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He kicked the door savagely with the bottom of one foot, opening into a jungle of fire, where some kind of electrical system had spilled out ropes of bundled wire that now burned floor to ceiling along with the furniture, books and lab equipment. Clouds of acrid smoke were collecting at the ceiling. Blancanales tried not to breathe but the wisps that he did inhale felt toxic and the blast of heat almost bowled him over. Something burst nearby, spewing orange, red-hot worms.
“Lyons!” Blancanales bellowed. “Schwarz!”
Then something big came leaping through the vines of fire and crashed at Blancanales’s feet. It was Carl Lyons, tangled in a strand of burning cable. He rolled away, extinguishing the flames that clung to his black BDUs. Blancanales snatched off a tangle of wire but a strand of melting insulation stuck to Lyon’s clothing like glue.
Then Hermann Schwarz charged through the flames, rolled once and was back on his feet, making a quick search of his body for anything that was still on fire.
“No way out!” Schwarz shouted over the heightening roar.
“Yeah, this way, come on!” Blancanales led the way back in the direction he had come. The conflagration in each room had grown progressively more intense within seconds. The fire was reaching out as if trying to grab them.
Blancanales heard a crash behind him. Carl Lyons had just dumped his pack to the ground. Lyons, without slowing, unceremoniously snatched the small pack off of Schwarz’s shoulder.
“Huh?” Schwarz demanded, shielding his eyes from the horrific heat and stinging fumes, but he could see that his pack was smoldering.
Blancanales slipped off his own smoking pack and left it in the room with the corpses of the two intruders. The room was biggest of the lab workrooms and it was an inferno. Blancanales felt his skin cooking and his lungs were exploding as if he were drowning—but he didn’t dare take another breath. One inhalation of the superheated air might just drop him in his tracks. His vision was a mass of orange and black. He saw the stairway entrance framed in fire and staggered into it.
The temperature was cooler and he allowed himself a sip of air. It was still so hot it burned his nostrils and he slowed to watch behind him. Schwarz came through. A heartbeat passed.
Then Lyons.
They called Lyons “Ironman.” It had been his nickname since long before any superhero movie and he had earned it by toughing out some of the most horrific battles any soldier had ever endured.
But now it looked as though the Ironman was about to crumple. Blancanales shoved Schwarz ahead and got behind Lyons, shouldering into him to keep him moving. The climb up the stairs seemed interminable, then they were into the upper hall. No sign of flame. But the wall trim along the floor was smoking.
“Go!” Blancanales ordered, shoving Schwarz and Lyons, and it was like trying to keep a pair of drunk wrestlers in motion. The trio staggered down the hall. Blancanales felt his feet burning. The sticky rubber toes of his boots were melting. Something liquid sloshed onto the floor and sizzled and Blancanales smelled griddled blood.
Somebody was bleeding buckets.
Lyons seemed to swerve slightly and Blancanales grabbed him around the waist.
Lyons grumbled something about being okay, and then they were in the exit stairs.
There was a rush of air behind them. The stairwell they had left seconds before went up in a fireball. A roar of flame erupted below them. The walls around them were now on fire. They careened down two flights and reached the landing. They saw two doors. One had a darkened exit sign. Smoke poured from the second door and Blancanales swore he actually saw it bulge.
“Out!” he insisted. The three of them pushed through the exit door.
Blancanales felt like he was in paradise—he gratefully inhaled the sweet, cool air of the Georgia night.
He stumbled over a body. It was the intruder whose knee he had shattered. The man had managed to crawl down the stairs and onto the grounds surrounding the Solon Labs. He was either dead or had passed out from the pain. Blancanales grabbed the man by the collar, intending to drag him farther away from the burning building.
But the body seemed to weigh a ton. Blancanales couldn’t budge him, and a quick pulse check told him that man was beyond help.
It also dawned on Blancanales that it wasn’t the body getting heavier that was the problem. It was himself, getting weaker.
Then he saw another spill of blood. It was his blood, and a lot of it.
No wonder he felt weak.
Blancanales collapsed alongside the dead intruder.
CHAPTER TWO
Lyons, Schwarz and Blancanales were members of Able Team, a supersecret covert-operations team based at Stony Man Farm.
Carl Lyons was fighting to sit upright in his helicopter seat without the seat belt. But he wasn’t sure Rosario Blancanales would even be able to stay alive for the next twenty minutes.
“Rosario’s in bad shape,” Lyons said into the mike on his headset.
“What is the nature of his injury?” Barbara Price asked.
“We haven’t figured that out yet. Gadgets is working on it.”
Hermann Schwarz had Blancanales strapped into the seat beside him and was ripping the man’s blood-drenched shirt off in shreds. “No broken bones. No sign of head trauma. But I can’t find the wound!” he said in frustration.
Then he found it. The last strip of the black BDU blouse came off Blancanales’s torso and there was a long, deep channel of black meandering across the man’s side, just above the hip. With the removal of the shirt, blood poured out of the wound.
“Jesus!” Schwarz stormed, covering the wound with his hand and squeezing the ripped flesh together to halt the bleeding.
