Don Pendleton - Ramrod Intercept

“What was that, Pol?” Lyons growled from the shotgun seat.

A wry smile worked its way over Blancanales’s lips. “Nothing, Carl. I was just having a heart palpitation. Might just be heartburn from lunch.”

Lyons was the leader of Able Team, which was comprised of the former L.A. detectives, Blancanales and Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz. They were all friends, tried and tested commandos who would make the ultimate sacrifice if need be, and for one another if it came down to that. It wasn’t that a wrathful Lyons made Blancanales especially nervous or even intimidated—no, berserker outbursts were simply wasted energy as far as he was concerned. Try telling that, he thought, to Ironman. Best just to let him vent some steam, clean the pipes out, then get himself refocused. Men, he knew, who fought and killed the enemy side by side, who knew what it was to face down death and walk out the other side of combat had a way of coming to read and gauge each other’s mind-sets and moods better than most couples married for a lifetime.

“I’m getting sick and tired of all this sneaking and peeking around,” Lyons growled, his gaze fixed on the strip joint across Sunset Boulevard. “Watching a bunch of goddamn playboys acting out their own Hollywood Babylon. They take two hour cocktail lunches in Brentwood, sashay out the office lobby before four, then go piss the night away gaping at ass and getting hummers in back rooms ‘reserved’ for their candy.”

Blancanales groaned against his will. “Oh, man…”

Lyons fixed him with an eye that was glinting between mocking and irritation. “Another heart palpitation? Maybe you should go a little easier on all that hot sauce I watch you drown your tacos in. We’re not getting any younger, my friend. We can’t assault our systems the way we used to, you know.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

Lyons went back to glowering at the front doors where two of their DYSAT exec targets had just entered to begin a long night of trolling for fun and games. “These thousand-dollar-suited pricks are starting to annoy the hell out of me. These guys, every time I see them get a lap dance they throw at least a twenty-spot away, go skipping up to the stage, same deal. A bunch of twinkle toes with shit-eating grins. Their cash is trash. Big shots.”

Blancanales looked into the rearview glass, caught Schwarz grinning from his control console in the back of the van. He put a glare into his eyes, softly shook his head, but, damn it if Schwarz didn’t barge ahead with it anyway.

“If I didn’t know better, Carl, I’d say you were sounding a smidge jealous.”

“You’re right—you don’t know any better. And jealous of what? I just got a full head of steam, three days and nights out here, doing grunt dick work while we wait on Hal to tell us the Man finally made the hard call. We know these guys at DYSAT are dirty. I mean, two pigeons vanished off the face of the earth just as Hal’s Justice suits were marching to scoop them up. Two and two still add up to four where I come from, guys.”

“We still have three to watch,” Pol said.

“Baby-sit, you mean,” Lyons said. “And, you know, I somehow don’t get the whole scam. If this DYSAT is run by spooks and former air commandos, why hire a bunch of kids damn near fresh out of business school? Still wet behind the ears, but given the keys to the kingdom.”

“I think I have a pretty good hunch why,” Schwarz volunteered.

“That right? Well, Pol and I are all ears.”

“They were handpicked, chosen.”

“You’re telling us,” Blancanales said, “they’re sacrificial lambs.”

“Something like that. I’m thinking they were sought out on purpose, with the specific intent of becoming scapegoats if the arms and high-tech wheeling and dealing was found out by the Feds. Your basic fall guys. The former air commandos, with their service records, would simply shrug it off, lie their way out of it, go to ground until the smoke cleared and the college boys were safely on their way to the big house.”

Blancanales saw Lyons bobbing his head, hashing it over.

“Makes sense, in some twisted way,” Lyons said. “And the marginal lifestyles they lead, it wouldn’t be a stretch for the top brass to point out these guys had serious vice problems.”

“It’s the only thing that fits,” Schwarz said. “We know they are simply numbers crunchers for the most part, moving the parts of the goodies around, writing up the manifests, using the contacts of the real powers to create safe transport lanes for delivery. They figured the civilian workforce they hired would be too naive to figure it out.”

“How wrong they were,” Blancanales said. Then he saw two big men in dark suit jackets and buzz cuts going for the doors to the gentlemen’s club, rolling out of the night shadows, flashing lights jumping about like winking halos around them from this lit-up neon stretch of clubs and bars. “Hey, heads up. Our playboys are about to get paid a visit by your friendly neighborhood DYSAT goons.”

“Yeah,” Lyons said. “They were at the last club, too, where Collins disappeared. Only I counted up three the last stop.”

“I know their vehicles,” Gadgets said, watching his monitor, the image being relayed from a minicam mounted on top of the van, the rolling command center handed off to Able Team courtesy of Hal Brognola’s Justice contacts in L.A. “I photoed them and the plates yesterday when they came out of the garage of the office complex.”

“So, go find them,” Lyons said, “and stick another of your famous tracking boxes so we can stay glued on their tails. I see a parking lot down the street, the direction they came from. Let’s rock and roll, Gadgets. I’m going in. Pol, keep the engine hot. The looks I just read on the goons’ faces…let’s just say I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Blancanales cleared his throat as he watched Lyons secure the mini-Uzi in a special rigging beneath his loose-fitting windbreaker, the Ironman’s .357 Magnum Colt Python snug in a shoulder holster on the opposite side with a clear bulge. Subtle wasn’t found in Lyons’s vocabulary. “Easy, big guy. We still haven’t been flashed the green light.”

Lyons shot Blancanales a cold grin, checked the load on his Colt Python, then slid the big piece back into shoulder leather. “Relax. I’ve got a few extra bucks on me to throw around. Maybe I’m just rolling in there to have a couple laughs, check out the girls. Let ’em know big daddy’s in town.”

Lyons was out the door, into the night. Schwarz rolled back the side door, gone to play his role as bug planter.

Now Blancanales felt a real heart palpitation, and it wasn’t the aftereffect of hot sauce and too many tacos. This wasn’t good, he thought. Hell’s bells, he could almost feel the angry energy, trailing Lyons as he crossed the street.

A human time bomb, looking for a place to blow.

No mistake, he could feel it all about to hit the fan, and maybe go straight to hell before the mission even got official status.

JACK ROSWELL DESPISED his current task, or, more to the point, the kind of flunkies he was hunting. The former air commando and black operative for the NSA had his orders from up top, and he would carry them out even if he couldn’t fathom the logic in the whole scheme from the very beginning. This whole mess, he thought, could have been avoided long ago. Now he had been cut loose, a stone-cold killer, on the march to silence wagging tongues.

As he weaved his way through the gaggle of suits and howling throngs of half-drunken lechers, Morton on his left flank, he wondered where it was all headed. It was the colonel’s show, just the same, from day one, and he had often considered broaching the subject. Such as why hire on a pack of twentysomething guys to do the dirty work of moving the prototype high-tech goodies around the globe? Such as why allow them access to classified files? Such as why let them run all around Los Angeles, having the Sodom and Gomorrah time of their lives, a couple of them coked up half the time, six figure salaries to a man? Flash, showing off, now flapping loose lips.