Orbital Velocity

“Toady? Toady, what the fuck? You drunk again?” a voice challenged.

“What’s up?” another asked.

“Damn fool passed out riding a goddamned luggage trolley around,” the man at the door said. Lyons saw a bone-white globe around the man’s neck. He stepped out into the open, and the other two men joined him.

Lyons had set his bait well, as Bones stuffed his big shiny stainless revolver into his waistband. The three of them walked closer to Toady in his perch, and one of the bikers leaned over the dashboard, looking for the ignition to stop the cart’s unrelenting “assault” on the locked door.

“Of all the—” Bones began.

Lyons didn’t let him complete his curse toward his fallen comrade. With a lunge, the big ex-cop burst into view, his forearm crashing against Bones’s jaw with the force of a sledgehammer. Lyons wanted the skull-wearing freak out cold and out of the fight to prevent the possibility that the other two could keep Bones from speaking. The biker toppled backward like a felled tree, but Lyons didn’t hear him fall, as he was too busy concentrating on other problems. One of the bikers was stooped over to catch Bones, but the last of them reached for a black 1911 he had tucked into his belt.

The handgun made him a target for Lyons, who lashed out with mae geri, the Shotokan front kick. Lyons had been a karateka for several years, since just before he’d joined Able Team, and his familiarity with the blunt, direct Shotokan style had proved to be more than an edge in countless fights at home and abroad. The blow struck the biker in the stomach, just below his navel, driving the wind from his lungs and folding him over reflexively. Thus positioned, Lyons automatically transitioned to a ushiro empi chop, bringing his elbow down savagely on the enemy’s back.

The gunner struck the ground face-first, mouth and nose gushing blood as they rocketed against the concrete. Lyons flipped the man onto his back and plucked the 1911 from his waistband. He dumped the magazine and worked the slide to eject the one in the pipe. He followed with a press of the thumb and a flick of the slide stop out of the frame. Now the weapon was useless, in two pieces and tossed away in two directions.

“Think you’re hot shit?” said the biker who’d lunged to Bones’s aid.

Lyons regarded the opponent who was reaching for his own iron. With a suiki uki block, Lyons scooped the man’s hand away from the handle of his sidearm, and he followed it up with his one-knuckle fist, his favorite punch in the art. With his knuckle projecting like a spearhead, he struck the biker in the breastbone with enough force to halt his breathing. Lyons stiffened his hand for a shuto strike and plunged the hardened blade of flesh and bone into his foe’s sternum. Fetid breath escaped from the man’s lungs, but Lyons withdrew and stabbed into the man’s clavicle, right at the juncture of nerves and blood vessels running along the side of the neck.

The biker was unconscious within moments.

Lyons turned and saw Bones struggle to get to his hands and knees. Lyons swept the biker’s hand out from under him. A quick frisk revealed that his shiny .44 Magnum was accompanied by a claw hammer, a favorite biker weapon. He threw both of them aside and hauled the stunned criminal to his feet.

“Come on, Bones,” Lyons said. “We’re going to talk about Plan B, and about that skull around your neck.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia

Hermann Schwarz entered the cybernetic paradise that was known as the Stony Man Farm War Room. He paused, looking at the wall of digital LCD monitors that offered a tapestry of views from around the globe. Workstations sprawled out, each indicative of their owner, all of whom were at work right now. There was an optional side station that Schwarz and Manning had appropriated for themselves whenever they were working at the Farm. The Canadian utilized the station simply for research on his varied fields, from ballistics to structural physics. Schwarz, on the other hand, fiddled and experimented with computer codework, constantly updating and improving the efficiency of the programs that he ran on his personal cell phone and the combat Personal Data Assistants that he’d assigned to his comrades in the action squads Able Team and Phoenix Force.

Right now, his Able Team partner and friend Carl Lyons was in Los Angeles, already in town on a rare moment of much-earned leave. With the veiled threat against Russia and the rest of the G8, Lyons had gone back on duty immediately. Schwarz was watching his combat PDA, knowing that it was possible that he’d be called to action to deal with problems along the coast.

In the meantime, Schwarz was working with the rest of the cybernetic team at the Farm in an effort to backtrack the kinetic shafts that had struck Moscow. They surely weren’t the only ones trying to figure out the trajectory of the deadly missiles, but at least they could act on that information almost as soon as they received it, as opposed to a more conventional agency, which needed at least four hours of logistics and even more time for intricate planning.

It wasn’t that Able Team and Phoenix Force could ever be accused of going off without a plan. However, the two Stony Man Farm teams had enough experience and skill, as well as the ability to think unconventionally, that they could be called upon at a moment’s notice. They trained for as many contingencies as possible, honing and refreshing their skills in the time between their missions. Their intelligence, training and the technology they were able to fall back upon had all combined into a cohesive catch-all for whatever they could face.

That had been proved by the events in London less than an hour ago, when two members of Phoenix Force had been the deciding factor in what could have been a tragedy, containing mass violence and allowing innocent civilians to escape from seething, violent soccer hooligans. Schwarz made certain to listen in on Lyons’s conversation with Brognola, though the big Able Team leader had gone silent as the VOR station at LAX was mentioned.

Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman turned his attention toward Schwarz. “You come up with anything yet, Gadgets?”

