Don Pendleton - Atomic Fracture

The second difference was that keeping Stony Man Farm a secret had actually worked.

Third—and most important of all—was that unlike the Mafia, the crew at Stony Man Farm worked for the good of mankind rather than conscienceless monetary profit.

Lyons glanced over his shoulder at the two men behind him in the jet. Like the Able Team leader himself, the men wore dark business suits. Blancanales was decked out in a deep navy-blue. Schwarz wore his usual gray. Lyons himself had chosen a black suit with gray pinstripes. He had never been high on bling. Nor was the Able Team leader the type to laugh out loud very often. Even his smiles were few and far between. But the sight of his fellow warriors masquerading as FBI agents instead of wearing blacksuits or BDUs made the corners of his mouth curl up slightly.

As the jet’s wheels hit the tarmac Lyons’s thoughts turned to Hal Brognola. As the Director of the Sensitive Operations Group, the covert operations arm of the U.S. Justice Department, Brognola worked as Stony Man’s liaison to conventional law enforcement. So, wearing his DOJ hat, he had called ahead to make sure that two real FBI agents out of the Colorado Springs field office would be waiting for them when they landed.

Now Lyons saw them off to the side of the runway, both leaning against the doors of two near-identical Chevrolet sedans.

The Learjet rolled almost to a halt before making a sharp left turn and taxiing onto a concrete access road. A moment later Mott stopped the plane just in front of the waiting men and cars.

Lyons, Blancanales and Schwarz said goodbye to Mott as they dropped down from the jet. Lyons moved forward toward a man who might have been the poster boy for an FBI recruitment ad. He had short, blond, brush-cut hair and broad shoulders. Even more telling was the way he moved, combining the balance of a tiger on the prowl with the apparent strength of a grizzly as he stepped up and extended his hand.

The Able Team leader gripped the man’s hand and immediately noticed two things. First, the man was a weight-lifter. FBI work could be dangerous and sometimes strenuous. But it didn’t put calluses on a man’s hands like the ones Lyons felt as they shook hands.

The second thing of which he took note was the lining of the man’s suit coat as it briefly appeared when the man extended his arm. As soon as he saw the striped material Lyons remembered that somewhere, sometime, someone had told him that striped lining inside a man’s suit meant expensive. Not being particularly interested in such things, he’d forgotten who and when. After all, he wasn’t a model for Gentleman’s Quarterly or James Bond on his way to a Monte Carlo casino. Able Team was not here to pose for men’s clothing photos or to play cards.

They had come to find out what had happened to a pair of nuclear bombs. And to kill anybody who got in their way.

“Special Agent Arthaud,” the broad-shouldered man said as he let loose of Lyons’s hand.

“Taylor,” said the other agent. He was taller and thinner. The fact was he looked more like a marathon runner than the wrestler, power-lifter or body-builder that Arthaud appeared to be. He wore an olive-green sport coat and khaki slacks.

“We have orders to supply you with a car,” said Arthaud. “Then to stay out of your way.” His smile looked genuine and it didn’t appear that he resented not knowing anything more about the men who had just arrived via Learjet.

“Thanks,” Lyons said simply. He pulled open the door of the plane’s cargo hold and he and the other men of Able Team unload their equipment bags. Their new Yankee Hill Machine Company 6.8 mm sound-suppressed rifles were in obvious padded gun cases complete with extra magazine pockets on the outside of the main compartment. When Arthaud saw them, he said, “Looks like you’re expecting something serious.”

“We always expect something serious,” Lyons said as he hefted a duffel bag in one hand and a rifle case in the other before carrying them both to the trunk of one of the Chevy sedans.

“You guys Hostage Rescue?” Taylor asked.

“Sometimes,” said Lyons, which left a quizzical look on the face of the man who had asked the question. A moment later they had finished transferring the equipment and closed the trunk. Lyons turned back to Arthaud. “Can you give us directions to the storage facility?” he asked.

Arthaud smiled again. And again it seemed genuine. “I can do better than that,” he said. “I’ve already set your GPS to take you there.”

“Ugh,” Blancanales said. “That means we’ve got to listen to that computer-generated female robot all the way there.” His voice climbed two octaves and he mimicked, “Turn right in one quarter mile. Proceed ten miles to intersection.” Then, shaking his head, he said, “And if we don’t follow directions we hear, ‘You have left the route—’” Hermann Schwarz hadn’t been nicknamed “Gadgets” for nothing. He loved, and seemed to understand instinctively, every new bit of technology that came along in a computer world that progressed at lightning speed. “Don’t worry,” he said, grinning at his partner. “I’ll dumb it down to your level and explain it to you as we go.”

Arthaud laughed and then said, “Tell you what. We’ll lead you there. Sound okay?”

“Sounds fine,” said Lyons. “But I’m afraid the front door is as far as you get. Nothing personal.”

Arthaud shrugged his big shoulders. “No problem,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious that whatever you’re here to do is highly sensitive. I mean, after all, we know the kind of stuff they’ve got stored at that facility.”

“Thanks for understanding,” Lyons said.

Arthaud chuckled. “I’m not being completely altruistic,” he said. “The bottom line is what we don’t know won’t hurt us. Meaning that if we know what you’re doing, and you screw something up, we’ll be tied up for days, maybe weeks, being interrogated ourselves as if we were criminals or terrorists.”

“Good thinking,” Lyons said. And typically bureaucratic, he thought but didn’t voice. Arthaud and Taylor both seemed like nice guys. But as happened with so many in government jobs, they had lost much of the ambition they had probably had when they’d first signed on with the FBI. They had come to know that promotions were more likely to go to agents who never made waves and had no complaints in their personnel files rather than those who worked hard, took chances and cracked major cases. And the best way to stay out of trouble was to avoid as much knowledge and work as possible.

The men of Able Team piled into the Chevy where they’d stored their gear and followed the other FBI car toward a gate in the fence that surrounded the airport. Lyons was behind the wheel. Blancanales had taken the backseat. From the shotgun seat next to the Able Team leader, Schwarz said, “Did anybody catch the other Fed’s name?”

“Taylor,” said Blancanales. “He seemed like the quiet type. Might help you to listen a little closer, old buddy, instead of always drifting off into that computer world of annoying beeps and buzzes and flashing lights.”

Behind the wheel, Lyons silently shook his head. He loved Schwarz and Blancanales like brothers, and had faced death by their sides far too many times to remember. And he knew their jabs at each other were all good-natured. When it came right down to it, any one of the three men of Able Team would lay down his life for the others. Without a thought. But sometimes the frequent friendly bickering got on his nerves.

“You could both learn something from Special Agent Taylor,” Lyons said as he pulled the Chevy through the gate and onto the highway.

“How’s that?” Schwarz said.

“Talk less and listen more,” Lyons said. “Pol had a point, too. Every once in a while you could pull your head out of that world of gadgets that earned you your nickname and take a quick look around at the real world.” He paused, then glanced up into the rearview mirror to catch Blancanales’s eyes in the reflection. “And it wouldn’t hurt you, Pol, to take a little bigger step into the twenty-first century. A lot of useful electronics have been invented since the pinball machines you played as a kid.”