Kitabı oku: «Extinction Crisis»

“MY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN RUNNING THE PROBABILITIES,” BROGNOLA SAID.

“Indian Point and Calvert Cliffs are their biggest and best targets to cause hysteria, even if they fail in the attempt.”

“But they pushed up their timetable now that Phoenix Force stopped them in France,” the President countered. “And then there’s Syria. And when Damascus suffers from their own chemical weapons, the response will be worse than riots. They’ll hit everyone who knew about their facilities, which means our people in Iraq and Israel.”

The President thought about the pictures of the dead Kurds that had been used in the Fallen’s threat video. “Europe’s out of control, and America and the Middle East are under threat. If we ever needed a miracle, we need it now.”

Price took a deep breath. “Luckily, that’s Stony Man’s job description. The impossible missions.”

The President nodded in agreement. “Things don’t get more impossible than this.”

Extinction Crisis
Don Pendleton’s

Stony Man ^®

America’s Ultra-Covert Intelligence Agency

www.mirabooks.co.uk

EXTINCTION CRISIS

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

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER ONE

Carl Lyons stopped at the edge of the wide puddle of blood, attempting to control his rage at the murder of a Department of Energy investigative agent. Mare Hirtenberg had been a beautiful woman, closing in on forty, but nothing pretty remained in her blood-spattered features, hazel eyes bulging out as her mouth was stretched and distorted in agony. The Able Team leader had been assigned to work with Hirtenberg for the past few days, reviewing infiltration attempts at nuclear power plants around the nation.

Hirtenberg had been Lyons’s kind of Fed, a no-nonsense woman with a sense of irony and cynicism that appealed to him. But today, he had found her seated at her desk, her throat slashed.

The Able Team commander hit a button on his Smart phone, a speed dial command that would bring a Justice Department evidence team running. There was no hope for Hirtenberg, not with two gallons of blood painting the floor tiles and her desk. Paramedics would only be good for confirming the blatantly obvious fact that she was dead.

Something whirred softly on the other side of Hirtenberg’s desk and Lyons drew the Smith & Wesson Military and Police 357 from its shoulder holster. He sidestepped the puddle of blood and saw something move Hirtenberg’s lifeless leg along the side of the desk. He was able to notice two small darts embedded in her calf. Whoever had murdered her had utilized a Taser, directed just above ankle level. Theories of the Israeli Negev Nuclear Research Center break-in rushed to Lyons’s mind. He briefly considered the possibility of a small trained animal slipping unnoticed through defenses.

Lyons snapped his MP-357 to eye level, brow furrowing as he realized that animals didn’t have electro-motors. A dull gunmetal-black tendril writhed as it disappeared around the base of Hirtenberg’s chair. Not having a clear target, Lyons held his fire.

“Come on, show yourself,” Lyons growled, tracking the floor.

Air pistons hissed and Lyons felt an agonizing jolt in his shin. A twenty-thousand-volt current blasted along a pair of fine wires, and the Able Team commander’s entire body seized up. The paralyzing charge tightened every muscle in the former cop’s body, including the index finger curled around the tuned, 6-pound trigger of the sleek new Smith & Wesson. The high-pressure .357 SIG round cracked loudly, a bark that was nearly as intense a bellow as Lyons’s old favored .357 Magnum cartridge, and in a moment, the continuous Taser charge dissipated.

Lyons was physically as powerful as any two men, but in the wake of a Taser jolt, even his mighty musculature went limp. Only his incredible athletic conditioning kept him from falling unconscious or careening uncontrollably off the corner of Hirtenberg’s desk. He managed to catch himself on his hands and elbows, the Smith & Wesson MP clattering from numbed hands.

At floor level, he saw a bulbous, insectlike head staring at him. Two hexagon-patterned domes formed eyes reminiscent of a dragonfly, and the only flaw in the space between them was a smoking .357-inch hole. Beneath the bullet entry, a rectangular turret dangled, slender wires dangling from it like drool. The buglike object writhed, twisted, as if recovering its senses at the same rate that Lyons did.

“No, you don’t, you little bastard,” Lyons growled, pushing off the floor. The metallic worm turned almost completely over on itself, a nodule rising from a second bulbous segment just behind the head. The Able Team leader knew it was another weapon, and he reached out, fist closing on a wastebasket. It was only a few pounds, but to his Taser-hammered muscles, it felt more like a few tons. He swung the metal receptacle in front of his face before another air-piston hissed and an electric motor whined to angry life. The wastebasket’s aluminum skin screamed as a deadly cutting wire whipped at it. There was very little physical push behind the miniature lash, but a gash appeared in the bottom of the wastebasket from Lyons’s point of view.

