Beloc followed the embassy man out of the ter-
minal and over to a late-model, medium blue Pontiac
sedan. The car was running. The man sitting behind

the wheel looked up as Sokolov opened the front and
rear passenger's-side doors. Beloc got in front, the
red-haired man in back.
  There was no time for introductions.
  "Here he comes," the driver said.
    Eshamani exited the terminal with his three body-
guards. The smiling limo driver already had the rear
door open for him.
    "Have you brought the weapons?" Beloc asked
Sokolov.
  "Under your seat."
    Beloc's fingers found the butt of a pistol. She put
the 10 mm Glock in her lap.
    "Is this all?" she said. "I gave the embassy a com-
plete list of what we needed."
    "Everything else is in the trunk," Sokolov assured
her. "Don't worry, it's all there. I saw to it myself."
    Beloc cracked back the Glock's slide half an inch
to make sure there was a round in the chamber. There
was. Then she pressed the muzzle against the driver's
rib cage.
  "Out," she ordered him.
    "What are you doing?" Sokolov demanded, star-
ing at the weapon poking through the gap between
the front seats.
    "Out!" she repeated, jabbing hard with the pistol.
"Keep your hands where I can see them."
    The driver reached across his chest for the door
handle; the palm of his other hand was pressed flat
against the headliner.
    "We're supposed to be your backup, Lieutenant,"
Sokolov protested as the driver quickly walked away
from the car.




"My backup will arrive on the next flight from
London."
    The red-haired man scowled at her. "You Spetsnaz
still think you run the world."
    Beloc pointed the weapon at his heart. "It's pretty
clear that I run this little comer of it. Now get out, or
I'll kill you."
    As Sokoiov obeyed, the brake lights on Eshamani's
limo winked off.
    Beloc dropped the Pontiac into gear and pulled out
into traffic four cars behind Eshamani's vehicle. She
kept a safe distance from the rear of the car, even
after it turned onto the expressway. She figured that
Eshamani would be nervous after Latvia. She was
right.
    When the limo suddenly exited the expressway, she
had to follow, even though there were no cars be-
tween them. She took the curve slowly until the big
car cut a hard right at the bottom of the ramp, then
she floored the gas pedal to maintain visual contact.
She had no more than gotten into position behind Es-
hamani again than the limo slashed a panic turn into
a narrow alley.
    "Hell!" Bcloc said, featbering her brakes. Either
they had seen her, or they suspected they were being
followed. No matter, she knew she had to pursue.
There was no one behind her to take over the point.
She just wished she'd had time to move some of the
heavy weapons up from the trunk.
    She cut the Pontiac's headlights as she swung into
the alley after the limo. The big car was really mov-
ing. She put her foot down hard on the gas and fought
to keep from swerving into the alley's walls as the
power surge hit the rear wheels. In the distance, brake

lights flared and she started gaining quickly on the
limo. Then it made a hard left turn at the end of the
alley and disappeared.
    "Come on, come on," she said, urging the car fas-
ter. She hit her brakes 150 feet from the end of the
alley. She had planned to make a smooth slide out
onto the street, but as she cleared the ends of the
buildings, she was hit by the glare of onrushing head-
lights from the right.
    She squashed her brakes as the car zoomed past,
missing her front bumper by inches. Instead of turn-
ing, she skidded straight across the street and halfway
up the alley entrance on the other side. The female
driver hadn't even seen her. As she dropped the Pon-
tiac into reverse and began to back out, she heard the
sounds of numerous silenced automatic weapons and
shattering glass from around the next corner. She
stopped and listened, her heart pounding high in her
throat.
    When she heard the limo roar off, she backed out
and headed for the comer. She knew what she was
going to see before she made the turn. The arms mer-
chant had laid an ambush for her and if it hadn't been
for sheer luck, she would've stumbled right into it.
Beloc didn't stop at the shot-up car; there wasn't time.
The limo was already turning right at the next corner,
returning to the main street.
    She did turn her head and look as she sped by the
smoking wreck. It was a no-survivor hit. Because of
the position of the shooters and the angle of the turn,
the poor driver didn't have a chance. Beloc knew she
wouldn't have had one, either.
    Once she had the limo in sight again, she was even
more cautious about maintaining her distance. The




pursuit got easier when Eshamani returned to the ex-
pressway. She actually relaxed a little. She thought
about what Leonid Sokoiov had said about the sheer
egotism of her special-forces unit. He had misunder-
stood her completely. She hadn't rejected his help be-
cause she thought no one but Spetsnaz could do this
job. She had put him on the street because there was
way too much tax-free money changing hands in the
arms deal. She knew how easy it was to buy someone
off, to pay someone to walk away at a critical mo-
ment. She trusted Sarnov, Turgenev and Ferdishenko
with her life, no one else.
    When the limo exited the expressway in Union City
and headed for the river, the traffic thinned and she
was forced to drop back farther or risk discovery. The
big car was four blocks away when she saw the flare
of its brake lights and watched it pull into the ware-
house driveway. She cut her headlights again and
parked on the street a long block away. After check-
ing the magazine on the Glock, she moved closer to
the limo on foot, keeping to the shadows along the
building fronts.
    As she approached the side of the warehouse, the
interior lights went on. She didn't like stepping into
the pool of light around the side doors, but she had
to do it. With the GIock up and ready to shoot, she
ran soundlessly across the wooden planks of the dock.
No one was guarding the outside of the warehouse.
She kept low and tight to the metal wall of the build-
ing.
    Through the gap between the double doors, she
could see into the warehouse. Sergio Eshamani
stepped into view. He was looking at the stacked
cargo containers and referring to a clipboard in his

hand. He moved out of view. Beloc relaxed her fin-
gers on the Glock, reset her grip, then tightened down
again.
    If the nuclear warhead was inside one of those con-
tainers, Spetsnaz was going to have a hell of a time
finding it. If Eshamani didn't give away the exact
location, they would have to open them and start
searching through the contents. Unless they got lucky,
it would take days, days they didn't have.
    If she could have called in the U.S. authorities, the
mission would have been much simpler. The problem
was, her unit had been ordered to capture the weapon
and return it without alerting the Americans. It was
the only way her government could save face. If they
turned the job over to U.S. authorities, or worse, let
the Americans find the weapon on their own, it would
appear that the Russians could not police their own
stockpiles, that they had to rely on the Americans to
do their job for them. That was not acceptable.
    As Eshamani and his bodyguards moved to the
front of the warehouse, she ducked away from the
door and retreated to the side of a Dumpster in front
of the neighboring warehouse. Kneeling there, she
saw Eshamani return to his limo. He only had two
gunmen with him, which meant that he had left the
other six to guard the place. Clearly something im-
portant was inside.
    After the limo pulled away, Beloc jogged back to
the Pontiac and used its cellular phone to call the
embassy. She left a coded message for Sarnov and
hung up when the receptionist said the ambassador
wanted to speak to her. Inside the cat's trunk she
found two black nylon gun cases: one long and nar-
row, the other short and very thick. She unzipped the




long one far enough tø see that it contained a Heckler
& Koch MSG-90 semiautomatic sniper rifle with a
Leupold scope. It was a more accurate gun than the
Dragunov she was used to, and had a much better
scope. The shorter case held three folding-stock
7.62 mm Valmet assault rifles with silencers and extra
30-round magazines.
    Under the gun cases was a ballistic nylon duffel
bag. From it she took a black jumpsuit, boots and
watch cap, and quickly changed clothes. Shouldering
the gun cases on their straps and lugging the gear bag,
she crossed the street at its darkest point, moving to
the block-long front of the deserted manufacturing
plant. She stepped into the deep shadow of a truck
entrance. The wooden gates leading to an interior
courtyard were chained and padlocked. Putting down
the war gear, she jumped up and grabbed the bottom
rung of the ladder to the fire escape. The ladder
groaned mightily as it swung to the ground. She held
the ladder down with her boot while she picked up
the bags, then climbed the fire escape carrying sev-
enty pounds of deadweight.
    Once she reached the roof, she moved to the front
of the building and got into position behind the low
brick wall that marked the end of the roof. She laid
down an insulated blanket on the tar paper, then took
the H&K sniper rifle from its case. After checking its
magazine, she opened the rifle's bipods and set the
weapon up on top of the low wall.
    Through the Leupold, she could see the front and
side of the warehouse. Even if the floodlights were
cut, she could control movement along those corri-
dors. Unfortunately, the river side of the building was
out of her field of vision. There was nothing she could

do about that until her backup arrived. If they didn't
make it in time, she had to hope that the weapon
would be moved by truck, rather than boat.
    The sound of an approaching car on the street be-
low made her pull back from the scope's rubber eye-
cup. She looked over the edge of the roof in time to
see a very low-slung sedan glide to a stop beside the
Pontiac. The doors of the car flew open, and six
young men in baggy clothes jumped out with tools in
their hands. They were, to say the least, organized.
One of them broke the driver's window with a ham-
mer, while another punched out the trunk lock. As the
trunk and driver's door swung open, the other young
men started jacking up the car, front and rear, then
set about removing the tires and wheels.
    Beloc was glad she hadn't left anything important
behind.
 Only the cell phone.
    They got that, of course. Along with the battery,
the radio, the tool kit and spare tire. She watched as
the youth gang dropped the stripped Pontiac onto the
street on its axles, then piled back into their car and
glided away into the night. She thought about sending
a single 7.62 mm round over their heads, just to say
hello, but from what she had read about American
street gangs, they would probably return fire with au-
tomatic weapons. It would make too much racket.
    She didn't want the police anywhere near the ware-
house.




CHAPTER TWELVE

Crowheart Creek, Wyoming
11:30 p.m. MDT

As soon as David McCarter turned onto Highway 26
out of Riverton, he pushed the Ford one4on van's
engine, suspension and steering to the limit, using
both sides of the narrow two-lane road, which
prompted Manning to wisecrack about his being "a
graduate of the Montana School of Driving." In truth,
none of McCarter's passengers was sweating the
squealing tires and the sudden side-to-side shifts of
momentum. The warriors of Phoenix Force knew
their team leader had once been a test driver for Brit-
ish Leyland.
    Because the Wyoming Highway Patrol was
stretched so thin over so many miles of highway, their
chances of being stopped for speeding were nil. It was
a good thing, too. If a state trooper had happened to
look inside the van, there would have been a lot of
explaining to do, not just about the tactical black out-
fits they were all wearing, but the highly illegal weap-
onry that was packed in around them.
    As they rolled along at eighty-five miles per hour,
a country music station played softly on the radio. It

was a time for private thoughts, maybe even a few
private prayers. The battlefield was close, and with it,
always, the chill of death.
    In his headlights, McCarter saw the beige box of
the Winnebago parked on the shoulder to the right.
He tapped the brakes and turned onto the soft ground.
During the daytime, it was a picnic spot, of sorts--a
dirt parking strip, two tables, a portable toilet, some
low trees, all overlooking a small but vigorously run-
ning creek. McCarter pulled in behind the conscripted
war wagon and cut the motor. The inside of the Win-
nebago was all lit up, its rooftop generator throbbing.
    The men of Phoenix Force moved quickly and si-
lently, gathering up their weapons cases and gear
bags. After locking the emptied van, McCarter
knocked on the side door of the Winnebago.
    When the door opened, Rosario Biancahales stood
backlit in the doorway. "Come on in," he said,
"we're making popcorn."
    "Popcorn, hell," McCarter said as he stepped in-
side. "All I smell is bloody gun oil." Mack Bolan
and Carl Lyons had gun parts and cleaning rags
spread over the small dining table. "Cheers, mates."
    The rest of Phoeaix Force climbed into the RV
with all their gear. The combined battle crew of nine
made the Winnebago feel cramped, even claustropho-
bic. The blinds inside the front windshield had been
pulled down all the way, and the captain's chairs in
the driving compartment were turned to face the rear.
    Right away, McCarter unrolled the large aerial re-
con photo of Old Glory Ranch that he had brought
from Stony Man Farm. He tacked up the photo on
the kitchen cabinets. The extreme blowup was marked
with small yellow arrows that indicated items of spe-




cial interest: the heavy-machine-gun emplacements,
the mined areas and the three-story-high water tower
with its sniper hide. Under the photo, he stuck up a
floor-plan diagram of the compound's buildings and
beside that, a cross-sectional sketch that showed the
underground passages that connected the ranch build-
ings. "Can everybody see?" he asked.
  There were grunts of assent all around.
    "Good," McCarter said. "As I go through this, if
anybody has any suggestions or questions, feel free
to stop me." He tapped the photo of the compound
with a finger. "What we have here, gentlemen, is a
hardsite designed to withstand a long-term siege. The
militiamen would love to hold a Waco-like standoff
against federal law enforcement. They want the public
platform that international press coverage would give
them. A standoff is precisely what we don't want. Our
mission is to penetrate and neutralize the compound,
then to locate and remove the nuke, if it's there. If
we strike out on the Soviet weapon, and we can't find
the 155 mm howitzer, then we'll search the premises
for anything they've left behind that might help us
locate their intended target."
"What about prisoners?" James asked.
McCarter's green eyes narrowed. "We're not going
in there to arrest these sods. The Sawtooth Patriots
stepped over the line a long time ago. They aren't just
bloody idiots in camou fatigues--they're idiots with
innocent blood on their hands. They've killed police
and civilians, and they're planning to waste a lot more
noncombatants before they're through. If anyone in-
side the compound resists, kill them."
    "That means kill them all," Blancanales said. "I
checked the FBI psych profiles on the men we know

are at the ranch. Carmody has gone through his ranks
and winnowed out the wish-washy and the warma-
bes. The occupants of Old Glory are all hard-core,
totally committed Patriots."
  "Don't call them that," Bolan said. "Ever."
    "Yeah," Lyons concurred. "It makes me want to
puke."
    "Militiamen, then," the white-haired Latin con-
ceded. "These guys aren't going to surrender."
    Schwarz addressed Blancanales. "You're telling us
that when we come crashing in on these guys, they're
so brainwashed that they'll actually think we're U.N.
troops from Bangladesh and fight to the death?"
    "Or maybe pull a mass murder-suicide, like Waco
or Jonestown?" Hawkins added.
    "That'd be real considerate of them," Manning
said.
    "Some of them will think we're enforcers from the
New World Order," Blancanales said. "Hell, some
of them think foreign troops are hiding under Detroit
right now. They're all fanatics of one twisted stripe
or another. That makes them unpredictable, psycho-
logically speaking. From the layout of the ranch, the
way they've fortified it, and from their rhetoric, it's
safe to say they look at Old Glory as their last stand.
So don't expect any white flags to pop up when the
shooting starts."
    McCarter tapped the aerial photograph again.
"There is a fifteen-foot-high wire perimeter fence,
and inside it, a stretch of open ground that surrounds
the various outbuildings. From the left, we've got a
bunkhouse, a connecting walkway that leads to the
main house, an open area that divides the barn from
the house and a water tower. Another open area di-




vides the barn from the gasoline reservoir shed here
at the top far right and the storage shed at the bottom
far right. According to the FBI informant, there are
upward of fifty enemy scattered through the complex,
The marked machine-gun positions are all armed with
M-60s. And we have a sniper hide in the catwalk
around the water tower's tank. We assume the faintly
visible line extending from the fence, here, to the run-
way is a buried utility pipe. Any questions so far?"
  The Stony Man warriors all shook their heads.
  "There's a major weak point in their defensive
  strategy," McCarter went on. "Manning and I have
  already gone over it. They've got the whole open area
  inside the compound mined to keep out tanks and
  Bradleys, and opposition foot soldiers. According to
  the informant, the militiamen have rigged the mine-
  field in grids. Each grid can be separately armed and
  fired by an electrical signal from the heavily fortified
  command center in the basement, here." He pointed
  at the cross-sectional drawing of the main house.
    "Which means all the mines in a grid are wired
together," Gadgets Schwarz said. "If they can blow
them all at once, so can we."
    "Right," Manning said, "but there's a problem.
From the informant's description, the mines are con-
trolled by a two-step switch. The first step arms them
and the second one detonates. We can't blow the
mines from outside the perimeter fence until the grid
has been armed from the command bunker, which
means we have to let them know we're coming."
    "That shoots the no-siege plan to hell," Hawkins
said. "If we warn these jerks, we can't stop them
from retreating to the main bunker. If we don't stop
them from crawling down their hidey-hole, they're

going to have the standoff they want. How're we go-
ing to dig them out of there?"
    "We can't chop through the floors of the main
house," McCarter said. "They're sheathed in steel
plate. The only way in is through these underground
passages. They lead into the command center from
the bunkhouse and barn. Manning says we can blow
the steel connecting doors."
"How do we get to the passages?" Encizo asked.
McCafret nodded. "That's my next point. The
other weak spots in the defense are at the bunkhouse
and storage-shed ends of the compound. On every
other side of the house, two machine guns share re-
sponsibility for a zone of tire. On each of these sides
there's only one M-60. The plan is to split up and hit
the ranch from both ends at once, but before that, we
have to deal with the observation posts." He pointed
at three symbols on the aerial recon photo some dis-
tance from the compound.
    "Striker, you, Manning, Encizo and James will
eliminate OP number one, then you'll close in on the
bunkhouse end of the compound. Hawk and Blancan-
ales will take OP number two. Hawk, you'll remain
there and control the road leading away from the
compound and support the attack with discretionary
sniper fire. Gadgets, Lyons and I will take OP number
three. Blancanales will peel off from Hawk and join
us, then we'll work our way to the gas and storage
side of the compound outside the perimeter fence.
    "Once everyone is in position, Gadgets and Man-
ning will penetrate the perimeter and rig the mine
grids at opposite ends of the compound to blow on
our command. When that's done, we'll break through
the wire and decommission the two machine-gun




posts with LAWs. Which should prompt the militia-
men to arm their minefields. Then Gadgets and Man-
ning will blow the mine grids to give us a safe route
across the compound. By blowing up both of them at
once, we'll confuse the militiamen and, with any luck,
make them split their forces."
    "So," Encizo said, "we cross the blown minefield
and take and hold the bunkhouse. Then we access the
underground passage to blow up the doors to the com-
mand center?"
    "That's the idea," McCarter said. "The faster we
move, mates, the easier this job's going to be. Any
more questions?"
  There were none.
    McCarter swiveled the driver's chair around and
raised the blinds that blocked the windshield. Ducking
under the RV's dash, he removed the fuses for the
brake and headlights. As he started the engine, Man-
ning stepped up beside him. The Canadian handed
him an AN/PVS-7 cyclops night observation device.
McCarter pulled the NOD over his head and adjusted
its straps for a snug fit. He turned the NOD on, then
cut the inside lights of the Winnebago. Gunning the
engine, he shifted the automatic transmission into
Drive and steered the RV onto the dark highway.

"How ARE YOU FEELING NOW?" Carmody asked Jack
Hutton.
    The informer sucked down the spoonful of hot
soup. Despite a half-hour-long hot shower, his whole
body was still shaking slightly. He didn't answer.
  "Feel like you're ready to talk to me?"
  "I would've talked to you before," Hutton said,

dipping the spoon back into the steaming bowl, "if
you'd have asked me."
    "Not with the same enthusiasm," Carmody said.
He leaned across the dining room table. "When are
the Feds coming?"
  "They wouldn't tell me something like that."
      "I didn't ask if they tom you, I asked if you knew.
If you want another swim, Hutton, I can arrange it."
  The man's eyes widened in horror.
    Carmody could see the guy draw into himself, like
a snail pulling back into its shell. He smiled. Now
that the stoolie was all toasty warm, now that he had
some hope and knew what was in store for him, the
threat had infinitely more power.
    "Cook," Carmody said to his second-in-command,
who was leaning against the dining room's knotty
pine wall, "escort our little buddy here back to the
well."
    Hutton dropped the soup spoon as Matt Cook
grabbed him by the shoulders. "No," he protested.
"No, wait. The Fed said 'very soon.' He wouldn't
tell me any more than that. Honest to God."
  "Not tonight, not tomorrow, not next week, just
soon?' '
  "That's the truth. I swear it."
    Carmody looked the soldier in the eye. He believed
him. The Feds would certainly protect themselves
from a situation like this and avoid telling their inside
man anything more than he needed to know. He nod-
ded to Cook, who roughly hoisted Hutton to his feet,
kicked away the chair and shoved the man toward the
door.
 As Cook passed, Carmody reached out and stopped




him. "Put the rope around his neck this time," he
whispered.
    Carmody checked his watch as he moved to the
dining-room window. He looked out the view slit at
the Old Glory runway. It was almost time to turn on
the landing lights. Johnson would be back shortly
with the Beechcraft, and the real nuclear howitzer
team would be leaving the ranch, en route to its real
target.

THE SENTRY at the ranch's forward observation post
wasn't looking through the AN/PVS-4 NOD mounted
on his M-16 when the blacked out Winnebago glided
down the highway bordering the edge of the ranch
property. The sentry, Ron Welch, was rubbing his
face and stomping his feet, trying to stay awake. The
wind sweeping over the mountains and down across
the plain covered the sound of the RV's engine. Be-
cause the vehicle's brake lights had been disabled,
Welch didn't notice when it stopped in the middle of
the empty road, allowing three armed men to jump
out before it rolled on.
    It wasn't that Welch didn't take his job seriously;
the trouble was he had been taking it seriously for too
long. Carmody had been telling his troops for more
than a week that the shit was about to hit the fan.
Every day while the fire team practiced with the how-
itzer trainer, the rest of the Sawtooth Patriots had been
running close-quarters combat drills, digging out the
mine grids, filling sandbags, welding steel plate and
pulling sentry duty. Welch was so bone tired that even
the fear of being overrun by federal troops couldn't
keep him on top of his game for more than a few
minutes at a stretch.

    He pushed on his eyeballs until it hurt, then he
pushed harder, making starbursts appear inside his
head. Then he picked up the M-16 and scanned the
distant road with its night-vision device. Something
moved between him and the fence. It was too small
to be a man and it was moving too fast. A coyote,
running full tilt.
    Welch swept the NOD over the intersection of the
highway and the ranch road, eight miles of dirt track
that made a single S-curve around a low hill before
ending at Old Glory's front gate. Nothing there.
    He rested the weapon against the sandbags of the
OP and took a sip of water from his canteen. He
swished it around his mouth, then spit it out. What
he needed was a pot of superstrong black coffee.
Though he was exhat~ted, Welch was ready to die
for what he believed in, ready to fight back against
the race-mixing, white-culture-crushing, international
conspiracy. Before he'd met Carmody, his anger at
the unfairness of the world had been unfocused. He
had wanted to strike back, but other than acts of van-
dalism and aggression on isolated individuals, he
hadn't known how. Carmody had shown him the way,
the path out of the hopeless muck of the humanist
present, the path leading to a bright white future.
    Far off in the night, a coyote howled. The shrill
sound sliced through the singing of the wind and then
it was gone. Welch shifted the M-16 back to his
shoulder and, leaning against the sandbagged rim,
slowly swept the terrain with the PVS-4. He felt the
sandbag cold against his chest and the night-vision
scope's rubber cup pressing against his eye socket.
He smelled desert sage. It was the next-to-last sen-
sation he ever had.




    The last thing Ron Welch felt was the stunning
impact of a 9 mm parabellum at the base of his skull.
His world went white from wall to wall before it went
black.
    McCarter hopped down into the OP and checked
the warm body for signs of life. There were none. He
rejoined Lyons and Gadgets at the base of the low
hill and they advanced to the rendezvous point and
waited.
    After a few minutes, a figure crossed the plain from
the direction of the road. It was green and ghostly in
their NOD goggles' fields of view. They all knew it
was Blancanales by his easy, rolling gait.
    "How'd it go at number two?" McCafret asked as
the Latin stepped up.
    "Piece of cake," Blancanales said. "Hawk's in po-
sition by now. Anybody coming down the road from
the ranch is going to shake hands with Mr. LAW?'
    McCafret took point for the four-man column,
moving in a low, fast crouch toward the lights of Old
Glory Ranch in the distance.

