Extreme Instinct

“Whoever installed this here was watching through the camera until activating the jammer,” Schwarz said, swinging around his laptop. “They waited until those poor folks back there were in the proper position, and then killed each one, making sure the bodies fell behind cover to not warn anybody pulling into the parking lot.”

“Ruthless,” Blancanales muttered in open disgust.

“Monstrous,” Lyons amended, resting the hot barrel of the Atchisson on a broad shoulder. “They were watching the cemetery through that video camera, until we arrived. Then they put the Sentry on automatic, and activated the radio jammers.”

“And burned out the transponder,” Schwarz added glumly, lifting a piece of melted electronics. “There’s no way we can track them through this.”

“Wait a second. Those are blocks of C-4 inside the Sentry,” Blancanales said with a frown. “If this thing was designed to explode and destroy any possible evidence if somebody captured it, then why didn’t it?” Slowly he smiled. “Oh, right.”

“Exactly,” Schwarz agreed, patting the laptop. “They were jamming us, but we were also jamming them.”

Lyons almost smiled. “You’re a devious man, Gadgets.”

Blancanales snorted. “Never saw an Auto-Sentry equipped with multiple weapon systems before. That also something new, Gadgets?”

Attaching some wires to an exposed circuit board, the man shrugged. “Nothing I ever heard about. Must be a modification they did. Clever idea, though.”

“Yeah, clever as hell,” Blancanales muttered, glancing back at the dead people sprawled in the ruined shrubbery. From this angle, he could see that the team had missed several corpses scattered around the hillock.

Typing some commands into the laptop, Schwarz grinned in satisfaction. Reaching past the twitching Barrett, the man yanked out some wiring, and the Sentry went dark and still. Instantly, the jamming field went off the air.

“Sky King to Rock Hounds. ETA, four minutes.” Grimaldi’s voice blared in their earbuds. “Repeat, ETA three minutes.”

“Sky King, this is Hollywood,” Lyons said quickly into his throat mike. “The party is over. Return to base. We’ll—” He glanced down at the van in the gravel parking lot. The chassis was dented, but still serviceable. Even the Lexan plastic windows were intact. However, all four of the tires were flat. “We’ll grab a cab, and be there soon.”

“What happened to your roller skate?”

Lyons grimaced. “Somebody brought a firecracker to the party.”

“Ah, understood, Hollywood,” Grimaldi continued smoothly. “I’ll have Bear call off the local cops, and send a couple of blacksuits to recover what’s left of the van.”

“Much appreciated,” Lyons said, listening to the howl of sirens growing steadily louder.

“All a part of the service, Hollywood.” Grimaldi chuckled. “This is Sky King, returning to blacktop. See you soon. Out.”

“Over and out,” Lyons said, brushing back his blond hair.

The three men waited expectantly for a few minutes until the police sirens abruptly stopped. In the ringing silence, the decimation of the cemetery somehow seemed even worse than before.

Loosening the clips and wires, Schwarz returned the laptop to his shoulder bag, then began ripping out the circuit boards from the Sentry.

“All right, anybody feel like checking the grave of the Russian janitor?” Lyons asked, clicking the safety on the Atchisson.

“I’ll do it,” Blancanales snorted, swinging up the M-16 assault rifle. Sweeping the rows of headstones, he found a fresh mound of dirt, checked the name on the headstone and then fired a single round. Instantly the grave exploded, blowing a geyser of dirt and rocks toward the clouds.

“Yeah, thought so,” the man muttered, lowering the assault rifle. “You would have to be a fool to booby trap an entire cemetery, but not the main reason we came here.”

“And whatever else these people are, they’re not fools,” Lyons agreed dourly, bending to recover one of the empty 25 mm rounds for the big Barrett.

Inspecting the bottom, the man was not surprised to see there was no lot number on the brass. There was no way to trace the ammunition. The Stony Man team used something similar in their weapons, as did the CIA, Navy SEALs, Homeland Security, British MI-5, the Mossad, a lot of folks who wanted to keep their involvement in clandestine operations out of the public scrutiny.

“Then again, maybe they are,” Schwarz muttered in a measured tone, extracting a tiny microprocessor from the morass of wiring and holding it triumphantly to the noon sunlight.

FIVE MILES AWAY in nearby Boca Raton, an armed man on the roof of the tallest downtown building released the telescope. When the transponder signal of the Auto-Sentry stopped broadcasting, that meant the jammer was in operation, which meant the balloon had gone up at the Bonaventure Cemetery. However, he was safe. No matter what sort of advanced military opticals the invaders might have with them, there was no way for anybody to find him this far away without astronomical-grade equipment, the kind that could not be transported without a hundred men and a fleet of trucks.

