Starfire

THE BIG FED’S THOUGHTS LOCKED ON THE INTERNATIONAL OUTRAGE

It was unthinkable that a rogue or supposed friendly nation was orbiting nuclear satellites, looking to butcher millions for an as yet unknown reason. Beyond the frightening facts, Hal Brognola knew ground zero in the Australian outback wouldn’t rate a footnote in history if a nuclear spear was plunged into a major city from above Earth’s atmosphere.

He drew a deep breath, let it out and said to the assembled team in the War Room, “The President green-lighted us to do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of what went down in Australia. The Man wants a rapid response, folks, no punches pulled, no mercy to the perpetrators. They go down hard and, if possible, their names and misdeeds are to be buried along with them. That’s the good news.

“Unfortunately, he also implied that because of the nature of the crisis, there’s a good chance our teams may well be locking horns with any number of operators. CIA. NSA. DOD. DIA. You name it.

“And on this one, it would be best if we kept our backs to the wall.”

Other titles in this series:

#22 SUNFLASH

#23 THE PERISHING GAME

#24 BIRD OF PREY

#25 SKYLANCE

#26 FLASHBACK

#27 ASIAN STORM

#28 BLOOD STAR

#29 EYE OF THE RUBY

#30 VIRTUAL PERIL

#31 NIGHT OF THE JAGUAR

#32 LAW OF LAST RESORT

#33 PUNITIVE MEASURES

#34 REPRISAL

#35 MESSAGE TO AMERICA

#36 STRANGLEHOLD

#37 TRIPLE STRIKE

#38 ENEMY WITHIN

#39 BREACH OF TRUST

#40 BETRAYAL

#41 SILENT INVADER

#42 EDGE OF NIGHT

#43 ZERO HOUR

#44 THIRST FOR POWER

#45 STAR VENTURE

#46 HOSTILE INSTINCT

#47 COMMAND FORCE

#48 CONFLICT IMPERATIVE

#49 DRAGON FIRE

#50 JUDGMENT IN BLOOD

#51 DOOMSDAY DIRECTIVE

#52 TACTICAL RESPONSE

#53 COUNTDOWN TO TERROR

#54 VECTOR THREE

#55 EXTREME MEASURES

#56 STATE OF AGGRESSION

#57 SKY KILLERS

#58 CONDITION HOSTILE

#59 PRELUDE TO WAR

#60 DEFENSIVE ACTION

#61 ROGUE STATE

#62 DEEP RAMPAGE

#63 FREEDOM WATCH

#64 ROOTS OF TERROR

#65 THE THIRD PROTOCOL

#66 AXIS OF CONFLICT

#67 ECHOES OF WAR

#68 OUTBREAK

#69 DAY OF DECISION

#70 RAMROD INTERCEPT

#71 TERMS OF CONTROL

#72 ROLLING THUNDER

#73 COLD OBJECTIVE

#74 THE CHAMELEON FACTOR

#75 SILENT ARSENAL

#76 GATHERING STORM

#77 FULL BLAST

#78 MAELSTROM

#79 PROMISE TO DEFEND

#80 DOOMSDAY CONQUEST

#81 SKY HAMMER

#82 VANISHING POINT

#83 DOOM PROPHECY

#84 SENSOR SWEEP

#85 HELL DAWN

#86 OCEANS OF FIRE

#87 EXTREME ARSENAL

Starfire

STONY MAN®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Don Pendleton

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Australia

Forty-three minutes and counting, and Chuck Boltmer knew they were cutting it close to the razor’s edge. He wasn’t even suited up and already he was sweating. If they stuck to training—both mock-up and virtual-reality dry runs—thirty-five minutes and a few more agonizing ticks alone would be devoured just getting set up, more, depending, of course, on the human factor. The low earth orbit satellite was already in position, and Boltmer knew if they were two shakes behind schedule Zenith One wasn’t about to hold up the show because the hired help was too slow on the draw from ground zero.

Man, oh, man, what kind of crazy life had he led, he wondered, that would lead him to the brink of suicide like this, and of his own free will?

