Читать книгу Splintered Sky - Don Pendleton - Страница 11

Yuma, Arizona

Leon Paczesny was turned over to federal Marshals, glad to be away from the big, menacing blond cop who liked to pound on his arm. It had only taken a gentle reminder, dozens of color photographs of the corpses Able Team had created the night before, to ensure that Paczesny was going to keep their part in the apocalyptic border-crossing quiet. Hal Brognola had a Justice Department detachment, independent of the Burgundy Lake investigation, take care of the turncoat. The deal was a simple one. Paczesny would eventually be turned over by Brognola’s baby-sitters, and the traitor would confess to his part in the operation.

In return for not contesting his espionage charges, he’d get to live. It would be an existence in an eight-foot-by-five-foot cell until he was old and decrepit, but it would be life. Any deviation from the deal would result in pieces of Paczesny being mailed to all of his living relatives, each part harvested from his screaming body.

Lyons told the traitor that they had excellent life support machines. He amended the threat with a story of the last fool who blew his free pass to continued existence. With grudging respect, Lyons noted that the turncoat had survived until he was trimmed down to an eyeless, earless, noseless head attached to a torso that had been carved down to just above the navel.

“It was the most incredible six months of my life, slicing a traitorous bastard up like lunch meat,” Lyons confessed.

It was all a lie, but Paczesny didn’t know that.

“Intimidation has a name,” Schwarz quipped after Paczesny left in the back of a Justice Department SUV. “Lyons. Carl Lyons.”

The Able Team leader snorted. “This isn’t a game, Gadgets.”

“No, you sure talk a good nightmare,” Schwarz answered.

“I don’t like it, but when it comes down to saving noncombatants and breaking apart some thug who’s in on a bunch of deaths I can prevent…”

“The needs of the many, bro,” Schwarz replied. He bopped the ex-cop on the shoulder.

Lyons looked at his watch. It was just after dawn. “Please. It’s too early for that Star Trek crap.”

“Speaking of which,” Blancanales interjected, “what’s the plan? Stick around poking at any support structure for the mercenaries who hit Burgundy Lake, or do we go to Florida?”

Lyons frowned. “We’ll spend a few hours here snooping around. We might hit something, but I doubt that the raiders’ backup would stick around longer than sunset.”

“That’s including the guy who ran off,” Blancanales reminded him.

Lyons nodded. “Our mystery opponent took off, and we still haven’t assembled much in terms of ranking on this group. Chances are, the escapee was either the highest ranking, or the most experienced in the marauder party. Either way, that will make him valuable enough to be useful in Florida.”

“A hit on Cape Canaveral would be insane,” Schwarz stated. “The security forces on hand are well-trained.”

“So were the Air Force guards at Burgundy Lake. Besides, we’ve penetrated NASA security before, too,” Lyons countered.

“Okay. We hit the bricks and try to catch our boy on the way out of town,” Blancanales said. “I’d make it a safe bet he’d try a charter flight.”

“Check on it,” Lyons told him. “I’ll be at the battle site. Gadgets, check out the warehouse where the combined task force has the wreckage. A closer look at the stolen technology might tell us if this was an effort to steal and reverse-engineer the thrusters, or just getting it out of the way.”

“Knowing the state of international rocketry research, it’s a good bet that they already have their own version of the operating thrusters Burgundy Lake was working on,” Schwarz agreed. “And where will you be?”

“You don’t run into anything larger than a few homes or a roadhouse until you reach the coast,” Lyons replied. “The north is the eastern suburbs of Yuma, so there’ll be airports, but the only major airfield in Mexico is pretty deep behind the border, about halfway to the coast.”

“Your Spanish sucks, Ironman,” Blancanales mentioned.

“I know enough to get by. I’m just going there to see what they’ve got set up. Bear took a look on satellite and saw only single seaters, but these engines are supposed to be small maneuvering thrusters, so they can’t take up a lot of space on something like a ninety-nine-ton shuttle. Transporting a few examples via a puddle hopper won’t be difficult,” Lyons surmised.

“What about the mercenaries?” Schwarz asked.

