LITMIR.BIZ

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know for sure by noon tomorrow,” he said, and went to work contacting Scotland Yard, routing the request through Brognola’s Justice department e-mail account. The British police regularly did the Farm small favors, assuming the requests came from Justice.

      “All right, I hacked the bank and got his credit card,” Delahunt announced smoothly. “The account for his wife was closed last year, and the dates match her supposed demise.”

      “What about him?” Price asked.

      “He spent a lot of time drinking at the local bars, months actually, then went to Amsterdam for a—” Delahunt coughed delicately. “Shall we say he had a lonely man’s weekend adventure?”

      “Everybody grieves in their own way. All I want to know is, where the frag is he now?” Kurtzman asked. “Exploring the forbidden delights of Hong Kong? Going down under in Australia?”

      “Australia?”

      “Prostitution is legal there.”

      “Is it? Well, the card shows he took British Airlines Flight 255 to Nashville, Tennessee, and he is staying at the Tuncisa Casino and Hotel in Memphis. Room 957, the Heartbreak Hotel suite.”

      In spite of the situation, Brognola almost smiled at that. “He’s an Elvis fan?”

      “And who isn’t?” Kissinger said languidly.

      “Has Jack gotten in touch with Able Team yet?” Price asked, standing from her chair. Jack Grimaldi was the chief pilot for Stony Man and often carried the field teams to and from battlegrounds. There wasn’t a machine with wings or rotors that Grimaldi couldn’t fly, including space shuttles.

      “Just a few minutes ago,” Kurtzman replied. “They were getting some R and R visiting Toni in Los Angeles, and not answering their cell phones, so I sent some blacksuits after them as you suggested. Thankfully, Ironman heard about New Mexico on the radio and the team is already on the way.”

      “Excellent. When they arrive, send the team to Memphis and bring in Professor Gallen,” she ordered. “We need him alive.”

      “Consider it done.”

      “What about Phoenix Force?” Brognola asked.

      “They’re going to Finland, to check the former location of the lab,” Price answered curtly. “Or rather, they will be soon. Unfortunately right now they’re incommunicado on that search-and-rescue mission to Sardinia. No way out of that.”

      Although irritated, the man accepted the information. Soldiers couldn’t very well answer a cell phone in the middle of a firefight. One small distraction could cost a hundred lives. There was nothing to do until McCarter called the Farm, either announcing a successful mission or asking for an immediate air strike.

      The big Fed took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “How soon until they call in?”

      Price checked the clock on the wall above the room’s entrance.

      “Just about any time now…” she answered as the hands moved forward with a mechanical click.

       CHAPTER THREE

       The Isle of Sardinia

      It was a moonless night and the stars were bright in the heavens. Sitting on a rock, the man in loose clothing was cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife when he went stiff, his eyes going wide in shock. His hands twitched from the effort to grab the AK-47 assault rifle laying across his lap, but they refused to obey even the most simple command.

      There was pain, searing pain, at the back of his head, and the guard realized that he had been stabbed in Death’s Doorway, the tiny fissure located near the right ear. Slide in a thin blade right there and your victim was paralyzed, twist the blade and they died instantly, like turning off a light switch. Click, dead. The guard had done it many times over the years to policemen, judges, even a few women who had refused to cooperate, but he never knew how much it hurt. The pain filled his body like electric fire. It was beyond agony! But he couldn’t make a sound. Not a sound.

      Then there was pressure from the blade, a flash of light and eternal blackness.

      With a soft exhalation, the dead man slid off the rock onto the white sandy beach, the assault rifle splashing into the blue sea.

      “One down, fifty to go,” T. J. Hawkins whispered, wiping the blade clean before sheathing it. A decorated member of the elite Delta Force before joining Stony Man, Thomas Jackson Hawkins, T.J. to his family and friends, was a big man, lightning-fast in his movements and a stone-cold killer on the battlefield.

      “Firebird One, this is Texas. The clubhouse is open,” Hawkins said, touching his throat mike.

      As silent as ghosts, more men rose from the scraggly juniper bushes of the low hillock and approached the rocky rill, moving from shadow to shadow. Past the hillock rose huge sand dunes that extended for miles. This section of Sardinia was often called the Sarah of Italy. Others called it purgatory, the gateway to hell.

      Carefully studying the coastline, David McCarter kept the Barnett crossbow steady in his grip, the blackened tip of the arrow as reflectionless as the sky above. A quiver of arrows for the crossbow was strapped across his back and a MP-5 machine gun was slung at his side, the barrel tipped with a sound suppressor.

      There was a tunnel straight ahead of the Stony Man team, a dark recess going straight into the bowels of the earth. Sardinia was famous for its gold mines, the island honeycombed with a warren of passages. But McCarter knew this abandoned mine was a dead end. The slavers were a lot smarter than that. They had been plying their trade for decades, and nobody had ever gotten closer than the length of a knife blade before.

      Until this night, McCarter thought grimly. A former member of the SAS, David McCarter was the leader of Phoenix Force, a former SAS commando and an Olympic-class pistol shot. Every man on the team owed his life to McCarter a dozen times over, and had repaid the debt in equal numbers. Their bonds of friendship had been forged in fields of blood.

      On the surface, the island of Sardinia was a tourist’s paradise, the fjords filled with more yachts and pleasure craft than all of the fishing boats of the entire chain of twenty-three islands combined. The beaches were made of the purest white sand, as pristine as newly fallen snow, and the sea was almost supernaturally clear. During the daylight, it was possible to look all the way to the bottom of the shoals and see the wrecked stone columns from the time of the Roman Empire.

      However, the criminal elements of Sardinia began to kidnap young women from Italy, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Spain and Sicily, hauling them away to a secret location. There they were brutalized until their spirits finally broke and they learned to accept their new position as sex slaves. Branded like cattle, the girls, mostly teenagers, were sold on the world sex market to high-priced whorehouses in Bangkok, harems in Arabia and South America or to millionaire sadists seeking fresh victims for their private torture rooms. If the girls refused to obey, or tried to escape, they were brutally killed.

      Italy lost an estimated thousand teenage girls a year to the monstrous slavers. Numerous ships had been caught at sea, and occasionally some girls were rescued alive. But the slavers disliked witnesses, and often tossed them overboard still locked in their heavy steel chains.

      If the flesh merchants were arrested by NATO forces, they went to stand trail in the world court. If taken by the Italian military, the slavers were executed at sea with a bullet to the back of the head. Nobody had ever accused the Italians of being soft on crime. But the lure of huge profits was too strong an incentive, and in spite of everything the UN, Interpol, Italy, Greece and Turkey could do, the foul practice continued.

      There were few villages along Costa Verde that afforded privacy to anybody who did not wish to be observed. Far out to sea, Arlentu Mountain was a basalt fortress rising on the horizon from the last volcanic eruption hundreds of years ago. It was a landmark for passing ships to find the safe deep-water harbors. The mountain was also an excellent way for the slavers to navigate without using radar or radio beacons, which might give away their

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