Day moment. Both took comfort from the repetition.
Kurtzman turned the wheelchair and began to keep pace with the female mission controller as they made for the Communications Room.
The former Big Ten college wrestler lifted a massive arm across a barrel chest and pushed his glasses up on his nose beneath a high forehead with a deep horizontal crease. Price had once teased him that the worry line was severe enough for him to be awarded a Purple Heart.
He’d earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He was a Stony Man veteran who had been with the Farm since the beginning, and his wheelchair was a constant testament to his dedication.
“McCarter just called for Phoenix,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “They’ve set up rendezvous with Encizo and James. Carl did the same for Able. They’re in place and ready to transport if we need them. They’ve been informed of the attack on NSA station Lazy Titan and the possibility of a survivor.”
“Good,” Price said. She took a drink of the strong coffee and pulled a face. “I’ll alert Hal, then. All we need is the go-ahead from the President.”
The pair entered the massive Communications Room and into a maelstrom of activity. Price paused at the door like a commander surveying her troops. She liked what she saw.
Kurtzman glided over to his work area, where it looked as if a bomb had gone off. His desk was covered in faxes, paperwork and the exposed wiring of half a dozen devices. Next to his desk, fingers flying across a laptop while monitoring a sat com link, Akira Tokaido bobbed his head in time to the music coming from a single earphone. The lean, compact hacker was the youngest member of Stony Man’s cybernetics team and the heir apparent to Kurtzman himself. The Japanese-American cyberpunk had at times worked virtual magic when Price had needed him to.
Across the room from Tokaido sat his polar opposite.
Professor Huntington Wethers had come to the Stony Man operations from his position on the faculty of UCLA. The tall, distinguished black man sported gray hair at his temples and an unflappable manner.
He currently worked two laptop screens as a translation program fed him information from monitored radio traffic coming out of France.
Carmen Delahunt walked through the door of the Communications Room. The ex-FBI agent made a beeline for Barbara Price when she saw her boss. The only female on the Farm’s cyberteam, she served as a pivotal balance between Tokaido’s hotshot hacking magic and Wethers’s more restrained, academic style.
She finished her conversation and snapped her cell phone shut as she walked up to Price. She pointed toward the newspaper in the mission controller’s hand.
“Since we’re on West Africa anyway you see the article about the new Congo player, General Nkunda?” she asked. “I started running an analytical of our files on that movement and him in particular.”
Price smiled. “You read my mind, Carmen,” she said. “Once we have Phoenix and Able taken care of, why don’t you send me a summary in case anything comes of it.”
“Will do.” Delahunt nodded. “I have to double-check the South American arraignments we made for the team’s extraction with the ‘package’—if it comes to that. It’s nice to be able to tap the resources of larger groups like the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, but coordination is a nightmare.”
“Let me know if anything goes wrong,” Price said.
Delahunt nodded, then turned and began walking back across the floor toward the connecting door to the Annex’s Computer Room, her fingers punching out a number on her encrypted cell phone.
Barbara Price smiled.
She could feel the energy, the sense of purpose that permeated the room, flow into her. Out there in the cold, eight men on two teams were about to enter into danger for the sake of their country. If they got into trouble, if they needed anything, they would turn to her and her people.
She did not intend to let them down.
She made her way to her desk, where a light flashing on her desktop phone let her know a call was holding. She looked over at Kurtzman and saw the man returning a telephone handset to its cradle. He pointed toward her.
“It’s Hal on line one,” he said.
“Thanks, Bear,” she answered.
She set her coffee down and picked up the handset as she sank into her chair. She put the phone to her ear and tapped a key on her computer, knocking the screen off standby mode.
“Hal, it’s Barb,” she said.
“I’m outside the Oval Office right now,” Brognola said. “Are the boys up and rolling?”
“As we speak,” Price answered. “Tell him operations are prepped to launch at his word.”
“All right. Let’s hope this one goes by the numbers,” the gruff federal agent said.
“As always,” she agreed, and hung up.
“All right, people,” she announced to the room. “Let’s get ready to roll.”
Nairobi, Kenya
PHOENIX FORCE MET UP in the capital and transferred to the Sikorsky MH-53 Pave Low helicopter. To them their mission was simple: go in and find a lone American survivor of a brutal attack. It didn’t matter that an entire army of heavily armed insurgents had taken him into a city turned into a hellish fortress.
They would proceed, always moving forward.
FOR ABLE TEAM THE MISSION evolved in a more circumspect manner.
In the back of the Lear jet taking them to the Farm the three-man team relaxed, unwinding from the mission. Thirty minutes into the flight, Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi opened the cockpit door.
“I got Barb on secure communications,” he told them. “I don’t think you guys are going home yet.”
“Perfect,” Blancanales said, laughing.
Nicaragua
ABLE TEAM’S PLAN WAS simple.
They would come in on a commercial flight and make it through customs clean. Following that, they would pick up a vehicle and make their way to a safehouse used by a joint CIA and Army Special Operations Intelligence Support Activity operation to establish a base before starting surveillance of the target.
Things began to go wrong immediately.
Carl Lyons pulled his carry-on bag down from the overhead compartment just after the Unfasten Seat Belts sign popped up on the TWA commercial flight. They were flying first-class as part of their administrative cover, and the team leader had watched, bemused, as Blancanales had seduced the Hispanic flight attendant with his gregarious charm.
Team funnyman Hermann Schwarz had cracked one stale joke after another as the silver-haired smooth-talker had reaffirmed his membership in the mile-high club thirty thousand feet over the Caribbean with a dark-eyed Nicaraguan beauty half his age.
In a more regulation-orientated