“Cessna Stationaires hold six passengers. They dump their assault load out, and they can pack on two thruster prototypes a piece with the 180-pound luggage capacity. I saw only four in the one truck, so given the two we found in the other, we can count three Stationaires, eighteen mercenaries and six thrusters in the air toward the coast,” Lyons pointed out. “That accounts for half the force we eliminated. Don’t forget that in Mexico, whatever flight-plan paperwork exists is literally on paper, not something we could get with a hacker.”

“That’s quite a distance,” Blancanales noted, looking at the aerial photo map Lyons pointed to. “One man, doing it on foot, that’d be a hump, even to the nearest road, which would be Route 8, cutting from Sonoyta to Puerto Penasco.”

“You or I could do it,” Lyons replied. “A disciplined soldier could make Route 8 by sunrise, and there is traffic on the road.”

Schwarz spoke up. “And if he and his buddies thought ahead, they could have had a spot to dump off the heavy vehicles and transfer to less conspicuous rides before they got to the airport.”

He summoned up a satellite map on his PDA and began calculating distances from the previous night’s battle and the road to the coast.

“Foothills?” Lyons asked.

“Yup. Found it. Seriously broken ground where you could stash a used car lot and keep it invisible from the air,” Schwarz answered. “I’m going to check on the thrusters, but I think I’ll talk to Dr. Bertonni. Something tells me that she’s not out of danger yet.”

Blancanales thought for a moment. “Give me a few minutes on the phone, then I’ll hop out with you and Jack to the airfield to check it out.”

“Good plan,” Lyons replied. “The less dicking around we do here, the less chance we have of losing our wayward punk.”

“Good hunting,” Schwarz told his partners.

“Thanks,” Lyons answered. “This guy looks like he’s dangerous game.”

S ABRINA B ERTONNI DIDN’T feel any more comfortable after having her side stitched shut, but she was alive, and no longer bleeding.

She was tired, having been up for a long time, but the investigative team looking into the Burgundy Lake raid had brought her to the warehouse where recovered hardware and wreckage from the battle scene were assembled on long tables to be examined in depth for forensic traces. After a grueling inventory, the exhausted rocket scientist took a seat on a bench in a corner. A deceptively baby-faced, mustached man with a mop of unkempt brown hair and sparkling brown eyes held a bottle of cold cola out to her.

Bertonni took the bottle with a smile and he sat next to her, opening his own drink. “Thanks.”

He wore a badge naming him as Henry Miller. Sabrina raised an eyebrow as he took a seat beside her without drilling her with questions.

“You look like you could use the caffeine,” Gadgets Schwarz told her.

“Thanks, Deputy Miller,” Sabrina replied.

“Call me Gadgets,” Schwarz replied. “Deputy makes me sound like I belong in a Western.”

“Gadgets,” Bertonni repeated. “So you’re a tech-head?”

“Ever since I was a kid,” Schwarz replied, taking a sip. “I’m mostly electronics, programming and robotics, but I’ve dabbled in rocket science.”

Bertonni nodded, drawing a sip from her soda. “So what department are you with?”

“The Justice Department,” Schwarz answered. “But I’m more a tech-head than a field agent, despite the gun on my hip.”

“So I don’t have to dumb down answers to any questions you have?” the woman asked.

Schwarz shook his head. “Nope. Though I already know about the basics of your compact hydrogen cell.”

“How much do you understand?” Bertonni prodded.

“Enough to be impressed at your fuel to energy conversion formulas,” Schwarz responded. “I’m more solid-state technology, but I’ve got a solid grounding in chemistry and physics. The important thing we need to know is, how recoverable are the engine parts?”

“The thrusters were made to withstand considerable shake, rattle and roll. These were going to be tested out on the next ISS mission. We had everything set up to transport today,” Bertonni said. The words caught in her throat. “It’s so hard to believe that only a few hours ago…”

Schwarz rested his hand on her shoulder. Bertonni gulped, trying to dislodge the constriction in her windpipe, but her voice still crackled with tension.

