The Chameleon Factor Read online

  Holding the sleek, tubular weapon, with a pair of UV goggles on his face, McCarter felt like a starship trooper in some sci-fi flick. But the characters in those movies only had robots and alien monsters to battle. His team was facing the most dangerous opponent known: other men, highly trained, heavily armed and on familiar ground.

  A sudden flurry of motion from the trees made the team swing their weapons in that direction. But they withheld firing at the sight of a flock of bats, the creatures squeaking and flapping through the night.

  “Must be near the mountains,” Manning said, resting the barrel of the AK-105 on a shoulder.

  “Most species of bats live in trees, not caves,” James corrected. His breath fogged at every word, but the cold didn’t really bother the tall former Navy SEAL. Born and raised in Chicago, anything sort of standing naked at the North Pole was merely chilly.

  Taking another drink from the thermos, Manning glanced about. “Trees we already got,” he muttered, screwing the cap back on.

  Checking the fuel gauge, McCarter saw the hovercraft were nearly at the halfway point. Soon they would have to stop or risk going on foot to the pickup point. A fishing trawler was waiting at a coastal village to the north to take the team, and any survivors, hide them and the passengers in its hold and sail them straight through the underwater sonar buoys of the Russian navy and into international waters where they could rendezvous with U.S. Navy ships. The plan was good, but as an old campaigner, David McCarter knew that virtually no battle plan ever survived first contact with the enemy. Some young wag in MI-5 had once said that a battle plan was merely a list of things that wouldn’t happen in combat.

  “I have a reading,” Encizo said, checking the scanner in his gloved hand.

  “The beacon?” McCarter demanded, checking his own.

  “No, a fire. But it’s in a triangle pattern. Just due north of us, 210 yards.”

  Could be the crash site. His hopes for some survivors rose at the news. A triangular pattern would mean a sideways approach. A deadly vertical impact would read as a circle.

  “Let’s go,” McCarter commanded, working the bolt on his AK-105 assault rifle. “Full speed!”

  Kobuk Valley, Alaska

  THE FLIES WERE THICK near the ruins of the grandstand, and flocked to the flashlights carried by Able Team.

  But Lyons and his teammates were prepared and sprayed themselves with insect repellant before working their way through the splintered timbers. Only vestiges of flagstones in the ground told them where the grandstand had originally stood. A single Delta Four didn’t leave much behind, and a salvo even less.

  Half-melted poles bent low to the ground, the only reminder of the safety nets erected to prevent clumps of soil from hitting the spectators when the missiles hit the distant hillside. Beyond what might have once been a railing was a flat field with a large charred hole in the center. Thumbing his flashlight to a tight beam, Lyons played it about, but not even scattered debris remained to mark the exact location of the annihilated bunker.

  “Nothing we can salvage from that,” Schwarz muttered unhappily, tucking away the scanner.

  “That looks like a direct hit,” Blancanales said slowly, rubbing his jaw. “Without a gunner washing it with a laser light, there must have been a homing unit in the blockhouse to make sure it was struck dead center. Deltas are good, but not that good.”

  “I’m betting on a homer,” Lyons stated, resting a shoe on a chunk of concrete as he fanned more of the field. The breeze from the nearby inlet carried a faint smell of saltwater, the clean air helped reduce the charnel-house reek of the killzone. “Our guy likes to plant hidden bombs. Bombers are very monogamous. They find one type of explosive and stick with it.”

  “You don’t,” Blancanales said to Schwarz.

  His teammate shrugged. “I’m a professional.”

  “Maybe our ape is, too,” Lyons growled, returning the flashlight to its usual setting. Then he stood. “Okay, we’ve seen ground zero. Let’s go check the lab.”

  The men were quiet on the ride out of the parking lot, each deep in thought about the attack. The homing beacons would have needed to be placed by hand, while the missile tests were going on in all likelihood. That took a particularly cool operative.

  As the SUV jounced onto the gravel road, Schwarz cast a look backward.

  “I’m willing to bet that if there were any intact bodies,” he muttered, “that we’d find several of the Marine Corps guards dead.”

