LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE

       Stony Man Farm, Virginia

      Barbara Price, Stony Man Farm’s mission controller, pushed a lock of honey-blond hair from her eyes as she climbed out from under the briefing-room conference table. Examining her tight slacks for dust, she brushed her hands across her thighs and looked to Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman. Kurtzman was sitting in his wheelchair, looking at her expectantly.

      “Well?” he said.

      “Let ’er rip,” Price stated.

      Kurtzman nodded and pressed a button on the control box in the surface of the table. He had spent the past few days wiring up new, higher-resolution, flat-screen monitors for the walls of the briefing room. Tasks such as these were among the hundreds of behind-the-scenes undertakings that Kurtzman and his cybernetics team fulfilled in support of the Farm’s missions. While Kurtzman’s upper body was massive and he could easily have pulled himself under the table to make the necessary connections, Price had offered to do it for him, if only to save him time.

      At Kurtzman’s touch, the wall screens switched on, displaying a test pattern.

      “Well, that looks good,” said Price. “We should be ready when Hal calls for the briefing.”

      “Yeah,” Kurtzman agreed. “I just want to—” He stopped. One by one, the wall screens switched from the test pattern to the image of a rounded, purple cartoon monster eating a lollipop. As Price watched, amazed, the monster began to find its way through a series of mazes bearing math problems. At the end of each passageway, it devoured another piece of candy.

      “What in the world?” Price asked.

      “Gadgets.” Kurtzman spit the name as if cursing.

      “Gadgets?” Price asked. “What does he have to do with it?” Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz was the technical expert on Able Team, one of the Farm’s two counterterror teams. He was as skilled with electronics and hardware as Kurtzman, the Farm’s computer expert and support team leader, was with software.

      “Our network runs in several shells,” said Kurtzman. “I keep the loosest security on the outer shell, the one that runs the office hardware. Encryption for our transmissions is handled on a deeper level of the network. But the outer layer, the one that handles just general connectivity among the hardware, can be adjusted internally.”

      “I don’t follow,” said Price. “What’s the connection?” She pointed at the cartoon monster. “What is that, Bear?”

      “That,” Kurtzman explained, “is Candy Monster Maze Farm online, one of the most popular smartphone apps on the market. It’s one of those addictive puzzle games. I keep deleting it from the outer network shell. Gadgets keeps hacking his way in to put it back on, no matter how many times I revoke his admin privileges.”

      Price hid her mouth behind her hand so Kurtzman would not see her smile. Schwarz was a notorious practical joker whose antics often helped the Farm’s personnel blow off steam. Given the extreme stress under which they all operated, Price was secretly grateful for Schwarz’s effect on morale. It might explain why, even though Able Team’s leader, Carl Lyons, was an irascible grump, unit cohesion in Able Team was as high as it had ever been.

      That was also true of Phoenix Force, Stony Man’s other counterterror team. Before David McCarter had become the leader of Phoenix Force, he was noted for his sharp tongue and glib nature. Yet the Briton had been awfully serious in the years since assuming leadership of the team, following the death of veteran Farm commando Yakov Katzenelenbogen.

      It was true what they said about the mantle of leadership. Price spent all her time worrying about the personnel of both teams, not to mention the support personnel who held them all together and made their missions possible.

      Kurtzman had produced a wireless compact keyboard and was now typing furiously at it. The purple, spherical monster was replaced on the wall screens with lines of code. As the monitors returned to the test pattern and then to a live feed of Hal Brognola sitting at his desk, a voice shouted from the corridor outside the briefing room.

      “No!” said Schwarz as he walked through the doorway. He was holding his secure satellite smartphone and watching the screen as he walked, tapping away with both thumbs. “I was almost to level ten. Now I’m going to forfeit my bonus lollipops.”

      “Gadgets—” Kurtzman snarled.

      “Uh,” Brognola interrupted from the wall screen. “If we could begin? I have an appropriations committee meeting in half an hour.” Brognola was speaking from his office on the Potomac. As Director of the Sensitive Operations Group and one of the few men alive who understood the extent and scope of the Stony Man Farm Operation, Brognola had his fingers in a lot of pies in Washington.

      Not for the first time, Price looked at the big Fed, wondering about his health. Over the years Brognola had cut back on a number of bad habits as stress, work load and time had conspired against him. How he managed on a day-to-day basis was a testament to his mental and physical strength. Nobody was shooting at Hal—although, over the years, that had happened a time or two—but he shouldered a load that was as great or greater than any of the fighting personnel on the Farm’s black-ops staff.

      Schwarz put his phone on the table. Kurtzman glared at the slim, nerdy-looking counterterrorist. Schwarz offered a sheepish grin before turning to greet his fellow Able Team members.

      Drinking from a disposable coffee cup that was probably full of Kurtzman’s own nuclear-strength brew, which Kurtzman fermented in an industrial coffeemaker in the Farm’s office annex, Carl “Ironman” Lyons strode into the briefing room. He nodded at Schwarz before settling his big frame into a chair of his own. The former LAPD detective was a big, imposing man…with a temper to match. Nonetheless, he was an extremely effective leader. Being able to tolerate Schwarz’s sense of humor on a daily basis was probably a big point in his favor.

      Behind Lyons was Rosario Blancanales, who had been nicknamed “Politician” for as long as Price had known him. Blancanales, a soft-spoken Hispanic man with gray hair, was an expert at “role camouflage” and a former Black Beret. As Lyons and Blancanales exchanged knowing looks first with Schwarz and then with Kurtzman—who was still doing his best to look angry at Schwarz—Price signaled Kurtzman to bring up the satellite feed for Phoenix Force. The Phoenix Force team was preparing to embark from an air base in Manila and had set up a portable satellite transmission unit in one of the outbuildings. It looked as if the five members of Phoenix Force were sharing space with several stacks of wooden crates and other supplies, including a leaning tower of oil cans.

      While they barely fit within the field of view of their field camera, the members of Phoenix Force were all present. There was David McCarter, the fox-faced Briton who was their team leader. Beside him crouched Rafael Encizo. The stocky, Cuban-born guerilla fighter was much shorter than square-jawed giant Gary Manning, a demolitions expert who had once served with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Kneeling in front of them was Calvin James, a lanky black man and former Navy SEAL from Chicago’s South Side. Also kneeling to fit within the camera frame was T. J. Hawkins, the youngest member of the team. The Georgia-born former Ranger had also earned himself a set of para wings along the way. His easygoing manner belied just how experienced he was at what all the Phoenix Force commandos excelled—the dealing out of fast, efficient, overwhelming force.

      “Okay, Hal,” Price confirmed. “We’re go.”

      Brognola cleared his throat. He pressed a button on the keyboard at his end. The display of his office was replaced by a graphic representation of the South China Sea, with several blinking target points indicated.

      “Beijing has laid claim to most of the South China Sea,” he said without preamble. “This isn’t the abrupt territory

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