Don Pendleton - Incendiary Dispatch

Blancanales stepped out of the blackness of his own shadowy alcove in the lab hallway and moved forward carefully. Despite a head of gray hair he had the agility and grace of a young man and moved silently.

But he didn’t need to. His prey was cowering in the darkness, speaking in hushed whispers to someone on a radio or phone.

The man never heard Rosario Blancanales approach on the other side of the protective wall and eavesdrop on his conversation.

Blancanales was a former Black Beret, highly trained, well-educated in a broad scope of esoteric subjects that, for whatever reason, might be useful in a black ops situation. That included languages. Blancanales was fluent in a few and functional enough in many to order a taxi in most parts of the world. But he didn’t recognize the language that the man on the other side of the brick wall was shouting into his cell phone. Something Scandinavian. Whatever the man was saying, he was getting more agitated by the second. Then he was pleading. “Nie! Nie!”

Blancanales knew those words without knowing the language they came from. He was saying “No! No!” And he was practically begging with the person on the other end of the line.

Blancanales didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t know why these men were here or what their purpose was. And he knew they weren’t exceptionally skilled intruders. Blancanales didn’t feel like he was in an especially dangerous situation—

Until now. Suddenly there was a knot of dread sitting in his gut. Something bad was about to happen.

Whatever it was, maybe he could stop it.

Blancanales slipped around the corner of the brick wall. The intruder’s combat shotgun was tucked uselessly under one arm, the cell phone in the other hand. The look on his face was one of sheer terror, but the terror had nothing to do with the unexpected arrival of Rosario Blancanales.

Blancanales disabled the man with a knee-shattering kick. The shotgun clattered away. The man collapsed and grabbed at the useless leg. Blancanales kicked the man’s right hand, shattering fingers, further damaging the knee. The man was groaning and sobbing until Blancanales demanded his attention by securing his shattered hand to his good one in a plastic cuff.

The soft-spoken Hispanic could be amazingly commanding when he needed to be. The Beretta handgun helped.

“Talk to me.”

The man was hyperventilating. A question came from the fallen cell phone.

The wounded intruder shouted at the phone.

The display showed the call had been disconnected. The intruder’s eyes widened and he forced himself onto his stomach and began crawling for the stairwell entrance.

Whatever was about to happen, this man considered it worse than the chance of being shot in the back by Rosario Blancanales.

Blancanales touched his transceiver. “Lyons! Schwarz! Get the fuck—”

He heard what sounded like a hiss, but loud as thunder, and the stairwell at the other end of the hallway filled with impossibly brilliant orange and the air distorted from the heat waves that rushed at Blancanales with immense speed. He ducked for cover behind the brick jut-out and let the tsunami of convection pass him. The atmosphere became so hot that his skin burned.

But the worst of the heat wave was gone. The intruder was a pathetic, broken thing crawling down the stairs and Blancanales let him go. He rushed down the hall, to the stairs that had filled with brilliance and become dark again. The air became hotter with every step he took.

“Carl, copy! Schwarz!”

No response.

“Stony, I can’t raise them. We’ve got trouble. Some sort of explosive.”

“Understood,” said the calm voice of mission controller Barbara Price. “Carmen’s trying to raise them.”

“Heading into the blast source,” Blancanales reported. “Damned hot.” He thundered down the stairs, trying to make sense of the ovenlike heat and the lack of a flame. He’d expected a firestorm.

“Lyons? Gadgets?” Blancanales found a fallen weapon, one of the intruders’ combat shotguns. Just beyond it was the scene where the burning seemed to have started. Two intruder corpses were on the ground, cooked black, their clothes incinerated. The cadavers were pocked with deep, smoking craters. The room was in flames—plastic furniture, the wallboard, even the steel cabinets appeared to have already melted and sagged. Blancanales felt as if he was cooking in his own skin. He looked into all the corners, searching for his teammates.

“No sign of them yet, Stony,” Blancanales announced.

“No response,” replied the cool female voice in his ear.

“Lyons! Gadgets, damn it!” Blancanales shouted. He raced to the far side of the room. It was one of the omnipresent steel fire doors.

And it was burning.

He shouldered through it, into the next section of the labs.

“Lyons!” Blancanales demanded of the roaring fire. Hungry flames were growing fat on shelves of stored paperwork. The heat was almost unbearable. The floor was covered with smoking, foot-wide craters. What were those all about?

Rosario Blancanales was suddenly angry. What the hell was going on here? Who the hell were these amateur intruders and what kind of freakish explosion had just gone off?

And where had Lyons and Schwarz been at the time of the explosion?

His arrived at another steel fire door. Why the hell were the fire doors freaking burning? Blancanales knew what an incendiary grenade did—spit out molten metal bits that burned through anything they touched. This was way more than a few incendiary grenades. There were streaks of burning steel.

He kicked the door savagely with the bottom of one foot, opening into a jungle of fire, where some kind of electrical system had spilled out ropes of bundled wire that now burned floor to ceiling along with the furniture, books and lab equipment. Clouds of acrid smoke were collecting at the ceiling. Blancanales tried not to breathe but the wisps that he did inhale felt toxic and the blast of heat almost bowled him over. Something burst nearby, spewing orange, red-hot worms.

“Lyons!” Blancanales bellowed. “Schwarz!”

Then something big came leaping through the vines of fire and crashed at Blancanales’s feet. It was Carl Lyons, tangled in a strand of burning cable. He rolled away, extinguishing the flames that clung to his black BDUs. Blancanales snatched off a tangle of wire but a strand of melting insulation stuck to Lyon’s clothing like glue.

Then Hermann Schwarz charged through the flames, rolled once and was back on his feet, making a quick search of his body for anything that was still on fire.

“No way out!” Schwarz shouted over the heightening roar.

“Yeah, this way, come on!” Blancanales led the way back in the direction he had come. The conflagration in each room had grown progressively more intense within seconds. The fire was reaching out as if trying to grab them.

Blancanales heard a crash behind him. Carl Lyons had just dumped his pack to the ground. Lyons, without slowing, unceremoniously snatched the small pack off of Schwarz’s shoulder.

“Huh?” Schwarz demanded, shielding his eyes from the horrific heat and stinging fumes, but he could see that his pack was smoldering.

Blancanales slipped off his own smoking pack and left it in the room with the corpses of the two intruders. The room was biggest of the lab workrooms and it was an inferno. Blancanales felt his skin cooking and his lungs were exploding as if he were drowning—but he didn’t dare take another breath. One inhalation of the superheated air might just drop him in his tracks. His vision was a mass of orange and black. He saw the stairway entrance framed in fire and staggered into it.

The temperature was cooler and he allowed himself a sip of air. It was still so hot it burned his nostrils and he slowed to watch behind him. Schwarz came through. A heartbeat passed.