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“You sound pretty sure,” Brognola interjected.
“I know it would make things simpler if we could target your lab in Georgia right now, but it’s not adding up,” Manning said. “Maybe this was a diversionary tactic. They wanted to create the prototype to show just how inept they were when it came to engineering weaponized incendiaries. That would explain why they would trying to submit something like this as an advanced prototype.” Manning was arguing with the schematics sheet in front of him. “Yeah. They must have known this was crap when they sent it into the DOD. They did it on purpose.”
“Everything about that situation was damned odd,” Lyons growled. “I bet it was those hamburger incendiaries that they had rigged to go off on us. They were throwing shit in all directions.”
Manning shrugged. “You load it up with thermite, it would be a great arson tool,” he said, sliding the clattering plastic piece across the conference table. “For getting through the A53 carbon steel they use for structural steel pipes—no way. Not the precision punctures we just saw happen in Alaska.”
“We’re getting bloody nowhere,” David McCarter grumbled. He got up, paced behind the table and sucked on his Egyptian Coca-Cola until the plastic bottle collapsed with a fingernails-on-chalkboard crackling noise, then stopped when he was the center of attention of every person in the War Room.
Except for Akira Tokaido and T. J. Hawkins, who were jabbering quietly together and poking at the tablet screen. There was a dull but tangible frustration in the room.
Despite the vast inventory of attacks that had just occurred, no action plan presented itself. This was not a group of people accustomed to doing nothing.
Still, not one of them noticed when the time code on the computer screens turned from 8:02 p.m. to 8:03 p.m.
The phone that Carl Lyons had lifted from the attacker in the lab in Georgia began to ring.
Everybody in the room looked at it.
T. J. Hawkins said something under his breath.
Akira Tokaido’s hand froze over the tablet.
There was a beep from a computer. Then the peal of an electronics alarm. And then another. The phone rang again.
“More attacks?” Kurtzman exclaimed.
“Shit!” Akira Tokaido said. “Coming through the fucking phones!” He sprawled over the conference table, grabbed the phone from Solon Labs and leaped behind one of the nearby terminals. The phone rang again. He snatched at a USB cable and jabbed it into the phone.
Kurtzman wheeled into position behind a computer of his own. Brognola, having vanished offscreen, saw none of the action.
“You getting this?” the big Fed’s voice demanded. “We’ve got railroad and bridge alerts! Are you getting this?”
“Incoming calls setting off the devices,” T. J. Hawkins explained as the cybernetics crew seated themselves at any terminal that happened to be available. “Akira and I were discussing that possibility just before the phone went off.”
“Tracking the incoming call,” Tokaido said, his voice on edge.
“What good will that do?” Manning asked Schwarz. “The calls won’t all be coming from the same number.”
“They’re originating somewhere,” Schwarz said.
The phone was still ringing.
“Tell me you got something, Barb!” Brognola barked from far away in D.C.
“Got it!” Tokaido said. “Tracking back!”
“How far can you get, Akira?” Price asked with an unreal calm.
“I don’t know!”
“Bear?” Price urged.
“We’re moving!” Kurtzman said. “We’re getting through!”
“Through to what?” Brognola asked.
Barbara Price shook her head at him. She wasn’t going to ask for an explanation right now.
“Got the bastard!” Tokaido said.
“Seeing it,” responded the low, calm rumble of Huntington Wethers. “Identifying that picocell as a nanoGSM. Sending you the serial number.”
“I’m accessing the OMC-R,” Tokaido said.
Hawkins, standing at Tokaido’s shoulder, made a face at Schwarz. “He can access the Operations and Management Center-Radio?” he whispered.
“I’m in,” Tokaido crowed. His fingers stabbed at the keys. He spoke angrily at the LCD screen. “You are not getting past me again.”
His fingers stopped. He sat there staring at the screen. Kurtzman pushed back from his monitor.
“Okay, it’s off,” Kurtzman said. “He turned it off. Akira, you did it. It’s off.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Holy shit. That was fast-ass hackwork, my friend,” Hawkins said, clapping Tokaido on the shoulder.
“Yeah.” Tokaido didn’t seem to share Hawkins’s enthusiasm. He began typing again furiously. “Gonna cover my tracks.”
“We know where the picocell is, right?” Schwarz demanded.
“I can give you a street address,” Wethers confirmed. “In Barcelona.”
“Let’s go get that damned box!” Hawkins said.
“Will it do us any good?” Price asked.
“It just might,” Kurtzman said. “The picocell, the base station controller—the radio operations and maintenance hardware give us a way into the system.”
“Sounds like a weak link. As soon as they know it’s compromised they’ll stop using it. Or incinerate it,” Price suggested.
“Maybe not,” Tokaido announced. “There’s a power outage in that end of the city. They’ll have battery backup but I told the Operations and Management Center for the nanoGSM to take steps against a surge. Maybe they’ll believe that was the reason their signals stopped going out.”
“A power outage caused by?”
Tokaido grimaced and held up ten wiggling fingers, then kept typing.
“They’ll never believe the timing was coincidental,” Price replied.
“I’m creating a record in the OMC of several hours of power fluctuations on the grid,” Tokaido said. “If I’m this terrorist, then I’m gonna dedicate my picocell to my own job. I’m not sharing it with anybody. Which means the picocell’s had low-volume traffic all day until the high volume of signals at 8:04 Eastern time. I’m making it look like the thing was cycling on and off. When the high volume of calls started, it was too at-risk and the system shut itself down again.”
