Ramrod Intercept

IT WAS SET TO BLOW, LOUD AND HOT

“Well, Agent Lemmon, I guess there’s not much left to say except I can’t recall the last time I saw a G-man walking around in rubber-soled combat boots. I didn’t know government issues, the official kind, trooped around with compact submachine guns in special swivel rigging beneath oversize windbreakers. To answer your questions, yes, I have a major deal in the works that could change the entire destiny of the world. My employees were just chess pieces, pawns to take the fall while I rode off into the sunset. You know what my problem is—”

“I’m not your shrink, Colonel,” Lyons interjected.

The Able Team leader was already searching for cover, aware that he and Blancanales were in a cross fire. It was something in Lake’s eyes, a look, that warned Lyons to make a scramble to save his skin.

He was in the air, flying over a couch as the Uzi appeared, like some sorcerer’s trick, in Lake’s hands.

Other titles in this series:

STONY MAN IV

STONY MAN V

STONY MAN VI

STONY MAN VII

STONY MAN VIII

#9 STRIKEPOINT

#10 SECRET ARSENAL

#11 TARGET AMERICA

#12 BLIND EAGLE

#13 WARHEAD

#14 DEADLY AGENT

#15 BLOOD DEBT

#16 DEEP ALERT

#17 VORTEX

#18 STINGER

#19 NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE

#20 TERMS OF SURVIVAL

#21 SATAN’S THRUST

#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

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

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

PROLOGUE

They knew.

He couldn’t nail down, of course, the when and where he suspected he’d been found out, but Reza Nahru sensed the angry heat of a killing mood in the barracks as soon as he was roused from sleep.

“Get up! On your feet! The general wishes to speak with us!”

There was real menace, he thought, in the way his brother Iranians glanced at him, then turned away, a few of them wrinkling noses as if they were in a hurry to clear a bad stench. He was on his feet, reaching for his assault rifle when Bahruz Fhalid growled, “Leave it.”

And then he knew he was a dead man, beyond any scintilla of a doubt.

Time seemed suspended, and he found it strange to the point of some peaceful, easy feeling how he could so calmly accept the inevitable, go and face down his own death. At least, he told himself, he wouldn’t die alone, since he heard both men were likewise told to leave their AK-47s where they were leaned up against respective edges of their cots.

Small comfort. Dead was dead.

A moment stolen to look at Tabriz and al-Hammud, rising now from their cots under the dark scowls and black eyes of AK-47s, and he still couldn’t help but wonder how his treachery had been uncovered.

It had to have been his CIA contact in Port Sudan or perhaps Khartoum. The secret meetings, accepting the envelopes of cash from the CIA’s contract agent in Sudan, had been spied out somehow, by someone. Sudan, he knew, was crawling with Iranian agents, all manner of former SAVAK thugs, and he could have cursed himself for not being more careful in watching his back. Too late to kick himself now—clearly word of his deceit and betrayal had trailed him all the way down to Madagascar.

The sweeping courtyard was just beyond the door. The massive stone walls of the garrison, once home to French soldiers, would be smeared with his blood when he was marched out there to be shot.

Death at the hands of his own. Shot down like a mad dog in the street. A sorry testament, he decided, to a bad life.

A fitting end.

“A moment to pray?” he asked Fhalid.

“Be quick about it.”

He slumped to his knees, shut his eyes, clasped his hands. As a Muslim, once devoted to God and his will, committed to prayer and to his faith, he had somehow, somewhere lost that faith, his belief in right and wrong, stripping himself of any sense of humanity. No, he wasn’t one hundred percent certain on exactly where and when he had stopped believing in God, but supposed it had begun when he had left—abandoned—his wife and three children in Tehran, right after the way with the Iraqis. From there, a pit stop in Beirut, beefing up on weapons and intel. There, rallying an elite corps of freedom fighters, mapping out strategy against the infidels. Then on the Gaza Strip, where he’d recruited the poor, the angry and the desperate out of Palestinian refugee camps to blow themselves up in Tel Aviv, martyrs for God. There was also an American diplomatic entourage wiped out in Pakistan not long ago that he had played no small role in arranging. At least twenty of the men gathered in the barracks had also been part of creating slaughterhouses in six different countries.

And it was his knowledge of these incidents that had brought the CIA to his doorstep in Port Sudan, dark shadow men picking his brain, putting the ultimatum to him. Play ball or else.

They wanted names and whereabouts of his fellow brothers in jihad. They wanted to know from where recent shipments of high-tech weapons were coming from, to find their way into the hands of his fellow Iranians.

