Don Pendleton: Incendiary Dispatch

STONY MAN

Of all the intelligence that reaches the Oval Office, none is more top secret than the existence of a group of warriors that officially...doesn’t exist. Stony Man is the President’s ultimate weapon, a covert, rapid-response antiterrorist team not bound by official rules of engagement. When Stony Man is deployed, time is of the essence and only hard, direct action counts.

DEATH SLICK

Oil lies at the heart of a series of devastating attacks targeting pipelines and tankers on three different seas. Oil and vengeance, that is, as an embittered Norwegian vows payback for the black gold extracted from his family’s territories. And he makes good on that promise by using simple cell phone calls to trigger remote-detonated, devastating nano-thermite incendiaries strategically planted around the world. As nations race to contain massive spills, Stony Man faces the mother of all do-or-die missions. And the President must risk his office and the covert team on a desperate one-shot offensive to dispatch this threat before the global crisis becomes a total meltdown.

“Oh, no,” groaned Akira Tokaido. “It’s an MUA.”

Multiple Unresponsive Aircraft. The Farm’s own internal acronym for the alert.

The phone shrilled at Kurtzman’s elbow and at the same time a new alarm went off on his computer. And then another.

“Bear?” Barbara Price was on the phone. “Are you seeing what’s happening in China?”

“China?” He scanned the next alert. It reported a large-scale oil pipeline break. His brain tried to play catch-up. Multiple aircraft—and then an oil pipeline?

“What the hell is that?” demanded Tokaido, standing at Kurtzman’s shoulder and stabbing a finger at a list of numbers on the screen. “I wrote this routine. Why the hell don’t I get what it’s showing?” Tokaido liked his world of iron-fisted cybernetics control. There was nothing worse than when one of his own apps went rogue.

“No,” Kurtzman said. “It’s working.”

“Then what is that?” There were six items on the screen. Then there were seven.

“Pipeline breaches. Each a different one.”

Tokaido glared at the computer. Of course he’d programmed the thing to display multiple catastrophic oil pipeline breaches, should they ever happen simultaneously. He’d just never dreamed that would ever happen.

“Talk to me, Bear,” Price snapped. “I’m on my way. Do you see what’s happening in China or not?”

Kurtzman paused. “Everywhere but,” he replied grimly.

Incendiary Dispatch

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Tim Somheil for his contribution to this work.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

The gunner stood alongside the open archway, ears tuned to the subtle sound of movement on the linoleum floor. The sound stopped. His enemy was hesitating. That hesitation, the gunner thought, would cost him his life. He twisted his body into the opening, already hanging on to the trigger of the Heckler & Koch MP-7. The rounds ate into the wallboard and bounced off the floor. But then the gunner laid his eyes on the source of the noise—an office chair rolling slowly in his direction. His final four rounds slammed into the padded back, and the office chair reversed direction as if kicked.

His enemy had vanished and his gun was empty. Very amateur, he thought. Could you tell it was his first time with a machine gun?

The amateur machine-gunner spun back into the cover behind the wall and grabbed for a spare magazine, but then he saw the shadows move and a heartbeat later his chest collapsed in on itself.

The amateur machine-gunner didn’t feel the pain but he felt the damage. Internal organs were mutilated, and blood cascaded from his chest. The sound of the blast seemed meaningless.

Then came his enemy, across the room, his face revealed in the glow of light from an exit sign. Blond hair and blue eyes. Cold eyes. The gunner knew he had been outmatched from the beginning.

He was sinking to his knees. He was as good as dead. Was it an honor or a mark of shame that he had been executed with a single shot?

“One shot,” he said, then toppled onto his face, surrounded by blood.

“What was that about?” There was another man in the shadows, and the gunner, now dead, hadn’t even known he was there.

“He was admiring my efficient use of ammo,” Carl Lyons answered. The large blond figure crouched to pat down the corpse.

“Meanwhile he wastes a bunch of rounds offing this fine piece of ergonomic Broyhill furniture,” said Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz, a slim man in wire-rimmed glasses.

Lyons came up with a cell phone and a thin wallet. He tucked them away for later examination and followed his partner into the next section of the lab.

Schwarz heard someone coming, approaching with quick, light steps. These guys, Schwarz decided, weren’t that good. This one was heading for the sound of the gunfire, and felt safe approaching from behind a steel fire door.

Schwarz quickly reviewed the people occupying the building. Himself, Carl Lyons and one more teammate, Rosario Blancanales. One company president sprawled dead in his own executive offices on the top floor. One intruder killed by Lyons.

That left two more intruders unaccounted for.

The approaching footsteps didn’t sound like Blancanales. Schwarz waited as the man reached the other side of the fire door, paused, then pulled it open slowly. The door was silent. And it was heavy-duty steel. It should have protected the intruder.

But it didn’t. Schwarz gave the door an abrupt shove. He heard the steel clatter against the gun in the intruder’s hand. He heard the clonk of a skull hitting the door, then the sound of a body bouncing against the painted cinder-block wall.

Schwarz slammed his foot into the door, crushing the body behind it, then nudged away the submachine gun that clattered from a limp hand. He reached around the door and dragged out the intruder, who had enough life left in him to struggle a little. Schwarz walked the attacker back to join his partner and sent the broken man crashing to the floor with his face in the expanding pool of the dead man’s blood.

The attacker sputtered and retched as his wrists and ankles were bound in plastic restraints. Then he was wrenched by one arm and landed hard on his back. He gasped for air, inhaling more of his dead companion’s lifeblood. That stopped when a large, compact wad of paper was forced into his mouth, wedging it open, and he wheezed around it.

The slim, unassuming man standing over him put a finger to his lips and pressed the business end of a Beretta 92-A1 into the man’s blood-smeared face. The man nodded, now very interested in cooperating.

* * *

ONE FLOOR UP, Blancanales paused to listen. The gunfire and the commotion of a quick take-down had come from directly below where he was standing.

“Two down,” said the voice of Carl Lyons through a microtransceiver in his ear.

Blancanales didn’t respond. Two down meant only one to go, which had to be the nervous-looking figure who had just retreated into a corner at the far end of the hall, where a protruding brick wall gave the man some cover. It also made him more vulnerable to unseen approach.