Incendiary Dispatch

Schwarz and Lyons blended into the bushes.

“They’re walking the rails,” Blancanales added from his vantage point. “They might be Virginia Railway Express track inspectors.”

“That’s to be expected.”

“Looks like one of them is armed.”

That was hardly out of the question either, Lyons thought, given the state of high anxiety in the nation and the fact that railroads had just become demonstrated targets.

“Any other equipment, Pol?” he asked quietly.

“No.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” Lyons commented. “Patrols should be obviously armed. Inspectors should have equipment.”

“Let’s ask them,” Schwarz suggested, extracting his Beretta 93-R, a handgun based on the well-known Beretta 92. One serious difference in the design: a selector switch that enabled the handgun to fire three-round bursts.

* * *

ROSARIO BLANCANALES LEFT the Explorer and followed the path taken earlier by Lyons and Schwarz. He moved quickly. There was a dull ache from the sutures in his gut. A dull ache was nothing compared to the pain he’d woken up with after the firestorm in Georgia.

He didn’t like what was happening. More than that, Blancanales knew that Stony Man was in a bad, bad place. What intelligence they had so far served them little in tracking down whoever was causing this mayhem. They needed information. They needed a source.

“Able Three here,” he said quietly. “I’m in position alongside the tracks.”

“Don’t engage,” Lyons said.

“Don’t plan to,” Blancanales replied. “I’m concealed. I’m the fly on the wall.”

The two men approached. The one in front had a firearm held close to his leg, on the far side of his body where Blancanales only glimpsed it. The other followed a few steps behind. The body language of the follower said “nervous.”

They were moving quickly now, half jogging. There was no cover here, unless they decided to crawl through the bushes where Encizo was camped.

Blancanales kept his mike wide open. Nothing to boost the audio. The Farm wasn’t going to hear much of this.

“Another thirty yards,” said the one in the rear.

“Yeah,” said the leader.

“This ain’t good, man.”

“Shut up.”

“This ain’t good, Gus.”

“I said shut the fuck up,” the leader stormed, waving his weapon in the direction of his partner.

In the cold cast of the lights over the track Blancanales saw the silhouette of a machine pistol. The follower was silenced by the provocative gesture, and the two men continued down the tracks. Blancanales had to take the chance. He slipped out of the bushes and followed after them, sprinting from shadow to shadow. The pair up ahead was high on anxiety but not too skilled at stealth.

They stopped on the tracks. Blancanales shrank into a weedy dark place. The leader, the one called Gus, faced away from the track, watching for trouble, while the follower crouched over it. Encizo saw him bend at a bulge alongside the central of the three-tracks set of railroad racks running side by side in this location. This was not the device Schwarz had located. The device was removed—no, just a cover lifted off. The man quickly extracted something from the device and slipped it into a camouflage backpack. Then he unzipped another section of the pack, removed another device and flipped it on. The screen blazed colorfully to life for a moment. The man was using his body to shield the screen, but wasn’t counting on a voyeur in a nearby overhang of weeds. Blancanales clearly saw it was a cell phone swap.

The man on technical duty closed the device. The swap was made in less than a minute.

The two men moved on and the technical man crouched at the next device—and froze at the sight of Schwarz’s steel wedge.

“What the hell is this?”

“What?” Gus demanded.

“Look at it!”

Gus shook his head. “I got no idea.”

“Me, neither, but it wasn’t there before! We’re made! Let’s get out of here.”

“If they found them, they wouldn’t have just left the igniters,” Gus said, although he was obviously confused by the steel wedge. His head was oscillating, looking for signs of surveillance. The night remained still. “We gotta finish this job.”

“Listen to me,” his companion insisted. “It wasn’t here before.”

“You listen,” Gus snapped. “They got us by the nuts. We don’t do the job, we rot in federal prison. Forever. Understand?”

“Call ’em,” the technical man said. “Tell them what we found.”

Gus nodded swiftly. “Yeah.”

“Don’t let them make that call, Gadgets!” Blancanales snapped into his mike.

Schwarz did the first thing that came to mind—he hit the detonator switch on the dedicated remote in his hand. The metal wedge reacted with a bang and rocketed into the device adhered to the railroad track with explosive force. The steel blade sliced through the adhesion of the device, just as it was intended to do, and kept going, into the technical man, who grunted and collapsed. The steel wedge clattered away over the track ballast. Gus bolted, made it four steps, then slammed into what felt like the front end of a diesel locomotive.