  “Bombers aren’t usually face-to-face killers,” Blancanales reminded him. “But yeah, I’ll buy that. Whoever this guy is, I’m surprised we haven’t encountered him before. Nobody this good just falls out of the sky.”

  “Maybe we have,” Lyons said grimly, shifting gears as he started up the rough incline. “But this is the first time we know about it.”

  The two soldiers frowned at the grim notion, but said nothing.

  After driving to Quiller Geo-Medical Laboratories, Able Team went through another search pattern, with equally poor results. The destruction was on a staggering level. There were no signs of additional bombs being planted in the complex, but they wouldn’t have been necessary. A pair of Delta Four missiles hitting a fully stocked chemical laboratory would reduce the building to a memory.

  Running an EM scan of the tattered lawn far outside the blast crater, Schwarz boosted his equipment to the maximum while Lyons and Blancanales swept the grass with their flashlights. The off-site backup file would be carefully hidden. Most likely the feeder cables snaked, or twined, with the local power company.

  Twining was something the federal government had been doing for decades. When a technical installation was being built near a civilian area, when the telephone company crew arrived to lay the cables, there would be a switch done by NSA agents, and the original cables replaced with an NSA special. The new cable would look exactly like a standard heavy-duty phone line, and would responded properly to the civilian instruments. But afterward the NSA would return to splice additional lines to the hidden wires inside the main cable, and run them to the listening post, off-site dump or whatever they wished. The utility did all of the hard digging, but the cable was under NSA control, and best of all, there were absolutely no records of the installation.

  “Anything?” Lyons asked, walking alongside his friend.

  “Not yet.” Schwarz pulled out his personal computer to check a map of what the area had formerly looked like. Changing direction, he moved out of the headlight beams of the SUV and headed for a broken clump of trees, then abruptly stopped.

  “Wait a second,” he said quietly, adjusting the scanner.

  Scuffing his shoes along the ground, Schwarz found something large and metallic. Kneeling, he pushed away the loose soil to expose a manhole cover.

  “Bingo.” He grinned in triumph. “Give me a hand, will you?”

  The three men wrestled the heavy cast-iron plate out of its rimmed recess and uncovered a dark hole. Lyons played his flashlight around inside and found a ladder welded to the side of the steel pipe, but the bottom was out of range of the beam.

  “Want some company?” Blancanales asked, using a strip of Velcro to attach his flashlight to the barrel of a .380 Colt pistol.

  Loosening his tie, Schwarz started down into the pipe. “No need. This should only take a few seconds.” Then he paused to wriggle his shoulder through the tight fit. The opening of the access pipe was an oval now instead of being circular from the crushing shock wave of the missile hits.

  Standing guard on top, Lyons and Blancanales watched their friend descend until he was gone from sight.

  “If this is a bust, we check the apartments of the staff next,” Lyons stated, switching his attention to the surrounding forest and the distant hillside. The military cordon thrown around the valley should have been enough to keep out any civilian witnesses, but he still had the odd feeling of being observed.

  “And after that?” Blancanales asked, brushing away some gnats. />
  “We start from the beginning to see what we missed,” the big man stated. “And we keep going it until Barb tells us to stop, or we find the files.”

  “Or the thief. You know, I’ve had fun before, and this ain’t it.”

  Lyons cracked a rare smile. “I hear ya.”

  Dark clouds blocked the stars overhead, and flying insects gathered around the bright halogen beams of the idling SUV across the lawn. Faint taps sounded as the bugs hit the glass and bounced off again and again.

  Clicking off their flashlights to save power, the men waited until their eyes adjusted to the darkness. A cool breeze rustled what leaves remained on the battered trees, but aside from that the silence was oppressive. No birds, no crickets, no night creatures. Just silence.

  Time passed slowly in the Alaskan field. They were starting to get concerned when a bobbing light appeared at the bottom of the pipe, then they heard Schwarz muttering curses as he climbed back up the ladder.