Lyons watched the flow of blood from between Schwarz’s fingers. He watched the color drain out of Schwarz’s face—but it wasn’t as gray as Blancanales’s.
“We found the wound. We don’t need a burn unit,” Lyons said into the mike. “We just need a lot of blood.”
“Understood,” Price said. “Putnam General Hospital in Eaton. You’re five minutes away.”
Jack Grimaldi, the ace Stony Man pilot, manhandled the controls and pulled the helicopter in a turning decent. “Tell them to be ready in three minutes, Stony,” he said.
“There’s no helipad,” Price added.
“Like I need one.”
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
BARBARA PRICE hit the switch and brought up the image on the main plasma screen in the War Room. It showed an office in Washington, D.C., and Justice Department official Hal Brognola looked at her from behind his desk. The Potomac was barely visible in the windows behind him.
The communications line between the big Fed’s office and Stony Man Farm was highly secure. Brognola was, after all, Director of the Sensitive Operations Group, the ultracovert intelligence agency so secret that its existence was known, ostensibly, only to the President of the United States. And the President was the only person Brognola answered to.
Stony Man Farm itself, tucked away in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, was the hidden base of the Stony Man antiterrorist, anticrime operation. The property had remained secure enough over many years to still be viable as the group’s mission center—but that meant diligently and constantly diverting attention away from the Farm and its activities.
Sometimes it was simply impossible for SOG operations to remain invisible.
“They landed in the parking lot?” Brognola asked, chewing an antacid.
“There was nowhere else for them to land,” Barbara Price said.
To be accurate, Jack Grimaldi had put the helicopter down in a section of decorative landscaping between the parking lot and the hospital emergency entrance doors. It was twenty feet closer than landing on asphalt, Grimaldi had explained. Twenty feet less distance they’d have to transport the wounded Blancanales.
“How’s Rosario?” the big Fed asked.
“He’ll be okay. He made a serious dent in the inventory of the blood banks in Putnam County. And the medical staff has been asking a lot of questions about the nature of his injury.”
“I’d like some explanation on that myself.”
Price strolled to the large conference table in the empty War Room. She was dressed in a conservative skirt and rather plain white blouse, but still managed to look stunning. She took a thin report from the table and brushed back a strand of honey-blond hair to read it.
“The doctors are calling it an incision caused by burning plastic material. The wound was clean-edged—clean enough that the escharotomy was a comparatively minor process.”
“Escharotomy?”
“The surgical removal of the skin killed by the burn. They wanted it off of him as quickly as possible to avoid infection. They also wanted to examine the material imbedded in the eschar. We didn’t permit that. We had the tissue samples sent to our medical staff. Rosario is resting. Unless there is infection in the wound, he’ll be on his feet in a matter of days.”
“Good to hear.” Brognola tapped his desktop with a very expensive pen. “Dr. Solon?”
“The video from Able Team confirmed it was his body in his office.”
“Huh.” Brognola didn’t like the sound of that.
The lab in Georgia had been researching weaponized thermite for the U.S. military. At least, that was what it had been contracted to do. But it looked as though the prototypes and research they were presenting to the U.S. military had actually been compiled offshore—probably in China.
Worse, the technology that the U.S. government was sharing with the lab was being funneled somewhere else.
It had been a brilliantly executed subterfuge and might have remained undetected if not for Stony Man Farm’s watchful cybernetic systems. One of the routines did nothing but sample telecommunications from around the world, looking for new kinds of security. Whenever it found one, the Farm would try to decrypt it—and one such call came to the personal phone of Dr. Anthony Solon.
The scramble was one of the most sophisticated the cybernetics experts at Stony Man Farm had ever seen. It took the team two days to crack it, and when the next scrambled call came to Dr. Solon, it was descrambled and recorded.
Just in time. Solon was getting out. A “special team” was coming to help remove equipment on loan from the U.S. government and to get Solon to safety. This special team would be on-site within hours.
Brognola and Stony Man Farm had their own team on the ground—Able Team. Schwarz, Lyons and Blancanales had observed the arrival of three hardmen in a rented SUV and plenty of heavy gear in their backpacks.
They weren’t Chinese.
And they weren’t there to extract Solon along with a piece of classified U.S. equipment. They were there to erase the evidence—starting with Solon. They had shot him in the back and left him dead in his office.
Then they had proceeded to place a number of incendiary devices throughout the building.
Somebody had set them off by remote control, not bothering to wait for the intruders to get to safety first. Schwarz and Lyons had found themselves fleeing from a chain of incendiary blasts that had driven them deep inside the building—and far from an escape route.
Just seconds after the incendiaries ignited, Blancanales had chased after his teammates and led them out. All three had suffered superficial burns to the skin. It was the best they could have hoped for. Seconds later and they would have been cooked.
The special team sent to clean out Solon Labs hadn’t been so special. Just a bunch of handymen sent to shoot a corrupt scientist in the back and drop off a bunch of remote-controlled incendiary devices. The thermite incendiaries had done their job. The lab was burned to the ground. The only evidence left was the unidentified corpse on the lawn and a few unexceptional personal items carried out in Lyons’s pockets.
