Seismic Surge

looked inhospitable to Hermann Schwarz as he walked through the wreckage of what used to be the Heyerdal Hull Company. A month ago, this place had been torched in an act of terrorism by a radical antiwar group. The incident had been investigated thoroughly by the NCIS and Norfolk police and fire departments due to the nature of Heyerdal’s naval contracts and the extensive fire damage. Someone with a lot of skill had torched the facility, incinerating what hulls remained and leaving bodies almost completely unrecognizable in the conflagration.

Schwarz was here with his Able Team partners, Carl Lyons and Rosario Blancanales, and together the three of them were looking for connections. Across the Atlantic, thousands of miles due east, the Canary Islands were experiencing one of the most unusual hostage crisis situations the world had ever seen.

La Palma was one of a scattered assembly of volcanic islands that formed the Spanish Canaries, a dot in the Atlantic that was home to eighty thousand souls and a tourist destination for millions more. It also, strangely enough, was the lynchpin in a white paper about a mega-tsunami that would devastate the East Coast of the United States, as well as the British Isles, Spain, Portugal and potentially the nations ringing the Mediterranean.

Because Heyerdal had been owned by the Jeopardy Corporation, which had also sponsored the white paper, it was a slim lead for Stony Man Farm and its efforts to suss out the situation. While the world’s eyes were locked on a vacation paradise under siege by madmen, the men of Able Team were looking for a handle on why La Palma was the focus of such interest.

Schwarz cast around, realizing that something was wrong but unable to put his finger on it. There was wreckage extending out into the water, the most spectacular of which was a gutted freighter that had been devastated by fire. He kept being drawn back to this, and noted that Carl Lyons, a former Los Angeles P.D. cop, also was focused on the strange vibe.

Schwarz was as comfortable with the metaphysical as he was with the very solid and real world of electronics and computer systems, and one of the things he strongly believed was that the human mind was attuned to pick up data that was outside of the realm of the five ordinary senses. He had been present when Lyons spoke of “the feel” of a crime scene. This was before the popularization of forensic psychology, and Schwarz had always been certain of some more-than-standard instincts displayed by his partners.

“What do you have, Ironman?” Schwarz asked.

Carl “Ironman” Lyons, the leader of Able Team, remained still, his gaze focused on the gutted hulk. “What did they say was in here?”

“Wreckage. It was gutted by the fire,” Schwarz explained. “But you already knew that. You went over the files three times on the trip over here.”

Lyons nodded, his face a grim mask.

“And you’re wondering why someone would start a fire inside a hulk like that?” Schwarz asked.

Again the silent nod of agreement.

“They only found nine of the OSHA team, too,” Schwarz said.

Lyons looked at a temporary gangplank that had been erected for investigators to look within the wreckage. Schwarz followed him up and overlooked the carnage within. Plenty of high-definition images had been taken of the madness left over from the arson inferno.

“Did they bring in divers?” Lyons asked.

“I’m not going to be Watson to your Holmes, homes,” Schwarz quipped. “They moved in as far as they could under the docks, but the wreckage made it impossible to get inside the hull here.”

“And they didn’t drop anyone down into the water here,” Lyons muttered, looking through the doorway. There was no latticework left to stand on, though he could see a small shelf where one of the bodies had been recovered. The flames had been insanely hot, yet there remained a small bit of surviving human tissue, carbonized, that could mark the OSHA inspector’s corpse.

“Underwater metal. Not a safe place to go high diving,” Schwarz returned.

Lyons nodded. He stared at the lifeless, black reflective pool beneath. Schwarz didn’t like the intensity of his friend’s focus.

“I said...” Schwarz started, his voice rising.

That didn’t stop Lyons. He took one step through the door and plummeted into the water below.

Schwarz reached out, his throat tight as his friend splashed down, twenty yards below. A sixty-foot drop was something that was akin to making the same jump sixty feet to concrete. The standard limit for Olympic-class diving was off a ten-meter board, and while the record was 172 feet documented, he didn’t believe that Lyons had the kind of training for that, not when he was jumping into a tangle of twisted metal. For a ten-meter dive, the FINA—Fédération Internationale de Natation—recommendation was four and a half to five meters of depth to allow for a glide to a halt.

