Combat Machines

by Don Pendleton

Two days later

  Mustering every bit of her willpower, Kathri Brauer extricated herself from her lover’s embrace and rolled out of bed. “What is the rush, my beauty? You still have plenty of time to make it to work.” Alexei Panshin snaked a muscular, toned arm toward her leg. “Come back to bed for just a few minutes...”

  Brauer looked down at him, nearly succumbing to her desire to just jump back into his arms. God, I could just stare at him all day, she thought, taking in his chiseled torso, strong legs and arms, and a face that could have graced the cover of a men’s fashion magazine. Just the thought of how they’d been spending every night since they’d met five days ago almost made her knees buckle.

  “That’s tempting, but I won’t be going anywhere if you keep that up.”

  Before her resolve could weaken any further, she hurried around the corner to the marble bathroom. Forgoing the whirlpool tub, she headed for the glassed-in waterfall shower and turned it on, luxuriating in the hot needlelike jets of water pouring over her. As she washed up, she thought of her new lover.

  Alexei Panshin was a midlevel representative of a large import-export firm out of Saint Petersburg, looking to expand its reach around the world. He’d come to Geneva on a fact-finding mission to investigate various banking methods that might better serve his superiors back in Russia. Brauer had met him at a networking gala held in the Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues. As good as he looked naked, he almost looked even better in a tuxedo.

  From the moment their gazes had met, it was as if fireworks had gone off. Brauer was more than experienced, having had a marriage, a divorce and several lovers under her belt, not to mention rising in the cutthroat world of international trade.

  With her penetrating intelligence, five-eleven height, Nordic good looks and white-blond hair, Brauer knew she often came across as intimidating on a first meeting. But Alexei Panshin hadn’t been intimidated in the least. When he first walked up to her bearing two glasses of champagne, the moment he opened his mouth, she was lost. The rest of the party fell away, and it was just the two of them, alone.

  Several glasses of champagne later, they were making out in the back of the Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan Panshin’s company had provided to chauffeur him around the city. They’d ended up at his hotel, the luxurious Mandarin Oriental Geneva, and the rest of their time together had passed in a blur of incredible conversation, gourmet meals and mind-melting sex.

  She got out of the shower and wrapped herself in a huge, fluffy towel. Checking the time, she figured she would just make it if she didn’t mind putting up with slightly damp hair on the way over.

  Drying, dressing and applying her makeup in record time, she trotted out the door to find Panshin setting down his smartphone. He was sitting in front of two breakfasts on a tray—a full one for him, and a continental of croissants and fruit for her.

  “That’s so sweet of you.” Even though it would put her behind, Brauer buttered a croissant. “Who called?”

  “My company. They are impressed with what I have learned so far, and wish for me to stay in the city for a few more days—to better take advantage of the contacts I have made here.” He rose and took her hands in his, kissing pastry crumbs off them. “But we can discuss that this evening. As much as it pains me to say it, you should probably get going, yes?”

  Damn!

  “Yes, I’ve got to run.” She kissed him and turned to leave.

  * * *

  THE DRIVE TO the office seemed to take forever, and Brauer found it hard to concentrate on anything—paying attention to traffic, the emails she had her car’s built-in system read to her on the way, the project she was supposed to be briefing her boss on this morning—all of it paled in comparison to her new, white-hot relationship.

  Pulling into the underground garage, she got out of her car and trotted to the elevator. As she was getting in, her phone vibrated.

  Conference moved up. Go directly to 15th floor conference room, the text read. Brauer knew she was supposed to stop on the main level and go through the security checkpoint, but she was already running close to her scheduled conference start time as it was, and stopping there would make her late. Besides, she had been working at the WTO building for the past four years—she certainly wouldn’t risk destroying her career to smuggle in something. And no one else had gotten to her briefcase in all the time she’d had it, so when the elevator arrived, she got in and pushed the button for the fifteenth floor.

  Grateful to find the elevator empty, Brauer took a few moments to run through the salient points of her presentation in her head, thanking her lucky stars she had been mostly done with it before she’d met Alexei.

  The bell chimed, signaling she had reached her destination floor. Kathri stepped out and headed directly for the frosted glass conference room at the end of the corridor. She entered and blinked in surprise at seeing not only the CEO of the company, but also several board members.

  “Ah, Ms. Brauer, so good to see you this morning,” her boss, Loïc Gilliard, greeted her as he shook her hand. He quickly introduced her to the other board members. “We’re looking forward to seeing what you have to show us today.”

  “And I think you’ll be pleased with my recommendations, if you don’t mind my saying so,” she replied as she strode to the head of the table and set down her briefcase. “I’ll just need a few moments to set up—”

  As she reached for the locks, she noticed a new scratch marring the brass finish on the left one—the same one that had popped open back at the hotel room. I’ll have to get that polished and fixed, she thought as she set the combination dials, undid the latches and opened the case. Or maybe just replace the whole damn thing—

  The small bomb in her briefcase detonated with a force powerful enough to blow her face off. She was blasted off her feet, hitting the wall hard enough to crack the wood before crashing to the floor. She had no idea that the explosion blew out all of the windows in the room and set the fire alarm blaring.

