His hands were frozen on the trigger. He couldn’t make himself shoot a second round at the city of Halifax, knowing that he might miss again, knowing that the round just might not self-destruct in time.
“Blow,” he whispered.
The 25 mm HEAT burst apart, high in the air, its outward force flying into the conflagration bursting from the train. That was all Schwarz needed to see. He triggered his second round, his mind suddenly blank and calm. He wasn’t acting “smart,” either, but rather with the instincts of the seasoned warrior. Even without the experience of having fired this specific new sort of grenade launcher at a small jet aircraft, aiming became suddenly easy. The second round homed in on the ascending jet as if it were laser-guided. It hit the belly of the aircraft and cracked it open. The aircraft bounced as if it had gone over a speed bump, and large chunks of plastic and metal spiraled away from it. There seemed to be very little fire, but fuel spilled out of the gaps in the broken hull.
And then the jet seemed to level out and continue its ascent. Schwarz fired again. A round hit the aircraft broadside and cracked open the hull just in front of the twin rear-mounted engines. It was precisely on target, right where Schwarz wanted it to be. And then metal shrapnel from the grenade and the explosion of scrap plastic and metal from the aircraft itself swirled into the uptake of the turbo fans. The engines immediately smoked and one began to scream in protest. The aircraft leveled out and for a moment the turbo fan cleared the smoke. The screaming of distressed machinery coughed and became quiet.
Hermann Schwarz was momentarily convinced that the jet was actually going to shake off two hits by 25 mm antitank rounds and survive.
But then the turbo fan belched black smoke and pieces of itself, and the jet arced gracefully out of the sky. It was going into the waters of Purcell’s Cove.
It must’ve been shallow where the small jet hit, because it shattered into a thousand plastic pieces without even submerging.
At that moment Schwarz remembered the blaze coming from the front of the train. His mind shouted at him. Ethanol fire. He didn’t get a chance to see it before Carl Lyons slammed into him and sent him flying off the boxcar.
Hermann Schwarz was thinking, for a fraction of a second, that it was going to be a long way to the ground.
It was.
He hit hard, felt the breath knocked out of him, felt both elbows crack against gravel and weeds. He forced his stunned body to roll through the impact and dissipate the energy.
He launched himself to his feet, trying to assess by feel whatever damage had been done by the ungraceful impact, and found himself crumpling to the earth again. Still he was looking at the tongue of fire that had rolled over the tops of the train cars—including the one where they had been standing.
Blancanales was there, bending over him, squeezing his limbs.
“Ouch, damn!” Schwarz said. Blancanales was merciless, testing Schwarz’s arms, then his legs.
“Is he broken?” Lyons demanded, keeping a close eye on the nearby conflagration.
“Just black-and-blue,” Schwarz said.
“Stony,” Lyons said into his mike, “do we have emergency personnel on the way?”
Price responded over the headset. “It’s coming, Carl. How big is it?”
Lyons shook his head. “Getting bigger.”
As if to reinforce his point another of the tank cars ahead blew apart, and Lyons turned his back to it, riding out the fierce hot breeze that swept over them.
“Carl,” Price said. “You okay?”
Lyons was glaring at the ball of yellow-orange fire that had come just a little closer to them. The heat of the flames was intense. It was going to break through the steel shell of the tanks and work its way down. Every time one of those tanks blew, the intensity would grow. The spread of the killing flames would be wider. There were at least eight more tank cars up ahead, then a dozen or so boxcars. Then a long, long chain of tankers. Diesel. Ethanol. Gasoline, for Christ’s sake. Weren’t there regulations against pulling this much flammable shit through a metropolitan area?
“Stony, we’re going to try to mitigate some of this damage before it happens.”
Barbara Price sounded even more calm than usual. “Able Team, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Those tanks are going to start blowing in more rapid succession. You’re not going to be able to get away when a chain reaction starts.”
“Neither is anybody else. We’re in a goddamned residential area, Stony. Gadgets, start hiking out. We’ll catch up with you in a minute.”
