Extermination

Through the fog of his traumatized mind, Robespierre recognized the odd object as it crawled slowly closer to him like a white, ramrod-straight maggot. He’d seen it on TV on a show about military weapons hosted by a bald guy who whispered dramatically to the point where he seemed more like a caricature than a soldier.

Global Hawk, the name came in a breathless, hushed tone pulled from the show. The wings seemed wrong, with cylinders nestled up beneath its pale belly.

This Hawk, came the host’s voice again, has talons.

“No…it couldn’t be,” Robespierre said to himself, his internal dialogue indeed clearer.

“Robey?” Clayton called over the radio. “What did you croak about?”

“Global Hawk,” Robespierre repeated, putting every ounce of strength into getting the name right.

“What?”

The unmanned drone soared over the squad car, and as it did so, two of the cylinders detached from the wing points. Robespierre tapped his sagging reserves of energy once again, hauling himself behind the dashboard of the car as he saw them release.

“Cover!” he bellowed into his radio.

He wondered if the warning was in time, then he heard a loud, powerful thump in the distance. The windshield suddenly cracked as if struck with a sledgehammer, the glass turning white with fractures as the flexible polymer core sandwiched between the panes did its job, preventing razor-sharp shards from flying into the interior of the car. The squad car, being a hundred feet from the blast center, had absorbed the wave of three pounds per square inch of increased air pressure, the roll cage and safety glass absorbing the shock wave that proved powerful enough to fold the metal struts holding up traffic signs.

Robespierre remained safe and conscious for the fifteen minutes it took for backup and an ambulance to arrive at the quiet town of Albion. What the trooper hadn’t noticed, thanks to the impact of a rifle bullet into his thoracic cavity, was a prior explosion at the fruit stand he’d paused at, where he’d seen the remnants of people who ate until their throats clogged or were maddened enough by hunger to charge a man holding a shotgun. The previous blast had turned the roadside attraction and the corpses around it into vapor, the combined force of two 500-pound laser-guided bombs more than sufficient to produce a thirty-meter-wide crater where any body parts found would have been made of ash or crumpled, blast-shattered bone.

The town had been rocked by more than just two of the canisters. Robespierre had been shell-shocked for the devastating explosion, missing the other two bombs that had been part of the MQ-9 Reaper’s 3800-pound payload. The MQ-9 was far different from the jet-engine-powered Global Hawk RQ-4, precisely for the propeller wash that had convinced the trooper that an aircraft had been approaching. Its six 500-pound dumb bombs had been more than enough to turn Albion into a smoldering crater—actually, two huge butterfly-shaped craters easily thirty meters wide. Even though Iowa was in the dreaded tornado alley of the central United States, the construction of the town hadn’t been sturdy enough to deal with the overpressure that flattened brick walls and turned wood to splinters.

Only Robespierre’s distance from ground zero, and the bloody mess he’d been reduced to, had spared him as the Reaper’s operator assumed he was likely mortally wounded. Had the trooper shown more signs of life than sagging against a car door, the drone’s operator would have used one of the wing-mounted AGM Hellfire missiles on the squad car, turning it into a mass of twisted wreckage.

It was a bit of overconfidence and laziness on the drone crew’s part. Not only did there exist a living witness to the carnage of Albion, but there was also dash-camera footage of a renegade, heavily armed unmanned aerial vehicle blowing a town on American soil to oblivion.

THE RINGING of a phone jarred Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz from his sleep, and his head popped up from the pillow. In the dark hotel room’s other bed, Schwarz’s best friend, Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, continued to snore. According to the luminous dial on Schwarz’s watch, it was a little after five in the afternoon.

Able Team, a three-man counterterrorism and anti-crime squad, had been hunting leads from the shadows of evening past the crack of dawn.

This particular hunt had brought them to Chicago, and the search was on for the steering and laser guidance models that would turn a gravity-flung conventional bomb into a precision strike munition. Such a device—let alone a large shipment—in the hands of the wrong people would result in large death tolls. One well-placed warhead, even of the 250-pound variety, would be able to collapse a skyscraper in on itself as if it were made of precariously balanced playing cards. A crowded office building or a federal building would go from bustling workplace for thousands of people to a tomb for those teeming multitudes.

