Splintered Sky

“Don’t forget to break out your Fed suits,” Price reminded him.

Lyons wrinkled his nose. “Yeah.”

Watching him over the Web cam link, he saw Price’s face brighten with gentle but mocking humor. “Just when you thought you’d gotten away from the suit and tie look…”

“Yeah,” Lyons said, rolling his eyes. “It’s the price I have to pay to get a look at Burgundy Lake.”

“We’ll be able to reconstruct the raiders’ hit when we’re on-site,” Blancanales added. “The tactics they used might give us a clue as to who trained this group.”

Lyons nodded. “I hope they’re local. I’d hate to lose a shot at them because they’re overseas.”

“Phoenix Force is prepped and ready to move out,” Price told him. “Your job this time around is to work inside our borders.”

Lyons sighed. “Used to have the whole world as our beat map.”

“You’ve been getting more chances to step out and play, Ironman. Don’t worry. This doesn’t seem close to finished,” Price promised.

Lyons glanced toward the broom closet where Paczesny was being softened by Schwarz’s home-brewed sonic assault. “Not with Paczesny. Right now, I’m melting his brain. In a few minutes, he’s going to wish he didn’t have one.”

The Able Team leader broke contact and freshened up.

C HRONOLOGICALLY , L EON P ACZESNY was left in the sensory deprivation for only forty minutes total. However, due to the white noise and utter lack of sensation except for the tearing agony in his ruined elbow, it felt as if he were penned up in the broom closet for forty hours.

The first hint he had of the real world was when the duct tape was ripped off his mouth and eyes. Gag free, he let out a yell that was cut off when Lyons punched him just under the sternum. The blow interrupted the shout and cut off his breathing for a few seconds.

Just long enough for the Able Team commander to slide the headphones off Paczesny’s ears. Then the turncoat felt the back of his head crack against the broom closet wall, ironhard fingers squeezing his jaw until it felt as if the mandible would snap.

“Welcome back to the land of the walking dead,” Lyons snarled. “I’m the Ironman, and I’ll be your host on the scenic tour of hell.”

“You can’t do this. I’m an American citiz—”

“You, Mr. Paczesny, are nothing anymore,” Lyons growled. “You are listed among the corpses stacked like cord wood back at Burgundy Lake. As such, you are a non-entity, only useful for as long as you are giving up information. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

“I have no rights?” Paczesny asked, already knowing the answer.

“You’re acting as if I’m some kind of cop. I’m the Grim Reaper, pal. It’s just been a busy night, thanks to you, and I want to play a little before packing you off to hell.”

“Damn it, you can’t do this. You have to have some kind of authority, some rulebook…” Paczesny said. “This isn’t Camp X-Ray.”

Lyons slammed his forearm down on Paczesny’s. “Camp X-Ray? That’s amateur hour, dip shit. It’s kindergarten, while this is the graduate class. Get it?”

“Yes. Yes, sir,” Paczesny whimpered. “I got it!”

Lyons started the digital recorder, and began asking questions. Paczesny spilled his guts.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

H UNTINGTON W ETHERS LISTENED to the download of the MP3 file that Able Team uploaded to him. Paczesny’s confession made the process of forensic accounting easier, enabling Wethers to locate the trail of funds.

Naturally, the identities of the mysterious donors remained vague. Paczesny didn’t have faces or voices, only e-mail contacts and a few shadowy meetings with men who hid their features and utilized vocal distortion technology. The trail of cash in Paczesny’s Cayman Island account also followed a tangled snarl of jumps from front company to front company, all of which were new and lacked any ties to previously known espionage or organized crime groups.

Wethers squeezed his brow as he went over the financial autopsy on the screen before him, scanning line by line for the name of a front company owner who would register on any of a thousand law-enforcement watch lists. Though the plodding, meticulous cyberdetective was utilizing his search engines to look for a familiar name, his own vast reserves of memorized information churned in his mind, working as fast as the powerful processors of the Cray supercomputers in the Annex.

For all of the technological power in the Stony Man cyber-center, the computers were still only pale duplicates of the human brain, lacking intuition or the ability to correlate something that didn’t quite match what came before.

Wethers blinked his eyes, realizing he hadn’t done so in several minutes. Tears washed over his parched orbs, flooding down the side of his cheek.