“A plane was supposed to be coming in to pick up the test modules at Burgundy Lake this morning,” she explained. “Burgundy Lake…Stupid name for the test facility. There wasn’t anything for forty miles that was inhabitable, let alone moisture. Flat desert with just that compound, and the outskirts of Yuma safely shielded behind a mountain and…”

Schwarz gave her a gentle squeeze as she began to ramble. Bertonni wiped a tear and smiled gently at him. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Schwarz said. “It’s going to be all right.”

He frowned, then pulled his CPDA. An aerial view of the compound betrayed a landing strip not a mile away. “You didn’t happen to see what went down at the airstrip?”

“No, but explosive charges were placed around the dormitories for the staff, as well as the testing and administrative buildings. All we knew was that the trucks rolled up, and then my partners started…started…”

Schwarz gave her shoulder a reassuring pat. She rested her hand on his, smiling at the gesture. “You need to get some sleep. I’ve got a pair of well-armed federal Marshals who will keep you safe.”

“Could have used them six hours ago,” Bertonni said with a sob. “You’re going to make sure whoever did this won’t get away with my friends’ murders, won’t you?”

“Someone already took care of most of them,” Schwarz informed her. “The killers are smeared across a five-mile stretch of desert along the border. They’ve been shoveling bodies into bags for identification.”

Bertonni nodded. “I thought I’d have felt better, knowing that the men who did this are dead…”

“It doesn’t take the pain away. It rarely ever does. But later on, you’ll know that the monsters behind this won’t hurt anyone else again,” Schwarz replied.

“And the guys who put them up to it?”

“They’re going down. I’ll see to it.”

Sonora, Mexico

S PEEDING OVER THE S ONORA desert in a Bell JetRanger, Carl Lyons heard his cell phone warble.

“What’s up, Gadgets?” the Able Team leader asked.

“Lot of shit’s not adding up, Ironman,” Schwarz responded. “There’s an airfield right by the test facility, call it a mile away, but with an access road. And a NASA transport was scheduled to pick up the test modules that the marauders stole. They could have hit the airstrip this morning and taken the transport if they’d only waited a few hours.”

Lyons frowned. “They have the pilots, especially if they intended to use any airstrips in Sonora. And the NASA crew wouldn’t notice bullet holes in the test facility. The raiders could have hit the plane, then taken it through one of the regular dope smuggling flight routes, and refuel it for a dash to a port or to an island refueling station.”

“Carl, Gadgets,” Blancanales interjected. “I just got off station with the Farm. The Justice Department forensics team going over our leftovers have reported in. It’s an international crew. It’s a mix between Europeans, Orientals and Semetic operatives.”

“Hired mercenaries, or perhaps a sanitized strike group assembled by a major power,” Lyons muttered. Outside his window, the sands of Mexico rocketed past at well over 100 miles an hour. “How soon till we reach the first of the airfields I looked at, Jack?”

“About ten minutes,” Grimaldi answered.

The terrain rippled, and Lyons was heartened by the fact that it would be difficult to even use a dune buggy or a motorcycle to cross it. The wrinkled furrows would make any rapid progress a stomach-churning, neck-snapping journey. The unmarked tops of windswept dunes showed no tire tracks, and both Lyons and Blancanales used their binoculars to scan for tracks or dust clouds of any sort. Frustration gnawed at Lyons’s gut as he hunted for clues. Then he spotted a glimmer against the pale blue sky in the distance.

Jack Grimaldi had seen it, as well. “An Ultralight.”

“Pushing the limits of its range,” Blancanales noted. While he didn’t have a PDA to calculate distance, the wily veteran was as good with a map and compass as any highly trained soldier. “He probably resorted to gliding to conserve fuel, which is how we caught up with him this far.”

“If it’s him,” Lyons countered. “Jack, get us closer. We can resume the search pattern if it’s a false alarm.”

“Got it,” Grimaldi replied.

“We’re closing in on the first airstrip,” Blancanales stated. On his map was a marker of a position that had been provided by Lyons’s contacts within the U.S. Border Patrol. “And he’s circling for a descent.”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Lyons replied. Still, he reached for the DSA-58 carbine he had stashed under his seat. He kept its stock folded, for better maneuverability inside the confines of the helicopter. He idly wished for the nose sensors on the Hughes 500 NOTAR they’d utilized only a few hours before, but the JetRanger had the kind of speed and range Grimaldi required to ferry them on their search of the desert. The airstrip was quiet and still, but camouflage netting could have concealed a small battalion from unaided eyes. FLIR and Terrain Radar would have given them a better heads-up. He clicked on his open line to the Farm.

