knew. Just dig in, do it. Nicknamed “Ironman,” he was no marshmallow melting in the flames of adversity. And Hal Brognola had handed Able Team its standing orders.
A two-hour-plus jaunt from D.C., for starters, following a web of backcountry roads off the interstate as given to the big Fed by his Shadow Man, and they were guided in by the GPS in the Farm’s custom war van. They were here now in the wooded belly of Western Maryland, about thirty miles south of Gettysburg to be more exact. One of Lyons’s two teammates had disgorged alongside him into the dark unknown, right in front of the gate with its No Trespassing sign, two klicks and change out from the concrete bunker dug into the hillside where the shadow encounter would go down, and which Stony Man cyberburglars had been fortunate enough to steal a peek at from a passing satellite. Any threat, Brognola warned, wouldn’t be overt; it would come sudden and out of nowhere, if personal experience served him right. In other words, Lyons and company knew to trust no one, and to not, under any circumstances, allow the seeming absence of menace to lull them into dropping their guard. These particular wolves in sheep’s clothing, he knew—black ops who put themselves above the law and who would execute innocent civilians if it served their twisted ideal of protecting national security—often came bearing smiles and friendly assurances while waving a white flag.
The former Los Angeles detective and current leader of Able Team dropped to a crouch behind a pine tree for quick situation assessment. Given that they knew next to nothing about Brognola’s rendezvous with the unknown spook source, they were ready to go tactical at the first double signal transmitted over vibrating pagers fixed to their respective hips. Like Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, he was togged in a blacksuit and weighted down with a combat harness and slotted vest stuffed to the gills with grenades, spare clips, on down to a sheathed Ka-Bar fighting knife on his shin. In lieu of his Colt Python .357 Magnum, the Able Team leader’s new sidearm of choice was a .50-caliber Desert Eagle, with mounted laser sight. Its clip was filled with fifteen rounds of special “black rhino” hollowpoint pulverizers. Stony Man’s resident armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, swore he could now nearly shred Kevlar like foam. Schwarz, he knew, was sitting with the war van, watching thermal screens and monitoring parabolic sensors for any traffic, human or vehicular, while Blancanales was on the move in a perimeter sweep to his deep right flank.
All set, but for what?
Lyons scanned the forested slopes through night-vision goggles, the Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun with attached sound suppressor and laser sight rolling in unison with his visual surveillance. Lyons listened to the dead silence. No matter how hard it tried, no matter the level of skill earned by tough experience, no living creature could advance in total silence through any such terrain. And that went for Blancanales, too, despite the fact the man was a Vietnam vet who had been baptized in the blood-soaked jungles of Southeast Asia where there was nothing but armed ghosts who moved silent as the wind. There was brush, twigs, stones to contend with, uneven but hard-packed earth to avoid, that would yield to encroaching weight. The body gave off distinct odors, often through expelled breath. Say a stalking opponent was inclined to smoke, booze, meat, or a splash of yesterday’s after-shave, or just so happened to be sweating out any number of toxins…
And Lyons caught a whiff of cigarette residue as a sudden breeze rustled through the woods. As good fortune had it, he was downwind. The trouble under these circumstances was that he was up against professionals, bad habits or not. As such they would have night vision, EM scanners—
What the hell was that? Lyons wondered. The figure—if he could call it such—was nearly invisible despite his infrared radiation-enhanced eye. It was a specter of human form, but in blurry white outline, almost perfectly blended with the outcrop beyond a stand of trees. Was it standing or moving, and where did it come from so suddenly? He wasn’t even sure he was looking at a living creature, since there was no discernible light-wave read, then he saw a subgun that appeared all but suspended in the air. Instinct screamed at Lyons he was marked, dead to rights, whatever the apparition, and if he wasn’t witness to the Invisible Man, then that was a mounted battery-operated weapon.
And going for broke!
Lyons was dropping for maximum shield behind the fat base of a pine just as the white beam of a laser speared the ghost-murk of night vision and bark flayed his exposed cheek and jaw to the burping retort of muffled subgun.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Extinction Level Event. ELE, if you like.”
If he liked. Hell, Hal Brognola didn’t like any of it. Not the Shadow Man’s flare for the dramatic, nor his vague reasoning of shared interests in national security, certain these meets were also manufactured fishing expeditions. Brognola grew conscious of the Glock 17 stowed beneath his suit jacket, having already noted the hardware tucked at left bicep level under Shadow Man’s windbreaker.
“What do you know about the space alerting and defense system?”
He was no astronomy expert by any stretch, but he knew the basics enough to thwart Shadow Man if he was attempting to paint him an ignoramus. Even a small portion of knowledge wielded some power, Brognola thought. He took a few moments to consider his answer, measure the man.
They were nameless sources of intelligence he had used over the years. Sometimes the big Fed went to them, but usually they sought him out through a series of encrypted e-mails they had arranged. Whether to pick his brains or to attempt to confirm suspicions and rumors of the existence of Stony Man Farm, he met them at a mutually agreed-upon time and place. He always seemed to walk away, taking everything, giving nothing, but only insofar as he knew.
They came as the usual clone of buzz cut, dark clothing, chiseled but nondescript faces, a security force of normally two shooters on hand, as was the case now. One mountain of granite with earpiece, throat mike and HK-33 was posted outside the door, the other wraith, Brognola had likewise last seen, was waiting behind the wheel of the black GMC with government plates. There could be more hardmen, likewise snipers buried in the woods for all he knew. But he had come armed with more than foresight and a bad gut feeling. Since nearly being murdered in the past during one such encounter, Brognola had Able Team in tow, more than confident that they had him covered. If the Stony Man commando sensed the slightest threat, the pager on his hip would vibrate to abort, go tactical. Barring that, there was the handheld radio unit clipped to his belt, and Carl Lyons wasn’t one to speak softly when it hit the fan.
“SADS,” Brognola finally said, deciding he could play the Shadow Man’s acronym game. “They are Earth’s last insurance policy against NEOs, or near earth objects.” He cleared his throat into a long moment of stony silence. “If this is a history on the threat of comets and asteroids, I know about the mile-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona, about Tunguska in Siberia where something like fifteen to twenty miles of forest was leveled by a twenty-megaton blast. I know a one kilometer space rock is considered a ‘large impactor.’ I know about twenty or thirty billion tons of said space rock hurtling toward Earth and impacting at about ten kilometers a second is what science considers the threshold for an extinction level event, which, I think, would yield something in the area of one million million megatons of TNT. Oh yeah, and a two or three mile rock would create global catastrophe. Earthquakes, firestorms, tidal waves of hundred-foot or more walls if it hit water. Hurricane winds off any chart we now measure them by would ensue and hurl tens of billions of tons of dust and debris into the air. The sun would vanish. A new Ice Age would start.”
The Shadow Man snorted.
Brognola felt the guy’s penetrating stare, then, annoyed at whatever his act, glanced around the room. The only furniture was four chairs and the steel table at which Brognola sat, all of them bolted to the concrete floor. He suspected there was a cellar, as evidenced by a short, arrow-straight
