Doom Prophecy

McCARTER RIPPED A BURST INTO HIS ATTACKER’S CHEST

The machete-wielding killer spread his arms wide, the wind knocked from his lungs before he could cry out, further raising the alarm.

Out of the corner of his eye, the Briton saw Hawkins leap out behind another predator, clubbing him with the buttstock of his P-90. The marauder collapsed without a sound, and Hawkins crawled on top of the stunned man, grabbing riot cuffs from his pocket.

The crack of a handgun split the night and McCarter and Manning separated, drawing the Phoenix Force leader’s attention back to the front of him. Manning’s FN spoke, coughing out suppressed rounds that chopped into the handgunner, ending his assault.

McCarter stumbled over a tree root, and looked up to see a machete-wielding murderer let out an enraged scream as he came down on the Briton, blade gleaming in the starlight, thirsty for blood.

Other titles in this series:

#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

#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

Ka55andra is the proper spelling for the character’s name. It is a habit for people in cyberspace to protect both their anonymity and individuality by adopting unique spellings of their names, often by replacing letters with numbers or symbols such as @, $, # and &. All references to Cassandra starting with “K” are properly spelled, as are the spellings of the mythological prophetess’s name.

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

PROLOGUE

The bridge was quiet and dark, in sharp contrast to the glittering San Francisco skyline to the south, reflecting off the Pacific Ocean like an orgy of fireflies. Cara Duong wasn’t afraid of the dark, or what lurked in it, not with the reassuring weight of the Colt 1911 in the waistband of her skirt. Her trench coat was drawn tightly around her as the chill breeze cut over the railroad trestle.

The smell of the ocean was strong, but another scent dominated her memories. It was the scent of fresh blood, still vivid after decades. The unmistakable image of her mother’s bare white ribs sticking through her blood-spattered chest stabbed into Cara Duong’s gut and twisted like a murderer’s knife. She had been only nine years old, but already she’d known pain and loss.

When she was only five, her father and teenage brother were slain during the 1968 Tet Offensive, killed in pitched battle against the American forces who sought to crush the Vietnamese dreams of independence and freedom from western oppression. Her mother told her constantly about the wretched whites and blacks who violated their country, who raped women and children and burned villages, deforesting jungles, turning paddies to poisoned muck with the corpses of their slain countrymen.

Cara Duong hated Americans as a child, but that was because she had a good teacher. Her mother was as much a warrior as her father was. Mama Duong was ageless, able to look as old or young as she wanted to with only a little change of clothing and makeup. She snuck into the cities when she could, slaying American soldiers on leave who looked for a little “brown nookie.”

Even today, the term filled her mouth with the acid taste of hateful bile. Duong trembled with rage, more than from the coolness of the northern California night.

Her mother had taught her well, how to hate, how to despise. At age eight, Duong learned to shoot her first gun, a captured Colt 1911 just like the one she stuffed down into her skirt. It was locked and cocked, meaning that the hammer was all the way back, ready to fire, but the safety was on, keeping it from going off accidentally. Her mother was good with guns, but even better with knives.

But all the skill in the world didn’t make a difference. Not with a dozen armed soldiers stalking through their village at night, hunting for insurgents. Mama Duong roused her fellow fighters to make a defense, laying a trap for the hunters.

Cara Duong didn’t know if it was an itchy trigger finger, a frightened reflex, or plain impatience that fired the first shot, spoiling the ambush. All she knew was that when the first bullet exploded, the Americans returned fire.

No. They returned more than fire. They returned the full unleashed wrath of hell. Grenades detonated and ripped huts asunder. Antitank rockets plowed through homes and reduced them to fluttering pieces of burning paper, everyone inside slaughtered and vaporized by the unholy fury of their blasts. Heavy machine guns ripped through the night, grunting like a herd of giant pigs, except these war pigs stampeded and churned human beings asunder.

Mama Duong brought up her AK-47 and blasted three of the Americans before they could react. She kept her head and raced with her daughter around the back of the unit of soldiers. A single man spun and fired back, blazing away with a grenade launcher that threw Cara’s limp form to the ground, her flesh charred by the heat of the explosion. Her mother avoided most of the blast, and she opened fire on the man with the grenade launcher.

Her shots had no effect. The man spun under the impact of a bullet through his upper arm, but he still held up his Colt Commando and blasted with his other hand.

Cara, her back and shoulders burning, saw the face of the soldier who killed her mother, his features illuminated by the blazing fireball of the muzzle of his short-barreled assault rifle.