So be it. A change was long since coming anyway. Sometimes, he thought, conversion of the soul just came to a man, a virgin bride eager to marry the one she loved, or sometimes the man actively and with passion he had never before known sought out the inner cleansing. Who could say?

But for some time Nahru had questioned the morality of the so-called holy way against the Great Satan. He asked himself if God was the creator of all men, why, then, would he want the blood of the innocent on his divine hands?

Silently Nahru asked God to have mercy on his wretched soul.

“Up!”

“We had a deal!”

Rising, eyes wide open, Nahru nearly laughed out loud when the moment of truth was revealed. The old Nahru would have unleashed a torrent of vicious cursing on al-Hammud. The new man simply felt a sense of curious relief sweeping over him. If nothing else, his own Judas would die beside him.

Al-Hammud began blubbering for his life to be spared. “You told me—”

Fhalid stung the man’s face with a backhand that slapped flesh with the sound of a pistol shot. “Get these jackals out of my face!”

Nahru allowed himself to be shoved and manhandled through the door. He winced into the beam of white light striking him in the face as he stumbled into the courtyard. He was thinking to be shot couldn’t be such a bad way to go. Quick, clean, fairly painless. One well-placed bullet through the heart…

The stench nearly knocked him off his feet. He heard al-Hammud scream out his terror next when he was pushed toward the trio of Madagascan soldiers. It was all he could do to keep the vomit from spewing out. The cattle carcass was still being gutted, long strands of intestines dug out by the soldiers with machetes ripping away, the dripping gore getting smeared up and down the long thin stakes.

Greasing the way.

Nahru felt knees buckle, his limbs turning to boneless mass when Fhalid bellowed the order to strip them down. The blows pummeled his head next, bringing on the stars and the white-hot pain. He was falling hard and fast, then became aware he was on the ground, face plastered in the red earth, hands like claws shredding his clothes.

Reza Nahru offered up one last silent prayer. He asked God to avenge the obscenity of his coming death.

GENERAL FATEH ARAKKHAN was a man without a country. It angered him to no end, this knowledge he was unwelcomed, unwanted in his homeland, not to mention he was a soldier being hunted for alleged war crimes. The rumor floating his way from Khartoum went that his own people, in their greed and hunger to become a prominent oil-developing and -exporting country, were ready and willing to hand his head over to the infidels.

The Arab-controlled north Sudan might be his home of birth, but a few circumstances had recently dictated he find comfortable lodging someplace far away from Khartoum. One, the military and intelligence bastards and whores of the evil Western empires, he thought, had proclaimed him the Butcher of Southern Sudan, and before the United Nations for five years running. Second, a number of upper-echelon two-faced thieves in the intelligence arm of the National Islamic Front were more than irked that he had helped himself to what they claimed was more than his rightful share of Red Cross and UN planeloads of food and medicine, shipped to southern Sudan under some shaky international-relief agreement.

Yes, it was true enough he had strongarmed enough supplies, reselling them to Somalia—not to mention helping himself to a vast pool of oil money—and mounted a fat numbered back account in Switzerland. But how could a leader, he reasoned, ever hope to lead unless he could feed, clothe, arm and pay his own men properly? A soldier with an empty belly, with no money in his pocket to throw around on R and R… Well, a soldier stirred up with bitter malcontent meant mass mutiny could be as close as tomorrow’s kneel to Mecca.

But the former number-two man of the National Salvation Revolutionary Council was working on his comeback. Someday soon he would return to Khartoum in triumph, and more than a few backstabbing colleagues would find themselves gored and suspended high in the air for all of Khartoum to gaze upon, the masses out there meant only to shimmy and shake in fear at the very mention of his name.

Just like the three treacherous Iranian jackals shrieking below, the future was in his mind’s eye, and it was looking bright.

The general mounted the parapet, reveled in the screams of traitors. He was short, slightly built, but he felt like a giant right then, the center of grim and undivided attention, decked out in full uniform, epaulets, with ribbons and medals weighing down his tunic. He savored this victory, a vision of tomorrow, as they were raised and the bloody ends of the stakes were buried deep into the ground. Of course, the ankles required rope, fastened to stakes to keep them in the air while gravity did its gruesome work.

As in most countries where Europeans once trod, there was a language barrier. Madagascar was no different. He addressed the Iranians in English, aware most of the Madagascan soldiers had a working knowledge of the universal language. “Behold the fate of all those who give themselves over to the Great Satan like common whores. I am General Fateh Arakkhan, but you already know that. What I am to you is your ayatollah—or sign of God. Treason is unacceptable. Submission to my will is acceptable. You have been brought to this island to serve in what will soon become the mother of all holy wars. Yes, I know you have your own agendas, regarding your islands in the Strait of Hormuz.”

