But it was all in his head, which, James now realized, hurt like hell.
He could feel blood covering his face. Chips of stone had flown at him when the large-caliber rounds cracked into the wall. He had thrown himself off just in time to avoid being stitched open. Now the world was pretty unstable but getting better by the second.
“Just let me sit here for minute,” he complained to Hawkins.
Hawkins’s eyes traveled over James’s head, saw something in the distance, and he said, “A minute you don’t have. We’re out of here.”
Calvin James understood vaguely that the aircraft must be coming in for another strafing run. But that fast? Hadn’t he just fallen off the wall a moment ago—or had he gone unconscious for some period of time?
Those slow-moving stealth jets couldn’t line up for a new attack that fast, could they?
Hawkins dragged James to his feet, and James fought to remain upright in the unstable world. His head hurt with every movement, but he allowed Hawkins to steer him down the steps, in search of cover.
* * *
“CAL IS OKAY,” HAWKINS announced, “but that aircraft is making another run at us.”
Manning felt great relief. In his head he could still see Calvin James taking a dive off that stupid wall. It must’ve been a hell of a hard landing.
His body was still screaming from his own mishap, and he hoped he hadn’t damaged some internal organs when that corner of stone thrust deep into his back, but right now he had other things to worry about. He hustled alongside Encizo through the interior of Structure 30, past wriggling prisoners, and stood at the front entrance. The aircraft would be coming up from behind them, they assumed, and buried inside this house of stone, they would probably not even hear it.
They wouldn’t know what was coming until it popped into view directly over their heads.
But that wasn’t true, either. The aircraft made itself known by firing its machine guns long before it flew over Structure 30 again. It was still looking for Gary Manning on the roof. Then the small gray jet materialized in the sky above them, with maybe thirty feet of clearance between it and the ruined structure. Manning had the sniper rifle at his shoulder.
* * *
JAMES FOUND HIMSELF falling again, only this time Hawkins had shoved him. He landed in the grass behind a partially rebuilt short wall, containing a stelea of some sort. Mayan words carved in stone thirteen centuries ago were obliterated in a second by a torrent of large-caliber machine-gun fire from the aircraft. James and Hawkins were on the move again as soon as the aircraft had passed above them, then it was gone over the top of the jungle again. It would be back soon.
“There,” James said, indicating another small nearby building. Structure 27. The back wall was completely missing, but the vaulted ceiling was solid and complete. The gunner in the aircraft would never see them in there, and even if he did, that thick stone would stand up to his ordnance.
Hawkins jogged across the corner of the central plaza, and slowed to grab James by the sleeve of his BDUs and drag him along. James was moving slow, but his wits were coming back. Still, it was an immense relief to sink to the ground under the safety of Structure 27.
* * *
DAVID MCCARTER ASSURED himself that Hawkins and James were under cover. He ordered Manning and Encizo to stay out of sight when the jet came back. It was going to be coming straight toward them this time. It was too risky to stand in the doorway and attempt to gun the thing down from head-on.
It would also be too risky for McCarter to try to shoot at it from the middle of the plaza. If he was successful, he could bring the aircraft crashing down right into Structure 30. Right on top of Encizo and Manning.
He jogged up the plaza and ducked alongside the outer wall of Structure 30 and took up a position behind the structure. He climbed a pile of rock so that he was peering out over the room and roof of the structure, where he could see the aircraft but it would have a hard time seeing him.
From here, he would have an opportunity to take a few clear shots at the belly of the aircraft as it passed overhead.
Whether a few rounds from a submachine gun would bring it down was another question.
It was coming. He witnessed the materialization of the craft over the canopy of the jungle again. The near-translucent body hid it amazingly well against the daylight sky.
But it was behaving differently. It was flying at a higher altitude and gaining speed. It did not look like it was coming in for landing or even for an attack this time. Maybe it was just an inspection flyover. At that height, McCarter had almost no chance of doing it significant damage from the ground. Not that he wasn’t going to try. It was still gaining altitude as it passed over Structure 30 and McCarter felt foolish when he sent several rounds from his submachine gun chasing after the thing. The little jet ignored him and flew away.
Then something burst apart nearby. David McCarter raced around Structure 30 and found the first aircraft, parked under the old tree, engulfed in flames. That was the reason for the final flyover. They were destroying their own aircraft. He watched the thing become a ball of white-and-orange flame, which quickly reached out to the tree and began to burn it. He saw the plastic wings dripping. He saw a flood of liquid gush out of the belly, and turn the fire.
It took less than five minutes for the flames to reduce the aircraft to a flaming unrecognizable pile.
CHAPTER FOUR
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Halifax was not a place where Carl Lyons expected to find terrorist violence. But in the twenty-first century, nowhere in the world was immune from terrorism. But Lyons, leader of Able Team, a covert trio of counterterrorism specialists, was relentless in his pursuit of terrorists.
And Halifax had invited in the elements that might attract violence. Like it or not, casinos brought with them the elements of vice. The elements of vice could sometimes attract the elements of organized crime. And now the line was blurring between the crime organizations and the terrorists.
