Perilous Skies (Stony Man)

  STONY MAN

  Only a few know of their existence, but the lives of millions lie in their hands. An elite, covert counterterrorist team acting under the President, Stony Man comprises the best cyber technicians and military warriors in the world. Their goal is to fight terror anywhere and anytime—even if it means sacrificing their lives in the process.

  PERILOUS SKIES

  When billion-dollar stealth technology drops to bargain prices, governments and drug cartels around the world want in on the action. Suddenly, hotspots are cropping up everywhere, and even the United States can feel its military security slipping away. No country is safe unless Stony Man’s command can find a way to destroy the technology. Determined to stop war from erupting, Able Team is sent to find the brain behind the stealth tech, while Phoenix Force infiltrates China to destroy the manufacturing plant. But time is of the essence. And the clock is already counting down.

  Encizo hit the gas and twisted the wheel, sending the Land Rover into a sideways skid toward the salt field

  The quick move raised a cloud of dust from the desert floor. Encizo accelerated across the grid of salt hills for several hundred yards before he braked again. The crusty desert surface, stripped of its top layer of salt, released another opportune cloud of dust. Encizo grinned. There was no way that aircraft could ignore him.

  He pulled a tight turn and pointed the Land Rover due north, wondering just how close the plane actually was. He couldn’t take the time to look for it and he couldn’t hear it. It could be on top of him and he wouldn’t even know it.

  He hit the gas again, and his question was answered by a burst of .50 caliber machine-gun fire that cracked into one of the piles of salt just as he was passing. Already close enough to have his range, then.

  Encizo touched the brake, and machine-gun hits on the ground in front of him threw up bursts of dust. The aircraft loomed into view, flying no more than forty feet over the peaks of the hills...almost directly over the hood of his Land Rover.

  Other titles in this series:

  #57 SKY KILLERS

  #58 CONDITION HOSTILE

  #59 PRELUDE TO WAR

  #60 DEFENSIVE ACTION

  #61 ROGUE STATE

  #62 DEEP RAMPAGE

  #63 FREEDOM WATCH

  #64 ROOTS OF TERROR

  #65 THE THIRD PROTOCOL

  #66 AXIS OF CONFLICT

  #67 ECHOES OF WAR

  #68 OUTBREAK

  #69 DAY OF DECISION

  #70 RAMROD INTERCEPT

  #71 TERMS OF CONTROL

  #72 ROLLING THUNDER

  #73 COLD OBJECTIVE

  #74 THE CHAMELEON FACTOR

  #75 SILENT ARSENAL

  #76 GATHERING STORM

  #77 FULL BLAST

  #78 MAELSTROM

  #79 PROMISE TO DEFEND

  #80 DOOMSDAY CONQUEST

  #81 SKY HAMMER

  #82 VANISHING POINT

  #83 DOOM PROPHECY

  #84 SENSOR SWEEP

  #85 HELL DAWN

  #86 OCEANS OF FIRE

  #87 EXTREME ARSENAL

  #88 STARFIRE

  #89 NEUTRON FORCE

  #90 RED FROST

  #91 CHINA CRISIS

  #92 CAPITAL OFFENSIVE

  #93 DEADLY PAYLOAD

  #94 ACT OF WAR

  #95 CRITICAL EFFECT

  #96 DARK STAR

  #97 SPLINTERED SKY

  #98 PRIMARY DIRECTIVE

  #99 SHADOW WAR

  #100 HOSTILE DAWN

  #101 DRAWPOINT

  #102 TERROR DESCENDING

  #103 SKY SENTINELS

  #104 EXTINCTION CRISIS

  #105 SEASON OF HARM

  #106 HIGH ASSAULT

  #107 WAR TIDES

  #108 EXTREME INSTINCT

  #109 TARGET ACQUISITION

  #110 UNIFIED ACTION

  #111 CRITICAL INTELLIGENCE

  #112 ORBITAL VELOCITY

  #113 POWER GRAB

  #114 UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE

  #115 EXTERMINATION

  #116 TERMINAL GUIDANCE

  #117 ARMED RESISTANCE

  #118 TERROR TRAIL

  #119 CLOSE QUARTERS

  #120 INCENDIARY DISPATCH

  #121 SEISMIC SURGE

  #122 CHOKE POINT

  Don Pendleton

  Perilous Skies

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Timothy Somheil for his contribution to this work.

  Contents

  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

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Adelmo Valdes searched the ocean horizon around the speck of Bahamian sand called Glass Key and saw nothing but empty water. The skies were just vast blue emptiness punctuated by a few pure white clouds.

  Glass Key was little more than a sand dune in the Caribbean. The island occasionally broke through the surface to become a streak of sparkling white sand. It was the perfect beach, but like all good things, it didn’t last. Glass Key would emerge from the water for no more than a few days at a time, when the tides were just right.

  Valdes didn’t even know why anyone had bothered to give it a name. The place had no value and no purpose for anyone, anywhere—except for him. To him it had a unique and special function.

