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“What was it you went looking for?” McCarter asked as Ahmadi brought the little microbus back under control at last. The Iranian did not answer until he took several more turns, then looked back to make sure they were not being pursued.
“That,” he said at last, “was much closer than I might have liked.”
“Well?” McCarter asked again.
“My apologies,” Ahmadi said. He reached into his jacket and removed a device. It was a pair of wires connected to a small metal box. He handed it to McCarter, and the Briton put the box against the metal of the door frame on his side, watching it stick there.
“Magnetized.”
“It is a bug,” Ahmadi said. “We have had good success with that particular model. It is preferred to fit it somewhere there is electrical wiring, such as in light fixtures.”
“A bug?” McCarter asked.
“Yes,” Ahmadi confirmed. “There were far too few men at the safehouse. And we found weapons, but not nearly enough. Ovan’s terrorist network is much more advanced, much better equipped than this.”
“Offhand,” James said, “I think I’m glad there weren’t more of them in that particular room.”
“This I understand,” Ahmadi said. “But I do not think you realize what this means.”
“The room was bugged,” McCarter said. “Understood. But there’s nothing they can use against us. How does this line up with there being too few men present?”
“No.” Ahmadi shook his head, spinning the wheel as he took one hard turn, then another. “Iranian Internal Security, even Ovan’s terrorist network, they do not use this equipment. This is my equipment.”
“The bug is—” McCarter began.
“That is standard-issue CIA surveillance equipment,” Ahmadi said. “I have used its like many times. I have never seen this particular unit, nor am I aware of any success in attempting to bug this structure. It has always been too well-guarded for us to risk it. At least, that was my understanding.”
“So you didn’t put this here and you don’t know of anyone else who did,” McCarter said.
“Correct.” Ahmadi nodded.
“And you think our boys were tipped off to expect trouble and effected at least a partial evacuation of the premises?”
“Unless they have moved up their timetable, it is the only explanation. They may be deployed at the rallies, which means we will meet greater difficulty in attempting to safeguard Magham’s people and supporters from the terrorists. Or it may be another problem entirely. There may be a mole within the CIA.”
“Bloody hell,” McCarter said.
CHAPTER FOUR
Syracuse, New York
The local minor-league baseball team was featuring a promotional night when door prizes were offered to fans. Carl Lyons couldn’t tell what the door prize was as they neared, but he didn’t suppose that it mattered.
Grimaldi and the Chinook waited in the middle of a vacant parking lot for a nearby weekend market. Fortunately they had not yet drawn a crowd, but that was inevitable. Mindful of the huge crowd inside the stadium, however, the men of Able Team had opted to leave their long-arms in the chopper. Lyons was already going through shotgun withdrawal as they took the steps leading to the stadium two at a time. Schwarz was trying to be discreet with his scanner, but Lyons couldn’t see any point in trying to hide too much. There was no way they could pass off as normal what was essentially a raid on a civilian location.
“Lead on,” Lyons urged as Schwarz once more took the lead.
Lyons felt exposed and worried that Schwarz was especially vulnerable. He liked that phone in the hands of the dead terrorist even less. The Warlock network had indicated that signals were coming from this location, and Able Team had opted to investigate the stadium first because it offered huge target potential. If the terrorists had come and gone, leaving their bombs behind, it was just possible that the smart bombs hadn’t yet detonated and could be neutralized without a gun battle. Much as he hated the thought of the terrorists planting their bombs and escaping undetected, Lyons had to admit that it would be preferable not to start spraying bullets in the company of…how many people? The stadium looked like it easily held a few thousand as he ran his eyes over the vacant and occupied seats.
They’d flashed their Justice Department ID coming through the gates, and now security personnel in black polo shirts were wandering around nearby, obviously wondering what was going on. Lyons figured his team could afford to ignore them for now. As long as they didn’t get in the way and as long as nothing went boom, it hardly mattered if a few of the locals gave Able Team the stink eye as they passed.