“Bear, got anything on satellite?”

“The sun’s been baking the area enough to make any thermal imaging a mess. Radar shows you following something, but its signature is faint and indecipherable,” Kurtzman answered. “It’s an ultralight?”

“Yeah,” Lyons confirmed. “It could be made of any one of a dozen materials that wouldn’t show up well on a radar scan. Even its engine would be masked by the superstructure. Are there any vehicles in the area?”

“Anything outside is probably covered,” Kurtzman told him. “The signal isn’t coming back clean, so it’s possible that someone’s got camouflage netting with radar-absorbent material in it. Expect trouble, but I don’t have any magic figures for you.”

“I’ve got the outline of a hangar,” Blancanales called out. “It looks large enough for half a dozen Cessnas. It’s covered in camouflage netting, and low profile to blend into the hills.”

Lyons squinted. There was motion near the airstrip as the Ultralight suddenly banked hard, powering into a climb to push above the altitude of the JetRanger. Grimaldi was watching their aerial quarry, but the movement on the ground was fluid motion of fabric tossed aside.

“Ironman, we’ve got signatures!” Kurtzman shouted. “Looks like…”

“Machine guns,” Lyons bellowed, jolting Grimaldi into a hard juke to one side. Spearing tracers burned through the air only inches from Lyons’s window, twin streams of glowing streaks confirming the dual-mounted .50-caliber machine guns raking the sky. Another position fluttered to life farther down the strip, and Blancanales shoved his folded FAL’s barrel through the window port, holding down the trigger for half of the 30-round extended magazine.

With Grimaldi engaging in evasive action, the Puerto Rican’s fire only swept the machine-gun nest with a few glancing shots, but it was enough to force the antiaircraft position to miss the JetRanger. Still, Blancanales was satisfied with the results of his suppression fire.

Lyons had his DSA-58 burping out rounds to harass the other antiaircraft nest, but he knew that there wasn’t much of a chance of scoring an easy hit, not with Grimaldi weaving through the sky. “Jack, we need to get out of here. At least set us down out of range of the twin mounts.”

“Make me a hole, guys,” Grimaldi said.

Blancanales thumbed a round into the breech of his grenade launcher and fired. The shell hit, spewing a noxious-looking green cloud that obscured one of the machine-gun nests. In the meantime, Lyons unslung his Mossberg Cruiser 500, ejecting its load of Brenneke shells and quickly thumbing in a load of ferret rounds. The 12-gauge shell spit a tear-gas bomb toward the other twin-mounted Fifty. Being a solid round, the shotgun tear-gas shell had the range to pepper the enemy gunnery position. By tromboning the slide as fast as he pulled the trigger, Lyons saturated the nest with a blinding, stinging caldron of capsicum gas. The machine gunner, his sinuses and respiratory passages swollen in reaction to the horrendously hot-pepper extract, held down the spade trigger on the heavy machine gun, firing uncontrollably. His tear ducts felt as if they were filled with scalding hot acid, and he swept the half of the sky that was empty.

Blancanales’s smoker was followed by a second, thickening the turgid green cloud, giving the helicopter room to maneuver.

“Put us down,” Lyons told Grimaldi. “If we back off, they won’t stick around.”

“Roger,” Grimaldi answered. “Luckily, Pol laid down a good landing marker.”

Lyons looked to see that the ace Stony Man pilot had swooped the helicopter over Blancanales’s thick green fog. The rotor wash pushed away the cloud, and Grimaldi let the aircraft drop right on top of the second machine-gun nest. The starboard landing skid hit the frame of the twin mount and tore it from its moorings, digging it into the sand.