  Switching their lights back on to help him see, the men waited until their teammate reached the ground and wiggled free, ripping his jacket on the recessed rim.

  “Damn it, that was new,” Schwarz cursed, getting to his feet.

  “Screw that. Did you find anything?” Blancanales demanded anxiously.

  “Yes and no.” Schwarz sighed. “I found the dump computer, but it was wiped clean. Our ape had been here long before the missiles arrived.”

  “How can you tell?” Lyons scowled.

  Reaching into a pocket, Schwarz pulled out a small lump of C-4 plastique. “He left this behind to blow the site. See here?” He touched a small silvery disk dangling from a broken wire. “That’s a pressure switch. This charge was supposed to blow the dump site when the concussion wave from the missiles arrived.”

  “So this was done first.”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn!”

  “You were expecting something like that,” Blancanales stated. “That’s why you wanted to go down alone.”

  “No, I just work better by myself,” he lied to his teammate with a toothy grin, tucking away the C-4.

  Pulling out a cell phone, Lyons started tapping numbers. “I’ll tell Barbara,” he said, then frowned as the device changed functions. Then did it again, and again. What the hell?

  With sudden understanding, the Able Team leader went cold. Son of a bitch. The cell phone was being hit by an infrared beam of some kind that was randomly activating its programs. It wasn’t an attempt to hack the phone; an infrared beam couldn’t do that. No, this was a concentrated beam and the only thing he could possibly think of was the tracer of a sniper rifle sweeping the team to zero in for a kill. Adrenaline flooded his body. They had flushed out a source of information. Now all his team had to do was stay alive to question him. Time to move!

  “Incoming!” Lyons yelled, and sprinted for the SUV.

  Blancanales and Schwarz responded instantly and spread out in different directions to not offer a single target. Almost immediately a hard metallic belch sounded from the trees on the hillside, closely followed by muffled thump as a canister hit the grass alongside the open pipe in the ground. It burst apart and began spewing out volumes of gray smoke.

  Catching a glimpse, Lyons doubled his speed for the car. That was sleep gas! Somebody had to have been following the team from the distant hilltop, waiting for them to find something and now was coming to collect the team alive for questioning. He wanted them alive just as much as Able Team did him. Not the thief, then. So who was he?

  The answer to that question was duck soup, Lyons thought as he pounded across the open ground. Step one—capture a duck. There were heavy weapons hidden in the ceiling panels of the SUV that would tip the balance in their favor. If he could just get hold of an M-203, or another grenade launcher…

  The Stony Man commando was only ten yards from the SUV when the hillside belched again and something crashed through the windshield of the vehicle, filling the interior with greenish smoke.

  Vomit gas! Okay, change in tactics. Shifting direction, Lyons raced across the open ground and dived headlong into the ragged bushes. The belch of a grenade launcher sounded again as the Able Team leader fought his way free and jumped off the top of the embankment. He landed with a splash into the trickling creek at the bottom and sprinted into the blackness of the storm drain set under the road. A figure rose before him, and Lyons almost fired from the hip when the shape gave a two-tone whistle. He responded and stepped closer to Blancanales and Schwarz.

  “Well, we found the end of the rope,” Blancanales said, checking his .380 Colt pistol. The weapon was woefully underpowered for a duel with a sniper, but everything else they had was in the SUV. “Anybody catch his direction?”

  “Toward that big peak to the west,” Lyons said. “That’s the direction my cell phone was facing when it triggered from the tracer beam.”

  “Good thing he’s using infrared. If it was UV, we’d be facedown in the dirt,” Schwarz commented. “And a pro would have known better than to point IR at civilian equipment.”

  “So this isn’t our ape, then? Damn! Then again, he might know who our guy is.”

  “We take this asshole alive,” Lyons stated.

  Just then, something splashed into the stream outside the storm drain and green smoke rose from the bubbling water.

  “More vomit gas,” Schwarz said, covering his mouth with a pocket handkerchief.

  Kneeling, Lyons dipped his handkerchief into a puddle before covering his mouth and drawing in a deep breath.