“I’m fine, Ironman,” Schwarz said. “What’s your plan?”
“Go!” Lyons said, and then jogged forward, making a quick examination of the couplers between the boxcars, then going flat to the ground and examining under the train cars. Their forward motion had now stopped completely—then came another heavy thump as a tank car ahead of them cracked open. The air seemed to suck itself away from them, the gray afternoon gave way to momentary harsh brilliance and another heavy, superheated wall of wind swept over them. Lyons covered his head with his arms, face in the gravel, allowing it to rush over him. It dissipated only slightly. The line of train cars jerked and rattled. Lyons sprang to his feet and pulled out an AN-M14. He jogged forward and ducked in between the next two boxcars.
Lyons felt intense discomfort and realized he was not breathing. The air was torrid, and it would be dangerous to stay here for more than a few seconds. He made a quick assessment of the coupler between the two cars. It was an AAR Type F—the same coupler as on a million train cars around the world. So tough and well engineered it would keep the train cars coupled even in many derailment scenarios. With the couplers under tension, there was no way Lyons was going to separate them. He wedged the bottom end of the incendiary grenade into the coupler knuckles, slipped the pin and got the hell out.
Blancanales was jogging toward him, coming to offer assistance.
“Other way,” Lyons said quickly. They both sprinted alongside a flat edge of the train cars, and Lyons tried not to gag on the noxious hot air that he had accidentally inhaled. He saw a glimmer of light that came from behind him, but the rush of the fire almost completely masked the detonation of the incendiary grenade.
Schwarz was moving awkwardly, staggering like a horror movie zombie over a low berm alongside the tracks. Lyons on one side and Blancanales on the other grabbed him and dragged him to the ground as another harsh crack indicated another tank car had blown.
“That was too soon,” Lyons shouted above the rush of noise. “I don’t know if it worked.”
Lyons poked his head over the top of the grassy berm and witnessed the chain reaction—the explosion sent one train car slamming into the next. Then burning wind rushed over them and they dropped back down. Lyons could swear he saw streaks of yellow fire in the air around him.
He gave the firewater a moment to weaken, then peeked over the berm again.
“Ironman,” Blancanales complained, “you’ll fry your eyeballs.”
Lyons pulled back down even as another explosion erupted at the front of the train. He could hear the crash of a train car being shoved violently into the car behind it, followed by the next and the next. Finally he could restrain himself no more and he glanced briefly out over the top of the berm. It was akin to thrusting his head into a blazing furnace, and he fought to keep his eyes open for only a second, and that was enough. His grenade had done its job. The powerful coupler melted in the extreme heat of the grenade and the explosions had created a violent impact that jolted from car to car—until his boxcar was shoved away from the rear of the train. It was separating itself at a snail’s pace from the exploding train.
A feeble effort, at best, Lyons thought as he sank down behind the protection of the berm. His skin was on fire and his eyeballs felt as if they had been roasted in their sockets, but he had seen what he had come to see.
“Let’s go,” he ordered, and rose onto all fours to begin a quick crawl away from the berm and th
e burn, only to be dragged down again by Blancanales as another tank car burst behind them. When Lyons glanced up, he saw a sky filled with pale yellow flame.
The next explosion just might send a tidal wave of burning fuel to engulf them. And explosions were coming in more rapid succession. Lyons allowed them just seconds of wait time, but as soon as the wall of fire began to diminish he shouted at the others.
“Move out now.”
He had a firm grip on Schwarz’s BDUs and thrust himself to his feet. Blancanales was dragging Schwarz by the other arm. Schwarz was complaining vigorously. They could talk about it later. Not now. Who knew how long it would be before the next tanker blew.
How long turned out to be less than six steps. Lyons heard the crack, sensed the rush of igniting fuel.
But now they were behind one of the houses. The big old building shielded them from the flame. The residents were already fleeing the fire, running along the water’s edge.
Able Team hustled to the dock.