OF THE DIVIDED STONY MAN force, Bolan and his
crew had the longest march before they made enemy
contact. Their first objective, a two-hundred-foot-high
pile of volcanic rubble, was four miles north of the
highway and a mile west of the ranch compound. Al-
though the Executioner kept them moving at a trot,
they made hardly any sound; their gear was all se-
curely battened down and essentially noiseproof. He
led Manning, James and Encizo in an arc away from
the ranch and the OP, keeping the targets at a constant
distance until he lined up the sentry's hilltop position
with the bunkhouse end of the compound. By putting

the hill between them and the Old Glory Ranch, and
attacking the OP from that side, he could take it with-
out being seen by the men in the compound.
    The big guy cut the pace as he turned for the hill.
Instead of moving in a straight line, he zigzagged,
taking advantage of what little cover there was on the
desert plain. The closer they got to the hill, the closer
they were to the gun on its summit, and the easier
targets they made. Bolan did his best to keep them
concealed; it was his top priority. If the OP alerted
the compound, their plans were scrapped, their mis-
sion scrubbed. His other concern had to do with the
safety of his men in the event they were seen by the
sentry. To this end, he chose a start-stop, side-to-side
route to the foot of the rubble hill that was calculated
to confound the shooter and, above all, spoil his first
shot. He selected the route based on years of experi-
ence on the other end of a sniper rifle.
    At the bottom of the hill, Bolan signaled a halt.
Taking out the OP was a one-man job. His job. As
the others closed ranks with him behind a boulder, he
put down his MP-5 machine pistol and his drag bag,
then shrugged out of his combat harness. In order to
scale the side of the hill without detection, the Exe-
cutioner had to dump the nonessentials. If he hung up
a piece of gear on the loose slope, it could start a
landslide of softball-sized rocks--something guaran-
teed to bring the sentry up firing. He left everything
on the ground, except for a silenced Beretta 93-R in
shoulder leather and a flat black Fairbairn-Sykes com-
mando knife in a forearm sheath. He crept up the
hillside like a cat, light-looted and quick. There was
no way he could keep the rocks from shifting under
the soles of his boots, but because he put weight on




them so briefly, they hardly moved at all. Nearing the
summit, he dropped to his belly and crawled the last
thirty feet to the bulwark of sandbags that circled the
OP.
    Facing the defensive wall, the Executioner drew
himself up into a coiled crouch, then he closed his
eyes and listened hard. He could hear the sentry
breathing on the other side of the defensive wall. He
pulled the commando knife free of its sheath with his
right hand and with his left picked up a chunk of rock.
He chucked the rock over his shoulder, down the
slope. It landed with a dry clatter somewhere in the
dark.
 The sentry stopped breathing.
    Bolan heard the man's boots crunch on the floor of
the OP as he turned to face the sound. The observer
was accustomed to hearing occasional, spontaneous
landslides from time to time; this noise was different.
Directly above the Executioner, the guard leaned over
the top of the pile of sandbags. Bolan could sense the
shape of a weapon, its barrel just above his head. The
barrel tracked back and forth as the sentry used the
PVS-4 atop his M~16 to search the desolate hillside
for movement.
  He was looking too far away.
    Bolan lunged up and struck hard with the com-
mando dagger in his fist. He had intended to slide the
flexible, double-edged blade through the man's throat
and up into his brain for a quick, silent kill, but at the
critical moment the sentry instinctively drew back
from the attack. Though he only moved a couple of
inches, it was enough to spoil Bolan's aim. The point
of the knife caught the guard under the chin, and the
powerful upward thrust sent it skewering into his

mouth, just behind his lower front teeth, through the
tip of his tongue and the roof of his mouth, into his
nasal cavity.
    The Executioner knew the instant he struck that he
had missed. He threw his shoulder into the man,
knocking the assault rifle away, driving himself over
the barrier. The M-16 crashed to the ground as Bolan
landed on top of the wounffed sentry. The man
couldn't scream because his mouth was held shut by
the blade, but he fought hard, spraying blood from his
nose and mouth, desperately clawing for his attacker's
face. Bolan yanked his Beretta free and put a silent
mercy bullet into the militiaman's forehead. The com-
mando knife was driven so deep into bone, that to
free it he had to put his boot on the dead man's face.
    Bolan rejoined the others at the foot of the hill.
They didn't ask him how it went. They didn't have
to, they could see. The right arm of his black shirt
glistened with blood from wrist to elbow. After pull-
ing on his gear, Bolan looked at his watch. They had
forty minutes to crawl a mile on their bellies, while
towing their heavy armament behind them in padded
drag bags. He hand-signaled for Manning, James and
Encizo to follow him.
    When they rounded the rear of the base of the hill,
the compound came into view. A halo of light sur-
rounded it. Bolan dropped into crawl mode and began
to advance on the enemy position. It was a tedious
and nerve-racking approach. He picked the line of
least discomfort around the larger rocks and bushes,
keeping to the low places in the terrain, the gullies
and erosion scars. Though they could have come un-
der fire from the compound at any moment, the Ex-
ecutioner knew the odds of that actually happening




were slim. Because the ranch was brightly !it, so was
the inside of the silver hurricane fence. The reflecting
mesh would confuse the view of ground-level sentries
and make it hard for them to isolate an attacking force
from the terrain until that force was very close to the
compound. As everything was so flat, the militiamen
didn't have a good angle of fire; even the water-tower
sniper would have trouble zeroing in.
    They were within twenty-five yards of the fence,
and one hundred yards from the bunkhouse, when Bo-
lan stopped crawling and waved Manning forward.
With a second hand signal, he told James and Encizo
to spread out to firing positions on either side.
    The Canadian demolition expert dumped all of his
gear except the combat harness and the autopistol un-
der his armpit. Manning removed his tool kit from the
drag bag and clipped it to his chest. Then he advanced
on his stomach to the wire, alone.

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the compound, Gadgets
Schwarz was in the same totally vulnerable position
as he crossed no-man's-land, inch by inch. The only
sentries he could see inside the wire were standing by
the front door of the main house, out of the wind,
which was picking up. The breeze curling over the
plain had already driven a tumbleweed up against the
fence line. He crawled forward, into the sights of the
machine gun stationed in the storage shed. The closer
he got to the sagebrush, the better he felt. It was big
enough and dense enough to conceal him while he
did his job.
    Belly down in the dirt, he quickly clipped a small
hole in the wire of the fence. Inside the compound,
there wasn't any brush, no cover whatsoever. He

couldn't reach an arm through the fence without giv-
ing himself away, so he had to work from the outside.
Whoever had planted the land mines directly in front
of him had done a good job of covering up the trench
and smoothing the soil, but the work had been com-
pleted very recently and there was still a difference
in the moisture content of the areas of dirt that had
been turned over, a difference that could be seen from
his angle. It started a foot inside the fence. He looked
more closely at the earth at the edge of the disturbed
area. There was a definite hump in it.
    Schwarz pushed a nonreflective, pencil-lead-thin
probe through the hole in the fence and carefully
brushed the soil away from the mine's trigger. Al-
though he didn't uncover all of the device, from the
trigger it looked like an antitank model. He couldn't
tell whether it was armed or not, but he assumed it
wasn't because men were moving around the com-
pound-men who otherwise might be killed by one
of their own weapons.
    Having located the first mine in the string, he used
his tool to etch out a short, shallow trench in the earth
between the fence and the mine. The soil was loose
and it only took him a minute. Then he excavated the
side of the mine that faced him, digging until he
found the arming sensor and the connecting wires. He
hooked and drew the sensor close to the fence and
clipped a set of wire leads to it from a spool in his
tool kit. After covering all the wires in the shallow
trench and concealing the mine, he retreated from the
fence, spooling out wire from his chest pack as he
went.
    When he reached the fallback point, McCafret and
Blancanales were each removing a LAW from their


respective drag bags2 They prepared the rockets for
firing as Schwarz connected the wire leads to a bat-
tery-powered detonator.

HAWKINS LOCKED DOWN the bolt of his silencer-
equipped, Remington 700 sniper rifle. One round of
New World Order ammo coming up, he thought as
he snugged up against the stock. He framed the op-
position sniper in the Leupoid sight's view field.
Thanks to the well-lit compound, he had no trouble
picking out the man on the water tower's catwalk.
The militia sniper was lying prone on a padded mat
on the leeward side of the tower, keeping warm, out
of the breeze.
    It was a nine-hundred-yard shot, into a gusting
cross wind. On top of that, because of the facing,
prone position, Hawkins's target was reduced to head
and shoulders. That didn't leave much margin for er-
ror.
    Though it was dicey, Hawkins was ready to take
the shot, anyway. A near miss, which he knew he
could score, might drive the guy off the tower, which
would remove the threat to the attacking force.
    As he dropped the Remington's safety, movement
at the ranch house's front door caught his attention.
He lowered the scope to center on two men. One was
dragging the other by the back of his shirt. The man
being dragged was bound hand and foot and gagged.
Hawkins didn't like the look of that one bit. It oc-
curred to him that the FBI's secret informant inside
the militia might be in big trouble.
    Hawkins's assignment was to trigger an alert inside
the compound. He had full discretion as to how that
panic was brought on, which meant he decided who

died first. He adjusted the Leupold's BDC for the new
range so he could shoot dead on the crosshairs.
    The man doing the dragging was bearded, lean and
muscular. The bound man, who was much smaller,
struggled frantically, digging in his toes as he was
hauled across the compound. As the bearded guy
flung his captive up against the side of the well, he
glanced over his shoulder at the house. One of the
sentries standing there must have said something to
him. He said something back.
    Hawkins watched as the bearded man grabbed the
well rope, tied a quick noose in it, then slipped it over
the smaller man's head. It was clear what was about
to happen when he lifted the bound man onto the lip
of the well.
    The roof structure of the well partially blocked
Hawkins's view, preventing him from attempting a
head shot on the would-be hangman. Hawkins
dropped his aim point a fraction and started his trigger
squeeze.
    If a ruckus was what McCarter wanted, a ruckus
was what he would get.

E. PAUL RUTHERFORD WAITED inside the door of his
room until he was sure the men talking in the dining
room were gone. Then, clad in slippers and a camp
tent of a velour bathrobe, he made his way down the
dark hall to the ranch house kitchen.
    Although he preferred to take his food in restau-
rants because there was less effort involved, in a
pinch he was perfectly willing to do for himself. Ear-
lier in the evening, he had only picked at dinner; now
he was ravenous, way too hungry to fall asleep. On
top of the calories he had missed, he was frightened,




and when frightened, he tended to eat even more than
his normal amount. He thought of himself as a "ner-
vous eater."
    Rutherford opened the refrigerator. Bathed in the
light of a single bulb were the remains of dinner's
gargantuan pot roast on a covered plate. He took it
and the chafing dish of vegetable accompaniment--
potatoes, carrots and onions--and set it on the
counter. Finding the bread box, he began to make
himself a towering sandwich of half-inch thick slices
of roast. When he sat down and began to have a go
at it, he felt better almost immediately.
    Maybe it was just low blood sugar that had him so
panicky. After all, what did he really have to worry
about? He had his roll of film, his sacrificial offering
to Agent Parker and the Justice Department. Maybe
the FBI would use the information to shut down the
militia. God knows, they needed shutting down. He
couldn't see how the destruction of the Sawtooth
Patriots could harm his career at this point. He had
ridden them as far as he could; the syndication deal
was practically a lock. And if the FBI did nail Car-
mody based on his information, he could get even
more money out of them in future.
    Rutherford took another huge bite of sandwich and
packed a pair of potatoes into his cheeks.

MATT COOK CONSIDERED himself a good soldier, a
guy who could follow orders to the letter. Of course,
some orders were easier to carry out than others.
When his CO in Desert Storm had told him to bracket
an Iraqi gun position with HE, that had been easy
duty. When his CO in the Sawtooth Patriots told him

to take a prisoner outside and hang him, that was easy
as pie, too. The rules of engagement were the same.
  War was war.
  Traitors had to die.
    He grabbed Jack Hutton under the armpits and
hoisted him up onto the rim of the well. "You're
getting a break you don't deserve," he said, looking
into the man's eyes. "If it was up to me, I'd stake
you out somewhere over thataway and leave you for
the buzzards." He adjusted the noose, moving the
knot to the side of the man's neck.
    "You should're known better thafl to sell us out
to the Feds. You should've known we'd figure it out.
Did you think we were stupid or something?"
    Hutton tried to speak, but could only make muffled,
unintelligible sounds around the gag.
    Cook took him by the shoulders and turned him
around, pushing his legs out over the black emptiness
of the well.
    "Look down there and tell me who's the stupid
one."
    The informant craned his neck around so he could
face his murderer, so he could show him that he
wasn't sorry for what he had done. That it was worth
dying for.
    "Let's see how far your neck stretches, hard guy,"
Cook said. He uncranked about twenty feet of bucket
rope and draped the slack neatly over the edge of the
well. Then he locked the crank in place with the loop
of cord.
    As he reached out to put his hands on Hutton's
trembling shoulders, bracing his legs to boost the man
off the ledge and into eternity, something hit him in
the stomach so hard that it knocked him away from




7

Z

the well. It literally blew him flat onto his butt in the
dirt, and he sat there, hunched over at the waist.
    The shock was so powerful that for a second he
felt nothing at all, not even the hard, cold ground
beneath his behind. He was instantly struck numb,
from head to foot. He floated, disembodied, in a space
that wasn't Wyoming, or the Old Glory Ranch.  A place between life and death.
    He returned to the land of the living only with a
great effort. It was then that he realized that he was
opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water,
that a fiver of slobber was drooling down his beard,
but no sound was coming out of his throat because
there was no air left in his lungs. It had all been driven
out by the force of the impact. He gasped for breath.
    Then his hands and feet started shaking. His heels
drummed in the dirt, raising a cloud of dust. A burn-
ing pain knifed through his midsection, and he knew
that he had been shot. He looked down at his belly
and saw the round, dark hole in his white T-shirt.
Blood began to ooze from it. His heels drummed fas-
ter against the ground; he couldn't make them stop.
  The pain swallowed him whole.
  And he began to scream.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Oswald Carmody closed the door of the floor safe in
his office, but didn't bother to lock it. He had already
transferred the cash contents of the safe, roughly a
quarter of a million dollars, to the center compartment
of his nylon travel bag. The money had been contrib-
uted by many donors, but the lion's share of it had
come from Charles Krick. As Carmody turned down
the corridor, heading for the entrance to the command
bunker, he heard terrible, shrill shrieks of pain coming
from outside the building. They didn't sound human;
they sounded like a gut-shot bear. It wasn't the FBI
stoolie singing his last tune because Cook had gagged
him before dragging him out of the main house. Car-
mody put down the money bag and reversed course,
running through the wide living room to the front
doors.
    On the porch outside, he found one of the two sen-
tries frozen in place. The other was hurrying away
across the compound toward the well.
    "What is it?" Carmody demanded of the man.
"Who's screaming like that?"
    "It's Cook," the sentry said. "All of a sudden he
just went down out there, over by the well."
Carmody stepped to the edge of the porch. He




could see Cook curled on his side on the ground,
kicking his legs and yelling. The stoolie sat perched
on the edge of the well with a rope around his neck.
    Carmody turned back to the sentry. "What hap-
pened to Cook?"
  "Don't know, sir."
  "Did you hear a shot?"
  ~'No. I didn't hear nothin', sir."
"Well, goddammit, get over there and help him!"
Carmody watched the sentry lope across the com-
pound, carrying his M-16 by the pistol grip. He was
a little more than halfway to the well when his partner
reached the fallen Cook. Instead of kneeling down
beside the writhing man, the sentry suddenly jerked
backward and down, as if flicked in the head by a
giant invisible finger. Blood spray glistened in the
floodlight as the sentry toppled, loose !imbed, to
~arth.
    Carmody knew goddamned well what had just hap-
pened. "Sniper!" he shouted. Then he called out over
his shoulder, "Can you see him, Burke? Can you get
a shot at him?"
    There was no answer from the Sawtooth Patriot
sniper.
      As he started to run along the porch, Carmody
oupped his hands and yelled through them, "Burke!"
  There was still no answer.
    Behind him, the surviving sentry had turned in the
middle of the compound and was sprinting back for
the main house.
    Carmody peered around the side of the building,
up at the water tower. There was no one on the cat-
walk, and the water tank had sprung a leak at what
would have been Burke's standing chest height. With

his eyes, Carmody tracked the arc made by the fine
jet of water. He followed it all the way to the ground,
where it splashed new mud onto the crumpled corpse
of the rifleman.
    "Jesus," Carmody exclaimed, turning back for the
front doors, "we're under attack! Everyone to battle
stations! Incoming! Incoming!"
    The second sentry was within twenty feet of the
front porch and safety when he, too, was sent sprawl-
ing by a silent gunshot. Hurled facedown in the dirt
by a bullet to the back, he tried to crawl the rest of
the way. His hands clawed at the dirt, his legs pushed
at it, but like a bug impaled on a pin, his body didn't
move an inch.
    Carmody ignored him. The commander in chief of
the Sawtooth Patriots reentered the house at a dead
run, yelling a warning at the top of his lungs. All
around him, militiamen moved quickly into their as-
signed positions. Even the men who had been sound
asleep at the first shout were already up and armed.
Their response to the threat was automatic, instinc-
tive; they had been drilling for this eventuality for a
long time. On the way to the bunker entrance, Car-
mody grabbed his money bag.
    The doorway to the command center was set in the
floor of a small bedroom in the middle of the ranch
house. The door itself was heavy-gauge tempered
steel, three inches thick, hinged on the inside. When
Carmody entered the bedroom, the bunker door was
open, tilted up and leaning back against an interior
wall. He dashed down the flight of metal stairs that
led to the underground command center.
    "Is everybody here who's supposed to be here?"
he asked Billy Ray Ransom.




  "Yes, sir."
    That meant that twenty men, including the howitzer
team, were inside the bunker, leaving a force of thirty
up top to defend the perimeter.
  "Batten us down," Carmody said.
    With the help of Peterson and Gabhart, Ransom
pulled down the door and bolted it from inside.
"We'rt, sealed, sir."
    "Arm the mine grids," Carmody told the man sit-
ting at the command console. "Arm all of them."
    "I'm on it, sir." The militiaman started flipping the
rows of switches marked with adhesive tape, A
through M.
      From overhead, there came a heavy pounding.
Someone was beating on the outside of the steel door.
  "Who the hell is that?" Carmody said.
    "It sounds like the fat man, sir," Gabhart said.
"He didn't make it down before we buttoned up.
Should we open the door for him?"
    "No," Carmody said. "That door doesn't open for
anybody. Rutherford's on his own."
    "Sir, the observation posts are all off-line," said
the Patriot's communications man. "There's no re-
sponse to the emergency signal."
    "I think we can assume they're neutralized. Either
dead or captured." As Carmody spoke, the entire
building rocked. Dust came raining down from the
bunker's ceiling as violent explosions hit both ends
of the compound simultaneously.

GARY WISEHART SCANNED the main gate of the com-
pound over the fixed front sight of his M-60 machine
gun. The five foot soldiers in the bunkhouse were

crowding in behind him, peering over his shoulder,
trying to see out the gun port, too.
    "Jesus, back off. Give me some room to work,"
he told them. His voice had gone all high and shrill,
but not nearly as high and shrill as Matt Cook's. From
his firing position, Wisehart could see the mortally
wounded Cook rolling around on the edge of the
minefield.
    He didn't roll for long after the mine grids were
armed.
    The solid whump of a detonating land mine sent a
puff of smoke, dirt and Cook ten feet into the air. The
screaming abruptly stopped. Then the airborne dirt,
rocks and body parts rained down on the compound.
    "Holy hell," Wisehart said, blinking his eyes. The
informant was no longer sitting on the edge of the
well; the well rope hung straight down. Wisehart
shook his head. "Oh, man, that was nasty and a
half."
    "What happened?" said the M-60 gunner stationed
behind Wisehart, on the other side of the bunkhouse.
Through his own gun port, he was covering the pe-
rimeter fence between the bunkhouse and the moun-
tains.
    "Cook just bought it, big time," Wisehart said.
"He sat on a mine."
    Trying for a better look out the gun slit, the foot
soldiers pressed in on Wisehart again. "Goddammit,
you guys aren't in position," he said. "Get in posi-
tion."
    Reluctantly the foot soldiers drew back to the tiers
of bunks and got ready to direct concentrated autofire
at the bunkhouse door.
  "I don't see a goddamned thing moving out




 there," said the bunkhouse's third gunner, whose sta-
 tion was at the end of the building. "Where the hell
 are they'?"
    The third gunner was looking at the hurricane fence
directly across the compound from his view slit when
the wire exploded in a rocking ball of flame. From
post to post, an entire thirty-foot section of fence van-
ished. In the bright light of the compound, something
sailed through the gray smoke, through the wide
break in the fence. At that moment, the machine gun-
ner's body was supercharged by fear. The adrenaline
rush made his vision so acute that he saw the flying
object clearly. He saw the head of the rocket and the
stabilizing fins behind it.  He saw death coming.
    When the LAW rocket slammed into the plywood
sheathing outside the steel-reinforced gun port, the
piezo-electric crystal in its nose cap crushed, sending
an electric current to the detonator. The sheet steel of
the fortification became an instant liability. The cy-
lindrically shaped, three-quarter-pound ocotol charge
of the HEAT warhead blew a three-foot hole in the
metal and broke free thousands upon thousands of
steel splinters from the back side of the barrier. Those
needles surfed on the 66 mm warhead's shock wave;
tumbling, they flew through the bunkhouse interior.
    That shock wave alone vaporized the machine gun-
ner's head.
    The steel splinters fanned out randomly from the
entry hole, killing and maiming the men inside the
bunkhouse.

MACK BOLAN HELD the bunkhouse gun port steady
in the LAW's front sight and waited. Only after Man-

ning had fired his rocket and the fence had burst into
flame did Bolan press the trigger bar. The firing tube
shuddered against his shoulder as the rocket launched.
He glimpsed its tail fins as it vanished into the curling
cloud of smoke. Then from the end of the bunkhouse
came a flash and a solid bang.
    On the other side of the compound, two more ex-
plosions racked the night. McCarter was right on
time.
    Bolan squinted to see through the tendrils of
smoke. The strong breeze had already swept most of
it away from the fence, and he could make out the
bunkhouse. He could see that the sheet of plywood
over the machine-gun port was on fire.  Bull's-eye.
    "Everybody down," the Executioner said. Then, to
Manning he growled, "Hit it!"
The Canadian flipped the switch on the detonator.
The entire strip of earth between the fence and the
bunkhouse suddenly lifted ten feet into the air. The
air itself was alive, screaming with metal fragments.
They rattled against the sides of the buildings, cut
slashes in the roof of the well and in the sides of the
parked vehicles.
    From the opposite end of compound, there was a
similar rolling roar as another entire minefield went
up at once. The detonation was followed by some-
thing unexpected, an explosion so violent that it
rocked the ground under Bolan's stomach. An enor-
mous red-orange fireball leaped into the sky over the
far side of the compound.
 The gas-storage tanks, Bolan thought.
 Then all the floodlights winked off.




Everything went black, except for a raging gasoline
fire.
    Bolan pushed up from the dirt and sprinted for the
break in the fence, his H&K subgun in his right hand.
He didn't call out for the others to follow him; he
knew they would be right on his heels. He scrambled
over the fused ends of the wire, which were still hot
from the LAW warhead, and burst through into the
compound. The former minefield was a jumble of
smoking, overturned earth, a field plowed by cordite.
    He ran to the side of the well, and knelt there for
a second until Manning, James and Encizo closed
ranks. All of them looked at the well rope, which was
hanging down into the hole. It swung, quivering
slightly as if a heavy weight was attached to it. None
of them said a word. The informant was dead. There
had been no way to save him.
    Bolan took off, charging straight for the burning
end of the bunkhouse. The others ran for the covered
walkway that connected the bunkhouse to the main
house.
    As he charged the building, the Executioner yanked
a frag grenade from his combat harness, pulled the
pin with his teeth and let off the safety spring. He
was twenty feet from the LAW's entry hole when
automatic guntire came from inside the ruined gun
port. Shooters from the bunkhouse were panicked,
trying desperately to return fire. It was unaimed and
therefore pointless. Bolan dropped into a feet-first
slide and chucked the grenade through the ragged
opening.
    Bolan put his back to the outside wall as the ex-
plosion rocked the bunkhouse.

"THEY'RE BREAKING THROUGH!" came the strangled
cry through the command center's intercom.
    The communication abruptly ended as a string of
explosions shook the bunker. Ceiling tiles rained
down on the militiamen, and the lights flickered, then
went off.
    "Auxiliary power!" Carmody shouted. "Get the
backup generator started."
    It took a couple of minutes for the Patriots to get
the gas-powered generator started. When they did, the
room lights came up.
    Carmody was beside himself. "How the hell did
they get in so easily?"
    The man behind the console answered. "It looks
like they blew up several grids to open a path. We
can still detonate the rest of the mines."
    Through the steel reinforcing of the bunker roof,
they could hear running feet and the clatter of auto-
fire.
    "What good would that do?" Carmody snapped.
"They're already inside the buildings. The question
is, are they in the underground passages?"
    "According to the infrared detectors," the man at
the console said, "they aren't down there yet."
    "Don't take your eyes off the readout," Carmody
said. "I want to know the instant they break the
beams." He crossed the room to the CB, flicked it on
and picked up the microphone.
    "This is OGR," he said. "OGR calling Sky
King."

CARL LYONS WAS the first one through the hole in
the fence. The heat from the burning gas tank made
him flinch, but it didn't slow him down. They hadn't




planned on torching the gas, but shit happened when
you were playing with high explosive and shrapnel.
    Into the Sawtooth Patriot compound, Lyons carried
a car-killer: a full-stocked 10-gauge semiautomatic
shotgun with a combat sling. Its 3.5-inch Magnum
shells had fifty percent more power than those of a
12-gauge and fired fifty percent more shot weight; in
this case, fifty percent more stainless-steel, double-
aught buck. Stony Man's armorer had expanded the
weapon's tubular magazine capacity to eight rounds
and customized the Countercoil recoil compensator to
further reduce the violent barrel rise when the Ithaca
Roadblocker was touched off.
    Lyons skirted the plume of fire that had once been
the gas-tank shed. The M-60 in the storage building
hadn't gotten off a shot at him, and from the looks
of the hole where the gun port had been, it never
would. He reached the comer of the barn without be-
ing fired upon. He could see the flash hider and front
sight of the machine gun sticking out of the gun slit
in the back side of the barn. The M-60 didn't have
an angle on him yet.
    He walked along the side of the building, and as
he walked, he fired the Roadblocker from the hip.
Ten-gauge thunder shook the air. Double-aught buck
skimmed the side of the machine gun's barrel, knock-
ing its aim point away from Lyons. The guy behind
the gun swung it right back. Lyons blasted again, and
this time the full-choked pattern of stainless-steel ball
bearings bent down the machine gun's front sight.
The weapon jerked violently at the solid impact, then
wobbled, then its muzzle tilted up in the air.
    Probably knocked the guy flat on his butt, Lyons
thought as he unslung his satchel charge and ignited

the fuse. He wedged the explosive package through
the view slit cut in the steel and let it drop. As he
turned from the slit, he saw frantic movement inside
the barn. Men were running, trying to beat the boom.
He followed suit, breaking into a sprint.
    Even though he expected the explosion, even
though he was counting down the seconds in his head,
the sheer force of it drove him to his knees beside the
barn. A wave of heat hit his back as the wall of the
three-story wooden structure cascaded into the com-
pound. The satchel charge had blown the sheet-steel
barrier out through the side of the building, shearing
off the vertical supports that held up the roof. When
the plate crashed to earth, the armed land mines under
it started popping off, sending fragments whining
through the yard.
    Lyons looked back and saw half the roof coming
down. The barn was collapsing in on itself in a cloud
of dust. And it was starting to burn. The shingles were
already on fire from the burst gas tank, while the in-
side of the barn was burning from the satchel explo-
sion, the flames licking out from under the split and
jumbled debris.
    Over the sounds of the detonating mines and the
roaring fire, he could hear the moans of the men
trapped and dying under the wreckage.
    As he moved on, Lyons fed the Roadblocker a pair
of Magnum shells to bring the magazine up to full.

