Capital Offensive

“Don’t worry, sir, we won’t let you down,” Brognola declared, rising from the chair.

“You never have before,” the President said, and started to add something more when telephone on the desk gave a soft buzz. The man glared at the device as if it were a live bomb, then lifted the receiver.

“Yes?” the President asked. He listened for a minute, then replaced the receiver in the cradle. “Well, it just happened,” he stated. “Two of our F-18 SuperHornets patrolling the oil fields of eastern Iraq got lost and accidentally crossed the boundary into western Iran. The mullahs are screaming violation of sovereign airspace and demanding punitive measures from the United Nations for our quote, ‘rampaging aggression,’ end quote.”

“The enemy is escalating their attacks already?” Brognola asked uneasily. “We can expect a lot more of this, and soon.”

The President opened a drawer and pulled out a folder marked with Top Secret seals and an explosive security tab. “Then stop wasting time talking to me and get moving,” he commanded, sliding on a pair of reading glasses and opening the file to start skimming the pages.

With a nod, Brognola turned and left the Oval Office, his mind already working on the complex matter. A lot of people hated America for various reasons. However, he knew there were few groups who had access to the sort of highly advanced technology needed to pull off this sort of cybernetic attack.

Departing from the building, Brognola headed for the parking lot behind the Old Executive Building. Heavily armed Park Rangers were on patrol everywhere inside enclosure, while D.C. police officers patrolled the sidewalks outside.

The key to the matter was how somebody had seized control of an ICBM in flight. And sent a military jet a hundred miles off course, the big Fed noted. There were a hundred safeguards and multiple backups on both guidance systems. Yet it had been done. There had to be some sort of common denominator; a computer chip or software program.

Stopping at his car, Brognola looked skyward at the dark storm clouds gathering high overhead. In the distance, thunder softly rumbled. Unfortunately there was only one thing he knew of that they both used as a navigational aid, and if that was compromised, the entire world was in more trouble than he could even contemplate.

CHAPTER TWO

Tokyo, Japan

A heavy rain fell over the sprawling metropolis, the sky dense with rumbling black clouds. Blurred by the downpour, heavy traffic flowed like rivers of stars through the city streets, a million neon signs blazing in every imaginable color.

In the nearby harbor, the dark shapes of cargo ships, oil tankers and American warships loomed like metal mountains rising from the choppy ocean. Impossibly tall, slender skyscrapers thrust into the storm, lightning illuminating them briefly in silhouette. Many of the office buildings were alive with bright lights, the diligent workforce of the mega-corporations working through the wee hours of the night to assure their nation’s future. The war for world domination had failed many decades ago, and the country paid a terrible price. Their attempt to financially control the West had also ended in total disaster, mostly through their own stupidity and greed, and now the Asian companies heroically struggled to try to repair the ghastly economic wounds.

Suddenly a low roar cut through the noise of the city and the storm. Then on top of an apartment building, a billboard advertising Green Apple cigarettes violently blasted into a million pieces of plastic and splintering wood as the prow of an American 767 jetliner punched through the flimsy obstruction.

Snarling curses, the frantic cockpit crew struggled to raise the lumbering aircraft, to change their course, regain the sky, their shock over not being at the airport dwarfed at their horror at the wall of mirrors looming directly ahead of them. What the hell were they doing downtown? How did they get this far off their flight plan?

Adorned with the name of the famous car manufacturer, the colossal skyscraper of chrome and steel swelled in front of the lost jetliner as it streaked across the broad city street, the pilot and copilot straining every muscle in their bodies as they fought the shuddering controls. Height! They needed more height! Before—

Lightning flashed as the jetliner and office building collided. The entire ninety stories of the majestic structure shook from the strident impact, then the rippling windows shattered as the crumpling 767 exploded into a deafening fireball. For a single horrible moment, the entire city of Tokyo was briefly illuminated in the hellish light. Then the building began to tilt to the side, cracks yawning wide in the exposed infrastructure.

