Drawpoint

“PRIORITIES?”

“The recovery of the enriched uranium,” Brognola said. “That’s the top threat. Next, we need to know just how far the connection between the WWUP and these domestic and international terror organizations goes.”

“On it,” Lyons said.

“Coordinate through Barb to have the Farm deliver anything additional you’ll need,” Brognola said. “I’ll arrange for a liaison with local law enforcement both in Chicago and wherever the trail ultimately takes you.”

“You sound like you have someplace in mind.”

“I might. Reginald Butler has long been a political activist. He’s one of the richest men in America, and if he’s mixed up in any of this, or even if he’s simply letting his company sell the Seever units to foreign nationals with ties to terror, I want him taken down.”

“Could get sticky,” Blancanales said dubiously. “Government operatives pressuring an American entrepreneur who’s already complaining about governmental harassment.”

“We don’t exist,” Brognola said. “We do, therefore, what we have to do.”

Drawpoint

Don Pendleton’s

Stony Man®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Phil Elmore for his contribution to this work.

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

PROLOGUE

UVC Limited Milling and Processing Facility,

Meghalaya, India

Patrick Farrah paused to light a cigarette, groping for the pack and lighter that weren’t there, cursing as the realization hit him for the fifth time in as many hours. He swore under his breath as he overrode the impulses so deeply ingrained in his mind and muscle memory. He fished out a pack of gum and stuck one of the pieces in his mouth, muttering under his breath as he chewed the hard stick into pliancy. Quitting smoking was something he’d promised his girlfriend he’d do. He’d live longer, Jody had told him. Well, maybe he would. But that didn’t make it easier.

Twilight had brought little relief from the subtropical humidity. Meghalaya, as the wettest state in India, received an average rainfall that ranked it among the wettest places on Earth, not just in the nation. The idea still staggered Farrah, but the country, for all its moisture, was relatively moderate in terms of day-to-day climate. It was also lush and beautiful, exotic in a way the States would never be. He had easily fallen in love with the place.

The work was relatively easy, too. Sugar Rapids Security, the company for which he contracted, was among those backfilling private security details in Afghanistan and Iraq. Farrah’s girlfriend, safe back in Upstate New York, had been none too happy about his accepting the assignment in India, even if it was just for a year. But Farrah knew she’d have been a lot more unhappy if he’d agreed to the even riskier jobs available for triple pay in those war zones. No, the pay for the India posting was high enough to make it attractive, and safe enough that he didn’t have to keep Jody up nights worrying if he was going to make it back.

He really couldn’t complain about the work. A year spent in the beautiful West Khasi Hills area was almost like a vacation, as far as he was concerned. And how hard was it to guard a bunch of mining equipment overnight, make sure it wasn’t stolen or meddled with? The owner of the equipment, Uranium-Vanadium Consortium, Limited, gave the SRS subcontractors little grief and plenty of cash. Except for occasional checks by his Sugar Rapids supervisor, Farrah was on his own most of the time. It was peaceful and, if a little boring, steady and honest work.

He did worry, with a sort of superstitious dread, about being stationed near the milling plant. He supposed it was better than pulling duty closer to the laser enrichment facility, where things really glowed in the dark. He’d heard the whole thing was experimental, too, the latest in UVC technology subsidized by the Indian government. But apart from the technology itself, the idea of uranium dust just kind of scared the crap out of him. There were plenty of safety protocols in place, he’d been assured up and down. But all of the SRS contractors with whom he worked were a little nervous around stuff that could poison you and make you sterile if it didn’t kill you. He’d worked nuclear plant security in the States and was no stranger to the vague sense of unease radioactive material produced. He’d learned to live with it.

He understood just enough of the process to steer clear of the dangerous areas. The uranium ore was mined from the shafts recently sunk here in the Meghalaya hills. The discovery had been a shock to everyone involved except UVC, apparently, who had been counting on their new proprietary technology to open up new markets.