Lyons touched his headset. “Stony, there’s an extremely hazardous situation here.” Quickly he briefed Barbara Price on the events of the past ninety seconds.
“Carl, are you getting out of there?” Price asked.
“Yeah. We’re in the boat.”
“How’s Hermann?”
“Hermann is fine,” Schwarz declared. He stepped off the dock into their watercraft, landing on both feet with a belligerent thunk. At that moment there was another explosion, louder than all the bursts that had come before. It was a staccato crack, followed by a heavy clank.
The three of them sank low and waited for any shrapnel from the blast to sail past them.
“That sounded like an explosive charge,” Blancanales said.
“Or something else on that train,” Lyons added. “Some cargo we don’t know about. Something even more dangerous than ethanol and oil.”
“Look,” Schwarz said.
The last blast had accomplished Lyons’s goal. The clank had been the powerful collision of the train cars being slammed together by the percussive force of the blast. The last car had rocketed off the tracks, flown six feet and slammed into the loose train cars behind it. It was powerful enough to nudge the line of cars away.
Blancanales muscled Schwarz out from behind the wheel and he steered them away from land. They watched the fascinating, horrific sight of the tank cars exploding down the line, one by one.
Price was watching it happen, as well, over Lyons’s lipstick cam.
“It’s working, Ironman,” she said to Lyons.
Carl Lyons wasn’t so confident. He watched the slow-motion escape of the back line of train cars race the approaching explosions from the tank cars still attached to the main train. The final tank blew, cracking open and releasing a mushroom cloud of orange fire and black smoke. The ball of flame rose over the burning cars and fiery tongues reached out in all directions. They licked at the first car in the slow-moving line of escaping cars. There had to be twenty more tanks back there, that Lyons could see. If the first one blew, the whole train might blow. If the whole train blew, it would burn down this entire section of the city.
The flames pulled back, and the first tank car rolling away showed no signs that it had even been singed. Still Lyons watched, glaring at the car that seemed to be moving almost at its leisure away from the catastrophe.
“It worked, Carl,” Barbara Price said confidently.
Lyons laughed without joy. “That is not exactly what I had in mind, Stony. It wasn’t my rounds that blew the train back. It was strictly dumb luck.”
“It was your rounds that separated that section of the train so that it could be pushed back,” Price responded. “Give yourself some credit, Ironman.”
“Stony, what the hell is the problem with the Canadians? Why the hell aren’t they out here minding their own goddamned store?”
“They are on their way now, Able.”
“A lot of good it will do now. The damage is done.”
“Transport is on its way, Able,” Price said.
“The resort itself is still vulnerable,” Lyons said. “We’re going ashore at Blackrock.”
“No way. The Canadians are finally taking your advice, Carl. There are a hundred troops on their way to Blackrock Island, in addition to the hazmat firefighters moving in to the train. They’ll take care of the situation now.”
Lyons could see large Canadian troop transport helicopters already on the horizon, over the mainland, coming from beyond Dartmouth.
They had been staged, waiting for something to happen. The Canadians had been just sitting there waiting for this to happen. They could’ve had their own people on the ground keeping it from happening.
One hundred troops, and some serious firepower, might have prevented this from happening at all.
CHAPTER FIVE
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
The attractive blonde, blue-eyed woman was in an embroidered cowboy shirt and a pair of well-worn, snug-fitting jeans. She wouldn’t have looked out of place on a ranch. In fact, Barbara Price was the Stony Man Farm mission controller, which meant she had operational responsibility for two of the most successful commando teams that had ever been fielded by the United States.
Barbara Price answered only to the director of the Sensitive Operations Group. The director in turn answered only to the President of the United States. The SOG antiterrorist organization was so secret that its existence was unknown—in theory—to anyone outside of the President and the SOG itself.
The director of the SOG, the man who served as the liaison between Stony Man Farm and the President, was Hal Brognola, a Justice Department official with an office in Washington, D.C., that gave him a view of the Potomac River.
