Red Frost

Blancanales closed on the trailers with caustic smoke flowing from the burning trucks swirling around him, stinging his eyes. The Light Fifty boomed again, and a car horn started to blow. He didn’t look back.

On the far side of the single-wides, Blancanales put down the girl. Her baby face was contorted with fear, but she just stood there, a doe in the headlights. She didn’t move even when he turned away. As he roughly ushered the others forward, the car horn stopped and the gunfire dwindled, as well. Someone started yelling from the meth lab. He couldn’t make out the words.

“Get down! Quick!” Blancanales shouted in Spanish, shoving the prisoners from behind. “On the ground! Cover your heads!”

Then time ran out.

THE METH SLAVES HIDING under burning truck 2 didn’t budge at Lyons’s urging. They stared back at him as if he were the bogeyman. The unintelligible shouting of a huge guy in a ski mask with two autoweapons didn’t do much to instill confidence and trust.

Lyons slung one of the machine pistols, then lunged forward, grabbing the nearest laborer by the arm. “The rest of you, come on!” he yelled. “You can’t stay under there! You’re all gonna die if you do!”

The raggedy laborer went limp on him. Deadweight in the dirt. Lyons hauled him out from under the chassis anyway, but as soon as he let go, the man turned and crawled right back.

The heat from the engine fire was getting worse. So was the oily smoke. The situation was flat-out impossible. There was nothing Lyons could do. In the end, self-preservation had to take precedence over rescue.

“Shit!” he snarled in frustration as he bailed. High-kicking, he raced back the way he had come, around the last truck in line, past the end of the meth lab and the corner of the shotgun shack, heading for the irrigation canal. A single gunshot from the Barrett rang out, followed by a massive, billowing explosion. Behind him, at the edges of his peripheral vision, the world turned a brilliant orange. Holding the machine pistols overhead, he jumped for the irrigation ditch. In midair, icy cold slammed his back, penetrating right through his blacksuit. A fraction of a second later the overloaded nerves correctly registered the sensation as heat.

Skin-blistering heat.

As he plunged into the ditch water, the explosion’s concussive force pitched him forward, face first toward the far bank.

SCHWARZ NEEDED ONLY ONE API round to send the whole narco compound straight to hell.

He put the M-8 incendiary slug through the middle of one of the fifty-five-gallon chemical barrels lined up in front of the meth lab. On impact, there was an intense white flash. A fraction of a second later, with a resounding boom the targeted drum became a forty-foot-wide, forty-foot-high ball of flame. The initial explosion set off a chain reaction with the other drums and with the cargo container. In a stunning instant, the raw materials of meth mass production—acetone, toluene, ether—were transformed into nothing less than a napalm bomb.

At the center of the seething fireball, the cargo container flew apart; the detonation’s shock wave blew off the roof of the tumbledown shack and rocked the single-wide trailers off their cinder-block foundations. As a churning black mushroom cloud erupted from the center of the explosion, the heaviest debris began raining down, a torrent of unrecognizable metallic junk falling through the flaming mist.

Like a string of massive firecrackers, the gas tanks and cargo boxes of the rental trucks exploded one by one.

The initial blast sent the trailer nearest to the lab sliding off its foundation. With a sickening screech it dominoed into the second single-wide and knocked it loose, as well. For an instant the sky overhead was the color of flame.

“Stay down!” Blancanales howled as one of the forced workers broke for the open fields behind them. “Cover your heads!”

The runner got maybe twenty feet before he was cut down by a cartwheeling, six-foot chunk of corrugated sheet steel. Its ragged edge caught him square in the back and pancaked him into the dirt.

Lighter and lighter materials pelted the field, then came a rain of fine, choking dust. Mixed in were burning bits of green paper, the contents of the black duffel. The meth lab had become a smoking hole in the ground.

Dripping wet, Carl Lyons appeared through the drug-profit confetti, a muddy smudge on the forehead and cheek of his ski mask.

Glancing at the surviving slaves scattering in all directions, Blancanales said, “What do you think, should we call INS to pick them up?”

“Not our job,” Lyons replied. “Besides, these people have been through enough for one day. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

The two men quickly dragged the limp bodies out of the blackened, blistered SUV and brushed some of the glass off the leather seats. Lyons then drove it on two flats across the field where Schwarz waited beside the combine. As he rode in the back with the Barrett, Schwarz looked up at the gore sprayed over the headliner and dash and said, “Man, I really made a mess of this ride, didn’t I?”