Mystery solved—time to get primitive, the former LAPD cop thought. Lyons lunged, his wastebasket shield bashing against the side of the metallic caterpillar as its hydraulic whip continued to carve at the aluminum bucket. The impact jarred the yard-long automaton, disrupting the slicing cord. The hydraulic whine ended, and Lyons reached around to grab the lethal worm.

The robot’s blunt tail whipped around and struck the Taser-stunned warrior in the forearm with enough force to break a lesser man’s bones. Lyons grunted, stunned as his limb was jammed into the floor. A second whiplash of the heavy tail slapped aside the wastebasket and glanced off of Lyons’s head. The robot flipped to its upright position, silvery metallic rollers dragging it rapidly toward a battered ventilation duct.

Cursing his weakness and vulnerability, Lyons knew there would be no way to catch up to the escaping automaton.

Hirtenberg’s mechanized murderer had gotten away, but the Able Team leader vowed that whoever had built it would not live to celebrate his colleague’s demise. If he had to battle to the end of the planet, he would get vengeance.

E HAN F ARKAS WAS A TRUE son of Egypt, and as a soldier in the elite Unit 777 of the Egyptian Army, he would fight to the very end, attempting the impossible to protect his nation. In this instance, it was a slightly unusual case. He was stuck in the confines of a Peugeot station wagon with a young woman of obvious European descent and two Americans of different ethnic backgrounds. The woman was known only as Atalanta, and she was obviously an agent of the Israeli Mossad. Top-secret joint operations between the two countries’ agencies were fraught with intrigue and mistrust.

The two American men had been sent to engage in field training with Unit 777. The agent introduced as Farrow was a tall, lanky black man, and Rey was a compact, muscular Hispanic. The two U.S. operators were considered friends of the antiterrorism unit, but Farkas had heard rumors from Muslim Brotherhood prisoners about the pair. A few months back, al Aksari and two of his allies had struck a brutal blow against the radical terrorist group as they were operating in Alexandria, supporting a central African militia. The two mystery men working alongside the legendary soldier had similar descriptions to Farrow and Rey.

The timing of this sneak-and-peek operation cemented Farkas’s worries. A week ago, Israel had been thrown into a state of high alert by a security breech at the Negev Nuclear Research Center. Cairo had been informed of the “near event” in the reactor core. With a 150-megawatt reactor, reportedly capable of producing enough material for one hundred nuclear warheads, a near event generally meant that the world almost ended for several thousand people. Had the reactor gone critical, the effects would have been akin to the nightmare that was Chernobyl, except that the much smaller, more heavily populated nation of Israel would have had a much larger percentage of habitable land turned into an inhospitable radioactive deadland. Both Jews and Arabs would have been sickened or killed, not to mention an area stretching as far north as the West Bank and as far east as Safi would have been rendered unsafe for farming or livestock.

That kind of news left Egypt on edge, and Farkas was fully aware of the proximity of the particular Brotherhood cell they were watching to the Inshas Nuclear Research Center. The Inshas core was only twenty-two megawatts, and was part of a pilot program for Egypt to develop her own nuclear warheads. Still, a meltdown incident would produce carnage and weaken the country’s standing in the Mediterranean community. All in all, if Farrow and Rey were the same high caliber of warrior that al Aksari was, then Farkas felt a sense of relief with their presence.

“We have movement,” Rafael Encizo said. “They’re loading a van.” Encizo’s cover name for this mission was Rey. His Phoenix Force partner, Calvin James, was using the cover name Farrow.

Farkas rested his fingers on the keys in the ignition. “All right. I’ll give them thirty seconds’ lead driving time before firing our ride up.”

“Good plan,” Atalanta said without a hint of irony or condescension.

“That’s a strange stack of boxes that they loaded,” Calvin James mused. “They don’t resemble any weapons storage that I’ve ever seen.”

“That would be too obvious, wouldn’t it?” Farkas asked. “Police would know rifle crates if they saw them in the back of a van.”

James frowned, his black mustache deepening the gloom of his expression. “But why would they use any kind of boxes to hide rifles? Gymnasium bags or standard luggage would be far more innocuous and just as easily contain assault weapons or grenade launchers.”

“Well, what was the nature of the Negev break-in?” Farkas asked.

“This has nothing to do with that,” Atalanta lied. Irritation sprawled across the Israeli woman’s features.

Farkas rolled his eyes, deepening her annoyance.

“Grow up, Atalanta,” Encizo snapped. “Farkas isn’t stupid and he’s not our enemy.”

