Incendiary Dispatch

“Look at it!”

Gus shook his head. “I got no idea.”

“Me, neither, but it wasn’t there before! We’re made! Let’s get out of here.”

“If they found them, they wouldn’t have just left the igniters,” Gus said, although he was obviously confused by the steel wedge. His head was oscillating, looking for signs of surveillance. The night remained still. “We gotta finish this job.”

“Listen to me,” his companion insisted. “It wasn’t here before.”

“You listen,” Gus snapped. “They got us by the nuts. We don’t do the job, we rot in federal prison. Forever. Understand?”

“Call ’em,” the technical man said. “Tell them what we found.”

Gus nodded swiftly. “Yeah.”

“Don’t let them make that call, Gadgets!” Blancanales snapped into his mike.

Schwarz did the first thing that came to mind—he hit the detonator switch on the dedicated remote in his hand. The metal wedge reacted with a bang and rocketed into the device adhered to the railroad track with explosive force. The steel blade sliced through the adhesion of the device, just as it was intended to do, and kept going, into the technical man, who grunted and collapsed. The steel wedge clattered away over the track ballast. Gus bolted, made it four steps, then slammed into what felt like the front end of a diesel locomotive.

Blancanales’s body blow took Gus down hard. A swift stomp broke several ribs and left him stunned. Blancanales snatched the Steyr SPP out of Gus’s grip and in the same motion swung the butt of the weapon into Technical Man’s skull as he tried to rise to his feet. The pistol was made of a composite polymer that the manufacturer had famously called “nearly indestructible.” Sure enough, the composite didn’t so much as crack.

Something in the Technical Man’s skull, however, broke and he collapsed and was still.

Blancanales grabbed at one of Gus’s wrists and twisted it, leveraging the man onto his face, then kept pulling the wrist until it was between his shoulder blades. Something cracked. Blancanales jerked a plastic cuff around it, then grabbed his other wrist and pulled it up, as well.

Gus screamed.

Blancanales landed both knees on either side of Gus’s spine. All the air in Gus’s body seemed to explode out of his mouth and he mustered no more noise or resistance.

“Need a hand?” Schwarz asked as he and Lyons arrived. Schwarz’s unfired 93-R covered the lifeless technician.

“No, I got this.” Blancanales gave Schwarz and Lyons a wicked grin. “Leave me in the car, will ya?”

“Able One?” Price said in the headsets. “What’s the status?”

“How should I know?” Lyons growled. “I’m just Pol’s sidekick.”

“Able Three here,” Blancanales said. “Listen, we have a backpack full of cell phones. These guys were going to swap them out. They’re just changing out cell phones, for God’s sake. This one was about to call somebody. If we make the call, we can trace it, right?”

“Yes,” Kurtzman said. “Give me the serial number.”

Schwarz snatched Gus’s phone and pulled a miniature screwdriver out of a small leg pack. He spun the screws off and recited the serial number.

“Here’s my thought,” Blancanales said quickly. “We place the call, get the trace, then detonate some of the old phone devices. We take the new phones and the rest of the devices with us. Maybe whoever was in charge of having them placed, will think this pair screwed something up. Then we get these quick to the Farm and figure out whatever we can from them.”

“It can’t hurt,” Price said.

“But I doubt they’ll buy it,” Schwarz said. He was now holding one of the devices—the one that the explosive chisel had sliced off the side of the railroad track. “They’re using some kick-ass adhesive. Some sort of modified cyanoacrylate, I’d guess. Unless you’re packing nail polish remover, we’re not getting these things off the rails in a hurry.”

“We can’t risk it,” Lyons said. “If these guys are expected to report in and don’t—they might risk blowing these devices.”

“No way,” Schwarz said. “They’re replacing the phones for a reason. To avoid using the old, traceable signal.”

“How sure are you of that, Gadgets?” Blancanales demanded. “Sure enough to stick around?”

“No way to that, either,” Schwarz conceded.

“We’ve got the phone online,” Kurtzman said. “When you make the call, we’ll trace it.”

Schwarz removed the old-system cell phone from the device in his hands. He jogged up the track and snatched out the new-system cell phone that the Technical Man had put there. He had the backpack over one shoulder.

“Dead,” Lyons announced after a quick check of the technician with the cratered skull. He gave a bark of disbelief when he saw Blancanales about to hoist Gus onto his shoulders. “I’ll get that one,” Lyons said. “I think your nerve endings must’ve fried out, Pol. Your guts should be screaming at you by now.”

“They’re a little achy,” Blancanales admitted.

In fact, the burn wound was throbbing. He could count the sutures by each individual needle of pain emanating from his side.

Lyons tossed groaning Gus over his shoulder and plodded with him up the steep berm. Schwarz had stayed behind to plant the phone in the ignition device adhered to the track, then he hustled after Lyons and Blancanales.

“I’m set,” Schwarz said. “But I don’t think this is gonna fool anybody.”

* * *

A SMALLER GROUP had gathered in the War Room. Phoenix Force was absent, now en route to Europe. Able Team was on hand, as was Stony Man armorer John “Cowboy” Kissinger, a tall man with broad shoulders and narrow hips. Kissinger was well-known for his expertise with almost every type of weapon. He could dismantle and rebuild any firearms system put in front of him.

Kissinger was—like almost everyone at the Farm—a veteran of bigger, more public organizations in the outside world. He had spent years with the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. When it was restructured as the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA, Kissinger went freelance for some time before finding a home at Stony Man Farm. He maintained the Farm armory, often upgrading and improving the standard-issue equipment.

“Explosives,” Kissinger said, “are not my primary focus, but I read the research. Including the stuff the military researchers don’t know I’m reading. So I know what the state of the art is in weaponized nanothermites.” He set the device on the table, now in pieces, and waved a hand at it. “This is beyond what we thought of as state of the art.”

Hal Brognola, sitting at his desk in Washington, edged forward in his seat and adjusted a camera on one of his displays to focus on the device. “Weaponized nanothermites aren’t new.”

“No way,” Schwarz said. “They’ve been tested for years. They’re looking at using MICs as primer in small arms. Not even for performance improvements. They want primers that won’t release vaporized lead every time a round is fired.”

“And this is an MIC?” Price asked.

Kissinger shook his head. “It’s not.”

“It’s not?” Schwarz echoed.

“It’s not a composite—not in the way everyone thinks of an MIC, a Metastable Intermolecular Composite,” Kissinger said. “The standard assumption is that MICs are laminated composites. It puts an ultrathin, nanoscale layer of aluminum or some other metal fuel atop a layer of an oxidizer. The two materials are exothermically reactive, and the proximity is so close that the diffusion of the oxidizer and fuel happens much more quickly and energetically. The rate of reaction is much, much faster. We’ve been working on tuning nanolaminated pyrotechnics to achieve different results. Different metals used in the nanolayers, different fillers used to separate and encase the laminates, give you interesting results. And the reaction time is far superior to a simple mixture of the old powders used in more standard incendiaries.”

“So how’s this different?” Schwarz demanded.

“Particle size, for one. We’re working with 100 to 200 nanometer-diameter particles when making the MICs. The particles in these devices are much, much smaller. They’re in the range of one-quarter to one-half of one nanometer in size.”

“They can do that?” Schwarz asked.

“Can we do that, you mean?” Kissinger asked. “Yeah. Maybe. Maybe in a lab. Or maybe not.”