Final Storm Read Online Free Page A

stop structure, nothing about the odd scene looked unusual.
    Just another busload of free-loading American terrorists, wearing their crazy costumes and taking tourist-type pictures. Absorbed in eating a pick-up breakfast in the warm, early-morning, Bermuda sunshine, none of the guards gave the busload of sheeted people a second look.
    But then, suddenly, the guards felt the ground starting to shake …
    “Now! Go! Go! ” Hunter screamed at the Rangers.
    The robed Rangers burst out of the creaking bus, the first six men firing away with their silencer-equipped M-16s. In a matter of seconds, the startled guards were quickly—and quietly—mowed down and the strike force’s sharpshooter had put a hushed burst into the Vietnamese officer in the guardhouse. At the same time, Hunter blinded the rotating security camera with a blast from his tracer-filled M-16 assault rifle, which was also carrying a silencer for the occasion.
    All the while the ground continued to rumble with the force of a mini-earthquake. Off to the southwest, Hunter could see the billowing black smoke and towers of flame shooting up from the tiny airbase a dozen miles away. Once again, Crunch & Crew had been right on the money.
    Now, it was up to Hunter and his gang to work quickly….
    The trio of South African mercenaries manning the skyscraper’s bottom floor video security system was baffled at why their rear entrance camera had suddenly blinked out. Short-circuit? Sudden drop in power? Or perhaps the slight shaking they had felt moments earlier had something to do with it.
    In any case, with the early morning hour and their coffee just being poured, none of the three was too anxious to get up and check out the camera’s problem. Still, it had to be done.
    “I’ll go,” one of them, a sergeant, said finally. He was hungover from a late-night drinking bout and was hoping the fresh air would clear his head and settle his stomach.
    Retrieving his little-used AK-47, the soldier drained his coffee cup and started out of the small TV security control room. But when he reached the door he was surprised to find that someone was trying to come in as he was trying to go out.
    It was a man dressed in an outlandish white robe and hood. Behind him were a dozen other men, all dressed the same way. As they stood facing each other for a very long second, the South African saw that the “visitor” was holding a camera in one hand; a hand grenade in the other.
    Suddenly the hooded man pushed the South African Hard, causing him to reel back into the control room, tossing the grenade in at the same time.
    There was a bright bolt of light and a very muffled explosion as the HE flash grenade quietly obliterated the small TV studio and everyone in it.
    Hunter nodded grimly as the Ranger sapper gave him the thumbs-up signal. The first objective had been destroyed. Surveillance cameras all over the building were at that moment quietly blinking out.
    No one noticed that the building’s top floor camera had suddenly stopped moving. To the contrary, it was business as usual on the top floor of the skyscraper.
    The ten-man nightguard was preparing to change shifts at 0630, as usual. The long-range satellite communications system—the electronic umbilical cord to the military clique in the Kremlin—was about to be switched on, as usual. The evening’s retinue of high-priced call girls—having plied their trade all night long in the skyscraper’s top floor penthouse—were about to be paid and dismissed, as usual.
    But when the officer of the nightwatch—a Bulgarian mercenary—drew back the suite’s massive drapes to let in the morning light, he saw something very unusual. Instead of the routine picture postcard view, he and the others in his squad were astounded to see a funnel cloud of black smoke and flame rising up from the airfield, 12 miles to their south.
    “Jesus Christ …” the startled officer said in a voice barely above a whisper. “What the hell is