STONY MAN

Of all the intelligence that reaches the Oval Office, none is more top secret than the existence of a group of warriors that officially...doesn’t exist. Stony Man is the President’s ultimate weapon, a covert, rapid-response antiterrorist team not bound by official rules of engagement. When Stony Man is deployed, time is of the essence and only hard, direct action counts.

DEATH SLICK

Oil lies at the heart of a series of devastating attacks targeting pipelines and tankers on three different seas. Oil and vengeance, that is, as an embittered Norwegian vows payback for the black gold extracted from his family’s territories. And he makes good on that promise by using simple cell phone calls to trigger remote-detonated, devastating nano-thermite incendiaries strategically planted around the world. As nations race to contain massive spills, Stony Man faces the mother of all do-or-die missions. And the President must risk his office and the covert team on a desperate one-shot offensive to dispatch this threat before the global crisis becomes a total meltdown.

“Oh, no,” groaned Akira Tokaido. “It’s an MUA.”

Multiple Unresponsive Aircraft. The Farm’s own internal acronym for the alert.

The phone shrilled at Kurtzman’s elbow and at the same time a new alarm went off on his computer. And then another.

“Bear?” Barbara Price was on the phone. “Are you seeing what’s happening in China?”

“China?” He scanned the next alert. It reported a large-scale oil pipeline break. His brain tried to play catch-up. Multiple aircraft—and then an oil pipeline?

“What the hell is that?” demanded Tokaido, standing at Kurtzman’s shoulder and stabbing a finger at a list of numbers on the screen. “I wrote this routine. Why the hell don’t I get what it’s showing?” Tokaido liked his world of iron-fisted cybernetics control. There was nothing worse than when one of his own apps went rogue.

“No,” Kurtzman said. “It’s working.”

“Then what is that?” There were six items on the screen. Then there were seven.

“Pipeline breaches. Each a different one.”

Tokaido glared at the computer. Of course he’d programmed the thing to display multiple catastrophic oil pipeline breaches, should they ever happen simultaneously. He’d just never dreamed that would ever happen.

“Talk to me, Bear,” Price snapped. “I’m on my way. Do you see what’s happening in China or not?”

Kurtzman paused. “Everywhere but,” he replied grimly.

Incendiary Dispatch

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Tim Somheil for his contribution to this work.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

The gunner stood alongside the open archway, ears tuned to the subtle sound of movement on the linoleum floor. The sound stopped. His enemy was hesitating. That hesitation, the gunner thought, would cost him his life. He twisted his body into the opening, already hanging on to the trigger of the Heckler & Koch MP-7. The rounds ate into the wallboard and bounced off the floor. But then the gunner laid his eyes on the source of the noise—an office chair rolling slowly in his direction. His final four rounds slammed into the padded back, and the office chair reversed direction as if kicked.

His enemy had vanished and his gun was empty. Very amateur, he thought. Could you tell it was his first time with a machine gun?

The amateur machine-gunner spun back into the cover behind the wall and grabbed for a spare magazine, but then he saw the shadows move and a heartbeat later his chest collapsed in on itself.

The amateur machine-gunner didn’t feel the pain but he felt the damage. Internal organs were mutilated, and blood cascaded from his chest. The sound of the blast seemed meaningless.

Then came his enemy, across the room, his face revealed in the glow of light from an exit sign. Blond hair and blue eyes. Cold eyes. The gunner knew he had been outmatched from the beginning.

He was sinking to his knees. He was as good as dead. Was it an honor or a mark of shame that he had been executed with a single shot?

“One shot,” he said, then toppled onto his face, surrounded by blood.

“What was that about?” There was another man in the shadows, and the gunner, now dead, hadn’t even known he was there.

“He was admiring my efficient use of ammo,” Carl Lyons answered. The large blond figure crouched to pat down the corpse.

“Meanwhile he wastes a bunch of rounds offing this fine piece of ergonomic Broyhill furniture,” said Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz, a slim man in wire-rimmed glasses.

Lyons came up with a cell phone and a thin wallet. He tucked them away for later examination and followed his partner into the next section of the lab.

Schwarz heard someone coming, approaching with quick, light steps. These guys, Schwarz decided, weren’t that good. This one was heading for the sound of the gunfire, and felt safe approaching from behind a steel fire door.

Schwarz quickly reviewed the people occupying the building. Himself, Carl Lyons and one more teammate, Rosario Blancanales. One company president sprawled dead in his own executive offices on the top floor. One intruder killed by Lyons.

That left two more intruders unaccounted for.

The approaching footsteps didn’t sound like Blancanales. Schwarz waited as the man reached the other side of the fire door, paused, then pulled it open slowly. The door was silent. And it was heavy-duty steel. It should have protected the intruder.

But it didn’t. Schwarz gave the door an abrupt shove. He heard the steel clatter against the gun in the intruder’s hand. He heard the clonk of a skull hitting the door, then the sound of a body bouncing against the painted cinder-block wall.

Schwarz slammed his foot into the door, crushing the body behind it, then nudged away the submachine gun that clattered from a limp hand. He reached around the door and dragged out the intruder, who had enough life left in him to struggle a little. Schwarz walked the attacker back to join his partner and sent the broken man crashing to the floor with his face in the expanding pool of the dead man’s blood.

The attacker sputtered and retched as his wrists and ankles were bound in plastic restraints. Then he was wrenched by one arm and landed hard on his back. He gasped for air, inhaling more of his dead companion’s lifeblood. That stopped when a large, compact wad of paper was forced into his mouth, wedging it open, and he wheezed around it.

The slim, unassuming man standing over him put a finger to his lips and pressed the business end of a Beretta 92-A1 into the man’s blood-smeared face. The man nodded, now very interested in cooperating.

* * *

ONE FLOOR UP, Blancanales paused to listen. The gunfire and the commotion of a quick take-down had come from directly below where he was standing.

“Two down,” said the voice of Carl Lyons through a microtransceiver in his ear.

Blancanales didn’t respond. Two down meant only one to go, which had to be the nervous-looking figure who had just retreated into a corner at the far end of the hall, where a protruding brick wall gave the man some cover. It also made him more vulnerable to unseen approach.

Blancanales stepped out of the blackness of his own shadowy alcove in the lab hallway and moved forward carefully. Despite a head of gray hair he had the agility and grace of a young man and moved silently.

But he didn’t need to. His prey was cowering in the darkness, speaking in hushed whispers to someone on a radio or phone.

The man never heard Rosario Blancanales approach on the other side of the protective wall and eavesdrop on his conversation.

Blancanales was a former Black Beret, highly trained, well-educated in a broad scope of esoteric subjects that, for whatever reason, might be useful in a black ops situation. That included languages. Blancanales was fluent in a few and functional enough in many to order a taxi in most parts of the world. But he didn’t recognize the language that the man on the other side of the brick wall was shouting into his cell phone. Something Scandinavian. Whatever the man was saying, he was getting more agitated by the second. Then he was pleading. “Nie! Nie!”

Blancanales knew those words without knowing the language they came from. He was saying “No! No!” And he was practically begging with the person on the other end of the line.

Blancanales didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t know why these men were here or what their purpose was. And he knew they weren’t exceptionally skilled intruders. Blancanales didn’t feel like he was in an especially dangerous situation—

Until now. Suddenly there was a knot of dread sitting in his gut. Something bad was about to happen.

Whatever it was, maybe he could stop it.

Blancanales slipped around the corner of the brick wall. The intruder’s combat shotgun was tucked uselessly under one arm, the cell phone in the other hand. The look on his face was one of sheer terror, but the terror had nothing to do with the unexpected arrival of Rosario Blancanales.

Blancanales disabled the man with a knee-shattering kick. The shotgun clattered away. The man collapsed and grabbed at the useless leg. Blancanales kicked the man’s right hand, shattering fingers, further damaging the knee. The man was groaning and sobbing until Blancanales demanded his attention by securing his shattered hand to his good one in a plastic cuff.

The soft-spoken Hispanic could be amazingly commanding when he needed to be. The Beretta handgun helped.

“Talk to me.”

The man was hyperventilating. A question came from the fallen cell phone.

The wounded intruder shouted at the phone.

The display showed the call had been disconnected. The intruder’s eyes widened and he forced himself onto his stomach and began crawling for the stairwell entrance.

Whatever was about to happen, this man considered it worse than the chance of being shot in the back by Rosario Blancanales.

