“I just hope the Farm still exists,” Blancanales commented, tightening the grip on his weapon. “Forge might have taken out our Comsat. Or it could have had a 747 plowing into the base at five hundred miles per hour.”
“That wouldn’t damage the underground computer annex,” Schwarz stated confidently.
“Unless it was carrying a nuke,” Lyons said succinctly.
With those words, tense stillness filled the luxury car until there was only the soft crackle of static on the radio and the soft hum of the tires on the smooth highway.
“This is Alpha.” Lieutenant Caramico spoke suddenly over the Kenwood radio, her words almost lost in the hash. “I want a sitrep.”
“Roger. This is Beta, all clear,” Lyons replied, accelerating the Cadillac to move past the dark blue SUV containing the Forge soldiers. He nodded in passing, they returned the gesture and Able Team took the point position again.
The two cars had been rotating around each other every fifteen minutes or so, since Kansas. A three-car formation would have offered infinitely better protection, but Caramico was in a hurry and didn’t want to chance tangling with the police by stealing a third car. The concept of simply buying a used vehicle from a dealer seemed to never have occurred to her, and Able Team wasn’t offering any suggestions. They much preferred to keep thing this way and keep the Stony Man team intact.
Especially since we’re driving into an ambush, Lyons noted dourly. He felt sure Forge would attack them the moment they reached a secluded location, most likely in the northern territory of South Dakota. Lots of desert up there, with countless arroyos and ravines to hide the burned wreckage of a car and lifeless corpses.
Lost in contemplation for a moment, Lyons came fiercely awake as the four cars ahead of the Cadillac started to jerk, veering wildly in every direction. Rubber chunks shot off the shredding tires and bounced randomly along the pavement. The drivers fought to control their shuddering vehicles, but a Volvo sedan and a Yugo violently slammed together. Fenders crumbled, headlights exploded and windshields cracked. With horns blaring loudly, the cars smashed into the concrete divider. The airbags of the Volvo deployed, but the driver of the Yugo was thrown against the dashboard with grisly results.
Wondering if there was a sniper shooting out the tires, Lyons concentrated on the surface of the road and saw the carpeting of dark objects a split second before plowing into the middle of them. Hundreds of four-point stars covered the asphalt, the needle-sharp tips jutting up like barb spears.
“Caltrops!” the former L.A. cop yelled, as all four tires on the Cadillac blew in unison.
The large car dropped to the pavement with a hard crash. The windows cracked, the exhaust system flattened, and a geyser of bright sparks flew from behind the vehicle like a fireworks display as it scraped along the pavement.
Twisting the steering wheel with all of his might, Lyons fought the shuddering Cadillac into the right-hand lane and managed to stop only inches from the berm.
But the other vehicles on the highway weren’t as lucky, and several of them went off the road and onto the loose gravel. The first car to reach the berm exploded into flames, broken pieces of passengers and chassis flying every which way. Close behind came an old pickup truck, the vehicle flipping high into the air from the AT land mine buried in the berm. Sheathed in flames, the smashed truck came crashing down to disappear in the lush cornfield. A sports car was next, and then a delivery van, body parts and broken glass splaying across the highway and field.
“Those are antitank land mines!” Lyons snarled, yanking off his seat belt. “I thought Forge wanted their people alive?”
“They do,” Blancanales countered, stuffing his pockets with spare ammo clips. “This must be somebody else.”
“Could be Trinity,” Schwarz muttered, scanning the surrounding area with a monocular. “But how did they find us? I disabled the low-jacks on both vehicles myself.”
“Forge must have told them,” Lyons rationalized, pulling the Atchisson shotgun special from the floor. He clicked off the safety. “This isn’t a hit, but a rescue attempt. Trinity wants to save its reputation by fulfilling the original contract.”
“Good. That gives us an edge,” Blancanales said grimly, sliding a satchel of grenades over a shoulder. “The mercs will hesitate to use heavy weapons until the Forge soldiers are in the clear. That’ll let us—”
At that second, the dark blue SUV came into view, wildly fishtailing across all three lanes in an effort to avoid the spiked stars. But the tires blew anyway, and the top-heavy sport utility vehicle flipped over to skid for yards along the littered highway, pushing a mound of the deadly caltrops ahead of them.