The screams faded to bitter weeping as shock set in and their limbs hung limply by their sides. “We must plan our futures together if we are to succeed in defeating our enemies. These three men were fools, with weak wills and deceit in their hearts. You can clearly see I still have friends in important places in Sudan, watching, waiting for my return.” He glossed over the fact it never hurt to spread the wealth around, whether Khartoum or here in Madagascar, where he had the president tucked in his pocket, along with ranking Madagascan officers and about one-third of the People’s National Assembly. “I am issuing the fatwa. Anyone who is not with us is against us. It cannot be much more clear and simple. Gaze now upon the fate of our enemies. That is all.”

A moan of agony rose up from the courtyard as he moved down the parapet. He would need a few minutes at some point with Fhalid to discuss where it all went from there. For now he would simply let his actions speak the truth, revealing the future of his enemies for all to behold.

RYAN COLLINS HAD a lifestyle to maintain, and figured a measly quarter-million a year wasn’t cutting it. There was the beachfront home in Malibu to consider. There were bimonthly trips to Hawaii, three sports cars to think about. There were two ex-wives with their hands clawed deep in his pockets, and their lawyers planted square up his butt. There was a mistress who had a coke habit….

Girls, girls, girls.

All things about the opposite sex considered, he felt right at home as he claimed a table in the far corner, eyes lighting up at the blond vision shaking and baking on stage. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, the coiffed dark hair, the rugged movie-star good looks, couldn’t resist a smile.

Feeling good.

He saw she was already cutting a beeline his way, all smiles, ready to rock, waving off the come-ons from the wanna-be lady-killers. He was one of the privileged elite clientele who had access to the back rooms. And why not, he figured, the kind of money he threw away in the place, a fringe benefit or two should always be on the menu. He was in a stressful line of work, after all, needed relief, and things weren’t getting any less tense around the office.

Los Angeles was a party town, around the clock, and Collins was looking for some way to keep the good times rolling. He believed he had found the answer, only he was concerned where he might go with his information and who should get it.

And for what price.

Still, he was disturbed about recent events he couldn’t explain, but his ticket to paradise was stashed away in the aluminum briefcase by his side.

And there were shadows following him. He couldn’t see them, but three of his colleagues had gone AWOL. The past month or so had seen a few grim-faced robots—Terminators, he thought—lumbering around the DYSAT office in Century City. These days, he felt he was always being watched, since he was a top-ranking executive with access to sensitive information to classified high-tech weapons, microchip processors….

Well, he had stumbled across the order manifests and they didn’t jibe with production output. Not only that, but the end users—purchasers—were logged as…

He shuddered to even consider whom DYSAT had fallen into bed with. Okay, he figured he could talk to the president of the company, a former Air Force colonel, and put the screws to him. It might cost him his job, but if he made some noise about going to the Feds unless there was ample cash compensation…

“Hey, cutie. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Was it his imagination, or did Cyndy look especially pleased to see him?

“Likewise.”

“You want a drink first?”

“After.”

She took his hand, leading the way. Paradise.

“You sound real horny tonight.”

“Tough day at the office.”

She seemed too eager to please, not even bothering to relieve him of two hundred bucks first, but he figured she was just hot to get it on. He trailed her through the rear door, into a narrow, murky hall. He was grateful the back rooms were nearly soundproof, blotting out the thunder of heavy metal and the roar of hyenas in heat. The only kind of noise he wanted to hear was her mewing for more. Down the hall to the last room, and she opened the door. He was moving inside, looking from the soft light burning on the nightstand, adjusting his eyes to the deeper gloom, when he spotted the shadow.

“What the…?”

“Mr. Collins. Nice of you to show up.”

Collins felt his blood pressure rise like a war drum in his ears, heart pulsing with fear and anger. “What is this? I’ve seen you before.”

“I left your envelope with the bartender.”

Collins nearly bellowed with outrage as the whore simply nodded, not even looking at him as she left the room, the door snicking shut.

The Terminator rose, and Collins heard the dialogue leaping to mind, aware he had been set up, screwed. He was about to say, “I can explain,” when the behemoth in a buzz cut pulled out a pistol and attached a sound suppressor.

“Your services are no longer required by DYSAT.”

“Listen! No, I can—”

A chug, then the lights were punched out.

CHAPTER ONE

“You look like the messenger with bad news—and ‘very’ bad news.”

Hal Brognola was fondling an unlit cigar as he rolled into the War Room at Stony Man Farm. The director of the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group swept on, past Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, the chief cyber sorcerer who was confined for life to his wheelchair, thanks to a bullet, and grunted at Bear’s remark.

