Читать книгу Incendiary Dispatch - Don Pendleton - Страница 8

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.”