Buffeted by the brutal shock wave, tens of thousands of people on the streets below looked upward in surprise, shouting at the nightmarish sight, then the rain of broken glass arrived and their cries became agonized shrieks. Hundreds of cars crashed into one another, spreading the destruction in every direction and plowing into countless horrified pedestrians.

More glass windows fell away as the trembling building began to collapse, crumbling into pieces like a sand castle. Chunks of smashed masonry mixed with debris, dead bodies, splintery furniture and burning pieces from the fuselage of the annihilated jetliner tumbled away into the rainy night. Crushing death filled the streets of Tokyo. An acrid cloud of concrete dust and roiling black smoke flowed outward from the building, the screams of the wounded and dying seeming to challenge the stentorian thunder of the raging maelstrom in the black sky above.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

I N A RUSH OF WARM AIR , the Black Hawk helicopter landed in the middle of the freshly mowed field. The side hatch opened and out stepped a tall blond man carrying a nylon equipment bag. He was dressed in dirty denim pants, a flannel work shirt and hiking boots.

Keeping his head low, Carl “Ironman” Lyons tried to ignore the spinning turboprops only inches above his head, the breeze ruffling his short hair. Closing the armored hatch, the former L.A.P.D. detective waved through the bulletproof Lexan plastic window at the pilot of the craft. His hand still on the joystick, the pilot nodded curtly in return and promptly revved the massive Detroit engines back to full power.

As the Black Hawk lifted into the air, Lyons moved quickly across the smooth grass. Heading toward a rustic-looking farmhouse, the ex-L.A.P.D. detective noted the dozen men scattered about the grounds. Wearing denim overalls, the guards were trimming bushes, painting wooden shutters or taking soil moisture readings with handheld probes. Even though Lyons knew everybody in sight was heavily armed, he couldn’t spot any of their weapons. That was both impressive, and a little annoying. The former cop had spent a lot of years on the mean streets of Los Angeles and usually could tag an armed man from fifty feet just from the way he stood and moved. Three pounds of steel strapped under your clothing altered a person’s stance significantly to the trained eye. But not these men. Which was one of the many reasons they had been chosen from the top professionals in the nation to become a blacksuit, the elite soldiers who guarded the country’s top antiterrorist headquarters, Stony Man Farm.

Stepping onto the wooden porch, Lyons pressed a hand to a sensor plate that resembled a smooth patch of wood. A moment later a small section of the wall cycled aside to reveal a keypad. He tapped in the entry code. There came a soft answering beep, then the armored front door swung aside with the soft hiss of working hydraulics. As he stepped into the building, the door closed behind him with a muffled boom.

Inside the farmhouse, the blacksuits were openly armed with pistols at their sides or carried in shoulder holsters. A softly beeping radar screen showed the departing Black Hawk heading for the horizon.

Hurrying on assorted errands, the men and women nodded to Lyons in passing as he strode for the elevator. Then he changed his mind and headed for the stairs. After six long hours in the Black Hawk he could use a good stretch of the legs.

Reaching the subbasement level, Lyons proceeded along a corridor. More blacksuits were down here, one standing on a ladder and fixing a light fixture, another dutifully running a waxing machine along the clean terrazzo floor. Both were wearing earphones and throat mikes, the constant chatter of the other guards a muted buzz from the miniature radios.

Passing the firing range, Lyons could dimly hear some sort of a machine gun yammering and took a guess that Kissinger was testing the new M-249 SAW. John “Cowboy” Kissinger was the armorer for the covert base, and there wasn’t a weapon in existence that the lanky Texan couldn’t fix, repair or modify for the field teams. Whatever was needed to get the job done, Kissinger had in stock.

The SAW was the latest addition to the Stony Man arsenal. Nicknamed “the Minimi” by NATO forces, the squad assault weapon had replaced the old M-60 machine gun as the standard support for a platoon needing suppressive firepower. An attached ammo box held the belt of ammunition, thus removing the possibility of tangling the feed, and also hiding from the enemy just how many rounds the gunner had remaining. Firing a much smaller 5.56 mm round, the M-249 was lighter, fired faster, farther and quieter. A lot of Marines were using them in Iraq, and nobody had complained about the weapons yet.

