Don Pendleton - Orbital Velocity

Lyons looked at the PDA screen and saw that Stony Man Farm had come up with the original phone number that his quarry was using. It was a cell phone owned by a fifty-eight-year-old woman in San Bernardino County. Right now, he was operating on a clone of a cloned phone. The cybernetic geniuses back in Virginia were running the recent list of calls that had been made on the line, but the other end of the line was well encrypted. There were regular numbers, and then there were lines of gibberish that couldn’t be deciphered.

Whoever they were up against, they had good, secure communications. Naturally, Lyons sighed mentally; anyone who would dare go after the leaders of eight nations, let alone the U.S. President, would have to be highly organized and capable. When something showed up on Able Team’s radar, it generally had to be a national-scale conspiracy seeking to achieve its goals by murder and mayhem.

Just wait and see who’s calling in, Lyons thought. He fished along his belt for a small sheath that contained a compact Bushnell night-vision monocular. The device had a 4x magnification, which would allow him to get a better look at the man with the phone.

The man was clad in a denim jacket, and through the green tint of the night vision, Lyons could see what appeared to be sigrunes on his neck. Normally, Lyons wouldn’t know about arcane, occult designs, but the sigrunes were on a list of identifying tattoos for the southern California Reich Highwaymen, a widespread gang of thugs enlisted by the prison-based White Pride Defenders as muscle for their outside operations. The makeup that covered the lightning-bolt S’s on the man’s neck was very different from his normal skin color under the light magnification, and the dark ink underneath showed through. In regular vision, even under good light, Lyons knew that the man would have covered himself so as not to be noticed.

Lyons grit his teeth, then checked his PDA, sending a text message off.

“Any signs of neo-Nazi activity in London or Moscow?” Lyons asked.

“Jakkhammer Legacy in London,” came the reply almost instantly. “Suspect RNCG organizing rioters in Moscow.”

Lyons furrowed his brow in concern. Sightings of three different local neo-Nazi groups in relation to threats to G8 nations was a disturbing trend. He quickly took a snapshot with the PDA and entered the text CRLR. He got the rapid message and its attachment off as quickly as possible as he heard his quarry’s phone ring.

Lyons listened in.

“Your phone is compromised. Ditch it,” came the terse order. “Pull back for Plan B.”

The Reich rider looked up from the cell, then dropped it to the tarmac, his boot heel crushing the device. Lyons cursed, but even this bit of activity had given him information about his enemy. They were able to monitor their phones, and somehow had picked up on the fact that their line had been cloned. Sophisticated technology plus a white supremacist biker gang with national prison ties added up to the kind of opposition that Lyons couldn’t help but welcome.

Whatever the biker’s contingency plan, Lyons hoped that they only had one mode of communication that they felt was secure. As it was, the Reich rider turned and jogged to the VOR transmitter building. The boxy red-and-white base of the building with its conelike tower was an unassuming little place, but it could hide at least three more men inside. Lyons was going to have to ask about Plan B before he got to the others.

Lyons exploded from his hiding space with the speed that had made him a star football player in high school and college. Powerful legs propelled him along like a human rocket, and he caught up to the anxious neo-Nazi biker before he could make out the thump of feet or the trainlike pants of breath escaping the ex-cop’s nose and mouth. The denim-clad gang member turned just in time for Lyons’s brawny arm to catch him right across the throat. Momentum and velocity slammed the Reich rider to the ground hard, his head bouncing on the tarmac.

Breath released in a subdued “oof,” thanks to the force that Lyons had applied to his throat, and his face was clenched up in a painful wince. The undercover biker must have hit the back of his head hard on the ground, which was fine with the Able Team commander. A little pain was a handle with which he could convince his prisoner to talk. He didn’t have much time before whoever the motorcycle thug had come here with came looking for him.

“Plan B?” Lyons growled, drawing his Protech automatic knife. A simple press of the button and the five-inch serrated blade flickered into being right before his prisoner’s eyes. Shock registered on the man’s face as he tried to squirm away from the razor-sharp cutting edge that ended in a wicked needle tip.

The biker had trouble getting enough breath to speak louder than a harsh whisper thanks to Lyons’s weight and the placement of his forearm. There was also an enraged madness flickering behind Lyons’s eyes, informing the downed criminal that if he cried out for help, the burly warrior would slice his face off and leave him to die slowly.

“I’m not asking again,” Lyons said, resting the edge of the knife against the biker’s left eyebrow. One flick of the wrist, and the biker knew he would be blinded and mutilated. It was a basic, inborn fear. The blind rarely lasted well in the days before the modern world. The biker himself not only had the gruesome mental images of his eyes punctured running through his mind, but also the realization that he would be ostracized by his circle of acquaintances. Riding with the gang would be out of the question, as well, as he would have failed his brothers. There was also no guarantee that Lyons wouldn’t take out the other orb, too, leaving him blind. He would lose the life he’d known for the past decade or so.

“We’re supposed to meet up with another group. They tell us the location when we call them,” the man said.

“You guys are too tight not to have a password on hand,” Lyons mentioned. “A code word to let them know everything is all right.”

“I don’t have that,” the thug confessed. “Bones does.”

“Which one is Bones?” Lyons asked.

“He has a baby skull on a necklace,” the biker told him.

“How many others?” Lyons asked.

“Two,” the prisoner confessed. “Don’t mess my eyes up, man.”

Lyons nodded, but that didn’t preclude reversing the blade, then punching the pommel of the knife against his temple. The steel-reinforced fiberglass handle was less fragile than the small bones of the human hand, which broke easily when punching a man in the skull. Out cold, the biker wouldn’t be much of a threat now.

Lyons rose from the ground and scanned the VOR station. One thing in his favor was that few such transmitter buildings had windows installed. Unfortunately, such structures had very limited numbers of entrances. In this case, there were two, parallel to each other. Lyons could try to go through the front door, but that would leave him a target for armed men inside. Three-to-one odds wasn’t new for the Able Team commander, and indeed, he’d handled far worse.

Lyons preferred to fight smart, as well as hard. He scooped up the unconscious biker and put him in the luggage cart’s driver’s seat. The cart itself was hardly a step up from a riding mower, except with an engine that let it pull thousands of pounds of luggage a day. Lyons strapped the biker in, started the engine, then steered toward the VOR station’s door. His final act was to push his former prisoner’s foot against the accelerator.

He was setting bait, getting the bikers inside the building as bunched up as possible. A slow-moving cart bumping against the side of the station would draw curiosity, while anything faster striking the structure would send everyone packing.