Terror Descending

ERUPTING FROM THE WATER, THE TEAM DREW RAGGED BREATHS

Bitter smoke billowed across the water like a woolen blanket. In the air above them, there was only noise and flames, bellowing madness mixed with pitiful screams. Then a dark shadow swept across the lock as something massive blocked out the sun and was gone.

Hawkins started to shout something, then realized Phoenix Force wasn’t alone in the lock. A cargo ship was only yards away, the rust-streaked hull rising like an iron wall alongside the men.

“Move!” McCarter shouted, lurching into a furious swim. Starting low and slow, a swell began to lift the team from the water being compressed between the ship and the wall of the lock.

A split second of panic engulfed the Stony Man team as the hull came straight for them.

Terror Descending

Don Pendleton

Stony Man®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVER INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Nick Pollotta for his contribution to this work.

For those who fight the good fight

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

PROLOGUE

Provence, France

As silent as a thief in the night, a shadow moved across the lush countryside, briefly eclipsing the bright sun and casting the world into stygian gloom.

Suzette Perdue recoiled slightly as a titanic 757 jumbo jet noisily rumbled over the Marseilles Provence Airport, the thunderous wake of the rising airliner audibly shaking the unbreakable Plexiglas window of the passenger lounge.

Smiling in embarrassment, Perdue looked around, but thankfully, nobody had noticed her childish reaction. The bustling crowd was busy rushing to and from gates, buying things at the duty-free shops, eating, laughing or standing impatiently in long lines at the security checkpoints.

Uniformed soldiers of the 1st PIR—Parachute Infantry Regiment, the French Special Forces—stood alert behind low sandbag walls, some sort of double-barrel weapons held in their calloused hands. Machine gun, assault rifle, bazooka, Perdue had no idea what the bulky things were, but the weapons looked very deadly, and she timidly shied away from the burly men and women in their stark military uniforms. Swinging her cell phone toward the soldiers, Perdue saw one of them glance her way and frown. Immediately she lowered the device and timidly smiled in return until the stern man nodded in approval and looked away.

Turning her back to the troops, Perdue exhaled in relief. These were perilous times, and all of this new security was necessary to allow the nation to run smoothly. As her grandmother always said, freedom was anything but free.

“Flight 219 from Cairo, arriving at Gate 18,” a genderless voice announced over the PA system.

Excitedly, Perdue moved closer to the observation window, lifting the cell phone and switching back to the camera function to try to record the arrival of the jet. A special moment to remember forever. This was it, Jean-Pierre was coming. At any second now they would be together at last. After so many years of service, her fiancé was finally returning from war in the Middle East, along with some general famous for something she had never heard about. The city had a big celebration planned for him, but that had nothing to do with her and Jean-Pierre. While the general was wined and dined, they would be married at a small chapel downtown, and then quickly leave for their honeymoon in the motel near the lake.

Outside the window, the massive airport spread out for what seemed like miles. There were a dozen runways, wide and black, radiating in an overlapping pattern.

Suddenly voices were raised in anger from behind and she turned to see grim-faced soldiers converging on a checkpoint. Briefly, Perdue saw a fat man struggling to get away from their grasping hands, then his shirt ripped open and out poured an endless flow of glistening white powder. Cocaine, or heroin, it was impossible to say. She aimed the tiny camera lens of the phone at the scene, then lowered it. This was not going into her wedding book.

Using the butts of their rifles, the soldiers brutally subdued the drug smuggler and the limp body was dragged away. Only moments later, the line of passengers was moving smoothly again, and an old janitor arrived with a mop and pail to start cleaning the bloody powder off the smooth terrazzo floor, overseen by airport security.

Turning away from the awful sight, Perdue pressed her face against the observation window, trying to see into the misty sky, the forgotten phone clenched tightly in her hand. However, there were too many planes overhead, and it was impossible to tell which were about to land and which were streaking past the airport at supersonic speeds. Distance made the velocity of the aircraft illusory, the lower planes seeming much faster than the rocketing aircraft high overhead.