Lyons went in feetfirst, as far as he could tell. Maybe that would help.

“Carl!” Schwarz called after him.

Lyons’s head, blond hair matted dark brown against his scalp after his dunking, broke the surface and he spit out water.

“Come on in, Gadgets,” Lyons returned. “Better yet, go get a rope.”

“You are a complete freak, Carl,” Schwarz snapped. It took him ten minutes to locate some rope, by which time Rosario “Pol” Blancanales, the third member of the team, had joined him. Blancanales didn’t seem surprised in the least that their leader had done something as stupid as Schwarz claimed. Lyons didn’t think he was indestructible, but he also knew that sometimes you had to push your limits to accomplish a task.

“Brought two spools, in case you found the tenth body,” Blancanales called down.

Lyons nodded. “Toss down that rope first, then anchor it. I’ll help with bearing that weight.”

“We’ll need a tarp. He’s been down there for thirty days,” Schwarz mused.

“It’s not pretty,” Lyons said. He held something up. It was small, metallic and red. “Got a present for you.”

“Think it’ll work after a month in the drink?” Blancanales asked. “In salt water?”

“Depending on how secure the SIM card was, I could recover data from it,” Schwarz returned. “All depending. I’ve got a reader in my Combat PDA. We all do.”

Lyons surfaced once more, and both men could see that he’d tied an x-harness around the shoulders of a dead man, his skin shriveled, body seeming like a mummified prune. He then waved for the next rope.

With that, Lyons was back up after a minute of climbing the knotted line.

“How did you know you’d be all right down there?” Blancanales asked, helping their drenched partner to the top of the gangplank.

“I had my combat boots on. Reinforced ankles designed for parachuting, so I figured that if I hit anything feetfirst, the boots would at least keep my feet and shins from exploding before I flexed,” Lyons answered. “Wouldn’t have been something a dive crew leader would authorize...”

“You do realize that your health insurance, in that case, would have been a 9 mm slug through the head, right?” Schwarz asked.

Lyons shrugged, then produced the cell phone from his pocket. “Here you go, Gadgets.”

Blancanales set off to obtain a tarp for the body of the OSHA agent.

Blancanales’s jog slowed, though. A sudden deceleration that was all the warning Schwarz and Lyons would need.

An instant later the two men hurled themselves down the gangplank, diving for cover as a stream of automatic gunfire ripped the side of the incinerated hulk.

Able Team had arrived and had only incidentally recovered potential evidence of what had happened during the firebombing here at the boatyard. But now, when a shadowy group of assassins opened fire, their original plan had succeeded. Acting as nosy investigators, they had drawn conspirators out of the woodwork, conspirators who might actually have information about the deadly group who had seized control of an entire island.

Now all they had to do was to survive the hard contact.

* * *

CARL LYONS DIVED INTO a shoulder roll, bullets zipping past him. The assassins were firing high because they’d started shooting when he and Hermann Schwarz were at the very top of the gangplank, and never got a chance to catch up. As it was summer, he and his allies had been clad for the warm Virginia weather, alleviated slightly by being on the Norfolk waterfront where boatyards caught the cool breezes off the Atlantic.

Unfortunately such warmth restricted the amount of firepower each could carry beneath their windbreakers that had been emblazoned with the letters DOJ in deference to their cover as Justice Department deputies following up on an arson investigation. The size of their weaponry was limited to enticing whatever death squad was on hand into believing they had the upper hand, an overwhelming advantage.

It was a Hail Mary strategy, a blind toss accompanied by a wild prayer, and it was one that Able Team had not only grown used to, but had also perfected. As such, they had come fully prepared for a war.

As much as the trio would have loved to have kept full-blown assault rifles and rocket launchers on hand, they needed to lull the conspirators behind the Norfolk arson into believing that they were ripe and easy targets, armed with nothing more than the standard Glock 22s

issued to federal service deputies. The choices in that regard could be limited, if Able Team hadn’t had the services of John “Cowboy” Kissinger, one of the world’s best weapon smiths.