Domination Bid. Don Pendleton

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      Major Riley Braden would never have admitted it to anyone, but he didn’t trust David Steinham. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about the defense contractor just didn’t add up. For one thing, he’d managed to find a way to violate his agreement with Cyrus without actually making it look otherwise. Braden had mentioned this to Cyrus, but his friend and CO had dismissed the idea as ludicrous.

      Braden suspected it might have something to do with Cyrus’s fear of losing their contract with Steinham, along with the money that came with it. Braden firmly believed there were other fish in the sea, easier to catch than holding on to the DCDI contract. At the same time, they’d lost a number of good men in a single operation, something that had never happened to Cyrus since starting the company. Braden had worked with Cyrus long enough to know it was partly a matter of professional pride and partly Cyrus’s wish that the deaths of their comrades did not become a vain sacrifice.

      It was for this reason Braden agreed to take the mission to Belarus, even though he felt deep down the operation would turn out to be a dud.

      Now aboard one of Steinham’s corporate jets, Braden sifted through the intelligence that had come from the DCDI contact Steinham claimed to have inside the country. Among the scant intelligence reports, Braden took particular interest in a section that theorized a special ops unit of the United States government might be dispatched to investigate Dratshev’s disappearance.

      All the rest of it had to do with the EMP research Dratshev had supposedly been working on, most of which went over Braden’s head. His specialties were covert military tactics and special operations. He had no expertise in the actual science of such weapons—most of it sounded farfetched and theoretical than anything else. Braden had reached out to his own contacts, as well; who’d informed him those holding the purse strings in Moscow hadn’t exactly been smitten with Dratshev’s work. Braden thought that a most interesting revelation and filed it as highly important if not outright provocative. It also made him wonder if the chance didn’t exist that Dratshev’s progress hadn’t been sabotaged by other elements within his own government. Hadn’t Steinham said he’d procured some of the finest minds on the subject and for five years it had gone nowhere? What did that mean in relationship to Dratshev’s research?

      Braden finally pushed the question from his mind. He closed the file folder, leaned back in his seat and rubbed his eyes. For now he’d rest on what he knew and let his subconscious push the pieces around on the board until something fell into place.

      Sooner or later, the answer would come to him.

      * * *

      “ARE YOU SURE you want to drive back to Washington?” Brognola asked.

      “Positive, Hal,” Carl Lyons replied.

      The Able Team warriors had retrieved all the information they could from Higgs and the data crew at the NSA.