Incendiary Dispatch

Price was now looking at the surface of the War Room conference table, not at any of them. She opened her hand, a hopeless gesture. “The town was surrounded, blocking all escape routes.”

The room full of people was silent for a moment.

“Anybody get out of that town?” Carl Lyons asked.

“It’s still burning.”

“Oh.”

“It’s important to note that most of these attacks were not intended to result in significant loss of life,” Aaron Kurtzman said. “Most of the pipeline attacks were not in populated areas. The intention was clearly to put these pipes out of commission. The same intention was behind the sabotage of oil tankers. We have a number of oil tankers burning or sunk, including several tankers that were nonmobile—used only for storage, not oil transport. In some ports, the damage is so widespread that it has not even been determined yet whether there was one ship sabotaged or more than one.”

“Obviously,” Price said, “whoever did this wanted to cripple the movement of oil and get the attention of the world. They wanted there to be no doubt in anybody’s mind that they had the means to do it.”

“So if they wanted to stop the movement of oil,” asked Rafael Encizo, one of the Phoenix Force commandos, “why’d they hit all the aircraft? A passenger jet to India, a passenger jet to Brazil—plus a cargo flight into Moscow? What am I missing here? What’s the purpose?”

“Terror is the purpose, we must assume,” Barbara Price said. “Whoever did this wanted the world to know they could hit anywhere. Anyplace and anybody.”

“Which brings up the big question of who?” Brognola said. “Unfortunately, we’ve got precious little to go on.”

“How can that be?” Carl Lyons demanded. “You don’t set off five hundred bombs at once, all around the world, and not leave some evidence.”

“Of course there’s evidence,” said Gary Manning, Phoenix Force’s demolitions expert. He was a veteran of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, where he had once served as an antiterrorist operative. He was a hulking, burly, square-jawed figure, often subdued compared to some of the other figures in his team, but never hesitant to say what was on his mind. “Half those hot spots are still burning. You think there’s been time to go in and sift through the wreckage?”

“FBI forensic demolitions analysis teams are on-site at five pipeline explosions, including at a Trans-Alaska Pipeline site thirty miles north of the Yukon River,” Brognola said.

“The blasts were all planned for maximum destruction. In Alaska, it seems the planning went awry,” Price said. “The pipeline wasn’t ripped apart as thoroughly as some of the others. It appears that only about a third of the explosives in the series actually detonated.”

Kurtzman typed a command into the interface board built into his wheelchair. The onscreen image of Hal shifted to a secondary screen and a map of Alaska showing a red, thick line that indicated the route of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System appeared on the main screen. He zoomed in on Fairbanks, then followed the trail of the pipeline north until it crossed the Yukon River and headed north another thirty miles.

“It looks as if most of the pipeline explosives included twenty to thirty shaped charges designed to go off simultaneously,” Price explained. “In Alaska, an estimated ten charges detonated simultaneously. The pipeline was damaged seriously, but not on the scale we’ve seen elsewhere around the world. We have video. Bear?”

She nodded to Kurtzman, who brought up shaky aerial footage of empty landscape. “A station in Fairbanks rushed a chopper to the scene as soon as they heard about it,” Price said. “They started taping when they saw the smoke.” The video shifted to show a flaming, billowing canal of black oil covering the ground and surrounding what was apparently an undamaged section of the pipeline. The destroyed section of the pipe appeared small, but it was difficult to grasp the scale from the shaky camera.

Then the pipe split open and more oil flooded out.

Manning was leaning forward on the table, watching the video intently. “So the charges didn’t go off when they were supposed to, but as soon as the fire catches up to them they ignite.”

“That’s what we think happened.”

“You said ignite,” stated the black Phoenix Force commando, Calvin James, who had once been a Navy SEAL.

“That’s what I said—ignite,” Manning agreed. There was a moment of silence as they stared at the screen, and the pipeline broke open farther downstream. More oil spilled out and the flames intensified.

“That’s a pretty damned efficient release of energy,” Manning pointed out, “even going off at the wrong time. It didn’t send oil spraying in all directions. It just opened up the metal.”

“Low explosives engineered to just break the shell?” James suggested.

“Maybe. But nah,” Manning said, frowning at the screen. “Got any more of those on tape?”

