Crossing over the border into South Dakota, Lyons stopped at a rest area to refuel the Hummer while Blancanales got them food from the restaurant, and Schwarz did things to the pay telephone. Getting back on the highway, Lyons drove swiftly into Sioux City, and started searching for a construction site. It took a while, but the team finally found a small strip mall being built near a new Native American casino. Parking the Hummer, Lyons went to the phone and began attaching another electronic device to the mouthpiece. A lounging street gang eyed the men in the new car with interest and began to saunter over until Blancanales and Schwarz displayed the M-16 assault rifles through the car windows and worked the arming bolts.
“Move along,” Blancanales said in a bored tone.
Without missing a beat, the street gang angled away and left the area.
At the pay phone, the Able Team leader finished attaching the device to the receiver. Schwarz swore that this Jumper would make anybody trying to trace the call believe it was coming from the sister unit near the border.
“Any way to test this?” Lyons asked, screwing the mouthpiece of the handset back into place.
“Nope,” the electronics wizard said languidly from the Hummer.
“Then here we go,” the man muttered, and started tapping on the keypad. There came a click, and then silence for a moment.
“Homeland Security,” a woman said in a calm, professional tone. “How may I direct your—”
“C-code nineteen,” Lyons gasped, then broke into a fit of hard coughing.
The woman’s cool demeanor was instantly gone. “Ident code?” she demanded brusquely.
Haltingly, Lyons gave a number. There came some soft taps as the woman on the other end of the line fed it into her computer. Then she audibly gasped.
Damn well should be startled. Lyons grinned. The code he gave would bring up the top-secret dossier of a member of the Thirty, the elite group of Secret Service agents assigned to personally guard the President of the Untied States.
“Is the Traveler in danger?” she asked hurriedly.
Traveler, one of the many code names for the President. “Yes.” Lyons coughed. “Must get…Christ, my guts…”
“Is Traveler hurt or compromised?”
Compromised meant kidnapped. “Traveler is…” Lyons panted weakly, then groaned. “My guts are on fire…they tell us how bad it’ll be at Q, but mother of God.” He broke into tears.
“You’re shot in the stomach? Son of a…Location!” she snapped, trying to cut through his fog of pain. “Special Agent Fielding, report your location!”
Slurring the words, Lyons gave an address a few miles away from the rest stop. Then he fired his gun twice into the air, grunted with pain and dropped the receiver. Walking in place, Lyons then lifted the receiver again and gently hung up.
Glancing about to see if the pistol shots had drawn any unwanted attention, the man saw Blancanales’s choice of locations had been spot-on. Construction sites were always full of noise, and after only a few days the neighbors stopped paying attention to anything they heard.
Returning to the Hummer, Lyons got behind the wheel and deftly started the big engine. “Done,” he announced, slipping into gear. “A wounded member of the Thirty in distress will have Homeland send everybody they can scrape together to that rest stop and start a house-by-house search.”
“One of them being a known crack house that will not want to be searched,” Blancanales added, “so I wish them luck there.”
“My money is on Homeland.”
“Agreed. But we’ll only have a maximum window of five hours before they realize it’s a trick. Possibly only four.”
“After which they’ll call the National Guard and fill the city with troops expecting a terrorist attack,” Blancanales added grimly, laying the assault rifle across his lap. “So we’d better be long gone by then.” In case of trouble with the local police, the M-203 grenade launcher was loaded with a stun bag. But the ammo clip was full of 5.56 mm HEAT rounds—high-explosive, armor-piercing tracers. A gift from the dearly departed Trinity.
“This never would have worked if the East Coast satellites weren’t down,” Schwarz noted, tucking his assault rifle away and pulling out his U.S. Army laptop. “In this sort of situation, the first thing Homeland will do is try to contact the White House. But with the cell phones down and the landlines jammed…”
“They’ll go ape shit,” Lyons finished, moving into the traffic. A semi rumbled by carrying steel beams for a bridge. “Got the correct address of where we’re going?”