Schwarz looked at Bear, the Stony Man cybernetics expert, and shook his head. He was still running mathematical calculations in his mind, but the Able Team electronics genius was the kind of a person who could mentally multitask with remarkable ease. When his teachers complained that he, as a youth, seemed to be antsy and distracted in class, he realized that it was because the lessons they gave him only occupied a small fraction of his brain power. He needed other distractions. Schwarz would hum to satisfy the part of his mental focus that needed music, while he idly designed circuits or performed complex equations as mere doodles. He literally had designed some of his gadgets in his sleep, the burning intellect trapped in his skull looking for something to do even as he dreamed.

In one way, it was a godsend for the brilliant technician. The burning need to create, to tinker, to modify and program allowed him to live in the moment, to focus on nothing and thus able to experience everything. There were times when he seemed to have an almost paranormal danger sense, but while the genius believed in the possibility of ESP, he knew the truth was a matter of being able to reconcile his conscious and subconscious minds. The human subconscious was vastly aware of the world around it, but very few people had tuned their upper mental faculties to pay attention to those background cues. Schwarz’s subconscious awareness was a directly accessible part of his mind, allowing him to process the sound of a scrape as either a breeze blowing a twig or a boot sole scuffing concrete.

“The nearest I could make out was that we’re looking at an eastward launch,” Schwarz replied. “The people who fired those darts were using Earth’s rotation to add to the relative velocity of those missiles. And who knows how many times they orbited the planet before they struck.”

“Given an equatorial launch, we could assume two or three cycles around the earth to angle in on Moscow,” Kurtzman replied.

“Maybe more, since those darts came in almost directly from the east,” Schwarz mused. Something caught his eye in his peripheral vision, and he turned his head, focusing on it.

“What is it?” Kurtzman asked.

“Something on the world map,” Schwarz said, getting up and walking toward the plasma screens. He headed toward the monitor panel that contained northern, equatorial Africa. It was a small flicker in Cameroon.

The monitor screen kept watch for anomalies that would add up to flags for potential problems that would end up in Stony Man’s lap. The computer would look for trends in increased criminal or terrorist activity, either smuggling or intensified violence. Then it would take regular census numbers of American or allied agents in those areas. Operatives who had not reported in for three consecutive days raised the flag.

“What do we have in Cameroon?” Schwarz asked.

“Nothing for CIA or NSA as far as we can tell,” Barbara Price spoke up from her liaison station. She frowned. “I’m checking Department of Defense.”

“You think this might be relevant?” Kurtzman asked.

Schwarz pointed at the proximity of the African coastal nation to the equator. “What were we just talking about, launchwise?”

Kurtzman grimaced. “Barb, what is the DoD looking at?”

“Two operatives were sent to the Congo to look into reports of kidnapping among the local population,” Price answered. She looked up. “Modern-day slavery, and in that region, slaves equal diamond mines.”

“Not necessarily in this case,” Schwarz said, “But then, there had to be something done to fund a potential launch pad.”

“Construction teams for a launcher,” Price murmured. “The Congo is akin to a million square miles…”

“One point four million square miles to be exact,” Schwarz corrected. “That’s just for the river basin, which is one of the top three largest unspoiled rainforests in the world.”

“Even with satellites, it’s going to take a lot of time to look through all that jungle,” Price noted, taking a deep breath. “And it’s not as if we have a lot of eyes in the sky looking down at the Congo.”

“Things are more interesting with piracy off the Horn of Africa or around the Mediterranean,” Kurtzman added. “Reallocating orbital surveillance for something that’s only a hunch is going to take a lot of effort and might raise too many flags.”

Schwarz turned, regarding Kurtzman. “I know it’s just a hunch, but everyone else is looking to the sky and pointing fingers at China and the U.S.”

“The only two countries with the resources to launch orbital bombardment satellites,” Price noted. “Though we’re concerned with something in the U.S. Lyons informed us that the Reich Highwaymen were skulking around LAX.”

“Reich Highwaymen in the U.S., Jakkhammer Legacy in England,” Schwarz mused. “Anything on our Nazi watch?”

“There’ve been funds flying around the backtrails, but nothing that points in any solid direction,” Carmen Delahunt spoke up. “All we know is—” she looked at her screen, her green eyes flashing as she did some quick math “—the amount of money in the stream is increased.”

“And no old artifacts or gold has turned up,” Schwarz stated.

“That’s true, but violence has increased in Europe among diamond smugglers,” Delahunt replied, anticipating Schwarz’s next supposition.

The Able Team genius frowned. Being right while he grasped at rumors and hints to form a plan of action was no victory. While he’d put together circumstantial evidence for where Stony Man should direct its attention for the origins of their unknown enemy, the conspiracy seemed to have links to violent, neofascist, racial supremacist groups from Moscow to Los Angeles. Putting boots on the ground in Africa would do nothing to stem the tide of mayhem that humans could cause, as opposed to the destruction wrought by throwing giant crowbars at cities from orbit.

Able Team had encountered the adherents of racial intolerance in the U.S. and engaged them in brutal combat. They were bloodthirsty and ruthless in their ideology, and recently the white supremacist scum had gone from supplementing their income with drug dealing and weapons smuggling to becoming full-time players, exercising their greed at easy money, power and prestige.

The Reich Highwaymen were symptomatic of this trend, being among the most successful smugglers across the border between California and Mexico. There were also five warrants for RHM members wanted for questioning in regard to twenty murders.

That’s just what the police knew. Unreported killings, in Schwarz’s experience, would be exponentially more.