MCCARTER, FOLLOWED BY Schwarz and Blancanales,
reached the front of the storage shed as Lyons dis-
appeared around the burning gas tank and headed for
the far side of the barn. The former SAS man took a
second to admire his own handiwork. The LAW he




i.

had fired had scored a direct hit on the shed's ma-
chine-gun post, plowing right through the middle of
the gun port. The force of the shock wave had blown
the shed's door off its hinges. A quick look inside the
doorway told McCarter that no one had survived the
shrapnel spray.
    He and the others were dashing across the open
ground that separated the shed from the barn when
Lyons's satchel charge went off. The barn doors on
their side blasted open, and six militiamen blew out,
followed by a roiling cloud of smoke, dust and straw.
The men were running when the explosion hit them;
they were knocked into the air, off-balance, and they
hit the ground hard. Behind them, the barn roof beam
split as the supports on the other side dropped away
and the building started caving in.
    Two of the militiamen landed on their stomachs
facing the Stony Man warnors. Somehow they man-
aged to get their guns up to cover their buddies' re-
treat. Their fire was full auto but poorly aimed.
    McCarter, Schwarz and Blancanales shot their ma-
chine pistols from solid kneeling positions. The pair
of militiamen died in the dirt where they lay.
    The four others didn't turn around to see what had
happened. They scrambled to their feet and made a
beeline for the safety of the main house. They had a
long way to go and very little time to get there.
    Still kneeling, McCarter and the others punched out
fifty rounds of precision fire. Through-and-through
body shots kicked up dirt all around the fleeing men,
and they went down in a tangle of arms and legs.
    Another rolling cloud of dust whooshed out of the
barn doorway as the far side of the building collapsed,
taking the entire roof with it. McCarter, Schwarz and

Biancanales dumped their empty mags and reloaded
before moving closer to the doors.
    When they looked inside the wined barn, every-
thing was burning. It was a funeral pyre for the Saw-
tooth Patriots.
      "Man!" Schwarz exclaimed, shielding his face
with a forearm as flames shot out of the opening.
  "Bloody hell," McCarter said.
  "What's wrong?" Blancanales asked him.
    "We can't get to the passage, dammir," McCarter
said. "The passage leading underground from the
barn to the bunker. Not until that bloody bonfire cools
off."
  "That could take days," Schwarz said.
    "Come on," McCarter urged, breaking into a trot.
He peered around the comer of the burning barn and
saw Lyons waiting for them at the other end. Mc-
Carter gave the Able Team leader the thumbs-up sign,
and they all crossed the open ground between the barn
and the main house.

"WE NEED YOU tO gun it, Sky King," CarroDdy said
into the CB's microphone, "The departure schedule
has been moved up." As he released the transmit
switch, another explosion rocked the room.
    "What's the damage?" Carmody shouted as he re-
gained his feet.
    "They've blown up the gas tank and taken the barn
and storage shed," the communications officer said.
"Nobody got out alive. The guys upstairs report that
it's all burning."
    Les Johnson's voice crackled over the CB speakers.
"You got trouble down there, OGR?"
Carmody thought for a second. What was the point




in lying to the guy? As soon as he flew over the ranch,
he'd see the place was burning down around them. If
Johnson was going to scrap the mission, it was better
to know it now, while there was still time to figure
out an alternate escape plan. "Yeah, we got trouble."
  "My price just went up."
  "How much?" Carmody asked, as if it mattered.
    "Times two," Johnson said. "In cash, as previ-
ously agreed. Is that a go?"
  "Roger, a go, Sky King. What's your ETA?"
  "Touchdown in ten. Airborne again in three."
  "We'll be on the runway."
    As Carmody switched off, the communications of-
ricer said, "Sir, we've got company in the bunkhouse
passage. The sensors just went haywire. They're com-
ing this way."

WHILE MANNING PLANTED a C-4 charge on the bunk-
house door, James and Encizo poured autofire into the
ranch house side door and windows.
    Answering fire from the main house picked chunks
of wood out of the wall a foot above their heads.
    "Hurry up!" James said as he dropped a spent mag
and slapped a fresh one into his H&K subgun.
    "Duck and cover," Manning said, tripping the det-
onator switch.
    The bunkhouse door came down in a flash. While
the smoke was still thick, they charged in, spreading
out as they filtered through the doorway.
    Gunfire erupted from under a tier of bunks, stitch-
ing a line of slugs across the drywall. It would have
cut them down if they hadn't jumped at the first gun
crack.
 James returned fire with his H&K, aiming at the

muzzle-flash coming from under the bed. He saturated
the bunk and its mattress with a storm of 9 mm par-
abellum slugs.
    On the other side of the room, one of the machine
gunners was trying to get his M-60 disentangled from
the wreckage so he could point it at them. Manning
and Encizo riddied the man with a flurry of 9 mm
bullets, driving him against the sheet steel of the gun
port. He slumped to his backside behind the still un-
fired machine gun.
    The LAW rocket, followed by a fragmentation gre-
nade, had done devastating damage to the room's oc-
cupants. The walls were streaked with smoke and
blood spray, and peppered by thousands of hits by
oddly shaped bits of steel. Bodies and body parts lay
sprawled on the floor and across the beds. None of
the Patriots in the bunkhouse showed signs of life.
    As the warriors finished the grim work, Bolan en-
tered the room through the doorway they had just
blown.
  "We're clear in here, Striker," James said.
  "A clean sweep," Encizo added.
    Manning was already at the trapdoor that led down
to the underground connecting passage. He put down
his satchel charge and rolled the limp body of a mi-
litiaman off the handle. "Think anybody is waiting
for us down there?" he said as he straightened up.
    "I don't think anybody got out of this room alive,"
Encizo answered.
    "There's only one way to tell," Bolan said. The
big guy moved the machine pistol to his left hand and
with his right, picked up the satchel charge Manning
had brought. "Cover my back."




    "Cover our backs," James corrected him. "This is
a job for two."
    Bolan nodded, then gestured at the trapdoor with
his subgun. "Open it up."
    The Executioner and James descended the steep
concrete stairway. They could see that the passage
dead-ended on the right of its intersection with the
stairs. Crouching just above the bottom step, Bolan
peeked low around the corner, then jerked back.
    The corridor was made of concrete blocks. The
floor was poured concrete. Everything was smooth
and well lit. There were no side passages, no niches
big enough to conceal a gunman.
    Bolan looked again, pausing a little longer before
he ducked back. The corridor was clear. It ended in
a heavy metal door that looked like it had been scav-
enged from a ship. On the other side of the door, if
the informant's sketch was accurate, was the com-
mand bunker. He moved up the stairs so James could
have a look.
    When the former SEAL drew back, Bolan said,
"Cover me from the stairwell while I plant the
charge." Then he turned to Manning and Encizo, who
waited above the trapdoor. "When the satchel
blows," he told them, "get to the bottom of the stairs
and back our play."
  "Gotcha," Manning said.
      Bolan stepped past James, down into the corridor.
He moved low and quick along the far wall. He saw the infrared sensors too late.
He had already broken the beams with his legs.
On the other side of the metal door, he had no
doubt that alarms were going off. He whirled and
raced for the stairs.

    "Out!" he said to lames, turning and pushing the
man up the steps ahead of him. "It's a trap!"

"DROP THE LID on those bastards!" Carmody snarled.
    Peterson, Gabhart and Ransom struggled with a
large T-shaped metal handle set high in the wall that
faced the bunkhouse. The long part of the handle was
connected to a heavy multistrand cable that disap-
peared into a hole in the concrete block. Heaving in
unison, the trio pulled the handle and its cable three
feet from the wall. A second later came a heavy dis-
tant crash, the sound of steel against concrete.
  "Kill the lights in there," Carmody said.
    When that was done, the commander in chief of
the militia stepped up to the flood valve. He opened
the valve, then moved to the command bunker's door.
On the other side of it, the roar of rushing water was
clearly audible. A river was emptying into the narrow,
sealed corridor. Water started seeping around the
seals at the edges of the door.
    Carmody bellowed into his side of the barrier,
"How do you like that, assholes?"
    Which brought a rousing cheer from the men in the
bunker.




CHAPTER FOURTEEN

When Les Johnson was five miles from Old Glory
Ranch, he saw the leaping, flickering light from the
burning gas tank and barn. He had seen lots of similar
fireworks during his career, so he knew exactly what
kind of party was going on down there.  A party with full metal jackets.
    He had to wonder if he'd sold his services too
cheaply. Maybe he should've asked for three times
the money.
    He put the Beechcraft Kingair's controls on auto-
pilot, undid his shoulder belt and picked up the body
armor draped over the copilot's seat. He shrugged into
the vest and adjusted the steel trauma plates so they
didn't gouge into his torso.
    In another four, maybe five minutes, he was going
to be within range of whoever was attacking the Saw-
tooth Patriot's compound. He was dropping into a
free-fire zone like a very dumb duck. He had to land
his aircraft, turn it around at the end of the strip and
take off in the opposite direction.
    Seven thousand feet of runway made for a hell of
a long shooting gallery.
    Johnson and the Beech had to run the Old Glory
gauntlet twice. With enough time in between each run

for the adrenaline-pumped federal shooters to reload
their weapons.
    As he neared the ranch, he could make out more
detail. The destruction at the far end of the compound
was total, the buildings leveled.
 It made him start rethinking his decision.
    He owed the Sawtooth Patriots absolutely nothing.
They owed him exactly nothing in return. Up to this
point, everything between them had been on a cash-
on-the-barrelhead basis. Johnson wasn't a member of
the militia. He didn't subscribe to their paranoid phi-
losophy. He had seen too much of the world to buy
into any simple explanation of everything, but he did
agree with their assessment that the world was going
to hell in a handbasket.
    That was on a par with agreeing that the sky was
blue, or that all politicians were corrupt.
    When it came to politics, Johnson didn't have any.
He had lost interest in the American political system
twenty years ago. If he had faith in anything, it was
in the power of money and in his skill as a pilot. He
liked lots of money and he liked a large helping of
personal risk.
  But he wasn't stone crazy.
    He decided to overtly the ranch once at two thou-
sand feet, to dip a wing as he passed and see if any-
body took a potshot at him.

GARY MANNING TENSED as Bolan called for a retreat.
He poked the muzzle of his H&K down at the stair-
well, ready to provide cover for his teammates. He
saw Bolan shove James up the Staircase. There was a
grating sound in the floor under his feet, and some-
thing clacked. A huge, we!l-greased latch. Manning




stared helplessly down as, with a groan and a rush of
air, the three-inch-thick steel door dropped from the
edge of the entryway and crashed against the fourth
concrete step, sealing the stairwell from wall to wall.
    "Oh, shit!" Encizo said, lowering his weapon as
he looked at the barrier. "Where the hell did that
come from?"
    "We friggin' missed it," Manning said. "Now
we've got to get the damned thing up."
    The Canadian jumped down into the stairwell and
tried to get his fingers under the edge of the door.
Encizo hopped down beside him. Both men struggled
in vain. The door had gouged so deeply into the con-
crete that there was nothing to get hold of.
    "I hear water running down there," Encizo said.
"Sounds like lots and lots of water."
  "Striker!" Manning said. "What's going on?"
  There was no answer.
    "This thing is heavier than shit," Encizo said.
"Look what it did to the steps, it turned the concrete
to powder. I don't think we could raise it even if we
could get a grip on it."
  "Striker! James!" Manning shouted.

"EvERy MAN IS BORN TO DIE," Oswald Carmody said
to the twenty Patriots assembled in the command bun-
ker, "but very few men get to die for something they
believe in. I know you'll fight on here at Old Glory
until your last drop of blood is shed. You know that
I'd rather stay here and fight on alongside you, that
I'd rather die alongside you, but we have a larger war
to win. Skel, Gabhart, Link, Billy Ray and I will be
making the same sacrifice, on another battlefield, in a

few hours. Maybe we'll all regroup in a much better
place, if that's God's will."
    He looked from man to man. "The longer you hold
the enemy at bay, the better the chance our ultimate
mission will succeed. The Sawtooth Patriots are going
to remake the world, and we start today."
    The militiamen gathered around him, putting their
hands on his shoulders or patting his arms. They knew
all about martyrdom. It was part of their special take
on history, part of their end-times philosophy. Glori-
ous martyrdom, like Waco, like Ruby Ridge. They
had known for months that it was going to happen to
each of them, sooner or later. They looked almost
relieved that the waiting was almost over.
    Ransom handed Carmody a miner's headlight and
he put it on.
    At the rear of the bunker, on the side of the ranch
house that faced the mountains, was a four-foot hole
in the wall. The hole had been concealed, until mo-
ments before, by a pair of metal cabinets that served
as gun racks. The opening led to a tunnel made of
corrugated pipe, also four feet in diameter. It was a
combination air intake and escape tunnel for the bun-
ker. For obvious reasons, only a handful of the mili-
tiamen at Old Glory Ranch knew of its existence. The
corrugated sewer pipe led away from the bunker at a
gradual, upward angle. At a depth of five feet, it
passed under the minefield to the perimeter fence. On
the other side of the fence, it was buried two feet
under the surface and continued at that depth across
the desert to the edge of the runway, where it ended
in a camouflaged exit.
    Carmody switched on his headlight and entered the
tunnel first. The space was so narrow he had to crawl




i'

through it on hands and knees, his machine pistol
hanging on a lanyard around his neck. He pushed the
money bag up the passage ahead of him. Peterson,
Ransom, Gabhart and Link brought up the rear.
    They passed under the minefield without incident.
Once they reached the perimeter fence, the going got
easier because it was level. They were somewhere in
the middle of the long tunnel when the pipe suddenly
jolted and an explosion echoed from behind them.
  "What was that?" Link said.
    "Keep moving, man," Peterson told him. "Just
keep moving."
    A few minutes later, they broke through the camou
netting at the mouth of the tunnel and crawled out
into the night. Carmody looked back at Old Glory,
burning. He could see muzzle-flashes lighting up the
ground floor of the main house.
    "Here comes the Beech," Ransom said, pointing
at the sky.
  "He's off-line for the runway," Peterson said.
    The wing lights on the right side of the aircraft
dropped as it passed over the compound.
    "He's doing a flyby!" Link said. "The bastard's
not going to land!"

MACK BOLAN STOOD in the pitch darkness, listening
as water poured into the concrete passage from a se-
ries of pipes concealed in the ceiling. His ears were
still ringing from the clang the trapdoor made when
it dropped. The water level was rising quickly above
his knees. It was cold.
    "Striker?" James called, sloshing through the tor-
rent toward him.

    "Here," he replied. "Against the wall, another
yard or so."
    James brushed his arm with a hand. "Wow, is it
ever dark."
    Bolan checked the luminous sweep hand of his
watch. "At the rate the water's coming in, we've got
about four minutes before this chamber fills up to the
ceiling. Let's see if we can't move the door."
    They tried shoving on the back side of barrier, but
they couldn't budge it an inch.
  "What are we going to do?" James asked.
    Bolan could hear the man's teeth chattering. It was
river water pouring in, straight from the glaciers of
the Sawtooth Range. If they didn't drown in the pas-
sageway, they'd surely die of the cold. At that mo-
ment, though, their odds of drowning looked real
good.
 "Manning!" Bolan shouted into the trapdoor.
 The answer was muffled, but affirmative.
    "You and Encizo get clear of the bunkhouse. Do
it now!" Bolan said. He pressed his ear to the steel
to make sure he could hear the reply.
    "Roger, Striker," came the response. "We're
gone."
    Bolan shrugged out of the satchel charge's canvas
strap. Then he dumped his combat harness. "Feel like
a swim?" he asked James.
  "We're going to swim out of here?"
    "Not exactly, but we're going to have to hold our
breath awhile under water."
  "[ can do almost two minutes, no sweat."
    "That ought to do it." Bolan fumbled with his har-
ness until he found the slim flashlight clipped there.
He turned it on and played the narrow beam down




 the corridor. Water had climbed up all but three of
 the stairs, and was now almost completely filling the
 passage. Only about six inches of air space remained.
    "When I give the word," the Executioner said,
"we're going to dive in and swim to the sealed door
at the other end of the corridor. We're going to stay
under water until the satchel charge blows. Let's hope
the concussion doesn't knock us both out."
    James started filling his lungs, stretching them so
they would hold more air.
    With the flash between his teeth, Bolan primed the
explosive package and propped it against the bottom
edge of the barrier. "Let's go," he said to James.
"Follow the wall." Then he dived into the water.
    James knifed in after him. He lost the glow of the
flashlight almost immediately and, as Bolan had sug-
gested, found the wall with his hand and swam along
it until he reached the end. Bolan waited for him
there, hanging on to the door handle. James gripped
the handle, too. Both men braced themselves for the
explosion.
    There was a bright flash of light, and a sudden,
awful pressure that slammed their chests and ear-
drums. They didn't black out. Lungs screaming for
air, they swam back down the passage to the stairwell.
Both of them were thinking the same thought as they
pulled themselves up the stairs: don't let the trapdoor
still be there.  It wasn't.
      As they scrambled up through the smoke, Manning
and Encizo were there to help them out.  "Man, what a bang!" Manning said.
    The bunkhouse was now open to the stars, the wind
gusting through the nonexistent back wall sending

bedding and personal items across the compound. The
rising water helped to focus the explosion by confin-
ing the area it had to expand in. The stairwell acted
like a concrete-barreled cannon, blowing the barrier
up and out through the bunkhouse roof and taking out
the side of the building in the process.
    Sounds of full-auto gunfire from the main house
mixed with the roar of a twin-engined aircraft turning
for a landing approach.
    "Somebody's trying to make a getaway," Encizo
said.
    "Not if I have anything to say about it," Bolan
told him.
    Dripping wet, the Executioner crossed the ruined
room and tried to pull out an M-60 from under the
rubble and overturned bunks. When he couldn't shift
it, he turned to Manning and said, "Give me a hand
here."

BEFORE HE CROSSED the threshold of the main house,
Lyons thumbed in a pair of ear protectors. He put the
sole of his boot to the side door in a powerful snap-
kick that splintered away the lock. Something moved
to his right as he entered. A muzzle-flash came from
behind a couch. The wind made by flying lead
brushed his face.
  The house was full of rats.
    Lyons detonated the Roadblocker into the front of
the sofa. The couch jolted onto its back legs as an
enormous hole opened up in the back cushion.
Though Lyons was ten feet away, the muzzle blast of
the Magnum shell set the plaid fabric on fire. He
jerked the smoking sofa away from the wall. Behind
it lay a headless man. Lyons took a second and




smothered the flames with a pillow. He had no choice
in the matter; they couldn't let the main house burn,
not until they'd searched it.
    As he straightened up, somebody else shot at him.
He saw a man duck back into the doorway at the far
end of the room. At some point, it must have been a
family room or den. Now it was all sandbags and steel
plate; in an emplacement on the right stood an aban-
doned M-60.
    Lyons put his back to the wall beside the doorway
and sucked in a quick breath. There were only two
ways of doing anything: Ironman's and everyone
else's. He didn't sneak a peek around the corner to
see what he was up against, because it didn't matter
to him. He spun around the doorjamb with the Road-
blocker at hip height.
    Four men stood in the hallway, armed with auto-
matic weapons. One of them knelt behind a pile of
sandbags, two stood half in and half out of doorways
on either side of the corridor, while the fourth had no
cover, and he was the closest.
    Lyons fired before any of them could get off a shot.
Two feet of flame belched from the Roadblocker's
muzzle. The closest man took a center-chest hit that
blew him off his feet and sent his vitals spraying out
his back. Through-and-through .3 !-caliber steel balls
whined down the corridor. Lyons rode the recoil wave
as the semiauto cycled out the empty hull and cham-
bered a live round. He rode it up and over to the man
in the doorway on the right. A second boom shook
the hallway. The doorjamb, the man's upraised gun,
his arm and half his head blurred in a red cloud of
mingled wood and bone chips.
 Finally the militiamen in the hallway got it together

and returned fire. From the door on the left and the
sandbags straight ahead, machine pistols chattered.
Lyons dropped to a knee. As he did, he raised the
10-gauge's stock to his shoulder. He put two shots
into the doorway. The first cut a ragged hole in the
wall, which caused the gunman to step into view. Ly-
ons's second shot practically tore him in half.
    The guy down the hall had to raise himself above
the sandbags in order to sight down on Lyons. When
he did so, Lyons also rose and fired. The militiaman's
arms flew out as he took a torso hit. His weapon clat-
tered against the wall, and he landed, thrashing, on
his back. Lyons couldn't hear his screams because of
the earplugs, but he could see the man's wide-open
mouth and pain-twisted face.
    As Lyons approached the downed Patriot, he
reached for the butt of the Colt Python he wore in
shoulder leather. By the time he got up to the man,
his legs had stopped kicking and there was no need
for a mercy bullet.
    Lyons moved down the hallway, checking rooms.
He didn't find anything else until he reached the next-
to-last room in the corridor. He had just finished
sweeping the walk-in closet and was turning to make
his exit when the wall in front of him started to dis-
integrate. A string of 9 mm holes stitched through the
drywall from right to left. The slugs crashed into the
closet's sliding doors behind him.
     Lyons didn't have to think about the shooter on the
 other side of the wall, didn't have to wonder which
 end of the room he was in, which end of the line of
 holes he was standing at. He already knew.
     The 10-gauge slammed his shoulder. It did worse
 things to the wall, blowing a foot-wide hole in it. The




 man on the other side was dusted with plaster and
 shredded by steel buckshot.
     Lyons looked out of the doorway at the end of the
 hall. It opened onto the ranch's kitchen. A service
 counter was on his right, on the other side of that, the
 refrigerator, stove and sink.
     As he stepped into the room, a man popped up
 from behind the kitchen counter. The M-16 in his
 hands flashed and spewed full-auto lead. Lyons
 touched off the Roadblocker, blasting a hole in the
 front of the counter. The impact of a storm of
 .31-caliber steel pellets sent the man crashing back
 into the refrigerator.
    Lyons stripped live 10-gauge shells from his har-
ness and thumbed them into the semiauto's tubular
magazine. He looked around the counter to make sure
the guy was dead. He was. He lay on his back in the
middle of a pile of trashed food--milk cartons, eggs,
lettuce, fruit. There were a couple of metal refriger-
ator shelf racks by his head.
    Lyons removed one of the earplugs, so he could
tell how the others were doing.
    "Ironman!" a familiar voice shouted. "We're clear
on this side."
    "Right," he replied, taking out the other earplug.
"Clear here, too."
    McCarter, Schwarz and Blancanales stepped in
from the dining room. They dumped half-empty mags
on the floor and reloaded.
  A sound overhead made them all freeze.
    "Goddamn, that plane's coming in for a landing!"
Biancahales said.
  "That's not our problem," McCarter stated. "Bo-

lan's team'!l handle it. Our job is to secure the en-
trance to the bunker."
    "Something two guys could do," Lyons said. "I'm
out of here. I'm going to stop that plane."
    He didn't wait to hear any argument from the Brit.
There was no argument. He was right.
    Lyons hit the walkway between the main house and
the remains of the bunkhouse at the same time as
Bolan. Lyons took in the wet clothes and hair, the
plaster-dusted M-60 and cartridge belt looped over his
shoulder, and smiled. The Executioner had been busy.
    There wasn't time for conversation. They could see
the Beechcraft turning in the distance, preparing to
land at the left end of the runway. On the right end,
five figures stood huddled, waiting for their ride out
of the killing ground.
    "We've got no shot from here," Bolan said. He
ran around the side of the bunkhouse, over the broken
earth of the minefield and back out through the hole
in the fence.
  Lyons followed him in easy, loping strides.
    As the Beech began its landing approach, they were
still four hundred yards from the runway.
     "I can hit it from here," Bolan said, setting the
 machine gun's bipod on the flat top of a boulder. He
 flipped the end of the cartridge belt to Lyons, took
 hold of the pistol grip and jacked a live 7.62 mm
 round under the hammer.
     As he dropped the M-60's safety, the runway and
 compound lights went out.
     A second later, the plane's landing and running
 lights winked out, too.
  "Son of a gun!" Bolan said as his target vanished.




    The Beechcraft glided in like a night owl, a hunter
in the dark.

 LES JOHNSON HAD FLOWN into Old Glory Ranch so
 many times that if he couldn't do it blindfolded, at
 least he could do it with the windows blacked out.
 He had already lined up for his landing and was be-
 ginning his descent when the runway lights went out.
   That surprised him a little.
 It was always a shock to see the ground disappear.
 He didn't pull up and abort. He continued his
 downward glide, calmly reaching over to the dash and
 shutting off all the aircraft's running lights.
    He started humming a little tune as he watched the
red glow of his altimeter. The needle dropped to 4500
feet, then 4450. Another indicator dial told him the
wings were level. 4425, 4420. He brought up the nose
of the plane and cut the power.
  The last ten feet were the longest.
    As the Beechcraft fell through the dark, he couldn't
know for sure whether he was still lined up with the
runway. He was coming in at one hundred miles per
hour. If the wheels hit sagebrush instead of asphalt,
he was going to be a fireball in a big hurry.
  With a jolt and a squeal, the tires hit tarmac.
    He had pancaked it a bit, but he was down safe.
Through the windshield, he could just make out the
white line that marked the center of the airstrip. When
he came to the warning lines painted at the far end,
he braked to a stop and started his 180-degree turn.
    The moment he stopped again, the passenger's door
opened and Carmody and the other four men piled in.
Rick Link was the last, and he took the copilot's seat.
 Before Link had got the door closed, Johnson was

accelerating back the way he had come. He pounded
down the throttle, dividing his attention between the
white line in front of them and the rising needle on
his speed indicator. He had made it in without getting
nicked. It looked like he might make it out the same
way.
    As he lifted off, the Beechcraft shuddered from
multiple bullet impacts. Heavy-caliber slugs punched
through the middle of the cabin. To the left, the chat-
ter of machine-gun fire was audible over the twin en-
gines' roar.
    Instead of pulling back on the stick and climbing,
Johnson flew fast and low, maybe fifty feet off the
ground. He knew the terrain, he knew that there were
no obstacles between him and the mountains. He
banked to put the tail of the aircraft toward the ma-
chine gun, presenting it with the smallest possible tar-
get.
    Only when he was well out of M-60 range did he
bank back to his original course and start to climb to
cruising altitude. The wind whistled shrilly through
the bullet holes in the fuselage. Johnson turned on the
cabin and outside running lights and did a quick dam-
age assessment.
  The Beech was okay.
     The worst damage had been done to the man sitting
 in the seat beside him.
 "Rick! Jesus, Oz, he's been hit," said Peterson.
 The assistant gunner slumped forward, held up only
 by his safety belt. Blood pooled on the floor under
 his seat. His mouth hung open; his face ashen.
     Billy Ray Ransom reached over and felt for a pulse
 in Link's throat. "He's bought it."




7

    "Open the door and dump him," Carmody or-
dered.
    Ransom and Peterson unbuckled the seat belt and,
as Johnson dipped the wing, pitched the warm corpse
out into the night.