“Well?” Kurtzman pressed. “Did the Man give us the green light?”

The Man, of course, was the President of the United States, and half of Brognola’s twin-bill duty was playing a critical role as the Farm’s liaison to the chief executive. “We’re sitting in limbo—still.”

No thumbs-up from the Oval Office, and Barbara Price, the Farm’s mission controller, groaned. “Unbelievable. Does he have any clue how hard we pushed, maneuvering all the logistical chess pieces, to get it at the doorstep of…this eleventh hour?”

The Justice man knew all too well how many hours—belay that—days the Farm team had racked up, the number of strings tugged, contacts cajoled, markers raked in from the Pentagon to Langley. It galled him alone to think Stony Man’s elite commandos were poised on three separate thresholds, combat ready, chomping on prebattle nerves.

Waiting for the phone to ring.

The big Fed poured a large foam cup of Kurtzman’s infamous coffee, then dumped enough sugar in the black swill to make it go down a little easier. “Five days, as a matter of fact, since we put this one on the drawing board. I don’t mind saying I’m feeling the strain myself, people, and all the way to the hair on my toes,” Brognola told the key players, grabbing his seat, dumping himself down at the head of the table. “The Man’s as clued in like I was the burning bush to his Moses, all right, but he’s firmly stated his concerns about what could become a whopping and ugly international mess.”

“Welcome to the Oval Office,” Kurtzman groused.

“I damn near said that. At any rate, it’s why I’ve been at my office all day, waiting by the phone, lighting a few more fires around Wonderland.” He glowered at the red phone on the table within arm’s reach. “Looks like we’re all still going to have to wait—if and when—for the tough choice to get made.”

The chopper ride from his office at the Justice Department to the Farm in Virginia was roughly ninety minutes. But with only a catnap on the office couch, here and there during the past few days Brognola felt as if he’d just crossed three time zones, jet lag and ten years older. Tired as King Solomon perhaps over the folly and insanity of humans chasing the wind, on edge admittedly, and leaning a little to the mean side.

Brognola worked on the coffee, chomping his stogie, then said, “Okay, sitreps. I know we’ve run it down before, but maybe we missed something. A to Z. The basics and the particulars. Let’s start with Phoenix Force. Barbara?”

The honey-haired blonde, who could have just walked off the pages of a fashion magazine and into the War Room, took up a remote-control box and snapped on one of the large monitors built into the wall. An enlarged grid map of Madagascar and the Indian Ocean to the east flared to life. “The hunter-killer submarine Seawolf SSN 21 is submerged and still holding its position, forty kilometers and change from where Phoenix will be inserted on the eastern central shore of Madagascar. Sat imagery shows it’s a remote area, with only two villages and a scattering of rice terraces, a solitary Catholic church along the march. It will be your basic grunt march—move fast and silent and avoid contact with the locals. According to our and the Seawolf’s depth gauges and X-ray sat imagery of the water, the inlet’s bottom is smooth enough, slanting evenly up to shore, no crags, no snags, to receive the unarmed torpedo that will carry their gear and weapons onto the beach. Something like an underwater surfboard, special delivery riding right up on the sand. Ready and waiting for them to finish out their swim.”

Brognola grunted. “For some reason, I get damn nervous over the idea of inserting them by sea. I see twenty things going wrong all at once. Aren’t those shark-infested waters? As in great white?”

“Actually,” Kurtzman said, “the eastern coastline of Madagascar is called Whale Highway. Most of the marine life traffic is made up primarily of the larger animals, at least, namely migrating humpback whales.”

“I hear primarily and actually and namely, I don’t exactly get a warm fuzzy feeling, Bear. I’m not sure, but I don’t think they teach wanna-be SEALs in BUDs what the hell to do—other than pray—when they see a sixteen-foot torpedo-like shadow coming at them out of the murk with bared teeth the size of a butcher’s knife.”

“Your white shark population sticks farther to the south, off the coastline of South Africa where there’s an abundant seal menu.”

“Why couldn’t it have been an air drop instead of going out the hatch of a submersible?”

“A minisub,” Price said. “Riding piggyback on the escape hatch of the Seawolf. A submersible requires a surface support vehicle at all times, often needs to be hooked by cable to the mother ship. The state-of-the-art Titan was designed by aerodynamic engineers for the specific intent of inserting soldiers by sea. It’s not a deep research vessel by any stretch. It’s built for speed and deployment of combat troops.”

“I stand corrected. If I sounded like a grumpy old man, Barbara…”