James nodded in agreement. “Don’t let national pride get in the way of an international crisis. Once this is over, Israel and Egypt can go back to their behind-the-scenes pissing contest.”

Tanya Kristopoulos, a.k.a. Atalanta, glared at the two American agents. She was a Greek-born Jew who had suffered the loss of family at the hands of jihad terrorists operating in her home country. She’d long ago put aside her anger at Arabs, but her allegiance to the Israeli Mossad had given her a perspective about operational security that bordered on paranoia. “Listen, just because the CIA can’t keep a damned secret doesn’t mean we have to accommodate your—”

Encizo put his hand up in front of her face to cut her off. “The Mossad doesn’t know how the controls to the coolant tanks were sabotaged, except that someone used a 9 mm handgun to shoot up vital components. There were no signs of entry except for minor damage to ventilation duct covers that were too small for even a child to crawl through.”

“God damn it, Rey!” Atalanta complained.

“Yell a little louder next time,” James sneered. “The pricks loading the van didn’t quite hear you.”

“So no human could have entered the Negev plant, but somehow a handgun punctured pipes and wrecked electronics-packed consoles?” Farkas asked.

Atalanta’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know about the pipes? You just asked about the nature of the security breech.”

“There were enough rumors flying about, but very little was substantive enough to quantify or qualify what really happened,” Farkas explained. “Rey filled in some holes in the theories that have been flying around Unit 777 and other national security agencies.”

“Well, whatever broke in either had a magical invisibility cloak or was shrunk to doll-size,” Encizo added.

“Invisibility cloaks are fantasy, not reality, Rey,” Atalanta chided dismissively.

“Actually, no, they are real,” James countered. “Tokyo University has preliminary technology in development that uses specially reflective beads and camera technology to render solid objects as see-through. That’s just technology in the public domain.”

Atalanta and Farkas both raised their eyebrows at that particular revelation.

“I doubt that the covert military optical stealth technology was utilized in the Negev break-in, though,” Encizo added. “Rear-projection morphic imagery only limits your visibility. It can’t phase you through bank vault doors or mask your scent and sound profile to highly trained attack dogs. No stealth fabric that we’ve encountered works against those particular measures.”

Encizo and James had encountered truly remarkable technologies in their journeys around the world. There were few things that they had seen or suspected that could ever surprise them anymore.

Farkas frowned. “’Tis a stranger world than I’ve ever imagined. Perhaps a trained simian with a gun? I know that bats and dolphins have been trained and used to deliver sabotaging explosives to hard-to-reach areas.”

“Any monkey small enough to operate in those particular ducts would have been roasted or frozen to death in various chambers,” Kristopoulos reluctantly admitted. “Plus, it wouldn’t have had the intellect to operate a firearm, nor the strength necessary to trigger or handle the recoil of a 9 mm pistol.”

Farkas turned his attention back to the suspects. They had just finished loading their van and gotten into the front. “We could just pull over their vehicle…”

“But what would keep them from blowing up their van to eliminate any evidence we’d capture?” Kristopoulos asked. “Remember, the Negev meltdown would have irradiated hundreds of miles, making it impossible to reach minimum safe distance without suffering debilitating, if not lethal, effects.”

“Besides, we want to keep an eye on how these guys are doing this,” James added. “Those men are only delivery boys, pawns.”

“You’ve got that correct,” Farkas agreed. “I know those two from our files. They’re errand boys who get handed all manner of shit duty, as you Americans so colorfully put it.”

“That’s believable,” Encizo said. “A lot more than some of the ideas we’ve been tossing around for the past minute. Okay, start her up.”

Farkas fired up their Peugeot and the station wagon pulled out to track the Brotherhood’s van as it drove toward the Inshas Nuclear Research Center. He couldn’t shake the feeling of dread that filled his gut. Tonight, a twenty-two-megawatt nuclear reactor was going to be assailed by terrorists armed with a form of technology that sliced through high-tech and low-tech defenses like a knife through butter.

Tonight, a radioactive nightmare could conceivably come true.

D AVID M C C ARTER LIT another cigarette to give his hands something to do. The Phoenix Force leader hated to cut short his vacation with Gary Manning and T. J. Hawkins, even if it was just a working holiday. The remaining members of Phoenix Force were in England to engage in a little cross training alongside elements of the SAS, so for McCarter it felt like a homecoming, despite the bruises and aches he sported from martial arts sparring with a crew of hardheaded Cockney recruits who reminded the Eastender of himself as a man in his twenties.