 THE INVISIBLE AIRPLANE droned off toward the moun-
 tains.
  "Did you hit it?" Lyons asked the Executioner.
     "Who knows? I only had a good angle on it for a
 second. That pilot knew his stuff."
     Behind them, the house lights came on, then the
 runway lights returned. Schwarz had probably re-
 stored the power, Bolan thought.
     "How'd those guys get out of the ranch house?"
 Lyons demanded. "We had all the exits covered. We
 should're seen them."
    "I was wondering the same thing. Remember that
straight line in the aerial photo leading away from the
compound? McCarter pointed out how the vegetation
was messed up."
  "The utility pipe?"
      "I don't think it was a utility pipe. I think it's an
underground escape tunnel."  "Got to be."
"Then we've got to close it off."
"How're we going to find it in the dark?"
"We're not going to be able to find the runway
end of it, but we know that it crosses under the pe-
rimeter fence. And from the aerial photo, we know
about where."
    They returned to the edge of the compound and ran
along the outside of the wire until Bolan noticed a
slight rise in the ground in about the right spot. To

verify, he sighted along the rise. It ran in a straight
line in the direction of the runway. The Executioner
dropped to his knees and started digging with his bare
hands. Lyons got down on the ground and helped
him.
    After a minute or two, their fingers scraped corru-
gated metal. The pipe wasn't deeply buried outside
the wire. They quickly uncovered a three-foot section.
    "It slopes that way," Lyons said, "down into the
bunker."
    "What're you got over there, mates?" McCarter
called from across the compound.
    Bolan didn't answer, but just waved. What he had
to say, he didn't want to shout. He and Lyons joined
McCarter and Manning at the walkway entrance to
the main house.
    "The situation is a stalemate," McCarter told
them. "The surviving militiamen are sealed in the
bunker. We can't get at them through the flooded pas-
sage, and the passage under the barn is too hot to try.
Manning and Gadgets can blow the door leading
down, but if we go through it to get to them, they'll
chew us to pieces."
    "They'll rip us the same way if we try to go in
through the escape tunnel," Bolan said.
    McCarter frowned, so Bolan explained to him what
they had found.
    While he was doing this, Carl Lyons was looking
up at the water tower, then at the hurricane fence,
estimating the distances and angles with his eyes.
"I've got an idea," he said. "'If that tank's full, it
might work."
  Bolan got the picture at once. "They tried to drown




L,

 us," he said. "Turnabout's fair play. Manning, can
 you drop that water tower onto the fence?"  "No sweat."
  "Can you drop it right where I tell you to?"
  "Piece of cake, Striker."
     Lyons and Bolan returned to the partially exposed
 pipe and stood there while Manning lined up the drop.
 Then Manning and McCarter attached C~4 charges to
 the girders that supported the water tower. When they
 were done, they waved for Bolan and Lyons to get
 out of the way and ducked around the comer of the
 building.
    The sequential explosions at the base of the water
tank's legs were small and precise; they severed the
structure's supports like scalpel cuts. The far legs
crumpled first, then as the tower began to tilt toward
the fence, the near legs blew. With a shriek of tortured
metal, the tall tower fell across the compound. The
globe of the water tank crushed the fence fiat, and the
tower's support posts detonated dozens of mines as
they crashed to earth.
    As soon as the dust cleared, Bolan and Lyons
started excavating the pipe in front of the tank's
domed top. Manning joined them and slapped a small
C-4 charge on the corrugated steel they had exposed.
They all ducked and covered as he detonated it.
    The result was just what they were looking for: the
pipe was breached by a ragged, open maw, two feet
in diameter.
"I can blow the tank, too," Manning said.
"Stand back," Bolan told him. The Executioner
emptied a 30-round mag into the top of the tank,
punching a tight ring of 9 mm holes in it. A torrent
began to pour out of the ring of holes, into the shallow

pit and the open pipe. The pit quickly filled, and the
pipe started throwing up huge bubbles of air. Water
rushed down the sloping tunnel, under the minefield
and into the bunker below.

JAMES, ENCIZO AND Blancanales stood in the small
bedroom near the trapdoor leading down to the com-
mand bunker. Through the armored floor, they heard
the militiamen yelling as water rushed into the sealed
room, panicking when they realized what was going
to happen to them. Then somebody must've taken
charge because the yelling stopped. They were getting
themselves reorganized.
    The Sawtooth Patriots only had one way out of the
bunker, and that was up through the main house.
James, Encizo and Blancanales were set up to ambush
them as they came out. But they didn't come out.
    From below came the sounds of single gunshots, a
flurry of them, popping off all at once.
    "The bastards are pulling a Waco on us," Encizo
said.
    When the gunfire stopped, there were no more hu-
man noises, only the sound of flowing water. It took
Gadgets and Manning less than three minutes to mine
and blow the steel door.
    When the smoke cleared, they edged closer to the
opening. There were still no sounds from below.
    James armed a pair of concussion grenades and
dropped them into the bunker. They clanged on the
metal steps, then exploded one right after the other,
raising a cloud of dust from the bedroom floor.
    James went down first, foflowed by Encizo and
McCarter.
  "What a mess," Encizo said.




ii/iz

    The bunker and all its occupants were history. The
corpses of fifteen men lay sprawled in the ankle-deep
water. Every head had a little entry hole in its face
and a huge exit hole at the back of the skull. All four
walls were spattered and dripping with blood and
brains.
    "Gadgets," McCarter called up the stairs, "we
need you down here."
    When Schwarz joined them, McCarter had him de-
activate all the minefields. Then the Phoenix Force
leader said, "We've got to do something about shut-
ting off the water. It's going to make it hard to work
down here if it gets much higher."
  "I think I can fix that," Gadgets said.
    As Schwarz hurried back up the stairs, McCarter
addressed the men in the bunker and those waiting on
the floor above. "Let's get on with it, gentlemen,"
he said. "We all know what we're looking for."

As CARL LYONS PASSED through the kitchen again,
he paused in front of the refrigerator. The blood from
the dead guy on the floor was puddled under him and
smeared on the refrigerator door. Some of the double-
aught buck had gone right through him. Four tightly
grouped holes marked the refrigerator door above the
handle. Then Lyons noticed the blood seeping under
the door's lower gasket. He reached for the handle
and opened it.
 The little light came on.
  "Goddamn," he said.
    Bolan came up behind him and looked over his
shoulder.
    The inside of the refrigerator was packed with hu-
manity, a single specimen of humanity. The grossly

fat man had evidently emptied the refrigerator of
food, shelf racks and storage boxes, then he had
wedged himself into the tight space in a fetal position.
He had taken four steel marbles to the brain.
    "Look," Lyons said in amazement, "he died suck-
ing his thumb."
    Bolan stepped over the body of the man on the
floor and resumed the room-by-room search.
    A few minutes later, he and Lyons came upon Car-
mody's study and the worktable. In silence, both men
examined the documents spread out before them.
    Lyons tapped the red circle on the street map, the
circle decorated with a death's-head. "From this, it
looks like we've located their target, if nothing else."
    "Yeah, looks like," Bolan said. "Time to call
home."




i::!!Z;

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Stony Man Farm
7:04 a.m. EDT

Hal Brognola held up his hand for silence in the com-
puter center. "Striker, please repeat," he said into the
speakerphone. "Did you say there was no nuke?"
    "No nuke, no cannon," Bolan replied via the
scrambled link.
  "Damn!" Brognola said.
    "We covered all the ground inside the compound
with Geiger counters," the Executioner continued.
"We checked the underground passages, too. We
haven't come up with any of the hardware we're
looking for. Of course, they could're buried the nuke
shell, the 155 howitzer and the truck somewhere out
on the plain."
    "Negative, Striker," Barbara Price said. "A de-
tailed analysis of the aerial photos has turned up no
evidence of that."
    "From the maps and overlays we've uncovered at
the ranch," Bolan said, "it looks like the intended
target is the Internal Revenue Service processing cen-
ter at Ogden, Utah."
  "A symbolic target," Wethers commented.

    "It does fit their 'get Big Brother off our backs'
rhetoric," Tokaido agreed, looking up from his mon-
itor. "What better way to remove big government
from the American wallet than by nuking its number
crunchers into the Stone Age? Maybe the militiamen
even think they'll get some sympathy from choosing
that as a target."
    "In some quarters, they probably will," Wethers
replied.
  "The sick bastards," Delahunt said in disgust.
  "Do we have a timetable?" Brognola asked Bolan.
    "No, but I think we can assume they'll wait until
the workers arrive before taking the shot."
    "At the earliest," Kurtzman said, "that would be
about five hours from now."
    "We can assume they'll use the weapon as soon
as possible," Brognola said. "They've got to know
the longer they wait, the better our odds of stopping
them."
    "Do we know their firing position from the docu-
ment you've recovered?" Price asked.
    "Roughly," Bolan answered. "There's a mark on
a map here that covers quite a bit of the area. You'll
see what I mean when I fax it to you. I'm also sending
a list of the titles of all the publications we found
with it. If the militiamen have moved the weapon out
of the truck and into a building, it could take some
time to conduct a proper search."
    "It's imperative that we take these guys out before
they get into firing position," Brognola said, "oth-
erwise, the risk to innocent people increases dramat-
ically. We know the gun team can shoot quickly, and
accurately. They proved that in Chocolate Canyon. I




don't want them to sneak off a shot while we're kick-
ing down the door."
    "There's a phone number written on the edge of
the map," Bolan said. "I don't know if it means any-
thing. Can we get a location on it?"
  "Let's have it," Delahunt said.
  Bolan rattled off the number.
  "I'm on it."
  "There's something else I want to say."
  "Go ahead, Striker," Price said.
    "There's a good chance the evidence we're work-
ing on here may be a false trail, meant to distract us
from the real attack."
"What makes you think that7" Kurtzman asked.
"The militiamen could have easily destroyed all
this incriminating material before we took the ranch
house. They had the time and the means. What I'm
saying is, this looks almost too good to be true, es-
pecially the phone number."
    "Are you telling us this isn't the real target?"
Brognola said.
    "I'm telling you I don't know whether it is or isn't.
We know there are two gun teams. The one that stole
the cannon in California and tested it in Utah and the
other team that the informant said was drilling at the
ranch with an artillery trainer. We don't know if each
team has its own howitzer and nuke. If they do,
maybe both teams are going to unload on the IRS. Or
maybe there's more than one target. Or maybe one is
just a decoy."
  "I get the drift," Brognola said grimly.
    "Do we have any idea where our boy Carmody
went?" Bolan asked. "He wasn't among the dead, so

it's a safe guess that he was one of the men who
escaped."
    Kurtzman answered. "Charles Krick's Learjet
logged a flight plan from Cody to Newark. They've
been in the air about fifteen minutes. My bet is they'll
change destinations once they cross the Jersey state
line, but they're definitely headed east. Their ETA is
around noon, our time."
  "What about the Beechcraft?" Bolan said.
    "No sign of it yet," Brognola said. "It wasn't at
the airport. SAC Parker is still searching around
Cody."
      "So we can't tie the five men I saw getting into
the Beech to the Lear's departure."  "Not yet."
 There was a long silence.
    "Look," Bolan said finally, "it'll be daylight in
another half hour out here. I need to look over the
test range they've been using. Maybe that'll clear
things up. I'll call you back in an hour."
    "Talk to you then," Brognola said, and broke the
connection.
    "What Striker's saying is possible," Katz said.
"The Ogden hit might just be a ruse."
    "Sure," Kurtzman agreed, "but the question is,
how do we prove it, and quickly?"
    Brognola shook his head. Every part of him was
exhausted; he looked as if he'd been pounded with
mallets. "The bottom line here is we don't have con-
tainment. We still don't know where the nuke or the
howitzer are, but we do know that somewhere out
there we have a pair of gun teams willing and able
to use them. We think we know what one of the tar-
gets is, but the other could be anywhere on the East




Coast. We know that the odds are one or both teams
will fire their weapon sometime in the next five to
eight hours. People, we're about to lose the handle on
this one, and the stakes are too damned high to let
that happen."
"What more can we do?" Kurtzman asked.
"Goddammit, Aaron, that's the point. If there is
another target and it's a major city on the East Coast,
we aren't going to be able to do the job by ourselves.
There's too much ground to cover in the time we
have. We're going to need serious backup before
we're through, not just investigative manpower, but
hard-strike capability. I'm going to call the Man right
now, and let him know where things stand. Get him
primed to take the jump when the time comes."
  "Military assistance?" Katz said.
      "Official-type," Brognola answered as he headed
for the door, "the whole foggin' ball of wax."
  "Bingo on that number," Delahunt said.
  Brognola paused in the doorway.
    "It's a pay phone at a highway rest area outside of
Ogden."
"Well," Wethers said, "at least that fits."
"Carmen," Kurtzman directed, "let's get an im-
mediate phone tap on that line. It may be their com-
munication link." He turned to the youngest member
of the Stony Man computer crew. "Akira, we need
transportation for nine men and weapons from Old
Glory to Ogden."
    "Already started on it, Bear. I'll have a pickup
plane in the air in ten minutes."
    Brognola went into a private office to make the
call. As he sat down at the desk, he reached into his
shirt pocket and took out a white plastic pill bottle.

He popped the top and poured a bunch of white tab-
lets into his palm. The antacids were double strength,
and the big Fed ate twice the recommended dose,
crunching them up and swallowing the gritty powder.
He had a bad feeling about Ogden. What Striker had
said made sense to him. If it hadn't, he wouldn't have
been on the verge of interrupting the most powerful
man in the most powerful nation on earth. He picked
up the scrambled phone and hit the autodialer.
    The hard part was, he already knew what the Pres-
ident was going to say.
 He was going to say, "No."

Old Glory Ranch
6:30 a.m. MDT

AS SOON AS IT WAS LIGHT enough, Bolan and Mc-
Carter took a jeep from the compound and drove it
out to the area the informant had sketched as the test
range. It wasn't hard to find. It was a well-traveled
path and they just followed the tire ruts. Bolan
stopped the jeep at a place where the wheel tracks
were all jumbled and crisscrossed and the sparse veg-
etation had been scuffed away by two-legged traffic.
    McCarter knelt down and looked at the trampled
earth and said, "They fired the trainer in this area.
See all the holes in the ground where they staked
down the tripod?"
Bolan nodded. "Ycah, this is the place, all right/'
"Now all we've got to do is figure out what they
were shooting at." McCarter took a compass from his
jacket pocket. "Good thing that informant took a
bearing for us. This is too big a country to play find-
the-bloody-pickle in."




    The Brit sighted in on a mountain in the near dis-
tance. "It's that way," he said, pointing at the sum-
mit.
    Bolan followed the well-worn ruts and drove at
high speed up the gradual incline to the base of the
mountain. He stopped there, and they both got out of
the jeep.
    McCarter stretched out the kinks in his back as he
surveyed the landscape above them. The hillside ris-
ing from the plain was a mix of thin soil and loose
shards that had fallen away from the bedrock of the
summit.
    "We're going to have a hell of time collecting any
hard evidence here," he said. "Even with a hundred
men, all armed with metal detectors, every one of
them lucky as bleeding hell, the chances of finding a
spent trainer round on that slope is next to nil. If we
can't find the evidence, Striker, then we can't verify
that this hillside was in fact the test-range target.
Without a clearly identified target, we can't even be-
gin to guess what this artillery test range was designed
to represent."
    "Let's have another look at the aerial map," Bolan
said. He unfolded it on the jeep's hood and found
their position. "Look, there's a lake on the other side
of the ridge we're facing. It's in a bowl between the
peak and the side of the higher mountain above it."
The Executioner checked the topo map for the height
of the ridge.
    "My guess is there aren't any trainer rounds in that
mountainside," Bolan said. "I think they're all in the
lake."
 McCarter looked up at the ridge. "That means the

second team is drilling in preparation for an indirect-
fire mission."
    "Right. They're practicing shooting a cannon over
an obstacle and letting the round fall on the target.
Sounds to me like they're planning to fire over a city
skyline."
    "That's kind of a leap in logic, isn't it?" McCarter
said. "Isn't it just as possible that the obstacle they're
shooting over is exactly the same? More mountains,
not skyscrapers. The second fire team could still be
targeting the IRS at Ogden."
  "Not if they're on their way to New Jersey."
    The sound of an approaching aircraft made both
men turn toward the runway.
    McCarter scratched the stubble on his chin and
said, "Something tells me that's for us."

Highway 15 Rest Area
Ogden, Utah
6:35 a.m. MDT

ED KELSO WALKED along the edge of the pavement,
past the other semis parked in the truck section of the
rest stop. Off to his right, the ground dropped away
sharply. When he stepped over to the stone barrier of
the lookout, he could see the fiver twisting through
the narrow canyon below. It glistened like a greasy,
green snake.
 He closed his eyes.
    He was standing on the edge of a towering cliff,
but not this one.
    He was about to jump off into space, but not this
space.
 The precipice he faced was inside his head. There


was no bottom to the canyon he visualized; its sheer
walls were smooth as glass.
    Once the numbers started falling, it would be eas-
ier, he told himselfi There wouldn't be time to think.
Just to act, to follow the drill.
    He shivered. The morning was dry cold. Under his
windbreaker, the MAC-10 hanging on a lanyard from
his neck felt like a two-ton weight, bending his spine,
dragging him down. He hadn't slept a wink.
    All night long, every time he shut his eyes, he kept
seeing the mushroom cloud. Like a hulking, dirty gray
beast rising over the plain that led to the Salt Lake.
And every time it rose, he thought, I did that. It was
an event that would be photographed and videotaped
from every conceivable angle, the images shown and
reshown around the world for as long as there were
human beings left to view it.
  Every time the footage ran he could say: I did that.
  All the sheepic thinking: Kelso did that.
  The event would live forever, and so would he.
    It made him want to puke over the lookout wall,
not because he had any second thoughts about the
terrible carnage he was about to inflict, but because
he didn't know if he was truly worthy of such an
honor. That kind of immortal fame belonged to the
great conquerors and despots of history: Alexander III
of Macedon, Augustus Caesar, Genghis Khan. Men
who had changed the world by bending it to their will.
    Kelso opened his eyes and looked down at the
river. He shook off the nausea by telling himself that
worthy didn't figure into it at all, that Fate now, as
always, had done all the choosing. In which case he,
like Alexander, like Caesar, was merely its instru-
ment. As was the nuke shell and the cannon.

    He walked across the parking lot to the rear of the
militia's truck. Mallone was standing guard there. He
wore a hooded parka that concealed the automatic
weapon he carried.
  "Anything going on?" Kelso said.
      "Nope. I haven't seen anything suspicious. Every-
body's still asleep around here, everybody but us."
  "I'll send Ringman out to spell you."
    Kelso walked along the trailer and climbed into the
passenger's side of the truck. Speck was sitting be-
hind the wheel. The curtain in front of the cab's sleep-
ing area was drawn back, and Wiley and Ringman
were lying down on the bunks. They looked relaxed,
if not rested. At dawn, Kelso had told the gun crew
what their target was. He wanted to give them plenty
of time to get the whooping and hollering out of their
systems. They had to be settled in, comfortable with
the idea when H-hour came.
  "How much longer until the call?" Speck asked.
    Kelso looked at his watch. "We should hear in
another hour and a half. Some time after eight."
    "The call" was critical to the full success of their
mission. According to plan, prior to his receiving full
payment for the Soviet artillery shell, the nuclear mid-
dleman had shipped the goods to Salt Lake City in a
heavy-duty washing-machine box. Still according to
plan, he was withholding the PAL code until Car-
mody reached New York and transferred the rest of
the money. Carmody was supposed to call them when
he had been given the nuke's arming and firing se-
quence.
  "Let's open the damned craze now," Speck said.
    "We can close it up again after we have a peek,"
Wiley said.




i! ....
?,

    Kelso was anxious to see the puppy, too, but he
had his standing orders and they made perfect sense.
Do not uncrate the shell until you are at the firing
site. If something unexpected happens, if you get into
a traffic accident, or if there's a skirmish with the law,
you have a better chance of moving the weapon from
the scene without raising an alarm if it's still in the
washing-machine box. The National Guard howitzer
could and would be abandoned because it was re-
placeable; the nuke was not. Those were the priorities.
    "We don't touch it until we're in position," Kelso
said.

Stony Man Farm
8:15 a.m. EDT

BROGNOLA HAD TO WAIT more than an hour for the
President to return his call. When they were con-
nected via the scrambler, he laid out the case for un-
precedented action. The longer he talked, the stonier
became the silence at the other end of the line. When
the President finally responded, he gave it to Brognola
with both barrels.
    "Hal, do you seriously think that I want to go
down in history as the first Chief Executive since the
Civil War to order the use of full military ordnance
against American citizens on American soil?"
    "Sir, with all due respect, if we don't take decisive,
large-scale action very soon, you may go down in
history as the first guy at the helm when the nukes
hit the fan."
    "From what you've told me, you don't know that.
In fact, you have no way of knowing at this point.
But you're asking me to commit unspecified weapons

of war, unselective, broad-impact weapons of war, for
use in heavily populated areas. The potential collat-
eral casualties and collateral damage to property are
unimaginable. Unthinkable."
    "Sir, if a nuclear weapon is detonated in a major
East Coast city, the destruction and loss of life will
be far worse. We're looking at damage control here."
  "Only if the threat you outline is real."
  "In my opinion, it is."
    "You need to take care of business, Hal," the Pres-
ident said. "I understand the time factor in mobilizing
sufficient force to do the job, but I categorically reject
a military alert at this stage of the game. You haven't
convinced me that the tactical situation warrants it.
For all you know, your people may be able to contain
the business in Utah this morning. If they do, this
whole thing will go away like it never happened. I
need solid proof before I will even consider author-
izing such an operation. If I proceed without proof
and the threat fails to materialize over your supposed
East Coast target, I could have a nationwide panic on
my hands."
  "I understand, sir."
"Like I said, Hal, take care of business."
Brognola put down the phone. He had failed to get
his point across that overwhelming lethal force had to
be on standby, ready to defuse the situation if circum-
stances dictated. The Man wouldn't commit because
'there was too much jeopardy, political and social. The
fallout wouldn't just be over Salt Lake City or Bos-
ton. Brognola had planted the idea, though. That was
all he could do at this stage.
    "The ball remains in our court," Brognola said to
Kurtzman and Price as he returned to the computer




center. "We're in sole charge of the operation until
the Ogden attack is neutralized."
    "He doesn't want to consider an East Coast pri-
mary target?" Price said.
  Brognola shook his head.
    "He's not alone them," Wethers said. "That
would make for a real nightmare scenario. We could
probably evacuate Ogden if we had to, but we
couldn't possibly deal with Boston, D.C. or New
York."
  "Where are we?" Brognola said.
    "Striker called back while you were waiting on the
phone," Kurtzman told him. "The combined Stony
Man teams are airborne via military jet. ETA the rest
area by 08:30."
  "And the test range?"
    "He says it represents a separate target," Price re-
plied, "not Ogden. Probably a big city. They prac-
ticed firing over a high obstacle to hit a lower-
elevation target. From the scale of the test range,
Striker estimates the range to the actual target is under
four miles."
    "That would give the gun crew a chance to escape
the effects of the blast," Katz said, "but just barely."
    "It fits into the high-angle-of-fim theory, though,"
Price said. "Tall buildings could absorb and block
some of the blast effects, which would make a close-
in shot less risky."
  "It could be New York, Hal," Katz warned.
    Brognola didn't respond. "Do we have any idea
what their preferred targets are likely to be?"
    "We're in the middle of running a word search of
all the Sawtooth Patriot communications Justice has
logged," Dr. Wethers said. "We're looking for fre-

quency of usage and context in order to get a list of
their priority targets. Then we can try to match the
locations and the ranges with what we know about
the trainer shots."
  "Sounds shaky as hell," Brognola said.
    "At this point," Kurtzman explained, "we've got
nothing else to go on."
    "Assuming the worst," Brognola went on, "that
the East Coast is in imminent danger, I need a mul-
tipronged contingency plan that the President will
agree to. Weapons, tactics, transport, personnel. With
an emphasis on minimizing collateral damage and
death."
    "Let's hope they find the nuke in Utah," Barbara
Price said.




'Z:

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Highway 15 Rest Area
Salt Lake City, Utah
7:32 a.m. MDT

David McCarter sat in the driver's seat of an un-
marked, cream-colored half-ton van. He was parked
about 150 feet from the rest-room peninsula that jut-
ted into the broad expanse of asphalt. Behind the rest-
room building were some vending machines and a
grassy area, and beyond that, the overlook to the can-
yon and river.
    From his position, the Phoenix Force leader could
see all the other vehicles involved in the operation.
To his right, nosed into the space at the tip of the
peninsula, was the light blue utility van manned by
Hawkins and Encizo. A little farther around the pe-
rimeter, also in a nose-in space, Bolan and Manning
sat in a white van. To his left, parked in the desig-
nated truck and RV area, was a sixty-foot motor home
driven by James. The RV also held Lyons and Blan-
canales. The RV was the team's hole card in case the
suspect vehicle tried to make for the highway en-
trance at the other end of the parking lot. Depending
on his angle when the critical moment came, James

would either ram the truck or block its path to keep
it from reaching the highway.
    The suspect vehicle, a red Kenworth tractor towing
a silver trailer, was parked almost directly in front of
McCarter. They had identified the semitruck by
matching the tread patterns on its tires with photos of
the tire tracks taken at the Chocolate Canyon location.
McCarter's view of the truck--and its view of him--
was partially blocked by another semi that was parked
between them. He could see the edge of the right rear
of the trailer and the man in the long overcoat leaning
against it.
    Earlier in the morning, McCarter had done a walk-
by himself. Only someone who knew what to look
for would've noticed anything out of the ordinary.
The cuts in the roof weren't visible from the street.
The gun crew had washed the trailer down pretty
thoroughly, but they had missed some burned pro-
pellant on the outside of the rear-door hinges. The
clincher, though, was what the gun blast had done to
the trailer itselfi Its walls were no longer true, but
bulged in the middle where half the rivets were miss-
ing.
    McCarter could also see the pay phone from where
he was parked. Two men stood beside it. Gadgets
Schwarz had already taken their pictures. He had also
photographed the three other men who had entered
and exited the suspect truck in the past hour. At that
very moment, all the photos were being compared
against Justice Department computer banks in an at-
tempt to get positive IDs on the men involved. A
check of the license plates On the truck and trailer
turned up nothing; if the vehicle had been stolen, the
theft hadn't been reported yet.