Schwarz let the phone stop ringing and pulled out his personal Combat PDA. The screen blipped to life, and Barbara Price was on the other end.

“What’s going on?” Schwarz asked.

“We found a few of the laser guidance modules,” Price said, her voice grim and eyes unwavering from the webcam she looked into. “Northeastern Iowa, near the Illinois border.”

“How many killed?” Schwarz asked.

That bit of conversation prompted Blancanales to sit up, fully awake, turning on the bedside lamp. Schwarz grimaced at the pile of pizza boxes and junk food bags overflowing from the room’s tiny garbage pail.

Though Blancanales’s hair was whitened with age, his weathered face lined with wrinkles, the man’s back and shoulders were tautly muscled, ropy coils of sinew flowing as he threw on his shoulder holster and then tugged on a sport shirt to conceal the carry rig.

“We can’t tell. Official reports put the population of Albion at 250, but there’s no finding most of their bodies,” Price said. “But we have an eyewitness and dash-cam footage. Hal’s doing everything to keep this squashed in the press, so you guys better get out there.”

Schwarz nodded for his CPDA’s webcam. “Something else is wrong?”

“The survivor and radio dispatch are telling us stories of strange activity before the bombs hit,” Price answered. “Very strange activity that makes the laser-guided bombs now a secondary concern.”

Schwarz frowned. “We’ll head to the airport and have Mott take us in.”

The CPDA connection clicked off, and Schwarz looked to his old buddy.

“Worse than laser-guided bombs?” Blancanales asked. “This is going to be another bad one.”

“I took the call. You go wake Carl,” Schwarz told him.

Blancanales, already dressed, nodded and acceded to his friend’s request. Schwarz took the opportunity to get his gear prepared for the trip. There was a knock at the room door much quicker than he would have expected.

Schwarz kept his pistol hidden behind his leg, just in case there was trouble. It was Blancanales again.

“You didn’t get Carl?” Schwarz asked.

Blancanales held up a note. “He taped this to our door.”

Schwarz unfolded it. “‘Picking up a loose end,’” he read out loud.

Blancanales nodded. “We’ll find him quick enough if we follow the sounds of the explosions.”

Schwarz sighed. “I’ll call Mott and have him wait for us while we rein in the Ironman.”

“If I know him, he’s been out all day,” Blancanales replied. “He might just be done already.”

CHAPTER TWO

Chicago’s late-afternoon weather was just perfect for Carl Lyons. It was neither too warm for the loose gun-concealing leather jacket he wore, nor was it so cold that he would risk being seen as out of place by leaving the jacket unzipped, thus making it quicker for him to reach for his defensive weapons.

Lyons was a former LAPD officer, and he generally wore a spine-numbing scowl that could unnerve even the toughest enemy. In a shoulder holster, Lyons wore the replacement for his old Colt Python, a Smith Wesson Model 686 Plus. It was a 7-shot .357 Magnum revolver with a six-inch barrel, giving the Able Team commander the option to engage enemies at up to 200 yards. The weapon had been refined in the Stony Man Farm armory, given a matte, nonreflective finish, Pachmayer Compact grips and a trigger job that made double-action shooting swift and instinctive. His backup for the mighty Mag-Plus was another Smith & Wesson, this time the polymer-framed MP-45, a sleek weapon that carried ten fat .45-caliber rounds in the magazine and another in the pipe. Lyons and the rest of the team had gone with the version that had the same thumb safety levers as on their single-action Colt 1911 autos, a lifesaving option if it came time to wrestle for the big .45, but not a hindrance to a locked and cocked .45 user as the levers worked identically to their Colt counterparts.

Kissinger, their armorer, had wanted to see how the same company’s 1911 version would work, but Able Team had grown spoiled with high-capacity magazines, and the MP-45 had one that fit flush instead of sticking out, making concealment difficult. Kissinger modified these with extended, threaded barrels for suppressed work and a knurled knob that protected the threads when not wearing a silencer. Lyons’s belt carried not only the .45, but also spare ammunition pouches for both pistols, a flashlight holder, a folding knife and his PDA/communicator, as well as a flat package of cable ties that could be deployed either as handcuffs, improvised door locks or tourniquets to prevent massive bleeding.

