Seismic Surge

The correlation of the White Soldiers to Option Omega, a connection established by Stony Man Farm, was only cause for more concern.

“What’s the approach?” Lyons asked Blancanales.

Rosario Blancanales had been called the Politician, or Pol for short, because of his way with words and ability to convince people to follow his suggestions, not because he was a liar who slung mud. Blancanales was one of Stony Man’s best interrogators, showing an uncanny skill at delving into someone’s wants and fears and utilizing diplomacy to open doors that even Carl “Ironman” Lyons couldn’t kick down. “I’m going to start with Rosca.”

Lyons glared at the Mexican bigot as he squirmed, wrists and ankles bound, eyes and mouth sealed off with duct tape, ears rendered numb by headphones pumping white noise.

“I know,” Blancanales added, reading the enmity that Lyons held for Rosca’s predecessors. Lyons had been captured, tortured and brainwashed by the Fascist International, a month-long ordeal that occurred in the wake of one of his best friends being murdered by those self-same “liberators.” “Carl, I know that this is one group that you wouldn’t mind resorting to killing with a thousand cuts. But we need answers.”

Lyons nodded. “Don’t worry about me. I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t even feel like executing the bound-up little bitch. Killing helpless prisoners isn’t my way.”

“I know that,” Blancanales said. He glanced at Rosca. “Though, mind if I let you build up a head of steam before I begin chatting him up?”

Lyons smirked. “Oh, I don’t need to build up a foul mood. I installed a tap for that years ago.”

Blancanales chuckled. “I figured as much. Gadgets and I’ve been getting pints off of you for years.”

“The fear of a psychopath, ready to rock,” Lyons growled. His good humor only added a frenzied mania to his angry appearance.

It was time for Blancanales to begin his work at dismantling the White Soldier’s defenses.

* * *

HERMANN SCHWARZ WASN’T called Gadgets as an ironic statement of his technical ineptitude. The man was an electronics engineer and innovator, having done much of the development of some of the surveillance and communications systems that kept the teams in constant communication with their headquarters in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Having gotten hold of the communications carried by the mercenary team that had attacked them, Schwarz was on the job. This wasn’t a toil for him, either. His was the kind of inquisitive mind that had dismantled and reassembled everything from the smallest robot toy to the most complex, top-of-the-line personal computer ever since he’d developed the coordination to operate a screwdriver.

The one SUV that Able Team had captured was fitted with electronics that Schwarz could tap into. The GPS unit from the SUV was one of the best bits of intelligence that he could have collected. He was able to backtrack the path that the hired guns had taken from their starting point to the Norfolk shipyard. Schwarz downloaded everything from the unit’s hard drive, gathering every destination that the vehicle had gone to and from.

While he was plotting out thousands of miles of road travel for the vehicle—he made special note of the fact that it wasn’t a rental—he went to work on the communications systems that the men carried.

They were fairly standard electronics, mass-produced in Southeast Asia—Vietnam to be exact. It didn’t quite jibe with the SIG 556 rifles, but Schwarz took a closer look at the assault weapons that had been utilized against them.

They were Brazilian IMBEL Model LCs, not SIGs, though there were considerable similarities between the two weapons that could cause confusion at a distance. The fineries of weapon identification hadn’t mattered in the heat of combat, just that they could tell the unique sound of a high-velocity .22-caliber round and how easily it could penetrate body armor but not solid cover. The Brazilian firearms were going to be difficult to track, but that was the point, Schwarz assumed. The electronics were similar, and he would have to rely on the skills of the Stony Man Farm cyberteam to look for elements inside of the programming for these GPS units, just in case they were utilizing proprietary software. He noticed that there were downloaded updates of coordinates that had been recently entered into the electronics, new paths updated on the fly.

Only two of the men had smartphones with them, at least as far as Schwarz could recover. He took the SIM cards from those phones to shield them from any long-range, remote nullification of the information in them. The phones themselves were just housings; the SIM cards held the most vital information for each of the mercenaries’ normal use. These were business phones, though, and had very little personal information as far as he could tell.