Turning a corner, Lyons saw Chief Buck Greene talking to a couple of unknown blacksuits.

Wearing sunglasses, with a massive Colt .45 revolver holstered at his hip, Greene resembled a drill instructor. Lyons almost smiled. Which was probably the whole idea. Veteran soldiers who would charge a chattering machine-gun nest flinched in horror at the memory of their miserable weeks at boot camp. Chief Greene was the man in charge of base security for the Farm, and he took his job very seriously. There was nobody better to have protecting your six.

Slinging his bag, Lyons grunted in passing, and Greene jerked his chin in reply. The men were friends and hadn’t seen each other for a while, but when Barbara Price announced an emergency recall, that meant the blood had already hit the fan and there was no time for pleasantries.

Reaching the Conference Room, Lyons pushed open the armored door. Four people were hunched over a conference table reading security reports. On the wall was a video monitor showing maps of the world, the war status of the superpowers scrolling along the bottom. Additional screens displayed weather conditions around the planet and a vector graphic of orbiting satellites.

“About time you showed up,” Rosario Blancanales said in greeting, laying aside a top-secret report.

Dressed is a three-piece suit of gray worsted material, Blancanales looked like a kindly banker rather than a professional soldier, and middle age had done nothing to soften his appearance of sheer physical strength. Called “The Politician” for his knack for fast-talking himself out of any trouble, Blancanales had salt-and-pepper hair and a million-dollar smile.

“Well, I was fishing in the Yukon,” Lyons stated, dropping his bag on the floor.

“Yeah, yeah, always the same old excuse,” Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz said with a chuckle.

Wearing casual business attire, Schwarz looked more like the manager of a video store than the best combat technician in the world. General Electric had a standing offer for Schwarz to join the corporation at a staggering salary, but long ago the technical wizard had decided to use his talents for defending the nation instead of acquiring wealth. Nobody in his family truly understood the choice, but the call to duty was something only another soldier could ever really understand.

“Sweet Jesus, you smell like Baltimore Harbor at low tide!” Price scowled, wrinkling her nose. “Would somebody please pour a cup of Aaron’s coffee over the man to kill the smell?” She was, of course, referring to Aaron Kurtzman, Stony Man’s computer whiz.

“Can’t. It might dissolve the concrete floor.” Lyons grinned, taking a chair at the table. Then the smile dutifully vanished. “All right, I read the initial report on the flight over here. What’s our current status?”

“Still at DefCon Five,” stated Barbara Price, the Mission Controller for Stony Man Farm.

Crossing his arms, Lyons frowned. “Damn. Has there been another attack?”

“Tokyo, less than an hour ago,” she replied, turning to gesture at a wall monitor.

“Son of a bitch,” Lyons said softly, reading the scroll from CNN and the BBC. As civilian news agencies went, those were among the best. When the estimated death toll came into view, the man tightened his hands into hard fists, suppressing his rage. Lowering his head, the leader of Able Team paused in silent contemplation, then looked up again, his eyes diamond points of glacial fury.

“Any suspects yet?” he asked coolly, forcing his hands to unclench.

“Everybody and anybody,” Blancanales replied with a dour expression. “This sort of thing seems out of the league for al Qaeda, the PLO or Hamas. Something like this must have required years of careful planning.”

“However the hell they did it,” Schwarz muttered angrily, studying a sheet of paper covered with technical information. There was a handwritten note for him from Brognola offering a possibility. But it was ridiculous. Utterly impossible, he thought. Thank God, because if it was correct, then America already had a gun to its head and the hammer was being pulled back to deliver the deathblow.

“We’ll figure out the details after we shovel them into the dirt and read their operation files,” Lyons declared. “By the way, where’s McCarter? I’m surprised that Phoenix Force isn’t also here.” He paused. “Or have they already come and gone?”