Blancanales touched his transceiver. “Lyons! Schwarz! Get the fuck—”

He heard what sounded like a hiss, but loud as thunder, and the stairwell at the other end of the hallway filled with impossibly brilliant orange and the air distorted from the heat waves that rushed at Blancanales with immense speed. He ducked for cover behind the brick jut-out and let the tsunami of convection pass him. The atmosphere became so hot that his skin burned.

But the worst of the heat wave was gone. The intruder was a pathetic, broken thing crawling down the stairs and Blancanales let him go. He rushed down the hall, to the stairs that had filled with brilliance and become dark again. The air became hotter with every step he took.

“Carl, copy! Schwarz!”

No response.

“Stony, I can’t raise them. We’ve got trouble. Some sort of explosive.”

“Understood,” said the calm voice of mission controller Barbara Price. “Carmen’s trying to raise them.”

“Heading into the blast source,” Blancanales reported. “Damned hot.” He thundered down the stairs, trying to make sense of the ovenlike heat and the lack of a flame. He’d expected a firestorm.

“Lyons? Gadgets?” Blancanales found a fallen weapon, one of the intruders’ combat shotguns. Just beyond it was the scene where the burning seemed to have started. Two intruder corpses were on the ground, cooked black, their clothes incinerated. The cadavers were pocked with deep, smoking craters. The room was in flames—plastic furniture, the wallboard, even the steel cabinets appeared to have already melted and sagged. Blancanales felt as if he was cooking in his own skin. He looked into all the corners, searching for his teammates.

“No sign of them yet, Stony,” Blancanales announced.

“No response,” replied the cool female voice in his ear.

“Lyons! Gadgets, damn it!” Blancanales shouted. He raced to the far side of the room. It was one of the omnipresent steel fire doors.

And it was burning.

He shouldered through it, into the next section of the labs.

“Lyons!” Blancanales demanded of the roaring fire. Hungry flames were growing fat on shelves of stored paperwork. The heat was almost unbearable. The floor was covered with smoking, foot-wide craters. What were those all about?

Rosario Blancanales was suddenly angry. What the hell was going on here? Who the hell were these amateur intruders and what kind of freakish explosion had just gone off?

And where had Lyons and Schwarz been at the time of the explosion?

His arrived at another steel fire door. Why the hell were the fire doors freaking burning? Blancanales knew what an incendiary grenade did—spit out molten metal bits that burned through anything they touched. This was way more than a few incendiary grenades. There were streaks of burning steel.

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.

And with all the money he’d just earned for himself, he’d have lots of free time.

London

THOMAS HAMMIL WAS TAKING a risk and he knew it. But if he pulled it off, the payoff would be huge. And he’d be out of this stinking job and out of stinking London and they could all go to hell.

He’d given them a lot of his life and got nothing back.

He’d given to his country. He’d served in the Royal navy, but they’d tossed him out like he was garbage—no money and no rank.

His mates, the boys he’d known since his school days, looked down their noses at him ever since he’d come home from his military stint. They said they believed his version of the story, but they’d been cool toward him. Every once in a while they’d been into their pints and one of them would say something sort of snidelike, and then Hammil would know they really didn’t believe his side of the story at all.

Clara? He couldn’t even remember why he’d married her. She was a shrew, that one. He’d spent seventeen years living in the same disgusting little row house with that woman and he couldn’t take another day of it.

He hated them. The lot of them. He hated bloody England and he hated this bloody company. Been with this bloody company eighteen years and him doing the same job today as when he’d started. Hammil was bossed around by a bunch of little turds ten years younger than him. And just lately somebody had been passing around a printout of one of the little turd’s pay stubs. The little turd—his direct supervisor—was making twice what Hammil did.

BirnBari Expediting Services should have been paying Hammil that kind of money. Hammil should have been getting a check from the Royal Navy all these years. Hammil should have had a wife who wasn’t a sow and a home that wasn’t a pigsty and mates who didn’t call him Hammy to his face—and worse things behind his back.

One thing he had gotten for all his years with BirnBari Expediting Services was a lock on the head expediter position. Not that he got to tell any of the other expediters what to do. He wasn’t a boss. Just highest on the seniority list. What it boiled down to was his pick of the shifts and four thousand pounds per year more than the regular expediters. Not much.

And the company trusted him. He’d done his job right for eighteen years without any major screwups. Nobody watched him anymore. Nobody checked his work.

The whistle told the crew it was lunchtime and the young ones began wandering off of the floor.

“They’re buying us lunch today, Hammil,” reminded one of the other expediters.

“Not for me,” Hammil said, and patted his stomach. For weeks he had been complaining of stomach problems and he’d been skipping meals. His coworkers had been telling him to see a doctor. The playacting had worked. They were used to his skipping meals now. Nobody thought anything strange about it—even on the one day of the month when the company paid the food tab at the pub next door.

Hammil was alone in the large distribution room.

He kept working like normal for several minutes. Just in case somebody forgot something and came back for it. Or whatever. Nobody did. The big warehouse got a kind of feel to it when it was empty of people. The sounds became bigger, in a way.

Hammil darted to the rear, peered out the back and found the lot empty. It took him less than fifteen seconds to retrieve a cardboard box from the trunk of his old Nissan. Then he was back inside. He stopped and listened. No sound. He was still alone. He spent another thirty seconds stuffing items from the box onto the shelves, then he ripped up the box and crammed it into the trash.

He was doing it all the way it was supposed to be done. Exactly the way they had told him to do it.

Next he began making his rounds again. He drove his cart up and down the aisles, grabbing items off the shelves per the manifest in his hand. It was for a cargo flight to Istanbul, leaving at 6:05 in the evening. Hammil knew the flight times by heart, and he knew it was three hours, forty-five minutes to Istanbul.

He had been instructed to follow some very simple rules when choosing the flights. They had to have a scheduled takeoff between six and eight in the evening. They had to be nonstop flights. They had to be three hours or longer.

This one was perfect.

Next came another cargo flight. Departure: 6:45. To Moscow. Again, an ideal fit. One of the packages went into the shipping crate for the Moscow flight.

The packages were in BirnBari Expediting Services boxes. They had official BirnBari bar-coded labels. Inside each box was an identical set of items: a cell phone, nail clippers, an expensive electric toothbrush, two new white button-down shirts, two tasteful silk ties and a bulky tablet computer. It was the kind of package some well-to-do travelers preshipped when they went on a trip to save them time going through security at the airport. If somebody opened this package and glanced at the contents, he’d see nothing alarming.

But the tablet wasn’t what it seemed to be. And it was plugged into the cell phone. And both the cell phone and the tablet computer were in sleep mode. If one of the boxes was opened and the contents examined closely, it would definitely raise suspicion.

Hammil had to hope and pray that wouldn’t happen. And there was no reason it should. BirnBari Expediting Services had a stellar security reputation. Hammil had never been considered a security risk.

The next flight on the manifest was to Paris. Too short. He loaded the cargo crate without adding one of his special packages. The next one was to Glasgow. No way.

The next was to Delhi. It was a passenger jet. A nine-hour flight departing at 7:30 p.m. Christ, it was an A380. You could cram more than five hundred passengers into one of those monsters. He swallowed hard. For the very first time, Hammil began thinking about the true repercussions of what he was doing.

But he loaded up the shipping crate anyway, adding his own special package, and carted the crate to the loading dock, sealed and ready for the aircraft.

Hammil packed nine more crates by the time the day shift began returning from lunch. Six crates had his special packages. Three of those were for passenger flights.

Which left at least six of his special packages still on the shelves in the big warehouse at BirnBari Expediting Services.

Hammil had been instructed carefully. He had been informed that there would almost certainly be more packages than he could ship out. As long as he shipped out most of them, he shouldn’t worry about it.

But now he was worried about it.

“Hammil!” It was one of the young guys on the day crew. Just some brainless bloke with a girlfriend and a bad complexion. “You look like hell! You feel okay?”

Hammil got off the cart and leaned with his hands on his knees. He was supposed to act sick. But he didn’t need to act at all.

“Hey, you want a drink of water or something?”

They were gathering around him now. The blokes on the day crew. Including the young turd who managed the shift.

“Your stomach acting up again, Hammil?” The shift manager, in his tie and jacket, was crouched next to him, looking at him worriedly. “You need a doctor.”

“I’m okay.” But his arms were shaking. That wasn’t a part of his act. “Need to lie down.”

“Take the rest of the day, but only promise me you’ll set up an appointment with a doctor already.”

“Yeah. All right.” He stood. He wavered a little. They were all gathered around him. There were thirteen of them. There were still six of his packages left on the shelves in this very room.

“You need to go to the hospital,” said one of the faces.

“I’m okay. Really.”

“How about I drive him home?”