:2

    The two guys by the phone were obviously waiting
for an incoming call. They had even taped a phony
Out Of Order sign on the coin box to keep the line
free.
    Were they waiting for the go-ahead from Oswald
Carmody to hit the IRS processing center, or were
they waiting for the PAL code so they could detonate
the weapon on the target?
    The Stony Man team didn't know, but, when and
if the call came through, they were in a position to
get the answers because the pay-phone line was
tapped. In the back of McCarter's van, Schwarz was
set up and ready to record and monitor the conver-
sation, which would also be routed directly to Stony
Man's computer lab.
    The combined Phoenix and Able offensive had
been postponed in the hope that a call would come
through for the howitzer team, that it could be traced
and that it would lead back to the other gun crew.
After what had happened at Old Glory Ranch,
McCarter was grateful for the slight delay. There had
been a lot of people at the rest stop when they had
first taken up their positions--rows of truckers still
asleep in their cabs after a long night on the road,
RVers on vacation getting a late start on the day. The
situation was somewhat less dangerous to bystanders
now, as most of the truckers and RVers were gone.
There was still the very real possibility that the bad
guys would go down fighting or would kill them-
selves. McCarter needed at least one of them alive, in
case the nuke wasn't in the trailer and the phone
didn't ring.
    He heard Schwarz rustling around in the back of
the van, which was packed with commandeered

phone equipment and a computer with a modem and
fax. The curtain that separated the driver from the
cargo compartment opened a crack.
    "We've got an incoming from the Farm," Schwarz
said.
    He passed McCarter the scrambler-equipped cel-
lular phone.
  "McCarter here."
  "This is the Bear. How's it going?"
    "Our friends at the pay phone are getting very ner-
vous. One guy's been to the bathroom twice in the
last twenty minutes. I think the call they're expecting
is way overdue."
    "Maybe it isn't coming," Kurtzman said. "Krick's
Learjet never made it to Newark. At the last minute,
it diverted to a private strip near Paterson. We
couldn't get Bureau personnel on-site before the plane
took off again. According to the airstrip's field crew,
six men exited the plane and got into a waiting mini-
van. That was over an hour ago. If they were going
to call the pay phone, they've had plenty of time to
do it."
    "We can't afford to wait any longer," Barbara
Price cut in, "not if we want to have any margin for
error at this end. We have to assume the Ogden team
has been stood up by their pals. We're all agreed that
you should take them down now, before they decide
to make a move."
    "Do it as quickly and gently as you can," Kurtz-
man cautioned. "We not only need survivors, but we
need them to be in good enough shape to answer
questions."
    "We'll do our best," McCarter said, and signed
off.




    He used the cellular phone to call each of the other
vehicles and inform them of the change in plans and
the new parameters. When he was done, he picked up
the Colt Woodsman .22 from the passenger's seat and
checked to make sure there was a hollowpoint round
in the chamber. The autopistol's two-inch barrel was
extended by another five inches by a Kissinger-
designed silencer. Coupled with the subsonic ammo,
it made about as much noise as a worm's sneeze.
    The Phoenix Force leader picked up a newspaper
from the dashboard and pretended to read it while he
kept an eye on the two men by the pay phone. The
way one of the guys was powering down the vending-
machine coffee, McCarter figured it wouldn't be long
before he made another pit stop.
    It wasn't. When McCarter saw the guy head for the
rest room, he bailed out of the van. As he did, he put
on his sunglasses. It was the signal for the attack to
begin. He crossed the asphalt with the Woodsman
concealed under the folded newspaper.
    The blue van's engine started up, and Hawkins be-
gan to back it out of the parking space at the end of
the peninsula.
    When the suspect entered the rest room, the white
van's doors opened and Bolan and Manning hopped
out. In one hand, Manning carried a yellow plastic
Closed For Cleaning sign. He placed it on the con-
crete outside the men's room, then followed Bolan
through the door.
    As McCarter stepped up on the curb, behind him,
across the parking lot, the doors of the motor home
popped open and Lyons and Blancanales jumped out.
They closed in on the Kenworth truck and trailer, as
McCarter closed in on the pay phone.

    It rang when he was thirty feet from it. The sudden
sound surprised the guy leaning against it and made
him flinch.
    At about the same time the phone rang, Hawkins
drove the blue van along the front of the rest room
and stopped against the curb, blocking the gun crew's
view of the phone and the lavatory entrance.
    McCarter was ten feet away when the man beside
the pay phone turned, ducked under the privacy hood
and picked up the handset. He put a finger in his left
ear so he could hear better over the sound of the high-
way traffic.
    Whatever Gadgets Schwarz said to him, it must're
been very upsetting because the man dropped the
phone and whirled around.
    If his intention was to run back to the truck, he
realized, as he looked up into a pair of hard green
eyes, that he was going to have to go through David
McCarter to get there. He started to reach into his
open jacket.
    "Don't," McCarter said, letting him see the si-
lencer's fat blue-black muzzle sandwiched between
the folds of newspaper. He tried his best to sound
convincing, earnest, concerned. "You don't have to
die here, mate. You have a choice."
    The expression on the man's face said he surren-
dered. The guy let his hand fall away from his jacket.
As he did so, he shook a long, thin-bladed knife from
his sleeve and, in a blinding rush, thrust it at the front
of the Phoenix Force leader's throat. When McCafret
managed to draw back enough so the strike came up
short, the man tried to gut him, whipping the knife
straight down, slicing through the front of his shirt
from collarbone to navel.




Y

    McCarter shot him once, center chest. The sound
of the silenced .22 pistol was lost in the highway's
racket. As the man slumped back against the phone
hood, the Briton surged forward, catching him under
the armpits. He manhandled the guy over to the slid-
ing door on the side of the light blue van just as
Encizo opened it from the inside. McCarter dumped
the man through the open doorway, and Encizo
helped to roll him onto the floor.
    "The only way we're going to get any information
out of this guy," Encizo said as he reached for a tarp,
"is if we hold a seance."
    "That bloody sod left me no choice," McCarter
said. "Let's hope we have better luck with the oth-
ers."
 Then he turned back for the rest room.

As THEY WALKED down the aisle between the rows
of parked semis, Lyons's and Blancanales's view of
what was going on at the pay phone was blocked by
the light blue van. Their immediate concern was the
man standing guard at the rear of the suspect trailer.
If he shouted a warning, the men in the truck cab
could get the big rig rolling and make everything real
messy in a hurry. The rear guard had to fall first.
    They could see the man was worried about the po-
sition of the blue van. He didn't like not being able
to maintain eye contact with his pals. As the Able
Team Warriors closed on his position, they saw him
step away from the trailer, his long overcoat flapping
around his knees, his cowboy boots clunking on the
tarmac as he tried for a better look.
    Lyons and Blancanales got within twenty-five feet
of him before he sensed their approach. His reactions

were cat quick. As he spun on them, out from under
the long coat came a silenced blue-steel machine pis-
tol.
    Blancanales had rehearsed in his head all the things
he was going to say to the guy to convince him to
give up without a fight. He was going to tell him that
no one at Old Glory Ranch had survived, that the
militia movement was dead, that he had to think about
himself, about his own survival. That under the cir-
cumstances, there was no shame in that, and a man
had to make his own peace with the world. Pol was
going to ask him about his family. Ask him if there
weren't people he loved who would miss him when
he was dead. He was going to tell him that a prison
term wasn't the end of the world. That he could do
his time and get out before he was too old to enjoy
himselfi
    All the things Pol had rehearsed went out the win-
dow as the MAC-10's muzzle moved from the ver-
tical to the horizontal.
    Blancanales and Lyons had danced to this tune be-
fore.
    They each stepped wide and fired almost simulta-
neously. Their silenced machine pistols spit 9 mm
lead into the man's chest. The mushrooming bullets
crisscrossed through the space that held a beating hu-
man heart.
 It beat no more.
    The Patriot's gun hand dropped, convulsing as he
died, and sending a dozen rounds of parabellum lead
into the ground at his feet, digging shallow little pits
in the asphalt.
    "Let's get him under the trailer," Blancanales said,
bending down and grabbing the man by his boots.




    With Lyons's help, it only took a minute to hide
the corpse. They straightened up and surveyed the
scene. Apparently no one had seen what had hap-
pened. There were no shouts of alarm. A flock of
birds tweeted at the trash receptacle along the walk,
and from the open window of a nearby fifth-wheeler,
a family squabble was in progress.
    Lyons and Biancanales split up, moving along op-
posite sides of the suspect rig. Lyons slipped up on
the driver's door. Noiselessly he climbed from the gas
tank to the footstep. The driver wasn't looking when
Lyons suddenly appeared outside the window. To get
his attention, Lyons tapped on the glass with the bar-
rel of his weapon.
    The guy must're had a subgun in his lap because
holes started popping through the outside of the red
door.
    Lyons let go of the hand grip and let himself fall
away from the cab. A salvo of slugs sailed over him,
thwacking into the trailer of the next rig in the row.
He fired as he dropped, sending half a clip into the
door. He had a split-second glimpse of the driver's
head shuddering from the impacts, then he hit the
ground hard on his taiibone and elbows.
      On the other side of the cab, the passenger bailed
out. Lyons saw his feet hit the pavement.  "Hold it," Blancanales said.
The guy didn't hold it. He took off running.
Lyons rolled to his feet and braced his weapon
against the truck's front fender. He had no shot be-
cause of the bystanders. The guy had ducked around
some tourists walking back along the canyon-side
path and he kept on running down the path. If the guy
was armed, he wasn't showing a weapon yet.

    Blancanales hid his own gun and took off after the
militiaman. Lyons followed in easy strides.
     They both thought they had him. The guy had no-
whem to run. The canyon cut off all escape. Well, perhaps not quite all.
    Lyons and Blancanales couldn't do anything but
watch as he jumped the low wall and ran off into
space. His legs were still pumping as he dropped out
of sight.
He didn't scream. In fact, he didn't make a sound.
The two members of Able Team ran back to the
truck. While Lyons checked on the condition of the
driver, Blancanales opened the trailer's side door. He
did this cautiously, with his weapon out, even though
they didn't think there was anyone left inside.
    Lyons joined him and said, "The driver is iced,
too."
    "So we went zero-for-three," Blancanales said.
"That sucks. We'd better see what we've got inside."
    When they climbed into the trailer, the first thing
they saw was the gun.
    "The California Guard will be glad to get this baby
back," Blancanales said, patting the carriage of the
M-198 howitzer. While he walked along the wall to
the front of the cannon and looked under the barrel,
Lyons examined the 155 mm HE shells secured to the
front inside wall.
    "If we add in the four rounds we know they fired
at Chocolate Canyon," Lyons said, "this totals up to
all the conventional ordnance that was reported stolen
from the armory."
    "So where's the nukeT' Biancahales said.
"There's nothing at this end of the trailer."
  "We've got one thing left up here," Lyons said.




When his panner joined him, he indicated the wood-
reinforced cardboard box that had Washing Machine
written all over it. "It's got to be in here."
    "It's about the right size," Blancanales said.
"Let's have a look."
    Using his commando dagger, Lyons pried off the
top of the box and set it aside. He had to remove the
interior packing to expose the box's contents.
    Biancanales looked in and said, "What the hell is
going on here? Is this supposed to be some kind of
joke?"
  "If it is, it isn't funny."

KELSO PLUGGED MORE CHANGE into the vending ma-
chine, punched the button and waited while the paper
cup filled with black coffee. It would be his last cup
for a while, he told himself, since he was stagging to
get jittery. Carmody was an hour late in making the
call. Something real bad couid've happened at the
New Jersey end. They could've been arrested, or the
middleman could've pulled a no-show, leaving them
without a PAL code and stuck with a worthless nuke.
Maybe the guy never had the code to begin
with. .. maybe it was all a scam.
    It didn't occur to him that he and Speck and the
others might have been the ones suckered. He still
thought he was going to write his name in dirty gray
smoke across the pages of the history books.
    He picked up the coffee and took a sip. It went
down his throat like battery acid. The day had turned
out bright and clear. A few sheeple filtered by him,
moving to and from the rest rooms and candy ma-
chines, exercising their miniature schnauzers and
cameras on the scenic walkway. He didn't make eye

contact with any of them. Under his jacket, the ma-
chine pistol rode uncomfortably against his chest; the
bottom of the magazine felt as though it was wearing
a hole in his shirt. He took the coffee with him back
to the pay phone where Speck stood waiting.
    "What are we going to do?" Speck said. He had
a worried look that Kelso didn't remember ever see-
ing before.
  "We wait a while longer."
    "And if the call still doesn't come? What are we
going to do then?"
    Kelso had been thinking about their options for the
past fifteen minutes. "We can always walk away from
the gun and the nuke," he said. "Hitch a ride down
into town and from there split up and go our separate
ways. Or we can stash the gun and the nuke some-
where until we find out what happened to Carmody
and the PAL code. Drive to a safe place, dump the
trailer and the tractor."
    "The third possibility," Speck said, "is to just
suck it up and do the dirty deed."
  "If we don't arm it, it won't explode."
    "But it'll break when it hits. The plutonium'11 go
all over the place. It'd take a major cleanup effort to
make the building safe again."
    "That's a minor inconvenience compared to what
we could do with an armed weapon. I say, if we don't
hear in the next few minutes, we get the hell out of
here. Then we sit on the tools until we can use them
in the way we planned."
    "Yeah," Speck said, "I guess that makes the most
sense."
    "I've got to use the head again," Kelso told him.
'TII be back in a minute."




r;i

THE TWO MEN WHc FOLLOWED Kelso into the rest
room both had weapons drawn. Mack Bolan held a
silenced Beretta 93-R, and Gary Manning wielded a
silenced MP-5. They checked under the doors of the
other stalls to make sure they were unoccupied.
    Through the crack between the stall door and the
metal wall, Gary Manning could see Kelso adjusting
his machine pistol. He nodded to Mack Bolan, who
started to move for one of the unoccupied stalls.
    Manning aimed through the crack and took the shot
with his 9 mm. The H&K coughed, spitting a puff of
smoke and ejecting a bright casing onto the concrete
floor. The jacketed hollowpoint hit Kelso high in the
right shoulder, shattering the joint.

KELSO GROANED and his knees started to buckle, but
he caught himself against the wall with his left arm.
His right arm hung useless at his side. Turning, he
struggled to find the grip of the MAC-10 with his
clumsy, nondominant hand.
    Then a guy dropped down on top of him from the
top of the stall wall at his back. Two hundred pounds
landed on his shoulders. Pain screamed through his
broken joint, and he collapsed.
    When he opened his eyes, Kelso was looking into
the silencer of a Beretta 93-R.
    "We're going to walk out of here," the black-
haired man with the Beretta told him as he reached
over and unlocked the stall door. "You're not going
to make a fuss. We're going to get into the light blue
van at the curb. Do you understand?"
    The barrel-chested guy opened the stall, then
picked up a spent shell casing from the floor and put
it into his pocket.

    The black-haired guy pushed him out of the stall,
then the two men bracketed him out of the rest room
and walked him toward the blue van. Clutching his
shoulder, Kelso looked over at the pay phone.
    Speck wasn't there, but the handset hanging down
on its metal-armored cable was still swinging. A
stocky guy with green eyes picked it up and put it
back on the hook. Then he retrieved the Closed For
Cleaning sign and swung into step beside them.
    "Closed for business is what you are," he said to
Kelso. He had a British accent.
    The other two men hurried him into the waiting
van. They pushed him onto the floor beside a tarp.
There was a long, still form underneath the canvas.
When they all got in and shut the door, it was
crowded in the back of the van. He counted four men
plus himself.
    "He's bleeding pretty bad," the man who had shot
him said.
"Has he said anything?" the Briton asked.
"Not even ouch," the black-haired guy replied.
Then the van started to move. The driver took it
around the parking lot and slipped in beside the red
Kenworth. The Briton opened the sliding door.
    "What do you think of that?" he said, nodding
toward the truck.
    The panel on the driver's door was riddied with
bullet holes--some exits, but mostly entries.
    "We got the truck, the howitzer and all your
friends," the Latin-looking man said. He flipped back
the edge of the tarp to reveal Speck's corpse. "Don't
you think it's time you started talking to us?"
 Under Kelso's fingers, blood was oozing forth




steadily. It had already soaked through his sleeve and
into the lining of the windbreaker.
      "Carmody stiffed you, huh?" the black-haired man
said. "He left you holding the bag."  "I want a lawyer," Kelso said.
    The British guy laughed at him. "We're not cops,"
he said. "You're not under arrest."
    "You're in much deeper shit than that," the man
who'd shot him warned.
    "Aren't you a bit puzzled by all this?" the black-
haired guy asked him. "I mean, how we got on to
you so quickly? Sure you are, it's eating you up in-
side. And we don't want that."  Kelso glared at him.
    "The reason we found you so easily is because
your commander in chief left us a trail a mile wide
that led right here." He waved the maps in Kelso's
face. "As you can see, the number of the pay phone
is written in the margin of the map that shows your
firing position and the intended target. A careful guy
like Carmody doesn't make a mistake like that with-
out meaning to. It explains why he never called you,
doesn't it? Face it, you're the patsy in this. The all-
day sucker."
    "He played you like he played everybody else,"
the barrel-chested man continued. "Fake reports and
fake verifications of troop movements, of black heli-
copters, of Soviet trucks on freight trains. All of it,
from beginning to end, has been one big lie. In the
last eight hours, a !or of people have died on account
of this asshole. He didn't care what happened to the
men at the ranch and he doesn't care what happens
to you. To him, you're just a means to an end."
  "We want to know where Carmody is," the Briton

said. "We want the location of the real nuclear target.
If you help us, it'll go a whole lot easier on you."
    "No way," Kelso said. His head was suddenly
spinning. What did the Briton mean by "real nuclear
target?" They had to have found the weapon in the
truck by now. Unless Mallone or Ringman had some-
how managed to make off with it. Oh, wouldn't that
be choice! Despite his pain, he wanted to laugh out
loud.
    "We've got something to show you," the black-
haired man said.
    They pulled him out of the van and dragged him
around to the side of the trailer. There were two guys
inside. They helped to jerk him up and in.
    The second Kelso saw the washing-machine box
standing there, he knew it was all over. The lid was
off the crate, and the packing was dumped on the
floor.
    They shoved him over to the box and forced him
to look inside.
  "Son of a bitch," Kelso said.
    "What the bloody hell were you going to do with
that?" the Brit asked him. "Clean up the government
one load at a time?"




PART THREE

OPERATION FIRESTORM




CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Union City, New Jersey
i0:i4 a. rn~ EDT

Captain Andrei Samov dropped the magazine of the
Valmet M-76F and checked the 7.62 mm round on
top of the stack. It had a black tip, which meant it
was U.S.-manufactured M-61. Armor-piercing. He
slapped the mag back into the Finnish knockoff of the
Soviet AK-47 assault rifle and made sure the fire-
selector switch was set on Safe.
  "You did well, Tasha," he said.
    "Thank the embassy's Intel people. They
scrounged up all the gear. I just put in the order."
    He looked at her. Her face alarmed him, but he
was stretched so thin on this mission there was noth-
ing he could do about it.
    "You must be tired," he said. "I wish I could re-
lieve you, but you know the situation."
    "I'm okay," Beloc said. "I've felt worse and still
done my job."
    "I know you have." He took a set of car keys from
the slash pocket of his leather bomber jacket and set
them down on the roof beside the walkie-talkie he




had brought for her. "Those are the keys to the sedan
parked at the foot of the fire escape," he said.
  "Fine."
    Sarnov raised himself from a sitting position and
looked over the edge of the derelict factory's roof. He
scanned the warehouse opposite with a pair of com-
pact binoculars. Ten minutes earlier, shortly after he,
Ferdishenko and Turgenev had arrived on the scene,
all of the regular workers at the International Scrap
Metal warehouse had exited the building carrying
their coats and lunch boxes. They had all driven away
with smiles on their faces. Apparently their boss had
given them the rest of the day off, with pay. The only
car left in the parking area was Sergio Ishmael
Eshamani's stretch limousine. The only people who
remained on the premises had machine pistols under
their coats.
    Three men in gray suits and silk T-shirts stood in
front of the building; three more were at the sliding
doors on its right side. They looked like the same
brand of thug that had escorted Eshamani in Riga and
had guarded his London residence. According to Be-
Ioc, there were at least three more of the hired guns
inside.
    Four against nine wasn't impossible odds, espe-
cially with Beioc behind the German-made sniper ri-
fle, but Samov had already decided against a con-
frontation at the warehouse. With all the sentries
milling around outside, the Spetsnaz team couldn't
get close enough to the warehouse to be able to tell
if the starookha was actually there. Based on the
roeming's activity, it looked like it had to be, but they
had no way of knowing for sure. If they attacked and
it wasn't there, they would have shown their hand to

Eshamani, which would leave them no alternative but
to torture him until he gave it up. If the starookha
was there and it was hidden in the cargo containers
that Beloc had described to him, they would need
time to find it. Lots of time. If they got into a tirefight,
the battle was bound to be prolonged since the Sici-
lians could easily retreat inside the building to defend
it. A prolonged firefight, even in a fairly deserted area
like this, would certainly bring the police, who would
surround them. The weapon would be discovered by
the American authorities, and the Russian government
would be publicly embarrassed and humiliated.
    Under the circumstances, Sarnov had decided that
he wouldn't try to take the weapon out of the ware-
house. Tactically the best thing for him to do was to
wait until the nuclear shell was transferred to the
buyer and the buyer left the building with it. If they
attacked the transporting vehicle on the street, they
could kill all the opposition in a single fusillade of
AP rounds, take the shell and be gone before anything
could be done about it by Sicilians or the New Jersey
police. To that end, Sarnov had appropriated three
embassy vehicles--a step van and two late-model se-
dans. Ferdishenko and Turgenev were already in po-
sition in the van at the north end of the block, but
they were, as yet, unarmed. He had to do something
about that, and quickly.
    It only took him a moment to return the Valmet
back into the three-gun carrying case. He picked it
up, patted Beloc on the shoulder and, in a crouch,
slipped back from the front of the roof.
    He took the fire escape down to the street. Keeping
close to the factory's high wall, he ran past the car
he'd brought for Beloc, then hurried around the cor-




ner where his own vehicle was parked. He opened the
rear door of the sedan and put the gun case on the
back seat. After transferring one of the Valmets and
a pair of extra magazines to the front seat, he drove
around the block to where the step van was parked.
    As he pulled in behind it, Ferdishenko opened the
back doors from the inside. He gave his captain the
thumbs-up sign as he accepted the gun case from him.
    Samov pulled a U-turn and returned the way he'd
come. He parked near the intersection of a cross street
a block south of the warehouse. Although he was well
back from the comer, he could still see the building.
Grabbing the Valmet by its pistol grip, he drew the
select-fire weapon into his lap. He worked the actu-
ator handle once, putting a live 7.62 mm round under
the hammer. After rechecking the safety, he set the
weapon on the seat and rolled down the passenger's
window.
    The walkie-talkie sitting between the front seats
chirped. It was Beloc.
    "A vehicle's coming toward the warehouse from
the south."
    "Got it," Samov said, looking to his fight. He
broke the connection.
    The gray Dodge minivan had six men in it. It sped
past his position and turned into the International
Scrap Metal driveway. As it parked next to the limo,
the Sicilians deserted their posts at the side and front
of the building and moved into firing stances all
around it.
    For the first time since his arrival in the States,
Samov felt a surge of confidence. He had already cho-
sen the north and south ambush sites, and they were
perfect. No matter which way the transporting vehicle

turned, the Spetsnaz team was ready to take it out. At
one hundred yards, the armor-piercing rounds in their
Valmets would penetrate a half inch of steel plate.
    To reach the highway with the starookha would
take nothing less than an M-1 tank.

As HE DROVE the minivan down from Paterson with
Skel Peterson and the gun crew in the back and
Charles Krick in the shotgun seat, Oswald Carmody
wasn't thinking about the men he'd left behind at Old
Glory, the men under his command who had surely
died. And he wasn't thinking about the gun team that
he had sacrificed in order to confound his enemies
and buy him the time to work. There hadn't been any
news about Old Glory or Ogden on the TV in the
Learjet, and five hours later, there was none on the
car radio, either. It was as if nothing had happened.
But he had expected that, the power of big govern-
ment to conceal was enormous, especially when it
was playing catch-up.
    What kept running through Carmody's mind as he
followed Krick's directions to the warehouse was
what a perfect target the United Nations made. Be-
cause it was located on the eastern shore of the East
River, there were no tall buildings to block observa-
tion of the registration shells. The spotter could do
his work from the west side of the fiver. They had
considered firing the cannon from the Long Island
side, shooting the nuke straight across the river, but
had decided against it because they felt it was too
close to ground zero. Not only. would they have been
exposed to more fire-blast, but the weapon location
would have been easier to pinpoint.
 If the UN's physical location made it a good




choice, what it represented in the rhetoric of the mi-
litia movement made it ideal. It was more than merely
symbolic of the concept of one-world government
that the Sawtooth Patriots were up in arms about. The
land the UN was on was no longer a part of the U.S.;
it had been ceded to the world body. It was an island
of invasion--literally an encroachment by a consor-
tium of foreign powers, something that would've
made the blood of the founding fathers boil. What
better way to start a war for freedom than to obliterate
that island? And if a quarter-square-mile of Manhat-
tan went up along with it, if half of New York City
was made uninhabitable for decades, so much the bet-
ter. The idea was to create a rallying point for the
millions of disaffected, disenfranchised citizens. Then
all the elements would be in place for revolution: a
simplistic ideology, a well-defined enemy, a charis-
matic leader and the final, perfect spark.
    Carmody thought about Charles Krick, too. He was
surprised that the man hadn't remained on his private
jet. Evidently he had underestimated the depth of
Krick's anger and commitment. Krick had a serious
bone to pick with the status quo. It was so serious
that he didn't just want to be the banker on Operation
Firestorm; it wasn't enough for him that through his
contacts, they had arranged to purchase the nuke and
the cannon to fire it. Krick wanted to get some gun
grease under his manicured tingemails.
    And why not? Big government had taken every-
thing from him. The fruit of the labors of most of his
adult life. And with the ever tightening noose of en-
vironmental laws, government was making sure that
he could never earn his fortune back again. The Feds
were simultaneously robbing and hobbling him. Even

if Krick did earn it all back, what was there to stop
them from robbing him of it all over again? Krick felt
that the time to strike was now and he wanted to be
a part of it.
    That was fine with Carmody. They were one short
on the gun crew with the loss of Rick Link, anyway.
    When Carmody pulled the Dodge minivan into the
driveway of International Scrap Metals, Eshamani's
hired hands came running. Four of them stepped up
to the front of the vehicle, two more to the side--
keeping their firing lanes clear. The miniUzis they
carried were very short, even with the attached si-
lencers. Carmody didn't much like going eyeball-to-
eyeball with almost two hundred rounds of ammuni-
tion.
  Neither did the other Sawtooth Patriots.
    "Who are the greaseballs?" Skel Peterson said as
he unfastened his seat belt.
    "And why are they pointing all those fucking guns
at us?" Billy Ray Ransom asked.
    "They're just taking care of business," Charles
Krick told them. When he got out of the van, he did
so with both hands in the air. "We're expected," he
said to the gunmen.
    Before he'd advanced three feet, he was grabbed,
turned and flung up against the van's stubby hood.
The Sicilians roughly frisked him for weapons.
    "Do know who I am?" Krick said. "Call your
boss. Call him right now!"
    "Stop that, Tonio," Eshamani said from the ware-
house doorway. "Let him go."
    His capo looked disappointed. It had been a very
boring morning so far.
  "I'm sorry, Mr. Krick. The boys are a little on edge




today. Come on inside, all of you. Let them pass,
Tonio."
    Krick came empty-handed, but the rest of the gun
crew left the minivan carrying heavy tool bags, back-
packs and tubular cardboard map cases. They filed
through the warehouse's front door and into the small,
dingy office area. The Sicilian soldiers remained out-
side. The slack was picked up by a trio of armed
mafiosi inside the doorway.
    Eshamani continued to apologize to Krick for the
rudeness of his men. "The problem was I told the
boys to expect four semis, one for each of the cargo
containers. When they saw the little van, they didn't
know who you were. Will the trucks be arriving
shortly?"
    "Yes," Krick said, "but before they do, we need
to examine all the goods."
    Carmody noted the surprise on Eshamani's face.
The arms merchant was not the least bit pleased by
the request.
    "Examine?" Eshamani said. "But everything is
packed in the cargo containers. I don't mind telling
you that I have gone to a great deal of trouble and
expense to conceal it from a customs search. I as-
sumed that you would want to keep it that way for
transport inside the U.S."
    Krick shook his head. "Before we turn the rest of
the funds over to you, we want to take it out. I'm
afraid our demand is not negotiable."
  "But..." Eshamani caught himself.
    Carmody knew then that they had him. The sleazy,
bald-headed little bastard was ready to do cartwheels
to get the nuke out of his warehouse. They were going
to oblige him, but not quite in the way he expected.

