LITMIR.BIZ

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at their backs. “His words, not mine.”

      “What’s the worst-case scenario?” Bolan asked.

      Brognola turned up his overcoat’s collar against the icy breeze that was blowing off the Potomac River and exhaled before answering, his breath appearing in a steady plume as thick as cigar smoke. “The Navy’s aircraft carriers are protected with a system called ADAS—Air Defense Alert System—designed and built by Nautech Corporation,” Brognola replied. “Worst-case scenario would be a terrorist group getting access to the computer code that gives ADAS its instructions. If an enemy was able to communicate with the program installed onboard a ship, hidden commands could be inserted into the operating system instructing ADAS to drop its electronic sensors. If that happened, our aircraft carriers would be like fish in a barrel.”

      “How does the system work?” the Executioner asked.

      The big Fed squinted into the distance for a moment before replying. He was wearing a charcoal gray topcoat that came to his knees, and a black felt fedora whose narrow brim cast the upper half of his face in shadow. A silk scarf printed with a rose-and-maroon paisley pattern filled the space between the topcoat’s wool collar and Brognola’s neck. In spite of the snow, his black wingtips were clean and shiny, his appearance as impeccable as if he had just come from a Fortune 500 boardroom.

      Still looking toward a distant horizon, he said, “When the ADAS cabinets are deployed onboard aircraft carriers, twenty-seven monitors that resemble small television screens are also installed and connected to the system. The monitors are mounted in various places—some on the bridge, in the weapons center, one in the captain’s quarters, some in the mess hall. The point is to put them all over the ship to make sure that both the captain and the weapons officer will always be close to one. The system grabs real-time electronic information from the ship’s radar and weapons systems, and displays everything approaching the vessel within thirty nautical miles. ADAS also keeps track of available weapons and missile inventories, automatically matching incoming targets with the appropriate weapons to neutralize them.”

      “Like a big video game,” Bolan commented.

      “Except that life and death are at stake,” Brognola replied dryly. “Today’s weapons systems are able to assess the environment, make decisions and initiate action within seconds. You don’t have much time to figure out the best course of action when a few warheads are speeding toward your ship at Mach 2. ADAS does it all in split seconds. Recognizes the targets, assigns weapons, tracks, engages, mitigates. The USS Stark taught the Navy what happens when you don’t have an electronic umbrella monitoring your immediate area for incoming threats.”

      Brognola adjusted his scarf with an efficient motion that suggested the gentle tugging and tucking might be a habit rather than a necessity. “If a terrorist group got their hands on Nautech’s top secret computer codes running ADAS,” he said, directing his gaze at Bolan, “they could blind our ships to incoming missiles. There are two or three aircraft carriers stationed in the Persian Gulf at any given time. Each one is a floating arsenal, transporting unbelievable weaponry to the modern-day battlefield. Fighter jets, bombers, guns, missiles—these nuclear-powered vessels are true death stars. They also cost close to a billion dollars to build and maintain. Losing even one in combat would be devastating. And not just because of the cost. Aircraft carriers represent the epitome of American military might. It would be a serious blow to both troop morale and our global prestige if we lost a carrier.”

      Brognola sighed heavily. “We need a soft probe, Striker. I can’t give you all the details here, but the objective is in Manitoba, about three hundred miles from the North Dakota border. We think a group of engineers from Nautech have hijacked the computer code and are planning to sell it on the black market.”

      Bolan finished reading the four-page briefing Homeland Security had given the President earlier that morning and passed it back to Brognola. The edges of the papers ruffled in the breeze as the big Fed folded the report before slipping it into his overcoat’s internal breast pocket and buttoning the flap closed.

      Bolan recalled missions he had accomplished in part aboard aircraft carriers, remembering the highly charged atmosphere where a crew of up to five thousand dedicated men and women worked in harmony to bring the enormous might of their vessel to bear. Brognola was right. It would be significant on a number of levels for the United States to lose a national asset like an aircraft carrier.

      Soft probe, Bolan thought. How many times had he heard the words “soft,” “cold,” or “unoccupied” used to incorrectly describe one of his drop zones? For Brognola to be requesting his assistance, the situation had to have already progressed to a point where the President no longer trusted his official people to mitigate the threat before it affected policy.

      “Okay,” Bolan said suddenly.

      “Akira’s ready to brief you,” Brognola responded, referring to the talented hacker who served on Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman’s cybernetics team at Stony Man Farm.

      The two men parted without another word, the man from the Justice Department setting off to inform the President that his request had been accepted; the man known to Brognola as “Striker” stepping away and turning up Twelfth Street. By the time the warrior had passed between the EPA and IRS buildings, he had merged with the few pedestrians braving the January cold, vanishing into the cityscape as effectively as a tiger disappeared into the jungle. The rules for survival were, if fact, the same everywhere.

      An alarm sounded on the snowmobile’s dashboard. The electronic unit was alerting Bolan that he was entering an area being scanned by the type of radiation used to power long-distance surveillance radars. He brought his snowmobile to a halt and turned off the sensor.

      In the stillness, he could hear snowmobiles. They were far away, at least three or four miles, the distance making it impossible to discern whether they were heading his way. Bolan’s experience on battlefields throughout the world had developed in him a phenomenal sense of space and distance. It was no coincidence that ancient cultures often portrayed their legendary warriors with ears resembling those of bats. In hand-to-hand combat, extraordinary fighters sometimes displayed an intimate feel for their surroundings so extreme they appeared to be operating with the assistance of a sixth sonarlike sense. Bolan listened hard for a few seconds before deciding the snowmobiles were moving away from his position.

      He switched the sensor back on. The intermittent chirping pattern signified he was at the extreme edge of coverage. On the unit’s LED, the scanning frequency was identified as one residing at the long end of the L-band, verifying Tokaido’s assertion that the engineers from Nautech would probably use energy bands similar to those they worked with at the company. The radiation’s magnitude, however, was of more interest to Bolan than its actual frequency. By measuring the intensity of the beam sweeping across the open plain, Tokaido’s sensor was able to get a lock on the source’s location. According to the display, the cabin was roughly five miles away, which meant Bolan had probably not shown up yet on their screen. Before resuming his approach, he turned on his unit’s cloaking circuit.

      “It’s only a snowmobile,” Akira Tokaido had replied to Barbara Price’s compliment after the hacker showed Stony Man Farm’s mission controller that there were methods other than physical design to shield items from radar detection. “It’s not like we’re hiding a battleship or anything.”

      Well-known weapons such as the American Stealth bomber and South Korea’s KDX-II destroyer used angles and composite coatings to deflect or absorb radar transmissions. Tokaido, however, knew how to use electronic tweaking, what he referred to as “turning a mirror on the illuminator,” to shield almost anything from conventional radars.

      With the unit’s LED emitting a steady green light indicating that an electronic cloak had been wrapped around him and his snowmobile, Bolan resumed his advance. It was growing colder, causing his exhaled breath to immediately form into ice crystals on the outside of his face mask. He pressed on, oblivious to the cold.

      Bolan heard the generator a good ten minutes before the cabin came into sight. The sun was slightly less than an hour from setting when he halted his snowmobile and dismounted

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