  Also of special use to him was an acquaintance in the U.S. Coast Guard. This acquaintance had some very special secrets, and Valdes knew what they were. He had a vivid piece of video shot from one of those nifty new smartphones with exceptional optics, which made the video all the more interesting. The special optics made the faces on the video quite distinct and recognizable.

  Adelmo Valdes was not one to break his promises. He would dispose of that video once his friend in the Coast Guard did him this one favor. It was a big favor, but it would be over soon and the acquaintance in the U.S. Coast Guard would be free to get on with his life. Valdes, if the U.S. Coast Guard acquaintance kept his part of the bargain, would be free to spend his millions.

  It was a high-stakes undertaking involving many millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine going into the United States in one large shipment. It would be the equivalent of several months of smaller-scale shipments, such as Valdes’s family was accustomed to sending. But sending small shipments meant sending more shipments, which meant more possibility for mistakes and more opportunity for carelessness. And more would be lost to seizure by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

  But carefully planning to send in a single large-scale shipment every few months, with more careful preparation and oversight, would inevitably lead to more successful shipments. Valdes was absolutely certain of this.

  He was banking his future, and the future of the family, on it. After the irresponsible actions of his brother, product and revenues had been wasted and lost on a massive scale. The family had seen its fortunes crumble in a matter of weeks.

  Those had been the worst weeks of Adelmo Valdes’s life.

  He had been the one left with the obligation to inform his sickly father about Pyo’s actions. But informing his father had been a mistake. The shock was so great it caused ano
ther final and fatal heart attack. The old man died cursing Pyo for what he had done to the family and cursing Adelmo for being the messenger of such ruinous tidings.

  His mother was no better. She had been screaming at him about Pyo for days. As if Adelmo could control what Pyo did. As if Adelmo was somehow responsible for Pyo’s carelessness and his mistakes and his rebellion.

  It had been their father who was at fault. Old Roberto was the one who’d given Pyo control over the business. Adelmo had begged him not to. Adelmo had tried to convince their father that Pyo was simply too headstrong and too foolhardy to run the business.

  Out of respect for his mother, Adelmo had held his tongue in the presence of the rest of the family. But then his father died, right there in the upstairs bedroom of the huge house that the family business had paid for. And then his mother was screaming at him like a madwoman for hours at a time, sobbing uncontrollably and then screaming again. Finally Adelmo had screamed back at her. He’d screamed about his father, and how he had made a mistake and had given Pyo the means to destroy the family.

  Unable to withstand any more of her hysteria, Adelmo had backhanded her viciously. She was flat on the floor in the vast kitchen of the family home. The servants froze in horror, then gathered around her and carried her up to one of the other bedrooms and put her to bed. That was two months ago. She had lived her life in that tight little suite of rooms from that day forward.

  But his own act of violence had stilled any indecision in Adelmo’s mind. He became calm and confident. His course of action was clear.

  Pyo, he the elder brother or not, was entirely unfit to run the family business. With his father dead and Pyo obviously incompetent, it fell to Adelmo to take control of this business.

  Pyo, conveniently, was nowhere to be found. He would disappear for days at a time, drinking and whoring. His absence gave Adelmo plenty of time to act.

  Adelmo had considered this course of action before, in the first few months when Pyo had been given control of the business, when their father had first become bedridden. He had seen even then that his brother was on a ruinous path. He should have acted then. But even thinking of taking control then had felt like betrayal.

  Now it felt appropriate—the correct thing to do.

  The takeover had happened calmly and with only words. He gathered what was left of his father’s people on the family estate and he announced his intentions. He was calm and reasonable, and laid out the rationale for his decision. His father’s people didn’t protest or even disagree. They, too, were fed up with Pyo’s impulsive acts and the horrible cost in lives and money of those mistakes.

  “We are starting over,” Adelmo announced to the gathering. “Pyo has lost most of the cash, including most of the money in our bank accounts. What is left to us is only this house, and whatever property we retain, and our current shipment. We must make the most of our next sale to provide the seed money needed to get us back into full-scale business. We can do this if we approach it intelligently, with a real strategy. That is how I intend to do business. I will not be a cowboy that my brother seems to think he is. I will plan carefully, and do what I can to keep this family business out of sight and out of mind of those who would put a stop to us. My way of running the family business will not be as exciting as my brother’s. If you want excitement, I will not give it to you. But you can be assured that I will not lead our people into disaster as Pyo has.”

  Then he asked the people in his father’s house, “Will you join me, and support me as the leader of this family, even when Pyo returns to confront me on it?”

  Again, there was no protest and no disagreement. His father’s people had been decimated by Pyo’s carelessness. They wanted nothing more to do with the elder brother. They immediately agreed to support Adelmo as the leader of the family.

  The work began. The planning was careful and extensive. The preparation work for this one shipment had been beyond anything that his father’s people had ever seen before.

  But the people saw how Adelmo made his own connections in the United States, and they saw how this would open the door for this single all-important shipment to reach the United States. Adelmo was running the drug-smuggling operation like a careful and intelligent businessman, just as he had promised he would do.