“You’re in luck,” Kurtzman said, nodding at the screen. There was a cut and the shot changed. Now the camera was zooming in close to the pipe. The men in the news chopper were interested in the damage being done to the pipeline, just as Manning was. The image was shaky and smoke-blurred. They couldn’t make out anything actually attached to the pipe. The pipe was cooking in the flames from the spreading oil underneath it, then a bright white streak appeared on the surface of the metal and it grew into a narrow opening in the pipe. Oil, no longer under pressure, oozed out, and the conflagration quickly wormed its way inside and ripped the pipeline wide open.

“What the hell was that?” growled Rafael Encizo. Stocky and powerful, he’d been born in Cuba and spent plenty of time rotting in Castro’s prisons. Castro couldn’t kill Encizo, but only made him stronger. Encizo was a naval tech specialist, as much at home in the water as on land.

“Virtually no visible fragmentation,” Manning pointed out.

“These bastards were trying to be neat about it?” McCarter demanded.

“They were trying to be efficient,” Manning said with a grim smile. “You go setting off five hundred devices at a time, you need to control costs. You figure out just exactly how much explosive or incendiary you need, you figure out how to make it do exactly what you want it to do, then you use just enough each time to do your dirty work.”

A man in a cowboy hat had been stretched out in the chair alongside James. As the others kept their eyes glued to the progressive damage playing out along the Alaskan pipeline, the man in the hat now walked around to stand behind Akira Tokaido.

Thomas Jackson Hawkins knew quite a bit about electronic communications—military, civilian and industrial. He watched intently as Tokaido played with some communications schematics out of Alaska, using computer models of communications infrastructure to replicate the simultaneous detonation of hundreds of bombs around the world—a type of communication whose failure could lead to the partial misfires that had occurred in Alaska.

“What about the lab in Georgia where Rafe got burned?” Hermann Schwarz was asking. “Gary, they were specializing in incendiary research.”

“I’ve looked at the reports. I don’t know what the hell that was all about. It was damned suspicious, for sure. But what were they trying to accomplish by bringing in foreign-made military research and prototype? I couldn’t figure it out.”

“What about the prototype devices they supplied the military?” Schwarz asked. “Any good?”

“No. They were shoddy,” Manning said.

“But could their prototypes do that?” Schwarz persisted, nodding at the screen where the Alaskan pipeline continued to open again every few minutes.

Manning shrugged. “I doubt it.”

“Would you like to see one of the devices from the Solon lab in Georgia?” Kurtzman asked.

Gary Manning blinked. “You have one?”

Kurtzman grimaced. “Don’t worry. It’s not live.”

Carmen Delahunt was already slipping out of the room and was back in a moment with a plastic crate. She opened it and removed several items packed in gray foam: a wallet and a cell phone, both removed by Carl Lyons from the intruder at the lab. There was also a small, engineered device composed of three plastic discs held together by three plastic screws. Delahunt handed it to Manning, along with a printout of the functional characteristics of the device.

“One of the prototype samples from the lab.”

Of the dozen people in the War Room, not one took notice when the time code on the various computer screens changed to 8:00 p.m.

Manning sneered at the prototype. “This?”

“Looks like a Big Mac without the all-beef patties,” Schwarz muttered.

“It is not more sophisticated than it looks,” Price said.

Manning spun the screw, examined the interior. “Nonmetallic. Cavity for ignitables. So what? How much taxpayer cash did this cost us?”

“Could it have been used for the attacks we just saw?”

“No,” Manning said. “It’s too small and it won’t create a directed ignition. You’d need specially shaped charges of thermite or something to make those holes.”

“You sound pretty sure,” Brognola interjected.

“I know it would make things simpler if we could target your lab in Georgia right now, but it’s not adding up,” Manning said. “Maybe this was a diversionary tactic. They wanted to create the prototype to show just how inept they were when it came to engineering weaponized incendiaries. That would explain why they would trying to submit something like this as an advanced prototype.” Manning was arguing with the schematics sheet in front of him. “Yeah. They must have known this was crap when they sent it into the DOD. They did it on purpose.”

“Everything about that situation was damned odd,” Lyons growled. “I bet it was those hamburger incendiaries that they had rigged to go off on us. They were throwing shit in all directions.”

