when I touch down.”
“Understood. I’ll see you in ten,” Price said, and clicked off.
She stepped off the exercise machine and grabbed up a handy towel to mop her forehead and blot the sweat on her arms. She threw it around her neck and then clicked over to the walkie-talkie function on her cell phone. Her thumb pressed the push-to-talk button and she spoke into the phone.
“Bear, you on?”
There was a pause and then Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman’s gruff voice growled out a response. “Go ahead, Barb. What’s up?” The brilliant technician served as leader of the Farm’s cyber team and was Barbara Price’s right-hand man.
“Meet me in the War Room,” Price told him. “Hal’s coming in now and he has something for us.”
“Something big?”
When she spoke Price could hear the same satisfied tone in her own voice as she had just identified in Hal Brognola’s. It made the corners of her mouth tug upward in an involuntary grin.
“Hal says we just broke something on our Stage One project.”
Kurtzman made no attempt to keep his enthusiasm in check. “Hot damn!” he barked into the phone, making Price wince. “It’s about time we caught a break on that one.”
“Copy that, Bear,” Price agreed. “Is Carmen or Akira near you?” she asked, referring to two members of Kurtzman’s team. Carmen Delahunt was an ex-FBI agent recruited into the Stony Man program by Hal Brognola, and Akira Tokaido was a network systems interfacing genius and all around cybercowboy who had conducted digital wizardry for Price many times in the past.
“Carmen’s right here,” Kurtzman replied.
“Good. Have her alert Able Team and Phoenix Force,” Price said. “I want the teams on standby and ready to go the minute we get the rundown from Hal.”
“Copy that.”
“All right, I’m out. See you in the War Room.” The mission controller cut communications and hurried out of the workout center.
The well-oiled machinery of Stony Man had begun ticking with precision timing and practiced competence. Soon men would be out on the sharp end and the blood of killers would begin to spill.
STONY MAN FARM was located in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Despite housing an extensive command-and-control logistics network, an airfield and outdoor training areas, the remote clandestine site maintained a facade as a tree farm, orchard and pulp mill. Security was a fully integrated package of electronic, computer-monitored and human surveillance. The farm workers and general laborers spread around the Farm were actually highly trained soldiers from America’s elite military and law enforcement units.
In the past rotational assignments to the Farm had given members of those units access to advanced training tactics and an opportunity to engage in cross-organizational networking. As the wars in southwest Asia and the Middle East had ground on, the short-term assignments to the top secret site had started to provide physically and emotionally exhausted multitour combat veterans with a low-key break from near-constant combat operations.
Such breaks were not available for members of the Farm’s premier crews, Able Team and Phoenix Force. While the security corps, designated as blacksuits, maintained protective defensive operations, the Farm’s strike teams deployed constantly across the Western Hemisphere and the world on offensive mandates for the U.S. government.
The leaders of those teams now gathered in the basement facility under the Farm’s main house in a briefing area called the War Room. Besides Hal Brognola and Barbara Price, Aaron Kurtzman was there with the unit commander of Phoenix Force, David McCarter, and Carl Lyons, Able Team leader.
Kurtzman, confined to a wheelchair after an attack on Stony Man grounds by KGB surrogates had left him paralyzed from the waist down, sat off to one side, running the briefing media presentation components from a keyboard built into his chair.
Built like a power lifter, the barrel-chested Kurtzman still routinely did sets of the bench press with 250 pounds for nearly a dozen reps. In contrast to his heavy build the two big men seated at the massive conference table in front of him seemed built more for endurance, despite impressively muscular builds.
The fox-faced Briton, David McCarter, was a consummate pilot and driver, as well as being a former member of the British Special Air Service. He had seen combat around the world in places as diverse as Oman and Belfast before coming on board as a shooter for the Farm’s Phoenix Force. Now, years later, the brown-eyed Englishman commanded that team and had committed violence on behalf of the U.S. government in every region of the globe.
“What have you got for us?” he asked, his English accent mellow after years in United States.
“Tell me it’s something good,” Carl Lyons answered.
The blond leader of the three-man Able Team was a former LAPD homicide detective. Lyons lived up to his moniker of Ironman. There was no better pistol marksman or fitter athlete than Lyons on the Farm’s teams. He had the subtlety of a bull in a China shop, combined with the acumen of a veteran espionage agent. When Carl Lyons ran into a problem he put his head down and battered his way through it.
“We’ve been waiting for a long time for some actionable intelligence on this,” Hal Brognola said. “A long time. Several years, in fact.” The Fed’s suit was rumpled and he spoke from around the stump of an unlit cigar. He gestured toward Barbara Price, who stood unselfconsciously in her sweat-stained workout gear. “Barb?”
The Stony Man mission controller nodded once curtly, obviously eager to get into the meat of the briefing.
“Gentlemen,” she said, “let me tell you about Stage One. Quite a while ago national intelligence estimates began warning the Oval Office about an increased threat focus coming from Iran. These threat focus assessments had little to do with Iraq or with Tehran’s burgeoning nuclear program. In fact, the assessments were not Israel centered in nature.”
Intrigued, McCarter lifted an eyebrow and glanced over at Lyons, who shrugged. Behind them, Kurtzman hit a button on his keyboard and an Iranian in an army general’s uniform appeared on the monitor at the head of the table.
“The intelligence was disparate, piecemeal and often obtuse. The Oval Office asked Hal to put Bear and his cyber team on it to try to analyze what we were seeing,” Price continued.
Kurtzman powered his wheelchair forward toward the head of the table. “We had precious little to go on,” he admitted. “Everything that was Iranian intelligence, Hezbollah, Hamas or Iraqi special groups related had to be screened to see if it fit with any other irregular activities worldwide. We figured out that whatever they were up to, it had something to do with the U.S. directly and not through surrogates or proxies. Mostly we got lost in smoke and mirrors.”
“Don’t be modest, Bear,” Hal Brognola said. “You were two weeks ahead of the golden boys at INR in identification of Stage One.” The big Fed referred to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
The bureau had few or no field operatives of its own, but was instead tasked with performing oversight and analysis of information gathered from other branches of the U.S. intelligence community. In both the cases of pre-9/11 threats and the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, the INR had offered up