The members of Able Team sighed in relief at the sight. Then a sleek Corvette came streaking down the highway, obviously trying to get past the obstructions by sheer speed. As the tires blew, the nose of the sports car dropped hard to the pavement, the airbags deployed and the car blindly rammed directly into the overturned SUV. The two vehicles bent around each other, metal crunching and glass exploding. Then the SUV shockingly detonated, the fireball expanding across the divider to wash both sides of the highway.
Buffeted by the concussion, the Stony Man operatives couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The Forge soldiers had been fine, virtually unharmed by the crash.
“The stupid assholes must have had a self-destruct bomb,” Schwarz raged. “Rigged to blow if they were captured alive.”
“And the crash set it off,” Blancanales finished. “There goes our only way of finding the American uplink site!”
“Not necessarily,” Lyons countered. “If this was a rescue mission, then Trinity should know where to take Caramico and Mendoza afterward.”
“And we still look like them,” Blancanales grunted.
“Sounds good,” Schwarz said, dropping the monocular and pulling a combat knife. He quickly began to slash apart the seat cushions and soon had cut a hole through to the trunk.
Tense moments passed as Schwarz passed the backpacks to the other men. Trinity might know their duplicates were riding escort, but it was highly doubtful that they knew which car contained Able Team. That gave the Stony Man operatives a small advantage. But as soon as the mercs decided to do a clean sweep…
Just then, the hood of the Cadillac buckled and a heartbeat later there came the rolling boom of a high-powered sniper rifle. A split second later, a fiery dart streaked across the top of the corn and slammed into the disabled Volvo, blowing it to smithereens.
Bursting out of their car, Able Team threw smoke grenades to give them some cover as they shuffled through the blanket of caltrops. The men were wearing civilian shoes, and the sharp spikes would stab straight through the soft soles.
Another LAW rocket streaked by and the sniper rifle boomed again, a chunk of pavement cracking away. Flipping the arming leveler on a smoke canister, Blancanales saw several men laying on the berm, ruined hands clutching their bloody feet. A woman was facedown on the asphalt, a caltrap embedded into her forehead, a pool of red spreading around her long tresses.
Their assault rifles chattering at the berm, a loud explosion only yards away rocked Schwarz, but he kept running, his tattered shirt exposing the NATO body armor underneath. Lyons and Blancanales got past the gravel without incident, and all three men jumped over the drainage ditch. They hit the soft loam and crawled away into the green stalks, only to converge again a hundred feet away. The corn randomly jerked from the passage of high-velocity bullets, and from somewhere there came the roiling blast of an HE grenade.
Checking their throat mikes and weapons, the Stony Man operatives listened carefully to the sounds of the enemy gunfire. The cross fire was coming from different directions. Choosing targets, the three men separated and charged down the paths between the rows of upright stalks.
Alternately running and crawling to try to hide his passage through the tall corn, Blancanales zigzagged across the farmland at his top speed. The young corn seemed to go on foreve
r.
Unexpectedly, he stopped at the sight of a figure lurking in the greenery. He saw it was only a farmhand, and started to leave when he noticed that although the man was wearing dirty overalls, he had on dress shoes, the patent leather shiny and clean. Leveling the M-16 assault rifle, Blancanales fired a short burst across the man’s legs, trying to only wound the stranger in case he was wrong. With a strangled cry, the farmer fell into plain sight, an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol tight in his hand. Ruthlessly, the Able Team warrior stroked the trigger once more, stitching the fake worker from throat to groin. The man twitched and dropped, lifeless.
Immediately, the silken tufts of the corn stalks overhead began to shake from incoming rounds, the green leaves wrapped around the corn jumping with juicy thwacks.
Staying low, Blancanales knelt in the soft loam and briefly checked the warm body. There was civilian clothing under the bloody overalls, and an S&W .357 revolver in a holster behind his back. A compact Kenwood transceiver was clipped to his belt, but a stray 5.56 mm round had accidentally blown the radio apart, loose wiring dangling. Clearly this was one of the men from the ambush, but the fellow was of African ancestry, and the three known members of Trinity were Europeans. Only one possibility made sense.