He knew. A washed-out CIA special op once connected to the Cali Cartel, who loved money more than law and order and was hunted by his own people, broke and down on his luck didn’t get to choose which banquet table offered the choicest meat.

Not much more than a street beggar, as far as he was concerned, but those days were fast coming to an end, one way or another.

And in the face of a holocaust that would leave no doubt.

Boltmer killed the Jeep’s engine and lights, then stared through the dust- and bug-spattered windscreen. The pub and surrounding area had been chosen as a test site, he knew, and right from the beginning, when his handlers laid out mission parameters and particulars. Remoteness guaranteed limited immediate collateral damage. That, and the handlers figured nobody much cared about a bunch of ex-cons, ex-mercs and other assorted riffraff living off the radar screen, to be used as guinea pigs in what struck him as little more than a ghoul’s experiment.

The problem haunting Boltmer was grim knowledge acquired during training. Sure, this stretch of out-back fanning away in oceanic dimensions was humped with rocky hills and cut with gorges, all but deserted of human beings, and they were situated well beyond the immediate four- to five-mile incineration radius. Or so said the nameless European principals who had hired him out of obscurity and grinding poverty in Berlin, eighteen months back, but what now seemed another lifetime. What worried him at the moment was all the spinifex grassland, the eucalypt forest to the north and east, subtropical rain forest that would rise up when—if—they managed to extract for the decon site. In other words, the dry countryside was a living hot zone, with enough incendiary flashpoints…

“We will be fine. Show courage. Just remember, we are being paid five million dollars. Apiece.”

Boltmer looked over at the big, bullet-head buzz-cut man with black eyes cold and lifeless enough to sub-humanize him as part-reptile in human flesh.

He knew him only as Karlov. Boltmer was certain that wasn’t his real name, but judging the accent, sloping forehead and high cheekbones, he pegged him as East Euro-trash, maybe Serb or Bulgarian, likewise a gangster, since Karlov had all the greedy, malicious aura of a common street thug, more muscle and animal instinct than good sense. And what made him so confident anyway? he wondered. Did Karlov know something he didn’t?

As his partner marked their position on the GPS unit mounted to the dashboard, began punching in the series of cutout numbers on the secured sat phone, then fiddling with the scrambler, Boltmer wondered about his own seeming death wish. The madness he was about to participate in and come out the other side would find those hefty retirement funds plunked down into a numbered Swiss account—or all his hopes, dreams and fears—would be over.

Vaporized, in truth, in less time than it took to blink.

He tried to focus on the positive, such as living. The thermal-insulated, one-piece raid suit he wore was state-of-the-art, similar to the protection tiles that shielded space shuttles upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, only stronger. Same deal for the main protective suit, but with obvious and subtle variations. Compare 2900 degrees Fahrenheit those astronauts faced to an educated ballpark half-million hellish units he was maybe staring down, what with superheated pressure waves that would come roaring their way at supersonic speed, and both thermal pj’s and their black project robot shell better be next to as invincible as any divine armor of heavenly angels against evil.

“This is Vortex to Zenith One. We are at Blast Furnace and moving into position. Repeat…”

Bottom line, Boltmer figured it was all about the spacesuits and their advanced cutting-edge extras, as he heard Karlov confirm transmission. Forget the bush lab rats, the two of them were the real test subjects, once they suited up. He’d been blindfolded and driven from Berlin, he briefly recalled, to the underground complex for training when verbally signing on, he had never been told outright who he’d pledged allegiance to. But he knew enough about the European Space Agency to know it housed the European Space Operation Center in Darmstadt, Germany, and two and two still equaled four, even in the spook world’s black hole. Armed now with the latest in supertech armor for astronauts, he knew he was way past the point of hoping the spacesuit to be donned would hold up under heat about as extreme as the core of the sun. At the end of the day, he decided, the principals’ main objectives were none of his wonder.

Living to collect five million was his end game.

“Let’s do it, my friend,” Karlov said.