“Fine,” said the shift manager.

“No. I’ll drive myself. I’m not that bad off.” The thought occurred to him that this lot would be gone in the late afternoon. An entirely different bunch of guys would be working this evening, in the room with the packages. These guys would be at home or at the pub or—somewhere else.

Which did make him feel just a bit better.

The shift manager was still walking with him as he got into his car. “I’ll be fine. I’ll call for an appointment.”

He drove away, and the more distance he put between himself and BirnBari Expediting Services the less awful he felt. Everything had gone smoothly, except for a brief case of nerves. If only he had time to stop for a pint—but that would have to wait until later.

He didn’t go home. He would never see his pigsty row house or his miserable Clara again.

He took the M11 out of London and never looked back.

* * *

LEWIS CHARD HAD NEVER earned so much money for so little work.

Fourteen devices placed on six cars and eight homes, all belonging to employees of BirnBari Expediting Services.

The homes were no problem. He didn’t need to break into them, just get close enough to deliver the device. A few miserable dogs yapped at him when he crept up in the middle of the night. If the miserable dogs woke any of the homeowners, they’d find nothing suspicious. Chard was away in seconds.

Putting the devices on the cars was riskier, but his contacts had told him exactly when the cars would be unattended. Apparently lunch would be paid for by the company today. Chard was told to wait for the shift to go to lunch, and then wait for one last bloke to step outside to get something out of his car. Chard didn’t ask questions, although it seemed an odd bit of staging.

So, sure enough, the shift workers went to the pub next door, then one fellow darted out the back door and grabbed something from the back of his car. After that, Chard put a device on all six cars without delay. The devices were magnetized. They were primed. The LEDs were green.

Lewis Chard was driving away from London before the lunch shift was half done.

He considered the fact that one of the cars he had rigged belonged to the man who had ducked out the back. The car had also been parked at one of the row houses that he had rigged with a device the night before.

Whoever had arranged this whole affair really wanted that one guy dead.

Qingdao, China

ZHANG JEI DUCKED into the park off of Xilingxia Road and sprinted through the darkness. The night was black. There was no reason for security this far away from the city center, the seaports or the airports.

His reef walker shoes were in his pants’ pocket. He pulled them on, then removed his slacks and shirt. He was wearing a wetsuit underneath. He stuffed his clothing and city shoes into his backpack and stepped into the cold waters of the bay.

The backpack floated behind as he paddled patiently into the blackness. There was no water traffic in this area. Too many rocks this close to the shore.

The illuminated face of his TomTom waterproof GPS unit led him effortlessly to the Farallon MK-8. The neutrally buoyant DPV—diver propulsion vehicle—was fully charged.

It started with a touch and hummed with power, like a sea snake. It was black aluminum and weighed almost 130 pounds with the battery.

The battery was key. Zhang had a lot of distance to cover before sunrise. The MK-8 had fantastic range—three miles. That was more than enough.

Silently, in darkness, he let the DPV pull him through the waters of Jiaozhou Bay, toward Berth 62.

Zhang Jei considered himself to be an extremely lucky man. He had been at the right place at the right time with the rare combination of attributes needed for this particular task. They’d needed someone skilled in stealth diving and DPV use. Someone who didn’t have qualms about a long-distance solo operation. Someone who had demonstrated a certain degree of ruthlessness.

Zhang Jei was all those things. Trained by the People’s Liberation Army navy for out-of-area operations, he had been part of the insertion teams on the Somalia shores that had successfully taken out a group of pirates preying on Chinese cargo ships. He’d earned a medal for it.

Then came the operation in North Korea. He’d been part of a three-man nighttime insertion—two divers and an army sniper. To this day Zhang Jei didn’t know the identity of the North Korean official they were supposed to have killed, or why—only that the man had somehow become a severe hindrance to effective Chinese/North Korean relations.

But the mission went all to hell. The sniper missed. Twice. The man was just sitting there in a parked military jeep and still the sniper missed.

Before a third shot could be fired the North Korean target had been hustled into hiding and twenty North Korean special forces operatives were in pursuit of the Chinese sniper team.

The sniper surrendered to the North Koreans. Maybe he thought the People’s Republic would negotiate his return. The other diver found himself surrounded by special forces operatives and shot himself in the head. It was a wise choice, in Zhang’s opinion, knowing that sniper would have endured months of torture and questioning before ending up just as dead.

Zhang had made it back to the shore and into the water and then he’d just swam. He’d come ashore at dawn and collapsed in a stand of vegetation near a noisy little factory village. Throughout the daylight hours he’d been roused from unconsciousness by the occasional screech of bending metal. That night he’d stolen into a shabby building and eaten putrid food, then taken to the ocean again.

It had taken him days to work his way up the coast, moving ever slower as his energy waned. He’d spent his last two nights on a makeshift float and kicked relentlessly across the tide.

The North Koreans patrolled the waters, but one man, in the water at night, could sneak through their guard. When the virtual wall of North Korean ships was behind him, Zhang Jei knew he was back in China.

But as far as China was concerned, he was dead. They had abandoned him. He would abandon them, as well. They had trained him to survive and thrive in darkness and secrecy, and he would make the most of it.

By the time he had wandered into Qingdao he had murdered three men and stolen their identities, as well as enough cash to live a comfortable lifestyle. His fourth victim was the most carefully chosen. A traveling man, recently widowed, no family, with a little inherited money. Nobody would miss him. That man had been the real Zhang Jei, but now the corpse of the real Zhang Jei was disintegrating in the East China Sea.

He had operated in the vicinity, taking on some dirty jobs for local officials and local drug organizations. Just enough to provide a comfortable income without making any unwanted alliances. It was learned that he was skilled at killing.

The job tonight was his biggest paycheck yet. He could live on the profits for a year or more.

If the man who now went by the name Zhang Jei was afraid of ghosts, he would have been worried about the decomposing corpse of the real Zhang Jei coming up and snatching him by the ankle.

But the man now known as Zhang Jei didn’t care about ghosts. Even if they did exist, no animated corpse could move as fast as the DPV.

* * *

BERTH 62 WAS FAR OUT into Jiaozhou Bay. It was a mechanical island large enough to dock an oil tanker up to 280,000 deadweight tonnage. It had four off-loading arms and pumped out huge volumes of crude oil. Still, for a ship like the Northern Aurora, it could take days to get in, get unloaded and get out of port.

She was a VLCC, a Very Large Crude Carrier. She was unexceptional in her class, one of about five hundred VLCCs plowing the world’s oceans. Still, any vessel capable of carrying two million barrels of oil was impressively large when seen from the waterline.

The massive shape loomed over Zhang Jei, but he couldn’t afford to admire it. He had a job to do. He floated on his back and removed the first device, placing it against the hull of the Northern Aurora. He dipped the device in the ocean to wet the foam backing, then pressed the foam to the hull and applied pressure. The foam cells burst and the encapsulated cyanoacrylate adhesive reacted with the water. In seconds, it was stuck in place. And it was never coming off.

The green LED inside waterproof plastic casing told Zhang Jei that the electronics were operational.

He swam along the hull, towing the DPV, making no sound loud enough to alert the security guard on the deck far above him. None of the bay patrol craft came close enough to spot a black-suited man in the black water alongside a black ship’s hull.

He put the second device in place 141 feet from the first one, and then a third. It wasn’t difficult, but he was careful. Soon all six devices were in place. Zhang Jei pulled a last phone from the pack—a waterproofed satellite phone. He dialed the number he had never dialed before.

He didn’t know who had hired him. He didn’t know why they wanted to sink the Northern Aurora. All he knew was that they had put a quarter-million dollars in his bank account already, and were obliged to pay him that much again when the job was done.

“Are they in place?” The man spoke English.

“They are,” Zhang Jei said.

“Wait,” the man said.

Zhang Jei didn’t wish to wait.

Then the man said, “We see a problem. One of the units is not responding.”

“Which one?”

“Do you want the serial number on the device?” the man demanded. “I can provide that if you think it will somehow help you determine which one of the six is not responding. Did you in fact note the serial numbers on the devices as you were placing them?”

Zhang Jei felt chagrined. He had asked a stupid question.

But he was feeling something else, too.

Maybe the question hadn’t been the stupidest thing he had done this day.

Ramvik, Norway

THE YOUNG MAN muted the phone and gave Olan Ramm a wicked grin.

“Zhang, finally?” Ramm demanded. He was a blond, emaciated man with a cadaverous face.

When the young man spoke he sounded like British gentry. “He’s only three minutes late. He’s all done.”