“Doing okay, Hunt?” Akira Tokaido asked from his workstation.

Wethers picked up his pipe and chewed on the stem, sitting back to allow his subconscious to digest the images burned into his retinas. “Just slow, steady work. I need to rest my eyes a little.”

Tokaido nodded.

“Nothing’s shown up yet?” Carmen Delahunt asked, stepping over to Wethers’ station.

“The money that ended up in Paczesny’s account has been immaculately sanitized,” Wethers responded. “I’ve gone over every single penny, and can’t make head nor tails of where it came from, despite all the front companies.”

“Maybe you’re looking at too large an object,” Tokaido responded. Wethers glanced over at his younger partner, gnawing on his pipe stem.

“You mean that this might have come from another source?” Wethers asked. “Someone might have found a way to pick up the fractions of pennies in interest and convert the digital leftovers into real money?”

“It’s happened before,” Tokaido replied. “But you’d have to be very good to break into that kind of a slush fund.”

“Wait…fractional cents of interest?” Delahunt asked. “Sure. Bank computers round down the interest they’re offering, keeping the leftover bit for themselves. But surely, it would take a large bank to accumulate that kind of money.”

“You’d be surprised, especially since we’re talking how many banking franchises in the U.S.?” Tokaido asked.

Wethers nodded his understanding. “So someone has a tap on banks, and they’re using that to create a clean form of money. And of course, the banks won’t say anything, because they don’t want the public to know that they’re being shortchanged. Instead of getting thirty-two point eight-five-two cents, they only get the thirty-two, and the bank keeps the slop over. In the course of a year, that can add up to ten cents an account, times however many hundred customers per branch, over the course of several years…”

“Big money tucked away for the guys up top,” Delahunt said. “And it’s completely independent of the FDIC insurance on any account.”

“So Paczesny ended up with forty grand in his account,” Wethers mused out loud. “And it’s made up of withheld interest surplus from a banking franchise, which can’t mention the disappearance of that kind of money, unless they want to pay taxes on it.”

“We’re dealing with a good hacker,” Delahunt noted. “The dummy companies that filtered those funds also have nothing much to give in terms of who set them up. Akira, think you can do something about that?”

“I’ll hit it hard,” Tokaido said, accepting the challenge. “There’s no way to make a dummy without leaving one fingerprint on it.”

“It could be that they left a fingerprint, but we just haven’t recognized it as such,” Wethers added. “Some signature that would be so obscure that while we’ve been looking at it, it just simply blends in.”

“Your fine-tooth comb has eliminated a lot of options,” Tokaido mentioned, looking at the relevant data that Wethers collected. “It’s going to take some hairy-ass cyber monkey action to break this open.”

Wethers snorted. “Thank you, Akira, for introducing an image of your hirsuteness that I shall need to gouge from my mind’s eye with a spork.”

Tokaido and Delahunt chuckled at the scholarly computer expert’s subdued shudder.

“Hunt, work with me on trying to back-trace the origin of the trucks,” Delahunt said. “It’ll be something new for your brain to work on to clear the cobwebs.”

“Unfortunately, Able Team didn’t leave much in terms of trace evidence on the vehicles,” Wethers lamented, looking at Delahunt’s notes. “And what Carl and the lads didn’t wreak, the marauders themselves contributed. VIN plates removed, and no accumulation of personal items that could betray origin. Even the odometers were taken out.”

“Thorough,” Delahunt agreed. She took a deep breath, returning to her workstation. “With the odometers, and a rough estimate of the distances traveled, we could have at least narrowed down the trucks to wherever they were stolen or purchased.”

“How about the electronics?” Wethers inquired. “Surely the IR illuminators should have betrayed a point of origin.”

“Chinese military equipment, top of the line for special forces,” Delahunt said. “It doesn’t show up on any catalogs, but we’ve had enough dealings with the Security Affairs Division to know what their gear looks like.”

Wethers observed the screen, looking at the night-vision equipment that had been photographed by Schwarz. Images of the complete unit, then dissected, were displayed. Chinese knockoff transistors were in the design. “It’s pretty damning. Red China is the only concurrent power to the United States to have a burgeoning aerospace industry devoted to orbital craft.”