Price nodded. “Hours ago. David McCarter and Phoenix Force are already at the Texas missile base checking into the possibility of sabotage,” she said. “But it’s just a feint to throw off the enemy. I’m also sending a couple of blacksuits to check the factory where the missiles were assembled, along with the U.S. Army train that delivered the warheads.”

The members of Able Team looked at her disapprovingly.

“Agreed.” Price sighed. “It’s a long shot, but then, gambles have paid off before.”

“So what is our assignment, another diversion?” Lyons asked, but then he saw her expression. “You found something.” He stated the observation as a fact.

“Hopefully. Aaron found something odd a few minutes ago, just before you arrived.” Price typed briefly on a small keyboard built into the wooden top of the conference table. The main wall screen changed from a view of the world to a satellite photo of southwestern America, then it jumped to a tight shot of Texas. Then again to a small town.

“The city of Sonora,” Price declared just before the name appeared to scroll along the bottom of the screen. “Aaron and his cyber team were surfing the Internet, looking for anything odd around the time of the launch, when they discovered this.” She tapped a button and a side monitor came alive with a newspaper headline from the Sonora Gazette. There was a picture of a smoking hole in the ground and several sheet-draped bodies. “Apparently an empty warehouse outside of town was blown up by a runaway gasoline truck at almost the exact same moment the missiles were launched.”

“How far away from the launch site did this happen?” Lyons asked, studying the article for details. From the struts among the charred wreckage, he would guess the structure had been some sort of a Quonset hut.

“Roughly eighty miles.”

“Interesting. Could the launch have been seen by anybody at the warehouse?” Schwarz asked, tapping a pencil on the table.

Price leaned back in her chair. “Bet your ass. An ICBM launch lights up the night brighter than a NASA space shuttle taking off. And there were three of them this time. Would have looked like the Fourth of July at Christmas.”

“How sure are we that the warehouse was empty?” Blancanales asked pointedly. “Could the records have been faked?”

“At the moment, we don’t know anything about the warehouse,” Price replied honestly. “Aaron ran an inventory search, checked the deed, traced the utilities bills, everything we could think of, and his team has hit a stone wall. Nobody seems to have built the Quonset hut, nobody owns it and there were no customers. Yet the warehouse had an armed man out front in a brick kiosk.”

That sounded like a guard station. “Dead?”

“Absolutely. Same as the truck driver. The preliminary autopsy indicates he was drunk, and that the guard was killed by flying glass.”

“Which could be true,” Blancanales said hesitantly. “However…”

“However, the driver was a Mormon, and they don’t drink,” she stated, sliding a sheet of paper into a slot on the desk. A wall monitor displayed the membership records from Salt Lake City, Utah. “That was a bad slip on the part of our saboteurs. And the guard…well, he seems to have died twice.”

“Twice?” Schwarz asked with a frown. He knew what that meant, and it wasn’t good.

“A spook,” Lyons stated, rubbing his unshaven jaw to the sound of sandpaper on rock. “Interesting.”

“We ran his footprints through the DOD.” Price didn’t have to tell the other people why. They all knew that fingers often got blown off in combat, or too badly mangled to read. However, footprints were just as reliable and inside an Army boot, they had a much higher rate of survival. “Apparently the guard was killed by a sniper near the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan four years ago, and then again yesterday.”

“The corpse have a name?” Lyons inquired.

She snorted. “Aaron found fifteen and they have all proved to be fakes. This guy was so deep undercover that he could have been one of us.”

There was a chilling observation. “That sounds like a CIA black bag operative,” Blancanales mused. Able Team had encountered such men before. The Agency would have an operative pretend to be a civilian and get recruited into the military. Then they would arrange for them to be sent into the heart of the fiercest fighting happening at the time. When the operative arrived, there would be a switch and a corpse would take his place on the battlefield, followed closely by a nice mangling explosion, and the CIA op would faded away, his identify safely removed.

“Anything is possible,” Price agreed, turning away from the screen. “Homeland Security, DOD, he’s obviously a government agent.”

“Yeah,” Schwarz muttered, stroking his mustache. “The question is, which government?” The defunct KGB had been particularly fond of this trick, along with MI-5 in the United Kingdom and the Mossad.