 "All right," Eshamani said, turning for the ware-
 house. "Let's get on with it."
     As they walked into the huge storage space lined
 with containers, Krick said, "We want to look at the
 howitzer first."
     Eshamani took them over to a group of four cargo
 containers that had been separated from the rest. "The
 cannon is in the three containers on the right. It's been
 broken down into barrel, carriage, wheels and sus-
 pension."
    He used a pair of bolt cutters to break the seal on
the first container door. When, at his direction, one
of the Sicilians slid back the door, Carmody saw what
the arms merchant was talking about. The inside of
the container was packed floor to ceiling with pieces
of scrap steel.
    The gun crew donned heavy leather gloves from
their tool bags and began unloading the scrap. They
piled it up on the warehouse planking.
    "Do you see now how long this will take?" Es-
hamani asked Krick.
    "We've got all day," he replied. "If you're in such
a hurry, why don't you tell your shooters to give them
a hand?"
    Eshamani nodded. "Go ahead," he told his men.
"Put on gloves and help them. Do something to earn
your pay."
    The Sicilians took off their suit jackets, and neatly
folded them before they pitched in.
    It did take a while to clear the gun carriage from
the tons of steel that had been so carefully packed in
around it. Once the carriage was free, Peterson and
Gabhart used the warehouse's ceiling crane to drag it
out onto the wooden plank flooring.




œ2

    Next, they started work on the container that held
the 152 mm howitzer's wheels and suspension, and
bags of small parts. When that, too, sat out on the
deck, Peterson and the others took a break, mopping
the sweat from their faces and necks.
    Carmody opened one of the backpacks and took
out a military manual they had painstakingly trans-
lated from the original Russian. He flipped the ar-
moreifs guide to the D-20 open to the section on parts
and assembly of the cannon's support and elevation
systems.
    "What are they doing now?" Eshamani demanded
as Carmody and Peterson started laying out the small
parts in groups. Ransom and Gabhart began wrestling
the larger pieces of the suspension into position.
    "They're putting the gun together," Krick said,
amused by the arms merchant's consternation. "How
else are we going to know if all the parts are here?
When I pay this much for an item, I don't expect to
have to run to the hardware store for some missing
bolts."
    "You're going to take it all apart again after you
assemble it?" Eshamani said. "And then pack the
pieces back into the containers? My God, that could
take days."
    "No, it'll go right into the trailer we've already
customized."
    Carmody looked up from his nut-counting in time
to see Eshamani's reaction to the lie.
 The arms merchant seemed much relieved.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Stony Man Farm
11:55 a~m. EDT

Barbara Price picked a glass bottle from the bin at
the back of the computer center, twisted off the top
and took a long swallow of apple juice. The cold liq-
uid soothed her parched throat. She'd been talking
almost nonstop for the past two hours. Talking and
analyzing. She was pleased with the result. The Stony
Man operations crew had made an amazing amount
of progress since McCarter had called in with the re-
port from the successful assault in the highway rest
area in Utah. Though she was never one to toot her
own horn in public, she knew that their productivity
was due in some measure to her organizational skills.
From the moment she'd realized that the Ogden how-
itzer team might be a decoy, she'd begun delegating
and compartmentalizing the team's efforts to cover all
the contingencies, as she and Kurtzman had broken
them down.
    The first thing she'd done had been to set the
Farm's tactical adviser, Yakov Katzenelenbogen, to
work identifying in detail all the military counter-
measures that could isolate and destroy the militia-




men's howitzer, no matter where it was sited. From
this range of options, she reasoned, they could quickly
select a response that would fit the actual circum-
stances of the impending attack and still be acceptable
to the President.
    At her request, Akira Tokaido had continued his
computerized word-frequency search of the Justice
Department's compilation of Sawtooth Patriot docu-
ments and recorded conversations.
    In anticipation of the target being identified prior
to H-hour, she had set both Carmen Delahunt and Dr.
Huntington Wethers working on the ground-search
parameters for the weapon. Specifically they had the
critical task of finding the keys to identifying the
most-likely firing positions, given the information
they'd already received from Old Glory Ranch. With
the limited manpower and time they had to resolve
the situation, they could only mount a highly concen-
trated search. They had to be able to squeeze the most
out of that effort.
    At 7:48 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time, when
McCarter had told them that the lone surviving mi-
litiaman had confirmed the existence of a second
howitzer and given up the location of its East Coast
target, Price had her people ready to take the infor-
mation and run with it.
Immediately things had begun to fall into place.
The target that the survivor had identified fit per-
fectly with Tokaido's data. In terms of the frequency
of mention and the hostility of language, the United
Nations was at the top of the Sawtooth Patriots' hate
list. The survivor's explanation for why the Old Glory
gun team had been forced to use an artillery trainer
instead of a real weapon also made sense. He had told

McCafret that they intended to fire a 152 mm Soviet
nuke shell through a Soviet 152 mm cannon, both of
which were being kept at a secret East Coast location.
McCarter had presumed, and Katz and Price had
agreed, that the howitzer was most likely in firing
position, if not already sighted in on the target.
    The moment the target was named, Brognola had
gotten on the horn with the President. After the chief
executive was made aware of the developments, he
gave Brognola authorization to contact the UN head-
quarters security force and arrange a discreet evacu-
ation of the building.
    By the time Brognola had finished arranging for
that, Katz had come up with a military option that he
felt was feasible and did not unnecessarily endanger
a large segment of the civilian population. His plan
looked good to everyone in the computer center.
    When Brognola had rung the President back, the
first thing he had told him was that they were on the
speakerphone at Stony Man, that time considerations
dictated that all parties at the Farm had to be instantly
available to answer his questions about the plan they
had in mind. Before going through the particulars of
the operation, Brognola had explained that they were
proceeding on a series of logical assumptions that
were based on the known facts. According to the sur-
vivor in Utah, the militia's howitzer team had never
fired the gun with which they intended to deliver the
nuke. They knew the gun team had only fired a trainer
at Old Glory. This virtually guaranteed that they
would have to shoot several marking or registration
rounds to get the nuke on target in New York. Brog-
nola explained that that narrow window of time, be-




tween the first and the final shot, was perhaps all the
wiggle room they had.
"Let's hear the plan, Ha!," the President had said.
"First we have to close down the airspace over
Manhattan Island and the surrounding waterways,"
the big Fed had told him. "Only an extremely limited
number of authorized aircraft will be allowed in the
area. Intruders will be subject to challenge and if they
do not withdraw, lethal force."  "Okay, so far."
    "We commit a pair of AN/TPQ-31 weapons-
locating radar units and crews to a site near or on the
UN grounds. They will be able to identify and track
the first registration round back to the gun that fired
it and give us its position."  "Fine."
    "We put Able Team and Phoenix Force aboard a
pair of Blackhawk helicopters and start them on a grid
search of the most likely firing positions. By the time
the strike teams arrive from Utah, we'll have com-
piled a potential target list for them. Even if they
don't uncover the gun before H-hour, this should put
them in good shape to close in on it once the
AN/TPQ-31 s spit out their coordinates."
  "What is this 'time window' you mentioned?"
  "Four or five minutes, tops."
  "Not much wiggle room there."
    "Which is why we need to deploy something
more," Brognola had told the President.
    At that point, everyone in the room had held their
breath. They all knew that this was the hardest part,
the request that a bona fide weapon of war be em-
ployed on American soil, against American citizens.
  "Under certain limited conditions of engagement,"

Brognola said, "we feel that a Hercules AC-130E
gunship could make the difference between success
and unthinkable disaster."
    "Under precisely what conditions do you propose
using the Spectre?"
    "We would commit the Hercules gunship to battle
only if the hostile weapon was discovered to be sited
in a sparsely populated area, only if it was clear that
the Blackhawks could not intervene in time to do the
job before the nuke round was fired and only if the
collateral damage to other structures was within ac-
ceptable limits."
    In the end, the President had only asked one ques-
tion. "Will it work?"
      "Given what we're up against, it's our only shot,"
Brognola had answered.  "Then take it."
    The effort after they had received the President's
okay had been, if anything, even more frantic than
what had gone before. They had a plan, and the au-
thorization to implement it, but it was all just words.
They had to make the nuts and bolts of it real before
they could make it happen. The next hour had been
spent chasing down the necessary matrriel and per-
sonnel, and arranging for everything to be transported
from where it was stored or stationed to where it
could do some good.
    Now that everything was finally in motion, all the
disparate pieces sliding into position, Price took a mo-
ment to sip cold juice and let the tension drain from
her neck and shoulders. It was only a moment; she
couldn't give herself more. The mission demanded
that she wade in again. The lives of tens of thousands
of people hung in the balance. Now that Stony Man




was fully committed to the operation, among the po-
tential victims were nine men that she deeply ad-
mired, nine brave, dedicated men who depended on
her. She walked up the ramp and stood beside Kurtz-
man's wheelchair. With him, she watched the wall
screens that displayed Delahunt's and Wethers's
work.
    Using the gun-to-target distance from the Old
Glory test range, they had drawn a circle around the
UN complex. Somewhere within the ting, give or take
a few blocks, was the probable firing position of the
cannon. After excluding the edges of the ring that
were impossible because of topography and shot an-
gle, they examined superdetailed satellite photos of
the area to identify unlikely firing positions within the
zone. These they also chopped out of the picture.
    The result was a hodgepodge of widely spaced po-
tential targets, most of which were in a corridor along
either side of the Hudson River. Everyone agreed that
there was still way too much ground to cover. At
present, with Tokaido's help, they were trying to fur-
ther narrow the scope by identifying the best firing
positions from the areas that were left, the ones that
could lay the weapon on target, and provide the gun-
ners with blast protection and escape routes.  It was slow going.
    Price checked the clock. Striker and the others
would be touching down in Newark in about three
hours. Brognola would arrive at McGuire AFB half
an hour before they touched down.
  She prayed they had that much time.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Union City. New Jersey
2:15 p.m. EDT

Sergio Eshamani watched the crumpled-up paper bags
from their hasty fast-food lunch blow lightly across
the warehouse floor. Lunch, such as it was, sat any-
thing but lightly on his stomach. Eshamani had the
feeling that the greasy, tasteless burger had re-formed
in his belly, the individual bites coalescing back into
its original, burger form. Of course, the burger was
only half of his indigestion problem.
    For almost four hours, the potential buyers of his
merchandise had been at work assembling the Soviet
D-20. The equilibrator had taken a good deal of time
to get operational, as it had been slightly damaged in
transit. It was the balancing gear that allowed the
hand wheel to smoothly and easily raise and lower
the barrel. The weapon's sights had also taken pains-
taking preparation. Now the thing was together, right
down to the last turn of the torque wrench on the final
bolt head.
    The green-and-black camOuflage-painted barrel
loomed high overhead as the man called Skel spun
the hand wheel, raising the barrel toward the ware-




house's ceiling. With another spin of the wheel, he
dropped it down again. Then he tested the right and
left adjustment. Two of the other buyers opened the
cannon's breech and left it that way. Inside and out,
the weapon gleamed. They had removed the cosmo-
line protective coating from every part and rebuttered
each with just the right amount of grease before as-
sembly.
    "Are you satisfied now?" the arms merchant asked
Krick.
    Krick looked at Carmody, the man with the long
face. "What do you say? Does it pass muster?"
    Carmody was wiping gun grease from his hands
with a rag. "It looks good to us. It'll do the job."
    The overhand knot in Eshamani's stomach loos-
ened a little. "Then you'll be calling for the truck to
transport it out of here?" he said.
    "Sure," Carmody said. "I'll make the call right
now, while you guys start unloading the last con-
tainer."
    They had barely gotten started when the long-faced
man returned.
    "How long until the truck gets here?" Eshamani
asked him.
    "It'll arrive in about thirty minutes," Carmody
said. "We should be done with everything by then."
"Year," Peterson said. "We'll be done."
    The arms merchant nodded. Another half hour was
a pain in the ass, but as long as he knew it was going
to be over soon, he could deal with it. From what he
had seen so far, unpacking scrap steel and assembling
a howitzer was neither a spectator nor a participant
sport. The three Sicilians were drenched in sweat and,
despite their precautions, had managed to get black

grease from the scrap metal on their shirts, pants and
faces. From the way they were moving, it looked like
their backs and legs were starting to stiffen up.
Eshamani was tired, too, tired of standing around. He
wanted his money and he wanted the military contra-
band out of his warehouse. He wanted to be on his
way.
    It was nearly a quarter to three by the time they
removed the starookha and six HE 152 mm shells
from the last cargo container.
  There was still no truck in sight.
    Like the artillery shells on the Varuskya Liset, the
nuke had in its own, solidly built wooden crate. Car-
mody briefly examined the outside of the box, then
said, "Go ahead and tear down the crate."
    Eshamani started to say something about saving the
box for transport, but before he could get the words
out, Krick and the other three men applied their crow-
bars to the sides of the crate, splintering the wooden
panels free.
    The Sicilians pulled the remaining fragments out of
the way, and the starookha stood there on the ware-
house planking in its steel, double-locked security
jacket.
    Carmody bent over the shell. In a plastic bag taped
to the front of the jacket was the shelfs keypad and
connecting cord. He ripped the bag free and took out
the keypad. "Time for you to show us how to use
this," he told Eshamani.
  "We need the PAL code," Krick said.
    "Of course," Eshamani said, "but first I need to
see the balance of the purchase price."
  Nobody moved. Nobody said anything.




    The knot in the arms merchant's stomach retight-
ened, big time.
    "I think I've been very patient with you up until
now," Eshamani said. "Perhaps too patient. You've
wasted most of my day. I need to see the color of
your money, gentlemen."
  "Get it," Krick told Carmody.
    Ca~ody turned and walked over to the warehouse
wall, where he'd put down the backpack he'd carned
in. As he picked up the pack, Krick and the three
other men stepped back from the nuke, leaving the
Sicilians to gawk at it as they mopped their faces with
handkerchiefs. Krick moved somewhat farther away
than the others and watched as Carmody returned.
    "It's all in here," Carmody said, setting the back-
pack down on the floor. From the main compagment,
he took out a silenced MAC-10. As he pointed the
weapon in Eshamani's face, two of his friends swung
their crowbars at the backs of the closest Sicilians'
heads. For hours, the warehouse had been ringing
with the harsh sounds of steel on steel. Steel on skull
produced a reellower tone, a thwack instead of a
clang. The thwacks knocked the stuffing out of the
mafiosi; they dropped to the planking as if their
strings had been cut.
    The third Sicilian just stood them, his mouth hang-
ing open in shock and disbelief. If he hadn't been so
exhausted, he might have made a dive for his weapon,
which hung on the front of a nearby container. He
might have even reached it.
    But as it was, Carmody deftly switched his point
of aim and shot him once through the head. The man
crumpled in a twitching heap beside his comrades.
  "What's this?" Eshamani demanded, even though

he knew precisely what it was. He was trying to buy
a little time to think.
    "Would it surprise you to hear there isn't any more
money?" Kdck said. "I'm tapped out. The stinking
Feds have either seized or frozen every dime I ever
earned."
    "Do you really think you can get away with this?"
Eshamani said. "All I have to do is yell and..." He
tilted his head toward the double side doors, on the
other side of which his armed security force stood
guard.
    '~You'11 get shot," Camody said, putting the hot
muzzle against the base of his skull. "Dead."
"You'll never get the PAL code out of me, then."
"And you'll never get to spend the money we've
paid you so far," Kock told him. "We can always
find another nuke--you'll have a harder time finding
a new brain to replace the one Carmody's going to
splatter all over the floor."
    Eshamani had m concede the point. "What guar-
antee do I have that you won't kill me after I give
you the code?"
    "You have my word," ~ick said. Then he smiled.
"Although I don't suppose that cames quite as much
weight now as it did a few minutes ago."
    "Skel," Carmody said, "let's get the gun moved
into position."
    With the help of the other two men in the gun crew,
Peterson hooked the howitzer to the ceiling crane and
staged towing it to the river end of the warehouse.
    Suddenly it all became clear to Eshamani. Not only
wasn't there going to be any more money in it for
him, but there wasn't any truck coming, either. The


 nuke shell was leaving the premises, and probably
 very soon, but the howitzer wasn't.
    "You're going to nuke Manhattan from here,"
Eshamani said. "You crazy bastards are going to
nuke Manhattan from my warehouse."
    Carmody didn't bother to reply. He shoved the
arms merchant over to the starookha and put the key-
pad into his hand. "Show us how to program the
weapon."
    "I have the coding sequence in my inside coat
pocket."
    Carmody aimed the MAC-10 at his heart. "Get it
out, slowly."
    Eshamani took out the loose pages. He handed
them to Carmody, who flipped through them, then
handed them back.
    "They don't make any sense to me," Carmody
told Krick. "They're just rows of numbers. I can't
tell what the six-digit sequences actually do. Our mid-
dleman here is going to have to run us through it."
    "Better yet," Krick said, "have him program the
weapon for us. Tell him what we want and have him
input the right codes."
    Carmody prodded Eshamani in the chest with the
muzzle of the MAC-10. "Get to work."
    With no other option, the arms merchant had to
obey. He pulled a number from the top page and
tapped it into the security iock's built-in keypad. The
bolts sprang back with an audible clack. "Help me
get the jacket off," he said.
    Krick and Carmody used the lifting handles to re-
move the jacket.
    Eshamani connected the separate keypad to the
warhead, then referred to the loose pages again.

  "What are you doing?" Carmody asked.
    "The first set of numbers is the handshake," Es-
hamani said, punching in the sequence. He showed
the LCD readout to Carmody. The row of little red
asterisks appeared on the readout, blinked twice, then
disappeared.
    Krick was also watching over his shoulder. "That's
supposed to happen?"
    "That's the confirmation that the codes have been
accepted," Eshamani said. "Now we can fuse the
warhead using these sets of tables. I need to know the
distance and flight time, and whether you want an air
or ground-burst."
  "Definitely ground-burst," Krick said.
    "Got the rest of it fight here," Carmody said, dig-
ging out a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket.
    The performance of the D-20 howitzer with a spe-
cific charge and payload was public record, so
Eshamani wasn't surprised that they already had all
the targeting numbers crunched.
    When Carmody gave him the necessary informa-
tion, Eshamani plugged it into the correct table, got
the adjusted value and input it into the warhead's
computer.
     Eshamani showed Carmody the LCD. Again the
row of stars blinked and disappeared.  "Now arm it," Kfick said.
    Eshamani hesitated, not because he gave a damn
about New York City, but because he didn't like be-
ing lied to in a business deal. Nor did he like being
robbed at gunpoint. He figured that when the whole
thing came down, it would turn out he'd been robbed
and murdered. Why would they leave him alive to
tell the tale, to point the finger at them? He didn't




have a chance in hell. The hopeless, humiliating sit-
uation cried out to his Iranian Italian blood. It cried
out for vengeance of some kind.
    "Go ahead," Carmody said, grinding the muzzle
of the MAC-10 against his closely shaved skull.
    Eshamani looked Krick in the eye, a deadpan ex-
pression on his face, and punched in the last six num-
bers. He held the keypad's blinking LCD screen up
and said, "That means it's ready to fire."
    At the other end of the warehouse, the gun crew
had unloaded their map cases and backpacks and
maps and charts were spread out on the warehouse
floor. Peterson was using a hand-held GPS unit to
locate their position and the position of the target.
After lining up the barrel and target horizontally, he
raised the howitzer's muzzle toward the ceiling.
    They weren't going to move the cannon outside to
fire it.
    "You're out of your damned minds," Eshamani
said.
    "We're crazy like foxes," Carmody said. He lifted
back the lapel of the arms merchant's Armani suit,
reached into the inside pocket and took out
Eshamani's fat wallet and his passport.
    Eshamani stood there while the man rifled through
the money, credit cards and other ID.
    "Hey," Carmody said, "this stuff says he's a Mr.
Walter Bertrand Combs from Texas."
    "He's a slippery customer, all right," Krick said.
"We'll have to tie him up extratight."
    Carmody pocketed the documents, credit cards and
money. Then he took duct tape and cord from his
backpack. With Krick's help, he trussed up Eshamani,
shoving a greasy rag into his mouth before wrapping

his head tightly with tape. The arms merchant didn't
struggle as he was dragged over to one of the emptied
cargo containers. They pitched him inside and then
dumped the dead Sicilian and his unconscious com-
rades in on top of him.
 The steel door slid shut with a clank.
    It was dark inside and hot, and there was very little
air. Buried under bodies, Eshamani felt wetness ooz-
ing onto his face. Wetness that belonged in an abattoir
or in a sewer. Gagging into the rag, he managed to
wriggle out from under the Sicilians. He crawled
away from them, scuttling across the container floor
on his side. He sat, breathing heavily through his
nose, at one end of the sealed box, listening to the
groans of his men as they slipped in and out of con-
sciousness. He had seen the wounds inflicted by the
crowbars. The backs of their skulls were caved in,
shards of bone driven into their brains.
 They were alive, but not for long. As was he.

TASHA BELOC WAS beginning to wonder if anything
was ever going to happen at the warehouse across the
street. The excitement of the first few minutes had
quickly vanished as the stakeout dragged on into the
afternoon. The most interesting thing that had hap-
pened so far was when the Sicilians had sent out for
lunch. She had no idea what was taking so long, and
from their discussions, neither did Samov. Could
Eshamani and the buyers be negotiating over the
price, haggling for hours over a few hundred thou-
sand? It seemed unlikely to her that the price
wouldn't have already been set, agreed to long before
this.




Maybe there wasn't any nuke inside and there
weren't any buyers.
    It was as frustrating as it was unfathomable, but the
Spetsnaz team couldn't move until the artillery shell
did.
    Sudden activity at the front of the warehouse sent
a jolt of adrenaline through Beloc's body. She hit the
transmit button of her walkie-talkie a second after she
saw one of the men from the Dodge Caravan step out
the door. "Looks like one of them might be leaving,"
she said into the mike. She peered through her bin-
oculars.
    "I can see him," Samov replied. "He isn't carry-
ing anything but a backpack. We know he couldn't
have the starookha tucked away in there."
    Beloc watched as the man walked past the Sicilian
guards and over to the minivan. He opened its rear
hatch and took out a black nylon travel bag.
    "He could have that bag stuffed with cash," she
said. "It could be the payoff."
    "Right you are," Samov said. "Vlad, Uri, stay on
your toes now. They may be finally closing the deal."
    Instead of returning to the warehouse by the front
door, the man with the backpack and travel bag
walked around the right-hand comer of the building
and along its side, past the double sliding doors.
    "Where's he going?" Samov said. "I can't see
him anymore."
    Beloc zoomed in on the retreating figure. "He's
climbing down the stairs at the back of the dock. They
lead down to the water. Wait..."
    She heard the drone of a single-engine airplane. It
was approaching from the west, behind her, and to
the north, to her left. As she turned, she saw a red-

and-white float plane coming in low about five hun-
dred yards away. It banked sharply over the water and
lined up with the shoreline.
    "A pontoon plane," she said. "Approaching the
back of the building."
    She caught a glimpse of the Cessna as it prepared
for a landing, then it disappeared behind the ware-
house.
    "It's stopping to pick up the man with the bags,"
she said. "He's getting away."
    "Let him go," Samov said. "As long as he didn't
take the starookha with him, it doesn't matter. We
can't show our hand, yet."
    Behind the building, the airplane's engine roared,
and it sped off on its pontoons. Beloc caught the flash
of its upper fuselage as it moved between the ware-
houses. She picked up the MSG-90 and with its scope
tracked along the rooftops of the buildings along the
river, following what she presumed to be the aircraft's
path. The float plane didn't lift into the air until it was
more than one hundred yards down the shore. With
the tail facing her like that, she didn't have a shot
anyway.
    She lowered her weapon. One thing was clear, the
man with the bag wasn't carrying the payoff to
Eshamani. There was still no explanation for the de-
lay in moving the nuke.

"How MUCU LONGER?" the capo asked Carmody as
he breezed past the guards at the front of the ware-
house.
    "We've still got another twenty or thirty minutes
and we're done. Then you guys can go somewhere
and put your dogs up, maybe grab a cold one."




