He tackled her, his stocky, short frame heaving her aside just before a firestorm of slugs tore into both of them. They landed near Adonis’s massive Desert Eagle, and he grabbed it, Sorenson reloading her pistol.
“Gadgets went down there,” Blancanales said, loading a fresh magazine and slipping the unmistakable stubby M-576 buckshot grenade into his rifle-grenade launcher combo.
“There’s a stairwell into the basement through that door,” Kowalski told Blancanales.
“Okay. Ski and Jackie, you two take that,” the Able Team commando ordered. “I’ll follow Gadgets’s route. Be careful.”
Kowalski looked back at the prone form of Adonis. Sorenson got her mini-Uzi and together they took the doorway.
BLANCANALES ADVANCED, poking the muzzle of his M-4 over the top of the stairwell. He saw Gadgets Schwarz on the ground, hand covered with blood as he clutched his side. Panic filled the Able Team warrior. A couple of Filipino hardmen were pushing through an open doorway, their weapons tracking for targets.
Blancanales knew his downed partner would have only a moment’s respite, thanks to the concrete steps he was behind, but that respite would end in bloody murder if he didn’t act. Stroking the trigger of the M-203 grenade launcher, he unleashed a hail of twenty, .24-caliber pellets from the M-576 buckshot round. The effect was similar to a sawed-off shotgun, except the cone of devastation was wider and more savage. The pair of Filipino gunmen were smashed instantly to the ground by the massive discharge of shotgun pellets.
Blancanales reloaded the M-203 as he descended the stairs, three at a time, racing down to his partner’s side.
“Gadgets?”
“Get behind some cover, Pol,” Schwarz called.
“How bad are you hit?” Blancanales kept his M-4 trained on the doorway. In the distance, the rattle of an Uzi and the booming of a Desert Eagle were met by automatic fire.
“I got clipped by a round that deflected off my body armor,” Schwarz answered. “It’s a flesh wound and it bleeds a lot.”
“You sure?” Blancanales asked.
Schwarz scrambled to his feet. “Yeah. Sure, the stuff that hit the armor felt as though they would break my ribs, but my breathing isn’t labored. I’ll live.”
“Jackie and Ski are in there,” Blancanales said.
“Upstairs?”
“Cleared. Even Adonis is down.”
Schwarz was about to say something when a huge shadow fell across Blancanales’s back. Seeing the shock on his partner’s face, Blancanales whirled and saw all six-and-a-half-feet of towering muscle looming at the top of the staircase, a massive potted plant held over his head.
“Die,” Adonis growled through mashed lips.
Blancanales hurled himself over the railing as the plant, which had to have weighed more than two-hundred pounds, shattered the wood and bent the wrought-iron rodding of the staircase handrail. Plummeting to the floor, he hit hard and scrambled to avoid an avalanche of dirt and broken stone from the plant’s pot. Blinking the dust from his eyes, he looked up to see Schwarz target him and empty a burst into Adonis’s chest.
Able Team locked on to the giant and opened fire even as he leaped. Adonis’s body sailed down the steps, knifing through the air. Landing on his hands, the titan somersaulted with far more agility than a man of his size should have shown, lunging for the fallen weapons of the Abu Sayyaff militiamen Schwarz had slain.
Schwartz locked on target first, his M-4 slamming rounds into Adonis’s back, jerking him erect with the painful impacts. The giant still managed to turn, an M-16 in each fist, triggering both weapons, their muzzle-blasts thunderously deafening in such tight quarters. As Blancanales dived for cover, he triggered his M-203.
The buckshot grenade bellowed in counterpoint. It was like the fist of an invisible god, finally smashing into the chest of Thor reincarnated. Blond hair flew and the Nordic giant was smashed hard through drywall over cinder block. The crater created by the big man was enormous, and even after a point-blank impact, he was still on his feet, trying to fight, triggering his M-16 at a madly scrambling Blancanales.
Schwarz let his empty M-4 drop and brought up his Beretta 93-R, on 3-round bursts, firing to hit Adonis in the head, but the giant was moving too quickly, scuttling along. All he did was attract return fire, one 5.56 mm round striking the Able Team commando’s body armor and driving the breath from his lungs.
