Triplecross. Don Pendleton

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      CHAPTER TWO

      Stony Man Farm, Virginia

      Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman sat huddled with a “tactical battle mug” of his industrial-strength coffee. The milled aluminum mug, which Barbara Price had called a “flagon,” had been a gift from a special operations team with whom the Farm had partnered some time back. The funny thing about the mug was that it bore a set of milled rails, identical to those on an M-4 carbine. The men of Able Team and Phoenix Force had, off and on, teased the cybernetics genius about the best optics to mount on his coffee cup.

      Kurtzman, for his part, was unruffled by their good-natured ribbing. He had been the head of the cybernetics team at the Farm since the Special Operations Group had first set up shop in the mountains of Virginia. He had not, however, always been in a wheelchair. That was the result of an attack on the Farm, one that had taken a heavy toll on the men and women of the SOG. Kurtzman, for his part, had simply gone on doing his job. He did not discuss his disability and had never once complained about it to anyone, as far as Barbara Price knew.

      Price, for her part, looked through her briefing folder. The Farm’s honey-blonde, model-beautiful mission controller checked the array of switches set within the briefing room’s conference table. The flat-screen monitor at the far end of the room was already up and running. A scrambled satellite link between Washington and the Farm showed Hal Brognola’s desk in his office on the Potomac in Wonderland. The big Fed was not himself at the desk, but he would be. He had excused himself briefly to speak with some government functionary or other in the hallway. When he was done he would secure the door to his office—on which was printed, simply, Hal Brognola: Justice—and rejoin them for the briefing.

      On a second monitor, this one opposite one side of the conference table, the men of Phoenix Force were assembling in front of their own portable satellite uplink. Wherever they were, it looked cold through the rear viewport of the MRAP crew compartment. David McCarter, leader of Phoenix Force, was peering into the uplink camera, looking annoyed. Calvin James and T. J. Hawkins sat to either side of him.

      Encizo and Manning were not visible on screen. They were, no doubt, guarding Phoenix Force’s position in hostile territory, probably from the turrets of the armored vehicles. Price did not like to think of the five-man team operating largely without support across so much open ground, but that was the job that Phoenix Force did. She loved every one of the men on that team like older brothers.

      A disturbance in the corridor outside the briefing room indicated that Able Team was on its way. It was Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz who entered first. As was often the case, he was locked in some sort of deeply philosophical argument with Rosario Blancanales, his teammate. Blancanales was known as “Pol,” short for “the Politician.” The soft-spoken, gray-haired Hispanic was, in fact, a former Black Beret, not to mention an expert in the psychology of violence and the application of role camouflage. Schwarz was, as his nickname “Gadgets” implied, Able Team’s electronics expert. His work had contributed to quite a bit of the equipment fielded by both Able and Phoenix, including the earbud transceivers that kept the teammates in constant voice contact while on missions.

      Behind Blancanales and Schwarz, his huge fist wrapped around a foam cup of black coffee, was Carl “Ironman” Lyons, leader of Able Team. The big, former LAPD officer dwarfed his teammates simply through bulk. He was powerfully built and moved with all the subtlety of a bulldozer.

      “I’m telling you,” Schwarz said to Blancanales, “every adventure movie where the hero gets caught and then has to fight his way out is automatically cliché. A bad guy catches a good guy, what’s he going to do? He’s going to kill him or he’s going to torture him, but either way our hero isn’t going to get free.”

      “But real people have escaped terrorist captors and home invaders in real life,” Blancanales countered. “People who didn’t even have any training. In your movie the hero is always a tough guy or someone who’s ex-military. Or both.”

      “Exactly my point,” Schwarz said.

      “Gadgets, do you realize you say, ‘Exactly my point,’ every time you start to lose an argument?”

      “Exactly my point,” Schwarz repeated.

      “So a trained, albeit fictional military or law-enforcement hero can’t do what a real-life civilian can do.”

      “Exactly my—”

      “Here,” Blancanales said. From his pocket he took a red-dot sight. “I can’t get this to illuminate. I changed the battery and everything. I think it’s broken. Why don’t you uphold that science-whiz reputation you have and see if you can’t fix it?”

      “Isn’t СКАЧАТЬ