"A cold six," the capo said. "It's been a hot day."
His colleagues granted in agreement. They were
thinking in terms of cases.
    Carmody opened the back of the van and took out
the bag that contained a quarter million in traveling
money. His traveling money. He waved at the capo
as he turned around the comer of the warehouse. The
Sicilians standing watch on the double doors did their
thing the second he stepped into view: hands dipped
under suit jackets, bodies dropped into bent-knee
shooting stances. None of them drew down on him,
though. They recognized him from earlier in the day.
    They asked him the same question. How much
longer? He gave them the same answer. They ac-
cepted it, if sullenly.
    As Carmody walked by, he checked the narrow
crack between the two-story-high, double sliding
doors. The cargo containers that had held the cannon
and nuke completely blocked the view. If they hadn't
been in the way, the Sicilians could have seen what
had gone down in the warehouse. In which case, Car-
mody had no doubt, the Sawtooth Patriots would have
been the ones locked inside a steel box, dead or
slowly dying in agony.
    He walked past the end of the warehouse. As he
did, he heard the sound of a small plane approaching.
The dock the building stood on extended another one
hundred feet before it ended at the fiver. Carmody
stepped to the ladder that led from the dock to the
water and started down. Directly below the ladder,
abutting and moored to the pier's pilings, was a small
floating dock.
    Les Johnson's timing was perfect. No sooner had
Carmody set foot on the dock than the float plane

appeared from the north, dipping down and skimming
over the water. The Cessna's nose came up, and it
landed on the fiver. The drag of the water on the
pontoons slowed the aircraft to a crawl in a matter of
yards.
    Johnson motored the plane forward, swinging the
Cessna 180's pontoon into the dock. As it bumped to
a stop, he reached over and opened the passenger
door.
    Carmody stepped up and shoved his bag and back-
pack on the floor in front of the copiiot's seat, then
got into the cabin.
    Johnson didn't wait for him to buckle up. The griz-
zled pilot shoved the throttle forward, and the plane
quickly began to pick up speed.
      "We've got a problem," he said to his passenger
over the engine noise.  "What's that?"
    "The Feds have shut down the airspace you want
me to fly in. I get the feeling they know something's
up." He looked over at Carmody. "They might even
know what's up. If they catch us in the no-fly zone,
we could be shot down. If we land in the no-fly zone,
they could blow us out of the water."
    Johnson pulled back on the controls, and the plane
lifted off the fiver. Instead of turning to the left and
heading southeast, across the island as they had
planned, he veered slightly inland and paralleled the
Jersey shore.
  "If you want more money..."
    "It isn't money," Johnson said "It's living long
enough to spend what you,ve already paid me. This
180 isn't exactly a combat aircraft. It's more like a
sitting duck with a bull's-eye painted on its butt."




    Carmody pulled the backpack up into his lap and
took out the MAC-10.
    "Give me a break," Johnson said when he saw the
machine pistol.
  "You're going to do what I tell you."
    "Like hell," Johnson said. He trimmed back the
throttle and steered the Cessna over the water.
    "Hey! What are you doing?" Carmody said as the
plane began its descent for another landing.
    The instant the pontoons hit, Johnson unbuckled
his seat belt and reached for the door handle. "I don't
have to do squat," he said, opening the door.
  Carmody took aim at his temple.
    ~'Go ahead," Johnson said. "Whether you shoot
me or not, you're going to have to fly this plane your-
seifi Somehow I don't think you're up to that."
  Carmody didn't waver.
    "What kind of a numbnuts do you think you're
dealing with? We both know that if I don't take you
to your observation point, this mission is finished. Put
the damn piece down. I can get you there, if I take
the long way around, but I'm not staying while you
do your dirty business. I'm dropping you off. You're
on your own."
    Carmody lowered the machine pistol. The original
plan had been for Johnson to fly him to an OP on the
East River and to wait there until the registration
rounds were marked. Then they would take off to the
north and keep low over the water. When they were
past Roosevelt Island, Carmody would give the "tire
for effect" command.
    Carmody had crafted the plan to ensure his own
safety after the nuclear detonation.
 All that was out the window now.

    He couldn't force the pilot to do anything but die,
and his dying wouldn't solve the immediate problem.
Carmody had to get into position to call in the attack.
There was no going back, no waiting until another
day, no moving the gear out of the warehouse. They
were committed.
    "How much longer will it take to go around?" he
asked Johnson.
  "An extra fifteen or twenty minutes."
    "All right, do it," Carmody said. "Get us out of
here."
    Then he called Skei Peterson on the cellular phone
to tell him that H-hour would be slightly but unavoid-
ably delayed.




CHAPTER TWENTY

McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey
2:50 p.m. EDT

Hal Brognola ducked his head as he hopped out of
the Justice Department's Sikorsky. The helicopter's
rotors whipped grit into his face, making him squint.
On the other side of the landing pad, standing next to
a Humvee, was a ramrod-straight Air Force lieutenant
colonel.
    "Welcome to McGuire, Mr. Brognola," she
greeted, extending a slim hand.
    "Thanks," he said. The strength of her grip
amazed him. He had to squeeze back hard, out of self-
defense.
    "I'm Deanne Kite," she went on. "I'll be escorting
you over to the Spectre. It's ready to fly."
    Brognola got in the passenger's side of the vehicle,
and Colonel Kite climbed behind the wheel.
    "We've got an exercise for the Jersey Air National
Guard on today," she said as she whipped a sharp
180-degree turn. "The AC-130E was scheduled to
participate in a firepower demonstration later this af-
ternoon. She was going to play demolition derby with
some armor that was scheduled to be chopped up for

scrap. So she's fully manned and armed, as re-
quested."
    Kite glanced over at Brognola. "I don't suppose
you're free to tell me what's going on?" she said.
"It's not every day that a combat-ready gunship gets
jerked out of an air show. In fact, it's not something
that has ever happened, as far as I know."  "No, I'm sorry. I can't talk about it."
    "Like I said, I figured you couldn't. Not if the mis-
sion is half as important as it looks." She paused and
then said, "Whatever job you're on, you should know
that you've got an experienced crew on board the
aircraft. Captain Nowlin and Senior Master Sergeant
Huggins flew a Spectre in the Panama raid. They were
part of the night attack on the Panama City police
headquarters. They reduced the entire complex to rub-
ble and dust."
    "I'm glad to hear that, Colonel," Brognola said.
His answer was suitably lawyerlike and vague. It
didn't confirm or deny that the full battlefield capa-
bilities of the gunship would be used in the matter at
hand. He didn't let on that he already knew the war
records of the crew.
    Kite pointed out the AC-130E on the concrete
apron dead ahead. Its four engines were already up
and running, the propellers spinning. It looked like a
regular Hercules except for the cannon muzzles stick-
ing out of the left side of the fuselage; they belonged
to a 105 mm howitzer and 20 mm electrically driven
Gatling guns.
    "She ain't sexy, but she's a beast and a half in an
air-to-ground firefight," Kite said admiringly.
    As they got out of the Hummer and approached the
plane, the pilot waved at them from the cabin.




    "I'm putting you in good hands," Kite announced
at the stairs. "Have a safe and successful flight."
    She shook Brognola's hand again, but this time he
was prepared and met fire with fire. He climbed up
into the aircraft and was immediately waved to a seat
by the pilot.
    Captain Nowlin apologized and said, "I'm afraid
it's kind of cramped in here. You're going to have to
take the jump seat behind me. My copilot, Lieutenant
Marquez, will get you plugged in to the communi-
cations system."
    The lieutenant handed Brognola a headset and
mike. "Put that on," Marquez said, "and you'll be
connected intership and radio."
    As Brognola did so, a man in his early forties
poked his head in and smiled. His prematurely gray-
ing hair was cut supershort. From the rank on his
sleeve, Brognola guessed it had to be Huggins.
    "Mr. Brognola," Nowlin said, "this is Senior
Master Sergeant Huggins, or 'Huggy.' He and his
boys keep the cannons fed and watered."
Brognola nodded, then buckled up his seat belt.
"As I understand it, this is a scramble," Nowlin
said, "so as soon as you're comfortable, we'll get out
of here."
  "Let's go," Brognola said.
    Captain Nowlin got his clearance and advanced the
aircraft to the takeoff point. When the engines reached
the critical rpm, he released the brakes and down the
runway they went.
    As soon as they cleared the field, Nowlin banked
a lazy turn and said, "Where to, Mr. Brognola?"
    "Put us on intership communications only." When
that was done, Brognola explained the nature of the

mission to the gunship's crew. "We're going to over-
fly New York City," he said. "We have a credible
threat of a nuclear attack there."  "Bomb?" Marquez asked.
    "No, a howitzer shooting a nuke shell," the big
Fed explained.
    A new voice crackled in Brognola's headset. It was
Huggy. "Hezbollah?" he speculated.
    "Unfortunately," Brognola replied, "these guys
are all homegrown, red-blooded Americans. Maybe a
better way of putting it is they were born here."
  "What are they aiming at?" Nowlin asked.
  "We're pretty sure they're after the UN."
    "Jesus," Lieutenant Marquez said. For good mea-
sure, he added, "Mary and Joseph."
    "At this moment," Brognola said, "a weapons-
locating radar system is being set up at the UN. If a
cannon is fired at the complex, it'll give us the lo-
cation of the gun. In advance of the actual attack,
we'll also have helicopter crews searching for the fir-
ing position. They'll direct us to the gun if they can
find it."
"How big is our target going to be?" Huggy asked.
"We won't know until the call comes through and
we get a look at it," Brognola said. "From what we
know of the group, it might be on a truck-and-trailer
rig. It could also be inside some kind of structure. If
it's on a truck, the Blackhawks can handle the job. If
it's inside a building or hardsite, it's up to us to get
the job done."
    "What about innocent people inside the building?"
Marquez asked.
    "We don't think they'll put the howitzer in a pop-
ulated area. It's too easily seen. We think it'll be in




a factory or warehouse, or something similar, proba-
bly along one side or the other of the Hudson."
  "Makes sense," Nowlin said.
    "We're hoping to get lucky and have the helicop-
ters interdict the gun before it starts shooting," Brog-
nola said, "but we're not counting on it, though."
    "How are we going to stop them from firing?"
Huggy asked.
    "We think they'll shoot at least two registration
rounds of HE before they unload the nuke. Our time
window is very narrow."
    "I suggest we circle the city at ten thousand feet
until we get the call," Nowlin said. "We can close
the distance to any target in the area you're talking
about in about a minute. Depending on the size of the
target, our firing altitude will be around four thousand
feet."
    "You do understand how this gunship operates?"
Marquez asked.
    "I understand you can direct withering firepower
into a small area," Brognola replied.
    "You got it. How we do it is, we bank a constant
turn and fly in perfect circles around the target, which
keeps the cannons aimed at it the whole time. We
circle and we direct the cannonfire electronically from
up front."
    "If we're actually ordered in to do this job," Now-
lin said, "you understand that the Spectre isn't a
smart bomb. We shoot a lot of rounds into a fairly
confined space, but we can still miss the target. We
did in Panama City."
  "But that was in the dark," Huggy qualified.
  "True."

    "We can do a whole lot better in broad daylight,"
Marquez added.
    "Smart bombs aren't smart one hundred percent of
the time," Brognola said. "When one misses, it does
a hell of a lot more damage than a howitzer round.
The odds of containing the destruction are better with
you guys. In the best of all possible scenarios, we
would knock out the howitzer with one shot."
  "Cannon versus cannon," Huggy said. "I like it."
    "That's about it," Brognola concluded. "Until we
have confirmation, we circle and hold our breath."
    "We'll be over NYC airspace in about fifteen
minutes," Nowlin said. "I understand there's a re-
striction in place."
    "Right," Brognola confirmed. "Except for us and
the Blackhawks, the airspace over NYC is closed to
all traffic."
     Marquez turned toward Brognola. "Incoming
scramble call for you, sir," he said.  It was the Bear.
    He informed Brognola that the National Guard
weapons-locating radar was in position, up and op-
erational. Then he patched the guardsmen manning
the units into the mission communications grid.

"TAKE US DOWN a bit lower," David McCarter said.
    The pilot of the Blackhawk dropped the helicopter
another seventy-five feet. The garbage barge loomed
large beneath them. Their rotor wash whipped the
crests of the trash heaps and sent a flock of gulls
wheeling up from their never ending feast. The birds
flew over the shabby little trailer that the sanitation
workers used to get out of the elements. All of the




 birds landed on the sloping mound behind the trailer,
 and immediately resumed their feeding.
  "Bloody rats with wings," McCarter said.
    Beside him in the doorway, Encizo lowered his
binoculars. "I hate to tell you, but that trailer house
is too small to hold a Soviet 152," he said. "Even if
it was rigged for travel, it wouldn't fit in there."
    "I was actually more concerned about the big trash
drift sitting behind it," the Phoenix Force team leader
said. "The one the bleeding gulls are sitting on. It's
tall enough to hide a howitzer. Someone could take
that bulldozer sitting down there and bury a cannon
under a few tons of garbage in a few minutes. When
the time came to shoot, just uncover it again."
    "Except for the way the barge is swinging around
in the current," James said. "If anybody tried to use
it for a shooting platform, there's no way they could
zero in on a target almost four miles away. Man,
they'd be marking hits all up and down the island."
    "You're right," McCarter said. "Good thinking.
They'd have to run the damned barge aground to sta-
bilize it. As it stands, it's a pretty poor platform."
    Hawkins gave the "take her up" sign to the pilot,
and the Blackhawk chopper climbed and turned away
from the barge.
    "Target Bravo Delta Four is a definite negative,"
McCarter said into his mike. "Papa Team is moving
to Bravo Delta Five."
    "Roger, Papa," Stony Man's Barbara Price said.
"Moving to Bravo Delta Five."
    The Blackhawk dropped low over the river and
headed north. The men inside the cargo bay continued
to scan the buildings along the waterfront, looking for
anything suspicious.

    On the New York side of the river, Able Team and
Striker were doing the same thing, getting as close as
they could to potential firing positions and trying to
shake something loose.
 So far, nothing was shaking.
    On the flight in from Utah, McCafret had known
that this part of the mission was going to be difficult.
But now that he was on-site, doing the job, he realized
how bloody slim their chances were, even within the
limited search area. There were too many structures
they couldn't see into--structures that could easily
contain the cannon. Around most of them, there was
no place to set the Blackhawk down, so a foot search
was out of the question. On top of that, he knew that
Stony Man Intel had, quite rightly, excluded a huge
portion of the area--any part of which might, in fact,
hold the gun.
    Through the ship-to-ship scrambler, he heard
Striker's voice. "This is Alpha Team," Bolan said.
"Targets Zulu George Seven through Nine are all
negative. Moving on to Target Tango."
  "Roger, Alpha," Price said. "Moving to Tango."
    The best of British luck, big guy, McCafret
thought.
    The Blackhawk wheeled right and paused, hover-
ing beside a row of double-wide trailers in a fenced-
in compound. McCarter again raised his binoculars.




CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

"Hey, Captain, what do you make of that?" Lieuten-
ant Marquez said. He pointed at the Long Island side
of the East River shoreline.
    Captain Nowlin dipped the left wing a little lower
for a better look. "In every crowd, there's always a
clown," he said. "Considering where we are, I'm sur-
prised we've only had the one."
    Brognola turned in his seat. "What is it? What are
you guys looking at?"
    "Oh, we've got a single-engine Cessna skirting the
edge of the no-fly zone," Nowlin said. "Maybe it's
nothing, maybe it's something. Watch him as we
come around again, Pete."
  "Affirmative," Marquez said.
    The Spectre completed another lazy circle at ten
thousand feet.
    "Something's hinky, Cap," the lieutenant said.
"He's setting the plane down some place he
shouldn't. A definite no-no."
    Brognola looked out the window. As he did, he
caught the glint of the float plane's white wing and
tail. Behind it, he could see two white wakes. The
aircraft had landed on the Long Island side of the
water, directly across the river from the UN plaza.

    "It could be the observer," Huggins offered.
"He's in a good position to do the spotting."
    The plane only sat on the water for fifteen seconds
before it took off again, heading northeast, angling
sharply out of the restricted airspace.
"Guess he didn't like the view," Nowtin said.
"Or he dumped a guy off," Marquez suggested.
"Alpha Team, this is Big Bird," Brognola said into
his headset mike. "The OP may be getting into po-
sition along the Long Island shoreline about a mile
south of the Queensboro Bridge. Break off your grid
search immediately and cross the island over the tar-
get. We'll relay the exact location of the possible OP
while you're en route."
    '~Roger, Big Bird," Striker said. "We're on our
way."
    "Papa Team, you keep up the search on the Jersey
side," Brognola ordered. "We'll keep you informed
on the OP. If tums out to be the real article and we
nail it, it might give us the howitzer's position."
    "Roger, Big Bird," McCarter said. "At the very
least, knocking out the OP will buy us some more
time to find the buggers with the gun."

CARMODY WAS STANDING on the Cessna 180's right
pontoon when Johnson swung the tail of the aircraft
around. He stepped off onto a low dock that was con-
nected to the beach by a long ramp. He didn't turn
and wave goodbye to the pilot-for-hire. Even if he'd
had the inclination, he wasn't given the opportunity.
Prop wash whipped Carmody's back as Johnson ac-
celerated away.
  After shrugging into the straps of his backpack and




 shouldering his money bag, Carmody ran up to the
 top of the ramp. Only then did he look back.
    He was excited. Across the water, on the opposite
shore, he could see the cluster of buildings he was
about to vaporize. He was on the verge of making
real his prophecy of a world police state. Of bringing
on the repression that would unify the forces of re-
bellion, of blowing life into the lie he had so carefully
spread.
    There would be a New World Order, all right. His
world. By his order.
    Carmody could have stood there all afternoon,
holding inside the secret knowledge of his power,
watching the city swarming full of people, happy in
their antlike ignorance of what was to come. As much
as he would've liked to wallow in his gloating,
though, he knew there wasn't time for it. He turned
away from the distant skyline and faced the water-
front on his shore.
    This was the general area from which he'd planned
to do his spotting, but he'd intended to do it from the
Cessna. He had to improvise now. He picked a grim,
three-story factory about a half block away that would
give him an elevated, and therefore better, view of
the target.
    As he jogged up to the building, he saw that a set
of dark letters had bled through the top coat of gray
paint. In a broad scroll they read Margee's Junior
Miss Fashions, Est. 1958. Carmody turned down the
side of the factory and found the fire escape.
    As he climbed it, he looked into the multipaned,
cantilevered, industrial windows at the landings. Mar-
gee's Fashions had been subdivided and converted

into artists' lofts, probably to beat the high prices of
similar digs on the other side of the river.
    One of the artists-in-residence on the third floor
saw him on the fire escape. The guy had paint in his
frizzy gray ponytail and on his arms and pants. He
was in the middle of splatter-painting a huge canvas
on the floor. He stopped what he was doing and
blinked up at Carmody.
    Carmody waved at him and kept on climbing to the
top.
    The factory roof was very broad and slightly
domed in the middle. Carmody trotted past the air
ducts shaped like little turrets and knelt down beside
the wall that faced the water. He removed his back-
pack and took out his MAC-10 and set it close to
hand. Then he pulled out his binoculars with the ar-
tillery reticle and a hand-held GPS unit. He fired up
the GPS and found his current position.
  Then he called New Jersey on his cellular phone.
    Skel Peterson answered before the second ring.
"Yo," he said.
    "I'm in position," Carmody said. He gave Peter-
son the exact coordinates.
    "Got it," Peterson said after he'd plugged them in
to his own GPS unit. "We got a live one up the pipe
over here. What do you say'?"
  "Let's rock," Carmody told him.
    The commander in chief of the Sawtooth Patriots
put down the phone without breaking the connection
and picked up the binoculars. They had a special scale
built in. The horizontal axis was divided into ten-
millimeter increments for the side-to-side adjustment
of tire. On the left side of the reticle, a series of in-
dividual bars showed five-millimeter increments for




adjusting the height of the burst. Carmody wasn't
concerned with the altitude scale.
    After adjusting the binoculars's focus, he found his
aim point on the opposite bank. It was the statue en-
titled Let Us Beat the Swords into Plowshares, which
stood at the edge of the river side of the UN plaza.
  Good name for an aim point, he thought.
  Something crunched on the roof gravel behind him.
  Carmody lowered the binoculars and reached for the
  machine pistol.

"GET ALL the sliding doors open," Peterson said.
"We're going to shoot this thing."
    Ransom, Krick and Gabhart ran to the rear doors
and rolled them apart. Then they did the same to the
side doors of the warehouse, which caused the Sici-
lian gunmen to look in.
  "What the hell's going on?" one of them asked.
    The three security men stared in disbelief at the
cannon pointed up at the ceiling.
    "Wait and see," Peterson said as he pulled on his
ear protectors. Uncoiling the lanyard, he stepped into
the open cargo container where Krick, Ransom and
Gabhart had already retreated.  Then he yanked the cord.
    If the sliding doors had been closed, the force of
the blast would've blown them off. It would also have
maimed or killed the gun crew, but because the doors
were open, the pressure created by the cannon's firing
had somewhere to go.
    The HE shell that shot out the barrel acted like a
clearing round, blasting a great, raggedy hole in the
ceiling of the warehouse. As the D-20 jolted on its
suspension, the end of the roof disappeared and boil-

ing clouds of dirt and smoke gusted out the open
doors. The unprepared Sicilians were blinded and
deafened by the cannon shot. They staggered back
from the building, choking on the corrosive fumes.
    No sooner was the round away and the larger hunks
of debris had stopped falling, than Peterson, Gabhart
and Ransom jumped out of the container and raced
back to the gun. Gabhart and Ransom ejected the
spent shell. As it rolled across the planking, they
dropped another HE 152 mm shell onto the loading
tray. After they rammed the shell home and slammed
the breech closed, Ransom tipped back PetersoWs ear
protectors and said, "Ready to fire, sir!"

SERGIO ESHAMANI could hear the gun crew talking
outside the cargo container that was his prison. He
knew that the howitzer was about to be fired. Even
so, he wasn't prepared for what happened when the
cannon went off in the enclosed space. His whole
dark, nasty-smelling world took a sudden, agonizing
upward jump. The container actually hopped on the
deck from the shock wave. The sound of the cannon
filled his head until he thought it would burst. Then
the choking gases began to filter down into the con-
tainer.
  His lungs burned.
  His eyes burned.
  His skin burned.
    He was being cauterized inside and out. He
screamed around the gag, trying to equalize the pres-
sure in his skull. He screamed until his lungs were
empty. Then he gasped for air, no longer caring how
much it hurt.
  Why hadn't he screamed before, when he'd had the




chance? Why hadn't he risked bringing his gunmen
into play? Not because he didn't think they were up
to the job. He knew they would've responded with
ruthless brutality; it was what they specialized in.
Maybe it was because he thought he could barter with
these cowboy bastards. If that was it, he'd been a fool.
If he'd yelled, he might're won; either way, he
would've missed what he was now enduring.
 A bullet to the head wasn't a bad way to die.
 This was a bad way to die.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Samov's mind was wandering when the roof of the
warehouse came off. He was so far gone he didn't
even see the side doors of the building slide open
prior to the blast. A lapse in concentration was to be
expected after so many hours of sitting there and
watching nothing happen. Sarnov had set his wrist-
watch alarm for five-minute intervals, and every time
it went off, he checked in with Ferdishenko and Tasha
Beloc, making sure that they were at least as on track
as he was.
    When the back of the building erupted in a huge
ball of fire and smoke, the Spetsnaz captain was
thinking about his first wife, Rita, replaying the few
happy memories he had of their brief, tempestuous
marriage.
    He blinked at the spectacle before him, not believ-
ing his eyes, not understanding what had happened.
Was the explosion internal? Had something blown up
inside the building? Or was it external? Had someone
targeted the warehouse with a rocket?
    "Captain!" Beioc shouted through the walkie-
talkie. Its tiny speaker turned her excited voice to a
high-pitched buzz.




     "Yes, yes, of course I see it," Sarnov told her.
 "Give me a minute to think."
    He sat there in the embassy car, watching the larger
chunks of the roof pelt the river and street, trying to
puzzle it out.
    There was no visible source for an air-to-ground
attack. No source for a ground-to-ground attack, ei-
ther.
      Then he saw the Sicilians come stumbling out the
side doors, through the dark smoke.  Open doors?
    He looked through his binoculars. As the smoke
and dust cleared a bit, he could see into the ware-
house. What he saw made him curse aloud. At the
back of the building, under the newly made hole in
the roof, he saw a long, dark shape that he recognized.
  A D-20 howitzer.
    "It's a cannon!" Sarnov shouted into his walkie-
talkie. "They've got a cannon in there! Get them!
Close in on them!" He threw down the communica-
tion device, stomped the gas pedal, and twisted the
sedan's ignition key. The starter whined. He had
flooded the engine.
    "Damn it!" Sarnov turned the key again, but the
engine still refused to catch. He could smell the gas-
oline that was choking the carburetor. "Shit!" he
said, pounding the dash with his fist.
    He forced himself to wait a few seconds, to let the
excess gas drain away. He had really screwed things
up. It had never occurred to him that Eshamani would
have a cannon inside the warehouse. Both cannon and
nuke shell at the same location. It was so obvious.
But what wasn't obvious, what he could never have
guessed, was that they would fire the gun from inside

the building. That Eshamani would allow it, that he
would be on the premises when they started shooting
at Manhattan. He had judged the man to be a criminal
of the most despicable sort, but never a terrorist.
    The smoke had lifted enough so that even without
binoculars Sarnov could see activity around the base
of the howitzer. They were reloading it for another
shot.
    When he cranked the key the third time, the engine
started. He dropped the car into gear and peeled away
from the curb. He skidded a left turn through the in-
tersection and barreled down the street toward the
warehouse.
    The Sicilians at the side of the building were still
out of commission. Two of them were on their knees,
doubled up in coughing or vomiting fits. He didn't
have to worry much about them. The men in the front
of the warehouse, on the other hand, were not hit by
the gun blast and they were on high alert.
    Samov steered with his left hand and reached for
the Valmet with his right. He dropped the safety and
propped the assault rifle's muzzle on the top of the
dash so he could fire it through the windshield.