Just then a shadow moved over the rows of tarmac and a fiery explosion blew apart a baggage truck, bodies and suitcases flying skyward in a grisly volcano of death.

Recoiling in horror, Perdue raised a hand to her mouth as more explosions riddled the runway, fuel trucks detonating like a nuclear blast. A Canadian 757 airliner violently came apart, the crumpled pieces of the fuselage lifting off the ground on a writhing column of flame.

By now, multiple sirens were howling, the sounds growing steadily in volume and power as something large rumbled over the airport terminal, closely followed by a deafening series of strident detonations.

Everybody had stopped talking in the airport, and the French soldiers were quickly muttering into the mikes dangling from cords attached to their epaulets.

Unable to believe what was happening, Perdue watched the wreath of flames spread outward to engulf other planes, Russian, Japanese, American, British; in turn each erupted, chunks of wreckage and human limbs flying away in every direction.

Several more planes on the ground burst apart as they tried to taxi out of the area, adding to the tidal wave of destruction. Bricks sprayed out from the control tower as the building started to buckle in the middle, the tall structure audibly groaning as it eased over, the tons of masonry cascading onto a row of parked cars filled with screaming people.

In the sky, the arriving planes were turning away from the airport, and two of them touched for a brief second, the wings bending before they snapped off. Sharply angling around, the airliners slammed directly into each other and broke apart, the pieces and passengers tumbling downward like a rain from hell.

Steadily increasing in power and fury, the destruction of the airport continued unabated, fires raged out of control in a hundred locations. Sprawled bodies covered the tarmac. A few of the forms pitifully tried to crawl away, but the rest were ominously still.

As bright as daggers from the sun, fiery darts shot across the chaotic airport, and the distant hangars became engulfed in flames.

Galvanized into action, Perdue cast aside her cell phone and dashed for the nearby emergency exit, her every thought on reaching Flight 219. Jean-Pierre had to still be alive. He had to be! As she reached for the handle of the door, the wall changed into blinding light and something hard hit her in the back, stealing the breath from her lungs. Thrown to the debris-covered floor, Perdue tried to rise again, but her legs were numb, unfeeling lumps of flesh below her blood-splattered hem. Everything seemed to slow as she looked down to see a dark red stain spreading across the front of her dress, a long shard of the Plexiglas window sticking out of her belly like a transparent dagger. Her throat tightened, but no sob came. She felt oddly dizzy, and there was no pain. No pain at all. How very strange.

Charging through the wreckage, a PIR soldier carrying a medical bag headed toward her when the floor cracked open wide and he fell out of sight into a smoke-filled crevice. Reaching out for the soldier, Perdue felt herself starting to fall forward into a bottomless abyss.

Less than a minute later Flight 219 descended from the misty sky to flash over the charred ruins of the international airport, the crew and passengers unable to believe the devastation below.

CHAPTER ONE

Stone Man Farm, Virginia

In the spacious War Room, several people sat in the dark around a large conference table, watching a jumbled recording of the dire events that had occurred in France less than six hours earlier. Their faces were grim, and nobody moved or spoke until the last horrific scene of destruction was finally over.

Pressing a button on the remote control, Barbara Price, the Farm’s mission controller, banished the horrific images. Slowly, the room lights brightened to full strength.

“That was recovered from a dozen smashed security cameras at the Marseilles-Provence Airport,” Price said, setting the remote control on the table. “The whole attack lasted less than two minutes.”

Somebody whistled softly, and another bitterly cursed.

“That fast?” David McCarter asked, raising an eyebrow.

“This was no slapdash operation by a bunch of lunatics throwing a homemade firebomb out of speeding car,” Price replied curtly. “This was a surgical attack with military precision, highly sophisticated and extremely well coordinated.”

“These people are as ruthless as mad dogs,” Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman growled, running stiff fingers through his wild crop of hair.