“Then we are all done,” Ramm said, feeling almost euphoric.

“All done. All in place. Nothing left to do except make some phone calls,” the young British man said.

“Let’s make them, then,” Ramm said.

The young man unmuted his telephone.

Qingdao, China

“THE PROBLEM SEEMS to have righted itself. Thanks so much for your services, Mr. Zhang.”

Zhang saw the connection get cut. The screen went dead. And Zhang knew he had made a very bad mistake. He grabbed the control handle on the MK-8 and started the motor. It pulled him away from the Northern Aurora at full speed. Which wasn’t going to be fast enough.

Ramvik, Norway

IT WAS 4:03 P.M. in Northeastern Vermont.

It was 9:03 p.m. in London.

It was 5:03 a.m. in Qingdao, China.

It was 10:03 p.m. in Ramvik when Olan Ramm made the most anticipated phone call of his life.

CHAPTER FOUR

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

He was a powerful-looking man, even confined to a wheelchair. Aaron Kurtzman was the top cybernetics expert at Stony Man Farm, and as such he was tapped into a dizzying array of electronic intelligence feeds. His fingers moved deftly over a wireless keyboard.

One of those feeds had just beeped at him. He had hundreds of alerts programmed into the system, but this one he recognized.

So did the Japanese man at a nearby terminal. The alert had played over his earbuds, interrupting the music. “Oh, no,” groaned Akira Tokaido. “It’s an MUA.”

Multiple Unresponsive Aircraft was their internal acronym for the alert.

Their dynamic search routines assessed all the data coming into the Farm, looking for patterns, any sign of trouble. Any unresponsive aircraft could signal trouble, but the truth was that aircraft went unresponsive every day. A bad radio, a storm, a flight crew in an animated discussion about yesterday’s game—anything could cause an aircraft to be unresponsive for a little while. Stony Man Farm’s MUA alert didn’t trigger when just one aircraft went unresponsive somewhere in the world.

But when there were several at once, it demanded immediate attention. If they’d only been able to track MUAs in 2001….

“Airbus out of Heathrow, en route to New Delhi,” Kurtzman said out loud as he sped through the feeds highlighted by the alert. “Cargo flight out of Heathrow to Istanbul.”

“Cargo flight, LHR to MOW,” Tokaido announced. LHR was Heathrow, MOW was Moscow. “Passenger, LHR to CPT.”

CPT was Cape Town. And again out of Heathrow. Somebody had just exploited a huge hole in Heathrow security….

“Passenger!” Tokaido blurted. “CDG to SXM!”

It took an extra second for that to register. Vacationers to St. Maarten—out of Paris. Kurtzman felt sick. Then his own screen showed him a new window. Passenger. MIA-GIG.

“Miami!” he shouted. “That’s a GPS tracking beacon response failure.”

Kurtzman wished every aircraft on the planet was equipped with a device like that, constantly transmitting its exact location. The truth was, most aircraft had beacons that didn’t go off until there was trouble. And sometimes the trouble happened too fast for the technology to activate.

The phone shrilled at Kurtzman’s elbow and at the same time a new alarm went off on his screen.

And then another.

“Aaron?” Barbara Price was on the phone. “Are you seeing what’s happening in China?”

“China?”

He scanned the next alert. It reported a large-scale oil pipeline break. His brain tried to play catch-up. Multiple aircraft—and then an oil pipeline?

“What the hell is that?” demanded Tokaido, now standing at Kurtzman’s shoulder and stabbing a finger at a list of numbers on the screen.

“I wrote this routine. Why the hell don’t I get what it’s showing?” Tokaido liked his world of iron-fisted cybernetics control. There was nothing worse than when one of his own apps went rogue.

“No,” Kurtzman said. “It’s working.”

“Then what is that?” There were six items on the screen. Then there were seven.

“Pipeline breaches. Each is a different one.”

Tokaido glared at the computer. Of course he had programmed the thing to display multiple catastrophic oil pipeline breaches, should they ever happen simultaneously.

He’d just never dreamed it would actually happen.

“Talk to me, Aaron,” Price snapped. “I’m on my way. Do you see what’s happening in China or not?”

“Everywhere but,” Kurtzman said grimly.

Washington, D.C.

THE SUNNY AFTERNOON turned dark.

“Jesus!”

Hal Brognola was in his office when he heard the expletive issued out in the hall. It reached him through two closed doors. Now somebody was running. Now somebody was sobbing.

The big Fed in the big office overlooking the Potomac felt his stomach churn as he snatched up the remote and stabbed the power button.

“—ruptured and exploded. We’re trying to get out but it’s moving fast.”

It looked like a small-time TV newscast. The title at the bottom of the screen read, Live in Shambert: Protesters Want Mayor Dubin’s Resignation.

What was on the screen was nothing as mundane as a protest against a local politician. The cameraman was trying to keep the image steady as the news reporter steered the van through black smoke.

“We heard the snaps and then we saw it coming down the hill. It didn’t take but a minute. Every building in the town’s on fire. We must’ve seen twenty people just get drenched in it. They’re still burning. No way to get to them. We’re trying to get out. Look at that!”

The camera swung to look out of the front windshield and for a moment there was the image of a street. Hundreds of gallons of black oil channeled between burning buildings and flooded through the streets. Running people scattered, but not fast enough. The burning oil tide swept over them. The camera caught the image of a woman twisting and staggering until the belching smoke masked her.

“Not getting out this way!” The reporter slammed the van into Reverse and whipped it around and into a side street.

And the image vanished. “We’re getting word from Houston of another oil fire, this one at an oil terminal station...”

The big Fed grabbed at the phone to make a call, but it was ringing when he touched it. It was the Stony Man Farm mission controller, Barbara Price.

“We need to shut down airspace, Hal.”

Brognola scowled. “Airspace? This some sort of aerial attack?”

He heard Price use a word that Barbara Price didn’t often use. Then there was a rush of words in the background. It was Kurtzman.

“Hal,” Price said calmly but firmly. “We have several incidents under way.”

“Top priority?” Brognola demanded. He could hear the urgency in her voice; there was no time for a debriefing. He was going to have trust her judgment—and he did.

“We’ve got many unresponsive aircraft alarms in the last few minutes. Half of them are out of Heathrow. Others are over Brazil, Africa, the Atlantic—”

“I thought the MUA alert system wasn’t supposed to work that well?” Brognola demanded, almost defensively. His mind was spinning.

“It’s working better than we had hoped, unfortunately,” Barbara Price said. “Six ELTs have activated, matching the MUAs. But only we know about it, Hal—because of the MUA alerts. Global air traffic control doesn’t yet see how widespread this emergency is. We need a global alert. We need airspace shut down. If we can get one more aircraft out of the sky before it’s attacked...”

“I’m on it.”

Brognola snatched up a second phone and dialed the President himself.

“Yes, sir. Right now our number-one concern is the aircraft. We believe at least six aircraft around the world have been downed. Yes, sir, some are passenger jets…. We don’t know.”

There was a pause.

“We don’t know. We can’t wait for the aviation authorities around the world to make these connections themselves. This attack is still going on.”

But even as he said it, Brognola wondered if it was true. The muted TV was showing a rotating series of nightmare images. Burning land. Burning people. Burning ships. Had everything really burst into flames simultaneously? If so, was the attack done?

The President hung up. He would make calls. Personally. He would ensure that warnings were spread around the world within minutes. Commercial aircraft would be lining up to land all over the planet. Air force patrols would take to the air by the thousands, looking for signs of attacking or suspicious aircraft. The response would be worldwide and as instantaneous as any global mobilization could possibly be.

Brognola looked at the clock.

It was 4:26 p.m.

The shadows were growing longer in D.C.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

AKIRA TOKAIDO’S BASIC skill set was in computer hacking, and right now he was tearing open digital security walls with all the finesse of a belligerent fifteen-year-old. It was somewhat amazing to watch his process. He would stare into one monitor, pull up a new attack report, then pound the keys in front of him, opening government and commercial systems with equal speed and ease, dismantling their firewalls in minutes, digesting the intelligence inside in search of anything that would help. He’d then dismiss it and move on to the next attack report.

So far, he’d come up with nothing. Neither had Carmen Delahunt nor Huntington Wethers, two other members of Kurtzman’s cyberteam. They were tearing through report after report in the Computer Room, looking for any electronic signature, any puzzle piece, any clue.

Barbara Price was doing what she could to simply organize what they knew so far.

The sheer number of the attacks was staggering. Pipelines all around the world. Oil tankers on every ocean. Aircraft—at least one on each inhabited continent.