Blancanales was in melee distance now. He drove the steel stock of his weapon into Adonis’s jaw. Bone cracked, but the giant grinned and swatted the Able Team commando in the head with the frame of one M-16, sending him skittering across the floor. Pol rolled to put a stop to his out of control slide, only just barely twisting out of the way of an M-16 burst that was tearing up the floor tiles.
Blancanales triggered his M-4, sweeping Adonis across his legs. Flesh burst apart and bone shattered with the multiple impacts. Schwarz opened up from behind, bullets hammering into Adonis’s right arm, 9 mm slugs tearing up into the shoulder, and one bullet striking the big man in his head. Golden hair suddenly stained with crimson, blood bursting in a cloud as Schwarz’s Beretta round clipped the giant’s head and tore open a flap of scalp on the other side.
Adonis crumpled, blue eyes glazing over, then finally closing.
“Is he dead?” Blancanales asked. He was busy reloading his M-4.
Schwarz walked slowly up to the bloodied monster, racking a fresh magazine into his own assault rifle. “His chest is still rising and falling. He’s still breathing.”
Blancanales aimed at the downed man. “Good God. What does it take to kill him?”
Schwarz glanced over. “I don’t know, but are we really going to give up our only link to the heart of the RING to find out?”
Blancanales shook his head. “This is a monster. He’s killed…”
“Hundreds. Thousands. But he’ll be imprisoned. You blew his legs to hell. I took out one of his arms. He probably has brain damage anyway,” Schwarz responded, pointing to the puddle of blood from where Adonis’s torn scalp leaked. “You want to tell Striker we lost our best lead to take apart the RING?”
The gunfire had died down. Blancanales was hurting all over and Schwarz was still bleeding. Both Kowalski and Sorenson limped through the door.
“How did…” Kowalski began. “Is he still alive?”
“Tie him up before we do anything else,” Sorenson ordered.
Schwarz tilted his head. “Anything else?”
“We’re calling Brognola for backup on this,” Kowalski explained. “Dr. Sorenson and I just discovered some new aspects of this nightmare.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Learjet taxied up to the old Air Reserve Station hangar. Two blacksuits Bolan didn’t recognize trotted up to the aircraft, their MP-5s kept low to their sides. They pushed up a rolling staircase and opened the jet’s door.
Bolan handed one of them a brooding, gaunt little man and his war bag. Dark eyes looked the Executioner over.
“You must be Striker,” the man said. He had a faint Scottish lilt to his voice. “Er, Colonel Brandon Stone, I mean, sir.”
“That’s right,” Bolan answered. “And you?”
“My name’s Ryker.” The blacksuit jerked his thumb at a six-foot, powerfully built man with piercing blue eyes. “That’s Priest.”
Bolan nodded and offered his hand. Surprised, the two soldiers took the handshake. “I’m not going to butter this up for you. We’re going to have a hell of a ride ahead of us.”
“I signed up for Farm duty to do the best I could for my country,” Priest answered in a deep, reverent tone. “If that means getting in harm’s way to protect this airport, then so be it.”
“And you?” Bolan asked Ryker.
“Making up for past mistakes,” the Scottish-accented blacksuit answered. “I’m not worth half of what citizens are worth.”
Bolan pursed his lips. “I’d say that kind of attitude makes you worth your weight in gold, Ryker.”
The Sc
otsman regarded Bolan for a moment, then his brooding dark eyes flickered with a moment of warmth, a smile on his lips, before he helped the Executioner carry his war bag into the hangar.
Buck Greene awaited him. “Striker,” he acknowledged. “We were just working out how we’d be protecting the airport. I already have a man stationed at the top of the O’Hare Hilton. He’s been joined by the local FBI office’s SWAT team snipers.”
Bolan knew the tall, black hotel. Its concave shape and great height made it a perfect overwatch for the entire airport. Even though the Executioner was going to try to stay up close and personal to engage in the fight to protect the facility at close range, were he a sniper, he’d set up shop atop the curved wall of obsidian glass.
