Don Pendleton - Orbital Velocity

With the cart set up, Lyons jogged along in its shadow, easily keeping up as he moved in a crouch behind the low-speed hauler. It struck one of the doors and crunched to a halt, its wheels grinding against the ground and causing the door to rattle. Lyons slipped out of sight behind the hauler and the unconscious biker.

Sure enough, the door opened a crack. Then a little farther. Lyons stayed hidden in the shadows, his do-rag tugged down to hide the glint of his blond hair in the ambient light.

“Toady? Toady, what the fuck? You drunk again?” a voice challenged.

“What’s up?” another asked.

“Damn fool passed out riding a goddamned luggage trolley around,” the man at the door said. Lyons saw a bone-white globe around the man’s neck. He stepped out into the open, and the other two men joined him.

Lyons had set his bait well, as Bones stuffed his big shiny stainless revolver into his waistband. The three of them walked closer to Toady in his perch, and one of the bikers leaned over the dashboard, looking for the ignition to stop the cart’s unrelenting “assault” on the locked door.

“Of all the—” Bones began.

Lyons didn’t let him complete his curse toward his fallen comrade. With a lunge, the big ex-cop burst into view, his forearm crashing against Bones’s jaw with the force of a sledgehammer. Lyons wanted the skull-wearing freak out cold and out of the fight to prevent the possibility that the other two could keep Bones from speaking. The biker toppled backward like a felled tree, but Lyons didn’t hear him fall, as he was too busy concentrating on other problems. One of the bikers was stooped over to catch Bones, but the last of them reached for a black 1911 he had tucked into his belt.

The handgun made him a target for Lyons, who lashed out with mae geri, the Shotokan front kick. Lyons had been a karateka for several years, since just before he’d joined Able Team, and his familiarity with the blunt, direct Shotokan style had proved to be more than an edge in countless fights at home and abroad. The blow struck the biker in the stomach, just below his navel, driving the wind from his lungs and folding him over reflexively. Thus positioned, Lyons automatically transitioned to a ushiro empi chop, bringing his elbow down savagely on the enemy’s back.

The gunner struck the ground face-first, mouth and nose gushing blood as they rocketed against the concrete. Lyons flipped the man onto his back and plucked the 1911 from his waistband. He dumped the magazine and worked the slide to eject the one in the pipe. He followed with a press of the thumb and a flick of the slide stop out of the frame. Now the weapon was useless, in two pieces and tossed away in two directions.

“Think you’re hot shit?” said the biker who’d lunged to Bones’s aid.

Lyons regarded the opponent who was reaching for his own iron. With a suiki uki block, Lyons scooped the man’s hand away from the handle of his sidearm, and he followed it up with his one-knuckle fist, his favorite punch in the art. With his knuckle projecting like a spearhead, he struck the biker in the breastbone with enough force to halt his breathing. Lyons stiffened his hand for a shuto strike and plunged the hardened blade of flesh and bone into his foe’s sternum. Fetid breath escaped from the man’s lungs, but Lyons withdrew and stabbed into the man’s clavicle, right at the juncture of nerves and blood vessels running along the side of the neck.

The biker was unconscious within moments.

Lyons turned and saw Bones struggle to get to his hands and knees. Lyons swept the biker’s hand out from under him. A quick frisk revealed that his shiny .44 Magnum was accompanied by a claw hammer, a favorite biker weapon. He threw both of them aside and hauled the stunned criminal to his feet.

“Come on, Bones,” Lyons said. “We’re going to talk about Plan B, and about that skull around your neck.”

The Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia

Hermann Schwarz entered the cybernetic paradise that was known as the Stony Man Farm War Room. He paused, looking at the wall of digital LCD monitors that offered a tapestry of views from around the globe. Workstations sprawled out, each indicative of their owner, all of whom were at work right now. There was an optional side station that Schwarz and Manning had appropriated for themselves whenever they were working at the Farm. The Canadian utilized the station simply for research on his varied fields, from ballistics to structural physics. Schwarz, on the other hand, fiddled and experimented with computer codework, constantly updating and improving the efficiency of the programs that he ran on his personal cell phone and the combat Personal Data Assistants that he’d assigned to his comrades in the action squads Able Team and Phoenix Force.

Right now, his Able Team partner and friend Carl Lyons was in Los Angeles, already in town on a rare moment of much-earned leave. With the veiled threat against Russia and the rest of the G8, Lyons had gone back on duty immediately. Schwarz was watching his combat PDA, knowing that it was possible that he’d be called to action to deal with problems along the coast.

In the meantime, Schwarz was working with the rest of the cybernetic team at the Farm in an effort to backtrack the kinetic shafts that had struck Moscow. They surely weren’t the only ones trying to figure out the trajectory of the deadly missiles, but at least they could act on that information almost as soon as they received it, as opposed to a more conventional agency, which needed at least four hours of logistics and even more time for intricate planning.

It wasn’t that Able Team and Phoenix Force could ever be accused of going off without a plan. However, the two Stony Man Farm teams had enough experience and skill, as well as the ability to think unconventionally, that they could be called upon at a moment’s notice. They trained for as many contingencies as possible, honing and refreshing their skills in the time between their missions. Their intelligence, training and the technology they were able to fall back upon had all combined into a cohesive catch-all for whatever they could face.

That had been proved by the events in London less than an hour ago, when two members of Phoenix Force had been the deciding factor in what could have been a tragedy, containing mass violence and allowing innocent civilians to escape from seething, violent soccer hooligans. Schwarz made certain to listen in on Lyons’s conversation with Brognola, though the big Able Team leader had gone silent as the VOR station at LAX was mentioned.

Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman turned his attention toward Schwarz. “You come up with anything yet, Gadgets?”

Schwarz looked at Bear, the Stony Man cybernetics expert, and shook his head. He was still running mathematical calculations in his mind, but the Able Team electronics genius was the kind of a person who could mentally multitask with remarkable ease. When his teachers complained that he, as a youth, seemed to be antsy and distracted in class, he realized that it was because the lessons they gave him only occupied a small fraction of his brain power. He needed other distractions. Schwarz would hum to satisfy the part of his mental focus that needed music, while he idly designed circuits or performed complex equations as mere doodles. He literally had designed some of his gadgets in his sleep, the burning intellect trapped in his skull looking for something to do even as he dreamed.

In one way, it was a godsend for the brilliant technician. The burning need to create, to tinker, to modify and program allowed him to live in the moment, to focus on nothing and thus able to experience everything. There were times when he seemed to have an almost paranormal danger sense, but while the genius believed in the possibility of ESP, he knew the truth was a matter of being able to reconcile his conscious and subconscious minds. The human subconscious was vastly aware of the world around it, but very few people had tuned their upper mental faculties to pay attention to those background cues. Schwarz’s subconscious awareness was a directly accessible part of his mind, allowing him to process the sound of a scrape as either a breeze blowing a twig or a boot sole scuffing concrete.