On a typical evening, Farrah made a long, slow circuit around the facility, giving the milling plant a wide berth. The enrichment plant was down the dirt road, beyond his specified territory; Ranjhit Bhatt patrolled that part of the complex. Bhatt was a good guy, a local who spoke fluent English and played a mean game of cards. The two sometimes met on their breaks to sneak in a few quick games.

Farrah tried to vary his routine slightly, but there were only so many ways to walk the perimeter and check on the various outbuildings in this part of the fenced compound. This night was no different. He shrugged mentally and started for the metal storage shed that was his mental landmark for the start of his circuit.

The shed exploded.

One moment it was there, the next it was a flaming cloud of debris. A wall of heat hit him, scorching his face and drying his eyes as the shock wave bowled him over. Farrah hit the ground hard, feeling the breath rush out of him in one great, wracking cough. He had the presence of mind to shield his head and roll over, painfully, as scraps of burning metal rained down. He had a moment to wonder what was happening before he heard it—a whistling noise increasing in pitch. When the heavy chunk of concrete struck him in the head, he didn’t have time to wonder what it was before his world went dark.

When he opened his eyes again to a throbbing pain in his skull, the night was aglow with flickering orange fire. He could hear the crackling flames and smell the smoke as he watched, his vision blurred from the blow to the head. Afraid to move from where he lay sprawled on the ground, he watched as trucks roared past. He coughed as their diesel exhaust plumes rolled over him, but tried otherwise to remain still. The trucks—he didn’t recognize them—were moving away from the enrichment plant. Men clung to the running boards on either side of the truck, men armed with what Farrah recognized as AK-47 rifles.

His brain fogged with pain and confusion, Farrah struggled first to one knee. Lurching to his feet, stumbling and getting up again, he fumbled at his belt for his pistol as the last of trucks roared past. There was only one man clinging to the side of the vehicle, a battered Toyota Land Cruiser. Farrah forced his blurred vision to cooperate just long enough to get his .45-caliber Springfield XD out of its holster. He fired once, then twice, then a third time, into the night.

He tripped and fell. The stumble saved his life, most likely, as return fire from a gunner in the rear of the Land Cruiser scored the air above him. Then the truck was gone, leaving only the burning wreckage of the UVC facility in its wake.

He groped for his radio but couldn’t find it. He wasn’t sure if he’d dropped it or if maybe it had been taken while he lay unconscious on the ground. With nowhere else to go, he staggered for the front entrance to the camp, where the chain-link gates had been knocked down. The trucks had probably driven through them.

He heard footsteps scraping through the dirt and brought up his gun, closing one eye in an attempt to fight back the double vision creeping into his sight. The bloody figure that emerged, backlighted by the flames, was Bhatt.

“Bhatt!” Farrah said in relief. “You’re alive!”

Bhatt tried to speak but fell to his knees, choking and coughing. Farrah reached for him but Bhatt waved him off, trying to catch his breath. Farrah turned and almost tripped over the body.

A dead man was sprawled on the dirt road.

The corpse wore olive-drab fatigues and a balaclava. An AK-47 had been dropped not far from the dead man. Also near the body was a square box the size of a large phone or personal data device. Farrah picked it up gingerly, fearing it might be a detonator of some kind. He turned it over in his hands, but couldn’t figure out what it might be. It looked like a complicated phone. Why would a guerrilla be carrying such a thing? And who were these people?

Bhatt coughed loudly and said something. Farrah turned to him and helped prop him up. Bhatt was flushed and choking, but he looked determined to choke out what he had to say.

“What is it?” Farrah asked him. “Bhatt, what it is?”

“Uranium!” Bhatt finally managed. “Enriched uranium!”

“What about it?” Farrah asked, his stomach sinking.

“They took it!” Bhatt said. “The trucks…full of drums of enriched uranium!”

“Full?” Farrah went pale. “Are you sure?”

Bhatt nodded.