The mercs had hired some mercs! Blancanales scowled, touched his throat mike. “Alert,” he subvocalized, “our friends have friends. Number unknown. One down.”
“Two down,” Schwarz whispered in his earphone.
“Three,” Lyons panted, as if running. “Stay sharp! We have no idea how many we’re facing. Watch out for civilians.”
“And me, too,” Blancanales responded, when the rows of corn around him started to tremble.
For a long tick of the clock, he thought the snipers had located him and were hammering the area with a barrage of hot lead. Then the ground began shaking, and Blancanales cursed as he sprinted for his life. A shadow covered the man, and the titanic combine loomed before him like a wall of doom, the chainsawlike cornheads cutting down the plants in an endless stream. It was like looking into the working maw of a woodchipper.
Firing a long burst from the M-16, Blancanales retreated as the 5.56 mm rounds ricocheted harmlessly off the heavy frame of the sturdy farm equipment. Then the whining noise of the cornheads changed to a thumping as the thrasher came to life, the thirty-foot-long drum of shiny blades spinning to a blur. The fallen corn stalks were annihilated and flew upward into the auger like confetti to be sucked out of sight and blown out the rear vents.
At the chilling sight, Blancanales knew this was part of the highway trap. There was no conceivable reason to attach the wheat thrasher to a combine in a corn field. But Trinity had done both, turning the ordinary piece of farm equipment into a rolling death machine.
Trying to shoot backward, Blancanales tripped on the exposed roots of the corn, but went into a barrel roll and came up running. The machine was closer now, the air throbbing with the beat of the thrasher and the roar of the massive 500-horsepower diesel engine.
Gaining a little distance, the Able Team warrior turned and put a 40 mm grenade directly into thrasher. The spinning blades detonated, shrapnel flying off to the sides, but the remaining couple of blades kept going ’round and ’round, now hacking the plants into chunks instead of tearing them completely apart.
The shell had exploded prematurely. He fired a long blast at the dimly seen driver, hidden behind dangling chains and tufts of corn silk. In response, the combine harvester accelerated, twin columns of black smoke from the mighty diesel engine pouring into the blue sky.
Frantically reloading the grenade launcher on the run, Blancanales aimed for the driver again. This time the barrage of double-aught buckshot smashed apart the windshield and the driver cried out, falling from his chair. The machine turned to the right. But a moment later, the driver reclaimed his seat, blood on his right arm, the tattered shirt revealing the molded body armor underneath.
“Another damn merc,” Blancanales growled. Shooting the M-16 nonstop, he tried to get around the huge machine, but the thrasher blades extended yards past the harvester on both sides. The brief glimpse of the side he got was of smooth metal. There wasn’t a vulnerable fuel line, hydraulic line or anything else in sight. Designed to work under the most adverse conditions, the combine was a tank in everything but name.
Then he’d fight it like any other tank.
Slinging the assault rifle under a shoulder, Blancanales paused for a dangerous length of time as he extracted a grenade, ripped the tape off the arming lever and pulled the ring. The cornheads were moving along the ground, destroying everything in their path. The former Black Beret threw the grenade as high as he could, then turned and ran. As the combine harvester moved after him, the grenade came down again and exploded in the air, a fiery rain of thermite falling over the colossal machine.
Almost instantly, the driver screamed in pain and the combine shifted off to the side. Without warning, a sharp hissing heralded the sizzling launch of a dozen LAW rockets from inside the burning cab, the warbirds streaking away in looping spirals. One of the rockets nosed into the dirt alongside Blancanales, and his heart stopped beating until he realized the distance from the cab had been too short for the warhead to arm.
By now, the writhing chemical flames completely covered the chassis, the unstoppable thermite burning through the industrial grade steel as if it were balsa wood. Hydraulic lines came loose, spraying red fluid about like severed arteries. Pneumatic hoses burst, whistling and hissing. The auger sighed to a halt, and the thrasher stopped with a jerk. Only the deadly chained blades of the cornheads continued processing.
