One moment it was there, the next it was a flaming cloud of debris. A wall of heat hit him, scorching his face and drying his eyes as the shock wave bowled him over. Farrah hit the ground hard, feeling the breath rush out of him in one great, wracking cough. He had the presence of mind to shield his head and roll over, painfully, as scraps of burning metal rained down. He had a moment to wonder what was happening before he heard it—a whistling noise increasing in pitch. When the heavy chunk of concrete struck him in the head, he didn’t have time to wonder what it was before his world went dark.
When he opened his eyes again to a throbbing pain in his skull, the night was aglow with flickering orange fire. He could hear the crackling flames and smell the smoke as he watched, his vision blurred from the blow to the head. Afraid to move from where he lay sprawled on the ground, he watched as trucks roared past. He coughed as their diesel exhaust plumes rolled over him, but tried otherwise to remain still. The trucks—he didn’t recognize them—were moving away from the enrichment plant. Men clung to the running boards on either side of the truck, men armed with what Farrah recognized as AK-47 rifles.
His brain fogged with pain and confusion, Farrah struggled first to one knee. Lurching to his feet, stumbling and getting up again, he fumbled at his belt for his pistol as the last of trucks roared past. There was only one man clinging to the side of the vehicle, a battered Toyota Land Cruiser. Farrah forced his blurred vision to cooperate just long enough to get his .45-caliber Springfield XD out of its holster. He fired once, then twice, then a third time, into the night.
He tripped and fell. The stumble saved his life, most likely, as return fire from a gunner in the rear of the Land Cruiser scored the air above him. Then the truck was gone, leaving only the burning wreckage of the UVC facility in its wake.
He groped for his radio but couldn’t find it. He wasn’t sure if he’d dropped it or if maybe it had been taken while he lay unconscious on the ground. With nowhere else to go, he staggered for the front entrance to the camp, where the chain-link gates had been knocked down. The trucks had probably driven through them.
He heard footsteps scraping through the dirt and brought up his gun, closing one eye in an attempt to fight back the double vision creeping into his sight. The bloody figure that emerged, backlighted by the flames, was Bhatt.
“Bhatt!” Farrah said in relief. “You’re alive!”
Bhatt tried to speak but fell to his knees, choking and coughing. Farrah reached for him but Bhatt waved him off, trying to catch his breath. Farrah turned and almost tripped over the body.
A dead man was sprawled on the dirt road.
The corpse wore olive-drab fatigues and a balaclava. An AK-47 had been dropped not far from the dead man. Also near the body was a square box the size of a large phone or personal data device. Farrah picked it up gingerly, fearing it might be a detonator of some kind. He turned it over in his hands, but couldn’t figure out what it might be. It looked like a complicated phone. Why would a guerrilla be carrying such a thing? And who were these people?
Bhatt coughed loudly and said something. Farrah turned to him and helped prop him up. Bhatt was flushed and choking, but he looked determined to choke out what he had to say.
“What is it?” Farrah asked him. “Bhatt, what it is?”
“Uranium!” Bhatt finally managed. “Enriched uranium!”
“What about it?” Farrah asked, his stomach sinking.
“They took it!” Bhatt said. “The trucks…full of drums of enriched uranium!”
“Full?” Farrah went pale. “Are you sure?”
Bhatt nodded.
Farrah looked down at the dead man, the man he’d killed, the first life he had ever taken. Then he looked back to Bhatt.
A single death was nothing compared to the potential mass murder that had just left through the main gate.
CHAPTER ONE
Aurora, Illinois
Carl “Ironman” Lyons sipped black coffee from a foam cup, surprised at how good it was. The former L.A. police officer had done more than his fair share of stakeouts, subsisting on gut-wrenching, greasy takeout leavened with bad coffee. He’d had coffee so bad, in fact, that it could make a person wince. But this was good coffee. The proliferation of designer coffees and trendy joints to drink it in had pushed the fast-food empires to keep pace. Lyons counted himself among those benefiting from this free market.
“I’ve never seen a man so thoughtful over a cup of Joe,” Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz commented. The electronics expert and veteran commando—whose nerdy demeanor concealed a hard core forged on many a battlefield—frowned and brushed a lock of brown hair out of his eyes. He shifted in the passenger seat of the black Suburban, glancing over at the bull-necked blond man who hulked behind the steering wheel sniffing at a coffee cup.
Lyons grunted at his teammate and turned back to watch the street. Encouraging Gadgets would only get him started, and it was too early in the morning to deal with his ribbing just yet.
The two members of the covert counterterrorist unit known as Able Team were parked down and across the street from the Illinois headquarters of the World Workers United Party. Even now, the third and final member of Able Team, Rosario “The Politician” Blancanales, was inside that building, patiently waiting to speak with the local director of the primary chapter of the WWUP. The gray-haired, dark-eyed, soft-spoken Hispanic was an expert in both the psychology of violence and in-role camouflage. He had needed no special disguise or even a particularly complicated cover story to get an appointment with the WWUP’s director. He had simply posed as an interested potential donor and made an appointment through the chapter’s secretary.
What had brought Able Team to the streets of this Chicago suburb was far more complicated. The brief had first been transmitted to him through the computer experts at Stony Man Farm, the covert organization under whose umbrella Able Team operated. A lot of it had caused Lyons’s eyes to glaze over in boredom, but he had of course been able to get the gist. The WWUP had a lot of money for a fringe political party, and the transfers of funds to and from the party had finally tripped whatever monitoring algorithms the supercomputers the Farm were using to monitor worldwide data transfers. More significantly, transfers of funds to the WWUP were being routed to the group from outside the country. The Byzantine web of laws governing political contributions was not something Lyons pretended to understand, but that didn’t matter. The key was that when the money tree was shaken hard enough, Stony Man had been able to link monies sent to the WWUP all the way back to offshore holding companies that were themselves linked to the Earth Action Front.
As Lyons had been so recently informed, the EAF was a notorious ecoterror group whose members were more than happy to use violence to achieve their aims. They had gone from total unknowns five years earlier, to the preeminent “green” terror group worldwide. While they’d started small-time—spray-painting EAF on “gas-guzzling” SUVs parked at American sales lots, or staging denial of service attacks on the networks of corporations overseas they deemed to be polluters—they’d long since graduated to acts of violence that bordered on mass murder. In the past month, in fact, the EAF had claimed responsibility for a housing development fire in California that had killed three—in the name of stopping “suburban sprawl”—and for the ill-planned bombing of a nuclear power plant in France that had killed a security guard. While international in scope, the EAF was known to have a significant presence domestically. And that
