Читать книгу Incendiary Dispatch - Don Pendleton - Страница 7

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.