Incendiary Dispatch

The rugged British commando, leader of one of the deadliest paramilitary units on the planet, was drinking on the job.

Drinking heavily. He upended the bottle and sucked out 500 ml of the brown liquid and kept sucking until the plastic bottle collapsed noisily upon itself. Then he released it into a trash can beside one of the computer desks and savagely twisted the plastic cap off of a second bottle.

The big plasma screen had been replaying news feeds from all over the world for three hours. How many times were they going to show this bloody piece of video? It must have been the tenth time he’d seen it.

But he couldn’t look away.

It was the video from the reporter and his cameraman out of a small station in Casper, Wyoming. They’d driven pretty far out of their way to get some video of a protest staged against the mayor of a little town called Shambert. Protesters didn’t agree with his budgeting priorities.

Then the pipelines blew and a sea of flaming crude oil swamped the town. The reporter and his cameraman had been broadcasting live as they careened wildly through Shambert, trying to find an escape route.

“Get ’em!”

It was already a famous sound bite. It was the cameraman shouting as a group of young men staggered into the streets, faces covered by their shirts from the already acrid smoke. For a second, you thought the cameraman was telling the reporter to just run the young men down to get out of town faster.

But the reporter was stomping on the brakes and the cameraman was shouting again. “We gotta get ’em!”

The cameraman screamed out the window. The young men piled into the news van. They screeched away—but maybe the reporter and cameraman shouldn’t have been Good Samaritans. Maybe they shouldn’t have taken those precious seconds to pick up those young men. Maybe they could have saved themselves, at least, if they’d had a few extra seconds to spare.

There was one way out of town left to them, and the oil was already advancing. The reporter tried to drive through the wall of flame. He had no other option. And he did manage to make it through. He reached the other side of the fire. But the van became drenched in burning oil. The men inside were shouting. It was mayhem.

Thank God the news network stopped the tape before the shouting turned to screaming. Once those men started screaming, the camera had continued to operate for eleven seconds. It sent eleven seconds of live video and audio around the world to millions of viewers. A lot of people had listened to those five men die.

The big Brit with the bottle had seen some seriously bad things in his life, but he never again wanted to hear the screaming of the men in that news van as they burned.

There was a different tape now and some female reporter was running down the latest list of attack sites. It just went on and on.

“What is that?”

Carl Lyons was there, staring at the Brit’s freshly opened bottle. It was red and sported a bright white logo in Arabic.

David McCarter waved the bottle dismissively. “Egyptian Coca-Cola. Carl, do we have anything to go on?”

“Not yet. They’re tearing it up back there.” Lyons nodded back into the depths of the Farm. McCarter understood what he meant—the cybernetics team ripping through the systems of the world in search of clues.

“What about arrests?”

“I just got here three minutes ago. I don’t know a thing.”

McCarter shook his head miserably. “How’s Pol?”

“Been better,” Rosario “Politician” Blancanales answered, trying not to limp when he came into the War Room.

“You been cleared by the doc?” Lyons demanded. “I thought you were on bed rest for another forty-eight hours.”

Blancanales’s attention was engaged for a moment by the bottle in McCarter’s hand, then he said. “I’m good to go. We got a target?”

“No,” Lyons replied. He wasn’t fooled for a second by Blancanales’s evasive response.

Blancanales’s circulatory system had been severely compromised. At the little hospital in Georgia, they had pumped every pint of compatible blood in the medical center into Blancanales before his skin began to resume something like its normal color—Lyons never would have thought Blancanales’s Hispanic complexion could have gone as pale as it had been when they’d first run him into that little E.R. They’d performed a quick, temporary stitch-up job to close the wound. Hours later, Blancanales had been transported to a larger hospital in Atlanta, where a surgeon sliced out a thin millimeter of dead flesh on either side of the wound, along with the blackened particles of burned material that had cut into him.

Blancanales hadn’t even noticed it—the moment when he was cut open by an orange-hot fragment of flying debris in the bowels of Solon Labs.

Lyons and Schwarz had fled the explosions deep into the lab and found themselves surrounded in flames. Blancanales rendezvoused with them there, in the biggest lab, where all kinds of equipment and materials were igniting, burning, melting and bursting. Something had exploded and Blancanales got in the way of a piece of shrapnel that burned through his armor, his clothing and his skin.

Blancanales was herding Lyons and Schwarz out of the building as the building burned around them. Blancanales hadn’t even realized he was losing critical quantities of blood out of the sizzling gash in his side.

“Barb—” McCarter said as the mission controller entered the War Room.

“We should have everybody on-site in twenty minutes,” she announced. “We’ll debrief then.” She looked at Blancanales. “Didn’t know you’d received medical clearance, Rosario.”

“All this is looking a lot like what we saw at the lab,” Blancanales said, waving at the big plasma screen and images of burning. Pipelines. Harbors. Ships. People.

“It does, on the surface,” she agreed.

“What about below the surface?”

Price shook her head slightly. “We just don’t know.”

* * *

THE TIME CODE on the screen read 7:35 p.m.

The War Room hosted a full house. David McCarter’s Phoenix Force teammates were present. The three members of Able Team were there.

Aaron Kurtzman was there with the Stony Many Farm cyberteam. Carmen Delahunt, a vivacious redhead, was a talented analyst. Huntington Wethers, a dignified black man, every inch the UCLA cybernetics professor that he had once been. And there was Akira Tokaido, the Japanese hacker. The man was snapping at the touchscreen on a tablet computer, looking as grim as anyone had ever seen him.

Hal Brognola was on the screen from his office in Washington, D.C. Barbara Price, as mission controller, was the one that everybody started unloading on.

“First things first,” Price said. “We’re going to go through a list of incidents.” She looked around at the gathering of faces. “It’s a long one.”

And indeed it was.

“Thirty major pipelines are out of commission,” Price said. “In nearly all cases, the sabotage occurred in semiremote areas where the explosive devices could be, we assume, placed in advance. It’s also clear that some locations were chosen for their geography—the places where the oil flow and fire could do the most damage.”

“Like in Wyoming,” said Hal Brognola.

“Yes,” Price said. “Like in Wyoming. We’re still receiving information from around the world, but there appears to be a standard approach to the sabotage. A series of small explosive devices were placed along the pipelines in advance, where they waited for a signal to detonate.”

“Does anyone have one of those devices?” Brognola said.

“As far as we know, most of the oil fires continue to burn and no investigation teams have been able to get to the scene of any of the actual explosions.”

“What about Alaska?” Brognola demanded.

“No.” Price looked at the screen. Video pickups shifted automatically even when Brognola’s image moved from one screen to another. “The pipeline attacks followed certain patterns, from what we can tell. The explosives detonated simultaneously—maybe as many as twenty to thirty small explosions at once. More in some cases.

“The pipeline in Wyoming was opened up at approximately thirty-four locations over a distance of two miles. The oil spilled out under the pipeline pressure. There are block valve stations on the line that responded to the pressure drop automatically and immediately shut down oil flow. However, at least fifteen of the explosions took place uphill of the station that is supposed to protect the town in case of a pipeline breach. The next station shut down the pipe, but the volume of oil remaining in the pipelines was considerable and was gravity-fed into the town. Gravity-fed oil flow from punctures on the east and the west of the town fed the fires on the town limits and trapped the population inside.”