Still, the news of the French Department of Nuclear Energy headquarters break-in was a sobering splash on McCarter’s reminiscences. Right now, in the regiment’s guest barracks at Hereford, they were awaiting news from Barbara Price back at Stony Man Farm for permission to launch their Paris investigation without interference from DCRI, the French version of the FBI or Homeland Security. As a British citizen, McCarter had every right to hop on the Channel ferry or to board the Chunnel train to shoot on over to Paris without much paperwork, but he would have to undertake such a trip unarmed and ill-equipped to deal with what had been reported as a mysterious commando team raiding the DNE offices with surgical precision.

The European Union’s views on firearms ownership by private citizens, no matter how sterling their prior military service, was at best intolerant of people with the determination to defend their lives. Of course, this meant that McCarter’s text message to a friend in Paris would be what their operation hinged on if they couldn’t get official clearance. McCarter knew people around the globe, and was able to acquire supplies of reliable weapons from them.

His cell phone burbled with a text message answer to his initial inquiry. What he read soured his mood.

“Can scrounge gear for you and your two friends. No Grand Puissants in inventory, alas.”

The Grand Puissant was the French term for a Browning Hi-Power, one of David McCarter’s preferred designs and his trusted companion across the globe for his entire professional warrior career. His comfort with the reliable, accurate 9 mm autoloader enabled him to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the classic design. Naturally, his disappointment sparked interest from his younger partner.

Hawkins read McCarter’s screen, then checked the look on his commander’s face. “Y’all make that sound like we’ll be landing in the middle of a nest of ninjas the moment we were within sight of the Eiffel Tower. So what if you have to pack a Glock for a while?”

Gary Manning regarded the youngest member of Phoenix Force with a wry grin. “Once you’ve acclimated yourself to true perfection, attempting to cope with an egotistical Austrian’s proclaimed flawless design is a troubling disappointment.”

McCarter chortled. “Besides, I’d be happy to have a row with a troupe of Japanese in black pajamas leaping about with swords and what have you. They’re so much fun when you head butt them and get their gobs all messy under those scarves.”

The laptop with the teleconference software burbled to life. Stony Man’s mission controller, Barbara Price, appeared on the screen, and she wasn’t very happy.

“I wonder if she’s grumpy over your lack of a Hi-Power, too,” Hawkins murmured.

“Don’t make me murder you in your sleep, lad,” McCarter quipped. “What’s wrong, Barb?”

“The big new French interior intelligence agency has been comparing notes with itself, and they decided they don’t want to play with American-sponsored Interpol investigators anymore,” Price replied. “Especially in matters of French nuclear-energy security breaches.”

“We’ve been on good terms with both French Intelligence in the past,” Manning said. “What is the problem now?”

“I’ll tell you what the problem is,” McCarter growled. “The head of the new amalgamated agency has his head up his arse. Though it’s not as if the bloody wankers sitting behind the desk realize that they’re telling us to sit this one out and leaving it to the second or third best in the world.”

“Pride is unbecoming of you, David,” Price admonished.

“Bollocks,” McCarter continued to snarl. “It’s the same ‘I know what’s best’ shit that happens every time we have to work with some department. We go somewhere and some half-wit thinks he’s the cock of the walk when he’s just a flounder in a bucket.”

“Well, Hal doesn’t want you to get caught. And if DCRI sends someone after you, try not to maim them,” Price ordered.

McCarter sneered. “Just a dent on their chin and a slap on the ass to run home to mother.”

Manning pulled out his Smart phone and began the process of ordering Chunnel train tickets. “Looks like you’re going to have to grin and bear it with whatever your mate supplies you.”

“I don’t care if it’s a wooden shoe that I have to break off in someone’s bum,” McCarter returned. “It’s time to show the DCRI how professionals deal with infiltrators.”

Manning grinned. It was good to see a flash of the cocky McCarter. It was also an indication of how much the enemy was going to regret pulling an operation that showed up on the Phoenix Force commander’s radar.

CHAPTER TWO

Lyons stood in the hallway, battered forearm wrapped in an athletic bandage to secure it in case the blow it had taken had resulted in a hairline fracture. The bandage would serve as a temporary splint until the forearm could be x-rayed. The Able Team leader didn’t intend to remove himself from the crime scene until the technicians had all of the data they needed to track down the escaped robot’s murderous masters. He had seen the killer, but he didn’t know its origins and who had sent it. The evidence linking Mare Hirtenberg’s murder to the rash of security breeches at international nuclear power plants was purely circumstantial, but Lyons couldn’t dismiss the possibility that someone had used a compact mechanical assassin to penetrate the Department of Energy’s Washington, D.C., offices with the same ghostlike ability of the saboteurs at the other plants.