That face was burned into her memory, the searing image forever tied to the state of her mother’s body, ripped apart and ruined by a hose of 5.56 mm slugs chopping into defenseless flesh. Unconsciousness claimed Cara moments after her mother flopped to the ground, her last thought being of a vow to kill the American who took away the last of her family.

Headlights flashed at the other end of the trestle. Cara tensed, her eyes narrowing with concentration.

He was coming.

Cara Duong never thought she’d ever see the man again, but to have not known Lieutenant Governor Riddley Mott, the crusading politician who took California by storm, she’d need to have had her head buried in the ground like an ostrich. Riddley Mott, Vietnam veteran, war hero, Purple Heart recipient.

Her mother’s murderer.

The living symbol of the American forces who slaughtered her father and older brother.

The man who destroyed the huts of the village of Troui, laying waste to her home, the home of her childhood friends.

The medical men who treated her upon awakening said that she was one of eight survivors from the battle of Troui. It was a complete slaughter, with the Vietnamese fighters being killed to a man, the cross fire laying waste to entire families. Tears came to Cara’s eyes, but something darker came into her life, wrapping around the base of her heart, coiling black bloodlust, a desire for vengeance that roosted in her breast like a cancer.

Now she had her chance. She was in spitting distance. Riddley Mott, the crusading politician, war hero, golden son of the California senatorial race, was no saint. With her computer skills, she’d managed to trace his bank account records, and found interesting sources of contributions, both public and private. Very few of them were a matter of record, and more than one of his contributors was listed under FBI surveillance.

But the FBI didn’t know that these corruptors had their fingers in Mott’s pocket. They knew that money was being laundered somewhere, but only Duong had been able to track the cash through the loops of offshore bank accounts until they finally found their way into the lieutenant governor’s pocket. The information would have made Duong rich enough in its own right, but the Vietnamese woman didn’t need cash. She could skim millions with a press of the button, not even breaking a sweat writing the code necessary for such a heist.

No. She wanted blood.

She imagined Mott, clutching his bloody guts, his stomach sporting one to five big fat .45-inch holes, coughing up gouts of syrupy red, eyes wide with horror and agony. The thought brought a warmth to her that dissipated the cold in her bones.

Mott walked toward her from the other side of the trestle. The headlights of his car backlit him and his shadow stretched crazily forward. Cara’s moon-shaped face glistened lightly in the reflection when Mott’s shadow didn’t block the light, but she doubted he’d remember her.

Not the way she remembered him, even with gray starting to replace the black in his hair, wrinkles deepening his craggy, handsome face.

Come get your payback, you son of a bitch, Duong thought. Through the vent pocket in her trench coat, she felt the wooden grips of her Colt .45. They were rough, the checkering clinging to her hand. She enjoyed the feel of the big handgun. Its handle was just small enough for her to get a good trigger reach, and yet the weapon was as powerful as anything on the market.

Mott stopped, twenty feet away from her.

“Good evening, Lieutenant Governor,” she said.

“Some gook,” Mott muttered. “So you’re the one threatening to tell the FBI about my friends?”

“Not just some gook, Riddley.”

“I survived four years in Vietnam taking on all comers. You’re supposed to impress me?” Mott asked.

“I’m not here to impress you, Riddley.”

“My friends call me Riddley, bitch.”

“Then, by all means, Lieutenant Governor, don’t count me among your friends, you murdering bastard.”

“Murder?” Mott asked. He was clearly surprised.

“Remember the village of Troui?” Duong asked. The muzzle of the .45 slipped out of her waistband.

Mott frowned.

“Remember a woman, a woman with a nine-year-old child, attacking you?” she asked.

“That wasn’t murder. It was self-defense. She tried to kill me first,” Mott said. He didn’t sound in the least bit guilty.

Too bad, Duong thought. Your punishment is coming.

“Listen, just turn around and go back home before you end up regretting this,” Mott suggested.

Duong pulled out the Colt, flicking off the safety in a single fluid motion. “I actually think you’re going to regret this, asshole.”

Mott looked at the gun, but his face didn’t show anything more than momentary surprise. He took a half step away from her, holding up his hands.

“Now come on. Don’t you think that’s a little too big for you?” Mott taunted.

The muzzle didn’t waver a single degree. She aimed at his stomach, anticipating the gut shots that would fold Mott like bloody laundry, making him vomit his life as his internal organs were reduced to soup by the fat .45-caliber hollowpoint rounds she loaded especially for the purpose of prolonging his agony.

“It’s too big for a rat bastard like you. But hey, you’ll die faster this way,” Duong said.

