LITMIR.BIZ

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recruited into the Puzzle Palace.

      High-strung, type A and nearly anorexic, the specialist was a mission-first workaholic who’d run one marriage into the ground and didn’t speak to his children. Despite this, or maybe because of it, he had a reputation as the premier field-operations guy in the Agency.

      At that moment the door to the communications station opened and a figure appeared in the doorway, submachine gun held in his hands.

      Ensign reached for the metal filing cabinet where he’d placed his holdout, an H&K MP-5. His fingers curled around the smooth metal handle of the drawer.

      The figure in the doorway stepped to one side and a second form appeared in the entrance. Hoffman had time to look toward Ensign as he yanked open the drawer and reached inside. Sloke covered his head with his arms.

      Ensign lifted the submachine gun, tried to turn as his thumb snapped the fire-selector off safety and onto full auto.

      The men in the doorway opened fire.

      Bullets streamed through the claustrophobic space in a hailstorm of lead. Rounds chewed through computer screens and electronics equipment, shattering cases and housing like sledgehammers.

      Sparks flew in wild rooster tails and miniature columns of smoke spewed upward as shards of plastic and stamped metal ricocheted around.

      The cowering Sloke caught a long burst that slammed into him with relentless force, gouging out the flesh of his side and back, shattering his ribs and scrambling his internal organs like eggs in a skillet. He screamed and flopped under the impact until a triple burst of soft-nosed slugs shattered his jaw, cracked his temple and punched two holes through the temporal bone of his skull.

      He slumped instantly, banging his head on the tabletop before flopping onto the diamond-plate flooring panels. His blood spilled out like flood waters.

      Hoffman rose to her feet in a half crouch, a hapless, helpless, terrified look freezing her face into a mask of fear. Her hands came up as if she could ward off the bullets with such a feeble attempt.

      Her left hand lost the pinkie and index finger as the rounds sliced through her. Her right palm blossomed with blood as a round slammed through the muscle under her thumb and lodged in the bones of her wrist.

      She opened her mouth to scream and a single round slid into her torso, slicing apart her diaphragm and venting the air in her lungs. She gasped weakly and folded like a lawn chair in time to catch six more bullets across her chest and throat.

      The intelligence agent fell backward, her blood splashing her computer screen, and tripped over her chair. She struck the ground like a kid falling out of a tree and gasped, fighting for breath through ruined lungs and larynx.

      Her eyes filmed gray in an instant and she fell slack. The oxygen-starved muscles of her abdomen spasmed once and a cascade of dark blood bubbled out of her mouth and streaked her face.

      Ensign leveled the H&K, his finger tight on the trigger.

      He felt two bullets strike him like the impacts of a baseball bat, one in his thigh and a second low in his gut. He squeezed the MP-5’s trigger and the submachine gun roared to life in his hands.

      His rounds sprayed wildly in a loose pattern, most of them burning off harmlessly into the ceiling.

      A second burst caught him in the chest and shoulder, smashing him back against the filing cabinet. The kinetic force jerked his arm, and the muzzle of the blazing SMG dropped.

      Two rounds struck one of the attackers in his right arm, slicing through the biceps and cracking the humerus bone beneath, while the other sliced a gouge of meat an inch wide off the man’s rib cage. The Nigerian killer grunted with the impact and staggered.

      The second gunman hosed the ex-Marine down, stitching a line of slugs in a diagonal pattern from hip to neck and unzipping the American’s stomach in the process.

      Ensign rebounded off the filing cabinet and dropped to his knees, the H&K falling silent. A final burst from the unwounded killer sliced his face off his skull, leaving only a bloody cavity in its place.

      The corpse fell forward and struck the ground with a wet slap.

      Colonel Kabila stepped into the hut, a bloody panga knife in hand, cigar burning in his mouth.

      He looked at his wounded police officer and jerked his head to the side, indicating the man should go.

      “Dress your wounds,” he ordered, and the man hurried to obey.

      Kabila took a deep drag and blew smoke out of his wide nostrils like a dragon. He looked at the other police officer and lifted his panga. The blade of the heavy bush tool was smeared black with blood.

      “Get to work,” he said.

      Twenty yards away Dexter huddled in the bush, hidden from sight.

      CHAPTER SIX

      Suburbs, Washington, D.C.

      The phone rang.

      Hal Brognola came awake instantly. The director of the Special Operations Group and head of Stony Man Farm sat up in bed and snapped on the lamp at his bedside table. His wife of some thirty years moaned in protest and rolled away.

      The phone rang again.

      Getting oriented, the director of America’s most sensitive covert operation group looked at the table and tried to determine which of his two phones was ringing. The first phone was his home and it often rang when some matter from his position at the Justice Department needed urgent attention.

      The second phone was a Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device, or SME PED. The combination of sat phone and PDA allowed the wireless transmission of classified information and conversations.

      When that phone rang then Brognola knew without question that the call was in reference to the Stony Man program. It would mean that somewhere in the world something had gone very wrong and that a decision had been made at the very highest level that resolution was only to be found at the muzzle of a gun.

      The Stony Man teams were the very best guns in the business.

      Brognola blinked and phone chirped again. It was the SME PED.

      Time to go to work, he thought, and picked up the secured device.

      “Go for Hal,” he said.

      Things started to roll.

      Stony Man Farm

      CARMEN DELAHUNT HAD CQ duty at the Farm.

      CQ was a military acronym for “command of quarters” and it simply meant that she had drawn after-hours duty. Despite not having the field teams on any active assignment at that precise moment, Stony Man was still a 24/7 operation and as such the Farm was fully staffed around the clock.

      Secure in the Communications Room of the Farm’s Annex, the fiery redhead and former FBI agent was monitoring updated intelligence situation reports, military communications traffic and twenty-four-hour cable news channels.

      While monitoring all this sensory input, Delahunt casually whipped through page after page of challenging Sudoku puzzles. She was a multitasking machine driven by a sharp, type A personality engine.

      On the top of the desk the duty phone blinked into life and then rang. Setting down her coffee cup, she snatched up the receiver.

      “Farm,” she said. Then, after a pause she continued, “Good morning, Hal.”

      She cocked a head as the big Fed began talking. Her fingers flew across the keyboard in front of her as she began pulling up the latest information on West Africa in general, the Congo in specific, focusing on the terrorist and criminal operatives in that area and a project known as Lazy Titan.

      Satisfied she was up to speed, Brognola hung up in his suburban D.C. home and began getting dressed.

      Once off the phone Delahunt made two priority

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