As they moved from the upper decks to the lower, and then to some access areas that were on the basement level of the stadium, Lyons fought an uneasy feeling of being watched. He hoped it was just his imagination. But if he was that dying terrorist and he’d had a chance to make one last phone call before he died, wouldn’t he have tried to warn the others in his network? It only made sense. And if they had been warned, and they were on-site, there was no telling what they might have planned.
Screw it. Lyons was disgusted with himself even for spending so much time dwelling on it. No matter how dangerous the job, of course, he and Blancanales and Schwarz would do it. The idea of worrying about their own hides when American lives were at stake never even entered into the equation. It was just that he, as team leader, had to worry from time to time. He had to worry about what would happen if they failed in their mission. That was the one thing Stony Man Farm could never do: fail. They had lost battles before and the ugly reality was that they would lose them again. But they could not afford to lose the war. The war was why Lyons had given up any hope of a normal life to dedicate himself to Able Team and to the Farm. He knew his teammates shared his drive and had made the same sacrifices.
They had lost many good men and women getting to this point. And it was all worth it. They fought because they had to. They fought because their country needed them. They fought because predators, monsters, killers like Ovan’s terrorists, sought to murder innocent men, women and children, and there had to be warriors like the men and women of Stony Man Farm to stand between those killers and the rest of the world.
“This door is locked,” Schwarz said. He was facing a fire door. The corridor of the access level was getting smaller. Lyons couldn’t tell where it went, but it was probably used for maintenance purposes. “This padlock looks brand-new.” The chain on the doors was indeed bright and polished, while the rest of the metal on that level looked scuffed and slightly rusted.
“I have a key,” Lyons said. He planted his combat-booted foot against the door, hard. Then he kicked it again. Then he did it again.
“You’re not going to break the padlock like that, Carl,” Schwarz said dryly.
“Don’t care about the padlock,” Lyons grunted. He heard the shriek of metal on metal as something started go give. “Care about the hinges.”
The hinges gave. The door, which had never been designed to sustain such an onslaught, fell aside at an angle, hanging on twisted flanges. Lyons shoved it aside and then waved down the corridor.
“Why, thank you, sir,” Schwarz said with an exaggerated flourish.
“Shut up and find me a bomb,” Lyons growled.
At the end of the corridor, they found a cluster of machinery whose purpose Lyons couldn’t guess.
“Sprinkler system,” Schwarz said.
“Thought they used AstroTurf in all these stadiums,” Lyons argued.
“Don’t you ever use the web browser on your phone?” Schwarz teased, referring to the secure satellite phones they all carried. “Read up on your local history, Carl. This stadium has had real turf for a few years now.”
“And I’m very happy for them.” Lyons’s growl turned deeper. “Find me a frigging bomb.”
The bomb casings looked like the ones they had found in Ithaca, New York, and they were chained together through the suitcaselike handles in a cluster at the rear of the machinery.
“Pol, the door,” Lyons directed. “Cover our backs. I’ll keep an eye on Gadgets.”
“And I get bomb duty,” Schwarz said. He pressed the scanner he had used to track the bombs to each of the devices, running the scanner across each bomb in a constantly moving pattern.
“Can’t you do one after the other?” Lyons asked.
“I’d rather get them all moving toward neutralization at once,” Schwarz said. “It helps disrupt the processors so that if the bombs are, well, thinking of going off, they won’t.”
“Great,” Lyons said.
“These are fully activated,” Schwarz explained, “and they’ve almost completed their calibration cycles. We were lucky. These could have gone off down here and spread a toxic cloud through most of the stadium.” Not far above them, they could hear the roar of the crowd as the home team did something worth cheering. The music playing over the PA reverberated through the ceiling. Lyons could feel it in his chest.
“We’ve got company!” Blancanales shouted from the doorway.
“What?” Lyons asked.
“Hostiles!” Blancanales yelled. “Coming down the corridor!”
Lyons cursed under his breath. Well, there was one way to handle it.
“Come on!” he shouted to Blancanales. “Gadgets! Watch your ass!”
“Thanks for thinking of me!” Schwarz called after them.