“They have enough range?” Bolan asked.
Greene nodded. “Three-thirty-eight Lapua Magnums. Reach out and touch you with power from a full mile away.”
Bolan nodded. “They’ll stay close to the terminals if they want to get the maximum disease spread.”
“So they really are going to release something like anthrax or Botox?” Another person spoke up. Bolan turned and saw a bearded man approach. He had tired eyes and his forehead was wrinkled from frowning.
“That’s Rutherford. USAMRIID,” Greene introduced. “U.S. Army’s version of the CDC.”
“Yeah. The Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases,” Bolan recalled. “You have any counterterrorism training?”
“I was the medic in my Delta Force unit before transferring to the institute,” Rutherford said. He sounded less tired and sad than he looked.
Bolan produced a silver sphere that he had taken from the quarry cave in Wisconsin. “Would you recognize what this is?”
“It’s a biological munitions container. Right now, it has neither ampules with virus in suspension, nor a central detonation core,” Rutherford explained as he opened the top of the sphere. “As for what virus would have been put in this, I don’t know.”
Bolan frowned. “If it’s any help, the fluid was amber in color.”
Rutherford pursed his lips and shook his head. “Did you pick up one of the ampules? There would have been an identification code on it. Nothing you’d have known if you weren’t studying it.”
Bolan frowned. “I didn’t pull out a live ampule, but I do remember an eight-digit mix of numbers and letters.”
Rutherford leaned closer to make out the code that the Executioner rattled off, then nodded thoughtfully as he listened. He didn’t react except to say the name of the concoction, and Bolan congratulated him on his poker face. “Botulinum toxin.”
“Botox for short,” Greene muttered.
Bolan shook his head. “Almost always fatal. No countermeasures. It gets ingested or inhaled, and then the toxin kills by paralyzing the part of the nervous system that controls breathing.”
“The good news is that there are antisera to counteract Botox,” Rutherford noted. “But getting it here would take a miracle. And we’d have to administer it immediately to everyone. Waiting until clinical symptoms appeared would be too late.”
“And doesn’t inoculation against it take around a year’s worth of shots?” Greene asked.
“Over the course of several months, at least,” Rutherford confirmed.
Ryker rolled his eyes. “Maybe we could ask the terrorists to wait until next year.”
Bolan grimaced. “We’ll just have to stop them before they can release the toxin. Failure isn’t an option anymore.”
“Buck, we’ve got a message from the Farm,” a newcomer answered.
The blacksuit paused. “Striker. They were just asking about you, sir.”
“Let’s go see what’s up,” Bolan said, nodding toward the radio center.
Sitting at the radio was one of the biggest men that the Executioner had ever seen, easily as tall and powerful as Adonis. He turned and recognized Toro Martinez, a DEA agent who had assisted Leo Turrin and Phoenix Force in breaking part of a ring trying to destabilize the Mexican presidency during a border fire war that flared up a couple of years earlier. He was still young and boyish, his dark complexion hiding wrinkles well.
“Yes, ma’am. Striker just showed up here,” Martinez stated. He smiled at the Executioner and let him take a seat in front of a laptop set up with a miniature Web cam.
Barbara Price’s face appeared on the screen. “Striker, we’ve got a new development. Able Team just discovered a communications center on the West Coast.”
Bolan frowned. “So they’re more widespread than we thought.”
“I’m transmitting the image they found on one computer console,” Price said.
At that moment Bolan found himself looking at a small radar circle in the upper corner of the laptop screen. Data windows surrounding it bore all the information for O’Hare International Airport. He felt a chill race through him. “They have control of O’Hare’s computer network?”
“Bear’s burning up the lines trying to cover that. We think that this is feeding to a SATCOM system,” Price said. “But then it could be retransmitted to aircraft once the airport’s transmitters are knocked out. If they time it right, nobody would know the difference.”
“It’s time-looped for 8:00 p.m. tonight,” Bolan pointed out.
“Yeah, and it’s allowing several flights to take off,” Price responded.
Bolan ran his fingers through his hair. “The ampules have no metal in them. They’re just glass.”