She brought up the live video feed from China. It had been the first attack report that she had seen, and only because she had been watching a live news feed from BBC Asia, almost at random. They had news crews in Qingdao—at a hotel on the bay, in fact. It was the sudden bright light, not the noise, that had roused one of the news crew, who’d promptly set up a camera at the window of his hotel room and begun taping the burning of Jiaozhou Bay.

The Northern Aurora, which had been sitting there, waiting for some paperwork to go through so it could off-load a million barrels of crude oil, had burst into flame in the predawn night.

The BBC replayed its first minutes of footage and Price paused the playback herself. The massive oil tanker was a black hulk in the black night, but six gaping holes were open in its side, exuding orange flames that were licking off of spilling oil. The holes had been spaced with a precision that was unsettling.

“Easy,” sneered Tokaido, looking at the video on the well-mounted video screen. “You could put them there with a rowboat.”

He was glaring at the screen, his eyes glinting. The young Japanese hacker looked—what? Enraged?

Tokaido had been with Stony Man Farm for several years. He had seen much. Why, Price wondered, was he taking this one so personally?

Or was that just her imagination?

Tokaido abruptly thrust his finger at the frozen image of the tanker on the huge plasma screen.

“Fucker!” he snarled.

The way that Tokaido went back to his computer, Price thought he was going to start pounding the keys with his fists.

Wethers, Delahunt and Kurtzman had all stopped what they were doing. Kurtzman met her eyes before he returned to rattling the keys of his own terminal.

Price hit Play and watched the playback from China. The local time code started at 4:06 a.m., the moment the quick-thinking BBC staffer got his camera going. By 4:33 a.m. local time the black hulk of the Northern Aurora had vanished behind a lake of flame. The lake spread. Price watched with horrified fascination as the orange brilliance illuminated the shore and the buildings and then seemed to swallow them up. There were explosions. Ship after ship was being consumed in the flame. At least two more oil tankers were engulfed and burned until they blossomed and added their own fuel to the flames. The voice of the reporter standing behind the camera described the oil spill’s creep along the shore of the bay. Buildings were being set ablaze. Thousands being evacuated from the shoreline as the fire jumped to the buildings and spread inland.

The vivid image of the bay was of half blackness and half conflagration, but the blackness continued to shrink. The fire seemed to have sensed the voyeurs in the hotel and was coming after them.

“We’re leaving the camera,” the reporter said. It was odd, hearing the voices of a bunch of Brits in a hotel room. The oil fire itself was silent.

“Let’s go!” the reporter said a moment later.

Then viewers around the world heard the door to the hotel room open and slam shut. There were no more voices. Just the camera’s unique view of the fire that seemed now to reach to the horizon.

The attacks had happened less than an hour ago. The damage still had a long way to spread.

Over the next twenty minutes the satellite-fed footage of the flames crawling to the hotel was dramatic and terrifying. Then a new kind of smoke appeared in front of the fire. Close-proximity fumes. The hotel itself was finally burning.

CHAPTER FIVE

The rugged British commando, leader of one of the deadliest paramilitary units on the planet, was drinking on the job.

Drinking heavily. He upended the bottle and sucked out 500 ml of the brown liquid and kept sucking until the plastic bottle collapsed noisily upon itself. Then he released it into a trash can beside one of the computer desks and savagely twisted the plastic cap off of a second bottle.

The big plasma screen had been replaying news feeds from all over the world for three hours. How many times were they going to show this bloody piece of video? It must have been the tenth time he’d seen it.

But he couldn’t look away.

It was the video from the reporter and his cameraman out of a small station in Casper, Wyoming. They’d driven pretty far out of their way to get some video of a protest staged against the mayor of a little town called Shambert. Protesters didn’t agree with his budgeting priorities.

Then the pipelines blew and a sea of flaming crude oil swamped the town. The reporter and his cameraman had been broadcasting live as they careened wildly through Shambert, trying to find an escape route.

“Get ’em!”

It was already a famous sound bite. It was the cameraman shouting as a group of young men staggered into the streets, faces covered by their shirts from the already acrid smoke. For a second, you thought the cameraman was telling the reporter to just run the young men down to get out of town faster.

But the reporter was stomping on the brakes and the cameraman was shouting again. “We gotta get ’em!”

The cameraman screamed out the window. The young men piled into the news van. They screeched away—but maybe the reporter and cameraman shouldn’t have been Good Samaritans. Maybe they shouldn’t have taken those precious seconds to pick up those young men. Maybe they could have saved themselves, at least, if they’d had a few extra seconds to spare.

There was one way out of town left to them, and the oil was already advancing. The reporter tried to drive through the wall of flame. He had no other option. And he did manage to make it through. He reached the other side of the fire. But the van became drenched in burning oil. The men inside were shouting. It was mayhem.

Thank God the news network stopped the tape before the shouting turned to screaming. Once those men started screaming, the camera had continued to operate for eleven seconds. It sent eleven seconds of live video and audio around the world to millions of viewers. A lot of people had listened to those five men die.

The big Brit with the bottle had seen some seriously bad things in his life, but he never again wanted to hear the screaming of the men in that news van as they burned.

There was a different tape now and some female reporter was running down the latest list of attack sites. It just went on and on.

“What is that?”

Carl Lyons was there, staring at the Brit’s freshly opened bottle. It was red and sported a bright white logo in Arabic.

David McCarter waved the bottle dismissively. “Egyptian Coca-Cola. Carl, do we have anything to go on?”

“Not yet. They’re tearing it up back there.” Lyons nodded back into the depths of the Farm. McCarter understood what he meant—the cybernetics team ripping through the systems of the world in search of clues.

“What about arrests?”

“I just got here three minutes ago. I don’t know a thing.”

McCarter shook his head miserably. “How’s Pol?”

“Been better,” Rosario “Politician” Blancanales answered, trying not to limp when he came into the War Room.

“You been cleared by the doc?” Lyons demanded. “I thought you were on bed rest for another forty-eight hours.”

Blancanales’s attention was engaged for a moment by the bottle in McCarter’s hand, then he said. “I’m good to go. We got a target?”

“No,” Lyons replied. He wasn’t fooled for a second by Blancanales’s evasive response.

Blancanales’s circulatory system had been severely compromised. At the little hospital in Georgia, they had pumped every pint of compatible blood in the medical center into Blancanales before his skin began to resume something like its normal color—Lyons never would have thought Blancanales’s Hispanic complexion could have gone as pale as it had been when they’d first run him into that little E.R. They’d performed a quick, temporary stitch-up job to close the wound. Hours later, Blancanales had been transported to a larger hospital in Atlanta, where a surgeon sliced out a thin millimeter of dead flesh on either side of the wound, along with the blackened particles of burned material that had cut into him.

Blancanales hadn’t even noticed it—the moment when he was cut open by an orange-hot fragment of flying debris in the bowels of Solon Labs.

Lyons and Schwarz had fled the explosions deep into the lab and found themselves surrounded in flames. Blancanales rendezvoused with them there, in the biggest lab, where all kinds of equipment and materials were igniting, burning, melting and bursting. Something had exploded and Blancanales got in the way of a piece of shrapnel that burned through his armor, his clothing and his skin.

Blancanales was herding Lyons and Schwarz out of the building as the building burned around them. Blancanales hadn’t even realized he was losing critical quantities of blood out of the sizzling gash in his side.

“Barb—” McCarter said as the mission controller entered the War Room.

“We should have everybody on-site in twenty minutes,” she announced. “We’ll debrief then.” She looked at Blancanales. “Didn’t know you’d received medical clearance, Rosario.”

“All this is looking a lot like what we saw at the lab,” Blancanales said, waving at the big plasma screen and images of burning. Pipelines. Harbors. Ships. People.

“It does, on the surface,” she agreed.

“What about below the surface?”

Price shook her head slightly. “We just don’t know.”

* * *

THE TIME CODE on the screen read 7:35 p.m.

The War Room hosted a full house. David McCarter’s Phoenix Force teammates were present. The three members of Able Team were there.

Aaron Kurtzman was there with the Stony Many Farm cyberteam. Carmen Delahunt, a vivacious redhead, was a talented analyst. Huntington Wethers, a dignified black man, every inch the UCLA cybernetics professor that he had once been. And there was Akira Tokaido, the Japanese hacker. The man was snapping at the touchscreen on a tablet computer, looking as grim as anyone had ever seen him.

Hal Brognola was on the screen from his office in Washington, D.C. Barbara Price, as mission controller, was the one that everybody started unloading on.

“First things first,” Price said. “We’re going to go through a list of incidents.” She looked around at the gathering of faces. “It’s a long one.”