“We’ve also got an international mix of operatives among those bodies not burned or mutilated beyond the point of recognition,” Delahunt mused. “China does have the kind of budget to…”

Wethers glanced over to her as her train of thought trailed off. Her green eyes flickered and Wethers knew she’d hit a hunch.

“Akira, put the bank search on hold,” Delahunt noted. “Take a look at brokers who make large dollar to yuan conversions.”

Tokaido nodded slowly. “Why didn’t I think of that in the first place?”

“That’s why we’re a team, Akira,” Wethers admonished. “Still, what would the PRC benefit by this? This kind of activity could result in trouble for them once an astute investigator figured this out.”

“You think that this is circumstantial evidence left to implicate Beijing?” Delahunt asked.

“It’s a possibility. Or, it could be a double-blind. The U.S. wouldn’t believe China to be so arrogant as to leave these traces, and thus waste energy confirming such a setup,” Wethers explained.

“One step at a time,” Delahunt said. “We find the evidence, and then see where it points. As setup or as genuine.”

“Fair enough,” Wethers stated. He went to work, going over transistor lots and equipment manufacture manifests. Though it looked as if he were in a trance, mentally slowed to a stop, his brain raced at the speed of light.

In the back of his brilliant mind, the eldest member of the Stony Man cybernetics crew wondered if the speed of light was still too slow to prevent Armageddon.

Midway Island, U.S. Naval Cleanup and Reclamation Center

P HOENIX F ORCE HAD BEEN returning from an operation in India when they received the alert to go on stand-by due to another crisis. David McCarter waited in the hangar at what was a covertly operating Naval Air Station, stubbing out a Player’s cigarette. The U.S. Navy had been publicly ordered to clean up the contamination of the Midway Station National Wildlife Refuse, but there were still low-profile facilities available for the United States Special Operations Command to use as forward staging areas. Phoenix Force was taking advantage of the top-secret station to recuperate from the first half of a long flight when they’d received a stand-by alert.

“Thank you, David,” Rafael Encizo said, waving the fumes away from his face.

McCarter winked and pulled another from its pack, lighting up. “Anytime, mate.”

Encizo rolled his eyes. “This is Hawaii. Fresh air, crystal-blue water, verdant green…”

“Yeah. But I’m workin’ as fast as I can to fix that,” McCarter joked.

“Give me strength,” Encizo groaned. He walked out onto the tarmac. The breeze blowing spared him from suffering McCarter’s secondhand smoke. “Think we’ll have time to head home, or will we have to resupply here?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” McCarter answered. “But I’m betting that it’ll be a little while until we’re back at the Farm. Hope you didn’t have any hot dates waiting.”

Encizo shrugged. “You know me, David. A girl in every port.”

McCarter didn’t know whether that was an exaggeration or not, but he didn’t particularly care. The Cuban had his relationships that had survived the social-life-strangling strains of covert operations, as McCarter had his own.

“We’ve got an update,” T. J. Hawkins announced. The youngest member of Phoenix Force had been manning their satellite uplink-equipped laptop, waiting for news.

McCarter crushed the half-smoked cigarette and joined Encizo beside Hawkins, Calvin James and Gary Manning to observe the electronic briefing from where they’d been occupying themselves.

“Currently, all we have is circumstantial evidence,” Barbara Price announced on screen. “But put together, it’s pretty damning. We’ve got several million dollars missing from People’s Republic of China banks. The money disappeared from facilities that were converting dollars to yuan and vice versa.”

“Added to the SAD-style night vision, it does look damning,” James, a former San Francisco police officer, agreed. “But circumstantial evidence doesn’t hold up. We need something stronger.”

“Try this image we’ve got from an NRO satellite,” Price added. An image appeared on the screen, a photograph of a launch facility. The image enlarged and focused on a corner of the launch campus. “It was observing a facility referred to in the records as the Phoenix Graveyard.”

“Glad I’m not superstitious,” McCarter muttered.

“Looks familiar,” Gary Manning said, cutting off his friend’s gloomy proclamation. “The same kind of terrorist combat training facilities that litter Asia from Syria to Pakistan.”

“Too disorganized to be conventional army barracks, and this tank,” Encizo mentioned. “I recognize that kind of water tank. There’s one at Cape Canaveral.”

“A zero-gravity, space-suit training tank,” James agreed. “The water duplicates the relative lack of gravity, as well as operating in a self-contained atmosphere, preparing people for extra-vehicular activity.”