Boltmer malingered a moment before piling out the door behind his partner, another few seconds lagging before hauling the heavy corpse-size nylon bag out of the back of the Jeep. Hanging the full weight of what would either save or fry his war-grizzled bacon over his shoulder, he felt Karlov’s glacier eyes drilling into the side of his head, but ignored the man as he stared east. All the blood on his hands, all the insane schemes by his own machinations he’d lived through in his day than he actually had a right to keep on claiming air, and he was hardly lacking in the guts department. But this?

Pure Hell on Earth.

Oh, but the insanity of it all, no question.

And here he was, Boltmer glancing at the illuminated dial of his Breitling emergency transmitter watch, moving out to fall in behind Karlov. Forty minutes and ticking…

Then, willingly, they would become the first human beings to try to live in the face and fury of a nuclear explosion almost four times as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima.

CHAPTER ONE

New Mexico

“We have a problem.”

Radic Kytol didn’t want to hear about problems at this late stage, but he read the tight expression on Ludjac Muyol’s goateed face.

Natural paranoia constant, instinct tried and proved many times during his climb up the ranks in Belgrade to current post as top lieutenant in charge of the Balayko Family’s expansion goals, he felt compelled to give the broad vista of scrubland another search through the high-powered military field glasses. Scanning mesas and other outcrops ringing their temporary command post, he mouthed a curse. The sunbaked desert plain appeared one vast heat shimmer, thus creating the mirage that something was always moving, even when there was nothing there. Spooky, he decided, then considered where they were.

Roswell, New Mexico.

They were close to six hundred miles from their final destination east, and the advent of their own extraterrestrial encounter was moments away. It didn’t escape him for one second that their safehouse was within an area where wild rumors abounded for decades how alien spacecraft had crashed here, and that the United States Air Force had purportedly recovered the bodies of little gray men in 1947, engineering a subsequent secret cover-up about UFOs and extraterrestrial life that apparently wasn’t all that secret. That was, of course, if he chose to submit to the truth as the locals would have him believe when their two minivans passed through town, purchasing necessities there to continue their journey.

Briefly, he recalled the gift shop and diner, all the UFO paraphernalia, meant, he was sure, to further inflame and keep the fantastic alive. But, now that he thought about it, were they not aliens in their own right, invaders, no less? Ah, but considering the mission, they were poised to unleash an invasion of sorts, if not from another world, then just beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Spinning on his heel, he marched for Muyol, handing off the field glasses before plunging into the shadowy bowels of the three-man workstation. He found the computer brains hard at it, earning what was in his mind exorbitant fees, working laptop keyboards in a controlled frenzy. He sensed the tension, torqued up, higher than normal. The living room was barren except for the bank of five computers and the necessary modems that kept them online to their network of contacts, both overseas and in-country. Unfortunately, his knowledge of what they did was rudimentary at best, but he understood enough to know that Milo Serjac’s monitor shouldn’t be filled with pornography.

“What is that?” Kytol snapped, skidding to a halt behind the trio in their wheeled high-back leather thrones. He noted the constipated look flashing over Serjac’s face, as if he—a man who held the power of life and death in his hands—was little more than an irritating mosquito in the geek’s ear.

Fingers flying over his keyboard, Serjac declared over his shoulder, “It is a man and woman copulating.”

“You get sarcastic with me?” Kytol felt his face flush with hot anger. “I can see that! Why is it on your screen?” he demanded, but feared he knew the answer already.

“Three of our e-mail sites have been bombed,” Serjac said. “Melbourne, Tokyo and Barcelona, all compromised.”

“By whom?”

Serjac snorted, as if he’d been asked a stupid question. “It could be someone in Butte, Montana, for all I know. Or it could be NORAD or NASA.”

“And bombing our supposed secured e-mail with porn?”

“Perhaps a ruse while they attempt to trace us.”

“I thought that was impossible. To trace us, that is.”

“Nothing is impossible when it comes to computers and hacking into them. Especially when dealing with professionals.”