“Think so,” Schwarz muttered, flipping up the screen. Already accessed, the plasma monitor showed a detailed street map of Sioux Falls. “Take the next left, and then go straight for a mile.”
Nodding acknowledgment, Lyons followed the directions to outside the city limits. Even for a President in trouble, there would still be a skeleton staff staying at the HSA office. The place was never totally empty; there were far too many important files to keep from falling into criminal hands. On the other hand, the secret Homeland armory should be totally deserted. Hopefully.
In short order, Able Team reached a storage facility near the beginning of the rocky desert. Parking at a gas station across the street, Blancanales got out to refuel their tank while Schwarz watched the EM scanner and Lyons swept the area with enhanced field glasses. There was a weedy lot alongside the storage facility, home to a Pontiac Firebird slowly disintegrating back into the soil. The other side was an abandoned drive-in theater, the silver screen peeling away from the metal framework behind.
Checking his pocket EM scanner, Lyons found no hot spots in the storage facility. So unless there were people inside wearing NASA spacesuits, or drenched in ice, the armory was deserted. Good.
“Anything?” Blancanales asked, climbing back inside the Hummer.
“Everything is clear as far as I can tell,” Schwarz said, busy with his own EM scanner, a cable attaching the delicate device to his laptop. “No chatter on the radio bands, passive radar is clear, no unusual EM spikes. The place looks clean.” He paused. “Except that the fence around this storage facility isn’t galvanized steel, but military-grade titanium. The same stuff the Farm uses to halt incoming missiles.”
“Then let’s move,” Blancanales said.
Driving casually across the road, Lyons read a Closed notice posted in the window of the small office. Ignoring that, the Stony Man operative carefully maneuvered the entry keypad alongside the rear passenger window.
Rolling down the window, Schwarz slid a data card into the slot, the plastic rectangle covered with exposed circuitry, thin wires attached to the end also trailing back to his laptop. The screen illuminated with binary codes and Schwarz hit a few keys in rapid sequence. The control box gave an answering beep and spit out the card. A moment later the heavy gate rumbled aside and Lyons drove inside the complex.
“Easy as pie,” he boasted, slinging the laptop over his shoulder, tucking the key card and wiring into a pocket.
“Try making a pie sometime,” Blancanales retorted, watching the passing rows of locked doors. There were no alleys or back doors, or any other conceivable hiding places. Just a flat apron of black asphalt surrounding the neat rows of painted steel sheds. If the team was attacked out here, it would be a slaughter. They were already trespassing on a secret government installation, and any guards would shoot first and never ask any questions at all.
“Which storage unit is it?” Lyons asked, driving along slowly, trying to appear as if they belonged here.
“B-13,” Schwarz said, closing the laptop.
Blancanales pointed. “And there it is.”
Heading in that direction, Lyons noted a cluster of propane tanks at the end of the row of sheds. Heating and cooking? They seemed strangely out of place, and he made a mental note of their location.
Parking in front of B-10, Able Team slipped on hardhats and picked up toolboxes before stepping out of their Hummer. The three men were dressed in d
ull gray coveralls and bright orange safety vests marked with the letters DPW, department of public works. Stretching as if they had been driving for a long time, the Stony Man operatives warily surveyed the area. Everything seemed peaceful and quiet.
Going to B-12, Lyons pulled out a keywire gun and tricked open the padlock. It yielded easily, but as he swung open the door there was seamless sheet of plastic blocking the entrance. Damn! He had planned to open a joining unit and listen for any movements inside B-13. Suddenly he had a feeling that there were no individual storage units, but just one huge unit two hundred feet long. That wasn’t an armory; it was a supply depot.
Closing the door, Lyons went to B-13 and tricked the padlock. As the door swung away, a ferruled slab of steel was revealed, resembling a bank vault door. There was a keypad and a flat screen roughly in the shape of a hand, a state-of-the-art palm lock.
Stepping aside, Lyons and Blancanales blocked any casual view as Schwarz went to work on the door with his U.S. Army laptop and some electronic probes. A tense minute passed, then another, before they heard a soft whirring noise and the internal bolts nosily disengaged.
