Seismic Surge

He took out a small nylon pouch and began handing out syringes to his bridge crew. He pushed the needle into his pectoral muscle and squeezed the bulb. There was a slight grunt of discomfort, and then he resumed talking.

“We needed your identifications, your luggage, your general appearances,” Espinoza said.

Natalie looked to the fishing boat, growing ever closer. There were women on the deck of that ship, as well as men.

“This was an excuse to get you all together in one spot, with a minimum of cleanup,” Espinoza said.

Suddenly people to Natalie’s right began coughing, jerking spasmodically. The wave of those falling ill spread quickly through the crowd. Natalie took a frightened breath, then she lost control of her hands and arms. Her head snapped upright and she could feel her teeth tear open her tongue as her jaws clenched violently shut like a bear trap. Blood and froth oozed over her lips as her legs gave way and she slumped to the deck. Derek was beside her, vibrating as if he were some child’s doll malfunctioning. The only signs that he was even alive were the spurts of blood through his nose, broken as he’d fallen onto his face, as his lungs tried to suck in fresh breath.

Vomit burst from Natalie’s stomach, and she felt her bladder release, as well.

“The Sendero Luminoso thanks you for the donation of your lives,” Espinoza’s voice echoed in her ears. “We promise to use them well, you spoiled little children.”

Natalie winced, reaching up as Espinoza glared down at her. Her specifically. Those blue, cool eyes she’d once lost herself in were now cold, hard, angry.

Darkness settled on the girl as the nerve gas finally took full effect.

Minutes later, gloved hands would hoist her over the rail, dropping her and the other young murder victims onto the ocean floor.

CHAPTER ONE

One month later

The cold waters of the harbor beyond the boatyard

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.

As Lyons, Schwarz and Blancanales reached their cover, the three partners made a quick visual verification that the team was whole and unharmed.

“No hits?” Lyons asked.

“Nope,” Blancanales returned. Schwarz simply grunted agreement.

“Not even on the body armor, not that we’d have been able to handle it. Those are five-five-six they’re pumping out,” Schwarz added. “They missed, but now they know how quick we are.”

“So we go sneaky,” Lyons returned, unleathering the machine pistol stored in a shoulder holster under his windbreaker. Long ago, Able Team had learned the benefits of carrying fully automatic handguns with folding foregrips for better control and utility. In the early days, these had been Beretta 93-R machine pistols. Now they opted for the Heckler and Koch MP-7. The bonus of the compact machine pistol was the fact that it not only had a vertical foregrip that could be folded to fit in a shoulder holster, but it also had an extendable stock to give it riflelike stability. Lyons wasn’t much of a fan of the MP-7’s 4.6 mm projectiles, but they moved at a blistering, Kevlar-defeating velocity and were still bigger than the rounds of a Heckler and Koch G-11 autorifle, which was much larger and bulkier

The three Stony Man warriors snapped out the collapsing shoulder stocks, folding down the forward grips. The folding iron sights were propped into place so that they resembled the precision sights of the M-4s and M-16s they normally utilized. As they did so, the team shifted among the wreckage of the arson-gutted boatyard, seeking better cover and concealment, even as enemy rifles crackled, trying to pin them down.

“These bastards are getting on my nerves,” Blancanales snarled as a spray of debris splashed against him from the impact of a dozen 5.56 mm rounds. “Especially since this seems like amateur hour.”

Lyons and Schwarz heard their partner over the hands-free communicators that they wore. Lyons spoke into his throat mike. “Confirm...low training?”

“I’m still here, and I’ve given them two clean shots at me,” Blancanales replied. “Do the math.”

“No fair, Pol,” Schwarz interrupted. “Ironman can barely do math in a classroom, let alone when he’s getting shot at.”

Lyons flipped off Schwarz. “All right. New plan.”

“Fall back and kill?” Blancanales asked over the headset.

“No. Just cover me,” Lyons said. He handed his machine pistol over to Schwarz.

“Bluejay,” Schwarz muttered.

Lyons pulled out one of his handguns, a Smith and Wesson .45, and held it between his thumb and forefinger. “Stop! Stop shooting!”

His voice was shrill, terrified. It was a completely alien sound compared to all that the other two members of Able Team had heard before, but this was completely new to the men trying to shoot at them.

“I’m just an accountant! Stop shooting!”