Lyons pulled his Colt Python from its shoulder holster. Blancanales, understanding the bold play the Able Team leader was running, raised his own weapon. Lyons just needed to verify that they weren’t staring down some errant security guards or even local police called to see what the hell was going on.
A pistol fired in their direction. Lyons could feel the bullet pass his face.
There was a knot of men moving down the corridor, all of them armed with handguns. Lyons could see one particularly large man behind the others. They were shouting to each other in something that almost sounded like Russian to Lyons’s ears; it was like the voice he had heard on the phone. It was probably Turkmen, and that meant that these men were Ovan’s operatives. It also meant they’d been lying in wait for Able Team, and that was very, very bad.
Forward, toward the danger. That was the only way.
Lyons roared, flattened himself against the wall of the corridor and started shooting.
The boom of the .357 Magnum rounds was deafening in the corridor. His first shots took out one, then another terrorist, and his crazed charge broke the enemy’s forward momentum. They had thought they were cornering their quarry. They had thought that, while the men they had waited to kill or capture weren’t helpless, they were at least at a disadvantage.
Lyons made his own advantages.
Screaming like madmen, the two Able Team soldiers continued to press their charge. Each time Lyons reloaded his Colt Python, Blancanales picked up the slack with his Beretta, filling the corridor with 9 mm destruction.
The tide turned. The men coming down the corridor began to back up, then broke, then fled. Lyons and Blancanales pursued. Foremost in Lyons’s mind was the fact that Schwarz was back there by himself, trying to defuse bombs that could kill thousands of people if he didn’t succeed. They had to make sure nothing interfered with that. They would have to shield Schwarz with their own bodies, if necessary.
Another man fell to a bullet. There were several ricochets around them, and Lyons ducked, taking a round in the arm that had expended most of its energy bouncing from the corridor wall. He gritted his teeth against the pain. There was some blood, but it didn’t feel as if the slug had penetrated very far.
Then all of the shooters were down, except one. He turned as if to run, and Blancanales tackled him.
Or he tried.
As he hit the big man’s legs, Blancanales realized that their opponent was almost a giant. He had to crouch to avoid scraping his head on the top of the corridor, and he seemed almost as broad through the shoulders as Blancanales was tall. The giant grunted as Blancanales hit his legs…and then he straightened, reaching around with one grizzly-bear-size palm to grab the back of Blancanales’s head. He threw Blancanales into the corridor then, and the Able Team warrior went slack, knocked out cold.
The gun that came up in the giant’s fist looked like a toy. There was an audible click as the hammer of the 1911-pattern .45 automatic failed to fire. It wasn’t locked back, but Lyons wasn’t going to wonder what gods of fate had prompted this misfire. He pulled the trigger of his Colt Python.
It clicked. He was empty.
The giant roared in laughter then, his whole body shaking. He had a lion’s mane of naturally curly black hair framing a face that could have been chipped from granite. Strangely piercing blue eyes stared out from his craggy face, and Lyons recognized that look. This was one of the two brothers mentioned at the briefing. This was Karbuly Ghemenizov, son of Nikolo Ovan and leader of Ovan’s terror network here in the United States.
Ghemenizov wasted no words. He threw himself at Lyons, the sheer weight of the man knocking the former L.A. cop onto his back. The Python skittered across the floor. The second he hit the corridor, Lyons understood the lethal danger. Going to the ground with a larger opponent like this was a sure way to get killed. If Ghemenizov mounted him and started to pound him with those ham-size fists, he would never get up again.
Lyons brought his feet up, scooting to one side, keeping his feet between Ghemenizov and himself. He fired several vicious kicks from that position, several times catching Ghemenizov painfully in the shins. The giant roared, then simply waded through the defense of Lyons’s legs. Lyons’s had just enough time to roll to the side to avoid being pinned when Ghemenizov landed on the floor of the corridor.
He was not fast enough to escape. The big terrorist grabbed him and hooked an arm around his neck. Lyons ducked through that, going for the crook of the elbow, escaping before the giant could apply pressure. That was the only thing that saved his life.