“And it’s not for astronauts, because this is a second tank in addition to one for the Chinese astronauts,” Manning said. “The Chinese don’t normally send people into orbit, and when they do, it’s on the QT. Mostly, their facilities are rented out to launch satellites, but they do have their own space program, complete with a knockoff of the shuttle that’s a little better than the Russians’.”

“So they’re training terrorists for zero-gravity combat in a space suit?” McCarter asked. “That narrows down the targets considerably.”

“The International Space Station,” Hawkins concluded. “Isn’t there supposed to be a shuttle launch and rendezvous?”

“It’ll be going up in three days,” Price answered. “Take a look at this setup here…”

The photograph increased in detail, and it was a maze of tires. Utilizing computer wizardry, the picture blended with the layout of the ISS. The commandos of Phoenix Force were immediately aware of the PVC pipes that simulated the crawl-spaces between the station’s various modules.

“Still circumstantial evidence,” James stated. “It’s too thin to make a rush into the People’s Republic.”

“One more bit of evidence. We did a sweep for radiation on the scene,” Price concluded. “We picked up high-energy gamma radiation signatures.”

James winced and McCarter knew that the Phoenix Force medic had heard something terrible. McCarter checked his memory for problems that would have a high gamma radiation signature.

“Iridium 192,” McCarter stated.

“You got it, David,” James answered. “It’s a very credible threat for a dirty bomb. External exposure to Ir-192 pellets can cause radiation burns, acute radiation sickness or even death.”

“They wouldn’t need explosives,” Manning interjected.

“What do you mean?” McCarter asked.

“Iridium is a highly dense metal. We’re talking a higher friction resistance than the toughest steels around. Plop it into the atmosphere on a proper trajectory, when it hits the ground, even the pencil-size sticks of Ir-192 used for industrial welding gauges will survive and merely fragment,” Manning said. “Put it in a barrel, and reentry will heat the drum up enough that when it strikes a solid surface, like a building, it’ll pop like a balloon, spitting shards over the center of a city.”

“A radioactive shotgun round,” McCarter mentioned. “Anyone not killed by a splinter of the stuff would receive a dose of radioactive shrapnel. With the amount of casualties possible from an air burst over a city, you’ll have hundreds, perhaps thousands, suffering from both fragments and the radiation they put out.”

“They wouldn’t need a barrel, and they’d have their delivery systems on the ISS,” Hawkins noted. “Right now, our shuttle is going up to augment the ISS satellite maintenance duties. At any time, there’s a half dozen satellites docked to the station, and there are remote operating thrusters to return the satellites to their proper orbits. It’d only take a minor bit of programming to turn a satellite into a weapon, especially with a load of Ir-192 in its guts.”

McCarter took a deep breath. “When do we take off, Barb?”

“There’s not too much activity now, but the timing of the hit on Burgundy Lake with the launch of the current shuttle mission is just too suspicious,” Price told them. “If it’s Beijing looking to make an official move, or renegades at work, we need to get you in the air now.”

“What’s our ride?” McCarter asked.

“The Gulfstream’s been refueled by naval aviation, but the closest approach to the Chinese launch facility is in Thailand. The Gulfstream’s not set up for HALO, nor a stealth border crossing, so you’ll transfer to a dedicated craft in Thailand, and then infiltrate the Phoenix Graveyard, approximately 250 miles west of Canton,” Price responded. “I’ll arrange for gear to be ready when you get there. Good luck.”

“We’ll need it,” Hawkins muttered.

“All right, team, load up,” McCarter ordered.

CHAPTER FOUR

Yuma, Arizona

Leon Paczesny was turned over to federal Marshals, glad to be away from the big, menacing blond cop who liked to pound on his arm. It had only taken a gentle reminder, dozens of color photographs of the corpses Able Team had created the night before, to ensure that Paczesny was going to keep their part in the apocalyptic border-crossing quiet. Hal Brognola had a Justice Department detachment, independent of the Burgundy Lake investigation, take care of the turncoat. The deal was a simple one. Paczesny would eventually be turned over by Brognola’s baby-sitters, and the traitor would confess to his part in the operation.

In return for not contesting his espionage charges, he’d get to live. It would be an existence in an eight-foot-by-five-foot cell until he was old and decrepit, but it would be life. Any deviation from the deal would result in pieces of Paczesny being mailed to all of his living relatives, each part harvested from his screaming body.

