Fire in the Sky

by Don Pendleton

  He found himself in a darkened locker room, using the penlight to cut through the gloom. Here, too, cobwebs attested to disuse, and thick layers of dust covered everything.

  Bolan made his way into the factory, by this time not surprised to see an empty building. Baylor Goggle and Optical, at least here in Sanford, Florida, was a sham. He shone the light all around, revealing nothing but bare concrete floor and bare walls as far as his light would carry. This place might have housed a thriving business at one time, but not now and not for quite some time. The United States government had been doing business with a nonexistent company, one that still issued clandestine checks to key government personnel, one that apparently employed someone to stay there and put on a phony front for any casual visitors. Curious.

  He turned away from the empty factory and headed toward the administrative offices. Perhaps this place only took care of the paperwork for the company, the factory space no longer needed. It didn't seem likely, but it was possible.

  He walked darkened hallways, filthy from disuse, and finally moved through double swing doors to administration. The difference was like night and day. This part of the structure was clean and well kept, but the few offices he peered into were empty.

  A sound made its way to his ears, a distant and tiny noise that seemed muffled by the walls and doors of several rooms. He followed the sound, moving through a doorway marked Executive Director.

  He was standing in what could only be described as a dining room. It was a large office. But instead of a desk, a wooden table with one chair sat in the center. There was also a pantry, a small refrigerator and a hot plate.

  The sound was louder here, and he could nearly make out voices. A door that led out the other side of the room was marked, Conference A. He approached it cautiously, holding the penlight in his mouth and withdrawing Big Thunder with his right hand.

  When he turned the knob, the door opened into a den with sofa and recliner and tables containing books, magazines, food wrappers and empty beer cans. The noise he'd heard had been a television, a nighttime soap opera filling its nineteen-inch screen. The man he'd seen earlier lived here, apparently a watchman at night and a fake employee during the day. That had been the buzzer he'd heard on entering this afternoon. It alerted the caretaker to interlopers.

  But where was he now?

  He caught just the barest glint of movement reflected in the TV screen and dived over the top of the couch, smashing into a coffee table as 9 mm parabellums spitting from the muzzle of a MAC-10 lit the place like daylight and tore Into the couch, white down filling the room like snowflakes.

  Bolan rolled, his mind whirling, and came up firing the AutoMag. A small corner of his brain wanted to try to take his assailant alive, but it wasn't possible in the confined space. It was kill or be killed, and the Executioner wasn't ready to trade in life for the unknown just yet.

  He fired off a line of slugs — chest level — across the room, which connected with groaning flesh halfway through its arc. The man fell heavily, dead before his body even hit the floor.

  Bolan came out of his crouch, stuffing from the couch falling around him, Big Thunder held two-handed in front of him. Navigating by the light of the TV, he moved to the body, kicking the MAC-10 away from it before relaxing his own defenses. He turned on the overhead lights to examine the man who'd greeted him earlier in the day.

  He searched the body, then, quickly, the offices themselves, coming away with nothing more than he had learned in his first minute in the building —namely, that it was an empty warehouse designed to look as if it weren't. Perhaps a serious investigating team could find more, but to Bolan's eye, the place had been kept conspicuously clean, a street meant to lead nowhere but to a dead end.

  He checked the dead man's pocket, coming out with a set of car keys. The man's wallet contained nearly a thousand dollars in cash and a check for two thousand more from the Baylor Goggle account. There was no other identification in the wallet — no driver's license, no social security card, nothing.

  A time check showed Bolan that he had been in the building less than thirty minutes. Not much time, but probably an eternity for Julie in the Cadillac. He turned off the television, then used the dead man's keys to let himself out of the building.

  The Lincoln was newer and appeared to be in better shape than the Cadillac. Since it wasn't of any more use to the nameless dead man, he unlocked the door, climbed in, then drove it to the bend in the road where Julie was parked.

  Afraid to take it around the corner, in case he scared her away, he got out of the car, walked to the Cadillac and opened the passenger side door.

