LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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