  And then Pyo returned. He looked like hell. He claimed he had paid to be freed from a Mexican prison. He had paid with his family’s money—from a bank account Adelmo had not even known existed. And now it was gone.

  The men who had gone with Pyo were now in a Mexican jail in Juarez. The local police who held them had identified Pyo and the men as members of a criminal organization. If this local police force turned them over to the federal police they would get nothing. But they would free them to Pyo for a hefty ransom—a ransom they called a “bail.” But there was nothing legal about the payoff.

  Pyo claimed that he intended to go back to free all his men. In a loud and very public altercation, Pyo demanded Adelmo surrender the cash. He loudly decried Adelmo’s assumption of leadership of the family. He demanded that Adelmo turn over access to his father’s bank accounts. There was just one family bank account with any real sum of money left in it. It was less than four million dollars, a fraction of the family’s previous wealth.

  Pyo was flabbergasted when he realized that his father’s men had indeed given their loyalty to Adelmo. But after ranting for some time, he calmed himself and became thoughtful—and claimed he would accept Adelmo as the leader of the family business.

  Adelmo did not believe or trust his brother, but when Pyo claimed he needed the money to free the last few men still held by the police in Juarez, Adelmo had to give it to him. If there was a chance of getting those men out of jail, he must take that chance. Only Pyo knew which individual would be able to free these men—for the specified bail.

  Pyo, quite predictably, disappeared with the money and had not been heard from in weeks.

  Adelmo would not let the betrayal distract him. Not today. Today, when this operation was successful, the family business would have a new start and the family bank accounts would begin to fill again with cash.

  But he could not escape the heaviness in his heart that had come from all this. He mourned the loss of his father, now in the ground, and the loss of his mother, who had shut herself away from the world and from her family—but he could not mourn the loss of his brother. Pyo had been, in truth, lost for years. He had gone crazy as a teenager; he’d suffered an overdose when he was fifteen and was never quite right after that. From then on he was impulsive and wild and destructive. And careless in his work for the family—no matter how many times their father had tried to beat the carelessness out of him.

  * * *

  RIGHT ON TIME, THE LUXURY motor yacht appeared on the blue sea, heading swiftly toward Glass Key. She was a seventy-foot luxury catamaran named the Great Escape, with expansive deck space and luxury interior appointments. She had been leased out of Key West three days ago by a trio of freshly graduated law students. The students were all studying for the bar—about to begin button-down lives, with big-time careers as corporate lawyers in St. Louis. Before they took that step, they wanted a little bit of excitement on the high seas. Young Americans, with promising futures, who wanted to have one really wild story to tell their closest friends in their future years.

  Adelmo Valdes had made contact with them through some of his own old acquaintances at St. Louis University. He had flown up to meet them and give them the hard sell. He promised them an adventure they’d never forget. They’d get the private luxury cruise, fully stocked with food and liquor. Entertainment would be provided in the form of a half-dozen University of South Florida sophomore coeds, while the yacht itself would be manned by a professional crew hired by Valdes. All they had to do was to lease the boat under their own names, pay for it themselves, with cash, which Valdes provided, and enjoy themselves. Get drunk and get laid and get the boat to Glass Key within forty-eight hours—and, most
importantly, be on hand to meet the Coast Guard if the yacht should be stopped.

  Boys like this, with a believable story to tell and with fathers with political connections, were the safest possible bet should the Great Escape be stopped by the Coast Guard or the DEA.

  The three American boys and their six hired sophomore playmates would spend an afternoon playing on the beautiful white sands of Glass Key, while Valdes and his men loaded up the Great Escape with the shipment. The American boys would turn around and head back to Florida. They would have another forty-eight to seventy-two hours to get drunk and screw the coeds from the University of South Florida, do some deep-sea fishing and generally just enjoy themselves.

  Valdes guaranteed that they would be met by a Coast Guard ship with which he had made special arrangements. The Great Escape would not be searched. He assured them that they would return to Florida unmolested.

  With their family connections and their family wealth, nobody was going to pester these boys too much. If there was an official record of their getting searched once, nobody could search them again.

  The carefully engineered scenario had its own built-in series of checks and balances. The status of the three young soon-to-be lawyers made them unlikely suspects by the DEA, particularly with their high-profile activities and the extreme expense of their rental boat. Regardless, these boys could be watched. But there would be no suspicious activity during the cruise that would alert the DEA, even if they were staring down on the Great Escape night and day with their spy drones.

  The shipment had been brought to the Glass Key days ago, in several small sailboats, and sunk on the site. That was one of the most significant risks of the entire operation—and it was a huge risk to leave the valuable, irreplaceable cargo in the middle of nowhere, unguarded for days.

  But it was also key. The DEA didn’t tend to stop boats that never stopped themselves. Smugglers needed to stop to transfer cargo but the drop-off boats never did. Just dumped their stuff over the side in their special submergible containers and kept going.

  Creating an erroneous perception was key. The actors in this play had to not behave like drug smugglers—even when viewed on radar or on the digital feeds from a DEA patrol drone.