Manning shrugged. “You load it up with thermite, it would be a great arson tool,” he said, sliding the clattering plastic piece across the conference table. “For getting through the A53 carbon steel they use for structural steel pipes—no way. Not the precision punctures we just saw happen in Alaska.”

“We’re getting bloody nowhere,” David McCarter grumbled. He got up, paced behind the table and sucked on his Egyptian Coca-Cola until the plastic bottle collapsed with a fingernails-on-chalkboard crackling noise, then stopped when he was the center of attention of every person in the War Room.

Except for Akira Tokaido and T. J. Hawkins, who were jabbering quietly together and poking at the tablet screen. There was a dull but tangible frustration in the room.

Despite the vast inventory of attacks that had just occurred, no action plan presented itself. This was not a group of people accustomed to doing nothing.

Still, not one of them noticed when the time code on the computer screens turned from 8:02 p.m. to 8:03 p.m.

The phone that Carl Lyons had lifted from the attacker in the lab in Georgia began to ring.

Everybody in the room looked at it.

T. J. Hawkins said something under his breath.

Akira Tokaido’s hand froze over the tablet.

There was a beep from a computer. Then the peal of an electronics alarm. And then another. The phone rang again.

“More attacks?” Kurtzman exclaimed.

“Shit!” Akira Tokaido said. “Coming through the fucking phones!” He sprawled over the conference table, grabbed the phone from Solon Labs and leaped behind one of the nearby terminals. The phone rang again. He snatched at a USB cable and jabbed it into the phone.

Kurtzman wheeled into position behind a computer of his own. Brognola, having vanished offscreen, saw none of the action.

“You getting this?” the big Fed’s voice demanded. “We’ve got railroad and bridge alerts! Are you getting this?”

“Incoming calls setting off the devices,” T. J. Hawkins explained as the cybernetics crew seated themselves at any terminal that happened to be available. “Akira and I were discussing that possibility just before the phone went off.”

“Tracking the incoming call,” Tokaido said, his voice on edge.

“What good will that do?” Manning asked Schwarz. “The calls won’t all be coming from the same number.”

“They’re originating somewhere,” Schwarz said.

The phone was still ringing.

“Tell me you got something, Barb!” Brognola barked from far away in D.C.

“Got it!” Tokaido said. “Tracking back!”

“How far can you get, Akira?” Price asked with an unreal calm.

“I don’t know!”

“Bear?” Price urged.

“We’re moving!” Kurtzman said. “We’re getting through!”

“Through to what?” Brognola asked.

Barbara Price shook her head at him. She wasn’t going to ask for an explanation right now.

“Got the bastard!” Tokaido said.

“Seeing it,” responded the low, calm rumble of Huntington Wethers. “Identifying that picocell as a nanoGSM. Sending you the serial number.”

“I’m accessing the OMC-R,” Tokaido said.

Hawkins, standing at Tokaido’s shoulder, made a face at Schwarz. “He can access the Operations and Management Center-Radio?” he whispered.

“I’m in,” Tokaido crowed. His fingers stabbed at the keys. He spoke angrily at the LCD screen. “You are not getting past me again.”

His fingers stopped. He sat there staring at the screen. Kurtzman pushed back from his monitor.

“Okay, it’s off,” Kurtzman said. “He turned it off. Akira, you did it. It’s off.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Holy shit. That was fast-ass hackwork, my friend,” Hawkins said, clapping Tokaido on the shoulder.

“Yeah.” Tokaido didn’t seem to share Hawkins’s enthusiasm. He began typing again furiously. “Gonna cover my tracks.”

“We know where the picocell is, right?” Schwarz demanded.

“I can give you a street address,” Wethers confirmed. “In Barcelona.”

“Let’s go get that damned box!” Hawkins said.

“Will it do us any good?” Price asked.

“It just might,” Kurtzman said. “The picocell, the base station controller—the radio operations and maintenance hardware give us a way into the system.”

“Sounds like a weak link. As soon as they know it’s compromised they’ll stop using it. Or incinerate it,” Price suggested.

“Maybe not,” Tokaido announced. “There’s a power outage in that end of the city. They’ll have battery backup but I told the Operations and Management Center for the nanoGSM to take steps against a surge. Maybe they’ll believe that was the reason their signals stopped going out.”