“I want answers, Serjac, not to stand here and suffer your infuriating condescension!”

Serjac moderated his tone. “There are something like twenty million skilled hackers around the world. There are over thirty thousand Web sites I know of that are set up for the express purpose of stealing information, especially classified information, since they are the most challenging, not to mention the most alluring and profitable. And those are just the amateurs. This would be a first in my experience. All transmissions were supposedly secured by a 128-bit encryption system—I will not burden you by telling you the near infinite number of quadrillion possibilities—but these were firewalls I personally built into our network. Suffice it to say this should not have happened.”

“But it has, you insufferable jackass! Change passwords! Create another firewall! Add a more secure antivirus program!”

“That is what I am in the process of doing. That, and trying to discover if other hot sites have been breached. Dear Comrade Kytol, what I am telling you is that whoever is doing this is good, maybe as good as we are. What you are seeing now is comparable to a chess game between masters, but one done in cyberspace.”

Kytol ordered Muyol to secure the perimeter, but add another man to help Vishdal watch the cameras, then he barked at Serjac, “NSA? CIA? DOD? Give me your best guess.”

Serjac shrugged as a happy face on a stick body and flashing the middle finger jumped onto his screen. “There it is again. London is now compromised. The last access code to put us online with Zenith was being transmitted when this popped on.”

“So, you did get the codes?”

Serjac ignored him, his grim stare locked on his monitor, fingers banging away as the happy-faced stickman mooned him. “This swine—taunt me, will you?”

“Stop playing games and answer me, or I will have your castrated balls sitting on that keyboard!”

Kytol, feeling his blood boil like hot lava in his veins, and who had little patience when it came to finessing a situation, computer or otherwise, wanted nothing more than to whip the .45 Glock from the shoulder rigging beneath his windbreaker and blow the machine into countless pieces all over the room. But the slightly built wiry man, he knew, had been an informal member of the notorious Crna Ruka. The Black Hand was responsible for hacking into the Kosovo Information Center in 1998, and from there it was a short cyberjump to break into NATO databases. For all the good it did, valuable intelligence was stolen from NATO right before the bombs began raining on Yugoslavia. He may not like these men, their superior attitudes, because he didn’t understand what they did or how they did it, but they were—in their parlance—super-cyberwarriors. They were the best at what they did, and at the moment he needed them more than the other way around. The days were gone, Kytol knew, when wars were won solely on brute force and overwhelming violence.

Serjac finally deemed him worthy of an answer as he waved at the screen in front of the Russian. “You can see for yourself.”

Kytol looked at the digital readout in the top corner of Anatoly Dyvshol’s split screen. Forty-two seconds and scrolling down. The Russian worked his keys with a renewed burst of energy, and the solar-winged silver ball enlarged after a flashing series of zoom-ins, the real observation LEO satellite, he knew, now monitoring its orbit. The satellite hung against the endless backdrop of outer space, and Kytol watched as a slender arm on the portside extended from the platform and locked into place, conical nose aimed at the blue planet.

Thirty seconds.

As the Russian began the final countdown at five, Kytol lost the smile. His eyes widened as a cone of fire burst from the rocket’s thrusters, instantly swallowed, it seemed, by infinite blackness.

“Three, two…”

It looked to Kytol like a giant silver spear.

“One…”

Then it was hurtling toward Earth, vanishing rapidly for the sea of clouds, a streaking javelin, but packed, Kytol knew, with fifty kilotons of fissionable devastation.

THE SKY WAS FALLING.

And it was all Boltmer could do to pry his eyes off the tumbling numbers on the watch engineered into the wrist of his spacesuit.

Less than a minute to impact.

Boltmer had never felt such pure cold terror. Trajectory, rate of descent, distance and potency of each ring to their observation-monitoring post all calculated—with supposedly no margin for error—it would blow, dead ahead, in their face. Grimly aware he would, in fact, be living just outside a nuclear fission blast—Boltmer could barely concentrate on the final chore.