"HEY, BUDDY, what the hell are you doing on my
roof?" the ponytailed artist said to Carmody, who
turned to face him.
    The artist winced as a high-pitched noise split the
air. It sounded like a freight train bearing down on
them. A freight train from hell.
    Over Carmody's right shoulder, a water spout
erupted in the middle of the East River, accompanied
by a thundering explosion.
 The artist's mouth dropped open. When he glanced




back at Carmody, the silenced MAC-10 was already
in his hands. Carmody cut loose with a savage burst,
stitching the man from crotch to throat with 9 mm
slugs. The impact flung the artist onto his back on the
roof. He landed hard and his body bounced, rubbery
limp. It didn't move again.
    Carmody picked up the cellular phone and said,
"Skel?"
  "Right here," came the reply.
    Carmody didn't need the binoculars to make the
first adjustment.
    "Over, line," he said. Which meant the shot was
long, but in line with the target.
    Peterson repeated the call back to him, then said,
"Number two coming up."
    A few seconds later, another HE shell screamed
over the horizon at Carmody. A plume of water
erupted well to the north of the aim point. It was,
however, closer to the target side of the river. Close,
but not close enough. Their nuke was small and dirty.
To get the maximum blast and firestorm effect, it
needed to practically fall down the chimney of the
General Assembly.
    Carmody viewed the impact point through his bin-
oculars, then gave Peterson the correction. "Over.
Right, four hundred."
  "Coming at you," Peterson said.
    Carmody held his breath, listening for the scream
of the shell. He only had to wait a few seconds. The
shell exploded in the fiver, right under the noses of
the residents of the Waterside Apartments, which was
down Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, south of the UN
plaza.
  Peterson had bracketed the target, and had walked

the impacts back toward the Manhattan shoreline.
  He was close, but still no cigar.
    Carmody called in the spot, then added his correc-
tion. He was looking at the target through the bin-
oculars when he saw something skim over the top of
the Secretariat building.
    Something black and fast, and heading straight for
him.
  "I've got company on the way, Skel," he said.

"WE HAVE A CONFIRMED radar track," Lieutenant
Marquez declared. He did a quick course plot to the
coordinates the guardsmen had given him, then rattled
it off to the captain.
    "Got it!" Nowlin banked the Hercules toward New
Jersey and pounded down the throttles. "We're on
their raggedy asses now."
    Brognola held on to the bottom of the jump seat as
the gut-wrenching tum was followed by a high-speed
descent.
    "A second mark, Captain," Marquez said.
"They've fired two. The location is verified."
    Brognola would've liked to have turned and seen
where they were going, but the G-force kept him
glued to his seat. He also had other, more important
things to do. "Papa Team," he said into his headset
mike. "Do you copy the gun coordinates? Do you
have a visual on it yet?"
    "Roger, Big Bird," McCarter said. "We can see
the firing position and are closing on it. It's in a large
warehouse over the water. If it's well defended, I
don't think we can stop them quickly enough."
    "Then stand down," Captain Nowlin said. "We'll
do the job."




      The AC-130E's descent suddenly slowed, and
Brognola's stomach lurched up into his throat.
  "We're at firing altitude, Cap."
    "We should be seeing the place ourselves by
now," Nowlin said.
    Brognola twisted around in his seat so he could
look out the front windshield.
    "There!" Nowlin jabbed a finger at the shoreline.
~'They've blown the damned roof off."
    From the near end of the warehouse, orange flame
blossomed through the roof, followed by a plume of
black smoke.
    Something big and mean screamed over the Her-
cules.
"That's three rounds fired," the lieutenant said.
"Big Bird, this is Alpha Team," Striker said.
"We're taking incoming on this side. A shell just hit
in the river to the north of the plaza. We're over the
UN grounds, now. Estimate contact with the sus-
pected spotter position in two minutes."
    "You got another one on the way, Alpha," Brog-
nola said.
  "Roger that, Big Bird."
    Captain Nowlin started to bank the left turn that
would put the warehouse in the middle of the Spec-
tre's zone of death.
    "When will you be ready to shoot back?" the big
Fed asked.
    "As soon as we get our target locked into the fire-
control system's electronics," Nowlin said. "Another
couple of seconds is all we need. How're we doing,
Pete?"
  "You're on the money."
  "Huggins, are you ready?"

  "Locked and loaded, sir."
    Brognola released his seat belt and leaned forward
so he could see the target out of the left side of the
aircraft. The rear end of the warehouse roof was burn-
ing around the hole made by the howitzer. A quick
scan of the surrounding area showed no police or fire
presence. There were a few human targets scattered
around the building, but he had to assume that they
were unfriendlies.
    The conditions of engagement he had discussed
with the President were all met.
    "Permission to fire, Mr. Brognola?" Captain Now-
lin said.
    As Brognola opened his mouth, another blast
ripped the air and a fourth round sailed away toward
Manhattan. Not the nuke, he thought. Please don't let
it be the nuke.  "Sir?"
    "Don't fool around with these people," Brognola
said. "Give 'em the works."
  "Glad to oblige."




CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Oswald Carmody hung tough, even though the
hounds of hell were beating down on him.
    Through his binoculars, he could see the black heli-
copter drop down over the front of the Secretariat, dip
low over the river and make a beeline for the ware-
house he was currently occupying. Because there was
no visible insignia on the aircraft, there was no way
of telling which of the alphabet soup of government
agencies it belonged to. Not that it mattered in the
least who had sent it. The standing orders to the hit
squad the Blackhawk carried would be the same: ter-
minate with extreme prejudice, show no mercy.
    Carmody hung in until the fourth HE shell arced
over Manhattan's skyline and crashed to earth.
    Behind the chopper, north of the General Assem-
bly, something flashed bright in the pocket park, fol-
lowed by white smoke and a thundering bang as the
conventional warhead's detonation rolled across the
water.
    That was all he needed to see. Peterson had more
than found the target; he'd squarely nailed it.
    "Fire for effect," Carmody said into the cellular
phone.
  "You'd better believe it," Peterson replied.

    Carmody broke the connection and threw the phone
down on the roof. He didn't need it anymore. He
grabbed the money bag and his machine pistol, and
sprinted for the fire escape, cutting a path around the
dead splatter-artist, who lay in a pool of his own splat-
tered blood.
    There was only one thing on Carmody's mind as
he hustled down the ladder. He had to put some cover
between himself and the nuclear blast that was only
seconds away. He dashed down the fire-escape stairs
and threw himself off the last landing and into an
overflowing Dumpster. The bulging black plastic bags
broke his fall.
    As he hopped down to the pavement, he could hear
the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter as it swept in
from the river. Too bad for the guys in black, he
thought as he raced for the front of the building. A
little thermonuclear shock wave was about to spoil
the rest of their lives. As he reached the front of the
building, the fifth and final shell howled over the ho-
rizon. With the building between himself and the nu-
clear explosion, he had a chance of surviving. He
ducked and covered against the bottom of the wall.

As THE BLACKHAWK that carried Bolan, Lyons, Blan-
canales and Schwarz swept down on the UN tower
from the northwest, the third HE round whacked a
huge circle of wave and froth in the river to their
right.
    "Big Bird, this is Alpha," Mack Bolan said
"Round three just hit in the water off to the south of
the complex. It landed much tighter to the west shore
than the first two. It won't take many more tries for
these guys to bring the gun on target."




    "Somebody's moving on the rooftop of our suspect
building," Schwarz said, lowering his binoculars.
"It's the gray one facing us end-on."
  "Did you see that?" Biancahales asked.
    "Yeah," Schwarz said. "Sun-flash on optics.
Whoever it is, they're looking our way."
    "Big Bird, this is Alpha," Bolan stated. "We have
a subject in sight on the roof of the suspect building.
He looks like an excellent candidate for the OP."
  Behind them, a thunderclap rocked the air.
    Lyons hung his head out the Blackhawk's open
doorway and looked back toward the UN.
    "Trouble," he said. "They laid the last round on
the park. Hit it dead in the middle."
    "Big Bird, this is Alpha again," Bolan said. "They
just scored a direct hit on the grounds. The next shot
will most likely be the nuke."
    "Look!" Blancanales said. "The spotter's up and
running."
    "Big Bird, our spotter is hightailing it. They've
definitely got the range on the target. Don't let them
fire the next round."
    "Goose this sucker," Lyons told the chopper pilot.
"That son of a bitch is getting away."
    The Blackhawk was fast, but not fast enough to
reach the far shore before the man disappeared down
the fire escape.
    "Damn," Lyons said. "Dammit to hell." He
started stripping off his battle gear. He dumped his
combat harness and shoulder holster on the deck, then
ripped off his black long-sleeved shirt.
  "What are you doing?" Biancahales asked.
  Lyons didn't answer. He yanked off his boots and

replaced them with the ballistic nylon fighting shoes
he'd worn on the flight from Utah.
    As they flew over the low dock that Carmody had
landed on a few minutes before, above the roar of the
Blackhawk's rotors, they all heard the howl of the
fifth shell in the distance.
 The noise was growing louder and louder.

AS CAPTAIN SARNOV braked to make a hard, screech-
ing right turn into the warehouse driveway, the sec-
ond howitzer round went off. A cloud of black smoke
puffed from the building's roof and rolled out the
open doors and fractured windows. The sedan
bounded up and over the driveway, landing on all four
wheels in the parking lot. Sarnov hit the brakes again,
squashing the pedal to the floorboards. The car's nose
dipped, his Sicilian targets scattered and he opened
fire. The front windshield shattered around 7.62 mm
holes as the folding-stock Valmet rattled in his right
fist.
He got one of the guards; he was sure of that.
The first burst flattened the guy up against the front
of the limousine. The hail of AP bullets held him
there for an instant, shuddering like a tree branch
caught in a river current, as his blood and bone
sprayed over the long, sleek hood.
    By then, Samov was taking answering fire from
three machine pistols that had retreated to the street
entrance to the warehouse. Nine millimeter slugs
sailed through the windshield at him and slammed
into the cat's grillwork. He realized at once that it
was no longer possible for him to sit inside the sedan
and survive. He wrenched open the driver's door and
rolled out, dragging the Vaimet and the extra mags




with him. Bullets smacked the asphalt at his heels as
he rounded the back of the car and crouched there.
    He turned when the embassy's step van pulled up
behind him. As he looked up, a hail of bullets swept
over his head. They turned the two panes of the van's
front windshield into ragged, frosted spikes. The ma-
chine-pistol slugs shook the truck's chassis, and the
radiator drained from a half-dozen holes.
    Sarnov skirted the front of the truck and rounded
its far side. Ferdishenko and Turgenev were there
waiting for him, safe, armed and ready to fight.
  "What now?" Turgenev asked.
"Do we charge the building?" Ferdishenko said.
The whine of a heavy rifle slug over their heads
answered both questions. It came from atop the aban-
doned factory across the street.
 They would wait for Beloc to do her part.
    As they knelt behind the step van, another howitzer
boom shook the air.

TASHA BELOC DREW a bead on the Sicilian standing
at the edge of the doorway, then swung her cross hairs
over a bit, into the middle of the opening. When the
gunman stepped out to fire on the step van, she tight-
ened down on the MSG-90's precision trigger. The
gun bucked hard into her shoulder. The powerful re-
coil wave made her lose the target in the scope field.
By the time she regained it, the target was no longer
standing. He was lying across the threshold with a
gaping hole where his heart should have been.
    The two men who remained in the front entryway
of the warehouse suddenly grew very cautious and no
longer showed themselves in the doorway.

    Beloc raised her eye from the Leupoid scope and
scanned the scene across the street.
    It was then that she noticed the silhouette of the
Blackhawk helicopter, hovering over the river about
a mile away. An instant later, she saw the much
larger, fixed-wing aircraft circling overhead.
    Beloc knew a Spectre gunship when she saw one.
She also knew the indiscriminate and total havoc it
could wreak on a stationary target.
    "Captain, get out of there!" she shouted into her
walkie-talkie.
    She didn't wait for a response. She didn't dare. She
abandoned her long gun and ran for the fire escape.

GABHART AND RANSOM carried the starookha in a
cradle they made of their linked arms. Both men were
smudged black with propellant soot, and both choked
back the urge to cough and clear their lungs of the
poisons they'd been inhaling. They very carefully set
the Soviet nuke down on the D-20's loading tray, then
pushed it into the cannon's breech. As they locked
down the shell, Charles Krick put a hand on Peter-
son's shoulder.
 "I want to pull the lanyard," he said hoarsely.
 Peterson grimaced.
  "I paid for this party," Krick reminded him.
    It did only seem fair. Peterson handed him the end
of the cord, and they all retired to the open cargo
container.
  "This one's from Charlie," Krick said.
    The greeting was not intended for public consump-
tion. He was the only one who could hear it. They all
had their ear protectors on.
 Krick yanked the cord.




    As the cannon boomed and the starookha sailed
away toward Manhattan, something different hap-
pened. The inside of the warehouse lit up white or-
ange and there was a second bang. Sharper, over-
whelming. It slammed the container so hard it sent
the gun crew crashing down on their faces.
  It was just a tiny taste of what was to come.

IN THE INSTANT before the Spectre opened fire, the
hole in the end of the warehouse roof flashed orange.
Brognola was as sure of it as he was of his own
mother's name.
 They had gotten off the nuke shell.
    It was too late for last-minute heroics, too late for
anything but all-out vengeance.
    Captain Nowlin and Senior Master Sergeant Hug-
gins sent a single aimed round of 105 mm HE through
the rear of the warehouse roof. It looked like it landed
right on top of the Soviet D-20. The explosion
sprayed out through the open doorways and the emp-
tied window frames, the shrapnel chopping down the
men standing outside.
    Then the 20 mm Gatlings opened up, and the gun-
ship vibrated from their continuous thunder.
    The electrically driven cannons whipped the ware-
house and its perimeter into a foaming sea of dust. A
dust puff rose with every hit, and there were
thousands of shell strikes concentrated in the narrow
target area. In seconds, the roof of the building van-
ished under the pounding of 20 mm hail, as did the
parking lot and dock.
    Brognola looked up from the withering onslaught,
across the Hudson to the New York skyline. It
should're been hit by now, he thought. A dirty gray

mushroom cloud should've been rising over the city.
A wave of renewed hope rushed over him.
    "Alpha," he said, shouting to be heard over the
rattle of high-speed cannonfire, "did you mark the fall
of the fifth round?"
      "Negative, Big Bird," Striker said. "We heard it
incoming, but it didn't explode."  "Thank God for that."
    "Yeah," Bolan said. "Alpha Team would've been
toast, along with a few hundred thousand other peo-
ple. We're making a move on the observer. I gotta
sign off."
  "Roger, that," Brognola said.
    The Spectre continued to fly its lazy circle, all the
while pouring fire down onto the target. A dozen
more 105 mm shells, thousands of rounds of 20 mm.
    The zone of fire wavered slightly, spreading out
over the street and then over the river, but Captain
Nowlin didn't let it slip any farther than that.
    Four minutes into the barrage, the walls of the
building began to collapse, then the roof toppled
down onto the interior. They could see the twisted
wreckage of the Soviet howitzer sticking up out of
the rubble.
    Brognola pulled the plug on the firepower display.
"Good work," he told the Spectre's crew. Then he
said, "Papa Team, Big Bird is through up here. It's
your turn."
    "Roger, Big Bird," McCarter said. "We're going
in."

LIKE THE GUN CREW, Sergio Eshamani was protected
by the cargo container from the first shot of 105 mm
HE that ripped through the warehouse roofi Though




he had been deafened by the previous blasts, he knew
right away that this one was not the same. Its shock
wave lifted the facing edge of the container off the
deck. As it crashed down, big chunks of steel
smashed into the sides of the cargo box, gouging rents
high in the walls.
    Shafts of light penetrated the darkness that sur-
rounded him. From the direction of the blast and its
force, he guessed that it had hit and incapacitated the
Soviet howitzer.
    For a second, the arms merchant thought he was
going to be rescued.
    That idea vanished as dozens of holes ripped
through the roof of the container and red-hot lead
slammed through the narrow space and into the floor
all around him. Eshamani couldn't hear the impacts,
but he could feel them in every nerve of his body.
The world was shaking apart as more and more shafts
of light speared through the roof of the chamber.
Fragments of exploding steel cut him to ribbons. In a
matter of seconds, he suffered thousands of wounds,
until a direct hit by a single 20 mm shell put him out
of his misery. His final thought, the instant before the
huge slug took off his head at the shoulders, was that
he had had the last laugh.
    In the other cargo container, Krick, Gabhart and
Ransom fell to pieces, as well. They died without ever
hearing the punchline of Eshamani's joke.
  Which was, of course, no sound at all.

TASHA BELOC'S WARNING through Ferdishenko's
walkie-talkie and the drone of the Spectre's four en-
gines overhead registered on Sarnov's consciousness
at the same moment. He shoved Turgenev and Fer-

dishenko away from the step van. "Across the
street," he shouted at their backs. "Run! Don't look
back!"
    Above them, something screamed to earth. The ex-
plosion rocked the ground and sent them to their
knees.
    "Cover," Sarnov told his men, "we've got to find
cover."
    As they scrambled to their feet and crossed to the
front of the deserted factory, 20 mm rounds began
thrashing the warehouse to splinters and churning the
earth into powder.
 There was no cover.
    The building's facade acted like a backstop, ab-
sorbing the fragments of cannon round and concrete
as the shells shattered on the pavement. Bits of razor-
sharp steel smacked into the bricks above their heads
and shattered the glass out of the windows high in
the wall.
    "Keep moving," Sarnov said, pushing his team
members ahead of him, along the front of the build-
ing.
    When they neared the padlocked truck entrance
where Sarnov had left Beioc's car, the fusillade
stopped. The roar of gunfire behind them was re-
placed by the sound of a lone helicopter approaching.
    Sarnov rounded the corner of the building and saw
the car was no longer there, under the fire escape.
 It was nowhere in sight.

"BIG BIRD DIDN'T LEAVE very much for us to mop
up," Encizo said as the Blackhawk angled in on the
smoking ruin of the warehouse.




"Fine with me," McCarter said, "as long as they
got the bloody gun."
    The helicopter touched down in the middle of the
cratered street, and Phoenix Force hopped out.
    Manning and Encizo cut right and took what re-
mained of the far side of the building. James, Haw-
kins and McCarter took the front entrance, which was
still standing.
    On the side of the warehouse, Manning and Encizo
found all the hostiles down and out. Three men in
expensive suits lay on their faces on the planking.
They were dusted all over with black soot. The black
stuff was even inside their ears. They had all taken
grievous and obviously mortal shrapnel wounds to the
back.
    James, Hawkins and McCarter approached the
limo, which had been virtually crushed by concen-
trated cannonfire. The shards of glass left in the slit
of a windshield were washed pink with the driver's
blood. As they rounded the limo, two men jumped
out of the collapsed front of the warehouse and rushed
them with machine pistols stuttering.
    Whether they were panicked beyond reason by the
fury of the Spectre's attack, or truly brave and seeking
revenge for the deaths of their comrades, the result
was suicide.
    Hawkins returned fire with his H&K subgun. He
chopped down both men down with multiple chest
and head hits, sending them crashing to the ground.
    There were no other apparent survivors at Inter-
national Scrap Metal, but to make absolutely sure,
they would have to call in a crane and search-and-
rescue dogs.

SARNOV WAS greatly relieved to see Beloc's car pull
a U-turn at an intersection and come down the street
toward them. She crossed the center line and pulled
up in front of the truck driveway on the wrong side
of the street. Then she scooted over into the passen-
ger's seat so Sarnov could drive. Ferdishenko and
Turgenev piled into the back.
    "Why did you turn the car around7" Samov asked
her.
    "Because I wanted a closer look at the men in the
Blackhawk."
  "That may not be such a good idea," he said.
    "We're traveling on diplomatic passports," she
said. "They can't do anything to us."
  "Nothing but kill us," Ferdishenko said.
  "Not without a reason," Beloc responded.
    As Sarnov drove around the helicopter, she sized
up the men decked out in full-assault black. She rec-
ognized the youngest one at once from Riga. He'd
been the sniper on the trawler moored across from the
Varuskya Liset. Beloc never forgot a man she'd had
in her sights.

HAWKINS LOOKED UP from his weapon as the sedan
crept past. The blonde in the passenger's seat caught
his eye, then pointed her index finger at him. Crook-
ing back her thumb, she made a pretend pistol out of
her hand, then pretended to take a potshot at him.
    Hawkins turned and watched the car until it dis-
appeared around a comer.
  "Who was that?" McCarter asked him.
      "I don't know, but I'd like to," Hawkins said.
"She was drop-dead gorgeous."
  "Ships in the night, Hawk."
  "Year, I guess so."




CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

As the Blackhawk descended over the roof of the gray
building where they'd spotted the suspect, Carl Lyons
pulled his Colt Python from its shoulder holster and
tucked it into the waistband of his pants at the small
of his back. He pulled the tail of his khaki T-shirt
down over the gun butt.
    "This is the only way we can get this bastard," he
said to Bolan. "You keep a close watch on him from
the air, tell me where he goes." Lyons picked up a
two-way radio and pushed it into a front pants pocket.
Then he stepped out of the open doorway.
    The drop was fifteen feet. Lyons landed in a
crouch, then ran for the fire escape. As he started
down the ladder, the Blackhawk wheeled away and
climbed.
    "He's running east," Bolan's voice crackled
through the radio's speaker, "heading down the street
in front of the gray building. He's white. Sandy blond
hair. Tall and wiry. He's wearing no hat, and has on
a dark blue T-shirt and jeans. He's carrying a black
travel bag on a shoulder sling. You'd better hotfoot
it, Ironman. He's really traveling."
    Lyons jumped from the fire escape into the Dump-
ster. He hit the pavement running. He was determined

not to lose the guy. But when he rounded the front
of the building, his suspect was nowhere to be seen.
  He keyed the two-way radio. "Where is he?"
    "Straight ahead," Bolan said. "I'll tell you when
to turn."
    Lyons shifted into wind-sprint mode. He emptied
his mind and concentrated on making everything
smooth. On making the energy flow from his center.
He turned when Bolan told him to.
    "It looks like he's heading for the subway." the
Executioner said. "If he gets on a train, we can forget
it."
    Lyons didn't answer. Sweat was starling to ooze
down the sides of his face and the middle of his back.
It cooled him off and gave him a second wind.

ALL OF OSWALD CARMODY'S plans evaporated when
the nuke didn't detonate.
    Crouching there like a halfwit fool in the lee of the
building, he knew the black chopper was streaking in
on him. He took off as fast as he could. There wasn't
anyplace for the helicopter to set down between
where he was and the Vernon-Jackson Street subway
stop.
    He didn't look behind him after the first fifty yards
or so. He figured that if they hadn't dumped off foot
pursuit by then, they weren't going to. And he didn't
look up while he was running; he didn't have to. He
could hear the helicopter hovering above, dogging
him. They hadn't fired on him yet, but he wasn't
counting on things staying so friendly. He cut back
and forth from one side of the street to the other,
doing his best to throw off any sniper's aim.
 It was the scum-sucking arms merchant who'd




screwed things up. Either he'd sold them a bogus
nuke or he'd fudged them on the PAL code. Maybe
he'd never ever really had the PAL. code. The upshot
was, the game was over for now.
  Not forever.
  Just for now.
    He had a quarter of a million in cash in the bag.
He could rent a car with Eshamani's credit card, drive
into Canada, then return to the U.S. into a militia-
friendly northern state. Hell, as an outlaw, he might
be even more successful at making converts to the
cause.
    Only when Carmody ducked into the subway en-
trance did he stop running.
 He stopped running because he was home free.

LYONS REACHED the subway less than a minute after
Carmody. Unlike Carmody, he kept on running. He
vaulted the turnstile and ran to the platform entrance.
There was a crowd stacked up, waiting for the next
train. Lots of morns and kids and a few old people.
And in the middle of the crowd, a tall guy in a blue
T-shirt carrying an overstuffed black bag.
    The station PA system announced that the next
train would be arriving in one minute. Lyons stayed
right where he was. There was no way the guy with
the bag would miss him coming; Lyons towered over
the other people on the platform. He had to wait until
the very last second to make his move. He reached
under the back of his shirt and adjusted the hang of
the Python, freeing the butt for a quick grab.
    When the train's brakes squealed out of sight down
the track, Lyons moved quickly up the platform. The

guy had his back turned, so Lyons moved faster, clos-
ing the distance between them.
    He realized then that he couldn't use the Python.
There were too many bystanders.
    The bad guy wasn't so fussy. When Carmody
looked over his shoulder and made eye contact, the
militiaman knew who Lyons was, and what he
wanted. Carmody rammed his hand into the open top
of the money bag.
    Lyons caught a glimpse of blue steel as the Saw-
tooth Patriot leader started to haul out his machine
pistol. In a blur, Lyons hurled himself forward, arms
windmilling, then tucking tight to his torso as he built
up momentum for the kill strike. There was only one
thing in his mind. The target--Oswald Carmody's
center chest.
    As the train roared into the subway stop, Lyons
lashed out with his right leg, making solid contact
with the ball of his foot. Something crunched. Some-
thing went "Oooof!" The kick sent Carmody hurtling
backward off the platform and into the path of the
onrushing train.
    He didn't make a sound as he fell. He couldn't
scream because all the air had been forced from his
lungs. The train hit him before the wheels ground him
up. It hit the black bag, too. Green bills burst into the
air like a startled flock of birds. They fluttered down
over the astounded people on the platform. Then the frenzy set in.
    Nobody gave a damn about the dead guy under the
wheels.
    People who'd been on the train jumped out onto
the platform and helped themselves. Everybody yell-
ing, grabbing for what they could get.




    Almost everybody. Lyons caught a few bills out of
the air and handed them to a kid too little and too
timid to join the fray. Only one person on the plat-
form noticed as he left, and she was smiling.

EPILOGUE

Stony Man Farm
6:35 p.m. EDT

Kurtzman clinked glasses with Barbara Price.
"Here's to you," he said. "The best in the business."
    Price sipped her Scotch on the rocks. They were
alone in the computer center. Everyone else had
called it a day and crept off for some long-postponed
sleep. Maybe because it was just the two of them, she
didn't say anything modest, didn't deny the truth of
the compliment right away. She gave herself a mo-
ment to savor it.
    Then she said, "We had some uncommon good
luck on this one, too. If the shell hadn't hit the park
lawn, if instead it had hit in the middle of Roosevelt
Drive or First Avenue, even if it hadn't exploded, the
warhead could have shattered and sent plutonium dust
drifting all over town."
    "If it hadn't hit the lawn on an almost perfect,
nose-down trajectory, it might have broken apart,
too," Kurtzman said.
 "Face it, we just barely dodged it this time, Bear."
 "A miss is as good as a mile."
 Price found it hard to be jubilant. "Next time,"




she said, "our would-be overnight nuclear power
might be some nutcase who's raided a hospital radi-
ation lab for its cesium. And then wrapped it around
a stick of good old-fashioned dynamite. We won't get
five chances to stop the bad guys then. We won't even
get one."
    Kurtzman rattled the ice in his glass. "You're right.
The genie's out of the box. Out of control a thousand
different ways, and all of them deadly. We both know
the war is never going to be won in our lifetimes. But
it's okay for us to celebrate a victory, even if the fight
goes on."
  "To victory," Price said.
  "And vigilance," Kurtzman added.