“The guard could have been working for anybody,” Lyons said, typing at another miniature keyboard set in the table and accessing a duplicate of the reports. He quickly flipped through the electronic documents. Nothing, nothing and even more nothing.

Just then, the intercom buzzed softly.

“Price,” the mission controller answered brusquely, touching a switch.

“Bear, here,” a gruff voice replied over the speaker. “My team just pulled in something hot.”

“Excellent,” Price said. “Send it over.”

A moment later there came a soft hum from the table and a document extruded from the printer under the table. When it dropped free, she picked it up and briefly scanned the message. Then she paused and read it again, slowly and more thoroughly.

“It seems that the real owner of the warehouse is the DOD,” she announced, sailing the sheet across the table. “And according to these top-secret inventory records, the Quonset hut was packed to the rafters with defunct electronics from the cold war. Mostly obsolete inertial guidance systems for ICBMs.”

“Son of a bitch,” Blancanales said, snatching up the sheet to read the report. “That’s what used to steer our long-range missiles before we switched to GPS navigation, right?”

“Before we switched to using GPS,” Schwarz said in a monotone, “an intercontinental ballistic missile was a hideously complex and staggeringly sophisticated piece of military ordnance. But not the warheads, of course. Atomic bombs were relatively easy to make. Slap two semicritical pieces of enriched uranium together and they exploded.”

No, the difficult part was delivering the warhead on target, and on time, through the enemy defenses, halfway around the world, without having it veer off and explode in friendly territory. The trick was guidance.

The Pentagon had tried a lot of solutions to the problem, some of them quite bizarre, but in the end, the inertial guidance system proved to be the only viable solution to steering an ICBM at the time. Anchored by gyroscopes, and with fantastically detailed relays, an INS device could precisely deliver a two-story-tall ICBM anywhere with deadly accuracy. However, an inertial guidance system was hideously expensive to manufacture, almost a million dollars a piece, and each unit took nearly six months to construct. Even with computer automation. It was simply that complex a piece of equipment.

During the Reagan administration, the Pentagon had decided to scrap the INS and use the much cheaper GPS. A collection of telecommunication satellites had been launched around the world and placed in stable orbits in specific points above the spinning Earth. The satellites transmitted a complex code and could be read on a receiver to give your precise location on the ground. A civilian model of a receiver would give your location within ten yards, a commercial model within two yards. A military model was dead-on, bull’s-eye accurate. Twenty years ago, the very existence of the GPS network had been beyond top secret. Nowadays, a person could buy a GPS device from the local electronics store to take on the family camping trip, and most of the better luxury cars came with the devices installed at the factory. It was commonplace. Ordinary. Mundane. There wasn’t a plane, train, ship, submarine, missile or long-range weapon system in the world that didn’t use the Global Positioning System as an aid to navigation.

“I thought the GPS network was untouchable,” Price said suspiciously, “the access codes mathematically impossible to break.”

“So did I.” Schwarz sighed deeply. “But I guess these folks found a way. Some new approach, or technique, that we never thought of.”

“Barb, you’d better call Hal and have him inform the President,” Lyons stated brusquely. “The military is down to laser-guided weapons, dead-head rockets and heat-seekers for defense until further notice.”

“All of them short-range weapons and pretty damn useless at stopping an incoming ICBM.”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

Without further comment, Price went to a phone on the wall and started punching buttons.

“Okay, if the saboteurs—or rather, the hackers—hit the warehouse before they stole the missiles,” Blancanales said slowly, narrowing his gaze, “that means they’re afraid we might fix this before a real war starts.”

“Which certainly seems to be their goal,” Lyons noted.

“Agreed. This seems to say that time is critical to them.”

“Then we just have to move faster,” Schwarz added somberly.

Deep in thought, Blancanales pulled in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Gadgets, any idea how long it might take for Jet Propulsion Laboratory to make replacement units?”

“I’m sure the templates are still in storage somewhere,” the man said hesitantly. “Unless they were also in the warehouse. But even if they have to work from scratch, I’d estimate three months, maybe only two.”

