Starfire. Don Pendleton

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      The indigenous bulk were Sunni Muslims, most of whom were fanatical to the extreme as they bowed to the tenets of Wahhabism. The country was no less than a slice of Islamic fundamentalist Hell on Earth, a land that time and most of humankind ignored, if they even knew it existed. Even globe-trotting, battle-hardened commandos like the troops he led, he thought, would be hard-pressed to find this desolate backwater on any globe without some eye strain.

      At their present position in the shadow of the towering, snow-capped, cloud-swathed Caucasus Mountains in the southwest corner of the country, what could have been transplanted moonscape fanned out in hills and steppe to the even more ominous empty east and north, until it all eventually dropped off into the vast Caspian Sea. Oil and gas were the country’s cash cows, and were the only reason Moscow still humped and bivouacked soldiers to what was loosely billed an autonomous Russian republic. It was no secret that Moscow, McCarter briefly pondered, maintained its iron grip on the spigots of major pipelines to keep pumping black gold and silver vapor north, but the Russians somehow managed to hide from the world that they were about as environmentally conscious as Godzilla stomping through Tokyo. Dagestan was an industrial dungheap, with major ecological contamination.

      But tree-hugging was not on Phoenix Force’s to-do list, though chemical death, McCarter knew, was one reason they were plunging into an area of the world where its people would just as soon shoot them as look at them.

      When he considered a tad more what this part of the world was all about, the Briton really wasn’t surprised in the least the fickle hand of black ops had steered them here. In some eerie way he figured it was about time for some scorched justice to find Dagestan’s local and imported beasts. Neighboring Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan were always spilling their own legions of rabid terror wolves across the borders. Guns, drugs, weapons of mass destruction, he weighed. Isolated training camps in this scarred mountain land were hidden from even the most stubborn of spy eyes in space. Money and matériel were shipped here en masse to be trained to carry out jihad.

      Assess. McCarter raised the small high-powered field glasses to his eyes again. The farmhouse was backed up near a jumbled row of Stegosaurus-armor-like rock at the foot of broken hills that looked equally in part Jurassic. Nobody, including their own in-country Omon and SVR contacts, could swear one way or the other if the opposition could make fast tracks into a suspected latticework of caves and tunnels once the shelling and shooting started. There were three tractors east, parked near wilting apple orchards, pallets heaped with crates and burlap sacks he was reasonably sure didn’t require the presence of two heavy DShK machine guns in tow. The main compound, its roof dotted with satellite dishes, was a two-story wooden affair. An attached concrete bunker, an annex to the north where the motor pool drew his eye. There, an armada of vehicles, ranged from Mercedes and ZIL limos, Jeeps, SUVs, Volga minivans and GAZ-66 transports, strewed in a staggered line, west to east. According to the Omon source—and there was a good chance he was buried in the deep pockets of the Lezgi Don—the annex was where the crime boss mixed business with pleasure. Intel had it there were always twenty to thirty imported prostitutes on hand for any visiting VIPs, speaking of which no one could state for certain who or how many big shots would be on hand for this party. Surveillance, or so he was told, was pretty much maintained by roving sentries, with the exception of cameras mounted to roof edges.

      Arrogant bastards.

      McCarter panned a little farther north and took in ground zero.

      He counted twenty-one tankers, flipped an invisible salute that bit of intel hit the bull’s-eye on that score. Judging length and girth of those behemoths on wheels the Phoenix Force leader ballparked all that refined petro at…

      Call it a quarter-million gallons. And however that number was given or taken, it still dumped the five of them on the potential wrong side of the coming big event.

      The truck stop was penned in by basic steel-mesh fencing, for reasons no one was clear on. A spray can of liquid nitrogen would snap off fencing, he knew, and allow two of the team onto the grounds. But with seven—count nine now—assault-rifle-toting guards on the prowl it was touch and go just to light the torch. McCarter framed the sentry in the northwest tower, then saw the smoke cloud hammer the glass booth. The guard then lifted a bottle to his lips, McCarter wanting to scratch him off the worry list, but in his experience there was no such thing as a guarantee in combat. That left three shirkers on the backside, the trio, he’d been informed, apparently more interested in staying warm with a bottle of vodka and hovering near a fire barrel.

      And what, pray tell, did all the big shots gathered in front of them need to fear anyway?

      Nothing, apparently—or so it seemed.

      Truth. A shadow group of Euro-Arab cutouts had finagled deals between Saddam and certain bureaucrats of the United Nations. And McCarter had learned during a CIA brief that a lot of cold, hard currency had been flown via Damascus to Jordan and shipped by diplomatic courier to Western Europe.

      McCarter recalled the black op back in Turkey stating the facts of life as he knew them between rumbles of chuckling and obscenity-laden swipes at the French, Germans and Russians. Clear evidence, the op had claimed, had been obtained by electronic intercepts. Enemy agents bagged by the FBI in Manhattan had snitched so loud and fast they had nearly gone hoarse, painting a picture of corruption reeking from New York to Pyongyang. For reasons unknown some marquee names of the upper echelon of the United Nations had fattened Saddam’s terror chest way back when. And with not only food but weapons, intelligence and oversize vans stuffed with cash, using East European gangsters for contact. Yet more shadows, McCarter suspected, in a chain of middlemen that only God seemed to know stretched how far and stopped where. The UN jackals would apparently turn around and deliver Iraqi oil to cronies in their own political and business circles who fronted for petrochemical distribution networks. All this rolling flimflam while Saddam hoarded food meant for the starving masses, but to be distributed and sold to whomever he saw fit. Word was the deposed dictator’s soldiers—and later, the insurgent rabble—managed to feed themselves like princes.

      On more than a few occasions—so the CIA word had it—a second deal was cut by the former regime with another rogue nation in exchange for still more cash and weapons. Yet more rumor connected to the sordid mess had it the Scotch-swilling despot of North Korea and mates were eating pretty good these days, and that alone was enough to have him seeing red what with the tyrannical buffoon in possession of…

      McCarter fast-forwarded. Four Iraqis, smoked out by the CIA in Paris, Belgrade and Istanbul as recently as six months previous, were trailed to the Dagestan border before the operatives bailed for reasons undetermined. Here and now, the United Nations money-men believed on-site felt the heat building, so they had thrown themselves at the mercy of the Lezgi Mob chieftain who had more irons in the fire than the Devil himself it seemed. Finally, Dagestani Don who had free and easy access to move tanker trucks brimmed with gasoline at will told the ex-SAS commando that he was connected to Russian power shadows, and he had more suspicions beyond the UN moneymen on that front. Oh, but McCarter hoped all party animals in question had indulged one last night but good…

      He stopped the train of angry thought.

      Their mission was two-or-more-pronged, as he warned himself to not project into a future he and the others may never see.

      Consequences. Blood was going to run, thick, swift and deep before the sun rose. As he felt the gas mask on his hip, it crossed his mind there was the not-so-little matter of what recently happened in Israel, and yet another savage twist of fate that had urged the five of them to trek to this godforsaken place. VX nerve gas wasn’t something any of them tended to gloss over as just a speed bump on the road to Hell. Assuming a cache of weapons of mass destruction was likewise under the roof…

      McCarter heard the first voice patch through СКАЧАТЬ