Retrieving the probes, Schwarz pushed against the metal door and it smoothly swung aside on silent hinges, revealing only inky blackness. Pulling small flashlights from their vests, Able Team probed the darkness with their white beams, revealing rows of gleaming assault rifles and huge pallets stacked with trays of grenades.
“Jackpot,” Schwarz whispered, sweeping an EM scanner across the area. There were some background readings for the power lines, but nothing else. There were no working video cameras, proximity sensors or live microphones in the lab.
With his Colt Python in one hand and a flashlight in the other, Lyons took point and eased inside the disguised building. Warily, he took a sniff, but there was no smell of cigarettes or coffee. Good enough.
“Okay, you know what we need,” he said, holstering the gun. “Let’s find a handtruck and start loading the Hummer.”
“We have—” Blancanales checked his wristwatch and tapped the alarm function “—four to five minutes, and counting.”
Unexpectedly, they heard the sound of a flushing toilet, and a door blocked by a pallet of satchel charges swung open exposing a uniformed HSA guard zipping up his pants. The guard and Able Team exchanged startled looks for a split second, then everybody clawed for weapons.
Lyons drew first and fired at the guard, trying for a shoulder wound in case the man wasn’t wearing any body armor, which he knew was highly unlikely in such a secure location.
The round tore through the man’s flesh, spinning him, blood spraying into the air. But he came to a stop in a crouch, firing a big-bore .357 Magnum Glock pistol. A booming lance of flame extended from the pitted muzzle and scored a bloody furrow along Blancanales’s cheek, missing removing the man’s head by the thickness of a prayer. Dropping flat, he returned fire, trying to drive the guard back into the restroom. But the guard stood firm and kept throwing hot death at the Stony Man team.
The fire extinguisher exploded on the wall behind Lyons, gushing out a torrent of chemical foam across the racks of assault rifles, combat shotguns and ammunition trunks.
Swinging up his Beretta, Schwarz dropped a bead on the man, then saw from the bloody rip in the shirt of the guard that the man indeed wasn’t wearing any body armor. Shit! Rapidly shifting his aim, the electronics expert stroked the trigger and hit the door. It violently swung shut, slamming into the HSA guard and driving him against the jamb. As bones cracked, the HSA guard cried out and wildly fired his weapon, taking out a fluorescent light fixture in the ceiling. Swinging downward on chains, the light swept between two racks of weapons, and Lyons dropped just in time to miss being beheaded.
Moving fast, Blancanales surged through the exit and out of sight.
Still gamely firing, the HSA guard took refuge behind the pallet of satchel charges, the Magnum rounds plowing through a case of gas masks and a pile of parachutes.
“Alert!” the guard whispered, quickly reloading.
But before he could say any more, Lyons stood in plain view and fired at the bulge on the crouching man’s hip. The radio transceiver there was blown into pieces, and the snarling guard caught Lyons twice in the chest. Slammed backward from the heavy Magnum rounds pounding onto his body armor, the Able Team leader hit the wall and cracked his head. Everything went fuzzy for a heartbeat, and the man instinctively dropped to the floor a split second before a .357 round dented the metal wall exactly where his head had just been located.
Firing into the washroom, Schwarz shattered the toilet and got a geyser of water that the HSA guard completely ignored. Only now the man was firing at the pallet of grenades, trying to blow up the armory rather than let it fall into enemy hands. Even as cold adrenaline flooded his body, Schwarz had to admire the guts of the fellow. This was one tough son of a bitch.
Streaking back in through the doorway, Blancanales appeared with his M-16/M-203 combo. Firing a long burst of 5.56 mm rounds all around the door to the flooded lavatory, he forced the guard into position and unleashed the grenade launcher. The 40 mm barrel belched smoke and the guard slammed against the wall, dropping his gun.
Weakly sinking to his knees, the man groaned as if dying, one hand on his chest, as the stun bag dropped away. Then his other hand came into view holding a wallet.
“Please,” the guard wheezed, holding out the thick folded wad of leather. “I surrender! Here, take my money!”