Blackrock Island Resort and Casino had been built specifically for travelers who did not want the Vegas experience. It couldn’t have been in a more geologically different part of North America. The island was in Halifax Harbour, a mile from the Seaport Market. Here the railroad lines fanned out into the great shipping and logistical center at the port of Halifax. The lines were less heavily used than they had once been, and one of the old lines had been rebuilt and rededicated for transporting vacationers to Blackrock Resort. A light-rail line had been extended from Halifax Stanfield International Airport for visitors arriving by air, and intersected with the dedicated station for the resort train. Other visitors took long rail trips in the well-appointed railcars, turning their Blackrock visit into the final stop of an old-fashioned rail tour of northeast Canada.
It was even possible for travelers to take a transcontinental rail trip, starting on the West Coast of North America in Vancouver. The Via Rail line out of Vancouver was equipped with some of the same overnight railcars with expensive sleeping berths. The route took the train to Edmonton, then across Canada through Saskatoon and Winnipeg, through Sudbury and finally to Toronto. Here, travelers had no need to change train cars. The special luxury travel cars were transferred to a different engine for the short jump from Toronto to Montreal, where they linked up with the line to Halifax.
A great deal of attention had been paid to the luxury cars when they were commissioned two years before, and to their old-fashioned, luxurious amenities, offered at what was a price more reasonable than a regular hotel. The trains garnered a lot of attention from the media, and continued to spur more publicity. It seemed that every time a local in a small town decided to take the trip on the Blackrock Island Transcontinental Railway, they became minor celebrities. They would get write-ups in their local papers or be interviewed on local news when they returned from their great adventure. Occasionally those stories would get picked up and run as fillers across North America.
It w
as a public relations boon for Blackrock Island Casino, and that was the entire point—to focus the attention on the climactic endpoint of a Blackrock Island railroad car trip. The implication was that if getting there was such a grand experience, then being there, at the luxurious casino on its own island off Halifax, Nova Scotia, must be even better.
It seemed to be a successful advertising campaign. Despite the vast cost to build the casino and essentially remake Blackrock Island from a deserted, private nature preserve into a multifaceted vacation destination, the business seemed to be thriving.
And now it was potentially in danger.
Carl Lyons was bothered by this setup. He felt exposed and unprepared, not knowing how the attack would come, or even where precisely the attack would be targeted. Blackrock Island was a large enough piece of land to support a sprawling resort, golf course, even biking and walking trails and outdoor event spaces. It sat off Point Pleasant Park in the waters of what was technically Purcell’s Cove.
It seemed unlikely that an attack would be coming from the direction of McNabb’s Island, a mile over the water. Nor from the waters that stretched to the southeast and eventually crossed an invisible line that put them in Halifax Harbour. Keep going, and the water opened into the North Atlantic.
To the west was Purcell’s Island, and little land development. Just the occasional house and a few inns sitting out on the water’s edge. It was awfully peaceful-looking.
The problem was, the attack could come from any direction. Even in the light of day, it could come fast, quiet and unseen until the very last moment.
Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz seemed to be reading his thoughts.
“Christ, they could come from anywhere. And the weather isn’t helping.”
“No, it’s not,” Lyons growled. The sky was gray and heavy, and the lapping of the cold waters and the wet blanket of the sky seemed to muffle the sounds of the afternoon in Halifax. A ship passing a few hundred yards to the north was almost unheard.
A near-silent aircraft could sneak up on them like a cat.
They were sitting in the waters in their own boat, which had been docked for them at Purcell’s Cove. It looked like one of the local pleasure boats—a robust, well-insulated piece of work meant to endure the harsh climate of the east coast of Canada. But a pleasure craft all the same.
Carl Lyons was the leader of the tight, three-man commando outfit called Able Team. It was a fairly innocuous name. The members of the team were anything but. Lyons himself was formerly a detective in Los Angeles, and he had gone up against one of the most infamous and dangerous vigilantes in U.S. history: Mack Bolan. Very few men antagonized Mack Bolan and lived to tell the tale.
Eventually Carl Lyons’s perspective had shifted and he found himself fighting alongside Bolan.
Lyons, like the two other members of Able Team, was recruited to the team by Bolan.
The other two were Hermann Schwarz, a gizmo guru who sometimes went by the nickname “Gadgets,” and Rosario Blancanales, the member of the trio whose people skills had earned him the nickname “Politician.”
Schwarz and Blancanales were a pleasant pair, considering what they had been through.
At some point the United States federal government essentially gave up on its efforts to stop Mack Bolan and instead decided to harness his energy. Hal Brognola, the Justice Department official who had been coordinating the effort to bring in Bolan, instead became Bolan’s partner in the development of a new and highly secret anticrime-antiterror organization that was based in a well-funded facility within sight of Stony Man Mountain, a four-thousand-foot peak in Shenandoah National Park. Operations had started in the farmhouse of a working farm and eventually expanded to larger belowground facilities. From the base at Stony Man Farm the mostly international commando team Phoenix Force was deployed, as well as Able Team, which primarily worked in North America. It served as Bolan’s base, as well, sometimes—when it suited him. He had never allowed himself to be controlled by the government. To this day his efforts remained essentially those of a vigilante.