Lyons’s leg was still raw from where the Taser darts had penetrated his skin and pumped twenty thousand volts through his body. The Justice Department crime scene techs had collected the contents of two Taser cartridges that had been loaded into the robot’s head section. There might have been more in the mechanism, in case the mechanism had encountered multiple opponents. A security officer, assigned to protect the DoE offices, approached Lyons, his step cautious as he caught the grim darkening of the big ex-cop’s face.

“No sighting of the robot?” Lyons asked, putting aside his rage to speak with a fellow lawman.

“No,” the security officer said. “It’ll take us a while to get our own camera-mount robot here, and even then, it might not fit into the air vents.”

Lyons’s brow furrowed. “I’d get a bomb-sniffing dog team here, just to be safe. If the device did have a self-destruct mechanism, it wouldn’t do much damage to the infrastructure of this building, but it could harm a mainframe or more personnel.”

“We’ve thought of that possibility already,” the officer replied. “But thanks for confirming that we’re not completely paranoid.”

“My teammates think otherwise, but I appreciate the sentiment,” Lyons returned.

The office door opened and a covered body on a gurney rolled into the hallway. The coroner walked beside the body of Hirtenberg, having claimed the corpse for release. The Justice Department medical examiner met Lyons’s gaze for a moment before the brooding Stony Man warrior looked down at the remains of a woman whom he’d befriended over the past few days.

“Cause of death was fairly obvious,” Alicia Khan said softly. Her dark, elfin face was serene and sympathetic, large and soulful brown eyes steady in the path of Lyons’s disquiet and angry grief. “Exsanguination due to laceration of the throat by an unknown weapon.”

“I saw it in action. It was a metal wire spun on an electric-motor-powered spool,” Lyons said. “The crime techs picked up trimmings of it with blood transfer from her.”

Lyons didn’t want to give in to the queasiness in his gut at the description of a friend’s agonizing murder, especially in front of someone as sympathetic and empathic as Khan. He swallowed his disgust at how clinically he spoke of her end. “You might find traces of the wire on her vertebrae, since the wire cuts flesh and thin aluminum easily, but might have been stopped by heavy bone.”

Khan nodded. “I’ll run an X-ray in that area. Metal from garrote wires or knife wounds often transfers to heavy bone. You going to be all right?”

Lyons took a deep breath. Khan, a gorgeous woman in her mid-forties, was no stranger to Lyons. She was one of a team whom Hal Brognola, director of Stony Man Farm, kept on hand to deal with the aftereffects of a domestic operation undertaken by Able Team, Phoenix Force or even the Executioner. The Justice crew kept traces of Stony Man’s covert operations well out of the public eye, but kept data on hand in case there was a prosecutable case left in the wreckage of Stony Man’s cleansing flames.

For a woman who interacted with the dead, her empathy was outstanding. She could endure even the worst of Lyons’s legendary rages, never steering away from providing him with a bridge back to humanity. Lyons managed a smile for her. “Thanks, Alicia, I can deal with the grief.”

Khan nodded. “Catharsis is one thing, baby. Just don’t hang on to the pain for too long.”

Lyons nodded. “Then get to testing, Alicia. I have murderers to track down.”

Khan stroked his cheek, a brief touch of tenderness from tigress to lion. They were both hunters, different predators in the same ecosystem, tracking criminals. While the medical examiner took to her chase with microscopes and spectrometers, Lyons’s tools of the hunt were measured in twelve gauge and .357.

“Good hunting,” she told him and returned to escorting Hirtenberg’s body to the coroner’s wagon.

The Able Team leader glanced one last time at the receding gurney, then left the hallway to meet up with his partners, Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, also fondly referred to as Pol. Able Team had gone from investigation and paper-pushing mode to full-on pursuit.

T HE DOOR PANEL on the side of the van rolled open and Hermann Schwarz felt the mass of Lyons’s muscular form tilt the vehicle. He opened his eyes after receiving a slap on the shoulder from his best friend, Rosario Blancanales.

“Look busy, the boss is here,” Blancanales said.

“Carl knows that I’m a slacker,” Schwarz replied.

“A slacker who calculates quantum physics equations the same way most people do Sudoko,” Lyons mentioned. “Actually, no. You don’t even need pen or paper. Do you need a description of the murder-bot one more time, Gadgets, or have you already cobbled one together out of soda cans and twist ties?”

Schwarz looked over his shoulder and looked back at his commander, attempting to imitate Lyons’s moments of annoyance. “Oh, fecal discharge, Rosario, my good man. The honorable Mr. Lyons just paid me a compliment and we haven’t even blown anyone up yet.”

“Gadgets, I’m being sweetness and love right now because I am under the delusion that you will put my hands around the throat of the scumbag who took out a fellow cop,” Lyons explained. “Do you want me to return that anger back toward you and your snarky attitude?”