Blancanales’s body blow took Gus down hard. A swift stomp broke several ribs and left him stunned. Blancanales snatched the Steyr SPP out of Gus’s grip and in the same motion swung the butt of the weapon into Technical Man’s skull as he tried to rise to his feet. The pistol was made of a composite polymer that the manufacturer had famously called “nearly indestructible.” Sure enough, the composite didn’t so much as crack.

Something in the Technical Man’s skull, however, broke and he collapsed and was still.

Blancanales grabbed at one of Gus’s wrists and twisted it, leveraging the man onto his face, then kept pulling the wrist until it was between his shoulder blades. Something cracked. Blancanales jerked a plastic cuff around it, then grabbed his other wrist and pulled it up, as well.

Gus screamed.

Blancanales landed both knees on either side of Gus’s spine. All the air in Gus’s body seemed to explode out of his mouth and he mustered no more noise or resistance.

“Need a hand?” Schwarz asked as he and Lyons arrived. Schwarz’s unfired 93-R covered the lifeless technician.

“No, I got this.” Blancanales gave Schwarz and Lyons a wicked grin. “Leave me in the car, will ya?”

“Able One?” Price said in the headsets. “What’s the status?”

“How should I know?” Lyons growled. “I’m just Pol’s sidekick.”

“Able Three here,” Blancanales said. “Listen, we have a backpack full of cell phones. These guys were going to swap them out. They’re just changing out cell phones, for God’s sake. This one was about to call somebody. If we make the call, we can trace it, right?”

“Yes,” Kurtzman said. “Give me the serial number.”

Schwarz snatched Gus’s phone and pulled a miniature screwdriver out of a small leg pack. He spun the screws off and recited the serial number.

“Here’s my thought,” Blancanales said quickly. “We place the call, get the trace, then detonate some of the old phone devices. We take the new phones and the rest of the devices with us. Maybe whoever was in charge of having them placed, will think this pair screwed something up. Then we get these quick to the Farm and figure out whatever we can from them.”

“It can’t hurt,” Price said.

“But I doubt they’ll buy it,” Schwarz said. He was now holding one of the devices—the one that the explosive chisel had sliced off the side of the railroad track. “They’re using some kick-ass adhesive. Some sort of modified cyanoacrylate, I’d guess. Unless you’re packing nail polish remover, we’re not getting these things off the rails in a hurry.”

“We can’t risk it,” Lyons said. “If these guys are expected to report in and don’t—they might risk blowing these devices.”

“No way,” Schwarz said. “They’re replacing the phones for a reason. To avoid using the old, traceable signal.”

“How sure are you of that, Gadgets?” Blancanales demanded. “Sure enough to stick around?”

“No way to that, either,” Schwarz conceded.

“We’ve got the phone online,” Kurtzman said. “When you make the call, we’ll trace it.”

Schwarz removed the old-system cell phone from the device in his hands. He jogged up the track and snatched out the new-system cell phone that the Technical Man had put there. He had the backpack over one shoulder.

“Dead,” Lyons announced after a quick check of the technician with the cratered skull. He gave a bark of disbelief when he saw Blancanales about to hoist Gus onto his shoulders. “I’ll get that one,” Lyons said. “I think your nerve endings must’ve fried out, Pol. Your guts should be screaming at you by now.”

“They’re a little achy,” Blancanales admitted.

In fact, the burn wound was throbbing. He could count the sutures by each individual needle of pain emanating from his side.

Lyons tossed groaning Gus over his shoulder and plodded with him up the steep berm. Schwarz had stayed behind to plant the phone in the ignition device adhered to the track, then he hustled after Lyons and Blancanales.

“I’m set,” Schwarz said. “But I don’t think this is gonna fool anybody.”

* * *

A SMALLER GROUP had gathered in the War Room. Phoenix Force was absent, now en route to Europe. Able Team was on hand, as was Stony Man armorer John “Cowboy” Kissinger, a tall man with broad shoulders and narrow hips. Kissinger was well-known for his expertise with almost every type of weapon. He could dismantle and rebuild any firearms system put in front of him.

Kissinger was—like almost everyone at the Farm—a veteran of bigger, more public organizations in the outside world. He had spent years with the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. When it was restructured as the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA, Kissinger went freelance for some time before finding a home at Stony Man Farm. He maintained the Farm armory, often upgrading and improving the standard-issue equipment.

“Explosives,” Kissinger said, “are not my primary focus, but I read the research. Including the stuff the military researchers don’t know I’m reading. So I know what the state of the art is in weaponized nanothermites.” He set the device on the table, now in pieces, and waved a hand at it. “This is beyond what we thought of as state of the art.”

Hal Brognola, sitting at his desk in Washington, edged forward in his seat and adjusted a camera on one of his displays to focus on the device. “Weaponized nanothermites aren’t new.”