It didn’t matter, thanks to the Location Area Identity entries into those cards. Now, in conjunction with the GPS, Schwarz could track their movements for several days.

Right now, he was uploading the data from the devices to Stony Man Farm after gathering some preliminary notes. If anyone could discern what patterns the opposition were keeping to, it would be the techno-wizards at the Farm.

In the meantime, he was going through the memory on the two smartphones that had been recovered. Memos and notes had been erased, but Schwarz had them plugged into his laptop, and he brought up a drive “unwiper” that could recover lost data easily.

Blancanales rapped on the door to the room that Schwarz had set up as his tech lab. “Gadgets?”

He looked up to his oldest, dearest friend. “What’s going on?”

“Carl’s hit a brick wall.”

“Poor wall. Or do you mean figuratively?” Schwarz asked.

“Figuratively,” Blancanales replied. “You’d have felt the safe house shake if he’d actually punched a wall.”

Schwarz nodded. “I’ve collected a lot of data already, on movements, on people called. Is he going to try to force admission?”

Blancanales grinned. “It helps to be able to say we’ve got someone where they’ve been. We need to know as much about them as possible.”

“Here’s the background and records pulled up from the Farm, too,” Schwarz replied. “Lots more dirt on our prisoners.”

Blancanales accepted the small file folder, looking it over. His lips were drawn tightly, and Schwarz could see the glint in his eyes as he was filling his brain, memorizing everything he could about the two men in their custody. It was a typical tactic, not only of police detectives, but of carnival mentalists who gave “cold” readings of their subjects.

The foreknowledge of answers to questions was a means of breaking down bricks in whatever wall the subject erected to deflect a questioner. If the questioner could provide answers to his own questions, it made any effort at keeping secrets seem more and more futile. Such a regimen was generally successful, even with the grimmest and toughest of subjects.

Interrogation—the most successful and adept interrogation—didn’t come from torture or from terror. It came from shattered spirits, from the truth that nothing could be hidden from those interrogating them.

“Carl and I have gotten about half of this,” Blancanales admitted. He looked up. “But we can still use this.”

“Good. I’m still working with the Farm to dig deeper,” Schwarz said. “Aaron’s already on top of the forensic accounting for these two thanks to the smartphone work.”

“That’ll prove interesting,” Blancanales mused. “Not enough for me to sit and watch it, but the results would be pretty damning, and useful for breaking our shooters.”

“Right now I’ve done all that I can. I’m going to be sitting on my thumbs for a good bit,” Schwarz said.

“Can’t grab a catnap?” Blancanales inquired.

Schwarz spread out all of the information he’d accumulated. “Data overstimulation. I’m running things through the back of my mind subconsciously, so I’m not going to get much toward sleep.”

“Multilevel intellect.” Blancanales sighed. “You’ve usually got at least three or four things working in that brain of yours. I’m surprised you can ever get to sleep.”

“Meditation which duplicates REM sleep generally gets me through,” Schwarz answered. “That or caffeine crash. Coffee actually makes me sleepy.”

Blancanales chuckled. “So what’s your plan? Hit up a coffee shop?”

“Unless...”

Schwarz looked down at one of the smartphones, then powered it back up.

“We nullified all of the GPS-locating soft- and hardware, didn’t we?” Blancanales asked.

“I triple-checked all of that,” Schwarz replied. “But you know...”

“Hang out as bait? That usually works best if you’re in a team,” Blancanales countered.

“You and Carl are busy. And Mack Bolan does the solo stuff all the time,” Schwarz answered.

Blancanales shook his head. “We’re not that guy. He’s too experienced, too skilled. He’s on a whole different level than we are.”

“He plans ahead, he lays traps,” Schwarz returned. “He thinks on damn near as many levels as I do. And he doesn’t have a trunk full of nasty technology like I do.”