“Throw your gun out!” one of the shooters shouted in response.

“Paper jockey!” Schwarz snarled out loud. He waylaid his MP-7 and fired his pistol, intentionally missing Lyons, but that elicited a wave of precision covering fire immediately.

Lyons tossed the Smith and Wesson on the ground, without a care, just like an inept desk worker would. He stumbled out into the open, arms wavering in the air, his eyes cast downward.

The Bluejay ploy was a simple one. One member of the team would feign injury or incompetence to call the attention of the enemy away from the others. So far, the three of them were aware that their opponents were only pretending incompetence on their own. Lyons’s use of himself as bait had not drawn enemy fire because they had some other agenda. When the prisoner that offered himself had come under fire from Schwarz, their precision shot up to deadly levels of effect.

Whoever these conspirators were, they were sharp and alert, but they were also curious about the trio of men who stumbled around the boatyard in Norfolk. That meant that they wanted and needed answers. If Lyons could get close, he might have a chance to take one while they were still in prisoner-acquisition mode.

And if not, well, Lyons still had his Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum in its shoulder holster. Lyons was an old-school LAPD officer, and his side arm had been a grandfathered revolver, either a Colt Python or its Smith and Wesson counterpart. Sure, the Colt 1911 had a lighter trigger and a faster reload, and it sat flatter beneath his concealment garments, but Lyons had a trigger finger that was trained for fast and deadly double-action revolver shooting. This wasn’t just any .357 Magnum, either, it was a Military and Police R8. It not only had the unusual five-inch, Picatinny-railed barrel, but it also was fed from an eight-round cylinder—matching the capacity of a 1911, but not the .45 auto he’d discarded, and was rendered portable by an alloy frame.

Recoil in rapid-fire with his preferred 125-grain jacketed hollowpoints was quite easy, thanks to a set of rubber finger-grooved grips and “enough” mass. Lyons could draw and fire the R8, a name referring to its being an 8-shot revolver, and put all eight hits inside of a playing card at fifteen feet, or hit four different targets twice in the space of five seconds.

It still wouldn’t help much if he were directly under the gun, but Able’s version of the Bluejay ploy counted on a full team effort.

Right now, Lyons could tell that there were three sets of sights on him directly, but judging by the hail of fire that started this off, the rest were pretty well out of his line of sight, at least since his hands were up.

Fortunately for him, he had two highly trained combat veterans on his side, and thanks to his earpiece, he was picking up the pings from their laser “painters,” which gave him a relative range and position for each of the enemy crew.

There were nine of them, three for each team member, at least those who were in sight. Lyons figured on at least two more drivers, plus security guns for their vehicles. His best guess put thirteen against them. It wasn’t the worst that Able Team had faced, but if this death squad was worth its salt, Lyons was in for one hell of a fight and he was going to start it standing out in the open.

“Who the hell are you?” the commando who had addressed him previously snarled.

Lyons kept his hands up at the level of his ears, his face wrinkled and masked in fear. He could only imagine the ribbing that he would receive later from his partners about his acting. That didn’t matter. Lyons simply had to confuse the enemy for a few more moments, not win an award for best actor.

“I’m just an accountant, I told you that already! Please just let me go.”

In the open, Lyons could better make out the uniforms of the gunmen and the gear they were packing. The man who was talking to him wore a dull, nonreflective helmet with bullet-resistant wraparound goggles. So clad, he was relatively safe from a head shot. The rifleman’s torso and shoulders were no less vulnerable, polycarbide shells shielding his shoulder joints and the heavy load-bearing vest betraying its built-in trauma plates. Whoever had sent these men to ensure that the Norfolk boatyard’s secrets remain buried beneath ash and submerged in the cold waters of the harbor was not taking any chances by sending the killers in with secondhand weapons and armor.

Blancanales’s voice hissed through the earpiece of Lyons’s hands-free communicator. “All right, Ironman, we’ve got the measure of these assholes. It’s all up to you. Give us the signal and we mop these idiots off the deck.”

Lyons simply nodded, maintaining his facade of fear. Thanks to the observations of Schwarz and Blancanales, he had a good idea of where the enemy had set themselves up. Right now he knew that there were two killers just out of his line of sight but in position to pop up and riddle him with bullets. However, since they had been sighted by his partners, they were far less of a threat simply because either Blancanales or Schwarz already had them targeted. The hidden gunmen were only a secondary threat compared to the grim, armored figure who was already addressing him.