“A power outage caused by?”

Tokaido grimaced and held up ten wiggling fingers, then kept typing.

“They’ll never believe the timing was coincidental,” Price replied.

“I’m creating a record in the OMC of several hours of power fluctuations on the grid,” Tokaido said. “If I’m this terrorist, then I’m gonna dedicate my picocell to my own job. I’m not sharing it with anybody. Which means the picocell’s had low-volume traffic all day until the high volume of signals at 8:04 Eastern time. I’m making it look like the thing was cycling on and off. When the high volume of calls started, it was too at-risk and the system shut itself down again.”

“A good IT guy will see through it.”

“They might see through it anyway,” Price snapped. “But we’ll be there if they’re not. Phoenix?”

“We’re gone,” McCarter snapped, and the room cleared of the five members in seconds.

“Carmen?” Price said.

“Transport to Barcelona is standing by for Phoenix Force,” Delahunt replied. Aircraft, like almost all dedicated Stony Man resources, had been standing by since the first attack. “Ground transport will be waiting for them in Barcelona.”

“Can I get an update here?” Brognola said.

Price walked to the screen and quickly summarized the rapid-fire chain of events. “We tracked down a specific picocell as the source of the calls going out. A picocell is a phone cell system. An office building might have one for dedicated mobile phone traffic. The hardware’s not large.”

“How large?” Brognola asked. “Would it need a dedicated IT room? Extra air-conditioning? That kind of thing?”

“No, Hal,” Kurtzman broke in, wheeling away from his desk. “The picocell itself, the operations and maintenance hardware, the base station, none of it’s bigger than a PC tower. The biggest piece would be a battery backup. That’s a 150-pound box, maybe.”

“Think they’ll buy the story about the power fluctuations?”

“If they have enough IT skill to look into the source of the problem, and not so much they analyze operational logs—maybe,” Kurtzman said.

“Or maybe they’ll play it safe and just burn it down. They’ll have backup phone systems,” Brognola said. He was staring at his own offscreen monitors. Barbara Price didn’t know what he was looking at. She would have time, soon enough, to assess the latest series of attacks.

“We’re working on tracing the destinations of the phone calls,” Kurtzman announced.

“I’m into the Mobile interface,” Tokaido announced. “I’m looking at the call traces.”

Kurtzman nodded. “Hunt?”

“We recorded some of the outgoing calls. This one to Chicago. It’s not voice. Sending commands to some sort of smartphone app. Pretty specific set of commands.”

“This is a call that went though?” Kurtzman asked.

“Yes.” Huntington Wethers turned to the big screen and brought up a computer map of Chicago, then zoomed in tight. “Right here,” he said.

“Railroad,” Kurtzman observed.

“Commuter rails have been hit heavily in the last ten minutes,” Brognola said. “Two commuter trains derailed in Chicago.”

“Mile southwest of the Metro Wrightwood station,” Wethers clarified.

“That’s one of them,” Brognola confirmed.

“We did intercept calls that did not go through,” Kurtzman stated, but there was a slight question in his voice.

“Yes,” Tokaido said. “Should I trace them?”

“How?” Schwarz said, suddenly alarmed.

“I gotta place a call.”

Silence.

“Several of the numbers are 703s,” Tokaido added.

“It appears—appears—that an app is used to ignite the devices. We’ll know more after we analyze this phone.” Kurtzman nodded at the phone on Tokaido’s desk—the one from the lab in Georgia.

“But it could be just the incoming call itself that does it?” Brognola asked loudly.

“Possible.”

“Allow any incoming call to start the ignition? That would be a foolish risk for the attackers to take,” Schwarz said.

“But not out of the question,” Price said.

“I’m calling this,” Brognola said. “I do know the risks. I know we could be setting off one of these devices. We must follow this lead.”

“You’re gambling,” Price said.

“I know,” Brognola shot back. “Make the call.”

Tokaido hit a key. The call went through. The ring came through the speakers on his monitor. It rang. And rang.

“Does that mean it didn’t detonate?” Brognola said.

“Maybe,” Kurtzman responded. All eyes were on Tokaido as he tracked the signal, hit an impasse, typed out commands and continued to track.

“Got it!”