  "God, I'm glad to see you," she said quickly. "I was scared silly waiting out here. What happened? Did anything…"

  "I didn't have any trouble," he said. "The building is empty."

  "Empty!"

  He shrugged. "I did get us another car, though," he said. "Just back around that bend and we'll take it."

  "But doesn't it belong to someone?" she asked.

  "Don't worry about it," he said. "It's ours now."

  She looked at him quizzically, but didn't question further. Putting the car in reverse, she backed up slowly and pulled up next to the Lincoln.

  "Now what?" she said.

  "We find the nearest airport."

  "Airport." She laughed. "For the love of Mike, where are we going?"

  "Arizona," he replied succinctly, and left the car.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hal Brognola and Gunnar Greggson sat side by side on vinyl chairs in the waiting area, holding up copies of the Washington Post in front of their faces, occasionally lowering the tops of the opened papers to sneak a look at the American Airlines ticket counters.

  Washington's National Airport was early-morning busy, the airlines' rush hour, as men in business suits and carrying hand luggage hurried for shuttle flights to New York and Philadelphia. Behind them, through the plate-glass windows, cabs, buses, hotel shuttles and private cars continuously disgorged passengers, all apparently late and looking in disgust at their watches, just as Brognola and Greggson were doing.

  "The damned flight is supposed to leave in twenty minutes," Greggson growled, turning to glance quickly at Brognola. "No way are we going to have time to pull this off now."

  "I'm thinking," Brognola replied calmly. "He'll be here. All we can do is take this thing a step at a time."

  "Yeah, but we've gotta have someplace to step to, my friend."

  "What time are our people set to go at Baylor Goggle?"

  "Ten hundred hours," Greggson said, turning to the sports section, "if the police aren't there. If the police are there, we scrub. After talking to your boy last night, I think we might be tying people up for nothing anyway. Has Bolan gotten away yet?"

  Brognola cocked his wrist and looked at his watch. "He should be in the air now. They've got a rental car waiting for them on the Phoenix end, and they'll drive down to Gila Bend early this afternoon."

  "You think there's anything to it?"

  The big Fed took a breath. "I'd have to check it out either way."

  "Yeah. You think it's a mistake for him to take the Arnold woman with him?"

  Brognola turned to the comics section, settling in for probably the only laugh he'd get all day. "I hate to say it this way, Greg," he replied, "but he's got no choice but to take her with him. Her brain carries our only connection to a completely new technology that our enemies have apparently already accessed. If she dies, theoretical research in liquid electricity goes backward twenty years. I want her in his sight every minute of every day until we get those mental notes transcribed."

  Greggson quieted for a moment, then said, "How about them Mets, huh?"

  Brognola turned partway in his seat to look at the man, when out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of Air Force blue. He turned quickly, then covered his face with the paper. "Don't turn around," he said, pulling his paper closer to his face, "but our boy just now climbed out
of an SP jeep and is making his way inside."

  Both men angled themselves away from the door, burying their faces until Captain Norm Michaels had passed. He carried a blue zip-up bag under his arm and an extra uniform in a garment bag was slung over his shoulder. A briefcase was swinging at his side. His right wrist was handcuffed to it. He wore dark sunglasses.

  "Would you look at the time?" Greggson said. "There's no way we can…"

  "I'm still thinking," Brognola interrupted. "Shh."

  Brognola watched the man strut to the counter like a rooster in the henhouse. He was having a difficult time not thinking of Michaels as the man who attacked his home, even though, logically, he probably had nothing to do with it. The head Fed hated this man without reserve, hated everything he stood for. And probably all because of a sense of violation over what had happened at the house.

  He watched the man pick up his ticket and spend an extra minute joking with the woman behind the counter, also in a blue uniform, at the expense of the people waiting behind him. It was going to give Brognola the greatest pleasure to flatten one of Leland's boys and start the momentum in the other direction.