Everybody who saw the hirsute goliath quickly accepted his nickname of Bear. Although an expert computer specialist, one of the best in the world, the man had the shoulders of a professional linebacker and the heavily muscled arms of a stone mason, in spite of the fact that he was in a wheelchair. His face was bright and alive, his black eyes sharply intelligent.

Odd for a man living at a government base with nearly unlimited funding, his wheelchair was an older model, the metal struts badly scarred from countless small repairs. But the burly computer expert much preferred the manual chair to any motorized version, as the constant exercise of pushing himself along kept his upper body in excellent shape.

“They’re worse than mad dogs,” Price countered, taking a seat. “That kind of attack would have been random, chaotic. This was deliberate, cold-blooded efficiency, plain brutal mass murder.”

“How many are dead?” asked Hal Brognola, director of the Sensitive Operations Group and Justice Department liaison to the White House. A leather briefcase lay nearby with the lid raised. Inside were stacks of manila folders marked with the telltale red stripe of a Top Secret report.

“We have no idea yet of the death toll,” Price replied, opening a folder and taking out several black-and-white photographs. “Homeland Security had the NSA fly a Keyhole satellite over the area and take some pictures, but there is simply too much wreckage. NATO and the French authorities are still…assembling the bodies.”

“Do they have a rough count?” Brognola asked, glancing at the photos. There was a set of before-and-after shots to help gauge the destruction, but the pairing wasn’t necessary. The area looked like something from the Iraq war, smashed buildings, hundreds of small fires and blast craters in the pavement large enough to see from space.

Folding her hands, Price nodded. “Yes. Approximately four hundred civilians, along with about a hundred military personnel, and maybe twice that in service personnel, but with so many tourists…”

“A blood bath,” Kurtzman muttered.

“Okay, how the hell did these sons of bitches get close enough to the airport to do a bombing run?” Carl Lyons demanded, his ice-blue eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Whatever did this must have been seen on radar, or was the place bombed by a stealth plane?”

The blond giant, a former Los Angeles police detective was the leader of Able Team. Banded cables of muscles stood out on his bare forearms, and a massive .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver rode in a military-style shoulder holster. The other two members of his team were in the garage, listening to the briefing over the intercom while checking the team’s new equipment van.

“Oh, the incoming plane was seen on radar, all right,” Price countered, sliding over another report. “The killers are quite visible. We have the log of the air traffic controllers to confirm that.”

“Was Flight 219 taken over by terrorists and armed somehow?” McCarter asked, glancing at the recon photos.

Called away from a fishing trip, the Phoenix Force leader was in uncharacteristic denims and a red flannel shirt. A pack of Player’s cigarettes was tucked into his shirt pocket, and the man smelled faintly of bug repellant.

“No, Flight 219 had nothing to do with the attack on the airport,” Price said, reaching out to tap a photograph of a jetliner. “They arrived about two minutes after the bombing and were escorted by a wing of Mirage jetfighters to Bordeaux-Mérignac air base where the passengers and crew were, well, vigorously interrogated, would be the polite term, and the plane all but disassembled. However, they were innocent dupes. The terrorists merely pretended to be the flight so that they could get close enough to bomb the airport.”

“How is that possible?” Brognola asked, frowning. “Aside from the radar, there are call signs, encoded transmissions and ident signals—”

“All of which were perfectly duplicated by the invaders,” Price said curtly. “So there was no reason why the tower should not have given the fake Flight 219 permission to approach and land.”

“Only they didn’t land,” Lyons said. He was starting to get an idea where this was going, and liking the situation less and less by the moment.

“No, they simply dropped a maelstrom of ordnance while flying past the airport at slightly over a thousand feet.”

“A thousand feet is pretty close,” McCarter said. “Anybody get a good look at the craft? Was it a stealth bomber?”

“Good Lord, no,” Price said. “This was a much older vehicle. Smaller, and more compact. A Boeing 707.”