In the Stony Man Farm War Room, Barbara Price touched the controls to bring up a video feed of Brognola from his D.C. office. The big Fed loomed even bigger than life on the large plasma screen that dominated one end of the War Room. A secondary screen showed the image of a burning stealth plane under a burning tree. When the camera image pulled back, it was revealed that the aircraft and tree were burning amid a campus of South American ruins.
“I take it we are not going to get any useful information out of that plane,” growled Brognola.
Brognola was seeing the video feed at the same time as Barbara Price. It was showing on one of the auxiliary monitors in his office in D.C.
“We didn’t even try,” Price said. “Jack took one look at it and said it wasn’t worth the danger. Phoenix would have to stay on-site for hours before the thing would be cooled down enough to even start poking around in the leftovers.”
Brognola nodded. “What about prisoners?”
“Early results from our questioning were not promising. We don’t think they know anything about the plane’s origin. We’ll keep working on them. Who knows?”
“Give me an update,” Brognola said, “on the scope of this problem.”
Barbara Price nodded, knowing that she had come to the part of this conversation that was going to cause Brognola some true consternation.
“We are up to 124 suspected incidents with the stealth aircraft, worldwide, in twenty-four days.”
The oversize image of Harold Brognola looked directly at Barbara Price from the office in D.C.
“Did you say 124?”
“I did. Up from seventeen incidents one week ago.”
“Where?” Brognola asked.
Price summoned a map of the American continents on an auxiliary screen. Mexico and South America were covered with yellow dots. There were dots in the Caribbean and in Florida, and along the border between the United States and Mexico. There was a sprinkling of dots across Europe, just a few in the Middle East, and more large groupings in Indonesia, Malaysia, China and other Southeast Asian nations.
“Most of these were simply sightings. Some were attacks. In Mexico there was much drug gang violence—one Mexican gang against another.”
“But all using stealth jet tec
hnology?” Brognola insisted.
“Most of the ones shown are confirmed stealth jet attacks,” Price said. “There’s been a rash of attacks in Vincente. It’s a small town fifteen miles outside of Juarez in northern Mexico. The Vincente family is well established there. They’ve been running drugs into the United States for eight years. This after displacing the Querol family. The Querol family was driven out of the area, into central Mexico, and has apparently been trying to reconstitute their organization. Three days ago, attacks began against the town of Vincente in Mexico, and the Vincente family homes were destroyed. Safe to assume the Querol family has taken possession of a couple of the stealth jets and is using them to quell the competition and get back into the family business. They even targeted the livestock. Vincente family horses and cattle were slaughtered in the field. Gunned down or burned.”
“Burned?” Brognola asked.
“Get this,” Price said. “Eyewitness reports said that they were throwing Molotov cocktails out of the windows of the aircraft.”
Brognola shook his head. “None of this makes any sense. How come you got all these people, all over the world, suddenly getting their hands on this unbelievably sophisticated stealth technology, and then using that technology to attack with burning beer bottles of gasoline? What’s wrong with this picture? Why am I not understanding this?”
Barbara Price shrugged. “I don’t have the answers.”
“How did you get a lead on the Mexico attack?” Brognola asked.
“CIA,” Price said. “An agent in Mexico picked up rumors that there would be a payback attempt at one of the new high-profile Mexican tourist sites in the southern part of the country. The rumor said they’d be attacking one of the sites that wasn’t accessible by car yet. That had to mean Chilan.”
“And the rationale behind the attack? Payback for heavy-handed drug enforcement by the Mexican government?”
“Exactly,” Price said. “One of the drug gangs in Mexico passed the word. They didn’t like how heavily the Mexican government was coming down on their business practices. They wanted to make it clear that if the Mexican government was going to hurt their revenues, they were going to hurt the revenues of the government. That meant sabotaging Mexico’s big tourism promotion push. Mexico’s lost billions from the slowdown in tourism over the last few years.”
Perilous Skies (Stony Man) Page 10