  Michaels walked away from the counter, directly toward the boarding area. He had barely ten minutes to spare before the scheduled departure, and Greggson was right. There wasn't enough time to do what they had to. But there were ways and there were ways.

  Brognola folded his paper. "Let's go," he said, standing quickly and starting after the man, Greggson jogging to catch up.

  Michaels moved through the concourse, then spoked toward the American Airlines terminal, the two Feds twenty paces behind him.

  The captain checked his watch as he walked, Brognola wondering how he could read the face through the dark glasses. He recognized two more of his men on either side of Michaels, angling slowly in, boxing the man loosely.

  Then all at once, Ted Healy, walking the other way, bumped right into Michaels, who stopped dead, everyone else closing in immediately.

  "I'm so sorry," Healy was saying, his hands on the man.

  "That's quite all..."

  The man beside Michaels had pulled up the overcoat he'd been carrying, jamming the barrel of a hidden .45 hard into the man's ribs, then pushing sideways.

  "Hey, wait. What are you ..."

  Brognola and Greggson had reached the scene by this time, five men grabbing quickly and pushing sideways, hustling the man through the rest room door that had the Closed sign hanging on it that they had planted earlier.

  The rest room was large, with gleaming white tile and aluminum fixtures and smelling of ammonia. Michaels, showing absolutely no sign of fear, struggled against the five of them.

  "Who the hell do you think you are?" he grated through clenched teeth as he pulled against them.

  "Down on your knees," the man with the .45 ordered, sticking the barrel of the weapon against Michaels's forehead. His name was Wortham and he had done hard time with the Company.

  "Fuck you!" Michaels said.

  Wortham smiled and cocked the weapon, easing the safety off. "I'd love to blow you away, soldier boy."

  Michaels went down slowly, the anger never leaving his face. Then he saw Brognola. "I know you," he said. "You sorry bastard."

  "Get to work," Brognola said, his eyes never leaving Michaels's.

  Ted Healy got behind the man, jerking downward on the collar of his dress uniform jacket, pulling it right off and tossing it over one of the stall dividers. Wortham dug through the man's pockets, coming out with the handcuff key. He tossed it to Morales, who was holding on to Michaels's right arm.

  Morales bent to the handcuff.

  "Don't touch that," Michaels warned, his voice icy. "That briefcase contains highly sensitive and classified documents, whose exposure opens you to a charge of treason and espionage against the United States of America. Do I make myself clear?"

  Morales hesitated, while Wortham rolled up Michaels's left shirt-sleeve. Morales looked up at Brognola.

  "Do it," the Fed said intensely. "What he's got in that case hasn't been issued by my government."

  "Ow!" Michaels said as Wortham jabbed him with a syringe, pumping clear fluid into his arm. "What's that?"

  Morales bent to the handcuff again, his hand shaking slightly as he put the key in the lock.

  "I'm warning you again," Michaels said. "You remove the briefcase and you will be buying yourself into criminal liability on a massive scale."

  Morales looked up again. "Mr. Brognola, are you sure..."

  "Give me the key," Brognola demanded, holding out his hand, impatient fingers twitching.

  Morales gave him the key, and the big Fed bent to the handcuffs.

  Just then the airline speaker in the rest room ceiling crackled. "This is the last call for American Airlines flight 501, nonstop service to Miami, Florida, now leaving at Gate 17. All aboard please."

  "What do we do?" Greggson asked, bending to take Brognola by the shoulder.

  "Go out to the pay phone," he said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Call the airline and tell them there's a bomb in the luggage compartment of flight 501."

  "That's what you've been thinking about all this time?" Greggson asked, exasperated.

  "It'll work. Do it."

  Greggson stood, walking to the door. "I hope we have a good lawyer," he said, and moved quickly out of the rest room.

  Brognola turned the key in the handcuffs, the lock springing, the unit dropping from Michaels's wrist. The man was leaning backward, threatening to topple over.

  "I'm warning you," he said sleepily, his eyes heavy-lidded, his sunglasses riding down on the end of his nose.