Schwarz pivoted in his seat and handed over a clipboard. “No. I did not build my own copy of the robot. Seems we were out of guitar picks necessary for the stegasaur-style ridge plates. But I do have technical drawings that hypothetically reconstruct the device based on your description of its movements and external dimensions.”

Lyons rewarded Schwarz with a tight-lipped smile as he accepted the stack of papers with twenty pages of sketches of motors and circuits. He leafed through until he came to a page depicting himself, clad in a bearskin, wielding a massive thigh bone, ready to smash the robot that had escaped him. Scrawled in a cartoon word balloon were the words, “Carl smash shiny worm!”

“Can I keep this for my fridge?” Lyons asked Schwarz.

The Able Team electronics whiz raised an eyebrow. “Sure.”

Lyons carefully ripped out the page, removed the sketch of the robot, then crumpled the rest of the page and hurled it out the sliding panel door, where it landed in the gutter. Lyons stuck it under the front clip as an impromptu cover for the robot design notes. “Do you know who built it?”

Schwarz looked out the door of the van, even though the wadded sketch was long gone. “Attempting to narrow down the original designer of a robot is next to impossible. There are entire schools of kids who build these things, not to mention countless amateurs who enter them into battle-bot competitions.”

Lyons nodded. “I’m growing disappointed.”

“Ah, but Mr. Lyons, you asked for a designer, while I applied my mental powers to a more productive course of action. I thought outside of the box,” Schwarz said. “There is room in the robot for a 5.8-gigahertz transmitter that can maintain a remote link.”

Lyons smirked. “You’ve been monitoring that signal?”

Schwarz rolled his eyes. “But of course. Unfortunately, I’ve only narrowed down the broadcast to a nearby relay module.”

Lyons looked through the windshield as Schwarz turned wordlessly in his swivel seat. Halfway down the block sat a brown delivery van with a popular company’s yellow logo painted on the back door. Lyons looked at the license plates. “They forgot to forge plates with the proper business coding on them. That vehicle’s only got stickers for nonperishable food delivery, not air freight.”

Blancanales shook his head. “You with the electronics, and him with the memorizing every possible type of license plate. Are you two attempting to make me feel like a fifth wheel here?”

Lyons winked. “Nothing could match your seven hundred years of experience, Methuselah.”

“We hadn’t run the plates yet,” Blancanales said, steering the conversation away from the fact that he was the oldest man in the van and on the team. “We simply tracked down the signal and I realized that there was no one on this street that had received a delivery, and no one had left that truck.”

Lyons looked along the sidewalks. “I might just make detectives out of you two jungle fighters yet.”

Schwarz sighed. “Detectives. That’s why God and Al Gore invented the Internets, Ironman. To make actual gumshoe work obsolete.”

Blancanales regarded Lyons. “Not going to tear the doors off of their van?”

“I want to see if they make a pickup instead of a delivery,” Lyons replied. “Gadgets, you have a camera focused on the undercarriage of that truck, right?”

Schwarz looked back at Lyons, sincerely offended this time by the implication that he wouldn’t have done what his leader had suggested. “You trust me to plant a bomb in a microcomputer in the space of fifteen seconds before thieves can run off with it, but when I’m sitting right behind a suspicious enemy vehicle, you doubt that I’ve already been recording it for the time it took for the CSI team to run all their fingerprints and blood-spray patterns?”

Schwarz flicked on a monitor attached to the dashboard before Lyons could answer. A high-quality view of the underside of the van was visible. “The monitor would have turned on because I have a sensor in the camera set up to activate at the first motion.”

Lyons patted Schwarz on the shoulder. “You just earned the weekends of the Consumer Electronics Show and the Electronic Entertainment Expo free. Barring end-of-the world crises.”

“Yay,” Schwarz droned, trying to seem unexcited, but Lyons knew exactly the kind of electronic geekery that went on for those two weekends. The monitor flickered, indicating a change in the ground-level camera view. “Okay, something just moved a storm grating in the shadow of the curb.”

Lyons squinted at the ten-inch monitor. “Come on, you son of a bitch, show yourself.”

The metal grille tottered, then flopped over. A bulbous, silvery head emerged from under the sidewalk. As Schwarz muttered about a downgrade of hydraulic efficiency from Lyons’s gunshot, movement on the sidewalk drew the Able Team leader’s attention. A man was pushing a stroller down the street.

“It should have been able to push the grating over a little more easily,” Schwarz commented.

“I’d hit it with my .357 Smith,” Lyons said distractedly, watching the man and the toddler walk closer to the delivery van.