“A good IT guy will see through it.”
“They might see through it anyway,” Price snapped. “But we’ll be there if they’re not. Phoenix?”
“We’re gone,” McCarter snapped, and the room cleared of the five members in seconds.
“Carmen?” Price said.
“Transport to Barcelona is standing by for Phoenix Force,” Delahunt replied. Aircraft, like almost all dedicated Stony Man resources, had been standing by since the first attack. “Ground transport will be waiting for them in Barcelona.”
“Can I get an update here?” Brognola said.
Price walked to the screen and quickly summarized the rapid-fire chain of events. “We tracked down a specific picocell as the source of the calls going out. A picocell is a phone cell system. An office building might have one for dedicated mobile phone traffic. The hardware’s not large.”
“How large?” Brognola asked. “Would it need a dedicated IT room? Extra air-conditioning? That kind of thing?”
“No, Hal,” Kurtzman broke in, wheeling away from his desk. “The picocell itself, the operations and maintenance hardware, the base station, none of it’s bigger than a PC tower. The biggest piece would be a battery backup. That’s a 150-pound box, maybe.”
“Think they’ll buy the story about the power fluctuations?”
“If they have enough IT skill to look into the source of the problem, and not so much they analyze operational logs—maybe,” Kurtzman said.
“Or maybe they’ll play it safe and just burn it down. They’ll have backup phone systems,” Brognola said. He was staring at his own offscreen monitors. Barbara Price didn’t know what he was looking at. She would have time, soon enough, to assess the latest series of attacks.
“We’re working on tracing the destinations of the phone calls,” Kurtzman announced.
“I’m into the Mobile interface,” Tokaido announced. “I’m looking at the call traces.”
Kurtzman nodded. “Hunt?”
“We recorded some of the outgoing calls. This one to Chicago. It’s not voice. Sending commands to some sort of smartphone app. Pretty specific set of commands.”
“This is a call that went though?” Kurtzman asked.
“Yes.” Huntington Wethers turned to the big screen and brought up a computer map of Chicago, then zoomed in tight. “Right here,” he said.
“Railroad,” Kurtzman observed.
“Commuter rails have been hit heavily in the last ten minutes,” Brognola said. “Two commuter trains derailed in Chicago.”
“Mile southwest of the Metro Wrightwood station,” Wethers clarified.
“That’s one of them,” Brognola confirmed.
“We did intercept calls that did not go through,” Kurtzman stated, but there was a slight question in his voice.
“Yes,” Tokaido said. “Should I trace them?”
“How?” Schwarz said, suddenly alarmed.
“I gotta place a call.”
Silence.
“Several of the numbers are 703s,” Tokaido added.
“It appears—appears—that an app is used to ignite the devices. We’ll know more after we analyze this phone.” Kurtzman nodded at the phone on Tokaido’s desk—the one from the lab in Georgia.
“But it could be just the incoming call itself that does it?” Brognola asked loudly.
“Possible.”
“Allow any incoming call to start the ignition? That would be a foolish risk for the attackers to take,” Schwarz said.
“But not out of the question,” Price said.
“I’m calling this,” Brognola said. “I do know the risks. I know we could be setting off one of these devices. We must follow this lead.”
“You’re gambling,” Price said.
“I know,” Brognola shot back. “Make the call.”
Tokaido hit a key. The call went through. The ring came through the speakers on his monitor. It rang. And rang.
“Does that mean it didn’t detonate?” Brognola said.
“Maybe,” Kurtzman responded. All eyes were on Tokaido as he tracked the signal, hit an impasse, typed out commands and continued to track.
“Got it!”
“Here it comes,” Wethers said as he pulled up the map on the big screen. “It’s the rail line, short distance from Franconia/Springfield Station, in Springfield, Virginia.”
“Checking the emergency bands,” Carmen Delahunt said. “Police and fire are relatively quiet in that vicinity.”
“We’re your gophers,” Carl Lyons growled.
Price glanced at the time display. “Move fast.”
CHAPTER SIX
Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi zipped them on a straight-line northwest flight over Virginia. Grimaldi was another veteran staffer of Stony Man Farm, one of many recruited back when Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, targeted the Mafia. Grimaldi had been a Mafia pilot, but Bolan had convinced him to switch sides.
When Bolan’s efforts shifted from mobsters to terrorists, and when the covert agency now based at Stony Man Farm was assembled to coordinate the activities of Bolan and the teams of black-operations commandos he had recruited, Grimaldi was on board.
His toy for today was an MD-600N, a sweet piece of helicopter engineering from McDonnell Douglas. It was fast. It was quiet. It didn’t look military. In fact, Stony Man had nameplates at the ready to make it look like a news chopper or a local SWAT mover. Today, there was no logo. Nobody was supposed to be in the air—nobody. Around Washington, D.C., the no-fly zone was being enthusiastically enforced, and it took some quick behind-the-scenes work by the Farm before the Army UH-60 Black Hawk that was trying to force them to land got a cease-and-desist order.
Able Team exited the helicopter before the skids fully settled on the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse. Blancanales got behind the wheel of a black Explorer, a vehicle with run-flat tires, power-boosting accessories under the hood, and body panels that were designed to withstand bullets and shrapnel.