  "Get the chair," Brognola said, picking up the briefcase, which was far heavier than he had expected, and moving away from the others for space to get into the case.

  Wortham hurriedly retrieved the wheelchair they had pushed into the john when they'd hung the Closed sign.

  Morales and Healy began pulling the man to his feet, as he drifted into unconsciousness.

  "Come on, Admiral," Healy coaxed. "We'll put you in a nice chair."

  "Thash good," Michaels said sluggishly, his eyes completely closed. "Thash real good."

  Brognola used the key to open the cuff on the briefcase, which in turn snapped the catch, the case springing open. Inside was a fully loaded MAC-10, plus government authorization to carry it on an aircraft. Next to it was a stack of banded money, a thick stack of fifties, and finally a bar of gold that must have weighed twenty pounds, which accounted for all the weight.

  He pulled those things out of the case and set them on the tile floor. "Oscar!" he called loudly, and the man came out of the stall dressed in a captain's uniform, complete with Norm Michaels's dress jacket.

  Greggson reentered the rest room shaking his head. "I did it, God forgive me. I committed another major felony."

  "Get over here with the camera," Brognola called to Largent, who had stopped at the wheelchair to take Michaels's watch and rings. As an afterthought, he pulled the man's sunglasses off his face and put them on.

  The big Fed pointed at the stuff on the floor. "Get pictures." Then he turned to Morales, Healy and Wortham. "Get our buddy Norm ready to travel."

  Brognola set the case on a sink with a mirror. The rest of the briefcase was full of papers. On the top was a manila envelope addressed to: General Albert Richter Cronin — Eyes Only.

  He pulled it out and handed it to Oscar. "Get pictures of every page and put them back in the same order that you removed them."

  He turned back to the case, Greggson already into the papers beneath the orders. "These are copies of Michaels's orders, too," the man said. "And whatever Project GOG is, it's scheduled to go at 0900 on Saturday, the 27th."

  "Day after tomorrow," Brognola said. "Good God."

  Greggson was scanning the paperwork, tearing through it. "He's supposed to return to Washington sometime before Saturday, and at 0800 that morning is to take command of the Marine honor guard
at the White House."

  "But he's in the Air Force," Brognola argued. "How do they expect him to command Marines?"

  "You're forgetting who trained those Marines," Greggson said, and looked up at Brognola.

  "Kit Givan." Realization sank in. "They may be Marines who're guarding the President right now, but they all belong to Leland. The enemy already controls the White House."

  "And something else," Greggson said. "From the looks of these orders, I can't help but think that something of a major cataclysm is expected Saturday morning."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "Listen to this." Greggson cleared his throat, then read, "'Though all normal channels of communication will have broken down or no longer exist, elements of command will keep in contact through the GOG satellite system.' Or how about this? 'Panic will settle down on its own after a time. Disaster management is not our responsibility.'"

  The two men stared at each other. Brognola had trouble finding his voice to speak. "Does it...say what sort of disaster they're expecting?" he finally managed, his voice low, his stomach feeling as if it were full of powdered glass.

  Greggson looked grim, his face drained of all color. "Not that I've seen yet."

  "Done," Oscar said, handing the manila envelope back to Brognola.

  The big Fed handed him Michaels's orders. "Do these, too," he said. "I want you to study this stuff carefully on the plane. You've got a lot of serious bluffing to do once you reach Florida."

  Oscar, looking for all the world like Michaels, smiled wanly. "Only if none of them know him already," he said, then took the material and set it atop a trash can to photograph.

  As Brognola turned to watch the job they were doing on Michaels, he heard the flight delay announcement for flight 501 to Miami. The three agents had lashed Michaels to the chair and had covered him from neck to feet with a large blanket. At that moment, Ted Healy was fitting a long-haired blond wig on the sleeping man's head, as Wortham hastily applied lipstick and rouge to his face. Enter Norman Michaels; exit Norma Michaels.