Don Pendleton - Extermination

“Be fine,” Robespierre added, hanging on for dear life. He wasn’t having trouble breathing now, but he was starting to feel light-headed. The blood was dark, nonarterial, which was good news. If it was an artery, his chances of survival would be lessened considerably. Veinous and capillary blood wasn’t what fed his body the vital reserves of oxygen it needed to keep going, though eventually blood loss was going to become a life-threatening factor. Most of his incapacitation was due to the nearly paralyzing pain of broken bones.

The deputies were fairly distant, but they were making good time racing up the incline toward his car. Robespierre also heard the distant whir of a propeller growing louder, cutting through the ringing in his ears from the brief gun battle he engaged in. Even outside, the MP-15 patrol rifle put out a considerable wave of pressure and sound that had funneled into the interior of the squad car and rebounded, making his right ear full of a pealing whine set to drive him nuts.

He turned his attention toward the approaching aircraft, wondering if the Iowa State Police had dispatched a helicopter. Robespierre didn’t think it could happen this quickly, but he was glad for the arrival. The faster he got to a hospital, the faster his bleeding and broken bones could be taken care of.

He didn’t see a helicopter, nor even a Cessna-style prop plane. The approaching craft looked akin to a torpedo with long, slender wings.

“’Zat?” Robespierre asked Clayton, slurring “what’s that” into a single utterance.

“You have something in the air by you?” Clayton returned. “Nothing has been dispatched.”

Through the fog of his traumatized mind, Robespierre recognized the odd object as it crawled slowly closer to him like a white, ramrod-straight maggot. He’d seen it on TV on a show about military weapons hosted by a bald guy who whispered dramatically to the point where he seemed more like a caricature than a soldier.

Global Hawk, the name came in a breathless, hushed tone pulled from the show. The wings seemed wrong, with cylinders nestled up beneath its pale belly.

This Hawk, came the host’s voice again, has talons.

“No…it couldn’t be,” Robespierre said to himself, his internal dialogue indeed clearer.

“Robey?” Clayton called over the radio. “What did you croak about?”

“Global Hawk,” Robespierre repeated, putting every ounce of strength into getting the name right.

“What?”

The unmanned drone soared over the squad car, and as it did so, two of the cylinders detached from the wing points. Robespierre tapped his sagging reserves of energy once again, hauling himself behind the dashboard of the car as he saw them release.

“Cover!” he bellowed into his radio.

He wondered if the warning was in time, then he heard a loud, powerful thump in the distance. The windshield suddenly cracked as if struck with a sledgehammer, the glass turning white with fractures as the flexible polymer core sandwiched between the panes did its job, preventing razor-sharp shards from flying into the interior of the car. The squad car, being a hundred feet from the blast center, had absorbed the wave of three pounds per square inch of increased air pressure, the roll cage and safety glass absorbing the shock wave that proved powerful enough to fold the metal struts holding up traffic signs.

Robespierre remained safe and conscious for the fifteen minutes it took for backup and an ambulance to arrive at the quiet town of Albion. What the trooper hadn’t noticed, thanks to the impact of a rifle bullet into his thoracic cavity, was a prior explosion at the fruit stand he’d paused at, where he’d seen the remnants of people who ate until their throats clogged or were maddened enough by hunger to charge a man holding a shotgun. The previous blast had turned the roadside attraction and the corpses around it into vapor, the combined force of two 500-pound laser-guided bombs more than sufficient to produce a thirty-meter-wide crater where any body parts found would have been made of ash or crumpled, blast-shattered bone.

The town had been rocked by more than just two of the canisters. Robespierre had been shell-shocked for the devastating explosion, missing the other two bombs that had been part of the MQ-9 Reaper’s 3800-pound payload. The MQ-9 was far different from the jet-engine-powered Global Hawk RQ-4, precisely for the propeller wash that had convinced the trooper that an aircraft had been approaching. Its six 500-pound dumb bombs had been more than enough to turn Albion into a smoldering crater—actually, two huge butterfly-shaped craters easily thirty meters wide. Even though Iowa was in the dreaded tornado alley of the central United States, the construction of the town hadn’t been sturdy enough to deal with the overpressure that flattened brick walls and turned wood to splinters.

Only Robespierre’s distance from ground zero, and the bloody mess he’d been reduced to, had spared him as the Reaper’s operator assumed he was likely mortally wounded. Had the trooper shown more signs of life than sagging against a car door, the drone’s operator would have used one of the wing-mounted AGM Hellfire missiles on the squad car, turning it into a mass of twisted wreckage.

It was a bit of overconfidence and laziness on the drone crew’s part. Not only did there exist a living witness to the carnage of Albion, but there was also dash-camera footage of a renegade, heavily armed unmanned aerial vehicle blowing a town on American soil to oblivion.

THE RINGING of a phone jarred Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz from his sleep, and his head popped up from the pillow. In the dark hotel room’s other bed, Schwarz’s best friend, Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, continued to snore. According to the luminous dial on Schwarz’s watch, it was a little after five in the afternoon.

Able Team, a three-man counterterrorism and anti-crime squad, had been hunting leads from the shadows of evening past the crack of dawn.

This particular hunt had brought them to Chicago, and the search was on for the steering and laser guidance models that would turn a gravity-flung conventional bomb into a precision strike munition. Such a device—let alone a large shipment—in the hands of the wrong people would result in large death tolls. One well-placed warhead, even of the 250-pound variety, would be able to collapse a skyscraper in on itself as if it were made of precariously balanced playing cards. A crowded office building or a federal building would go from bustling workplace for thousands of people to a tomb for those teeming multitudes.

Schwarz let the phone stop ringing and pulled out his personal Combat PDA. The screen blipped to life, and Barbara Price was on the other end.

“What’s going on?” Schwarz asked.

“We found a few of the laser guidance modules,” Price said, her voice grim and eyes unwavering from the webcam she looked into. “Northeastern Iowa, near the Illinois border.”

“How many killed?” Schwarz asked.

That bit of conversation prompted Blancanales to sit up, fully awake, turning on the bedside lamp. Schwarz grimaced at the pile of pizza boxes and junk food bags overflowing from the room’s tiny garbage pail.

Though Blancanales’s hair was whitened with age, his weathered face lined with wrinkles, the man’s back and shoulders were tautly muscled, ropy coils of sinew flowing as he threw on his shoulder holster and then tugged on a sport shirt to conceal the carry rig.

“We can’t tell. Official reports put the population of Albion at 250, but there’s no finding most of their bodies,” Price said. “But we have an eyewitness and dash-cam footage. Hal’s doing everything to keep this squashed in the press, so you guys better get out there.”