to plan. Svetlana reached up and kissed Dmitri quickly, leaving a lipstick mark so red on his pale skin it looked like a wound. Then she was up the stairs and being greeted like an old friend.
Klegg waited patiently, ignoring Dmitri’s hard stare. He waited while Svetlana passed kisses of greetings all around and hugged Milosevic. She laughed at something he said, then helped herself to a line of the coke and a glass of the expensive champagne. Milosevic seemed generally happy to see her and, having spent time with the lady himself, Klegg could understand why.
After a few moments, once she was comfortably ensconced next to the Russian syndicate lawyer, he saw her lean in close, hand on Milosevic’s thigh, and begin whispering in his ear.
Klegg, long attuned to these things, watched Milosevic’s body language change. The smile, a social mask, stayed in place, but when his eyes cut away from Svetlana and down the stairs to Klegg they glittered like a snake’s, sizing him up.
Klegg smiled slightly back in acknowledgment.
It was time to make his play. He was a six plus one.
CHAPTER FIVE
Stony Man Farm
The Bronco pulled out of the dirt road emerging from the orchard and came to a stop at the foot of the hill. Doors were kicked open and the five members of Phoenix Force emerged from the vehicle. Gary Manning unwrapped a protein bar and began eating it.
“Good God, Manning,” Calvin James said. “Are you always eating?”
Still chewing, the massively muscled Manning looked at him and shrugged. “I’m in a bulking phase. I want to see how much weight I can put on and still keep my two-mile-run time under eleven and a half minutes.”
“Christ,” Rafael Encizo groused. “If you get any goddamn bigger we’ll never get the helicopter off the ground.”
“Then I’ll just leap to the target in a single bound,” Manning shot back.
Moments later a second SUV pulled up, this one containing Able Team and driven by John “Cowboy” Kissinger.
Kissinger had done time as a DEA agent before coming to work as armorer for the Stony Man operation. When it came to tactical equipment, firearms and explosives, he combined the creative insight of Akira Tokaido and the intense analytical skills of Professor Wethers.
McCarter took a sip of his coffee out of a cardboard cup and looked over at the armorer. Kissinger was laughing in response to something Hermann Schwarz was saying.
“Oh, Christ,” the Briton muttered as Manning strolled up beside him. “Schwarz is telling jokes again.”
The Canadian moaned in response as the two field teams converged. Schwarz kept right on talking, his eyes fairly dancing with delight as Carl Lyons, his favorite target for off-color humor, studiously ignored him.
“You think that’s bad, Cowboy?” Schwarz asked Kissinger. “One time after we got our operational bonuses we went in on a cattle ranch.”
“Oh, man,” Calvin James muttered to T. J. Hawkins, “this is going to be awful.”
“Usually,” Hawkins agreed. Then, momentarily taken back by the outlandishness, he turned toward James. “Wait, did they invest in property?”
“The only property Lyons ever invested in was the stripper pole he put up in his condo,” James replied.
“So we decide to buy this bull,” Schwarz continued. “You know, to increase our stock.”
“Please shut up,” Lyons said, his voice dull with hopelessness. “Can’t we just train?”
Schwarz continued as if he hadn’t heard. “So I go over there and Carl is all down, really bummed, says the bull just eats grass all day and won’t even look at the cows.” Schwarz stopped talking long enough to cut his eyes over to the burly ex-LAPD detective. The man looked resigned and Schwarz’s grin grew. “So I tell him to get a vet out quick to fix the problem. Two weeks later we get scrambled by Barb for a deployment.”
“Where I wished you’d suffered a horrific wound to your mouth,” Lyons added.
“And I ask Carl how things are going and he’s happy as hell! ‘The bull has taken care of all my cows, broke through the fence and has even serviced all the neighbor’s cows!’ I’m all like wow!” Schwarz laughed. “What the hell did the vet do to that bull? ‘Just gave him some pills,’ said Carl. So I’m like, what kind of pills? And Carl looks me straight in the eye—this is no bullshit—and says ‘I don’t know, but they sort of taste like peppermint.’”
Schwarz immediately began laughing at his own joke, folding almost in two with mirth as he guffawed. He looked up and saw the rest of the men from Stony looking at him with flat affects. “What?” he demanded. “He said ‘they taste like peppermint!’ See, he was eating the horny pills.” Out in the long grass, crickets chirped. Schwarz frowned. “These are the jokes, people.”
Rafael Encizo shook his head in pain. “You’ve got a real gift, man.”
“Yeah, he’s got a gift,” Blancanales replied. “He’s got such a gift Hal had to go to the freakin Oval Office to keep the CIA from stealing his jokes to use on the prisoners in Gitmo.”
“Oh, man.” McCarter shook his head. “If the ACLU thought sleep deprivation was torture they would have lost their minds if they’d ever heard Schwarz telling detainees jokes.”
Schwarz stood, his face holding a shocked expression. “You know Jesus said a prophet is never revered in his own land. Now I know what he meant.”
Kissinger burst out laughing in incredulous mirth. “Yeah, Hermann, whenever I think of Jesus I think of you, man.” The armorer stepped forward, shaking his head. “How ’bout I show you guys why I brought you out here before Carl picks up Blancanales and beats you to death with him?”
“Sure.” Schwarz shrugged. “I like new toys as much as the next electronics genius.”
“You can see,” Lyons observed, “he’s as modest as he is funny.”
“Please tell us what you brought,” Manning begged Kissinger.
“Let me introduce you boys to a little bit of gear I appropriated from DARPA by way of our good friends at Lockheed Martin.”
“Jet pack?” McCarter, a pilot, asked, only half joking.
“Close.” Kissinger nodded and led the teams around to the rear of his SUV where he lowered the back hatch. “Exoskeletons.”
“Exoskeletons?” Encizo asked.
Kissinger nodded. “Yep. Called HULC.” He began handing out surprisingly compact packages. “We do the first trial out here on a few hill runs, then I had Hal go through Justice and get us some time at the Marine Corps obstacle course down in Quantico. We’re going to put these mothers through a workout, then see if they’d be any use to you shooters out in the field.”
Hawkins looked at his package. “They call it the Hulk?” he asked.
“No,”