Startled, Brognola arched an eyebrow. “Do we have confirmation on that?”

“Yes, Hal, we do,” Price said, touching the remote control once more. “This was recovered from the smashed cell phone of a dead woman waiting for Flight 219 to arrive.” The wall screen came to life showing the blurred image of something flying high above the airport, a dotted line of black objects tumbling from a belly hatch, while fiery darts launched from weapons pods hidden between the turbojets on the wings.

“That’s not a 707,” Lyons stated with growing conviction. “Look at where the wings are positioned. That’s a B-52 heavy bomber!”

“Impossible. It can’t be,” Brognola countered, squinting at the wall screen. “There are windows along the sides. A B-52 doesn’t have any side windows. Then again, those are double engines, not singles. Barbara, is that a B-52?”

“Yes, although it was modified to resemble a Boeing 707,” Price replied, tapping a switch. The screen split into a side-by-side view of two different jet planes. “Carl was correct. It’s a B-52 bomber. Those windows are only painted onto the fuselage.” She adjusted the controls and the picture zoomed in to show a tight shot on an aft window. “See? The paint has streaked a little on a couple of them from the force of the wind shear. The hulls of the two planes are similar enough to fool even combat pilots. The B-52 is based upon the basic design of the 707.”

“Which is a tough enough bird, as it is,” McCarter added.

“But surely any trained pilot…” Brognola started, then stopped. “No, forget that. The general shape of the two planes is very similar, and any differences, wing position, double engines, would be undetectable at a thousand feet, much less ten thousand.”

“And the standard cruising height is thirty thousand.”

Standing quietly in the corner, John “Cowboy” Kissinger merely grunted at the news. The master gun-smith maintained every weapon on the Farm, along with those used by the field teams. He had nothing to add to the meeting at the present, but was already mentally calculating what kinds of explosives and specialty ordnance the field teams might need.

“Unfortunately, there’s more,” Price stated, pressing a button on the console. Silently sheets of paper slid out of slots set into the table in front of each person. “At the exact same time there were similar attacks on a civilian airport in China, as well as an American AFB just outside Nome, Alaska.”

“Any connection to the three locations?” Brognola asked tersely.

“None that we are aware of.”

“Damn.”

“Agreed.”

“So this is not just a grudge with France, but a worldwide strike on both civilian and military targets.”

Price nodded. “Yes.”

The single word sent chills down the backs of the Stony Man operatives. An attack this widespread meant a major organization, thousands of personnel and nearly unlimited funds.

“If a Chinese airport hadn’t been hit, I would have assumed they were behind it all,” McCarter said. “Any chance they hit their own territory as a diversion?”

“At the cost of billions in collateral damage?” Price queried. “No way, David. It’s not the Chinese. The Red Star wants these Airwolves even more than France does.”

“You know, I would have thought that hacking into the electronic system of a major airport, and doing it fast enough to ‘impersonate’ an arriving plane, would have been flat-out impossible,” Brognola said, thoughtfully twisting his wedding ring. “Obviously, I was wrong.”

“We all were,” Price admitted. “Nobody thought this could happen.”

“Which makes the big question, how was it done?” Lyons asked irritably.

“Something like this would require a top-notch team of samurai,” Kurtzman said, then saw the puzzled expressions, and quickly explained. “ Samurai is our term for an expert hacker, the very best in their field.”

Frowning, Kurtzman continued. “They’d also need a really good supercomputer. A Cray Mark IV might do, but I would have gone with an IBM Blue Gene or a Dell Thunderbird.”

Nobody made a comment on the bizarre observation. The best way to find a terrorist was to learn how to think like one. The tactic required a special kind of mental flexibility that many ordinary police officers simply could not accommodate. For an operative working for Stony Man, it was practically a requirement.

