Incendiary Dispatch

They drove less than a mile and Schwarz and Lyons exited the vehicle near the station. The big Alexandria, Virginia, parking lot was eerily quiet. The trains were not running today, and wouldn’t be running anytime soon. Schwarz and Lyons avoided the security personnel posted at the station and slipped through the darkness and into the weeds before stepping onto the tracks.

“We’re on-site, Stony,” the Able Team leader said into his headset.

“We’re tracking you, Carl. You’re a hundred feet away and closing.”

Lyons’s MV-321G Gen 3 night-vision goggles were equipped with infrared illumination. The plan was for him to use night vision while Schwarz conducted a naked-eyes search. So far the track was so well lit by overhead lighting that Lyons didn’t need the NVGs.

They watched the tracks, looking for signs of devices that didn’t belong. Tokaido’s little track-back trick had triangulated the location of just one of the cell phones. The reports of the latest wave of attacks—including derailments on several commuter and cargo railroads in the United States and around the world—suggested there would be half a dozen devices planted along the tracks. Whoever was doing this, obviously wanted to do the job completely.

They were still ten yards from the location of the specific tracked device when Schwarz froze.

“I think I’ve got one.”

“Show us, Able,” Price said through the headset.

Schwarz pulled out a video camera, offering far higher resolution than the video feed from the lipstick-size video pickups on his headset. He pointed it at the device nestled against the steel rail of the Fredericksburg Line.

“Manning is seeing it. Cowboy’s here, too,” Price announced. John “Cowboy” Kissinger was the Stony Man Farm armorer.

“Looks like a rock,” Gary Manning announced from his seat on a jet over the Atlantic Ocean.

“I’m no ballistics expert like Gary,” Kissinger said, “but I’d have to agree that it looks like a rock.”

“You’re a big help,” Schwarz said. “Can’t thank you guys enough. See the plastic foam on the bottom? It’s adhered to the metal. Bonding agent of some kind. They have it glued to the track itself so they can be sure the rail is damaged by the blast.”

“Gadgets,” Manning said, “you can’t touch that thing. What if it’s got a motion-sensing trigger?”

Schwarz snorted. “It’s super-glued to the rail of a commuter train line. It’s been getting rattled for days.”

“Gadgets—” Lyons said.

“Hey, you don’t have to tell me to be careful,” Schwarz said. “We don’t have to touch it. We’ll move it from a distance.”

Schwarz pulled out a small, dense wedge of steel on a metallic spike. He pulled a safety strip to activate it, then impaled the thing in the ground, within a half inch of the device on the rail track.

They moved away from the device, along the curve of the track.

“Able Three here,” Blancanales said on the line from his lookout in the Explorer. “Get to cover. Company coming. Two white males.”

Schwarz and Lyons blended into the bushes.

“They’re walking the rails,” Blancanales added from his vantage point. “They might be Virginia Railway Express track inspectors.”

“That’s to be expected.”

“Looks like one of them is armed.”

That was hardly out of the question either, Lyons thought, given the state of high anxiety in the nation and the fact that railroads had just become demonstrated targets.

“Any other equipment, Pol?” he asked quietly.

“No.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” Lyons commented. “Patrols should be obviously armed. Inspectors should have equipment.”

“Let’s ask them,” Schwarz suggested, extracting his Beretta 93-R, a handgun based on the well-known Beretta 92. One serious difference in the design: a selector switch that enabled the handgun to fire three-round bursts.

* * *

ROSARIO BLANCANALES LEFT the Explorer and followed the path taken earlier by Lyons and Schwarz. He moved quickly. There was a dull ache from the sutures in his gut. A dull ache was nothing compared to the pain he’d woken up with after the firestorm in Georgia.

He didn’t like what was happening. More than that, Blancanales knew that Stony Man was in a bad, bad place. What intelligence they had so far served them little in tracking down whoever was causing this mayhem. They needed information. They needed a source.

“Able Three here,” he said quietly. “I’m in position alongside the tracks.”

“Don’t engage,” Lyons said.

“Don’t plan to,” Blancanales replied. “I’m concealed. I’m the fly on the wall.”

The two men approached. The one in front had a firearm held close to his leg, on the far side of his body where Blancanales only glimpsed it. The other followed a few steps behind. The body language of the follower said “nervous.”

They were moving quickly now, half jogging. There was no cover here, unless they decided to crawl through the bushes where Encizo was camped.

Blancanales kept his mike wide open. Nothing to boost the audio. The Farm wasn’t going to hear much of this.

“Another thirty yards,” said the one in the rear.

“Yeah,” said the leader.

“This ain’t good, man.”

“Shut up.”

“This ain’t good, Gus.”

“I said shut the fuck up,” the leader stormed, waving his weapon in the direction of his partner.

In the cold cast of the lights over the track Blancanales saw the silhouette of a machine pistol. The follower was silenced by the provocative gesture, and the two men continued down the tracks. Blancanales had to take the chance. He slipped out of the bushes and followed after them, sprinting from shadow to shadow. The pair up ahead was high on anxiety but not too skilled at stealth.

They stopped on the tracks. Blancanales shrank into a weedy dark place. The leader, the one called Gus, faced away from the track, watching for trouble, while the follower crouched over it. Encizo saw him bend at a bulge alongside the central of the three-tracks set of railroad racks running side by side in this location. This was not the device Schwarz had located. The device was removed—no, just a cover lifted off. The man quickly extracted something from the device and slipped it into a camouflage backpack. Then he unzipped another section of the pack, removed another device and flipped it on. The screen blazed colorfully to life for a moment. The man was using his body to shield the screen, but wasn’t counting on a voyeur in a nearby overhang of weeds. Blancanales clearly saw it was a cell phone swap.

The man on technical duty closed the device. The swap was made in less than a minute.

The two men moved on and the technical man crouched at the next device—and froze at the sight of Schwarz’s steel wedge.

“What the hell is this?”

“What?” Gus demanded.