  The bank’s CEO, who had been walking over to stand next to Brauer, took the full force of the flying briefcase lid in the chest, pulverizing his ribs and stopping his heart. He was dead before he hit the floor.

  With the blast directed more or less away from the board members, they escaped with their lives.

  Amazingly, Brauer lived for one hundred twenty-two minutes after the blast. But as the paramedics were lifting her onto a gurney to take her to a medevac helicopter in a vain attempt to save her life, all she kept repeating was one word:

  “Alexei...”

  Chapter Three

  Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  Twelve hours later

  Head bobbing in time with the electronic dance music blasting through his earbuds, Akira Tokaido scanned the various monitors at his workstation. Although a genius computer hacker, the young man had quickly grown to love reviewing the endless data feeds. After all, what was data mining but searching for patterns in events and correlating the possible outcomes? In a way, he felt it was kind of like figuring out a program, but in real life.

  However, real life was much more random and arbitrary. Just this morning, a bomb had gone off at the World Trade Organization headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Tokaido scanned the CIA summary document, learning that it seemed an employee had brought the explosives in with her, which explained how it had gotten by the main entry security. She had been killed in the blast, along with the current WTO chairman. Several board members had also been injured. No terrorist group had claimed responsibility yet, and police were pursuing all possible leads.

  Tokaido flagged that as being of possible interest, then ran a search through domestic and international databases and law-enforcement files for acts classified as potential terrorism in the last thirty-six hours. More than eighty popped up, from a skirmish between the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army and what looked like the last
of the Anyayna II resistance in the Sudan to a disarmed bomb planted by a radical anarchist splinter group in Iceland to a raid on a known militia headquarters in Montana.

  Next, he refined his search to the European continent and the United Kingdom, getting a dozen hits. These ranged from the small—a flaming garbage bin in Leicester, England—to the much more deadly: an assassination of a midlevel government official in Brussels, Belgium.

  The Stony Man hacker skimmed through that one as well, and learned the victim, Jean-George Belloc, was the country’s finance minister. He had been ambushed outside his home, shot in his car as he was heading to work. The suspect, driving a motorcycle, had worn a full-coverage helmet, and had made his escape before any eyewitnesses could get a good look at the assassin.

  Pulling up recent quotes from the slain government official, Tokaido found he had been advocating taking a harder stance in trade negotiations with Russia, even suggesting the possibility of sanctions for its recent actions in the Ukraine, and its intervention in the Syrian civil war. Of course, that wasn’t really anything new—most of the countries in the European Union weren’t happy with Russia’s recent saber-rattling, but they apparently also weren’t going to speak too loudly about it, either, for fear of provoking the bear.

  After all, look what happened to this guy, Tokaido mused.

  On a hunch, he refined his search to potential terrorist acts with any links to Russia, adding his new target country to the list, in the event there had been any domestic incidents recently. His event list shrank to six: the Brussels event plus five others. Four of them he eliminated fairly quickly, although he did confirm that Polish authorities had finally captured a Lithuanian serial killer that had eluded them for the past decade. But the last one, occurring in Germany, made him frown as he studied it.

  The percentage chance of this event being classified a terrorist act was small, but still viable. The body of a retired German army general had been found in his home the previous evening, apparently having died from a fall down his stairs. What made both him and the incident of interest was that he was a staunch opponent of friendly relations with Russia, and had written a book and several op-ed pieces critical of both his own government and Russia’s. He had also received death threats from fringe groups seeking to normalize relations between the two countries.

  So that’s two with Russian connections...although the German one is thin at best, Tokaido thought. He returned to the first one, the Geneva bombing. More data had been aggregated on that case in just a past few minutes, including the last thing the woman said after the bomb had gone off. It was a man’s name: Alexei.

  The young hacker blinked. It was probably just coincidence, right? He hacked into the security cameras outside the WTO headquarters until he found her car entering the underground parking level. He then scanned all of the perimeter cameras in a five-minute window around her entrance to see if anything unusual came up. He watched intently, then expanded the time window to ten minutes, but nothing out of the ordinary appeared on the monitors.

  Then Tokaido tried to see if her car had a GPS program he could use to backtrack the route she had used to drive to work. He managed to hack into the car, but the GPS wasn’t activated. So he began backtracking her route by using the traffic cameras located on the main thoroughfares.

  Even with the help of Stony Man’s computers, it took him more than forty-five minutes to plot the route using the available cameras. But at last he had her route plotted from start to finish. And she had started from the Mandarin Oriental Geneva.

  Tokaido whistled, then muttered, “I suppose a midlevel NGO functionary could splurge on a night at a fancy hotel, but I doubt that’s what was happening.”

  The rest was all too easy. A check of the guest registry revealed that one—and only one—guest named Alexei, an Alexei Panshin, had been checked in for the past week. Video footage showed him moving about the hotel—including with the bomb victim. In fact, from what was revealed by the hallway cameras, they seemed to be having a very close relationship. And what was even more interesting, he had checked out of the hotel within twenty minutes of the WTO employee leaving. Unfortunately, video footage did not show his face.