Lyons flattened the gas pedal and the SUV bounded forward, porpoising over the furrows and slewing through the soft, tilled earth. The designated landing zone was a half mile away from the killzone, just in case the mop-up was incomplete.

It wasn’t.

When Lyons stopped the Lexus, nothing but rims were left on the driver’s side. At once a gray-and-red helicopter popped up out of the north, swinging in very low and very fast. Because of the ongoing federal airspace surveillance, Jack Grimaldi’s landing was touch-and-go. The second the skids struck dirt, Able Team piled in.

No time for small talk.

A half-smoked, unlit cigar clenched in his teeth, Grimaldi vaulted the chopper off the ground with a sickening lurch, then wheeled it around 180 degrees, dropping to fencepost height and really putting the hammer down.

“DEA closing in?” Blancanales asked as he snapped into a safety harness.

“Are you kidding?” the deeply tanned pilot growled over his shoulder. “The Feds’ mouths are still hanging open.”

“Then where’s the goddamn fire?” Lyons asked.

“Two hours away. Just got word from the Farm on the secure line. Shit has hit the fan over on the coast…this one’s big time.”

CHAPTER TWO

Stony Man Farm, Virginia,

9:49 a.m. EDT

Fourteen minutes after the Russian sub ran aground on Ediz Hook, eight minutes after receiving a frantic hot-line call from the White House, five minutes after Jack Grimaldi was notified of the situation via secure scrambled channel, Hal Brognola was still staring at the satellite feed replay on the flat-panel wallscreen. He couldn’t help himself. The other members of the Stony Man team—mission controller Barbara Price, weapons specialist John “Cowboy” Kissinger, and the elite cyber squad of Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, Huntington Wethers, Akira Tokaido and Carmen Delahunt—were all having the same reaction.

Recurring disbelief.

The image on the screen was that shocking.

The bow of the huge black foreign warship jutted out of U.S. waters, its submerged propeller churning up plumes of froth. In the background, not one hundred yards away, stood the little orange Coast Guard air station hangar at the tip of Ediz Hook.

A second flat-panel wallscreen was filled with jerky live-feed video with sound from a circling Coast Guard helicopter. A dense pillar of smoke boiled up from the sub’s sail, drifting lazily south over the little mill town.

Brognola knew that at that moment additional Coast Guard and Navy helicopters from Neah Bay and Whidbey Island, respectively, were en route, as was the emergency-nuclear-response unit from sub base Bangor on Hood Canal. ETA on the ENR team was five more minutes. Meanwhile, scrambled A-6s from Whidbey Naval Air Station were already screaming low over the scene, sealing off the airspace.

As the Coast Guard video zoomed in tight on the sub’s stern and the churning prop, the head Fed couldn’t help but grimace. Nuke-powered boat running full tilt half out of the water, smoke pouring out amidships. Brognola wasn’t the only one who visualized dire consequences.

“For pete’s sake, why doesn’t the crew shut down the engines!” Barbara Price exclaimed.

“It’s got to be hotter than hell in there,” Hunt Wethers said. The African American, former Berkeley cybernetics professor gestured at the screen with the mouthpiece of his unlit pipe and said, “Why hasn’t anyone bailed from the sub?”

“Maybe they can’t get out,” Akira Tokaido suggested. “Exit routes all blocked…”

“Actually, the damage doesn’t look that bad,” Kissinger told the young Japanese American. “Like a lot of the Russian subs, the hull is probably made up of two layers, an inner and outer skin with six feet of crush space between them, so even grounded there might not be a full breach. I’ve never seen that design configuration before, but the ship is similar to the Bars class attack subs—something just over three hundred feet in length. There’s got to be at least thirty or forty crew on board.”

“Is it carrying nukes?” Delahunt asked. The redheaded former FBI agent and divorced mother of three put her finger right on the hot button.

“It’s an SSN, not a ballistic-missile sub,” Kissinger said, “but who knows what armament’s on board.”

“There’s a nuclear reactor, though,” Brognola countered.

“Actually there are probably two pressurized water reactors,” Kissinger corrected him.