“No way,” Schwarz said. “They’ve been tested for years. They’re looking at using MICs as primer in small arms. Not even for performance improvements. They want primers that won’t release vaporized lead every time a round is fired.”

“And this is an MIC?” Price asked.

Kissinger shook his head. “It’s not.”

“It’s not?” Schwarz echoed.

“It’s not a composite—not in the way everyone thinks of an MIC, a Metastable Intermolecular Composite,” Kissinger said. “The standard assumption is that MICs are laminated composites. It puts an ultrathin, nanoscale layer of aluminum or some other metal fuel atop a layer of an oxidizer. The two materials are exothermically reactive, and the proximity is so close that the diffusion of the oxidizer and fuel happens much more quickly and energetically. The rate of reaction is much, much faster. We’ve been working on tuning nanolaminated pyrotechnics to achieve different results. Different metals used in the nanolayers, different fillers used to separate and encase the laminates, give you interesting results. And the reaction time is far superior to a simple mixture of the old powders used in more standard incendiaries.”

“So how’s this different?” Schwarz demanded.

“Particle size, for one. We’re working with 100 to 200 nanometer-diameter particles when making the MICs. The particles in these devices are much, much smaller. They’re in the range of one-quarter to one-half of one nanometer in size.”

“They can do that?” Schwarz asked.

“Can we do that, you mean?” Kissinger asked. “Yeah. Maybe. Maybe in a lab. Or maybe not.”

“So layers of particles that fine,” Price said, “would be that much closer together. The reaction is that much faster.”

“Much faster,” Kissinger confirmed. “Here’s where it gets interesting. There are no layers in this device. Instead of a layer of fuel and a layer of oxidizer, the particles are conjoined.”

“Conjoined?” Price queried.

“No way!” Schwarz said. “They can do that?”

“Can we do that, you mean?” Kissinger repeated. “No way. They can, obviously. And they did.”

“Conjoined—layers?” Kurtzman asked. “I think I’m a few steps back.”

“You’re not the only one,” Brognola muttered loudly. “I’ve been lost for the past five minutes.”

“Conjoined particles. Take one particle of fuel—at 0.5 nanometer in diameter. Take one particle of oxidizer, same size. Adhere them so they’re conjoined. They’re glued together. The reaction time is far faster than any incendiary device we’ve seen before.”

“And this is not something that has been accomplished before?” Brognola challenged. “Not by the U.S.? Not by anybody?”

Kissinger shrugged. “Not by anybody as far as I know.”

“This is good news, right?” Carl Lyons said, speaking for the first time. “Specialty item needs special people or special equipment to be made. Now we have something to go on. Right? So let’s get going.”

“You’re right, Carl,” Kissinger said. “This is indeed specialty technology. There are a few companies out there working on nanoparticles in this range, and a few university labs, as well. One of them is here in the United States. Company in Texas. Name is—get this—NanoPlasPulse LLC. Brains behind the operation is the CEO, Harry Envoi. They’re using his patents.”

“Ugh. This sounds like a familiar situation,” Rosario Blancanales growled. “Like the Georgia lab.”

“Yeah, I thought the same thing at first,” Kissinger continued. “Then I checked the guy out. He’s got the credibility that your friend in Georgia did not have.” Kissinger tapped a stapled white stack of pages that lay in front of him.

Brognola tried to read the title through his video. “What is that?”

Schwarz raised the stack and read the cover sheet. “‘Production Technique Studies on Conjoined Nanopowder Particulates for Metastable Intermolecular Composite Alternatives.’”

“Sorry I asked,” Brognola said.

“Envoi wrote it. He’s written several papers throughout the years. He’s demonstrated long-term expertise and pioneering development in the creation of creating unagglomerated nanopowders.”

“Unagglomerated means ‘not glommed together,’ I assume,” Brognola said.

“Right,” Kissinger said. “Think of it this way. The smaller the particle, and the closer a particle is to a complementary but different particle, the more the complementary effect will be—whether that effect is an incendiary reaction or, say, metal flexibility.”

“So could Envoi be the guy who created the devices?” Lyons asked. “If so, what’s his home address?”

“I’m not going to rule him out,” Kissinger said. “I’ll let you all do that. But here’s the rub—at the same time we were doing a quick evaluation of this device, other devices were being evaluated in other parts of the world.”

They had already received the news of other devices being discovered around the world. Tokaido’s quick work had left many of the units in place and unactivated, and large-scale search efforts were turning them up.

“Twenty minutes before I came into this meeting, DARPA identified this material and set up a classified conference call with Harry Envoi. He’s agreed to be a consultant on the investigation. I want to be in on that call.”

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