“Akira’s working on the cell phone as we speak. He’s not optimistic,” Price noted.
“Then we’ve got nothing,” Brognola complained. “There’s some serious high technology being exported by this operation and we don’t even know who they were. Only that they’re hostile and very determined to cover their own tracks.”
“You’re right,” Price said. “That’s all we’ve got.”
CHAPTER THREE
Northeastern Vermont
Abraham Clay liked New England. This wild and wooded spot in northern Vermont was beautiful. Especially in the autumn. He really loved it when the colors changed. But there were other places you could go to watch the change of season. There were only a few safe spots where you could go digging up the Portland-Montreal pipeline.
This spot was ideal. Twenty miles from any sizable towns. Unincorporated land meant little likelihood of state or federal rangers nosing around. Chances of being spotted were slim to none.
He’d come to this spot months ago with his ATV and yanked the warning signs out of the ground. If he’d been arrested then it would have been simple vandalism.
Nobody had noticed or bothered to replace the signs. If somebody caught him digging here now, they couldn’t exactly claim he was doing anything dangerous, because there were no markers visible in either direction to tell him that there was a crude oil pipeline not three feet below where he was standing.
So his ass was well covered in case he got caught. And he wasn’t going to get caught anyway.
He waited awhile, chomping a protein bar, which helped reinforce the image he was going for: casual hiker. He was in his North Face boots—cost him a cool $170—with a water bottle on his belt and a bright yellow Garmin geocaching GPS unit hung around his neck. Hell, the Garmin GPS had been cheaper than the damned boots.
If anybody caught him, he’d claim he was looking for the “Lewis’s Ninth” cache. The geocaching website gave it a Terrain Rating of 2 stars out of 5 and a Difficulty Rating of 5 out of 5. In other words, a reasonably easy hike to the spot, but once you got there you’d have a hell of a time actually finding the cache itself. And the coordinates led right here. And there was evidence of something being buried in this spot. That’s why he was digging here, Officer.
Abe Clay had come up with the strategy before he’d even started this project. It sounded reasonable. He’d posted the fake entries to the geocaching websites himself. And after several digs, he had never once had to use the excuse, because he had never once been caught.
After waiting a suitable interval, and hearing and seeing no signs of anyone in the vicinity, he checked his watch and got to work. He unfolded his shovel, scraped off the thin layer of vegetation, and dug into the rich earth. Eighteen inches down, he hit metal.
Another reason this spot was ideal: uncharacteristically aggressive erosion in this vicinity in the past few years had brought the pipeline much closer to the surface than it was supposed to be. Thank you, Hurricane Irene. Clay found it pretty easy to get the erosion reports from the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. Overlay those with the publically available reports of the exact routes of the Portland-Montreal pipeline, look for population densities and scout the sites months in advance, including pulling up the warning signs that have been hastily staked after Irene washed away most of the original.
The same process had worked in Maine.
This was his final placement. He cleared the earth around the first pipe, the eighteen-inch pipe, and as he moved the dirt he found the bigger, twenty-four-inch pipe. He took a quick look around, found he was still in the clear and snatched the charges from his backpack. They were in small black plastic bags.
Inside was a device that was no bigger than his fist and looked like some sort of computer accessory. Black plastic, with a curved profile and a USB port inside. Clay flipped the switch on the device.
This was the only time he got nervous. He didn’t understand exactly how these things were engineered, but he did understand that the ignition power source was inside the device itself. What if there was a problem inside the device and powering it up caused premature ignition?
But, like all the times before, the device’s only response to the powerup was the glow of a yellow LED.
Next Clay turned on the cell phone. It was one of those prepaid cell phones. Not many bells and whistles. You couldn’t play Angry Birds on the thing. But one feature it did have was exceptional battery life—the longest standby-mode rating in its class.
Finally he attached the cell phone to the device with a short USB cable. To tell the truth, this part made him nervous, too. The phone was supposed to get the call, and that call would somehow send a signal through the USB cable telling the device to do its thing. What if the act of plugging in the cable somehow gave some sort of signal to the device that it should do its thing now?
But the only thing that happened was that the LED on the device changed from yellow to green. All systems go. He placed the phone and pushed the device with some force against the metal shell of the twenty-four-inch pipe, and poured on water.
After a few seconds he released his hold on the device. The foamy stuff on the bottom of the device reacted with the water and made it into a strong adhesive. The device wasn’t going to come off unless you cut it off.
He repeated the process with a second device. The phone powered up, the LED turned green, the device was adhered to the eighteen-inch pipe. Clay carefully filled in earth all around the plastic devices, not quite burying them completely. He jumped to his feet and looked at his watch.
Three minutes, fifty-eight seconds! His personal best. And now he was done. Devices buried in eight different locations along a hundred-mile stretch of the pipeline in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.
He’d seen some really pretty scenery, too. And somehow, knowing he’d be one of the last people to see it in its pristine state for a long, long time, made him appreciate it that much more.
Maybe he would take up hiking for real.
After all, he had invested in these kick-ass hiking boots.