“Here it comes,” Wethers said as he pulled up the map on the big screen. “It’s the rail line, short distance from Franconia/Springfield Station, in Springfield, Virginia.”

“Checking the emergency bands,” Carmen Delahunt said. “Police and fire are relatively quiet in that vicinity.”

“We’re your gophers,” Carl Lyons growled.

Price glanced at the time display. “Move fast.”

CHAPTER SIX

Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi zipped them on a straight-line northwest flight over Virginia. Grimaldi was another veteran staffer of Stony Man Farm, one of many recruited back when Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, targeted the Mafia. Grimaldi had been a Mafia pilot, but Bolan had convinced him to switch sides.

When Bolan’s efforts shifted from mobsters to terrorists, and when the covert agency now based at Stony Man Farm was assembled to coordinate the activities of Bolan and the teams of black-operations commandos he had recruited, Grimaldi was on board.

His toy for today was an MD-600N, a sweet piece of helicopter engineering from McDonnell Douglas. It was fast. It was quiet. It didn’t look military. In fact, Stony Man had nameplates at the ready to make it look like a news chopper or a local SWAT mover. Today, there was no logo. Nobody was supposed to be in the air—nobody. Around Washington, D.C., the no-fly zone was being enthusiastically enforced, and it took some quick behind-the-scenes work by the Farm before the Army UH-60 Black Hawk that was trying to force them to land got a cease-and-desist order.

Able Team exited the helicopter before the skids fully settled on the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse. Blancanales got behind the wheel of a black Explorer, a vehicle with run-flat tires, power-boosting accessories under the hood, and body panels that were designed to withstand bullets and shrapnel.

They drove less than a mile and Schwarz and Lyons exited the vehicle near the station. The big Alexandria, Virginia, parking lot was eerily quiet. The trains were not running today, and wouldn’t be running anytime soon. Schwarz and Lyons avoided the security personnel posted at the station and slipped through the darkness and into the weeds before stepping onto the tracks.

“We’re on-site, Stony,” the Able Team leader said into his headset.

“We’re tracking you, Carl. You’re a hundred feet away and closing.”

Lyons’s MV-321G Gen 3 night-vision goggles were equipped with infrared illumination. The plan was for him to use night vision while Schwarz conducted a naked-eyes search. So far the track was so well lit by overhead lighting that Lyons didn’t need the NVGs.

They watched the tracks, looking for signs of devices that didn’t belong. Tokaido’s little track-back trick had triangulated the location of just one of the cell phones. The reports of the latest wave of attacks—including derailments on several commuter and cargo railroads in the United States and around the world—suggested there would be half a dozen devices planted along the tracks. Whoever was doing this, obviously wanted to do the job completely.

They were still ten yards from the location of the specific tracked device when Schwarz froze.

“I think I’ve got one.”

“Show us, Able,” Price said through the headset.

Schwarz pulled out a video camera, offering far higher resolution than the video feed from the lipstick-size video pickups on his headset. He pointed it at the device nestled against the steel rail of the Fredericksburg Line.

“Manning is seeing it. Cowboy’s here, too,” Price announced. John “Cowboy” Kissinger was the Stony Man Farm armorer.

“Looks like a rock,” Gary Manning announced from his seat on a jet over the Atlantic Ocean.

“I’m no ballistics expert like Gary,” Kissinger said, “but I’d have to agree that it looks like a rock.”

“You’re a big help,” Schwarz said. “Can’t thank you guys enough. See the plastic foam on the bottom? It’s adhered to the metal. Bonding agent of some kind. They have it glued to the track itself so they can be sure the rail is damaged by the blast.”

“Gadgets,” Manning said, “you can’t touch that thing. What if it’s got a motion-sensing trigger?”

Schwarz snorted. “It’s super-glued to the rail of a commuter train line. It’s been getting rattled for days.”

“Gadgets—” Lyons said.

“Hey, you don’t have to tell me to be careful,” Schwarz said. “We don’t have to touch it. We’ll move it from a distance.”

Schwarz pulled out a small, dense wedge of steel on a metallic spike. He pulled a safety strip to activate it, then impaled the thing in the ground, within a half inch of the device on the rail track.

They moved away from the device, along the curve of the track.

“Able Three here,” Blancanales said on the line from his lookout in the Explorer. “Get to cover. Company coming. Two white males.”