The sound of footsteps behind her reached her ears too late. Black shapes lunged out of the darkness, a blow knocking her gun hand up. The Colt erupted into the night sky, its muzzle-flash lighting the darkness. Strong fingers wrapped around her slender arms, yanking her off balance. The .45 was pulled from her grasp and thrown to Mott.

“Silly bitch,” Mott said. “You think I wouldn’t come here without some kind of backup?”

Duong thrashed, trying to pull free as Mott held the pistol loosely in his hand. The bodyguards held on to her tightly, not giving up an inch of slack. Her dark eyes stared back in defiance at her mother’s murderer.

The barrel whipped across her face, its front sight slicing into the flesh of her jaw. The metal carved a four-inch furrow in her smooth, once unlined face, throwing her head back. Her eyes crossed.

“Hold this gook down, guys,” Mott said, stuffing the pistol into his jacket pocket. “I always enjoyed having a piece of brown tail.”

Duong’s eyes blurred as her trench coat was torn open, rough hands ripping at her skirt as she kicked and struggled.

HITTING THE WATER was a shock. She felt her shoulder dislocate as she struck from seventy feet up. Her entire body had already been abused and violated. Somehow, through the whole ordeal, she’d stayed conscious, her brain rousing back to life as she was finally dragged, half naked, to the edge of the trestle that overlooked the swollen river below.

On the way down, she took a deep breath and knew that even as she tried, the impact with the water would knock it from her lungs. If she hit wrong, in a spot that wasn’t deep enough, she’d be dashed against the river floor, broken apart.

Instead, hitting the water only popped her shoulder free from its socket and left her breathless. The next few moments were a nightmare swirl of turgid waves, inky darkness and body-numbing pain, but somehow she found the strength to breach the surface of the river, gulping down fresh lungfuls of air.

She had survived the fall, even though she was being swept away from the bridge in a crazy tumble. Mott threw her over, in the hope that the fall would kill her. A bullet in her would leave too much evidence should she be washed ashore after a few days.

But she was alive, and she kicked, dragging herself with her good arm toward the shore.

She needed to make the shore, to survive.

Riddley Mott wasn’t getting away with murder tonight.

Cara Duong still lived to kill again.

CHAPTER ONE

COMMAND:> RUN RADIO FREQJAM.EXE BAND 438.79

COMMAND:> RUN VOICEMOD.EXE SAMPLE 11418

COMMAND:> BEGIN XMIT

The radio crackled to life with a staccato burst of static that made the members of Special Forces Unit Knight Seven jump to attention. “Rook’s Nest to Knight Seven. Respond.”

Captain Jacob Kensington took the radio. “Knight Seven reporting. What’s the problem?”

The jungle zipped past the windows of the MH-60K Pave Hawk as it cut through the night skies twenty feet above the Kenyan countryside. The Pave Hawk was designed for low-level flying, with advanced avionics and terrain avoidance/terrain following multimode radar. The pilot could fly in pitch black without fear of encountering obstacles that could tear off the rotors. There was still some light that reflected off a gibbous moon; however, the Pave Hawk crew wouldn’t take chances. The ship’s gunner was strapped into his harness, hands wrapped around the .50-caliber machine gun, scanning the night.

But all the technology in the world, redundant electronics and hydraulics, still didn’t bring reassurance to Captain Kensington. Not with the sudden call.

“The problem is that the target is moving,” Rook’s Nest’s voice responded.

“What?” Kensington asked. He kicked himself for being so blatantly obvious, Rook’s Nest would provide an explanation to him immediately. Shock had taken him off guard. What in the hell was the Shining Warrior Path doing moving their training base at this time of night?

Unless…

“The Predator UAV drone has picked up a convoy of trucks moving out,” Rook’s Nest explained.

“Dammit,” Kensington cursed under his breath. The rest of Knight Seven, listening in over their own headsets, tensed up. They looked at him for confirmation.

“We think they must have noticed the Predator on its overflight while there was still light,” Rook’s Nest answered. “They’ve been packing up and moving out.”

“All right, team,” Kensington advised. “Change of plan. We have to take out that convoy.”

“It’s your option, Knight Seven. The Copperheads we had tagged for the warmup can be redirected, but you have to be on the ground to laze the target,” Rook’s Nest pointed out.

“Thanks,” Kensington replied. He grit his teeth in frustration. The team had no ambush site plotted out, and in the time it took for a flight of Copperhead missiles to reach the convoy, the trucks would be able to drive away unless Knight’s Seven slowed them. That meant two minutes of fighting.