“Excuse me?” Price asked.
“They’re not going to try to perform a mass release of Botulinum toxin here. They might scatter one or two ampules, enough to cause a panic, especially with a couple explosions going on. But by now, Dark and Adonis are counting on us to have counterterrorism forces on hand to contain the threat,” the Executioner surmised. “We respond to some sacrificial lambs and in the meantime, we have a bunch of unarmed thugs spreading out and delivering a deadly bio-weapon to dozens of cities.”
“Not Adonis, Striker.” Schwarz’s voice came over the link. “He’s here in San Fran.”
“Dead?” Bolan asked.
“Alive, but comatose. We’re keeping him alive. Hal’s got us a team of Justice Department agents to secure the mall so the cops don’t take away bodies, prisoners or evidence,” Schwarz explained. “We want Adonis in custody, don’t we?”
“If he wakes up, we’ll be able to get what information we want out of him. Then he gets his sentence served,” the Executioner answered. “Did you find anything else?”
“Twenty to thirty heavily armed Filipinos. In a Christian missionary center,” Schwarz replied.
“A Christian missionary center?” Bolan asked for clarification.
“Striker, you don’t think that they’d be…” Price began.
“What did you guys find over there?” Schwarz asked.
“I’m guessing that the RING intends to spread Botulinum toxin ampules to various airports around the country and to other countries,” Bolan said. “Christian missionaries. That would provide plenty of cover for a large group of people to come into an airport at once, and then just split up.”
“I’m having Jackie Sorenson check it on their computers. She’s found their financial records,” Schwarz replied.
Minutes ticked away while Bolan waited for a response. In the meantime, the Executioner conferred with Greene.
“We’ll need security and our spotters to look out for buses that could be carrying in fake missionaries,” the Executioner said.
“Local security and the cops have been working with us. Toro here has been running back and forth between their HQ and ours to keep things secure,” Greene replied.
“Oh?” Bolan asked.
“We ran a check. The whole phone system is tapped,” Greene said. “And the thing is, it’s all done through official channels. NSA, DEA, FBI—everything from office phones to pay phones. But the taps have a shadow signature on them, someone other than the real authorities is listening in.”
“The RING,” Bolan surmised.
Greene nodded. “In fact, according to our computer people, our own firewall is under attack constantly. He’s shifting encryptions constantly to fight off unauthorized listeners.”
Bolan looked at the comm center. “Probably other members of the RING’s core group. I just can’t see a terrorist organization having hackers who could match us.”
“Sir.” Martinez spoke up. The great bull of a man looked grim. “Able Team reports that the fake missionaries have bought thirty tickets to twenty-five different cities.”
Bolan grimaced. “All right. We’ll do what we can on this end. Have Able try to get here as fast as possible. I know they’re tired, but we’ll need all the muscle and firepower we can get.”
“Yes, sir,” Martinez answered, turning back to the comm center.
Bolan stepped to the door of the hangar, looking out over the airfield. Thoughts whirled in his mind as he balanced the news of potential apocalypse to the lost Sable Burton. At that moment, his cell phone vibrated.
“Stone,” he answered, pulling the phone from his pocket.
Even though Bolan had heard the voice only once, he knew it was Dark. “Hello, Colonel. How’s this afternoon treating you?”
“Why don’t you come see me and I’ll tell you in detail?”
“Thanks for the invitation, Colonel,” Dark answered, “but I don’t have to be there for a while. On the other hand, there is a lady who is dying to see you again.”
“I told Adonis, if she got hurt, I’d bring the sky down on you and yours,” the Executioner said, restraining his rage. He took a deep breath. “Oh, wait. I don’t think Adonis is in a position to tell you that.”
There was a grunt on the other end. “What do you mean?”
“Well, he ran into some of my people in San Francisco,” Bolan told him. “You might not have heard yet.”
“You’re trying to tell me you’ve taken down Adonis?”
“He’ll be in custody. Granted, we’re not sure there’s enough to testify, but—”
“Nice trick. I try to draw you out, then you try to get me to run to my friend,” Dark replied. “He wouldn’t be taken alive.”
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