Able Team had gone through hell, time and again, for the good of the country and the peace of its people. And sometimes the three men found themselves doing other people’s jobs.
“Tell me again why there are no Canadians out here keeping an eye on the place.” Rosario Blancanales leaned on the rail of the boat and glared at Blackrock Island.
Lyons shook his head. “Beats the hell out of me.”
“Couldn’t have a bunch of armed Mounties loitering around the place. It would make the gamblers feel insecure,” Schwarz said. “Hard to relax on your vacation if you think you’re about to be attacked.”
Lyons nodded grimly. “Yeah.”
The fact was, there probably were Canadian security forces of some type in the vicinity. They’d been alerted to the possibility of an attack on this location. But tourist destinations were always at risk. They were always a target to terrorists. Governments were constantly forced into the position of having to decide which threats to address and which to ignore—a constant struggle to balance security and ongoing, uninterrupted operation.
And right now, what was not a target of the stealth planes? No one knew how many of them were out there, and no one knew who had them. So there was no way of knowing what they would be used for. And so far, they seemed to have been used for just about every dirty deed you could think of. Revenge. Smuggling. Robbery. And worse.
And always, they had the advantage of the stealthy approach. There seemed to be no place in the world where they couldn’t perpetrate damage. No place was safe. No radar seemed capable of spotting them. You never heard them coming. They seemed to have chameleon skin that absorbed the color around them, making them difficult to spot. They seemed highly maneuverable—and they were deadly.
Most of the aircraft were mounted with .50-caliber machine guns under the nose. A stealth plane in Italy had attacked a Mafia motorcade with at least two weapons blazing—5.56 mm NATO rounds were recovered later. The survivors of the battle claimed the weapons were being shot from armored slots in the belly of the aircraft.
In Turkey, a series of attacks in Kurd-claimed regions had relied on jettisoned incendiary devices.
Several of the attacks had even used flamethrowers, and curiously, in most of these cases, the aircraft had crashed and burned themselves. What was left was mystifying—mostly melted plastic and badly burned components. Whatever was being used for flamethrower fuel must have been deadly.
Only now, after a full two weeks of worldwide attacks, was a picture of the aircraft starting to come into focus. It could be that the entire aircraft was itself highly flammable and triggered to self-destruct—or to easily be destroyed from a distance. This was the lesson that Phoenix Force had learned in southern Mexico just hours before.
And now, if the warnings were correct, another attack was planned for this place. Its cause was unrelated to the attack in Mexico, and to every other known attack around the world. Likewise, the perpetrators were not known to have a link to any other stealth plane perpetrator in the world.
That was the real problem. These planes were everywhere, in the hands of all kinds of despicable people. A new tool with which to right wrongs, exert influence, solve disputes and kill innocent people.
The death toll was in the hundreds and climbing. It had to be stopped.
But first they had to actually get their hands on one of those planes so it could be dismantled, studied, and so they could trace back to its source.
But could three men in a fishing boat hope to actually bring down one of those aircraft?
“It would take one hundred Mounties to cover that island,” Blancanales observed. “You would have to have them in the hotel, tucked in the bushes on the golf courses, hanging out in the wedding gazebo, everywhere.”
“Even that wouldn’t do any good,” Schwarz said. “Not unless they had antiaircraft hardware.”
“So how do we protect this place?�
� Blancanales demanded.
“We don’t,” Lyons said. “It’s not our job. We’re here to take down and take out whoever attacks this place. Find out where they came from. Find out where they got their planes. And then follow the trail back.”
“Yeah,” Blancanales said. “And why do we think they’re not going to attack the rail first?”
“We don’t. It’s just an assumption. We had a little bit of intelligence, and what it indicated was that Blackrock would be targeted in some way.”
“That’s kind of general,” Blancanales said. “Doesn’t rule out the rail. My inclination would be to lump that in as part of the resort.”
Lyons nodded shortly. “Me, too.”
Hermann Schwarz turned away from the water and looked behind him as if there was something to see there, then opened one of the compartments and pulled out a glossy brochure for the Blackrock Resort. He examined the map in the middle and looked over the top at the distant mainland of Halifax.
“Let’s head that way,” Schwarz said, “deeper into Purcell’s Cove.”
Blancanales sat behind the wheel. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go there.”
Lyons looked over Schwarz’s shoulder at the tourist map. It showed visitor-friendly destinations. Point Pleasant Park. The Public Gardens. The Commons.
“You want to move us away from Blackrock Island?”
“Yeah,” Schwarz said, tapping a spot on the tourist map. “Here.”
Lyons leaned in. “Atlantic School of Theology?”
“Not exactly,” Schwarz said. “Here. The railroad line runs pretty close to the water. I’m thinking that almost anybody who decides they’re going to come after that train, no matter how much stealth they’ve got on their side, is still going to want to make a low-profile approach. They can’t do that outside the city limits to the west, where there’s a lot of traffic to and from the airport. So they’re going to do it by coming in this way, or this way.”
Perilous Skies (Stony Man) Page 8