He wriggled free and managed to get to his feet as the giant also rose, still on top of him. Then a fist the size of a small moon was rocketing toward him. He tried to bring up his arm to block and felt the fist smash right past his guard and into his face. The blow bounced him off the wall of the narrow access corridor. Stars exploded in his vision and bright spots swam in front of his eyes.
One of his martial-arts instructors had once counseled him, “Never celebrate the hit.” It was the sensei’s way of telling him not to waste time reacting to a blow, no matter how painful. The appropriate response to being hit was to hit back harder.
Lyons fired a punch with everything he had. He felt as if he’d struck a brick wall, but he put all his power behind it anyway, following through with every fiber of his being. Ghemenizov howled and actually rocked back slightly.
Lyons didn’t know how much damage he was doing and didn’t care. Half blind, he began punching and kicking, throwing knees and round kicks and elbow strikes, anything and everything he could summon. He mixed in ax-hand strikes and hammer fists, too, fighting for his life, driving back the monster who towered over him.
He felt something give in the big man’s torso, possibly a rib.
With a bellow of inhuman fury, Ghemenizov started to drive Lyons back. He fought with little technique, using his natural strength and ferocity, but this he had in abundance. Lyons felt the shock wave of every blow as the giant hammered away at him. Then, as he reeled under the onslaught, he heard the giant speak.
“You wonder, don’t you,” Ghemenizov whispered, his accent sounding like nothing so much as thickly Russian. “You wonder why I waited. Why I watched you tamper with my little bombs. I know you stopped the bombs in the little market. We were warned. I wanted to see. I like to see my foes, see who dares to challenge me, before I crush them.”
Then he was done talking, apparently. Ghemenizov grabbed Lyons, now dazed, by the throat with one hand, wrapping his fingers in the leather of Lyons’s bomber jacket with the other. He started squeezing, and Lyons could only hammer away ineffectually at the big man’s arms. He tried to reach for the tactical folding knife he kept clipped to his pants’ pocket, but he could not find it; it had apparently been dislodged during the struggle.
“You are very strong,” the giant said in his ear, still squeezing.
Lyons could feel his vision start to go gray around the edges. Black spots replaced the bright blobs he had seen before.
“I like a good fight. You have given me one. But you, like everyone who faces me, have lost. I enjoy making people lose. I enjoy hurting them. I have enjoyed hurting you.”
He threw Lyons to the floor, and the big cop felt the floor strike his face with unyielding finality. Some part of his mind could picture Ghemenizov raising a large foot to stomp him. A man like this would relish stomping on a fallen enemy.
Schwarz would have been able to deactivate the bombs by now. He and Blancanales would be able to continue the fight. He, Carl Lyons, would not be the first Stony Man warrior to fall in the line of duty, at the hands of a brutal foe.
He only regretted that he would not be able to complete the mission and destroy Ovan’s network—
The shots, when they came, sounded strangely distant. Lyons realized then that he was hearing the triple bursts of Schwarz’s Beretta 93-R. He faded for a moment, then came back, then faded again. Finally he opened his eyes and looked up at the face of Hermann Schwarz.
“Oh, thank God,” Schwarz said. “I thought I was going to have to give you mouth to mouth.”
Blancanales’s face came into view. He looked sheepish. “Come on, Ironman. We’ve got to keep moving.”
“Did you get him?”
“No,” Schwarz said. “He got away. With you and Pol both down I didn’t dare go after him and leave you and the bombs unattended.”
“It was…Karbuly Ghemenizov. Head of their terror network here. Should have…gone after him.”
“And let your brains leak out all over this floor?” Schwarz said with a half grin. “Not likely, Carl. Come on. We’ve got to get the deactivated bombs back to the chopper.”
“Police?”
“Not coming unless somebody thought we should have paid at the gate,” Schwarz said. “The noise down here was probably nothing like gunfire to the folks upstairs.” They could still hear the music and cheering of the game above.
“You saved my life,” Lyons said.
“Pol’s, too,” Schwarz said. “I keep reminding him.”
“Help me up,” Lyons said.
His teammates helped the big blond cop get to his feet.
