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 calls, both to other locations on the Stony Man facility. The first was to inform Jack Grimaldi, chief pilot for the covert project, that he was needed ASAP to take a helicopter into Wonderland on the Potomac and ferry Brognola to the Farm.
The second call went to Barbara Price.
BARBARA PRICE, Stony Man’s mission controller, opened her eyes.
She awoke clearheaded and alert, knowing exactly where she was and what she needed to do.
There was a war being fought in the shadows and like the ringmaster of a circus, she was at its epicenter. Her eyes went to the window of her bedroom. It was dark outside. She looked over to her bedroom table and noted the glowing red numerals of her digital clock.
She had been asleep for a little over four hours. She sat up and pushed a slender hand through her honey-blond hair. She felt revitalized after her power nap and with a single cup of Aaron “Bear” Kurtzman’s coffee she knew she’d be ready to face another day.
She got out of bed and smoothed her clothes before picking up the copy of the Washington Post she had placed by her bed. The headline jumped out at her as she stepped out into the upstairs hallway of the Stony Man Farm main house.
Rebel Forces Invade Congo
Late yesterday afternoon the Congo was rocked by violence as insurgents under command of the infamous Gen. Nkunda took control of a region on the upper river. Human rights groups are worried as communication with the area has been cut off…
Disgusted, Price stopped reading. She had too much on her mind at the moment to worry about politics as usual in Africa.
She frowned. The name “General Nkunda” was unfamiliar. If there was a new player trampling through national playgrounds then she needed to be on top of it. She resolved to have her computer wizard Akira Tokaido see if Stony Man had any files on the man.
As she walked down the hall and took the stairs to the main floor of the farmhouse she began clicking through options and mentally categorizing her tasks. She had men on standby, preparing to go into danger, and like the maestro of a symphony it was her responsibility to coordinate all the disparate parts into a seamless whole.
She was in the basement and heading for the rail system that connected to the Annex when the cell phone on her belt began to vibrate. She plucked it free and used the red push-talk button to initiate the walkie-talkie mode on the encrypted device.
“This is Barb,” she said, voice cool.
“Barb,” Carmen Delahunt began, “Hal called. We have a situation.”
“Thanks, Carmen,” Price told the ex-FBI agent. “I’m in the tunnel and coming toward the Annex now.”
“See you in a minute,” Delahunt said, and signed off.
Price put her phone away and got into the light electric railcar. The little engine began to hum and Price quickly picked up speed as she shot down the one-thousand-foot tunnel sunk fifteen feet below the ground of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.
Things were starting to click, and Price could feel the tingle she had first felt as a mission controller for long-range operations conducted by the National Security Agency. It was there she had made her bones in the intelligence business before being recruited by Hal Brognola to run logistics and support at the more covert Stony Man operation.
It had been quite a promotion, she reflected as the railcar raced down the subterranean tunnel past conduit pipes and thick power cables toward the Farm’s Annex, which was camouflaged underneath a commercial wood-chipping facility.
Stony Man had operated as a clandestine antiterrorist operation since long before the infamous attacks of September 11 had put all of America’s military, intelligence and law-enforcement efforts on the same page. As such, Stony Man operated as it always had: under the direct control of the White House and separate from both the Joint Special Operations Command and the Directorate of National Intelligence.
Stony Man had been given carte blanche to operate at peak efficiency, eliminating oversights and legalities in the name of pragmatic results. It also, perhaps most importantly, offered the U.S. government the ability to disavow any knowledge of operations that went badly. Sometimes the big picture could provide a very cold and unforgiving snapshot.
This left Stony Man and its operators particularly vulnerable to certain types of exposure. One hint of their existence in a place like MSNBC or the New York Times could lead to horrific outcomes.
The electric engine beneath her seat began to power down and the railcar slowed to a halt. She pushed the morose reflections from her mind as she prepared to enter the Annex building.
Things were ready to roll hot; she could not afford to be distracted now. She stood and stepped out of the car. Fluorescent lights gleamed off linoleum floors and a sign on the whitewashed wall read Authorized Personnel Only. Price input the code on the keypad and reached over to open the door to the tunnel.
After passing through the door, she was met by the wheelchair-bound Aaron Kurtzman. The big man reached out a hand the size of a paw and gave her a steaming mug of coffee. She eyed the ink-colored liquid dubiously.
“Thanks, Bear. That’s just what I’ve been missing—something that can put hair on my chest.”
The
