Incendiary Dispatch

He kicked the door savagely with the bottom of one foot, opening into a jungle of fire, where some kind of electrical system had spilled out ropes of bundled wire that now burned floor to ceiling along with the furniture, books and lab equipment. Clouds of acrid smoke were collecting at the ceiling. Blancanales tried not to breathe but the wisps that he did inhale felt toxic and the blast of heat almost bowled him over. Something burst nearby, spewing orange, red-hot worms.

“Lyons!” Blancanales bellowed. “Schwarz!”

Then something big came leaping through the vines of fire and crashed at Blancanales’s feet. It was Carl Lyons, tangled in a strand of burning cable. He rolled away, extinguishing the flames that clung to his black BDUs. Blancanales snatched off a tangle of wire but a strand of melting insulation stuck to Lyon’s clothing like glue.

Then Hermann Schwarz charged through the flames, rolled once and was back on his feet, making a quick search of his body for anything that was still on fire.

“No way out!” Schwarz shouted over the heightening roar.

“Yeah, this way, come on!” Blancanales led the way back in the direction he had come. The conflagration in each room had grown progressively more intense within seconds. The fire was reaching out as if trying to grab them.

Blancanales heard a crash behind him. Carl Lyons had just dumped his pack to the ground. Lyons, without slowing, unceremoniously snatched the small pack off of Schwarz’s shoulder.

“Huh?” Schwarz demanded, shielding his eyes from the horrific heat and stinging fumes, but he could see that his pack was smoldering.

Blancanales slipped off his own smoking pack and left it in the room with the corpses of the two intruders. The room was biggest of the lab workrooms and it was an inferno. Blancanales felt his skin cooking and his lungs were exploding as if he were drowning—but he didn’t dare take another breath. One inhalation of the superheated air might just drop him in his tracks. His vision was a mass of orange and black. He saw the stairway entrance framed in fire and staggered into it.

The temperature was cooler and he allowed himself a sip of air. It was still so hot it burned his nostrils and he slowed to watch behind him. Schwarz came through. A heartbeat passed.

Then Lyons.

They called Lyons “Ironman.” It had been his nickname since long before any superhero movie and he had earned it by toughing out some of the most horrific battles any soldier had ever endured.

But now it looked as though the Ironman was about to crumple. Blancanales shoved Schwarz ahead and got behind Lyons, shouldering into him to keep him moving. The climb up the stairs seemed interminable, then they were into the upper hall. No sign of flame. But the wall trim along the floor was smoking.

“Go!” Blancanales ordered, shoving Schwarz and Lyons, and it was like trying to keep a pair of drunk wrestlers in motion. The trio staggered down the hall. Blancanales felt his feet burning. The sticky rubber toes of his boots were melting. Something liquid sloshed onto the floor and sizzled and Blancanales smelled griddled blood.

Somebody was bleeding buckets.

Lyons seemed to swerve slightly and Blancanales grabbed him around the waist.

Lyons grumbled something about being okay, and then they were in the exit stairs.

There was a rush of air behind them. The stairwell they had left seconds before went up in a fireball. A roar of flame erupted below them. The walls around them were now on fire. They careened down two flights and reached the landing. They saw two doors. One had a darkened exit sign. Smoke poured from the second door and Blancanales swore he actually saw it bulge.

“Out!” he insisted. The three of them pushed through the exit door.

Blancanales felt like he was in paradise—he gratefully inhaled the sweet, cool air of the Georgia night.

He stumbled over a body. It was the intruder whose knee he had shattered. The man had managed to crawl down the stairs and onto the grounds surrounding the Solon Labs. He was either dead or had passed out from the pain. Blancanales grabbed the man by the collar, intending to drag him farther away from the burning building.

But the body seemed to weigh a ton. Blancanales couldn’t budge him, and a quick pulse check told him that man was beyond help.

It also dawned on Blancanales that it wasn’t the body getting heavier that was the problem. It was himself, getting weaker.

Then he saw another spill of blood. It was his blood, and a lot of it.

No wonder he felt weak.

Blancanales collapsed alongside the dead intruder.

CHAPTER TWO

Lyons, Schwarz and Blancanales were members of Able Team, a supersecret covert-operations team based at Stony Man Farm.

Carl Lyons was fighting to sit upright in his helicopter seat without the seat belt. But he wasn’t sure Rosario Blancanales would even be able to stay alive for the next twenty minutes.

“Rosario’s in bad shape,” Lyons said into the mike on his headset.

“What is the nature of his injury?” Barbara Price asked.

“We haven’t figured that out yet. Gadgets is working on it.”

Hermann Schwarz had Blancanales strapped into the seat beside him and was ripping the man’s blood-drenched shirt off in shreds. “No broken bones. No sign of head trauma. But I can’t find the wound!” he said in frustration.

Then he found it. The last strip of the black BDU blouse came off Blancanales’s torso and there was a long, deep channel of black meandering across the man’s side, just above the hip. With the removal of the shirt, blood poured out of the wound.

“Jesus!” Schwarz stormed, covering the wound with his hand and squeezing the ripped flesh together to halt the bleeding.

Lyons watched the flow of blood from between Schwarz’s fingers. He watched the color drain out of Schwarz’s face—but it wasn’t as gray as Blancanales’s.

“We found the wound. We don’t need a burn unit,” Lyons said into the mike. “We just need a lot of blood.”

“Understood,” Price said. “Putnam General Hospital in Eaton. You’re five minutes away.”

Jack Grimaldi, the ace Stony Man pilot, manhandled the controls and pulled the helicopter in a turning decent. “Tell them to be ready in three minutes, Stony,” he said.

“There’s no helipad,” Price added.

“Like I need one.”

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

BARBARA PRICE hit the switch and brought up the image on the main plasma screen in the War Room. It showed an office in Washington, D.C., and Justice Department official Hal Brognola looked at her from behind his desk. The Potomac was barely visible in the windows behind him.

The communications line between the big Fed’s office and Stony Man Farm was highly secure. Brognola was, after all, Director of the Sensitive Operations Group, the ultracovert intelligence agency so secret that its existence was known, ostensibly, only to the President of the United States. And the President was the only person Brognola answered to.

Stony Man Farm itself, tucked away in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, was the hidden base of the Stony Man antiterrorist, anticrime operation. The property had remained secure enough over many years to still be viable as the group’s mission center—but that meant diligently and constantly diverting attention away from the Farm and its activities.

Sometimes it was simply impossible for SOG operations to remain invisible.

“They landed in the parking lot?” Brognola asked, chewing an antacid.

“There was nowhere else for them to land,” Barbara Price said.

To be accurate, Jack Grimaldi had put the helicopter down in a section of decorative landscaping between the parking lot and the hospital emergency entrance doors. It was twenty feet closer than landing on asphalt, Grimaldi had explained. Twenty feet less distance they’d have to transport the wounded Blancanales.

“How’s Rosario?” the big Fed asked.