Farrah looked down at the dead man, the man he’d killed, the first life he had ever taken. Then he looked back to Bhatt.

A single death was nothing compared to the potential mass murder that had just left through the main gate.

CHAPTER ONE

Aurora, Illinois

Carl “Ironman” Lyons sipped black coffee from a foam cup, surprised at how good it was. The former L.A. police officer had done more than his fair share of stakeouts, subsisting on gut-wrenching, greasy takeout leavened with bad coffee. He’d had coffee so bad, in fact, that it could make a person wince. But this was good coffee. The proliferation of designer coffees and trendy joints to drink it in had pushed the fast-food empires to keep pace. Lyons counted himself among those benefiting from this free market.

“I’ve never seen a man so thoughtful over a cup of Joe,” Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz commented. The electronics expert and veteran commando—whose nerdy demeanor concealed a hard core forged on many a battlefield—frowned and brushed a lock of brown hair out of his eyes. He shifted in the passenger seat of the black Suburban, glancing over at the bull-necked blond man who hulked behind the steering wheel sniffing at a coffee cup.

Lyons grunted at his teammate and turned back to watch the street. Encouraging Gadgets would only get him started, and it was too early in the morning to deal with his ribbing just yet.

The two members of the covert counterterrorist unit known as Able Team were parked down and across the street from the Illinois headquarters of the World Workers United Party. Even now, the third and final member of Able Team, Rosario “The Politician” Blancanales, was inside that building, patiently waiting to speak with the local director of the primary chapter of the WWUP. The gray-haired, dark-eyed, soft-spoken Hispanic was an expert in both the psychology of violence and in-role camouflage. He had needed no special disguise or even a particularly complicated cover story to get an appointment with the WWUP’s director. He had simply posed as an interested potential donor and made an appointment through the chapter’s secretary.

What had brought Able Team to the streets of this Chicago suburb was far more complicated. The brief had first been transmitted to him through the computer experts at Stony Man Farm, the covert organization under whose umbrella Able Team operated. A lot of it had caused Lyons’s eyes to glaze over in boredom, but he had of course been able to get the gist. The WWUP had a lot of money for a fringe political party, and the transfers of funds to and from the party had finally tripped whatever monitoring algorithms the supercomputers the Farm were using to monitor worldwide data transfers. More significantly, transfers of funds to the WWUP were being routed to the group from outside the country. The Byzantine web of laws governing political contributions was not something Lyons pretended to understand, but that didn’t matter. The key was that when the money tree was shaken hard enough, Stony Man had been able to link monies sent to the WWUP all the way back to offshore holding companies that were themselves linked to the Earth Action Front.

As Lyons had been so recently informed, the EAF was a notorious ecoterror group whose members were more than happy to use violence to achieve their aims. They had gone from total unknowns five years earlier, to the preeminent “green” terror group worldwide. While they’d started small-time—spray-painting EAF on “gas-guzzling” SUVs parked at American sales lots, or staging denial of service attacks on the networks of corporations overseas they deemed to be polluters—they’d long since graduated to acts of violence that bordered on mass murder. In the past month, in fact, the EAF had claimed responsibility for a housing development fire in California that had killed three—in the name of stopping “suburban sprawl”—and for the ill-planned bombing of a nuclear power plant in France that had killed a security guard. While international in scope, the EAF was known to have a significant presence domestically. And that presence was thought by many, including Stony Man Farm’s computer wizards, to include the WWUP.

Compare the World Workers United Party membership rolls to the EAF’s in the United States, Lyons imagined, and you’d most likely get more than a little overlap. That, by itself, was a matter for the FBI or other federal organizations, or so Lyons had thought. He had placed the call to the Farm to express this opinion, only to be gently persuaded otherwise by Hal Brognola, director of the Sensitive Operations Group’s and Lyons’s boss. Lyons had, of course, used the diplomacy for which he was well-known when discussing the issue with Brognola.

“This, Hal,” he’d said over the secure satellite phone, “is a steaming pile of horseshit.”

