Incendiary Dispatch

“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.

Blancanales stepped out of the blackness of his own shadowy alcove in the lab hallway and moved forward carefully. Despite a head of gray hair he had the agility and grace of a young man and moved silently.

But he didn’t need to. His prey was cowering in the darkness, speaking in hushed whispers to someone on a radio or phone.

The man never heard Rosario Blancanales approach on the other side of the protective wall and eavesdrop on his conversation.

Blancanales was a former Black Beret, highly trained, well-educated in a broad scope of esoteric subjects that, for whatever reason, might be useful in a black ops situation. That included languages. Blancanales was fluent in a few and functional enough in many to order a taxi in most parts of the world. But he didn’t recognize the language that the man on the other side of the brick wall was shouting into his cell phone. Something Scandinavian. Whatever the man was saying, he was getting more agitated by the second. Then he was pleading. “Nie! Nie!”

Blancanales knew those words without knowing the language they came from. He was saying “No! No!” And he was practically begging with the person on the other end of the line.

Blancanales didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t know why these men were here or what their purpose was. And he knew they weren’t exceptionally skilled intruders. Blancanales didn’t feel like he was in an especially dangerous situation—

Until now. Suddenly there was a knot of dread sitting in his gut. Something bad was about to happen.

Whatever it was, maybe he could stop it.

Blancanales slipped around the corner of the brick wall. The intruder’s combat shotgun was tucked uselessly under one arm, the cell phone in the other hand. The look on his face was one of sheer terror, but the terror had nothing to do with the unexpected arrival of Rosario Blancanales.

Blancanales disabled the man with a knee-shattering kick. The shotgun clattered away. The man collapsed and grabbed at the useless leg. Blancanales kicked the man’s right hand, shattering fingers, further damaging the knee. The man was groaning and sobbing until Blancanales demanded his attention by securing his shattered hand to his good one in a plastic cuff.

The soft-spoken Hispanic could be amazingly commanding when he needed to be. The Beretta handgun helped.

“Talk to me.”

The man was hyperventilating. A question came from the fallen cell phone.

The wounded intruder shouted at the phone.

The display showed the call had been disconnected. The intruder’s eyes widened and he forced himself onto his stomach and began crawling for the stairwell entrance.

Whatever was about to happen, this man considered it worse than the chance of being shot in the back by Rosario Blancanales.

Blancanales touched his transceiver. “Lyons! Schwarz! Get the fuck—”

He heard what sounded like a hiss, but loud as thunder, and the stairwell at the other end of the hallway filled with impossibly brilliant orange and the air distorted from the heat waves that rushed at Blancanales with immense speed. He ducked for cover behind the brick jut-out and let the tsunami of convection pass him. The atmosphere became so hot that his skin burned.

But the worst of the heat wave was gone. The intruder was a pathetic, broken thing crawling down the stairs and Blancanales let him go. He rushed down the hall, to the stairs that had filled with brilliance and become dark again. The air became hotter with every step he took.

“Carl, copy! Schwarz!”

No response.

“Stony, I can’t raise them. We’ve got trouble. Some sort of explosive.”

“Understood,” said the calm voice of mission controller Barbara Price. “Carmen’s trying to raise them.”

“Heading into the blast source,” Blancanales reported. “Damned hot.” He thundered down the stairs, trying to make sense of the ovenlike heat and the lack of a flame. He’d expected a firestorm.

“Lyons? Gadgets?” Blancanales found a fallen weapon, one of the intruders’ combat shotguns. Just beyond it was the scene where the burning seemed to have started. Two intruder corpses were on the ground, cooked black, their clothes incinerated. The cadavers were pocked with deep, smoking craters. The room was in flames—plastic furniture, the wallboard, even the steel cabinets appeared to have already melted and sagged. Blancanales felt as if he was cooking in his own skin. He looked into all the corners, searching for his teammates.

“No sign of them yet, Stony,” Blancanales announced.

“No response,” replied the cool female voice in his ear.

“Lyons! Gadgets, damn it!” Blancanales shouted. He raced to the far side of the room. It was one of the omnipresent steel fire doors.

And it was burning.

He shouldered through it, into the next section of the labs.

“Lyons!” Blancanales demanded of the roaring fire. Hungry flames were growing fat on shelves of stored paperwork. The heat was almost unbearable. The floor was covered with smoking, foot-wide craters. What were those all about?

Rosario Blancanales was suddenly angry. What the hell was going on here? Who the hell were these amateur intruders and what kind of freakish explosion had just gone off?

And where had Lyons and Schwarz been at the time of the explosion?

His arrived at another steel fire door. Why the hell were the fire doors freaking burning? Blancanales knew what an incendiary grenade did—spit out molten metal bits that burned through anything they touched. This was way more than a few incendiary grenades. There were streaks of burning steel.