Buch lesen: «Rolling Thunder»

CHAPTER ONE

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Rosario Blancanales jogged higher up into the foothills surrounding Stony Man Farm. It was his favorite time of day, just past dawn with the sun yet to break through the early-morning clouds. There was a briskness in the air and the valley below him was quiet and tranquil. He’d passed a few small animals—rabbits and chipmunks—and the occasional bird flapped overhead, but otherwise he felt as if he had the winding dirt path to himself.

Soon Blancanales came upon a rocky escarpment affording a panoramic view of the Shenandoah Valley. From this perspective, Stony Man Farm looked much like any number of other isolated ranch estates scattered throughout pockets of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The main house and surrounding buildings were only faintly ostentatious, seemingly part of a modest farming enterprise that included the raising of seasonal crops and, off to the north, some harvesting of wood. Behind the unassuming facade, however, the sprawling valley enclave served as the command center for the covert Sensitive Operations Group, made up of not only Blancanales’s Able Team comrades, but also the warriors of Phoenix Force and a centralized support group that rarely left the Farm’s confines.

From his vantage point, Blancanales could see a few scattered farmhands laboring in the orchards. To his right, standing atop the crest of the nearest mountain, another two men busied themselves inspecting the high, barbwire-topped cyclone fence that encircled the Farm’s perimeter. The men, like those working down below, weren’t mere hired laborers, but rather highly trained, combat-ready members of the facility. The blacksuits.

Like the security force, Blancanales was a man of deceptive appearance. With his prematurely gray hair and well-tanned Hispanic features, he looked less like a battle-trained commando than a successful businessman out for a quick jog before heading into the office at some high-rise in Washington, D.C. In fact, Blancanales had resorted to such a role while on a recent assignment, using his white-suit savvy to infiltrate a shell company fronting for an Asian gun-running operation. One moment he’d been wheeling and dealing with the company’s CEOs at a business office; the next he was fighting alongside Able Team cohorts Carl Lyons and Gadgets Schwarz, trading gunfire with a goon squad at the warehouse where the black-market guns were stored. Before the dust had settled, the men had been forced to resort to hand-to-hand combat, and Blancanales had used his mastery of bo jitsu to neutralize a pair of thugs who together outweighed him by more than one hundred pounds. Blancanales had emerged from the skirmish with only a few aches and bruises, but Schwarz had been put out of commission for a few weeks with a stress fracture of the right leg, and while Lyons had quickly recovered from a flesh wound to the shoulder, he’d been subsequently laid low by a particularly virulent strain of the flu.

Now, for the first time in weeks, Blancanales had been presented with a reprieve from the field. Once he was finished with his jog, he planned to get a ride to Dulles International so that he could fly out to California for a long overdue visit with his family in East L.A. It’d been nearly a year since he’d been home, and he was looking forward to the trip and the inevitable backyard barbecues that were always thrown together at a moment’s notice once word spread that he was coming home.

As it turned out, however, Fate had other plans in store.

Blancanales was about to start back when he heard a rustling in the brush twenty yards downhill from where he was standing. Someone was heading up the path he’d just taken.

“Yo, Pol,” a familiar voice called out. Seconds later, Blancanales spotted Akira Tokaido on the trail. The young Japanese American was a key member of the Farm’s cybernetic team. He wore his black hair up in a topknot and, as usual, was chomping away at a few sticks of bubble gum. He popped the pink balloon he’d just blown, then called out, “¿Que pasa?”

“Since when did you speak Spanish?” Blancanales asked.

“That’s about all I know,” Tokaido confessed. “But you better brush up on yours.”

“Why’s that?”

“Barbara sent me to fetch you. Something’s going down in Spain, and she wants you and Jack Grimaldi to hook up with the guys over there to check it out. Or, as Yoda might put it, ‘May the Force be with you.’”

“I think that was Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“Whatever,” Tokaido said.

“Isn’t Phoenix on assignment in Korea?” he asked Tokaido.