“All of which these wolves in sheep’s clothing obviously have,” Price said, rising from her chair to walk to the side table. The woman poured herself a mug of steaming coffee and took a sip. “Broadcasting the correct codes and ident signals, these people are, for all intents and purposes, invisible, innocently mixed in with all of the other planes until they attack.”

Lyons grimaced. “In a single day, the military has been thrown back to visually tracking incoming planes by using binoculars, and against a supersonic jetfighter no one would have a clue!”

“Even if somebody got a visual on the B-52,” Brognola said slowly. “They’d think it was just a 707, and without the flight log of the tower to check, how could anybody know the incoming flight was actually supposed to be something else!”

“Mathematics,” Kurtzman said suddenly.

Everybody turned to look at him. Hunched over, the man was feverishly working a handheld calculator.

“The math on these attacks doesn’t work out right,” Kurtzman repeated, looking up and placing the calculator on the table. “To hack into the tower, get the ident for a plane, and the flight path, then slip in just ahead of the plane, would require supercomputers.”

“You already told us that,” Brognola stated, then suddenly looked alert. “And there’s not a plane in the world large enough to carry one of those into battle. It can’t be done! A supercomputer is huge, but very delicate.”

“They also weighs tons, and require a lot of constant technical support,” Price added, setting her mug aside. “Just taking off from the ground would crash a supercomputer.”

Kurtzman nodded. “Most likely.”

“Which means the Airwolves must have a ground base somewhere,” McCarter added, grimly intent. “That might be mobile, on a ship maybe, but it gives us a target to find. Take out the computers, or even the comm sat—”

“And they’re visible again, flying in plain sight,” Price finished. “Bear, have your team start a global search. Find their satellite and backtrack it to their ground base.”

“On it,” Kurtzman stated, hitting a button on the intercom to issue some terse instructions to his team in the Annex’s Computer Room.

“You know, whatever we do, we’ll need a diversion to keep the enemy off balance and looking in the wrong direction,” Lyons said, clearly thinking out loud. “Bear, how many abandoned airports are there in North America?”

That caught the chief hacker off guard. “Let me check,” he replied, and worked his laptop for a moment. “Okay, according to the last FAA survey, there are 1643 abandoned airfields.”

“Damn. Are there any long enough to land a 707?”

In growing understanding, Kurtzman grinned and worked the keyboard again. “That would be 603, including the Nevada Salt Flats, where you could land Mt. Rushmore.”

“Hal,” Price said, “please contact the President immediately, and ask him to have the Air Force bomb those old airfields, then send in regular Army ground troops to check the ruins.”

“To make them think we’re desperate,” Brognola said with a grin.

“It’s worth a try,” she admitted.

Without a word, the man rose and went to a wall phone. “Give me a secure line to the White House,” he demanded. After a brief wait, he spoke in a subdued whisper for several minutes, then hung up the receiver.

“Done and done,” Brognola announced. “Now what?”

“What exactly did the Airwolves hit the airport with?” Lyons asked, staring hard at the pictures of destruction.

Setting aside her mug, Price checked a page on a clipboard. “Let’s see—air-to-ground missiles, rockets, cluster bombs, smart bombs and iron bombs.”

Looking up, Kurtzman started to ask what those were, then stopped as he suddenly remembered that with the creation of smart bombs, old-fashioned bombs that had no guidance systems or any electronics, had been renamed dumb bombs, then finally iron bombs. Politically correct weapons. The very idea made his butt hurt.

“Any chance the French gathered enough parts to figure out where the weapons came from?” Brognola asked. “The Sûreté has some of the best criminal forensic people in the business.”

“They do,” Price replied. “We made the missiles. Or rather they were U.S. Air Force issue. The rockets were British, the cluster bombs Russian and iron bombs from Italy.”

“Mixed ordnance,” Lyon said, rubbing his jaw. “Sounds like these bastards were using whatever they could get.”

“Or else that’s what they’re trying to make us think,” McCarter responded. “This might actually be China, or some new group trying keep hidden. Remember the Brigade, or Unity?”