As a former beat cop, Lyons didn’t mind the weight that hung around his hips, especially since it would give him an edge toward survival. Schwarz and Blancanales had often teased him about being a big Boy Scout, always being prepared. Lyons had never been in the Scouts, and he doubted that there was a merit badge for busting up bar fights or dropping a hostage taker with a single gunshot from across a parking lot. However, that preparedness was what had elevated the burly, blond ex-cop to become one of America’s top nine fighting men, the people called upon when every other option was either used up or any other law enforcement or military response was simply too slow to save the day. Lyons’s entire existence now was lived day-to-day, looking out for worst-case scenarios and maintaining the mental agility to solve those problems as they came to him.

Lyons slid into a tenement building and slipped his flashlight into his hand, palmed to conceal it. It was a four-inch-long, squat, fat pipe of knurled steel with a rubber cap at one end for the toggle switch. The lens at the other end was surrounded by an octagonal collar that had the density and strength to shatter glass or lay open a cheek down to the bone. Lyons hadn’t needed the nine powerful LED bulbs for illumination, his eyes quickly adjusting to the shadows of the lobby, but the flashlight would prove to be an effective impact weapon against an attacker, and those LED lights would sear the vision of someone trying to attack him with a gun in the close quarters of the lobby.

That kind of thinking was how the man called Ironman had become Able Team’s leader, commanding two Special Forces veterans when Lyons hadn’t had traditional military or paramilitary experience. The big blond ex-cop had survived the rough streets of Los Angeles and had also survived for years working undercover against the mob, quite often teaming with Mack Bolan, the Executioner. It was surviving against mob hits and backing up Bolan in his one-man war that had earned Lyons the nickname Ironman, a legacy that had been forged even deeper in hell zones from the jungles of South America to the deserts of the Middle East.

That kind of edge and awareness had been born in the streets, though. The team had been on the hunt for a shipment of modules that were capable of turning unguided bombs packed with hundreds of pounds of high explosives into precision killing machines. The most dramatic instance of such a tool utilized in a city was when the Israeli Defense Force had fired one at a terrorist leader who had taken up residence in an apartment building ringed with bodyguards and the added “protection” of innocent Palestinian civilians living in the building. The whole complex had been taken out by a single one-ton bomb that killed fourteen and wounded fifty others. The building had been turned into a crater, and had the warhead been launched at any other time, the death toll would have been even greater. It wasn’t the kind of move that Lyons would have preferred, but to only kill fifteen people with two thousand pounds of high explosives, launched from a supersonic strike fighter, was a sign of how deadly those modules could be.

That was the kind of firepower that a terrorist group, no matter how disciplined, could hardly keep secret. There would be bragging, an increase in veiled threats, something that broke loose into the whisper stream, rumors flying through the underground that someone would trade in on. Hundreds of the high-tech units could be combined with weapons no more refined than steel pipes stuffed with plastic explosives and rolled out of the back of a cargo plane. One of these could easily be dropped into a meeting of Congress, or an airport crowded with innocent travelers, causing death and devastation in a manner that terrorists loved.

The arms-dealer trail was their only lead. It was what had gotten them to Chicago, but nothing had gone further. The Farm’s cybernetic crew had worked hard, pulling out the stops on suspected foreign and domestic terrorist groups who would have the money and coordination for such a theft under the opinion that perhaps one cell had been disciplined enough to hold their tongues.

But that wasn’t how it appeared. From radical Islamic fundamentalists—the scourge who gave the Arab world a bad reputation—to Illinois neo-Nazis—a scourge who gave all humanity a worse reputation—no one seemed to be primed with confidence or assigning extra security to protect their illicit firepower.

The laser modules had moved on somewhere, and they had most likely gone to be stored with the bombs that they were destined to steer toward death and destruction.