That brought a grin to Schwarz’s face. “Able Team. Travel the world. Meet technological wonders. Shoot them to pieces.”

“’Kin A,” Lyons agreed softly.

The robotic inchworm crawled toward the center of the truck’s undercarriage. A panel opened above it, and two hands reached down to grasp it.

“We’ve got the bas—” Lyons began.

“It’s a segment too long,” Schwarz cut him off.

Lyons’s attention flitted from the monitor to the father and child on the street. He exploded out of his seat, jumping to the sidewalk and charging toward the delivery truck. He didn’t need an explanation about the nature of Schwarz’s grim, sudden warning. He took off from the Able Team van as if launched from the barrel of a gun as fast as his powerful leg muscles could propel him.

“Carl! Wait!” he heard Blancanales call out.

It was too late to stop Lyons as he drew upon his high school and college football conditioning to rocket him down the sidewalk with explosive speed. Each thrust of his powerful leg muscles carried him closer to the delivery van and the two bystanders who were now even with the stopped vehicle. The young father looked up from his child in the stroller, seeing the human freight train barrelling toward them both. Lyons unfurled his massive arms and scooped up father and infant. The Able Team commander twisted himself so that his broad back would absorb the shock wave that he expected to erupt. It came an instant later, the brown metal skin billowing out. Thankfully the hull of the truck was not pre-scored metal so that when it split due to the rupturing overpressure of the exploding robot, no shrapnel flew from the delivery van, though Lyons had his Kevlar on under his shirt and jacket. Lyons’s forward momentum had carried all three of them past the torn vent in the side of the truck, sparing the trio exposure to a gout of flame that vomited through the wound in the vehicle.

Outside, in open air, the pressure wave had space to roll and disperse, sparing the Able Team leader and the two bystanders. The men inside of the truck would have had no such dispersal as the atmosphere inside of the vehicle could only compress so much before it crushed the bodies it was trapped with. Any living leads had been pulverized by the self-destruct mechanism in the robot.

“Y-you saved us,” the man stammered.

Lyons set down the stroller, unhooking the crying toddler within. He handed the girl off to dad after a quick examination for shrapnel injuries or possible burns. The father had suffered a scraped elbow, but the baby had been shielded from sidewalk rash by Lyons’s body and her crumpled stroller. “Just calm your little girl down and go home.”

“What…is this, a terrorist attack?” the man inquired.

“No. It’s just a couple of crooks being silenced by their boss,” Lyons explained. “You didn’t see anything, but don’t stick around, all right? Just make sure the kid’s fine.”

The girl’s wails subsided as her father cradled her. “Thank you.”

Lyons nodded and waved him off.

Schwarz and Blancanales had run up to the gutted van, but the heat of the fire inside kept them at bay. Lyons jogged back around toward his partners, phone already in hand.

“Barb, we have an explosion four blocks north of the Department of Energy offices. Get on the press and the Justice Department and start spinning that it’s organized crime related, and totally independent of the murder of Mare. Keep this from being released as a terrorist attack,” Lyons said to Stony Man.

“You found the robot?” Price asked.

“Yes, and it had a self-destruct mechanism inside,” Lyons told her. “We won’t get anything from the punks who delivered it.”

“I’ll put word forward to Calvin and Rafael,” Price replied. “They’re following another van with a mystery load in the vicinity of Inshas.”

“Relay to them that the robot I encuntered had built-in Tasers and a wire whip that cuts through aluminum and flesh like butter,” Lyons added.

“Given the Israeli situation at Negev, the robot they might encounter could have a firearm built in, as well,” Price said. “You lucked out.”

“Didn’t seem so lucky for Hirtenberg,” Lyons growled. “Send Alicia to pick up our crispy critters here. And give her my apologies for two call-outs in one day.”

“You sound like you’re not coming back to the Farm,” Price mused.

“No. I know the van builders who might have crafted the fake delivery truck,” Lyons said.

“We haven’t even run the plates off of Gadgets’s video footage,” Price replied.

“I know the D.C. area chop shops and kinky garages like the back of my hand, Barb,” Lyons countered. “We beat cops don’t like waiting for slow shit like Web searches.”

Price laughed. “All right. Khan’s team is on the way to the blast site. D.C. Metropolitan Police has been advised to control the area and allow you egress from the crime scene.”

Lyons looked up at the police helicopter that was already watching the area. “Good. Just to be safe, tell Alicia we may have a third corpse pickup for her.”

“I’ll convey your apologies,” Price said. “Flowers and candy, too?”