Having encountered this sort of thing before from drug dealers back in Los Angeles, Lyons ducked behind a plastic crate of MRE food packs as the deadly .44 derringer hidden inside the wallet fired, the double explosion shredding the leather.
But Schwarz caught both rounds in the chest. It would have been a killing blow, except for the NATO body armor underneath. The guard seemed shocked that the Stony Man operative wasn’t dead, and Schwarz used the distraction to level his Beretta, but stayed his hand. In spite of the urgency of the situation, he couldn’t gun down a man simply doing his job. The crazy son of a bitch was fighting as if terrorists were trying to raid a Homeland Security arsenal. The HSA guard was only doing what any of them would have done in a similar situation. Fight to the death, to keep the enemy from stealing the weapons.
Bracing himself, Lyons hopped over the MRE boxes, charged across the empty floor and slammed a shoulder into a tall gunrack. The rows of combat shotguns rattled, the metal shelving bent. The big man put everything he had into shoving harder, and with a tortured groan, the floor bolts tore free and the entire rack came crashing down on the floor, sounding like a detonating locomotive.
A dozen shotguns came loose and buried the guard under a hundred pounds of unloaded steel. As the man fought to get clear, Blancanales closed the breech of the M-203 with a hard snap, and fired again.
Caught directly in the stomach, the HSA guard doubled over with a ghastly exhalation, then violently retched, shuddering and shaking all over before limply collapsing.
Quickly reloading in case the man was faking, the Stony Man operatives rushed over to the guard and kicked away his Glock before turning the groaning man over.
Blancanales checked the unconscious guard for any serious injuries. “He’ll be fine,” he said at last, feeling the man’s chest for any broken bones. “Thankfully, that’s only a flesh wound in the shoulder.”
“Wasn’t trying to kill him,” Lyons said gruffly, dabbing the back of his neck with a handkerchief. The cloth came away red from the earlier blow to his head.
“We came damn close, though,” Schwarz retorted, sliding a satchel charge of M-2 plastic under the guard’s head to make him more comfortable.
But Blancanales eased it away. Any niceties or succor from them would look bad for the guard, as if friends had attacked the secret armory.
“Use this,” Lyons said, passing over a roll of gray duct tape.
Stoically, his teammates bound the guard at the ankles and wrists, and laid a strip loosely
across his mouth.
Just then, Blancanales’s wristwatch beeped softly. “That’s the thirty-minute warning,” he said, slinging the assault rifle. “We’d better move fast.”
“And hope there are no more of these guys,” Schwarz added.
LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER, Able Team drove away from the storage facility, the rear of the Hummer jammed full of boxes and canvas bags. As they headed back onto Route 29, a fleet of National Guard helicopters flew across the skyline of Sioux Falls. Sirens began to howl across the metropolis, warning of impending danger.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sahara Desert, Middle East
The side door of the Hummer opened, and a slim man dressed in a three-piece suit climbed from the military vehicle and strode to the side of a sand dune. A pair of large boulders formed a sort of natural recess, and the dapper man stooped to enter the cool darkness.
Here the ground was hard and firm, a sprinkling of loose particles covering the sand-colored concrete. Armed men stood guard nearby and they saluted the newcomer by snapping their assault rifles to their chests. Impatient with the useless protocol, the man nodded in return and went around a bend to a plain steel door set into a concrete wall. Placing his hand on a pad, he waited until the device scanned his palm and fingerprints, then flashed a green light. The steel wall split apart, revealing an elevator, a line of U.S. Army Claymore mines circling the box at waist level.
Stepping coolly inside, the man did nothing, ignoring the row of buttons. After a moment, the elevator automatically engaged and began to descend to the bunker that existed two hundred feet below the burning surface of the Sahara. Touching any of the buttons would instantly set off the ring of antipersonnel charges hidden inside the floor and ceiling, the double blast totally destroying the elevator, along with anybody inside, no matter how much body armor he or she was wearing.
Capital Offensive (Stony Man) Page 23