  “That wasn’t a mortar round,” he stated, tying the cloth behind his head. “It sounds too weak. Maybe a Russian RPG or a 40 mm American M-79.” If he caught some of the smoke, the wet cloth would help, but not for long, and not against tear gas.

  Or VX nerve gas, Lyons observed. How long would the sniper try to take them alive before he changed to more lethal tactics?

  “He’s firing too fast for those. I’d bet it’s an MM-1,” Schwarz replied. “That holds eighteen rounds, and he’s only sent five our way so far.”

  There came another crash of glass, and the hissing from above became noticeably louder.

  “Make that six,” he amended.

  Blancanales frowned. Twelve more rounds before reloading. And the shells for an MM-1 came in a wide variety. The person on the hill could start lobbing anything at them, from aerial flares to light up the night, to antipersonnel shotgun rounds that could cut an oak tree in two.

  “Anybody else have a grenade?” Lyons demanded, pulling the explosive charge from his pocket. The colored stripes marked it as a stun grenade. It was perfect for this sort of work. Unfortunately, it had a very limited range, while that weapon on the hill could easily sweep the whole valley.

  “Just the C-4,” Schwarz said, patting a lumpy pocket. “Why, got a plan?”

  “Yeah, we make a run for the SUV and get more weapons,” Lyons said, pulling out the keys. He pressed the fob and there was an answering horn honk from the vehicle as the engine turned off.

  “Okay, in about thirty seconds the headlights will automatically cycle off, and with this cloud cover we’ll be almost invisible,” Lyons stated quickly.

  Blancanales took some mud from the floor of the drain and smeared it on his cheeks in lieu of combat cosmetics.

  Smart man. Lyons copied the trick. “We hit the car from both sides and get the Sabers from the trunk. The ceiling panels take too long to open for the other weapons. After that we can—”

  He was interrupted by a loud explosion from above, followed by a soft explosion and a crackling noise.

  “That sounded like the SUV got hit with an explosive round,” Blancanales said, furrowing his brow. “So much for the Saber assault guns in the trunk.”

  “Damn things are too heavy anyway,” Schwarz muttered, blinking hard against the stinging gas. The wind was blowing through the tunnel from the western ocean. If the sniper figured that out and hit them with gas on both sides, they would be forced into th
e open. Easy pickings.

  “I don’t think our boy wants us alive anymore,” Lyons said, liberally adding more mud to his white shirt. The rest of the suit was nicely dark, but the clean white shirt would only be a beacon asking to be shot in a night attack.

  “That second blast was the gas tank. I recognized the sound,” Schwarz said, shifting his stance in the muddy water. “The ammo will start cooking off soon, and when that goes, it’ll set off the C-4 satchel charge hidden under the seats.”

  “We can use the explosion as a diversion,” Lyons said. “We’ll break for the trees and go after the bastard when the C-4 charges blow.”

  “How long?” Blancanales asked, looking at Schwarz, who shrugged.

  “Any time now.”

  With those words, the entire world seemed to shake, and a harsh red light banished the night, the concrete tunnel cracking slightly overhead and sprinkling fine dust. Without pause, Able Team dashed out of the storm drain and into the night.

  Scrambling up the steep slope of the culvert, the three men barely reached the top when a canister dropped into the space behind them. Spreading out fast, each man was going in a different direction across the grass when the charge loudly detonated. A vertical wall of flame rose upward, channeled by the embankment, the hellish light brightly illuminating the night for a terrible few seconds. And then it was gone.

  Waiting for shrapnel to hit him in the back, Lyons tensed his muscles, but kept going headlong into the bushes. Immediately, he ducked behind a tree for safety, then charged off at an angle to make it impossible for the gunner above to track his movements. Sure enough, a few moments later, an explosion shook the tree, followed by the rustling rain of leaves and debris falling back to earth.

  Okay, the gloves were off now, and the gunner knew that he had trouble coming. That had been willy peter, white phosphorous, used in the drain and HE on the tree. He was going for a kill now. But what the gunner didn’t know was that Able Team wanted him alive much more than he needed them dead.