Lyons told the traitor that they had excellent life support machines. He amended the threat with a story of the last fool who blew his free pass to continued existence. With grudging respect, Lyons noted that the turncoat had survived until he was trimmed down to an eyeless, earless, noseless head attached to a torso that had been carved down to just above the navel.

“It was the most incredible six months of my life, slicing a traitorous bastard up like lunch meat,” Lyons confessed.

It was all a lie, but Paczesny didn’t know that.

“Intimidation has a name,” Schwarz quipped after Paczesny left in the back of a Justice Department SUV. “Lyons. Carl Lyons.”

The Able Team leader snorted. “This isn’t a game, Gadgets.”

“No, you sure talk a good nightmare,” Schwarz answered.

“I don’t like it, but when it comes down to saving noncombatants and breaking apart some thug who’s in on a bunch of deaths I can prevent…”

“The needs of the many, bro,” Schwarz replied. He bopped the ex-cop on the shoulder.

Lyons looked at his watch. It was just after dawn. “Please. It’s too early for that Star Trek crap.”

“Speaking of which,” Blancanales interjected, “what’s the plan? Stick around poking at any support structure for the mercenaries who hit Burgundy Lake, or do we go to Florida?”

Lyons frowned. “We’ll spend a few hours here snooping around. We might hit something, but I doubt that the raiders’ backup would stick around longer than sunset.”

“That’s including the guy who ran off,” Blancanales reminded him.

Lyons nodded. “Our mystery opponent took off, and we still haven’t assembled much in terms of ranking on this group. Chances are, the escapee was either the highest ranking, or the most experienced in the marauder party. Either way, that will make him valuable enough to be useful in Florida.”

“A hit on Cape Canaveral would be insane,” Schwarz stated. “The security forces on hand are well-trained.”

“So were the Air Force guards at Burgundy Lake. Besides, we’ve penetrated NASA security before, too,” Lyons countered.

“Okay. We hit the bricks and try to catch our boy on the way out of town,” Blancanales said. “I’d make it a safe bet he’d try a charter flight.”

“Check on it,” Lyons told him. “I’ll be at the battle site. Gadgets, check out the warehouse where the combined task force has the wreckage. A closer look at the stolen technology might tell us if this was an effort to steal and reverse-engineer the thrusters, or just getting it out of the way.”

“Knowing the state of international rocketry research, it’s a good bet that they already have their own version of the operating thrusters Burgundy Lake was working on,” Schwarz agreed. “And where will you be?”

“You don’t run into anything larger than a few homes or a roadhouse until you reach the coast,” Lyons replied. “The north is the eastern suburbs of Yuma, so there’ll be airports, but the only major airfield in Mexico is pretty deep behind the border, about halfway to the coast.”

“Your Spanish sucks, Ironman,” Blancanales mentioned.

“I know enough to get by. I’m just going there to see what they’ve got set up. Bear took a look on satellite and saw only single seaters, but these engines are supposed to be small maneuvering thrusters, so they can’t take up a lot of space on something like a ninety-nine-ton shuttle. Transporting a few examples via a puddle hopper won’t be difficult,” Lyons surmised.

“What about the mercenaries?” Schwarz asked.

“Cessna Stationaires hold six passengers. They dump their assault load out, and they can pack on two thruster prototypes a piece with the 180-pound luggage capacity. I saw only four in the one truck, so given the two we found in the other, we can count three Stationaires, eighteen mercenaries and six thrusters in the air toward the coast,” Lyons pointed out. “That accounts for half the force we eliminated. Don’t forget that in Mexico, whatever flight-plan paperwork exists is literally on paper, not something we could get with a hacker.”

“That’s quite a distance,” Blancanales noted, looking at the aerial photo map Lyons pointed to. “One man, doing it on foot, that’d be a hump, even to the nearest road, which would be Route 8, cutting from Sonoyta to Puerto Penasco.”

“You or I could do it,” Lyons replied. “A disciplined soldier could make Route 8 by sunrise, and there is traffic on the road.”

Schwarz spoke up. “And if he and his buddies thought ahead, they could have had a spot to dump off the heavy vehicles and transfer to less conspicuous rides before they got to the airport.”