Fireburst. Don Pendleton

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      CHAPTER THREE

      Mumbai, India

      A hard cold rain pelted the sprawling expanse of the eastern metropolis. Thunder constantly rumbled, and sheet lightning flashed from cloud to cloud, occasionally hitting the ground in a blazing display of nature unbridled.

      Glistening skyscrapers of glass and steel dominated the vast landscape of gated homes, stores and tar-paper shacks. Freight trains moved slowly along the complex network of railroads, and the mighty Ganges River was high, threatening at any moment to overflow its banks and flood the city.

      Washed clean by the unrelenting downpour, the downtown streets were nearly empty of merchants and tourists, unusual for the teeming city. The day’s accumulation of trash was gone, flushed into the wide drains, and the traffic was reduced to taxicabs, trolley cars and the mandatory army of unstoppable bike messengers. Only the street people remained.

      Music came from a hundred locations: tea shops, taverns, restaurants, discotheques, open apartment windows and electronics stores blaring their latest acquisitions to the world. In the hills, a wedding party continued full-force, undampened by the weather, a cadre of eunuchs dressed as women dancing in front of the house to wish the new couple good luck. Down by the busy docks, a Bollywood crew was frantically trying to film a sequel to an unexpectedly popular science fiction movie.

      A gantry rose high above the crew, technicians, stunt men and government safety inspectors checking the rig attached to the hero. The maze of wires were all painted dark green so that a computer could easily remove them in the lab.

      “Are we ready?” the director said into a hand mike, the words booming out of amplifiers safe inside canvas tents. “Okay then, we go on three…two…one!”

      Backflipping through a store window, the dashingly handsome hero launched into the air using his high-tech battlesuit. Instantly, a woman screamed, a dozen prop cars exploded into wild flames, and a hundred bearded assassins opened fired on rooftops with Russian machine guns and Chinese assault weapons. Easily smashing his way through them, the hero scooped up the woman in his arms and launched into the sky, circling around a billboard promoting a local jeans company.

      “Cut! Great job!” the director said. “Everybody to second marks, and we’ll do the big fight scene!”

      Standing on the sixteenth floor of the Chandra Building, the executive director of RAW scowled at the dimly heard commands. “Everybody to the second marks.” If the hero didn’t win the first time, then just do it again and again until he did. No problem. If only it was that simple in real life, the man thought.

      In the room behind him, the top agents for RAW were sitting around a large conference desk reviewing Most Secret reports. If their conclusion matched his, then the entire world was in more danger than he could possibly imagine.

      The agency was called RAW, the Research Analysis Wing, and was the external intelligence agency for India. Officially located in New Delhi, the covert agency actually operated out of Mumbai, posing as a legitimate business constructing desalination plants to make sea water drinkable. Which they did, but only as a sideline. Reporting only to the prime minister, the organization had stopped hundreds of terrorist attacks since its creation, and often joined forces with the Americans to eliminate terrorist training camps in Pakistan. RAW helped the Mossad capture Nazi war criminals, assisted Ukraine Intelligence to kill former KGB agents and joined forces with NATO in stopping human trafficking, as well as its usual duties of protecting the nation. But this new threat…

      Watching the water trickle down the bulletproof window, the executive director briefly thought back to the warm summer rains of his childhood, playing in the mud puddles and sailing folded paperboats. Ah, youth. However, with the new information they had just obtained, it would seem as if those days were long gone, as antiquated as a coin-operated payphone.

      “Sir, are you sure this HUMINT is hard?” the agent muttered, СКАЧАТЬ