And indeed it was.

“Thirty major pipelines are out of commission,” Price said. “In nearly all cases, the sabotage occurred in semiremote areas where the explosive devices could be, we assume, placed in advance. It’s also clear that some locations were chosen for their geography—the places where the oil flow and fire could do the most damage.”

“Like in Wyoming,” said Hal Brognola.

“Yes,” Price said. “Like in Wyoming. We’re still receiving information from around the world, but there appears to be a standard approach to the sabotage. A series of small explosive devices were placed along the pipelines in advance, where they waited for a signal to detonate.”

“Does anyone have one of those devices?” Brognola said.

“As far as we know, most of the oil fires continue to burn and no investigation teams have been able to get to the scene of any of the actual explosions.”

“What about Alaska?” Brognola demanded.

“No.” Price looked at the screen. Video pickups shifted automatically even when Brognola’s image moved from one screen to another. “The pipeline attacks followed certain patterns, from what we can tell. The explosives detonated simultaneously—maybe as many as twenty to thirty small explosions at once. More in some cases.

“The pipeline in Wyoming was opened up at approximately thirty-four locations over a distance of two miles. The oil spilled out under the pipeline pressure. There are block valve stations on the line that responded to the pressure drop automatically and immediately shut down oil flow. However, at least fifteen of the explosions took place uphill of the station that is supposed to protect the town in case of a pipeline breach. The next station shut down the pipe, but the volume of oil remaining in the pipelines was considerable and was gravity-fed into the town. Gravity-fed oil flow from punctures on the east and the west of the town fed the fires on the town limits and trapped the population inside.”

Price was now looking at the surface of the War Room conference table, not at any of them. She opened her hand, a hopeless gesture. “The town was surrounded, blocking all escape routes.”

The room full of people was silent for a moment.

“Anybody get out of that town?” Carl Lyons asked.

“It’s still burning.”

“Oh.”

“It’s important to note that most of these attacks were not intended to result in significant loss of life,” Aaron Kurtzman said. “Most of the pipeline attacks were not in populated areas. The intention was clearly to put these pipes out of commission. The same intention was behind the sabotage of oil tankers. We have a number of oil tankers burning or sunk, including several tankers that were nonmobile—used only for storage, not oil transport. In some ports, the damage is so widespread that it has not even been determined yet whether there was one ship sabotaged or more than one.”

“Obviously,” Price said, “whoever did this wanted to cripple the movement of oil and get the attention of the world. They wanted there to be no doubt in anybody’s mind that they had the means to do it.”

“So if they wanted to stop the movement of oil,” asked Rafael Encizo, one of the Phoenix Force commandos, “why’d they hit all the aircraft? A passenger jet to India, a passenger jet to Brazil—plus a cargo flight into Moscow? What am I missing here? What’s the purpose?”

“Terror is the purpose, we must assume,” Barbara Price said. “Whoever did this wanted the world to know they could hit anywhere. Anyplace and anybody.”

“Which brings up the big question of who?” Brognola said. “Unfortunately, we’ve got precious little to go on.”

“How can that be?” Carl Lyons demanded. “You don’t set off five hundred bombs at once, all around the world, and not leave some evidence.”

“Of course there’s evidence,” said Gary Manning, Phoenix Force’s demolitions expert. He was a veteran of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, where he had once served as an antiterrorist operative. He was a hulking, burly, square-jawed figure, often subdued compared to some of the other figures in his team, but never hesitant to say what was on his mind. “Half those hot spots are still burning. You think there’s been time to go in and sift through the wreckage?”

“FBI forensic demolitions analysis teams are on-site at five pipeline explosions, including at a Trans-Alaska Pipeline site thirty miles north of the Yukon River,” Brognola said.

“The blasts were all planned for maximum destruction. In Alaska, it seems the planning went awry,” Price said. “The pipeline wasn’t ripped apart as thoroughly as some of the others. It appears that only about a third of the explosives in the series actually detonated.”

Kurtzman typed a command into the interface board built into his wheelchair. The onscreen image of Hal shifted to a secondary screen and a map of Alaska showing a red, thick line that indicated the route of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System appeared on the main screen. He zoomed in on Fairbanks, then followed the trail of the pipeline north until it crossed the Yukon River and headed north another thirty miles.

“It looks as if most of the pipeline explosives included twenty to thirty shaped charges designed to go off simultaneously,” Price explained. “In Alaska, an estimated ten charges detonated simultaneously. The pipeline was damaged seriously, but not on the scale we’ve seen elsewhere around the world. We have video. Bear?”

She nodded to Kurtzman, who brought up shaky aerial footage of empty landscape. “A station in Fairbanks rushed a chopper to the scene as soon as they heard about it,” Price said. “They started taping when they saw the smoke.” The video shifted to show a flaming, billowing canal of black oil covering the ground and surrounding what was apparently an undamaged section of the pipeline. The destroyed section of the pipe appeared small, but it was difficult to grasp the scale from the shaky camera.

Then the pipe split open and more oil flooded out.

Manning was leaning forward on the table, watching the video intently. “So the charges didn’t go off when they were supposed to, but as soon as the fire catches up to them they ignite.”

“That’s what we think happened.”

“You said ignite,” stated the black Phoenix Force commando, Calvin James, who had once been a Navy SEAL.

“That’s what I said—ignite,” Manning agreed. There was a moment of silence as they stared at the screen, and the pipeline broke open farther downstream. More oil spilled out and the flames intensified.

“That’s a pretty damned efficient release of energy,” Manning pointed out, “even going off at the wrong time. It didn’t send oil spraying in all directions. It just opened up the metal.”

“Low explosives engineered to just break the shell?” James suggested.

“Maybe. But nah,” Manning said, frowning at the screen. “Got any more of those on tape?”

“You’re in luck,” Kurtzman said, nodding at the screen. There was a cut and the shot changed. Now the camera was zooming in close to the pipe. The men in the news chopper were interested in the damage being done to the pipeline, just as Manning was. The image was shaky and smoke-blurred. They couldn’t make out anything actually attached to the pipe. The pipe was cooking in the flames from the spreading oil underneath it, then a bright white streak appeared on the surface of the metal and it grew into a narrow opening in the pipe. Oil, no longer under pressure, oozed out, and the conflagration quickly wormed its way inside and ripped the pipeline wide open.

“What the hell was that?” growled Rafael Encizo. Stocky and powerful, he’d been born in Cuba and spent plenty of time rotting in Castro’s prisons. Castro couldn’t kill Encizo, but only made him stronger. Encizo was a naval tech specialist, as much at home in the water as on land.

“Virtually no visible fragmentation,” Manning pointed out.

“These bastards were trying to be neat about it?” McCarter demanded.

“They were trying to be efficient,” Manning said with a grim smile. “You go setting off five hundred devices at a time, you need to control costs. You figure out just exactly how much explosive or incendiary you need, you figure out how to make it do exactly what you want it to do, then you use just enough each time to do your dirty work.”

A man in a cowboy hat had been stretched out in the chair alongside James. As the others kept their eyes glued to the progressive damage playing out along the Alaskan pipeline, the man in the hat now walked around to stand behind Akira Tokaido.

Thomas Jackson Hawkins knew quite a bit about electronic communications—military, civilian and industrial. He watched intently as Tokaido played with some communications schematics out of Alaska, using computer models of communications infrastructure to replicate the simultaneous detonation of hundreds of bombs around the world—a type of communication whose failure could lead to the partial misfires that had occurred in Alaska.

“What about the lab in Georgia where Rafe got burned?” Hermann Schwarz was asking. “Gary, they were specializing in incendiary research.”

“I’ve looked at the reports. I don’t know what the hell that was all about. It was damned suspicious, for sure. But what were they trying to accomplish by bringing in foreign-made military research and prototype? I couldn’t figure it out.”

“What about the prototype devices they supplied the military?” Schwarz asked. “Any good?”

“No. They were shoddy,” Manning said.

“But could their prototypes do that?” Schwarz persisted, nodding at the screen where the Alaskan pipeline continued to open again every few minutes.

Manning shrugged. “I doubt it.”

“Would you like to see one of the devices from the Solon lab in Georgia?” Kurtzman asked.

Gary Manning blinked. “You have one?”

Kurtzman grimaced. “Don’t worry. It’s not live.”

Carmen Delahunt was already slipping out of the room and was back in a moment with a plastic crate. She opened it and removed several items packed in gray foam: a wallet and a cell phone, both removed by Carl Lyons from the intruder at the lab. There was also a small, engineered device composed of three plastic discs held together by three plastic screws. Delahunt handed it to Manning, along with a printout of the functional characteristics of the device.