“And reservations for dinner,” Lyons added. He turned to Schwarz and Blancanales. “Mount up, soldiers. It’s time to kill people and break things.”

“Enough investigation?” Blancanales asked.

Lyons nodded. “Now it’s time for prosecution.”

Schwarz grinned. “Prosecution to the max, baby.”

Able Team drove off, ready for war in the streets.

C ALVIN J AMES, RIDING IN the backseat of the Peugeot station wagon with “Atalanta” Kristopoulos, answered his satellite phone’s chirp on the first ring.

“Farrow here,” James said, using his cover name.

“We have news from across the pond.” Barbara Price opened the conversation. “Ironman and his boys encountered some delivery men just like yours. Their special present was a two-fold surprise.”

“Whatever it is, it had a self-destruct mechanism,” James deduced. That brought sharp stares from the others in the station wagon.

“All right. Only one surprise,” Price corrected herself.

“It was a robot?” James inquired.

“Here’s the surprise. It’s been rigged with antipersonnel defenses, and was utilized for the assassination of an investigator that Ironman was liaising with,” Price explained. “It gave Ironman a pounding with Tasers, a wire saw and its tail boom.”

“Tail?” James asked.

“It’s a worm- or snake-shaped robot, which probably allows for greater flexibility through vents and drainage pipes,” Price said.

“Okay. That makes sense. I was imagining one of those modified radio-controlled cars or a rebuilt lawn mower device like the battle bots that show up on British television,” James said. “So the delivery men don’t control the robots themselves?”

“No, but they do sit on a remote signal relay,” Price told him. “Gadgets and Bear agree that the command frequency is beamed through a tight focus point, which allows the signal to penetrate concrete and steel over short distances.”

“The usual structures of a nuclear power plant would interfere with the robot’s reception,” James agreed, following Price’s logic.

“Precisely,” she said. “A narrow-band, high-energy transmission allows for real time control in a power-plant campus or even your average office building.”

“And these things are rigged for fighting?” James continued.

“Ironman was tased, and when the saw got snarled on a wastebasket he used for a shield, it nearly shattered his arm with its shield,” Price recounted. “But that was the extent of its offensive weaponry.”

“So it’s agile and tough to escape our favorite caveman,” James said.

“Carl put a .357 SIG round into it and was only able to take out the robot’s Taser battery,” Price described. “I’d hate to see what would happen if the Taser were replaced with a Glock.”

“Chances are, that’s what we’ll have to deal with,” James muttered. “Thanks for the heads-up on the destruct mechanism, as well.”

“It’s enough to kill everyone inside of a Grumman Kurbmaster,” Price added. “But Carl was only fifteen feet from the van when it exploded, and came through unharmed. That’s not to say the destruct mechanism can’t produce its own shrapnel.”

“Add in constant monitoring, presumably through built-in cameras,” James said.

“Just built-in cameras?” Encizo asked from the Peugeot’s shotgun seat. “Ask mother hen if she happens to have an eye in the sky over our position.”

“Just satellites.” James relayed her answer. “And they don’t see anything in the air.”

Farkas spoke up. “That’s the point of remote observation drones. If they showed up on radar and aerial cameras.”

“Figures,” Kristopoulos grumbled. “Robots belly-crawling on the ground and flying in the air over our heads.”

“It’s only observing us so far,” Encizo said. “But if they warn the Brotherhood members in the van or if it has weapons of its own, we’re screwed.”

“We are hanging back far enough that the drone operator may not think we’re following their people,” Farkas offered.

“If they are paranoid enough to put a set of eyes in the air, then they’re too smart to leave our continued trailing of their deliverymen to chance,” Encizo countered. “We were made long before I ever noticed their bird.”

“Well, that’s the end of a perfectly good surveillance operation,” Kristopoulos said. “What would be their response?”

“Anything from scorched earth to the Brotherhood engaging in evasive maneuvers,” James said. “But the deliverymen don’t seem to have deviated from their normal course.”

“Maybe they want us to know,” Farkas said. “After all, how do you defend against armed, murderous robots?”

Encizo brought his field glasses to bear on the back of the Muslim Brotherhood van. “The back door just moved.”

The Cuban drew his Glock 34 from its spot in a cross-draw holster under his photographer’s vest. He heard Kristopoulos and James do likewise in the backseat.

“We might not know how to prevent robots from infiltrating a nuclear power plant, but a pissed-off terrorist with an assault rifle is practically a Friday-night get-together for us,” James said.

A hundred yards ahead, the muzzle-flash of an AK-47 burned. Even as the windshield cracked and deformed under the first impact, Farkas swerved hard to avoid the rain of shattered glass and steel-cored bullets tearing into their vehicle.