“They wrapped things up there earlier this morning. They’re already on their way to Bilbao.”

Blancanales sighed. So much for downtime. “What are we up against?” he asked.

“Something about a stolen supertank. Briefing’s in ten minutes, or whenever the chief gets back from D.C. He’ll fill you in.”

As if on cue, the two men suddenly heard the faint droning of an approaching helicopter. Blancanales glanced back out over the valley and saw an unarmed OH-58D Kiowa Warrior drift over the mountaintops and begin its descent toward the Farm’s camouflaged airstrip.

“Speak of the devil,” Blancanales murmured.

“I won’t tell him you said that.” Tokaido blew another bubble, then turned and started back down the path, calling over his shoulder, “Last one down’s a rotten egg.”

Blancanales shrugged and began to lope behind Tokaido, muttering to himself, “I’ve been called worse.”

THE CHIEF WAS Hal Brognola. Also known as the head Fed, he was Stony Man’s liaison with the powers-that-be in Washington. Working under the guise of a functionary with the Justice Department, Brognola had been on a first-name basis with the past five presidents, and during that span he’d probably sat in on more meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff than any other person.

“I’ll try my best to keep this brief,” he began, pacing before those assembled in the basement War Room of the main house. Akira Tokaido wasn’t present; he’d gone off to join his colleagues at the computer facilities, located in the Farm’s Annex. Blancanales was there, however, seated alongside Brognola’s top aides, mission controller Barbara Price and Aaron Kurtzman, head of SOG’s cybernetic operations.

“I’m sure you’re all familiar with the FSAT-50,” Brognola said, launching into the briefing.

“Some kind of supertank, right?” Blancanales said.

The big Fed nodded. “We were building them in conjunction with Spain until last spring, when the Defense Department pulled the plug on any further U.S. financing.”

“But Spain’s kept up production,” Kurtzman recalled. “I believe they’re calling it the tank of the future. If I remember correctly, they’re rigging it to double not only as a war boat but also as a modified submarine.”

“Correct,” Brognola said. “FSAT stands for Fully Submersible Amphibious Tank. Last time it was tested underwater, it proved functional at a depth of more than a hundred feet. That’s six times deeper than you can go in a snorkel-equipped T-72. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as the advancements they’ve incorporated into the design. For starters, they’ve plated the tank with some kind of lightweight armor that’s every bit as strong as DU.”

“They’re keeping a tight lid on the armor specs,” Price interjected, “but we suspect they’re using a combination of titanium and plastic along with some variant of the depleted uranium used on the Abrams. Whatever the mix, they’ve brought the weight of the tank down to under thirty tons. That’s roughly half the weight of an Abrams, but it still has an RHA rating of over 1000. On top of that, apparently the frame has built-in pockets that act as ballast tanks when they’re filled with gas.”

“Let’s not get bogged down with too many specifics,” Brognola suggested. “That’s not the issue.”

“Thank God,” Kurtzman deadpanned. “You’re starting to lose me.”

“Amen,” Blancanales said. “Let’s cut to the chase. Akira says somebody’s snatched one of these tanks. My guess is that’s where we come in.”

“Right you are,” Brognola replied. He moved to one of the monitor screens built into the wall behind him. Kurtzman had already cued up a detailed map of northern Spain. Using one of his signature cigars as a pointing stick, the head Fed indicated a spot along the coast of the Bay of Biscay. “Gamuso Armorers were building the FSATs here in Zamudio, an industrial sector on the outskirts of Bilbao,” he went on. “They were field-testing one of the prototypes yesterday afternoon when there was a raid of some sort on the test grounds. We have conflicting reports, but somewhere between twenty and thirty people were killed, most of them members of Gamuso’s training crew. Bottom line—the prototype is now missing and assumed to be in the hands of the perpetrators.”

“Who’s that?” Blancanales asked.

“The Basque Liberation Movement,” Price interjected. “They’re a splinter group of Euskadi Ta Askatasuma. The ETA.”

“Can you shorthand that a little?” Blancanales asked.