The original plan was to have Knight’s Seven land and use its laser designators to bring down a storm of warheads to obliterate the camp, and once the enemy forces were decimated, the Special Forces team would move in, mopping up. They were to kill anyone who was left, butcher’s work, but the Shining Warrior Path was a group of hardened murderers, aligned with the remnants of the Taliban. They had been responsible for dozens of car bombings throughout Pakistan, and had killed more than forty people and injuring hundreds. If slaughtering the terrorists seemed cold-blooded, then Kensington had only to remember the photographs he’d seen of the carnage wrought by the Shining Warrior Path.

It was payback time.

He glanced at the pilot’s monitor, seeing the Predator’s video feed showing a line of trucks moving through the forest. The GPS readings gave the pilot a good path.

“All right. Swing around front,” Kensington said, checking his own map of the area. “We’ll use the hairpin that’s heading into the canyon.”

“Gotcha,” the pilot answered.

“Rook’s Nest, do you have that?” Kensington asked.

“Right. The ambush will happen at the hairpin road leading into the canyon,” Ka55andra answered, her voice masked by a modulator to sound exactly like Rook’s Nest. “Plotting the flight path now.”

Ka55andra smiled as she looked at her transmitting equipment. She was forwarding the information to the Shining Warrior Path as she spoke. It was she who took control of the Predator UAV drone, and she who was feeding computer-generated imagery through the monitor, giving Knight Seven and their Pave Hawk false information.

She was glad that she anticipated the best spot for Knight Seven to land and attempt to engage the convoy. Her brother, Wilson Sere, had taught her well; military tactics were as second nature to her as the complex coding of high-powered computer programs.

As she watched on the Predator’s true video feed, the Pave Hawk swerved off course from the main Shining Warrior Path camp, soaring toward the canyon. She directed the drone, piloting the remote-control spy in the sky after the helicopter. The Pave Hawk had slowed considerably, allowing the 150-mile-per-hour unmanned aerial vehicle to do more than keep pace. Putting on a burst of speed, she targeted the American helicopter.

The Predator was unarmed, but in effect, it was a slow-flying, guided missile. One that was big and heavy enough to do a lot of damage to a helicopter just by crashing into it. Ka55andra smirked as the distance between the two craft shortened.

Algul’s men wouldn’t need to use their RPG rockets to bring down the aircraft. There was a good chance, too, that they would be able to capture some of the American soldiers alive.

Algul was exactly the wrong kind of person that American soldiers wanted to be in the hands of. He liked to promote the rumor that he was one of the avenging dead. Even his name was Arabic for the blood-drinking nightmares that stalked the night, a Pan-Arabian version of the vampire. Prisoners who fell into his hands were bled dry into goblets, their vital fluids occasionally drunk in an orgy of madness.

Ka55andra wanted that on live, streaming video, presented to the world.

American soldiers, slain by her very own pet ghoul, would be an excellent calling card, a chilling message to be sent back to the leaders of the Department of Homeland Security.

The Predator transmitted its final images, the Pave Hawk looming in the view of the monitor. The door gunner screamed, sending out a blast of .50-caliber shells, but it was too little, too late. The Predator’s video image jerked violently and turned to static.

Knight Seven was screaming over the radio.

The helicopter was fatally hit, but somehow the pilot was directing the wounded aircraft to a landing.

It didn’t matter.

Algul was waiting.

MONSTERS DID EXIST, and as Captain Kensington struggled to push open the crumpled door of the helicopter, he saw them rise from the African jungle, blood-streaked, horror-faced monstrosities that moved with unnatural quickness. Wild eyes rimmed with red focused on him and his team, and he brought up his Barrett M-486. The Barrett was an M-4 rifle that had been chambered for the new Special Forces 6.8 mm Special Purpose Cartridge as an improvement over the smaller 5.56 mm NATO round. Grabbing the rail-mounted forward grip to stabilize it, he flicked the rifle to full-auto and fired through the gap between the door and frame of the downed aircraft, spitting a stream of SPC rounds. The heavy bullets smashed into a trio of the charging shadows.

His commandos struggled as hot brass rained down on them. They tried to get up, to gather their own weapons.

The first three attackers were swatted down in Kensington’s initial burst, but moments later other bodies slammed into the hull of the Pave Hawk. He whirled, but the barrel snagged in the grip of one blood-caked, snarling madman. Wrenching with all his strength, the Special Forces captain tried to pull free, to regain control of his gun.

It was like fighting a gigantic octopus. Other hands gripped the barrel of his rifle, fingers clawing at his sleeve and snagging it. The ripstop material resisted Kensington’s efforts to pull free, and he found himself being dragged through the gap.