“No better than that?” Price demanded unhappily, hanging up the receiver.

Schwarz shrugged. “Hey, it used to take six months to build the things, and the very first model took years to perfect.”

“All right, inertial guidance systems are expensive, rare and delicate,” Lyons said, looking upward to stare at the featureless ceiling. “So let’s use that to our advantage.”

“What do you mean?” Price asked, reclaiming her chair.

“If we had more inertial guidance units, our ICBMs would be safe and the terrorists would be out of business.”

Slowly, her face lit up. “So we make more of them. Hundreds more. On paper.”

“Exactly. Then when the terrorists attack the fake warehouse,” Lyons said, “we grab a few alive and twist the location of their base out of them.”

“And how they’re doing it,” Schwarz added, gesturing with a finger. “That’s paramount.”

“Agreed.”

Price said nothing. She could image what would be involved in the process. Able Team wouldn’t torture a prisoner for information, no matter how badly it was needed, but there were a lot of ways a man could be forced to talk. Including letting him escape and following him back to his base of operations. However, that was used only when the situation was truly desperate. Sometimes, the “rabbit” would simply run, staying far away from his comrades. But then, nothing was certain in life except death.

Tapping on the intercom, Price said, “Bear?”

“Yeah?” the man replied.

“We need you to create a virtual warehouse full of INS devices,” Price told him.

“What for?” Kurtzman growled over the speaker. “Oh, I get it. A trap. Sure. Where do you want it located? I know of a DOD warehouse in Columbus, Ohio, where we store nonsensitive documents. Easy enough to switch the inventory to guidance systems…no, that would be much too close. The warehouse has to be as far away as possible, but still on American soil.”

“Good point. How about Puerto Rico?” Blancanales suggested, leaning forward in his chair. “I know for a fact that the U.S. government already has several long-term storage facilities on the island.”

“Sounds fine,” Kurtzman replied.

“As soon as you have the fake warehouse filed, I’ll pull Phoenix Force off their inspection and have them order the technicians at the silo to prepare the other missiles for an emergency retrofit,” Price said. “Then they’ll take a standard military transport to Puerto Rico, requisition a cargo truck and drive off into the jungle, with a return flight scheduled for an hour.”

“Why not helicopters?”

“The winds are too strong in some of the more remote valleys,” she answered. “Besides, trucks are slower. Which gives the terrorists time to stage an ambush. So choose someplace appropriate, Aaron. Far from civilians.”

“With plenty of combat room. I understand. No problem,” the man replied, and the intercom clicked silent.

“How can we be sure the terrorists find out in time?” Blancanales asked, furrowing his brow.

“How did they learn about the first warehouse?” Price countered, typing on the keyboard. “Now, I want you three in Sonora, ASAP. These people would be fools not to have somebody watching the ruined warehouse to see who we send to investigate.” She smiled coldly. “That’s why I didn’t send Phoenix Force there first. Make them sweat a little. Nervous people make mistakes.”

“If I was any more nervous I’d need a change of underwear,” Schwarz quipped.

“Again?” Blancanales retorted.

Ignoring the banter, Lyons pulled a .357 Magnum Colt Python from behind his back and swung out the cylinder to check the load. He closed the gun with a firm click. “How soon can Jack be ready to fly us down to Texas?”

“He’s warming up a C-130 Hercules at Dulles right now,” Price replied, looking up from the keyboard. “Your equipment van is already being loaded. And a blacksuit has a helicopter on the front lawn waiting for you. Find me somebody, and burn the rope.”

Stoically, the three members of Able Team rose from the table, gathered their personal belongings and headed for the door.

“Move fast on this,” Price ordered in dismissal. “The numbers are already falling. You have no idea how close we came to the end of everything last night.”

But the men were already gone, the armored door swinging closed behind them.

“Good luck,” the mission controller added softly, returning to her typing. For a long while, the only sounds in the War Room were the soft patting of her strong fingers and the steady ticking of the mechanical clock mounted on the concrete wall.