Lyons and Blancanales snapped out of their harnesses and were out the chopper’s doors in an instant. The Able Team leader paused only long enough to ram the pistol grip of his Mossberg into the jaw of one of the antiaircraft crew they’d landed among. Bone shattered under the impact, the gunner’s head flopping loosely on a rubbery neck. Blancanales’s FAL carbine burped out a short burst, churning 7.62 mm slugs through the intestines of a second gun crewman.

Lyons didn’t have to tell Grimaldi to take off, as the helicopter popped into the sky like a cork. Already the tear gas was wearing off on the first machine gun nest. “Pol!”

Blancanales whirled, feeding his M-203 again. Snapping the shoulder stock straight on his rifle, he triggered the grenade launcher. A 40-mm round spiraled through the air between the two antiaircraft positions, the shell’s travels seeming to take forever as Grimaldi struggled to gain altitude. When it felt like the first crew of enemy gunners could have recovered and taken a nap to sleep off the effects of the tear gas, the grenade landed at their feet. Six-point-five ounces of high explosive converted from solid potential chemical energy into a thunderclap of pressure and heat. The twin-mounted machine gun was shorn into its component parts by a wave of force that turned its crew’s legs and lower torsos into a rocketing halo of jellied meat. Their top halves were simply lobbed out of the sandbag ring, bouncing on the tarmac.

Lyons traded his Mossberg for the DSA carbine to deal with a group of newcomers to the battle, teams of men exploding through two doors of the hangar, brandishing automatic weapons. Lyons’s full-auto fire lanced into the squad, stitching torsos with high-velocity bullets that exploded through bone and vaporized tunnels through muscle and organ tissue.

“Damn it! Get them!” a voice shouted. Lyons narrowed his eyes and spotted a short, balding man with lean, cruel features, tripping a memory in the Able Team commander’s mental mug book. He dismissed his familiarity with the enemy leader, swinging his DSA’s chattering stream of automatic fire toward his slender opponent. The enemy leader charged ahead of the scything arc of supersonic lead, saving his own life, but causing Lyons to mow down three of his forces.

Blancanales added his autofire to the conflagration, but the fleeing leader was inside the protective walls of the hangar. Rather than being deterred, the Able Team grenadier stuck an M-433 HEDP round into his launcher and fired. When the dual-purpose round touched the wall of the hangar, its copper armor-penetrating shrapnel charge spit out the prefab wall material and molten metal in a cone of lethal devastation that slashed through whatever defenders stood on the other side of the door. Screams of agony split the air.

Lyons emptied his DSA through the hole, then transitioned to his six-inch Colt Python. The airplane access doors groaned ominously and buckled as a thunderous force exerted itself. Moments after the doors deformed, they toppled over, concussive force shearing them from their moorings. Inside, a Cessna Stationaire idled, its propeller sucking smoke from the detonations into spirals of inky grayness. The dark-clad, blond figure stood in a half-open door and brought up a pair of flashing Uzi submachine guns.

Lyons and Blancanales dived for cover as a salvo of 9 mm slugs stabbed at them. The Able Team leader grunted as his body armor stopped a pair of slugs, and he triggered the Colt Python, knowing it wouldn’t be enough to stop the prop plane. He missed the twin-machine-pistol-wielding enemy leader as the Cessna shot forward. Another plane closed its access door and followed the lead plane, but having started later, it was slower, enabling Blancanales to cut loose with his FAL rifle.

The engine belched smoke as 7.62 mm slugs tore into it. The high-velocity bullets shattered the pistons, freezing up the propeller. Lyons let the Python drop to the tarmac and he unslung his Mossberg 500. Tromboning the slide, he hammered a blast of slugs into the fuselage and passenger cabin. Twelve-gauge missiles punched through fiberglass and flesh, tearing into the gunmen jammed into the back of the plane.

Blancanales’s grenade launcher chugged loudly, a third Cessna disappearing in a cloud of flame and splinters.

All the while, Lyons watched the lead plane, and the enemy commander, the same slender figure who’d raced into the darkness before. The Cessna climbed until it was a tiny speck in thousands of miles of empty sky. It was out of eyesight in a minute, but it was not out of sight of the satellites that the Farm had watching the airstrip.

“That’s twice you’ve gotten away,” Lyons snarled. “But we’ll see where you’re going. There won’t be a third time.”