This was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way. “My arms are getting tired, can I put them down please?” Lyons whimpered as he spoke.

“I don’t want any funny business from you, motherfucker,” the cleanup crew killer snarled in warning. He didn’t lower the muzzle of his rifle, a SIG 556 folding-stock assault rifle. Lyons knew that his body armor couldn’t take a point-blank volley from the killer; Kevlar might just as well have been gossamer for all the good it would do him. “Leave your damn mitts in the air.”

Lyons noticed a jutting steel I-beam that had the mass and durability to deflect the storm of rifle fire, and it was just within a few yards of his position. Just to be certain, Lyons mentally measured the distance once more, and then with an explosion of power he leaped into the shadow of the I-beam. Even as he dived for cover he clawed the N-frame .357 Magnum from its hidden holster. The enemy commando opened up with his SIG, but Lyons was no longer where the muzzle of the weapon was pointing as he pulled the trigger. A swarm of buzzing hornets whipped through the air, close enough that one of the bullets plucked at the sleeve of his windbreaker. Regardless of how close the enemy’s fire had come to ending his life, Lyons was shielded and down once again.

From his right, Schwarz and his MP-7 entered the fight, the little machine pistol’s 4.6 mm bullets zipping to catch one of the ambushers in the back of his head. The gunman’s helmet deflected much of the glancing burst, but the single projectile hit dead-on, its reinforced point punching through the Kevlar helmet and into the skull of the would-be murderer. An explosion of skull fragments, glass and spongy dollops of brain matter sprayed to the air close enough to Lyons that it peppered the left shoulder of his windbreaker.

Lyons didn’t mind brain stains on the Department of Justice windbreaker. He was far more concerned with the rifleman who was trying to burn him out of cover with extended bursts from an assault rifle. Lyons must have annoyed the killer because he had abandoned fire discipline and was shooting without regard for how much ammo he had in the weapon. In only a few seconds the sniper would run out, and once there was a lull in the firing, Lyons was poised to make his move.

The enemy rifle went silent and Lyons could hear a muffled curse coming from the angry commando. Too late the shooter realized his error and was torn between fumbling a new magazine into the weapon and ducking behind cover himself. That pause allowed Lyons the time he needed to whip around the I-beam, center the front sight of his Magnum on his enemy’s goggles and milk the trigger of the revolver. Punching out of the barrel at over 1500 feet per second, Lyons’s shot smashed into the tough ballistic glass of the killer’s eyewear, breaking through it and crushing the forehead beneath.

From Lyons’s left, Blancanales had already entered the battle with a quieter opening gambit. The wily old Able Team warrior had fast-balled a fragmentation grenade hard enough at the head of the third assailant that it popped straight up into the air over the dazed gunman. As the handheld bomb reached the apex of its bounce, it exploded. A sheet of fire and shrapnel rained down, scything into the helmet and shoulder armor of the man. Heavily protected, the gunner was unharmed by the fragments thrown off by the grenade, but the pressure wave struck him like a baseball bat and even the protection of his helmet couldn’t keep him from staggering dazedly into the open.

Blancanales hated that he had to be so ruthless toward the stunned foe, but the armored assassin still had a firm grip on his weapon and would recover his senses within a few moments. Taking aim, Blancanales opened fire and peppered the gunman’s chest with a full-auto salvo. While the action was tactically sound, despite its ruthlessness, Blancanales was not being unnecessarily cruel. He was simply stopping a would-be killer from continuing to target federal investigators.

Just because Able Team was undercover as Department of Justice employees didn’t mean that they weren’t actual Feds. This was as much self-defense as rooting out the truth behind who initiated the assassinations of the OSHA investigators. Nine innocent men, all unarmed, had died by fire to keep a secret here in the Norfolk boatyard.

Clearly the shooters who had arrived and immediately opened fire were not police officers. Furthermore they would definitely know what was going on and who had likely been behind the others’ deaths.

Blancanales held off moving on to another target, keeping cover between himself and the other gunmen. These shooters were wearing armor, so he waited to be sure that the 4.6 mm bullets from his machine pistol had been able to punch through to his enemy’s vitals.