Lumbering in his robotic-like cocoon, he stepped up and snapped the supersuction cups mounted on the base of the black-tinted diamond shield to the floor with his boot. The list of a hundred-and-one things that could go wrong wanted to scream through his mind. They were on the outer limits of what the principals called the third ring. Instruments to measure wind and radiation levels likewise sewn into the arms of their suits—supposedly impervious to shock waves—with cameras to film the initial blast and its effects shielded inside a classified crystallized carbon composite and meant to bear up under flying debris and searing heat, the winds at this distance would still hammer them at over 200 mph.

Blast. Heat. Radiation.

The three big ones.

The sudden flash jolted Boltmer, a cry of alarm trapped and echoing inside the reinforced bubble of his helmet. It was dazzling, then flared beyond brilliant, like a thousand suns rushing together for one infinite supernova, the burst of light piercing even both sets of protective covering enough he had to squint.

Time seemed suspended, all but immeasurable in this frozen eternity, as Boltmer stood, awed and terrified by the expanding cloud.

The gauges on his arm, he found, were shooting numbers so fast they blurred.

It was coming.

CHAPTER TWO

“What the hell was that?”

They were gasping, all but turned to stone, squinting at the blinding orange-white ball as it roiled across the floor-to-ceiling plasma relay monitor. Swelling until the cloud ran off the twenty-by-twenty-foot screen, the image jumped, then flickered with static as titanic shock waves reached out for the observation satellite. They were too stunned, too late to readjust the ob-sat’s altitude and pull it back from the nuke’s asteroid-like hammerblows. Gyroscopes, radar, radio, John Ellison knew, the whole computerized nerve center, in short, that could monitor and transmit the situation from those space eyes wiped out.

All systems go, however, from where he stood.

While the twelve-man, three-woman workforce launched into scientific babble all over Control Room Omega, scrambling from bay to bay to check monitors and digital readouts and bark questions into throat mikes, Ellison kept a straight face. Hanging back, he listened as the director demanded to know what in God’s name had just happened.

God, the NSA man knew, had nothing to do with it.

What they knew was that the suspicious unidentified low earth orbit satellite their Keyhole and NASA-affiliated observation and military satellites were tracking had just detonated in a measured read of fifty-kiloton self-immolation. The same explosive yield, to their mounting horror and panic, that had just blown a chunk of Western Queensland outback into radioactive dust from a rocket fired from the killer satellite.

Ellison stole another moment to watch their frenzied search for quick answers they weren’t about to find anywhere in their computer systems. Director Turner looked torn between the wall monitor’s leaping fuzz, firing questions at his scientists and the red phone mounted on his personal command desk in the far corner. NORAD, the Pentagon, the CIA, down to NASA and every American military and law-enforcement agency in the continental United States and abroad with access to satellites would know by now the United States, its allies, and the world at large was just thrust to the edge of Armageddon. Ellison knew the combined authority of all that clout was scrambling right then to reach the Joint Chiefs, the President, anybody on his staff with a secured cell or sat phone. Only they would flood the White House with SOS to be flung back into this black hole of unfathomable mystery and international menace, the likes of which no power on Earth had yet to face.

Ellison left them to their terror and confusion, looked up at the observation deck. Behind the thick-glass bubble stood his one and only superior. The man in charge was casually working on a cigar, looking down on the workforce like some king on a throne about to pass judgment on his subjects.

In truth, he just had.

Ellison made eye contact with the man known only to the others as Sir. It was quick, but Sir lifted a hand to the blind side of their commotion, long enough to shoot him a thumbs-up.

THE SKY WAS ON FIRE.

Or so it looked to Boltmer in his flying vortex.

Unless he’d been nailed to the hull of a battleship, he knew there was nothing he could now do but let himself get dragged, lifted, dropped and bounced across the ground. Human tumbleweed. The shimmering radioactive halo that fanned across the heavens was the least of his concerns. Round one was punishing enough, as he and Karlov had hurtled in tandem, sailing west. How far they’d been tossed he couldn’t say, but he was still breathing.