“Usually it’s David who gives me grief,” Brognola had said, referring to David McCarter, the leader of Stony Man Farm’s international counterterrorist unit, Phoenix Force. “What’s the problem?”

“Don’t we have bigger fish to shoot in a barrel?” Lyons had thrown back, deliberately mangling the metaphor. “Able Team is better used on just about anything other than rousting some play-acting Commies.”

“WWUP is a remarkably powerful organization,” Brognola’d said, “whose professed ideology is admittedly socialist or Communist, depending on whom you ask. They are far from pretenders. There is serious talk of WWUP fielding a viable third-party candidate in the next presidential election.”

Lyons had hit back. “Since when does a third party have a chance? You expect me to take these people seriously?”

“You don’t have a choice,” Brognola had told him. “ We don’t have a choice. The WWUP didn’t exist before a few years ago. It’s rushed in to fill a perceived void in domestic politics, becoming a very real Communist movement.”

“And the WWUP is getting its funding from a global gang of environmentalist whackos. That’s still a job for the FBI.”

“This isn’t just about ‘environmentalist whackos,’” Brognola had insisted. “Ecoterror is on the rise, globally and domestically. Now, don’t get me wrong. We’re not talking about conservationists or legitimate environmental defense groups. We’re talking about extremists, those willing to commit violence to achieve their aims. And we’ve long gone past some animal rights activists releasing minks from cages, or vandals throwing bricks through the windows of fast-food restaurants. Our friends at the FBI, in fact, have a couple of thousand cases of arson, bombings, theft and vandalism on the books in recent years, all of them attributable to ‘green’ terrorist groups. My sources within the Bureau say they’re ranking it a greater emerging threat than the hot-button domestic terrorists of a decade or two ago—neo-Nazis, paramilitary groups, Klan splinter factions, and so on. And while the crimes are rising here in frequency and in violent intensity, they are rising simultaneously in developed nations across the globe.”

“So what’s the link?” Lyons had asked him.

“For whatever reason,” Brognola had said, sounding tired, “the radical, violent fringe of the environmentalist or ‘green’ movement has become the new home for collectivist politics domestically. The radical greens often tout a socialist agenda as part and parcel of the economic and environmental reforms they advocate. The more violent Communist and socialist groups are happy to embrace them. There’s a lot of cross-pollination between and among the various terrorist and fringe groups involved.”

“I’m not a politician, Hal. And I’m not a cop anymore.”

“I’m not asking you to be one,” Brognola had said, “and if this was about politics or could be taken care of by the local authorities, it would have nothing to do with the SOG. But Aaron’s team has identified an exponential trend in fund transfers to WWUP from accounts that can be linked, ultimately, to ecoterror groups, most notably the Earth Action Front. Most of the transactions are being routed through a single person at the top of the chain, the director of WWUP’s Chicago chapter.” Aaron was Aaron Kurtzman, head of Stony Man Farm’s cyber team.

“Why Chicago?”

“It’s the domestic headquarters for WWUP, the hub of their network of chapters throughout the country. Any decisions implemented by WWUP, including their potential presidential campaign, are ultimately made in Illinois.”

“So you want Able to…what?”

“There’s a timetable at work here,” Brognola’d confided. “The people behind WWUP, and especially their donors, have to know that their monetary transactions will look suspicious eventually. The Farm caught it a lot earlier than the usual domestic institutions would, but they’d have noticed it eventually, too. Campaign finance laws, IRS regulations, standard federal banking policies…any of these could have raised a few flags in a few hundred computers. For the WWUP and their backers to be acting so brazenly tells me that something is going to happen. Something big, considering the risks, and considering the scope of the WWUP in the United States.”

“What are you telling me, Hal?” Lyons had said, finally losing his hostile tone.