“One of the prototype samples from the lab.”

Of the dozen people in the War Room, not one took notice when the time code on the various computer screens changed to 8:00 p.m.

Manning sneered at the prototype. “This?”

“Looks like a Big Mac without the all-beef patties,” Schwarz muttered.

“It is not more sophisticated than it looks,” Price said.

Manning spun the screw, examined the interior. “Nonmetallic. Cavity for ignitables. So what? How much taxpayer cash did this cost us?”

“Could it have been used for the attacks we just saw?”

“No,” Manning said. “It’s too small and it won’t create a directed ignition. You’d need specially shaped charges of thermite or something to make those holes.”

“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.

They drove less than a mile and Schwarz and Lyons exited the vehicle near the station. The big Alexandria, Virginia, parking lot was eerily quiet. The trains were not running today, and wouldn’t be running anytime soon. Schwarz and Lyons avoided the security personnel posted at the station and slipped through the darkness and into the weeds before stepping onto the tracks.

“We’re on-site, Stony,” the Able Team leader said into his headset.

“We’re tracking you, Carl. You’re a hundred feet away and closing.”

Lyons’s MV-321G Gen 3 night-vision goggles were equipped with infrared illumination. The plan was for him to use night vision while Schwarz conducted a naked-eyes search. So far the track was so well lit by overhead lighting that Lyons didn’t need the NVGs.

They watched the tracks, looking for signs of devices that didn’t belong. Tokaido’s little track-back trick had triangulated the location of just one of the cell phones. The reports of the latest wave of attacks—including derailments on several commuter and cargo railroads in the United States and around the world—suggested there would be half a dozen devices planted along the tracks. Whoever was doing this, obviously wanted to do the job completely.

They were still ten yards from the location of the specific tracked device when Schwarz froze.

“I think I’ve got one.”

“Show us, Able,” Price said through the headset.

Schwarz pulled out a video camera, offering far higher resolution than the video feed from the lipstick-size video pickups on his headset. He pointed it at the device nestled against the steel rail of the Fredericksburg Line.

“Manning is seeing it. Cowboy’s here, too,” Price announced. John “Cowboy” Kissinger was the Stony Man Farm armorer.

“Looks like a rock,” Gary Manning announced from his seat on a jet over the Atlantic Ocean.

“I’m no ballistics expert like Gary,” Kissinger said, “but I’d have to agree that it looks like a rock.”

“You’re a big help,” Schwarz said. “Can’t thank you guys enough. See the plastic foam on the bottom? It’s adhered to the metal. Bonding agent of some kind. They have it glued to the track itself so they can be sure the rail is damaged by the blast.”

“Gadgets,” Manning said, “you can’t touch that thing. What if it’s got a motion-sensing trigger?”

Schwarz snorted. “It’s super-glued to the rail of a commuter train line. It’s been getting rattled for days.”

“Gadgets—” Lyons said.

“Hey, you don’t have to tell me to be careful,” Schwarz said. “We don’t have to touch it. We’ll move it from a distance.”

Schwarz pulled out a small, dense wedge of steel on a metallic spike. He pulled a safety strip to activate it, then impaled the thing in the ground, within a half inch of the device on the rail track.

They moved away from the device, along the curve of the track.

“Able Three here,” Blancanales said on the line from his lookout in the Explorer. “Get to cover. Company coming. Two white males.”

Schwarz and Lyons blended into the bushes.

“They’re walking the rails,” Blancanales added from his vantage point. “They might be Virginia Railway Express track inspectors.”

“That’s to be expected.”

“Looks like one of them is armed.”

That was hardly out of the question either, Lyons thought, given the state of high anxiety in the nation and the fact that railroads had just become demonstrated targets.

“Any other equipment, Pol?” he asked quietly.

“No.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” Lyons commented. “Patrols should be obviously armed. Inspectors should have equipment.”

“Let’s ask them,” Schwarz suggested, extracting his Beretta 93-R, a handgun based on the well-known Beretta 92. One serious difference in the design: a selector switch that enabled the handgun to fire three-round bursts.

* * *

ROSARIO BLANCANALES LEFT the Explorer and followed the path taken earlier by Lyons and Schwarz. He moved quickly. There was a dull ache from the sutures in his gut. A dull ache was nothing compared to the pain he’d woken up with after the firestorm in Georgia.

He didn’t like what was happening. More than that, Blancanales knew that Stony Man was in a bad, bad place. What intelligence they had so far served them little in tracking down whoever was causing this mayhem. They needed information. They needed a source.

“Able Three here,” he said quietly. “I’m in position alongside the tracks.”

“Don’t engage,” Lyons said.

“Don’t plan to,” Blancanales replied. “I’m concealed. I’m the fly on the wall.”

The two men approached. The one in front had a firearm held close to his leg, on the far side of his body where Blancanales only glimpsed it. The other followed a few steps behind. The body language of the follower said “nervous.”

They were moving quickly now, half jogging. There was no cover here, unless they decided to crawl through the bushes where Encizo was camped.

Blancanales kept his mike wide open. Nothing to boost the audio. The Farm wasn’t going to hear much of this.

“Another thirty yards,” said the one in the rear.

“Yeah,” said the leader.

“This ain’t good, man.”

“Shut up.”

“This ain’t good, Gus.”

“I said shut the fuck up,” the leader stormed, waving his weapon in the direction of his partner.

In the cold cast of the lights over the track Blancanales saw the silhouette of a machine pistol. The follower was silenced by the provocative gesture, and the two men continued down the tracks. Blancanales had to take the chance. He slipped out of the bushes and followed after them, sprinting from shadow to shadow. The pair up ahead was high on anxiety but not too skilled at stealth.

They stopped on the tracks. Blancanales shrank into a weedy dark place. The leader, the one called Gus, faced away from the track, watching for trouble, while the follower crouched over it. Encizo saw him bend at a bulge alongside the central of the three-tracks set of railroad racks running side by side in this location. This was not the device Schwarz had located. The device was removed—no, just a cover lifted off. The man quickly extracted something from the device and slipped it into a camouflage backpack. Then he unzipped another section of the pack, removed another device and flipped it on. The screen blazed colorfully to life for a moment. The man was using his body to shield the screen, but wasn’t counting on a voyeur in a nearby overhang of weeds. Blancanales clearly saw it was a cell phone swap.

The man on technical duty closed the device. The swap was made in less than a minute.

The two men moved on and the technical man crouched at the next device—and froze at the sight of Schwarz’s steel wedge.

“What the hell is this?”

“What?” Gus demanded.

“Look at it!”

Gus shook his head. “I got no idea.”

“Me, neither, but it wasn’t there before! We’re made! Let’s get out of here.”

“If they found them, they wouldn’t have just left the igniters,” Gus said, although he was obviously confused by the steel wedge. His head was oscillating, looking for signs of surveillance. The night remained still. “We gotta finish this job.”

“Listen to me,” his companion insisted. “It wasn’t here before.”

“You listen,” Gus snapped. “They got us by the nuts. We don’t do the job, we rot in federal prison. Forever. Understand?”

“Call ’em,” the technical man said. “Tell them what we found.”

Gus nodded swiftly. “Yeah.”

“Don’t let them make that call, Gadgets!” Blancanales snapped into his mike.

Schwarz did the first thing that came to mind—he hit the detonator switch on the dedicated remote in his hand. The metal wedge reacted with a bang and rocketed into the device adhered to the railroad track with explosive force. The steel blade sliced through the adhesion of the device, just as it was intended to do, and kept going, into the technical man, who grunted and collapsed. The steel wedge clattered away over the track ballast. Gus bolted, made it four steps, then slammed into what felt like the front end of a diesel locomotive.

Blancanales’s body blow took Gus down hard. A swift stomp broke several ribs and left him stunned. Blancanales snatched the Steyr SPP out of Gus’s grip and in the same motion swung the butt of the weapon into Technical Man’s skull as he tried to rise to his feet. The pistol was made of a composite polymer that the manufacturer had famously called “nearly indestructible.” Sure enough, the composite didn’t so much as crack.

Something in the Technical Man’s skull, however, broke and he collapsed and was still.

Blancanales grabbed at one of Gus’s wrists and twisted it, leveraging the man onto his face, then kept pulling the wrist until it was between his shoulder blades. Something cracked. Blancanales jerked a plastic cuff around it, then grabbed his other wrist and pulled it up, as well.

Gus screamed.