“I’ll try,” Price said. “The ETA is Spain’s answer to the IRA. They’ve been clamoring for a separate Basque state for years, and they’ve racked up fair-sized death toll in the process, mostly through car-bombings and kidnappings. The Navarra cell is the most violent of the batch, and apparently they splintered off last year because they thought the ETA was going soft.”

“Specifically,” Brognola added, “there was a falling out after the head of the Navarra cell was gunned down by a Basque counterterrorism unit known as the Ertzainta. We don’t need to focus on the Ertzainta right now.”

Price nodded and resumed. “The head of Navarra’s cell was Carlos Rigo. He was a widower with two grown sons and a daughter. The children took over the cell and demanded that the ETA drop everything it was doing and go after the men who killed their father. When the ETA balked, they decided to go it alone and formed the BLM. They managed to get their revenge, then they dropped out of sight.”

“Until last night,” said Brognola. “Now they’re back in business, and if they’ve got their hands on this tank like we think, they’ve just turned themselves into a force to be reckoned with.”

“Assuming they know how to use it,” Blancanales said.

“I think that’s a safe assumption,” Brognola countered. “They were off the radar more than six months, and my guess is they spent most of that time planning this heist. Why would they go to all that trouble unless they were sure they’d know what to do with the tank once they got their hands on it?”

“Fair enough,” Blancanales conceded, “but still, it’s only one tank, right? I don’t care how high-tech it is, it’s not like they’re suddenly armed to the teeth.”

Brognola shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong, Pol. You see, one of the upgrades Gamuso made when they took over the development program was a retractable missile launcher. A modified Scud system to be exact. Only it’s not restricted to your usual HEAT or AA rounds.”

Blancanales sat upright in his seat, already dreading the worse. “Nukes?” he murmured aloud. “It can fire nukes?”

Brognola nodded gravely. “I’m afraid so.”

“But it wasn’t armed with warheads when they stole it, was it?” Kurtzman asked.

“No,” Brognola said, “but there’s a small item that’s been kept classified since the raid. At roughly the same time the raid was carried out, there was a power brownout inside the Gamuso facility. During all the commotion, somebody managed to gain access to the arms depot. They only had a three minute window of opportunity, but they made the most of it. Once the power was back on and security checked the premises, they came up two missiles short.”

“Both of them nukes,” Blancanales guessed.

“Yes,” Brognola confirmed. “Both missiles had nuclear warheads compatible with the tank’s launch system.”

“Inside job,” Kurtzman speculated.

“That seems a lock,” Brognola concurred. “Spain’s AMI already has the place barricaded and is interrogating all personnel. They also have the militia laying a dragnet within a hundred-mile radius of the test grounds. And their counterterrorist forces are honing in on all known BLM strongholds throughout Navarra.”

“Sounds like they’re covering all the bases,” Blancanales said. “And I hate to say it, but, bad as this all sounds, it seems like an internal problem. Why are we being brought in?”

“Good question.” Brognola turned his attention back to the monitor, this time pointing his cigar at the northeast coastline of Spain. “This Friday there’s a NATO conference being held in Barcelona. Dealing with the ETA and BLM is near the top of the agenda, and both Spain and France have already gone on record asking the other member nations for help. The President has already promised our support.”

“So the Basques want to retaliate by heaving a nuke at the conference?” Blancanales said, his voice tinged with skepticism. “Sounds like overkill, don’t you think?”

“We can’t rule it out,” Brognola insisted. “Put yourselves in their shoes a minute. Say you’ve got some global heavyweights about to gang up on you. Are you going to sit back and wait for them to make the first move? Or are you going to strike first, figuring it’s now or never?”

Blancanales nodded. “I’d go with Plan B.”

“There you have it, then,” Brognola said. “The President was on the phone all night trying to have the conference canceled or at least moved out of Spain, but he’s been overruled. Apparently the other countries feel they can’t run from these separatists and then expect to sound credible when they talk about standing up to them.”