With the thrasher out of commission, Blancanales pumped another 40 mm shell into the booth and the control room violently exploded, grisly bits of man and machinery blowing skyward. As the thrasher collapsed onto the cornheads, the blades jammed the chains, and the entire front of the combine seemed to tear apart. Sprocket assemblies audibly broke, support struts bent, the conveyor belt burst at the seams, and the auger cracked free. Then the diesel engine whoofed into flames, the smoky orange fire mixing oddly with the searing blue-white glare of the military thermite.
RUNNING FAST ALONG THE PATH between the waving field of corn, Schwarz encountered two farmhands in the wrong clothing and took them down fast.
Checking one of the bodies, the Stony Man commando found a Kenwood transceiver, but with a million possible combinations on the alphanumeric keypad, he would need the laptop back in the Cadillac to bust the encoding. He could hear the enemy, but not what they were saying. The words were garbled squeals and chirps. Useless. But tucking the radio away just in case, Schwarz dropped out of the way of a LAW rocket that came from out of nowhere. The warbird arched high, then dived straight down and detonated in the loose soil, the blast throwing loose dirt and cornstalks for dozens of yards. Taking advantage of the chaotic moment, Schwarz fired a long burst from one of the dropped MAC-10 machine pistols, then loudly cried out in pain. But the other mercenaries didn’t buy the clever trick, and responded with a hail of lead that peppered the green stalks all around him.
Dodging out of the way, Schwarz crawled along the soft soil until reaching an unexpected zone of smooth grass. Directly ahead was a large billboard. Dropping the partially loaded clip packed with imbalanced tumblers, he quickly reloaded the M-16 with armor-piercing rounds and emptied the entire clip, sweeping back and forth across the billboard.
The AP rounds punched through the wood with snapping sounds, and mercs dropped into view from behind the billboard, their machine pistols chattering once before going silent. In short bursts, Schwarz took out the would-be snipers, then reloaded and waited. The mercs might be dead, but every combat instinct he had said that these were merely the flankers for one of the Trinity team. Warily alert, Schwarz stayed low and waited for the real enemy to appear.
PAUSING AT THE EDGE of the cornfield, Lyons tugged his cap on tighter and studied the farmhouse. The building was mostly made of brick, but with
a freshly painted trim, almost all of it speckled with bullet holes. He didn’t have to check inside to know that the legal owners were long gone.
There didn’t seem to be anybody inside the farmhouse, and now Lyons could see a previously unnoticed barn that had been converted into a garage. Probably for the combine harvester, the big man guessed, trying to stay motionless. Come on, guys, show yourselves.
A thunderous blast erupted from atop the silo, followed by a lance of flame. Spinning, Lyons saw a car on the highway buck from the arrival of the incoming round, then the gas tank ignited flames. That was a Barrett! Somebody atop the silo had a Barrett sniper rifle!
Swinging up his Atchisson autoshotgun, Lyons almost smiled as he flipped the selector to full-auto. Creeping through the rustling corn, he got behind the garage, then boldly stepped into view and cut loose with the shotgun, the 12-gauge cartridges of steel fléchettes ripping through the corrugated aluminum of the grain silo. The weatherproof metal opened wide as the entire structure shook from the thundering fusillade. A man cried out from on top, then the badly damaged side buckled and the silo collapsed, falling on the ground into a pile of rending metal and swirling dust clouds. From somewhere inside the wreckage the Barrett boomed. Lyons replied with another blast from the hammering Atchisson, and there was only the muted groaning sound of the silo settling upon itself.
That was when a trio of shiny humanoids stepped out of the farmhouse and onto the wooden porch.
Thumbing cartridges into the Atchisson, Lyons could see that the three men were dressed in silvery heat-resistant suits that covered every inch of their bodies, a hood with a reflective faceplate masking their features. Two of them carried flamethrowers, with bulletproof vests draped over the pressurized fuel tanks strapped to their backs. Stubby MP-5 submachine guns were slung at their sides. The third man carried a massive XM-214 electric minigun, the enclosed Niagara-style ammo feed going over his shoulder and out of sight inside his thermal suit.
Capital Offensive (Stony Man) Page 20