Blancanales landed both knees on either side of Gus’s spine. All the air in Gus’s body seemed to explode out of his mouth and he mustered no more noise or resistance.

“Need a hand?” Schwarz asked as he and Lyons arrived. Schwarz’s unfired 93-R covered the lifeless technician.

“No, I got this.” Blancanales gave Schwarz and Lyons a wicked grin. “Leave me in the car, will ya?”

“Able One?” Price said in the headsets. “What’s the status?”

“How should I know?” Lyons growled. “I’m just Pol’s sidekick.”

“Able Three here,” Blancanales said. “Listen, we have a backpack full of cell phones. These guys were going to swap them out. They’re just changing out cell phones, for God’s sake. This one was about to call somebody. If we make the call, we can trace it, right?”

“Yes,” Kurtzman said. “Give me the serial number.”

Schwarz snatched Gus’s phone and pulled a miniature screwdriver out of a small leg pack. He spun the screws off and recited the serial number.

“Here’s my thought,” Blancanales said quickly. “We place the call, get the trace, then detonate some of the old phone devices. We take the new phones and the rest of the devices with us. Maybe whoever was in charge of having them placed, will think this pair screwed something up. Then we get these quick to the Farm and figure out whatever we can from them.”

“It can’t hurt,” Price said.

“But I doubt they’ll buy it,” Schwarz said. He was now holding one of the devices—the one that the explosive chisel had sliced off the side of the railroad track. “They’re using some kick-ass adhesive. Some sort of modified cyanoacrylate, I’d guess. Unless you’re packing nail polish remover, we’re not getting these things off the rails in a hurry.”

“We can’t risk it,” Lyons said. “If these guys are expected to report in and don’t—they might risk blowing these devices.”

“No way,” Schwarz said. “They’re replacing the phones for a reason. To avoid using the old, traceable signal.”

“How sure are you of that, Gadgets?” Blancanales demanded. “Sure enough to stick around?”

“No way to that, either,” Schwarz conceded.

“We’ve got the phone online,” Kurtzman said. “When you make the call, we’ll trace it.”

Schwarz removed the old-system cell phone from the device in his hands. He jogged up the track and snatched out the new-system cell phone that the Technical Man had put there. He had the backpack over one shoulder.

“Dead,” Lyons announced after a quick check of the technician with the cratered skull. He gave a bark of disbelief when he saw Blancanales about to hoist Gus onto his shoulders. “I’ll get that one,” Lyons said. “I think your nerve endings must’ve fried out, Pol. Your guts should be screaming at you by now.”

“They’re a little achy,” Blancanales admitted.

In fact, the burn wound was throbbing. He could count the sutures by each individual needle of pain emanating from his side.

Lyons tossed groaning Gus over his shoulder and plodded with him up the steep berm. Schwarz had stayed behind to plant the phone in the ignition device adhered to the track, then he hustled after Lyons and Blancanales.

“I’m set,” Schwarz said. “But I don’t think this is gonna fool anybody.”

* * *

A SMALLER GROUP had gathered in the War Room. Phoenix Force was absent, now en route to Europe. Able Team was on hand, as was Stony Man armorer John “Cowboy” Kissinger, a tall man with broad shoulders and narrow hips. Kissinger was well-known for his expertise with almost every type of weapon. He could dismantle and rebuild any firearms system put in front of him.

Kissinger was—like almost everyone at the Farm—a veteran of bigger, more public organizations in the outside world. He had spent years with the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. When it was restructured as the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA, Kissinger went freelance for some time before finding a home at Stony Man Farm. He maintained the Farm armory, often upgrading and improving the standard-issue equipment.

“Explosives,” Kissinger said, “are not my primary focus, but I read the research. Including the stuff the military researchers don’t know I’m reading. So I know what the state of the art is in weaponized nanothermites.” He set the device on the table, now in pieces, and waved a hand at it. “This is beyond what we thought of as state of the art.”

Hal Brognola, sitting at his desk in Washington, edged forward in his seat and adjusted a camera on one of his displays to focus on the device. “Weaponized nanothermites aren’t new.”

“No way,” Schwarz said. “They’ve been tested for years. They’re looking at using MICs as primer in small arms. Not even for performance improvements. They want primers that won’t release vaporized lead every time a round is fired.”

“And this is an MIC?” Price asked.

Kissinger shook his head. “It’s not.”

“It’s not?” Schwarz echoed.

“It’s not a composite—not in the way everyone thinks of an MIC, a Metastable Intermolecular Composite,” Kissinger said. “The standard assumption is that MICs are laminated composites. It puts an ultrathin, nanoscale layer of aluminum or some other metal fuel atop a layer of an oxidizer. The two materials are exothermically reactive, and the proximity is so close that the diffusion of the oxidizer and fuel happens much more quickly and energetically. The rate of reaction is much, much faster. We’ve been working on tuning nanolaminated pyrotechnics to achieve different results. Different metals used in the nanolayers, different fillers used to separate and encase the laminates, give you interesting results. And the reaction time is far superior to a simple mixture of the old powders used in more standard incendiaries.”

“So how’s this different?” Schwarz demanded.

“Particle size, for one. We’re working with 100 to 200 nanometer-diameter particles when making the MICs. The particles in these devices are much, much smaller. They’re in the range of one-quarter to one-half of one nanometer in size.”

“They can do that?” Schwarz asked.

“Can we do that, you mean?” Kissinger asked. “Yeah. Maybe. Maybe in a lab. Or maybe not.”

“So layers of particles that fine,” Price said, “would be that much closer together. The reaction is that much faster.”

“Much faster,” Kissinger confirmed. “Here’s where it gets interesting. There are no layers in this device. Instead of a layer of fuel and a layer of oxidizer, the particles are conjoined.”

“Conjoined?” Price queried.

“No way!” Schwarz said. “They can do that?”

“Can we do that, you mean?” Kissinger repeated. “No way. They can, obviously. And they did.”

“Conjoined—layers?” Kurtzman asked. “I think I’m a few steps back.”

“You’re not the only one,” Brognola muttered loudly. “I’ve been lost for the past five minutes.”

“Conjoined particles. Take one particle of fuel—at 0.5 nanometer in diameter. Take one particle of oxidizer, same size. Adhere them so they’re conjoined. They’re glued together. The reaction time is far faster than any incendiary device we’ve seen before.”

“And this is not something that has been accomplished before?” Brognola challenged. “Not by the U.S.? Not by anybody?”

Kissinger shrugged. “Not by anybody as far as I know.”

“This is good news, right?” Carl Lyons said, speaking for the first time. “Specialty item needs special people or special equipment to be made. Now we have something to go on. Right? So let’s get going.”

“You’re right, Carl,” Kissinger said. “This is indeed specialty technology. There are a few companies out there working on nanoparticles in this range, and a few university labs, as well. One of them is here in the United States. Company in Texas. Name is—get this—NanoPlasPulse LLC. Brains behind the operation is the CEO, Harry Envoi. They’re using his patents.”

“Ugh. This sounds like a familiar situation,” Rosario Blancanales growled. “Like the Georgia lab.”

“Yeah, I thought the same thing at first,” Kissinger continued. “Then I checked the guy out. He’s got the credibility that your friend in Georgia did not have.” Kissinger tapped a stapled white stack of pages that lay in front of him.

Brognola tried to read the title through his video. “What is that?”

Schwarz raised the stack and read the cover sheet. “‘Production Technique Studies on Conjoined Nanopowder Particulates for Metastable Intermolecular Composite Alternatives.’”

“Sorry I asked,” Brognola said.

“Envoi wrote it. He’s written several papers throughout the years. He’s demonstrated long-term expertise and pioneering development in the creation of creating unagglomerated nanopowders.”

“Unagglomerated means ‘not glommed together,’ I assume,” Brognola said.

“Right,” Kissinger said. “Think of it this way. The smaller the particle, and the closer a particle is to a complementary but different particle, the more the complementary effect will be—whether that effect is an incendiary reaction or, say, metal flexibility.”

“So could Envoi be the guy who created the devices?” Lyons asked. “If so, what’s his home address?”

“I’m not going to rule him out,” Kissinger said. “I’ll let you all do that. But here’s the rub—at the same time we were doing a quick evaluation of this device, other devices were being evaluated in other parts of the world.”

They had already received the news of other devices being discovered around the world. Tokaido’s quick work had left many of the units in place and unactivated, and large-scale search efforts were turning them up.

“Twenty minutes before I came into this meeting, DARPA identified this material and set up a classified conference call with Harry Envoi. He’s agreed to be a consultant on the investigation. I want to be in on that call.”

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