  There was, of course, one more thing to check. A quick search of public documents indicated a decisive cooling of the WTO toward doing business with Russia, with several interviews with the now-deceased CEO pointing toward a definite distancing of the organization from the country, citing its continuing record of corruption and human rights abuses. And countries around the world typically took the WTO’s opinion on something—whether it was a trade agreement or an emerging country’s potential market viability—pretty seriously.

  But even so, did any of this actually mean anything? Alexei was a common enough name, particularly in Russia and Bulgaria. It was simply possible she was mouthing the name of her lover right before she died.

  A quick cross-check on Alexei Panshin revealed that he was an employee of Artus International, an import-export firm based in Saint Petersburg, and that he had been on what looked like a business trip to Geneva. All fairly aboveboard, from what Tokaido could tell. Even so, the nagging suspicion about these seemingly unrelated events still wouldn’t subside. It was possible that this man wasn’t the real Alexei Panshin.

  Though hacking was Tokaido’s area of expertise, he had been encouraged to delve into data analysis. While training him in the cryptic art, his boss, Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, had stressed that it was as much art as science. “Connecting what seems like disparate events into a cohesive picture can often rely on your gut instinct as much as the hard data you acquire. The trick is knowing when to go with your feeling about a particular situation, and when to rely on the evidence as your primary lead.”

  With a sigh, Tokaido saved his data and rose from his chair to go find Kurtzman. Even if he was wrong about all of this, it would be a good theoretical exercise for them to discuss, and he could get some pointers to refine his analytical skills.

  He was just heading for the main doors to the Computer Room when they slid open and Kurtzman wheeled himself into the room.

  “Hey, Bear, I—” was all Tokaido said as he popped an earbud out to talk before he was forced to step out of the way of the other man as he zoomed his wheelchair over to his workstation.

  “Akira, have you got anything unusual on the Russians this morning?” Kurtzman asked without even a perfunctory greeting as he began looking over his own monitors.

  “I...well, I don’t know if it’s unusual, but I did notice what looked like some Federation-based activity over the past twenty-four hours. Why?”

  “I want you to have whatever you’ve got ready to present in five minutes. A US senator was just shot and wounded in Paris an hour ago, and the assailant seemed to be of Russian origin. We want to know what’s going on over there, and if it ties into anything larger, and if so, how.”

  “I’m on it.” Tokaido ran back to his station and began typing with lightning speed.

  * * *

  “AND THOSE ARE the correlations between the various events, as I see them,” Tokaido said, hoping he didn’t sound too nervous.

  Normally he served as support staff, assisting Mack Bolan or Able Team or Phoenix Force with their missions in the field. There, he was rock-solid, the calm voice in the team members’ earpieces giving them up-to-the-minute security intel, or defeating a security system from the other side of the world.

  He could count on one hand the number of times he’d actually been involved in presenting a briefing to the head of Stony Man Farm.

  Currently, Hal Brognola was staring at him like a bulldog eyeing a particularly juicy steak. Tokaido didn’t take it personally—he knew the big Fed regarded anyone who had what he wanted in exactly the same way. The Justice Department honcho was director of the clandestine Sensitive Operations Group, based at Stony Man Farm, a
nd was Stony Man’s conduit to the White House.

  Tokaido shifted his gaze to Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, the person who handled oversight of the Farm’s missions. She nodded at him and smiled, indicating he’d done a good job on his summary presentation.

  That was confirmed by Brognola. “Nice work, Akira. Good to see Bear’s program is bearing some fruit.

  “Okay, people, what does this seeming blitzkrieg of terror attacks mean? Are they really related, or are these just random acts that are occurring close enough together to draw our attention?”

  “Given the increasing severity of the incidents, and the fact that Interpol, MI-5, and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz have all gone to high alert internally, I don’t see how we can’t view this as anything but some kind of coordinated, if erratic, assault on the European Union as a whole,” Kurtzman replied.

  “And the US, don’t forget.” Brognola snatched the soggy cigar from his mouth and jabbed the unlit end at Kurtzman. “I never liked that pompous ass Richard DiStephano, but no one deserves to be shot.”

  “Says here that the assailant sped by on a motorcycle as DiStephano was heading to a meeting with his counterpart in the French government,” Price said. “The attacker fired at least two dozen rounds from a small submachine gun as he sped by, hitting DiStephano and killing his aide.”

  “That’s a damn shame,” Kurtzman said. “What’s DiStephano’s prognosis?”

  “Stable, although it was touch and go for a while,” Price answered. “They say one of the gendarmes providing security wounded the shooter, making him crash his motorcycle, but he still got away.”

  Kurtzman grunted as he reviewed the data on the French attack. “DiStephano’s one of those hawks beating the drum for military intervention in Sudan, isn’t he?”

  Brognola nodded sourly. “Yeah, mostly to counter what he feels is the increased Russian presence in the country. He’s amassed a small group of right-wing chuckleheads—mostly first-termers—and they’ve been trying to fire up a larger coalition to put a bill forward to send troops over there. Of course, they’re ignoring the very real threat of ISIS in the region, as well.” He shook his head. “The damn fools spend as much time putting their collective feet in their mouths in the media as they do actual governance.”