“I’ve got Aaron and his people looking into the wider implications, tracking both financial data and terrorist incidents at home and abroad,” Brognola had explained. “But our working theory is that a force or forces outside the United States is or are working very hard to exert political influence inside the country. Specifically, we theorize that one or more of these terror groups are funding a seemingly legitimate incursion into U.S. politics using, among other means, violence. Whatever they’re planning is coming to a head, or they wouldn’t be risking financial exposure. The top of the pyramid is in Chicago. I want you to take Able Team and poke your head in the dragon’s lair.”

“To see if we get roasted alive?”

“Something like that. If we’re wrong, we lose a little time and a little effort. If we’re not, we get in on whatever the WWUP is plotting, maybe make them nervous enough to expose themselves, tip their hand. The clock is ticking, Carl. Something big is ramping up, and my instincts tell me we have to move now, stop it before it can get out of control.”

The big Fed had been right about this kind of thing more than once, Lyons knew. “All right, Hal. We’ll take a look. We’ll see what we can shake loose. But I’m not promising anything resembling diplomacy.”

“Do what you do, Ironman,” Brognola had said. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

Now Able Team was on site, parked on Ogden Avenue in Aurora, Illinois. At least, two-thirds of the team was sitting in the SUV. The last member of the team, the man they called “the politician,” was on the inside, his every word monitored by the microtransceivers each member of the team wore in his ear.

The little earbud devices, nearly invisible when worn, had an effective range of half a city block. The one Blancanales wore would, if anyone noticed it, appear to be nothing more than a small hearing aid. Gadgets Schwarz had helped develop the minuscule units for the Farm’s use.

Schwarz’s banter notwithstanding, the two men kept their idle chatter to a minimum as they watched the front of the WWUP building, a converted storefront nestled between a pack-and-ship mailbox store and a sheet music shop. Blancanales could hear every word they said, so there was no point in annoying or distracting him with unnecessary chatter. As the two men waited and listened, they could hear the ringing of office telephones in the background. Now and again they could hear the WWUP receptionist’s voice, though her words were indistinct at Blancanale’s presumed distance from her. The wingnuts inside, Lyons reflected, had kept his teammate waiting for at least half an hour past his appointment time. Whether this was simply business on their part, or a calculated tactic, he couldn’t be sure. It didn’t seem likely that they’d antagonize a potential donor by making him cool his heels unnecessarily.

Even as he considered it, Lyons sat up. There was rustling on the other end of the connection as Blancanale put down whatever newspaper or magazine he’d most likely been pretending to read. A voice that Lyons recognized as the receptionist’s, closer now, told the man that the director would see him.

Schwarz, next to Lyons, press-checked his silenced Beretta 93-R, ready to go operational at Lyons’s command. As Schwarz holstered the weapon, Lyons ran through his mental checklist, idly patting himself down with one hand to verify that all of his gear was in place. His .357 Magnum Colt Python was secure in his shoulder holster. While the SUV held a concealed locker in which the team’s heavy weapons were locked, they’d opted to travel more lightly for this initial probe. Concealed under the gray business suit Blancanales wore, Lyons knew, was a Beretta 92-F in a shoulder holster, which should prove sufficient if he got into any trouble inside. Still, there was an element of risk in all such operations, especially since the man was placing himself at the mercy of potential enemies, cut off from the team by distance and a few doorways.

The Able Team leader listened as Blancanales and the director, who introduced himself as Timothy Albert, exchanged pleasantries. Lyons allowed himself a tight smile as Blancanales ran through a spiel on the injustices of “world capitalism” and “corporate rule,” intended to put Albert at ease, persuade him—momentarily, at least—that he was speaking to a fellow traveler ideologically. The two traded what, to Lyons, sounded like pompous slogans that would be lame coming from college radio jocks. Eventually, though, Blancanales moved in for the kill. Lyons tensed as he heard it coming, nodding to Schwarz. If he managed to shake anything loose, it would come now.

“Much as I would like to continue this conversation, my friend,” Blancanales was saying quietly, “there is the matter of the World Workers United and its status as a political party in the United States.”