Pulling a PDA from his belt, the man thumbed in a coded text message, then sent it out over the Internet as a microsecond T-burst. The message was simple and concise. “Package delivered, goods en route.”

Tucking away the device, the man wiped his prints off the big telescope and headed for the elevator. Time to go home. Briefly, the mercenary wondered if the three men were with the FBI, CIA, NSA or more of those triple-damn Homeland Security agents. Those were very hard boys, and mighty hard to stop. Then again, it really didn’t make a difference. Once Westmore had them strapped down to a surgical table and then began to remove pieces of their internal anatomy, they’d talk.

Everybody always did.

CHAPTER FOUR

Podbanske Base, Slovakia

When the Communist government fell, the Russian soldiers assigned to the Czechoslovakian missile base simply turned off the equipment and went home. Naturally, they took along everything they could in lieu of pay, but all of the big machinery stayed intact and fully operational—including a mainframe computer and all of the big thermonuclear weapons. Only the tactical nukes had been carried away, which was why General Novostk had been forced to trade a Euro-Russian hydrogen bomb for a Chinese tactical nuke. That trade was the key to get the much more useful T-bombs.

In every way possible, the Soviet missile base was superior to the old headquarters of Saris Castle in the badlands of the Carpathian Mountains where even the goats found nothing to eat. Easily half of the crumbling ruins were inhabitable during the winter, with the water pipes freezing solid, the toilets backing up and the electricity fading away for no apparent reason. Then the soldiers had been forced to become extremely proficient with their handguns to eliminate the staggering rat population. One section of the cellar they had declared a demilitarized zone, and simply nailed the door shut in surrender.

But here at Missile Base Nine, the Slovakians had lights, heat, food, weapons, vehicles, everything needed to wage war on the hated Russians. Of course, the general had known about the base for decades, but even when it had been abandoned, there was no way to get past the massive armored door at the entrance. Then, like a gift from God, some crazy American billionaire had hired them to steal a T-bomb, and offered full technical support, including an American criminal who was an expert at opening bank vaults. Once the Slovakians got past the door, the general discovered the nuclear weapons in storage, and a bold new plan was made, with Lindquist eagerly on board from the very beginning.

Prompted by a blast of the Russian truck’s horn, a dozen soldiers rushed out of a tinted-glass office on the loading dock to assist with the unloading of the T-bomb.

Masking his impatience, General Novostk waited for the unloading to commence. On their way to Slovakia, Colonel Lindquist and Lieutenant Vladislav had been dropped off at a small island in the Black Sea to proceed on their individual assignments, recruitment and misdirection. This would allow the general to concentrate on the real mission: revenge and mass destruction.

“Good to have you back, sir,” a corporal shouted to Novostk, giving a stiff salute. “May I take it that the mission went well?”

“More than well. We have acquired seven of the weapons,” Novostk replied, returning the salute. Normally, soldiers did not salute a superior officer while inside a building, but the entire Red Army base was underground, and so technically inside, so he accepted one if offered, but did not push the matter. These were patriots, ready to die to serve their nation. Novostk would not begrudge them some minor blurring of the rules of military etiquette.

“Seven,” the corporal gasped. The word was repeated several times by the unloading crew. “That’s grand news, sir. We’ll smash the Russians for sure now.”

Did that mean he had harbored doubts before? Novostk wondered privately. That was disquieting, but then soldiers always grumbled, even patriots.

Just then, an electric crane rumbled into life, the arm swinging out over the truck, heavy chains jingling as they descended. The soldiers were scurrying to attach the chains to the precious T-bomb.

“Handle them carefully, gentlemen!” the general bellowed in his best parade-ground voice. “If you set one off, I will be most displeased.”

That made the soldiers crack smiles, and they redoubled the work efforts, the previous tension massively eased.

“I’m always impressed how you do that, sir,” the corporal said in clear envy, resting a hand on the Rex pistol holster at his side. “I’ll never make much of an officer until I learn how.”

“You will learn in time,” General Novostk said, walking out of the way of the busy workers. “Now, is there anything to report on your end? How is the house cleaning progressing?”

The corporal flashed a toothy grin. “Complete victory, sir. We got rid of all the bats by using a flamethrower and roasting the little bastards alive.”

Slowly, the general raised an eloquent eyebrow. The hull of an ICBM was just strong enough to withstand launch, and keep the fuel tanks attached to the engines long enough to reach the target halfway around the world. There had been ten missiles snug in their silos. All of them had been damaged in some way from sheer neglect, but by cannibalizing parts for one to fix another, he had hoped to get three, maybe four of them, into working order.

“Son, did you just tell me,” the general asked in a measure voice, “that you used a flamethrower to clean out the colony of bats inside the launch tube of a thermonuclear ICBM?”